Man every time I want to get a new macbook air they come up with a new macbook pro which means 6 months later they're going to come up with a new generation of airs by which time I think "let me wait a bit and see if people like it", and so here I am with a 2022 M2 that is perfectly fine except for the disk being too small.
I still have the original M1 Pro (thankfully with enough disk space) and I still don't really see a reason to upgrade. Since the M1 all these MacBooks are more than powerful enough for anything I might want to do and the original battery life was so good an upgrade would harldy be worth it.
Yeah you Mac users are spoiled. I bought this Framework 13 with the Ryzen 5 340 last year and was blown away at how fast it was, only to discover that it's roughly on par with the M1 Pro that came out 4 years earlier (and has much better battery life).
I don't _need_ the battery life and still prefer to run Linux so the tradeoff is worth it to me, but for most users it's pretty hard to not recommend a Macbook.
I don’t understand this. I have a m4 with 16gb, and it can barely run office. Throw in a couple of browser tabs of ChatGPT and LinkedIn, and it slows to a crawl.
Every app window / browser tab is like 1GB these days.
They are soldered in. Replacement itself can probably be done by a professional repair technician who is equipped with the right tools. But it is not a self-service job that anyone can do.
On top of that, the drives might be somehow paired to the motherboard. And I would imagine that pairing a new one with the existing motherboard may require some proprietary software that only Apple has.
These are only my assumptions though. People e.g. at Louis Rossmann's repair shop might know more.
I'm still on my early 2022 macbook 14" M1, which I was thoughtful enough to get 64gb ram for at the time, and remain still incredibly happy. M6 must be nuts!
Yeah, I'm still on a 2021 M1 Pro and the only real complaint is that the battery has weakened somewhat, but still fine. and if I really cared I would probably figure out what to do to get firefox from being such a constant drain.
The air is designed for non degenerates who don’t actually use the laptop in their laps. For us degens we need active cooling lest we are thermal throttled from belly heat
I bought my 2022 M2 Air with 24GB/1TB/10-core GPU. Very very glad I did.
The only reason I’m bitter is because they put in WiFi 6E in the M3 generation. Now I just use a 2.5Gbe USB-C adaptor when transferring large files to and from my NAS.
I picked up a 24GB 2TB M2 air and it's still cruising along. Short of having the foresight to pick up 512GB Ultra prior to the rampocalypse, I'm happy.
I’m in the exact same predicament: I bought an M2 Air upon release in 2022, chose a BTO with 16 GB of RAM, the top-bin processor, and it still runs absolutely 100% perfectly. Unlike the OP, I’m doing very OK with storage, so I don’t even have that excuse.
The machine is basically flawless and entirely suitable for everything I throw at it (and throw stuff at it I do: when I’m not web-browsing or playing YouTube videos I’m using Wolfram Mathematica, which is one heck of a resource hog) and it’s absolutely utterly fine and blasé about the whole thing.
As things are, I can see myself keeping it for a decade. There was a time when I used to change Apple laptops on a yearly basis (starting with PowerBook G4s in the early/mid 2000s and up until the mid 2010s, when I migrated most of my mobile computing to iPads… which lasted for about a decade until I got this thing).
Cries in mid2012 mac book air. This one refuses to die, and it does everything I need except LLMs (but I have a desktop with a 3090), so I'm stuck with it...
Great hardware, but I can't stand MacOS anymore after switching to Linux on home dekstop. KDE is such a breath of fresh air after years of dealing with Apple's idiosyncrasies.
I’m using KDE on the gaming box I recently transitioned away from Windows as well as on a secondary single-use laptop where Linux has been installed for a while.
It’s not bad, but I find it still to be very much an acquired taste. It’s fine for my usage, where the DE has barely any impact but having been using macOS as my main OS for the better part of 30 years, it would probably drive me insane if I had to shift my main body of computer use to it. It’s not any one thing, but dozens of papercuts that can’t be configured away (I’d need to maintain my own fork to fix them) as well as the more Windows-like desktop paradigm.
Yeah I use KDE as well for my desktop and it’s the perfect environment. (Btw I use Arch)
Still I’m very tempted by the new MacBooks. I don’t know of any laptop that is a tenth as good and I don’t want to sit at my desk all day to use a computer.
I would buy apple hardware instantly if you could seamlessly install Linux on it just like a PC. Even if you had to "burn a fuse" to permanently detached it from Apples support and ecosystem.
I love and respect what Asahi has done but I want apple to support a turn key, open drivers, everything works, system.
Nano-texture upgrade option is coming for the whole line of products.
Edit: the thing I'm confused about is it seems there are at least two but maybe three different things that they are calling "nano-texture". On buying screens, the Studio Display and iPad Mini say "Nano-texture glass" and the new MacBook Pro says "Nano-texture display." But the Duo marketing says "Nano-texture finish."
I get that the internal Duo screen has the film over it and so it says "finish," but is there a difference between "glass" and "display"?
"Nano-texture glass" and "Nano-texture display" should refer to the same: A microscopic etching into the display glass.
"Nano-texture finish" on iPhone Duo refers to an additional layer they put on top of the display panel. It's basically a sticker with a similar (same?) surface structure (they can't put it on the display glass itself because it's too thin)
I get glass vs finish. But there's a third term being used for the new M6 MacBook Pro, which is nano-texture "display." Someone clarified that it's the same as the "glass" so I take this to just be Day 1 marketing confusion that'll hopefully get cleaned up on the buying screen.
