Also just noticed this:
"And now with M5, the new 14-inch MacBook Pro and iPad Pro benefit from dramatically accelerated processing for AI-driven workflows, such as running diffusion models in apps like Draw Things, or running large language models locally using platforms like webAI."
First time I've ever heard of webAI - I wonder how they got themselves that mention?
Now that they own the SoC design pipeline, they’re really able to flex these muscles.
Very often the intel chips in macbooks were stellar, they were just seriously inhibited by Apples terrible cooling designs and so were permanently throttled.
They could never provide decent cooling for the chips coupled with their desire to make paper thin devices.
Curiously they managed to figure this out exactly when it became their silicon instead (M1 MacBook Pros were notably thicker and with more cooling capacity than the outgoing Intel ones)
And this would eventually evolve into MacOS.
EDIT: I seem to be getting downvoted, so I will just leave this here for people to see I am not lying:
https://www.businessinsider.com/tim-cook-apple-is-not-a-hard...
Apple's product revenue in this fiscal year has been $233B, with a gross margin of $86B.
Their services revenue is $80B with $60B gross margin.
Regardless of revenue, Apple isn't a hardware company or a software company. It's a product company. The hardware doesn't exist merely to run the software, nor does the software exist merely to give functionality to the hardware. Both exist to create the product. Neither side is the "main" one, they're both parts of what ultimately ships.
Yes, it's $70B a year from iPhones alone and $23B from the totality of the Services org. (including all app store / subscription proceeds). Significantly more than 50% of the company's total profits come from hardware sales.
We should be comparing profit on those departments not revenue. Do you have those figures?
It is well known that companies often sell the physicval devices at a loss, in order to make the real money from the services on top.
Apple is and always has been a HW company first.
It was coherent, (relatively) bug free, and lacked the idiot level iOSification and nagging that is creeping in all over MacOS today.
I haven't had to restart Finder until recently, but now even that has trouble with things like network drives.
I'm positive there are many internals today that are far better than in Snow Leopard, but it's outweighed by user visible problems.
It shouldn't surprise you I think that Android Jelly Bean was the best phone OS ever made as well, and they went completely in the wrong direction after that.
being poor, I need to sell my Macbook to get money to pay of my 16e, then sell the 16e and use that money to but a Pixel 9, then probably a but a Thinkpad Carbon X1. Just saying all that to show you the lengths I am going through to boycott/battle the enshitification.
At least its open source and free I guess.
Adding extra features that aren't necessarily needed is enshittification, and very not-unix.
That would be the end of open source, hobbyists and startup companies because you'd have to pay up just to have a basic C library (or hope some companies would have reasonable licensing and support fees).
Remember one of the first GNU projects was GCC because a compiler was an expensive, optional piece of software on the UNIX systems in those days.
It's not even about open source or closed source at this point. It's about feature creep.
> Hardware and software both matter, and Apple’s history shows that there’s a good argument to be made for developing integrated hardware and software. But if you asked me which matters more, I wouldn’t hesitate to say software. All things considered I’d much prefer a PC running Mac OS X to a Mac running Windows.
https://daringfireball.net/2009/11/the_os_opportunity
At the time I'd only been a Mac user for a few years and I would have strongly agreed. But definitely things have shifted— I've been back on Windows/WSL for a number of years, and it's software quality/compatibility issues that are a lot of what keeps me from trying another Mac. Certainly I'm far more tempted by the hardware experience than I am the software, and it's not even really close.
It's a server or developer box first and a non-technical user second.
On Linux there is variety and choice, which some folks dislike.
But on the Mac I get whatever Apple gives me, and that is often subject to the limitations of corporate attention spans and development budgets.
And arbitrary turf wars like their war against web apis/apps causing more friction for devs and end users.
If I close my laptop for a few days, I don't want significant battery drain. If I don't use it for two weeks, I want it to still have life left. And I don't want to write tens of gigabytes to disk every time I close the lid, either!
