I always get a little bothered when I see negative reviews from a CPU update in Apple laptops. While a new CPU alone isn’t a thrilling update, it’s important that they do these regularly so consumers looking to buy aren’t forced to buy a 3 year old product with no idea when a refresh will come. I’ve been in this situation many times with Apple and it has been very frustrating. I’m glad they are back on a yearly refresh schedule.
I think the issue stems from too many people making their living off reviews that require something exciting to get views. When updates are more evolution than revolution, it makes for a more boring article/video. I always worry that these types of responses will lead Apple to do silly things, like leaving old chips out there too long, or adding pointless features just so there is something new to talk about.
> While a new CPU alone isn’t a thrilling update, it’s important that they do these regularly so consumers looking to buy aren’t forced to buy a 3 year old product with no idea when a refresh will come.
Also: incremental updates add up.
A (e.g.) 7% increase from one year to the next isn't a big deal, but +7%, +7%, +7%, …, adds up when you finally come up for a tech refresh after 3-5 years.
Agree. So many people online (not just reviewers) complaining that it's just a spec-bump, demanding a new design. I remember the time people were (rightfully) complaining that the update schedules were slow for Macs, mainly because of Intel's limitations. Now we get yearly refresh, they complain that it looks the same.
I don't think they appreciate the cost of redesigning and retooling. Echo your thoughts and hope Apple doesn't listen to this feedback. Imagine more expensive laptops because some people want more frequent design changes!
Apple is the company where every new iPhone release is both simultaneously boring, not worth it and a sure sign of their impending collapse and also somehow a vicious treadmill which forces people to upgrade every year, throwing out their old phone and contributing to e-waste. They could announce a cure for cancer tomorrow and within a month people would be back to asking what have they innovated recently. People just like to complain.
Intel had multiple years of promising that their new next-gen more efficient 10nm CPUs were coming very soon, and then those kept being delayed.
The chips they did release in that time period were mostly minor revisions of the same architecture.
Apple was pretty clearly building chassis designs for the CPUs that Intel was promising to release, and those struggled with thermal management of the chips that Intel actually had on the market. And Apple got tired of waiting for Intel and having their hardware designs out of sync with the available chips.
The review ecosystem is really toxic in that regard, as makers will court to it.
We had the silly unboxing videos fade, and it meant gorgeous packaging flying in the face of recyclability and cost reduction.
I wonder if the glass backs and utterly shiny but heavy and PITA to repair design is also part from there. A reviewer doesn't care that much if it costs half the phone to repair the back panel.
Not me: I wanted Apple’s software division to innovate like its hardware division. Extra power with nothing to use it on except more and more docker containers isn’t compelling to me. I’ve not upgraded my M1 Macbook Pro and don’t plan to
I'd much prefer they focus on fixing their existing software quality problems. No innovation needed, just boring old software maintenance and design work.
They are already innovating more than they can deliver. While Apple's hardware quality is usually good, their quality standards are much lower on the software side.
At this point does the hardware division really innovate that much ?
There is significant improvement from the M4 to the M5, but how much of it is comes from TSMC and how much from Apple ? They have exclusivity on the latest processes, so it's harder to compare with what Qualcomm or AMD is doing for instance, but right now Strix Halo is basically on par with the M3~4 developped on the same node density.
On the other hardware parts, form factor has mostly stagnated, and the last big jump was the Vision Pro...
The Vision Pro was still pretty recent. They also refreshed the hardware designs of everything when moving to the M-series chips.
They also made that new wireless chip recently, the chips for the headphones, and some for the Vision Pro. The camera in the iPhone also gets a lot of attention, which takes a lot of hardware engineering. In the iPhone more generally we saw fairly big changes just a month or so ago with the new Pro phone and the Air. The Pro models on the MacBook and iPad are almost as thin, if not more thin than the Air line, which I’m sure took a considerable amount of work, to the point of making the Air branding a little silly.
The Vision Pro is a technical marvel, but as a hardware product it's uncomfortable (too heavy), bloated (useless front screen) and badly designed (straps are finally getting decent if we can trust the reviews).
These decisions IMHO fall on the hardware team, and they're not doing a good job IMHO. Meta's hardware team is arguably pulling more weight, as much as we can hate Meta for being Meta.
> headphones
Here again, the reception wasn't that great. The most recent airPod Pro was a mixed bag, the airPod max had most of the flaws of the Vision Pro and they didn't learn anything from it.
> camera
The best smartphone cameras aren't the iPhone by far now, they're losing to the Chinese makers, but don't have to compete as the market is segmented.
> MacBook and iPad are almost as thin
I wouldn't put the relentless focus on thinness as a net positive though.
All in all I'm not saying they're slacking, I'm arguing they lost the plot on many fronts and their product design is lagging behind in many ways. Apple will stay the top dog by sheer money (even just keeping TSMC in their pocket) and inertia, but I wouldn't be praising their teams as much as you do.
I still think the future for the Vision Pro is very bright. I think this version is more to get developers working on applications for it. Spatial computing is a fascinating idea.
It has a reasonable probability to get somewhere(that would require a lot of redesign, but they have th money to do so), but to be honest I wouldn't be happy with the most restrictive and closed ecosystem winning again in a new field.
If it was by design excellence and truly providing a better proposition it would sweeten the pill, but as of now it would be only because the way better products are from a company everyone hates.
