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M1 Pro to M5 Pro — justified in my use case?

H

HoratioPerdu

macrumors member
Original poster
M1 Pro user for years. Love the computer but curse the day I opted for 16GB RAM. It doesn’t throttle often but I run VM Windows 11 and edit 4K video for marketing. It definitely hits a wall from time to time. I also plan on getting into AI in the coming months….


M5 Pro with 64GB or nah? Pony up for the MAX in case AI gets serious? (I’m a lawyer and it’s a business expense so that softens the blow. We already use AI a fair bit.)
 
The M5 Pro with 64 GB will be a very capable machine for dabbling in and being productive with local generative AI. I don't think there's a situation where I'd recommend the Max for what you mentioned unless you knew for sure you were going to get very serious with local AI.

If you knew for a certainty that local AI was your jam, then I'd say go big or go home: get the M5 Max with 128 GB so you can run larger models or multiple smaller models.

I first dabbled in local generative AI on my ancient Intel iMac, and it was a miserable experience. Then I bought the M2 Air with 24 GB of memory, and suddenly AI became a pleasure to work with. Despite being "slow" it was no longer painful. Now I have a M3 Max with 128 GB and I love it for local AI. With the advances made with M5 in AI already demonstrated by the base chip, there are some instances where a M5 Pro with 64 GB will actually outperform my M3 Max with AI tasks, despite my Max having twice the memory and twice the graphics cores. The M5 Pro isn't going to be a slouch.
 
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I've got an M5 Pro and 64GB on order. Go for it. You get AI accelerator stuff which will let you dabble in AI and ray tracing if gaming is in your wheelhouse (who says lawyers can't have fun?). As @Tdude96 mentions, if you get really serious about AI - local LLMs etc - time to graduate to the Max if you stick with MBP form factor, or better yet wait and get a Studio with a potential Ultra and 512GB memory.
 
Thanks so much guys. I'm relatively new to this space, but after chatting with Grok and Claude extensively I've landed in exactly the spot you're both indicating: an M5 Pro will happily allow me to dabble in 70B models as I get my feet wet; and the Max with 128GB of RAM could either do the same with ramped up speed and precision, or push something closer to 100B+ in modelling.

All things considered, I'm inclined to cancel my order and move up the ranks to the M5 Max. The additional capex, although not small, will be smaller today than buying a new machine in a year or two. I do expect to hit that ceiling at some point, as I can already see tremendous value (and fun!) using AI for my business. On top of that, precision in writing and analysis are pretty important in my field.

One question, though. In an earlier chat with Grok, it warned strongly against connecting my laptop to the internet given the sensitive nature of the documents I'll be handling. I'm not sure if I was asking the wrong questions, but tonight it suggested that I could simply set up a separate user account on my MacBook, and through clever permissions/file sharing effectively "air gap" my laptop on one side but not the other. This would obviously be great, since I use my laptop for just about everything. Which of these two scenarios is true?
 
It occurs to me that Grok was being over-cautious, which is fair when considering what you do. Its suggestions would be highly secure, but may be more than necessary. I made the assumption that your current machine:
• has client data
• you're cautious with that information
• is Internet-connected
I asked Grok for a 3rd opinion with those assumptions: https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5_37c350d6-643e-4dff-a9c3-bcd98f3bcbea

That sounds more reasonable to me than severing Internet connectivity altogether, unless those exceptions for super-secure data Grok mentioned apply to your work, in which case my assumption was bad and you probably wouldn't have your current machine online.
 
2TB is honestly a ton. But I remember hitting the ceiling a few times back when I did video editing. I don’t want that to happen again. With thunderbolt 5, though, external is a total no brainer. Glad to join the club!
 
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