I purchased my Macbook Pro M5 Pro 64GB 1TB on Monday evening. I saved $700!
I really put it off. I am using a Mac Mini M1 16GB 512GB SSD. It works great. No question. This has been my daily driver production machine since it arrived at Christmas 2020. It has made me a lot of money over the last almost six years. And it still works great! SSD at about 400GB so very close, but I have a 1TB SSD connected by USBC. So it is OK for many uses.
I hit the limit, and really didn’t know it. I use a lot of Chrome tabs for my work. Yes, I could reduce, but I don’t want to. I always have. And it has still been OK. But over the last two years in particular, my workflow is changing. And it hasn’t come from running local LLM models on my machine (although I do have a use case for that).
I have genuinely hit the limit of 16GB. Lots of compressed memory, memory pressure and swaps! But still, the mini seems pretty good. But some of the quirkiness - Cowork side tabs disappearing, strange breaks, some slowness where there never used to be, istat menus popping up the memory pressure and processor messages… and other things. I ran my activity monitor output through Claude and the description he gave was that I was effectively trying to utilize about 36GB of Ram through my swap and compressed RAM. Wow, who would have known. I commented that the mini seemed fine, and Claude mentioned that the Mac OS was so good at managing it, that I was effectively walking the edge of a cliff with the Mac OS keeping my balance. And that I could expect significant improvement mainly from an upgrade in RAM, but the processor was working very hard to manage the swaps.
So I did it. I went with the Macbook Pro because of the M5 upgrade. I wanted to go desktop, but you can’t even get an M4 mini, and we see rumors on the M5… but while my machine still functions, I think I crossed the bridge of “You need a new Mac.” So I did it. Back to a laptop as a desktop. Maybe in 2 years, I’ll get something for a desktop.
I went with the Pro, 64, 1TB to maximize memory and keep cost under control. I did get the 16 inch, as my eyes are getting older, battery and thermals are better, and that 16 inch screen almost works as a third monitor more smoothly. I just could not justify a max with 128 GB right now… maybe in a couple/three years.