It's a bit of an emotional goodbye to the super cheap Mac Minis we got to enjoy for a while. I got some for family members, we had some serving as iOS/macOS build servers sitting in a closet at my last job, they were fantastic.
Not that they're a bad deal now, but at European prices of over €1000 for M6/16GB/256GB it's a psychological barrier that's been broken.
If you adjust for inflation, is it a big change from the super cheap Mac Minis of the past? Probably still somewhat more expensive, but not as much as the nominal difference would imply.
And except at the beginning, the Mac Minis of the past weren’t famous for being cheap, but rather for being disappointingly, unattractively expensive and, over time, apparently increasingly forgotten by Apple.
When they discontinued the M4 with 16GB a few months ago I had literally just ordered one off Amazon which they promptly cancelled. It would have been 600 after exchange rate from GBP.
I can't justify a more than 2x price increase for what I'm guessing are marginal improvements. I want to replace my home lab but as it stands my underpowered NAS will have to continue as it has the past few years
I play quite a few games on my Mac Mini via Crossover, but rarely anything particularly graphically intensive. Though I do see occasional buzz about improvements in the game porting toolkit leading to significant perf improvements when they make their way into Crossover.
cp2077 sits permanently at 60fps and looks great on my m1 max 64gb. I used to play it on my 4090, but once I figured out how to do redmods on macos I quit using it and play it on my mac to save power (I'm 100% solar powered).
Someone actually got an eGPU to pass-through to a Linux VM - with a steep performance penalty anyway. If you are gaming at 4K a 4090 will still be better even with the performance hit. Although obviously this will blow your solar budget!
From what I've seen they do care quite a bit about gaming, but not to the point where they're willing to actually do much about it, so I wouldn't expect a proton style compatibility layer anytime soon unfortunately
> From what I've seen they do care quite a bit about gaming, but not to the point where they're willing to actually do much about it
If they aren't willing to do much about it, they don't—however much they might pretend as long as it costs them nothing of value to do so—actually “care quite a bit” about it.
I wouldnt quite agree with that, gaming featured fairly prominently at least years WWDC, thats competing with a lot of other software and announcements for limited time. Pretending to care at an event where you can pretend to care about so many things is as close to caring as you get.
But I think it comes down to the wording a bit. At their core, the only single thing Apple cares about is making money. They only pretend to care about their computers, phones, everything they do is just an act, but we all know that so caring about something is relative, when we say they care about their computers its more that they put more resources into that than they do other things which we'd say they dont care about.
Apple does this thing where they pick a very old game and then boast about how well it runs. It's so bizarre.
Not like Mac gaming is good anyway...they have "Game Porting Toolkit" but it's not free and open like Proton so nobody will use it unless Apple pushes them. Removing Rosetta doesn't help either.
Apple also just can't give up the idea of selling games through the AppStore either and you end up with situations like with AC: Shadows where it was ported, but you must buy the macport via the app store. Your copy on steam does not include the mac port, so if you wan to play on both your Windows/Linux desktop and Mac, you have to buy it twice. So stupid.
it happens to be a title well-known but also natively supported. for a wide sea of games and their hostility towards open standards such as vulkan, we get a handful of games supported in their platform through partnerships. in the end of the day don't hold your breath for their involvement unless the game publisher does all the work.
What I am missing in all of those benchmarks, how does the M6 compares to the M5 Pro.
I don't care how the M6 compares to the M1, even when the M6 2.3x compared to M1 in Excel spreadsheet. That is no measurement even in accounting. The dead time is not the Excel.
The median price is high because Americans tend to buy more car than they can afford and/or need.
If we look at what you can realistically buy OTD (out the door) prices, the picture changes. New Odyssey/Sienna are coming in the low to mid $40k, and these are at the upper end of quality and features. Your typical compact SUVs is in the upper $20k range.
Upgraded my work machine from an M1 MBP to an M4 Mac Mini a couple of years ago. I do a lot of work in Excel with large sheets. The performance improvement was very noticeable and appreciated!
So happy with my base M4 purchase for $499 when it released. I even snagged a 1TB replacement drive for $199 a year ago. Feels like I got the last train out.
I’m currently hoping that my Intel Arc B580 doesn’t die on me cause even a 5060 Ti 16 GB has reached like 700 EUR price over here. I don’t think the prices will get better anytime soon.
Same with my M1 Air for being on the move, even notebooks would be more expensive than they’re worth.
I got an essentially free upgrade from an M1 air to an M4 air and let me tell you...there is zero difference in day to day usage. You've got another 5+ years of headroom at least.
Yep, for cpu I’m sure that’s true. It isn’t often that I wish the M1 was faster. But I need more memory. 16 GB was fine five years ago, but it’s getting cramped for me now.
I don't really care about gaming, but there's a PC I got for free a while back with a 2060ti that overheats if I don't peg the fans at 100% and keep the case open. Would be nice if that holds on.
Same thing for me! Got it with the education discount when it came out in 2024 and, although I've been pretty disappointed with macOS, it's crazy to see that the price increased by $300 in less than 2 years, with no sign of the price increases slowing down.
What will happen once people are priced out of buying computers? I find this worrying.
I’m sure some kind capitalist will be happy to rent them a thin client linked to a computer in the cloud.
Maybe we'll see a return to the late 1990's, when companies would give you a free computer as long as you allowed it to constantly display an ad banner on the top of the screen.
There were at least seven companies offering this. I personally knew two people who had them from two different companies, and I think they were also available at Best Buy and Circuit City.
But yes, they all went out of business during when the dot-com bubble burst.
Thinkpad and Framework are notable brands for easily replaced components. They should run forever if you just replace moving parts like fans and keyboards.
Macs, as nice as the hardware is, are hostile to repair.
I don't really understand this dooming. All market forecasters, memory bulk purchasers and the memory producers themselves have stated multiple times, unequivocally that the shortage will get worse in 2027 and then as new fabs come online the shortage will taper off as 2028 progresses.
We've been through.. 4? 5? memory boom-bust-boom cycles already. Nothing is pointing to this one being any different, aside it probably becoming the mother of all busts since AI isn't adding much productivity and as businesses realize this, they'll stop paying top dollar for access meaning AI vendors cancel all their reserved order space.
The fabs already exist at that point so it's less of a loss for the memory fabs to crank out memory chips and have the OEMs sell them at bargain bin prices. No pseudo-cartel prices possible either with CMXT becoming a major player. $50 for 32GB-64GB of DDR5 in 2029 here we come babyy
Seems hard to believe, I mean I'm not an AI absolutist but as a programmer it allows me to automate simple things like writing small patches or config changes in a matter of minutes where before I would have invested hours, so hard to believe that it won't at least bump productivity up by 20-60 % overall, it's also tremendously better at finding relevant content and curating it than me so that's another time saver unrelated to programming but relevant for any type of knowledge work. Friends in research and medecine and law also tell me that AI has drastically accelerated their rate of processing and ingesting any type of information and helped them to automate aspects of their jobs. So not sure but negligible isn't the word I would use here.
> it allows me to automate simple things like writing small patches or config changes in a matter of minutes where before I would have invested hours
One of the problems here is that things like this only count as "increased productivity" in the economic sense if it results in more income at the end of the funnel. Are you actually making more product faster in all your new-found free time?
I mean I can deliver the same software in one month that I delivered in maybe 3 months before and for many things I don't need a dedicated frontend developer, designer or writer anymore. So for me it's the case!
> One of the problems here is that things like this only count as "increased productivity" in the economic sense if it results in more income at the end of the funnel. Are you actually making more product faster in all your new-found free time?
