This is, sadly, probably a foreign concept to a lot of people who have only worked at companies where hardware purchases are viewed as something to minimize and everyone is stuck with the same low spec laptops that the finance department picked out. At companies where someone might have a legitimate use for a $20K machine, their fully loaded costs (not their salary) are $300K or more, and other teams like sales are spending thousands of dollars per week on things like travel and hotels for their job, spending $20K on a computer that’s going to last several years is not a hard choice.

If Apple didn't sold these things they wouldn't make them but, also the level of marketing that Apple is talking about for AI is basically the new group they need to capture because the ones I just listed are already buying Macs and or easily to motivate with the other obvious CPU / GPU performance upgrades for code compilation, faster memory and video transcoding.

For which configuration, though?

Put another way: If $25k is the full extent of the start up capital costs, and operating costs are very low, that is a much cheaper business to start than most! The question is whether this is actually a useful model for a revenue generating business. I think that remains to be seen.

My guess is that there will be a few hits (which we'll hear a lot about - especially when someone actually pulls off "the first single-person unicorn", which I do suspect will happen someday) and a huuuge number of misses, which we won't hear much about.

AI based tools are very useful here - thinks like object removable or cleanup etc, not just AI generation.

For example Apple mentioned performance increases for https://learn.foundry.com/nuke/content/reference_guide/air_n...

Something like this would give you three concurrent sessions, each with 240k token context:

  sudo sysctl iogpu.wired_limit_mb=110000
  
  llama-server -hf unsloth/Qwen3.8-27B-GGUF:BF16 -c 786432 --parallel 3 -ngl 99 -fa on

I assume the M6 will take the crown back and then a few months later Intel/AMD will release a new chip and take that crown back again. That's the state of the world we used to expect, but it's a state that has been missing ever since the release of the M1 in 2020 until Intel finally caught up again this year.

- Apple: We have matched Intel in CPU performance thanks to this new PowerPC! (Shows ad that uses carefully handpicked benchmarks to suggest that the PowerPC is actually faster when it really isn’t on average)

- Intel: Oh, we just found a 30% clock rate increase in the pocket of our other fab pants.

- AMD: Hold my beer, I have the DEC Alpha guys making an x86 CPU… How about 64-bit while at it.

I know Apple do some special hardware software integration magic too.

Also, a lot of companies are looking at how to run capable models locally to cut some of their (massive) cloud AI bills. An easy answer is worth a lot to them.

Apple: Meep Meep...

This seems to happen repeatedly.

Apple: Look at this cool new chip!

Others: Look how we very slightly passed Apple (six months later, with worse thermals and power consumption)

Apple: Look at this even cooler new chip!

Apple computers tend to have excellent resale value, and Mac Minis/Studios have the least depreciation of them all. I understand the benefits to both taxes and cash flow, but boy is Apple winning big on those lease offers for Studios.

Got the recommendation from these articles: https://www.xda-developers.com/qwen-3-8-27b-reverse-engineer... https://www.xda-developers.com/lenovo-thinkstation-pgx-revie...

But haven't had a chance to try it myself.

In EU you also have 14 days to return products bought online, for any reason.

That being said: you might want to consider at least 2TB storage. Having 256GB RAM to fit models is less useful when you can only store a 3 or 4 large models on your disk. The M4 -> M5 transition doubled the drive bandwidth (at least for the MacBook Pro, I'd assume the Studio is no different) making them extra nice for loading large models. Then again, you can always add an external NVMe drive over thunderbolt, so the tradeoff is less straightforward than with a portable MBP.

Mac Mini + MacBook Neo w/ ssh can be a better setup than MacBook Pro for many people.

Should bench better than Opus 4.7.

For tinkering and learning, it's been great. Tie it into something like Hermes and you have a pretty powerful AI assistant in a box. And when you need to step up your model, you just do something like OpenRouter and it makes it pretty easy.

Please say more? Is it because it is a one-time cost, unlike a recurring subscription of Claude/Codex?

Fab capacity is being bought online; there’s just lead time.

Noticeably greater intelligence is being achieved at the same number of parameters (see: Qwen3.8).

I think the future will be bright, it might be a matter of time. And for tinkers, a used Epyc + DDR4 server can be great fun and epic value.

Is there anything better now though?

All I see from AI, is an amplification of the enshittification of the internet.

And people being even more alone.

I believe that the CPUs are actually limited by ram bandwidth more than the neural engine right when it comes to LLM processing?

Maybe the M7 introduces something new to get around the current ram bandwidth problems on the non-Ultra chips.

