New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro(apple.com) |
New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro(apple.com) |
I can't hate a direction where Apple becomes more about building great computers rather than trying to force more and more subscriptions. I do wish they would fix many of the long-standing OS and native app problems.
My daily driver personal machines are incredible pieces of kit, but everything is always getting worse because majority of software is some SaaS living in the cloud, or even if on-desktop is constantly updating slop.
Why does it take 10 seconds for my streaming music app to open when my machine is 10-20 cores, 32GB+ RAM, high bandwidth NVMe storage, and I am connected to gigabit fiber internet? The thing is autoplaying videos, and has about 10 different panes clearly owned by different product managers that hate each other. Half the time its pushing me some pop-up dialog I don't care about.
Winamp in 1998 took about 2 seconds to load.
Most people simply don't care about using well-made software so long as it gets the job done because they don't even look at other options. I suppose this is how carpenters feel when they see ubiquitous IKEA furniture.
I really miss when vendors would run the SPEC benchmark suite and performance was quantitative, and not qualitative.
“Results are compared to previous-generation Mac mini systems with Apple M4, 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, 32GB of unified memory, and 2TB SSD.”
I paid $499 for my M4 back in April with the academic discount since I predicted the next generation base model would cost more. Sadly my prediction was correct: $599 to $899 is steep. I understand why; the prices of DIMMs, GPUs, and SSDs have also skyrocketed. But $899 for a base Mac Mini is painful, even if the alternatives on the current market are also painfully expensive.
/s
Apple's software holds the hardware back, and it's ugly (especially liquid glass!)
Wait for the product to be publicly available if you want in depth testing.
That trend of the last several decades has been completely destroyed in the last year or so. Sure you can buy a new computer that might be slightly better than one a few years old, but it will be significantly more expensive to the point where an upgrade is almost certainly not worth it unless money is no object. Even replacing a computer from the pre-AI era would be virtually impossible at anywhere near what it cost you to buy it new unless it was verging on truly ancient by computer standards. Computers have always been a counterpoint to inflation everywhere else, but now that seems to be not only no longer true, but computer costs are inflating significantly worse than other goods.
I find myself increasingly in favor of the movement against data centers. Not because I think data centers are bad on their own, but because of the hording of computing resources they represent and the impact that has on people trying to buy any sort of computing device for their personal use. The PC I built 2 years ago is basically irreplaceable at anywhere near the price I paid for it. That's a truly unacceptable state of affairs in personal computing.
The industry has little incentive to fix this problem and as the market shrinks so does the incentive.
We lived thru the PC revolution. It looks over now to me.
Whether OEMs like Apple pass these savings along to consumers is tbd though.
What will happen once people are priced out of buying computers? I find this worrying.
We've been through.. 4? 5? memory boom-bust-boom cycles already. Nothing is pointing to this one being any different, aside it probably becoming the mother of all busts since AI isn't adding much productivity and as businesses realize this, they'll stop paying top dollar for access meaning AI vendors cancel all their reserved fab capacity.
The fabs already exist at that point so it's less of a loss for the memory fabs to crank out memory chips and have the RAM OEMs sell them at bargain bin prices. No pseudo-cartel pricing possible either with CMXT becoming a major player. $50 for 32GB-64GB of DDR5 in 2029 here we come babyy
If it persists for years people will have time to spin up more fabs and meet demand
What happens is that people start buying Chinese mini PCs, some of those even have spyware preinstalled along with another malware that is Windows 11
The m6 with same specs are $2000.
Also m4 Mac mini seem to now be in stock on their refurbished store.
I’m sure some kind capitalist will be happy to rent them a thin client linked to a computer in the cloud.
Same with my M1 Air for being on the move, even notebooks would be more expensive than they’re worth.
It will last longer and hopefully the GPU prices will recover in a few years.
I hope
My son is using my old ~2011 Mac mini with Linux Mint on it. Slow but works.
If you are running Steam in the background, one of the buttons triggers an HUD keyboard, where the left trackpad types keys on the left side of the keyboard and the right trackpad for the right side of the keyboard. My guess is the new controller works the same way.
Also, some media center software, such as Kodi, have gamepad support. So a gamepad will feel completely natural to control it without having to resort to using the mouse and HUD keyboard.
