I'm currently on a marathon to keep my M1 Pro running until the M7 Pro/Max is available. Not sure if I'll make it, but I'm not eager to pay $6000+ for a decent spec dev computer, until I really have to
I'm loving my M1 Macbook Air still, and only a few weeks away from six years of use Sometimes it lags a bit when I'm running a macOS VM, and all the coding agent VMs, so I'm kind of interested in going to 32GB of RAM, but honestly this computer is still faster than any of my laptops that came before, even with the visual atrocity of Liquid Glass.<p>I'll go and look at this new box, drool a little, and realize that I'd get more personal utility from donating $3k (or whatever the trade in delta is) to a charity than upgrading my computer.
I got a second hand M1 air like two years ago for 200usd with 1tb hdd and 16gb ram. I got it after my intel Air died after about..12 years? (Edit: the ssd died, which is removable… but literally had a plane to catch). All my pros have died within a few years. Air all the way. Never looking back.
I wonder if this is from not trying to get maximum performance, and instead focusing on efficiency? But I've noticed this too. I definitely prefer the Air form factor over larger models as the primary benefit, but the durability seems to be a big benefit too. Fewer ports, thinner shell that seals tighter and can't flex as much due to the curved metal instead of flat surfaces... everything about it just seems like a better design.
Yeah the formfactor, the noise, the heat… even the performance seems better except for what, benchmarks..?
No fans though. I like being able to crank them full blast. I'm not sure this pro would ever actually run the fans all out with my usage with the existing fan curve. Apple always favors it running quiet and hot, but I don't mind loud and prefer cool palms. I grew up with far more noisy rigs.
> All of my pros have died within a few years<p>What are you doing to them?<p>I still have MBPs from 2015 and 2018 that have not 'died'.
Just use. There were two models that had issues with the gpu desoldering, 2012 and 2015 iirc? I was lucky enough to have them. I put the mobos in the oven (180deg for seven minutes?) and that would fix it. For about a month… and then 2 weeks.. and then… I actually have a 2018 that I borrowed from a friend after my 2013 Air ssd gave up, it is still working I think, but its twice as slow, at least as my Air was. Its so weird. The Air stayed ‘snappy’ even after my friends Pro’s would become too sluggish. Maybe because I never update ;)
I freaking hate liquid-glass UI Apple has "forced" onto us. No freaking way to disable it. I hate it so much.
There's a slider to reduce the liquidity
Been on HN for many years now, and the one thing that never changes is people posting angrily about small UI changes. It makes me wonder- if things have only ever gotten worse, what was the peak UI? MS DOS?
I think the biggest thing isn't really whatever it is but the act of changing and forcing everyone to change into the new ui that is the disruptive part. It is a combination of window dressing changing but also sometimes functions breaking. It is ironic because software written for developers prides itself generally on maintaining compatibility with say depreciated flags, or if things will be depreciated plenty of notice ahead of time. But that only holds for cli software. GUI software and the OS that all goes out the window. Stuff breaks, workflows break, you have no recourse and in fact they might make it genuinely difficult to go back to an older version. Like this part of it is the shitty part. Never mind how it happens to look. It is the forcing effect.
Windows 2000 / XP in classic mode / XP / Vista / 7. For OSX I'd say High Sierra to Catalina.
Small improvements don't get much accolades. And for the most part, the UX is so good that most changes tend to be neutral or for the worse. And when you're really attached to something and there's on an unnecessary change, it feels almost like betrayal!<p>I, for one, prefer Apple products because they sweat the small stuff more than the other options, and when they have put in effort to make things worse it's kind of infuriating.<p>I do a bit of desktop Linux work too, and it's OK, but hard to complain when it's all open source volunteer work! Windows is so terrible that I wouldn't even know where to start. What's the point? There's nobody at Microsoft that even gives a damn.
Liquid Glass was not a "small UI change". It disrupted many accessibility aspects of macOS, so much so that Apple toned down quite a few aspects of the design in subsequent updates, even adding a slider to reduce the effect. [1]<p>The quantity of requests for how to disable Liquid Glass on Apple Discussions is staggering. [2]<p>[1]<a href="https://www.macrumors.com/2026/06/09/macos-golden-gate-liquid-glass/" rel="nofollow">https://www.macrumors.com/2026/06/09/macos-golden-gate-liqui...</a><p>[2]<a href="https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256227663" rel="nofollow">https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256227663</a>
No, it was Windows 3.11
The way things are going you will be able to run your favorite flavor of Linux on those pretty soon.
It will be the best of both worlds: the best hardware and a good OS. Hopefully Apple doesn't take steps to block it.
