I'm currently on a marathon to keep my M1 Pro running until the M7 Pro/Max is available. Not sure if I'll make it, but I'm not eager to pay $6000+ for a decent spec dev computer, until I really have to
I'm loving my M1 Macbook Air still, and only a few weeks away from six years of use Sometimes it lags a bit when I'm running a macOS VM, and all the coding agent VMs, so I'm kind of interested in going to 32GB of RAM, but honestly this computer is still faster than any of my laptops that came before, even with the visual atrocity of Liquid Glass.
I'll go and look at this new box, drool a little, and realize that I'd get more personal utility from donating $3k (or whatever the trade in delta is) to a charity than upgrading my computer.
My son's M1 Air CPU died suddenly. Maybe it was a thermal death from overheating. Not sure. But all the data on it was lost because the storage is soldered on. PSA to make sure devices with non-removable storage are backed up!
(We replaced it with a Framework... with removable storage.)
> PSA to make sure devices with non-removable storage are backed up!
Really this should be devices full stop. Also, "backed up" should include no fewer than two backups on different media and in different physical locations e.g. Time Machine to an external SSD _plus_ continuous cloud backup.
In Windows, by default, Microsoft tools put projects in ~/source/repos, which OneDrive, in turn, by default won't touch so they'll be lost if the SSD fail and they're not in git.
However, OneDrive doesn't seem to even know how to handle source files (it doesn't even attempt to honor the gitignore), so rebuilding a project in folders covered by OneDrive results in flurries of temporary files being uploaded/updated to the cloud, hogging the bandwidth, with a bonus of locking files, crashing builds, or even reverting changes silently.
One would think backup tools, even if primarily for normal users are still literally made by programmers, at least consider the use case of programmers instead of just ignoring them entirely.
That's a big ask. Probably only work the few hundred it'd take to do that, then get the data off it, if you had some super important documents // crypto wallet.
Is it really? In China you can upgrade your iPhone storage this way. Sure it's not for your average phone case store, but it's not exactly rocket science either.
Unfortunately not really a lot of places to do this in the US. And unlike shipping new devices from China to US, shipping used devices from US to China and back is prohibitively expensive.
The backup would live someplace other than on the broken machine. It would be encrypted some other way (or maybe not at all, depending on threat profile).
No point in encrypting those family photos burned to disc.
I got a second hand M1 air like two years ago for 200usd with 1tb hdd and 16gb ram. I got it after my intel Air died after about..12 years? (Edit: the ssd died, which is removable… but literally had a plane to catch). All my pros have died within a few years. Air all the way. Never looking back.
The last few models of Intel Mac Pro that I used were mostly good at getting really hot.
Dropbox would fire up to do massive walks of the filesystem tree and the fans would take off. I think the thermal interface material on the GPU got cooked at some point. It would be a relatively easy fix, for me a couple of hours, but I chose to fix it with an M1 MacBook Air.
Just use. There were two models that had issues with the gpu desoldering, 2012 and 2015 iirc? I was lucky enough to have them. I put the mobos in the oven (180deg for seven minutes?) and that would fix it. For about a month… and then 2 weeks.. and then… I actually have a 2018 that I borrowed from a friend after my 2013 Air ssd gave up, it is still working I think, but its twice as slow, at least as my Air was. Its so weird. The Air stayed ‘snappy’ even after my friends Pro’s would become too sluggish. Maybe because I never update ;)
The old airs were legendary. My 2012 still runs just fine despite being beaten to hell. Would still be a great dev machine for non-GPU workloads if it weren't for a lack of OS updates. Have been very happy with my M1 Pro as well though.
Wow turns out there's a whole community of us! Same boat. I usually recycle, hand me down, trade-in but have really had a hard time letting that little one go.
You gotta be kidding me. The old M1 Air had the "bendgate" where several people, me included, saw their screen die overnight for no reason. Tens and tens of pages of people complaining about it only to be with "you're holding it wrong" answers. Insanity.
I think Apple fixed that mess with the gen after that one.
I wonder if this is from not trying to get maximum performance, and instead focusing on efficiency? But I've noticed this too. I definitely prefer the Air form factor over larger models as the primary benefit, but the durability seems to be a big benefit too. Fewer ports, thinner shell that seals tighter and can't flex as much due to the curved metal instead of flat surfaces... everything about it just seems like a better design.
No fans though. I like being able to crank them full blast. I'm not sure this pro would ever actually run the fans all out with my usage with the existing fan curve. Apple always favors it running quiet and hot, but I don't mind loud and prefer cool palms. I grew up with far more noisy rigs.
I bought my M1 Pro the week it came out and it was unlike any computer I ever had, expectations, compute, battery life especially. It was just a joy to use and not worry about chargers. I'm so glad they went this path.
Been on HN for many years now, and the one thing that never changes is people posting angrily about small UI changes. It makes me wonder- if things have only ever gotten worse, what was the peak UI? MS DOS?
On the Windows side, Windows 2000 and XP/Vista/7’s Classic mode, though Aero was quite nice. I’m not a fan of the interfaces from 8 onward, and I didn’t like Luna in XP.
On the Mac side, it’s a toss up between the platinum interface of Mac OS 8/9 and Mac OS X Tiger. With that said, I have a work-issued MacBook Pro running Golden Gate as my daily driver, and Liquid Glass is alright. It’s not what I’d prefer if I had a choice, but it’s not a dramatic departure from previous versions of macOS. A Cheetah or Puma Mac OS X user should be able to navigate Golden Gate with ease, mostly.
Leopard was better because it introduced spaces. Honestly I think that whole concept (I know windows has something analogous now) was the biggest step change in OS functionality I've seen in my life having started on windows 95.
Apple was actually last to the party on that. Linux had virtual desktops for years at that point, and Windows had them as well through Microsoft PowerToys. I’m pretty sure I was running it on Windows 2000.
I had virtual desktops on UNIXes with X11 well before Linus started working on Linux. They came for free to Linux because they were implemented by many window managers.
The problem is that window management is so atrocious in Mac OS that using multiple desktops is just asking for trouble. Like of you close one window of some software, it will jump to some random other window of the same software on some other desktop.
In the end you’ll spend a significant amount of your time trying to “get back” to where you just where (that alt-tab, a possible savior for this in all other OSs, doesn’t work at all on Mac just adds to the UX mess)
Eh. I get what it's going for. The Multi-Window application concept and what not.
In the end though I just feel like it's extra cognitive load to have to think about two different shortcuts to do what is in many ways the same thing.
Say, I've got two browser windows open and a code editor open. I'm wanting to flip through the browser windows to check on things while I work in the code editor. In reality I'm just wanting to juggle the three windows, but depending on if I'm wanting to go from browser to browser it's a different shortcut than if I'm wanting to go from editor to browser. And there's a good chance I'll then need to swap from editor to browser, then issue a different shortcut to go from that browser to the other. When I could have just hit the same shortcut twice.
I've just never really encountered a situation where I've felt like it added something, but I'm constantly having cases where its more annoying.
Thanks, that does make sense. Though as a many-windower alt-tab is just often tooooooo big for my tastes to even try to rely on.
The 40-year-deep-history Mac answer to workflows like that with a small working set with frequent cross-app-one-to-other-switching IMO is mouse-based navigation + spatial partially-overlapping windows, but this seems to be an extremely foreign concept to Windows/*nix users that grew up on full-screen-maximize or tiling. So I don't think is particularly likely to be adopted by anyone who doesn't already have it burned into their brains at this point. :) There's a lot of these old Mac bones still baked into the OS (e.g. if you have a folder on your desktop, and double click it, and move it, then close it, it'll open to the location you moved it to next time. And that memory is separate from that for another folder on your desktop. Though some of the follow-on behaviors have changed (opening folders in already-open windows used to behave similarly, opening new windows by default).
The 20-year-history version is my own personal lord and savior: Exposé hot corners.
Spaces and no-mouse navigation are still in many ways comparative afterthoughts to mouse-based/spatial workflows. Though as someone with 30+ year of Mac muscle memories in my head, the switching-windows-vs-switching-app concept and awareness of "where" I am relative to it is pretty embedded.
Ehh I'm not to caught up with window management on macos. Bunch of shells open I might use tmux. But otherwise I just keep things in piles organized in spaces, and use expose all to get to whatever I need in the pile. It works much like the piles on my desk in real life so I'm comfortable with it. But it was better in leopard when it was a grid of spaces vs a line of spaces. Less rigidity was nice.
It doesn't make a lot of sense to me as a default, but there's an option to turn off the automatic switching of spaces when switching applications, and it pretty much eliminates the unwanted switches from closing the last window on the current space.
Liquid Glass was not a "small UI change". It disrupted many accessibility aspects of macOS, so much so that Apple toned down quite a few aspects of the design in subsequent updates, even adding a slider to reduce the effect. [1]
The quantity of requests for how to disable Liquid Glass on Apple Discussions is staggering. [2]
Yea, I am trichromatic color blind, and it is legitimately unusable for me. I am unable to type on the keyboard. I know there are changes since it launched, by after my ipad updated automatically, rendering it near useless to me, I just disabled updates on my iphone.
I think the biggest thing isn't really whatever it is but the act of changing and forcing everyone to change into the new ui that is the disruptive part. It is a combination of window dressing changing but also sometimes functions breaking. It is ironic because software written for developers prides itself generally on maintaining compatibility with say depreciated flags, or if things will be depreciated plenty of notice ahead of time. But that only holds for cli software. GUI software and the OS that all goes out the window. Stuff breaks, workflows break, you have no recourse and in fact they might make it genuinely difficult to go back to an older version. Like this part of it is the shitty part. Never mind how it happens to look. It is the forcing effect.
I think it’s also because these UI changes are always designed to improve first-impression and first-usage. They are outright hostile to anyone who wants to go fast and get faster — the power user. At minimum the re-arrangement resets any gains you had, and at maximum its irrecoverable because the UI is now fundamentally designed to slow you down.
This eventually becomes awkwardly precise complaints about information density and general change; but the underlying issue is I want to go fast and the system says no
I think the only real solution to this is to switch to an OS with a backing org that has optimization for power users as a first-class goal. I've been liking Omarchy and NixOS for that. I say this as a Mac user since 1989.
If you consider the transition from macOS 15 to 26+ 'small', I think you should see an optician.
Like GP, I despise the new design. I'll say the old design was pretty peak design. Windows looked like windows. Buttons like buttons. With accessibility tweaks (for transparency and borders) I could make it very, very usable.
This new thing is a crime against UI. Every icon now sits in a circle, and takes up % more room as a result. Because … it's pretty? It isn't pretty.
I upgraded my laptop thinking I was going to develop an app and that I'd need to be on the latest design. I ended up developing a TUI so I needn't have bothered. Every time I see my partner's laptop, still on Sequoia, I shed a little tear.
Small improvements don't get much accolades. And for the most part, the UX is so good that most changes tend to be neutral or for the worse. And when you're really attached to something and there's on an unnecessary change, it feels almost like betrayal!
I, for one, prefer Apple products because they sweat the small stuff more than the other options, and when they have put in effort to make things worse it's kind of infuriating.
I do a bit of desktop Linux work too, and it's OK, but hard to complain when it's all open source volunteer work! Windows is so terrible that I wouldn't even know where to start. What's the point? There's nobody at Microsoft that even gives a damn.
It's been a long time, but I'm pretty sure Appearance Manager and the corresponding unreleased-but-leaked Hi-Tech theme was 8.5-or-so-and-up-only, which means I must reject 7.6 on aesthetic grounds ;)
The way things are going you will be able to run your favorite flavor of Linux on those pretty soon.
It will be the best of both worlds: the best hardware and a good OS. Hopefully Apple doesn't take steps to block it.
Liquid Glass is more than just the transparency. There are many other changes that cannot be disabled that way. Not to mention the overall lag compared to Sequoia (I skipped Tahoe entirely so I had a direct knife-edge transition). 27 is less bad than 26 but Liquid Glass doesn't make anything better than prior UI and makes several things worse, even if you turn down the transparency.
I imagine that the UI changes since Sequoia regarding the giant buttons and whitespace are because Apple plans to release a touchscreen laptop (most rumors say it will be announced tomorrow) so they've decided to make the UI touch friendly at the expense of bloating the UI for everyone who doesn't have a touchscreen. Microsoft made this same decision with the Windows releases after 7.
Why? My SO has a Windows laptop with touchscreen, touchpad, keyboard and mouse. She uses the mouse but sometimes pushing a button by touching the screen saves time. If you think about it, by the time you reached for the mouse and started aiming for the button you already pressed it with your finger. The touchpad reduces the travel of the hand but not the time to aim. Hitting something with a finger is always faster. She is missing that on her work laptop.
I used touch on Windows to test multitouch and pen input support in a familiar environment. Less hassle than grabbing a tablet, setting up remote DevTools, etc.
Happily running my M1 Max, but have recently been annoyed at my decision to go with the off-the-shelf 32GB version at the time. I recalled telling friends at the time that the ridiculous memory bandwidth should offset that, so I ran some tests on memory pressure while running all my mess and, well, whaddya know, everything is actually tickety-boo. No memory pressure for the most part. And this is with big rust projects, Orbstack builds and runs.
The engineering that went into the M1 was amazing, I truly think that now, an M1 Max was the biggest bargain ever in my entire computing life. £3,299.00. In contrast, the 64GB i9 I bought only two years before was £4,149.00.
Stay strong! I went from an M1 to M5 generation, and it was a nice bump, but I could have gone another year without any significant impact on my quality of life/work.
My M1 MacBook Pro has been the best hardware investment I’ve ever made. I had planned to update it in 2025 at the four year mark, but it’s still going strong so I don’t see a reason. The new plan is to go to the Apple store the very day that it dies.
I've been using my M1 Max 64 GB for 5 years now and it's pretty zippy once you rewrite some slow software. I have an M4 Max with 128 GB but I never ended up migrating to it. That's how good it is.
Not op here, but I rewrote the file manager giving claude only two goals: cold startup below 100ms and 30mb nikon raw preview also below 100ms. One night in a loop and it hit around 20, 30ms respectively. My macs now feel uber fast.
I’ve been a Mac user for 20 years and it’s wild to think how slow my 2003 PowerBook G4 or even my 2008 MacBook Pro felt after five years compared with my 2021 M1 Pro.
My 2013 Core i7 took almost eight years to get to where the previous ones were at five, and if it weren’t for local LLMs pushing me toward an upgrade in the next year or two, I have to imagine my M1 Pro could be my daily driver well into the next decade.
Have an M1 air as well. Got a Pro m5. For daily coding tasks, and general web browsing the M1 air still holds. I'm going to pass it on to my kid. Reminds me of the honda we have that we'll also pass down.
The M series MBAirs, and ofc the M1 originally, are hands down THE BEST laptops ever made. I have a maxed out MBP ofc but the Airs are unbeatable quality and price/performance.
I think the M1+ MacBook Airs will be regarded eventually like the original Macintosh originally the iPod, or the introduction of the original Air and the creation of the product class that came to be known as “ultrabooks”. It really changed everything about laptops to have a fantastic keyboard, speakers, screen, trackpad, hinge, and 12+ hour battery life… for $1k.
My 16" M1 Pro personal laptop is literally just as smooth for 99% of tasks as my work M5 pro. It's crazy how well they built these. I mean the screen on this and the speakers are superb. And you can find these for like 500-800 bucks 2nd hand. I just hope they give us a few more years of MacOS updates.