In a weird way, Meta has been good at balancing hardware lockdown, and I'd see a better future with them leading the pack and allowing for better alternatives to come up along the way. Basically the same way the Quest allowed for exploration, and extended the PCVR market enough for it to survive up to this point. That wouldn't happen with Apple domining the field.
As someone who was new to Mac and eager to use AppleScript for automation, I was disappointed to find that a number of things just don't work under AppleScript in Apple Silicon. It's pretty deprecated; Shortcuts seems supported though.
> How much innovation is there to do in the OS at this point?
1) Sign Nvidia's drivers again, at least for compute (there's no excuse)
2) Implement Vulkan 1.2 compliance (even Asahi did it, c'mon)
3) Stop using notifications to send me advertisements
3.1) Stop using native apps to display advertisement modals
4) Do not install subscription services on my machine by-default
5) Give macOS a "developer mode" that's at-least as good as WSL2 (if they won't ship GNU utils)
6) Document the APFS filesystem so the primary volume isn't inscrutable, akin to what M$ did for NTFS
If they're trying to get me to switch off Linux, those would be a nice start. I don't think any of that is too much to ask from a premium platform, but maybe my expectations are maligned.
Honestly I'd be happy if they just made it stop lagging when I switch between multiple desktops in mission control. I spend most of my time in 3d party apps anyway. They recently added that lag I think with the liquid glass.
I don't think anyone should upgrade if they're happy, but I also think faster chips do have real-world benefits that tend not to be appreciated by people who aren't valuing their time enough. I replaced my M1 MBP with an M4 earlier this year, and it's had a couple real-world benefits:
- builds are noticeably faster on later chips as multicore performance has increased a lot. When I replaced my M1 MBP with an M4, builds in both Xcode, cargo and LaTeX (I'll switch to Typst one of these days, but haven't yet) took about 60% of the time they had previously. That adds up to real productivity gains
- when running e.g. qwen3 on LM Studio, I was getting 3-5 tok/s on the M1 and 10-15 on the M4, which to me at least crosses the fuzzy barrier between "interesting toy to tinker with sometimes" and "can actually use for real work"
- 5G connectivity
- WiFi 7
- Tandem OLED Screen
- Better webcam
- FaceID
- Cheaper RAM (RAM is more important to me these days than CPU speed)
- More ports
- Better/cheaper monitors
- Make a proper tablet OS
- Maybe a touchscreen but I really don't want one
As someone who hates Apple's facial recognition implementation, I'm eagerly awaiting the day they ditch TouchID for FaceID. That'll be the year for me to upgrade to a high-spec laptop on the last generation with TouchID.
Price gouging on RAM is a very intentional decision by Apple to charge 8x market rate for it. Same for storage, you can get a blazing fast 4 TB NVMe SSD for just a few hundred bucks vs $2k or whatever Apple extorts from you.
I thought this was going to be about Apple's various recent catastrophic software innovations, saying "why did you have to mess with a good thing? We just wanted it to stay as-is, even if that's considered 'boring'"
I've heard that the M-series chips with metal do great on the whole small model with low latency front; but I have no practical experience doing this yet. I'm hoping to add some local LLM/STT function to my office without heating my house.
I'm uncertain as to whether any M series mac will be performant enough and the M1/M2 mac mini's specifically, or whether there are features in the M3/M4/M5 architecture that make it worth my while to buy new.
Are these incremental updates actually massive in the model performance and latency space, or are they just as small or smaller?
Frankly I’d be incredibly exited if the next Apple OS update was “No new major featurs. Bug fixes, perf optimization, and minor ergonomic improvements only”.
The important work isn’t always glamorous. This is a problem that has tainted the entire industry.
The new pretty stuff feels a lot less magical when it lags or the UI glitches out. Apple sells fluidity and a seamless user experience. They need those bug fixes and an obsessive attention to detail to deliver on what is expected of their products.
> The difference is that with Apple silicon, Apple owns and controls the primary technologies behind the products it makes, as Tim Cook has always wanted.
I hate that computers get faster, because it means I'll be forced to buy another laptop. It goes like this:
- Some developer buys a new laptop
- Developer writes software (a browser)
- When the software works "fast enough" on their new laptop, they ship it
- The software was designed to work on the dev's new laptop, not my old laptop
- Soon the software is too bloated to work on my old laptop
- So I have to buy a new laptop to run the software
Before I'd buy a laptop because it had cool new features. But now the only reason I buy a new one is the new software crashes from too little RAM, or runs too slowly. My old laptops work just fine. All the old apps they come with work just fine. Even new native apps work just fine. But they can't run a recent browser. And you can't do anything without a recent browser.
If our computers never got faster, we would still be able to do everything the same that we can do today. But we wouldn't have to put down a grand every couple years to replace a perfectly good machine.
Mac hardware has so significantly outpaced software needs I think there are diminishing returns. I'm a software developer who uses all sorts of advanced stuff and I only bought an M4 Pro, not a Max, because it wasn't worth the extra money. There are so few applications that max out a CPU for any meaningful amount of time these days like rendering videos or 3D.
My M4 iPad Pro is amazing but feels totally overpowered for what it's capable of.
I guess what I'm saying is.......I don't need faster CPUs. I want longer battery life, 5G connectivity, WiFI 7, lighter weight, a better screen, a better keyboard, etc..
