I'm currently on a marathon to keep my M1 Pro running until the M7 Pro/Max is available. Not sure if I'll make it, but I'm not eager to pay $6000+ for a decent spec dev computer, until I really have to
I'm loving my M1 Macbook Air still, and only a few weeks away from six years of use Sometimes it lags a bit when I'm running a macOS VM, and all the coding agent VMs, so I'm kind of interested in going to 32GB of RAM, but honestly this computer is still faster than any of my laptops that came before, even with the visual atrocity of Liquid Glass.
I'll go and look at this new box, drool a little, and realize that I'd get more personal utility from donating $3k (or whatever the trade in delta is) to a charity than upgrading my computer.
I got a second hand M1 air like two years ago for 200usd with 1tb hdd and 16gb ram. I got it after my intel Air died after about..12 years? (Edit: the ssd died, which is removable… but literally had a plane to catch). All my pros have died within a few years. Air all the way. Never looking back.
Just use. There were two models that had issues with the gpu desoldering, 2012 and 2015 iirc? I was lucky enough to have them. I put the mobos in the oven (180deg for seven minutes?) and that would fix it. For about a month… and then 2 weeks.. and then… I actually have a 2018 that I borrowed from a friend after my 2013 Air ssd gave up, it is still working I think, but its twice as slow, at least as my Air was. Its so weird. The Air stayed ‘snappy’ even after my friends Pro’s would become too sluggish. Maybe because I never update ;)
I wonder if this is from not trying to get maximum performance, and instead focusing on efficiency? But I've noticed this too. I definitely prefer the Air form factor over larger models as the primary benefit, but the durability seems to be a big benefit too. Fewer ports, thinner shell that seals tighter and can't flex as much due to the curved metal instead of flat surfaces... everything about it just seems like a better design.
Been on HN for many years now, and the one thing that never changes is people posting angrily about small UI changes. It makes me wonder- if things have only ever gotten worse, what was the peak UI? MS DOS?
Liquid Glass was not a "small UI change". It disrupted many accessibility aspects of macOS, so much so that Apple toned down quite a few aspects of the design in subsequent updates, even adding a slider to reduce the effect. [1]
The quantity of requests for how to disable Liquid Glass on Apple Discussions is staggering. [2]
Small improvements don't get much accolades. And for the most part, the UX is so good that most changes tend to be neutral or for the worse. And when you're really attached to something and there's on an unnecessary change, it feels almost like betrayal!
I, for one, prefer Apple products because they sweat the small stuff more than the other options, and when they have put in effort to make things worse it's kind of infuriating.
I do a bit of desktop Linux work too, and it's OK, but hard to complain when it's all open source volunteer work! Windows is so terrible that I wouldn't even know where to start. What's the point? There's nobody at Microsoft that even gives a damn.
The way things are going you will be able to run your favorite flavor of Linux on those pretty soon.
It will be the best of both worlds: the best hardware and a good OS. Hopefully Apple doesn't take steps to block it.
Liquid Glass is more than just the transparency. There are many other changes that cannot be disabled that way. Not to mention the overall lag compared to Sequoia (I skipped Tahoe entirely so I had a direct knife-edge transition). 27 is less bad than 26 but Liquid Glass doesn't make anything better than prior UI and makes several things worse, even if you turn down the transparency.
Stay strong! I went from an M1 to M5 generation, and it was a nice bump, but I could have gone another year without any significant impact on my quality of life/work.
My i7 is still running the marathon...pretty poorly. But it's still there!
It's painful to use my work provided M4 Max all day and then switch to my 2019 i7 in the evenings. Even my older work provided M1 Pro ran circles around the i7, the difference was staggering.
Have an M1 air as well. Got a Pro m5. For daily coding tasks, and general web browsing the M1 air still holds. I'm going to pass it on to my kid. Reminds me of the honda we have that we'll also pass down.
Biggest issue with my M3 Max is apple mandatory fun bloatware. I think it's the same playbook as phones long term. The hardware is still powerful but the software is optimized for the latest CPU, so older models run hot, take a fraction of the second longer to load the resources, etc. That stacks up over 5-6 years of releases to make older models feel slower.
