[HN Gopher] Apple M5 chip
___________________________________________________________________
Apple M5 chip
Author : mihau
Score : 878 points
Date : 2025-10-15 13:02 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.apple.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.apple.com)
| nik736 wrote:
| This is only the base model, no upgrades yet for the Pro/Max
| version. The memory bandwidth is 153GB/s which is not enough to
| run viable open source LLM models properly.
| quest88 wrote:
| What do you mean by properly? What's the behavior one would
| observe if they did run an llm?
| nik736 wrote:
| If you have enough memory to load a model, but not enough
| bandwidth to handle it, you will get a very low token/s
| output.
| Rohansi wrote:
| You can also have enough bandwidth but be compute limited
| and get lower performance than expected. This is more
| likely to be the case for Apple Silicon vs. high power
| GPUs.
| burnte wrote:
| "Properly" means at some arbitrary speed that the writer
| would describe as "fast" or "fast enough". If you have a
| lower demand for speed they'll run fine.
| hu3 wrote:
| Enough or not, they do describe it like this in an image
| caption:
|
| "M5 is Apple's next-generation system on a chip built for AI,
| resulting in a faster, more efficient, and more capable chip
| for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, and Apple Vision Pro."
| mpeg wrote:
| The memory capacity to me is an even bigger problem, at 32GB
| max.
| sgt wrote:
| That'll come in the MacBook Pro etc cycle, like last time,
| then you'll have 512GB RAM
| mpeg wrote:
| Same with bandwidth though, usually pro/max memory has much
| higher speed
| andy_ppp wrote:
| Yes the M4 Base has 120 GB/s, Pro 273 GB/s and Max has
| 546 GB/s... That means M5 Pro is potentially around 348
| GB/s and M5 Max is almost at 700 GB/s - for comparison a
| 4090 has around 1,000 GB/s. So pretty incredible!
| sgt wrote:
| Also I think even an M3 Ultra is more cost effective at
| running LLMs than 4090 or 5090. Mostly due to being more
| energy efficient. And less fragile than running a gamer
| PC build.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| It can run larger models quite slowly but lacks matmul
| acceleration (included in the M5) that is very useful for
| context and prompt performance at inference time. I will
| probably burn my budget with an M5 Max with 256gb (maybe
| even 512gb) memory, the price will be upsetting but I
| guess that is life!
| sgt wrote:
| Yes! I think smaller models on the M3 Ultra is
| interesting enough, but now with matmul/ tensors on M5
| Ultra or Max, with decent unified mem, it will be a
| gamechanger.
|
| I can easily imagine companies running Mac Studios in
| prod. Apple should release another Xserve.
| replete wrote:
| I think the M5 Max will be more like 614GB/s, unless they
| somehow have exceeded DDR5x-9600 or added more than 32
| memory controllers
| bombcar wrote:
| Is the M4 Ultra even out yet? I can't see anything with 512
| GB but the M3 Ultra on the Mac Studio (for a cool $4000
| more).
| asimovDev wrote:
| i am interested in seeing if they skip m4 and go straight
| to M5 and only make that available in the Pro. From my
| unscientific observations it seems that chips are running
| hotter and hotter, I wouldn't be surprised if M5 Ultra
| would struggle in a Studio and would require cooling
| performance of the Mac Pro case
| iyn wrote:
| Yeah, that's my main bottleneck too. Constantly at 90%+ RAM
| utilization with my 64GiB (VMs, IDEs etc.). Hoping to go with
| at least 128GiB (or more) once M5 Max is released.
| czbond wrote:
| I am interested to learn why models move so much data per
| second. Where could I learn more that is not a ChatGPT session?
| shorts_theory wrote:
| You might be interested in LLM Systems which talks about how
| LLMs work at the hardware level and what optimizations can be
| done to improve the efficiency of them in this course:
| https://llmsystem.github.io/llmsystem2025spring/
| modeless wrote:
| The models (weights and activations and caches) can fill all
| the memory you have and more, and to a first (very rough)
| approximation every byte needs to be accessed for each token
| generated. You can see how that would add up.
|
| I highly recommend Andrej Karpathy's videos if you want to
| learn details.
| pfortuny wrote:
| A very simplified version is: you need all the matrix to
| compute a matrix x vector operation, even if the vector is
| mostly zeroes. Edit: obviously my simplification is wrong
| but if you add up compression, etc... you _get an idea_.
| rs186 wrote:
| Would you mind specifying which video(s)? He has quite a
| lot of content to consume.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Models are made of "parameters" which are really weights in a
| large neural network. For each token generated, each
| parameter needs to take its turn inside the CPU/GPU to be
| calculated.
|
| So if you have a 7B parameter model with 16-bit quantization,
| that means you'll have 14 GB/s of data coming in. If you only
| have 153 GB/sec of memory bandwidth, that means you'll cap
| out ~11 tokens/sec, regardless of how my processing power you
| have.
|
| You can of course quantize to 8-bit or even 4-bit, or use a
| smaller model, but doing so makes your model dumber. There's
| a trade-off between performance and capability.
| adastra22 wrote:
| I think you mean GB/token
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Err...yup. My bad. Can't edit it now.
| wizee wrote:
| 153 GB/s is not bad at all for a base model; the Nvidia DGX
| Spark has only 273 GB/s memory bandwidth despite being billed
| as a desktop "AI supercomputer".
|
| Models like Qwen 3 30B-A3B and GPT-OSS 20B, both quite decent,
| should be able to run at 30+ tokens/sec at typical (4-bit)
| quantizations.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Even at 1.8x the base memory bandwidth and 4x the memory
| capacity Nvidia spent a lot of time talking about how you can
| pair two DGXs together with the 200G NIC to be able to slowly
| run quantized versions of the models everyone was actually
| interested in.
|
| Neither product actually qualifies for the task IMO, and that
| doesn't change just because two companies advertised them as
| such instead of just one. The absolute highest end Apple
| Silicon variants tend to be a bit more reasonable, but the
| price advantage goes out the window too.
| cma wrote:
| M5 says 3X thunderbolt 5, should be able to do 240G
| bidirectional in total. Not that useful yet with max 32GB
| of RAM though.
| diabllicseagull wrote:
| You don't want to be bandwidth-bound, sure. But it all depends
| on how much compute power you have to begin with. 153GB/s is
| probably not enough bandwidth for an Rtx5090. But for the entry
| laptop/tablet chip M5? It's likely plenty.
| chedabob wrote:
| My guess would be those are going into the rumoured OLED models
| coming out next year.
| Tepix wrote:
| With MoE LLMs like Qwen 3 30B-A3B that's no longer true.
| replete wrote:
| Looks like the M5 base has LPDDR5x-9600, which works out to
| 153.6 from base M4's 120GB/s DDR5x-7500. The Pro/Max versions
| have more memory controllers, 16, 24 and 32 channels
| accordingly. The 32 channel M5 top-end version will have
| 614GB/s by my calculations.
|
| It would take 48 channels of DDR5x-9600 to match a 3090's
| memory bandwidth, so the situation is unlikely to change for a
| couple of years when DDR6 arrives I guess
| heystefan wrote:
| Is it me or did they use to avoid calling it "AI"?
| simonw wrote:
| Yeah, they rebranded it "Apple Intelligence" but this press
| release appears to be mostly using AI in the same (vague) way
| that the rest of the industry does.
|
| Also just noticed this:
|
| "And now with M5, the new 14-inch MacBook Pro and iPad Pro
| benefit from dramatically accelerated processing for AI-driven
| workflows, such as running diffusion models in apps like Draw
| Things, or running large language models locally using
| platforms like webAI."
|
| First time I've ever heard of webAI - I wonder how they got
| themselves that mention?
| rgo wrote:
| > First time I've ever heard of webAI - I wonder how they got
| themselves that mention?
|
| I wondered the same. Went into Crunchbase and found out
| Crunchbase are now fully paywalled (!), well saw that
| coming... Anyway, hit the webAI blog, apparently they were
| showcased at the M4 Macbook Air event in 2024 [1] [2]:
|
| > During a demonstration, a 15-inch Air ran a webAI's 22
| billion parameter Companion large language model, rendered a
| 4K image using the Blender app, opened several productivity
| apps, and ran the game Wuthering Waves without any kind of
| slowdown.
|
| My guess is this was the best LLM use-case Apple could dig-up
| for their local-first AI strategy. And Apple Silicon is the
| best _hardware_ use-case webAI could dig-up for their local-
| first AI strategy. As for Apple, other examples would look
| too hacky, purely dev-oriented and depend on LLM behemoths
| from US or China. Ie "try your brand-new performant M5 chip
| with LM Studio loaded with China's Deepseek or Meta's Llama"
| is an Apple exec no-go.
|
| 1. https://www.webai.com/blog/why-apples-m4-macbook-air-is-a-
| mi...
|
| 2. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-updates-bestselling-
| mac...
| airza wrote:
| I get they want to have a lot of their own swift-based bindings
| but I wish they could also keep their MPS pytorch bindings up to
| date...
| toddmorey wrote:
| The modern Apple feels like their hardware teams way
| outperforming the software teams.
| alexanderson wrote:
| Apple has always been a hardware company first - think of how
| they sell consumers computers with the OS for free, while
| Microsoft primarily just sells the OS (when comparing the
| consumer business; I don't want to get into all the other stuff
| Microsoft does).
|
| Now that they own the SoC design pipeline, they're really able
| to flex these muscles.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Not really. Back in the day you wouldn't buy a MacBook
| because it was powerful. Most likely it had a very shitty
| Intel CPU with not a lot of cores and with thermal
| challenges, and the reason you bought it was because macOS.
| alt227 wrote:
| > very shitty Intel CPU with not a lot of cores and with
| thermal challenges
|
| Very often the intel chips in macbooks were stellar, they
| were just seriously inhibited by Apples terrible cooling
| designs and so were permanently throttled.
|
| They could never provide decent cooling for the chips
| coupled with their desire to make paper thin devices.
| scrlk wrote:
| They made things even worse with fan curves tuned for
| silence until the CPU was practically at TjMax.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| > They could never provide decent cooling for the chips
| coupled with their desire to make paper thin devices.
|
| _Curiously_ they managed to figure this out exactly when
| it became their silicon instead (M1 MacBook Pros were
| notably thicker and with more cooling capacity than the
| outgoing Intel ones)
| alt227 wrote:
| I still believe they purposefully throttled the last gen
| of intel Macs just to make people have bad memories of
| them.
| bzzzt wrote:
| I presume they were just playing it safe to not let the
| M1 migration flop. If you're dragging your users through
| a big migration the last thing you need is complaints
| about the new hardware...
| chasil wrote:
| And in many decades past, OpenStep was slowly moving its
| GUI from Next hardware to software sales on various UNIX
| platforms and Windows NT.
|
| And this would eventually evolve into MacOS.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStep
| qwertytyyuu wrote:
| not just mac os, also the decent keyboard and actually good
| display, guarenteed.
| fnord123 wrote:
| The intel laptops also grounded into the user. I still
| can't believe they didn't have a recall to sort that out.
| hinkley wrote:
| The tingling just lets you know you're alive.
| hamdingers wrote:
| Nope, many bought it in spite of macOS because it was a
| durable laptop with an excellent screen, good keyboard, and
| (afaik still) the only trackpad that didn't suck.
| leptons wrote:
| >the reason you bought it was because macOS.
|
| That is probably the least of reasons why people buy Apple
| - to many it's just a _status symbol_ , and the OS is a
| secondary consideration.
| alt227 wrote:
| Apple has always been a software first company, and they only
| sell the hardware as a vehicle to their software. They
| regularly say this themselves and have always called
| themselves a software company. Compare their hardware
| revenues with that of the app store and icloud subscriptions,
| you will see where they make most of their money.
|
| EDIT: I seem to be getting downvoted, so I will just leave
| this here for people to see I am not lying:
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/tim-cook-apple-is-not-a-
| hard...
| RossBencina wrote:
| Apple has been calling themselves a consumer electronics
| company since at least 2006.
| alt227 wrote:
| "Apple views itself as a software company" - _Steve Jobs
| (2007)_
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEeyaAUCyZs
| jsnell wrote:
| Sure, let's compare.
|
| Apple's product revenue in this fiscal year has been $233B,
| with a gross margin of $86B.
|
| Their services revenue is $80B with $60B gross margin.
| justincormack wrote:
| Much of the service revenue is the payment from Google
| for search placement.
| alt227 wrote:
| Source?
| jsnell wrote:
| Good grief. Apple's official financials.
|
| https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/fy2025-q3/FY25_Q3_Con
| sol...
|
| Look, I totally understand making an off-hand comment
| like you did based on a gut feeling. Nobody can fact-
| check everything they write, and everyone is wrong
| sometimes. But it is pretty lazy to demand a source when
| _you_ were just making things up. When challenged with
| specific and verifiable nubmers, _you_ should have
| checked the single obvious source for the financials of
| any public company. Their quarterly statements.
| bombcar wrote:
| Tim Apple is notoriously misinformed about his own company.
| alt227 wrote:
| I guess Steve Jobs was as well then.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEeyaAUCyZs
| ksec wrote:
| It goes back even further, Steve Jobs said Apple is a
| software company, you just have to buy its hardware to use
| it. It is the whole experience.
| alt227 wrote:
| Here is the quote for anyone who is interested:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEeyaAUCyZs
| wat10000 wrote:
| I did that comparison and they make the vast majority of
| their money on hardware. Half of their revenue is iPhone, a
| quarter is services, and the remaining quarter is divided
| up among the other hardware products.
|
| Regardless of revenue, Apple isn't a hardware company _or_
| a software company. It 's a product company. The hardware
| doesn't exist merely to run the software, nor does the
| software exist merely to give functionality to the
| hardware. Both exist to create the product. Neither side is
| the "main" one, they're both parts of what ultimately
| ships.
| alt227 wrote:
| Do the same calculation for profit instead of revenue.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Are those numbers available? In any case, comment said
| revenue, not profit.
| alt227 wrote:
| > The hardware doesn't exist merely to run the software
|
| Watch this and maybe you might change your mind:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEeyaAUCyZs
| wat10000 wrote:
| I think he's saying software is essential, not that it's
| the only thing. He contrasts the iPod with products from
| Japanese companies, which tend to make great hardware
| with crap software, and that software difference is why
| the iPod beat them.
|
| Modern Apple is also quite a bit more integrated. A
| company designing their own highly competitive CPUs is
| more hardware-oriented than one that gets their CPUs off
| the shelf from Intel.
| achierius wrote:
| > Compare their hardware revenues with that of the app
| store and icloud subscriptions, you will see where they
| make most of their money.
|
| Yes, it's $70B a year from iPhones alone and $23B from the
| totality of the Services org. (including all app store /
| subscription proceeds). Significantly more than 50% of the
| company's total profits come from hardware sales.
| the_arun wrote:
| Shouldn't we compare profit? Instead of revenues?
| transcriptase wrote:
| McDonald's is still a burger joint, even if the soda and
| fries are far higher margin.
| spogbiper wrote:
| mcds is more of a real estate company -
| https://www.wallstreetsurvivor.com/mcdonalds-beyond-the-
| burg...
| ertgbnm wrote:
| In addition, making money off the software that others
| develop and sell on the app store doesn't make Apple more
| of a software company, it makes them a middle man.
| alt227 wrote:
| IMO a middle man means you are in between 2 other
| services, taking a cut off the top. In this instance,
| apple not only created and curate the app store, but also
| invented the concept. In this case they are definitely
| not a middle man, they are a software company selling
| access to their software to developers.
| alt227 wrote:
| Where are you getting these numbers from, care to share
| source?
|
| We should be comparing profit on those departments not
| revenue. Do you have those figures?
|
| It is well known that companies often sell the physicval
| devices at a loss, in order to make the real money from
| the services on top.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Apple does not sell hardware at a loss.
| alt227 wrote:
| Yeah, everyone says stuff like this but nobody can
| actually produce any reliable sources to show how much
| profit it actually makes. So until you can, its all guess
| work.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Apple is a public company. You can find the numbers
| (broken down into product aka hardware vs service) here:
| https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/fy2025-q3/FY25_Q3_Con
| sol...
| alt227 wrote:
| Feel free to do the maths and prove me wrong then.
| adastra22 wrote:
| The numbers are literally right there. Did you click the
| link? In the last quarter, they had $67B in hardware
| sales, with $45B as costs for that division. That's a
| profit margin (hardware only) of about 33%. They are not
| losing money on hardware.
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| Tim is the CEO, he's going to say whatever he needs to in
| the moment to drive investment.
|
| Apple is and always has been a HW company first.
| alt227 wrote:
| OK So I guess when the CEO of a company explicitly says
| something about their company, we should just ignore it
| because he is 'in the moment'?
| dylan604 wrote:
| Apple has always? Sure, maybe today with collection % of
| sales from apps it looks like a software company. If there
| was no iDevcies, there'd be no need for app store. Your
| link is all about Cook, yet he was not always the CEO. Woz
| didn't care what software you ran, he just wanted the
| computer to be usable so you could run whatever software.
| Jobs wanted to restrict things, but it was still about
| running the hardware. Whatever Cook thinks Apple is _now_
| does not make it _always been_ as you claim
| alt227 wrote:
| You know you might just have a point if you werent
| completely making that all up.
|
| Steve Jobs consistently made the point that Apples
| hardware is the same as everyone elses, what makes them
| different is they make the best software which enables
| the best user experience.
|
| Here see this quote from Steve Jobs which shows that his
| attitude is the complete opposite of what you wrote.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEeyaAUCyZs
| ViktorRay wrote:
| Steve Jobs himself said that Apple sees itself as a software
| company
|
| https://youtu.be/dEeyaAUCyZs
|
| The above link is a video where he mentions that.
|
| It is true that Apple's major software products like iOS and
| MacOS are only available on Apple's own hardware. But the
| Steve Jobs justification for this (which he said in a
| different interview I can't find right now so I will
| paraphrase) is that he felt Apple made the best hardware and
| software in the world so he wanted Apple's customers to
| experience the best software on the best hardware possible
| which he felt only Apple could provide. (I wish I could find
| the exact quote.)
|
| Anyway according to Steve Jobs Apple is a software first
| company.
| hinkley wrote:
| But Steve also clearly believed in Alan Kay's old aphorism:
|
| If you care about software you have to make your own
| hardware.
|
| I'll allow that perhaps Apple considers hardware a means to
| an end. But what an end.
| fidotron wrote:
| What I would do for Snow Leopard on the M class hardware.
| RossBencina wrote:
| You could run it in an emulator.
| asimovDev wrote:
| do you mean literally 10.6 on AS or do you mean something as
| good as it was
| fidotron wrote:
| Something that good.
|
| It was coherent, (relatively) bug free, and lacked the
| idiot level iOSification and nagging that is creeping in
| all over MacOS today.
|
| I haven't had to restart Finder until recently, but now
| even that has trouble with things like network drives.
|
| I'm positive there are many internals today that are far
| better than in Snow Leopard, but it's outweighed by user
| visible problems.
|
| It shouldn't surprise you I think that Android Jelly Bean
| was the best phone OS ever made as well, and they went
| completely in the wrong direction after that.
| astrange wrote:
| It was very easy to lose data in Snow Leopard because
| they hadn't introduced the document autosave system yet.
| That was the next version.
| fidotron wrote:
| You mean it only did things you told it to do? That's a
| feature.
|
| Programs absolutely could have much more controllable
| auto save before for when it made sense.
| astrange wrote:
| "I lose work when the power goes out" is not a feature.
| Neither is "I can't apply security updates because I
| can't restart".
|
| Speaking of security it didn't have app sandboxing
| either.
| fidotron wrote:
| You mean programs could access the file system normally?
| They were absolutely isolated as standard unix processes.
|
| This is what I mean about iOSification - it's trending
| towards being a non serious OS. Linux gets more
| attractive by the day, and it really is the absence of
| proper support of hardware in the class of the M series
| that prevents a critical mass of devs jumping ship.
| astrange wrote:
| The only Unix security boundary is between users. There
| isn't a standard boundary between "a web browser tab" and
| "the file with your credit card info in it".
| TheAtomic wrote:
| last solid MacOS IMO
| sys_64738 wrote:
| The SL GUI enhancements live with us to this day.
| geodel wrote:
| Well besides software that runs in data centers/ cloud most
| other software is turning to crap. And people who think this
| crap is fine have now reached to position of responsibility at
| lot of companies. So things would go only worse from here.
| sho_hn wrote:
| Except community-developed open source software, which
| (slowly, perhaps) keeps getting better and has high
| resistance to enshittification.
| Noaidi wrote:
| This right here is moving me back to GrapheneOS and Linux.
| I was lucky enough to be able to uninstall Liquid glAss
| before the embargo. I will miss the power efficiency of my
| M1, but the trade off keep looking better and better.
|
| being poor, I need to sell my Macbook to get money to pay
| of my 16e, then sell the 16e and use that money to but a
| Pixel 9, then probably a but a Thinkpad Carbon X1. Just
| saying all that to show you the lengths I am going through
| to boycott/battle the enshitification.
| pbronez wrote:
| If you already have an M1 MacBook, why no run Asahi
| Linux?
| Noaidi wrote:
| Is it functional yet? Last I looked at it was about a
| year ago. Do you have any real use experience of it?
| kroaton wrote:
| Look higher up in the thread, someone did a full
| breakdown.
| Aperocky wrote:
| Remember log4j? I don't share your enthusiasm.
|
| At least its open source and free I guess.
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| Wow.
| usefulcat wrote:
| That was a bug, not at all the same thing as
| enshittification.
| Aperocky wrote:
| It was enshittification. A logging framework that looks
| up LDAP servers? Why?
|
| Adding extra features that aren't necessarily needed is
| enshittification, and very not-unix.
| bzzzt wrote:
| It's not really added functionality, more unintended
| consequences of too much flexibility. Java contains JNDI
| (Java naming & directory interface), a very unified
| 'directory' system for all kinds of configuration of
| which LDAP is just one of the backend implementation
| options. The key issue is you can call into other objects
| which is unwise to do when used with untrusted user
| input.
| Aperocky wrote:
| > The key issue is you can call into other objects which
| is unwise to do when used with untrusted user input.
|
| This, and while in this case it is specifically unwise on
| security terms, there are plenty of other example where
| the feature are completely cosmetic and deviates from the
| core user requirements/scenario.
| jacquesm wrote:
| What is your point even? That open source has bugs? The
| closed source does not have such bugs?
| geodel wrote:
| Indeed a software used by thousands of commercial
| products and millions of enterprise applications with
| ZERO dollar support from either must be maintained at
| perfect, bug free level by lazy volunteers. Because
| internet demands it.
| bzzzt wrote:
| Would it even be possible to create today's software
| ecosystems by mandating all libraries are maintained and
| supported to the strictest standards?
|
| That would be the end of open source, hobbyists and
| startup companies because you'd have to pay up just to
| have a basic C library (or hope some companies would have
| reasonable licensing and support fees).
|
| Remember one of the first GNU projects was GCC because a
| compiler was an expensive, optional piece of software on
| the UNIX systems in those days.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That would be the end of the software industry. No
| company outside of aerospace and medical devices is
| capable of delivering this and I even have my doubts
| about those two, though at least they are trying.
| Aperocky wrote:
| You won't have that bug if the logger isn't trying to
| talk to some ldap server.
|
| It's not even about open source or closed source at this
| point. It's about feature creep.
| bzzzt wrote:
| It's not talking to an LDAP server, it's the
| functionality for talking to an LDAP server that is
| causing the issue. Even if you don't need LDAP you're
| still vulnerable when a client can inject information in
| a log message.
| Aperocky wrote:
| Why is this functionality needed in the first place? I
| want to write log, some kind of string, into some kind of
| files, with rotation, maybe even send it somewhere that
| expect logs.
|
| Why parse whatever is in the logs, at all?
|
| Imagine the same stuff in your SSH client, it would parse
| the content before sending them over because a
| functionality requires it to talk to some server
| somewhere, it's insanity.
| bzzzt wrote:
| Log4j contains a very big collection of extensions for
| just about anything including inserting data from various
| sources. Of course it's overkill for lots of situation,
| but nobody ever uses all functionality. It's just that
| nobody can agree on which functionality is useless ;)
| geodel wrote:
| The OSS that keeps getting "better" is one that accept lot
| user feature requests and/or implementation. Else
| maintainers are hostile to users. And when they do accept
| most of those requests and code we all know how it goes.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| Tell that to the people who run gimp development. Open
| source doesn't protect from bad decisions and bad
| directions.
| TheAtomic wrote:
| Yup. And the marketing department is ahead of both of them.
| z3ratul163071 wrote:
| i was about to write exactly that.
| linguae wrote:
| This is not the first time this has happened in Apple's
| history. The transition from the 68k architecture to the
| PowerPC brought major performance improvements, but Apple's
| software didn't take full advantage of it. If I remember
| correctly, even after the PowerPC switch, core elements of the
| classic Mac OS still ran in emulation as late as Mac OS 9.
| Additionally, the classic Mac OS lacked protected memory and
| preemptive multitasking, leading to relatively frequent
| crashes. Taligent and Copland were attempts to address these
| issues, but they both faced development hell, culminating with
| the purchase of NeXT and the development of Mac OS X. But by
| the time Mac OS X was released, PowerPC was becoming less
| competitive than the x86, culminating with the Intel switch in
| 2006. At this point it was Apple's software that distinguished
| Macs from the competition, which remained the case until the M1
| Macs were released five years ago.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Sixteen years ago, John Gruber wrote:
|
| > Hardware and software both matter, and Apple's history
| shows that there's a good argument to be made for developing
| integrated hardware and software. But if you asked me which
| matters more, I wouldn't hesitate to say software. All things
| considered I'd much prefer a PC running Mac OS X to a Mac
| running Windows.
|
| https://daringfireball.net/2009/11/the_os_opportunity
|
| At the time I'd only been a Mac user for a few years and I
| would have strongly agreed. But definitely things have
| shifted-- I've been back on Windows/WSL for a number of
| years, and it's software quality/compatibility issues that
| are a lot of what keeps me from trying another Mac. Certainly
| I'm far more tempted by the hardware experience than I am the
| software, and it's not even really close.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| I bet most people around here would prefer fully supported
| linux over mac os on their apple silicon.
| Romario77 wrote:
| Linux UI is crap compared to Mac.
|
| It's a server or developer box first and a non-technical
| user second.
| timschmidt wrote:
| I've felt the opposite for more than a decade. On Linux,
| it's relatively easy for me to choose a set of
| applications which all use the same UI toolkit.
| Additionally, the web browser is often called "Web
| Browser" in the application launcher, LibreOffice Writer
| "Word Processor", and so on. In general there is far less
| branding and advertisement and more focus on function.
| Linux was the first OS with an "app store" (the package
| manager). CLI utilities available tend to be the full fat
| versions with all the useful options, rather than
| minimalist versions there to satisfy posix compatibility.
| I could go on.
|
| On Linux there is variety and choice, which some folks
| dislike.
|
| But on the Mac I get whatever Apple gives me, and that is
| often subject to the limitations of corporate attention
| spans and development budgets.
| MichealCodes wrote:
| > limitations of corporate attention spans and
| development budgets
|
| And arbitrary turf wars like their war against web
| apis/apps causing more friction for devs and end users.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| I'm a Linux fan and I like that Apple isn't rubber-
| stamping the two new web APIs a week that Google comes up
| with. There are hundreds of them, most of them quite
| small fortunately.
| robenkleene wrote:
| > The web browser is often called "Web Browser" in the
| application launcher, LibreOffice Writer "Word
| Processor", and so on. In general there is far less
| branding and advertisement and more focus on function.
|
| Should Emacs and Vim both be called "Editor" then?
|
| To me, this is actually a great example of the problems
| with Linux as a community, that GUI applications seem to
| just be treated as placeholders (e.g., all word
| processors are the same?), but then its inconsistent by
| _celebrating_ the unique differences between editors like
| Vim and Emacs. Photoshop, Excel, Logic Pro, Final Cut Pro
| are, in my opinion, crown jewels of what we 've
| accomplished in computing, and by extension some of the
| greatest creations of the human race, democratizing tasks
| that in some cases would have cost millions of dollars
| before (e.g., a recording studio in your home).
| Relegating these to generic names like "spreadsheet",
| makes them sound interchangeable, when in my opinion
| they're each individual creations of great beauty that
| should wear their names with pride. They've helped
| improve the trajectory of the human race by facilitating
| many individuals to perform actions they never would have
| had the resources to do otherwise.
| gedy wrote:
| That was maybe the case 10+ years ago but honestly have
| been using Fedora with Gnome on my M1, it's pretty
| polished and nice now.
| pxc wrote:
| Fully supported Linux + proper suspend-to-RAM are the two
| things I want out of Apple Silicon and may never quite
| get. Better online low power states are fine, but I want
| suspend-to-RAM and suspend-then-hibernate.
|
| If I close my laptop for a few days, I don't want
| significant battery drain. If I don't use it for two
| weeks, I want it to still have life left. And I don't
| want to write tens of gigabytes to disk every time I
| close the lid, either!
| zozbot234 wrote:
| What happens if you enable airplane mode before closing
| the laptop? That should power down all radios so battery
| drain should be approximately equivalent to S3 standby.
| ValdikSS wrote:
| Sleep states are not trivial from the security
| perspective, and they've eliminated the issue by just not
| allowing it :)
| astrange wrote:
| It does hibernate. It just takes a long time to do it
| because the experience of waking up from it is bad.
| vuggamie wrote:
| The best part of MacOS for me is the unix tools. The
| command line is a real unix command line. And the rest
| just works. If I need a linux environment I ssh into a
| VPS.
| epistasis wrote:
| Or even just containers on the Mac. Unless you need a GPU
| with specific hardware, or to connect to a cluster,
| there's ever decreasing need to use remote boxes.
| Daneel_ wrote:
| Well, kind of.. the commands on Mac OS all just a little
| bit different and a little bit janky. I still had to
| relearn all the common commands I use in order to
| function. I survived 6 months before I went back to a
| Windows/WSL combo.
| epistasis wrote:
| If you want the GNU versions of tools rather than the Mac
| POSIX versions, then brew can help replace your bin
| directory with all the GNU niceties.
|
| If you're talking about hardware interaction from the
| command line, that's very different and I don't think
| there's a fix.
| MobiusHorizons wrote:
| Notice the op said Unix not Linux. Gnu made a lot of
| incompatible changes from the Unix tools it was cloning.
| Many people in the Linux community prefer the GNU quirks
| (they are definitely more performance optimized for
| example). But if you are talking about Unix, the FreeBSD
| derived userland on a Mac has real Unix lineage.
| ghaff wrote:
| It doesn't matter for everyone/most. But, yes, having a
| Unix command line within MacOS is a pretty big win for
| some of us. Not something I use on a daily basis
| certainly. And I'd probably set up a Linux box (or ssh
| into one) if I really needed that routinely. But it's a
| nice bonus.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > If I need a linux environment I ssh into a VPS.
|
| I want good window management. Linux gives me a huge
| number of options. MacOS - not as much.
| a456463 wrote:
| Unix tools that are barely supported by an external
| community via brew or macports? Mac is not a dev machine.
| It is a dev hostile machine.
| geodel wrote:
| "Fully supported by whom" is the issue and important one.
| Apple won't do it and going by support from "most people
| around here" Hector Martin et al got crumbs for years,
| nowhere near to support the development.
|
| One can just hand wave "Apple must support Linux and all"
| but that is not going to get anything done.
| 7e wrote:
| Linux is a vanity and the illusion is only skin-deep. The
| overall UX truly sucks.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| Which illusion? It's a computer, no more, no less and
| Linux is a perfectly fine interface to that computer.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| I don't understand. From a pure visual standpoint OSX
| beats. Linux is not particularly known for looking good
| or cohesive. But in basically all matters it beats the
| pants of OSX.
| artisin wrote:
| The UX only sucks if you're unwilling to put in a minimal
| amount of time and effort. After that, it has no equal;
| it is, by definition, the opposite of vanity.
| selectodude wrote:
| That's so wild to me - my personal laptop is still a Mac
| but I'm in windows all day for work. Some of the new
| direction of macOS isn't awesome but the basics are still
| rock solid. Touchpad is perfect, sleep works 100% of the
| time for days on end, still has UNIX underneath.
| MichealCodes wrote:
| The basics are not rock solid. Even a core feature such
| as remote management crashes and freezes every 5 minutes
| when you connect from a non-apple machine, many have
| reported this over years but Apple just does Apple.
| Safari is still atrocious when it comes to web api
| supports. The worst part is, with Apple, we do not know
| if these are intentional anti-competitive barriers or
| actual software bugs. I purchased a mac mini simply to
| compile apps via xcode and can say the core experience is
| MUCH more buggy than a fresh Windows or Ubuntu install.
