I've briefly tested M5 Pro in an Apple store and was surprised by how quick it felt and did anything. A tangible and significant difference, and I really feel it would be good getting it, or M6.

However - before, MacOS was a big factor driving me towards Apple - now, it would be hard for me to give up my Linux setup and all the stuff I love about it, even for such performance...Linux progressed really nicely, while MacOS deteriorated at the same rate, and it's changing the balance and the decision for me.

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

The battery indicator is starting to show a decrease in performance. It won’t hold a full charge, but even when I’m without a direct power connection, I can still have it running for nearly 4 hours with Wi-Fi, 6+ without.

You should be able to deeply tweak how window management works, but Mac won't let you do that.

I'd run Linux on the hardware if it wasn't a hack.

https://rectangleapp.com/

Not involved in dev of this, just a happy user

Best computer I've had in a long time.

Apple - the absolute kings of planned obsolescence. Who else could do it so brazenly AND have a bunch of zealots who will now reply to this defending them and attcking anyone who points it out.

Any industry not involving a computer they'd be in big trouble even with their massive (legal) bribes to politicians and fortune spent on legal teams.

There’s absolutely no reason a maxed out MacBook Pro from 10 years ago shouldn’t be able to run something like the ChatGPT or Claude app, because those seem to think they need a newer version of the OS and Apple has decided that a 8 core 3.8ghz i7 with 32gb of ram is obsolete

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

I love the battery life, appreciate the hardware, but find the OS to be annoying. Less annoying than Windows for sure, but I'd rather be running Linux.

How did you measure this? I have an M1 Pro and short of actually measuring with tools I can't imagine you can tell the diffrence between an M1 Pro and an M5 Pro in the Apple Store

My Poor M1 Mini though is struggling though but that's b/c I'm running it as home server and 8 GB RAM is not enough anymore.

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

Meanwhile my Linux laptop continues to get faster every year as the operating system improves with performance updates and bugfixes.

I use an iPhone X as my low-end test, now. It tops out on 18.

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

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

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

Apple Music must have been written by an intern or outsourced, how can you have a music playing app crash and do a System Report just by hitting the previous song button.

They are avoiding GPL3 licensed software and some GPL2 software are getting outdated.

That's why they didn't upgrade bash3 to bash4 , and replaced rsync with openrsync

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

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

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

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

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

There are more!

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

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

But the Goldblum phrase I really try to keep alive is thinking jail, as in "What is beige? It's not even a color. Were they in thinking jail?" I often remark out loud when I realize I have been in thinking jail on a subject.

When you install Chrome, which you cannot accidentally do, and when you set it as the OS browser default, which you also cannot accidentally do...

... the next time you launch Safari, it will say that the default browser has been changed, "Did you mean to do that?" and of the two options presented ("Keep using Chrome" or "Switch back to Safari") the Safari option will be the default.

That's my experience on M4 Mac Mini and M3 MacBook Air.

Is it amazing for LLM stuff? No, but that's the same story for anyone else _not_ spending boatloads, or willing to hack on weird mining cards.

Given how much more you can get buying used versus new, I'd go used unless there's some feature/characteristic only the new hardware has.

Having said that, I could see stuff slowing down over time with OS updates/etc. I've had my M1 air for a while, and some UI stuff was slower after specific updates (I think glass in particular).

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

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

As a recent Mac-> Windows switcher for work, my productivity has nosedived partially for keybinding confusion. For instance, I instinctively reach for Option+Arrow keys to jump the cursor over words, which mapped onto the Windows keyboard is Windows->Arrow, which moves the whole window around the desktop into predefined positions. Cool feature, but my muscle memory for the other thing means I'm always screwing up window position (and never thinking to use it on purpose).

I've lost count of how many interfaces I've had to fenangle to get a job done. For 20 odd years I rocked Gentoo as my daily driver but my lap can't take the heat any more. Wifey gets Arch and I've settled on Ubuntu for a simple life.

Embarrassingly enough, I had to get a "child" to explain to me how to get a wine dispenser to work, recently 8)

Here's to hoping they don't turn into Microsoft one day.

He was arguing that Windows is well past its best years and that OSX is now starting on the downward slope and that is why he was moving to Linux. It was a interesting take on the whole thing about the life times of OS quality.

But with a new CEO for Apple, they have an opportunity to turn things around and blame it all on Tim Cook, but only time will tell if they do that.

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

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

I have stuck with distros that are not trying to chase the latest trends but keep a ethical high ground.

You might think that desktop environments are going downhill (which is a fair opinion), but Steam reports an all-time high adoption of desktop Linux in 2026: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/

I can ride this puppy for the next 10 years. Say what you will about Apple but their hardware is top notch and it is a great value if you can snag some OG hardware in M series.

Great hardware. I don't miss OSX though.

Even if I prefer the body of a X1 Carbon ThinkPad, its keyboard and trackpoint.

There's actually a number of Thinkpads that can. Searching "thinkpad macos efi" will reveal a number of OpenCore configurations that support booting into the various x86 builds of macOS. I set it up once and was surprised to see that even my touchscreen worked, in addition to a HW accelerated desktop.

Also, I do not want to have to upgrade my machine and OS every few years just to keep up with apps that stop working or installing, not because the hardware is no longer capable, but due to ridiculous obsolescence policies. Heck, I can not run the latest version of a lot of software (including basic developer tools) on one of my MacBooks, simply because it is running Monterey.

A proper package manager CLI is also sorely needed. Delegating that to Homebrew and MacPorts doesn't cut it.

[1] (Personally, macports hasn't been my jam in decades)

I tried to install stuff with Homebrew; it kept warning me that they don't support such an old macOS. Almost everything I wanted to install with it, it tried to do a source build, because the binaries did not exist for it. At one point it was building LLVM to install a dependency, which ran for almost one whole day, I kid you not, and still failed

Also, the latest version of Podman (both CLI and desktop) does not run properly on Monterey. Even if you manage to install those, you cannot create a Podman VM, because it relies on some newer Apple virtualization tech instead of QEmu, and that is not supported on Monterey.

MS Office, Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop, etc... The latest versions of these do not run on Monterey.

These are just a few of the examples.

On Big Sur, things were even worse. The latest versions of VSCode, VSCodium, Brave browser, and many things you might want install with Homebrew, etc. do not run on it. You will have to hunt for specifc old versions to install.

If the app devs drop support for a system that sucks, but it’s the devs decisions. One system I run I’ve had to air gap since it is out of date, but I’m not blaming apps. Though I gripe with the openjdk decision to not support Apple intel, it’s what it is.

Edit: im sure linux distros have problems as well, just like windows does with this. (Why can’t windows 95 run oblivion with 20 mods on it?)

Same, but it's Windows that's been deteriorating fast for me. Linux has it's warts, but it's FAR better than the current commercial offerings.

But, still:

- it slows down after a while

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

- so little control over system behavior, functionality, looks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

case insensitive file systems.

generally stability..

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

It's one of those NeXTSTEP things that was copied over.

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

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

In that I can make them what ever I want

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

Eventually I will upgrade, but for me the M1 Pro Macbook (14") has to be the best computer of the last two decades.

Before that, I had the butterfly Intel version, and that was a disaster. Apple just cooked with the M1+ line...

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

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

    - Xiaomi: We have matched Apple in CPU performance.
    - Apple: *Meep Meep...*

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

Then I got a iPod so I needed to download iTunes. I downloaded iTunes, it told me to import my music. I imported my meticulously organised collection. It duplicated every single file into the iTunes approved format (AAC?) - my meticulous collection was now less meticulous, messy even.

It caused me to swear off Apple products for decades. Though it also led me to some very basic programming in order to delete the duplicates. I was only partially successful.

Programming led me to use Linux, before I eventually moved over to Mac. I like to think this was their plan all along.

I remember getting so excited, then depressed when I realised a hobbyist teenager could never compete with the people Apple would have applying. Later seeing how bizarrely bloated iTunes for PC turned out, guess I probably could have.