I had an M1 Max machine with 32GB of memory and upgraded it to an M4 Max machine with 128GB of memory for local AI model experimentation.
It's sad that M5 (and M6) are so much faster at prefilling and other LLM-related operations, but I'm happy with the computer I got and will keep it at least 3-4 generations.
The M6 version is also cheaper than the M5 Max by a significant amount. I wouldn't be surprised if the M6 could keep up on LLM prefill (compute bound), but the memory bandwidth means that decode is going to be a lot slower, most likely?
It's a base M6 chip. The Pro doubles that, and the Max doubles again. And the Ultra doubles yet again. This is how the entire M series has always worked.
Hmm, still no OLED displays? I wonder what's the holdup? (I have a fairly mainstream PC laptop with OLED display, and the display is the one thing where my MBP looks pretty poor in direct comparison).
Is this an odd rollout for their actual high end MacBook Pros, or is this sitting in that space where they like to have a base MacBook Pro between their Airs and the expensive MacBook Extremely Pros?
Just the standard chip without Pro/Max makes me assume this is that base one. If so, the price is way high for where that tends to sit, but welcome to buying a computer in 2026 I guess.
This is the base one. You get a better display, more, faster Thunderbolt ports, and an honest to god HDMI port, plus some fans for cooling on long running processes that you don't get with the M6 Air (which also doesn't exist).
Why would you want greasy fingerprints all over your display and gorilla arm syndrome when there's a perfectly fine keyboard and touchpad attached to the display for free?
There's no happy medium here that would satisfy everybody: when they make marketing claims about improvements relative to products from several years ago, they get criticized for not focusing on the improvements relative to last gen (even if those comparisons are also somewhere in the announcement). When they focus on the most recent generations, people complain that it doesn't make sense to upgrade every year.
Just accept that even if you aren't still using an Intel MacBook Pro, the comparison is still relevant to some part of their target market.
They only just dropped support for Intel Macs from this fall's operating system release (but are still doing security patches for the releases that Intel Macs can run). A year from now, it actually will be fairly reasonable to expect them to give up marketing to the holdouts.
I would guess there's still quite a lot of people on Intel Macs out there (they were sold 5 years ago), so it is still very much worth it for Apple to market to them.
Why? Apple devices have the best battery life in the market right now to my knowledge. It's an important part of the evaluation for a laptop which is the opposite of cringe.
Actually, they don’t! Intel Core Ultra Series 3 beats Apple laptops as of the M5 on battery life.
IIRC the Framework 13 Pro beats the MacBook Pro at both video streaming tests and office productivity with 300 bits brightness tests. (Framework live-streamed the video playback test, and the office provided productivity tests I referred to were done by Just Josh Tech)
Perhaps the M6 has leapfrogged but that remains to be seen.
In usual developer type tasks, among my friend group what I hear is that panther lake laptops are competitive with M4 laptops. But, M4s do that with a 55Wh battery, whereas most panther lake laptops come with a 70Wh battery. So if you're discussing chip performance per watt then it's probably an edge to apple silicon.
I recall seeing some crazy stats like 41+ hours maybe on a snapdragon processor w/windows. I imagine your screen brightness would have to be like 99% dark and not playing videos is my guess.
One of the interesting slights of hand Apple marketing must do is simultaneously say the new processor is awesome while selling the higher spec versions of the previous processor as upgrades:
The M6 chip joins M5 Pro and M5 Max to create our most advanced line-up of chips ever built for a pro laptop. With a 12-core CPU, 12-core GPU and our first ever Dual 16‑core Neural Engine, M6 brings next-generation speed and advanced on device AI. All three chips deliver phenomenal single- and multithreaded CPU performance and faster unified memory. . . .
The case of your 5090 having become a coveted artifact of great rarity in these times - may be a nuance of some measure.
Also, the following two have very different 'needs' to feel good enough:
1. heavy agentic workloads via harness
vs
2. a simple private chat interface with a local instance
Even if an MBP's bandwidth were higher, it's tough to see a reason to run it as a constantly loaded 24/7 inference machine due to heat degradation.
P.S. still extremely awesome to be able to host and chat with a decently quantized 27B model on your laptop. ...and to be fair even a 32GB Air would do that!
