[HN Gopher] Teardown of the 14'' MacBook Pro M2 with Apple's Help
___________________________________________________________________
Teardown of the 14'' MacBook Pro M2 with Apple's Help
Author : transpute
Score : 119 points
Date : 2023-01-29 04:43 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ifixit.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ifixit.com)
| popol12 wrote:
| I like that the guy talking about the macbook has a framework
| laptop on his desk
| throwanem wrote:
| Wild that the same company makes a critical material for Apple
| silicon, and the dashi broth base in my pantry...
| bitwize wrote:
| Mitsubishi makes cars, electronics, cameras (Nikon), heavy
| machinery, and... canned tuna?!
|
| (Actually they spun off their canned food division a few years
| back under the name Ace of Diamonds, which was then snapped up
| by some Thai company for a song. Nevertheless...)
|
| Japanese keiretsus are weird, man. In Japan, 7-Eleven does
| _banking_.
| FearlessNebula wrote:
| Which company and which critical material?
| throwanem wrote:
| Ajinomoto, who make [1] the "ABF substrates" mentioned in the
| article's discussion of DRAM selection for the M2 SOC, and
| also "HonDashi" and apparently many other brands of
| foodstuffs.
|
| [1] https://www.ajinomoto.com/innovation/action/buildupfilm
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Apple is being credited with providing self service repair
| resources. Shouldn't we also be crediting the regulations (or
| threat of regulations) that's forcing them to behave better?
|
| I'm not convinced Apple came to the conclusion that it ought to
| do this for business reasons.
| madsbuch wrote:
| This is being mentioned in the end of the video. They also only
| get a 5 out of 10 in their repairability score.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| I also find it interesting that these gestures start to happen
| when user hardware upgrades have become all but impossible
| anyway, and the difference between the 8GiB and 32GiB models
| can be upwards of $1000.
| webmobdev wrote:
| Yeah, let's not lose sight of how the right-to-repair movement
| made this possible. And we still have long way to go as even
| iFixit notes:
|
| > There is of course the elephant in the room: parts pairing.
| As it stands, despite the increasingly repairable designs, the
| software locks that Apple maintains will result in waste as
| otherwise-useful components end up in landfills instead of
| being repurposed. The useful life of our devices will also be
| limited to Apple's hardware support--whatever they decide that
| may be. Once support is dropped for a device, those software
| locks will remain in place which means even if a third-party
| manufacturer is willing to step in with replacement parts,
| those parts may be restricted in functionality.
|
| > It took us 20 years to get these manuals ...
| brookst wrote:
| Do motives matter? I'm hard pressed to think of a company doing
| the right thing for noble reasons rather than profit motive.
| foepys wrote:
| Especially since Lenovo had full disassembly and replacement
| instructions for quite a few (all?) ThinkPads for years now.
| There maybe others but Lenovo is the one I know about.
|
| Just last week I upgraded the memory in mine, no repair kit
| required, just a simple screwdriver.
| bayindirh wrote:
| All products from HP, IBM/Lenovo, Apple and others have these
| instructions. The matter is not presence but availability to
| consumer.
|
| I've used a (presumably leaked) 2008 MacBook Pro 15" service
| guide to disassemble, mend the bent case (due to a bad fall),
| change the hard drive with a SSD, and put my machine
| together.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| > All products from HP, IBM/Lenovo, Apple and others have
| these instructions. The matter is not presence but
| availability to consumer.
|
| I think this is unfair, because precisely what the OP is
| saying is that in e.g. Lenovo products these instructions
| have been readily available for customers, sometimes even
| in the very product manual itself. I have an HP tablet from
| around 5 years ago where the disassembly instructions came
| with the printed manual. Also, it requires about 3 tools
| only, all of which are so standard that except for a
| suction cap I think they are almost in every household.
| Compare to this teardown of a much thicker laptop... even
| for replacing just the battery, I wouldn't have the tools,
| much less the balls to do it. It's not a surprise that
| iFixit still gives them a rather low "5" score.
| bayindirh wrote:
| I don't think I'm being unfair to OP, because I'm not
| putting a counterargument on the table.
|
| I just say that these guides are always produced, but not
| generally made available to consumers, and that's bad.
|
| I wish every electronic equipment is shipped with a
| User's Guide and Service Manual out of the factory.
|
| However, both to protect service businesses and due to
| more integrated nature of newer devices, self-service is
| becoming more impractical every day. Hope right to repair
| changes that for the better.
|
| Also, there was an Ask HN about "Declination of
| Everything", and people objected vehemently. Why we are
| having this debate now, if nothing is declining?
| raisin_churn wrote:
| I've been fixing ThinkPads since the IBM days (my first
| laptop was a 770x), and I seem to recall reasonable
| documentation having been available then, too. Or it's
| possible that it was just so easy to do the most common
| things (eg separate labeled RAM covers set into the bigger
| bottom cover) that I never even bothered looking for repair
| docs and I'm conflating their availability with their lack of
| necessity.
| titzer wrote:
| There are some Lenovo models with RAM soldered into the logic
| board. I have one. It's a brick now because the memory
| started failing.
| [deleted]
| olliej wrote:
| "Psychological obsolescence" is a new one. Now it's wrong for
| Apple to even release new products??
| anonymouse008 wrote:
| > We spend a lot of time criticizing Apple for their anti-
| consumer practices like monopolizing its repair ecosystem with
| parts pairing, engaging in psychological obsolescence, and lying
| to congress--among many examples of poor corporate behavior--but
| here's one thing they're finally doing that shows a lot of
| promise-- the Self Service Repair program.
|
| Whoever was on this team at inception and whoever is still
| running it today - you are an ember of what made Apple, Apple.
| Thank you sincerely. Truly, you all should be expert witnesses to
| the antitrust cases to show what exactly it takes to do what
| everyone is expecting to 'happen overnight' done excellently.
| Maursault wrote:
| > After 2021's mind-blowing release of Apple M1 Silicon [sic],
| we're left a little bit underwhelmed with this year's nominal
| performance bump in the M2 Pro and M2 Macs chipsets.
|
| From time immemorial, Apple's new releases have only ever had
| _incremental performance gains_ from the previous release of
| whatever model. It has always been this way, and it is true of
| the M1 and of the M2. What is mind-blowing about M1 is its
| efficiency, and that Apple switched platforms seamlessly while
| still incrementally increasing CPU performance. I don 't
| understand why anyone expects things to change and to see a
| massive increase in performance at every model refresh _when that
| has never ever happened._ Yet at every new Apple release, there
| 's always this disappointment from pundits and people _who should
| know better_ that the new machine isn 't exponentially more
| performant than the last model. What is causing this?!
| dbspin wrote:
| This is inaccurate, the performance gains over intel 9 Macbook
| Pro on the higher end Mac Pro's (Max and Ultra) are not
| incremental. Depending on the task it can be twice as fast
| (e.g.: real time video editing of heigh bit depth, high
| resolution video). But a general boost in overall performance
| is visible in even synthetic benchmarks - e.g.: from 1250 to
| 1745 in Geekbench. A 43% increase. Moreover a perceived boost
| to performance was notable to even the most casual users in
| boot time, general OS responsiveness and file copying between
| the intel and M1 generations. I agree that it's not reasonable
| to expect this to continue as M1 develops.
