New 14‑inch MacBook Pro with M6 (apple.com)

349 pointsby beex16 hours ago467 comments

at1as 16 hours ago

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

jwilcoxson 16 hours ago

My M1 Pro has been great, certainly doesn’t feel like a 5-year old computer.

freakynit 16 hours ago

M1 Air guy here... I'm not looking for a replacement still. Almost 6 years now. Runs butter-smooth. Best tech purchase I ever made.

xXSLAYERXx 16 hours ago

Have an M1 air as well. Got a Pro m5. For daily coding tasks, and general web browsing the M1 air still holds. I'm going to pass it on to my kid. Reminds me of the honda we have that we'll also pass down.

sneak 10 hours ago

The M series MBAirs, and ofc the M1 originally, are hands down THE BEST laptops ever made. I have a maxed out MBP ofc but the Airs are unbeatable quality and price/performance.

I think the M1+ MacBook Airs will be regarded eventually like the original Macintosh originally the iPod, or the introduction of the original Air and the creation of the product class that came to be known as “ultrabooks”. It really changed everything about laptops to have a fantastic keyboard, speakers, screen, trackpad, hinge, and 12+ hour battery life… for $1k.

hutattedonmyarm 2 hours ago

Still running my M1 Pro as well, no plans on upgrading for the next few years

TrainedMonkey 16 hours ago

Biggest issue with my M3 Max is apple mandatory fun bloatware. I think it's the same playbook as phones long term. The hardware is still powerful but the software is optimized for the latest CPU, so older models run hot, take a fraction of the second longer to load the resources, etc. That stacks up over 5-6 years of releases to make older models feel slower.

at1as 15 hours ago

I've held back an OS update or two, specifically because I'm worried about performance dropoff on the old chip

But with all of the AI-discovered exploits I think it'll become more important to keep everything up to date

sneak 10 hours ago

Apple makes security updates available for the last few major OS versions, and even backports really bad ones further back on a case by case basis.

incanus77 15 hours ago

Same, and I dual-boot Asahi as well.

dmtroyer 13 hours ago

generally agree, although mine's battery health has been sitting at 80% for what seems like ages now.

mortenjorck 13 hours ago

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 were 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.

NorthSouthNorth 9 hours ago

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.

itake 5 hours ago

My work gave me an m4 MacBook Pro. I could barely tell the difference between my personal computer and my work computer.

ErneX 16 hours ago

If the rumours are true (about AI capabilities) it’d be best to wait yes.

hmokiguess 16 hours ago

which rumours?

speedgoose 15 hours ago

The M7 will the much better for local LLM inference. If you can afford the memory.

hmokiguess 15 hours ago

Oh interesting, any more info on "how"?

smallmancontrov 15 hours ago

With a three point plan, I suspect: memory bandwidth, memory bandwidth, and more memory bandwidth.

heroiccocoa 14 hours ago

How useful would that actually be for local inference, when the bottleneck is, essentially, always memory size? I think the sweet spot is somewhere around 64 to 128 GB. That ought to be enough for almost all uses, like Qwen3.8-Flash-Next at a decent quant.

smallmancontrov 13 hours ago

You can order a 128GB MacBook Pro today -- though point taken, memory size probably does belong in the three part plan :-)

kridsdale1 13 hours ago

> I think the sweet spot is somewhere around 64 to 128 GB. That ought to be enough for almost all uses

This will be the “640kb ought to be enough for anybody” Bill Gates quote of our era.

skohan 12 hours ago

Memory size is a bottleneck, but I have found that speed is very important for getting actual work done. Running a big model is great, but if you're getting 10t/s you're going to be spending a lot of time waiting.

kridsdale1 13 hours ago

More ASIC Mat-Mul too.

shwaj 10 hours ago

Plus with more low precision compute… to help with the memory bandwidth!

epistasis 16 hours ago

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.

freakynit 16 hours ago

I freaking hate liquid-glass UI Apple has "forced" onto us. No freaking way to disable it. I hate it so much.

randomblock1 15 hours ago

There's a slider to reduce the liquidity

Telaneo an hour ago

Reduce != disable.

woah 15 hours ago

Been on HN for many years now, and the one thing that never changes is people posting angrily about small UI changes. It makes me wonder- if things have only ever gotten worse, what was the peak UI? MS DOS?

epistasis 15 hours ago

Small improvements don't get much accolades. And for the most part, the UX is so good that most changes tend to be neutral or for the worse. And when you're really attached to something and there's on an unnecessary change, it feels almost like betrayal!

I, for one, prefer Apple products because they sweat the small stuff more than the other options, and when they have put in effort to make things worse it's kind of infuriating.

I do a bit of desktop Linux work too, and it's OK, but hard to complain when it's all open source volunteer work! Windows is so terrible that I wouldn't even know where to start. What's the point? There's nobody at Microsoft that even gives a damn.

cmoski 15 hours ago

No, it was Windows 3.11

rzzzt 15 hours ago

Windows 2000 / XP in classic mode / XP / Vista / 7. For OSX I'd say High Sierra to Catalina.

al_borland 15 hours ago

I’d go with Tiger (10.4) for peak OS X, personally.

asdff 14 hours ago

Leopard was better because it introduced spaces. Honestly I think that whole concept (I know windows has something analogous now) was the biggest step change in OS functionality I've seen in my life having started on windows 95.

al_borland 13 hours ago

I never used Spaces much.

Apple was actually last to the party on that. Linux had virtual desktops for years at that point, and Windows had them as well through Microsoft PowerToys. I’m pretty sure I was running it on Windows 2000.

pmontra 6 hours ago

I had virtual desktops on UNIXes with X11 well before Linus started working on Linux. They came for free to Linux because they were implemented by many window managers.

ant6n 11 hours ago

The problem is that window management is so atrocious in Mac OS that using multiple desktops is just asking for trouble. Like of you close one window of some software, it will jump to some random other window of the same software on some other desktop.

In the end you’ll spend a significant amount of your time trying to “get back” to where you just where (that alt-tab, a possible savior for this in all other OSs, doesn’t work at all on Mac just adds to the UX mess)

asdff 11 hours ago

Ehh I'm not to caught up with window management on macos. Bunch of shells open I might use tmux. But otherwise I just keep things in piles organized in spaces, and use expose all to get to whatever I need in the pile. It works much like the piles on my desk in real life so I'm comfortable with it. But it was better in leopard when it was a grid of spaces vs a line of spaces. Less rigidity was nice.

ant6n 9 hours ago

But even then. If you close a terminal, it'll jump to some random terminal on another desktop. It just doesn't make any sense.

wtallis 8 hours ago

It doesn't make a lot of sense to me as a default, but there's an option to turn off the automatic switching of spaces when switching applications, and it pretty much eliminates the unwanted switches from closing the last window on the current space.

majormajor 5 hours ago

The separation of Cmd-tab and Cmd-backtick is one of my favorite things in Appleland... what about it is broken to you compared to alt-tab?

vel0city 4 hours ago

Eh. I get what it's going for. The Multi-Window application concept and what not.

In the end though I just feel like it's extra cognitive load to have to think about two different shortcuts to do what is in many ways the same thing.

Say, I've got two browser windows open and a code editor open. I'm wanting to flip through the browser windows to check on things while I work in the code editor. In reality I'm just wanting to juggle the three windows, but depending on if I'm wanting to go from browser to browser it's a different shortcut than if I'm wanting to go from editor to browser. And there's a good chance I'll then need to swap from editor to browser, then issue a different shortcut to go from that browser to the other. When I could have just hit the same shortcut twice.

