Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

M1 Pro 2021 16GB RAM

Feels as snappy and impressive as the first day I got it. I never need to close apps, or reboot. I record multitrack audio on it without any perceptible latency. I write code on it. It's the best computer I've ever owned by a significant margin.

Also M1 Air 8gb, though not the daily driver. Bought second hand, the machine is still an absolute champ with no slowdown and is my go to machine when I want a calm space for writing.

Same here, my M1 Max 64GB beats the s*t out of my work-provided M5 16GB :P

Best computer I've had in a long time.

I splurged for the 16GB version of this. Originally bought it for my spouse, and then replaced it with a refurbed M2 with 1TB of storage for reasons. So I took the "old" M1 Air. So far, can't come up with a reason to want to replace it. Not updating to Tahoe helps with that too.

Same here. For tough compute, I spin up a machine in some cloud service, do what I need, and shut it down. Of course, its a different issue if you need power on the desktop right there, like for A/V/Graphics work.

Which MacOS version are you on, out of curiosity? Do others see the same software issues?

Same. It was borderline unusable on Tahoe to the point I had to downgrade it, but the Golden Gate beta brought it back to life.

I’m only using it as a travel machine now, trying to hold on from upgrading it until I can get an Air with OLED display - hopefully coming in <24 months…

Same here. Still using the original M1 as a daily dev pc. The portability and battery life are great. Biggest gripe is the limited number of USB-C ports...

Great to hear! The absolute best Air Form Factor, I've debated a lot buying a used one because I dislike the square form of M2+ Air compared.

Same here. Got the same machine and feel the same as you about it.

M1 air 2020 16gb ram - still working like its new

Same, but MBP. Incredible machine, still has a lot of miles left

Same here, the thing is a beast

I bought a used M1 air with 16GB and 2TB a few years ago for $1000 CAD. It’s easily the fastest computer I’ve ever used, and I have no reason to upgrade. It chews through 4K footage and ten of thousands of RAW images off my cameras.

bro people don't measure things - it's all vibes these days (in all fairness OP specifically used the word "felt"). if they measured anything they'd have realized M5 GPU is ~V100 lolol.

Curious about the choice of the Mac as a home server. I feel like an off-lease x86 usff pc, at roughly half the cost, would be more useful as a server. Pre-RAM-crisis you could get one with 32GB of RAM for like $240. My main home server is one of those HP ProDesk, running Debian.

Different people are sensitive to different things. I still find my 6th gen ULV i5 and 8GB of RAM tolerable.

I agree with you that this is a noticeable effect, but I have a hard time figuring out why it is, especially on Macs with the sealed system volume (which should make the operating system files bit-for-bit identical between a freshly set up Mac and one you've been using for years). Certainly it could come from the accumulation of cruft in /Library and ~/Library, but you can clean that up too.

Yeah, same - I tried the M5 Pro randomly while waiting for my daughter to finish salivating over a Neo, and just got surprised by how quickly it opened apps and reacted to anything I did - ~1-1.5 seconds for Affinity Designer was amazing.

My MBP probably got affected by OS updates like other people are saying - opening apps and responsiveness definitely got worse, and felt like slightly deteriorating over time (but it might have been MacOS updates along the way).

Absolutely agree - happened on MBP, 2 generations of iPads, and Watch...For iPads and Watch, I thought that it might just be the famous battery health vs performance tradeoff they enforce on us, but I rarely ever used the MBP on battery, it was plugged in 95% of the time.

The only Apple products that I can think of that haven't degraded in quality over time are the iPods and maybe the Apple Watch.

This may be true (not perceptible w/ my apple silicon Macs), but the important thing is that they get slower more slowly than my wintel gets slower (I blame disgruntled Windows and/or nvidia drivers devs....)

My Apple ][+ improved with age as I added things like 48K of RAM, a floppy disk, a language card, etc...

iOS 26 made my iPhone SE pretty much unusable.

Not OP, but a decades-long Mac user. Removing CLI tools over the years would be one way, though I run Homebrew and have everything I want or need. That doesn't change that scripting is less useful on a fleet of devices.

Also, the UI has been in decline for a decade or so, with the regrettable decisions under Alan Dye. Thankfully, Zuck poached him and we're all grateful for that. I mean, what they've done to our icons is tragic, the glyphs in the menus was intern-level boneheaded, and reduction of contrast to "get out of the way" of our content has made everything less usable, especially for people with vision issues.

A bug that I filed about window-ordering when using the Cmd-` / Shift-Cmd-` shortcuts has been live since 2010 without getting fixed, though an industrious HN user posted a link to the background utility they made to fix it themselves[0].

