Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max
apple.com
apple.com
Apple unveils the new MacBook Pro featuring the M3 family of chips - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38078065
Apple supercharges 24‑inch iMac with new M3 chip - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38078068
- Note that memory bandwidth is down. M2 Pro had 200GB/s, M3 Pro only has 150GB/s. M3 Max only has 400GB/s on the higher binned part.
- Just like the low-spec M3 14" has one fewer Thunderbolt port, it also doesn't officially support Thunderbolt 4 (like M1/M2 before it)
- The M3 Pro loses the option for an 8TB SSD. Likely because it was a low volume part for that spec.
- The M3 Pro actually has more E-cores than the Max (6 vs 4). Interesting to see them take this away on a higher-specced part; seems like Intel wouldn't do this
M2 pro: 8 performance cores + 4 efficiency cores.
M3 pro: 6 performance cores + 6 efficiency cores.
Not a great trade... I'm not sure the M3 pro can be considered an upgrade
Has the CPU industry really managed to pull off it's attempt at a bs coup that more cores always === better?
I thought we'd learned our lesson with the silly Mhz Myth already?
<< Depends. Is it faster? Then it's an upgrade. Has the CPU industry really managed to pull off it's attempt at a bs coup that more MHz always === better?
I thought we'd learned our lesson with the silly cores Myth already? >>
I agree with GP that we should rely on real measures like "is it faster", but maybe the goal of exchanging performance cores for efficiency was to decrease power consumption, not be faster?
Your reading comprehension needs work, no wonder you're unconvinced when you don't even understand what is being said.
The devil tends to be in the details. More precisely, in the benchmark details. I think Apple provided none other than the marketing blurb. In the meantime, embarrassingly parallel applications do benefit from having more performant cores.
It's one thing to argue that some real-world data might not be representative all on itself.
It's an entirely different thing to present no proof at all, and just claim "trust me, bro" on marketing brochures.
That's only rendering speed, and M3 Max vs M1 Max (not Pro). M3 Pro is only 30 percent faster:
> The 12-core CPU design has six performance cores and six efficiency cores, offering single-threaded performance that is up to 30 percent faster than M1 Pro.
Apple's PR release for M2 pro: "up to 20 percent greater performance over M1 Pro"
Apple's announcement for M3 pro: "up to 20 percent faster than M1 Pro" (they didn't bother to compare it to M2 pro)
Presumably it makes more marketing sense to compare to the M1 family up front because most people that bought an M2 last year are probably not going to be upgrading to M3. They are speaking to the people most likely to upgrade.
I’m currently at 4 to 5 years on laptops and 3 to 4 years on phones, and even then I hand them over to kids/friends/family who get a bit more use out of them.
Apple always comes from a position of strength. Again, they're saying as much as they're not saying.
Also, if they really cared about long lasting machines: slotted ram and flash please, thanks!
Expandable internal storage would be nice, yeah. But I get the sealed, very tightly packed chassis they’re going for.
Soldered memory allows higher bus frequency much, much easier. From a high frequency perspective, the slots are a nightmare.
Needless to say it has batshit insane implications for memory bandwidth.
I've got an M1, and the load time for apps is absolutely fucking insane by comparison to my iMac; there's at least one AAA game whose loading time dropped from about 5 minutes on my quad-core intel, to 5 seconds on my mac studio.
There's just a shitload of text-processing and compiling going on any time a large game gets launched. It's been incredibly good for compiling C++ and Node apps, as well.
The Dell XPS 17 is only 0.1 inch thicker yet has fully replaceable RAM and 2(!) m2 slots. I’m pretty sure what Apple is going for is maximizing profit margins over anything else..
I understand the desire for slotted RAM, but the major limiting factor for nearly 10 years was CPU support for more than 16G of RAM. I had 16G of ram in 2011 and it was only 2019 when Intels 9th Gen laptop CPUs started supporting more.
The Dell XPS 17 itself has so many issues that if it was a Macbook people would be chomping at the bit, including not having a reliable suspend and memory issues causing BSOD's. -- reliability of these devices, at least when it comes to memory, might actually be worse and cause a shorter lifespan than if it had been soldered.
Of course it always feels good to buy an underspecced machine and upgrade it a year later, which is what we're trading off.
But it's interesting that we don't seem to have taken issue with BGA CPU mounts in laptops but we did for memory, I think this might be because Apple was one of the first to do it - and we feel a certain way when Apple limits us but not when other companies do.
On top of that, the higher-power laptop SKUs have supported 64gb or more since that time as well.
Secondly, it’s silly to claim that having RAM slots somehow makes a computer inherently more unstable. Typically these types of issues are the result of the manufacturer of the machine having bugs in the BIOS/EFI implementation, which are exacerbated by certain brands/types of memory. If you don’t want to mess around with figuring that stuff out, most manufacturers publish a list of officially-tested RAM modules which are not always the cheapest in absolute terms, but are always night-and-day cheaper than Apple’s ridiculous memory pricing.
[1] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/88190/i...
No Dell Latitude, Elitebook, Thinkpad X/T-series or even Fujitsu lifebook supported a CPU that was permitting greater than 16GiB of memory.
I know this because it was something I was looking at intently at the time and was very happy when the restrictions were lifted for commercially viable laptop SKUs.
Citing that something exists predisposes the notion of availability and functionality. No sane person is going to be rocking into the room with a Precision 7520 and calling it portable. The thing could be used as a weapon and not much else if you had no power source for more than 2hrs.
Also, socketed anything definitely increases material reliability. I ship desktop PC's internationally pretty often and the movement of shipping unseats components quite easily even with good packing.
I'm talking as if I'm against socketed components, I'm not, but don't pretend there's no downsides and infinite upgrade as an upside, it's disingenuous, in my experience there are some minor reliability issues (XPS17 being an exceptional case and one I was using to illustrate that sometimes we cherry pick what one manufacturer is doing with the belief that there were no trade offs to get there) and some limitations on the hardware side that limit your upgrade potential outside of being soldered.
> No Dell Latitude, Elitebook, Thinkpad X/T-series or even Fujitsu lifebook supported a CPU that was permitting greater than 16GiB of memory.
Here are the Lenovo PSRef specs for the Thinkpad T470, which clearly states 32GB as the officially-supported maximum, using a 6th or 7th gen CPU:
https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkPad/ThinkPad_T...
This is not a behemoth of a laptop; I'm writing this on a T480 right now, which supports 32GB officially and 64GB unofficially, and it weighs 4lbs with the high-capacity battery (the same as the T470).
I can't tell if you're trolling or what, but if you're serious, you clearly didn't look hard enough.
Edit: since you mentioned Latitudes, Elitebooks, and Fujitsu lifebooks:
- Dell Latitude 7480 (6th gen CPUs) officially supports 32GB: https://www.dell.com/support/manuals/en-us/latitude-14-7480-...
- HP Elitebook 840 G3 (6th gen CPUs) officially supports 32GB: https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c05259054
- For Lifebooks, I couldn't find an older one that supported 32GB, but this U937 uses 7th gen CPUs, and has 4GB soldered and one DIMM slot which supports up to 16GB. This is a total of 20GB, again, breaking the 16GB barrier: https://www.fujitsu.com/tw/Images/ds-LIFEBOOK%20U937.pdf
I believe these are all 14"-class laptops that weigh under 4 pounds.
Any laptop which used LPDDR3 (soldered) typically maxed out at 16GB, but as far as I'm aware, this was due to capacity limitations of the RAM chips, not anything to do with the CPUs. For example, the Lenovo X1 Carbon had a 16GB upper limit for a while due to this. I believe the 15" MacBook Pro had the same limitation until moving to DDR4. But this is entirely the result of a design decision on the part of the laptop manufacturer, not the CPU, and as I've shown there were plenty of laptops out there in the ~2014-2016 timeframe which supported 32GB or more.
DDR4 support was introduced with the 6th gen Core (except Core m) in 2016, LPDDR4 support didn't show up until (half of) the 10th gen lineup in 2019. It's just another aspect of their post-Skylake disaster, wherein they kept shipping the same stuff under new names for years on end before finally getting 10nm usable enough for some laptop processors, then a few years later getting it working well enough for desktop processors. In the meantime, they spent years not even trying to design a new memory PHY for the 14nm process that actually worked.
The problem with Apple, however, is that their hardware will long outlive their software support. So if they really want to save natural resources by making long-lasting machines, they should put much more effort into sustained software support.
But, drivers are only available for win 7 and macOS High Sierra was the last supported version.
Luckily Linux still works great.
When my first Macbook lasted for more than 3 or 4 years I was surprised that I was upgrading before it died. I went through many upgrades with almost zero issues(one HDD failure, one battery failure). I still have a 2012 Macbook Pro that I've since installed Linux on.
When I bought the first touchbar Macbook (late 2015?) I spent around $6k maxing out the options, and I was surprised at how totally trash it was. Hardware QC issues were shocking: particles under the screen from manufacturing, keys stuck within the first hour of usage, external monitor issues, touchbar issues...
I haven't bought a laptop since.
They don't, but the difference is that Windows users generally don't know or care about processor generations. In contrast, it's common for Mac users to know they have an "old" Intel-based Pro, an M1 Air, etc., and to use that knowledge to help determine when it might be time to upgrade.
You can test this by asking Windows users what CPU they have. For the few who know and who have an Intel CPU, you can ask what their Brand Modifier¹ (i3/i5/i7) is. If they know that, you can ask what the 5-digit number following the Brand Modifier is — the first two digits are the Generation Indicator¹. I'd be surprised if more than 0.01% of Windows users know this.
¹ Intel's name
My interpretation while watching the event is that this is a company persuading x86 holdouts to upgrade to Apple Silicon, and maybe some M1 users as well.
Not at all. I've worked with FANG developers with brand new M1 MBPs that had no idea what 'm1' meant until something broke.
Apple likes doing that quite frequently while dumping their "up to X% better" stats on you for minutes.
I find it interesting how people respond to this. On one side, it’s marketing so it should be taken critically. OTOH, if they stress the improvements over the last generation, people say they create artificial demand and things about sheeple; if they compare to generations before people say that it’s deceptive and that they lost their edge. It seems that some vocal people are going to complain regardless.
> The 12-core CPU design has six performance cores and six efficiency cores, offering single-threaded performance that is up to 30 percent faster than M1 Pro.
I've got an M1 Max 64GB and I'm not even tempted to upgrade yet, maybe they'll still be comparing to M1 when the M10 comes out though.
https://images.macrumors.com/t/wMtonfH5PZT9yjQhYNv0uHbpIlM=/...
I thought this at first then I realized the cost-performance benefit gained from adding more cores often outweighs just improving the performance of single cores. Even in gaming. I think this is what led AMD to create their Ryzen 9 line of CPUs with 12 cores in 2019.
That being said, I abhor the deceptive marketing which says 50% more performance when in reality, it's at most 50% more performance specifically on perfectly parallel tasks which is not the general performance that the consumer expects.
Apple's E cores take up ~1/4 the die space of their P core. If the M3 pro lost 2 performance cores but gained 4-8 efficiency cores it'd be a much more reasonable trade.
If you bought a $2k M2 machine and traded it for a $2k M3 machine, you may gain better battery life with no concessions, except for benchmark measurements (that don't affect your daily work).
$2K-3K is what my 3090/7800x3D sff desktop cost (depending on whether you include the price of the TV/peripherals I already own).
Minimum 8GB RAM is more universally egregious but I’m not going to sit here and justify my own exception whilst discounting the possibility that 8GB works for others.
To be fair– While 8GB is annoying– I've bought the M1 MacBook Air when it came out and it's remarkably resilient. I've only had it freeze a few times due to too little RAM.
I've also been using many different programs. I just have to be a tad mindful about closing tabs (especially Google tabs) and programs.
We've seen the same with Nvidia's GPUs going from the 10 to 20 series. If people don't perceive higher gains without compromises, they won't buy it.
M2: 8 + 4
M3: 6*1.2 + 6*1.3 =
7.2 + 7.8
They do say the system overall is up to 65% faster, and has lower power consumption at the same performance level.
M2 pro = 8*3 + 4 =28 (the *3 representing that the performance cores contribute ~3x more to total system performance than the efficiency cores)
M3 pro = 6*3*1.15 + 6*1.3 =28 (apple claims 15% more performance for the p cores not 20%)
They don't claim either of those things. They claim the performance is 20% faster than the M1 pro. Interestingly, they made that exact same claim when they announced the M2 pro.
Energy efficiency might be better, but I'm skeptical till I see tests. I suspect at least some of the performance gains on the p+e cores are driven by running at higher clock rates and less efficiently. That may end up being more significant to total energy consumption than the change in the mix of p/e cores. To put it another way, they have more e cores, but their new e cores may be less efficient due to higher clock speeds. Total energy efficiency could go down. We'll just have to wait and see but given that apple isn't claiming an increase in battery life for the M3 pro products compared to their M2 pro counterparts, I don't think we should expect an improvement.
In summary, there is supposedly improvement in all areas so the reduced P core count doesn't seem to be a downgrade in any form as the OP suggested.
I believe this is due to the TB4 spec requiring support for two external displays on a single port. The base spec M series SoCs only support one external display.
I’d expect the ports to work identically to a TB4 port in all other aspects.
I'm sure there is some kind of technical explanation but both Intel and NVIDIA seemed to managed 3+ scanouts even on low end parts for a long time.
I mean, it almost certainly is? I would guess a majority of the low-end SKUs are rarely if ever attached to one external display. Two would be rarer still.
I can pick areas where Apple is beating Intel. Different products have different feature matrices, news at 11.
It does seem like a shame, though—Intel’s IOT department seems to try lots of things, but not get many hits.
they operate 100% on profitability, not what's technically feasible. They are extremely focused on making money. Yes, there is a reason after all.
