New iMac with M6
apple.com
apple.com
I suggest spending a bit more and getting a mac mini and a studio display instead (Equally well built but can be used almost forever). If you could only (easily) use them as monitors once they went out of support...
I'm still using a 2019 iMac 27" and starting to think about Linux again.
You could just run any other OS if any of the free OS upgrades that Apple provides aren’t good enough.
Today, you can use software like Luna or Duet, or native screen sharing to control an iMac from another Mac (or vice versa). I have a 2019 iMac, bought for pennies and upgraded after to max out; way better value than buying the display on its own or a comparable monitor alone. The screen quality is just great.
I use it both as a daily driver and as a "thin client" for all my other machines with the software above.
There is a g4 model too there if thats the version you have.
Also they require software on both sides, so if you want to use your imac to display your computer BIOS, no.
This oddball Apple cable sits proudly in our "old proprietary Apple cables" cardboardbox (Thunderbolt2 is NOT DisplayPortMini, despite their physical interconnectability)... and are now worth ≥$65/each.
Too bad my 2009 iMac 27" is still alive, occassionally requiring that cable's usage; a more-powerful 15" MBP can then use it as its main display =D
My 2015 iMac is 11 years old and still works fine - I use it to run Windows 10 for the occasional thing that needs that and to test builds of software in High Sierra. It also runs Linux great.
- It’s slower
- GPU support in VMs is weird, especially when the host and guest use different graphics stacks (i.e. Windows games often don’t work in a Windows VM running on macOS because while the CPU can be passed through to the VM directly the GPU cannot; the VM driver has to try to translate DirectX GPU commands to Metal or OpenGL; some games can be a worse experience than using Wine)
There are systems with lightweight hypervisors for security purposes (like Android or PlayStation or even Windows sometimes), but those are (a) lightweight and built to use little resources, and (b) specifically designed to support the system APIs needed / use the same stack as the OS, so they won’t have the issues mentioned above.
Stuff like Qubes is also fine because you explicitly accept the tradeoffs when using it (that’s why Qubes has such high system requirements). And the VMs are all Linux-on-Linux, so the GPU issue is minimized.
While modern systems take inspiration from VMs, the sandboxing that most modern OSes do is designed to be much more lightweight than virtualization, since it doesn’t require virtualizing any hardware.
For example, I used Sketch on my ond mac once and was quite happy, but then they dropped support for the OS version that mac was stuck upon. And since newer libraries resources etc all target latest version of Sketch, the version of Sketch I could run quickly became useless.
However, it's great that developers are not too concerned with backwards compatibility. It was really holding back a lot of software
On your second point, proper developers release security updates and backports for software released decades ago, while others always chase new shiny things and contribute a lot to this unsupportable legacy hell that we have to deal with.
It's almost as if your anecdote isn't reality or truth.
That's one thing Windows is generally much better at.
I own two 2022 Studio Displays and as beautiful and overbuilt as they are, it just does not make sense to own such an expensive 60hz display today. You can get a 144hz 5k 27inch LG for $800 now. Yes, Apple makes a $3300 120hz version of the Studio Display.
Maybe it wouldn’t bother some but 60hz is pure agony at this point
And I don't really see much value in high refresh rates outside gaming. The difference between 60 Hz and 144 Hz is minimal in most uses. Given what displays were in the 90s and 2000s, I would have chosen a different career if I was too picky about display quality.
I'm almost considering getting rid of the other two Samsung displays and replacing them with Studio Displays because it's just so much better.
It just depends on what you value. A MBP with 32GB memory and 2TB disk is much more expensive than a Dell equivalent.
(I say this as someone who owns a MBP)
For phones its not as clear, I agree, but at least they added iPhone 17e starting at $599.
What I care about is resolution, color fidelity, color gamut, viewing angles, (anti-)glare, even how quickly the monitor wakes up. I don't play competitive FPS games, I do coding, graphics, and video work on my monitors.
I spent three decades @30Hz, and just the past few ≥60Hz@4K... as I've aged I appreciate the analogue more, and the jarring stutters of 30Hz are constant reminders of computized digitality.
Also, PoE at 144Hz is incredible (I went from <30Hz to 144Hz with this one simple trick: $1000 5070Ti, which turns out was actually a great investment, too [today's price $1449]). But so is scrolling through walls of text, now.
¢¢
I avoid any-higher refresh rates, by your own reasoning =P
I still maintain an entire fleet of 30Hz equipment, but my main two machines are each 144Hz (sharing one screen $$). The $600 Mac Mini handles this easily. Obviously the other's nVidia GPU is a different $tory$$$$ == PoE@144Hz so_pretty
My favorite digital reading method, conversely, is probably less than 1Hz (eInk)? But even hundred of pages of text I'll always prefer printouts.
