> With 16GB of unified memory standard, configurable up to 32GB, and higher memory bandwidth up to 170GB/s
Apple MacBook M5 Max has bandwidth up to 600GB/s, is 170GB/s for M6 the real limit? If so, wouldn't this slow down LLM processing?
epistasis 7 minutes ago [-]
The M6 version is also cheaper than the M5 Max by a significant amount. I wouldn't be surprised if the M6 could keep up on LLM prefill (compute bound), but the memory bandwidth means that decode is going to be a lot slower, most likely?
Choco31415 11 minutes ago [-]
There are rumors that Apple is not releasing Pro/Max versions of the M6 with the intention of focusing these research efforts on the M7 instead.
Even then, 170GB/s is a bump up from 153GB/s of the M5. So we see a 11% uplift already.
brandall10 9 minutes ago [-]
It's a base M6 chip. The Pro doubles that, and the Max doubles again. And the Ultra doubles yet again. This is how the entire M series has always worked.
So the theoretical Max would be 680GB/s.
at1as 56 minutes ago [-]
I'm currently on a marathon to keep my M1 Pro running until the M7 Pro/Max is available. Not sure if I'll make it, but I'm not eager to pay $6000+ for a decent spec dev computer, until I really have to
sgarrity 11 minutes ago [-]
Stay strong! I went from an M1 to M5 generation, and it was a nice bump, but I could have gone another year without any significant impact on my quality of life/work.
epistasis 38 minutes ago [-]
I'm loving my M1 Macbook Air still, and only a few weeks away from six years of use Sometimes it lags a bit when I'm running a macOS VM, and all the coding agent VMs, so I'm kind of interested in going to 32GB of RAM, but honestly this computer is still faster than any of my laptops that came before, even with the visual atrocity of Liquid Glass.
I'll go and look at this new box, drool a little, and realize that I'd get more personal utility from donating $3k (or whatever the trade in delta is) to a charity than upgrading my computer.
thenthenthen 31 minutes ago [-]
I got a second hand M1 air like two years ago for 200usd with 1tb hdd and 16gb ram. I got it after my intel Air died after about..12 years? (Edit: the ssd died, which is removable… but literally had a plane to catch). All my pros have died within a few years. Air all the way. Never looking back.
epistasis 16 minutes ago [-]
I wonder if this is from not trying to get maximum performance, and instead focusing on efficiency? But I've noticed this too. I definitely prefer the Air form factor over larger models as the primary benefit, but the durability seems to be a big benefit too. Fewer ports, thinner shell that seals tighter and can't flex as much due to the curved metal instead of flat surfaces... everything about it just seems like a better design.
freakynit 35 minutes ago [-]
I freaking hate liquid-glass UI Apple has "forced" onto us. No freaking way to disable it. I hate it so much.
woah 16 minutes ago [-]
Been on HN for many years now, and the one thing that never changes is people posting angrily about small UI changes. It makes me wonder- if things have only ever gotten worse, what was the peak UI? MS DOS?
epistasis 11 minutes ago [-]
Small improvements don't get much accolades. And for the most part, the UX is so good that most changes tend to be neutral or for the worse. And when you're really attached to something and there's on an unnecessary change, it feels almost like betrayal!
I, for one, prefer Apple products because they sweat the small stuff more than the other options, and when they have put in effort to make things worse it's kind of infuriating.
I do a bit of desktop Linux work too, and it's OK, but hard to complain when it's all open source volunteer work! Windows is so terrible that I wouldn't even know where to start. What's the point? There's nobody at Microsoft that even gives a damn.
cmoski 9 minutes ago [-]
No, it was Windows 3.11
randomblock1 24 minutes ago [-]
There's a slider to reduce the liquidity
Spartan-S63 12 minutes ago [-]
I had an M1 Max machine with 32GB of memory and upgraded it to an M4 Max machine with 128GB of memory for local AI model experimentation.
It's sad that M5 (and M6) are so much faster at prefilling and other LLM-related operations, but I'm happy with the computer I got and will keep it at least 3-4 generations.
jwilcoxson 47 minutes ago [-]
My M1 Pro has been great, certainly doesn’t feel like a 5-year old computer.
freakynit 42 minutes ago [-]
M1 Air guy here... I'm not looking for a replacement still. Almost 6 years now. Runs butter-smooth. Best tech purchase I ever made.
xXSLAYERXx 35 minutes ago [-]
Have an M1 air as well. Got a Pro m5. For daily coding tasks, and general web browsing the M1 air still holds. I'm going to pass it on to my kid. Reminds me of the honda we have that we'll also pass down.