This strikes me as a problem with how we define productivity in this context. If I can do my job in 1 hour, when it took me 8 before, am I not more productive in a rate-based sense? Sure, I might only work 5 hours in a week instead of 40, so my net production is the same, but my rate of productivity was certainly much higher.
Wealth created is still the same, and that's what an economist means by "productive" - you produced X amount of wealth (usually measured in dollar amounts).
It's like "work" meaning one thing to a normal person, but something very specific and counterintuitive in Newtonian physics (if you carry a fifty-pound weight in a circle and stop at your starting point, you've done no work).
I suppose I can understand that perspective, but disagree with it? We should measure time returned to individuals as wealth, maybe even the highest form of wealth.
In the sense measured in economics, only if the product at the end of the day is sold for the same nominal amount of dollars as before. It doesn't matter how many features or lines of code or bugs or anything like this you produced - it matters how much revenue your work produced.
So, if the product isn't selling any more expensive even though you're adding ~8 times more features, or if you're still getting paid for the full 40 hours even though you only really work 5, then economic productivity hasn't actually increased.
Yup, I understand. And through a very narrow definition of economics it makes sense. I just don't see the utility in viewing it this way.
You've returned one of the most valuable resources (time) back to a human. In my mind there's simply nothing more valuable, and no sign of of efficiency more poignant than that.
It is actually a very relevant real-world definition - even though I agree with you on the intangible value of time.
The reason why it is very relevant is that, in the way we have unfortunately structured our economy, the amount of work you have to do to be able to eat and enjoy your time will always expand to grow to at least force you to maintain (if not increase) your economic productivity. That is, if AI enables engineers to deliver 10x more features in the same unit of time, then their employers will expect them to deliver 10x more features to continue earning their current pay.
So, while the AI did, in principle, allow you to just reduce your work schedule while getting the same pay, as you're providing the same results in 1/10th of the time, the economic system does not - your previous work is instead simply worth less than it used to be. Assuming you're not happy to take a 90% pay cut, you'll have to continue spending 40+ hour weeks, just using AI as well now.
Everything is ultimately a chosen definition, nothing is "real". I'd argue the definition is antiquated. In the modern world, free time being returned to individuals is perhaps one of the greatest examples of wealth.
Yup. And in my experience, AI has made the communication and decision making overhead significantly worse thanks to 100x longer docs, code that noone understands and enormous pressure by executives to magically produce software that just works.
That's just because most people are bad at communication to start with.
Look at all the shit github README before llm. Most repos didn't bother because it was effort. those few that did, were because of autistic focus. Of those, very few were "great" user documentation.
now llms are here, the effort barrier is gone, and now we're inundated with shit README that provide no value to users nor respect their time.
Once you start applying SKILL.md that revolve around fixing HOW to communicate value to users in a way that respects their time, you'll see this story change in noticeable places.
I doubt it will change everywhere because it also requires that you give a shit about doing this in the first place, so those people Ed Zitron talks about... business idiots won't care, because they're ultimately nihlist.
It is really a deeper problem that "productivity" works in a factory producing widgets as output per labor-hour of widgets.
The Principles of Scientific Management was just wrong that these ideas extend universally but we are still doing this stupid Barnesian performance as if they do. It clearly makes no sense with knowledge work. It is stupid.
Then the efficient market hypothesis provides a type of circular proof because since the market is always right, if this didn't work we wouldn't be doing it. Another stupid idea we are not able to get past.
For my job and basically everyone I know outside of programming, the productivity from AI is literally zero.
I think what this says is the productivity is in specific silos and why the experience of the utility of AI is so vastly different for different people.
Aside: I used to love reading qz. Anyone remember when it was a chat/imessage style mobile app? The news was super short and quirky.
Then they sold out and most recently literally sold out to this software company from my neck of the woods. Every single article now feels like it's written by an LLM optimized to write like a crypto/AI bro.
no one remembers the last time things got better rather than worse. shitcoin-driven scarcity seamlessly transitioned into COVID-driven scarcity and now into hyperscaler-driven scarcity. the chipmakers' cabal decided to meet increased demand with four digit margins rather than expanding production.
I don't remember any previous price increase this significant or sustained. Relevant to this thread, I don't ever remember major computer companies like Apple having to significantly jack up their prices because hardware costs had gone up so significantly and stayed there.
This is a great route. Just yank or wipe the windows disk, install Linux, and it’s way more secure and performant than any preload windows would be. It probably runs games better too.
The last Gigabyte Brix I got my hands on, ended up into the recycling center, there was no way to have Linux distributions, whichever one I tried, to boot from UEFI, while the same distributions would boot from external drives over USB.
After several months of wasted lifetime, it died and got the deserved burial at a recycling center.
I'm kind of lost on what to do with it. I have better workstation PCs, and I couldn't find a good way to turn it into a media center - it would be a great living room PC - but couldn't find a BT remote friendly solution last time I checked. Anyone has a solution for this ? I don't want to be using mouse/keyboard every time I sit on the couch - something that would let me stream something like jellyfin fullscreen with a remote ?
There are various "air mouse" variants that properly work with MacOS as well. I have one with some media/navigation keys on the front, and a tiny keyboard on the back - kodi I can navigate just with the navigation keys, and if I want to do a bit more (but not get out the proper keyboard) I just flip it around, and can do that as well.
Personal assistant (e.g. openclaw) in the mac ecosystem. You need external models to power it ofc, but cool to have all the Apple integration and local network in your assistant. The claw can be addressed in multiple ways and can command your local hardware if you so wish.
Maybe try a Steam Controller? I've used the OG one. I think the device itself registers as a keyboard. Its trackpad controls the mouse cursor and the triggers act as the various mouse clicks.
If you are running Steam in the background, one of the buttons triggers an HUD keyboard, where the left trackpad types keys on the left side of the keyboard and the right trackpad for the right side of the keyboard. My guess is the new controller works the same way.
Also, some media center software, such as Kodi, have gamepad support. So a gamepad will feel completely natural to control it without having to resort to using the mouse and HUD keyboard.
I was not in need of a mac mini then and I’m not in need now, but damn I hope my laptop will last a long time because FML the best price/performance minipc of the last few years got wrecked and the entire market is in shambles
My personal laptop is a 2018 ThinkPad Carbon X1 Gen 6. It's eight years old now. Still running Linux pretty well, but I really need to figure out what to do for a replacement sooner than later...
I know it's at least a little irrational, but I am indescribably angry with the pricing trajectory of personal computing. I'm not all that young and for pretty much all my life the computers you as a random person could buy have consistently become massively more performant and massively cheaper over time. Even when the exponential performance increases started to taper off, every few years you could buy or build a new computer that was either cheaper or faster than the one you already had.
That trend of the last several decades has been completely destroyed in the last year or so. Sure you can buy a new computer that might be slightly better than one a few years old, but it will be significantly more expensive to the point where an upgrade is almost certainly not worth it unless money is no object. Even replacing a computer from the pre-AI era would be virtually impossible at anywhere near what it cost you to buy it new unless it was verging on truly ancient by computer standards. Computers have always been a counterpoint to inflation everywhere else, but now that seems to be not only no longer true, but computer costs are inflating significantly worse than other goods.
I find myself increasingly in favor of the movement against data centers. Not because I think data centers are bad on their own, but because of the hording of computing resources they represent and the impact that has on people trying to buy any sort of computing device for their personal use. The PC I built 2 years ago is basically irreplaceable at anywhere near the price I paid for it. That's a truly unacceptable state of affairs in personal computing.
