M5 Ultra in a MacBook

[indefinite]

That battery wouldn't last much though.

An M5 Ultra chip sitting in a power user's lap idle is unlikely. So either the MacBook Pro would need to get a battery/thermal upgrade or the user can carry around a power adapter.

 

[Lounge vibes 05]

Doesn’t the battery in the current 16 inch MacBook Pro already pushed right up against the airplane battery capacity restrictions?
Either way, I have seen and held gaming laptops, and I also owned a 16 inch MacBook Pro for a time.
It is absolutely ridiculous to say that those 6 LB + plastic beasts are even close to the portability of a MacBook Pro.
Personally, I’m hoping that the next MacBook Pro actually see a *reduction* in size.
If there is one thing the Touch Bar MacBook Pros had going for them, it was the fact that the actual design of the things were incredible to hold and carry around. Hopefully the efficiency improvements that come along with moving to 2 NM allow them to slim the MBPs down a little, but importantly with no performance compromise.

 

[Luftkopf]

Bunch of non-sense. Just because Apple sucks at making laptops, doesn't mean it can't be done. Other laptop manufactures have no problem cooling 400W of power no problem at all.

Give the M5 Ultra to Lenovo and you will see they can make it work no problem at all.

Apple laptops are bad are they. Tell that to my 2012 MacBook Air, which my brother still uses, that is in better condition now than the 3 year old Asus it replaced was.

 

[benholt]

JPack is spot on about the power draw, but there are two other physical realities that kill the "M5 Ultra MacBook" idea, even with the aggressive core parking you're describing:

1. Static Power Leakage: An Ultra chip is essentially two Max dies stitched together via UltraFusion. Even if macOS perfectly parks the extra cores during normal workloads, a piece of silicon that massive inherently suffers from static power leakage. You'd be hauling around a giant chip that actively drains your battery life even while just browsing the web.
2. Physical Footprint vs. Battery Caps: The package size of an Ultra (plus the extra unified memory modules required to feed its massive memory bandwidth) would dominate the logic board. That leaves less physical room for the battery. Since the FAA strictly caps laptop batteries at 100Wh for flights, you'd end up with a thicker, heavier laptop that dies significantly faster than an M-Max.

Running a huge, expensive piece of silicon at 75% speed just to keep it from melting a laptop chassis is exactly the kind of inefficiency Apple Silicon was designed to escape. For workloads that genuinely require that much sustained, parallel compute, the Mac Studio is the right tool for the job.

 

[conmee]

JPack is spot on about the power draw, but there are two other physical realities that kill the "M5 Ultra MacBook" idea, even with the aggressive core parking you're describing:

1. Static Power Leakage: An Ultra chip is essentially two Max dies stitched together via UltraFusion. Even if macOS perfectly parks the extra cores during normal workloads, a piece of silicon that massive inherently suffers from static power leakage. You'd be hauling around a giant chip that actively drains your battery life even while just browsing the web.
2. Physical Footprint vs. Battery Caps: The package size of an Ultra (plus the extra unified memory modules required to feed its massive memory bandwidth) would dominate the logic board. That leaves less physical room for the battery. Since the FAA strictly caps laptop batteries at 100Wh for flights, you'd end up with a thicker, heavier laptop that dies significantly faster than an M-Max.

Running a huge, expensive piece of silicon at 75% speed just to keep it from melting a laptop chassis is exactly the kind of inefficiency Apple Silicon was designed to escape. For workloads that genuinely require that much sustained, parallel compute, the Mac Studio is the right tool for the job.

Forgot one...

3. Wallet Leakage: This occurs when Apple stitches together two extremely expensive dies and tries to design a thin and light chassis to house them in along with a silicon-anode battery for power.

 

[subjonas]

A M5 Ultra MBP is the target audience of Apple. Because the Apple audience mainly buys laptops, not desktops.

And to be honest, Apple has no business selling desktops because it has none of the advantages that desktop has, which is upgradability and repairability. With real desktops, you can just replace the GPU if a new one comes out and you are done. With Apple "desktops", you need to buy a whole new machine.

There are more people that would buy a M5 Ultra MBP then a M5 Ultra desktop.