TrainedMonkey 40 minutes ago [-]
Biggest issue with my M3 Max is apple mandatory fun bloatware. I think it's the same playbook as phones long term. The hardware is still powerful but the software is optimized for the latest CPU, so older models run hot, take a fraction of the second longer to load the resources, etc. That stacks up over 5-6 years of releases to make older models feel slower.
at1as 20 minutes ago [-]
I've held back an OS update or two, specifically because I'm worried about performance dropoff on the old chip
But with all of the AI-discovered exploits I think it'll become more important to keep everything up to date
ErneX 43 minutes ago [-]
If the rumours are true (about AI capabilities) it’d be best to wait yes.
hmokiguess 41 minutes ago [-]
which rumours?
speedgoose 22 minutes ago [-]
The M7 will the much better for local LLM inference. If you can afford the memory.
32GB Unified RAM max. Is that really the machine I want for running local LLMs?
flohofwoe 14 minutes ago [-]
Hmm, still no OLED displays? I wonder what's the holdup? (I have a fairly mainstream PC laptop with OLED display, and the display is the one thing where my MBP looks pretty poor in direct comparison).
locusofself 8 minutes ago [-]
Dare I even ask how much the 32gb/1tb variant will be? $3,000?
lostNFound 4 minutes ago [-]
You could have dared to check. But no, it's $2399 for those specs.
poolnoodle 11 minutes ago [-]
Where's the touch screen??? The rumors promised touch!!!
flohofwoe 6 minutes ago [-]
Why would you want greasy fingerprints all over your display and gorilla arm syndrome when there's a perfectly fine keyboard and touchpad attached to the display for free?
> Phenomenal battery life: In addition to the huge leap in performance, battery life gets up to 14 additional hours for Intel-based upgraders
the m2/m3 announcements were already kind of cringe to keep saying 'HEY IT'S BETTER THAN INTEL' but at this point it's just embarrassing?
Grombobulous 1 hours ago [-]
Fun fact: the laptop in this size/performance class with the best battery life is a Windows Intel Core Ultra Series 3 laptop, not a MacBook Pro!
So Apple is now comparing against computers they were selling 7-8 years ago rather than what Intel is delivering now.
wtallis 1 hours ago [-]
There's no happy medium here that would satisfy everybody: when they make marketing claims about improvements relative to products from several years ago, they get criticized for not focusing on the improvements relative to last gen (even if those comparisons are also somewhere in the announcement). When they focus on the most recent generations, people complain that it doesn't make sense to upgrade every year.
Just accept that even if you aren't still using an Intel MacBook Pro, the comparison is still relevant to some part of their target market.
They only just dropped support for Intel Macs from this fall's operating system release (but are still doing security patches for the releases that Intel Macs can run). A year from now, it actually will be fairly reasonable to expect them to give up marketing to the holdouts.
anamexis 1 hours ago [-]
I would guess there's still quite a lot of people on Intel Macs out there (they were sold 5 years ago), so it is still very much worth it for Apple to market to them.
thibaut_barrere 1 hours ago [-]
More people than you think (outside tech) are using Intel Macs at the moment (family computers etc).
jwilcoxson 54 minutes ago [-]
Exactly. A late model Intel Mac is still a perfectly cromulent computer in 2026.
Razengan 46 minutes ago [-]
"cromulent" sounds like such a disgusting word that isn't.
probably because of its adjacency to "corpulent" lol
anamexis 37 minutes ago [-]
The word "cromulent" was coined by the TV show The Simpsons in a gag.
> Mrs. Krabappel: "Embiggens"? I never heard that word before I moved to Springfield.
> Ms. Hoover: I don't know why. It's a perfectly cromulent word.
But now it has made it into the Merriam-Webster dictionary.
zaphar 1 hours ago [-]
Why? Apple devices have the best battery life in the market right now to my knowledge. It's an important part of the evaluation for a laptop which is the opposite of cringe.
Grombobulous 59 minutes ago [-]
Actually, they don’t! Intel Core Ultra Series 3 beats Apple laptops as of the M5 on battery life.
IIRC the Framework 13 Pro beats the MacBook Pro at both video streaming tests and office productivity with 300 bits brightness tests. (Framework live-streamed the video playback test, and the office provided productivity tests I referred to were done by Just Josh Tech)
Perhaps the M6 has leapfrogged but that remains to be seen.
jwilcoxson 52 minutes ago [-]
Competition is a beautiful thing.
porridgeraisin 51 minutes ago [-]
In usual developer type tasks, among my friend group what I hear is that panther lake laptops are competitive with M4 laptops. But, M4s do that with a 55Wh battery, whereas most panther lake laptops come with a 70Wh battery. So if you're discussing chip performance per watt then it's probably an edge to apple silicon.
Grombobulous 44 minutes ago [-]
72.4 Wh is the size of the M4 MacBook Pro battery, about the same size as the Framework 13 Pro.
Intel and now Qualcomm are really not far off on performance per watt. Mostly Apple maintains an advantage on single core performance.
