Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra
apple.com
apple.com
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.
Is it amazing for LLM stuff? No, but that's the same story for anyone else _not_ spending boatloads, or willing to hack on weird mining cards.
Given how much more you can get buying used versus new, I'd go used unless there's some feature/characteristic only the new hardware has.
Having said that, I could see stuff slowing down over time with OS updates/etc. I've had my M1 air for a while, and some UI stuff was slower after specific updates (I think glass in particular).
That's my experience on M4 Mac Mini and M3 MacBook Air.
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].
Apple Music must have been written by an intern or outsourced, how can you have a music playing app crash and do a System Report just by hitting the previous song button.
They are avoiding GPL3 licensed software and some GPL2 software are getting outdated.
That's why they didn't upgrade bash3 to bash4 , and replaced rsync with openrsync
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.
I've lost count of how many interfaces I've had to fenangle to get a job done. For 20 odd years I rocked Gentoo as my daily driver but my lap can't take the heat any more. Wifey gets Arch and I've settled on Ubuntu for a simple life.
Embarrassingly enough, I had to get a "child" to explain to me how to get a wine dispenser to work, recently 8)
Here's to hoping they don't turn into Microsoft one day.
I have two members of staff who have asked me to migrate them over. I just need to get "drive mappings" stable and it looks like SMB over QUIC might do the trick.
Canonical show no signs of going evil empire and even if they did there are plenty of options, starting with Debian!
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).
Jeff Goldblum's 30 second "Presenting three easy steps to the internet" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjY0xsoozs8
And now when you want to set up a fresh Mac it's a parade of dialogue boxes:
Do you want to turn on Siri? No. (the dialogue-choice is probably "maybe later" ugh)
Do you want to share app analytics with developers? Yes.
Do you want to add Touch ID? No, because I'm setting this up for someone else.
There are more!
I gave those examples -- each of which having a different answer or reason -- to show that the problem of onboarding is nontrivial, but Apple has spent no(?) effort toward fixing it. It's the same for new iPhones and iPads.
NB I don't know if you sign into your Apple account it pre-answers these questions. That'd be nice.
But the Goldblum phrase I really try to keep alive is thinking jail, as in "What is beige? It's not even a color. Were they in thinking jail?" I often remark out loud when I realize I have been in thinking jail on a subject.
When you install Chrome, which you cannot accidentally do, and when you set it as the OS browser default, which you also cannot accidentally do...
... the next time you launch Safari, it will say that the default browser has been changed, "Did you mean to do that?" and of the two options presented ("Keep using Chrome" or "Switch back to Safari") the Safari option will be the default.
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.
I tried to install stuff with Homebrew; it kept warning me that they don't support such an old macOS. Almost everything I wanted to install with it, it tried to do a source build, because the binaries did not exist for it. At one point it was building LLVM to install a dependency, which ran for almost one whole day, I kid you not, and still failed
Also, the latest version of Podman (both CLI and desktop) does not run properly on Monterey. Even if you manage to install those, you cannot create a Podman VM, because it relies on some newer Apple virtualization tech instead of QEmu, and that is not supported on Monterey.
MS Office, Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop, etc... The latest versions of these do not run on Monterey.
These are just a few of the examples.
On Big Sur, things were even worse. The latest versions of VSCode, VSCodium, Brave browser, and many things you might want install with Homebrew, etc. do not run on it. You will have to hunt for specifc old versions to install.
If the app devs drop support for a system that sucks, but it’s the devs decisions. One system I run I’ve had to air gap since it is out of date, but I’m not blaming apps. Though I gripe with the openjdk decision to not support Apple intel, it’s what it is.
Edit: im sure linux distros have problems as well, just like windows does with this. (Why can’t windows 95 run oblivion with 20 mods on it?)
In general, the model on Mac is that you need to run latest. It's not like you're gonna use it for a production server, they're meant to be personal devices, so upgrading them is not a major issue.
[1] (Personally, macports hasn't been my jam in decades)
*or hacintosh but I haven’t kept up with that
Try doing what you write on a (corporate) Windows machine with NTFS and file filters
I reported it about ten times, Apple never replied or addressed it. After a while I decided to take things into my own hands, and to write my own driver.
Just installing a VM you can load a driver in for development and testing was a two-week effort. Everything locked down. Their VM infrastructure is so bad you can't even properly emulate or route the device, so in the end the only way to test it properly was to install the driver in the real thing, which is extremely disturbing to productivity, as the device you're working on constantly crashes.
The whole platform is developer-hostile, which is essentially the same thing as user-hostile as far as I'm concerned.
Meanwhile, on Linux, zero issues, and writing or testing a driver is child's play. It's literally built for tinkerers.
btw if it happens often, check your cable, try a different one
With macOS I have to reverse engineer their bootloader with radare2 and remove a stupid safety check just to be able to load a driver.
Why are you expecting a Mac system to operate like Linux? As much as I like Mac I know it will never be used for games, so I use something else.
Even if I prefer the body of a X1 Carbon ThinkPad, its keyboard and trackpoint.
There's actually a number of Thinkpads that can. Searching "thinkpad macos efi" will reveal a number of OpenCore configurations that support booting into the various x86 builds of macOS. I set it up once and was surprised to see that even my touchscreen worked, in addition to a HW accelerated desktop.
I do have a mint x230 I7, might throw Tahoe on it for fun.
I am getting about half the performance (if you combine CPU and GPU) for the same price with X1 Carbon. It's true X1 is lighter, arguably has a better keyboard (although that's a judgement call) and has a trackpoint. At this point though Apple wins on both performance and price overall.
In that I can make them what ever I want
I can ride this puppy for the next 10 years. Say what you will about Apple but their hardware is top notch and it is a great value if you can snag some OG hardware in M series.
Great hardware. I don't miss OSX though.
I am quite sure Apple will think of a reason to deprecate my M1 Macbook Pro (which works great BTW!) in a couple of years, at which point I'm switching back to Linux and will not be coming back. I'm tired of accumulating perfectly good hardware in my house which is nerfed by lack of software updates.
I think it's very likely due to OS updates, like other people are commenting on. It probably doesn't happen to everyone, and maybe doing a clean reinstall helps (I tried all the standard stuff - rebuild caches etc).
Eventually I will upgrade, but for me the M1 Pro Macbook (14") has to be the best computer of the last two decades.
Before that, I had the butterfly Intel version, and that was a disaster. Apple just cooked with the M1+ line...
I’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…
Feels as snappy and impressive as the first day I got it. I never need to close apps, or reboot. I record multitrack audio on it without any perceptible latency. I write code on it. It's the best computer I've ever owned by a significant margin.
The battery indicator is starting to show a decrease in performance. It won’t hold a full charge, but even when I’m without a direct power connection, I can still have it running for nearly 4 hours with Wi-Fi, 6+ without.
You should be able to deeply tweak how window management works, but Mac won't let you do that.
I'd run Linux on the hardware if it wasn't a hack.
Not involved in dev of this, just a happy user
Swift Salamander: https://salamander.codesurfer.ch/ Rascal: https://tryrascal.org/ or brew install --cask chang-07/tap/rascal Forel: https://github.com/lab421/forel or brew install --cask lab421/tap/forel Hyperkey: https://hyperkey.app Vorssaint: https://vorssaint.com Wick: https://trywick.co Wisp: https://sulemaanhamza.github.io/..
Anyone have any experience of it?
I just don't get on with OSX, I can use it, it's "fine" but it never feels like home the way Linux always has, mostly because I generally run with defaults for everything but when something does bother me I can poke it on Linux until it's how I want it to be.
Linux simply assumes you know what you want and lets you have it, Apple assumes they know what you want and based on how much love OSX gets from some folks they seem to get that mostly right for those people.
I can't speak for others, but my preference for macOS basically boils down to "it's a *nix system that can run the commercial software I need, with a lot of nice little attention to detail features" I'm trading friction in some areas, for the removal of friction elsewhere.
Plus macOS has little niceties like readline key bindings in every text field OOTB, pleasant font rendering (on retina quality displays), and all the "ecosystem" features. I use universal control between my mac and iPad daily, AirDrop, universal clipboard, and airpods auto device switching, etc.
I don't pretend it's a perfect OS, it's far from it, but I willingly accept the tradeoffs and find ways to work around them to get the other features I want.
I can vouch for Aerospace, it brings i3 windowing to MacOS well.
I’ve not found anything that works as smoothly for Gnome. So I keep going back to macOS with Rectangle to solve its UX issues.
It's a hack in a good way and this is a really bad reason to not run Linux.
However, I live with Activity Monitor open at all times. The computer constantly grinds to a halt, and I have to force quit apps at least 10 times per day.
Not really Apple's fault though, just most apps use around 4GB of RAM these days even when they're idle. Some use upwards of 16GB.
I've watched the computer slowly get obsoleted over time, not because the hardware is too old, but because software just get's worse every year.
AI has greatly increased the number of security bugs found on a weekly basis (which is great) and we're getting one of those one-shotted and then immediately abandoned open source "projects" every day (which is useless).
And yet there is no indication that any of this new software development capacity is going into improving the quality and efficiency of the software we use on a daily basis.
Why is widely used professional software not getting better and more efficient if bug fixing is supposedly so much cheaper now? Is it not worth putting any effort into optimisation at all?
I think the reason could be that AI can only do more of what we have done manually before, i.e. more lowest common denominator code.
Or am I just too impatient and this is all coming?
I doubt its coming, at least not within the timescale OpenAI or Anthropic would like to believe. If we were close, then we'd see the fruits of that, which like you said, we are seeing the opposite currently.
The bottleneck was never writing code, and it still isn't. Writing code is like 15% of the job, but the labs can't tell investors "Yeah we make everyone only 15% more efficient" and still be able to raise trillions in capital. Whatever AI accelerates, the bottleneck is still code review, comprehension, and security debt.
Vibe coded slop gets abandoned because non-devs were never going to be able to use AI to make commercial software beyond an MVP. Once your app needs multi-tenant auth, session invalidation, concurrency handling, API changes, graceful degradation under load, etc. natural language prompts will fail. You still need a mental model of how things work.
When building a house, lowering the cost of bricks and getting them delivered faster does nothing to speed up the rest of the process that still relies on engineering discipline.
One problem is that you need Firefox because safari doesn’t peppery do ad blocking. But once you have 20 tabs open or so, it uses 5GB GB ram. But perhaps your also need safari for something else. That’s another 5GB of RAM. Then once you count a finder replacement (2GB ram), and some office stuff (probably 1-4GB for each app window), 16GB of ram are almost as sluggish as an old windows laptop. Add MS Teams, and the thing is brought to it’s knees. And Mac OS has a lot of quirks and the window management is atrocious (alt-tab doesn’t switch between app windows, a bunch of apps to get alt-tab behavior don’t work properly either).
I feel like more and more that Mac Users are being forced by the atrocious window management to only have one window open per software, so then the system is fast. Problem is when you have multiple tasks going on in parallel, then you need many windows and desktops.
With Windows you can as well just restart the whole machine, once it touches swap it won't stop thrashing ever.
Different folks different strokes as they say.
