The Mac Experience

"It just works. Until it doesn't, then you need trained professional, and $1,000"

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📓 The Gist

In this note, I'm talking about Mac, and MacOS. What do you think?

🧠 My Perspective

I think Mac is the best computer you can buy, so long as gaming isn't your main focus. Apple Silicon supercharges these 15 and 16" laptops, and the new M5. Just wow. It almost beats the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K, a full desktop-grade processor. The new chip has 18 CPU cores – 6 super cores, and 12 performance – and 40 GPU cores. This chip excels in 4K video editing, professional applications (such as 3D work, and local AI). It is also incredibly power efficient, with M5 Max getting up to 22 hours of video streaming. And with Thunderbolt 5, up to 120GB/s, applicable to displays, SSDs and much more.

🛠️ Technical Implementation

Now, onto AI. The local AI performance of M5 Max is unparalleled, with up to 4x peak GPU compute compared to M4 Max and 8x faster image generation (if you use that) than M1 Max. It is configurable with up to 128GB of unified memory. That's a lot of RAM. It's also equipped with a 16-core Neural Engine, capable of running DeepSeek-R1 8B (distilled) at ~68.2 tok/s. For reference, Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4.6 averages anywhere between 45 to 53 tok/s.

🏁 Final Thoughts

So, I know that I'd love a MacBook Pro right about now, but what about you? What do you think?

🔚 The End

I hope you enjoyed this, and it was useful to you in some way. I'll see you on the next one.