Apple M5 rumors

[Eric]

no, you really, really need 2TB

I considered it but mostly work off external drives so I think I can get away with 1TB, even now with 256 GB it's not much of an issue. What I really need is the RAM and CPU power to be able to work with the files.

 

[Yoused]

I guess if you have the one with the SDXC slot, you can add a TB or two with just a card.

 

[Eric]

I guess if you have the one with the SDXC slot, you can add a TB or two with just a card.

Really? Great to know, I was wondering what that was for.

 

[mr_roboto]

I would consider dropping down to M4 Pro. For the same $3499 you could get 48GB RAM and a 2TB SSD.

M4 Max is an upgrade over M4 Pro if you need:

- lots more graphics horsepower
- more than 48GB RAM
- support for up to four external displays (Pro's limited to two)
- more media codec engines

CPU differences are small, and in the case of the entry level 14-core M4 Max you're considering, approximately zero (14-core Pro and Max are both 10 performance + 4 efficiency core configs).

Either chip should be overkill for Lightroom. As far as I can tell Premiere editing should be the about the same, but render (GPU) and export (media engines) may be somewhat faster on Max. But Pro's probably enough, I found some reviews of the M4 Pro Mac Mini that were very happy with its Premiere performance.

 

[Eric]

I would consider dropping down to M4 Pro. For the same $3499 you could get 48GB RAM and a 2TB SSD.

M4 Max is an upgrade over M4 Pro if you need:

- lots more graphics horsepower
- more than 48GB RAM
- support for up to four external displays (Pro's limited to two)
- more media codec engines

CPU differences are small, and in the case of the entry level 14-core M4 Max you're considering, approximately zero (14-core Pro and Max are both 10 performance + 4 efficiency core configs).

Either chip should be overkill for Lightroom. As far as I can tell Premiere editing should be the about the same, but render (GPU) and export (media engines) may be somewhat faster on Max. But Pro's probably enough, I found some reviews of the M4 Pro Mac Mini that were very happy with its Premiere performance.

Okay, I appreciate the info here. I hate to underestimate the draw of LRC though, because I thought the M1 would be enough but I can't even run most tasks on this laptop, of course I think only having 8 GB ram is the larger problem. As for Premiere Pro when it comes to rendering it's also a memory hog and is also pretty much unusable.

I would just want to be sure I can push the GPU and still be okay, I don't really need 2TB of space as that's the least of my issues so I can get away with half that.

 

[leman]

Considering this (16") for my next purchase. I've been traveling more and more lately to film gigs and clients often want content delivered before I can get home and process it, my current MBP has 8 GB memory and 256 GB drive, it's simply incapable of editing photos in LRC or videos in Premiere Pro. I really need a workhorse that'll last a few years.

View attachment 36924

If you can afford to wait a couple of months, M5 Max will be much better value for money.

 

[Nycturne]

Okay, I appreciate the info here. I hate to underestimate the draw of LRC though, because I thought the M1 would be enough but I can't even run most tasks on this laptop, of course I think only having 8 GB ram is the larger problem. As for Premiere Pro when it comes to rendering it's also a memory hog and is also pretty much unusable.

I would just want to be sure I can push the GPU and still be okay, I don't really need 2TB of space as that's the least of my issues so I can get away with half that.

Things get... interesting.

The Max has a second video encoder block, so it can churn through an encoding pass twice as fast as the Pro, at least when looking at Final Cut Pro. I'm not 100% sure how much Premiere Pro can lean on these, so it depends there.

I don't do much with the GPU related to video, so I can't help there, but Affinity Photo does lean heavily on the GPU for real-time filters/layering/etc, even more than LR does, and I've had no complaints there. That said, the M4 Pro in terms of raw performance is knocking on the door of the M1 Max, which itself is >3x faster than the M1's baseline GPU. The M4 Max *is* faster still, but it really depends on just how much you want to spend on the extra performance.

I went from an M1 Max 16" to an M4 Pro 14" and I have been happy with it, even though I gave up a little GPU performance to be able to cut the time of my CPU-intensive tasks in half.

 

[mr_roboto]

Okay, I appreciate the info here. I hate to underestimate the draw of LRC though, because I thought the M1 would be enough but I can't even run most tasks on this laptop, of course I think only having 8 GB ram is the larger problem. As for Premiere Pro when it comes to rendering it's also a memory hog and is also pretty much unusable.

I would just want to be sure I can push the GPU and still be okay, I don't really need 2TB of space as that's the least of my issues so I can get away with half that.

Based on Adobe's docs on system requirements, I suspect your M1 would be doing fine if it had at least 16GB RAM.

https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/system-requirements.html

https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/kb/optimize-performance-lightroom.html

https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/kb/lightroom-gpu-faq.html

Their minimum and recommended GPU requirements for LRC on Windows are very modest. No reason it'd be any different on macOS, but they don't go into as much detail (probably because they don't need to, I bet any Apple Silicon GPU will do).

