alt Hacker NewsNew 14‑inch MacBook Pro with M6
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I have to say, I really dislike the thing where the base M(n+1) is always in the market alongside M(n) Pro/Max. I appreciate the underlying chips are probably quite distinct, but from a naming standpoint its confusing as hell.
I switched entirely over to Asahi Linux on my M1 Macbook Air and installed a third-party 55Wh battery, as the original battery had fallen below 80% capacity. That machine is good to go for another 5 years.
There are no features or performance characteristics of any of the subsequent M[2-6] Macbook Air or Pro models that I care about. I'm not really sold on running models on the hardware I have right in front of me. So long as I can rent an RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell at about half a buck per hour through a European provider, I'm fine using that with Qwen3.8-27B UD-Q4_K_M for the few things I consider more privacy-sensitive.
I want to propose a called AI Index, if you can do say 1000t/s on processing and 50t/s on generation on a min 25B model you can call your device AI9 and you have AI7 and AI5 and AI3 with 3 being 100t/s processing and 10t/s generation on a min 10B model. Values above are on a 100k context size minimum. OFFLINE.
So any effing claim of being an AI device doesn't end on the demo of best buy laptop where you remove a dog from a photo....
Or that you have "better noise removal" or "you look better on the cam" because that's called noise cancelling and instagram filter and it's being done for ages...
I’ll wait for it to surface on eBay in few years and then consider again. Pretty sure many of these go in the hands of people who can never make good use of all the nice hardware in it.
Increasingly all I need is a laptop with a big/nice enough screen to ssh into a beefy Linux box to run agents on Herdr.
I think my 48GB 16 inch MBP will last me 15+ years at this point.
I've been pretty happy with my M1-2 devices like most posters here seem to say, but I don't have the same level of core stability while doing dev work. Am I doing something wrong with my workloads?
- Orbstack, but just for one containerised service - Laravel Herd for app environments, so all native services instead of containers with bigger VM overhead - Brave browser, profile for work and personal - PHPStorm (quite a hog on RAM) - Now agents in the mix
Had an M1 Pro 8GB but I found 8 to really not be enough. M2 Air 16GB has been a much better sweet spot, albeit it feels like the battery life on it is worse than M1. I've recently started trying to use Zed more and more as my editor instead of PHPStorm and things feel mostly stable, but I still feel like a beefier machine would be good for work purposes.
I have a 14” M2 that you’d need to prize from my cold dead hands. I can’t imagine buying an M6. There just isn’t any need.
>With the new 14-inch MacBook Pro, users can connect high-speed peripherals, transfer photos, work with multiple external displays, and more with its wide array of ports.
* looks inside *
4 kinds of ports. while being generous, and including the SD card slot and the headphone jack.
I don't know anyone who would consider 2-4 to be a "wide array".
Look at the first image with the people in the field. That looks to me like a very poorly generated image, not a real image of people, and not even a high-quality AI generated image.
Is this what we can expect of the new apple? I'm not against AI generated imagery, but I expect them to be of equal quality to a real photo.
Or am I wrong, and it isn't AI generated?
The things that make me think it is just poorly made are 1) the angles of the laptop on the black case, 2) the lack of any lighting on the back panel, 3) the size of the hand on the woman in the back, and the squareness of what she is holding (if it is even supposed to be another mac).
I thought we were supposed to get a design overhaul this gen?
Also framing AI use for the base M models marketing makes no sense to me. You are way better off getting a used M1 max with 64gb and way higher mem bandwidth when those are the real bottlenecks.
This is a strange release. The M6 tops out at 32GB RAM and then you fall back to M5/Pro. Kinda midway between an Air and a true Pro. Only 14" no 16" with M6.
> 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?
I have an M1 Air 13" and M2 Air 15", and M4 Air 14" and and M4 Pro 14" with nano texture.
I love them all. The M4 Air 14" is from work, so kinda limited in what I can do. The M4 14" Pro is kinda chunky after the Airs. The M2 15" is ideal except on a plane. The M1 13" is great as a personal device on work travel. If only I could not work...