I've just never really encountered a situation where I've felt like it added something, but I'm constantly having cases where its more annoying.

majormajor 4 hours ago

Thanks, that does make sense. Though as a many-windower alt-tab is just often tooooooo big for my tastes to even try to rely on.

The 40-year-deep-history Mac answer to workflows like that with a small working set with frequent cross-app-one-to-other-switching IMO is mouse-based navigation + spatial partially-overlapping windows, but this seems to be an extremely foreign concept to Windows/*nix users that grew up on full-screen-maximize or tiling. So I don't think is particularly likely to be adopted by anyone who doesn't already have it burned into their brains at this point. :) There's a lot of these old Mac bones still baked into the OS (e.g. if you have a folder on your desktop, and double click it, and move it, then close it, it'll open to the location you moved it to next time. And that memory is separate from that for another folder on your desktop. Though some of the follow-on behaviors have changed (opening folders in already-open windows used to behave similarly, opening new windows by default).

The 20-year-history version is my own personal lord and savior: Exposé hot corners.

Spaces and no-mouse navigation are still in many ways comparative afterthoughts to mouse-based/spatial workflows. Though as someone with 30+ year of Mac muscle memories in my head, the switching-windows-vs-switching-app concept and awareness of "where" I am relative to it is pretty embedded.

spockz an hour ago

For me it is that cmd+` only cycles between windows of the same app in the active desktop. It makes it hard to switch back to a window of the app that was put in full screen.

I get that that behaviour shouldn’t just be changed but I would appreciate it if there were another key combination that would allow cycling through all windows of an app.

majormajor 5 hours ago

Expose added in Panther was the last window management feature that changed my day to day usage of PCs.

Expose + Cmd-tab/Cmd-backtick being separated == a gap that Linux/Windows have somehow never managed to close in 20+ years now.

larsmaxfield 15 hours ago

Liquid Glass was not a "small UI change". It disrupted many accessibility aspects of macOS, so much so that Apple toned down quite a few aspects of the design in subsequent updates, even adding a slider to reduce the effect. [1]

The quantity of requests for how to disable Liquid Glass on Apple Discussions is staggering. [2]

[1]https://www.macrumors.com/2026/06/09/macos-golden-gate-liqui...

[2]https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256227663

richjdsmith 5 hours ago

Yea, I am trichromatic color blind, and it is legitimately unusable for me. I am unable to type on the keyboard. I know there are changes since it launched, by after my ipad updated automatically, rendering it near useless to me, I just disabled updates on my iphone.

asdff 14 hours ago

I think the biggest thing isn't really whatever it is but the act of changing and forcing everyone to change into the new ui that is the disruptive part. It is a combination of window dressing changing but also sometimes functions breaking. It is ironic because software written for developers prides itself generally on maintaining compatibility with say depreciated flags, or if things will be depreciated plenty of notice ahead of time. But that only holds for cli software. GUI software and the OS that all goes out the window. Stuff breaks, workflows break, you have no recourse and in fact they might make it genuinely difficult to go back to an older version. Like this part of it is the shitty part. Never mind how it happens to look. It is the forcing effect.

setr 13 hours ago

I think it’s also because these UI changes are always designed to improve first-impression and first-usage. They are outright hostile to anyone who wants to go fast and get faster — the power user. At minimum the re-arrangement resets any gains you had, and at maximum its irrecoverable because the UI is now fundamentally designed to slow you down.

This eventually becomes awkwardly precise complaints about information density and general change; but the underlying issue is I want to go fast and the system says no

ericd 13 hours ago

I think the only real solution to this is to switch to an OS with a backing org that has optimization for power users as a first-class goal. I've been liking Omarchy and NixOS for that. I say this as a Mac user since 1989.

ericd 13 hours ago

I'd say Snow Leopard was peak.

pebble 13 hours ago

Small?

oofabz 12 hours ago

Mac OS 7.6.1 was peak Apple

SoftTalker 7 hours ago

It was great if you could tolerate an application crash taking down the whole operating system hard.

majormajor 4 hours ago

It's been a long time, but I'm pretty sure Appearance Manager and the corresponding unreleased-but-leaked Hi-Tech theme was 8.5-or-so-and-up-only, which means I must reject 7.6 on aesthetic grounds ;)

linguae 12 hours ago

On the Windows side, Windows 2000 and XP/Vista/7’s Classic mode, though Aero was quite nice. I’m not a fan of the interfaces from 8 onward, and I didn’t like Luna in XP.

On the Mac side, it’s a toss up between the platinum interface of Mac OS 8/9 and Mac OS X Tiger. With that said, I have a work-issued MacBook Pro running Golden Gate as my daily driver, and Liquid Glass is alright. It’s not what I’d prefer if I had a choice, but it’s not a dramatic departure from previous versions of macOS. A Cheetah or Puma Mac OS X user should be able to navigate Golden Gate with ease, mostly.

jen729w 3 hours ago

If you consider the transition from macOS 15 to 26+ 'small', I think you should see an optician.

Like GP, I despise the new design. I'll say the old design was pretty peak design. Windows looked like windows. Buttons like buttons. With accessibility tweaks (for transparency and borders) I could make it very, very usable.

This new thing is a crime against UI. Every icon now sits in a circle, and takes up % more room as a result. Because … it's pretty? It isn't pretty.

I upgraded my laptop thinking I was going to develop an app and that I'd need to be on the latest design. I ended up developing a TUI so I needn't have bothered. Every time I see my partner's laptop, still on Sequoia, I shed a little tear.

dasKrokodil an hour ago

NeXTSTep

BugsJustFindMe 15 hours ago

> No freaking way to disable it.

Um. https://imgur.com/a/ydt3MN5

tedd4u 14 hours ago

Liquid Glass is more than just the transparency. There are many other changes that cannot be disabled that way. Not to mention the overall lag compared to Sequoia (I skipped Tahoe entirely so I had a direct knife-edge transition). 27 is less bad than 26 but Liquid Glass doesn't make anything better than prior UI and makes several things worse, even if you turn down the transparency.

ndiddy 13 hours ago

I imagine that the UI changes since Sequoia regarding the giant buttons and whitespace are because Apple plans to release a touchscreen laptop (most rumors say it will be announced tomorrow) so they've decided to make the UI touch friendly at the expense of bloating the UI for everyone who doesn't have a touchscreen. Microsoft made this same decision with the Windows releases after 7.

LoganDark 12 hours ago

The rumors also said it would be announced today, so we'll just have to see. Even a broken clock is right twice a day, after all.

macintux 9 hours ago

Press event is tomorrow. I don’t think a touchscreen laptop is a good idea, but I guess we’ll see whether Apple can do a good job with it.

selcuka 7 hours ago

A touchscreen laptop is only a good idea if it can also be used like a tablet (with a detached keyboard). Otherwise it's useless.

pmontra 6 hours ago

Why? My SO has a Windows laptop with touchscreen, touchpad, keyboard and mouse. She uses the mouse but sometimes pushing a button by touching the screen saves time. If you think about it, by the time you reached for the mouse and started aiming for the button you already pressed it with your finger. The touchpad reduces the travel of the hand but not the time to aim. Hitting something with a finger is always faster. She is missing that on her work laptop.

spider-mario 12 minutes ago

> If you think about it, by the time you reached for the mouse and started aiming for the button you already pressed it with your finger. The touchpad reduces the travel of the hand but not the time to aim. Hitting something with a finger is always faster.

