New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro

Post by jckahn » Tue, Aug 25, 2026, 9:56 PM UTC

bigyabai wrote: post #200

EagnaIonat wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your statement is not really true any more. I have an old M1 Max with 32GB that runs inference models fine, especially those using MLX. Dedicated graphics cards are faster but not to the point that it matters. That’s a six year old machine. My newer machine M5 max 128GB will far outperform your typical 32GB gaming card once the model exceeds memory. To even get close to that on a dedicated graphics card you are payin…

> Dedicated graphics cards are faster but not to the point that it matters. It definitely matters, if you're intending to run a Claude Code/OpenCode style agent workflow. Most of those harnesses start with 8-12k token contexts, which is a lot of prefill for a Mac but cheap for a CUDA GPU. The GPGPU compute on the fastest Macs is still trailing behind Nvidia's laptop GPUs; the highest-bandwidth Apple Silicon chip (now…

Post by tedd4u » Tue, Aug 25, 2026, 10:11 PM UTC

Lwrless wrote: post #158

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?

Post by rcarmo » Tue, Aug 25, 2026, 10:14 PM UTC

als0 wrote: post #184

redox99 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both are still very low for AI btw.

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

Post by type0 » Tue, Aug 25, 2026, 10:27 PM UTC

timpera wrote: post #49

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.

Same thing for me! Got it with the education discount when it came out in 2024 and, although I've been pretty disappointed with macOS, it's crazy to see that the price increased by $300 in less than 2 years, with no sign of the price increases slowing down. What will happen once people are priced out of buying computers? I find this worrying.

Post by type0 » Tue, Aug 25, 2026, 10:28 PM UTC

iamacyborg wrote: post #73

timpera wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same thing for me! Got it with the education discount when it came out in 2024 and, although I've been pretty disappointed with macOS, it's crazy to see that the price increased by $300 in less than 2 years, with no sign of the price increases slowing down. What will happen once people are priced out of buying computers? I find this worrying.

> 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.