Biggest issue with my M3 Max is apple mandatory fun bloatware. I think it's the same playbook as phones long term. The hardware is still powerful but the software is optimized for the latest CPU, so older models run hot, take a fraction of the second longer to load the resources, etc. That stacks up over 5-6 years of releases to make older models feel slower.
Also M1 Pro here. Any reason why you're planning to upgrade at M7 Pro? I still don't feel the need to upgrade, as much as I wish I could justify it.
I like to factory reset my devices every couple of years, it really gives them a new lease on life. My M1 Pro feels as smooth and fast as the day I got it.
I had an M1 Max machine with 32GB of memory and upgraded it to an M4 Max machine with 128GB of memory for local AI model experimentation.
It's sad that M5 (and M6) are so much faster at prefilling and other LLM-related operations, but I'm happy with the computer I got and will keep it at least 3-4 generations.
They really have radically improved the situation for prefill speed! But the generation speed is behind enough that you'd notice. An M4 Max is a great choice I think.
this machine just keeps getting better and better in the inference world. the memory bandwidth is too good, newer macbook pros aren't that much faster in memory bandwidth, many are slower. not enough to upgrade yet as they're mostly horizontal upgrades, the improvements in other areas are adding up like wifi bandwidth and protocol, NVMe speeds, webcam
if they do the M7 correctly: which is just everything their current models do plus way faster memory bandwidth and much greater memory possible 192GB+, then it will be a really great and timely upgrade
Here are the numbers that got me buying a used M1 Max for LLM work.
M1 Max 400GB/s
M4 Pro 273GB/s
M5 Pro 307GB/s
Only Max are worthwhile for LLMs. An Ultra is just two Mac chips on a die, but I think they're just used in Mac Studio.
I'll check it that inference engine! Thanks!
Edit: it doesn't give numbers for unsloth/Qwen-3.6-35B-A3B 4bit, but I'm using mlx-serve right now and getting petty good numbers (and it took a while to tweak everything properly!)
My M1 screen just cracked :(
Debating to get it fixed (it’s a 32GB 2 TB machine). Crazy that I likely will spend 500€ to get a super old machine repaired just so au do not have to spend >3000€ for a similarly equipped new one.
I have an M1 Pro as well but my next computer will be a split setup mainly because I realized that I'm most often working / focusing on hard things while at the desk and just browsing / checking in on things when I'm away from the desk so I'm thinking something like:
that's the plan for now, I just haven't had the M1 Pro slow down/hang/lag enough to give it up. It's a mid-range M1 Pro with 32GB of ram, works for me for dev work, I don't run any local LLM or resource intensive things on it. Battery only has 250 cycles on it so it's not like it dies off-charger.
I have M1 Maxes (one for work, one for home) that perform as good as new, as far as I can tell. Only thing they lack is an Nvidia GPU. I might pick up the new uber-studio though tmw when it launches (presumably).
IMO Apple knows a ton of people are doing this, especially with the rumors on memory bandwidth aka LPDDR6X bringing huge generational uplifts[0], which is why it seems they haven't brought down trade-in values from a few weeks ago, at least for my base spec M2 Pro MBP - Still $835. Pretty compelling to do that and pay just over $100/mo for a year to get a M6, given I've already gotten >3 years out of it.
I figured my direct family could use an extra Macbook, so I decided to "peel" my M1 Pro away as a gift to my mom. It stays close, I can use her unused space as backup, provide ad-hoc Tailscale to her (way smoother than with her crufty Windows machine), and I get a nice upgrade to my current workflows.
Having said that, I did plan on sticking it out 7 years. Ended up bailing on an M5 Pro!
I think I'm on the same computer, the M1 MBP with the touchbar right? I was eyeing an upgrade for a while but now that I've transitioned to running agents on a home server instead of locally, I think I'll be putting my money into a ram upgrade for that box instead. My macbook is basically a dumb terminal at this point, the only reason for an upgrade would be battery life. I might get an air or even a neo if this thing dies.
I also have a high spec M1 and was delaying upgrading, but eventually I needed more RAM.
My M1 is still fast and enjoyable, but I regret to inform you that the M5 actually does feel faster in day to day use. I thought for sure I wouldn’t notice, but the difference is there.
When I do large builds the difference is also bigger than I was expecting.
For the ability to run our full server-side application stack locally, including all services and as much of the test suite as possible, as well as the profilers, debuggers and telemetry tools to debug issues. Way faster to develop when you can have a change running live in about 3 seconds instead of 5 minutes, run targeted tests in seconds and a full test suite in a few minutes.
Not op here, but: i have a build box i ssh to, but when on the go: planes, taxis, etc. its annoying to constantly have to connect. Slightly. Having a fallback, fast local laptop is a convenience. Tho I do travel a lot - usually >100 flights per year.
Big test suites. I have one project hitting 35 mins on m1 max, vs around 12 min on the m5 max, vs. 7 min on the linux box I keep in the basement. Unit tests, integration tests, headless browser with webgpu stuff.
When I was in the market for a new machine, I had the same attitude. As I was about to hit "Buy" on a standard issue $2k MBP, my wife said, "What if we got you a top of the line machine?"
I replied that it would make no sense unless I was going to start running local inference or training my own models locally...
2 years later, and this MacBook Pro M4 Max w/48GB is the best $4k I've ever spent!
I have a M1 pro for personal use and an M4 pro from work and I don't notice any difference switching between them. The M1 is still more than enough for most computer usage.
I just bought a m1 Air with 8GB as secondary device to the m4 mbp that my employer provides since they dialed up the spyware lately.
I should have bought a m4 Air last November but I hope the m1 holdes until the rampocalypse is over.
How useful would that actually be for local inference, when the bottleneck is, essentially, always memory size? I think the sweet spot is somewhere around 64 to 128 GB. That ought to be enough for almost all uses, like Qwen3.8-Flash-Next at a decent quant.
Memory size is a bottleneck, but I have found that speed is very important for getting actual work done. Running a big model is great, but if you're getting 10t/s you're going to be spending a lot of time waiting.
That’s what even low spec computers used to cost, not even adjusted for inflation. I don’t think spending $200-400/month on a hardware budget that enables me to earn 50-100x that is that onerous, we just think “six grand for a laptop???!?” But it’s ridiculously cheap for what it is. We wouldn’t be similarly shocked at a $6k car, for example.
I have to say, I really dislike the thing where the base M(n+1) is always in the market alongside M(n) Pro/Max. I appreciate the underlying chips are probably quite distinct, but from a naming standpoint its confusing as hell.
If the difference between M6 and M5 Pro or M5 Max is confusing to you, I strongly recommend you don't look at the names of literally any other CPU, GPU, or chipset that is being manufactured.
The second one was the first iPhone with 3G networking (which had broadly been considered a required feature for smartphones when the original iPhone was introduced without it.)
And the iPhone XR! All part of the twelfth-gen models. Of course the subsequent thirteenth-gen models were just called "iPhone 11" in a return to sanity.
All the people under you not understanding that you meant AMD repackaging 2-4 year old CPU cores as """new""" by giving them a current series name and bolting some extra features on.
Not better - but Apple in early days was easy: Choose Air if you don't nedd much. Choose MacBook if you need a little but more and choose Pro if you need max power. That's one of the reasons why I bought an Apple years ago.
Compare that with the regilar lineup of other manufacturers: Cryptic model names which are uncomparable and models that are so similar that they could be equivalent.
So, no, 1 is not better but I don't care (as customer) about variety.
Tell me you're not old enough to remember the Performa and Centris lines without telling me you're not old enough to remember the Performa and Centris lines.
Most of those models were not sold concurrently. The Apple II, II+, and IIe each replaced the previous model; the same was true of the IIc and IIc Plus. "//e" was an alternate textual rendering of IIe, not a separate model.
The most Apple II models that were sold concurrently were the IIe Platinum, IIc Plus, and IIgs. (And this was around 1990, at which point there were far more models of Macintosh computers on the market.)
I'm guessing the Base and Pro chips come off the same wafer, and they get 5 Base chips (some defects) for every one Pro chip (very few defects). So they run the Base-model assembly line for six months and eventually they accumulate enough Pro chips to satisfy Pro-model demand.
Pro chips come much later than base chips and vary significantly in ways other than number of cores (which can be up to double), such as doubled memory bandwidth and peripheral support (thunderbolt 5 instead of 4).
You mean as in binning? High defect rates for chips but they're burned to disable non-working parts and sell them as non-pro chips and accumulate the good ones ?
The Pro and Max chips have a different die than the base model. They don't bin down to the base model. Maybe Max bins down to Pro now that those are the same die, or Pro bins up to one half a Max?
If you look at the platform name and the kernel code you'l realize that this is not even remotely true. The base M chips are T8xxx which are (more or less) just iPad chips. The pro/max/ultra are T6xxx and are their own new thing, starting with M1 pro which was T6000
makes me want to wait another one
I have an M1 Max and just set up playing with an M1 (non-max) and realized it can't drive 3 displays. I recall getting Max just for this, but generally, makes me think of non-Max as a non-pro after all.
And having what's presumably the latest CPU but with potentially worse features than the last generation combined with increased prices from RAM is a deal breaker so I'll guess I'll push my M1 for another year.
Whenever I do this, I enter into a perpetual one-more-year wait loop.
When I finally cave in and buy something after 5 years I’m very momentarily sad for not perfectly timing the release window, then I realize I keep hardware long enough a half year barely matters.
It's also kinda sad that there's no clear-cut best chip, e.g. the M6 outperforms the M5 Pro in some ways (singlethreaded performance, maybe NPU and stuff) but then the M5 Pro also outperforms the M6 in some ways (multithreading, graphics). This was even worse when the Mac Studio was stuck on M3 Ultra for a while when the M5 Max was out. The M5 Max was simply better at most things and it was ironic that the fastest computer you could buy was briefly a laptop.
How could it possibly be otherwise? Single core performance goes up every year, but not enough that this year’s 12-core CPU beats last year’s 18-core CPU at multithreaded benchmarks.
It's also not exclusive to Apple; the normal product cadence from Intel and AMD usually has the large workstation and server chips falling behind the consumer chips in peak single-core performance for part of the product cycle. Some market segments just don't sustain annual updates very well, and it's always easier to get a smaller chip out the door first before a larger chip.
Latest vs. greatest. Buyers who’ll pay for performance can deal with that discomfort and be squeezed for buying the best, but those who need an extra push to buy Apple might be sold on the idea of the latest.
Put another way, it is a peculiar naming regime when M(n-[2-4]) Pro/Max/Ultra is superior to M(n). This is very visible right now because of the demand for running local AI on Macs.
I get you, but I suspect it reflects reality. The M-with-adjective chips are M(n) chips with more cores and cache, it stands to reason that it takes real wall time for TSMC to start cranking them out with acceptable defect rates.
So Apple can either toss the early production in inventory while the whole process catches up, or they can do what they do. Better for both the company and the consumer that they do the latter.
I switched entirely over to Asahi Linux on my M1 Macbook Air and installed a third-party 55Wh battery, as the original battery had fallen below 80% capacity. That machine is good to go for another 5 years.
There are no features or performance characteristics of any of the subsequent M[2-6] Macbook Air or Pro models that I care about. I'm not really sold on running models on the hardware I have right in front of me. So long as I can rent an RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell at about half a buck per hour through a European provider, I'm fine using that with Qwen3.8-27B UD-Q4_K_M for the few things I consider more privacy-sensitive.
How is Asahi Linux from a reliability perspective? Last I checked there were some issues with docking and HDMI out that would've made it tough for me to use as a daily driver.
I've been running Ubuntu on an MSI Ge66 gaming laptop, Intel + Nvidia gpu for a couple of years now. I did have some teething problems with wifi and sleep but after resolving those it's been rock solid. I'd say 99.9% stable if we're throwing out random percentages here.
While not Asahi/M1, I can tell you my desktop has been Linux Mint for about 5 years, including through distro upgrades, etc and I have had to troubleshoot it like once.
97% is a high estimate based on my linux efforts.. just yesterday some kind of update, i think kernel, took out my amd graphics.. still wouldn’t pick anything else.
Not a Mac user. I assume HDMI might be improving soon as AMD finally got the HDMI consortium to wind their necks in and full HDMI support was recently merged.
I want to propose a called AI Index, if you can do say 1000t/s on processing and 50t/s on generation on a min 25B model you can call your device AI9 and you have AI7 and AI5 and AI3 with 3 being 100t/s processing and 10t/s generation on a min 10B model.
Values above are on a 100k context size minimum.
OFFLINE.
So any effing claim of being an AI device doesn't end on the demo of best buy laptop where you remove a dog from a photo....
Or that you have "better noise removal" or "you look better on the cam" because that's called noise cancelling and instagram filter and it's being done for ages...
I have been a fan of these newer macbooks. They are just pushing the boundaries of a good laptop. While I understand the use, I hope someday my AAA games are also as supported in MacBooks as my gaming laptop.
https://fxgl.github.io/steamac/ my friend and partner made this. For the first time I’ve been playing games on Mac without much trouble. For me best feature is automate of vm in background - finally I can play games and pause them arbitrarily
Depends on the game obviously. e.g. Assassin's Creed N+1 - you've seen the formula like 20+ times already, all the previous games + all of Far Cry from 3 upwards. There's nothing new. And there's Cyberpunk2077 and BG3 which are still huge but unique and carefully designed
I'm playing Assassin's Creed: Origins this month, for the first time playing any of that franchise, and one of the most recent games I've played (it's from 2017) and I'm amazed by:
a) how much effort they obviously put into it, historic details from Egypt 2k years ago, game engine, quests, little details
b) how much it feels like a thin wrapper around Cookie Clicker
Steam tells me 1/3rd of players don't even get out of the Prologue area.
I have a soft limit of $35. I generally find that quality decreases (not quality-per-dollar, just quality alone on an absolute scale) once you start going over that. By the time you reach $60 it's in the gutter. Exceptions to the rule obviously exist.
Compared to what time frame? The annual sports games have been terrible for over a decade. Basic open world games have been around for just as long, though they’re more prevalent now.
From my perspective, there’s been a small but steady trickle of good games for decades. Recent AAA games that pushed the boundaries are Elden Ring and Baldurs Gate 3, and they would not have been possible at their scale back in the day.
I'm generally with you on it, they're sort of fatiguing in a depressing way.
But try the new James Bond game. Linear shooter, but a great story and fantastic cast on top of super fun mechanics. By the Hitman studio with a lot of their core ideas Bondified to favor action over stealth. It hasn't irritated me in the way almost any other game manages to.
The decompilation efforts I've been seeing with 15 year old Xbox 360 games or PS3 games has been absolutely incredible, getting them running natively on macOS with presumably much fewer engineering resources than are allocated to a standard game port.
I do think the limited macOS gaming market is a chicken-or-the-egg problem - people don't game on Macs because there aren't that many great games on Mac (Although Cyberpunk runs amazingly on my M4 Macbook Pro).
> I do think the limited macOS gaming market is a chicken-or-the-egg problem
This feels like a re-hash of Valve's original Steam Machine mistake. Porting modern games to native Linux didn't increase user or developer interest in supporting the platform. It made Valve liable for a lot of investment into systems that no developers ever used, and Valve themselves would eventually abandon.