The Panther Lake integrated GPU in the X7/X9 SKI is actually faster than the one you get in the base M5.
porridgeraisin 29 minutes ago [-]
You're right. I think I remember those numbers from an Air vs 3xxH comparison.
throwitaway222 15 minutes ago [-]
I recall seeing some crazy stats like 41+ hours maybe on a snapdragon processor w/windows. I imagine your screen brightness would have to be like 99% dark and not playing videos is my guess.
Guillaume86 18 minutes ago [-]
That's not what the marketing is saying, they keep comparing to their own super old intel models.
ErneX 42 minutes ago [-]
They want those users to upgrade, I don’t see the problem.
adolph 30 minutes ago [-]
One of the interesting slights of hand Apple marketing must do is simultaneously say the new processor is awesome while selling the higher spec versions of the previous processor as upgrades:
The M6 chip joins M5 Pro and M5 Max to create our most advanced line-up of chips ever built for a pro laptop. With a 12-core CPU, 12-core GPU and our first ever Dual 16‑core Neural Engine, M6 brings next-generation speed and advanced on device AI. All three chips deliver phenomenal single- and multithreaded CPU performance and faster unified memory. . . .
cbeach 20 minutes ago [-]
My 5090 has a bandwidth of 1,792 GB/s, and that is just about good enough for basic (i.e. 27B models) local LLM inference.
The fastest M6 MacBook Pro (24/32GB configs) has a memory bandwidth of 170 GB/s. And the M5 Max is 614 GB/s.
Am I missing some nuance of the M6 MBP here, or am I right to assume it won't set the local LLM world on fire?
lowbloodsugar 12 minutes ago [-]
Is your 5090 in a laptop? o_0
cbeach 3 minutes ago [-]
No. But does high memory bandwidth necessarily require desktop/server style power and cooling?
tines 23 minutes ago [-]
sleight*
villgax 1 hours ago [-]
About time they put a battery in the lid, which is what an iPad already manages to do with thinness. Boom another half a decade of updates all the way to 48hrs
wren6991 24 minutes ago [-]
Also a great way to make money from screen replacements when the battery expands!
xena 27 minutes ago [-]
Citation?
wren6991 24 minutes ago [-]
It's confusingly worded but I think it's a suggestion for something Apple could do in the future. I don't see any mention of this in the linked Apple article.
Razengan 47 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 17:35:16 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Apple MacBook M5 Max has bandwidth up to 600GB/s, is 170GB/s for M6 the real limit? If so, wouldn't this slow down LLM processing?
Even then, 170GB/s is a bump up from 153GB/s of the M5. So we see a 11% uplift already.
So the theoretical Max would be 680GB/s.
I'll go and look at this new box, drool a little, and realize that I'd get more personal utility from donating $3k (or whatever the trade in delta is) to a charity than upgrading my computer.
I, for one, prefer Apple products because they sweat the small stuff more than the other options, and when they have put in effort to make things worse it's kind of infuriating.
I do a bit of desktop Linux work too, and it's OK, but hard to complain when it's all open source volunteer work! Windows is so terrible that I wouldn't even know where to start. What's the point? There's nobody at Microsoft that even gives a damn.
It's sad that M5 (and M6) are so much faster at prefilling and other LLM-related operations, but I'm happy with the computer I got and will keep it at least 3-4 generations.
But with all of the AI-discovered exploits I think it'll become more important to keep everything up to date
the m2/m3 announcements were already kind of cringe to keep saying 'HEY IT'S BETTER THAN INTEL' but at this point it's just embarrassing?
So Apple is now comparing against computers they were selling 7-8 years ago rather than what Intel is delivering now.
Just accept that even if you aren't still using an Intel MacBook Pro, the comparison is still relevant to some part of their target market.
They only just dropped support for Intel Macs from this fall's operating system release (but are still doing security patches for the releases that Intel Macs can run). A year from now, it actually will be fairly reasonable to expect them to give up marketing to the holdouts.
probably because of its adjacency to "corpulent" lol
> Mrs. Krabappel: "Embiggens"? I never heard that word before I moved to Springfield.
> Ms. Hoover: I don't know why. It's a perfectly cromulent word.
But now it has made it into the Merriam-Webster dictionary.
IIRC the Framework 13 Pro beats the MacBook Pro at both video streaming tests and office productivity with 300 bits brightness tests. (Framework live-streamed the video playback test, and the office provided productivity tests I referred to were done by Just Josh Tech)
Perhaps the M6 has leapfrogged but that remains to be seen.
Intel and now Qualcomm are really not far off on performance per watt. Mostly Apple maintains an advantage on single core performance.
The Panther Lake integrated GPU in the X7/X9 SKI is actually faster than the one you get in the base M5.
The fastest M6 MacBook Pro (24/32GB configs) has a memory bandwidth of 170 GB/s. And the M5 Max is 614 GB/s.
Am I missing some nuance of the M6 MBP here, or am I right to assume it won't set the local LLM world on fire?