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throwfaraway135 26 minutes ago [-]
"M6 features a powerful, larger 12-core GPU that provides higher geometry rates and updated Dynamic Caching to deliver stunning visuals and fluid frame rates in demanding games like Mixtape."
Why choose the worst game of the year? Just because it's made by the daughter of Larry Ellison?
kridsdale1 23 minutes ago [-]
Just the other day I mentioned how odd it was that Mixtape felt just like AI-Art. At first glance it has great visual style and seems cool. But spend more than 5 minutes with it and you’ll agree there’s nothing there. It has zero ART inside. It’s one hundred percent vibes.
I’m not claiming this title was
made by GenAI. I’m saying something much more insulting: that the human artists who made it have no talent.
docmars 22 minutes ago [-]
That's pretty embarrassing. It's such a poor representation of gaming. I'm surprised anyone is still talking about it.
SockThief 15 minutes ago [-]
Well, there's 24 people still playing it now on Steam
dprkh 12 minutes ago [-]
I never even heard of this game.
bigyabai 19 minutes ago [-]
It would have been funny to see Tomb Raider return for it's 12th annual performance comparison in a 2026 Apple keynote.
rxyz 4 minutes ago [-]
They should have used Cyberpunk or Control. They are few years old now but are native Mac games with ray tracing
bayindirh 4 hours ago [-]
I know, this is a bit of a meaningless comment, but it's funny in a way. Feels like late 90s again:
- Xiaomi: We have matched Apple in CPU performance.
- Apple: *Meep Meep...*
derwiki 4 hours ago [-]
Reading Infinite Games, they tell an anecdote about a Microsoft exec on a flight telling an Apple exec that the Zune was a way better portable music player than the iPod. The Apple exec was just “yup, you’re probably right” and then soon after the iPhone dropped
VCFundedGenYer 1 hours ago [-]
To be fair, the Zune actually was a better media player than the ipod in almost every way. That wasn't a false statement.
The issue was the abysmal marketing and "me too" attitude Microsoft had (and still has).
tcmart14 10 minutes ago [-]
Never had a zune, but I did have an iPod. I am willing to accept Zune was superior. But its just an example that, yea, often times the superior solution doesn't actually win. There is a huge list of better technology that lost out to worst technology. Which is why I find it funny the claim that the market is optimal in choosing winners and loosers.
gffrd 1 hours ago [-]
Technical capability pales in comparison to human desire.
sigmoid10 28 minutes ago [-]
Until you actually need to run a business. Then money is much more important than the preferences of your employees. That's why Apple has barely penetrated the business world beyond overfunded startups that are more driven by hype and design wanna-bes than actual profit.
badprose 9 minutes ago [-]
> Until you actually need to run a business.
Did you mean to say "Until you actually need to sell to a business."?
They did do very well for a long time mostly by focusing on consumers...
Razengan 32 minutes ago [-]
Being easy and pleasant to use and own is also an important capacity.
insane_dreamer 52 minutes ago [-]
I had the first iPod, and later the first Zune. The Zune had a beautiful UI, but by then Apple came out with the iPod Nano 2nd gen and that took the cake.
21 minutes ago [-]
riazrizvi 29 minutes ago [-]
The Zune failed vs the iPod because of marketing? Okay.
QuercusMax 17 minutes ago [-]
The turd brown color certainly didn't help
wat10000 1 hours ago [-]
It was better in every way you can quantify in a tech specs listing, and not in any way that actually matters to the customer.
georgel 60 minutes ago [-]
I had the OG white Zune. It was the same price as an iPod ~$250. The reason I chose Zune was the Zune Pass. A precursor to Spotify. Plus growing up in the Seattle area, I knew other people who had them and we would trade songs.
Andrex 44 minutes ago [-]
I completely forgot you could "squirt" songs to other Zune owners. What a time!
(Brown launch model here.)
jimbokun 21 minutes ago [-]
Not much difference between storing as many songs you can listen to in a lifetime, or storing twice as many songs as you can listen to in a lifetime.
stillpointlab 1 hours ago [-]
100% - the iPod wasn't just good enough, it was more than enough for almost everyone. The Zune was firmly in the diminishing returns category by the time it came out.
compiler-guy 28 minutes ago [-]
Yep. To overcome an incumbent that sells a very good product and has momentum, it is almost never enough to be somewhat better. You have to be "knock my socks off" better.
The Zune may have been somewhat better (until the nano and iphone), but it wasn't enough better to overcome the ecosystem switching costs.
1 hours ago [-]
aatd86 59 minutes ago [-]
me still thinking about the iRiver H320 I was lusting after...
1 hours ago [-]
shuwix 59 minutes ago [-]
Actually, Microsoft came with "modern" smart phone much sooner.
Actually too soon, technology wasn't there (price, computing power, size, weight, battery life).
Apple never came first ... but often just at the right moment and had marketing skills to make it a new trend.
skrebbel 51 minutes ago [-]
I'm the opposite of an Apple fanboy (typing this on a Windows box), but this is some grade A nonsense.
Sure, MS launched PDAs and phone-ish devices long ago, running Windows CE and whatnot but they were awful. It's absolute bollocks that the iPhone was a splashing success because of Apple marketing. It was a splashing success because it worked spectacularly well. Random non-tech people would randomly pull out their newest purchase to show their friends. "And now it's a notepad!" "Look and now suddenly it's a calculator!" Sure, your awful HP Tablet had all that, and a call function, well before. But it sucked. It felt like using a computer while squinting, and not like a magic calculator that can turn into a notepad and then into a phone and then into an iPod.
The iPhone was a success because it worked so well. And it worked so well because the technology was there - in part because they invented it and in part because they had the taste to not bring out a shit product but wait a bit instead.
philistine 27 minutes ago [-]
This shorthand that marketing means a bad thing is actually not true for Apple. Apple's marketing is how it ought to be at every company. They do market research to figure out what users need, they famously came up with the iPod's click wheel, they don't just do the ads. Of course Apple is eminently critiquable, but its marketing division is what everybody should do.
shuwix 28 minutes ago [-]
Reading with understanding is absent in your skillset.
I exactly wrote that Microsoft devices were quite bad as they came too soon.
And Apple came at the right moment, when low power chips were powerful enough, touchscreens were precise enough without a pen. And device had acceptable consumption, batteries had decent capacity, lifespan.
nitin7 31 minutes ago [-]
Imagine having to go to Start - Programs - Phone, in order to make a call.
qlte 8 minutes ago [-]
Sure, I can imagine it. But I had a Windows Mobile phone and definitely didn't need to do this, there was a Phone button on the start screen.
__alexs 55 minutes ago [-]
Windows CE (1996) was garbage compared to Palm OS (also 1996.)
0x457 13 minutes ago [-]
Years after the first iPhone release, Microsoft had a dogshit mobile OS, and every single device using it was dogshit. Before Android, the industry's answer to iOS and iPhone was a resistive touch screen and stylus because, other than the launcher, absolutely nothing was adapted to fingers. That was if you were lucky; some didn't include a stylus, reducing usefulness for making calls. It was like running regular Windows applications scaled down to a smartphone screen.
NoMoreNicksLeft 52 minutes ago [-]
>Apple never came first ... but often just at the right moment and had marketing skills to make it a new trend.
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)
mikestew 3 hours ago [-]
Might want to edit, as this would make sense/be amusing if the exec in the last sentence was Apple.
That, or I can’t read.
derwiki 3 hours ago [-]
You got it, thank you!
nxobject 2 hours ago [-]
Hell hath no fury like Apple Global Security scorned...
mark_l_watson 1 hours ago [-]
I loved the book The Infinite Game. Really changed how I looked at work, personal research, and being an author. Recommended!
troupo 3 hours ago [-]
Zune was probably a better player. It was too late, and arrived when MS didn't much care.
There are emails unearthed in various lawsuits where you can read Bill Gates screaming at his subordinates: "why the hell can't our partners like Sony and Creative create a similar device? Give them all, give them early access to everything, work with them". In the end MS felt compelled to make their own.
bayindirh 3 hours ago [-]
Sony can't be bothered to compete with Apple in that era. They were trying to recover from their DRM dreams, and their devices were already sounding great with in-house software and hardware.
Creative's Muvo^2 already was the poor man's iPod with surprisingly good audio quality as well.
cptskippy 2 hours ago [-]
I feel like this completely misses the mark. Audio quality was never the compelling feature of the iPod and people weren't clamoring for it because it sounded good.
When the iPod came out you largely had two options for carrying your music collection on the go. You either carried a binder of CDs, or you had some niche player like Mini-Disc or an MP3 player. Both alternatives were expensive and had limitations similar to a CD in terms of number of tracks you could carry.
I had an MP3 player on either side of 2000 that was slightly smaller than a deck of playing cards that could use Smart Media flash memory cards. The largest card at the time was either 16 or 32mb and was enough to hold 1 album at near CD quality.
Creative's Muvo was a weird form factor that was larger than an iPod. It had a horrid interface both on device and for loading music. It's only grace was that it was slightly cheaper than an iPod and didn't need a Mac with FireWire. Although iircc this was pre USB 2.0 so not having FireWire would mean loading music took forever and a day.
The iPod allowed you to carry most, if not all, of your music collection in a package slightly larger than a deck of playing cards. And it had a fantastic interface for navigating music on the device.
This was at a time before most people had laptops and if you had a PC it was at home and used sparingly. The iPod was such a compelling mobile computing device that it drove adoption of the iMac. Apple would eventually release iTunes for Windows and USB support but that was many years later.
thewebguyd 2 hours ago [-]
> I had an MP3 player on either side of 2000 that was slightly smaller than a deck of playing cards that could use Smart Media flash memory cards. The largest card at the time was either 16 or 32mb and was enough to hold 1 album at near CD quality.
I had something similar. The storage was the iPod's killer feature, along with iTune's $0.99 songs. Suddenly you no longer had to buy whole albums, and you didn't have to swap out what was on your MP3 player every day when you wanted a different playlist. A 5GB hard drive in your pocket was a huge innovation then.
fckgw 1 hours ago [-]
"1000 songs in your pocket" was the entire driving force behind the thing. It was constantly bellowed in the marketing and it's what Steve Jobs demanded of the engineering team from day one. The size and the storage were paramount and they knew no one else could match it.
peezd 1 hours ago [-]
Yep this was really it. The amount of storage on the ipod was amazing and just opened up the idea that "yes you put your full music collection on it".
jonhohle 1 hours ago [-]
I had a Rio Volt which somewhat bridged the gap. 700MB mp3 CD/RWs (about 10 hours of music per disc) and a CD player when traveling and picking up new music. Not as small as an iPod, but no book of CDs was necessary, either.
cosmic_cheese 1 hours ago [-]
> Zune was probably a better player.
In some ways, anyway. Never owned a Zune myself, but a university classmate did and I was shocked by how poorly it handled non-Latin languages… she had a ton of Japanese and Korean songs loaded onto it, and their metadata all displayed as "missing character" blocks. She used it a lot like one might use an iPod Shuffle despite it having a nice screen because the only way to tell what was playing was by hearing it play.
By contrast my 4th gen B&W iPod which was about 5-6 years older handled unicode just fine.
VCFundedGenYer 1 hours ago [-]
IIRC the Zune had a much better DAC on the device than any ipod. I own two of them and the sound quality was always notably great.
“Squirting” was ridiculed at the time and the word itself scaring away women. Jobs killed it then in an interview with a classic quote: Microsoft = Cold tech and Apple = Humanity. MS scares her away, Apple gets the girl.
> QUESTION: Microsoft has announced its new iPod competitor, Zune. It says that this device is all about building communities. Are you worried?
> Steve Jobs: In a word, no. I’ve seen the demonstrations on the Internet about how you can find another person using a Zune and give them a song they can play three times. It takes forever. By the time you’ve gone through all that, the girl’s got up and left! You’re much better off to take one of your earbuds out and put it in her ear. Then you’re connected with about two feet of headphone cable.
yard2010 2 hours ago [-]
I just want to take a minute and be grateful for getting the chance to live through the 90s again. I always felt a bit sorry for myself being a child through the og 90s. Now I feel like in a decade or so into the future I will look back and be happy I got to live in the naïve days of windows 95 again, as an adult this time. I really appreciate it.
VCFundedGenYer 1 hours ago [-]
Seems most computer companies are still boasting that they can beat the M1 and it's like...congrats on beating a 6 year old chipset?
bob1029 1 hours ago [-]
I still have zero urgency in upgrading from my M1 MBP.
rconti 13 minutes ago [-]
Same. My personal laptop is an M1 Air and I also have an M1 Studio desktop.
My work machine is an M4, and in "regular" use I can't tell the difference between them.
ant6n 1 hours ago [-]
I don’t get that sentiment. I have an m4 16gb and it’s such a sluggish machine. and that’s not even doing development, just browsers, word, excel, PowerPoint. (And so many eternal bugs… I feel like I’m on windows)
georgel 48 minutes ago [-]
I have an M2 Pro MBP 16GB, compared to the latest MBP issued by my employer a couple months ago, I see zero difference in real world performance. Can’t speak for Office on Mac, I have not used it in over a decade, but for typical full stack web dev I literally don’t need anything more.
omnimus 31 minutes ago [-]
You better check health of your machine then.
forinti 4 hours ago [-]
Cheap RAM in 500 yards. ->
RankingMember 4 hours ago [-]
[apparent tunnel to cheap RAM painted on rock face]
bayindirh 4 hours ago [-]
...and Apple zooms through it like it's a real tunnel.
PUSH_AX 3 hours ago [-]
Apple is like the Billy Mitchell of computing. Just waited for them to beat it before announcing the gains they were sitting on.
inigyou 3 hours ago [-]
Does this imply they faked all their benchmarks?
chvid 33 minutes ago [-]
The US “export controls” what Chinese companies can buy at TSMC.
bryanlarsen 3 hours ago [-]
It's been really weird reading laptop reviews over the last few months. I've seen a bunch of reviews where they have their usual bar graphs comparing a bunch of laptops, and the laptop that is at the bottom is an Apple. It's the really inexpensive Neo, of course, but even the M5 laptops are consistently beat on performance and battery life by Intel Windows laptops.
I assume the M6 will take the crown back and then a few months later Intel/AMD will release a new chip and take that crown back again. That's the state of the world we used to expect, but it's a state that has been missing ever since the release of the M1 in 2020 until Intel finally caught up again this year.
dbspin 3 hours ago [-]
> even the M5 laptops are consistently beat on performance and battery life by Intel Windows laptops.
When plugged in... This caveat is so enormous it should almost be legislated. If your computer use is at all portable, a computer that scales down to 20 - 40% of GPU power when unplugged is an enormously significant factor. So far as I'm aware (could be wrong about arm devices?) there's no non-apple laptop that operates at 100% speed on the road.
doomroot13 3 hours ago [-]
Newer Intel Panther Lake chips perform the same or very similarly on battery as they do when plugged in - as do Qualcomm chips. However, I don't know where they're seeing "consistently beat on performance and battery life by Intel Windows laptops". Multi-core performance can definitely beat M5 in some configurations but single core performance is still fairly far behind and battery life is comparable again depending on the exact specifications and design of the laptop. I've seen analysis showing M5 is still the perf/watt king though regardless of configurations.
bryanlarsen 3 hours ago [-]
Sorry, poor wording. It's the Neo that's on the bottom in many reviews, but the M5 is regularly beaten by Windows laptops. My usage of "consistently" was in the sense of regularly beaten, not in the sense of always beaten.
senordevnyc 2 hours ago [-]
So…inconsistently?
bryanlarsen 2 hours ago [-]
So consistently beats the M5 on something, just not on everything.
bryanlarsen 3 hours ago [-]
Have you tried Panther Lake or Wildcat Lake laptops?
3 hours ago [-]
inigyou 3 hours ago [-]
Jesus, they're still calling their chips Lake? As in Skylake? As in 2012?
fhn 3 hours ago [-]
Jesus, why does it matter? Don't you still have your name since birth? How lame!
inigyou 59 minutes ago [-]
Because the naming convention was used for chips based on Skylake microarchitecture (but with other differences such as process node). Not changing the name implies they've either changed the naming convention (why?) or they haven't improved the microarchitecture since 2012.
2 hours ago [-]
adgjlsfhk1 3 hours ago [-]
Apple also is faster when plugged in
dbspin 2 hours ago [-]
Citation needed. I've owned Apple laptops for many years - and I'm a video editor (amongst other things). If this is the case it's new behaviour.
addaon 1 hours ago [-]
This is a difference between selecting Highest or Automatic for performance under the battery menu item.
Topfi 3 hours ago [-]
> [...] but even the M5 laptops are consistently beat on performance and battery life by Intel Windows laptops.