Apple has stepped in this same cowpie. They depreciated hundreds of "old" macOS games by radically changing their runtime, and then nobody invested into the new Metal-native paradigm. Porting games like Tomb Raider and Death Stranding won't kickstart the macOS gaming revolution any more than native Left 4 Dead magically made Linux an alternative to Windows for gaming. We know this from experience.
Decomps and emulation is a good solution for 15-year-old games, but Apple can't enjoy day-1 support if they refuse the industry's standards. There is no trust in Metal as a stable API, or macOS as a reliable and backwards-compatible runtime. Windows is not only much more profitable, it's easier to support for decades to-come.
> Apple has stepped in this same cowpie. They depreciated hundreds of "old" macOS games by radically changing their runtime, and then nobody invested into the new Metal-native paradigm
This is the reason. Apple couldn't care less about backwards compatibility. In fact, I'd cynically say backwards incompatibility is counted as feature at Apple, because you can sell more X. The first time people were bit with a game they purchased on the App Store no longer working a year later, was also the last time many of them bought a game from the App Store.
> Porting modern games to native Linux didn't increase user or developer interest in supporting the platform. It made Valve liable for a lot of investment into systems that no developers ever used
This I can't agree with though. They succeeded on their second iteration with the Steam Deck and Proton, which had the side effect of making it easy for normal Linux users to run games, which increased developer interest. Also, developers love developing on Linux, as far as I know.
> a game they purchased on the App Store no longer working a year later, was also the last time many of them
(raises hand)
> Apple couldn't care less about backwards compatibility.
its also the exact opposite of what an os is supposed to do: provide a base and abstraction for applications/programs to run stably; if apps breaks all the time whats the point?
I agree with everything here. Apple has a perverse incentive to create support churn for games and blame developers, but overall the strategy doesn't work on Mac. It only really panned out on mobile, where gambling apps and gacha games take up Apple's mantle in exchange for access to a larger audience. Which is a rich parallel to Apple's story about the App Store "protecting consumers" and the other knee-jerk DSA/DMA apologia.
> They succeeded on their second iteration with the Steam Deck and Proton
> Also, developers love developing on Linux, as far as I know.
Well, Valve steered away from the cowpie this time. Proton is a concession that Windows won, and the equivalent for Linux (Steam Linux Runtime) is still a great idea but goes relatively unused. Valve went to where the gamers were and met them halfway, which is why the Steam Deck became an instant hit despite costing more than an iPad. Proton could be optimized to fix games that were objectively broken on DirectX (see: Elden Ring, Fallout 3/New Vegas) without developers lifting a finger to port anything. It gave customers a real alternative to suffering through Windows and the Windows runtime.
I personally love development on Linux, and I'm making a few hobby games on NixOS right now. The dev experience wasn't the problem for the original Steam Machine or for macOS either, it's the concentration of game devs, modders and players that all treat Win32 and DX11 as the lingua-franca of gaming. Valve threw in the towel on native ports, and it enabled them to focus on curb-cutting efforts that made Linux stick.
Your point about the steam machine was correct at the time, but Linux gaming is flourishing now due to the steam deck. I think it's more accurate to say that the steam machine itself wasn't sufficiently compelling as a platform.
Have the same setup -- got a good black friday deal last year on an AMD 395+ w/ 128gb of RAM. Still not super bullish on running AI models on it, but it makes a great dev server anyway.
Actually had claude spin up a kanban board to manage my tasks in a 'TODO -> Plan -> Implement -> Review -> QA -> Shipping -> Done' flow (with a worktree for each task) that works great!
If that continues to be the case, next time you can "downgrade" to the MacBook Air. Even today you can get one with 32GB RAM, so when you're in the market I'm sure more will be available. They are quite thin and light compared to the MBPs.
I've just transitioned to the same setup a week ago - that's why I'm considering Air as the next upgrade, given the better portability.
One thing that bugs me mentally is leaving that machine pending on my input ("wasted") overnight etc... I'd like to arrive at a workflow where I can have agents running toward the overall goal autonomously overnight as much as they can, and I can review and iterate and "engineer" parts that need it afterwards...
For now, I still guide implementation very closely, piece by piece. Has anyone had any good experiences with workflows / skills / similar for that?
Did the same. Took a week or so to get used to the workflow after doing dev locally my entire career, but now I'm certain it's the best way to work. Even better is using a few scripts to simplify things like opening in VS Code (instead of `code folder-name` I run `codeon repo-name` from my local machine).
I did actually get a new M5 Pro/48GB machine last month, but that's only because I bought my work machine to keep my personal and professional lives properly separated; otherwise I wasn't seeing any issue running that M3 Max/36GB for a long time further.
That's exactly what I am doing. I have a Dell R740 with 96 cores and 512 GB of RAM, and RAID 10 with 16 SSDs. All of my machines connect to it via Tailscale.
I have an M1 Air 13" and M2 Air 15", and M4 Air 14" and and M4 Pro 14" with nano texture.
I love them all. The M4 Air 14" is from work, so kinda limited in what I can do. The M4 14" Pro is kinda chunky after the Airs. The M2 15" is ideal except on a plane. The M1 13" is great as a personal device on work travel. If only I could not work...
Look at the first image with the people in the field.
That looks to me like a very poorly generated image, not a real image of people, and not even a high-quality AI generated image.
Is this what we can expect of the new apple?
I'm not against AI generated imagery, but I expect them to be of equal quality to a real photo.
Or am I wrong, and it isn't AI generated?
The things that make me think it is just poorly made are
1) the angles of the laptop on the black case,
2) the lack of any lighting on the back panel,
3) the size of the hand on the woman in the back, and the squareness of what she is holding (if it is even supposed to be another mac).
Almost certainly not AI gen, it's shot with a 35mm lens (quality looks like the 1.4 L to me), probably around f8 given how the DOF falloff happens, heavy forward flood (flash or otherwise, but whatever it was it's defused) and then what's I think giving you the sense it's AI is it looks like they've over used a double S curve to bump the contrast and sharpness. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZh_9HnO_4w&t=640s
That was my first thought, is that guy's face AI? The angle of the laptop looks off. Then I decided I don't care and moved on, but yeah, you're not the only one who thought it looked off.
I thought we were supposed to get a design overhaul this gen?
Also framing AI use for the base M models marketing makes no sense to me. You are way better off getting a used M1 max with 64gb and way higher mem bandwidth when those are the real bottlenecks.
Apparently another announcement coming tomorrow, with the OLED panels. But according to the fpt channel on Youtube, it doesn't look any different. Just has an OLED panel with touchscreen, with massive cooling changes inside.
MacRumors is still claiming we're getting a new chassis
> Apple on Wednesday will announce 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models featuring touch-enabled OLED displays with thinner bezels, a Dynamic Island instead of a notch, M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, and a lighter and slightly thinner design
Interesting. Will be way out of my budget, but keen to see how the OLED display performs long term. Nearly everyone I've seen that has used an OLED on laptop say they absolutely love it. But I still hate the idea of touchscreen, especially with the changes to MacOS to cater for this
IMO changes to a touchscreen would've been perfect for professional artists, but only if it enabled using an Apple Pencil. Which is pretty unlikely if they don't also solve the ergonomics of doing that, e.g. with a 360" hinge.
>With the new 14-inch MacBook Pro, users can connect high-speed peripherals, transfer photos, work with multiple external displays, and more with its wide array of ports.
* looks inside *
4 kinds of ports. while being generous, and including the SD card slot and the headphone jack.
I don't know anyone who would consider 2-4 to be a "wide array".
It's a shame that only the Mac Studios come with USB-A ports. I know, won't fit on a MBA, but similar size and class laptops to the MBP often come with at least one USB-A.
It's just handy when you have a USB-A device and don't want a dongle, traveling, etc.
Am I crazy, or are a lot more people using the term "uplift" in place of "increase" within the last year? Google Trends (for whatever it's worth) shows a significant increase (uplift?) since mid-late 2025. [0]
Language changes. People at work have started saying things are an easy lift instead of a quick win. And it's not new hires, it's the people I've worked with for years. I never got on board with quick win either.
Some people adopt stuff faster than others. I've lived in NZ for nearly 20 years and called someone bro for the first time just last week while playing a sport "should have left it for me bro". Slipped out natural as. Still having bad thoughts about it.
If you want to do anything beyond getting a small single-core speed bump the M5 Pro is a better, more capable purchase. At least until the M7 comes out.
The M6 version is also cheaper than the M5 Max by a significant amount. I wouldn't be surprised if the M6 could keep up on LLM prefill (compute bound), but the memory bandwidth means that decode is going to be a lot slower, most likely?
It's a base M6 chip. The Pro doubles that, and the Max doubles again. And the Ultra doubles yet again. This is how the entire M series has always worked.
It's also absolutely wild that you apparently cannot spec one with more than 32GB, for any amount of money? Wow.
Not that I blame Apple here, for once. Seems like they're trying to cope with the limited quantity of RAM they can procure. And with the paltry bandwidth (170GB/s) of these CPUs they're a bad choice for anything but tiny local models anyway.
That's for the base model M6. The Pro can take more, the Max even more, the Ultra the most.
They're not making those models for the M6 though; they rerouted their resources to making M7 faster at running local LLMs.
If you want more bandwidth, get an M5 Pro, Max, or Ultra. If you want a lower power base model, get the M6. If you want to have your cake and eat it too, wait for the M7, reportedly in the spring.
Umm yes, the M6 chip only has a certain amount of memory controllers and channels, which means you can only have so many LPDDR5X modules.
Yes, high-capacity LPDDR5X are made and do exist, but for all practical intents and purposes, you can't buy enough of them to deliver to customers at Apple scale.
Hmm, still no OLED displays? I wonder what's the holdup? (I have a fairly mainstream PC laptop with OLED display, and the display is the one thing where my MBP looks pretty poor in direct comparison).
This is a strange release. The M6 tops out at 32GB RAM and then you fall back to M5/Pro. Kinda midway between an Air and a true Pro. Only 14" no 16" with M6.
Just now realizing there's a difference between "MacBook Pro with M# chip" and "MacBook Pro with M# Pro chip". Was curious to see how my MBP with M4 Pro compared, and I saw it has 273 gb/s memory bandwidth compared to the MBP M6 (sans Pro)'s 170gb/s. Makes sense that "Pro" in the laptop model doesn't also describe the chip, but only if you remember that the non-pro "Macbook" line stopped in 2017 (which was the last time I went shopping for Apple laptops until buying the MBP4)
The "Pro" in MacBook Pro has slowly degraded to "it comes with a fan so that the chip can keep chugging when it gets a hard workload, unlike the MacBook Air where the chip will throttle since there's no fan".
The text of this product's announcement really tries to sell it as a 10x AI performance upgrade for existing MacBook M1 users.
Ok, plausible number for that use case. Striking how it seems like the M-series Macs are almost too good enough for most people.
It's almost desperate prose.
(The AI image processing in Pixelmator Pro saved me hours of work on a recent project. Two button clicks vs a day of tweaking. But even that was on my M1 MacBook Air.)
As lots of Apple Users are in here: I'm thinking about "sidegrading", my M2 Pro runs fine, but I chose 16 GB/512 GB when I bought it and I think 32 GB/1 TB would be nicer in some cases.
Is it easily possible to sidegrade/upgrade with a Timemachine backup?
I am due to an upgrade (still using the 2019 intel). However I am torn between a M5 Pro with 48 Gigs of ram or waiting for M6 pro. I’d really like to run local models for once.
Is this an odd rollout for their actual high end MacBook Pros, or is this sitting in that space where they like to have a base MacBook Pro between their Airs and the expensive MacBook Extremely Pros?
Just the standard chip without Pro/Max makes me assume this is that base one. If so, the price is way high for where that tends to sit, but welcome to buying a computer in 2026 I guess.
This is the base one. You get a better display, more, faster Thunderbolt ports, and an honest to god HDMI port, plus some fans for cooling on long running processes that you don't get with the M6 Air (which also doesn't exist).
last time I checked, every Windows laptop had the absolutely massive caveat that it needed to throttle performance by a ton to have a low enough TDP to compete on battery life. You just cannot match the efficiency of ARM Apple chips with an x86 chip.
There's no happy medium here that would satisfy everybody: when they make marketing claims about improvements relative to products from several years ago, they get criticized for not focusing on the improvements relative to last gen (even if those comparisons are also somewhere in the announcement). When they focus on the most recent generations, people complain that it doesn't make sense to upgrade every year.
Just accept that even if you aren't still using an Intel MacBook Pro, the comparison is still relevant to some part of their target market.
They only just dropped support for Intel Macs from this fall's operating system release (but are still doing security patches for the releases that Intel Macs can run). A year from now, it actually will be fairly reasonable to expect them to give up marketing to the holdouts.
I would guess there's still quite a lot of people on Intel Macs out there (they were sold 5 years ago), so it is still very much worth it for Apple to market to them.
I think it makes sense. Do you think most potential buyers are coming from last year's model, or from laptops that are more like 3-5 years old?
As long as they're clear about the comparisons they're making ("X% more battery life than Y" as opposed to simply ("X% more battery life") I'm good with it.
Why? Apple devices have the best battery life in the market right now to my knowledge. It's an important part of the evaluation for a laptop which is the opposite of cringe.
Actually, they don’t! Intel Core Ultra Series 3 beats Apple laptops as of the M5 on battery life.
IIRC the Framework 13 Pro beats the MacBook Pro at both video streaming tests and office productivity with 300 bits brightness tests. (Framework live-streamed the video playback test, and the office provided productivity tests I referred to were done by Just Josh Tech)
Perhaps the M6 has leapfrogged but that remains to be seen.
I did. I am seeing single core geekbench scores of 2700 compared to my MacBook Air at 3500. This, for a laptop that is thicker and heavier than my air.
in my original post, i said "perf", i am not sure what you imagined, but i am not moving anything, geekbench single core score is a perfectly reasonable thing to measure under the name "perf"
In usual developer type tasks, among my friend group what I hear is that panther lake laptops are competitive with M4 laptops. But, M4s do that with a 55Wh battery, whereas most panther lake laptops come with a 70Wh battery. So if you're discussing chip performance per watt then it's probably an edge to apple silicon.
I recall seeing some crazy stats like 41+ hours maybe on a snapdragon processor w/windows. I imagine your screen brightness would have to be like 99% dark and not playing videos is my guess.
Still using my 8gig m1 to make mac builds, its slow, but works fine. Keep thinking about upgrading, but max 32gigs ram, if I can hold out for 2 years, and maybe have 64/128gig as options, and cheaper.
In your shoes, I'd just get whatever Pro processor is available at that time. (Knowing that new processors were coming, I happily bought an M5 Pro machine last month)
Still using the M1 Macbook Air for 4K video editing on Davinci Resolve and Photo Editing with Darktable (open source). Just 8GB of Ram too and I've never really needed more. Obviously these new versions are great but even the original is not too shabby.
I want the newest one and I want to run Gentoo Linux on it with working Asahi patches for all aspects of the hardware. I want it enough I'm willing to pay for it. I'll pay 3x Apple's current sticker price.
But Apple will never sell that to me, as far as I can guess. Apple is not a good person.
Why would you want greasy fingerprints all over your display and gorilla arm syndrome when there's a perfectly fine keyboard and touchpad attached to the display for free?
No reason for gorilla-arm when touch is an alternative interaction mode and not a required one. You still have trackpad and keyboard. You can dynamically switch modes depending on the action.
