[HN Gopher] Apple introduces M4 chip
___________________________________________________________________
Apple introduces M4 chip
Author : excsn
Score : 961 points
Date : 2024-05-07 14:37 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.apple.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.apple.com)
| stjo wrote:
| Only in the new iPads though, no word when it'll be available in
| Macs.
| speg wrote:
| In the video event, Tim mentions more updates at WWDC next
| month - I suspect we will see a M4 MacBook Pro then.
| atonse wrote:
| Haven't they been announcing Pros and Max's around December?
| I don't remember. If they're debuting them at WWDC I'll
| definitely upgrade my M1. I don't even feel the need to, but
| it's been 2.5 years.
| Foobar8568 wrote:
| November 2023 for the M3 refresh, M2 was January 2023 if I
| remember well.
| hmottestad wrote:
| Mac Studio with M4 Ultra. Then M4 Pro and Max later in the
| year.
| throwaway5959 wrote:
| Hopefully in the Mac Mini at WWDC.
| ramboldio wrote:
| if only macOS would run on iPad..
| user90131313 wrote:
| All that power so ipad stays limited like a toy.
| Eun wrote:
| then a lot of people would buy it, including me :-)
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Please no. I don't want no touch support in macOS.
| jwells89 wrote:
| It might work if running in Mac mode required a reboot (no on
| the fly switching between iOS and macOS) and a connected
| KB+mouse, with the touch part of the screen (aside from
| Pencil usage) turning inert in Mac mode.
|
| Otherwise yes, desktop operating systems are a terrible
| experience on touch devices.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| > It might work if running in Mac mode required a reboot
| (no on the fly switching between iOS and macOS) and a
| connected KB+mouse, with the touch part of the screen
| (aside from Pencil usage) turning inert in Mac mode.
|
| Sounds like strictly worse version of Macbook. Might be
| useful for occasional work, but I expect people who would
| use this mode continuously just to switch to Macbook.
| jwells89 wrote:
| The biggest market would be for travelers who essentially
| want a work/leisure toggle.
|
| It's not too uncommon for people to carry both an iPad
| and MacBook for example, but a 12.9" iPad that could
| reboot into macOS to get some work done and then drop
| back to iPadOS for watching movies or sketching could
| replace both without too much sacrifice. There's
| tradeoffs, but nothing worse than what you see on PC
| 2-in-1's, plus no questionable hinges to fail.
| ginko wrote:
| MacBooks even the air are too large and heavy imo. A
| 10-11 inch tablet running a real os would be ideal for
| travel imo.
| Nevermark wrote:
| Because it would be so great you couldn't help using it? /h
|
| What would be the downside to other's using it?
|
| I get frustrated that Mac doesn't respond to look & pinch!
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Because I saw how this transformed Windows and GNOME.
| Applications will be reworked with touch support and become
| worse for me.
| jonhohle wrote:
| Why would you need it? Modern iPads have thunderbolt ports
| (minimally USB-C) and already allow keyboards, network
| adapters, etc. to be connected. It would be like an iMac
| without the stand and an option to put it in a keyboard
| enclosure. Sounds awesome.
| tcfunk wrote:
| I'd settle for some version of xcode, or some other way of not
| requiring a macOS machine to ship iOS apps.
| JimDabell wrote:
| Swift Playgrounds, which runs on the iPad, can already be
| used to build an app and deploy it to the App Store without a
| Mac.
| alexpc201 wrote:
| You can't make a decent iOS app with Swift Playgrounds, its
| just a toy for kids to learn to code.
| interpol_p wrote:
| You're probably correct about it being hard to make a
| decent iOS app in Swift Playgrounds, but it's definitely
| not a toy
|
| I use it for work several times per week. I often want to
| test out some Swift API, or build something in SwiftUI,
| and for some reason it's way faster to tap it out on my
| iPad in Swift Playgrounds than to create a new project or
| playground in Xcode on my Mac -- even when I'm sitting
| directly in front of my Mac
|
| The iPad just doesn't have the clutter of windows and
| communication open like my mac does that makes it hard to
| focus on resolving one particular idea
|
| I have so many playground files on my iPad, a quick
| glance at my project list: interactive gesture-driven
| animations, testing out time and date logic, rendering
| perceptual gradients, checking baseline alignment in SF
| Symbols, messing with NSFilePresenter, mocking out a UI
| design, animated text transitions, etc
| hot_gril wrote:
| It needs a regular web browser too.
| havaloc wrote:
| Maybe this June there'll be an announcement, but like Lucy with
| the football, I'm not expecting it. I would instabuy if this
| was the case, especially with a cellular iPad.
| swozey wrote:
| Yeah, I bought one of them a few years ago planning to use it
| for a ton of things.
|
| Turns out I only use it on flights to watch movies because I
| loathe the os.
| umanwizard wrote:
| They make a version of iPad that runs macOS, it is called a
| MacBook Pro.
| zuminator wrote:
| MacBook Pros have touchscreens and Apple Pencil compatibility
| now?
| umanwizard wrote:
| Fair enough, I was being a bit flippant. It'd be nice if
| that existed, but I suspect Apple doesn't want it to for
| market segmentation reasons.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I just went to store.apple.com and specced out a 13" iPad
| Pro with 2TB of storage, nano-texture glass, and a cell
| modem for $2,599.
|
| MacBook Pros start at $1,599. There's an enormous overlap
| in the price ranges of the mortal-person models of those
| products. It's not like the iPad Pro is the cheap
| alternative to a MBP. I mean, I couldn't even spec out a
| MacBook Air to cost as much.
| ranyefet wrote:
| Just give us support for virtualization and we could install
| Linux on it and use it for development.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| UTM can be built for iOS.
