New 14‑inch MacBook Pro with M6

I still have the original M1 Pro (thankfully with enough disk space) and I still don't really see a reason to upgrade. Since the M1 all these MacBooks are more than powerful enough for anything I might want to do and the original battery life was so good an upgrade would harldy be worth it.

The unbearable burden of consumerism.

"You didn't even finish your M2 yet and already want to refill your plate?"

Genuine question from someone who knows nothing about Apple products... can't you replace/upgrade the drive?

I'm still on my early 2022 macbook 14" M1, which I was thoughtful enough to get 64gb ram for at the time, and remain still incredibly happy. M6 must be nuts!

Yeah, I'm still on a 2021 M1 Pro and the only real complaint is that the battery has weakened somewhat, but still fine. and if I really cared I would probably figure out what to do to get firefox from being such a constant drain.

Just get the Air. Moore's law peaked a long time ago and the differences between the M-generations are too small to be meaningful.

I bought my 2022 M2 Air with 24GB/1TB/10-core GPU. Very very glad I did.

The only reason I’m bitter is because they put in WiFi 6E in the M3 generation. Now I just use a 2.5Gbe USB-C adaptor when transferring large files to and from my NAS.

I picked up a 24GB 2TB M2 air and it's still cruising along. Short of having the foresight to pick up 512GB Ultra prior to the rampocalypse, I'm happy.

Exactly the same story here. I'm still very happily using an M2, which is just great.

I’m in the exact same predicament: I bought an M2 Air upon release in 2022, chose a BTO with 16 GB of RAM, the top-bin processor, and it still runs absolutely 100% perfectly. Unlike the OP, I’m doing very OK with storage, so I don’t even have that excuse.

The machine is basically flawless and entirely suitable for everything I throw at it (and throw stuff at it I do: when I’m not web-browsing or playing YouTube videos I’m using Wolfram Mathematica, which is one heck of a resource hog) and it’s absolutely utterly fine and blasé about the whole thing.

As things are, I can see myself keeping it for a decade. There was a time when I used to change Apple laptops on a yearly basis (starting with PowerBook G4s in the early/mid 2000s and up until the mid 2010s, when I migrated most of my mobile computing to iPads… which lasted for about a decade until I got this thing).

Cries in mid2012 mac book air. This one refuses to die, and it does everything I need except LLMs (but I have a desktop with a 3090), so I'm stuck with it...

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I’m using KDE on the gaming box I recently transitioned away from Windows as well as on a secondary single-use laptop where Linux has been installed for a while.

It’s not bad, but I find it still to be very much an acquired taste. It’s fine for my usage, where the DE has barely any impact but having been using macOS as my main OS for the better part of 30 years, it would probably drive me insane if I had to shift my main body of computer use to it. It’s not any one thing, but dozens of papercuts that can’t be configured away (I’d need to maintain my own fork to fix them) as well as the more Windows-like desktop paradigm.

KDE is really great. I have a Threadripper FreeBSD desktop I do kernel work on and it is such a breath of fresh air compared to my work Mac.

I'm a habitual device-swapper and I'm staggered by how... satisfied I am with my 8 year old Thinkpad X1 Carbon with Fedora KDE on it.

Yeah I use KDE as well for my desktop and it’s the perfect environment. (Btw I use Arch)

Still I’m very tempted by the new MacBooks. I don’t know of any laptop that is a tenth as good and I don’t want to sit at my desk all day to use a computer.

I would buy apple hardware instantly if you could seamlessly install Linux on it just like a PC. Even if you had to "burn a fuse" to permanently detached it from Apples support and ecosystem.

I love and respect what Asahi has done but I want apple to support a turn key, open drivers, everything works, system.

"Nano-texture glass" and "Nano-texture display" should refer to the same: A microscopic etching into the display glass.

"Nano-texture finish" on iPhone Duo refers to an additional layer they put on top of the display panel. It's basically a sticker with a similar (same?) surface structure (they can't put it on the display glass itself because it's too thin)

I could be wrong, but I think glass=hard, while finish=soft. The inside Duo screen is not hard like the outer glass.

It's preparation for the inevitable nano-texture cloth you need to buy from Apple to wipe the screen with.

