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I know it's at least a little irrational, but I am indescribably angry with the pricing trajectory of personal computing. I'm not all that young and for pretty much all my life the computers you as a random person could buy have consistently become massively more performant and massively cheaper over time. Even when the exponential performance increases started to taper off, every few years you could buy or build a new computer that was either cheaper or faster than the one you already had.

That trend of the last several decades has been completely destroyed in the last year or so. Sure you can buy a new computer that might be slightly better than one a few years old, but it will be significantly more expensive to the point where an upgrade is almost certainly not worth it unless money is no object. Even replacing a computer from the pre-AI era would be virtually impossible at anywhere near what it cost you to buy it new unless it was verging on truly ancient by computer standards. Computers have always been a counterpoint to inflation everywhere else, but now that seems to be not only no longer true, but computer costs are inflating significantly worse than other goods.

I find myself increasingly in favor of the movement against data centers. Not because I think data centers are bad on their own, but because of the hording of computing resources they represent and the impact that has on people trying to buy any sort of computing device for their personal use. The PC I built 2 years ago is basically irreplaceable at anywhere near the price I paid for it. That's a truly unacceptable state of affairs in personal computing.

Same thing for me! Got it with the education discount when it came out in 2024 and, although I've been pretty disappointed with macOS, it's crazy to see that the price increased by $300 in less than 2 years, with no sign of the price increases slowing down.

What will happen once people are priced out of buying computers? I find this worrying.

I was not in need of a mac mini then and I’m not in need now, but damn I hope my laptop will last a long time because FML the best price/performance minipc of the last few years got wrecked and the entire market is in shambles

I got a 32gb M4 macbook air with the lower CPU core count, right before things got stupid. Can't even buy that skew now.

I wish I picked one up last fall when the stores were trying to clear them out. Now you can’t even buy them in person.

Wait, their website only shows preorders for M6 or M5 Pro, and they have nothing about the M4. So do they currently have zero Mac minis in stock?

I feel that way about my GPU for normal gaming use. Now I’m afraid of it dying on me.

I'm kind of lost on what to do with it. I have better workstation PCs, and I couldn't find a good way to turn it into a media center - it would be a great living room PC - but couldn't find a BT remote friendly solution last time I checked. Anyone has a solution for this ? I don't want to be using mouse/keyboard every time I sit on the couch - something that would let me stream something like jellyfin fullscreen with a remote ?

I almost bought one for my kids back then and now seriously regret that I didn't.

My son is using my old ~2011 Mac mini with Linux Mint on it. Slow but works.

When they discontinued the M4 with 16GB a few months ago I had literally just ordered one off Amazon which they promptly cancelled. It would have been 600 after exchange rate from GBP.

I can't justify a more than 2x price increase for what I'm guessing are marginal improvements. I want to replace my home lab but as it stands my underpowered NAS will have to continue as it has the past few years

If you adjust for inflation, is it a big change from the super cheap Mac Minis of the past? Probably still somewhat more expensive, but not as much as the nominal difference would imply.

> but at European prices of over €1000 for M6/16GB/256GB it's a psychological barrier that's been broken.

We should be buying European solutions anyway. Different psychological barrier that was broken long before.

No bro, >1000€ for 16/256 is a really bad deal

So many things I would impulse buy, but I have to wait a month and so I don't.

Don't give them ideas...

Wonder how the cybertruck sales would have gone if tesla had done that.

(250,000 pre-orders, vs now ~5000 sales/quarter)

At least in the UK, that's exactly what they're doing right now. They're allowing pre-orders, with shipping on Sept 22.

The big difference you're not looking at is the memory bandwidth. The M5 Pro has nearly twice the one of the M6:

170GB/s memory bandwidth Configurable up to 32GB unified memory

307GB/s memory bandwidth Configurable up to 64GB unified memory

That is also the factor you want to take into account for AI inference, of course.

Last time the benchmark numbers from apple were stupid and they still are.

I just wait for practical real live numbers with real stacks i use.

And btw. they reduced the memory bandwdith on the M4 in comparision to its previous version by 40gb/sec or so, you need to wait to see.