|
| https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks
| Maursault wrote:
| > This is inaccurate, the performance gains over intel 9
| Macbook Pro on the higher end Mac Pro's (Max and Ultra) are
| not incremental.
|
| You are comparing apples and oranges. Within specific model
| releases, MacBook Pro vs next MacBook Pro, Mac Pro vs. next
| Mac Pro, and every single other Apple model release compared
| to it's previous and subsequent releases, the performance
| gains have always been incremental. I don't understand how
| anyone could expect it to be otherwise.
| ddulaney wrote:
| If you say that Intel MacBook Pro is a different product
| category from Arm MacBook Pro, then yes, gains are
| incremental within a product category.
|
| The parent is arguing that really, these are the same
| product category. If you bought, say, a middle-of-the-road
| MacBook Pro every time a new one was announced, you'd see a
| huge jump in performance (more than just incremental) when
| moving from Intel to M1, then a return to incremental
| improvement from M1 to M2.
|
| I'm pretty convinced by them. I think that Apple has done
| such a good job of compatibility that all MacBook Pros are
| essentially the same product category. And the M1
| performance improvement really was a step change over
| Intel.
| Maursault wrote:
| No, that's not what I am saying.
|
| > gains over intel 9 Macbook Pro on the higher end Mac
| Pro's
|
| I'm saying you can't compare a MBP to a Mac Pro, like you
| tried to do, because that wasn't my claim. My claim is
| that the first Apple Silicon MBP was only an incremental
| increase in performance from the last Intel MBP. And I am
| saying this is true, within specific model lines, for
| everything Apple ever released. And I don't have specific
| knowledge of this, but I would assume it is true for
| every other computer and platform, that each subsequent
| generation of model is a little faster than the last, and
| not twice as fast or even 50% faster.
| threeseed wrote:
| > My claim is that the first Apple Silicon MBP was only
| an incremental increase in performance from the last
| Intel MBP.
|
| M1 MacBook Air was 2-3x as fast as previous model.
| MacBook Pro was closer to 2x.
|
| Both with dramatically improved battery life.
|
| https://www.tomsguide.com/news/macbook-pro-m1-benchmarks-
| are...
| Maursault wrote:
| > M1 MacBook Air was 2-3x as fast as previous model.
| MacBook Pro was closer to 2x.
|
| Incorrect. The Late 2020 M1 MacBook Air has just under a
| 35% performance increase in single core performance over
| the Early 2020 i7 MacBook Air, though nearly a 2.5x
| increase in multicore performance[1] (because it has more
| cores). That doesn't make it 2-3 times faster as the
| single core performance is a bottleneck, but its
| multicore performance increase is certainly impressive,
| it just means the Air's small formfactor was hamstrung by
| Intel multicore and got to breath a little in the
| platform switch with more cores, _not that the last Intel
| models are 2-3 times slower than the first Apple Silicon
| models._ That 's absurd. The MBP has much less impressive
| performance increases in the platform switch compared to
| Air. Looking at the last and fastest intel MBP, the
| 13-inch mid-2020, and comparing to the first M1, the
| 13-inch Late-2020, the performance increased[2] about 30%
| in single core performance and increased 40% in multicore
| performance, which is typical of the performance
| increases between the last Intel and first Apple Silicon
| selections of most other Mac models.
|
| [1] https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/17
|
| [2] https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-pro-
| retina-intel-...
| hedgehog wrote:
| Let's base our opinions on facts. Taking the 13" Pro
| example the annualized growth in single thread
| performance from the 2008 model to the last Intel model
| is about 13.2%. The increase from the last Intel to the
| M1 model was about 41% (multi-threaded around 67%
| faster). Way outside the typical progress from before the
| M1. Now the Macs live on the trajectory of Apple's in-
| house silicon which will probably slow to 10-20%
| improvement per year but which has for the last decade
| sat way above the Intel trajectory for laptop
| performance.
| Maursault wrote:
| > Way outside
|
| This is where we disagree. I see a smooth slope of
| performance increases generationally. You see some kind
| of chasm opening up.
| threeseed wrote:
| Geekbench isn't showing you the complete picture. Its
| running time is short so it doesn't stress the thermal
| management capabilities of the device like the real-world
| benchmarks I posted do.
|
| This benchmark shows the difference in performance of the
| M2 devices when you run them for a long period:
|
| https://wccftech.com/m2-macbook-air-throttling-problem-
| under...
|
| The success of the M1 is not just raw performance numbers
| but its efficiency.
| klelatti wrote:
| If you've done (1707 - 1113) / 1707 to get to a just
| under 35% increase for the Air then thats the wrong
| calculation.
| dijit wrote:
| those benchmarks you linked are not spelling out the same
| story that you are.
|
| M1 vs intel looks to be a 1.5x to 2x improvement on the
| air in synthetic benchmarks.
| Maursault wrote:
| That's not what the numbers say. It's on the order of low
| dozens of percent improvement, not hundreds of percent.
| dijit wrote:
| I don't mean to be rude, but I think in order for you to
| be right then either I have different site content than
| you or I am blind.
|
| MBA 2020 (early) i3, i5, i7 are scoring 972, 1048 and
| 1113 respectively.
|
| MBA 2020 (late) M1 scores 1707.
|
| thats 175% of 972 and 150% of 1113.
|
| Am I wrong?
|
| Thats a huge leap in performance for the high end, but
| even more so for the entry level.
| Maursault wrote:
| > Am I wrong?
|
| Yes. And you're making it overly complicated. Look at the
| benchmarks[1] for _one single model_ , the 13" mid-2020
| MBP, single core performance is 1213. Now look at the
| very next generation of that machine, the 13" late-2020
| MBP M1, single core performance is 1708. What percentage
| of 1213 would you need to add to 1213 to make it equal
| 1708? About 40% of 1213 then added to 1213 would give you
| 1708, so the increase in performance in single core for
| this model jumping from Intel to Apple Silicon M1 is a
| 40% increase, not 150% or whatever.
|
| [1] https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-pro-
| retina-intel-...
| klelatti wrote:
| > My claim is that the first Apple Silicon MBP was only
| an incremental increase in performance from the last
| Intel MBP.
|
| Do you have anything to support this claim because all
| the benchmarks I've seen say something quite different.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| Yeah, Intel->Apple Silicon was one of the biggest
| improvements I can remember.
| Maursault wrote:
| less than 35% performance increase, in fact.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Have you compared the Air?
|
| The first Arm versus the last Intel? Base model versus
| base model. It's an awful lot more than 35%, particularly
| in multi core. And it's quiet and cool. It's a massive
| generational leap.
|
| https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-air-late-2020
| Maursault wrote:
| With the Air, the single core performance increase is
| just under 35% from the last Intel to the first Apple
| Silicon. The multicore performance increased nearly 250%,
| due to more cores in Apple Silicon, but before you get
| too impressed, this is due to the fact that Air is too
| small to fit as many Intel cores, and does not translate
| to a machine that is 2-3 times faster because of the
| importance of single core performance. No other Mac saw
| as large a performance increase, and generally it's under
| 35% increase in single core performance and less than 40%
| increase in multicore performance, and that's because all
| the other Mac models are large enough to hold an equal
| number of Intel cores vs Apple Silicon. Air is just too
| small, so it's still not a generational leap, it's just
| that more Apple Silicon cores fit in the Air.