In psychedelic tongue: it drips well.
And it's getting so inexpensive (I can easily price many 120Hz systems, barely above $1000)!
How much (approx) was your son's build?
But a web page just sits there. And I never scroll slowly enough for refresh rate to matter, I go for big jumps that look the same on anything faster than e-ink. The benefit I get from a faster screen during normal desktop activities is slightly better mouse precision and latency.
The $800 LG outperforms the studio display in almost every dimension you mention.
Look at the reviews for that LG. Sure the specs on the tin are better but quality control looks like garbage.
Apple does not accept that. I have never got a bad Apple screen in any Apple product I have ever bought. Not the case from other companies.
(e.g., https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/studio-displays-with-sc...)
Maybe the panel lottery is more in your favour but it isn't gone.
“But ackshully” — you fully understand the point I was making!
Their lower tier monitors have issues but so do literally every other manufacturer. The high-end LGs are very good and QC as of 2026 has been phenomenal.
Real shame they discontinued them.
If you open them up and keep them clean, they can have uses forever:
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My 27" iMac (2009) still sits faithfully alongside my main 48" setup (because I own the copy of CS4 installed upon it – FU Adobe!). It mostly plays background shows (while I work on main computer, adjacent).
My 24" iMac (2006) still sits faithfully on my tax desk, for its annual usage/filing. It also still plays Warcraft 3: Frozen Throne (quite well!).
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>I suggest spending a bit more and getting a mac mini and a ... display, instead
This is fantastic advice; my past two Apple's have been Mini's. My three main machines all connect to the same massive 48" display (that is about to outlast its first retired Mini).
The only new iMac I would ever again consider purchasing would be something on-par with the iMac Pro (2017) – but in 2026+ any iMac would need a 32"+ display (minimum) to be "usable" IMHO.
I mean even the newer ones aren't bad but cutting the tape, cleaning up and putting new tape is kinda annoying. They should have stuck with the magnets.
Having done this dozens-of-times, each attempt remains scary. Reattaching the glass, the magnets flex the pane incomprehensibly.
My favorite feature of these older iMacs (and laptops of the era) is that you can manhandle the glassed screens (pointing, touching, scraping), to no destriment of the LCD (beneath).
We had a ton of these at work and upgraded them to SSD because they got so laggy.
I had a similar event (but only once) supporting university labs: one of those four "alignment pins" broke off; but they're not necessary once the magnets are engaged. Unfortunately, I had to completely re-disassemble the entire unit to shake out that metallic-breakoff.
The 2006 iMac is a dream to work on: the back plate (including stand) simply detaches, exposing access to everything without having to remove the LCD – this latter part is the worst part of any newer iMac-opening.
Thanks for sharing your similarities, fellow-oldening-hat.
I like Omarchy because it is so different from what I am used to but still useful. Opinions on its creator (DHH) vary, but from an O/S perspective, I enjoy it. I am sure other distros are great too.
Too many great options today to settle that overpriced undersized thing.
But in principle you are right, the 7y is too restrictive.
These computers are generally obsolete, although they're still useful for period-accurate single-purpose tasks.
Claude can SSH into these old machines to patch issues and write bespoke software. We should reconsider what obsolete means nowadays if agents can help us upcycle old hardware.
Only hassle was setting up the Broadcom WiFi drivers which aren't upstream, but I did this before I would have trusted AI with this task and even then it was not a big deal. I think these days running Linux on those things is likely trivial.
But they aren't Apple.
You might not think it’s much harder, but it’s harder.
Anyone commenting on this forum is not going to mind looking after those parts and buying a mounting solution. Apple sells enough iMacs to show that most people have priorities and inclinations that differ from the people who comment on this forum.
Apple's solution to reflections is to overpower them. I use my MacBook in some bright public spaces and reflections have never been an issue. For an iMac which is more likely than a laptop to be used in an environment with controlled lighting, it's just a non-issue.
That literally cannot be true, unless you're saying that your users are ALSO going to have a 218ppi desktop. If you're developing for phones, sorry, a 218ppi display is woefully inadequate for replicating what the phone looks like because phones (modern iPhones) have 450+ ppi, more than TWICE the ppi of the display you're using.
An apple display is nice. But it's absolutely NOT absolutely required for anything no matter the creative work you're doing, because there's nothing it matches except developing stuff for display on that exact display.
Looks to me like it would be the opposite unless a majority of your users are on a Mac. MacOS has a 30% market share in the USA and only around 15% globally.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapcsales/comments/1v87f6i/moni...
