Apple announces new flagship M2 processor | Hacker News Reader

Apple announces new flagship M2 processor

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173 pointsAlphaWeaver146 comments

It's fun to be back in the age where every few years you want to upgrade your computer because the new ones are so much faster, not because the old one is worn out.

20% faster isn't enough to make me regret my M1 purchase, but after one or two more 20% speed gains I'll feel like upgrading to the latest is going to be worth it.

I think you got that wrong. Speed isn't a bottleneck anymore and you won't get much better experience. This is same as phones.

Soon, they'll have to be more creative for people to consider buying every few years.

I wish MBA started having ProMotion.

> I think you got that wrong. Speed isn't a bottleneck anymore and you won't get much better experience. This is same as phones.

Well... I'm pretty sure that this is Hacker News. And for many developers, any performance improvement is great.

I first got an M1 Air, which was fantastic. Faster than my 3700X workstation for building Rust projects, while it was passively cooled and portable. Despite the awesome performance of the M1 Air, I upgraded to an M1 Pro when it came out. Moving from 4 performance + 4 efficiency cores to 8 performance + 2 efficiency cores was yet another awesome upgrade, giving again much quicker builds.

I work on machine learning stuff, so the AMX matrix co-processing unit in the M1 was really great for training small networks (sometimes convolution networks are still great for NLP + being able to train locally is nice for development). Then the M1 Pro/Max had double the AMX units, so it's again a great step forward.

Getting 20% YoY improvements will definitely make me very happy (and I bet many other developers).

Depends what you do. Compiling/Building or Video/Photo editing, the speed makes a big difference. M1s cut compile time on xcode build by half compared to I9s. Also docker builds are faster. Shaving off a few minutes here and there makes a big difference in ROI when you factor in the a year lifespan. Let's say it saves you 15 minutes a day. That is 62 hours a years.

Completely agree here. Not only that, but I have faster compiles on my m1 mac than on my i7 mac, _and_ I can compile on batter on my M1 and still have it last all day.

Small things add up. Freezing a track in Ableton, for instance, is substantially faster. This makes a huge difference to the workflow. When you're in a creative state of flow, stopping several seconds just for a track to freeze can take you completely out of your zone.

I spend a lot of my (non-work) time doing photo editing using Adobe products while traveling.

I'll happily take a laptop that is 10x as fast as my current one...

I am a Linux user.

For me lagging on Windows is not only noticeable but also maddening.

Typically my old laptop with a 3 year old processor and half the memory is snappier running a mainstream distro with KDE Plasma than a brand new one running Windows.

>Soon, they'll have to be more creative for people to consider buying every few years.

No, they will just stop the "security" updates and force you to buy a new one.

> Speed isn't a bottleneck anymore

stares in Mojang's poorly optimised Java

(Also, as other people have pointed out, it absolutely can be when compiling, using Photoshop, doing billions of Prolog inferences, etc.)

Higher speed at the same power usage translates to better battery life.

Right, and this is quite impressive, since they haven't yet been able to go from 5nm to 3nm. So, by the time the M3 is out, it will be a great update for the M1. (And the M1 will still be awesome for people who don't need the bump.)

IDK that I'd count on node shrinks to provide anywhere near the performance/power saving bumps that it used to. We are pretty close to the point were smaller nodes will mean more power consumption with the same design merely due to the fact that smaller nodes mean more leakage due to electron tunneling.

This has been the story for years and we just keep solving the problems. Perhaps one day you’ll be right, but it won’t be N5 to N3.

I'd want the Wirth's law[1] to be not true regardless of where we are in the hardware scale.

I recently tried using a 486 + CRT monitor setup. The speed at which your keystrokes appear on the screen is simply astounding. I'd like us to pay more attention to how software is written and debloating the layers of abstraction with hindsight.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

Boot on Linux and bash on a modern computer. Do you think the keystrokes are slower?

The problem isn't even the computer most times, its more often the display. Many modern flat panel displays have far more latency than even a crappy analog CRT, and yes the difference is definitely often noticeable if you have any experience with computers. Some of the most modern ones can be the worst offenders too, given the amount of signal processing a modern display does.

To add to earlier example, I do some retro gaming on an old windows 98 box with a CRT, the lack of latency moving the mouse in first person shooters of this era compared to today can be incredible.

