The M5 vs. M6 MacBook Pro Buyer’s Dilemma

This post brought even more questions about M5 vs M6 MacBooks Pro. The timing is weird this year. The M5 MacBook Pro arrives soon. (Likely March 4!) The M6 arrives later in the year with a completely new design and OLED display. You could buy in spring or wait until fall.

The M5 is a massive jump in AI performance. 4X over M4. Apple engineered the GPU specifically for running language models locally. The M6 is a design refresh. New chassis. OLED display. Probably some GPU improvements too, but nothing as dramatic as the M5 jump.

This is a use case decision. If you’re running local AI models or doing development work that benefits from GPU acceleration, buy the M5. The performance gain is real and the wait costs you months of productivity.

If you’re doing video editing, color grading, or anything where display quality matters to your actual work, the M6 OLED is worth waiting for. If you’re mostly doing text-based work, this choice barely matters. The M5 is more than sufficient.

Now the money angle. Apple usually signs long-term memory contracts. RAM is getting expensive. Memory prices are likely to go up. An M5 with 32GB might be $2,400 now. The same RAM in an M6 could be $2,600 in September.

Prettier design, better display, faster GPU. But you might pay more for the same memory.

My recommendation: Buy the M5 if you need the performance now. You’ll regret waiting more than you’ll regret missing the design refresh.

Wait for the M6 only if display quality or industrial design are actually important to your work. Not aspirationally important. Actually important.

Regardless of whether you go M5 or M6, you’re going to get a helluva Mac.

The Red Badge Won

When it comes to my home screen, I don’t like to show too many apps. I prefer to work in context instead of apps. So those context shortcuts in my dock do a lot of the heavy lifting. While on this quest to banish apps from my home screen I tried to hide my communication apps behind Shortcuts action buttons…

… and I failed.

The idea was clean. Messages, Slack, and Notion don’t need to sit on my home screen. I can tuck them under a contextual menu in my dock. Fewer icons, less visual clutter, less temptation to check things compulsively. In theory, perfect.

In practice, I forgot people existed.

My editor for Mac Power Users sent me a message about something he needed fixed. I didn’t see it for a day and a half. Not because I was busy. Because I never tapped the button. Without the little red badge staring at me from the home screen, I just… didn’t think about it.

So now I have four apps on my home screen. Phone, Messages, Slack, and Notion. They’re there specifically because they show badges. That’s their entire purpose on my screen. I would prefer to hide them. I am not disciplined enough to check them otherwise.

A Labs member offered a middle ground I hadn’t considered. He puts his communication apps inside a folder, along with shortcut icons for speed-dialing specific people. Tap the folder, see all your communication options plus one-tap calling for the people you talk to most. The folder still shows a badge, so you know something needs attention. And you consolidate everything into a single spot.

I tried this and ran into a different problem. A folder badge tells you something needs attention. It doesn’t tell you what. When I see a badge on Slack, I know it might be my team and I should deal with it now. A badge on Messages can wait until tonight. A folder badge? I’d tap it, see it was just a text from my sister, and feel like I wasted a context switch. Besides all that, the folder on my home screen is ugly and I just couldn’t get used to it.

If you can live without that distinction, this approach is worth trying. You get the badge reminder with less home screen clutter.

Another option is persistent notifications. They stick on top of the home screen until you deal with them. But I know that would last for about 10 minutes before I’d just dismiss and forget about them. Know thyself.

So at the end of the day, my communication apps sit on the home screen. It’s not the minimalist dream I wanted. But I’ve learned something about myself through this process. My systems have to account for how I actually behave, not how I wish I behaved. I’m not the guy who checks his messages on a schedule. I need the visual nudge.

If you’re more disciplined than me, hide them. If you’re like me, give them a spot on the screen and move on. There are more productive things to feel guilty about.

Donkey Work – What I Actually Want AI to Do

I’ve been using the term “donkey work” a lot lately, and some of you have been asking what I mean by it. Fair enough. Let me explain.

When I started paying attention to AI, I realized pretty quickly that I didn’t want it writing for me. I didn’t want it making my videos or drafting my newsletters. That’s the work I love. That’s the stuff I wake up wanting to do. If I hand that off to a machine, what’s left?