I understand the "might as well make it portable" argument, but even without upgradability, stationary Mac desktops still have significant advantages over MacBooks. The two biggest are thermals and price. The thermals are far better than their portable equivalents, allowing them to have far better sustained performance. And if someone already has or prefers an external display and other external peripherals, the Mac desktop is the far less expensive option without the costly built-in display, keyboard, trackpad, and camera.

Other advantages are more ports which means less need for docks/hubs which add cost and clutter, and desktops have a general cleaner appearance than a laptop on a stand. They're also a bit more repairable according to iFixit.

Even though the market for desktop Macs is small compared to MacBooks, I believe that says more about how desirable and useful MacBooks are than how undesirable and un-useful Mac desktops are. There is still a significant market for desktops.

A MacBook that is designed to run an M Ultra would likely either sacrifice major performance compared to an M Ultra Mac Studio or major portability compared to an M Max 16" MBP, and it likely would cost significantly more than either. All of that means it would probably have less market demand than either.

 

[Bug-Creator]

Apple's laptops are meant to be laptops.

They need to run relatively silent.
They need to run full speed just on battery.
The battery needs to last a long time even when running full load.

If Apple were in the business of making compute luggage an Ultra chips would make sense, but they aren't.

 

[Herr Podspro]

Bunch of non-sense. Just because Apple sucks at making laptops, doesn't mean it can't be done. Other laptop manufactures have no problem cooling 400W of power no problem at all.

Give the M5 Ultra to Lenovo and you will see they can make it work no problem at all.

Apple sucks at making laptops? Are you still stuck in 2019?
Some people really try to make being a contrarian part of their online identity.
I sometimes can’t help but stumble into a senseless argument myself, but this is another level.
Just because Apple doesn’t make what you might want doesn’t negate their decades of experience and their strides in hardware development since 2020.
MacBooks have never been this performant, reliable, and affordable (considering the used and refurbished market).

 

[Herr Podspro]

What you mean thick? My Lenovo Legion Pro i7 is pretty much the same size as my 16" M1 Max MacBook Pro while having superior cooling. It even fits into the same 16" laptop bag that I bought for the 16" M1 Max MacBook Pro.

And it doesn't need a "massive powerbrick" as it has Thunderbolt 5, so you can use any charger, except if you want to do gaming at maximum settings at 240 FPS.

Only Apple needs to build a super thick brick to cool a M5 Ultra, while Lenovo can do this in the same size as the 16" MBP no problem.

Then why haven’t they done so?

 

[JPack]

Below is the Lenovo gaming notebook - to give everyone a perspective of what the other poster claims is the "same" as MacBook Pro.

The thing is ridiculously thick and heavy. The power adapter weighs 2.25 lbs.

Even with all that weight and thickness, it's made from stamped (not unibody) aluminum covers. The interior is all plastic, meaning deck flex.

 

[Queen6]

Is too much power in a notebook without significant compromise. My boutique gaming notebook has a Ryzen 9 9955HX3D & 5070TI it's battery life is best described as a UPS. I knew that going in as wanted desktop performance in a portable format. Could have opted for a 5090, I just dont need that level of GPU performance or care for Nvidia's entertaining pricing. While MechRevo are using the best of tech to keep the systems size & weight down it remains to be a dense system to pack up & carry.

M5 Max is already knocking on the door, an Ultra would be likely same as my notebook where it's all or nothing with the CPU pulling up to 140 watts in isolation (can do more as it an unlocked CPU).

Q-6

 

[jinnyman]

I don't know. It'd be nice to have workstation performance in Mac OS. I'm willing to sacrifice the size if Apple brings out such model.

1~1.5 in thick with vapor chamber + enough performing fans will suffice to run them. Since it's workstation, make it 18" or 17.6" whatever, with higher resolution.

Apple did vision pro, and I think a supposed workstation M ultra laptop would sell more than that.

 

[theorist9]

Honestly, folks, the poster everyone's arguing with here (who I won't even name) has a long history on MR of taking ridiculous swipes at Apple that are completely unsupported, and beyond the bounds of sense and logic—e.g., "Apple sucks at making laptops" made on this thread, or a thread they started titled "ARM MAC = new Windows Vista machines in 2025".

