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I have one of these too. I can’t believe how long it’s performed at very high levels of use including two external screens and 10-15 memory intensive applications running concurrently, including three different browsers with multiple tabs open on each. I installed a new video editing application today and was apprehensive it would stumble, but it worked like a champ.

The battery indicator is starting to show a decrease in performance. It won’t hold a full charge, but even when I’m without a direct power connection, I can still have it running for nearly 4 hours with Wi-Fi, 6+ without.

I have exactly this. Been trying to setup local models. I either end up with something that’s too big for my mac or too small.

MacBook is great hardware, but I really hate MacOS. It feels perpetually cellophane wrapped, and I don't like any of the window management. Finder is particularly awful too.

You should be able to deeply tweak how window management works, but Mac won't let you do that.

I'd run Linux on the hardware if it wasn't a hack.

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

Agreed, I loved my M1 Air!

That’s what I have and love it. I have M(N+1) envy but I remind myself that my machine runs great. And it’s paid for.

> 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.

What makes Golden Gate usable?

Agreed. I have an M1 Air base model (also an M4 Pro), and hated the squared-off change for the M2. The wedge was the entire point.

One reason is the ssd. A heavily used ssd is just slower than a new one.

Do you mean Airpods?

first gen? Because my SE from 2023 works very well with the latest 26.5 version.

100% I wish Alan and Meta well. I look at what happened to System Preferences (I mean Settings) and it’s a disaster. Some apps have title bars and many don’t (AppleTV). Just trying to enjoy Apple Music is so painful compared to the old iTunes. I am struggling to enjoy my Mac as much as I did during the M1 transition when I thought finally they got rid of the HW bottlenecks brought by Jony like the dreaded MacBook keyboard and touch bar. Not the greatest hardware. But, now the software experience is so subpar, especially the HI (I mean UX).

> Removing CLI tools over the years would be one way

They are avoiding GPL3 licensed software and some GPL2 software are getting outdated.

That's why they didn't upgrade bash3 to bash4 , and replaced rsync with openrsync

"There's no step three!" -- I can hear his voice in my head.

But the Goldblum phrase I really try to keep alive is thinking jail, as in "What is beige? It's not even a color. Were they in thinking jail?" I often remark out loud when I realize I have been in thinking jail on a subject.

No, all those dialogs are there with Apple account sign-in as well. Maybe even more, since they might want to upsell you on something along the way (Can't remember, haven't bought a new phone in almost 3 years)

Just as bad in Windows land.

My "favorite"?

When you install Chrome, which you cannot accidentally do, and when you set it as the OS browser default, which you also cannot accidentally do...

... the next time you launch Safari, it will say that the default browser has been changed, "Did you mean to do that?" and of the two options presented ("Keep using Chrome" or "Switch back to Safari") the Safari option will be the default.

I find macOS to be sluggish when it comes to opening apps. But it's not a deterioration, it's just always been like that.

That's my experience on M4 Mac Mini and M3 MacBook Air.

Same, I bought it with the justification that this would be future proofed for 4-5 years. Nearly 5 years later with daily usage, it's not limping along, the battery isn't on its last legs, it's doing great. My impulsive side is annoyed that I don't have a justification to buy the next latest and greatest.

Is it amazing for LLM stuff? No, but that's the same story for anyone else _not_ spending boatloads, or willing to hack on weird mining cards.

I have an M5 pro at work, and certain things are a smidge faster than my personal M1 Max, but they're pretty close overall.

Given how much more you can get buying used versus new, I'd go used unless there's some feature/characteristic only the new hardware has.

Having said that, I could see stuff slowing down over time with OS updates/etc. I've had my M1 air for a while, and some UI stuff was slower after specific updates (I think glass in particular).

Same, although my M1 pro has only 16 GB of RAM and that does seem to slow it down a bit with my current usage. I recently bought a used Mac Studio M2 Max with 64 GB RAM and it's much faster, both subjectively and objectively by looking at how long it takes to run the full test suite of the Rails app I'm working on.

Same. I have an M1 Pro (personal use) and a M3 Max. Whenever I do side projects on my M1 Pro it feels nearly identical.