Inflation is a few percent a year roughly. Prices for hardware have skyrocketed. Ram has jumped anywhere from 2-4x in cost. NVMe drives are still going for 2-3x what they cost about 2 years ago. Just go look at one of the amazon price trackers to see how bad it is.
TSMC, plus flash and memory manufacturers with their own facilities, have dramatically cut production of almost anything that isn't in demand for AI, plus Macs were just about the only way to get more than 16GB of 'VRAM' without spending multiple thousands of dollars, so Mac Minis and Studios with more than about 24GB of ram have been under months-long backorders, which is unprecedented. Tim Apple made is name in supply chain logistics. Even he can't logistic his way out of this. Making things worse, the RAM that Macs use is really fast stuff, nearly the speed of high end desktop GPUs.
Supply for anything that isn't exactly what NVIDIA, Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, and MS want has pretty much evaporated. And even that stuff has skyrocketed in cost because, essentially, the race has turned into who can hoard the most of TSMC's and NVIDIA's production capacity in a particular year.
The pathetic thing is that it isn't even actual purchases in some cases. In some cases, it's OpenAI or Anthropic merely "promising" they will buy X% of a memory manufacturer's capacity.
I can't wait for all of this to come crashing down.For all this hardware that is useless for anything else because of its density and power consumption - to absolutely crater in price and become e-waste.
The official one.
The reality is a bit worse. A trip to the supermarket was 50 Euros some years ago, now it is 150 - 200 50 Euros. That is not "a few percent".
I think their point is that computers used to defy inflation. Across the decades, computers were getting cheaper in an absolute sense (i.e. not factoring in inflation) and astonishingly cheaper in terms of dollars per unit of performance.
Even when the cost of the cheapest computers bottomed out, it likely had more to do with lower prices not making sense. At a certain point, the cost of things that encapsulate the computer and I/O (like the enclosure and screen) end up overwhelming the cost of the actual compute.
I don't think it's an accident that the market is on a trajectory toward personal computer (and particularly storage) rental being the only economically viable game. There are significant players who will profit directly. Indirectly it helps companies for whom end users owning general purpose computers and storage threaten their business models.
The industry has little incentive to fix this problem and as the market shrinks so does the incentive.
We lived thru the PC revolution. It looks over now to me.
Indeed, also to note something that younger folks keep missing, the PC revolution only happened due IBM's mistake, everyone else was vertically integrated, even with something like CP/M.
> the PC revolution only happened due IBM's mistake, everyone else was vertically integrated
IBM was extremely vertically integrated. What actually happened was that Compaq reverse engineered their BIOS and made a compatible system and the courts said it was okay.
The thing destroying the modern world is DMCA 1201. Adversarial interoperability is fundamental.
The common components are irrelevant. Even Apple still has components manufactured by Foxconn, buys RAM and flash from the same vendors as anyone else, etc. The phones made by Xiaomi et al are perfectly capable of running the same apps as Apple's from a hardware perspective.
The difference is that now if someone wants to make a competing store for iOS apps, or a competing client app for Reddit or Twitter, the incumbents use the DMCA and remote attestation and similar anti-competitive levers to lock those competitors out of the market and governments have been letting them get away with it.
It is easy to say that IBM had monopolistic tendencies, because they did. On the other hand, the 5100 sounds like a vertically integrated design and it ended up being extremely expensive. The Datamaster strayed away from IBM components, but was still based upon IBM software. One can blame it's failure on the IBM PC being released a month later, but in a way that would prove the point. The Datamaster had such a big head start that the IBM PC borrowed elements of it's design, while the proprietary software of the Datamaster held back its release date.
Undoubtedly, IBM wanted more control over the PC. Avoiding a completely proprietary design was probably a calculated bet, an intentional course of action rather than a mistake. It just happens to be a bet they lost.
In capitalism, incentive usually is aligned with price. The industry doesn’t have incentive - the incentive arrives with higher prices, which is what we’re discussing in the first place.
I agree in general, but the market response can be very lumpy and sometimes substitution happens more quickly than investment in new capacity.
Only a handful of companies can make high end memory, semiconductors and semiconductor equipment. And some of them are wary of creating overcapacity down the line. Creating new capacity takes years and creating a competitor to any of these companies takes even longer.
So it's absolutely possible that consumers change behaviour before a sufficient supply side response arrives.
I feel like we are basically reliving the COVID era supply chain crunch, that it's basically inevitable that in 18-36 months more capacity will come online and prices will crash back to earth.
Whether OEMs like Apple pass these savings along to consumers is tbd though.
Memory orders for the whole 2027 were already reserved. There is little indication that in 2028 situation will be any better unless something drastic happens like AI crash.
And then the opposite can happen like an unknown drone with 100 kg warhead striking memory production facility.
It can be Russia to limit availability of AI heavy drones for Ukraine. Or it can be a small private organization using the strike as a mean to manipulate market.
> There is little indication that in 2028 situation will be any better unless something drastic happens like AI crash.
China.
This market situation is a perfect storm for chinese manufacturers to step up. They don't have to chase latest-and-greatest, price-performance is one of the strongest demand drivers in consumer segment. They need a viable alternative, offer it at a reasonable price - which is much easier to achieve under current heavily inflated conditions - and that would quickly entrench them as a household brand.
Remember, it's not that there's no chinese lithography tech at all, it's just not advanced enough to yield mass production silicon at commercially viable prices. It might be the case that at current market conditions this caveat does not hold and all they need to do is ship. Even if the current prices mean they do it at break-even it would still be an enormously massive win.
Again, they don't have to compete at the flagship level from the get go, they need something commercially viable. There are tons of Chinese companies in the west and probably even more western on the outside chinese white-label goods. Chinese government has enough weight to push domestic silicon on those companies to create domestic silicon industry that can make the unit economies work.
All in all, there is a very likely scenario where this current AI boom and the resulting crunch on silicon supply creates a competitive silicon industry in China. If you think something in the realm of "I would not buy chinese silicon even if it was cheaper" it does not matter. Look at smartphone market share outside of USA, Japan and West Europe: in majority of the world Apple+Samsung barely touches 50%. What this "rest of the world" lacks in individual purchasing power it more than makes up for in numbers.
Even if somehow you had the super hero ability to create this silicon out of thin air and even double it, I'd argue that it wouldn't drive down prices.
Simply because both the AI datacenter's need and their ability to pay is bigger then the consumer market. So far it seems that the more silicon you throw at AI, then the better your reasoning output. So the cheaper the chips, the more these datacenters will buy. Arguably they would buy even more because then you can tell investors that you have more powerful models (due to more compute) and your price per output is cheaper (because average hardware is cheaper).
Isn't too early to see if the Gigadatacenters will really pay off? I'm not trying to be an AI doomer here, but I thought the new really large DCs are just not yet online.
1. That a new player would offer enterprise level product, instead of consumer grade. IMO it's very likely that if such a scenario unfolded, the market would be segmented into enterprise/consumer not only at the product level, but at the supplier level too. At least initially.
2. That AI compute demand is essentially unlimited AND silicon production capacity is and will remain bottleneck in datacenter buildouts. IMO we are much closer to the point where physical infrastructure becomes the apparent bottleneck than it would seem, IF political climate allows. Datacenter buildout is THE talking point in Ohio elections and if the dems win, datacenters will become THE talking point in the whole USofA. In just a couple of months the landscape they are operating in could become very different.
I'd add the gold rush for hardware to mine crypto coins, depending what component you're looking at.
What stands out to me is that you can't rely on pricing acting predictably any more, it used to be that when a new product/generation released there would be a few weeks of high demand/short supply, but when that was satisfied it would be a nice graceful decline over its lifespan until the next generation was nearly ready to come out and take its place in the market. You can look at old PCPartPicker trends graphs via archive.org to see this over and over. Now it feels like trying to catch a falling knife and it really raises the threshold for whether I actually need an upgrade versus other areas of my life where I could spend.
