Apple M5 Mac
Shares rank 37 of 63 laptops by recommenders
People recommend it for speed, battery life and running large local AI models on unified memory; critics say it trails GPUs for AI work and lacks good Linux support.
People recommend it for speed, battery life and running large local AI models on unified memory; critics say it trails GPUs for AI work and lacks good Linux support.
19 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 10
- criticize it
- 9
- approval share
- 53%
Recommended in 6 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 10 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 1.1 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 6 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Runs large local AI models
“I personally now do more AI stuff and gaming on my M5 mac with its 24 GB shared (300 GB/s) RAM pool than my 12 GB 5070 Ti”
Comment from 29 May 2026 in “It's hard to justify buying a Framework 12” “It's a beast of a machine - I love that I can run an 80GB model and still have 48GB left for everything else.”
Comment from 15 May 2026 in “A Few Words on DS4” “since it uses unified RAM and a powerful SoC CPU/GPU”
Comment from 23 Jun 2026 in “Unsloth GLM-5.2 – How to Run Locally” Fast, long battery life
“2.26x faster and 3-4x more battery life for the Mac.”
Comment from 27 Mar 2026 in “A Year with the Framework 13” “it's streets ahead of my old M1 Pro in speed”
Comment from 16 Oct 2026 in “Apple ML Research: Muse Spark Open with MLX on Mac Studio” “my M5 uses 50 watts on the exact same save”
Comment from 26 Aug 2026 in “Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Slow for AI versus GPUs
“Macs could be real interesting in this space butr they lack the raw FLOPS with the M5 generation”
Comment from 7 Jul 2026 in “GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse” “It will run, but prefill and token gen are still slow relative to my consumer GPU box.”
Comment from 29 Jul 2026 in “Show HN: Open-source engine running Gemma 4 26B in 2 GB RAM on any M-series Mac” “It feels pretty slow on both the M5 Mac and the DGX Spark.”
Comment from 17 Aug 2026 in “Qwen 3.8 27B is excellent, but it defaults to overthinking things” Poor Linux support
“If you think running a Linux desktop on an Ampere is bad, try running it on an M5 Mac!”
Comment from 30 Jun 2026 in “The end of the AArch64 desktop experiment” “it's not possible due to Apple's lack of documentation and some other issues”
Comment from 28 Jun 2026 in “GitHub – librepods-org/librepods: AirPods liberated from Apple's ecosystem” “I wouldn't buy an M5 for Linux”
Comment from 1 Jul 2026 in “Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report” Background AI tasks and fan load
“Games and heavy applications slow down and stutter because of "AI" background processes”
Comment from 16 Oct 2026 in “Apple ML Research: Muse Spark Open with MLX on Mac Studio” “Every time I turn on my M5 I have to manually turn apple intelligence off.”
Comment from 21 Sep 2026 in “Turn off and restrict access to Apple Intelligence features on Mac” “I basically have to run my fans at full speed all day while working now”
Comment from 16 Oct 2026 in “Apple ML Research: Muse Spark Open with MLX on Mac Studio”
Other laptops people recommend
The four most recommended other laptops, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apple MacBook Pro | 928 | 688 | 57% | 13 | 5 yrs248 owners | — |
| Apple MacBook Neo | 707 | 355 | 66% | 9 | 1 mo8 owners | — |
| MacBook Air | 633 | 209 | 75% | 12 | 5 yrs130 owners | Approved |
| Apple MacBook | 499 | 348 | 59% | 12 | 9 yrs77 owners | — |
| Apple M5 MacThis page | 10 | 9 | 53% | 6 | — | — |
What people said
All 21 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“I was having these issues on Tahoe on my M5 (came with it, unfortunately)”
“I basically have to run my fans at full speed all day while working now”
“it's streets ahead of my old M1 Pro in speed”
“Games and heavy applications slow down and stutter because of "AI" background processes”
“Every time I turn on my M5 I have to manually turn apple intelligence off.”
“Newer Macs are always just gonna smoke anything earlier than an M5.”
“my M5 uses 50 watts on the exact same save”
“It feels pretty slow on both the M5 Mac and the DGX Spark.”
“It will run, but prefill and token gen are still slow relative to my consumer GPU box.”
“Macs could be real interesting in this space butr they lack the raw FLOPS with the M5 generation”
“I wouldn't buy an M5 for Linux”
“It just seems to run better.”
“If you think running a Linux desktop on an Ampere is bad, try running it on an M5 Mac!”
“it's not possible due to Apple's lack of documentation and some other issues”
“I just caved and bought an M5 to replace my older one. Boo.”
“since it uses unified RAM and a powerful SoC CPU/GPU”
“I personally now do more AI stuff and gaming on my M5 mac with its 24 GB shared (300 GB/s) RAM pool than my 12 GB 5070 Ti”
“It's a beast of a machine - I love that I can run an 80GB model and still have 48GB left for everything else.”
“I hate that my M5 with 24 gb has so much trouble with these models”
“2.26x faster and 3-4x more battery life for the Mac.”
“2 is still like 5 fewer than I want”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.