Nice. I've also found, through that, kinto.sh which is apparently the equivalent for Windows.

As a recent Mac-> Windows switcher for work, my productivity has nosedived partially for keybinding confusion. For instance, I instinctively reach for Option+Arrow keys to jump the cursor over words, which mapped onto the Windows keyboard is Windows->Arrow, which moves the whole window around the desktop into predefined positions. Cool feature, but my muscle memory for the other thing means I'm always screwing up window position (and never thinking to use it on purpose).

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.

Yup, that's the benefit. To each their own on Linux. I absolutely love Wayland and Systemd (snap... not so much), but no one is forcing me to use them or not use them, and that's the way I like it.

Exactly. In a broad sense, 'Linux' is an idea not a specific thing. I mean, yes, there is a specific kernel but beyond that it is flexible beyond reason.

I have stuck with distros that are not trying to chase the latest trends but keep a ethical high ground.

CachyOS was the one who moved me from Ubuntu/Debian based distros.

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/

I could not disagree more. I have been using linux for about 15 years. Linux is better now than it ever was.

But you aren't buying a Mac at that point, no? The hardware is 1/2 or 1/4. I'd get an X1 myself if it could run macOS, I like the looks and the aesthetic, don't much care about Linux besides my Proxmox / HA/ *arr setup on an old NUC. Why can't we have it all, eh? :)

Maybe they have standards and preferences. "fine" and "overreacting" seem like your very subjective value judgements.

Proper macOS virtualization, for example.

Also, I do not want to have to upgrade my machine and OS every few years just to keep up with apps that stop working or installing, not because the hardware is no longer capable, but due to ridiculous obsolescence policies. Heck, I can not run the latest version of a lot of software (including basic developer tools) on one of my MacBooks, simply because it is running Monterey.

A proper package manager CLI is also sorely needed. Delegating that to Homebrew and MacPorts doesn't cut it.

Improve the speed of APFS. Like try forking off a job to create a bunch of git worktrees in on APFS vs EXT4 -- it's significantly slower. Deleting a ton of files, cloning repos, hardlink performance, etc; APFS performance is poor compared to just about any other Linux filesystem.

Make installing Linux on it easy

In almost 20 years of using Mac OS I can count on one hand the time I've used the "Services" menu, and that was mostly by accident...

Why not just stay on the previous 15 release? They still even push updates for it!

Linux (especially KDE) is probably the best desktop OS right now. Not great for laptops though

What are your gripes with linux desktops?

I recall reading this story of some user doing a sync with Zune on their new computer. The computer had no songs on it and the Zune synced with that machine and wiped all the existing music off his Zune without warning him(or something like that its been years). I recall thinking, yep thats Microsoft. And to this day I still encounter dumb ways of thinking in many of their products. The endless negative stories I hear about Windows 11 are just the tip of the iceberg. The entire company has to be following a cohesive vision with leadership at top needing to be truly involved to make great end to end products and really Microsoft has not been that in a long time.

Exactly. The same for Windows Phone. Both was amazing software on great hardware. They just never gained enough traction because MS was a bit late to the party and wasn't willing to push through (e.g. by compensating the late start and poor market position with heavy marketing investments and partnerships), so they eventually trashed those projects.

It's such a shame that the shitty MS products survive the ages while the great ones never gain real traction. I feel a bit sorry for the people who built such amazing stuff just to see it being cancelled and then having to work on the unsolicited background execution of the SharePoint 365 rev4.7 update manager (I made this up, but it probably exists).

The iPod's click wheel was amazing. Grab one if you have the chance and play a bit with it. I imagine a lot of people don't remember or have never used. Such a great feel and UX, Apple at its best.

iTunes was also unrivaled in its first versions, before it became an everything app. And syncing was pretty great before ubiquitous internet was a thing.

From what I recall Zune had a much bigger screen for videos so I bought one for that reason you can see the side by side here:

https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/zune-ipod.htm

Technical capability pales in comparison to human desire.

The point is that after the iPhone dropped it didn't matter.

You’re right but that is not the point. The point t is that soon after the whole category of portable MP3 players got wiped out by smart phones.