EDIT: or buy AAPL. If I had bought Apple stock instead of buying a Mac LC II in 1992, then I would have about $2 million in Apple stock.

Put together a similar build with a couple of rtx 6000 Ada cards and Apple's price tag suddenly looks pretty damn reasonable

I wouldn’t recommend buying any bare metal unless money is a second thought or you can fully deduct the price.

Most often in the end you pay half the price then. Depending on the write offs you could even make some bucks out of it.

Or buy and lease. Under certain circumstances the hardware costs you nothing.

But you need money to save money. And a company.

    16GB   $239 - $15/GB 
    32GB   $800 - $25/GB
    64GB $1,600 - $25/GB

Ok I'll be that guy. It's pretty easy to figure out if you're talking to an LLM now we know it's tics, failure modes, jailbreak techniques etc

...

> I don’t think anyone truly knows when, but it will happen.

Do you know what cyclical means ... ?

THE (Col.) Billy Mitchell was actually a badass. His time in Alaska alone, running telegraph lines in the wilderness, made him a legend even before his forward thinking during WWI and beyond.

You'll just have to be careful to match the enclosure to the ports on the system. The base-model M6 Mac mini still uses Thunderbolt 4, so a USB4v2 enclosure would be wasted.

That's one big plus.

And the "popularized" version is faulty also since it uses an ideal, abstract human judge (like the "spheroidal economic agent").

But if you want to add declinations to the said popularized image of the Turing test, you may add Maxim Lott's IQ tests at trackingai.org . Between the end of 2024 and the beginning of 2025 LLMs reached an equivalent IQ of 100, for example.

ELIZA beat the Turing test and then everyone forgot about it. Humans are just really terrible at recognising robots.

E.g how is the perf/$ vs Wildcat lake

There's aren't really any alternative OS [1], but I don't think it's fair to say there's a closed software ecosystem. You can install/compile/run whatever you want, including kernel extensions. The hardware isn't locked.

[1] Hardware isn't locked: https://asahilinux.org/about/

> Apple allows booting unsigned/custom kernels on Apple Silicon Macs without a jailbreak! This isn’t a hack or an omission, but an actual feature that Apple built into these devices.

Could you provide more details about the Epyc + DDR4 server?

Basically everyone that makes memory is building new fabs, meanwhile I'm not sure how much longer AI datacenter demand for ram will last. I think the decrease in AI ram demand and the new fabs will likely coincide leading to a collapse in pricing.

That is, of course, assuming the memory manufacturers don't pull their favorite trick and collude.

- Extreme poverty has dropped from 30% to under 10% globally. - Child mortality rates have dropped in half - Internet access has exploded from 10% to 70% - Solar energy costs have dropped 90% - Cancer death rates have declined by 30%

All of these massive improvements in less than 30 years.

While there certainly are issues to solve, and if you simply follow journalism you may think the world is worse off, but for many, their lives have been significantly improved.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect

It turns out the limiting factor isn't how sophisticated algorithms are, it's how gullible humans are.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/the-digital-self/202...

https://commission.europa.eu/news-and-media/news/safer-and-m...

I've tried [1] and I almost 100% detect which is the AI. I really want to convince myself I have failed, does anyone know of a better site/resource for this?

I know it might be moving goalposts but I would consider AI to have passed in a well and truly undisputed manner when [2] is resolved.

But in a more practical sense, if AI can impersonate humans so well today then why are state of the art frontier models so obviously AI when they create PRs, commit messages, documentation, etc. Are the companies deliberately making them unnatural?

[1] https://turingtest.live/

[2] https://www.metaculus.com/questions/11861/date-when-ai-passe...

These times are exciting and rough seas make good sailors. Find your path forward.

I think there are elements showing lowering of performance and expectation.

It's a very deliberate choice when if it doesn't make sense to gamers.

Intel Panther lake beats the M5 in GPU and multi-core performance, and is only behind in single core (and not by much). Panther Lake is also on some Windows laptops that trounce MacBook battery life (e.g., Framework 13 Pro according to Just Josh Tech medium-brightness productivity benchmarking).

The Snapdragon X2 Elite beats the M5 multi-core performance (the HP Omnibook Ultra 14 is priced identically spec-for-spec with the MacBook Pro with M5). Still behind in single core and probably graphics, but squarely in the same realm.

Both of these chips are within small deviations of the M5. We could call Intel and Qualcomm 1 year behind at best.

But it had nothing to do with the iPod/iPhone release in his story.

(story starts ~1:15, but I highly recommend the entire talk)

5.25GHz Pentium 4s, intentionally lower binned Athlons, the era your CPU got obsoleted the moment you booted it for the first time.