Even using the sale prices, an iMac is still cheaper than a Mini with the Kuycon.
Edit: Samsung 32 inch 6K at 165 MHz refresh is on sale now for $1349.
I have bought a 32" 4k monitor like five years ago and have really regretted it. Sure fonts are slightly crisper but I would rather have preferred to have a higher refresh rate. Newer games will barely run on 4k if you don't have top of the like hardware or will need frame generation trickery. Plus the odd app that still doesn't support hidpi displays properly.
I feel like 1440p is already the sweet spot.
My absolute favorite feature of Apple displays is that I don't need to have the brightness cranked to max all the time, even when sitting next to a window. Some of them are, dare I say it, too bright for a normal office at maximum brightness (yet still dim for comfort in a pitch black room).
There are some good alternatives if your budget stretches to $1000, though: Samsung's 27" ViewFinity S9 comes to mind, with 2880p and 600 nits.
Lots and lots of people use 15.6" laptop with 1080p screen and are perfectly happy.
Every time I see people talk like this, I have to wonder who it is for.
Given that the smartphone industry also adopted high PPI displays as a minimum standard, it’s actually the external display industry that is the odd one out here. Low PPI displays should have gone the way of CRTs, but they cling on.
Retina displays have been around for more than 10 years now and are just much better than low-DPI displays. Especially for text and user interfaces. For movies or gaming it doesn't matter so much.
2. Aesthetic
3. Pretty colors
4. Nostalgia
It's simpler and better for both hardware makers and buyers to just keep refreshing instead of trying to get clever about who deserves the current series of chips in their form factor, assuming the refreshes are of similar cost, utility etc.
It is ugly. Especially i places like a reception, where the back of the screen is facing the customer. Plain and simple.
I'm not one of them, but I think many of us have had to convince partners that the big clunky monstrosity of a setup is actually cool...
Regular people want their homes to look nice. It's really important to them. We may think it's weird and stupid, but that's who they are, and it decides what computers they buy.
It’s also a usb c dock with a Ethernet port
Not sure about ppi and stuff, but works great for me.
Does anyone know of a good looking display, just a slab on a stand like imacs or Studio displays?
I want something good looking for the Linux PC in my living room but almost all monitors out there are just plain ugly and bulky. Ideally 27-32" but at this point i dont really care anymore...
Thanks!
Edit: For posterity the model I have is a U2724D.
Huawei mateview is also quite eye-candy.
As with many things, you pay for the atheistics.
I'm not sure of anything that fits the bill. Are you?
I've been feeling that: much about keeping my sanity in this age is about noticing those patterns we keep falling in and arranging for "easier" ways to fall into healthier patterns. The annoying thing is that it doesn't seem that those "unhealthy" patterns were that easy to predict in order to avoid. Like some 15 years ago would it have been as obvious that we would get to such a consistently predictable pattern of "comfy spot on the couch or bed" and the unhealthy social and personal repercussions of that?
I just wish I start being able to predict those pitfalls earlier than the current few years per tech evolution.
Slightly less worse would be one of those fold-out multi-monitor attachments that I've never seen in the wild either
That said, truly not caring what strangers at a coffee shop think about you is probably a great step toward a great life.
If you want to do it in a Panera or SBux go ahead but not in a local shop. Being conscientious is actually a good thing, believe it or not.
> That said, truly not caring what strangers at a coffee shop think about you is probably a great step toward a great life.
To an extent. But this is also how we get people watching social media clips at full volume in the cafe/bus/hiking trail. Which is a great step towards diminishing the life of everyone around you.
There's a very important distinction to be made between not caring what people think about your choices, and making choices that impose upon other people. Setting up a portable desktop at a coffee shop isn't imposing any more than hanging out at the same table with a laptop is. Blasting loud music from it is still a terrible thing to do.
I saw a guy with a Commodore PET at a coffee shop in Toronto once.
And more than once, I've been that guy with a TRS-80 at a Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf shop in Las Vegas.
A TV reporter who stopped in for coffee seemed interested in what I was doing, until he saw that I was just playing Monopoly.
Nobody's going to want to talk to you if you show up with a full iMac setup.
I mean, this seems like a dream but in a bad sense: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/01/imacs...
For sure and you get a nice workout hauling a full desktop computer around to coffee shops. A fun conversation starter too, I bet!
If you bring in a color printer and photo scanner, you can really get some work done. Just need to grab another table to fit it all. I am sure nobody would mind.
Not everyone wants a massive display. Not everyone wants cables everywhere. Not everyone cares about their keyswitches. Not everyone upgrades often enough for a few hundred more bucks to really make a difference.
