M1 Pro 2021 16GB RAM as well.

However, I live with Activity Monitor open at all times. The computer constantly grinds to a halt, and I have to force quit apps at least 10 times per day.

Not really Apple's fault though, just most apps use around 4GB of RAM these days even when they're idle. Some use upwards of 16GB.

I've watched the computer slowly get obsoleted over time, not because the hardware is too old, but because software just get's worse every year.

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'm baffled why anyone would think you wouldn't be able to record multi track audio on a modern laptop with SSDs as if it was a difficult task. I had an Alesis HD24 once and that recorded 24 tracks on hard disks, not SSDs.

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

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.

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.

Agreed, I loved my M1 Air!

> 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.

Good news for you is that whoever told you that was almost certainly wrong. Apple considers a product "vintage" 5 years after it was last offered for sale, and "obsolete" 7 years after it was last offered for sale[1]. Parts availability is guaranteed until vintage status, and is generally still available until obsolete status.

The M1 airs were available for sale as recently as march of 2024, so you have at minimum another ~3 years of replacement parts availability ahead of you. The timer starts from the last offering for sale, not when you bought your computer. Software updates might be more limited, we'll have to see. 6-7 major updates is about average for the Airs[2], but 8 and 9 isn't unheard of either and we're already at 7 for the M1s

They were however right about one thing, out of warranty repairs are only warrantied for 90 days from Apple.

[1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102772

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook_Air#Supported_operatin...

The main problem with Apple's is the limited years of updates to MacOS, combined with less than ideal Linux support. I can easily install Linux on any Thinkpad, but I don't think it's yet easy for newer Macbooks.

With Linux, a device can stay snappy far longer than Apple provides updates to MacOS. That's why my personal computer is old Thinkpad, I can thankfully use work-issued Mac for anything that requires more power.

Same. It's a monster

bad consumer

While I agree with a lot of what he says (complexity and layers of abstraction impact performance), it's probably worth noting that his examples are not necessarily relevant to all software.

Does my web browser feel slow because of pointer indirection or virtual function calls? Or is it because I have to download 15 MB of Javascript to load this page, which then goes out to 35 other domains to fetch other Javascript and ads and CSS?

In the insanely tight compute loop that he's looking at all of those things definitely make a difference, but a lot of software is slow not because it's inefficiently written (which it probably is) but because it's inefficiently designed and it's doing too much.

In a game engine, where you have 16ms to do 100% of your simulation work, update all your state, and then send all the data out to be rendered, definitely this sort of thing is an issue. In an Electron app? There are a thousand other things that are wasting far more of your time and responsiveness than the misguided 'cleanliness' of your code.

I write clean code with lots of encapsulation. Not C++ just an ecomm webapp but our business hinges heavily on time to load and we do great there.

Clean code or messy code the thing that all fast code has in common - including your example is this: YOU FOCUSED ON IT.

You measured it, then improved against the benchmark. You spent time and effort on it so it improved.

That's it. That's the secret.

Not to forget the fact that websites nowadays can be real memory hogs, are dynamically assembled on your machine and burn cycles on pure eye candy UX like animations and transparency. The web's focus on design and cleverness over content and functionality is partly to blame.

Yes, but that's a game developers perspective. Hardware performance is not be-all end-all (an argument can be made on environmental reasons that it should be - but bear with me in the first instance).

Software is a tool working within a socio-technical system. Some systems have low user workflow diversity and a low rate of change - a game being a perfect example. Games get patched, but the diversity is purely in user data, not in feature use - everyone uses the same engine, the same textures, the same game logic. Some systems have high user workflow diversity - such as business software.

Pair that with the fact that games, due to the nature of the system, have to optimise for low latency AND they run on the edge - and it's natural that the primary optimisation will be for CPU cycles. For business software, for which distributional advantage of running it through web + the high rate of feature change that is a result of the specification being opaque and a moving target - means you have plenty networking latency that can hide your CPU latency for long after it becomes a true problem for you.

Not to mention that "clean code" optimises for developer churn and business priority shift (which is a luxury games which are an upfront investement don't have) as a result of accelerating industry of software technology and greater saturation of developers.

Had software remained the domain of the same number of practitioners such as <1995, even given everything else, the organisational systems would have evolved to protect them at all cost because churn would be catastrophic, and then they would enjoy more power and would be able to structure code not optimising for brain shift, because they'd hold the context in their heads.