Personal assistant (e.g. openclaw) in the mac ecosystem. You need external models to power it ofc, but cool to have all the Apple integration and local network in your assistant. The claw can be addressed in multiple ways and can command your local hardware if you so wish.
Not that they're a bad deal now, but at European prices of over €1000 for M6/16GB/256GB it's a psychological barrier that's been broken.
I can't justify a more than 2x price increase for what I'm guessing are marginal improvements. I want to replace my home lab but as it stands my underpowered NAS will have to continue as it has the past few years
We should be buying European solutions anyway. Different psychological barrier that was broken long before.
(250,000 pre-orders, vs now ~5000 sales/quarter)
Don't give them ideas...
I don't care how the M6 compares to the M1, even when the M6 2.3x compared to M1 in Excel spreadsheet. That is no measurement even in accounting. The dead time is not the Excel.
I am to only one?
170GB/s memory bandwidth Configurable up to 32GB unified memory
307GB/s memory bandwidth Configurable up to 64GB unified memory
That is also the factor you want to take into account for AI inference, of course.
- Apple M5 Ultra chip
- 30-core CPU with 10 super cores and 20 performance cores
- 64-core GPU
- Neural Accelerators
- Hardware-accelerated ray tracing
- 32-core Neural Engine
- 1.2TB/s memory bandwidth
one point 2 terrabyte a second memory bandwidth....
512gb coming later this year
but at the cost of a small car
I just wait for practical real live numbers with real stacks i use.
And btw. they reduced the memory bandwdith on the M4 in comparision to its previous version by 40gb/sec or so, you need to wait to see.
Says 1.2x for multithreaded and doesn't specify (I presume smaller) for single-threaded. That's compared to M5 not M5 Pro, so M5 Pro is likely significantly faster.
Don’t know, but this as main ad headline feels almost like a threat to my personal home computing needs
I have an old M1 Max with 32GB that runs inference models fine, especially those using MLX.
Dedicated graphics cards are faster but not to the point that it matters.
That’s a six year old machine.
My newer machine M5 max 128GB will far outperform your typical 32GB gaming card once the model exceeds memory.
To even get close to that on a dedicated graphics card you are paying upwards of $20K.
That said, models are getting smaller and faster which allows me to run multiple different models with ease.
[edit] Just checked the 5 models I use take up 57GB when all loaded at the same time.
"Please don't act like a jerk on HN. There are articles and comments criticizing Apple all the time and it's fine."
As a disclaimer though, I haven't even tried to really run local models on the M1 as I also have a 'gaming PC' that can run them fine.
However the main reason I would upgrade is to run LLMs locally and RAM prices are making this a no-go. One day if RAM comes down to earth I'll upgrade. If not I'll stick to this old machine for a long time.
I mean, local LLMs already are really good if you own Nvidia Cards, not sure what you are waiting for. 2x3090 will blow any current Mac out of the water in tok/sec
I'm not sure I'd consider a gaming PC 'regular consumer' hardware especially with today's prices. But yeah, it's definitely doable.
Because otherwise a lot of this hardware (including their blazing fast SSDs) is wasted. Cuz my M1 mac mini is awesome otherwise.
For example: it is copy-on-write, and my corruption happened in the superblock checkpoint. There is no built-in command in Disk Utility to "mount" an older checkpoint (and accepting a small amount of dataloss). Also the "First Aid" command allegedly runs volume repair top-down when it is recommended to do it inside-out.
It's the Linux kernel that deliberately does not provide user land a way to change file creation times.
Meanwhile XNU/macOS does.
Interesting that Apple quotes performances when playing Cyberpunk 2077 ! Maybe they will want to care more about gaming ?
And while i'm at it, I was wondering a few weeks ago if I should try this game on my M3 pro. Anyone has played it on Apple and has feedback ?
So is this performance gain probably due to the new Neural Accelerators?
Former owner of Amiga, 1000, 2000, 3000, and 4000 I would have gotten a Next computer at the time if I could’ve afforded it, unfortunately, I was tied to a PC at work using AutoCAD, Revit and Navis Managed a few years later.
The Games back in the day on the Amiga computers were ahead of the PC for about 9-10 years, coincidentally Sony bought a British gaming company called Psychosis for their games and gaming technology. They were pretty big back in the day on the Amiga.
The thought of local AI is also disgraceful, Nvidia didn’t buy for Hugging Face for 12-13 billion for nothing.
