I'll go and look at this new box, drool a little, and realize that I'd get more personal utility from donating $3k (or whatever the trade in delta is) to a charity than upgrading my computer.
(We replaced it with a Framework... with removable storage.)
Really this should be devices full stop. Also, "backed up" should include no fewer than two backups on different media and in different physical locations e.g. Time Machine to an external SSD _plus_ continuous cloud backup.
2/ This is like complaining that climate activists were harping too much 30 years ago, and that's why nobody listened
I'm assuming that all of my local work would be lost. But I'd still have the sixteen million duplicate photos.
iCloud's priorities are not a great fit for preserving my source code repos. Fortunately those aren't very big.
But when my son's Mac dies, his huge Logic Pro projects are toast. And he is a few thousand miles away now.
However, OneDrive doesn't seem to even know how to handle source files (it doesn't even attempt to honor the gitignore), so rebuilding a project in folders covered by OneDrive results in flurries of temporary files being uploaded/updated to the cloud, hogging the bandwidth, with a bonus of locking files, crashing builds, or even reverting changes silently.
One would think backup tools, even if primarily for normal users are still literally made by programmers, at least consider the use case of programmers instead of just ignoring them entirely.
There is iCloud Drive sync, but that only syncs your Documents and Desktop folders, but any other files are not synced.
How would you restore the backup if your secure hardware device is lost/stolen/damaged?
No point in encrypting those family photos burned to disc.
> We replaced it with a Framework... with removable storage.
Cool. How are you backing it up?
What are you doing to them?
I still have MBPs from 2015 and 2018 that have not 'died'.
2012 MacBook Pro
2015 MacBook Pro
2019 MacBook Air
2020 M1 MacBook Pro
I almost wish one of them would konk out so I can get an M series, but then I wouldn’t be on a 5k iMac anymore, which would suck. Love these machines.
Dropbox would fire up to do massive walks of the filesystem tree and the fans would take off. I think the thermal interface material on the GPU got cooked at some point. It would be a relatively easy fix, for me a couple of hours, but I chose to fix it with an M1 MacBook Air.
The battery doesn't hold a charge anymore, but as long as it's plugged in, it keeps chugging along.
You gotta be kidding me. The old M1 Air had the "bendgate" where several people, me included, saw their screen die overnight for no reason. Tens and tens of pages of people complaining about it only to be with "you're holding it wrong" answers. Insanity.
I think Apple fixed that mess with the gen after that one.
On the Mac side, it’s a toss up between the platinum interface of Mac OS 8/9 and Mac OS X Tiger. With that said, I have a work-issued MacBook Pro running Golden Gate as my daily driver, and Liquid Glass is alright. It’s not what I’d prefer if I had a choice, but it’s not a dramatic departure from previous versions of macOS. A Cheetah or Puma Mac OS X user should be able to navigate Golden Gate with ease, mostly.
Expose + Cmd-tab/Cmd-backtick being separated == a gap that Linux/Windows have somehow never managed to close in 20+ years now.
Apple was actually last to the party on that. Linux had virtual desktops for years at that point, and Windows had them as well through Microsoft PowerToys. I’m pretty sure I was running it on Windows 2000.
In the end you’ll spend a significant amount of your time trying to “get back” to where you just where (that alt-tab, a possible savior for this in all other OSs, doesn’t work at all on Mac just adds to the UX mess)
I get that that behaviour shouldn’t just be changed but I would appreciate it if there were another key combination that would allow cycling through all windows of an app.
In the end though I just feel like it's extra cognitive load to have to think about two different shortcuts to do what is in many ways the same thing.
Say, I've got two browser windows open and a code editor open. I'm wanting to flip through the browser windows to check on things while I work in the code editor. In reality I'm just wanting to juggle the three windows, but depending on if I'm wanting to go from browser to browser it's a different shortcut than if I'm wanting to go from editor to browser. And there's a good chance I'll then need to swap from editor to browser, then issue a different shortcut to go from that browser to the other. When I could have just hit the same shortcut twice.
I've just never really encountered a situation where I've felt like it added something, but I'm constantly having cases where its more annoying.