| haswell wrote:
| You seem to be doing a lot of gymnastics to try to put
| the chips on a level playing field, but this doesn't make
| any sense to me at all.
|
| They're fundamentally different architectures, so when
| the Air experiences the jump in performance that it did,
| you can't just hand wave that away because "well if Intel
| had smaller and cooler cores, it wouldn't be as big of a
| difference".
|
| On the contrary - this is the entire point.
|
| Anecdotally, my 1st gen M1 air is significantly faster at
| almost every task when compared to my last-gen i9 16"
| MacBook Pro.
|
| It seems your argument is just that some increments are
| smaller than other increments? It seems the primary point
| is that the move to M1 was a much larger jump than most
| jumps.
|
| Anyone who has been purchasing Apple hardware over the
| years experienced this in a very practical sense.
| Maursault wrote:
| The Air does not work as a counter example. It is _one
| model_ , one single model saw performance increases of
| 150% _in multicore_ performance, and understanding why is
| important, because NONE of the other models saw anywhere
| near that performance increase and much closer to 30%-40%
| increases across the board. And the level of these
| increases is slightly more than the increases seen from
| the second to last gen Intels and the last gen Intels.
| And those performance increases were slightly more than
| the third to the last Intels to the second to the last
| Intels. And the further you go back, the smaller the
| performance gains are, but fundamentally all of these
| performance gains are incremental and not abrupt. They
| follow Apple 's trend of increasing performance
| incrementally at each new release.
| fifafu wrote:
| @maursault Your argument appears to lack logic and
| contradicts the evidence presented in the data.
| Maursault wrote:
| I don't know what you're looking at, but all in-model
| benchmarks support my claim, i.e. for any specific
| particular model compared to it's next generation you
| will never see an exponential gain in performance, nor
| even a doubling of performance, but only incremental
| gains in performance not yet breaching a 35% increase,
| which going from the 2018 Mac mini to the 2020 Mac mini
| comes close to, but it isn't just true of the minis, its
| true of all models.
| jayd16 wrote:
| What a silly hill to die on. Some releases are certainly more
| exciting perf wise than others. Usually excitement is tied to
| some technology upgrade like SSD or new ram or some such thing.
| This is a boring upgrade.
| Maursault wrote:
| I didn't die on this hill, I pioneered it and conquered it.
| I'm developing it. See the difference? What is silly is
| expecting an exponential increase in performance from one
| generation model to the next. That never happens, not at
| Apple, not anywhere.
| highwaylights wrote:
| Lack of domain knowledge.
|
| Reviewers online aren't particularly well informed. They think
| they are because many of them sort-of-kinda understand the
| devices they're talking about at a high level, but they're not
| really familiar with how it works and what the constraints are.
|
| M2 has very predictable performance, on a line with all other
| CPU gains in recent years.
|
| M1 had _a lot_ of low hanging fruit to reach for that
| standardised architectures aren't able to mimic for fear of
| breaking things (co-located memory, purpose-built buses,
| function-specific co-processing). And then they got on a node
| no-one else could get on due to their backlog.
| Maursault wrote:
| I'm starting to see it. Just look at this thread and how
| insistent many comments are.
| highwaylights wrote:
| Yep.
|
| I watched that kinda cringe LTT mea culpa video over the
| PS5 storage architecture a while back and I was a little
| taken aback at how much of the basics he didn't really seem
| to understand, even in his apology video.
|
| These very bespoke systems can take some really innovative
| steps with custom compression hardware and expanded bus
| space.
|
| It's not Intel or AMD that can't keep up with Apple, it's
| the standards they build their hardware on.
| oneplane wrote:
| This is what we see with M2 vs M1 considering the die-to-
| die interconnects and even before M1 Max/Ultra etc were
| getting shipped things like the AIC being present twice
| already did show us the amount of significant changes a
| single cycle (and even within a cycle!) can bring if you
| don't have the ball-and-chain of legacy standards to keep
| around for over three decades. We are pretty much living
| in the future here, getting consumer products with
| features that were bleeding edge and never seen before in
| servers just a couple of years ago.
|
| Backwards compatibility can be nice, but if implemented
| backwards it starts hurting your hardware development
| (and software adoption) pretty bad.
|
| As for reviewers/writers having bad takes, this keeps
| happening as long as they don't understand the goal that
| things were designed for. It's easy to always assume that
| big bad hardware corp made it so that you get the worst
| possible product for the highest possible price, but if
| we just take hardware pairing for a moment, this gives
| you two things: zero-trust guarantees ("just because the
| hardware is plugged in doesn't mean we trust it") and
| actual production (you have to actually have the keys to
| decrypt anything or prove ownership to the system, it's
| not just some pinky swear). As a downside, as long as PKI
| is the least-worst option we have for doing this, it
| means that Apple fully controls this (same as Intel with
| ME/BROM and AMD with BROM and AGESA), for which nobody
| really seems to have an alternate solution yet. Luckily
| for the big hardware companies, most users don't care and
| aren't really affected by it either. Unlike tractor
| repairs (those things tend to break frequently enough to
| warrant end-user expertise), the overlap of people that
| are in need of repairs and the people that have the
| expertise to do it is extremely thin.
| Maursault wrote:
| Right now, Intel and AMD are having trouble. AMD is
| comparing their new Ryzen processor to last year's M1
| Pro. I think this might become ordinary unless Intel and
| AMD abandon x86/amd64, users of 30yo software be damned,
| and release their own ARM chips. Then Apple will sweat.
| hedgehog wrote:
| I'm not sure what's up here but I think the points you're
| making in this thread are mostly opposite reality. Each
| of the M1 products has been a big step up from the
| preceding versions in almost every respect and especially
| performance. If there is a respect in which the M1 is
| derivative and predictable it's that it is a fairly
| incremental step from the A12X, which itself was a very
| strong performer. It's been fairly obvious since the A7
| that Apple was lining up to do a chip for Macs, just a
| question of when. Intel's designs are ok but not great,
| they have been struggling with execution problems
| including on the fab side for years going back to around
| 2016. AMD's chips are pretty good now and their lack of
| mobile and desktop market share has nothing to do with
| technology. ARM architecture by itself is not significant
| performance advantage or competitive advantage at all,
| and there's no real secret sauce in Apple's chip program
| other than tight focus, a long time horizon, and massive
| amounts of cash. And CPU performance growth is slower
| than it once was as anyone who remembers the road from
| the 286 to the Pentium Pro can attest. I'll leave a
| quantitative comment about yearly perf growth in one of
| those threads. Edit: And efficiency and performance are
| essentially the same thing in laptops where getting rid
| of heat is the biggest limit on sustaining throughput for
| multiple minutes.