You mean even for the air?

Maybe Apple is shifting the terminology from display to glass as an homage to fine watch terminology.

That is RealTree camo, not military camo. And it's really not a crop field? I'm guessing this is AI-generated. It's odd. It looks like a backyard garden, because you have mixed greens with kale, plentiful weeds, and marigolds (which are commonly used to keep pests at bay in small, hand-harvested gardens, but cannot be mixed into mechanically harvested fields). But the permanently-installed drip irrigation says commercial operation.

My guess is this photo was taken in a local garden co-op or small farmstead, but it looked too barren to use for advertising so they added a bunch of plants later.

They are just trying to portray "working in the field" creative types/students and alluding to all day battery life.

Nothing about that picture looks military

I had a similar thought too looking at that photo and then I realized that personally, the only computer I've ever used out 'in the field' for extended durations was a MBP when I was working on an autonomous drone project senior year of undergrad.

It was November/December in Iowa, so it was freezing and the local R/C club airfield was nestled between an ocean of corn fields and the city dump, so it smelled terrible.

But that 16" MBP was red hot from Android Studio and kept my fingers from freezing, so credit where credit is due. Really fun project too!

Realree camo has become popular with the "creatives sipping soy lattes" demographic. Although Apple is actually bit behind the curve here, I think it's already become a little passe.

It looks more like students to me.

Not all camo is military. That to me looks more like the camo that you find at bass pro shop

The hat looks like one of a million other hats you see any guy wearing out in Iowa, from farmers to students to contractors. I have a hat just like it myself.

Especially seeing is the things break if you fart near them too loudly.

After getting my M1 MBP I mostly stopped paying attention to the new releases until the M4 came out and I decided to see how much "better" it was and was equally completely baffled by the insane number of SKUs and their seeming overlap. Insane product lineup decisions.

They’re binned, not every piece of silicon will work perfectly so they’re selling the ones that did as higher SKUs and the ones with minor flaws become the lower core counts.

  Chip: Apple M5
  Total Number of Cores: 10 (4 Super and 6 Efficiency)

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Why the heck would one want to do that???

Windows 11 is missing devicetree support for arm macs. It won’t boot.

You might be better off waiting for an Asahi linux update.

I hate the implication that apple is doing anything to stop you from booting windows like how phones prevent you from installing custom roms. The boot loader is unlocked, there is nothing stopping you from installing windows, apple just (rightfully so IMO) doesn't invest money in maintaining windows drivers for their custom silicon because... why would they?

I'm pretty sure bootcamp was only a thing specifically because the intel macs were essentially white box windows laptops with a nicer than average trackpad for the time. Trackpad drivers is a much smaller lift when everything else practically works out of the box

Do you want AIshitification on your mac?

  And it's still $1999. 

Because the price hike happened in June, in this case from 1699 to 1999.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48672732 https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/apple-raises-pric...

And it’s still working amazing. Other than trying to run an agent locally I haven’t ran into any limiting bottlenecks

A bit less impressive considering that it's the M6 and not the M6 Pro.

That impressed me the most. 1TB storage is minimum now too.

They have huge margins and can absorb price increases of some of the components.

"Clique" is a small close group of people, "cliché" is an oft-repeated observation.

Yes, first thing Jobs did upon returning to Apple was radically simplify the product line.

Touchscreens, supposedly.

Agree. I'm still on my M1 Max w/ 32g, and I can't really find a reason to upgrade.

There's a "Select your adapter" option right below the memory and storage options that lets you select between the 70 W and 96 W options.

For Apple's laptop range when was the last time you could choose your power supply? Was that ever an option?

Am I missing something?

(since I'm rate limited)....

With the OP's comment "guess its a use-once device now..." I was thinking they meant power supply in the desktop sense, not the power adapter. I have no idea why a power adapter would be the thing that makes a laptop a "use-once" device.

But yes in the configuration options you can choose between two power adapters.

I think the M5 Pro can be configured with the 64 gb option, not the regular m5 chip.

I'm running an M5 max with 128Gb of RAM right now on a 14" macbook pro

Or just ride the shortage out with high prices.