I went from meticulously curated MP3 collection on Linux to letting iTunes do it for me, and I realized that the meticulous curation and hunting down album art and everything was a hobby I didn't actually love. But if you do love it, great! Different tools for different jobs.

> their new computer. The computer had no songs on it and the Zune synced with that machine and wiped all the existing music

This is identical to the default way the iPod worked. If you bought a new Mac, and needed to get your music onto it, you had to use the migration assistant (connect via ethernet or firewire) or copy the music yourself. If you just plugged in your iPod to the new 'empty' mac and hit Sync, you'd lose your music too.

This was done as a show of good faith to the RIAA - their nightmare was that users would go from one dorm room to the next, dumping all their music onto all their friends' PCs. As a result, an iPod (or indeed still an iPhone today) can only sync with one music library (aka one computer) at a time. If you put it in "manually manage" mode, you can copy onto the iPod/iPhone from a 'foreign' library, but you can still never copy in the other direction. And all of this is true even when your music has no DRM encryption.

Two years later they introduce the Zune, which could not play "Playsforsure" music people had purchased from MSN..

They were also done with the android-apps-on-windowsphone project but dumped it because PC marketplace managers got mad at it because then devs wouldn't use their sdk. Luckily we still got the first version of WSL because of that project's partnership with that linux team.

I thought to myself: "I better add these two new albums to my ipod so that I can listen to them while away". I plug in the ipod, itunes loads up, I walk away. I come back 10 minutes later and it had not finished yet and I wonder what is going on. Turns out it deleted my entire 40gb library off my ipod and started re-syncing. I had to leave so I unplugged the ipod but it was basically useless at that point.

I do agree with Microsoft in general but Apple seems to be very much the same in my experience.

But then they just started dumping everything onto it and it eventually crumbled under the weight.

Some time later, I connected it to my dad's computer to put a couple more songs on it. The first thing it did when I hit "sync" was delete everything on the iPod.

I learned that day that "sync" meant something different to Apple than it did to me.

I'm sure it gave me some kind of prompt but it was not a clear "hey this is going to delete everything" prompt.

It did all kinds of things like hiding your music library, merging your music with apple's music, all kinds of nonsense.

You used to be able to put your music on your phone easily, then it became sort of a gauntlet in favor of apple's subscription service.

The iTunes case was also a classis UI 101 blunder combined with stupidity. If there was no iPod plugged in, the "Sync on connection" toggle in iTunes simply disappeared. First of all, when something is inapplicable, you grey it out. You don't just make it disappear.

But in this case, even greying it out would have committed the same blunder, because the default state for this behavior was YES.

So if the hard drive in your computer went bad and you installed the OS fresh on a new one, thinking that all your music was backed up on your iPod, you were right... until you plugged it in.

So, so dumb.

And finally: Apple never addressed the lack of "computer overwrites mobile" and "mobile overwrites computer," which Palm OS syncing nailed in the '90s.

This is the kind of nonsense we have been putting up with for years.

It's such a shame that the shitty MS products survive the ages while the great ones never gain real traction. I feel a bit sorry for the people who built such amazing stuff just to see it being cancelled and then having to work on the unsolicited background execution of the SharePoint 365 rev4.7 update manager (I made this up, but it probably exists).

Not just the app, but also the browser.

Also, in my experience the Windows Phone hardware was dodgy. The first one I bought was a Dell and failed under warranty…and the replacement failed out of warranty. Then after an LG Android, I bought one of the last Lumia’s. The camera failed just out of warranty. Then the whole thing failed while I was traveling.

So I bought an iPhone.

I end up on Android simply because of file drag and drop and an open App ecosystem which they are now trying to lock down.

I never could understand why MS would not put heavy muscle behind it. Maybe they deep down knew hardware execution was not their strong suit. People think the software was the problem, but I think if MS really believed in the product, the software side was eminently solvable.

It felt like once they dropped mobile, their whole direction become misguided. Also UWP made sense when there was also a mobile/tablet side to it, could even deploy those apps to the Xbox and it kind of worked. But then they kicked out that supporting support and suddenly they got working on trashing what good Windows still had.

iTunes was also unrivaled in its first versions, before it became an everything app. And syncing was pretty great before ubiquitous internet was a thing.

"Apple at its best" ... I sure hope not. But for sure, people LOVED that wheel. I would take a 4-way clicky from the Zune any day.

That’s exactly what you often do on them, when they are good at it. How would you rather browse a large library: one by one, slowly, or use a non-linear accelerator to quickly get close to where you want to be and then precisely pick your choice?

The click wheel was brilliant software and hardware, simultaneously, which is why I call it “Apple at its best”.

It could have been good software with unreliable, wobbly hardware, or robust hardware with a slight rendering delay, which would break the illusion. Instead it was sturdy, responsive and just a joy to use. Much like Apple’s trackpads, which remain surprisingly unmatched.

But I guess we have different tastes on music players.

It did have its sweet spot - jogging to an exact spot in a song, or scrolling a long list. But you do a lot more than just that on a music player. And the overall experience of the iPod was actually somewhat sub par because of the overuse of that one feature.

https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/zune-ipod.htm

https://youtu.be/e-blUcmpW1s?list=PLcIkt5s7w8D0ywp0CBmNFWRTF...

At the end of the day Apple got design and Microsoft didn't and it showed in their sales.

At work we can freely choose which OS we run on our machines. Guess what everybody wants since IT got forced to upgrade each laptop to Windows 11? Macbook Pro.

I personally am running Linux just because I already know how to use it but macOS (despite its flaws) is way less intrusive and much faster than Windows. Even Microsoft's own programs (Office 365, Teams) are running faster and have better UX on macOS than on Windows.

https://github.com/microsoft/azurelinux

If there's choice, everyone goes with Linux servers.

Your choice to go with Azure probably has more to do with where you're getting value for cloud services, and where you started your project - in other words, how tied you are to the Azure ecosystem, or the AWS ecosystem as the case may be.

Why should 90% of people need to deal with BIOS updates, driver updates, daily operating system updates, and blue screens of death?

Androids are probably better than iPhones. But you may lose a first date with a girl for sending a message with green bubbles instead of blue bubbles, so people buy iPhones. The iPhone is worth more than the Android, in this example.

Apple knows it, it's why they do everything they can to prevent 3rd party 'workarounds' to use iMessage. It's one of the things that gets people in the ecosystem, and keeps people in the ecosystem once they're in.

Blue bubbles and Facetime has probably kept more customers than anything else they have

(Brown launch model here.)

The Zune may have been somewhat better (until the nano and iphone), but it wasn't enough better to overcome the ecosystem switching costs.

WELCOME TO THE SOCIAL

I remember multiple tech reviewers praising the marketing at the time. It was the first time my younger and more naive self experienced that now-familiar feeling in relation to the tech industry: "am I taking crazy pills? have I slipped into the bizarro universe? have these people ever interacted with another human being?" etc

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

Until Apple developed it. Those early iPhones employed a lot of tricks to squeeze usability, battery life, and performance out of underpowered devices.

Prior smartphone attempts mostly applied PC-centric concepts to the device, it’s no surprise they ended up failing.

You can see the failure of Microsoft in their performance in mobile when the playing field was level Microsoft and Intel have trouble competing, you can also see it in the Surface computer efforts Microsoft has no clue.

It’s too bad SGI, Sun, Digital, Amiga, Acorn didn’t make it because you can see many elements within Apple OS from that bygone era in the hardware and software.

Sure, MS launched PDAs and phone-ish devices long ago, running Windows CE and whatnot but they were awful. It's absolute bollocks that the iPhone was a splashing success because of Apple marketing. It was a splashing success because it worked spectacularly well. Random non-tech people would randomly pull out their newest purchase to show their friends. "And now it's a notepad!" "Look and now suddenly it's a calculator!" Sure, your awful HP Tablet had all that, and a call function, well before. But it sucked. It felt like using a computer while squinting, and not like a magic calculator that can turn into a notepad and then into a phone and then into an iPod.

The iPhone was a success because it worked so well. And it worked so well because the technology was there - in part because they invented it and in part because they had the taste to not bring out a shit product but wait a bit instead.