I don't remember early 90s much. I was too young back then. I don't remember much stuff from that era. But late 90s, early 2000s.

Oh, boy.

P.S.: AMD64 was a great sucker punch though. One of the professors in our university rejected to believe and got mad when he learnt that Intel licensed AMD64 from AMD, heh.

My YouTube will load 0.00001s faster!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test

I ordered an ASUS Zephyrus G16 with 5090 NVIDIA card + 1.9kg (quite an overkill, and I know that I will have to limit power output), but hasn't arrived yet.

But what's fun is that I love QML+QuickShell with its hot reloading, Hyprland with its Lua support.

With AI nowdays it's just so easy to do deep UI changes that wasn't possible a year ago.

They’re very different things.

The more logical argument to me is that Apple uses its upgrade price points as more than just direct BOM and rather as a proxy for things that are amortized across all their sales like support/warranty/etc so higher SKUs subsidize the costs of the lower ones.

The most disruptive thing in Omarchy is not the keyboard, it's the tiling WM in my opinion.

When plugged in... This caveat is so enormous it should almost be legislated. If your computer use is at all portable, a computer that scales down to 20 - 40% of GPU power when unplugged is an enormously significant factor. So far as I'm aware (could be wrong about arm devices?) there's no non-apple laptop that operates at 100% speed on the road.

The real question is whether all these Intel Windows laptops spin their fans at full speed when doing absolutely nothing. That’s something I can never go back to. I do some light gaming on my M2 Pro MBP and it gets hot when trying to push 120 fps. But my Lenovo Legion (that’s now collecting the dust) is so loud I could hear it through headphones.

Hold up, in what metric/benchmark? Feel personally like we life in an age where, no matter the SOC vendor, something high performant and efficient is offered, so seeing a claim that any vendor, be it Intel, AMD, Qualcomm or Apple, is consistently outperforming another, I'd like to get more context on that.

Of course you can beat the entry level MacBook Neo by comparing it to larger, more powerful, more expensive laptops.

The M5 is an entire family with a range of performance. Intel/AMD have done a lot to improve performance but they’re not beating the high end M5 chips on performance or battery life yet.

Intel had to reduce the frequency of their processors when running AVX2 instructions and the AVX2 frequency of the processors were non-disclosable to anyone.

Also, benchmarking Intel processors and publishing these numbers were forbidden in some cases. I don't know whether this ban is still in effect.

x86 processors can't keep up with the ARM processors TDP and thermal profile wise. So they slow down a ton when running on battery. See Jeff Geerling's last video on Apple Neo vs. some Intel laptop. It's as "efficient", but slow as a newborn tortoise learning to walk when unplugged and trying to get the most endurance out of the battery.

My M1 Mac gets almost 2 days of low-intensity use after ~6 years of use, and it got warm once or twice because something ran away in the background for tens of minutes.

The issue was the abysmal marketing and "me too" attitude Microsoft had (and still has).

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

That, or I can’t read.

There are emails unearthed in various lawsuits where you can read Bill Gates screaming at his subordinates: "why the hell can't our partners like Sony and Creative create a similar device? Give them all, give them early access to everything, work with them". In the end MS felt compelled to make their own.

[2017] Speaking at an event Tuesday, Scott Forstall, who lead Apple's iOS software division under Jobs, recounted the surprising history behind the company's first touchscreen prototype, which ultimately lead to the first iPhone.

It all began, Forstall said, because Jobs had an acquaintance at Microsoft who he really, really, didn't like.

"It began because Steve hated this guy at Microsoft," Forstall said during the event. "Any time Steve had any interaction with the guy, he'd come back pissed off."

The unnamed Microsoft exec, who was apparently the husband of a friend of Jobs' wife, apparently bragged so much it pushed Jobs over the edge.

"He just shoved it in Steve's face -- the way they were going to rule the world with their new tablets with their pens. He came in on Monday with a set of expletives and then was like 'let's show them how it's really done.' "

https://mashable.com/article/scott-forstall-steve-jobs-micro...

What makes this expensive & sell well is it's not very fungible at the moment. Where else are you going to get 512 GB of high speed memory with a well supported accelerator attached that you can throw in the corner of anyone's home and not really have them notice? There are plenty of lesser options, plenty of noiser/power hungry options, plenty of harder to support options, but not really something in direct competition at the moment. Even the next rounds of the integrated AMD/Nvidia solutions are only targeting 196 GB of much slower memory and compute.