It’s like the claim is “get a Mac and you’ll never see a slow down ever again! Just as long as you run software that won’t make the whole system come to a crawl”
I think most true native apps don't have these issues. Unfortunately there is very little incentive to build on the macOS platform these days, which is where I point more of the finger at Apple. UX, UI, & DX are all quite a bit worse for Mac native.
ublock origin lite is on the app stores (both mac and i-devices), and works reasonably well.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ublock-origin-lite/id674534269...
Install Linux to unleash the full potential of your M1 (or to liberate any other system with a BloatOs, like macOS or Windows).
I resucitated and saved from the landfill a laggy and almost unusable laptop with Window 10, 4GB RAM and a Celeron processor, how?... Installing Manjaro (Arch), XFCE and kernel 6.18.
ZSwap and MGLru do wonders with memory and cache management.
It's fast enough with Thorium SSE4. I can easily open 15-20 tabs.
I use it as daily driver.
Best computer I've had in a long time.
Apple - the absolute kings of planned obsolescence. Who else could do it so brazenly AND have a bunch of zealots who will now reply to this defending them and attcking anyone who points it out.
Any industry not involving a computer they'd be in big trouble even with their massive (legal) bribes to politicians and fortune spent on legal teams.
There’s absolutely no reason a maxed out MacBook Pro from 10 years ago shouldn’t be able to run something like the ChatGPT or Claude app, because those seem to think they need a newer version of the OS and Apple has decided that a 8 core 3.8ghz i7 with 32gb of ram is obsolete
You sure can't do it with an iphone. I own one an iphone 15. Was beautiful when new. Even now it has started on the path of suck. Apple have "upgraded" it to have a more frustrating touchscreen because they clearly think I should give them more money to keep the experience I bought. They are not cheap.
Apple are the absolute kings of planned obsolescence.
Zealots going for silent downvotws because there is no case they can make to the contrary. Not what downvotes are for, says HN but we're all used to HN being used like this by now.
It is ridiculous to suggest otherwise. Go pick up an iphone 6 and try to do anything with it and then tell me that is how awful the ui was when it was released to apple orchestrated media fanfare. Or any older ipad. Imagine if that ui extreme sluggishness, random delay and the button moving just as you hit it is what they were showing off at launch. The laughter would have haunted them all the way to the accountants telling them their options were now worthless.
Apple latency degradation is not worth discussing with anyone who says it isn't happening. You can't solve whatever issues they have.
I know that in some ways Apple is better than their hardware-making peers in terms of supporting current OS on hardware made a few years back. But compared to other software vendors, say, Microsoft, they are terrible.
Golden Gate runs on 2020 and newer macs.
Windows 11 runs on 2017 8th-gen Intel CPUs and better.
Windows 10 is supported even on PCs from 2006 with 4GB of RAM - and importantly, a ton of modern software (e.g. Chrome) is still compatible with Windows 10.
The comparison may be relevant since it seems Apple is incentivized primarily to move hardware, whereas Microsoft seems like they want to promote Windows as a stable, non-fragmented platform you can trust, both as a consumer and as a developer. One of their worst-received OSs was the one that basically forced most users to buy a new PC -- Vista. (And to a lesser degree, the TPM 2.0 requirement in Win11.)
With Linux, a device can stay snappy far longer than Apple provides updates to MacOS. That's why my personal computer is old Thinkpad, I can thankfully use work-issued Mac for anything that requires more power.
The M1 airs were available for sale as recently as march of 2024, so you have at minimum another ~3 years of replacement parts availability ahead of you. The timer starts from the last offering for sale, not when you bought your computer. Software updates might be more limited, we'll have to see. 6-7 major updates is about average for the Airs[2], but 8 and 9 isn't unheard of either and we're already at 7 for the M1s
They were however right about one thing, out of warranty repairs are only warrantied for 90 days from Apple.
[1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102772
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook_Air#Supported_operatin...
I used to have Netflix, Civ 5, and a Simulator running with no visible slowdown. Nowadays Safari + Simulator is enough to make everything less snappy; and I no longer keep WebStorm open either.
Anecdotal, but I do think they’re releasing heavier updates. Can’t imagine the M1 on macOS 26 does very well.
Everyday I check on Fedora M4 progress.
And I don't feel like beating a very dead horse, so just google "macOS Tahoe design issues" and take your pick.
On my M2, I have kept it on 15 but Apple aggressively tries to trick me into upgrading in a way that reminds me of Microsoft's behavior with Windows 8/10.
I just buy older stock or refurbished these days. M1s and M2s are still good enough for me. Recently picked up a refurbished M1 16" because I wanted a larger screen in bed / on the couch for a good price with good condition refurbished from amazon.
Sharing files with a windows hard drive. My workmate had a seagate that installed an NTFS driver on mac, which saved us a few times. Never had a problem on linux.
Python never seems to work right. Conda, and other stuff, just never worked smoothly with the bioinformatics code we were running. Cluster machines it was easy.
There is a wierd issue that you can't close a macbook and use it with an external monitor without plugging it in. It just sleeps.
Would you like to join iCloud. No really would you like to join iCloud. How about apple music? (To be fair MS is just as bad if not worse about onedrive...)
We had a pythonTK program to print labels from a CSV file. Every MacOS update broke it. We ended up just running it on a windows machine. back up was going command line on mac.
case insensitive file systems.
generally stability..
Its not bad, just seems the OS has gotten worse.
It's one of those NeXTSTEP things that was copied over.
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.
I’ve been using computers since almost 3 decades now.
My MacBook feels like a computer that even 5-6 years ago I would classify as too futuristic.
I rarely ever switch it off, I run 40+ chrome tabs, 2 coding agents, and 2 editors all the time, with slack and a few other utilities running.
I can install power user software like Raycast and Handy.
Meanwhile my Linux laptop continues to get faster every year as the operating system improves with performance updates and bugfixes.
I use an iPhone X as my low-end test, now. It tops out on 18.
I'm thinking, now that I fully gotten used to and am in love with fedora Workstation and Gnome I should give it another try maybe and see what it can do nowadays. I was holding back cause DP Alt was missing and that still seems to be an issue. but have since reduced to 1 big external monitor so even HDMI would do it. or DisplayLink.
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.
The cheaper PCs don't have strong graphic cards which I needed to run Plex and hardware transcoding and other few ML tasks that I occasionally do but that was only a smaller factor.
Nowadays, it's even more important b/c I refuse to keep an AI model on my mac mini in case it gets compromised.
For non-AI, non-AAA gaming needs, I was able to get an RX560 GPU module[1] for my EliteDesk, which I use for Minecraft (It is mutually exclusive with its 2.5" HDD/SSD bay, but I just have an nvme drive in that).
[1] this part: https://www.ebay.com/p/13066999150?iid=277828413614
My home "servers" don't do much but 8 GB or 16 GB of RAM is enough them, for now (Linux).
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.
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).
Phase change thermal pads help with this, extending that timeline out beyond 5+ years but still will eventually degrade.
There's all kinds of other hardware things we don't usually think about that can start having an actual performance impact after ~3-5 years too. Battery, obviously, as it degrades can limit your peak wattage, the power delivery capacitors lose capacitance over the years and develop more resistance impacting maximum clock states, fan bearings wear out, you get vacuum leaks in copper heat pipes, and micro-fissures in soldering.
Granted, most of it is going to be software but its easy to forget that hardware degrades, and degrades relatively quickly especially in higher power systems.
This is why repairability and user serviceability is so important. If you can't open up and swap parts in your machine easily, a $10 consumable turns it into $2,000+ ewaste.
He was arguing that Windows is well past its best years and that OSX is now starting on the downward slope and that is why he was moving to Linux. It was a interesting take on the whole thing about the life times of OS quality.
But with a new CEO for Apple, they have an opportunity to turn things around and blame it all on Tim Cook, but only time will tell if they do that.
I’ve been moving all my machines to devuan with xfce (or freebsd with xfce).
I have zero issues despite not having to deal with wayland, systemd, snap, etc.
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 have stuck with distros that are not trying to chase the latest trends but keep a ethical high ground.
I am typing this on a gaming laptop with a Nvidia card that probably would have been a nightmare trying to use linux not too long ago but instead it is an absolute dream machine.
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
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.
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.
Windows sucks and MacOS perhaps even more, but we're locked in.
Perhaps soon everything will be reversed by AI and we can use whatever OS we wish on whatever device we supposedly own.
> surprised by how quick it felt
Aren't these properties of the (G)UI rather than of the processor?
I've been using systems 20 years ago that were super snappy. The same software would still be snappy today obviously. But the software has become bloated to the point that you need to run the latest generation of CPUs such that things are not sluggish. In principle you don't need 32-core GHz CPUs to move a window around on a screen without it feeling sluggish.
But I too have ran a super snappy XFCE desktop for ages on pretty old hardware. I only recently switched to KDE+Wayland on much newer hardware and felt like it was snappy enough to not bother me.
I also remember there were times were my much more powerful dedicated GPU was outperformed by my CPU integrated GPU, which I think has something to do how shared memory can be faster for UI rendering (or maybe it was just driver-related)
They are a result of all of them.
But hey, microservices and static linking are the future. /s
Aren't those two things contradicting each other? ;)
I think macOS getting more sluggish in each release (which is objectively true) is just plain old bad software engineering and prioritising the wrong things. E.g. it's just Apple's version of "What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away.".
For example, is there a version of linux that I'm missing? I've not run a desktop linux box in over a decade, any suggestions would be great, or is everyone happily running ubuntu / fedora?
PorteuX is also an interesting performance-optimised distro that takes a different approach - which is that of extreme minimalism (aggressive binary stripping, minimal packages) and its "Copy to RAM" feature (basically the OS runs 100% from RAM, so storage I/O bottlenecks are completely eliminated).
I've tested both on a 128GB Strix Halo laptop and haven't found much of a difference in terms of snappiness, but if you have older, more humble machine, I reckon PorteuX would definitely feel more snappy.
Finally in terms of snappiness, the DE you use also makes a huge difference. The PorteuX guys have just put together an interesting benchmark comparing various DEs and Wayland to X11 which is worth checking out: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Wayland-X11-Performance-Porteu...
My mum was on an Ubuntu base as well (Mint first, later Xubuntu) but after both eventually experienced failed dist-upgrades (no GUI after reboot), I switched her to an immutable distro (Aurora) and it's been rock solid so far. And in the event something does break, rollback is as simple as selecting the previous image from the boot menu.
So for normies who want a macOS like experience, I'd recommend Bluefin, and for Windows-like, I'd recommend Aurora. And Bazzite for gamers. All of these are Fedora-based immutable distros and have none of the stability issues that Ubuntu-based distros have, plus the generally newer kernel+mesa stack compared to Ubuntu means you'll also have better compatibility with newer hardware.
I'm using ArchLinux with XMonad as my window manager. That's neat, though it doesn't make Firefox or VSCode any faster (nor slower).
I'd pump the brakes on Ubuntu, which nowadays is a perceptibly worse user experience than other mainstream distros. Snap is a disaster, and flatpak rocketed past it years ago thanks to Valve bucks.
