New 14‑inch MacBook Pro with M6
apple.com163 points by meetpateltech 20 hours ago
163 points by meetpateltech 20 hours ago
Man every time I want to get a new macbook air they come up with a new macbook pro which means 6 months later they're going to come up with a new generation of airs by which time I think "let me wait a bit and see if people like it", and so here I am with a 2022 M2 that is perfectly fine except for the disk being too small.
I still have the original M1 Pro (thankfully with enough disk space) and I still don't really see a reason to upgrade. Since the M1 all these MacBooks are more than powerful enough for anything I might want to do and the original battery life was so good an upgrade would harldy be worth it.
Yeah you Mac users are spoiled. I bought this Framework 13 with the Ryzen 5 340 last year and was blown away at how fast it was, only to discover that it's roughly on par with the M1 Pro that came out 4 years earlier (and has much better battery life).
I don't _need_ the battery life and still prefer to run Linux so the tradeoff is worth it to me, but for most users it's pretty hard to not recommend a Macbook.
> I don't _need_ the battery life and still prefer to run Linux so the tradeoff is worth it to me, but for most users it's pretty hard to not recommend a Macbook.
The thing is I never had a Mac(Book) before, but the hardware at the time was just so much ahead of anything else that I didn't mind that limitation. At least for what I bought it any OS (Windows/MacOS/Linux) would have been totally fine.
Same here. A part of me wants to get a new MBP but I really can't justify it.
playing gta 6 on it maybe.
It's a console exclusive as of now and if/when it releases for computers at least I would rather play it on a dedicated Gaming PC and not a Laptop.
It'll be decompiled and released on PC by modders within a week of it being officially released, AI tools have gotten too good for things like that to be controlled by Sony/Rockstar.
I don’t understand this. I have a m4 with 16gb, and it can barely run office. Throw in a couple of browser tabs of ChatGPT and LinkedIn, and it slows to a crawl.
Every app window / browser tab is like 1GB these days.
The unbearable burden of consumerism.
"You didn't even finish your M2 yet and already want to refill your plate?"
Maybe gp should try squeezing it through the other major cavity of the body. Might have some extra room there.
Edit: guys, come up, muster some sense of humor. This screen is only 14" after all.
Genuine question from someone who knows nothing about Apple products... can't you replace/upgrade the drive?
They are soldered in. Replacement itself can probably be done by a professional repair technician who is equipped with the right tools. But it is not a self-service job that anyone can do.
On top of that, the drives might be somehow paired to the motherboard. And I would imagine that pairing a new one with the existing motherboard may require some proprietary software that only Apple has.
These are only my assumptions though. People e.g. at Louis Rossmann's repair shop might know more.
Apple does not use common parts for its storage. People are used to M.2 drives, but those have the controller on the stick, and Apple has integrated the controller inside its M-series. So you first need to find compatible storage in the first place, and the only place it can come from is a donor Mac.
Oh you silly boy, of course you can, it's extremely easy, here is a video showing how to do it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xrg7nPG6_UU
Thanks! I can't believe I didn't know how easy this is!
For those who can't see the video, I think the above two commenters are being facetious for humor.
It is funny because the video is 50 minutes long which requires a difficult soldering job and chip reprogramming. This does not include the process of opening the Macbook Pro, disassembling it, removing the logic board, nor the reverse process.
Heh, no, it's soldered.
If you throw enough money at a sufficiently skilled technician it can be done, but no M.2 slots in sight here.
You really know nothing, lol! When was the last time you replaced your "drive" inside your Android phone?
This is an Apple device, the word upgrade does not exist in their world.
Of course it does! You just have to go to a Genius Bar after the release of a new MacBook, and tell them you're interested in buying one. They'll even handle recycling your old one for you!
I'm still on my early 2022 macbook 14" M1, which I was thoughtful enough to get 64gb ram for at the time, and remain still incredibly happy. M6 must be nuts!
Yeah, I'm still on a 2021 M1 Pro and the only real complaint is that the battery has weakened somewhat, but still fine. and if I really cared I would probably figure out what to do to get firefox from being such a constant drain.