Honestly, if a 14" screen is fine, I bet you would even have good results with the non-Pro M5 MBP they just announced.

Also, you're buying this in the US. If you buy direct from Apple, take advantage of their 2 week no questions asked return policy to avoid worries about being stuck with too little computer to do the job. Just make sure to immediately load it up with the jobs that have brought your M1 to its knees. If it's not good enough, run it through the factory wipe process, return it, and use the credit towards a higher spec Mac.

 

[Jimmyjames]

Fist M5 MacBook Pro Geekbench scores. 4.61ghz. Different clock speed than the one from the leaked Russian YT video. Maybe a different model or setup quirk?

Mac17,2 - Geekbench

Benchmark results for a Mac17,2 with an Apple M5 processor.

browser.geekbench.com

Mac17,2 - Geekbench

Benchmark results for a Mac17,2 with an Apple M5 processor.

browser.geekbench.com

 

[Eric]

Based on Adobe's docs on system requirements, I suspect your M1 would be doing fine if it had at least 16GB RAM.

https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/system-requirements.html

https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/kb/optimize-performance-lightroom.html

https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/kb/lightroom-gpu-faq.html

Their minimum and recommended GPU requirements for LRC on Windows are very modest. No reason it'd be any different on macOS, but they don't go into as much detail (probably because they don't need to, I bet any Apple Silicon GPU will do).

Honestly, if a 14" screen is fine, I bet you would even have good results with the non-Pro M5 MBP they just announced.

Also, you're buying this in the US. If you buy direct from Apple, take advantage of their 2 week no questions asked return policy to avoid worries about being stuck with too little computer to do the job. Just make sure to immediately load it up with the jobs that have brought your M1 to its knees. If it's not good enough, run it through the factory wipe process, return it, and use the credit towards a higher spec Mac.

I understand that I'm running 8GB instead of 16GB but anecdotally speaking it took me over an hour to edit 15 photos, including masking and noise reduction, even if I were to cut that time in half it would still be beyond ridiculous. I know the specs say one thing but that doesn't seem realistic to me.

 

[mr_roboto]

I understand that I'm running 8GB instead of 16GB but anecdotally speaking it took me over an hour to edit 15 photos, including masking and noise reduction, even if I were to cut that time in half it would still be beyond ridiculous. I know the specs say one thing but that doesn't seem realistic to me.

It's totally realistic that insufficient RAM can slow the computer down to an absurd degree. RAM random access latency is at least 100x faster than SSD, so whenever a CPU needs to access data that was previously swapped out to a file on disk, that's very bad news for performance.

A key concept in thinking about this is the "working set size". The "working set" is the subset of RAM allocated by a program which it actually uses frequently. Most programs allocate a mix - some of their memory is in the working set, some is very rarely used. It's okay if the system has to swap out stuff that's not in the working set, you don't really notice.

However, once the collective working set size of all running programs grows to be substantially larger than the amount of RAM in the computer, it will be forced to swap a lot more, and a lot of the data swapped out will be in the working set, and you will notice. The performance hit is not subtle. It's exactly what you describe, where some task takes at least ten times longer than it should, maybe even worse.

Back in the spinning rust days, the performance gap between RAM and permanent storage was far worse than it is now. It was not uncommon for a computer driven into heavy swapping to become so unresponsive to UI inputs that it was essentially impossible to kill the process responsible for slowing everything to a crawl. Often easier to just hit the reset button.

 

[NotEntirelyConfused]

I understand that I'm running 8GB instead of 16GB but anecdotally speaking it took me over an hour to edit 15 photos, including masking and noise reduction, even if I were to cut that time in half it would still be beyond ridiculous. I know the specs say one thing but that doesn't seem realistic to me.

I urge you to consider carefully what @mr_roboto wrote. Your ignorance could cost you a lot of money, and his post will fix that if you read it and understand it.

tl;dr: Doubling your ram might have no impact on performance at all, or it might increase performance by 10-20x (or even more!). In your particular case it's extremely likely definitely going to be the latter.

 

[Eric]

I urge you to consider carefully what @mr_roboto wrote. Your ignorance could cost you a lot of money, and his post will fix that if you read it and understand it.

tl;dr: Doubling your ram might have no impact on performance at all, or it might increase performance by 10-20x (or even more!). In your particular case it's extremely likely definitely going to be the latter.

I was going to drag my knuckles into the Apple store and buy that Max but you've shown me the error of my ways. I did have to call in an expert to read it and help me understand though.

 

[NotEntirelyConfused]

I was going to drag my knuckles into the Apple store and buy that Max but you've shown me the error of my ways. I did have to call in an expert to read it and help me understand though.

Yeah, sorry, that was probably a little harsh. I spent some time swimming in the muck over at MR yesterday and today, and the irritation probably rubbed off here. What a waste of time. It's even worse than when I left.

And BTW, not to discourage you from buying that Max- it's a great machine. But for photos, it's overkill. The M5 is likely more than enough - but if you do, consider going to 24 or 32 GB, despite the highway robbery.