I guess it's odd that Apple spends so much time making faster computers when that is practically an already solved problem.
I have an old card printer that I only use occasionally, and firing up a windows 7 virtual machine is (was?) the most convenient way to do it. I think it's not so uncommon to have old devices around that don't work with newer versions of windows.
Perhaps a Macbook is now fast enough to just run Windows 7 in full emulation? Haven't tried, though.
Edit: Checked on Youtube. Yeah, Windows 7 seems to be fast enough on an Apple silicon Macbook in full emulated mode. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9zqfv54CzI
This is pure copium. Generally, people want rapid technological advancements, not being sold minor improvements at premium prices. I swear some Apple fanboys will do anything they can to warp reality to support their beloved company, it's a mystery why Apple spends so much on marketing when they've got so many people willing to do their work for free.
We want Apple to compete. When they stopped signing CUDA drivers, I thought it was because Apple had a competitive GPGPU solution that wasn't SPIR-V in a trenchcoat. Here we are 10 years later with SPIR-V in a trenchcoat. The lack of vision is pathetic and has undoubtedly cost Apple trillions in the past half-decade alone.
If you think this is a boring architecture, more power to you. It's not boring enough for me.
Genuine question, how does SPIR-V compare with CUDA? Why is SPIR-V in a trench coat less desirable? What is it about Metal that makes it SPIR-V in a trench coat (assuming that's what you meant)?
There might be a subset of people, such as yourself, that looks for CUDA as a hard requirements when buying a GPU. But I think it's fair to say that Vulkan/Spir-V has a _lot_ of investment and momentum currently outside of the US AI bubble.
Valve is spending a lot of resources and AFAIK so are all the AI companies in the asian market.
There are plenty of people who wants an open-source alternative that breaks the monopoly that Nvidia has over CUDA.
I think the new AMD R9700 looks pretty exciting for the price. Basically a power tweaked RX 9070 with 32gb vram and pro drivers. Wish it was an option 6-7 months ago when I put my new desktop together.
Yes, I really want an M5, a CPU I can buy today, more than Panther Lake, which isn’t on the market yet and hasn’t been reviewed by 3rd parties.
I want a laptop that gives me amazing performance, thermals, build quality, and battery life. It’s gonna take a while to see what manufacturers will do with panther lake.
These arguments constantly devolve into "why would you want an APPLE product that's less good than $_new_shiny_PC_thing" and it's always currently available products being pitched against conceptual products in the heads of Intel's fanboys that may come to market in a year. It's a ridiculous comparison.
I got an M3 Pro Macbook Pro on clearance recently for $1,600, 16 inch screen brighter than any PC laptop's I've ever seen, that's the fastest computer I have ever used, hands down and it's 2 generations out of date already. OR I can have a PC gaming laptop where the fit and finish isn't as nice, where the screen is blurrier, the battery life maxes out at 4 hours if I do absolutely nothing with it, and any time I do anything of remote consequence the fans kick up and make it sound like it's trying to take off.
And that's without even taking into account the awful mess Windows is lately, especially around power management. It makes every laptop experience frustrating, with the same issues that were there when I was in fucking high school.
Like if you just hate Mac, fine, obviously a Mac is a bad fit for you then and I wouldn't try and tell you otherwise. But I absolutely reserve the right to giggle when those same people are turning their logical brains into pretzels to justify hating a Mac when it has utterly left the PC behind in all things apart from gaming.
I have a PC on the other side of my wall from where I'm sitting with a 7800X3D and an nvidia 4090. It's for gaming only most of the time, though I do take advantage of the 4090 for some basic LLM stuff, mostly for local audio transcription and summarizing (I take a lot of notes out loud, I speak faster than I can write). The rest of the time it's playing AAA gaming titles at full tilt at 5120x1440, full res, getting 60fps on basically anything I throw at it, all while sucking down 600W (400 for the GPU alone while playing Cyberpunk). It's a beast. I love it.
I have an M4 Mac Mini on my desk. At full tilt it pulls 30W. It scores higher in benchmarks than my gaming PC. It cost less than my 4090 did on its own, and that's including an upgraded third-party iBoff storage upgrade.
Of course, trade offs and process size differences abound; the M4 is newer, I can pack way more RAM into my PC years after I built it. I can swap cards. I can add another internal SSD. It can handle different kinds of load better, but at a cost of FAR more power draw and heat, and its in a full tower case with 4 180mm fans moving air over it (enough airflow to flap papers around on my desk). It's huge. Lumbering. A compute golem, straining under the weight of its own appetite, coils whining at the load of amps coursing through them.
Meanwhile, at idle, my Mac mini uses less power than the monitors connected to it, and eats up most of the same tasks without ruffling its suit. At full tilt, it uses less power than my air purifer. It's preposterous how good it is for what it costs to buy and run. I don't even regret not getting the M4 Pro.
When the Thunderbolt Display came out I was in a raid group and I wanted a display with great refresh rate and low delay (melee character, don’t get stuck standing in the poo). So I researched and researched and the only monitor that had equivalent response times to that dumb Thunderbolt Display was only $60 cheaper, had a plastic shell and I’d have to fight UPS over getting it.
Or I could drive across town and have a monitor today and pay $60 for the aluminum shell that hides dust better.
