We want Apple to compete. When they stopped signing CUDA drivers, I thought it was because Apple had a competitive GPGPU solution that wasn't SPIR-V in a trenchcoat. Here we are 10 years later with SPIR-V in a trenchcoat. The lack of vision is pathetic and has undoubtedly cost Apple trillions in the past half-decade alone.
If you think this is a boring architecture, more power to you. It's not boring enough for me.
Not me: I wanted Apple’s software division to innovate like its hardware division. Extra power with nothing to use it on except more and more docker containers isn’t compelling to me. I’ve not upgraded my M1 Macbook Pro and don’t plan to
I'd much prefer they focus on fixing their existing software quality problems. No innovation needed, just boring old software maintenance and design work.
You want Apple to invent reasons for you to need a more powerful computer? I could understand this argument for the iPad, but this is a weird complaint for Macs. Play a video game, use local LLMs, or get into video editing?
I don't even want more docker containers - I want to be able to run the same containers with much less overhead on the system. Hoping their new native containerisation plays that out soon.
I always get a little bothered when I see negative reviews from a CPU update in Apple laptops. While a new CPU alone isn’t a thrilling update, it’s important that they do these regularly so consumers looking to buy aren’t forced to buy a 3 year old product with no idea when a refresh will come. I’ve been in this situation many times with Apple and it has been very frustrating. I’m glad they are back on a yearly refresh schedule.
I think the issue stems from too many people making their living off reviews that require something exciting to get views. When updates are more evolution than revolution, it makes for a more boring article/video. I always worry that these types of responses will lead Apple to do silly things, like leaving old chips out there too long, or adding pointless features just so there is something new to talk about.
> While a new CPU alone isn’t a thrilling update, it’s important that they do these regularly so consumers looking to buy aren’t forced to buy a 3 year old product with no idea when a refresh will come.
Also: incremental updates add up.
A (e.g.) 7% increase from one year to the next isn't a big deal, but +7%, +7%, +7%, …, adds up when you finally come up for a tech refresh after 3-5 years.
Every car company in the world realized that yearly product updates was the way to go, and no one whines that this year's model isn't good enough to justify upgrading from the previous year.
I don’t think most people are upset about the update itself. They’re just reacting to the mismatch between the scale of the improvements and the scale of the marketing.
Yeah, I literally just bought an M4 device mere weeks before the M5 came out. The performance jump is nontrivial for my use case. Am I worried about it? Nah. In another year there will be another jump, and then the year after. I’m just on a different upgrade cadence, that’s all.
Meanwhile back in the pre-M1 days I remember stalking Mac rumors for moths trying to make sure I wasn’t going to buy right before their once-in-blue-moon product refresh. You could buy a Mac and get most of its useful life before they upgrade the chip, if you timed it right, so an upgrade right after you bought was a real kick in the pants.
Nobody realy talks about the knock on effects of the attention economy. I opted out of it a long time ago, I despise YouTubers, TikTokers etc. because of the world they're shaping, and it's not just the injection of mindless rubbish into people's brains, it's real world effects like you outline in your second paragraph. It amazes me when I see seemingly smart people on HN talking about how they're addicted to YouTube "Shorts", it's like being addicted to labotomies.
> I think the issue stems from too many people making their living off reviews that require something exciting to get views.
The problem is that our hardware as we know it, has lost a lot of its stretch. Used to be that we got 100% performance gains on a generation to generation update. Then it became 50%, 30% ... Like in the GPU market, the last generation that actually got me exited was the 1000 series (1070 specific).
Now its "boring" 10 a 15% upgrades for the same generation (if we do not count naming / pricing rearrangements).
When was the last time any of use was "hey, i am exited to potentially buy this tech, really". Apple M1 comes to mind, and that is 5 years ago.
Nvidia tried to push the whole ray tracing (a bit too early), but again, its just a incremental update to graphics (as we had a lot of tricks to simulate lighting effects that had good performance). So again, kind of a boring gain if we look back.
Mobile gaming handhelds was trilling, steam deck... Then we got competitors but with high price tags = excitement became less. And now, nobody blinks with a new generation gets released because the CPU/iGPU gains are the same boring 15 a 20%... So who wants to put down 700, 900 Euro for a 15% gain.