0: https://github.com/tacomanator/sash

An example of deterioration:

Jeff Goldblum's 30 second "Presenting three easy steps to the internet" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjY0xsoozs8

And now when you want to set up a fresh Mac it's a parade of dialogue boxes:

Do you want to turn on Siri? No. (the dialogue-choice is probably "maybe later" ugh)

Do you want to share app analytics with developers? Yes.

Do you want to add Touch ID? No, because I'm setting this up for someone else.

There are more!

I gave those examples -- each of which having a different answer or reason -- to show that the problem of onboarding is nontrivial, but Apple has spent no(?) effort toward fixing it. It's the same for new iPhones and iPads.

NB I don't know if you sign into your Apple account it pre-answers these questions. That'd be nice.

Not OP, but I have been using an M1 pro Mac Book since release. It's not sluggish in any way whatsoever.

If you have not tried it this is an absolute game changer for Mac users moving to Linux. https://github.com/RedBearAK/toshy

I've been running it for 3 years now. I am so macpilled that I had to install it on my new Framework 13 pro.

The Mac muscle memory was always my biggest hurdle with Linux. I always felt handicapped by it. But Toshy eliminates that.

Linux has been going down hill, but since you can choose distributions, there is an escape hatch.

I’ve been moving all my machines to devuan with xfce (or freebsd with xfce).

I have zero issues despite not having to deal with wayland, systemd, snap, etc.

I ran my ~2011 i7 MBA for 12 years as primary laptop before the battery finally killed it (had to run linux on it due to apple killing support the last few years).

Great hardware. I don't miss OSX though.

my 16" m1 max w/ 64gb is getting a little sluggish on some things

Agreed. I loved Macs, but I need it to run Linux.

I am in the same boat. I would buy a Mac if I could run Linux on it. As it is I will pay more for X1 Carbon with a worse CPU just to run free OS on it.

macOS is fine, you guys are just overreacting… Is it perfect? No. Is it usable? Clearly yes.

What would you want Apple to do to improve the developer experience?

“macOS lacks” LMAO

To be clear, I'm definitely not saying that MacOS is now bad - it's absolutely still a pretty good OS. But, personally, I do have a couple of gripes, and my feeling is that things are changing in the opposite direction from what I would like. Compared to Linux let's say a couple of years ago - yeah, better. Compared to Windows - there's no comparison.

But, still:

- it slows down after a while

- design direction is questionable and controversial - that it got more inconsistent is factual - also, so much wasted space and everything got bigger and a little dumber

- so little control over system behavior, functionality, looks

On modern Linux, you get a more polished (wow, unbelievable thing to say - I first dabbled with Linux in 1997), robust, and infinitely more functional and customizable experience. After a while, I started feeling at home - like it's "mine" - and how distinctively MacOS feels like being a guest there, and that it was never "my environment".

I definitely realize how vague and unquantifiable most of this sounds - and how little value those things have for a lot of people - but I've come to enjoy my setup, I spend ~12h / day in it, and I discovered that how it "feels" matters to me.

stuff that annoyed me on mac was the "find" feature was useful, but to get to a enclosing folder (what I want), involved searching, clicking something, finding the file again in the display and "enclosing folder" (this might not be exact, I don't have a computer in front of me).

Sharing files with a windows hard drive. My workmate had a seagate that installed an NTFS driver on mac, which saved us a few times. Never had a problem on linux.

Python never seems to work right. Conda, and other stuff, just never worked smoothly with the bioinformatics code we were running. Cluster machines it was easy.

There is a wierd issue that you can't close a macbook and use it with an external monitor without plugging it in. It just sleeps.

Would you like to join iCloud. No really would you like to join iCloud. How about apple music? (To be fair MS is just as bad if not worse about onedrive...)

We had a pythonTK program to print labels from a CSV file. Every MacOS update broke it. We ended up just running it on a windows machine. back up was going command line on mac.

case insensitive file systems.

generally stability..

Its not bad, just seems the OS has gotten worse.

I would say the artist formerly known as OS X has never been good. It literally started its life as a half-assed NeXT attempt and has only gone downhill from there. There's still a "Services" entry in the file menu. .DS_Store files are an abomination. Mac OS thinks it knows better than I do about which software I'd like to install. Plist insanity that makes the Windows registry look pristine. GUI inconsistencies across every surface area... I'm curious what you like about it, because other than font rendering (which it does well), I can't think of anything positive.