That's analog for you. You essentially have a speed of light connection from the frame buffer to the electron gun, with no processing involved. As fast as the bits can be read from the data buffer they appear on the screen.

Same reason most people playing FPS games today use a 144hz+ monitor, ideally with black frame insertion. The difference is night and day.

I've tried FreeBSD (without desktop) on Thinkpad X1. I must admit, it is pretty good.

Dan's famous article on this subject has benchmarks: https://danluu.com/keyboard-latency/

The most responsive computer I’ve ever used was a Mac 512ke upgraded with 2.5 MB of RAM. I booted and loaded applications all off a RAMdisk and every input was instantaneous, including launching applications.

I remember reading that 1/10 of a second response time is "interactive"

I wonder how many systems don't qualify as interactive?

I don't think typing into the amazon search bar qualifies.

> I recently tried using a 486 + CRT monitor setup. The speed at which your keystrokes appear on the screen is simply astounding.

Use a fast editor like Sublime Text or even something like JetBrains IDEA with the zero-latency mode enabled and the editor delay will be single-digit milliseconds.

Get a modern 120Hz or more monitor (search for gaming monitor) with low latency and your display lag will be less than 10ms.

More info here: https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/

I’ve been using Sublime Text since the Aztecs and it is really fast, but not as fast as what I described earlier. Yep, using it on macOS with 120Hz Liquid Retina (M1 MBP 14 inch).

I’ll check Jet Brains zero latency mode. I didn’t know that exists, cool.

The example here will still neglect the reality that the stack processing the input will significantly increase the latency.

The (likely) ps2 keyboard on the 486 will have lower input latency as it doesn't have the multiple complex (both hardware and software) stacks that each key-input will need to travel through. People say you can't feel it, but people are regularly incorrect.

I feel like Rick (C-137) when I say, you gotta experience low latency on something like the original pong machine (from 1972) to know what you're missing out on. Once you've used this, the wireless mice and USB keyboards will feel slow and laggy even in low latency software.

I can't understand why people like those tiny wireless keyboards and mice they have to recharge and pair. When you're at a workstation just plug in one dongle and hook up all of it. It's so easy.

Downvoted to zero points again, apparently not contributing to the discussion.

It's the OS and event driven model, and polling USB vs interrupt based PS/2.

The nearly unnoticeable latency is small price for progress.

For as long as I can remember, every new Apple computer was "up to" 5... 10... 15... times faster than the one before. The use of "up to" is a clever marketing ploy. Because if all those were actual figures then, with all that compound multiplication, the current laptops must be about a million times faster than the one I had 20 or so years ago.

definitely feels a million times faster than a iMac circa 2000 with it's 333mhz CPU. I mean, we are talking 100000x performance at least.

Well, even my phone feels about a million times faster than the desktop machine with an old pentium chip (that was in the mid megahertz range) that I was still using 20 years ago.

Even 20 years ago, Notepad used to open in a flash on my desktop. The Notes app on my phone however...

That doesn't seem new. Just taking the default single-thread benchmark from Anandtech, CPUs that are sequentially 20% slower than the current record, the Intel Core i9-12900K (Q4 2021), are the Ryzen 9 5900X (Q4 2020), the Core i9-10900K (Q2 2020), Core i3-7350K (Q1 2017), and Core i5-6500 (Q3 2015). That's a doubling in performance in about 6.25 years. So you needn't have waited for your fruity savior to bring you biennial 20% performance increases.

Meanwhile my main computers are all about 2010, even for hobby 3D graphics coding I will never be able to saturate the GPUs with my designer skills.

> for hobby 3D graphics coding I will never be able to saturate the GPUs with my designer skills

Yeah, but latest versions of usual apps (especially web-browser) requires newer GPU/CPU.

Sadly, our days coding style by popular software devs is not focused on performance & optimization.

Web browser 3D apis are a bad example, because WebGL 2.0 is unware of what happened after 2011 in GPU hardware, while WebGPU is targeting 2015 hardware.

Forgive me my specific view: The M2 itself is marvelous. But the highly integraded path apple chose with all its hardware ruins it for me. For me, its enviromentally insane to buy such a device that is nearly unrepairable.

