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Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

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Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#721

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…

Still rocking an M1 Air - 2020 build. 8GB ram. No slowdown or deterioration at all. Battery health reports the battery max capacity at 84%. Best computer I've ever owned, by far.

M1 air 2020 16gb ram - still working like its new

Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#722

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 still rocking m1 pro with 16gb ram. for all my eng stuff its still snappy for me. that includes some iOS dev from time to time, lightroom classic, much better than my pc with ryzen 9 5900x + rtx 3080 somehow! i haven't even think about upgrading my mac

Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#723
post #667

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still rocking an M1 Air - 2020 build. 8GB ram. No slowdown or deterioration at all. Battery health reports the battery max capacity at 84%. Best computer I've ever owned, by far.

I splurged for the 16GB version of this. Originally bought it for my spouse, and then replaced it with a refurbed M2 with 1TB of storage for reasons. So I took the "old" M1 Air. So far, can't come up with a reason to want to replace it. Not updating to Tahoe helps with that too.

> Not updating to Tahoe helps with that too.

Apple - the absolute kings of planned obsolescence. Who else could do it so brazenly AND have a bunch of zealots who will now reply to this defending them and attcking anyone who points it out.

Any industry not involving a computer they'd be in big trouble even with their massive (legal) bribes to politicians and fortune spent on legal teams.

Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#724

I feel like the M series macs have been some of the most positively received computers ever made. I am yet to meet someone who doesn't love theirs, myself included.

I tried to love my work issued m4 pro for many months but couldn't stand macOS so asked for a linux compatible machine.

Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#725

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have not tried it this is an absolute game changer for Mac users moving to Linux. https://github.com/RedBearAK/toshy I've been running it for 3 years now. I am so macpilled that I had to install it on my new Framework 13 pro. The Mac muscle memory was always my biggest hurdle with Linux. I always felt handicapped by it. But Toshy eliminates that.

That is amusing because to me one of the largest abominations about mac is the keyboard layout and mappings. It's terrible for anyone with decent sized hands to accomplish anything of even medium complexity.

20 years of mac use has me feeling severely handicapped without it.

Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#726

I bought a 128GB M4 Max Mac Studio a while back, and for a while I thought like I had done really well to buy it when I did. The problem I'm having now is that no models are targeting RAM of that size. Everything is either much smaller, targeting laptops, or much larger, targeting hardware well out of reach of enthusiasts. Please, AI people, start making models targeting 128GB machines again. The last interesting one…

It's not exactly straight out of one of the labs -- it's heavily quantized -- but have a look at [1].

[1] https://github.com/antirez/ds4

Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still rocking an M1 Air - 2020 build. 8GB ram. No slowdown or deterioration at all. Battery health reports the battery max capacity at 84%. Best computer I've ever owned, by far.

M1 Pro 2021 16GB RAM Feels as snappy and impressive as the first day I got it. I never need to close apps, or reboot. I record multitrack audio on it without any perceptible latency. I write code on it. It's the best computer I've ever owned by a significant margin.

Hmm same one but mine is clearly deteriorating lately. Lots of beachballs. I think I abused the SSD pretty badly though if I’m being honest. Loading and offloading large media files almost daily for five years lol

Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#728

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have not tried it this is an absolute game changer for Mac users moving to Linux. https://github.com/RedBearAK/toshy I've been running it for 3 years now. I am so macpilled that I had to install it on my new Framework 13 pro. The Mac muscle memory was always my biggest hurdle with Linux. I always felt handicapped by it. But Toshy eliminates that.

That is amusing because to me one of the largest abominations about mac is the keyboard layout and mappings. It's terrible for anyone with decent sized hands to accomplish anything of even medium complexity.

Do you take issue with wrapping your thumb under your palm to hit command/option, or is it something else?

Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#729
post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question - why are you so stuck on Macs for local inference? A 4 GPU linux box with 3090s, which are $1500 a piece right now, will blow this thing out of the water. Even 2x3090 rig will run most of the good local models like Gemma4:31b at 100+ tok/sec The VRAM of the GPUs are MUCH faster than the unified ram within Apple Silicon. The only difference is the initial model load, which takes longer from disk to VR…

AIUI you can only connect two 3090s at a time with NV link? So you’d only have 48GB of fast combined memory? That’s not tremendously interesting as you’re still limited to the smaller models which, while impressive in their own right, are still IMO too limited to use as your only model.

There are kernel patches to enable P2P communication via PCIE on 3090 which is almost as fast as NVLink for vllm

Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#730

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.

I agree with you that this is a noticeable effect, but I have a hard time figuring out why it is, especially on Macs with the sealed system volume (which should make the operating system files bit-for-bit identical between a freshly set up Mac and one you've been using for years). Certainly it could come from the accumulation of cruft in /Library and ~/Library, but you can clean that up too.
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