Gorilla-arm was a fear based on the naive idea that if you had touch, you would be required to only use touch for every action.
Is apple going to be so restrained to keep the design of the OS as a mouse first experience or are they going to cripple information density so I might be able to close a window with my elbow?
People act as if Chromebooks with touch screens aren't already considered a huge UX upgrade over Chromebooks without. Use your finger where it makes sense and the mouse where it doesn't. Literally nobody gets tripped up over this in practice.
I need 64GB RAM and 1TB SSD suddenly having been more than comfortable with 16GB and 256GB respectively. My agents have sessions which have workteees and scratchpads and simulators and build runs and test suites and wow. The hours I’ve been spending for memory swaps and quad simulator calls to run through. I am compelled to view a $4k machine as a necessity. Also a cool thing about M5 Pro is that it’s very close to Max on the CPU performance side with identical core count if you get the 18 core variant. The Pro’s Geekbench scores are also in similar ballpark as the Max. You rather get the Pro for most use cases and use the extra cash on RAM.
One of the interesting slights of hand Apple marketing must do is simultaneously say the new processor is awesome while selling the higher spec versions of the previous processor as upgrades:
The M6 chip joins M5 Pro and M5 Max to create our most advanced line-up of chips ever built for a pro laptop. With a 12-core CPU, 12-core GPU and our first ever Dual 16‑core Neural Engine, M6 brings next-generation speed and advanced on device AI. All three chips deliver phenomenal single- and multithreaded CPU performance and faster unified memory. . . .
The case of your 5090 having become a coveted artifact of great rarity in these times - may be a nuance of some measure.
Also, the following two have very different 'needs' to feel good enough:
1. heavy agentic workloads via harness
vs
2. a simple private chat interface with a local instance
Even if an MBP's bandwidth were higher, it's tough to see a reason to run it as a constantly loaded 24/7 inference machine due to heat degradation.
P.S. still extremely awesome to be able to host and chat with a decently quantized 27B model on your laptop. ...and to be fair even a 32GB Air would do that!
It is a thing of beauty: the amount of folks this may add to the hacker/tinker community.
The 5090 does have a bandwidth advantage, but also must pass more data from main to GPU memory for any particular task. Comparisons of a 5090 to a DGX Spark at 273 GB/s are illustrative since the Spark uses unified memory similar to Apple's M-series. [0] The 5090 certainly wins most benchmarks but that doesn't mean the DGX Spark is not useful.
Loading data to the GPU will generally never be the bottleneck. Yes that's a bit better for unified memory, but prefill and decode will still be bound by compute and memory bandwidth respectively.
There's some value in having a huge amount of memory addressable by the GPU for loading larger models, but even that doesn't make sense for current gen models. For MOE models, newer inference engines with smarter GPU expert caching and pinned memory allow a GPU with lots of bandwidth to significantly outperform a Spark, so that leaves you with larger dense models that fit on a spark but not on a GPU where you might have a use-case.
But even then it's hard. For instance a full-fat BF16 of a ~30B parameter model will fit on a 128GB spark and not a 32GB 5090, but at that size it's going to be frustratingly slow on the spark given the compute and bandwidth constraints.
Imo these devices are mostly good for experimentation, or if you only want to do overnight jobs or training which wouldn't be possible on a GPU, and you don't want to pay $100k for a DGX station.
About time they put a battery in the lid, which is what an iPad already manages to do with thinness. Boom another half a decade of updates all the way to 48hrs
It's confusingly worded but I think it's a suggestion for something Apple could do in the future. I don't see any mention of this in the linked Apple article.
I'm currently having an M2, but I just can't imagine buying an Apple laptop again. The hardware is great, but the sofware is just unbearably bad. I used Arch Linux with KDE before, and it was just an experience 10 times better. If they would just support Linux out of the box...
The design is really great for the new MacBook Pro. The cpu is no compare to other laptops.
One thing, framing AI use for the base M models marketing makes no sense to me.
But honestly this computer is still faster than any of my laptops that came before, even with the visual atrocity of Liquid Glass.
I'm currently on a marathon to keep my M1 Pro running until the M7 Pro/Max is available. Not sure if I'll make it, but I'm not eager to pay $6000+ for a decent spec dev computer, until I really have to
I'm loving my M1 Macbook Air still, and only a few weeks away from six years of use Sometimes it lags a bit when I'm running a macOS VM, and all the coding agent VMs, so I'm kind of interested in going to 32GB of RAM, but honestly this computer is still faster than any of my laptops that came before, even with the visual atrocity of Liquid Glass.
I'll go and look at this new box, drool a little, and realize that I'd get more personal utility from donating $3k (or whatever the trade in delta is) to a charity than upgrading my computer.
My son's M1 Air CPU died suddenly. Maybe it was a thermal death from overheating. Not sure. But all the data on it was lost because the storage is soldered on. PSA to make sure devices with non-removable storage are backed up!
(We replaced it with a Framework... with removable storage.)
you should be backing up all devices with removable storage or not, SSDs can also die without warning.
> PSA to make sure devices with non-removable storage are backed up!
Really this should be devices full stop. Also, "backed up" should include no fewer than two backups on different media and in different physical locations e.g. Time Machine to an external SSD _plus_ continuous cloud backup.
The more you people keep harping on this ultra robust backup strategy, the fewer everyday average people are actually even going to attempt a backup.
And restore tested.
Isn't icloud backup on by default??
I'm not aware of any control over what gets backed up.
I'm assuming that all of my local work would be lost. But I'd still have the sixteen million duplicate photos.
iCloud's priorities are not a great fit for preserving my source code repos. Fortunately those aren't very big.
But when my son's Mac dies, his huge Logic Pro projects are toast. And he is a few thousand miles away now.
In Windows, by default, Microsoft tools put projects in ~/source/repos, which OneDrive, in turn, by default won't touch so they'll be lost if the SSD fail and they're not in git.
However, OneDrive doesn't seem to even know how to handle source files (it doesn't even attempt to honor the gitignore), so rebuilding a project in folders covered by OneDrive results in flurries of temporary files being uploaded/updated to the cloud, hogging the bandwidth, with a bonus of locking files, crashing builds, or even reverting changes silently.
One would think backup tools, even if primarily for normal users are still literally made by programmers, at least consider the use case of programmers instead of just ignoring them entirely.
Kind of, but without a sub you only get a trivial amount of storage.
There is no iCloud Backup for Macs, only iOS devices.
There is iCloud Drive sync, but that only syncs your Documents and Desktop folders, but any other files are not synced.
iCloud will sync your contacts, Notes, Keychains, and other data on macOS.
Can't a decent shop desolder it tho?
All the data is encrypted and the key is held inside the secure enclave within the CPU. If the CPU fails then the data is unrecoverable.
That's a big ask. Probably only work the few hundred it'd take to do that, then get the data off it, if you had some super important documents // crypto wallet.
Is it really? In China you can upgrade your iPhone storage this way. Sure it's not for your average phone case store, but it's not exactly rocket science either.
Unfortunately not really a lot of places to do this in the US. And unlike shipping new devices from China to US, shipping used devices from US to China and back is prohibitively expensive.
Key is held on a separate chip unfortunately
encrypted by both a boot password and a secure enclave held key
Are you suggesting that both keys should be required for decryption?
How would you restore the backup if your secure hardware device is lost/stolen/damaged?
The backup would live someplace other than on the broken machine. It would be encrypted some other way (or maybe not at all, depending on threat profile).
No point in encrypting those family photos burned to disc.
And the owners of the computer can't get the key in the secure enclave? Are they part of the threat model?
“Some person with physical access to the computer” absolutely is part of the threat model.
Some person, yes. The owner, no.
This is a not-very-large subset of the ways you can permanently lose data which exists in only one copy. Have a Time Machine. No step two.
> We replaced it with a Framework... with removable storage.
Cool. How are you backing it up?
I got a second hand M1 air like two years ago for 200usd with 1tb hdd and 16gb ram. I got it after my intel Air died after about..12 years? (Edit: the ssd died, which is removable… but literally had a plane to catch). All my pros have died within a few years. Air all the way. Never looking back.
> All of my pros have died within a few years
What are you doing to them?
I still have MBPs from 2015 and 2018 that have not 'died'.
Similar experience. In active use in my house:
The longevity is incredible.My first gen 5k iMac (2014) is our kitchen machine these days. Still a joy to use. The final gen (2020) model is still my main machine.
I almost wish one of them would konk out so I can get an M series, but then I wouldn’t be on a 5k iMac anymore, which would suck. Love these machines.
The last few models of Intel Mac Pro that I used were mostly good at getting really hot.
Dropbox would fire up to do massive walks of the filesystem tree and the fans would take off. I think the thermal interface material on the GPU got cooked at some point. It would be a relatively easy fix, for me a couple of hours, but I chose to fix it with an M1 MacBook Air.
Just use. There were two models that had issues with the gpu desoldering, 2012 and 2015 iirc? I was lucky enough to have them. I put the mobos in the oven (180deg for seven minutes?) and that would fix it. For about a month… and then 2 weeks.. and then… I actually have a 2018 that I borrowed from a friend after my 2013 Air ssd gave up, it is still working I think, but its twice as slow, at least as my Air was. Its so weird. The Air stayed ‘snappy’ even after my friends Pro’s would become too sluggish. Maybe because I never update ;)
Sounds like user error tbh.
Its from when they switched to lead free solder. Its a known issue.
They fare differently in dusty environments, for one. Airs being sealed do well.
The old airs were legendary. My 2012 still runs just fine despite being beaten to hell. Would still be a great dev machine for non-GPU workloads if it weren't for a lack of OS updates. Have been very happy with my M1 Pro as well though.
the 2012 was a really solid generation (the 2010 as well. i still have both, not running osx anymore of course)
Another 2012 Air user here.
The battery doesn't hold a charge anymore, but as long as it's plugged in, it keeps chugging along.
I replaced my original in a 2012 pro. The replacement died so I run it without a battery.
Wow turns out there's a whole community of us! Same boat. I usually recycle, hand me down, trade-in but have really had a hard time letting that little one go.
I also have a 2010 air still in service. Replaced the battery once with an Amazon special. It’s due for another but I just keep it plugged in mostly
> The old airs were legendary.
You gotta be kidding me. The old M1 Air had the "bendgate" where several people, me included, saw their screen die overnight for no reason. Tens and tens of pages of people complaining about it only to be with "you're holding it wrong" answers. Insanity.
I think Apple fixed that mess with the gen after that one.
We're not talking about M-series Airs.
I wonder if this is from not trying to get maximum performance, and instead focusing on efficiency? But I've noticed this too. I definitely prefer the Air form factor over larger models as the primary benefit, but the durability seems to be a big benefit too. Fewer ports, thinner shell that seals tighter and can't flex as much due to the curved metal instead of flat surfaces... everything about it just seems like a better design.
Yeah the formfactor, the noise, the heat… even the performance seems better except for what, benchmarks..?
No fans though. I like being able to crank them full blast. I'm not sure this pro would ever actually run the fans all out with my usage with the existing fan curve. Apple always favors it running quiet and hot, but I don't mind loud and prefer cool palms. I grew up with far more noisy rigs.
incredible deal
I bought my M1 Pro the week it came out and it was unlike any computer I ever had, expectations, compute, battery life especially. It was just a joy to use and not worry about chargers. I'm so glad they went this path.
My worry is mostly storage. SSD do not last forever
I freaking hate liquid-glass UI Apple has "forced" onto us. No freaking way to disable it. I hate it so much.
Been on HN for many years now, and the one thing that never changes is people posting angrily about small UI changes. It makes me wonder- if things have only ever gotten worse, what was the peak UI? MS DOS?
On the Windows side, Windows 2000 and XP/Vista/7’s Classic mode, though Aero was quite nice. I’m not a fan of the interfaces from 8 onward, and I didn’t like Luna in XP.
On the Mac side, it’s a toss up between the platinum interface of Mac OS 8/9 and Mac OS X Tiger. With that said, I have a work-issued MacBook Pro running Golden Gate as my daily driver, and Liquid Glass is alright. It’s not what I’d prefer if I had a choice, but it’s not a dramatic departure from previous versions of macOS. A Cheetah or Puma Mac OS X user should be able to navigate Golden Gate with ease, mostly.
Windows 2000 / XP in classic mode / XP / Vista / 7. For OSX I'd say High Sierra to Catalina.
I’d go with Tiger (10.4) for peak OS X, personally.
Leopard was better because it introduced spaces. Honestly I think that whole concept (I know windows has something analogous now) was the biggest step change in OS functionality I've seen in my life having started on windows 95.
Expose added in Panther was the last window management feature that changed my day to day usage of PCs.
Expose + Cmd-tab/Cmd-backtick being separated == a gap that Linux/Windows have somehow never managed to close in 20+ years now.
I never used Spaces much.
Apple was actually last to the party on that. Linux had virtual desktops for years at that point, and Windows had them as well through Microsoft PowerToys. I’m pretty sure I was running it on Windows 2000.
I had virtual desktops on UNIXes with X11 well before Linus started working on Linux. They came for free to Linux because they were implemented by many window managers.
The problem is that window management is so atrocious in Mac OS that using multiple desktops is just asking for trouble. Like of you close one window of some software, it will jump to some random other window of the same software on some other desktop.
In the end you’ll spend a significant amount of your time trying to “get back” to where you just where (that alt-tab, a possible savior for this in all other OSs, doesn’t work at all on Mac just adds to the UX mess)
The separation of Cmd-tab and Cmd-backtick is one of my favorite things in Appleland... what about it is broken to you compared to alt-tab?
Eh. I get what it's going for. The Multi-Window application concept and what not.
In the end though I just feel like it's extra cognitive load to have to think about two different shortcuts to do what is in many ways the same thing.
Say, I've got two browser windows open and a code editor open. I'm wanting to flip through the browser windows to check on things while I work in the code editor. In reality I'm just wanting to juggle the three windows, but depending on if I'm wanting to go from browser to browser it's a different shortcut than if I'm wanting to go from editor to browser. And there's a good chance I'll then need to swap from editor to browser, then issue a different shortcut to go from that browser to the other. When I could have just hit the same shortcut twice.
I've just never really encountered a situation where I've felt like it added something, but I'm constantly having cases where its more annoying.
Thanks, that does make sense. Though as a many-windower alt-tab is just often tooooooo big for my tastes to even try to rely on.
The 40-year-deep-history Mac answer to workflows like that with a small working set with frequent cross-app-one-to-other-switching IMO is mouse-based navigation + spatial partially-overlapping windows, but this seems to be an extremely foreign concept to Windows/*nix users that grew up on full-screen-maximize or tiling. So I don't think is particularly likely to be adopted by anyone who doesn't already have it burned into their brains at this point. :) There's a lot of these old Mac bones still baked into the OS (e.g. if you have a folder on your desktop, and double click it, and move it, then close it, it'll open to the location you moved it to next time. And that memory is separate from that for another folder on your desktop. Though some of the follow-on behaviors have changed (opening folders in already-open windows used to behave similarly, opening new windows by default).
The 20-year-history version is my own personal lord and savior: Exposé hot corners.
Spaces and no-mouse navigation are still in many ways comparative afterthoughts to mouse-based/spatial workflows. Though as someone with 30+ year of Mac muscle memories in my head, the switching-windows-vs-switching-app concept and awareness of "where" I am relative to it is pretty embedded.