It's got a bright and colorful design where a Mac mini and any third party monitor would just be silver/grey + black plastic. Everything works together, no decision making about compatibility, no extra purchases, it has a webcam, speakers, one power cable, only one customer support call if you need help with any of it, one warranty etc. It's quite far from the "same" computer as a Mac Mini.
"Why would anyone get Eames Lounge Chair? I can buy similar enough kit for a 20th of the price".
Since many of us are sort of keen on products this would be really, really good to remember :)
I would buy one in a heartbeat!
But basically no AIOs or monitors come anywhere near the "slab on a stand" look of current imacs/Studio displays - would love one for my next Linux PC though...
A Mac Mini is what I buy when I need a CI runner to run build, signature, and UI testing for macOS / iOS apps. I also have (one of) mine hooked up to a projector for home theater.
An iMac is what I buy my aging parents so that they can have an Internet terminal in the breakfast nook.
Totally different markets.
What's antiquated about it? It's the perfect monitor for most tasks. Very bright, high DPI. If you're typing a paper, this is going to be much better than a 15" laptop monitor.
A 32" gaming monitor is garbage once you're used to 216 ppi for creative work.
Realistically there is like 1 display from BenQ that even comes close spec wise.
Their target user will pay 1700 and have an incredible machine that does literally everything they want and probably won't need to upgrade for what, 5-10 years in a single purchase. Compared to having to buy a mouse, keyboard, speakers, webcam, and monitor.
Also having good speakers and a webcam is underrated. I use my wife's Studio Display sometimes and it's a real, real nice piece of hardware. I have a 5k LG ultrafine at work that's spec for spec similar but it feels like a toy in comparison (it's also like half the price though so).
The old Studio Display still goes for $900 used for 27” so it’s definitely a component of the cost that’s valued by the folks who do end up buying these. The PC market very much wants to disregard the ‘high PPI, well-calibrated color by default, built-in webcam and virtual surround speakers’ aspect of the iMac display but that’s worth the entire cost of the device to someone who wants that out of the box (except at that price you get 27” for display only :) Gaming and very large monitor folks may have more nuanced preferences but I can plonk down this iMac for any generic Mac user and they will be satisfied enough to get work done, barring field-specific technical requirements (primarily in thermals or extreme ram/cpu) that exclude use of an iMac regardless of cost.
You’ll have to be more specific about the manner of your dislike to convey how it may have bearing here — is your monitor preference for Mac use? What’s uniquely great about it to you that Apple’s display lacks? etc.
Everyone is entitled to their opinions I guess :P
I never cared about any of this until I had to help my wife with monitor shopping where colour accuracy & PPI is king, and spent some time testing these out. Hard to go back now.
I was using the 49" Samsung Ultrawide for years at work and now I feel like I can count the pixels.
The magic trackpad is nice, but really not required.
It’s all about segmentation of the market.
Apple has customers that want a small, well designed all in one computer that fits on a desk. If it has a pop of color, all the better. It is a customer segment that Apple knows well and has been serving since the first Macs.
There are many companies that want to address the market for a budget friendly small PC with an external monitor. There aren’t many that try to address this segment of the market.
For some people is pretty much priceless.
Also there's no cables to connect the monitor and the device making it all one thing you can pickup and move around, which people value as well. Also the difference between (900+$monitor+$mouse+$keyb) and $1700 is really not a lot of money for a lot of people, especially those people considering an Apple devices.
There's something to be said about the aesthetic of having everything in one, not having speakers and Webcams strewn across the place.
I still think it captures the ethos of why fairly well.
If my mum or dad asked me “should I get one of these?”, given how long they used their old iMac for (about 6-7 years), I wouldn’t hesitate to say yes. Would I buy one? No, perfectly happy with an MBP docked to a trio of dell ultrasharps (ignoring the notable lack of MST…)
24” or even 27” feels like such a downgrade.
Also please make the iMacs usable as external monitors agains. Would buy one as a “livingroom computer” instantly if it was also possible to occasionally use it as a docking station for an air..
If you have an older 5k iMac, there is an inexpensive third party hardware kit to convert it into a display with modern connectors.
There is no excuse other than laziness IMO. They likely decided not enough people use it and that they didn’t need to keep an excellent feature (total speculation to be fair). I can use iMovie to directly control/run playback from a dvcam from 2002 via like 4 daisy chained cables - including FireWire 400 - but they can’t connect an iMac anymore over thunderbolt 4 after supporting that for over a decade? Nah. Maybe there is a legitimate reason but I am incredibly skeptical.
They dropped it when the cable and connector standards of the day didn't support a display that big.