(it was late in it's lifecycle and there were frequent sales)
I really don’t see how they can avoid it not in the current climate, the design and engineering is already there, 10 to 20 billion dollars is already there, all they need to do is partner with Intel or TSMC onshore in the USA, Arizona would be fine. but Prineville Oregon would be better.
Particularly with Chinese companies pushing to get more out of smaller models. You can run really capable models on the top end macs right now, it just costs way more than buying credits.
Feels like they’re doing it for the sake of getting with the times, but why would the average Mac User care? I wonder if this an answer the OpenClaw craze.
I went with a 64GB M2 Max a few years back even though it stretched my budget and I'm glad I did. I'm not sure what I'd pick in this case. Tough call.
IMO memory size is the most important since you can always wait longer for it to compute while a blazing fast but dumb model is much less useful.
It depends on what model(s) you want to run.
A new Mac Mini with that much ram and storage costs about double now.
Today development work is limited by compile times and test run times, particularly with UI tests in the iOS simulator.
Hardware on the development machine finally maters.
Not like Mac gaming is good anyway...they have "Game Porting Toolkit" but it's not free and open like Proton so nobody will use it unless Apple pushes them. Removing Rosetta doesn't help either.
I don't know what this means - game porting toolkit is free
If they aren't willing to do much about it, they don't—however much they might pretend as long as it costs them nothing of value to do so—actually “care quite a bit” about it.
They include game metrics in their marketing often, because they know their customers care about gaming. But no—for whatever reason, it never translates into Apple caring about gaming. I don't get it, but that's the way it has been for a long time.
They’ve also said when they pull Rosetta for intel compatibility, it will still be available for old games to use, which is a huge improvement from their usual stance of “that game studio that hasn’t existed since 2008 should dust off their code and update it to our new architecture.”
And no, being nice to people that have no problem just straight up lying about shit is not the solution.
Macs, as nice as the hardware is, are hostile to repair.
The game gets a bad rap for the last-gen console performance, but even 2020's iGPUs could handle it: https://youtu.be/oUm5GmJcBPA
I feel like a big part of macos slowing down is installing too much crap over the years that sits in the background.
I'm usually running about ~4 instances of it locally in separate Git worktrees, which (in our setup) means I'm also running 4 copies of the whole stack: web, frontend, Redis, Postgres, etc. These are rebuilt and torn down multiple times per day. Lot of frontend assets to compile.
Additionally, like many people in corporate environments, we do of course also pay a performance tax thanks to the security software we need to run.
So perf does matter for us.
We could, of course, alternatively... just run cheap shitboxes locally and have all our dev environments in the cloud. Certainly appealing in many ways from a cost perspective and you don't even need to give up DX really.
However, in the next ~5 years, as "actually useful" local LLM inference starts to become genuinely useful (for software engineering, this seems to roughly mean "the ability to run 28B+ models at usable speeds") then having local compute horsepower might start to look more attractive again. Even if it's not an absolute winner on cost/utility alone, the data privacy and cost certainty have value to many.
It is big. No dashboard. square steering wheel without turn signals or gear stalk. The rear-view mirror doesn't see out unless you lower the cover in the back. The side mirrors are strangely shaped and small. The front corners are a mysterious mostly unpredictable distance out the front window.
But then... It has cameras in all directions including the front bumper. There is a top-down sort of heat-map display when you park. All 4 wheels can be turned for a tighter turning circle. and it can self-park.
So... I would feel embarrassed to be seen in it, but it was definitely an interesting experience.
I may need to replace some parts at some point, but this far it's not been necessary.
I'd love to have the 16", which didn't exist when I bought the 13", but thanks to Altman, hardware prices are insane these days. :/
With larger (also really fast) unified memory on the chip, it could easily load larger weights, and the thing is that the quantized results on the M5s are really good, I believe that for most local inferencing, users would be using INT4 (maybe more bits per weight sometimes) quantized models, that might be where the Neural Accelerators kick in. In raw power, a desktop 5090 easily outperforms the M5 Max, but for this specific use case, I believe that the M5 Max is good enough.
If we look at what you can realistically buy OTD (out the door) prices, the picture changes. New Odyssey/Sienna are coming in the low to mid $40k, and these are at the upper end of quality and features. Your typical compact SUVs is in the upper $20k range.
Your typical base model compact SUVs start in upper $20K range. Your typical compact SUV usually lands somewhere in the 30s.
