I was blown away by M1 Pro, and used it for 4 years before it became a little sluggish, and replacing it with an Asus S16 running on Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 (an excellent laptop). One of the main reasons was missing my old Linux setup.
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.
Still rocking an M1 Air - 2020 build. 8GB ram. No slowdown or deterioration at all. Battery health reports the battery max capacity at 84%. Best computer I've ever owned, by far.
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.
I have one of these too. I can’t believe how long it’s performed at very high levels of use including two external screens and 10-15 memory intensive applications running concurrently, including three different browsers with multiple tabs open on each. I installed a new video editing application today and was apprehensive it would stumble, but it worked like a champ.
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.
MacBook is great hardware, but I really hate MacOS. It feels perpetually cellophane wrapped, and I don't like any of the window management. Finder is particularly awful too.
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.
Hmm same one but mine is clearly deteriorating lately. Lots of beachballs. I think I abused the SSD pretty badly though if I’m being honest. Loading and offloading large media files almost daily for five years lol
Also M1 Air 8gb, though not the daily driver. Bought second hand, the machine is still an absolute champ with no slowdown and is my go to machine when I want a calm space for writing.
Same here. For tough compute, I spin up a machine in some cloud service, do what I need, and shut it down. Of course, its a different issue if you need power on the desktop right there, like for A/V/Graphics work.
I splurged for the 16GB version of this. Originally bought it for my spouse, and then replaced it with a refurbed M2 with 1TB of storage for reasons. So I took the "old" M1 Air. So far, can't come up with a reason to want to replace it. Not updating to Tahoe helps with that too.
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.
Their “sorry this hardware is too old to run the latest macOS” seems entirely based on KPIs versus capabilities.
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 run a 2012 MacBook Air 11” for Zoom meetings. It’s stuck on Catalina, but it runs fine. If I really wanted (which I don’t), I could probably hack it to run newer operating systems. I know there’s a few ways to do that.
Same. It was borderline unusable on Tahoe to the point I had to downgrade it, but the Golden Gate beta brought it back to life.
I’m only using it as a travel machine now, trying to hold on from upgrading it until I can get an Air with OLED display - hopefully coming in <24 months…
Same here. Still using the original M1 as a daily dev pc. The portability and battery life are great. Biggest gripe is the limited number of USB-C ports...
I bought a used M1 air with 16GB and 2TB a few years ago for $1000 CAD. It’s easily the fastest computer I’ve ever used, and I have no reason to upgrade. It chews through 4K footage and ten of thousands of RAW images off my cameras.
The M1 was genuinely a big step forward, but what has followed, not so much. I have an M5 Pro with 48GB of RAM and it is genuinely good ... but that's about it.
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.
> 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.
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
bro people don't measure things - it's all vibes these days (in all fairness OP specifically used the word "felt"). if they measured anything they'd have realized M5 GPU is ~V100 lolol.
I'm really curious about this deterioration? I use a M1 Macbook Pro with 16GB RAM as my primary machine and it still runs fine. I do iOS development so it's not exactly fast but I wouldn't call it slow by any word.
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.
Curious about the choice of the Mac as a home server. I feel like an off-lease x86 usff pc, at roughly half the cost, would be more useful as a server. Pre-RAM-crisis you could get one with 32GB of RAM for like $240. My main home server is one of those HP ProDesk, running Debian.
I'm always a little cautious about "tried it in the store" experience. If I nuke and rebuild my machine (either Linux, or Windows), it's always significantly faster than it was before. Over time stuff just tends to accumulate that you don't notice. Like the old days of needing to defrag hard disks.
I agree with you that this is a noticeable effect, but I have a hard time figuring out why it is, especially on Macs with the sealed system volume (which should make the operating system files bit-for-bit identical between a freshly set up Mac and one you've been using for years). Certainly it could come from the accumulation of cruft in /Library and ~/Library, but you can clean that up too.
Yeah, same - I tried the M5 Pro randomly while waiting for my daughter to finish salivating over a Neo, and just got surprised by how quickly it opened apps and reacted to anything I did - ~1-1.5 seconds for Affinity Designer was amazing.
My MBP probably got affected by OS updates like other people are saying - opening apps and responsiveness definitely got worse, and felt like slightly deteriorating over time (but it might have been MacOS updates along the way).
I have never owned an Apple product that didn't slowly get worse over time. After a couple iPads and MacBooks, I'm almost certain they are intentionally updating their operating system to slow down older products. Even worse is the removal of access to certain applications for older hardware in the name of security or compatibility.
Meanwhile my Linux laptop continues to get faster every year as the operating system improves with performance updates and bugfixes.
Absolutely agree - happened on MBP, 2 generations of iPads, and Watch...For iPads and Watch, I thought that it might just be the famous battery health vs performance tradeoff they enforce on us, but I rarely ever used the MBP on battery, it was plugged in 95% of the time.
This may be true (not perceptible w/ my apple silicon Macs), but the important thing is that they get slower more slowly than my wintel gets slower (I blame disgruntled Windows and/or nvidia drivers devs....)
Can you characterize the deterioration more specifically? I only ask because every time I run this exercise for myself I end up back on macOS, despite any hiccups.
Not OP, but a decades-long Mac user. Removing CLI tools over the years would be one way, though I run Homebrew and have everything I want or need. That doesn't change that scripting is less useful on a fleet of devices.
Also, the UI has been in decline for a decade or so, with the regrettable decisions under Alan Dye. Thankfully, Zuck poached him and we're all grateful for that. I mean, what they've done to our icons is tragic, the glyphs in the menus was intern-level boneheaded, and reduction of contrast to "get out of the way" of our content has made everything less usable, especially for people with vision issues.
A bug that I filed about window-ordering when using the Cmd-` / Shift-Cmd-` shortcuts has been live since 2010 without getting fixed, though an industrious HN user posted a link to the background utility they made to fix it themselves[0].
100% I wish Alan and Meta well. I look at what happened to System Preferences (I mean Settings) and it’s a disaster. Some apps have title bars and many don’t (AppleTV). Just trying to enjoy Apple Music is so painful compared to the old iTunes. I am struggling to enjoy my Mac as much as I did during the M1 transition when I thought finally they got rid of the HW bottlenecks brought by Jony like the dreaded MacBook keyboard and touch bar. Not the greatest hardware. But, now the software experience is so subpar, especially the HI (I mean UX).
I really like what they did with the MBP redesign, reminds me of the PowerBook G4 Titanium aesthetic. The hardware to me is great, but the OS has gone very downhill. If I had a Snow Leopard era-ish build of OSX + modern security I would be perfectly happy. Settings.app is a disaster, same goes for recent iOS versions.
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.
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.
"There's no step three!" -- I can hear his voice in my head.
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.
No, all those dialogs are there with Apple account sign-in as well. Maybe even more, since they might want to upsell you on something along the way (Can't remember, haven't bought a new phone in almost 3 years)
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.
Same, I bought it with the justification that this would be future proofed for 4-5 years. Nearly 5 years later with daily usage, it's not limping along, the battery isn't on its last legs, it's doing great. My impulsive side is annoyed that I don't have a justification to buy the next latest and greatest.
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.
I have a nice M2 and a Linux box ... I do enjoy the looks of the Mac, but I never find myself reaching for it. A modern Linux box is just so much more useful, especially when you live in the backend dev / K8S world where Linux is the assumed foundation.
I have an M5 pro at work, and certain things are a smidge faster than my personal M1 Max, but they're pretty close overall.
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).
Same, although my M1 pro has only 16 GB of RAM and that does seem to slow it down a bit with my current usage. I recently bought a used Mac Studio M2 Max with 64 GB RAM and it's much faster, both subjectively and objectively by looking at how long it takes to run the full test suite of the Rails app I'm working on.
Nice. I've also found, through that, kinto.sh which is apparently the equivalent for Windows.
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).
That is amusing because to me one of the largest abominations about mac is the keyboard layout and mappings. It's terrible for anyone with decent sized hands to accomplish anything of even medium complexity.
I wonder if the dislike comes from using third-party keyboards with excessively wide spacebars that make the modifier keys genuinely hard to reach with a thumb.
I'm not a fan myself but needing to only memorize one set of commands and keyboard shortcuts is plus for sure. It's one of the biggest annoyances when switching between operating systems.
IT is a bit of a journey (as is life). I started off with a ZX80 kit and some bluetac ...
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)
There is a youtube channel 'Dank Pods', he was going on about his Framework laptop and was talking about how modern OS's have this ark to their usability.
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.
Yup, that's the benefit. To each their own on Linux. I absolutely love Wayland and Systemd (snap... not so much), but no one is forcing me to use them or not use them, and that's the way I like it.
Exactly. In a broad sense, 'Linux' is an idea not a specific thing. I mean, yes, there is a specific kernel but beyond that it is flexible beyond reason.
I have stuck with distros that are not trying to chase the latest trends but keep a ethical high ground.
I'm not a kernel plumber, but I don't think Wayland, systemd or snap are necessarily part of Linux whatsoever.
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/
My 16" M1 Pro MacBook with 32 Gigs of RAM is still going strong. Not going to upgrade till this thing dies.
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.
I ran my ~2011 i7 MBA for 12 years as primary laptop before the battery finally killed it (had to run linux on it due to apple killing support the last few years).
I am in the same boat.
I would buy a Mac if I could run Linux on it. As it is I will pay more for X1 Carbon with a worse CPU just to run free OS on it.
But you aren't buying a Mac at that point, no? The hardware is 1/2 or 1/4. I'd get an X1 myself if it could run macOS, I like the looks and the aesthetic, don't much care about Linux besides my Proxmox / HA/ *arr setup on an old NUC. Why can't we have it all, eh? :)
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.
Yep, vote with your wallets. It’s about time Apple learned that excellent hardware alone would not make up for what macOS lacks and where it fails for development.
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.
Honestly, Homebrew is so healthy[1], and modern Apple is so corrupted by greed, that I'm sure I don't want Apple to try to Sherlock it. Can you imagine? To get a package published, you'd need the developer subscription, and Apple would block any package that threatened any of their revenue streams. Not to mention that they'd probably want to also run the scan the MAS does to ensure you're not using any "private APIs." No thanks, Apple has no role to play here.
[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.
I mean that is unfortunate, but those are app specific problems not problems necessarily with Mac. Exhausted example but if pull up a raspberry pi 2 I’m not going to expect it to run the latest version of rust.
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?)
Improve the speed of APFS. Like try forking off a job to create a bunch of git worktrees in on APFS vs EXT4 -- it's significantly slower. Deleting a ton of files, cloning repos, hardlink performance, etc; APFS performance is poor compared to just about any other Linux filesystem.
The entire point of this comment chain is that Apple makes great hardware but they don’t like the OS. Buying a Dell laptop doesn’t get you the 256 GB GPU.
I'm still using an M1 Ultra Mac Studio with 128GB RAM running Fedora Asahi Remix. It's far more power than I need for a very long time, which is one of the reasons I love the Apple Silicon platform so much.
To be clear, I'm definitely not saying that MacOS is now bad - it's absolutely still a pretty good OS. But, personally, I do have a couple of gripes, and my feeling is that things are changing in the opposite direction from what I would like. Compared to Linux let's say a couple of years ago - yeah, better. Compared to Windows - there's no comparison.
But, still:
- it slows down after a while
- design direction is questionable and controversial - that it got more inconsistent is factual - also, so much wasted space and everything got bigger and a little dumber
- so little control over system behavior, functionality, looks
On modern Linux, you get a more polished (wow, unbelievable thing to say - I first dabbled with Linux in 1997), robust, and infinitely more functional and customizable experience. After a while, I started feeling at home - like it's "mine" - and how distinctively MacOS feels like being a guest there, and that it was never "my environment".
I definitely realize how vague and unquantifiable most of this sounds - and how little value those things have for a lot of people - but I've come to enjoy my setup, I spend ~12h / day in it, and I discovered that how it "feels" matters to me.
stuff that annoyed me on mac was the "find" feature was useful, but to get to a enclosing folder (what I want), involved searching, clicking something, finding the file again in the display and "enclosing folder" (this might not be exact, I don't have a computer in front of me).
Sharing files with a windows hard drive. My workmate had a seagate that installed an NTFS driver on mac, which saved us a few times. Never had a problem on linux.
Python never seems to work right. Conda, and other stuff, just never worked smoothly with the bioinformatics code we were running. Cluster machines it was easy.
There is a wierd issue that you can't close a macbook and use it with an external monitor without plugging it in. It just sleeps.
Would you like to join iCloud. No really would you like to join iCloud. How about apple music?
(To be fair MS is just as bad if not worse about onedrive...)
We had a pythonTK program to print labels from a CSV file. Every MacOS update broke it. We ended up just running it on a windows machine. back up was going command line on mac.
I would say the artist formerly known as OS X has never been good. It literally started its life as a half-assed NeXT attempt and has only gone downhill from there. There's still a "Services" entry in the file menu. .DS_Store files are an abomination. Mac OS thinks it knows better than I do about which software I'd like to install. Plist insanity that makes the Windows registry look pristine. GUI inconsistencies across every surface area... I'm curious what you like about it, because other than font rendering (which it does well), I can't think of anything positive.
I love it! I write my own services for it all the time. You can assign global hotkeys to them as well which makes it crazy convenient to be able to select text, a file, etc and invoke some script you wrote on them.
I wouldn't even know where to begin, because the slide in quality has permeated every aspect of the operating system, from stability to design. Numerous networking bugs, SSH agent bugs, sleep state bugs, sometimes having to restart my machine because the network screws up so badly, Bluetooth issues that they keep introducing and then not fixing; I have peripherals that just no longer work due to this. I could go on and on. I could talk about the mobilization of a desktop interface (same mistake the Unity and GNOME teams made)
And I don't feel like beating a very dead horse, so just google "macOS Tahoe design issues" and take your pick.
Agreed. I have skipped Tahoe and will update to Golden Gate when it's out of beta. I did the same complete skip on "Sonoma," I think. At this point, the complete absence of quality in MacOS releases has turned me from an "update on day one" guy into a "Skip major version updates unless it's widely being praised for improving performance and fixing existing bugs" guy.
Battery life. I love my Linux laptops, and I don't mind being selective to make sure the hardware's fully supported, but whatever the reason Mac battery life is second to none.
I can get that being annoying. I enjoy that keybinds are a configurable thing in the linux distributions and DEs that I've used, and I've found that most tend to have sane defaults. I assume that the situation is similar in macOS, but I don't know. The last time I've used any version of macOS was in 2008 during school, and I was far too young to really "get" computers, so I never experienced them in the way that I assume many people do now. The only other Apple products I've used since has been some combination of fourth gen and seventh gen ipod nanos (which were excellent, save for windows iTunes). Is there some secret sauce that Apple has that I'm just unexposed to that makes it wonderful?
My NixOS + Hyprland desktop largely has the same shortcuts as OSX. I super+space for launching things. Super+Q for quitting. Custom keybinds are trivial. I always thought KDE and Gnome were kind of garbage, but Hyprland gets out of the way and really lets me build the desktop environment I want.
i'm still rocking m1 pro with 16gb ram. for all my eng stuff its still snappy for me. that includes some iOS dev from time to time, lightroom classic, much better than my pc with ryzen 9 5900x + rtx 3080 somehow! i haven't even think about upgrading my mac
Weird, I'm still using my M1 Pro and it feels just as fast as it always has. MacOS feels almost identical to me as it did 5 years ago, too, except the ugly icon change.
Desktop is taking a bit to render after a reboot (which I need to do very rarely, admittedly), apps definitely got slower to open, a small delay in actions here and there - it started feeling a bit sluggish compared to before and it felt like it's deteriorating over time - but slightly.
I think it's very likely due to OS updates, like other people are commenting on. It probably doesn't happen to everyone, and maybe doing a clean reinstall helps (I tried all the standard stuff - rebuild caches etc).
What cant you do what you can do with Linux? Nowadays my main apps are terminal apps mostly running Claude. Honestly don't really care whether it's macOS or Linux or maybe even windows. I do care about local speed. Occasionally try out local models.
I still use my M1 Pro Macbook... for iOS development. It still works amazing well, and the battery still is holding strong. For large apps, compiling can be a tad slow, but for medium and small apps it still works amazingly well.
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...
Not OP. I'm a huge fan of Asahi and use it on my M2 MBP. There are some significant downsides in particular battery life is nowhere near what you'll get from MacOS due to inability to go into low power sleep state, and buggy DP alt mode for external monitors. I hope that will change but it's not there yet.
Because it still doesn't fully support all of the hardware on M1. I know it because I used Asahi while I had M1. Now I have M4 for work and it doesn't support Asahi at all.
I just use Linux PC as much as possible instead. And that 4$ M4 is just a fancy presentation computer I use when I travel.
Personally I would spend thousands on an actually great Linux laptop, but there are still none around.
Reading Infinite Games, they tell an anecdote about a Microsoft exec on a flight telling an Apple exec that the Zune was a way better portable music player than the iPod. The Apple exec was just “yup, you’re probably right” and then soon after the iPhone dropped
I recall reading this story of some user doing a sync with Zune on their new computer. The computer had no songs on it and the Zune synced with that machine and wiped all the existing music off his Zune without warning him(or something like that its been years). I recall thinking, yep thats Microsoft. And to this day I still encounter dumb ways of thinking in many of their products. The endless negative stories I hear about Windows 11 are just the tip of the iceberg. The entire company has to be following a cohesive vision with leadership at top needing to be truly involved to make great end to end products and really Microsoft has not been that in a long time.
I was a zune user. I had my music organised meticulously and could simply drag and drop to my zune from my (parents) windows desktop. It was simple and it was fantastic.
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.
As a hobbyist teen I built my own itunes clone for PC from scratch and remember getting so excited when Apple posted a job for someone to port iTunes officially.
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.
iTunes for Mac was also awful. I don’t know where the idea comes from that iTunes on Mac was good software but I remember reading that and getting a my first (then Intel) Mac and wondering why it got so much praise on Mac. It was the same software with slightly better UI but generally the same awful UX (except for drivers and performance which was never an issue on Win for me)
I believe that, (possibly only) in the early days, it offered to add any imported music to your library, which I think it indeed did by converting to AAC and putting in a directory structure of its choosing.
It probably could convert to AAC, but the biggest issue for collector nerds with carefully curated collections of mp3's organized in folders by artist and album and with perfect metadata was that iTunes would take all your hard work, shake it around, rename all the files and dump them in a single folder and fuck up your metadata. At least that's how I remember it, but it's over 20 years ago ...
I think the core lesson of the story is knowing if your hobby is listening to music or curating a music collection. Optimize for one or the other.
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.
I remember the trick was to use a network hard disk or drive for the music. iTunes kept the organized folders and all files untouched while building its metadata-only archive in local. But in general, yes, the tendency to mess with your file was built-in.
I'm sure there are other examples, but you picked one here that is very unfair.
> 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.
Heh, sounds like Windows Phone. Release Windows Phone 7, get early adopters and traction. Thank the early adopters by releasing Windows Phone 8, which is incompatible with existing Windows Phone 7 devices. Also make it use a new app development SDK so that Windows Phone 8 apps don't work on Windows Phone 7 (modulo some weird transition tech that almost nobody uses).
The funny thing was they could have done the adaptation--instead of doing it they just presumed devs would transition.
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.
One of the many reasons I moved away from ipods is because iTunes (which was awful; some of the worst software I've used) did the same thing to me just before I went on a trip.
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.
iTunes was great in the beginning. If you can, find someone with a G3/G4 and OSX 10.4/10.5 and see just how snappy that thing feels even with a 100th the RAM of today and a spinning disk. A real nice piece of software.
But then they just started dumping everything onto it and it eventually crumbled under the weight.
To be fair, I had that experience with my first iPod. As soon as I got it, I synced it with my computer and loaded up a ton of songs on it. This took a while.
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.
To be fair, iTunes suffered from the same defect at one point. Microsoft is now a clinic on defective design, execution, and attitude. But back then it wasn't that bad.
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 weeks fun example of 'What will Windows 11 do today?' is that it suddenly wants to max out the Ethernet adapter with nothing. No packets are actually going anywhere but it just ends up hogging the entire data bus until you restart it once or twice.
This is the kind of nonsense we have been putting up with for years.
Oh, you mean like MacOS (OSX) installer deleting whole hard drives if there was a space in the volume name? It's so funny how fan boys can selectively ignore the bugs by their favorite company
Exactly. The same for Windows Phone. Both was amazing software on great hardware. They just never gained enough traction because MS was a bit late to the party and wasn't willing to push through (e.g. by compensating the late start and poor market position with heavy marketing investments and partnerships), so they eventually trashed those projects.
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).
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.
Yes, the death of Windows phone was a tragedy for the mobile phone market; it had a fresh take on things, and could have stirred up healthy competition with the duopoly of iPhones and Android phones.
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.
At the time when they killed Windows Phone they had a $7 billion write off and that was huge. A decade or so later they would buy Activision for $69 billion without blinking. I would happy swap those in an instant.
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.
The iPod's click wheel was amazing. Grab one if you have the chance and play a bit with it.
I imagine a lot of people don't remember or have never used.
Such a great feel and UX, Apple at its best.
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.
I owned one for a very long time. I know people loved the clicky clack, but that thing was a UX abomination. The only thing it was good for was high speed jogging - not something that you typically do very often on a music player.
"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.
> …high speed jogging - not something that you typically do very often on a music player.
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.
I think it was an example of a well executed idea taken war too far, like the touchscreens on a Tesla replacing essential physical buttons. Or the obsession with getting rid of buttons on the iPhone (which we’re now thankfully retreating from).
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.
Until you actually need to run a business. Then money is much more important than the preferences of your employees. That's why Apple has barely penetrated the business world beyond overfunded startups that are more driven by hype and design wanna-bes than actual profit.
Microsoft fumbled the Windows ball so hard, everybody i know got rid of their Windows PC and either went to Android/iPhone or got a Mac or Linux.
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.
10% of Microsoft's revenue is Windows. Azure is closer to 40%. Their focus has shifted hard from software to services. Azure is making them around $100B and growing. It'd be far more surprising if they were putting their focus back to Windows in a saturated market given all the incentives they have to chase bigger revenue elsewhere.
We chose Azure for our startup because of data location, and it was cheaper than the other two as well. Data center locations may not matter much in the US (because everyone has this covered well), but it does in other places of the world.
Can't reply to @shorel, but of course Azure is running Linux servers. It has nothing to do with being tied to a Windows ecosystem.
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.
Most devs choosing Macbooks has a lot to do with culture. It's boutique, cool, and all the other successful people have it. Yes, officially it's always for technical reasons, but no one would ever admit to get something just because it's shiny.
One can argue they made much more money selling to people than business. Business forces you to compete on price and that drives everything down to 0. The market clearly values selling to people more than selling to business: look at their stock price. So if you are actually running a computer company wouldn't it be better if you took Apple's approach (if you could)?
> Until you actually need to run a business.
Did you mean to say "Until you actually need to sell to a business."?
They did do very well for a long time mostly by focusing on consumers...
I feel like businesses could spend way less (money-wise and time-wise) on technical support if they just gave out MacBook Airs to their employees which could then remote into virtual Windows desktops for whatever legacy software they need to use.
Why should 90% of people need to deal with BIOS updates, driver updates, daily operating system updates, and blue screens of death?
Never had a zune, but I did have an iPod. I am willing to accept Zune was superior. But its just an example that, yea, often times the superior solution doesn't actually win. There is a huge list of better technology that lost out to worst technology. Which is why I find it funny the claim that the market is optimal in choosing winners and loosers.
The market is optimal, you're failing to value brand perception and any social effects as a price factor
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.
I was being a little exaggeratory on the 'first date' specifically, but there is 100% a subculture of 'normies' who care about things like that. The iPhone, and even the amount of cameras on your iPhone, became a status symbol.
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
I haven't heard of people losing a first date, but I remember a few years ago seeing articles about teens being excluded from group chats if they were using an Android because it was considered something you'd only buy if you couldn't afford an iphone. Android and iphone also didn't share the same features for texting, so people didn't want Android users in their chat because it meant they couldn't use all the imessage features.
People have preferences. Some preferences are shallow. That's it, really. All kinds of people exist in this world, and wanting to be perceived as high-status is practically quintessential human behaviour.
I had the first iPod, and later the first Zune. The Zune had a beautiful UI, but by then Apple came out with the iPod Nano 2nd gen and that took the cake.
I had the OG white Zune. It was the same price as an iPod ~$250. The reason I chose Zune was the Zune Pass. A precursor to Spotify. Plus growing up in the Seattle area, I knew other people who had them and we would trade songs.
100% - the iPod wasn't just good enough, it was more than enough for almost everyone. The Zune was firmly in the diminishing returns category by the time it came out.
Yep. To overcome an incumbent that sells a very good product and has momentum, it is almost never enough to be somewhat better. You have to be "knock my socks off" better.
The Zune may have been somewhat better (until the nano and iphone), but it wasn't enough better to overcome the ecosystem switching costs.
And the Zune media player was a much better media player than the other 6 Microsoft media players. It was crazy how much Microsoft invested in cannibalizing its own products--I remember they had a similar number of word processors, email clients, etc.
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
I'm with you. It was brown, and if I remember right, in the light the edges had a sort of greenish tint to them? I thought it looked so cool, hadn't seen anything like it before.
Actually, Microsoft came with "modern" smart phone much sooner.
Actually too soon, technology wasn't there (price, computing power, size, weight, battery life).
Apple never came first ... but often just at the right moment and had marketing skills to make it a new trend.
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.
Microsoft never had a chance because Apple is the last vertical computer company (OS plus hardware) a survivor from the 1980s when there were many vertical American computer companies. Even Apple would have been dead if Steve Jobs had not come back with the Next operating system.
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.
Also, capacitative/multitouch touchscreens were ridiculously expensive until Apple made orders at a scale large enough to bring the technology costs down.
I'm the opposite of an Apple fanboy (typing this on a Windows box), but this is some grade A nonsense.
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.
Having used a variety of pre-iPhone WinCE, Palm, Psion, etc PDAs, going purely by bullet points specs, the best WinMo devices launched in 2007 were capable and even feature-rich, but I agree the overall user experience was hobbled. Large touch-screen devices integrating phone, data and media needed a different UX and OS. MSFT's business was too platform-centric to take the strategic risk and their mindset was too incremental to make the conceptual leap.
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.
Apple understood software/hardware and how to marry the two together (in a way that the general public wanted to use) if it was easy, Microsoft or someone in the Linux world with hardware would be further long but they’re not.
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.
This shorthand that marketing means a bad thing is actually not true for Apple. Apple's marketing is how it ought to be at every company. They do market research to figure out what users need, they famously came up with the iPod's click wheel, they don't just do the ads. Of course Apple is eminently critiquable, but its marketing division is what everybody should do.
Reading with understanding is absent in your skillset.
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.
> 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.
It’s easy to forget what a difference multitouch capacitive touchscreens made to mobile devices. As far as I’m aware, the iPhone was the first device to use it at scale. Apple also spent years designing a new interaction paradigm for it, taking multitouch from cool tech demo (Fingerworks) to the mainstream.
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.
The Kin was pretty cool. Very usable with cheap hardware and cheap data plans. If the timing was a bit different, Microsoft might not have been tempted to commit infanticide.
From what I remember, they bought Danger which had a popular product that worked, but some VP made them rewrite all their software on a Microsoft stack. This took years and didn’t work very well. By the time they were finally released they were woefully outdated and only on the market for a few weeks before being killed.
Years after the first iPhone release, Microsoft had a dogshit mobile OS, and every single device using it was dogshit. Before Android, the industry's answer to iOS and iPhone was a resistive touch screen and stylus because, other than the launcher, absolutely nothing was adapted to fingers. That was if you were lucky; some didn't include a stylus, reducing usefulness for making calls. It was like running regular Windows applications scaled down to a smartphone screen.
Zune was probably a better player. It was too late, and arrived when MS didn't much care.
There are emails unearthed in various lawsuits where you can read Bill Gates screaming at his subordinates: "why the hell can't our partners like Sony and Creative create a similar device? Give them all, give them early access to everything, work with them". In the end MS felt compelled to make their own.
Sony can't be bothered to compete with Apple in that era. They were trying to recover from their DRM dreams, and their devices were already sounding great with in-house software and hardware.