Even using multiple windows in parallel for as many as 5-10 hours per day, I find that I am not fully using my claude max (20x) and chatgpt pro (20x) accounts. I can for sure use up the claude max account, but chatgpt either gives me a free reset before I run out of tokens or I just fail to use the full quota. The quota for Sol seems like 10x that of Claude Opus at the same level, and forget Fable, you can use a 5 hour quota in 20 minutes.

But lets do the math:

Lets say a 20k workstation can run 1 inference at a time at the same speed you get with Sol hosted by openai (big assumption) and run an equally capable model (big assumption).

Each month this gives you about 100-170 inference hours on a Sol 20x Pro account, and 720 hours (if you utilize 24/7) on the workstation.

Assuming a 36 month amortization before the workstation has to be replaced due to no longer being able to run frontier models or is too inefficient due to electrical costs or what have you:

The monthly workstation cost is about $550 capex and $150 electricity -> $700/month

You would need about 6 Pro accounts to reach that capacity, which would cost you $1200 a month.

But this fails because:

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

- During work hours you are capable of utilizing more than 1 concurrent session. 6 Sol accounts would support as many as 20-30 during working hours, not all the time but if you could burst to that many (don't forget sub-agents and agent directed parallel agent workloads).

- In 1 year the cost of Sol level models is likely to cost a fraction of what it does now.

this leads to:

                       Workstation   1 Sol Pro   2 Sol Pro

  Monthly cost            $700          $200        $400

  Raw capacity (hrs)      720           120         240

  Usable capacity (hrs)   100-130       120         240

  Concurrent sessions     1             3-5         6-10

  $ per usable hour       ~$6.00        $1.67       $1.67

  Usable hours per $700   ~115          ~420        ~420

consumer electronics has literally never been an asset.

> Apple computers tend to have excellent resale value

do you think the new leasing category might change that? hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

edit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1vxzg6v/apple_i...

For example when using PyTorch I wanted to try to speed up my NN kernel by 2x by just using half precision and haven't noticed any speedup at all. Also I was missing the easy to use GNU tools that had to be mixed with Apple's tools.

I loved using Arc browser as well, and I'm missing it, but I guess I will do without it somehow (Chrome's vertical tabs are just not the same).

My main program missing from going back to Linux was ChatGPT Desktop, but now it's there.

I just checked out Hammerspoon, I'm happy for you that you wrote it, and looks great, but it has the same problem that I had: for security reasons Apple stopped allowing the window APIs to get all important information on other workspaces. You can only do it with Accessibility API. I was trying to fight with it but have up.

It’s a bit depressing because it means that if I ever feel forced to switch my daily driver, it won’t come without a dump truck load of friction, frustration, and lost productivity, which I’ve validated by using the various Linux desktops on secondary machines.

Not being able to upgrade the SSD or the ram is a big issue, not so much on a portable laptop.

I edit 4K ProRes and H.265 footage, sometimes with multicam (up to 4 streams) and color adjustments, titles, etc. It's only after stacking 3-5 effects before things can stutter, really.

Or if you try doing something CPU-intense in the background _while_ running some heavy creative software. I just don't do that.

The prices are ridiculous though. I may just keep rolling with my Windows 10 setup.

I love the battery life, appreciate the hardware, but find the OS to be annoying. Less annoying than Windows for sure, but I'd rather be running Linux.

Nevermind that Apple still insists on providing base systems with only 512GB of non-upgradable SSD. The equivalent spec mini (4TB/64/10G) is almost $5k for half the VRAM. Not as good a CPU compared to the M5/6 but you also get 20 cores and full CUDA.

My Poor M1 Mini though is struggling though but that's b/c I'm running it as home server and 8 GB RAM is not enough anymore.

He was arguing that Windows is well past its best years and that OSX is now starting on the downward slope and that is why he was moving to Linux. It was a interesting take on the whole thing about the life times of OS quality.

But with a new CEO for Apple, they have an opportunity to turn things around and blame it all on Tim Cook, but only time will tell if they do that.

I can ride this puppy for the next 10 years. Say what you will about Apple but their hardware is top notch and it is a great value if you can snag some OG hardware in M series.

How did you measure this? I have an M1 Pro and short of actually measuring with tools I can't imagine you can tell the diffrence between an M1 Pro and an M5 Pro in the Apple Store

Meanwhile my Linux laptop continues to get faster every year as the operating system improves with performance updates and bugfixes.

She's been the co-founder and major backer of Annapurna for a decade.

She's not a developer, she's a publisher, and this game is one of the tons of games Annapurna has put out over a decade.

I get that Annapurna is a lightning rod of politics due to ellison and is increasingly under scrutiny for many debates but they are a mainstay of the industry, hardly a blow in, and like it or not, a lot of the games industry and media really like these kinda of artistic pieces, with this being yet another instance of the age old walking simulator debate.

