There's no happy medium here that would satisfy everybody: when they make marketing claims about improvements relative to products from several years ago, they get criticized for not focusing on the improvements relative to last gen (even if those comparisons are also somewhere in the announcement). When they focus on the most recent generations, people complain that it doesn't make sense to upgrade every year.
Just accept that even if you aren't still using an Intel MacBook Pro, the comparison is still relevant to some part of their target market.
They only just dropped support for Intel Macs from this fall's operating system release (but are still doing security patches for the releases that Intel Macs can run). A year from now, it actually will be fairly reasonable to expect them to give up marketing to the holdouts.
> Apple is now comparing against computers they were selling 7-8 years ago
6 years ago, which is still within the amount of time that people commonly keep premium laptops for. And they compare against the most recent previous model too.
Just Josh Tech’s review of the Framework 13 Pro or the Lenovo ThinkPad X9 15p Aura Edition. Multiple similar sized/classed laptops get better battery life.
This is of course as of the M5, M6 hasn’t been tested yet.
last time I checked, every Windows laptop had the absolutely massive caveat that it needed to throttle performance by a ton to have a low enough TDP to compete on battery life. You just cannot match the efficiency of ARM Apple chips with an x86 chip.
I think it makes sense. Do you think most potential buyers are coming from last year's model, or from laptops that are more like 3-5 years old?
As long as they're clear about the comparisons they're making ("X% more battery life than Y" as opposed to simply ("X% more battery life") I'm good with it.
About time they put a battery in the lid, which is what an iPad already manages to do with thinness. Boom another half a decade of updates all the way to 48hrs
It's confusingly worded but I think it's a suggestion for something Apple could do in the future. I don't see any mention of this in the linked Apple article.
I'm currently on a marathon to keep my M1 Pro running until the M7 Pro/Max is available. Not sure if I'll make it, but I'm not eager to pay $6000+ for a decent spec dev computer, until I really have to
I’ve been a Mac user for 20 years and it’s wild to think how slow my 2003 PowerBook G4 or even my 2008 MacBook Pro felt after five years compared with my 2021 M1 Pro.
My 2013 Core i7 took almost eight years to get to where the previous ones felt at five, and if it weren’t for local LLMs pushing me toward an upgrade in the next year or two, I have to imagine my M1 Pro could be my daily driver well into the next decade.
My 16" M1 Pro personal laptop is literally just as smooth for 99% of tasks as my work M5 pro. It's crazy how well they built these. I mean the screen on this and the speakers are superb. And you can find these for like 500-800 bucks 2nd hand. I just hope they give us a few more years of MacOS updates.
I'm wondering what decrease in performance you were expecting from a five year old computer? It isn't like the processor suddenly gets slower simply because it's older.
I rode a 2009 MacPro5,1 (¡galliently! into the future, with capable GPU upgrades) until Jan23's M2Pro mini debut (which I still use as my main Mac).
Apple Silicon is certainly incredible (I also have a base-model M4mini, but it severely lacks RAM/ports so I don't really use it much/eWaste); my only Silicon-purchase-regret was buying a beautiful new 2024 MacBookAir (15") – heavily discounted $850@CostCo – but with only 8GB of RAM (it is functionally worthless, other than for watching it destroy your SSD with page-outs as you casually stream YouTubies...). In 2024, only 8GB of RAM (soldered onto the board because fuck you)!
Macbook Pro 14" Max M1 (64GB). Best Apple device I've owned and worth the investment at the time, especially given the prices now. It's still pretty great for being as old as it is. Have no intention to pay inflated prices, I'll ride it out.
I'm loving my M1 Macbook Air still, and only a few weeks away from six years of use Sometimes it lags a bit when I'm running a macOS VM, and all the coding agent VMs, so I'm kind of interested in going to 32GB of RAM, but honestly this computer is still faster than any of my laptops that came before, even with the visual atrocity of Liquid Glass.
I'll go and look at this new box, drool a little, and realize that I'd get more personal utility from donating $3k (or whatever the trade in delta is) to a charity than upgrading my computer.
My son's M1 Air CPU died suddenly. Maybe it was a thermal death from overheating. Not sure. But all the data on it was lost because the storage is soldered on. PSA to make sure devices with non-removable storage are backed up!
(We replaced it with a Framework... with removable storage.)
In Windows, by default, Microsoft tools put projects in ~/source/repos, which OneDrive, in turn, by default won't touch so they'll be lost if the SSD fail and they're not in git.
However, OneDrive doesn't seem to even know how to handle source files (it doesn't even attempt to honor the gitignore), so rebuilding a project in folders covered by OneDrive results in flurries of temporary files being uploaded/updated to the cloud, hogging the bandwidth, with a bonus of locking files, crashing builds, or even reverting changes silently.
One would think backup tools, even if primarily for normal users are still literally made by programmers, at least consider the use case of programmers instead of just ignoring them entirely.
>file sync is backup against the things most people have to deal with
I would say accidentally deleting a file is more common than a house fire, so NO, file-sync is not a backup nor is RAID (block-sync) or clustering (data/state-sync).
A backup is/should be a non-modifiable snapshot of data/files maybe even a state.
I give you an example:
You have a password-safe (as a file). Your computer blows up, but you are safe, because your password-safe is synced on Dropbox....but oh my god what was the password to Dropbox??? Your restore is gone because you forgot to "backup" your password-safe.
However you are not a Loser, being a Admin is a ~lost art and a really good paid one (again).... ;)
It goes to your trash can/recycle bin for a while. That's literally what it's for: to guard against accidental deletes. Very few people accidentally delete files from their computer's drive anymore. The only time people do this in 2026 is accidentally formatting an SD card that had their camera's pictures on it or something.
I guess I'm not tracking. I put all my source folders in my Documents folder on the Mac, and check the checkbox to have that sync to iCloud. It works quite well.
I also do a bunch of video work with Da Vinci Resolve, and those project files are in the same folder. I don't keep the clips there, those are on an external disc, but that's just because I haven't gone from the two terabyte iCloud plan to the six terabyte plan.
Surprising somehow, to me.
One would imagine Apple could make a good amount of money by selling storage and thoughts-off safety for normies?
And catch up to what Google offered like then years ago already with ChromeOS.
> PSA to make sure devices with non-removable storage are backed up!
Really this should be devices full stop. Also, "backed up" should include no fewer than two backups on different media and in different physical locations e.g. Time Machine to an external SSD _plus_ continuous cloud backup.
1. And yet we have someone on HN reminding everyone to even have a backup in the first place so let's not assume everyone on HN can't also make "average people mistakes".
2. You mean the climate activists who used to risk their lives back in the 80s on open oceans instead of gluing themselves to streets? Yeah, the times have changed.
I agree, if it has too much friction it's more likely you will postpone it. Any option, either just a cloud backup tool or a spare HDD or SSD with CCC or TimeMachine is better than nothing. And you have to plan for the most likely case, e.g. spilling beer on the laptop vs the house burning down.