Creative's Muvo^2 already was the poor man's iPod with surprisingly good audio quality as well.
I feel like this completely misses the mark. Audio quality was never the compelling feature of the iPod and people weren't clamoring for it because it sounded good.
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 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.
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.
"1000 songs in your pocket" was the entire driving force behind the thing. It was constantly bellowed in the marketing and it's what Steve Jobs demanded of the engineering team from day one. The size and the storage were paramount and they knew no one else could match it.
The iPod’s user interface was good once you figured it out. I bought a 2nd gen one, I think, because it was the only large capacity device that supported audible audiobooks, and the UI frustrated the heck out of me. I consistently had trouble navigating it.
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.
I had a Rio Volt which somewhat bridged the gap. 700MB mp3 CD/RWs (about 10 hours of music per disc) and a CD player when traveling and picking up new music. Not as small as an iPod, but no book of CDs was necessary, either.
> I feel like this completely misses the mark. Audio quality was never the compelling feature of the iPod and people weren't clamoring for it because it sounded good.
> 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.
Yeah I had an iriver. That thing was great because it essentially acted as a giant (for the time) USB drive. And it could play any mp3s and you put on it.
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.
“Squirting” was ridiculed at the time and the word itself scaring away women. Jobs killed it then in an interview with a classic quote: Microsoft = Cold tech and Apple = Humanity. MS scares her away, Apple gets the girl.
> 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.
The anecdote is likely a false rip of the actual story:
[2017] Speaking at an event Tuesday, Scott Forstall, who lead Apple's iOS software division under Jobs, recounted the surprising history behind the company's first touchscreen prototype, which ultimately lead to the first iPhone.
It all began, Forstall said, because Jobs had an acquaintance at Microsoft who he really, really, didn't like.
"It began because Steve hated this guy at Microsoft," Forstall said during the event. "Any time Steve had any interaction with the guy, he'd come back pissed off."
The unnamed Microsoft exec, who was apparently the husband of a friend of Jobs' wife, apparently bragged so much it pushed Jobs over the edge.
"He just shoved it in Steve's face -- the way they were going to rule the world with their new tablets with their pens. He came in on Monday with a set of expletives and then was like 'let's show them how it's really done.' "
In Steve's case "fueled by spite" would be more precisely "borderline personality disorder". If you read him in that lens it might help distinguish how to be successful like him without all of the bad parts.
I just want to take a minute and be grateful for getting the chance to live through the 90s again. I always felt a bit sorry for myself being a child through the og 90s. Now I feel like in a decade or so into the future I will look back and be happy I got to live in the naïve days of windows 95 again, as an adult this time. I really appreciate it.
- 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.
I said late 90s though. The insanity which poured through early 2000s.
5.25GHz Pentium 4s, intentionally lower binned Athlons, the era your CPU got obsoleted the moment you booted it for the first time.
I don't remember early 90s much. I was too young back then. I don't remember much stuff from that era. But late 90s, early 2000s.
Oh, boy.
P.S.: AMD64 was a great sucker punch though. One of the professors in our university rejected to believe and got mad when he learnt that Intel licensed AMD64 from AMD, heh.
Ironically enough, I knew a polar opposite prof… swore off Intel after the FDIV bug (he did cosmological simulations on Beowulf clusters)… although he was a stickler for time management, when Opteron came out he threw out his summer schedule to find grant money for a new cluster.
I had a G4 MacBook when I switched to the first-gen Intel MacBooks, and subjectively, the G4 performed much, much better. Probably because the best pairing for any Intel CPU is thermal throttling.
I lived through the PPC->Intel transition porting real Mac apps, and "I liked the G4 laptops better" is definitely not a take I heard from anyone back then...
A lot of the important applications took a while to get ported. Also the last two generations of G4 hardware just overclocked basically unchanged chips. The 12" G4 laptop was infamous for slowly cooking your junk with their titanium shell.
The black MacBook I remember especially for leaving me with denim burns. And then I read all of the eulogies from people who never had to run it as a daily driver…
It's been really weird reading laptop reviews over the last few months. I've seen a bunch of reviews where they have their usual bar graphs comparing a bunch of laptops, and the laptop that is at the bottom is an Apple. It's the really inexpensive Neo, of course, but even the M5 laptops are consistently beat on performance and battery life by Intel Windows laptops.
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.
> even the M5 laptops are consistently beat on performance and battery life by Intel Windows laptops.
When plugged in... This caveat is so enormous it should almost be legislated. If your computer use is at all portable, a computer that scales down to 20 - 40% of GPU power when unplugged is an enormously significant factor. So far as I'm aware (could be wrong about arm devices?) there's no non-apple laptop that operates at 100% speed on the road.
Newer Intel Panther Lake chips perform the same or very similarly on battery as they do when plugged in - as do Qualcomm chips. However, I don't know where they're seeing "consistently beat on performance and battery life by Intel Windows laptops". Multi-core performance can definitely beat M5 in some configurations but single core performance is still fairly far behind and battery life is comparable again depending on the exact specifications and design of the laptop. I've seen analysis showing M5 is still the perf/watt king though regardless of configurations.
Sorry, poor wording. It's the Neo that's on the bottom in many reviews, but the M5 is regularly beaten by Windows laptops. My usage of "consistently" was in the sense of regularly beaten, not in the sense of always beaten.
Because the naming convention was used for chips based on Skylake microarchitecture (but with other differences such as process node). Not changing the name implies they've either changed the naming convention (why?) or they haven't improved the microarchitecture since 2012.
> but even the M5 laptops are consistently beat on performance and battery life by Intel Windows laptops
The real question is whether all these Intel Windows laptops spin their fans at full speed when doing absolutely nothing. That’s something I can never go back to. I do some light gaming on my M2 Pro MBP and it gets hot when trying to push 120 fps. But my Lenovo Legion (that’s now collecting the dust) is so loud I could hear it through headphones.
Yeah, as a somewhat new MacBook air user I'm also sceptical when people claim that any windows laptop is now better or at least as good as a MacBook.
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.
Those Windows laptops always have a dealbreaker for me (besides Windows itself). If they have decent screens, sound, and battery life then the trackpad or keyboard will suck. If it's cheap it'll creak and groan like a Tesla interior...and have a terrible trackpad.
> [...] but even the M5 laptops are consistently beat on performance and battery life by Intel Windows laptops.
Hold up, in what metric/benchmark? Feel personally like we life in an age where, no matter the SOC vendor, something high performant and efficient is offered, so seeing a claim that any vendor, be it Intel, AMD, Qualcomm or Apple, is consistently outperforming another, I'd like to get more context on that.
Intel were x86, Apple Silicon is ARM-based. ARM-based chips are more power-efficient.
Also, it's built on a much smaller process. 3nm, if I'm not mistaken, older Intel was something bigger than 10nm. Heck, if you take a really old Intel Mac, you have something like 65nm process, which is much less efficient than 3nm.
> It's the really inexpensive Neo, of course, but even the M5 laptops are consistently beat on performance and battery life by Intel Windows laptops.
Of course you can beat the entry level MacBook Neo by comparing it to larger, more powerful, more expensive laptops.
The M5 is an entire family with a range of performance. Intel/AMD have done a lot to improve performance but they’re not beating the high end M5 chips on performance or battery life yet.
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.
x86 is way more complex when compared to ARM processors, as a result their TDP is way higher when you request performance from them.
Intel had to reduce the frequency of their processors when running AVX2 instructions and the AVX2 frequency of the processors were non-disclosable to anyone.
Also, benchmarking Intel processors and publishing these numbers were forbidden in some cases. I don't know whether this ban is still in effect.
x86 processors can't keep up with the ARM processors TDP and thermal profile wise. So they slow down a ton when running on battery. See Jeff Geerling's last video on Apple Neo vs. some Intel laptop. It's as "efficient", but slow as a newborn tortoise learning to walk when unplugged and trying to get the most endurance out of the battery.
My M1 Mac gets almost 2 days of low-intensity use after ~6 years of use, and it got warm once or twice because something ran away in the background for tens of minutes.
Being mistaken on the CISC vs RISC debate (besides, modern x86 is closer to RISC via micro-ops then old school CISC) is understandable. There is a lot of misinformation out there and myths, plus, it just feels right to consider CISC overly burdened, etc. TLDR: Intel x86_64 is closer to RISC then you likely think and Apple Silicon arm is closer to CISC then you likely think. These lines are blurry and have been for decades, very much for good reason.
> But talking this authoritatively on something without doing the reading, that's grating...
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.
Because being too confident about someone you don't know is a bad habit. Where I work doesn't matter though, but what I do is.
Pointing me to C&C is a nice touch though. Not only I read the site and very article you sent me before, I used to consume Anandtech before that.
As a mere mortal, I can make mistakes and gladly accept them, but I can't accept rude replies. Pardon my French, but being called a low-key liar or smoke blower gets me a little upset.
> Pointing me to C&C is a nice touch though. Not only I read the site and very article you sent me before, I used to consume Anandtech before that.
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.
Same. My personal laptop is an M1 Air and I also have an M1 Studio desktop.
My work machine is an M4, and in "regular" use I can't tell the difference between them.
I don’t get that sentiment. I have an m4 16gb and it’s such a sluggish machine. and that’s not even doing development, just browsers, word, excel, PowerPoint. (And so many eternal bugs… I feel like I’m on windows)
do you have a corp laptop with a dozen scanners like Carbon Black, Crowdstrike, etc. installed? My corp M4 Max with 48 GB is slower than my old M1 16GB machine by a large margin. I don't know what evil things those scanners do, but they're alwayus spinning like 35% CPU, and the M4 Max machine just drags..
I have an M2 Pro MBP 16GB, compared to the latest MBP issued by my employer a couple months ago, I see zero difference in real world performance. Can’t speak for Office on Mac, I have not used it in over a decade, but for typical full stack web dev I literally don’t need anything more.
Sounds broken, somehow. The M1 iPad Pro I just traded in worked fine. Traded it for a Neo and the Neo does some stuff faster, but for day-to-day casual use, it's not notably different.
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.
I think it’s weird to say Apple is faster than Xiaomi when both are just using arm chips and using TSMC to build them, and this chip is only any faster because TSMC made a smaller node.
I know Apple do some special hardware software integration magic too.
To be fair, this kind of dominance is not unprecedented. Intel was even further ahead in the early 2000's. Every new competitor process was further behind the leading edge and not closer. TSMC started launching half nodes like 28nm just to have something in the market that would sell.
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.
TBH Apple never should've been the one who makes the best CPUs -- that's not really their area of expertise historically speaking either. It just appears that everyone else did such a terrible job for so long that they caught up
That's sadly true though. Also booting something was really simple.
Now we boot an embedded microcontroller (or CPU) which boots the main CPU which boots another OS semi-persistently to boot the main OS (if it's allowed).
Sometimes there are other processors needs to be up to allow processor to continue booting as well (these are mostly servers, but eh).
You can still have the 90s OS experience, even today, but these days we use the name bootloader, not operating system, for that amount of functionality.
It's interesting to see how defensive some of these pro-China posters get on HN and elsewhere. I'm genuinely curious why there seems to be an inferiority complex here with respect to America/American companies.
> Xiamoi is some random chinese company not known for high end chips and was able to catch up impressivly in a short period of time
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.
Are they well known in China? I'm seeing that Chinese tech has decoupled from the West. They have all this cool stuff that we do not hear about because they aren't selling it to us because they don't need to. It's usually been stuff with better price to performance or ultra low prices though, rather than ultimate performance stuff. I wouldn't be surprised if they made a top end chip that everyone in China knew about, and we didn't.
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.
Intereresting point I will try to see if i can find more about it. I would assume apple has a lot more magic sause than just TSMCs best node and a little bit of ARM architecture addons.
I think it's great but it's important to remember that we haven't seen Xiaomi's chips in actual devices under real world tests. We don't know if the speeds are sustainable, under what wattage, etc. Competition is still great and I look forward to learning more, of course.
I find it funny not because I support Apple. I find it funny because it feels like the leapfrogging happened in early superscalar CPU evolution. The era when the Moore's Law was working.
I enjoy it because of progress, not because of Apple.
Even w/the pricing spike, inflation adjusted we are back to roughly the prices of a new Mac SE/30 for something that can beat a turing test w/o sweating.
I yield the floor to no one when it comes to pessimism, but that's incredible.
I'm expecting it to somewhat collapse. I don't know if it'll go back to pre bubble prices (here's to hoping), but I do expect a pretty sharp decline around 2030... probably not before then.
Basically everyone that makes memory is building new fabs, meanwhile I'm not sure how much longer AI datacenter demand for ram will last. I think the decrease in AI ram demand and the new fabs will likely coincide leading to a collapse in pricing.
That is, of course, assuming the memory manufacturers don't pull their favorite trick and collude.
If there's a decrease in AI ram demand, it will not be because the models get better. Models getting better will increase RAM demand, because it grows the part of the economy that models are useful for. Classic Jevon's Paradox.
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.
the better AI becomes the more non-programmers will be able to use it to build apps, and because they don't know how to program themselves they will use FAR more tokens than us to achieve the same thing. As long as AI is good enough for them to build whatever they desire there will be a lot of demand imo.
I’ve been thinking about this question for months: with access to good LLMs and unlimited tokens, how many non developers will end up making software?
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.
My analogy is: almost everyone can to go Home Depot and grab all the plumbing supplies they need to do a lot of jobs. And people do - Home Depot does great business.
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've met at least one person that has gone pretty far on a somewhat complicated project who has literally zero programming experience. he did it for fun.
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.
> 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
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.
I think LLMs will start being etched into custom chips. There’s already some companies experimenting with it. The benefits are enormous - you get better performance, lower memory usage and no need to load a model in ram. Companies would be able to sell local LLMs while keeping their models proprietary.
If that happens, hopefully the ram price comes back to earth.
I’d love to buy a tiny swappable coprocessor that slots in next to my cpu and can take this stuff on. Swap it out every 8 months as you can benefit from something better. Hell, sign me up for a subscription!
Yes, but a right now a lot of the RAM buy is for demand that doesnt exist yet. Big tech is projecting AI demand and making sure they have enough compute to fulfill that, so AI demand would have to increase even more than they expect, otherwise theyll build their datacenters and then slow down the amount they buy.
How does a stock market crash increase RAM prices (when RAM demand goes down)?
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
The second and third and fourth-order exposure to AI spending is maybe bigger than you think. The blast radius if it pops could be quite large. Patrick Boyle had an interesting video discussing this recently https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTiYaWFP59Q
I don’t think the effects on the hardware market of open weight models triumphing has been reflected upon enough. It’s not clear that it will be less impactful if every enterprise decides to build for predominantly on-premise inference. In fact, before the question is ultimately decided, we’re probably heading towards a few years where hobbyists, enterprises and ‘hyper scalers’ are all competing for certain parts in common. Ram booked through 2027 sounds about right.
Companies are avoid risks, and at this stage, sometimes, I feel that all cloud providers are just buying RAM that they would have bought anyway. Now it's ensure that no company will be willing to pay x digits just for cards. One of my clients is stuck in "we are doing things on premise but we are too cheap to spend a few 100k in cards but we don't want to go on clouds.
Last thing i heard was that large companies are starting to seriously spend on ai infrastructure (think nvidia clusters rather than tokens from openai or anthropic) to fine-tune and run custom models.
This might become the driver for memory and chips demand in the near future.
I for one can't wait. Current prices are absolutely insane.
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.
That sufficient supply is maybe on the distant horizon. In the meantime everyone is being fleeced because the scalpers have the only supply available. Even if there's a supply glut tomorrow the scalpers have the infrastructure in place to buy out retail channels keeping prices high.
I built a new PC about two years ago, and I probably got it at the last possible opportunity for a while. CPU and motherboard have come down by maybe £100 in between the two of them, but a 7900 xtx (or any other 24GB GPU) for under £1,000 now seems like a bargain, and £180 for 64GB of DDR5 makes me feel like an old man talking about the halcyon days.
I bought a motherboard from Newegg in late 2024. It came with 16GB of RAM as a free "gift". The same RAM goes for $534 on Newegg today. It was $437 in January. Prices are still creeping up for this "throwaway" memory.
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.
Welcome to the club. If you're _really_ competitive in cs2, I'd swap out to a 9800x3d setup, but it's still a maybe. Very little reason to upgrade right now other than to run LLMs.
It will never make sense to me to run Llms locally unless I had 50k. I don't even think that would compete with price perf of a remote llm and getting business done. And that's completely ignoring that sol/fable level is not local
Absolutely, I am in a hold pattern for the next few years. I suspect in another 3-4 years you will be able to build an absolutely stacked machine at a reasonable price. Probably won't go back to what was before but it will be decent.
Cycles tend to be 5-10 years long not 25. Without knowing anything else I would expect a fab you seriously start planning today will be at full capacity in about 5 years. Nobody serious likes delays - in particular the banks don't like loaning money that won't at least start paying off. They know it takes some time to design a building - but factories typically are standard buildings so once you know about the size you can get it done fast - I expect 1 year to have the building done is the worst case (and it can be done in 3 months possibly if your project management is good - after interest this is cheaper than the 1 year). It takes time to build and install the specialized machines that go inside - this is the largest problem, but you typically order them first and then plan the building around the needed space and when they will arrive. Then you need 6 months to setup the inside of the building. From there it is just ramp up time.
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.
If you don't understand that the AI driven memory boom has totally broken the cycle you are going to lose a lot of money. There is infinite demand for Intelligence and that translates directly to chips.
I happily booted and ran an Intel Mac mini using a 4TB drive in a Thunderbolt 3 enclosure, and I do the same for an M4 Max Mac Studio using an 8TB drive in a USB4v2 enclosure (OWC Express 1M2 80G).
You'll just have to be careful to match the enclosure to the ports on the system. The base-model M6 Mac mini still uses Thunderbolt 4, so a USB4v2 enclosure would be wasted.
Sure, but this thread started with somebody pointing out that these computer prices are in line with Mac SE/30 prices. I'm just carrying that over to cover storage and it's even more amazing how much we get for so little money.
There is nothing special about making a computer that's unaffordable, irrespective of whether it's 2026 or 1989. If anything, it just shows how little they're trying.
Sure, when you look a little wider, since 2000 we have seen the following major improvements:
- Extreme poverty has dropped from 30% to under 10% globally.
- Child mortality rates have dropped in half
- Internet access has exploded from 10% to 70%
- Solar energy costs have dropped 90%
- Cancer death rates have declined by 30%
All of these massive improvements in less than 30 years.
While there certainly are issues to solve, and if you simply follow journalism you may think the world is worse off, but for many, their lives have been significantly improved.
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.)
Thanks for sharing this sentiment and including data. So few people seem aware of the wonderful progress humanity keeps making. Makes me worry that the progress will stall or even reverse because people don't even know it's happening.
I think a lot of it is because the majority of improvements are not seen by those who already comparatively have so much. AIDs used to be a death sentence, and now it's a manageable disease, and there is a lot of work going on to vaccinate against it. These are massive things that I think a lot of people ignore. It's always easier to see when things are on fire rather than to celebrate the victories along the way.
In part, sure. From drug discovery to crop yields to education, compute and AI have material benefits. It's kind of shocking that anyone could doubt this.
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.
AI in the sense of LLMs is too new to really make an impact yet. But it is compute driven. Modern science and engineering would be impossible as we do it now without high-end compute.
These improvements are showing that we're producing plenty so that the cost is driven down and distributed to wider and wider portions of humanity.
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.
That's not quite the case. Effort and focus by amazing groups, governments and individuals are the reasons for improvements, not just that producing more or costs being driven downwards.
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.
Just like the computer revolution, it will make a small number of people richer and put everyone else at their mercy. In real terms the average person is far poorer than in the 20th century. Used to be able to buy a home and support a family on a single income. Now it can take two just to survive.
In real terms, the median human globally today is vastly richer than at any point during the twentieth century.
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!
Why in the world are you choosing to live that way?
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?
It's a grovel-for-investor-dollars site that we've long pretended is for serious technical discussion. Comments should always be filtered through that lens.
What does that have to do with the Turing Test? The TT has clear rules: There are judges that have a dialogue with anonymized AI/humans. The humans cannot cheat and impersonate a machine, they have to act normally. The AI obviously should try to sound human.
No AI would pass this test with experienced judges.
The test doesn't say that the judge has to be experienced. But I also don't care if some random gullible person can't tell the difference. Nothing passes the Turing Test for me yet.
Edit: Also doesn't say anything about who the human test subject is
Of course, and I'm sure OP wouldn't disagree with you, it was clearly a joke for emphasis. Some people round here need to clean and calibrate their humour detectors more often.
I've never done a test. That means 1. you know it's a test 2. you get like 5 back-and-forths or 5 minutes 3. you have a human subject to compare to. But pretty sure I'd pass anyway, as the judge or subject.
I think that if you have a long enough chat, yeah, I think you can figure out who's meat. The original rules for the TT specified a short interaction, but I can probably accelerate it by pasting in large code snippets to force early compactions.
One needs to be a little more sophisticated about it. Ray Kurzweil, for example, set fairly clear rules for his interpretation of the test in his 2001 wager:
It was always a bad test, despite the greatness of Turing. The human organism is built to 'project' humanity onto anything available; apart from this none of the peculiar phenomena of the so-called 'modern human' is even intelligible, even the possibility of science. I bring all that is in me onto you as soon as you seem to be saying something, and reciprocally. We do this at the drop of a hat, and all specifically human life depends on it. But this power shows its 'gullibility' with 'gods' as also with Eliza. I am not snide about it because it is overreach by something the significance of which is overwhelming , but one is indeed amazed by the failure to reflect on the part of the ones eg giving LLMs rights - to take extreme case of a very widespread cultus - as if /they/ were the rational party, not ancients placating the storm god.
Yeah...but in context, "gullible" seem a bit pejorative. Humans are also hopelessly incapable of sensing radioactivity, methanol in their alcoholic drinks, carbon monoxide, and a great many other things that our ancestors just didn't encounter much.
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.
Nowadays, I prefer AI CS agents to humans. I just had a chat with an AI yesterday, it understood me perfectly even when I made mistakes, I was impressed.
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.
Yeah, at least LLMs read everything you write (for now). Human first level support agents are incredibly frustrating if you have to explain anything with more than one logical step.
Customer service is very different. Crappiest audio quality possible & scripted answers all the way down.
Almost like humans are forced to behave like machines.
The Turing test is more complex than what gets suggested.
And the "popularized" version is faulty also since it uses an ideal, abstract human judge (like the "spheroidal economic agent").
But if you want to add declinations to the said popularized image of the Turing test, you may add Maxim Lott's IQ tests at trackingai.org . Between the end of 2024 and the beginning of 2025 LLMs reached an equivalent IQ of 100, for example.
Yes, which is exactly and entirely the point of the whole paper. Somehow missed still -- despite how important AI has become, shockingly few people actually read the short, layperson-accessible paper that started the whole field.
It depends who takes the test. I am not yet, to my knowledge, fooled by AI.
I've tried [1] and I almost 100% detect which is the AI. I really want to convince myself I have failed, does anyone know of a better site/resource for this?
I know it might be moving goalposts but I would consider AI to have passed in a well and truly undisputed manner when [2] is resolved.
But in a more practical sense, if AI can impersonate humans so well today then why are state of the art frontier models so obviously AI when they create PRs, commit messages, documentation, etc. Are the companies deliberately making them unnatural?
we might need to bring back the Voight-Kampff test. anthropic at the very least is introducing a water making system to Claude which might make them more identifiable to humans as well as much easier to detect for machines.
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.
Rumors say that Apple will only release M6 base variant and skips M6 Pro, M6 Max and M6 Ultra variants to concentrate all efforts to create a good AI capable M7:
"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.
I wonder when/if we will start to see Apple include a silicon encoded model into their chips. Similar to Taalas build Llama 3.1 silicon with 17,000 tok/s inference.
So could the M7 actually include an AFM 3B model, alongside a generic neural engine?
Apple's biggest bottleneck for real-world inference is prefill processing. They need a better GPGPU architecture, which is what I'm expecting M7 to reveal.
Agreed, seems like the M5 has already made steps in that direction, with 4x prompt processing / prefill performance vs. M4. [1] And token generation also got a 10% boost. The data below is only for Pro & Max but I think the base M5 got the same relative boosts vs. M4 base.
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
Look at the "Q4_0 Prompt" column. That's the tokens-per-second processing the initial prompt/system prompt. This is where the "neural accelerators inside each GPU core" is seen most prominently.
The M5 GPU added better matmul and dot product support in hardware (IIRC) that really boosted performance of those kernels over previous GPUs. Current transformer models rely heavily on matmuls. Prefill (processing the current context) is mostly limited by raw GPU processing power where token generation (predicting the next token from the current context) is mostly limited by memory bandwidth.
While an older M-series might run a matmul or dot product kernel just fine the M5 can run them much faster.
i sold my m3 ultra /512 for £14000, or about $18000. The difference is what is important to me for a new one, and assuming $6k or so for the 256->512 boost, my cost will be about $16k, so i’ll save $2k by upgrading to the top-of-the-range model, bar it being a 4TB drive
That makes sense. I also think that we are at the point where maybe the expectation of a yearly refresh on everything should be reconsidered. They can end up on a Tick-Tock schedule when the Pro/Max/Ultra can be done every second year.
Apple has a dedicated "neural engine" which is designed as an inference NPU. Where as Google's TPU has a dual focus, both inference and training, which is a more complex design.
Apple Studio with maxed out M5 Ultra, 256GB RAM and 16TB storage is 18,299$. The 512GB RAM version apparently is coming in October, considering that the difference between 96GB and 256GB is priced at 4000$, the 512GB upgrade must be eye watering.
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).
So is downpayment on a house. I would buy the house and just pay for tokens as needed. The house will get more valuable and that wealth would buy a lot of tokens in the future - which will probably get cheaper.
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.
Or more simply – $25K (+ tax) put in a savings account will earn about enough interest to pay for a $100/month AI subscription indefinitely. And at the end of it you still have the $25K.
Not 'more simply', there are basically zero savings accounts that are going to net you a 5%+ interest rate to give you that $100 a month. And that $25k becomes less valuable over time. $25k is now only worth $19k because inflation.
Do you think monthly AI 'subscriptions' are going to be $100 a month in 5 years? These people using these would probably be on $200/month subscriptions and with that OPs assertion of 'shoving away and paying with interest' makes no sense.
It’s basically impossible to compete on economic terms with deeply subsidized hardware that is widely available to rent or as a service with zero commitment.
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
Why are we comparing to the maxed out model only? The M5 Ultra with 96 GB, 1 TB, and 64 GPU cores is $5499.
Apple lets you lease that model for $110/month for 36 months.
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.
I don't need privacy, so it would be financially imprudent for me to spend 20 grand on such a machine. But I have a financial management client who does need such privacy, and if I get more fully engaged with them then I would be able to justify getting a loaded Mac.
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)
Well, this is all assuming a 20% down payment, which anecdotally as a 26 yr. old, nobody I know is able to achieve. All my home-owning friends put 3-7% down. Granted, most are using first-time homebuyer loans which are generally more favorable.
I tripled my money on my RAM purchase of three years ago. So, yes, for short-term appreciation that's hard to beat. But I don't think it's something that will continue.
Regarding the $25 price per GB RAM. These chips use LPDDR5X RAM. Looking at the Framework site, they are selling LPDDR5X LPCAMM2 modules for the following prices:
Apple hasn't been selling just ram for a long time, they sell vram. Try getting 512 gb of HBM on current Nvidia cards - it's gonna cost way more than $ 24k. And here you get the same amount of memory for weights right in a quiet unit under your desk
Put together a similar build with a couple of rtx 6000 Ada cards and Apple's price tag suddenly looks pretty damn reasonable
HBM itself is very expensive but it’s not really fair to compare to LPDDR or GDDR
They’re very different things.
The more logical argument to me is that Apple uses its upgrade price points as more than just direct BOM and rather as a proxy for things that are amortized across all their sales like support/warranty/etc so higher SKUs subsidize the costs of the lower ones.
"Nobody" puts down 20%. That hasn't been a requirement for decades (in the US).
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 remember when SGI boxes were $50k and then literally worthless just a couple bears later. i remember my university had a pile of them for free outside the deans office.