Interesting choice of pic...a guy with a military camo hat, laptop propped up on a hardshell field deployment case...but in a crop field. That's quite a departure from Appe's usual creatives sipping soy lattes vibe
That is RealTree camo, not military camo. And it's really not a crop field? I'm guessing this is AI-generated. It's odd. It looks like a backyard garden, because you have mixed greens with kale, plentiful weeds, and marigolds (which are commonly used to keep pests at bay in small, hand-harvested gardens, but cannot be mixed into mechanically harvested fields). But the permanently-installed drip irrigation says commercial operation.
My guess is this photo was taken in a local garden co-op or small farmstead, but it looked too barren to use for advertising so they added a bunch of plants later.
I had a similar thought too looking at that photo and then I realized that personally, the only computer I've ever used out 'in the field' for extended durations was a MBP when I was working on an autonomous drone project senior year of undergrad.
It was November/December in Iowa, so it was freezing and the local R/C club airfield was nestled between an ocean of corn fields and the city dump, so it smelled terrible.
But that 16" MBP was red hot from Android Studio and kept my fingers from freezing, so credit where credit is due. Really fun project too!
Realree camo has become popular with the "creatives sipping soy lattes" demographic. Although Apple is actually bit behind the curve here, I think it's already become a little passe.
To me it looks like farmers or biologists that use a MacBook because it is durable and has excellent battery life (or at least that seems to be the message when you read the rest of the announcement).
The hat looks like one of a million other hats you see any guy wearing out in Iowa, from farmers to students to contractors. I have a hat just like it myself.
Minor rant – why come up with a consistent CPU naming scheme (Mx generation with Pro, Max etc. tiers) but then sell variants of each with different numbers of cores? It tosses the entire convention out of the window.
It is especially annoying during resale or benchmarking, because “M5 Pro” by itself doesn't mean much, and you have to count the number of CPU & GPU cores to figure out the actual SKU.
After getting my M1 MBP I mostly stopped paying attention to the new releases until the M4 came out and I decided to see how much "better" it was and was equally completely baffled by the insane number of SKUs and their seeming overlap. Insane product lineup decisions.
They’re binned, not every piece of silicon will work perfectly so they’re selling the ones that did as higher SKUs and the ones with minor flaws become the lower core counts.
Yes which is why every company that does this kind of binning advertises the actual SKU they are selling. This doesn’t fit the Apple marketing vibe, and so we end up having to guess.
I recently snagged a really good deal on a Macbook (very nice hardware!), but the more I use it, the more I struggle with macOS (even though a few utilities can help bring some of Windows' features).
I used to be able to completely boot into Windows on my Intel mac a few years ago, but Apple no longer supports it for some reason. It's a shame, especially since the ARM64 version of Windows 11 has gotten very good now.
It would also be nice to be able to install Linux too. It's my own hardware, after all!
I purchase the hardware, I should be able to do what I want with it. I want apple hardware for the good processor specs and battery life and general hardware quality.
Apple should be forced to release the necessary hardware specs to develop drivers so that I can use my hardware I purchased as I want. They should be required to let me own my own signing keys to boot my own software.
Anyway, I'd personally want bootcamp because it's a step closer to being able to install Linux, an operating system that lets me have a good tiling window manager that works.
Why the heck would anyone want to use macOS willingly, where the window manager and file browser are both complete unconfigurable trash.
I hate the implication that apple is doing anything to stop you from booting windows like how phones prevent you from installing custom roms. The boot loader is unlocked, there is nothing stopping you from installing windows, apple just (rightfully so IMO) doesn't invest money in maintaining windows drivers for their custom silicon because... why would they?
I'm pretty sure bootcamp was only a thing specifically because the intel macs were essentially white box windows laptops with a nicer than average trackpad for the time. Trackpad drivers is a much smaller lift when everything else practically works out of the box
It's clique at this point I know, but "If steve jobs were still alive" he wouldn't give people the option to get a 14 with M5 Pro/Max or M6 while the 16 can only have a M5 Pro/Max. Yes, I know the 16 will get it, but I'm point out this weird recent trend where there isn't a clear choice for the non tech savvy person.
The major thing I notice about modern apple is they definitely rush to meet a deadline instead of just waiting for the product to be ready
Apparently after the memory and storage shortage we are also experiencing a power supply shortage now - if you choose the base 16GB/1TB config you cant even choose any power supply as an option, guess its a use-once device now...
In some parts of EU and the UK there's no bundled power adapter, due to regulations. Historically, Apple has offset the cost of the laptop to accommodate this. Not sure if they're doing the same here.
For Apple's laptop range when was the last time you could choose your power supply? Was that ever an option?
Am I missing something?
(since I'm rate limited)....
With the OP's comment "guess its a use-once device now..." I was thinking they meant power supply in the desktop sense, not the power adapter. I have no idea why a power adapter would be the thing that makes a laptop a "use-once" device.
But yes in the configuration options you can choose between two power adapters.
Apple laptops historically included a power supply. Now some models don't, and you have to buy it as a separate item.
I appreciate the frustration, but as a separate item then a user can choose any power supply on the market, rather than being stuck with one that Apple chose.
It seems that you can only get 32GBs of RAM maximum for the new 14" M6 Macbooks? M5 still has 64GB options available. edit: the larger configurations are only available for the Pro and Max chips apparently.
I was considering getting the M6 with 32GB which would come down to €2769 here in the Netherlands. But now I have an offer for a used M2 Max 64GB for €1900.
Apple's only path to bringing a real DRAM fab in-house is acquiring Micron. That's it.
