So happy with my base M4 purchase for $499 when it released. I even snagged a 1TB replacement drive for $199 a year ago. Feels like I got the last train out.
Same thing for me! Got it with the education discount when it came out in 2024 and, although I've been pretty disappointed with macOS, it's crazy to see that the price increased by $300 in less than 2 years, with no sign of the price increases slowing down.
What will happen once people are priced out of buying computers? I find this worrying.
I’m currently hoping that my Intel Arc B580 doesn’t die on me cause even a 5060 Ti 16 GB has reached like 700 EUR price over here. I don’t think the prices will get better anytime soon.
Same with my M1 Air for being on the move, even notebooks would be more expensive than they’re worth.
It's a bit of an emotional goodbye to the super cheap Mac Minis we got to enjoy for a while. I got some for family members, we had some serving as iOS/macOS build servers sitting in a closet at my last job, they were fantastic.
Not that they're a bad deal now, but at European prices of over €1000 for M6/16GB/256GB it's a psychological barrier that's been broken.
When they discontinued the M4 with 16GB a few months ago I had literally just ordered one off Amazon which they promptly cancelled. It would have been 600 after exchange rate from GBP.
I can't justify a more than 2x price increase for what I'm guessing are marginal improvements. I want to replace my home lab but as it stands my underpowered NAS will have to continue as it has the past few years
If you adjust for inflation, is it a big change from the super cheap Mac Minis of the past? Probably still somewhat more expensive, but not as much as the nominal difference would imply.
After watching a video about how the filesystems are > 2x faster (and testing this myself in my mac mini vs a linux machine), I feel like Apple is leaving a lot on the table, and I hope that they get APFS to be as fast as the linux filesystems.
Because otherwise a lot of this hardware (including their blazing fast SSDs) is wasted. Cuz my M1 mac mini is awesome otherwise.
I took a peek into APFS a bit ago [1] because I (stupidly) yanked a usb SSD before it was unmounted and corrupted it. Reading the documentation, it seems to have many "cool" features which just aren't fully exposed/utilized in the OS, and there is a lack of API tooling.
For example: it is copy-on-write, and my corruption happened in the superblock checkpoint. There is no built-in command in Disk Utility to "mount" an older checkpoint (and accepting a small amount of dataloss). Also the "First Aid" command allegedly runs volume repair top-down when it is recommended to do it inside-out.
What I am missing in all of those benchmarks, how does the M6 compares to the M5 Pro.
I don't care how the M6 compares to the M1, even when the M6 2.3x compared to M1 in Excel spreadsheet. That is no measurement even in accounting. The dead time is not the Excel.
Says 1.2x for multithreaded and doesn't specify (I presume smaller) for single-threaded. That's compared to M5 not M5 Pro, so M5 Pro is likely significantly faster.
Which is more important for AI/LLM stuff, the number of GPU cores or the amount of unified memory? I can choose from a Mini with the M5 Pro 18CPU/30GPU and 64GB RAM or a Studio with a M5 Max 18CPU/40GPU and 48GB RAM for roughly the same price
Apple does this thing where they pick a very old game and then boast about how well it runs. It's so bizarre.
Not like Mac gaming is good anyway...they have "Game Porting Toolkit" but it's not free and open like Proton so nobody will use it unless Apple pushes them. Removing Rosetta doesn't help either.
Apple also just can't give up the idea of selling games through the AppStore either and you end up with situations like with AC: Shadows where it was ported, but you must buy the macport via the app store. Your copy on steam does not include the mac port, so if you wan to play on both your Windows/Linux desktop and Mac, you have to buy it twice. So stupid.
From what I've seen they do care quite a bit about gaming, but not to the point where they're willing to actually do much about it, so I wouldn't expect a proton style compatibility layer anytime soon unfortunately
I play quite a few games on my Mac Mini via Crossover, but rarely anything particularly graphically intensive. Though I do see occasional buzz about improvements in the game porting toolkit leading to significant perf improvements when they make their way into Crossover.