| tosh wrote:
| Did they mention anything about RAM?
| tosh wrote:
| > faster memory bandwidth
| zamadatix wrote:
| The announcement video also highlighted "120 GB/s unified
| memory bandwidth". 8 GB/16 GB depending on model.
| dmitshur wrote:
| I don't think they included it in the video, but
| https://www.apple.com/ipad-pro/specs/ says it's 8 GB of RAM in
| 256/512 GB models, 16 GB RAM in 1/2 TB ones.
| Takennickname wrote:
| Why even have an event at this point? There's literally nothing
| interesting.
| antipaul wrote:
| Video showing Apple Pencil Pro features was pretty sick, and I
| ain't even an artist
| Takennickname wrote:
| The highlight of the event was a stylus?
| gardaani wrote:
| I think they are over-engineering it. I have never liked
| gestures because it's difficult to discover something you
| can't see. A button would have been better than an invisible
| squeeze gesture.
| swozey wrote:
| I used Android phones forever until the iphone 13 came out
| and I switched to IOS because I had to de-Google my life
| completely after they (for no reason at all, "fraud" that I
| did not commit) blocked my Google Play account.
|
| The amount of things I have to google to use the phone how
| I normally used Android is crazy. So many gestures required
| with NOTHING telling you how to use them.
|
| I recently sat around a table with 5 of my friends trying
| to figure out how to do that "Tap to share contact info"
| thing. Nobody at the table, all long term IOS users, knew
| how to do it. I thought that if we tapped the phones
| together it would give me some popup on how to finish the
| process. We tried all sorts of tapping/phone versions until
| we realized we had to unlock both phones.
|
| And one of the people there with the same phone as me (13
| pro) couldn't get it to work at all. It just did nothing.
|
| And the keyboard. My god is the keyboard awful. I have
| never typoed so much, and I have _no_ idea how to copy a
| URL out of Safari to send to someone without using the
| annoying Share button which doesn 't even have the app I
| share to the most without clicking the More.. button to
| show all my apps. Holding my finger over the URL doesn't
| give me a copy option or anything, and changing the URL
| with their highlight/delete system is terrible. I get so
| frustrated with it and mostly just give up. The cursor
| NEVER lands where I want it to land and almost always
| highlights an entire word when I want to make a one letter
| typo fix. I don't have big fingers at all. Changing a long
| URL that goes past the length of the Safari address bar is
| a nightmare.
|
| I'm sure (maybe?) that's some option I need to change but I
| don't even feel like looking into it anymore. I've given up
| on learning about the phones hidden gestures and just use
| it probably 1/10th of how I could.
|
| Carplay, Messages and the easy-to-connect-devices ecosystem
| is the only thing keeping me on it.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Sounds like the ideal use case for an AI assistant. Siri
| ought to tell you how to access hidden features on the
| device. iOS, assist thyself.
| antipaul wrote:
| To copy URL from Safari, press and hold (long-press) on
| URL bar
|
| Press and hold also allows options elsewhere in iOS
| throwaway11460 wrote:
| 2x better performance per watt is not interesting? Wow, what a
| time to be alive.
| LoganDark wrote:
| To me, cutting wattage in half is not interesting, but
| doubling performance is interesting. So performance per watt
| is actually a pretty useless metric since it doesn't
| differentiate between the two.
|
| of course efficiency matters for a battery-powered device,
| but I still tend to lean towards raw power over all else.
| Others may choose differently, which is why other metrics
| exist I guess.
| throwaway11460 wrote:
| This still means you can pack more performance into the
| chip though - because you're limited by cooling.
| LoganDark wrote:
| Huh, never considered cooling. I suppose that contributes
| to the device's incredible thinness. Generally thin-and-
| light has always been an incredible turnoff for me, but
| tech is finally starting to catch up to thicker devices.
| hedora wrote:
| Thin and light is easier to cool. The entire device is a
| big heat sink fin. Put another way, as the device gets
| thinner, the ratio of surface area to volume goes to
| infinity.
|
| If you want to go thicker, then you have to screw around
| with heat pipes, fans, etc, etc, to move the heat a few
| cm to the outside surface of the device.
| LoganDark wrote:
| That's not why thin-and-light bothers me. Historically,
| ultrabooks and similarly thin-and-light focused devices
| have been utterly insufferable in terms of performance
| compared to something that's even a single cm thicker.
| But Apple Silicon seems extremely promising, it seems
| quite competitive with thicker and heavier devices.
|
| I never understood why everyone [looking at PC laptop
| manufacturers] took thin-and-light to such an extreme
| that their machines became basically useless. Now Apple
| is releasing thin-and-light machines that are incredibly
| powerful, and that is genuinely innovative. I hadn't seen
| something like that from them since the launch of the
| original iPhone, that's how big I think this was.
| throwaway5959 wrote:
| It means a lot to me, because cutting power consumption in
| half for millions of devices means we can turn off power
| plants (in aggregate). It's the same as lightbulbs; I'll
| never understand why people bragged about how much power
| they were wasting with incandescents.
| yyyk wrote:
| >cutting power consumption in half for millions of
| devices means we can turn off power plants
|
| It is well known that software inefficiency doubles every
| couple years, that is, the same scenario would take 2x as
| much compute, given entire software stack (not
| disembodied algorithm which will indeed be faster).
|
| The extra compute will be spent on a more abstract UI
| stack or on new features, unless forced by physical
| constraints (e.g. inefficient batteries of early
| smartphone), which is not the case at present.
| throwaway11460 wrote:
| That's weird - if software gets 2x worse every time
| hardware gets 2x better, why did my laptop in 2010 last 2
| hours on battery while the current one lasts 16 doing
| _much_ more complex tasks for me?
