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.
My son's M1 Air CPU died suddenly. Maybe it was a thermal death from overheating. Not sure. But all the data on it was lost because the storage is soldered on. PSA to make sure devices with non-removable storage are backed up!
(We replaced it with a Framework... with removable storage.)
I got a second hand M1 air like two years ago for 200usd with 1tb hdd and 16gb ram. I got it after my intel Air died after about..12 years? (Edit: the ssd died, which is removable… but literally had a plane to catch). All my pros have died within a few years. Air all the way. Never looking back.
I bought my M1 Pro the week it came out and it was unlike any computer I ever had, expectations, compute, battery life especially. It was just a joy to use and not worry about chargers. I'm so glad they went this path.
My worry is mostly storage. SSD do not last forever
I freaking hate liquid-glass UI Apple has "forced" onto us. No freaking way to disable it. I hate it so much.
you can probably get the battery replaced for a better speedup
Donate $3k… to some charity that’s going to use it to justify their COO’s $200k/year salary. GTFOH!
I think it's things like this that are a great argument against soldered ram. Especially with memory shortages.
(Obviously there are other reasons to solder like performance)
Indeed, pricing has gone a bit out of hand. I got the top-of-the-line MBP when I was starting my PhD at the end of 2013, for something like $3,200. You couldn't get a more expensive consumer-oriented laptop at the time. It's mind-boggling that the equivalent purchase today costs around twice as much.
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.
Same. Only because I broke my M1. Performance wise the M5 barely feels any faster to me in 90% of tasks
second this anecdote
I gave away my base spec (8gb ram, 256gb ssd) M1 air just a few months ago and it's still working fine, I just needed something higher than base spec for work but the new owner of the M1 loves it, for general purpose use it may as well be an M5.
I do wish they had removable storage though, I originally got that Macbook as it was the cheapest way I could try out MacOS and M1, once I decided I liked it, I was stuck with 256gb or spending all that money (and then some) again. This time, I went with 1tb.
My M1 MacBook Pro has been the best hardware investment I’ve ever made. I had planned to update it in 2025 at the four year mark, but it’s still going strong so I don’t see a reason. The new plan is to go to the Apple store the very day that it dies.
My M1 Pro has been great, certainly doesn’t feel like a 5-year old computer.
I'm wondering what decrease in performance you were expecting from a five year old computer? It isn't like the processor suddenly gets slower simply because it's older.
I’ve been a Mac user for 20 years and it’s wild to think how slow my 2003 PowerBook G4 or even my 2008 MacBook Pro felt after five years compared with my 2021 M1 Pro.
My 2013 Core i7 took almost eight years to get to where the previous ones were at five, and if it weren’t for local LLMs pushing me toward an upgrade in the next year or two, I have to imagine my M1 Pro could be my daily driver well into the next decade.
M1 Air guy here... I'm not looking for a replacement still. Almost 6 years now. Runs butter-smooth. Best tech purchase I ever made.
My 16" M1 Pro personal laptop is literally just as smooth for 99% of tasks as my work M5 pro. It's crazy how well they built these. I mean the screen on this and the speakers are superb. And you can find these for like 500-800 bucks 2nd hand. I just hope they give us a few more years of MacOS updates.
My work gave me an m4 MacBook Pro. I could barely tell the difference between my personal computer and my work computer.
generally agree, although mine's battery health has been sitting at 80% for what seems like ages now.
Same, and I dual-boot Asahi as well.
Biggest issue with my M3 Max is apple mandatory fun bloatware. I think it's the same playbook as phones long term. The hardware is still powerful but the software is optimized for the latest CPU, so older models run hot, take a fraction of the second longer to load the resources, etc. That stacks up over 5-6 years of releases to make older models feel slower.
I've been using my M1 Max 64 GB for 5 years now and it's pretty zippy once you rewrite some slow software. I have an M4 Max with 128 GB but I never ended up migrating to it. That's how good it is.
I do enjoy the fact that if software annoys you, it’s easy as hell to simply generate a better version.
Which software have you rewritten for speed?
Haha same here. The M1 Pro is such a powerful machine and it still works great. I did buy a MacBook Air M5 for non work, and I think it’s about as fast as the M1 Pro, but the latter has 64GB of RAM so I can actually work. Will probably request a new one next year though, it’s time.
Happily running my M1 Max, but have recently been annoyed at my decision to go with the off-the-shelf 32GB version at the time. I recalled telling friends at the time that the ridiculous memory bandwidth should offset that, so I ran some tests on memory pressure while running all my mess and, well, whaddya know, everything is actually tickety-boo. No memory pressure for the most part. And this is with big rust projects, Orbstack builds and runs.
The engineering that went into the M1 was amazing, I truly think that now, an M1 Max was the biggest bargain ever in my entire computing life. £3,299.00. In contrast, the 64GB i9 I bought only two years before was £4,149.00.
The “on-device AI” with the standard M6 seems to be slightly faster than the M1 Max of five years ago. All the rest seems to more or less match. Hope the M7 Max is yet another leap that serves many users for years to come.
The M1 Max MacBook with 64 gigabytes is still a great machine and fairly affordable on the second-hand market.
(Returning an i9 to wait a few more years on the M1, any M1, was absolutely worth it)
Also M1 Pro here. Any reason why you're planning to upgrade at M7 Pro? I still don't feel the need to upgrade, as much as I wish I could justify it.
I like to factory reset my devices every couple of years, it really gives them a new lease on life. My M1 Pro feels as smooth and fast as the day I got it.
I think the rumors are the M6 and then later M7 Pro/Max will be put into a new chassis with a touchscreen and no notch.