|
| Edit: Hard to call intentionally preventing support for
| web apis a power user thing. This creates more friction
| for basic users trying to use any web app.
|
| Edit2: lol Apple PR must be all over this, went from +5
| to -1 in a single refresh. Flagged for even criticizing
| what they intentionally break.
| butlike wrote:
| They said the basics are rock solid (to which I agree).
| What you're describing, I'd consider a "power user."
| foldr wrote:
| Are those basics? You don't have to use Safari, and I've
| never used remote management over the 20 years or so that
| I've been a Mac user.
| MichealCodes wrote:
| If we dismiss remote management as a non-core feature
| shouldn't we consider installing a new browser to be
| advanced usage as well?
|
| I understand that this post is about MacOS, but yes, we
| are forced to support Safari for iOS. Many of these
| corporate decisions to prevent web apps from functioning
| properly spill over from MacOS Safari to iOS Safari.
| selectodude wrote:
| Safari adds hours of battery life due to its hyper focus
| on power consumption. The level to which web API
| standards are affected is rather immaterial to me. I
| imagine we're different consumers though.
| MichealCodes wrote:
| Adds hours of battery life to the expense of making your
| microphone input completely inaudible due to throttling
| if you background the tab it's running on.
|
| On iOS you cannot even keep a web app running in the
| background. The second they mutlitask, even with an
| audio/microphone active, Apple kills it. Are they truly
| adding battery life or are they cheating by creating
| restrictions that prevent apps from working?
|
| Being able to conduct a voice call through the browser
| seems like a pretty basic use case to me.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| I am in the same boat. I prefer battery life
| MichealCodes wrote:
| Breaking things is not extending battery life. Battery
| life assumes functionality. Breaking functionality to
| extend it is a scapegoat and the break-whatever-you-want
| could be provided as a mode instead of one-size fits all,
| we don't care what breaks approach.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| If you're comparing to Chrome, tests show it's no longer
| true
| astrange wrote:
| Why would you want to support web APIs? They're all just
| Google proposing 5000 new ways for advertisers to
| fingerprint you but doing it through "standards".
| MichealCodes wrote:
| Nice strawman. The core of webapis is about opening up
| lower level functionality from the sandbox/accessibility
| of the web. Beyond audio and video IO, there's great
| stuff coming with webgpu and webNN. Web apps are much
| safer and much more convenient than downloading an app,
| well in theory they could be if support wasn't regularly
| sabotaged to protect a corporate interest in walled
| gardens.
| pico303 wrote:
| Same boat, and 100% agree. I couldn't find a single
| example of Windows or Windows software where I think the
| experience is in any way better. Windows only saving
| grace, as a developer, is WSL.
|
| For a simple example, no app remembers the last directory
| you were working in. The keys each app uses are
| completely inconsistent from app to app. And it was only
| in Windows 11 that Windows started remembering my window
| configuration when I plugged and unplugged a monitor.
| Then there's the Windows 95-style dialog boxes mixed in
| with the Windows 11-style dialog boxes; what a UI mess. I
| spoke with one vendor the other day who was actually
| proud they'd adopted a ribbon interface in their UI "just
| like Office" and I verbally laughed.
|
| From a hardware perspective, I still don't understand why
| Windows and laptop manufacturers can't get sleep working
| right. My Intel MacBook Pro with an old battery still
| sleeps and wakes and lasts for several hours, while my
| new Windows laptop lasts about an hour and won't wake
| from hibernate half the time without a hard reboot.
|
| I think Windows is the "good enough" for most people.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > I couldn't find a single example of Windows or Windows
| software where I think the experience is in any way
| better.
|
| While overall I may say MacOS is better, I would not say
| it's better in _every_ way.
|
| Believe it or not, I had a better experience with 3rd
| party window managers in Windows than on MacOS.
|
| I don't think the automation options in MacOS are better
| than AutoHotKey (even Linux doesn't have something as
| good).
|
| And for corporate work, the integration with Windows is
| _much_ better than anything I 've seen on MacOS.
|
| Mac HW is great. The OS is in that uncanny valley where
| it's UNIX, but not as good as Linux.
| robenkleene wrote:
| > I don't think the automation options in MacOS are
| better than AutoHotKey (even Linux doesn't have something
| as good).
|
| Did you try Keyboard Maestro
| https://www.keyboardmaestro.com/main/ (I've never used
| AutoHotKey and I'd be super curious if there are
| deficiencies in KM relative to it, but Keyboard Maestro
| is, from my perspective, a masterpiece, it's hard to
| imagine it being any better.)
|
| Also I think this statement needs a stronger defense
| given macOS includes Shortcuts, Automator, and
| AppleScript, I don't know much about Windows automation
| but I've never heard of them having something like
| AppleScript (that can say, migrate data between
| applications without using GUI scripting [e.g., iterate
| through open browser tabs and create todos from each of
| them operating directly on the application data rather
| than scripting the UI]).
| wingworks wrote:
| Yeah, the things that AppleScript can do is so crazy.
| I've fully automated keeping 1 tab in Chrome logged into
| a website that insists on logging me out every hour or
| something. (not banking or anything)
| prewett wrote:
| > Windows only saving grace, as a developer, is WSL.
|
| So, Windows' saving grace is being able to run a
| different operating system inside it? Damning with faint
| praise if I ever heard it...
| dboreham wrote:
| Also the control key works.
| simonh wrote:
| Just enable space bar heating.
| jpalawaga wrote:
| Mac also can't get sleep right. Have you tried to make a
| macbook consistently be 'awake' when the lid is closed?
|
| You can't, really. Almost everyone resorts to buying an
| HDMI dongle to fake a display. Apple solved the problem
| at such a low level, the flexibility to run something in
| clamshell mode is broken, even when using
| caffeine/amphetamine/etc etc etc.
|
| So, tradeoffs. They made their laptops go to sleep very
| well, but broke functionality in the process. You can
| argue it's a good tradeoff, just acknowledge that there
| WAS a tradeoff made.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| Counter-Example: I ran an air without a monitor connected
| for years using caffeine, worked perfectly for me..
| strbean wrote:
| > And it was only in Windows 11 that Windows started
| remembering my window configuration when I plugged and
| unplugged a monitor.
|
| Oh god, I'm going to have to bite the bullet and switch
| to 11, huh?
|
| The one thing that has been saving me from throwing my PC
| out the window in rage has been the monitor I have that
| supports a "keep alive" mode where switching inputs is
| transparent to the computers connected to it. So when
| switching inputs between my PC and laptop neither one
| thinks the monitor is being disconnected/reconnected. If
| it wasn't for that, I'd be screaming "WHY ARE YOU MOVING
| ALL MY WINDOWS?" on a regular basis. (Seriously, why are
| you moving all my windows? Sure, if they're on the
| display that was just disconnected, I get you. But when I
| connect a new display, Windows 10 seems to throw a dart
| at the display space for every window and shuffle them to
| new locations. Windows that live in a specific place on a
| specific display 100% of the time just fly around for no
| reason. Please god just stop.)
| oritron wrote:
| > the basics are still rock solid
|
| A friend of mine lost a ton of messages when upgrading
| the OS (and therefore Mail). A number of others were
| affected by the same issue. There have been show-stopper
| bugs in the core functionality of Photos as well. I don't
| get the impression that the basics are Apple's focus with
| respect to software.
| simonask wrote:
| It's not as if such bugs are unheard of for Windows
| users, and certainly not Linux users.
|
| But I've certainly never struggled with getting WiFi to
| work on a Mac, or struggled with getting it to
| sleep/wake, or a host of other problems you routinely
| have on both Windows and Linux.
|
| It's not even close.
| oritron wrote:
| I haven't heard about surprise-your-files-are-deleted
| bugs in core programs of other systems. That's a bigger
| show-stopper in my opinion.
|
| To compare Apples to apples, you'd have to look at a
| Framework computer and agree that wifi is going to work
| out of the box... but here I'm meeting you on a much
| weaker argument: "Apple's software basics are /not/ rock
| solid, but other platforms have issues too"
| robenkleene wrote:
| > I haven't heard about surprise-your-files-are-deleted
| bugs in core programs of other systems. That's a bigger
| show-stopper in my opinion.
|
| I don't find your original anecdote convincing:
|
| > A friend of mine lost a ton of messages when upgrading
| the OS (and therefore Mail).
|
| E.g., what does this mean? They lost mail messages? How
| did they verify they had those messages before and after?
| E.g., file-system operations? GUI search? How much do
| they know about how Mail app stores message (e.g., I used
| to try understand this decades ago, but I expect today
| messages aren't even necessarily always stored locally)?
| How are you syncing mail messages, e.g., using native
| IMAP, or whatever Gmail uses, or Exchange? What's the
| email backend?
|
| E.g. without deeper evidence _this sounds more like a
| mail message indexing issue_ rather than a mail-messages-
| stored-on-disk-issue (in 2025, I 'd personally have zero
| expectations about how Mail manages messages on disk,
| e.g., I'd expect local storage of message to be
| dynamically managed like most applications that aren't
| document-based use a combination of cloud functionality
| and local caching, e.g., found this in a quick search
| https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/471801/ensure-
| maco...), but if you have stronger evidence I'd love to
| hear it. But as presented your extrapolating much
| stronger conclusions than are warranted by the anecdote
| in my opinion.
| oritron wrote:
| Mail deleted a large number of messages but not all of
| them. It was stored in files (which were smaller on disk,
| so not an indexing issue) and recovery required loading
| snapshots from Time Machine, converting to a format
| Thunderbird could import and transitioning to that.
| robenkleene wrote:
| You've only addressed something like 30% of the issues I
| asked about (although I'm honestly impressed you got that
| far), e.g., I wouldn't call Apple Mail an application
| designed to managed a collection of emails on disk. Isn't
| the important question here whether the emails were still
| stored on the server? E.g., or were they using POP?
| afandian wrote:
| I've been using Mac OS since 10.3 and, whilst it's better
| now, I've had a memorable number of of wifi connection
| bugs. And ISTR issues with waking from sleep, but that
| might have been before the Intel migration. It's never
| been immune from bugs.
| philsnow wrote:
| > But I've certainly never struggled with getting WiFi to
| work on a Mac
|
| I want to be able to set different networking options
| (manual DNS, etc) for different wifi networks, but as far
| as I can tell, I can only set them per network interface.
|
| There's something like "locations" but last time I tried
| using that, the entire System Settings.app slowed to a
| crawl / beachballed until I managed to turn it back off.
|
| > or struggled with getting it to sleep/wake
|
| My m1 MBP uses something like 3-5% of its battery per
| hour while sleeping, because something keeps waking it
| up. I tried some app that is designed to help you
| diagnose the issue but came up empty-handed.
|
| ... but yes on both counts, it's light years better than
| my last experience with Linux, even on hardware that's
| supposed to have fantastic support (thinkpads).
| sofixa wrote:
| > sleep works 100% of the time for days on end
|
| In my case it works roughly ~50% of the time. Probably
| because of the Thunderbolt monitor connected to power it,
| idk.
|
| > the basics are still rock solid
|
| The basics like the OS flat out refusing to provide you
| any debugging information on anything going wrong? It's
| rock solid allright. I had an issue where occasionally I
| would get an error "a USB device is using too much power,
| try unplugging it and replugging it." Which device? Why
| the hell would Apple tell you that, where is the fun in
| that?
|
| Key remapping requires installing a keylogger, nor can
| you have a different scroll direction between mouse and
| touchpad. There still isn't window management which for
| the sizes of modern monitors is quite constraining.
|
| > still has UNIX underneath
|
| A very constrained UNIX. A couple of weeks ago I wanted
| to test something (pkcs11-tool signing with a software
| HSM), and turns out that Apple has decided that libraries
| can only be loaded from a number of authorised locations
| which can only be accessed while installing an
| application. You can't just use a dynamic library you're
| linking to, it has to be part of a wider install.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > Key remapping requires installing a keylogger
|
| You can remap with config files: https://hidutil-
| generator.netlify.app
| eitally wrote:
| I've been primarily on a Macbook for the past three
| years, after almost 10 years using Chromebooks as my
| primary machines (yay work at Google). Until 2015, I had
| been a rabid defender of Thinkpads (T-series, mostly),
| and used Windows at work and Linux (mostly Kubuntu) at
| home, from around 2009-2015.
|
| Long story short, I was very happy with the "it just
| works" of ChromeOS, and only let down by the lack of
| support for some installed apps I truly needed in my
| personal life. I tried a Mac back in 2015 but couldn't
| get used to how different it was, and it felt very bulky
| compared to ChromeOS and much slower than the Linux
| machine I'd had, so I switched to a Pixelbook as was
| pretty content.
|
| Fast forward to 2023 when I needed to purchase a new
| personal laptop. I'd bought my daughter a Pixelbook Go in
| 2021 and my son a Lenovo x1 Carbon at the same time.
| Windows was such a dumpster fire I absolutely ruled it
| out, and since I could run all the apps I needed on
| ChromeOS it was between Linux & Mac. I decided to try a
| Mac again, for both work & personal, and I've been a very
| happy convert ever since.
|
| My M2 Pro has been rock solid, and although I regret
| choosing to upgrade to Sequoia recently, it still makes
| me feel better than using Windows. M4 Pro for work is
| amazingly performant and I still can't get over the
| battery efficiency. The nicest thing, imho, is that the
| platform has been around long enough for a mature &
| vibrant ecosystem of quality-of-life utilities to exist
| at this point, so even little niggles (like why do I need
| the Scroll Reverser app at all?) are easy to deal with,
| and all my media editing apps are natively available.
| TheAmazingRace wrote:
| Sequioa is honestly a sorry sight better than Tahoe. It's
| only downhill from here!
| a456463 wrote:
| I come back to my work MBP M2 dead almost everyday and I
| have to leave it charged or wait 15 minutes for Mac to
| decide that it is okay to boot even when the power has
| been connected.
| qwertytyyuu wrote:
| these days i'd rather have macbook running windows than
| macos running on standard windows laptop of the same form
| factor, purely for the efficiency of apple silicon.
| floam wrote:
| It wouldn't be so power efficient anymore.
| lenkite wrote:
| Windows would have beat MacOS only if Microsoft had just
| done one small, teeny-weeny thing - just left the OS alone
| after Win 10.
| xedrac wrote:
| I haven't been able to stomach Windows since Vista, and I
| can barely stomach MacOS. Linux has spoiled me.
| leptons wrote:
| It depends on what you mean by "beat". Windows has a
| vastly larger market share than Apple ever has, or ever
| will.
| dysoco wrote:
| Oh but they absolutely did beat MacOS. The amount of
| people who give a damn about UI polish, response times,
| etc. is insignificant to them.
|
| They got away with pushing ads, online and enterprise
| services, Copilot, etc. to every desktop user.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| I think you meant to say Windows 7...
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Seeing my wife have to deal with BSOD and tedious restarts
| for Windows updates and myriad just to use Teams/Excel
| makes me think the software issues are far worse on the
| Windows side.
|
| Not once in 10 years have I had ti troubleshoot while she
| uses her personal macOS, but a Dell Latitude laptop in 2025
| still can't just "open lid, work, close lid".
|
| And it's slower. And eats more battery.
| klooney wrote:
| Advertisements in Windows seem like a deal breaker to me,
| but I've been gone for a while.
| foobarian wrote:
| To me it's not a MacOS vs Windows thing. It's a hardware
| build quality thing for sure; but even more importantly
| it's the integration with the OS. Now, you could say we
| could get a team together and integrate Windows too, but
| the problem is this is vastly more effective when the
| hardware and software are co-designed in the same house
| with strong feedback loops. As a result Apple's product
| will inevitably be better than those without such an
| organizational backbone.
|
| Quoth the Tao of Programming:
|
| 8.4
|
| Hardware met Software on the road to Changtse. Software
| said: "You are Yin and I am Yang. If we travel together, we
| will become famous and earn vast sums of money." And so
| they set forth together, thinking to conquer the world.
|
| Presently, they met Firmware, who was dressed in tattered
| rags and hobbled along propped on a thorny stick. Firmware
| said to them: "The Tao lies beyond Yin and Yang. It is
| silent and still as a pool of water. It does not seek fame;
| therefore, nobody knows its presence. It does not seek
| fortune, for it is complete within itself. It exists beyond
| space and time."
|
| Software and Hardware, ashamed, returned to their homes.
| larodi wrote:
| Curiously every big player/vendor doing something remotely
| relevant to GPU/NPU/APU etc. sees massive growth. Apple's
| M-processors are much better in terms price/value ratio for
| current ML pipelines. But Apple do not have server line,
| which then seems to be super massive problem for their
| products, even though their products actually compete with
| NVidia in the consumer market, which is very substantial
| position, software or not.
|
| AMD was also lagging with drivers, but now we see OpenAI
| swearing they gonna buy loads of their products, which so
| many people were not favor of liek just 5-7 years ago.
| tantalor wrote:
| Been like that since 1977
| mcv wrote:
| I want this hardware available for other systems.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| That won't happen for now:
|
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/report-apple-is-
| savi...
|
| Apple's chip engineering is top tier, but money also buys
| them a lot of advance.
| ksec wrote:
| Modern ARM C1 Ultra Core is only 10% slower than M5, likely
| even less when you factor in system level cache and memory.
| So the gap isn't as wide as most people think it is.
| hamdingers wrote:
| What laptops is that chip featured in?
| mcv wrote:
| That sounds awesome. Can we get laptops with that thing? We
| should be getting rid of the power hungry x86 stuff.
| samwillis wrote:
| Software is very easy to bloat, expand scope, and grow to do
| more than really needed, or just to release apps that are then
| forgotten about.
|
| Hardware is naturally limited in scope due to manufacturing
| costs, and doesn't "grow" in the same way. You replace features
| and components rather than constantly add to them.
|
| Apple needs someone to come in and aggressively cut scope in
| the software, removing features and products that are not
| needed. Pair it down to something manageable and sustainable.
| pxc wrote:
| > pare down products and features
|
| macOS has way too many products but far too few features. In
| terms of feature-completeness, it's already crippled. What OS
| features can macOS afford to lose?
| coredog64 wrote:
| I would say it's less about losing and more about focus.
| Identify the lines of business you don't want to be in and
| sell those features to a third party who can then bundle
| them for $1/$10/$20. A $2T company just doesn't care, but I
| would bet that those excised features would be good enough
| for a smaller software house.
|
| (I have the same complaint about AWS, where a bunch of
| services are in KTLO and would be better served by not
| being inside AWS)
| panick21_ wrote:
| If you think hardware can't bloat, I suggest you look into
| the history of Intels attempt to replace x86. Or the VAX. Not
| to mention tons of minicomputer companies who built ever more
| complex minis. And not to mention the supercomputer startup
| bubble.
| 6SixTy wrote:
| macOS has like no features already, and they keep removing
| more.
| foofoo12 wrote:
| It must be observed that the Apple enterprise is, above all
| else, a purveyor of fine physical contrivances and apparatus.
|
| Furthermore, they do also engage in the traffic and sale of
| digital programmes wrought by the hands of other, independent
| artisans.
| elicash wrote:
| For Vision Pro, software team has been impressive. And arguably
| outperformed the hardware team.
|
| But this is the exception.
| thomascgalvin wrote:
| > The modern Apple feels like their hardware teams way
| outperforming the software teams.
|
| There aren't a lot of tangible gains left to be made by the
| software teams. The OS is fine, the office suite is fine, the
| entertainment apps are fine.
|
| If "performance" is shoving AI crap into software that was
| already doing what I wanted it to do, I'd rather the devs take
| a vacation.
| butlike wrote:
| There were a few things on that page that made me excited for
| the future of where computing is going, but I do think we're
| going to hit a "lull" in terms of exciting new features until
| some of the really futuristic stuff comes to pass.
|
| Who knows, maybe the era of "exciting computing" is over, and
| iteration will be a more pleasant and subtle gradient curve
| of improvements, over the earth-shattering announcements of
| yore (such as the advent of popular cellular phones).
| scbzzzzz wrote:
| True. I would like to hijack this thread and wante d to
| discuss what we want for software that is not present. For
| me. All i can think of is ondevice , al/ml ( photo editing,
| video editing etc ) and not the ones the current companies
| are trying hard shove down our throats.
|
| May be steve is true. We don't know what we want until some
| one shows it .
| throw_this_one wrote:
| Their software is literally falling apart. ios26 was the
| biggest trash ive ever experienced from a company this big
| vuggamie wrote:
| I'm old enough to remember Windows CE phones crashing during
| phone calls.
| pivo wrote:
| How so? Seriously asking because it works fine for me.
| throw_this_one wrote:
| Buggy. Random slowness in the UI going well below 120hz.
| Massive battery drain for no reason. UI elements just
| looking out of place, big print, random places.
|
| The UI itself is supposed to be intense to render to some
| degree. That's crazy because most of the time it looks like
| an Android skin from 2012.
|
| And on top of this all -- absolutely nobody asked for this.
| No one asked for some silly new UI that is transparent or
| whateveer.
| lijok wrote:
| Sounds like an experience problem
| eloisant wrote:
| Apple have always been a hardware company, like Google have
| always been a software company even if they're doing hardware
| too now.
| steve1977 wrote:
| Google has always been a advertising company
| tempest_ wrote:
| It wasnt always but its defiantly has been the host for the
| DoubleClick parasite it ingested in the early 2000s
| hinkley wrote:
| advertising company/feedlot to hoard good engineers and
| keep them from wandering off and writing a competitor.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _Apple have always been a hardware company..._
|
| Apple (post Apple II) has always been a _systems_ company,
| which is much different. Dell is a hardware company.
| kace91 wrote:
| There are talks of the hardware head replacing Cook.
|
| Hopefully that will bring whatever they're doing right to other
| teams.
| butlike wrote:
| I really liked the energy of the guy who announced the iPhone
| Air this past WWDC or whatever it's called now. John Ternus.
| Hopefully he makes it there (CEO) one day; I'd like to see
| it.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| Ternus is who the parent was referring to, he's SVP of
| hardware engineering and suspected to be Cook's successor.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I pretty much see the Macbook as some fancy toys with mediocre
| software. Maybe the kernel is solid but other software are very
| meh, even comparing to Windows. But I'm definitely biased as a
| Windows/Linux user, and my hobby is system programming so
| naturally a Linux box is more suitable.
|
| Biggest grief with MacOS software:
|
| - Finder is very mediocre comparing to even File explorer in
| Windows
|
| - Scrollbar and other UI issues
|
| Unfortunately I don't think Asahi is going to catch up, and
| Macbook is so expensive, so I'll probably keep buying second
| hand Dell/Lenovo laptop and dump a Linux on top of it.
| lou1306 wrote:
| What makes Mac great is/was the ecosystem of 3rd party tools
| with great UI and features. Apple used to be good enough at
| writing basic 1st-party apps that would mostly just disappear
| into the background and let you do your thing, but they are
| getting increasingly "louder" which... may become a problem.
|
| I still agree that second hand Thinkpads are ridiculously
| better in terms of price/quality ratio, and also more
| environmentally sustainable.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I have to admit, every time I looked into screenshots of
| earlier Macs, like the 68K and PPC ones, I felt I loved the
| UI and such. I even bought a PPC laptop (I think it's a
| maxed out iBook with 1.5GB of RAM) to tinker with PPC
| assembly.
|
| But I could be wrong. Maybe the earlier Macs didn't have
| great software either -- but at least the UI is better.
| prewett wrote:
| Having lived through those days... well, it was good for
| the time, mostly. MacOS was definitely better than
| Windows 3.11, and a lot more whimsical, both the OS and
| Mac software in general, which I miss. The featureset,
| though, was limited. Managing extensions was clunky, and
| until MacOS 10, applications had a fixed amount of RAM
| they could use, which could be set by the user, but which
| was allocated at program start. It was also shared
| memory, like Windows 3.11 and to some extent Windows
| 95/98, so one program could, and routinely did, take down
| the whole OS. With Windows NT (not much adopted by
| consumers, to be fair), this did not happen. Windows NT
| and 2000 were definitely better than MacOS, arguably even
| UI-wise.
|
| I do miss window shading from MacOS 8 or 9, though. I
| think a whimsical skin for MacOS would be nice, too. The
| system error bomb icon was classic, the sad-Mac boot-
| failure icon was at least consolation. Now everything is
| cold and professional, but at least it stays out of my
| way and looks decent.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Interesting. I thought the new MacOS was unix-y? But I
| never owned a Mac back then so not sure. For me Windows
| 2000 is the pinnacle. It doesn't crash (often), supports
| most of the games I played then, and I like the UI
| design.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > - Finder is very mediocre comparing to even File explorer
| in Windows
|
| It really is awful. Why the hell is there no key to delete a
| file? Where's the "cut" option for moving a file? Why is
| there no option for showing ALL folders (ie, /bin, /etc)
| without having to memorize some esoteric key combination?
|
| For fuck's sake, even my home directory is hidden by default.
|
| > - Scrollbar and other UI issues
|
| Disappearing scrollbars make sense on mobile where screen
| real estate is at a premium and people don't typically
| interact with them. It does _not_ make sense on any screen
| that you 'd use a mouse to navigate.
|
| For years, you couldn't even disable mouse acceleration
| without either an esoteric command line or using 3rd party
| software. Even now, you can't disable scroll wheel
| acceleration. I hate that I can't just make a consistent "one
| click = ~2 lines of text" behavior.
|
| I could go on and on about the just outright dumb decisions
| regarding UX in MacOS. So many things just don't make sense,
| and I feel like they were done for the sole purpose of being
| different from everyone else, rather than because of a sense
| of being better.
| kemayo wrote:
| > Why the hell is there no key to delete a file?
|
| Command + backspace.
| cmiller1 wrote:
| > Why the hell is there no key to delete a file?
|
| Cmd+delete? I don't really want it to be a single key as
| it's too easy to accidentally trigger (say I try to delete
| some text in a filename but accidentally bump my mouse and
| lose focus on the name)
| dd_xplore wrote:
| You know IMHO Apple doesn't have any 'Pro' machines. A
| 'Pro' machine isn't about hardware (although it helps), it
| comes mainly from the software.
|
| MacOS doesn't have enough 'openness' to it. There's no
| debug information, lack of tools etc. To this day I can
| still daily drive a XP or 98/2000 machine( if they
| supported the modern web) because all the essentials are
| still intact. You can look around system files, you
| customize them edit them. I could modify game files to
| change their behaviour. I could modify windows registry in
| tons of ways to customize my experience, experiment lot of
| things.
|
| As a 'Pro' user my first expectation is options, options in
| everything I do , which MacOS lacks severely.
|
| All the random hardware that we see launching from time to
| time have drivers for windows but not for Mac. Even linux
| has tons of terminal tools and customisation.
|
| MacOS is like a glorified phone OS. It's weirdly locked
| down at certain places that drive you crazy. Tons of things
| do not have context menus(windows is filled with it).
|
| Window management sucks, there's no device manager! Not
| even cli tools! (Or maybe I'm not aware?) Why can't I simpy
| cut and paste?
|
| There's no API/way to control system elements via
| scripting, windows and linux are filled to the brim with
| these! Even though the UI is good looking I just cannot
| switch to an Apple device (both Mac and iPhone) for these
| reasons. I bought an iPad pro and I'm regretting. There's
| no termux equivalent in iPadOS/iOS , there are some
| terminal tools but they can't use the full processing
| power, they can't multi thread. They can't run in
| background, it's just ridiculous. The iPad Pro is just a
| glorious iPhone. Hardware doesn't make a device 'Pro'
| software does. Video editing isn't a 'Pro' workflow in the
| sense that it can be done in any machine that has
| sufficient oomph. An iPad Pro from 5 years ago will be
| slower than an iPad Air of today, does that make the air a
| 'Pro' device? No!
| astrange wrote:
| > As a 'Pro' user my first expectation is options,
| options in everything I do , which MacOS lacks severely.
|
| It's a bad idea to add an option entirely for the purpose
| of making the product not work anymore.
|
| https://limi.net/checkboxes
|
| > Window management sucks
|
| I'm always mystified reading these kinds of posts on HN
| because it literally always starts out as "macOS is an OS
| for babies" and turns out to mean "macOS doesn't have a
| tiling window manager". Like, cmon man, who cares.
|
| > there's no device manager! Not even cli tools!
|
| `ioreg -l` or `system_profiler`. Why does this matter?
|
| > There's no API/way to control system elements via
| scripting
|
| https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation
| /Ac...
|
| https://developer.apple.com/documentation/XCUIAutomation
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleScript
|
| https://support.apple.com/guide/shortcuts/welcome/ios
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > > Window management sucks
|
| > I'm always mystified reading these kinds of posts on HN
| because it literally always starts out as "macOS is an OS
| for babies" and turns out to mean "macOS doesn't have a
| tiling window manager". Like, cmon man, who cares.
|
| For me, not so much the window management, but task
| management. I very strongly believe that the task bar (I
| guess the Dock bar in MacOS) should have a separate item
| for each open window of an app. If I have 3 Firefox
| windows open, that should be 3 entries in the task/dock
| bar so I can switch between them in a single click. I can
| do this in Windows, can't do it in MacOS.
|
| One of the problems I have with MacOS is that it's not
| obvious how to start a second instance of an app. Sure,
| some apps will have a "New Window" option. But what about
| apps that don't, like Burp Suite? If I bring up the
| launcher, then click Burp Suite when one is already
| loaded, it just shows me the existing one.
| astrange wrote:
| You can't start a second instance of an app. Or rather
| you can (run the app binary from the Terminal) but apps
| are not required to expect you to do this, and it would
| probably lead to data corruption from them writing to
| shared files.
|
| A weakness of this is you can duplicate apps and launch
| the duplicate, even though they have the same bundle ID,
| so they might still fight over things.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| > Why the hell is there no key to delete a file?
|
| Command+Backspace.
| nabla9 wrote:
| Doing good job is rewarded.
|
| Apple's Hardware Chief, John Ternus, seems to be next in line
| for succession to Tim Cook's position.
| utf_8x wrote:
| Interesting, I thought the next in line was Craig Federighi
| wslh wrote:
| I've been thinking whether it could be a reasonable move for
| Apple to launch a cheaper secondary brand, one that offers
| devices capable of running Linux or Windows to reach a broader
| market without cannibalizing its own.
| dawnerd wrote:
| Apple already sells pretty competitively priced computers.
| The base Mac mini for example. For most people that's already
| overkill.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| There has to be a whole different mindset with hardware though.
| Every change has to necessarily be more considered, cross-
| checked. And I don't say this in any way to disparage software
| engineers (hold up hand) but I suspect there's a discipline in
| hardware design that is ... less rigidly adhered to in software
| design. (And a software update containing a revert, though
| undesirable, is always a solution.)
| SCdF wrote:
| I don't think it's the modern Apple, I think that's just Apple.
|
| I remember using iTunes when fixing the name of an album was a
| modal blocking function that had to write to each and every
| MP3, one by one, in the slowest write I have ever experienced
| in updating file metadata. Give me a magnetised needle and a
| steady hand and I could have done it faster.
|
| A long time ago they had some pretty cool design guides, and
| the visual design has often been nice, but other than that I
| don't think their software has been notable for its quality.
| robenkleene wrote:
| Apple makes Logic Pro, Final Cut Pro, Notes, Calendar,
| Contacts, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Freeform, just from a
| "quality" standpoint, I'd rank any of those applications as
| competitive for the "highest quality" app in their category
| (an admittedly difficult thing to measure). In aggregate,
| those applications would make Apple the most effective
| company in the world at making high-quality GUI applications.
|
| Curious if I'm missing something though, is there another
| entity with a stronger suite than that? Or some other angle
| to look at this? (E.g., it seems silly to me to use an MP3
| metadata example when you're talking about the same company
| that makes Logic Pro.)
| bigyabai wrote:
| Do you regularly use the alternatives to these programs?
| Admittedly I'm not cut out to judge the office suite, but
| the consensus in the music world seems to be that Logic Pro
| is awful. It lacks support for lots of plugins and
| hardware, and costs loads for what is essentially a weaker
| value prop than Bitwig or Ableton Live. Most bedroom
| musicians are using Garageband or other cheap DAWs like
| Live Lite, and the professional studios are all bought into
| Pro Tools or Audition. Don't even get me started on the
| number of pros I see willingly use Xcode...
|
| It's not exactly clear to me what niche Apple occupies in
| this market. It doesn't feel like "native Mac UI" is a
| must-have feature for DAWs or IDEs alike, but maybe that's
| just my perspective.
| robenkleene wrote:
| Yes, I use Ableton Live every day.
|
| > It lacks support for lots of plugins and hardware, and
| costs loads for what is essentially a weaker value prop
| than Bitwig or Ableton Live.
