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  • My father was a plumber in the 80s and bought our family an Amiga 1000 for $1,200. Today thats about $3800 in inflation adjusted money. I just bought my son a top of the line pc for $2,000. I get that it used to be cheaper, but value is still relatively good for these machines.
  • 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
  • In 2011 I bought a fully loaded 27 inch iMac paid 3700 (used it for 9-1/2 years) at today’s prices that would be about $5400, bought a M2 Mac studio M2 ultra that cost about $7200 2-1/2 years ago the price for the new Mac studio M5 ultra just announced by Apple is $11,400.

    Former owner of Amiga, 1000, 2000, 3000, and 4000 I would have gotten a Next computer at the time if I could’ve afforded it, unfortunately, I was tied to a PC at work using AutoCAD, Revit and Navis Managed a few years later.

    The Games back in the day on the Amiga computers were ahead of the PC for about 9-10 years, coincidentally Sony bought a British gaming company called Psychosis for their games and gaming technology. They were pretty big back in the day on the Amiga.

  • 2.5Gbe as standard is nice.
  • Still no SFP option?
  • 10 years later from the rest of the market
  • I'm curious what 2.5GbE chipset they used.
  • About damn time, Gigabit ethernet started shipping on desktop Macs over 20 years ago.
    by wpm
  • The "4x AI performance" smells suspicious to me, M5 Pro does have slightly higher memory bandwidth than the M4 Pro, but there are also the new Neural Accelerators in the GPU cores, I've always wondered what they actually do, since the SoC has AMX (Apple Matrix Coprocessor) since the original M1 chip era.

    So is this performance gain probably due to the new Neural Accelerators?

  • 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.
  • Do we need a 3rd top level discussion on this?
  • > Up to 2x faster gaming performance with ray tracing in Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition when compared to Mac mini with M4.

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

    And while i'm at it, I was wondering a few weeks ago if I should try this game on my M3 pro. Anyone has played it on Apple and has feedback ?

  • it happens to be a title well-known but also natively supported. for a wide sea of games and their hostility towards open standards such as vulkan, we get a handful of games supported in their platform through partnerships. in the end of the day don't hold your breath for their involvement unless the game publisher does all the work.
  • 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.
  • > 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.

  • 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.
  • 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
  • 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.

  • After watching a video about how the filesystems are > 2x faster (and testing this myself in my mac mini vs a linux machine), I feel like Apple is leaving a lot on the table, and I hope that they get APFS to be as fast as the linux filesystems.

    Because otherwise a lot of this hardware (including their blazing fast SSDs) is wasted. Cuz my M1 mac mini is awesome otherwise.

  • I did also watch theos video on this and wonder if apple could be improving things for the agentic era.
  • 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 :)
  • 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

  • The M-chips are insanely powerful. So powerful for my regular use that I'm still on M1-generated devices and don't really need to update. 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.

    As a disclaimer though, I haven't even tried to really run local models on the M1 as I also have a 'gaming PC' that can run them fine.

  • 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 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.

  • > for always-on agentic computing

    Don’t know, but this as main ad headline feels almost like a threat to my personal home computing needs

  • What I am missing in all of those benchmarks, how does the M6 compares to the M5 Pro.

    I don't care how the M6 compares to the M1, even when the M6 2.3x compared to M1 in Excel spreadsheet. That is no measurement even in accounting. The dead time is not the Excel.

    I am to only one?

  • 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.