Apple has no experience running large fabs, manufacturing modern DDR4 or DDR5, negotiating for precursors, packaging memory, integrating packages, optimizing DRAM efficiency, yield tuning or process sampling & qualification testing. It's equally as absentminded as suggesting that Apple simply replace TSMC with ASMC, their in-house EUV fab that can make 3nm wafers with 100% yield. Samsung has been making memory for 40 years, and they can't compete with SK Hynix' output despite their experience in design and fabrication. And Samsung is a success story, relatively speaking.
Apple cannot supply themselves at the iPhones scale, and would bankrupt themselves binning DDR5 for 512GB Macs. The US could give Apple the entirety of Intel Foundry Services as an act of corrupt eminent domain, and Apple would still be 15 years away from supplying their own RAM. DDR5 fabs are a small club, and Apple ain't in it.
I don't want AI. I am preparing for a jump (back) to Linux. "Choice" disappeared, and yes, I know about the "fix" [0]
Maybe this idea may be foreign to many, but personal computers were something I built from bags of parts socketed and/or soldered onto S-100 cards, and that experience was the foundation of most of my career.
I was a Henry Higgins, and proud of my Eliza(s). While I get along cooperatively with Eliza (the happy ending to "My Fair Computer") I don't want Eliza to be my caretaker. This morphing of computers and internet into nannies and caretakers is IMO reverting to the "good old days" of servants. While some inventions are truly liberating (ask the guy who missed his Mom at an airport and freaked out for hours until she showed up at my home, courtesy of a cab or bus) how many are just replacing people with machines?
I could seriously use some friendship of the human variety, rather than a humanoid in a box (or an especially nice robot as in "I Sing the Body Electric" by Ray Bradbury, memorable on The Twilight Zone) Try being older and living alone, typing away.
I don't even use GPS any more, since I trashed Apple Maps when they kissed the Emperor's big fanny.
There's never been a more confusing time to buy a MacBook. I understand there are technical variations, but it's difficult to compare when different screen sizes require different chip generations. Different memory amounts require different processor types. Etc. Etc.
I probably complained when Apple offered too FEW options too - but hey, this is the Internet.
For LLMs (apart from Apple's foundation models) the M1 Max still holds its own for the most part.
The base M6 is faster (much much faster) than the M1 Max at prefill (compute bound).
The M1 Max outperforms the base M6 at token generation; this is memory-bandwidth-bound, and while the M1 Max can't actually saturate its memory bandwidth, it gets a lot closer with the GPU.
So I suspect the M6 is better if your AI tasks are decision-based or video/image based, and the M1 Max is better if you're running a coding LLM. Though prefill is a bit of an issue.
Really just function of mobility? Move a lot? 15-16 is combersome. Stationary often, maybe just roaming from your desk to your couch/bed? 16 is totally fine.
I'm in the 14-15 camp w/ lighter form factors being worth the premium.
I tried below 13 after the trend of smaller laptops from a couple years back - I now don't believe anyone who tells me they're regularly productive on these smaller form factors lol.
I am not — I'm using a 64GB M1 Max. Mostly with Muse Glimmer, sometimes Qwen 3.8 27B, Gemma 4 12B QAT, currently playing with LFM 2.5 24B-2B a bit.
I'm just saying, the base M6 is not very competitive in terms of memory bandwidth (the M5 Pro has about 80% faster memory bandwidth).
Compared with my old M1 Max, the M5 Pro is radically better at prefill, only about 15% slower at most at generation (and probably performs better at DFlash and MLX than the M1, so it might close the gap or even outperform the M1 Max)
So the models I am using/testing should all be quite fun, assuming the 48GB RAM machine. The Gemma 4 12B and LFM should run well on the 24GB machine. Neither of those are great coding models but they should be pretty good assistants. There are harsher quantisations of those other models that may fit.
Whether playing with these things locally is worth the extra spend, I don't know. It's probably more cost-effective to buy a cheaper Mac, experiment with the smaller models, and use Openrouter for the bigger ones.
32GB of RAM only? What? Also weird that they are talking about token speed, but no larger LLMs can fit on this thing.
Also, what happened to the I/O?? I was happy to see on the M4 they had HDMI, an SD card slot, and more. Why are they back to 2 USB-C ports? I only see pictures of one side, but the left side has traditionally had more I/O.
C'mon, Apple, do better. It's a PRO model, not a MacBook Air
while understandable i think you are too hasty.
the side shown does indeed only have two usb c ports and the magsafe port, but the other side will almost certainly still have the usb c, hdmi, and card reader (cant remember if they added a second usb c port there at some point as well)
also, i don't blame you for this given that Apple's naming scheme is so fucked here but the 32gb limitation is for the MacBook Pro with the M6, _not_ the MacBook Pro with the M6 Pro or M6 Max.
yes, that is confusing, but imo the standard MacBook "Pro" with the base M chip is basically a glorified MacBook Air with a better chassis. I feel like they only sell these things to make the Air seem like a better deal and to justify a higher price for the M Pro / Max versions
edit: those M Pro versions may be announced tomorrow alongside a version with, or those being the version with a touchscreen
16gb for default ram? is this a joke? base level is same for almost 5 years now, crazy level of slow upgrades, basically anyone needs pro device will never purchase the default specs, even air makes more sense.
Arguably the thing you’re missing is the 5090 is $1999 MSRP and more like $5000+ retail currently, and then you still need to buy the rest of the computer. This on the other hand is a whole system for $2400 (for the 32gb config). Maybe won’t set the “local LLM” world on fire, but likely to do a lot more for it than the 5090s will for the moment.