I was at the 2007 iPhone announcement, got hands-on a prototype in the booth and had a dev unit pre-ship. As a technology strategist for a F500 ISV, my job was to assess the changing mobile device landscape. With the iPhone I think Apple deserves significant credit for two big things: the conceptual leap to a new UX/OS and going all-in on the large touch screen. Completely sacrificing both a physical keyboard or pen was bold and controversial.

While it was the right long-term vision, the reality which often gets glossed over, is the iPhone 1 didn't deliver on the vision and early adopters struggled. It wasn't until the iPhone 3G shipped 18 months later and the app store was released that the iPhone first began to slowly fulfill it's promise. I didn't daily drive an iPhone until the 3G. In recent years, I think many look back with rose-colored glasses at the iPhone launch and give Apple even more expansive credit for the "iPhone breakthrough" than the legitimate credit they justly deserve. Of the major players at the time, Apple was the only one who could make those bold choices because they didn't have existing phone products or platform agendas to preserve.

Combining hardware and software the OS was done by many companies in the 1980s because if you wanted to sell something you had to do both and it’s been well over 36 years no one has really stepped up.

I exactly wrote that Microsoft devices were quite bad as they came too soon. And Apple came at the right moment, when low power chips were powerful enough, touchscreens were precise enough without a pen. And device had acceptable consumption, batteries had decent capacity, lifespan.

The argument is heavily reductionist because it treats technical breakthroughs as passive market timing rather than active, high-risk engineering.

Apple did not succeed by waiting for silicon to become fast enough to brute-force a desktop UI into a handheld. Instead, they reimagined the hardware-software stack from the ground up specifically around human fingertips and GPU acceleration.

Apple incorporated a GPU to accelerate the graphics. Apple acquired Fingerworks in 2005 and built custom chips to make multitouch viable. When Blackberry engineers were in disbelief about battery life, they cracked open an iPhone and found the battery occupied nearly the entire case. Apple also invested in aggressive thermal and power co-design such as power-gating states, dynamic clocks, ambient light sensors, etc.

It's because Apple was vertically oriented, they were able to make the necessary hardware advances.

Microsoft had Windows Mobile and WinCE for years before iOS, but typically they got the UI wrong and tried to jam a desktop interface on a mobile OS (a few years later they overcompensated and jammed a tablet interface on a desktop OS). By the time the iPhone was out it was too late to rework Mobile into a multitouch OS.

Famously, the BlackBerry guys thought it was impossible to put a full desktop os on a phone, and that Apple must have faked the initial demo. Again, by the time they could respond by ditching their existing software and buying QNX it was too late for them too.

Android only survived because it was a new OS and the team immediately ditched their Blackberry clone UI and built an iOS clone instead. Even then it took until at least v5 before it was as smooth as iOS, and the tablet story is still poor.

Newton.

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

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

That, or I can’t read.

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

Creative's Muvo^2 already was the poor man's iPod with surprisingly good audio quality as well.

When the iPod came out you largely had two options for carrying your music collection on the go. You either carried a binder of CDs, or you had some niche player like Mini-Disc or an MP3 player. Both alternatives were expensive and had limitations similar to a CD in terms of number of tracks you could carry.

I had an MP3 player on either side of 2000 that was slightly smaller than a deck of playing cards that could use Smart Media flash memory cards. The largest card at the time was either 16 or 32mb and was enough to hold 1 album at near CD quality.

Creative's Muvo was a weird form factor that was larger than an iPod. It had a horrid interface both on device and for loading music. It's only grace was that it was slightly cheaper than an iPod and didn't need a Mac with FireWire. Although iircc this was pre USB 2.0 so not having FireWire would mean loading music took forever and a day.

The iPod allowed you to carry most, if not all, of your music collection in a package slightly larger than a deck of playing cards. And it had a fantastic interface for navigating music on the device.

This was at a time before most people had laptops and if you had a PC it was at home and used sparingly. The iPod was such a compelling mobile computing device that it drove adoption of the iMac. Apple would eventually release iTunes for Windows and USB support but that was many years later.

I had something similar. The storage was the iPod's killer feature, along with iTune's $0.99 songs. Suddenly you no longer had to buy whole albums, and you didn't have to swap out what was on your MP3 player every day when you wanted a different playlist. A 5GB hard drive in your pocket was a huge innovation then.

Then it clicked, the control, no matter what it looked like, it wasn’t a d-pad. It was a weird touchpad emulating a physical dial. Which exactly nothing in the documentation that it came with mentioned.

I worked for Microsoft at the time, and took a lot of grief for not using a Zune. Except I owned one, bought cheaply at the company store. It just never supported Audible.

Indeed. Apple made (and showed) the actual reasoning in the iPod introduction. All competitors had to was do the same: https://youtu.be/bz1ZWvZBGYM?is=NFlmkhq1gWfcNVgv

- 1000 songs

- play all popular formats: mp3, wav, aiff

- Firewire for fast transfers. Download 1000 songs at 30x speed than USB

- 10 hours continuous playback on single rechargeable battery

- the size of a card deck

Not like it was magical unknown hardware components at the time. And the competition still couldn't do it for almost a decade

There were a couple things Apple had in their favor but it certainly didn't take 10 years for folks to catch up. They mostly one because they captured people's hearts and minds.

The key things Apple did right was a high speed connection and owning their software. The Creative Nomad Jukebox used the same HDD as the iPod and beat Apple to market by a year, but Creative didn't own the software. The iRiver H series of players showed up around 2004 and were comparable to iPods in terms of quality and capability, though their aesthetic wasn't polished minimalism. Their UI wasn't as good but it was still very good. Their crux was Windows and Mac support wasn't great. I had an iRiver in 2007 and was running an opensource (rockbox?) firmware to get around some of those issues.

Apple has always been good at innovating around the problem which is usually the UI or software at large. This comes in part because of their vertical integration and being able to make minor tweaks to other parts of the ecosystem (e.g. desktop OS) to dramatically improve the experience of their product. The iPods are another great example where they made minor tweaks to iOS Bluetooth that magically made the experience of using wireless headphones dramatically better.

You synced music by manually managing folders on the device. All my non technical friends were horrified by it. They didn’t have neatly organised mp3 libraries. For all of iTunes’ problems, being able to plug in a cable and hit the big “Sync” button was really simple and convenient.

In some ways, anyway. Never owned a Zune myself, but a university classmate did and I was shocked by how poorly it handled non-Latin languages… she had a ton of Japanese and Korean songs loaded onto it, and their metadata all displayed as "missing character" blocks. She used it a lot like one might use an iPod Shuffle despite it having a nice screen because the only way to tell what was playing was by hearing it play.

By contrast my 4th gen B&W iPod which was about 5-6 years older handled unicode just fine.

https://youtu.be/ud6rwVkbovA

And they could listen to it 3 times in 3 days

> QUESTION: Microsoft has announced its new iPod competitor, Zune. It says that this device is all about building communities. Are you worried?

> Steve Jobs: In a word, no. I’ve seen the demonstrations on the Internet about how you can find another person using a Zune and give them a song they can play three times. It takes forever. By the time you’ve gone through all that, the girl’s got up and left! You’re much better off to take one of your earbuds out and put it in her ear. Then you’re connected with about two feet of headphone cable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Apple: We have matched Intel in CPU performance thanks to this new PowerPC! (Shows ad that uses carefully handpicked benchmarks to suggest that the PowerPC is actually faster when it really isn’t on average)

- Intel: Oh, we just found a 30% clock rate increase in the pocket of our other fab pants.

- AMD: Hold my beer, I have the DEC Alpha guys making an x86 CPU… How about 64-bit while at it.

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

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

Oh, boy.

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

> The 12" G4 laptop was infamous for slowly cooking your junk with their titanium shell.

That's my experience with every unibody Intel MacBook as well, but not with Apple Silicon.

I assume the M6 will take the crown back and then a few months later Intel/AMD will release a new chip and take that crown back again. That's the state of the world we used to expect, but it's a state that has been missing ever since the release of the M1 in 2020 until Intel finally caught up again this year.