Yea, this is how I feel too. I've been hoping that Intel would turn itself around, but Intel has failed at its roadmap over the past few years. Intel canceled 20A and 18A is delayed. It had looked like Intel would leapfrog TSMC, but that didn't come to fruition.
I hope that Intel does well in the future. It's better for us all if more than one company can push the boundaries on fabrication.
I also remember the days when the shoe was on the other foot. Motorola or IBM was going to put out a processor that would decimate Intel - it was always a year away. Meanwhile, Intel kept pushing the P6 architecture (Pentium Pro to Pentium 3) and then NetBurst (Pentium 4) and then Core. Apple keeps improving its M-series processors and single-core speed is up 80% since the M1 and 25% faster than the fastest desktop processor from AMD and 31% faster than the fastest desktop processor from Intel.
I'd love for Panther Lake to be amazing. It will put pressure on Apple to offer better performance for my dollar. Some of performance is how much CPU a company is willing to give me at a price point and what margins they'll accept. If an amazing Panther Lake pushes Apple to offer more cores at a cheaper price, that's a win for Apple users. If an amazing Panther Lake pushes Apple to offer 2nm processors quicker (at higher cost to them), that's a win for Apple users.
But I'm also skeptical of Intel. They kept promising 10nm for years and failed. They've done a bit better lately, but they've also stumbled a lot and they're way behind their roadmap. What kind of volume will we see for Panther Lake? What prices? It's hard to compare a hopeful product to something that actually exists today. Part of it isn't just whether Intel can make 18A chips, but how fast can they produce them. If most of Intel's laptop, desktop, and server processors in 2026 aren't 18A, then it isn't the same win. And before someone says "Apple is just a niche manufacturer," they aren't anymore. Apple is making CPUs for every iPhone in addition to Macs so it has to be able to get CPUs manufactured at a very high scale - around the same scale as the Intel's CPU market.
I hope Intel can do wonderfully, but given how much Intel has overpromised and underdelivered, I'm definitely not taking their word for it.
I am excited about Panther Lake myself but where are you reading that it has higher performance/watt than M5? The chips aren't even out yet. All we have are Intel marketing materials with vague lines on charts. No one could have possibly done a performance/watt test on Panther Lake yet. I'm hoping they beat M5 but if I had to, I'd put my money on M5.
Leaving aside the availability of various Intel processors, exactly what I want is for the various manufacturers to compete as hard as they possibly can.
I want Intel to catch up this month. And then next month I want AMD to overtake them. And then ARM to make them all look slow. And then Apple to show them how it's done.
The absolute last thing I'd want is for Apple to have special magic chips that nobody else even comes close to.
From what I’ve read, single thread for panther lake is roughly the same as last gen. The gains are in efficiency, multi thread, and GPU. The most optimistic reading I’ve seen suggested 50% gains in GPU performance and in multithread. I’ll wait for independent testing before making any judgements, but Intel has a way to go to rebuild trust.
That’s partly the difference between making your own components and getting them from a vendor. Sure Intel can send select vendors prerelease prototypes but the feedback loop will never be as efficient as in house.
But it’s like a margin call. Everything is great until it completely sucks. Of course a lot of that comes down to TSMC. So if Apple falls it’s likely others will too.
I think it's the difference between having enough CPUs that you can launch a product and having enough CPUs that people start planning future products.
Volume takes time. That's why we're seeing 2026. And before someone says "that just gives Apple an advantage because they're smaller," Apple is shipping a comparable volume of CPUs - and they're doing basically all their volume on the latest fabrication tech.
I always get a little bothered when I see negative reviews from a CPU update in Apple laptops. While a new CPU alone isn’t a thrilling update, it’s important that they do these regularly so consumers looking to buy aren’t forced to buy a 3 year old product with no idea when a refresh will come. I’ve been in this situation many times with Apple and it has been very frustrating. I’m glad they are back on a yearly refresh schedule.
I think the issue stems from too many people making their living off reviews that require something exciting to get views. When updates are more evolution than revolution, it makes for a more boring article/video. I always worry that these types of responses will lead Apple to do silly things, like leaving old chips out there too long, or adding pointless features just so there is something new to talk about.
> While a new CPU alone isn’t a thrilling update, it’s important that they do these regularly so consumers looking to buy aren’t forced to buy a 3 year old product with no idea when a refresh will come.
Also: incremental updates add up.
A (e.g.) 7% increase from one year to the next isn't a big deal, but +7%, +7%, +7%, …, adds up when you finally come up for a tech refresh after 3-5 years.
Agree. So many people online (not just reviewers) complaining that it's just a spec-bump, demanding a new design. I remember the time people were (rightfully) complaining that the update schedules were slow for Macs, mainly because of Intel's limitations. Now we get yearly refresh, they complain that it looks the same.
I don't think they appreciate the cost of redesigning and retooling. Echo your thoughts and hope Apple doesn't listen to this feedback. Imagine more expensive laptops because some people want more frequent design changes!
Apple is the company where every new iPhone release is both simultaneously boring, not worth it and a sure sign of their impending collapse and also somehow a vicious treadmill which forces people to upgrade every year, throwing out their old phone and contributing to e-waste. They could announce a cure for cancer tomorrow and within a month people would be back to asking what have they innovated recently. People just like to complain.
