Boring is what we wanted

Posted by Amorymeltzer 10/28/2025

440 points | 267 commentspage 2

Sweepi 10/29/2025|

> 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.

Normal_gaussian 10/28/2025||

I'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 10/29/2025||

As 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 10/29/2025||

The 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.

nl 10/29/2025||

I 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 10/29/2025|

> 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.

0xbadcafebee 10/29/2025||

I 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.

Liftyee 10/29/2025||

I think what you want is for software developers not to write bloated code, instead of computers not getting faster. The bloated code is a result of undisciplined programming and not paying attention to users' devices.

If our computers never got faster, we would never get faster computers (obviously...) to run efficient code even faster. 3D rendering and physics simulation come to mind.

I have noticed what you mention over longer timescales (e.g. a decade). But it's mostly "flashy" software - games, trendy things... Which also includes many websites sadly - the minimum RAM usage for a mainstream website tab these days seems to be around 200MB.

Anecdata: My 12 year old desktop still runs Ubuntu+latest Firefox fine (granted, it probably wouldn't be happy with Windows, and laptops are generally weaker). Counter-anecdata: A friend's Mac Pro from many years ago can't run latest Safari and many other apps, so is quite useless.

LogicHound 10/29/2025|||

> I think what you want is for software developers not to write bloated code, instead of computers not getting faster. The bloated code is a result of undisciplined programming and not paying attention to users' devices.

I am so fed up of hearing this. I would love to optimise my code, but management will always prioritise features over optimisations because that is what drives sales. This happens at almost every company I've worked at.

Also more often than not, I have a huge problem even getting stuff working and having to wrangle co-workers who I have to suffer with that cannot do basic jobs, do not write test and in some cases I've found don't even run the code before submitting PRs. That code then get merged because "it looks good" when there is obvious problems that I can spot in some cases from literally the other side of the room.

0xbadcafebee 10/29/2025|||

> If our computers never got faster, we would never get faster computers (obviously...) to run efficient code even faster. 3D rendering and physics simulation come to mind.

The solution to that is a few decades old: plug-in a 3D rendering card. (Of course there's the whole system bus issue, but that's largely solved by a bigger bus, rather than a faster CPU and more system memory. 3d programs requiring more cpu/memory is largely software bloat)

A few decades ago there was a lot of research into system-level parallel processing. The idea was to just add more machines to scale up processing power (if needed). But because machines got faster, there was less need for it, so the research was mostly abandoned. We would all be using distributed OSes today if it weren't for faster machines.

telchior 10/29/2025|||

I don't know if that's accurate to software developers, but it makes me cringe a bit as a game developer. I upgraded from a 1060 to 4060 and suddenly did waaaay less optimization; it just wasn't top of mind anymore. Of course, that bill still comes due eventually..

jen729w 10/29/2025||

What nonsense.

Name a software that won’t run comfortably on my M1 MacBook Air, now 5 years old.

drob518 10/29/2025|||

I 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.

vachina 10/29/2025||||

Mac is not the lowest common denominator

Mashimo 10/29/2025|||

Well if you bought the 8GB ram version there might be some apps that won't work that well ;-)

Huxley1 10/29/2025||

I 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?

kentm 10/28/2025||

Frankly 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 10/28/2025||

The Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard approach. It was good.

hansvm 10/29/2025|||

A 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.

noitpmeder 10/28/2025||

Sadly this approach is less likely to get the exec a bonus

al_borland 10/28/2025|||

The 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 10/29/2025|||

The 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 10/29/2025||

That’s sad.

dur-randir 10/29/2025||

Nah. I want fixes in macos, not "boring" nor "shiny updates".

jammo 10/29/2025||

I 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 10/29/2025|

Yep, one of the biggest success for Apple in recent years is to hire a team of chip designers for these M chips.

JodieBenitez 10/29/2025||

Still no need to upgrade my M1 MBA... life is good.

snvzz 10/29/2025|

For 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 10/29/2025|

Can you elaborate on why exactly we should be specifically excited by RISC-V rather than other open architectures?

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