I think the snappiness is less this, and more about the speed to open a file, how quickly chrome pops open when you open it etc. I assume this is a combination of hardware and how fast SSD->RAM is due to the SOC, but software will certinaly play a big part too.
That is exactly what I'm talking about. Sorry, you are completely off. My machine 20 years ago was not an SOC and didn't have an SSD either. It was fast as lightning to open a window.
What does this have to do with SSD? Or an SOC? It's all because the software is incredibly bloated, and as your comment indicates, the young generation doesn't even know this and thinks the hardware is to blame because it's 2 gens behind state of the art (so, 3.5 years old).
This is very sad and exactly why things are the way they are.
I keep my chromium and chromium profile loaded into a ram drive, and it’s still slow and sluggish. Tech debt and a growing monorepo has damaged it beyond recovery. I really hope those two new browser engines reach a usable state soon. Chromium, WebKit, gecko have been doing for too long without a full foundational overhaul.
I never understand what people exactly mean by claims like this. I very vividly remember double clicking some executable, and then immediately hearing the HDD start to spin, and waiting with baited breath to see if it will spawn a window or silently fail, as programs on Windows 98 (the only option for personal computers at the time) often did.
So what exactly was snappy? Nothing that runs off a HDD is ever snappy.
Or even just the computer taking 5 minutes to start up.
Are you sure about that? At that time, hard drives were constantly spinning. Getting them to suspend was a rare feat.
> programs on Windows 98 (the only option for personal computers at the time) often did.
20 years ago, Windows 98 had long been abandoned. At that time I had been running a Linux desktop for many years already.
> Nothing that runs off a HDD is ever snappy.
Of course it can be. By already being in RAM. Open another window of some program didn't need to touch the HDD. If I nowadays open another instance of some electron thing, it takes a while load those gigabytes of bloat and make dozens of network roundtrips.
I'm not saying all software 20 years ago was snappy. But today's bloat is undeniable. The user experience has not improved with the orders of magnitude (!) with which the hardware has gotten more performant.
I think people don't realize how much more performant today's hardware is. Mostly because the bloated and terribly architected software eats it all up.
I am pretty sure, though, of course, memory is highly fallible (and note that I was a kid back then, and didn't understand that well what those sounds or the blinking disk light actually meant).
> 20 years ago, Windows 98 had long been abandoned. At that time I had been running a Linux desktop for many years already.
20 years ago means the mid-to-late nineties. That's my position and I'm sticking with it /s
But I think it's undeniable that Linux in the 2000s was a massive pain for anyone but the most dedicated tinker, and even then only for pretty carefully chosen hardware. The Year of the Linux Desktop meme existed for a very clear reason. Virtually the entire PC user base, both Consumer and Corporate, was running Windows XP in the 2000s.
On my machine 20 years ago most apps had some sort of loading splash screen, so I think you just have rose tinted glasses imo!
You don’t really get those anymore - you click and the app is open.
As the old saying goes what Intel giveth the Microsoft taketh away.
Also, the m5 mac mini impulse buy as a home server has been fantastic to just login to remotely, but I'm so glad I'm still using Monterey on my M1 for daily coding.
> took two airs for almost a decade from 10.4 to 10.10 or something
I’m curious, did macOS 10.4->10.10 not constitute an OS update? Or was this a time when you applied your rule differently?
Maybe I misunderstood your question... I never updated the OS on either of them. Or on any Mac I've owned since the mid 90s.
I thought that both started at 10.4 and then had all version updates up until 10.10.
My worry is that they'll kill signing for people who aren't updating, though that shouldn't be a factor. I would have to simply get another machine to port to, because I don't trust that changes they make are always going to be good in any sense.
There might be a window for computing within which it's good: I find I'm not worried about adding new Linux machines and architectures to build for, but my Windows builds are 32 and 64 bit on Windows 7 with no attempt to modernize the build system, and I've got that two-stage Mac build process where it starts on a time capsule machine not connected to the internet, and continues on the M1 running Monterey. I'm anxious for the day Apple requires you use stuff that's constantly changed out from under you. I don't work like that.
One great reason for never upgrading the OS is you can still pop open a laptop and run things you wrote 10 or 20 years ago... and honestly now I've sent Claude around my local network accessing those old laptops and snapshotting and clicking ancient apps and rewriting things I'm too tired to do by hand, which is weird but kind of a nice coda to my work.
This cost me half a day wiping the disk, restoring the original OS, and then carefully upgrading back to Sequoia. Now it works well again, but I am counting the days to when Linux is the only way to continue using this great piece of hardware.
Another anecdote: a few years ago I was offered a shiny new never-before-used iPad for free by a client (a telco). There was only one catch, I was told: it was a few generations old. It had sat in its box on a shelf unopened for several years. I thought it might be useful at least as an e-reader, but I soon realized why it was now useless: I could not find a single app in the App Store that would install on it because every app required a “newer OS” (which wasn’t available). Most websites also refused to talk to its old (non-upgradable) web browser. Well played, Apple.
Casey Muratori has a 20 minute talk on YouTube called "Clean code, horrible performance"[1]. Using an oft-repeated example in C++ he rewrites it uncleanly and then benchmarks.
Removing Classes/subclasses/polymorphism: 1.5x faster. That overhead was like reducing an iPhone 14 to an iPhone 11 performance.
Replacing Encapsulation with a table-driven calculation: 10x faster. That overhead was like reverting an average desktop CPU from 2023 back to 2010 performance.
Adding basic SIMD: 20x faster.
His position is that the principles of Clean Code wiped out 15 - 20 years of hardware progress, for a subjective ideal of maintainability, and even if they deliver on that, the cost is too high. It shouldn't/cannot cost a decade of hardware performance to make programmer's lives easier.
Clean code or messy code the thing that all fast code has in common - including your example is this: YOU FOCUSED ON IT.
You measured it, then improved against the benchmark. You spent time and effort on it so it improved.
That's it. That's the secret.
One is that the rewrite has 'mechanical sympathy' with the machine e.g. arrays without pointer chasing can fit more data in CPU cache with fewer stalls while it reads over the main memory bus and waits after every item. That should not be a surprise, it's knowable in advance. Why deliberately ignore knowledge about the machine when designing the code, then come back and use that knowledge?
Another objection is to the idea of "measure then improve". Imagine a delivery truck which loads parcels without checking their weight first, then drives the truck onto a weigh machine (profiling), then if the truck is overweight they unload each parcel, weigh them individually, find the one heavy one filled with lead weights, then repack the truck without it. That would be silly and inefficient, right? Now imagine they unload the truck and there's no single parcel which is surprisingly heavy and instead the goods have been packed with 'lead foam'. Who could forsee that would cause problems with the weight on the delivery truck? (Anyone!). Now what's the fix? Unpack and repack every parcel, rewrite the whole code. There's no accidentally quadratic here to remove, instead every tiny piece takes a few more microseconds than it needs to and those add up.
Another objection is "YOU FOCUSED ON IT' - this implies that there is some way you can design and write code that doesn't need any focus. Part of the point of the video is that the faster code is not harder to write, there's no complex algorithms, no compiler intrinsics, no deep knowledge; it doesn't take a focused performance expert to write a switch(){} instead of a subclass.
Another objection is your implication that performance shouldn't be a consideration until you measure it and find a problem, and prove that it is. Which is like saying that aeroplane design weight doesn't matter until after you build it and measure it and prove that it matters. Computers are finite and limited, why have we got to the stage of assuming they are infinite and unlimited, and then demanding proof that they aren't, over and over on a case-by-case basis? A 3D game can render a virtual world at 100 frames per second. Does a program which takes 3 seconds to show a username/password login prompt need enough resources for 300 frames of game until proven otherwise?
Another objection is that you are defaulting to 'clean code is the default, performant code needs measuring and benchmarking to justify itself in every individual case. Why isn't that the other way around? Less resource-wasting code as the default, and 'clean code' only when maintainability has been measured and proved to be a problem, and only in the parts of the codebase which have the highest maintainability problems?
If all the clean code, encapsulation, isolation, abstraction layers, are providing the developer benefits that are claimed - why aren't programs better? If it's now so clean and easy to refactor, why doesn't that translate to software that gets better instead of software that gets worse? Casey's example is that Visual Studio debugger updated the watch window in realtime while stepping through code, on single core Pentium 4 with 512MB RAM, and now on a modern multicore machine with 64GB RAM and an M2 SSD it can't do that. (RemedyBG can, so it's not impossible).
He coined the phrase "pit of success" after his team had spent months profiling and tuning the .NET startup to remove many milliseconds from it. One developer on another team called a default constructor for an XML class, and in that commit wiped out all their gains, three times over, he didn't know the default path was slow and there was another way. Rico was giving a talk and said that isn't a good way to design things, success can't be the hard way that only a few experts can find, it has to be like 'falling into a pit', the default way to do things has to be the good way.
Anyway, with one browser related performance regression, they profiled and found that the layout engine was using a lot more CPU. He believed the layout engine was good enough, looked elsewhere and found a commit which invalidated a node in a tree and all subnodes. That was cheap and didn't stand out in the trace, but far away in the codebase it triggered a lot of layout updates. Separating things out to focus on just one part at a time, and then the profiler can reveal where the problems are, neither of those things worked as intended.
its crazy how our devices have become basically dumping grounds for terribly optimized software
Software is a tool working within a socio-technical system. Some systems have low user workflow diversity and a low rate of change - a game being a perfect example. Games get patched, but the diversity is purely in user data, not in feature use - everyone uses the same engine, the same textures, the same game logic. Some systems have high user workflow diversity - such as business software.
Pair that with the fact that games, due to the nature of the system, have to optimise for low latency AND they run on the edge - and it's natural that the primary optimisation will be for CPU cycles. For business software, for which distributional advantage of running it through web + the high rate of feature change that is a result of the specification being opaque and a moving target - means you have plenty networking latency that can hide your CPU latency for long after it becomes a true problem for you.
Not to mention that "clean code" optimises for developer churn and business priority shift (which is a luxury games which are an upfront investement don't have) as a result of accelerating industry of software technology and greater saturation of developers.
Had software remained the domain of the same number of practitioners such as <1995, even given everything else, the organisational systems would have evolved to protect them at all cost because churn would be catastrophic, and then they would enjoy more power and would be able to structure code not optimising for brain shift, because they'd hold the context in their heads.
I'll leave as exercise for the reader what pushing AI into the software development equation does for the system and inevitable hardware throughput implications.
Does this excuse making 75 network calls instead of 5? Or knowing that you make a lot of network calls but designing the code as if they were instant and have the bandwidth of a local SSD?
> "Not to mention that "clean code" optimises for developer churn" "structure code not optimising for brain shift, because they'd hold the context in their heads."
Based on what studies or evidence is this optimised or optimal? How is it easier to work through code which is atomised and abstracted until there appears to be nowhere that anything actually happens, where the method and variable and parameter names are long compound words, where everything is multiple layers of indirection and generalised, and you have to hold all that context in your head?
