MacBook Pro M5 Max with 128GB RAM for heavy use

[anjanesh]

I am using an M2 Air with 24GB RAM (macOS 15.7.4). It good enough esp for travel purposes.

But when I have PhpStorm, PyCharm and WebStorm open simultaneously, so far it hasn't lagged when only one project of each is opened.
But if I try to open more than one Laravel/Django/NodeJS project it, starts lagging. And plugins like Claude Code are running as well.
Apart from this and 5 browsers and some applications are always open without an OS restart unless there's an Sequoia update.

I was wondering if I should get a MacBook Pro M5 Max with 128GB RAM 40 core GPU next month for the purpose of using it heavily at home. I also want to make use of local LLMs, Docker and Apple Creator Studio products.

This will cost me a bomb so I would've to take this on an EMI but should be worth it.

 

[keksikuningas]

I am using an M2 Air with 24GB RAM (macOS 15.7.4). It good enough esp for travel purposes.

But when I have PhpStorm, PyCharm and WebStorm open simultaneously, so far it hasn't lagged when only one project of each is opened.
But if I try to open more than one Laravel/Django/NodeJS project it, starts lagging. And plugins like Claude Code are running as well.
Apart from this and 5 browsers and some applications are always open without an OS restart unless there's an Sequoia update.

I was wondering if I should get a MacBook Pro M5 Max with 128GB RAM 40 core GPU next month for the purpose of using it heavily at home. I also want to make use of local LLMs, Docker and Apple Creator Studio products.

This will cost me a bomb so I would've to take this on an EMI but should be worth it.

if using heavily at home, consider a mac studio instead. for the price of the m5 max you could get a studio with an ultra chip probably.
it's not like you'd be running LLMs on the go anyway, the fans would spin up and annoy everyone and battery would drain in an hour if not faster

excluding LLMs, 48GB seems like it would be more than enough for your use case.

 

[anjanesh]

if using heavily at home, consider a mac studio instead.
the problem with desktops is that I can't leave the machine on and get out of the house for long. Here, the electricity may go out any time (not happening so often the last couple of years, but still) and a laptop will go into hibernation after sometime. But a Mac Studio would end up forcibly shut down - and then I would have to invest in UPS for which I need to do wiring and setup extra space in the room etc which is more of a hassle.

 

[Alameda]

if using heavily at home, consider a mac studio instead.
the problem with desktops is that I can't leave the machine on and get out of the house for long. Here, the electricity may go out any time (not happening so often the last couple of years, but still) and a laptop will go into hibernation after sometime. But a Mac Studio would end up forcibly shut down - and then I would have to invest in UPS for which I need to do wiring and setup extra space in the room etc which is more of a hassle.

I have a UPS. You don’t “do wiring” for it. It’s just like plugging your Mac into a surge suppressor. Quite simple and then you forget it.

I have one for my NAS and the gateway is plugged in as well. After 15 minutes, a USB connection between the UPS and the NAS triggers the NAS to gracefully shut down, and remaining power keeps the internet running if we lose power. Quite simple.

 

[Alpha Centauri]

That's quite a jump going from 24 to 128 GB but exactly how much swap is occurring in Activity Monitor during all your heavy simultaneous processes? Personally, keeping my machines for very long time, I decided to purchase 64 GB with my M2 MBP Max.

I believe the old saying of "buy as much RAM as you can afford" is still valid.

 

[Hajj.david]

if using heavily at home, consider a mac studio instead.
the problem with desktops is that I can't leave the machine on and get out of the house for long. Here, the electricity may go out any time (not happening so often the last couple of years, but still) and a laptop will go into hibernation after sometime. But a Mac Studio would end up forcibly shut down - and then I would have to invest in UPS for which I need to do wiring and setup extra space in the room etc which is more of a hassle.

I bought a UPS for my mac studio, its literally like a surge protector just plug it in and it works, I bought the one macrumors reviewed:

BLUETTI Elite 30 V2 Portable Power Station | 600W 288Wh (Glacier Blue)

Lightweight (4.3kg), 288Wh/600W solar power station with 9 ports, UltraCell™ tech, 1500W surge, ideal for camping, travel, backup.

www.bluettipower.com

I get about 5 hours of batter for my mac + router + fiber modem. If I still have no power after that my whole house generator gets turned on.

 

[ChrisA]

if using heavily at home, consider a mac studio instead.
the problem with desktops is that I can't leave the machine on and get out of the house for long. Here, the electricity may go out any time (not happening so often the last couple of years, but still) and a laptop will go into hibernation after sometime. But a Mac Studio would end up forcibly shut down - and then I would have to invest in UPS for which I need to do wiring and setup extra space in the room etc which is more of a hassle.