> Interesting that Apple quotes performances when playing Cyberpunk 2077 ! Maybe they will want to care more about gaming ?
They include game metrics in their marketing often, because they know their customers care about gaming. But no—for whatever reason, it never translates into Apple caring about gaming. I don't get it, but that's the way it has been for a long time.
With the “game mode” and “game porting toolkit” in recent history, I think there’s one person at Apple who cares about gaming and every couple of years he escapes from the basement where they keep him locked up and manages to sneak something into the release branch
They’ve also said when they pull Rosetta for intel compatibility, it will still be available for old games to use, which is a huge improvement from their usual stance of “that game studio that hasn’t existed since 2008 should dust off their code and update it to our new architecture.”
they've done a bunch to make macs a better gaming platform, including the very nice game porting toolkit (https://developer.apple.com/games/game-porting-toolkit/) which you can use yourself to run pc games on the mac. All macs since m1 have very nice gpus that can handle most games made today, and the newer ones can run the latest AAA ones with good detail. At this point it's more that game publishers/studios don't care about the mac
cp2077 sits permanently at 60fps and looks great on my m1 max 64gb. I used to play it on my 4090, but once I figured out how to do redmods on macos I quit using it and play it on my mac to save power (I'm 100% solar powered and barely generate 600w, 4090 consumes 500+). In apples infinite wisdom they don't support egpus, so my 4090 egpu will never work with my mac, which was a really disappointing thing to discover.
Not really. It's Gurman, once again throwing darts at the wall to see what sticks like a desperate roach begging for subscribers to his bullshit newsletter of guesses and predictions he'll flip in a month the opposite direction for even more clicks and bait.
Have been considering a used M1 but I'm concerned that I'm going to get flash storage that's been thrashed to within an inch of it's life by someone running it as a poorly configured inference host.
There are sooo sooo many students and normal people using these devices or corporate laptops never seen inferencing or anything like this, its so hard to trash the storage of them, i wouldn't worry about it.
Last week I purchased a MacBook Pro M1 Max from www.macsales.com, which is owned by Other World Computer, a maker of Mac peripherals. My computer comes with a 1-year warranty. It was my first time purchasing from them.
Upgrading to 48GB memory is $600…. Gut punch. I have a M4 Pro (top cpu skew 14 cores). Any idea the performance gain to M5 Pro? I feel like they holding off releasing M6 Pro because a new studio is dropping soon as well.
Not a surprise with John Ternus taking the reigns as CEO in a week, who was previously SVP of hardware engineering.
I can't hate a direction where Apple becomes more about building great computers rather than trying to force more and more subscriptions. I do wish they would fix many of the long-standing OS and native app problems.
I do worry that at this point it's no longer just Apple's problem to solve. They need to figure out a way to take the rest of the industry with it. Maybe if their standards are high enough everyone else will look bad by comparison.
My daily driver personal machines are incredible pieces of kit, but everything is always getting worse because majority of software is some SaaS living in the cloud, or even if on-desktop is constantly updating slop.
Why does it take 10 seconds for my streaming music app to open when my machine is 10-20 cores, 32GB+ RAM, high bandwidth NVMe storage, and I am connected to gigabit fiber internet? The thing is autoplaying videos, and has about 10 different panes clearly owned by different product managers that hate each other. Half the time its pushing me some pop-up dialog I don't care about.
I think there's a valid argument for this pattern when you know most people are on 3-ish year upgrade cycles. Also, if you compare against the most recent generation, you risk creating buyer's remorse for recent purchases.
Yup. Yesterday it was $799 for the base Mac Mini M4, a $200 increase from the original MSRP before June’s price hikes.
I paid $499 for my M4 back in April with the academic discount since I predicted the next generation base model would cost more. Sadly my prediction was correct: $599 to $899 is steep. I understand why; the prices of DIMMs, GPUs, and SSDs have also skyrocketed. But $899 for a base Mac Mini is painful, even if the alternatives on the current market are also painfully expensive.