| Maursault wrote:
| I don't know what's up with your comment, but you more or
| less contradict yourself. First of all, the switch to
| Apple Silicon, from each specific model, brought about a
| 30% increase in single core performance and a 40%
| increase in multi-core performance. It's a few more
| percents than the increases in performance from the
| second to last Apple Intels to the last Apple Intels,
| which was a few more percents performance than the third
| to the last Intels to the second to last Intels. Seeing
| the trend here? Apple's releases were never twice as fast
| as the last revision of a particular model. I'm pretty
| sure that's true of every hardware provider, Dell, HP,
| Acer, whatever. New models are always incrementally more
| performant than the last generation of that particular
| model. That is the way it's always been, so it shouldn't
| be such a surprise when the M2 Max is only 30% performant
| than the M1 Max in whatever model machine that was
| upgraded.
|
| Now here is your contradiction:
|
| > Each of the M1 products has been a big step up from the
| preceding versions in almost every respect and especially
| performance.
|
| > ARM architecture by itself is not significant
| performance advantage or competitive advantage at all,
| and there's no real secret sauce in Apple's chip program
| other than tight focus, a long time horizon, and massive
| amounts of cash. And CPU performance growth is slower
| than it once was as anyone who remembers the road from
| the 286 to the Pentium Pro can attest.
|
| These statements conflict. I agree with your second
| statement. Regarding Apple Silicon, the leap forward was
| in power efficiency, in the platform switch, which by
| itself was pretty amazing, the performance increases are
| NOT 200% increases across the board on all models. Apple
| Silicon is roughly a third faster than the previous Apple
| Intel model generation, up a small amount of increase
| from the previous Intel generation to the last, and if
| you go back through the models you'll see these
| performance gains have been increasing, but the gains are
| incrementally faster on an incremental performance gain
| at each generation. This shouldn't be surprising. What is
| surprising is you and everyone raving about the massive
| performance gains that aren't there. There is a
| performance gain, but it is not earth-shattering, like if
| each gen was performing twice as fast as the previous.
| They're not, and they won't, if they ever do, for years
| if not decades. The refreshes are always incremental,
| Apple Silicon is no exception.
| hedgehog wrote:
| Your math doesn't line up at all with the numbers you
| linked for the 13" Pro, and I've not mentioned anything
| about 200% (or 2x which by the way is different), so
| let's look at the real numbers. A 50%+ perf bump after a
| decade that averaged 13% a year doesn't seem very smooth
| to me. 13% actually overstates the situation, progress
| slowed towards 2020 and the mid-2020 i7 update vs
| mid-2019 i7 only gained 7%. It seems pretty fair to call
| the M1 jump "big."
|
| As for the second, that's not a contradiction. ARM ISA
| has very little to do with Apple's in-house processor
| performance. If they had stuck with PowerPC they could
| have achieved roughly the same thing (on a technical
| basis, licensing is a whole separate issue and likely the
| biggest driver of the switch to ARM).
| wtallis wrote:
| > AMD is comparing their new Ryzen processor to last
| year's M1 Pro.
|
| Are you expecting AMD (or anyone else) to compare their
| new processors to things the competitors have not yet
| announced?
| Maursault wrote:
| AMD announced at CES first week of January. The M1 Pro
| and M1 Max were introduced in October 2021, the M1 Ultra
| mid March 2022, and the M2 over last summer, 2022. Apple
| announced the M2 Pro and M2 Max January 17th. What I
| expect is for AMD to abandon backwards compatibility,
| which is a trap and has been holding back their's and
| Intel's processor designs for, let's see, _decades_ , and
| design their own ARM chips to actually compete with Apple
| Silicon rather than embarrassingly announce a chip that
| barely beats an Apple chip that is nearing EOL.
| wtallis wrote:
| Regardless of whether a new chip from AMD is an evolution
| of their previous chips or a radical shift in strategy,
| when announcing it they have to compare it against the
| competition that actually exists at that time, even if
| the competitors are on a different schedule.
| Maursault wrote:
| Well good for AMD. I certainly didn't intend to rain on
| their parade. The point I was making was that at this
| moment, no one competes with Apple. But maybe today they
| compete with the Apple of October 2021.
| jemmyw wrote:
| I doubt Apple will sweat. Intel and AMD aren't going to
| come out with an ARM based chip that's twice as fast as
| an M1, and their partners who manufacture the actual
| devices will have a harder time creating their own SOC -
| I guess Samsung would be well placed to do it, but they'd
| be as likely to just bypass Intel/AMD anyway. It's not
| like Apple competes on top performance.
| Maursault wrote:
| They have a lot more experience, so I expect if they
| turned their efforts to it, they might produce something
| that does make Apple sweat.
| scyzoryk_xyz wrote:
| You're looking in the wrong place. Time immemorial this is has
| been how tech journalism and marketing works.
|
| In other words, drumming up excitement/disappointment is a
| feature, not a bug.
|
| (Otherwise factually I agree with everything you said)
| Maursault wrote:
| Apple picks and chooses what it wants to showcase, but their
| marketing is reasonably honest in the details. The problem
| comes from misinterpretation of what they are showcasing, "30
| times faster performance in some Photoshop filter," doesn't
| say anything about whether the machine is faster overall at
| everything than some bizarre whitebox someone built that is
| missing expensive Mac features. But, in general, at release,
| more often than not Macs have been the fastest performing
| machine at that moment, though within a few months they're no
| longer faster than such and such PC, and Macs have a long
| wait between in-model releases. There were 4 years between
| the 2014 Mac mini and 2018 model, and 6 years between the
| 2013 Mac Pro and the 2019 Mac Pro. That's a lot of time for
| the competition.
| ajconway wrote:
| But M1 did provide fundamental increase in performance. It had
| only 4 performance cores, yet it could build my code 1.5 times
| faster than the mightiest i9 of the time.
| merb wrote:
| tbf the mightiest i9 mobile chip at the time was pretty bad,
| thermal wise and throttled extremly fast, besides that it was
| basically offered for ultrabooks... I mean the m1 did draw
| only half or even less power than the mightiest i9 mobile
| chip at the time (and still does lol)
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| The M1 is fast for a few reasons:
|
| * It uses a fabrication process that noone has gotten their
| hands on yet. These have always been massive jumps, and
| giving access to that node to AMD and Intel gets them to
| similar performance (actually, they already are at similar
| performance with the same gen).
|
| * You're buying an un-upgradeable SoC. Soldered on everything
| means fast interconnect, while others have to play ball with
| standards that allow me to change components whenever I want.
|
| * It's a pretty damn good CPU.
|
| So, out of these three, Apple is responsible for 1/3. Dump an
| i9 on a SoC with a 3nm process and it'll eat the M1 alive.
| There's no "fundamental" increase.
| brookst wrote:
| I think you're saying I shouldn't be impressed that my M1
| machine is much faster than my previous Intel machine,
| while having 3x the battery life, because Apple cheated or
| something.
|
| I don't care. I'm impressed.
| mwint wrote:
| Yep. A lot of this thread feels like I'm being gaslit
| into believing the M1 machines were not the ridiculously
| huge jumps we all knew they were at the time.
|
| I don't really care about benchmarks, these things have
| allowed me to do twice the work with half as much pain.
| That's not incremental.
|
| Maybe they're not great processors and it's just Apple
| cheating in software/process-node/whatever. Great! Let me
| know when other manufacturers figure out how to cheat in
| software/process-node/whatever and I'll consider them.
