Nano-texture upgrade option is coming for the whole line of products.
Edit: the thing I'm confused about is it seems there are at least two but maybe three different things that they are calling "nano-texture". On buying screens, the Studio Display and iPad Mini say "Nano-texture glass" and the new MacBook Pro says "Nano-texture display." But the Duo marketing says "Nano-texture finish."
I get that the internal Duo screen has the film over it and so it says "finish," but is there a difference between "glass" and "display"?
"Nano-texture glass" and "Nano-texture display" should refer to the same: A microscopic etching into the display glass.
"Nano-texture finish" on iPhone Duo refers to an additional layer they put on top of the display panel. It's basically a sticker with a similar (same?) surface structure (they can't put it on the display glass itself because it's too thin)
I get glass vs finish. But there's a third term being used for the new M6 MacBook Pro, which is nano-texture "display." Someone clarified that it's the same as the "glass" so I take this to just be Day 1 marketing confusion that'll hopefully get cleaned up on the buying screen.
They are very similar, but maybe not identical. The iPad nano-texture reportedly is less prone to fingerprints than at least the XDR monitor; perhaps that’s just an additional oleophobic coating. There may also be generational differences as these weren’t introduced at the same time and may come from different production lines.
Really just function of mobility? Move a lot? 15-16 is combersome. Stationary often, maybe just roaming from your desk to your couch/bed? 16 is totally fine.
I'm in the 14-15 camp w/ lighter form factors being worth the premium.
I tried below 13 after the trend of smaller laptops from a couple years back - I now don't believe anyone who tells me they're regularly productive on these smaller form factors lol.
Apple has moved from a "Big day out" of marketing per year, where all product lineups would be announced, with novelty and conferences, to rolling releases along the year.
Man every time I want to get a new macbook air they come up with a new macbook pro which means 6 months later they're going to come up with a new generation of airs by which time I think "let me wait a bit and see if people like it", and so here I am with a 2022 M2 that is perfectly fine except for the disk being too small.
I'm still on my early 2022 macbook 14" M1, which I was thoughtful enough to get 64gb ram for at the time, and remain still incredibly happy. M6 must be nuts!
For those who can't see the video, I think the above two commenters are being facetious for humor.
It is funny because the video is 50 minutes long which requires a difficult soldering job and chip reprogramming. This does not include the process of opening the Macbook Pro, disassembling it, removing the logic board, nor the reverse process.
They are soldered in. Replacement itself can probably be done by a professional repair technician who is equipped with the right tools. But it is not a self-service job that anyone can do.
On top of that, the drives might be somehow paired to the motherboard. And I would imagine that pairing a new one with the existing motherboard may require some proprietary software that only Apple has.
These are only my assumptions though. People e.g. at Louis Rossmann's repair shop might know more.
Apple does not use common parts for its storage. People are used to M.2 drives, but those have the controller on the stick, and Apple has integrated the controller inside its M-series. So you first need to find compatible storage in the first place, and the only place it can come from is a donor Mac.
Of course it does! You just have to go to a Genius Bar after the release of a new MacBook, and tell them you're interested in buying one. They'll even handle recycling your old one for you!
I still have the original M1 Pro (thankfully with enough disk space) and I still don't really see a reason to upgrade. Since the M1 all these MacBooks are more than powerful enough for anything I might want to do and the original battery life was so good an upgrade would harldy be worth it.
Yeah you Mac users are spoiled. I bought this Framework 13 with the Ryzen 5 340 last year and was blown away at how fast it was, only to discover that it's roughly on par with the M1 Pro that came out 4 years earlier (and has much better battery life).
I don't _need_ the battery life and still prefer to run Linux so the tradeoff is worth it to me, but for most users it's pretty hard to not recommend a Macbook.
> I don't _need_ the battery life and still prefer to run Linux so the tradeoff is worth it to me, but for most users it's pretty hard to not recommend a Macbook.
The thing is I never had a Mac(Book) before, but the hardware at the time was just so much ahead of anything else that I didn't mind that limitation. At least for what I bought it any OS (Windows/MacOS/Linux) would have been totally fine.
Yeah, I'm still on a 2021 M1 Pro and the only real complaint is that the battery has weakened somewhat, but still fine. and if I really cared I would probably figure out what to do to get firefox from being such a constant drain.
I bought my 2022 M2 Air with 24GB/1TB/10-core GPU. Very very glad I did.
The only reason I’m bitter is because they put in WiFi 6E in the M3 generation. Now I just use a 2.5Gbe USB-C adaptor when transferring large files to and from my NAS.
I picked up a 24GB 2TB M2 air and it's still cruising along. Short of having the foresight to pick up 512GB Ultra prior to the rampocalypse, I'm happy.
In terms of performance, the difference is active cooling. That will matter to people who are regularly doing sustained CPU or GPU intensive workloads.
