M5 Ultra in a MacBook

[indefinite]

That battery wouldn't last much though.

An M5 Ultra chip sitting in a power user's lap idle is unlikely. So either the MacBook Pro would need to get a battery/thermal upgrade or the user can carry around a power adapter.

 

[Lounge vibes 05]

Doesn’t the battery in the current 16 inch MacBook Pro already pushed right up against the airplane battery capacity restrictions?
Either way, I have seen and held gaming laptops, and I also owned a 16 inch MacBook Pro for a time.
It is absolutely ridiculous to say that those 6 LB + plastic beasts are even close to the portability of a MacBook Pro.
Personally, I’m hoping that the next MacBook Pro actually see a *reduction* in size.
If there is one thing the Touch Bar MacBook Pros had going for them, it was the fact that the actual design of the things were incredible to hold and carry around. Hopefully the efficiency improvements that come along with moving to 2 NM allow them to slim the MBPs down a little, but importantly with no performance compromise.

 

[Luftkopf]

Bunch of non-sense. Just because Apple sucks at making laptops, doesn't mean it can't be done. Other laptop manufactures have no problem cooling 400W of power no problem at all.

Give the M5 Ultra to Lenovo and you will see they can make it work no problem at all.

Apple laptops are bad are they. Tell that to my 2012 MacBook Air, which my brother still uses, that is in better condition now than the 3 year old Asus it replaced was.

 

[benholt]

JPack is spot on about the power draw, but there are two other physical realities that kill the "M5 Ultra MacBook" idea, even with the aggressive core parking you're describing:

1. Static Power Leakage: An Ultra chip is essentially two Max dies stitched together via UltraFusion. Even if macOS perfectly parks the extra cores during normal workloads, a piece of silicon that massive inherently suffers from static power leakage. You'd be hauling around a giant chip that actively drains your battery life even while just browsing the web.
2. Physical Footprint vs. Battery Caps: The package size of an Ultra (plus the extra unified memory modules required to feed its massive memory bandwidth) would dominate the logic board. That leaves less physical room for the battery. Since the FAA strictly caps laptop batteries at 100Wh for flights, you'd end up with a thicker, heavier laptop that dies significantly faster than an M-Max.

Running a huge, expensive piece of silicon at 75% speed just to keep it from melting a laptop chassis is exactly the kind of inefficiency Apple Silicon was designed to escape. For workloads that genuinely require that much sustained, parallel compute, the Mac Studio is the right tool for the job.

 

[conmee]

JPack is spot on about the power draw, but there are two other physical realities that kill the "M5 Ultra MacBook" idea, even with the aggressive core parking you're describing:

1. Static Power Leakage: An Ultra chip is essentially two Max dies stitched together via UltraFusion. Even if macOS perfectly parks the extra cores during normal workloads, a piece of silicon that massive inherently suffers from static power leakage. You'd be hauling around a giant chip that actively drains your battery life even while just browsing the web.
2. Physical Footprint vs. Battery Caps: The package size of an Ultra (plus the extra unified memory modules required to feed its massive memory bandwidth) would dominate the logic board. That leaves less physical room for the battery. Since the FAA strictly caps laptop batteries at 100Wh for flights, you'd end up with a thicker, heavier laptop that dies significantly faster than an M-Max.

Running a huge, expensive piece of silicon at 75% speed just to keep it from melting a laptop chassis is exactly the kind of inefficiency Apple Silicon was designed to escape. For workloads that genuinely require that much sustained, parallel compute, the Mac Studio is the right tool for the job.

Forgot one...

3. Wallet Leakage: This occurs when Apple stitches together two extremely expensive dies and tries to design a thin and light chassis to house them in along with a silicon-anode battery for power.

 

[subjonas]

A M5 Ultra MBP is the target audience of Apple. Because the Apple audience mainly buys laptops, not desktops.

And to be honest, Apple has no business selling desktops because it has none of the advantages that desktop has, which is upgradability and repairability. With real desktops, you can just replace the GPU if a new one comes out and you are done. With Apple "desktops", you need to buy a whole new machine.

There are more people that would buy a M5 Ultra MBP then a M5 Ultra desktop.

I understand the "might as well make it portable" argument, but even without upgradability, stationary Mac desktops still have significant advantages over MacBooks. The two biggest are thermals and price. The thermals are far better than their portable equivalents, allowing them to have far better sustained performance. And if someone already has or prefers an external display and other external peripherals, the Mac desktop is the far less expensive option without the costly built-in display, keyboard, trackpad, and camera.

Other advantages are more ports which means less need for docks/hubs which add cost and clutter, and desktops have a general cleaner appearance than a laptop on a stand. They're also a bit more repairable according to iFixit.

Even though the market for desktop Macs is small compared to MacBooks, I believe that says more about how desirable and useful MacBooks are than how undesirable and un-useful Mac desktops are. There is still a significant market for desktops.

A MacBook that is designed to run an M Ultra would likely either sacrifice major performance compared to an M Ultra Mac Studio or major portability compared to an M Max 16" MBP, and it likely would cost significantly more than either. All of that means it would probably have less market demand than either.