That's not laziness, it's a technical limitation.
Now that we have newer high bandwidth connection standards, you can once again use a newer iMac as an external display over a thunderbolt connection.
That’s not a technical limitation, that’s laziness. Go read more about this. It simply doesn’t work anymore without 3rd party solutions.
If you're OK with video compression artifacts, you can even do it over a WiFi connection.
Target display mode, the feature that allowed this, is no longer supported.
At least you can finally acknowledge reality.
Also, VLC over a wired connection and streaming from one Mac to another using WiFi (AirPlay) are built into the OS.
> It simply doesn’t work anymore without 3rd party solutions.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50266629
You know what I am saying. This is a dumb argument and I’m moving on.
But with the 2017 revision, they had a displayport 1.4 GPU in there, and there was no good reason for leaving display target mode out.
And they've left it out ever since.
Streaming compressed video with a significant latency penalty doesn't count. But if it we act like it does count, then they lose their excuse for removing target display in the first place, because even in 2014 it was possible to do 4:2:0 5K @ 60Hz over a normal connector. That looks better than compressed video does!
Would just be nice if I could buy the monitors from apple too.
iPad docking station too
And I don't need to run games at full resolution.
6K at 32" would be the same density as 5K at 27"
The generation doesn't mater as much to me as the memory bandwidth. When that day comes, I'd rather have a M1 Max 64GB over a M5 Pro 64GB.
I am one of those: bought the M1 Max with 64gb thinking in running VMs, afterward bought a lighter Air with less memory and ended up using the M1 Max as a kind of luxury for LLMs and multicore computing.
The only hope we have is the AI bubble bursting, but that will undoubtedly come with its own set of macroeconomic surprises.
The fabs are terrified to overscale in case the market collapses before the builds are complete.
> AI datacenter provisioning will go down
Depends on political opposition at both local and national levels. Hard to predict the future, which feeds into the previous point.
Supply is not elastic and responds very much slower than demand. There's no conspiracy or corruption needed for this result.
Have you not seen Micron or Sandisk stock?
Micron's stock price did go way up, after they stopped selling DRAM to the consumer market. It has been flat for several months though.
For comparison, SK Hynix stock is flat YoY and Samsung's stock did go up this year, but has come back down a bit (they're also much more diversified). Those are the only other companies outside of China that actually make DRAM at scale. There's also CXMT, which is making inroads, but its stock is not traded on any open markets, and the company is heavily backed by the Chinese government.
I don't know man?
The generation kind of does matter. I'm not gonna lie, matrix multiplication units speed things up considerably. That hardware confers a material change in capability.
Maybe from M5 up, it doesn't matter? But you're definitely going to notice the difference between M1 and M5 for instance.
And now if you stretch you can run DeepSeek Flash 4.1.
And if you were willing to roll up your sleeves you could build your own AI lab at home and run this model and models like GLM Flash 5.3 and DeepSeek Flash V4.1 at lower quants. The budget GPUs (like V100) are kind of not budget now, but still <5K to acquire 128GB of fast VRAM that can compete with a 5090 and actually has a lot more interesting options available IMO.
Dense models also don't like quantization as much and are less tolerant of it. There are some very interesting smaller models like https://huggingface.co/nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-Labs-Dory1.0-4... Dory that I would check out. You need system RAM or to stream a larger MoE model from disk and it won't be fast. You need to specialize the models some to get quality results if you have very limited system resources.
It will show you on the model selection IF a model fits and if you use a "Qwen 3.8-35B-A3B" type of model, it should just work out of the box. A3B stands for Active which means you need a lot less fast ram.
You will run into issues fast though: If you have big tasks for it to do, your pc/mac will get warm very fast and noisy and you will cosume relevant more energy.
And as you mention: yeah small context!
Its still not that practical in my opinion.
Are you sure or is this new?
https://github.com/Niko1221/Strata/
My setup is a Ryzen 3600, 90GB DDR4 allocated to a VM (don’t even really need that much, just had it available, special thanks to the year 2024), and an RX 9060XT 16GB ($500 GPU).
I get around 40-60 tok/s depending on the quantization level I choose.
As you can see, the CPU is nothing special, don’t even need DDR5.
I asked Claude to come up with 7 problems to solve that were not part of any benchmarks. Besides speed, I asked it to put together a scoring that would reflect models that perform well on the 7 problems and in a reasonable time-frame (RWS, the definition is in the artifact). I valued models that produced good answers in a reasonable time better than models that had very high throughput but kept spitting useless stuff. Overall, IIRC most of them still had a >30% chance of producing wrong/non-working replies.
