It does make purchasing decisions a little harder. My M1 Pro MBP is getting quite long in the tooth but waiting for the die shrink M6 / redesign is very tempting now if it really will come out next year. Would have jumped on the M5 if the the pro variant had come out this year though. My wife has her eyes on my M1 to replace her 2019 Intel MBP and the fans do drive me nuts… Guess I could just get her a refurb M2/3 for Christmas then wait it out.
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Apple's 2026 Mac Plans
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Older A-series chips into peripherials, monitors, speakers.
A18 or A18 pro, A series are still for phones and tablets.
I do not understand rumors about adding them into laptop. This is going to be proof of concept tested on consumers. Alternative is to give tablets macOS. I do not understand that macOS on iPad is a no-go. Edit: Sorry for my english.
A18 or A18 pro, A series are still for phones and tablets.
I do not understand rumors about adding them into laptop. This is going to be proof of concept tested on consumers. Alternative is to give tablets macOS. I do not understand that macOS on iPad is a no-go. Edit: Sorry for my english.
macOS is not really designed for touch, which is likely one of the biggest reasons why it never made it to the iPad as-is.
It's happening, liquid glass is a touch first interface ( big round buttons finger sized)...the reason why it is a mess on Macs...
This time it's happening, and people saying won't ever use it will be here saying it's the best thing they ever used!
In April 2014, Apple dropped the price of the 11-inch MacBook Air to $899, which was the first publicly available Mac notebook under $900.
If a $599-699 materializes then I'd be very happy.
yes it is very minimal, my circumstances today have changed to what it was 3 years ago. I'm not sure if I should wait until MacBook Air M5 with bigger ram or bite the bullet with the Pro M5 (and also if it is worth upgrading ram for it to be future-proof)...
"Apple has announced the release of the MacBook Pro M5 Max, which is marginally better than the previous MacBook Pro M4 Max..."
It's just this, on repeat play, forever.
It's nice if you need to buy a new MacBook but, outside of having the latest and greatest, there just isn't a compelling upgrade reason. If you really are one of the people who need it, then maybe you might shave a few seconds off that 4K video encode...? If you're running AI models, it's RAM and not CPU/GPU speed that matters. But Apple has always been very tight-fisted with that, keeping the "8GB is enough for anybody" messaging long after it ceased to be true.
Many of us bought M1 Macs just after release, and are still using them. That was the upgrade we had been looking for.
Apple could be claiming by this point that better M-series chips gives a better AI experience, but they dropped the ball on that. And even the AI stuff outside of Siri is still a bit weak and hardly creating compelling use cases for the AI cores. Deleting things from photos is kinda neat but not a daily feature we use.
It's just this, on repeat play, forever.
It's nice if you need to buy a new MacBook but, outside of having the latest and greatest, there just isn't a compelling upgrade reason. If you really are one of the people who need it, then maybe you might shave a few seconds off that 4K video encode...? If you're running AI models, it's RAM and not CPU/GPU speed that matters. But Apple has always been very tight-fisted with that, keeping the "8GB is enough for anybody" messaging long after it ceased to be true.
Many of us bought M1 Macs just after release, and are still using them. That was the upgrade we had been looking for.
Apple could be claiming by this point that better M-series chips gives a better AI experience, but they dropped the ball on that. And even the AI stuff outside of Siri is still a bit weak and hardly creating compelling use cases for the AI cores. Deleting things from photos is kinda neat but not a daily feature we use.
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If you are running a VM, it depends on your use case. Are you running games in the guest OS, or other graphics-intensive apps? If not, you will probably be fine with 16 GB RAM on an Apple silicon Mac. RAM "upgrades" are really expensive, and also not so necessary when doing basic productivity apps in virtualized Windows on a Mac, for instance.
The other thing you might think about is whether your VM app supports all that RAM. If it's Parallels Desktop, you would need the Pro version to use more than 8 GB of RAM for a VM, and this costs more and is subscription-based. So, even if you buy a Mac with 24 GB or 32 GB of RAM, your VM software might not be able to use it anyway.
Like I said, it depends on your use case.
Liquid Glass will gone, just a matter of time. As did Aqua go, this will too.
Oh, here is an interesting article:
What would an Aqua UI look like in 2025?
Sure, the unification of MacOS and iOS started with Big Sur. Ever since then people have been predicting either a Mac with touch screen or MacOS on the iPad. Both are stupid ideas.
thanks for the insight, appreciate it! not using graphic intensive apps?
Nah, just productivity apps for my translation and editing work, ones that are only available on Windows. They work fine with a 16 GB M1 MacBook Pro.
Just wait until Solid Glass…
Just kidding, I completely understand you. I’m probably going to purchase an M5 Mac mini next year, and honestly if it had been released with Sequoia I would have stayed there for a while. But unfortunately I’m going to have to deal with the new interface.
