Apple introduces the new 14‑inch MacBook Pro with M6

Posted by beex 1 hour ago

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Comments

Comment by relaxatorium 44 seconds ago

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.

Comment by bigwheels 20 minutes ago

> 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?

Comment by epistasis 14 minutes ago

The M6 version is also cheaper than the M5 Max by a significant amount. I wouldn't be surprised if the M6 could keep up on LLM prefill (compute bound), but the memory bandwidth means that decode is going to be a lot slower, most likely?

Comment by Choco31415 18 minutes ago

There are rumors that Apple is not releasing Pro/Max versions of the M6 with the intention of focusing these research efforts on the M7 instead.

Even then, 170GB/s is a bump up from 153GB/s of the M5. So we see a 11% uplift already.

Comment by brandall10 16 minutes ago

It's a base M6 chip. The Pro doubles that, and the Max doubles again. And the Ultra doubles yet again. This is how the entire M series has always worked.

So the theoretical Max would be 680GB/s.

Comment by at1as 1 hour ago

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

Comment by sgarrity 18 minutes ago

Stay strong! I went from an M1 to M5 generation, and it was a nice bump, but I could have gone another year without any significant impact on my quality of life/work.

Comment by epistasis 45 minutes ago

I'm loving my M1 Macbook Air still, and only a few weeks away from six years of use Sometimes it lags a bit when I'm running a macOS VM, and all the coding agent VMs, so I'm kind of interested in going to 32GB of RAM, but honestly this computer is still faster than any of my laptops that came before, even with the visual atrocity of Liquid Glass.

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.

Comment by thenthenthen 39 minutes ago

I got a second hand M1 air like two years ago for 200usd with 1tb hdd and 16gb ram. I got it after my intel Air died after about..12 years? (Edit: the ssd died, which is removable… but literally had a plane to catch). All my pros have died within a few years. Air all the way. Never looking back.

Comment by giwook 7 minutes ago

> All of my pros have died within a few years

What are you doing to them?

I still have MBPs from 2015 and 2018 that have not 'died'.

Comment by epistasis 23 minutes ago

I wonder if this is from not trying to get maximum performance, and instead focusing on efficiency? But I've noticed this too. I definitely prefer the Air form factor over larger models as the primary benefit, but the durability seems to be a big benefit too. Fewer ports, thinner shell that seals tighter and can't flex as much due to the curved metal instead of flat surfaces... everything about it just seems like a better design.

Comment by freakynit 42 minutes ago

I freaking hate liquid-glass UI Apple has "forced" onto us. No freaking way to disable it. I hate it so much.

Comment by woah 23 minutes ago

Been on HN for many years now, and the one thing that never changes is people posting angrily about small UI changes. It makes me wonder- if things have only ever gotten worse, what was the peak UI? MS DOS?

Comment by epistasis 18 minutes ago

Small improvements don't get much accolades. And for the most part, the UX is so good that most changes tend to be neutral or for the worse. And when you're really attached to something and there's on an unnecessary change, it feels almost like betrayal!

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.

Comment by cmoski 16 minutes ago

No, it was Windows 3.11

Comment by randomblock1 31 minutes ago

There's a slider to reduce the liquidity

Comment by Spartan-S63 20 minutes ago

I had an M1 Max machine with 32GB of memory and upgraded it to an M4 Max machine with 128GB of memory for local AI model experimentation.

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.

Comment by jwilcoxson 55 minutes ago

My M1 Pro has been great, certainly doesn’t feel like a 5-year old computer.

Comment by freakynit 49 minutes ago

M1 Air guy here... I'm not looking for a replacement still. Almost 6 years now. Runs butter-smooth. Best tech purchase I ever made.

Comment by xXSLAYERXx 43 minutes ago

Have an M1 air as well. Got a Pro m5. For daily coding tasks, and general web browsing the M1 air still holds. I'm going to pass it on to my kid. Reminds me of the honda we have that we'll also pass down.

Comment by TrainedMonkey 47 minutes ago

Biggest issue with my M3 Max is apple mandatory fun bloatware. I think it's the same playbook as phones long term. The hardware is still powerful but the software is optimized for the latest CPU, so older models run hot, take a fraction of the second longer to load the resources, etc. That stacks up over 5-6 years of releases to make older models feel slower.

Comment by at1as 27 minutes ago

I've held back an OS update or two, specifically because I'm worried about performance dropoff on the old chip

But with all of the AI-discovered exploits I think it'll become more important to keep everything up to date

Comment by ErneX 50 minutes ago

If the rumours are true (about AI capabilities) it’d be best to wait yes.

Comment by hmokiguess 48 minutes ago

which rumours?

Comment by speedgoose 29 minutes ago

The M7 will the much better for local LLM inference. If you can afford the memory.

Comment by 58 minutes ago

Comment by flohofwoe 21 minutes ago

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).

Comment by vintagedave 11 minutes ago

Also here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50258521

Comment by thinkling 10 minutes ago

32GB Unified RAM max. Is that really the machine I want for running local LLMs?

Comment by locusofself 15 minutes ago

Dare I even ask how much the 32gb/1tb variant will be? $3,000?

Comment by lostNFound 11 minutes ago

You could have dared to check. But no, it's $2399 for those specs.

Comment by poolnoodle 18 minutes ago

Where's the touch screen??? The rumors promised touch!!!

Comment by V99 2 minutes ago

This is only the base model MBP. The high-end touch one will be later this week.

Comment by flohofwoe 13 minutes ago

Why would you want greasy fingerprints all over your display and gorilla arm syndrome when there's a perfectly fine keyboard and touchpad attached to the display for free?

Comment by giwook 6 minutes ago

mmmmm....grease

Comment by BugsJustFindMe 1 hour ago

dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50258521

Comment by adolph 37 minutes ago

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. . . .