Almost always it’s maximizing profit margins rather than anything else.
I recently went on a 5-day trip and forgot to bring the charger for my M2. The first day I thought I'd have to rush around and find one. By the fourth day I still had 8% and then finally realized I could charge it via USB-C instead of magsafe.
Just 2 would be enough. Which seems like a basic feature their competitors are are capable of supporting for a very low costs.
They in fact are competing on checkboxes, specifically they are probably using this limitation to upsell theirs more expensive models.
Some of them were trying out Apple Silicon replacements, though I'm not aware of what they did monitor wise. Probably used the excuse to buy a single large ultrawide each instead, though I don't actually know. ;)
MacBook Air is a world-leading form factor for travel, it's not "low-end".
MBA with extra storage/RAM can exceed revenue of base MBP.
The travel form factor of MBA is not available for MBP, for any price.
Heh, that's not how I would describe MacBook Pros. ;)
Honestly, I'm an accountant and everyone in my office uses 2-3 monitors with $1,200 business ultrabook.
you're saying they're low-end because Intel? if you've got your macbook connected to two monitors, you're not very concerned about battery performance.
So isn't Intel silicon competitive speedwise? I thought the M[0-4]s were OK but sort of hypey as to being better in all regards.
I’d seriously consider not taking a job if they were still on Intel MacBooks. I appreciate that an arch switch isn’t a piece of cake for many many workloads, and it isn’t just a sign of employers cheaping out. But for me it’s just been such a significant improvement.
And even if you do not care about battery, you still care about throttling.
Real world, the M series chips are by far the best I’ve ever used as a software engineer and it’s not even close.
What dev shop immediately buys all developers the newest and shiniest thing as soon as its released without trialing it first?
At least at the time, things worked a bit easier having the entire pipeline (dev -> prod) use a single architecture.
(Overall the transition was super smooth, but it wasn't instant or without bumps)
If the company bought Pro or Max chips and not base models, it wouldn’t be a problem.
But with the general power of the base model Apple Silicon I don't think most dev shops really need the higher end models, honestly.
Those are harder questions to answer. We could assume Apple crunched the numbers. Or perhaps they just stuck to the status quo.
Only an insider or decision maker (maybe that’s you) knows.
But it’s a frustrating limitation and remains one of the only areas their old intel based laptops were better at.
I think it's weird though how far people go to defend Apple. It's objectively making (some) users worse off. Apple clearly doesn't care and the people defending them also clearly don't. But the affected users do care and "but money" isn't really a good excuse for them. It also doesn't solve their problem of not being able to use two external monitors anymore without spending significantly more money.
On the MacBook Air one output is connected to the internal display leaving one output for an external display.
(The Mac Mini that uses the same SoC is limited to 2 external displays for the same reason)
To support more displays they would have to add support for a second Thunderbolt bus to the base SoC.
The base-tier chips are designed as high-volume tablet chips first and foremost, with ultramobility crossover capability.
Using DisplayLink or certain kinds of thunderbolt multimonitor are possible while running outside the pixel pipe or running multiple monitors on a single pixel pipe (this is not MST which is multiple pixel pipes on a single stream). But yeah it's ugly especially on a base-tier processor with this eating cycles/dumping heat. You're running the hardware encoder at least.
Discord had this weird error if you tried to enable the screen/audio capture, it tries to launch something and fails and the solution is you need to manually install "airfoil" because it's an audio capture module that discord licensed. you don't have to fully install it but the audio driver is the part that discord uses and that goes first (has to be allowed as a kext, ie non-secure mode). theoretically a kernel-level capture like that could be a ton faster than userland, I think that's the on-label use of airfoil.
And to not support industry standard NVIDIA GPU on ARM Macs, too. 1 GPU typically supports 5 output over as little bandwidth as PCIe x1.
AMD is 6 displays. You see this rarely on consumer boards but the ASRock 5700 XT Taichi for some inexplicable reason did expose all six -- with four DisplayPorts to boot, too. I do not think there has been 4 DP or six output customer cards since.
I'm sure it's a marketing explanation: they make bigger margins on more expensive machines, and they need some feature differentiators to nudge people to move up. 2 extra displays is a poweruser/pro feature.
They make their own silicon, it's not like they're shy about designing hardware, if they wanted to stuff features into the lower end books they easily could.
Llama.cpp is a pretty extreme cpu ram bus saturator, but I dunno how close it is (and its kind of irrelevant because why wouldn't you use a Metal backend).
If you want to run larger models, then CPU inference is your only choice.
Also, not many implementations can even use it.
Is this because they are not populating all the memory channels, or just using lesser memory ICs?
If its the former... thats annoying. It just makes their products worse for artificial segmentation and very little cost savings.
Given that there has never been any public incidents about it and what we know about similar defaults I would be surprised if Apple is getting less than 95% opt-in rate.
But I suspect at high-end they only really care about the performance of a few dozen professional apps e.g. Logic or Final Cut. And at the low-end it's likely just efficiency.
A 95% opt-in rate is INSANELY high for any type of usage-stat opt-in, everything above 50% is usually outstanding.
What is known about "similar defaults"?
So there are people who were opted-in that change their minds. My friends and family opt-in rate is <50%. And most of them are non-technical.
To someone with experience in that area of UX, a 95% opt-IN rate is ridiculously high.
A 95% consent-rate would already be hard to achieve as opt-OUT.
For opt-in a 95% rate would require both attention AND consent from 95% of the audience at this stage in the setup wizard.
I highly doubt that it can achieve 95% attention, let alone 95% consent.
Anonymized stats from your machine? Most normal people (who don't use computers like we do) do not care and just click the most affirmative option so that they can move forward.
Every college kid has a Mac Book Pro, yet they are by definition not Pros
My dad can't tell apart Windows and Linux, but he makes sure to uncheck any kind of data collection, tracking, and clicks 'reject all' on every cookie warning
Normal people don't even give a second of thought to this. My partner knows the difference between windows and Mac, and is perfectly content to browse the internet without an ad blocker and to read in between all the cookie dialogs. The only time she clicks on one is when it's required to proceed, and she'll click whichever one is the most obvious button.
> But it's not quite opt in our opt out in this case. The user is required to opt for something. Apple literally has 100% attention, because otherwise the user can't move past the screen.
Thing is, you don't even have 100% of the users' attention in this case. The user wants to use the device, you're just standing in the way.
The scenario is this: You force the user to take a decision between option A and B. Regardless of his decision he will achieve his immediately desired outcome (move to the next screen / use the device).
Getting 95% to vote for 'A' would require some quite aggressive dark pattern, to the point that option 'B' would need to be almost invisible and actively discouraged.
Even if the UI would be a pre-checked check-box and the user would just have to select "Next" to Continue (=opt-out), your rate of consent would not be 95%. As mentioned, everything beyond 50% is already outstanding
Or, let's rephrase: If Apple would have 95% opt-in rate, they wouldn't bother chasing for consent again on every SW-update
And I've never heard people complain?
Genuinely surprised as it seems to be quite a commonly controversial thing amongst devs.
This calls out some soft spots that were exposed during the Hong Kong riots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQ9LR8homt4
It's not like it's enabled by default and you have to know to go and find the setting to turn it off or anything..
IMO that’s quite different to something that’s just silently on by default, and requires you to set an environment variable or run a command to opt out.
so you like them enough to pay them thousands for the premium product, but not enough to tell them how much CPU you use?
Could be “how much CPU does this user use?” but could also be “when prompted with a notification that a user’s iCloud backup storage is low, how long did they hesitate on the prompt before dismissing? How can we increase their odds of upgrading?”
Also, my willingness to provide information does not correlate to how much I “like” a company’s products. If I buy a sandwich from a deli, and they ask for my email for their newsletter or something, I won’t give it. That doesn’t mean I don’t like their company or their sandwich. Could be the best sandwich in the world, they don’t need my email.
That's not super surprising to me. Apple loves to charge stupid prices for storage and memory. Maybe it's worth it for lots of people to have the convenience of built in storage at the lower levels, but I have to imagine that most people would want 8TB of SSD would rather just get an external solution for... much less.
Wouldn’t do what? Intel has more E-cores than P-cores on most of their range, and especially on the higher end e.g. on raptor lake S the i9 all have 16 E and 8 P, the i7s have 8:8, only the lower end of the i5 (below 13500) have more P than E cores. And the i3 have no E cores.
The story is somewhat similar on mobile (H and HX), a minority of SKUs have more P than E, and none of them in P and U.
In fact that was one of the things which surprised me when Intel started releasing asymmetric SMT, they seemed to bank heavily on E cores when mobile and Apple had mostly been 1:1 or biased towards P cores.
Although that’s not quite true either e.g. on raptor lake H, the upper i5 (13600H) has 8 E cores while the low range i7 (13620H) has 4, but the i7 has 6 P-cores versus 4. The base frequencies also get lower as you move from i5 to i7. And you have less GPU EU (80 -> 64).
just contrasting this with the recent TR4 announcements from AMD, apparently their PRO variants top (theoretically at least) at around 325GB/s (non-pro versions are half of this), so just from that perspective alone M3 Max's might be better ?
i always have the naive assumption here that keeping the-beast i.e. the cpu fed with data is much better for overall performance than just clock-rates etc.
There's a reason they didn't just stick an A series chip in their laptops and call it a day - they want more performance even if it comes at the cost of efficiency. It's probably better to say that Apple is pushing performance within a relatively restricted power envelope.
Just to illustrate my point - if m3 had exactly the same performance as m1, but with 1/2 the power draw, I don't think many people would have been happy even if it would have been an amazing increase in computing efficiency.
I dream of a world where instead of a marketing company becoming a top 3 tech company, a tech company would have. Wonder what they would have done for their laptop...
Or maybe this is just an inevitable outcome of capitalism/human biology where a veblen goods company will become a top player in a market.
(I have my own Google and M$ complaints too)
I dunno, if a there was marketing company that could design the likes of the M series chips along with the mobile versions, develop a full technology stack from programming language and compiler, custom chips, through to shipping whole devices at unimaginable scale would make me wonder what technology companies were doing.
What other “tech” company really compares from a hardware perspective? Samsung? Dell? AMD? Love them or hate them, there’s no denying that Apple has serious technical chops. One day people will only hate Apple for reasonable things, today’s not that day apparently.
Obviously, other people care.
There are very few companies that have as much first party Tech in their products from start to finish.
I think Apple under prioritizes sdvanced functionality but if they’re not a Tech company than it’s hard to see what is.
I think Apple plays the "niche" very well, not only regarding marketing, but also from a techs view.
Of course I have no idea why am I taking the effort to respond to an edgy single word comment…
An obvious rule of thumb is for "Pro"-branded laptops to only use "Pro"-branded chips. It's what they follow for the iPhone lineup, but I suppose iPad Pros also use non-Pro chips. Just seems like a very confusing SKU to create, and definitely something Steve wouldn't approve of.
And yet, the MBA's screen in comparison is serviceable and nice, but nothing outstanding. That's the case for the MBP 14 (when the 16 is just too large and bulky).
absolutely not... working for 10 years on 13/14 and never _felt_ that way I get this is personal ;)
Look, I'm a 16" guy myself, I even carried one of the 17" cafeteria trays back in the day… but it's clearly the sweet spot for _most_ people.
I'm more confused about the "M3 Pro" variant. Its performance either seems to be overkill or not enough. A more sensible lineup to me would be:
M3 - 2 thunderbolt ports, dual monitor support, memory up to 8-24gb (2x4, 2x6, 2x8, 2x12, 2x16). In the MacBook Pro, always comes equipped with second tier upgrades.
M3 Max - 3 thunderbolt ports, quad monitor support, 32-128gb (8x4, 8x6, 8x8, 8x12, 8x16).
Then again this wouldn't let Apple upsell people on basic functionality like dual monitor support so they'll never do this.
Now it’s clearly, if you really need perf you get an M3 max.
My work laptop is a 14-inch MacBook Pro and I've been impressed with the battery life considering all of the containers that run (on Kubernetes!) as part of my dev workflow. I guess Apple deciding to compare Intel and M1 was to try to convince existing MacBook users to upgrade to the latest generation CPUs.
You mean others now got to use TSMC's 4nm process? These new M3 chips are probably on the 3nm process, Apple is still a generation ahead here.
It looks like Apples aim is to always stay a generation ahead of its competition, I wonder how long they can keep that up since they aren't running their own fabs.
This has been the case on HN for more than 5 years. Intel Fabs used to sell their industry best node to only Intel themselves, and charges a premium for those newer CPU. I guess that is unethical too.
Apple pays lavishly to support TSMC's early node research, and they get their say in what happens in the R&D process, and very early insight into the node and their say on how it would work for them as they do their rollout. TSMC gets carried through the research phases much faster than their competitors can do, and it's led them to be on an absolute tear starting with 7nm. And they absolutely cannot fill the same level of demand with the same level of R&D funding from any of their competitors.
It's been a healthy, productive long-term partnership, TSMC is maybe the only supplier Apple can't boss around and Apple is certainly a client that is always too big to fire. Doesn't mean every apple product is good (and TSMC can still flub, and their competitors are catching up a little bit) but Apple can move whatever they need to lol, they are masters of supply chain managment. They can cover TSMC's mistakes if needed, and they have insight into exactly what is happening as the node is developed and how they need to maneuver their product stack around to exploit it.
Engineers study designs, CEOs study logistics. Also true of NVIDIA btw lol, they are very logistics-oriented because they make up such a large marketshare. How many companies on the planet are ordering big bulk runs of GDDR? Well, if we are ordering 20% of the planet's GDDR on a fixed timetable then maybe we can get a custom version, micron, right? (9 months later, GDDR5X/6X is born lol)
It is an interesting contrast to Intel - this is almost the same kind of synergistic relationship as intel's own fab and IP side have historically had together. Did intel fail because they had a tight fab-design coupling, or did they fail because they had a rotted internal culture and then the fab slipped a bunch?