If you're talking about hardware interaction from the command line, that's very different and I don't think there's a fix.
One can just hand wave "Apple must support Linux and all" but that is not going to get anything done.
Edit: Hard to call intentionally preventing support for web apis a power user thing. This creates more friction for basic users trying to use any web app.
Edit2: lol Apple PR must be all over this, went from +5 to -1 in a single refresh. Flagged for even criticizing what they intentionally break.
I understand that this post is about MacOS, but yes, we are forced to support Safari for iOS. Many of these corporate decisions to prevent web apps from functioning properly spill over from MacOS Safari to iOS Safari.
On iOS you cannot even keep a web app running in the background. The second they mutlitask, even with an audio/microphone active, Apple kills it. Are they truly adding battery life or are they cheating by creating restrictions that prevent apps from working?
Being able to conduct a voice call through the browser seems like a pretty basic use case to me.
For a simple example, no app remembers the last directory you were working in. The keys each app uses are completely inconsistent from app to app. And it was only in Windows 11 that Windows started remembering my window configuration when I plugged and unplugged a monitor. Then there’s the Windows 95-style dialog boxes mixed in with the Windows 11-style dialog boxes; what a UI mess. I spoke with one vendor the other day who was actually proud they’d adopted a ribbon interface in their UI “just like Office” and I verbally laughed.
From a hardware perspective, I still don’t understand why Windows and laptop manufacturers can’t get sleep working right. My Intel MacBook Pro with an old battery still sleeps and wakes and lasts for several hours, while my new Windows laptop lasts about an hour and won’t wake from hibernate half the time without a hard reboot.
I think Windows is the “good enough” for most people.
A friend of mine lost a ton of messages when upgrading the OS (and therefore Mail). A number of others were affected by the same issue. There have been show-stopper bugs in the core functionality of Photos as well. I don't get the impression that the basics are Apple's focus with respect to software.
But I’ve certainly never struggled with getting WiFi to work on a Mac, or struggled with getting it to sleep/wake, or a host of other problems you routinely have on both Windows and Linux.
It’s not even close.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/report-apple-is-savi...
Apple's chip engineering is top tier, but money also buys them a lot of advance.
Hardware is naturally limited in scope due to manufacturing costs, and doesn't "grow" in the same way. You replace features and components rather than constantly add to them.
Apple needs someone to come in and aggressively cut scope in the software, removing features and products that are not needed. Pair it down to something manageable and sustainable.
macOS has way too many products but far too few features. In terms of feature-completeness, it's already crippled. What OS features can macOS afford to lose?
(I have the same complaint about AWS, where a bunch of services are in KTLO and would be better served by not being inside AWS)
Furthermore, they do also engage in the traffic and sale of digital programmes wrought by the hands of other, independent artisans.
But this is the exception.
There aren't a lot of tangible gains left to be made by the software teams. The OS is fine, the office suite is fine, the entertainment apps are fine.
If "performance" is shoving AI crap into software that was already doing what I wanted it to do, I'd rather the devs take a vacation.
Who knows, maybe the era of "exciting computing" is over, and iteration will be a more pleasant and subtle gradient curve of improvements, over the earth-shattering announcements of yore (such as the advent of popular cellular phones).
May be steve is true. We don't know what we want until some one shows it .
Hopefully that will bring whatever they’re doing right to other teams.
Biggest grief with MacOS software:
- Finder is very mediocre comparing to even File explorer in Windows
- Scrollbar and other UI issues
Unfortunately I don't think Asahi is going to catch up, and Macbook is so expensive, so I'll probably keep buying second hand Dell/Lenovo laptop and dump a Linux on top of it.
I still agree that second hand Thinkpads are ridiculously better in terms of price/quality ratio, and also more environmentally sustainable.
But I could be wrong. Maybe the earlier Macs didn't have great software either -- but at least the UI is better.
Apple's Hardware Chief, John Ternus, seems to be next in line for succession to Tim Cook's position.