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.
They really have radically improved the situation for prefill speed! But the generation speed is behind enough that you'd notice. An M4 Max is a great choice I think.
Just replaced the keycaps on my M1 for the second time to make it feel new-ish again.
Still a great machine, shame those keycaps wear so badly (developing shiny greasy-looking patches)
M1 Max 64gb here, running Qwen 3.6 35b (unsloth 4bit) and it's plenty usable, and cheap used. Best bang for buck.
heyyy same, checkout kapitsa as the inference engine, gets 145+ tokens/sec
https://github.com/nace-ai/kapitsa
this machine just keeps getting better and better in the inference world. the memory bandwidth is too good, newer macbook pros aren't that much faster in memory bandwidth, many are slower. not enough to upgrade yet as they're mostly horizontal upgrades, the improvements in other areas are adding up like wifi bandwidth and protocol, NVMe speeds, webcam
if they do the M7 correctly: which is just everything their current models do plus way faster memory bandwidth and much greater memory possible 192GB+, then it will be a really great and timely upgrade
I’m hopeful mine survives until RAM and SSD prices return to Earth. Unless I drop it I suspect it will. It’s still going strong. Maybe the M8. Hopefully chips and local LLMs have developed to the degree that local inference will be good and fast.
I'm also on an M1 Pro, trying and failing to find a reason to upgrade other than wanting a "shiny new toy".
My M1 screen just cracked :( Debating to get it fixed (it’s a 32GB 2 TB machine). Crazy that I likely will spend 500€ to get a super old machine repaired just so au do not have to spend >3000€ for a similarly equipped new one.
Still with macmini m1 8gb here. still working OK taking care of space and RAM.
And, here I am with my 2012 macbook pro, still thinking if its worth upgrading.
Are you on the model with the CD drive or the high resolution "thin body" version? I graded the ram in mine and put in an SSD, and it still works beautifully, but I'm now on now on Linux with it, and have been for some time.
They will pry my M1 Pro Macbook from my cold, dead fingers.
I have an M1 Pro as well but my next computer will be a split setup mainly because I realized that I'm most often working / focusing on hard things while at the desk and just browsing / checking in on things when I'm away from the desk so I'm thinking something like:
- a low end Macbook Pro or Air
- Mac Studio, mid-to-high specs
Why not just continue to use your m1 pro as your low end client? Save a couple hundred.
I have M1 Maxes (one for work, one for home) that perform as good as new, as far as I can tell. Only thing they lack is an Nvidia GPU. I might pick up the new uber-studio though tmw when it launches (presumably).
Doesn't the high resale value of Macs not make it worthwhile to hang on to your old one as long as possible?
Also why would you have to spend $6000? You can get a refurbished 16-inch M5 Pro with 48 Gb RAM and 1 Tb SSD from Apple for $3000.
That's funny, I bought the config you are describing, but with nanotectured 14" instead of 16 new in July from microcenter for 2700 after tax.
IMO Apple knows a ton of people are doing this, especially with the rumors on memory bandwidth aka LPDDR6X bringing huge generational uplifts[0], which is why it seems they haven't brought down trade-in values from a few weeks ago, at least for my base spec M2 Pro MBP - Still $835. Pretty compelling to do that and pay just over $100/mo for a year to get a M6, given I've already gotten >3 years out of it.
Why would you need a $6000 computer for dev work? For toying around with local models I would understand.
For the ability to run our full server-side application stack locally, including all services and as much of the test suite as possible, as well as the profilers, debuggers and telemetry tools to debug issues. Way faster to develop when you can have a change running live in about 3 seconds instead of 5 minutes, run targeted tests in seconds and a full test suite in a few minutes.
When I was in the market for a new machine, I had the same attitude. As I was about to hit "Buy" on a standard issue $2k MBP, my wife said, "What if we got you a top of the line machine?"
I replied that it would make no sense unless I was going to start running local inference or training my own models locally...
2 years later, and this MacBook Pro M4 Max w/48GB is the best $4k I've ever spent!
Big test suites. I have one project hitting 35 mins on m1 max, vs around 12 min on the m5 max, vs. 7 min on the linux box I keep in the basement. Unit tests, integration tests, headless browser with webgpu stuff.
Standard issue at our company. There's just some apps that are huge, especially legacy ones.
I figured my direct family could use an extra Macbook, so I decided to "peel" my M1 Pro away as a gift to my mom. It stays close, I can use her unused space as backup, provide ad-hoc Tailscale to her (way smoother than with her crufty Windows machine), and I get a nice upgrade to my current workflows.
Having said that, I did plan on sticking it out 7 years. Ended up bailing on an M5 Pro!
I think I'm on the same computer, the M1 MBP with the touchbar right? I was eyeing an upgrade for a while but now that I've transitioned to running agents on a home server instead of locally, I think I'll be putting my money into a ram upgrade for that box instead. My macbook is basically a dumb terminal at this point, the only reason for an upgrade would be battery life. I might get an air or even a neo if this thing dies.
I also have a high spec M1 and was delaying upgrading, but eventually I needed more RAM.
My M1 is still fast and enjoyable, but I regret to inform you that the M5 actually does feel faster in day to day use. I thought for sure I wouldn’t notice, but the difference is there.
When I do large builds the difference is also bigger than I was expecting.
Same here! M1 Max going strong. I'm curious to see what they put out tomorrow but spending over 5K in a machine is a pretty rough pill to swallow
I have tried an M4 Macbook a while ago but my M1 Max Macbook still feels plenty fast. Hope to keep that for a long time.