Depends on how accurate you need to be. How fast/confident you can be at hitting with a finger can easily drop off a cliff.

LoganDark 5 hours ago

I used touch on Windows to test multitouch and pen input support in a familiar environment. Less hassle than grabbing a tablet, setting up remote DevTools, etc.

tedd4u 3 hours ago

Yeah I think this is probably right. I use a 13" MBA as my primary machine so space is crucial and Liquid Glass wastes it.

bluecalm 15 hours ago

The way things are going you will be able to run your favorite flavor of Linux on those pretty soon. It will be the best of both worlds: the best hardware and a good OS. Hopefully Apple doesn't take steps to block it.

dzhiurgis 11 hours ago

Whats so forced on you? I'm on still on Sequoia and no one forced me to update to latest OS. Everything still works and I get security updates.

zerd 10 hours ago

They're going to force us soon. When getting a new device I don't think you can install an older version either.

thenthenthen 16 hours ago

I got a second hand M1 air like two years ago for 200usd with 1tb hdd and 16gb ram. I got it after my intel Air died after about..12 years? (Edit: the ssd died, which is removable… but literally had a plane to catch). All my pros have died within a few years. Air all the way. Never looking back.

epistasis 15 hours ago

I wonder if this is from not trying to get maximum performance, and instead focusing on efficiency? But I've noticed this too. I definitely prefer the Air form factor over larger models as the primary benefit, but the durability seems to be a big benefit too. Fewer ports, thinner shell that seals tighter and can't flex as much due to the curved metal instead of flat surfaces... everything about it just seems like a better design.

thenthenthen 14 hours ago

Yeah the formfactor, the noise, the heat… even the performance seems better except for what, benchmarks..?

asdff 14 hours ago

No fans though. I like being able to crank them full blast. I'm not sure this pro would ever actually run the fans all out with my usage with the existing fan curve. Apple always favors it running quiet and hot, but I don't mind loud and prefer cool palms. I grew up with far more noisy rigs.

giwook 15 hours ago

> All of my pros have died within a few years

What are you doing to them?

I still have MBPs from 2015 and 2018 that have not 'died'.

thenthenthen 14 hours ago

Just use. There were two models that had issues with the gpu desoldering, 2012 and 2015 iirc? I was lucky enough to have them. I put the mobos in the oven (180deg for seven minutes?) and that would fix it. For about a month… and then 2 weeks.. and then… I actually have a 2018 that I borrowed from a friend after my 2013 Air ssd gave up, it is still working I think, but its twice as slow, at least as my Air was. Its so weird. The Air stayed ‘snappy’ even after my friends Pro’s would become too sluggish. Maybe because I never update ;)

giwook 12 hours ago

Sounds like user error tbh.

thenthenthen 7 hours ago

Its from when they switched to lead free solder. Its a known issue.

wilkystyle 12 hours ago

Similar experience. In active use in my house:

    2012 MacBook Pro
    2015 MacBook Pro
    2019 MacBook Air
    2020 M1 MacBook Pro

The longevity is incredible.

simonh 11 hours ago

My first gen 5k iMac (2014) is our kitchen machine these days. Still a joy to use. The final gen (2020) model is still my main machine.

I almost wish one of them would konk out so I can get an M series, but then I wouldn’t be on a 5k iMac anymore, which would suck. Love these machines.

kranner 8 hours ago

They fare differently in dusty environments, for one. Airs being sealed do well.

watersb 8 hours ago

The last few models of Intel Mac Pro that I used were mostly good at getting really hot.

Dropbox would fire up to do massive walks of the filesystem tree and the fans would take off. I think the thermal interface material on the GPU got cooked at some point. It would be a relatively easy fix, for me a couple of hours, but I chose to fix it with an M1 MacBook Air.

evantbyrne 13 hours ago

The old airs were legendary. My 2012 still runs just fine despite being beaten to hell. Would still be a great dev machine for non-GPU workloads if it weren't for a lack of OS updates. Have been very happy with my M1 Pro as well though.

monegator 13 hours ago

the 2012 was a really solid generation (the 2010 as well. i still have both, not running osx anymore of course)

reaperducer 13 hours ago

Another 2012 Air user here.

The battery doesn't hold a charge anymore, but as long as it's plugged in, it keeps chugging along.

awad 11 hours ago

Wow turns out there's a whole community of us! Same boat. I usually recycle, hand me down, trade-in but have really had a hard time letting that little one go.

kyleee 8 hours ago

I also have a 2010 air still in service. Replaced the battery once with an Amazon special. It’s due for another but I just keep it plugged in mostly

wglb 8 hours ago

I replaced my original in a 2012 pro. The replacement died so I run it without a battery.

TacticalCoder 11 hours ago

> The old airs were legendary.

You gotta be kidding me. The old M1 Air had the "bendgate" where several people, me included, saw their screen die overnight for no reason. Tens and tens of pages of people complaining about it only to be with "you're holding it wrong" answers. Insanity.

I think Apple fixed that mess with the gen after that one.

reaperducer 10 hours ago

We're not talking about M-series Airs.

JMiao 11 hours ago

incredible deal

olalonde 26 minutes ago

I'd still buy MacBook Airs even if they cost more than the Pros. The lighter weight and the silence of having no fan are worth more to me than the extra performance.

markstos 13 hours ago

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.)

Schiendelman 13 hours ago

Isn't icloud backup on by default??

simonh 11 hours ago

Kind of, but without a sub you only get a trivial amount of storage.

watersb 8 hours ago

I'm not aware of any control over what gets backed up.

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.

martheen 4 hours ago

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.

ihateolives an hour ago

OneDrive, Dropbox etc are not backup tools, they're file sync tools. This really should be common knowledge.

kalleboo 6 hours ago

There is no iCloud Backup for Macs, only iOS devices.

There is iCloud Drive sync, but that only syncs your Documents and Desktop folders, but any other files are not synced.

paulschreiber 4 hours ago

iCloud will sync your contacts, Notes, Keychains, and other data on macOS.

frxx an hour ago

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.

tynorf 12 hours ago

> 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.

SoftTalker 7 hours ago

And restore tested.

y1n0 6 hours ago

The more you people keep harping on this ultra robust backup strategy, the fewer everyday average people are actually even going to attempt a backup.

andruby an hour ago

1/ You're on HN, the audience isn't "everyday average people"

2/ This is like complaining that climate activists were harping too much 30 years ago, and that's why nobody listened

y1n0 an hour ago

It's getting more average every day. QED.

znpy 13 minutes ago

> 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)

andruby 7 minutes ago

What would have been the right amount of harping about the environment though? Or is it always going to be a pointless exercise trying to convince/alert people?

Or is the only way to do that successfully, doing it subconsciously/covertly like the state actors are swaying public opinion? :-/

samatman 12 hours ago

This is a not-very-large subset of the ways you can permanently lose data which exists in only one copy. Have a Time Machine. No step two.

> We replaced it with a Framework... with removable storage.