“It costs a lot to buy a new computer better than the one I have” is another way of saying “computers aren’t going obsolete as fast” which sounds like a great thing.
Please. Yes the pricing sucks, but that means more capacity to build more computers will develop. It will equalize at some point.
Crashing the data center boom in a vain attempt to get a cheaper pc is a) short-sighted and selfish and b) counterproductive, bans on data centers would almost guarantee permanent high prices, or lower performing parts.
The bot blocking services are more advanced than that. They will do stuff like checking how your fonts are rendered in a canvas element to determine your browser and OS. A stock mac circumvent all that by hiding in plain sight.
My cable internet is 2.5G. So it’s nice to get that full speed when I have a wired connection.
To be honest though, my usage does not benefit from the speed. The only benefit is to the reptile part of my brain that says “speed. Must have the fastest possible, and since I’m paying for it, even though maybe I should downgrade it, I want my speed.”
I’d love to take the extra speed if the networking equipment cost wasn’t so crazy.
Then, like you said, on the WAN side you’ve got the monthly internet bill.
1Gbps is the sweet spot, especially since 6Ghz WiFi runs at something like 600Mbps in the real world a reasonable distance away from the WiFi router in an ideal deployment. Saturate your wired, and you get a slight benefit over a 500Mbps plan for your wireless.
The people using Mac mini/mac studios are very likely media editors who have a NAS on the local network. 1gbit ethernet is slower than wifi at this point and incredibly outdated. 2.5gbit ethernet is quite cheap and common now.
Yeah, the Mac mini is cheap in cost but the buyer of that system is more demanding than someone who buys a MacBook Air or iMac despite the fact that the Mac mini is the cheapest Mac.
The Mac Studio is Apple’s realization that the best Mac Pro was actually the Mac mini with some slight modifications.
I don't know about 'very likely' though I too know some, if you were doing that you'd buy the 10G upgrade anyway right? Or a studio which comes with 10G
I think there's a valid argument for this pattern when you know most people are on 3-ish year upgrade cycles. Also, if you compare against the most recent generation, you risk creating buyer's remorse for recent purchases.
I'd imagine most are on longer than 3 years for computers. Most (non developers) I know hang onto their laptops and computers until they die or get spec constrained, and that ends up being around ~6 or 7 years, so in this case the comparison to the M1/M1 Max makes sense, as for the next couple years that's going to be the cohort that's looking to upgrade.
The people who read Apple press posts would skew towards upgrading more often. Ultimately there is no number that would satisfy everyone and you are reading a marketing piece from Apple.
Wait for the product to be publicly available if you want in depth testing.
Maybe try reinstalling macos? I have an M1 pro personally and an M4 pro for work and I don't feel any difference between them, but I reinstalled a fresh copy of macos recently.
I feel like a big part of macos slowing down is installing too much crap over the years that sits in the background.
I'm usually running about ~4 instances of it locally in separate Git worktrees, which (in our setup) means I'm also running 4 copies of the whole stack: web, frontend, Redis, Postgres, etc. These are rebuilt and torn down multiple times per day. Lot of frontend assets to compile.
Additionally, like many people in corporate environments, we do of course also pay a performance tax thanks to the security software we need to run.
So perf does matter for us.
We could, of course, alternatively... just run cheap shitboxes locally and have all our dev environments in the cloud. Certainly appealing in many ways from a cost perspective and you don't even need to give up DX really.
However, in the next ~5 years, as "actually useful" local LLM inference starts to become genuinely useful (for software engineering, this seems to roughly mean "the ability to run 28B+ models at usable speeds") then having local compute horsepower might start to look more attractive again. Even if it's not an absolute winner on cost/utility alone, the data privacy and cost certainty have value to many.
After watching a video about how the filesystems are > 2x faster (and testing this myself in my mac mini vs a linux machine), I feel like Apple is leaving a lot on the table, and I hope that they get APFS to be as fast as the linux filesystems.
Because otherwise a lot of this hardware (including their blazing fast SSDs) is wasted. Cuz my M1 mac mini is awesome otherwise.
I took a peek into APFS a bit ago [1] because I (stupidly) yanked a usb SSD before it was unmounted and corrupted it. Reading the documentation, it seems to have many "cool" features which just aren't fully exposed/utilized in the OS, and there is a lack of API tooling.
For example: it is copy-on-write, and my corruption happened in the superblock checkpoint. There is no built-in command in Disk Utility to "mount" an older checkpoint (and accepting a small amount of dataloss). Also the "First Aid" command allegedly runs volume repair top-down when it is recommended to do it inside-out.
Is APFS that much slower than ZFS or btrfs (more comparable Linux file systems) or just ext4? Btrfs is noticeably slower than ext4, but at least all the Mac and Linux file systems are way faster than file operations on Windows :)
Just watched that after I got home from work. I was pleasantly surprised with how in-depth it was. Thanks for sharing it! It does seem like the worst issues he was seeing had to do with parallel IO performance, which is exacerbated by the agent development use case, so for sequential file creation/deletion, APFS is bad but not horrible.
It might not be the fastest, but at least it supports setting/keeping file creation time - unlike the clusterf*ck we still have on basically all Linux filesystems unfortunately
Upgrading to 48GB memory is $600…. Gut bunch. I have a M4 Pro (top cpu skew 14 cores). Any idea the performance gain to M5 Pro? I feel like they holding off releasing M6 Pro because a new studio is dropping soon as well.
Not really. It's Gurman, once again throwing darts at the wall to see what sticks like a desperate roach begging for subscribers to his bullshit newsletter of guesses and predictions he'll flip in a month the opposite direction for even more clicks and bait.
Not a surprise with John Ternus taking the reigns as CEO in a week, who was previously SVP of hardware engineering.
I can't hate a direction where Apple becomes more about building great computers rather than trying to force more and more subscriptions. I do wish they would fix many of the long-standing OS and native app problems.
I do worry that at this point it's no longer just Apple's problem to solve. They need to figure out a way to take the rest of the industry with it. Maybe if their standards are high enough everyone else will look bad by comparison.
My daily driver personal machines are incredible pieces of kit, but everything is always getting worse because majority of software is some SaaS living in the cloud, or even if on-desktop is constantly updating slop.
Why does it take 10 seconds for my streaming music app to open when my machine is 10-20 cores, 32GB+ RAM, high bandwidth NVMe storage, and I am connected to gigabit fiber internet? The thing is autoplaying videos, and has about 10 different panes clearly owned by different product managers that hate each other. Half the time its pushing me some pop-up dialog I don't care about.
I agree with you, but I also think sadly most consumers don't really care about this. The reason the internet is in the state it's in is because most people tolerate it.
Most people simply don't care about using well-made software so long as it gets the job done because they don't even look at other options. I suppose this is how carpenters feel when they see ubiquitous IKEA furniture.
I don't think polishing macos more will win more users, Windows is a flaming garbage heap where virtually every built in program is broken and people keep using it. Making macbooks cheaper and more accessible will do far more.
Don't worry, there are exactly zero Apple chips that are good for any sort of local inference right now. Unified ram is fast for ram, but dogshit slow compared to actual dedicated VRAM on graphics cards.
> Dedicated graphics cards are faster but not to the point that it matters.