What has really gotten you exited? Where your just willing to throw money at something? AI? And we see the same issue with LLMs ... what used to be big step/gain, in barely a years has gone from massive gains, to incremental gains. 10% better on this benchmark, 5% better there, ... So it becomes boring (GPT5 launch and reaction, Sora 2 launch and reaction).
> When updates are more evolution than revolution, it makes for a more boring article/video.
If you think about it, there is a reason why tech channels have issues and are even more clickbait then ever. Those people live on views, so when the tech they follow/review is boring to the audience, they start pushing more and more clickbait. But that eventually burning the channels.
Unfortunately, we have a entire industry that is designed around making parts smaller and smaller every generation, to make those gains. As we lost the ability to make large gains on making those smaller making parts ...
Its ironic, as we knew this was coming and yet, it seems nobody made any breakthrough at all. Quantum computing was a field that everybody knew had no road to general computing at home (materials issues).
So what is left is the same old, lets may the die a bit smaller, gain a bit, do some optimizing left and right, and call it a new product. But for customers, getting product 2.1, being named "this is our product 3.0!!!! Buy buy" ... when customers see its just 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 ...
We are in a boring time because companies sat too darn long on their behinds, milking their exiting products but never really figured how to make new products. I think the only one that took a risk was Intel years ago, and it blew up in their face.
So yes, unless some smart cookie makes a new invention, that can revolutionize how we make chips (and that can be mass produced), boring is the standard now. No matter how companies try to repackage it.
One thing that bothers me about the lack of a redesign is that it means there's been no progress on minimizing or getting rid of the notch. Apple is clearly able to do this, they made the notch smaller on iPhones a few years ago, but on Macs it's just as big and intrusive as it was when they introduced it 4 years ago. To me, this indicates that Apple either doesn't care about how intrusive having a big gap in the middle of the menu bar is, or worse, considers it a part of the Mac's "brand identity" now, something that indicates at a glance that someone's using a Mac.
I agree. Apple needs to either shrink the notch or add Face ID. I was surprised Face ID was not included initially with the notch, but figured there was a last minute problem or something. But here we are several revisions later, and still no change.
So it was with PowerPC, Sparc, SGI CPUs, and a bunch of older now obsolete architectures. I don't think we should be limiting the technological potential to keep old Windows drivers afloat, and they weren't native to the platform to begin with. You can always get a PC and virtualize Windows 7 just fine.
Frankly I’d be incredibly exited if the next Apple OS update was “No new major featurs. Bug fixes, perf optimization, and minor ergonomic improvements only”.
A few ergonomics improvements and a wifi stack that doesn't periodically crash could be enough to pull me to the dark side. I like my setup, but I'm lazy and don't really like the process of upgrading computers. Apple taking that load off could buy me as a customer for a decade. The amazing battery life is nothing to sneeze at either.
I've heard that the M-series chips with metal do great on the whole small model with low latency front; but I have no practical experience doing this yet. I'm hoping to add some local LLM/STT function to my office without heating my house.
I'm uncertain as to whether any M series mac will be performant enough and the M1/M2 mac mini's specifically, or whether there are features in the M3/M4/M5 architecture that make it worth my while to buy new.
Are these incremental updates actually massive in the model performance and latency space, or are they just as small or smaller?
As someone who purchased their first M-series Mac this year (M4 pro), I've been thrilled to discover how well it does with local genAI tasks to produce text, code and images. For example openai/gpt-oss-20b runs locally quite well with 24GB memory. If I knew beforehand how performant the Mac would be for these kinds of tasks, I probably would have purchased more RAM in order to load larger models. Performance for genAI is a function of GPU, # of GPU cores, and memory bandwidth. I think your biggest gains are going from a base chip to a pro/max/ultra version with the greater gpu cores and greater bandwidth.
The M5 is a huge upgrade over the M4 for local inference. They advertise 400% and there is reason to believe this isn’t a totally BS number. They redo the GPU cores to avoid having to emulate certain operations at the core inner loop of LLM inference.
I have an M4 and it is plenty fast enough. But honestly the local models are just not anywhere near the hosted models in quality, due to the lower parameter count, so I haven’t had much success yet.