|
| This is an obviously silly statement, not only is Logic
| Pro competitively priced ($200, relative to $100-$400 for
| Bitwig, $99-$750 for Live), but those applications
| obviously have different focuses than Logic Pro (sound
| design and electronic music, versus the more general-
| purpose and recording focus of Logic Pro, also you'd be
| hard pressed to find _anyone_ who doesn 't think Logic
| Pro comes with the best suite of stock plugins of any
| DAW, so the value prop angle is a particularly odd
| argument to make [i.e., Logic Pro is pretty obviously
| under priced]).
|
| But all this isn't that important because many of these
| applications are great. DAWs are one of the most
| competitive software categories around and there are
| several applications folks will vehemently defend as the
| best and Logic Pro is unequivocally one of them.
|
| > Most bedroom musicians are using Garageband or other
| cheap DAWs like Live Lite, and the professional studios
| are all bought into Pro Tools or Audition.
|
| This is old, but curious if you have a better source for
| your statement
| https://blog.robenkleene.com/2019/06/10/2015-digital-
| audio-w...
|
| Found a more recent survey https://www.production-
| expert.com/production-expert-1/2024-d...
|
| > We can see that Pro Tools for music is the most popular
| choice, with Logic for music second and Pro Tools for
| post coming third.
|
| Note that I'd say Logic Pro's popularity is actually
| particularly notable since it's not crossplatform, so the
| addressable market is far smaller than the other big
| players. It's phenomenal popular software, both in terms
| of raw popularity and fans who rave about it. E.g., note
| the contrast in how people talk about Pro Tools vs. Logic
| Pro. Logic Pro has some of the happiest users around, but
| Pro Tools customers talk like they feel like their
| hostages to the software. That difference is where the
| _quality_ argument comes in.
| bigyabai wrote:
| That is an awfully large amount of text for what amounts
| to an admission that Logic Pro is lower quality software
| than Pro Tools. Your comment reeks of all the hallmarks
| of Reality Distortion Syndrome, while I'm willing to
| argue on merits you simply sound smitten by Apple's
| (rapidly degenerating) accumen for visual design. In the
| other response, you're telling off a _perfectly valid
| criticism_ of Apple software because they won 't fulfill
| your arbitrary demand for a better-looking DAW. Are you
| even engaging with the point they're trying to make?
|
| I'm sorry to say it, but I genuinely think you're
| detached from the way professionals evaluate software.
| While I enjoyed my time on macOS when Apple treated it
| like a professional platform, I have no regrets leaving
| it behind or it's "quality" software. Apple Mail fucking
| sucks, iCloud is annoying as sin, the Settings App only
| got worse year-over-year and the default Music app is
| somehow slower than iTunes from 2011. Ads pop up
| everywhere, codecs and filesystems go unsupported due to
| greed, and hardware you own gets randomly depreciated
| because you didn't buy a replacement fast enough.
|
| If that's your life, go crazy. People like you helped me
| realize that Macs aren't made for people like me.
| robenkleene wrote:
| > That is an awfully large amount of text for what
| amounts to an admission that Logic Pro is lower quality
| software than Pro Tools.
|
| I _definitely_ didn 't say this. Pro Tools likely has
| higher marketshare than Logic Pro, but I don't think
| anyone would conflate that with quality. I only brought
| up marketshare because you framed Logic Pro as being
| unpopular, which is just objectively not true.
|
| > I'm sorry to say it, but I genuinely think you're
| detached from the way professionals evaluate software.
|
| I literally think I've spent more time trying to
| understand this than practically anyone else e.g.,
| https://blog.robenkleene.com/2023/06/19/software-
| transitions... but also my blog archives
| https://blog.robenkleene.com/archive/, it's one of the
| main subjects I think about and write about.
|
| Note that how professionals evaluate software is
| tangential to what "quality" means in the context of
| software. E.g., I don't think anyone would argue Adobe is
| the paragon of software quality, but they're arguably the
| most important GUI software there is for creative
| professionals.
|
| Both topics are very interesting to me, what software
| professionals use and why, and what constitutes quality
| in software.
|
| > In the other response, you're telling off a perfectly
| valid criticism of Apple software because they won't
| fulfill your arbitrary demand for a better-looking DAW.
| Are you even engaging with the point they're trying to
| make?
|
| I'm not sure what this means, who's talking about a
| "better-looking DAW" and which point am I not engaging
| with?
| SCdF wrote:
| Of those apps you've listed that I've used, none of them
| have been notable for being high quality to me, though as
| you say it's difficult to measure. For me I would rate them
| somewhere between unremarkable (notes, calendar,
| contacts!?) and awkward (pages, numbers, keynote). If you
| asked me to guess what desktop software Apple makes that
| people rate highly, I never would have guessed any of
| those, except _maybe_ Logic[1] and Final Cut, though
| ironically those are two of the three I've never used.
|
| I also think you're confusing what I wrote. It's not a
| competition.
|
| I have just found that Apple's hardware on desktop has been
| stronger than their software, in my experience (periodic
| sporadic use, ~2006->now).
|
| [1] and now from a sibling comment I hear that perhaps
| people regard that tool as bad, so there you go, they jury
| is clearly out
| robenkleene wrote:
| What software do you find to be higher quality and why?
| That's the only valid way of even trying to have this
| conversation.
|
| E.g., I'd rank something like VS Code "lower quality"
| because when I launch VS Code, I can see each layer of
| the UI pop in as it's created, e.g., first I see a blank
| window, then I see window chrome being loaded, then a I
| see a row of icons being loaded on the left. This gives
| an impression of the software not being solid, because it
| feels like the application is struggling just to display
| the UI.
|
| > I also think you're confusing what I wrote. It's not a
| competition.
|
| > I have just found that Apple's hardware on desktop has
| been stronger than their software, in my experience
| (periodic sporadic use, ~2006->now).
|
| I disagree with this, _the only way to make an argument
| that Apple has deficiencies in their software is to
| demonstrate that other software is higher quality than
| Apples_. Otherwise it could just be Apple 's quality
| level is the maximum feasible level of quality.
|
| > unremarkable (notes, calendar, contacts!?) and awkward
| (pages, numbers, keynote).
|
| This is laughable, Notes is unremarkable? Give me a
| break, and Keynote is awkward? Have you ever Google'd how
| people feel about these applications?
|
| I'd argue a critic only has value if they're willing to
| offer their own taste for judgement.
| 7e wrote:
| Apple relies heavily on H1-B slave labor. They don't pay their
| software teams enough to be competitive and they run with only
| about a third of the headcount they need to polish the
| software. Thus, they have mediocre talent and not enough of it.
| Penny-wise, pound foolish.
| whitehexagon wrote:
| I dunno, didnt they already crack the 400GB/s memory bandwidth
| some years ago? This seems like just another small bump to
| handle latest OS effects sludge.
|
| Now the M1 range, that really was an impressive 'outperform'
| moment of engineering for them, but otherwise this is just a
| clock-work MBA driven trickle of slightly better over-hyped
| future eWaste.
|
| To outperform during this crisis, hardware engineers worth
| their salt need to designing long lived boxes with internals
| that can be easily repaired or upgraded. "yeah but the RAM
| connections are fiddly" Great, now that sounds like a challenge
| worth solving.
|
| But you are right about the software. Installing Asahi makes me
| feel like I own my compter again.
| astroflection wrote:
| https://asahilinux.org/
|
| "Linux on Apple Silicon: Asahi Linux aims to bring you a
| polished Linux(r) experience on Apple Silicon Macs."
|
| Why the "(r)" after Linux? I think this is the first time
| I've seen this.
| utf_8x wrote:
| The Linux "brand" is trademarked by Linus Torvalds,
| presumably to stop things like "Microsoft(r) Linux(r)" from
| happening...
| tyrellj wrote:
| This seems to be pretty true in general. SBC companies are not
| competing with Raspberry Pi because their software is quite a
| bit behind (boot loaders, linux kernel support, etc). Particle
| released a really cool dev board recently, but the software is
| lacking. Qualcomm struggled with their new CPU launch with poor
| support as well. It sometimes takes a while for new Intel
| processor features to be supported in the toolchains, kernel,
| and then get used in software.
|
| Aside from that, I think of Apple as a hardware company that
| must write software to sell their devices, maybe this isn't
| true anymore but that's how I used to view them. Maintaining
| and updating as much software as Apple owns is no small task
| either.
| amelius wrote:
| Yes. And their consumer teams are way outperforming their
| business teams.
| oofbey wrote:
| In a sense, hardware's job is easier, because the goals are
| more clear. Make it faster, and more power efficient. Vast
| amounts of complexity within those goals. But try to summarize
| the north-star vision for a complex software project like an OS
| in terms anywhere close as simply as this.
| mproud wrote:
| The hardware team has always shined, but how about one example
| of this:
|
| The PowerBook from the mid 1990's were hugely successful,
| especially the first ones, which were notable for what we now
| take for granted: pushing the keyboard back allowing space for
| palm rests. Wikipedia says at one time Apple had captured 40%
| of the laptop market. All the while the '90s roared on, Apple
| was languishing, looking for a modern OS.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Apple is a hardware company. This has always been the case.
| It's not just the modern Apple.
| gloosx wrote:
| From my vast experience with MacOS, Apple is notoriously bad at
| the most basic software, like notes or calculator
| textlapse wrote:
| It does feel like Apple is firing on all cylinders for their
| core competencies.
|
| Software (iOS26), services (Music/Tv/Cloud/Apple Intelligence)
| and marketing (just keep screaming Apple Intelligence for 3
| months and then scream Liquid Glass) ---- on the other hand
| seem like they are losing steam or very reactive.
|
| No wonder John Ternus is the widely anticipated to replace Tim
| Cook (and not Craig).
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| No M5 mac mini?
| randomtoast wrote:
| A unified memory bandwidth of 1,224 gigabits per second is quite
| impressive.
| vardump wrote:
| Probably gigabytes (GB) and not gigabits (Gb)?
|
| Edit: gigabits indeed. Confusing, my old M2 Max has 400 GB/s
| (3200 gigabits per second) bandwidth. I guess it's some sort of
| baseline figure for the lowest end configuration?
|
| Edit 2: 1,224 Gbps equals 153 GB/s. Perhaps M5 Max will have
| 153 GB/s * 4 = 612 GB/s memory bandwidth. Ultra double that. If
| anyone knows better, please share.
| mihau wrote:
| why? M3 Ultra already had 800 GB/s (6400 gbps) memory bandwidth
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| But what did the base M3 have? Why compare to different
| categories?
|
| Edit: Apparently 100GB/s, so a 1.5x improvement over the M3
| and a 1.25x improvement over the M4. That seems impressive if
| it scales to Pro, Max and Ultra.
| sapiogram wrote:
| And that was already impressive. High-end gaming computers
| with dual-channel DDR5 only reach ~100GB/s of CPU memory
| bandwidth.
| Aurornis wrote:
| High end gaming computers have far more memory bandwidth in
| the GPU, though. The CPU doesn't need more memory bandwidth
| for most non-LLM tasks. Especially as gaming computers
| commonly use AMD chips with giant cache on the CPU.
|
| The advantage of the unified architecture is that you can
| use all of the memory on the GPU. The unified memory
| architecture wins where your dataset exceeds the size of
| what you can fit in a GPU, but a high end gaming GPU is far
| faster if the data fits in VRAM.
| RossBencina wrote:
| Right, but high-end gaming GPUs exceed 1000GB/s and that's
| what you should be comparing to if you're interested in any
| kind of non-CPU compute (tensor ops, GPU).
| Rohansi wrote:
| And you can find high-end (PC) laptops using LPDDR5x
| running at 8533 MT/s or higher which gives you more
| bandwidth than DDR5.
| modeless wrote:
| Nvidia DGX Spark has 273 GB/s (2184 gigabits with your units)
| and people are saying it's a disappointment because that's not
| enough for good AI performance with large models. All the
| neural accelerators in the world won't make it competitive in
| speed with discrete GPUs that all have way more bandwidth.
| hannesfur wrote:
| > All the neural accelerators in the world won't make it
| competitive in speed with discrete GPUs that all have way
| more bandwidth.
|
| That's true for the on-GPU memory but I think there is some
| subtlety here. MoE models have slimmed the difference
| considerably in my opinion, because not all experts might fit
| into the GPU memory, but with a fast enough bus you can
| stream them into place when necessary.
|
| But the key difference is the type of memory. While NVIDIA
| (Gaming) GPUs ship with HBM memory ship for a while now, the
| DGX Spark and the M4 use LPDDR5X which is the main source for
| their memory bottleneck. And unified memory chips with HBM
| memory are definitely possible (GH200, GB200), they are just
| less power efficient on low/idle load.
|
| NVIDIA Grace sidestep: They actually use both HBM3e (GPU) and
| LPDDR5X (CPU) for that reason (load characteristics).
|
| The moat of the memory makers is just so underrated...
| Havoc wrote:
| I was looking at that number and thinking opposite - that's
| oddly slow at least in context of new apple chip.
|
| Guessing that's their base tier and it'll increase on the
| higher spec/more mem models.
| Retr0id wrote:
| Perhaps they're worried that if they make the memory
| bandwidth _too_ good, people will start buying consumer apple
| devices and shoving them into server racks at scale.
| tiahura wrote:
| No 16"?
| adamch wrote:
| They'll announce that along with M5 Pro and Max in March or so.
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| And here I am, selling my Macbook M4 Pro to buy a Macbook Air and
| a dedicated gaming machine. I've tried gaming on the Macbook with
| Heroic, GPTK, Whiskey, RPCS3 emu and some native. When a game
| runs, the performance is stunning for a Laptop - but there is
| always glitches, bugs and annoyances that take out the joy.
| Needles to mention lack of support from any sort of online
| multiplayer, due to the lack of anticheat support.
|
| I wish Apple would take gaming more seriously and make GPTK a
| first class citizen such as Proton on Linux.
| SigmundA wrote:
| Yep, I use Moonlight / Sunshine / Apollo to stream from my
| gaming PC, so I still use my Mac setup but get nearly perfect
| windows gaming with PC elsewhere in house.
|
| This has been by far the best setup until Apple can take gaming
| seriously, which may never happen.
| bamboozled wrote:
| Sometimes I just feel like buying the latest and greatest game,
| I have an m4 too, the choices are usually quite abysmal. I
| agree.
| qnpnp wrote:
| My solution is cloud gaming in that case, such as GeforceNow
| (for compatible games), or Shadow (for a whole PC to do as
| you please).
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Many people blame the lack of OpenGL/Vulkan... but I really
| don't buy it. It doesn't pass the sniff test as an objection.
| PlayStation doesn't support OpenGL/Vulkan (they have their own
| proprietary APIs, GNM, GNMX, PSSL). Nintendo supports Vulkan
| but performance is so bad, almost everyone uses the proprietary
| API (NVN / NVN2). Xbox obviously doesn't accept OpenGL/Vulkan
| either, requiring DirectX. Understanding of Metal is widespread
| in mobile gaming, so it's weird AAA couldn't pull from that
| industry if they wished.
| coldpie wrote:
| The primary reason is Apple's environment is too unstable for
| gaming's most common business model. Most games are
| developed, released, and then sold for years and years with
| little or no maintenance. Additionally, gamers expect the
| games they purchased to continue to work indefinitely. Apple
| regularly breaks backwards compatibility in a wide variety of
| ways (code signing requirements; breaking OS API changes;
| hardware architecture changes). That means software run on
| Apple OSes must be constantly maintained or else it will
| eventually stop working. Most games aren't developed like
| that.
|
| No one who was forced to write a statement like [this](https:
| //help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/5E0D-522A-4E62-B6...) is
| going to be enthusiastic about continuing to work with Apple.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| I've heard this argument, but it also doesn't pass the
| sniff test in 2025.
|
| 1. When is the next transition on bits? Is Apple going to
| suddenly move to 128-bit? No.
|
| 2. When is the next transition on architecture? Is Apple
| going to suddenly move back to x86? No.
|
| 3. When is the next API transition? Is Apple suddenly going
| to add Vulkan or reinvigorate OpenGL? No. They've been
| clear it's Metal since 2014, 11 years ago. That's plenty of
| time for the industry to follow if they cared, and mobile
| gaming has adopted it without issue.
|
| We might as well complain that the PlayStation 4 was
| completely incompatible with the PlayStation 3.
| coldpie wrote:
| I mean, I worked in this space, and I'm telling you why
| many of the people I worked with weren't interested in
| supporting Apple. I'm happy to hear your theories if you
| don't like mine, though.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| I think the past bit people, but unlike the PS4
| transition or gaming consoles in the past (which were
| rarely backwards compatible), there wasn't enough
| cultural momentum to plow through it... leaving "don't
| support Apple" as a bit of a institutional memory at this
| point, even though the odds of another transition seem
| almost nonexistent. What would it even be? 128 bit? Back
| to x86? Notarization++? Metal 4 incompatible with Metal
| 1?
| coldpie wrote:
| Yeah, I buy that, so I think we are actually agreeing
| with each other. The very rough backwards support story
| Apple has had for the past decade, which I mentioned, has
| made people uninterested in supporting the platform, even
| if they're better about it now, as you claim (though I'm
| unconvinced about that personally, having worked on macOS
| software for more than a decade).
|
| > What would it even be? 128 bit? Back to x86?
| Notarization++? Metal 4 incompatible with Metal 1?
|
| Sure, I can think of lots of things. Every macOS update
| when I worked in this space broke something that we had
| to go fix. Code signature requirements change a bit in
| almost every release, not hard to imagine a 10-year-old
| game finally running afoul of some new requirement. I can
| easily see them removing old, unmaintained APIs. OpenGL
| is actively unmaintained and I would guess a massive
| attack vector, not hard to see that going away. Have you
| ever seen their controller force feedback APIs? Lol,
| they're so bad, it's a miracle they haven't removed those
| already.
| bigyabai wrote:
| > even though the odds of another transition seem almost
| nonexistent.
|
| You see, the existence of that "almost" is already less
| confidence than developers have on every game console as
| well as Linux and Windows.
| fruitworks wrote:
| What happens when apple switches to riscv, or depreciates
| versions of metal in a backwards incompatible way, or
| mandates some new code signing technique?
|
| The attitude in the apple developer ecosystem is that
| apple tells you to jump, and you ask how high.
|
| You could complain that Playstation 4 software is
| incompatible with Playstation 3. This is the PC gaming
| industry, there are higher standards for the
| compatibility of software that only a couple companies
| can ignore.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Apple will never transition to RISC-V; especially when
| they cofounded ARM. They have 35 years of institutional
| knowledge in ARM. Their cores and techniques are licensed
| and patented with mixtures of their own IP and ARM-
| compatible IP. That is decades away, if ever. Even the
| assumption RISC-V will eventually achieve equality with
| ARM performance is untested; as sometimes ISAs do fail at
| scale (Itanium anyone? While unlikely to repeat; even a
| discovered 5% structural difference in the negative would
| handicap adoption permanently.)
|
| "This is the PC gaming industry"
|
| Who said Apple needed to present themselves as a PC
| gaming alternative over a console alternative?
| fruitworks wrote:
| Consoles are dying and PCs are replacing them. Like the
| original commenter suggested, people want to run PC
| games. The market has decided that the benefits of
| compatibility outweigh the added complexity. On the PC
| you have access to a massive expanding back-catalog of
| old software, far more competition in the market, mods,
| and you're able to run whatever software you want
| alongside games (discord, teamspeak, game streaming,
| etc.).
|
| Macs are personal computers, whether or not they come
| from some official IBM Personal Computer compatibility
| bloodline.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Steam Deck - 6 million
|
| Sega Saturn - 9 million
|
| Wii U - 13 million
|
| PlayStation 5 - 80 million
|
| Nintendo Switch - 150 million
|
| Nintendo Switch 2 opening weekend - 4 million in 3 days
|
| Sure.
| ascagnel_ wrote:
| For comparison, the lifetime sales of the first Nintendo
| Switch would be considered a good year for iPhone sales
| -- six generations of phones sold >150MM units.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-
| selling_mobile_ph...
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| And in the last 48 hours, Steam peaked at 39.5M users
| online, providing a highly pessimistic lower-bound on how
| many PC gamers there are.
|
| https://store.steampowered.com/stats/stats/
|
| If you consider time zones (not every PC gamer is online
| at the same time), the fact that it's not the weekend,
| and other factors, I'd estimate the PC gaming audience is
| at _least_ 100M.
|
| Unfortunately, there's no possible way to get an exact
| number. There are multiple gaming PC manufacturers, not
| to mention how many gaming PCs are going to be built by
| hand. I'm part of a PC gaming community, and nearly 90%
| of us have a PC built by either themselves or a
| friend/family. https://pdxlan.net/lan-stats/
| jolux wrote:
| > I've heard this argument, but it also doesn't pass the
| sniff test in 2025.
|
| I mean, it's at least partially true. I used to play
| BioShock Infinite on my MacBook in high school, there was
| a full port. Unfortunately it's 32 bit and doesn't run
| anymore and there hasn't been a remaster yet.
| galad87 wrote:
| Game developers make most of the money shortly after a game
| release, so having a 15 years old game not working anymore
| shouldn't make much difference in term of revenues.
|
| Anyway, the whole situation was quite bad. Many games were
| still 32-bit, even if macOS itself had been mainly 64-bit
| for almost 10 years or more. And Valve didn't help either,
| the Steam store is full of 64-bit mislabeled as 32-bit.
| They could have written a simple script to check whether a
| game is actually 64-bit or not, instead they decided to do
| nothing and keep their chaos.
|
| The best solution would have been a lightweight VM to run
| old 32-bit games, nowadays computer are powerful enough to
| do so.
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| I don't buy it either, because Apples GPTK works similar as
| Proton - they have a DX12-to-Metal Layer that works quite
| well - if it works. And their GPTK is based on wine, just as
| proton. It is more other annoyances like lack of steam
| support. There are patched version of steam circulating that
| run in GPTK though (offline mode) but that is where
| everything gets finnicky and brittle. It is mostly community
| efforts, and I think gaming could be way better on Apple if
| they embrace the Proton-approach that they started with GPTK.
| ldoughty wrote:
| Apple collects no money from Steam sales, so they don't see
| a reason to support it.
|
| You don't buy Apple to use your computer they way you want
| to use it. You buy it to use it the way they tell you to.
| E.g. "you're holding it wrong" fiasco.
|
| In some ways this is good for general consumers (and even
| developers, with limited config comes less
| unpredictablilty)... However this generally is bad for
| power users or "niche" users like Mac gamers.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Apple collects no money from Photoshop, Microsoft, or
| anything else that runs on the Mac besides the tiny
| minority of apps sold on the Mac App Store.
|
| Not to mention many subscription services on iOS that
| don't allow you to subscribe through the App Store.
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| > Apple collects no money from Steam sales, so they don't
| see a reason to support it.
|
| That is true, but now they are in a position where their
| hardware is actually more affordable and powerful than
| their Windows/x86 counterpart - and Win 11 is a shitload
| of adware and an annoyance in itself, layered ontop of a
| OS. They could massively expand their hardware sales to
| the gaming sector.
|
| I'm eyeing at a framework Desktop with an AMD AI 395 APU
| for gaming (I am happy with just 1080p@60) and am looking
| at 2000EUR to spend, because I wan't a small form factor.
| Don't quote me on the benchmarks, but a Mac Mini on M4
| Pro is probably cheaper and more powerful for gaming - IF
| it had proper software support.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| PlayStation, Nintendo, and Xbox all have 10s of millions of
| gamers each. Meanwhile MacOS makes up ~2% of steam users
| which is probably a pretty good proxy for the number of MacOS
| gamers.
|
| Why would I do anything bespoke _at all_ for such a tiny
| market? Much less an entirely unique GPU API?
|
| Apple refusing to support OpenGL and Vulkan absolutely hurt
| their gaming market. It increased the porting costs for a
| market that was already tiny.
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| > Why would I do anything bespoke at all for such a tiny
| market?
|
| Because there is a huge potential here to increase market
| share.
| sapiogram wrote:
| > I wish Apple would take gaming more seriously and make GPTK a
| first class citizen such as Proton on Linux.
|
| Note that games with anticheat don't work on Linux with Proton
| either. Everything else does, though.
| rpdillon wrote:
| Many of them do, but it's a game of cat and mouse, so it's
| more hit and miss than I would like.
| dralley wrote:
| Several games with anticheat work. But it's up to the
| developers whether they check the box that allows it to work,
| which is why even though both Apex Legends and Squad use Easy
| Anticheat, Squad works and Apex does not.
|
| Of course some anticheats aren't supported at all, like EA
| Javelin.
| ascagnel_ wrote:
| Apex Legends is an interesting case because EA/Respawn
| initially shipped with first-class support for the Steam
| Deck (going as far as to make changes to the game client so
| it would get a "Verified" badge from Valve) -- including
| "check[ing] the box that allows it to work". However, the
| observation was that the anti-cheat code on Linux wasn't as
| effective, so they eventually dropped support for it.
|
| https://forums.ea.com/blog/apex-legends-game-info-hub-
| en/dev...
| bob1029 wrote:
| > lack of anticheat support.
|
| I just redid my windows machine to get at TPM2.0 and secure
| boot for Battlefield 6. I did use massgrave this time because
| I've definitely paid enough Microsoft taxes over the last
| decade. I thought I would hate this new stuff but it runs much
| better than the old CSM bios mode.
|
| Anything not protected by kernel level anti cheats I play on my
| steam deck now. Proton is incredible. I am shocked that games
| like Elden Ring run this well on a linux handheld.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| Honestly, gaming consoles are so much cheaper and "no hassle."
| I never games on my Mac.
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| More expensive on the long run, as the games are more
| expensive and you need some kind of subscription to play
| online.
| dlojudice wrote:
| Good point. Many people (including me) switched to Apple
| Silicon with the hope (or promise?) of having just one computer
| for work and leisure, given the potential of the new
| architecture. That didn't happen, or only partially, which is
| the same.
|
| In my case, for software development, I'd be happy with an
| entry-level MacBook Air (now with a minimum of 16GB) for $999.
| ryao wrote:
| Off the top of my head, here is what that needs:
| 1. Implementing PR_SET_SYSCALL_USER_DISPATCH 2.
| Implementing ntsync 3. Implementing OpenGL 4.6 support
| (currently only OpenGL 4.1 is supported) 4. Implementing
| Vulkan 1.4 with various extensions used by DXVK and
| vkd3d-proton.
|
| That said, there are alternatives to those things.
| 1. Not implementing this would just break games like Jurassic
| World where DRM hard codes Windows syscalls. I do not believe
| that there are many of these, although I could be wrong.
| 2. There is https://github.com/marzent/wine-msync, although
| implementing ntsync in the XNU kernel would be better. 3.
| The latest OpenGL isn't that important these days now that
| Vulkan has been widely adopted, although having the latest
| version would be nice to have for parity. Not many things would
| suffer if it were omitted. 4. They could add the things
| needed for MoltenVK to support Vulkan 1.4 with those extensions
| on top of Metal:
|
| https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK/issues/203
|
| It is a shame that they do not work with Valve on these things.
| If they did, Proton likely would be supported for MacOS from
| within Steam and the GPTK would benefit.
| hannesfur wrote:
| I agree--the difference between the different compatibility
| layers and native games is very steep at times. Death Stranding
| on my M2 Pro looks so good it's hard to believe, but running
| GTA Online is so brittle and clunky... Even when games have
| native macOS builds, it's rare to find them with Apple Silicon
| support (and even rarer with Metal support). There is a notable
| exception though: Arma 3 has experimental Apple Silicon
| support, though it comes with significant limitations.
| (Multiplayer, flying & mods) Although I don't believe it's in
| Apple's interest, gaming on Linux might become an option in the
| future, even on Mac, but the lack of ARM builds is an even
| bigger problem there...
|
| Since I am playing mostly MSFS 2024 these days I currently use
| GeForce Now which is fine, but cloud gaming isn't still quite
| there yet...
| kllrnohj wrote:
| > Death Stranding on my M2 Pro looks so good it's hard to
| believe,
|
| Death Stranding is a great looking game to be sure, but it's
| also kinda hard to get excited about a 5 year old game
| achieving rtx 2060 performance on a $2000+ system. And that
| was apparently worthy of a keynote feature...
| imcritic wrote:
| What about wine flavor from crossdressers?
| ed_elliott_asc wrote:
| Pretty sure you don't mean crossdressers!
|
| Codeweavers?
| coldpie wrote:
| Little of column A, little of column B ;) This was a fun
| day in the office:
| https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/jwhite/2011/1/18/all-
| dresse...
| dimgl wrote:
| Yeah I agree. If it weren't for gaming I would have already
| uninstalled Windows permanently. It's really unfortunate
| because it sticks out as the one product in my house that I
| truly despise but I can't get rid of, due to gaming.
|
| I've been trying to get Unreal Engine to work on my Macbook but
| Unity is an order of magnitude easier to run. So I'm also stuck
| doing game development on my PC. The Metal APIs exist and
| apparently they're quite good... it's a shame that more engines
| don't support it.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| I can't sell my MacBook Pro because the speakers are so
| insanely good. Air can't compare. The speakers are worth the
| extra kilos.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| I have never once used my laptop speakers. Not saying youre
| wrong but its crazy how different priorities for products can
| be
| prewett wrote:
| I shocked when I tried out the 2019 MBP speakers, they were
| almost as good as my (low-end) studio headphones. I was
| even more shocked with the M2 speakers, which are arguably
| better (although not as flat frequency response, I think,
| there definitely is something a little artificial, but it
| sounds really good). I really could not imagine laptop
| speakers being even close to par to decent headphones.
| Perhaps they aren't on par with $400 headphones, I've never
| had any of those. But now by preference I listen on the
| laptop speakers. It's not a priority--I'm totally happy to
| go back to the headphones--more like an unexpected perk.
| adastra22 wrote:
| But why would you ever use the speakers?
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| I work alone- I can use the speakers at any volume
| without bothering anybody or wearing anything in my ears
| or on my head. It's wonderful.
| mrcwinn wrote:
| Going back to the Air's screen from your Pro will be a steep
| fall.
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| Not really, 95% of the time I use it in a dock with 2
| external screens.
| ge96 wrote:
| I'm gonna be looking for a 4080 in SFF form factor since my
| current gaming rig can't get upgraded to win 11. Also I
| wouldn't mind a smaller desktop.
|
| edit: for now I'll get that win 10 ESU
| gbil wrote:
| On top of that, what is the strategy from Apple on gaming?
| Advertise extra performance and features that you only get if
| you upgrade your whole device? This is non-sustainable to put
| it mildly. There are egpu enclosures with TB5, developing
| something like that for the Mac would make more sense if they
| really cared about gaming anyhow.
| jasoneckert wrote:
| With the same number and types (P/E) of cores, the M5 seems more
| like a feature refinement over M4. I wonder if this is a CPU that
| Apple released primarily for AI marketing purposes and
| perception, rather than to push the envelope.
| willahmad wrote:
| Are we going to see SOTA local coding models anytime soon with
| this hardware or is it still long way to go?
| Etheryte wrote:
| You can already do that, just how slow or fast you go depends
| on how much you're ready to pay for memory. It's a $1200
| premium to go from 36GB to 128GB of unified memory, that cost
| is hard to justify unless you really need it, or if someone
| else is paying.
| willahmad wrote:
| None is comparable to GPT-5 or Sonnet 4.5 experience
| mertbio wrote:
| Yet.
| elzbardico wrote:
| Frankly, right now I am way more satisfied with
| qwen-3-coder-420 using Cerebras inference than with those
| more powerful models.
|
| Inference speed and fast feedback matter a lot more than
| perfect generation to me.
| StopDisinfo910 wrote:
| I appreciate Apple propping up the GPU performance of their SoC
| but it feels a bit pointless when all the libraries they provide
| are so insular and disconnected from the rest of the industry.
|
| I personally wish they would learn from the failure of Metal.
|
| Also _unleashes_? Really? The marketing madness has to stop at
| some point.
| mcv wrote:
| Soon they'll be _stomping_ all over your calculation problems,
| and then _obliterating_ them!
| dralley wrote:
| Not that I've actually used any of these APIs, but supposedly
| Metal is the best designed Graphics API by a decent margin,
| it's just handicapped severely by how insular they and their
| ecosystem are.
| bigyabai wrote:
| Depends on what you're comparing to. Many people will point
| to OpenGL and Vulkan as comparisons, which is fair. But those
| are just the Open Source alternatives, and Metal itself is a
| proprietary solution competing against other well-designed
| alternatives like DirectX and NVN.
|
| I think Metal's ergonomics advantage is a much slimmer lead
| when you consider the other high-level APIs it competes with.
| thurn wrote:
| No "max" or "pro" equivalent? I wanted to get a new Macbook Pro,
| but there's no obvious successor to the M4 Max available, M5
| looks like a step down in performance if anything.
| infecto wrote:
| I assume that would come with the next release cycle of the
| MacBook? Isn't that supposed to be early next year?
| nocoiner wrote:
| Apparently not until early next year. I was surprised by this
| too, but I hadn't really been following the rumors at all, so I
| didn't really have any grounds for being surprised by this.
| ytch wrote:
| they usually release Pro or Max model later:
|
| M4: May 2024
|
| M4 pro/max: Oct 2024
|
| https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/05/apple-introduces-m4-c...
|
| https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/10/apple-introduces-m4-p...
| nsteel wrote:
| M3: same time
|
| https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/10/apple-
| unveils-m3-m3-p...
|
| M2: June 2022
|
| M2 pro/max: Jan 2023
|
| https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/06/apple-
| unveils-m2-with...
|
| https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/01/apple-
| unveils-m2-pro-...
| jmull wrote:
| No doubt the "wider" versions of the M5 are coming.
|
| My hope is that they are taking longer because of a memory
| system upgrade that will make running significantly more
| powerful LLMs locally more feasible.
| benjaminclauss wrote:
| Despite the flak Apple gets, there M-series continues to impress
| me as I learn more about hardware.
| vardump wrote:
| I guess I'm waiting for the M5 Max chip. Hopefully it's
| configurable with 256 GB RAM for LLMs and some VMs.
| mumber_typhoon wrote:
| The M5 MacBook Pro still gets the Broadcom WiFi chip but the M5
| iPad Pros get the N1 and C1X (Sweet).
|
| All in all, apple is doing some incredible things with hardware.
|
| Software teams at apple really need to get their act together.
| The M1 itself is so powerful that nobody really needs to upgrade
| that for most things most people do on their computers. Tahoe
| however makes my M1 Air feel sluggish doing the exact same tasks
| ive been last couple of years. I really hope this is not
| intentional from Apple to make me upgrade. That would be a big
| let down.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| Won't that make Linux support even harder :/
| ksec wrote:
| The Broadcom WiFi support 320Mhz while N1 is stuck with 160Mhz.
| There were report of N1 not supporting 4096 QAM as well but I
| didn't check.