Ten years ago a bought an expensive MBP because I do a lot of stats in R, Python etc that benefited from it. But the next Mac I’ll buy will be a much lower-end model, because it’s just easier these days to do that work in notebooks in the cloud.
I don't think 16TB storage is a right choice. Going 2TB and it's 11,299. Probably, if you buy the storage and install it yourself you can go higher and quite cheaper.
I think the reason they offer these options in the first place is the discontinuation of the MacPro and their remaining need to offer high end solutions.
I live right next to a micro center and remember when they started offering that deal... still so pissed at myself for not buying one. I ended up just buying a raspberry Pi for what I was doing, but seeing as where the prices are now, I messed that up a bit. Also my worst sin was not buying 64GB of DDR5 when I was doing my computer upgrades back in August last year.
I returned an M4 Mac mini, 64GB, unopened... because I thought it was excessive for my needs then. I swear it'll be one of the things flashing before my eyes when this all ends.
I feel so incredibly lucky I chose to overdo it a bit on RAM when I upgraded last year... though I remember deliberating to go for 192GB (it's 96GB now) but motherboard support was somewhat more complicated and it felt like a waste of 300 euros...
Out of all of my home servers, the M4 Mac Mini is probably my favorite and runs many workloads even though it sits on a 96 core Epyc server now (needed the massive amounts of PCIe for something else). I was able to upgrade my SSD with a 3rd party one, not that sticking an NVMe drive on one of the thunderbolt ports would have been a bad pick. About the only place it didn't make sense is if you wanted a ton of RAM.
Apple still has the best hardware so I moved to it for the last few years, but the closed software ecosystem is terrible for taking advantage of it.
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.
> 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.
It’s barely a “feature” that they let you execute arbitrary code on your own hardware.
They don’t provide any source code or documentation (which they easily could) so if want to do literally anything with your “open” device you must first reverse engineer the entire MacOS driver stack like the Asahi project did. Great fun, but it’s a criminal waste of incredibly talented engineer hours.
On top of that, the reason Asahi doesn’t work on M4 and later is that Apple has intentionally modified the ARM core to prevent stock MacOS from running once the hardware is “unlocked,” which makes it way more difficult to reverse engineer.
I wanted to try it but it works just on M1 and I have M4. I was also considering upgrading to M5/M6, again to take advantage of what I really love: access to the 2nm process.
The performance you get with M5/M6 in theory is crazy (especially having matmul cores with such an energy envelope and unified memory). By the time I can use it well in Linux there will be M7/M8 though.
With NVIDIA I can buy a Blackwell based core right now and use it (even if I will have much less GPU memory. Though it will be high bandwidth).
I had a chance to try Omarchy past few days and it's just very different vs macOS. I honestly never had a problem with the windowing system ever since I built my own customization scripts (i.e. Hammerspoon). I can see the appeal for someone who wants ultimate customization though but macOS still wins overwhelmingly when it comes to polish, ecosystem, user experience, and apps (nothing comes close).
It’s not just Omarchy, there’s really not much out there in the desktop Linux sphere for those who are mostly happy with how macOS works out of the box. Everything is either in a similar vein to the Omarchy setup (hyper-minimal tiling WM), Windows-like (KDE, Cinnamon, most other DEs), or a chimera with a grab bag of design bits from every desktop and mobile platform (GNOME, Pantheon, COSMIC).
It’s a bit depressing because it means that if I ever feel forced to switch my daily driver, it won’t come without a dump truck load of friction, frustration, and lost productivity, which I’ve validated by using the various Linux desktops on secondary machines.
I run KDE on a secondary machine and it's the best it's ever been, but for me it's best for single-purpose machines where desktop differences basically don't matter. It's about on par with one of the better Windows releases (XP or 7 maybe) in terms of how frustrating I'd find it to do work under.
There were 1000 plugins created for Omarchy 4 in 2 days. That's why I don't feel it being hyper minimal anymore.
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.
Perhaps, but one of desktop Linux's defining philosophies is the machine working for and adapting to the user rather than the reverse, so it's a letdown that this only really applies if you're coming from Windows or have been a Linux user all along.
It's interesting because I just haven't felt the polish.
For example when using PyTorch I wanted to try to speed up my NN kernel by 2x by just using half precision and haven't noticed any speedup at all. Also I was missing the easy to use GNU tools that had to be mixed with Apple's tools.
I loved using Arc browser as well, and I'm missing it, but I guess I will do without it somehow (Chrome's vertical tabs are just not the same).
My main program missing from going back to Linux was ChatGPT Desktop, but now it's there.
I just checked out Hammerspoon, I'm happy for you that you wrote it, and looks great, but it has the same problem that I had: for security reasons Apple stopped allowing the window APIs to get all important information on other workspaces. You can only do it with Accessibility API. I was trying to fight with it but have up.
If the browser being Chromium-based isn’t a hard requirement, it may be worth checking out the Firefox-based Zen Browser[0]. Its UI is very similar to that of Arc, to the point that I’d call it Arc’s spiritual successor.
I don't understand how absolutely basic things are not possible on Mac OS. Switching between two windows easily, displaying hidden files in the finder...
These things would be way easier to solve than building the next generation hardware.
How are you liking Omarchy? I saw a video on it recently, and it looks 'pretty' but still looks like it's a lot of memorization of shortcuts and feels like the 40% keyboard of OS's. Like some people it's absolutely amazing, but lets be honest, it's going to be really difficult to be as productive as a full fat keyboard.
As a long time Emacs user, I beg to differ. Muscle memory will settle in after a few days. I still use Emacs shortcuts to navigate text boxes on macOS.
The most disruptive thing in Omarchy is not the keyboard, it's the tiling WM in my opinion.
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.
Add ARM boot camp, MacOS is too restrictive compared to modern Linux. Asahi's devs can't keep up with the constant hardware releases so official support is important.
The 512GB Ultra is amazing, sure. But who is it for exactly? VC funded big spender founders? In that case why would they need local AI? The ultra rich enthusiast? But there can't be too many of those. So who actually buys these?
I think there's some mental inertia around what a computer is and what it's worth. This thing can build custom software for you, mostly autonomously. It can monitor things happening on the internet that are relevant to you, in a holistic and flexible way. We have one crawling the web for local events we'll like, and it judges them based on what it knows about us, and it tells us about the best matches every weekend, which has yielded some awesome outings we wouldn't have known about. It reads the literature on a subject in seconds and uses it as context to help in decision support. It's not the same value proposition as a computer 3 years ago, where most people are mentally anchored on what a computer should cost. Having it at home means that you can use it as a personal agent that always puts your interests first, regardless of what ad model the commercial providers decide to put in, and you can stash in it your medical data, what you buy, what you make, your worries, hopes, and dreams, without worrying about that being used as training data, or worse, something to exploit you commercially. I think it'll become considered totally reasonable to consider spending the cost of a small car on a computer, for many families.
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.
By this kind of logic we'd paying something like ~$10,000/month for our internet connections. The perceived value needs to exceed the cost but that does not make it the only factor to consider price with.
What makes this expensive & sell well is it's not very fungible at the moment. Where else are you going to get 512 GB of high speed memory with a well supported accelerator attached that you can throw in the corner of anyone's home and not really have them notice? There are plenty of lesser options, plenty of noiser/power hungry options, plenty of harder to support options, but not really something in direct competition at the moment. Even the next rounds of the integrated AMD/Nvidia solutions are only targeting 196 GB of much slower memory and compute.
I think the difference besides the supply crunch there is that everyone connected gets the ~same internet, just faster or slower. Quantitative, not qualitative difference. On the other hand, a computer that can run Gemma 4 8B versus one that can run DeepSeek Flash are different enough experiences that I'd say they're effectively a difference in kind. It's been a bit since we had such serious stratification in outright capability in computing, rather than just how long it takes to get something done, or how many of something it can serve at once. In the early 90s, I think there were a lot more of those "this computer can do this thing, this one just can't" scenarios.
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.
If it were about capability instead of speed then you're welcome to pay me $5,000 for DeepSeek Flash running on an SSD :D. For $10,000 I'll even give you something which can run 700 GB models comfortably from RAM - not that the speed should be worth much.
Haha right, well, usable speed. And I guess there are some parallels with internet, the internet is technically usable with HughesNet, but people used to fiber would probably consider it unusable.
I like this train of thought. The inverse is saying that the cost of this computer is the value we give away to AI companies by doing compute on their servers with our data. And to take it another way, is the value to you, the cost of a small used car?
> And to take it another way, is the value to you, the cost of a small used car?
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.
Sure, it’s pretty dumb/naive implementation, would need to be a lot more efficient to scale. Basically had Claude write polite/low touch dumb crawlers for a bunch of local sites (library, local events spaces, luma, theaters, maker spaces) and whip up a little frontend to let our family and friends manage a little text description of what their family members like, constraints, that sort of thing. Once a week, the crawlers look for new events, add to a db, and then run through the list and ask our local LLM to grade each event, given the text description and constraints. Take the top 20ish for the following two weekends and email out. It’s been super helpful, lowers the activation energy to go to more local events.
Probably don’t really need it, just makes it easier. I tried it with some potato class models first and they would ignore or mishandle constraints, especially when vaguely worded. Sometimes it would try to send us to events that were obviously in the middle of the school day, and I’d look at their reasoning traces and there’d be some really boneheaded mistakes in there. If it reliably sends you a decent fraction of garbage reccs, the emails stop getting opened, my SO has no patience for that.
If I can get Sol level capabilities on a $20k machine, then it is well worth it for my employer to buy me that machine for work as a workstation. When you start paying in tokens vs subscription costs due to enterprise agreements, you really start to see how much cash utilizing frontier models at the frontier costs (and I'm efficiently using luna and other models where possible!)
Yeah, I'm not sure people realize how expensive ZDR/Zero Data Retention is, and how important it is to a lot of businesses, this kind of thing starts looking really cheap really fast if it's a reasonable substitute.
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
One of the advantages of LLM's is that you can set up a task list and tell it to burn through those tasks overnight. It's a rare night that Claude isn't busy for me, and I do burn through my 20x subscription, sufficiently that I downgrade from fable around about ... now in the week...
"You most likely can't utilize the workstation 24/7. Your work hours will be concentrated into 6-10 hours per day."
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.
Sorry for the snark, but are you trying to cure cancer? What could possibly need 24/7 research in our domain, that doesn’t need your input every 30 minutes?
Normal boring CS scientific work. Just running running my experiments, reproducing other papers, etc. A lot of it does involve the agent waiting for some computation, but the fact that it resumes independently when I'm sleeping is kind of the point (+ usually I have several running in parallel).
I'm not trying to cure cancer, although I do hope people who are use LLMs. ;)
Subscriptions are, and will likely remain, the best deal in town. Unfortunately, larger companies aren't able to do that. When your monthly token costs are in the $5-10k range, the local inference starts to look a lot more attractive
In the case where you pay for tokens without a subscription, the analysis is still very much not in favor of buying hardware.
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)
The economics can never work in your favor for buying your own hardware here, unless you can utilize it or sell excess capacity and you have access to nearly free electricity. The reason is someone else can buy the same hardware at scale (or realistically more efficient hardware), park it somewhere with very cheap electricity, and sell tokens. They can get very high utilization that you are not likely to get.
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.
As speed goes up the cost / Mtoken will necessarily go down at roughly the same ratio so it will wash out. The still use hardware or sell hardware value is factored in to the amortized monthly cost, it assumes a 3 year markdown, and does not factor in the cost of money which should almost cancel the resale value in the end, which I think is quite accurate (any residual cost on a graphics card after 3 years is so small compared to the current price it should be discounted and in included there).
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.
> - You most likely can't utilize the workstation 24/7. Your work hours will be concentrated into 6-10 hours per day.
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.
I think "ultra rich enthusiast" is in the right ballpark. There are people betting on being able to create their own revenue generating products and services with their own local hardware and very little operating costs. That may or may not make sense as a business idea. But people with wealth and risk appetite trying a new kind of business model and cost structure has a strong tradition.
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.
Enthusiasts buying these for fun are not the target market. These aren’t big sellers to begin with but a lot of the sales are going to companies where people have budgets for gear like this and can make a business case for it.
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.
Other than the local AI crowd which is much recent it is professionals using Final Cut Pro for video editing, Logic Pro as a DAW and music production, Video transcoding, Photoshop and other tasks for high performance computing that don't need Laptops but want above 128GB of ram and prefer a Mac. Then there is the obvious group of developers that are making Apps for all of their products. Also, these are great for the workplace. AI is much more recent thing that Apple products were used for.
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.
Anyone dealing with sensitive or regulated data can get started instantly with local models where they may need time consuming process or complexities to send sensitive data outside.
The competition is a custom multi-GPU NVIDIA RTX pro desktop, which go for much much more. $20k is cheap for 512GB addressable memory. The old mac pro could easily be configured to cost that much.
this comment has always existed behind every apple release, most especially anything vaguely pro-ish.
to answer your question : looking at the aftermarket availability of Apple's prior best and brightest : practically no one buys them.
"people here buy them" , well, 'here' is one of the most affluent groups of people in the world.
They're available as movie and television set pieces (undoubtedly disappearing into the home of someone close to the staff post-production), and for administrative/boss types that can slip the cost into a ledger somewhere that few will ever see.
It has been a hobby of mine every few years to check out the apple site and see how big I can option a machine. My record was when I was in high school years ago and was able to option some pro studio-ish apple desktop thing to like 61,000 usd out the door.
Movie set pieces, as a motivation for Apple making these high-end configs available? That makes no sense.
For one thing, you can’t tell from a movie what the specs are. A $999 Mac Studio looks exactly the same as a $20,000 one.
For another, Apple updates the industrial design on their products so rarely, a 6-year-old Mac, iMac or MacBook also looks nearly indistinguishable from a brand-new one.
I realize it's not a 512, but for context on why I ordered a 96GB. $95/month after a trade in. I'll use it for a long term project where I'm building a national sized dataset/processing video transcripts with a rubric (of churches/sermon health). I'm willing to trade SOTA models for local ones for cost of regenerating/model consistency/ethical reasons.
I'll find other ways to use the power though, opencode or maybe start working on more video projects.
My friend plans to get the 512GiB M5 Ultra ASAP. He makes money by selling synthetic data and training models for companies in San Francisco and it's the cheapest way to be able to do that on your own local hardware. It's also a bit irrational as he could save money by just renting, but I get the appeal of owning something outright.
Local AI is the future, and a lot of people want the first mover advantage or to toy around with it. I know a guy with a small rack of Nvidia Spark machines that he uses for that purpose; it's as much as a decent used car.
But is it? If it’s cheap enough latency doesn’t matter. Unlike say cloud gaming, where latency does matter. I’ll take my games local and my text bots cloud
Of course. People are valuing privacy now, and it's almost inevitable that humans will seek to have more agency over a social contact, even if it's an artificial one.
The first three are starting to get more closely associated with privacy.
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.
I wonder to what extent the timing of this release was driven by their need to increase prices, but not wanting to apply it to in-market hardware. It's kind of a weird time to drop new Macs, between WWDC and the iPhone release, but not early enough that it could be purchased by college students. I get that most students use laptops, but if I were heading off this year I might use an iPad + Mac mini for more horsepower while maintaining portability.
I run a lot of local models (I am always experimenting) on my 32G M2-Pro MacMini - I would love to upgrade.
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.
Honest question - why are you so stuck on Macs for local inference?
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. ;)
AIUI you can only connect two 3090s at a time with NV link? So you’d only have 48GB of fast combined memory? That’s not tremendously interesting as you’re still limited to the smaller models which, while impressive in their own right, are still IMO too limited to use as your only model.
Upgrading RAM is still probably cheaper than spending $6000 on a linux box. You're correct that inference will be much faster on the Linux box. But, the mac's unified memory can load larger models. And as OP mentions, it's still hard to beat cloud pricing at home.
Yes, GPUs are much better for dense models. On Macs, MOE models run better, so I agree Macs are more limited and expensive. I have a Linux laptop with a 10GB 1080 GPU, dated, but I should add even more system RAM and try that.
>A 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.
Leasing now an option, only $50/month (cheaper than inference subscription?), so even cash-poor can go the amortized-investment route.
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.
I looked at multiple configurations, and mathed it out. With leasing, you pay ~75% of the capital cost (excl. tax) over 3 years, but end up with no asset.
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.
I'm not sure who that line is supposed to impress. Gamers focusing on graphically demanding AAA games would laugh at this. People who don't game much probably won't know whether this is good or not.
I somehow find it better to give 2 frontier model companies 100-200/month than dropping 10 grand on a hardware that will get old in no time with bad TPS. I really want to have a fully local model but seems like one more generation wait and we will be there?
You’re still stuck paying for a 3 year contract for deprecating hardware. And the 256gb model which is still not enough is $230 a month. And it runs models 8 months behind frontier
Lots of people use the Mac Mini to run the frontier models over night or while traveling. I have a rack in my basement and have thought about throwing one in. You can get a cheaper machine but Apple feels a little more, “rack and forget,” if you have less price sensitivity.
Mac Mini + MacBook Neo w/ ssh can be a better setup than MacBook Pro for many people.
If it’s purely for experimentation then why not the DGX Spark/GB10? It’s up about 10% from release RRP which is quite good (you might argue it was overpriced then, but prosumer and workstation GPU prices are up 100%). 4TB NVMe is not cheap these days - it’d cost at least $500 for a stick - and you get 128GB at a similar bandwidth to an M5 Pro.
Nevermind that Apple still insists on providing base systems with only 512GB of non-upgradable SSD. The equivalent spec mini (4TB/64/10G) is almost $5k for half the VRAM. Not as good a CPU compared to the M5/6 but you also get 20 cores and full CUDA.
Why do they focus so much on hardware when their biggest problem is software?
I don't get it. My Dell XPS 13 is probably not that powerful in terms of performance but Linux is so much more productive.
This drives me crazy
I bought a 128GB M4 Max Mac Studio a while back, and for a while I thought like I had done really well to buy it when I did.
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.
I have had a difficult time with running 120b models on my 128gb setup, especially with any larger context size. The 6bit of Qwen 3.5 is already just over 100gb, and when you go down to 4bit it seems a bit lobotomized.
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?
The page says 170G/s memory bandwidth for the NPU and 1.2T/s for the GPU. Why the discrepancy if it's all "unified memory"? The former is nothing to write home about as far as AI compute is. The latter is really nice.
Which one is it you can run local models on? I suppose the NPU only.
For me it's be Strix Halo, 128gb machine, especially running Qwen models. Except when I bought it, it was $1,900, now it's $4,600 for the same box. (Wow that's insane)
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.
I still struggle with local llm being a reason to drop insane money on one of these - they are targeting people who want high performance local LLMs, that value privacy over using 3rd party api, but also dont want to use Nvidia? small part of the pie by any reckoning?
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..)
Does anyone know if they’re actually at 2nm transistors, or if this is more marketing talk? It’s kinda like when TVs advertised their contrast ratios (do they still do that?) but they all used their own measurement methods, so dynamic contrast ratio became a worthless metric.
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".
"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."
I feel like the M series macs have been some of the most positively received computers ever made. I am yet to meet someone who doesn't love theirs, myself included.
Yeah for a lot of us macOS really gets in the way of using the otherwise excellent hardware. My daily driver is an M1 Pro with Asahi and it's easily my favorite computer ever. It's a real shame that the newer M models can't run Linux.
I did a little stint studying thermal cyclic fatigue in multi-die packages (many years ago) and I'm wondering how the issues there are solved these days.
Damn. I just bought a maxed out MacBook Pro M5 Max 128GB 8TB, still waiting for it to be delivered. I could get 256GB RAM M5 Ultra 1TB for roughly the same price, and it's double the memory bandwidth. Which one would you recommend? I do plan to run local LLMs.
M5 Ultra if the portable form factor is not a requirement. (I have a M5 Max 128GB 2TB for context.)
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.
Contact Apple care and see what they can do. They have been known to do upgrades if you buy around the same time. But with the ram situation that courtesy might be gone now.
Sick. Particularly stoked for the 10gb network card ($100 option) when using the Mac Mini as a server. Just wish the memory + NVMe prices could come back down to pre ai-goldrush prices. As $2999 for the M5 Pro with 64GB RAM feels painfully over-priced.
My example is I'm looking for a new media creation machine to replace my homebuilt PC from 2015. Since that old machine can't run Windows 11 and also because Apple storage is so expensive, my idea is to turn the PC into a Linux storage machine with a 10G NIC. Then I should just be able to edit off of the storage instead of worrying about caching it locally.
The prices are ridiculous though. I may just keep rolling with my Windows 10 setup.
As long as everything is using 10gb, faster transfer speeds when moving data between computers. For downloads, it wont help unless you have 10gb fiber, but for most folks, 2.5gb is quite fast. Hell my spinning media NAS has a hard time saturating when moving files between internal servers.
RAM and SSD in apple gear has always been way over-priced. There was a short blessed period in March where the M5 Max macbook pro was out, but the general 30% price hike had not yet happened. In this period, given the insane inflated RAM prices, the price apple was charging for the M5 Max with 128 GB RAM was actually _reasonable_.
Ok, I just read the announcement word by word. There is a neaural accelerator in each GPU core. So presumably 64 vs 80 neural accelerators, with corresponding inference performance difference. It will make a difference for pre-fill.
So the idea of networking multiple Mac Minis via RDMA over Thunderbolt 5 to run local LLMs is intriguing, but doesn't really seem reasonable at this price point? What are the more cost-effective alternatives?
I use both the base M4 Mac mini and an M4 MacBook Air for Final Cut Pro, Photoshop, and Fusion, and while they're not as almost-always-perfectly-smooth as my Mac Studio, they're about 100x better than the experience I used to have on my old Intel MacBook Pros in the 2010s.
I edit 4K ProRes and H.265 footage, sometimes with multicam (up to 4 streams) and color adjustments, titles, etc. It's only after stacking 3-5 effects before things can stutter, really.
Or if you try doing something CPU-intense in the background _while_ running some heavy creative software. I just don't do that.
0% APR for 12 months (24 for iPhones only?) from Apple Financial Services for a device that can approach or even exceed what we were paying for new cars just a few years ago. Apple is definitely making bank off these financing offers, and with very little risk as unlike a car these Mac Studios don’t lose 20% of their value when you drive them off the lot.
Are you sayin 0% is bad? What is better then? If you have the means, pay outright, no? It used to be a lot worse, paying $16K+ for a 128MB Quadra something based RIP in mid nineties . Do you mean that these things are overpriced from the get go?
I am merely pointing out additional revenue streams for Apple here. They make money off the hardware and again off the financing. Car manufacturers and have much lower margins and finance via their financial arms with much less predatory terms than your average credit card. The zero percent APR is very attractive, and easy to convince yourself to go with something above what you can afford. Times are good for Apple.
Good for them. Things cost what they do. I hear you that one can fall into the 0% interest trap, but that’s on us.
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.
My friend, the same way everyone else does. It goes from 0% to 28% interest when you miss a payment. Those are rates normal lenders fall asleep dreaming of.
"M6 features a powerful, larger 12-core GPU that provides higher geometry rates and updated Dynamic Caching to deliver stunning visuals and fluid frame rates in demanding games like Mixtape."
Why choose the worst game of the year? Just because it's made by the daughter of Larry Ellison?
Just the other day I mentioned how odd it was that Mixtape felt just like AI-Art. At first glance it has great visual style and seems cool. But spend more than 5 minutes with it and you’ll agree there’s nothing there. It has zero ART inside. It’s one hundred percent vibes.
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.
Whether or not you don't like the game, it's a weird misrepresentation to say it's made by Megan ellison.
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.
Despite all the exposure the game has gotten, it currently has less online players[1] than games like "Tennis Elbow 4"[2] (by a factor of 4).
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.
It's not objectively terrible. It's subjective - entirely.
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.
I don't buy it. I'm sorry but I know shit when I play it.
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.
I've never heard of Mixtape, but I'm surprised to see such a weirdly contemptuous post about a video game get so much traction on HN. At a glance, critical review aggregators are showing 80+ on this game. Is there some drama or culture war issue here that I'm missing?
Isn't that a pretty well-established genre going back at least to the 1980s? I'm pretty out of date on modern games, but I do remember Heavy Rain being widely acclaimed 15 years ago. There's gotta be something else that explains the vitriol against this new game.
Heavy Rain garnered good reviews, but has aged worse than most of it's contemporary games from 2010. David Cage, the game's director, had his reputation dumpstered and hasn't directed a game in 8 years.
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.
Ah, well that must be it then. The stench of culture war was pretty strong in the original comment, so I'm not surprised, although I'm a bit disappointed to see it so front and center on HN (especially given that it was set off by a tiny mostly irrelevant mention in an Apple press release)!
M5 Pro in a Mac Mini with 64GB RAM and 10Gbit Ethernet seems like the perfect Jellyfin server and Ollama test server. All for just over $3K (I specced with only 1TB local nvme).
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.
not sure which cpu that Synology has, but I run jellyfin on ugreen nasync dxp8800 plus which has intel with QSV and it breaks no sweat in both transcoding (if needed) and serving over 10GBE.
It's a Synology DS720+ with a Celeron J4125, 2GHz, 4 cores, 2GB of RAM.
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).
A Pi isn't a NAS with an old CPU and minimal RAM which is running a bunch of other things as well. I have run Plex on my Synology, and it's fine, but I also have 8gb ram and honestly always have a better experience running Jellyfin on a small PC. Easier that way, and you can run other services. Before the rampocalypse you could find mini-PCs with 32gb ram and 1tb SSD for like $350, and have great transcoding ability when you are on the go or have multiple streams going.
I have Mac M1 Max and I'm quite happy with it. But these advances make me think that maybe I should upgrade to Mac M6 (or something) when it is released.
cool but maybe i was expecting much more from both m5 ultra and the next gen so it feels somewhat underwhelming.
Hopefully m6 max is more than just a 10% improvement over m5 max
Maybe in a year or so or maybe never. It depends on how 14a turns out and if it is comparable to TSMC 2NM. They may also choose to utilize 18a-p / 14a for other chips and not the M-series.
I'm so disappointed with the memory pricing we have to endure... MacStudio M5 Pro is $2,499 base with 36GB RAM, but when you increase it to 256GB, the price jumps to $9,499!!!
Every time Intel/AMD gets close enough, Apple just crushes competition in terms of SoC. I don’t know who’s on that chip team but they’re world-class. Hope they get paid more than a bunch of AI idiots Meta hired to do absolutely nothing (but I know they are not even close).
So I had just bought from Amazon in July an M4 mini, brand new, for a lucky post-hike price of 832 CA$ (682 USD); it was the very last unit at that price and I snatched it the morning it listed on the Apple/Amazon.ca official vendor. So far I've been using it for a month and it's been great (switching back from a Windows desktop for a decade).
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...
Apple is a terrible company through and through that should have been broken up million years ago. But, nobody dares to question apple.
My 2019 macbook pro recently started giving me CATERR errors. There are a few forums and LLMs tell me it is logic board. I took it to Best Buy - a location suggested by apple support and they say we could replace battery but there is no guaranteee it will work.
Logic board replacement would be $600 to $800. Unfortunately, only Apple can repair it given how every component is integrated and soldered. There is no help available from Apple support or anyone on this issue.
Apple creates "Planned Obsolescence" deliberately. Every year they launch new products with minor improvements and that basically distorts markets. There is MEGA scalping going on for Mac Mini but Apple does not care. As a trillion dollar corporation seeking profits Apple does nothing to help price gauging. Unfortunately, there is no competition. Microsoft is 10x deep into its own issues.
I wish we had startups who came up with strong competition for Apple.
My 2019 macbook pro recently started giving me CATERR errors.
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?
Is Apple just going to announce everything silently from now on? No more getting excited for the big events to see what's new -- it just appears on the blog one day?
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.)
I'm getting kind of tired of them announcing the base level chip and then waiting forever to release the more powerful versions. I'm also pretty upset that it's unlikely to change now that they've found it's good for business. Like releasing only the base level iPhones first.
Aren't you kind of stuck with smaller models on the mini though? Even with the pro you'd be stuck with a max of four daisy chained over thunderbolt and with the 160 gig memory bandwidth you'd probably be far better off with other configurations.
will be great fun if one M5 Ultra with 512GB memory at 1.2T bandwidth capable of doing 3x smallish local model inferencing each at Opus 4.5 level of intelligence.