The Pro has a bigger brighter ProMotion display. It has active cooling, larger speakers, more ports, longer battery life, better graphics performance, better keyboard, and a larger default storage option (starts at 1tb).
If the Base M6 is good enough processor for you but want a more "premium" product, then the base Pro makes sense.
It seems that you can only get 32GBs of RAM maximum for the new 14" M6 Macbooks? M5 still has 64GB options available. edit: the larger configurations are only available for the Pro and Max chips apparently.
Great hardware, but I can't stand MacOS anymore after switching to Linux on home dekstop. KDE is such a breath of fresh air after years of dealing with Apple's idiosyncrasies.
Yeah I use KDE as well for my desktop and it’s the perfect environment. (Btw I use Arch)
Still I’m very tempted by the new MacBooks. I don’t know of any laptop that is a tenth as good and I don’t want to sit at my desk all day to use a computer.
I’m using KDE on the gaming box I recently transitioned away from Windows as well as on a secondary single-use laptop where Linux has been installed for a while.
It’s not bad, but I find it still to be very much an acquired taste. It’s fine for my usage, where the DE has barely any impact but having been using macOS as my main OS for the better part of 30 years, it would probably drive me insane if I had to shift my main body of computer use to it. It’s not any one thing, but dozens of papercuts that can’t be configured away (I’d need to maintain my own fork to fix them) as well as the more Windows-like desktop paradigm.
In theory maybe, but in reality it’s a full-time job keeping up with changes from mainline with big projects like KDE, which isn’t very practical if you need to do other things to keep a paycheck coming in.
I would buy apple hardware instantly if you could seamlessly install Linux on it just like a PC. Even if you had to "burn a fuse" to permanently detached it from Apples support and ecosystem.
I love and respect what Asahi has done but I want apple to support a turn key, open drivers, everything works, system.
I purchase the hardware, I should be able to do what I want with it. I want apple hardware for the good processor specs and battery life and general hardware quality.
Apple should be forced to release the necessary hardware specs to develop drivers so that I can use my hardware I purchased as I want. They should be required to let me own my own signing keys to boot my own software.
Anyway, I'd personally want bootcamp because it's a step closer to being able to install Linux, an operating system that lets me have a good tiling window manager that works.
Why the heck would anyone want to use macOS willingly, where the window manager and file browser are both complete unconfigurable trash.
There's just no getting "then don't buy it" for people who obviously don't agree with Apple's terms and conditions, is there? Not every product sold in the market will be done your way, and you can't act oppressed here because if you don't like Apple computers, you have a ton of other options...
Apple's terms are completely arbitrary. People will complain about this until the computers are capable of it again, because there is no legitimate technical reason that Apple Silicon cannot support third-party OSes.
I recently snagged a really good deal on a Macbook (very nice hardware!), but the more I use it, the more I struggle with macOS (even though a few utilities can help bring some of Windows' features).
I used to be able to completely boot into Windows on my Intel mac a few years ago, but Apple no longer supports it for some reason. It's a shame, especially since the ARM64 version of Windows 11 has gotten very good now.
It would also be nice to be able to install Linux too. It's my own hardware, after all!
Are you sure? It is my understanding that Parallels is just a VM, like VMWare Fusion, and that there's no way to natively dual boot Windows on Apple Silicon.
Looks like you're right about Linux though, I didn't know about Asahi Linux. Thank you for sharing.
It achieves the same thing or close enough. Apple isn't going to spend engineering resources (i.e. time and money) to build an easy way to install Windows. There isn't really a point for them to do so. There are other ways around it to be able to actually install Windows 11 specifically but Parallels is going to be your best bet.
Sadly I also can't natively install my Nintendo Switch software on my Xbox.
Apple is spending engineering resources every day to _prevent you_ from installing what you want on your own device. They're actively spending R&D money to fuck you over.
For LLMs (apart from Apple's foundation models) the M1 Max still holds its own for the most part.
The base M6 is faster (much much faster) than the M1 Max at prefill (compute bound).
The M1 Max outperforms the base M6 at token generation; this is memory-bandwidth-bound, and while the M1 Max can't actually saturate its memory bandwidth, it gets a lot closer with the GPU.
So I suspect the M6 is better if your AI tasks are decision-based or video/image based, and the M1 Max is better if you're running a coding LLM. Though prefill is a bit of an issue.
Interesting choice of pic...a guy with a military camo hat, laptop propped up on a hardshell field deployment case...but in a crop field. That's quite a departure from Appe's usual creatives sipping soy lattes vibe
To me it looks like farmers or biologists that use a MacBook because it is durable and has excellent battery life (or at least that seems to be the message when you read the rest of the announcement).
Edit: the thing I'm confused about is it seems there are at least two but maybe three different things that they are calling "nano-texture". On buying screens, the Studio Display and iPad Mini say "Nano-texture glass" and the new MacBook Pro says "Nano-texture display." But the Duo marketing says "Nano-texture finish."