| seniorivn wrote:
| the fab process is their for grabs not by accident, they
| made the right call to invest in a longterm relationship
| with tsmc long time ago, so they have dibs on all cutting
| edge tech.
|
| un-upgradable SoC is a strategic design choice so which is
| basically part of the third reason which is their
| responsibility as you pointed out.
|
| So basically their success with m1,m2, etc is a well done
| implementation of a very ambitious strategy to disrupt the
| market. I don't see why it should be disputed.
| drvdevd wrote:
| I hope you are correct as I'm all for competition and don't
| really care about Architectures. In my own experience it's
| the thermals and power use that are the most impressive
| parts or the M-series.
| hedgehog wrote:
| I'm not sure this is true, looking at say the i7-1260P in
| the XPS 13 it appears to turn in performance similar to the
| base M2 and half the battery life. M2 Max is twice as fast
| as the i7 and still 2x-3x the battery life, though also
| twice as expensive. I don't see any case that Intel's
| designs are somehow better than anyone else's let alone
| enough to "eat alive" any competitor design on equal
| process.
| Maursault wrote:
| > But M1 did provide fundamental increase in performance.
|
| No it didn't. Look at the Mac mini benchmarks.[0] It is a
| smooth curve of increasing performance from the oldest models
| up to the M1. Performance is increasing faster, as should be
| expected, but the increases in performance from model to
| model are incremental, always resulting in "experts" being
| surprised and disappointed. M1 Mac mini is not ten or five
| times faster than the 2018 Mac mini, and not even twice as
| fast. It is 26% faster in multicore performance and 36%
| faster in single core performance. These are increments, not
| massive leaps in performance.
|
| [0] https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/mac-mini-late-2020
| ericmay wrote:
| I'm not sure if this changes anything here but when I think
| about performance at least for laptops but even for other
| products I think not just actual CPU operations but energy
| efficiency as well.
|
| I do agree that Apple's CPU releases are incremental
| updates (and mostly always have been), but when I used an
| M-series Mac for the first time it was a step grade upgrade
| from the previous gen even if it's somehow not accounted
| for in CPU performance metrics (though I think it will be
| if you account for energy as well).
| Maursault wrote:
| > I think not just actual CPU operations but energy
| efficiency as well.
|
| Since when? Seriously. Since the first Apple Silicon
| release, undoubtedly.
| 2fast4you wrote:
| Yup. Apple really set the bar. I've never expected
| battery life like this from my laptop. Now that I know I
| can get the same(or better) performance with much higher
| efficiency, I'm never going back.
|
| My laptop doesn't heat up anymore. It doesn't die. If it
| has fans, they're absolutely silent. All this, and I
| haven't had to change my workload at all.
| Maursault wrote:
| No one cared (not entirely true, but for most) until
| Apple made power efficiency relevant. There were
| efficient processors prior to Apple Silicon. No one
| (again, exaggerating) cared until Apple made them care.
| nordsieck wrote:
| > No one cared (not entirely true, but for most) until
| Apple made power efficiency relevant. There were
| efficient processors prior to Apple Silicon. No one
| (again, exaggerating) cared until Apple made them care.
|
| I don't think that's really true.
|
| The major cause for the failure of the macbook was a lack
| of power efficiency. Intel just didn't make a performant
| enough low power chip to make the concept work outside of
| a small group of people who value portability over
| everything else.
|
| But even beyond that, there have been frequent complaints
| of Apple's laptops running hot. Those complaints don't
| necessarily show up in benchmark numbers, but I've run
| across them many, many times.
| tomnipotent wrote:
| > The major cause for the failure of the macbook was a
| lack of power efficiency
|
| In what world or category did the Macbook fail? It's
| consistently top selling and top rated.
| wtallis wrote:
| I think he's referring specifically to the most recent
| machine branded simply MacBook, with no Air or Pro
| suffix. That was a 12" fanless notebook introduced in
| 2015, a few years before the MacBook Air got a Retina
| Display upgrade.
| dastbe wrote:
| for all of the commenters, i'm fairly sure the macbook
| being referred to is the 12-inch macbook. that was
| absolutely a failure due to lack of a power efficient and
| performant cpu
| Maursault wrote:
| If by failure you mean the best selling laptop of its
| model year, sure.
| [deleted]
| threeseed wrote:
| Mac mini is a poor example to use here since it was not
| thermally throttled to nearly the same extent, if at all,
| as the MacBook Pro.
| Maursault wrote:
| Choose any other model. It is true for all of them,
| always. Though performance gains are getting larger and
| larger over time, each subsequent release of any model is
| an incremental performance bump from the last. Not just
| true with Apple hw, true for all hw. IOW, we have not
| seen a leap in performance of 100% or even 50%, from one
| model to its next revision, and idk that we will.
| fifafu wrote:
| that's just not true. Take any of the last Macbook Pro
| Intel (maxed out) models and compare it to a similarly
| priced M1 Max. The difference in real world usage is
| night and day - although a lot of it is caused by the
| horrible thermal throttling, that made the Intel models
| almost unusable. It was definitely the biggest
| performance boost I have ever seen going from one
| generation to the next.
|
| Example: On the last Intel MBP I could barely run Teams
| with video, the Intel Macbooks (I tried many) got
| immediately super hot and started throttling to a point
| that made the machines unusable. The M1 Max doesn't even
| turn on the fan.
| Maursault wrote:
| > Take any of the last Macbook Pro Intel (maxed out)
| models and compare it to a similarly priced M1 Max.
|
| What you have done is leap frog a couple generations
| there. Compare the benchmarks[0] of one model of the last
| Intel MBP, say the 2019 13" MBP (MacBookPro15,4) and the
| very next generation of that model, the 13" 2020 M1 MBP
| (MacBookPro17,1) and you will see it is an incremental
| increase in performance, a 36% performance increase in
| single core and a 40% increase in multicore performance.
| Impressive, but these are not exponential gains in
| performance nor even a doubling of performance, like what
| everyone seems to expect between the benchmarks of M1 and
| M2, and in fact this foolishness is not new, and has been
| going on since 68k models were new, all through the PPC
| era, into the Intel era up to today.
|
| [0] https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-
| pro-13-inch-retin...
| fifafu wrote:
| I'm talking about this 1 generation jump (the 13" models
| have usually been limited in multi-core options, only now
| with the introduction of the 14" MBP they offer the exact
| same options as the 16"):
|
| https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-pro-16-inch-
| late-...
|
| https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-
| pro-16-inch-2021-...
|
| And the real world usage implication feel even more crazy
| than the numbers look like.
|
| Also, even the one you linked looks crazy. Almost 40%
| increase - when did you ever get something like this in a
| year to year upgrade?
|
| Additionally these benchmarks don't really tell about the
| thermal throttling problems the Intel machines had, which
| are completely gone with Apple Silicon. So all in all I'd
| definitely not call the Apple Silicon jump incremental -
| for the Apple hardware it was revolutionary.
| fredoliveira wrote:
| Are you looking at the link you posted? A 36% (quoting
| _your_ number) single-core increase over the 2018 model
| would mean a score jump from 1098 to 1493. The real number
| is 1715 (a 56% increase instead). You may argue that 's
| just incremental too, but what would your threshold be?