> <i>No freaking way to disable it.</i><p>Um. <a href="https://imgur.com/a/ydt3MN5" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/ydt3MN5</a>
Liquid Glass is more than just the transparency. There are many other changes that cannot be disabled that way. Not to mention the overall lag compared to Sequoia (I skipped Tahoe entirely so I had a direct knife-edge transition). 27 is less bad than 26 but Liquid Glass doesn't make anything better than prior UI and makes several things worse, even if you turn down the transparency.
My M2 pro is perfect still other than the fact that the 16gb of RAM is killing me.
Stay strong! I went from an M1 to M5 generation, and it was a nice bump, but I could have gone another year without any significant impact on my quality of life/work.
I have an M1 Pro as well but my next computer will be a split setup mainly because I realized that I'm most often working / focusing on hard things while at the desk and just browsing / checking in on things when I'm away from the desk so I'm thinking something like:<p>- a low end Macbook Pro or Air<p>- Mac Studio, mid-to-high specs
I just bought a m1 Air with 8GB as secondary device to the m4 mbp that my employer provides since they dialed up the spyware lately.
I should have bought a m4 Air last November but I hope the m1 holdes until the rampocalypse is over.
My M1 Pro has been great, certainly doesn’t feel like a 5-year old computer.
M1 Air guy here... I'm not looking for a replacement still. Almost 6 years now. Runs butter-smooth. Best tech purchase I ever made.
Same, and I dual-boot Asahi as well.
Biggest issue with my M3 Max is apple mandatory fun bloatware. I think it's the same playbook as phones long term. The hardware is still powerful but the software is optimized for the latest CPU, so older models run hot, take a fraction of the second longer to load the resources, etc. That stacks up over 5-6 years of releases to make older models feel slower.
I had an M1 Max machine with 32GB of memory and upgraded it to an M4 Max machine with 128GB of memory for local AI model experimentation.<p>It's sad that M5 (and M6) are <i>so much</i> faster at prefilling and other LLM-related operations, but I'm happy with the computer I got and will keep it at least 3-4 generations.
Im on that same cycle. M1 pro max still running strong though. 3 cycles might be hard though...
M1 Pro here as well. I will buy M6 Pro Mac Studio o Mac mini.
I've been using my M1 Max 64 GB for 5 years now and it's pretty zippy once you rewrite some slow software. I have an M4 Max with 128 GB but I never ended up migrating to it. That's how good it is.
I have tried an M4 Macbook a while ago but my M1 Max Macbook still feels plenty fast. Hope to keep that for a long time.
Same here! M1 Max going strong. I'm curious to see what they put out tomorrow but spending over 5K in a machine is a pretty rough pill to swallow
Right there with you
If the rumours are true (about AI capabilities) it’d be best to wait yes.
still rocking the m1 studio, shows no signs of stopping
I switched entirely over to Asahi Linux on my M1 Macbook Air and installed a third-party 55Wh battery, as the original battery had fallen below 80% capacity. That machine is good to go for another 5 years.<p>There are no features or performance characteristics of any of the subsequent M[2-6] Macbook Air or Pro models that I care about.
> With 16GB of unified memory standard, configurable up to 32GB, and higher memory bandwidth up to 170GB/s<p>Apple MacBook M5 Max has bandwidth up to 600GB/s, is 170GB/s for M6 the real limit? If so, wouldn't this slow down LLM processing?
There are rumors that Apple is not releasing Pro/Max versions of the M6 with the intention of focusing these research efforts on the M7 instead.<p>Even then, 170GB/s is a bump up from 153GB/s of the M5. So we see a 11% uplift already.
The M6 version is also cheaper than the M5 Max by a significant amount. I wouldn't be surprised if the M6 could keep up on LLM prefill (compute bound), but the memory bandwidth means that decode is going to be a lot slower, most likely?
It's a base M6 chip. The Pro doubles that, and the Max doubles again. And the Ultra doubles yet again. This is how the entire M series has always worked.<p>So the theoretical Max would be 680GB/s.
Hmm, still no OLED displays? I wonder what's the holdup? (I have a fairly mainstream PC laptop with OLED display, and the display is the <i>one</i> thing where my MBP looks pretty poor in direct comparison).
Just now realizing there's a difference between "MacBook Pro with M# chip" and "MacBook Pro with M# Pro chip". Was curious to see how my MBP with M4 Pro compared, and I saw it has 273 gb/s memory bandwidth compared to the MBP M6 (sans Pro)'s 170gb/s. Makes sense that "Pro" in the laptop model doesn't also describe the chip, but only if you remember that the non-pro "Macbook" line stopped in 2017 (which was the last time I went shopping for Apple laptops until buying the MBP4)<p><a href="https://www.apple.com/mac/compare/?modelList=MacBook-Neo-A18-Pro,MacBook-Pro-14-M4-Pro,MacBook-Pro-14-M6" rel="nofollow">https://www.apple.com/mac/compare/?modelList=MacBook-Neo-A18...</a>
The "notch" seems to be gone based on the product pictures. Time to upgrade from my ~2014 model MBP.