Just get the Air. Moore's law peaked a long time ago and the differences between the M-generations are too small to be meaningful.
The air is designed for non degenerates who don’t actually use the laptop in their laps. For us degens we need active cooling lest we are thermal throttled from belly heat
No agreed, for me it’s about the incidentals - nicer camera, nicer screen, WiFi 6e, large drive etc
I got a used M2 Air a year ago and it's the best Apple laptop I've ever owned. And I've owned dozens.
Plus it runs Asahi linux on the metal.
I bought my 2022 M2 Air with 24GB/1TB/10-core GPU. Very very glad I did.
The only reason I’m bitter is because they put in WiFi 6E in the M3 generation. Now I just use a 2.5Gbe USB-C adaptor when transferring large files to and from my NAS.
I picked up a 24GB 2TB M2 air and it's still cruising along. Short of having the foresight to pick up 512GB Ultra prior to the rampocalypse, I'm happy.
Exactly the same story here. I'm still very happily using an M2, which is just great.
I’m in the exact same predicament: I bought an M2 Air upon release in 2022, chose a BTO with 16 GB of RAM, the top-bin processor, and it still runs absolutely 100% perfectly. Unlike the OP, I’m doing very OK with storage, so I don’t even have that excuse.
The machine is basically flawless and entirely suitable for everything I throw at it (and throw stuff at it I do: when I’m not web-browsing or playing YouTube videos I’m using Wolfram Mathematica, which is one heck of a resource hog) and it’s absolutely utterly fine and blasé about the whole thing.
As things are, I can see myself keeping it for a decade. There was a time when I used to change Apple laptops on a yearly basis (starting with PowerBook G4s in the early/mid 2000s and up until the mid 2010s, when I migrated most of my mobile computing to iPads… which lasted for about a decade until I got this thing).
Cries in mid2012 mac book air. This one refuses to die, and it does everything I need except LLMs (but I have a desktop with a 3090), so I'm stuck with it...
Great hardware, but I can't stand MacOS anymore after switching to Linux on home dekstop. KDE is such a breath of fresh air after years of dealing with Apple's idiosyncrasies.
I think I'll keep my Framework 13 Pro preorder.
I’m using KDE on the gaming box I recently transitioned away from Windows as well as on a secondary single-use laptop where Linux has been installed for a while.
It’s not bad, but I find it still to be very much an acquired taste. It’s fine for my usage, where the DE has barely any impact but having been using macOS as my main OS for the better part of 30 years, it would probably drive me insane if I had to shift my main body of computer use to it. It’s not any one thing, but dozens of papercuts that can’t be configured away (I’d need to maintain my own fork to fix them) as well as the more Windows-like desktop paradigm.
> It’s not any one thing, but dozens of papercuts that can’t be configured away
Exactly how I feel about having to use macOS at work, except some of the 'configurations away' are overpriced plugins/third party tools.
Many seem to not want to admit it for some reason, but the truth is that desktop environments are an extremely personal, subjective sort of software. One person's nirvana is another's anathema.
This is why I think it's important that there's a wealth of different desktops available to use that represent a variety of different paradigms, particularly in the context of Linux on the desktop. Desktop Linux represents the ultimate in potential to mold the computer to the user instead of the reverse, and it really bums me out to see suggestions or implications that would-be Linux users should just accept a Windows-ish shape or tiling keyboard-driven shape and stop hoping for something more Mac-like (which as an aside, GNOME is not despite superficial appearances).
> I’d need to maintain my own fork to fix them
At least this is an option with Linux
In theory maybe, but in reality it’s a full-time job keeping up with changes from mainline with big projects like KDE, which isn’t very practical if you need to do other things to keep a paycheck coming in.
KDE is really great. I have a Threadripper FreeBSD desktop I do kernel work on and it is such a breath of fresh air compared to my work Mac.
I'm a habitual device-swapper and I'm staggered by how... satisfied I am with my 8 year old Thinkpad X1 Carbon with Fedora KDE on it.
Yeah I use KDE as well for my desktop and it’s the perfect environment. (Btw I use Arch)
Still I’m very tempted by the new MacBooks. I don’t know of any laptop that is a tenth as good and I don’t want to sit at my desk all day to use a computer.