In context, my Macbook air just died yesterday ... the one from 2014. Luckily, its the replaceble SSD that went dead. And due to OpenCore, it still runs the latest MacOS.

If I would by the new M2 with the new MacBook Air: Same problem would doom the complete hardware. And I would have been stuck with the OS that Apple deems I can have.

Maybe this comes with age, but I see buzzwords + glitz + speedups ... but little to none envirmental progress. Which is a shame.

You can't make that form factor and a repairable laptop, no?

I don't see why not. With M.2 SSDs and DIMM sticks you've got quite a thin minimum footprint. Apple has decided that soldering everything onto the PCB is worth the cost of making the device unrepairable, and that's their business decision (and yours if you decide to buy such devices).

There are downsides to normal solutions (i.e. higher latency, needing to design places for screws to go) but it's not nearly as impossible as modern tech companies would like you to believe.

Framework has designed a laptop with some excellent repairability and they're just a small team with extremely limited funds. Tech giants like Apple should have no trouble coming up with similar devices if they actually cared to do so.

Idk where this idea of repairability = good for the environment came from.

You’ll be hard pressed to find a laptop that is built with more recycled material than a MacBook.

Are you open to ideas? Repairability = good for the environment comes from replacing a small piece of a larger hardware item so the whole hardware does not have to be recycled in the first place.

Now what happens when the MacBook has a defect processor or ram or ssd or screen? The whole thing is trash. And thats much more footprint than any smolten copper/gold/... that was put into it.

The only reusability is shredding - most of the time! - and smelting/separating the metals, which causes a lot of enviromental issues.

The old slogan "reduce, reuse, recycle" is written in priority order: buying recycled products is good, but extending life and avoiding consumption are better.

Apple forces people to buy base configs, they support their devices longer than others, and their laptops are built from more recyclable parts than the competitors.

"they support their devices longer than others" - true. its just after that time apple keeps the key to the device so they become insecure electronic ... paperweights? I mean, whats the use of an old phone / ipad / ... that you can infect with a single message, yet you can't run an alternate os on it. This is the point of the critcism: Unrepairable Hardware + Lockdown = Paperweights over time = less ecological than a modular, repairable and unlocked laptop, computer or phone.

> they support their devices longer than others

They support the laptop/desktop hardware longer than others. Software-wise, Windows supports a given hardware set longer than macOS does. Note that you can mod macOS to support older hardware than it official does (dosdude1, ben216k, opencore).

They've ended support for 2015 Macbooks after seven years. Even Microsoft, heavily critisised for its arbitrary cutting off point in Windows 11, still supports Windows 10 for years to come, supporting devices for well over 10 to 13 years. Personally, I think it's unacceptable that a $2k device from 2016 gets less support than a $700 laptop from 2012, especially in cases where the hardware manufacturer is also the software manufacturer.

If you want to run a fully patched operating system on the top-of-the-line Macbook you bought in 2016 you'll have to run Windows or Linux. Apple's software patches for older versions are spotty and often incomplete, after all, because so many devices upgrade to the latest OS immediately unless they have no choice.

iOS definitely receives excellent support, but Apple's reputation for long term support only seems to apply to mobile phones. The computer market has higher standards for software support in which Apple doesn't perform well.

> Idk where this idea of repairability = good for the environment came from.

> You’ll be hard pressed to find a laptop that is built with more recycled material than a MacBook.

How is swapping one part built with "recycled material" not better than swapping that one part plus the whole rest of the device with equally "recycled material"?

Reusing instead of recycling will always be more environment friendly. No exception.

The idea came from logic, and from people who study the environment, and from endless peer reviewed studies.

Had you spent a few moments looking into the issue, you too would have come to the same conclusion.

> You’ll be hard pressed to find a laptop that is built with more recycled material than a MacBook.

From reading their materials, all the aluminum and most of the tin in the laptop are recycled, and most of the packaging they send you the computer in, and that seems to be it.

Chips can't be recycled. Macs seem to contain very little recycled plastic. The circuit boards are definitely not recyclable.

Reduce; reuse; recycle in that order.

> I don't see why not. With M.2 SSDs and DIMM sticks you've got quite a thin minimum footprint.