I then tested Strata ( https://github.com/niko1221/strata ) and the results are not even close. You can basically ignore everything in that table and use Strata instead, you can use bigger/less-quantized models and have way better results. Basically any otherwise-decent model degrades noticeably at Q < 5, and KV cache at Q4 also contributes a lot.
Still, a 20$/mo Claude subscription is way cheaper/more efficient if you code 2-3h in the evening than running stuff locally, unless you really have hardware than can hold models that get most things right at the first try. You can iterate way faster and cover a lot more ground in 2-3h using a Claude subscription, or OpenRouter if you prefer to change models. You get faster replies that are 99% correct at the first try, whereas using the local model you'd be spending 30% of your time fixing things that don't work and prompting it to do better.
Nowadays I use the local model to delegate tasks that would burn a lot of tokens, like sifting through big data archives for indexing and such.
This is not about if a frontier AI provider is cheaper. It is about having control over your data and use of AI.
https://stealthgoat.com/fnfl/pelicans.html
Also YMMV in “faster” — I have less than 5K into my home AI lab shenanigans and it’s pretty fast :)
Yes, but like original poster I have 16GB of VRAM and 64GB of RAM, I was referring to non-Strata benchmarks :)
I did quickly run a couple things on Strata but haven't gotten around yet to benchmark bigger models/customize them with Strata, but will do rather soon. So far Strata/Swift IQ2_XS performed really well compared to non-Strata/Qwen3.8 quantized variants.
> This is not about if a frontier AI provider is cheaper. It is about having control over your data and use of AI.
Yep, totally get it, and to be honest getting to run ablated models sometimes can also be useful.
> Also YMMV in “faster” — I have less than 5K into my home AI lab shenanigans and it’s pretty fast :)
My rig is... ~1.5k, maybe 3k if we count the CPU and GPU upgrade since 2019 :-D I really wanted to grab one of the latest mini-PCs (Halo, Spark, and other minor assemblers) for local setup, but to be honest I can't justify a 6k+ purchase for me and my wife alone. Perhaps in 3 years these mini-PCs will get to the ~2k ballpark (perhaps used), and although older by then, I might be able to run things 24/7 locally as well.
Get a couple or V100S GPU. Figure out cooling. They will run it /fast/ with the right engine. :)
So it depends on what you're doing. Using it for a fun oracle without feeding it too much context per turn? Sure, an older Max chip is great.
As a coding agent doing meaningful work on a sizable project? Compared to a cheap as chips cloud option, it will take an order of magnitude more time to complete.
It feels just as fast as day 1 and I've never had any speed issues. Say what you want about Apple and their pricing and ecosystem but I've been using their hardware for over 20 years now and it's always been top notch.
If you buy their support/AppleCare, your support and warranty is excellent too. They don't skimp. I've seen them go so far past the extra mile it's unreal.
Definitely grabbing 128 GB + for the next machine.
I jest...but I'm disgusted by the price gouging going on. Glad my hardware is relatively recent and I had mostly maxed out already when I bought it a few years back. The same setup today would be closer to $7k with equivalent parts.
Isn't it also rumored that the M7 is reworked for AI?
And Xiaomi announced their AI Cube with 1.2t of bandwidth. Just because Nvidia is protecting its business by giving consumers either compute or bandwidth and Apple being something in between, doesn't mean we can't get both a lot better balanced.
I'm gonna max out most of the specs on the next one I get, would feel insanely wasteful to do that now.
Yes the latest chip is better but the rumor is that the M7 has either more/better parts for LLM math OR that it has significiant changes to memory bandwidth too.
This is the first time I’ve ever kept a computer this long and never really felt like it needed to be upgraded. I suppose this is a bit of a gift and a curse for Apple.
But well, they'll survive :) Their M-series was a stroke of luck considering AI.
Then again the people working on stuff involving this much local model compute demands probably make enough where they don't care about the couple grand they'd save building their own node. I guess apple will get the bag from being the nicest prebuilt out there in this case.
Mini PC with Occulink, EGPU dock, 750w power supply and a refurbished 3090 is 2500. It can run Gemma4:31b at 1000+ tok/sec prefill, ~40 tok/sec generation (which is slow, but a fully connected model is way better for all tasks)
if you want more specialized partial activation models like Qwen, you can get 100+ tok/sec generation.
This beats anything that Apple has by a long shot. You don't need to run large models for usefulness. Large models can get things write the first time, but thats their only advantage. Running small models that are good enough like gemma4:31b fast allows you to do faster iterations.
And if you really want, you can also do multi GPU setups if you want slightly slower model loading with usb4/thunderbolt ports.