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

No, but they did beat 14nm like a dead horse for almost a decade. So you're not that far off.

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

I'm still traumatized by my windows laptop randomly turning on in my backpack, heating itself up and draining the battery because of windows.

Aside from that I'm now used to MacOS for my daily needs aside from gaming so windows laptop have to do a lot of work convincing me of getting back to them.

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

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

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

It's also not hard to find a Windows laptop that beats the M5 on battery life. Single-thread performance is the only remaining measure where the M5 is king.

This is admittedly the measure that most correlates with perceived responsiveness and quality of user experience

This shows the Neo winning on benchmarks, except for file transfer speed.

The Dell laptop wins on file transfer speed and got 14 hours of battery time versus the Neo's 13 hours.

I don't understand how you read that article and concluded that the Neo got beat on "every conceivable measure"

Can you count how many (out of 9) measurements the windows laptop beat the Neo in that article?

But talking this authoritatively on something without doing the reading, that's grating: https://chipsandcheese.com/p/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-matter

Thanks for your prejudice on me without knowing anything about me. In short, I'm a HPC sysadmin and programmer who works in a HPC center, separated from the actual hardware by a couple of floors.

We can discuss how transistors' heat generation doesn't discern about ISAs or being in a DAC or a cutting edge microprocessor, and we can even discuss how implementation of some functional blocks generate heat regardless of the ISA being involved. If you want we can discuss how saturating memory controllers affect pipeline saturation in processors even...

But talking this authoritatively on something with that amount of prejudice, that's grating.

All I'll say is, that's worse then. Presuming you had not read up before promoting a long disproven myth, that was an assumption by me, I'll admit that and maybe I should not have done that, my mistake. But it was a gracious mistake, it was done in your favour, it was giving you credit.

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

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

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

Local AI isnt useful for agent stuff.

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

Apple: Meep Meep...

This seems to happen repeatedly.

Apple: Look at this cool new chip!

Others: Look how we very slightly passed Apple (six months later, with worse thermals and power consumption)

Apple: Look at this even cooler new chip!

But then you started to see the cracks. New competitors would launch new products with very slightly better metrics than Intel's older stuff, just to be, heh, meep-meeped at the next press conference. But the overlap was real, if small. And it grew over time until everyone looked up around the 5nm node and realized Intel had lost.

That's where we are right now with Apple. "Funny in a way", sure. But history says this is more likely to be the beginning of the end. Everything goes in cycles.

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

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

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

This in-turn later on, AIs will train to make pro-China comments as AIs train on these.

They got the sheer man-power, and with AIs it's even easier.

Xiamoi is a huge company and is a commonly known brand. They’ve been making chips for a long time. They didn’t start a few months ago and catch up with Apple on their first try.

I mean you expect some company which did some android rom, a smartphone, IoT Robots stuff a car?! and now makes a chip which can compete with apple.

Oh i have soooo many news for you!

That might be the funniest thing I read all day. Xiaomi is a massive company that makes all sorts of things, including a lot of pretty high-end mobiles, and has an annual revenue in the order of 75 billion US.

It’s no Apple, but it’s not exactly “some random Chinese company” either.

They're using ARM designed cores. So it's more like Apple just isn't as far ahead of ARM as some people claim.

Why would you assume that? ARM has been a chip design firm for 35 years...

As an ARM processor enthusiast since the 90's, it's all I care about.

I'm not convinced it will ever stop being important.

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

@TRACK: yipinwong

Just kidding but seriously man, this level of paranoia isn't healthy. Try talking about it with someone you trust. The comment you're replying to is completely normal.

I'd like to back up my belief and claims based on my metrics and experience.

If data backs it up, then I will apply my baynesian thinking to change my mind.

Anecdotes normally triumphs in real life and biz, but not in online communities.

I'm not an apple fanboy nor a xiamoi fanboy.

Its impressive that a random chinese company was able to catch up to the 2th richest company with global experts so fast and this achievement is not dimnished just because apple announced their M6 today.

Are you some fanboy?

It's just funny how it's consistent they deny their own heritage. Be proud of who you are.

I yield the floor to no one when it comes to pessimism, but that's incredible.

Fab capacity is being bought online; there’s just lead time.

Noticeably greater intelligence is being achieved at the same number of parameters (see: Qwen3.8).

I think the future will be bright, it might be a matter of time. And for tinkers, a used Epyc + DDR4 server can be great fun and epic value.

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

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

For 1, AI datacenter builders have said that they have more equipment than they have places to put them. Leaving a ton of hardware shelved while you wait for datacenters to build out is bad business to say the least.

For 2, I think we are nearing saturation for the usefulness of AI. I certainly could be wrong, but I don't really foresee there to be a bunch of new exciting usages of AI that will ultimately justify the continued buildout.

I’m sure some people will. But most people I know don’t think about software like that. They don’t know what use cases are, or ask themselves how their life could be simpler with different software. LLMs only make software if you prompt them. Most people don’t frame the problems they have in life as “I’m missing software to solve problem X”.

I think most people will never prompt LLMs to write software. Just like I don’t have a 3d printer, because I don’t think about how problems in my life could be solved with little plastic doodads.

But plumbers are still in very high demand, and charge really high prices for what is in many cases really simple stuff.

For a lot of folks, the idea just never enters their mind that they can solve simple problems themselves. Most people don’t want to spend the time, undertake the learning, have the possibility of doing it wrong, risk their property, insurance/code issues, etc. And this is an absolutely reasonable position to take! We can’t all be specialists at all things.

All that to say: people will long think that software is something that is made by someone of a special role. Even long after that’s not necessary anymore. That’s not great job security, but it’s what I’m going with for now!

I also know someone that thought about making a SaaS for his specific niche he works in, he asked me if I ever used Claude then told me his project.

Yes, most people will never do it because they're not the type of people that are self-motivated and courageous enough to dive into something with confidence to see how it goes.

But probably, as more people build stuff and it makes headlines that X person built Y service and is making Z$$ per month and he can't even write a hello world to save his life, a lot more people will try it out.

Or they’re just not interested. Just look around to see how many things that people are doing that you have no interest into. That’s the same disinterest people have towards programming and sys admin.

Unless some other breakthrough in AI happens, like applying AI to some other large market.

Overall i think that AI is here to stay, if anything it will become more common.

Maybe in ten years we’ll all have some 256gb ai machine at home, like we most (all?) of us have AC.

If that happens, hopefully the ram price comes back to earth.

How many people actually use fable over opus? How far are we up the diminishing returns curve, and will their customers even care?

Or would it affect people's purchasing power. I guess to some extent it does for people with significant investments in the stock market, but that's not a huge percentage of the people wanting to buy RAM or devices with RAM

This might become the driver for memory and chips demand in the near future.

But i don’t know, of course, we’ll i guess.

It will happily walk me through all the legal and illegal ways to systematically kill rodents.

At least it is on-brand for something used by militaries that want to target civilians, I guess.

However a problem exists with scalper bots. They're going to fight tooth and nail to keep prices artificially high even when supply increases. Same with the hyperscalers blowing "free money" at eating supply as a strategic position against smaller competitors.

If I sold just the two sticks of RAM in it right now, it’d pay for nearly half of the total cost.

I still have it, but never installed it because I only use ECC memory in my desktops. I'm saving it for a future Desktop in case memory prices never fall again.

The above is a standard project management problem. We do this for lots of industry all the time. There is every reason to think you can get a new factory running in 5 years.

Note that I said 1 factory above. Some of the special machines we don't have the ability to make them fast enough to do 2 (I don't know the real number!) new factories in 5 years. Existing factories are using most of the special machine capacity to replace machines that wore out on the way - this can be corrected as well, but it adds another year and the expenses are much larger. Realistically though 1 new factory is likely enough.

https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter3/transportat...

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

Compared to the prices of storage today, when people are presumably buying the product, it's actually a bad price.

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

Is there anything better now though?

All I see from AI, is an amplification of the enshittification of the internet.