You're correct, the base (non-Pro, non-Max) chips are still not great for local LLMs. M5 and M6 both improved prefill speed/time-to-first-token over prior gens, but bw is still a bottleneck.
There's rumored to be no M6 Pro or M6 Max coming, i.e. the higher bandwidth chips will skip a gen. M7 is also rumored to have better memory bandwidth across the range.
> With 16GB of unified memory standard, configurable up to 32GB, and higher memory bandwidth up to 170GB/s, MacBook Pro makes multitasking and working with demanding apps and large projects even faster.
So they're basically removing the ability to run local models effectively. I wonder if they'll bifurcate their market to enable those.
> I wonder if they'll bifurcate their market to enable those.
No they won't, the market for "running local models" is approximately 0. There's nothing to bifurcate anyway because once they release the more capable chips they'll be able to be configured with hiring amounts of RAM.
Apple in recent years has been updating their laptop range or specific models (Air or something) with their latest base M series chip (M4, M5, M6, &c.) and then later comes the higher end CPUs. But the base series chips don't have the hardware to it seems support higher RAM loads, or maybe they are artificially restricted in some way.
Apple has moved from a "Big day out" of marketing per year, where all product lineups would be announced, with novelty and conferences, to rolling releases along the year.
Man every time I want to get a new macbook air they come up with a new macbook pro which means 6 months later they're going to come up with a new generation of airs by which time I think "let me wait a bit and see if people like it", and so here I am with a 2022 M2 that is perfectly fine except for the disk being too small.
I still have the original M1 Pro (thankfully with enough disk space) and I still don't really see a reason to upgrade. Since the M1 all these MacBooks are more than powerful enough for anything I might want to do and the original battery life was so good an upgrade would harldy be worth it.
Yeah you Mac users are spoiled. I bought this Framework 13 with the Ryzen 5 340 last year and was blown away at how fast it was, only to discover that it's roughly on par with the M1 Pro that came out 4 years earlier (and has much better battery life).
I don't _need_ the battery life and still prefer to run Linux so the tradeoff is worth it to me, but for most users it's pretty hard to not recommend a Macbook.
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Same here. A part of me wants to get a new MBP but I really can't justify it.
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They're snappier, that's about it.
I don’t understand this. I have a m4 with 16gb, and it can barely run office. Throw in a couple of browser tabs of ChatGPT and LinkedIn, and it slows to a crawl.
Every app window / browser tab is like 1GB these days.
The unbearable burden of consumerism.
"You didn't even finish your M2 yet and already want to refill your plate?"
Maybe gp should try squeezing it through the other major cavity of the body. Might have some extra room there.
Edit: guys, come up, muster some sense of humor. This screen is only 14" after all.
Genuine question from someone who knows nothing about Apple products... can't you replace/upgrade the drive?
They are soldered in. Replacement itself can probably be done by a professional repair technician who is equipped with the right tools. But it is not a self-service job that anyone can do.
On top of that, the drives might be somehow paired to the motherboard. And I would imagine that pairing a new one with the existing motherboard may require some proprietary software that only Apple has.
These are only my assumptions though. People e.g. at Louis Rossmann's repair shop might know more.
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Oh you silly boy, of course you can, it's extremely easy, here is a video showing how to do it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xrg7nPG6_UU
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Heh, no, it's soldered.
If you throw enough money at a sufficiently skilled technician it can be done, but no M.2 slots in sight here.
You really know nothing, lol! When was the last time you replaced your "drive" inside your Android phone?
This is an Apple device, the word upgrade does not exist in their world.
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I'm still on my early 2022 macbook 14" M1, which I was thoughtful enough to get 64gb ram for at the time, and remain still incredibly happy. M6 must be nuts!
Yeah, I'm still on a 2021 M1 Pro and the only real complaint is that the battery has weakened somewhat, but still fine. and if I really cared I would probably figure out what to do to get firefox from being such a constant drain.
Just get the Air. Moore's law peaked a long time ago and the differences between the M-generations are too small to be meaningful.
The air is designed for non degenerates who don’t actually use the laptop in their laps. For us degens we need active cooling lest we are thermal throttled from belly heat
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No agreed, for me it’s about the incidentals - nicer camera, nicer screen, WiFi 6e, large drive etc
I got a used M2 Air a year ago and it's the best Apple laptop I've ever owned. And I've owned dozens.
Plus it runs Asahi linux on the metal.
I bought my 2022 M2 Air with 24GB/1TB/10-core GPU. Very very glad I did.
The only reason I’m bitter is because they put in WiFi 6E in the M3 generation. Now I just use a 2.5Gbe USB-C adaptor when transferring large files to and from my NAS.
I picked up a 24GB 2TB M2 air and it's still cruising along. Short of having the foresight to pick up 512GB Ultra prior to the rampocalypse, I'm happy.
Exactly the same story here. I'm still very happily using an M2, which is just great.
I’m in the exact same predicament: I bought an M2 Air upon release in 2022, chose a BTO with 16 GB of RAM, the top-bin processor, and it still runs absolutely 100% perfectly. Unlike the OP, I’m doing very OK with storage, so I don’t even have that excuse.
The machine is basically flawless and entirely suitable for everything I throw at it (and throw stuff at it I do: when I’m not web-browsing or playing YouTube videos I’m using Wolfram Mathematica, which is one heck of a resource hog) and it’s absolutely utterly fine and blasé about the whole thing.