Never had a zune, but I did have an iPod. I am willing to accept Zune was superior. But its just an example that, yea, often times the superior solution doesn't actually win. There is a huge list of better technology that lost out to worst technology. Which is why I find it funny the claim that the market is optimal in choosing winners and loosers.

I had the first iPod, and later the first Zune. The Zune had a beautiful UI, but by then Apple came out with the iPod Nano 2nd gen and that took the cake.

It was better in every way you can quantify in a tech specs listing, and not in any way that actually matters to the customer.

Apple excels in marketing. They are more similar to Nintendo than Nvidia.

And the Zune media player was a much better media player than the other 6 Microsoft media players. It was crazy how much Microsoft invested in cannibalizing its own products--I remember they had a similar number of word processors, email clients, etc.

And marketing it with "turd brown" ass (oops!) an option

> the abysmal marketing

WELCOME TO THE SOCIAL

I remember multiple tech reviewers praising the marketing at the time. It was the first time my younger and more naive self experienced that now-familiar feeling in relation to the tech industry: "am I taking crazy pills? have I slipped into the bizarro universe? have these people ever interacted with another human being?" etc

The Zune failed vs the iPod because of marketing? Okay.

> technology wasn’t there

Until Apple developed it. Those early iPhones employed a lot of tricks to squeeze usability, battery life, and performance out of underpowered devices.

Prior smartphone attempts mostly applied PC-centric concepts to the device, it’s no surprise they ended up failing.

I'm the opposite of an Apple fanboy (typing this on a Windows box), but this is some grade A nonsense.

Sure, MS launched PDAs and phone-ish devices long ago, running Windows CE and whatnot but they were awful. It's absolute bollocks that the iPhone was a splashing success because of Apple marketing. It was a splashing success because it worked spectacularly well. Random non-tech people would randomly pull out their newest purchase to show their friends. "And now it's a notepad!" "Look and now suddenly it's a calculator!" Sure, your awful HP Tablet had all that, and a call function, well before. But it sucked. It felt like using a computer while squinting, and not like a magic calculator that can turn into a notepad and then into a phone and then into an iPod.

The iPhone was a success because it worked so well. And it worked so well because the technology was there - in part because they invented it and in part because they had the taste to not bring out a shit product but wait a bit instead.

Windows CE (1996) was garbage compared to Palm OS (also 1996.)

Years after the first iPhone release, Microsoft had a dogshit mobile OS, and every single device using it was dogshit. Before Android, the industry's answer to iOS and iPhone was a resistive touch screen and stylus because, other than the launcher, absolutely nothing was adapted to fingers. That was if you were lucky; some didn't include a stylus, reducing usefulness for making calls. It was like running regular Windows applications scaled down to a smartphone screen.

>Apple never came first ... but often just at the right moment and had marketing skills to make it a new trend.

Newton.

You got it, thank you!

Sony can't be bothered to compete with Apple in that era. They were trying to recover from their DRM dreams, and their devices were already sounding great with in-house software and hardware.

Creative's Muvo^2 already was the poor man's iPod with surprisingly good audio quality as well.

> Zune was probably a better player.

In some ways, anyway. Never owned a Zune myself, but a university classmate did and I was shocked by how poorly it handled non-Latin languages… she had a ton of Japanese and Korean songs loaded onto it, and their metadata all displayed as "missing character" blocks. She used it a lot like one might use an iPod Shuffle despite it having a nice screen because the only way to tell what was playing was by hearing it play.

By contrast my 4th gen B&W iPod which was about 5-6 years older handled unicode just fine.

It let you squirt over a song to your friend

https://youtu.be/ud6rwVkbovA

And they could listen to it 3 times in 3 days

Spite cam actually be one of the most powerful motivators for productivity, in my own experience. I can buy this story being accurate.

...and Apple zooms through it like it's a real tunnel.

Ironically enough, I knew a polar opposite prof… swore off Intel after the FDIV bug (he did cosmological simulations on Beowulf clusters)… although he was a stickler for time management, when Opteron came out he threw out his summer schedule to find grant money for a new cluster.

