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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

#261

Post by m463 »

throw03172019 wrote: post #212
m463 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wonder how the cybertruck sales would have gone if tesla had done that. (250,000 pre-orders, vs now ~5000 sales/quarter)

I am shocked every time I see one of those driving in SF. street parking must be awful!

I drove one as a loaner.

It is big. No dashboard. square steering wheel without turn signals or gear stalk. The rear-view mirror doesn't see out unless you lower the cover in the back. The side mirrors are strangely shaped and small. The front corners are a mysterious mostly unpredictable distance out the front window.

But then... It has cameras in all directions including the front bumper. There is a top-down sort of heat-map display when you park. All 4 wheels can be turned for a tighter turning circle. and it can self-park.

So... I would feel embarrassed to be seen in it, but it was definitely an interesting experience.

Re: New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro

#262

Post by KennyBlanken »

api wrote: post #258
rainsford wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know it's at least a little irrational, but I am indescribably angry with the pricing trajectory of personal computing. I'm not all that young and for pretty much all my life the computers you as a random person could buy have consistently become massively more performant and massively cheaper over time. Even when the exponential performance increases started to taper off, every few years you could buy or build a n…

Isn’t this just inflation? We are in a highly inflationary environment. Everything is going up in nominal terms.

Inflation is a few percent a year roughly. Prices for hardware have skyrocketed. Ram has jumped anywhere from 2-4x in cost. NVMe drives are still going for 2-3x what they cost about 2 years ago. Just go look at one of the amazon price trackers to see how bad it is.

TSMC, plus flash and memory manufacturers with their own facilities, have dramatically cut production of almost anything that isn't in demand for AI, plus Macs were just about the only way to get more than 16GB of 'VRAM' without spending multiple thousands of dollars, so Mac Minis and Studios with more than about 24GB of ram have been under months-long backorders, which is unprecedented. Tim Apple made is name in supply chain logistics. Even he can't logistic his way out of this. Making things worse, the RAM that Macs use is really fast stuff, nearly the speed of high end desktop GPUs.

Supply for anything that isn't exactly what NVIDIA, Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, and MS want has pretty much evaporated. And even that stuff has skyrocketed in cost because, essentially, the race has turned into who can hoard the most of TSMC's and NVIDIA's production capacity in a particular year.

The pathetic thing is that it isn't even actual purchases in some cases. In some cases, it's OpenAI or Anthropic merely "promising" they will buy X% of a memory manufacturer's capacity.

I can't wait for all of this to come crashing down.For all this hardware that is useless for anything else because of its density and power consumption - to absolutely crater in price and become e-waste.

Re: New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro

#264

Post by baxtr »

ThePhysicist wrote: post #177
throwaway85825 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://fortune.com/2026/08/22/executives-ai-productivity-la... There's been a few studies. Most find productivity gain from 'AI' to be negligible.

Seems hard to believe, I mean I'm not an AI absolutist but as a programmer it allows me to automate simple things like writing small patches or config changes in a matter of minutes where before I would have invested hours, so hard to believe that it won't at least bump productivity up by 20-60 % overall, it's also tremendously better at finding relevant content and curating it than me so that's another time saver un…

Even if it was true… does anyone really believe that companies will stop using AI?

Re: New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro

#265

Post by II2II »

api wrote: post #258
rainsford wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know it's at least a little irrational, but I am indescribably angry with the pricing trajectory of personal computing. I'm not all that young and for pretty much all my life the computers you as a random person could buy have consistently become massively more performant and massively cheaper over time. Even when the exponential performance increases started to taper off, every few years you could buy or build a n…

Isn’t this just inflation? We are in a highly inflationary environment. Everything is going up in nominal terms.

I think their point is that computers used to defy inflation. Across the decades, computers were getting cheaper in an absolute sense (i.e. not factoring in inflation) and astonishingly cheaper in terms of dollars per unit of performance.

Even when the cost of the cheapest computers bottomed out, it likely had more to do with lower prices not making sense. At a certain point, the cost of things that encapsulate the computer and I/O (like the enclosure and screen) end up overwhelming the cost of the actual compute.

Re: New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro

#266

Post by EvanAnderson »

rainsford wrote: post #251
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 know it's at least a little irrational, but I am indescribably angry with the pricing trajectory of personal computing. I'm not all that young and for pretty much all my life the computers you as a random person could buy have consistently become massively more performant and massively cheaper over time. Even when the exponential performance increases started to taper off, every few years you could buy or build a n…

I don't think it's an accident that the market is on a trajectory toward personal computer (and particularly storage) rental being the only economically viable game. There are significant players who will profit directly. Indirectly it helps companies for whom end users owning general purpose computers and storage threaten their business models.

The industry has little incentive to fix this problem and as the market shrinks so does the incentive.

We lived thru the PC revolution. It looks over now to me.

Re: New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro

#267

Post by NamlchakKhandro »

api wrote: post #258
rainsford wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know it's at least a little irrational, but I am indescribably angry with the pricing trajectory of personal computing. I'm not all that young and for pretty much all my life the computers you as a random person could buy have consistently become massively more performant and massively cheaper over time. Even when the exponential performance increases started to taper off, every few years you could buy or build a n…

Isn’t this just inflation? We are in a highly inflationary environment. Everything is going up in nominal terms.

lmfao ... inflation. are you trolling sir?

Re: New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro

#269

Post by NamlchakKhandro »

drTobiasFunke wrote: post #244
swiftcoder wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it allows me to automate simple things like writing small patches or config changes in a matter of minutes where before I would have invested hours One of the problems here is that things like this only count as "increased productivity" in the economic sense if it results in more income at the end of the funnel. Are you actually making more product faster in all your new-found free time? Very few orgs I've worked i…

Yup. And in my experience, AI has made the communication and decision making overhead significantly worse thanks to 100x longer docs, code that noone understands and enormous pressure by executives to magically produce software that just works.

That's just because most people are bad at communication to start with.

Look at all the shit github README before llm. Most repos didn't bother because it was effort. those few that did, were because of autistic focus. Of those, very few were "great" user documentation.

now llms are here, the effort barrier is gone, and now we're inundated with shit README that provide no value to users nor respect their time.

Once you start applying SKILL.md that revolve around fixing HOW to communicate value to users in a way that respects their time, you'll see this story change in noticeable places.

I doubt it will change everywhere because it also requires that you give a shit about doing this in the first place, so those people Ed Zitron talks about... business idiots won't care, because they're ultimately nihlist.

Re: New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro

#270

Post by redox99 »

rcarmo wrote: post #225
als0 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, even 600GB/s is barely usable and not fun.

Well, “low” is relative. Not everyone can spend a small car’s worth on a Studio…

But everyone can load 10 bucks on a deepseek flash API and have almost unlimited usage at decent speed.
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