I remember using iTunes when fixing the name of an album was a modal blocking function that had to write to each and every MP3, one by one, in the slowest write I have ever experienced in updating file metadata. Give me a magnetised needle and a steady hand and I could have done it faster.
A long time ago they had some pretty cool design guides, and the visual design has often been nice, but other than that I don't think their software has been notable for its quality.
Edit: gigabits indeed. Confusing, my old M2 Max has 400 GB/s (3200 gigabits per second) bandwidth. I guess it's some sort of baseline figure for the lowest end configuration?
Edit 2: 1,224 Gbps equals 153 GB/s. Perhaps M5 Max will have 153 GB/s * 4 = 612 GB/s memory bandwidth. Ultra double that. If anyone knows better, please share.
Edit: Apparently 100GB/s, so a 1.5x improvement over the M3 and a 1.25x improvement over the M4. That seems impressive if it scales to Pro, Max and Ultra.
The advantage of the unified architecture is that you can use all of the memory on the GPU. The unified memory architecture wins where your dataset exceeds the size of what you can fit in a GPU, but a high end gaming GPU is far faster if the data fits in VRAM.
That’s true for the on-GPU memory but I think there is some subtlety here. MoE models have slimmed the difference considerably in my opinion, because not all experts might fit into the GPU memory, but with a fast enough bus you can stream them into place when necessary.
But the key difference is the type of memory. While NVIDIA (Gaming) GPUs ship with HBM memory ship for a while now, the DGX Spark and the M4 use LPDDR5X which is the main source for their memory bottleneck. And unified memory chips with HBM memory are definitely possible (GH200, GB200), they are just less power efficient on low/idle load.
NVIDIA Grace sidestep: They actually use both HBM3e (GPU) and LPDDR5X (CPU) for that reason (load characteristics).
The moat of the memory makers is just so underrated…
Guessing that's their base tier and it'll increase on the higher spec/more mem models.
I wish Apple would take gaming more seriously and make GPTK a first class citizen such as Proton on Linux.
This has been by far the best setup until Apple can take gaming seriously, which may never happen.
No one who was forced to write a statement like [this](https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/5E0D-522A-4E62-B6...) is going to be enthusiastic about continuing to work with Apple.
1. When is the next transition on bits? Is Apple going to suddenly move to 128-bit? No.
2. When is the next transition on architecture? Is Apple going to suddenly move back to x86? No.
3. When is the next API transition? Is Apple suddenly going to add Vulkan or reinvigorate OpenGL? No. They've been clear it's Metal since 2014, 11 years ago. That's plenty of time for the industry to follow if they cared, and mobile gaming has adopted it without issue.
We might as well complain that the PlayStation 4 was completely incompatible with the PlayStation 3.
> What would it even be? 128 bit? Back to x86? Notarization++? Metal 4 incompatible with Metal 1?
Sure, I can think of lots of things. Every macOS update when I worked in this space broke something that we had to go fix. Code signature requirements change a bit in almost every release, not hard to imagine a 10-year-old game finally running afoul of some new requirement. I can easily see them removing old, unmaintained APIs. OpenGL is actively unmaintained and I would guess a massive attack vector, not hard to see that going away. Have you ever seen their controller force feedback APIs? Lol, they're so bad, it's a miracle they haven't removed those already.
The attitude in the apple developer ecosystem is that apple tells you to jump, and you ask how high.
You could complain that Playstation 4 software is incompatible with Playstation 3. This is the PC gaming industry, there are higher standards for the compatibility of software that only a couple companies can ignore.
"This is the PC gaming industry"
Who said Apple needed to present themselves as a PC gaming alternative over a console alternative?
Macs are personal computers, whether or not they come from some official IBM Personal Computer compatibility bloodline.
Sega Saturn - 9 million
Wii U - 13 million
PlayStation 5 - 80 million
Nintendo Switch - 150 million
Nintendo Switch 2 opening weekend - 4 million in 3 days
Sure.
