Hacker News

Apple introduces the new 14‑inch MacBook Pro with M6

89 points by beex 3 hours ago | 92 comments

at1as 2 hours 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

epistasis 2 hours 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.

thenthenthen 2 hours 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.

epistasis 2 hours 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.

thenthenthen 19 minutes ago

Yeah the formfactor, the noise, the heat… even the performance seems better except for what, benchmarks..?

giwook 59 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'.

thenthenthen 21 minutes ago

Just use. There were two models that had issues with the gpu desoldering, 2012 and 2015 iirc? I was lucky enough to have them. I put the mobos in the oven (180deg for seven minutes?) and that would fix it. For about a month… and then 2 weeks.. and then… I actually have a 2018 that I borrowed from a friend after my 2013 Air ssd gave up, it is still working I think, but its twice as slow, at least as my Air was. Its so weird. The Air stayed ‘snappy’ even after my friends Pro’s would become too sluggish. Maybe because I never update ;)

freakynit 2 hours ago

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

woah 2 hours 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?

rzzzt 46 minutes ago

Windows 2000 / XP in classic mode / XP / Vista / 7. For OSX I'd say High Sierra to Catalina.

al_borland 36 minutes ago

I’d go with Tiger (10.4) for peak OS X, personally.

larsmaxfield 36 minutes ago

Liquid Glass was not a "small UI change". It disrupted many accessibility aspects of macOS, so much so that Apple toned down quite a few aspects of the design in subsequent updates, even adding a slider to reduce the effect. [1]

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...

[2]https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256227663

epistasis 2 hours 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.

cmoski 2 hours ago

No, it was Windows 3.11

randomblock1 2 hours ago

There's a slider to reduce the liquidity

bluecalm 27 minutes ago

The way things are going you will be able to run your favorite flavor of Linux on those pretty soon. It will be the best of both worlds: the best hardware and a good OS. Hopefully Apple doesn't take steps to block it.

BugsJustFindMe 30 minutes ago

> No freaking way to disable it.

Um. https://imgur.com/a/ydt3MN5

tedd4u 19 minutes ago

Liquid Glass is more than just the transparency. There are many other changes that cannot be disabled that way. Not to mention the overall lag compared to Sequoia (I skipped Tahoe entirely so I had a direct knife-edge transition). 27 is less bad than 26 but Liquid Glass doesn't make anything better than prior UI and makes several things worse, even if you turn down the transparency.

sgarrity 2 hours 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.

vjvjvjvjghv 8 minutes ago

[delayed]

jwilcoxson 2 hours ago

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

freakynit 2 hours 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.

xXSLAYERXx 2 hours 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.

incanus77 42 minutes ago

Same, and I dual-boot Asahi as well.

TrainedMonkey 2 hours 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.

at1as 2 hours 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

Spartan-S63 2 hours 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.

somehnguy 36 minutes ago

My i7 is still running the marathon...pretty poorly. But it's still there!

It's painful to use my work provided M4 Max all day and then switch to my 2019 i7 in the evenings. Even my older work provided M1 Pro ran circles around the i7, the difference was staggering.

Maybe I'll upgrade at the next generation.

marinhero 25 minutes ago

Same here! M1 Max going strong. I'm curious to see what they put out tomorrow but spending over 5K in a machine is a pretty rough pill to swallow

green-salt 24 minutes ago

Right there with you

ErneX 2 hours ago

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

hmokiguess 2 hours ago

which rumours?

speedgoose 2 hours ago

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

hmokiguess 47 minutes ago

Oh interesting, any more info on "how"?

smallmancontrov 27 minutes ago

With a three point plan, I suspect: memory bandwidth, memory bandwidth, and more memory bandwidth.

efficax 48 minutes ago

still rocking the m1 studio, shows no signs of stopping

danso 10 minutes ago

Just now realizing there's a difference between "MacBook Pro with M# chip" and "MacBook Pro with M# Pro chip". Was curious to see how my MBP with M4 Pro compared, and I saw it has 273 gb/s memory bandwidth compared to the MBP M6 (sans Pro)'s 170gb/s. Makes sense that "Pro" in the laptop model doesn't also describe the chip, but only if you remember that the non-pro "Macbook" line stopped in 2017 (which was the last time I went shopping for Apple laptops until buying the MBP4)

https://www.apple.com/mac/compare/?modelList=MacBook-Neo-A18...

bigwheels 2 hours 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?

Choco31415 2 hours 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.

epistasis 2 hours 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?

brandall10 2 hours 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.

flohofwoe 2 hours 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).

yuhao2dai 39 minutes ago

wait till tomorrow's touch screen

relaxatorium 52 minutes 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.

wpm 40 minutes ago

This is the base one. You get a better display, more, faster Thunderbolt ports, and an honest to god HDMI port, plus some fans for cooling on long running processes that you don't get with the M6 Air (which also doesn't exist).

swyx 35 minutes ago

i think also better general support for multi screen setup

thinkling 2 hours ago

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

Tagbert 11 minutes ago

This M6 is the base Pro model. You probably want the M5 pro/max for your LLMs.