But I also realized I spend hours every day on stuff that has nothing to do with creation. Resetting a customer’s password. Chasing down links for a blog post. Formatting show notes. Updating spreadsheets. Processing email. None of that is creative work. It’s necessary, but it’s not why I’m here.

That’s donkey work. The administrative tedium that fills your day and keeps you from the work that actually matters to you.

And here’s what I’ve figured out. The current state of AI is really good at donkey work. Not perfect, but good. If you spend some time setting things up, you can get AI to handle a surprising amount of the tedium.

I’m talking about real, practical stuff you can do today. Not someday. Today.

The big AI companies are so busy talking about artificial general intelligence and curing cancer that they’re skipping over the boring part.

Right now, Claude can process my email. It can triage my task list. It can process a customer service request. It can look up information I need for a blog post in seconds instead of the 20 minutes it used to take me. That’s not science fiction. That’s today.

I don’t look at AI as a replacement for me. I look at it as a way to get my time back. Every hour I save on donkey work is an hour I can spend writing, recording, or teaching. That’s the trade I’m making, and so far it’s a good one.

You’ll be hearing more about this from me. I’m living at the sharp end of this stuff every day, testing what works and what doesn’t.

But I wanted to put a name on the concept because I think it changes how you think about AI. Stop asking “Can AI do my job?” Start asking, “Can AI do the parts of my job I don’t want to do?”

For a lot of us, the answer is already yes. The solutions to your tedium problems might be closer than you think.

The Apple March 4 Experience

Apple just announced a “special Apple Experience” on March 4 in New York, London, and Shanghai. Not an “event.” An “experience.”

The rumor mill has up to nine new products in play: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and Max, MacBook Air with M5, iPhone 17e, two new iPads, a budget MacBook with an A18 chip, a refreshed Studio Display, a new Apple TV, and a HomePod mini 2. That’s a lot of hardware, and I doubt we’ll see all (or perhaps any?) of it on March 4.

Part of me wants this to be the big HomePod moment. A proper smart speaker with a proper Siri. But we still haven’t seen a successful Siri brain transplant, so I suspect that’s still a ways off.

If I had to bet a nickel, I’d say the headliner is the M5 MacBook Pro and new Studio Displays. If you’ve been following my posts on M5 AI performance, you know I think this chip is a big deal. March 4 might be the day we get real specs and a ship date.

Mac Power Users 836: Welcome, Stephen

On this episode of Mac Power Users, I officially welcome Stephen Robles as co-host, exploring his background in music, podcasting, and his Mac setup. Then, rapid-fire questions, putting Stephen on the spot for some Apple hot takes!

This episode of Mac Power Users is sponsored by:

  • Insta360: Introducing the Insta360 Wave and the Link 2 Pro.
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Why the M5 Matters If You Run AI Locally

Apple says the M5 delivers 4X the peak GPU compute for AI compared to the M4. Most tech sites reported the number and moved on. I don’t think people have fully grasped what this means for running AI locally.

The gain isn’t just faster cores. Apple put a Neural Accelerator in every GPU core. I’ve been running local models through MLX on my M2 Mac for a while now, but barely. The M5 turns local AI from “it works, I guess” into something that feels responsive.

There’s a timing angle here too. NAND and memory prices jumped 55-60% in Q1 2026, and the industry expects them to keep climbing. If you want a Mac with serious memory for local AI work, buying now might save you real money over waiting for the M6 or M7. Future machines could carry a much higher price tag for the same RAM.

I look at these numbers, and then I look at my M2 Mac Studio, and I’m raising an eyebrow. The M2 was great when I bought it. But 4X faster prompt processing with purpose-built AI hardware? That’s the kind of gap that makes you start browsing the Apple Store at midnight.

If you have zero interest in local AI, the M5 is just another chip upgrade. But if you’re running models, experimenting with MLX, or thinking about it, this is the first Mac where Apple clearly built the GPU around AI. And with memory prices headed where they’re headed, the window to get in at current pricing might not stay open.