I lived through the PPC->Intel transition porting real Mac apps, and "I liked the G4 laptops better" is definitely not a take I heard from anyone back then...

A lot of the important applications took a while to get ported. Also the last two generations of G4 hardware just overclocked basically unchanged chips. The 12" G4 laptop was infamous for slowly cooking your junk with their titanium shell.

Newer Intel Panther Lake chips perform the same or very similarly on battery as they do when plugged in - as do Qualcomm chips. However, I don't know where they're seeing "consistently beat on performance and battery life by Intel Windows laptops". Multi-core performance can definitely beat M5 in some configurations but single core performance is still fairly far behind and battery life is comparable again depending on the exact specifications and design of the laptop. I've seen analysis showing M5 is still the perf/watt king though regardless of configurations.

Have you tried Panther Lake or Wildcat Lake laptops?

Apple also is faster when plugged in

Yeah, as a somewhat new MacBook air user I'm also sceptical when people claim that any windows laptop is now better or at least as good as a MacBook.

I'm still traumatized by my windows laptop randomly turning on in my backpack, heating itself up and draining the battery because of windows.

Aside from that I'm now used to MacOS for my daily needs aside from gaming so windows laptop have to do a lot of work convincing me of getting back to them.

It seems logical in this case.

Intel were x86, Apple Silicon is ARM-based. ARM-based chips are more power-efficient.

Also, it's built on a much smaller process. 3nm, if I'm not mistaken, older Intel was something bigger than 10nm. Heck, if you take a really old Intel Mac, you have something like 65nm process, which is much less efficient than 3nm.

Here's a random benchmark I found on the internet (literally the first thing on Google, you can find more if you want) https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-intel_core_i7_1065...

You can also beat the Neo on every measure by comparing it to $700 Windows laptops. https://www.tomshardware.com/laptops/dell-xps-13-2026-review

It's also not hard to find a Windows laptop that beats the M5 on battery life. Single-thread performance is the only remaining measure where the M5 is king.

Being mistaken on the CISC vs RISC debate (besides, modern x86 is closer to RISC via micro-ops then old school CISC) is understandable. There is a lot of misinformation out there and myths, plus, it just feels right to consider CISC overly burdened, etc. TLDR: Intel x86_64 is closer to RISC then you likely think and Apple Silicon arm is closer to CISC then you likely think. These lines are blurry and have been for decades, very much for good reason.

But talking this authoritatively on something without doing the reading, that's grating: https://chipsandcheese.com/p/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-matter

I have 0 urgency buying something more expensive than a $150 refurbished i5 16gb ram laptop.

Local AI isnt useful for agent stuff.

Same. My personal laptop is an M1 Air and I also have an M1 Studio desktop. My work machine is an M4, and in "regular" use I can't tell the difference between them.

I don’t get that sentiment. I have an m4 16gb and it’s such a sluggish machine. and that’s not even doing development, just browsers, word, excel, PowerPoint. (And so many eternal bugs… I feel like I’m on windows)

China follows foot-in-the-door tactic per the Art of War. (done in HK, Korea, Singapore, and Malaysia)

This in-turn later on, AIs will train to make pro-China comments as AIs train on these.

They got the sheer man-power, and with AIs it's even easier.

I'm not a pro-china poster, i'm from germany and didn't find this 'funny'.

Apple is the second richest company on the world (which doesn't need help/protection?!) and they have experts in chip design.

Xiamoi is some random chinese company not known for high end chips and was able to catch up impressivly in a short period of time.

This fact doesn't get funny or wahtever just because apple brought out a new chip today.

I'm not a fanboy for any of it and do not care.

I find pro apple comments funnier; but you know, everyones got their own rose colored glasses.

25 day old account, very first comment about using US models because you can't trust China? Be gone russian bot

@TRACK: yipinwong

Just kidding but seriously man, this level of paranoia isn't healthy. Try talking about it with someone you trust. The comment you're replying to is completely normal.

I'm just a german dude not finding this 'joke' funny.

I'm not an apple fanboy nor a xiamoi fanboy.