| yyyk wrote:
| Elsewhere in the comments, it is noted Apple's own
| estimates are identical despite allegedly 2x better
| hardware.
|
| Aside, 2 hours is very low even for 2010. There's a
| strongly usability advantage for going to 16. But going
| from 16 to 128 won't add as much. The natural course of
| things is to converge on a decent enough number and
| 'spend' the rest on more complex software, a lighter
| laptop etc.
| Nevermark wrote:
| They like bright lights?
|
| I have dimmable LED strips around my rooms, hidden by
| cove molding, reflecting off the whole ceiling, which
| becomes a super diffuse, super bright "light".
|
| I don't boast about power use, but they are certainly
| hungry.
|
| For that I get softly defuse lighting with a max
| brightness comparable to outdoor clear sky daylight.
| Working from home, this is so nice for my brain and
| depression.
| codedokode wrote:
| First, only CPU power consumption is reduced, not other
| components, second, I doubt tablets contribute
| significantly to global power consumption, so I think no
| power plants will be turned off.
| Takennickname wrote:
| That's bullshit. Does that mean they could have doubled
| battery life if they kept the performance the same?
| Impossible.
| throwaway11460 wrote:
| Impossible why? That's what happened with M1 too.
|
| But as someone else noted, CPU power draw is not the only
| factor in device battery life. A major one, but not the
| whole story.
| Takennickname wrote:
| Intel to M1 is an entire architectural switch where even
| old software couldn't be run and had to be emulated.
|
| This is a small generational upgrade that doesn't
| necessitate an event.
|
| Other companies started having events like this because
| they were copying apples amazing events. Apples events
| now are just parodies of what Apple was.
| praseodym wrote:
| "With these improvements to the CPU and GPU, M4 maintains Apple
| silicon's industry-leading performance per watt. M4 can deliver
| the same performance as M2 using just half the power. And
| compared with the latest PC chip in a thin and light laptop, M4
| can deliver the same performance using just a fourth of the
| power."
|
| That's an incredible improvement in just a few years. I wonder
| how much of that is Apple engineering and how much is TSMC
| improving their 3nm process.
| cs702 wrote:
| Potentially > 2x greater battery life for the same amount of
| compute!
|
| That _is_ pretty crazy.
|
| Or am I missing something?
| krzyk wrote:
| Wait a bit. M2 wasn't as good as the hype was.
| fallat wrote:
| This. Remember folks Apple's primary goal is PROFIT. They
| will tell you anything appealing before independent tests
| are done.
| modeless wrote:
| That's because M2 was on the same TSMC process generation
| as M1. TSMC is the real hero here. M4 is the same
| generation as M3, which is why Apple's marketing here is
| comparing M4 vs M2 instead of M3.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| I thought M3 and M4 were different processes though.
| Higher yield for the latter or such.
| jonathannorris wrote:
| Actually, M4 is reportedly on a more cost-efficient TSMC
| N3E node, where Apple was apparently the only customer on
| the more expensive TSMC N3B node; I'd expect Apple to
| move away from M3 to M4 very quickly for all their
| products.
|
| https://www.trendforce.com/news/2024/05/06/news-
| apple-m4-inc....
| geodel wrote:
| And why other PC vendors not latching on to the hero?
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Apple often buys their entire capacity (of a process) for
| quite a while.
| modeless wrote:
| Apple pays TSMC for exclusivity on new processes for a
| period of time.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Saying tsmc is a hero ignores the thousands of suppliers
| that improved everything required for tsmc to operate.
| Tsmc is the biggest, so they get the most experience on
| all the new toys the world's engineers and scientists are
| building.
| whynotminot wrote:
| It's almost as if every part of the stack -- from the
| uArch that Apple designs down to the insane machinery
| from ASML, to the fully finished SoC delivered by TSMC --
| is vitally important to creating a successful product.
|
| But people like to assign credit solely to certain spaces
| if it suits their narrative (lately, _Apple isn 't
| actually all that special at designing their chips, it's
| all solely the process advantage_)
| modeless wrote:
| Saying TSMC's success is due to their suppliers ignores
| the fact that all of their competitors failed to keep up
| despite having access to the same suppliers. TSMC
| couldn't do it without ASML, but Intel and Samsung failed
| to do it even with ASML.
|
| In contrast, when Apple's CPU and GPU competitors get
| access to TSMC's new processes after Apple's exclusivity
| period expires, they achieve similar levels of
| performance (except for Qualcomm because they don't
| target the high end of CPU performance, but AMD does).
| eqvinox wrote:
| Sadly, this is only processor power consumption, you need to
| put power into a whole lot of other things to make an useful
| computer... a display backlight and the system's RAM come to
| mind as particular offenders.
| cs702 wrote:
| Thanks. That makes sense.
| treesciencebot wrote:
| backlight is now the main bottleneck for consumption heavy
| uses. I wonder what are the main advancements that are
| happening there to optimize the wattage.
| sangnoir wrote:
| Is the iPad Pro not yet on OLED? All of Samsung's
| flagship tablets have OLED screens for well over a decade
| now. It eliminates the need for backlighting, has
| superior contrast and pleasant to ise in low-light
| conditions.
| kbolino wrote:
| I'm not sure how OLED and backlit LCD compare power-wise
| exactly, but OLED screens still need to put off a lot of
| light, they just do it directly instead of with a
| backlight.
| callalex wrote:
| The iPad that came out today finally made the switch.
| iPhones made the switch around 2016. It does seem odd how
| long it took for the iPad to switch, but Samsung
| definitely switched too early: my Galaxy Tab 2 suffered
| from screen burn in that I was never able to recover
| from.
