MacBooks Are Now AI Powerhouses. Time To Upgrade to Upcoming Agents?

By -

I think it is time for me to upgrade from my MacBook Air to the latest one. My sole reason is simple. I am all in on AI such as running local LLM, experimenting with 3D and focusing on AI generated contents. My current MacBook Air can do quite a bit but if I want to run bigger models and render faster, the MacBook Air with M5 with 32 GB would go a long way. However, should you even if you are still rocking the MacBook Air with the M1?

It really comes down to what you are doing now with your MacBook. What has me thinking about it more this week is not because of the MacBook Neo and the new MacBook Pro that Apple released this week. Rather, it is all the new AI development in the last few weeks. 

A simple anime-style illustration of two laptops. The left laptop features a glowing brain and a lock, representing private local AI. The right laptop shows a robotic claw emerging from a cloud, representing cloud-based AI agents

AI development continues at a pace layman like us cannot keep up. Read up on something and something new from another AI company is out by afternoon. Only a few weeks ago, Clawbot burst into mainstream media and after a couple of name changes, the developer settled on OpenClaw. It continues to make waves. Especially in China but that's another story entirely. This type of agent that can live on your computer is here to stay. OpenAI bought them. That's how big it is. Then both Anthropic, OpenAI's nemesis, and Perplexity both released their own agents though they are two cloud based. And then this week, Nvidia made its intention known that it was getting into the personal AI assistant game with its own open source agent, NemoClaw. (There is no direct link to Nemoclaw at this time.)

Are there going to be others working on it? Certainly. We have not heard to Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon yet. So, it will not be long before you computer will be running an AI agent. The issue or choice is whether you truly run it locally or in the cloud. Right now, only OpenClaw truly runs locally with the LLM on your computer. Given the privacy nightmare were reported regarding OpenClaw, I will shy away from it until smarter and more knowledgeable folks tell me it is okay for me to run it. Personally, I cannot wait to see Apple's own take on it. But whether you and I end up running OpenClaw or Apple's own solution, on device AI assistant may provide the best privacy and control. 

Perhaps you’re asking why are you just talking about the MacBook Air and not the MacBook Pro if you re doing a lot of AI and 3D work. The main reason is this - cost versus performance. Go back a year, I would have suggested that if you are going to do AI on a Mac, you probably would want to go with a MacBook Pro because of the faster chips in the form of M4 Pro and M4 Max. The 14" MacBook Pro with M4 Pro would have been my choice - upgrade the hard drive to 1 TB and RAM to 48GB. But the M5 chips are different. Not only are they faster as you would expect from Apple, AMD, and Intel with each upgrade, but the M5 has something that Apple has not done before: neural accelerators built directly into the GPU cores that dramatically speed up the time to first token in LLM.

In general, the M5 is 4X faster with AI performance. Sure, what's the big deal, right? The M5 being four times faster than the M1. Nah, man! It's 4 times faster than the M4! That's the game changer for me as far as the M5 goes. And it is a game changer for you as well.

When most people think AI, they are thinking ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude. AI apps on the iPhone or iPad that generate pictures. AI, specifically Apple Intelligence, is very different. Apple Intelligence features are built into apps and OS. We are using a lot of Apple Intelligence features without even realizing it. Live translation, creating Genmoji, and background features like adaptive power mode to name a few. All these AI features are just features. They do not stand out and say "you're using AI to take photos".  

Apple Intelligence will become smarter year after year. New features will be added. One I look forward to an a Siri agent that will manage your Mac much like OpenClaw with a strong emphasis on privacy. No matter what these other guys say, I trust Apple's stance on privacy more than any other company.

With that said, when you upgrade, take Apple Intelligence into account. I know that Apple will support the Mac for years with MacOS updates. Future proofing your Mac investment so that future Apple Intelligence upgrade and features can run smoothly should be taken into consider.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Created An App And Other AI Uses This Week

By -
Image
I have been using AI for more than a year. Like most, I did not touch ChatGPT for the first six months or so and I only tired it because I was bored at the time. I still remember what I was doing that day and decided to give it a try while at work.  It took a few more weeks for me to give it another go. And then the days between uses became shorter and shorter until now when I use it daily.  The most exciting thing I did this week was to create an app via Claude AI - it was a simple Swift app that I wanted to work - a list generator. Then I used Gemini to help me get started with Pandas and create a simple neuron (I know there is a bias) looks like and what it does. For a few hours of prompting and learning to run these codes, I would say I knew about ten times more about data analysis and AI than when I first started. Which means nothing really because I knew nothing about this from at the start of it all. Here are other uses this week: I asked about what my credit score mean...
Read more

Google Contact Lenses, Apple’s Vision Pro, And The Future of AR in Glasses

By -
Image
 We can walk and chew gum at the same time. But how about watching a video while doing yard work, during a meeting you don’t want to be at, or, ahem, school? Okay, I don’t recommend doing that but I am sure it has been done before or worse. I am suggesting this because with the recent Vision Pro unveil by Apple, I cannot help but imagine in a few years, perhaps a decade from now, Apple and other tech companies will be able to jam all that technology that currently has to sit on the top of your head into a pair of glasses.  We already have glasses with audio built in from the likes of Oakley and Ankers. There were rumors a few years ago that Google was going to skip the glasses altogether and go directly to incorporating tech into contact lenses. Now if you remember Google Glasses, let us just say that Google was way ahead of its time and it should not have included a camera.  Despite the fact that Google Glasses did not go anywhere, I cannot help but feel that Google has ...
Read more

Signing Into iCloud On iPhone Helps Get Around One iCloud Account Per Device Limitation

By -
I have more than one iCloud accounts where I keep personal data separate from other more public facing data (blogs and other writings, coding, and business endevours). To my knowledge, there is no way to have more than one iCloud Drive.  As many of you know, you can add accounts from Google, Outlook, and even other iCloud accounts onto your iPHone or iPad but you are really limited to just one main iCloud account. You should be able to access mail and calendar. Well, what about notes and iCloud Drive? Then you are out of luck. I have come across users, though not many, would want to be able to address more iCloud features from multiple accounts to an iPhone or iPad. Even more have asked for the iPad to support mutliple users. Me? I just want to be able to access different iCloud drives on the iPhone or iPad.  So, I decided to see if I can log into iCloud through the browser. And guess what? It works. I can access emails and notes. Pretty much all the iCloud features though the...
Read more