M3 seems like it generally underwhelms. A17 had like a 3% increase in IPC. They didn't discuss battery much and I suspect that's because ramping the clockspeeds to over 4GHz isn't so good for the battery benchmarks.
The most worrying part is the transistor count. M3 Max gets quite a bit higher transistor count, but M3 is only 37B transistors while M1 was 33.7B. Apple and/or N3 absolutely suck here.
Looks like I might be keeping my M1 system for yet another upgrade cycle.
In the meantime, M3 is on N3B despite very low yields, which surely applied design pressure to keep size down, and the power gains are not as good, and also the density is worse than promised. Apple also surely feels pressure to keep prices high (bait-tier M3 base option with 8GB lol) and honestly they probably are going to be tough to justify on a performance/efficiency basis compared to very fierce ARMv8 competition (we are now testing the thesis there's no difference lol). Apple still has advantages but man do they take you to the cleaners for the result, a loaded apple laptop is obscene. I chose to go for an older loaded M1 Max instead of waiting for M3, because I could actually get a nice laptop that wouldn't impose limits on a prosumer etc. 1TB is all anyone can afford still and that's really silly.
(SSD prices in particular are absolutely inexcusable lol. Mandate a M.2 NVMe 3.0/4.0/+ port please, EU, it's time. Don't care how it works, slot it into the side or whatever if you want, it can be single-sided 2230 or 2242 if you want (or caddy-loading, the icy dock standard lol), but it's time.)
https://global.icydock.com/products-c5-s48-i0.html
https://global.icydock.com/vancheerfile/images/mb873mp-b_v2/...
I also wonder if losing a bunch of the PA Semi team to whatever startup (it may have been nuvia or tenstorrent lol) may also have hurt apple's velocity on A16/A17. There were a lot of apple silicons before M1, after all. But certainly TSMC is a bunch of the problem here.
I think they'll hustle to refresh it and do M3+ as a fast follow in 6-12 months with N3E, the cost economics are very favorable to jump as soon as there's the volume. That doesn't mean MBP gets refreshed immediately though, they'll ramp on the phones (iphone 16/16 pro, etc) and base-tier M3+ or whatever first.
Without N3B, there will never be N3E.
It was the same with N7. And none of these are new to a new node generation.
Then you proceed to link to one that... hasn't? (it's good, yes, but it's not caught up at all)
However, when they’re that close in performance, I think power usage should be taken into account. It’s a laptop CPU after all. Maybe I’d rather have 80% of the performance at 4x the battery life
The perf per watt claims still apply.
Redis, Memcached, PostgreSQL, MySQL- it's all native arm64 images now.
If I’m running M3 images on my Ryzen, performance is gonna be horrible, but why would I?
EDIT I get your intent though because it runs better when the images match the host.
$ brew install hyperkit
hyperkit: The x86_64 architecture is required for this software.
Error: hyperkit: An unsatisfied requirement failed this build.It say it clearly on the name, Windows containers.
Why is this sort of question always framed as if people have to provide a justification for not buying a new model, as if spending money on the new shiny without any reason is normal or desirable?
We live in a day and age where hardware bought a decade ago still packs enough punch to run most of today's software without any hiccup. Why would anyone waste their cash to replace something that works without having any compelling reason?
For some background in my thinking, it is because today's announcement really focused on Intel users. My semi-educated guess is that Apple did a whole bunch of user studies and realized there are a lot of people out there, like the OP, who haven't upgraded yet, hence the focus. As a result, I'm genuinely curious why this person hasn't upgraded.
And for my own personal experience, the upgrade/switch from intel to m*, is night and day better ergonomics as a developer. It isn't just some shiny new toy or a waste in cash. For the same reason professional mechanics in F1 don't use shitty tools to work on their cars. Or tour de france racers aren't using 30lbs Huffy bikes.
TLDR: I don't give a f'ck if you don't happen to upgrade, that's your choice. I'm just curious about why.
We also live on a finite planet. And then energy savings for many desk jockeys is unlikely to be worth it for a few decades more, if one considers the literal tons of material and energy in manufacturing.
This thread is literally about the decision to buy an M3-based MacBook Pro to replace M2/M1/Intel MacBook Pros. We're talking about hardware launched in the past 4/3/2/1 years.
That's hardly "20yo" anything.
Also, you failed to provide any concrete, objective reason to buy a M3. None at all. Is it that hard to put together any argument to justify the move?
My car comparison was trying to propose an alternative metaphor since comparing a top-of-the-line racing car to a child's bicycle struck me as absurdly out of proportion. Cars are generally maintained and kept in service longer than computers, so I picked 20y out of thin air.
> Also, you failed to provide any concrete, objective reason to buy a M3. None at all. Is it that hard to put together any argument to justify the move?
My point is for most people there is no justification to move. Unless one has a device beyond repair, so old its software cannot be kept up-to-date, or the very rare need for the latest performance then stick with what you have.
Apple has telemetry from macOS. So they knew exactly what percentage of users are still on Intel Macs.
And it's low-hanging fruit to go after them then try and convince existing Windows users.
For the same reason professional mechanics in F1
don't use shitty tools to work on their cars.
That's a fantastically entirely subjective opinion.
That's the point: objectively, there is absolutely no concrete reason that justifies replacing a MacBook bought in the past 3 or 4 years with the M3 ones. None at all.
In fact, it boggles the mind how anyone could justify replacing any MacBook pro with a M3 one by claiming "pros don't use shitty tools", as if MacBook Pros packing an Intel core 7/M1/M2 suddenly became shitty laptops just because Apple released a new one.
Again, what you mean to say is that _you_ cannot think of a reason that would make _you_ upgrade from a 4 year old MacBook to a new M3 one.
> objectively
Do you understand that what you say is literally, definitionally, subjective? It's one thing to make primitive and clumsy generalisations, but quite another to be confusing subjectivity and objectivity.
> it boggles the mind
Starting to believe there isn't a lot of mind to boggle here…
> how anyone could justify replacing any MacBook pro with a M3 one by claiming "pros don't use shitty tools"
I haven't noticed anyone making this argument, but I know many people who upgrade their tools -- whether computers or otherwise -- to the latest and greatest whenever they can, because working faster and more efficiently is a concrete benefit, and it really would take an inestimable moron to, say, argue that late Intel-era MacBooks can do the same things that M-series MacBooks can.
I haven't noticed anyone making this argument
Not that you missed anything of value. A previous poster, latchkey, quite literally made that argument:
"the upgrade/switch from intel to m*, is night and day
better ergonomics as a developer. It isn't just some
shiny new toy or a waste in cash. For the same reason
professional mechanics in F1 don't use shitty tools
to work on their cars. Or tour de france racers aren't
using 30lbs Huffy bikes"
it really would take an inestimable moron to, say,
argue that late Intel-era MacBooks can do the same
things that M-series MacBooks can.
But if you spend some time learning about our industry you'll realize that not all development workflows are identical, and not all have the same bottlenecks, and for many tasks an Intel-powered Mac is not a bottleneck. Surely you can understand that, or aspire to understand that.
I would certainly agree with a more generalized and reality-based version of what you and the other poster seem to be attempting to say: If your current hardware is bottlenecking you in any way, you should most definitely address that if at all possible. A hardware upgrade that unbottlenecks you and improves your developer ergonomics will almost certainly pay for itself in the long run. That is sane and profitable advice and something I've always done.
> As to this laughable claim […]
This is a response to a specific point which rewmie has made several times. They seem to genuinely believe there is literally no difference between M-series and Intel chips:
> There is absolutely nothing I can do with my M2 laptop that I cannot do well with my cheap old Intel laptop. Nothing.
> there is absolutely no concrete reason that justifies replacing a MacBook bought in the past 3 or 4 years with the M3 ones. None at all.
> it boggles the mind how anyone could justify replacing any MacBook pro with a M3 one by claiming "pros don't use shitty tools", as if MacBook Pros packing an Intel core 7/M1/M2 suddenly became shitty laptops just because Apple released a new one
I likely disagree with your position, and believe you have made some bad faith arguments, but you're at least compos mentis.
> But if you spend some time learning about our industry
Whoops.
> you'll realize that not all development workflows are identical, and not all have the same bottlenecks, and for many tasks an Intel-powered Mac is not a bottleneck. Surely you can understand that, or aspire to understand that.
Would you mind restating what you believe my argument to be? Because this reads as a patronising non-sequitur to me, and I'm sure you're not intending for it to land that way.
(If you are pushed for time, I'll do it: nearly everyone spending thousands of dollars to upgrade their computer has what they consider to be a good reason for doing so, whether that reason be boosting their self-esteem by having the latest toy, or a mild performance boost in their day-to-day work. You may not find their interpretation of "a good reason" to be persuasive, but there are likely to be many areas of your personal spending which they would see as imprudent or rooted in tenuous reasons. This thread is full of people incapable of understanding the reasons others have for upgrading and making emphatic sweeping statements. Everyone is different. News at 11.)
"There is absolutely nothing I can do with my M2
laptop that I cannot do well with my cheap old Intel laptop"
The alternative interpretation, that they believed there was no objective difference in capability between Intel and Apple Silicon laptops, was so absurd I couldn't imagine anybody expressing it or believing it. I think I made the correct interpretation but it was definitely an extrapolation on my part and definitely fits the HN guideline of "assume best intentions."
To be clear, the Apple Silicon laptops certainly trounce the Intel MBPs and I think most developers will find them well worth the upgrade for most things -- I just didn't like the assertion that anybody still using an Intel Mac was equivalent to somebody riding the Tour de France in a Huffy.
I tried to, but found it hard given that OP also challenged people to provide "concrete reasons" to upgrade, and said things like "there is absolutely no reason". Everything OP says indicates to me that they actually meant this as evidence for their generalisation.
> The alternative interpretation, that they believed there was no objective difference in capability between Intel and Apple Silicon laptops, was so absurd I couldn't imagine anybody expressing it or believing it.
I agree it's a head scratcher… and yet here it is, before our very eyes, time and time again. I even recapitulated the argument in more reasonable terms ("I think what you meant to say is…"), but they seem resolute in their belief that there are no reasons to upgrade from a "late 2010s" MacBook to a new one.
> I just didn't like the assertion that anybody still using an Intel Mac was equivalent to somebody riding the Tour de France in a Huffy.
Heh, yeah that gave me pause too. I actually think that the example of the F1 mechanic slices the other way entirely: I can't imagine an F1 mechanic not taking an interest in the latest marginally improved wrench, given the narrow margins by which they succeed or fail in competition against other teams, and other mechanics.
You are right that many Intel machines are still highly capable. One could buy an Intel Mac Pro until earlier this year, for example.
But the trigger for Mr/Mrs/Mx "No difference between Intel Macs and the M-series" was another commenter benignly asking someone why they hadn't upgraded ("Any reason for not upgrading?") from a 2015 Intel MacBook Pro.
I said this elsewhere, but it seems like a fair question to ask someone on a computer/programming forum, particularly when the machine in question is close to EOL and has been blown away by a new technology. Don't get me wrong, if this was someone using a 2006 Core Duo in 2012, I'd think it was much of muchness, but the M-series does change things somewhat.
https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-apple_m2_8_gpu-vs-...
To put it in fully objective terms, a lot of development tasks (for many people) are still dominated by single-core performance.
The M2 has roughly 2x single-core performance, which is going to be absolutely awesome if you're spending a lot of time waiting for the CPU. But if that's not really a bottleneck, and the things you do are already completing at a speed that doesn't disrupt your flow state or otherwise consume significant amounts of your day.
I'm working (on my 2018 MBP) on some Python software that does science stuff. The single core perf delta between my CPU and the M2 is even smaller for a lot of tasks, more like 50% instead of 100%. And I'm not doing anything that would really benefit from more than 6 cores.
I'm currently planning an upgrade, but it's just not a pressing need as $2K-$3K is a significant investment for me at the moment.
I can't imagine an F1 mechanic not taking an interest
in the latest marginally improved wrench
My position is not that there aren't good reasons to have not upgraded from a 2015 Mac, or that I'm having trouble imagining what they are, but rather that it's a reasonable question to ask of someone in this specific forum.
> F1 teams have mandated cost caps…
We're not really arguing the point here. OP was not trying to pass an exam about the specific details of how F1 teams operate.
They were extending the analogy to make a counter point. That's a good faith thing to do.
I believe that OP's intention was to suggest that professionals who work in fields with high demands for performance, like professionals who are passionate about their work, are likely to invest in new and improved ways of accomplishing their work, even if it's only a marginal gain. (e.g. the marginal gain of moving from Spotlight to Raycast was worth it for me).
Discussing cost controls in Formula 1 moves us further away (IMO) from that universal truth they were trying to cast a light on.
> if their current wrenches are completely sufficient
… you are not making an honest argument, because it is entirely subjective as to whether their current wrenches are "completely sufficient".
The dog I have in this fight is not upgrade cycles or Intel vs. M1, it's "argue the fucking point without descending into high school rhetoric and logical fallacies".
It's surprising to me that you think that cutting-edge racing mechanics don't have objective criteria for these things and that it's all some sort of subjective dark art. But it's a bad analogy to begin with and it's not my analogy.
The one thing I do admire about the person who offered it is that they are at least trying to persuade by offering different lenses through which to interpret their perspective, instead of repeatedly shouting THERE IS NO GOOD REASON TO UPGRADE LMAO.
That nails it on the head.
That said, if anyone would like to send me $4000, I will absolutely upgrade to a new 14" Macbook in a heartbeat.
The newer 16 inch MacBook Pros are half a pound heavier than the Intel one.