| devsda wrote:
| If the usecases involve working on dark terminals all day
| or watching movies with dark scenes or if the general
| theme is dark, may be the new oled display will help
| reduce the display power consumption too.
| whereismyacc wrote:
| QD-oled reduces it by like 25% I think? But maybe that
| will never be in laptops, I'm not sure.
| eqvinox wrote:
| QD-OLED is an engineering improvement, i.e. combining
| existing researched technology to improve the result
| product. I wasn't able to find a good source on what
| exactly it improves in efficiency, but it's not a
| fundamental improvement in OLED electrical-optical energy
| conversion (if my understanding is correct.)
|
| In general, OLED screens seem to have an efficiency
| around 20[?]30%. Some research departments seem to be
| trying to bump that up
| [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-05671-x]
| which I'd be more hopeful on...
|
| ...but, honestly, at some point you just hit the limits
| of physics. It seems internal scattering is already a
| major problem; maybe someone can invent pixel-sized
| microlasers and that'd help? More than 50-60% seems like
| a pipe dream at this point...
|
| ...unless we can change to a technology that
| fundamentally doesn't emit light, i.e. e-paper and the
| likes. Or just LCD displays without a backlight, using
| ambient light instead.
| neutronicus wrote:
| Please give me an external ePaper display so I can just
| use Spacemacs in a well-lit room!
| mszcz wrote:
| Onyx makes a HDMI "25 eInk display [0]. It's pricey.
|
| [0] https://onyxboox.com/boox_mirapro
|
| edit: "25, not "27
| vsuperpower2020 wrote:
| I'm still waiting for the technology to advance. People
| can't reasonably spend $1500 on the world's shittiest
| computer monitor, even if it is on sale.
| neutronicus wrote:
| Dang, yeah, this is the opposite of what I had in mind
|
| I was thinking, like, a couple hundred dollar Kindle the
| size of a big iPad I can plug into a laptop for text-
| editing out and about. Hell, for my purposes I'd love an
| integrated keyboard.
|
| Basically a second, super-lightweight laptop form-factor
| I can just plug into my chonky Macbook Pro and set on top
| of it in high-light environments when all I need to do is
| edit text.
|
| Honestly not a compelling business case now that I write
| it out, but I just wanna code under a tree lol
| eqvinox wrote:
| A friend bought it & I had a chance to see it in action.
|
| It is nice for some _very specific use cases_. (They 're
| in the publishing/typesetting business. It's... idk,
| really depends on your usage patterns.)
|
| Other than that, yeah, the technology just isn't there
| yet.
| mholm wrote:
| I think we're getting pretty close to this. The
| Remarkable 2 tablet is $300, but can't take video input
| and software support for non-notetaking is near non-
| existent. There's even a keyboard available. Boox and
| Hisense are also making e-ink tablets/phones for
| reasonable prices.
| craftkiller wrote:
| If that existed as a drop-in screen replacement on the
| framework laptop and with a high refresh rate color
| gallery 3 panel, then I'd buy it at that price point in a
| heart beat.
|
| I can't replace my desktop monitor with eink because I
| occasionally play video games. I can't use a 2nd monitor
| because I live in a small apartment.
|
| I can't replace my laptop screen with greyscale because I
| need syntax highlighting for programming.
| gumby wrote:
| Maybe the $100 nano-texture screen will give you the
| visibility you want. Not the low power of a epaper screen
| though.
|
| Hmm, emacs on an epaper screen might be great if it had
| all the display update optimization and "slow modem mode"
| that Emacs had back in the TECO days. (The SUPDUP network
| protocol even implemented that at the client end and
| interacted with Emacs directly!)
| craftkiller wrote:
| AMD gpus have "Adaptive Backlight Management" which
| reduces your screen's backlight but then tweaks the
| colors to compensate. For example, my laptop's backlight
| is set at 33% but with abm it reduces my backlight to 8%.
| Personally I don't even notice it is on / my screen seems
| just as bright as before, but when I first enabled it I
| did notice some slight difference in colors so its
| probably not suitable for designers/artists. I'd 100%
| recommend it for coders though.
| ProfessorLayton wrote:
| Strangely, Apple seems to be doing the opposite for some
| reason (Color accuracy?), as dimming the display doesn't
| seem to reduce the backlight as much, and they're using a
| combination of software dimming, even at "max"
| brightness.
|
| Evidence can be seen when opening up iOS apps, which seem
| to glitch out and reveals the brighter backlight [1].
| Notice how #FFFFFF white isn't the same brightness as the
| white in the iOS app.
|
| [1] https://imgur.com/a/cPqKivI
| naikrovek wrote:
| that's still amazing, to me.
|
| I don't expect an M4 macbook to last any longer than an M2
| macbook of otherwise similar specs; they will spend that
| extra power budget on things other than the battery life
| specification.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Comparing the tech specs for the outgoing and new iPad Pro
| models, that potential is very much not real.
|
| Old: 28.65 Wh (11") / 40.88 Wh (13"), up to 10 hours of
| surfing the web on Wi-Fi or watching video.
|
| New: 31.29 Wh (11") / 38.99 Wh (13"), up to 10 hours of
| surfing the web on Wi-Fi or watching video.
| binary132 wrote:
| Ok, but is it twice as fast during those 10 hours, leading
| to 20 hours of effective websurfing? ;)
| jeffbee wrote:
| A more efficient CPU can't improve that spec because those
| workloads use almost no CPU time and the display dominates
| the energy consumption.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Unfortunately Apple only ever thinks about battery life
| in terms of web surfing and video playback, so we don't
| get official battery-life figures for anything else.