IOT_Apprentice 39 minutes ago

Nope.

vintagedave 2 hours ago

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

BugsJustFindMe 3 hours ago

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

poolnoodle 2 hours ago

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

flohofwoe 2 hours 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?

Tagbert 10 minutes ago

No reason for gorilla-arm when touch is an alternative interaction mode and not a required one. You still have trackpad and keyboard. You can dynamically switch modes depending on the action.

Gorilla-arm was a fear based on the naive idea that if you had touch, you would be required to only use touch for every action.

giwook 58 minutes ago

mmmmm....grease

V99 54 minutes ago

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

efficax 47 minutes ago

the rumors were about a supposed Macbook Ultra that would have a screen like the ipad pros. Still to come (or not)

ritzaco 3 hours 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?

Grombobulous 2 hours 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.

BugsJustFindMe 13 minutes ago

> Apple is now comparing against computers they were selling 7-8 years ago

Apple didn't fully stop selling Intel macs until June 2023. And they compare against the most recent previous model too.

sandoze 48 minutes ago

[flagged]

wtallis 3 hours 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.

anamexis 3 hours 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.

thibaut_barrere 3 hours ago

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

jwilcoxson 2 hours ago

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

Razengan 2 hours ago

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

probably because of its adjacency to "corpulent" lol

anamexis 2 hours 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.

zaphar 3 hours 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.

Grombobulous 2 hours 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.

dmitrygr 56 minutes ago

Neither of those have comparable perf

Grombobulous 10 minutes ago

The Core Series Ultra X7 358H is absolutely comparable performance with the M5. It's a bit slower on single core but is faster than the M5 on graphics.

Here's the battery life result, beating the M5 MacBook Pro by 2 hours:

https://youtu.be/IGcVLkXwsnE?si=9syK342ubVPQVXpZ&t=438

Here's the GeekBench results. Comparable on multi-core, slower on single core:

https://youtu.be/IGcVLkXwsnE?si=Lalsi1tblnFyRNoi&t=149

Cinebench multi-core results beat M5:

https://youtu.be/IGcVLkXwsnE?si=h7ZILF-m3RsY5ig_&t=174

GPU benchmarks in Steel Nomad Light (cross-platform native benchmark) show it beating the M5 GPU:

https://youtu.be/IGcVLkXwsnE?si=j_RycLT93Y3GRk6Z&t=338

Here's the surface temperature charts, showing the Lenovo runs cooler to the touch:

https://youtu.be/IGcVLkXwsnE?si=TMy8RQxAmV26LeqK&t=232

The weight slots in between the MacBook Air 15" and the MacBook Pro 14"

https://youtu.be/IGcVLkXwsnE?si=HYeyJ8b_iZK3lbyY&t=475

For a 1:1 pricing comparison, you'll be bumped down to the Intel Core Ultra 5 338H, which only loses a couple of the GPU cores compared to the 358H SKU so it still has strong graphics on par with the M5, and for the 32GB/1TB configuration, it sits at $140 less than the M6 MacBook Pro bumped up to 32GB RAM.

Sure, yes, the M6 is faster than an M5, and therefore faster than a Core Ultra 5 338H, so it's widening the gap, but we are not talking about a wide enough gulf to make any workflow difference. It looks like the M6 is also gaining back its competitive battery life compared to the M5, though nobody has tested it yet.

These are close enough where I would definitely label them as being in a comparable performance class.

jwilcoxson 2 hours ago

Competition is a beautiful thing.

porridgeraisin 2 hours 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.

Grombobulous 2 hours 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.

porridgeraisin 2 hours ago

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

throwitaway222 2 hours 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.

Guillaume86 2 hours ago

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

ErneX 2 hours ago

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

Kalanos 41 minutes ago

i wonder if it has 2 fans

locusofself 2 hours ago

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

lostNFound 2 hours ago

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

adolph 2 hours 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. . . .

cbeach 2 hours 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?

tedd4u 14 minutes ago

Isn't the laptop version of the 5090 is a more apples-to-apples comparison? It has 896 GB/s memory bandwidth (compared to the 614 on the M5 Max MBP).

quantumink 56 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.

lowbloodsugar 2 hours ago

Is your 5090 in a laptop? o_0

cbeach 2 hours ago

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

tines 2 hours ago

sleight*

yuhao2dai 38 minutes ago

eh no thanks. not jumping to m5 max now we know apple is cooking with m7 pro and m7 max. don't drop the ball.

swyx 35 minutes ago

you know they jut bump this every year right

villgax 3 hours 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

wren6991 2 hours ago

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

xena 2 hours ago

Citation?

wren6991 2 hours 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.

oswinburne 38 minutes ago

[flagged]

Razengan 2 hours ago

[dead]