Its impressive that a random chinese company was able to catch up to the 2th richest company with global experts so fast and this achievement is not dimnished just because apple announced their M6 today.

Are you some fanboy?

If there's a decrease in AI ram demand, it will not be because the models get better. Models getting better will increase RAM demand, because it grows the part of the economy that models are useful for. Classic Jevon's Paradox.

I'm going with 2029 just so that it can be exactly 100 years from the Great depression. ;)

The memory companies report that they're sold out through 2027... so it might be a while

Or, they're price fixing, as they have many times before, and are currently being sued for [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing

[2] https://moginlawllp.com/dram-antitrust-suit-ai-memory-supply...

I for one can't wait. Current prices are absolutely insane.

However a problem exists with scalper bots. They're going to fight tooth and nail to keep prices artificially high even when supply increases. Same with the hyperscalers blowing "free money" at eating supply as a strategic position against smaller competitors.

I built a new PC about two years ago, and I probably got it at the last possible opportunity for a while. CPU and motherboard have come down by maybe £100 in between the two of them, but a 7900 xtx (or any other 24GB GPU) for under £1,000 now seems like a bargain, and £180 for 64GB of DDR5 makes me feel like an old man talking about the halcyon days.

Welcome to the club. If you're _really_ competitive in cs2, I'd swap out to a 9800x3d setup, but it's still a maybe. Very little reason to upgrade right now other than to run LLMs.

Cycles tend to be 5-10 years long not 25. Without knowing anything else I would expect a fab you seriously start planning today will be at full capacity in about 5 years. Nobody serious likes delays - in particular the banks don't like loaning money that won't at least start paying off. They know it takes some time to design a building - but factories typically are standard buildings so once you know about the size you can get it done fast - I expect 1 year to have the building done is the worst case (and it can be done in 3 months possibly if your project management is good - after interest this is cheaper than the 1 year). It takes time to build and install the specialized machines that go inside - this is the largest problem, but you typically order them first and then plan the building around the needed space and when they will arrive. Then you need 6 months to setup the inside of the building. From there it is just ramp up time.

The above is a standard project management problem. We do this for lots of industry all the time. There is every reason to think you can get a new factory running in 5 years.

Note that I said 1 factory above. Some of the special machines we don't have the ability to make them fast enough to do 2 (I don't know the real number!) new factories in 5 years. Existing factories are using most of the special machine capacity to replace machines that wore out on the way - this can be corrected as well, but it adds another year and the expenses are much larger. Realistically though 1 new factory is likely enough.

Sounds like you are telling us it’s a new paradigm?

https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter3/transportat...

Sure, yes, compared to the prices of storage 35 years ago, it's a bargain.

Compared to the prices of storage today, when people are presumably buying the product, it's actually a bad price.

But software also fit in 640kB instead of 640GB.

On that note, I'd like to share Fix the News: https://substack.fixthenews.com/

It's a Substack that reports good things happening around the world, divided into sections like "Conservation and Restoration," "Climate and Energy," "Medicine," etc. And they also give part of their profits directly to projects in those categories.

(I'm not affiliated with them, I'm just a subscriber.)

Thanks for sharing this sentiment and including data. So few people seem aware of the wonderful progress humanity keeps making. Makes me worry that the progress will stall or even reverse because people don't even know it's happening.

Is that AI / compute driven?

These improvements are showing that we're producing plenty so that the cost is driven down and distributed to wider and wider portions of humanity.

But my personal observations of AI is that it's producing more and more of the same stuff and not moving the front forward much. The human innovation and invention seems to be lost.

I wonder if doubling the workforce had anything to do with that..

In real terms, the median human globally today is vastly richer than at any point during the twentieth century.

And the median American is also richer in real terms, both in terms of wealth and in terms of income.

Of course, that all assumes that you use a reasonable measure of inflation that’s stable, well-designed, and applied methodically and consistently over many decades.

Alternatively, you can cherry pick data points and go based on vibes, which lets claim whatever you want!

What is exciting about getting pablum spoonfed by a data center owned by trillionaires?

I'd rather go to the library and read a book.

False dichotomies make for terrible conversation.