I have a M1 pro for personal use and an M4 pro from work and I don't notice any difference switching between them. The M1 is still more than enough for most computer usage.
Yeah. M1 Max with 64gb remains more pleasurable than my work M5 with 48gb.
my intel to M1 Pro upgrade was like stepping into the future, still on it and my only motivation fro swapping computers is i dropped it from my lap when i fell asleep after a long day with the kids, and the n key hasn't worked for a year
authorized repair shop says 4 days to fix it and it's my only laptop, so i go without :(
I just bought a m1 Air with 8GB as secondary device to the m4 mbp that my employer provides since they dialed up the spyware lately. I should have bought a m4 Air last November but I hope the m1 holdes until the rampocalypse is over.
M1 Max, 32GB, 1TB; still not feeling the need to upgrade, especially when the upgrade is as expensive as they are now.
same
I saw a decent listing for a 16" 16gb m1 pro macbook the other day, and i was seriously considering spending those money.
I have a 16" m4 max from work (36gb) and is an incredible machine (build quality, incredible display, overall feel). I also have a private macbook neo which should be similar to M1 in terms of performance but it's limited to 8gb of memory.
The neo/M1 performances are sufficient for my needs (for private computing) and chances are the M1 pro actually performs better than my neo (if anything for the more abundant memory).
I might to back to the listing and try to haggle the price even lower, considering a new generation of macbook pros has just been announced.
If the rumours are true (about AI capabilities) it’d be best to wait yes.
which rumours?
I have an M1 and an M5 MBA. For the most part, the M1 is doing extremely well, but imo this is the year where M1 is showing its age.
Im on that same cycle. M1 pro max still running strong though. 3 cycles might be hard though...
M1 Pro here as well. I will buy M6 Pro Mac Studio o Mac mini.
My M2 pro is perfect still other than the fact that the 16gb of RAM is killing me.
Right there with you
still rocking the m1 studio, shows no signs of stopping
That’s what even low spec computers used to cost, not even adjusted for inflation. I don’t think spending $200-400/month on a hardware budget that enables me to earn 50-100x that is that onerous, we just think “six grand for a laptop???!?” But it’s ridiculously cheap for what it is. We wouldn’t be similarly shocked at a $6k car, for example.
Why wouldn't it make it?
Mine is running great and it has 24/7 use.
I have to say, I really dislike the thing where the base M(n+1) is always in the market alongside M(n) Pro/Max. I appreciate the underlying chips are probably quite distinct, but from a naming standpoint its confusing as hell.
If the difference between M6 and M5 Pro or M5 Max is confusing to you, I strongly recommend you don't look at the names of literally any other CPU, GPU, or chipset that is being manufactured.
Yeah, but traditionally Apple doesn't pull that weird naming shit. Although I guess the mobile naming scheme has been headed there for a while.
> I strongly recommend you don't look at the names of literally any other CPU, GPU, or chipset that is being manufactured.
And certainly don't look at MikroTik's product naming. ;)
In a world with the chips themselves named things like:
Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 495 or Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6.
Your distaste seems misplaced.
They're all bad, some are worse
We should have enough distaste for them all
> Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 495 or Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6.
Don't even get me started on USB...
I'm guessing the Base and Pro chips come off the same wafer, and they get 5 Base chips (some defects) for every one Pro chip (very few defects). So they run the Base-model assembly line for six months and eventually they accumulate enough Pro chips to satisfy Pro-model demand.
I suspect it has depended a bit on whether a new process has lower output or higher defects. High defects, they'll focus on smaller baseline chips to get better yields. Low output, they'll launch pro models first because those are lower volume. Neither problem, they'll roll out updates pretty quickly across multiple product lines.
And that should change going forward with smaller chiplets being integrated in package, vs huge Ultra chips.
Pro chips come much later than base chips and vary significantly in ways other than number of cores (which can be up to double), such as doubled memory bandwidth and peripheral support (thunderbolt 5 instead of 4).
You mean as in binning? High defect rates for chips but they're burned to disable non-working parts and sell them as non-pro chips and accumulate the good ones ?
As others have said, the pro is a different mask set.
But you are right, they do bin. You can get versions of the cpu with different core counts for this reason.
I’m only seeing this with the pro and max though.
If you look at the platform name and the kernel code you'l realize that this is not even remotely true. The base M chips are T8xxx which are (more or less) just iPad chips. The pro/max/ultra are T6xxx and are their own new thing, starting with M1 pro which was T6000
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_silicon#Comparison_of_M-...
Curious, where's 5 come from? Is there a reason for the specific guess or is it just an example?
+1
makes me want to wait another one I have an M1 Max and just set up playing with an M1 (non-max) and realized it can't drive 3 displays. I recall getting Max just for this, but generally, makes me think of non-Max as a non-pro after all.
And having what's presumably the latest CPU but with potentially worse features than the last generation combined with increased prices from RAM is a deal breaker so I'll guess I'll push my M1 for another year.
It can drive 3 displays using a DisplayLink dock/adapter.
Whenever I do this, I enter into a perpetual one-more-year wait loop.
When I finally cave in and buy something after 5 years I’m very momentarily sad for not perfectly timing the release window, then I realize I keep hardware long enough a half year barely matters.
And I can never remember whether Pro is better than Max or vice-versa. It’s an apples/oranges naming scheme.
Regular < Pro < Max < Ultra
It's also kinda sad that there's no clear-cut best chip, e.g. the M6 outperforms the M5 Pro in some ways (singlethreaded performance, maybe NPU and stuff) but then the M5 Pro also outperforms the M6 in some ways (multithreading, graphics). This was even worse when the Mac Studio was stuck on M3 Ultra for a while when the M5 Max was out. The M5 Max was simply better at most things and it was ironic that the fastest computer you could buy was briefly a laptop.