After several months of wasted lifetime, it died and got the deserved burial at a recycling center.
To be honest though, my usage does not benefit from the speed. The only benefit is to the reptile part of my brain that says “speed. Must have the fastest possible, and since I’m paying for it, even though maybe I should downgrade it, I want my speed.”
Then, like you said, on the WAN side you’ve got the monthly internet bill.
1Gbps is the sweet spot, especially since 6Ghz WiFi runs at something like 600Mbps in the real world a reasonable distance away from the WiFi router in an ideal deployment. Saturate your wired, and you get a slight benefit over a 500Mbps plan for your wireless.
The Mac Studio is Apple’s realization that the best Mac Pro was actually the Mac mini with some slight modifications.
IBM was extremely vertically integrated. What actually happened was that Compaq reverse engineered their BIOS and made a compatible system and the courts said it was okay.
The thing destroying the modern world is DMCA 1201. Adversarial interoperability is fundamental.
Rest assured there would be no IBM PC compatibles otherwise, in fact PS/2 and MCA architecture was a failed attempt to regain control.
It is easy to say that IBM had monopolistic tendencies, because they did. On the other hand, the 5100 sounds like a vertically integrated design and it ended up being extremely expensive. The Datamaster strayed away from IBM components, but was still based upon IBM software. One can blame it's failure on the IBM PC being released a month later, but in a way that would prove the point. The Datamaster had such a big head start that the IBM PC borrowed elements of it's design, while the proprietary software of the Datamaster held back its release date.
Undoubtedly, IBM wanted more control over the PC. Avoiding a completely proprietary design was probably a calculated bet, an intentional course of action rather than a mistake. It just happens to be a bet they lost.
Only a handful of companies can make high end memory, semiconductors and semiconductor equipment. And some of them are wary of creating overcapacity down the line. Creating new capacity takes years and creating a competitor to any of these companies takes even longer, even when the incentives (high prices) exist.
So it's absolutely possible that consumers change behaviour before a sufficient supply side response arrives.
Demand destruction is a market response as well.
Even when the cost of the cheapest computers bottomed out, it likely had more to do with lower prices not making sense. At a certain point, the cost of things that encapsulate the computer and I/O (like the enclosure and screen) end up overwhelming the cost of the actual compute.
I’m worried that this is a harbinger of dollar collapse.
Inflation doesn’t show up evenly everywhere. It shows up in assets and hot areas first.
TSMC, plus flash and memory manufacturers with their own facilities, have dramatically cut production of almost anything that isn't in demand for AI, plus Macs were just about the only way to get more than 16GB of 'VRAM' without spending multiple thousands of dollars, so Mac Minis and Studios with more than about 24GB of ram have been under months-long backorders, which is unprecedented. Tim Apple made is name in supply chain logistics. Even he can't logistic his way out of this. Making things worse, the RAM that Macs use is really fast stuff, nearly the speed of high end desktop GPUs.
Supply for anything that isn't exactly what NVIDIA, Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, and MS want has pretty much evaporated. And even that stuff has skyrocketed in cost because, essentially, the race has turned into who can hoard the most of TSMC's and NVIDIA's production capacity in a particular year.
The pathetic thing is that it isn't even actual purchases in some cases. In some cases, it's OpenAI or Anthropic merely "promising" they will buy X% of a memory manufacturer's capacity.
I can't wait for all of this to come crashing down.For all this hardware that is useless for anything else because of its density and power consumption - to absolutely crater in price and become e-waste.
The official one. The reality is a bit worse. A trip to the supermarket was 50 Euros some years ago, now it is 150 - 200 50 Euros. That is not "a few percent".
This is capitalism, as demand increases, so does price, regardless of the cogs.
Capitalism is simply where private individuals own the "means of production" (factories, tools, land) and operate them to accumulate profit.
That is private as in not lords, guilds, cartels, governmental authorities, tribal leaderships, etc.
There's a lot of stuff people conflate with capitalism like free market economics, currency, share based companies, free mobility of labor, or debt instruments of any kind.
Capitalism does require a market so goods can be exchanged, that's all it requires, and there's enough flavors of capitalism thanks to the different countries in the world that this distinction isn't superfluous.
M1 Max: 400 GB/s memory bandwidth, ~20.8 FP16 Tflops
M4 Pro: 273 GB/s memory bandwidth ~17.2 FP16 Tflops
And then the opposite can happen like an unknown drone with 100 kg warhead striking memory production facility.