Mac hardware has so significantly outpaced software needs I think there are diminishing returns. I'm a software developer who uses all sorts of advanced stuff and I only bought an M4 Pro, not a Max, because it wasn't worth the extra money. There are so few applications that max out a CPU for any meaningful amount of time these days like rendering videos or 3D.
My M4 iPad Pro is amazing but feels totally overpowered for what it's capable of.
I guess what I'm saying is.......I don't need faster CPUs. I want longer battery life, 5G connectivity, WiFI 7, lighter weight, a better screen, a better keyboard, etc..
I guess it's odd that Apple spends so much time making faster computers when that is practically an already solved problem.
They aren’t just making computers, though. Today’s CPU improvements go into tomorrow’s Vision Pro. Today’s improved E cores become tomorrow’s watch cores. Or something like that.
I thought this was going to be about Apple's various recent catastrophic software innovations, saying "why did you have to mess with a good thing? We just wanted it to stay as-is, even if that's considered 'boring'"
> The difference is that with Apple silicon, Apple owns and controls the primary technologies behind the products it makes, as Tim Cook has always wanted.
I hate that computers get faster, because it means I'll be forced to buy another laptop. It goes like this:
- Some developer buys a new laptop
- Developer writes software (a browser)
- When the software works "fast enough" on their new laptop, they ship it
- The software was designed to work on the dev's new laptop, not my old laptop
- Soon the software is too bloated to work on my old laptop
- So I have to buy a new laptop to run the software
Before I'd buy a laptop because it had cool new features. But now the only reason I buy a new one is the new software crashes from too little RAM, or runs too slowly. My old laptops work just fine. All the old apps they come with work just fine. Even new native apps work just fine. But they can't run a recent browser. And you can't do anything without a recent browser.
If our computers never got faster, we would still be able to do everything the same that we can do today. But we wouldn't have to put down a grand every couple years to replace a perfectly good machine.
I'm still typing this from an M1 MAX MBP w/ 64 gig of ram. I ended up needing more memory so, I swapped to this machine instead of my M1 air w/ 16gig. Both machines are completely capable for most tasks I deal with as a developer. Do I like my work m3? Sure. I wish I had the old m3 air I had to give back. But I'm happy with my machines.
It's funny that my ipad has a more current CPU than my two laptops.
Personally: I am extremely excited for a world where we have silicon that's capable of driving triple-A level gaming in the ~20w TDP envelope. M5 might actually be the first real glimpse we've had into this level of efficiency.
Apple could have my money in exchange for their hardware. I won't even ask for support. They just need to provide the hardware specifications to Linux developers.
I can relate. Most users just want stable, quiet performance improvements, not a revolution every update.
Do you care more about performance improvements or new features?
I have a M1 Max MPB from 2022 with 32G RAM (which I'm grateful for).
More performance (especially for local AI models) is always great, but I'm trying to imagine what I'd want out of a design change!
I think slightly thinner would be nice, but not if it runs hotter or throttles.
Smaller bezels on the screen maybe?
I'm one of those who liked the touchbar (because I think that applications which labelled its shortcuts in the touchbar are awesome) so I think some innovation around things like that would be nice. But not if it compromises the perfect keyboard.
I do think MacOS would be improved with touchscreen support.
60 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 74.7 ms ] threadM5 has performance/watt below Panther Lake.
Is that really what you want?
If you think this is a boring architecture, more power to you. It's not boring enough for me.
I think the issue stems from too many people making their living off reviews that require something exciting to get views. When updates are more evolution than revolution, it makes for a more boring article/video. I always worry that these types of responses will lead Apple to do silly things, like leaving old chips out there too long, or adding pointless features just so there is something new to talk about.
Also: incremental updates add up.
A (e.g.) 7% increase from one year to the next isn't a big deal, but +7%, +7%, +7%, …, adds up when you finally come up for a tech refresh after 3-5 years.
Every car company in the world realized that yearly product updates was the way to go, and no one whines that this year's model isn't good enough to justify upgrading from the previous year.