How could it possibly be otherwise? Single core performance goes up every year, but not enough that this year’s 12-core CPU beats last year’s 18-core CPU at multithreaded benchmarks.
This is “sad”?!? First world problems.
It's way better than the naming scehme of Ryzen and Intel Core i series.
Threadripper’s model numbers where briefly their msrp.
Latest vs. greatest. Buyers who’ll pay for performance can deal with that discomfort and be squeezed for buying the best, but those who need an extra push to buy Apple might be sold on the idea of the latest.
bigger number = more megahertz
Put another way, it is a peculiar naming regime when M(n-[2-4]) Pro/Max/Ultra is superior to M(n). This is very visible right now because of the demand for running local AI on Macs.
I get you, but I suspect it reflects reality. The M-with-adjective chips are M(n) chips with more cores and cache, it stands to reason that it takes real wall time for TSMC to start cranking them out with acceptable defect rates.
So Apple can either toss the early production in inventory while the whole process catches up, or they can do what they do. Better for both the company and the consumer that they do the latter.
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I switched entirely over to Asahi Linux on my M1 Macbook Air and installed a third-party 55Wh battery, as the original battery had fallen below 80% capacity. That machine is good to go for another 5 years.
There are no features or performance characteristics of any of the subsequent M[2-6] Macbook Air or Pro models that I care about. I'm not really sold on running models on the hardware I have right in front of me. So long as I can rent an RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell at about half a buck per hour through a European provider, I'm fine using that with Qwen3.8-27B UD-Q4_K_M for the few things I consider more privacy-sensitive.
Out of curiosity, how do you rent such a device and who do you do it with? I'd be interested.
How is Asahi Linux from a reliability perspective? Last I checked there were some issues with docking and HDMI out that would've made it tough for me to use as a daily driver.
100% stable for me at the level of any other linux machine. True the USB-C display doesn't (officially) work yet but I have 0 issues with the HDMI.
I've been daily driving it for months with no blockers. You can tell Linux uses the battery less efficiently than MacOS though so that's good to know.
It's quite stable. Been running NixOS on my M2 Max with basically no issues (HDMI working fine as well). However the lack of adequate sleep / no support for suspend to disk led to me buying a Framework 13 Pro, and I'm now selling the M2.
Not a Mac user. I assume HDMI might be improving soon as AMD finally got the HDMI consortium to wind their necks in and full HDMI support was recently merged.
USB-C video still doesn't work but in my experience virtually everything else you need does.
It's great aside from no usb-c display, mine has an HDMI port though.
It's been my primary dev machine for 2 years
How is using an external provider any better for privacy sensitive issues? European provider does not automatically mean they aren’t logging everything or that they’d nor share that with a bidder?
> So long as I can rent an RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell at about half a buck per hour through a European provider, ..
Mind sharing the provider’s URL?
Not necessarily an endorsement, but one of the more popular ones: https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-gpu/
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I want to propose a called AI Index, if you can do say 1000t/s on processing and 50t/s on generation on a min 25B model you can call your device AI9 and you have AI7 and AI5 and AI3 with 3 being 100t/s processing and 10t/s generation on a min 10B model. Values above are on a 100k context size minimum. OFFLINE.
So any effing claim of being an AI device doesn't end on the demo of best buy laptop where you remove a dog from a photo....
Or that you have "better noise removal" or "you look better on the cam" because that's called noise cancelling and instagram filter and it's being done for ages...
Doesn't this depend on the model and quant as well vs. the hardware and its capability? Plus memory bandwidth, amount, and layout.
My Strix Halo now can run some models through the NPU and its roughly as fast as its GPU+CPU (on some of the models - some its slower)
Can't you just look at memory bandwidth for generation?
You also need to look at memory size (to store the model). And processing can still be the bottleneck.
It’s more nuanced than that, but yes that’s the biggest factor.
Increasingly all I need is a laptop with a big/nice enough screen to ssh into a beefy Linux box to run agents on Herdr.
I think my 48GB 16 inch MBP will last me 15+ years at this point.
Have the same setup -- got a good black friday deal last year on an AMD 395+ w/ 128gb of RAM. Still not super bullish on running AI models on it, but it makes a great dev server anyway.
Actually had claude spin up a kanban board to manage my tasks in a 'TODO -> Plan -> Implement -> Review -> QA -> Shipping -> Done' flow (with a worktree for each task) that works great!
I've just transitioned to the same setup a week ago - that's why I'm considering Air as the next upgrade, given the better portability.
One thing that bugs me mentally is leaving that machine pending on my input ("wasted") overnight etc... I'd like to arrive at a workflow where I can have agents running toward the overall goal autonomously overnight as much as they can, and I can review and iterate and "engineer" parts that need it afterwards...
For now, I still guide implementation very closely, piece by piece. Has anyone had any good experiences with workflows / skills / similar for that?
If that continues to be the case, next time you can "downgrade" to the MacBook Air. Even today you can get one with 32GB RAM, so when you're in the market I'm sure more will be available. They are quite thin and light compared to the MBPs.
The screen on MB Air can not compete with the one on MB pro.
Hah, I agree. As soon as I can figure out how to replace batteries myself, I'd also be happily doing the same thing with mine.
The main problem is Apple killing support for very old models.
Did the same. Took a week or so to get used to the workflow after doing dev locally my entire career, but now I'm certain it's the best way to work. Even better is using a few scripts to simplify things like opening in VS Code (instead of `code folder-name` I run `codeon repo-name` from my local machine).