And people being even more alone.

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

All of these massive improvements in less than 30 years.

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

It's a Substack that reports good things happening around the world, divided into sections like "Conservation and Restoration," "Climate and Energy," "Medicine," etc. And they also give part of their profits directly to projects in those categories.

(I'm not affiliated with them, I'm just a subscriber.)

Evidence:

* https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.09809

* https://phys.org/news/2016-12-mobile-money-access-percent-ke...

* https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3893351

This being HN, I hasten to add they also have massive downsides, we're all doomed, nobody programs the right way anymore, those poor people just think compute & AI are improving their lives, etc, etc.

But my personal observations of AI is that it's producing more and more of the same stuff and not moving the front forward much. The human innovation and invention seems to be lost.

Innovation with AI is happening as well, but it obviously will need more time. It's already being used to diagnose tumors and disease earlier in the process, which will improve outcomes for patients, but obviously it's going to take time to see the results of those efforts.

I think of AI (especially self hosted) as the most helpful computer assistant that can do things I otherwise wouldn't dedicate time to do. I have a massive media library that is a mess of naming conventions and want to clean it up. Writing specific scripts and processes for doing that is possible, but I don't want to invest the time. Or I can ask the local Qwen model to go through and do it for me with a single prompt, "Please rename these files in each folder following this specific format, and when needed access this local service to look up the additional information needed" and then extend that to when I dump new media in, it's automatically organized and renamed. Works pretty darn well and I spent a whopping 5 minutes getting it going, rather than the hours of writing scripts and doing it by hand.

And the median American is also richer in real terms, both in terms of wealth and in terms of income.

Of course, that all assumes that you use a reasonable measure of inflation that’s stable, well-designed, and applied methodically and consistently over many decades.

Alternatively, you can cherry pick data points and go based on vibes, which lets claim whatever you want!

That's one big plus.

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

I'm writing the best music of my life, realizing games and art projects I never had time for, and writing higher quality software in addition to dramatically more of it. Who has time for pablum?

How exactly are you using these tools that you have that experience?

You have become a spectator.

You have agency and can choose your own adventures. If you don't like something, don't do it.

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

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

No AI would pass this test with experienced judges.

Edit: Also doesn't say anything about who the human test subject is

You can always say “oh well these judges don’t have the experience to catch this type of AI.

The fact that you have to insert this qualifier, to ensure you always have a way to discredit the test, pretty much shows to me that we’re beyond it.

https://www.writingsbyraykurzweil.com/a-wager-on-the-turing-...

Those rules are fairly reasonable, at least as a start.

Though we're pretty good at sizing up a person's emotional balance/maturity and competence at familiar tasks. So maybe have an old blacksmith watch the AI/robot interact with horse owners for a while, then shoe their horses, and see how well it does.

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

In contrast, humans tend to paste me the same barely-relevant macro over and over, no matter how much time I spend explaining my issue.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[1] https://turingtest.live/

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

Not sure where you're quoting from but if it's the metaculus question comments, many of them are from 2023. The consensus is it will resolve in 2029. I believe it will not resolve before 2035.

"According to reports from Bloomberg, Apple will be skipping its M6 Pro, M6 Max, and M6 Ultra chips to accelerate development of the M7 chip. That means the only chip to be released from the M6 family will be the base M6.

The reason for this break with tradition: AI. Apple had been planning major neural-processing upgrades for the M7 family and ultimately decided those improvements were important enough to justify accelerating the next generation rather than completing the M6 lineup." https://9to5mac.com/2026/08/08/apple-m7-chip-heres-why-it-ma...

I'd skip M5 and M6 chips for LLM work and wait for a year for M7.

So could the M7 actually include an AFM 3B model, alongside a generic neural engine?

I believe that the CPUs are actually limited by ram bandwidth more than the neural engine right when it comes to LLM processing?

Maybe the M7 introduces something new to get around the current ram bandwidth problems on the non-Ultra chips.

    Chip         BW (GB/s)   GPU Cores   Q4_0 Prompt   Q4_0 Gen
    M4 Pro (20c)    273         20          439.78        50.74
    M4 Max (40c)    546         40          885.68        83.06
    M5 Pro (20c)    307         20      ~1500 to 1700    ~56
    M5 Max (40c)    614         40      ~3000 to 3500    ~92

While an older M-series might run a matmul or dot product kernel just fine the M5 can run them much faster.

  Apple's biggest bottleneck for real-world inference is prefill processing.

Super cool!

Please say more? Is it because it is a one-time cost, unlike a recurring subscription of Claude/Codex?

So, on the mini the RAM upgrade runs at 25$ per GB on all tiers, the same as the Studio therefore the upgrade to 512 will probably cost 6400$.

The fully maxed out Apple Studio then will be 24699$. It's 17199$ if you don't upgrade the storage(1TB).

Nevertheless I itch to have one :)

EDIT: or buy AAPL. If I had bought Apple stock instead of buying a Mac LC II in 1992, then I would have about $2 million in Apple stock.

If treasuries “fail” we have a different class of problem.

???

30 Day SEC Yield as of Aug 24, 2026: 3.61%

12m Trailing Yield as of Aug 24, 2026: 3.74%

https://www.ishares.com/us/products/314116/ishares-0-3-month...

1.39% might not seem like a lot, but that's off by more than a quarter.

For general inference there’s no ROI that makes this work vs subscriptions.

25k for computer now, plus 9-10% sales tax, plus operating cost, plus time and cost for R&D tinkering with models, harnesses, and infra (assuming highly capable engineering talent that can get paid for your human inference) vs a HEAVILY subsidized subscription at 200 per month with free R&D has a pretty long ROI (15 years?)

At API costs, it’s like 6 months if you’re heavy on inference. For training, specialized models will have their own ROI that makes this worthwhile. Then debate renting capacity and the platform to choose

If you can settle for a M5 Max base model that would be a $49/month lease.

Today, you should be able to run Qwen 3.8 - 27B amazingly well on either which is giving comparable performance to 5.6 Luna on SWE Bench. The local models are now getting better and more efficient and this should give you headroom. Tools like turbo fieldfare are really reducing the memory requirements to run large models and I don’t see it stopping soon.

https://github.com/drumih/turbo-fieldfare

Unless you need privacy for your inference this instant, paying for credits can get 80 to 90 percent of people everything they need.

Of course if you do need that privacy, then forking the $25K over to Apple is a no brainer.

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

… I wish I hadn’t just calculated that.

You get what you pay for.

In RTP (NC), a ~$400k house at 5% down is $20k

problem solved /s

    16GB   $239 - $15/GB 
    32GB   $800 - $25/GB
    64GB $1,600 - $25/GB

Put together a similar build with a couple of rtx 6000 Ada cards and Apple's price tag suddenly looks pretty damn reasonable

They’re very different things.

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

And there are plenty of places in the US where you can buy a house for $150-$200k. Maybe not places you want to live for one reason or another, but they're there.

I wouldn’t recommend buying any bare metal unless money is a second thought or you can fully deduct the price.

Most often in the end you pay half the price then. Depending on the write offs you could even make some bucks out of it.

Or buy and lease. Under certain circumstances the hardware costs you nothing.

But you need money to save money. And a company.

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaVznUB6wss

I wasn't able to debug network errors (restartin my Mac worked), Metal was missing low level disassembly / debugging tools (there is some hard to use UI), but the worst thing was the inflexible windowing system.

Even getting all the window handles on all screens/desktops with their titles and programs is impossible.

I just decided that I move to Omarchy 4 (basically Hyperland + QuickShell) + NVIDIA GPU, and I already was able to customize it more than my Mac in years.

I will miss Apple's hardware for sure, but not MacOS and the missing hardware documentation

There's aren't really any alternative OS [1], but I don't think it's fair to say there's a closed software ecosystem. You can install/compile/run whatever you want, including kernel extensions. The hardware isn't locked.

[1] Hardware isn't locked: https://asahilinux.org/about/

> Apple allows booting unsigned/custom kernels on Apple Silicon Macs without a jailbreak! This isn’t a hack or an omission, but an actual feature that Apple built into these devices.