China.
This market situation is a perfect storm for chinese manufacturers to step up. They don't have to chase latest-and-greatest, price-performance is one of the strongest demand drivers in consumer segment. They need a viable alternative, offer it at a reasonable price - which is much easier to achieve under current heavily inflated conditions - and that would quickly entrench them as a household brand.
Remember, it's not that there's no chinese lithography tech at all, it's just not advanced enough to yield mass production silicon at commercially viable prices. It might be the case that at current market conditions this caveat does not hold and all they need to do is ship. Even if the current prices mean they do it at break-even it would still be an enormously massive win.
Again, they don't have to compete at the flagship level from the get go, they need something commercially viable. There are tons of Chinese companies in the west and probably even more western on the outside chinese white-label goods. Chinese government has enough weight to push domestic silicon on those companies to create domestic silicon industry that can make the unit economies work.
All in all, there is a very likely scenario where this current AI boom and the resulting crunch on silicon supply creates a competitive silicon industry in China. If you think something in the realm of "I would not buy chinese silicon even if it was cheaper" it does not matter. Look at smartphone market share outside of USA, Japan and West Europe: in majority of the world Apple+Samsung barely touches 50%. What this "rest of the world" lacks in individual purchasing power it more than makes up for in numbers.
Even if somehow you had the super hero ability to create this silicon out of thin air and even double it, I'd argue that it wouldn't drive down prices.
Simply because both the AI datacenter's need and their ability to pay is bigger then the consumer market. So far it seems that the more silicon you throw at AI, then the better your reasoning output. So the cheaper the chips, the more these datacenters will buy. Arguably they would buy even more because then you can tell investors that you have more powerful models (due to more compute) and your price per output is cheaper (because average hardware is cheaper).
What stands out to me is that you can't rely on pricing acting predictably any more, it used to be that when a new product/generation released there would be a few weeks of high demand/short supply, but when that was satisfied it would be a nice graceful decline over its lifespan until the next generation was nearly ready to come out and take its place in the market. You can look at old PCPartPicker trends graphs via archive.org to see this over and over. Now it feels like trying to catch a falling knife and it really raises the threshold for whether I actually need an upgrade versus other areas of my life where I could spend.
https://everymac.com/global-mac-prices/all-msrp-mac-mini-pri...
Though $599 for the M4 in 2024 seems like a local optimum.
The difference is that now if someone wants to make a competing store for iOS apps, or a competing client app for Reddit or Twitter, the incumbents use the DMCA and remote attestation and similar anti-competitive levers to lock those competitors out of the market and governments have been letting them get away with it.
1. That a new player would offer enterprise level product, instead of consumer grade. IMO it's very likely that if such a scenario unfolded, the market would be segmented into enterprise/consumer not only at the product level, but at the supplier level too. At least initially.
2. That AI compute demand is essentially unlimited AND silicon production capacity is and will remain bottleneck in datacenter buildouts. IMO we are much closer to the point where physical infrastructure becomes the apparent bottleneck than it would seem, IF political climate allows. Datacenter buildout is THE talking point in Ohio elections and if the dems win, datacenters will become THE talking point in the whole USofA. In just a couple of months the landscape they are operating in could become very different.
no one remembers the last time things got better rather than worse. shitcoin-driven scarcity seamlessly transitioned into COVID-driven scarcity and now into hyperscaler-driven scarcity. the chipmakers' cabal decided to meet increased demand with four digit margins rather than expanding production.
It's Deja vu for NVMe and SSD drives this time as prices are way up there.
Then they sold out and most recently literally sold out to this software company from my neck of the woods. Every single article now feels like it's written by an LLM optimized to write like a crypto/AI bro.
I used to use it daily and now not at all.
Would love to know where this comes from. I am not sure about that. Could you point to data/anecdata?
There's been a few studies. Most find productivity gain from 'AI' to be negligible.
https://www.economist.com/business/2026/07/27/america-has-be...
Single-Core Multi-Core
M1 Max, 10-core 2,204 14,004
M4 Pro, 14-core 3,311 24,711
It definitely matters, if you're intending to run a Claude Code/OpenCode style agent workflow. Most of those harnesses start with 8-12k token contexts, which is a lot of prefill for a Mac but cheap for a CUDA GPU. The GPGPU compute on the fastest Macs is still trailing behind Nvidia's laptop GPUs; the highest-bandwidth Apple Silicon chip (now the M5 Ultra) has ~7x lower memory bandwidth than a single B100 card.