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| "stuck".
|
| An infinitely small percentage of people can take advantage
| of 320Mhz. It's fine.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Today. But in 3 years time it'll be widespread and your Mac
| will be the one with the sluggish WiFi connection that jams
| up the airwaves for all other devices too.
| shwaj wrote:
| How does it "jam up the airwaves" if its operating at a
| different frequency than the devices you say it will be
| jamming?
| landl0rd wrote:
| It really won't, and there will be a ton of devices
| "jamming up" the airwaves. In most places the backhaul
| isn't fast enough for anyone to get any use for 320MHz
| channels beyond maybe very large LAN file transfers which
| are for some reason happening over WiFi?
| fragmede wrote:
| Thankfully, there has been nothing new to use computers
| for since 2022. Definitely no new technology that
| involves downloading different 10+ Gib large files to
| test with, and users couldn't possibly conceive of a NAS,
| nevermind owning one because Netflix has never removed
| shows while people are watching them, breaking an assumed
| promise by users. ISP speeds are never ever going to
| improve either. Everyone knows that!
| MrAlex94 wrote:
| Does it? If it's the same WiFi chip used in other M4 Mac's
| then it's still limited to 160MHz:
|
| https://support.apple.com/en-
| gb/guide/deployment/dep268652e6...
| t-3 wrote:
| I doubt the number of people in both "has no neighbors" and
| "owns Apple hardware" camps are significant at all.
| fragmede wrote:
| Poe's law?
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| I don't think 4096 QAM is realistic anyway, except if your
| router is 10 cm away from your laptop.
| ExoticPearTree wrote:
| > The Broadcom WiFi support 320Mhz while N1 is stuck with
| 160Mhz.
|
| I was at a Wi-Fi vendor presentation a while back and they
| said that 160 Mhz is pretty improbable unless you're leaving
| alone and no wireless networks around you. And 320 Mhz even
| less so.
|
| In real life probably the best you can get is 80 Mhz in a
| really good wireless environment.
| amluto wrote:
| I would believe that MLO or similar features could make it
| a bit more likely that large amounts of bandwidth would be
| useful, as it allows using discontiguous frequencies.
|
| WiFi does currently get anywhere near the bandwidth that
| these huge channels advertise in realistic environments.
| astrange wrote:
| OFDMA also makes it more useful, but I don't know if
| vendors actually use that in practice.
| shadowpho wrote:
| For which band? I run 160/160 on 5/6ghz and it's nice. They
| are short range enough to work. For 2.4 yeah 20mhz only
| greg5green wrote:
| For 5ghz, that's a pretty unusual. You need to be
| somewhere where DFS isn't an issue to even get 160mhz.
|
| For 6ghz? Yeah, not uncommon.
| mrtesthah wrote:
| Indeed, in any relatively dense setting no one should even
| think about using channels that wide. Think about the
| original problem with 2.4ghz 802.11b/g: there were only
| three non-overlapping channels, so you had interference no
| matter where you went. Why would we want to return to that
| hell?
| 0x457 wrote:
| My limited experience:
|
| 2.4Ghz is pretty much only used by IoT, you generally
| don't care about channel width there. When your client
| device (laptop, phone) downgrades to 2.4Ghz it might as
| well disconnect because it's unusable.
|
| 5Ghz get stopped by a drywall, so unless your walls are
| just right to bounce off single, you need AP in every
| room. Ceiling mounting is pretty much required and you're
| pretty much free to use channels as wide as your device
| support and local laws allow.
|
| 6Ghz get stopped by a piece of paper, so the same as 5Ghz
| except you won't get 6Ghz unless you have haev direct
| line of sight to the AP.
| zdw wrote:
| From Apple's support docs:
|
| https://support.apple.com/guide/deployment/wi-fi-ethernet-
| sp...
|
| No devices support 320Mhz bandwidths, and only supports
| 160Mhz on 6GHz band on MacBooks and iPads. Some iPhones
| support 160Mhz on 5GHz as well.
| Avamander wrote:
| Channel width is not the only thing that determines the
| usability or quality of a chipset though.
|
| Reducing Broadcom's influence over the WiFi ecosystem alone
| would be a large benefit.
| kokada wrote:
| > Tahoe however makes my M1 Air feel sluggish doing the exact
| same tasks ive been last couple of years.
|
| I have a work provided M2 Pro with 32GB of RAM. After the Tahoe
| upgrade it feels like one of the sluggish PCs at the house. It
| is the only one that I can see the mouse teleporting sometimes
| when I move it fast. This is after disabling transparency in
| Accessibility settings mind you, it was even worse before.
| fersarr wrote:
| same here
| ExoticPearTree wrote:
| 26.0.1 fixed the sluggishness. 26.0 was pretty unstable -
| felt like a game dropping frames.
| kokada wrote:
| 26.0.1 is better, but I can still get sluggishness in a few
| specific cases.
|
| I just got one example while passing the mouse quickly
| through my dock (I still use the magnify animation) and I
| can clearly see it dropping a few frames. This never
| happened in macOS 15.
| speedgoose wrote:
| Do you have a few electron powered apps that didn't get
| updated yet?
|
| Electron used to override a private function that makes the
| Mac OS sluggish on Tahoe, and apparently no one uses Electron
| apps while doing testing at Apple.
| kokada wrote:
| I keep my applications pretty much up-to-date but I didn't
| check the release notes for each Electron application that
| I have to make sure they're updated. I still think this is
| a failure of macOS, since one misbehaving application
| shouldn't bring the whole environment to slow to a crawl.
|
| What I can say is that while the situation is much better
| than at Day 1, the whole Tahoe experience is not as fluid
| as Sequoia.
|
| Also, it doesn't really matter to me if this was a private
| function or not, if this was Windows or Gnome/KDE people
| would blame the developers of the desktop instead.
| speedgoose wrote:
| Yes I think Apple is to blame there. Electron is so
| prominent that they should have detected the problem and
| found a solution well before the general release.
| IMTDb wrote:
| So now you can disregard the notion of "private function"
| if you pass 100k stars on GitHub ?
| ruined wrote:
| all APIs are public APIs
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| Only if you don't care about your users or your apps
| reputation. Of course, if you are using Electron those
| ships have already sailed.
| javawizard wrote:
| There's definitely a line of thinking that would say
| "yes": https://www.hyrumslaw.com/
| 0x457 wrote:
| Sure, someone will depend on it, we all ignored "private"
| vs "public" at least once. Okay to do and okay to be mad
| when your thing breaks because you decided to depend on
| it? Nope.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Okay to be mad the OS vendor didn't do anything to help
| when the users are the ones that face the fallout? Yes.
|
| Even if you disqualify the devs from being mad, everyone
| else gets to be mad.
| 0x457 wrote:
| Vendor did help...marked function as private. I view this
| specific incident as another argument against electron,
| so I'm biased.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| That's a good initial step. But once it got put on a
| zillion computers, there should have been additional
| mitigation steps.
|
| In an ideal situation, they would have noticed the
| widespread use of this private function a long time ago,
| put a note on the bug report that it works around, and
| after they fixed the bug they would have reached out to
| electron to have them remove that access.
| javawizard wrote:
| Exactly. As they say: if you owe the bank $100, that's
| your problem; if you owe the bank $100 million, that's
| the bank's problem.
| wrs wrote:
| Apple just doesn't work that way, and hasn't since I
| worked there in the 90s. Private APIs are out of bounds.
| It's like a "the FBI doesn't negotiate with kidnappers"
| situation.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| > "the FBI doesn't negotiate with kidnappers"
|
| Welp
|
| https://leb.fbi.gov/articles/featured-articles/fifty-
| years-o...
|
| Apple's private API situation was also much more nuanced,
| back in the days if Adobe was using an API, private or
| not, it probably wouldn't be degraded in any way until
| the core applications moved forward. Current Apple might
| not give a damn though.
| danudey wrote:
| Apple releases betas of their OS specifically so that
| developers can try their apps on them. macOS is so
| prominent that Electron-using developers should have
| detected the problem and found a solution well before the
| general release.
| dylan604 wrote:
| It shouldn't be the user's responsibility to know what
| architecture the software uses to then need to go look at
| upgrading them. Upstream comments blaming Apple for this
| for "not testing Electron apps internally", but I don't
| expect Apple to test every single app ever released for
| regression testing. Apple releases betas, and the
| software devs are expected to test their app against it.
| The problem comes from the app devs using a bit of
| private code where it is suggested to not do that for
| this very reason. Even if Apple did test and find the
| result, it would still be the app dev that would need to
| fix it. Maybe the thought is that an email from Apple to
| the dev saying fix your code would more compelling???
| kokada wrote:
| > Upstream comments blaming Apple for this for "not
| testing Electron apps internally", but I don't expect
| Apple to test every single app ever released for
| regression testing.
|
| This happens in pretty much every Electron app as far I
| know, and lots of Electron apps are like Spotify, VSCode
| or Slack are very likely to be in the Top 10 or at least
| Top 100 most used apps. And yes, I would expect Apple to
| test at least the most popular apps before releasing a
| new version of their OS.
|
| > Maybe the thought is that an email from Apple to the
| dev saying fix your code would more compelling???
|
| Of course not. Apple controls the SDK, they could
| workaround this in many different ways, for example
| instead of changing how this function was implemented
| they could introduce a new method (they're both private
| so it doesn't matter) and effectively ignore the old
| method (maybe also they could add a message for
| developers building their application that this method
| was removed). It would draw ugly borders in the affected
| apps but it wouldn't cause this issue at least.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > (maybe also they could add a message for developers
| building their application that this method was removed)
|
| why do we think this would be a solve as the devs clearly
| ignored the previous message about _not_ using a private
| method?
| kokada wrote:
| > why do we think this would be a solve as the devs
| clearly ignored the previous message about not using a
| private method?
|
| If anything the fact that devs can actually access
| private symbols is an issue with how Apple designed their
| APIs, because they could make this so annoying to do that
| nobody would try (for example, stripping symbols).
|
| Also, the fact that devs need to access private symbols
| to do what they need to do also shows that the public API
| is lacking at least some features.
|
| Another thing, if this only affected the app itself that
| would be fine, but this makes the whole system slow to a
| crawl.
|
| So while devs share some of the blame here (and I am not
| saying they don't), I still think this whole situation is
| mostly Apple's fault.
| tedivm wrote:
| If you actually read the specific bug and use of a
| private method it really was a stupid decision by one
| developer awhile ago that just fell through the cracks.
| There really wasn't a benefit to doing what they did,
| which is why their fix was to just go back to using
| public APIs.
|
| I think the failures here are that Apple should have
| tested this themselves _and_ the Electron devs should
| have tested and resolved this during the beta period.
| magicalist wrote:
| > _If you actually read the specific bug and use of a
| private method it really was a stupid decision by one
| developer awhile ago that just fell through the cracks.
| There really wasn 't a benefit to doing what they did,
| which is why their fix was to just go back to using
| public APIs._
|
| I don't think it's that clear cut. It looks like it was a
| workaround for a MacOS rendering bug going back to at
| least 2017, landed in 2019 and had no apparent downsides
| for six years[1].
|
| The PR removing the private API code also included
| someone verifying that Apple had fixed the original bug
| some time in the intervening years[2].
|
| I probably wouldn't have taken this approach personally
| (at the very least file the original rendering issue with
| Apple and note it with the code, though everyone knows
| the likelihood of getting a even a response on an issue
| like that), but it wasn't some cargo culted fix.
|
| [1] https://github.com/electron/electron/pull/20360
|
| [2] https://github.com/electron/electron/pull/48376#issue
| comment...
| conductr wrote:
| Who's to say Apple didn't test it and pushed it out
| anyway to force the Electron devs hands. It's their
| garden and they can move the walls
| kokada wrote:
| This only made Apple look bad, again this is not a bug
| that make the app slow, it makes the whole system slow.
|
| Imagine now that you're a non tech savvy user, that
| probably doesn't update apps as often, they are probably
| wondering why "my laptop is so slow after updating". But
| like I said in other thread, maybe this is on purpose to
| make people upgrade.
| wvenable wrote:
| "When developing Windows 95, one manager bought every
| program available at a local software store..."
|
| https://www.pcworld.com/article/2816273/how-microsofts-
| windo...
| bee_rider wrote:
| That was the 90's, the QA was harder to do but actually
| done sometimes.
| 0x457 wrote:
| Spotify doesn't use Electron, though. Also, I do not
| expect Apple to care about Electron because delivering
| shitty electron experience only benefit their native
| apps.
| kokada wrote:
| If anything the ones that got a worse reputation here is
| Apple itself. The bug basically slow the whole system,
| not just the application that has the bad behavior.
|
| Sure, people in Hacker News now know that the issue is
| "that Electron bug", but I am sure lots of other people
| that are less tech savvy just kept questioning what the
| hell is happening and maybe even considered an upgrade.
| But maybe that is the whole point.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| Seems like the right patch is to just crash any app
| attempting to use the private API so blame would go where
| it is deserved. And if it caused a lot of more awareness
| of the need to get rid of Electron, bonus.
| danudey wrote:
| It seems as though a lot of arguments about this boil
| down to a few inane implications:
|
| 1. Apple should test every (common?) app and any change
| to the OS that they make that makes an app worse
| shouldn't be done regardless of why they wanted to make
| that change. 2. Even though Apple tells people not to use
| private APIs, if a program uses a private API anyway
| Apple should build a workaround into their OS instead of
| letting apps suffer their own repercussions. 3. Apple
| should test everything ahead of time and then go around
| telling all the app developers that there's a problem, as
| if those app developers are going to do anything about
| it.
|
| No matter what Apple did here, their actual choices
| boiled down to:
|
| 1. Add workarounds for misbehaving broken apps, giving
| those apps no incentive to fix their issues, and forcing
| Apple to support those workarounds indefinitely; this
| also undermines their "don't use private APIs, they could
| break later" position. This is the kind of thing that
| made Windows into an unmaintainable sack of cruft.
|
| 2. Do what they did, which is change the API and let
| broken apps be broken to the user's detriment. Everyone
| blames Apple even though it's objectively not their
| fault.
|
| 2. Add some kind of non-workaround that caused problems
| for the app and not the user; e.g. have this private API
| rate limited or something so that the app ends up
| blocking in the call. Could cause problems for actual
| consumers of this API, and people would still blame Apple
| but in this case it would be _more_ of their fault than
| option 2.
|
| In the end, Apple can't spend their time fretting over
| what bad developers do wrong; they spend their time on
| their OS and software and if a developer writes bad
| software and causes problems then so be it.
| placatedmayhem wrote:
| The check script I've been recommending is here:
|
| https://github.com/tkafka/detect-electron-apps-on-mac
|
| About half of the apps I use regularly have been fixed.
| Some might never be fixed, though...
| EasyMark wrote:
| wasn't there a workaround for those apps that might not
| ever get updated? I thought I saw something on reddit.
| Some config change
| joshstrange wrote:
| > Run launchctl setenv CHROME_HEADLESS 1 on every system
| start. The CHROME_HEADLESS flag has a side effect of
| disabling Electron app window shadows, which makes them
| ugly, but also stops triggering the issue.
|
| From: https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1nvoirl/i_m
| ade_a_scr...
| EasyMark wrote:
| This is why I stay on previous release until at least 0.2
| or 0.3 to let them work out the bugs so I dont' have to
| deal with them, there was nothing in 26 that felt pressing
| to me that I would need to update
| abustamam wrote:
| Tbh I'm purposely not updating because I'm not in love
| with the new ~Aero~ glass UI.
| michelb wrote:
| The OS and stock apps are much slower in Tahoe even. And
| the UI updates/interactions are also slower. I'm lucky I
| only upgraded my least used machine, and that's a well
| stocked M2.
| astrange wrote:
| It should not be slower. File a report in Feedback
| Assistant.
| nikanj wrote:
| Or more likely nobody gives a damn about performance while
| doing testing.
| kobalsky wrote:
| my tinfoil-hat theory is that on each OS iteration Apple adds
| a new feature that leverages the latest chips hardware
| acceleration features and for older chips they do software-
| only implementations.
|
| they ship-of-thesseus the crap out of their OS but replacing
| with parts that need these new hardware features that run
| slow on older chips due to software-only implementations.
|
| I got the first generation iPad Pro, which is e-waste now,
| but I use it as a screen for my CCTV, it cannot even display
| the virtual keyboard without stuttering like crazy, it lags
| switching apps, there's a delay for everything, this thing
| was smooth as butter on release.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| I have the 4th gen (2020) iPad Pro with the A12X Bionic,
| the same chip they put in the Apple Silicon transition dev
| kits. With iPadOS 26 it's become barely usable, despite
| still being performant as ever on iPadOS 18. I'm talking
| huge drop in performance, stutters and slow downs
| everywhere.
|
| I was considering just replacing the battery and keeping it
| for several more years but now I feel forced to upgrade
| which has me considering whether I still want/need an iPad
| since I'd also have to buy a new magic keyboard since they
| redesigned it, and they bumped the price ($1299 now vs.
| $999 when I got the 4th gen) so I'd be looking at $1700.
| Trying to hold out for an iPad Air with ProMotion.
|
| I may be in the minority here, but I think 5 years is too
| short of a lifespan for these devices at this point. Early
| days when things were advancing like crazy, sure. But now?
| I have 8 year old computers that are still just fine, and
| with the M-series chips I'd expect at least 10 years of
| usable life at minimum (battery not withstanding)
| qingcharles wrote:
| That's weird. I have an 8th Gen iPad, the slowest device
| that can run iPadOS 26, and everything is fine on that
| old thing. (except the OS takes up the majority of the
| storage)
| thewebguyd wrote:
| Interesting. Might try a factory reset then and see.
| There's noticable lag for me, it's especially slow when
| switching apps or bringing up the keyboard, as well as on
| first unlock. Interacting within a single app is still
| fine, it's interacting with the OS that's really
| sluggish.
| gosub100 wrote:
| Total guess but is there a tiny fan inside that got
| filled with dust? Maybe it's thermal throttling.
| sgerenser wrote:
| Apple has never made an iPad with a fan
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| How long have you been running on 26? Every iOS/iPadOS
| update takes a few days to stabilize.
| dwood_dev wrote:
| 8th Gen iPad is about the same on iPadOS 26 as 18 for me,
| which is slow. The 32GB really handicapped it for even
| being usable as to even upgrade it, I have to factory
| reset it first. I'm replacing it with a Mini.
|
| The iPad Air 13 with a M3 is a really nice experience.
| Very fast device.
| trinix912 wrote:
| Plus they don't let you downgrade to previous iOS versions
| on iPhones and iPads (unless you've been smart to save SHSH
| blobs and all that) so the only option to revert to a
| smooth version now is to download a sketchy jailbreak.
| osn9363739 wrote:
| At some point you have to use the new features available to
| you. That's not really tinfoil, just progress, and how all
| tech works no.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| Transparency disabling ads anothe draw layer that is opaque
| on top making it even worse than when it's on
| array_key_first wrote:
| If they developed it in the most naive and stupid way
| imaginable, sure. If we're assuming Apple isn't filled with
| 3rd year comp sci students, then no.
| prettyblocks wrote:
| I'm on an M2 with 24GB ram and it feels like it flies as fast
| as ever.
| runjake wrote:
| It's probably due to the Electron bug[1]. A lot of common
| apps haven't patched up yet.
|
| I also have an M2 Pro with 32GB of memory. When I A/B test
| with Electron apps running vs without, the lag disappears
| when all the unpatched Electron apps are closed out.
|
| 1. https://avarayr.github.io/shamelectron/
|
| Here's a script I got from somewhere that shows unpatched
| Electron apps on your system:
|
| Edit: HN nerfed the script. Found a direct link: https://gist
| .github.com/tkafka/e3eb63a5ec448e9be6701bfd1f1b1...
| xrisk wrote:
| hmm there are apps produced by your script that claim to be
| fixed according to https://avarayr.github.io/shamelectron/
| (Signal, Discord, Notion, etc). And I checked that those
| apps are updated. Which one's correct?
| runjake wrote:
| HN broke the script. Here's a link: https://gist.github.c
| om/tkafka/e3eb63a5ec448e9be6701bfd1f1b1...
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| unpatched include Asana, Bitwarden, Dropbox... some pretty
| high-profile apps
| runjake wrote:
| Yes, and 1Password up until today!
| fjarlq wrote:
| Helpful script, except it prints the same line regardless
| of the version found.
| geoffpado wrote:
| If I'm remembering correctly, the original script he
| found had different emoji in the two lines (red X vs.
| green checkmark), but since HN comments strip emoji,
| pasting it here made them equivalent.
| runjake wrote:
| HN nerfed the script. Here you go: https://gist.github.co
| m/tkafka/e3eb63a5ec448e9be6701bfd1f1b1...
| Angostura wrote:
| I don't get this - I have an M1 iMac - haven't noticed much
| difference.
| lelandfe wrote:
| As a UI/UX nerd, it's a coin flip on intentionality. I've been
| noticing so many rough edges to Apple's software when it used
| to astound. iOS Settings search will flash "No Results" as you
| begin to type which is comically amateurish. The macOS menu bar
| control panels can't be keyboard navigated... It's just silly.
|
| I've been debating making a Tumblr-style blog, something like
| "dumbapple.com," to catalogue all the dumb crap I notice.
| butlike wrote:
| iirc, there's a setting to make the menu bar navigatable. you
| just need to "alt+tab" to it with some weird button combo,
| like Ctrl + Cmd + 1 or something.
| lelandfe wrote:
| You can turn on "Full Keyboard Access," which paints a
| hideous rectangle around anything you focus but _does_
| allow keyboard access to everything.
|
| But, like, man - why can't I just use the arrow keys to
| select my WiFi network anymore? I was able to for a decade.
|
| And the answer, of course, is the same for so much of
| macOS' present rough edges. Apple took some iPadOS
| interface elements, rammed them into the macOS UI, and
| _still_ have yet to sand the welds. For how much we
| complain on HN about Electron, we really need to be pissed
| about Catalyst /Marzipan.
|
| Why does the iCloud sign in field have me type on the right
| side of an input? Why does that field have an iPadOS
| cursor? Why can't I use Esc to close its help sheet? Why
| aren't that sheet's buttons focusable?
|
| Why does the Stocks app have a Done button appear when I
| focus its search field? Why does its focus ring lag behind
| the search field's animated size?
|
| Where in the HIG does it sign off on unfocusable text-only
| bolded buttons, like Maps uses? https://imgur.com/a/e7PB5jm
|
| ...Anyway.
| netcoyote wrote:
| There's also an app, MenuWhere, that enables you to
| configure different keys to walk the menu bar. It's free
| (but nagware). https://manytricks.com/menuwhere/
| vessenes wrote:
| Liquid Glass feels rushed to me. Tons of UI annoyances
| especially on iPhone - it's suddenly many clicks to get to
| prior calls for instance, a core way I call people. I'm
| imagining it will get ironed out over the next two years.
| bombcar wrote:
| It really does. It's a two-year update and hey should have
| had two teams - one for Liquid Glass working for the next
| release, and one doing a Snow Leopard-type cleanup for this
| year. Let the Mac and iPhone be a bit out of sync if
| needed.
| jtbayly wrote:
| Please do this. Here are some examples to add to your list,
| leaving out the 26.0 bugs that I've come to expect running a
| .0 release.
|
| 1. I won't focus on a bunch of Siri items, but one example
| that always bugs me: I cannot ask Siri to give me directions
| to my next meeting. The latest OS introduces an answer for
| the first time, though. It tells me to open the calendar app
| on my Apple watch, and tap on the meeting, and tap the
| address. (I don't have an Apple watch.)
|
| 2. Mail.app on iOS does not have a "share sheet." This makes
| it impossible to "do" anything with an email message, like
| send it to a todo app. (The same problem exists with messages
| in Messages.app)
|
| 3. It is impossible to share a contact card from Messages.app
| (both iOS and MacOS). You have to leave messages, go to
| contacts and select the contact to share. Contacts should be
| one of the apps that shows up in the "+" list like photos,
| camera, cash, and plenty third party apps.
|
| 4. You _still_ have to set the default _system_ mail app in
| MacOS as a setting in the Mail.app, instead of in system
| settings. Last I checked, I 'm pretty sure you couldn't do
| this, without first setting up an account in the Mail.app.
| Infuriating.
| grincho wrote:
| I had that complaint about Mail too. Then I realized you
| can begin dragging an email (from the list view), switch
| apps with your other hand, and drop it into, say, a todo.
| Of course, this is less discoverable, so I agree a Share
| button would not go amiss.
| askonomm wrote:
| There already is something like it (though not Apple-
| exclusive): https://grumpy.website/
| jerf wrote:
| "iOS Settings search will flash "No Results" as you begin to
| type which is comically amateurish."
|
| I'd love to agree that comically amateurish, but apparently
| there's something about settings dialogs that make them
| incredibly difficult to search. It takes Android several
| seconds to search its settings, and the Microsoft start menu
| is also comically slow if you try to access control panels
| through it, although it's just comically slow at search in
| general. Even Brave here visibly chokes for like 200ms if I
| search in its preferences dialog... which compared to Android
| or Windows is instant but still strikes me as a bit to the
| slow side considering the small space of things being
| searched. Although it looks like it may be more related to
| layout than actual searching.
|
| Still. I dunno why but a _lot_ of settings searches are mind-
| bogglingly slow.
|
| (The only thing I can guess at is that the search is done by
| essentially fully instantiating the widgets for all screens
| and doing a full layout pass and extracting the text from
| them and frankly that's _still_ not really accounting for
| enough time for these things. Maybe the Android search is
| blocked until the Storage tab is done crawling over the
| storage to generate the graphs that are not even going to be
| rendered? That 's about what it would take to match the
| slowdown I see... but then the Storage tab happily renders
| almost instantly before that crawl is done and updates
| later... I dunno.)
| robenkleene wrote:
| The parent isn't commenting about the _speed_ of search,
| just that saying "No Results", when they really mean
| "we're still checking for results" is bad UI (which I agree
| with).
| fodkodrasz wrote:
| It is possibly Null value pattern in action, which is a
| good thing in my opinion (as in robust), though its
| display this way is a bit suboptimal.
|
| Funny I'm defending them, but I think this is not even a
| papercut in my opinion, while they have far bigger
| issues.
| fragmede wrote:
| I'm sure this is me seeing the past through rose-colored
| glasses, but the reason bits of visual pollution like
| that is particularly annoying is Apple shit used to be so
| exceptionally polished. Not sure what emotion I want to
| project on them as to why they're like that now (or if
| it's even actually true), but it's the perception that if
| they're no longer getting the little stuff like that
| polished anymore, what else just isn't being done to the
| same high standard?
