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Posted by only bandwidth = more tg
 - Today at 12:05:46
Or look up the 153.6 GB/s and 120 GB/s values here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_silicon#M-series_SoCs.
Posted by only bandwidth = more tg
 - Today at 12:04:31
As expected, a vid by Alex Ziskind (youtube.com/watch?v=XGe7ldwFLSE), in this case, proves that Apples's claim of
Quote from: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M5#PerformancePeak GPU AI compute: over 4× faster
does not apply to running 3rd party LLMs and only the RAM/unified memory bandwidth increase increases the token generation (28% = 1.28 = 153.6 GB/s (M5) / 120 GB/s (M4)). (153.6 GB/s = 128-bit * 9600 MT/s / 1000 / 8)
Posted by Interesting for reviewers
 - Today at 11:07:12
This may be interesting for reviewers:
Quote from: youtube.com/watch?v=HKxIGgyeISMApple's Energy Model - Deconstructed

In this video, I reverse engineer Apple's Energy Model on the Mac Studio M4 Max. In the process I explain why and how measured DC power can appear up to 3 times higher than reported M4 Max GPU power.

[..]
Posted by How tastes differ
 - March 13, 2026, 09:35:10
Quote from: juri on March 13, 2026, 03:09:11and still no matte option for the screen, so idiotic without any reason.
It's not 12W, look again. Maybe the matte coating on your screen played a prank on you ;)
And I'm so glad that it's glossy (richer colors, sharper text). Mind that while it's glossy, the anti-reflective coating/ability is very good.
Posted by juri
 - March 13, 2026, 03:09:11
12W average in idle?? how can that be, lunar lake is only a third of this.
why are you not doing the battery test with idle and video playback any more??

and still no matte option for the screen, so idiotic without any reason.
until then i wont consider an air.
Posted by Will MBAir fit 27B quants
 - March 11, 2026, 18:15:54
Quote from: not_anton on March 11, 2026, 17:16:44
Quote from: Will MBAir fit 27B quants on March 11, 2026, 12:23:33Will the 24 GB RAM option fit Qwen3.5-27B-UD-Q4_K_XL.gguf (17.6 GB) or Qwen3.5-27B-UD-Q5_K_XL.gguf (20.2 GB)? (huggingface.co/unsloth/Qwen3.5-27B-GGUF) (I know there's mlx-community/Qwen3.5-27B-4bit (16.1 GB) too, but I don't know if its perplexity is good)

I have a 15" M2 Air with 24GB RAM, but it can only run 3B models max because of overheating. Work is fine, gaming is fine, but LLMs throttle it to 0.4GHz on GPU in a minute. Sorry, you would need something with a fan or two to make those models useful.
Good to know, but will those quants fit (if I had ot guess I'd say yes)? There's also sysctl iogpu.wired_limit_mb=<MB> (I know not to assign too much to the VRAM (1-3 GB may be ok), as the OS may start to write/swap to the SSD).
Posted by not_anton
 - March 11, 2026, 17:16:44
Quote from: Will MBAir fit 27B quants on March 11, 2026, 12:23:33Will the 24 GB RAM option fit Qwen3.5-27B-UD-Q4_K_XL.gguf (17.6 GB) or Qwen3.5-27B-UD-Q5_K_XL.gguf (20.2 GB)? (huggingface.co/unsloth/Qwen3.5-27B-GGUF) (I know there's mlx-community/Qwen3.5-27B-4bit (16.1 GB) too, but I don't know if its perplexity is good)

I have a 15" M2 Air with 24GB RAM, but it can only run 3B models max because of overheating. Work is fine, gaming is fine, but LLMs throttle it to 0.4GHz on GPU in a minute. Sorry, you would need something with a fan or two to make those models useful.
Posted by Will MBAir fit 27B quants
 - March 11, 2026, 12:23:33
Will the 24 GB RAM option fit Qwen3.5-27B-UD-Q4_K_XL.gguf (17.6 GB) or Qwen3.5-27B-UD-Q5_K_XL.gguf (20.2 GB)? (huggingface.co/unsloth/Qwen3.5-27B-GGUF) (I know there's mlx-community/Qwen3.5-27B-4bit (16.1 GB) too, but I don't know if its perplexity is good)
Posted by h
 - March 09, 2026, 16:25:21
screen contrast is lower so much than m4 15 macbook air ,is a defective one or m5 just had bad panel, we need more example
Posted by zorka
 - March 09, 2026, 14:39:28
Can you please check the screen for Dithering? thank you.
Posted by Understated
 - March 09, 2026, 14:03:26
Quote from: dumb_oems on March 09, 2026, 11:44:29This is not emphasized enough
...
the actual user experience, especially on battery power

I agree. I don't think people understand. There are many gaming laptops out there that give wonderful performance @ almost 60 dB noise. So basically like an airplane taking of a runway. Is that really usable? Then there's the heat output, enough to make someone impotent by sterilizing the sperm on your ballsac.

What happens to your thermals / noise output if you live in a warmer country which is especially becoming increasingly prevalent in this era of global warming?

We're not even getting into battery health and longevity increasing due to less heat.

My hope is that this showcase is enough of an embarrassment that the other big tech entities (Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Qcomm, etc) in the windows ecosystem are pretty much forced to wake up, start innovating again and eventually catch up in few years so we can all be benefit. Much like how over a decade ago Apple were among the first to start mandating SSDs & IPS displays in laptops when HDDs and TN were the norm.
Posted by Reliability
 - March 09, 2026, 12:55:03
Quote from: JimD on March 09, 2026, 12:11:02Fanless is not really an attraction for me.

What a reliability? Would you consider that an important factor to you? Moving parts are considered less reliable. That's one of the reasons why we moved from HDDs to SSDs (apart from massive speed boost in read seek and write times) and also moved away from optical mediums (CDs, DVDs, BluRays) in laptops.

Fanless devices tend to have longer runtimes as well.
Posted by JimD
 - March 09, 2026, 12:11:02
Fanless is not really an attraction for me. What I want is a quiet design. I'm not bothered by a fan that I can't hear. Windows OEMs are incredibly incompetent and can't even achieve giving that as an option.
Posted by dumb_oems
 - March 09, 2026, 12:04:06
Indirectly, this also means that battery life benchmarks are not fair.

You will tear your hairs out while using heavily throttled Intel CPUs on Windows laptops, apps will be slow to open, tabs will be slow to switch etc. Unless you switch to high perf power profiles, which will reduce battery life by 80%.

But of course, on Macbooks, there is no such benchmark hacking. The experience is snappy throughout. And even with that, they can still deliver 17 hours of battery life. Nothing with a comparable user experience comes close in the non-apple laptop market.
Posted by dumb_oems
 - March 09, 2026, 11:44:29
> I'm not an APPLE user (yet?), but no fan is nice.

it is not nice, it is a game changer. probably I have Asperger's, but it reduces my stress levels like nothing else. It just brings zen.

> The CPU performance is not reduced on battery power.

This is not emphasized enough. The performance is out of this world at the given TDP. But that's not all, Windows laptops are usually benchmarked with high performance power profiles. But virtually no one uses them with such profiles, especially not on battery power - since the runtimes would go to complete s*** and it would be louder than a plane.

So not only do you have the best performance on paper for most tasks at amazing efficiency and power draw, but the practical experience of using the laptop will be much better to what the numbers suggest - since again, Intel/AMD (Qualcomm to a lesser extent but still significantly) throttle like crazy on battery power.

This is not emphasized enough honestly. There is no competition and the gap in the actual user experience, especially on battery power, is MUCH bigger than what the benchmarks suggest.