2/ That's a fair challenge - and I definitely have more trouble reading through an absolutely ramped to the max collection of C# code (which reinforces the behaviour you describe) than a superscript; but for interchangeability, the middle between those two ends is typically better - you're trying to minimise functional context for the thing that a software developer needs to do. This has the additional failure mode that the feature that is envisioned (of sufficient complexity) never actually gets delivered, but the component parts that can be well encapsulated do. And this is because no one holds the full system in their heads. But this can be explained away to business as "there's too much complexity, we need another cycle" and "we need to iterate" and therefore the cycle continues.
I think I actually convinced myself away from encapsulation and separation of concerns in that last comment.
Does my web browser feel slow because of pointer indirection or virtual function calls? Or is it because I have to download 15 MB of Javascript to load this page, which then goes out to 35 other domains to fetch other Javascript and ads and CSS?
In the insanely tight compute loop that he's looking at all of those things definitely make a difference, but a lot of software is slow not because it's inefficiently written (which it probably is) but because it's inefficiently designed and it's doing too much.
In a game engine, where you have 16ms to do 100% of your simulation work, update all your state, and then send all the data out to be rendered, definitely this sort of thing is an issue. In an Electron app? There are a thousand other things that are wasting far more of your time and responsiveness than the misguided 'cleanliness' of your code.
Bit the bullet, installed arch and dwm. I remember my initial impressions on how fast the boot went, how silent the hdd is, how the whole things works reporting just a fraction of RAM in use(right after boot).
It was the first hands-on YAGNI experience. Windows(and macos and the likes of ubuntu) loads and starts everything it has and keeps the system busy at all times in terms of cpu, disk io, network io.
Barebone linux without beefy desktop environment was like “I boot into essentials and will lazy load anything upon request”.
This is new to me, where does he say this specifically?
Not to white knight Casey but his niche has been in rendering and graphics afaik , where everything he does have to fit inbetween frames, so it makes sense to be a "performance maximalist" in that environment.
It could be that you and he are working on different sets of problems with different tools.
But I'd be really interested I where he says you must write unmaintainable code.
Also (my take) : if you're looking at "clean code" to find abstractions that allow things to be refactored, then I think that's probably not the type of performance he's talking about for you. LLMs can do that type of work. FWIW I think he refactors from what things ought to be, not how they are currently
To be completely fair, I use the Desktop via DisplayPort at 144 Hz, while the MacBook uses HDMI + USB-C, and I believe it's just at 60 Hz, which is also a factor, but I honestly think that this is not the primary reason.
But it’s not setting the PC laptop market on fire, and I’m quite surprised as well… I guess Lunar lake and the few ARM compatibility issues make it a worse option?
My last Mac was an MacBook Air from 2011 (now we can talk about "a little sluggish"). I also don't dislike the current MacOS, although I do prefer the older look to the new one. But this is from a person using Windows 11 at work, so everything is a step up, right?
WSL2 is one of the best linux experience you can have.
I think what changed is that you got better at Linux. Leveled-up, so to speak.
Windows emulation did see some improvements with Valve's sponsorship, but I wouldn't really consider that significant, and it's not like mac has any comparable technology anyway.
I can relate. I'm one of the few people at work using linux, most use MacOS or Windows with WSL. Every single time I share my screen and run build commands, people comment on how fast my computer is, then seem surprised when I say I bought it before COVID.
Weird, I didn't know silicone degrades in this way. Perhaps it was rather the macOS and Mac apps that were getting progressively worse?
I remember long ago, when I first met a computer person in college and he told me about PCs vs UNIX, I asked him, "why don't they make it run on a PC?"
The globe key only works with Mac keyboards, which apparently Apple refuses to license? And all Mac keyboards seem to be terrible.
Sometimes, the main application window seems to go away; or when I open an application it opens with no main window? What is the point of that?
So close to being a world class operating system. In some ways, Windows feels superior in terms of having softer edges. I think you can work around the Mac's hard edges with third party software, but in that way it feels more like a hobbyist operating system.
I can relate to that. MacOS was my dream OS, even I installed Linux elementaryOS before I can get hand on Mac. Catalina is my favorite, I don't bother upgrade to BigSur and beyond. Now my Macbook is dead, I don't have reason anymore to get another one, maybe if Apple support Nvidia again somehow.
- Xiaomi: We have matched Apple in CPU performance.
- Apple: *Meep Meep...*That, or I can’t read.
There are emails unearthed in various lawsuits where you can read Bill Gates screaming at his subordinates: "why the hell can't our partners like Sony and Creative create a similar device? Give them all, give them early access to everything, work with them". In the end MS felt compelled to make their own.
Creative's Muvo^2 already was the poor man's iPod with surprisingly good audio quality as well.
When the iPod came out you largely had two options for carrying your music collection on the go. You either carried a binder of CDs, or you had some niche player like Mini-Disc or an MP3 player. Both alternatives were expensive and had limitations similar to a CD in terms of number of tracks you could carry.
I had an MP3 player on either side of 2000 that was slightly smaller than a deck of playing cards that could use Smart Media flash memory cards. The largest card at the time was either 16 or 32mb and was enough to hold 1 album at near CD quality.
Creative's Muvo was a weird form factor that was larger than an iPod. It had a horrid interface both on device and for loading music. It's only grace was that it was slightly cheaper than an iPod and didn't need a Mac with FireWire. Although iircc this was pre USB 2.0 so not having FireWire would mean loading music took forever and a day.
The iPod allowed you to carry most, if not all, of your music collection in a package slightly larger than a deck of playing cards. And it had a fantastic interface for navigating music on the device.
This was at a time before most people had laptops and if you had a PC it was at home and used sparingly. The iPod was such a compelling mobile computing device that it drove adoption of the iMac. Apple would eventually release iTunes for Windows and USB support but that was many years later.
I had something similar. The storage was the iPod's killer feature, along with iTune's $0.99 songs. Suddenly you no longer had to buy whole albums, and you didn't have to swap out what was on your MP3 player every day when you wanted a different playlist. A 5GB hard drive in your pocket was a huge innovation then.
Indeed. Apple made (and showed) the actual reasoning in the iPod introduction. All competitors had to was do the same: https://youtu.be/bz1ZWvZBGYM?is=NFlmkhq1gWfcNVgv
- 1000 songs
- play all popular formats: mp3, wav, aiff
- Firewire for fast transfers. Download 1000 songs at 30x speed than USB
- 10 hours continuous playback on single rechargeable battery
- the size of a card deck
Not like it was magical unknown hardware components at the time. And the competition still couldn't do it for almost a decade
There were a couple things Apple had in their favor but it certainly didn't take 10 years for folks to catch up. They mostly one because they captured people's hearts and minds.
The key things Apple did right was a high speed connection and owning their software. The Creative Nomad Jukebox used the same HDD as the iPod and beat Apple to market by a year, but Creative didn't own the software. The iRiver H series of players showed up around 2004 and were comparable to iPods in terms of quality and capability, though their aesthetic wasn't polished minimalism. Their UI wasn't as good but it was still very good. Their crux was Windows and Mac support wasn't great. I had an iRiver in 2007 and was running an opensource (rockbox?) firmware to get around some of those issues.
Apple has always been good at innovating around the problem which is usually the UI or software at large. This comes in part because of their vertical integration and being able to make minor tweaks to other parts of the ecosystem (e.g. desktop OS) to dramatically improve the experience of their product. The iPods are another great example where they made minor tweaks to iOS Bluetooth that magically made the experience of using wireless headphones dramatically better.
You synced music by manually managing folders on the device. All my non technical friends were horrified by it. They didn’t have neatly organised mp3 libraries. For all of iTunes’ problems, being able to plug in a cable and hit the big “Sync” button was really simple and convenient.
The Creative Nomad Jukebox used a normal laptop 2.5" drive. The iPod used a new 1.8" drive from Toshiba that Apple bought up the whole initial run of. That's why the iPod was smaller and more pocketable, the Jukebox was more the size of a CD player.
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 want to say that Apple invented that particular design language, and prior to the original iPod nothing resembled that UI but I'm not sure.
It seems to me that the OP was either too young or not alive when the OG iPod came out, and so they're looking at it like a modern man trying to figure out caveman tools.
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.
And they could listen to it 3 times in 3 days
> QUESTION: Microsoft has announced its new iPod competitor, Zune. It says that this device is all about building communities. Are you worried?
> Steve Jobs: In a word, no. I’ve seen the demonstrations on the Internet about how you can find another person using a Zune and give them a song they can play three times. It takes forever. By the time you’ve gone through all that, the girl’s got up and left! You’re much better off to take one of your earbuds out and put it in her ear. Then you’re connected with about two feet of headphone cable.
The issue was the abysmal marketing and "me too" attitude Microsoft had (and still has).
The Zune may have been somewhat better (until the nano and iphone), but it wasn't enough better to overcome the ecosystem switching costs.
(Brown launch model here.)
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.
If there's choice, everyone goes with Linux servers.
But, are your servers Linux or Windows?
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.
If devs just want shiny flashy then MS has failed at providing that directly or through their partners. If devs are able to make credible technical reasons, year after year, that sustain IT & budgetary scrutiny, that also is a failure from MS.
Personally “being able to run docker without this bs” was credible for many years, tech that now is a de facto expectation for most .NET dev jobs and well-integrated-ish into windows and WSL.
Why should 90% of people need to deal with BIOS updates, driver updates, daily operating system updates, and blue screens of death?
Androids are probably better than iPhones. But you may lose a first date with a girl for sending a message with green bubbles instead of blue bubbles, so people buy iPhones. The iPhone is worth more than the Android, in this example.
What.the.actual.fuck. Can you expand on this? I have so many questions.
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
Two years later they introduce the Zune, which could not play "Playsforsure" music people had purchased from MSN..
They were also done with the android-apps-on-windowsphone project but dumped it because PC marketplace managers got mad at it because then devs wouldn't use their sdk. Luckily we still got the first version of WSL because of that project's partnership with that linux team.
However, what the Zune ecosystem DID have that was insane for the time, was a $10 or so monthly subscription that let you listen to and download ANY song, as long as you had Wifi, with the bonus that you could download completely unprotected MP3s of ten of those songs a month. Songs at the time were still $1 each, so this was essentially free music streaming for people who bought songs regularly, with no potential for rug pulls.
Outside of this subscription, you could loan a song to your friend, who could listen to it on their Zune like three times.
They also had a nifty procedural playlist feature.
They were trying to do social media of music! Microsoft used to be freaking nuts.
Then I got a iPod so I needed to download iTunes. I downloaded iTunes, it told me to import my music. I imported my meticulously organised collection. It duplicated every single file into the iTunes approved format (AAC?) - my meticulous collection was now less meticulous, messy even.
It caused me to swear off Apple products for decades. Though it also led me to some very basic programming in order to delete the duplicates. I was only partially successful.
Programming led me to use Linux, before I eventually moved over to Mac. I like to think this was their plan all along.
I remember getting so excited, then depressed when I realised a hobbyist teenager could never compete with the people Apple would have applying. Later seeing how bizarrely bloated iTunes for PC turned out, guess I probably could have.
