Framework 13 Pro 64GB vs Macbook Pro M5 Pro 48GB
I will be going to MSCS (UW Madison) coming Fall 2026, I've been sure about the MacBook Pro M5 Pro 48GB till now. But the sudden heroic appearance of the 13 Pro has completely derailed my plans.
I was originally with the Macbook because of it's large unified memory (48GB) that allows me to locally run LLMs at a very resonable token speed. But, inferencing LLMs is not what I will always be doing.
I want to work on OS, systems and distributed systems during the next 2 years, and I'm not sure if MacOS will be good for it. That was my only gripe about Macbook till now.
The price difference is also quite notable, the MBP comes to only 2k USD (M5 Pro, 48GB Memory, 1tb storage) because of an Employee discount, the Framework comes to 2.8K ish USD (X7 358H, 64GB Memory, 2TB storage). Not sure if the price difference will be worth it for the x86 architecture.
I'm new to Systems btw, I wanna dive deep into this relatively soon, so I apoligize if I got the gist of things wrong, willing to learn any advantages and disadvantages of both the laptops