Hold up, in what metric/benchmark? Feel personally like we life in an age where, no matter the SOC vendor, something high performant and efficient is offered, so seeing a claim that any vendor, be it Intel, AMD, Qualcomm or Apple, is consistently outperforming another, I'd like to get more context on that.
achenet 1 hours ago [-]
It seems logical in this case.
Intel were x86, Apple Silicon is ARM-based. ARM-based chips are more power-efficient.
Also, it's built on a much smaller process. 3nm, if I'm not mistaken, older Intel was something bigger than 10nm. Heck, if you take a really old Intel Mac, you have something like 65nm process, which is much less efficient than 3nm.
> It's the really inexpensive Neo, of course, but even the M5 laptops are consistently beat on performance and battery life by Intel Windows laptops.
Of course you can beat the entry level MacBook Neo by comparing it to larger, more powerful, more expensive laptops.
The M5 is an entire family with a range of performance. Intel/AMD have done a lot to improve performance but they’re not beating the high end M5 chips on performance or battery life yet.
It's also not hard to find a Windows laptop that beats the M5 on battery life. Single-thread performance is the only remaining measure where the M5 is king.
code_duck 41 minutes ago [-]
Build quality, keyboard and displays are consistently reviewed as being nicer for the Neo than that price range of windows laptops.
f6v 2 hours ago [-]
> but even the M5 laptops are consistently beat on performance and battery life by Intel Windows laptops
The real question is whether all these Intel Windows laptops spin their fans at full speed when doing absolutely nothing. That’s something I can never go back to. I do some light gaming on my M2 Pro MBP and it gets hot when trying to push 120 fps. But my Lenovo Legion (that’s now collecting the dust) is so loud I could hear it through headphones.
bayindirh 3 hours ago [-]
x86 is way more complex when compared to ARM processors, as a result their TDP is way higher when you request performance from them.
Intel had to reduce the frequency of their processors when running AVX2 instructions and the AVX2 frequency of the processors were non-disclosable to anyone.
Also, benchmarking Intel processors and publishing these numbers were forbidden in some cases. I don't know whether this ban is still in effect.
x86 processors can't keep up with the ARM processors TDP and thermal profile wise. So they slow down a ton when running on battery. See Jeff Geerling's last video on Apple Neo vs. some Intel laptop. It's as "efficient", but slow as a newborn tortoise learning to walk when unplugged and trying to get the most endurance out of the battery.
My M1 Mac gets almost 2 days of low-intensity use after ~6 years of use, and it got warm once or twice because something ran away in the background for tens of minutes.
Topfi 3 hours ago [-]
Being mistaken on the CISC vs RISC debate (besides, modern x86 is closer to RISC via micro-ops then old school CISC) is understandable. There is a lot of misinformation out there and myths, plus, it just feels right to consider CISC overly burdened, etc. TLDR: Intel x86_64 is closer to RISC then you likely think and Apple Silicon arm is closer to CISC then you likely think. These lines are blurry and have been for decades, very much for good reason.
> But talking this authoritatively on something without doing the reading, that's grating...
Thanks for your prejudice on me without knowing anything about me. In short, I'm a HPC sysadmin and programmer who works in a HPC center, separated from the actual hardware by a couple of floors.
We can discuss how transistors' heat generation doesn't discern about ISAs or being in a DAC or a cutting edge microprocessor, and we can even discuss how implementation of some functional blocks generate heat regardless of the ISA being involved. If you want we can discuss how saturating memory controllers affect pipeline saturation in processors even...
But talking this authoritatively on something with that amount of prejudice, that's grating.
aaa_aaa 1 hours ago [-]
But still, your point was AFAIK already dismissed long ago.
Topfi 2 hours ago [-]
After that comment, why does it matter where you work?
bayindirh 2 hours ago [-]
Because being too confident about someone you don't know is a bad habit. Where I work doesn't matter though, but what I do is.
Pointing me to C&C is a nice touch though. Not only I read the site and very article you sent me before, I used to consume Anandtech before that.
As a mere mortal, I can make mistakes and gladly accept them, but I can't accept rude replies. Pardon my French, but being called a low-key liar or smoke blower gets me a little upset.
Topfi 1 hours ago [-]
> Pointing me to C&C is a nice touch though. Not only I read the site and very article you sent me before, I used to consume Anandtech before that.
All I'll say is, that's worse then. Presuming you had not read up before promoting a long disproven myth, that was an assumption by me, I'll admit that and maybe I should not have done that, my mistake. But it was a gracious mistake, it was done in your favour, it was giving you credit.
pavlov 3 hours ago [-]
In the ‘90s it was the opposite.
- Apple: We have matched Intel in CPU performance thanks to this new PowerPC! (Shows ad that uses carefully handpicked benchmarks to suggest that the PowerPC is actually faster when it really isn’t on average)
- Intel: Oh, we just found a 30% clock rate increase in the pocket of our other fab pants.
- AMD: Hold my beer, I have the DEC Alpha guys making an x86 CPU… How about 64-bit while at it.
bayindirh 2 hours ago [-]
I said late 90s though. The insanity which poured through early 2000s.
5.25GHz Pentium 4s, intentionally lower binned Athlons, the era your CPU got obsoleted the moment you booted it for the first time.
I don't remember early 90s much. I was too young back then. I don't remember much stuff from that era. But late 90s, early 2000s.
Oh, boy.
P.S.: AMD64 was a great sucker punch though. One of the professors in our university rejected to believe and got mad when he learnt that Intel licensed AMD64 from AMD, heh.
qwertytyyuu 4 hours ago [-]
Echos of the ai race as well haha
Gud 2 hours ago [-]
Except in the 90s, I could wield my OS of choice on the hardware I bought.
bayindirh 2 hours ago [-]
That's sadly true though. Also booting something was really simple.
Now we boot an embedded microcontroller (or CPU) which boots the main CPU which boots another OS semi-persistently to boot the main OS (if it's allowed).
Sometimes there are other processors needs to be up to allow processor to continue booting as well (these are mostly servers, but eh).
ajross 3 hours ago [-]
To be fair, this kind of dominance is not unprecedented. Intel was even further ahead in the early 2000's. Every new competitor process was further behind the leading edge and not closer. TSMC started launching half nodes like 28nm just to have something in the market that would sell.
But then you started to see the cracks. New competitors would launch new products with very slightly better metrics than Intel's older stuff, just to be, heh, meep-meeped at the next press conference. But the overlap was real, if small. And it grew over time until everyone looked up around the 5nm node and realized Intel had lost.
That's where we are right now with Apple. "Funny in a way", sure. But history says this is more likely to be the beginning of the end. Everything goes in cycles.
handbanana_ 3 hours ago [-]
Haha, late 90s wasn't really like that though
mr_toad 4 hours ago [-]
Apple levelled up in the middle of a fight.
Zylokloto 3 hours ago [-]
I do not find it funny tbh.
I'm very very surprised that Xiaomi matches Apples speed even with the newest release, its not diminishing Xiaomis success.
giwook 3 hours ago [-]
It's interesting to see how defensive some of these pro-China posters get on HN and elsewhere. I'm genuinely curious why there seems to be an inferiority complex here with respect to America/American companies.
yipinwong 3 hours ago [-]
China follows foot-in-the-door tactic per the Art of War. (done in HK, Korea, Singapore, and Malaysia)
This in-turn later on, AIs will train to make pro-China comments as AIs train on these.
They got the sheer man-power, and with AIs it's even easier.
2 hours ago [-]
Zylokloto 3 hours ago [-]
I'm not a pro-china poster, i'm from germany and didn't find this 'funny'.
Apple is the second richest company on the world (which doesn't need help/protection?!) and they have experts in chip design.
Xiamoi is some random chinese company not known for high end chips and was able to catch up impressivly in a short period of time.
This fact doesn't get funny or wahtever just because apple brought out a new chip today.
I'm not a fanboy for any of it and do not care.
Aurornis 1 hours ago [-]
> Xiamoi is some random chinese company not known for high end chips and was able to catch up impressivly in a short period of time
Xiamoi is a huge company and is a commonly known brand. They’ve been making chips for a long time. They didn’t start a few months ago and catch up with Apple on their first try.
vkazanov 52 minutes ago [-]
> random chinese company
Oh i have soooo many news for you!
inigyou 3 hours ago [-]
Are they well known in China? I'm seeing that Chinese tech has decoupled from the West. They have all this cool stuff that we do not hear about because they aren't selling it to us because they don't need to. It's usually been stuff with better price to performance or ultra low prices though, rather than ultimate performance stuff. I wouldn't be surprised if they made a top end chip that everyone in China knew about, and we didn't.
Nursie 2 hours ago [-]
> Xiamoi is some random chinese company
That might be the funniest thing I read all day. Xiaomi is a massive company that makes all sorts of things, including a lot of pretty high-end mobiles, and has an annual revenue in the order of 75 billion US.
It’s no Apple, but it’s not exactly “some random Chinese company” either.
dismalaf 1 hours ago [-]
> catch up impressivly in a short period of time.
They're using ARM designed cores. So it's more like Apple just isn't as far ahead of ARM as some people claim.
cyanydeez 3 hours ago [-]
I find pro apple comments funnier; but you know, everyones got their own rose colored glasses.
smith7018 3 hours ago [-]
I think it's great but it's important to remember that we haven't seen Xiaomi's chips in actual devices under real world tests. We don't know if the speeds are sustainable, under what wattage, etc. Competition is still great and I look forward to learning more, of course.
bayindirh 3 hours ago [-]
I find it funny not because I support Apple. I find it funny because it feels like the leapfrogging happened in early superscalar CPU evolution. The era when the Moore's Law was working.
I enjoy it because of progress, not because of Apple.
yipinwong 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
deaux 2 hours ago [-]
25 day old account, very first comment about using US models because you can't trust China? Be gone russian bot
@TRACK: yipinwong
Just kidding but seriously man, this level of paranoia isn't healthy. Try talking about it with someone you trust. The comment you're replying to is completely normal.
yipinwong 1 hours ago [-]
ty for the concern.
I'd like to back up my belief and claims based on my metrics and experience.
If data backs it up, then I will apply my baynesian thinking to change my mind.
Anecdotes normally triumphs in real life and biz, but not in online communities.
Zylokloto 3 hours ago [-]
I'm just a german dude not finding this 'joke' funny.
I'm not an apple fanboy nor a xiamoi fanboy.
Its impressive that a random chinese company was able to catch up to the 2th richest company with global experts so fast and this achievement is not dimnished just because apple announced their M6 today.
Are you some fanboy?
yipinwong 3 hours ago [-]
I've seen so many I am not from China comment in all of the countries I mentioned like in HK, Japanese, Korea, Malaysia, but all turns out they are. Some of those countries communities expose countries, and yes, they are from mostly Guanzhou.
It's just funny how it's consistent they deny their own heritage. Be proud of who you are.
4fterd4rk 2 hours ago [-]
There's that legendary German sense of humor.
recursivedoubts 4 hours ago [-]
Even w/the pricing spike, inflation adjusted we are back to roughly the prices of a new Mac SE/30 for something that can beat a turing test w/o sweating.
I yield the floor to no one when it comes to pessimism, but that's incredible.
dannyw 4 hours ago [-]
The DRAM market is cyclical. I don’t think anyone truly knows when, but it will happen.
Fab capacity is being bought online; there’s just lead time.
Noticeably greater intelligence is being achieved at the same number of parameters (see: Qwen3.8).
I think the future will be bright, it might be a matter of time. And for tinkers, a used Epyc + DDR4 server can be great fun and epic value.
brookst 4 hours ago [-]
100%. We're probably on the cusp of over-capacity, a glut, cheap RAM, bankruptcies, and shortages.
unsupp0rted 1 hours ago [-]
The memory companies report that they're sold out through 2027... so it might be a while
kstenerud 1 hours ago [-]
That's only if the AI companies continue their build outs.
How many people actually use fable over opus? How far are we up the diminishing returns curve, and will their customers even care?
agentcoops 49 minutes ago [-]
I don’t think the effects on the hardware market of open weight models triumphing has been reflected upon enough. It’s not clear that it will be less impactful if every enterprise decides to build for predominantly on-premise inference. In fact, before the question is ultimately decided, we’re probably heading towards a few years where hobbyists, enterprises and ‘hyper scalers’ are all competing for certain parts in common. Ram booked through 2027 sounds about right.
Foobar8568 41 minutes ago [-]
Companies are avoid risks, and at this stage, sometimes, I feel that all cloud providers are just buying RAM that they would have bought anyway. Now it's ensure that no company will be willing to pay x digits just for cards. One of my clients is stuck in "we are doing things on premise but we are too cheap to spend a few 100k in cards but we don't want to go on clouds.
SSLy 4 hours ago [-]
Looks like I'll be sporting my 5800X3D + DDR4 + 9070 XT gaming box for a little while. Too bad the CPU's ST is slower than my MB Air m4.
pdpi 3 hours ago [-]
I built a new PC about two years ago, and I probably got it at the last possible opportunity for a while. CPU and motherboard have come down by maybe £100 in between the two of them, but a 7900 xtx (or any other 24GB GPU) for under £1,000 now seems like a bargain, and £180 for 64GB of DDR5 makes me feel like an old man talking about the halcyon days.
devmor 1 hours ago [-]
I built my current PC the day that the AM5 platform released, for about $6k not including the 3090 I moved over from the previous rig.
If I sold just the two sticks of RAM in it right now, it’d pay for nearly half of the total cost.
Lwerewolf 3 hours ago [-]
Welcome to the club. If you're _really_ competitive in cs2, I'd swap out to a 9800x3d setup, but it's still a maybe. Very little reason to upgrade right now other than to run LLMs.
what_hn 3 hours ago [-]
It will never make sense to me to run Llms locally unless I had 50k. I don't even think that would compete with price perf of a remote llm and getting business done. And that's completely ignoring that sol/fable level is not local
SSLy 21 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, instead I have unsubbed from WoW this week. The atrocious state of the game's code and scripting is unbearable.
cogman10 3 hours ago [-]
I'm expecting it to somewhat collapse. I don't know if it'll go back to pre bubble prices (here's to hoping), but I do expect a pretty sharp decline around 2030... probably not before then.
Basically everyone that makes memory is building new fabs, meanwhile I'm not sure how much longer AI datacenter demand for ram will last. I think the decrease in AI ram demand and the new fabs will likely coincide leading to a collapse in pricing.
That is, of course, assuming the memory manufacturers don't pull their favorite trick and collude.
FeepingCreature 3 hours ago [-]
If there's a decrease in AI ram demand, it will not be because the models get better. Models getting better will increase RAM demand, because it grows the part of the economy that models are useful for. Classic Jevon's Paradox.
cogman10 22 minutes ago [-]
I'm expecting the drop for a couple of reasons.
For 1, AI datacenter builders have said that they have more equipment than they have places to put them. Leaving a ton of hardware shelved while you wait for datacenters to build out is bad business to say the least.
For 2, I think we are nearing saturation for the usefulness of AI. I certainly could be wrong, but I don't really foresee there to be a bunch of new exciting usages of AI that will ultimately justify the continued buildout.
ciupicri 4 hours ago [-]
If it will happen in 100 years it will practically never happen (for us). Even 25 years would be a lot, it's half of a career.
Could you provide more details about the Epyc + DDR4 server?
bluGill 3 hours ago [-]
Cycles tend to be 5-10 years long not 25. Without knowing anything else I would expect a fab you seriously start planning today will be at full capacity in about 5 years. Nobody serious likes delays - in particular the banks don't like loaning money that won't at least start paying off. They know it takes some time to design a building - but factories typically are standard buildings so once you know about the size you can get it done fast - I expect 1 year to have the building done is the worst case (and it can be done in 3 months possibly if your project management is good - after interest this is cheaper than the 1 year). It takes time to build and install the specialized machines that go inside - this is the largest problem, but you typically order them first and then plan the building around the needed space and when they will arrive. Then you need 6 months to setup the inside of the building. From there it is just ramp up time.
The above is a standard project management problem. We do this for lots of industry all the time. There is every reason to think you can get a new factory running in 5 years.
Note that I said 1 factory above. Some of the special machines we don't have the ability to make them fast enough to do 2 (I don't know the real number!) new factories in 5 years. Existing factories are using most of the special machine capacity to replace machines that wore out on the way - this can be corrected as well, but it adds another year and the expenses are much larger. Realistically though 1 new factory is likely enough.
vonneumannstan 2 hours ago [-]
If you don't understand that the AI driven memory boom has totally broken the cycle you are going to lose a lot of money. There is infinite demand for Intelligence and that translates directly to chips.
Mistletoe 28 minutes ago [-]
Sounds like you are telling us it’s a new paradigm?