I wouldn't even know where to begin, because the slide in quality has permeated every aspect of the operating system, from stability to design. Numerous networking bugs, SSH agent bugs, sleep state bugs, sometimes having to restart my machine because the network screws up so badly, Bluetooth issues that they keep introducing and then not fixing; I have peripherals that just no longer work due to this. I could go on and on. I could talk about the mobilization of a desktop interface (same mistake the Unity and GNOME teams made)

And I don't feel like beating a very dead horse, so just google "macOS Tahoe design issues" and take your pick.

https://x.com/hsuchingpo/status/2091724431785861353

Ok, what am I using on my workstations then? Windows? Hell no. Terrible hardware, OS sucks. Linux? Hell no! Terrible hardware, desktop is terrible.

CachyOS with KDE...it's been amazingly fast, dependable, stable, customizable, polished (yes, really)...

Tahoe slows it down, but Seqouia is still strong.

same... mine works great...

Desktop is taking a bit to render after a reboot (which I need to do very rarely, admittedly), apps definitely got slower to open, a small delay in actions here and there - it started feeling a bit sluggish compared to before and it felt like it's deteriorating over time - but slightly.

I think it's very likely due to OS updates, like other people are commenting on. It probably doesn't happen to everyone, and maybe doing a clean reinstall helps (I tried all the standard stuff - rebuild caches etc).

I can’t download ms teams on Linux (the browser version sucks).

Not OP. I'm a huge fan of Asahi and use it on my M2 MBP. There are some significant downsides in particular battery life is nowhere near what you'll get from MacOS due to inability to go into low power sleep state, and buggy DP alt mode for external monitors. I hope that will change but it's not there yet.

Because it still doesn't fully support all of the hardware on M1. I know it because I used Asahi while I had M1. Now I have M4 for work and it doesn't support Asahi at all.

I just use Linux PC as much as possible instead. And that 4$ M4 is just a fancy presentation computer I use when I travel.

Personally I would spend thousands on an actually great Linux laptop, but there are still none around.

Everytime I look at fedora, I think "are those GNOME guys retarded?" Linux would be much better if fedora never exist

To be fair, the Zune actually was a better media player than the ipod in almost every way. That wasn't a false statement.

The issue was the abysmal marketing and "me too" attitude Microsoft had (and still has).

Actually, Microsoft came with "modern" smart phone much sooner. Actually too soon, technology wasn't there (price, computing power, size, weight, battery life).

Apple never came first ... but often just at the right moment and had marketing skills to make it a new trend.

Simon Sinek - Apple vs Microsoft: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jEOftmUJ6a4

But it had nothing to do with the iPod/iPhone release in his story.

(story starts ~1:15, but I highly recommend the entire talk)

Might want to edit, as this would make sense/be amusing if the exec in the last sentence was Apple.

That, or I can’t read.

Hell hath no fury like Apple Global Security scorned...

Zune was probably a better player. It was too late, and arrived when MS didn't much care.

There are emails unearthed in various lawsuits where you can read Bill Gates screaming at his subordinates: "why the hell can't our partners like Sony and Creative create a similar device? Give them all, give them early access to everything, work with them". In the end MS felt compelled to make their own.

I loved the book The Infinite Game. Really changed how I looked at work, personal research, and being an author. Recommended!

That just sounds like a standard introvert response when one doesn’t want to walk.

The anecdote is likely a false rip of the actual story:

[2017] Speaking at an event Tuesday, Scott Forstall, who lead Apple's iOS software division under Jobs, recounted the surprising history behind the company's first touchscreen prototype, which ultimately lead to the first iPhone.

It all began, Forstall said, because Jobs had an acquaintance at Microsoft who he really, really, didn't like.

"It began because Steve hated this guy at Microsoft," Forstall said during the event. "Any time Steve had any interaction with the guy, he'd come back pissed off."

The unnamed Microsoft exec, who was apparently the husband of a friend of Jobs' wife, apparently bragged so much it pushed Jobs over the edge.

"He just shoved it in Steve's face -- the way they were going to rule the world with their new tablets with their pens. He came in on Monday with a set of expletives and then was like 'let's show them how it's really done.' "

https://mashable.com/article/scott-forstall-steve-jobs-micro...

[apparent tunnel to cheap RAM painted on rock face]

I said late 90s though. The insanity which poured through early 2000s.

5.25GHz Pentium 4s, intentionally lower binned Athlons, the era your CPU got obsoleted the moment you booted it for the first time.

I don't remember early 90s much. I was too young back then. I don't remember much stuff from that era. But late 90s, early 2000s.

Oh, boy.

P.S.: AMD64 was a great sucker punch though. One of the professors in our university rejected to believe and got mad when he learnt that Intel licensed AMD64 from AMD, heh.

I had a G4 MacBook when I switched to the first-gen Intel MacBooks, and subjectively, the G4 performed much, much better. Probably because the best pairing for any Intel CPU is thermal throttling.