It should be judged on its own merits. Not it's Annapurna link and it's not a shock to see it come up in an artsy Apple Mac hipster circle.

I’m not claiming this title was made by GenAI. I’m saying something much more insulting: that the human artists who made it have no talent.

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

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

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

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

The performance you get with M5/M6 in theory is crazy (especially having matmul cores with such an energy envelope and unified memory). By the time I can use it well in Linux there will be M7/M8 though.

With NVIDIA I can buy a Blackwell based core right now and use it (even if I will have much less GPU memory. Though it will be high bandwidth).

Even if I prefer the body of a X1 Carbon ThinkPad, its keyboard and trackpoint.

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

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

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

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

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

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

… I wish I hadn’t just calculated that.

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

A 4 GPU linux box with 3090s, which are $1500 a piece right now, will blow this thing out of the water. Even 2x3090 rig will run most of the good local models like Gemma4:31b at 100+ tok/sec

The VRAM of the GPUs are MUCH faster than the unified ram within Apple Silicon. The only difference is the initial model load, which takes longer from disk to VRAM due to PCIE limitations, but once the model is loaded, GPUs can prefill and and generate tokens way faster than any Apple Silicon.

So is your desire to upgrade to mac because you just aren't aware of how to set up a GPU rig, or is it something else?

Our transistors are about 30 nm give or take. But we've found new ways of aligning them so that if we had continued using old techniques, the density we get would be "2nm".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2_nm_process

Depends on where you live. Also keep in mind population decline so long term, im not so sure. Prices already dropping in less desirable places (everywhere outside of most blue areas) (Assuming you are talking about the US sorry if not)

problem solved /s

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No AI would pass this test with experienced judges.

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for your prejudice on me without knowing anything about me. In short, I'm a HPC sysadmin and programmer who works in a HPC center, separated from the actual hardware by a couple of floors.

We can discuss how transistors' heat generation doesn't discern about ISAs or being in a DAC or a cutting edge microprocessor, and we can even discuss how implementation of some functional blocks generate heat regardless of the ISA being involved. If you want we can discuss how saturating memory controllers affect pipeline saturation in processors even...

But talking this authoritatively on something with that amount of prejudice, that's grating.

Then I got a iPod so I needed to download iTunes. I downloaded iTunes, it told me to import my music. I imported my meticulously organised collection. It duplicated every single file into the iTunes approved format (AAC?) - my meticulous collection was now less meticulous, messy even.

It caused me to swear off Apple products for decades. Though it also led me to some very basic programming in order to delete the duplicates. I was only partially successful.

Programming led me to use Linux, before I eventually moved over to Mac. I like to think this was their plan all along.

It did all kinds of things like hiding your music library, merging your music with apple's music, all kinds of nonsense.

You used to be able to put your music on your phone easily, then it became sort of a gauntlet in favor of apple's subscription service.

It felt like once they dropped mobile, their whole direction become misguided. Also UWP made sense when there was also a mobile/tablet side to it, could even deploy those apps to the Xbox and it kind of worked. But then they kicked out that supporting support and suddenly they got working on trashing what good Windows still had.

I never could understand why MS would not put heavy muscle behind it. Maybe they deep down knew hardware execution was not their strong suit. People think the software was the problem, but I think if MS really believed in the product, the software side was eminently solvable.

You can see the failure of Microsoft in their performance in mobile when the playing field was level Microsoft and Intel have trouble competing, you can also see it in the Surface computer efforts Microsoft has no clue.

It’s too bad SGI, Sun, Digital, Amiga, Acorn didn’t make it because you can see many elements within Apple OS from that bygone era in the hardware and software.

This is admittedly the measure that most correlates with perceived responsiveness and quality of user experience

> their new computer. The computer had no songs on it and the Zune synced with that machine and wiped all the existing music

This is identical to the default way the iPod worked. If you bought a new Mac, and needed to get your music onto it, you had to use the migration assistant (connect via ethernet or firewire) or copy the music yourself. If you just plugged in your iPod to the new 'empty' mac and hit Sync, you'd lose your music too.

This was done as a show of good faith to the RIAA - their nightmare was that users would go from one dorm room to the next, dumping all their music onto all their friends' PCs. As a result, an iPod (or indeed still an iPhone today) can only sync with one music library (aka one computer) at a time. If you put it in "manually manage" mode, you can copy onto the iPod/iPhone from a 'foreign' library, but you can still never copy in the other direction. And all of this is true even when your music has no DRM encryption.