I did actually get a new M5 Pro/48GB machine last month, but that's only because I bought my work machine to keep my personal and professional lives properly separated; otherwise I wasn't seeing any issue running that M3 Max/36GB for a long time further.
That's exactly what I am doing. I have a Dell R740 with 96 cores and 512 GB of RAM, and RAID 10 with 16 SSDs. All of my machines connect to it via Tailscale.
I have a similar setup! I use a Dell R820 though, with 1.5TB of RAM and NVMe ;)
and I thought I was doing something special with my little GMKTec 32GB machine I use for a dev server haha
>With the new 14-inch MacBook Pro, users can connect high-speed peripherals, transfer photos, work with multiple external displays, and more with its wide array of ports.
* looks inside *
4 kinds of ports. while being generous, and including the SD card slot and the headphone jack.
I don't know anyone who would consider 2-4 to be a "wide array".
Compared to Air 2 :D ?
It's a shame that only the Mac Studios come with USB-A ports. I know, won't fit on a MBA, but similar size and class laptops to the MBP often come with at least one USB-A.
It's just handy when you have a USB-A device and don't want a dongle, traveling, etc.
This only serves to prolong the suffering.
3x Thunderbolt 4 ports
But hey, it's got USB-C and also supports UD USB-C (upside-down)
I thought we were supposed to get a design overhaul this gen?
Also framing AI use for the base M models marketing makes no sense to me. You are way better off getting a used M1 max with 64gb and way higher mem bandwidth when those are the real bottlenecks.
Apparently another announcement coming tomorrow, with the OLED panels. But according to the fpt channel on Youtube, it doesn't look any different. Just has an OLED panel with touchscreen, with massive cooling changes inside.
MacRumors is still claiming we're getting a new chassis
> Apple on Wednesday will announce 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models featuring touch-enabled OLED displays with thinner bezels, a Dynamic Island instead of a notch, M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, and a lighter and slightly thinner design
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/10/27/macbook-pro-with-touchs...
> Just has an OLED panel with touchscreen
I must be out of the loop, you skimmed over this. A Mac with a touchscreen??
Look at the first image with the people in the field. That looks to me like a very poorly generated image, not a real image of people, and not even a high-quality AI generated image.
Is this what we can expect of the new apple? I'm not against AI generated imagery, but I expect them to be of equal quality to a real photo.
Or am I wrong, and it isn't AI generated?
The things that make me think it is just poorly made are 1) the angles of the laptop on the black case, 2) the lack of any lighting on the back panel, 3) the size of the hand on the woman in the back, and the squareness of what she is holding (if it is even supposed to be another mac).
Almost certainly not AI gen, it's shot with a 35mm lens (quality looks like the 1.4 L to me), probably around f8 given how the DOF falloff happens, heavy forward flood (flash or otherwise, but whatever it was it's defused) and then what's I think giving you the sense it's AI is it looks like they've over used a double S curve to bump the contrast and sharpness. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZh_9HnO_4w&t=640s
It is interesting how people are confusing depth of field with AI generated. It's a shame, but perhaps it will end the bokeh conversations and disparaging of M43 sensors.
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I’m more confused by the scene itself. Why are they in a field? What are they doing?
That was my first thought, is that guy's face AI? The angle of the laptop looks off. Then I decided I don't care and moved on, but yeah, you're not the only one who thought it looked off.
It's just a very bad picture, but every detail is perfectly coherent, it's not AI generated.
Still a baffling choice.
> With 16GB of unified memory standard, configurable up to 32GB, and higher memory bandwidth up to 170GB/s
Apple MacBook M5 Max has bandwidth up to 600GB/s, is 170GB/s for M6 the real limit? If so, wouldn't this slow down LLM processing?
There are rumors that Apple is not releasing Pro/Max versions of the M6 with the intention of focusing these research efforts on the M7 instead.
Even then, 170GB/s is a bump up from 153GB/s of the M5. So we see a 11% uplift already.
> So we see a 11% uplift already.
Am I crazy, or are a lot more people using the term "uplift" in place of "increase" within the last year? Google Trends (for whatever it's worth) shows a significant increase (uplift?) since mid-late 2025. [0]
[0] https://trends.google.com/explore?q=uplift&date=today%205-y&...
> Even then, 170GB/s is a bump up from 153GB/s of the M5. So we see a 11% uplift already.
My M2 Pro does 200GB/s.
wtf are we even talking about here.
Why are we comparing the M6 to the M5 Max?
What was the speed of the base M5?
As pointed out in a sibling comment, 153GB/s.
If you want to do anything beyond getting a small single-core speed bump the M5 Pro is a better, more capable purchase. At least until the M7 comes out.
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.
So the theoretical Max would be 680GB/s.
It's also absolutely wild that you apparently cannot spec one with more than 32GB, for any amount of money? Wow.
Not that I blame Apple here, for once. Seems like they're trying to cope with the limited quantity of RAM they can procure. And with the paltry bandwidth (170GB/s) of these CPUs they're a bad choice for anything but tiny local models anyway.
That's for the base model M6. The Pro can take more, the Max even more, the Ultra the most.
They're not making those models for the M6 though; they rerouted their resources to making M7 faster at running local LLMs.
If you want more bandwidth, get an M5 Pro, Max, or Ultra. If you want a lower power base model, get the M6. If you want to have your cake and eat it too, wait for the M7, reportedly in the spring.
Umm yes, the M6 chip only has a certain amount of memory controllers and channels, which means you can only have so many LPDDR5X modules.