It is a thing of beauty: the amount of folks this may add to the hacker/tinker community.
About time they put a battery in the lid, which is what an iPad already manages to do with thinness. Boom another half a decade of updates all the way to 48hrs
It's confusingly worded but I think it's a suggestion for something Apple could do in the future. I don't see any mention of this in the linked Apple article.
I'll go and look at this new box, drool a little, and realize that I'd get more personal utility from donating $3k (or whatever the trade in delta is) to a charity than upgrading my computer.
What are you doing to them?
I still have MBPs from 2015 and 2018 that have not 'died'.
The quantity of requests for how to disable Liquid Glass on Apple Discussions is staggering. [2]
[1]https://www.macrumors.com/2026/06/09/macos-golden-gate-liqui...
[2]https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256227663
I, for one, prefer Apple products because they sweat the small stuff more than the other options, and when they have put in effort to make things worse it's kind of infuriating.
I do a bit of desktop Linux work too, and it's OK, but hard to complain when it's all open source volunteer work! Windows is so terrible that I wouldn't even know where to start. What's the point? There's nobody at Microsoft that even gives a damn.
Um. https://imgur.com/a/ydt3MN5
It's painful to use my work provided M4 Max all day and then switch to my 2019 i7 in the evenings. Even my older work provided M1 Pro ran circles around the i7, the difference was staggering.
Maybe I'll upgrade at the next generation.
But with all of the AI-discovered exploits I think it'll become more important to keep everything up to date
It's sad that M5 (and M6) are so much faster at prefilling and other LLM-related operations, but I'm happy with the computer I got and will keep it at least 3-4 generations.
Apple MacBook M5 Max has bandwidth up to 600GB/s, is 170GB/s for M6 the real limit? If so, wouldn't this slow down LLM processing?
Even then, 170GB/s is a bump up from 153GB/s of the M5. So we see a 11% uplift already.
So the theoretical Max would be 680GB/s.
Just the standard chip without Pro/Max makes me assume this is that base one. If so, the price is way high for where that tends to sit, but welcome to buying a computer in 2026 I guess.
the m2/m3 announcements were already kind of cringe to keep saying 'HEY IT'S BETTER THAN INTEL' but at this point it's just embarrassing?
So Apple is now comparing against computers they were selling 7-8 years ago rather than what Intel is delivering now.
Just accept that even if you aren't still using an Intel MacBook Pro, the comparison is still relevant to some part of their target market.
They only just dropped support for Intel Macs from this fall's operating system release (but are still doing security patches for the releases that Intel Macs can run). A year from now, it actually will be fairly reasonable to expect them to give up marketing to the holdouts.
probably because of its adjacency to "corpulent" lol
> Mrs. Krabappel: "Embiggens"? I never heard that word before I moved to Springfield.
> Ms. Hoover: I don't know why. It's a perfectly cromulent word.
But now it has made it into the Merriam-Webster dictionary.
IIRC the Framework 13 Pro beats the MacBook Pro at both video streaming tests and office productivity with 300 bits brightness tests. (Framework live-streamed the video playback test, and the office provided productivity tests I referred to were done by Just Josh Tech)
Perhaps the M6 has leapfrogged but that remains to be seen.
Intel and now Qualcomm are really not far off on performance per watt. Mostly Apple maintains an advantage on single core performance.
The Panther Lake integrated GPU in the X7/X9 SKI is actually faster than the one you get in the base M5.
The fastest M6 MacBook Pro (24/32GB configs) has a memory bandwidth of 170 GB/s. And the M5 Max is 614 GB/s.
Am I missing some nuance of the M6 MBP here, or am I right to assume it won't set the local LLM world on fire?
Also, the following two have very different 'needs' to feel good enough:
1. heavy agentic workloads via harness vs 2. a simple private chat interface with a local instance
Even if an MBP's bandwidth were higher, it's tough to see a reason to run it as a constantly loaded 24/7 inference machine due to heat degradation.
P.S. still extremely awesome to be able to host and chat with a decently quantized 27B model on your laptop. ...and to be fair even a 32GB Air would do that! It is a thing of beauty: the amount of folks this may add to the hacker/tinker community.