It definitely matters, if you're intending to run a Claude Code/OpenCode style agent workflow. Most of those harnesses start with 8-12k token contexts, which is a lot of prefill for a Mac but cheap for a CUDA GPU. The GPGPU compute on the fastest Macs is still trailing behind Nvidia's laptop GPUs; the highest-bandwidth Apple Silicon chip (now the M5 Ultra) has ~7x lower memory bandwidth than a single B100 card.
There's a good reason why Apple Silicon isn't to be found anywhere in the datacenter buildout. It's nonviable for training, and wastes electricity running real-world inference workloads.
Mine cost $5K probably because I only have ever needed 2TB of SSD.
But this is an old argument that seems to be thrown at Macs. Normally everything is cherry picked to show it's better than the Mac while ignoring all the features.
Although I would hope if you pay $8K you can get something that outperforms the Mac in every way.
It's funny because I was the same as you. I hated Macs with a passion. I saw them as overpriced shiny things that weren't as good as a PC.
Back in early 2000's I was commissioned to build an application that should also run on the Mac.
I bought a second hand old Mac Mini. Within a couple of months I bought a brand new one, and since then I have been on Mac when it comes to non-gaming (even though it can do gaming).
The main reason was I could just get shit done. The operating system is transparent to what I needed to do. With Windows you were forever dealing with the operating system to solve things.
Windows eventually got better in this regards, and more recently worse again.
I own/use windows as well. But mainly for gaming or a VM on an internal server.
Often when people give a comparison of how much PC is better, they compare a PC desktop to a laptop. Windows laptops for the same features is same or more expensive, while feeling cheap/heavy/noisy.
So form factor is one part of it, and then how the whole ecosystem works together with my phone/iPad and other devices.
At the end of the day, if I am doing any serious inferencing then I use my companies server, or Claude.
...
What has amazed me over the years is the sheer hate I get from some people for even owning a Mac. I was probably the same, but I was younger then.
Its died down since ARM came in, but the irrational hate seems wasted. Someone prefers Linux, Android, Windows, etc. Good for them.
I dunno why Apple fans do this thing where they pretend that their specific workflow is the standard for how things work, and because they can do it so well on their Macs, that means Macs are the best.
To be specific, 5 models at 57 gb means you are using crap quantized models, which suck for any real agentic work. I mean, sure they give you some inference, but compared to the full parameter models like Qwen3.8 and Gemma4 that can run full agentic loops, you may as well just use cloud inference for the price.
You of course could "run" those larger models, but we both know that the tok/sec is dogshit on Macs for those.
And 57 gb is split across 3 cards quite easily, which will all be cheaper than your comparable Mac and way faster.
You really need to educated yourself on how running local models works and what the models like Gemma 4 are capable of, so you don't continue to waste money on Macs.
You mean someone who uses a Mac? I find the term "Apple fan" is used as a way to attack the person.
> that can run full agentic loops, you may as well just use cloud inference for the price.
You can run full agentic loops fine with quantised models. In fact that is likely what you are doing with a 32GB PC Graphics card. Or what model are you using?
You use the right model for the right job. For example granite4.2 is optimised for agentic work and only needs 5GB of memory.
Gemma4 MLX runs fine with the larger model needing 19GB.
Prior to that I had OpenClaw (in Parallels VM) create an application with local models that worked the exact same way as created by Claude. It was more an experiment in how OpenClaw works, hence the VM.
> And 57 gb is split across 3 cards quite easily,
I assume you are talking about a good graphics card. A good 32GB will run you $2K a card, so that $6K to beat out a laptop of similar price, and where the difference doesn't matter.
Running agentic loops doesnt mean just being able to execute them. When your llm is so slow that you are faster writing the code yourself with free gemini that comes with google account, local llm is no longer worth it. Tok/sec is everything.
And 3090 is $1500 used, and 24gb gb of ram. 3x is $4500 for 72gb of ram.
That selling point is probably more about using a claude code subscription than running your own models. Because of apple's lockin there are certain things you can only do on apple devices and a mac mini is useful for that
Which is more important for AI/LLM stuff, the number of GPU cores or the amount of unified memory? I can choose from a Mini with the M5 Pro 18CPU/30GPU and 64GB RAM or a Studio with a M5 Max 18CPU/40GPU and 48GB RAM for roughly the same price
I don't know why some guy downvoted me. It's a great choice without expending 7K on some hardware than in less than two years will be replaced by the M7 (which is in the making).
I’m very hopeful that Apple in time won’t sit around, I hope that they will take the design and engineering of memory in house like their A and M processors or their new C series modems.
I really don’t see how they can avoid it not in the current climate, the design and engineering is already there, 10 to 20 billion dollars is already there, all they need to do is partner with Intel or TSMC onshore in the USA, Arizona would be fine. but Prineville Oregon would be better.
The M-chips are insanely powerful. So powerful for my regular use that I'm still on M1-generated devices and don't really need to update. Perhaps in a few years when both local-running LLMs are good enough on regular consumer hardware there'll be a good reason to upgrade.
As a disclaimer though, I haven't even tried to really run local models on the M1 as I also have a 'gaming PC' that can run them fine.
I feel much the same. I feel like the next time I upgrade I could splurge a bit more and get a really bigger CPU and storage to be even more productive with.
However the main reason I would upgrade is to run LLMs locally and RAM prices are making this a no-go. One day if RAM comes down to earth I'll upgrade. If not I'll stick to this old machine for a long time.
> Perhaps in a few years when both local-running LLMs are good enough on regular consumer hardware there'll be a good reason to upgrade.
I mean, local LLMs already are really good if you own Nvidia Cards, not sure what you are waiting for. 2x3090 will blow any current Mac out of the water in tok/sec
I was talking about upgrading to another M-series device. I actually mentioned in the post that you're replying to that I do run them locally on my desktop. And I run them off of an AMD card, 7900XTX.
yeah my m1 mac studio shows no signs of stopping and i can't justify another upgrade until doing so really unlocks something new at a reasonable price (like running local llms that are competitive with the cloud services at a decent speed, which presumably the mac studio M5 Ultras can do with qwen 3.8 but the 256GB Ultra config is more than $10k!)
~75% higher price for some extra GPU power and small CPU boost compared to M4? Eh. It's pretty far from M4's value, which was a no-brainer recommendation for people who wanted a tiny box sitting somewhere on their desk.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 13.6 ms ] threadNot that they're a bad deal now, but at European prices of over €1000 for M6/16GB/256GB it's a psychological barrier that's been broken.
https://everymac.com/global-mac-prices/all-msrp-mac-mini-pri...
I can't justify a more than 2x price increase for what I'm guessing are marginal improvements. I want to replace my home lab but as it stands my underpowered NAS will have to continue as it has the past few years
We should be buying European solutions anyway. Different psychological barrier that was broken long before.
https://www.imec-int.com/en
Interesting that Apple quotes performances when playing Cyberpunk 2077 ! Maybe they will want to care more about gaming ?
And while i'm at it, I was wondering a few weeks ago if I should try this game on my M3 pro. Anyone has played it on Apple and has feedback ?
https://scottjg.com/posts/2026-05-05-egpu-mac-gaming/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48137145
If they aren't willing to do much about it, they don't—however much they might pretend as long as it costs them nothing of value to do so—actually “care quite a bit” about it.
But I think it comes down to the wording a bit. At their core, the only single thing Apple cares about is making money. They only pretend to care about their computers, phones, everything they do is just an act, but we all know that so caring about something is relative, when we say they care about their computers its more that they put more resources into that than they do other things which we'd say they dont care about.
Not like Mac gaming is good anyway...they have "Game Porting Toolkit" but it's not free and open like Proton so nobody will use it unless Apple pushes them. Removing Rosetta doesn't help either.