The memory used in Apple laptops is not the same type of memory that you find on a DIMM. The architecture is more like a GPU, with high-speed memory placed as close as possible to the CPU.

Nobody complains that they can't upgrade the RAM on their GPU because we all understand the benefits of putting it on the same PCB. Apple did the same with CPUs.

> Framework has designed a laptop with some excellent repairability and they're just a small team with extremely limited funds. Tech giants like Apple should have no trouble coming up with similar devices if they actually cared to do so.

99.9% of consumers do not care about upgrading. They wouldn't be opening their laptops and trying to swap out components even if they could. It's not reasonable to expect Apple to compromise the design of their system to cater to the vanishingly small minority of customers who demand such features.

For that minority of users, companies like Framework exist to fill the void. However, let's not pretend like the Framework laptop is on par with an M1/M2 Apple laptop in terms of speed, size, power, battery life, or really any other metric beyond ability to swap out parts. They're cool laptops, but Apple's highly integrated products are on a different level entirely.

> The memory used in Apple laptops is not the same type of memory that you find on a DIMM. The architecture is more like a GPU, with high-speed memory placed as close as possible to the CPU.

That was a design decision too. It's not that they bought a chip, they made it themselves.

> It's not reasonable to expect Apple to compromise the design of their system to cater to the vanishingly small minority of customers who demand such features.

I repaired an upgraded dozens of laptops for friends and family, extending their service life for years. Less rare earth in a landfill and more money in the pockets of my acquaintances. The "small minority" is "vanishing" because people are being trated more and more like consumers that throw away the current toy to buy a new one. Companies like Apple are the root cause to this. They want this.

They build upon an architecture they knew from their phone socs and arm mobile socs never had dimmable ram. I get your viewpoint but your arguments are null if you look back on how their silicone came to be.

> vanishingly small minority of customers who demand such features.

I'd love to see apple do an A/B test with a model of, say, their current 15" MBP vs. a modular 15" MBP that made those compromises to get repairability/expandability, and see how the models sold and actually measure the demand.

"Nobody is buying them because we don't give anyone the choice, so nobody cares about it" isn't terribly scientific or even market-driven.

Apple's extremely limited specs speak of LPDDR5, which is just standard. They might've chosen to put the controller and power supply from the RAM slots into the CPU and motherboard for reasons, but that's still just a choice.

I don't concur on your 99.9%. Consumers don't necessarily think in upgrading, but in my circles people will generally go to some third party computer dealer and ask them "to make it fast again". This usually includes stuffing more RAM or an SSD (if they didn't have one yet) into an older PC, cleaning up some crapware cruft, and unless the CPU was cheap and shitty (i.e. Celeron, Pentium, the castrated i3 in some products like the old macbook Airs) the system will feel fast and responsive again without spending $2k on a new device. With unmaintainable stuff like Apple's these computer stores will have to tell people to buy a new device. This is not a "small minority", it's more like 30-40% of people in my experience.

Perhaps maintainability of Apple hardware isn't important because if you've got enough money to buy into the Apple ecosystem you've probably got enough money to buy a new one after three or four years.

You are right. But instead of making things smaller all the time, a company could chose to make things better repairable - like the framework laptop. Would Apple do that? No, why should they, since most if its hardware buyers are oblivious to the implications of bad repairability. It least thats what I think, but what do I know ...

Well, the framework laptop is really going places for one. They just need to hit that slightly higher high end with an i9 and an OLED imo

Check out the service manual for a Lenovo X1 Yoga. You can replace/repair almost everything and it's one of the thinnest devices. Apple goes for the soldered internals to spill you even more money since thy are the only ones able to repair it.

https://download.lenovo.com/pccbbs/mobiles_pdf/tp_x1_carbon_...

I have smaller x86 tablets that are more repairable.

It's a real shame, but the people working on Ahasi Linux seem to be making steady progress. With a bit of luck, the device will remain usable when Apple eventually drops support for this machine, assuming the non-user-replaceable parts like the storage or the RAM don't wear out.

> Maybe this comes with age, but I see buzzwords + glitz + speedups ... but little to none envirmental progress.

They are doing plenty of environmental progress considering MacBook Airs have no competition in terms of price to longevity and power usage relative to the performance and utility one can get out of them.