TLDR; local ai has already been useful for quite some time if you arent brainwashed into believing that Macs are the best for running local inference.
Before you make assumptions, there are valid reasons for the choice I made:
I paid $1k for a refurbished M1 Max 64GB macbook that can run Qwen 3.8 27B at 24tok/sec (looks like they are about $1.5k on ebay). In my case, Apple was a lot cheaper (used) if you're looking at price-per-token. Yes, it's almost twice as slow as a 3090, but it's also half the price /performance ratio.
Qwen 3.8 27B Q4 with 64k:
3090: ~40tok/sec
M1 Max : ~24tok/sec (MLX)
In fact, the Max can even do 265k context which isn't possible with a single 3090 last I checked (without dropping to Q3-Q2)
Try more like 70-130 tok/sec. https://github.com/L-Forster/open-jet/tree/master/megakernel.
And also Qwen models famously chase benchmarks. They are good for writing code, but fall behind in other areas. Gemma4:31B is 6gb larger and does a much better job across all areas. https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1vyzopv/gemma4_...
Go ahead and run Gemma4 on your M1, and you will find that its unusable at 12 tok/sec.
And this is also not touching prefill, which is the biggest thing that you need fast, and Apple sucks in this regard compared to nvidia cards. With gfx cards, you can throw big codebases at the local models and it will happily crunch through them in very little time.
Sure, spending 1.5k on a Macbook enables you to run a local model, and if you really have a good reason for running local (like running heretic/abliterated models) for tasks you don't mind waiting for, it works. The difference is, spend 1k more and let you never have to pay for tokens, and you can run inference all day long without your computer thermal throttling, like your Macbook.
And I don't need to make assumptions when you say idiotic stuff like "We're getting close to local AI being really useful", like you have any idea what you are talking about. On par with being an Apple fan though.
I'm one of those Mac users, but I do have a linux tower for remote dev work and LLMs.
Gemma4:31b, which is the better model with more complex architecture (and thus can't be compiled into a megakernel), is gonna be way slower in prefill, and ~50% slower than a 3090 even with oMLX. You can't get away from much slower shared ram vs vram, and less parallelism compared to 3090.
The other advantage of an eGPU setup, you can simply add/swap performance. Dual 4070s give you 24b of ram and you can still get about 80% of the performance of a single 3090, and actually you get faster prefill due to more parallelism.
So in terms of money/usefulness, Mac always loses.
Though I have had good results buying 1-2 generation old refurbished Macs as my secondary machines or for family members who don’t need cutting edge everything.
It’s even more valuable now that Apple silicon of every generation is more than enough to run every non-power user use case short of newer video games.
It only makes sense for niche use cases, like your grandpa who is happy to have a single spot in his home for the computer, or a reception desk at a business, etc.
This is basically 99% of the proposition of the iMac at this point. If you don't need the specific all-in-one, color, and other design aspects of the iMac or can afford a Studio display, there's no reason not to buy some other display + a Mac mini or a laptop + display
If you need to push performance you'd probably go for a Mac Studio, no? Or at least a Mini.
I did have a 2010 Mac mini server, don't remember how it compared to the non-server one other than having dual HDDs instead of the DVD drive. I put them in RAID-1.
If you need portability, you have your phone already.
On a desktop you view face on, who fucking cares how thin it is?
"And we’re just getting started."
It is an Apple machine, yes.
I'm surprised they haven't yet gone the route of making a hyper thin screen and hiding the actual cpu somewhere else (something akin tot he puck for the Apple Vision display). Hell you could probably do a proprietary wireless signal and have the display be completely detached. (Or existing wifi6 or something?)
The edges of the thin monitor could be actual transparent glass.
It’s too bad. A high end iMac still holds a lot of appeal, especially for those seeking clean desk setups. I’m using an MBP hooked up to dual monitors through a dock right now and it’s fine, but I do miss how clean my desk was back when it was a VESA mounted iMac Pro and companion monitor.
the iMac returned to its roots as the “family computer” or “grandma email box” kind of machine.
What's the appeal there? Doing big-RAM-requirement stuff that just won't run on a laptop?
So if I’m going to have a machine always sitting on my desk at home anyway, it may as well be a desktop with fewer compromises and no battery to slowly degrade while never getting used.
A nice bonus is that it takes a lot more to make the fans on a desktop noisy relative to what it takes on an MBP, and if there’s one thing I dislike about computers it’s fan noise.
Nowadays, the M series chips are so powerful that I’ve not had a real need to use my Studio and work mainly using my M2 Air.