"If you don't understand that the AI driven memory boom has totally broken the cycle you are going to lose a lot of money."
mathisfun123 2 hours ago [-]
> The DRAM market is cyclical.
...
> I don’t think anyone truly knows when, but it will happen.
Do you know what cyclical means ... ?
darreninthenet 4 hours ago [-]
An additional £1,000 for a 2TB drive is crazy though, rapidly takes the new Mac mini from a good price to a nuts price
SloopJon 43 minutes ago [-]
I happily booted and ran an Intel Mac mini using a 4TB drive in a Thunderbolt 3 enclosure, and I do the same for an M4 Max Mac Studio using an 8TB drive in a USB4v2 enclosure (OWC Express 1M2 80G).
You'll just have to be careful to match the enclosure to the ports on the system. The base-model M6 Mac mini still uses Thunderbolt 4, so a USB4v2 enclosure would be wasted.
criddell 3 hours ago [-]
Considering hard drives were $10k / GB in the Mac SE/30 days, that feels like a bargain too.
aurmc 1 minutes ago [-]
Sure, yes, compared to the prices of storage 35 years ago, it's a bargain.
Compared to the prices of storage today, when people are presumably buying the product, it's actually a bad price.
inigyou 3 hours ago [-]
But software also fit in 640kB instead of 640GB.
bigfishrunning 55 minutes ago [-]
It still can, but until very recently the motivation for keeping software small wasn't there. I'm still hoping the tide is coming in.
Keyframe 3 hours ago [-]
On the higher end upgrade we're more like back to roughly SGI prices.
afro88 19 minutes ago [-]
> something that can beat a turing test w/o sweating
Ok I'll be that guy. It's pretty easy to figure out if you're talking to an LLM now we know it's tics, failure modes, jailbreak techniques etc
intrasight 4 hours ago [-]
Yes. I commented elsewhere that it's only twice as expensive as my first mac which has 128kb.
high_na_euv 4 hours ago [-]
You should compare with competition, not what was decades ago.
It turns out the limiting factor isn't how sophisticated algorithms are, it's how gullible humans are.
ashetr 4 hours ago [-]
What does that have to do with the Turing Test? The TT has clear rules: There are judges that have a dialogue with anonymized AI/humans. The humans cannot cheat and impersonate a machine, they have to act normally. The AI obviously should try to sound human.
No AI would pass this test with experienced judges.
pibaker 31 minutes ago [-]
Colloquially the Turing test is just a stand in for "can a human mistake a computer for a person." No need to overcomplicate it.
mingus88 3 hours ago [-]
You’ve moved the goalposts.
You can always say “oh well these judges don’t have the experience to catch this type of AI.
The fact that you have to insert this qualifier, to ensure you always have a way to discredit the test, pretty much shows to me that we’re beyond it.
stavros 3 hours ago [-]
You think current frontier models couldn't pass for a human on an online chat? You and I have very different perceptions of reality.
stickfigure 1 hours ago [-]
I think that if you have a long enough chat, yeah, I think you can figure out who's meat. The original rules for the TT specified a short interaction, but I can probably accelerate it by pasting in large code snippets to force early compactions.
frollogaston 3 hours ago [-]
Sounds like something we could settle right here and now.
stavros 3 hours ago [-]
Ha ha! Fool! You've been talking to an LLM all this time! Your wife is actually Haiku 4.5.
frollogaston 3 hours ago [-]
Huh, should've known it was odd for my wife to always say I'm right (as the boomers would say)
frollogaston 4 hours ago [-]
The test doesn't say that the judge has to be experienced. But I also don't care if some random gullible person can't tell the difference. Nothing passes the Turing Test for me yet.
Edit: Also doesn't say anything about who the human test subject is
simonh 3 hours ago [-]
Of course, and I'm sure OP wouldn't disagree with you, it was clearly a joke for emphasis. Some people round here need to clean and calibrate their humour detectors more often.
frollogaston 3 hours ago [-]
I wasn't responding to OP. I get the emphasis, the M6 Mac is very powerful.
cortesoft 1 hours ago [-]
How can you be certain you haven’t failed a Turing test?
frollogaston 39 minutes ago [-]
I've never done a test. That means 1. you know it's a test 2. you get like 5 back-and-forths or 5 minutes 3. you have a human subject to compare to. But pretty sure I'd pass anyway, as the judge or subject.
42 minutes ago [-]
beardedetim 4 hours ago [-]
I think of this and the book the author wrote Computer Power and Human Reason every time I try to talk to product about the short comings of LLMs
applicative 1 hours ago [-]
It was always a bad test, despite the greatness of Turing. The human organism is built to 'project' humanity onto anything available; apart from this none of the peculiar phenomena of the so-called 'modern human' is even intelligible, even the possibility of science. I bring all that is in me onto you as soon as you seem to be saying something, and reciprocally. We do this at the drop of a hat, and all specifically human life depends on it. But this power shows its 'gullibility' with 'gods' as also with Eliza. I am not snide about it because it is overreach by something the significance of which is overwhelming , but one is indeed amazed by the failure to reflect on the part of the ones eg giving LLMs rights - to take extreme case of a very widespread cultus - as if /they/ were the rational party, not ancients placating the storm god.
bell-cot 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah...but in context, "gullible" seem a bit pejorative. Humans are also hopelessly incapable of sensing radioactivity, methanol in their alcoholic drinks, carbon monoxide, and a great many other things that our ancestors just didn't encounter much.
Though we're pretty good at sizing up a person's emotional balance/maturity and competence at familiar tasks. So maybe have an old blacksmith watch the AI/robot interact with horse owners for a while, then shoe their horses, and see how well it does.
Someone1234 4 hours ago [-]
The EU just had to pass a law to force companies to disclose if a customer service agent is AI or Human. It is beaten.
Also the endless online debates of ‘is this post made by ai? What about those images, that video or that music?’.
stavros 3 hours ago [-]
Nowadays, I prefer AI CS agents to humans. I just had a chat with an AI yesterday, it understood me perfectly even when I made mistakes, I was impressed.
In contrast, humans tend to paste me the same barely-relevant macro over and over, no matter how much time I spend explaining my issue.
rogerrogerr 1 hours ago [-]
Yeah, at least LLMs read everything you write (for now). Human first level support agents are incredibly frustrating if you have to explain anything with more than one logical step.
maximilianthe1 3 hours ago [-]
Customer service is very different. Crappiest audio quality possible & scripted answers all the way down.
Almost like humans are forced to behave like machines.
bnchrch 4 hours ago [-]
According to Psychology today, April this year by GPT 4.5
I think it was determined that the Turing test is too easy because humans are too easily fooled.
bbor 4 hours ago [-]
Yes, which is exactly and entirely the point of the whole paper. Somehow missed still -- despite how important AI has become, shockingly few people actually read the short, layperson-accessible paper that started the whole field.
The Turing test is more complex than what gets suggested.
And the "popularized" version is faulty also since it uses an ideal, abstract human judge (like the "spheroidal economic agent").
But if you want to add declinations to the said popularized image of the Turing test, you may add Maxim Lott's IQ tests at trackingai.org . Between the end of 2024 and the beginning of 2025 LLMs reached an equivalent IQ of 100, for example.
3836293648 4 hours ago [-]
~1960
ELIZA beat the Turing test and then everyone forgot about it. Humans are just really terrible at recognising robots.
mdp2021 3 hours ago [-]
Or can we reframe it: when did humans start losing the (so-called) "Turing test".
I think there are elements showing lowering of performance and expectation.
It depends who takes the test. I am not yet, to my knowledge, fooled by AI.
I've tried [1] and I almost 100% detect which is the AI. I really want to convince myself I have failed, does anyone know of a better site/resource for this?
I know it might be moving goalposts but I would consider AI to have passed in a well and truly undisputed manner when [2] is resolved.
But in a more practical sense, if AI can impersonate humans so well today then why are state of the art frontier models so obviously AI when they create PRs, commit messages, documentation, etc. Are the companies deliberately making them unnatural?
we might need to bring back the Voight-Kampff test. anthropic at the very least is introducing a water making system to Claude which might make them more identifiable to humans as well as much easier to detect for machines.
dmd 4 hours ago [-]
“advanced LLMs like GPT-4”
shric 4 hours ago [-]
> "advanced LLMs like GPT-4"
Not sure where you're quoting from but if it's the metaculus question comments, many of them are from 2023. The consensus is it will resolve in 2029. I believe it will not resolve before 2035.
dmd 4 hours ago [-]
From the home page of turingtest.live.
shric 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah. That's why I asked if there was something better
intrasight 4 hours ago [-]
2050 I'm guessing
Rover222 2 hours ago [-]
are you living under a rock?
bubblegumcrisis 4 hours ago [-]
Sigh..
Is there anything better now though?
All I see from AI, is an amplification of the enshittification of the internet.
And people being even more alone.
AbsurdCensor 4 hours ago [-]
Sure, when you look a little wider, since 2000 we have seen the following major improvements:
- Extreme poverty has dropped from 30% to under 10% globally.
- Child mortality rates have dropped in half
- Internet access has exploded from 10% to 70%
- Solar energy costs have dropped 90%
- Cancer death rates have declined by 30%
All of these massive improvements in less than 30 years.
While there certainly are issues to solve, and if you simply follow journalism you may think the world is worse off, but for many, their lives have been significantly improved.
It's a Substack that reports good things happening around the world, divided into sections like "Conservation and Restoration," "Climate and Energy," "Medicine," etc. And they also give part of their profits directly to projects in those categories.
(I'm not affiliated with them, I'm just a subscriber.)
SamPatt 3 hours ago [-]
Thanks for sharing this sentiment and including data. So few people seem aware of the wonderful progress humanity keeps making. Makes me worry that the progress will stall or even reverse because people don't even know it's happening.
wang_li 60 minutes ago [-]
These improvements are showing that we're producing plenty so that the cost is driven down and distributed to wider and wider portions of humanity.
But my personal observations of AI is that it's producing more and more of the same stuff and not moving the front forward much. The human innovation and invention seems to be lost.
minhaz23 4 hours ago [-]
Is that AI / compute driven?
brookst 3 hours ago [-]
In part, sure. From drug discovery to crop yields to education, compute and AI have material benefits. It's kind of shocking that anyone could doubt this.
This being HN, I hasten to add they also have massive downsides, we're all doomed, nobody programs the right way anymore, those poor people just think compute & AI are improving their lives, etc, etc.
rowanG077 4 hours ago [-]
AI in the sense of LLMs is too new to really make an impact yet. But it is compute driven. Modern science and engineering would be impossible as we do it now without high-end compute.
cedws 4 hours ago [-]
Just like the computer revolution, it will make a small number of people richer and put everyone else at their mercy. In real terms the average person is far poorer than in the 20th century. Used to be able to buy a home and support a family on a single income. Now it can take two just to survive.
senordevnyc 2 hours ago [-]
In real terms, the median human globally today is vastly richer than at any point during the twentieth century.
And the median American is also richer in real terms, both in terms of wealth and in terms of income.
Of course, that all assumes that you use a reasonable measure of inflation that’s stable, well-designed, and applied methodically and consistently over many decades.
Alternatively, you can cherry pick data points and go based on vibes, which lets claim whatever you want!
marknutter 4 hours ago [-]
I wonder if doubling the workforce had anything to do with that..
svachalek 3 hours ago [-]
You're right, probably nothing to do with moving all manufacturing out of the country or Reagan's union busting.
kilroy123 4 hours ago [-]
Well, there is more renewable energy than ever before powering the world. It's all being built and added to the grid faster and faster each year.
That's one big plus.
runjake 4 hours ago [-]
Then you’re either spending time in the wrong parts of the internet or doing things that don't fulfill you.
These times are exciting and rough seas make good sailors. Find your path forward.
ashetr 4 hours ago [-]
What is exciting about getting pablum spoonfed by a data center owned by trillionaires?
I'd rather go to the library and read a book.
brookst 3 hours ago [-]
Why in the world are you choosing to live that way?
I'm writing the best music of my life, realizing games and art projects I never had time for, and writing higher quality software in addition to dramatically more of it. Who has time for pablum?
How exactly are you using these tools that you have that experience?
ted_dunning 3 hours ago [-]
You are actually not doing much of that.
You have become a spectator.
runjake 1 hours ago [-]
You can do both. I still find time to read a couple books a month.
You have agency and can choose your own adventures. If you don't like something, don't do it.
theoreticalmal 4 hours ago [-]
Your legs broke? Go do that
2shag15 4 hours ago [-]
What does it have to do with legs? This site has turned a mental hospital with AI patients.
corysama 3 hours ago [-]
It's an expression. "You're legs broke?" here means "What's stopping you from going to the library and reading a book?"
LevGoldstein 3 hours ago [-]
It's a grovel-for-investor-dollars site that we've long pretended is for serious technical discussion. Comments should always be filtered through that lens.
senordevnyc 2 hours ago [-]
Who is stopping you?
snozolli 4 hours ago [-]
False dichotomies make for terrible conversation.
"Find your path forward!" he shouted with glee, as he ran toward the cliff.
JKCalhoun 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
mrtksn 4 hours ago [-]
Apple Studio with maxed out M5 Ultra, 256GB RAM and 16TB storage is 18,299$. The 512GB RAM version apparently is coming in October, considering that the difference between 96GB and 256GB is priced at 4000$, the 512GB upgrade must be eye watering.
So, on the mini the RAM upgrade runs at 25$ per GB on all tiers, the same as the Studio therefore the upgrade to 512 will probably cost 6400$.
The fully maxed out Apple Studio then will be 24699$. It's 17199$ if you don't upgrade the storage(1TB).
Nevertheless I itch to have one :)
intrasight 4 hours ago [-]
So is downpayment on a house. I would buy the house and just pay for tokens as needed. The house will get more valuable and that wealth would buy a lot of tokens in the future - which will probably get cheaper.
EDIT: or buy AAPL. If I had bought Apple stock instead of buying a Mac LC II in 1992, then I would have about $2 million in Apple stock.
paxys 4 hours ago [-]
Or more simply – $25K (+ tax) put in a savings account will earn about enough interest to pay for a $100/month AI subscription indefinitely. And at the end of it you still have the $25K.
AbsurdCensor 4 hours ago [-]
Not 'more simply', there are basically zero savings accounts that are going to net you a 5%+ interest rate to give you that $100 a month. And that $25k becomes less valuable over time. $25k is now only worth $19k because inflation.
spacephysics 1 hours ago [-]
Money market/treasuries (even ETF like SGOV) gets pretty close to 5% when typical savings rate is a bit under
If treasuries “fail” we have a different class of problem.
wonnage 34 minutes ago [-]
Rates are around 3.5% right now before taxes.
kphorn 3 hours ago [-]
It’s basically impossible to compete on economic terms with deeply subsidized hardware that is widely available to rent or as a service with zero commitment.
For general inference there’s no ROI that makes this work vs subscriptions.
25k for computer now, plus 9-10% sales tax, plus operating cost, plus time and cost for R&D tinkering with models, harnesses, and infra (assuming highly capable engineering talent that can get paid for your human inference) vs a HEAVILY subsidized subscription at 200 per month with free R&D has a pretty long ROI (15 years?)
At API costs, it’s like 6 months if you’re heavy on inference.
For training, specialized models will have their own ROI that makes this worthwhile. Then debate renting capacity and the platform to choose
sanderjd 3 hours ago [-]
Isn't there something to be said for owning your own hardware though?
bigyabai 40 minutes ago [-]
Not if it's 5-10x slower than a remote inference server. Mac prefill latency is exhausting.
bilbo0s 4 hours ago [-]
This is the real answer.
Unless you need privacy for your inference this instant, paying for credits can get 80 to 90 percent of people everything they need.
Of course if you do need that privacy, then forking the $25K over to Apple is a no brainer.
intrasight 3 hours ago [-]
I don't need privacy, so it would be financially imprudent for me to spend 20 grand on such a machine. But I have a financial management client who does need such privacy, and if I get more fully engaged with them then I would be able to justify getting a loaded Mac.
throwa356262 3 hours ago [-]
Why is this a no brainer?
There are both cheaper and faster options out there.
physicalecon 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
ziofill 4 hours ago [-]
where are downpayments so cheap? I'll move there ^^'
kridsdale1 44 minutes ago [-]
Yeah my down payment 10 years ago was $200,000. The house has appreciated 0%. I sold meta shares to buy it. Those would be worth a million now.
… I wish I hadn’t just calculated that.
weakfish 21 minutes ago [-]
Well, this is all assuming a 20% down payment, which anecdotally as a 26 yr. old, nobody I know is able to achieve. All my home-owning friends put 3-7% down. Granted, most are using first-time homebuyer loans which are generally more favorable.