And this poster's tactic for any pushback against this is 'oh, we're not allowed to criticize Apple on MR', when in fact many with whom they're arguing have crticized Apple in many ways. But at least they've done it for a reason.

This poster, by contrast, instead makes general unsupported put-downs, which seem purely for the purpose of provoking outrage. Maybe they're bored or lonely, so this is their form of entertainment. Who knows. In any event, my advice is not to reply at all to their comments. Don't feed him or her!

 

[theorist9]

My general take on an Ultra MBP is this:

Apple could easily do it. But to be a functional unit that could truly make use of the Ultra (offer sustained operation with minimal throttling, and without annoyingly loud fans), it would need to have much better cooling than the current MBP, which means it would have to be noticeably larger and heavier.

Having said that, I don't think a purchaser who wanted a portable Ultra would mind that extra size and weight (as well as the need to carry a portable battery)—I think they'd accept it as a reasonable tradeoff for the huge increase in performance.

Thus I don't think the size and weight is the true barrier.

Instead, I think it's the number of users who would want a portable Ultra. And I suspect Apple knows that number is too small to justify designing and producing such a machine at this time.

Granted, it is possible that, with the growing interest in home AI, things will change such that a portable MBP with 512 GB* unifed RAM is something that would sell in the future. So maybe we will see such a device a few years down the road. [*Or more, when LPPDR6, with its higher memory density, becomes available.]

 

[RdWing]

I don't know. It'd be nice to have workstation performance in Mac OS. I'm willing to sacrifice the size if Apple brings out such model.

1~1.5 in thick with vapor chamber + enough performing fans will suffice to run them. Since it's workstation, make it 18" or 17.6" whatever, with higher resolution.

Apple did vision pro, and I think a supposed workstation M ultra laptop would sell more than that.

I mean, a full Max chip is essentially already a workstation class laptop, especially kitted out with 128GB of ram and 8TB SSD. Fast IO allows even greater access to networking and storage, what else would you want? This is a serious question.

The miracle of Apple Silicon is that this level of performance is available in a relatively portable chassis and power budget, all the way down to the 14" pro. These machines top out at ~ 100W full sustained tilt.

As someone else mentioned, the 16" pro's are right at the FAA lithium battery limit, so there's no more battery coming.

 

[jinnyman]

I mean, a full Max chip is essentially already a workstation class laptop, especially kitted out with 128GB of ram and 8TB SSD. Fast IO allows even greater access to networking and storage, what else would you want? This is a serious question.

The miracle of Apple Silicon is that this level of performance is available in a relatively portable chassis and power budget, all the way down to the 14" pro. These machines top out at ~ 100W full sustained tilt.

As someone else mentioned, the 16" pro's are right at the FAA lithium battery limit, so there's no more battery coming.

Why do we have to be limited by max if all we have to give up to get ultra is little bit more thickness? We are pretty much day dreaming here, and what I described is much more realistic and more users than vision pro's. Hence I'm just wishing man. What's got to lose for wanting more?

 

[streetfunk]

in my opinion there`s enough folks with high income who would jump on a macbook with ultra chip. Even if they don`t necessarily need one.

See the hype for AI data centers.
-> The very same thoughts "could" drive such people to just grab a ultra-chip macbook with high or huge amounts of RAM. Even if the costs for such MB would have to rise to 8K+. In fact, apple could just sell it for 10K+ even if 8K would suffice. This is how some markets work today. And don`t we have Power outlets nearly everywhere available now ? Just plug it in to mains power as much as available ?
I see this a fit.

But i don`t see apple beeing good at reading the market....and how some stuff acts also to keep a brands reputation up.* See Forumula 1 car racing for example. Or alots of -action or high competition- sports sponsoring.

* Jim Cook was/is an idiot. (IMHO)
It`s often enough wrong to only produce what gains certain amounts of income.
Just look that you don`t lose. Which has mainly also to be applyed to the man power available.

I think a ultra-chip MB, the necessary bit bigger and heavier, could be donne by the same teams without stealing much of their power. Even make it just as an exersice to remain fit and fluid in thinking 😉

 

[conmee]

in my opinion there`s enough folks with high income who would jump on a macbook with ultra chip. Even if they don`t necessarily need one.