I went from meticulously curated MP3 collection on Linux to letting iTunes do it for me, and I realized that the meticulous curation and hunting down album art and everything was a hobby I didn't actually love. But if you do love it, great! Different tools for different jobs.
edit: I just compared iTunes 4 and Music in Tahoe and they still have the same preference! It's funny how they clearly did a s/iTunes/Music/, resulting in the "Music/Music" dir https://kalleboo.com/linked/itunes4-vs-musictahoe.png
Having iTunes organize your music into its own folder structure was an preference you could turn off, but that option was not shown in the onboarding so it ruined many a people's meticulously organized files...
The iTunes case was also a classis UI 101 blunder combined with stupidity. If there was no iPod plugged in, the "Sync on connection" toggle in iTunes simply disappeared. First of all, when something is inapplicable, you grey it out. You don't just make it disappear.
But in this case, even greying it out would have committed the same blunder, because the default state for this behavior was YES.
So if the hard drive in your computer went bad and you installed the OS fresh on a new one, thinking that all your music was backed up on your iPod, you were right... until you plugged it in.
So, so dumb.
And finally: Apple never addressed the lack of "computer overwrites mobile" and "mobile overwrites computer," which Palm OS syncing nailed in the '90s.
This is the kind of nonsense we have been putting up with for years.
It 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 thought to myself: "I better add these two new albums to my ipod so that I can listen to them while away". I plug in the ipod, itunes loads up, I walk away. I come back 10 minutes later and it had not finished yet and I wonder what is going on. Turns out it deleted my entire 40gb library off my ipod and started re-syncing. I had to leave so I unplugged the ipod but it was basically useless at that point.
I do agree with Microsoft in general but Apple seems to be very much the same in my experience.
But then they just started dumping everything onto it and it eventually crumbled under the weight.
> 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.
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.
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.
iTunes was also unrivaled in its first versions, before it became an everything app. And syncing was pretty great before ubiquitous internet was a thing.
"Apple at its best" ... I sure hope not. But for sure, people LOVED that wheel. I would take a 4-way clicky from the Zune any day.
That’s exactly what you often do on them, when they are good at it. How would you rather browse a large library: one by one, slowly, or use a non-linear accelerator to quickly get close to where you want to be and then precisely pick your choice?
The click wheel was brilliant software and hardware, simultaneously, which is why I call it “Apple at its best”.
It could have been good software with unreliable, wobbly hardware, or robust hardware with a slight rendering delay, which would break the illusion. Instead it was sturdy, responsive and just a joy to use. Much like Apple’s trackpads, which remain surprisingly unmatched.
But I guess we have different tastes on music players.
It did have its sweet spot - jogging to an exact spot in a song, or scrolling a long list. But you do a lot more than just that on a music player. And the overall experience of the iPod was actually somewhat sub par because of the overuse of that one feature.
It's such a shame that the shitty MS products survive the ages while the great ones never gain real traction. I feel a bit sorry for the people who built such amazing stuff just to see it being cancelled and then having to work on the unsolicited background execution of the SharePoint 365 rev4.7 update manager (I made this up, but it probably exists).
Not just the app, but also the browser.
Also, in my experience the Windows Phone hardware was dodgy. The first one I bought was a Dell and failed under warranty…and the replacement failed out of warranty. Then after an LG Android, I bought one of the last Lumia’s. The camera failed just out of warranty. Then the whole thing failed while I was traveling.
So I bought an iPhone.
I end up on Android simply because of file drag and drop and an open App ecosystem which they are now trying to lock down.
I never could understand why MS would not put heavy muscle behind it. Maybe they deep down knew hardware execution was not their strong suit. People think the software was the problem, but I think if MS really believed in the product, the software side was eminently solvable.
It felt like once they dropped mobile, their whole direction become misguided. Also UWP made sense when there was also a mobile/tablet side to it, could even deploy those apps to the Xbox and it kind of worked. But then they kicked out that supporting support and suddenly they got working on trashing what good Windows still had.
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
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)
Apple never came first ... but often just at the right moment and had marketing skills to make it a new trend.
Newton.
Sure, MS launched PDAs and phone-ish devices long ago, running Windows CE and whatnot but they were awful. It's absolute bollocks that the iPhone was a splashing success because of Apple marketing. It was a splashing success because it worked spectacularly well. Random non-tech people would randomly pull out their newest purchase to show their friends. "And now it's a notepad!" "Look and now suddenly it's a calculator!" Sure, your awful HP Tablet had all that, and a call function, well before. But it sucked. It felt like using a computer while squinting, and not like a magic calculator that can turn into a notepad and then into a phone and then into an iPod.
The iPhone was a success because it worked so well. And it worked so well because the technology was there - in part because they invented it and in part because they had the taste to not bring out a shit product but wait a bit instead.
I 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.
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 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.
I was at the 2007 iPhone announcement, got hands-on a prototype in the booth and had a dev unit pre-ship. As a technology strategist for a F500 ISV, my job was to assess the changing mobile device landscape. With the iPhone I think Apple deserves significant credit for two big things: the conceptual leap to a new UX/OS and going all-in on the large touch screen. Completely sacrificing both a physical keyboard or pen was bold and controversial.
While it was the right long-term vision, the reality which often gets glossed over, is the iPhone 1 didn't deliver on the vision and early adopters struggled. It wasn't until the iPhone 3G shipped 18 months later and the app store was released that the iPhone first began to slowly fulfill it's promise. I didn't daily drive an iPhone until the 3G. In recent years, I think many look back with rose-colored glasses at the iPhone launch and give Apple even more expansive credit for the "iPhone breakthrough" than the legitimate credit they justly deserve. Of the major players at the time, Apple was the only one who could make those bold choices because they didn't have existing phone products or platform agendas to preserve.
Combining hardware and software the OS was done by many companies in the 1980s because if you wanted to sell something you had to do both and it’s been well over 36 years no one has really stepped up.
Just give 'em ATI rage and tell them they have best workstation for graphics.
We all remember Steve Balmer's comments about the iPhone when it was launched. That, without a physical keyboard, it wouldn't appeal to business users.
Yet, you can see the night and day difference between using the native keyboard and using a simulated one in games like Wordle. Whatever tricks they pulled to make the keyboard work like magic speak to the execution of the smartphone that Apple excelled at.
And that separated the iPhone from whatever came before it.
Until Apple developed it. Those early iPhones employed a lot of tricks to squeeze usability, battery life, and performance out of underpowered devices.
Prior smartphone attempts mostly applied PC-centric concepts to the device, it’s no surprise they ended up failing.
You can see the failure of Microsoft in their performance in mobile when the playing field was level Microsoft and Intel have trouble competing, you can also see it in the Surface computer efforts Microsoft has no clue.
It’s too bad SGI, Sun, Digital, Amiga, Acorn didn’t make it because you can see many elements within Apple OS from that bygone era in the hardware and software.
It was again the right time, when technology was there and Apple's skill was the ability to spot the moment when otherwise overly expensive touch screens can be cheapened by scale of production to acceptable level, had the marketing machine to sell an expensive device in millions at times, when most people were used to cheap cell phones for calls & sms.
[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...
I assume the M6 will take the crown back and then a few months later Intel/AMD will release a new chip and take that crown back again. That's the state of the world we used to expect, but it's a state that has been missing ever since the release of the M1 in 2020 until Intel finally caught up again this year.
When plugged in... This caveat is so enormous it should almost be legislated. If your computer use is at all portable, a computer that scales down to 20 - 40% of GPU power when unplugged is an enormously significant factor. So far as I'm aware (could be wrong about arm devices?) there's no non-apple laptop that operates at 100% speed on the road.
No, but they did beat 14nm like a dead horse for almost a decade. So you're not that far off.
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.
But talking this authoritatively on something without doing the reading, that's grating: https://chipsandcheese.com/p/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-matter
Thanks for your prejudice on me without knowing anything about me. In short, I'm a HPC sysadmin and programmer who works in a HPC center, separated from the actual hardware by a couple of floors.
We can discuss how transistors' heat generation doesn't discern about ISAs or being in a DAC or a cutting edge microprocessor, and we can even discuss how implementation of some functional blocks generate heat regardless of the ISA being involved. If you want we can discuss how saturating memory controllers affect pipeline saturation in processors even...
But talking this authoritatively on something with that amount of prejudice, that's grating.
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.
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.
To me people that say that x86 is slow etc. never used an x86 processor with anything other than Windows. Yes, Windows is shit and laptops that run Windows are for the same reason shit. I get it. But on an x86 system you can run other OS, and, for example, a Linux distro with well tweaked power consumption parameters can get you even 3 days of battery life, or even more.
The point is that Windows keeps almost always the CPU above the minimum frequency, because it's full of useless background services, because programs are not well optimized for the hardware (to maximize backward compatibility they don't compile target x86_64 v3 for example and thus don't leverage on features and instructions available on new CPU or fall in the emulation case I've mentioned initially), and other reasons.
With a Linux distro you can keep the CPU at 600Mhz while web browsing, you can even turn off cores that you don't need, and the battery with this configuration surely lasts ages (at that point it becomes more predominant the consumption of other peripherals such as the display).
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.
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...
The real question is whether all these Intel Windows laptops spin their fans at full speed when doing absolutely nothing. That’s something I can never go back to. I do some light gaming on my M2 Pro MBP and it gets hot when trying to push 120 fps. But my Lenovo Legion (that’s now collecting the dust) is so loud I could hear it through headphones.
I'm still traumatized by my windows laptop randomly turning on in my backpack, heating itself up and draining the battery because of windows.
Aside from that I'm now used to MacOS for my daily needs aside from gaming so windows laptop have to do a lot of work convincing me of getting back to them.
Of course you can beat the entry level MacBook Neo by comparing it to larger, more powerful, more expensive laptops.
The M5 is an entire family with a range of performance. Intel/AMD have done a lot to improve performance but they’re not beating the high end M5 chips on performance or battery life yet.
It's also not hard to find a Windows laptop that beats the M5 on battery life. Single-thread performance is the only remaining measure where the M5 is king.
This is admittedly the measure that most correlates with perceived responsiveness and quality of user experience
Can you count how many (out of 9) measurements the windows laptop beat the Neo in that article?
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"
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'm very very surprised that Xiaomi matches Apples speed even with the newest release, its not diminishing Xiaomis success.
I enjoy it because of progress, not because of Apple.
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.
That, combined with sleek marketing and a good eye for product design, and building what was the best smartphone by far (IMO) in the world at the time it was first released, snowballed into Apple becoming the behomoth it is today.
Great quality.
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.
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.
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.
Xiamoi is a huge company and is a commonly known brand. They’ve been making chips for a long time. They didn’t start a few months ago and catch up with Apple on their first try.
I mean you expect some company which did some android rom, a smartphone, IoT Robots stuff a car?! and now makes a chip which can compete with apple.
They're using ARM designed cores. So it's more like Apple just isn't as far ahead of ARM as some people claim.
Why would you assume that? ARM has been a chip design firm for 35 years...
Oh i have soooo many news for you!
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.
Or, Apple bought P.A. Semi and gave them the money and manpower they needed and they made a great job of designing CPUs and GPUs.
- Apple: We have matched Intel in CPU performance thanks to this new PowerPC! (Shows ad that uses carefully handpicked benchmarks to suggest that the PowerPC is actually faster when it really isn’t on average)
- Intel: Oh, we just found a 30% clock rate increase in the pocket of our other fab pants.