"Find your path forward!" he shouted with glee, as he ran toward the cliff.

What does that have to do with the Turing Test? The TT has clear rules: There are judges that have a dialogue with anonymized AI/humans. The humans cannot cheat and impersonate a machine, they have to act normally. The AI obviously should try to sound human.

No AI would pass this test with experienced judges.

One needs to be a little more sophisticated about it. Ray Kurzweil, for example, set fairly clear rules for his interpretation of the test in his 2001 wager:

https://www.writingsbyraykurzweil.com/a-wager-on-the-turing-...

Those rules are fairly reasonable, at least as a start.

I think of this and the book the author wrote Computer Power and Human Reason every time I try to talk to product about the short comings of LLMs

It was always a bad test, despite the greatness of Turing. The human organism is built to 'project' humanity onto anything available; apart from this none of the peculiar phenomena of the so-called 'modern human' is even intelligible, even the possibility of science. I bring all that is in me onto you as soon as you seem to be saying something, and reciprocally. We do this at the drop of a hat, and all specifically human life depends on it. But this power shows its 'gullibility' with 'gods' as also with Eliza. I am not snide about it because it is overreach by something the significance of which is overwhelming , but one is indeed amazed by the failure to reflect on the part of the ones eg giving LLMs rights - to take extreme case of a very widespread cultus - as if /they/ were the rational party, not ancients placating the storm god.

Yeah...but in context, "gullible" seem a bit pejorative. Humans are also hopelessly incapable of sensing radioactivity, methanol in their alcoholic drinks, carbon monoxide, and a great many other things that our ancestors just didn't encounter much.

Though we're pretty good at sizing up a person's emotional balance/maturity and competence at familiar tasks. So maybe have an old blacksmith watch the AI/robot interact with horse owners for a while, then shoe their horses, and see how well it does.

Nobody thinks customer service agents are real, realistic or useful. EU just passes laws.

Also the endless online debates of ‘is this post made by ai? What about those images, that video or that music?’.

Nowadays, I prefer AI CS agents to humans. I just had a chat with an AI yesterday, it understood me perfectly even when I made mistakes, I was impressed.

In contrast, humans tend to paste me the same barely-relevant macro over and over, no matter how much time I spend explaining my issue.

Customer service is very different. Crappiest audio quality possible & scripted answers all the way down. Almost like humans are forced to behave like machines.

April last year

Yes, which is exactly and entirely the point of the whole paper. Somehow missed still -- despite how important AI has become, shockingly few people actually read the short, layperson-accessible paper that started the whole field.

I kinda have to link it now, so uhh here's a random PDF: https://www.hec.edu/sites/default/files/documents/Computing%...

tried turingtest.live, gave each side the same question (programming-related), immediately recognized the LLMisms on side A, boom side B is the human.

we might need to bring back the Voight-Kampff test. anthropic at the very least is introducing a water making system to Claude which might make them more identifiable to humans as well as much easier to detect for machines.

“advanced LLMs like GPT-4”

Agreed, seems like the M5 has already made steps in that direction, with 4x prompt processing / prefill performance vs. M4. [1] And token generation also got a 10% boost. The data below is only for Pro & Max but I think the base M5 got the same relative boosts vs. M4 base.

    Chip         BW (GB/s)   GPU Cores   Q4_0 Prompt   Q4_0 Gen
    M4 Pro (20c)    273         20          439.78        50.74
    M4 Max (40c)    546         40          885.68        83.06
    M5 Pro (20c)    307         20      ~1500 to 1700    ~56
    M5 Max (40c)    614         40      ~3000 to 3500    ~92

  Apple's biggest bottleneck for real-world inference is prefill processing.

I understand that will boost read rates to around 14 Gbps as compared to the current 10 Gbps for LPDDR5X, so a 40% improvement.

Not 'more simply', there are basically zero savings accounts that are going to net you a 5%+ interest rate to give you that $100 a month. And that $25k becomes less valuable over time. $25k is now only worth $19k because inflation.

It’s basically impossible to compete on economic terms with deeply subsidized hardware that is widely available to rent or as a service with zero commitment.