I’ve kept that philosophy over the years, the MBA was replaced by the 2017 12” retina MacBook and then again with the 13” M2 MBA. The Mini gave way to the 2018 Mini, then a M1 Max Studio. I even attempted replacing the MacBook with an iPad though that didn’t really workout.
It’s the best of both worlds really, enough power to do everything when on the go and even more power back at the office.
0: https://elliotjaystocks.com/blog/a-note-about-my-new-mac-set...
24" is a good size for casual users which is the main market. You can have two roomy-ish GUI apps (two web pages, etc) side by side.
This has been reported for many months. Sorry if you missed the news, but if you need a much higher memory variant the M5 Pro/Max are what’s available this cycle.
Peripherals not included.
To be honest, I doubt we're going to see iMacs with very high RAM any time soon. RAM is expensive and most people buying high-RAM machines want to bring their own monitor, not get an all-in-one with a small-ish screen.
That's not what they said. I gathered they were waiting for an iMac refresh, with the hopes that iMac Pro would get an upgrade. Hence the "would be nice to have some kind of a pro model"
> most people buying high-RAM machines want to bring their own monitor
The 27" iMac Pro 5K is holding its value pretty well on second-hand markets, despite its age. The Mac Studio replaced the Mac Pro, not the iMac Pro.
Sam predicted price-per-transistor-per-square-inch density would asymptote, while Leslie predicted it would level off and then regress.
Leslie's Law is in full effect, it seems.
That said, I don't believe that SSDs can feel pain, so I am quite happy for the OS to thrash them as much as necessary. The fear of SSD failure is massively overblown IMO.
Everything I use, almost literally everything, is either cloud or a box I’m ssh’d into.
I can see how I’m the exception, though.
https://omlahore.github.io/RemoveMacAI/
The angry ghost of Steve Jobs must HAUNT Cupertino. Plug and Play is now Plug, install de-bloat software and multiple extensions to de-crappify your machine, then play.
Or at least give us the option for a black display surround. The white bezel around the display is such an eyesore...
0: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iMac+Intel+27-Inch+EMC+2309+...
1: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iMac+M3+24-Inch+Teardown:+Ap...
I used to put post-its on mine too.
I would love to have a pink one for my MBP!
£700/£800 buys you a 24" display (with an unspecified refresh rate, so presumably 60Hz), a keyboard, and a mouse. I loved my 27" iMac to pieces, but it's really hard to justify buying this thing today.
That's about $1000, and it buys you a 32" 4K OLED panel with a high refresh rate, better than anything the Mac has. That's the kind of monitor you would pair with a gaming rig though, and probably overkill for the kind of office use the Mac is intended for.
If I were buying a display for work (which is to say, mostly programming), my choice would probably be the £600 BenQ RD280UG — a 28" 3840x2560 display, which is 4k vertically enlarged to a 3:2 ratio.
The ECC in DDR5 is on-die ECC and that's not "real" ECC, it's what DDR5 needs to not fail. Side-band ECC is the standard method, employing extra memory chips and 72bit memory. OEMs mix these in the marketing materials to fool the users into thinking they buy the better option.
Intel is weird with their stuff like that, I wrote about how they introduced and then dropped an SHA instruction that could be used to optimize hashing (useful for things like block checksum hashes on storage servers) before: https://neosmart.net/blog/will-amds-ryzen-finally-bring-sha-...
Her eyes were much less tired at the end of the day.
It’s nice for games but I don’t really care for productivity use. In fact in that situation I’d take integer-scaled HiDPI density over refresh rate in that scenario.
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/mxk53am/a/magic-mouse-usb...
If it were back to 27" and hidpi screen again it might make sense
We thought long and hard about a Mac Mini — and not happy about going from 27" to 24" — but a Studio Display doubles the price and he's not willing to take another chance on third-party stuff.
Mechanically straightforward since it’s all in one. Pretty much just the power cable, keyboard and mouse. Pretty unbreakable ux wise, reliably sleeps with little power draw and wakes up quickly without them questioning if it’s broken. Reasonably unobtrusive updates so they don’t go turning them off. Etc.
My mother is still using my old iMac 2013 (the sceen is literally seprated from the body and the damp thing has an issue that sometimes make system task go 1000% of CPU)
The screen was always the selling point. Who even needs a 24" overpriced monitor?
Would have bought one otherwise.
Says the guy who provides no examples of an equivalent machine that costs less.
If you're going to be critical of Apple, at least provide a link to a Dell machine that's ugly, made of plastic, and has worse specs. It's HN tradition.
It’s just a really good looking computer, especially with the accessories. Give me one with an M6 Pro and a 128GB memory cap, and they can take my money as I move my homelab and AI compute onto it.