|
| And let's be honest -- synthetic benchmarks are bullshit.
| In this thread, you have a number of different people
| describing their experience of how much the perceived
| performance gains were, and how they didn't feel
| incremental. You are bending over backwards to try and
| dismiss those, and I don't get why. My perception, between
| having a maxed out 16" Intel MBP and getting an M1 mini at
| the time, was nothing short of "holy shit, this thing
| smokes my $4000 machine". Call it incremental; call it
| whatever feels right to you, but I know what it felt like.
| My sample size of 1 analysis is: it was not incremental at
| all.
|
| (An aside: M1 to M2? definitely incremental.)
| indymike wrote:
| I agree that claims of 5x and 10x are probably exaggerated
| a bit. An awful lot of people were trading in a _dual core_
| i5 (Air), or a quad core i3 (mini) or i5 (MBP or Mini) for
| an M1. You could pay more for a six core i5 or i7 in the
| mini, and those models performed much better than the lower
| price points...
|
| Coming from the lower end of the product line, the M1 was
| an incredible upgrade, and the price point really didn't
| change (I paid 997 for the Intel, $949 for the M1). I
| swapped an Intel Air for a M1 Air, and could build Go and
| Node apps in 25% of the time it took the Intel Air... and
| could do so _all day on battery_.
| Msw242 wrote:
| 36% increase inbetween generations is absolutely massive
| though
|
| Prior steps were about 10% or less.
| Maursault wrote:
| It is an incremental increase in performance compared to
| the last incremental release. Performance increases
| _should_ get larger and larger, and more and more
| frequently, that is how computing technology advances,
| along a logarithmic curve yet bounded by Moore 's Law and
| the limits of what can be done with the technology of the
| hour. But there was never once a 100% increase in
| performance or even a 50% increase in performance between
| one model and its immediate next revision. And that many
| seem to be expecting this is tremendously unrealistic.
| thfuran wrote:
| A consistent 10% improvement at a regular cadence is
| already exponential growth. Ever-increasing improvements
| at an ever-increasing frequency would look exponential on
| a log plot. I don't know how you could possibly expect
| that and then complain that other people are crazy for
| expecting exponential growth.
| Maursault wrote:
| For the last 5 years and the next 5, I expect less than
| 30% performance increases from one gen model to the next.
| But it took 20 years to get to that level. A decade ago
| it was 15% increases in performance between gens.
| jcadam wrote:
| So, no reason not to pickup a refurb/clearance M1 MBP and save
| some money :)
| Maursault wrote:
| That's why there's a market for old Macs. I acquired two
| quad-core 2012 Mac minis in 2021, which is quite the upgrade
| from my 2010 MacBook Pro. But the low-end Apple Silicon minis
| are so cheap I don't know how I can avoid owning one within
| the next year.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _What is causing this?!_
|
| Pundits criticize, that's what they do. It's impossible for
| anything to ever be "perfect". If a product is simple then it
| can be criticized for not having enough features, if it's full
| of features it can be criticized for not being simple enough.
| And when everything's pretty much fine, the standard criticism
| is "the new version hasn't changed/improved enough". (While
| when lots of things change/improve, it becomes "but is it too
| different/incompatible for people used to the old version?!")
|
| The job of a pundit isn't to try to provide any kind of
| objective or even consistent truth. It's just to provide
| talking points than turn into headlines that drive clicks.
|
| The pundits, as people, _absolutely_ know better. But that 's
| not their job as a paid pundit. Their job is to drive clicks
| and comments and engagement.
| brookst wrote:
| Yes, and most pundits can't think about target markets. How
| often have you read a review of a luxury car / computer /
| resort from someone who works hard to make $50k/year, and
| their complaint is that the product is too expensive?
|
| We all have different financial situations. Tell me what's
| good and bad about a product and let me decide if it's "worth
| it" for the price point.
| duxup wrote:
| I have an allergic reaction to what I think of as constant
| editorializing on everything these days. Feels like everything
| has to have a label as underwhelming or amazing. There was an
| iFixit video a bit ago where they made a weird comment "oh no
| where is the heat spreader!?!?" like it was missing or amazing
| ... they were holding it.
|
| Not that those comments can't be on point, but it feels like
| everything now has something like that.
|
| And yeah efficiency is the impressive part of those chips.
| xctr94 wrote:
| Thanks for saying this. It's a bit toxic if reviewers are
| constantly demanding immense change, immense improvements.
| Small incremental gains are great. We're mired in spectacular
| technology. If anything, software practices and efficiency
| are the parts that most need to catch up.
| smoldesu wrote:
| I don't understand why we should be impressed when GPU, single-
| core and multi-core power consumption has gone _up_. Apple cut
| off Intel and AMD so they could stop bumping the wattage for
| marginal performance increases. Ironically, now _Apple_ is the
| one stranded on a unique manufacturing process, and AMD /Intel
| are the ones reducing their wattage.
|
| It's not disappointing, but it's hardly impressive. Once again;
| this is the world's largest company, and we're freaking out
| over TDP trades for performance. It reminds me of the people in
| the 90s who would shill Disney's theme park tech; maybe it's
| cool on a technical level, but these people have billions of
| dollars. What's impressive is running Linux on unsupported
| hardware or single-handedly getting a copy of the no-fly list.
| I can't be bothered to give a fuck about Apple spending 18
| months to make a 40% faster GPU that consumes 20% more power.
| Maursault wrote:
| > Ironically, now Apple is the one stranded on a unique
| manufacturing process, and AMD/Intel are the ones reducing
| their wattage.
|
| That's not irony. Irony is that, right now, no other hw
| manufacturer can compete with Apple. I don't think Intel or
| AMD will ever be able to compete again until they abandon
| x86/amd64 and release their own ARM chip. Apple will not
| sweat before that happens.
| smoldesu wrote:
| AMD does just fine competing with Apple, they had chips
| competing with the M1 on 7nm silicon, 18 months before the
| M1 hit shelves. Intel is shaken, but their roadmap is
| starting to look competitive again for the first time since
| Skylake. Apple's _only defense_ was their control over the
| 5nm node, which is gone now. We have 4nm GPUs that make
| Apple 's offerings look like toys, and the 5nm AMD APUs are
| highly competitive with even Apple's highest-end chip.
|
| Apple made the right choice abandoning Intel on the 10nm
| node, but they don't have a roadmap from here besides "get
| better silicon". The competition is hot, and I don't think
| either my next laptop or desktop will be ARM based (unless
| someone out-performs Apple).
| Maursault wrote:
| > AMD does just fine competing with Apple
|
| Right now, AMD is showcasing a processor, the Ryzen 7040,
| and proudly comparing it to _last year 's_ M1 Pro using
| cherry picked benchmarks. That's how its going to go from
| now on. They have nothing to compete with M1 Max or
| Ultra, or Apple's current flagship processor, M2 Max, and
| by the time they do, Apple will have left the M2 Ultra
| behind and will have the M3 Max as their flagship
| processor. That isn't competing, that is chasing.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Is that not impressive? AMD is proving that they can
| engineer an x86 CPU that's comparable to ARM on the same
| silicon. That's kinda _crazy_ , especially once you
| consider that it's roughly the same power envelope as
| M1/M2.