The 40-year-deep-history Mac answer to workflows like that with a small working set with frequent cross-app-one-to-other-switching IMO is mouse-based navigation + spatial partially-overlapping windows, but this seems to be an extremely foreign concept to Windows/*nix users that grew up on full-screen-maximize or tiling. So I don't think is particularly likely to be adopted by anyone who doesn't already have it burned into their brains at this point. :) There's a lot of these old Mac bones still baked into the OS (e.g. if you have a folder on your desktop, and double click it, and move it, then close it, it'll open to the location you moved it to next time. And that memory is separate from that for another folder on your desktop. Though some of the follow-on behaviors have changed (opening folders in already-open windows used to behave similarly, opening new windows by default).
The 20-year-history version is my own personal lord and savior: Exposé hot corners.
Spaces and no-mouse navigation are still in many ways comparative afterthoughts to mouse-based/spatial workflows. Though as someone with 30+ year of Mac muscle memories in my head, the switching-windows-vs-switching-app concept and awareness of "where" I am relative to it is pretty embedded.
The quantity of requests for how to disable Liquid Glass on Apple Discussions is staggering. [2]
[1]https://www.macrumors.com/2026/06/09/macos-golden-gate-liqui...
This eventually becomes awkwardly precise complaints about information density and general change; but the underlying issue is I want to go fast and the system says no
Like GP, I despise the new design. I'll say the old design was pretty peak design. Windows looked like windows. Buttons like buttons. With accessibility tweaks (for transparency and borders) I could make it very, very usable.
This new thing is a crime against UI. Every icon now sits in a circle, and takes up % more room as a result. Because … it's pretty? It isn't pretty.
I upgraded my laptop thinking I was going to develop an app and that I'd need to be on the latest design. I ended up developing a TUI so I needn't have bothered. Every time I see my partner's laptop, still on Sequoia, I shed a little tear.
I, for one, prefer Apple products because they sweat the small stuff more than the other options, and when they have put in effort to make things worse it's kind of infuriating.
I do a bit of desktop Linux work too, and it's OK, but hard to complain when it's all open source volunteer work! Windows is so terrible that I wouldn't even know where to start. What's the point? There's nobody at Microsoft that even gives a damn.
The engineering that went into the M1 was amazing, I truly think that now, an M1 Max was the biggest bargain ever in my entire computing life. £3,299.00. In contrast, the 64GB i9 I bought only two years before was £4,149.00.
The M1 Max MacBook with 64 gigabytes is still a great machine and fairly affordable on the second-hand market.
(Returning an i9 to wait a few more years on the M1, any M1, was absolutely worth it)
My 2013 Core i7 took almost eight years to get to where the previous ones were at five, and if it weren’t for local LLMs pushing me toward an upgrade in the next year or two, I have to imagine my M1 Pro could be my daily driver well into the next decade.
I think the M1+ MacBook Airs will be regarded eventually like the original Macintosh originally the iPod, or the introduction of the original Air and the creation of the product class that came to be known as “ultrabooks”. It really changed everything about laptops to have a fantastic keyboard, speakers, screen, trackpad, hinge, and 12+ hour battery life… for $1k.
But with all of the AI-discovered exploits I think it'll become more important to keep everything up to date
I like to factory reset my devices every couple of years, it really gives them a new lease on life. My M1 Pro feels as smooth and fast as the day I got it.
It's sad that M5 (and M6) are so much faster at prefilling and other LLM-related operations, but I'm happy with the computer I got and will keep it at least 3-4 generations.
https://github.com/nace-ai/kapitsa
this machine just keeps getting better and better in the inference world. the memory bandwidth is too good, newer macbook pros aren't that much faster in memory bandwidth, many are slower. not enough to upgrade yet as they're mostly horizontal upgrades, the improvements in other areas are adding up like wifi bandwidth and protocol, NVMe speeds, webcam
if they do the M7 correctly: which is just everything their current models do plus way faster memory bandwidth and much greater memory possible 192GB+, then it will be a really great and timely upgrade
M1 Max 400GB/s
M4 Pro 273GB/s
M5 Pro 307GB/s
I'll check it that inference engine! Thanks!
Edit: it doesn't give numbers for unsloth/Qwen-3.6-35B-A3B 4bit, but I'm using mlx-serve right now and getting petty good numbers (and it took a while to tweak everything properly!)
it has unsloth on the list of 3.6 35b variants only on the 2-bit unsloth UD-IQ2_XXS GGUF variant
I'd say let it down 4-bit Qwen 3.6 35b again and see what how it performs in both benchmarks and your preferred conversational and agentic harness
it's Kflash verifier is competing against MTP and Dflash2, thats where the additional novelty is
Also why would you have to spend $6000? You can get a refurbished 16-inch M5 Pro with 48 Gb RAM and 1 Tb SSD from Apple for $3000.