Intel released new CPUs every year; they shouldn't be blamed when Apple refused to update.
Intel had multiple years of promising that their new next-gen more efficient 10nm CPUs were coming very soon, and then those kept being delayed.
The chips they did release in that time period were mostly minor revisions of the same architecture.
Apple was pretty clearly building chassis designs for the CPUs that Intel was promising to release, and those struggled with thermal management of the chips that Intel actually had on the market. And Apple got tired of waiting for Intel and having their hardware designs out of sync with the available chips.
I remember reading about an aging Mac Pro not seeing an update because the Xeon chips it used hadn’t seen an update from Intel.
I’m sure Intel had some releases each year, but did they have the right ones to make it possible for Apple to release an update?
Yes.
The review ecosystem is really toxic in that regard, as makers will court to it.
We had the silly unboxing videos fade, and it meant gorgeous packaging flying in the face of recyclability and cost reduction.
I wonder if the glass backs and utterly shiny but heavy and PITA to repair design is also part from there. A reviewer doesn't care that much if it costs half the phone to repair the back panel.
Makers? Could you expand on this?
You can replace it with "manufacturer", I do think it becomes clearer.
Maker has a specific connotation, but technically still fits on the GP.
He means OEMs. Device manufacturers.
Examples include Apple, Samsung, Lenovo, etc etc.
Not me: I wanted Apple’s software division to innovate like its hardware division. Extra power with nothing to use it on except more and more docker containers isn’t compelling to me. I’ve not upgraded my M1 Macbook Pro and don’t plan to
I'd much prefer they focus on fixing their existing software quality problems. No innovation needed, just boring old software maintenance and design work.
They are already innovating more than they can deliver. While Apple's hardware quality is usually good, their quality standards are much lower on the software side.
At this point does the hardware division really innovate that much ?
There is significant improvement from the M4 to the M5, but how much of it is comes from TSMC and how much from Apple ? They have exclusivity on the latest processes, so it's harder to compare with what Qualcomm or AMD is doing for instance, but right now Strix Halo is basically on par with the M3~4 developped on the same node density.
On the other hardware parts, form factor has mostly stagnated, and the last big jump was the Vision Pro...
The Vision Pro was still pretty recent. They also refreshed the hardware designs of everything when moving to the M-series chips.
They also made that new wireless chip recently, the chips for the headphones, and some for the Vision Pro. The camera in the iPhone also gets a lot of attention, which takes a lot of hardware engineering. In the iPhone more generally we saw fairly big changes just a month or so ago with the new Pro phone and the Air. The Pro models on the MacBook and iPad are almost as thin, if not more thin than the Air line, which I’m sure took a considerable amount of work, to the point of making the Air branding a little silly.
The Vision Pro is a technical marvel, but as a hardware product it's uncomfortable (too heavy), bloated (useless front screen) and badly designed (straps are finally getting decent if we can trust the reviews).
These decisions IMHO fall on the hardware team, and they're not doing a good job IMHO. Meta's hardware team is arguably pulling more weight, as much as we can hate Meta for being Meta.
> headphones
Here again, the reception wasn't that great. The most recent airPod Pro was a mixed bag, the airPod max had most of the flaws of the Vision Pro and they didn't learn anything from it.
> camera
The best smartphone cameras aren't the iPhone by far now, they're losing to the Chinese makers, but don't have to compete as the market is segmented.
> MacBook and iPad are almost as thin
I wouldn't put the relentless focus on thinness as a net positive though.
All in all I'm not saying they're slacking, I'm arguing they lost the plot on many fronts and their product design is lagging behind in many ways. Apple will stay the top dog by sheer money (even just keeping TSMC in their pocket) and inertia, but I wouldn't be praising their teams as much as you do.
I still think the future for the Vision Pro is very bright. I think this version is more to get developers working on applications for it. Spatial computing is a fascinating idea.
It has a reasonable probability to get somewhere(that would require a lot of redesign, but they have th money to do so), but to be honest I wouldn't be happy with the most restrictive and closed ecosystem winning again in a new field.
If it was by design excellence and truly providing a better proposition it would sweeten the pill, but as of now it would be only because the way better products are from a company everyone hates.
In a weird way, Meta has been good at balancing hardware lockdown, and I'd see a better future with them leading the pack and allowing for better alternatives to come up along the way. Basically the same way the Quest allowed for exploration, and extended the PCVR market enough for it to survive up to this point. That wouldn't happen with Apple domining the field.
How much innovation is there to do in the OS at this point? You can install applications and they can innovate.
Maybe you need AI, but maybe you just need some AI agent app that uses AppleScript under the hood.
I'd rather buttery smooth, secure, fast, no bugs, let me do my work.
Well, it’s 2025 and I still need to install a 3rd party toolbar calendar app, so there’s that.
I also can’t snap windows, and Cmd-tab still can’t tab between different windows of the same application.
There’s lots more usability that can be improved IMO
As someone who was new to Mac and eager to use AppleScript for automation, I was disappointed to find that a number of things just don't work under AppleScript in Apple Silicon. It's pretty deprecated; Shortcuts seems supported though.
> How much innovation is there to do in the OS at this point?