I think you did not misunderunderstand me on purpose, but the modularity/repairablity is abysmal, period. One example: Internal ssd dead - system cannot be used. And since its soldered in, thats it. Am I wrong?

Sure, but they are making tradeoffs, whether it be portability or profit. Either way, their machines and product tend to last very long relative to the competition, and they seem to be doing the most to drive down power consumption. Little to no environmental progress seems overboard from my perspective.

I think their point is there multiple ways that you can tackle the environmental impact of the devices you use and Apple is approaching that in multiple ways, just not in terms of easier repairability. That doesn't mean you can't be critical of what they're doing here, of course.

You are not wrong and it's a really terrible thing they are doing with all their devices outside of the Mac Pro and maybe Mac Studio.

Maybe it failed because it was repairable...

Sealing everything into one blob is going to be way more reliable than thousands of crusty connections.

Thats an interesting opinion. I wonder if there are statistics on failures of ssds that are soldered and that are modular ... ;-) You would be amazed how similar they are.

I’m sure Apple has data. Ultimately user xp is better when device doesn’t fail instead of easy repair when it does.

Replacing cheaply the ssd with 4 times the capacity / speed a few years later sure seems good xp for me.

Seems you need different hardware then. Most people don’t care.

We are literally on a thread where new CPU is made every year and you say people want to replace ssd…

Huh, that's a new one.

> Citation needed?

> I’m sure Apple has data.

At least in the US - the cost to repair a laptop is quite high & cumbersome - and the depreciation is quite fast - such that there aren't a lot of cases where it financially makes sense to repair.

This is a problem not unique to laptops.

I don't know how to feel about it.

> For me, its enviromentally insane to buy such a device that is nearly unrepairable.

I would generally feel the same, the only reason I don't is that Apple laptops tend to last a very long time for me and get replaced due to becoming obsolete, not due to becoming nonfunctioning. My 2011 MBA was in use until 2016, my 2015 MBP is still in use and due to be replaced soon. The lifespan of one of these devices is roughly 5 years in my use case, and I usually hand them down to someone else that needs a decent computer but where my use cases have outgrown it. I know one I handed off is still being used 10 years after it was purchased and it still works "fine" for some value of fine.

That's not an argument against repairability, but to say that a well-made product often has a longer lifespan than a useful lifespan for its original owner.

A large number of Macbook Pros from around 2013-2015 have had failed SSDs. Mine failed 4 years ago.

Because I was able to put in a new SSD - one twice the size and about twice the speed, I might add - I was able to keep using the system, and still am. I had to use an adapter, because Apple tried to discourage SSD replacement by using a proprietary pinout on the NVMe connector.

If the soldered-on SSD in an M1 mac fails, you can't even boot the system. You can't send the system off to have someone do a board-level replacement, because apparently they do some bullshit to "pair" the flash chips with the flash controller.

Apple has gone out of their way to take systems that used to be incredibly durable and long-lasting, and give them a very finite lifespan.

> If I would by the new M2 with the new MacBook Air: Same problem would doom the complete hardware. And I would have been stuck with the OS that Apple deems I can have.

There is nothing preventing you from installing an alternate OS on AppleSilicon Macs. Apple supports this officially via something called Apple Secure MultiBoot.

What alternate OS? The one where developers are still in the process of reverse engineering Apple's SoC?

Asahi Linux

That would fit the second part of my message.

It's usable (like right now) and certainly will be when Apple drops macOS support for it.

This was not an option until MacOS 12.2, and AFAIK is not "officially supported" or even documented by Apple. Can you link to somewhere where they describe supporting this?

Repairability is certainly something that could be improved, and extending the life of your machine is great for the environment.

However, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a machine with a better power-performance curve than the M1 (or now M2) machines. Reducing the electrical power needed for the same amount of processing power is absolutely helpful for the environment; the new chips are doing much more for much less.

Additionally, Apple tends to support old hardware far longer than competitors. My personal machine is still a 2012 MBP and it's just now starting to not receive the latest OS updates.

> Reducing the electrical power needed for the same amount of processing power is absolutely helpful for the environment

Just not buying a new device is likely still better for the environment, though a jump to the ARM architecture makes a bit more sense in that regard.

There are many lower hanging fruits than the energy consumption of laptops.

