Short answer: Jordan Metzner says Apple has not announced premium M5 chips, so the top RAM MacBook Pro still needs an M4 Pro, his team does not run LLMs locally, and he calls it a so so launch.
Watch this answer from Episode 17 (starts at 24:52) · Episode 17 notes and transcript
From Episode 17: Sora API, AI Automations, and Apple’s M5 Chip, starting at 24:52.
Sam Nadler [24:51]: Yeah. It's crazy. Okay. Last story is Apple has just rolled out m five across their product line, MacBook Pro, iPad, Vision Pro. I think not yet the Air, but supposedly, I think one more AI performance, I think four x AI performance compared to the m four. Also, in my opinion, really reasonable price tag, 14 inch MacBook Pro at about 1,500, $1,600. I don't know. It feels like probably a year ago, maybe it's been more that they released the m four, but just, a ton of more storage for more AI, essentially.
Jordan Metzner [25:33]: Yeah. Obviously I think, Apple's like it's kinda like the old Saturday Night Live thing with the razor. Right? Like one more blade. Right? So, m six is gonna be four times faster than m five, and, seven will be four times faster than six, and, etcetera. But, is this exciting and interesting to software developers or not? So I think that's, like, the real question here. Do you wanna go buy an m five? So a few things I think that are interesting to know. One is, in the previous versions, like m four and m three and m two, etcetera, they've had two additional lines besides kind of the m four line. They had, like, a pro, and I forgot the other line no line what they call it, they had two lines of premium chipsets on top of the standard line. With this m five announcement, they have not announced the premium version. So meaning that if you want the top of the line MacBook Pro with the most amount of RAM, you actually have to buy an m four Pro, I think, is what they call it.
Jordan Metzner [26:32]: So I think that's, like, incredibly interesting because that's it's a little, antithesis to kind of how Apple normally operates. I think the second thing is that, to your point, kind of they price them down, meaning that, like, it doesn't really make sense to buy a base model m four because you can buy a base model m five for the same price now. So that's kind of a replacement device. Obviously, the purpose of this device so you can run LLMs locally on your machine. I don't really know if developers are doing that. I know that we are not really doing that. I think, like, having a port more powerful machine will continue to help developers, like, produce more AI and produce better applications, but we're not really running kind of LLM models locally considering that we're using mostly, managed services from the LLM perspective. But, I guess we'd have to try using the m five and see if it's significantly better. I know when I moved up to m four, I didn't notice the difference, and I have a lot more RAM. So I think it's kind of like a half completed approach from Apple here.
Jordan Metzner [27:26]: And even funnier, like, they updated the Vision Pro. I thought that was, like, I thought that was dead, honestly. I mean, I don't think anybody's even talking about the m five update on the Vision Pro, or even, like, the updates on the iPad. I mean, is anybody even excited about, an iPad that now has m five or m four? I don't know. I don't think so. So and it's mostly because that when they do announce these features, they knew they announced these new chips, there's no features. And people care about features. They don't care about performance. Anyway, that's my wrap up on Apple. I think they're in a weird spot. Think I you just saw yesterday their head of search, who just got promoted to the role, just left to Meta. So it's been brutal for them on the AI front. Looks like they're partnering with everybody. But yeah, I thought that this was a so so launch from Apple, and not a superstar launch.
Jordan Metzner [28:08]: It seems like from the phone perspective, the AirPods threes, those have been doing really well, especially at retail. But this, we'll see. I think it's just a subset launch out of the Apple camp.
Sam Nadler [28:18]: Well, cool. Well, that wraps it up for Built This Week episode 17. Is there any final thoughts before we sign off?
Jordan Metzner [28:27]: Yeah. Sam, great episode. Like we mentioned, we've seen a crazy amount of investments. We didn't even talk about kind of all the OpenAI deals that they've done with, Oracle and NVIDIA. And, we talked about Walmart, but, I mean, it's just nonstop the amount of partnerships that they're doing. Broadcom got announced this week as well with OpenAI. So it's just been a slew of deals happening, ton of capital all over the place. And I'm excited for episode 18 next week because I think we'll see even more AI news and movement. So, thanks everyone for listening. Like and subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcast, and thanks, Sam. Great episode.
Sam Nadler [29:05]: See you next week, everyone.
Jordan Metzner [29:06]: Bye. See you.