Honestly I think the worst implementation of Liquid Glass is the macOS one, and the worst aspect of it is related to the Finder windows. I don’t mind the transparency on the menu bar or control center buttons, but the windows…
On my iOS and iPadOS devices I’m staying on iOS 18, but in this case it’s for the performance and battery life, rather than the UI aesthetics.
Just popping in here for my semi-annual "Don't Buy an iMac" campaign.
If you own one it is probably in your top three largest and most expensive throw-away household tech items - behind your stove and refrigerator.
It is also similarly not upgradable, but comes in fantastic colors and finishes.
If you own one it is probably in your top three largest and most expensive throw-away household tech items - behind your stove and refrigerator.
It is also similarly not upgradable, but comes in fantastic colors and finishes.
It’s odd to see supposedly smart people making seemingly well intentioned decisions that often turn out to be stupid. Yes, I include Liquid Glass in this, but I’m going to talk about something else, something not exclusively Apple.
Bad text. By that I mean the direction over the past several years to make text, whether in print or onscreen,illegible. They do it by using ever thinner fonts and lessening contrast by using text coloured in greys rather than black.
The rationale behind it was that lessening contrast on the page, or on the screen, would be easier on people’s eyes that are staring at displays for ever longer periods. But the actual result of this has been to make text often more difficult to read particularly for an aging population with aging eyes.
It’s long been common for fine print on products and product packaging to be excruciatingly small wherein you need a magnifying glass to read it. And thats often compounded by lower contrast between the text and the background, such as putting black on red or yellow on red or even grey on red. Lots of magazines have grey rather than black text for the articles themselves within the magazines. And a lot of online text wherever you go has small and fine lined grey text on white rather than black on white. It’s maddening.
Now circling back to Liquid Glass. Firstly for awhile now MacOS has this thing where you cannot (or I don’t know how) enlarge the text on the menu bar or certain windows like System Settings. This is itself is maddening. You can enlarge this text on iOS and iPadOS, but not MacOS? Why?
Now, Liquid Glass was meant to refresh the look of the UI along with making it (supposedly) more effecient to use. Refresh the look—check, it does that, but generally not in a positive way. It adds unnecessary complexity with childish visual effects and animation resulting in something that is distracting and often disturbing to one’s perception of the UI. Your eyes are constantly adjusting to distractions of unneeded transparencies, blurring, shadows and animation.
So in giving it this new look it made the overall experience less pleasant and less effective. Whatever gains in efficiency (if any) are cancelled out by the overall user experience.
The overall experience of 26 on iOS and iPadOS isn’t horrible, you get used to it, but it’s not as good as as what we had with 18 previously. It looks unnecessarily gimmicky, juvenile and less effective than before. I haven’t upgraded my iMac to Tahoe yet because of these reservations.
Bad text. By that I mean the direction over the past several years to make text, whether in print or onscreen,illegible. They do it by using ever thinner fonts and lessening contrast by using text coloured in greys rather than black.
The rationale behind it was that lessening contrast on the page, or on the screen, would be easier on people’s eyes that are staring at displays for ever longer periods. But the actual result of this has been to make text often more difficult to read particularly for an aging population with aging eyes.
It’s long been common for fine print on products and product packaging to be excruciatingly small wherein you need a magnifying glass to read it. And thats often compounded by lower contrast between the text and the background, such as putting black on red or yellow on red or even grey on red. Lots of magazines have grey rather than black text for the articles themselves within the magazines. And a lot of online text wherever you go has small and fine lined grey text on white rather than black on white. It’s maddening.
Now circling back to Liquid Glass. Firstly for awhile now MacOS has this thing where you cannot (or I don’t know how) enlarge the text on the menu bar or certain windows like System Settings. This is itself is maddening. You can enlarge this text on iOS and iPadOS, but not MacOS? Why?
Now, Liquid Glass was meant to refresh the look of the UI along with making it (supposedly) more effecient to use. Refresh the look—check, it does that, but generally not in a positive way. It adds unnecessary complexity with childish visual effects and animation resulting in something that is distracting and often disturbing to one’s perception of the UI. Your eyes are constantly adjusting to distractions of unneeded transparencies, blurring, shadows and animation.
So in giving it this new look it made the overall experience less pleasant and less effective. Whatever gains in efficiency (if any) are cancelled out by the overall user experience.
The overall experience of 26 on iOS and iPadOS isn’t horrible, you get used to it, but it’s not as good as as what we had with 18 previously. It looks unnecessarily gimmicky, juvenile and less effective than before. I haven’t upgraded my iMac to Tahoe yet because of these reservations.
As is, and does, my 2017 27" i7 64GB iMac. I need/want at least 27", and I'm going to hold off spending $3,000 for a Mac mini/Studio Display combo for as long as I can.
I would love them to provide a > 8TB BTO option. That would be one thing that would be sufficient to get an upgrade. Or enough time that the current MBP is no longer getting updates. 
I mean there's a big difference between oils, dead skin cells --- and then residue from Doritos.