Meanwhile back in the pre-M1 days I remember stalking Mac rumors for moths trying to make sure I wasn’t going to buy right before their once-in-blue-moon product refresh. You could buy a Mac and get most of its useful life before they upgrade the chip, if you timed it right, so an upgrade right after you bought was a real kick in the pants.
The problem is that our hardware as we know it, has lost a lot of its stretch. Used to be that we got 100% performance gains on a generation to generation update. Then it became 50%, 30% ... Like in the GPU market, the last generation that actually got me exited was the 1000 series (1070 specific).
Now its "boring" 10 a 15% upgrades for the same generation (if we do not count naming / pricing rearrangements).
When was the last time any of use was "hey, i am exited to potentially buy this tech, really". Apple M1 comes to mind, and that is 5 years ago.
Nvidia tried to push the whole ray tracing (a bit too early), but again, its just a incremental update to graphics (as we had a lot of tricks to simulate lighting effects that had good performance). So again, kind of a boring gain if we look back.
Mobile gaming handhelds was trilling, steam deck... Then we got competitors but with high price tags = excitement became less. And now, nobody blinks with a new generation gets released because the CPU/iGPU gains are the same boring 15 a 20%... So who wants to put down 700, 900 Euro for a 15% gain.
What has really gotten you exited? Where your just willing to throw money at something? AI? And we see the same issue with LLMs ... what used to be big step/gain, in barely a years has gone from massive gains, to incremental gains. 10% better on this benchmark, 5% better there, ... So it becomes boring (GPT5 launch and reaction, Sora 2 launch and reaction).
> When updates are more evolution than revolution, it makes for a more boring article/video.
If you think about it, there is a reason why tech channels have issues and are even more clickbait then ever. Those people live on views, so when the tech they follow/review is boring to the audience, they start pushing more and more clickbait. But that eventually burning the channels.
Unfortunately, we have a entire industry that is designed around making parts smaller and smaller every generation, to make those gains. As we lost the ability to make large gains on making those smaller making parts ...
Its ironic, as we knew this was coming and yet, it seems nobody made any breakthrough at all. Quantum computing was a field that everybody knew had no road to general computing at home (materials issues).
So what is left is the same old, lets may the die a bit smaller, gain a bit, do some optimizing left and right, and call it a new product. But for customers, getting product 2.1, being named "this is our product 3.0!!!! Buy buy" ... when customers see its just 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 ...
We are in a boring time because companies sat too darn long on their behinds, milking their exiting products but never really figured how to make new products. I think the only one that took a risk was Intel years ago, and it blew up in their face.
So yes, unless some smart cookie makes a new invention, that can revolutionize how we make chips (and that can be mass produced), boring is the standard now. No matter how companies try to repackage it.
I'm uncertain as to whether any M series mac will be performant enough and the M1/M2 mac mini's specifically, or whether there are features in the M3/M4/M5 architecture that make it worth my while to buy new.
Are these incremental updates actually massive in the model performance and latency space, or are they just as small or smaller?
I have an M4 and it is plenty fast enough. But honestly the local models are just not anywhere near the hosted models in quality, due to the lower parameter count, so I haven’t had much success yet.
My M4 iPad Pro is amazing but feels totally overpowered for what it's capable of.
I guess what I'm saying is.......I don't need faster CPUs. I want longer battery life, 5G connectivity, WiFI 7, lighter weight, a better screen, a better keyboard, etc..
I guess it's odd that Apple spends so much time making faster computers when that is practically an already solved problem.
But did customers want it?
I'll leave it here, as the point is made.
If our computers never got faster, we would still be able to do everything the same that we can do today. But we wouldn't have to put down a grand every couple years to replace a perfectly good machine.
That's gonna be wild starting 2026, with the first implementations of RVA23, such as Tenstorrent Ascalon devboards TBA Q2.
It's funny that my ipad has a more current CPU than my two laptops.
More performance (especially for local AI models) is always great, but I'm trying to imagine what I'd want out of a design change!
I think slightly thinner would be nice, but not if it runs hotter or throttles.
Smaller bezels on the screen maybe?
I'm one of those who liked the touchbar (because I think that applications which labelled its shortcuts in the touchbar are awesome) so I think some innovation around things like that would be nice. But not if it compromises the perfect keyboard.
I do think MacOS would be improved with touchscreen support.