Ehh I'm not to caught up with window management on macos. Bunch of shells open I might use tmux. But otherwise I just keep things in piles organized in spaces, and use expose all to get to whatever I need in the pile. It works much like the piles on my desk in real life so I'm comfortable with it. But it was better in leopard when it was a grid of spaces vs a line of spaces. Less rigidity was nice.
But even then. If you close a terminal, it'll jump to some random terminal on another desktop. It just doesn't make any sense.
It doesn't make a lot of sense to me as a default, but there's an option to turn off the automatic switching of spaces when switching applications, and it pretty much eliminates the unwanted switches from closing the last window on the current space.
Liquid Glass was not a "small UI change". It disrupted many accessibility aspects of macOS, so much so that Apple toned down quite a few aspects of the design in subsequent updates, even adding a slider to reduce the effect. [1]
The quantity of requests for how to disable Liquid Glass on Apple Discussions is staggering. [2]
[1]https://www.macrumors.com/2026/06/09/macos-golden-gate-liqui...
[2]https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256227663
Yea, I am trichromatic color blind, and it is legitimately unusable for me. I am unable to type on the keyboard. I know there are changes since it launched, by after my ipad updated automatically, rendering it near useless to me, I just disabled updates on my iphone.
I'd say Snow Leopard was peak.
I think the biggest thing isn't really whatever it is but the act of changing and forcing everyone to change into the new ui that is the disruptive part. It is a combination of window dressing changing but also sometimes functions breaking. It is ironic because software written for developers prides itself generally on maintaining compatibility with say depreciated flags, or if things will be depreciated plenty of notice ahead of time. But that only holds for cli software. GUI software and the OS that all goes out the window. Stuff breaks, workflows break, you have no recourse and in fact they might make it genuinely difficult to go back to an older version. Like this part of it is the shitty part. Never mind how it happens to look. It is the forcing effect.
I think it’s also because these UI changes are always designed to improve first-impression and first-usage. They are outright hostile to anyone who wants to go fast and get faster — the power user. At minimum the re-arrangement resets any gains you had, and at maximum its irrecoverable because the UI is now fundamentally designed to slow you down.
This eventually becomes awkwardly precise complaints about information density and general change; but the underlying issue is I want to go fast and the system says no
I think the only real solution to this is to switch to an OS with a backing org that has optimization for power users as a first-class goal. I've been liking Omarchy and NixOS for that. I say this as a Mac user since 1989.
If you consider the transition from macOS 15 to 26+ 'small', I think you should see an optician.
Like GP, I despise the new design. I'll say the old design was pretty peak design. Windows looked like windows. Buttons like buttons. With accessibility tweaks (for transparency and borders) I could make it very, very usable.
This new thing is a crime against UI. Every icon now sits in a circle, and takes up % more room as a result. Because … it's pretty? It isn't pretty.
I upgraded my laptop thinking I was going to develop an app and that I'd need to be on the latest design. I ended up developing a TUI so I needn't have bothered. Every time I see my partner's laptop, still on Sequoia, I shed a little tear.
Small improvements don't get much accolades. And for the most part, the UX is so good that most changes tend to be neutral or for the worse. And when you're really attached to something and there's on an unnecessary change, it feels almost like betrayal!
I, for one, prefer Apple products because they sweat the small stuff more than the other options, and when they have put in effort to make things worse it's kind of infuriating.
I do a bit of desktop Linux work too, and it's OK, but hard to complain when it's all open source volunteer work! Windows is so terrible that I wouldn't even know where to start. What's the point? There's nobody at Microsoft that even gives a damn.
Mac OS 7.6.1 was peak Apple
It's been a long time, but I'm pretty sure Appearance Manager and the corresponding unreleased-but-leaked Hi-Tech theme was 8.5-or-so-and-up-only, which means I must reject 7.6 on aesthetic grounds ;)
It was great if you could tolerate an application crash taking down the whole operating system hard.
No, it was Windows 3.11
Small?
There's a slider to reduce the liquidity
Whats so forced on you? I'm on still on Sequoia and no one forced me to update to latest OS. Everything still works and I get security updates.
They're going to force us soon. When getting a new device I don't think you can install an older version either.
The way things are going you will be able to run your favorite flavor of Linux on those pretty soon. It will be the best of both worlds: the best hardware and a good OS. Hopefully Apple doesn't take steps to block it.
> No freaking way to disable it.
Um. https://imgur.com/a/ydt3MN5
Liquid Glass is more than just the transparency. There are many other changes that cannot be disabled that way. Not to mention the overall lag compared to Sequoia (I skipped Tahoe entirely so I had a direct knife-edge transition). 27 is less bad than 26 but Liquid Glass doesn't make anything better than prior UI and makes several things worse, even if you turn down the transparency.
I imagine that the UI changes since Sequoia regarding the giant buttons and whitespace are because Apple plans to release a touchscreen laptop (most rumors say it will be announced tomorrow) so they've decided to make the UI touch friendly at the expense of bloating the UI for everyone who doesn't have a touchscreen. Microsoft made this same decision with the Windows releases after 7.
Yeah I think this is probably right. I use a 13" MBA as my primary machine so space is crucial and Liquid Glass wastes it.
The rumors also said it would be announced today, so we'll just have to see. Even a broken clock is right twice a day, after all.
Press event is tomorrow. I don’t think a touchscreen laptop is a good idea, but I guess we’ll see whether Apple can do a good job with it.
A touchscreen laptop is only a good idea if it can also be used like a tablet (with a detached keyboard). Otherwise it's useless.
Why? My SO has a Windows laptop with touchscreen, touchpad, keyboard and mouse. She uses the mouse but sometimes pushing a button by touching the screen saves time. If you think about it, by the time you reached for the mouse and started aiming for the button you already pressed it with your finger. The touchpad reduces the travel of the hand but not the time to aim. Hitting something with a finger is always faster. She is missing that on her work laptop.
I used touch on Windows to test multitouch and pen input support in a familiar environment. Less hassle than grabbing a tablet, setting up remote DevTools, etc.
you can probably get the battery replaced for a better speedup
Donate $3k… to some charity that’s going to use it to justify their COO’s $200k/year salary. GTFOH!
Happily running my M1 Max, but have recently been annoyed at my decision to go with the off-the-shelf 32GB version at the time. I recalled telling friends at the time that the ridiculous memory bandwidth should offset that, so I ran some tests on memory pressure while running all my mess and, well, whaddya know, everything is actually tickety-boo. No memory pressure for the most part. And this is with big rust projects, Orbstack builds and runs.
The engineering that went into the M1 was amazing, I truly think that now, an M1 Max was the biggest bargain ever in my entire computing life. £3,299.00. In contrast, the 64GB i9 I bought only two years before was £4,149.00.
Stay strong! I went from an M1 to M5 generation, and it was a nice bump, but I could have gone another year without any significant impact on my quality of life/work.
Same. Only because I broke my M1. Performance wise the M5 barely feels any faster to me in 90% of tasks
second this anecdote
My M1 MacBook Pro has been the best hardware investment I’ve ever made. I had planned to update it in 2025 at the four year mark, but it’s still going strong so I don’t see a reason. The new plan is to go to the Apple store the very day that it dies.
I've been using my M1 Max 64 GB for 5 years now and it's pretty zippy once you rewrite some slow software. I have an M4 Max with 128 GB but I never ended up migrating to it. That's how good it is.
I do enjoy the fact that if software annoys you, it’s easy as hell to simply generate a better version.
Which software have you rewritten for speed?
Not op here, but I rewrote the file manager giving claude only two goals: cold startup below 100ms and 30mb nikon raw preview also below 100ms. One night in a loop and it hit around 20, 30ms respectively. My macs now feel uber fast.
Text viewer, password manager, console/browser hybrid, specialized text editors, household agent, task manager, kb, that sort of stuff.
My M1 Pro has been great, certainly doesn’t feel like a 5-year old computer.
I’ve been a Mac user for 20 years and it’s wild to think how slow my 2003 PowerBook G4 or even my 2008 MacBook Pro felt after five years compared with my 2021 M1 Pro.
My 2013 Core i7 took almost eight years to get to where the previous ones were at five, and if it weren’t for local LLMs pushing me toward an upgrade in the next year or two, I have to imagine my M1 Pro could be my daily driver well into the next decade.
M1 Air guy here... I'm not looking for a replacement still. Almost 6 years now. Runs butter-smooth. Best tech purchase I ever made.
Still running my M1 Pro as well, no plans on upgrading for the next few years
Have an M1 air as well. Got a Pro m5. For daily coding tasks, and general web browsing the M1 air still holds. I'm going to pass it on to my kid. Reminds me of the honda we have that we'll also pass down.
The M series MBAirs, and ofc the M1 originally, are hands down THE BEST laptops ever made. I have a maxed out MBP ofc but the Airs are unbeatable quality and price/performance.
I think the M1+ MacBook Airs will be regarded eventually like the original Macintosh originally the iPod, or the introduction of the original Air and the creation of the product class that came to be known as “ultrabooks”. It really changed everything about laptops to have a fantastic keyboard, speakers, screen, trackpad, hinge, and 12+ hour battery life… for $1k.
My 16" M1 Pro personal laptop is literally just as smooth for 99% of tasks as my work M5 pro. It's crazy how well they built these. I mean the screen on this and the speakers are superb. And you can find these for like 500-800 bucks 2nd hand. I just hope they give us a few more years of MacOS updates.
My work gave me an m4 MacBook Pro. I could barely tell the difference between my personal computer and my work computer.
generally agree, although mine's battery health has been sitting at 80% for what seems like ages now.
Same, and I dual-boot Asahi as well.
Biggest issue with my M3 Max is apple mandatory fun bloatware. I think it's the same playbook as phones long term. The hardware is still powerful but the software is optimized for the latest CPU, so older models run hot, take a fraction of the second longer to load the resources, etc. That stacks up over 5-6 years of releases to make older models feel slower.
I've held back an OS update or two, specifically because I'm worried about performance dropoff on the old chip
But with all of the AI-discovered exploits I think it'll become more important to keep everything up to date
Apple makes security updates available for the last few major OS versions, and even backports really bad ones further back on a case by case basis.
Also M1 Pro here. Any reason why you're planning to upgrade at M7 Pro? I still don't feel the need to upgrade, as much as I wish I could justify it.
I like to factory reset my devices every couple of years, it really gives them a new lease on life. My M1 Pro feels as smooth and fast as the day I got it.
I think the rumors are the M6 and then later M7 Pro/Max will be put into a new chassis with a touchscreen and no notch.
I had an M1 Max machine with 32GB of memory and upgraded it to an M4 Max machine with 128GB of memory for local AI model experimentation.
It's sad that M5 (and M6) are so much faster at prefilling and other LLM-related operations, but I'm happy with the computer I got and will keep it at least 3-4 generations.
They really have radically improved the situation for prefill speed! But the generation speed is behind enough that you'd notice. An M4 Max is a great choice I think.
M1 Max 64gb here, running Qwen 3.6 35b (unsloth 4bit) and it's plenty usable, and cheap used. Best bang for buck.
heyyy same, checkout kapitsa as the inference engine, gets 145+ tokens/sec
https://github.com/nace-ai/kapitsa
this machine just keeps getting better and better in the inference world. the memory bandwidth is too good, newer macbook pros aren't that much faster in memory bandwidth, many are slower. not enough to upgrade yet as they're mostly horizontal upgrades, the improvements in other areas are adding up like wifi bandwidth and protocol, NVMe speeds, webcam
if they do the M7 correctly: which is just everything their current models do plus way faster memory bandwidth and much greater memory possible 192GB+, then it will be a really great and timely upgrade
Here are the numbers that got me buying a used M1 Max for LLM work.
Only Max are worthwhile for LLMs. An Ultra is just two Mac chips on a die, but I think they're just used in Mac Studio.I'll check it that inference engine! Thanks!
Edit: it doesn't give numbers for unsloth/Qwen-3.6-35B-A3B 4bit, but I'm using mlx-serve right now and getting petty good numbers (and it took a while to tweak everything properly!)
it has just a few models it can download, it's really qwen and apple silicon pilled
it has unsloth on the list of 3.6 35b variants only on the 2-bit unsloth UD-IQ2_XXS GGUF variant
I'd say let it down 4-bit Qwen 3.6 35b again and see what how it performs in both benchmarks and your preferred conversational and agentic harness
it's Kflash verifier is competing against MTP and Dflash2, thats where the additional novelty is
My M1 screen just cracked :( Debating to get it fixed (it’s a 32GB 2 TB machine). Crazy that I likely will spend 500€ to get a super old machine repaired just so au do not have to spend >3000€ for a similarly equipped new one.
And, here I am with my 2012 macbook pro, still thinking if its worth upgrading.
They will pry my M1 Pro Macbook from my cold, dead fingers.
Doesn't the high resale value of Macs not make it worthwhile to hang on to your old one as long as possible?
Also why would you have to spend $6000? You can get a refurbished 16-inch M5 Pro with 48 Gb RAM and 1 Tb SSD from Apple for $3000.
That's funny, I bought the config you are describing, but with nanotectured 14" instead of 16 new in July from microcenter for 2700 after tax.
I have an M1 Pro as well but my next computer will be a split setup mainly because I realized that I'm most often working / focusing on hard things while at the desk and just browsing / checking in on things when I'm away from the desk so I'm thinking something like:
- a low end Macbook Pro or Air
- Mac Studio, mid-to-high specs
Why not just continue to use your m1 pro as your low end client? Save a couple hundred.
that's the plan for now, I just haven't had the M1 Pro slow down/hang/lag enough to give it up. It's a mid-range M1 Pro with 32GB of ram, works for me for dev work, I don't run any local LLM or resource intensive things on it. Battery only has 250 cycles on it so it's not like it dies off-charger.
I have M1 Maxes (one for work, one for home) that perform as good as new, as far as I can tell. Only thing they lack is an Nvidia GPU. I might pick up the new uber-studio though tmw when it launches (presumably).
IMO Apple knows a ton of people are doing this, especially with the rumors on memory bandwidth aka LPDDR6X bringing huge generational uplifts[0], which is why it seems they haven't brought down trade-in values from a few weeks ago, at least for my base spec M2 Pro MBP - Still $835. Pretty compelling to do that and pay just over $100/mo for a year to get a M6, given I've already gotten >3 years out of it.
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48681392
I figured my direct family could use an extra Macbook, so I decided to "peel" my M1 Pro away as a gift to my mom. It stays close, I can use her unused space as backup, provide ad-hoc Tailscale to her (way smoother than with her crufty Windows machine), and I get a nice upgrade to my current workflows.
Having said that, I did plan on sticking it out 7 years. Ended up bailing on an M5 Pro!
I think I'm on the same computer, the M1 MBP with the touchbar right? I was eyeing an upgrade for a while but now that I've transitioned to running agents on a home server instead of locally, I think I'll be putting my money into a ram upgrade for that box instead. My macbook is basically a dumb terminal at this point, the only reason for an upgrade would be battery life. I might get an air or even a neo if this thing dies.
I also have a high spec M1 and was delaying upgrading, but eventually I needed more RAM.
My M1 is still fast and enjoyable, but I regret to inform you that the M5 actually does feel faster in day to day use. I thought for sure I wouldn’t notice, but the difference is there.
When I do large builds the difference is also bigger than I was expecting.