Yes, high-capacity LPDDR5X are made and do exist, but for all practical intents and purposes, you can't buy enough of them to deliver to customers at Apple scale.
This is a strange release. The M6 tops out at 32GB RAM and then you fall back to M5/Pro. Kinda midway between an Air and a true Pro. Only 14" no 16" with M6.
The lack of a 16" model for the M6 is consistent with Apple's current minimum of M5 Pro chip.
I've been pretty happy with my M1-2 devices like most posters here seem to say, but I don't have the same level of core stability while doing dev work. Am I doing something wrong with my workloads?
- Orbstack, but just for one containerised service - Laravel Herd for app environments, so all native services instead of containers with bigger VM overhead - Brave browser, profile for work and personal - PHPStorm (quite a hog on RAM) - Now agents in the mix
Had an M1 Pro 8GB but I found 8 to really not be enough. M2 Air 16GB has been a much better sweet spot, albeit it feels like the battery life on it is worse than M1. I've recently started trying to use Zed more and more as my editor instead of PHPStorm and things feel mostly stable, but I still feel like a beefier machine would be good for work purposes.
My big issue with the M1 generation is the lack of more E-cores, which get assigned a lot of the OS background tasks. When working at the top of the RAM limit, I'd notice issues around lag to the point that I started looking at CPU stats and found those two measly e-cores completely maxed out for hours on end. Occasionally a crash, though that could be RAM related rather than CPU.
A bit of googling around seems to point that architecture as somewhat of a problem for others, and might be why Apple quickly moved to put more e-cores on the later generations.
Something to consider. Never managed to get proper distinct confirmation that this was the problem, but a (corporate) laptop upgrade did get me out of this pickle.
I don't think you're doing anything wrong. I struggle with similar workloads on 32GB RAM. Compute isn't the issue, once I have a JetBrains IDE open, a dev environment, some browser tabs, Claude, and a bunch of other crap Electron apps I need the machine is already swapping quite a bit.
Years ago there were frequent crashes (kernel panics) i could directly relate to IntelliJ (PHPStorm, etc), so it might sound dull but upgrading to the latest versions is the first thing I’d check. In this case even a manual check on their website instead of relying on the auto updater to work.
I have found that my M5pro gets unstable when I really stress it's memory use. I think that with 8 or 16GB you are going to hit this quite a lot more than I do with 48GB.
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).
wait till tomorrow's touch screen
I have an M1 Air 13" and M2 Air 15", and M4 Air 14" and and M4 Pro 14" with nano texture.
I love them all. The M4 Air 14" is from work, so kinda limited in what I can do. The M4 14" Pro is kinda chunky after the Airs. The M2 15" is ideal except on a plane. The M1 13" is great as a personal device on work travel. If only I could not work...
Just now realizing there's a difference between "MacBook Pro with M# chip" and "MacBook Pro with M# Pro chip". Was curious to see how my MBP with M4 Pro compared, and I saw it has 273 gb/s memory bandwidth compared to the MBP M6 (sans Pro)'s 170gb/s. Makes sense that "Pro" in the laptop model doesn't also describe the chip, but only if you remember that the non-pro "Macbook" line stopped in 2017 (which was the last time I went shopping for Apple laptops until buying the MBP4)
https://www.apple.com/mac/compare/?modelList=MacBook-Neo-A18...
The "Pro" in MacBook Pro has slowly degraded to "it comes with a fan so that the chip can keep chugging when it gets a hard workload, unlike the MacBook Air where the chip will throttle since there's no fan".
Screen, ports too (to be fair I've used the HDMI port about 5 times, and the card reader never).
The base model chip on the Air is binned too - 8 GPU cores on the Air vs 10 on the Pro.
I’ll wait for it to surface on eBay in few years and then consider again. Pretty sure many of these go in the hands of people who can never make good use of all the nice hardware in it.
I have a 14” M2 that you’d need to prize from my cold dead hands. I can’t imagine buying an M6. There just isn’t any need.
The text of this product's announcement really tries to sell it as a 10x AI performance upgrade for existing MacBook M1 users.
Ok, plausible number for that use case. Striking how it seems like the M-series Macs are almost too good enough for most people.
It's almost desperate prose.
(The AI image processing in Pixelmator Pro saved me hours of work on a recent project. Two button clicks vs a day of tweaking. But even that was on my M1 MacBook Air.)
As lots of Apple Users are in here: I'm thinking about "sidegrading", my M2 Pro runs fine, but I chose 16 GB/512 GB when I bought it and I think 32 GB/1 TB would be nicer in some cases.
Is it easily possible to sidegrade/upgrade with a Timemachine backup?
Yes. Make sure both source and destination are the same macOS version. I use 27.0.1, you could upgrade to 27.2 first though.
Then do a fresh install on your new system and then use Migration Assistant. Use a USB-4 or a Thunderbolt cable to speed it up.
yes, if your plugged into the Apple Ecosystem, upgrading to a new machine is a breeze, done it many times
I'm in the exact same boat as you, exact same specs. CPU/GPU holding up perfectly for my use cases, but 512GB is tough to manage now.
I have a 14 inch M1 MBP running fine up to this day. 16G RAM, 1T SSD. I don't know if I ever will need to replace it.
You will if you use macos and want to stay supported. On the other hand, being an M1 puts you squarely in Asahi supported territory.
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.
> Is this an odd rollout for their actual high end MacBook Pros
It's the same rollout they've used for a couple of generations now. First the base model chips in fall, then the pro/max versions in spring
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).
i think also better general support for multi screen setup
Nice, I'll keep my 64GB m1.max though.