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| Lots of things. iOS has never implemented the iPod USB
| interface properly and whoever thought listing music
| alphabetically was a good default should be fired.
| array_key_first wrote:
| The speed is bad too. At least on Android, it does
| actually take 5-10 seconds sometimes. That's not an
| exaggeration.
|
| It should be searching, what, a few hundred strings? What
| is it doing? Is it making a network call? For what?
|
| Anyway, barely related, but it does bring into question
| the quality of modern software.
| SoKamil wrote:
| The old System Preferences search was lightning fast
| compared to current SwiftUI System Settings on macOS.
| vizzier wrote:
| Might have to be more specific than Android and Windows.
| Tried them on my devices (S24, windows 11) and they're
| practically instantaneous.
| Insanity wrote:
| Yeah I love my M1 iPad Pro. But the "liquid glass" update made
| it feel slower. Really only the 'unlock' feels slower, once I'm
| using it it's fine. But it's slightly annoying and does make me
| want to update this year to the m5.
|
| But it's a glorified Kindle and YouTube box, so I'm hesitating
| a little bit.
| asimovDev wrote:
| my dad's got a pre AS iPad Pro and it's so bad after updating
| to 26. My 6th gen iPad on iOS 17 felt faster than this
| baq wrote:
| I have a 5th gen? Can't even remember now it's so old.
| Nothing works anymore except Netflix, YouTube and Disney,
| and that only after a minute or so.
|
| Which is fine, since it's exclusively used to watch a kids
| show for a half an hour a day.
|
| ...but it's also super sad to see a once fantastic piece of
| kit to degrade so much primarily due to software.
| knowitnone3 wrote:
| "make me want to update this year to the m5." Then Apple
| software devs did what they were told
| butlike wrote:
| I think it's probably a play to get you to upgrade for the new
| GPU computational power. I _do_ think that what we're seeing
| (and marketed as AI) will be the future, but I don't think it
| will look like what we're seeing now. Whatever that future
| holds will require the upgraded capabilities of these new GPU
| architectures, and this being a reason for the subtle nudge to
| upgrade from Apple makes sense to me.
|
| It feels very much like how I imagine someone living in the
| late 1800's might have felt. The advent of electricity, the
| advent of cars, but can't predict airplanes, even though
| they're right around the corner and they'll have likely seen
| them in their lifetime.
| WhitneyLand wrote:
| "nobody really needs to upgrade that for most things"
|
| Maybe, but for lots of scenarios even M5 could still benefit
| from being an order of magnitude faster.
|
| AI, dev, some content scenarios, etc...
| dawnerd wrote:
| I'm still daily driving my M1 Max and have no reason to upgrade
| for a long time. There's really nothing in my workflow that
| could be markedly improved performance wise. There's only thing
| is maybe more ram as the need for that keeps growing - I'm
| isn't just under 30 when running a bunch of containers.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| There are so many software related things that drive me
| absolutely loony with Apple right now.
|
| * My iPhone as a remote for my Apple TV has randomly stopped
| deciding it can control the volume - despite the "Now Playing"
| UI offering an audio control that works.
|
| There auth screens drive me crazy:
|
| * Why cannot I not punch in a password while Face ID is
| working? If I'm skiing, I know Face ID isn't gong to work, stop
| making me wait.
|
| * Likewise, on Apple TV the parental control input requires me
| to explicitly choose to enter a Pin Code. Why? Just show me the
| Pin Code screen. If I can approve from my device, I will.
| * Similarly, if I use my phone as a remote, why do I need to
| manually click out of the remote to get to the parental control
| approval screen. I'm literally using my phone. Just auto-
| approve.
| strbean wrote:
| > * Why cannot I not punch in a password while Face ID is
| working? If I'm skiing, I know Face ID isn't gong to work,
| stop making me wait.
|
| Funny, a similar thing has been driving me crazy on my Ubuntu
| 20.04 laptop with fingerprint login. When unlocking, I can
| either enter a password or use fingerprint. On boot, I am not
| allowed to enter a password until I fail with fingerprint. If
| I use fingerprint to log in on boot, I have to enter my
| password anyways once logged in to unlock my keychain.
|
| I should probably just figure out a way to disable
| fingerprint on boot and only use it for the lock screen.
| prettymuchnoone wrote:
| I think this is a GNOME thing...the keychain by default has
| the same password as the login password, so logging in with
| the password unlocks it too. fingerprint login doesn't
| unlock it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38527876,
| https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GNOME/Keyring
| strbean wrote:
| Yeah, I've resigned myself to that. The part that irks me
| is that it doesn't present a password prompt (on initial
| login) until fingerprint attempts are exhausted.
| sotix wrote:
| Why can I not use my password manager for my Apple ID but can
| use it for any other password field? Instead I have to switch
| to my password manager, copy the password, reopen the App
| Store, select get app, and paste the password in the Apple ID
| login pop up in the 10 seconds before my password clears from
| my clipboard.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Been ages but I think you can mitigate that annoyance by
| approving fingerprint purchases.
| sotix wrote:
| It requires a password to enable Touch ID whenever you
| restart your phone. For security reasons, the iPhone
| automatically restarts every few days. So I run into this
| issue regularly.
| sgt wrote:
| I highly recommend the Apple remote .. then you also don't
| need to take your phone with you when you are watching TV,
| which is an added benefit for some.
|
| Of course the thin Apple remote has a way of getting lost,
| but it has a Find Me feature which locates it pretty well.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| Remote is fine, but it's always stuck in a couch cushion.
| sgt wrote:
| Same here.. so we use that Find Remote functionality
| about once a month! Without it we'd be lost. Business
| idea: Make a cover for the Apple remote that makes it
| bigger and harder to lose.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| I think they are readily available:
|
| https://a.co/d/64ikSJW
| K7PJP wrote:
| There was a company or two that made cases for the older
| Apple remotes with the express purpose of making them
| larger, which I always thought was kind of funny. I would
| buy one for the current remote if one existed.
| gxs wrote:
| As someone who jumped in the apple bandwagon at peak apple
| and hasn't been through all their ups and downs the way some
| die hards have been, it's been super aggravating dealing with
| apples shit lately - not what I signed up for all those years
| ago
|
| It seems to have been degrading for a long time, but for me
| it's been in this past year where it's crossed into that
| threshold android used to live in where using the phone
| causes a physiological response from how aggravating it can
| be sometimes
|
| I let my guard down and got too deep into the apple
| ecosystem- I know better and always avoided getting myself
| into these situations in the last, but here I am
|
| The phone sucks right now - super buggy and they continue to
| remove/impose features that should be left as an option to
| the user By Yes, this has always been the knock on apple, but
| I typically havent had an issue with their decisions - it's
| just so bad now
|
| Lesson (re)learned and I will stay away from ecosystems -
| luckily the damage here is only for media
|
| The minute I can get blue bubbles reliably on an android,
| I'll give the pixel a shot again - if that sucks too then
| maybe I'll go back to my teenage years and start rooting
| devices again
| skinnymuch wrote:
| How would you ever get blue bubbles reliably on Android?
| Are you talking about iMessage or something else?
|
| I am fully bought into the Apple ecosystem. Not sure yet if
| I regret it. It is annoying to be so tied down to one
| company that isn't going the way I want it to.
| gxs wrote:
| Yeah iMessage - over the years there have been
| "breakthroughs" - people find nifty workarounds or have
| even reverse engineered the iMessage protocol, but for
| whatever reason nothing ever sticks
|
| There are current workarounds, like isn't your home Mac
| as a relay, but nothing super elegant that I know of
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| So, I still think the experience is generally better and
| more integrated than when I was on an Android device. I
| just find they're generally not really paying attention to
| user details the way they have in the past.
| sample2 wrote:
| I see the same bug with the remote on my phone, how did they
| manage to break volume control in the app while keeping it
| working from the lock screen "now playing"?
|
| I've also been unable to get the remote app on my watch to
| work at all. It's hard to imagine people working at Apple
| don't also run into these issues all the time.
| thenaturalist wrote:
| Don't kidd yourself: Planned obsolescence is real.
|
| Apple has a higher duty to their shareholders than to their
| customers.
|
| Not hating on Apple, just stating the hard economic truth.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| Nope, never been real, never will be real. Just conspiracy
| theories like all the others.
|
| PS The Earth isn't flat. We did go to the Moon. Vaccines
| don't cause autism.
| random3 wrote:
| This needs benchmarks.
|
| Sad if true. I feel my M1 max sluggish too lately. After
| bragging that this was the longest lived work machine I had and
| thinking I'm good to wait for M6. This is not good for
| business, but IMO you need more than raw power to justify
| upgrades even for professional use - form factor, screen
| quality, battery, etc.
|
| I think they bet a lot of hardware money on AI capabilities,
| but failed to deliver the software, so there was no real reason
| to upgrade because of AI features in the chip (which is
| literally what they boast on the first line of the announcement
| - yet nobody cares about making more cute faces)
|
| It's not 100% their fault. Everyone got onto the LLM bandwagon
| like it's "the thing" so even if they didn't believe it they
| sill needed something. Except an OS is not a chat interface,
| and LLMs do suck at stricter things.
| lawlessone wrote:
| >The M1 itself is so powerful that nobody really needs to
| upgrade that for most things most people do on their computers
|
| a rant on my part, but a computer from 10 years ago would be
| fine for what most people do on their computer, only for
| software bloat..
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Tahoe however makes my M1 Air feel sluggish_
|
| Counterpoint: my M1 Pro was a turtle for a few weeks and then
| stopped doing nonsense in the background and is back to its
| zippy self. (Still buggy. But that would be true on new
| hardware, too.)
| quadyeast wrote:
| mediaanalysisd has been consuming ~140% CPU since upgrading a
| few weeks ago. I just turned off Apple Intelligence and it
| dropped to 0%.
| seunosewa wrote:
| My M1 Air got very sluggish after upgrading to Tahoe but then
| it started behaving normally after a couple of days. Hopefully,
| you'll experience the same soon.
| antipaul wrote:
| Which is harder these days, software or hardware?
| DSingularity wrote:
| Each challenging in their own ways. The real challenge is
| that we need codesign and that's the tricky part.
| kwanbix wrote:
| I really wish apple sold the Mx to others like Lenovo.
|
| I would love to se a ThinkPad with an M5 running Linux.
| fph wrote:
| What is the Linux experience on new Mac hardware? I'd be
| interested also in running a Macbuntu.
| bmdhacks wrote:
| Asahi linux is essentially in a holding pattern with only
| support up to M2. Likely linux will never be supported
| above M2 and even M2 has a lot of rough edges. When my
| monitor sleeps on M2 linux it can never reawaken without a
| reboot.
| greg5green wrote:
| >The M5 MacBook Pro still gets the Broadcom WiFi chip but the
| M5 iPad Pros get the N1 and C1X (Sweet).
|
| Is that good? Their cellular modems have been terrible. I'll
| reserve judgement until trying one out.
|
| >The M1 itself is so powerful
|
| I think this is a bit of a fallacy. Apple Silicon is great for
| the power consumption to power ratio, but something like a
| Ryzen 9 7945HX can do 3x more work than an M1 Max. And a non-
| laptop chip, like an Intel Core Ultra 7 265k can do 3.5x.
| wizee wrote:
| Those ratios seem way off if you're referring to the M1 Max
| and not the base M1. If we use Geekbench CPU performance, the
| Ryzen 9 7945HX (which is from 2023) is around 12% faster
| single core and 32% faster multicore than the M1 Max (which
| is from 2021). If you look at the 2024 M4 Max, it's
| substantially faster than the Ryzen and Intel you mentioned.
|
| https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/amd-ryzen-9-7945hx
|
| https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-
| ultra-7-...
|
| https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-
| pro-16-inch-2021-...
|
| https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-
| pro-16-inch-2024-...
| Avamander wrote:
| Having a cellular modem on a MacBook would be really handy
| even if it's not perfect.
| n8cpdx wrote:
| Source re:modem claims? Performance seems fine in general,
| modestly slower on very high end networks but using 25% less
| power.
|
| Performance claims:
|
| https://www.ookla.com/articles/iphone-c1-modem-
| performance-q...
|
| Energy claims:
|
| https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/02/27/apples-c1-modem-b.
| ..
| phamduongtria wrote:
| Even the M4 Max MacBook, I tried in the stores were running
| like shit on Tahoe
| port11 wrote:
| It's incredible what the hardware teams at Apple have been
| doing. I imagine they also feel let down by the software that's
| driving these beasts. It's as if they're 2 completely different
| companies.
| kenjackson wrote:
| The latest iPhone OS (iOS 26) is embarrassing. The number of
| glitches and amount of UI sloppiness is crazy for a company
| that historically prided itself on the details. It's the
| first major iOS update I've taken that just seems almost
| strictly worse than its predecessor.
| paweladamczuk wrote:
| I remember using my first Apple product years ago, it was
| an iPod touch 4th gen. The quality of the software on that
| thing was in a completely different league compared to
| anything I had used before.
|
| I also installed the iOS 26 update recently. The
| competitive advantage of software polish that Apple had
| seems totally gone.
|
| Add to that bugs in iCloud, AirDrop... I don't think I will
| be buying any more Apple devices for myself.
| georgel wrote:
| This feels more like a repeat of iOS7 to me.
| kossTKR wrote:
| A small silver lining is if the worlds largest company can
| ship complete garbage like this don't feel bad about your
| own small mistakes. I mean i've hotfixed and done my fair
| share of production reverts - but never, never anything as
| bad as this.
|
| Disclaimer, i actually like a bit of "bling", but both
| Tahoe and IOS so filled with glitches and errors, while the
| UX is bizarrely inconsistent it really is catastrophically
| bad.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| i've never had such a major downgrade as this one
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| > ...The <thing I own right now> is so powerful that nobody
| really needs to upgrade...
|
| I keep hearing this since the Intel 486DX times, and
|
| > Nobody will ever need more than 640K of RAM!
| bombcar wrote:
| This is the first time I've gone four+ years without even a
| real desire to upgrade, I have a hard time figuring out even
| what would be faster.
|
| Amusingly enough, adding more _ports_ could do it.
| dimal wrote:
| Seems like the software teams are there to simply squander the
| extra processing power that the hardware teams provide, thus
| ensuring recurring revenue. I see no good reason to upgrade to
| Tahoe. I'd have to buy a new computer just so I could power
| transparencies that I don't want.
| bsimpson wrote:
| This feels like it's always been true.
|
| Devices get slower for no perceivable reason, when in reality
| software at all levels makes higher assumptions about how
| much power you have, and squanders it more readily.
| DecentShoes wrote:
| They always release a slowdown update to destroy their older
| hardware. I don't know why you're even questioning it
| red369 wrote:
| I agree with your feeling that about Apple devices eventually
| getting updates to the point they becomes sluggish. I have
| just reached that point with iOS 26 and my iPhone 13 mini.
|
| I am undecided in my thoughts about how malicious this is. Do
| people think that it is something like wanting to cram more
| features into the operating systems, and they are careless
| how it affects the earliest supported models? Or do most
| people think it is planned obsolescence?
|
| Apple generally offer updates longer than Android, so is it
| more pronounced on iPhones than Android phones? I remember
| seeing similar slow-downs on Android phones in the past.
|
| Apple generally offer updates for iOS for less time than
| Windows. I don't really have a feel for the difference
| between the two in terms of how much new versions slow down
| older hardware.
|
| Obviously separating feature updates and security updates
| would be a way to address, and it's not possible that no one
| at Apple has considered that idea. They are a business and
| selling new products is unfortunately a disincentive pushing
| them away from doing that.
| jadbox wrote:
| ... no benchmarks?
| nake13 wrote:
| It seems this generation focuses more on GPU and AI acceleration
| rather than CPU. The M5 chip allows Apple Vision Pro to render
| 10% more pixels and operate at up to 120 Hz. It delivers up to
| four times the peak GPU compute performance compared with M4,
| provides 30% higher graphics performance, and offers 15% faster
| multithreaded CPU performance.
| Noaidi wrote:
| I am wondering if Apple's focus is off lately with this drive for
| AI. So far all they are showing in that presentation is that I
| can have
|
| "the ability to transform 2D photos into spatial scenes in the
| Photos app, or generating a Persona -- operate with greater speed
| and efficiency."
|
| And by making Apple AI (which is something I do not use for many
| reasons, but mainly because of Climate Change) their focus, I am
| afraid they are losing and making their operating Systems worse.
|
| For instance, Liquid Glass, the mess I was lucky enough to
| uninstall before they put in the embargo against doing so, is,
| well, a mess. An Aplha release in my opinion which I feel was a
| distraction from their lack of a robust AI release.
|
| So by blowing money on the AI gold rush that they were too late
| for, will they ultimately ruin their products across the board?
|
| I am currently attempting to sell my iPhone 16E and my M1 Macbook
| Air to move back to Linux because of all of this.
| steinvakt2 wrote:
| If you don't use AI for climate reasons then you should read
| the recent reports about how little electricity and water is
| actually used. It's basically zero (image and video models
| excluded). Your information about this is probably related to
| GPT3.5 or something. Which is now 3 years old - a lifetime in
| AI world.
| greekrich92 wrote:
| Big data centers running tons of GPUs and the construction of
| even bigger ones is not carbon neutral come on
| wat10000 wrote:
| Don't newer models use _more_ energy? I thought they were
| getting bigger and more computationally intensive.
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| They use a massive amount of energy during training. During
| inference they use a tiny amount of energy, less than a web
| search (turns out you can be really efficient if you don't
| mind giving wrong answers at random, and can therefore skip
| expensive database queries!)
| wat10000 wrote:
| Right, but the comment I was responding to suggested that
| ChatGPT3.5 used lots of energy and newer models use less.
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| Indeed, this is correct. See today's Claude Haiku 4
| announcement for an example.
| imcritic wrote:
| I think they will continue ruining their products via software
| updates. That's implied by a walled garden approach they chose
| to do their business: this forces users to consoom more and
| thus generates profits. Apple isn't a "lean" company, it needs
| outrageous profits to stay afloat.
| StopDisinfo910 wrote:
| > making Apple AI [...] their focus
|
| Are they really doing that? Because if it's the case they have
| shockingly little to show for it.
|
| Their last few attempts at actual innovation seem to have been
| less than successful. The Vision Pro failed to find a public.
| Liquid Glass is to put it politely divisive.
|
| At that point to me, it seems that good SoC and a captive
| audience in the US are pretty much all they have remaining and
| competition on the SoC part is becoming fierce.
| Noaidi wrote:
| Yeah, I agree, they have a captive audience for sure. But
| they still need to satisfy share holders. If people are
| failing to upgrade that is a problem. And the battery drain
| on my iPhone 16e on Glass was horrific. I know casual users
| who did not notice until I pointed it out and they were
| tracking it better. This, unfortunatly, makes me think
| conspiratorially. Even a modest about of extra battery use
| and degradation will mean more upgrades in the future.
|
| But I think $500 billion is a lot of money for AI:
|
| Apple accelerates AI investment with $500B for skills,
| infrastructure
|
| https://www.ciodive.com/news/Apple-AI-infrastructure-
| investm...
|
| Imagine using $500 for the operating system and squashing
| bugs or making the system even more energy efficient? Or
| maybe figuring out how to connect to an android tablet's file
| system natively?
| knotimpressed wrote:
| Assuming you've read https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-cheat-
| sheet-for-conversa... or the longer full essay/related works,
| could you elaborate on why you don't use Apple Intelligence?
|
| I totally understand why someone would refuse to use it due to
| environmental reasons (amongst others) but I'm curious to hear
| your opinions on it.
| pcdoodle wrote:
| For me: unproven trust and no killer feature.
|
| If I can't search my Apple Mail without AI, why would I trust
| AI?
| sylens wrote:
| > could you elaborate on why you don't use Apple
| Intelligence?
|
| Why would I trust this when they can't deliver a voice
| assistant that can parse my sentences beyond "Set a reminder"
| or "Set a timer"? They have neglected this area of their
| products for over a decade, they are not owed the benefit of
| the doubt
| Noaidi wrote:
| Some commenters already answered for me. To me there is no
| real use benefit. I am rather a simple user and it seems to
| take up space on the phone as well. I refuse to use iCloud so
| space is important to me since photography is what I do the
| most.
|
| Also, I like researching things old school how I learned in
| college because I think it leads to unintended discoveries.
|
| I do not trust the source you linked to. It is an
| organization buried under organizations for which I cannot
| seem to find their funding source after looking for a good 15
| minutes this morning. It led me back to https://ev.org/ where
| I found out one guy used to work for "Bain and Company", a
| consulting firm, and was associated with FTX funding:
|
| https://oxfordclarion.uk/wytham-abbey-and-the-end-of-the-
| eff...
|
| Besides "Effective Altruism" makes no sense to me. Altruism
| is Altruism IMO.
|
| Altruism: unselfish regard for or devotion to the welfare of
| others
|
| There is no way to be ineffective at altruism. The more you
| have to think about altruism the further you get from it.
|
| But the organization stinks as some kind of tech propaganda
| arm to me.
| timeon wrote:
| Not sure why would one think that article is something other
| than distraction attempt. Because emissions are adding up.
|
| I'm from country (in Europe) where CO2 emissions per capita
| [0] are 5.57 while number for USA is 14.3, so reading this
| sentence in that article: "The average American uses ~50,000
| times as much water every day..." surly does not imply that
| one should use ChatGPT because it is nothing. If "average
| American" wants to decrease emissions then not using LLMs is
| just start.
|
| [0]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-
| capita
| adastra22 wrote:
| > I totally understand why someone would refuse to use it due
| to environmental reasons
|
| Huh. This one baffles me.
| jeffbee wrote:
| I'm interested in reading about your low-carbon lifestyle that
| is so efficient you got to the point of giving up machine
| inference.
| timeon wrote:
| Depends where you are. People in some countries have lot of
| catching up: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-
| per-capita
|
| Maybe they are in USA - every little think counts there.
| Noaidi wrote:
| I am in the US, and thanks for that link. I am of the
| opinion that the Climate Crisis should be the number one
| focus for everyone right now.
|
| So, to keep this on point, Apple making a faster chip is
| not on my climate change agenda and anything but negative.
| jeffbee wrote:
| No, in the USA it is the opposite. The little things do not
| and cannot add up to anything. The only things that make a
| difference are motor fuels and hamburgers.
| Noaidi wrote:
| I live in a van full time. I have a 200w solar panel and a
| 1500w output solar battery that powers everything I use,
| mostly for cooking, sometimes heat. I also poop in the woods
| a lot. :) I do not use the internet much really. Driving is
| my biggest carbon footprint but I really do not put much more
| mileage than the average suburban person. Anyway, I try my
| best. I am permanently disabled so that makes a lot of it
| easier. Being poor dramatically lowers ones carbon footprint.
| jeffbee wrote:
| If you drive a van as much as the average suburbanite
| drives their vehicle, emitting ~10 metric tons of CO2
| annually, posting about how you gave up local machine
| inference for the climate is performative and asinine.
| Burning 1000 gallons of motor fuel has the same GHG impact
| as 300 _million_ uses of Google Gemini, and the CO2 impact
| of local inference on a Mac is even less.
| leakycap wrote:
| What a nice way to talk to another person who... didn't
| attack you?
|
| A typical passenger car driving 12,000 miles puts out
| about 5 metric tons of C02
|
| The person driving that passenger car likely has a 1,000
| sq ft or larger home or apartment, which can vary widely
| but could be reasonably estimated at another 5 metric
| tons of C02 (Miami vs. Minnesota makes a huge difference)
|
| So we're at 10 metric tons for someone who doesn't live
| in a van but still drives like a suburbanite
|
| Care to be a little kinder next time you feel whatever
| compelled you to write you response to the other user?
| Jeesh.
| Noaidi wrote:
| First, I need my van. My van is my house.
|
| > Burning 1000 gallons of motor fuel has the same GHG
| impact as 300 million uses of Google Gemini, and the CO2
| impact of local inference on a Mac is even less
|
| Still, even lets say your number are correct (and I feel
| they are not), does that mean I should just add to the
| problem and use something I do not need?
|
| Driving my van for my yearly average creates about 4.4
| metric tons of CO2.
|
| "A more recent study reported that training GPT-3 with
| 175 billion parameters consumed 1287 MWh of electricity,
| and resulted in carbon emissions of 502 metric tons of
| carbon, equivalent to driving 112 gasoline powered cars
| for a year."
|
| https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2023/06/09/ais-growing-
| car...
|
| Just to get an idea of how I conserve, another example is
| I only watch videos in 480 becasue it uses less power.
| This has a double benefit for me since it saves my solar
| battery as well.
|
| I am not bragging, just showing what is possible. Right
| now, being tsill this week in the desert, my carbon
| footprint is extremely low.
|
| Second, I cannot really trust most numbers that are
| coming out regarding AI. Sorry, just too much confusion
| and green-washing. For example, Meta is building an AI
| site that is about the size of Manhattan. Is all the
| carbon used to build that counted in the equations?
|
| But this paper from 5/25:
|
| https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-
| energ...
|
| says "by 2028 more than half of the electricity going to
| data centers will be used for AI. At that point, AI alone
| could consume as much electricity annually as 22% of all
| US households."
|
| And
|
| "Tallies of AI's energy use often short-circuit the
| conversation--either by scolding individual behavior, or
| by triggering comparisons to bigger climate offenders.
| Both reactions dodge the point: AI is unavoidable, and
| even if a single query is low-impact, governments and
| companies are now shaping a much larger energy future
| around AI's needs."
|
| And
|
| "The Lawrence Berkeley researchers offered a blunt
| critique of where things stand, saying that the
| information disclosed by tech companies, data center
| operators, utility companies, and hardware manufacturers
| is simply not enough to make reasonable projections about
| the unprecedented energy demands of this future or
| estimate the emissions it will create. "
|
| So the confusion and obfuscation is enough for me to
| avoid it. I think AI shoudl be restaind to research, not
| to be used from most of the silliness adn AI slop that is
| being produced. Because yiou know, we are not even
| counting the AI slop views that also take up data space
| and energy by people looking at it all.
|
| But part if why I do not use it is my little boycott. I
| do not like AI, at least how it is being misused to
| create porn and AI slop instad of doing the great things
| it might do. They are misusing AI to make a profit. And
| that is also what I protest.
| Tagbert wrote:
| Most of the AI and Machine Learning Apple has done so far are
| primarily done on device so you can see whether there is any
| climate change concern or not.
| GaggiX wrote:
| >The 10-core GPU features a dedicated Neural Accelerator in each
| core
|
| "The neural engine features a graphic accelerator" probably M6
| h1fra wrote:
| I keep seeing all those crazy screenshots from games on Mac, and
| yet there are barely any big releases for this platform. I guess
| it benefits a whole range of software, not just games, but still
| that's a pity.
| tantalor wrote:
| Because gaming on Mac actually looks bad in practice.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44906305
| qnpnp wrote:
| This is easy to fix, not an explanation.
|
| Gaming on mac is indeed lacking, but that's really not the
| reason.
| tantalor wrote:
| It's a symptom of the deeper problem: Apple does not value
| game developers or the experience of users.
| SXX wrote:
| 32GB RAM limit on current M5 models. Now wait for M5 Max.
| bombcar wrote:
| M5 Max Macs
|
| If they're studios, you can have stacks of M5 Max Macs.
| gmm1990 wrote:
| Interesting that there's only the m5 on the macbook pro. I
| thought the m4 and m4 pro/max were at the same time on the
| macbook pro
| jbjbjbjb wrote:
| I'm glad I opted to get the base model M4 Mac Mini rather than
| upgrade the memory for longevity.
| mohsen1 wrote:
| First time seeing Apple using "AI" in their marketing material.
| It was "Machine Learning" and "Apple Intelligence" before...
| mentalgear wrote:
| Unfortunately, they have also succumbed to the AI hype machine.
| Apple, calling it by its actual name "machine learning" was
| about the only thing I still liked about Apple.
| rpdillon wrote:
| Wait, didn't they try to backronym their way into "Apple
| Intelligence" last cycle?
|
| https://www.apple.com/apple-intelligence/
| kryllic wrote:
| Probably don't want to draw more attention to their ongoing
| lawsuits [1]. Apple, for all its faults, does enjoy
| consistency and the unruly nature of LLM's is something I'm
| shocked they thought they could tame in a short amount of
| time. The fallout of the hilariously bad news/message
| "summaries" were more than enough to spook Apple from
| allowing that to go much further.
|
| >Built into your iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Vision Pro*
| to help you write, express yourself, and get things done
| effortlessly.** Designed with groundbreaking privacy at
| every step.
|
| The asterisks are really icing on the cake here.
|
| ---
|
| [1] https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/apple-accused-of-
| ai-cop...
| kgwgk wrote:
| > actual name "machine learning"
|
| Yesterday's hype is today's humility.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Machine learning is a bit more specific than what we now call
| AI, no?
| asadotzler wrote:
| the other way around.
| adastra22 wrote:
| I don't follow. Machine learning was coined to
| specifically describe the application of neural networks
| to unsupervised classification systems. Its meaning has
| grown beyond that, but at the outset, it was a niche part
| of artificial intelligence. Now you're saying that AI is
| a subset of machine learning?
| low_tech_punk wrote:
| Not all is lost: AI can still be acronym for Apple
| Intelligence.
| vessenes wrote:
| I like sniping - but I _could_ make a product call here to
| support the messaging - when it 's running outside diffusion
| models and LLMs (as per the press release) we could call that
| AI. Agreed that they should at least have mentioned Apple
| Intelligence in their PR though
| vayup wrote:
| I am sure by AI they mean Apple Intelligence:-)
| lenerdenator wrote:
| Now if some game companies would just port their wares to Apple
| Silicon and the MacOS libraries already...
| zoobab wrote:
| Does it run Linux?
| sameermanek wrote:
| Did anyone else notice that the base storage has been upgraded to
| 512G? I knew this was coming after iPhone 17s storage upgrade!
| xd1936 wrote:
| 512GB was the base storage of the M4 also.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20251010205008/https://www.apple...
| criddell wrote:
| Looks like the base storage on the iPad Pro is still 256 GB.
| Tepix wrote:
| This is the Macbook Pro, not the Macbook Air.
| gzer0 wrote:
| M5 Chip currently only avaialble with up to 32 GB of RAM on the
| 14 inch Macbook pro variant, just FYI.
|
| [1] https://www.apple.com/us-edu/shop/buy-mac/macbook-
| pro/14-inc...
| pixelpoet wrote:
| That's laughable in 2025, and together with the wimpy 153 GB/s
| memory bandwidth (come on, Strix Halo is 256GB/s at a fraction
| of the price!) they really don't have a leg to stand on calling
| this AI-anything!
| hannesfur wrote:
| As pointed out in other places as well a better comparison
| will be the upcoming Pro & Max variants. Also, as far as I
| know, Strix Halo mainly uses the GPU for inference not the
| little AI accelerator AMD has put on there. That one is just
| to limited.
| Tepix wrote:
| So you're saying these won't sell at all?
| pixelpoet wrote:
| I'm saying this is pretty weaksauce for AI-anything in
| 2025, especially considering the price tag. Sure, there
| will be later models with more memory and bandwidth (no
| doubt at eye-watering prices), but with 32 GB this model
| isn't it.
|
| I'm sure it's a perfectly fine daily driver, but you have
| to appreciate the irony of a massive chip loaded to the
| gills with matrix multiplication units, marketed as an
| amazing AI machine, and yet so hobbled by mem capacity and
| bandwidth.
| jon-wood wrote:
| > Apple 2030 is the company's ambitious plan to be carbon neutral
| across its entire footprint by the end of this decade by reducing
| product emissions from their three biggest sources: materials,
| electricity, and transportation.
|
| But never, ever, through not shipping incremental hardware bumps
| every year regardless of whether there's anything really worth
| shipping.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I'm always skeptical about these carbon neutral pledges because
| in practice it's a lot of administrative magic, like paying a
| company that says they will plant trees or whatever which will
| sign some official looking paper saying 'ye apple totaly
| compensated three morbillion tonnes of carbon emissions'.
|
| And it's things like not including a charger, cable, headphones
| anymore to reduce package size, which sure, will save a little
| on emissions but it's moot because people will still need those
| things.
| asdhtjkujh wrote:
| Very few people are buying a new machine every year, even when
| the updates (like this year) are arguably more than incremental
| -- selling outdated hardware that will become obsolete sooner
| is not more environmentally-friendly.
|
| Hardware longevity and quality are probably the least valid
| criticisms of the current Macbook lineup. Most of the industry
| produces future landfill at an alarming rate.
| SG- wrote:
| second hand Apple market is very big, especially since M series
| MacBooks leapfrogged performance.
| sebastianconcpt wrote:
| Wonder how it compares with the M4 Max that I've just bought haha
| dmix wrote:
| Same I just bought an M4 Max 2 weeks ago and had a bit of
| anxiety for a moment. I'm going to justify it because they
| haven't released M5 Max yet
| sebastianconcpt wrote:
| It's going to be fine, what's important is what we do with
| the thingy :)
|
| Logos is King
| whitepoplar wrote:
| Any word on whether this chip has "Memory Integrity Enforcement"
| capability, as included in Apple's A19/A19 Pro chips?
|
| https://security.apple.com/blog/memory-integrity-enforcement...
| SG- wrote:
| it's the same core, so more than likely yes.
| gcr wrote:
| So how many hardware systems does Apple silicon have for doing
| matrix multiplies now?
|
| 1. CPU, via SIMD/NEON instructions (just dot products)
|
| 2. CPU, via AMX coprocessor (entire matrix multiplies, M1-M3)
|
| 3. CPU, via SME (M4)
|
| 4. GPU, via Metal (compute shaders + simdgroup-matrix + mps
| matrix kernels)
|
| 4. Neural Engine via CoreML (advisory)
|
| Apple also appears to be adding a "Neural Accelerator" to each
| core on the M5?
| hannesfur wrote:
| I inferred that they meant the neural engine cores by neural
| accelerators or it could be a bigger/different AMX (which
| really should become a standard btw)
| oskarkk wrote:
| Would it be possible to use all of them at the same time? Not
| necessarily in a practical way, but just for fun? Could
| different ways of doing this on CPU be done in some extent by
| one core at the same time, given it's superscalar?
| staticfloat wrote:
| This is a very old answer about the M1, but yes what you're
| saying is possible:
| https://stackoverflow.com/a/67590869/230778
| nullbyte wrote:
| Thankfully I think libraries like Pytorch abstract this stuff
| away. But it seems very convoluted if you're building something
| from the ground up.
| gardnr wrote:
| Does PyTorch support other acceleration? I thought they just
| support Metal.
| joshuabaker2 wrote:
| You can convert a PyTorch model to an ONNX model that can
| use CoreML (or in some cases just convert it to a CoreML
| model directly)
| twoodfin wrote:
| Is this really strange? Matmul is just a specialized kind of
| primitive compute, one that is seeing an explosion in practical
| uses.
|
| A Mac Quadra in 1994 probably had floating point compute all
| over the place, despite the 1984 Mac having none.
| jmrm wrote:
| I wonder if some Apple-made software, like Final Cut, make use
| of all of those "duplicated" instructions at the same time for
| getting a better performance...
|
| I know how just the multitasking nature of the OS probably make
| this situation happens across different programs, but
| nonetheless would be pretty cool!
| HeckFeck wrote:
| Adding CPUs and GPUs on top of your CPUs and GPUs... Sounds
| like we've the spiritual successor of the Sega Saturn.
| throwaway31131 wrote:
| Doesn't that make sense though as each manipulates a different
| layer in the memory hierarchy allowing the programmer to
| control the latency and throughput implications. I see it as a
| good thing.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| >Apple also appears to be adding a "Neural Accelerator" to each
| core on the M5?
|
| The "neural accelerator" is per GPU core, and is matmul. e.g.
| "Tensor cores".
| hannesfur wrote:
| It's unfortunate that this announcement is still unspecific about
| what they improved in the Neural Engine. Since all we know about
| the Neural Engine comes from Apple papers or reverse engineering
| efforts (https://github.com/hollance/neural-engine), it's
| plausible that they addressed some quirks to enable better
| transformer performance. They have written quite interesting
| papers on transformers on the Neural Engine:
|
| - https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/neural-engine-tra...
|
| - https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/vision-transforme...
|
| Things have definitely gotten better with MLX on the software
| side, though it still seems they could do more in that area
| (let's see what the M5 Max brings). But even if they made big
| strides here, it won't help previous generations, and the main
| thing limiting Apple Intelligence (in my opinion) will continue
| to be the 8 GB of unified memory they still insist on.