Same here! M1 Max going strong. I'm curious to see what they put out tomorrow but spending over 5K in a machine is a pretty rough pill to swallow
Why would you need a $6000 computer for dev work? For toying around with local models I would understand.
For the ability to run our full server-side application stack locally, including all services and as much of the test suite as possible, as well as the profilers, debuggers and telemetry tools to debug issues. Way faster to develop when you can have a change running live in about 3 seconds instead of 5 minutes, run targeted tests in seconds and a full test suite in a few minutes.
That's fair, I've never worked in a domain where I need to run that locally. Is there a reason to not just SSH into a workstation that can run it?
Not op here, but: i have a build box i ssh to, but when on the go: planes, taxis, etc. its annoying to constantly have to connect. Slightly. Having a fallback, fast local laptop is a convenience. Tho I do travel a lot - usually >100 flights per year.
Big test suites. I have one project hitting 35 mins on m1 max, vs around 12 min on the m5 max, vs. 7 min on the linux box I keep in the basement. Unit tests, integration tests, headless browser with webgpu stuff.
When I was in the market for a new machine, I had the same attitude. As I was about to hit "Buy" on a standard issue $2k MBP, my wife said, "What if we got you a top of the line machine?"
I replied that it would make no sense unless I was going to start running local inference or training my own models locally...
2 years later, and this MacBook Pro M4 Max w/48GB is the best $4k I've ever spent!
Standard issue at our company. There's just some apps that are huge, especially legacy ones.
I have tried an M4 Macbook a while ago but my M1 Max Macbook still feels plenty fast. Hope to keep that for a long time.
I have a M1 pro for personal use and an M4 pro from work and I don't notice any difference switching between them. The M1 is still more than enough for most computer usage.
The only reason I upgraded from an M1 Pro to an M4 Pro is because I wanted more RAM. The processor itself was still plenty fast.
Yeah. M1 Max with 64gb remains more pleasurable than my work M5 with 48gb.
I just bought a m1 Air with 8GB as secondary device to the m4 mbp that my employer provides since they dialed up the spyware lately. I should have bought a m4 Air last November but I hope the m1 holdes until the rampocalypse is over.
M1 Max, 32GB, 1TB; still not feeling the need to upgrade, especially when the upgrade is as expensive as they are now.
same
I have an M1 and an M5 MBA. For the most part, the M1 is doing extremely well, but imo this is the year where M1 is showing its age.
Im on that same cycle. M1 pro max still running strong though. 3 cycles might be hard though...
M1 Pro here as well. I will buy M6 Pro Mac Studio o Mac mini.
If the rumours are true (about AI capabilities) it’d be best to wait yes.
which rumours?
The M7 will the much better for local LLM inference. If you can afford the memory.
Oh interesting, any more info on "how"?
With a three point plan, I suspect: memory bandwidth, memory bandwidth, and more memory bandwidth.
How useful would that actually be for local inference, when the bottleneck is, essentially, always memory size? I think the sweet spot is somewhere around 64 to 128 GB. That ought to be enough for almost all uses, like Qwen3.8-Flash-Next at a decent quant.
Memory size is a bottleneck, but I have found that speed is very important for getting actual work done. Running a big model is great, but if you're getting 10t/s you're going to be spending a lot of time waiting.
> I think the sweet spot is somewhere around 64 to 128 GB. That ought to be enough for almost all uses
This will be the “640kb ought to be enough for anybody” Bill Gates quote of our era.
You can order a 128GB MacBook Pro today -- though point taken, memory size probably does belong in the three part plan :-)
Plus with more low precision compute… to help with the memory bandwidth!
More ASIC Mat-Mul too.
My M2 pro is perfect still other than the fact that the 16gb of RAM is killing me.
Right there with you
still rocking the m1 studio, shows no signs of stopping
That’s what even low spec computers used to cost, not even adjusted for inflation. I don’t think spending $200-400/month on a hardware budget that enables me to earn 50-100x that is that onerous, we just think “six grand for a laptop???!?” But it’s ridiculously cheap for what it is. We wouldn’t be similarly shocked at a $6k car, for example.
Why wouldn't it make it?
Mine is running great and it has 24/7 use.
I have to say, I really dislike the thing where the base M(n+1) is always in the market alongside M(n) Pro/Max. I appreciate the underlying chips are probably quite distinct, but from a naming standpoint its confusing as hell.
If the difference between M6 and M5 Pro or M5 Max is confusing to you, I strongly recommend you don't look at the names of literally any other CPU, GPU, or chipset that is being manufactured.
Yeah, but traditionally Apple doesn't pull that weird naming shit. Although I guess the mobile naming scheme has been headed there for a while.
The second iPhone was the 3g the third was the 3gs.
The second one was the first iPhone with 3G networking (which had broadly been considered a required feature for smartphones when the original iPhone was introduced without it.)
I won't try to defend the 3Gs ;)
Not to mention X and Xs.
And the iPhone XR! All part of the twelfth-gen models. Of course the subsequent thirteenth-gen models were just called "iPhone 11" in a return to sanity.
And the fact that they skipped 9 and will likely skip iPhone 19 as well
Microsoft skipped Window 9 too.
Samsung skipped an entire range of numbers from Galaxy S 11 to 19.
Looks like tech companies don't like 9...
Supposedly Microsoft skipped 9 because of a lot of hardcoded checks for windows 95 and 98 that checked the first digit
All the people under you not understanding that you meant AMD repackaging 2-4 year old CPU cores as """new""" by giving them a current series name and bolting some extra features on.
they used to have 1 iphone, now there are 6 models with around 21 exterior versions total
And you think 1 is better.
Not better - but Apple in early days was easy: Choose Air if you don't nedd much. Choose MacBook if you need a little but more and choose Pro if you need max power. That's one of the reasons why I bought an Apple years ago.
Compare that with the regilar lineup of other manufacturers: Cryptic model names which are uncomparable and models that are so similar that they could be equivalent.
So, no, 1 is not better but I don't care (as customer) about variety.
I think it's simpler
Tell me you're not old enough to remember the Performa and Centris lines without telling me you're not old enough to remember the Performa and Centris lines.
Are you kidding? When have they not? Apple II, II+, IIc, IIc Plus, IIe (also //e), IIe enhanced, IIGS. All sold concurrently.
They’ve always been this way.
Most of those models were not sold concurrently. The Apple II, II+, and IIe each replaced the previous model; the same was true of the IIc and IIc Plus. "//e" was an alternate textual rendering of IIe, not a separate model.
The most Apple II models that were sold concurrently were the IIe Platinum, IIc Plus, and IIgs. (And this was around 1990, at which point there were far more models of Macintosh computers on the market.)
The 2 and 2+ were concurrent.
The 2e, 2e enhanced, 2c, 2c+ and 2gs were concurrent.
I didn’t bother with Mac because I got tired of writing all the things.
//e was a separate model from the ][+
64kb RAM + 80col card vs 48kb/40col
Bad example, but very true with the Mac under sculley. When Jobs came back that was one of the things he greatly simplified
> I strongly recommend you don't look at the names of literally any other CPU, GPU, or chipset that is being manufactured.
And certainly don't look at MikroTik's product naming. ;)
In a world with the chips themselves named things like:
Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 495 or Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6.
Your distaste seems misplaced.
I'm guessing the Base and Pro chips come off the same wafer, and they get 5 Base chips (some defects) for every one Pro chip (very few defects). So they run the Base-model assembly line for six months and eventually they accumulate enough Pro chips to satisfy Pro-model demand.
Pro chips come much later than base chips and vary significantly in ways other than number of cores (which can be up to double), such as doubled memory bandwidth and peripheral support (thunderbolt 5 instead of 4).
You mean as in binning? High defect rates for chips but they're burned to disable non-working parts and sell them as non-pro chips and accumulate the good ones ?
The Pro and Max chips have a different die than the base model. They don't bin down to the base model. Maybe Max bins down to Pro now that those are the same die, or Pro bins up to one half a Max?
As others have said, the pro is a different mask set.
But you are right, they do bin. You can get versions of the cpu with different core counts for this reason.
I’m only seeing this with the pro and max though.
Curious, where's 5 come from? Is there a reason for the specific guess or is it just an example?
It was a made-up number.
If you look at the platform name and the kernel code you'l realize that this is not even remotely true. The base M chips are T8xxx which are (more or less) just iPad chips. The pro/max/ultra are T6xxx and are their own new thing, starting with M1 pro which was T6000
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_silicon#Comparison_of_M-...
+1
makes me want to wait another one I have an M1 Max and just set up playing with an M1 (non-max) and realized it can't drive 3 displays. I recall getting Max just for this, but generally, makes me think of non-Max as a non-pro after all.
And having what's presumably the latest CPU but with potentially worse features than the last generation combined with increased prices from RAM is a deal breaker so I'll guess I'll push my M1 for another year.
Whenever I do this, I enter into a perpetual one-more-year wait loop.
When I finally cave in and buy something after 5 years I’m very momentarily sad for not perfectly timing the release window, then I realize I keep hardware long enough a half year barely matters.
And I can never remember whether Pro is better than Max or vice-versa. It’s an apples/oranges naming scheme.
Regular < Pro < Max < Ultra
Just Apple thing, Maximum does not mean Maximum.
It's also kinda sad that there's no clear-cut best chip, e.g. the M6 outperforms the M5 Pro in some ways (singlethreaded performance, maybe NPU and stuff) but then the M5 Pro also outperforms the M6 in some ways (multithreading, graphics). This was even worse when the Mac Studio was stuck on M3 Ultra for a while when the M5 Max was out. The M5 Max was simply better at most things and it was ironic that the fastest computer you could buy was briefly a laptop.
How could it possibly be otherwise? Single core performance goes up every year, but not enough that this year’s 12-core CPU beats last year’s 18-core CPU at multithreaded benchmarks.
This is “sad”?!? First world problems.
It's also not exclusive to Apple; the normal product cadence from Intel and AMD usually has the large workstation and server chips falling behind the consumer chips in peak single-core performance for part of the product cycle. Some market segments just don't sustain annual updates very well, and it's always easier to get a smaller chip out the door first before a larger chip.
It's way better than the naming scehme of Ryzen and Intel Core i series.
Threadripper’s model numbers where briefly their msrp.
bigger number = more megahertz
Latest vs. greatest. Buyers who’ll pay for performance can deal with that discomfort and be squeezed for buying the best, but those who need an extra push to buy Apple might be sold on the idea of the latest.
Put another way, it is a peculiar naming regime when M(n-[2-4]) Pro/Max/Ultra is superior to M(n). This is very visible right now because of the demand for running local AI on Macs.
I get you, but I suspect it reflects reality. The M-with-adjective chips are M(n) chips with more cores and cache, it stands to reason that it takes real wall time for TSMC to start cranking them out with acceptable defect rates.
So Apple can either toss the early production in inventory while the whole process catches up, or they can do what they do. Better for both the company and the consumer that they do the latter.
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I switched entirely over to Asahi Linux on my M1 Macbook Air and installed a third-party 55Wh battery, as the original battery had fallen below 80% capacity. That machine is good to go for another 5 years.
There are no features or performance characteristics of any of the subsequent M[2-6] Macbook Air or Pro models that I care about. I'm not really sold on running models on the hardware I have right in front of me. So long as I can rent an RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell at about half a buck per hour through a European provider, I'm fine using that with Qwen3.8-27B UD-Q4_K_M for the few things I consider more privacy-sensitive.
How is Asahi Linux from a reliability perspective? Last I checked there were some issues with docking and HDMI out that would've made it tough for me to use as a daily driver.
100% stable for me at the level of any other linux machine. True the USB-C display doesn't (officially) work yet but I have 0 issues with the HDMI.
I've been daily driving it for months with no blockers. You can tell Linux uses the battery less efficiently than MacOS though so that's good to know.
> at the level of any other Linux machine
So, 97% stable then? (Downvote me but it's true.)
I've been running Ubuntu on an MSI Ge66 gaming laptop, Intel + Nvidia gpu for a couple of years now. I did have some teething problems with wifi and sleep but after resolving those it's been rock solid. I'd say 99.9% stable if we're throwing out random percentages here.
While not Asahi/M1, I can tell you my desktop has been Linux Mint for about 5 years, including through distro upgrades, etc and I have had to troubleshoot it like once.
97% is a high estimate based on my linux efforts.. just yesterday some kind of update, i think kernel, took out my amd graphics.. still wouldn’t pick anything else.
PEBKAC
Not a Mac user. I assume HDMI might be improving soon as AMD finally got the HDMI consortium to wind their necks in and full HDMI support was recently merged.
USB-C video still doesn't work but in my experience virtually everything else you need does.
Does DisplayLink work?
It's great aside from no usb-c display, mine has an HDMI port though.
It's been my primary dev machine for 2 years
> So long as I can rent an RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell at about half a buck per hour through a European provider, ..
Mind sharing the provider’s URL?
Not necessarily an endorsement, but one of the more popular ones: https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-gpu/
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I want to propose a called AI Index, if you can do say 1000t/s on processing and 50t/s on generation on a min 25B model you can call your device AI9 and you have AI7 and AI5 and AI3 with 3 being 100t/s processing and 10t/s generation on a min 10B model. Values above are on a 100k context size minimum. OFFLINE.
So any effing claim of being an AI device doesn't end on the demo of best buy laptop where you remove a dog from a photo....
Or that you have "better noise removal" or "you look better on the cam" because that's called noise cancelling and instagram filter and it's being done for ages...
Doesn't this depend on the model and quant as well vs. the hardware and its capability? Plus memory bandwidth, amount, and layout.
My Strix Halo now can run some models through the NPU and its roughly as fast as its GPU+CPU (on some of the models - some its slower)
Can't you just look at memory bandwidth for generation?
You also need to look at memory size (to store the model). And processing can still be the bottleneck.
It’s more nuanced than that, but yes that’s the biggest factor.
I have been a fan of these newer macbooks. They are just pushing the boundaries of a good laptop. While I understand the use, I hope someday my AAA games are also as supported in MacBooks as my gaming laptop.
https://fxgl.github.io/steamac/ my friend and partner made this. For the first time I’ve been playing games on Mac without much trouble. For me best feature is automate of vm in background - finally I can play games and pause them arbitrarily
How does anyone enjoy playing AAA games these days? Literally feels like a chore. This coming from a previous gaming addict.
Depends on the game obviously. e.g. Assassin's Creed N+1 - you've seen the formula like 20+ times already, all the previous games + all of Far Cry from 3 upwards. There's nothing new. And there's Cyberpunk2077 and BG3 which are still huge but unique and carefully designed
I'm playing Assassin's Creed: Origins this month, for the first time playing any of that franchise, and one of the most recent games I've played (it's from 2017) and I'm amazed by:
a) how much effort they obviously put into it, historic details from Egypt 2k years ago, game engine, quests, little details
b) how much it feels like a thin wrapper around Cookie Clicker
Steam tells me 1/3rd of players don't even get out of the Prologue area.
GORILLA.BAS
Sometimes our tastes change as we age, or vice versa: our tastes remain the same and the world has moved along.
Just to say we all have nostalgia and the good old days are never coming back.
There's a whole movie about Golden Age thinking / Golden Age fallacy by Woody Allen called "Midnight in Paris." Worth a watch.
I have a soft limit of $35. I generally find that quality decreases (not quality-per-dollar, just quality alone on an absolute scale) once you start going over that. By the time you reach $60 it's in the gutter. Exceptions to the rule obviously exist.
