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New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro

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Re: New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro

#151

Post by rafaelmn »

jdoe1337halo wrote: post #11

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.

I'm kind of lost on what to do with it. I have better workstation PCs, and I couldn't find a good way to turn it into a media center - it would be a great living room PC - but couldn't find a BT remote friendly solution last time I checked. Anyone has a solution for this ? I don't want to be using mouse/keyboard every time I sit on the couch - something that would let me stream something like jellyfin fullscreen with a remote ?

Re: New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro

#152

Post by ActorNightly »

smartmic wrote: post #66

> for always-on agentic computing Don’t know, but this as main ad headline feels almost like a threat to my personal home computing needs

Don't worry, there are exactly zero Apple chips that are good for any sort of local inference right now. Unified ram is fast for ram, but dogshit slow compared to actual dedicated VRAM on graphics cards.

Re: New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro

#153

Post by ActorNightly »

Insanity wrote: post #97

The M-chips are insanely powerful. So powerful for my regular use that I'm still on M1-generated devices and don't really need to update. Perhaps in a few years when both local-running LLMs are good enough on regular consumer hardware there'll be a good reason to upgrade. As a disclaimer though, I haven't even tried to really run local models on the M1 as I also have a 'gaming PC' that can run them fine.

> Perhaps in a few years when both local-running LLMs are good enough on regular consumer hardware there'll be a good reason to upgrade.

I mean, local LLMs already are really good if you own Nvidia Cards, not sure what you are waiting for. 2x3090 will blow any current Mac out of the water in tok/sec

Re: New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro

#154

Post by jtbayly »

nodesocket wrote: post #62
Zylokloto wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You will not feel a difference in coding/dev work between M1 to M6 in a relevant manner.

I also can feel a speed/sluggishness difference between my M1 Max MacBook Pro and my M4 Pro (14 core).

Honest question: Which one feels faster?

Re: New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro

#155

Post by massysett »

matt-p wrote: post #118
wpm wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About damn time, Gigabit ethernet started shipping on desktop Macs over 20 years ago.

Eh, for what? Most people use it only for 'internet' and 1G full duplex is generally still enough for that. Happy for 2.5G though :)

My cable internet is 2.5G. So it’s nice to get that full speed when I have a wired connection.

To be honest though, my usage does not benefit from the speed. The only benefit is to the reptile part of my brain that says “speed. Must have the fastest possible, and since I’m paying for it, even though maybe I should downgrade it, I want my speed.”

Re: New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro

#156

Post by mullingitover »

brightball wrote: post #79
iamacyborg wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Capitalism will lead to: - Lots of options competing on quality, price, user experience, user needs - Every marketplace innovation that we talk about on this platform So somebody might offer exactly that and if it's a good option, people will use it. If it's not, they'll use an alternative. Government regulation will lead to: - Giant entrenched companies that are difficult to disrupt thanks to insider connections - L…

Capitalism doesn't exist without government regulation. Who's going to enforce the contracts? Who's going to break up the giant entrenched companies rent-squeezing every cent out of their natural monopolies, and then using their illicit gains to crush any would-be competitors as they ooze into other markets?

Literally everything listed for 'government regulation will lead to' can and has happened in unchecked capitalism. Insider connections rule everything right now in this current regime of chest-beating 'capitalists.'

Capitalism and socialism aren't real things outside of freshman year econ textbooks.

Re: New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro

#157

Post by booty »

user43928 wrote: post #114
Zylokloto wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You will not feel a difference in coding/dev work between M1 to M6 in a relevant manner.

Two years ago maybe, when I wrote code by hand. Today development work is limited by compile times and test run times, particularly with UI tests in the iOS simulator. Hardware on the development machine finally maters.

I work on a big web monolith on an M5 Pro 48GB.

I'm usually running about ~4 instances of it locally in separate Git worktrees, which (in our setup) means I'm also running 4 copies of the whole stack: web, frontend, Redis, Postgres, etc. These are rebuilt and torn down multiple times per day. Lot of frontend assets to compile.

Additionally, like many people in corporate environments, we do of course also pay a performance tax thanks to the security software we need to run.

So perf does matter for us.

We could, of course, alternatively... just run cheap shitboxes locally and have all our dev environments in the cloud. Certainly appealing in many ways from a cost perspective and you don't even need to give up DX really.

However, in the next ~5 years, as "actually useful" local LLM inference starts to become genuinely useful (for software engineering, this seems to roughly mean "the ability to run 28B+ models at usable speeds") then having local compute horsepower might start to look more attractive again. Even if it's not an absolute winner on cost/utility alone, the data privacy and cost certainty have value to many.

Re: New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro

#158

Post by Lwrless »

The "4x AI performance" smells suspicious to me, M5 Pro does have slightly higher memory bandwidth than the M4 Pro, but there are also the new Neural Accelerators in the GPU cores, I've always wondered what they actually do, since the SoC has AMX (Apple Matrix Coprocessor) since the original M1 chip era.

So is this performance gain probably due to the new Neural Accelerators?

Re: New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro

#159

Post by vortep »

rafaelmn wrote: post #151
jdoe1337halo wrote: post #11

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.

I'm kind of lost on what to do with it. I have better workstation PCs, and I couldn't find a good way to turn it into a media center - it would be a great living room PC - but couldn't find a BT remote friendly solution last time I checked. Anyone has a solution for this ? I don't want to be using mouse/keyboard every time I sit on the couch - something that would let me stream something like jellyfin fullscreen with…

I recommend a combined keyboard+trackpad device. Compact, fully featured.

Re: New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro

#160

Post by finaard »

rafaelmn wrote: post #151
jdoe1337halo wrote: post #11

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.

I'm kind of lost on what to do with it. I have better workstation PCs, and I couldn't find a good way to turn it into a media center - it would be a great living room PC - but couldn't find a BT remote friendly solution last time I checked. Anyone has a solution for this ? I don't want to be using mouse/keyboard every time I sit on the couch - something that would let me stream something like jellyfin fullscreen with…

There are various "air mouse" variants that properly work with MacOS as well. I have one with some media/navigation keys on the front, and a tiny keyboard on the back - kodi I can navigate just with the navigation keys, and if I want to do a bit more (but not get out the proper keyboard) I just flip it around, and can do that as well.
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