- a low end Macbook Pro or Air
- Mac Studio, mid-to-high specs
Having said that, I did plan on sticking it out 7 years. Ended up bailing on an M5 Pro!
My M1 is still fast and enjoyable, but I regret to inform you that the M5 actually does feel faster in day to day use. I thought for sure I wouldn’t notice, but the difference is there.
When I do large builds the difference is also bigger than I was expecting.
I replied that it would make no sense unless I was going to start running local inference or training my own models locally...
2 years later, and this MacBook Pro M4 Max w/48GB is the best $4k I've ever spent!
This will be the “640kb ought to be enough for anybody” Bill Gates quote of our era.
Mine is running great and it has 24/7 use.
I won't try to defend the 3Gs ;)
Samsung skipped an entire range of numbers from Galaxy S 11 to 19.
Looks like tech companies don't like 9...
Compare that with the regilar lineup of other manufacturers: Cryptic model names which are uncomparable and models that are so similar that they could be equivalent.
So, no, 1 is not better but I don't care (as customer) about variety.
They’ve always been this way.
The most Apple II models that were sold concurrently were the IIe Platinum, IIc Plus, and IIgs. (And this was around 1990, at which point there were far more models of Macintosh computers on the market.)
The 2e, 2e enhanced, 2c, 2c+ and 2gs were concurrent.
I didn’t bother with Mac because I got tired of writing all the things.
64kb RAM + 80col card vs 48kb/40col
And certainly don't look at MikroTik's product naming. ;)
Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 495 or Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6.
Your distaste seems misplaced.
But you are right, they do bin. You can get versions of the cpu with different core counts for this reason.
I’m only seeing this with the pro and max though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_silicon#Comparison_of_M-...
makes me want to wait another one I have an M1 Max and just set up playing with an M1 (non-max) and realized it can't drive 3 displays. I recall getting Max just for this, but generally, makes me think of non-Max as a non-pro after all.
And having what's presumably the latest CPU but with potentially worse features than the last generation combined with increased prices from RAM is a deal breaker so I'll guess I'll push my M1 for another year.
When I finally cave in and buy something after 5 years I’m very momentarily sad for not perfectly timing the release window, then I realize I keep hardware long enough a half year barely matters.
This is “sad”?!? First world problems.
So Apple can either toss the early production in inventory while the whole process catches up, or they can do what they do. Better for both the company and the consumer that they do the latter.
- 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.
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've been daily driving it for months with no blockers. You can tell Linux uses the battery less efficiently than MacOS though so that's good to know.
Still some tiny issues with waking from sleep lid closed, but I'm expecting to get that fixed myself with some prompting this week. The people working on Linux on Mac are really impressive (and have access to unlimited tokens), so I expect all issues to be fixed very soon.
Being able combine agents, linux software and Apple hardware is so much fun.
So, 97% stable then? (Downvote me but it's true.)
It's been my primary dev machine for 2 years
Mind sharing the provider’s URL?
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...
My Strix Halo now can run some models through the NPU and its roughly as fast as its GPU+CPU (on some of the models - some its slower)
I think my 48GB 16 inch MBP will last me 15+ years at this point.
Actually had claude spin up a kanban board to manage my tasks in a 'TODO -> Plan -> Implement -> Review -> QA -> Shipping -> Done' flow (with a worktree for each task) that works great!
One thing that bugs me mentally is leaving that machine pending on my input ("wasted") overnight etc... I'd like to arrive at a workflow where I can have agents running toward the overall goal autonomously overnight as much as they can, and I can review and iterate and "engineer" parts that need it afterwards...
For now, I still guide implementation very closely, piece by piece. Has anyone had any good experiences with workflows / skills / similar for that?
I did actually get a new M5 Pro/48GB machine last month, but that's only because I bought my work machine to keep my personal and professional lives properly separated; otherwise I wasn't seeing any issue running that M3 Max/36GB for a long time further.
* 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".
It's just handy when you have a USB-A device and don't want a dongle, traveling, etc.
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...
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).
Still a baffling choice.
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.
> Apple on Wednesday will announce 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models featuring touch-enabled OLED displays with thinner bezels, a Dynamic Island instead of a notch, M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, and a lighter and slightly thinner design
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/10/27/macbook-pro-with-touchs...
I must be out of the loop, you skimmed over this. A Mac with a touchscreen??