MacBook Pro M4 Max tops $5k AI race

Apple’s unified memory architecture remains a moat for local inference, offering the only viable path for running 70B+ models at interactive speeds without a massive GPU rack. M4 Max bandwidth (546 GB/s) more than doubles AMD Strix Halo (256 GB/s), resulting in 2-3x faster token generation for dense models. New RDMA over Thunderbolt 5 (macOS 26) enables sub-10 microsecond latency for multi-node memory pooling, while AMD's slower prompt prefill and ROCm overhead remain significant friction points.