Apple's only path to bringing a real DRAM fab in-house is acquiring Micron. That's it.

Apple has no experience running large fabs, manufacturing modern DDR4 or DDR5, negotiating for precursors, packaging memory, integrating packages, optimizing DRAM efficiency, yield tuning or process sampling & qualification testing. It's equally as absentminded as suggesting that Apple simply replace TSMC with ASMC, their in-house EUV fab that can make 3nm wafers with 100% yield. Samsung has been making memory for 40 years, and they can't compete with SK Hynix' output despite their experience in design and fabrication. And Samsung is a success story, relatively speaking.

Apple cannot supply themselves at the iPhones scale, and would bankrupt themselves binning DDR5 for 512GB Macs. The US could give Apple the entirety of Intel Foundry Services as an act of corrupt eminent domain, and Apple would still be 15 years away from supplying their own RAM. DDR5 fabs are a small club, and Apple ain't in it.

You should be able to do some local LLM models on the M2 Max 64gb (Qwen 3.8 27b would be a strong model). I might go for that one.

64gb is the way

There are probably countless other things they could do which would move the revenue numbers more than supporting Linux.

I believe Apple is expected to announce MacBook Pro 16” with OLED on Nov 6th (macrumors.com)

Touch OLED laptops expected at tomorrow's event.

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/10/25/macbook-pro-with-touchs...

I feel like I am about to go the opposite way lol. Love the 16" screen...hate lugging it around

Yeah. I love my 16" almost max specced out, but for travel I wanted something lighter and compact so I got a 13" m5 mba.

Love both.

Same. I had a 14" M1 Pro and found it the screen too small for my aging eyes.

The good news is bigger laptops coming tomorrow in the phased release.

I ended up doing the opposite! After being on the go with 15, 16, and 17 inch laptops I've finally moved to smaller 13 and 14 inch screens.

It's much, much easier to transport even though I do miss the screen real estate.

what llms are you running with m5 pro?

while understandable i think you are too hasty. the side shown does indeed only have two usb c ports and the magsafe port, but the other side will almost certainly still have the usb c, hdmi, and card reader (cant remember if they added a second usb c port there at some point as well)

also, i don't blame you for this given that Apple's naming scheme is so fucked here but the 32gb limitation is for the MacBook Pro with the M6, _not_ the MacBook Pro with the M6 Pro or M6 Max. yes, that is confusing, but imo the standard MacBook "Pro" with the base M chip is basically a glorified MacBook Air with a better chassis. I feel like they only sell these things to make the Air seem like a better deal and to justify a higher price for the M Pro / Max versions

edit: those M Pro versions may be announced tomorrow alongside a version with, or those being the version with a touchscreen

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/10/25/macbook-pro-with-touchs...

Huh? It still has all the same ports.

Arguably the thing you’re missing is the 5090 is $1999 MSRP and more like $5000+ retail currently, and then you still need to buy the rest of the computer. This on the other hand is a whole system for $2400 (for the 32gb config). Maybe won’t set the “local LLM” world on fire, but likely to do a lot more for it than the 5090s will for the moment.

You're correct, the base (non-Pro, non-Max) chips are still not great for local LLMs. M5 and M6 both improved prefill speed/time-to-first-token over prior gens, but bw is still a bottleneck.

There's rumored to be no M6 Pro or M6 Max coming, i.e. the higher bandwidth chips will skip a gen. M7 is also rumored to have better memory bandwidth across the range.

The base model has always been limited to 32gb. Select a pro or max chip for more memory options.

> I wonder if they'll bifurcate their market to enable those.

No they won't, the market for "running local models" is approximately 0. There's nothing to bifurcate anyway because once they release the more capable chips they'll be able to be configured with hiring amounts of RAM.

Apple in recent years has been updating their laptop range or specific models (Air or something) with their latest base M series chip (M4, M5, M6, &c.) and then later comes the higher end CPUs. But the base series chips don't have the hardware to it seems support higher RAM loads, or maybe they are artificially restricted in some way.

Apple has had release-weeks in spring and fall, with some variance, for a while now:

https://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#mac https://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#ipad

Post-COVID Apple releases have been totally different than the Jobs era.