The memory bandwidth and size seems to be there, but what is the tokens per sec on like a qwen model? And you can basically do 3x opus 4.5 on the $100 a month claude plan. Your payback will be near infinity years after electricity.
you are assuming the idea, the data, the code being touched by opus worths nothing.
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?
> M5 Ultra features a massive amount of high-bandwidth unified memory, up to 512GB, and delivers a staggering 1.2TB/s of unified memory bandwidth that is 50 percent higher than M3 Ultra.
Apple never needed to participate in the AI race to zero. Because they were already at the finish line years ago building their own chips that can run large >100B parameter AI models locally.
As someone who works in AI now, I have found it pretty amazing that Apple basically didn't do much with AI software, and focused more on the hardware side. I think this is what the future of AI is going to look like, local models run on your mac for your workflow.
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.
> 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.
Ten years ago I got 64gb of ram in my laptop, same as I have now. I bought both for business and personal use. System ram capacity hasn't changed much in 10 years.
It makes me curious how old you were 10 years ago.
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)
>I have found it pretty amazing that Apple basically didn't do much with AI software
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.
Same here. Sadly I think the voices like ours won't be heard, though, because Apple's looking for someone who's going to buy in on the whole ecosystem, and I think we're not it. Or at least I'm not.
It's worth noting that the 5090 (or the RTX Pro 6000 big brother with 92GB VRAM) will run rings around the Mac when it comes to compute.
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.
There is no magic, if the data you compute as atomic chunk don't fit in cache then memory bandwidth R/W limit kicks in and architecture does not matter. On contrary - having multi gpu setup of same price and same memory size with even slower memories may give you effectively much higher bandwidth but at the cost of power consumption.
I was so blown away at all the discourse surrounding "Apple fumbling on models". They should never have been in the model game to begin with. Apple crushes hardware over the last decade and that's a huge advantage today. In the end, massive models have proven to be very strong, but small models have proven to be good enough (especially with the recent Qwen 2.8 27B drop) and that's where I imagine the future will lie for consumers.
I think this is a bit of a crazy statement. Everyone expects Apple to somehow build a category leading product every year. I'd expect something innovative every couple of years
* 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.
I think that each of the products you name is the top or near the top of their category, but these weren't creating a category. I don't think my original comment says anything about "changing that industry", so that's a bit of a strawman. They absolutely change the industry they're in. They're just not first to any of those categories that you mentioned (maybe unified memory, I'm not sure).
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.
They did participate early on with Apple Intelligence and failed miserably. Really good move to not double down and let the others explore the space first
Is there anything comparable that runs Linux, doesn't necessarily look as good, but is perhaps (a lot) cheaper/fixable? Or is this really pretty optimal?
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.
I love linux and would be using it if the ARM support was better. It's just not there and most distros that support ARM do it a little poorly. I just haven't seen anything even remotely comparable to Apple Silicon and unfortunately Linux is struggling very hard to support it.
It's not quite that ARM support isn't good on Linux, it's that there aren't high-performance ARM chips with strong general-purpose software stacks. Like the Raspberry Pi is very well supported, but otherwise the only upmarket devices are things like Ampere workstations and hyperscaler server chips.
You can't run Linux directly on these. Asahi Linux supports up to M2 only.
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 guess, what I mean is: Why are these tiny aluminum boxes so optimal?
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...
The PC platforms have anemic memory bandwidth in comparison. Eg, Strix Halo is 256GB/s max. If money is a bigger limiter than performance it can be an option though. As can Nvidia DGX Spark machines. (Also limited to 128GB memory and comparatively low bandwidth, but higher compute than Strix Halo.)
AFAIK, apple does not release drivers open source, asahi is a reverse-engineering endeavour and does not support GPU.
For nvidia, there are both proprietary and open-source linux drivers. CUDA and inference works on linux with nvidia.
I would recommend checking out this video of Alex Ziskind to shop for a computer to run local LLMs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mevUEQcumzU&t=224s.
TL;DR besides Apple he recommends, DGX Spark, Tenstorrent Wormhole N300, AMD Radeon 7900 and NVIDIA RTX 5090.
"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" .
From what I’ve noticed, Apple products have been getting worse in quality year after year. Sometimes they even ruin their own devices with updates... I guess it’s all because of marketing.
I’m mostly talking about their iPhones, where new updates sometimes make older models worse. I know a lot of people whose iPhones started lagging after iOS updates.
Apple has the mlx framework. Most/all major software for running models locally support it. Apple also has RDMA for interconnecting multiple machines across Thunderbolt connections.
Uhhh, they are? They’re a hardware co for sure, but to say they aren’t focusing on on-device models is absurd on its face. They’ve spent over 2 years on Siri AI which is (mostly) local.
I was blown away by M1 Pro, and used it for 4 years before it became a little sluggish, and replacing it with an Asus S16 running on Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 (an excellent laptop). One of the main reasons was missing my old Linux setup.
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.
Still rocking an M1 Air - 2020 build. 8GB ram. No slowdown or deterioration at all. Battery health reports the battery max capacity at 84%. Best computer I've ever owned, by far.
M1 Pro 2021 16GB RAM
Feels as snappy and impressive as the first day I got it. I never need to close apps, or reboot. I record multitrack audio on it without any perceptible latency. I write code on it. It's the best computer I've ever owned by a significant margin.
I have one of these too. I can’t believe how long it’s performed at very high levels of use including two external screens and 10-15 memory intensive applications running concurrently, including three different browsers with multiple tabs open on each. I installed a new video editing application today and was apprehensive it would stumble, but it worked like a champ.
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.
I have exactly this. Been trying to setup local models. I either end up with something that’s too big for my mac or too small.
MacBook is great hardware, but I really hate MacOS. It feels perpetually cellophane wrapped, and I don't like any of the window management. Finder is particularly awful too.
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.
Rectangle solved my macos window management annoyances.
https://rectangleapp.com/
Not involved in dev of this, just a happy user
Hmm same one but mine is clearly deteriorating lately. Lots of beachballs. I think I abused the SSD pretty badly though if I’m being honest. Loading and offloading large media files almost daily for five years lol
Also M1 Air 8gb, though not the daily driver. Bought second hand, the machine is still an absolute champ with no slowdown and is my go to machine when I want a calm space for writing.
Agreed, I loved my M1 Air!
Which MacOS version are you on, out of curiosity? Do others see the same software issues?
Same here. For tough compute, I spin up a machine in some cloud service, do what I need, and shut it down. Of course, its a different issue if you need power on the desktop right there, like for A/V/Graphics work.
Same here, my M1 Max 64GB beats the s*t out of my work-provided M5 16GB :P
Best computer I've had in a long time.
That’s what I have and love it. I have M(N+1) envy but I remind myself that my machine runs great. And it’s paid for.
I splurged for the 16GB version of this. Originally bought it for my spouse, and then replaced it with a refurbed M2 with 1TB of storage for reasons. So I took the "old" M1 Air. So far, can't come up with a reason to want to replace it. Not updating to Tahoe helps with that too.
> Not updating to Tahoe helps with that too.
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.
Their “sorry this hardware is too old to run the latest macOS” seems entirely based on KPIs versus capabilities.
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 run a 2012 MacBook Air 11” for Zoom meetings. It’s stuck on Catalina, but it runs fine. If I really wanted (which I don’t), I could probably hack it to run newer operating systems. I know there’s a few ways to do that.
Same. It was borderline unusable on Tahoe to the point I had to downgrade it, but the Golden Gate beta brought it back to life.
I’m only using it as a travel machine now, trying to hold on from upgrading it until I can get an Air with OLED display - hopefully coming in <24 months…
What makes Golden Gate usable?
Same here. Still using the original M1 as a daily dev pc. The portability and battery life are great. Biggest gripe is the limited number of USB-C ports...
Great to hear! The absolute best Air Form Factor, I've debated a lot buying a used one because I dislike the square form of M2+ Air compared.
Agreed. I have an M1 Air base model (also an M4 Pro), and hated the squared-off change for the M2. The wedge was the entire point.
Same here. Got the same machine and feel the same as you about it.
M1 air 2020 16gb ram - still working like its new
Same, but MBP. Incredible machine, still has a lot of miles left
Same here, the thing is a beast
I bought a used M1 air with 16GB and 2TB a few years ago for $1000 CAD. It’s easily the fastest computer I’ve ever used, and I have no reason to upgrade. It chews through 4K footage and ten of thousands of RAW images off my cameras.
The M1 was genuinely a big step forward, but what has followed, not so much. I have an M5 Pro with 48GB of RAM and it is genuinely good ... but that's about it.
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.
> 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.
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
bro people don't measure things - it's all vibes these days (in all fairness OP specifically used the word "felt"). if they measured anything they'd have realized M5 GPU is ~V100 lolol.
I'm really curious about this deterioration? I use a M1 Macbook Pro with 16GB RAM as my primary machine and it still runs fine. I do iOS development so it's not exactly fast but I wouldn't call it slow by any word.
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.
Different people are sensitive to different things. I still find my 6th gen ULV i5 and 8GB of RAM tolerable.
Curious about the choice of the Mac as a home server. I feel like an off-lease x86 usff pc, at roughly half the cost, would be more useful as a server. Pre-RAM-crisis you could get one with 32GB of RAM for like $240. My main home server is one of those HP ProDesk, running Debian.
I'm always a little cautious about "tried it in the store" experience. If I nuke and rebuild my machine (either Linux, or Windows), it's always significantly faster than it was before. Over time stuff just tends to accumulate that you don't notice. Like the old days of needing to defrag hard disks.
I agree with you that this is a noticeable effect, but I have a hard time figuring out why it is, especially on Macs with the sealed system volume (which should make the operating system files bit-for-bit identical between a freshly set up Mac and one you've been using for years). Certainly it could come from the accumulation of cruft in /Library and ~/Library, but you can clean that up too.
One reason is the ssd. A heavily used ssd is just slower than a new one.
Yeah, same - I tried the M5 Pro randomly while waiting for my daughter to finish salivating over a Neo, and just got surprised by how quickly it opened apps and reacted to anything I did - ~1-1.5 seconds for Affinity Designer was amazing.
My MBP probably got affected by OS updates like other people are saying - opening apps and responsiveness definitely got worse, and felt like slightly deteriorating over time (but it might have been MacOS updates along the way).
I have never owned an Apple product that didn't slowly get worse over time. After a couple iPads and MacBooks, I'm almost certain they are intentionally updating their operating system to slow down older products. Even worse is the removal of access to certain applications for older hardware in the name of security or compatibility.
Meanwhile my Linux laptop continues to get faster every year as the operating system improves with performance updates and bugfixes.
Absolutely agree - happened on MBP, 2 generations of iPads, and Watch...For iPads and Watch, I thought that it might just be the famous battery health vs performance tradeoff they enforce on us, but I rarely ever used the MBP on battery, it was plugged in 95% of the time.
The only Apple products that I can think of that haven't degraded in quality over time are the iPods and maybe the Apple Watch.
Do you mean Airpods?
iPods were a very popular Apple product once upon a time...
This may be true (not perceptible w/ my apple silicon Macs), but the important thing is that they get slower more slowly than my wintel gets slower (I blame disgruntled Windows and/or nvidia drivers devs....)
My Apple ][+ improved with age as I added things like 48K of RAM, a floppy disk, a language card, etc...
iOS 26 made my iPhone SE pretty much unusable.
first gen? Because my SE from 2023 works very well with the latest 26.5 version.
First gen tops out at iOS15. I just shelved mine (used for a low-end test), a few months ago.
I use an iPhone X as my low-end test, now. It tops out on 18.
Can you characterize the deterioration more specifically? I only ask because every time I run this exercise for myself I end up back on macOS, despite any hiccups.
Not OP, but a decades-long Mac user. Removing CLI tools over the years would be one way, though I run Homebrew and have everything I want or need. That doesn't change that scripting is less useful on a fleet of devices.
Also, the UI has been in decline for a decade or so, with the regrettable decisions under Alan Dye. Thankfully, Zuck poached him and we're all grateful for that. I mean, what they've done to our icons is tragic, the glyphs in the menus was intern-level boneheaded, and reduction of contrast to "get out of the way" of our content has made everything less usable, especially for people with vision issues.
A bug that I filed about window-ordering when using the Cmd-` / Shift-Cmd-` shortcuts has been live since 2010 without getting fixed, though an industrious HN user posted a link to the background utility they made to fix it themselves[0].
0: https://github.com/tacomanator/sash
100% I wish Alan and Meta well. I look at what happened to System Preferences (I mean Settings) and it’s a disaster. Some apps have title bars and many don’t (AppleTV). Just trying to enjoy Apple Music is so painful compared to the old iTunes. I am struggling to enjoy my Mac as much as I did during the M1 transition when I thought finally they got rid of the HW bottlenecks brought by Jony like the dreaded MacBook keyboard and touch bar. Not the greatest hardware. But, now the software experience is so subpar, especially the HI (I mean UX).
I really like what they did with the MBP redesign, reminds me of the PowerBook G4 Titanium aesthetic. The hardware to me is great, but the OS has gone very downhill. If I had a Snow Leopard era-ish build of OSX + modern security I would be perfectly happy. Settings.app is a disaster, same goes for recent iOS versions.
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.
> Removing CLI tools over the years would be one way
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
An example of deterioration:
Jeff Goldblum's 30 second "Presenting three easy steps to the internet" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjY0xsoozs8
And now when you want to set up a fresh Mac it's a parade of dialogue boxes:
Do you want to turn on Siri? No. (the dialogue-choice is probably "maybe later" ugh)
Do you want to share app analytics with developers? Yes.
Do you want to add Touch ID? No, because I'm setting this up for someone else.
There are more!
I gave those examples -- each of which having a different answer or reason -- to show that the problem of onboarding is nontrivial, but Apple has spent no(?) effort toward fixing it. It's the same for new iPhones and iPads.
NB I don't know if you sign into your Apple account it pre-answers these questions. That'd be nice.
"There's no step three!" -- I can hear his voice in my head.
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.
No, all those dialogs are there with Apple account sign-in as well. Maybe even more, since they might want to upsell you on something along the way (Can't remember, haven't bought a new phone in almost 3 years)
Just as bad in Windows land.
My "favorite"?
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.
Not OP, but I have been using an M1 pro Mac Book since release. It's not sluggish in any way whatsoever.
I find macOS to be sluggish when it comes to opening apps. But it's not a deterioration, it's just always been like that.
That's my experience on M4 Mac Mini and M3 MacBook Air.
Same, I bought it with the justification that this would be future proofed for 4-5 years. Nearly 5 years later with daily usage, it's not limping along, the battery isn't on its last legs, it's doing great. My impulsive side is annoyed that I don't have a justification to buy the next latest and greatest.
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.
I have a nice M2 and a Linux box ... I do enjoy the looks of the Mac, but I never find myself reaching for it. A modern Linux box is just so much more useful, especially when you live in the backend dev / K8S world where Linux is the assumed foundation.
I have an M5 pro at work, and certain things are a smidge faster than my personal M1 Max, but they're pretty close overall.
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).
Same, although my M1 pro has only 16 GB of RAM and that does seem to slow it down a bit with my current usage. I recently bought a used Mac Studio M2 Max with 64 GB RAM and it's much faster, both subjectively and objectively by looking at how long it takes to run the full test suite of the Rails app I'm working on.
Same. I have an M1 Pro (personal use) and a M3 Max. Whenever I do side projects on my M1 Pro it feels nearly identical.
If you have not tried it this is an absolute game changer for Mac users moving to Linux. https://github.com/RedBearAK/toshy
I've been running it for 3 years now. I am so macpilled that I had to install it on my new Framework 13 pro.
The Mac muscle memory was always my biggest hurdle with Linux. I always felt handicapped by it. But Toshy eliminates that.
Nice. I've also found, through that, kinto.sh which is apparently the equivalent for Windows.
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).
That is amusing because to me one of the largest abominations about mac is the keyboard layout and mappings. It's terrible for anyone with decent sized hands to accomplish anything of even medium complexity.
Do you take issue with wrapping your thumb under your palm to hit command/option, or is it something else?
I wonder if the dislike comes from using third-party keyboards with excessively wide spacebars that make the modifier keys genuinely hard to reach with a thumb.
I'm not a fan myself but needing to only memorize one set of commands and keyboard shortcuts is plus for sure. It's one of the biggest annoyances when switching between operating systems.
IT is a bit of a journey (as is life). I started off with a ZX80 kit and some bluetac ...
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)
The latest version of Ubuntu works great. They've come such a long way, it actually feels comfortable recommending Linux to beginners now.
Here's to hoping they don't turn into Microsoft one day.
20 years of mac use has me feeling severely handicapped without it.
There is a youtube channel 'Dank Pods', he was going on about his Framework laptop and was talking about how modern OS's have this ark to their usability.
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.
Linux has been going down hill, but since you can choose distributions, there is an escape hatch.
I’ve been moving all my machines to devuan with xfce (or freebsd with xfce).
I have zero issues despite not having to deal with wayland, systemd, snap, etc.
Yup, that's the benefit. To each their own on Linux. I absolutely love Wayland and Systemd (snap... not so much), but no one is forcing me to use them or not use them, and that's the way I like it.
Exactly. In a broad sense, 'Linux' is an idea not a specific thing. I mean, yes, there is a specific kernel but beyond that it is flexible beyond reason.
I have stuck with distros that are not trying to chase the latest trends but keep a ethical high ground.
CachyOS was the one who moved me from Ubuntu/Debian based distros.
I'm not a kernel plumber, but I don't think Wayland, systemd or snap are necessarily part of Linux whatsoever.
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 could not disagree more. I have been using linux for about 15 years. Linux is better now than it ever was.
My 16" M1 Pro MacBook with 32 Gigs of RAM is still going strong. Not going to upgrade till this thing dies.
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.
I ran my ~2011 i7 MBA for 12 years as primary laptop before the battery finally killed it (had to run linux on it due to apple killing support the last few years).
Great hardware. I don't miss OSX though.
my 16" m1 max w/ 64gb is getting a little sluggish on some things
Yeah, if I could install Linux without any hacks I will get one.
Even if I prefer the body of a X1 Carbon ThinkPad, its keyboard and trackpoint.
Agreed. I loved Macs, but I need it to run Linux.
I am in the same boat. I would buy a Mac if I could run Linux on it. As it is I will pay more for X1 Carbon with a worse CPU just to run free OS on it.
But you aren't buying a Mac at that point, no? The hardware is 1/2 or 1/4. I'd get an X1 myself if it could run macOS, I like the looks and the aesthetic, don't much care about Linux besides my Proxmox / HA/ *arr setup on an old NUC. Why can't we have it all, eh? :)
> I'd get an X1 myself if it could run macOS
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.
LLMs and unified memory
Yep, vote with your wallets. It’s about time Apple learned that excellent hardware alone would not make up for what macOS lacks and where it fails for development.
macOS is fine, you guys are just overreacting… Is it perfect? No. Is it usable? Clearly yes.
Maybe they have standards and preferences. "fine" and "overreacting" seem like your very subjective value judgements.
What would you want Apple to do to improve the developer experience?
Proper macOS virtualization, for example.
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.
Honestly, Homebrew is so healthy[1], and modern Apple is so corrupted by greed, that I'm sure I don't want Apple to try to Sherlock it. Can you imagine? To get a package published, you'd need the developer subscription, and Apple would block any package that threatened any of their revenue streams. Not to mention that they'd probably want to also run the scan the MAS does to ensure you're not using any "private APIs." No thanks, Apple has no role to play here.
[1] (Personally, macports hasn't been my jam in decades)
Even my MacBook Intel from 2015 is still receiving updates. It's slow, but everything works.
MacOS 27 drops Intel support, but 10 years of updates is a long run. The 2015 MBPs were so good.
Same here, it can’t run models but it’s got all the applications I run with no problems. Sounds more like a user error or an app preference error.
Hmm, let's see:
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.
Those are all third party services that decided to stop shipping Intel releases for their Mac software. That isn’t Apple’s fault.
I mean that is unfortunate, but those are app specific problems not problems necessarily with Mac. Exhausted example but if pull up a raspberry pi 2 I’m not going to expect it to run the latest version of rust.
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?)
Improve the speed of APFS. Like try forking off a job to create a bunch of git worktrees in on APFS vs EXT4 -- it's significantly slower. Deleting a ton of files, cloning repos, hardlink performance, etc; APFS performance is poor compared to just about any other Linux filesystem.
Make installing Linux on it easy
Just get a dell laptop with Ubuntu on it, that’s easier
The entire point of this comment chain is that Apple makes great hardware but they don’t like the OS. Buying a Dell laptop doesn’t get you the 256 GB GPU.
“macOS lacks” LMAO
I'm still using an M1 Ultra Mac Studio with 128GB RAM running Fedora Asahi Remix. It's far more power than I need for a very long time, which is one of the reasons I love the Apple Silicon platform so much.
> Linux progressed really nicely, while MacOS deteriorated at the same rate, and it's changing the balance and the decision for me.
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.
Mac OS has been hands down one of the best OS that I’ve used in a long long time. What problems are you running into?
To be clear, I'm definitely not saying that MacOS is now bad - it's absolutely still a pretty good OS. But, personally, I do have a couple of gripes, and my feeling is that things are changing in the opposite direction from what I would like. Compared to Linux let's say a couple of years ago - yeah, better. Compared to Windows - there's no comparison.
But, still:
- it slows down after a while
- design direction is questionable and controversial - that it got more inconsistent is factual - also, so much wasted space and everything got bigger and a little dumber
- so little control over system behavior, functionality, looks
On modern Linux, you get a more polished (wow, unbelievable thing to say - I first dabbled with Linux in 1997), robust, and infinitely more functional and customizable experience. After a while, I started feeling at home - like it's "mine" - and how distinctively MacOS feels like being a guest there, and that it was never "my environment".
I definitely realize how vague and unquantifiable most of this sounds - and how little value those things have for a lot of people - but I've come to enjoy my setup, I spend ~12h / day in it, and I discovered that how it "feels" matters to me.
stuff that annoyed me on mac was the "find" feature was useful, but to get to a enclosing folder (what I want), involved searching, clicking something, finding the file again in the display and "enclosing folder" (this might not be exact, I don't have a computer in front of me).
Sharing files with a windows hard drive. My workmate had a seagate that installed an NTFS driver on mac, which saved us a few times. Never had a problem on linux.
Python never seems to work right. Conda, and other stuff, just never worked smoothly with the bioinformatics code we were running. Cluster machines it was easy.
There is a wierd issue that you can't close a macbook and use it with an external monitor without plugging it in. It just sleeps.
Would you like to join iCloud. No really would you like to join iCloud. How about apple music? (To be fair MS is just as bad if not worse about onedrive...)
We had a pythonTK program to print labels from a CSV file. Every MacOS update broke it. We ended up just running it on a windows machine. back up was going command line on mac.
case insensitive file systems.
generally stability..
Its not bad, just seems the OS has gotten worse.
I would say the artist formerly known as OS X has never been good. It literally started its life as a half-assed NeXT attempt and has only gone downhill from there. There's still a "Services" entry in the file menu. .DS_Store files are an abomination. Mac OS thinks it knows better than I do about which software I'd like to install. Plist insanity that makes the Windows registry look pristine. GUI inconsistencies across every surface area... I'm curious what you like about it, because other than font rendering (which it does well), I can't think of anything positive.
In almost 20 years of using Mac OS I can count on one hand the time I've used the "Services" menu, and that was mostly by accident...
No one has ever used it.
It's one of those NeXTSTEP things that was copied over.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Services_menu
I'm sure there are some die hard users out there. Speak up!
I love it! I write my own services for it all the time. You can assign global hotkeys to them as well which makes it crazy convenient to be able to select text, a file, etc and invoke some script you wrote on them.
I wouldn't even know where to begin, because the slide in quality has permeated every aspect of the operating system, from stability to design. Numerous networking bugs, SSH agent bugs, sleep state bugs, sometimes having to restart my machine because the network screws up so badly, Bluetooth issues that they keep introducing and then not fixing; I have peripherals that just no longer work due to this. I could go on and on. I could talk about the mobilization of a desktop interface (same mistake the Unity and GNOME teams made)
And I don't feel like beating a very dead horse, so just google "macOS Tahoe design issues" and take your pick.
Why not just stay on the previous 15 release? They still even push updates for it!
Agreed. I have skipped Tahoe and will update to Golden Gate when it's out of beta. I did the same complete skip on "Sonoma," I think. At this point, the complete absence of quality in MacOS releases has turned me from an "update on day one" guy into a "Skip major version updates unless it's widely being praised for improving performance and fixing existing bugs" guy.
Apple should just switch to making servers instead.
https://x.com/hsuchingpo/status/2091724431785861353
Ok, what am I using on my workstations then? Windows? Hell no. Terrible hardware, OS sucks. Linux? Hell no! Terrible hardware, desktop is terrible.
Linux (especially KDE) is probably the best desktop OS right now. Not great for laptops though
Why not great?
Battery life. I love my Linux laptops, and I don't mind being selective to make sure the hardware's fully supported, but whatever the reason Mac battery life is second to none.
What are your gripes with linux desktops?
what’re your gripes with people wanting to buy a Mac for the OS and hardware? It’s nice to have things work out the box
oh cool, where can I get a Mac that does that?
Apart from anything else the keybindings are the most annoying thing ever.
I can get that being annoying. I enjoy that keybinds are a configurable thing in the linux distributions and DEs that I've used, and I've found that most tend to have sane defaults. I assume that the situation is similar in macOS, but I don't know. The last time I've used any version of macOS was in 2008 during school, and I was far too young to really "get" computers, so I never experienced them in the way that I assume many people do now. The only other Apple products I've used since has been some combination of fourth gen and seventh gen ipod nanos (which were excellent, save for windows iTunes). Is there some secret sauce that Apple has that I'm just unexposed to that makes it wonderful?
My NixOS + Hyprland desktop largely has the same shortcuts as OSX. I super+space for launching things. Super+Q for quitting. Custom keybinds are trivial. I always thought KDE and Gnome were kind of garbage, but Hyprland gets out of the way and really lets me build the desktop environment I want.
Lmao keyboard shortcuts in Linux are AMAZING.
In that I can make them what ever I want
I’m on an 14” M5 Pro MacBook Pro with nano texture display. It’s the best computer I have ever owned. Not close.
i'm still rocking m1 pro with 16gb ram. for all my eng stuff its still snappy for me. that includes some iOS dev from time to time, lightroom classic, much better than my pc with ryzen 9 5900x + rtx 3080 somehow! i haven't even think about upgrading my mac
I'm still on my M1 Pro. I bought one M5 for one of my employees and after 5 minutes playing around I am thinking in getting a new one.
What Linux distribution do you use?
CachyOS with KDE...it's been amazingly fast, dependable, stable, customizable, polished (yes, really)...
Weird, I'm still using my M1 Pro and it feels just as fast as it always has. MacOS feels almost identical to me as it did 5 years ago, too, except the ugly icon change.
Tahoe slows it down, but Seqouia is still strong.
same... mine works great...
the top comment .. "i prefer linux"
How did it become sluggish?
Desktop is taking a bit to render after a reboot (which I need to do very rarely, admittedly), apps definitely got slower to open, a small delay in actions here and there - it started feeling a bit sluggish compared to before and it felt like it's deteriorating over time - but slightly.
I think it's very likely due to OS updates, like other people are commenting on. It probably doesn't happen to everyone, and maybe doing a clean reinstall helps (I tried all the standard stuff - rebuild caches etc).
What cant you do what you can do with Linux? Nowadays my main apps are terminal apps mostly running Claude. Honestly don't really care whether it's macOS or Linux or maybe even windows. I do care about local speed. Occasionally try out local models.
I can’t download ms teams on Linux (the browser version sucks).
I still use my M1 Pro Macbook... for iOS development. It still works amazing well, and the battery still is holding strong. For large apps, compiling can be a tad slow, but for medium and small apps it still works amazingly well.
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...
Why buy all that for Linux when there’s asahi for the m1?
Not OP. I'm a huge fan of Asahi and use it on my M2 MBP. There are some significant downsides in particular battery life is nowhere near what you'll get from MacOS due to inability to go into low power sleep state, and buggy DP alt mode for external monitors. I hope that will change but it's not there yet.
