alt Hacker NewsI chased down what the "4x faster at AI tasks" was measuring:
> Testing conducted by Apple in January 2026 using preproduction 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Air systems with Apple M5, 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, 32GB of unified memory, and 4TB SSD, and production 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Air systems with Apple M4, 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, 32GB of unified memory, and 2TB SSD. Time to first token measured with an 8K-token prompt using a 14-billion parameter model with 4-bit quantization, and LM Studio 0.4.1 (Build 1). Performance tests are conducted using specific computer systems and reflect the approximate performance of MacBook Air.
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>Time to first token measured with an 8K-token prompt using a 14-billion parameter model with 4-bit quantization
Oh dear 14B and 4-bit quant? There are going to be a lot of embarrassed programmers who need to explain to their engineering managers why their Macbook can't reasonably run LLMs like they said it could. (This already happened at my fortune 20 company lol)
Topical. My hobby project this week (0) has been hyper-optimizing microgpt for M5's CPU cores (and comparing to MLX performance). Wonder if anything changes under the regime I've been chasing with these new chips.
Quite interesting that it's now a selling point just like fps in Crysis was a long time ago.
That is talking about battery life, not AI tasks. Footnote 53, where it says, "Up to 18 hours battery life":
So it's not measuring output tokens/s, just how long it takes to start generating tokens. Seems we'll have to wait for independent benchmarks to get useful numbers.
Does that include loading the model again? Apple seems to be the only company doing such shenanigans in their measurements
14-billion parameter model with 4-bit quantization seems rather small
Like saying my PC boots up 2x faster so it must be 2x more powerful. lol