A nice bump in specs, but nothing groundbreaking like the initial ship. Somewhat disappointed that AV1 isn't supported in hardware, and Apple's continued push with HEVC gives me doubts they'll support the codec in the future.

They have a balancing act to perform. It will take time to engineer the high end versions of M2 and they can’t afford to eclipse the current high end M1 machines.

Anyway it seems likely the engineering tradeoffs made in the overall M* architecture will be with us for several years to come at least, and the first few generations will be incremental improvements.

> Somewhat disappointed that AV1 isn't supported in hardware

Given that the M2 is based on the A15, which doesn't have AV1, this was kind of expected. I'd imagine that, due to their general cycle, AV1 would come to iPhones first if/when it arrives.

the Apple chip development progression is well known - all apple M chips come from the corresponding iPhone chip that came before. It means that the M3 will follow from the next iPhone so you can easily tell what codecs will come.

no need to be disappointed, you can just look to the iphone for the next macbook.

There are like two Apple M chips, is that something official or internally leaked?

Apple has bought heavily into the HEVC ecosystem so they'll have to support it for at least a few generations just to make sure their hardware performs well combined with their previously released phones. And if you're already dumping money into the HEVC patent sinkhole, why bother also implementing a free codec?

I'm curious about what caused the 24GB limit. Does it have 3 memory buses limited to 8GB each?

Also a bit disappointed the Mini didn't get a refresh or, at least, the option.

Isn’t all memory on the SOC? I don’t think it’s a bus issue as much as it’s just a space issue.

Or more likely a market segmentation issue.

I think it's 3 memory buses. It's rated at 50% more memory bandwidth than the M1.

More likely due to DDR5

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31649250

This is all great and everything but when will enterprise customers like me see it? I’ve still my M1 Max on back order since February because “Apple is experiencing supply issues and prioritises consumer and education ahead of enterprise”

The M2 Max will be with us when my Mac finally ships…

I ordered mine in February as well, and after being delayed so many times the estimates were landing in July...it actually shipped out, and it arrived around a week ago. Was debating just cancelling and getting something else, but after using it, I'm very glad I didn't.

I ordered mine in mid-March and got it a week or two ago. I hate to say it, but it pays to call them and bitch about the delays. Squeaky wheel gets the grease and all that. They said they'd put me on priority and it seems from these comments maybe they actually did.

I hope we see a refresh with the M2 based SoCs in other systems as well this year. I intend to upgrade my old MBP and also probably acquire a Mac Mini or Mac Studio as a workstation later this year, and while the M1 Max/Ultra is pretty great, I'd love to see these incremental improvements up front.

I wonder how this would stack up against my m1 pro equipped mbp 14.

It looks like it has more power efficiency, which will matter more for some people than others. They certainly didn't want to trash their previously-flagship laptop processors...

I am waiting on an M1 Pro MBP 16 (I currently have the Intel MBP 16). Although right now I am thinking of cancelling that and ordering a MacBook Air and using that until the M2 Pro chips are released.

I switched to MacBook Air M1 from MBP 16 Intel a month ago, and

a) it still feels weirdly faster then the MBP

b) I can spend 6h outside working from the garden on one charge (running vitejs or react native + metro, plus slack, Spotify etc...)

c) I'm still a bit pissed that I didn't wait a month for the 2nd gen

return it!

Anything you miss from the 16?

I have a M1 Pro 16 as a work machine and a personal M1 Air. The screen on the 16" is much better (higher refresh and brighter)

Having ports on both sides of the machine. I use a usb-c display and need to flip the laptop upside down when docking. Otherwise my cables would get a bit messy or I’d have to rearrange my desk to avoid direct sunlight falling on the main screen.

Tbh, I have barely used the desk since I bought the machine, so we’ll see how much of an annoyance this will become in autumn:)

Do note that supply-chain issues plagued later orders of the M1 Pro/Max MBPs, so I wouldn't be surprised if it would take a decent bit of time to actually get an M2 Pro/Max, even after it actually gets announced in a few more months.

> I am thinking of cancelling that and ordering a MacBook Air

An M1 Pro or Max laptop should still be faster than an M2 Air, and can address a lot more memory (if that's what you ordered).