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

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

Bastards.

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

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

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

https://pointieststick.com/2025/10/04/a-mac-like-experience-...

It's still not well integrated of course as those plugins are from different people, but I at least don't feel powerless as I know I can make any change easily.

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

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

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

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

[0]: https://zen-browser.app/

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

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

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

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

Also, a lot of companies are looking at how to run capable models locally to cut some of their (massive) cloud AI bills. An easy answer is worth a lot to them.

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

Closest competition I see right now are stacks of 2-4 connected DGX Sparks, similar lowish speed high mem, and about the same cost/gig.

For me personally, not quite that valuable yet, but I think it's getting there quickly. Deepseek V4 Flash massively increased the value of local AI to me, to the point where it's displaced most of my Claude Code usage, its upcoming vision enabled version should bump it further, and it's only going to get better from there.

It's a lot faster, but a lot of it is also feeling free to discuss things I wouldn't be comfortable sending to Claude, with the idea that that info is now theirs in perpetuity. I got my genome fully sequenced recently (it's cheap now!), and I get a battery of blood tests every year. Wouldn't do processing on any of that with Claude, but local AI? Totally great.

And if I was running a company with a large cloud AI bill, I'd probably buy a wheelbarrow full of these macs. Cheaper, but also a more solid/predictable base to build on.

For the M5 Ultra, I suspect it would be valuable for someone who wants to achieve all the above and more, but with local AI due to data privacy concerns, and also not regulated data that comes with lots of other requirements solved by more traditional approaches.

Three possibilities:

1. The type of person who deals with lots of intellectual property using expensive Mac-only desktop applications that aren't meant for servers, whose mind has formed positive associations with the term "Apple Intelligence", whose values overlap with Apple's lawyer's values, who actually stands to profit from having a Mac that's more powerful than anyone else's Mac, whose long-term goals are not impacted by planned obsolecense on a piece of computer hardware costing over $25k ($50k after 1TB SSD add-on).

2. Trust fund beneficiary who wants to show off, LARP as #1, prime target for Apple's marketing.

3. 2026 kit for billionare-class iPad babies. All brain rot content is 100% local AI-generated. Never have to speak to your children again. A true "we have dead internet theory at home" machine.

AI based tools are very useful here - thinks like object removable or cleanup etc, not just AI generation.

For example Apple mentioned performance increases for https://learn.foundry.com/nuke/content/reference_guide/air_n...

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

But lets do the math:

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

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

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

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

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

But this fails because:

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

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

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

this leads to:

                       Workstation   1 Sol Pro   2 Sol Pro

  Monthly cost            $700          $200        $400

  Raw capacity (hrs)      720           120         240

  Usable capacity (hrs)   100-130       120         240

  Concurrent sessions     1             3-5         6-10

  $ per usable hour       ~$6.00        $1.67       $1.67

  Usable hours per $700   ~115          ~420        ~420

I have agents running 24/7 doing research, in fact I would argue this how they will be used for most programming tasks in the near future. For chatting, I agree local inference makes no sense. But for tasks that run continually, I'm not so sure. Personal computers took a while, local inference will too, but I think it will happen.

I'm not trying to cure cancer, although I do hope people who are use LLMs. ;)

The assumption previously used was that you can run a Sol level model on an M6 or whatever hardware $20k gives you. That is not true, it was an assumption made to show that even giving your own hardware every reasonable advantage it still loses.

Lets compare buying tokens of the best model you might run on your own hardware (still being unrealistic in favor of your own hardware) vs that same class of model on the market. I think one of the best models you might be able to run is GLM 5.4, but lets just look at chinese models generally:

$20k workstation, best case: $15k M5 Ultra 512GB, 36-month amortization, ~$440/mo. Runs a GLM-5.3-class model at ~30 tok/s. Saturated 24/7 it produces roughly 58M output tokens/month.

Buying those tokens:

  DeepSeek V4 Pro  @ $0.87/M   $50
  Kimi K2.6        @ $4.00/M   $232
  GLM-5.3          @ $4.40/M   $255
  Kimi K3          @ $15.00/M  $870  (does not fit on the box)

And keep in mind I am giving 'your own hardware' no overhead or maintenance cost, despite your condition that it's in a large corporate environment. In reality corporate IT would make it almost impossible to set up and your would need huge lead times to buy the hardware and get it installed.

So yes, at that speed for sure. But if the speed goes up? or the ability to batch at the same speed goes up? The economics start to shift. The gap is much closer, and you'd end up with a box you can still use or sell later.

Subscription pricing is still the best though!

Where you might win by owning your own hardware: - Hardware costs go up, and thus api costs go up. You've locked in your pricing. - Chinese/Open models become illegal/hard to access the way we do now. OpenAI and Anthropic are trying very hard to build a regulatory capture scheme to do this. I think they will be unsuccessful because China just won't participate.

isn't the whole point of all this ..... agents? isn't that what literally everyone is always clammering about in these threads? in which case the workstation is useful 720 hours out of 720 hours.

Put another way: If $25k is the full extent of the start up capital costs, and operating costs are very low, that is a much cheaper business to start than most! The question is whether this is actually a useful model for a revenue generating business. I think that remains to be seen.

My guess is that there will be a few hits (which we'll hear a lot about - especially when someone actually pulls off "the first single-person unicorn", which I do suspect will happen someday) and a huuuge number of misses, which we won't hear much about.

This is, sadly, probably a foreign concept to a lot of people who have only worked at companies where hardware purchases are viewed as something to minimize and everyone is stuck with the same low spec laptops that the finance department picked out. At companies where someone might have a legitimate use for a $20K machine, their fully loaded costs (not their salary) are $300K or more, and other teams like sales are spending thousands of dollars per week on things like travel and hotels for their job, spending $20K on a computer that’s going to last several years is not a hard choice.

If Apple didn't sold these things they wouldn't make them but, also the level of marketing that Apple is talking about for AI is basically the new group they need to capture because the ones I just listed are already buying Macs and or easily to motivate with the other obvious CPU / GPU performance upgrades for code compilation, faster memory and video transcoding.

Its cheaper than Nvidia AI hardware.

That may not be many people, but there certainly will be some people who want to do that, and are willing to pay big bucks to do so.

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

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

I'll find other ways to use the power though, opencode or maybe start working on more video projects.

Convenience: if I want information from a chatbot, I don't want to have to hear how I can save on my car insurance by switching to another insurance company. That's basically what websites have become. Go to any American local news station's site. It's just wallpapered with ads and you'll inevitably get a popup asking to subscribe. I don't want that from my chatbot.

Cheapness: this doesn't matter over the long run because inevitably, both straight-up monetary payment and revenue generated by invading privacy become part of the service providers' revenue streams, if they don't start out that way. Cable TV used to be ad-free, as did streaming services. Then there was a need to fund the coke habits of some finance guys in Lower Manhattan, so ads were introduced as a "free" tier. Now there's only "reduced" ads on the paid tier, and you still fork over your data to let service providers give advertising clients a better profile of you.

Safety: identity thieves, stalkers, and even government agents acting against the law use commercial data sources to do things they otherwise couldn't. Imagine what they could glean from chatbot or other AI sources.

If you're your own LLM service provider, none of this is a problem.

The financial aspects don’t work however: I can learn and experiment with what I have for local models, and I pay as I go on FireWorks.ai for open model inferencing and no matter how much I use this service my monthly bill is between $10 and $40 and much faster than any reasonable home rig.

Hybrid ‘small local’ and buying inference is the way I choose.

A 4 GPU linux box with 3090s, which are $1500 a piece right now, will blow this thing out of the water. Even 2x3090 rig will run most of the good local models like Gemma4:31b at 100+ tok/sec

The VRAM of the GPUs are MUCH faster than the unified ram within Apple Silicon. The only difference is the initial model load, which takes longer from disk to VRAM due to PCIE limitations, but once the model is loaded, GPUs can prefill and and generate tokens way faster than any Apple Silicon.