Is this an odd rollout for their actual high end MacBook Pros, or is this sitting in that space where they like to have a base MacBook Pro between their Airs and the expensive MacBook Extremely Pros?<p>Just the standard chip without Pro/Max makes me assume this is that base one. If so, the price is way high for where that tends to sit, but welcome to buying a computer in 2026 I guess.
This is the base one. You get a better display, more, faster Thunderbolt ports, and an honest to god HDMI port, plus some fans for cooling on long running processes that you don't get with the M6 Air (which also doesn't exist).
Also here: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50258521">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50258521</a>
32GB Unified RAM max. Is that really the machine I want for running local LLMs?
dupe <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50258521">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50258521</a>
Where's the touch screen??? The rumors promised touch!!!
Why would you want greasy fingerprints all over your display and gorilla arm syndrome when there's a perfectly fine keyboard and touchpad attached to the display for free?
No reason for gorilla-arm when touch is an alternative interaction mode and not a required one. You still have trackpad and keyboard. You can dynamically switch modes depending on the action.<p>Gorilla-arm was a fear based on the naive idea that if you had touch, you would be required to only use touch for every action.
mmmmm....grease
This is only the base model MBP. The high-end touch one will be later this week.
the rumors were about a supposed Macbook Ultra that would have a screen like the ipad pros. Still to come (or not)
> Phenomenal battery life: In addition to the huge leap in performance, battery life gets up to 14 additional hours for Intel-based upgraders<p>the m2/m3 announcements were already kind of cringe to keep saying 'HEY IT'S BETTER THAN INTEL' but at this point it's just embarrassing?
Fun fact: the laptop in this size/performance class with the best battery life is a Windows Intel Core Ultra Series 3 laptop, not a MacBook Pro!<p>So Apple is now comparing against computers they were selling 7-8 years ago rather than what Intel is delivering now.
There's no happy medium here that would satisfy everybody: when they make marketing claims about improvements relative to products from several years ago, they get criticized for not focusing on the improvements relative to last gen (even if those comparisons are also somewhere in the announcement). When they focus on the most recent generations, people complain that it doesn't make sense to upgrade every year.<p>Just accept that even if <i>you</i> aren't still using an Intel MacBook Pro, the comparison <i>is</i> still relevant to some part of their target market.<p>They only just dropped support for Intel Macs from this fall's operating system release (but are still doing security patches for the releases that Intel Macs <i>can</i> run). A year from now, it actually <i>will</i> be fairly reasonable to expect them to give up marketing to the holdouts.
I would guess there's still quite a lot of people on Intel Macs out there (they were sold 5 years ago), so it is still very much worth it for Apple to market to them.
More people than you think (outside tech) are using Intel Macs at the moment (family computers etc).
Why? Apple devices have the best battery life in the market right now to my knowledge. It's an important part of the evaluation for a laptop which is the opposite of cringe.
Actually, they don’t! Intel Core Ultra Series 3 beats Apple laptops as of the M5 on battery life.<p>IIRC the Framework 13 Pro beats the MacBook Pro at both video streaming tests and office productivity with 300 bits brightness tests. (Framework live-streamed the video playback test, and the office provided productivity tests I referred to were done by Just Josh Tech)<p>Perhaps the M6 has leapfrogged but that remains to be seen.