For the house burning scenario, a cheap strategy is having one or two old HDD's in USB cases, located somewhere away from your house, in a place you regularly visit and trust security-wise. Then you can just make a habit of dumping the files there whenever visiting. Most important data of mine is safe even if internet goes down and somebody nukes the city I live in, for zero recurring cost.
While I was expressing an ideal setup, it isn’t all or nothing. A single backup is still better than none at all.
I suppose I didn’t specify exactly what I would recommend to someone who thinks it’s too hard, so here is that:
1. Install Backblaze. This is basically fire and forget.
2. (1) is enough for most people, but if interested (and on a Mac, which is what I’m familiar with), plug in an external SSD once a week or so for Time Machine. Setup involves clicking on the drive in the setup wizard and specifying an encryption password.
I don’t know about “ultra” robust, but this gives you protection from accidental deletions, natural disasters happening to your computer, hardware failures, and corruption from software bugs. The ongoing maintenance is plugging in a hard drive once a week.
If that is too much effort, just (1) provides natural disaster and hardware failure protection. It helps somewhat with the others but Backblaze only saves versions for 60 days and that’s a tight window to notice subtle corruption of e.g. your photos.
if you want to talk about 'average people' go hang out on reddit. How many times have 'average people' been brought up here explicitly to shut down a discussion. It is reductive and insulting
how many good things have 'average people' (and the avaricious wanterpreneurs chasing their dollars) ruined? Nearly everything!
That's a big ask. Probably only work the few hundred it'd take to do that, then get the data off it, if you had some super important documents // crypto wallet.
Is it really? In China you can upgrade your iPhone storage this way. Sure it's not for your average phone case store, but it's not exactly rocket science either.
Unfortunately not really a lot of places to do this in the US. And unlike shipping new devices from China to US, shipping used devices from US to China and back is prohibitively expensive.
The backup would live someplace other than on the broken machine. It would be encrypted some other way (or maybe not at all, depending on threat profile).
No point in encrypting those family photos burned to disc.
that's just a false sense of security. A machine should be treated as a whole. Separate components only matter economically, not for data security.
My macbook updates my documents etc to my NAS, and the NAS syncs to crucial folders to the cloud (not everything for cost reasons)
You should always assume your device can be stolen, you can spill fluids on it (or a guest), a cat can pee on it, an electric shock may kill it... No matter how great care you take of it, shit happens, data needs to be safe.
The SSD dying standalone vs the system dying doesn't change at all for data security. It's not a different risk factor
Hard drives failing is a far more common problem in my experience. As is theft and loss - one should always treat a laptop as if it will fail at any moment and keep good backups.
If your looking for arguments against soldered storage the facts ssds are wear items and will eventually need replacement is a much better one.
If almost ANY failure means the laptop is basically bricked then even with good backups it means days or weeks before being back up to speed, having a working laptop with recovered data, esp. when working on highly confidential data as agreements can mean you cannot upload the data to a cloud.
If given a choice, I prefer a system where a HDD/RAM/GPU/CPU/PSU/Screen/Port/Battery/Keyboard failure is barely if at all disruptive to one where all of these effectively brick the system.
SSDs are a more common failure point, as is theft or loss or damage.
The point is it shouldn’t matter if the cpu or ssd dies because you have backed up everything already and are prepared for anything to fail or happen to the device rather then “oh the ssd is removable so in these select few situations I can recover my data”
It's unrelated to the physical connection, but the drive encryption used on the built-in drive keeps its keys in the CPU's secure enclave, so dead CPU == data lost, regardless of whether the ssd itself is damaged.
Obviously if you used the same encryption scheme on a removable drive you'd hit the same issue - but most people don't do that, because storing the encryption keys in the Secure Enclave makes your drive effectively no longer removable.
Even if the storage is soldered on the data can still be saved if it's not the storage that died and even then, it could be possible to retireve at least part of the data. Get a data recovery specialist.
I bought my M1 Pro the week it came out and it was unlike any computer I ever had, expectations, compute, battery life especially. It was just a joy to use and not worry about chargers. I'm so glad they went this path.
I had an M1 Max machine with 32GB of memory and upgraded it to an M4 Max machine with 128GB of memory for local AI model experimentation.
It's sad that M5 (and M6) are so much faster at prefilling and other LLM-related operations, but I'm happy with the computer I got and will keep it at least 3-4 generations.
They really have radically improved the situation for prefill speed! But the generation speed is behind enough that you'd notice. An M4 Max is a great choice I think.
Stay strong! I went from an M1 to M5 generation, and it was a nice bump, but I could have gone another year without any significant impact on my quality of life/work.
My i7 is still running the marathon...pretty poorly. But it's still there!
It's painful to use my work provided M4 Max all day and then switch to my 2019 i7 in the evenings. Even my older work provided M1 Pro ran circles around the i7, the difference was staggering.
I have a M1 pro for personal use and an M4 pro from work and I don't notice any difference switching between them. The M1 is still more than enough for most computer usage.
I just bought a m1 Air with 8GB as secondary device to the m4 mbp that my employer provides since they dialed up the spyware lately.
I should have bought a m4 Air last November but I hope the m1 holdes until the rampocalypse is over.
I have an M1 Pro as well but my next computer will be a split setup mainly because I realized that I'm most often working / focusing on hard things while at the desk and just browsing / checking in on things when I'm away from the desk so I'm thinking something like:
I have M1 Maxes (one for work, one for home) that perform as good as new, as far as I can tell. Only thing they lack is an Nvidia GPU. I might pick up the new uber-studio though tmw when it launches (presumably).
I've been using my M1 Max 64 GB for 5 years now and it's pretty zippy once you rewrite some slow software. I have an M4 Max with 128 GB but I never ended up migrating to it. That's how good it is.
Not op here, but I rewrote the file manager giving claude only two goals: cold startup below 100ms and 30mb nikon raw preview also below 100ms. One night in a loop and it hit around 20, 30ms respectively. My macs now feel uber fast.
you should, I was surprised how seamless migrating was. I just connected both devices with a usb c cable, waited an hour, and everything was moved. Including application settings etc... It was completely painless. Just needed to login to some new websites etc.., but it took me less than 30 minutes of my effort to migrate, mindblow (total time was 2 hours because it copies all your data, but you don't have to stay with it)
I think I'm on the same computer, the M1 MBP with the touchbar right? I was eyeing an upgrade for a while but now that I've transitioned to running agents on a home server instead of locally, I think I'll be putting my money into a ram upgrade for that box instead. My macbook is basically a dumb terminal at this point, the only reason for an upgrade would be battery life. I might get an air or even a neo if this thing dies.
My M1 MacBook Pro has been the best hardware investment I’ve ever made. I had planned to update it in 2025 at the four year mark, but it’s still going strong so I don’t see a reason. The new plan is to go to the Apple store the very day that it dies.
I also have a high spec M1 and was delaying upgrading, but eventually I needed more RAM.
