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Boring is what we wanted
- snvzz 1y agoFor Exciting, look into RISC-V. That's gonna be wild starting 2026, with the first implementations of RVA23, such as Tenstorrent Ascalon devboards TBA Q2.
- noname120 1y agoCan you elaborate on why exactly we should be specifically excited by RISC-V rather than other open architectures?
- bigyabai 1y agoWe want Apple to compete. When they stopped signing CUDA drivers, I thought it was because Apple had a competitive GPGPU solution that wasn't SPIR-V in a trenchcoat. Here we are 10 years later with SPIR-V in a trenchcoat. The lack of vision is pathetic and has undoubtedly cost Apple trillions in the past half-decade alone. If you think this is a boring architecture, more power to you. It's not boring enough for me.
- tel 1y agoGenuine question, how does SPIR-V compare with CUDA? Why is SPIR-V in a trench coat less desirable? What is it about Metal that makes it SPIR-V in a trench coat (assuming that's what you meant)?
- XorNot 1y agoAt this stage of the game what people want is CUDA. I just bought a new GPU and the only requirement I had was "must run reasonably modern CUDA".
- p-o 1y agoThere might be a subset of people, such as yourself, that looks for CUDA as a hard requirements when buying a GPU. But I think it's fair to say that Vulkan/Spir-V has a _lot_ of investment and momentum currently outside of the US AI bubble. Valve is spending a lot of resources and AFAIK so are all the AI companies in the asian market. There are plenty of people who wants an open-source alternative that breaks the monopoly that Nvidia has over CUDA.
- tracker1 1y agoI think the new AMD R9700 looks pretty exciting for the price. Basically a power tweaked RX 9070 with 32gb vram and pro drivers. Wish it was an option 6-7 months ago when I put my new desktop together.
- adastra22 1y agoGreat. I’m with you there. There is no way that’s describing Apple though. They’re not open source, for sure. But even setting that aside, they don’t offer anything like CUDA for their system. Nobody is taking an honest stab at this.
- nl 1y agoTriton is a very compelling alternative to CUDA for many applications. Many people know it from the outstanding Unsloth kernels. https://triton-lang.org/main/python-api/triton.language.html https://triton-lang.org/main/python-api/triton.language.html Mojo has support for Apple Silicon kernels: https://forum.modular.com/t/apple-silicon-gpu-support-in-mojo/2295 https://forum.modular.com/t/apple-silicon-gpu-support-in-moj...
- davedx 1y agoNot me: I wanted Apple’s software division to innovate like its hardware division. Extra power with nothing to use it on except more and more docker containers isn’t compelling to me. I’ve not upgraded my M1 Macbook Pro and don’t plan to
- Herring 1y agoHonestly I'd be happy if they just made it stop lagging when I switch between multiple desktops in mission control. I spend most of my time in 3d party apps anyway. They recently added that lag I think with the liquid glass.
- hexbin010 1y ago> They recently added that lag They tend to add lag in major OS releases. Gets people to consider refreshing their hardware. Just by sheer coincidence, they have a new model out this year! :-)
- Herring 1y agoYeah so it seems. Well I have plenty of desktop Linux experience so it's not that hard to pop right back.
- retired_account 1y agoI think Final Cut and maybe Logic make good use of the new silicon features. I’m rather happy I don’t have to upgrade from my M1. More performance is nice, but making it the baseline to run an OS would just be silly.
- Forgeties79 1y agoIt’s actually very sad to see the state final cut is in. It’s a perfectly competent NLE for speed editing and has some solid features, but they had a real piece of software on their hands for years and just kind of sat around doing nothing from 2018 or so onward. I guess it just isn’t generating enough revenue to warrant the attention it deserves. It was my workhorse for a solid decade, I passionately defended FCPX because it was truly excellent after they got it to a good place 12-18mo in. Their native multicam and audio sync blew premiere/plural eyes out of the water for years. But now it’s just so…meh I can’t imagine leaving Resolve to go back even though I still wayyyy prefer the FCPX UI.
- al_borland 1y agoI always get a little bothered when I see negative reviews from a CPU update in Apple laptops. While a new CPU alone isn’t a thrilling update, it’s important that they do these regularly so consumers looking to buy aren’t forced to buy a 3 year old product with no idea when a refresh will come. I’ve been in this situation many times with Apple and it has been very frustrating. I’m glad they are back on a yearly refresh schedule. I think the issue stems from too many people making their living off reviews that require something exciting to get views. When updates are more evolution than revolution, it makes for a more boring article/video. I always worry that these types of responses will lead Apple to do silly things, like leaving old chips out there too long, or adding pointless features just so there is something new to talk about.