- AMD: Hold my beer, I have the DEC Alpha guys making an x86 CPU… How about 64-bit while at it.
5.25GHz Pentium 4s, intentionally lower binned Athlons, the era your CPU got obsoleted the moment you booted it for the first time.
I don't remember early 90s much. I was too young back then. I don't remember much stuff from that era. But late 90s, early 2000s.
Oh, boy.
P.S.: AMD64 was a great sucker punch though. One of the professors in our university rejected to believe and got mad when he learnt that Intel licensed AMD64 from AMD, heh.
> The 12" G4 laptop was infamous for slowly cooking your junk with their titanium shell.
That's my experience with every unibody Intel MacBook as well, but not with Apple Silicon.
Now we boot an embedded microcontroller (or CPU) which boots the main CPU which boots another OS semi-persistently to boot the main OS (if it's allowed).
Sometimes there are other processors needs to be up to allow processor to continue booting as well (these are mostly servers, but eh).
What OS could I have loaded onto my Macintosh SE/30 that wasn't from Apple?
Still supported, by the way. Does Apple support your Macintosh SE/30 still? I believe Linux was also supported.
Local AI isnt useful for agent stuff.
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.
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!
My YouTube will load 0.00001s faster!
I know Apple do some special hardware software integration magic too.
But come on - if they had to use intel’s fab - their chips would be terrible. The reason the m6 is faster is largely because TSMC invented a smaller process node.
If they made it on the same node as last time it Would basically be the same speed.
Apple are not wizards. They did the bulk of the work making m1 and the subsequent chips have just been on faster nodes
If they made the new m6 but with the fab tech from m1 how much faster do you think it would actually be? My guess is not much.
Apple: our CEO is gay.
Samsung: our CEO is also gay and waterproof.
I believe I said the same thing down below somewhere, but it's too buried to find now.
I yield the floor to no one when it comes to pessimism, but that's incredible.
E.g how is the perf/$ vs Wildcat lake
I kinda have to link it now, so uhh here's a random PDF: https://www.hec.edu/sites/default/files/documents/Computing%...
https://commission.europa.eu/news-and-media/news/safer-and-m...
In contrast, humans tend to paste me the same barely-relevant macro over and over, no matter how much time I spend explaining my issue.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/the-digital-self/202...
ELIZA beat the Turing test and then everyone forgot about it. Humans are just really terrible at recognising robots.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect
It turns out the limiting factor isn't how sophisticated algorithms are, it's how gullible humans are.
No AI would pass this test with experienced judges.
Edit: Also doesn't say anything about who the human test subject is
You can always say “oh well these judges don’t have the experience to catch this type of AI.
The fact that you have to insert this qualifier, to ensure you always have a way to discredit the test, pretty much shows to me that we’re beyond it.
Though we're pretty good at sizing up a person's emotional balance/maturity and competence at familiar tasks. So maybe have an old blacksmith watch the AI/robot interact with horse owners for a while, then shoe their horses, and see how well it does.
https://www.writingsbyraykurzweil.com/a-wager-on-the-turing-...
Those rules are fairly reasonable, at least as a start.
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?
[2] https://www.metaculus.com/questions/11861/date-when-ai-passe...
Not sure where you're quoting from but if it's the metaculus question comments, many of them are from 2023. The consensus is it will resolve in 2029. I believe it will not resolve before 2035.
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 there are elements showing lowering of performance and expectation.
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.
If I sold just the two sticks of RAM in it right now, it’d pay for nearly half of the total cost.
I still have it, but never installed it because I only use ECC memory in my desktops. I'm saving it for a future Desktop in case memory prices never fall again.
How many people actually use fable over opus? How far are we up the diminishing returns curve, and will their customers even care?
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 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
- Suppliers that memory companies depend on JIT are entangled and go under, halting production or stalling capacity increases
- Downstream suppliers / distributors for not vertically integrated memory companies go under, and there is a shortage of finished product ready for consumer use even though there is an excess of memory chips
- Memory producers / fabs can’t handle the depressed demand and go under / have to halt production, alleviating the demand glut for the surviving suppliers, who have less competition. Coordinating a cartel becomes easier when there are fewer suppliers and becomes more desirable now that everyone realizes it’s a matter of survival.
There are also plenty of good reasons to think prices will go down if demand is depressed, but it does seem possible for prices to go up
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.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing
[2] https://moginlawllp.com/dram-antitrust-suit-ai-memory-supply...
Could you provide more details about the Epyc + DDR4 server?
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.
Basically everyone that makes memory is building new fabs, meanwhile I'm not sure how much longer AI datacenter demand for ram will last. I think the decrease in AI ram demand and the new fabs will likely coincide leading to a collapse in pricing.
That is, of course, assuming the memory manufacturers don't pull their favorite trick and collude.
For 1, AI datacenter builders have said that they have more equipment than they have places to put them. Leaving a ton of hardware shelved while you wait for datacenters to build out is bad business to say the least.
For 2, I think we are nearing saturation for the usefulness of AI. I certainly could be wrong, but I don't really foresee there to be a bunch of new exciting usages of AI that will ultimately justify the continued buildout.
Unless some other breakthrough in AI happens, like applying AI to some other large market.
Overall i think that AI is here to stay, if anything it will become more common.
Maybe in ten years we’ll all have some 256gb ai machine at home, like we most (all?) of us have AC.
If that happens, hopefully the ram price comes back to earth.
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.
I also know someone that thought about making a SaaS for his specific niche he works in, he asked me if I ever used Claude then told me his project.
Yes, most people will never do it because they're not the type of people that are self-motivated and courageous enough to dive into something with confidence to see how it goes.
But probably, as more people build stuff and it makes headlines that X person built Y service and is making Z$$ per month and he can't even write a hello world to save his life, a lot more people will try it out.
Or they’re just not interested. Just look around to see how many things that people are doing that you have no interest into. That’s the same disinterest people have towards programming and sys admin.
If person X didn’t contribute anything but a prompt, he probably wont be able to charge much.
First guy I mentioned spent a month tinkering, testing what he could, getting a basic high level understanding of the problem space to understand why his prompts didn't work, etc
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!
This is why ROI is so critical, and I’d argue that picture looks a lot less optimistic for it to pan out functionality wise today than it did in March, when everyone was being forced to use it. Faced with millions of dollars in token costs and gains not materializing, the question is more about the overall usefulness of LLMs as a matter of returns.
We do seem to be spending trillions of dollars to drown our public spaces in grey goo
https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter3/transportat...
...
> I don’t think anyone truly knows when, but it will happen.
Do you know what cyclical means ... ?
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.
These times are exciting and rough seas make good sailors. Find your path forward.
I'd rather go to the library and read a book.
I'm writing the best music of my life, realizing games and art projects I never had time for, and writing higher quality software in addition to dramatically more of it. Who has time for pablum?
How exactly are you using these tools that you have that experience?
You have become a spectator.
You have agency and can choose your own adventures. If you don't like something, don't do it.
"Find your path forward!" he shouted with glee, as he ran toward the cliff.
- 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.
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.
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.)
But my personal observations of AI is that it's producing more and more of the same stuff and not moving the front forward much. The human innovation and invention seems to be lost.
Innovation with AI is happening as well, but it obviously will need more time. It's already being used to diagnose tumors and disease earlier in the process, which will improve outcomes for patients, but obviously it's going to take time to see the results of those efforts.
I think of AI (especially self hosted) as the most helpful computer assistant that can do things I otherwise wouldn't dedicate time to do. I have a massive media library that is a mess of naming conventions and want to clean it up. Writing specific scripts and processes for doing that is possible, but I don't want to invest the time. Or I can ask the local Qwen model to go through and do it for me with a single prompt, "Please rename these files in each folder following this specific format, and when needed access this local service to look up the additional information needed" and then extend that to when I dump new media in, it's automatically organized and renamed. Works pretty darn well and I spent a whopping 5 minutes getting it going, rather than the hours of writing scripts and doing it by hand.
And the median American is also richer in real terms, both in terms of wealth and in terms of income.
Of course, that all assumes that you use a reasonable measure of inflation that’s stable, well-designed, and applied methodically and consistently over many decades.
Alternatively, you can cherry pick data points and go based on vibes, which lets claim whatever you want!
Too bad the measure that everyone points to is far from stable¹; BLS's various CPIs² have been consistently and substantially modified over time, and not for purposes aligned with the interests of consumers³.
¹ https://www.bls.gov/cpi/additional-resources/historical-chan...
² https://www.shadowstats.com/article/cpi-glossary
³ https://www.shadowstats.com/article/no-438-public-comment-on...
That's one big plus.
Compared to the prices of storage today, when people are presumably buying the product, it's actually a bad price.
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.
You might be able to boot from the internal drive, install/upgrade the external drive, then boot from it.
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
"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.
Please say more? Is it because it is a one-time cost, unlike a recurring subscription of Claude/Codex?
Local models will be that much better in a year, so unless you have to have a top-of-the-line local rig today (the argument goes), stick with Claude for another year.
I believe that the CPUs are actually limited by ram bandwidth more than the neural engine right when it comes to LLM processing?
Maybe the M7 introduces something new to get around the current ram bandwidth problems on the non-Ultra chips.
Chip BW (GB/s) GPU Cores Q4_0 Prompt Q4_0 Gen
M4 Pro (20c) 273 20 439.78 50.74
M4 Max (40c) 546 40 885.68 83.06
M5 Pro (20c) 307 20 ~1500 to 1700 ~56
M5 Max (40c) 614 40 ~3000 to 3500 ~92
While an older M-series might run a matmul or dot product kernel just fine the M5 can run them much faster.
Apple's biggest bottleneck for real-world inference is prefill processing.
So could the M7 actually include an AFM 3B model, alongside a generic neural engine?
Apple is better off building chips with generalizable TPUs (or equivalent) so they can upgrade/patch models.
Or you could lease an M5 max/ultra until the M7 equivalent comes out. At least in the US a leasing option is available.
If you encrypt from day one then a lease isn't much different.
Another note on this, it's likely the M7 ultra will be released around 6 months after the M7 Max, if the M1 and M5 are taken as reference. So the M7 ultra may be delayed until early 2028.
The phones are watches are primarily sold on annual leases through carriers. And no one is buying them for the chips, it's all camera and form factor.
The macs, on the other hand, can more easily swap between chips in manufacturing. And the form factor is pretty static. So Apple, in a race to have the best chip in the field at any given time, is just releasing them as soon as they're ready.
I agree the whole "m5 max > m6" is confusing, but I think they figure only the nerds who learn the specifics are going to care anyway.
So, on the mini the RAM upgrade runs at 25$ per GB on all tiers, the same as the Studio therefore the upgrade to 512 will probably cost 6400$.
The fully maxed out Apple Studio then will be 24699$. It's 17199$ if you don't upgrade the storage(1TB).
Nevertheless I itch to have one :)
EDIT: or buy AAPL. If I had bought Apple stock instead of buying a Mac LC II in 1992, then I would have about $2 million in Apple stock.
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.
There are both cheaper and faster options out there.
If treasuries “fail” we have a different class of problem.
???