That said, I was actually thinking ergonomics in terms of performance of development. The thing is so fast that commands complete faster than I can deal with them. My IDE can keep up with me. I can run a ton of apps and it doesn't slow down or glitch. It doesn't get nearly as hot and there is rarely fan noise. The screen is higher quality. The speakers sound better. Magsafe is back! The button for my fingerprint works very well. No more stupid touch bar. Function keys!
I could keep going...
Ideally, I'd consolidate these older systems into one new Mac mini, or even a Mac Studio.
I'd like at least 64 GB of memory, at a reasonable price.
The latest Mac mini maxes out at only 32 GB of RAM, if I'm remembering it right.
I think the latest low-end Mac Studio could be upgraded to 64 GB of memory, but the last time I priced it, this upgrade cost more than I'd been expecting. It also put the overall cost above what I'd prefer to pay.
While I'd like to keep using a Mac, it's looking more and more like I'd be better off just building a PC, where I could likely get comparable enough processing performance, but far more memory (and storage) at a lower cost.
I spend 8-10 hours on my Macbook every day. The amount of time I've saved / productivity I've gained by things just running faster and by being more mobile (much longer battery life) is huge compared to the $2000 price tag.
Frugality is good but there are some things in life (depending on your personal circumstances) where it does in fact make sense to upgrade for clear benefits.
I spend 8-10 hours a day coding on my 2018 MBP (web apps - Postgres and Rails or Python) but almost none of that is really CPU-bound in my case. The meat of my work, the actual coding and iteration, is not limited by the aging CPU.
The one thing that's painfully slow is rebuilding Docker images, but we don't do that too often. Less than once per week.
I actually am upgrading soon, but it is not going to make an amazing difference for me in terms of productivity in my current work.
You see, this is simply not true. At all. By far.
I have a cheap Intel laptop released 8-10 years ago. It shipped with 8GB of RAM and 4 cores. I bought it on a clearance sale for around $500. I use it still to this day to work on webapps, including launching half a dozen services with Docker Compose. The only time I experience any type of slowdown is when I launch IntelliJ.
I also have new kit, including a M2 MacBook.
There is absolutely nothing I can do with my M2 laptop that I cannot do well with my cheap old Intel laptop. Nothing. The only issue I have with my old laptop is battery life, and that's just because I don't bother replacing it.
Please do point out a single concrete example of "productivity gains" that I would get by spending $2k on a new laptop.
My spouse has a 12y old laptop that has had pretty much everything (but the soldered GPU) upgraded - CPU, memory, HDD->SSD, CD-SSD, WiFi (to support 5GHz), keyboard (replaced), fan & heatsink, battery (replaced, might rebuild one w/ LG's 18650 MJ1). Unfortunately pre-Sandy Bridge memory is capped at 8GB, so it shows its age - still an amazing thing.
[…]
> The only time I experience any type of slowdown is when I launch IntelliJ.
I can't tell if you're a serially dishonest interlocutor, or whether your fetish for making very emphatic generalisations with lots of intensifiers makes you seem like one, but once again this is very weak reasoning. You have yourself pointed out something you cannot do with your Intel laptop which you could with an upgrade.
> Please do point out a single concrete example of "productivity gains" that I would get by spending $2k on a new laptop.
You can run IntelliJ smoothly and have no battery life issues. (Literally from your own post… it's just so sad to see this utter lack of self awareness.)
Similarly, buying cheap used cars only works because someone else bought them new.
And not because it's shiny, fun and lets her socialise with her friends.
I don't know how you managed to read the comment you responded to as suggesting that.
For example as you passed 2016-2019, not only did you have the butterfly keyboard mess but each generation reportedly got hotter and thus louder.
My 2015 was quieter/cooler than my 2019.
So if you’re happy it may turn out that even though the newer machine has better performance it feels like a downgrade for other reasons.
(I don’t think that’s the case here)
https://www.macrumors.com/guide/butterfly-keyboard-vs-scisso...
The M1 dropped both times by in the region of 30 minutes, could do multiple rounds on a single charge and didn't make a tonne of noise while doing so.
The amount of time savings you get from the improved CPU perf is quantifiable, and you can assign a monetary amount to that time.
Now if your use case is not performance (cpu, battery, etc) limited then of course there's no reason to upgrade, ever really, but that would apply to any laptop or pc not just Macs.
OP didn't frame it any way at all as far as I can tell, but either way it seems like an entirely reasonable question to ask of someone on a forum which is largely comprised of computer and programming enthusiasts who has not upgraded their daily driver for nearly a decade.
> as if spending money on the new shiny without any reason is normal or desirable?
Every single person who spends their money on "the new shiny" has a reason. You may not find the reason edifying, but that's irrelevant to your stated argument.
> Why would anyone waste their cash to replace something that works without having any compelling reason?
As you were doubtless aware when you specifically constructed a straw man argument predicated on an entirely false premise and laden with your own subjective judgements about "waste" and things that "work" and "compelling" reasons, nobody does this.
I suspect what you really mean is that you believe people upgrade their machines without what _you_ consider to be a good reason. You think people are too quick to upgrade when their machine isn't the very latest, or when it's got a dent, or when it's slowing down a little.
If you'd written what you really believe -- that people should not upgrade as rapidly as they do -- you'd probably have pulled on the thread for a further 0.02s and realised that everyone has different values and priorities, and you likely "waste money" in others' eyes across multiple line items of your annual budget. So it's terrific luck, really, that the internet's various competing interpretations of a "compelling reason" can't stop you from spending your money however you'd like.
Are professionals expected to mindlessly throw money around at the new shiny without having absolutely no compelling reason to do so?
I think my post was rather straight-forward: people buy things only when they feel there is a clear upside to it. If you made that purchase 2 or 3 or 4 years ago, you need a very good reason to just throw it away and buy a new replacement. You need to at least make a valid case for it, otherwise you are just wasting your hard-earned money for nothing at all.
> Every single person who spends their money on "the new shiny" has a reason.
Why was OP framing that question on whether no reason was needed then, and instead people had to justify why weren't they wasting their money on the new shiny? Why is being new and shiny such a strong rationale that the onus of not buying is placed on not buying?
These are simple questions. In fact, all it would take is provide a single compelling reason why it would be a good idea to waste money on a M3 Macbook Pro when you already own a M2/M1 Macbook Pro, or even a late 2010s Macbook Pro. Hell, why on earth would you even waste money on a M3 Macbook Pro if you already have a M2 Macbook Air?
If you cannot answer this question, why would it be anything than absolutely foolish to pretend that people should justify not buying a M3?
Once again you're loading an incredibly tawdry straw man argument here with your own inane value judgements. The only difference is that this time you've undermined your argument with a typo: it's otherwise as self-evidently vacuous as your original comment.
Just look at this epistemological nightmare you enumerated with apparent sincerity:
> why on earth would you even waste money on a M3 Macbook Pro if you already have a M2 Macbook Air? If you cannot answer this question, why would it be anything than absolutely foolish to pretend that people should justify not buying a M3?
Putting aside haplography (I guess if your argument is just begging the question a dozen times it gets hard to write coherently), it seems that you're literally incapable of considering that other people have fundamentally different values and priorities to you.
Read this sentence you wrote:
> In fact, all it would take is provide a single compelling reason why it would be a good idea to waste money on a M3 Macbook Pro when you already own a M2/M1 Macbook Pro, or even a late 2010s Macbook Pro
It is axiomatic that there can be no "compelling reason why it would be a good idea [sic]" to "waste" money on an M3 MacBook Pro. It's a waste of money, so there cannot be a good reason. What you presumably intend to write is: "I cannot think of a single compelling reason for a person to upgrade to an M3 MacBook Pro if they already own an M2, M1, or late-2010s MacBook Pro."
And that's it. You can't think of a reason. People in this thread have given you both examples of reasons to upgrade, and clear-eyed explanations of why your inability to suspend your disbelief in this area is not the incisive general argument you think it is.
Much of the work I personally do will be made significantly faster by upgrading from the M1 to the M3 Max, which I will upgrade to. I upgraded to the M1 from an Intel Core i9.
You might think that this is a compelling reason -- wanting one's work to be faster and more efficient. You might not. It doesn't matter. It's a good enough reason for me to upgrade, and that's the rub. Everyone has a reason to upgrade, you just disagree with how compelling those reasons are. And again, the great news for everyone else is that your handwringing serves only to make you seem enormously judgemental and narrow-minded. You remain free to spend your money as you wish.
Upgrade policies aren't driven by new requirements, or performance improvements. Some companies have mandatory hardware replacement policies which mostly serve to allow their tech support staff to standardized on a small number of devices. Getting a M3 MacBook Pro replacement just because your employer doesn't want to maintain an Intel MacBook Pro is hardly indicative that a M3 is worth spending money on, let alone replace a M2 or even M1 MacBook Pro.
If one is that concerned about someone exploiting an OS level security flaw to exfiltrate their online banking credentials (wildly unlikely), they should just be doing that stuff in a VM or similarly isolated environment anyways.
For a while, yes, but the browser being up-to-date doesn't make an EOL OS safe to expose to the Internet.
> If one is that concerned about someone exploiting an OS level security flaw to exfiltrate their online banking credentials (wildly unlikely), they should just be doing that stuff in a VM or similarly isolated environment anyways.
Just doing sensitive stuff in a VM isn't good protection at all, since a malicious host can trivially compromise the guest.
It can, Ubuntu runs just fine on it
would be my guess
https://github.com/docker/roadmap/issues/384 is still open. :(
https://docs.docker.com/desktop/release-notes/#4250
I have been using it for a few months (in beta) and it works great !
The new Magic Keyboard ( or Scissor 2.0 ) just doesn't suites me. 1.0mm Key travel is so so much worse than the 1.3/1.5mm old scissors on my 2015 MBP.
I actually dont need the seamless, ultra large trackpad. Which gets false positive from time to time. This has never been the case on a sane trackpad size.
My Workload is memory limited, and rarely CPU limited. Upgrading wouldn't bring a lot of benefits unless I have more memory, and Memory upgrade is expensive.
Did I mention keyboard or trackpad?
I just had a battery swap on this MBP earlier this year, hopefully it will last another 4 - 5 years or whenever I cant update Safari. Although I guess I could still use Firefox.
Sure it feels 100x faster. But more than that it’s DEAD SILENT (no fan in the machine!) and completely cool.
The temperature/noise, if I had experienced it myself first, would have probably gotten me to upgrade.
I use a 2019 Intel MBP at work. It’s much faster than my old 2015 too, but with the additional heat and noise I didn’t really want one.
I would have taken the noise/heat of the M1 + 2018 or 2019 performance. Instead I got heat/noise of the M1 and far better performance, for a fraction of what my 2015 cost (unadjusted) new.
Amazing upgrade.
By the time the M2 came around ppl knew what was up. So you might be able to find a bog standard M1 that low (they do show up) due to this… but it’s rare.
M1->M2 wasn't that big, generally seen as a small incremental improvement at best, and the last few Intel updates barely moved the needle between them.
Consider a battery pack? I have a Bluetti K2 and get far more hours running heavy workloads than people report on M1. It's never bothered me carrying it around, though some might care I guess.
My only regret is that it's slightly over the amount that is legal on planes in most jurisdictions.
Gotten so much mileage out of this laptop battery, especially on long distance trains, but it's a no go on planes by being so slightly over the limit.
edit: looks like they are make bigger strides than I thought on M2 as well https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support#m2-p...
Yes, he's continuing to work on the long tail of drivers needed for Linux on Apple silicon. Looks like lately he's working on speakersafetyd, a daemon that will monitor audio levels and keep the builtin speakers from being damaged: https://github.com/marcan?tab=overview&from=2023-09-01&to=20...
For my part I would say that you shouldn't police other people and tell them what to do in public, or if you do it, soften it sightly.
I completely agree that "don't link to my site" is a ridiculous request - I'm not saying that I approve of it. But it's what they want - and the Asahi project has numerous problems with it anyway, so avoiding drawing attention from HN has some benefits to everyone.
My apologies if it sounded like I was policing - that was not my intent.
I reject the notion that I shouldn't link to someone in good faith, regardless of whether they like it.
> I reject the notion that I shouldn't link to someone in good faith, regardless of whether they like it.
In general, I completely agree!
I usually get like 20% or less... sometimes they're hard to even give away.
It's very hard to get anything like that much off a Mac, since Apple appears to have pretty tight control over prices, even as charged by third parties.
Before buying any Apple hardware, it's worth looking up a couple of sites that suggest when the next release cycle will be for a given item and what specs are expected in the next release. The one I use is https://buyersguide.macrumors.com/
After years of waiting for a non-butterfly keyboard, they released a working Intel based MBP, but almost immediately made it worthless by announcing the migration to Arm. They even "rented" prototypes using A12Z chips for developers to use to prepare their apps nearly a year in advance. Hardly a stealth endeavour.
And for me as a Samsung phone user, I'm pretty annoyed that I have to drag out a win10 machine every time I want to update the firmware of my phone because Odin is only available on Windows and UTM can't use Rosetta to emulate a Windows VM at any acceptable speed or stability.
The docker thing is nonsense if you're using orbstack for example.
The guest drivers don't work under Win7.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/apps-on-arm-x8...
Apple Silicon laptops are so much better than Intel-based machines, there is really no comparison.
(Just curious; I worked in the industry on the web app side)
Also you can get other free vm managers on Macs now since it ships with a hypervisor and vm framework.
I'm not sure how VMWare compares to Parallels but performance isn't as good as Bootcamp. I wouldn't want to use it all day long.
For the rare times I need it, I sometimes use a cloud VM (like Shadow.tech if you need a good GPU, otherwise any Windows VM I guess).
Also, for any GPU-intensive apps (not sure if CNC counts), it might be worth giving Game Porting Toolkit (the other GPT) and Whisky (a GUI on top of that) a shot? Might run better than Parallels.