In RTP (NC), a ~$400k house at 5% down is $20k
intrasight 3 hours ago [-]
There are 70 houses for sale in Pittsburgh for $25K or less
derwiki 4 hours ago [-]
Coshocton, Ohio, plenty of houses for <100k
brookst 3 hours ago [-]
On second thought...
d_runs_far 4 hours ago [-]
Had I done that as well, then maybe I wouldn't have gotten intrigued by HyperCard, then Director/Authorware, then Flash, then HTML, then...
garciasn 4 hours ago [-]
With the way RAM prices are going up, you could expect to make 20% profit on any purchase.
intrasight 4 hours ago [-]
I tripled my money on my RAM purchase of three years ago. So, yes, for short-term appreciation that's hard to beat. But I don't think it's something that will continue.
physicalecon 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
_the_inflator 12 minutes ago [-]
The trick are tax deductions.
I wouldn’t recommend buying any bare metal unless money is a second thought or you can fully deduct the price.
Most often in the end you pay half the price then. Depending on the write offs you could even make some bucks out of it.
Or buy and lease. Under certain circumstances the hardware costs you nothing.
But you need money to save money. And a company.
tedd4u 17 minutes ago [-]
Regarding the $25 price per GB RAM. These chips use LPDDR5X RAM. Looking at the Framework site, they are selling LPDDR5X LPCAMM2 modules for the following prices:
M6 Mac mini maxes out at 32GB—if you want 64GB you have to go with the M5 Pro (just priced it out on Apple's store page).
TimByte 4 hours ago [-]
Apple hasn't been selling just ram for a long time, they sell vram. Try getting 512 gb of HBM on current Nvidia cards - it's gonna cost way more than $ 24k. And here you get the same amount of memory for weights right in a quiet unit under your desk
Put together a similar build with a couple of rtx 6000 Ada cards and Apple's price tag suddenly looks pretty damn reasonable
tedd4u 25 minutes ago [-]
The RAM in the M5 is LPDDR5X, not HBM. You're right of course that it's unified and used as VRAM in that sense.
dagmx 2 hours ago [-]
HBM itself is very expensive but it’s not really fair to compare to LPDDR or GDDR
They’re very different things.
The more logical argument to me is that Apple uses its upgrade price points as more than just direct BOM and rather as a proxy for things that are amortized across all their sales like support/warranty/etc so higher SKUs subsidize the costs of the lower ones.
smcleod 4 hours ago [-]
I wish you could drop $20k and get a house! Down payment here store like $100k+ (AUD). So "only" 5~ Max Studios.
sanderjd 3 hours ago [-]
Ha yeah that was my thought. How is this a down payment? This would only be 20% of a $100k house...
Marsymars 2 hours ago [-]
Well a substantial proportion of home buyers in Canada put down only the minimum 5% down payment.
2 hours ago [-]
frogperson 4 hours ago [-]
i remember when SGI boxes were $50k and then literally worthless just a couple bears later. i remember my university had a pile of them for free outside the deans office.
fluidcruft 3 hours ago [-]
I figure most electronics are worthless after a couple of bears.
mf2hd 3 hours ago [-]
But every second bear doubles the transistor count.
mr_toad 4 hours ago [-]
Ten years ago a bought an expensive MBP because I do a lot of stats in R, Python etc that benefited from it. But the next Mac I’ll buy will be a much lower-end model, because it’s just easier these days to do that work in notebooks in the cloud.
ff10 2 hours ago [-]
I think the reason they offer these options in the first place is the discontinuation of the MacPro and their remaining need to offer high end solutions.
meerita 2 hours ago [-]
I don't think 16TB storage is a right choice. Going 2TB and it's 11,299. Probably, if you buy the storage and install it yourself you can go higher and quite cheaper.
paxys 4 hours ago [-]
More validated by the day that my $450 M4 Mac Mini (16GB) was the best deal in computing for a long, long time.
hasteg 4 hours ago [-]
I live right next to a micro center and remember when they started offering that deal... still so pissed at myself for not buying one. I ended up just buying a raspberry Pi for what I was doing, but seeing as where the prices are now, I messed that up a bit. Also my worst sin was not buying 64GB of DDR5 when I was doing my computer upgrades back in August last year.
brookst 3 hours ago [-]
I returned an M4 Mac mini, 64GB, unopened... because I thought it was excessive for my needs then. I swear it'll be one of the things flashing before my eyes when this all ends.
F7F7F7 4 hours ago [-]
Should have grabbed two.
giwook 3 hours ago [-]
Should have grabbed 100.
mark_l_watson 1 hours ago [-]
I run a lot of local models (I am always experimenting) on my 32G M2-Pro MacMini - I would love to upgrade.
The financial aspects don’t work however: I can learn and experiment with what I have for local models, and I pay as I go on FireWorks.ai for open model inferencing and no matter how much I use this service my monthly bill is between $10 and $40 and much faster than any reasonable home rig.
Hybrid ‘small local’ and buying inference is the way I choose.
gardaani 4 hours ago [-]
Rumors say that Apple will only release M6 base variant and skips M6 Pro, M6 Max and M6 Ultra variants to concentrate all efforts to create a good AI capable M7:
"According to reports from Bloomberg, Apple will be skipping its M6 Pro, M6 Max, and M6 Ultra chips to accelerate development of the M7 chip. That means the only chip to be released from the M6 family will be the base M6.
The reason for this break with tradition: AI. Apple had been planning major neural-processing upgrades for the M7 family and ultimately decided those improvements were important enough to justify accelerating the next generation rather than completing the M6 lineup." https://9to5mac.com/2026/08/08/apple-m7-chip-heres-why-it-ma...
I'd skip M5 and M6 chips for LLM work and wait for a year for M7.
bhouston 3 hours ago [-]
The M6 doubled the neural engine from 16 to 32 cores. I would expect that the M7 doubles that again to 64 from 32? That would make sense.
I believe that the CPUs are actually limited by ram bandwidth more than the neural engine right when it comes to LLM processing?
Maybe the M7 introduces something new to get around the current ram bandwidth problems on the non-Ultra chips.
bigyabai 26 minutes ago [-]
Apple's biggest bottleneck for real-world inference is prefill processing. They need a better GPGPU architecture, which is what I'm expecting M7 to reveal.
tedd4u 10 minutes ago [-]
Agreed, seems like the M5 has already made steps in that direction, with 4x prompt processing / prefill performance vs. M4. [1] And token generation also got a 10% boost. The data below is only for Pro & Max but I think the base M5 got the same relative boosts vs. M4 base.
Chip BW (GB/s) GPU Cores Q4_0 Prompt Q4_0 Gen
M4 Pro (20c) 273 20 439.78 50.74
M4 Max (40c) 546 40 885.68 83.06
M5 Pro (20c) 307 20 ~1500 to 1700 ~56
M5 Max (40c) 614 40 ~3000 to 3500 ~92
Do current models run on the NPU or GPU? Wondering if Apple will have something like a TPU.
curious_cat_163 3 hours ago [-]
> 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?
romanovcode 1 hours ago [-]
I'll upgrade M3 Air only when Mx Pro/Ultra can run Opus level perf locally. Otherwise what's the point.
RetpolineDrama 3 hours ago [-]
The true-local AI chip, codename "buddy", will be the M8
xiphias2 4 hours ago [-]
Apple still has the best hardware so I moved to it for the last few years, but the closed software ecosystem is terrible for taking advantage of it.
I wasn't able to debug network errors (restartin my Mac worked), Metal was missing low level disassembly / debugging tools (there is some hard to use UI), but the worst thing was the inflexible windowing system.
Even getting all the window handles on all screens/desktops with their titles and programs is impossible.
I just decided that I move to Omarchy 4 (basically Hyperland + QuickShell) + NVIDIA GPU, and I already was able to customize it more than my Mac in years.
I will miss Apple's hardware for sure, but not MacOS and the missing hardware documentation
Axsuul 4 hours ago [-]
I had a chance to try Omarchy past few days and it's just very different vs macOS. I honestly never had a problem with the windowing system ever since I built my own customization scripts (i.e. Hammerspoon). I can see the appeal for someone who wants ultimate customization though but macOS still wins overwhelmingly when it comes to polish, ecosystem, user experience, and apps (nothing comes close).
cosmic_cheese 3 hours ago [-]
It’s not just Omarchy, there’s really not much out there in the desktop Linux sphere for those who are mostly happy with how macOS works out of the box. Everything is either in a similar vein to the Omarchy setup (hyper-minimal tiling WM), Windows-like (KDE, Cinnamon, most other DEs), or a chimera with a grab bag of design bits from every desktop and mobile platform (GNOME, Pantheon, COSMIC).
It’s a bit depressing because it means that if I ever feel forced to switch my daily driver, it won’t come without a dump truck load of friction, frustration, and lost productivity, which I’ve validated by using the various Linux desktops on secondary machines.
prmoustache 36 minutes ago [-]
It is just regular resistance to change. Loss of productivity is exagerated, it indeed exists in which ever direction but it is only temporary.
cosmic_cheese 8 minutes ago [-]
Perhaps, but one of desktop Linux's defining philosophies is the machine working for and adapting to the user rather than the reverse, so it's a letdown that this only really applies if you're coming from Windows or have been a Linux user all along.
xiphias2 3 hours ago [-]
There were 1000 plugins created for Omarchy 4 in 2 days. That's why I don't feel it being hyper minimal anymore.
It's still not well integrated of course as those plugins are from different people, but I at least don't feel powerless as I know I can make any change easily.
xiphias2 3 hours ago [-]
It's interesting because I just haven't felt the polish.
For example when using PyTorch I wanted to try to speed up my NN kernel by 2x by just using half precision and haven't noticed any speedup at all. Also I was missing the easy to use GNU tools that had to be mixed with Apple's tools.
I loved using Arc browser as well, and I'm missing it, but I guess I will do without it somehow (Chrome's vertical tabs are just not the same).
My main program missing from going back to Linux was ChatGPT Desktop, but now it's there.
I just checked out Hammerspoon, I'm happy for you that you wrote it, and looks great, but it has the same problem that I had: for security reasons Apple stopped allowing the window APIs to get all important information on other workspaces. You can only do it with Accessibility API. I was trying to fight with it but have up.
cosmic_cheese 3 hours ago [-]
If the browser being Chromium-based isn’t a hard requirement, it may be worth checking out the Firefox-based Zen Browser[0]. Its UI is very similar to that of Arc, to the point that I’d call it Arc’s spiritual successor.
How are you liking Omarchy? I saw a video on it recently, and it looks 'pretty' but still looks like it's a lot of memorization of shortcuts and feels like the 40% keyboard of OS's. Like some people it's absolutely amazing, but lets be honest, it's going to be really difficult to be as productive as a full fat keyboard.
rrgok 4 hours ago [-]
On what hardware you running Omarchy?
xiphias2 4 hours ago [-]
Just Beelink, but it doesn't matter at all.
I ordered an ASUS Zephyrus G16 with 5090 NVIDIA card + 1.9kg (quite an overkill, and I know that I will have to limit power output), but hasn't arrived yet.
But what's fun is that I love QML+QuickShell with its hot reloading, Hyprland with its Lua support.
With AI nowdays it's just so easy to do deep UI changes that wasn't possible a year ago.
SilverSlash 4 hours ago [-]
The 512GB Ultra is amazing, sure. But who is it for exactly? VC funded big spender founders? In that case why would they need local AI? The ultra rich enthusiast? But there can't be too many of those. So who actually buys these?
ericd 4 hours ago [-]
I think there's some mental inertia around what a computer is and what it's worth. This thing can build custom software for you, mostly autonomously. It can monitor things happening on the internet that are relevant to you, in a holistic and flexible way. We have one crawling the web for local events we'll like, and it judges them based on what it knows about us, and it tells us about the best matches every weekend, which has yielded some awesome outings we wouldn't have known about. It reads the literature on a subject in seconds and uses it as context to help in decision support. It's not the same value proposition as a computer 3 years ago, where most people are mentally anchored on what a computer should cost. Having it at home means that you can use it as a personal agent that always puts your interests first, regardless of what ad model the commercial providers decide to put in, and you can stash in it your medical data, what you buy, what you make, your worries, hopes, and dreams, without worrying about that being used as training data, or worse, something to exploit you commercially. I think it'll become considered totally reasonable to consider spending the cost of a small car on a computer, for many families.
Also, a lot of companies are looking at how to run capable models locally to cut some of their (massive) cloud AI bills. An easy answer is worth a lot to them.
zamadatix 1 hours ago [-]
By this kind of logic we'd paying something like ~$10,000/month for our internet connections. The perceived value needs to exceed the cost but that does not make it the only factor to consider price with.
What makes this expensive & sell well is it's not very fungible at the moment. Where else are you going to get 512 GB of high speed memory with a well supported accelerator attached that you can throw in the corner of anyone's home and not really have them notice? There are plenty of lesser options, plenty of noiser/power hungry options, plenty of harder to support options, but not really something in direct competition at the moment. Even the next rounds of the integrated AMD/Nvidia solutions are only targeting 196 GB of much slower memory and compute.
ericd 53 minutes ago [-]
I think the difference besides the supply crunch there is that everyone connected gets the ~same internet, just faster or slower. Quantitative, not qualitative difference. On the other hand, a computer that can run Gemma 4 8B versus one that can run DeepSeek Flash are different enough experiences that I'd say they're effectively a difference in kind. It's been a bit since we had such serious stratification in outright capability in computing, rather than just how long it takes to get something done, or how many of something it can serve at once. In the early 90s, I think there were a lot more of those "this computer can do this thing, this one just can't" scenarios.
Closest competition I see right now are stacks of 2-4 connected DGX Sparks, similar lowish speed high mem, and about the same cost/gig.
Jesus_piece 25 minutes ago [-]
Could you share what you did to find events to do? That sounds really cool
ericd 11 minutes ago [-]
Sure, it’s pretty dumb/naive implementation, would need to be a lot more efficient to scale. Basically had Claude write polite/low touch dumb crawlers for a bunch of local sites (library, local events spaces, luma, theaters, maker spaces) and whip up a little frontend to let our family and friends manage a little text description of what their family members like, constraints, that sort of thing. Once a week, the crawlers look for new events, add to a db, and then run through the list and ask our local LLM to grade each event, given the text description and constraints. Take the top 20ish for the following two weekends and email out. It’s been super helpful, lowers the activation energy to go to more local events.
conmod278 56 minutes ago [-]
Nvidia is definitely working on a AI Rack machine fully built for on-prem uses for companies.
hectdev 4 hours ago [-]
I like this train of thought. The inverse is saying that the cost of this computer is the value we give away to AI companies by doing compute on their servers with our data. And to take it another way, is the value to you, the cost of a small used car?
ericd 4 hours ago [-]
> And to take it another way, is the value to you, the cost of a small used car?
For me personally, not quite that valuable yet, but I think it's getting there quickly. Deepseek V4 Flash massively increased the value of local AI to me, to the point where it's displaced most of my Claude Code usage, its upcoming vision enabled version should bump it further, and it's only going to get better from there.
It's a lot faster, but a lot of it is also feeling free to discuss things I wouldn't be comfortable sending to Claude, with the idea that that info is now theirs in perpetuity. I got my genome fully sequenced recently (it's cheap now!), and I get a battery of blood tests every year. Wouldn't do processing on any of that with Claude, but local AI? Totally great.
And if I was running a company with a large cloud AI bill, I'd probably buy a wheelbarrow full of these macs. Cheaper, but also a more solid/predictable base to build on.
jeffreygoesto 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
brookst 3 hours ago [-]
Hey, a high school jock from 1982 wandered in to the computer lab...
iammrpayments 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
evanjrowley 1 hours ago [-]
Members of my C-suite are doing this today on a raspberry pi, so the promise is not empty. Key difference is they aren't using local AI to do it.
For the M5 Ultra, I suspect it would be valuable for someone who wants to achieve all the above and more, but with local AI due to data privacy concerns, and also not regulated data that comes with lots of other requirements solved by more traditional approaches.
Three possibilities:
1. The type of person who deals with lots of intellectual property using expensive Mac-only desktop applications that aren't meant for servers, whose mind has formed positive associations with the term "Apple Intelligence", whose values overlap with Apple's lawyer's values, who actually stands to profit from having a Mac that's more powerful than anyone else's Mac, whose long-term goals are not impacted by planned obsolecense on a piece of computer hardware costing over $25k ($50k after 1TB SSD add-on).