So is your desire to upgrade to mac because you just aren't aware of how to set up a GPU rig, or is it something else?

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

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

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

Not at all. Airflow with big fans is quiet. What I do hear is coil-whine. In fact my PC is quieter than my Macbook when both are running top speed. But one has 4000 AI TOPS.

I've often felt there is tremendous value locked up in underutilized old computers. It would be interesting to see Apple in 3 years offering compute as a service using lease returns (or more likely, partnering with someone else to operate it (perhaps exclusively in secondary markets like China or India, to address political demands for local siting or jobs). Apple is in the best position to work around or even gap-fix older software/hardware limitations in a controlled environment, and now they can do so without cannibalizing new hardware sales.

Apple computers tend to have excellent resale value, and Mac Minis/Studios have the least depreciation of them all. I understand the benefits to both taxes and cash flow, but boy is Apple winning big on those lease offers for Studios.

consumer electronics has literally never been an asset.

> Apple computers tend to have excellent resale value

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

edit:

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

For which configuration, though?

not getting on that bandwagon but wasn't that not the most demanding game as its a just a nonstop cutscene.

It's a very deliberate choice when if it doesn't make sense to gamers.

Mac Mini + MacBook Neo w/ ssh can be a better setup than MacBook Pro for many people.

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

The problem I'm having now is that no models are targeting RAM of that size. Everything is either much smaller, targeting laptops, or much larger, targeting hardware well out of reach of enthusiasts.

Please, AI people, start making models targeting 128GB machines again. The last interesting one was Qwen 3.5 122B.

Something like this would give you three concurrent sessions, each with 240k token context:

  sudo sysctl iogpu.wired_limit_mb=110000
  
  llama-server -hf unsloth/Qwen3.8-27B-GGUF:BF16 -c 786432 --parallel 3 -ngl 99 -fa on

Should bench better than Opus 4.7.

[1] https://github.com/antirez/ds4

My M5 MacBook Pro, while amazing, is basically relegated to being a thin client with amazing battery life that exclusively SSH's into my desktop PC for work.

I could spawn a Linux VM / use Docker/Podman locally, but dealing with allocating memory, hard drive space and whatever other limitations non-native containerisation incurs isn't worth the squeeze.

Plus I really want to have Vulkan access, both so I can actually play games like a sane person and also use standardized local LLM tooling (MLX is cool but I don't like dedicating time learning things that I can't leverage elsewhere).

If the Mac Mini / Studio range had Linux support, I might actually consider buying one for my home lab. I know others already do and just put up with MacOS - but if I buy a "pro" product, I want it for "professional" usage damn it

Great devices for watching YouTube and video editing I guess?

In US its $4000 upgade so $25 for 1GB.

Also:

> 512GB memory option for M5 Ultra coming late October

New Hampshire, Oregon, Montana, Alaska, Delaware.

If you want to comfortably afford this gen you had to trade options on memory stocks...

Which one is it you can run local models on? I suppose the NPU only.

For tinkering and learning, it's been great. Tie it into something like Hermes and you have a pretty powerful AI assistant in a box. And when you need to step up your model, you just do something like OpenRouter and it makes it pretty easy.

Got the recommendation from these articles: https://www.xda-developers.com/qwen-3-8-27b-reverse-engineer... https://www.xda-developers.com/lenovo-thinkstation-pgx-revie...

But haven't had a chance to try it myself.

This feels like paying a lot for something that is just not very good yet - cloud models are too good vs local models (may change in the future..)

Do you think that little moniker will just disappear in a decade or so as we reach 0nm advertisements, or do you think they'll just add more decimal places? 0.0001 nm! Next year, 0.00001!!

Our transistors are about 30 nm give or take. But we've found new ways of aligning them so that if we had continued using old techniques, the density we get would be "2nm".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2_nm_process

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

You might expect the M5 Ultra to produce 50 t/s from Qwen 3.8 27B with a good context length.

That being said: you might want to consider at least 2TB storage. Having 256GB RAM to fit models is less useful when you can only store a 3 or 4 large models on your disk. The M4 -> M5 transition doubled the drive bandwidth (at least for the MacBook Pro, I'd assume the Studio is no different) making them extra nice for loading large models. Then again, you can always add an external NVMe drive over thunderbolt, so the tradeoff is less straightforward than with a portable MBP.

In EU you also have 14 days to return products bought online, for any reason.

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

Anybody knows?

Just to clarify, Neural Accelerators have nothing to do with Neural Engine.

I plan on maximizing my residual student benefits, and taking advantage of education pricing.

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

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

Interesting times, to say the least!

Not that I want it to happen, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple could get away with even higher prices today. Like 50% more retail on everything. They are holding the line, but I wonder for how long and why. They can pretty much charge what they want.

Why choose the worst game of the year? Just because it's made by the daughter of Larry Ellison?

I’m not claiming this title was made by GenAI. I’m saying something much more insulting: that the human artists who made it have no talent.

She's been the co-founder and major backer of Annapurna for a decade.

She's not a developer, she's a publisher, and this game is one of the tons of games Annapurna has put out over a decade.

I get that Annapurna is a lightning rod of politics due to ellison and is increasingly under scrutiny for many debates but they are a mainstay of the industry, hardly a blow in, and like it or not, a lot of the games industry and media really like these kinda of artistic pieces, with this being yet another instance of the age old walking simulator debate.

It should be judged on its own merits. Not it's Annapurna link and it's not a shock to see it come up in an artsy Apple Mac hipster circle.

It's not even in the top 5000, because it is objectively terrible. People would rather play the original Life is Strange one more time (despite a remaster being out), than play this game.

At some point you really have to start getting suspicious why it keeps coming up.

The number of reviews vs. number of actual players online doesn't make sense when compared to peers in its genre either. It has a similar number of reviews as Life is Strange Remastered, but it loses to the 4 years old re-release of an 11 years old story-based game by an order of magnitude. For a genre that that has extremely top-heavy player count charts this doesn't make sense.

Funnily enough Life is Strange Remastered had a bit of a revival around that game's release, probably because people decided they'd rather play LiS.

Entertainment media entertaining nobody is just objectively bad at its job and the blatant astroturfing and nepo-baby-pampering adds an unsavory dimension to it.

1: https://steamcharts.com/app/2582320

2: https://steamcharts.com/app/760640

It is a 3 hour long game with 4k or so reviews.

Life is strange original has 70K reviews and is 14 hours long.

The remaster has 4000+ reviews and again, is 14 hours long. These games are also all time favourites that fans do replay from time to time. If has more replayability than mixtape, despite it being fairly linear.

A 3 hour one time only game does not retain players on the charts like a game that takes multiple play sessions to finish. Or a game like "tennis elbow" which has far lower max concurrent (like, nowhere near the concurrent max mixtape has) but is a sim game that if it's your jam you will repeatedly come back to.

Its very simple - it's not a game for you, and you have to understand that these types of games absolutely have their niche fandoms who love this kind of stuff.

There is no conspiracy here, artsy titles like this have always, across all mediums, got a disproportional critical appreciation vs more traditional titles.

It's just the same old story. Yes people do like these games. No they are not the majority. Yes you can just ignore it, no it's not a conspiracy.

And the player numbers still don't make sense. If you want to compare to a game from the same publisher that was actually good, look at "What Remains of Edith Finch". Released a decade ago, still 4x Mixtapes's player count, roughly the same length, but somehow no 20 video game magazines falling over themselves to give it 10/10 ratings.

You can slap as many 10/10 ratings and astroturfed reviews on it as you want, but I've played too many of these games to not recognize this as below average in its weight class (i.e. price). It's maybe a 6/10, carried by its presentation and vibe, which are okay if you're in the mood for it. And to give it that kind of score I'm looking past its most cringe-inducing moments, immature writing, and bland story - which is being extremely charitable considering it's a game that should be carried by its writing, but isn't.

The only way you can enjoy that game is if you haven't been spoiled by better titles yet - because you've probably not played many narrative-based titles, or maybe not played many video games at all. If it's one of the only video games you've ever played, that fact alone would've made it somewhat exciting. The first time you've had cotton candy it was great as well, but now that you have more developed taste, you probably won't consider it haute cuisine.