Now I think AMD and Intel caught up enough, Apple didn't keep the momentum, and they do standard Apple pricing discrimination - I think I'll take a gamble on Framework AMD version. I really like the idea behind the self-repairable upgradeable device and want to support them. If I was able to work on my Apple Intel i9 overheating PoS for past few years I'll be better off with anything, might as well support the stuff I like.
Interesting. I don't really like Apple, mainly because of how they handle the app store vendor lock in stuff, and I hate macOS. But I use an M2 MBP purely because I can't find any other laptop that has the same fast performance, long battery life, quiet fan noise, no heat.
Can you recommend an AMD/Intel or anything that comes close? I'd switch in a heartbeat. The closest that comes to mind is the ThinkPad X13s.
Compared to my Macbook Air the Mac excels in a couple of areas which Thinkpad is lacking in. Like ambient light sensor, port quality (ie. how recessed the USB-C port is and how much strain it can take), audio output quality (Macs have powered headphone jacks for high impedance headphones) and of course speaker quality which on Macs is second to none.
The Thinkpad by comparison has poor quality speakers, no ambient light sensor so it doesn't auto adjust the screen or keyboard backlight. Its USB-C ports are also not very strong so the any strain on them or wiggle will cause them to disconnect - they certainly feel very fragile.
I hear the Thinkpad Z13/Z16 is more comparable to a Macbook but again it doesn't have little details like an ambient light sensor which seems an odd omission in a luxury laptop and price wise it's practically the same.
That said, the new AMD Ryzen 7840HS and 7940HS chips are pretty competitive with an equivalent Apple M2:
There's also the 7945HX which is a 16 core CPU, but only comes with big dedicated GPUs, sadly.
Buying their products for the same reason everyone else does is "liking Apple".
"Rowing for the same reason everyone else rows is 'liking slavery'".
Counter-proof by reductio ad absurdum.
If you hate Disney's Frozen because you've seen it so many times, but you watch it with your daughter because she likes Frozen, does that mean you like Frozen because you're doing the same thing that people who like it are doing? No; people's motivation for the same thing can be different. People can do thing they disapprove of, for reasons other than approving of thing.
As far as the market is concerned, if prisoners like rotting food more than starving then they "like (and approve of) rotting food" in general. People understand more than just pricing signals and can see the problems with that reasoning. At least, I can. In a similar way that the playground challenge "would you rather (horrible-thing A) or (horrible-thing B)?" is hilarious because whichever you pick, it means you actually like horrible-thing, haha ha! This reasoning is "the market is a good judge of character and if it has judged you, then you must have that character". Another option is "the market works on very few signals, most of them monetary, and that makes it a poor judge of character and motivation and other higher human concepts".
Another comparison is the web adverts which reason "if you bought a lawnmower then you will want to see adverts for lawnmowers because we have strong evidence that you are interested in lawnmowers" - as we warn about markets, past performance is no guarantee of future interest in lawnmowers. It could mean you are a lawnmower enthusiast, but it could mean you are disinterested in mowers and but have a lawn and an obligation to mow it, it could mean you choose whichever is in stock at the closest store which is no vote about the product and only a vote about your local store's stock levels. It doesn't mean that if you bought a lawnmower instead of a private jet that's because you like FloorGoo lawnmower F6240h PowerMow+ with leaf-eviscerator extension more, only that you can't afford a private jet. It could mean you ran over your neighbour's lawnmower with your truck and are buying a replacement of whatever model they had. It could mean your kid wants to earn money by mowing lawns over summer and you wanted to support them by funding the mower, or that you got a job at a lawn care firm and need to buy the tools they use for yourself, it could mean you took advice on which mower to buy from a friend and don't have any personal knowledge of mowers, or that a shop had a sale, or that a shop had an attractive smooth talking lawnmower salesperson, or that you had a breakdown and need to finish mowing before the rain due at the end of the day and had no time to do any research or like/dislike anything, or that you are supporting a mow-for-charity drive for a group going to mow churchyards and you are just buying within the budget that the volunteers donated, or that you aren't technical and misunderstood that you need an Apple lawnmower for your bank app because they advertised and told you that you did because companies employ highly skilled professional manipulators working full time to frame and distort the truth and your access to information in their favour...
You might also argue that if I want a silent laptop with long battery life that is a "proper *nix" and not a limited WinRT/ChromeOS/Android then I don't have a choice and am therefore not exercising a proper informed choice so the signal from it is misleading.
I think I'll get an Framework 16 or 13 with AMD in a few months, will make sure Linux drivers are in order before ordering.
I use the Framework laptop for work because I need to use Linux.
The Framework laptop is mediocre just like pretty much all PC laptops. The hinges are awful, if you pick up the laptop upright, about 50% of the time the screen falls flat 180 degrees.
The trackpad is arse in Linux.
If you're lucky you can probably get 5 hours battery life, but on a realistic workload you're looking at 2-3 hours.
The keyboard is pretty nice, but I wish ctrl/fn is swapped like Apple and it has the inverted mini-T keyboard arrows (or at least I wish someone would make a swappable keyboard for the Framework).
The speakers are bloody awful.
Display/Webcam/Mic are fine.
I would like more ports over modular ports, but I appreciate the design that went into the modular ports.
Speaking of modular ports, sometimes they abruptly stop working and require removing and reseating.
All these small nits really add up and it just feels like a mediocre experience. It is my work laptop, but I try my best to avoid using it over my PC with WSL2 or either Air laptop, but I try my best not to mix work and personal.
Both the 13" M1 Air and 15" M2 Air are just amazing compared to the Framework, and I suspect PC laptops in general. They have their drawbacks, price (gouging in some ways), less ports, can't drive dual displays, but their trackpad, finish, speakers, etc. are just amazing. I personally prefer MacOS to Linux for a desktop experience as well.
I want a portable workstation that I can occasionally use as a laptop, so build quality and laptop stuff isn't that big of a deal to me. I'm always using a screen via USBC + dedicated keyboard and mouse. Performance and noise are a factor - I'm hoping that AMD versions deliver on that.
I'm leaning towards framework because if my current MBP dies I can't do anything about it since it's been out of warenty for years. And upgrading it eventually with next gen CPU without having to change storage/RAM, etc. sounds nice.
I'm very happy with my Ryzen 7 6800U.
Matte screen? Check.
Lots of full perf cores? Check.
USB A and C? Check.
Really good battery even though I'm plugged in all the time? Check.
X86-64? Check.
AFAICT, the biggest benefit is just the unified memory model at this point.
- less frequent laptop releases mean lower sales (do you want this 2020 Mac or this 2023 Dell?)
- lower sales mean lower revenue, lower revenue means lower costs
- so now Apple has to spend less on R&D and at the same time convince its board of directors that lower sales don't mean Apple is failing
I'm being facetious, but it's an unanswerable question.
So I think it's mostly aimed at the Intel hold-overs.
Currently I'm running Sonoma on a 2010 MacBook Pro. I'd love an ARM-based Mac, but can't afford one yet. I'd have to disagree about the idea that "time is ticking"...
Was looking towards M3 for a big leap, but apart from heat and power (I use my MBP plugged in 95% of the time) there still isn't that compelling a reason to deal with some of the issues (thunderbolt / multiple displays) for my use case.
At 4 grand (sterling!) for comparable spec to my intel mbp, I just can't bring myself to take a plunge.
And I am not your bro.
And presumably the person running k8s is probably not running them to have them idle. They are technically knowledgeable enough to be aware how much resources do they consume, and be excited for such comparison.
When you have kubernetes on your laptop, that is to test your code alongside a set of other microservices functionnally representative of a prod deployment. That doesn't mean your containers will have much load appart from your own punctual testing.
Even if they do their own chips, Apple cannot achieve a revolutionary performance gain year over year, that's why between two generations we'll see something like this for a long time. And since their idea is for people to be using Macs for many years, it makes sense to compare it to older generations to try and persuade people to do the upgrade.
Plus they are nerfing the desktops by only offering the all-in-ones with m2, so you can walk into a store and want to buy any other desktop now you are paying a huge premium for outdated tech :(
I was really hoping for FaceID and better display support, but I don't feel there was any compelling reason to upgrade anything. If you preferred Windows before, you probably still prefer Windows. If you have an M processor there is no compelling reason to upgrade. If you were thinking about getting a Studio or a mini, you should probably just wait until they update the processor.
I'm confused by this statement. The iMacs leapfrogged M2. The new models shipping next month will have regular M3 chips, replacing M1 models.
...or you are vastly exaggerating by stating that a 8 month old device is an old outdated processor and that you can't wait 4 more months for the update.
Plus the entire reason why I have to spend so much money is because they didn't bother to put a few dollars in i/o parts to allow it to support more video outputs that their low end devices could easily drive, and they don't support third party drivers well enough that we can use displaylink.
I would have hesitated to get an M2 with the M3 announced, but having used one now… I don’t care very much. It’s a bit like updating your iPhone every year. It’s like 5% better and in the scheme of things, it’s not worth worrying about.
yep. powering 2+ screens on a mac is not a straightforward process. for the prices Apple is charging on their "pro" machines, it should be simple to plug in 2 or even more screens to get work done.
Nowadays with my big corp SWE job, things outside my control make my workflow a lot slower, and I don't benefit from using more than just 1 screen. I work on multiple things at once, but they're totally separate, so I tab between them on my laptop.
The USB-C can power one 6k or 2 4k monitors.
The HDMI port on M2 Pro and newer can power one 8k.
It's like Apple re-enabled displaylink, but only begrudingly after they didn't allow it for a few generations of the OS.
Apple has been shifting away from performance cores with each generation. M1 Pro: 75-80% P-cores; M2 Pro: 60-67% P-cores; M3 Pro: 45-50% P-cores.
This shows up when you look at Geekbench results. A 10-core M2 Pro (6+4) gets 12,100 while a 10-core M1 Pro (8+2) gets 12,202. The 12-core M2 Pro (8+4) gets 14,221. That's a 16.5% increase from having 20% more cores. In some ways, this feels like an odd result. Adding two additional M2 P-cores gets Apple a comparatively small result over the 10-core M2 Pro (less than the average core performance). However, adding two efficiency cores over the M1 Pro gives them the same 16.5% boost over the 8+2 M1 Pro.
If I had to guess, maybe it's thermal throttling when running the benchmark. If the additional P-cores can't truly be P-cores under 100% load, then their impact shows up less. Likewise, if the E-cores can match P-core performance under heavy thermal load, then it could show up as being roughly equivalent in the benchmark.
I wonder if real-world scenarios end up differing from benchmarks in a meaningful way around this. For example, core-pinning can be useful for warm caches and in a real-world scenario you might have a process the OS tries to pin to P-core-1 that has spikes in utilization while another process is pinned to P-core-2 with similar spikes. So both get the performance of a P-core and warm caches while the thermal load isn't that high so the P-cores are still at their peak performance (unlike a benchmark that's trying to use all cores as much as possible at the same time).
Maybe this is a business decision more than something based around how the chip performs. The big selling point of the M1/M2 Max was graphics (maybe the extra RAM as well). You could get the same CPU in the Pro or Max. Now the M3 Pro is a 5+6 or 6+6 CPU while the M3 Max is 10+4. 67-100% more performance cores becomes a selling point for the M3 Max even for those who might not care about graphics as much.
The GPU is a very large fraction of the thermal output these SoCs are engineered to handle, so there really shouldn't be any throttling if you're only loading the CPU.
In the M1 generation there was no benefit from going from Pro to the Max.
Apple made their E-cores a lot faster the past couple generations. Despite being a tiny fraction of the size, they get nearly 50% of the performance (yay diminishing returns) while using around 10x less power.
If your task only scales to 1-4 cores, you need those cores to be fast, but generally speaking, if you can scale more than that, you can probably scale to a LOT of cores. From this perspective, 6-8 cores allow a couple of those lightly-threaded applications at the same time which is usually all the more you'll be running.
After that, putting 4-6 E-cores+cache in the space of just one P-core+cache means you're still using half the power, but getting a lot more performance in those very scalable applications.
AMD is headed this same direction with Zen 4c and 5c chiplets where you'll have one performance chiplet and multiple efficiency chiplets.
The area and power wins are just too big to ignore.
EDIT: Digging this a bit, it's not (one or more) 72-bit wide busses with 2^32 words as I'd expect as a gray-beard, it's (probably) six 32-bit wide busses with 6 GiB per bus; and this use of 1.5 * 2^N deep memories has become relatively common with the use of IC stacking, with 12 power-of-two sized ICs stacked in a single package (instead of the more "comfortable" 8 high or 16 high stacks of the same ICs giving powers of two).
Clive Sinclair did that trick back in the 80s.
Instead, it looks like after the 8-high stacks that I knew about, manufacturers went to 12-high stacks. There are 16-high stacks available too, but looks like there's a lot more backside thinning needed to keep the same Z height so cost goes up disproportionately and 12-highs are a reasonably sweet spot for capacity per dollar.
M2 and M3 go up to 24GB
M3 Pro is available in 18GB and 36GB
M3 Max is available in 36GB, 48GB, 64GB, 96GB, and 128GB
Rumor is Apple bought all of TSMC's initial 3nm production. They are probably yield limited on full featured chips.
Often, people will search for a random part that fulfills the same function, sort by cheapest, and then let their indignation run wild, completely ignoring the difference in form factor, other properties, or even quality.
That said, it’s no secret that Apple adds a healthy margin and an “inconvenience” tax.
In Apple’s ideal world, all people would purchase a handful of mass-produced configurations. This saves them in manufacturing costs, assembly costs, and logistical costs.
Apple also spent an ungodly amount on engineering to “make more with less”.
In the long run, this saves them money on lower-capacity components, especially at the quality and with the ancillary properties they're purchased. This is why spec for spec their iPhones and Macs look underpowered compared to competitors while performing the same if not better.