1) Sign Nvidia's drivers again, at least for compute (there's no excuse)
2) Implement Vulkan 1.2 compliance (even Asahi did it, c'mon)
3) Stop using notifications to send me advertisements
3.1) Stop using native apps to display advertisement modals
4) Do not install subscription services on my machine by-default
5) Give macOS a "developer mode" that's at-least as good as WSL2 (if they won't ship GNU utils)
6) Document the APFS filesystem so the primary volume isn't inscrutable, akin to what M$ did for NTFS
If they're trying to get me to switch off Linux, those would be a nice start. I don't think any of that is too much to ask from a premium platform, but maybe my expectations are maligned.
Honestly I'd be happy if they just made it stop lagging when I switch between multiple desktops in mission control. I spend most of my time in 3d party apps anyway. They recently added that lag I think with the liquid glass.
I upgraded to the M4 for more ram and more GPU for local LLMs so I'm not sending all my shit to OpenAI, but it's not for everybody.
I think Final Cut and maybe Logic make good use of the new silicon features.
I’m rather happy I don’t have to upgrade from my M1. More performance is nice, but making it the baseline to run an OS would just be silly.
I don't think anyone should upgrade if they're happy, but I also think faster chips do have real-world benefits that tend not to be appreciated by people who aren't valuing their time enough. I replaced my M1 MBP with an M4 earlier this year, and it's had a couple real-world benefits:
- builds are noticeably faster on later chips as multicore performance has increased a lot. When I replaced my M1 MBP with an M4, builds in both Xcode, cargo and LaTeX (I'll switch to Typst one of these days, but haven't yet) took about 60% of the time they had previously. That adds up to real productivity gains
- when running e.g. qwen3 on LM Studio, I was getting 3-5 tok/s on the M1 and 10-15 on the M4, which to me at least crosses the fuzzy barrier between "interesting toy to tinker with sometimes" and "can actually use for real work"
How about:
- 5G connectivity - WiFi 7 - Tandem OLED Screen - Better webcam - FaceID - Cheaper RAM (RAM is more important to me these days than CPU speed) - More ports - Better/cheaper monitors - Make a proper tablet OS - Maybe a touchscreen but I really don't want one
just to get started
As someone who hates Apple's facial recognition implementation, I'm eagerly awaiting the day they ditch TouchID for FaceID. That'll be the year for me to upgrade to a high-spec laptop on the last generation with TouchID.
Price gouging on RAM is a very intentional decision by Apple to charge 8x market rate for it. Same for storage, you can get a blazing fast 4 TB NVMe SSD for just a few hundred bucks vs $2k or whatever Apple extorts from you.
I thought this was going to be about Apple's various recent catastrophic software innovations, saying "why did you have to mess with a good thing? We just wanted it to stay as-is, even if that's considered 'boring'"
General purpose computing is what we wanted.
I've heard that the M-series chips with metal do great on the whole small model with low latency front; but I have no practical experience doing this yet. I'm hoping to add some local LLM/STT function to my office without heating my house.
I'm uncertain as to whether any M series mac will be performant enough and the M1/M2 mac mini's specifically, or whether there are features in the M3/M4/M5 architecture that make it worth my while to buy new.
Are these incremental updates actually massive in the model performance and latency space, or are they just as small or smaller?
For Exciting, look into RISC-V.
That's gonna be wild starting 2026, with the first implementations of RVA23, such as Tenstorrent Ascalon devboards TBA Q2.
Frankly I’d be incredibly exited if the next Apple OS update was “No new major featurs. Bug fixes, perf optimization, and minor ergonomic improvements only”.
The Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard approach. It was good.
Sadly this approach is less likely to get the exec a bonus
The exec, but also the SWEs. In my company, if all you have to show is minor improvements and bug fixes, you're at risk of being fired.
The important work isn’t always glamorous. This is a problem that has tainted the entire industry.
The new pretty stuff feels a lot less magical when it lags or the UI glitches out. Apple sells fluidity and a seamless user experience. They need those bug fixes and an obsessive attention to detail to deliver on what is expected of their products.
> The difference is that with Apple silicon, Apple owns and controls the primary technologies behind the products it makes, as Tim Cook has always wanted.
But did customers want it?
I'll leave it here, as the point is made.
What happened to the M3 GPU to give it a drop in score?
When you make a major architecture change (e.g. dynamic caching) there's always one or two workloads that get slower.
I hate that computers get faster, because it means I'll be forced to buy another laptop. It goes like this:
Before I'd buy a laptop because it had cool new features. But now the only reason I buy a new one is the new software crashes from too little RAM, or runs too slowly. My old laptops work just fine. All the old apps they come with work just fine. Even new native apps work just fine. But they can't run a recent browser. And you can't do anything without a recent browser.If our computers never got faster, we would still be able to do everything the same that we can do today. But we wouldn't have to put down a grand every couple years to replace a perfectly good machine.
What nonsense.
Name a software that won’t run comfortably on my M1 MacBook Air, now 5 years old.
Mac hardware has so significantly outpaced software needs I think there are diminishing returns. I'm a software developer who uses all sorts of advanced stuff and I only bought an M4 Pro, not a Max, because it wasn't worth the extra money. There are so few applications that max out a CPU for any meaningful amount of time these days like rendering videos or 3D.
My M4 iPad Pro is amazing but feels totally overpowered for what it's capable of.