| Perhaps you can get more battery life out of your iPad
| Pro web surfing by using dark mode, since OLEDs should
| use less power than IPS displays with darker content.
| codedokode wrote:
| Isn't this weird, a new chip consumes 2 times less power,
| but the battery life is the same?
| masklinn wrote:
| It's not weird when you consider that browsing the web or
| watching videos has the CPU idle or near enough, so 95%
| of the power draw is from the display and radios.
| rsynnott wrote:
| The OLED likely adds a fair bit of draw; they're
| generally somewhat more power-hungry than LCDs these
| days, assuming like-for-like brightness. Realistically,
| this will be the case until MicroLEDs are available for
| non-completely-silly money.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| This surprises me. I thought the big power downside of
| LCD displays is that they use filtering to turn unwanted
| color channels into waste heat.
|
| Knowing nothing else about the technology, I assumed that
| would make OLED displays more efficient.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Can't beat the thermodynamics of exciton recombination.
|
| https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsami.9b10823
| sroussey wrote:
| OLED will use less for a screen of black and LCD will use
| less for a screen of white. Now, take whatever average of
| what content is on the screen and for you, it may be
| better or may be worse.
|
| White background document editing, etc., will be worse,
| and this is rather common.
| beeboobaa3 wrote:
| No, they have a "battery budget". It the CPU power draw
| goes down that means the budget goes up and you can spend
| it on other things, like a nicer display or some other
| feature.
|
| When you say "up to 10 hours" most people will think "oh
| nice that's an entire day" and be fine with it. It's what
| they're used to.
|
| Turning that into 12 hours might be possible but are the
| tradeoffs worth it? Will enough people buy the device
| because of the +2 hour battery life? Can you market that
| effectively? Or will putting in a nicer fancy display
| cause more people to buy it?
|
| We'll never get significant battery life improvements
| because of this, sadly.
| fvv wrote:
| this
| masklinn wrote:
| Yeah double the PPW does not mean double the battery,
| because unless you're pegging the CPU/SOC it's likely only
| a small fraction of the power consumption of a light-use or
| idle device, especially for an SOC which originates in
| mobile devices.
|
| Doing basic web navigation with some music in the
| background, my old M1 Pro has short bursts at ~5W (for the
| entire SoC) when navigating around, a pair of watts for
| mild webapps (e.g. checking various channels in discord),
| and typing into this here textbox it's sitting happy at
| under half a watt, with the P-cores essentially sitting
| idle and the E cores at under 50% utilisation.
|
| With a 100Wh battery that would be a "potential" of 150
| hours or so. Except nobody would ever sell it for that,
| because between the display and radios the laptop's
| actually pulling 10~11W.
| pxc wrote:
| So this could be a bit helpful for heavier duty usage
| while on battery.
| tracker1 wrote:
| On my M1 air, I find for casual use of about an hour or
| so a day, I can literally go close to a couple weeks
| without needing to recharge. Which to me is pretty
| awesome. Mostly use my personal desktop when not on my
| work laptop (docked m3 pro).
| Dibby053 wrote:
| 2x efficiency vs a 2 year old chip is more or less in line
| with expectations (Koomey's law). [1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koomey%27s_law
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Is the CPU/GPU really dominating power consumption that much?
| masklinn wrote:
| Nah, GP is off their rocker. For the workloads in question
| the SOC's power draw is a rounding error, low single-digit
| percent.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| On one hand, it's crazy. On the other hand, it's pretty typical
| for the industry.
|
| Average performance per watt doubling time is 2.6 years:
| https://newsroom.arm.com/blog/performance-per-
| watt#:~:text=T....
| praseodym wrote:
| M2 was launched in June 2022 [1] so a little under 2 years
| ago. Apple is a bit ahead of that 2.6 years, but not by much.
|
| [1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/06/apple-
| unveils-m2-with...
| halgir wrote:
| If they maintain that pace, it will start compounding
| incredibly quickly. If we round to 2 years vs 2.5 years,
| after just a decade you're an entire doubling ahead.
| luyu_wu wrote:
| Note that performance per watt is 2x higher at both chips
| peak performance. This is in many ways an unfair comparison
| for Apple to make.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| > I wonder how much of that is Apple engineering and how much
| is TSMC improving their 3nm process.
|
| I think Apple's design choices had a huge impact on the M1's
| performance but from there on out I think it's mostly due to
| TSMC.
| izacus wrote:
| Apple usually massively exaggerates their tech spec comparison
| - is it REALLY half the power use of all times (so we'll get
| double the battery life) or is it half the power use in some
| scenarios (so we'll get like... 15% more battery life total) ?
| alphakappa wrote:
| Any product that uses this is more than just the chip, so you
| cannot get a proportional change in battery life.
| izacus wrote:
| Sure, but I also remember them comparing M1 chip to 3090
| GTX and my MacBook M1 Pro doesn't really run games well.
|
| So I've become really suspicious about any claims about
| performance done by Apple.
| servus45678981 wrote:
| That is fault of the devs. Because optimization for
| dedicated graphic cards is a either integrated in the
| game engine or they just have a version for rtx users.
| filleduchaos wrote:
| I mean, I remember Apple comparing the M1 _Ultra_ to
| Nvidia 's RTX 3090. While that chart was definitely
| putting a spin on things to say the least, and we can
| argue from now until tomorrow about whether power
| consumption should or should not be equalised, I have no
| idea why anyone would expect the M1 _Pro_ (an explicitly
| much weaker chip) to perform anywhere near the same.
|
| Also what games are you trying to play on it? All my
| M-series Macbooks have run games more than well enough
| with reasonable settings (and that has a lot more to do
| with OS bugs and the constraints of the form factor than
| with just the chipset).