I'm sure there's literally dozens of people who actually enjoyed it, and good for them, but we need to have some standards if we're to have any at all. And "well someone out there ought to like it" is not an argument.

tl;dr: If this game is truly one of the best games of all time - as reviews would have you believe - then we need to recalibrate the scale. There are hundreds of games in its genres one should pick up before Mixtape. It only stands out for being pretty.

Similar studios like Telltale also ran out of funding, even with recognizable IP like The Walking Dead at their disposal. Just reading the economic tea leaves, Mixtape is the type of oddity that does direct some scrutiny towards the publisher that pushed for it.

That's wild!

This may depend on the size of your library. I tried installing Jellyfin on a Synology NAS, which runs Plex just fine, and it ran so poorly it was basically unusable. It “worked”, but it was painful.

I thought it would be fine, because Plex has no issues, but it was painful. Every client I tried on the AppleTV was equally painful, and I didn't even try using a client until making sure all the metadata was downloaded and setup via the web UI. I was very deliberate and did one thing at a time, spending a whole day on it (mostly waiting and browsing to different screens to force metadata to get downloaded and cached).

With everyone saying Jellyfin can run on a Pi, I would think it would be better optimized for low-end hardware.

Edit: never mind, 2.5G is now the default, so you'll probably need more than 40 people to saturate that with streaming video.

Just amazing engineering push, the competition got the message and we benefit.

Today I entered this new M4 mini's serial as a trade in for the M6 base mini, and the retail price went from $1249 CAD to $824 "once trade-in received". That's the automatic estimate, so basically I'd be paying twice for an upgrade...

I can't believe that Apple still comes with this bullshit like 32 GBs is a lot. It's a lot for video memory - vRAM, but not RAM.

It's a seven year old laptop. Did you want to be buried with it? All in good humor, my guy, only wondering about your expectations. The error seems to be Intel related, Apple is the manufacturer, but you are out of warranty. What is your issue?

Also: "a staggering 1.2TB/s of unified memory bandwidth" -- yay, the GPU has reached the year 2020! (I'm a bit bitter that my M4 Max is near useless for local LLMs because of its low memory bandwidth.)

A m4 mac mini is better than al of these per dollar, msrp adjusted.

Hopefully by the end of the decade China figures out manufacturing at scale and fixes this.

Depending on the use case for known processes the LLM requirements are much, much, simpler and lower to make and keep it more predictable.

how about measuring returns in the sense that I no longer need to share my flagship idea with some random 3rd party just because it hosts the LLM I am using?

It's possible that they're working on their own LLM that's going to work very well on their chips, and possibly outperform anything out there when they do release it.

10 years ago 32GB ram laptops sounded too much. 8 was enough. These days even I would get that much ram since it’s soldered. 64GB is higher end.

In a few years we should see such high end hardware commonplace. Working with a local LLM to get work done is the ideal way to go which has mostly hardware limitation as of now that gets solved in due time.

We were definitely outliers that long ago. I put 64 GB in a MacBook Pro back in 2019, and that was (a) overkill for everything I ever ran on that machine, and (b) stupidly expensive by 2019 standards (albeit almost affordable by 2026 standards)

The iPhone 15 was almost entirely marketed based upon AI (I would say fraudulently so, advertising features they still haven't delivered), and a huge portion of the OS work was on local AI or AI integration.

And for that matter Apple has been dumping enormous sums into their own AI development. Their failure to have a lot to show for it doesn't void the fact that they tried really, really hard.

It's bizarre how often this "Apple sat on the sidelines and let the AI people fight...so smart!" narrative appears on HN. Apple hasn't gone down the path of spending hundreds of billions on nvidia GPU data centres, but they absolutely tried really hard to matter in AI.

Yep, Siri AI; they’re doing it in public.

But you get a generic computer and much more RAM.

And you lose a couple of organs.

It would take Apple one or two engineers to make Linux life much easier on macs. But Linux is outside their walled garden so it's ignored.

My Mac Mini is strictly a headless server for llama.cpp.

I use a Linux workstation.

If I were limited to use Mac hardware , I would install Linux in VMware Fusion and work from there.

My old 3090 is typically significantly faster (almost 2x token/s) than my M4 Max 128GB machine, as long as the model fits in the 24GB of VRAM.

In most situations it's a better idea to just buy tokens. But there are definitely cases when that's not an option. And then a machine like the M5 Ultra can allow you to do things locally for a fairly limited budget. And in a simpler package to manage than a machine with multiple GPUs.

* the iPhone * the iPad * apple watch * airpods * unified memory laptops and computers

Those are all products that either created a category or changed that industry.

They weren't the first smart phone, tablet, smart watch, or true wireless earbuds. They did a damn fine job making each of those though. I am typing this on a my work macbook wearing AirPods, and AppleWatch, listening to audio on my iPhone. Apple does a really good job with their products.

Realizing how surrounding by Apple I am...

I mean this is not nvidia based right? It's all custom? So we can use it under Asahi perhaps?

I want to get something for my company to run local models, wondering what would be a good option.

Linux runs very well in a VM on macOS. There are many good options for this, some free and open source (QEMU, UTM, Lima, Colima), some proprietary (VMware Fusion, Parallels).

But Linux in a VM doesn't get access to the real GPU, so model performance is limited. Those running on the CPU perform well, and those needing the GPU don't.

However, macOS on M-series macs is excellent for local models. (Maybe not as excellent as a box full of the best nVidia GPUs, but still excellent).

So if you're getting Apple hardware, like Linux, and want to run all of it locally, a fine setup for a machine to run local models, with agentic characteristics:

- macOS running one of the many local model runners. I used to use Ollama and Whisper, and now use llama.cpp instead of Ollama. Others use LM Studio, oMLX, etc. Provide HTTP endpoints to access the models.

- Linux in a VM for overall control and orchestration, with standard VM settings, and bridged networking so it appears as its own machine on your network. Also, in here provide a robust shared file server for shared state. Use this VM as your desktop and primary access to the machine, if you like Linux.

- Linux in a VM to launch ephemeral, volatile containers, with the containers using a memory-only tmpfs overlay on top of a read-only Linux filesystem in a VM disk image, with tools in this filesystem. Alternatively, a writable Linux filesystem in a VM disk image, with disk buffering set to use macOS host buffering and discard fsync requests. These settings optimise for container disk performance for data that's only ephemeral which will be deleted soon or on system shutdown. (You can combined both VMs, but need to use two VM disks to get equivalent behaviour, and be careful about VM disk configuration of the two disks.)

- Containers spawned within that second Linux VM can be spawned very quickly and run quickly, so are ideal for LLM agents that need a quick sandbox. These sandboxes generally run faster than a macOS sandbox, despite being on the same machine with VM overhead, because Linux is faster at some things. Teach the LLMs to store files and memories they want to keep in the shared file server.

I just want my butt ugly repairable beast machine to do the same trick. Why is my ram not unified? I have an iGPU in my server, but it can't access the 64 GB ram (I got last year for 150 euro) directly or something? It's on the CPU right? Why did only Apple go for this architecture? So many questions...

What’s the point?

Can we please kill the xcode. It is worst pile of garbage I have to use just to develop ios app.

Massive. I feared it would only be up to 1x the speed of an M5 /s

Is this a joke?

>Additionally, M5 Ultra features a massive amount of high-bandwidth unified memory, up to 512GB

Now we're talking. But at what cost?

"M6 also introduces a Dual 16-core Neural Engine, providing up to 2x the peak compute over previous generations to make on-device AI workflows run even faster" .

256 memory gets you to like 11k. So like 15-20k.

and 512GB is so 2025.

Give us 1TB version. Where is the competitive spirit?

To be fair, where is the competitor at this form factor?

It's the Hardware, Software and Services in combination. None would work without the other (to reach the scale apple is)

FWIW, Ollama, LM Studio and Lemonade (and oMLX) also wrap Apple's MLX framework.