30 Day SEC Yield as of Aug 24, 2026: 3.61%
12m Trailing Yield as of Aug 24, 2026: 3.74%
https://www.ishares.com/us/products/314116/ishares-0-3-month...
1.39% might not seem like a lot, but that's off by more than a quarter.
Our assumptions may differ - and that’s ok... The monthly costs may go down too.
That means for context under ~5k or so ttft (time to first token) it's going to respond faster than Claude. If the answer is less than ~1k I think the request finishes sooner. And it's ~claude 4.5 or 4.6 level intelligence.
I've had it work for more than a day on a pi.dev "loop engineering" project involving writing software.
Plus privacy. Plus offline.
For general inference there’s no ROI that makes this work vs subscriptions.
25k for computer now, plus 9-10% sales tax, plus operating cost, plus time and cost for R&D tinkering with models, harnesses, and infra (assuming highly capable engineering talent that can get paid for your human inference) vs a HEAVILY subsidized subscription at 200 per month with free R&D has a pretty long ROI (15 years?)
At API costs, it’s like 6 months if you’re heavy on inference. For training, specialized models will have their own ROI that makes this worthwhile. Then debate renting capacity and the platform to choose
If the pace of hardware change is what the jensens of the world say, then the rents on existing hardware will decline.
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 wish I hadn’t just calculated that.
Maybe they had the cash on hand, maybe they didn’t. Assuming they are in the family formation stage of life with young kids, an outlier risk appetite would be required to sleep well at night.
In RTP (NC), a ~$400k house at 5% down is $20k
You get what you pay for.
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)
problem solved /s
Put together a similar build with a couple of rtx 6000 Ada cards and Apple's price tag suddenly looks pretty damn reasonable
They’re very different things.
The more logical argument to me is that Apple uses its upgrade price points as more than just direct BOM and rather as a proxy for things that are amortized across all their sales like support/warranty/etc so higher SKUs subsidize the costs of the lower ones.
And there are plenty of places in the US where you can buy a house for $150-$200k. Maybe not places you want to live for one reason or another, but they're there.
16GB $239 - $15/GB
32GB $800 - $25/GB
64GB $1,600 - $25/GBI 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 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
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.
It’s a bit depressing because it means that if I ever feel forced to switch my daily driver, it won’t come without a dump truck load of friction, frustration, and lost productivity, which I’ve validated by using the various Linux desktops on secondary machines.
It's 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.
You can't expect any system, even the most configurable ones, to be ready out of the box to everyone's particular nitpicking without a minimum of effort.
https://pointieststick.com/2025/10/04/a-mac-like-experience-...
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.
The most disruptive thing in Omarchy is not the keyboard, it's the tiling WM in my opinion.
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.
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).
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.
Naturally, the benefit for Linux is still the variety available in distributions. While IBM's RHEL and Canonical's Ubuntu may adopt some questionable stuff, Slackware, Devuan, Omarchy, and such likely won't.
Can you elaborate at all?
Between windows in a program is command+~
It is even more frustrating that this behavior is somewhat inconsistent, with some applications allowing this and others not (although it is more often the latter).
I made a workaround solution here with minimal setup/overhead: https://github.com/dainank/apple-click-through but I do wish someday this could be configurable in the OS as a setting.
The apps it works in are probably written in Cocoa née "Yellow Box" (allegedly so named because Bill Gates stated that rather than write apps for NeXT APIs he would instead....)
The way I fix it when using my Mac these days is to only use apps written using Objective-C and so forth.
Not being able to upgrade the SSD or the ram is a big issue, not so much on a portable laptop.
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.
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.
What makes this expensive & sell well is it's not very fungible at the moment. Where else are you going to get 512 GB of high speed memory with a well supported accelerator attached that you can throw in the corner of anyone's home and not really have them notice? There are plenty of lesser options, plenty of noiser/power hungry options, plenty of harder to support options, but not really something in direct competition at the moment. Even the next rounds of the integrated AMD/Nvidia solutions are only targeting 196 GB of much slower memory and compute.
Closest competition I see right now are stacks of 2-4 connected DGX Sparks, similar lowish speed high mem, and about the same cost/gig.
Its cheaper than Nvidia AI hardware.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ~420The assumption previously used was that you can run a Sol level model on an M6 or whatever hardware $20k gives you. That is not true, it was an assumption made to show that even giving your own hardware every reasonable advantage it still loses.
Lets compare buying tokens of the best model you might run on your own hardware (still being unrealistic in favor of your own hardware) vs that same class of model on the market. I think one of the best models you might be able to run is GLM 5.4, but lets just look at chinese models generally:
$20k workstation, best case: $15k M5 Ultra 512GB, 36-month amortization, ~$440/mo. Runs a GLM-5.3-class model at ~30 tok/s. Saturated 24/7 it produces roughly 58M output tokens/month.
Buying those tokens:
DeepSeek V4 Pro @ $0.87/M $50
Kimi K2.6 @ $4.00/M $232
GLM-5.3 @ $4.40/M $255
Kimi K3 @ $15.00/M $870 (does not fit on the box)
And keep in mind I am giving 'your own hardware' no overhead or maintenance cost, despite your condition that it's in a large corporate environment. In reality corporate IT would make it almost impossible to set up and your would need huge lead times to buy the hardware and get it installed.
So yes, at that speed for sure. But if the speed goes up? or the ability to batch at the same speed goes up? The economics start to shift. The gap is much closer, and you'd end up with a box you can still use or sell later.
Subscription pricing is still the best though!
Where you might win by owning your own hardware: - Hardware costs go up, and thus api costs go up. You've locked in your pricing. - Chinese/Open models become illegal/hard to access the way we do now. OpenAI and Anthropic are trying very hard to build a regulatory capture scheme to do this. I think they will be unsuccessful because China just won't participate.
For agentic coding, ~90% of the cost comes from cached input tokens. This cost increases quadratically with the session length. If sessions go near 1M context, the number of cached input tokens can easily exceed 1B in a day.
GLM-5.3 @ $0.26/M x 1000 = $260/day
This is the math to use.
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 have agents running 24/7 doing research, in fact I would argue this how they will be used for most programming tasks in the near future. For chatting, I agree local inference makes no sense. But for tasks that run continually, I'm not so sure. Personal computers took a while, local inference will too, but I think it will happen.
I'm not trying to cure cancer, although I do hope people who are use LLMs. ;)
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.
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.
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...
Put another way: If $25k is the full extent of the start up capital costs, and operating costs are very low, that is a much cheaper business to start than most! The question is whether this is actually a useful model for a revenue generating business. I think that remains to be seen.
My guess is that there will be a few hits (which we'll hear a lot about - especially when someone actually pulls off "the first single-person unicorn", which I do suspect will happen someday) and a huuuge number of misses, which we won't hear much about.
This is, sadly, probably a foreign concept to a lot of people who have only worked at companies where hardware purchases are viewed as something to minimize and everyone is stuck with the same low spec laptops that the finance department picked out. At companies where someone might have a legitimate use for a $20K machine, their fully loaded costs (not their salary) are $300K or more, and other teams like sales are spending thousands of dollars per week on things like travel and hotels for their job, spending $20K on a computer that’s going to last several years is not a hard choice.
I'll find other ways to use the power though, opencode or maybe start working on more video projects.
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.
For which configuration, though?
Apple computers tend to have excellent resale value, and Mac Minis/Studios have the least depreciation of them all. I understand the benefits to both taxes and cash flow, but boy is Apple winning big on those lease offers for Studios.
consumer electronics has literally never been an asset.
> Apple computers tend to have excellent resale value
do you think the new leasing category might change that? hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
edit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1vxzg6v/apple_i...
not getting on that bandwagon but wasn't that not the most demanding game as its a just a nonstop cutscene.
It's a very deliberate choice when if it doesn't make sense to gamers.
* it's critically acclaimed (86 metacritic, 10/10 IGN)
* whatever person decided this likely knows nothing about video games
* most importantly it's a modern game in UE5 that's COMING NATIVELY TO MAC, including to the App Store
What would you have put?
The financial aspects don’t work however: I can learn and experiment with what I have for local models, and I pay as I go on FireWorks.ai for open model inferencing and no matter how much I use this service my monthly bill is between $10 and $40 and much faster than any reasonable home rig.
Hybrid ‘small local’ and buying inference is the way I choose.
A 4 GPU linux box with 3090s, which are $1500 a piece right now, will blow this thing out of the water. Even 2x3090 rig will run most of the good local models like Gemma4:31b at 100+ tok/sec
The VRAM of the GPUs are MUCH faster than the unified ram within Apple Silicon. The only difference is the initial model load, which takes longer from disk to VRAM due to PCIE limitations, but once the model is loaded, GPUs can prefill and and generate tokens way faster than any Apple Silicon.
So is your desire to upgrade to mac because you just aren't aware of how to set up a GPU rig, or is it something else?
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.
* 3090 memory bandwidth: 936 GB/s
* Maximum NVLink bandwidth between two 3090s: ~56 GB/s one way
* Maximum PCIe v4 bandwidth between two 3090s: 31.5 GB/s one way
* M5 Ultra memory bandwidth: 1.2 TB/s
I know that memory bandwidth is only one factor influencing LLM performance, but this seems like a major problem if your goal is to run larger models that won't fit on one 3090 - and even those fitting on two 3090s with NVLink will be pretty restricted.
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. ;)
You also don't need to run the models 24/7, nor is your computer gonna be doing inference all the time when you are coding.
Mac Mini + MacBook Neo w/ ssh can be a better setup than MacBook Pro for many people.
Nevermind that Apple still insists on providing base systems with only 512GB of non-upgradable SSD. The equivalent spec mini (4TB/64/10G) is almost $5k for half the VRAM. Not as good a CPU compared to the M5/6 but you also get 20 cores and full CUDA.
The problem I'm having now is that no models are targeting RAM of that size. Everything is either much smaller, targeting laptops, or much larger, targeting hardware well out of reach of enthusiasts.
Please, AI people, start making models targeting 128GB machines again. The last interesting one was Qwen 3.5 122B.
Should bench better than Opus 4.7.
Something like this would give you three concurrent sessions, each with 240k token context:
sudo sysctl iogpu.wired_limit_mb=110000
llama-server -hf unsloth/Qwen3.8-27B-GGUF:BF16 -c 786432 --parallel 3 -ngl 99 -fa onDocker on Linux is miles better and efficient.
Window management and Desktop environment on Linux is whatever I want it to be.
Open source gives me freedom: I (LLMs) can investigate/fix/change anything since it's all opensource. Don't like round borders? Easy. Want to fix a bug or improve a behaviour? Not impossible, often easy.
In US its $4000 upgade so $25 for 1GB.
Also:
> 512GB memory option for M5 Ultra coming late October
New Hampshire, Oregon, Montana, Alaska, Delaware.
If you want to comfortably afford this gen you had to trade options on memory stocks...
Which one is it you can run local models on? I suppose the NPU only.
For tinkering and learning, it's been great. Tie it into something like Hermes and you have a pretty powerful AI assistant in a box. And when you need to step up your model, you just do something like OpenRouter and it makes it pretty easy.