I would buy apple hardware instantly if you could seamlessly install Linux on it just like a PC. Even if you had to "burn a fuse" to permanently detached it from Apples support and ecosystem.
I love and respect what Asahi has done but I want apple to support a turn key, open drivers, everything works, system.
I'm the same. They don't even have to "support" it, just stop doing everything they can to prevent it. Volunteers will support it for them.
Are they really “doing everything they can to prevent it”? The Asahi folks have already talked about how some of the things in the boot loader only make sense to allow non-Apple OSes. On top of the fact that the boot loader itself is unlocked when we know for a fact they know how to lock down a boot loader for their own chips since they do it for iPhones and iPads.
It seems to me like they are indeed just “not supporting” it, to the fullest extent possible.
Nano-texture upgrade option is coming for the whole line of products.
Edit: the thing I'm confused about is it seems there are at least two but maybe three different things that they are calling "nano-texture". On buying screens, the Studio Display and iPad Mini say "Nano-texture glass" and the new MacBook Pro says "Nano-texture display." But the Duo marketing says "Nano-texture finish."
I get that the internal Duo screen has the film over it and so it says "finish," but is there a difference between "glass" and "display"?
"Nano-texture glass" and "Nano-texture display" should refer to the same: A microscopic etching into the display glass.
"Nano-texture finish" on iPhone Duo refers to an additional layer they put on top of the display panel. It's basically a sticker with a similar (same?) surface structure (they can't put it on the display glass itself because it's too thin)
I could be wrong, but I think glass=hard, while finish=soft. The inside Duo screen is not hard like the outer glass.
I get glass vs finish. But there's a third term being used for the new M6 MacBook Pro, which is nano-texture "display." Someone clarified that it's the same as the "glass" so I take this to just be Day 1 marketing confusion that'll hopefully get cleaned up on the buying screen.
They are very similar, but maybe not identical. The iPad nano-texture reportedly is less prone to fingerprints than at least the XDR monitor; perhaps that’s just an additional oleophobic coating. There may also be generational differences as these weren’t introduced at the same time and may come from different production lines.
It's preparation for the inevitable nano-texture cloth you need to buy from Apple to wipe the screen with.
That's exactly what the £9 Apple Polishing Cloth is!
> Made with soft, non-abrasive material, the Polishing Cloth cleans any Apple display, including nano-texture, safely and effectively.
That is surprisingly cheap from Apple
They recently reduced the price (also rare from Apple), but the macbooks with nano upgrade do ship with one.
I will say that it's the best cloth ever, and the nano upgrade is worth it
Maybe Apple is shifting the terminology from display to glass as an homage to fine watch terminology.
Interesting choice of pic...a guy with a military camo hat, laptop propped up on a hardshell field deployment case...but in a crop field. That's quite a departure from Appe's usual creatives sipping soy lattes vibe
That is RealTree camo, not military camo. And it's really not a crop field? I'm guessing this is AI-generated. It's odd. It looks like a backyard garden, because you have mixed greens with kale, plentiful weeds, and marigolds (which are commonly used to keep pests at bay in small, hand-harvested gardens, but cannot be mixed into mechanically harvested fields). But the permanently-installed drip irrigation says commercial operation.
My guess is this photo was taken in a local garden co-op or small farmstead, but it looked too barren to use for advertising so they added a bunch of plants later.
They are just trying to portray "working in the field" creative types/students and alluding to all day battery life.
I had a similar thought too looking at that photo and then I realized that personally, the only computer I've ever used out 'in the field' for extended durations was a MBP when I was working on an autonomous drone project senior year of undergrad.
It was November/December in Iowa, so it was freezing and the local R/C club airfield was nestled between an ocean of corn fields and the city dump, so it smelled terrible.
But that 16" MBP was red hot from Android Studio and kept my fingers from freezing, so credit where credit is due. Really fun project too!
> the local R/C club airfield was nestled between an ocean of corn fields and the city dump, so it smelled terrible.
That's just how Iowa smells. If anything, the city dump was probably improving things!