 

[Eric]

Yeah, sorry, that was probably a little harsh. I spent some time swimming in the muck over at MR yesterday and today, and the irritation probably rubbed off here. What a waste of time. It's even worse than when I left.

And BTW, not to discourage you from buying that Max- it's a great machine. But for photos, it's overkill. The M5 is likely more than enough - but if you do, consider going to 24 or 32 GB, despite the highway robbery.

My M4 Mac Studio with 128 MB RAM handles LRC image processing fine but it still takes time when it comes to rendering masks and denoising, it's not just basic post processing as I often times have to batch process hundreds of images, and it eats up a ton of resources. I'm not sure if it's just the latest versions utilizing AI (for certain local tasks) or what but even on my M4 I still find myself closing out other heavy applications to speed it up.

 

[Nycturne]

Back in the spinning rust days, the performance gap between RAM and permanent storage was far worse than it is now. It was not uncommon for a computer driven into heavy swapping to become so unresponsive to UI inputs that it was essentially impossible to kill the process responsible for slowing everything to a crawl. Often easier to just hit the reset button.

Off topic, but I really do not miss those days. It's one reason I tend to over-buy on RAM even now. Do I need 48GB of RAM right now? No. But am I going to drop down to 24GB after being on 32GB for a few years? Also no.

I still remember the first SSD I added to one of the early Intel systems, and that was a revelation. Never went back to HDDs except for bulk storage after that.

My M4 Mac Studio with 128 MB RAM handles LRC image processing fine but it still takes time when it comes to rendering masks and denoising, it's not just basic post processing as I often times have to batch process hundreds of images, and it eats up a ton of resources. I'm not sure if it's just the latest versions utilizing AI (for certain local tasks) or what but even on my M4 I still find myself closing out other heavy applications to speed it up.

One thing to consider is measuring the CPU/GPU load during these tasks. Before I left Adobe's suite behind, the thing I noticed is that different things would stress a system differently. Some filters and tools were still leveraging the code written ages ago when the feature was first introduced, and so was still leaning on the CPU. Some of them weren't even multithreaded, and so would take considerable time even on a fast machine with lots of cores because nobody had been given the green light to rewrite that particular tool to be multithreaded, or use the GPU for faster processing.

EDIT: Once you know if your pain points are single-threaded, CPU-only or actually running on the GPU, you can make better choices on wether a larger GPU block would even help you in those specific tasks.

One downside of a legacy system driven by a corporate entity on a subscription model: the old stuff inevitably tends to become something that shall not be touched. Mostly because the business priority at that point is to drive higher revenue, which making an old thing faster almost never does under the subscription model, sadly.

 

[mr_roboto]

Off topic, but I really do not miss those days. It's one reason I tend to over-buy on RAM even now. Do I need 48GB of RAM right now? No. But am I going to drop down to 24GB after being on 32GB for a few years? Also no.

Same. I know I don't really need the 48GB in this computer, I could just close things I'm not really using, but it is nice to never worry about swapping.

In my experience virtual memory is the top thing that makes it hard to explain computer performance to people who don't have CS degrees. I think this is because the normal case is pretty intuitive: as long as there's enough RAM, performance is mostly a function of the available CPU and GPU resources. There's complications due to parallelism, but otherwise it's easy to think about. Virtual memory muddies the waters.

(Another problem that makes for difficult explanations: sometimes people learn that adding enough RAM to a computer boosted performance a lot, and falsely generalize that experience into believing adding more RAM is a panacea for all performance issues.)

 

[dada_dave]

One potentially interesting wrinkle is that Apple codenames seem to have a gap for M6, no Pros or Max.

M4+ Chip Generation - Speculation Megathread [MERGED]

Updated codenames - 10/05/2025 On https://theapplewiki.com/wiki/User:Ilikeiphone123/Playground/Codenames there are a lot of new information. What is the most notable to me is that Apple seems to plan to release Pro/Max/Ultra chips at a slower pace than the regular M chips. Maybe Apple will...

forums.macrumors.com

Not sure how reliable this information is? But let's go on a limb and say it's accurate (and not missing anything), it could be that Pro and Max chips are being pushed back this generation and there will be a gap next generation, but maybe a quicker update with the M7? So let's say Mar 2026 and then October 2027? Rather than releasing October 2025 and October 2027?

I have to admit I'm not sure I believe this - the rumor mill is that Apple will massively updating the M6 MBPs, but if there are literally no Pro and Max chips then no 16" MBP at all, no Pro minis, and no Studios, so the only upgraded MBPs is the 14" with the base M6 chip. Hmmmm ... possible of course, but seems unlikely.

Provided the information in the post above is correct, I quite like deconstruct60's solution that Apple will be updating the M6 Pro/Max "platform" so that it matches the A-series with the same CPU cores/GPU generation. Thus they will still be M6s but with the platform IDs that would have previously been associated with M7s.