I'll leave as exercise for the reader what pushing AI into the software development equation does for the system and inevitable hardware throughput implications.

To be fair, Objective C uses message passing, which doesn't have the same performance characteristics as C++ (worse initially dealing with the selector pool rather than a vtable offset; much better later when maintaining stability in your brittle C++ ABI requires pImpl->pImpl patterns jumping all around heap memory).

My problem with Casey is that he is not a performance engineer, he is a performance maximalist. Software is a set of tradeoffs. If he truly cared about performance, the best thing for him to do would be to write clean code that had good performance, but he refuses to do that, since it's hard. Instead he insists that the only way to do performance is to write unmaintainable code which ironically enough makes it difficult to do performance optimizations because it's hard to lean on abstractions that allow for things to be refactored.

I have found these same principles to be true in my own projects. More modern, “cleaner” implementations usually end up with a larger code base but a noticeable reduction in performance. Bloat ruins everything.

What Andy (Grove) giveth, Bill (Gates) taketh away.

Surely you mean you don't update the major OS version, e.g. from Sequoia (15) to Tahoe (26)? Or do you literally mean if you start on Sequoia 15.0, you stay on 15.0 the entire life of the machine? The former is fairly understandable, but the latter is just insane considering the number of bugs in a x.0 release (including severe security and usability issues).

I do this! Interesting to see someone else advocating the practice. In my open source development I start work on a retro machine running Snow Leopard, specifically to be able to generate authentic retro binaries that'll work anywhere, and then I have a process to port to modern MacOS and signed Apple Silicon binaries, but the machine's a M1 Studio on Monterey and building for 11.1.

My worry is that they'll kill signing for people who aren't updating, though that shouldn't be a factor. I would have to simply get another machine to port to, because I don't trust that changes they make are always going to be good in any sense.

There might be a window for computing within which it's good: I find I'm not worried about adding new Linux machines and architectures to build for, but my Windows builds are 32 and 64 bit on Windows 7 with no attempt to modernize the build system, and I've got that two-stage Mac build process where it starts on a time capsule machine not connected to the internet, and continues on the M1 running Monterey. I'm anxious for the day Apple requires you use stuff that's constantly changed out from under you. I don't work like that.

> never, ever update the OS.

> took two airs for almost a decade from 10.4 to 10.10 or something

I’m curious, did macOS 10.4->10.10 not constitute an OS update? Or was this a time when you applied your rule differently?

I'm not sure either of your approaches are optimal. You'd be further ahead with the shoes to be alternating two pairs as they last longer with recovery & dry time. Ignoring security updates, while maintaining performance, takes on a certain amount of risk. And while I do a similar approach to machines I do art/performance stuff with, they're air gapped when frozen. And you can't take this approach if you're publishing anything with Xcode.

I should have done this with my 2020 Intel Macbook Pro. Now it's basically unusable and spins rainbow wheels constantly, because the OS is apparently garbage for an Intel system.

I have an old laptop that is still usable because I never updated it from win7 or better I updated it once but switched back.

Just run debian + xfce, that’ll feel super snappy on 4GB of RAM, maybe even 2 (but then of course you’re bound by whatever other apps you use)

Plain Kubuntu on an Asus Zenbook OLED 14 laptop looks and feels pretty great compared to both Win11 on the same machine (ok that's not really surprising) or current macOS on an M1 Pro MBP (hardware is pretty old by now ofc). Once you start CPU intensive tasks the ASUS gets pretty hot though, while the Mac at most gets a bit warm.

Distro choice mostly determines package manager and how configuration works and what you get by default. Any distribution can approximately run any program and that includes window managers.

I'm using ArchLinux with XMonad as my window manager. That's neat, though it doesn't make Firefox or VSCode any faster (nor slower).

Atomic OS images. I moved away from individual package management once I discovered the alternates. Currently on Bluefin (Fedora-based) - not affiliated with the project but just a happy user.

https://projectbluefin.io/

No distro is going to be perceptibly faster than another. It's all about user experience - what tools ship with it, package manager, etc.

I'd pump the brakes on Ubuntu, which nowadays is a perceptibly worse user experience than other mainstream distros. Snap is a disaster, and flatpak rocketed past it years ago thanks to Valve bucks.

Use Debian. It's matured perfectly as a graphical distro IMO

Fedora is very good these days.