| fooblaster wrote:
| MLX doesn't use the neural engine still right? I still wish
| they would abandon that unit and just center everything around
| metal and tensor units on the GPU.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Wrt. language models/transformers, the neural engine/NPU is
| still potentially useful for the pre-processing step, which
| is generally compute-limited. For token generation you need
| memory bandwidth so GPU compute with neural/tensor
| accelerators is preferable.
| fooblaster wrote:
| I think I'd still rather have the hardware area put into
| tensor cores for the GPU instead of this unit that's only
| programmable with onnx.
| hannesfur wrote:
| Oh, I overlooked that! You are right. Surprising... since
| Apple has shown that it's possible through CoreML
| (https://github.com/apple/ml-ane-transformers)
|
| I would hope that the Foundation Models
| (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundationmodels)
| use the neural engine.
| hannesfur wrote:
| Edit: Foundation Models use the Neural Engine. They are
| referring to a Neural Engine compatible K/V cache in this
| announcement:
| https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/introducing-
| apple...
| fooblaster wrote:
| The neural engine not having a native programming model
| makes it effectively a dead end for external model
| development. It seems like a legacy unit that was designed
| for cnns with limited receptive fields, and just isn't
| programmable enough to be useful for the total set of
| models and their operators available today.
| hannesfur wrote:
| That's sadly true, over in x86 land things don't look
| much better in my opinion. The corresponding accelerators
| on modern Intel and AMD CPUs (the "Copilot PCs") are very
| difficult to program as well. I would love to read a blog
| post on someone trying though!
| fooblaster wrote:
| I have a lot of the details there. Suffice to say it's a
| nightmare:
|
| https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=8997
| 844...
|
| AMD is likely to back away from this IP relatively soon.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| MLX is a training/research framework, and the work product is
| usually a CoreML model. A CoreML model will use any and all
| resources that are available to it, at least if the resource
| fits for the need.
|
| The ANE is for very low power, very specific inference tasks.
| There is no universe where Apple abandons it, and it's super
| weird how much anti-ANE rhetoric there is on this site, as if
| there can only be one tool for an infinite selection of
| needs. The ANE is how your iPhone extracts every bit of text
| from images and subject matter information from photos with
| little fanfare or heat, or without destroying your battery,
| among many other uses. It is extremely useful for what it
| does.
|
| >tensor units on the GPU
|
| The M5 / A19 Pro are the first chips with so-called tensor
| units. e.g. matmul on the GPU. The ANE used to be the only
| tensor-like thing on the system, albeit as mentioned designed
| to be super efficient and for very specific purposes. That
| doesn't mean Apple is going to abandon the ANE, and instead
| they made it faster and more capable again.
| almostgotcaught wrote:
| > the work product is usually a CoreML model.
|
| What work product? Who is running models on Apple hardware
| in prod?
| llm_nerd wrote:
| An enormous number of people and products. I'm actually
| not sure if your comment is serious, because it seems to
| be of the "I don't, therefore no one does" variety.
| bigyabai wrote:
| Enormous compared to what? Do you have any numbers, or
| are you going off what your X/Bluesky feed is telling
| you?
| llm_nerd wrote:
| I'm super not interested in arguing with the peanut
| gallery (meaning people who don't know the platform but
| feel that they have absolute knowledge of it), but enough
| people have apps with CoreML models in them, running
| across a billion or so devices. Some of those models were
| developed or migrated with MLX.
|
| You don't have to believe this. I could not care less if
| you don't.
|
| Have a great day.
| bigyabai wrote:
| I don't believe it. MLX is a proprietary model format and
| usually the last to get supported on Huggingface. Given
| that most iOS users aren't selecting their own models, I
| genuinely don't think your conjecture adds up. The
| majority of people are likely using safetensors and GGUF,
| not MLX.
|
| If you had a source to cite then it would remove all
| doubt pretty quickly here. But your assumptions don't
| seem to align with how iOS users actually use their
| phone.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| Cite a source? That CoreML models are prolific on Apple
| platforms? That Apple devices are prolific? Search for it
| yourself.
|
| You seem set on MLX and apparently on your narrow view of
| what models are. This discussion was about ANE vs
| "tensor" units on the GPU, and someone happened to
| mention MLX in that context. I clarified the role of MLX,
| but that from an inference perspective most deployments
| are CoreML, which will automatically use ANE if the model
| or some subset fits (which is actually fairly rare as
| it's a very limited -- albeit speedy and power efficient
| -- bit of hardware). These are basic facts.
|
| >how iOS users actually use their phone.
|
| What does this even mean? Do you think I mean people are
| running Qwen3-Embedding-4B in pytorch on their device or
| something? Loads of apps, including mobile games, have
| models in them now. This is not rare, and most users are
| blissfully unaware.
| kanaffa12345 wrote:
| > That CoreML models are prolific on Apple platforms?
| That Apple devices are prolific?
|
| correct and non-controversial
|
| > An enormous number of people and products [use CoreML
| on Apple platforms]
|
| non-sequitur
|
| EDIT: i see people are not aware of
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox
| kanaffa12345 wrote:
| > I'm super not interested in arguing with the peanut
| gallery
|
| i love blustery nerds lol. what if i told you i'm a
| coreml contrib and i know _for a fact_ you 're wrong?
| llm_nerd wrote:
| Logging into the alt for _this_? Good god.
|
| It would help if you would explain what I said that is
| wrong. You know, as the "haven't logged in in three years
| but pulled out the alt for this" CoreML contributor you
| are. This is an especially weird bit of trolling giving
| that nothing I said is remotely even contentious, and is
| utterly banal facts.
| koolala wrote:
| Can you share a example of apps you mean any maybe it
| would clear up any confusion?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > ...and it's super weird how much anti-ANE rhetoric there
| is on this site, as if there can only be one tool for an
| infinite selection of needs
|
| That seems like a strange comment. I've remarked in this
| thread (and other threads on this site) about what's known
| re: low-level ANE capabilities, and it seems to have
| significant potential overall, even for some part of LLM
| processing. I'm not expecting it to be best-in-class at
| everything, though. Just like most other NPUs that are also
| showing up on recent laptop hardware.
| trymas wrote:
| > the main thing limiting Apple Intelligence (in my opinion)
| will continue to be the 8 GB of unified memory they still
| insist on.
|
| As you said - it won't help previous generations, though since
| last year (or two??) all macs start with 16GB of memory. Even
| entry level macbook airs.
| hannesfur wrote:
| Thats true! I was referring to their wider line up,
| especially the iPad, where users will expect the same
| performance as on the Mac's (they payed for an Mx chip) and
| they sold me an iPad Air this year that comes with a really
| fast M3 and still only 8 GB of RAM (you only get 16 on the
| iPad Pro btw if you go with at least 1TB of storage on the M4
| Pro one)
| moi2388 wrote:
| Why would you expect the same performance on iPad and
| MacBook Pro?
|
| The latter has up to 128GB of memory?
| hannesfur wrote:
| You probably wouldn't with a Pro but you might between an
| iPad Pro and an MacBook Air. With the foundation models
| API they basically said that there will be one size of
| model for the entire platform, making smarter models on a
| MacBook Pro unrealistic and only faster ones possible.
| LoganDark wrote:
| Isn't Private Cloud Compute already enabling the more
| powerful models to be run on the server? That way the on-
| device models don't have as much pressure to be The One.
| moi2388 wrote:
| That's fair
| doug_durham wrote:
| "They sold me"? You me you bought.
| raverbashing wrote:
| I bet Cook authorized the upgrade with grinned teeth and I
| was all for it
| liuliu wrote:
| Faster compute helps, for things like vision language model
| that requires bigger context to be filled. My understanding is
| that ANE is still optimized for convolution load, and compute
| efficiency while the new neural accelerators optimized for
| flexibility and performance.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The old ANE enabled arbitrary statically scheduled multiply-
| add, of INT8 or FP16. That's good for convolution but not
| specifically geared for it.
| liuliu wrote:
| I am not an expert on ANE, but I think it is related to the
| size of register files and how that is smaller than what we
| need for GEMM on modern transformers (especially these fat
| ones with MoE).
| zozbot234 wrote:
| AIUI the ANE makes use of data in unified memory, not in
| the register file. So this wouldn't be an inherent
| limitation. (OTOH, that's why it wastes memory bandwidth
| for most newer transformer models, which use heavily
| quantized data - the ANE will have to read
| padded/unquantized values and the fraction of memory
| bandwidth that's used for that padding is pure waste.)
| hannesfur wrote:
| That would be an interesting approach if true. I hope someone
| gets to the bottom of it once we have hardware in our hands.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I can only guess that significant changes in hardware have
| longer lead times than software (for example). I suppose I am
| not expecting anything game-changing until the M6.
| zuspotirko wrote:
| ofc true. Unified memory is always less than vram. And my 16GB
| vram aren't enough.
|
| But I think it's also a huge issue Apple makes storage so
| expensive. If Apple wants local AI to answer your questions it
| should be able to take your calender, emails, text messages,
| photos, journal entries etc. into account. It can't do that as
| nicely as long as customers opt for only 256GB or 1TB devices
| due to cost
| xiphias2 wrote:
| My guess is that they moved the systolic arrays inside the GPU
| cores just like how it's done in modern NVIDIA chips.
|
| That's the only way to speed up MLX 4x compared to M4.
| jdlyga wrote:
| If only the Windows ecosystem could make the processor transition
| as smooth as Mac.
| lostmsu wrote:
| I don't think it is the ecosystem. The ARM CPUs not from Apple
| are just too slow.
| wmf wrote:
| X Elite and N1X are fine; the problem is with Windows.
| bigyabai wrote:
| As someone who admins Linux and Windows ARM machines, rest
| assured the issue is not _just_ with Windows. ARM support
| is best-effort on most distros, and still fairly incomplete
| even on nixpkgs and Debian unstable.
| kotaKat wrote:
| Surprised they aren't beating the "performance per watt" drum
| they normally would be on Mx releases. I'm assuming this will be
| a bit of a snoozer until the M5X/M5 Ultra or an M6 hits the
| pipeline.
|
| If anything, these refreshes let them get rid of the last old
| crap on the line for M1 and M2, tie up loose ends with Walmart
| for the $599 M1 Air they still make for 'em, and start shipping
| out the A18 Pro-based Macbooks in November.
| ajross wrote:
| They don't have a new process to launch on, so one wouldn't
| expect a power metric to improve at all.
| sbbq wrote:
| The chips are great. Now they just need to improve the quite
| stagnant laptop hardware to go with it.
| alberth wrote:
| Vision Pro went from M2 to M5, that's quite a jump in horse-
| power.
| adamschwartz wrote:
| Also ~200g heavier due in part to the counterweight in the new
| strap.
| outcoldman wrote:
| Marketing:
|
| M5 announcement [1] says 4x the peak GPU compute performance for
| AI compared to M4. I guess in the lab?
|
| Both iPad and MBP M5 [2][3] say "delivering up to 3.5x the AI
| performance". But all the examples of AI (in [3]), they are
| 1.2-2.3X faster than M4. So where this 3.5X is coming from? What
| tests did Apple do to show that?
|
| ---
|
| 1. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/10/apple-
| unleashes-m5-th...
|
| 2. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/10/apple-unveils-
| new-14-...
|
| 3. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/10/apple-introduces-
| the-...
| relativeadv wrote:
| Its not uncommon for Apple and others to compare against two
| generations ago rather than the immediately preceding one
| outcoldman wrote:
| I referenced everything about comparing to M4. I left outside
| the comparison with M1.
| storus wrote:
| M5 is supposed to support FP4 natively which would explain the
| speed up on Q4 quantized models (down from BF16).
| exabrial wrote:
| > A nearly 30 percent increase in unified memory bandwidth to
| 153GB/s
|
| I'll believe the benchmarks, not marketing claims, but an
| observation and a question.
|
| 1. AMD EPYC 4585PX has ~89GB/s, with pretty good latency, as long
| you use 2xdimm
|
| 2. How does this compare to the memory bandwidth and latency of
| M1,M2,M3,M4 in reality with all of the caveats? It seems like M1
| was a monumental leap forward, then everything else was a
| retraction.
| exabrial wrote:
| Apple's software division has lost their way. They've done
| nothing but add flashy features and move buttons around,
| deprecating things and breaking backwards compatibility (yeah,
| 32bit has been awhile now, but alas), meanwhile retreating on
| stability.
|
| Snow Leopard still remains the company's crown achievement. 0
| bloatware, 0 "mobile features on desktop" (wtf is this even a
| thing?), tuned for absolute speed and stability.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| They completely removed _hardware_ support for 32 bit software.
| morshu9001 wrote:
| This was in the Intel generation of Macs. If Windows can
| support 32-bit software then so should Mac, along with all
| that 64-bit software that got broken in random Mac updates.
|
| Ironically I can still run old 32-bit Windows software in
| Wine on my M1 Mac. Windows software is more stable on a Mac
| than Mac software.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Do you think they didn't know they were moving away from
| Intel when they did that? Besides code is shared between
| MacOS and iOS even then. They removed 32 bit support from
| ARM processors years before they moved to ARM based Macs.
| morshu9001 wrote:
| They probably did, but just because M1 gets released
| doesn't mean Intel Macs suddenly don't have 32-bit
| capable hardware. I get why it was easier to drop it in
| the new OS regardless of hardware, only it throws a lot
| of software under the bus, and running software is kinda
| the OS's main job.
|
| And the hardware isn't a showstopper anyway. Apple did
| x86-64 on AS, Windows' WoW64 does x86-32 on ARM-32 or
| even IA-64, and I'll bet Windows will do x86-32 on x86-64
| if Intel ever drops the 32 mode. Wine 32on64 will run
| x86-32 on AS already.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| And Windows is also a bloated mess that they couldn't use
| on mobile and their ARM initiatives have gone nowhere.
|
| If you don't think Windows is a bloated mess, look up all
| of the different ways you have to represent a "string"
| depending on the API you are calling.
| morshu9001 wrote:
| Sure but those are unrelated. Microsoft doesn't make the
| chips, and Windows crapiness is its own thing. It not
| like macOS would turn to crap if they made Rosetta2
| support x86-32, or in general stopped breaking all the 3P
| software.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Windows crapiness is because they won't deprecate
| anything ever. Read some of Raymond Chen's posts about
| all of the special casing they did for apps that broke on
| newer versions of Windows because app developers were
| using unpublished APIs.
|
| Every bit of backwards compatibility increases the
| testing surface and the vulnerabilities. In fact, an
| early bug in Windows NT that you could encode DOS shell
| commands in the browser URL bar from a client and they
| wouod run with admin privileges if the server was running
| IIS.
|
| Should Apple have also kept 68K emulation around? PPC?
| morshu9001 wrote:
| Apple went the other extreme. Even if you use public APIs
| exactly the way they want, your software will break
| frequently. This is without even getting into the whole
| OpenGL vs Metal drama.
|
| In Windows they took things a bit too far by not only
| supporting old stuff but also treating it as first-class.
| If software is too outdated, it's fair to stick it behind
| some compat layer that makes it slower, as long as it
| still runs. But that's not even the biggest problem with
| Windows, it's Microsoft turning it into adware, also not
| being Unixlike in the first place.
|
| To answer your last question, yes for PPC at least. 68K
| is too old to matter. Emulation layer doesn't need to
| hold back the entire system. If it means less dev
| resources to spend making glass effects and emojis, fine.
| badc0ffee wrote:
| I've heard about rounded corners and low information density
| windows in Tahoe, but what "mobile features on desktop" are in
| Sequoia and earlier? The App Store? Launchpad? iCloud?
| Notifications? You don't need to use those.
| morshu9001 wrote:
| They tried to make you use the App Store for Xcode and system
| updates, but thankfully there have been solid workarounds
| morshu9001 wrote:
| I liked Snow Leopard too, it was indeed the last focused Mac
| OS, but there was some memory-related bug that made me update
| past it. The new OSes aren't so bad, but yeah I don't touch any
| of the new features.
| yalogin wrote:
| It feels like apple is " a square peg in a round hole" when it
| comes to AI - atleast for now.
|
| They are not the hardware provider like nvidia, they don't do the
| software and services like OpenAI or even Microsoft/oracle. So
| they are struggling to find a foothold here. I am sure they are
| working on a lot of things but the only way to showcase them is
| through their phone which ironically enough feels like not the
| best path for apple.
|
| Apple's best option is to put llms locally on the phone and claim
| privacy (which is true) but they may end up in the same Siri vs
| others situation, where Siri always is the dumber one.
|
| This is interesting to see how it plays out
| mirekrusin wrote:
| Being late in AI race or not entering it from training side is
| not necessarily bad, others have burned tons of money, if Apple
| enters with their hardware first (only?) it may disrupt status
| quo from consumer side. It's not impossible that they'll
| produce hardware everybody will want to run local models that
| will be on par with closed ones. If this happens it may change
| real money flow (as opposed to investor based on imaginary
| evaluation money that can evaporate).
| bob1029 wrote:
| > Being late
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-
| mover_advantage#Second-m...
| mft_ wrote:
| They are the leader in manufacturing consumer systems with
| sufficient high-bandwidth memory to enable decent-sized LLMs to
| be run locally with reasonable performance. If you want to run
| something that needs >=32GB of memory (which is frankly bottom-
| end for a somewhat capable LLM) they're your only widely-
| available choice (otherwise you've got the rare Strix Halo AI
| Max+ 395 chip, or you need multiple GPUs, or maybe a self-build
| based around a Threadripper.)
|
| This might not be widely recognised, as the proportion of
| people wanting to run capable LLMs locally is likely a rounding
| error versus the people who use ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini
| regularly. It's also not something that Apple market on, as
| they can't monetize it. However, as time goes on and memory and
| compute power gradually decrease in price, and also maybe as
| local LLMs continue to increase in ability (?) it may become
| more and more relevant.
| yalogin wrote:
| All current use cases, the ones that caught the public eye,
| just don't have a need for locally run LLMs. Apple has to
| come up with functionality that can work with on-device LLMs
| and that is hard to do. There aren't that many use cases for
| it as the input vectors all map to an app or camera. Even
| then a full fledged LLM is always better than a quantized,
| low precision one running locally. Yeah, increased compute is
| the way, but not a silver bullet as Vision and Audio bound
| LLMs require large amounts of memory
| bfrog wrote:
| The big win would be a linux capable device. I don't have any
| interest in mac os x but the apple m parts always seem amazing.
|
| In theory this would be where qualcomm would come in and provide
| something but in practice they seem to be stuck in qualcomm land
| where only lawyers matter and actual users and developers can get
| stuffed.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Yeah, this is the biggest hole in ARM offerings.
|
| The only well supported devices are either phones or servers
| with very little in between.
|
| Even common consumer devices like wifi routers will have ARM
| SOCs with pinned version of the kernel they are attached to
| which will get supported for 1 to 2 years at most.
| mrkeen wrote:
| I have a pretty good time on Asahi Fedora (macbook air M1). It
| supposedly also supports M2 but no higher.
|
| And it's a PITA to install (needs to be started within macosx,
| using scripts, with the partitions already in a good state)
| Gethsemane wrote:
| If I was less lazy I could probably find this answer online,
| but how do you find the battery life these days? I'd love to
| make the switch, but that's the only thing holding me back...
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| How's Thunderbolt and display port alt mode?
| mysteria wrote:
| The issue is that it's hacky, and in that case I'd rather go
| with a Intel or AMD x86 system with more or less out of the
| box Linux support. What we're looking for is a performant ARM
| system where Linux is a first class citizen.
| walterbell wrote:
| Apparently the Windows exclusivity period has ended, so Google
| will support Android and ChromeOS on Qualcomm X2-based devices,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45368167
| mittermayr wrote:
| This morning I was looking to maybe replace my Macbook Pro 2018,
| which had the horrible keyboard and finally seems to be crippled
| enough to not be fun to use anymore -- now this!
|
| However, I have been disappointed by Apple too many times (they
| wouldn't replace my keyboard despite their highly-flamed design-
| faux-pas, had to replace the battery twice by now, etc.)
|
| Two years ago I finally stopped replacing their expensive
| external keyboards, which I used to buy once a year or every
| other (due to broken key-hinges) and have been so incredibly
| positively surprised by getting used to the MX Keys now. Much
| better built, incredible mileage for the price. Plus, I can
| easily switch and use them on my Windows PC, too.
|
| So, about the Macbook -- if I were to switch mobile computing
| over to Windows, what can I replace it with? My main machine is
| still a Mac Mini M2 Pro, which is perfect value/price. I like the
| Surface as a concept (replacable keyboards are a fantastic idea,
| battery however, super iffy nonsense), and I've got a Surface Pro
| 6 around, but it's essentially the same gloss-premium I don't
| need for my use.
|
| Are there any much-cheaper but somewhat comparable laptops (12h+
| battery, 1 TB disk, 16-32GB RAM, 2k+ Display) with reasonable
| build quality? Does bypassing the inherent premium of all the
| Apple gloss open up any useful options? Or is Apple actually
| providing the best value here?
|
| Would love to hear from non-Surface, non-Thinkpad (I love it,
| but) folks who've got some recommendations for sub $1k laptops.
|
| Not my main machine, but something I take along train rides, or
| when going to clients, or sometimes working offsite for a day.
| vachina wrote:
| LG Gram SuperSlim. Very light (900grams). I once went hiking
| with it and forgot the laptop was still in the bag.
|
| But its really only capable of high performance in short bursts
| because of the extremely small thermal mass.
| mittermayr wrote:
| thanks for the hint, spec-wise, this is exactly what I meant,
| 1tb ssd, 16gb ram, 16 hours of battery, very nice. then I saw
| it's 1700 EUR where I am at the moment, so pretty much
| Macbook Pro price :(
| alberth wrote:
| Apple is binning the iPad Pro chips: Storage
| CPU <= 512GB 3 P-cores (and 6 E-cores) 1TB+
| 4 P-cores (and 6 E-cores)
|
| https://www.apple.com/ipad-pro/specs/
| tempaccount420 wrote:
| Storage-gating is really disgusting considering how much Apple
| charges for storage.
| aloer wrote:
| iirc in the past it was about memory and that larger storage
| needs more memory for caching.
|
| So this made at least some sense.
|
| I guess yields might be good enough that they can afford to
| bin with another core in there as well.
|
| Memory is probably still the main reason for binning in the
| first place.
| criddell wrote:
| I wish I could get the nano texture glass on a lower spec iPad
| Pro. I probably only need the 512 GB model and the glass is only
| available on 1 and 2 TB modes.
| nblgbg wrote:
| 32GB is the maximum memory configuration for the 14-inch laptop,
| which isn't sufficient for running local LLMs. I think a Mac
| Studio or Mac Mini with higher memory would be more useful.
| reacharavindh wrote:
| One that's be a nice quality of life improvement in
| MacBook(Air/Pro) is built-in 5G connectivity. I'd spring for that
| convenience not needing to connect to a hotspot draining precious
| battery on my phone. I thought we were closer given Apple started
| making their own modems, but it is still a miss.
| port3000 wrote:
| They want you to buy the Apple phone and pair it, so they sell
| more
| pier25 wrote:
| Does the M5 feature the UltraFusion connector which would enable
| the Ultra variant?
| ozaiworld wrote:
| that would likely only be present on the Max chip of the M5
| generation
| pier25 wrote:
| thanks I had always assumed it needed to be present in the
| base design of the chip
| dmitshur wrote:
| The claimed 1.6x increase in video game frame rate compared to M4
| seems pretty good. Looking forward to seeing it tested out in
| practice.
| Insanity wrote:
| Assume they released this ahead of their end of month event in
| response to all the leaks from the past weeks.
| superkuh wrote:
| I know it's only shared system RAM and not VRAM, but the M5's
| 150GB/s isn't going to be very fast when doing AI inference. A
| fairly old rtx 3060 12GB does 360GB/s. But I guess quantity is a
| quality all of it's own when it comes to RAM and inference.
| sidcool wrote:
| I wonder if they informed Jensen about it.
| davidw wrote:
| Are we headed back to the bad old days of very proprietary
| systems, where megacorps dictate everything?
| GeekyBear wrote:
| I'd argue that calling the new matrix multiplication unit they
| added to the GPU cores a neural engine instead of a tensor
| processing unit is a branding error that will lead to confusion.
|
| The existing neural engine's function is to maximize power
| efficiency, not flexible performance on models of any size.
| bigyabai wrote:
| I'd argue that Apple's definition of "neural engine" was
| entirely different from what the greater desktop, edge and
| datacenter markets already considered a "neural engine" to be.
|
| It's an improvement, nomenclature-wise.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| A computing device named M5 with highly advanced AI capabilities
| meant for enterprise (or Enterprise) computing environments? Uh-
| oh, I think I'll pass; I saw this episode of Star Trek (TOS: The
| Ultimate Computer) before. Hope the owner's manual comes with a
| warning not to wear a red shirt anywhere near it, dohohoho.
|
| (Perhaps it would be safer to wait for The Next Generation?)
| ironman1478 wrote:
| It's surprising to me macs aren't a more popular target for
| games. They're extremely capable machines and they're console-
| like in that there isn't very much variation in hardware, as
| opposed to traditional PC gaming. I would think that it's easier
| to develop a game for a MacBook than a Windows machine where you
| never know what hardware setup the user will have.
| LtdJorge wrote:
| Metal is a very recent API compared to DirectX and OpenGL.
| Also, there's very very little people on Mac, and even less
| that also play videogames. There are almost no libraries and
| tooling built around Metal and the Mac SDKs, and a very small
| audience, so it doesn't make financial sense.
| sosodev wrote:
| It's easier to develop a game for a mac in some ways but you
| reach a tiny fraction of gamers that way.
| hangonhn wrote:
| I wonder how that might look once you factor in Apple TV
| devices. They're pretty weak devices now but future ones can
| come with M-class CPUs. That's a huge source of potential
| revenue for Apple.
| amluto wrote:
| The current Apple TV is, in many respects, unbelievably
| bad, and it has nothing to do with the CPU.
|
| Open up the YouTube app and try to navigate the UI. It's
| okay but not really up to the Apple standard. Now try to
| enter text in the search bar. A nearby iPhone will
| helpfully offer to let you use it like a keyboard. You get
| a text field, and you can type, and keystrokes are slowly
| and not entirely reliably propagated to the TV, but text
| does not stay in sync. And after a few seconds, in the
| middle of typing, the TV will decide you're done typing and
| move focus to a search result, and the phone won't notice,
| and it gets completely desynchronized.
| ascagnel_ wrote:
| The YouTube app has never been good and never felt like a
| native app -- it's a wrapper around web tech.
|
| More importantly for games, though, is the awful storage
| architecture around the TV boxes. Games have to slice
| themselves up into 2GB storage chunks, which can be
| purged from the system whenever the game isn't actively
| running. The game has to be aware of missing chunks and
| download them on-demand.
|
| It makes open-world games nearly impossible, and it makes
| anything with significant storage requirements
| effectively impossible. As much as Apple likes to push
| the iOS port of Death Stranding, that game cannot run on
| tvOS as currently architected for that reason.
| ProfessorZoom wrote:
| i think it depends on how easy it is for a dev to deploy to
| apple. M1 was great at running call of duty in a windows
| emulator. iPhone can run the newest resident evil. apple needs
| to do more to convince developers to deploy to mac
| jayd16 wrote:
| Mac dev sucks. You're forced to use macos and xcode (for the
| final build anyway). You're not able to virtualize the build
| machines.
|
| Apple is actively hostile to how you would build for Linux or
| PC or console.
| nasseri wrote:
| This is simply not the case. Every major game
| framework/engine targets Mac natively.
|
| If you are building your engine/game from scratch, you
| absolutely do not need to use Xcode
| jayd16 wrote:
| Why don't you look through the Unreal and Unity docs and
| see if you can make a build without a Mac and xcode.
| nasseri wrote:
| Yea you're right I skipped over the part where you said
| the final build required it.
|
| Nonetheless that's a small fraction of the time spent
| actually developing the game.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Ideally, it's a continuous part of development because
| you're making daily (or more) builds and testing them.
|
| That makes it a continuous headache to keep your Mac
| builders up.
|
| It means you need to double dev hardware costs or more as
| you need a gaming PC to target your core audience and
| Macs handle the mac bugs.
|
| It means your mac build machines are special snowflakes
| because you can't just use VMs.
|
| The list goes on and on of Mac being actively hostile to
| the process.
|
| Just Rider running on a Mac is pleasant sure, but that's
| not the issue.
| nasseri wrote:
| I think I misunderstood your point as "developing a game
| on Mac sucks", vs "developing for Mac without a Mac
| sucks" which I absolutely can't disagree with
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Mac dev sucks. You 're forced to use macos and xcode (for
| the final build anyway)_
|
| Having to use xcode "for the final build" is irrelevant to
| the game development experience.
| jayd16 wrote:
| If you're an indie with just PC hardware it sure as hell
| matters.
| matthew-wegner wrote:
| > You're not able to virtualize the build machines.
|
| Sure you can. And officially, too. Apple still ships a bunch
| of virtualization drivers in macOS itself. Have a look:
|
| /System/Library/Extensions/IONetworkingFamily.kext/Contents/P
| lugIns/AppleVmxnet3Ethernet.kext
|
| Whether or not you're using ESXi, or want to, is an entirely
| different question. But "you're not able to" is simply
| incorrect. I virtualize several build agents and have for
| years with no issues.
|
| macOS 26 is the last major version to support Intel, so once
| macOS 28 is latest this will probably become impossible
| (macOS 26 should be able to use Xcode 27, but maybe the
| platform removal will change this previous year's OS support
| from continuing).
| GTP wrote:
| > Apple still ships a bunch of virtualization drivers in
| macOS itself.
|
| I think OP means virtualizing on something that isn't
| Apple.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Interesting. The last I looked into it, you could only
| officially do this on Mac hardware (defeating the purpose).
|
| You can get an xcode building for arm Macs on PC hardware
| with this?
| ikamm wrote:
| - have to build using XCode on macOS
|
| - have to pay Apple to have your executable signed
|
| - poor Vulkan support
|
| The hardware has never been an issue, it's Apple's walled
| garden ecosystem.
| lazypenguin wrote:
| As far as I've seen, Apple is to blame here as they usually
| make it harder to target their platform and don't really try to
| cooperate with the rest of the industry.
|
| As a game developer, I have to literally purchase Apple
| hardware to test rather than being able to conveniently
| download a VM
| neogodless wrote:
| I'm not a subject matter expert, but I do find it a little
| odd to read the second half of that. I'd expect, beyond
| development/debugging, there's certainly a phase of testing
| that requires hardware that matches your target system?
|
| Like, I get if you develop for consoles, you probably use
| some kind of emulation on your development workstation, which
| is _probably_ running Windows. Especially for consoles like
| XBOX One or newer, and PS4 or newer, which are essentially
| PCs. And then builds get passed off to a team that has the
| hardware.
|
| Is anyone developing games for Windows on Apple hardware? Do
| they run Parallels and call it a day? How is the gaming
| performance? If the answers to those 3 questions are "yes,
| yes, great", then Apple supports PC game development _better_
| than they support Apple game development?
| throwuxiytayq wrote:
| > Like, I get if you develop for consoles, you probably use
| some kind of emulation on your development workstation
|
| I don't think anybody does this. I haven't heard about
| official emulators for any of the mainstream consoles.
| Emulation would be prohibitively slow.
|
| Developers usually test on dedicated devkits which are a
| version of the target console (often with slightly better
| specs as dev builds need more memory and run more slowly).
| This is annoying, slow and difficult, but at least you can
| get these dev kits, usually for a decent price, and there's
| a point to trying to ship on those platforms. Meanwhile,
| nobody plays games on macs, and Apple is making zero effort
| to bring in the developers _or_ the gamers. It's a no-
| chicken-and-no-egg situation, really.
| lazypenguin wrote:
| Basically you are correct, MacOS has to be treated like a
| console in that way. Except you get all the downsides of
| that development workflow with none of the upsides. The
| consoles provide excellent debugging and other tools for
| targeting their platform, can't say the same for MacOS.
|
| For testing, I can do a large amount of testing in a VM for
| my game. Maybe not 100% and not full user testing but
| nothing beats running on the native hardware and alpha/beta
| with real users.
|
| Also, since I can pass through hardware to my VM I can get
| quite good performance by passing through a physical GPU
| for example. This is possible and quite straightforward to
| do on a Linux host. I'm not sure if it's possible using
| Parallels.
| cesarvarela wrote:
| I'm sure you literally purchased Nvidia hardware for game
| development.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| A component is much cheaper than an entire dedicated system
| (which would of course contain a similar component).
| cesarvarela wrote:
| I don't know; a 5090 costs about 3k, a 5070 about 500.
| You can either buy a MacBook Pro or a Mac Mini. Seems
| reasonable.
| whatever1 wrote:
| You do it for Xbox and PlayStation and Nintendo.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| for games, how would you test in a VM, when games so
| explicitly want direct hardware access?
|
| i am obviously misunderstanding something, i mean.
| zulban wrote:
| I run Linux and test my Windows releases on a VM. It works
| great.
|
| Sure, I'm not doing performance benchmarking and it's just
| smoke tests and basic user stories, but that's all that 98%
| of indie developers do for cross platform support.
|
| Apple has been intensely stupid as a platform to launch on,
| though I did do it eventually. I didn't like Apple before
| and now I like it even less.
| lazypenguin wrote:
| I develop a game that easily runs on much weaker hardware
| and runs fine in a VM, I would say most simple 3D & 2D
| games would work fine in a VM on modern hardware.
|
| However, these days it's possible pass-through hardware to
| your VM so I would be able to pass through a 2nd GPU to
| MacOS...if it would let me run it as a guest.
| Liquix wrote:
| on linux, KVM provides passthrough for GPUs and other
| hardware, so the VM "steals" the passed through resources
| from the host and provides near-native performance.
| spogbiper wrote:
| you _have_ to release major titles for windows and console,
| because there are tons of customers using them.
|
| so a mac port, even if simple, is additional cost. there you
| have the classic chicken and egg problem. the cost doesn't seem
| to be justified by the number of potential sales, so major
| studios ignore the platform. and as long as they do, gamers
| ignore the platform
|
| i've seen it suggested that Apple could solve this standoff by
| funding the ports, maybe they have done this a few times. but
| Apple doesn't seem to care much about it
| leshenka wrote:
| I was very surprised, and pleasantly too, that Cyberpunk 2077
| can maintain 60FPS (14", M4 Pro, 24gb RAM) with only occasional
| dips. Not with full resolution (actually around FullHD), but at
| least without "frame generation". Turning frame generation on,
| it now can output 90-100 FPS depending on environment, but
| VSync is disabled so dips become way more noticeable.
|
| It even has "for this mac" preset which is good enough that you
| don't need to tinker with settings to have decent experience.
|
| The game is paused, almost like becomes "frozen" if it's not
| visible on screen which helps with battery (it can be in the
| background without any noticeable impact on battery and
| temperature). Overall way better experience than I expected.
| GTP wrote:
| Up to some years ago, it was common for gamers to assemble
| their own PC, something that you can't do with a Mac. Not sure
| if this is still common among gamers though.