I am due to an upgrade (still using the 2019 intel). However I am torn between a M5 Pro with 48 Gigs of ram or waiting for M6 pro. I’d really like to run local models for once.
won't be an M6 pro, they are saving the ram and other components for the M7 series
Interesting. I guess I’ll have to go with the m5. On one hand it feels bad to buy older generation hardware. But then. It’s already so much faster than what I have…
> Phenomenal battery life: In addition to the huge leap in performance, battery life gets up to 14 additional hours for Intel-based upgraders
the m2/m3 announcements were already kind of cringe to keep saying 'HEY IT'S BETTER THAN INTEL' but at this point it's just embarrassing?
Fun fact: the laptop in this size/performance class with the best battery life is a Windows Intel Core Ultra Series 3 laptop, not a MacBook Pro!
So Apple is now comparing against computers they were selling 7-8 years ago rather than what Intel is delivering now.
> Fun fact: the laptop in this size/performance class with the best battery life is a Windows Intel Core Ultra Series 3 laptop, not a MacBook Pro!
Source for that fun fact?
> Apple is now comparing against computers they were selling 7-8 years ago
Apple didn't fully stop selling Intel macs until June 2023. And they compare against the most recent previous model too.
last time I checked, every Windows laptop had the absolutely massive caveat that it needed to throttle performance by a ton to have a low enough TDP to compete on battery life. You just cannot match the efficiency of ARM Apple chips with an x86 chip.
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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.
More people than you think (outside tech) are using Intel Macs at the moment (family computers etc).
Exactly. A late model Intel Mac is still a perfectly cromulent computer in 2026.
I think it makes sense. Do you think most potential buyers are coming from last year's model, or from laptops that are more like 3-5 years old?
As long as they're clear about the comparisons they're making ("X% more battery life than Y" as opposed to simply ("X% more battery life") I'm good with it.
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.
I recall seeing some crazy stats like 41+ hours maybe on a snapdragon processor w/windows. I imagine your screen brightness would have to be like 99% dark and not playing videos is my guess.
That's not what the marketing is saying, they keep comparing to their own super old intel models.
They want those users to upgrade, I don’t see the problem.
I always max out whenever I upgrade my MacBook Pro.
Last time, in 2024, it cost me $6K
Today, it’s $10K
Yowza
I've always done the opposite; getting the base model (maybe bump 1 spec), but then just stay current.
Still using my 8gig m1 to make mac builds, its slow, but works fine. Keep thinking about upgrading, but max 32gigs ram, if I can hold out for 2 years, and maybe have 64/128gig as options, and cheaper.
In your shoes, I'd just get whatever Pro processor is available at that time. (Knowing that new processors were coming, I happily bought an M5 Pro machine last month)
32GB Unified RAM max. Is that really the machine I want for running local LLMs?
This M6 is the base Pro model. You probably want the M5 pro/max for your LLMs.
It's called Pro, but it's hardly Pro, more like a MacBook with a good fan.
Not really - it seems that M7 will come out in Q1 27 and be targeted at that use-case more specifically.
Base M7 probably will still have pretty low memory bandwidth for serious AI workflows. M7 max/ultra might be pretty interesting though.
Nope.
Where's the touch screen??? The rumors promised touch!!!
Why would you want greasy fingerprints all over your display and gorilla arm syndrome when there's a perfectly fine keyboard and touchpad attached to the display for free?
No reason for gorilla-arm when touch is an alternative interaction mode and not a required one. You still have trackpad and keyboard. You can dynamically switch modes depending on the action.
Gorilla-arm was a fear based on the naive idea that if you had touch, you would be required to only use touch for every action.
I don't actually want a MacBook at all, I was just joking.
mmmmm....grease
This is only the base model MBP. The high-end touch one will be later this week.
the rumors were about a supposed Macbook Ultra that would have a screen like the ipad pros. Still to come (or not)
I would pay 2x or even 3x for this with working Asahi Linux patches provided in source code form on Apple's site.
Asahi supports up to the M3 line. Linux 7.4 supports M4 so surely Asahi will support it soon.
What is it about this MBP that makes it so much more preferable to an MBP with M3 Pro/Max?
I want the newest one and I want to run Gentoo Linux on it with working Asahi patches for all aspects of the hardware. I want it enough I'm willing to pay for it. I'll pay 3x Apple's current sticker price.
But Apple will never sell that to me, as far as I can guess. Apple is not a good person.
doubt
Still using the M1 Macbook Air for 4K video editing on Davinci Resolve and Photo Editing with Darktable (open source). Just 8GB of Ram too and I've never really needed more. Obviously these new versions are great but even the original is not too shabby.
I need 64GB RAM and 1TB SSD suddenly having been more than comfortable with 16GB and 256GB respectively. My agents have sessions which have workteees and scratchpads and simulators and build runs and test suites and wow. The hours I’ve been spending for memory swaps and quad simulator calls to run through. I am compelled to view a $4k machine as a necessity. Also a cool thing about M5 Pro is that it’s very close to Max on the CPU performance side with identical core count if you get the 18 core variant. The Pro’s Geekbench scores are also in similar ballpark as the Max. You rather get the Pro for most use cases and use the extra cash on RAM.
i hope they're not launching that touch stuff... just stick with these pls
This is going to be great with Asahi
Did they figure out how to fit an LTE modem into it?
does it run linux?
Anyone designing their own macbook clone using llms yet?
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But can it run Omarchy :)
too bad only the iMac gets all the color!!!
The "notch" seems to be gone based on the product pictures. Time to upgrade from my ~2014 model MBP.
Looks just as notchy as they've always been.