Is it though? Still remains to be seen. I am considering the 14 inch Macbook Pro with the M1 Pro chip or the M2 Macbook Air.

An M1 Pro starts at 6 CPU P-cores (2 e-cores) and 14 GPU cores at twice the memory bandwidth.

Think about what you do and what you need. I bought an M1 MacBook Air to keep me going until the Apple Silicon 16" Pro, and ended up staying with the Air.

16GB is fine for a typical web dev setup with three Docker containers. When I go out for more than a day I take an external monitor with me, the total package weighs less than a 16" Pro and has way more screen real estate.

Of course there's some people who definitely need the 16" Pro.

Which external monitor do you use if I may ask?

Lenovo M14. The design and hinge is great and the panel is fine, but I actually wouldn't recommend this one as it's 1920x1080 which scales poorly with MacOS. For VSCode or a web browser it's fine though, I just use CMD+(+/-).

Ideally I'd recommend anything with 2560x1440 or 2560x1600 resolution.

Given that the die size is even bigger, I'd expect them to have even worse thermal issues than the M1 Pros, but only time will tell

The M1 pro is the coolest device I have ever used, not sure what you mean by "even worse"

> worse thermal issues than the M1 Pros

What thermal issues?

What thermal issues? I can build PyTorch with all cores and the fans do spin up, but they are barely audible in a normal environment. When you touch the laptop it's warmer than idle, but not hot at all.

Even worse thermal issues than ... a laptop with no thermal issues and a fan that never even seems to audibly turn on?

The M1 Pros occasionally get hot enough you can hear the fan over a quiet conversation. Are you referring to the previous generation Intel MBPs which routinely maxed out their cooling system and thermal throttled?

Regarding the Process–architecture–optimization model from intel, what do each of those upgrades mean to the user?

I believe Process has the most to deal with energy efficiency due to the shrinkage, which is why M1 was so energy efficient when it was launched.

M2 seems like an architecture/optimization change, seems like they are just able to cram more stuff which is why it's faster without increasing battery life.

For those familiar with Intel, what does the consumer mainly gain out of optimization product launches?

> I believe Process has the most to deal with energy efficiency due to the shrinkage, which is why M1 was so energy efficient when it was launched.

Eh, that's part of it, but a lot of it has to do with the M1 having very very high IPC (much higher than comparable x86-64 parts), meaning they could run the chip at a much lower max clock speed (3.2 GHz versus boosting to 5 GHz for most competitive x86-64 CPUs) for similar overall performance.

This makes a huge difference because power consumption increases exponentially with clock speed.

edit: thinking about how it relates to Intel's process–architecture–optimization, it feels a bit tricky to compare. Apple's process seems to be something like: architecture(A-series chip for iPhones)-optimize-with-new-die-reusing-basic-cores-in-diff-arrangement-targetting-perf-in-small-thermal-envelope(M1 for iPad Pro and small Macbooks)-optimize-again-with-another-new-die-reusing-basic-cores-but-in-yet-another-arrangement-targetting-perf-in-a-wider-thermal-envelope(M1 Pro/Max/Ultra), and that all happens before you get to the next M-series increment, which begins with an A-series increment.

So the M2 is less the optimization of the M1 than it is the re-use of the cores in the new A-series chip preceding it, which was an architectural change, plus optimizations and other SoC differences.

> This makes a huge difference because power consumption increases exponentially with clock speed.

It scales linearly with clock speed.

P = V^2 * f, yes, but V and f are correlated. You can't increase f without also increasing V, hence: exponential scaling.

That's polynomial scaling, not exponential.

That's still a polynomial, not an exponential

These graphs look linear to you?

https://blog.stuffedcow.net/2012/07/ivy-bridge-power-consump...

https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-61820a6b86759c354d41d...

These graphs look like they depict f only scaling?

Who said anything about f?

I said "power consumption increases exponentially with clock speed" not "power consumption increases exponentially with f". That any modern processor has to crank up V to crank up its clock speed is a given.

Hence, power consumption is exponential with clock speed (which is achieved by cranking up both V - the polynomial term in P – and f).

(Which, fine, if you want to be pedantic, is polynomial growth, but that changes nothing about the point, which is that you have to burn a shitload more power at 5 GHz than at 3.2 GHz, because your consumption isn't scaling anything close to linear).