There is no work to install an UPS. It is just like a power strip but a little thicker and heavier. How hard is it to install a power strip? It is the same for an UPS.


The other advantage of the Studio over the MPB is that the screen can be MUCH better and you can have more screens and your screens can be all identical.



A Studio or even a Mini with a 4K, 27-inch screen is MUCH easier to use than any MPB, well unless Apple starts selling 27-inch notebooks.


Finally, one thing is that a "Local LLM" does not need to run on your desktop Mac. The very best place for it is running on a “Gaming PC" that is running Linux. Buy one or more high-end GPU cards and put the PC in a closet or even the garage. It will run circles around the Mac and take all that computational load off the main computer. This PC can be cheap. I buy used/refurbished PCs from Newegg that came with 64GB RAM for under $1k and they have multiple PCI slots and big-enough power supplies. I paid about $500 for an off-lease HP workstation.



All my data lives on a Synology NAS and is backed up to another NAS and to the cloud.



The way to make the Mac run faster is to offload it.

 

[jeroenvip]

I was also thinking the same with running local LLMs. But the simple fact is that local LLMs just can't compete with the process power, for example, Claude Code delivers. Let alone the extra costs for this amount of memory.

I am also a heavy user with PHPStorm, Android Studio, and Xcode sitting on a MacBook Pro M1 16GB. I'll be switching to the M5 Pro (with 2 fans), 48 or 64 GB RAM to be future-proof. And leave the LLM stuff for coding with a monthly Claude Max subscription. If I don't need it anymore, I just cancel it.

 

[anjanesh]

Regarding UPS setup here - most of India has voltage fluctuations throughout the year.
I had a UPS with 3 batteries 10+ years ago - 1.0KVA UPS System from Way Electric Private Limited.
The company shutdown soon after but I didn't get an alternative UPS since the power shutdowns were rare as infrastructure become better. But power does go down during rains and in other scenarios etc. But in 2008 when I got the UPS for my 2 desktops I had to get the electrician's assistance. Apartment generators are not available in most older buildings.

I believe the old saying of "buy as much RAM as you can afford" is still valid.
I'm looking at the Pro M5 Max with 128GB RAM 40 core GPU as a 10 year investment. I'll still keep the M2 Air for mobility only.

And I guess I'll leave the LLMs to Claude Code for now. Thanks.

 

[SDAVE]

Don't get dual machines for this purpose. M class MacBook Pro's run really well as desktops, all you need is a nice stand and a dock like a the CalDigit TS5 and it becomes a full blown desktop with Ethernet and all and you can charge it/connect to displays via 1 single cable.

If RAM is an issue, get the M5 Max with high amounts of ram. You can probably get rid of the M2 Air after you move over all your data to the MBP. It's nice to work on everything on a single machine. Back in the Intel days you were kind of required to have both a laptop and a desktop.

On my end it's a bit different, I like having a laptop and desktop separate since I work in production,.

 

[960design]

I'm currently running a M4 Pro with 48GB of ram and will upgrade to the M5 Max with 128GB ( or 256GB - fingers crossed ) when they are released next, next week.

M2 Air is great for single projects, but if you need to 'spread-out' then upgrade to the MacBook Pro with as much Ram as you can afford.

And I guess I'll leave the LLMs to Claude Code for now.

A MacBook Pro M4 with 48GB of memory can easily run qwen3-coder-30b-a3b-instruct-mlx ( speculative decoding is broken in LLM Studio right now ) with 32k context and generate 85-90 tok/sec at ~80-83% Claude Opus Extended quality. The upgrade to M5 Max 128GB should get you to 90-93% Claude Opus Extended capability. If you want to hit the +95% capability mark you will need a maxed out M5 Ultra 512GB ( 1TB wishful ).

Don't get dual machines for this purpose. M class MacBook Pro's run really well as desktops, all you need is a nice stand and a dock like a the CalDigit TS5 and it becomes a full blown desktop with Ethernet and all and you can charge it/connect to displays via 1 single cable.

Exactly! Currently running a Studio display with the MBP in a stand and a single cable running from the monitor to the MBP for power/data. Numeric keyboard and trackpad plug directly into monitor. When I head out for a trip ( Nine Inch Nail concert in Jacksonville, FL ), I just pull the laptop out of the stand and off we go.

 

[PotentPeas]

I have max-spec 16" M2 Max system. (96 GB RAM was the max at the time.)