Cool. How are you backing it up?

dzhiurgis 11 hours ago

Can't a decent shop desolder it tho?

bdavbdav 11 hours ago

Key is held on a separate chip unfortunately

judge2020 11 hours ago

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.

dzhiurgis 9 hours ago

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.

ariwilson 8 hours ago

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.

tarsierscripter 7 hours ago

All the data is encrypted and the key is held inside the secure enclave within the CPU. If the CPU fails then the data is unrecoverable.

dwaite 7 hours ago

encrypted by both a boot password and a secure enclave held key

pmontra 6 hours ago

And the owners of the computer can't get the key in the secure enclave? Are they part of the threat model?

rafram 6 hours ago

“Some person with physical access to the computer” absolutely is part of the threat model.

pmontra 5 hours ago

Some person, yes. The owner, no.

JoshTriplett 40 minutes ago

The standard way you distinguish "adversary with physical possession" from "owner" is "do they have the owner's passphrase".

Eueudhsbsj32 6 hours ago

Are you suggesting that both keys should be required for decryption?

How would you restore the backup if your secure hardware device is lost/stolen/damaged?

vel0city 4 hours ago

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.

katbyte 8 hours ago

you should be backing up all devices with removable storage or not, SSDs can also die without warning.

xenator an hour ago

How removable storage will protect you from burned down laptop? Do you plan to keep SSD in your pocket while you are sleeping?

brandonpelfrey 12 hours ago

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.

mag7269 9 hours ago

Donate $3k… to some charity that’s going to use it to justify their COO’s $200k/year salary. GTFOH!

yieldcrv 8 hours ago

you can probably get the battery replaced for a better speedup

socalgal2 7 hours ago

My worry is mostly storage. SSD do not last forever

Spartan-S63 15 hours ago

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.

dofm 14 hours ago

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.

sgarrity 15 hours ago

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.

boogieknite 12 hours ago

second this anecdote

richstokes 7 hours ago

Same. Only because I broke my M1. Performance wise the M5 barely feels any faster to me in 90% of tasks

efficax 15 hours ago

still rocking the m1 studio, shows no signs of stopping

marinhero 14 hours ago

Same here! M1 Max going strong. I'm curious to see what they put out tomorrow but spending over 5K in a machine is a pretty rough pill to swallow

green-salt 14 hours ago

Right there with you

vjvjvjvjghv 14 hours ago

I have tried an M4 Macbook a while ago but my M1 Max Macbook still feels plenty fast. Hope to keep that for a long time.

Gigachad 11 hours ago

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.

icedchai 9 hours ago

The only reason I upgraded from an M1 Pro to an M4 Pro is because I wanted more RAM. The processor itself was still plenty fast.

jdwyah 7 hours ago

Yeah. M1 Max with 64gb remains more pleasurable than my work M5 with 48gb.

boringg 14 hours ago

Im on that same cycle. M1 pro max still running strong though. 3 cycles might be hard though...

lhoff 14 hours ago

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.

moecables 14 hours ago

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:

- a low end Macbook Pro or Air

- Mac Studio, mid-to-high specs

asdff 14 hours ago

Why not just continue to use your m1 pro as your low end client? Save a couple hundred.

moecables 14 hours ago

that's the plan for now, I just haven't had the M1 Pro slow down/hang/lag enough to give it up. It's a mid-range M1 Pro with 32GB of ram, works for me for dev work, I don't run any local LLM or resource intensive things on it. Battery only has 250 cycles on it so it's not like it dies off-charger.

a34729t 14 hours ago

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).

meerita 14 hours ago

M1 Pro here as well. I will buy M6 Pro Mac Studio o Mac mini.

arjie 14 hours ago

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.

antihero 12 hours ago

I do enjoy the fact that if software annoys you, it’s easy as hell to simply generate a better version.

stackghost 7 hours ago

Which software have you rewritten for speed?

arjie 4 hours ago

Text viewer, password manager, console/browser hybrid, specialized text editors, household agent, task manager, kb, that sort of stuff.

aenis 4 hours ago

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.

platevoltage 14 hours ago

My M2 pro is perfect still other than the fact that the 16gb of RAM is killing me.

herunan 13 hours ago

I have an M1 and an M5 MBA. For the most part, the M1 is doing extremely well, but imo this is the year where M1 is showing its age.

andkenneth 13 hours ago

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.

ramijames 12 hours ago

They will pry my M1 Pro Macbook from my cold, dead fingers.

aerhardt 12 hours ago

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.

Aurornis 11 hours ago

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.

judge2020 11 hours ago

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.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48681392

pazimzadeh 11 hours ago

Doesn't the high resale value of Macs not make it worthwhile to hang on to your old one as long as possible?

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.

Zacharias030 9 hours ago

That's funny, I bought the config you are describing, but with nanotectured 14" instead of 16 new in July from microcenter for 2700 after tax.

moralestapia 10 hours ago

Why wouldn't it make it?

Mine is running great and it has 24/7 use.

raffraffraff 10 hours ago

M1 Max 64gb here, running Qwen 3.6 35b (unsloth 4bit) and it's plenty usable, and cheap used. Best bang for buck.

yieldcrv 7 hours ago

heyyy same, checkout kapitsa as the inference engine, gets 145+ tokens/sec

https://github.com/nace-ai/kapitsa

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, the improvements in other areas are adding up like wifi bandwidth and protocol, NVMe speeds, webcam

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

raffraffraff 2 hours ago

Here are the numbers that got me buying a used M1 Max for LLM work.

    M1 Max 400GB/s
    M4 Pro 273GB/s
    M5 Pro 307GB/s

Only Max are worthwhile for LLMs. An Ultra is just two Mac chips on a die, but I think they're just used in Mac Studio.

I'll check it that inference engine! Thanks!

Edit: it doesn't give numbers for unsloth/Qwen-3.6-35B-A3B 4bit, but I'm using mlx-serve right now and getting petty good numbers (and it took a while to tweak everything properly!)

yieldcrv 2 hours ago

it has just a few models it can download, it's really qwen and apple silicon pilled

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

sneak 10 hours ago

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.

nidnogg 10 hours ago

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!

monk_grilla 10 hours ago

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.

teaearlgraycold 9 hours ago

I think the rumors are the M6 and then later M7 Pro/Max will be put into a new chassis with a touchscreen and no notch.

gkanai 9 hours ago

M1 Max, 32GB, 1TB; still not feeling the need to upgrade, especially when the upgrade is as expensive as they are now.

sevenseacat 4 hours ago

same

bigmadshoe 7 hours ago

Why would you need a $6000 computer for dev work? For toying around with local models I would understand.

killingtime74 7 hours ago

Standard issue at our company. There's just some apps that are huge, especially legacy ones.

td521534f12 6 hours ago

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.

bigmadshoe 6 hours ago

That's fair, I've never worked in a domain where I need to run that locally. Is there a reason to not just SSH into a workstation that can run it?

aenis 4 hours ago

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.

jballanc 6 hours ago

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!

aenis 4 hours ago

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.

gobins 5 hours ago

And, here I am with my 2012 macbook pro, still thinking if its worth upgrading.

stigi 4 hours ago

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.

vr46 4 hours ago

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.

Stitch4223 an hour ago

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)

drchaim 2 hours ago

Still with macmini m1 8gb here. still working OK taking care of space and RAM.

brabel an hour ago

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.