|
| If we're only getting more 20-30% spec bumps every 18
| months from Apple, it sounds like the race is pretty
| close.
| Maursault wrote:
| I honestly don't see ARM as an advance in performance
| over Intel/AMD. It's more an advance in efficiency. Intel
| and AMD can make faster processors, I just don't think
| their power draw can compete with ARM, and I don't
| understand why they don't abandon placing such a premium
| on backwards compatibility. Just who is running 35yo
| platform-specific software?! They're holding everything
| up. EOL them. Move on.
| threeseed wrote:
| The strategy is to follow iPhones/iPads and have both M1
| _and_ M2 options.
|
| So there is no point releasing a major update and making the
| M1 look obsolete. They just need a solid update.
| smoldesu wrote:
| I think that's a convenient marketing justification for the
| fact that they can't get better silicon. There's every
| reason in the world to make the M1 look obsolete _if you
| can_ , but the bum-rush for TSMC's 4nm process may have
| locked that option out.
|
| In time we'll see if there are greater improvements coming.
| Something tells me that we're never going to see a
| performance leap comparable to the 10nm -> 5nm one, though.
| threeseed wrote:
| It's not a marketing justification. It's the product
| strategy that underpins the iPhone/iPads growth.
|
| The whole approach centres around consumers feeling like
| if they do purchase a cheaper M1 model that it is a
| great, future-proof device and not an obsolete one.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Right, and how did they take that into account when they
| lambasted the Cronenberg i9 Macbooks for the sake of
| selling M1s?
|
| To Apple, marketing and product strategy are deeply
| synergistic. It is for every company at their scale, and
| _especially_ when you have to sell something direct-to-
| consumer.
| threeseed wrote:
| They didn't. Everyone knew that i9 were garbage.
|
| And the only people buying them were those that needed
| Intel apps that weren't yet optimised for M1.
| whoami_nr wrote:
| Wouldn't you consider FaceID to be a step jump in tech? I
| didn't know IR scanning was a feasible consumer tech before
| that. Even M1 was the same, right?
| robin_reala wrote:
| FaceID is basically a miniaturised Xbox Kinect (which also
| does face tracking), and is firmly consumer tech.
| bangonkeyboard wrote:
| _> From time immemorial...only ever had...always been this
| way...don 't understand why anyone expects...that has never
| ever happened...should know better..._
|
| iPad 2 a year after iPad 1 had 2x faster CPU, 9x faster GPU, 2x
| RAM, weighed 15% less, was up to 33% thinner in every
| dimension, and had longer battery life.
| Maursault wrote:
| iPad is not a Mac, and you're massively exaggerating. The
| iPad had a single core CPU, iPad 2 a dual core. Mystery
| solved there. The GPU _was not 9 times faster!_ [1] DDR2 RAM,
| released 8 years before the iPad 2, is twice as fast as DDR.
| You should be complaining about the iPad not having DDR2
| rather than being amazed at the performance leap between
| subsequent generations, which, btw, was indeed incremental.
|
| [1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/SGX535-vs-
| SGX543MP2_2376_2572....
| wtallis wrote:
| Am I missing something, or is there literally nothing in
| your link that actually provides a performance comparison
| between those two GPUs?
|
| Also, how does the stuff about DDR vs DDR2 RAM fit into
| this conversation at all? What you're responding to seems
| to be a claim about RAM capacity rather than speed.
| cebert wrote:
| My biggest complaint about Apple and self repair is that it's
| nearly impossible to upgrade RAM or storage on the new Apple
| Silicon macs. This allows Apple to charge high prices on
| upgrades. Additionally, I would argue that it lowers the expected
| life of the device as you have no ability to upgrade in the
| future.
| threeseed wrote:
| Storage isn't as much of an issue with Thunderbolt 4.
|
| The connector exceeds what even the fastest NVME SSD can
| deliver and the form factor of enclosures are small enough that
| you can simply carry it everywhere.
| jltsiren wrote:
| Thunderbolt 4 is a fast port but a slow bus. It's effectively
| 4 lanes of PCIe 3.0. High-end consumer SSDs typically expect
| PCIe 4.0 x4, or twice as much bandwidth. Thunderbolt 5 is
| supposed to provide that once it's finally released, but by
| then PCIe 5.0 SSDs will also be out, doubling the bandwidth
| requirements again.
| bayindirh wrote:
| On the plus side, embedding RAM into SoC is one of the magic
| tricks of Apple for such massive performance, due to short path
| lengths. I assume SSD got a similar treatment.
|
| An 16 GB MacBook Pro can live as a development machine (at
| least for what I develop) for almost a decade, so getting a 64G
| machine today will not make it obsolete for me till the machine
| itself dies.
|
| Also, an 16GB MacBook is pretty enough for running a lot of
| applications, incl. Electron based hogs. MacOS manages its
| memory pretty well.
| masklinn wrote:
| > On the plus side, embedding RAM into SoC is one of the
| magic tricks of Apple for such massive performance, due to
| short path lengths. I assume SSD got a similar treatment.
|
| Neither RAM nor SSD is embedded in the SoC. The RAM is just
| soldered on the package. While this makes for slightly
| shorter path lengths, the only real gain is motherboard
| footprint.
| bayindirh wrote:
| You're right about RAM, that's my mistake. I never implied
| that they also embedded SSD into the SoC. I just said that
| they may have tried to minimize path lengths.
|
| As an old overclocker, I don't believe that this compact
| soldering is only due to motherboard footprint. It would
| allow them greatly push the RAM chips to their limits.
| bonsaibilly wrote:
| > While this makes for slightly shorter path lengths, the
| only real gain is motherboard footprint.
|
| Well, that and the ability to use LPDDR5 in the first
| place. There's no such thing as a pluggable LPDDR5 stick;
| the design decisions around low voltages & high signaling
| rates make it physically impractical to survive the longer
| traces and discontinuities involved in the signal
| traversing a connector.
| masklinn wrote:
| > Well, that and the ability to use LPDDR5 in the first
| place.
|
| You can solder it on the motherboard, you don't have to
| solder it on the package.
| bonsaibilly wrote:
| Ah yeah, I was speaking to the soldering part and missed
| the SOC part.
| captn3m0 wrote:
| SSD speeds have gone down in the past with a huge perf hit:
| https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/27/23184515/apple-macbook-
| pr...
|
| And because this is soldered down, you can't fix this like
| how it would be doable on other laptops.
| philliphaydon wrote:
| I'm sorry but anyone with an entry level pro is not going
| to be using the ssd enough to notice any perf difference.
|
| This is really nitpicking.
| acdha wrote:
| It's only huge in one synthetic benchmark which doesn't
| represent what users do: sustained linear writes to storage
| on the lowest-end model where it went from two chips to
| one. How often do you need to completely fill the disk in 2
| minutes rather than 3? If you did have a situation where
| you can meaningfully write data that quickly, you'd
| presumably also have enough data that you'd buy the larger
| models or you'd be using external storage.