For general inference there’s no ROI that makes this work vs subscriptions.

25k for computer now, plus 9-10% sales tax, plus operating cost, plus time and cost for R&D tinkering with models, harnesses, and infra (assuming highly capable engineering talent that can get paid for your human inference) vs a HEAVILY subsidized subscription at 200 per month with free R&D has a pretty long ROI (15 years?)

At API costs, it’s like 6 months if you’re heavy on inference. For training, specialized models will have their own ROI that makes this worthwhile. Then debate renting capacity and the platform to choose

Why are we comparing to the maxed out model only? The M5 Ultra with 96 GB, 1 TB, and 64 GPU cores is $5499. Apple lets you lease that model for $110/month for 36 months.

If you can settle for a M5 Max base model that would be a $49/month lease.

Today, you should be able to run Qwen 3.8 - 27B amazingly well on either which is giving comparable performance to 5.6 Luna on SWE Bench. The local models are now getting better and more efficient and this should give you headroom. Tools like turbo fieldfare are really reducing the memory requirements to run large models and I don’t see it stopping soon.

https://github.com/drumih/turbo-fieldfare

Isn't there something to be said for owning your own hardware though?

This is the real answer.

Unless you need privacy for your inference this instant, paying for credits can get 80 to 90 percent of people everything they need.

Of course if you do need that privacy, then forking the $25K over to Apple is a no brainer.

[dead]

Yeah my down payment 10 years ago was $200,000. The house has appreciated 0%. I sold meta shares to buy it. Those would be worth a million now.

… I wish I hadn’t just calculated that.

Detroit, Cleveland, etc. Basically huge swaths of the rust belt. Plus a smattering of small towns in the south.

Well, this is all assuming a 20% down payment, which anecdotally as a 26 yr. old, nobody I know is able to achieve. All my home-owning friends put 3-7% down. Granted, most are using first-time homebuyer loans which are generally more favorable.

In RTP (NC), a ~$400k house at 5% down is $20k

There are 70 houses for sale in Pittsburgh for $25K or less

Coshocton, Ohio, plenty of houses for <100k

I tripled my money on my RAM purchase of three years ago. So, yes, for short-term appreciation that's hard to beat. But I don't think it's something that will continue.

"Nobody" puts down 20%. That hasn't been a requirement for decades (in the US).

And there are plenty of places in the US where you can buy a house for $150-$200k. Maybe not places you want to live for one reason or another, but they're there.

Well a substantial proportion of home buyers in Canada put down only the minimum 5% down payment.

But every second bear doubles the transistor count.

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.

The creator of the Overcast podcast app grabbed 48.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaVznUB6wss

KDE Plasma is as good as it gets if you'd like to transition from MacOS:

https://pointieststick.com/2025/10/04/a-mac-like-experience-...

There were 1000 plugins created for Omarchy 4 in 2 days. That's why I don't feel it being hyper minimal anymore.

It's still not well integrated of course as those plugins are from different people, but I at least don't feel powerless as I know I can make any change easily.

It is just regular resistance to change. Loss of productivity is exagerated, it indeed exists in which ever direction but it is only temporary.

If the browser being Chromium-based isn’t a hard requirement, it may be worth checking out the Firefox-based Zen Browser[0]. Its UI is very similar to that of Arc, to the point that I’d call it Arc’s spiritual successor.

[0]: https://zen-browser.app/

I think the difference besides the supply crunch there is that everyone connected gets the ~same internet, just faster or slower. Quantitative, not qualitative difference. On the other hand, a computer that can run Gemma 4 8B versus one that can run DeepSeek Flash are different enough experiences that I'd say they're effectively a difference in kind. It's been a bit since we had such serious stratification in outright capability in computing, rather than just how long it takes to get something done, or how many of something it can serve at once. In the early 90s, I think there were a lot more of those "this computer can do this thing, this one just can't" scenarios.

Closest competition I see right now are stacks of 2-4 connected DGX Sparks, similar lowish speed high mem, and about the same cost/gig.

> And to take it another way, is the value to you, the cost of a small used car?