So probably still in line with what you remember.
What do you mean by these days? Do you think the games are different? Or just you not enjoying the danger type of content any more?
Games are significantly different, shittified, and dumbed down these days
I don't know. In hitman I can disable all the hints and it's quite a challenge to get a good time.
Also plenty of mil Sims available if you are into multilayer.
Compared to what time frame? The annual sports games have been terrible for over a decade. Basic open world games have been around for just as long, though they’re more prevalent now.
From my perspective, there’s been a small but steady trickle of good games for decades. Recent AAA games that pushed the boundaries are Elden Ring and Baldurs Gate 3, and they would not have been possible at their scale back in the day.
There are still older less dumbed down AAA games to play. AAA does not mean "brand new."
I'm generally with you on it, they're sort of fatiguing in a depressing way.
But try the new James Bond game. Linear shooter, but a great story and fantastic cast on top of super fun mechanics. By the Hitman studio with a lot of their core ideas Bondified to favor action over stealth. It hasn't irritated me in the way almost any other game manages to.
Mainly console games. I play some games on Mac but maybe only like 10-15% of Steam library is supported on Mac.
I’d love for games to work on a Mac too. I just can’t justify paying through the nose for a PC when I hate using it for everything else.
Linux is pretty great these days
It still sucks to need another machine to play games that a MBP should easily be able to handle.
Especially give how good recompilation projects are anymore.
Be the change you want to see in the world
The decompilation efforts I've been seeing with 15 year old Xbox 360 games or PS3 games has been absolutely incredible, getting them running natively on macOS with presumably much fewer engineering resources than are allocated to a standard game port.
I do think the limited macOS gaming market is a chicken-or-the-egg problem - people don't game on Macs because there aren't that many great games on Mac (Although Cyberpunk runs amazingly on my M4 Macbook Pro).
I'm very excited for the future.
> I do think the limited macOS gaming market is a chicken-or-the-egg problem
This feels like a re-hash of Valve's original Steam Machine mistake. Porting modern games to native Linux didn't increase user or developer interest in supporting the platform. It made Valve liable for a lot of investment into systems that no developers ever used, and Valve themselves would eventually abandon.
Apple has stepped in this same cowpie. They depreciated hundreds of "old" macOS games by radically changing their runtime, and then nobody invested into the new Metal-native paradigm. Porting games like Tomb Raider and Death Stranding won't kickstart the macOS gaming revolution any more than native Left 4 Dead magically made Linux an alternative to Windows for gaming. We know this from experience.
Decomps and emulation is a good solution for 15-year-old games, but Apple can't enjoy day-1 support if they refuse the industry's standards. There is no trust in Metal as a stable API, or macOS as a reliable and backwards-compatible runtime. Windows is not only much more profitable, it's easier to support for decades to-come.
> Apple has stepped in this same cowpie. They depreciated hundreds of "old" macOS games by radically changing their runtime, and then nobody invested into the new Metal-native paradigm
This is the reason. Apple couldn't care less about backwards compatibility. In fact, I'd cynically say backwards incompatibility is counted as feature at Apple, because you can sell more X. The first time people were bit with a game they purchased on the App Store no longer working a year later, was also the last time many of them bought a game from the App Store.
> Porting modern games to native Linux didn't increase user or developer interest in supporting the platform. It made Valve liable for a lot of investment into systems that no developers ever used
This I can't agree with though. They succeeded on their second iteration with the Steam Deck and Proton, which had the side effect of making it easy for normal Linux users to run games, which increased developer interest. Also, developers love developing on Linux, as far as I know.
I agree with everything here. Apple has a perverse incentive to create support churn for games and blame developers, but overall the strategy doesn't work on Mac. It only really panned out on mobile, where gambling apps and gacha games take up Apple's mantle in exchange for access to a larger audience. Which is a rich parallel to Apple's story about the App Store "protecting consumers" and the other knee-jerk DSA/DMA apologia.
> They succeeded on their second iteration with the Steam Deck and Proton
> Also, developers love developing on Linux, as far as I know.
Well, Valve steered away from the cowpie this time. Proton is a concession that Windows won, and the equivalent for Linux (Steam Linux Runtime) is still a great idea but goes relatively unused. Valve went to where the gamers were and met them halfway, which is why the Steam Deck became an instant hit despite costing more than an iPad. Proton could be optimized to fix games that were objectively broken on DirectX (see: Elden Ring, Fallout 3/New Vegas) without developers lifting a finger to port anything. It gave customers a real alternative to suffering through Windows and the Windows runtime.
I personally love development on Linux, and I'm making a few hobby games on NixOS right now. The dev experience wasn't the problem for the original Steam Machine or for macOS either, it's the concentration of game devs, modders and players that all treat Win32 and DX11 as the lingua-franca of gaming. Valve threw in the towel on native ports, and it enabled them to focus on curb-cutting efforts that made Linux stick.
Your point about the steam machine was correct at the time, but Linux gaming is flourishing now due to the steam deck. I think it's more accurate to say that the steam machine itself wasn't sufficiently compelling as a platform.
>Windows is not only much more profitable, it's easier to support for decades to-come.
"windows is the most stable ABI"
https://github.com/NotProtonNot/NotProton
Increasingly all I need is a laptop with a big/nice enough screen to ssh into a beefy Linux box to run agents on Herdr.
I think my 48GB 16 inch MBP will last me 15+ years at this point.
Have the same setup -- got a good black friday deal last year on an AMD 395+ w/ 128gb of RAM. Still not super bullish on running AI models on it, but it makes a great dev server anyway.
Actually had claude spin up a kanban board to manage my tasks in a 'TODO -> Plan -> Implement -> Review -> QA -> Shipping -> Done' flow (with a worktree for each task) that works great!
If that continues to be the case, next time you can "downgrade" to the MacBook Air. Even today you can get one with 32GB RAM, so when you're in the market I'm sure more will be available. They are quite thin and light compared to the MBPs.
The screen on MB Air can not compete with the one on MB pro.
I've just transitioned to the same setup a week ago - that's why I'm considering Air as the next upgrade, given the better portability.
One thing that bugs me mentally is leaving that machine pending on my input ("wasted") overnight etc... I'd like to arrive at a workflow where I can have agents running toward the overall goal autonomously overnight as much as they can, and I can review and iterate and "engineer" parts that need it afterwards...
For now, I still guide implementation very closely, piece by piece. Has anyone had any good experiences with workflows / skills / similar for that?
Did the same. Took a week or so to get used to the workflow after doing dev locally my entire career, but now I'm certain it's the best way to work. Even better is using a few scripts to simplify things like opening in VS Code (instead of `code folder-name` I run `codeon repo-name` from my local machine).
I did actually get a new M5 Pro/48GB machine last month, but that's only because I bought my work machine to keep my personal and professional lives properly separated; otherwise I wasn't seeing any issue running that M3 Max/36GB for a long time further.
That's exactly what I am doing. I have a Dell R740 with 96 cores and 512 GB of RAM, and RAID 10 with 16 SSDs. All of my machines connect to it via Tailscale.
I have a similar setup! I use a Dell R820 though, with 1.5TB of RAM and NVMe ;)
and I thought I was doing something special with my little GMKTec 32GB machine I use for a dev server haha
I have an M1 Air 13" and M2 Air 15", and M4 Air 14" and and M4 Pro 14" with nano texture.
I love them all. The M4 Air 14" is from work, so kinda limited in what I can do. The M4 14" Pro is kinda chunky after the Airs. The M2 15" is ideal except on a plane. The M1 13" is great as a personal device on work travel. If only I could not work...
Look at the first image with the people in the field. That looks to me like a very poorly generated image, not a real image of people, and not even a high-quality AI generated image.
Is this what we can expect of the new apple? I'm not against AI generated imagery, but I expect them to be of equal quality to a real photo.
Or am I wrong, and it isn't AI generated?
The things that make me think it is just poorly made are 1) the angles of the laptop on the black case, 2) the lack of any lighting on the back panel, 3) the size of the hand on the woman in the back, and the squareness of what she is holding (if it is even supposed to be another mac).
Almost certainly not AI gen, it's shot with a 35mm lens (quality looks like the 1.4 L to me), probably around f8 given how the DOF falloff happens, heavy forward flood (flash or otherwise, but whatever it was it's defused) and then what's I think giving you the sense it's AI is it looks like they've over used a double S curve to bump the contrast and sharpness. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZh_9HnO_4w&t=640s
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That was my first thought, is that guy's face AI? The angle of the laptop looks off. Then I decided I don't care and moved on, but yeah, you're not the only one who thought it looked off.
It's just a very bad picture, but every detail is perfectly coherent, it's not AI generated.
Still a baffling choice.
I thought we were supposed to get a design overhaul this gen?
Also framing AI use for the base M models marketing makes no sense to me. You are way better off getting a used M1 max with 64gb and way higher mem bandwidth when those are the real bottlenecks.
Apparently another announcement coming tomorrow, with the OLED panels. But according to the fpt channel on Youtube, it doesn't look any different. Just has an OLED panel with touchscreen, with massive cooling changes inside.
MacRumors is still claiming we're getting a new chassis
> Apple on Wednesday will announce 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models featuring touch-enabled OLED displays with thinner bezels, a Dynamic Island instead of a notch, M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, and a lighter and slightly thinner design
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/10/27/macbook-pro-with-touchs...
Interesting. Will be way out of my budget, but keen to see how the OLED display performs long term. Nearly everyone I've seen that has used an OLED on laptop say they absolutely love it. But I still hate the idea of touchscreen, especially with the changes to MacOS to cater for this
IMO changes to a touchscreen would've been perfect for professional artists, but only if it enabled using an Apple Pencil. Which is pretty unlikely if they don't also solve the ergonomics of doing that, e.g. with a 360" hinge.
> Just has an OLED panel with touchscreen
I must be out of the loop, you skimmed over this. A Mac with a touchscreen??
>With the new 14-inch MacBook Pro, users can connect high-speed peripherals, transfer photos, work with multiple external displays, and more with its wide array of ports.
* looks inside *
4 kinds of ports. while being generous, and including the SD card slot and the headphone jack.
I don't know anyone who would consider 2-4 to be a "wide array".
It's a shame that only the Mac Studios come with USB-A ports. I know, won't fit on a MBA, but similar size and class laptops to the MBP often come with at least one USB-A.
It's just handy when you have a USB-A device and don't want a dongle, traveling, etc.
3x Thunderbolt 4 ports
But hey, it's got USB-C and also supports UD USB-C (upside-down)
> With 16GB of unified memory standard, configurable up to 32GB, and higher memory bandwidth up to 170GB/s
Apple MacBook M5 Max has bandwidth up to 600GB/s, is 170GB/s for M6 the real limit? If so, wouldn't this slow down LLM processing?
There are rumors that Apple is not releasing Pro/Max versions of the M6 with the intention of focusing these research efforts on the M7 instead.
Even then, 170GB/s is a bump up from 153GB/s of the M5. So we see a 11% uplift already.
> So we see a 11% uplift already.
Am I crazy, or are a lot more people using the term "uplift" in place of "increase" within the last year? Google Trends (for whatever it's worth) shows a significant increase (uplift?) since mid-late 2025. [0]
[0] https://trends.google.com/explore?q=uplift&date=today%205-y&...
It's monkey-see-monkey-do language.
See also: The use of "learnings" instead of "lessons."
that one and "educator" both make my skin crawl for some reason
Language changes. People at work have started saying things are an easy lift instead of a quick win. And it's not new hires, it's the people I've worked with for years. I never got on board with quick win either.
Some people adopt stuff faster than others. I've lived in NZ for nearly 20 years and called someone bro for the first time just last week while playing a sport "should have left it for me bro". Slipped out natural as. Still having bad thoughts about it.
Shit I still use “low hanging fruit”! How out of date am I?
Here I am doing the needful still.
> Even then, 170GB/s is a bump up from 153GB/s of the M5. So we see a 11% uplift already.
My M2 Pro does 200GB/s.
wtf are we even talking about here.
I believe they're discussing the base processors as a way of comparing generations, since there is no M6 Pro/Max. (the M2 base was at 100GB/s)
For a direct comparison to your processor, the M5 Pro is at 308GB/s.
Why are we comparing the M6 to the M5 Max?
What was the speed of the base M5?
As pointed out in a sibling comment, 153GB/s.
If you want to do anything beyond getting a small single-core speed bump the M5 Pro is a better, more capable purchase. At least until the M7 comes out.
The M6 version is also cheaper than the M5 Max by a significant amount. I wouldn't be surprised if the M6 could keep up on LLM prefill (compute bound), but the memory bandwidth means that decode is going to be a lot slower, most likely?
It's a base M6 chip. The Pro doubles that, and the Max doubles again. And the Ultra doubles yet again. This is how the entire M series has always worked.
So the theoretical Max would be 680GB/s.
It's also absolutely wild that you apparently cannot spec one with more than 32GB, for any amount of money? Wow.
Not that I blame Apple here, for once. Seems like they're trying to cope with the limited quantity of RAM they can procure. And with the paltry bandwidth (170GB/s) of these CPUs they're a bad choice for anything but tiny local models anyway.
That's for the base model M6. The Pro can take more, the Max even more, the Ultra the most.
They're not making those models for the M6 though; they rerouted their resources to making M7 faster at running local LLMs.
If you want more bandwidth, get an M5 Pro, Max, or Ultra. If you want a lower power base model, get the M6. If you want to have your cake and eat it too, wait for the M7, reportedly in the spring.
Umm yes, the M6 chip only has a certain amount of memory controllers and channels, which means you can only have so many LPDDR5X modules.
Yes, high-capacity LPDDR5X are made and do exist, but for all practical intents and purposes, you can't buy enough of them to deliver to customers at Apple scale.
Hmm, still no OLED displays? I wonder what's the holdup? (I have a fairly mainstream PC laptop with OLED display, and the display is the one thing where my MBP looks pretty poor in direct comparison).
wait till tomorrow's touch screen
This is a strange release. The M6 tops out at 32GB RAM and then you fall back to M5/Pro. Kinda midway between an Air and a true Pro. Only 14" no 16" with M6.
The lack of a 16" model for the M6 is consistent with Apple's current minimum of M5 Pro chip.
Just now realizing there's a difference between "MacBook Pro with M# chip" and "MacBook Pro with M# Pro chip". Was curious to see how my MBP with M4 Pro compared, and I saw it has 273 gb/s memory bandwidth compared to the MBP M6 (sans Pro)'s 170gb/s. Makes sense that "Pro" in the laptop model doesn't also describe the chip, but only if you remember that the non-pro "Macbook" line stopped in 2017 (which was the last time I went shopping for Apple laptops until buying the MBP4)
https://www.apple.com/mac/compare/?modelList=MacBook-Neo-A18...
The "Pro" in MacBook Pro has slowly degraded to "it comes with a fan so that the chip can keep chugging when it gets a hard workload, unlike the MacBook Air where the chip will throttle since there's no fan".
The text of this product's announcement really tries to sell it as a 10x AI performance upgrade for existing MacBook M1 users.
Ok, plausible number for that use case. Striking how it seems like the M-series Macs are almost too good enough for most people.
It's almost desperate prose.
(The AI image processing in Pixelmator Pro saved me hours of work on a recent project. Two button clicks vs a day of tweaking. But even that was on my M1 MacBook Air.)