The game gets a bad rap for the last-gen console performance, but even 2020's iGPUs could handle it: https://youtu.be/oUm5GmJcBPA
I don't know what this means - game porting toolkit is free
(it was late in it's lifecycle and there were frequent sales)
I don't care how the M6 compares to the M1, even when the M6 2.3x compared to M1 in Excel spreadsheet. That is no measurement even in accounting. The dead time is not the Excel.
I am to only one?
I just wait for practical real live numbers with real stacks i use.
And btw. they reduced the memory bandwdith on the M4 in comparision to its previous version by 40gb/sec or so, you need to wait to see.
170GB/s memory bandwidth Configurable up to 32GB unified memory
307GB/s memory bandwidth Configurable up to 64GB unified memory
That is also the factor you want to take into account for AI inference, of course.
- Apple M5 Ultra chip
- 30-core CPU with 10 super cores and 20 performance cores
- 64-core GPU
- Neural Accelerators
- Hardware-accelerated ray tracing
- 32-core Neural Engine
- 1.2TB/s memory bandwidth
one point 2 terrabyte a second memory bandwidth....
512gb coming later this year
but at the cost of a small car
If we look at what you can realistically buy OTD (out the door) prices, the picture changes. New Odyssey/Sienna are coming in the low to mid $40k, and these are at the upper end of quality and features. Your typical compact SUVs is in the upper $20k range.
Your typical base model compact SUVs start in upper $20K range. Your typical compact SUV usually lands somewhere in the 30s.
Same with my M1 Air for being on the move, even notebooks would be more expensive than they’re worth.
It will last longer and hopefully the GPU prices will recover in a few years.
I hope
Do you just mean in terms of getting something for the cheapest possible price or are you talking about quality going down in some way?
What will happen once people are priced out of buying computers? I find this worrying.
I’m sure some kind capitalist will be happy to rent them a thin client linked to a computer in the cloud.
Maybe we'll see a return to the late 1990's, when companies would give you a free computer as long as you allowed it to constantly display an ad banner on the top of the screen.
But yes, they all went out of business during when the dot-com bubble burst.
Macs, as nice as the hardware is, are hostile to repair.
We've been through.. 4? 5? memory boom-bust-boom cycles already. Nothing is pointing to this one being any different, aside it probably becoming the mother of all busts since AI isn't adding much productivity and as businesses realize this, they'll stop paying top dollar for access meaning AI vendors cancel all their reserved order space.
The fabs already exist at that point so it's less of a loss for the memory fabs to crank out memory chips and have the OEMs sell them at bargain bin prices. No pseudo-cartel prices possible either with CMXT becoming a major player. $50 for 32GB-64GB of DDR5 in 2029 here we come babyy
Would love to know where this comes from. I am not sure about that. Could you point to data/anecdata?
There's been a few studies. Most find productivity gain from 'AI' to be negligible.
One of the problems here is that things like this only count as "increased productivity" in the economic sense if it results in more income at the end of the funnel. Are you actually making more product faster in all your new-found free time?
Right, but are you delivering 3x more software now, and more importantly, are you selling 3x more software now?
This strikes me as a problem with how we define productivity in this context. If I can do my job in 1 hour, when it took me 8 before, am I not more productive in a rate-based sense? Sure, I might only work 5 hours in a week instead of 40, so my net production is the same, but my rate of productivity was certainly much higher.
It's like "work" meaning one thing to a normal person, but something very specific and counterintuitive in Newtonian physics (if you carry a fifty-pound weight in a circle and stop at your starting point, you've done no work).
So, if the product isn't selling any more expensive even though you're adding ~8 times more features, or if you're still getting paid for the full 40 hours even though you only really work 5, then economic productivity hasn't actually increased.
You've returned one of the most valuable resources (time) back to a human. In my mind there's simply nothing more valuable, and no sign of of efficiency more poignant than that.
The reason why it is very relevant is that, in the way we have unfortunately structured our economy, the amount of work you have to do to be able to eat and enjoy your time will always expand to grow to at least force you to maintain (if not increase) your economic productivity. That is, if AI enables engineers to deliver 10x more features in the same unit of time, then their employers will expect them to deliver 10x more features to continue earning their current pay.
So, while the AI did, in principle, allow you to just reduce your work schedule while getting the same pay, as you're providing the same results in 1/10th of the time, the economic system does not - your previous work is instead simply worth less than it used to be. Assuming you're not happy to take a 90% pay cut, you'll have to continue spending 40+ hour weeks, just using AI as well now.
Look at all the shit github README before llm. Most repos didn't bother because it was effort. those few that did, were because of autistic focus. Of those, very few were "great" user documentation.
now llms are here, the effort barrier is gone, and now we're inundated with shit README that provide no value to users nor respect their time.
Once you start applying SKILL.md that revolve around fixing HOW to communicate value to users in a way that respects their time, you'll see this story change in noticeable places.
I doubt it will change everywhere because it also requires that you give a shit about doing this in the first place, so those people Ed Zitron talks about... business idiots won't care, because they're ultimately nihlist.
The Principles of Scientific Management was just wrong that these ideas extend universally but we are still doing this stupid Barnesian performance as if they do. It clearly makes no sense with knowledge work. It is stupid.
Then the efficient market hypothesis provides a type of circular proof because since the market is always right, if this didn't work we wouldn't be doing it. Another stupid idea we are not able to get past.
This goes back before AI: see Solow's paradox.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox
* https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-solow-productivity-pa...
For my job and basically everyone I know outside of programming, the productivity from AI is literally zero.
I think what this says is the productivity is in specific silos and why the experience of the utility of AI is so vastly different for different people.
https://www.economist.com/business/2026/07/27/america-has-be...
Then they sold out and most recently literally sold out to this software company from my neck of the woods. Every single article now feels like it's written by an LLM optimized to write like a crypto/AI bro.
I used to use it daily and now not at all.
no one remembers the last time things got better rather than worse. shitcoin-driven scarcity seamlessly transitioned into COVID-driven scarcity and now into hyperscaler-driven scarcity. the chipmakers' cabal decided to meet increased demand with four digit margins rather than expanding production.
It's Deja vu for NVMe and SSD drives this time as prices are way up there.
If it persists for years people will have time to spin up more fabs and meet demand
The m6 with same specs are $2000.
Also m4 Mac mini seem to now be in stock on their refurbished store.
What happens is that people start buying Chinese mini PCs, some of those even have spyware preinstalled along with another malware that is Windows 11
After several months of wasted lifetime, it died and got the deserved burial at a recycling center.
Personal assistant (e.g. openclaw) in the mac ecosystem. You need external models to power it ofc, but cool to have all the Apple integration and local network in your assistant. The claw can be addressed in multiple ways and can command your local hardware if you so wish.
If you are running Steam in the background, one of the buttons triggers an HUD keyboard, where the left trackpad types keys on the left side of the keyboard and the right trackpad for the right side of the keyboard. My guess is the new controller works the same way.
Also, some media center software, such as Kodi, have gamepad support. So a gamepad will feel completely natural to control it without having to resort to using the mouse and HUD keyboard.
I may need to replace some parts at some point, but this far it's not been necessary.
I'd love to have the 16", which didn't exist when I bought the 13", but thanks to Altman, hardware prices are insane these days. :/
My son is using my old ~2011 Mac mini with Linux Mint on it. Slow but works.
That trend of the last several decades has been completely destroyed in the last year or so. Sure you can buy a new computer that might be slightly better than one a few years old, but it will be significantly more expensive to the point where an upgrade is almost certainly not worth it unless money is no object. Even replacing a computer from the pre-AI era would be virtually impossible at anywhere near what it cost you to buy it new unless it was verging on truly ancient by computer standards. Computers have always been a counterpoint to inflation everywhere else, but now that seems to be not only no longer true, but computer costs are inflating significantly worse than other goods.