My M1 is still fast and enjoyable, but I regret to inform you that the M5 actually does feel faster in day to day use. I thought for sure I wouldn’t notice, but the difference is there.
When I do large builds the difference is also bigger than I was expecting.
IMO Apple knows a ton of people are doing this, especially with the rumors on memory bandwidth aka LPDDR6X bringing huge generational uplifts[0], which is why it seems they haven't brought down trade-in values from a few weeks ago, at least for my base spec M2 Pro MBP - Still $835. Pretty compelling to do that and pay just over $100/mo for a year to get a M6, given I've already gotten >3 years out of it.
this machine just keeps getting better and better in the inference world. the memory bandwidth is too good, newer macbook pros aren't that much faster in memory bandwidth, many are slower. not enough to upgrade yet as they're mostly horizontal upgrades.
if they do the M7 correctly: which is just everything their current models do plus way faster memory bandwidth and much greater memory possible 192GB+, then it will be a really great and timely upgrade
no it’s stuck there, M1 has a 720p cam with a smaller sensor thats noticeably bad in low light, and the refresh has occurred twice to 1080p with larger sensor and 12MP but cropped to 1080p for audience tracking
That’s what even low spec computers used to cost, not even adjusted for inflation. I don’t think spending $200-400/month on a hardware budget that enables me to earn 50-100x that is that onerous, we just think “six grand for a laptop???!?” But it’s ridiculously cheap for what it is. We wouldn’t be similarly shocked at a $6k car, for example.
I figured my direct family could use an extra Macbook, so I decided to "peel" my M1 Pro away as a gift to my mom. It stays close, I can use her unused space as backup, provide ad-hoc Tailscale to her (way smoother than with her crufty Windows machine), and I get a nice upgrade to my current workflows.
Having said that, I did plan on sticking it out 7 years. Ended up bailing on an M5 Pro!
Also M1 Pro here. Any reason why you're planning to upgrade at M7 Pro? I still don't feel the need to upgrade, as much as I wish I could justify it.
I like to factory reset my devices every couple of years, it really gives them a new lease on life. My M1 Pro feels as smooth and fast as the day I got it.
For the ability to run our full server-side application stack locally, including all services and as much of the test suite as possible, as well as the profilers, debuggers and telemetry tools to debug issues. Way faster to develop when you can have a change running live in about 3 seconds instead of 5 minutes, run targeted tests in seconds and a full test suite in a few minutes.
Not op here, but: i have a build box i ssh to, but when on the go: planes, taxis, etc. its annoying to constantly have to connect. Slightly. Having a fallback, fast local laptop is a convenience. Tho I do travel a lot - usually >100 flights per year.
When I was in the market for a new machine, I had the same attitude. As I was about to hit "Buy" on a standard issue $2k MBP, my wife said, "What if we got you a top of the line machine?"
I replied that it would make no sense unless I was going to start running local inference or training my own models locally...
2 years later, and this MacBook Pro M4 Max w/48GB is the best $4k I've ever spent!
Big test suites. I have one project hitting 35 mins on m1 max, vs around 12 min on the m5 max, vs. 7 min on the linux box I keep in the basement. Unit tests, integration tests, headless browser with webgpu stuff.
Are you on the model with the CD drive or the high resolution "thin body" version? I graded the ram in mine and put in an SSD, and it still works beautifully, but I'm now on now on Linux with it, and have been for some time.
My M1 screen just cracked :(
Debating to get it fixed (it’s a 32GB 2 TB machine). Crazy that I likely will spend 500€ to get a super old machine repaired just so au do not have to spend >3000€ for a similarly equipped new one.
Happily running my M1 Max, but have recently been annoyed at my decision to go with the off-the-shelf 32GB version at the time. I recalled telling friends at the time that the ridiculous memory bandwidth should offset that, so I ran some tests on memory pressure while running all my mess and, well, whaddya know, everything is actually tickety-boo. No memory pressure for the most part. And this is with big rust projects, Orbstack builds and runs.
The engineering that went into the M1 was amazing, I truly think that now, an M1 Max was the biggest bargain ever in my entire computing life. £3,299.00. In contrast, the 64GB i9 I bought only two years before was £4,149.00.
The “on-device AI” with the standard M6 seems to be slightly faster than the M1 Max of five years ago. All the rest seems to more or less match. Hope the M7 Max is yet another leap that serves many users for years to come.
The M1 Max MacBook with 64 gigabytes is still a great machine and fairly affordable on the second-hand market.
(Returning an i9 to wait a few more years on the M1, any M1, was absolutely worth it)
Haha same here. The M1 Pro is such a powerful machine and it still works great.
I did buy a MacBook Air M5 for non work, and I think it’s about as fast as the M1 Pro, but the latter has 64GB of RAM so I can actually work. Will probably request a new one next year though, it’s time.
I’m hopeful mine survives until RAM and SSD prices return to Earth. Unless I drop it I suspect it will. It’s still going strong. Maybe the M8. Hopefully chips and local LLMs have developed to the degree that local inference will be good and fast.
I saw a decent listing for a 16" 16gb m1 pro macbook the other day, and i was seriously considering spending those money.
I have a 16" m4 max from work (36gb) and is an incredible machine (build quality, incredible display, overall feel). I also have a private macbook neo which should be similar to M1 in terms of performance but it's limited to 8gb of memory.
The neo/M1 performances are sufficient for my needs (for private computing) and chances are the M1 pro actually performs better than my neo (if anything for the more abundant memory).
I might to back to the listing and try to haggle the price even lower, considering a new generation of macbook pros has just been announced.
I gave away my base spec (8gb ram, 256gb ssd) M1 air just a few months ago and it's still working fine, I just needed something higher than base spec for work but the new owner of the M1 loves it, for general purpose use it may as well be an M5.
I do wish they had removable storage though, I originally got that Macbook as it was the cheapest way I could try out MacOS and M1, once I decided I liked it, I was stuck with 256gb or spending all that money (and then some) again. This time, I went with 1tb.
my intel to M1 Pro upgrade was like stepping into the future, still on it and my only motivation fro swapping computers is i dropped it from my lap when i fell asleep after a long day with the kids, and the n key hasn't worked for a year
authorized repair shop says 4 days to fix it and it's my only laptop, so i go without :(
Indeed, pricing has gone a bit out of hand. I got the top-of-the-line MBP when I was starting my PhD at the end of 2013, for something like $3,200. You couldn't get a more expensive consumer-oriented laptop at the time. It's mind-boggling that the equivalent purchase today costs around twice as much.
Me too, running a 16 inch M1 Pro. So glad I went for 32GB as that'll add to the longevity. Providing no hardware failures I can see at least another 4-5 years. It's been running silky smooth up to now even with the Golden Gate update.
I mean, you don't have to. Do you need a Mac? I make mobile apps and Xcode is only on macOS so I definitely need it but most people don't, there are Windows and Linux options that are great for fractions of the price.