As things are, I can see myself keeping it for a decade. There was a time when I used to change Apple laptops on a yearly basis (starting with PowerBook G4s in the early/mid 2000s and up until the mid 2010s, when I migrated most of my mobile computing to iPads… which lasted for about a decade until I got this thing).
Cries in mid2012 mac book air. This one refuses to die, and it does everything I need except LLMs (but I have a desktop with a 3090), so I'm stuck with it...
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Great hardware, but I can't stand MacOS anymore after switching to Linux on home dekstop. KDE is such a breath of fresh air after years of dealing with Apple's idiosyncrasies.
I think I'll keep my Framework 13 Pro preorder.
I’m using KDE on the gaming box I recently transitioned away from Windows as well as on a secondary single-use laptop where Linux has been installed for a while.
It’s not bad, but I find it still to be very much an acquired taste. It’s fine for my usage, where the DE has barely any impact but having been using macOS as my main OS for the better part of 30 years, it would probably drive me insane if I had to shift my main body of computer use to it. It’s not any one thing, but dozens of papercuts that can’t be configured away (I’d need to maintain my own fork to fix them) as well as the more Windows-like desktop paradigm.
> It’s not any one thing, but dozens of papercuts that can’t be configured away
Exactly how I feel about having to use macOS at work, except some of the 'configurations away' are overpriced plugins/third party tools.
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> I’d need to maintain my own fork to fix them
At least this is an option with Linux
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KDE is really great. I have a Threadripper FreeBSD desktop I do kernel work on and it is such a breath of fresh air compared to my work Mac.
I'm a habitual device-swapper and I'm staggered by how... satisfied I am with my 8 year old Thinkpad X1 Carbon with Fedora KDE on it.
Yeah I use KDE as well for my desktop and it’s the perfect environment. (Btw I use Arch)
Still I’m very tempted by the new MacBooks. I don’t know of any laptop that is a tenth as good and I don’t want to sit at my desk all day to use a computer.
I would buy apple hardware instantly if you could seamlessly install Linux on it just like a PC. Even if you had to "burn a fuse" to permanently detached it from Apples support and ecosystem.
I love and respect what Asahi has done but I want apple to support a turn key, open drivers, everything works, system.
I'm the same. They don't even have to "support" it, just stop doing everything they can to prevent it. Volunteers will support it for them.
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Nano-texture upgrade option is coming for the whole line of products.
Edit: the thing I'm confused about is it seems there are at least two but maybe three different things that they are calling "nano-texture". On buying screens, the Studio Display and iPad Mini say "Nano-texture glass" and the new MacBook Pro says "Nano-texture display." But the Duo marketing says "Nano-texture finish."
I get that the internal Duo screen has the film over it and so it says "finish," but is there a difference between "glass" and "display"?
"Nano-texture glass" and "Nano-texture display" should refer to the same: A microscopic etching into the display glass.
"Nano-texture finish" on iPhone Duo refers to an additional layer they put on top of the display panel. It's basically a sticker with a similar (same?) surface structure (they can't put it on the display glass itself because it's too thin)
I could be wrong, but I think glass=hard, while finish=soft. The inside Duo screen is not hard like the outer glass.
I get glass vs finish. But there's a third term being used for the new M6 MacBook Pro, which is nano-texture "display." Someone clarified that it's the same as the "glass" so I take this to just be Day 1 marketing confusion that'll hopefully get cleaned up on the buying screen.
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It's preparation for the inevitable nano-texture cloth you need to buy from Apple to wipe the screen with.
That's exactly what the £9 Apple Polishing Cloth is!
> Made with soft, non-abrasive material, the Polishing Cloth cleans any Apple display, including nano-texture, safely and effectively.
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You mean even for the air?
Maybe Apple is shifting the terminology from display to glass as an homage to fine watch terminology.
Interesting choice of pic...a guy with a military camo hat, laptop propped up on a hardshell field deployment case...but in a crop field. That's quite a departure from Appe's usual creatives sipping soy lattes vibe
That is RealTree camo, not military camo. And it's really not a crop field? I'm guessing this is AI-generated. It's odd. It looks like a backyard garden, because you have mixed greens with kale, plentiful weeds, and marigolds (which are commonly used to keep pests at bay in small, hand-harvested gardens, but cannot be mixed into mechanically harvested fields). But the permanently-installed drip irrigation says commercial operation.
My guess is this photo was taken in a local garden co-op or small farmstead, but it looked too barren to use for advertising so they added a bunch of plants later.
They are just trying to portray "working in the field" creative types/students and alluding to all day battery life.
Nothing about that picture looks military
I had a similar thought too looking at that photo and then I realized that personally, the only computer I've ever used out 'in the field' for extended durations was a MBP when I was working on an autonomous drone project senior year of undergrad.
It was November/December in Iowa, so it was freezing and the local R/C club airfield was nestled between an ocean of corn fields and the city dump, so it smelled terrible.
But that 16" MBP was red hot from Android Studio and kept my fingers from freezing, so credit where credit is due. Really fun project too!
> the local R/C club airfield was nestled between an ocean of corn fields and the city dump, so it smelled terrible.
That's just how Iowa smells. If anything, the city dump was probably improving things!
/s
lived here my whole life, it's an olfactory adventure :P
Realree camo has become popular with the "creatives sipping soy lattes" demographic. Although Apple is actually bit behind the curve here, I think it's already become a little passe.
It looks more like students to me.