I find myself increasingly in favor of the movement against data centers. Not because I think data centers are bad on their own, but because of the hording of computing resources they represent and the impact that has on people trying to buy any sort of computing device for their personal use. The PC I built 2 years ago is basically irreplaceable at anywhere near the price I paid for it. That's a truly unacceptable state of affairs in personal computing.
TSMC, plus flash and memory manufacturers with their own facilities, have dramatically cut production of almost anything that isn't in demand for AI, plus Macs were just about the only way to get more than 16GB of 'VRAM' without spending multiple thousands of dollars, so Mac Minis and Studios with more than about 24GB of ram have been under months-long backorders, which is unprecedented. Tim Apple made is name in supply chain logistics. Even he can't logistic his way out of this. Making things worse, the RAM that Macs use is really fast stuff, nearly the speed of high end desktop GPUs.
Supply for anything that isn't exactly what NVIDIA, Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, and MS want has pretty much evaporated. And even that stuff has skyrocketed in cost because, essentially, the race has turned into who can hoard the most of TSMC's and NVIDIA's production capacity in a particular year.
The pathetic thing is that it isn't even actual purchases in some cases. In some cases, it's OpenAI or Anthropic merely "promising" they will buy X% of a memory manufacturer's capacity.
I can't wait for all of this to come crashing down.For all this hardware that is useless for anything else because of its density and power consumption - to absolutely crater in price and become e-waste.
The official one. The reality is a bit worse. A trip to the supermarket was 50 Euros some years ago, now it is 150 - 200 50 Euros. That is not "a few percent".
Even when the cost of the cheapest computers bottomed out, it likely had more to do with lower prices not making sense. At a certain point, the cost of things that encapsulate the computer and I/O (like the enclosure and screen) end up overwhelming the cost of the actual compute.
This is capitalism, as demand increases, so does price, regardless of the cogs.
I’m worried that this is a harbinger of dollar collapse.
Inflation doesn’t show up evenly everywhere. It shows up in assets and hot areas first.
The industry has little incentive to fix this problem and as the market shrinks so does the incentive.
We lived thru the PC revolution. It looks over now to me.
IBM was extremely vertically integrated. What actually happened was that Compaq reverse engineered their BIOS and made a compatible system and the courts said it was okay.
The thing destroying the modern world is DMCA 1201. Adversarial interoperability is fundamental.
Rest assured there would be no IBM PC compatibles otherwise, in fact PS/2 and MCA architecture was a failed attempt to regain control.
The difference is that now if someone wants to make a competing store for iOS apps, or a competing client app for Reddit or Twitter, the incumbents use the DMCA and remote attestation and similar anti-competitive levers to lock those competitors out of the market and governments have been letting them get away with it.
It is easy to say that IBM had monopolistic tendencies, because they did. On the other hand, the 5100 sounds like a vertically integrated design and it ended up being extremely expensive. The Datamaster strayed away from IBM components, but was still based upon IBM software. One can blame it's failure on the IBM PC being released a month later, but in a way that would prove the point. The Datamaster had such a big head start that the IBM PC borrowed elements of it's design, while the proprietary software of the Datamaster held back its release date.
Undoubtedly, IBM wanted more control over the PC. Avoiding a completely proprietary design was probably a calculated bet, an intentional course of action rather than a mistake. It just happens to be a bet they lost.
Only a handful of companies can make high end memory, semiconductors and semiconductor equipment. And some of them are wary of creating overcapacity down the line. Creating new capacity takes years and creating a competitor to any of these companies takes even longer.
So it's absolutely possible that consumers change behaviour before a sufficient supply side response arrives.
Demand destruction is a market response as well.
Whether OEMs like Apple pass these savings along to consumers is tbd though.
And then the opposite can happen like an unknown drone with 100 kg warhead striking memory production facility.
China.
This market situation is a perfect storm for chinese manufacturers to step up. They don't have to chase latest-and-greatest, price-performance is one of the strongest demand drivers in consumer segment. They need a viable alternative, offer it at a reasonable price - which is much easier to achieve under current heavily inflated conditions - and that would quickly entrench them as a household brand.
Remember, it's not that there's no chinese lithography tech at all, it's just not advanced enough to yield mass production silicon at commercially viable prices. It might be the case that at current market conditions this caveat does not hold and all they need to do is ship. Even if the current prices mean they do it at break-even it would still be an enormously massive win.
Again, they don't have to compete at the flagship level from the get go, they need something commercially viable. There are tons of Chinese companies in the west and probably even more western on the outside chinese white-label goods. Chinese government has enough weight to push domestic silicon on those companies to create domestic silicon industry that can make the unit economies work.
All in all, there is a very likely scenario where this current AI boom and the resulting crunch on silicon supply creates a competitive silicon industry in China. If you think something in the realm of "I would not buy chinese silicon even if it was cheaper" it does not matter. Look at smartphone market share outside of USA, Japan and West Europe: in majority of the world Apple+Samsung barely touches 50%. What this "rest of the world" lacks in individual purchasing power it more than makes up for in numbers.
Even if somehow you had the super hero ability to create this silicon out of thin air and even double it, I'd argue that it wouldn't drive down prices.
Simply because both the AI datacenter's need and their ability to pay is bigger then the consumer market. So far it seems that the more silicon you throw at AI, then the better your reasoning output. So the cheaper the chips, the more these datacenters will buy. Arguably they would buy even more because then you can tell investors that you have more powerful models (due to more compute) and your price per output is cheaper (because average hardware is cheaper).
1. That a new player would offer enterprise level product, instead of consumer grade. IMO it's very likely that if such a scenario unfolded, the market would be segmented into enterprise/consumer not only at the product level, but at the supplier level too. At least initially.
2. That AI compute demand is essentially unlimited AND silicon production capacity is and will remain bottleneck in datacenter buildouts. IMO we are much closer to the point where physical infrastructure becomes the apparent bottleneck than it would seem, IF political climate allows. Datacenter buildout is THE talking point in Ohio elections and if the dems win, datacenters will become THE talking point in the whole USofA. In just a couple of months the landscape they are operating in could become very different.
What stands out to me is that you can't rely on pricing acting predictably any more, it used to be that when a new product/generation released there would be a few weeks of high demand/short supply, but when that was satisfied it would be a nice graceful decline over its lifespan until the next generation was nearly ready to come out and take its place in the market. You can look at old PCPartPicker trends graphs via archive.org to see this over and over. Now it feels like trying to catch a falling knife and it really raises the threshold for whether I actually need an upgrade versus other areas of my life where I could spend.
To be honest though, my usage does not benefit from the speed. The only benefit is to the reptile part of my brain that says “speed. Must have the fastest possible, and since I’m paying for it, even though maybe I should downgrade it, I want my speed.”
Then, like you said, on the WAN side you’ve got the monthly internet bill.
1Gbps is the sweet spot, especially since 6Ghz WiFi runs at something like 600Mbps in the real world a reasonable distance away from the WiFi router in an ideal deployment. Saturate your wired, and you get a slight benefit over a 500Mbps plan for your wireless.
The Mac Studio is Apple’s realization that the best Mac Pro was actually the Mac mini with some slight modifications.
Wait for the product to be publicly available if you want in depth testing.
I feel like a big part of macos slowing down is installing too much crap over the years that sits in the background.
M1 Max: 400 GB/s memory bandwidth, ~20.8 FP16 Tflops M4 Pro: 273 GB/s memory bandwidth ~17.2 FP16 Tflops
Today development work is limited by compile times and test run times, particularly with UI tests in the iOS simulator.