Because it still doesn't fully support all of the hardware on M1. I know it because I used Asahi while I had M1. Now I have M4 for work and it doesn't support Asahi at all.
I just use Linux PC as much as possible instead. And that 4$ M4 is just a fancy presentation computer I use when I travel.
Personally I would spend thousands on an actually great Linux laptop, but there are still none around.
Just run a linux vm
40+ years of guis and I'd rate MacOS usability around early 90s Openwindows. Something about being wedded to Fitts's law and 1985 design docs.
Everyday I check on Fedora M4 progress.
Everytime I look at fedora, I think "are those GNOME guys retarded?" Linux would be much better if fedora never exist
Try omarchy
I know, this is a bit of a meaningless comment, but it's funny in a way. Feels like late 90s again:
Reading Infinite Games, they tell an anecdote about a Microsoft exec on a flight telling an Apple exec that the Zune was a way better portable music player than the iPod. The Apple exec was just “yup, you’re probably right” and then soon after the iPhone dropped
To be fair, the Zune actually was a better media player than the ipod in almost every way. That wasn't a false statement.
The issue was the abysmal marketing and "me too" attitude Microsoft had (and still has).
I recall reading this story of some user doing a sync with Zune on their new computer. The computer had no songs on it and the Zune synced with that machine and wiped all the existing music off his Zune without warning him(or something like that its been years). I recall thinking, yep thats Microsoft. And to this day I still encounter dumb ways of thinking in many of their products. The endless negative stories I hear about Windows 11 are just the tip of the iceberg. The entire company has to be following a cohesive vision with leadership at top needing to be truly involved to make great end to end products and really Microsoft has not been that in a long time.
I was a zune user. I had my music organised meticulously and could simply drag and drop to my zune from my (parents) windows desktop. It was simple and it was fantastic.
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.
Can’t reply to jsondb, but iTunes had a default option to convert to AAC afaik.
iTunes for Windows was indeed awful.
As a hobbyist teen I built my own itunes clone for PC from scratch and remember getting so excited when Apple posted a job for someone to port iTunes officially.
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.
iTunes for Mac was also awful. I don’t know where the idea comes from that iTunes on Mac was good software but I remember reading that and getting a my first (then Intel) Mac and wondering why it got so much praise on Mac. It was the same software with slightly better UI but generally the same awful UX (except for drivers and performance which was never an issue on Win for me)
Because back in the dawn of OS X it was legitimately a good music utility
I don’t think that happened. At least not as you’re telling it. iTunes never required AAC files.
I believe that, (possibly only) in the early days, it offered to add any imported music to your library, which I think it indeed did by converting to AAC and putting in a directory structure of its choosing.
It probably could convert to AAC, but the biggest issue for collector nerds with carefully curated collections of mp3's organized in folders by artist and album and with perfect metadata was that iTunes would take all your hard work, shake it around, rename all the files and dump them in a single folder and fuck up your metadata. At least that's how I remember it, but it's over 20 years ago ...
I think the core lesson of the story is knowing if your hobby is listening to music or curating a music collection. Optimize for one or the other.
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.
I remember the trick was to use a network hard disk or drive for the music. iTunes kept the organized folders and all files untouched while building its metadata-only archive in local. But in general, yes, the tendency to mess with your file was built-in.
I'm sure there are other examples, but you picked one here that is very unfair.
> 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.
I remember Microsoft introduced a DRM / certification program they called "Playsforsure".
Two years later they introduce the Zune, which could not play "Playsforsure" music people had purchased from MSN..
Heh, sounds like Windows Phone. Release Windows Phone 7, get early adopters and traction. Thank the early adopters by releasing Windows Phone 8, which is incompatible with existing Windows Phone 7 devices. Also make it use a new app development SDK so that Windows Phone 8 apps don't work on Windows Phone 7 (modulo some weird transition tech that almost nobody uses).
The funny thing was they could have done the adaptation--instead of doing it they just presumed devs would transition.
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.
One of the many reasons I moved away from ipods is because iTunes (which was awful; some of the worst software I've used) did the same thing to me just before I went on a trip.
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.
iTunes was great in the beginning. If you can, find someone with a G3/G4 and OSX 10.4/10.5 and see just how snappy that thing feels even with a 100th the RAM of today and a spinning disk. A real nice piece of software.
But then they just started dumping everything onto it and it eventually crumbled under the weight.
To be fair, I had that experience with my first iPod. As soon as I got it, I synced it with my computer and loaded up a ton of songs on it. This took a while.
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.
to be honest, apple did this when it launched apple music.
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.
I did the same when I tried to copy a friends music from his iPod to my iTunes library. Wiped his iPod instead. I think we have a tie there...
To be fair, iTunes suffered from the same defect at one point. Microsoft is now a clinic on defective design, execution, and attitude. But back then it wasn't that bad.
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 weeks fun example of 'What will Windows 11 do today?' is that it suddenly wants to max out the Ethernet adapter with nothing. No packets are actually going anywhere but it just ends up hogging the entire data bus until you restart it once or twice.
This is the kind of nonsense we have been putting up with for years.
Oh, you mean like MacOS (OSX) installer deleting whole hard drives if there was a space in the volume name? It's so funny how fan boys can selectively ignore the bugs by their favorite company
Exactly. The same for Windows Phone. Both was amazing software on great hardware. They just never gained enough traction because MS was a bit late to the party and wasn't willing to push through (e.g. by compensating the late start and poor market position with heavy marketing investments and partnerships), so they eventually trashed those projects.
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).
Google broke YouTube for Windows Phone.
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 had a great run with the Lumia range devices but I could see it vary wildly depending on designer/manufacturers.
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.
Yes, the death of Windows phone was a tragedy for the mobile phone market; it had a fresh take on things, and could have stirred up healthy competition with the duopoly of iPhones and Android phones.
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.
At the time when they killed Windows Phone they had a $7 billion write off and that was huge. A decade or so later they would buy Activision for $69 billion without blinking. I would happy swap those in an instant.
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.
The iPod's click wheel was amazing. Grab one if you have the chance and play a bit with it. I imagine a lot of people don't remember or have never used. Such a great feel and UX, Apple at its best.
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.
I owned one for a very long time. I know people loved the clicky clack, but that thing was a UX abomination. The only thing it was good for was high speed jogging - not something that you typically do very often on a music player.
"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.
> …high speed jogging - not something that you typically do very often on a music player.
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.
I think it was an example of a well executed idea taken war too far, like the touchscreens on a Tesla replacing essential physical buttons. Or the obsession with getting rid of buttons on the iPhone (which we’re now thankfully retreating from).
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.
From what I recall Zune had a much bigger screen for videos so I bought one for that reason you can see the side by side here:
https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/zune-ipod.htm
I had to hunt this, but the classic design perspective of the ipod vs zune by Joel
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.
Technical capability pales in comparison to human desire.
Being easy and pleasant to use and own is also an important capacity.
Until you actually need to run a business. Then money is much more important than the preferences of your employees. That's why Apple has barely penetrated the business world beyond overfunded startups that are more driven by hype and design wanna-bes than actual profit.
Microsoft fumbled the Windows ball so hard, everybody i know got rid of their Windows PC and either went to Android/iPhone or got a Mac or Linux.
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.
10% of Microsoft's revenue is Windows. Azure is closer to 40%. Their focus has shifted hard from software to services. Azure is making them around $100B and growing. It'd be far more surprising if they were putting their focus back to Windows in a saturated market given all the incentives they have to chase bigger revenue elsewhere.
And Linux is the premier OS on Azure. I'll never stop getting a kick out of Azure Linux.
https://github.com/microsoft/azurelinux
Yeah, but there's no reason to go Azure unless you are really tied to the MS Windows ecosystem.
If there's choice, everyone goes with Linux servers.
We chose Azure for our startup because of data location, and it was cheaper than the other two as well. Data center locations may not matter much in the US (because everyone has this covered well), but it does in other places of the world.
Can't reply to @shorel, but of course Azure is running Linux servers. It has nothing to do with being tied to a Windows ecosystem.
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.
Most devs choosing Macbooks has a lot to do with culture. It's boutique, cool, and all the other successful people have it. Yes, officially it's always for technical reasons, but no one would ever admit to get something just because it's shiny.
Hmm, you are saying that devs have preferred a POSIX system over whatever Windows 11 is, because it's "boutique"?
Not OP, but I absolutely know people like this. Devs who don't even know what POSIX is, let alone care whether their OS is compliant.
Yes, exactly.
I chose a MacBook as my laptop last job because my Nvidia drivers kept breaking on my Linux laptop
One can argue they made much more money selling to people than business. Business forces you to compete on price and that drives everything down to 0. The market clearly values selling to people more than selling to business: look at their stock price. So if you are actually running a computer company wouldn't it be better if you took Apple's approach (if you could)?
> Until you actually need to run a business. Did you mean to say "Until you actually need to sell to a business."? They did do very well for a long time mostly by focusing on consumers...
Macs have a smaller marketshare for Business than Windows machines, but iPhones are ubiquitous in enterprise.
I feel like businesses could spend way less (money-wise and time-wise) on technical support if they just gave out MacBook Airs to their employees which could then remote into virtual Windows desktops for whatever legacy software they need to use.
Why should 90% of people need to deal with BIOS updates, driver updates, daily operating system updates, and blue screens of death?
The point is that after the iPhone dropped it didn't matter.
You’re right but that is not the point. The point t is that soon after the whole category of portable MP3 players got wiped out by smart phones.
Never had a zune, but I did have an iPod. I am willing to accept Zune was superior. But its just an example that, yea, often times the superior solution doesn't actually win. There is a huge list of better technology that lost out to worst technology. Which is why I find it funny the claim that the market is optimal in choosing winners and loosers.
The market is optimal, you're failing to value brand perception and any social effects as a price factor
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.
> 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.
What.the.actual.fuck. Can you expand on this? I have so many questions.
I was being a little exaggeratory on the 'first date' specifically, but there is 100% a subculture of 'normies' who care about things like that. The iPhone, and even the amount of cameras on your iPhone, became a status symbol.
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
I haven't heard of people losing a first date, but I remember a few years ago seeing articles about teens being excluded from group chats if they were using an Android because it was considered something you'd only buy if you couldn't afford an iphone. Android and iphone also didn't share the same features for texting, so people didn't want Android users in their chat because it meant they couldn't use all the imessage features.
I’ve met people like this. “Oh, green bubbles - I don’t know what I expected” / “I didn’t realise he was poor”. It’s 100% a thing for some people.
People have preferences. Some preferences are shallow. That's it, really. All kinds of people exist in this world, and wanting to be perceived as high-status is practically quintessential human behaviour.
I had the first iPod, and later the first Zune. The Zune had a beautiful UI, but by then Apple came out with the iPod Nano 2nd gen and that took the cake.
It was better in every way you can quantify in a tech specs listing, and not in any way that actually matters to the customer.
I had the OG white Zune. It was the same price as an iPod ~$250. The reason I chose Zune was the Zune Pass. A precursor to Spotify. Plus growing up in the Seattle area, I knew other people who had them and we would trade songs.
I completely forgot you could "squirt" songs to other Zune owners. What a time!
(Brown launch model here.)
100% - the iPod wasn't just good enough, it was more than enough for almost everyone. The Zune was firmly in the diminishing returns category by the time it came out.
Yep. To overcome an incumbent that sells a very good product and has momentum, it is almost never enough to be somewhat better. You have to be "knock my socks off" better.
The Zune may have been somewhat better (until the nano and iphone), but it wasn't enough better to overcome the ecosystem switching costs.
Not much difference between storing as many songs you can listen to in a lifetime, or storing twice as many songs as you can listen to in a lifetime.
me still thinking about the iRiver H320 I was lusting after...
My Zune 30's still kicking! Ipods aren't.
Apple excels in marketing. They are more similar to Nintendo than Nvidia.
And the Zune media player was a much better media player than the other 6 Microsoft media players. It was crazy how much Microsoft invested in cannibalizing its own products--I remember they had a similar number of word processors, email clients, etc.
And marketing it with "turd brown" ass (oops!) an option
> the abysmal marketing
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
The Zune failed vs the iPod because of marketing? Okay.
The turd brown color certainly didn't help
For you maybe. I love the color of my turds.
shut your mouth - that brown was beautiful.
I'm with you. It was brown, and if I remember right, in the light the edges had a sort of greenish tint to them? I thought it looked so cool, hadn't seen anything like it before.
The color definitely made me want to shut my mouth
That combined with naming the sharing feature "squirting".
2006 was the year Nintendo showed us how to play with our Wiis, while Microsoft asked us to squirt at THE SOCIAL.
They failed because of design.
Actually, Microsoft came with "modern" smart phone much sooner. Actually too soon, technology wasn't there (price, computing power, size, weight, battery life).
Apple never came first ... but often just at the right moment and had marketing skills to make it a new trend.
> technology wasn’t there
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.
Microsoft never had a chance because Apple is the last vertical computer company (OS plus hardware) a survivor from the 1980s when there were many vertical American computer companies. Even Apple would have been dead if Steve Jobs had not come back with the Next operating system.
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.
BlackBerry didn’t seem to port too many PC-centric concepts. Felt like a step too far in the opposite direction actually, too PDA-ish.
Also, capacitative/multitouch touchscreens were ridiculously expensive until Apple made orders at a scale large enough to bring the technology costs down.
I'm the opposite of an Apple fanboy (typing this on a Windows box), but this is some grade A nonsense.
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.
Having used a variety of pre-iPhone WinCE, Palm, Psion, etc PDAs, going purely by bullet points specs, the best WinMo devices launched in 2007 were capable and even feature-rich, but I agree the overall user experience was hobbled. Large touch-screen devices integrating phone, data and media needed a different UX and OS. MSFT's business was too platform-centric to take the strategic risk and their mindset was too incremental to make the conceptual leap.
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.
Apple understood software/hardware and how to marry the two together (in a way that the general public wanted to use) if it was easy, Microsoft or someone in the Linux world with hardware would be further long but they’re not.
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.
This shorthand that marketing means a bad thing is actually not true for Apple. Apple's marketing is how it ought to be at every company. They do market research to figure out what users need, they famously came up with the iPod's click wheel, they don't just do the ads. Of course Apple is eminently critiquable, but its marketing division is what everybody should do.
Reading with understanding is absent in your skillset.
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.
> 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.
It’s easy to forget what a difference multitouch capacitive touchscreens made to mobile devices. As far as I’m aware, the iPhone was the first device to use it at scale. Apple also spent years designing a new interaction paradigm for it, taking multitouch from cool tech demo (Fingerworks) to the mainstream.
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.
Mr. Schmidt helped out enormously… :)
The Kin was pretty cool. Very usable with cheap hardware and cheap data plans. If the timing was a bit different, Microsoft might not have been tempted to commit infanticide.
From what I remember, they bought Danger which had a popular product that worked, but some VP made them rewrite all their software on a Microsoft stack. This took years and didn’t work very well. By the time they were finally released they were woefully outdated and only on the market for a few weeks before being killed.
Imagine having to go to Start - Programs - Phone, in order to make a call.
Sure, I can imagine it. But I had a Windows Mobile phone and definitely didn't need to do this, there was a Phone button on the start screen.
Windows CE (1996) was garbage compared to Palm OS (also 1996.)
Years after the first iPhone release, Microsoft had a dogshit mobile OS, and every single device using it was dogshit. Before Android, the industry's answer to iOS and iPhone was a resistive touch screen and stylus because, other than the launcher, absolutely nothing was adapted to fingers. That was if you were lucky; some didn't include a stylus, reducing usefulness for making calls. It was like running regular Windows applications scaled down to a smartphone screen.
>Apple never came first ... but often just at the right moment and had marketing skills to make it a new trend.
Newton.
Simon Sinek - Apple vs Microsoft: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jEOftmUJ6a4
But it had nothing to do with the iPod/iPhone release in his story.
(story starts ~1:15, but I highly recommend the entire talk)
Might want to edit, as this would make sense/be amusing if the exec in the last sentence was Apple.
That, or I can’t read.
You got it, thank you!
Hell hath no fury like Apple Global Security scorned...
Zune was probably a better player. It was too late, and arrived when MS didn't much care.
There are emails unearthed in various lawsuits where you can read Bill Gates screaming at his subordinates: "why the hell can't our partners like Sony and Creative create a similar device? Give them all, give them early access to everything, work with them". In the end MS felt compelled to make their own.
Sony can't be bothered to compete with Apple in that era. They were trying to recover from their DRM dreams, and their devices were already sounding great with in-house software and hardware.
Creative's Muvo^2 already was the poor man's iPod with surprisingly good audio quality as well.
I feel like this completely misses the mark. Audio quality was never the compelling feature of the iPod and people weren't clamoring for it because it sounded good.
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 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.
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.
"1000 songs in your pocket" was the entire driving force behind the thing. It was constantly bellowed in the marketing and it's what Steve Jobs demanded of the engineering team from day one. The size and the storage were paramount and they knew no one else could match it.
The iPod’s user interface was good once you figured it out. I bought a 2nd gen one, I think, because it was the only large capacity device that supported audible audiobooks, and the UI frustrated the heck out of me. I consistently had trouble navigating it.
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.
I'm having a hard time imagining the click wheel took you more than 10 seconds to figure out.
I had a Rio Volt which somewhat bridged the gap. 700MB mp3 CD/RWs (about 10 hours of music per disc) and a CD player when traveling and picking up new music. Not as small as an iPod, but no book of CDs was necessary, either.
Yep this was really it. The amount of storage on the ipod was amazing and just opened up the idea that "yes you put your full music collection on it".
> I feel like this completely misses the mark. Audio quality was never the compelling feature of the iPod and people weren't clamoring for it because it sounded good.
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
> 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.
Yeah I had an iriver. That thing was great because it essentially acted as a giant (for the time) USB drive. And it could play any mp3s and you put on it.
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.
I clean forgot a about iRiver :)
> Zune was probably a better player.
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.
IIRC the Zune had a much better DAC on the device than any ipod. I own two of them and the sound quality was always notably great.
It let you squirt over a song to your friend
https://youtu.be/ud6rwVkbovA
And they could listen to it 3 times in 3 days
“Squirting” was ridiculed at the time and the word itself scaring away women. Jobs killed it then in an interview with a classic quote: Microsoft = Cold tech and Apple = Humanity. MS scares her away, Apple gets the girl.
> 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.
I loved the book The Infinite Game. Really changed how I looked at work, personal research, and being an author. Recommended!
That just sounds like a standard introvert response when one doesn’t want to walk.
The anecdote is likely a false rip of the actual story:
[2017] Speaking at an event Tuesday, Scott Forstall, who lead Apple's iOS software division under Jobs, recounted the surprising history behind the company's first touchscreen prototype, which ultimately lead to the first iPhone.
It all began, Forstall said, because Jobs had an acquaintance at Microsoft who he really, really, didn't like.
"It began because Steve hated this guy at Microsoft," Forstall said during the event. "Any time Steve had any interaction with the guy, he'd come back pissed off."
The unnamed Microsoft exec, who was apparently the husband of a friend of Jobs' wife, apparently bragged so much it pushed Jobs over the edge.
"He just shoved it in Steve's face -- the way they were going to rule the world with their new tablets with their pens. He came in on Monday with a set of expletives and then was like 'let's show them how it's really done.' "
https://mashable.com/article/scott-forstall-steve-jobs-micro...
Spite cam actually be one of the most powerful motivators for productivity, in my own experience. I can buy this story being accurate.
In Steve's case "fueled by spite" would be more precisely "borderline personality disorder". If you read him in that lens it might help distinguish how to be successful like him without all of the bad parts.
I just want to take a minute and be grateful for getting the chance to live through the 90s again. I always felt a bit sorry for myself being a child through the og 90s. Now I feel like in a decade or so into the future I will look back and be happy I got to live in the naïve days of windows 95 again, as an adult this time. I really appreciate it.
Cheap RAM in 500 yards. ->
[apparent tunnel to cheap RAM painted on rock face]
...and Apple zooms through it like it's a real tunnel.
In the ‘90s it was the opposite.
- 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.
I said late 90s though. The insanity which poured through early 2000s.
5.25GHz Pentium 4s, intentionally lower binned Athlons, the era your CPU got obsoleted the moment you booted it for the first time.
I don't remember early 90s much. I was too young back then. I don't remember much stuff from that era. But late 90s, early 2000s.
Oh, boy.
P.S.: AMD64 was a great sucker punch though. One of the professors in our university rejected to believe and got mad when he learnt that Intel licensed AMD64 from AMD, heh.
Ironically enough, I knew a polar opposite prof… swore off Intel after the FDIV bug (he did cosmological simulations on Beowulf clusters)… although he was a stickler for time management, when Opteron came out he threw out his summer schedule to find grant money for a new cluster.
I had a G4 MacBook when I switched to the first-gen Intel MacBooks, and subjectively, the G4 performed much, much better. Probably because the best pairing for any Intel CPU is thermal throttling.
I lived through the PPC->Intel transition porting real Mac apps, and "I liked the G4 laptops better" is definitely not a take I heard from anyone back then...
A lot of the important applications took a while to get ported. Also the last two generations of G4 hardware just overclocked basically unchanged chips. The 12" G4 laptop was infamous for slowly cooking your junk with their titanium shell.
At the time I switched, nearly everything that I used was running native.
> 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.
The black MacBook I remember especially for leaving me with denim burns. And then I read all of the eulogies from people who never had to run it as a daily driver…
It's been really weird reading laptop reviews over the last few months. I've seen a bunch of reviews where they have their usual bar graphs comparing a bunch of laptops, and the laptop that is at the bottom is an Apple. It's the really inexpensive Neo, of course, but even the M5 laptops are consistently beat on performance and battery life by Intel Windows laptops.
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.
> even the M5 laptops are consistently beat on performance and battery life by Intel Windows laptops.
When plugged in... This caveat is so enormous it should almost be legislated. If your computer use is at all portable, a computer that scales down to 20 - 40% of GPU power when unplugged is an enormously significant factor. So far as I'm aware (could be wrong about arm devices?) there's no non-apple laptop that operates at 100% speed on the road.
Newer Intel Panther Lake chips perform the same or very similarly on battery as they do when plugged in - as do Qualcomm chips. However, I don't know where they're seeing "consistently beat on performance and battery life by Intel Windows laptops". Multi-core performance can definitely beat M5 in some configurations but single core performance is still fairly far behind and battery life is comparable again depending on the exact specifications and design of the laptop. I've seen analysis showing M5 is still the perf/watt king though regardless of configurations.
Sorry, poor wording. It's the Neo that's on the bottom in many reviews, but the M5 is regularly beaten by Windows laptops. My usage of "consistently" was in the sense of regularly beaten, not in the sense of always beaten.
So…inconsistently?
So consistently beats the M5 on something, just not on everything.
Have you tried Panther Lake or Wildcat Lake laptops?
Jesus, they're still calling their chips Lake? As in Skylake? As in 2012?
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/decoding-intel-code-names
Jesus, why does it matter? Don't you still have your name since birth? How lame!
Because the naming convention was used for chips based on Skylake microarchitecture (but with other differences such as process node). Not changing the name implies they've either changed the naming convention (why?) or they haven't improved the microarchitecture since 2012.
>they haven't improved the microarchitecture since 2012.
No, but they did beat 14nm like a dead horse for almost a decade. So you're not that far off.
Apple also is faster when plugged in
Citation needed. I've owned Apple laptops for many years - and I'm a video editor (amongst other things). If this is the case it's new behaviour.
This is a difference between selecting Highest or Automatic for performance under the battery menu item.
> but even the M5 laptops are consistently beat on performance and battery life by Intel Windows laptops
The real question is whether all these Intel Windows laptops spin their fans at full speed when doing absolutely nothing. That’s something I can never go back to. I do some light gaming on my M2 Pro MBP and it gets hot when trying to push 120 fps. But my Lenovo Legion (that’s now collecting the dust) is so loud I could hear it through headphones.
Yeah, as a somewhat new MacBook air user I'm also sceptical when people claim that any windows laptop is now better or at least as good as a MacBook.
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.
Those Windows laptops always have a dealbreaker for me (besides Windows itself). If they have decent screens, sound, and battery life then the trackpad or keyboard will suck. If it's cheap it'll creak and groan like a Tesla interior...and have a terrible trackpad.
> [...] but even the M5 laptops are consistently beat on performance and battery life by Intel Windows laptops.
Hold up, in what metric/benchmark? Feel personally like we life in an age where, no matter the SOC vendor, something high performant and efficient is offered, so seeing a claim that any vendor, be it Intel, AMD, Qualcomm or Apple, is consistently outperforming another, I'd like to get more context on that.
It seems logical in this case.
Intel were x86, Apple Silicon is ARM-based. ARM-based chips are more power-efficient.
Also, it's built on a much smaller process. 3nm, if I'm not mistaken, older Intel was something bigger than 10nm. Heck, if you take a really old Intel Mac, you have something like 65nm process, which is much less efficient than 3nm.
Here's a random benchmark I found on the internet (literally the first thing on Google, you can find more if you want) https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-intel_core_i7_1065...
> It's the really inexpensive Neo, of course, but even the M5 laptops are consistently beat on performance and battery life by Intel Windows laptops.
Of course you can beat the entry level MacBook Neo by comparing it to larger, more powerful, more expensive laptops.
The M5 is an entire family with a range of performance. Intel/AMD have done a lot to improve performance but they’re not beating the high end M5 chips on performance or battery life yet.
You can also beat the Neo on every measure by comparing it to $700 Windows laptops. https://www.tomshardware.com/laptops/dell-xps-13-2026-review
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.
Build quality, keyboard and displays are consistently reviewed as being nicer for the Neo than that price range of windows laptops.
> 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
> You can also beat the Neo on every measure by comparing it to $700 Windows laptops. https://www.tomshardware.com/laptops/dell-xps-13-2026-review
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"
> You can also beat the Neo on every measure by comparing it to $700 Windows laptops
Can you count how many (out of 9) measurements the windows laptop beat the Neo in that article?
Did you read the article you linked? The neo beats the performance of this dell laptop in several of the listed benchmarks.
x86 is way more complex when compared to ARM processors, as a result their TDP is way higher when you request performance from them.
Intel had to reduce the frequency of their processors when running AVX2 instructions and the AVX2 frequency of the processors were non-disclosable to anyone.
Also, benchmarking Intel processors and publishing these numbers were forbidden in some cases. I don't know whether this ban is still in effect.
x86 processors can't keep up with the ARM processors TDP and thermal profile wise. So they slow down a ton when running on battery. See Jeff Geerling's last video on Apple Neo vs. some Intel laptop. It's as "efficient", but slow as a newborn tortoise learning to walk when unplugged and trying to get the most endurance out of the battery.
My M1 Mac gets almost 2 days of low-intensity use after ~6 years of use, and it got warm once or twice because something ran away in the background for tens of minutes.
Being mistaken on the CISC vs RISC debate (besides, modern x86 is closer to RISC via micro-ops then old school CISC) is understandable. There is a lot of misinformation out there and myths, plus, it just feels right to consider CISC overly burdened, etc. TLDR: Intel x86_64 is closer to RISC then you likely think and Apple Silicon arm is closer to CISC then you likely think. These lines are blurry and have been for decades, very much for good reason.
But talking this authoritatively on something without doing the reading, that's grating: https://chipsandcheese.com/p/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-matter
> But talking this authoritatively on something without doing the reading, that's grating...
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.
But still, your point was AFAIK already dismissed long ago.
After that comment, why does it matter where you work?
Because being too confident about someone you don't know is a bad habit. Where I work doesn't matter though, but what I do is.
Pointing me to C&C is a nice touch though. Not only I read the site and very article you sent me before, I used to consume Anandtech before that.
As a mere mortal, I can make mistakes and gladly accept them, but I can't accept rude replies. Pardon my French, but being called a low-key liar or smoke blower gets me a little upset.
> Pointing me to C&C is a nice touch though. Not only I read the site and very article you sent me before, I used to consume Anandtech before that.
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.
Echos of the ai race as well haha
Seems most computer companies are still boasting that they can beat the M1 and it's like...congrats on beating a 6 year old chipset?
I don't think this is the case.
