alt Hacker NewsNew 14‑inch MacBook Pro with M6
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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
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 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 have been a fan of these newer macbooks. They are just pushing the boundaries of a good laptop. While I understand the use, I hope someday my AAA games are also as supported in MacBooks as my gaming laptop.
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 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".
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.
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.
> 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?
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...
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.
The design is really great for the new MacBook Pro. The cpu is no compare to other laptops.
One thing, framing AI use for the base M models marketing makes no sense to me. But honestly this computer is still faster than any of my laptops that came before, even with the visual atrocity of Liquid Glass.
I would pay 2x or even 3x for this with working Asahi Linux patches provided in source code form on Apple's site.
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.
Did they figure out how to fit an LTE modem into it?
> 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?
M6 Pro wen
Been waiting to get a new MacBook and that day has finally come! Thanks for sharing
32GB Unified RAM max. Is that really the machine I want for running local LLMs?
i hope they're not launching that touch stuff... just stick with these pls
Where's the touch screen??? The rumors promised touch!!!
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. . . .It's not justifying an upgrade. Shame there are no finance options for M5 Max 128GB.
Dare I even ask how much the 32gb/1tb variant will be? $3,000?
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
eh no thanks. not jumping to m5 max now we know apple is cooking with m7 pro and m7 max. don't drop the ball.
Imagine, these are the machines we get to vibecode on.
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The "notch" seems to be gone based on the product pictures. Time to upgrade from my ~2014 model MBP.
I'm currently having an M2, but I just can't imagine buying an Apple laptop again. The hardware is great, but the sofware is just unbearably bad. I used Arch Linux with KDE before, and it was just an experience 10 times better. If they would just support Linux out of the box...
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.