Hardware on the development machine finally maters.
I'm usually running about ~4 instances of it locally in separate Git worktrees, which (in our setup) means I'm also running 4 copies of the whole stack: web, frontend, Redis, Postgres, etc. These are rebuilt and torn down multiple times per day. Lot of frontend assets to compile.
Additionally, like many people in corporate environments, we do of course also pay a performance tax thanks to the security software we need to run.
So perf does matter for us.
We could, of course, alternatively... just run cheap shitboxes locally and have all our dev environments in the cloud. Certainly appealing in many ways from a cost perspective and you don't even need to give up DX really.
However, in the next ~5 years, as "actually useful" local LLM inference starts to become genuinely useful (for software engineering, this seems to roughly mean "the ability to run 28B+ models at usable speeds") then having local compute horsepower might start to look more attractive again. Even if it's not an absolute winner on cost/utility alone, the data privacy and cost certainty have value to many.
Because otherwise a lot of this hardware (including their blazing fast SSDs) is wasted. Cuz my M1 mac mini is awesome otherwise.
For example: it is copy-on-write, and my corruption happened in the superblock checkpoint. There is no built-in command in Disk Utility to "mount" an older checkpoint (and accepting a small amount of dataloss). Also the "First Aid" command allegedly runs volume repair top-down when it is recommended to do it inside-out.
[1] https://www.ntfs.com/apfs-structure.htm
It's the Linux kernel that deliberately does not provide user land a way to change file creation times.
Meanwhile XNU/macOS does.
I can't hate a direction where Apple becomes more about building great computers rather than trying to force more and more subscriptions. I do wish they would fix many of the long-standing OS and native app problems.
My daily driver personal machines are incredible pieces of kit, but everything is always getting worse because majority of software is some SaaS living in the cloud, or even if on-desktop is constantly updating slop.
Why does it take 10 seconds for my streaming music app to open when my machine is 10-20 cores, 32GB+ RAM, high bandwidth NVMe storage, and I am connected to gigabit fiber internet? The thing is autoplaying videos, and has about 10 different panes clearly owned by different product managers that hate each other. Half the time its pushing me some pop-up dialog I don't care about.
Winamp in 1998 took about 2 seconds to load.
Most people simply don't care about using well-made software so long as it gets the job done because they don't even look at other options. I suppose this is how carpenters feel when they see ubiquitous IKEA furniture.
Don’t know, but this as main ad headline feels almost like a threat to my personal home computing needs
I have an old M1 Max with 32GB that runs inference models fine, especially those using MLX.
Dedicated graphics cards are faster but not to the point that it matters.
That’s a six year old machine.
My newer machine M5 max 128GB will far outperform your typical 32GB gaming card once the model exceeds memory.
To even get close to that on a dedicated graphics card you are paying upwards of $20K.
That said, models are getting smaller and faster which allows me to run multiple different models with ease.
[edit] Just checked the 5 models I use take up 57GB when all loaded at the same time.
It definitely matters, if you're intending to run a Claude Code/OpenCode style agent workflow. Most of those harnesses start with 8-12k token contexts, which is a lot of prefill for a Mac but cheap for a CUDA GPU. The GPGPU compute on the fastest Macs is still trailing behind Nvidia's laptop GPUs; the highest-bandwidth Apple Silicon chip (now the M5 Ultra) has ~7x lower memory bandwidth than a single B100 card.
There's a good reason why Apple Silicon isn't to be found anywhere in the datacenter buildout. It's nonviable for training, and wastes electricity running real-world inference workloads.
But this is an old argument that seems to be thrown at Macs. Normally everything is cherry picked to show it's better than the Mac while ignoring all the features.
Although I would hope if you pay $8K you can get something that outperforms the Mac in every way.
Back in early 2000's I was commissioned to build an application that should also run on the Mac.
I bought a second hand old Mac Mini. Within a couple of months I bought a brand new one, and since then I have been on Mac when it comes to non-gaming (even though it can do gaming).
The main reason was I could just get shit done. The operating system is transparent to what I needed to do. With Windows you were forever dealing with the operating system to solve things.
Windows eventually got better in this regards, and more recently worse again.
I own/use windows as well. But mainly for gaming or a VM on an internal server.
Often when people give a comparison of how much PC is better, they compare a PC desktop to a laptop. Windows laptops for the same features is same or more expensive, while feeling cheap/heavy/noisy.
So form factor is one part of it, and then how the whole ecosystem works together with my phone/iPad and other devices.
At the end of the day, if I am doing any serious inferencing then I use my companies server, or Claude.
...
What has amazed me over the years is the sheer hate I get from some people for even owning a Mac. I was probably the same, but I was younger then.
Its died down since ARM came in, but the irrational hate seems wasted. Someone prefers Linux, Android, Windows, etc. Good for them.
To be specific, 5 models at 57 gb means you are using crap quantized models, which suck for any real agentic work. I mean, sure they give you some inference, but compared to the full parameter models like Qwen3.8 and Gemma4 that can run full agentic loops, you may as well just use cloud inference for the price.
You of course could "run" those larger models, but we both know that the tok/sec is dogshit on Macs for those.
And 57 gb is split across 3 cards quite easily, which will all be cheaper than your comparable Mac and way faster.
You really need to educated yourself on how running local models works and what the models like Gemma 4 are capable of, so you don't continue to waste money on Macs.
You mean someone who uses a Mac? I find the term "Apple fan" is used as a way to attack the person.
> that can run full agentic loops, you may as well just use cloud inference for the price.
You can run full agentic loops fine with quantised models. In fact that is likely what you are doing with a 32GB PC Graphics card. Or what model are you using?
You use the right model for the right job. For example granite4.2 is optimised for agentic work and only needs 5GB of memory.
Gemma4 MLX runs fine with the larger model needing 19GB.
Prior to that I had OpenClaw (in Parallels VM) create an application with local models that worked the exact same way as created by Claude. It was more an experiment in how OpenClaw works, hence the VM.
> And 57 gb is split across 3 cards quite easily,
I assume you are talking about a good graphics card. A good 32GB will run you $2K a card, so that $6K to beat out a laptop of similar price, and where the difference doesn't matter.
And 3090 is $1500 used, and 24gb gb of ram. 3x is $4500 for 72gb of ram.
I have never had that issue, and LLMs are used for more than just code generation.
> And 3090 is $1500 used
Second hand Macs are also cheaper.
Not sure what your point is, but you just seem to arguing because of your hatred of Macs.
"Please don't act like a jerk on HN. There are articles and comments criticizing Apple all the time and it's fine."
And no, being nice to people that have no problem just straight up lying about shit is not the solution.
It depends on what model(s) you want to run.
IMO memory size is the most important since you can always wait longer for it to compute while a blazing fast but dumb model is much less useful.
I really don’t see how they can avoid it not in the current climate, the design and engineering is already there, 10 to 20 billion dollars is already there, all they need to do is partner with Intel or TSMC onshore in the USA, Arizona would be fine. but Prineville Oregon would be better.
As a disclaimer though, I haven't even tried to really run local models on the M1 as I also have a 'gaming PC' that can run them fine.
However the main reason I would upgrade is to run LLMs locally and RAM prices are making this a no-go. One day if RAM comes down to earth I'll upgrade. If not I'll stick to this old machine for a long time.
I mean, local LLMs already are really good if you own Nvidia Cards, not sure what you are waiting for. 2x3090 will blow any current Mac out of the water in tok/sec
Apple's software holds the hardware back, and it's ugly (especially liquid glass!)