I'm always surprised that devs need such high spec machines just for developing software. Unless you're developing games or scientific computing software or similar, I din't know what the power would be used for.
My dev machine is an i5 of some description about 6 years old, that's about all I could tell you off the top of my head because I've never worried about needing slightly faster compiles. (Ignoring running local LLMs of course. Currently they can't compete with Opus 5.5)
I'm developing an inference engine and need access to the latest Neural Accelerator features, and therefore need to keep up to date with the Apple releases. M1 through M5 Max 128GB. As a broke bootstrapped un-funded startup founder this is extremely tough to afford given the price increases and all.
I'm still running a 4 year old M1 Max 32GB Mac Studio as my daily and really haven't found anything that it shows sign of slowness/age with.
That said I don't do any local AI or 8K video editing type stuff.
On upgrade I could probably live on a moderate/high spec Mac mini since the only reason I went Studio originally was the resolution/number of displays it could support.
I'm with you. Typing this on a 2021 m1 64gb. I keep thinking it's time to get a new one and I'd really like 128gb but justifying the spend is REALLY hard. I've had m5/128gb for a few weeks at a time and it's an upgrade for sure, but not $6k+ upgrade.
One of the interesting slights of hand Apple marketing must do is simultaneously say the new processor is awesome while selling the higher spec versions of the previous processor as upgrades:
The M6 chip joins M5 Pro and M5 Max to create our most advanced line-up of chips ever built for a pro laptop. With a 12-core CPU, 12-core GPU and our first ever Dual 16‑core Neural Engine, M6 brings next-generation speed and advanced on device AI. All three chips deliver phenomenal single- and multithreaded CPU performance and faster unified memory. . . .
The case of your 5090 having become a coveted artifact of great rarity in these times - may be a nuance of some measure.
Also, the following two have very different 'needs' to feel good enough:
1. heavy agentic workloads via harness
vs
2. a simple private chat interface with a local instance
Even if an MBP's bandwidth were higher, it's tough to see a reason to run it as a constantly loaded 24/7 inference machine due to heat degradation.
P.S. still extremely awesome to be able to host and chat with a decently quantized 27B model on your laptop. ...and to be fair even a 32GB Air would do that!
It is a thing of beauty: the amount of folks this may add to the hacker/tinker community.
The 5090 does have a bandwidth advantage, but also must pass more data from main to GPU memory for any particular task. Comparisons of a 5090 to a DGX Spark at 273 GB/s are illustrative since the Spark uses unified memory similar to Apple's M-series. [0] The 5090 certainly wins most benchmarks but that doesn't mean the DGX Spark is not useful.
Loading data to the GPU will generally never be the bottleneck. Yes that's a bit better for unified memory, but prefill and decode will still be bound by compute and memory bandwidth respectively.
There's some value in having a huge amount of memory addressable by the GPU for loading larger models, but even that doesn't make sense for current gen models. For MOE models, newer inference engines with smarter GPU expert caching and pinned memory allow a GPU with lots of bandwidth to significantly outperform a Spark, so that leaves you with larger dense models that fit on a spark but not on a GPU where you might have a use-case.
But even then it's hard. For instance a full-fat BF16 of a ~30B parameter model will fit on a 128GB spark and not a 32GB 5090, but at that size it's going to be frustratingly slow on the spark given the compute and bandwidth constraints.
Imo these devices are mostly good for experimentation, or if you only want to do overnight jobs or training which wouldn't be possible on a GPU, and you don't want to pay $100k for a DGX station.
Hmm, still no OLED displays? I wonder what's the holdup? (I have a fairly mainstream PC laptop with OLED display, and the display is the one thing where my MBP looks pretty poor in direct comparison).
The M6 version is also cheaper than the M5 Max by a significant amount. I wouldn't be surprised if the M6 could keep up on LLM prefill (compute bound), but the memory bandwidth means that decode is going to be a lot slower, most likely?
If you want to do anything beyond getting a small single-core speed bump the M5 Pro is a better, more capable purchase. At least until the M7 comes out.
It's also absolutely wild that you apparently cannot spec one with more than 32GB, for any amount of money? Wow.
Not that I blame Apple here, for once. Seems like they're trying to cope with the limited quantity of RAM they can procure. And with the paltry bandwidth (170GB/s) of these CPUs they're a bad choice for anything but tiny local models anyway.
That's for the base model M6. The Pro can take more, the Max even more, the Ultra the most.
They're not making those models for the M6 though; they rerouted their resources to making M7 faster at running local LLMs.
If you want more bandwidth, get an M5 Pro, Max, or Ultra. If you want a lower power base model, get the M6. If you want to have your cake and eat it too, wait for the M7, reportedly in the spring.
Umm yes, the M6 chip only has a certain amount of memory controllers and channels, which means you can only have so many LPDDR5X modules.
Yes, high-capacity LPDDR5X are made and do exist, but for all practical intents and purposes, you can't buy enough of them to deliver to customers at Apple scale.
Why would you want greasy fingerprints all over your display and gorilla arm syndrome when there's a perfectly fine keyboard and touchpad attached to the display for free?
No reason for gorilla-arm when touch is an alternative interaction mode and not a required one. You still have trackpad and keyboard. You can dynamically switch modes depending on the action.
Gorilla-arm was a fear based on the naive idea that if you had touch, you would be required to only use touch for every action.
Is apple going to be so restrained to keep the design of the OS as a mouse first experience or are they going to cripple information density so I might be able to close a window with my elbow?
People act as if Chromebooks with touch screens aren't already considered a huge UX upgrade over Chromebooks without. Use your finger where it makes sense and the mouse where it doesn't. Literally nobody gets tripped up over this in practice.
Chromebooks run Android apps natively, so you can flip the screen around and use them as pure tablets or just use tablet apps in laptop mode just fine. For math, you can just write directly on the screen. In schools, kids playing Blooket/Gimkit/Kahoot on touchscreen devices crush those using a touchpad.
Is this an odd rollout for their actual high end MacBook Pros, or is this sitting in that space where they like to have a base MacBook Pro between their Airs and the expensive MacBook Extremely Pros?
Just the standard chip without Pro/Max makes me assume this is that base one. If so, the price is way high for where that tends to sit, but welcome to buying a computer in 2026 I guess.
Just now realizing there's a difference between "MacBook Pro with M# chip" and "MacBook Pro with M# Pro chip". Was curious to see how my MBP with M4 Pro compared, and I saw it has 273 gb/s memory bandwidth compared to the MBP M6 (sans Pro)'s 170gb/s. Makes sense that "Pro" in the laptop model doesn't also describe the chip, but only if you remember that the non-pro "Macbook" line stopped in 2017 (which was the last time I went shopping for Apple laptops until buying the MBP4)
The "Pro" in MacBook Pro has slowly degraded to "it comes with a fan so that the chip can keep chugging when it gets a hard workload, unlike the MacBook Air where the chip will throttle since there's no fan".