For me personally, not quite that valuable yet, but I think it's getting there quickly. Deepseek V4 Flash massively increased the value of local AI to me, to the point where it's displaced most of my Claude Code usage, its upcoming vision enabled version should bump it further, and it's only going to get better from there.

It's a lot faster, but a lot of it is also feeling free to discuss things I wouldn't be comfortable sending to Claude, with the idea that that info is now theirs in perpetuity. I got my genome fully sequenced recently (it's cheap now!), and I get a battery of blood tests every year. Wouldn't do processing on any of that with Claude, but local AI? Totally great.

And if I was running a company with a large cloud AI bill, I'd probably buy a wheelbarrow full of these macs. Cheaper, but also a more solid/predictable base to build on.

Sure, it’s pretty dumb/naive implementation, would need to be a lot more efficient to scale. Basically had Claude write polite/low touch dumb crawlers for a bunch of local sites (library, local events spaces, luma, theaters, maker spaces) and whip up a little frontend to let our family and friends manage a little text description of what their family members like, constraints, that sort of thing. Once a week, the crawlers look for new events, add to a db, and then run through the list and ask our local LLM to grade each event, given the text description and constraints. Take the top 20ish for the following two weekends and email out. It’s been super helpful, lowers the activation energy to go to more local events.

Hey, a high school jock from 1982 wandered in to the computer lab...

Weird swipe, I'm not trying to sell it to you, this is just where I see it going, and why these things are going to sell (and why 512 gig M3 Ultra Mac Studios have skyrocketed in demand/price). It's not been an empty promise, in that it's been providing lots of very concrete value to us already.

Members of my C-suite are doing this today on a raspberry pi, so the promise is not empty. Key difference is they aren't using local AI to do it.

For the M5 Ultra, I suspect it would be valuable for someone who wants to achieve all the above and more, but with local AI due to data privacy concerns, and also not regulated data that comes with lots of other requirements solved by more traditional approaches.

Three possibilities:

1. The type of person who deals with lots of intellectual property using expensive Mac-only desktop applications that aren't meant for servers, whose mind has formed positive associations with the term "Apple Intelligence", whose values overlap with Apple's lawyer's values, who actually stands to profit from having a Mac that's more powerful than anyone else's Mac, whose long-term goals are not impacted by planned obsolecense on a piece of computer hardware costing over $25k ($50k after 1TB SSD add-on).

2. Trust fund beneficiary who wants to show off, LARP as #1, prime target for Apple's marketing.

3. 2026 kit for billionare-class iPad babies. All brain rot content is 100% local AI-generated. Never have to speak to your children again. A true "we have dead internet theory at home" machine.

What exactly is empty about any of what he wrote?

One of the advantages of LLM's is that you can set up a task list and tell it to burn through those tasks overnight. It's a rare night that Claude isn't busy for me, and I do burn through my 20x subscription, sufficiently that I downgrade from fable around about ... now in the week...

"You most likely can't utilize the workstation 24/7. Your work hours will be concentrated into 6-10 hours per day."

I have agents running 24/7 doing research, in fact I would argue this how they will be used for most programming tasks in the near future. For chatting, I agree local inference makes no sense. But for tasks that run continually, I'm not so sure. Personal computers took a while, local inference will too, but I think it will happen.

Subscriptions are, and will likely remain, the best deal in town. Unfortunately, larger companies aren't able to do that. When your monthly token costs are in the $5-10k range, the local inference starts to look a lot more attractive

Some people neglect to factor in electricity costs. Some homes have very expensive service.

> - You most likely can't utilize the workstation 24/7. Your work hours will be concentrated into 6-10 hours per day.

isn't the whole point of all this ..... agents? isn't that what literally everyone is always clammering about in these threads? in which case the workstation is useful 720 hours out of 720 hours.

Even at high announced pricing 4 of them still much more accessible than any Nvidia solution with same amount of VRAM,

Movie production (editors, sound design, and a portion of fx work).

I'm going to buy one to watch youtube videos and surf social media.

Of course. People are valuing privacy now, and it's almost inevitable that humans will seek to have more agency over a social contact, even if it's an artificial one.