I get that the internal Duo screen has the film over it and so it says "finish," but is there a difference between "glass" and "display"?
"Nano-texture finish" on iPhone Duo refers to an additional layer they put on top of the display panel. It's basically a sticker with a similar (same?) surface structure (they can't put it on the display glass itself because it's too thin)
> Made with soft, non-abrasive material, the Polishing Cloth cleans any Apple display, including nano-texture, safely and effectively.
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/10/25/macbook-pro-with-touchs...
It's much, much easier to transport even though I do miss the screen real estate.
I'm in the 14-15 camp w/ lighter form factors being worth the premium.
I tried below 13 after the trend of smaller laptops from a couple years back - I now don't believe anyone who tells me they're regularly productive on these smaller form factors lol.
Love both.
Do they get the same marketing impact?
https://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#mac https://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#ipad
"You didn't even finish your M2 yet and already want to refill your plate?"
If you throw enough money at a sufficiently skilled technician it can be done, but no M.2 slots in sight here.
It is funny because the video is 50 minutes long which requires a difficult soldering job and chip reprogramming. This does not include the process of opening the Macbook Pro, disassembling it, removing the logic board, nor the reverse process.
On top of that, the drives might be somehow paired to the motherboard. And I would imagine that pairing a new one with the existing motherboard may require some proprietary software that only Apple has.
These are only my assumptions though. People e.g. at Louis Rossmann's repair shop might know more.
Plus it runs Asahi linux on the metal.
I don't _need_ the battery life and still prefer to run Linux so the tradeoff is worth it to me, but for most users it's pretty hard to not recommend a Macbook.
The thing is I never had a Mac(Book) before, but the hardware at the time was just so much ahead of anything else that I didn't mind that limitation. At least for what I bought it any OS (Windows/MacOS/Linux) would have been totally fine.
The only reason I’m bitter is because they put in WiFi 6E in the M3 generation. Now I just use a 2.5Gbe USB-C adaptor when transferring large files to and from my NAS.
Makes me now wonder what's in store for tomorrow's pro launch.
If the Base M6 is good enough processor for you but want a more "premium" product, then the base Pro makes sense.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48672732 https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/apple-raises-pric...
I think I'll keep my Framework 13 Pro preorder.
Still I’m very tempted by the new MacBooks. I don’t know of any laptop that is a tenth as good and I don’t want to sit at my desk all day to use a computer.
It’s not bad, but I find it still to be very much an acquired taste. It’s fine for my usage, where the DE has barely any impact but having been using macOS as my main OS for the better part of 30 years, it would probably drive me insane if I had to shift my main body of computer use to it. It’s not any one thing, but dozens of papercuts that can’t be configured away (I’d need to maintain my own fork to fix them) as well as the more Windows-like desktop paradigm.
At least this is an option with Linux
Exactly how I feel about having to use macOS at work, except some of the 'configurations away' are overpriced plugins/third party tools.
I love and respect what Asahi has done but I want apple to support a turn key, open drivers, everything works, system.
Apple should be forced to release the necessary hardware specs to develop drivers so that I can use my hardware I purchased as I want. They should be required to let me own my own signing keys to boot my own software.
Anyway, I'd personally want bootcamp because it's a step closer to being able to install Linux, an operating system that lets me have a good tiling window manager that works.
Why the heck would anyone want to use macOS willingly, where the window manager and file browser are both complete unconfigurable trash.
How about suffer a lightly deoptimized workflow on one platform for the interoperability of the ecosystem…?
If you could install linux, however, then I would buy one yesterday.
https://asahilinux.org/
I used to be able to completely boot into Windows on my Intel mac a few years ago, but Apple no longer supports it for some reason. It's a shame, especially since the ARM64 version of Windows 11 has gotten very good now.
It would also be nice to be able to install Linux too. It's my own hardware, after all!
You can install both Windows and Linux on MacBooks. For Windows you may need to buy Parallels[1] or something but you can do it.
[1] https://www.parallels.com/products/desktop/
Looks like you're right about Linux though, I didn't know about Asahi Linux. Thank you for sharing.
Sadly I also can't natively install my Nintendo Switch software on my Xbox.
As for linux, https://asahilinux.org/ currently supports M1/M2 quite well, and is approaching ready on M3+
You might be better off waiting for an Asahi linux update.
The base M6 is faster (much much faster) than the M1 Max at prefill (compute bound).
The M1 Max outperforms the base M6 at token generation; this is memory-bandwidth-bound, and while the M1 Max can't actually saturate its memory bandwidth, it gets a lot closer with the GPU.
So I suspect the M6 is better if your AI tasks are decision-based or video/image based, and the M1 Max is better if you're running a coding LLM. Though prefill is a bit of an issue.
They missed a chance to have the lady holding an iPad though.