If anything, Pro really means pro now. It used to just be the default laptop everyone bought because the Air was too slow and had a terrible screen. The 2020 MBP was almost as thin as the MBA and had barely any more connectivity.
I switched entirely over to Asahi Linux on my M1 Macbook Air and installed a third-party 55Wh battery, as the original battery had fallen below 80% capacity. That machine is good to go for another 5 years.
There are no features or performance characteristics of any of the subsequent M[2-6] Macbook Air or Pro models that I care about.
How is Asahi Linux from a reliability perspective? Last I checked there were some issues with docking and HDMI out that would've made it tough for me to use as a daily driver.
Not a Mac user. I assume HDMI might be improving soon as AMD finally got the HDMI consortium to wind their necks in and full HDMI support was recently merged.
While not Asahi/M1, I can tell you my desktop has been Linux Mint for about 5 years, including through distro upgrades, etc and I have had to troubleshoot it like once.
97% is a high estimate based on my linux efforts.. just yesterday some kind of update, i think kernel, took out my amd graphics.. still wouldn’t pick anything else.
Funny you say this. I had my issues with Linux during the years but last 2-3 years I have been running it with no issues whatsoever on a Dell XPS 9xxx series. I recently got an M5 Max and it had more issues than the Linux/Dell duo.
It wasn't meant to be bait. I'd really like it if Linux was as rock solid as Mac or Windows. But it clearly isn't and it doesn't help anyone that so many Linux fans pretend it is (look at the replies!).
That said, I do have hopes that AI will basically solve this. It's extremely good at diagnosing low level bugs, reverse engineering drivers and so on. A silver lining of AI taking our jobs at least!
Funny that Linux is perceived as unstable, I have to fix a Windows laptop where Windows starts up fine 1 time out of 10, while normally it freezes (not even blue screens) on the boot loading spinner, I've done everything possible (including of course running a 2 hours RAM test, and testing it with a Linux live USB) to exclude hardware problems, so what is remains is... Windows of course.
One of my coworker that uses a Mac has an issue with a USB dongle that stopped working randomly, not even with a system update. If he uses on its laptop the external monitor remains blank, the same dongle with another monitor and another identical Macbook with the same macOS version works, the same dongle with the same PC and another brand of monitor works, the same PC with the same monitor and a dongle of a different brand does work, but a different dongle of the same model doesn't. So I guess for some reason macOS saved the ID of that dongle and the setting got corrupted. Tried to reset the hell of it and it doesn't work.
I've never had similar issues with Linux. Most of the time when something doesn't work with Linux you just look at the logs, figure out what is wrong, correct it, and it start work fine again. Configuration of the system is predictable, if you install a software and then you uninstall it the system is left in the same state as before installing it, it doesn't leave files that waste disk space, as well as when you upgrade the system (yes, every Windows or macOS update leaves old stuff behind that it's impossible to delete, effectively "leaking" disk space at the point you have to perform a clean install).
Also really happy with Omarchy on Macbook.
I installed the nightly kernel that has usb-c and it works really well. Connects fine to both LG Ultrafine 5k, and Studio Display. https://x.com/AGTPinsights/status/2106564829532328331
Still some tiny issues with waking from sleep lid closed, but I'm expecting to get that fixed myself with some prompting this week. The people working on Linux on Mac are really impressive (and have access to unlimited tokens), so I expect all issues to be fixed very soon.
Being able combine agents, linux software and Apple hardware is so much fun.
It's quite stable. Been running NixOS on my M2 Max with basically no issues (HDMI working fine as well). However the lack of adequate sleep / no support for suspend to disk led to me buying a Framework 13 Pro, and I'm now selling the M2.
I think the point the OP was making was that you can rent this for a couple of hours when you need it, and then it makes sense. If you are using it say 2 hours a week (or even 5 hours a week) it's going to be much cheaper than building your own hardware for a long long time.
It's a little confusing from the page, but you can't actually use those hourly in terms of spinning them up. You pay the € 209 - 1499 setup fee when you provision one. They're just showing the monthly price broken down into an hourly price.
How is using an external provider any better for privacy sensitive issues? European provider does not automatically mean they aren’t logging everything or that they’d nor share that with a bidder?
No the OP, but I keep a $10 rolling budget on vast.ai. I tend to use it more for training things, but equally as useful. I pay about $0.15/hour for an A4000.
OTOH if you are really concerned about privacy it's probably not the best choice (it's random people's machines).
That's exactly what I am doing. I have a Dell R740 with 96 cores and 512 GB of RAM, and RAID 10 with 16 SSDs. All of my machines connect to it via Tailscale.
Did the same. Took a week or so to get used to the workflow after doing dev locally my entire career, but now I'm certain it's the best way to work. Even better is using a few scripts to simplify things like opening in VS Code (instead of `code folder-name` I run `codeon repo-name` from my local machine).
I did actually get a new M5 Pro/48GB machine last month, but that's only because I bought my work machine to keep my personal and professional lives properly separated; otherwise I wasn't seeing any issue running that M3 Max/36GB for a long time further.
I've just transitioned to the same setup a week ago - that's why I'm considering Air as the next upgrade, given the better portability.
One thing that bugs me mentally is leaving that machine pending on my input ("wasted") overnight etc... I'd like to arrive at a workflow where I can have agents running toward the overall goal autonomously overnight as much as they can, and I can review and iterate and "engineer" parts that need it afterwards...
For now, I still guide implementation very closely, piece by piece. Has anyone had any good experiences with workflows / skills / similar for that?
I haven't had good outcomes from letting the agent decide what to do, but if you spend time deciding what tasks to add to your backlog, then how to accomplish those tasks, when you're awake, you can end up with five or six or more projects to let your agent do overnight. planning when you're awake, execution when you're not.
I have a Hetzner box that costs about 10$ a month - I use that as my always-on box. I use Pi as my harness and they run in herdr. I can then from my Mac (bottom of the line macbook air - next laptop will be a Neo) ssh to the box and control my agents. I can also ssh into the box from my iPhone (using Termius) and continue seamlessly from there too.
Have the same setup -- got a good black friday deal last year on an AMD 395+ w/ 128gb of RAM. Still not super bullish on running AI models on it, but it makes a great dev server anyway.
Actually had claude spin up a kanban board to manage my tasks in a 'TODO -> Implement -> Review -> QA -> Shipping -> Done' flow (with a worktree for each task) that works great!
If that continues to be the case, next time you can "downgrade" to the MacBook Air. Even today you can get one with 32GB RAM, so when you're in the market I'm sure more will be available. They are quite thin and light compared to the MBPs.
Yep, that's why this M6 Pro and its ancestors probably exists. It's for people whose work can run on MacBook Air specs but with the superior screen, battery, speakers, and ports.
True. I still think it is good. My dream is for 120Hz on a future Air model. I took it as a positive sign they brought 120Hz to the non-Pro iPhones with the models last year. I can dream, I guess. And yes, I know MBP screen has benefits other than the refresh rate.