I mean, it's at least partially true. I used to play BioShock Infinite on my MacBook in high school, there was a full port. Unfortunately it's 32 bit and doesn't run anymore and there hasn't been a remaster yet.
Anyway, the whole situation was quite bad. Many games were still 32-bit, even if macOS itself had been mainly 64-bit for almost 10 years or more. And Valve didn't help either, the Steam store is full of 64-bit mislabeled as 32-bit. They could have written a simple script to check whether a game is actually 64-bit or not, instead they decided to do nothing and keep their chaos.
The best solution would have been a lightweight VM to run old 32-bit games, nowadays computer are powerful enough to do so.
You don't buy Apple to use your computer they way you want to use it. You buy it to use it the way they tell you to. E.g. "you're holding it wrong" fiasco.
In some ways this is good for general consumers (and even developers, with limited config comes less unpredictablilty)... However this generally is bad for power users or "niche" users like Mac gamers.
Not to mention many subscription services on iOS that don’t allow you to subscribe through the App Store.
Note that games with anticheat don't work on Linux with Proton either. Everything else does, though.
Of course some anticheats aren't supported at all, like EA Javelin.
I just redid my windows machine to get at TPM2.0 and secure boot for Battlefield 6. I did use massgrave this time because I've definitely paid enough Microsoft taxes over the last decade. I thought I would hate this new stuff but it runs much better than the old CSM bios mode.
Anything not protected by kernel level anti cheats I play on my steam deck now. Proton is incredible. I am shocked that games like Elden Ring run this well on a linux handheld.
In my case, for software development, I'd be happy with an entry-level MacBook Air (now with a minimum of 16GB) for $999.
1. Implementing PR_SET_SYSCALL_USER_DISPATCH
2. Implementing ntsync
3. Implementing OpenGL 4.6 support (currently only OpenGL 4.1 is supported)
4. Implementing Vulkan 1.4 with various extensions used by DXVK and vkd3d-proton.
1. Not implementing this would just break games like Jurassic World where DRM hard codes Windows syscalls. I do not believe that there are many of these, although I could be wrong.
2. There is https://github.com/marzent/wine-msync, although implementing ntsync in the XNU kernel would be better.
3. The latest OpenGL isn't that important these days now that Vulkan has been widely adopted, although having the latest version would be nice to have for parity. Not many things would suffer if it were omitted.
4. They could add the things needed for MoltenVK to support Vulkan 1.4 with those extensions on top of Metal:
It is a shame that they do not work with Valve on these things. If they did, Proton likely would be supported for MacOS from within Steam and the GPTK would benefit.
Since I am playing mostly MSFS 2024 these days I currently use GeForce Now which is fine, but cloud gaming isn’t still quite there yet…
Codeweavers?
I've been trying to get Unreal Engine to work on my Macbook but Unity is an order of magnitude easier to run. So I'm also stuck doing game development on my PC. The Metal APIs exist and apparently they're quite good... it's a shame that more engines don't support it.
I personally wish they would learn from the failure of Metal.
Also unleashes? Really? The marketing madness has to stop at some point.
M4: May 2024
M4 pro/max: Oct 2024
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/05/apple-introduces-m4-c...
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/10/apple-introduces-m4-p...
My hope is that they are taking longer because of a memory system upgrade that will make running significantly more powerful LLMs locally more feasible.
All in all, apple is doing some incredible things with hardware.
Software teams at apple really need to get their act together. The M1 itself is so powerful that nobody really needs to upgrade that for most things most people do on their computers. Tahoe however makes my M1 Air feel sluggish doing the exact same tasks ive been last couple of years. I really hope this is not intentional from Apple to make me upgrade. That would be a big let down.
An infinitely small percentage of people can take advantage of 320Mhz. It's fine.
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/deployment/dep268652e6...
I was at a Wi-Fi vendor presentation a while back and they said that 160 Mhz is pretty improbable unless you're leaving alone and no wireless networks around you. And 320 Mhz even less so.
In real life probably the best you can get is 80 Mhz in a really good wireless environment.