2. Trust fund beneficiary who wants to show off, LARP as #1, prime target for Apple's marketing.
3. 2026 kit for billionare-class iPad babies. All brain rot content is 100% local AI-generated. Never have to speak to your children again. A true "we have dead internet theory at home" machine.
ericd 1 hours ago [-]
If you actually want to learn, highly recommend a visit to https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/. People there are running stacks of 2-4x DGX Sparks to get to similar levels of memory, at similar cost.
ericd 3 hours ago [-]
Weird swipe, I'm not trying to sell it to you, this is just where I see it going, and why these things are going to sell (and why 512 gig M3 Ultra Mac Studios have skyrocketed in demand/price). It's not been an empty promise, in that it's been providing lots of very concrete value to us already.
marknutter 3 hours ago [-]
What exactly is empty about any of what he wrote?
DrScientist 3 hours ago [-]
Remember core customers of Apple studio type products is content creation/video editing, etc.
AI based tools are very useful here - thinks like object removable or cleanup etc, not just AI generation.
Enthusiasts buying these for fun are not the target market. These aren’t big sellers to begin with but a lot of the sales are going to companies where people have budgets for gear like this and can make a business case for it.
This is, sadly, probably a foreign concept to a lot of people who have only worked at companies where hardware purchases are viewed as something to minimize and everyone is stuck with the same low spec laptops that the finance department picked out. At companies where someone might have a legitimate use for a $20K machine, their fully loaded costs (not their salary) are $300K or more, and other teams like sales are spending thousands of dollars per week on things like travel and hotels for their job, spending $20K on a computer that’s going to last several years is not a hard choice.
sanderjd 3 hours ago [-]
I think "ultra rich enthusiast" is in the right ballpark. There are people betting on being able to create their own revenue generating products and services with their own local hardware and very little operating costs. That may or may not make sense as a business idea. But people with wealth and risk appetite trying a new kind of business model and cost structure has a strong tradition.
Put another way: If $25k is the full extent of the start up capital costs, and operating costs are very low, that is a much cheaper business to start than most! The question is whether this is actually a useful model for a revenue generating business. I think that remains to be seen.
My guess is that there will be a few hits (which we'll hear a lot about - especially when someone actually pulls off "the first single-person unicorn", which I do suspect will happen someday) and a huuuge number of misses, which we won't hear much about.
55 minutes ago [-]
maherbeg 4 hours ago [-]
If I can get Sol level capabilities on a $20k machine, then it is well worth it for my employer to buy me that machine for work as a workstation. When you start paying in tokens vs subscription costs due to enterprise agreements, you really start to see how much cash utilizing frontier models at the frontier costs (and I'm efficiently using luna and other models where possible!)
ericd 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I'm not sure people realize how expensive ZDR/Zero Data Retention is, and how important it is to a lot of businesses, this kind of thing starts looking really cheap really fast if it's a reasonable substitute.
ltbarcly3 1 hours ago [-]
I don't think this is accurate.
Even using multiple windows in parallel for as many as 5-10 hours per day, I find that I am not fully using my claude max (20x) and chatgpt pro (20x) accounts. I can for sure use up the claude max account, but chatgpt either gives me a free reset before I run out of tokens or I just fail to use the full quota. The quota for Sol seems like 10x that of Claude Opus at the same level, and forget Fable, you can use a 5 hour quota in 20 minutes.
But lets do the math:
Lets say a 20k workstation can run 1 inference at a time at the same speed you get with Sol hosted by openai (big assumption) and run an equally capable model (big assumption).
Each month this gives you about 100-170 inference hours on a Sol 20x Pro account, and 720 hours (if you utilize 24/7) on the workstation.
Assuming a 36 month amortization before the workstation has to be replaced due to no longer being able to run frontier models or is too inefficient due to electrical costs or what have you:
The monthly workstation cost is about $550 capex and $150 electricity -> $700/month
You would need about 6 Pro accounts to reach that capacity, which would cost you $1200 a month.
But this fails because:
- You most likely can't utilize the workstation 24/7. Your work hours will be concentrated into 6-10 hours per day.
- During work hours you are capable of utilizing more than 1 concurrent session. 6 Sol accounts would support as many as 20-30 during working hours, not all the time but if you could burst to that many (don't forget sub-agents and agent directed parallel agent workloads).
- In 1 year the cost of Sol level models is likely to cost a fraction of what it does now.
this leads to:
Workstation 1 Sol Pro 2 Sol Pro
Monthly cost $700 $200 $400
Raw capacity (hrs) 720 120 240
Usable capacity (hrs) 100-130 120 240
Concurrent sessions 1 3-5 6-10
$ per usable hour ~$6.00 $1.67 $1.67
Usable hours per $700 ~115 ~420 ~420
hellohello2 19 minutes ago [-]
"You most likely can't utilize the workstation 24/7. Your work hours will be concentrated into 6-10 hours per day."
I have agents running 24/7 doing research, in fact I would argue this how they will be used for most programming tasks in the near future. For chatting, I agree local inference makes no sense. But for tasks that run continually, I'm not so sure. Personal computers took a while, local inference will too, but I think it will happen.
timfsu 1 hours ago [-]
Subscriptions are, and will likely remain, the best deal in town. Unfortunately, larger companies aren't able to do that. When your monthly token costs are in the $5-10k range, the local inference starts to look a lot more attractive
ltbarcly3 60 minutes ago [-]
In the case where you pay for tokens without a subscription, the analysis is still very much not in favor of buying hardware.
The assumption previously used was that you can run a Sol level model on an M6 or whatever hardware $20k gives you. That is not true, it was an assumption made to show that even giving your own hardware every reasonable advantage it still loses.
Lets compare buying tokens of the best model you might run on your own hardware (still being unrealistic in favor of your own hardware) vs that same class of model on the market. I think one of the best models you might be able to run is GLM 5.4, but lets just look at chinese models generally:
$20k workstation, best case: $15k M5 Ultra 512GB, 36-month amortization, ~$440/mo. Runs a GLM-5.3-class model at ~30 tok/s. Saturated 24/7 it produces roughly 58M output tokens/month.
Buying those tokens:
DeepSeek V4 Pro @ $0.87/M $50
Kimi K2.6 @ $4.00/M $232
GLM-5.3 @ $4.40/M $255
Kimi K3 @ $15.00/M $870 (does not fit on the box)
The economics can never work in your favor for buying your own hardware here, unless you can utilize it or sell excess capacity and you have access to nearly free electricity. The reason is someone else can buy the same hardware at scale (or realistically more efficient hardware), park it somewhere with very cheap electricity, and sell tokens. They can get very high utilization that you are not likely to get.
And keep in mind I am giving 'your own hardware' no overhead or maintenance cost, despite your condition that it's in a large corporate environment. In reality corporate IT would make it almost impossible to set up and your would need huge lead times to buy the hardware and get it installed.
maherbeg 6 minutes ago [-]
Thank you for being explicit with the math!
So yes, at that speed for sure. But if the speed goes up? or the ability to batch at the same speed goes up? The economics start to shift. The gap is much closer, and you'd end up with a box you can still use or sell later.
Subscription pricing is still the best though!
mathisfun123 44 minutes ago [-]
> - You most likely can't utilize the workstation 24/7. Your work hours will be concentrated into 6-10 hours per day.
isn't the whole point of all this ..... agents? isn't that what literally everyone is always clammering about in these threads? in which case the workstation is useful 720 hours out of 720 hours.
tencentshill 4 hours ago [-]
The competition is a custom multi-GPU NVIDIA RTX pro desktop, which go for much much more. $20k is cheap for 512GB addressable memory. The old mac pro could easily be configured to cost that much.
LeBit 4 hours ago [-]
For some , the idea that some proprietary information could potentially leak is enough to justify any price.
zitterbewegung 3 hours ago [-]
Other than the local AI crowd which is much recent it is professionals using Final Cut Pro for video editing, Logic Pro as a DAW and music production, Video transcoding, Photoshop and other tasks for high performance computing that don't need Laptops but want above 128GB of ram and prefer a Mac. Then there is the obvious group of developers that are making Apps for all of their products. Also, these are great for the workplace. AI is much more recent thing that Apple products were used for.
If Apple didn't sold these things they wouldn't make them but, also the level of marketing that Apple is talking about for AI is basically the new group they need to capture because the ones I just listed are already buying Macs and or easily to motivate with the other obvious CPU / GPU performance upgrades for code compilation, faster memory and video transcoding.
serf 4 hours ago [-]
this comment has always existed behind every apple release, most especially anything vaguely pro-ish.
to answer your question : looking at the aftermarket availability of Apple's prior best and brightest : practically no one buys them.
"people here buy them" , well, 'here' is one of the most affluent groups of people in the world.
They're available as movie and television set pieces (undoubtedly disappearing into the home of someone close to the staff post-production), and for administrative/boss types that can slip the cost into a ledger somewhere that few will ever see.
It has been a hobby of mine every few years to check out the apple site and see how big I can option a machine. My record was when I was in high school years ago and was able to option some pro studio-ish apple desktop thing to like 61,000 usd out the door.
avalys 4 hours ago [-]
Movie set pieces, as a motivation for Apple making these high-end configs available? That makes no sense.
For one thing, you can’t tell from a movie what the specs are. A $999 Mac Studio looks exactly the same as a $20,000 one.
For another, Apple updates the industrial design on their products so rarely, a 6-year-old Mac, iMac or MacBook also looks nearly indistinguishable from a brand-new one.
michaelbuckbee 56 minutes ago [-]
Movie production (editors, sound design, and a portion of fx work).
SXX 4 hours ago [-]
You can connect up to 4 of them via RDMA so 2TB total RAM.
Its cheaper than Nvidia AI hardware.
serf 4 hours ago [-]
also way slower if we're just going against 'nvidia hardware'.
SXX 1 hours ago [-]
Even at high announced pricing 4 of them still much more accessible than any Nvidia solution with same amount of VRAM,
Mistletoe 18 minutes ago [-]
I always just assume that super expensive computers are like hot rods and an expensive hobby.
skinfaxi 4 hours ago [-]
A number of people in these comments, it would seem.
usrnm 4 hours ago [-]
So, rich enthusiasts it is, then
fearmerchant 3 hours ago [-]
I'm going to buy one to watch youtube videos and surf social media.
eigenspace 4 hours ago [-]
If you want to run reasonably big, local AI models, what are your alternatives?
That may not be many people, but there certainly will be some people who want to do that, and are willing to pay big bucks to do so.
mschuetz 4 hours ago [-]
I know people who would get it for local LLMs for use in their company.
mikert89 4 hours ago [-]
you can run open source models in the privacy of your own home :)
lenerdenator 4 hours ago [-]
Local AI is the future, and a lot of people want the first mover advantage or to toy around with it. I know a guy with a small rack of Nvidia Spark machines that he uses for that purpose; it's as much as a decent used car.
brianwawok 4 hours ago [-]
But is it? If it’s cheap enough latency doesn’t matter. Unlike say cloud gaming, where latency does matter. I’ll take my games local and my text bots cloud
intrasight 4 hours ago [-]
It's as much as a new car
try-working 4 hours ago [-]
Twitter users.
j45 4 hours ago [-]
Companies used to have local server rooms in their office, like mini centers, and buy all the equipment end to end.
It’s when self hosting and local hosting was the norm, and why it’s also starting to come back.
There will be workloads that can never touch a public cloud, and for it solutions like this are an option.
rconti 11 minutes ago [-]
Was the quad die layout expected? I've checked a couple articles and can't find any commentary on it, but I don't remember hearing this rumored.
w10-1 4 hours ago [-]
Leasing now an option, only $50/month (cheaper than inference subscription?), so even cash-poor can go the amortized-investment route.
I've often felt there is tremendous value locked up in underutilized old computers. It would be interesting to see Apple in 3 years offering compute as a service using lease returns (or more likely, partnering with someone else to operate it (perhaps exclusively in secondary markets like China or India, to address political demands for local siting or jobs). Apple is in the best position to work around or even gap-fix older software/hardware limitations in a controlled environment, and now they can do so without cannibalizing new hardware sales.
GoofGarage 2 hours ago [-]
I looked at multiple configurations, and mathed it out. With leasing, you pay ~75% of the capital cost (excl. tax) over 3 years, but end up with no asset.
Apple computers tend to have excellent resale value, and Mac Minis/Studios have the least depreciation of them all. I understand the benefits to both taxes and cash flow, but boy is Apple winning big on those lease offers for Studios.
mathisfun123 43 minutes ago [-]
> but end up with no asset
consumer electronics has literally never been an asset.
> Apple computers tend to have excellent resale value
do you think the new leasing category might change that? hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
> Leasing now an option, only $50/month (cheaper than inference subscription?)
For which configuration, though?
anshumankmr 4 hours ago [-]
>fluid frame rates in demanding games like Mixtape.
not getting on that bandwagon but wasn't that not the most demanding game as its a just a nonstop cutscene.
nemomarx 4 hours ago [-]
it's not super well optimized I think. unreal engine 5 is taxing even without a lot of gameplay or stuff on screen
flaunf221 3 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure who that line is supposed to impress. Gamers focusing on graphically demanding AAA games would laugh at this. People who don't game much probably won't know whether this is good or not.
4 hours ago [-]
gizmodo59 2 hours ago [-]
I somehow find it better to give 2 frontier model companies 100-200/month than dropping 10 grand on a hardware that will get old in no time with bad TPS. I really want to have a fully local model but seems like one more generation wait and we will be there?
henry2023 2 hours ago [-]
You just described why the datacenter business is hard and as a corollary why space datacenters will not be economically viable.
tyleo 2 hours ago [-]
Lots of people use the Mac Mini to run the frontier models over night or while traveling. I have a rack in my basement and have thought about throwing one in. You can get a cheaper machine but Apple feels a little more, “rack and forget,” if you have less price sensitivity.
Mac Mini + MacBook Neo w/ ssh can be a better setup than MacBook Pro for many people.
throwaway219450 43 minutes ago [-]
If it’s purely for experimentation then why not the DGX Spark/GB10? It’s up about 10% from release RRP which is quite good (you might argue it was overpriced then, but prosumer and workstation GPU prices are up 100%). 4TB NVMe is not cheap these days - it’d cost at least $500 for a stick - and you get 128GB at a similar bandwidth to an M5 Pro.
Nevermind that Apple still insists on providing base systems with only 512GB of non-upgradable SSD. The equivalent spec mini (4TB/64/10G) is almost $5k for half the VRAM. Not as good a CPU compared to the M5/6 but you also get 20 cores and full CUDA.
siavosh 32 minutes ago [-]
What's everyones recommendation for one to run a good local LLM model on?
manmal 25 minutes ago [-]
1-2 RTX5090 will be better value than Macs because they have the memory bandwidth for somewhat fast local inference.
bigyabai 28 minutes ago [-]
If you don't want to wait for prefill, you're going to want a CUDA dGPU system.
Roark66 4 hours ago [-]
The page says 170G/s memory bandwidth for the NPU and 1.2T/s for the GPU. Why the discrepancy if it's all "unified memory"? The former is nothing to write home about as far as AI compute is. The latter is really nice.
Which one is it you can run local models on? I suppose the NPU only.
kamranjon 4 hours ago [-]
I think you misread, it’s 170gb/s for base M6 model and 1.2tb/s for M5 ultra.
riobard 4 hours ago [-]
Unified memory is about address space. The bandwidth is still determined by bottlenecks to the processor. CPU/RAM links are still fairly narrow.
4 hours ago [-]
SXX 4 hours ago [-]
96GB -> 256GB upgrade costs 4000 GBP in UK or $5460. $34 for GB.
In US its $4000 upgade so $25 for 1GB.
Also:
> 512GB memory option for M5 Ultra coming late October
dgellow 4 hours ago [-]
That US price is before sales tax no?
cute_boi 4 hours ago [-]
Correct. It is better to go to delaware and purchase it.
rootusrootus 1 hours ago [-]
Delaware? For people in California, Oregon is way closer.
AbsurdCensor 3 hours ago [-]
Or just use Privacy.com and use an address in Delaware. Then you can buy it where ever.
cute_boi 3 hours ago [-]
How does this even work? You need to get the item delivered, and sales tax will incur in the state where it is delivered.
Void_ 4 hours ago [-]
VAT?
cs02rm0 4 hours ago [-]
I think the $34/GB figure might be inclusive of VAT and the $4560 not, which would be $28.5 otherwise. Not sure.
SXX 4 hours ago [-]
Oops sorry its just typo. Its 5460 not 4560.
SXX 4 hours ago [-]
AFAIK UK VAT is 20% and it's 27% higher price. Its just what you get for living in UK I guess.
int32_64 3 hours ago [-]
I was just comparing this to an rtx6000 96gb build and when the f*ck did nvidia double the price?
If you want to comfortably afford this gen you had to trade options on memory stocks...
Jskewel 1 hours ago [-]
The M6 is useless for AI. Is there any model which is actually useful and fast on 32GB?
dabeeeenster 39 minutes ago [-]
Qwen3.8
calf 7 minutes ago [-]
So I had just bought from Amazon in July an M4 mini, brand new, for a lucky post-hike price of 832 CA$ (682 USD); it was the very last unit at that price and I snatched it the morning it listed on the Apple/Amazon.ca official vendor. So far I've been using it for a month and it's been great (switching back from a Windows desktop for a decade).
