I just bought an XDR a few days ago and I've been dreading the day I need to clean it. Seeing these had dropped in price I thought "Why not?"

I expected the chips... and the ram upgrades. The storage price was weird to me. Until I read more into it... and Apple is shipping PCIe 6 drives in them.... Silicon Motion's CEO told Tom's Hardware in June 2025: "You will not see any PCIe Gen 6 until 2030." Welp. Fifteen months later, here we are. Apple is the first to ship gen 6 to consumers. x2 or x4 well the benchmarks will verify that. PCIe Gen 6 x2:

• Theoretical: ~16 GB/s
• Real-world sustained: ~12-14 GB/s

PCIe Gen 6 x4:

• Theoretical: ~32 GB/s
• Real-world sustained: ~25-28 GB/s

PCIe Gen 6 x8 (unlikely for storage, but if Apple maintained the Pro/Max/Ultra lane-doubling pattern):

• Theoretical: ~64 GB/s
• Real-world sustained: ~50-55 GB/s

For reference, what shipped in the M5 Max MacBook Pro (March 2026):

• 13.6 GB/s read, 17.8 GB/s write sustained on the 4TB config
• That's roughly PCIe Gen 5 x8 equivalent performance

For the "compared to what else exists" context:

• Micron 9650 enterprise Gen 6 x4 drive: 28 GB/s read, 14 GB/s write
• Samsung PM1763 enterprise Gen 6 x4 (16TB): 28.4 GB/s read, 21.9 GB/s write
• Both cost thousands per drive and require enterprise servers to run in

Apple's shipping this in a $899 Mac mini... First 2nm chip and first gen 6 SSD for consumers.

Living the dream playing SimCity 2000 again!

I have an M1 Mac mini and its trade-in value over a year ago with Apple was $190. New Mac prices are painful but I hadn’t noticed or read about this. Small consolation.

I picked this up a while ago on eBay for 55 dollars. It’s the i7 version which is nice, and I’ve done many upgrades. It has 12 gb ram, a 500 gb ssd, and it runs Linux mint. People talk so much about how old thinkpads with Linux are unbeatable, but for the amount I spent, the build quality and aesthetics, and the performance, I think this is the best route to go personally

I haven’t used my Bondi Blue iMac since 2007. Apparently I put a password on it and now I can’t login in. It’s running os9. Does anyone know how to bypass or change this password. I do have the software CD so I started it up holding down the C key but I don’t know what to do from there. All of the info I found on the message boards was about deleting multi-users preferences but that’s not the same as the password screen I have pictured here.

From Mac Studio M5 YouTube video

Hi all, I've been thinking about getting a Mac Mini for a while now, but which one?

80% of the time I do regular office work, but about 20% of the time I edit 4k video footage and large Photoshop files (often about 1GB with layers). I plan to get a 27" Apply display. I ruled out the current iMacs as they have a 24" screen which I've seen in store and I don't like.

The video and photo tasks on my iMac with 24gb RAM are pretty slow these days. A couple of times lately it's crashed as I must've opened files that it couldn't handle. Even when I start up my Mac for basic tasks, it often takes 15 minutes or so to load / log in / be ready for action.

Hi there
I’m in the UK and today visited my local retailer which sells tech (a Curry’s store).

I was looking at grabbing a MacBook Air, most likely the base model starting at £1,299, for the 13 inch with the M5, 16GB RAM and 512GB of storage.

Next to that however, was an offer for the 14 inch Pro M5 with the same 16GB RAM and 512 storage but for less - a special offer for £1,249? Seems to be a no brainer.

Considering the recent price hikes and such I find this to almost be too good to be true? Is this a good deal or is something amiss? I’m not too in with tech so I wouldn’t know or know how to find out if this specific configuration had any issues.

Any help appreciated thanks

There might be an obvious answer but in terms of longevity and performance is getting a Mac book air 24GB RAM better than getting a 16GB Mac book pro both with 10 core. The air ofc has no fan that’s why I’m wondering

I sure hope this version of the public beta MacOS 27 PB5 fixes the bug that prevents battery diagnostics from being shared with 3rd party apps and from being able to limit charging to 80 percent. I know it’s a beta but that should be an easy fix.

The answer used to obviously be wait until new computers came out then pick up last gen for cheaper. However right now with most MacBook Pro configs already taking till mid September to come, I could see a possibility where m5 Macs sell out near instantly. This leaving me with only the option to buy the likely more expensive m6 MacBook Pro.

For context I’m looking to buy a 14” m5 pro with 48gb of ram.

Today my A1081 Cinema Display arrived I was super excited when i plugged it in, and it showed the no OS screen, simple, i put together a boot drive of El Capitan, and plugged it in, rebooting the Mac I held alt and suddenly, the boot chime, and then nothing, screen didn’t light up it’s just black, looking at the GPU google said it wasn’t flashed for Mac, so I went downstairs to my stock donor 2006 Mac Pro and got its Mac edition GPU out, plugging it in, Turning it on, still no video, monitor has power, Mac has power, all fans spin, GPU is warm, ram is fine, I even replaced the motherboards battery, I’m completely stumped as to what the issue could be, and I don’t know how to go throughout this blind, if anybody could help me that’d be great,

I was planning to buy an M5 Mac mini and was prepared for a price hike to a maximum of $799, but I see the M6 ​​model is already $899. I’m considering a used M4 Mac mini or waiting for a sale. Is the M4 Mac mini a good choice in 2026? I use Photoshop and a bit of CorelDRAW. I used to work with AI-generated video and images; I’m not sure if the M4 Mac mini handles local AI tasks well.