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Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

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Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#701

Post by ColdStream »

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…

That makes sense. I also think that we are at the point where maybe the expectation of a yearly refresh on everything should be reconsidered. They can end up on a Tick-Tock schedule when the Pro/Max/Ultra can be done every second year.

Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#702

Post by alluro2 »

foxyv wrote: post #597
alluro2 wrote: post #524

I was blown away by M1 Pro, and used it for 4 years before it became a little sluggish, and replacing it with an Asus S16 running on Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 (an excellent laptop). One of the main reasons was missing my old Linux setup. I've briefly tested M5 Pro in an Apple store and was surprised by how quick it felt and did anything. A tangible and significant difference, and I really feel it would be good getting it, or…

I have never owned an Apple product that didn't slowly get worse over time. After a couple iPads and MacBooks, I'm almost certain they are intentionally updating their operating system to slow down older products. Even worse is the removal of access to certain applications for older hardware in the name of security or compatibility. Meanwhile my Linux laptop continues to get faster every year as the operating system…

Absolutely agree - happened on MBP, 2 generations of iPads, and Watch...For iPads and Watch, I thought that it might just be the famous battery health vs performance tradeoff they enforce on us, but I rarely ever used the MBP on battery, it was plugged in 95% of the time.

Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#703

Post by alluro2 »

Twirrim wrote: post #632
alluro2 wrote: post #524

I was blown away by M1 Pro, and used it for 4 years before it became a little sluggish, and replacing it with an Asus S16 running on Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 (an excellent laptop). One of the main reasons was missing my old Linux setup. I've briefly tested M5 Pro in an Apple store and was surprised by how quick it felt and did anything. A tangible and significant difference, and I really feel it would be good getting it, or…

I'm always a little cautious about "tried it in the store" experience. If I nuke and rebuild my machine (either Linux, or Windows), it's always significantly faster than it was before. Over time stuff just tends to accumulate that you don't notice. Like the old days of needing to defrag hard disks.

Yeah, same - I tried the M5 Pro randomly while waiting for my daughter to finish salivating over a Neo, and just got surprised by how quickly it opened apps and reacted to anything I did - ~1-1.5 seconds for Affinity Designer was amazing.

My MBP probably got affected by OS updates like other people are saying - opening apps and responsiveness definitely got worse, and felt like slightly deteriorating over time (but it might have been MacOS updates along the way).

Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#704

Post by hedora »

ColdStream wrote: post #687
alluro2 wrote: post #524

I was blown away by M1 Pro, and used it for 4 years before it became a little sluggish, and replacing it with an Asus S16 running on Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 (an excellent laptop). One of the main reasons was missing my old Linux setup. I've briefly tested M5 Pro in an Apple store and was surprised by how quick it felt and did anything. A tangible and significant difference, and I really feel it would be good getting it, or…

There is a youtube channel 'Dank Pods', he was going on about his Framework laptop and was talking about how modern OS's have this ark to their usability. He was arguing that Windows is well past its best years and that OSX is now starting on the downward slope and that is why he was moving to Linux. It was a interesting take on the whole thing about the life times of OS quality. But with a new CEO for Apple, they ha…

Linux has been going down hill, but since you can choose distributions, there is an escape hatch.

I’ve been moving all my machines to devuan with xfce (or freebsd with xfce).

I have zero issues despite not having to deal with wayland, systemd, snap, etc.

Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#705

Post by zamadatix »

aucisson_masque wrote: post #634
hasteg wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live right next to a micro center and remember when they started offering that deal... still so pissed at myself for not buying one. I ended up just buying a raspberry Pi for what I was doing, but seeing as where the prices are now, I messed that up a bit. Also my worst sin was not buying 64GB of DDR5 when I was doing my computer upgrades back in August last year.

Mac mini aren't that good for home made server, raspberry sure ain't powerful but there are in-between. Not being able to upgrade the SSD or the ram is a big issue, not so much on a portable laptop.

Out of all of my home servers, the M4 Mac Mini is probably my favorite and runs many workloads even though it sits on a 96 core Epyc server now (needed the massive amounts of PCIe for something else). I was able to upgrade my SSD with a 3rd party one, not that sticking an NVMe drive on one of the thunderbolt ports would have been a bad pick. About the only place it didn't make sense is if you wanted a ton of RAM.

Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#706

Post by apatheticonion »

Nice! Linux Please.

My M5 MacBook Pro, while amazing, is basically relegated to being a thin client with amazing battery life that exclusively SSH's into my desktop PC for work.

I could spawn a Linux VM / use Docker/Podman locally, but dealing with allocating memory, hard drive space and whatever other limitations non-native containerisation incurs isn't worth the squeeze.

Plus I really want to have Vulkan access, both so I can actually play games like a sane person and also use standardized local LLM tooling (MLX is cool but I don't like dedicating time learning things that I can't leverage elsewhere).

If the Mac Mini / Studio range had Linux support, I might actually consider buying one for my home lab. I know others already do and just put up with MacOS - but if I buy a "pro" product, I want it for "professional" usage damn it

Great devices for watching YouTube and video editing I guess?

Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#707

Post by gregors »

kwanbix wrote: post #544
alluro2 wrote: post #524

I was blown away by M1 Pro, and used it for 4 years before it became a little sluggish, and replacing it with an Asus S16 running on Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 (an excellent laptop). One of the main reasons was missing my old Linux setup. I've briefly tested M5 Pro in an Apple store and was surprised by how quick it felt and did anything. A tangible and significant difference, and I really feel it would be good getting it, or…

Yeah, if I could install Linux without any hacks I will get one. Even if I prefer the body of a X1 Carbon ThinkPad, its keyboard and trackpoint.

Agreed. I loved Macs, but I need it to run Linux.

Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#709

Post by bigyabai »

hedora wrote: post #704
ColdStream wrote: post #687

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a youtube channel 'Dank Pods', he was going on about his Framework laptop and was talking about how modern OS's have this ark to their usability. He was arguing that Windows is well past its best years and that OSX is now starting on the downward slope and that is why he was moving to Linux. It was a interesting take on the whole thing about the life times of OS quality. But with a new CEO for Apple, they ha…

Linux has been going down hill, but since you can choose distributions, there is an escape hatch. I’ve been moving all my machines to devuan with xfce (or freebsd with xfce). I have zero issues despite not having to deal with wayland, systemd, snap, etc.

I'm not a kernel plumber, but I don't think Wayland, systemd or snap are necessarily part of Linux whatsoever.

You might think that desktop environments are going downhill (which is a fair opinion), but Steam reports an all-time high adoption of desktop Linux in 2026: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/

Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#710

Post by tw1984 »

brianwawok wrote: post #184
tw1984 wrote: post #131

will be great fun if one M5 Ultra with 512GB memory at 1.2T bandwidth capable of doing 3x smallish local model inferencing each at Opus 4.5 level of intelligence.

The memory bandwidth and size seems to be there, but what is the tokens per sec on like a qwen model? And you can basically do 3x opus 4.5 on the $100 a month claude plan. Your payback will be near infinity years after electricity.

you are assuming the idea, the data, the code being touched by opus worths nothing.

how about measuring returns in the sense that I no longer need to share my flagship idea with some random 3rd party just because it hosts the LLM I am using?

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