I have a work provided M2 Pro with 32GB of RAM. After the Tahoe upgrade it feels like one of the sluggish PCs at the house. It is the only one that I can see the mouse teleporting sometimes when I move it fast. This is after disabling transparency in Accessibility settings mind you, it was even worse before.
I just got one example while passing the mouse quickly through my dock (I still use the magnify animation) and I can clearly see it dropping a few frames. This never happened in macOS 15.
Electron used to override a private function that makes the Mac OS sluggish on Tahoe, and apparently no one uses Electron apps while doing testing at Apple.
What I can say is that the situation is much better than at Day 1, the whole Tahoe experience is not as fluid as Sequoia.
Also, it doesn't really matter to me if this was a private function or not, if this was Windows or Gnome/KDE people would blame the developers of the desktop instead.
https://github.com/tkafka/detect-electron-apps-on-mac
About half of the apps I use regularly have been fixed. Some might never be fixed, though...
they ship-of-thesseus the crap out of their OS but replacing with parts that need these new hardware features that run slow on older chips due to software-only implementations.
I got the first generation iPad Pro, which is e-waste now, but I use it as a screen for my CCTV, it cannot even display the virtual keyboard without stuttering like crazy, it lags switching apps, there's a delay for everything, this thing was smooth as butter on release.
I’ve been debating making a Tumblr-style blog, something like “dumbapple.com,” to catalogue all the dumb crap I notice.
But, like, man - why can't I just use the arrow keys to select my WiFi network anymore? I was able to for a decade.
And the answer, of course, is the same for why so much of macOS sucks now. Apple took some iPadOS interface elements, rammed them into the macOS UI, and still have yet to make them whole. It's the same reason why the Share sheet is so weird. For how much we complain on HN about Electron, we really need to be pissed about Catalyst/Marzipan.
Why does the iCloud sign in field have me type on the right side of an input? Why does that field have an iPadOS cursor? Why can't I use Esc to close its help sheet? Why aren't that sheet's buttons focusable? Why does the Stocks app have a Done button appear when I focus its search field? Why does its focus ring lag behind the search field's animated size?
...Anyway.
But it's a glorified Kindle and YouTube box, so I'm hesitating a little bit.
It feels very much like how I imagine someone living in the late 1800's might have felt. The advent of electricity, the advent of cars, but can't predict airplanes, even though they're right around the corner and they'll have likely seen them in their lifetime.
Maybe, but for lots of scenarios even M5 could still benefit from being an order of magnitude faster.
AI, dev, some content scenarios, etc…
"the ability to transform 2D photos into spatial scenes in the Photos app, or generating a Persona — operate with greater speed and efficiency."
And by making Apple AI (which is something I do not use for many reasons, but mainly because of Climate Change) their focus, I am afraid they are losing and making their operating Systems worse.
For instance, Liquid Glass, the mess I was lucky enough to uninstall before they put in the embargo against doing so, is, well, a mess. An Aplha release in my opinion which I feel was a distraction from their lack of a robust AI release.
So by blowing money on the AI gold rush that they were too late for, will they ultimately ruin their products across the board?
I am currently attempting to sell my iPhone 16E and my M1 Macbook Air to move back to Linux because of all of this.
Are they really doing that? Because if it's the case they have shockingly little to show for it.
Their last few attempts at actual innovation seem to have been less than successful. The Vision Pro failed to find a public. Liquid Glass is to put it politely divisive.
At that point to me, it seems to me good SoC and a captive audience in the US are pretty much all they have remaining and competition on the SoC part is becoming fierce.
I totally understand why someone would refuse to use it due to environmental reasons (amongst others) but I'm curious to hear your opinions on it.
If I can't search my Apple Mail without AI, why would I trust AI?
Why would I trust this when they can't deliver a voice assistant that can parse my sentences beyond "Set a reminder" or "Set a timer"? They have neglected this area of their products for over a decade, they are not owed the benefit of the doubt
Also, I like researching things old school how I learned in college because I think it leads to unintended discoveries.