> QUESTION: Microsoft has announced its new iPod competitor, Zune. It says that this device is all about building communities. Are you worried?

> Steve Jobs: In a word, no. I’ve seen the demonstrations on the Internet about how you can find another person using a Zune and give them a song they can play three times. It takes forever. By the time you’ve gone through all that, the girl’s got up and left! You’re much better off to take one of your earbuds out and put it in her ear. Then you’re connected with about two feet of headphone cable.

Can you count how many (out of 9) measurements the windows laptop beat the Neo in that article?

"Apple at its best" ... I sure hope not. But for sure, people LOVED that wheel. I would take a 4-way clicky from the Zune any day.

My MBP probably got affected by OS updates like other people are saying - opening apps and responsiveness definitely got worse, and felt like slightly deteriorating over time (but it might have been MacOS updates along the way).

Great hardware. I don't miss OSX though.

Not that I want it to happen, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple could get away with even higher prices today. Like 50% more retail on everything. They are holding the line, but I wonder for how long and why. They can pretty much charge what they want.

You get what you pay for.

New Hampshire, Oregon, Montana, Alaska, Delaware.

I thought to myself: "I better add these two new albums to my ipod so that I can listen to them while away". I plug in the ipod, itunes loads up, I walk away. I come back 10 minutes later and it had not finished yet and I wonder what is going on. Turns out it deleted my entire 40gb library off my ipod and started re-syncing. I had to leave so I unplugged the ipod but it was basically useless at that point.

I do agree with Microsoft in general but Apple seems to be very much the same in my experience.

Not just the app, but also the browser.

Also, in my experience the Windows Phone hardware was dodgy. The first one I bought was a Dell and failed under warranty…and the replacement failed out of warranty. Then after an LG Android, I bought one of the last Lumia’s. The camera failed just out of warranty. Then the whole thing failed while I was traveling.

So I bought an iPhone.

Androids are probably better than iPhones. But you may lose a first date with a girl for sending a message with green bubbles instead of blue bubbles, so people buy iPhones. The iPhone is worth more than the Android, in this example.

The iTunes case was also a classis UI 101 blunder combined with stupidity. If there was no iPod plugged in, the "Sync on connection" toggle in iTunes simply disappeared. First of all, when something is inapplicable, you grey it out. You don't just make it disappear.

But in this case, even greying it out would have committed the same blunder, because the default state for this behavior was YES.

So if the hard drive in your computer went bad and you installed the OS fresh on a new one, thinking that all your music was backed up on your iPod, you were right... until you plugged it in.

So, so dumb.

And finally: Apple never addressed the lack of "computer overwrites mobile" and "mobile overwrites computer," which Palm OS syncing nailed in the '90s.

Two years later they introduce the Zune, which could not play "Playsforsure" music people had purchased from MSN..

When the iPod came out you largely had two options for carrying your music collection on the go. You either carried a binder of CDs, or you had some niche player like Mini-Disc or an MP3 player. Both alternatives were expensive and had limitations similar to a CD in terms of number of tracks you could carry.

I had an MP3 player on either side of 2000 that was slightly smaller than a deck of playing cards that could use Smart Media flash memory cards. The largest card at the time was either 16 or 32mb and was enough to hold 1 album at near CD quality.

Creative's Muvo was a weird form factor that was larger than an iPod. It had a horrid interface both on device and for loading music. It's only grace was that it was slightly cheaper than an iPod and didn't need a Mac with FireWire. Although iircc this was pre USB 2.0 so not having FireWire would mean loading music took forever and a day.

The iPod allowed you to carry most, if not all, of your music collection in a package slightly larger than a deck of playing cards. And it had a fantastic interface for navigating music on the device.

This was at a time before most people had laptops and if you had a PC it was at home and used sparingly. The iPod was such a compelling mobile computing device that it drove adoption of the iMac. Apple would eventually release iTunes for Windows and USB support but that was many years later.

I’m only using it as a travel machine now, trying to hold on from upgrading it until I can get an Air with OLED display - hopefully coming in <24 months…

Jeff Goldblum's 30 second "Presenting three easy steps to the internet" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjY0xsoozs8

And now when you want to set up a fresh Mac it's a parade of dialogue boxes:

Do you want to turn on Siri? No. (the dialogue-choice is probably "maybe later" ugh)

Do you want to share app analytics with developers? Yes.

Do you want to add Touch ID? No, because I'm setting this up for someone else.

There are more!

I gave those examples -- each of which having a different answer or reason -- to show that the problem of onboarding is nontrivial, but Apple has spent no(?) effort toward fixing it. It's the same for new iPhones and iPads.