|
| Random I/O is the number most people are affected by and
| there's a reason the clickbait commenters never mention
| that: you don't see this large an effect and these machines
| are all more than fast enough for the vast majority of
| buyers. That will not get you a ton of YouTube impressions
| so it's all about a use-case these machines don't have.
| bayindirh wrote:
| The low performance because of SSD geometry is bad design,
| that's true (that shouldn't have happened).
|
| On the other hand, I still think that having slots adds a
| lot of bulk to system design. Considering SSDs have limited
| life spans, being able to change them makes great sense,
| but when you dedicate 90% of your footprint to battery, it
| becomes hard to make them replaceable.
|
| One might argue that HP, Dell and Lenovo offers this, and I
| suggest buying these machines if that's importance to you.
| I'm fond of all three companies' higher end designs, but
| Apple provides more at the same price point, at least for
| me.
| inamberclad wrote:
| I still wouldn't be impossible for them to throw a DIMM
| socket in there. Even if the expanded memory is at a higher
| latency, there would still be many perfectly good
| applications for it.
| bayindirh wrote:
| A standard SO-DIMM together with the socket to add it is
| thicker than a MacBook Air's (or Pro's) bottom part, when
| measured outside to outside.
|
| It's cramped inside, so no go.
| bonsaibilly wrote:
| It seems like there would be a lot of added complexity in
| the memory controller for this to happen, if it's even
| possible. LPDDR5 is not and will never be available in
| DIMMs, so you'd be talking to two different signaling
| standards for the onboard vs the expanded RAM. You could
| switch to DIMMs across the board, but to keep performance
| equivalent you'd trade-off a significant chunk of battery
| life.
|
| I can't off the top of my head think of any CPU that's ever
| supported running different DDR standards side-by-side
| simultaneously (there were some dual DDR2/DDR3 boards back
| in the day, but it was an either/or proposition).
| goosedragons wrote:
| The SSDs aren't any faster than consumer NVME M.2 drives.
| Apple does get to save some pennies because the the SSD
| controller is in the SoC instead of being on the board with
| the NAND chips. They've also neutered performance on the M2
| base models by only including 1 NAND chip on the board
| instead of 2 so you no longer get the benefits of striping
| and faster speeds. To top it off they then charge you $200 to
| bump a base model 256GB to 512GB which is absolutely
| ridiculous when you can get a very good 1TB M.2 NVME SSD at
| retail for less.
|
| While their absolutely is benefits to how they handle their
| RAM the upgrade prices are nuts. $200 extra for 8GB more,
| 64GB requires a CPU upgrade and costs $400 extra over 32GB.
| I've heard the CAMM modules Dell developed and seem poised to
| replace SO-DIMMs in laptops will allow for faster speeds and
| replaceable LPDDR too with less Z height and eaiser board
| design so hopefully we will see an uptick in PC laptops with
| replaceable memory again.
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| The way these arguments always seem to end is that the main
| issue most people have is not the impossibility of upgrades
| so much as the cost of buying the well-equipped machine in
| the first place.
|
| I don't know why manufacturers charge so much for spec
| bumps (this isn't limited to Apple). Is it really only
| because they can?
| acdha wrote:
| One reason historically was that the knuckle on the price
| curve shifted between the time the machine was released
| and when you upgraded. When a new generation of RAM came
| on the market, prices often fell rapidly as the process
| matured and competition set in.
|
| This also played into sale or discount strategies: if the
| same model becomes cheaper over time but list pricing
| doesn't adjust, you're making a good bit more from
| everyone who isn't price sensitive even if you allow
| resellers to discount it periodically or offer better
| pricing to business orders ("free RAM upgrade").
| jstummbillig wrote:
| Because that is how the business model works: You have
| the entry model to create a customer. Then those who
| really need more, are gonna pay substantially more. See
| basically every SaaS product.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _They 've also neutered performance on the M2 base models
| by only including 1 NAND chip on the board instead of 2 so
| you no longer get the benefits of striping and faster
| speeds._
|
| This is addressed in TFA, which suggests it's a side effect
| of smaller 128GB modules becoming scarce -- or maybe more
| accurately, "not reliably available at Apple volumes".
|
| The article asks "why is Apple even bothering with a 512GB
| version?", and the two answers are: (1) To create a cheap-
| ish "price anchor" config, and (2) as a reasonably-priced
| choice when price is paramount.
|
| Also, for those who want to do 4K video editing or
| whatever, it's easy to throw a couple M.2s in an external
| dual Thunderbolt enclosure1 to create very large, very fast
| local storage to complement the 512GB boot/apps/documents
| drive.
|
| 1 https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1635760-REG/sabren
| t_e...
| goosedragons wrote:
| So they should have just boosted the 256GB models to
| 512GB and 512GB to 1TB. The only model where it makes
| sense to be this agressive on price is the $600 Mini.
| Considering you can get a decent 512GB SSD like the 980
| at retail, with the SSD controller for less than $50 so
| you have to wonder how much they're really saving on that
| $1300 MBA and $2000 MBP? $5? $10?
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Perhaps, but it's being done for a real reason (beyond Apple's
| bottom line)--without sockets, Apple is able to achieve
| drastically higher memory bandwidth/latency at low power
| consumption, and the architecture is built around this.
| Terretta wrote:
| Stats from the e-commerce vendor in Germany show that Apple's
| laptops have a fraction of the "in warranty" repair rate,
| roughly 1 in 200, with many laptops at 1 in 20 or worse.
|
| It's pretty clear that Apple's decisions about manufacturing
| approaches are not to make iFixit's job harder or easier, but
| to avoid needing iFixit at all for most users.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Because a lot of Apple users go directly to Apple for
| warranty claims/repairs, not back to the retailer. That's
| apples to oranges comparison.
| adolph wrote:
| Did Apple just Sherlock iFixit?
| conorh wrote:
| I'm going through the Apple self repair process currently and it
| has been excellent. I spilled coffee that managed to get inside
| my Mac Studio (via the front ports) and it stopped powering up. I
| downloaded the self repair manual and followed the instructions
| to disassemble it; found coffee on the power supply which may
| have caused the problem. I ordered a replacement power supply
| from the very well organized self repair order site. I was also
| happy to see that they promote recycling by giving you a good
| amount of money back if you send the old parts in. I'll find out
| on Monday if my theory about the power supply is correct :)
|
| I don't know how much of this is due to the new regulations, but
| it has been a very smooth process.
| cyberlurker wrote:
| This is incredible and the first time I have ever heard of
| money for returning old, damaged parts.
| tencentshill wrote:
| [dead]
| commoner wrote:
| In the automotive industry, replacement auto parts are often
| sold with a deposit called a core charge that is refunded
| when the old part is returned to the seller.
|
| https://www.bar.ca.gov/arsc/newsletters/newsletter/fall-2021.
| ..
| wackget wrote:
| Usually with liquid damage it's possible to clean and dry the
| component thoroughly using isopropyl alcohol and it can work
| again. Did you give that a try?
| conorh wrote:
| Yes, thanks (my comment above is the short version). I
| cleaned where I found coffee with 99% isopropyl alcohol and
| qtips. No go unfortunately. When it happened I wasn't
| thinking and left the Studio turned on while I cleaned up
| everything else, I'd imagine that did not help.
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