I do not trust the source you linked to. It is an organization buried under organizations for which I cannot seem to find their funding source after looking for a good 15 minutes this morning. It led me back to https://ev.org/ where I found out one guy used to work for "Bain and Company", a consulting firm, and was associated with FTX funding:
https://oxfordclarion.uk/wytham-abbey-and-the-end-of-the-eff...
Besides "Effective Altruism" makes no sense to me. Altruism is Altruism IMO.
Altruism: unselfish regard for or devotion to the welfare of others
There is no way to be ineffective at altruism. The more you have to think about altruism the further you get from it.
But the organization stinks as some kind of tech propaganda arm to me.
"The neural engine features a graphic accelerator" probably M6
If they're studios, you can have stacks of M5 Max Macs.
>Built into your iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Vision Pro* to help you write, express yourself, and get things done effortlessly.** Designed with groundbreaking privacy at every step.
The asterisks are really icing on the cake here.
---
[1] https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/apple-accused-of-ai-cop...
Yesterday’s hype is today’s humility.
https://web.archive.org/web/20251010205008/https://www.apple...
[1] https://www.apple.com/us-edu/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/14-inc...
But never, ever, through not shipping incremental hardware bumps every year regardless of whether there's anything really worth shipping.
And it's things like not including a charger, cable, headphones anymore to reduce package size, which sure, will save a little on emissions but it's moot because people will still need those things.
Hardware longevity and quality are probably the least valid criticisms of the current Macbook lineup. Most of the industry produces future landfill at an alarming rate.
Logos is King
https://security.apple.com/blog/memory-integrity-enforcement...
1. CPU, via SIMD/NEON instructions (just dot products)
2. CPU, via AMX coprocessor (entire matrix multiplies, M1-M3)
3. CPU, via SME (M4)
4. GPU, via Metal (compute shaders + simdgroup-matrix + mps matrix kernels)
4. Neural Engine via CoreML (advisory)
Apple also appears to be adding a “Neural Accelerator” to each core on the M5?
- https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/neural-engine-tra...
- https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/vision-transforme...
Things have definitely gotten better with MLX on the software side, though it still seems they could do more in that area (let’s see what the M5 Max brings). But even if they made big strides here, it won’t help previous generations, and the main thing limiting Apple Intelligence (in my opinion) will continue to be the 8 GB of unified memory they still insist on.
I would hope that the Foundation Models (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundationmodels) use the neural engine.
As you said - it won’t help previous generations, though since last year (or two??) all macs start with 16GB of memory. Even entry level macbook airs.
If anything, these refreshes let them get rid of the last old crap on the line for M1 and M2, tie up loose ends with Walmart for the $599 M1 Air they still make for ‘em, and start shipping out the A18 Pro-based Macbooks in November.
M5 announcement [1] says 4x the peak GPU compute performance for AI compared to M4. I guess in the lab?
Both iPad and MBP M5 [2][3] say "delivering up to 3.5x the AI performance". But all the examples of AI (in [3]), they are 1.2-2.3X faster than M4. So where this 3.5X is coming from? What tests did Apple do to show that?
---
1. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/10/apple-unleashes-m5-th... 2. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/10/apple-unveils-new-14-... 3. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/10/apple-introduces-the-...
I'll believe the benchmarks, not marketing claims, but an observation and a question.
1. AMD EPYC 4585PX has ~89GB/s, with pretty good latency, as long you use 2xdimm
2. How does this compare to the memory bandwidth and latency of M1,M2,M3,M4 in reality with all of the caveats? It seems like M1 was a monumental leap forward, then everything else was a retraction.
Snow Leopard still remains the company's crown achievement. 0 bloatware, 0 "mobile features on desktop" (wtf is this even a thing?), tuned for absolute speed and stability.
They are not the hardware provider like nvidia, they don’t do the software and services like OpenAI or even Microsoft/oracle. So they are struggling to find a foothold here. I am sure they are working on a lot of things but the only way to showcase them is through their phone which ironically enough feels like not the best path for apple.