| achandlerwhite wrote:
| They compared them in terms of perf/watt, which did hold
| up, but obviously implied higher performance overall.
| illusive4080 wrote:
| From their specs page, battery life is unchanged. I think
| they donated the chip power savings to offset the increased
| consumption of the tandem OLED
| xattt wrote:
| I've not seen discussion that Apple likely scales
| performance of chips to match the use profile of the
| specific device it's used in. An M2 in an iPad Air is very
| likely not the same as an M2 in an MBP or Mac Studio.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| A Ryzen 7840U in a gaming handheld is not (configured)
| the same as a Ryzen 7840U in a laptop, for that matter,
| so Apple is hardly unique here.
| refulgentis wrote:
| Surprisingly, I think it is: I was going to comment that
| here, then checked Geekbench, single core scores match
| for M2 iPad/MacBook Pro/etc. at same clock speed. i.e. M2
| "base" = M2 "base", but core count differs, and with the
| desktops/laptops, you get options for M2 Ultra Max SE bla
| bla.
| joakleaf wrote:
| The GeekBench [1,2] benchmarks for M2 are:
|
| Single Core: iPad Pro (M2): 2539 Macbook Air (M2): 2596
| Macbook Pro (M2): 2645
|
| Multi Core: iPad Pro (M2 8-core): 9631 Macbook Air (M2
| 8-core): 9654 Macbook Pro (M2 8-core): 9642
|
| So, it appears to be almost the same performance (until
| it throttles due to heat, of course).
|
| 1. https://browser.geekbench.com/ios-benchmarks 2.
| https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks
| aledalgrande wrote:
| Well battery life would be used by other things too right?
| Especially by that double OLED screen. "best ever" in every
| keynote makes me laugh at this point, but it doesn't mean
| that they're not improving their power envelope.
| philistine wrote:
| Quickly looking at the press release, it seems to have the
| same comparisons as in the video. None of Apple's comparisons
| today are between the M3 and M4. They are ALL comparing the
| M2 and M4. Why? It's frustrating, but today Apple replaced a
| product with an M2 with a product with an M4. Apple always
| compares product to product, never component to component
| when it comes to processors. So those specs are far more
| impressive than if we could have numbers between the M3 and
| M4.
| jorvi wrote:
| Didn't they do extreme nitpicking for their tests so they
| could show the M1 beating a 3090 (or M2 a 4090, I can't
| remember).
|
| Gave me quite a laugh when Apple users started to claim
| they'd be able to play Cyberpunk 2077 maxed out with maxed
| out raytracing.
| philistine wrote:
| I'll give you that Apple's comparisons are sometimes
| inscrutable. I vividly remember that one.
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/17/22982915/apple-m1-ultr
| a-r...
|
| Apple was comparing the power envelope (already a
| complicated concept) of their GPU against a 3090. Apple
| wanted to show that the peak of their GPU's performance
| was reached with a fraction of the power of a 3090. What
| was terrible was that Apple was cropping their chart at
| the point where the 3090 was pulling ahead in pure
| compute by throwing more watts at the problem. So their
| GPU was not as powerful as a 3090, but a quick glance at
| the chart would completely tell you otherwise.
|
| Ultimately we didn't see one of those charts today, just
| a mention about the GPU being 50% more efficient than the
| competition. I think those charts are beloved by Johny
| Srouji and no one else. They're not getting the message
| across.
| izacus wrote:
| Plenty of people on HN thought that M1 GPU is as powerful
| as 3090 GPU, so I think the message worked very well for
| Apple.
|
| They really love those kind of comparisons - e.g. they
| also compared M1s against really old Intel CPUs to make
| the numbers look better, knowing that news headlines
| won't care for details.
| philistine wrote:
| They compared against really old intel CPUs because those
| were the last ones they used in their own computers!
| Apple likes to compare device to device, not component to
| component.
| oblio wrote:
| You say that like it's not a marketing gimmick meant to
| mislead and obscure facts.
|
| It's not some virtue that causes them to do this.
| threeseed wrote:
| It's funny because your comment is meant to mislead and
| obscure facts.
|
| Apple compared against Intel to encourage their previous
| customers to upgrade.
|
| There is nothing insidious about this and is in fact
| standard business practice.
| izacus wrote:
| No, they compared it because it made them look way better
| for naive people. They have no qualms comparing to other
| competition when it suits them.
|
| You're explanation is a really baffling case of corporate
| white knighting.
| w0m wrote:
| > not component to component
|
| that's honestly kind of stupid when discussing things
| like 'new CPU!' like this thread.
|
| I'm not saying the M4 isn't a great platform, but holy
| cow the corporate tripe people gobble up.
| refulgentis wrote:
| Yes, can't remember the precise combo either, there was a
| solid year or two of latent misunderstandings.
|
| I eventually made a visual showing it was the same as
| claiming your iPhone was 3x the speed of a Core i9: Sure,
| if you limit the power draw of your PC to a battery the
| size of a post it pad.
|
| Similar issues when on-device LLMs happened, thankfully,
| quieted since then (last egregious thing I saw was stonk-
| related wishcasting that Apple was obviously turning its
| Xcode CI service into a full-blown AWS competitor that'd
| wipe the floor with any cloud service, given the 2x
| performance)
| homarp wrote:
| because previous ipad was M2. So 'remember how fast was
| your previous ipad', well this one is N better.
| kiba wrote:
| I like the comparison between much older hardware with
| brand new to highlight how far we came.
| chipdart wrote:
| > I like the comparison between much older hardware with
| brand new to highlight how far we came.
|
| That's ok, but why skip the previous iteration then?