> all I need is a laptop with a big/nice enough screen to ssh
> 48GB 16 inch MBP
That's wicked overkill for ssh + browser. A 15" MacBook Air would work for this really nicely. This is how I use my 13" Air, and for the big screen I dock it at a desk.
I wish they could bring back the 11" Air or 12" MacBook and trim the bezels for something like this. It would be an amazingly portable computer. The 11" iPad Pro with keyboard case is almost this, but you're stuck with iOS and it's actually pretty thick and heavy compared to a MacBook.
I'm currently having an M2, but I just can't imagine buying an Apple laptop again. The hardware is great, but the sofware is just unbearably bad. I used Arch Linux with KDE before, and it was just an experience 10 times better. If they would just support Linux out of the box...
I have been a fan of these newer macbooks. They are just pushing the boundaries of a good laptop. While I understand the use, I hope someday my AAA games are also as supported in MacBooks as my gaming laptop.
Depends on the game obviously. e.g. Assassin's Creed N+1 - you've seen the formula like 20+ times already, all the previous games + all of Far Cry from 3 upwards. There's nothing new. And there's Cyberpunk2077 and BG3 which are still huge but unique and carefully designed
I'm playing Assassin's Creed: Origins this month, for the first time playing any of that franchise, and one of the most recent games I've played (it's from 2017) and I'm amazed by:
a) how much effort they obviously put into it, historic details from Egypt 2k years ago, game engine, quests, little details
b) how much it feels like a thin wrapper around Cookie Clicker
Steam tells me 1/3rd of players don't even get out of the Prologue area.
I'm generally with you on it, they're sort of fatiguing in a depressing way.
But try the new James Bond game. Linear shooter, but a great story and fantastic cast on top of super fun mechanics. By the Hitman studio with a lot of their core ideas Bondified to favor action over stealth. It hasn't irritated me in the way almost any other game manages to.
Compared to what time frame? The annual sports games have been terrible for over a decade. Basic open world games have been around for just as long, though they’re more prevalent now.
From my perspective, there’s been a small but steady trickle of good games for decades. Recent AAA games that pushed the boundaries are Elden Ring and Baldurs Gate 3, and they would not have been possible at their scale back in the day.
I have a soft limit of $35. I generally find that quality decreases (not quality-per-dollar, just quality alone on an absolute scale) once you start going over that. By the time you reach $60 it's in the gutter. Exceptions to the rule obviously exist.
https://fxgl.github.io/steamac/ my friend and partner made this. For the first time I’ve been playing games on Mac without much trouble. For me best feature is automate of vm in background - finally I can play games and pause them arbitrarily
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 31.3 ms ] threadthe m2/m3 announcements were already kind of cringe to keep saying 'HEY IT'S BETTER THAN INTEL' but at this point it's just embarrassing?
Just accept that even if you aren't still using an Intel MacBook Pro, the comparison is still relevant to some part of their target market.
They only just dropped support for Intel Macs from this fall's operating system release (but are still doing security patches for the releases that Intel Macs can run). A year from now, it actually will be fairly reasonable to expect them to give up marketing to the holdouts.
So Apple is now comparing against computers they were selling 7-8 years ago rather than what Intel is delivering now.
6 years ago, which is still within the amount of time that people commonly keep premium laptops for. And they compare against the most recent previous model too.
Source for that fun fact?
Framework 13 Pro, Lenovo ThinkPad X9 15p Aura Edition, for example.
This is of course as of the M5, M6 hasn’t been tested yet.
It is not 2020 anymore. Look up reviews. Just Josh Tech’s ThinkPad X9 15p Aura Edition review, for example.
What you’re saying is just absolutely not true at all and is only backed by your gut feeling.
As long as they're clear about the comparisons they're making ("X% more battery life than Y" as opposed to simply ("X% more battery life") I'm good with it.
My 2013 Core i7 took almost eight years to get to where the previous ones felt at five, and if it weren’t for local LLMs pushing me toward an upgrade in the next year or two, I have to imagine my M1 Pro could be my daily driver well into the next decade.
Apple Silicon is certainly incredible (I also have a base-model M4mini, but it severely lacks RAM/ports so I don't really use it much/eWaste); my only Silicon-purchase-regret was buying a beautiful new 2024 MacBookAir (15") – heavily discounted $850@CostCo – but with only 8GB of RAM (it is functionally worthless, other than for watching it destroy your SSD with page-outs as you casually stream YouTubies...). In 2024, only 8GB of RAM (soldered onto the board because fuck you)!
I'll go and look at this new box, drool a little, and realize that I'd get more personal utility from donating $3k (or whatever the trade in delta is) to a charity than upgrading my computer.
(We replaced it with a Framework... with removable storage.)
I'm assuming that all of my local work would be lost. But I'd still have the sixteen million duplicate photos.
iCloud's priorities are not a great fit for preserving my source code repos. Fortunately those aren't very big.
But when my son's Mac dies, his huge Logic Pro projects are toast. And he is a few thousand miles away now.
However, OneDrive doesn't seem to even know how to handle source files (it doesn't even attempt to honor the gitignore), so rebuilding a project in folders covered by OneDrive results in flurries of temporary files being uploaded/updated to the cloud, hogging the bandwidth, with a bonus of locking files, crashing builds, or even reverting changes silently.
One would think backup tools, even if primarily for normal users are still literally made by programmers, at least consider the use case of programmers instead of just ignoring them entirely.
file sync is backup against the things most people have to deal with (hardware breaking, theft, house fire, residential lightning strike)
I would say accidentally deleting a file is more common than a house fire, so NO, file-sync is not a backup nor is RAID (block-sync) or clustering (data/state-sync).
A backup is/should be a non-modifiable snapshot of data/files maybe even a state.
I give you an example:
You have a password-safe (as a file). Your computer blows up, but you are safe, because your password-safe is synced on Dropbox....but oh my god what was the password to Dropbox??? Your restore is gone because you forgot to "backup" your password-safe.
However you are not a Loser, being a Admin is a ~lost art and a really good paid one (again).... ;)
It goes to your trash can/recycle bin for a while. That's literally what it's for: to guard against accidental deletes. Very few people accidentally delete files from their computer's drive anymore. The only time people do this in 2026 is accidentally formatting an SD card that had their camera's pictures on it or something.
I also do a bunch of video work with Da Vinci Resolve, and those project files are in the same folder. I don't keep the clips there, those are on an external disc, but that's just because I haven't gone from the two terabyte iCloud plan to the six terabyte plan.
There is iCloud Drive sync, but that only syncs your Documents and Desktop folders, but any other files are not synced.
Really this should be devices full stop. Also, "backed up" should include no fewer than two backups on different media and in different physical locations e.g. Time Machine to an external SSD _plus_ continuous cloud backup.