So, from their perspective, it’s “fair” to upcharge the “spec peepers” and professionals who really need it. The latter is generally less price-sensitive.
But even when one could just pop in your own RAM, many would still buy Apple's upgrade, which sounds insane on the surface. But there are actually pretty sound reasons for it:
1. They're buying the Mac hardware because it works. That's one of the core motivations for spending the extra to begin with.*
2. Adding ram is the gateway to unexpected crashes, such as errors that only pop up during heavy use, higher temperatures and the like. It doesn't have to be cheap either.
3. But if one is going for those cheaper components, one gets what they pay for: "mislabeled"(online fraud schemes), counterfeit, bottom-rung binned components sold as legit are par for the course.
--
* A lot of brands say their products work, when they simply don't. Here's some of my own examples:
I'm now onto my 3rd brand of mesh wifi routers - why? Because what's out there is garbage, even when you pay a lot for it. It's clear that there is insufficient QA on many top brands, and they simply won't acknowledge that the product they've sold you doesn't perform.
I purchased one of the pricy 5k LG screens that were a total lemon, at this level of expense you don't expect school-boy errors in hardware. LG handled it poorly, both in their return and exchange options, as well as customer support and patches.
Specifically, when it comes to routers, it seems that manufacturers only ensure that the basic routing works adequately and that all the bells and whistles exist solely for marketing reasons.
This is so bad that their CS is trained to have you disable said marketed bells and whistles during troubleshooting, only to conclude that everything is fine as long as the basic routing functionality works and that anything that doest work beyond that is a “you” problem.
3x6GB = 18GB
3x12GB = 36GB
3x32GB = 96GB
4x12GB = 48GB
4x16GB = 64GB
4x32GB = 128GB
That sounds like 3 memory controllers vs 4 memory controllers, likely due to chip binning. TSMC's 3nm processes supposedly still has relatively low yields.
I'm running the lowest spec m1 with 8 gigs of ram for my daily driver.
I frequently have tens of chrome browser tabs open across multiple profiles, multiple chrome debuggers, at least two or three VS code instances, multiple high memory nodejs processes, video conferencing, screen sharing and building code all at the same time - and the thing runs smoothly without a hiccup. And does it on battery! For a full work day, at least.
Weighs less than a pixie's fart.
I can't even imagine the capabilities the new m3 max has with that kind of memory and power available.
It's going to pinch, but I guess I'll be finding out in a few weeks.
My m1 is so good it seriously makes me wonder if I really need to upgrade.
What kind of workload are you running on yours?
What is your usecase, LLMs? Other AI models? Multiple large VMs? It’s always worth it to max the memory. In this case going from 64 to 96.
Their designs, being primarily mobile-focused, are rather hard-coded to specific memory configurations.
Or a 12 plus a binned 8?
Not sure why my initial comment is -4 votes right now. What am I remembering wrong?
"MacBook" (not Pro) was plastic from the start, and introduced the same year as the MacBook Pro (always aluminum): 2006. The plastic MacBook was discontinued after the 2010 model. There was a one-off aluminum 13" MacBook in 2008, but it coexisted with the plastic MacBook and was not replaced by a plastic model—instead, the 13" model was promoted up to the MacBook Pro product line, which previously had been just 15" and 17".
After several years of not having a plain MacBook, Apple did the 12" aluminum MacBook from 2015 to 2017. It was basically what they wished the MacBook Air could be, but was too expensive and too thermally constrained to truly replace the MacBook Air of the time. It was killed when they finally upgraded the MacBook Air to have a Retina display.
I don't think it was the Pro version (if it even existed). I certainly didn't have money to buy anything but the cheapest model.
My gut feeling is that it's kind of like Z compression, but using the high amount of privileged software (basically a whole RTOS) they run on the GPU to dynamically allocate pages so that scare quotes "vram" allocations don't require giant arenas.
If that's the case, I'm not sure that ML will benefit. Most ML models are pretty good about actually touching everything they allocate, in which case, lazy allocations won't help you much and may actually get in the way startup latency.
Llama.cpp (and MLC) have to read the all the model weights from RAM for every token. Batching aside, there's no way around that.
On a separate note does anyone have any insight on how unified memory compares to vram in the context of machine learning performance? Considering an H100 with 80GB costs like $30k a maxed out macbook pro with 128gb unified memory for $5k is interesting. Is it remotely comparable or compelling for large models considering realistically most prosumers are capped at the 24gb nvidia cards for anything resembling a reasonable budget.
Maybe not. It’s a bit of a pain having to unplug and replug everything in, not to mention having windows and such shuffle around each time.
I have no idea what Apple's sales are for the macbooks or if Airs sell more than Pros, etc., but they're definitely making profit this way to be this consistent in their approach.
Nvidia's approach doesn't have this.
1. Engineering bandwidth (it's work to upgrade a lineup! They probably need at least a year)
2. Manufacturing bandwidth - they probably spent the first half of the year manufacturing the 3nm iphone processor while researching the mbp processor. I expect it's difficult to ramp manufacturing on many chips simultaneously
3. Sure, consider the demand side. If my parents are going to buy a new laptop and a new phone this year, I think they would be more likely to do that 6 months apart. Similarly, I expect keeping a cadence of announce products a,b,c in this quarter and d,e,f in that quarter helps keep apple in the news (for good/exciting things)
Wrt machine learning: I can't wait for the results to come out for this once we can get our hands on it
Sort of. It's that the whole concept of a "ramp" implies that manufacturing things (not just chips!) starts expensive and risky and get cheaper and reliable over time as people work out the kinks in the various processes.
The M2 is mature. TSMC can make them reliably and in high quantity at low marginal price. Why would you *not* sell a product like that if there's a market for it?
Apple introduced the 15 inch MacBook Air on June 6th.
If they upgraded it to the M3 right now that machine would have only lasted 4 months and 4 days.
Sure they could do it, but how many sales are they really losing because they haven’t? People buying the Air are not exactly looking for the absolute best in technology. They’re probably much more likely to be price sensitive, and putting a brand new M3 in would likely make that worse.
So if you consider that you have to make new boxes and manuals and new hardware and test it and change the lines and everything else… what are the chances you would come out positive after such a short amount of time?
It would make some more sense for the 13 inch air which is about 18 months old, but again if you don’t have to maybe you keep selling the M2 for another six months.
I forget how many fabs TSMC has that have 3-nanometer capability, but it's gotta be low. Apple's supposedly got _all_ of TSMC's capacity[0], but I doubt it's enough.
[0]: Apple is saving “billions” on chips thanks to unique deal with TSMC | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37040722
It costs less to manufacture the current generation ship and the last generation chip concurrently, it allows them to push the newest generation chip out the door faster without running out of supply or having to open up excessive production lines.
>H100 vs apple silicon
while it's only one spec, H100 has over 2TB/s of memory bandwidth and Apple silicon caps out at 400GB/s. H100 in general kicks the pants out of Apple silicon performance and has far more support. These parts aren't really in the same league but Apple Silicon has become a popular hobbyist choice for LLM inferencing.
Also see: The Jetson AGX Orin 64gb, Nvidia RTX A6000 48gb, AMD Radeon Pro W7900 48gb, two nvlinked 24gb 3090's.
For the M1 and M2 generations, the airs released in the fall and the pros a few months later in the spring. The airs have gotten so good that many people that would have gotten the more expensive (and more lucrative) pros got airs instead.
The presentation explicitly highlighted this very randomly, without showing how AI development actually works.
I know Apple has put more effort into Apple Silicon support for PyTorch but is it there yet?
See eg. https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/16o4ka8/running...
M3 Max might be a contender, but Metal is far from CUDA yet? A laptop M3 Max looks like it can compete with a Nvidia 3070.
It's an unfair comparison as Nvidia is a huge desktop heat/energy hog and Apple M chips are really efficient. Let's see how desktop M3 chips fare.
A lot of things work out of the box with pytorch on mps, but not everything, and it can be frustrating to figure what works and what doesn't while you have a bunch of other moving parts shifting under your feet due to how fast the whole thing is moving.
That said, llama.cpp (aka "ggml") on M1/M2 Mac is very robust. If you just want to run inference (as opposed to training) of models and you're comfortable with a Mac, there's really no reason to go out and by an nVidia card.
FWIW, some numbers I found on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/16o4ka8/running...
With the ability to capture in Log, it's possible that the next iPhone release might be filmed using the very phone that's being unveiled.
[1] Source: https://www.youtube.com/live/ctkW3V0Mh-k?t=30m02s
Also waiting for a great Linux port battery/weight wise.
I would add that my MacBook Air received an smoothie of strawberry, mango, and orange over its keyboard and also fell off a few times from more than a meter.
BTW, I don't consider myself an Apple fan but really appreciate different form factors and real innovations. Hope others to follow. I think using several operating systems opens your mind.
Especially since (and this just occurred to me), in a roundabout way the original may have been the first Mac game to ever use raytracing (in its pre-rendering)
I was just coming here to ask about the Myst reference, since I played that 25 (?) years ago and wondered why they mentioned it. So there's a remake?
Instant sleep/resume, great input devices and monitor, cpu power at will without overheating or loud fan, super fast shock resistant storage, 20+ hours of battery life, no battery drain when off.
It took us 30 years but we finally have it.
Now let’s hope WIntel can also catch up soon.
There are several support notes about sleep problems and overheating, so I know I'm not alone.
No combination of BIOS or OS settings should make it possible to overheat while asleep---especially not the defaults! (Notably, overheating occurs equally in Windows or any of the 5 Linux distros I've installed in the past two years.) It's particularly disappointing when the computer is made by the processor company. There's no excuse---no missing documentation or inability to test side effects. Expecting peerless hardware support was THE reason I went with Intel instead of any other small-form-factor PC.
Honestly, at this point, if I want Windows, I'll probably run Parallels on a Mac. I hate Mac. That's where I stand with Intel and Microsoft.
Apple likes to wait until it can announce something with a most around it. In this case, more compute isn’t enough, I don’t think.
The RAM is still not ECC. They focus so much on the shallow marketing without shipping anything which makes a difference.
These are nice machines, though, and I buy one for building iOS apps every couple of years - but usually 1-2 generations later so that the pricing is more reasonable.
But the chassis is made from 100% recycled aluminum!~
On a serious note, Apple has a simple and working strategy, to which they're 100% committed: repair only in authorized service points, otherwise recycle. Making devices user-repairable adds costs and compromises on specs; you can't put a number on the disks being replaceable as easily as you can put a number on size, IO bandwidth, or number of write cycles, and numbers is what looks good on benchmarks.
You also have to consider Apple's scale: they have literally billions of deployed devices (everything from AirPods to Mac Pros) that they need to support, so what could work for a different vendor won't necessarily work for them.
(I don't necessarily agree with that strategy from end-user POV, merely pointing out the context.)
I've had the same MacBook, in a similar timeframe. It gets just as much use. Its still rock-solid.
Your concern is a hypothetical one. The inability to upgrade has, in a VERY REAL sense, meant for me: I overbuy specs upfront, so I don't have to upgrade (and thus, generate e-waste). It also experientially means that the machines are more reliable. The least wasteful machine is one that doesn't have to be upgraded; not one that can be and needs to be. The 500gb of storage I have in my MacBook sometimes feels limiting; but the cost of upgrading (a whole new machine) has stopped me from actually going out and doing it; and thus less e-waste is generated.
Eventually I will brainstorm what to do with this machine once its outlived its useful life as a laptop. I'm thinking, server rack. We've got Asahi, its got thunderbolt so wiring up super fast storage drives is a cinch.
Regardless, I choose my non-Apple hardware how you choose your Apple hardware. I buy something which won't have to be upgraded or replaced for a long time.
Being able to repair hardware matters. It's fine if it doesn't matter to you and to others.
The problem that I have is: memory modules and SSDs aren't exactly reliable, and need to be replaced. One of those SSD upgrades was a Want; the other was a Need. Hypothetically, Apple should be subject to the same problem; and they are, to some degree, but what we're talking about are degrees. If their machines need to be repaired X% less often, but those repairs do require the replacement of an entire logic board; there's a value of X where they are generating less e-waste per user than modular solutions.
Sure, that's a lot of `if`s; but everything I've seen suggests they're on the right side of that equation. Especially considering their repair loop is closed, and they're obviously very proud of their considerable recycling capabilities.
For me, still on m1 is good news, one more generation I can skip without feeling too much FOMO. Graphics improvement are irrelevant since im not gaming on them and cpu difference is fine for being just <40% overall.
This stuff is only really relevant if you are dealing with complex uber-shaders and recursive function invocations, both of which are fairly common in raytracing pipelines.
Long answer:
If the hypothesis of the parent comment is correct, then the following should be true: joining shader logic paths or parts with very different resource usage, notably register usage, shall no more cause occupancy issues which on traditional architectures could be sometimes resolved by artificially splitting the logic into multiple different kernels with the sole purpose of making it possible for low-resource usage portions of the logic to run with higher occupancy.
If the case, it is of course beneficial not only because such splitting burns development hours (and can be potentially error prone), but also because such splitting introduces overhead of its own, for reasons anywhere from having to repeat some of the calculations in more than one separate kernel (instead of reusing the results) through having to store and subsequently reload intermediate values to communicate between parts, to having to pay the overhead of launching and synchronizing additional kernels.
It stands to reason, however, this is not going to help in those cases when it's not the occupancy that's the problem, but rather sparse SIMD/wavefront utilization of ALU resources is: in cases when the control flow is sub-wavefront divergent, but splitting the code into multiple kernel launches allows for compactification of SIMDs/wavefronts.