No one uses Ubuntu any more (besides corporations), it's possibly the worst distro of the whole lot due to several bad decisions from Canonical (snap etc). Fedora is a decent alternative, but if you're really after performance, CachyOS is the way to go as they provide highly optimised (PGO/LTC etc) and CPU-family specific kernel, custom scheduler (BORE) and optimised binary packages (catering to x86-64-v3, x86-64-v4 and znver4+ architectures).

PorteuX is also an interesting performance-optimised distro that takes a different approach - which is that of extreme minimalism (aggressive binary stripping, minimal packages) and its "Copy to RAM" feature (basically the OS runs 100% from RAM, so storage I/O bottlenecks are completely eliminated).

I've tested both on a 128GB Strix Halo laptop and haven't found much of a difference in terms of snappiness, but if you have older, more humble machine, I reckon PorteuX would definitely feel more snappy.

Finally in terms of snappiness, the DE you use also makes a huge difference. The PorteuX guys have just put together an interesting benchmark comparing various DEs and Wayland to X11 which is worth checking out: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Wayland-X11-Performance-Porteu...

> I assume this is a combination of hardware and how fast SSD->RAM is due to the SOC, but software will certinaly play a big part too.

That is exactly what I'm talking about. Sorry, you are completely off. My machine 20 years ago was not an SOC and didn't have an SSD either. It was fast as lightning to open a window.

What does this have to do with SSD? Or an SOC? It's all because the software is incredibly bloated, and as your comment indicates, the young generation doesn't even know this and thinks the hardware is to blame because it's 2 gens behind state of the art (so, 3.5 years old).

This is very sad and exactly why things are the way they are.

Windows 11 isn’t full of vibe coded AI slop because that hasn’t existed long enough to affect it much. It is full of poor decisions and poor programming the old fashioned hand made way.

> But hey, microservices and static linking are the future. /s

Aren't those two things contradicting each other? ;)

I think macOS getting more sluggish in each release (which is objectively true) is just plain old bad software engineering and prioritising the wrong things. E.g. it's just Apple's version of "What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away.".

A high refresh rate is only a crutch/workaround to reduce latency caused by too many pipeline stages until an input action shows up on the screen. A better fix is too reduce complexity in the involved software layers.

Yeah tell that to the chrome instance that takes 3.5 seconds to open an new tab. Because it needs to suspend one of the other tabs that are taking 5 GB of ram each.

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

Windows is definitely guilty of slowly getting worse performance wise. Requiring faster and faster hardware and more RAM just to keep the OS running.

Do you mean Airpods?

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

Interoperability between my server and working dev system was a perk that I'm willing to pay the apple premium for. I can run Linux on the server but then I have to deal with running Linux and if I want to develop something locally instead of having to ssh into my machine it's nice.

The cheaper PCs don't have strong graphic cards which I needed to run Plex and hardware transcoding and other few ML tasks that I occasionally do but that was only a smaller factor.

Nowadays, it's even more important b/c I refuse to keep an AI model on my mac mini in case it gets compromised.

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/

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Just as bad in Windows land.

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)

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.

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).

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.

Same here. I use a MacBook M3 for work and it's nice (still on Sequoia though - new macOS looks horrible) but I also have my own 2012 MBP still working and running (recently taken out of the cupboard due to my Lenovo dying) with Linux on it; replaced the battery, put in more RAM, and put in a different SSD and it's still fine. Well made hardware.

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? :)

It's useable, but for me it's a sometimes frustrating experience. You're meant to compensate for the hard edges of the operating system, instead of the operating system being designed for humans.

My M5 pro macbook panics one to two times a week. I narrowed it down to an issue with a thunderbolt-linked ethernet adapter.

I reported it about ten times, Apple never replied or addressed it. After a while I decided to take things into my own hands, and to write my own driver.

Just installing a VM you can load a driver in for development and testing was a two-week effort. Everything locked down. Their VM infrastructure is so bad you can't even properly emulate or route the device, so in the end the only way to test it properly was to install the driver in the real thing, which is extremely disturbing to productivity, as the device you're working on constantly crashes.

The whole platform is developer-hostile, which is essentially the same thing as user-hostile as far as I'm concerned.

Meanwhile, on Linux, zero issues, and writing or testing a driver is child's play. It's literally built for tinkerers.

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

how would that work exactly?

My M1 Air also died out of nowhere after 4 years

You can download ms teams on Linux, you just can't use it.

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

What are your gripes with linux desktops?