> even the M5 laptops are consistently beat on performance and battery life by Intel Windows laptops.

When plugged in... This caveat is so enormous it should almost be legislated. If your computer use is at all portable, a computer that scales down to 20 - 40% of GPU power when unplugged is an enormously significant factor. So far as I'm aware (could be wrong about arm devices?) there's no non-apple laptop that operates at 100% speed on the road.

> but even the M5 laptops are consistently beat on performance and battery life by Intel Windows laptops

The real question is whether all these Intel Windows laptops spin their fans at full speed when doing absolutely nothing. That’s something I can never go back to. I do some light gaming on my M2 Pro MBP and it gets hot when trying to push 120 fps. But my Lenovo Legion (that’s now collecting the dust) is so loud I could hear it through headphones.

> [...] but even the M5 laptops are consistently beat on performance and battery life by Intel Windows laptops.

Hold up, in what metric/benchmark? Feel personally like we life in an age where, no matter the SOC vendor, something high performant and efficient is offered, so seeing a claim that any vendor, be it Intel, AMD, Qualcomm or Apple, is consistently outperforming another, I'd like to get more context on that.

> It's the really inexpensive Neo, of course, but even the M5 laptops are consistently beat on performance and battery life by Intel Windows laptops.

Of course you can beat the entry level MacBook Neo by comparing it to larger, more powerful, more expensive laptops.

The M5 is an entire family with a range of performance. Intel/AMD have done a lot to improve performance but they’re not beating the high end M5 chips on performance or battery life yet.

[dead]

x86 is way more complex when compared to ARM processors, as a result their TDP is way higher when you request performance from them.

Intel had to reduce the frequency of their processors when running AVX2 instructions and the AVX2 frequency of the processors were non-disclosable to anyone.

Also, benchmarking Intel processors and publishing these numbers were forbidden in some cases. I don't know whether this ban is still in effect.

x86 processors can't keep up with the ARM processors TDP and thermal profile wise. So they slow down a ton when running on battery. See Jeff Geerling's last video on Apple Neo vs. some Intel laptop. It's as "efficient", but slow as a newborn tortoise learning to walk when unplugged and trying to get the most endurance out of the battery.

My M1 Mac gets almost 2 days of low-intensity use after ~6 years of use, and it got warm once or twice because something ran away in the background for tens of minutes.

I don't think this is the case.

Intel Panther lake beats the M5 in GPU and multi-core performance, and is only behind in single core (and not by much). Panther Lake is also on some Windows laptops that trounce MacBook battery life (e.g., Framework 13 Pro according to Just Josh Tech medium-brightness productivity benchmarking).

The Snapdragon X2 Elite beats the M5 multi-core performance (the HP Omnibook Ultra 14 is priced identically spec-for-spec with the MacBook Pro with M5). Still behind in single core and probably graphics, but squarely in the same realm.

Both of these chips are within small deviations of the M5. We could call Intel and Qualcomm 1 year behind at best.

I still have zero urgency in upgrading from my M1 MBP.

Does this imply they faked all their benchmarks?

Funny, wasn't getting the reference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Mitchell vs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Mitchell_(gamer)

THE (Col.) Billy Mitchell was actually a badass. His time in Alaska alone, running telegraph lines in the wilderness, made him a legend even before his forward thinking during WWI and beyond.

Yay a CPU in 2026!

My YouTube will load 0.00001s faster!

Apple is not "just using arm chips". They have been designing their own 100% custom cores for more than a decade.

TBH Apple never should've been the one who makes the best CPUs -- that's not really their area of expertise historically speaking either. It just appears that everyone else did such a terrible job for so long that they caught up

That's sadly true though. Also booting something was really simple.

Now we boot an embedded microcontroller (or CPU) which boots the main CPU which boots another OS semi-persistently to boot the main OS (if it's allowed).

Sometimes there are other processors needs to be up to allow processor to continue booting as well (these are mostly servers, but eh).

You can still have the 90s OS experience, even today, but these days we use the name bootloader, not operating system, for that amount of functionality.

Except in the 90s, I could wield my OS of choice on the hardware I bought.

What OS could I have loaded onto my Macintosh SE/30 that wasn't from Apple?

It's interesting to see how defensive some of these pro-China posters get on HN and elsewhere. I'm genuinely curious why there seems to be an inferiority complex here with respect to America/American companies.

I think it's great but it's important to remember that we haven't seen Xiaomi's chips in actual devices under real world tests. We don't know if the speeds are sustainable, under what wattage, etc. Competition is still great and I look forward to learning more, of course.

I find it funny not because I support Apple. I find it funny because it feels like the leapfrogging happened in early superscalar CPU evolution. The era when the Moore's Law was working.