Furthermore, the joined shader might still fall a little bit short of expectations anyway because joining code together not always results in the compiler successfully identifying and eliminating redundant or repeated calculations, and/or allocating resources better due to having access to the entire program at once. It's usually the case, but occasionally the opposite happens - sometimes joined code results in compiler's optimizations taking a different path and producing code that is actually worse than it would have been if different parts of the code were compiled separately. The risk of that increases if the frequency with which the shader execution takes specific paths in the program is unusual (statistically not typical where statistics are taken over the whole world of programs across space and time :-) ) and the compiler ends up mispredicting which paths are low- and high-probability.
I would probably have upgraded my i9 as soon as the M1 Pros were announced if it hadn't been my employer's property.
I had constant thermal throttling from the instant I booted the damn thing. Worst laptop I ever had.
I had an M1 at work for a while, it was amazing and I loved it.
Lots of people are probably sticking to Intel Macs simply because the averege user doesn't care about performance and will keep using a computer until it dies.
Windows for ARM runs well on Apple Silicon, and has its own translation layer for x86 software. It should be fine unless you need specific x86-only drivers.
I would’ve loved one, but some of the tools I needed did not work without real Intel hardware yet and there were no workarounds.
Today there are. But because of that I had to get a new Intel machine. And that’s going to be my machine until it reaches the standard replacement cycle. So I’ll still have it for a few more years probably.
By the same token a family member bought a new (to them, refurb) iMac maybe six months before the M1 iMac came out. Again I think that would’ve been a better computer, but it didn’t exist. And the old computer was on its last legs and needed replacing.
That computer does not get heavy use and will last a long time. It will probably get used until Apple stops updating Intel OSes and it starts becoming a real problem for the user.
Likely an output of so many electron based apps which are memory hungry, but if the memory is supposedly "really fast" then I would expect better performance. Never had the issue with Intel.
But with a nice bit or memory, the performance is really nice.
*compiling is slower, but the desktop has a much faster CPU
M1 Air with 16 GB RAM. I have RubyMine (JetBrains IDE), an application server running Rails, MariaDB, MongoDB, Redis, Slack, Safari and Apple Music running, and DxO PhotoLab 7 loaded on the non-work desktop space and clicking through some photos I took yesterday. Memory pressure green, laptop chilling at 30 °C.
I’ve got a 8GB Mac mini, 16GB iMac and a 64GB MBP, all on Apple Silicon. In 99% of the cases I can’t tell a difference in responsiveness or use and my main use is app development in Xcode and high resolution photo and video editing.
Even when actively monitoring things I mainly see a difference in memory compression, not so much in swap.
As for Intel, before Apple Silicon I had the most tricked out Intel MBP and I’d rather chop my left arm off and be stuck in a bunker for a year with just the 8GB Mac mini than have to use that the Intel MBP is had. Unless perhaps the bunker has no heating, in which case I might have to reconsider.
I guess you're just complaining about what you get for the lowest price.
And no, it's almost 2024, people should not be able to buy 8gb RAM computers when they're soldered in and 1k+ in price.
Does this mean we can finally play Cyberpunk 2077 on a laptop? Is it going to be anywhere near as powerful as desktop Nvidia cards?
It's about as powerful as a PS5.
Sony uses its custom graphics API (GNM and GNMX) and custom shader language and x86 platform. Xbox uses DirectX. Apple went in on its own route with Metal. That widens the gap.
I can think of very few examples of games being cross ported on all platforms like Fortnite or Genshin Impact.
To the point of the ps5 comparison we're talking very different games people are thinking of. Maybe Apple needs to go the usual route of buying a studio and releasing games but I don't think apple likes or respect gaming enough to do that with good results.
Also having played the game, I can tell you the scenes chosen there (pretty much all of Act 1) are some of the best optimized/least demanding areas. Especially the DLC is going to be unplayable with that performance.
Certainly looks like with just a bit more hardware power and development it could be getting somewhere though.
My 2020 14" RTX 2060 laptop played it just fine, with decent settings (and copious DLSS). At 4K!
In the state I played it (earlier this year), it was great looking even without raytracing.
* ~~Ultra~~ Max probably has an adequate limit with "up to" 128GB
* Pro would be nicer to have "up to" (say) 64GB, rather than 'only' 36GB
* Base perhaps "up to" 32GB, rather than 24GB
There are some situations (running a VM or three with different OS(es)) where there really isn't a substitute for more bits.
But naturally, if you want to run on 128 cores and 4TB of ram, then you can’t do that in a laptop anyway.
Not surprised. But I agree with you. Especially for anything with the word “Pro” on it.
I get it that they must say it but for the rest of us it's pretty obvious that they would say and it would make sense to develop something that will be less advanced than the stuff you already have.
You might make different trade offs but you surely would not do whatever the equivalent of de-growth be in computing.
especially as the macs ship much sooner...
There is a long-standing culture with the Mac that (a) backwards compatibility is minimal, (b) developers need to always keep their code current and (c) users should expect constant turnover in the platform. None of that exists on Windows. And when we last saw Windows on ARM the outcomes were that this wasn't going to change.
Which means it will never be a transition rather a fragmentation of Windows ecosystem into two equal parts. Making it far less compelling for everyone.
The more compelling reason for fragmentation is that AMD and Intel will stay with x86 as long as they can, and high prices from Qualcomm will keep people from shifting over en mass.
Something at Apple broke when they switched to their own silicon outside iPad and iPhone. They turned around the slow march toward parity on price:performance/RAM/storage and went screaming in the other direction. I really wanted to switch to mac when I was shopping for a new system earlier this year, but the prices were and remain ridiculous.
What use would be 20h of battery life for me?
I don't do the whole coding in the coffee shop or on the beach lifestyle, and even if I did, 8h of battery life is plenty for that since I can't spend 20h in the coffee shop.
There's probably a bunch of workers who are always on the road like contractors for whom this is a benefit.
I don't. I only work at my desk as that's where I have the best ergonomy from height adjustment desk, chair, keyboard, mouse and large monitor on adjustable arm that give me the healthy posture I want for long session of deep work and focus.
I can't understand how people can get work done hunched over their tiny laptop on the couch or kitchen table while getting a crooked neck/back, when that's what desks are meant to prevent. That's just not me, nor anyone I personally know.
I never wanna go back. I know some PCs can do it too. It’s just so much nicer than having to plug in two or five or eight cables. It doesn’t seem like a big thing if you only plug-in and unplugg once a day but it is.
Arguably the bigger impact of long battery life is how it’s no longer necessary to throttle the system when it’s unplugged to not burn through battery in an instant. The performance of plugged and unplugged is identical.
These comparisons are always based on raw performance numbers or price. Which isn’t useful.
(a) should have been fixed years ago but still randomly happens on my partner’s laptop. (b) is a pain to deal with when you just want to get in to work. No longer having wall wort proximity anxiety every time I go to use my MacBook is really nice.
I’ll move back when laptops catch up though since I miss dual booting.
MacBooks can run into the same problem if you have AirPods. I don't know WHAT the exact logic is, but the number of times I've used my AirPods at night, with the last pair being to my phone and the AirPods now connecting to my work laptop instead, causing a series of blares from MS Teams, Outlook and a ton of other notifications, people on Teams seeing me being "active" despite it being middle of the night... annoying as fuck.
I don't get why it seems to be impossible to tell the MacBook to not wake up from any kind of Bluetooth event. I get that this is the default because Apple wants trackpads, keyboards and mice to wake up a laptop... but I'd REALLY love to be able to turn that off because I don't use either of these three.
At home, I work in a few different seats (one of them is a desk with a big monitor, but for emails/reading, I prefer to sit elsewhere, including on the back deck in nice weather), all but one does have an outlet, but it sure is nice to be able to get up and move around without constantly plugging/unplugging the laptop. Magsafe does make that easier though, only takes a second to plug in and no big deal if you stand up without unplugging, it doesn't pull the laptop out of your hands or the charger out of the wall.
Not to mention that you can cut most laptops' rated battery lives in half or even worse if you're doing anything moderately demanding, and that those demanding workloads often cause them to throttle pretty badly when on battery power, so it's not a simple question of "X hour battery life".
A high-spec laptop that's actually autonomous for daily use (from weight to screen quality to battery life) and does not turn into a radiator or a turbine when it's being put through its paces should be a reasonable enough value proposition for anyone to understand even if they personally don't want it; I don't understand why people are always so eager to snidely bring up devices that don't meet those criteria whenever Macbooks are mentioned.
P.S. both you and I know that the 20 hour number is not real.
B&H doesn't stock it anymore, but it looks like other places still sell it with updated specs.
Then you haven't been looking close enough. Cheapo gaming laptops yes, but Lenovo Legion, Asus G14 plus most other more premium models from other manufacturers have very good screens.
Also while this is niche, at the high end (M3 max + 128gb) you end up with a laptop that can literally just do things no Nvidia laptop can do right now due to the gobs of memory directly addressable by the GPU. I'm not saying 99.9% of people are going to take advantage of it, but it is a thing.
Actually, a lot of people do. Here's one famous example [1], and I also know people in my network who love their MacBooks for the hardware.
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/linus-torvalds-uses-...
Hardware was the primary reason for me buying an M2 MBP. I've been primarily a Linux user for years, but I bought a MBP after my ThinkPad T14s just died and became completely unresponsive in the middle of a work day. The screen is gorgeous, the trackpad is great, the keyboard is decent, but the battery life is incredible. My ThinkPad was advertised to have a 12 hour battery life, but I'd be lucky to get 8. I can go nearly two days without charging my MBP.
I don't love macOS though. I had to install several third party apps to get basics like window snapping and a middle click, but I'm mostly okay since I just swap between Emacs and Chrome. Once Asahi gets DP over USB-C support though, I'll probably switch.
When I bought it, I knew it was going to be a laptop that I'll keep for at least 5 years. So far, it still feels like new.
I want to wait for the dust to settle on the Proton-like compatbility layer feature. I know crossover exists but past experiences lead me to believe is not as compatible as Proton. Back in 2021 I've tested various programs that worked well on Proton but not so well in Crossover. Hopefully the Metal enhancements fix it.
- no support for cross platform gfx apis (opengl, vulkan
- requires physical Mac to publish, no support for emulation
OT: I love my M1 MBA and really hate the new style which seems to cut into my wrists and arms :(
This has to be a product differentiation decision at this point, right? Is there any serious technical limitation against more displays in the base chip, that Apple has not been able to solve in three generations?
They do, you have to pay more for an M3 Pro or M3 Max.
That combo isn't currently offered, and judging from today's M3 specs the next MBA won't likely offer it either.
I assume the iMac has the same limitation, which is a bit of a downer for some uses. It would be nice to drive a second monitor and a wall-mounted TV or projector from an iMac in sleek a home setup.
...and almost any Windows laptop at the same price point.
I finally bit the bullet and bought a DisplayLink dock, which gets the job done, but just seems like a silly compromise when the Intel MBA could support 2 external monitors natively.
For the vast majority of Apple customers, Macbook Airs are plenty powerful. They're also lighter weight, and significantly cheaper.
I don't like my M2 MacBook Air nearly as much as the M1, in terms of the physical feel and dimensions.
But the Air brand has been so successful, I think they just called it that knowing it would help move units.
That said, I use MBA M2 for my main machine and its so powerful and has such a fantastic battery life it is still the best Mac I've had since 2015 MBA.
I really enjoy the wedge shape of the original MBA that was maintained until the 2020 MBA M1, they feel better to my wrists than the 13 in MBA M2.
The 15in MBA M2 however feels to me like a 2012 15in MBP (I had one of those as well). Except for the relative lack of ports which didn’t bother me too much so far.
My M2 MBA is 2.7lbs. The 14" MBP starts at 3.4lbs. That is a very noticeable 26% increase.
0.44 inches thick versus 0.61 inches thick is also noticeable.
I have a 14" MBP for work, so I have plenty of first hand experience with both devices.
The screen sizes of the relevant laptops are as follows:
MBA (13in): 13.6 inches
MBP (14in): 14.2 inches (+0.6in vs 13in MBA)
MBA (15in): 15.3 inches (+1.1in vs 14in MBP)
To add an additional spec for clarity, by my math the relative screen areas are as follows:
MBA (13in): 84.36 square inches
MBP (14in): 91.63 square inches (+8.6% vs 13in MBA)
MBA (15in): 106.24 square inches (+16% vs 14in MBP)
MBA (13in): 2560 by 1664 at 500 nits
MBP (14in): 3024 by 1964 at 1000 nits
MBA (15in): 2880 by 1864 at 500 nits
Then I look at the new line up and they are starting at 8GB still? And please don't BS me with "it's enough for most users", because this is a stupid argument, gonna tell you what, so is my macbook 2013!!!
An 8gb upgrade then costs me 300 euros? This is crazy, 8gb ddr5 memories at Apple volumes is 15$ expense at best.
The fact that Apple keeps gouging software engineers and professionals that will always take the upgraded model (as my employer and virtually all I know does) makes me say yet again: those models can sit on the shelf for me.
I'm not opening my wallet for such a greed.
The new 24” are lovely, but I will miss the real estate (still using a "Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2015” one).
I remember working on a PC laptop years ago and as soon as you pressed F5 the fans came on cranking for a couple of seconds, it was farcical.
The thing Macs really excel at atm is long, sustained workloads on battery... Other than gaming.
WTH, was Apple sandbagging on the M1?
The performance improvements here is roughly what you would expect if you knew the specs of TSMC 3nm chips.
When the m1 came out details about the m3 were well known and that this was going to be a pretty big generation for performance improvements. I think the surprising thing was that m2 got pretty close to m3 in situations which were not as thermally constrained.
I think ARMv9 SKUs from others are just around the corner, and that's going to be a pain point for Apple.
Apple implements all armv8.5 features and some 8.6 features.
The 9.0 competitors are at the same level as 8.5.
Cortex-X4 is at 9.2 which is not yet in any SoC.
The only difference between armv8.5 and armv9.0 is one single extension that is required on 9.0, namely SVE2 (scalable vector extensions 2).
