Another year goes by and another developers conference takes place beginning on June 8th starting with the keynote (pre-recorded) at 10AM Pacific and runs until June 12th. As it has been since the COVID pandemic shutdowns (for the past 6 years), this year’s conference sessions will also be online only (with the exception of a few developers who have been invited to Apple Park for the awards ceremony).
As noted before, I’ve kept tabs on the conference every year (even after my involvement with Apple ended a long time ago) just to get an overview of what software related developments are planned. Throughout the years, I’ve remained unsticky in terms of the ecosystem (iCloud Photos remains disabled as one example). Additionally, my most compute intensive tasks that I now do is done on my gaming tower (it’s now old RTX4070Ti Super is still competitive for those niche ML tasks).
As for WWDC, I still do miss the old in-person format where those keynotes thrived on the dynamic of the attendees in the auditorium, and the actual conference provided actual face-to-face contact with many Apple hardware and software engineers. But this format again is the new reality post-COVID where many companies have found this much more budget friendly.
Until recently, I had no Apple Silicon based systems again besides an iPad Pro M5 (I had given away an M3 Pro MacBook Pro and an M4 Pro mini) and have been doing most of my non-compute intensive tasks on my 2019 Mac Pro. Last month though, I decided to pickup a MacBook Pro M5 Max (64GB RAM, 2TB SSD, 18-core CPU, 40-core GPU, and 16-core Neural Engine) because of the ongoing supply constraints + component price increases in the supply chain (which Apple had enough in their supply chain to weather for these current products); it took nearly a month for that build to order configuration to be manufactured (this one in Vietnam).
I had been waiting out for a Studio M5 Ultra but Apple’s recent quarterly conference call highlighted how these their Mac desktop line would be supply constrained for a while. Many are also wondering if they will just save a lot of those memory and storage components for an M6 variant (they’ve removed many of the higher end memory and storage configurations for the Mini and Studio).
This M5 Max (with the 40-core GPU) while fast for most regular workflows, it is only barely able to keep up (using both the CPU and GPU) with my now outdated RTX 4070Ti Super (on my gaming tower) on AI/machine learning (local model) tasks for audio, video (enhancing. restoration, and upscaling), and graphics processing at the start of that process (but normally ends up around 10-15% slower through a batch job since there are occasions where performance is throttled even when on the performance setting while on power since I opted for the 14″ where the laws of thermodynamics kick in with regards to thermal management).
This is where case form factor (on the desktop side) plays a huge role (a tower with proper airflow simply allows efficient cooling and removal of heat). For this laptop, I decided against the 16″ (where this throttling isn’t an issue) because the tradeoff is that size (16″ one isn’t something I want to carry around). While this performance per watt is impressive in a laptop form factor (albeit with the fans ramped up), it still highlights that whatever next generation chip goes into the Studio form factor, there will also be this limiting thermal factor preventing a desktop configuration from pushing these Apple Silicon chips to much higher levels of performance (from that desktop computing POV).
The Studio form factor is not a thermal dead end design yet but all it takes is Intel getting back on track with a processor design that isn’t anemic like their current ones are (remains to be seen) once paired with a capable discrete GPU (even a middle of the road RTX 5070Ti would chew through these ML workflows for video processing). I guess I’ll also need to see an 80-core M5 Ultra GPU in action to see how it compares to an RTX 5090 in that niche area (which is my personal use case).
Apple rarely announces hardware at WWDC but we’ll see if they provide more clarity/visibility into this with the Studio since the expected M5 upgrade has not materialized.