The alt-text was "Two people perform fieldwork using MacBook Pro outdoors on a sunny day", apparently.
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Not all camo is military. That to me looks more like the camo that you find at bass pro shop
To me it looks like farmers or biologists that use a MacBook because it is durable and has excellent battery life (or at least that seems to be the message when you read the rest of the announcement).
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The hat looks like one of a million other hats you see any guy wearing out in Iowa, from farmers to students to contractors. I have a hat just like it myself.
Especially seeing is the things break if you fart near them too loudly.
Minor rant – why come up with a consistent CPU naming scheme (Mx generation with Pro, Max etc. tiers) but then sell variants of each with different numbers of cores? It tosses the entire convention out of the window.
It is especially annoying during resale or benchmarking, because “M5 Pro” by itself doesn't mean much, and you have to count the number of CPU & GPU cores to figure out the actual SKU.
After getting my M1 MBP I mostly stopped paying attention to the new releases until the M4 came out and I decided to see how much "better" it was and was equally completely baffled by the insane number of SKUs and their seeming overlap. Insane product lineup decisions.
Where is a Steve Jobs to return to Apple and simplify the product lineup again?
They’re binned, not every piece of silicon will work perfectly so they’re selling the ones that did as higher SKUs and the ones with minor flaws become the lower core counts.
Yes which is why every company that does this kind of binning advertises the actual SKU they are selling. This doesn’t fit the Apple marketing vibe, and so we end up having to guess.
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Bring back Boot Camp and let us install Windows 11 on these, you cowards!
Why the heck would one want to do that???
I recently snagged a really good deal on a Macbook (very nice hardware!), but the more I use it, the more I struggle with macOS (even though a few utilities can help bring some of Windows' features).
I used to be able to completely boot into Windows on my Intel mac a few years ago, but Apple no longer supports it for some reason. It's a shame, especially since the ARM64 version of Windows 11 has gotten very good now.
It would also be nice to be able to install Linux too. It's my own hardware, after all!
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I purchase the hardware, I should be able to do what I want with it. I want apple hardware for the good processor specs and battery life and general hardware quality.
Apple should be forced to release the necessary hardware specs to develop drivers so that I can use my hardware I purchased as I want. They should be required to let me own my own signing keys to boot my own software.
Anyway, I'd personally want bootcamp because it's a step closer to being able to install Linux, an operating system that lets me have a good tiling window manager that works.
Why the heck would anyone want to use macOS willingly, where the window manager and file browser are both complete unconfigurable trash.
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Because not everyone likes macOS and dislikes Windows.
Run software without crossover/parallels/wine/GPTK
Choice and freedom?
Yeah, I don't get it.
If you could install linux, however, then I would buy one yesterday.
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gaming
Windows 11 is missing devicetree support for arm macs. It won’t boot.
You might be better off waiting for an Asahi linux update.
I hate the implication that apple is doing anything to stop you from booting windows like how phones prevent you from installing custom roms. The boot loader is unlocked, there is nothing stopping you from installing windows, apple just (rightfully so IMO) doesn't invest money in maintaining windows drivers for their custom silicon because... why would they?
I'm pretty sure bootcamp was only a thing specifically because the intel macs were essentially white box windows laptops with a nicer than average trackpad for the time. Trackpad drivers is a much smaller lift when everything else practically works out of the box
Do you want AIshitification on your mac?
No, I just want to be able to boot into Windows 11. It worked really well on Intel macs.
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And it's still $1999. That's impressive. I paid the same for the M1 Pro in 2021.
Because the price hike happened in June, in this case from 1699 to 1999.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48672732 https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/apple-raises-pric...
And it’s still working amazing. Other than trying to run an agent locally I haven’t ran into any limiting bottlenecks
Mine has a broken fan so I have to run it in slow mode and it's still working fine.
A bit less impressive considering that it's the M6 and not the M6 Pro.
Ah good point. Is there somewhere a comparison between M6 and M1 Pro?
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like really what's the point of this laptop man, just trying to get more money out of people who otherwise wouldve gotten the M6 Air?
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That impressed me the most. 1TB storage is minimum now too.
They have huge margins and can absorb price increases of some of the components.
It's clique at this point I know, but "If steve jobs were still alive" he wouldn't give people the option to get a 14 with M5 Pro/Max or M6 while the 16 can only have a M5 Pro/Max. Yes, I know the 16 will get it, but I'm point out this weird recent trend where there isn't a clear choice for the non tech savvy person.
The major thing I notice about modern apple is they definitely rush to meet a deadline instead of just waiting for the product to be ready
"Clique" is a small close group of people, "cliché" is an oft-repeated observation.
Yes, first thing Jobs did upon returning to Apple was radically simplify the product line.
I thought Apple "Pro & Tell" day is tomorrow.
Makes me now wonder what's in store for tomorrow's pro launch.
Touchscreens, supposedly.
Apparently after the memory and storage shortage we are also experiencing a power supply shortage now - if you choose the base 16GB/1TB config you cant even choose any power supply as an option, guess its a use-once device now...
There's a "Select your adapter" option right below the memory and storage options that lets you select between the 70 W and 96 W options.
In some parts of EU and the UK there's no bundled power adapter, due to regulations. Historically, Apple has offset the cost of the laptop to accommodate this. Not sure if they're doing the same here.
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For Apple's laptop range when was the last time you could choose your power supply? Was that ever an option?
Am I missing something?
(since I'm rate limited)....