| Isn't the M2 only two generations behind? It's not that
| much older. It's also a marketing blurb, not a
| reproducible benchmark. Why leave out comparisons with
| the previous iteration even when you're just hand-waving
| over your own data?
| FumblingBear wrote:
| In this specific case, it's because iPad's never got the
| M3. They're literally comparing it with the previous
| model of iPad.
|
| There were some disingenuous comparisons throughout the
| presentation going back to A11 for the first Neural
| Engine and some comparisons to M1, but the M2 comparison
| actually makes sense.
| philistine wrote:
| I wouldn't call the comparison to A11 disingenuous, they
| were very clear they were talking about how far their
| neural engines have come, in the context of the
| competition just starting to put NPUs in their stuff.
|
| I mean, they compared the new iPad Pro to an iPod Nano,
| that's just using your own history to make a point.
| FumblingBear wrote:
| Fair point--I just get a little annoyed when the
| marketing speak confuses the average consumer and felt as
| though some of the jargon they used could trip less
| informed customers up.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| personally I think this is a comparison most people want.
| The M3 had a lot of compromises over the M2.
|
| that aside, the M4 is about the Neural Engine upgrades over
| anything (which probably should have been compared to the
| M3)
| dakiol wrote:
| What are such compromises? I may buy an M3 mbp, so would
| like to hear more
| fh9302 wrote:
| The M3 Pro had some downgrades compared to the M2 Pro,
| less performance cores and lower memory bandwidth. This
| did not apply to the M3 and M3 Max.
| sod wrote:
| Yes, kinda annoying. But on the other hand, given that
| apple releases a new chip every 12 months, we can grant
| them some slack here. Given that from AMD, Intel or nvidia
| we see usually a 2 year cadence.
| dartos wrote:
| There's probably easier problems to solve in the ARM
| space than x86 considering the amount of money and time
| spent on x86.
|
| That's not to say that any of these problems are easy,
| just that there's probably more lower hanging fruit in
| ARM land.
| kimixa wrote:
| And yet they seem to be the only people picking the
| apparently "Low Hanging Fruit" in ARM land. We'll see
| about Qualcomm's Nuvia-based stuff, but that's been
| "nearly released" for what feels like years now, but you
| still can't buy one to actually test.
|
| And don't underestimate the investment Apple made - it's
| likely at a similar level to the big x86 incumbents. I
| mean AMD's entire Zen development team cost was likely a
| blip on the balance sheet for Apple.
| re-thc wrote:
| > We'll see about Qualcomm's Nuvia-based stuff, but
| that's been "nearly released" for what feels like years
| now, but you still can't buy one to actually test.
|
| That's more bound by legal than technical reasons...
| transpute wrote:
| _> Qualcomm 's Nuvia-based stuff, but that's been "nearly
| released" for what feels like years now_
|
| Launching at Computex in 2 weeks,
| https://www.windowscentral.com/hardware/laptops/next-gen-
| ai-...
| 0x457 wrote:
| Good to know that it's finally seeing the light. I
| thought they're still in legal dispute with ARM about
| Nuvia's design?
| transpute wrote:
| Not privy to details, but some legal disputes can be
| resolved by licensing price negotiations, motivated by
| customer launch deadlines.
| dartos wrote:
| Again, not saying that they are easy (or cheap!) problems
| to solve, but that there are more relatively easy
| problems in the ARM space than the x86 space.
|
| That's why Apple can release a meaningfully new chip
| every year where it takes several for x86 manufacturers
| blackoil wrote:
| Maybe for GPUs, but for CPU both intel and AMD release
| with yearly cadance. Even when Intel has nothing new to
| release, generation is bumped.
| MBCook wrote:
| It's an iPad event and there were no M3 iPads.
|
| That's all. They're trying to convince iPad users to
| upgrade.
|
| We'll see what they do when they get to computers later
| this year.
| epolanski wrote:
| I have a Samsung Galaxy S7 FE tablet, and I can't figure
| any use case where I may use more power.
|
| I agree that iPad has more interesting software than
| android for use cases like video or music editing, but I
| don't do those on a tablet anyway.
|
| I just can't imagine anyone updating their ipad M2 for
| this except a tiny niche that really wants that more
| power.
| MBCook wrote:
| The A series was good enough.
|
| I'm vaguely considering this but entirely for the screen.
| The chip has been irrelevant to me for years, it's long
| past the point where I don't notice it.
| nomel wrote:
| A series was definitely not good enough. Really depends
| on what you're using it for. Netflix and web? Sure. But
| any old HDR tablet, that can maintain 24Hz, is good
| enough for that.
|
| These are 2048x2732 with 120Hz displays, that support 6k
| external displays. Gaming and art apps push them pretty
| hard. From the iPad user in my house, goin from the 2020
| non M* iPad to a 2023 M2 iPad made a _huge_ difference
| for the drawing apps. Better latency is always better for
| drawing, and complex brushes (especially newer ones),
| selections, etc, would get fairly unusable.
|
| For gaming, it was pretty trivial to dip well below 60Hz
| with a non M* iPad, with some of the higher demand games
| like Fortnight, Minecraft (high view distance), Roblox
| (it ain't what it used to be), etc.
|
| But, the apps will always gravitate to the performance of
| the average user. A step function in performance won't
| show up in the apps until the adoption follows, years
| down the line. Not pushing the average to higher
| performance is how you stagnate the future software of
| the devices.
| MBCook wrote:
| You're right, it's good enough _for me_. That's what I
| meant but I didn't make that clear at all. I suspect a
| ton of people are in a similar position.
|
| I just don't push it at all. The few games I play are not
| complicated in graphics or CPU needs. I don't draw, 3D
| model, use Logic or Final Cut or anything like that.