- ebbi 1y agoAgree. So many people online (not just reviewers) complaining that it's just a spec-bump, demanding a new design. I remember the time people were (rightfully) complaining that the update schedules were slow for Macs, mainly because of Intel's limitations. Now we get yearly refresh, they complain that it looks the same. I don't think they appreciate the cost of redesigning and retooling. Echo your thoughts and hope Apple doesn't listen to this feedback. Imagine more expensive laptops because some people want more frequent design changes!
- wmf 1y agoIntel released new CPUs every year; they shouldn't be blamed when Apple refused to update.
- al_borland 1y agoI remember reading about an aging Mac Pro not seeing an update because the Xeon chips it used hadn’t seen an update from Intel. I’m sure Intel had some releases each year, but did they have the right ones to make it possible for Apple to release an update?
- stetrain 1y agoIntel had multiple years of promising that their new next-gen more efficient 10nm CPUs were coming very soon, and then those kept being delayed. The chips they did release in that time period were mostly minor revisions of the same architecture. Apple was pretty clearly building chassis designs for the CPUs that Intel was promising to release, and those struggled with thermal management of the chips that Intel actually had on the market. And Apple got tired of waiting for Intel and having their hardware designs out of sync with the available chips.
- bittercynic 1y agoThey say no downside, but if you need to run windows 7 in virtualbox, you still need an intel mac (or other non-arm computer).
- pavlov 1y agoWindows 7 is sixteen years old. There are full x86 emulators available. Seems like a niche pursuit.
- bittercynic 1y agoI have an old card printer that I only use occasionally, and firing up a windows 7 virtual machine is (was?) the most convenient way to do it. I think it's not so uncommon to have old devices around that don't work with newer versions of windows.
- mrkpdl 1y agoI don’t think that use case is worth designing a computer for in 2025
- vardump 1y agoPerhaps a Macbook is now fast enough to just run Windows 7 in full emulation? Haven't tried, though. Edit: Checked on Youtube. Yeah, Windows 7 seems to be fast enough on an Apple silicon Macbook in full emulated mode. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9zqfv54CzI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9zqfv54CzI
- Apocryphon 1y agoI have an old 2019 MBP running Windows 10 for old gaming
- tiagod 1y agoToday I was testing an x64 msi installer and app in a Windows ARM VM on UTM and it worked just fine with the Windows built-in emulation.
- kentm 1y agoFrankly I’d be incredibly exited if the next Apple OS update was “No new major featurs. Bug fixes, perf optimization, and minor ergonomic improvements only”.
- pavlov 1y agoThe Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard approach. It was good.
- noitpmeder 1y agoSadly this approach is less likely to get the exec a bonus
- al_borland 1y agoThe important work isn’t always glamorous. This is a problem that has tainted the entire industry. The new pretty stuff feels a lot less magical when it lags or the UI glitches out. Apple sells fluidity and a seamless user experience. They need those bug fixes and an obsessive attention to detail to deliver on what is expected of their products.
- yodsanklai 1y agoThe exec, but also the SWEs. In my company, if all you have to show is minor improvements and bug fixes, you're at risk of being fired.
- adastra22 1y agoThat’s sad.
- hansvm 1y agoA few ergonomics improvements and a wifi stack that doesn't periodically crash could be enough to pull me to the dark side. I like my setup, but I'm lazy and don't really like the process of upgrading computers. Apple taking that load off could buy me as a customer for a decade. The amazing battery life is nothing to sneeze at either.
- fullofdev 1y agoAgree! very happy with the M4 performance.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- amelius 1y agoGeneral purpose computing is what we wanted.
- Normal_gaussian 1y agoI've heard that the M-series chips with metal do great on the whole small model with low latency front; but I have no practical experience doing this yet. I'm hoping to add some local LLM/STT function to my office without heating my house. I'm uncertain as to whether any M series mac will be performant enough and the M1/M2 mac mini's specifically, or whether there are features in the M3/M4/M5 architecture that make it worth my while to buy new. Are these incremental updates actually massive in the model performance and latency space, or are they just as small or smaller?
- trailbits 1y agoAs someone who purchased their first M-series Mac this year (M4 pro), I've been thrilled to discover how well it does with local genAI tasks to produce text, code and images. For example openai/gpt-oss-20b runs locally quite well with 24GB memory. If I knew beforehand how performant the Mac would be for these kinds of tasks, I probably would have purchased more RAM in order to load larger models. Performance for genAI is a function of GPU, # of GPU cores, and memory bandwidth. I think your biggest gains are going from a base chip to a pro/max/ultra version with the greater gpu cores and greater bandwidth.