NB I don't know if you sign into your Apple account it pre-answers these questions. That'd be nice.

Also, the UI has been in decline for a decade or so, with the regrettable decisions under Alan Dye. Thankfully, Zuck poached him and we're all grateful for that. I mean, what they've done to our icons is tragic, the glyphs in the menus was intern-level boneheaded, and reduction of contrast to "get out of the way" of our content has made everything less usable, especially for people with vision issues.

A bug that I filed about window-ordering when using the Cmd-` / Shift-Cmd-` shortcuts has been live since 2010 without getting fixed, though an industrious HN user posted a link to the background utility they made to fix it themselves[0].

0: https://github.com/tacomanator/sash

Best computer I've had in a long time.

Feels as snappy and impressive as the first day I got it. I never need to close apps, or reboot. I record multitrack audio on it without any perceptible latency. I write code on it. It's the best computer I've ever owned by a significant margin.

I've been running it for 3 years now. I am so macpilled that I had to install it on my new Framework 13 pro.

The Mac muscle memory was always my biggest hurdle with Linux. I always felt handicapped by it. But Toshy eliminates that.

I’ve been moving all my machines to devuan with xfce (or freebsd with xfce).

I have zero issues despite not having to deal with wayland, systemd, snap, etc.

I exactly wrote that Microsoft devices were quite bad as they came too soon. And Apple came at the right moment, when low power chips were powerful enough, touchscreens were precise enough without a pen. And device had acceptable consumption, batteries had decent capacity, lifespan.

The assumption previously used was that you can run a Sol level model on an M6 or whatever hardware $20k gives you. That is not true, it was an assumption made to show that even giving your own hardware every reasonable advantage it still loses.

Lets compare buying tokens of the best model you might run on your own hardware (still being unrealistic in favor of your own hardware) vs that same class of model on the market. I think one of the best models you might be able to run is GLM 5.4, but lets just look at chinese models generally:

$20k workstation, best case: $15k M5 Ultra 512GB, 36-month amortization, ~$440/mo. Runs a GLM-5.3-class model at ~30 tok/s. Saturated 24/7 it produces roughly 58M output tokens/month.

Buying those tokens:

  DeepSeek V4 Pro  @ $0.87/M   $50
  Kimi K2.6        @ $4.00/M   $232
  GLM-5.3          @ $4.40/M   $255
  Kimi K3          @ $15.00/M  $870  (does not fit on the box)

And keep in mind I am giving 'your own hardware' no overhead or maintenance cost, despite your condition that it's in a large corporate environment. In reality corporate IT would make it almost impossible to set up and your would need huge lead times to buy the hardware and get it installed.

I was at the 2007 iPhone announcement, got hands-on a prototype in the booth and had a dev unit pre-ship. As a technology strategist for a F500 ISV, my job was to assess the changing mobile device landscape. With the iPhone I think Apple deserves significant credit for two big things: the conceptual leap to a new UX/OS and going all-in on the large touch screen. Completely sacrificing both a physical keyboard or pen was bold and controversial.

While it was the right long-term vision, the reality which often gets glossed over, is the iPhone 1 didn't deliver on the vision and early adopters struggled. It wasn't until the iPhone 3G shipped 18 months later and the app store was released that the iPhone first began to slowly fulfill it's promise. I didn't daily drive an iPhone until the 3G. In recent years, I think many look back with rose-colored glasses at the iPhone launch and give Apple even more expansive credit for the "iPhone breakthrough" than the legitimate credit they justly deserve. Of the major players at the time, Apple was the only one who could make those bold choices because they didn't have existing phone products or platform agendas to preserve.

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

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

They don’t provide any source code or documentation (which they easily could) so if want to do literally anything with your “open” device you must first reverse engineer the entire MacOS driver stack like the Asahi project did. Great fun, but it’s a criminal waste of incredibly talented engineer hours.

On top of that, the reason Asahi doesn’t work on M4 and later is that Apple has intentionally modified the ARM core to prevent stock MacOS from running once the hardware is “unlocked,” which makes it way more difficult to reverse engineer.

Bastards.

Evidence:

* https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.09809

* https://phys.org/news/2016-12-mobile-money-access-percent-ke...

* https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3893351

This being HN, I hasten to add they also have massive downsides, we're all doomed, nobody programs the right way anymore, those poor people just think compute & AI are improving their lives, etc, etc.

You can always say “oh well these judges don’t have the experience to catch this type of AI.

The fact that you have to insert this qualifier, to ensure you always have a way to discredit the test, pretty much shows to me that we’re beyond it.