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| The advent of silicon interposer technology has made modular
| memory and separate CPU/GPU soon to be obsolete IMO
|
| The communication bandwidth you can achieve by putting CPU,
| CPU, and memory together at the factory is much higher than
| having these components separate.
|
| Sad for enthusiasts, but practically inevitable
| shantara wrote:
| The main roadblock for porting the games to Mac has never been
| the hardware, but Apple themselves. Their entire attitude is
| that they can do whatever they please with their platforms, and
| expect the developers to adjust to the changes, no matter how
| breaking. It's a constant support treadmill, fixing the stuff
| that Apple broke in your previously perfectly functioning
| product after every update. If said fixing is even possible,
| like when Apple removed support for 32-bit binaries altogether,
| rendering 3/4 of macOS Steam libraries non-functional. This
| works for apps, but it's completely antithetical to the way
| game development processes on any other platform are
| structured. You finish a project, release it, do a patch cycle,
| and move on.
|
| And that's not even talking about porting the game to either
| Metal or an absolutely ancient OpenGL version that could be
| removed with any upcoming OS version. A significant effort just
| to address a tiny market.
| astrange wrote:
| > If said fixing is even possible, like when Apple removed
| support for 32-bit binaries altogether, rendering 3/4 of
| macOS Steam libraries non-functional.
|
| IIRC developers literally got 15 years of warning about that
| one.
| bigyabai wrote:
| IIRC that didn't convince many developers to revisit their
| software. I still have hard drives full of _Pro Tools_
| projects that open on Mojave but error on Catalina. Not to
| mention all the Steam games that launch fine on Windows
| /Linux but error on macOS...
| astrange wrote:
| Yes, game developers can't revisit old games because they
| throw out the dev environments when they're done, or
| their middleware can't get updated, etc.
|
| But it's not possible to keep maintaining 32-bit forever.
| That's twice the code and it can't support a bunch of
| important security features, modern ABIs, etc. It would
| be better to run old programs in a VM of an old OS with
| no network access.
| bigyabai wrote:
| > But it's not possible to keep maintaining 32-bit
| forever.
|
| Apple had the money to support it, we both know that.
| They just didn't respect their Mac owners enough, Apple
| saw more value in making them dogfood iOS changes since
| that's where all the iOS devs are held captive. Security
| was never a realistic excuse considering how much real
| zombie code still exists in macOS.
|
| Speaking personally, _I_ just wanted Apple to wait for
| WoW64 support to hit upstream. Their careless
| interruption of my Mac experience is why I ditched the
| ecosystem as a whole. If Apple cannot invest in making it
| a premium experience, I 'll take my money elsewhere.
| astrange wrote:
| > Apple had the money to support it, we both know that.
|
| Not possible without forking the OS. No amount of money
| can make software development faster forever.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month
|
| Especially because Apple has a functional design which
| means there is nearly no redundancy; there's only one
| expert in any given field and that expert doesn't want to
| be stuck with old broken stuff. Nor does anyone want
| software updates to be twice as big as they otherwise
| would be, etc.
|
| > Security was never a realistic excuse considering how
| much real zombie code still exists in macOS.
|
| Code doesn't have security problems if nobody uses it.
| But nothing that's left behind is as bad as, say,
| QuickTime was.
|
| nb some old parts were replaced over time as the people
| maintaining them retired. In my experience all of these
| people were named Jim.
| Rohansi wrote:
| Another big, non-technical reason is most games make most
| of their money around their release date. Therefore there
| is no financial benefit to updating the game to keep it
| working. Especially not on macOS where market share is
| small.
| ascagnel_ wrote:
| Apple's mistake was allowing 32-bit stuff on Intel in the
| first place -- if they had delayed the migration ~6 months
| and passed on the Core Duo for Core 2 Duo, it would've
| negated the need to ever allow 32-bit code on x86.
| coffeeaddict1 wrote:
| > an absolutely ancient OpenGL version
|
| I still don't get this. Apple is a trillion dollar company.
| How much does it cost to pay a couple of engineers to
| maintain an up to date version on top of Metal? Their current
| implementation is 4.1, it wouldn't cost them much to provide
| one for 4.6. Even Microsoft collaborated with Mesa to build a
| translation on top of dx12, Apple could do the same.
| mandarax8 wrote:
| Their current OpenGL 4.1 actually does run on top of metal
| making it even more blatantly obvious that they just don't
| want to.
| astrange wrote:
| They can't do Khronos things because they don't get along
| with Khronos. Same reason they stopped having NVidia GPUs
| forever ago.
| coffeeaddict1 wrote:
| > They can't do Khronos things because they don't get
| along with Khronos.
|
| Has anyone figured out what exactly the crux of their
| beef? OpenGL 4.1 came out in 2010, so surely whatever
| happened is settled by now.
| ryandrake wrote:
| The company in general never really seemed that interested in
| Games, and that came right from Steve Jobs. John Carmack made
| a Facebook post[1] several years ago with some interesting
| insider insights about his advocacy of gaming to Steve Jobs,
| and the lukewarm response he received. They just never really
| seemed to be a priority at Apple.
|
| 1: https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=21464128
| 25...
| astrange wrote:
| It's impossible to care about video games if you live in SV
| because the weather is too nice. You can feel the desire to
| do any indoor activity just fade away when you move there.
| This is somehow true even though there's absolutely nothing
| to do outside except take walks (or "go hiking" as locals
| call it) and go to that Egyptian museum run by a cult.
|
| Somehow Atari, EA and PlayStation are here despite this. I
| don't know how they did it.
|
| Meanwhile, Nintendo is successful because they're in
| Seattle where it's dark and rains all the time.
| zarzavat wrote:
| Gamedevs have not forgotten that Apple attempted to get
| Unreal Engine banned from all their platforms, thus rug
| pulling every game built on top of it.
|
| It was only the intervention of Microsoft that managed to
| save Apple from their own tantrum.
| insraq wrote:
| I wrote a post (rant)[1] about my experience of releasing a
| game on macOS as an indie dev. tl;dr: Apples goes a long way to
| make the process as painful as possible with tons of paper
| cuts.
|
| [1] https://ruoyusun.com/2023/10/12/one-game-six-
| platforms.html#...
| Damogran6 wrote:
| There's a cost/value calculation that just doesn't work
| well...I have a Ryzen9/rtx3070 PC ($2k over time) and my M4
| Mini ($450) holds it's own for most all normal user
| stuff...sprinting ahead for specific tasks (Video CODEC)...but
| the 6 year old dedicated GPU on the PC annihilates the Mini in
| pushing pixels...You can spec an Apple that does better for
| gaming, but man, are you gonna pay for it, and still not keep
| up with current PC GPUS.
|
| Now...something like minecraft or SubNautica? The M4 is fine,
| especially if you're not pushing 4k 240hz.
|
| Apple has been pushing the gaming experience for years (iPhone
| 4s?) but it never REALLY seems to land, and when someone has a
| great gaming seperience in a modern AAA game, they always seem
| to be using a $4500 Studio or similar.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| It's kind of a myth though, Mac has many flagship games and
| everything in between
|
| If you _identify_ as a "gamer" and are in those communities,
| then you'll see communities talking about things you can't
| natively play
|
| but if you leave niches you already have everything
|
| and with microtransactions, Apple ecosystem users are the
| whales. again, not something that people who identify as
| "gamers" wants to admit being actually okay with, but those
| people are not the revenue of game production.
|
| so I would say it is a missed opportunity for developers that
| are operating on antiquated calculations of MacOS deployment
| bigyabai wrote:
| > It's kind of a myth though
|
| It's kinda not. Here's a rough list of the 10 most-played
| games currently on PC: https://steamdb.info/charts/
|
| macOS is supported by one title (DOTA 2). Windows supports
| all 10, Linux (the free OS, just so we're clear) runs 7 of
| the games and has native ports of 5 of them. If you want to
| go argue to _them_ about missed revenue opportunities then be
| my guest, but something tells me that DOTA 2 isn 't being
| bankrolled by Mac owners.
|
| If you have any hard figures that demonstrate "antiquated
| calculations" then now is the time to fetch them for us. I'm
| somewhat skeptical.
| croes wrote:
| Doesn't MacOS favor an 60Hz output? Gamers prefer much higher
| rates.
|
| And don't forget they made an VR headset without controllers.
|
| Apple doesn't care about games
| jsheard wrote:
| > Doesn't MacOS favor an 60Hz output?
|
| Kind of? It does support higher refresh rates, but their
| emphasis on "Retina" resolutions imposes a soft limit because
| monitors that dense rarely support much more than 60hz, due
| to the sheer bandwidth requirements.
| 333c wrote:
| The MacBook Pro has had a 120 Hz screen for nearly half a
| decade. And of course, external displays can support
| whatever resolution/refresh rate, regardless of the OS
| driving them.
| mavbo wrote:
| I play a lot of World of Warcraft on my M3 MacBook Pro which
| has a native MacOS build. It's a CPU bottlenecked game with
| most users recommending the AMD X3D CPUs to achieve decent
| framerates in high end content. I'm able to run said content at
| high (7/10) graphics settings at 120fps with no audible fan
| noise for hours at a time on battery. It's been night and day
| compared to previous Windows machines.
| viktorcode wrote:
| The porting is not straightforward; you must switch to Metal,
| you should adapt rendering pipeline to tiled deferred shading.
| jajuuka wrote:
| Multiple solid reasons have been mentioned from ones created by
| Apple to ones enforced in software by Apple. One that hasn't
| been mentioned is the lack of marketshare. Macos market is just
| tiny and very limited. It's also not a growing market. PC
| gaming isn't blowing up either but the amount of players is
| just simply higher.
|
| Ports to macos have not done well from what I've heard. However
| you can see ports on PC do really well and have encouraged
| studios like Sony and SquareEnix to invest more in PC ports.
| Even much later after the console versions sell well. Just not
| a lot of reasons to add the tech debt and complexity of
| supporting mac as well.
|
| Even big publishers like Blizzard who have been mac devs for a
| long time axed the dedicate mac team and client and moved to a
| unified client. This has downfalls like mac specific issues. If
| those are not critical then they get put in the pile with the
| rest of the bugs.
| jdc0589 wrote:
| this is cool and all, but what im really exited about is the
| possibility that one day they update their laptops so the keys
| stop leaving marks on the screen.
|
| I know we are a few major scientific breakthroughs away from that
| even being remotely possible, but it sure would be nice.
| maxk42 wrote:
| For my use case I need MSL to support fp64. Until that happens I
| don't care what hardware changes they make: I'm not going to be
| filling racks with M5s and they're not producing something I can
| use to even tinker with AI with in my spare time. Apple has lost
| the AI war before it even got started IMO.
| mrbonner wrote:
| I'm waiting for the day when the iphone would be equipped with an
| M chip. Maybe not long of a wait I hope.
| paxys wrote:
| M5 is 4-6x more powerful than M4, which was 5x more powerful than
| M3, which was 4x more powerful than M2, which was 4x more
| powerful than M1, which itself was 6x faster than an equivalent
| Intel processor. Great!
|
| Looking at my Macbook though, I can say with utmost certainty
| that it isn't 4000x faster than the Intel one I had 5 years ago.
|
| So, where is the disconnect here? Why is actual user experience
| not able to keep up with benchmarks and marketing?
| vintagedave wrote:
| What scares me is that my M2 started seeing performance issues
| in macOS recently. Safari is sometimes slow (I admit I stress
| it with many tabs, but it wasn't like this a year ago.) Somehow
| the graphics in general seems slower on Tahoe, eg the effects
| when minimising a window.
|
| I am deeply concerned all the performance benefits of the new
| chips will get eaten away.
| conradev wrote:
| That is certainly inevitable, it's just a question of when:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law
| MobiusHorizons wrote:
| You are probably actually witnessing the reduction in
| performance of swap as your drive fills up. Check the memory
| pressure in activity manager. The fix is pretty easy (delete
| stuff).
| vintagedave wrote:
| Thanks, but I have over a hundred gig free. And I got the
| max RAM I could (24GB.) I feel like the machine _should_ be
| capable in 2025.
| Tagbert wrote:
| 26.0 is very much a dot-zero release. It is missing a lot of
| optimizations and there are some open bugs like memory leaks.
| Initial reports on 26.1 show a lot of improvement in those.
| The 3rd beta of 26.1 just came out yesterday. They will
| probably launch this new version with improved optimizations
| by end of October.
| tmountain wrote:
| Probably synthetic benchmarks that don't represent actual
| bottlenecks in application usage. How much of what you are
| doing is actually CPU bound? Your machine still has to do I/O,
| and even though that's "very fast" these days, it's not
| happening inside your CPU, so you'll only see the actual
| improvements when running workloads that benefit from the
| performance improvements (i.e., complex calculations that can
| live in the CPU and its cache).
| monocasa wrote:
| Each is a different specific benchmark, so they don't stack the
| way you're doing.
|
| This is 4-6x faster _in AI_ for instance.
| tylerhou wrote:
| > M5 is 4-6x more powerful than M4
|
| In GPU performance (probably measured on a specific set of
| tasks).
| condiment wrote:
| It's GPU performance.
|
| Spin up ollama and run some inference on your 5-year-old intel
| macbook. You won't see 4000x performance improvement (because
| performance is bottlenecked outside of the GPU), but you might
| be in the right order of magnitude.
| jandrese wrote:
| Comparing GPU performance to some half decade old Intel IGP
| seems like lying with statistics.
|
| "Look how many times faster our car is![1]"
|
| [1] Compared to a paraplegic octogenarian in a broken
| wheelchair!"
| umanwizard wrote:
| Well, Apple isn't making that comparison, the OP was.
| blihp wrote:
| Not possible given the anemic memory bandwidth [1]... you can
| scale up the compute all you want but if the memory doesn't
| scale up as well you're not going to see anywhere near those
| numbers.
|
| [1] The memory bandwidth is fine for CPU workloads, but not
| for GPU / NN workloads.
| tester756 wrote:
| Because this is bullshit, lies, marketing
| freehorse wrote:
| They are not 4x more powerful than the previous generation at
| everything, or even at the same thing every time, so it does
| not stuck up. Here 4x refers sth wrt LLMs running on the GPU.
|
| I use both an M1 max and an M3 max, and frankly I do not notice
| much difference if you control for the core count in most
| stuff. And for running LLMs they are almost the same
| performance. I think from M1-M3 there was no much performance
| increase in general.
| random3 wrote:
| The disconnect is that you're reading sideways.
|
| First line on their website:
|
| > M5 delivers over 4x the peak GPU compute performance for AI
| compared to M4
|
| It's the GPU not the CPU (which you compare with your old
| Intel) and it's an AI workload, not your regular workload
| (which again is what you compare)
| bangaladore wrote:
| And they are comparing peak compute. Which means essentially
| nothing.
| random3 wrote:
| There was a time when Apple decided throwing random
| technical numbers shouldn't be the news (those were
| following the times of Megahertz counting). These times
| have been changing post Steve Jobs. This said, it is a chip
| announcement rather than a product announcement, so maybe
| that _is_ the news.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| They also lost big during the megahertz wars. Consumers
| made it clear that they wanted to see number go up and
| voted with their wallet. There is probably still some
| cultural remnant of that era.
| tempodox wrote:
| Do not trust any statistics you did not fake yourself.
| james4k wrote:
| Those marketing claims are each about a very specific workload,
| not about general performance. Yes, it is often misleading.
| Jnr wrote:
| It states it is "peak performance". Probably in a very specific
| use case. Or maybe it reaches the peak for an extremely short
| period of time before it drops the performance.
| thebitguru wrote:
| Apple has also seemingly stopped caring about the quality and
| efficiency of their software. You can see this especially in
| the latest iOS/iPadOS/macOS 26 versions of their operating
| systems. They need their software leadership to match their
| hardware leadership, otherwise good hardware with bad software
| still leads to bad product, which is what we are seeing now.
| taf2 wrote:
| i think 15.6.1 (24G90) will be my last mac osx... omarchy is
| blazing fast
| drcongo wrote:
| I see this sentiment a lot, but I've found the OS26 releases
| to be considerably better than the last few years' OS
| releases, especially macOS which actually feels coherent now
| compared to the last few years of janky half baked UI.
| cmcaleer wrote:
| It is frankly ridiculous how unintuitive it was to add an
| email account to Mail on iOS. This is possibly the most basic
| functionality I would expect an email client to have. One
| would expect that they go to their list of mailboxes and add
| a new account.
|
| No. You _exit the mail app_ - > Go to settings -> apps ->
| scroll through a massive list (that you usually just use for
| notification settings btw) to go to mail -> mail accounts ->
| add new account.
|
| Just a simple six-step process after you've already hunted
| for it in the mail app.
| jrmg wrote:
| There's an "Accounts..." entry in the main "Mail" menu.
|
| You can also click the "+" button at the bottom of the list
| of accounts in the "Accounts" panel in Mail's settings
| window.
| ant6n wrote:
| I think the most most basic integration w.r.t. email I want
| from Apple is that I want to set up another email program
| besides "Mail" as the default email program, but without
| having to set up Mail first.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| > Apple has also seemingly stopped caring about the quality
| and efficiency of their software.
|
| Hardware has improved significantly, but it needs _software_
| to enable me to enjoy using it.
|
| Apple is not the only major company that has completely
| abandoned _the users_.
|
| The fastest CPUs and GPUs with the most RAM will not make me
| happier being targeted by commercial surveillance mechanisms,
| social-media applications, and hallucinating LLM systems.
| Rover222 wrote:
| iOS 26 is so bad. It's the first time I've really felt
| annoyed daily when using an Apple device. Basically on par
| with my Android experiences now.
| justinator wrote:
| You know, 64% of statistics are made up.
| cj wrote:
| I'm not sure I see the disconnect.
|
| At our company we used to buy everyone MacBook Pros by default.
|
| After the M-series chip, the MBPs are just too powerful and no
| longer necessary for the average white collar worker (they seem
| like "actual" pro machines, now) to the point where we now
| order MacBook Airs for new employees.
|
| I feel like until recently, you really needed a MBP to get a
| decent UX (even just using chrome). But now there doesn't seem
| to be a major compromise when buying an Air for half the price,
| at least compared to 3-5 years ago.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| What's crazy about that to me is the Macbook Air doesn't even
| have a fan. The power efficiency of the ARM chips is really
| something.
| mort96 wrote:
| Well, the power efficiency about Apple Silicon combined
| with their firmware and drivers is really something. ARM
| doesn't have much to do with it.
| charliebwrites wrote:
| Anecdotal, but I switched to an M3 MBA from an M1 MBP for my
| iOS and other dev related work
|
| I've had zero problems with lag or compile time (prior to
| macOS 26 anyway)
|
| The only thing it can't do is run Ableton in a low latency
| way without strongly changing the defaults
|
| You press a key on the keyboard to play a note and half a
| second later you hear it
|
| Other than that, zero regrets
| cyberpunk wrote:
| That's weird, my m1 air handles ableton absolutely fine.
|
| something's off with your setup.
| hartator wrote:
| > After the M-series chip, the MBPs are just too powerful and
| no longer necessary for the average white collar worker (they
| seem like "actual" pro machines, now) to the point where we
| now order regular MacBooks (not Pro's) for new employees
|
| Regular MBs are not really a thing anymore. You mean Airs?
| cj wrote:
| Yes, fixed!
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| Absolutely true. I now know that I only need an MBA, not an
| MBP.
| hibikir wrote:
| In 2021, we bought everyone M1 Pros with 32 gigs of ram.
| Historically, keeping a developer in a 4 year old laptop
| would have been crazy, but nobody is really calling for
| upgrades, like we did back when we got rid of the Intels.
| semiinfinitely wrote:
| All those extra flops are spent computing light refraction in
| the liquid glass of the ui
| quitit wrote:
| You wrote:
|
| >Looking at my Macbook though, I can say with utmost certainty
| that it isn't 4000x faster than the Intel one I had 5 years
| ago. So, where is the disconnect here?
|
| They wrote:
|
| > Together, they deliver up to 15 percent faster multithreaded
| performance over M4
|
| The problem is comprehension, not marketing.
| CryptoBanker wrote:
| I think you're the one misreading here. The 15% refers to CPU
| speed while the 6x, etc. multiples refer to GPU speed
| graeme wrote:
| GPU for ai workloads. That plausibly is that much faster as
| the intel laptops with integrated GPUs weren't made for
| that workload.
| Choco31415 wrote:
| Not quite. The announcement mentions that:
|
| "M5 delivers over 4x the peak GPU compute performance for AI"
|
| In this situation, at least, it's just referring to AI
| compute power.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Much of this is probably down to optimized transformer
| kernels.
| mort96 wrote:
| Their "peak GPU compute performance for AI" is quite
| different from your unqualified "performance". I don't know
| what figures they're quoting, but something stupid like
| supporting 4-bit floats while the predecessor only
| supported down to 16-bit floats could easily deliver "over
| 4x peak GPU compute performance for AI" (measured in FLOPS)
| without actually making the hardware significantly faster.
|
| Did they claim 4x peak GPU compute going from the M3 to M4?
| Or M2 to M3? Can you link to these claims? Are you sure
| they weren't boasting about _other_ metrics being improved
| by some multiplier? Not every metric is the same, and
| different metrics don 't necessarily stack with each other.
| foota wrote:
| User experience (for most things, unless you sit there encoding
| video all day) isn't really related to raw performance so much
| as latency. Processor power can help there, but design and at
| the limit memory latency is the key constraint.
| oulipo2 wrote:
| Agreed, if I have 40 tabs opened on Chrome, my M1 macbook is no
| longer responsive... I'm not sure about their performance
| claims, apart from some niche GPU rendering for games, which
| constitutes about 0% of my daily laptop usage
| 0x457 wrote:
| Well, if you read the very next thing after 4x, you will notice
| it says "the peak GPU compute performance for AI compared to
| M4".
|
| The disconnect here is that you can't read. Sorry, no other way
| to say it.
| potatolicious wrote:
| Because there's more to "actual user experience" than peak
| CPU/GPU/NPU workload.
|
| Firstly, the M5 isn't 4-6x more powerful than M4 - the claim is
| only for GPU, only for one narrow workload, not overall
| performance uplift. Overall performance uplift looks like ~20%
| over M4, and probably +100% over M1 or so.
|
| But there is absolutely a _massive_ sea change in the MacBook
| since Intel 5 years ago: your peak workloads haven 't changed
| much, but the hardware improvements give you _radically_
| different UX.
|
| For one thing, the Intel laptops absolutely burned through the
| battery. Five years ago the notion of the all-day laptop was a
| fantasy. Even relatively light users were tethered to chargers
| most of the day. This is now almost fully a thing of the past.
| Unless your workloads are very heavy, it is now safe to charge
| the laptop once a day. I can go many hours in my workday
| without charging. I can go through a long flight without any
| battery anxiety. This is a _massive_ change in how people use
| laptops.
|
| Secondly is heat and comfort. The Intel Macs spun their fans up
| at even mild workloads, creating noise and heat - they were
| often very uncomfortably warm. Similar workloads are now
| completely silent with the device barely getting warmer than
| ambient temp.
|
| Thirdly is allowing more advanced uses on lower-spec and less
| expensive machines. For example, the notion of rendering and
| editing video on a Intel MacBook Air was a total pipe dream.
| Now a base spec MacBook Air can do... a _lot_ that once forced
| you into a much higher price point /size/weight.
|
| A lot of these HN conversations feel like sports car fans
| complaining: "all this R&D and why doesn't my car go 500mph
| yet?" - there are other dimensions being optimized for!
| leakycap wrote:
| > So, where is the disconnect here?
|
| > I can say with utmost certainty that it isn't 4000x faster
|
| The numbers you provided do not come to 4000x faster (closer to
| 2400x)
|
| > Why is actual user experience not able to keep up with
| benchmarks and marketing?
|
| Benchmarks and marketing are very different things, but you
| seem to be holding them up as similar here.
|
| The 5x 6x 4x numbers you describe across marketing across many
| years don't even refer to the same thing. You're giving numbers
| with no context, which implies you're mixing them and the
| marketing worked because the only thing you're recalling is the
| big number.
|
| Often, every M-series chip is a HUGE advancement over the past
| in GPU. Most of the "5x" performance jumps you describe are in
| graphics processing, and the "Intel" they're comparing it to is
| often an Intel iGPU like the Iris Xe or UHD series. These were
| low end trash iGPUs even when Apple launched those Intel
| devices, so being impressed by 5x performance when the M1 came
| out was in part because the Intel Macs had such terrible
| integrated graphics.
|
| The M1 was a giant jump in overall system responsiveness, and
| the M-series seems to be averaging about a 20% year over year
| meaningful speed increase. If you use AI/ML/GPU, the M-series
| yearly upgrade is even better. Otherwise, for most things it's
| a nice and noticeable bump but not a Intel-to-M1 jump even from
| M1-to-M4.
| omikun wrote:
| Says M5 is 4x faster than M4 and 6x faster than M1 for AI
| compute on the GPU. Basically M4 was only a little faster than
| M1 at this task. Ex. if M5 is 24 AI TOPS, M4 is 6 AI TOPS, and
| M1 is 4 AI TOPS.
|
| Unless you're looking at your MacBook running LM Studio you
| won't be seeing much improvement in this regard.
| pzo wrote:
| This is quite weird move and confusing (probably on purpose).
| This chip M5 is released in Macbook PRO but previous macbook pro
| had M4 Pro or M4 Max so their more like macbook air series to
| even like ipad pro series.
|
| They say "M5 offers unified memory bandwidth of 153GB/s,
| providing a nearly 30 percent increase over M4" but my old
| Macbook M2 Max have 400GB/s
| rcarmo wrote:
| I'll take one inside an iPad mini, thank you very much.
| mattray0295 wrote:
| They push these new generations out so quick, and with crazy
| performance boosts. Impressive
| elric wrote:
| Meanwhile intel seems to be doing a big bunch of nothing much.
| And AMD seems busy playing house with OpenAI to catch up to
| nvidia on the GPU front.
|
| Now if only Apple would sell these for use outside of their
| walled garden.
| mrlonglong wrote:
| Good old Brits, taking over the world with an ISA extraordinarily
| efficient that at inception they discovered that the processor
| still kept operating by sucking voltage from leakage currents
| even though the power was off.
|
| From:
| https://www.theregister.com/2012/05/03/unsung_heroes_of_tech...
|
| "> The power test tools they were using were unreliable and
| approximate, but good enough to ensure this rule of thumb power
| requirement. When the first test chips came back from the lab on
| the 26 April 1985, Furber plugged one into a development board,
| and was happy to see it working perfectly first time.
|
| > Deeply puzzling, though, was the reading on the multimeter
| connected in series with the power supply. The needle was at
| zero: the processor seemed to be consuming no power whatsoever.
|
| > As Wilson tells it: "The development board plugged the chip
| into had a fault: there was no current being sent down the power
| supply lines at all. The processor was actually running on
| leakage from the logic circuits. So the low-power big thing that
| the ARM is most valued for today, the reason that it's on all
| your mobile phones, was a complete accident."
|
| > Wilson had, it turned out, designed a powerful 32-bit processor
| that consumed no more than a tenth of a Watt."
| busymom0 wrote:
| > M5 brings its industry-leading power-efficient performance to
| the new 14-inch MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, and Apple Vision Pro
|
| Not for Mac mini?
| supernes wrote:
| They'll put it in the Mini when they push out a new Studio to
| upsell to.
| looneysquash wrote:
| Thats cool, but so much software only supports CUDA.
| allenrb wrote:
| I'd like a filter to remove all mention of AI and associated
| performance from copy like this. Maybe I can build it with...
| nvm.
|
| Seriously, can't you tell me about the CPU cores and their
| performance?
| wina wrote:
| why do you want more CPU cores and better performance than the
| M4, if not for running local AI models?
| adastra22 wrote:
| COU cores aren't relevant to running AI?
| sib wrote:
| Photo & video post-processing...
| Remnant44 wrote:
| Essentially ever other use case for a computer.
|
| Whether you're playing games, or editing videos, or doing 3D
| work, or trying to digest the latest bloated react mess on
| some website.. ;)
| allenrb wrote:
| I... think you're joking, but I can't be sure.