Gareth321 42 minutes ago

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.

znpy 17 minutes ago

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.

bodge5000 11 minutes ago

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.

headz 11 minutes ago

I'm also on an M1 Pro, trying and failing to find a reason to upgrade other than wanting a "shiny new toy".

swiftcoder 13 hours ago

I have to say, I really dislike the thing where the base M(n+1) is always in the market alongside M(n) Pro/Max. I appreciate the underlying chips are probably quite distinct, but from a naming standpoint its confusing as hell.

random3 13 hours ago

makes me want to wait another one I have an M1 Max and just set up playing with an M1 (non-max) and realized it can't drive 3 displays. I recall getting Max just for this, but generally, makes me think of non-Max as a non-pro after all.

And having what's presumably the latest CPU but with potentially worse features than the last generation combined with increased prices from RAM is a deal breaker so I'll guess I'll push my M1 for another year.

Aurornis 11 hours ago

Whenever I do this, I enter into a perpetual one-more-year wait loop.

When I finally cave in and buy something after 5 years I’m very momentarily sad for not perfectly timing the release window, then I realize I keep hardware long enough a half year barely matters.

CharlieDigital an hour ago

It can drive 3 displays using a DisplayLink dock/adapter.

samatman 12 hours ago

I get you, but I suspect it reflects reality. The M-with-adjective chips are M(n) chips with more cores and cache, it stands to reason that it takes real wall time for TSMC to start cranking them out with acceptable defect rates.

So Apple can either toss the early production in inventory while the whole process catches up, or they can do what they do. Better for both the company and the consumer that they do the latter.

StilesCrisis 12 hours ago

I'm guessing the Base and Pro chips come off the same wafer, and they get 5 Base chips (some defects) for every one Pro chip (very few defects). So they run the Base-model assembly line for six months and eventually they accumulate enough Pro chips to satisfy Pro-model demand.

LoganDark 12 hours ago

Curious, where's 5 come from? Is there a reason for the specific guess or is it just an example?

StilesCrisis 7 hours ago

It was a made-up number.

whizzter 12 hours ago

You mean as in binning? High defect rates for chips but they're burned to disable non-working parts and sell them as non-pro chips and accumulate the good ones ?

LoganDark 6 hours ago

The Pro and Max chips have a different die than the base model. They don't bin down to the base model. Maybe Max bins down to Pro now that those are the same die, or Pro bins up to one half a Max?

simonh 11 hours ago

Pro chips come much later than base chips and vary significantly in ways other than number of cores (which can be up to double), such as doubled memory bandwidth and peripheral support (thunderbolt 5 instead of 4).

dmitrygr 11 hours ago

If you look at the platform name and the kernel code you'l realize that this is not even remotely true. The base M chips are T8xxx which are (more or less) just iPad chips. The pro/max/ultra are T6xxx and are their own new thing, starting with M1 pro which was T6000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_silicon#Comparison_of_M-...

y1n0 11 hours ago

As others have said, the pro is a different mask set.

But you are right, they do bin. You can get versions of the cpu with different core counts for this reason.

I’m only seeing this with the pro and max though.

aqme28 12 hours ago

And I can never remember whether Pro is better than Max or vice-versa. It’s an apples/oranges naming scheme.

raffraffraff 10 hours ago

Regular < Pro < Max < Ultra

mrheosuper 2 hours ago

Just Apple thing, Maximum does not mean Maximum.

npunt 2 hours ago

I don't think Apple has ever officially said Max = Maximum. Could be someone's name :) The bigger confusion to me is it's pronounced Macs!

Whitespace 12 hours ago

If the difference between M6 and M5 Pro or M5 Max is confusing to you, I strongly recommend you don't look at the names of literally any other CPU, GPU, or chipset that is being manufactured.

swiftcoder 11 hours ago

Yeah, but traditionally Apple doesn't pull that weird naming shit. Although I guess the mobile naming scheme has been headed there for a while.

usern20260720 11 hours ago

they used to have 1 iphone, now there are 6 models with around 21 exterior versions total

y1n0 11 hours ago

And you think 1 is better.

usern20260720 11 hours ago

I think it's simpler

chrisandchris 9 hours ago

Not better - but Apple in early days was easy: Choose Air if you don't nedd much. Choose MacBook if you need a little but more and choose Pro if you need max power. That's one of the reasons why I bought an Apple years ago.

Compare that with the regilar lineup of other manufacturers: Cryptic model names which are uncomparable and models that are so similar that they could be equivalent.

So, no, 1 is not better but I don't care (as customer) about variety.

y1n0 11 hours ago

Are you kidding? When have they not? Apple II, II+, IIc, IIc Plus, IIe (also //e), IIe enhanced, IIGS. All sold concurrently.

They’ve always been this way.

duskwuff 11 hours ago

Most of those models were not sold concurrently. The Apple II, II+, and IIe each replaced the previous model; the same was true of the IIc and IIc Plus. "//e" was an alternate textual rendering of IIe, not a separate model.

The most Apple II models that were sold concurrently were the IIe Platinum, IIc Plus, and IIgs. (And this was around 1990, at which point there were far more models of Macintosh computers on the market.)

efitz 11 hours ago

//e was a separate model from the ][+

64kb RAM + 80col card vs 48kb/40col

y1n0 10 hours ago

The 2 and 2+ were concurrent.

The 2e, 2e enhanced, 2c, 2c+ and 2gs were concurrent.

I didn’t bother with Mac because I got tired of writing all the things.

jonaustin 10 hours ago

Bad example, but very true with the Mac under sculley. When Jobs came back that was one of the things he greatly simplified

noosphr 11 hours ago

The second iPhone was the 3g the third was the 3gs.

sib 10 hours ago

The second one was the first iPhone with 3G networking (which had broadly been considered a required feature for smartphones when the original iPhone was introduced without it.)

I won't try to defend the 3Gs ;)

Cyph0n 10 hours ago

Not to mention X and Xs.

gleenn 9 hours ago

And the fact that they skipped 9 and will likely skip iPhone 19 as well

kijin 8 hours ago

Microsoft skipped Window 9 too.

Samsung skipped an entire range of numbers from Galaxy S 11 to 19.

Looks like tech companies don't like 9...

tiagod 4 hours ago

Supposedly Microsoft skipped 9 because of a lot of hardcoded checks for windows 95 and 98 that checked the first digit

tedd4u 3 hours ago

And the iPhone XR! All part of the twelfth-gen models. Of course the subsequent thirteenth-gen models were just called "iPhone 11" in a return to sanity.

hoistbypetard 10 hours ago

Tell me you're not old enough to remember the Performa and Centris lines without telling me you're not old enough to remember the Performa and Centris lines.

jorvi 9 hours ago

All the people under you not understanding that you meant AMD repackaging 2-4 year old CPU cores as """new""" by giving them a current series name and bolting some extra features on.

traceroute66 11 hours ago

> I strongly recommend you don't look at the names of literally any other CPU, GPU, or chipset that is being manufactured.

And certainly don't look at MikroTik's product naming. ;)

TMWNN 11 hours ago

Put another way, it is a peculiar naming regime when M(n-[2-4]) Pro/Max/Ultra is superior to M(n). This is very visible right now because of the demand for running local AI on Macs.