See the hype for AI data centers.
-> The very same thoughts "could" drive such people to just grab a ultra-chip macbook with high or huge amounts of RAM. Even if the costs for such MB would have to rise to 8K+. In fact, apple could just sell it for 10K+ even if 8K would suffice. This is how some markets work today. And don`t we have Power outlets nearly everywhere available now ? Just plug it in to mains power as much as available ?
I see this a fit.

But i don`t see apple beeing good at reading the market....and how some stuff acts also to keep a brands reputation up.* See Forumula 1 car racing for example. Or alots of -action or high competition- sports sponsoring.

* Jim Cook was/is an idiot. (IMHO)
It`s often enough wrong to only produce what gains certain amounts of income.
Just look that you don`t lose. Which has mainly also to be applyed to the man power available.

I think an ultra-chip MB, the necessary bit bigger and heavier, could be donne by the same teams without stealing much of their power. Even make it just as an exersice to remain fit and fluid in thinking 😉

You may be right. But on the other hand they just discontinued the Mac Pro. And look at the Vision Pro. I think there aren’t enough of the high income folks or professionals to warrant making it. And you don’t just want a bunch of Kardashians to buy a beast like this only to use it for Instagram. That does nothing for the ecosystem of software developers making high end software to take advantage of it. They definitely could make it, maybe they will. But it is unlikely to be a volume seller. Especially in the current conditions with SoC silicon at a premium (Cook said sourcing chips would be a bigger challenge than memory/storage pricing). And speaking of pricing, it would likely be astronomical.

 

[novagamer]

One way this could work is if Apple had an option so that the power envelope and power draw was significantly higher and critically able to be supplied directly other than route through the laptop battery power channels. Add more thermal headroom, better materials and TIMs and maybe some refined more modern vapor chamber cooling like what nvidia does on their 5090FE.

The M4 Max when using the CPU and GPU fully doing complex work will drain the battery slowly, even the 16” and it’s much worse on the 14” – and from what I understand this is even more of an issue on the M5 Max… I think it could be done, essentially a ‘portable desktop’ mode (e.g. high power mode that does not drain the battery at all) but I’m not sure on the details of how that could work.

I’d consider buying it, especially once long thunderbolt 5 cables become available… having my M4 Max 6 feet away is great when I’m running high workloads, the fan noise is not a problem even when it’s really cranking, but on a desk it in front of me it would be annoying after a while.

 

[theorist9]

Why do we have to be limited by max if all we have to give up to get ultra is little bit more thickness?

Unfortunately, it's not just a "little bit more thickness".

If Apple were to deliver an Ultra MBP, they'd want it to run high sustained loads without throttling, and with relatively quiet fans (i.e., no more noisy than what you'd get with an Ultra Studio)—otherwise, what's the point? No use in delivering a compromised machine, particularly since anyone shelling out for this to get an Ultra's performance will not tolerate any compromises.

Heck, even the Max Mac Studio doesn't have sufficient thermal disssipation for an Ultra chip, which is why they had to give it a much more substantial heat sink. So, given that the Max Mac Studio (volume = 3,687 cm^3), can't handle an Ultra, hopefully you can see that that something with just a "little bit more thickness" than a 16" MBP (volume = 1,483 cm^3 including display and battery, which don't contribute to SoC heat dissipation) would not work.

Instead, for a portable Ultra, you'd probably need a chassis at least the size of the Falcon Northwest DRX laptop (volume = 4,992 cm^3). And before you protest that this is more than the volume of the Studio, please note, again, that a lot of the DRX's volume is the battery and the display.

And this laptop is 1.5" thick, which is over twice as thick as the 0.66"-thick 16" M5 MacBook Pro. That's hardly what anyone would call 'a little bit thicker'!

The Falcon Northwest DRX laptop | A desktop replacement notebook with uncompromising power

The Falcon DRX Desktop Replacement laptop is one of the most powerful notebook PCs in the world. It features up to Nvidia RTX 5090 graphics with an Intel Core Ultra 9 24-Core CPU.

www.falcon-nw.com

Hence I'm just wishing man. What's got to lose for wanting more?

Nothing wrong with wishing, so long as you know just what it is that you're wishing for!