Neither of those have comparable perf
The Core Series Ultra X7 358H is absolutely comparable performance with the M5. It's a bit slower on single core but is faster than the M5 on graphics.<p>Here's the battery life result, beating the M5 MacBook Pro by 2 hours:<p><a href="https://youtu.be/IGcVLkXwsnE?si=9syK342ubVPQVXpZ&t=438" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/IGcVLkXwsnE?si=9syK342ubVPQVXpZ&t=438</a><p>Here's the GeekBench results. Comparable on multi-core, slower on single core:<p><a href="https://youtu.be/IGcVLkXwsnE?si=Lalsi1tblnFyRNoi&t=149" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/IGcVLkXwsnE?si=Lalsi1tblnFyRNoi&t=149</a><p>Cinebench multi-core results beat M5:<p><a href="https://youtu.be/IGcVLkXwsnE?si=h7ZILF-m3RsY5ig_&t=174" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/IGcVLkXwsnE?si=h7ZILF-m3RsY5ig_&t=174</a><p>GPU benchmarks in Steel Nomad Light (cross-platform native benchmark) show it beating the M5 GPU:<p><a href="https://youtu.be/IGcVLkXwsnE?si=j_RycLT93Y3GRk6Z&t=338" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/IGcVLkXwsnE?si=j_RycLT93Y3GRk6Z&t=338</a><p>Here's the surface temperature charts, showing the Lenovo runs cooler to the touch:<p><a href="https://youtu.be/IGcVLkXwsnE?si=TMy8RQxAmV26LeqK&t=232" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/IGcVLkXwsnE?si=TMy8RQxAmV26LeqK&t=232</a><p>The weight slots in between the MacBook Air 15" and the MacBook Pro 14"<p><a href="https://youtu.be/IGcVLkXwsnE?si=HYeyJ8b_iZK3lbyY&t=475" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/IGcVLkXwsnE?si=HYeyJ8b_iZK3lbyY&t=475</a><p>For a 1:1 pricing comparison, you'll be bumped down to the Intel Core Ultra 5 338H, which only loses a couple of the GPU cores compared to the 358H SKU so it still has strong graphics on par with the M5, and for the 32GB/1TB configuration, it sits at $140 less than the M6 MacBook Pro bumped up to 32GB RAM.<p>Sure, yes, the M6 is faster than an M5, and therefore faster than a Core Ultra 5 338H, so it's widening the gap, but we are not talking about a wide enough gulf to make any workflow difference. It looks like the M6 is also gaining back its competitive battery life compared to the M5, though nobody has tested it yet.<p>These are close enough where I would definitely label them as being in a comparable performance class.
Competition is a beautiful thing.
In usual developer type tasks, among my friend group what I hear is that panther lake laptops are competitive with M4 laptops. But, M4s do that with a 55Wh battery, whereas most panther lake laptops come with a 70Wh battery. So if you're discussing chip performance per watt then it's probably an edge to apple silicon.
72.4 Wh is the size of the M4 MacBook Pro battery, about the same size as the Framework 13 Pro.<p>Intel and now Qualcomm are really not far off on performance per watt. Mostly Apple maintains an advantage on single core performance.<p>The Panther Lake integrated GPU in the X7/X9 SKI is actually faster than the one you get in the base M5.
I recall seeing some crazy stats like 41+ hours maybe on a snapdragon processor w/windows. I imagine your screen brightness would have to be like 99% dark and not playing videos is my guess.
That's not what the marketing is saying, they keep comparing to their own super old intel models.
They want those users to upgrade, I don’t see the problem.
Dare I even ask how much the 32gb/1tb variant will be? $3,000?
i wonder if it has 2 fans
About time they put a battery in the lid, which is what an iPad already manages to do with thinness. Boom another half a decade of updates all the way to 48hrs
eh no thanks. not jumping to m5 max now we know apple is cooking with m7 pro and m7 max. don't drop the ball.
One of the interesting slights of hand Apple marketing must do is simultaneously say the new processor is awesome while selling the higher spec versions of the previous processor as upgrades:<p><pre><code> The M6 chip joins M5 Pro and M5 Max to create our most advanced line-up of chips ever built for a pro laptop. With a 12-core CPU, 12-core GPU and our first ever Dual 16‑core Neural Engine, M6 brings next-generation speed and advanced on device AI. All three chips deliver phenomenal single- and multithreaded CPU performance and faster unified memory. . . .</code></pre>
My 5090 has a bandwidth of 1,792 GB/s, and that is just about good enough for basic (i.e. 27B models) local LLM inference.<p>The fastest M6 MacBook Pro (24/32GB configs) has a memory bandwidth of 170 GB/s. And the M5 Max is 614 GB/s.<p>Am I missing some nuance of the M6 MBP here, or am I right to assume it won't set the local LLM world on fire?
The case of your 5090 having become a coveted artifact of great rarity in these times - may be a nuance of some measure.<p>Also, the following two have very different 'needs' to feel good enough:<p>1. heavy agentic workloads via harness
vs
2. a simple private chat interface with a local instance<p>Even if an MBP's bandwidth were higher, it's tough to see a reason to run it as a constantly loaded 24/7 inference machine due to heat degradation.<p>P.S. still extremely awesome to be able to host and chat with a decently quantized 27B model on your laptop. ...and to be fair even a 32GB Air would do that!
It is a thing of beauty: the amount of folks this may add to the hacker/tinker community.
Isn't the laptop version of the 5090 is a more apples-to-apples comparison? It has 896 GB/s memory bandwidth (compared to the 614 on the M5 Max MBP).
Is your 5090 in a laptop? o_0
sleight*
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