Got the recommendation from these articles: https://www.xda-developers.com/qwen-3-8-27b-reverse-engineer... https://www.xda-developers.com/lenovo-thinkstation-pgx-revie...
But haven't had a chance to try it myself.
Im currently measuring a pareto front in J/tok in order to set power limits of this card without sacrificing too much performance. Since we are talking about full power draw of ~480W which is fine during the day (with solar panels) but during night when the sun doesn't shine (even with a battery) I'd like to limit this a little bit.
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..)
M1 pro: 16 GPU cores, 200GB/s memory bandwidth
M6: 12 GPU cores, 170GB/s memory bandwidth
Now the AI compute is over 5x more. So it should probably be possible to make models that perform better on the M6, but the same models just won't work.
But the M5 pro mac mini will wipe the floor with the base M6, as most of its stats are double that of the M6 chip. Should be double the performance easily.
Perhaps also relevant: the M5 pro mac mini should have very similar to double the performance to the Nvidia DGX Spark, assuming the model fits the memory.
So that is probably the chip it should be compared to for a quick guess about benchmark results.
You might expect the M5 Ultra to produce 50 t/s from Qwen 3.8 27B with a good context length.
These are 2nm. While normally pretty cynical, I am experiencing one of those "what a time to be alive" moments.
why would the industry keep using the 'nm' unit when it no longer measure the actually etched features, how is the number even picked? :D
/facepalm
That being said: you might want to consider at least 2TB storage. Having 256GB RAM to fit models is less useful when you can only store a 3 or 4 large models on your disk. The M4 -> M5 transition doubled the drive bandwidth (at least for the MacBook Pro, I'd assume the Studio is no different) making them extra nice for loading large models. Then again, you can always add an external NVMe drive over thunderbolt, so the tradeoff is less straightforward than with a portable MBP.
In EU you also have 14 days to return products bought online, for any reason.
The prices are ridiculous though. I may just keep rolling with my Windows 10 setup.
Today I entered this new M4 mini's serial as a trade in for the M6 base mini, and the retail price went from $1249 CAD to $824 "once trade-in received". That's the automatic estimate, so basically I'd be paying twice for an upgrade...
I plan on maximizing my residual student benefits, and taking advantage of education pricing.
I edit 4K ProRes and H.265 footage, sometimes with multicam (up to 4 streams) and color adjustments, titles, etc. It's only after stacking 3-5 effects before things can stutter, really.
Or if you try doing something CPU-intense in the background _while_ running some heavy creative software. I just don't do that.
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."
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?
Interesting times, to say the least!
Not that I want it to happen, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple could get away with even higher prices today. Like 50% more retail on everything. They are holding the line, but I wonder for how long and why. They can pretty much charge what they want.
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.)
Anybody knows?
Just to clarify, Neural Accelerators have nothing to do with Neural Engine.
A m4 mac mini is better than al of these per dollar, msrp adjusted.
Hopefully by the end of the decade China figures out manufacturing at scale and fixes this.
Depending on the use case for known processes the LLM requirements are much, much, simpler and lower to make and keep it more predictable.
It's rather interesting that Apple (and Arm) are blazing the trail while Intel is seemingly left in the dust. Maybe not entirely on raw performance, but definitely on performance per watt.
I think Intel will rise again.
Why choose the worst game of the year? Just because it's made by the daughter of Larry Ellison?
I’m not claiming this title was made by GenAI. I’m saying something much more insulting: that the human artists who made it have no talent.
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.
Mixtape's story isn't interesting, nor are the characters. The protagonist has a superiority complex based on her musical taste, she doesn't have an arc and doesn't evolve/grow by the end. The supporting cast is either annoying or a non-entity. For a game grounded in reality, the characters don't act much like real people.
I think this type of game had its time in the spotlight and then people got bored by it. Same thing happened to point-and-click adventure games and Telltale-style narrative games.
She's been the co-founder and major backer of Annapurna for a decade.
She's not a developer, she's a publisher, and this game is one of the tons of games Annapurna has put out over a decade.
I get that Annapurna is a lightning rod of politics due to ellison and is increasingly under scrutiny for many debates but they are a mainstay of the industry, hardly a blow in, and like it or not, a lot of the games industry and media really like these kinda of artistic pieces, with this being yet another instance of the age old walking simulator debate.
It should be judged on its own merits. Not it's Annapurna link and it's not a shock to see it come up in an artsy Apple Mac hipster circle.
It's not even in the top 5000, because it is objectively terrible. People would rather play the original Life is Strange one more time (despite a remaster being out), than play this game.
At some point you really have to start getting suspicious why it keeps coming up.
The number of reviews vs. number of actual players online doesn't make sense when compared to peers in its genre either. It has a similar number of reviews as Life is Strange Remastered, but it loses to the 4 years old re-release of an 11 years old story-based game by an order of magnitude. For a genre that that has extremely top-heavy player count charts this doesn't make sense.
Funnily enough Life is Strange Remastered had a bit of a revival around that game's release, probably because people decided they'd rather play LiS.
Entertainment media entertaining nobody is just objectively bad at its job and the blatant astroturfing and nepo-baby-pampering adds an unsavory dimension to it.
It is a 3 hour long game with 4k or so reviews.
Life is strange original has 70K reviews and is 14 hours long.
The remaster has 4000+ reviews and again, is 14 hours long. These games are also all time favourites that fans do replay from time to time. If has more replayability than mixtape, despite it being fairly linear.
A 3 hour one time only game does not retain players on the charts like a game that takes multiple play sessions to finish. Or a game like "tennis elbow" which has far lower max concurrent (like, nowhere near the concurrent max mixtape has) but is a sim game that if it's your jam you will repeatedly come back to.
Its very simple - it's not a game for you, and you have to understand that these types of games absolutely have their niche fandoms who love this kind of stuff.
There is no conspiracy here, artsy titles like this have always, across all mediums, got a disproportional critical appreciation vs more traditional titles.
It's just the same old story. Yes people do like these games. No they are not the majority. Yes you can just ignore it, no it's not a conspiracy.
And the player numbers still don't make sense. If you want to compare to a game from the same publisher that was actually good, look at "What Remains of Edith Finch". Released a decade ago, still 4x Mixtapes's player count, roughly the same length, but somehow no 20 video game magazines falling over themselves to give it 10/10 ratings.
You can slap as many 10/10 ratings and astroturfed reviews on it as you want, but I've played too many of these games to not recognize this as below average in its weight class (i.e. price). It's maybe a 6/10, carried by its presentation and vibe, which are okay if you're in the mood for it. And to give it that kind of score I'm looking past its most cringe-inducing moments, immature writing, and bland story - which is being extremely charitable considering it's a game that should be carried by its writing, but isn't.
The only way you can enjoy that game is if you haven't been spoiled by better titles yet - because you've probably not played many narrative-based titles, or maybe not played many video games at all. If it's one of the only video games you've ever played, that fact alone would've made it somewhat exciting. The first time you've had cotton candy it was great as well, but now that you have more developed taste, you probably won't consider it haute cuisine.
I'm sure there's literally dozens of people who actually enjoyed it, and good for them, but we need to have some standards if we're to have any at all. And "well someone out there ought to like it" is not an argument.
tl;dr: If this game is truly one of the best games of all time - as reviews would have you believe - then we need to recalibrate the scale. There are hundreds of games in its genres one should pick up before Mixtape. It only stands out for being pretty.
What was surprising was to showcase a game that would run on a potato as the "look it's a capable gaming machine" segment. While you could have choose BG3, any newer AC, The Last of Us remasters etc. all of which are a much better fit. Of course they don't have the name of Larry Ellison associated with it.
That's wild!
Edit: never mind, 2.5G is now the default, so you'll probably need more than 40 people to saturate that with streaming video.
This may depend on the size of your library. I tried installing Jellyfin on a Synology NAS, which runs Plex just fine, and it ran so poorly it was basically unusable. It “worked”, but it was painful.
I thought it would be fine, because Plex has no issues, but it was painful. Every client I tried on the AppleTV was equally painful, and I didn't even try using a client until making sure all the metadata was downloaded and setup via the web UI. I was very deliberate and did one thing at a time, spending a whole day on it (mostly waiting and browsing to different screens to force metadata to get downloaded and cached).
With everyone saying Jellyfin can run on a Pi, I would think it would be better optimized for low-end hardware.
Just amazing engineering push, the competition got the message and we benefit.
Have we cracked 100 yet.
When we crack 100 tok/s at 2M context for <$10K I’ll buy one.
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.
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.
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)
Yep, Siri AI; they’re doing it in public.
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.
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 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...
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.
But you get a generic computer and much more RAM.
And you lose a couple of organs.
It would take Apple one or two engineers to make Linux life much easier on macs. But Linux is outside their walled garden so it's ignored.
My Mac Mini is strictly a headless server for llama.cpp.
I use a Linux workstation.
If I were limited to use Mac hardware , I would install Linux in VMware Fusion and work from there.
My old 3090 is typically significantly faster (almost 2x token/s) than my M4 Max 128GB machine, as long as the model fits in the 24GB of VRAM.
In most situations it's a better idea to just buy tokens. But there are definitely cases when that's not an option. And then a machine like the M5 Ultra can allow you to do things locally for a fairly limited budget. And in a simpler package to manage than a machine with multiple GPUs.
* the iPhone * the iPad * apple watch * airpods * unified memory laptops and computers
Those are all products that either created a category or changed that industry.
They weren't the first smart phone, tablet, smart watch, or true wireless earbuds. They did a damn fine job making each of those though. I am typing this on a my work macbook wearing AirPods, and AppleWatch, listening to audio on my iPhone. Apple does a really good job with their products.
Realizing how surrounding by Apple I am...
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?
That's faster than majority of GPUs available today: 5090 ~1.8TB 5080 1TB 5070 0.72TB My R9700 0.64TB :(
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.
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?
Misery loves company? Fuck off.
You are the one defending a company that deliberately makes its own shit unrepairable so it can shake people down for $800 on a 7-year-old laptop, then acts shocked when anyone wants actual competition instead of this locked-down ransom model. That’s not me being miserable. That’s you simping for planned obsolescence and calling it principle. You’re the classic white knight who gets bullied and then turns around defending the bully. Any chance that’s your whole personality?
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.
Can we please kill the xcode. It is worst pile of garbage I have to use just to develop ios app.
I was going to stop making low effort comments, but, come on, you have to agree Apple started making those first.
What’s the point?
Massive. I feared it would only be up to 1x the speed of an M5 /s
Is this a joke?
>Additionally, M5 Ultra features a massive amount of high-bandwidth unified memory, up to 512GB
Now we're talking. But at what cost?
"M6 also introduces a Dual 16-core Neural Engine, providing up to 2x the peak compute over previous generations to make on-device AI workflows run even faster" .
256 memory gets you to like 11k. So like 15-20k.
and 512GB is so 2025.
Give us 1TB version. Where is the competitive spirit?
To be fair, where is the competitor at this form factor?
FWIW, Ollama, LM Studio and Lemonade (and oMLX) also wrap Apple's MLX framework.
It's the Hardware, Software and Services in combination. None would work without the other (to reach the scale apple is)
More specifically, they're a hardware dongle company first