/s
lived here my whole life, it's an olfactory adventure :P
Realree camo has become popular with the "creatives sipping soy lattes" demographic. Although Apple is actually bit behind the curve here, I think it's already become a little passe.
It looks more like students to me.
The alt-text was "Two people perform fieldwork using MacBook Pro outdoors on a sunny day", apparently.
Lmao so some human/AI was told to show "fieldwork" and decided it meant people standing in the middle of a field.
Some fieldwork does happen in a field. They look like perhaps botany or biology students.
Not all camo is military. That to me looks more like the camo that you find at bass pro shop
To me it looks like farmers or biologists that use a MacBook because it is durable and has excellent battery life (or at least that seems to be the message when you read the rest of the announcement).
It’s not even a camo hat really, just an outdoorsy one.
They missed a chance to have the lady holding an iPad though.
> They missed a chance to have the lady holding an iPad though.
Yeah this was a big miss. Farmers typically don't bring laptops out into the field, but tablets are extremely common. Tablets aren't nearly as susceptible to damage from dirt and dust and are easier to use on the go.
The hat looks like one of a million other hats you see any guy wearing out in Iowa, from farmers to students to contractors. I have a hat just like it myself.
Minor rant – why come up with a consistent CPU naming scheme (Mx generation with Pro, Max etc. tiers) but then sell variants of each with different numbers of cores? It tosses the entire convention out of the window.
It is especially annoying during resale or benchmarking, because “M5 Pro” by itself doesn't mean much, and you have to count the number of CPU & GPU cores to figure out the actual SKU.
After getting my M1 MBP I mostly stopped paying attention to the new releases until the M4 came out and I decided to see how much "better" it was and was equally completely baffled by the insane number of SKUs and their seeming overlap. Insane product lineup decisions.
Where is a Steve Jobs to return to Apple and simplify the product lineup again?
They’re binned, not every piece of silicon will work perfectly so they’re selling the ones that did as higher SKUs and the ones with minor flaws become the lower core counts.
Yes which is why every company that does this kind of binning advertises the actual SKU they are selling. This doesn’t fit the Apple marketing vibe, and so we end up having to guess.
In the system info they’re referred to as M1 Pro 10 Core or whatever, much easier than Xeon 2950 E3 v3 in the scheme of things.
Chip: Apple M5
Total Number of Cores: 10 (4 Super and 6 Efficiency)
Bring back Boot Camp and let us install Windows 11 on these, you cowards!
Why the heck would one want to do that???
I recently snagged a really good deal on a Macbook (very nice hardware!), but the more I use it, the more I struggle with macOS (even though a few utilities can help bring some of Windows' features).
I used to be able to completely boot into Windows on my Intel mac a few years ago, but Apple no longer supports it for some reason. It's a shame, especially since the ARM64 version of Windows 11 has gotten very good now.
It would also be nice to be able to install Linux too. It's my own hardware, after all!
Windows for ARM requires specific support for each device. They don’t have it for arm macs - Windows 11 simply will not boot.
As for linux, https://asahilinux.org/ currently supports M1/M2 quite well, and is approaching ready on M3+
> It would also be nice to be able to install Linux too. It's my own hardware, after all!
You can install both Windows and Linux on MacBooks. For Windows you may need to buy Parallels[1] or something but you can do it.
Are you sure? It is my understanding that Parallels is just a VM, like VMWare Fusion, and that there's no way to natively dual boot Windows on Apple Silicon.
Looks like you're right about Linux though, I didn't know about Asahi Linux. Thank you for sharing.
It achieves the same thing or close enough. Apple isn't going to spend engineering resources (i.e. time and money) to build an easy way to install Windows. There isn't really a point for them to do so. There are other ways around it to be able to actually install Windows 11 specifically but Parallels is going to be your best bet.
Sadly I also can't natively install my Nintendo Switch software on my Xbox.
Apple is spending engineering resources every day to _prevent you_ from installing what you want on your own device. They're actively spending R&D money to fuck you over.
This just isn't true on the Mac- as noted, Linux installs fine. The same path is open to MS if they want to patch Windows to install on a Mac.
I want them to prevent me from installing things on my device. It's a feature that I intentionally pay for, not a bug.