I enjoy it because of progress, not because of Apple.

They didn't. It's an off the shelf chip, the threads on that post dismantled it pretty thoroughly as a false claim.

[flagged]

I'm expecting it to somewhat collapse. I don't know if it'll go back to pre bubble prices (here's to hoping), but I do expect a pretty sharp decline around 2030... probably not before then.

Basically everyone that makes memory is building new fabs, meanwhile I'm not sure how much longer AI datacenter demand for ram will last. I think the decrease in AI ram demand and the new fabs will likely coincide leading to a collapse in pricing.

That is, of course, assuming the memory manufacturers don't pull their favorite trick and collude.

100%. We're probably on the cusp of over-capacity, a glut, cheap RAM, bankruptcies, and shortages.

Looks like I'll be sporting my 5800X3D + DDR4 + 9070 XT gaming box for a little while. Too bad the CPU's ST is slower than my MB Air m4.

Absolutely, I am in a hold pattern for the next few years. I suspect in another 3-4 years you will be able to build an absolutely stacked machine at a reasonable price. Probably won't go back to what was before but it will be decent.

If it will happen in 100 years it will practically never happen (for us). Even 25 years would be a lot, it's half of a career.

Could you provide more details about the Epyc + DDR4 server?

If you don't understand that the AI driven memory boom has totally broken the cycle you are going to lose a lot of money. There is infinite demand for Intelligence and that translates directly to chips.

> The DRAM market is cyclical.

...

> I don’t think anyone truly knows when, but it will happen.

Do you know what cyclical means ... ?

I happily booted and ran an Intel Mac mini using a 4TB drive in a Thunderbolt 3 enclosure, and I do the same for an M4 Max Mac Studio using an 8TB drive in a USB4v2 enclosure (OWC Express 1M2 80G).

You'll just have to be careful to match the enclosure to the ports on the system. The base-model M6 Mac mini still uses Thunderbolt 4, so a USB4v2 enclosure would be wasted.

Considering hard drives were $10k / GB in the Mac SE/30 days, that feels like a bargain too.

You should compare with competition, not what was decades ago.

E.g how is the perf/$ vs Wildcat lake

Sure, when you look a little wider, since 2000 we have seen the following major improvements:

- Extreme poverty has dropped from 30% to under 10% globally. - Child mortality rates have dropped in half - Internet access has exploded from 10% to 70% - Solar energy costs have dropped 90% - Cancer death rates have declined by 30%

All of these massive improvements in less than 30 years.

While there certainly are issues to solve, and if you simply follow journalism you may think the world is worse off, but for many, their lives have been significantly improved.

Just like the computer revolution, it will make a small number of people richer and put everyone else at their mercy. In real terms the average person is far poorer than in the 20th century. Used to be able to buy a home and support a family on a single income. Now it can take two just to survive.

Well, there is more renewable energy than ever before powering the world. It's all being built and added to the grid faster and faster each year.

That's one big plus.

Then you’re either spending time in the wrong parts of the internet or doing things that don't fulfill you.

These times are exciting and rough seas make good sailors. Find your path forward.

1966

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect

It turns out the limiting factor isn't how sophisticated algorithms are, it's how gullible humans are.

The EU just had to pass a law to force companies to disclose if a customer service agent is AI or Human. It is beaten.

https://commission.europa.eu/news-and-media/news/safer-and-m...

According to Psychology today, April this year by GPT 4.5

https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/the-digital-self/202...

The Turing test is more complex than what gets suggested.

And the "popularized" version is faulty also since it uses an ideal, abstract human judge (like the "spheroidal economic agent").

But if you want to add declinations to the said popularized image of the Turing test, you may add Maxim Lott's IQ tests at trackingai.org . Between the end of 2024 and the beginning of 2025 LLMs reached an equivalent IQ of 100, for example.

I think it was determined that the Turing test is too easy because humans are too easily fooled.

~1960

ELIZA beat the Turing test and then everyone forgot about it. Humans are just really terrible at recognising robots.

Or can we reframe it: when did humans start losing the (so-called) "Turing test".

I think there are elements showing lowering of performance and expectation.

2001 according to Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test

It depends who takes the test. I am not yet, to my knowledge, fooled by AI.

I've tried [1] and I almost 100% detect which is the AI. I really want to convince myself I have failed, does anyone know of a better site/resource for this?

I know it might be moving goalposts but I would consider AI to have passed in a well and truly undisputed manner when [2] is resolved.

But in a more practical sense, if AI can impersonate humans so well today then why are state of the art frontier models so obviously AI when they create PRs, commit messages, documentation, etc. Are the companies deliberately making them unnatural?