Today I entered this new M4 mini's serial as a trade in for the M6 base mini, and the retail price went from $1249 CAD to $824 "once trade-in received". That's the automatic estimate, so basically I'd be paying twice for an upgrade...
Axsuul 4 hours ago [-]
Can anyone recommend the perfect sweet spot for someone who wants to run their own inference?
For me it's be Strix Halo, 128gb machine, especially running Qwen models. Except when I bought it, it was $1,900, now it's $4,600 for the same box. (Wow that's insane)
For tinkering and learning, it's been great. Tie it into something like Hermes and you have a pretty powerful AI assistant in a box. And when you need to step up your model, you just do something like OpenRouter and it makes it pretty easy.
LeoPanthera 4 hours ago [-]
I bought a 128GB M4 Max Mac Studio a while back, and for a while I thought like I had done really well to buy it when I did.
The problem I'm having now is that no models are targeting RAM of that size. Everything is either much smaller, targeting laptops, or much larger, targeting hardware well out of reach of enthusiasts.
Please, AI people, start making models targeting 128GB machines again. The last interesting one was Qwen 3.5 122B.
rahimnathwani 29 minutes ago [-]
If I had 128GB unified RAM I'd try hf.co/unsloth/Qwen3.8-27B-GGUF:BF16 which needs 55GB for just the weights.
Something like this would give you three concurrent sessions, each with 240k token context:
Great news. Qwen 3.8 Flash Next (125B A6B) is coming out tomorrow. 4 or 6-bit should run nicely on 128GB.
Should bench better than Opus 4.7.
AbsurdCensor 2 hours ago [-]
I have had a difficult time with running 120b models on my 128gb setup, especially with any larger context size. The 6bit of Qwen 3.5 is already just over 100gb, and when you go down to 4bit it seems a bit lobotomized.
Marsymars 2 hours ago [-]
Well the upside is that you can run a laptop-sized model and still have enough memory left over to run a couple of Electron apps.
3 hours ago [-]
vldmrs 3 hours ago [-]
I would love to see real LLM performance benchmarks for these machines. Apple statement regarding LLM performance seem little vague.
bilsbie 37 minutes ago [-]
Is this the best bet for running local AI now? The choices are overwhelming.
You might expect the M5 Ultra to produce 50 t/s from Qwen 3.8 27B with a good context length.
2 hours ago [-]
walrus01 4 hours ago [-]
If I compare to like, January 2024, the prices for RAM these days make me want to weep.
ComputerGuru 3 hours ago [-]
0% APR for 12 months (24 for iPhones only?) from Apple Financial Services for a device that can approach or even exceed what we were paying for new cars just a few years ago. Apple is definitely making bank off these financing offers, and with very little risk as unlike a car these Mac Studios don’t lose 20% of their value when you drive them off the lot.
Interesting times, to say the least!
zimzam 3 hours ago [-]
How are they "making bank" by giving out 0% loans?
ComputerGuru 3 hours ago [-]
My friend, the same way everyone else does. It goes from 0% to 28% interest when you miss a payment. Those are rates normal lenders fall asleep dreaming of.
xattt 4 hours ago [-]
Tangential, but what would be the ideal Mac option for home movie editing, casual gaming and amateur CAD fiddling in Fusion?
I plan on maximizing my residual student benefits, and taking advantage of education pricing.
j45 4 hours ago [-]
The regular Mac mini will blow you away, search YouTube for video editing reviews using different Mac mini’s.
geerlingguy 4 hours ago [-]
I use both the base M4 Mac mini and an M4 MacBook Air for Final Cut Pro, Photoshop, and Fusion, and while they're not as almost-always-perfectly-smooth as my Mac Studio, they're about 100x better than the experience I used to have on my old Intel MacBook Pros in the 2010s.
I edit 4K ProRes and H.265 footage, sometimes with multicam (up to 4 streams) and color adjustments, titles, etc. It's only after stacking 3-5 effects before things can stutter, really.
Or if you try doing something CPU-intense in the background _while_ running some heavy creative software. I just don't do that.
jambalaya8 18 minutes ago [-]
Super psyched for the upcoming Mac Mini. Maybe the old NUC can be tossed.
ricardobayes 4 hours ago [-]
Interesting that "coding" is now part of the marketing brochure as one of the use cases, while that was historically kind of missing. Is this new?
callamdelaney 4 hours ago [-]
Usable ram amounts in late October
pixl97 4 hours ago [-]
Usable, not affordable.
nozzlegear 4 hours ago [-]
Subjective
logotype 3 hours ago [-]
Damn. I just bought a maxed out MacBook Pro M5 Max 128GB 8TB, still waiting for it to be delivered. I could get 256GB RAM M5 Ultra 1TB for roughly the same price, and it's double the memory bandwidth. Which one would you recommend? I do plan to run local LLMs.
darken 14 minutes ago [-]
M5 Ultra if the portable form factor is not a requirement. (I have a M5 Max 128GB 2TB for context.)
That being said: you might want to consider at least 2TB storage. Having 256GB RAM to fit models is less useful when you can only store a 3 or 4 large models on your disk. The M4 -> M5 transition doubled the drive bandwidth (at least for the MacBook Pro, I'd assume the Studio is no different) making them extra nice for loading large models. Then again, you can always add an external NVMe drive over thunderbolt, so the tradeoff is less straightforward than with a portable MBP.
post_break 3 hours ago [-]
Contact Apple care and see what they can do. They have been known to do upgrades if you buy around the same time. But with the ram situation that courtesy might be gone now.
TimByte 4 hours ago [-]
Gonna go sell a kidney, should just about cover a base Mac Studio. Guess I'll need a payday loan for the power cable
FuckButtons 4 hours ago [-]
~12k for 80 core gpu with 256gb, 14k in October for 512gb. Seems like that could make for a very descent on prem inference server.
SXX 4 hours ago [-]
It cant be 14k for 512GB because 96 -> 256 upgrade alone cost $4000
FpUser 53 minutes ago [-]
Call me when Linux will be officially supported. After that I can look and see what else can I get for the price and maybe then ...
nelsonic 4 hours ago [-]
Sick. Particularly stoked for the 10gb network card ($100 option) when using the Mac Mini as a server. Just wish the memory + NVMe prices could come back down to pre ai-goldrush prices. As $2999 for the M5 Pro with 64GB RAM feels painfully over-priced.
oscarteg 4 hours ago [-]
As someone who is a beginner at home networking and have a Mac Mini running as a Plex server at home; what is the use case for the 10gb network card?
AbsurdCensor 2 hours ago [-]
As long as everything is using 10gb, faster transfer speeds when moving data between computers. For downloads, it wont help unless you have 10gb fiber, but for most folks, 2.5gb is quite fast. Hell my spinning media NAS has a hard time saturating when moving files between internal servers.
user00005 3 hours ago [-]
My example is I'm looking for a new media creation machine to replace my homebuilt PC from 2015. Since that old machine can't run Windows 11 and also because Apple storage is so expensive, my idea is to turn the PC into a Linux storage machine with a 10G NIC. Then I should just be able to edit off of the storage instead of worrying about caching it locally.
The prices are ridiculous though. I may just keep rolling with my Windows 10 setup.
snovv_crash 3 hours ago [-]
It feels stupid having my internet be faster than my computer can connect to it
Phemist 4 hours ago [-]
RAM and SSD in apple gear has always been way over-priced. There was a short blessed period in March where the M5 Max macbook pro was out, but the general 30% price hike had not yet happened. In this period, given the insane inflated RAM prices, the price apple was charging for the M5 Max with 128 GB RAM was actually _reasonable_.
jbverschoor 1 hours ago [-]
Very well timed for John Ternus's first quarter.
4 hours ago [-]
r0fl 4 hours ago [-]
Maxed out Studio is $30,000+ tax in Canada if financed through Apple.
That's wild!
brianwawok 4 hours ago [-]
The storage is pretty silly. Bring that down and the max isn’t nearly as bad, more like 12k
Artgor 4 hours ago [-]
I have Mac M1 Max and I'm quite happy with it. But these advances make me think that maybe I should upgrade to Mac M6 (or something) when it is released.
stuff4ben 4 hours ago [-]
M5 Pro in a Mac Mini with 64GB RAM and 10Gbit Ethernet seems like the perfect Jellyfin server and Ollama test server. All for just over $3K (I specced with only 1TB local nvme).
paxys 4 hours ago [-]
Probably worth it for Ollama but you can run Jellyfin off a raspberry pi.
doublepg23 49 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, if you're transcoding for clients a lot I'd just spend the cash on upgrading the clients to support HEVC at minimum.
al_borland 4 hours ago [-]
> you can run Jellyfin off a raspberry pi.
This may depend on the size of your library. I tried installing Jellyfin on a Synology NAS, which runs Plex just fine, and it ran so poorly it was basically unusable. It “worked”, but it was painful.
Keyframe 4 hours ago [-]
not sure which cpu that Synology has, but I run jellyfin on ugreen nasync dxp8800 plus which has intel with QSV and it breaks no sweat in both transcoding (if needed) and serving over 10GBE.
al_borland 3 hours ago [-]
It's a Synology DS720+ with a Celeron J4125, 2GHz, 4 cores, 2GB of RAM.
I thought it would be fine, because Plex has no issues, but it was painful. Every client I tried on the AppleTV was equally painful, and I didn't even try using a client until making sure all the metadata was downloaded and setup via the web UI. I was very deliberate and did one thing at a time, spending a whole day on it (mostly waiting and browsing to different screens to force metadata to get downloaded and cached).
AbsurdCensor 2 hours ago [-]
You don't have enough RAM. Not sure why you wouldn't use a cheap PC to run jellyfin on and then just use your NAS as the media pool.
al_borland 51 minutes ago [-]
Why would I buy and manage a whole PC for Jellyfin when Plex runs off the NAS without issue?
With everyone saying Jellyfin can run on a Pi, I would think it would be better optimized for low-end hardware.
stuff4ben 4 hours ago [-]
True re: the Raspberry Pi, but I was thinking the 10Gbit Ethernet would allow more concurrent streaming in my household. But it's probably overkill.
AndroTux 1 hours ago [-]
If your household consists of more than 15 people consuming 4K content at the same time, the 10G upgrade may be worth considering.
Edit: never mind, 2.5G is now the default, so you'll probably need more than 40 people to saturate that with streaming video.
neverrroot 4 hours ago [-]
Wouldn’t it be amazing for Apple to give us a MacBook Air 15” M6 with a 15W sustained passive TDP capability?
Just amazing engineering push, the competition got the message and we benefit.
madduci 3 hours ago [-]
A Macbook Neo with an M6 and 16 GB RAM at $699/€699 would be a killer feat
4 hours ago [-]
shafkathullah 3 hours ago [-]
Saw a 768GB RAM mac coming soon, would wait for that.
tester756 4 hours ago [-]
When will Apple's Mx CPUs use Intel's 18A/18A-P/14A node(s)?
etempleton 4 hours ago [-]
Maybe in a year or so or maybe never. It depends on how 14a turns out and if it is comparable to TSMC 2NM. They may also choose to utilize 18a-p / 14a for other chips and not the M-series.
GreenLightGo 4 hours ago [-]
From what I’ve noticed, Apple products have been getting worse in quality year after year. Sometimes they even ruin their own devices with updates... I guess it’s all because of marketing.
I’m mostly talking about their iPhones, where new updates sometimes make older models worse. I know a lot of people whose iPhones started lagging after iOS updates.
notenlish 3 hours ago [-]
When is the m6 air coming though
lvl155 2 hours ago [-]
Every time Intel/AMD gets close enough, Apple just crushes competition in terms of SoC. I don’t know who’s on that chip team but they’re world-class. Hope they get paid more than a bunch of AI idiots Meta hired to do absolutely nothing (but I know they are not even close).
ciupicri 4 hours ago [-]
> M6 supports up to 32GB of unified memory to multitask across demanding apps
I can't believe that Apple still comes with this bullshit like 32 GBs is a lot. It's a lot for video memory - vRAM, but not RAM.
al_borland 2 hours ago [-]
The M6 is a base level chip, for normal users. Anyone needing more than 32GB of RAM is likely going with higher end chip that supports more RAM.
LoganDark 4 hours ago [-]
Is Apple just going to announce everything silently from now on? No more getting excited for the big events to see what's new -- it just appears on the blog one day?
Also: "a staggering 1.2TB/s of unified memory bandwidth" -- yay, the GPU has reached the year 2020! (I'm a bit bitter that my M4 Max is near useless for local LLMs because of its low memory bandwidth.)
wmf 53 minutes ago [-]
I assume they'll have events for the MacBook Ultra and M7.
amazingamazing 4 hours ago [-]
I should have bought a 100 m4 mac minis when I had the chance. Thanks hyperscalers for buying all the supply and renting it back.
A m4 mac mini is better than al of these per dollar, msrp adjusted.
Hopefully by the end of the decade China figures out manufacturing at scale and fixes this.
j45 4 hours ago [-]
How much ram would each of those have 100 had?
amazingamazing 4 hours ago [-]
16gb unified
AbsurdCensor 2 hours ago [-]
Aren't you kind of stuck with smaller models on the mini though? Even with the pro you'd be stuck with a max of four daisy chained over thunderbolt and with the 160 gig memory bandwidth you'd probably be far better off with other configurations.
rvz 5 hours ago [-]
> M5 Ultra features a massive amount of high-bandwidth unified memory, up to 512GB, and delivers a staggering 1.2TB/s of unified memory bandwidth that is 50 percent higher than M3 Ultra.
Apple never needed to participate in the AI race to zero. Because they were already at the finish line years ago building their own chips that can run large >100B parameter AI models locally.
nasaeclipse 4 hours ago [-]
As someone who works in AI now, I have found it pretty amazing that Apple basically didn't do much with AI software, and focused more on the hardware side. I think this is what the future of AI is going to look like, local models run on your mac for your workflow.
It's possible that they're working on their own LLM that's going to work very well on their chips, and possibly outperform anything out there when they do release it.
compounding_it 4 hours ago [-]
>local models run on your mac for your workflow.
10 years ago 32GB ram laptops sounded too much. 8 was enough. These days even I would get that much ram since it’s soldered. 64GB is higher end.
In a few years we should see such high end hardware commonplace. Working with a local LLM to get work done is the ideal way to go which has mostly hardware limitation as of now that gets solved in due time.
parineum 4 hours ago [-]
> 10 years ago 32GB ram laptops sounded too much. 8 was enough. These days even I would get that much ram since it’s soldered. 64GB is higher end.
Ten years ago I got 64gb of ram in my laptop, same as I have now. I bought both for business and personal use. System ram capacity hasn't changed much in 10 years.
It makes me curious how old you were 10 years ago.
swiftcoder 4 hours ago [-]
> Ten years ago I got 64gb of ram in my laptop
We were definitely outliers that long ago. I put 64 GB in a MacBook Pro back in 2019, and that was (a) overkill for everything I ever ran on that machine, and (b) stupidly expensive by 2019 standards (albeit almost affordable by 2026 standards)
llm_nerd 4 hours ago [-]
>I have found it pretty amazing that Apple basically didn't do much with AI software
The iPhone 15 was almost entirely marketed based upon AI (I would say fraudulently so, advertising features they still haven't delivered), and a huge portion of the OS work was on local AI or AI integration.
And for that matter Apple has been dumping enormous sums into their own AI development. Their failure to have a lot to show for it doesn't void the fact that they tried really, really hard.
It's bizarre how often this "Apple sat on the sidelines and let the AI people fight...so smart!" narrative appears on HN. Apple hasn't gone down the path of spending hundreds of billions on nvidia GPU data centres, but they absolutely tried really hard to matter in AI.
givinguflac 4 hours ago [-]
|It's possible that they're working on their own LLM
Yep, Siri AI; they’re doing it in public.
robotresearcher 4 hours ago [-]
‘Apple Foundation Model’
ngvrnd 4 hours ago [-]
nth mover advantage.
Havoc 43 minutes ago [-]
Has yet to materialise
LeBit 4 hours ago [-]
1.2TB/s is 2/3 the speed of an nVidia 5090.
But you get a generic computer and much more RAM.
And you lose a couple of organs.
bel8 4 hours ago [-]
The real downside for me is not having Linux support.
It would take Apple one or two engineers to make Linux life much easier on macs. But Linux is outside their walled garden so it's ignored.
3form 2 hours ago [-]
Same here. Sadly I think the voices like ours won't be heard, though, because Apple's looking for someone who's going to buy in on the whole ecosystem, and I think we're not it. Or at least I'm not.