I really want a mini for running local models, but there's no way I'm buying one for the next few years. I'm planning on waiting for models to get better and more powerful, as well as for hardware prices to come down.
What will happen once people are priced out of buying computers? I find this worrying.
I’m sure some kind capitalist will be happy to rent them a thin client linked to a computer in the cloud.
Same with my M1 Air for being on the move, even notebooks would be more expensive than they’re worth.
Not that they're a bad deal now, but at European prices of over €1000 for M6/16GB/256GB it's a psychological barrier that's been broken.
I can't justify a more than 2x price increase for what I'm guessing are marginal improvements. I want to replace my home lab but as it stands my underpowered NAS will have to continue as it has the past few years
We should be buying European solutions anyway. Different psychological barrier that was broken long before.
Because otherwise a lot of this hardware (including their blazing fast SSDs) is wasted. Cuz my M1 mac mini is awesome otherwise.
For example: it is copy-on-write, and my corruption happened in the superblock checkpoint. There is no built-in command in Disk Utility to "mount" an older checkpoint (and accepting a small amount of dataloss). Also the "First Aid" command allegedly runs volume repair top-down when it is recommended to do it inside-out.
[1] https://www.ntfs.com/apfs-structure.htm
I don't care how the M6 compares to the M1, even when the M6 2.3x compared to M1 in Excel spreadsheet. That is no measurement even in accounting. The dead time is not the Excel.
I am to only one?
170GB/s memory bandwidth Configurable up to 32GB unified memory
307GB/s memory bandwidth Configurable up to 64GB unified memory
That is also the factor you want to take into account for AI inference, of course.
I just wait for practical real live numbers with real stacks i use.
And btw. they reduced the memory bandwdith on the M4 in comparision to its previous version by 40gb/sec or so, you need to wait to see.
Says 1.2x for multithreaded and doesn't specify (I presume smaller) for single-threaded. That's compared to M5 not M5 Pro, so M5 Pro is likely significantly faster.
Don’t know, but this as main ad headline feels almost like a threat to my personal home computing needs
Interesting that Apple quotes performances when playing Cyberpunk 2077 ! Maybe they will want to care more about gaming ?
And while i'm at it, I was wondering a few weeks ago if I should try this game on my M3 pro. Anyone has played it on Apple and has feedback ?
Not like Mac gaming is good anyway...they have "Game Porting Toolkit" but it's not free and open like Proton so nobody will use it unless Apple pushes them. Removing Rosetta doesn't help either.
They include game metrics in their marketing often, because they know their customers care about gaming. But no—for whatever reason, it never translates into Apple caring about gaming. I don't get it, but that's the way it has been for a long time.
They’ve also said when they pull Rosetta for intel compatibility, it will still be available for old games to use, which is a huge improvement from their usual stance of “that game studio that hasn’t existed since 2008 should dust off their code and update it to our new architecture.”
(it was late in it's lifecycle and there were frequent sales)
I can't hate a direction where Apple becomes more about building great computers rather than trying to force more and more subscriptions. I do wish they would fix many of the long-standing OS and native app problems.
My daily driver personal machines are incredible pieces of kit, but everything is always getting worse because majority of software is some SaaS living in the cloud, or even if on-desktop is constantly updating slop.
Why does it take 10 seconds for my streaming music app to open when my machine is 10-20 cores, 32GB+ RAM, high bandwidth NVMe storage, and I am connected to gigabit fiber internet? The thing is autoplaying videos, and has about 10 different panes clearly owned by different product managers that hate each other. Half the time its pushing me some pop-up dialog I don't care about.
Winamp in 1998 took about 2 seconds to load.
I paid $499 for my M4 back in April with the academic discount since I predicted the next generation base model would cost more. Sadly my prediction was correct: $599 to $899 is steep. I understand why; the prices of DIMMs, GPUs, and SSDs have also skyrocketed. But $899 for a base Mac Mini is painful, even if the alternatives on the current market are also painfully expensive.
/s