Apple’s best option is to put llms locally on the phone and claim privacy (which is true) but they may end up in the same Siri vs others situation, where Siri always is the dumber one.
This is interesting to see how it plays out
it seems inevitable that LLMs on local hardware will become a cheaper, faster, and more reliable way to access AI features than paying for inference on third-party servers, but we're a long way off from the hardware being good enough that it can be a real thing that customers care about. as long as they keep iterating and working towards that, and don't give up, in 5-10 years the MacBook can be a best-in-class AI device. but right now, the reality is that nobody (outside like 20 people) really cares how their laptop performs at local AI tasks, and the only ai products that people care about are hosted in datacentres.
In theory this would be where qualcomm would come in and provide something but in practice they seem to be stuck in qualcomm land where only lawyers matter and actual users and developers can get stuffed.
The only well supported devices are either phones or servers with very little in between.
Even common consumer devices like wifi routers will have ARM SOCs with pinned version of the kernel they are attached to which will get supported for 1 to 2 years at most.
And it's a PITA to install (needs to be started within macosx, using scripts, with the partitions already in a good state)
Also, did you know that guitar technology is advancing a lot too? Doesn't make a bit of difference if the user sucks. Spoiler Alert: most of y'all, especially guys like Paul Graham, have brain damage from huffing your own farts and don't deserve nice things anymore. Selah.
However, I have been disappointed by Apple too many times (they wouldn't replace my keyboard despite their highly-flamed design-faux-pas, had to replace the battery twice by now, etc.)
Two years ago I finally stopped replacing their expensive external keyboards, which I used to buy once a year or every other (due to broken key-hinges) and have been so incredibly positively surprised by getting used to the MX Keys now. Much better built, incredible mileage for the price. Plus, I can easily switch and use them on my Windows PC, too.
So, about the Macbook — if I were to switch mobile computing over to Windows, what can I replace it with? My main machine is still a Mac Mini M2 Pro, which is perfect value/price. I like the Surface as a concept (replacable keyboards are a fantastic idea, battery however, super iffy nonsense), and I've got a Surface Pro 6 around, but it's essentially the same gloss-premium I don't need for my use.
Are there any much-cheaper but somewhat comparable laptops (12h+ battery, 1 TB disk, 16-32GB RAM, 2k+ Display) with reasonable build quality? Does bypassing the inherent premium of all the Apple gloss open up any useful options? Or is Apple actually providing the best value here?
Would love to hear from non-Surface, non-Thinkpad (I love it, but) folks who've got some recommendations for sub $1k laptops.
Not my main machine, but something I take along train rides, or when going to clients, or sometimes working offsite for a day.
Storage CPU
≤ 512GB 3 P-cores (and 6 E-cores)
1TB+ 4 P-cores (and 6 E-cores)
nik736•1h ago
quest88•1h ago
nik736•1h ago
burnte•1h ago
hu3•1h ago
"M5 is Apple’s next-generation system on a chip built for AI, resulting in a faster, more efficient, and more capable chip for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, and Apple Vision Pro."
mpeg•1h ago
sgt•1h ago
mpeg•1h ago
andy_ppp•50m ago
bombcar•1h ago
asimovDev•19m ago
iyn•22m ago
czbond•1h ago
shorts_theory•58m ago
modeless•56m ago
I highly recommend Andrej Karpathy's videos if you want to learn details.
pfortuny•32m ago
wizee•1h ago
Models like Qwen 3 30B-A3B and GPT-OSS 20B, both quite decent, should be able to run at 30+ tokens/sec at typical (4-bit) quantizations.
zamadatix•43m ago
Neither product actually qualifies for the task IMO, and that doesn't change just because two companies advertised them as such instead of just one. The absolute highest end Apple Silicon variants tend to be a bit more reasonable, but the price advantage goes out the window too.
cma•18m ago
diabllicseagull•50m ago
chedabob•36m ago