2/ This is like complaining that climate activists were harping too much 30 years ago, and that's why nobody listened
this is a serious issue though.
if you harp too much about something, it becomes background noise. people get desensitized.
if you harp about too many things, it fatigues people as well (ever heard of "alert fatigue"?).
so yeah, harping too much, too loudly about too many things is a serious and the society should really start looking into this
(edit: i am aware of the irony of harping about harping)
2. You mean the climate activists who used to risk their lives back in the 80s on open oceans instead of gluing themselves to streets? Yeah, the times have changed.
I suppose I didn’t specify exactly what I would recommend to someone who thinks it’s too hard, so here is that:
1. Install Backblaze. This is basically fire and forget. 2. (1) is enough for most people, but if interested (and on a Mac, which is what I’m familiar with), plug in an external SSD once a week or so for Time Machine. Setup involves clicking on the drive in the setup wizard and specifying an encryption password.
I don’t know about “ultra” robust, but this gives you protection from accidental deletions, natural disasters happening to your computer, hardware failures, and corruption from software bugs. The ongoing maintenance is plugging in a hard drive once a week.
If that is too much effort, just (1) provides natural disaster and hardware failure protection. It helps somewhat with the others but Backblaze only saves versions for 60 days and that’s a tight window to notice subtle corruption of e.g. your photos.
how many good things have 'average people' (and the avaricious wanterpreneurs chasing their dollars) ruined? Nearly everything!
> We replaced it with a Framework... with removable storage.
Cool. How are you backing it up?
How would you restore the backup if your secure hardware device is lost/stolen/damaged?
No point in encrypting those family photos burned to disc.
My macbook updates my documents etc to my NAS, and the NAS syncs to crucial folders to the cloud (not everything for cost reasons)
You should always assume your device can be stolen, you can spill fluids on it (or a guest), a cat can pee on it, an electric shock may kill it... No matter how great care you take of it, shit happens, data needs to be safe.
The SSD dying standalone vs the system dying doesn't change at all for data security. It's not a different risk factor
I wouldn't choose to buy a car I use every day that's 100x less reliable than a normal car.
If your looking for arguments against soldered storage the facts ssds are wear items and will eventually need replacement is a much better one.
If given a choice, I prefer a system where a HDD/RAM/GPU/CPU/PSU/Screen/Port/Battery/Keyboard failure is barely if at all disruptive to one where all of these effectively brick the system.
The point is it shouldn’t matter if the cpu or ssd dies because you have backed up everything already and are prepared for anything to fail or happen to the device rather then “oh the ssd is removable so in these select few situations I can recover my data”
Obviously if you used the same encryption scheme on a removable drive you'd hit the same issue - but most people don't do that, because storing the encryption keys in the Secure Enclave makes your drive effectively no longer removable.
Apple with their SoC really changed a lot of people's minds about hardware.
It's sad that M5 (and M6) are so much faster at prefilling and other LLM-related operations, but I'm happy with the computer I got and will keep it at least 3-4 generations.
It's painful to use my work provided M4 Max all day and then switch to my 2019 i7 in the evenings. Even my older work provided M1 Pro ran circles around the i7, the difference was staggering.
Maybe I'll upgrade at the next generation.
- a low end Macbook Pro or Air
- Mac Studio, mid-to-high specs
My M1 is still fast and enjoyable, but I regret to inform you that the M5 actually does feel faster in day to day use. I thought for sure I wouldn’t notice, but the difference is there.
When I do large builds the difference is also bigger than I was expecting.
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48681392
Also why would you have to spend $6000? You can get a refurbished 16-inch M5 Pro with 48 Gb RAM and 1 Tb SSD from Apple for $3000.
Mine is running great and it has 24/7 use.
a benchmark here: https://github.com/nace-ai/kapitsa/pull/618
this machine just keeps getting better and better in the inference world. the memory bandwidth is too good, newer macbook pros aren't that much faster in memory bandwidth, many are slower. not enough to upgrade yet as they're mostly horizontal upgrades.
if they do the M7 correctly: which is just everything their current models do plus way faster memory bandwidth and much greater memory possible 192GB+, then it will be a really great and timely upgrade
I'll check it that inference engine! Thanks!
it has unsloth on the list of 3.6 35b variants only on the 2-bit unsloth UD-IQ2_XXS GGUF variant
I'd say let it down 4-bit Qwen 3.6 35b again and see what how it performs in both benchmarks and your preferred conversational and agentic harness
it's Kflash verifier is competing against MTP and Dflash2, thats where the additional novelty is
Has the webcam changed or improved in the last couple years? It seems to still have the same webcam specs as the M4?
Having said that, I did plan on sticking it out 7 years. Ended up bailing on an M5 Pro!
I like to factory reset my devices every couple of years, it really gives them a new lease on life. My M1 Pro feels as smooth and fast as the day I got it.
I replied that it would make no sense unless I was going to start running local inference or training my own models locally...
2 years later, and this MacBook Pro M4 Max w/48GB is the best $4k I've ever spent!
The engineering that went into the M1 was amazing, I truly think that now, an M1 Max was the biggest bargain ever in my entire computing life. £3,299.00. In contrast, the 64GB i9 I bought only two years before was £4,149.00.
The M1 Max MacBook with 64 gigabytes is still a great machine and fairly affordable on the second-hand market.
(Returning an i9 to wait a few more years on the M1, any M1, was absolutely worth it)
I have a 16" m4 max from work (36gb) and is an incredible machine (build quality, incredible display, overall feel). I also have a private macbook neo which should be similar to M1 in terms of performance but it's limited to 8gb of memory.
The neo/M1 performances are sufficient for my needs (for private computing) and chances are the M1 pro actually performs better than my neo (if anything for the more abundant memory).
I might to back to the listing and try to haggle the price even lower, considering a new generation of macbook pros has just been announced.
I do wish they had removable storage though, I originally got that Macbook as it was the cheapest way I could try out MacOS and M1, once I decided I liked it, I was stuck with 256gb or spending all that money (and then some) again. This time, I went with 1tb.
Still a great machine, shame those keycaps wear so badly (developing shiny greasy-looking patches)
authorized repair shop says 4 days to fix it and it's my only laptop, so i go without :(
(Obviously there are other reasons to solder like performance)
Until then, then M1 Pro will be fine for my usage, which is already more advanced than most.
My ideal scenario:
- 2027 the AI bubble bursts
- 2028 new memory factories reach the production stage and fail to meet demand, so we have a glut of memory and rock-bottom prices.
My dev machine is an i5 of some description about 6 years old, that's about all I could tell you off the top of my head because I've never worried about needing slightly faster compiles. (Ignoring running local LLMs of course. Currently they can't compete with Opus 5.5)
In my experience with this, most of the work happens on a HPC cluster. Your actual machine just needs to work as a thin client.
That said I don't do any local AI or 8K video editing type stuff.
On upgrade I could probably live on a moderate/high spec Mac mini since the only reason I went Studio originally was the resolution/number of displays it could support.
The fastest M6 MacBook Pro (24/32GB configs) has a memory bandwidth of 170 GB/s. And the M5 Max is 614 GB/s.