Clock speed is just f.

And yet the Mac Pro is still on Intel with no Nvidia option.......

When they make a chip for that machine that competes then I might be interested

Just wait until docker and packages and everything is built for these beasts.

If you’re referring to those pieces of software having support for Apple silicon, Docker already does (even without Rosetta installed) and I have yet to encounter a package on homebrew that isn’t natively built for ARM.

valgrind on arm is one I've not found to work

The environment is already pretty good. When it came out last year I had a few woes with x86_64 software, but nowadays I think most things you'd want are built for ARM, or you can get a very good experience with Rosetta 2.

Funny, I guess B&H were right: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31637122

Heres a new black box. It looks like the last but is 20% better. Trust me. We didnt fix bugs in our crappy software. It was perfect the day you got it. So, the improvents could only be in this new black box. Sure we neeed to whip people to mine thse rocks and underpay them, but look at the shiny form over function.

Also, just dump your old stuff every year, sine you dont want to be that uncool kid, doyou? All the coal melting, molding, glass, labor, CO2, is worthless now. And while youre here, it will be one kidney or a yearlong service for a low price of $50, which if you give us all your financial history you can get a 3% cashback on.

If Solidworks would run on this, I’d buy four of them tomorrow.

great. on top of yearly environment destruction via phones. now there are whole displays, batteries, keyboards and a ton of other special material just to fuel this greed carbon monster.

They aren't the only ones making new computers every year.

A very small portion of the population upgrade yearly, and having older devices go into a drawer or landfill is the most expensive option (over trade in/resale or hand-me-down to family members)

As someone who recently traded back to Apple a whole pile of older machines, don't sleep on that option. I had some fancy stuff like an iMac Pro, and some stuff as far back as the first Retina iMac. I'd been sitting on them because 'I can use them for something' (and there was software I had perpetual license to that wasn't offering free update to Apple Silicon).

Even the oldest stuff got me a couple hundred bucks from Apple in trade-in. The iMac Pro got me nearly three thousand dollars in trade-in. Don't sleep on the trade-in, you're feeding their 'refurbished' market and even if it goes to landfills it's not normal landfills, they're very interested in recycling some of the materials out of the machines. They wouldn't be offering that much in exchange if they weren't serious about it.

Later follow-up: I tried to check what the value was on my very new Macbook Pro, and it was shockingly low compared to the older Intel iMac Pro etc.

Which makes me wonder if they're intentionally trying to get the Intel machines out of circulation in order to help their transition to Apple Silicon. Mind you, I got a good amount for the 1st-gen M1 laptop… I suspect it all depends, but definitely see what you're offered if you have a powerful but Intel-based Mac. It seems like that was the sweet spot for their trade-in value.

How do they get away with infringing on BMW trademarks? M2, M3, etc..

Two completely different industries. Same reason that M3 medical imaging can.

And while there is a concept of a "famous trademark" that can provide general protection across all industries against trademark dilution, it is extremely unlikely something as generic as a letter and a number would receive such protection.

That is not how Trademarks work. It isn't "We used it first, so no one else can". If you are in an unrelated industry, selling unrelated products you can use any name that might be trademarked in another industry/product space.

> For instance, the name "MY GIRL" is a registered trademark owned by Enertec Enterprises for a line of dolls and accessories. However, there is a second trademark registration for the same name "MY GIRL" that is owned by Acushnet Company for a line of golf putters. The reason that these two different companies could register a trademark for the exact same name is that they operate in totally unrelated industries, and offer totally unrelated products. One company sells dolls, whereas the other company sells golf equipment.

https://secureyourtrademark.com/can-you-trademark/trademark-...

No one is going to confuse a Mac Book for a luxury car, or vice-versa.

A trademark can be registered for one or more classes of goods/services [1]. The APPLE M1 mark [2], for example, is registered across multiple US classes (21, 23, 26, 36, and 38). I did not immediately find a registration for US M2-based marks by either BMW or Apple. Maybe that's coming soon. Or I didn't input the right incantation into TESS [3].

[1] https://tmep.uspto.gov/RDMS/TMEP/current#/current/TMEP-1400d...

[2] https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4806:q6...

[3] https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/

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