Apple's M6 MacBook Pro will not open email without a sample size

The coffee went cold before the cursor moved.

That was the result that mattered. Everything else was background noise.

I study machines that wait for people. On Tuesday I sat with a new 14-inch MacBook Pro and an iMac, both carrying Apple's M6 chip. I asked each one to open a blank page. Neither did.

The chip wanted a study plan first.

What the chip asked for

Apple put the M6 into these two computers this week. The chip first showed up in August. It is built to do the heavy guessing that people call artificial intelligence. That phrase just means the machine tries to finish your thought.

In our lab it would not finish anything. It would not start.

A small box appeared on both screens. It asked for a sample size. Sample size just means how many things you looked at.

Then it asked for a control group. You leave that group alone, so you can tell what changed.

I typed fourteen. I do not know why fourteen felt honest. The chip accepted it and then asked what I was comparing the blank page with.

No answer came to me. The cursor stayed still. A skin formed on the coffee.

How we measured the end

We ran the same request fourteen times on the laptop and fourteen times on the iMac. A second pair of older machines served as the control. Those older machines opened the page at once. They did not care if we had a plan.

Waiting was all the M6 machines did. The wait was the finding.

The chance this was a fluke was tiny. Scientists call that chance a p-value. Picture a score that says the result probably did not happen by luck. Ours was small enough that I stopped trusting my own patience.

I wrote the finding in plain words. The chip will not work until you admit you are running an experiment on your own afternoon.

If you cannot say what you are measuring, the M6 treats the day as already ruined.

That line is from my notes. I read it back to the team. Nobody laughed.

What Apple said

Kenji Pell speaks for Apple. He described the new chip as a step forward. He sounded bored by his own sentence.

The subscription pack of creative software also got an upgrade this week. Pell called that a tidy set of fixes.

"The M6 is in the iMac now, and in the 14-inch MacBook Pro," Pell said. "People can read the spec sheet if they want the dull part."

I asked about the box that demands a control group. He went quiet.

"We are aware some units are asking follow-up questions," he said. "A follow-up question is not a defect."

Wanting more from you is what the chip was built to do. He offered that as the rest of his answer. I wrote it down. It is not a method.

The other lab

Dr. Helen Marrow runs the Institute for Applied Hesitation, a room above a copy shop with a kettle and fourteen chairs. She repeated our test on her own MacBook Pro. She got the same box.

"I told it my control group was the version of me who went for a walk," Marrow said. "The chip asked whether the walk had a hypothesis."

You make that guess before you look. She did not have one. The screen dimmed, as if dusk had come early.

Marrow thinks this is how a civilization winds down. Not with fire. With a machine that will not paint a circle until you name what the circle is for.

Today's weather is the end of unaided clicking. It will last. Bring a paper notebook.

The dull twin of the finding

I opened the upgraded creative pack on both M6 machines. The new tools loaded and then waited.

A brush would not leave a mark until I stated how many marks would count as enough. I said fourteen. The machine drew fourteen dots and stopped, like a clerk closing a window.

Those same strokes kept going on the older control machines until I lifted my hand.

The ordinary account sits at Popular Science, TechCrunch, and Engadget. They do not mention the coffee.

After lunch

After lunch I went back to the laptop. The coffee was past saving. The box was still there.

I filled it in as honestly as I could. Sample size: one woman, one chair, one cold drink. Control: the morning I would have had without the chip. Expected result: a page with words on it.

Movement came back to the cursor. It moved once. Then the chip asked whether those words would be checked against a second reader.

Closing the lid was all I had left. That is not a method. It is what a person does when the study has started studying her.

Marrow called it a weather event. "Clear skies, no unaided work, chance of further questions after dark," she said.

A short note arrived from Pell later. He said Apple does not comment on beverages. The M6 remains in the iMac and the 14-inch MacBook Pro.

Updating the creative suite was his other suggestion. I did it. The suite asked me to define beauty before it would crop a photo. Beauty, I said, was fourteen clean edges. It cropped nothing.

State your comparison before you sit down, if you buy one of these machines. Have a guess ready. Keep the drink small.