There's a good reason why Apple Silicon isn't to be found anywhere in the datacenter buildout. It's nonviable for training, and wastes electricity running real-world inference workloads.
To be specific, 5 models at 57 gb means you are using crap quantized models, which suck for any real agentic work. I mean, sure they give you some inference, but compared to the full parameter models like Qwen3.8 and Gemma4 that can run full agentic loops, you may as well just use cloud inference for the price.
You of course could "run" those larger models, but we both know that the tok/sec is dogshit on Macs for those.
And 57 gb is split across 3 cards quite easily, which will all be cheaper than your comparable Mac and way faster.
You really need to educated yourself on how running local models works and what the models like Gemma 4 are capable of, so you don't continue to waste money on Macs.
You mean someone who uses a Mac? I find the term "Apple fan" is used as a way to attack the person.
> that can run full agentic loops, you may as well just use cloud inference for the price.
You can run full agentic loops fine with quantised models. In fact that is likely what you are doing with a 32GB PC Graphics card. Or what model are you using?
You use the right model for the right job. For example granite4.2 is optimised for agentic work and only needs 5GB of memory.
Gemma4 MLX runs fine with the larger model needing 19GB.
Prior to that I had OpenClaw (in Parallels VM) create an application with local models that worked the exact same way as created by Claude. It was more an experiment in how OpenClaw works, hence the VM.
> And 57 gb is split across 3 cards quite easily,
I assume you are talking about a good graphics card. A good 32GB will run you $2K a card, so that $6K to beat out a laptop of similar price, and where the difference doesn't matter.
[edit]
Anyway my main point is Macs work fine for local models. I have a 6 year old machine that proves that.
And 3090 is $1500 used, and 24gb gb of ram. 3x is $4500 for 72gb of ram.
But this is an old argument that seems to be thrown at Macs. Normally everything is cherry picked to show it's better than the Mac while ignoring all the features.
Although I would hope if you pay $8K you can get something that outperforms the Mac in every way.
I have never had that issue, and LLMs are used for more than just code generation.
> And 3090 is $1500 used
Second hand Macs are also cheaper.
Not sure what your point is, but you just seem to arguing because of your hatred of Macs.
Back in early 2000's I was commissioned to build an application that should also run on the Mac.
I bought a second hand old Mac Mini. Within a couple of months I bought a brand new one, and since then I have been on Mac when it comes to non-gaming (even though it can do gaming).
The main reason was I could just get shit done. The operating system is transparent to what I needed to do. With Windows you were forever dealing with the operating system to solve things.
Windows eventually got better in this regards, and more recently worse again.
I own/use windows as well. But mainly for gaming or a VM on an internal server.
Often when people give a comparison of how much PC is better, they compare a PC desktop to a laptop. Windows laptops for the same features is same or more expensive, while feeling cheap/heavy/noisy.
So form factor is one part of it, and then how the whole ecosystem works together with my phone/iPad and other devices.
At the end of the day, if I am doing any serious inferencing then I use my companies server, or Claude.
...
What has amazed me over the years is the sheer hate I get from some people for even owning a Mac. I was probably the same, but I was younger then.
Its died down since ARM came in, but the irrational hate seems wasted. Someone prefers Linux, Android, Windows, etc. Good for them.
Leasing not only allows Apple to keep "selling" people new devices, it will also mostly like accelerate the second-hand sales and resource recycling arms of the business. Consumers will be more willing to upgrade sooner and stay in perpetual payments vs having to buy out the device at lease end - and Apple gets back newer devices where the recycled tech is arguably more valuable.
Companies will prioritize components for cloud computing and lease us thin clients...
Maybe we'll see a return to the late 1990's, when companies would give you a free computer as long as you allowed it to constantly display an ad banner on the top of the screen.
But yes, they all went out of business during when the dot-com bubble burst.
- Lots of options competing on quality, price, user experience, user needs
- Every marketplace innovation that we talk about on this platform
So somebody might offer exactly that and if it's a good option, people will use it. If it's not, they'll use an alternative.