2III7 11 hours ago

It's way better than the naming scehme of Ryzen and Intel Core i series.

trnkgkekwkng 9 hours ago

Threadripper’s model numbers where briefly their msrp.

porphyra 11 hours ago

It's also kinda sad that there's no clear-cut best chip, e.g. the M6 outperforms the M5 Pro in some ways (singlethreaded performance, maybe NPU and stuff) but then the M5 Pro also outperforms the M6 in some ways (multithreading, graphics). This was even worse when the Mac Studio was stuck on M3 Ultra for a while when the M5 Max was out. The M5 Max was simply better at most things and it was ironic that the fastest computer you could buy was briefly a laptop.

shwaj 11 hours ago

How could it possibly be otherwise? Single core performance goes up every year, but not enough that this year’s 12-core CPU beats last year’s 18-core CPU at multithreaded benchmarks.

This is “sad”?!? First world problems.

wtallis 9 hours ago

It's also not exclusive to Apple; the normal product cadence from Intel and AMD usually has the large workstation and server chips falling behind the consumer chips in peak single-core performance for part of the product cycle. Some market segments just don't sustain annual updates very well, and it's always easier to get a smaller chip out the door first before a larger chip.

GeekyBear 10 hours ago

In a world with the chips themselves named things like:

Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 495 or Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6.

Your distaste seems misplaced.

znpy 11 minutes ago

> Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 495 or Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6.

Don't even get me started on USB...

goodluckchuck 7 hours ago

Latest vs. greatest. Buyers who’ll pay for performance can deal with that discomfort and be squeezed for buying the best, but those who need an extra push to buy Apple might be sold on the idea of the latest.

tjwebbnorfolk 4 hours ago

bigger number = more megahertz

larodi 9 minutes ago

I’ll wait for it to surface on eBay in few years and then consider again. Pretty sure many of these go in the hands of people who can never make good use of all the nice hardware in it.

steelframe 14 hours ago

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. I'm not really sold on running models on the hardware I have right in front of me. So long as I can rent an RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell at about half a buck per hour through a European provider, I'm fine using that with Qwen3.8-27B UD-Q4_K_M for the few things I consider more privacy-sensitive.

passivepinetree 12 hours ago

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.

zamalek 12 hours ago

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.

Gigachad 11 hours ago

USB-C video still doesn't work but in my experience virtually everything else you need does.

monk_grilla 10 hours ago

Does DisplayLink work?

cyberclimb 10 hours ago

100% stable for me at the level of any other linux machine. True the USB-C display doesn't (officially) work yet but I have 0 issues with the HDMI.

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.

IshKebab 10 hours ago

> at the level of any other Linux machine

So, 97% stable then? (Downvote me but it's true.)

esperent 8 hours ago

I've been running Ubuntu on an MSI Ge66 gaming laptop, Intel + Nvidia gpu for a couple of years now. I did have some teething problems with wifi and sleep but after resolving those it's been rock solid. I'd say 99.9% stable if we're throwing out random percentages here.

dannyw 7 hours ago

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.

radlad 6 hours ago

PEBKAC

cevn 6 hours ago

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.

csomar an hour ago

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.

educar 22 minutes ago

Love your bait

andreash an hour ago

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.

gedy 4 hours ago

It's great aside from no usb-c display, mine has an HDMI port though.

It's been my primary dev machine for 2 years

ayewo 6 hours ago

> So long as I can rent an RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell at about half a buck per hour through a European provider, ..

Mind sharing the provider’s URL?

steelframe 4 hours ago

Not necessarily an endorsement, but one of the more popular ones: https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-gpu/

papyrus9244 an hour ago

I understand that managing hw can be time consuming, but if you built a similar machine it would get paid off in ~18 months.

isatty an hour ago

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?

aaronrobinson 11 minutes ago

I have a 14” M2 that you’d need to prize from my cold dead hands. I can’t imagine buying an M6. There just isn’t any need.

xlayn 10 hours ago

I want to propose a called AI Index, if you can do say 1000t/s on processing and 50t/s on generation on a min 25B model you can call your device AI9 and you have AI7 and AI5 and AI3 with 3 being 100t/s processing and 10t/s generation on a min 10B model. Values above are on a 100k context size minimum. OFFLINE.

So any effing claim of being an AI device doesn't end on the demo of best buy laptop where you remove a dog from a photo....

Or that you have "better noise removal" or "you look better on the cam" because that's called noise cancelling and instagram filter and it's being done for ages...

argee 10 hours ago

Can't you just look at memory bandwidth for generation?

josephg 10 hours ago

You also need to look at memory size (to store the model). And processing can still be the bottleneck.

stingraycharles 10 hours ago

It’s more nuanced than that, but yes that’s the biggest factor.

hypercube33 10 hours ago

Doesn't this depend on the model and quant as well vs. the hardware and its capability? Plus memory bandwidth, amount, and layout.

My Strix Halo now can run some models through the NPU and its roughly as fast as its GPU+CPU (on some of the models - some its slower)

TheCapeGreek an hour ago

I've been pretty happy with my M1-2 devices like most posters here seem to say, but I don't have the same level of core stability while doing dev work. Am I doing something wrong with my workloads?

- Orbstack, but just for one containerised service - Laravel Herd for app environments, so all native services instead of containers with bigger VM overhead - Brave browser, profile for work and personal - PHPStorm (quite a hog on RAM) - Now agents in the mix

Had an M1 Pro 8GB but I found 8 to really not be enough. M2 Air 16GB has been a much better sweet spot, albeit it feels like the battery life on it is worse than M1. I've recently started trying to use Zed more and more as my editor instead of PHPStorm and things feel mostly stable, but I still feel like a beefier machine would be good for work purposes.

Stitch4223 an hour ago

Years ago there were frequent crashes (kernel panics) i could directly relate to IntelliJ (PHPStorm, etc), so it might sound dull but upgrading to the latest versions is the first thing I’d check. In this case even a manual check on their website instead of relying on the auto updater to work.

00deadbeef 23 minutes ago

I don't think you're doing anything wrong. I struggle with similar workloads on 32GB RAM. Compute isn't the issue, once I have a JetBrains IDE open, a dev environment, some browser tabs, Claude, and a bunch of other crap Electron apps I need the machine is already swapping quite a bit.

sgt101 11 minutes ago

I have found that my M5pro gets unstable when I really stress it's memory use. I think that with 8 or 16GB you are going to hit this quite a lot more than I do with 48GB.

agrippanux 13 hours ago

Increasingly all I need is a laptop with a big/nice enough screen to ssh into a beefy Linux box to run agents on Herdr.

I think my 48GB 16 inch MBP will last me 15+ years at this point.

system2 12 hours ago

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.

bdcravens 12 hours ago

and I thought I was doing something special with my little GMKTec 32GB machine I use for a dev server haha

kirubakaran 11 hours ago

I have a similar setup! I use a Dell R820 though, with 1.5TB of RAM and NVMe ;)

bdcravens 12 hours ago

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.

alluro2 10 hours ago

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?

justinram11 10 hours ago

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 -> Plan -> Implement -> Review -> QA -> Shipping -> Done' flow (with a worktree for each task) that works great!

tedd4u 3 hours ago

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.

mrheosuper 2 hours ago

The screen on MB Air can not compete with the one on MB pro.

00deadbeef 20 minutes ago

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.

jerieljan an hour ago

Hah, I agree. As soon as I can figure out how to replace batteries myself, I'd also be happily doing the same thing with mine.

so-gala-massey 12 minutes ago

The main problem is Apple killing support for very old models.

Groxx 11 hours ago

>With the new 14-inch MacBook Pro, users can connect high-speed peripherals, transfer photos, work with multiple external displays, and more with its wide array of ports.