As lots of Apple Users are in here: I'm thinking about "sidegrading", my M2 Pro runs fine, but I chose 16 GB/512 GB when I bought it and I think 32 GB/1 TB would be nicer in some cases.
Is it easily possible to sidegrade/upgrade with a Timemachine backup?
Yes. Make sure both source and destination are the same macOS version. I use 27.0.1, you could upgrade to 27.2 first though.
Then do a fresh install on your new system and then use Migration Assistant. Use a USB-4 or a Thunderbolt cable to speed it up.
yes, if your plugged into the Apple Ecosystem, upgrading to a new machine is a breeze, done it many times
I'm in the exact same boat as you, exact same specs. CPU/GPU holding up perfectly for my use cases, but 512GB is tough to manage now.
I am due to an upgrade (still using the 2019 intel). However I am torn between a M5 Pro with 48 Gigs of ram or waiting for M6 pro. I’d really like to run local models for once.
won't be an M6 pro, they are saving the ram and other components for the M7 series
Is this an odd rollout for their actual high end MacBook Pros, or is this sitting in that space where they like to have a base MacBook Pro between their Airs and the expensive MacBook Extremely Pros?
Just the standard chip without Pro/Max makes me assume this is that base one. If so, the price is way high for where that tends to sit, but welcome to buying a computer in 2026 I guess.
> Is this an odd rollout for their actual high end MacBook Pros
It's the same rollout they've used for a couple of generations now. First the base model chips in fall, then the pro/max versions in spring
This is the base one. You get a better display, more, faster Thunderbolt ports, and an honest to god HDMI port, plus some fans for cooling on long running processes that you don't get with the M6 Air (which also doesn't exist).
i think also better general support for multi screen setup
Quite messy and wonky as in Linus Tech Tips testing. Require plugging displays in right order to get desired resolution / refresh rate.
I have a 14 inch M1 MBP running fine up to this day. 16G RAM, 1T SSD. I don't know if I ever will need to replace it.
You will if you use macos and want to stay supported. On the other hand, being an M1 puts you squarely in Asahi supported territory.
I always max out whenever I upgrade my MacBook Pro.
Last time, in 2024, it cost me $6K
Today, it’s $10K
Yowza
> Phenomenal battery life: In addition to the huge leap in performance, battery life gets up to 14 additional hours for Intel-based upgraders
the m2/m3 announcements were already kind of cringe to keep saying 'HEY IT'S BETTER THAN INTEL' but at this point it's just embarrassing?
Fun fact: the laptop in this size/performance class with the best battery life is a Windows Intel Core Ultra Series 3 laptop, not a MacBook Pro!
So Apple is now comparing against computers they were selling 7-8 years ago rather than what Intel is delivering now.
> Fun fact: the laptop in this size/performance class with the best battery life is a Windows Intel Core Ultra Series 3 laptop, not a MacBook Pro!
Source for that fun fact?
I think they refer to low-tier Wildcat which, indeed, is more efficient than Apple's CPU in Neo, which they typically get compared against.
> Apple is now comparing against computers they were selling 7-8 years ago
Apple didn't fully stop selling Intel macs until June 2023. And they compare against the most recent previous model too.
last time I checked, every Windows laptop had the absolutely massive caveat that it needed to throttle performance by a ton to have a low enough TDP to compete on battery life. You just cannot match the efficiency of ARM Apple chips with an x86 chip.
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There's no happy medium here that would satisfy everybody: when they make marketing claims about improvements relative to products from several years ago, they get criticized for not focusing on the improvements relative to last gen (even if those comparisons are also somewhere in the announcement). When they focus on the most recent generations, people complain that it doesn't make sense to upgrade every year.
Just accept that even if you aren't still using an Intel MacBook Pro, the comparison is still relevant to some part of their target market.
They only just dropped support for Intel Macs from this fall's operating system release (but are still doing security patches for the releases that Intel Macs can run). A year from now, it actually will be fairly reasonable to expect them to give up marketing to the holdouts.
I would guess there's still quite a lot of people on Intel Macs out there (they were sold 5 years ago), so it is still very much worth it for Apple to market to them.
More people than you think (outside tech) are using Intel Macs at the moment (family computers etc).
Exactly. A late model Intel Mac is still a perfectly cromulent computer in 2026.
"cromulent" sounds like such a disgusting word that isn't.
probably because of its adjacency to "corpulent" lol
The word "cromulent" was coined by the TV show The Simpsons in a gag.
> Mrs. Krabappel: "Embiggens"? I never heard that word before I moved to Springfield.
> Ms. Hoover: I don't know why. It's a perfectly cromulent word.
But now it has made it into the Merriam-Webster dictionary.
I think it makes sense. Do you think most potential buyers are coming from last year's model, or from laptops that are more like 3-5 years old?
As long as they're clear about the comparisons they're making ("X% more battery life than Y" as opposed to simply ("X% more battery life") I'm good with it.
Why? Apple devices have the best battery life in the market right now to my knowledge. It's an important part of the evaluation for a laptop which is the opposite of cringe.
Actually, they don’t! Intel Core Ultra Series 3 beats Apple laptops as of the M5 on battery life.
IIRC the Framework 13 Pro beats the MacBook Pro at both video streaming tests and office productivity with 300 bits brightness tests. (Framework live-streamed the video playback test, and the office provided productivity tests I referred to were done by Just Josh Tech)
Perhaps the M6 has leapfrogged but that remains to be seen.
Neither of those have comparable perf
They do, please look up reviews of Panther Lake 338H/358H. Example: Lenovo Thinkpad X9 15p Aura Edition
I did. I am seeing single core geekbench scores of 2700 compared to my MacBook Air at 3500. This, for a laptop that is thicker and heavier than my air.
why tack on the goalpost moving? And geekbench single core isn't the only measure of performance.
in my original post, i said "perf", i am not sure what you imagined, but i am not moving anything, geekbench single core score is a perfectly reasonable thing to measure under the name "perf"
In usual developer type tasks, among my friend group what I hear is that panther lake laptops are competitive with M4 laptops. But, M4s do that with a 55Wh battery, whereas most panther lake laptops come with a 70Wh battery. So if you're discussing chip performance per watt then it's probably an edge to apple silicon.
72.4 Wh is the size of the M4 MacBook Pro battery, about the same size as the Framework 13 Pro.
Intel and now Qualcomm are really not far off on performance per watt. Mostly Apple maintains an advantage on single core performance.
The Panther Lake integrated GPU in the X7/X9 SKI is actually faster than the one you get in the base M5.
You're right. I think I remember those numbers from an Air vs 3xxH comparison.
Competition is a beautiful thing.
I recall seeing some crazy stats like 41+ hours maybe on a snapdragon processor w/windows. I imagine your screen brightness would have to be like 99% dark and not playing videos is my guess.
That's not what the marketing is saying, they keep comparing to their own super old intel models.
They want those users to upgrade, I don’t see the problem.
Also here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50258521
dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50258521
Still using my 8gig m1 to make mac builds, its slow, but works fine. Keep thinking about upgrading, but max 32gigs ram, if I can hold out for 2 years, and maybe have 64/128gig as options, and cheaper.
In your shoes, I'd just get whatever Pro processor is available at that time. (Knowing that new processors were coming, I happily bought an M5 Pro machine last month)
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50258521
32GB Unified RAM max. Is that really the machine I want for running local LLMs?
This M6 is the base Pro model. You probably want the M5 pro/max for your LLMs.
It's called Pro, but it's hardly Pro, more like a MacBook with a good fan.
Not really - it seems that M7 will come out in Q1 27 and be targeted at that use-case more specifically.
Base M7 probably will still have pretty low memory bandwidth for serious AI workflows. M7 max/ultra might be pretty interesting though.
Nope.
Still using the M1 Macbook Air for 4K video editing on Davinci Resolve and Photo Editing with Darktable (open source). Just 8GB of Ram too and I've never really needed more. Obviously these new versions are great but even the original is not too shabby.
I would pay 2x or even 3x for this with working Asahi Linux patches provided in source code form on Apple's site.
Asahi supports up to the M3 line. Linux 7.4 supports M4 so surely Asahi will support it soon.
What is it about this MBP that makes it so much more preferable to an MBP with M3 Pro/Max?
I want the newest one and I want to run Gentoo Linux on it with working Asahi patches for all aspects of the hardware. I want it enough I'm willing to pay for it. I'll pay 3x Apple's current sticker price.
But Apple will never sell that to me, as far as I can guess. Apple is not a good person.
And I want a pony
> Apple is not a good person
It's a company.
doubt
Where's the touch screen??? The rumors promised touch!!!
Why would you want greasy fingerprints all over your display and gorilla arm syndrome when there's a perfectly fine keyboard and touchpad attached to the display for free?
No reason for gorilla-arm when touch is an alternative interaction mode and not a required one. You still have trackpad and keyboard. You can dynamically switch modes depending on the action.
Gorilla-arm was a fear based on the naive idea that if you had touch, you would be required to only use touch for every action.
Is apple going to be so restrained to keep the design of the OS as a mouse first experience or are they going to cripple information density so I might be able to close a window with my elbow?
People act as if Chromebooks with touch screens aren't already considered a huge UX upgrade over Chromebooks without. Use your finger where it makes sense and the mouse where it doesn't. Literally nobody gets tripped up over this in practice.
I don't actually want a MacBook at all, I was just joking.
mmmmm....grease
This is only the base model MBP. The high-end touch one will be later this week.
the rumors were about a supposed Macbook Ultra that would have a screen like the ipad pros. Still to come (or not)
This is going to be great with Asahi
I need 64GB RAM and 1TB SSD suddenly having been more than comfortable with 16GB and 256GB respectively. My agents have sessions which have workteees and scratchpads and simulators and build runs and test suites and wow. The hours I’ve been spending for memory swaps and quad simulator calls to run through. I am compelled to view a $4k machine as a necessity. Also a cool thing about M5 Pro is that it’s very close to Max on the CPU performance side with identical core count if you get the 18 core variant. The Pro’s Geekbench scores are also in similar ballpark as the Max. You rather get the Pro for most use cases and use the extra cash on RAM.
But can it run Omarchy :)
Did they figure out how to fit an LTE modem into it?
Anyone designing their own macbook clone using llms yet?
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too bad only the iMac gets all the color!!!
i hope they're not launching that touch stuff... just stick with these pls
The "notch" seems to be gone based on the product pictures. Time to upgrade from my ~2014 model MBP.
Looks just as notchy as they've always been.
I do see it in one photo on their site. I just hide mine with software ("topnotch") and it's fine.
One of the interesting slights of hand Apple marketing must do is simultaneously say the new processor is awesome while selling the higher spec versions of the previous processor as upgrades:
My 5090 has a bandwidth of 1,792 GB/s, and that is just about good enough for basic (i.e. 27B models) local LLM inference.
The fastest M6 MacBook Pro (24/32GB configs) has a memory bandwidth of 170 GB/s. And the M5 Max is 614 GB/s.
Am I missing some nuance of the M6 MBP here, or am I right to assume it won't set the local LLM world on fire?
The case of your 5090 having become a coveted artifact of great rarity in these times - may be a nuance of some measure.
Also, the following two have very different 'needs' to feel good enough:
1. heavy agentic workloads via harness vs 2. a simple private chat interface with a local instance
Even if an MBP's bandwidth were higher, it's tough to see a reason to run it as a constantly loaded 24/7 inference machine due to heat degradation.
P.S. still extremely awesome to be able to host and chat with a decently quantized 27B model on your laptop. ...and to be fair even a 32GB Air would do that! It is a thing of beauty: the amount of folks this may add to the hacker/tinker community.
Isn't the laptop version of the 5090 is a more apples-to-apples comparison? It has 896 GB/s memory bandwidth (compared to the 614 on the M5 Max MBP).
The 5090 does have a bandwidth advantage, but also must pass more data from main to GPU memory for any particular task. Comparisons of a 5090 to a DGX Spark at 273 GB/s are illustrative since the Spark uses unified memory similar to Apple's M-series. [0] The 5090 certainly wins most benchmarks but that doesn't mean the DGX Spark is not useful.
0. https://float16.cloud/en-en/ai-benchmark/dgx-spark-vs-rtx-50...
Loading data to the GPU will generally never be the bottleneck. Yes that's a bit better for unified memory, but prefill and decode will still be bound by compute and memory bandwidth respectively.
There's some value in having a huge amount of memory addressable by the GPU for loading larger models, but even that doesn't make sense for current gen models. For MOE models, newer inference engines with smarter GPU expert caching and pinned memory allow a GPU with lots of bandwidth to significantly outperform a Spark, so that leaves you with larger dense models that fit on a spark but not on a GPU where you might have a use-case.
But even then it's hard. For instance a full-fat BF16 of a ~30B parameter model will fit on a 128GB spark and not a 32GB 5090, but at that size it's going to be frustratingly slow on the spark given the compute and bandwidth constraints.
Imo these devices are mostly good for experimentation, or if you only want to do overnight jobs or training which wouldn't be possible on a GPU, and you don't want to pay $100k for a DGX station.
Is your 5090 in a laptop? o_0
No. But does high memory bandwidth necessarily require desktop/server style power and cooling?
Laptop 5090 (24gb) is 800gb/s.
M5 Max (128gb) is 600gb/s
Rtx spark laptop (128gb) is 200gb/s.
Desktop 5090 (32gb) is 1700gb/s.
Desktop 6000 (96gb) is 1700gb/s and 600W.
So, yes?
sleight*
Does it run Linux?
I can't understand this people
M6 Pro wen
Dare I even ask how much the 32gb/1tb variant will be? $3,000?
You could have dared to check. But no, it's $2399 for those specs.
It's not justifying an upgrade. Shame there are no finance options for M5 Max 128GB.
Apple can release as much fantastic hardware as they want - as long as the software keeps getting worse, what's the point?
i wonder if it has 2 fans
About time they put a battery in the lid, which is what an iPad already manages to do with thinness. Boom another half a decade of updates all the way to 48hrs
I think the 16" pro is already at the max battery size you can take on a plane.
Also a great way to make money from screen replacements when the battery expands!
Citation?
It's confusingly worded but I think it's a suggestion for something Apple could do in the future. I don't see any mention of this in the linked Apple article.
eh no thanks. not jumping to m5 max now we know apple is cooking with m7 pro and m7 max. don't drop the ball.
Yes but have you considered the M8?
you know they jut bump this every year right
The rumour is they aren't going to bump the pro and pro max.
Imagine, these are the machines we get to vibecode on.
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Been waiting to get a new MacBook and that day has finally come! Thanks for sharing
I'm currently having an M2, but I just can't imagine buying an Apple laptop again. The hardware is great, but the sofware is just unbearably bad. I used Arch Linux with KDE before, and it was just an experience 10 times better. If they would just support Linux out of the box...
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The design is really great for the new MacBook Pro. The cpu is no compare to other laptops.
One thing, framing AI use for the base M models marketing makes no sense to me. But honestly this computer is still faster than any of my laptops that came before, even with the visual atrocity of Liquid Glass.
Hard for me to get excited about these anymore.
Apple software is getting worse every day and while they're not Google or Microsoft they're getting more user hostile at every turn as well.
The lengths they go through to prevent you from doing what you want on their (not your) devices is astonishing.
Very happy with my framework running fedora for many years now... Sure it's not an M1000 but it's almost as good and properly mine