Government regulation will lead to:
- Giant entrenched companies that are difficult to disrupt thanks to insider connections
- Lack of competition, price increases, terrible customer service and pretty much everything that "anti-capitalists" today complain about in regards to capitalism.
Everything government involvement touches gets more expensive. See healthcare, college tuition, student loan debt as some easy examples.
Oh, you mean like Apple, Google, and Microsoft?
> - Lack of competition, price increases, terrible customer service and pretty much everything that "anti-capitalists" today complain about in regards to capitalism.
Have you looked around? This is already happening.
And it leads to comments like the parent blaming "capitalism"
Literally everything listed for 'government regulation will lead to' can and has happened in unchecked capitalism. Insider connections rule everything right now in this current regime of chest-beating 'capitalists.'
Capitalism and socialism aren't real things outside of freshman year econ textbooks.
One of the problems here is that things like this only count as "increased productivity" in the economic sense if it results in more income at the end of the funnel. Are you actually making more product faster in all your new-found free time?
Very few orgs I've worked in have actually been limited by the speed of programmers writing code. Usually it's communication overhead and management processes eating up most of the bandwidth - and those tend to expand to absorb any additional bandwidth.
Look at all the shit github README before llm. Most repos didn't bother because it was effort. those few that did, were because of autistic focus. Of those, very few were "great" user documentation.
now llms are here, the effort barrier is gone, and now we're inundated with shit README that provide no value to users nor respect their time.
Once you start applying SKILL.md that revolve around fixing HOW to communicate value to users in a way that respects their time, you'll see this story change in noticeable places.
I doubt it will change everywhere because it also requires that you give a shit about doing this in the first place, so those people Ed Zitron talks about... business idiots won't care, because they're ultimately nihlist.
The Principles of Scientific Management was just wrong that these ideas extend universally but we are still doing this stupid Barnesian performance as if they do. It clearly makes no sense with knowledge work. It is stupid.
Then the efficient market hypothesis provides a type of circular proof because since the market is always right, if this didn't work we wouldn't be doing it. Another stupid idea we are not able to get past.
This strikes me as a problem with how we define productivity in this context. If I can do my job in 1 hour, when it took me 8 before, am I not more productive in a rate-based sense? Sure, I might only work 5 hours in a week instead of 40, so my net production is the same, but my rate of productivity was certainly much higher.
It's like "work" meaning one thing to a normal person, but something very specific and counterintuitive in Newtonian physics (if you carry a fifty-pound weight in a circle and stop at your starting point, you've done no work).
So, if the product isn't selling any more expensive even though you're adding ~8 times more features, or if you're still getting paid for the full 40 hours even though you only really work 5, then economic productivity hasn't actually increased.
Right, but are you delivering 3x more software now, and more importantly, are you selling 3x more software now?
This goes back before AI, with computers not being found to be improving productivity numbers: Solow's paradox.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox
* https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-solow-productivity-pa...
For my job and basically everyone I know outside of programming, the productivity from AI is literally zero.
I think what this says is the productivity is in specific silos and why the experience of the utility of AI is so vastly different for different people.
Medicare is cheaper that US private insurance:
* https://www.kff.org/medicare/how-much-more-than-medicare-do-...
Also:
> A single-payer universal health care system could cover every American, save more than 100,000 lives a year, and still cost $1 trillion less than the system it would replace, according to a new preprint study led by researchers at the Yale School of Public Health.
* https://ysph.yale.edu/news-article/universal-health-coverage...
The one notable exception is if you're a group of workers and you negotiate a contract with your employer: the state can and will interfere to void it if it prevents the workers from being properly exploited.
You've returned one of the most valuable resources (time) back to a human. In my mind there's simply nothing more valuable, and no sign of of efficiency more poignant than that.
The reason why it is very relevant is that, in the way we have unfortunately structured our economy, the amount of work you have to do to be able to eat and enjoy your time will always expand to grow to at least force you to maintain (if not increase) your economic productivity. That is, if AI enables engineers to deliver 10x more features in the same unit of time, then their employers will expect them to deliver 10x more features to continue earning their current pay.
So, while the AI did, in principle, allow you to just reduce your work schedule while getting the same pay, as you're providing the same results in 1/10th of the time, the economic system does not - your previous work is instead simply worth less than it used to be. Assuming you're not happy to take a 90% pay cut, you'll have to continue spending 40+ hour weeks, just using AI as well now.