- adastra22 1y agoThe M5 is a huge upgrade over the M4 for local inference. They advertise 400% and there is reason to believe this isn’t a totally BS number. They redo the GPU cores to avoid having to emulate certain operations at the core inner loop of LLM inference. I have an M4 and it is plenty fast enough. But honestly the local models are just not anywhere near the hosted models in quality, due to the lower parameter count, so I haven’t had much success yet.
- gsibble 1y agoMac hardware has so significantly outpaced software needs I think there are diminishing returns. I'm a software developer who uses all sorts of advanced stuff and I only bought an M4 Pro, not a Max, because it wasn't worth the extra money. There are so few applications that max out a CPU for any meaningful amount of time these days like rendering videos or 3D. My M4 iPad Pro is amazing but feels totally overpowered for what it's capable of. I guess what I'm saying is.......I don't need faster CPUs. I want longer battery life, 5G connectivity, WiFI 7, lighter weight, a better screen, a better keyboard, etc.. I guess it's odd that Apple spends so much time making faster computers when that is practically an already solved problem.
- pohl 1y agoThey aren’t just making computers, though. Today’s CPU improvements go into tomorrow’s Vision Pro. Today’s improved E cores become tomorrow’s watch cores. Or something like that.
- philipwhiuk 1y agoWhat happened to the M3 GPU to give it a drop in score?
- nchmy 1y agoI thought this was going to be about Apple's various recent catastrophic software innovations, saying "why did you have to mess with a good thing? We just wanted it to stay as-is, even if that's considered 'boring'"
- anArbitraryOne 1y agoI wouldn't call the old software good either
- avmich 1y ago> The difference is that with Apple silicon, Apple owns and controls the primary technologies behind the products it makes, as Tim Cook has always wanted. But did customers want it? I'll leave it here, as the point is made.
- tpmoney 1y agoLong time Apple customers? Almost certainly. Apple has a history of having conflict with their chip makers and other component vendors. For the longest time, Apple wasn't big enough for those vendors to bother with doing anything Apple wanted them to do. Or even when Apple was big, still wasn't big enough to make a dent in their vendor's pipelines (see also Intel and low power chips)
- stetrain 1y agoCustomers seem pretty happy with the changes and sales are up since the transition. A Macbook with some of the best processors available in a laptop with the battery life and thermal characteristics of an iPhone or iPad is a pretty compelling product for many people.
- adastra22 1y agoYou didn’t make any point.
- 0xbadcafebee 1y agoI hate that computers get faster, because it means I'll be forced to buy another laptop. It goes like this: - Some developer buys a new laptop - Developer writes software (a browser) - When the software works "fast enough" on their new laptop, they ship it - The software was designed to work on the dev's new laptop, not my old laptop - Soon the software is too bloated to work on my old laptop - So I have to buy a new laptop to run the software Before I'd buy a laptop because it had cool new features. But now the only reason I buy a new one is the new software crashes from too little RAM, or runs too slowly. My old laptops work just fine. All the old apps they come with work just fine. Even new native apps work just fine. But they can't run a recent browser. And you can't do anything without a recent browser. If our computers never got faster, we would still be able to do everything the same that we can do today. But we wouldn't have to put down a grand every couple years to replace a perfectly good machine.
- jen729w 1y agoWhat nonsense. Name a software that won’t run comfortably on my M1 MacBook Air, now 5 years old.
- vachina 1y agoMac is not the lowest common denominator
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- drob518 1y agoI agree. My M1 Air is the best laptop I’ve ever owned (and that goes back 30 years). While I’m finally getting tempted to upgrade by M5, the reality is my M1 is still quite usable. I’m thinking I might use it until it either fails or Apple finally cuts support for it.
- Mashimo 1y agoWell if you bought the 8GB ram version there might be some apps that won't work that well ;-)
- ZenoArrow 1y ago[flagged]
- tpmoney 1y ago> This is pure copium. Generally, people want rapid technological advancements, not being sold minor improvements at premium prices. Do they? I'm pretty sure it's an annual tradition around iPhone releases for all sorts of people to trot out their complaints about Apple releasing a new phone every year and contributing to e-waste by forcing people into buying an upgrade when their current phone is good enough. I can only imagine how much more griping we'd hear if each new iPhone actually was a rapid advancement over the previous generation that really did make it worth replacing your phone after only 1 year. Never mind all the people that would be upset at having bought a phone just 2 or 3 months before.