I do see it in one photo on their site. I just hide mine with software ("topnotch") and it's fine.
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. . . .My 5090 has a bandwidth of 1,792 GB/s, and that is just about good enough for basic (i.e. 27B models) local LLM inference.
The fastest M6 MacBook Pro (24/32GB 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?
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.
Isn't the laptop version of the 5090 is a more apples-to-apples comparison? It has 896 GB/s memory bandwidth (compared to the 614 on the M5 Max MBP).
The 5090 does have a bandwidth advantage, but also must pass more data from main to GPU memory for any particular task. Comparisons of a 5090 to a DGX Spark at 273 GB/s are illustrative since the Spark uses unified memory similar to Apple's M-series. [0] The 5090 certainly wins most benchmarks but that doesn't mean the DGX Spark is not useful.
0. https://float16.cloud/en-en/ai-benchmark/dgx-spark-vs-rtx-50...
Is your 5090 in a laptop? o_0
sleight*
Dare I even ask how much the 32gb/1tb variant will be? $3,000?
You could have dared to check. But no, it's $2399 for those specs.
M6 Pro wen
It's not justifying an upgrade. Shame there are no finance options for M5 Max 128GB.
i wonder if it has 2 fans
Apple can release as much fantastic hardware as they want - as long as the software keeps getting worse, what's the point?
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
I think the 16" pro is already at the max battery size you can take on a plane.
Also a great way to make money from screen replacements when the battery expands!
Citation?
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.
eh no thanks. not jumping to m5 max now we know apple is cooking with m7 pro and m7 max. don't drop the ball.
Yes but have you considered the M8?
you know they jut bump this every year right
The rumour is they aren't going to bump the pro and pro max.
Does it run Linux?
I can't understand this people
Imagine, these are the machines we get to vibecode on.
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https://fxgl.github.io/steamac/ my friend and partner made this. For the first time I’ve been playing games on Mac without much trouble. For me best feature is automate of vm in background - finally I can play games and pause them arbitrarily
How does anyone enjoy playing AAA games these days? Literally feels like a chore. This coming from a previous gaming addict.
Depends on the game obviously. e.g. Assassin's Creed N+1 - you've seen the formula like 20+ times already, all the previous games + all of Far Cry from 3 upwards. There's nothing new. And there's Cyberpunk2077 and BG3 which are still huge but unique and carefully designed
I have a soft limit of $35. I generally find that quality decreases (not quality-per-dollar, just quality alone on an absolute scale) once you start going over that. By the time you reach $60 it's in the gutter. Exceptions to the rule obviously exist.
So probably still in line with what you remember.
Sometimes our tastes change as we age, or vice versa: our tastes remain the same and the world has moved along.
Just to say we all have nostalgia and the good old days are never coming back.
What do you mean by these days? Do you think the games are different? Or just you not enjoying the danger type of content any more?
I'm generally with you on it, they're sort of fatiguing in a depressing way.
But try the new James Bond game. Linear shooter, but a great story and fantastic cast on top of super fun mechanics. By the Hitman studio with a lot of their core ideas Bondified to favor action over stealth. It hasn't irritated me in the way almost any other game manages to.
Mainly console games. I play some games on Mac but maybe only like 10-15% of Steam library is supported on Mac.
I’d love for games to work on a Mac too. I just can’t justify paying through the nose for a PC when I hate using it for everything else.
Linux is pretty great these days
The decompilation efforts I've been seeing with 15 year old Xbox 360 games or PS3 games has been absolutely incredible, getting them running natively on macOS with presumably much fewer engineering resources than are allocated to a standard game port.
I do think the limited macOS gaming market is a chicken-or-the-egg problem - people don't game on Macs because there aren't that many great games on Mac (Although Cyberpunk runs amazingly on my M4 Macbook Pro).
I'm very excited for the future.
> I do think the limited macOS gaming market is a chicken-or-the-egg problem
This feels like a re-hash of Valve's original Steam Machine mistake. Porting modern games to native Linux didn't increase user or developer interest in supporting the platform. It made Valve liable for a lot of investment into systems that no developers ever used, and Valve themselves would eventually abandon.
Apple has stepped in this same cowpie. They depreciated hundreds of "old" macOS games by radically changing their runtime, and then nobody invested into the new Metal-native paradigm. Porting games like Tomb Raider and Death Stranding won't kickstart the macOS gaming revolution any more than native Left 4 Dead magically made Linux an alternative to Windows for gaming. We know this from experience.
Decomps and emulation is a good solution for 15-year-old games, but Apple can't enjoy day-1 support if they refuse the industry's standards. There is no trust in Metal as a stable API, or macOS as a reliable and backwards-compatible runtime. Windows is not only much more profitable, it's easier to support for decades to-come.
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Been waiting to get a new MacBook and that day has finally come! Thanks for sharing
I'm currently having an M2, but I just can't imagine buying an Apple laptop again. The hardware is great, but the sofware is just unbearably bad. I used Arch Linux with KDE before, and it was just an experience 10 times better. If they would just support Linux out of the box...
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The design is really great for the new MacBook Pro. The cpu is no compare to other laptops.
One thing, framing AI use for the base M models marketing makes no sense to me. But honestly this computer is still faster than any of my laptops that came before, even with the visual atrocity of Liquid Glass.
Hard for me to get excited about these anymore.
Apple software is getting worse every day and while they're not Google or Microsoft they're getting more user hostile at every turn as well.
The lengths they go through to prevent you from doing what you want on their (not your) devices is astonishing.
Very happy with my framework running fedora for many years now... Sure it's not an M1000 but it's almost as good and properly mine