I guess what I'm saying is.......I don't need faster CPUs. I want longer battery life, 5G connectivity, WiFI 7, lighter weight, a better screen, a better keyboard, etc..
I guess it's odd that Apple spends so much time making faster computers when that is practically an already solved problem.
Agree! very happy with the M4 performance.
They say no downside, but if you need to run windows 7 in virtualbox, you still need an intel mac (or other non-arm computer).
Windows 7 is sixteen years old. There are full x86 emulators available. Seems like a niche pursuit.
I have an old card printer that I only use occasionally, and firing up a windows 7 virtual machine is (was?) the most convenient way to do it. I think it's not so uncommon to have old devices around that don't work with newer versions of windows.
Perhaps a Macbook is now fast enough to just run Windows 7 in full emulation? Haven't tried, though.
Edit: Checked on Youtube. Yeah, Windows 7 seems to be fast enough on an Apple silicon Macbook in full emulated mode. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9zqfv54CzI
I don’t think that use case is worth designing a computer for in 2025
I have an old 2019 MBP running Windows 10 for old gaming
Today I was testing an x64 msi installer and app in a Windows ARM VM on UTM and it worked just fine with the Windows built-in emulation.
This is pure copium. Generally, people want rapid technological advancements, not being sold minor improvements at premium prices. I swear some Apple fanboys will do anything they can to warp reality to support their beloved company, it's a mystery why Apple spends so much on marketing when they've got so many people willing to do their work for free.
We want Apple to compete. When they stopped signing CUDA drivers, I thought it was because Apple had a competitive GPGPU solution that wasn't SPIR-V in a trenchcoat. Here we are 10 years later with SPIR-V in a trenchcoat. The lack of vision is pathetic and has undoubtedly cost Apple trillions in the past half-decade alone.
If you think this is a boring architecture, more power to you. It's not boring enough for me.
Genuine question, how does SPIR-V compare with CUDA? Why is SPIR-V in a trench coat less desirable? What is it about Metal that makes it SPIR-V in a trench coat (assuming that's what you meant)?
At this stage of the game what people want is CUDA. I just bought a new GPU and the only requirement I had was "must run reasonably modern CUDA".
There might be a subset of people, such as yourself, that looks for CUDA as a hard requirements when buying a GPU. But I think it's fair to say that Vulkan/Spir-V has a _lot_ of investment and momentum currently outside of the US AI bubble.
Valve is spending a lot of resources and AFAIK so are all the AI companies in the asian market.
There are plenty of people who wants an open-source alternative that breaks the monopoly that Nvidia has over CUDA.
I think the new AMD R9700 looks pretty exciting for the price. Basically a power tweaked RX 9070 with 32gb vram and pro drivers. Wish it was an option 6-7 months ago when I put my new desktop together.
M1 had performance/watt way ahead of x86.
M5 has performance/watt below Panther Lake.
Is that really what you want?
Yes, I really want an M5, a CPU I can buy today, more than Panther Lake, which isn’t on the market yet and hasn’t been reviewed by 3rd parties.
I want a laptop that gives me amazing performance, thermals, build quality, and battery life. It’s gonna take a while to see what manufacturers will do with panther lake.
These arguments constantly devolve into "why would you want an APPLE product that's less good than $_new_shiny_PC_thing" and it's always currently available products being pitched against conceptual products in the heads of Intel's fanboys that may come to market in a year. It's a ridiculous comparison.
I got an M3 Pro Macbook Pro on clearance recently for $1,600, 16 inch screen brighter than any PC laptop's I've ever seen, that's the fastest computer I have ever used, hands down and it's 2 generations out of date already. OR I can have a PC gaming laptop where the fit and finish isn't as nice, where the screen is blurrier, the battery life maxes out at 4 hours if I do absolutely nothing with it, and any time I do anything of remote consequence the fans kick up and make it sound like it's trying to take off.
And that's without even taking into account the awful mess Windows is lately, especially around power management. It makes every laptop experience frustrating, with the same issues that were there when I was in fucking high school.
Like if you just hate Mac, fine, obviously a Mac is a bad fit for you then and I wouldn't try and tell you otherwise. But I absolutely reserve the right to giggle when those same people are turning their logical brains into pretzels to justify hating a Mac when it has utterly left the PC behind in all things apart from gaming.
I have a PC on the other side of my wall from where I'm sitting with a 7800X3D and an nvidia 4090. It's for gaming only most of the time, though I do take advantage of the 4090 for some basic LLM stuff, mostly for local audio transcription and summarizing (I take a lot of notes out loud, I speak faster than I can write). The rest of the time it's playing AAA gaming titles at full tilt at 5120x1440, full res, getting 60fps on basically anything I throw at it, all while sucking down 600W (400 for the GPU alone while playing Cyberpunk). It's a beast. I love it.
I have an M4 Mac Mini on my desk. At full tilt it pulls 30W. It scores higher in benchmarks than my gaming PC. It cost less than my 4090 did on its own, and that's including an upgraded third-party iBoff storage upgrade.
Of course, trade offs and process size differences abound; the M4 is newer, I can pack way more RAM into my PC years after I built it. I can swap cards. I can add another internal SSD. It can handle different kinds of load better, but at a cost of FAR more power draw and heat, and its in a full tower case with 4 180mm fans moving air over it (enough airflow to flap papers around on my desk). It's huge. Lumbering. A compute golem, straining under the weight of its own appetite, coils whining at the load of amps coursing through them.
