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Apple introduces the new 14‑inch MacBook Pro with M6

66 points beex 1 hour ago 56 comments

ritzaco 1 hour ago | parent

> 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?

anamexis 1 hour ago | parent

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.

zaphar 1 hour ago | parent

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.

Grombobulous 56 minutes ago | parent

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.

jwilcoxson 48 minutes ago | parent

Competition is a beautiful thing.

porridgeraisin 47 minutes ago | parent

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.

Grombobulous 40 minutes ago | parent

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.

porridgeraisin 26 minutes ago | parent

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

Guillaume86 15 minutes ago | parent

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

throwitaway222 11 minutes ago | parent

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.

thibaut_barrere 1 hour ago | parent

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

jwilcoxson 51 minutes ago | parent

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

Razengan 42 minutes ago | parent

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

probably because of its adjacency to "corpulent" lol

anamexis 34 minutes ago | parent

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.

wtallis 59 minutes ago | parent

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.

Grombobulous 58 minutes ago | parent

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.

ErneX 39 minutes ago | parent

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

villgax 1 hour ago | parent

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

xena 23 minutes ago | parent

Citation?

wren6991 20 minutes ago | parent

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.

wren6991 21 minutes ago | parent

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

at1as 53 minutes ago | parent

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

jwilcoxson 44 minutes ago | parent

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

freakynit 38 minutes ago | parent

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.

xXSLAYERXx 32 minutes ago | parent

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.

TrainedMonkey 37 minutes ago | parent

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.

at1as 17 minutes ago | parent

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

ErneX 40 minutes ago | parent

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

hmokiguess 38 minutes ago | parent

which rumours?

speedgoose 19 minutes ago | parent

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

epistasis 35 minutes ago | parent

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.

freakynit 32 minutes ago | parent

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

randomblock1 20 minutes ago | parent

There's a slider to reduce the liquidity

woah 13 minutes ago | parent

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?

epistasis 7 minutes ago | parent

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.

cmoski 5 minutes ago | parent

No, it was Windows 3.11

thenthenthen 28 minutes ago | parent

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.

epistasis 12 minutes ago | parent

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.

Spartan-S63 9 minutes ago | parent

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.

sgarrity 7 minutes ago | parent

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.

adolph 26 minutes ago | parent

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. . . .

tines 20 minutes ago | parent

sleight*

cbeach 17 minutes ago | parent

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?

lowbloodsugar 9 minutes ago | parent

Is your 5090 in a laptop? o_0

flohofwoe 11 minutes ago | parent

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).

bigwheels 9 minutes ago | parent

> 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?

Choco31415 7 minutes ago | parent

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.

brandall10 5 minutes ago | parent

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.

epistasis 3 minutes ago | parent

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?

poolnoodle 7 minutes ago | parent

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

flohofwoe 3 minutes ago | parent

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?

locusofself 5 minutes ago | parent

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

lostNFound 1 minute ago | parent

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

vintagedave 22 seconds ago | parent

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