- ZenoArrow 1y ago> Do they? Yes, they do. The incremental improvements offered each year is not more desirable than rapid improvements. > forcing people into buying an upgrade FOMO doesn't mean devices stop working. Nobody is being forced into buying new devices. To give a counter example, I've got a PS4 and have chosen not to get a PS5, partly because despite some advancements, it's not a large enough generational leap for me. I would prefer that when new devices are released, they offer something the previous generation could not. Similarly, I have no desire to buy a new phone every year, because the improvements are too small.
- LarsDu88 1y agoReading this on my brand new M5 Mac :)
- jmspring 1y agoI'm still typing this from an M1 MAX MBP w/ 64 gig of ram. I ended up needing more memory so, I swapped to this machine instead of my M1 air w/ 16gig. Both machines are completely capable for most tasks I deal with as a developer. Do I like my work m3? Sure. I wish I had the old m3 air I had to give back. But I'm happy with my machines. It's funny that my ipad has a more current CPU than my two laptops.
- 827a 1y agoPersonally: I am extremely excited for a world where we have silicon that's capable of driving triple-A level gaming in the ~20w TDP envelope. M5 might actually be the first real glimpse we've had into this level of efficiency.
- naruhodo 1y agoApple could have my money in exchange for their hardware. I won't even ask for support. They just need to provide the hardware specifications to Linux developers.
- anArbitraryOne 1y agoExactly. I might even pay them for the opportunity cost of not harvesting my data
- topspin 1y agoThat would immediately induce my first ever significant Apple purchase.
- IshKebab 1y agoWoo they'll have 2 extra customers! It totally sucks but you can see why they wouldn't ever bother with this.
- topspin 1y ago> but you can see I don't see that at all. I'm not unique. There are many Linux users, and we also tend to be technically competent power users with a significant influence in organizations. There is a usable port of Linux to Apple hardware now, created without support from Apple. What other cadre of people are both capable of and inspired to do such a thing? None, as far as I know. If there were even tacit support, Apple could sell millions of MacBooks to us.
- IshKebab 1y ago> There are many Linux users Not really. Even if there were more Apple wants it's customers to use Macos. They don't want people using Linux.
- anArbitraryOne 1y ago
- dur-randir 1y agoNah. I want fixes in macos, not "boring" nor "shiny updates".
- Huxley1 1y agoI can relate. Most users just want stable, quiet performance improvements, not a revolution every update. Do you care more about performance improvements or new features?
- nl 1y agoI have a M1 Max MPB from 2022 with 32G RAM (which I'm grateful for). More performance (especially for local AI models) is always great, but I'm trying to imagine what I'd want out of a design change! I think slightly thinner would be nice, but not if it runs hotter or throttles. Smaller bezels on the screen maybe? I'm one of those who liked the touchbar (because I think that applications which labelled its shortcuts in the touchbar are awesome) so I think some innovation around things like that would be nice. But not if it compromises the perfect keyboard. I do think MacOS would be improved with touchscreen support.
- trinix912 1y ago> I do think MacOS would be improved with touchscreen support. On the contrary, I appreciate the Mac UI not being forced into touch friendliness. The whitespace increase in Big Sur is already bad enough, at least to me.
- kristianp 1y agoThis seems like a straw man. Are reviewers really calling the M5 boring?
- Sweepi 1y ago> Back in the PowerPC and Intel days, Macs would sometimes go years between meaningful spec bumps, as Apple waited on its partners to deliver appropriate hardware for various machines. Yes and no. Sometimes Intel did not move as fast as Apple wanted, and sometimes Apple didnt feel like it. Especially the MacPro (trash can and old cheese-grate) and the MacMini (2012-2018) were neglected. Today, the MacPro ships with M2 Ultra, the MacStudio ships with M3 Ultra, and its not certain that the MacMini and the iMac will get the M5 or will continue shipping with the M4 for the foreseeable future.
- JodieBenitez 1y agoStill no need to upgrade my M1 MBA... life is good.
- jammo 1y agoI have a 2020 intel 10nm quad core MBP and my god even the M2 is so much faster. They are doing absolutely incredible work to be getting >10% improvement every single year without fail starting from that point.
- linhns 1y agoYep, one of the biggest success for Apple in recent years is to hire a team of chip designers for these M chips.
- gotschi_ 1y agoI just want the old Macbook Air M1 design back :(
- noname120 1y agoWhat don’t you like about the new design?
- DeltaCoast 1y agoThat’s what I am holding on to.