Intel Panther lake beats the M5 in GPU and multi-core performance, and is only behind in single core (and not by much). Panther Lake is also on some Windows laptops that trounce MacBook battery life (e.g., Framework 13 Pro according to Just Josh Tech medium-brightness productivity benchmarking).
The Snapdragon X2 Elite beats the M5 multi-core performance (the HP Omnibook Ultra 14 is priced identically spec-for-spec with the MacBook Pro with M5). Still behind in single core and probably graphics, but squarely in the same realm.
Both of these chips are within small deviations of the M5. We could call Intel and Qualcomm 1 year behind at best.
I still have zero urgency in upgrading from my M1 MBP.
I have 0 urgency buying something more expensive than a $150 refurbished i5 16gb ram laptop.
Local AI isnt useful for agent stuff.
Same. My personal laptop is an M1 Air and I also have an M1 Studio desktop. My work machine is an M4, and in "regular" use I can't tell the difference between them.
I don’t get that sentiment. I have an m4 16gb and it’s such a sluggish machine. and that’s not even doing development, just browsers, word, excel, PowerPoint. (And so many eternal bugs… I feel like I’m on windows)
do you have a corp laptop with a dozen scanners like Carbon Black, Crowdstrike, etc. installed? My corp M4 Max with 48 GB is slower than my old M1 16GB machine by a large margin. I don't know what evil things those scanners do, but they're alwayus spinning like 35% CPU, and the M4 Max machine just drags..
You better check health of your machine then.
I think software makes it sick. Perhaps it would be better without it.
I have an M2 Pro MBP 16GB, compared to the latest MBP issued by my employer a couple months ago, I see zero difference in real world performance. Can’t speak for Office on Mac, I have not used it in over a decade, but for typical full stack web dev I literally don’t need anything more.
Sounds broken, somehow. The M1 iPad Pro I just traded in worked fine. Traded it for a Neo and the Neo does some stuff faster, but for day-to-day casual use, it's not notably different.
Apple is like the Billy Mitchell of computing. Just waited for them to beat it before announcing the gains they were sitting on.
Does this imply they faked all their benchmarks?
Funny, wasn't getting the reference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Mitchell vs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Mitchell_(gamer)
THE (Col.) Billy Mitchell was actually a badass. His time in Alaska alone, running telegraph lines in the wilderness, made him a legend even before his forward thinking during WWI and beyond.
Xiaomi: We have matched Apple in CPU performance.
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!
Yay a CPU in 2026!
My YouTube will load 0.00001s faster!
I think it’s weird to say Apple is faster than Xiaomi when both are just using arm chips and using TSMC to build them, and this chip is only any faster because TSMC made a smaller node.
I know Apple do some special hardware software integration magic too.
Apple is not "just using arm chips". They have been designing their own 100% custom cores for more than a decade.
To be fair, this kind of dominance is not unprecedented. Intel was even further ahead in the early 2000's. Every new competitor process was further behind the leading edge and not closer. TSMC started launching half nodes like 28nm just to have something in the market that would sell.
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.
TBH Apple never should've been the one who makes the best CPUs -- that's not really their area of expertise historically speaking either. It just appears that everyone else did such a terrible job for so long that they caught up
The US “export controls” what Chinese companies can buy at TSMC.
Haha, late 90s wasn't really like that though
Except in the 90s, I could wield my OS of choice on the hardware I bought.
That's sadly true though. Also booting something was really simple.
Now we boot an embedded microcontroller (or CPU) which boots the main CPU which boots another OS semi-persistently to boot the main OS (if it's allowed).
Sometimes there are other processors needs to be up to allow processor to continue booting as well (these are mostly servers, but eh).
You can still have the 90s OS experience, even today, but these days we use the name bootloader, not operating system, for that amount of functionality.
Except in the 90s, I could wield my OS of choice on the hardware I bought.
What OS could I have loaded onto my Macintosh SE/30 that wasn't from Apple?
Apple levelled up in the middle of a fight.
I do not find it funny tbh.
I'm very very surprised that Xiaomi matches Apples speed even with the newest release, its not diminishing Xiaomis success.
It's interesting to see how defensive some of these pro-China posters get on HN and elsewhere. I'm genuinely curious why there seems to be an inferiority complex here with respect to America/American companies.
China follows foot-in-the-door tactic per the Art of War. (done in HK, Korea, Singapore, and Malaysia)
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.
I'm not a pro-china poster, i'm from germany and didn't find this 'funny'.
Apple is the second richest company on the world (which doesn't need help/protection?!) and they have experts in chip design.
Xiamoi is some random chinese company not known for high end chips and was able to catch up impressivly in a short period of time.
This fact doesn't get funny or wahtever just because apple brought out a new chip today.
I'm not a fanboy for any of it and do not care.
> Xiamoi is some random chinese company not known for high end chips and was able to catch up impressivly in a short period of time
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.
Yeah I know but that wasn't what I was hinting at.
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.
Are they well known in China? I'm seeing that Chinese tech has decoupled from the West. They have all this cool stuff that we do not hear about because they aren't selling it to us because they don't need to. It's usually been stuff with better price to performance or ultra low prices though, rather than ultimate performance stuff. I wouldn't be surprised if they made a top end chip that everyone in China knew about, and we didn't.
> random chinese company
Oh i have soooo many news for you!
> Xiamoi is some random chinese company
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.
> catch up impressivly in a short period of time.
They're using ARM designed cores. So it's more like Apple just isn't as far ahead of ARM as some people claim.
Intereresting point I will try to see if i can find more about it. I would assume apple has a lot more magic sause than just TSMCs best node and a little bit of ARM architecture addons.
> apple has a lot more magic sause
Why would you assume that? ARM has been a chip design firm for 35 years...
I find pro apple comments funnier; but you know, everyones got their own rose colored glasses.
I wish I could understand how they created a cult like following despite having mid tier products.
They somehow convinced people low power consumption on CPU mattered.
>They somehow convinced people low power consumption on CPU mattered.
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.
Battery life in mobile products doesn't matter now?
Yeah I'm sure you use 6 hours of battery life before you find a charger and aren't a loyalist to a corporation.
I think it's great but it's important to remember that we haven't seen Xiaomi's chips in actual devices under real world tests. We don't know if the speeds are sustainable, under what wattage, etc. Competition is still great and I look forward to learning more, of course.
I find it funny not because I support Apple. I find it funny because it feels like the leapfrogging happened in early superscalar CPU evolution. The era when the Moore's Law was working.
I enjoy it because of progress, not because of Apple.
They didn't. It's an off the shelf chip, the threads on that post dismantled it pretty thoroughly as a false claim.
Even w/the pricing spike, inflation adjusted we are back to roughly the prices of a new Mac SE/30 for something that can beat a turing test w/o sweating.
I yield the floor to no one when it comes to pessimism, but that's incredible.
The DRAM market is cyclical. I don’t think anyone truly knows when, but it will happen.
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.
I'm expecting it to somewhat collapse. I don't know if it'll go back to pre bubble prices (here's to hoping), but I do expect a pretty sharp decline around 2030... probably not before then.
Basically everyone that makes memory is building new fabs, meanwhile I'm not sure how much longer AI datacenter demand for ram will last. I think the decrease in AI ram demand and the new fabs will likely coincide leading to a collapse in pricing.
That is, of course, assuming the memory manufacturers don't pull their favorite trick and collude.
If there's a decrease in AI ram demand, it will not be because the models get better. Models getting better will increase RAM demand, because it grows the part of the economy that models are useful for. Classic Jevon's Paradox.
I'm expecting the drop for a couple of reasons.
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.
the better AI becomes the more non-programmers will be able to use it to build apps, and because they don't know how to program themselves they will use FAR more tokens than us to achieve the same thing. As long as AI is good enough for them to build whatever they desire there will be a lot of demand imo.
I’ve been thinking about this question for months: with access to good LLMs and unlimited tokens, how many non developers will end up making software?
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.
My analogy is: almost everyone can to go Home Depot and grab all the plumbing supplies they need to do a lot of jobs. And people do - Home Depot does great business.
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've met at least one person that has gone pretty far on a somewhat complicated project who has literally zero programming experience. he did it for fun.
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.
> 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
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.
> For 2, I think we are nearing saturation for the usefulness of AI. I certainly could be wrong
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.
I think LLMs will start being etched into custom chips. There’s already some companies experimenting with it. The benefits are enormous - you get better performance, lower memory usage and no need to load a model in ram. Companies would be able to sell local LLMs while keeping their models proprietary.
If that happens, hopefully the ram price comes back to earth.
I’d love to buy a tiny swappable coprocessor that slots in next to my cpu and can take this stuff on. Swap it out every 8 months as you can benefit from something better. Hell, sign me up for a subscription!
Yes, but a right now a lot of the RAM buy is for demand that doesnt exist yet. Big tech is projecting AI demand and making sure they have enough compute to fulfill that, so AI demand would have to increase even more than they expect, otherwise theyll build their datacenters and then slow down the amount they buy.
I'm going with 2029 just so that it can be exactly 100 years from the Great depression. ;)
100%. We're probably on the cusp of over-capacity, a glut, cheap RAM, bankruptcies, and shortages.
The memory companies report that they're sold out through 2027... so it might be a while
That's only if the AI companies continue their build outs.
How many people actually use fable over opus? How far are we up the diminishing returns curve, and will their customers even care?
The stock market crash caused by AI companies halting their planned build outs may in practice cause RAM to remain unaffordable.
How does a stock market crash increase RAM prices (when RAM demand goes down)?
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
The second and third and fourth-order exposure to AI spending is maybe bigger than you think. The blast radius if it pops could be quite large. Patrick Boyle had an interesting video discussing this recently https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTiYaWFP59Q
I don’t think the effects on the hardware market of open weight models triumphing has been reflected upon enough. It’s not clear that it will be less impactful if every enterprise decides to build for predominantly on-premise inference. In fact, before the question is ultimately decided, we’re probably heading towards a few years where hobbyists, enterprises and ‘hyper scalers’ are all competing for certain parts in common. Ram booked through 2027 sounds about right.
Companies are avoid risks, and at this stage, sometimes, I feel that all cloud providers are just buying RAM that they would have bought anyway. Now it's ensure that no company will be willing to pay x digits just for cards. One of my clients is stuck in "we are doing things on premise but we are too cheap to spend a few 100k in cards but we don't want to go on clouds.
Last thing i heard was that large companies are starting to seriously spend on ai infrastructure (think nvidia clusters rather than tokens from openai or anthropic) to fine-tune and run custom models.
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.
Fable would have a much bigger userbase if Anthropic didn’t remove a zero data retention option because muh safeguards
Or if it didn’t constantly kick people off fable. It won’t talk to me about gardening or computing.
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.
Or, they're price fixing, as they have many times before, and are currently being sued for [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing
[2] https://moginlawllp.com/dram-antitrust-suit-ai-memory-supply...
I for one can't wait. Current prices are absolutely insane.
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.
Scalper bots need customers to sell to; their business model falls apart in the face of sufficient supply.
That sufficient supply is maybe on the distant horizon. In the meantime everyone is being fleeced because the scalpers have the only supply available. Even if there's a supply glut tomorrow the scalpers have the infrastructure in place to buy out retail channels keeping prices high.
Looks like I'll be sporting my 5800X3D + DDR4 + 9070 XT gaming box for a little while. Too bad the CPU's ST is slower than my MB Air m4.
I built a new PC about two years ago, and I probably got it at the last possible opportunity for a while. CPU and motherboard have come down by maybe £100 in between the two of them, but a 7900 xtx (or any other 24GB GPU) for under £1,000 now seems like a bargain, and £180 for 64GB of DDR5 makes me feel like an old man talking about the halcyon days.
I built my current PC the day that the AM5 platform released, for about $6k not including the 3090 I moved over from the previous rig.
If I sold just the two sticks of RAM in it right now, it’d pay for nearly half of the total cost.
I bought a motherboard from Newegg in late 2024. It came with 16GB of RAM as a free "gift". The same RAM goes for $534 on Newegg today. It was $437 in January. Prices are still creeping up for this "throwaway" memory.
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.
Welcome to the club. If you're _really_ competitive in cs2, I'd swap out to a 9800x3d setup, but it's still a maybe. Very little reason to upgrade right now other than to run LLMs.
It will never make sense to me to run Llms locally unless I had 50k. I don't even think that would compete with price perf of a remote llm and getting business done. And that's completely ignoring that sol/fable level is not local
Yeah, instead I have unsubbed from WoW this week. The atrocious state of the game's code and scripting is unbearable.
Absolutely, I am in a hold pattern for the next few years. I suspect in another 3-4 years you will be able to build an absolutely stacked machine at a reasonable price. Probably won't go back to what was before but it will be decent.
If it will happen in 100 years it will practically never happen (for us). Even 25 years would be a lot, it's half of a career.
Could you provide more details about the Epyc + DDR4 server?
Cycles tend to be 5-10 years long not 25. Without knowing anything else I would expect a fab you seriously start planning today will be at full capacity in about 5 years. Nobody serious likes delays - in particular the banks don't like loaning money that won't at least start paying off. They know it takes some time to design a building - but factories typically are standard buildings so once you know about the size you can get it done fast - I expect 1 year to have the building done is the worst case (and it can be done in 3 months possibly if your project management is good - after interest this is cheaper than the 1 year). It takes time to build and install the specialized machines that go inside - this is the largest problem, but you typically order them first and then plan the building around the needed space and when they will arrive. Then you need 6 months to setup the inside of the building. From there it is just ramp up time.
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.
If you don't understand that the AI driven memory boom has totally broken the cycle you are going to lose a lot of money. There is infinite demand for Intelligence and that translates directly to chips.
Sounds like you are telling us it’s a new paradigm?
https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter3/transportat...
"If you don't understand that the AI driven memory boom has totally broken the cycle you are going to lose a lot of money."
Fortunately there's a near infinite demand for boosterism too.
> The DRAM market is cyclical.
...
> I don’t think anyone truly knows when, but it will happen.
Do you know what cyclical means ... ?
An additional £1,000 for a 2TB drive is crazy though, rapidly takes the new Mac mini from a good price to a nuts price
I happily booted and ran an Intel Mac mini using a 4TB drive in a Thunderbolt 3 enclosure, and I do the same for an M4 Max Mac Studio using an 8TB drive in a USB4v2 enclosure (OWC Express 1M2 80G).
You'll just have to be careful to match the enclosure to the ports on the system. The base-model M6 Mac mini still uses Thunderbolt 4, so a USB4v2 enclosure would be wasted.
Considering hard drives were $10k / GB in the Mac SE/30 days, that feels like a bargain too.
Sure, yes, compared to the prices of storage 35 years ago, it's a bargain.
Compared to the prices of storage today, when people are presumably buying the product, it's actually a bad price.
Sure, but this thread started with somebody pointing out that these computer prices are in line with Mac SE/30 prices. I'm just carrying that over to cover storage and it's even more amazing how much we get for so little money.
But software also fit in 640kB instead of 640GB.
It still can, but until very recently the motivation for keeping software small wasn't there. I'm still hoping the tide is coming in.
On the higher end upgrade we're more like back to roughly SGI prices.
Yes. I commented elsewhere that it's only twice as expensive as my first mac which has 128kb.
You should compare with competition, not what was decades ago.
E.g how is the perf/$ vs Wildcat lake
There is nothing special about making a computer that's unaffordable, irrespective of whether it's 2026 or 1989. If anything, it just shows how little they're trying.
Yo... the Se/30 was worth it. dual floppies was so lame
Sigh..
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.
Sure, when you look a little wider, since 2000 we have seen the following major improvements:
- Extreme poverty has dropped from 30% to under 10% globally. - Child mortality rates have dropped in half - Internet access has exploded from 10% to 70% - Solar energy costs have dropped 90% - Cancer death rates have declined by 30%
All of these massive improvements in less than 30 years.
While there certainly are issues to solve, and if you simply follow journalism you may think the world is worse off, but for many, their lives have been significantly improved.
On that note, I'd like to share Fix the News: https://substack.fixthenews.com/
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.)
Thanks for sharing this sentiment and including data. So few people seem aware of the wonderful progress humanity keeps making. Makes me worry that the progress will stall or even reverse because people don't even know it's happening.
I think a lot of it is because the majority of improvements are not seen by those who already comparatively have so much. AIDs used to be a death sentence, and now it's a manageable disease, and there is a lot of work going on to vaccinate against it. These are massive things that I think a lot of people ignore. It's always easier to see when things are on fire rather than to celebrate the victories along the way.
Is that AI / compute driven?
In part, sure. From drug discovery to crop yields to education, compute and AI have material benefits. It's kind of shocking that anyone could doubt this.
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.
Absolutely computer driven. It's hard to say the impact of AI, let's give it the same 25 years of computer advancements.
AI in the sense of LLMs is too new to really make an impact yet. But it is compute driven. Modern science and engineering would be impossible as we do it now without high-end compute.
These improvements are showing that we're producing plenty so that the cost is driven down and distributed to wider and wider portions of humanity.
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.
That's not quite the case. Effort and focus by amazing groups, governments and individuals are the reasons for improvements, not just that producing more or costs being driven downwards.
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.
Just like the computer revolution, it will make a small number of people richer and put everyone else at their mercy. In real terms the average person is far poorer than in the 20th century. Used to be able to buy a home and support a family on a single income. Now it can take two just to survive.
I wonder if doubling the workforce had anything to do with that..
You're right, probably nothing to do with moving all manufacturing out of the country or Reagan's union busting.
In real terms, the median human globally today is vastly richer than at any point during the twentieth century.
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!
Well, there is more renewable energy than ever before powering the world. It's all being built and added to the grid faster and faster each year.
That's one big plus.
Then you’re either spending time in the wrong parts of the internet or doing things that don't fulfill you.
These times are exciting and rough seas make good sailors. Find your path forward.
What is exciting about getting pablum spoonfed by a data center owned by trillionaires?
I'd rather go to the library and read a book.
Why in the world are you choosing to live that way?
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 are actually not doing much of that.
You have become a spectator.
You can do both. I still find time to read a couple books a month.
You have agency and can choose your own adventures. If you don't like something, don't do it.
Your legs broke? Go do that
What does it have to do with legs? This site has turned a mental hospital with AI patients.
It's an expression. "You're legs broke?" here means "What's stopping you from going to the library and reading a book?"
It's a grovel-for-investor-dollars site that we've long pretended is for serious technical discussion. Comments should always be filtered through that lens.
Who is stopping you?
False dichotomies make for terrible conversation.
"Find your path forward!" he shouted with glee, as he ran toward the cliff.
So do platitudes.
when was the turing test beaten?
1966
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect
It turns out the limiting factor isn't how sophisticated algorithms are, it's how gullible humans are.
What does that have to do with the Turing Test? The TT has clear rules: There are judges that have a dialogue with anonymized AI/humans. The humans cannot cheat and impersonate a machine, they have to act normally. The AI obviously should try to sound human.
No AI would pass this test with experienced judges.
Colloquially the Turing test is just a stand in for "can a human mistake a computer for a person." No need to overcomplicate it.
The test doesn't say that the judge has to be experienced. But I also don't care if some random gullible person can't tell the difference. Nothing passes the Turing Test for me yet.
Edit: Also doesn't say anything about who the human test subject is
Of course, and I'm sure OP wouldn't disagree with you, it was clearly a joke for emphasis. Some people round here need to clean and calibrate their humour detectors more often.
I wasn't responding to OP. I get the emphasis, the M6 Mac is very powerful.
How can you be certain you haven’t failed a Turing test?
I've never done a test. That means 1. you know it's a test 2. you get like 5 back-and-forths or 5 minutes 3. you have a human subject to compare to. But pretty sure I'd pass anyway, as the judge or subject.
You think current frontier models couldn't pass for a human on an online chat? You and I have very different perceptions of reality.
I think that if you have a long enough chat, yeah, I think you can figure out who's meat. The original rules for the TT specified a short interaction, but I can probably accelerate it by pasting in large code snippets to force early compactions.
Humans are famously good at reading large code snippets.
Sounds like something we could settle right here and now.
Ha ha! Fool! You've been talking to an LLM all this time! Your wife is actually Haiku 4.5.
Huh, should've known it was odd for my wife to always say I'm right (as the boomers would say)
You’ve moved the goalposts.
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.
One needs to be a little more sophisticated about it. Ray Kurzweil, for example, set fairly clear rules for his interpretation of the test in his 2001 wager:
https://www.writingsbyraykurzweil.com/a-wager-on-the-turing-...
Those rules are fairly reasonable, at least as a start.
I think of this and the book the author wrote Computer Power and Human Reason every time I try to talk to product about the short comings of LLMs
It was always a bad test, despite the greatness of Turing. The human organism is built to 'project' humanity onto anything available; apart from this none of the peculiar phenomena of the so-called 'modern human' is even intelligible, even the possibility of science. I bring all that is in me onto you as soon as you seem to be saying something, and reciprocally. We do this at the drop of a hat, and all specifically human life depends on it. But this power shows its 'gullibility' with 'gods' as also with Eliza. I am not snide about it because it is overreach by something the significance of which is overwhelming , but one is indeed amazed by the failure to reflect on the part of the ones eg giving LLMs rights - to take extreme case of a very widespread cultus - as if /they/ were the rational party, not ancients placating the storm god.
Yeah...but in context, "gullible" seem a bit pejorative. Humans are also hopelessly incapable of sensing radioactivity, methanol in their alcoholic drinks, carbon monoxide, and a great many other things that our ancestors just didn't encounter much.
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.
The EU just had to pass a law to force companies to disclose if a customer service agent is AI or Human. It is beaten.
https://commission.europa.eu/news-and-media/news/safer-and-m...
Nobody thinks customer service agents are real, realistic or useful. EU just passes laws.
Also the endless online debates of ‘is this post made by ai? What about those images, that video or that music?’.
Nowadays, I prefer AI CS agents to humans. I just had a chat with an AI yesterday, it understood me perfectly even when I made mistakes, I was impressed.
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.
Yeah, at least LLMs read everything you write (for now). Human first level support agents are incredibly frustrating if you have to explain anything with more than one logical step.
Customer service is very different. Crappiest audio quality possible & scripted answers all the way down. Almost like humans are forced to behave like machines.
According to Psychology today, April this year by GPT 4.5
https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/the-digital-self/202...
April last year
The Turing test is more complex than what gets suggested.
And the "popularized" version is faulty also since it uses an ideal, abstract human judge (like the "spheroidal economic agent").
But if you want to add declinations to the said popularized image of the Turing test, you may add Maxim Lott's IQ tests at trackingai.org . Between the end of 2024 and the beginning of 2025 LLMs reached an equivalent IQ of 100, for example.
I think it was determined that the Turing test is too easy because humans are too easily fooled.
Yes, which is exactly and entirely the point of the whole paper. Somehow missed still -- despite how important AI has become, shockingly few people actually read the short, layperson-accessible paper that started the whole field.
I kinda have to link it now, so uhh here's a random PDF: https://www.hec.edu/sites/default/files/documents/Computing%...
~1960
ELIZA beat the Turing test and then everyone forgot about it. Humans are just really terrible at recognising robots.
Or can we reframe it: when did humans start losing the (so-called) "Turing test".
I think there are elements showing lowering of performance and expectation.
2001 according to Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test
It depends who takes the test. I am not yet, to my knowledge, fooled by AI.
I've tried [1] and I almost 100% detect which is the AI. I really want to convince myself I have failed, does anyone know of a better site/resource for this?
I know it might be moving goalposts but I would consider AI to have passed in a well and truly undisputed manner when [2] is resolved.
But in a more practical sense, if AI can impersonate humans so well today then why are state of the art frontier models so obviously AI when they create PRs, commit messages, documentation, etc. Are the companies deliberately making them unnatural?
[1] https://turingtest.live/
[2] https://www.metaculus.com/questions/11861/date-when-ai-passe...
tried turingtest.live, gave each side the same question (programming-related), immediately recognized the LLMisms on side A, boom side B is the human.
we might need to bring back the Voight-Kampff test. anthropic at the very least is introducing a water making system to Claude which might make them more identifiable to humans as well as much easier to detect for machines.
“advanced LLMs like GPT-4”
> "advanced LLMs like GPT-4"
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.
From the home page of turingtest.live.
Yeah. That's why I asked if there was something better
2050 I'm guessing
are you living under a rock?
> something that can beat a turing test w/o sweating
Ok I'll be that guy. It's pretty easy to figure out if you're talking to an LLM now we know it's tics, failure modes, jailbreak techniques etc
Rumors say that Apple will only release M6 base variant and skips M6 Pro, M6 Max and M6 Ultra variants to concentrate all efforts to create a good AI capable M7:
"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.
I wonder when/if we will start to see Apple include a silicon encoded model into their chips. Similar to Taalas build Llama 3.1 silicon with 17,000 tok/s inference.
So could the M7 actually include an AFM 3B model, alongside a generic neural engine?
The M6 doubled the neural engine from 16 to 32 cores. I would expect that the M7 doubles that again to 64 from 32? That would make sense.
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.
Apple's biggest bottleneck for real-world inference is prefill processing. They need a better GPGPU architecture, which is what I'm expecting M7 to reveal.
Agreed, seems like the M5 has already made steps in that direction, with 4x prompt processing / prefill performance vs. M4. [1] And token generation also got a 10% boost. The data below is only for Pro & Max but I think the base M5 got the same relative boosts vs. M4 base.
[1] https://www.hardware-corner.net/m5-pro-m5-max-local-llm-4x-f...ELI5?
Look at the "Q4_0 Prompt" column. That's the tokens-per-second processing the initial prompt/system prompt. This is where the "neural accelerators inside each GPU core" is seen most prominently.
The M5 GPU added better matmul and dot product support in hardware (IIRC) that really boosted performance of those kernels over previous GPUs. Current transformer models rely heavily on matmuls. Prefill (processing the current context) is mostly limited by raw GPU processing power where token generation (predicting the next token from the current context) is mostly limited by memory bandwidth.
While an older M-series might run a matmul or dot product kernel just fine the M5 can run them much faster.
LPDDR6 is coming.
I understand that will boost read rates to around 14 Gbps as compared to the current 10 Gbps for LPDDR5X, so a 40% improvement.
The bus is also 50% wider so the bandwidth is double.
Or they could make use of LPDDR5X-PIM? That would be such a killer feature and competitive advantage.
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/hot-chips-20...
Super cool!
i sold my m3 ultra /512 for £14000, or about $18000. The difference is what is important to me for a new one, and assuming $6k or so for the 256->512 boost, my cost will be about $16k, so i’ll save $2k by upgrading to the top-of-the-range model, bar it being a 4TB drive
That makes sense. I also think that we are at the point where maybe the expectation of a yearly refresh on everything should be reconsidered. They can end up on a Tick-Tock schedule when the Pro/Max/Ultra can be done every second year.
Do current models run on the NPU or GPU? Wondering if Apple will have something like a TPU.
Apple has a dedicated "neural engine" which is designed as an inference NPU. Where as Google's TPU has a dual focus, both inference and training, which is a more complex design.
> I'd skip M5 and M6 chips for LLM work and wait for a year for M7.
Please say more? Is it because it is a one-time cost, unlike a recurring subscription of Claude/Codex?
I'll upgrade M3 Air only when Mx Pro/Ultra can run Opus level perf locally. Otherwise what's the point.
The true-local AI chip, codename "buddy", will be the M8
Apple Studio with maxed out M5 Ultra, 256GB RAM and 16TB storage is 18,299$. The 512GB RAM version apparently is coming in October, considering that the difference between 96GB and 256GB is priced at 4000$, the 512GB upgrade must be eye watering.
So, on the mini the RAM upgrade runs at 25$ 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 :)
So is downpayment on a house. I would buy the house and just pay for tokens as needed. The house will get more valuable and that wealth would buy a lot of tokens in the future - which will probably get cheaper.
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.
Or more simply – $25K (+ tax) put in a savings account will earn about enough interest to pay for a $100/month AI subscription indefinitely. And at the end of it you still have the $25K.
Not 'more simply', there are basically zero savings accounts that are going to net you a 5%+ interest rate to give you that $100 a month. And that $25k becomes less valuable over time. $25k is now only worth $19k because inflation.
Money market/treasuries (even ETF like SGOV) gets pretty close to 5% when typical savings rate is a bit under
If treasuries “fail” we have a different class of problem.