It basically means that every meaningful comparison produced an embarrassing improvement multiplier

Upgraded my work machine from an M1 MBP to an M4 Mac Mini a couple of years ago. I do a lot of work in Excel with large sheets. The performance improvement was very noticeable and appreciated!

Benchmarks from the manufacturer are just marketing as well. Wait for independent 3rd party reviews.

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/08/apple-introduces-m6-a...

Says 1.2x for multithreaded and doesn't specify (I presume smaller) for single-threaded. That's compared to M5 not M5 Pro, so M5 Pro is likely significantly faster.

Don't worry, there are exactly zero Apple chips that are good for any sort of local inference right now. Unified ram is fast for ram, but dogshit slow compared to actual dedicated VRAM on graphics cards.

I feel much the same. I feel like the next time I upgrade I could splurge a bit more and get a really bigger CPU and storage to be even more productive with.

However the main reason I would upgrade is to run LLMs locally and RAM prices are making this a no-go. One day if RAM comes down to earth I'll upgrade. If not I'll stick to this old machine for a long time.

yeah my m1 mac studio shows no signs of stopping and i can't justify another upgrade until doing so really unlocks something new at a reasonable price (like running local llms that are competitive with the cloud services at a decent speed, which presumably the mac studio M5 Ultras can do with qwen 3.8 but the 256GB Ultra config is more than $10k!)

> Perhaps in a few years when both local-running LLMs are good enough on regular consumer hardware there'll be a good reason to upgrade.

I mean, local LLMs already are really good if you own Nvidia Cards, not sure what you are waiting for. 2x3090 will blow any current Mac out of the water in tok/sec

I took a peek into APFS a bit ago [1] because I (stupidly) yanked a usb SSD before it was unmounted and corrupted it. Reading the documentation, it seems to have many "cool" features which just aren't fully exposed/utilized in the OS, and there is a lack of API tooling.

For example: it is copy-on-write, and my corruption happened in the superblock checkpoint. There is no built-in command in Disk Utility to "mount" an older checkpoint (and accepting a small amount of dataloss). Also the "First Aid" command allegedly runs volume repair top-down when it is recommended to do it inside-out.

[1] https://www.ntfs.com/apfs-structure.htm

It might not be the fastest, but at least it supports setting/keeping file creation time - unlike the clusterf*ck we still have on basically all Linux filesystems unfortunately

Is APFS that much slower than ZFS or btrfs (more comparable Linux file systems) or just ext4? Btrfs is noticeably slower than ext4, but at least all the Mac and Linux file systems are way faster than file operations on Windows :)

Except we've gotten so much better at making computers since the Amiga, its a travesty that things have gotten so bad for consumers. You know the ones that bail out the bubbles

Apple does this thing where they pick a very old game and then boast about how well it runs. It's so bizarre.

Not like Mac gaming is good anyway...they have "Game Porting Toolkit" but it's not free and open like Proton so nobody will use it unless Apple pushes them. Removing Rosetta doesn't help either.

From what I've seen they do care quite a bit about gaming, but not to the point where they're willing to actually do much about it, so I wouldn't expect a proton style compatibility layer anytime soon unfortunately

I play quite a few games on my Mac Mini via Crossover, but rarely anything particularly graphically intensive. Though I do see occasional buzz about improvements in the game porting toolkit leading to significant perf improvements when they make their way into Crossover.

cp2077 sits permanently at 60fps and looks great on my m1 max 64gb. I used to play it on my 4090, but once I figured out how to do redmods on macos I quit using it and play it on my mac to save power (I'm 100% solar powered and barely generate 600w, 4090 consumes 500+). In apples infinite wisdom they don't support egpus, so my 4090 egpu will never work with my mac, which was a really disappointing thing to discover.

> Interesting that Apple quotes performances when playing Cyberpunk 2077 ! Maybe they will want to care more about gaming ?

They include game metrics in their marketing often, because they know their customers care about gaming. But no—for whatever reason, it never translates into Apple caring about gaming. I don't get it, but that's the way it has been for a long time.

