Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

apple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 1001 posts

Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#281

Post by cosmic_cheese »

xiphias2 wrote: post #226
Axsuul wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a chance to try Omarchy past few days and it's just very different vs macOS. I honestly never had a problem with the windowing system ever since I built my own customization scripts (i.e. Hammerspoon). I can see the appeal for someone who wants ultimate customization though but macOS still wins overwhelmingly when it comes to polish, ecosystem, user experience, and apps (nothing comes close).

It's interesting because I just haven't felt the polish. For example when using PyTorch I wanted to try to speed up my NN kernel by 2x by just using half precision and haven't noticed any speedup at all. Also I was missing the easy to use GNU tools that had to be mixed with Apple's tools. I loved using Arc browser as well, and I'm missing it, but I guess I will do without it somehow (Chrome's vertical tabs are just n…

If the browser being Chromium-based isn’t a hard requirement, it may be worth checking out the Firefox-based Zen Browser[0]. Its UI is very similar to that of Arc, to the point that I’d call it Arc’s spiritual successor.

[0]: https://zen-browser.app/

Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#282

Post by inigyou »

criddell wrote: post #209
darreninthenet wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An additional £1,000 for a 2TB drive is crazy though, rapidly takes the new Mac mini from a good price to a nuts price

Considering hard drives were $10k / GB in the Mac SE/30 days, that feels like a bargain too.

But software also fit in 640kB instead of 640GB.

Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#283

Post by Topfi »

bayindirh wrote: post #274
bryanlarsen wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been really weird reading laptop reviews over the last few months. I've seen a bunch of reviews where they have their usual bar graphs comparing a bunch of laptops, and the laptop that is at the bottom is an Apple. It's the really inexpensive Neo, of course, but even the M5 laptops are consistently beat on performance and battery life by Intel Windows laptops. I assume the M6 will take the crown back and then a…

x86 is way more complex when compared to ARM processors, as a result their TDP is way higher when you request performance from them. Intel had to reduce the frequency of their processors when running AVX2 instructions and the AVX2 frequency of the processors were non-disclosable to anyone. Also, benchmarking Intel processors and publishing these numbers were forbidden in some cases. I don't know whether this ban is s…

Being mistaken on the CISC vs RISC debate (besides, modern x86 is closer to RISC via micro-ops then old school CISC) is understandable. There is a lot of misinformation out there and myths, plus, it just feels right to consider CISC overly burdened, etc. TLDR: Intel x86_64 is closer to RISC then you likely think and Apple Silicon arm is closer to CISC then you likely think. These lines are blurry and have been for decades, very much for good reason.

But talking this authoritatively on something without doing the reading, that's grating: https://chipsandcheese.com/p/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-matter

Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#284

Post by artisin »

simlevesque wrote: post #82
nonewideas wrote: post #71

Cannot believe "moar transistors" is still the only idea they have.

They pionneered unified memory a few years ago.

No. Apple did not invent or pioneer the concept of unified or shared memory, but they did create an exceptional implementation of it.

Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#285

Post by intrasight »

ziofill wrote: post #126
intrasight wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So is downpayment on a house. I would buy the house and just pay for tokens as needed. The house will get more valuable and that wealth would buy a lot of tokens in the future - which will probably get cheaper. EDIT: or buy AAPL. If I had bought Apple stock instead of buying a Mac LC II in 1992, then I would have about $2 million in Apple stock.

where are downpayments so cheap? I'll move there ^^'

There are 70 houses for sale in Pittsburgh for $25K or less

Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#286

Post by post_break »

logotype wrote: post #219

Damn. I just bought a maxed out MacBook Pro M5 Max 128GB 8TB, still waiting for it to be delivered. I could get 256GB RAM M5 Ultra 1TB for roughly the same price, and it's double the memory bandwidth. Which one would you recommend? I do plan to run local LLMs.

Contact Apple care and see what they can do. They have been known to do upgrades if you buy around the same time. But with the ram situation that courtesy might be gone now.

Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#287

Post by pavlov »

bayindirh wrote: post #117

I know, this is a bit of a meaningless comment, but it's funny in a way. Feels like late 90s again: - Xiaomi: We have matched Apple in CPU performance. - Apple: *Meep Meep...*

In the ‘90s it was the opposite.

- Apple: We have matched Intel in CPU performance thanks to this new PowerPC! (Shows ad that uses carefully handpicked benchmarks to suggest that the PowerPC is actually faster when it really isn’t on average)

- Intel: Oh, we just found a 30% clock rate increase in the pocket of our other fab pants.

- AMD: Hold my beer, I have the DEC Alpha guys making an x86 CPU… How about 64-bit while at it.

Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#288

Post by bryanlarsen »

doomroot13 wrote: post #273
dbspin wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> even the M5 laptops are consistently beat on performance and battery life by Intel Windows laptops. When plugged in... This caveat is so enormous it should almost be legislated. If your computer use is at all portable, a computer that scales down to 20 - 40% of GPU power when unplugged is an enormously significant factor. So far as I'm aware (could be wrong about arm devices?) there's no non-apple laptop that opera…

Newer Intel Panther Lake chips perform the same or very similarly on battery as they do when plugged in - as do Qualcomm chips. However, I don't know where they're seeing "consistently beat on performance and battery life by Intel Windows laptops". Multi-core performance can definitely beat M5 in some configurations but single core performance is still fairly far behind and battery life is comparable again depending…

Sorry, poor wording. It's the Neo that's on the bottom in many reviews, but the M5 is regularly beaten by Windows laptops. My usage of "consistently" was in the sense of regularly beaten, not in the sense of always beaten.

Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#289

Post by RetpolineDrama »

gardaani wrote: post #169

Rumors say that Apple will only release M6 base variant and skips M6 Pro, M6 Max and M6 Ultra variants to concentrate all efforts to create a good AI capable M7: "According to reports from Bloomberg, Apple will be skipping its M6 Pro, M6 Max, and M6 Ultra chips to accelerate development of the M7 chip. That means the only chip to be released from the M6 family will be the base M6. The reason for this break with tradi…

The true-local AI chip, codename "buddy", will be the M8

Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#290

Post by [deleted] »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #267
dbspin wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> even the M5 laptops are consistently beat on performance and battery life by Intel Windows laptops. When plugged in... This caveat is so enormous it should almost be legislated. If your computer use is at all portable, a computer that scales down to 20 - 40% of GPU power when unplugged is an enormously significant factor. So far as I'm aware (could be wrong about arm devices?) there's no non-apple laptop that opera…

Have you tried Panther Lake or Wildcat Lake laptops?

[deleted]
Post reply on HN