[1] https://turingtest.live/

[2] https://www.metaculus.com/questions/11861/date-when-ai-passe...

2050 I'm guessing

are you living under a rock?

Apple's biggest bottleneck for real-world inference is prefill processing. They need a better GPGPU architecture, which is what I'm expecting M7 to reveal.

LPDDR6 is coming.

Apple has a dedicated "neural engine" which is designed as an inference NPU. Where as Google's TPU has a dual focus, both inference and training, which is a more complex design.

Or more simply – $25K (+ tax) put in a savings account will earn about enough interest to pay for a $100/month AI subscription indefinitely. And at the end of it you still have the $25K.

Where I’m from $25k is the down payment on a parking space in a garage, not an entire house (or condo).

>The house will get more valuable

Depends on where you live. Also keep in mind population decline so long term, im not so sure. Prices already dropping in less desirable places (everywhere outside of most blue areas) (Assuming you are talking about the US sorry if not)

where are downpayments so cheap? I'll move there ^^'

Had I done that as well, then maybe I wouldn't have gotten intrigued by HyperCard, then Director/Authorware, then Flash, then HTML, then...

With the way RAM prices are going up, you could expect to make 20% profit on any purchase.

[dead]

why not buy the maxed out mac and then buy a metaverse house that you can live in virtually

problem solved /s

The RAM in the M5 is LPDDR5X, not HBM. You're right of course that it's unified and used as VRAM in that sense.

HBM itself is very expensive but it’s not really fair to compare to LPDDR or GDDR

They’re very different things.

The more logical argument to me is that Apple uses its upgrade price points as more than just direct BOM and rather as a proxy for things that are amortized across all their sales like support/warranty/etc so higher SKUs subsidize the costs of the lower ones.

Ha yeah that was my thought. How is this a down payment? This would only be 20% of a $100k house...

op forgot to add "/hyperbole"

I figure most electronics are worthless after a couple of bears.

I returned an M4 Mac mini, 64GB, unopened... because I thought it was excessive for my needs then. I swear it'll be one of the things flashing before my eyes when this all ends.

I feel so incredibly lucky I chose to overdo it a bit on RAM when I upgraded last year... though I remember deliberating to go for 192GB (it's 96GB now) but motherboard support was somewhat more complicated and it felt like a waste of 300 euros...

Mac mini aren't that good for home made server, raspberry sure ain't powerful but there are in-between.

Not being able to upgrade the SSD or the ram is a big issue, not so much on a portable laptop.

Should have grabbed 100.

It’s barely a “feature” that they let you execute arbitrary code on your own hardware.

They don’t provide any source code or documentation (which they easily could) so if want to do literally anything with your “open” device you must first reverse engineer the entire MacOS driver stack like the Asahi project did. Great fun, but it’s a criminal waste of incredibly talented engineer hours.

On top of that, the reason Asahi doesn’t work on M4 and later is that Apple has intentionally modified the ARM core to prevent stock MacOS from running once the hardware is “unlocked,” which makes it way more difficult to reverse engineer.

Bastards.

I wanted to try it but it works just on M1 and I have M4. I was also considering upgrading to M5/M6, again to take advantage of what I really love: access to the 2nm process.

The performance you get with M5/M6 in theory is crazy (especially having matmul cores with such an energy envelope and unified memory). By the time I can use it well in Linux there will be M7/M8 though.

With NVIDIA I can buy a Blackwell based core right now and use it (even if I will have much less GPU memory. Though it will be high bandwidth).

It’s not just Omarchy, there’s really not much out there in the desktop Linux sphere for those who are mostly happy with how macOS works out of the box. Everything is either in a similar vein to the Omarchy setup (hyper-minimal tiling WM), Windows-like (KDE, Cinnamon, most other DEs), or a chimera with a grab bag of design bits from every desktop and mobile platform (GNOME, Pantheon, COSMIC).

It’s a bit depressing because it means that if I ever feel forced to switch my daily driver, it won’t come without a dump truck load of friction, frustration, and lost productivity, which I’ve validated by using the various Linux desktops on secondary machines.

It's interesting because I just haven't felt the polish.

For example when using PyTorch I wanted to try to speed up my NN kernel by 2x by just using half precision and haven't noticed any speedup at all. Also I was missing the easy to use GNU tools that had to be mixed with Apple's tools.

I loved using Arc browser as well, and I'm missing it, but I guess I will do without it somehow (Chrome's vertical tabs are just not the same).

My main program missing from going back to Linux was ChatGPT Desktop, but now it's there.