LeBit 4 hours ago [-]
I’m done with macOS.
My Mac Mini is strictly a headless server for llama.cpp.
I use a Linux workstation.
If I were limited to use Mac hardware , I would install Linux in VMware Fusion and work from there.
mhast 3 hours ago [-]
It's worth noting that the 5090 (or the RTX Pro 6000 big brother with 92GB VRAM) will run rings around the Mac when it comes to compute.
My old 3090 is typically significantly faster (almost 2x token/s) than my M4 Max 128GB machine, as long as the model fits in the 24GB of VRAM.
In most situations it's a better idea to just buy tokens. But there are definitely cases when that's not an option. And then a machine like the M5 Ultra can allow you to do things locally for a fairly limited budget. And in a simpler package to manage than a machine with multiple GPUs.
snapcaster 4 hours ago [-]
is it still effectively 2/3rds? Don't know enough to compare a discrete GPU/CPU setup to something like this where it's more integrated
danielEM 4 hours ago [-]
There is no magic, if the data you compute as atomic chunk don't fit in cache then memory bandwidth R/W limit kicks in and architecture does not matter. On contrary - having multi gpu setup of same price and same memory size with even slower memories may give you effectively much higher bandwidth but at the cost of power consumption.
noodletheworld 4 hours ago [-]
How much memory does that come with?
rbinv 4 hours ago [-]
32 GB GDDR 7
jjice 4 hours ago [-]
I was so blown away at all the discourse surrounding "Apple fumbling on models". They should never have been in the model game to begin with. Apple crushes hardware over the last decade and that's a huge advantage today. In the end, massive models have proven to be very strong, but small models have proven to be good enough (especially with the recent Qwen 2.8 27B drop) and that's where I imagine the future will lie for consumers.
chasd00 4 hours ago [-]
I suspected Apple would let everyone else blow all their money then, when the dust settles, deliver a better experience to end users and clean up.
jjice 4 hours ago [-]
Agreed. Apple doesn't innovate anymore, but they're generally pretty good at adapting once other people have.
maherbeg 4 hours ago [-]
I think this is a bit of a crazy statement. Everyone expects Apple to somehow build a category leading product every year. I'd expect something innovative every couple of years
* the iPhone
* the iPad
* apple watch
* airpods
* unified memory laptops and computers
Those are all products that either created a category or changed that industry.
jjice 33 minutes ago [-]
I think that each of the products you name is the top or near the top of their category, but these weren't creating a category. I don't think my original comment says anything about "changing that industry", so that's a bit of a strawman. They absolutely change the industry they're in. They're just not first to any of those categories that you mentioned (maybe unified memory, I'm not sure).
They weren't the first smart phone, tablet, smart watch, or true wireless earbuds. They did a damn fine job making each of those though. I am typing this on a my work macbook wearing AirPods, and AppleWatch, listening to audio on my iPhone. Apple does a really good job with their products.
Realizing how surrounding by Apple I am...
dgellow 4 hours ago [-]
They did participate early on with Apple Intelligence and failed miserably. Really good move to not double down and let the others explore the space first
teekert 4 hours ago [-]
Is there anything comparable that runs Linux, doesn't necessarily look as good, but is perhaps (a lot) cheaper/fixable? Or is this really pretty optimal?
I mean this is not nvidia based right? It's all custom? So we can use it under Asahi perhaps?
I want to get something for my company to run local models, wondering what would be a good option.
jlokier 3 hours ago [-]
You can't run Linux directly on these. Asahi Linux supports up to M2 only.
Linux runs very well in a VM on macOS. There are many good options for this, some free and open source (QEMU, UTM, Lima, Colima), some proprietary (VMware Fusion, Parallels).
But Linux in a VM doesn't get access to the real GPU, so model performance is limited. Those running on the CPU perform well, and those needing the GPU don't.
However, macOS on M-series macs is excellent for local models. (Maybe not as excellent as a box full of the best nVidia GPUs, but still excellent).
So if you're getting Apple hardware, like Linux, and want to run all of it locally, a fine setup for a machine to run local models, with agentic characteristics:
- macOS running one of the many local model runners. I used to use Ollama and Whisper, and now use llama.cpp instead of Ollama. Others use LM Studio, oMLX, etc. Provide HTTP endpoints to access the models.
- Linux in a VM for overall control and orchestration, with standard VM settings, and bridged networking so it appears as its own machine on your network. Also, in here provide a robust shared file server for shared state. Use this VM as your desktop and primary access to the machine, if you like Linux.
- Linux in a VM to launch ephemeral, volatile containers, with the containers using a memory-only tmpfs overlay on top of a read-only Linux filesystem in a VM disk image, with tools in this filesystem. Alternatively, a writable Linux filesystem in a VM disk image, with disk buffering set to use macOS host buffering and discard fsync requests. These settings optimise for container disk performance for data that's only ephemeral which will be deleted soon or on system shutdown. (You can combined both VMs, but need to use two VM disks to get equivalent behaviour, and be careful about VM disk configuration of the two disks.)
- Containers spawned within that second Linux VM can be spawned very quickly and run quickly, so are ideal for LLM agents that need a quick sandbox. These sandboxes generally run faster than a macOS sandbox, despite being on the same machine with VM overhead, because Linux is faster at some things. Teach the LLMs to store files and memories they want to keep in the shared file server.
datakan 4 hours ago [-]
I love linux and would be using it if the ARM support was better. It's just not there and most distros that support ARM do it a little poorly. I just haven't seen anything even remotely comparable to Apple Silicon and unfortunately Linux is struggling very hard to support it.
Marsymars 2 hours ago [-]
It's not quite that ARM support isn't good on Linux, it's that there aren't high-performance ARM chips with strong general-purpose software stacks. Like the Raspberry Pi is very well supported, but otherwise the only upmarket devices are things like Ampere workstations and hyperscaler server chips.
teekert 4 hours ago [-]
I guess, what I mean is: Why are these tiny aluminum boxes so optimal?
I just want my butt ugly repairable beast machine to do the same trick. Why is my ram not unified? I have an iGPU in my server, but it can't access the 64 GB ram (I got last year for 150 euro) directly or something? It's on the CPU right? Why did only Apple go for this architecture? So many questions...
Lunar5227 4 hours ago [-]
Strix platform maybe?
mhast 3 hours ago [-]
The PC platforms have anemic memory bandwidth in comparison. Eg, Strix Halo is 256GB/s max. If money is a bigger limiter than performance it can be an option though. As can Nvidia DGX Spark machines. (Also limited to 128GB memory and comparatively low bandwidth, but higher compute than Strix Halo.)
intelkishan 4 hours ago [-]
Asahi was stuck at M3 last time I checked it out.
notenlish 3 hours ago [-]
Development on m3 is ongoing, m2 is supported
rowanG077 4 hours ago [-]
M2 even.
terminalcommand 4 hours ago [-]
AFAIK, apple does not release drivers open source, asahi is a reverse-engineering endeavour and does not support GPU.
For nvidia, there are both proprietary and open-source linux drivers. CUDA and inference works on linux with nvidia.
I would recommend checking out this video of Alex Ziskind to shop for a computer to run local LLMs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mevUEQcumzU&t=224s.
TL;DR besides Apple he recommends, DGX Spark, Tenstorrent Wormhole N300, AMD Radeon 7900 and NVIDIA RTX 5090.
m3kw9 3 hours ago [-]
yesterday someone posted a link saying xiaomi "matched" apple's latest M series performance. Was that for less than 24 hours?
tw1984 4 hours ago [-]
will be great fun if one M5 Ultra with 512GB memory at 1.2T bandwidth capable of doing 3x smallish local model inferencing each at Opus 4.5 level of intelligence.
brianwawok 4 hours ago [-]
The memory bandwidth and size seems to be there, but what is the tokens per sec on like a qwen model? And you can basically do 3x opus 4.5 on the $100 a month claude plan. Your payback will be near infinity years after electricity.
hn0tdqaek4 4 hours ago [-]
Well said
cute_boi 4 hours ago [-]
> Apple’s developer frameworks and tools — including Core AI, Core ML, Metal, and Xcode
Can we please kill the xcode. It is worst pile of garbage I have to use just to develop ios app.
blueTiger33 3 hours ago [-]
fucking awesome
luciana1u 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
mrchrome 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
AndroTux 4 hours ago [-]
Where does the M6 geekbench score come from?
mrchrome 4 hours ago [-]
It's an estimate, for now, based on Apple's claims. I will update it to the real geekbench score when it comes out.
coldtea 4 hours ago [-]
>M6 supports up to 32GB of unified memory
Is this a joke?
>Additionally, M5 Ultra features a massive amount of high-bandwidth unified memory, up to 512GB
Now we're talking. But at what cost?
arcatech 4 hours ago [-]
The Pro and Ultra variants are the ones with the higher RAM amounts. They didn’t announce the M6 Pro yet.
coldtea 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah, but they still write regarding plain M6:
"M6 also introduces a Dual 16-core Neural Engine, providing up to 2x the peak compute over previous generations to make on-device AI workflows run even faster" .
kjs3 3 hours ago [-]
They've announced there won't be a M6 Pro in favor of getting M7 out the door.
brianwawok 4 hours ago [-]
At the price points they are hitting, can’t afford over 32 GB on the cheaper model.
256 memory gets you to like 11k. So like 15-20k.
varispeed 4 hours ago [-]
512GB late october sounds lame.
and 512GB is so 2025.
Give us 1TB version. Where is the competitive spirit?
rrgok 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah, for developers it should be 128GB base version.
bilbo0s 4 hours ago [-]
>Where is the competitive spirit?
To be fair, where is the competitor at this form factor?
nonewideas 4 hours ago [-]
Cannot believe "moar transistors" is still the only idea they have.
simlevesque 4 hours ago [-]
They pionneered unified memory a few years ago.
artisin 3 hours ago [-]
No. Apple did not invent or pioneer the concept of unified or shared memory, but they did create an exceptional implementation of it.
delduca 4 hours ago [-]
I know they are a phone company, but I think they should focus on local models software, not only hardware.
kksweet 4 hours ago [-]
They aren't a phone company, and haven't been ever. They're a hardware company first
flyingjoe 4 hours ago [-]
More like an "ecosystem company".
It's the Hardware, Software and Services in combination. None would work without the other (to reach the scale apple is)
dosisking 4 hours ago [-]
> They're a hardware company first
More specifically, they're a hardware dongle company first
Matl 4 hours ago [-]
Software wise there's plenty to choose from already. Ollama/llama.cpp, LM Studio, Lemonade, vllm etc. Anything Apple would bring to the table?
FWIW, Ollama, LM Studio and Lemonade (and oMLX) also wrap Apple's MLX framework.
mleo 4 hours ago [-]
Apple has the mlx framework. Most/all major software for running models locally support it. Apple also has RDMA for interconnecting multiple machines across Thunderbolt connections.
rrgok 4 hours ago [-]
False, they are a Marketing Company.
3 hours ago [-]
micromacrofoot 4 hours ago [-]
their strength has been hardware for over 30 years now
givinguflac 4 hours ago [-]
Uhhh, they are? They’re a hardware co for sure, but to say they aren’t focusing on on-device models is absurd on its face. They’ve spent over 2 years on Siri AI which is (mostly) local.
wookmaster 4 hours ago [-]
My 100k company only buys Mac laptops and you're calling them a phone company. Such an odd comment.
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.
The issue was the abysmal marketing and "me too" attitude Microsoft had (and still has).
(Brown launch model here.)
The Zune may have been somewhat better (until the nano and iphone), but it wasn't enough better to overcome the ecosystem switching costs.
Apple never came first ... but often just at the right moment and had marketing skills to make it a new trend.
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.
Newton.
But it had nothing to do with the iPod/iPhone release in his story.
(story starts ~1:15, but I highly recommend the entire talk)
That, or I can’t read.
There are emails unearthed in various lawsuits where you can read Bill Gates screaming at his subordinates: "why the hell can't our partners like Sony and Creative create a similar device? Give them all, give them early access to everything, work with them". In the end MS felt compelled to make their own.
Creative's Muvo^2 already was the poor man's iPod with surprisingly good audio quality as well.
When the iPod came out you largely had two options for carrying your music collection on the go. You either carried a binder of CDs, or you had some niche player like Mini-Disc or an MP3 player. Both alternatives were expensive and had limitations similar to a CD in terms of number of tracks you could carry.
I had an MP3 player on either side of 2000 that was slightly smaller than a deck of playing cards that could use Smart Media flash memory cards. The largest card at the time was either 16 or 32mb and was enough to hold 1 album at near CD quality.
Creative's Muvo was a weird form factor that was larger than an iPod. It had a horrid interface both on device and for loading music. It's only grace was that it was slightly cheaper than an iPod and didn't need a Mac with FireWire. Although iircc this was pre USB 2.0 so not having FireWire would mean loading music took forever and a day.
The iPod allowed you to carry most, if not all, of your music collection in a package slightly larger than a deck of playing cards. And it had a fantastic interface for navigating music on the device.
This was at a time before most people had laptops and if you had a PC it was at home and used sparingly. The iPod was such a compelling mobile computing device that it drove adoption of the iMac. Apple would eventually release iTunes for Windows and USB support but that was many years later.
I had something similar. The storage was the iPod's killer feature, along with iTune's $0.99 songs. Suddenly you no longer had to buy whole albums, and you didn't have to swap out what was on your MP3 player every day when you wanted a different playlist. A 5GB hard drive in your pocket was a huge innovation then.
In some ways, anyway. Never owned a Zune myself, but a university classmate did and I was shocked by how poorly it handled non-Latin languages… she had a ton of Japanese and Korean songs loaded onto it, and their metadata all displayed as "missing character" blocks. She used it a lot like one might use an iPod Shuffle despite it having a nice screen because the only way to tell what was playing was by hearing it play.
By contrast my 4th gen B&W iPod which was about 5-6 years older handled unicode just fine.
https://youtu.be/ud6rwVkbovA
And they could listen to it 3 times in 3 days
> QUESTION: Microsoft has announced its new iPod competitor, Zune. It says that this device is all about building communities. Are you worried?
> Steve Jobs: In a word, no. I’ve seen the demonstrations on the Internet about how you can find another person using a Zune and give them a song they can play three times. It takes forever. By the time you’ve gone through all that, the girl’s got up and left! You’re much better off to take one of your earbuds out and put it in her ear. Then you’re connected with about two feet of headphone cable.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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).
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.
I'm very very surprised that Xiaomi matches Apples speed even with the newest release, its not diminishing Xiaomis success.
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.
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.
Oh i have soooo many news for you!
That might be the funniest thing I read all day. Xiaomi is a massive company that makes all sorts of things, including a lot of pretty high-end mobiles, and has an annual revenue in the order of 75 billion US.
It’s no Apple, but it’s not exactly “some random Chinese company” either.
They're using ARM designed cores. So it's more like Apple just isn't as far ahead of ARM as some people claim.
I enjoy it because of progress, not because of Apple.
@TRACK: yipinwong
Just kidding but seriously man, this level of paranoia isn't healthy. Try talking about it with someone you trust. The comment you're replying to is completely normal.
I'd like to back up my belief and claims based on my metrics and experience.
If data backs it up, then I will apply my baynesian thinking to change my mind.
Anecdotes normally triumphs in real life and biz, but not in online communities.
I'm not an apple fanboy nor a xiamoi fanboy.
Its impressive that a random chinese company was able to catch up to the 2th richest company with global experts so fast and this achievement is not dimnished just because apple announced their M6 today.
Are you some fanboy?
It's just funny how it's consistent they deny their own heritage. Be proud of who you are.
I yield the floor to no one when it comes to pessimism, but that's incredible.
Fab capacity is being bought online; there’s just lead time.
Noticeably greater intelligence is being achieved at the same number of parameters (see: Qwen3.8).
I think the future will be bright, it might be a matter of time. And for tinkers, a used Epyc + DDR4 server can be great fun and epic value.
How many people actually use fable over opus? How far are we up the diminishing returns curve, and will their customers even care?
If I sold just the two sticks of RAM in it right now, it’d pay for nearly half of the total cost.
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.
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.
https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter3/transportat...
...
> I don’t think anyone truly knows when, but it will happen.
Do you know what cyclical means ... ?
You'll just have to be careful to match the enclosure to the ports on the system. The base-model M6 Mac mini still uses Thunderbolt 4, so a USB4v2 enclosure would be wasted.
Compared to the prices of storage today, when people are presumably buying the product, it's actually a bad price.
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
E.g how is the perf/$ vs Wildcat lake
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.
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.