I love having the RAM even if I don't push it to nearly full very often. Yeah, it cost a lot ... but ... Apple hasn't raised memory prices like the rest of the industry (...yet...) so it is looking like less of a bad deal than it used to, at least.

Anyway, I wanted to chime in to say that the 16" MacBook Pro still seems quite "portable" to me. Yeah, it is bigger than a MacBook Air, but it way smaller and more manageable than a Windows "workstation" laptop (that's what I had before). I routinely move it around, from room to room, work with it on my lap in bed, and so forth. I occasionally connect it to a bigger screen for more "working space". For traveling, I throw it in a hard-shell case and that fits easily into a backpack.

The display is excellent. And man, the battery ... I have no trouble getting a full workday out of it, if the screen brightness is turned down some and I am not pushing the CPU hard.

I'll definitely keep using the same "form factor" when I upgrade. (A couple of years out, I'm thinking maybe M7 generation.)

All this to say, especially in your situation where power is flaky, a high-end Mac laptop makes a lot of sense. And maybe you don't even need to keep the MacBook Air.

 

[Howard2k]

if using heavily at home, consider a mac studio instead.
the problem with desktops is that I can't leave the machine on and get out of the house for long. Here, the electricity may go out any time (not happening so often the last couple of years, but still) and a laptop will go into hibernation after sometime. But a Mac Studio would end up forcibly shut down - and then I would have to invest in UPS for which I need to do wiring and setup extra space in the room etc which is more of a hassle.

UPS is trivial and it can even be connected to send a "hey power is off, you need to shutdown" message to your Mac. I keep one connected to my NAS and network just to keep things alive if there is an outage, and then NAS will do a graceful shutdown after 10 minutes.

 

[Makisupa Policeman]

I don't think anyone should be buying a M5 Pro/Max MBP unless they are in desperate need or if you can get it heavily discounted. Wait for the OLED MBP--that will likely be out later this year--if you can.

 

[Alameda]

I am using an M2 Air with 24GB RAM (macOS 15.7.4). It good enough esp for travel purposes.

But when I have PhpStorm, PyCharm and WebStorm open simultaneously, so far it hasn't lagged when only one project of each is opened.
But if I try to open more than one Laravel/Django/NodeJS project it, starts lagging. And plugins like Claude Code are running as well.
Apart from this and 5 browsers and some applications are always open without an OS restart unless there's an Sequoia update.

I was wondering if I should get a MacBook Pro M5 Max with 128GB RAM 40 core GPU next month for the purpose of using it heavily at home. I also want to make use of local LLMs, Docker and Apple Creator Studio products.

This will cost me a bomb so I would've to take this on an EMI but should be worth it.

Seriously, do you really need to open and process in three AI environments at the same time? And you “need” to open five browsers at once?

Sure, anybody can open enough memory/CPU hungry apps until their machine slows, but do you really need to open all that stuff at the same time? Seems like you don’t work very efficiently.

 

[960design]

I don't think anyone should be buying a M5 Pro/Max MBP unless they are in desperate need or if you can get it heavily discounted. Wait for the OLED MBP--that will likely be out later this year--if you can.

I am getting the Max with 128GB or 256GB (if available), currently have a M4 Pro 48GB. I need a bit more and do not want to throw $10-$12k at a 512GB Studio Ultra M5 because I need mobility more than not. Had I the foresight I would have perfect with a 128GB M4 Max. I do not think desperation has anything to do with it, only requirements. If an M6 Max comes out with 256GB later this year, then I will upgrade again.

 

[anjanesh]

I understand that M6 would be all touch-screens ? I'm not comfortable with that.

 

[Howard2k]

I understand that M6 would be all touch-screens ? I'm not comfortable with that.

You don't have to use it. My Windows laptop has a touch screen and I just don't touch it. Works perfectly fine all the same.

 

[Adult80HD]

I don't think anyone should be buying a M5 Pro/Max MBP unless they are in desperate need or if you can get it heavily discounted. Wait for the OLED MBP--that will likely be out later this year--if you can.

If they release an M5 MBP this week I find it extremely unlikely we'll see the M6 one before next year this time.

 

[SDAVE]

If they release an M5 MBP this week I find it extremely unlikely we'll see the M6 one before next year this time.

We'll see an M6 14" with touch screen (if they do) with OLED and redesign most likely in the Fall and a 16" M6 Pro/Max next year March.

 

[playtech1]

Things can and do get delayed - Autumn for M6 / Pro / Max is possible, but I bet these end up being 2027 products.