>Money market/treasuries (even ETF like SGOV) gets pretty close to 5% when typical savings rate is a bit under
???
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.
Rates are around 3.5% right now before taxes.
There's still many high interest savings accounts that are at least 4%
And you still need at least 5% to do what OP is suggesting.
Do you think the hardware will still be worth $25k once it is five years old?
Do you think monthly AI 'subscriptions' are going to be $100 a month in 5 years? These people using these would probably be on $200/month subscriptions and with that OPs assertion of 'shoving away and paying with interest' makes no sense.
It’s basically impossible to compete on economic terms with deeply subsidized hardware that is widely available to rent or as a service with zero commitment.
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
Why are we comparing to the maxed out model only? The M5 Ultra with 96 GB, 1 TB, and 64 GPU cores is $5499. Apple lets you lease that model for $110/month for 36 months.
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
Isn't there something to be said for owning your own hardware though?
Not if it's 5-10x slower than a remote inference server. Mac prefill latency is exhausting.
M5 changed that a lot though - it could still be better but 4x improvement made it cross the frustratingly slow barrier for me.
Oh tell me more about prefill latency.
https://blog.exolabs.net/nvidia-dgx-spark/
Thank you very much for this link! Extremely fascinating.
This is the real answer.
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.
I don't need privacy, so it would be financially imprudent for me to spend 20 grand on such a machine. But I have a financial management client who does need such privacy, and if I get more fully engaged with them then I would be able to justify getting a loaded Mac.
Why is this a no brainer?
There are both cheaper and faster options out there.
Where I’m from $25k is the down payment on a parking space in a garage, not an entire house (or condo).
>The house will get more valuable
Depends on where you live. Also keep in mind population decline so long term, im not so sure. Prices already dropping in less desirable places (everywhere outside of most blue areas) (Assuming you are talking about the US sorry if not)
where are downpayments so cheap? I'll move there ^^'
Yeah my down payment 10 years ago was $200,000. The house has appreciated 0%. I sold meta shares to buy it. Those would be worth a million now.
… I wish I hadn’t just calculated that.
Having a place to live is an investment in your health and wellbeing. Can't live in a stock option.
At the time, were you aware that you could borrow against your portfolio?
Detroit, Cleveland, etc. Basically huge swaths of the rust belt. Plus a smattering of small towns in the south.
Sure, and living there is the housing equivalent to buying a super cheap off brand computer.
You get what you pay for.
Well, this is all assuming a 20% down payment, which anecdotally as a 26 yr. old, nobody I know is able to achieve. All my home-owning friends put 3-7% down. Granted, most are using first-time homebuyer loans which are generally more favorable.
In RTP (NC), a ~$400k house at 5% down is $20k
There are 70 houses for sale in Pittsburgh for $25K or less
Coshocton, Ohio, plenty of houses for <100k
On second thought...
Had I done that as well, then maybe I wouldn't have gotten intrigued by HyperCard, then Director/Authorware, then Flash, then HTML, then...
With the way RAM prices are going up, you could expect to make 20% profit on any purchase.
I tripled my money on my RAM purchase of three years ago. So, yes, for short-term appreciation that's hard to beat. But I don't think it's something that will continue.
why not buy the maxed out mac and then buy a metaverse house that you can live in virtually
problem solved /s
Regarding the $25 price per GB RAM. These chips use LPDDR5X RAM. Looking at the Framework site, they are selling LPDDR5X LPCAMM2 modules for the following prices:
$7000 of that is for the 16tb of storage. That is certainly not worth it if you are trying to save money.
M6 Mac mini maxes out at 32GB—if you want 64GB you have to go with the M5 Pro (just priced it out on Apple's store page).
Apple hasn't been selling just ram for a long time, they sell vram. Try getting 512 gb of HBM on current Nvidia cards - it's gonna cost way more than $ 24k. And here you get the same amount of memory for weights right in a quiet unit under your desk
Put together a similar build with a couple of rtx 6000 Ada cards and Apple's price tag suddenly looks pretty damn reasonable
The RAM in the M5 is LPDDR5X, not HBM. You're right of course that it's unified and used as VRAM in that sense.
HBM itself is very expensive but it’s not really fair to compare to LPDDR or GDDR
They’re very different things.
The more logical argument to me is that Apple uses its upgrade price points as more than just direct BOM and rather as a proxy for things that are amortized across all their sales like support/warranty/etc so higher SKUs subsidize the costs of the lower ones.
I wish you could drop $20k and get a house! Down payment here store like $100k+ (AUD). So "only" 5~ Max Studios.
Ha yeah that was my thought. How is this a down payment? This would only be 20% of a $100k house...
"Nobody" puts down 20%. That hasn't been a requirement for decades (in the US).
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.
Well a substantial proportion of home buyers in Canada put down only the minimum 5% down payment.
op forgot to add "/hyperbole"
i remember when SGI boxes were $50k and then literally worthless just a couple bears later. i remember my university had a pile of them for free outside the deans office.
I figure most electronics are worthless after a couple of bears.
But every second bear doubles the transistor count.
bear metal
Ten years ago a bought an expensive MBP because I do a lot of stats in R, Python etc that benefited from it. But the next Mac I’ll buy will be a much lower-end model, because it’s just easier these days to do that work in notebooks in the cloud.
The trick are tax deductions.
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.
I don't think 16TB storage is a right choice. Going 2TB and it's 11,299. Probably, if you buy the storage and install it yourself you can go higher and quite cheaper.
I think the reason they offer these options in the first place is the discontinuation of the MacPro and their remaining need to offer high end solutions.
Does anyone know if you can link multiples of these together for a single large model?
More validated by the day that my $450 M4 Mac Mini (16GB) was the best deal in computing for a long, long time.
I live right next to a micro center and remember when they started offering that deal... still so pissed at myself for not buying one. I ended up just buying a raspberry Pi for what I was doing, but seeing as where the prices are now, I messed that up a bit. Also my worst sin was not buying 64GB of DDR5 when I was doing my computer upgrades back in August last year.
I returned an M4 Mac mini, 64GB, unopened... because I thought it was excessive for my needs then. I swear it'll be one of the things flashing before my eyes when this all ends.
I feel so incredibly lucky I chose to overdo it a bit on RAM when I upgraded last year... though I remember deliberating to go for 192GB (it's 96GB now) but motherboard support was somewhat more complicated and it felt like a waste of 300 euros...
Mac mini aren't that good for home made server, raspberry sure ain't powerful but there are in-between.
Not being able to upgrade the SSD or the ram is a big issue, not so much on a portable laptop.
Out of all of my home servers, the M4 Mac Mini is probably my favorite and runs many workloads even though it sits on a 96 core Epyc server now (needed the massive amounts of PCIe for something else). I was able to upgrade my SSD with a 3rd party one, not that sticking an NVMe drive on one of the thunderbolt ports would have been a bad pick. About the only place it didn't make sense is if you wanted a ton of RAM.
Should have grabbed two.
Should have grabbed 100.
The creator of the Overcast podcast app grabbed 48.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaVznUB6wss
Apple still has the best hardware so I moved to it for the last few years, but the closed software ecosystem is terrible for taking advantage of it.
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
> but the closed software ecosystem
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.
It’s barely a “feature” that they let you execute arbitrary code on your own hardware.
They don’t provide any source code or documentation (which they easily could) so if want to do literally anything with your “open” device you must first reverse engineer the entire MacOS driver stack like the Asahi project did. Great fun, but it’s a criminal waste of incredibly talented engineer hours.
On top of that, the reason Asahi doesn’t work on M4 and later is that Apple has intentionally modified the ARM core to prevent stock MacOS from running once the hardware is “unlocked,” which makes it way more difficult to reverse engineer.
Bastards.
I wanted to try it but it works just on M1 and I have M4. I was also considering upgrading to M5/M6, again to take advantage of what I really love: access to the 2nm process.
The performance you get with M5/M6 in theory is crazy (especially having matmul cores with such an energy envelope and unified memory). By the time I can use it well in Linux there will be M7/M8 though.
With NVIDIA I can buy a Blackwell based core right now and use it (even if I will have much less GPU memory. Though it will be high bandwidth).
I had a chance to try Omarchy past few days and it's just very different vs macOS. I honestly never had a problem with the windowing system ever since I built my own customization scripts (i.e. Hammerspoon). I can see the appeal for someone who wants ultimate customization though but macOS still wins overwhelmingly when it comes to polish, ecosystem, user experience, and apps (nothing comes close).
It’s not just Omarchy, there’s really not much out there in the desktop Linux sphere for those who are mostly happy with how macOS works out of the box. Everything is either in a similar vein to the Omarchy setup (hyper-minimal tiling WM), Windows-like (KDE, Cinnamon, most other DEs), or a chimera with a grab bag of design bits from every desktop and mobile platform (GNOME, Pantheon, COSMIC).
It’s a bit depressing because it means that if I ever feel forced to switch my daily driver, it won’t come without a dump truck load of friction, frustration, and lost productivity, which I’ve validated by using the various Linux desktops on secondary machines.
KDE Plasma is as good as it gets if you'd like to transition from MacOS:
https://pointieststick.com/2025/10/04/a-mac-like-experience-...
I run KDE on a secondary machine and it's the best it's ever been, but for me it's best for single-purpose machines where desktop differences basically don't matter. It's about on par with one of the better Windows releases (XP or 7 maybe) in terms of how frustrating I'd find it to do work under.
There were 1000 plugins created for Omarchy 4 in 2 days. That's why I don't feel it being hyper minimal anymore.
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.
It is just regular resistance to change. Loss of productivity is exagerated, it indeed exists in which ever direction but it is only temporary.
Perhaps, but one of desktop Linux's defining philosophies is the machine working for and adapting to the user rather than the reverse, so it's a letdown that this only really applies if you're coming from Windows or have been a Linux user all along.
It's interesting because I just haven't felt the polish.
For example when using PyTorch I wanted to try to speed up my NN kernel by 2x by just using half precision and haven't noticed any speedup at all. Also I was missing the easy to use GNU tools that had to be mixed with Apple's tools.
I loved using Arc browser as well, and I'm missing it, but I guess I will do without it somehow (Chrome's vertical tabs are just not the same).
My main program missing from going back to Linux was ChatGPT Desktop, but now it's there.
I just checked out Hammerspoon, I'm happy for you that you wrote it, and looks great, but it has the same problem that I had: for security reasons Apple stopped allowing the window APIs to get all important information on other workspaces. You can only do it with Accessibility API. I was trying to fight with it but have up.
If the browser being Chromium-based isn’t a hard requirement, it may be worth checking out the Firefox-based Zen Browser[0]. Its UI is very similar to that of Arc, to the point that I’d call it Arc’s spiritual successor.
[0]: https://zen-browser.app/
I don't understand how absolutely basic things are not possible on Mac OS. Switching between two windows easily, displaying hidden files in the finder... These things would be way easier to solve than building the next generation hardware.
How are you liking Omarchy? I saw a video on it recently, and it looks 'pretty' but still looks like it's a lot of memorization of shortcuts and feels like the 40% keyboard of OS's. Like some people it's absolutely amazing, but lets be honest, it's going to be really difficult to be as productive as a full fat keyboard.
As a long time Emacs user, I beg to differ. Muscle memory will settle in after a few days. I still use Emacs shortcuts to navigate text boxes on macOS.
The most disruptive thing in Omarchy is not the keyboard, it's the tiling WM in my opinion.
On what hardware you running Omarchy?
Just Beelink, but it doesn't matter at all.
I ordered an ASUS Zephyrus G16 with 5090 NVIDIA card + 1.9kg (quite an overkill, and I know that I will have to limit power output), but hasn't arrived yet.
But what's fun is that I love QML+QuickShell with its hot reloading, Hyprland with its Lua support.
With AI nowdays it's just so easy to do deep UI changes that wasn't possible a year ago.
I like my Mac mini as much as the next person, but I don’t think an M5 ultra 64gb with 4tb should be as much as a DGX Spark with 128gb and 4tb.
Add ARM boot camp, MacOS is too restrictive compared to modern Linux. Asahi's devs can't keep up with the constant hardware releases so official support is important.
The 512GB Ultra is amazing, sure. But who is it for exactly? VC funded big spender founders? In that case why would they need local AI? The ultra rich enthusiast? But there can't be too many of those. So who actually buys these?
I think there's some mental inertia around what a computer is and what it's worth. This thing can build custom software for you, mostly autonomously. It can monitor things happening on the internet that are relevant to you, in a holistic and flexible way. We have one crawling the web for local events we'll like, and it judges them based on what it knows about us, and it tells us about the best matches every weekend, which has yielded some awesome outings we wouldn't have known about. It reads the literature on a subject in seconds and uses it as context to help in decision support. It's not the same value proposition as a computer 3 years ago, where most people are mentally anchored on what a computer should cost. Having it at home means that you can use it as a personal agent that always puts your interests first, regardless of what ad model the commercial providers decide to put in, and you can stash in it your medical data, what you buy, what you make, your worries, hopes, and dreams, without worrying about that being used as training data, or worse, something to exploit you commercially. I think it'll become considered totally reasonable to consider spending the cost of a small car on a computer, for many families.
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.
By this kind of logic we'd paying something like ~$10,000/month for our internet connections. The perceived value needs to exceed the cost but that does not make it the only factor to consider price with.
What makes this expensive & sell well is it's not very fungible at the moment. Where else are you going to get 512 GB of high speed memory with a well supported accelerator attached that you can throw in the corner of anyone's home and not really have them notice? There are plenty of lesser options, plenty of noiser/power hungry options, plenty of harder to support options, but not really something in direct competition at the moment. Even the next rounds of the integrated AMD/Nvidia solutions are only targeting 196 GB of much slower memory and compute.
I think the difference besides the supply crunch there is that everyone connected gets the ~same internet, just faster or slower. Quantitative, not qualitative difference. On the other hand, a computer that can run Gemma 4 8B versus one that can run DeepSeek Flash are different enough experiences that I'd say they're effectively a difference in kind. It's been a bit since we had such serious stratification in outright capability in computing, rather than just how long it takes to get something done, or how many of something it can serve at once. In the early 90s, I think there were a lot more of those "this computer can do this thing, this one just can't" scenarios.
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.
If it were about capability instead of speed then you're welcome to pay me $5,000 for DeepSeek Flash running on an SSD :D. For $10,000 I'll even give you something which can run 700 GB models comfortably from RAM - not that the speed should be worth much.
Haha right, well, usable speed. And I guess there are some parallels with internet, the internet is technically usable with HughesNet, but people used to fiber would probably consider it unusable.
I like this train of thought. The inverse is saying that the cost of this computer is the value we give away to AI companies by doing compute on their servers with our data. And to take it another way, is the value to you, the cost of a small used car?
> And to take it another way, is the value to you, the cost of a small used car?
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.
Nvidia is definitely working on a AI Rack machine fully built for on-prem uses for companies.
Could you share what you did to find events to do? That sounds really cool
Sure, it’s pretty dumb/naive implementation, would need to be a lot more efficient to scale. Basically had Claude write polite/low touch dumb crawlers for a bunch of local sites (library, local events spaces, luma, theaters, maker spaces) and whip up a little frontend to let our family and friends manage a little text description of what their family members like, constraints, that sort of thing. Once a week, the crawlers look for new events, add to a db, and then run through the list and ask our local LLM to grade each event, given the text description and constraints. Take the top 20ish for the following two weekends and email out. It’s been super helpful, lowers the activation energy to go to more local events.
Do you really need a powerful Mac to do this? Wouldnt this work on a base model or even an old Windows computer?
Probably don’t really need it, just makes it easier. I tried it with some potato class models first and they would ignore or mishandle constraints, especially when vaguely worded. Sometimes it would try to send us to events that were obviously in the middle of the school day, and I’d look at their reasoning traces and there’d be some really boneheaded mistakes in there. If it reliably sends you a decent fraction of garbage reccs, the emails stop getting opened, my SO has no patience for that.
Remember core customers of Apple studio type products is content creation/video editing, etc.
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...
If I can get Sol level capabilities on a $20k machine, then it is well worth it for my employer to buy me that machine for work as a workstation. When you start paying in tokens vs subscription costs due to enterprise agreements, you really start to see how much cash utilizing frontier models at the frontier costs (and I'm efficiently using luna and other models where possible!)
Yeah, I'm not sure people realize how expensive ZDR/Zero Data Retention is, and how important it is to a lot of businesses, this kind of thing starts looking really cheap really fast if it's a reasonable substitute.
I don't think this is accurate.
Even using multiple windows in parallel for as many as 5-10 hours per day, I find that I am not fully using my claude max (20x) and chatgpt pro (20x) accounts. I can for sure use up the claude max account, but chatgpt either gives me a free reset before I run out of tokens or I just fail to use the full quota. The quota for Sol seems like 10x that of Claude Opus at the same level, and forget Fable, you can use a 5 hour quota in 20 minutes.
But lets do the math:
Lets say a 20k workstation can run 1 inference at a time at the same speed you get with Sol hosted by openai (big assumption) and run an equally capable model (big assumption).
Each month this gives you about 100-170 inference hours on a Sol 20x Pro account, and 720 hours (if you utilize 24/7) on the workstation.
Assuming a 36 month amortization before the workstation has to be replaced due to no longer being able to run frontier models or is too inefficient due to electrical costs or what have you:
The monthly workstation cost is about $550 capex and $150 electricity -> $700/month
You would need about 6 Pro accounts to reach that capacity, which would cost you $1200 a month.
But this fails because:
- You most likely can't utilize the workstation 24/7. Your work hours will be concentrated into 6-10 hours per day.
- During work hours you are capable of utilizing more than 1 concurrent session. 6 Sol accounts would support as many as 20-30 during working hours, not all the time but if you could burst to that many (don't forget sub-agents and agent directed parallel agent workloads).
- In 1 year the cost of Sol level models is likely to cost a fraction of what it does now.
this leads to:
One of the advantages of LLM's is that you can set up a task list and tell it to burn through those tasks overnight. It's a rare night that Claude isn't busy for me, and I do burn through my 20x subscription, sufficiently that I downgrade from fable around about ... now in the week...
"You most likely can't utilize the workstation 24/7. Your work hours will be concentrated into 6-10 hours per day."
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.
Sorry for the snark, but are you trying to cure cancer? What could possibly need 24/7 research in our domain, that doesn’t need your input every 30 minutes?
Normal boring CS scientific work. Just running running my experiments, reproducing other papers, etc. A lot of it does involve the agent waiting for some computation, but the fact that it resumes independently when I'm sleeping is kind of the point (+ usually I have several running in parallel).
I'm not trying to cure cancer, although I do hope people who are use LLMs. ;)
I didn’t expect an answer I can actually agree with - keep up the good work ;)
Subscriptions are, and will likely remain, the best deal in town. Unfortunately, larger companies aren't able to do that. When your monthly token costs are in the $5-10k range, the local inference starts to look a lot more attractive
Don't subscriptions have limits and resets? Making them not very usable for an ongoing operation?
In the case where you pay for tokens without a subscription, the analysis is still very much not in favor of buying hardware.
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:
The economics can never work in your favor for buying your own hardware here, unless you can utilize it or sell excess capacity and you have access to nearly free electricity. The reason is someone else can buy the same hardware at scale (or realistically more efficient hardware), park it somewhere with very cheap electricity, and sell tokens. They can get very high utilization that you are not likely to get.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.
Thank you for being explicit with the math!
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!
As speed goes up the cost / Mtoken will necessarily go down at roughly the same ratio so it will wash out. The still use hardware or sell hardware value is factored in to the amortized monthly cost, it assumes a 3 year markdown, and does not factor in the cost of money which should almost cancel the resale value in the end, which I think is quite accurate (any residual cost on a graphics card after 3 years is so small compared to the current price it should be discounted and in included there).
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.
Leaving out that apparently high RAM Mac's apparently no longer lose value over time...
There is a critical shortage right now, if the AI datacenter boom slows the prices could crash very quickly.
Some people neglect to factor in electricity costs. Some homes have very expensive service.
> - You most likely can't utilize the workstation 24/7. Your work hours will be concentrated into 6-10 hours per day.
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.
Don't forget about electricity costs, esp in California. Even with free hardware you may be better off using APIs.
I think "ultra rich enthusiast" is in the right ballpark. There are people betting on being able to create their own revenue generating products and services with their own local hardware and very little operating costs. That may or may not make sense as a business idea. But people with wealth and risk appetite trying a new kind of business model and cost structure has a strong tradition.
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.
Enthusiasts buying these for fun are not the target market. These aren’t big sellers to begin with but a lot of the sales are going to companies where people have budgets for gear like this and can make a business case for it.
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.
Other than the local AI crowd which is much recent it is professionals using Final Cut Pro for video editing, Logic Pro as a DAW and music production, Video transcoding, Photoshop and other tasks for high performance computing that don't need Laptops but want above 128GB of ram and prefer a Mac. Then there is the obvious group of developers that are making Apps for all of their products. Also, these are great for the workplace. AI is much more recent thing that Apple products were used for.
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.
For some , the idea that some proprietary information could potentially leak is enough to justify any price.
Anyone dealing with sensitive or regulated data can get started instantly with local models where they may need time consuming process or complexities to send sensitive data outside.
You can connect up to 4 of them via RDMA so 2TB total RAM.
Its cheaper than Nvidia AI hardware.
also way slower if we're just going against 'nvidia hardware'.
Even at high announced pricing 4 of them still much more accessible than any Nvidia solution with same amount of VRAM,
If you want to run reasonably big, local AI models, what are your alternatives?
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.
The competition is a custom multi-GPU NVIDIA RTX pro desktop, which go for much much more. $20k is cheap for 512GB addressable memory. The old mac pro could easily be configured to cost that much.
I know people who would get it for local LLMs for use in their company.
this comment has always existed behind every apple release, most especially anything vaguely pro-ish.
to answer your question : looking at the aftermarket availability of Apple's prior best and brightest : practically no one buys them.
"people here buy them" , well, 'here' is one of the most affluent groups of people in the world.
They're available as movie and television set pieces (undoubtedly disappearing into the home of someone close to the staff post-production), and for administrative/boss types that can slip the cost into a ledger somewhere that few will ever see.
It has been a hobby of mine every few years to check out the apple site and see how big I can option a machine. My record was when I was in high school years ago and was able to option some pro studio-ish apple desktop thing to like 61,000 usd out the door.
Movie set pieces, as a motivation for Apple making these high-end configs available? That makes no sense.
For one thing, you can’t tell from a movie what the specs are. A $999 Mac Studio looks exactly the same as a $20,000 one.
For another, Apple updates the industrial design on their products so rarely, a 6-year-old Mac, iMac or MacBook also looks nearly indistinguishable from a brand-new one.
Movie production (editors, sound design, and a portion of fx work).
I realize it's not a 512, but for context on why I ordered a 96GB. $95/month after a trade in. I'll use it for a long term project where I'm building a national sized dataset/processing video transcripts with a rubric (of churches/sermon health). I'm willing to trade SOTA models for local ones for cost of regenerating/model consistency/ethical reasons.
I'll find other ways to use the power though, opencode or maybe start working on more video projects.
My friend plans to get the 512GiB M5 Ultra ASAP. He makes money by selling synthetic data and training models for companies in San Francisco and it's the cheapest way to be able to do that on your own local hardware. It's also a bit irrational as he could save money by just renting, but I get the appeal of owning something outright.
A number of people in these comments, it would seem.
So, rich enthusiasts it is, then
I'm going to buy one to watch youtube videos and surf social media.
I always just assume that super expensive computers are like hot rods and an expensive hobby.
Local AI is the future, and a lot of people want the first mover advantage or to toy around with it. I know a guy with a small rack of Nvidia Spark machines that he uses for that purpose; it's as much as a decent used car.
But is it? If it’s cheap enough latency doesn’t matter. Unlike say cloud gaming, where latency does matter. I’ll take my games local and my text bots cloud
Of course. People are valuing privacy now, and it's almost inevitable that humans will seek to have more agency over a social contact, even if it's an artificial one.
History has shown me people value convenience and cheapness and maybe safety. Privacy is far down the list for 99% of the world
The first three are starting to get more closely associated with privacy.
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.
It's as much as a new car
you can run open source models in the privacy of your own home :)
Twitter users.
John Siracusa, for sure. He's not getting an EV. He's getting this.
it's for me
Companies used to have local server rooms in their office, like mini centers, and buy all the equipment end to end.
It’s when self hosting and local hosting was the norm, and why it’s also starting to come back.
There will be workloads that can never touch a public cloud, and for it solutions like this are an option.
I wonder to what extent the timing of this release was driven by their need to increase prices, but not wanting to apply it to in-market hardware. It's kind of a weird time to drop new Macs, between WWDC and the iPhone release, but not early enough that it could be purchased by college students. I get that most students use laptops, but if I were heading off this year I might use an iPad + Mac mini for more horsepower while maintaining portability.
I run a lot of local models (I am always experimenting) on my 32G M2-Pro MacMini - I would love to upgrade.
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.
Honest question - why are you so stuck on Macs for local inference?
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?
That's 6 YEARS of their cloud inference!
And, you have to include power. Where I am, the power for a rig with 2x 3090, running for four hours a day, would be around $70/month!
It's kinda like datacenter only exist to optimize compute cost through oversubscription of hardware/time share, cheaper business energy rates, and bulk discounts, compared to self hosting. ;)
AIUI you can only connect two 3090s at a time with NV link? So you’d only have 48GB of fast combined memory? That’s not tremendously interesting as you’re still limited to the smaller models which, while impressive in their own right, are still IMO too limited to use as your only model.
There are kernel patches to enable P2P communication via PCIE on 3090 which is almost as fast as NVLink for vllm
Upgrading RAM is still probably cheaper than spending $6000 on a linux box. You're correct that inference will be much faster on the Linux box. But, the mac's unified memory can load larger models. And as OP mentions, it's still hard to beat cloud pricing at home.
Yes, GPUs are much better for dense models. On Macs, MOE models run better, so I agree Macs are more limited and expensive. I have a Linux laptop with a 10GB 1080 GPU, dated, but I should add even more system RAM and try that.
A Mac mini running an LLM is quiet
A PC with similar capabilities is going to sound like a jet taking off.
A Mac Mini is easy to match by a PC in terms of inference, and the PC will win without getting noisy.
>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.
Leasing now an option, only $50/month (cheaper than inference subscription?), so even cash-poor can go the amortized-investment route.
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.
I looked at multiple configurations, and mathed it out. With leasing, you pay ~75% of the capital cost (excl. tax) over 3 years, but end up with no asset.
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.
> but end up with no asset
consumer electronics has literally never been an asset.
> Apple computers tend to have excellent resale value
do you think the new leasing category might change that? hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
edit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1vxzg6v/apple_i...
Trade in value isn’t the market resell value though, you’re losing money for the convenience of having a trusted and easy buyer.
> Leasing now an option, only $50/month (cheaper than inference subscription?)
For which configuration, though?
>fluid frame rates in demanding games like Mixtape.
not getting on that bandwagon but wasn't that not the most demanding game as its a just a nonstop cutscene.
But it has the right creative vibe which is the point really. Apple has a general creative aesthetic which plays well with artsy games like mixtape.
It's a very deliberate choice when if it doesn't make sense to gamers.
cutscenes are often the most demanding part of a game!
it's not super well optimized I think. unreal engine 5 is taxing even without a lot of gameplay or stuff on screen
I'm not sure who that line is supposed to impress. Gamers focusing on graphically demanding AAA games would laugh at this. People who don't game much probably won't know whether this is good or not.
I somehow find it better to give 2 frontier model companies 100-200/month than dropping 10 grand on a hardware that will get old in no time with bad TPS. I really want to have a fully local model but seems like one more generation wait and we will be there?
You could spend 100 a month leasing one of these for three years and get the best of both worlds
You’re still stuck paying for a 3 year contract for deprecating hardware. And the 256gb model which is still not enough is $230 a month. And it runs models 8 months behind frontier
You just described why the datacenter business is hard and as a corollary why space datacenters will not be economically viable.
Lots of people use the Mac Mini to run the frontier models over night or while traveling. I have a rack in my basement and have thought about throwing one in. You can get a cheaper machine but Apple feels a little more, “rack and forget,” if you have less price sensitivity.
Mac Mini + MacBook Neo w/ ssh can be a better setup than MacBook Pro for many people.