Edit: Also doesn't say anything about who the human test subject is
Though we're pretty good at sizing up a person's emotional balance/maturity and competence at familiar tasks. So maybe have an old blacksmith watch the AI/robot interact with horse owners for a while, then shoe their horses, and see how well it does.
https://commission.europa.eu/news-and-media/news/safer-and-m...
In contrast, humans tend to paste me the same barely-relevant macro over and over, no matter how much time I spend explaining my issue.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/the-digital-self/202...
I kinda have to link it now, so uhh here's a random PDF: https://www.hec.edu/sites/default/files/documents/Computing%...
And the "popularized" version is faulty also since it uses an ideal, abstract human judge (like the "spheroidal economic agent").
But if you want to add declinations to the said popularized image of the Turing test, you may add Maxim Lott's IQ tests at trackingai.org . Between the end of 2024 and the beginning of 2025 LLMs reached an equivalent IQ of 100, for example.
ELIZA beat the Turing test and then everyone forgot about it. Humans are just really terrible at recognising robots.
I think there are elements showing lowering of performance and expectation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test
I've tried [1] and I almost 100% detect which is the AI. I really want to convince myself I have failed, does anyone know of a better site/resource for this?
I know it might be moving goalposts but I would consider AI to have passed in a well and truly undisputed manner when [2] is resolved.
But in a more practical sense, if AI can impersonate humans so well today then why are state of the art frontier models so obviously AI when they create PRs, commit messages, documentation, etc. Are the companies deliberately making them unnatural?
[1] https://turingtest.live/
[2] https://www.metaculus.com/questions/11861/date-when-ai-passe...
Not sure where you're quoting from but if it's the metaculus question comments, many of them are from 2023. The consensus is it will resolve in 2029. I believe it will not resolve before 2035.
Is there anything better now though?
All I see from AI, is an amplification of the enshittification of the internet.
And people being even more alone.
- Extreme poverty has dropped from 30% to under 10% globally. - Child mortality rates have dropped in half - Internet access has exploded from 10% to 70% - Solar energy costs have dropped 90% - Cancer death rates have declined by 30%
All of these massive improvements in less than 30 years.
While there certainly are issues to solve, and if you simply follow journalism you may think the world is worse off, but for many, their lives have been significantly improved.
It's a Substack that reports good things happening around the world, divided into sections like "Conservation and Restoration," "Climate and Energy," "Medicine," etc. And they also give part of their profits directly to projects in those categories.
(I'm not affiliated with them, I'm just a subscriber.)
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.
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.
And the median American is also richer in real terms, both in terms of wealth and in terms of income.
Of course, that all assumes that you use a reasonable measure of inflation that’s stable, well-designed, and applied methodically and consistently over many decades.
Alternatively, you can cherry pick data points and go based on vibes, which lets claim whatever you want!
That's one big plus.
These times are exciting and rough seas make good sailors. Find your path forward.
I'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.
So, on the mini the RAM upgrade runs at 25$ per GB on all tiers, the same as the Studio therefore the upgrade to 512 will probably cost 6400$.
The fully maxed out Apple Studio then will be 24699$. It's 17199$ if you don't upgrade the storage(1TB).
Nevertheless I itch to have one :)
EDIT: or buy AAPL. If I had bought Apple stock instead of buying a Mac LC II in 1992, then I would have about $2 million in Apple stock.
If treasuries “fail” we have a different class of problem.
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
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.
… I wish I hadn’t just calculated that.
In RTP (NC), a ~$400k house at 5% down is $20k
I wouldn’t recommend buying any bare metal unless money is a second thought or you can fully deduct the price.
Most often in the end you pay half the price then. Depending on the write offs you could even make some bucks out of it.
Or buy and lease. Under certain circumstances the hardware costs you nothing.
But you need money to save money. And a company.
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.
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.
"According to reports from Bloomberg, Apple will be skipping its M6 Pro, M6 Max, and M6 Ultra chips to accelerate development of the M7 chip. That means the only chip to be released from the M6 family will be the base M6.
The reason for this break with tradition: AI. Apple had been planning major neural-processing upgrades for the M7 family and ultimately decided those improvements were important enough to justify accelerating the next generation rather than completing the M6 lineup." https://9to5mac.com/2026/08/08/apple-m7-chip-heres-why-it-ma...
I'd skip M5 and M6 chips for LLM work and wait for a year for M7.
I 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.
Please say more? Is it because it is a one-time cost, unlike a recurring subscription of Claude/Codex?
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
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.
For example when using PyTorch I wanted to try to speed up my NN kernel by 2x by just using half precision and haven't noticed any speedup at all. Also I was missing the easy to use GNU tools that had to be mixed with Apple's tools.
I loved using Arc browser as well, and I'm missing it, but I guess I will do without it somehow (Chrome's vertical tabs are just not the same).
My main program missing from going back to Linux was ChatGPT Desktop, but now it's there.
I just checked out Hammerspoon, I'm happy for you that you wrote it, and looks great, but it has the same problem that I had: for security reasons Apple stopped allowing the window APIs to get all important information on other workspaces. You can only do it with Accessibility API. I was trying to fight with it but have up.
[0]: https://zen-browser.app/
I ordered an ASUS Zephyrus G16 with 5090 NVIDIA card + 1.9kg (quite an overkill, and I know that I will have to limit power output), but hasn't arrived yet.
But what's fun is that I love QML+QuickShell with its hot reloading, Hyprland with its Lua support.
With AI nowdays it's just so easy to do deep UI changes that wasn't possible a year ago.
Also, a lot of companies are looking at how to run capable models locally to cut some of their (massive) cloud AI bills. An easy answer is worth a lot to them.
What makes this expensive & sell well is it's not very fungible at the moment. Where else are you going to get 512 GB of high speed memory with a well supported accelerator attached that you can throw in the corner of anyone's home and not really have them notice? There are plenty of lesser options, plenty of noiser/power hungry options, plenty of harder to support options, but not really something in direct competition at the moment. Even the next rounds of the integrated AMD/Nvidia solutions are only targeting 196 GB of much slower memory and compute.
Closest competition I see right now are stacks of 2-4 connected DGX Sparks, similar lowish speed high mem, and about the same cost/gig.
For me personally, not quite that valuable yet, but I think it's getting there quickly. Deepseek V4 Flash massively increased the value of local AI to me, to the point where it's displaced most of my Claude Code usage, its upcoming vision enabled version should bump it further, and it's only going to get better from there.
It's a lot faster, but a lot of it is also feeling free to discuss things I wouldn't be comfortable sending to Claude, with the idea that that info is now theirs in perpetuity. I got my genome fully sequenced recently (it's cheap now!), and I get a battery of blood tests every year. Wouldn't do processing on any of that with Claude, but local AI? Totally great.
And if I was running a company with a large cloud AI bill, I'd probably buy a wheelbarrow full of these macs. Cheaper, but also a more solid/predictable base to build on.
For the M5 Ultra, I suspect it would be valuable for someone who wants to achieve all the above and more, but with local AI due to data privacy concerns, and also not regulated data that comes with lots of other requirements solved by more traditional approaches.
Three possibilities:
1. The type of person who deals with lots of intellectual property using expensive Mac-only desktop applications that aren't meant for servers, whose mind has formed positive associations with the term "Apple Intelligence", whose values overlap with Apple's lawyer's values, who actually stands to profit from having a Mac that's more powerful than anyone else's Mac, whose long-term goals are not impacted by planned obsolecense on a piece of computer hardware costing over $25k ($50k after 1TB SSD add-on).
2. Trust fund beneficiary who wants to show off, LARP as #1, prime target for Apple's marketing.
3. 2026 kit for billionare-class iPad babies. All brain rot content is 100% local AI-generated. Never have to speak to your children again. A true "we have dead internet theory at home" machine.
AI based tools are very useful here - thinks like object removable or cleanup etc, not just AI generation.
For example Apple mentioned performance increases for https://learn.foundry.com/nuke/content/reference_guide/air_n...
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.
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.
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:
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.
The assumption previously used was that you can run a Sol level model on an M6 or whatever hardware $20k gives you. That is not true, it was an assumption made to show that even giving your own hardware every reasonable advantage it still loses.
Lets compare buying tokens of the best model you might run on your own hardware (still being unrealistic in favor of your own hardware) vs that same class of model on the market. I think one of the best models you might be able to run is GLM 5.4, but lets just look at chinese models generally:
$20k workstation, best case: $15k M5 Ultra 512GB, 36-month amortization, ~$440/mo. Runs a GLM-5.3-class model at ~30 tok/s. Saturated 24/7 it produces roughly 58M output tokens/month.
Buying those tokens:
The economics can never work in your favor for buying your own hardware here, unless you can utilize it or sell excess capacity and you have access to nearly free electricity. The reason is someone else can buy the same hardware at scale (or realistically more efficient hardware), park it somewhere with very cheap electricity, and sell tokens. They can get very high utilization that you are not likely to get.And keep in mind I am giving 'your own hardware' no overhead or maintenance cost, despite your condition that it's in a large corporate environment. In reality corporate IT would make it almost impossible to set up and your would need huge lead times to buy the hardware and get it installed.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Its cheaper than Nvidia AI hardware.
That may not be many people, but there certainly will be some people who want to do that, and are willing to pay big bucks to do so.
It’s when self hosting and local hosting was the norm, and why it’s also starting to come back.
There will be workloads that can never touch a public cloud, and for it solutions like this are an option.
I've often felt there is tremendous value locked up in underutilized old computers. It would be interesting to see Apple in 3 years offering compute as a service using lease returns (or more likely, partnering with someone else to operate it (perhaps exclusively in secondary markets like China or India, to address political demands for local siting or jobs). Apple is in the best position to work around or even gap-fix older software/hardware limitations in a controlled environment, and now they can do so without cannibalizing new hardware sales.
Apple computers tend to have excellent resale value, and Mac Minis/Studios have the least depreciation of them all. I understand the benefits to both taxes and cash flow, but boy is Apple winning big on those lease offers for Studios.
consumer electronics has literally never been an asset.
> Apple computers tend to have excellent resale value
do you think the new leasing category might change that? hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
edit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1vxzg6v/apple_i...
For which configuration, though?
not getting on that bandwagon but wasn't that not the most demanding game as its a just a nonstop cutscene.
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.
Which one is it you can run local models on? I suppose the NPU only.
In US its $4000 upgade so $25 for 1GB.
Also:
> 512GB memory option for M5 Ultra coming late October
If you want to comfortably afford this gen you had to trade options on memory stocks...
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...
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.
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.
The problem I'm having now is that no models are targeting RAM of that size. Everything is either much smaller, targeting laptops, or much larger, targeting hardware well out of reach of enthusiasts.
Please, AI people, start making models targeting 128GB machines again. The last interesting one was Qwen 3.5 122B.
Something like this would give you three concurrent sessions, each with 240k token context:
Should bench better than Opus 4.7.
You might expect the M5 Ultra to produce 50 t/s from Qwen 3.8 27B with a good context length.
Interesting times, to say the least!
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.
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.
The prices are ridiculous though. I may just keep rolling with my Windows 10 setup.
That's wild!
This may depend on the size of your library. I tried installing Jellyfin on a Synology NAS, which runs Plex just fine, and it ran so poorly it was basically unusable. It “worked”, but it was painful.
I thought it would be fine, because Plex has no issues, but it was painful. Every client I tried on the AppleTV was equally painful, and I didn't even try using a client until making sure all the metadata was downloaded and setup via the web UI. I was very deliberate and did one thing at a time, spending a whole day on it (mostly waiting and browsing to different screens to force metadata to get downloaded and cached).
With everyone saying Jellyfin can run on a Pi, I would think it would be better optimized for low-end hardware.
Edit: never mind, 2.5G is now the default, so you'll probably need more than 40 people to saturate that with streaming video.
Just amazing engineering push, the competition got the message and we benefit.
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.
Also: "a staggering 1.2TB/s of unified memory bandwidth" -- yay, the GPU has reached the year 2020! (I'm a bit bitter that my M4 Max is near useless for local LLMs because of its low memory bandwidth.)
A m4 mac mini is better than al of these per dollar, msrp adjusted.
Hopefully by the end of the decade China figures out manufacturing at scale and fixes this.
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)
The iPhone 15 was almost entirely marketed based upon AI (I would say fraudulently so, advertising features they still haven't delivered), and a huge portion of the OS work was on local AI or AI integration.
And for that matter Apple has been dumping enormous sums into their own AI development. Their failure to have a lot to show for it doesn't void the fact that they tried really, really hard.
It's bizarre how often this "Apple sat on the sidelines and let the AI people fight...so smart!" narrative appears on HN. Apple hasn't gone down the path of spending hundreds of billions on nvidia GPU data centres, but they absolutely tried really hard to matter in AI.
Yep, Siri AI; they’re doing it in public.
But you get a generic computer and much more RAM.
And you lose a couple of organs.
It would take Apple one or two engineers to make Linux life much easier on macs. But Linux is outside their walled garden so it's ignored.
My Mac Mini is strictly a headless server for llama.cpp.
I use a Linux workstation.
If I were limited to use Mac hardware , I would install Linux in VMware Fusion and work from there.
My old 3090 is typically significantly faster (almost 2x token/s) than my M4 Max 128GB machine, as long as the model fits in the 24GB of VRAM.
In most situations it's a better idea to just buy tokens. But there are definitely cases when that's not an option. And then a machine like the M5 Ultra can allow you to do things locally for a fairly limited budget. And in a simpler package to manage than a machine with multiple GPUs.
* the iPhone * the iPad * apple watch * airpods * unified memory laptops and computers
Those are all products that either created a category or changed that industry.
They weren't the first smart phone, tablet, smart watch, or true wireless earbuds. They did a damn fine job making each of those though. I am typing this on a my work macbook wearing AirPods, and AppleWatch, listening to audio on my iPhone. Apple does a really good job with their products.
Realizing how surrounding by Apple I am...
I mean this is not nvidia based right? It's all custom? So we can use it under Asahi perhaps?
I want to get something for my company to run local models, wondering what would be a good option.
Linux runs very well in a VM on macOS. There are many good options for this, some free and open source (QEMU, UTM, Lima, Colima), some proprietary (VMware Fusion, Parallels).
But Linux in a VM doesn't get access to the real GPU, so model performance is limited. Those running on the CPU perform well, and those needing the GPU don't.
However, macOS on M-series macs is excellent for local models. (Maybe not as excellent as a box full of the best nVidia GPUs, but still excellent).
So if you're getting Apple hardware, like Linux, and want to run all of it locally, a fine setup for a machine to run local models, with agentic characteristics:
- macOS running one of the many local model runners. I used to use Ollama and Whisper, and now use llama.cpp instead of Ollama. Others use LM Studio, oMLX, etc. Provide HTTP endpoints to access the models.
- Linux in a VM for overall control and orchestration, with standard VM settings, and bridged networking so it appears as its own machine on your network. Also, in here provide a robust shared file server for shared state. Use this VM as your desktop and primary access to the machine, if you like Linux.
- Linux in a VM to launch ephemeral, volatile containers, with the containers using a memory-only tmpfs overlay on top of a read-only Linux filesystem in a VM disk image, with tools in this filesystem. Alternatively, a writable Linux filesystem in a VM disk image, with disk buffering set to use macOS host buffering and discard fsync requests. These settings optimise for container disk performance for data that's only ephemeral which will be deleted soon or on system shutdown. (You can combined both VMs, but need to use two VM disks to get equivalent behaviour, and be careful about VM disk configuration of the two disks.)
- Containers spawned within that second Linux VM can be spawned very quickly and run quickly, so are ideal for LLM agents that need a quick sandbox. These sandboxes generally run faster than a macOS sandbox, despite being on the same machine with VM overhead, because Linux is faster at some things. Teach the LLMs to store files and memories they want to keep in the shared file server.
I just want my butt ugly repairable beast machine to do the same trick. Why is my ram not unified? I have an iGPU in my server, but it can't access the 64 GB ram (I got last year for 150 euro) directly or something? It's on the CPU right? Why did only Apple go for this architecture? So many questions...
Can we please kill the xcode. It is worst pile of garbage I have to use just to develop ios app.
Is this a joke?
>Additionally, M5 Ultra features a massive amount of high-bandwidth unified memory, up to 512GB
Now we're talking. But at what cost?
"M6 also introduces a Dual 16-core Neural Engine, providing up to 2x the peak compute over previous generations to make on-device AI workflows run even faster" .
256 memory gets you to like 11k. So like 15-20k.
and 512GB is so 2025.
Give us 1TB version. Where is the competitive spirit?
To be fair, where is the competitor at this form factor?
It's the Hardware, Software and Services in combination. None would work without the other (to reach the scale apple is)
More specifically, they're a hardware dongle company first
FWIW, Ollama, LM Studio and Lemonade (and oMLX) also wrap Apple's MLX framework.