MacBook Pro M5 Max 128GB 4TB

I maxed out the specs, so I can already feel the guilt arriving with the box. Recording the inner struggle here.

Why did you buy it

Because I want it, that’s why.

I bought a Mac mini M4 16GB at the start of the year and had been happily using it as a home-base machine — running OpenClaw, remote-controlling Claude Code, that sort of thing. But when I asked it to do heavier analysis locally, it sometimes just couldn’t. So I started wanting a machine with generous memory. Also, the Mac mini chained me to the one room with a display; a laptop I could carry around and use near my family started sounding pretty good.

I’ve done it now

So: MacBook Pro M5 Max, 128GB, 4TB, purchased. I’ve done it. I overdid it. And yet I also feel the opposite regret — maybe I should have gone to 8TB of storage. If you tell me the M5 Pro 64GB would have been plenty, well, you’re right. But I wanted the Max 128GB. If I’m still using it three years from now, maybe by then there’ll be genuinely useful lightweight local AI models that fit on it.

The storage is where I may have cheaped out. I don’t work with video, so I talked myself down from 8TB — but if it becomes a thing to keep a big MoE model on disk and dynamically page the needed experts into memory, I’m stuck. I guess I’ll just buy another one then…