* looks inside *

4 kinds of ports. while being generous, and including the SD card slot and the headphone jack.

I don't know anyone who would consider 2-4 to be a "wide array".

dietr1ch 11 hours ago

But hey, it's got USB-C and also supports UD USB-C (upside-down)

aledamasmx 8 hours ago

3x Thunderbolt 4 ports

dannyw 7 hours ago

It's a shame that only the Mac Studios come with USB-A ports. I know, won't fit on a MBA, but similar size and class laptops to the MBP often come with at least one USB-A.

It's just handy when you have a USB-A device and don't want a dongle, traveling, etc.

bartvk an hour ago

This only serves to prolong the suffering.

rafaelmn an hour ago

Compared to Air 2 :D ?

pedalpete 10 hours ago

Look at the first image with the people in the field. That looks to me like a very poorly generated image, not a real image of people, and not even a high-quality AI generated image.

Is this what we can expect of the new apple? I'm not against AI generated imagery, but I expect them to be of equal quality to a real photo.

Or am I wrong, and it isn't AI generated?

The things that make me think it is just poorly made are 1) the angles of the laptop on the black case, 2) the lack of any lighting on the back panel, 3) the size of the hand on the woman in the back, and the squareness of what she is holding (if it is even supposed to be another mac).

jodrellblank 9 hours ago

That was my first thought, is that guy's face AI? The angle of the laptop looks off. Then I decided I don't care and moved on, but yeah, you're not the only one who thought it looked off.

neom 9 hours ago

Almost certainly not AI gen, it's shot with a 35mm lens (quality looks like the 1.4 L to me), probably around f8 given how the DOF falloff happens, heavy forward flood (flash or otherwise, but whatever it was it's defused) and then what's I think giving you the sense it's AI is it looks like they've over used a double S curve to bump the contrast and sharpness. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZh_9HnO_4w&t=640s

iLoveOncall 9 hours ago

It's just a very bad picture, but every detail is perfectly coherent, it's not AI generated.

Still a baffling choice.

boesboes an hour ago

I’m more confused by the scene itself. Why are they in a field? What are they doing?

jdprgm 12 hours ago

I thought we were supposed to get a design overhaul this gen?

Also framing AI use for the base M models marketing makes no sense to me. You are way better off getting a used M1 max with 64gb and way higher mem bandwidth when those are the real bottlenecks.

ebbi 12 hours ago

Apparently another announcement coming tomorrow, with the OLED panels. But according to the fpt channel on Youtube, it doesn't look any different. Just has an OLED panel with touchscreen, with massive cooling changes inside.

hbn 12 hours ago

MacRumors is still claiming we're getting a new chassis

> Apple on Wednesday will announce 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models featuring touch-enabled OLED displays with thinner bezels, a Dynamic Island instead of a notch, M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, and a lighter and slightly thinner design

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/10/27/macbook-pro-with-touchs...

ebbi 12 hours ago

Interesting. Will be way out of my budget, but keen to see how the OLED display performs long term. Nearly everyone I've seen that has used an OLED on laptop say they absolutely love it. But I still hate the idea of touchscreen, especially with the changes to MacOS to cater for this

judge2020 10 hours ago

IMO changes to a touchscreen would've been perfect for professional artists, but only if it enabled using an Apple Pencil. Which is pretty unlikely if they don't also solve the ergonomics of doing that, e.g. with a 360" hinge.

monk_grilla 9 hours ago

> Just has an OLED panel with touchscreen

I must be out of the loop, you skimmed over this. A Mac with a touchscreen??

0xWTF 3 hours ago

I have an M1 Air 13" and M2 Air 15", and M4 Air 14" and and M4 Pro 14" with nano texture.

I love them all. The M4 Air 14" is from work, so kinda limited in what I can do. The M4 14" Pro is kinda chunky after the Airs. The M2 15" is ideal except on a plane. The M1 13" is great as a personal device on work travel. If only I could not work...

bigwheels 15 hours ago

> With 16GB of unified memory standard, configurable up to 32GB, and higher memory bandwidth up to 170GB/s

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?

Choco31415 15 hours ago

There are rumors that Apple is not releasing Pro/Max versions of the M6 with the intention of focusing these research efforts on the M7 instead.

Even then, 170GB/s is a bump up from 153GB/s of the M5. So we see a 11% uplift already.

brandon272 13 hours ago

> So we see a 11% uplift already.

Am I crazy, or are a lot more people using the term "uplift" in place of "increase" within the last year? Google Trends (for whatever it's worth) shows a significant increase (uplift?) since mid-late 2025. [0]

[0] https://trends.google.com/explore?q=uplift&date=today%205-y&...

reaperducer 13 hours ago

It's monkey-see-monkey-do language.

See also: The use of "learnings" instead of "lessons."

desolate_muffin 10 hours ago

that one and "educator" both make my skin crawl for some reason

jemmyw 13 hours ago

Language changes. People at work have started saying things are an easy lift instead of a quick win. And it's not new hires, it's the people I've worked with for years. I never got on board with quick win either.

Some people adopt stuff faster than others. I've lived in NZ for nearly 20 years and called someone bro for the first time just last week while playing a sport "should have left it for me bro". Slipped out natural as. Still having bad thoughts about it.

ok_dad 11 hours ago

Shit I still use “low hanging fruit”! How out of date am I?

mgiampapa 11 hours ago

Here I am doing the needful still.

Implicated 12 hours ago

> Even then, 170GB/s is a bump up from 153GB/s of the M5. So we see a 11% uplift already.

My M2 Pro does 200GB/s.

wtf are we even talking about here.

bdcravens 11 hours ago

I believe they're discussing the base processors as a way of comparing generations, since there is no M6 Pro/Max. (the M2 base was at 100GB/s)

For a direct comparison to your processor, the M5 Pro is at 308GB/s.

brandall10 15 hours ago

It's a base M6 chip. The Pro doubles that, and the Max doubles again. And the Ultra doubles yet again. This is how the entire M series has always worked.

So the theoretical Max would be 680GB/s.

epistasis 15 hours ago

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?

gaoshan 13 hours ago

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.

booty 13 hours ago

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.

Schiendelman 13 hours ago

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.

dannyw 7 hours ago

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.

hbn 13 hours ago

Why are we comparing the M6 to the M5 Max?

What was the speed of the base M5?

bdcravens 11 hours ago

As pointed out in a sibling comment, 153GB/s.

npalli 10 hours ago

This is a strange release. The M6 tops out at 32GB RAM and then you fall back to M5/Pro. Kinda midway between an Air and a true Pro. Only 14" no 16" with M6.

kristianp 8 hours ago

The lack of a 16" model for the M6 is consistent with Apple's current minimum of M5 Pro chip.

flohofwoe 15 hours ago

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).

yuhao2dai 15 hours ago

wait till tomorrow's touch screen

cvakiitho 26 minutes ago

Nice, I'll keep my 64GB m1.max though.

danso 14 hours ago

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)

https://www.apple.com/mac/compare/?modelList=MacBook-Neo-A18...

solatic 11 hours ago

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".

aldonius 2 hours ago

Screen, ports too (to be fair I've used the HDMI port about 5 times, and the card reader never).

The base model chip on the Air is binned too - 8 GPU cores on the Air vs 10 on the Pro.

watersb 7 hours ago

The text of this product's announcement really tries to sell it as a 10x AI performance upgrade for existing MacBook M1 users.