Innovation with AI is happening as well, but it obviously will need more time. It's already being used to diagnose tumors and disease earlier in the process, which will improve outcomes for patients, but obviously it's going to take time to see the results of those efforts.

I think of AI (especially self hosted) as the most helpful computer assistant that can do things I otherwise wouldn't dedicate time to do. I have a massive media library that is a mess of naming conventions and want to clean it up. Writing specific scripts and processes for doing that is possible, but I don't want to invest the time. Or I can ask the local Qwen model to go through and do it for me with a single prompt, "Please rename these files in each folder following this specific format, and when needed access this local service to look up the additional information needed" and then extend that to when I dump new media in, it's automatically organized and renamed. Works pretty darn well and I spent a whopping 5 minutes getting it going, rather than the hours of writing scripts and doing it by hand.

There are both cheaper and faster options out there.

How many people actually use fable over opus? How far are we up the diminishing returns curve, and will their customers even care?

If I sold just the two sticks of RAM in it right now, it’d pay for nearly half of the total cost.

For 1, AI datacenter builders have said that they have more equipment than they have places to put them. Leaving a ton of hardware shelved while you wait for datacenters to build out is bad business to say the least.

For 2, I think we are nearing saturation for the usefulness of AI. I certainly could be wrong, but I don't really foresee there to be a bunch of new exciting usages of AI that will ultimately justify the continued buildout.

Edit: Also doesn't say anything about who the human test subject is

Not sure where you're quoting from but if it's the metaculus question comments, many of them are from 2023. The consensus is it will resolve in 2029. I believe it will not resolve before 2035.

If treasuries “fail” we have a different class of problem.

I'm writing the best music of my life, realizing games and art projects I never had time for, and writing higher quality software in addition to dramatically more of it. Who has time for pablum?

How exactly are you using these tools that you have that experience?

But then they just started dumping everything onto it and it eventually crumbled under the weight.

I end up on Android simply because of file drag and drop and an open App ecosystem which they are now trying to lock down.

This is the kind of nonsense we have been putting up with for years.

Then it clicked, the control, no matter what it looked like, it wasn’t a d-pad. It was a weird touchpad emulating a physical dial. Which exactly nothing in the documentation that it came with mentioned.

I worked for Microsoft at the time, and took a lot of grief for not using a Zune. Except I owned one, bought cheaply at the company store. It just never supported Audible.

And, you have to include power. Where I am, the power for a rig with 2x 3090, running for four hours a day, would be around $70/month!

It's kinda like datacenter only exist to optimize compute cost through oversubscription of hardware/time share, cheaper business energy rates, and bulk discounts, compared to self hosting. ;)

What.the.actual.fuck. Can you expand on this? I have so many questions.

I had something similar. The storage was the iPod's killer feature, along with iTune's $0.99 songs. Suddenly you no longer had to buy whole albums, and you didn't have to swap out what was on your MP3 player every day when you wanted a different playlist. A 5GB hard drive in your pocket was a huge innovation then.

Indeed. Apple made (and showed) the actual reasoning in the iPod introduction. All competitors had to was do the same: https://youtu.be/bz1ZWvZBGYM?is=NFlmkhq1gWfcNVgv

- 1000 songs

- play all popular formats: mp3, wav, aiff

- Firewire for fast transfers. Download 1000 songs at 30x speed than USB

- 10 hours continuous playback on single rechargeable battery

- the size of a card deck

Not like it was magical unknown hardware components at the time. And the competition still couldn't do it for almost a decade

> The 12" G4 laptop was infamous for slowly cooking your junk with their titanium shell.

That's my experience with every unibody Intel MacBook as well, but not with Apple Silicon.

The argument is heavily reductionist because it treats technical breakthroughs as passive market timing rather than active, high-risk engineering.

Apple did not succeed by waiting for silicon to become fast enough to brute-force a desktop UI into a handheld. Instead, they reimagined the hardware-software stack from the ground up specifically around human fingertips and GPU acceleration.

Apple incorporated a GPU to accelerate the graphics. Apple acquired Fingerworks in 2005 and built custom chips to make multitouch viable. When Blackberry engineers were in disbelief about battery life, they cracked open an iPhone and found the battery occupied nearly the entire case. Apple also invested in aggressive thermal and power co-design such as power-gating states, dynamic clocks, ambient light sensors, etc.

It's because Apple was vertically oriented, they were able to make the necessary hardware advances.

Combining hardware and software the OS was done by many companies in the 1980s because if you wanted to sell something you had to do both and it’s been well over 36 years no one has really stepped up.

While an older M-series might run a matmul or dot product kernel just fine the M5 can run them much faster.