Spending the price of a BYD Qin to buy a high-end "Apple Family Bucket", is the Apple logo really that valuable? After experiencing the 50,000 MacBook Pro and the 30,000 Studio Display XDR, I feel that these two gadgets are indeed niche, but it is difficult to find a replacement...
After talking about Guoguo's "low-priced" affordable product MacBook Neo a while ago, and looking back at high-end products such as MacBook Pro, I can only say that Guoguo uses its unique hardware architecture and ultimate pursuit of craftsmanship to provide a unique experience for so-called high-end productivity.
Tony is still the same, starting with his appearance.
Aluminum metal CNC integrated body, large and easy-to-use touchpad, easy-to-use MacOS, you can experience these on the MacBook Air next door that costs thousands of dollars.
Since the MacBook Pro sells for 50,000 yuan, the fruity and delicate flavor is its least worth mentioning advantage.
Compared with the Air, the Pro's interface configuration will be more complete: three Thunderbolt 5, a full-blooded HDMI 2.1, which can support up to 8K 60Hz or 4K 240Hz, and a stronger 3.5mm headphone jack!
However, there is a trick hidden in the SD card slot. It only supports UHS-II. The Win workstation next door supports the Express specification. Are you trying to force everyone to use Thunderbolt 5 and then switch to a card reader?
The Magsafe charging port has returned on the MacBook Air. Tony has almost never used it during his experience with the Air. However, it seems more necessary on the Pro. No one wants to lose 50,000 yuan because of tripping over the charging cable, right?
The screen also continues the XDR screen of the previous generation, and its quality is also unique. With the nano-texture coating, it is difficult to feel reflections when using it. Turn off the machine and tell us how good its anti-glare capability is.
Okay, the appetizer is over, after all, the MacBook Pro chip upgrade is the highlight.
This M5 Max chip is not a simple upgrade of the M5. Compared with the core architecture of M5, the E-core is completely abandoned and instead uses a full-core design of super core + performance core. The CPU scale reaches 6 + 12 for a total of 18 cores.
What's even more unreasonable is this Chiplet design. Apple disassembles the CPU and GPU into different modules and then uses "glue to stick them together."
According to the information on the official website, Tony inferred that the M5 Pro and Max processors this time are at least divided into two parts: CPU and GPU.
And the number of channels of the memory controller in M5 Max also varies depending on the size of the GPU. Since the GPU is the main memory consumer, the memory controller should be part of the GPU.
And don’t look at the 128G unified memory. The capacity is quite impressive, but what’s even more impressive is the memory bandwidth of up to 614GB/s.
What is this concept in the Win camp?
There are gaming laptops that are so fast, reaching the level of 5070Ti, but the memory (video memory) size is far less than Guoguo; while the memory capacity of the most powerful core graphics laptop is increased, but the speed is far behind.
In other words, those that are faster than Apple are not as big as Apple, and those that are bigger than Apple are not as fast as Apple. Looking at it this way, Guoguo’s unified memory is indeed quite powerful.
Tony also did some performance testing, and we can see that the performance of the M5 Max is powerful enough.
So much so that the MBP, which is so expensive, is capable even in gaming areas it is not good at.
It natively supports MacOS Mingchao. While the picture quality is excellent, the frame rate can also be supported up to 120. Coupled with the peripheral configuration of MacBook Pro, it is really exciting to play.
Another example is the veteran 3A game Cyberpunk 2077. Tony also ran the Steam version that needed to be translated. He turned off overclocking at the ultra-high preset and got more than 70 frames under the pressure of about 2K resolution, which is enough to play.
Tony did admit that Mac’s native game ecology is not as rich as that of Win next door, but in Mac’s old business, MBP does not have a good substitute for such needs as creation and editing.
But now, there is another direction, and MacBook Pro has shown its "cost-effectiveness" in this direction-AI.
When testing a large model under LM Studio, a model that is too small is really a small case for it.
Tony went directly to Qwen3.5 122b-a10b, which is a model with a total parameter of about 122 billion. After loading the context to 256k, the memory occupied is about 80G, and the generation speed is about 50 Token/s.
The limit of this machine is step3.5-flash, a 196b model! Just loading this model already takes up 100G of memory.
It’s just that the current AI capabilities of MacBook Pro are mostly focused on reasoning, and the ecological construction of MLX will take time. However, some developers can greatly accelerate model training and fine-tuning effects by reverse-engineering Apple's neural engine... Cook, you clearly have good stuff, so just give it to everyone.
In short, putting it into a backpack is equivalent to the experience of "putting a local large model, a video editing workstation, or even a game console into a backpack", which is really unique.
However, for ordinary consumers like us, the combination of 16+512G and 32+1T is completely enough. After all, the quality and workmanship have not shrunk no matter what configuration it is, MBA or MBP.
After talking about MacBook Pro, Tony will talk about the 30,000-dollar screen. Many people say, wouldn’t it be the same if I bought a 4K monitor worth 3,000 yuan?
What a difference.
5K resolution is a perfect “physical level” adaptation for Mac’s UI scaling. Not to mention the 2,000 nits peak brightness and 2,304 light control zones.
As a professional monitor, it is probably one of the few that can provide sufficiently accurate and excellent image quality performance in both SDR and HDR. As a MiniLED device, halo control and viewing angle are almost the ceiling of MiniLED.
Halos can only be felt when very close
But the shortcomings are equally obvious, first of all, the price... Well, this may be my problem, and the display support is limited to Apple devices - if you switch to Windows or Android, HDR will not be provided... In a sense, it is also "Only Apple Can Do".
But with its unique color accuracy and HDR performance, it’s really hard to find another similar device.
Whether it's MacBook Pro or Studio Display XDR, Apple's products will always give target users a reason to "Shut up and take my money."
In short, these two products are indeed ridiculously expensive, but if you are the kind of person who cares about privacy and needs to run local models in a cafe, or a Pro brother who directly adjusts 8K ProRes Raw HDR material on the set, then what Apple provides is not a computer, but "almost the only mobile productivity closed loop on the planet."
Although Apple's own AI is still "preparing", these devices are already shining in the field of AI. It's expensive, probably because there really isn't a second choice for these specific needs.
If it were you, how would you choose to spend these 80,000 yuan?