Ok, plausible number for that use case. Striking how it seems like the M-series Macs are almost too good enough for most people.

It's almost desperate prose.

(The AI image processing in Pixelmator Pro saved me hours of work on a recent project. Two button clicks vs a day of tweaking. But even that was on my M1 MacBook Air.)

martin_a 13 hours ago

As lots of Apple Users are in here: I'm thinking about "sidegrading", my M2 Pro runs fine, but I chose 16 GB/512 GB when I bought it and I think 32 GB/1 TB would be nicer in some cases.

Is it easily possible to sidegrade/upgrade with a Timemachine backup?

trollbridge 13 hours ago

Yes. Make sure both source and destination are the same macOS version. I use 27.0.1, you could upgrade to 27.2 first though.

Then do a fresh install on your new system and then use Migration Assistant. Use a USB-4 or a Thunderbolt cable to speed it up.

OzzyB 13 hours ago

yes, if your plugged into the Apple Ecosystem, upgrading to a new machine is a breeze, done it many times

ebbi 12 hours ago

I'm in the exact same boat as you, exact same specs. CPU/GPU holding up perfectly for my use cases, but 512GB is tough to manage now.

relaxatorium 15 hours ago

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.

wpm 15 hours ago

This is the base one. You get a better display, more, faster Thunderbolt ports, and an honest to god HDMI port, plus some fans for cooling on long running processes that you don't get with the M6 Air (which also doesn't exist).

swyx 15 hours ago

i think also better general support for multi screen setup

SXX 11 hours ago

Quite messy and wonky as in Linus Tech Tips testing. Require plugging displays in right order to get desired resolution / refresh rate.

swiftcoder 13 hours ago

> Is this an odd rollout for their actual high end MacBook Pros

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

macrolab 7 hours ago

I have a 14 inch M1 MBP running fine up to this day. 16G RAM, 1T SSD. I don't know if I ever will need to replace it.

y1n0 3 hours ago

You will if you use macos and want to stay supported. On the other hand, being an M1 puts you squarely in Asahi supported territory.

yoz-y 6 hours ago

I am due to an upgrade (still using the 2019 intel). However I am torn between a M5 Pro with 48 Gigs of ram or waiting for M6 pro. I’d really like to run local models for once.

pazimzadeh 6 hours ago

won't be an M6 pro, they are saving the ram and other components for the M7 series

ritzaco 16 hours ago

> Phenomenal battery life: In addition to the huge leap in performance, battery life gets up to 14 additional hours for Intel-based upgraders

the 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?

anamexis 16 hours ago

I would guess there's still quite a lot of people on Intel Macs out there (they were sold 5 years ago), so it is still very much worth it for Apple to market to them.

zaphar 16 hours ago

Why? Apple devices have the best battery life in the market right now to my knowledge. It's an important part of the evaluation for a laptop which is the opposite of cringe.

Grombobulous 16 hours ago

Actually, they don’t! Intel Core Ultra Series 3 beats Apple laptops as of the M5 on battery life.

IIRC the Framework 13 Pro beats the MacBook Pro at both video streaming tests and office productivity with 300 bits brightness tests. (Framework live-streamed the video playback test, and the office provided productivity tests I referred to were done by Just Josh Tech)

Perhaps the M6 has leapfrogged but that remains to be seen.

jwilcoxson 16 hours ago

Competition is a beautiful thing.

porridgeraisin 16 hours ago

In usual developer type tasks, among my friend group what I hear is that panther lake laptops are competitive with M4 laptops. But, M4s do that with a 55Wh battery, whereas most panther lake laptops come with a 70Wh battery. So if you're discussing chip performance per watt then it's probably an edge to apple silicon.

Grombobulous 16 hours ago

72.4 Wh is the size of the M4 MacBook Pro battery, about the same size as the Framework 13 Pro.

Intel and now Qualcomm are really not far off on performance per watt. Mostly Apple maintains an advantage on single core performance.

The Panther Lake integrated GPU in the X7/X9 SKI is actually faster than the one you get in the base M5.

porridgeraisin 16 hours ago

You're right. I think I remember those numbers from an Air vs 3xxH comparison.

dmitrygr 15 hours ago

Neither of those have comparable perf

Grombobulous 11 hours ago

They do, please look up reviews of Panther Lake 338H/358H. Example: Lenovo Thinkpad X9 15p Aura Edition

dmitrygr 10 hours ago

I did. I am seeing single core geekbench scores of 2700 compared to my MacBook Air at 3500. This, for a laptop that is thicker and heavier than my air.

asadotzler 8 hours ago

why tack on the goalpost moving? And geekbench single core isn't the only measure of performance.

dmitrygr 8 hours ago

in my original post, i said "perf", i am not sure what you imagined, but i am not moving anything, geekbench single core score is a perfectly reasonable thing to measure under the name "perf"

Guillaume86 15 hours ago

That's not what the marketing is saying, they keep comparing to their own super old intel models.

throwitaway222 15 hours ago

I recall seeing some crazy stats like 41+ hours maybe on a snapdragon processor w/windows. I imagine your screen brightness would have to be like 99% dark and not playing videos is my guess.

thibaut_barrere 16 hours ago

More people than you think (outside tech) are using Intel Macs at the moment (family computers etc).

jwilcoxson 16 hours ago

Exactly. A late model Intel Mac is still a perfectly cromulent computer in 2026.

Razengan 16 hours ago

"cromulent" sounds like such a disgusting word that isn't.

probably because of its adjacency to "corpulent" lol

anamexis 16 hours ago

The word "cromulent" was coined by the TV show The Simpsons in a gag.

> Mrs. Krabappel: "Embiggens"? I never heard that word before I moved to Springfield.

> Ms. Hoover: I don't know why. It's a perfectly cromulent word.

But now it has made it into the Merriam-Webster dictionary.

wtallis 16 hours ago

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.

Grombobulous 16 hours ago

Fun fact: the laptop in this size/performance class with the best battery life is a Windows Intel Core Ultra Series 3 laptop, not a MacBook Pro!

So Apple is now comparing against computers they were selling 7-8 years ago rather than what Intel is delivering now.

BugsJustFindMe 14 hours ago

> Apple is now comparing against computers they were selling 7-8 years ago

Apple didn't fully stop selling Intel macs until June 2023. And they compare against the most recent previous model too.

asimovDev 33 minutes ago

in 2023 they were only selling desktop Intel Macs. I am pretty sure by 2021 they weren't selling Intel laptops unless maybe refurbished

zuhsetaqi 13 hours ago

> Fun fact: the laptop in this size/performance class with the best battery life is a Windows Intel Core Ultra Series 3 laptop, not a MacBook Pro!

Source for that fun fact?

cromka 9 hours ago

I think they refer to low-tier Wildcat which, indeed, is more efficient than Apple's CPU in Neo, which they typically get compared against.

desolate_muffin 10 hours ago

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.

ErneX 16 hours ago

They want those users to upgrade, I don’t see the problem.

booty 13 hours ago

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.

khazhoux 11 hours ago

I always max out whenever I upgrade my MacBook Pro.

Last time, in 2024, it cost me $6K

Today, it’s $10K

Yowza

bartvk an hour ago

I've always done the opposite; getting the base model (maybe bump 1 spec), but then just stay current.

vintagedave 15 hours ago

Also here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50258521