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| It's disappointing to me how far behind other chipmakers are in
| having unified gpu/cpu memory bus. Only AMD Strix Halo even
| attempts this. Well this announcement tipped my hand and I'm
| finally buying a new macbook :)
| hereme888 wrote:
| Base models only:
|
| - M1 | 5 nm | 8 (4P+4E) | GPU 7-8 | 16-core Neural | Memory
| Bandwidth: 68.25 GB/s | Unified Memory: 16 GB | Geekbench6 ~2346
| / 8346
|
| - M2 | 5 nm (G2) | 8 (4P+4E) | GPU 8-10 | 16-core Neural | Memory
| Bandwidth: 100 GB/s | Unified Memory: 24 GB | Geekbench6 ~2586 /
| 9672
|
| - M3 | 3 nm (first-gen) | 8 (4P+4E) | GPU 8-10 | 16-core Neural |
| Memory Bandwidth: 100 GB/s | Unified Memory: 24 GB | Geekbench6
| ~2965 / 11565
|
| - M4 | 3 nm (second-gen) | 10 (4P+6E) | GPU 8-10 | 16-core Neural
| | Memory Bandwidth: 120 GB/s | Unified Memory: 32 GB | Geekbench6
| ~3822 / 15031
|
| - M5 | 3 nm (third-gen) | 10 (4P+6E) | GPU 10 | 16-core Neural |
| Memory Bandwidth: 153 GB/s | Unified Memory: up to 32 GB |
| Geekbench6 ~4133 / 15,437 (9-core sample)
| gigatexal wrote:
| Amazing. My M3Max is going to look like a paper-weight very
| soon. And that's fine by me. When I get an M6 or M7Max to
| replace it it'll be amazing.
| bombcar wrote:
| I'm trying to find any reason I can that my M1 Max needs
| replacement; it's hard. How do you justify it?
| alexeldeib wrote:
| Fun one: https://incident.io/blog/festive-macbooks
| nu11ptr wrote:
| I am in the same boat as my Rust compile times are solid.
| I'm good for now, but with the M4 max twice as fast,
| upgrading to the M5 max next year could be a tempting
| upgrade.
| djtriptych wrote:
| Same. I have an M1 Max Studio and it's just laughing at the
| little workloads I throw at it (pro photo editing, music
| production, software dev, generally all at the same time).
|
| It just never sweats AT ALL - it feels like a decade from
| obsolescence based on what I'm doing now.
|
| It would have to be an order of magnitude faster for me to
| even notice at this point.
| oblio wrote:
| You're not opening enough Chrome tabs. Or Electron apps.
| andrepd wrote:
| You're clearly running low-intensity tasks (pro photo
| editing, music production, software dev, generally all at
| the same time) instead of highly-demanding ones (1 jira
| tab)
| zahirbmirza wrote:
| Obsolescence for Macs comes when Apple decides not to
| allow your mac update the OS to the latest one.
| phony-account wrote:
| > Obsolescence for Macs comes when Apple decides not to
| allow your mac update the OS to the latest one.
|
| That doesn't make it obsolete, at all.
| badc0ffee wrote:
| When they stop releasing security patches for that OS
| version 2 years later, it becomes more risky to connect
| the thing to a network. Or take in any data from the
| outside, really, whether it's via Bluetooth, or USB
| drive.
|
| And then there's 3rd party software that will stop
| supporting that old OS version, in part because Apple's
| dev tools make that difficult.
|
| Eventually, Apple's own services will stop supporting
| that OS - no convenient iCloud support.
|
| Finally, the root CA certs bundled with the OS will
| become too out of date to use.
|
| I'm planning on putting Linux on my Intel Mac Mini soon.
| But when a M3+ Mini goes out of support, will we have
| that option?
| unilynx wrote:
| Don't forget about Bootcamp for the (soon) obsolete
| Intels .
|
| With a debloated Windows 10 (which we're not going to
| connect to the internet anyway) they can live on for
| older games.
| illusive4080 wrote:
| Even my 2017 MBP on macOS 13 still gets security updates.
| Heck iPhone 6 got a security update recently.
|
| Your points are valid but it's not 2 years, it's more
| than that for big vulnerabilities.
| badc0ffee wrote:
| > Even my 2017 MBP on macOS 13 still gets security
| updates.
|
| Has it had one since macOS 26 came out? They usually do 2
| versions behind - in the summer, that was macOS 13, but
| now it's macOS 14.
| manmal wrote:
| Patches for old OS versions are unfortunately not 100%
| covering all security issues. Apple is often arguing that
| vulns can only be fixed in actively supported versions.
| zahirbmirza wrote:
| Depends if you use xcode or not...I still have my macbook
| 12inch, for work use, it is amazing, but I can't run the
| latest xcode, making it defunct for some of my uses. It
| would be fine running xcode weak as it is; i am sure.
| Liquid glass might have killed it tho.
| zahirbmirza wrote:
| Also, would love to hear any tips you have for eeking out
| use...Sounds like you may have some...
| jkestner wrote:
| I've got a 2010 MBP that's still perfectly suitable, but
| without OS updates, I can't get a browser that websites
| will load cleanly on, can't use Xcode, bunch of the Apple
| services the company hooks you on don't work, etc. Used
| OpenCore bootloader to extend its life into newer
| macOSes, but that's getting hard to keep up with. What a
| (e)waste.
| davidkwast wrote:
| You can use Ubuntu. I use Ubuntu on a 2009 MBP and on a
| 2010 too.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| It is 15 years old - I think it is past eWaste into
| antique.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| I've got a "late 2008" MacBook Pro that connects to sites
| ok in Firefox. That seems to be the browser that does the
| best at long-term support for old Macs.
| holoduke wrote:
| My old macbook Air from 2010 is already running 6 years
| home assistant on Ubuntu. It's in my fuse/meter room
| running 24 hours.
| skor wrote:
| I use one from around that time to teach my kid basic
| stuff, you can run linux on it as well.
| poultron wrote:
| Obsolescence comes when Apple conveniently "optimizes" a
| new architecture in the OS for a new chip... that
| conveniently, ironically, somehow severely de-optimizes
| things for the old chips... and suddenly that shiny new
| OS feels slow and sluggish and clunky and "damn I need to
| upgrade my computer!." They'll whitewash it not as
| planned obsolescence but optimization for new products.
| Doesn't have to be that way, shouldn't be that way, but
| its incredibly profitable.
| MPSimmons wrote:
| Maybe by that time ARM linux on this platform will be
| excellent and we can migrate to it for old gear. I still
| have a 2011 MBP running Linux on my electronics workbench
| and it is just fine.
| kinnth wrote:
| yup I'm an M1 max laptop, i actually went upto an m4 pro
| and went back the m1 max, it could handle more trading
| screens!
| montebicyclelo wrote:
| On the contrary; now might be a good time to get an M1 Max
| laptop. A second hand one, ex-corporate, in good condition,
| with 64Gb RAM, is pretty good value, compared to new
| laptops at the same price. It's still a fantastic CPU.
| ozarkerD wrote:
| That's what I did, bought a used one with 64GB and a dent
| in the back for ~$1k a year back or so. Some of the best
| money i've ever spent.
| simondotau wrote:
| Honestly the only Apple Silicon e-waste has been their
| 8GB models. And even those are still perfectly good for
| most people so long as they use Safari rather than
| Chrome.
| runlaszlorun wrote:
| Does Safari use less RAM?
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| Where would one look for ex-corporate MacBook pros?
| smith7018 wrote:
| You should wait until next Fall if you don't really need to
| replace your M1 Max. Rumors say that Apple's going to
| redesign the Macbook Pros next year with an OLED screen.
| kossTKR wrote:
| For the love of god remove the notch, that's the only
| idiotic branding vestige left.
| mort96 wrote:
| And put the web cam where?
|
| The notch is bigger than it should be for sure, I
| would've loved for it to be narrower. But I don't really
| mind the trade-off it represents.
|
| You could add half an inch of screen bezel and make the
| machine bigger, just to fit the web cam. Or you could
| remove half an inch of screen , essentially making the
| "notch" stretch across the whole top of the laptop. Or
| you could find some compromised place to put the camera,
| like those Dell laptops which put the camera near the
| hinge. Or you can let the screen fill the whole lid of
| the laptop, with a cut-out for the camera, and design the
| GUI such that the menu bar fills the part of the screen
| that's interrupted by the notch.
|
| I personally don't mind that last option. For my needs,
| it might very well be the best alternative. If I needed a
| bigger below-the-notch area, I could get the 16" option
| instead of the 14" option.
| hu3 wrote:
| Dell XPS has webcam, no notch and same o bezel as
| macbooks.
|
| Maybe it's a patent thing.
| mort96 wrote:
| They have the solution with the web cam near the hinge
| that I mentioned. I had a couple of Dell XPS laptops like
| that. It's fine if the webcam is really just an
| afterthought for you, but it does mean the webcam has a
| very unflattering angle that's looking up your nostrils.
|
| I use my webcam enough these days to take part in video
| meetings that it'd be a pretty big problem for me.
| gargan wrote:
| Checkout the Dell XPS 13 9345, webcam is on top but with
| thinner bezels than a Macbook, it's got a Snapdragon ARM
| processor for good battery life, OLED screen, upto 64GB
| RAM, and is smaller and lighter than a Macbook Air
|
| Snapdragon X Elite 2 processor will be out next year for
| the refreshed model
| badc0ffee wrote:
| Also it gives the huge hands effect when you're typing.
| cyberax wrote:
| > They have the solution with the web cam near the hinge
| that I mentioned.
|
| Companies tried that. You get very strange-looking up-
| your-nose pictures.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| I wonder how hard it would be to have a camera 'pop up'
| from the laptop. (i'm not a hardware guy)
| eastbound wrote:
| Some laptops literally have the camera behind the screen.
| As in, behind pixels. It's possible and classy.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| do you have a picture of what that looks like? having a
| hard time conceptualizing that.
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| It's not visible at all. The camera is just placed behind
| the screen.
|
| OLED screens are inherently transparent, there is just a
| light-emitting layer in them. You put your camera behind
| the screen, and either make the few pixels on top of the
| lens go black when it's on, or you use a lot of software
| to remove the light that comes from the screen and clean
| up the picture.
| Lammy wrote:
| My REDMAGIC Android phone is like this too and I love not
| having a stupid notch cut out of the screen. I've hated
| them since the very first time I saw a iPhone X. Can't
| believe such a ridiculous design defect infected Macbooks
| too :/
| brookst wrote:
| You want a strip of black plastic across the entire top
| rather than pixels to the left and right of the cameras?
| jltsiren wrote:
| I would rather buy the last refresh of the old design.
| Waiting for a redesign is risky, as some redesings are
| just bad (like the touchbar MBP). And Apple is
| opinionated enough that it often refuses to admit its
| mistakes and sticks to them for years.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I got an old MBP with the touchbar as payment for a favor
| last year and I quite like it. I don't know why it gets
| so much hate.
| no_wizard wrote:
| I think it's because of the non optionality of it. If you
| could have gotten every but sans/includes the touch bar
| people could have simply made their choices based on
| preference.
|
| In the end they reverted because they were not willing to
| make it optional. They also never released a touch bar
| keyboard for desktop, which would have made it more
| useful perhaps
| skor wrote:
| no escape key, that's one reason
| jltsiren wrote:
| I had one for a few years. The keyboard was bad, and
| there was no physical escape key. There were lot of
| accidental clicks with the touchbar, as it had a
| different logic (touch to use rather than press to use)
| than the other keys, or the function keys on every other
| keyboard. And I was using USB-A and HDMI adapters all the
| time, as the laptop lacked essential ports.
| astrospective wrote:
| The butterfly switches break easily and replacing the
| entire keyboard because of it is a pain. I held on to my
| 2015 intel MBP for ages waiting for them to address that.
| gigatexal wrote:
| I do a lot with VMs, and other memory intensive things so I
| went with 128GB of ram. I'm hoping for a laptop with 256GB+
| in a few generations and one with more or less double the
| oomph would be nice. Everything can be faster, bring it on!
| dgacmu wrote:
| I finally replaced my m1 mini because of memory capacity
| (16GB doesn't cut it for me and jumping to 64 was worth
| it), but I'm having the same feeling about my M1 pro MBP
| with 32GB. It just still works so well for nearly
| everything I do.
|
| I'm guessing the m5 pro may support 64GB but...
| varispeed wrote:
| I have M1 Max 32GB and I think I'll go with M5 Max simply
| because I need more RAM. I am constantly swapping about
| 16GB. I don't feel it that much, but it bothers me.
| zer0zzz wrote:
| I have an easy one: asahi Linux only runs on m1 and m2 at
| the moment
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I was thinking similar thoughts about my M2 Max MBP. I look
| at the newer chips and wonder at what point will (or has it
| happened already) will the base M chip outperform my M2 Max?
| I'll probably hold onto it a while anyway -- I think it will
| be a while before I find 96GB limiting or the CPU slow enough
| for my purposes, but I'd still like to know how things are
| progressing.
| grishka wrote:
| My M1 Max works just fine. Everything is as snappy as it was
| the day I bought it. I don't see any reason it might need a
| replacement any time soon. (The fact that I don't install
| major system updates unless absolutely necessary probably
| helps too)
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| Thank you. Looking at replacing an Intel MacBook Air, I hope
| there are price drops on the "outdated" M4s (although an M2
| phased out early this year would do well enough...)
| nu11ptr wrote:
| The step down from 32GB to 24GB of unified memory is
| interesting. Theories? Perhaps they decided M4 allowed too much
| memory in the standard chip and they want to create a larger
| differential with Pro/Max chips?
|
| Update: I am thinking the 24GB for M5 is a typo. I see on
| Apple's site the 14 inch MBP can be configured optionally with
| 32GB of RAM.
| makeramen wrote:
| That seems like a typo or incorrect info, the M5 MBP
| definitely can be configured up to 32 GB, and the Apple page
| mentions 32 GB explicitly as well.
| christkv wrote:
| the still have an option for 32GB
| eftychis wrote:
| I had the same question, but I can only speculate at the
| moment. The cynical part of me thinks in a similar line:
| create an artificial differentiation and push people to
| upgrade.
|
| If anyone has any real clues that they can share
| pseudonymously, that would be great. Not sure which
| department drove that change.
| brailsafe wrote:
| They definitely do that. You could get 64gb ram without
| going up to the top spec of the Max tier of CPU in the M1
| and M2 generations, but with the M4 Pro you can only do 24
| or 48gb, while on the lower spec M4 Max you can only do
| 36gb and nothing else, only the absolute best CPU can do
| 64, therefore if you were otherwise going to get the 48gb
| m4 pro, you'd have to spend another ~$1200 USD to get
| another 16gb of ram if all you cared about was ram.
|
| There may be a technical explanation for it, but incentives
| are incentives.
| surcap526 wrote:
| Apple is running planned obsolescence scam.
| umanwizard wrote:
| M1 MBPs are still great laptops. In fact there are even
| Intel models from 2019 that are still officially supported.
| Apple is pretty much the last company it makes sense to
| accuse of planning obsolescence.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Yup, but only on the hardware side. On the software side,
| you are entirely at their mercy - unlike Windows which
| goes to utterly ridiculous length to keep software dating
| back to the Windows 95 era running on top notch Windows
| 11 systems, Mac developers are all too used of having to
| constantly keep up with whatever crap Apple has changed
| and moved around this time.
| tgma wrote:
| Windows, huh?
|
| Pulled shenanigans wrt TPM requirements for Windows 10
| and 11. Actively trying to make sure people login to a
| Microsoft Account and making it hard to use Local
| Accounts.
|
| > Mac developers are all too used of having to constantly
| keep up with whatever crap Apple has changed and moved
| around this time.
|
| Mmm... Win16 API Win32 API
| (including variants like GoodLuckSystemCallExExEx2W(...))
| MFC ATL .NET WinForms .NET Avalon/WPF
| Silverlight MAUI ...
| mschuster91 wrote:
| For what it's worth I'm running Mac mostly, outside of
| ham radio stuff because there's just so much stuff that
| only is available on Windows.
|
| The thing with all the mentioned APIs is that, excluding
| 16 bit stuff (that got yeeted in Win7 x64, but if you did
| need it you could run W7 x32), you can still run software
| using them without too much of a hassle and you most
| probably can compile it if you need to fix a bug.
|
| Good luck trying to get a Mac game from the 90s running
| on any Mac natively without an emulator/VM in contrast.
| varispeed wrote:
| Yup. I was amazed that I could still run software I wrote
| as a teenager decades ago and it just worked.
| tgma wrote:
| Sometimes _it just works_ , sometimes not quite. If that
| were always true, they would not have had to ship things
| like _XP Mode_ [1].
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUStjHO-E8A&t=9
| cyberax wrote:
| The thing is, MFC/ATL are _still_ supported. With the
| last release in October, 2024. And the Win32 API is so
| stable that people are joking that it's the only stable
| API on Linux.
|
| .NET technologies... Yeah, MS dropped the ball there.
| ben_w wrote:
| I've tried running old Civ2 on a recent windows machine,
| no dice.
|
| I'm sure it's _possible_ to do that, but the backwards
| compatibility on Windows is definitely not as good as you
| say.
|
| That said, I'm also currently, as a fun personal project,
| converting a game originally intended to work on 68k Macs
| and which still has parts explicitly labelled as for
| resource forks, and I've lived through (and done work on)
| 68k, PPC, Intel, and M-series hardware, plus all the
| software changes, so I agree with you about Apple.
| chj wrote:
| I think there is a x64 patch you need to apply
| umanwizard wrote:
| That doesn't really have anything to do with planned
| obsolescence. Causing churn for developers is not
| intended to make people buy more Macs before they should
| need to, which is what planned obsolescence means.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| A piece of software I got in 1995 (Earth Siege) is
| reasonably playable on a modern PC, no VM, no emulator,
| it just works (albeit with requiring compatibility mode).
|
| No piece of Mac software anyone has bought in the late
| PPC Mac era can even run (!) at all natively on a modern
| Mac, and even early Intel Mac software will not run on
| the last Intel generation ever since macOS dropped 32-bit
| support in userspace entirely. You need to pay the
| developers for a new version, that's obsolescence by
| definition and particularly I'm still pissed about the 32
| bit removal as that also killed off WINE running 32 bit
| apps which, you can probably guess, include many games
| that never got a 64-bit Windows binary because they were
| developed long before Windows x64 became mainstream (or
| into existence).
|
| I do love Apple for high quality hardware, but I'll stick
| the finger to them till the day I die for killing off
| WINE during the Intel era for no good reason at all.
| umanwizard wrote:
| I understand all that. Nevertheless, it has nothing to do
| with planned obsolescence.
|
| > You need to pay the developers for a new version,
| that's obsolescence by definition
|
| Sure, but you don't have to pay _Apple_.
|
| The entire point of the idea of planned obsolescence is
| companies intentionally making their products last less
| time than they should, so you have to pay that company
| more money.
|
| This is a company making it so you might have to pay
| _other_ companies more money, because backwards
| compatibility isn 't a priority for them. You can be
| annoyed by that, sure, but it is not the same thing, and
| is not obviously corrupt like planned obsolescence is.
| trollbridge wrote:
| What are you talking about? macOS 26 still runs on 2019
| x86 Macs.
| ElijahLynn wrote:
| Thank you! Since this is the top rated comment, can you also
| add M1 and M2 as well?
| rick_dalton wrote:
| The multi-core geekbench score for the M5 is the 9 core version
| iirc. The 10 core score isn't out yet as far as I know.
| morshu9001 wrote:
| And the fastest M4 max was already fastest single and multicore
| CPU by a decent margin, while the fastest non-Apple CPU was
| only specialized for single or multi.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| The single thread performance for modern high performance
| CPUs are all very close to each other. Apple's latest usually
| has a small advantage because they're the first to use TSMC's
| latest nodes, which is good for something like 15-20%.
|
| The fastest multicore CPUs are the ones with a lot of cores,
| e.g. 64+ core Threadrippers. These have approximately the
| same single-core performance as everything else from the same
| generation because single-core performance isn't affected
| much by number of cores or TDP, and they use the same cores.
|
| Everyone also uses Geekbench to compare things to Apple CPUs
| but the latest Geekbench multi-core is trash:
| https://dev.to/dkechag/how-geekbench-6-multicore-is-
| broken-b...
| morshu9001 wrote:
| I was going by Geekbench. If it's broken then yeah.
| jjcm wrote:
| They're going to have a hard time selling the M5 when compared
| to the M4 Pro. Geekbench for that chip is 3843/22332, which is
| slightly slower for single core but better for multi, but also
| has thunderbolt 5 instead of 4.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| The numbers for M5 Geekbench are for the binned iPad Pro
| version with one performance core disabled.
|
| It's the only M5 device that leaked to the public early.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| Fortunately they will be selling the M5 Pro against the M4
| Pro (and more likely, their expectation is no one with the
| current Pro is going to upgrade for one generation) so it
| will be easier.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| Serious questions. How is Asahi these days? Is it ready as a
| daily driver? Is it getting support from Apple or are they
| hostile to it? Are there missing features? And can I run KDE on
| it?
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| nevermind. Found this. Still a ways to go.
| https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/feature-
| support/m4/#tab...
| zargon wrote:
| Asahi will probably only ever be feasible for years-old
| hardware. macOS is a total non-starter for me, so maybe one
| day I'll end up with one of these, but only as some kind of
| tertiary / retro machine.
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| Yeah, given all the people with passion/ability for low-
| level reverse engineering have left the project, I don't
| think we should ever expect to get greater than M2 support
| from Asahi. Maybe one day another project will pick up the
| ideas, but for anyone not wanting to use years old
| hardware, the dream of Linux almost natively existing on
| modern Apple silicon remains just that: a dream.
| SXX wrote:
| On macbook air M1 Asahi is pretty usable when it comes to
| hardware support. And been usable for at least 1 year.
|
| Though either Fedora itself, how it built with Asahi or just
| running it with little disk space end up with freeze on boot
| after random updates. Twice, once without even rpmfusion
| enabled. Either some weird btrfs issue or I dont know what.
|
| Like I'm Linux dude for two decades and dont do anything
| fancy, so this is weird. Switched to Asahi Ubuntu on ext4 and
| it working great so far.
| pbasista wrote:
| > How is Asahi these days?
|
| Much less active than it used to be when it was run by Hector
| Martin. The core development is a lot slower. Although the
| graphics stack, for instance, has reached a very mature state
| recently.
|
| > Is it ready as a daily driver?
|
| It depends. Only M1 and M2 devices are reasonably well-
| supported. There is no support for power-efficient sleep,
| Display Port, Thunderbolt, video decoding or encoding, touch
| ID. The speakers overheat and turn off momentarily when
| playing loud for a longer period of time. The audio stack in
| general had to be built from ground up and it seems to me
| like there are bits and pieces still missing or configured
| sub-optimally.
|
| > Is it getting support from Apple?
|
| Not that I am aware of.
|
| > are they (Apple) hostile to it?
|
| Not to my knowledge.
|
| > Are there missing features?
|
| Plenty, as described above. There has been some work done
| recently on Thunderbolt / Display Port. Quite a few other
| features are listed as WIP on their feature support page.
|
| > Can I run KDE on it?
|
| Of course. KDE Plasma on Fedora is Asahi Linux's "flagship"
| desktop environment.
| strogonoff wrote:
| It is a shame Asahi supports only up to around M2 or so,
| because I really wanted to use it.
| alberth wrote:
| Did TSMC 2nm slip to next year, or was it always planned to be
| 2026?
| hooch wrote:
| Always been one more iteration of 3nm in the plan
| runjake wrote:
| Let's see if I can turn this into an ASCII table and have it
| survive HN's reformatting. +------+----------
| --------+--------------+----------+----------------+-----------
| --------+-------------------+---------------------------+
| | Chip | Process | CPU Cores | GPU | Neural
| Engine | Memory Bandwidth | Unified Memory | Geekbench6
| (Single/Multi) | +------+------------------+-----------
| ---+----------+----------------+-------------------+-----------
| --------+---------------------------+ | M1 | 5 nm
| | 8 (4P+4E) | 7-8 | 16-core Neural | 68.25 GB/s
| | 16 GB | ~2346 / 8346 | | M2
| | 5 nm (G2) | 8 (4P+4E) | 8-10 | 16-core Neural |
| 100 GB/s | 24 GB | ~2586 / 9672
| | | M3 | 3 nm (first-gen) | 8 (4P+4E) | 8-10 |
| 16-core Neural | 100 GB/s | 24 GB | ~2965
| / 11565 | | M4 | 3 nm (second-gen)| 10
| (4P+6E) | 8-10 | 16-core Neural | 120 GB/s | 32
| GB | ~3822 / 15031 | | M5 | 3
| nm (third-gen) | 10 (4P+6E) | 10 | 16-core Neural | 153
| GB/s | up to 32 GB | ~4133 / 15437 (9-core) |
| +------+------------------+--------------+----------+----------
| ------+-------------------+-------------------+----------------
| -----------+
| PeterCorless wrote:
| You've done yeoman's work, lad.
| jacobolus wrote:
| Or to fit in a narrower window: Chip |
| Process | CPU | GPU | Neural | Memory | Unified
| | Geekbench6 | | Cores | | Engine
| | Bandwidth | Memory | Single / Multi -----|-------
| --|-----------|------|---------|-------------|---------|-----
| ----------------- M1 | 5 nm G1 | 8: 4P+4E | 7-8 |
| 16-core | 68.25 GB/s | 16 GB | 2346 / 8346
| M2 | 5 nm G2 | 8: 4P+4E | 8-10 | 16-core | 100 GB/s |
| 24 GB | 2586 / 9672 M3 | 3 nm G1 | 8:
| 4P+4E | 8-10 | 16-core | 100 GB/s | 24 GB | 2965 / 11565
| M4 | 3 nm G2 | 10: 4P+6E | 8-10 | 16-core | 120 GB/s |
| 32 GB | 3822 / 15031 M5 | 3 nm G3 | 10:
| 4P+6E | 10 | 16-core | 153 GB/s | <=32 GB | 4133 /
| 15437 (9 core)
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| Interesting to see that over 5 years (M1 was 2020), the
| benchmark performance has not quite doubled. Is this an
| indictment of Moore's law, or just Apple over-speccing the M1
| and slowly decreasing that over time?
| imoverclocked wrote:
| Moore's law has never been an absolute and it's also about
| the number of transistors per mm/^2 ... not speed. Sometimes
| progress is a little faster and sometimes it's a little
| slower.
| hinkley wrote:
| More than double the memory bandwidth. Processors can't do
| much while they're stalled waiting for data to load.
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| Does this mean the M5 is serious as fast as my intel 13900 cpu?
| hinkley wrote:
| That's a lot of memory bandwidth. Kinda surprised geekbench
| doesn't benefit more from the fatter pipe.
| t1234s wrote:
| Any reason they don't have an apple TV pro with an M* chip that's
| targeted towards gaming?
| quentindanjou wrote:
| I think it is because there are not enough games to be the
| reason for integrating an M* chip.
| boogieknite wrote:
| probably right but on the other hand Apple is willing to
| throw mountains of $ at tv+ productions just to get ppl on
| their platform
|
| an economist could probably tell me why portioning some of
| that money to spend on game port budget isnt valuable.
| gamepass seems ripe to be undercut too
| textlapse wrote:
| I wonder how much of the nVidia DGX Spark announcement was meant
| to precede this M5 announcement by a day or two; M5 MBP has
| higher performance with a monitor attached and with a (bit) lower
| price tag.
|
| If you could yank the screen out, it probably evens out :)
|
| I have seen quite a few such announcements from competitors that
| tend to be so close that I wonder if they have some competitor
| analysis to precede the Goliath by a few days (like Google vs
| rest, Apple vs rest etc).
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| I think it would be amazing to be able to buy an M5 based open
| platform.
| mgaunard wrote:
| why is Apple focusing on AI? do they have any AI products like
| Google, Meta or OpenAI?
| drnick1 wrote:
| A lot of Apple hardware is impressive on paper, but I will never
| buy a Mac that can't run Linux. I simply don't want to live in
| Apple's walled garden.
|
| Then there is the whole ARM vs x86 issue. Even if a compatible
| Linux distro were made, I expect to run all kinds of software on
| my desktop rig including games, and ARM is still a dead end for
| that. For laptops, it's probably a sensible choice now, but we're
| still far from truly free and usable ARM desktop.
| geek_at wrote:
| I'm still looking for a decent ARM laptop that runs linux well.
| I have my eye on one from lenovo but linux support is still not
| the best
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| > A lot of Apple hardware is impressive on paper, but I will
| never buy a Mac that can't run Linux.
|
| They run Linux actually very well, have you ever tried
| Parallels or VMware Fusion? Especially Parallels ships with
| good softwaer drivers for 2d/3d/video acceleration, suspend,
| and integration into the host OS. If that is not your thing,
| the new native container solution in Tahoe can run container
| from dockerhub and co.
|
| > I simply don't want to live in Apple's walled garden.
|
| And what walled garden would that be on macOS? You can install
| what you want, and there is homebrew at your fingertips with
| all the open and non-open software you can ask for.
| imoverclocked wrote:
| ... or UTM. I have run windows and Linux on my M1 MB Pro with
| plenty of success.
|
| Windows - because I _needed_ it for a single application.
|
| Linux - has been extremely useful as a compliment to small
| arm SBCs that I run. eg: Compiling a kernel is much faster
| there than on (say) a Raspberry Pi. Also, USB device sharing
| makes working with vfat/ext4 filesystems on small memory
| cards a breeze.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Last I looked... extensive telemetry and a sealed boot volume
| that makes it impractical to turn off even if theoretically
| possible. There are other problems of course.
| TypesWillSaveUs wrote:
| You can disable SIP and even disable immutable kernel text,
| load arbitrary drivers, enable/disable any feature, remove
| any system daemon, use any restricted entitlements. The
| entire security model of macOS can be toggled off (csrutil
| from recoveryOS).
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Aware of that. Way too big of a request just to make
| reasonable configuration changes, like shutting down
| daemons, etc.
| niek_pas wrote:
| Just out of curiosity, are these philosophical objections
| or do you have a practical use for disabling code signing
| and messing with your boot volume?
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| I have practical use for disabling telemetry and other
| misfeatures. (Maybe you meant to reply to your sibling
| comment?)
| gffrd wrote:
| OK, so then don't.
| jokoon wrote:
| thanks for your comment
| drcode wrote:
| M1 and M2 Macs run Asahi Linux very well (but no option for
| M3,M4,M5 yet)
| a456463 wrote:
| I came to chime in. I have hardware that apple chooses to
| willfully upsell me on repairing and $1500 for $35 keyboard
| repair. Apple as a company is still terrible at recycling and
| manufacturing obseletion. It is also a walled garden with no
| choice as to what you can do on your machines.
| jokoon wrote:
| honestly, computing speed doesn't matter that much anymore
|
| I mean as long as the law of wirth does not bite too hard
| anteloper wrote:
| I can't find a single moore's law chart that includes 2025 data
| (they all seem to cut off around 2020 actually).
|
| Does anyone know if we're still on pace with Moore's law?
| umvi wrote:
| I would buy a mac mini with an M* chip in the blink of an eye if
| merely upgrading the RAM didn't double the cost of the unit
| newman8r wrote:
| What's sad is there's still no asahi support for m4. I have one
| and I barely ever use it for that reason.
| aetherspawn wrote:
| Wish boot camp was free again... sick of paying for parallels.
| sneak wrote:
| Cool. My maxxed out M4 Max MBP is scheduled for delivery
| tomorrow. Guess I'll return it.
| ppeetteerr wrote:
| The M5 Pro/Max models are likely going to arrive in March (but
| maybe earlier)
| sneak wrote:
| Oh, the M5s available max out at 32GB ram, even in the MBP.
| That's a nonstarter for me in a pro machine.
| zhyder wrote:
| "complementing the Neural Accelerators in the CPU and GPU" seems
| to be a misprint; I don't believe they have the accelerators in
| the CPU too.
|
| Still super interesting architecture with accelerators in each
| GPU core _and_ a dedicated neural engine. Any links to software
| documentation for how to leverage both together, or when to
| leverage one vs the other?
| perdomon wrote:
| It's kind of crazy that they insist on doing basically one of
| these every year. A lot of people complain that the iPhone
| stopped changing (meaningfully) between updates several years
| back. I think Apple Silicon is bound to be the same. I will say
| that the M4 Mac Mini was groundbreaking in terms of a budget-
| friendly Apple product -- I hope they recognized why it was loved
| and continue to iterate in that direction.
| jtrn wrote:
| No wifi 7. No 5g. No 16". No upgrade to Max ram. No upgrade to
| screen. No Bluetooth 6. No upgrade for me. I'll stay with my M1
| Max for now.
| _zoltan_ wrote:
| you're comparing your M1 Max with the base model M5, not M5
| Max. chill. it will come.
| elnatro wrote:
| I don't understand why they don't advertise this cpu as one
| capable of running local LLMs, because it can, right?
| anuraj wrote:
| Too underwhelming. Apple under Tim Cook has been running out of
| steam. What prevents Apple from having 100s of GPU cores and
| higher memory bandwidth? They need to catch the AI wave before
| they perish under it.
| pertymcpert wrote:
| What are you talking about? People love Macs for running local
| LLMs.
| hu3 wrote:
| For real work tho? My colleagues couldn't get past toy demos.
|
| And it ruins battery life.
|
| For coding it's on par with GPT3 at best which is amateur
| tier these days.
|
| It's good for text to speech and speech to text but PCs can
| do that too.
| mrkaluzny wrote:
| Emm... why it says that a charger is not included on the
| purchase. That's just crazy.
| apatheticonion wrote:
| Wake me up when I can play video games on my MacBook and I'll
| upgrade my MacBook M1 Pro.
|
| Until then, I take a mini PC with me along with my M1 when I
| travel and use game streaming for gaming and offload dev and AI
| work via ssh + ssh remote tools.
|
| To me, M5 has amazing hardware, but they put square wheels on a
| Ferrari
| thomascountz wrote:
| Imagine Apple released a laptop that shipped without MacOS. Just
| the hardware, drivers, and the integrated M-series chips.
| The MacBook Zero
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| never see the day that I would say that Apple device is one of
| the best to run LLM
| warrenmiller wrote:
| why only on the 14'' not the 16'' ?
| YouAreWRONGtoo wrote:
| When it allows installing any Linux with working drivers, I will
| consider it. Otherwise, you can go back to your garage and I will
| continue to make fun of people using Macs.
| shitloadofbooks wrote:
| Why do you care so much? Sounds exhausting...
| zelias wrote:
| Do I want to buy this, an M1 or an M4?
| gr4vityWall wrote:
| if only the Linux support was good. Or any other UNIX-like that
| made it usable without having to deal with macOS. It's a shame,
| because the hardware is top tier.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-10-15 23:00 UTC)