- willtemperley 1y agoWe want cheaper storage, now. 1TB costs around $400 based on speccing a 2TB M5 Macbook pro. That's probably a 4x markup, and the $200 to go from 256 to 512 is even worse. Every time a user considers jumping from Windows but balks at the storage costs, that's leaving many thousands of potential revenue on the table. I just can't believe it really makes economic sense for them, except in short-term cashflow terms.
- SSLy 1y ago1TB of good NAND costs 30€ or so.
- psyklic 1y agoRAM too. They want +$1K to go from 64GB to 128GB, with no other spec changes. It's a way of segmenting the market -- those who actually need it are willing to pay a lot more (e.g. for AI / 4K videos).
- willtemperley 1y agoThere is at least scarcity in that there are probably few M chips in the 128GB bin. NAND is commodity by comparison. You’re probably right though about market segmentation. Some people will pay that happily. Or perhaps it’s to push people to iCloud storage.
- bongripper 1y ago[dead]
- KolibriFly 1y agoSoo we can't demand both stability and constant reinvention
- stego-tech 1y agoFor those of us immersed in hardware fandom, the cycle is neither new or disappointing - if anything, a lot of us relish the “boring” times, because it means we can finally squeeze performance out of our investment without fretting about arbitrary replacement timelines or major improvements in technology leading to gargantuan gains. It’s nice, quiet, and let’s us enjoy the fruits of our labors and hobbies. That being said, I do kind of head-tilt at the folks screaming that this sort of “boring” cycle of hardware isn’t sustainable, that somehow, someone must create the next major improvement to justify all new spend or otherwise this is a worthless exercise. In reality, it’s always been the opposite: Moore’s Law wasn’t infinitely scalable, and anyone who suffered through the Pentium 4 era was painfully aware of its limitations. Sure, we can find other areas to scale (like going from clock speed to core counts, and core counts to core types), but Moore’s Law is not infallible or infinite; eventually, a plateau will be reached that cannot be overcome without serious R&D or a fundamental sea-change in the marketplace (like moving from x86 to ARM), often a combination of both. Apple, at least, has the unenviable position of being among the first in addressing this challenge: how do you sell more products when power or efficiency gains are increasingly thin, year over year? Their approach has been to leverage services for recurring revenue and gradually slowing down product refreshes over time, while tempering expectations of massive gains for those product lines seeing yearly refreshes. I suspect that will be the norm for a lot of companies going forward, hence the drive to close walled gardens everywhere and lock-in customers (see also the Android sideloading discourse). The hardware cycle at present is fairly boring, and I quite like it. My M1 iPad Pro and M1 Pro Macbook Pro dutifully serve me well, and I have no need to replace either until they break.
- neo_cs193p 1y agoBoring is what I wanted on the software side too. I've really tried to like/tolerate Tahoe, but the UI is close to unusable in some places (like System Settings, some icons), plain ugly in other places (like menu bar fonts, window corners, dock etc.), or both (the contrast in most places where liquid glass and text interact). It was messing with my workflow so bad, to the point I've given up. All my Macs are on Sequoia today. One of the main reasons I've been using Macs is because the OS was functional and beautiful. This is becoming less and less true. And it's not just resistance to change. I've also been skeptical about the UI transition from Catalina to Big Sur, but the usability issues were much smaller and I could was able to get used to the new look very quickly. With Tahoe it's different: its ugliness is uncanny. I've just given up on it.
- neo_cs193p 1y agoI really hope it's just a [short] phase, like the butterfly keyboard. I can't stay on Sequoia forever, and I'd like a beautiful MacOS in the future.
- bryanlarsen 1y agoM1 had performance/watt way ahead of x86. M5 has performance/watt below Panther Lake. Is that really what you want?
- mcphage 1y agoNo, you're right, that's not—let me go buy a Panther Lake laptop right now. What site would you recommend?
- bryanlarsen 1y agoM5 and Panther Lake are both late 2025 releases. They're fair comparisons.
- doomroot13 1y agoPanther Lake isn't appearing in any products until 2026.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- hinkley 1y agoThat’s partly the difference between making your own components and getting them from a vendor. Sure Intel can send select vendors prerelease prototypes but the feedback loop will never be as efficient as in house. But it’s like a margin call. Everything is great until it completely sucks. Of course a lot of that comes down to TSMC. So if Apple falls it’s likely others will too.
- mdasen 1y agoI think it's the difference between having enough CPUs that you can launch a product and having enough CPUs that people start planning future products. Volume takes time. That's why we're seeing 2026. And before someone says "that just gives Apple an advantage because they're smaller," Apple is shipping a comparable volume of CPUs - and they're doing basically all their volume on the latest fabrication tech.