But that model doesn't come in Space Black. Well played, you son of a bitch. Well played.
They've mastered the art of the pricing ladder and it's fairly aggravating.
Btw, I didn't see the comparison with M2 chip. Could anyone give me the reference for that? Thank you.
It's taken years but AV1 has ended up everywhere.
Encode for h264 and HEVC was slow too. It basically never even happened for VP9 outside of phones, AFAIK.
This is the funniest thing I have ever seen in an Apple press release. Myst came out in 1993, and the "graphics-intensive" version of Myst that they are demonstrating is clearly realMyst which came out in February 2014, just a few months shy of a decade ago.
Meanwhile, my wife is happily playing Baldur's Gate 3 on her M1 Mac. Could they really not get the sign-off from any other studio but Cyan on this? No shade against Myst, it is one of the best games ever produced, but this is not how you do a graphics demo...
----
EDIT: Just now learning that there is yet another Myst remake from 2021 made in Unreal. It turns out I have played this version, but I did it on a Meta Quest 2, so I thought I was just playing a VR port of realMyst because it looked equally bad.
So Myst has to be one of the most-remade and ported games in the industry: five major iterations just on PC.
And even if it was true, it doesn't matter because Apple is obsessed with placing their chips in the most thermally constrained form factors as possible.
AMD/Intel meanwhile will cherry pick benchmarks and way overpromise.
For example?
Rick and Morty did it before.
Maybe the best thing about these M3 chips is that they’re making those older machines more affordable.
This reads horribly in my opinion
I figure the 16" with M3 Max and 64 GB is a good machine that will last me 5-6 years but I'm not sure if I should pony up for the 2TB storage upgrade.
I just pray this revision won't have some unexpected problems. I'm actually glad it seems to only be a spec bump so I won't be taking on any new tech. Hopefully any issues have been shaken out from the M1 and M2 releases.
My current HD is 500 GB and I have ~140 GB free. But I've also turned up the iCloud offloading feature, stored larger media files like videos on an external SSD and a few times gone through folders removing files to clean up space.
I suppose if I want to play around with ML models then I should just bite the bullet and get more space. Fair play to Apple knowing how to squeeze every last cent out of their wannabe pro users.
A lot of that price comes from the required upgrade of the base model cpu to the best cpu.
I'll give them some credit and say that a very mid-tier upgrade from my 16gb ram intel mbp 13" to the now baseline 18gb 14" wouldn't be excruciatingly expensive and probably a great machine, but ram is being eaten up harder and faster than ever. At minimum, as a non-ML (unemployed) software dev, the 36gb is minimum I'd expect to be practical over the next 5 years
I wouldn't have expected a new revision in the same year. I also swear apple used to have a policy for this situation, but I can't find it now.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230912190332/https://buyersgui...
Neutral looked pretty good to me.
Personally, I don't mind trading 2 P-cores for 2 E-cores but the memory nerf annoys me, and I suspect the cache has been nerfed as well.
It's been pointed that that marketing for the M3 Pro is the same as it was for the M2 Pro earlier this year - up to 20% faster compute than the M1 Pro. As is the wireless web battery life.
Sure this will be variable based on the workload, but on average, this is a barely there upgrade.
The M4 will likely flip things back due to the yield issue, and there I suspect we'll see compute will improve by 40%+. I also suspect we'll see that upgrade sooner than later (next summer?) as Apple likely wants to get off these chips ASAP.
I'm fond of the E-cores and my main gripe with my M1 Max is the 2 E-cores being constantly pegged and 2 P-cores always active to compensate, which likely means the first P-core cluster can't sleep. It would be fun to see how 6 E-cores would handle daily tasks but I'm not spending $3k to find out. Only paid 2k for a used full-size M1 Max a over a year ago so I'll likely skip this gen. I get ~6-8 hours of constant use btw.
I don't think the e-cores were an actual engineering decision, but a way to reduce transistor count to improve yields without reducing performance.
Agreed about 2 being too few. I see the 2 on my M1 Pro regularly pegged as well, but I imagine a 1/4 ratio to be ideal.
Surely they should play it at 60 or more fps...
Do I miss something? I wished I had more insight on Apple architecture support from the AI frameworks out there.
I thought this was funny considering the original Myst can run on a modern toaster. I'm guessing they're referring to a new Myst re-release?
https://i.postimg.cc/TYpx7SVf/Screen-Shot-2023-10-30-at-8-48...
One of my favorite things about my M1 is the battery life. I wonder how the actual battery life will compare for the different market segments.
As usual Apple will charge arm+leg for 32gb/1tb config -- and I don't need the graphics really
The m2 Mac Studio right now at $2400 for the 64gb model is cheaper than most anything new if you want 64gb unified pool of gpu memory other than the $2000 Nvidia 64gb Jetson AGX Orin which is much slower.
A threadripper based system is physically freaking large, and loud, and incredibly vram constrained. It of course is going to absolutely destroy the Mac Studio in most situations because it's better than the Mac Studio in most metrics, but honestly I'm very excited by the prospect of future Macs with gobs of memory, although I'm concerned at how Apple isn't generationally improving memory bandwidth.
Is time moving backward?
It looks like the market shifts mean they’re assuming people who want bigger displays will buy a separate 5-8K display and connect it to a Mac Mini, which is probably correct. That used to cost more when the third-party market was so limited but that’s improved considerably.
So it seems to me like the iMac has very much been repositioned as a stylish, basic desktop computer for the home and general office tasks now. No M3 Pro/Max, no bigger monitors, limited I/O, etc. I personally don't really like it because I have labs full of decked-out 27" iMacs that are now kind of left without a clear upgrade path, but I understand what they're doing.
They don't "make" them, they design it.
I suspect any $2,600,000,000,000 company could pull it off, if they moved first.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi
Nope. Apple and AMD both use TSMC for manufacturing. It's all made by the same factory. AMD does not have the advantage there. Apple buys the most capacity on the most advanced process nodes since they place much bigger orders (Apple also has 10x more cash than AMD).
The real question is why Apple left it so long. They clearly wanted the first generation to be a clear success, but they could have probably pulled this off faster had they wanted to.
Some folks are going to lose their marbles that Apple released a black MacBook Pro.
...or 15% and 30% faster than M2 according to their graph further down, so it's basically another M2-level upgrade.
I'm just out of words for this.
So we've finally come full circle. Next step, bring the old CEO back in an advising capacity.
If not intentional, their marketing should do it every time they want customers to upgrade.
How is that a downgrade?
So there are downsides to not upgrading.
I was hoping for some Mac Pro news or an iMac Pro or other such things.
Those macbooks can stay on the shelf for me.
All those intel machines that were so impressive in 2019 are running like crap now. All going according to plan, I'm sure.
I manage a fleet of about 200 of these things. They are easy to manage, and oh-so-nice to look at, but boy, they are a huge waste of money.
These things should only be used by engineers and creatives. Yawn.
SoC: 11-core CPU, 14-core GPU, 16-core NE Memory: 18 GB Disk Space: 1 TB SSD Power: 70 Watt Price: $2199
I personally would go for the 36GB Ram on this, bump the processor to the 12/18 core set and go for 2TB drive but the price skyrockets with these additions.
FWIW, MBA M2 fully loaded is a very sound laptop.
Am I missing something here? Is it 1994?
Maybe Myst was the first game to get an update to adopt the new APIs?
Was that GPU or CPU?
My current MBP is nearly 8 years old, cost $4,500, and is finally in need of replacement. I just purchased a $4,300 M3. Why should I have to purchase a 3 year old M1
Apple's monitors are only worth getting if you're incredibly picky about very specific things.
Apple won't make a display that doesn't align to that, since macOS doesn't handle anything else perfectly.
I wish Apple had succeeded in getting 27" monitors to be 5k resolution across the board -- but that ship seems to have long since sailed.
And 600$ upgrade for the privilege of having a second external monitor is one hell of a step.
e.g. https://www.globaldata.com/data-insights/technology-media-an...
Tims a finance guy, they are kinda evil by default.
Even having to upgrade the RAM is a hassle when price comparing etc. They know this and it's - by design - misleading to the type of affluent less-tech-friendly users who prefer Apple products.
I mean, surely a mixed bag, and I still participate in it regardless, but pretty much, yeah.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-mining-children-trfn/...
https://www.culawreview.org/journal/child-labor-and-the-huma...
Im just some punk trying to have a good time with some spicy comments on HN. It's ok to both hate and exist within capitalism. It requires a certain level of pain (masochism) to survive that existence, or dare to enjoy it, while also raging against it.
Seriously, you can't make up this stuff..
And that $1599 USD is without taxes. So not the whole US has this price. It was always worth for me to travel to Oregon to have zero tax.
So I’d rather have to do some basic math but save 10% (of course different tax rates only partially explain the price difference, it still is significantly more expensive in Europe without VAT)
Perhaps what's ridiculous is that we have so many different taxing jurisdictions.
Why is that ridiculous? I don't pay sales tax, what else would you have them advertise?
- Macbook Pro (M3, 8GB RAM, 512 GB Storage): $1549 -> €2049 ($2179) = 40% Markup
- Dell XPS 15 (i3-13700H, RTX 4050, 16GB RAM, 512GB Storage): $1865 -> €1989 ($2110) = 13% Markup
- Framework 16 (Prebuilt Performance Pro - Ryzen 7840HS, 16GB RAM, 512GB Storage): $1739 -> €1907 ($2023) = 16% markup
Apple's EU markup is an outlier here.
Still, US sales tax is low. EU is >= ~20% almost everywhere.
Sadly (or perhaps gladly, depending on your perspective), there just is no equivalent to a macbook for many people.
I was a long-time Mac user. I remember when my 2006 MacBook cost less than comparable PC laptops. My last Mac purchase was a refurbished 2013 Mac Pro I purchased from Apple in 2017; since 2021 I've switched to PCs. While I love the configuration choices and expandability of PCs, the operating system situation leaves much to be desired, in my opinion. The shenanigans Microsoft continues to pull with Windows as well as the Sisyphean development cycle of the Linux desktop ecosystem (systemd, Wayland, etc.) makes me peek at Apple whenever there's an announcement, but the steep prices for a Mac configuration that fits my needs are too much for me, and so I remain a PC user.
Around 6 months ago I actually bought a beefy desktop PC to play around with, dual booting both Windows and Linux and they were just terrible. The default keyboard shortcuts on Windows are a joke (not to mention, the lack of an additional modifier key which is present with mac, which makes shortcuts more difficult than it needs to be).
Linux on the other hand, was so limited. People then argue that Linux is customizable, but I spent forever trying to customise it and half the time, the modifications literally don't work at all. I assume because there are so many distros and the eco-system is so fragmented that something is almost guaranteed to break.
I don't see how they're equivalent. F2 is vastly inferior to pressing the enter key to renaming a file. Alt + F4 to close a window as opposed to cmd + w.
Can you name shortcuts that are more convenient on Windows than on Mac?
That wasn't my argument
> They seem to be just as inconvenient and requiring a rebind on both systems
But they exist: Screenshot with PrtScn (or even Windows key + Shift + S) is better than the 3/4 Mac ones
> F2 is vastly inferior to pressing the enter key to renaming a file.
It's actually close to objectively better (though not a good one):
- Enter is a side-ways-stretch pinky key, so one of the worst keys out there (Backspace is worse since it's diagonal stretch)
- F2 is a middle-finger vertical key, so more convenient
Besides, this blocks opening files with Enter in the dumb Mac file manager, so add that to the downsides of superior Mac shortcuts
I think more than anything, it's difficult to discredit something that you don't actively use and aren't completely familiar with. Like I'm just saying Windows is shit because it's not Mac, but that's disingenuous because I don't actively use Windows as my main OS. But hey, if you like Windows, use Windows. If you like Mac, use Mac.
I think the base MBP from 2015 had 8GB.
I waited for today's announcement because I'm in the market for a laptop with 32GB of RAM. Today's announcement looked really tempting! However, $2399 + AppleCare + sales tax for the 36GB M3 Pro MacBook Pro is too much for me, and so it looks like it's either a refurbished M2, a Framework laptop, or a ThinkPad for me.
You just need patience and enjoy the fall. Just a few years and soon enough nobody is going to care developing stuff for their platform, it will be mostly empty shells, but at least they are pretty, I guess. Patience my friend, karma will do its thing eventually...
Just like the last product release spent more time on huffing their own farts (the Apple Watch is the first of its kind carbon negative product), there is no real innovation or something to garner interest for me here.
Edit: I love seeing what HN will downvote. Absolutely hilarious.
However, then on the information page they show Myst. Doesn't look spectacular to be honest, probably doesn't make use of hardware raytracing anyways. Having a short video of a fast-paced shooter with hardware ray-tracing support would be more impressive.
I guess it will take some time until games will adopt new Metal graphic APIs for hardware raytracing.
Scroll down to "Power and Battery", about halfway down the page.
But also, I bought a 16" MacBook Pro M1 Max when it was announced. The M2 Max replacement was announced only 15 months later and didn't seem like a big enough improvement to justify buying. Maybe they know there are a lot of M1 owners with my mindset, and we're who they're pitching.
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Scree...
Apple is so dumb.
PCs didn't start running Windows until they were nearly 10 years old, and then Windows was just an option. Shortly after Windows became popular, Linux emerged too and some people were running Linux on their PCs instead. There have been many other OSes on PCs over the years.
I've owned and used many PCs, yet hardly ever needed to use Windows. Even when I developed software that ran in Windows, including games, I used Linux to do the development :)
e.g. https://www.space.com/spacex-drone-ship-a-shortfall-of-gravi...
Nice! When can I order these most advanced PC chips for my next build? Do they have any kind of upgrade path for existing AMD/Intel users? I don't mind starting over too! Exciting times.
If you have several billion dollars to convince them to sell them for you as standalone chip, very soon!