I just checked out Hammerspoon, I'm happy for you that you wrote it, and looks great, but it has the same problem that I had: for security reasons Apple stopped allowing the window APIs to get all important information on other workspaces. You can only do it with Accessibility API. I was trying to fight with it but have up.

As a long time Emacs user, I beg to differ. Muscle memory will settle in after a few days. I still use Emacs shortcuts to navigate text boxes on macOS.

The most disruptive thing in Omarchy is not the keyboard, it's the tiling WM in my opinion.

Just Beelink, but it doesn't matter at all.

I ordered an ASUS Zephyrus G16 with 5090 NVIDIA card + 1.9kg (quite an overkill, and I know that I will have to limit power output), but hasn't arrived yet.

But what's fun is that I love QML+QuickShell with its hot reloading, Hyprland with its Lua support.

With AI nowdays it's just so easy to do deep UI changes that wasn't possible a year ago.

By this kind of logic we'd paying something like ~$10,000/month for our internet connections. The perceived value needs to exceed the cost but that does not make it the only factor to consider price with.

What makes this expensive & sell well is it's not very fungible at the moment. Where else are you going to get 512 GB of high speed memory with a well supported accelerator attached that you can throw in the corner of anyone's home and not really have them notice? There are plenty of lesser options, plenty of noiser/power hungry options, plenty of harder to support options, but not really something in direct competition at the moment. Even the next rounds of the integrated AMD/Nvidia solutions are only targeting 196 GB of much slower memory and compute.

I like this train of thought. The inverse is saying that the cost of this computer is the value we give away to AI companies by doing compute on their servers with our data. And to take it another way, is the value to you, the cost of a small used car?

Nvidia is definitely working on a AI Rack machine fully built for on-prem uses for companies.

Could you share what you did to find events to do? That sounds really cool

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Yeah, I'm not sure people realize how expensive ZDR/Zero Data Retention is, and how important it is to a lot of businesses, this kind of thing starts looking really cheap really fast if it's a reasonable substitute.

I don't think this is accurate.

Even using multiple windows in parallel for as many as 5-10 hours per day, I find that I am not fully using my claude max (20x) and chatgpt pro (20x) accounts. I can for sure use up the claude max account, but chatgpt either gives me a free reset before I run out of tokens or I just fail to use the full quota. The quota for Sol seems like 10x that of Claude Opus at the same level, and forget Fable, you can use a 5 hour quota in 20 minutes.

But lets do the math:

Lets say a 20k workstation can run 1 inference at a time at the same speed you get with Sol hosted by openai (big assumption) and run an equally capable model (big assumption).

Each month this gives you about 100-170 inference hours on a Sol 20x Pro account, and 720 hours (if you utilize 24/7) on the workstation.

Assuming a 36 month amortization before the workstation has to be replaced due to no longer being able to run frontier models or is too inefficient due to electrical costs or what have you:

The monthly workstation cost is about $550 capex and $150 electricity -> $700/month

You would need about 6 Pro accounts to reach that capacity, which would cost you $1200 a month.

But this fails because:

- You most likely can't utilize the workstation 24/7. Your work hours will be concentrated into 6-10 hours per day.

- During work hours you are capable of utilizing more than 1 concurrent session. 6 Sol accounts would support as many as 20-30 during working hours, not all the time but if you could burst to that many (don't forget sub-agents and agent directed parallel agent workloads).

- In 1 year the cost of Sol level models is likely to cost a fraction of what it does now.

this leads to:

                       Workstation   1 Sol Pro   2 Sol Pro

  Monthly cost            $700          $200        $400

  Raw capacity (hrs)      720           120         240

  Usable capacity (hrs)   100-130       120         240

  Concurrent sessions     1             3-5         6-10

  $ per usable hour       ~$6.00        $1.67       $1.67

  Usable hours per $700   ~115          ~420        ~420

Don't forget about electricity costs, esp in California. Even with free hardware you may be better off using APIs.

also way slower if we're just going against 'nvidia hardware'.

Movie set pieces, as a motivation for Apple making these high-end configs available? That makes no sense.

For one thing, you can’t tell from a movie what the specs are. A $999 Mac Studio looks exactly the same as a $20,000 one.

For another, Apple updates the industrial design on their products so rarely, a 6-year-old Mac, iMac or MacBook also looks nearly indistinguishable from a brand-new one.

So, rich enthusiasts it is, then

But is it? If it’s cheap enough latency doesn’t matter. Unlike say cloud gaming, where latency does matter. I’ll take my games local and my text bots cloud

It's as much as a new car

That's 6 YEARS of their cloud inference!

And, you have to include power. Where I am, the power for a rig with 2x 3090, running for four hours a day, would be around $70/month!