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

previously cmd+enter would work to "show in finder". New siri-enabled search seem to break that for some reason, but right click menu/show in finder on a found item still works.

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...

macOS always had terrible UI and accessibility, it's their trademark feature. I thought that's what people liked about it.

Windows emulation did see some improvements with Valve's sponsorship, but I wouldn't really consider that significant, and it's not like mac has any comparable technology anyway.

Up to the M2 series are supported pretty much fully. There are a few exceptions, but it does work quite well. I'd need a good reason to grab an intel/amd laptop just for running linux.

Reviewers seem very happy with the new Framework Pro, have you considered it? Of course, it still wont have quite the same level CPU/GPU.

From what I understand, the based M1/M2s are closer to the battery life you'd want and still quite good for a linux laptop. USB DP is a real bummer though.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 dated someone studying at a conservatory (the music kind) around that time. IIRC the Zune was quite popular with the students - even if most of them had an iMac - because it had one of the best microphones for recording live performances in an affordable package.

Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen kept me alive through a mindless summer job

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

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

That's part of the joke, I think.

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

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.

Because why would Sony go out on a limb and take all that risk for tiny hardware margins just so Microsoft could grab the lion’s share of margins with software licensing fees?

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

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.

> 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.

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.

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

You got it, thank you!

> It just appears that everyone else did such a terrible job for so long that they caught up

Or, Apple bought P.A. Semi and gave them the money and manpower they needed and they made a great job of designing CPUs and GPUs.

...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.

It doesn't really matter, because x86 processors inside are almost similar to modern ARM processors, the instructions that most programs use are more or less the same, and more complex "legacy" instructions are just emulated by splitting them into simpler instructions inside the CPU.

To me people that say that x86 is slow etc. never used an x86 processor with anything other than Windows. Yes, Windows is shit and laptops that run Windows are for the same reason shit. I get it. But on an x86 system you can run other OS, and, for example, a Linux distro with well tweaked power consumption parameters can get you even 3 days of battery life, or even more.

The point is that Windows keeps almost always the CPU above the minimum frequency, because it's full of useless background services, because programs are not well optimized for the hardware (to maximize backward compatibility they don't compile target x86_64 v3 for example and thus don't leverage on features and instructions available on new CPU or fall in the emulation case I've mentioned initially), and other reasons.

With a Linux distro you can keep the CPU at 600Mhz while web browsing, you can even turn off cores that you don't need, and the battery with this configuration surely lasts ages (at that point it becomes more predominant the consumption of other peripherals such as the display).

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)

NetBSD.

Still supported, by the way. Does Apple support your Macintosh SE/30 still? I believe Linux was also supported.

https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/mac68k/

Yes as I said in the comment, I know they do design them - based on arm.

But come on - if they had to use intel’s fab - their chips would be terrible. The reason the m6 is faster is largely because TSMC invented a smaller process node.

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...

Funnily enough I do the same with my Intel iMac... I have a 2TB Thunderbolt 3 Glyph drive as my primary and boot drive and it works a dream... if I got one of these new Mac minis without upgrading the drive, presumably I could just plug this straight into it and apple will do its magical migration thing?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Humans are equally fooled into believing each other are conscious.

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”

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.

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.

Is that AI / compute driven?

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!

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

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.

On the other hand, models these days are getting to the point where even if all development halted permanently, they would continue to be useful long into the future. (At least until their knowledge base or linguistics become too outdated.)

I cant shake the feeling of "640KB is enough for everybody". Imagine not one AI answering over 1 minute but a team of 100+ agents in hieararchical structure taking care of your request in seconds, checking each other.

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.

That TPU training part I get, but from what I have seen the NPU is rarely used for inference by LLMs. They still use the GPU, no?

What do you do with older hardware that you've bought? Do you not wipe it and resell / donate?

If you encrypt from day one then a lease isn't much different.

Just delete the encryption key.

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

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.

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

[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.

Give IBM some time, and there will likely be similar stuff on Linux distributions. The Linux kernel has been dropping hardware support, and systemd has been getting some... interesting features.

Naturally, the benefit for Linux is still the variety available in distributions. While IBM's RHEL and Canonical's Ubuntu may adopt some questionable stuff, Slackware, Devuan, Omarchy, and such likely won't.

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/

Well, Arc is basically dead on Mac now anyways :(

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

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.

Why? They are making wheelbarrows of cash providing compute for datacenters at much higher prices.

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.