Comment by cbeach 27 minutes ago

My 5090 has a bandwidth of 1,792 GB/s, and that is just about good enough for basic (i.e. 27B models) local LLM inference.

The fastest M6 MacBook Pro (24/32GB configs) has a memory bandwidth of 170 GB/s. And the M5 Max is 614 GB/s.

Am I missing some nuance of the M6 MBP here, or am I right to assume it won't set the local LLM world on fire?

Comment by quantumink 4 minutes ago

The case of your 5090 having become a coveted artifact of great rarity in these times - may be a nuance of some measure.

Also, the following two have very different 'needs' to feel good enough:

1. heavy agentic workloads via harness vs 2. a simple private chat interface with a local instance

Even if an MBP's bandwidth were higher, it's tough to see a reason to run it as a constantly loaded 24/7 inference machine due to heat degradation.

P.S. still extremely awesome to be able to host and chat with a decently quantized 27B model on your laptop. ...and to be fair even a 32GB Air would do that! It is a thing of beauty: the amount of folks this may add to the hacker/tinker community.

Comment by lowbloodsugar 20 minutes ago

Is your 5090 in a laptop? o_0

Comment by cbeach 10 minutes ago

No. But does high memory bandwidth necessarily require desktop/server style power and cooling?

Comment by tines 30 minutes ago

sleight*

Comment by ritzaco 1 hour ago

> 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?

Comment by Grombobulous 1 hour ago

Fun fact: the laptop in this size/performance class with the best battery life is a Windows Intel Core Ultra Series 3 laptop, not a MacBook Pro!

So Apple is now comparing against computers they were selling 7-8 years ago rather than what Intel is delivering now.

Comment by wtallis 1 hour ago

There's no happy medium here that would satisfy everybody: when they make marketing claims about improvements relative to products from several years ago, they get criticized for not focusing on the improvements relative to last gen (even if those comparisons are also somewhere in the announcement). When they focus on the most recent generations, people complain that it doesn't make sense to upgrade every year.

Just accept that even if you aren't still using an Intel MacBook Pro, the comparison is still relevant to some part of their target market.

They only just dropped support for Intel Macs from this fall's operating system release (but are still doing security patches for the releases that Intel Macs can run). A year from now, it actually will be fairly reasonable to expect them to give up marketing to the holdouts.

Comment by anamexis 1 hour ago

I would guess there's still quite a lot of people on Intel Macs out there (they were sold 5 years ago), so it is still very much worth it for Apple to market to them.

Comment by thibaut_barrere 1 hour ago

More people than you think (outside tech) are using Intel Macs at the moment (family computers etc).

Comment by jwilcoxson 1 hour ago

Exactly. A late model Intel Mac is still a perfectly cromulent computer in 2026.

Comment by Razengan 53 minutes ago

"cromulent" sounds like such a disgusting word that isn't.

probably because of its adjacency to "corpulent" lol

Comment by anamexis 45 minutes ago

The word "cromulent" was coined by the TV show The Simpsons in a gag.

> Mrs. Krabappel: "Embiggens"? I never heard that word before I moved to Springfield.

> Ms. Hoover: I don't know why. It's a perfectly cromulent word.

But now it has made it into the Merriam-Webster dictionary.

Comment by zaphar 1 hour ago

Why? Apple devices have the best battery life in the market right now to my knowledge. It's an important part of the evaluation for a laptop which is the opposite of cringe.

Comment by Grombobulous 1 hour ago

Actually, they don’t! Intel Core Ultra Series 3 beats Apple laptops as of the M5 on battery life.

IIRC the Framework 13 Pro beats the MacBook Pro at both video streaming tests and office productivity with 300 bits brightness tests. (Framework live-streamed the video playback test, and the office provided productivity tests I referred to were done by Just Josh Tech)

Perhaps the M6 has leapfrogged but that remains to be seen.

Comment by dmitrygr 4 minutes ago

Neither of those have comparable perf

Comment by jwilcoxson 59 minutes ago

Competition is a beautiful thing.

Comment by porridgeraisin 58 minutes ago

In usual developer type tasks, among my friend group what I hear is that panther lake laptops are competitive with M4 laptops. But, M4s do that with a 55Wh battery, whereas most panther lake laptops come with a 70Wh battery. So if you're discussing chip performance per watt then it's probably an edge to apple silicon.

Comment by Grombobulous 51 minutes ago

72.4 Wh is the size of the M4 MacBook Pro battery, about the same size as the Framework 13 Pro.

Intel and now Qualcomm are really not far off on performance per watt. Mostly Apple maintains an advantage on single core performance.

The Panther Lake integrated GPU in the X7/X9 SKI is actually faster than the one you get in the base M5.

Comment by porridgeraisin 36 minutes ago

You're right. I think I remember those numbers from an Air vs 3xxH comparison.

Comment by throwitaway222 22 minutes ago

I recall seeing some crazy stats like 41+ hours maybe on a snapdragon processor w/windows. I imagine your screen brightness would have to be like 99% dark and not playing videos is my guess.

Comment by Guillaume86 25 minutes ago

That's not what the marketing is saying, they keep comparing to their own super old intel models.

Comment by ErneX 50 minutes ago

They want those users to upgrade, I don’t see the problem.

Comment by villgax 1 hour ago

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

Comment by wren6991 31 minutes ago

Also a great way to make money from screen replacements when the battery expands!

Comment by xena 34 minutes ago

Citation?

Comment by wren6991 31 minutes ago

It's confusingly worded but I think it's a suggestion for something Apple could do in the future. I don't see any mention of this in the linked Apple article.

Comment by Razengan 54 minutes ago

[dead]