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).
Just now realizing there's a difference between "MacBook Pro with M# chip" and "MacBook Pro with M# Pro chip". Was curious to see how my MBP with M4 Pro compared, and I saw it has 273 gb/s memory bandwidth compared to the MBP M6 (sans Pro)'s 170gb/s. Makes sense that "Pro" in the laptop model doesn't also describe the chip, but only if you remember that the non-pro "Macbook" line stopped in 2017 (which was the last time I went shopping for Apple laptops until buying the MBP4)
https://www.apple.com/mac/compare/?modelList=MacBook-Neo-A18...
Nice, I'll keep my 64GB m1.max though.
The text of this product's announcement really tries to sell it as a 10x AI performance upgrade for existing MacBook M1 users.
Ok, plausible number for that use case. Striking how it seems like the M-series Macs are almost too good enough for most people.
It's almost desperate prose.
(The AI image processing in Pixelmator Pro saved me hours of work on a recent project. Two button clicks vs a day of tweaking. But even that was on my M1 MacBook Air.)
As lots of Apple Users are in here: I'm thinking about "sidegrading", my M2 Pro runs fine, but I chose 16 GB/512 GB when I bought it and I think 32 GB/1 TB would be nicer in some cases.
Is it easily possible to sidegrade/upgrade with a Timemachine backup?
Is this an odd rollout for their actual high end MacBook Pros, or is this sitting in that space where they like to have a base MacBook Pro between their Airs and the expensive MacBook Extremely Pros?
Just the standard chip without Pro/Max makes me assume this is that base one. If so, the price is way high for where that tends to sit, but welcome to buying a computer in 2026 I guess.
I have a 14 inch M1 MBP running fine up to this day. 16G RAM, 1T SSD. I don't know if I ever will need to replace it.
I am due to an upgrade (still using the 2019 intel). However I am torn between a M5 Pro with 48 Gigs of ram or waiting for M6 pro. I’d really like to run local models for once.
> 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?
I always max out whenever I upgrade my MacBook Pro.
Last time, in 2024, it cost me $6K
Today, it’s $10K
Yowza
Still using my 8gig m1 to make mac builds, its slow, but works fine. Keep thinking about upgrading, but max 32gigs ram, if I can hold out for 2 years, and maybe have 64/128gig as options, and cheaper.
32GB Unified RAM max. Is that really the machine I want for running local LLMs?
I would pay 2x or even 3x for this with working Asahi Linux patches provided in source code form on Apple's site.
Where's the touch screen??? The rumors promised touch!!!
Still using the M1 Macbook Air for 4K video editing on Davinci Resolve and Photo Editing with Darktable (open source). Just 8GB of Ram too and I've never really needed more. Obviously these new versions are great but even the original is not too shabby.
does it run linux?
I need 64GB RAM and 1TB SSD suddenly having been more than comfortable with 16GB and 256GB respectively. My agents have sessions which have workteees and scratchpads and simulators and build runs and test suites and wow. The hours I’ve been spending for memory swaps and quad simulator calls to run through. I am compelled to view a $4k machine as a necessity. Also a cool thing about M5 Pro is that it’s very close to Max on the CPU performance side with identical core count if you get the 18 core variant. The Pro’s Geekbench scores are also in similar ballpark as the Max. You rather get the Pro for most use cases and use the extra cash on RAM.
This is going to be great with Asahi
i hope they're not launching that touch stuff... just stick with these pls
Did they figure out how to fit an LTE modem into it?
But can it run Omarchy :)
Anyone designing their own macbook clone using llms yet?
too bad only the iMac gets all the color!!!
The "notch" seems to be gone based on the product pictures. Time to upgrade from my ~2014 model MBP.
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. . . .Does it run Linux?
Dare I even ask how much the 32gb/1tb variant will be? $3,000?
M6 Pro wen
It's not justifying an upgrade. Shame there are no finance options for M5 Max 128GB.
Apple can release as much fantastic hardware as they want - as long as the software keeps getting worse, what's the point?
i wonder if it has 2 fans
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
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