Meanwhile, at idle, my Mac mini uses less power than the monitors connected to it, and eats up most of the same tasks without ruffling its suit. At full tilt, it uses less power than my air purifer. It's preposterous how good it is for what it costs to buy and run. I don't even regret not getting the M4 Pro.
When the Thunderbolt Display came out I was in a raid group and I wanted a display with great refresh rate and low delay (melee character, don’t get stuck standing in the poo). So I researched and researched and the only monitor that had equivalent response times to that dumb Thunderbolt Display was only $60 cheaper, had a plastic shell and I’d have to fight UPS over getting it.
Or I could drive across town and have a monitor today and pay $60 for the aluminum shell that hides dust better.
And even for gaming, depending on what you play it's perfectly serviceable.
Yea, this is how I feel too. I've been hoping that Intel would turn itself around, but Intel has failed at its roadmap over the past few years. Intel canceled 20A and 18A is delayed. It had looked like Intel would leapfrog TSMC, but that didn't come to fruition.
I hope that Intel does well in the future. It's better for us all if more than one company can push the boundaries on fabrication.
I also remember the days when the shoe was on the other foot. Motorola or IBM was going to put out a processor that would decimate Intel - it was always a year away. Meanwhile, Intel kept pushing the P6 architecture (Pentium Pro to Pentium 3) and then NetBurst (Pentium 4) and then Core. Apple keeps improving its M-series processors and single-core speed is up 80% since the M1 and 25% faster than the fastest desktop processor from AMD and 31% faster than the fastest desktop processor from Intel.
I'd love for Panther Lake to be amazing. It will put pressure on Apple to offer better performance for my dollar. Some of performance is how much CPU a company is willing to give me at a price point and what margins they'll accept. If an amazing Panther Lake pushes Apple to offer more cores at a cheaper price, that's a win for Apple users. If an amazing Panther Lake pushes Apple to offer 2nm processors quicker (at higher cost to them), that's a win for Apple users.
But I'm also skeptical of Intel. They kept promising 10nm for years and failed. They've done a bit better lately, but they've also stumbled a lot and they're way behind their roadmap. What kind of volume will we see for Panther Lake? What prices? It's hard to compare a hopeful product to something that actually exists today. Part of it isn't just whether Intel can make 18A chips, but how fast can they produce them. If most of Intel's laptop, desktop, and server processors in 2026 aren't 18A, then it isn't the same win. And before someone says "Apple is just a niche manufacturer," they aren't anymore. Apple is making CPUs for every iPhone in addition to Macs so it has to be able to get CPUs manufactured at a very high scale - around the same scale as the Intel's CPU market.
I hope Intel can do wonderfully, but given how much Intel has overpromised and underdelivered, I'm definitely not taking their word for it.
I am excited about Panther Lake myself but where are you reading that it has higher performance/watt than M5? The chips aren't even out yet. All we have are Intel marketing materials with vague lines on charts. No one could have possibly done a performance/watt test on Panther Lake yet. I'm hoping they beat M5 but if I had to, I'd put my money on M5.
Leaving aside the availability of various Intel processors, exactly what I want is for the various manufacturers to compete as hard as they possibly can.
I want Intel to catch up this month. And then next month I want AMD to overtake them. And then ARM to make them all look slow. And then Apple to show them how it's done.
The absolute last thing I'd want is for Apple to have special magic chips that nobody else even comes close to.
From what I’ve read, single thread for panther lake is roughly the same as last gen. The gains are in efficiency, multi thread, and GPU. The most optimistic reading I’ve seen suggested 50% gains in GPU performance and in multithread. I’ll wait for independent testing before making any judgements, but Intel has a way to go to rebuild trust.
so slower compared to the 14th gens.
Though it sounds like it won't be a 400W desktop part at least.
I don't want Panther Lake, whatever that is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL7yD-0pqZg
This is just how Intel names their CPU generations. It's far more boring than you're imagining. It's presumably named after https://snohomishcountywa.gov/5383/Panther
Comet Lake, Elkhart Lake, Cooper Lake, Rocket Lake, Adler Lake, Raptor Lake, Meteor Lake.
No, you're right, that's not—let me go buy a Panther Lake laptop right now. What site would you recommend?
M5 and Panther Lake are both late 2025 releases. They're fair comparisons.
One of them I can go to the store and buy right now. One I cannot. That is a very important difference.
Panther Lake isn't appearing in any products until 2026.
That’s partly the difference between making your own components and getting them from a vendor. Sure Intel can send select vendors prerelease prototypes but the feedback loop will never be as efficient as in house.
But it’s like a margin call. Everything is great until it completely sucks. Of course a lot of that comes down to TSMC. So if Apple falls it’s likely others will too.
I think it's the difference between having enough CPUs that you can launch a product and having enough CPUs that people start planning future products.
Volume takes time. That's why we're seeing 2026. And before someone says "that just gives Apple an advantage because they're smaller," Apple is shipping a comparable volume of CPUs - and they're doing basically all their volume on the latest fabrication tech.
You're absolutely right. Where should we go to get a Panther Lake laptop?
That’s exactly what I’m asking.
And we’re sure that when it shows up in products it’ll be as good as Intel says it is?