Yes, the "neural accelerators" in the M5 GPU cores really do 4x pre-fill performance over M4. You can find benchmarks online since M5 has been out for months now. I assume the M6 has whatever the next-gen version of those is. These are not the "neural processors" that have been there since M1 (those still exist) but are additionl matrix math accelerators inside the actual GPU cores. Like "tensor cores" on Nvidia GPUs.

About damn time, Gigabit ethernet started shipping on desktop Macs over 20 years ago.

I'm curious what 2.5GbE chipset they used.

Still no SFP option?

10 years later from the rest of the market

Considering doing exactly this, hopefully by the time M7 Ultra is out, the RAM Apocalypse will be over.

They are both somewhat important. The compute speed impacts the tokens per second, and memory impacts the size of the model/capability.

IMO memory size is the most important since you can always wait longer for it to compute while a blazing fast but dumb model is much less useful.

Memory bandwidth is one of the most important factors. The Max machines typically have higher bandwidth than Pro (you should look up these exact models to verify though). Having said that, you could run bigger models with 64GB.

I went with a 64GB M2 Max a few years back even though it stretched my budget and I'm glad I did. I'm not sure what I'd pick in this case. Tough call.

Larger model -> more memory

It depends on what model(s) you want to run.

They affect different things. You want more powerful models -> more memory. You want the models that run to be faster -> more gpu cores.

Not really. It's Gurman, once again throwing darts at the wall to see what sticks like a desperate roach begging for subscribers to his bullshit newsletter of guesses and predictions he'll flip in a month the opposite direction for even more clicks and bait.

Large majority of users moved to Hermes Agent

How many tokens per second would you even get on them?

You will not feel a difference in coding/dev work between M1 to M6 in a relevant manner.

I guess so. It's slightly cheaper to buy 2x 32GB M6 minis than opt for 64GB sku (which is only available with the M5 Pro chip)...

I do worry that at this point it's no longer just Apple's problem to solve. They need to figure out a way to take the rest of the industry with it. Maybe if their standards are high enough everyone else will look bad by comparison.

My daily driver personal machines are incredible pieces of kit, but everything is always getting worse because majority of software is some SaaS living in the cloud, or even if on-desktop is constantly updating slop.

Why does it take 10 seconds for my streaming music app to open when my machine is 10-20 cores, 32GB+ RAM, high bandwidth NVMe storage, and I am connected to gigabit fiber internet? The thing is autoplaying videos, and has about 10 different panes clearly owned by different product managers that hate each other. Half the time its pushing me some pop-up dialog I don't care about.

Winamp in 1998 took about 2 seconds to load.

I don't think polishing macos more will win more users, Windows is a flaming garbage heap where virtually every built in program is broken and people keep using it. Making macbooks cheaper and more accessible will do far more.

It's not worth it yet when datacenter compute is being subsidized and consumer hardware is massively overpriced, but the tipping point will come where it makes far more sense.

Particularly with Chinese companies pushing to get more out of smaller models. You can run really capable models on the top end macs right now, it just costs way more than buying credits.

Running useful models locally with privacy would be a great selling point. We're not quite there, but the next five years should be interesting.

… from the fine print:

“Results are compared to previous-generation Mac mini systems with Apple M4, 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, 32GB of unified memory, and 2TB SSD.”

I think there's a valid argument for this pattern when you know most people are on 3-ish year upgrade cycles. Also, if you compare against the most recent generation, you risk creating buyer's remorse for recent purchases.

Yup. Yesterday it was $799 for the base Mac Mini M4, a $200 increase from the original MSRP before June’s price hikes.

I paid $499 for my M4 back in April with the academic discount since I predicted the next generation base model would cost more. Sadly my prediction was correct: $599 to $899 is steep. I understand why; the prices of DIMMs, GPUs, and SSDs have also skyrocketed. But $899 for a base Mac Mini is painful, even if the alternatives on the current market are also painfully expensive.

Faster CPU and Ethernet is certainly worth $100. Sucks though, I agree.

Era of cheap compute is over I'm afraid