If it’s purely for experimentation then why not the DGX Spark/GB10? It’s up about 10% from release RRP which is quite good (you might argue it was overpriced then, but prosumer and workstation GPU prices are up 100%). 4TB NVMe is not cheap these days - it’d cost at least $500 for a stick - and you get 128GB at a similar bandwidth to an M5 Pro.
Nevermind that Apple still insists on providing base systems with only 512GB of non-upgradable SSD. The equivalent spec mini (4TB/64/10G) is almost $5k for half the VRAM. Not as good a CPU compared to the M5/6 but you also get 20 cores and full CUDA.
That does not sound like rack and forget. Just looking at prices it’s also way more expensive.
Why do they focus so much on hardware when their biggest problem is software? I don't get it. My Dell XPS 13 is probably not that powerful in terms of performance but Linux is so much more productive. This drives me crazy
I bought a 128GB M4 Max Mac Studio a while back, and for a while I thought like I had done really well to buy it when I did.
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.
If I had 128GB unified RAM I'd try hf.co/unsloth/Qwen3.8-27B-GGUF:BF16 which needs 55GB for just the weights.
Something like this would give you three concurrent sessions, each with 240k token context:
Great news. Qwen 3.8 Flash Next (125B A6B) is coming out tomorrow. 4 or 6-bit should run nicely on 128GB.
Should bench better than Opus 4.7.
I have had a difficult time with running 120b models on my 128gb setup, especially with any larger context size. The 6bit of Qwen 3.5 is already just over 100gb, and when you go down to 4bit it seems a bit lobotomized.
It's not exactly straight out of one of the labs -- it's heavily quantized -- but have a look at [1].
[1] https://github.com/antirez/ds4
Well the upside is that you can run a laptop-sized model and still have enough memory left over to run a couple of Electron apps.
Nice! Linux Please.
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?
96GB -> 256GB upgrade costs 4000 GBP in UK or $5460. $34 for GB.
In US its $4000 upgade so $25 for 1GB.
Also:
> 512GB memory option for M5 Ultra coming late October
That US price is before sales tax no?
Correct. It is better to go to delaware and purchase it.
Or just use Privacy.com and use an address in Delaware. Then you can buy it where ever.
How does this even work? You need to get the item delivered, and sales tax will incur in the state where it is delivered.
In the context of buying from UK, use Delaware (or any no-sales-tax state’s) mail forwarding company.
In that case you'll just pay import tax and its gonna be almost the same price, but 1 month later.
Delaware? For people in California, Oregon is way closer.
Agree. There are 5 states called NOMAD state where there is 0% sales tax.
New Hampshire, Oregon, Montana, Alaska, Delaware.
VAT?
I think the $34/GB figure might be inclusive of VAT and the $4560 not, which would be $28.5 otherwise. Not sure.
Oops sorry its just typo. Its 5460 not 4560.
AFAIK UK VAT is 20% and it's 27% higher price. Its just what you get for living in UK I guess.
Just bought AMD AI 395+ 64GB RAM for 2000eur. Mac mini would be 2x for about similar performance. Pass.
I was just comparing this to an rtx6000 96gb build and when the f*ck did nvidia double the price?
If you want to comfortably afford this gen you had to trade options on memory stocks...
The page says 170G/s memory bandwidth for the NPU and 1.2T/s for the GPU. Why the discrepancy if it's all "unified memory"? The former is nothing to write home about as far as AI compute is. The latter is really nice.
Which one is it you can run local models on? I suppose the NPU only.
I think you misread, it’s 170gb/s for base M6 model and 1.2tb/s for M5 ultra.
Unified memory is about address space. The bandwidth is still determined by bottlenecks to the processor. CPU/RAM links are still fairly narrow.
Can anyone recommend the perfect sweet spot for someone who wants to run their own inference?
For me it's be Strix Halo, 128gb machine, especially running Qwen models. Except when I bought it, it was $1,900, now it's $4,600 for the same box. (Wow that's insane)
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.
Seconded. I just got a Strix Halo box a few months back and it is great. Does everything I need it to.
Thinkstation PGX maybe?
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.
I would love to see real LLM performance benchmarks for these machines. Apple statement regarding LLM performance seem little vague.
I still struggle with local llm being a reason to drop insane money on one of these - they are targeting people who want high performance local LLMs, that value privacy over using 3rd party api, but also dont want to use Nvidia? small part of the pie by any reckoning?
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..)
Does anyone know if they’re actually at 2nm transistors, or if this is more marketing talk? It’s kinda like when TVs advertised their contrast ratios (do they still do that?) but they all used their own measurement methods, so dynamic contrast ratio became a worthless metric.
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!!
It's all marketing talk, sort of.
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
Imagine if any other industry worked like this.
"Our Quarter Pounder may weigh only 1/8 oz, but we figured out how to pack double the flavor in each mouthful, so we're still selling it as a Quarter Pounder."
My macbook pro M1 is still running fast and silent.
I feel like the M series macs have been some of the most positively received computers ever made. I am yet to meet someone who doesn't love theirs, myself included.
I tried to love my work issued m4 pro for many months but couldn't stand macOS so asked for a linux compatible machine.
Yeah for a lot of us macOS really gets in the way of using the otherwise excellent hardware. My daily driver is an M1 Pro with Asahi and it's easily my favorite computer ever. It's a real shame that the newer M models can't run Linux.
I did a little stint studying thermal cyclic fatigue in multi-die packages (many years ago) and I'm wondering how the issues there are solved these days.
You just never let tour cpu/gpu die get cold! No cycles, no issues! /s
FWIW scaling up from https://huggingface.co/avlp12/Qwen3.8-27B-Alis-MLX-6bit and some other sources:
You might expect the M5 Ultra to produce 50 t/s from Qwen 3.8 27B with a good context length.
Damn. I just bought a maxed out MacBook Pro M5 Max 128GB 8TB, still waiting for it to be delivered. I could get 256GB RAM M5 Ultra 1TB for roughly the same price, and it's double the memory bandwidth. Which one would you recommend? I do plan to run local LLMs.
M5 Ultra if the portable form factor is not a requirement. (I have a M5 Max 128GB 2TB for context.)
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.
Contact Apple care and see what they can do. They have been known to do upgrades if you buy around the same time. But with the ram situation that courtesy might be gone now.
You should be able to cancel it for free.
In EU you also have 14 days to return products bought online, for any reason.
M5 Ultra and toss in a MacBook Neo or older MacBook Air to SSH in
Was the quad die layout expected? I've checked a couple articles and can't find any commentary on it, but I don't remember hearing this rumored.
Sick. Particularly stoked for the 10gb network card ($100 option) when using the Mac Mini as a server. Just wish the memory + NVMe prices could come back down to pre ai-goldrush prices. As $2999 for the M5 Pro with 64GB RAM feels painfully over-priced.
As someone who is a beginner at home networking and have a Mac Mini running as a Plex server at home; what is the use case for the 10gb network card?
My example is I'm looking for a new media creation machine to replace my homebuilt PC from 2015. Since that old machine can't run Windows 11 and also because Apple storage is so expensive, my idea is to turn the PC into a Linux storage machine with a 10G NIC. Then I should just be able to edit off of the storage instead of worrying about caching it locally.
The prices are ridiculous though. I may just keep rolling with my Windows 10 setup.
As long as everything is using 10gb, faster transfer speeds when moving data between computers. For downloads, it wont help unless you have 10gb fiber, but for most folks, 2.5gb is quite fast. Hell my spinning media NAS has a hard time saturating when moving files between internal servers.
It feels stupid having my internet be faster than my computer can connect to it
RAM and SSD in apple gear has always been way over-priced. There was a short blessed period in March where the M5 Max macbook pro was out, but the general 30% price hike had not yet happened. In this period, given the insane inflated RAM prices, the price apple was charging for the M5 Max with 128 GB RAM was actually _reasonable_.
The M4 Mac Mini had that option too.
How many Neural Accelerators does M5 Ultra has in its 64 vs 80-GPU variants?
Anybody knows?
Just to clarify, Neural Accelerators have nothing to do with Neural Engine.
Ok, I just read the announcement word by word. There is a neaural accelerator in each GPU core. So presumably 64 vs 80 neural accelerators, with corresponding inference performance difference. It will make a difference for pre-fill.
So the idea of networking multiple Mac Minis via RDMA over Thunderbolt 5 to run local LLMs is intriguing, but doesn't really seem reasonable at this price point? What are the more cost-effective alternatives?
Honestly, waiting 5 years until the supply constraints are lesser
Tangential, but what would be the ideal Mac option for home movie editing, casual gaming and amateur CAD fiddling in Fusion?
I plan on maximizing my residual student benefits, and taking advantage of education pricing.
The regular Mac mini will blow you away, search YouTube for video editing reviews using different Mac mini’s.
I use both the base M4 Mac mini and an M4 MacBook Air for Final Cut Pro, Photoshop, and Fusion, and while they're not as almost-always-perfectly-smooth as my Mac Studio, they're about 100x better than the experience I used to have on my old Intel MacBook Pros in the 2010s.
I edit 4K ProRes and H.265 footage, sometimes with multicam (up to 4 streams) and color adjustments, titles, etc. It's only after stacking 3-5 effects before things can stutter, really.
Or if you try doing something CPU-intense in the background _while_ running some heavy creative software. I just don't do that.
Usable ram amounts in late October
Usable, not affordable.
Subjective
Interesting that "coding" is now part of the marketing brochure as one of the use cases, while that was historically kind of missing. Is this new?
0% APR for 12 months (24 for iPhones only?) from Apple Financial Services for a device that can approach or even exceed what we were paying for new cars just a few years ago. Apple is definitely making bank off these financing offers, and with very little risk as unlike a car these Mac Studios don’t lose 20% of their value when you drive them off the lot.
Interesting times, to say the least!
Are you sayin 0% is bad? What is better then? If you have the means, pay outright, no? It used to be a lot worse, paying $16K+ for a 128MB Quadra something based RIP in mid nineties . Do you mean that these things are overpriced from the get go?
I am merely pointing out additional revenue streams for Apple here. They make money off the hardware and again off the financing. Car manufacturers and have much lower margins and finance via their financial arms with much less predatory terms than your average credit card. The zero percent APR is very attractive, and easy to convince yourself to go with something above what you can afford. Times are good for Apple.
Good for them. Things cost what they do. I hear you that one can fall into the 0% interest trap, but that’s on us.
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.
How are they "making bank" by giving out 0% loans?
My friend, the same way everyone else does. It goes from 0% to 28% interest when you miss a payment. Those are rates normal lenders fall asleep dreaming of.
"M6 features a powerful, larger 12-core GPU that provides higher geometry rates and updated Dynamic Caching to deliver stunning visuals and fluid frame rates in demanding games like Mixtape."
Why choose the worst game of the year? Just because it's made by the daughter of Larry Ellison?
Just the other day I mentioned how odd it was that Mixtape felt just like AI-Art. At first glance it has great visual style and seems cool. But spend more than 5 minutes with it and you’ll agree there’s nothing there. It has zero ART inside. It’s one hundred percent vibes.
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.
Whether or not you don't like the game, it's a weird misrepresentation to say it's made by Megan ellison.
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.
Despite all the exposure the game has gotten, it currently has less online players[1] than games like "Tennis Elbow 4"[2] (by a factor of 4).
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's not objectively terrible. It's subjective - entirely.
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.
I don't buy it. I'm sorry but I know shit when I play it.
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.
That's pretty embarrassing. It's such a poor representation of gaming. I'm surprised anyone is still talking about it.
Well, there's 24 people still playing it now on Steam
I never even heard of this game.
It would have been funny to see Tomb Raider return for it's 12th annual performance comparison in a 2026 Apple keynote.
They should have used Cyberpunk or Control. They are few years old now but are native Mac games with ray tracing
I've never heard of Mixtape, but I'm surprised to see such a weirdly contemptuous post about a video game get so much traction on HN. At a glance, critical review aggregators are showing 80+ on this game. Is there some drama or culture war issue here that I'm missing?
It's not a game, think of it as a long FMV sequence which barely requires any input at all through it all, except in one quicktime event.
Isn't that a pretty well-established genre going back at least to the 1980s? I'm pretty out of date on modern games, but I do remember Heavy Rain being widely acclaimed 15 years ago. There's gotta be something else that explains the vitriol against this new game.
Heavy Rain garnered good reviews, but has aged worse than most of it's contemporary games from 2010. David Cage, the game's director, had his reputation dumpstered and hasn't directed a game in 8 years.
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.
Yes, it's a culture war thing and the commenters here are participating in it: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/adventure/mixtape-is-at-the-ce...
Ah, well that must be it then. The stench of culture war was pretty strong in the original comment, so I'm not surprised, although I'm a bit disappointed to see it so front and center on HN (especially given that it was set off by a tiny mostly irrelevant mention in an Apple press release)!
~12k for 80 core gpu with 256gb, 14k in October for 512gb. Seems like that could make for a very descent on prem inference server.
It cant be 14k for 512GB because 96 -> 256 upgrade alone cost $4000
Gonna go sell a kidney, should just about cover a base Mac Studio. Guess I'll need a payday loan for the power cable
The M6 is useless for AI. Is there any model which is actually useful and fast on 32GB?
My jaw dropped, not even a 64GB option, 128 would have been nice. 32 is an insult.
Qwen3.8
Not nearly fast enough on 32GB, would like to be wrong though.
What's everyones recommendation for one to run a good local LLM model on?
1-2 RTX5090 will be better value than Macs because they have the memory bandwidth for somewhat fast local inference.
If you don't want to wait for prefill, you're going to want a CUDA dGPU system.
Will forever miss the 499$ mac mini!
If I compare to like, January 2024, the prices for RAM these days make me want to weep.
Maxed out Studio is $30,000+ tax in Canada if financed through Apple.
That's wild!
The storage is pretty silly. Bring that down and the max isn’t nearly as bad, more like 12k
Hmm, I was about to get a MBP with an older Max chip, guess I should wait for prices to slide a bit.
M5 Pro in a Mac Mini with 64GB RAM and 10Gbit Ethernet seems like the perfect Jellyfin server and Ollama test server. All for just over $3K (I specced with only 1TB local nvme).
Probably worth it for Ollama but you can run Jellyfin off a raspberry pi.
> you can run Jellyfin off a raspberry pi.
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.
not sure which cpu that Synology has, but I run jellyfin on ugreen nasync dxp8800 plus which has intel with QSV and it breaks no sweat in both transcoding (if needed) and serving over 10GBE.
It's a Synology DS720+ with a Celeron J4125, 2GHz, 4 cores, 2GB of RAM.
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).
You don't have enough RAM. Not sure why you wouldn't use a cheap PC to run jellyfin on and then just use your NAS as the media pool.
Why would I buy and manage a whole PC for Jellyfin when Plex runs off the NAS without issue?
With everyone saying Jellyfin can run on a Pi, I would think it would be better optimized for low-end hardware.
A Pi isn't a NAS with an old CPU and minimal RAM which is running a bunch of other things as well. I have run Plex on my Synology, and it's fine, but I also have 8gb ram and honestly always have a better experience running Jellyfin on a small PC. Easier that way, and you can run other services. Before the rampocalypse you could find mini-PCs with 32gb ram and 1tb SSD for like $350, and have great transcoding ability when you are on the go or have multiple streams going.
Yeah, if you're transcoding for clients a lot I'd just spend the cash on upgrading the clients to support HEVC at minimum.
True re: the Raspberry Pi, but I was thinking the 10Gbit Ethernet would allow more concurrent streaming in my household. But it's probably overkill.
If your household consists of more than 15 people consuming 4K content at the same time, the 10G upgrade may be worth considering.
Edit: never mind, 2.5G is now the default, so you'll probably need more than 40 people to saturate that with streaming video.
Can't say about Ollama but my 2017 Intel NUC 32 GB runs all of the arr and fin stack while it's idling, swimmingly.
Wouldn’t it be amazing for Apple to give us a MacBook Air 15” M6 with a 15W sustained passive TDP capability?
Just amazing engineering push, the competition got the message and we benefit.
I have Mac M1 Max and I'm quite happy with it. But these advances make me think that maybe I should upgrade to Mac M6 (or something) when it is released.
My m2 max is still running strong, but may upgrade soon
This fits neatly in the backpack with the MacBook Pro, if I need more compute power.
cool but maybe i was expecting much more from both m5 ultra and the next gen so it feels somewhat underwhelming. Hopefully m6 max is more than just a 10% improvement over m5 max
Is this the best bet for running local AI now? The choices are overwhelming.
A Macbook Neo with an M6 and 16 GB RAM at $699/€699 would be a killer feat
i wish i could use their hardware, but i refuse their software
When will Apple's Mx CPUs use Intel's 18A/18A-P/14A node(s)?
Maybe in a year or so or maybe never. It depends on how 14a turns out and if it is comparable to TSMC 2NM. They may also choose to utilize 18a-p / 14a for other chips and not the M-series.
Very well timed for John Ternus's first quarter.
Saw a 768GB RAM mac coming soon, would wait for that.
Saw like a leak or just speculation?
I'm so disappointed with the memory pricing we have to endure... MacStudio M5 Pro is $2,499 base with 36GB RAM, but when you increase it to 256GB, the price jumps to $9,499!!!
How much did Larry Ellison pay to have his daughter's pet video game project featured on there?
Every time Intel/AMD gets close enough, Apple just crushes competition in terms of SoC. I don’t know who’s on that chip team but they’re world-class. Hope they get paid more than a bunch of AI idiots Meta hired to do absolutely nothing (but I know they are not even close).
When is the m6 air coming though
So I had just bought from Amazon in July an M4 mini, brand new, for a lucky post-hike price of 832 CA$ (682 USD); it was the very last unit at that price and I snatched it the morning it listed on the Apple/Amazon.ca official vendor. So far I've been using it for a month and it's been great (switching back from a Windows desktop for a decade).
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...
Super psyched for the upcoming Mac Mini. Maybe the old NUC can be tossed.
Call me when Linux will be officially supported. After that I can look and see what else can I get for the price and maybe then ...
> M6 supports up to 32GB of unified memory to multitask across demanding apps
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.
The M6 is a base level chip, for normal users. Anyone needing more than 32GB of RAM is likely going with higher end chip that supports more RAM.
I can accept the fact that something is low level, but don't present it like it's high level.
Apple is a terrible company through and through that should have been broken up million years ago. But, nobody dares to question apple.
My 2019 macbook pro recently started giving me CATERR errors. There are a few forums and LLMs tell me it is logic board. I took it to Best Buy - a location suggested by apple support and they say we could replace battery but there is no guaranteee it will work. Logic board replacement would be $600 to $800. Unfortunately, only Apple can repair it given how every component is integrated and soldered. There is no help available from Apple support or anyone on this issue.
Apple creates "Planned Obsolescence" deliberately. Every year they launch new products with minor improvements and that basically distorts markets. There is MEGA scalping going on for Mac Mini but Apple does not care. As a trillion dollar corporation seeking profits Apple does nothing to help price gauging. Unfortunately, there is no competition. Microsoft is 10x deep into its own issues.
I wish we had startups who came up with strong competition for Apple.
My 2019 macbook pro recently started giving me CATERR errors.
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?
yesterday someone posted a link saying xiaomi "matched" apple's latest M series performance. Was that for less than 24 hours?
Is Apple just going to announce everything silently from now on? No more getting excited for the big events to see what's new -- it just appears on the blog one day?
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.)
I assume they'll have events for the MacBook Ultra and M7.
I'm getting kind of tired of them announcing the base level chip and then waiting forever to release the more powerful versions. I'm also pretty upset that it's unlikely to change now that they've found it's good for business. Like releasing only the base level iPhones first.
I should have bought a 100 m4 mac minis when I had the chance. Thanks hyperscalers for buying all the supply and renting it back.
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.
How much ram would each of those have 100 had?
16gb unified
Aren't you kind of stuck with smaller models on the mini though? Even with the pro you'd be stuck with a max of four daisy chained over thunderbolt and with the 160 gig memory bandwidth you'd probably be far better off with other configurations.
They can be connected to share ram and processing.
Depending on the use case for known processes the LLM requirements are much, much, simpler and lower to make and keep it more predictable.
Neat.. Roughly.. 1.6 TB of RAM? Was there a view of how you say that being allocated and split up or was there spare capacity too?
will be great fun if one M5 Ultra with 512GB memory at 1.2T bandwidth capable of doing 3x smallish local model inferencing each at Opus 4.5 level of intelligence.
The memory bandwidth and size seems to be there, but what is the tokens per sec on like a qwen model? And you can basically do 3x opus 4.5 on the $100 a month claude plan. Your payback will be near infinity years after electricity.
you are assuming the idea, the data, the code being touched by opus worths nothing.
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?
Well said
> M5 Ultra features a massive amount of high-bandwidth unified memory, up to 512GB, and delivers a staggering 1.2TB/s of unified memory bandwidth that is 50 percent higher than M3 Ultra.
Apple never needed to participate in the AI race to zero. Because they were already at the finish line years ago building their own chips that can run large >100B parameter AI models locally.
As someone who works in AI now, I have found it pretty amazing that Apple basically didn't do much with AI software, and focused more on the hardware side. I think this is what the future of AI is going to look like, local models run on your mac for your workflow.
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.
>local models run on your mac for your workflow.
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.
> 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.
Ten years ago I got 64gb of ram in my laptop, same as I have now. I bought both for business and personal use. System ram capacity hasn't changed much in 10 years.
It makes me curious how old you were 10 years ago.
> Ten years ago I got 64gb of ram in my laptop
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)
>I have found it pretty amazing that Apple basically didn't do much with AI software
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.
|It's possible that they're working on their own LLM
Yep, Siri AI; they’re doing it in public.
‘Apple Foundation Model’
nth mover advantage.
Has yet to materialise
1.2TB/s is 2/3 the speed of an nVidia 5090.
But you get a generic computer and much more RAM.
And you lose a couple of organs.
The real downside for me is not having Linux support.
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.
Same here. Sadly I think the voices like ours won't be heard, though, because Apple's looking for someone who's going to buy in on the whole ecosystem, and I think we're not it. Or at least I'm not.
I’m done with macOS.
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.
It's worth noting that the 5090 (or the RTX Pro 6000 big brother with 92GB VRAM) will run rings around the Mac when it comes to compute.
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.
is it still effectively 2/3rds? Don't know enough to compare a discrete GPU/CPU setup to something like this where it's more integrated
There is no magic, if the data you compute as atomic chunk don't fit in cache then memory bandwidth R/W limit kicks in and architecture does not matter. On contrary - having multi gpu setup of same price and same memory size with even slower memories may give you effectively much higher bandwidth but at the cost of power consumption.
How much memory does that come with?
32 GB GDDR 7
I was so blown away at all the discourse surrounding "Apple fumbling on models". They should never have been in the model game to begin with. Apple crushes hardware over the last decade and that's a huge advantage today. In the end, massive models have proven to be very strong, but small models have proven to be good enough (especially with the recent Qwen 2.8 27B drop) and that's where I imagine the future will lie for consumers.
I suspected Apple would let everyone else blow all their money then, when the dust settles, deliver a better experience to end users and clean up.
Agreed. Apple doesn't innovate anymore, but they're generally pretty good at adapting once other people have.
I think this is a bit of a crazy statement. Everyone expects Apple to somehow build a category leading product every year. I'd expect something innovative every couple of years
* 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.
I think that each of the products you name is the top or near the top of their category, but these weren't creating a category. I don't think my original comment says anything about "changing that industry", so that's a bit of a strawman. They absolutely change the industry they're in. They're just not first to any of those categories that you mentioned (maybe unified memory, I'm not sure).
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...
They did participate early on with Apple Intelligence and failed miserably. Really good move to not double down and let the others explore the space first
Is there anything comparable that runs Linux, doesn't necessarily look as good, but is perhaps (a lot) cheaper/fixable? Or is this really pretty optimal?
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.
I love linux and would be using it if the ARM support was better. It's just not there and most distros that support ARM do it a little poorly. I just haven't seen anything even remotely comparable to Apple Silicon and unfortunately Linux is struggling very hard to support it.
It's not quite that ARM support isn't good on Linux, it's that there aren't high-performance ARM chips with strong general-purpose software stacks. Like the Raspberry Pi is very well supported, but otherwise the only upmarket devices are things like Ampere workstations and hyperscaler server chips.
You can't run Linux directly on these. Asahi Linux supports up to M2 only.
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 guess, what I mean is: Why are these tiny aluminum boxes so optimal?
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...
Strix platform maybe?
The PC platforms have anemic memory bandwidth in comparison. Eg, Strix Halo is 256GB/s max. If money is a bigger limiter than performance it can be an option though. As can Nvidia DGX Spark machines. (Also limited to 128GB memory and comparatively low bandwidth, but higher compute than Strix Halo.)
Asahi was stuck at M3 last time I checked it out.
Development on m3 is ongoing, m2 is supported
M2 even.
AFAIK, apple does not release drivers open source, asahi is a reverse-engineering endeavour and does not support GPU. For nvidia, there are both proprietary and open-source linux drivers. CUDA and inference works on linux with nvidia. I would recommend checking out this video of Alex Ziskind to shop for a computer to run local LLMs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mevUEQcumzU&t=224s. TL;DR besides Apple he recommends, DGX Spark, Tenstorrent Wormhole N300, AMD Radeon 7900 and NVIDIA RTX 5090.
"hacker news"
I wonder why they even bothered with m5 ultra instead of going m6 ultra directly, honestly.
What’s the point?
Yield probably.
Now if only I can natively run Linux on their hardware.
> Apple’s developer frameworks and tools — including Core AI, Core ML, Metal, and Xcode
Can we please kill the xcode. It is worst pile of garbage I have to use just to develop ios app.
This is why so many iOS apps these days are based on Electron/Capacitor/React Native/etc.
fucking awesome
>up to 1.2x faster multithreaded performance as compared to M5
Massive. I feared it would only be up to 1x the speed of an M5 /s
>M6 supports up to 32GB of unified memory
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?
The Pro and Ultra variants are the ones with the higher RAM amounts. They didn’t announce the M6 Pro yet.
Yeah, but they still write regarding plain M6:
"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" .
They've announced there won't be a M6 Pro in favor of getting M7 out the door.
At the price points they are hitting, can’t afford over 32 GB on the cheaper model.
256 memory gets you to like 11k. So like 15-20k.
512GB late october sounds lame.
and 512GB is so 2025.
Give us 1TB version. Where is the competitive spirit?
Yeah, for developers it should be 128GB base version.
>Where is the competitive spirit?
To be fair, where is the competitor at this form factor?
Xiaomi is coming. Hopefully they'll make 1TB box.
Cannot believe "moar transistors" is still the only idea they have.
They pionneered unified memory a few years ago.
No. Apple did not invent or pioneer the concept of unified or shared memory, but they did create an exceptional implementation of it.
I feel like this is true of almost everything apple does -- they take something clunky from a year ago and "pioneer it" by improving the UX.
From what I’ve noticed, Apple products have been getting worse in quality year after year. Sometimes they even ruin their own devices with updates... I guess it’s all because of marketing.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
I’m mostly talking about their iPhones, where new updates sometimes make older models worse. I know a lot of people whose iPhones started lagging after iOS updates.
I know they are a phone company, but I think they should focus on local models software, not only hardware.
They aren't a phone company, and haven't been ever. They're a hardware company first
More like an "ecosystem company".
It's the Hardware, Software and Services in combination. None would work without the other (to reach the scale apple is)
> They're a hardware company first
More specifically, they're a hardware dongle company first
Software wise there's plenty to choose from already. Ollama/llama.cpp, LM Studio, Lemonade, vllm etc. Anything Apple would bring to the table?
Maybe https://mlx-framework.org
FWIW, Ollama, LM Studio and Lemonade (and oMLX) also wrap Apple's MLX framework.
Apple has the mlx framework. Most/all major software for running models locally support it. Apple also has RDMA for interconnecting multiple machines across Thunderbolt connections.
False, they are a Marketing Company.
their strength has been hardware for over 30 years now
Uhhh, they are? They’re a hardware co for sure, but to say they aren’t focusing on on-device models is absurd on its face. They’ve spent over 2 years on Siri AI which is (mostly) local.
My 100k company only buys Mac laptops and you're calling them a phone company. Such an odd comment.