Am I missing some nuance of the M6 MBP here, or am I right to assume it won't set the local LLM world on fire?
Also, the following two have very different 'needs' to feel good enough:
1. heavy agentic workloads via harness vs 2. a simple private chat interface with a local instance
Even if an MBP's bandwidth were higher, it's tough to see a reason to run it as a constantly loaded 24/7 inference machine due to heat degradation.
P.S. still extremely awesome to be able to host and chat with a decently quantized 27B model on your laptop. ...and to be fair even a 32GB Air would do that! It is a thing of beauty: the amount of folks this may add to the hacker/tinker community.
0. https://float16.cloud/en-en/ai-benchmark/dgx-spark-vs-rtx-50...
There's some value in having a huge amount of memory addressable by the GPU for loading larger models, but even that doesn't make sense for current gen models. For MOE models, newer inference engines with smarter GPU expert caching and pinned memory allow a GPU with lots of bandwidth to significantly outperform a Spark, so that leaves you with larger dense models that fit on a spark but not on a GPU where you might have a use-case.
But even then it's hard. For instance a full-fat BF16 of a ~30B parameter model will fit on a 128GB spark and not a 32GB 5090, but at that size it's going to be frustratingly slow on the spark given the compute and bandwidth constraints.
Imo these devices are mostly good for experimentation, or if you only want to do overnight jobs or training which wouldn't be possible on a GPU, and you don't want to pay $100k for a DGX station.
Apple MacBook M5 Max has bandwidth up to 600GB/s, is 170GB/s for M6 the real limit? If so, wouldn't this slow down LLM processing?
Not that I blame Apple here, for once. Seems like they're trying to cope with the limited quantity of RAM they can procure. And with the paltry bandwidth (170GB/s) of these CPUs they're a bad choice for anything but tiny local models anyway.
They're not making those models for the M6 though; they rerouted their resources to making M7 faster at running local LLMs.
If you want more bandwidth, get an M5 Pro, Max, or Ultra. If you want a lower power base model, get the M6. If you want to have your cake and eat it too, wait for the M7, reportedly in the spring.
Yes, high-capacity LPDDR5X are made and do exist, but for all practical intents and purposes, you can't buy enough of them to deliver to customers at Apple scale.
What was the base speed of the M5?
Because the question is "Which is better for local inference out of the M6 or the M5 Max?"
If an M6 Pro/Max was an option that would change the question.
Gorilla-arm was a fear based on the naive idea that if you had touch, you would be required to only use touch for every action.
Never understand the appeal of touchscreen on laptop.
Just the standard chip without Pro/Max makes me assume this is that base one. If so, the price is way high for where that tends to sit, but welcome to buying a computer in 2026 I guess.
It's the same rollout they've used for a couple of generations now. First the base model chips in fall, then the pro/max versions in spring
https://www.apple.com/mac/compare/?modelList=MacBook-Neo-A18...
The base model chip on the Air is binned too - 8 GPU cores on the Air vs 10 on the Pro.
There are no features or performance characteristics of any of the subsequent M[2-6] Macbook Air or Pro models that I care about.
I've been daily driving it for months with no blockers. You can tell Linux uses the battery less efficiently than MacOS though so that's good to know.
So, 97% stable then? (Downvote me but it's true.)
That said, I do have hopes that AI will basically solve this. It's extremely good at diagnosing low level bugs, reverse engineering drivers and so on. A silver lining of AI taking our jobs at least!
One of my coworker that uses a Mac has an issue with a USB dongle that stopped working randomly, not even with a system update. If he uses on its laptop the external monitor remains blank, the same dongle with another monitor and another identical Macbook with the same macOS version works, the same dongle with the same PC and another brand of monitor works, the same PC with the same monitor and a dongle of a different brand does work, but a different dongle of the same model doesn't. So I guess for some reason macOS saved the ID of that dongle and the setting got corrupted. Tried to reset the hell of it and it doesn't work.
I've never had similar issues with Linux. Most of the time when something doesn't work with Linux you just look at the logs, figure out what is wrong, correct it, and it start work fine again. Configuration of the system is predictable, if you install a software and then you uninstall it the system is left in the same state as before installing it, it doesn't leave files that waste disk space, as well as when you upgrade the system (yes, every Windows or macOS update leaves old stuff behind that it's impossible to delete, effectively "leaking" disk space at the point you have to perform a clean install).
Still some tiny issues with waking from sleep lid closed, but I'm expecting to get that fixed myself with some prompting this week. The people working on Linux on Mac are really impressive (and have access to unlimited tokens), so I expect all issues to be fixed very soon.
Being able combine agents, linux software and Apple hardware is so much fun.
It's been my primary dev machine for 2 years
Mind sharing the provider’s URL?
OTOH if you are really concerned about privacy it's probably not the best choice (it's random people's machines).
I think my 48GB 16 inch MBP will last me 15+ years at this point.
I did actually get a new M5 Pro/48GB machine last month, but that's only because I bought my work machine to keep my personal and professional lives properly separated; otherwise I wasn't seeing any issue running that M3 Max/36GB for a long time further.
One thing that bugs me mentally is leaving that machine pending on my input ("wasted") overnight etc... I'd like to arrive at a workflow where I can have agents running toward the overall goal autonomously overnight as much as they can, and I can review and iterate and "engineer" parts that need it afterwards...
For now, I still guide implementation very closely, piece by piece. Has anyone had any good experiences with workflows / skills / similar for that?
Actually had claude spin up a kanban board to manage my tasks in a 'TODO -> Implement -> Review -> QA -> Shipping -> Done' flow (with a worktree for each task) that works great!
> 48GB 16 inch MBP
That's wicked overkill for ssh + browser. A 15" MacBook Air would work for this really nicely. This is how I use my 13" Air, and for the big screen I dock it at a desk.
I wish they could bring back the 11" Air or 12" MacBook and trim the bezels for something like this. It would be an amazingly portable computer. The 11" iPad Pro with keyboard case is almost this, but you're stuck with iOS and it's actually pretty thick and heavy compared to a MacBook.
Especially give how good recompilation projects are anymore.
a) how much effort they obviously put into it, historic details from Egypt 2k years ago, game engine, quests, little details
b) how much it feels like a thin wrapper around Cookie Clicker
Steam tells me 1/3rd of players don't even get out of the Prologue area.
But try the new James Bond game. Linear shooter, but a great story and fantastic cast on top of super fun mechanics. By the Hitman studio with a lot of their core ideas Bondified to favor action over stealth. It hasn't irritated me in the way almost any other game manages to.
From my perspective, there’s been a small but steady trickle of good games for decades. Recent AAA games that pushed the boundaries are Elden Ring and Baldurs Gate 3, and they would not have been possible at their scale back in the day.
Also plenty of mil Sims available if you are into multilayer.
So probably still in line with what you remember.
Just to say we all have nostalgia and the good old days are never coming back.