With the OP's comment "guess its a use-once device now..." I was thinking they meant power supply in the desktop sense, not the power adapter. I have no idea why a power adapter would be the thing that makes a laptop a "use-once" device.
But yes in the configuration options you can choose between two power adapters.
Apple laptops historically included a power supply. Now some models don't, and you have to buy it as a separate item.
I appreciate the frustration, but as a separate item then a user can choose any power supply on the market, rather than being stuck with one that Apple chose.
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I think the M2 Macbook Air was the first time I remember seeing an option, choosing between a 2 port charger or a single port one.
Edit: Even today if you go to the Macbook Pro config tool you get to choose between the standard 70 W or upgraded 96 W.
It seems that you can only get 32GBs of RAM maximum for the new 14" M6 Macbooks? M5 still has 64GB options available. edit: the larger configurations are only available for the Pro and Max chips apparently.
I think the M5 Pro can be configured with the 64 gb option, not the regular m5 chip.
I'm running an M5 max with 128Gb of RAM right now on a 14" macbook pro
I was considering getting the M6 with 32GB which would come down to €2769 here in the Netherlands. But now I have an offer for a used M2 Max 64GB for €1900.
Which one should I pick?
You should be able to do some local LLM models on the M2 Max 64gb (Qwen 3.8 27b would be a strong model). I might go for that one.
64gb is the way
Nice, but in the long term, Apple is going to need to bring memory in-house.
Or just ride the shortage out with high prices.
Apple's only path to bringing a real DRAM fab in-house is acquiring Micron. That's it.
Apple has no experience running large fabs, manufacturing modern DDR4 or DDR5, negotiating for precursors, packaging memory, integrating packages, optimizing DRAM efficiency, yield tuning or process sampling & qualification testing. It's equally as absentminded as suggesting that Apple simply replace TSMC with ASMC, their in-house EUV fab that can make 3nm wafers with 100% yield. Samsung has been making memory for 40 years, and they can't compete with SK Hynix' output despite their experience in design and fabrication. And Samsung is a success story, relatively speaking.
Apple cannot supply themselves at the iPhones scale, and would bankrupt themselves binning DDR5 for 512GB Macs. The US could give Apple the entirety of Intel Foundry Services as an act of corrupt eminent domain, and Apple would still be 15 years away from supplying their own RAM. DDR5 fabs are a small club, and Apple ain't in it.
I don't want AI. I am preparing for a jump (back) to Linux. "Choice" disappeared, and yes, I know about the "fix" [0]
Maybe this idea may be foreign to many, but personal computers were something I built from bags of parts socketed and/or soldered onto S-100 cards, and that experience was the foundation of most of my career.
I was a Henry Higgins, and proud of my Eliza(s). While I get along cooperatively with Eliza (the happy ending to "My Fair Computer") I don't want Eliza to be my caretaker. This morphing of computers and internet into nannies and caretakers is IMO reverting to the "good old days" of servants. While some inventions are truly liberating (ask the guy who missed his Mom at an airport and freaked out for hours until she showed up at my home, courtesy of a cab or bus) how many are just replacing people with machines?
I could seriously use some friendship of the human variety, rather than a humanoid in a box (or an especially nice robot as in "I Sing the Body Electric" by Ray Bradbury, memorable on The Twilight Zone) Try being older and living alone, typing away.
I don't even use GPS any more, since I trashed Apple Maps when they kissed the Emperor's big fanny.
[0] https://github.com/omlahore/RemoveMacAI
There's never been a more confusing time to buy a MacBook. I understand there are technical variations, but it's difficult to compare when different screen sizes require different chip generations. Different memory amounts require different processor types. Etc. Etc.
I probably complained when Apple offered too FEW options too - but hey, this is the Internet.
Don't think it's worth moving from previous max products yet to be honest. My M3 MAX still does a hell of a job whenever I need it.
Agree. I'm still on my M1 Max w/ 32g, and I can't really find a reason to upgrade.
For LLMs (apart from Apple's foundation models) the M1 Max still holds its own for the most part.
The base M6 is faster (much much faster) than the M1 Max at prefill (compute bound).
The M1 Max outperforms the base M6 at token generation; this is memory-bandwidth-bound, and while the M1 Max can't actually saturate its memory bandwidth, it gets a lot closer with the GPU.
So I suspect the M6 is better if your AI tasks are decision-based or video/image based, and the M1 Max is better if you're running a coding LLM. Though prefill is a bit of an issue.
You know, it kind of surprises me there isn't an Apple Linux yet.
It seems like such an easy win and could rapidly become the most popular Linux distro, even running on non Apple hardware.
They have the money so why not just do it?
There are probably countless other things they could do which would move the revenue numbers more than supporting Linux.
Wasn't this rumored to have OLED or am I confusing it with something else?
I believe Apple is expected to announce MacBook Pro 16” with OLED on Nov 6th (macrumors.com)
Touch OLED laptops expected at tomorrow's event.
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/10/25/macbook-pro-with-touchs...
Any possibility that these will also support the Apple Pencil?
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After using a 16" laptop it would be hard for me to go back
I feel like I am about to go the opposite way lol. Love the 16" screen...hate lugging it around
Really just function of mobility? Move a lot? 15-16 is combersome. Stationary often, maybe just roaming from your desk to your couch/bed? 16 is totally fine.
I'm in the 14-15 camp w/ lighter form factors being worth the premium.
I tried below 13 after the trend of smaller laptops from a couple years back - I now don't believe anyone who tells me they're regularly productive on these smaller form factors lol.