It's kinda like datacenter only exist to optimize compute cost through oversubscription of hardware/time share, cheaper business energy rates, and bulk discounts, compared to self hosting. ;)

AIUI you can only connect two 3090s at a time with NV link? So you’d only have 48GB of fast combined memory? That’s not tremendously interesting as you’re still limited to the smaller models which, while impressive in their own right, are still IMO too limited to use as your only model.

Upgrading RAM is still probably cheaper than spending $6000 on a linux box. You're correct that inference will be much faster on the Linux box. But, the mac's unified memory can load larger models. And as OP mentions, it's still hard to beat cloud pricing at home.

Yes, GPUs are much better for dense models. On Macs, MOE models run better, so I agree Macs are more limited and expensive. I have a Linux laptop with a 10GB 1080 GPU, dated, but I should add even more system RAM and try that.

A Mac mini running an LLM is quiet

A PC with similar capabilities is going to sound like a jet taking off.

> but end up with no asset

consumer electronics has literally never been an asset.

> Apple computers tend to have excellent resale value

do you think the new leasing category might change that? hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

edit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1vxzg6v/apple_i...

I'm not sure who that line is supposed to impress. Gamers focusing on graphically demanding AAA games would laugh at this. People who don't game much probably won't know whether this is good or not.

You’re still stuck paying for a 3 year contract for deprecating hardware. And the 256gb model which is still not enough is $230 a month. And it runs models 8 months behind frontier

If it’s purely for experimentation then why not the DGX Spark/GB10? It’s up about 10% from release RRP which is quite good (you might argue it was overpriced then, but prosumer and workstation GPU prices are up 100%). 4TB NVMe is not cheap these days - it’d cost at least $500 for a stick - and you get 128GB at a similar bandwidth to an M5 Pro.

Nevermind that Apple still insists on providing base systems with only 512GB of non-upgradable SSD. The equivalent spec mini (4TB/64/10G) is almost $5k for half the VRAM. Not as good a CPU compared to the M5/6 but you also get 20 cores and full CUDA.

I have had a difficult time with running 120b models on my 128gb setup, especially with any larger context size. The 6bit of Qwen 3.5 is already just over 100gb, and when you go down to 4bit it seems a bit lobotomized.

Correct. It is better to go to delaware and purchase it.

I think the $34/GB figure might be inclusive of VAT and the $4560 not, which would be $28.5 otherwise. Not sure.

AFAIK UK VAT is 20% and it's 27% higher price. Its just what you get for living in UK I guess.

Seconded. I just got a Strix Halo box a few months back and it is great. Does everything I need it to.

Imagine if any other industry worked like this.

"Our Quarter Pounder may weigh only 1/8 oz, but we figured out how to pack double the flavor in each mouthful, so we're still selling it as a Quarter Pounder."

Yeah for a lot of us macOS really gets in the way of using the otherwise excellent hardware. My daily driver is an M1 Pro with Asahi and it's easily my favorite computer ever. It's a real shame that the newer M models can't run Linux.

My example is I'm looking for a new media creation machine to replace my homebuilt PC from 2015. Since that old machine can't run Windows 11 and also because Apple storage is so expensive, my idea is to turn the PC into a Linux storage machine with a 10G NIC. Then I should just be able to edit off of the storage instead of worrying about caching it locally.

The prices are ridiculous though. I may just keep rolling with my Windows 10 setup.

As long as everything is using 10gb, faster transfer speeds when moving data between computers. For downloads, it wont help unless you have 10gb fiber, but for most folks, 2.5gb is quite fast. Hell my spinning media NAS has a hard time saturating when moving files between internal servers.

It feels stupid having my internet be faster than my computer can connect to it

I use both the base M4 Mac mini and an M4 MacBook Air for Final Cut Pro, Photoshop, and Fusion, and while they're not as almost-always-perfectly-smooth as my Mac Studio, they're about 100x better than the experience I used to have on my old Intel MacBook Pros in the 2010s.

I edit 4K ProRes and H.265 footage, sometimes with multicam (up to 4 streams) and color adjustments, titles, etc. It's only after stacking 3-5 effects before things can stutter, really.

Or if you try doing something CPU-intense in the background _while_ running some heavy creative software. I just don't do that.

Subjective

I am merely pointing out additional revenue streams for Apple here. They make money off the hardware and again off the financing. Car manufacturers and have much lower margins and finance via their financial arms with much less predatory terms than your average credit card. The zero percent APR is very attractive, and easy to convince yourself to go with something above what you can afford. Times are good for Apple.

My friend, the same way everyone else does. It goes from 0% to 28% interest when you miss a payment. Those are rates normal lenders fall asleep dreaming of.