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Yeah. I love my 16" almost max specced out, but for travel I wanted something lighter and compact so I got a 13" m5 mba.
Love both.
Same. I had a 14" M1 Pro and found it the screen too small for my aging eyes.
The good news is bigger laptops coming tomorrow in the phased release.
I ended up doing the opposite! After being on the go with 15, 16, and 17 inch laptops I've finally moved to smaller 13 and 14 inch screens.
It's much, much easier to transport even though I do miss the screen real estate.
I travel a lot with my 13" MacBook Air and can't imagine wanting to deal with anything bigger and heavier.
Yeah 14" pro is the best thing I have ever moved around with. I have a studio display at my desk though.
If you want to run LLMs: get the M5 Pro, not the base M6.
what llms are you running with m5 pro?
I am not — I'm using a 64GB M1 Max. Mostly with Muse Glimmer, sometimes Qwen 3.8 27B, Gemma 4 12B QAT, currently playing with LFM 2.5 24B-2B a bit.
I'm just saying, the base M6 is not very competitive in terms of memory bandwidth (the M5 Pro has about 80% faster memory bandwidth).
Compared with my old M1 Max, the M5 Pro is radically better at prefill, only about 15% slower at most at generation (and probably performs better at DFlash and MLX than the M1, so it might close the gap or even outperform the M1 Max)
So the models I am using/testing should all be quite fun, assuming the 48GB RAM machine. The Gemma 4 12B and LFM should run well on the 24GB machine. Neither of those are great coding models but they should be pretty good assistants. There are harsher quantisations of those other models that may fit.
Whether playing with these things locally is worth the extra spend, I don't know. It's probably more cost-effective to buy a cheaper Mac, experiment with the smaller models, and use Openrouter for the bigger ones.
someone donate me this. or i can build something for you also. whatever works. :)
Spec'd out Air is all you need
"A Huge Upgrade". They literally just changed the CPU? How is that a huge upgrade? What would they call an actual upgrade, the kind people expected?
So tired of their PR grandiose.
32GB of RAM only? What? Also weird that they are talking about token speed, but no larger LLMs can fit on this thing.
Also, what happened to the I/O?? I was happy to see on the M4 they had HDMI, an SD card slot, and more. Why are they back to 2 USB-C ports? I only see pictures of one side, but the left side has traditionally had more I/O.
C'mon, Apple, do better. It's a PRO model, not a MacBook Air
while understandable i think you are too hasty. the side shown does indeed only have two usb c ports and the magsafe port, but the other side will almost certainly still have the usb c, hdmi, and card reader (cant remember if they added a second usb c port there at some point as well)
also, i don't blame you for this given that Apple's naming scheme is so fucked here but the 32gb limitation is for the MacBook Pro with the M6, _not_ the MacBook Pro with the M6 Pro or M6 Max. yes, that is confusing, but imo the standard MacBook "Pro" with the base M chip is basically a glorified MacBook Air with a better chassis. I feel like they only sell these things to make the Air seem like a better deal and to justify a higher price for the M Pro / Max versions
edit: those M Pro versions may be announced tomorrow alongside a version with, or those being the version with a touchscreen
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/10/25/macbook-pro-with-touchs...
Huh? It still has all the same ports.
16gb for default ram? is this a joke? base level is same for almost 5 years now, crazy level of slow upgrades, basically anyone needs pro device will never purchase the default specs, even air makes more sense.
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.
The fastest M6 MacBook Pro (24/32GB config) has a memory bandwidth of 170 GB/s. And the M5 Max is 614 GB/s.
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?
Arguably the thing you’re missing is the 5090 is $1999 MSRP and more like $5000+ retail currently, and then you still need to buy the rest of the computer. This on the other hand is a whole system for $2400 (for the 32gb config). Maybe won’t set the “local LLM” world on fire, but likely to do a lot more for it than the 5090s will for the moment.
You're correct, the base (non-Pro, non-Max) chips are still not great for local LLMs. M5 and M6 both improved prefill speed/time-to-first-token over prior gens, but bw is still a bottleneck.
There's rumored to be no M6 Pro or M6 Max coming, i.e. the higher bandwidth chips will skip a gen. M7 is also rumored to have better memory bandwidth across the range.
Am I reading this correct? Max of 32Gb of RAM?
> With 16GB of unified memory standard, configurable up to 32GB, and higher memory bandwidth up to 170GB/s, MacBook Pro makes multitasking and working with demanding apps and large projects even faster.
So they're basically removing the ability to run local models effectively. I wonder if they'll bifurcate their market to enable those.
The base model has always been limited to 32gb. Select a pro or max chip for more memory options.
> I wonder if they'll bifurcate their market to enable those.
No they won't, the market for "running local models" is approximately 0. There's nothing to bifurcate anyway because once they release the more capable chips they'll be able to be configured with hiring amounts of RAM.
Apple in recent years has been updating their laptop range or specific models (Air or something) with their latest base M series chip (M4, M5, M6, &c.) and then later comes the higher end CPUs. But the base series chips don't have the hardware to it seems support higher RAM loads, or maybe they are artificially restricted in some way.
Apple has moved from a "Big day out" of marketing per year, where all product lineups would be announced, with novelty and conferences, to rolling releases along the year.
Do they get the same marketing impact?
Apple has had release-weeks in spring and fall, with some variance, for a while now:
https://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#mac https://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#ipad
Post-COVID Apple releases have been totally different than the Jobs era.
I think I'll skip this one. Apple's M-series chips are so good that my upgrade cycles just keep getting longer and longer...