|
| I agree the extra power is useful to some people. But
| even there we have the M1 (what I've got) and the M2
| models. But I bet there are plenty of people like me who
| mostly bought the pro models for the better screen and
| not the additional grunt.
| r00fus wrote:
| AI on the device may be the real reason for an M4.
| MBCook wrote:
| Previous iPads have had that for a long time. Since the
| A12 in 2018. The phones had it even earlier with the A11.
|
| Sure this is faster but enough to make people care?
|
| It may depend heavily on what they announce is in the
| next version of iOS/iPadOS.
| grujicd wrote:
| I don't know who would prefer to do music or video
| editing on smaller display, without keyboard for
| shortcuts, without proper file system and with
| problematic connectivity to external hardware. Sure, it's
| possible, but why? Ok, maybe there's some usecase on the
| road where every gram counts, but that seems niche.
| mlsu wrote:
| They know that anyone who has bought an M3 is good on
| computers for a long while. They're targeting people who
| have m2 or older macs. People who own an m3 are basically
| going to buy anything that comes down the pipe, because who
| needs an m3 over an m2 or even an m1 today?
| abnercoimbre wrote:
| I'm starting to worry that I'm missing out on some huge
| gains (M1 Air user.) But as a programmer who's not making
| games or anything intensive, I think I'm still good for
| another year or two?
| richiebful1 wrote:
| I have an M1 Air and I test drove a friend's recent M3
| Air. It's not very different performance-wise for what I
| do (programming, watching video, editing small memory-
| constrained GIS models, etc)
| mlsu wrote:
| I wanted to upgrade my M1 because it was going to swap a
| lot with only 8 gigs of RAM and because I wanted a
| machine that could run big LLMs locally. Ended up going
| 8G macbook air M1 -> 64G macbook pro M1. My other
| reasoning was that it would speed up compilation, which
| it has, but not by too much.
|
| The M1 air is a very fast machine and is perfect for
| anyone doing normal things on the computer.
| giantrobot wrote:
| You're not going to be missing out on much. I had the
| first M1 Air and recently upgraded to an M3 Air. The M1
| Air has years of useful life left and my upgrade was for
| reasons not performance related.
|
| The M3 Air performs better than the M1 in raw numbers but
| outside of some truly CPU or GPU limited tasks you're not
| likely to actually notice the difference. The day to day
| behavior between the two is pretty similar.
|
| If your current M1 works you're not missing out on
| anything. For the power/size/battery envelope the M1 Air
| was pretty awesome, it hasn't really gotten any worse
| over time. If it does what you need then you're good
| until it doesn't do what you need.
| mh8h wrote:
| That's because the previous iPad Pros came with M2, not M3.
| They are comparing the performance with the previous
| generation of the same product.
| raydev wrote:
| > They are ALL comparing the M2 and M4. Why?
|
| Well, the obvious answer is that those with older machines
| are more likely to upgrade than those with newer machines.
| The market for insta-upgraders is tiny.
|
| edit: And perhaps an even more obvious answer: there are no
| iPads that contained the M3, so the comparison would be
| more useless. The M4 was just launched today exclusively in
| iPads.
| loongloong wrote:
| Doesn't seem plausible to me that Apple will release a "M3
| variant" that can drive "tandem OLED" displays. So probably
| logical to package whatever chip progress (including
| process improvements) into "M4".
|
| And it can signal that "We are serious about iPad as a
| computer", using their latest chip.
|
| Logical alignment to progresses in engineering (and
| manufacturing) packaged smartly to generate marketing
| capital for sales and brand value creation.
|
| Wonder how the newer Macs will use these "tandem OLED"
| capabilities of the M4.
| mkl wrote:
| > Apple always compares product to product, never component
| to component when it comes to processors.
|
| I don't think this is true. When they launched the M3 they
| compared primarily to M1 to make it look better.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| The iPads skipped the M3 so they're comparing your old iPad
| to the new one.
| cletus wrote:
| IME Apple has always been the most honest when it makes
| performance claims. LIke when they said an Macbook Air would
| last 10+ hours and third-party reviewers would get 8-9+
| hours. All the while, Dell or HP would claim 19 hours and
| you'd be lucky to get 2 eg [1].
|
| As for CPU power use, of course that doesn't translate into
| doubling battery life because there are other components. And
| yes, it seems the OLED display uses more power so, all in
| all, battery life seems to be about the same.
|
| I'm interested to see an M3 vs M4 performance comparison in
| the real world. IIRC the M3 was a questionable upgrade. Some
| things were better but some weren't.
|
| Overall the M-series SoCs have been an excellent product
| however.
|
| [1]: https://www.laptopmag.com/features/laptop-battery-life-
| claim...
|
| EDIT: added link
| ajross wrote:
| > IME Apple has always been the most honest when it makes
| performance claims
|
| That's just laughable, sorry. No one is particularly honest
| in marketing copy, but Apple is for sure one of the worst,
| historically. Even more so when you go back to the PPC
| days. I still remember Jobs on stage talking about how the
| G4 was the fasted CPU in the world when I knew damn well
| that it was half the speed of the P3 on my desk.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Indeed. Have we already forgotten about the RDF?
| coldtea wrote:
| No, it was just always a meaningless term...
| dijit wrote:
| You can claim Apple is dishonest for a few reasons.
|
| 1) Graphs often are unannotatted.
|
| 2) Comparisons are rarely against latest generation
| products. (their argument for that has been that they do
| not expect people to upgrade yearly, so its showing the
| difference of their intended upgrade path).
|
| 3) They have conflated performance, for performance per
| watt.
|
| However, when it comes to battery life, performance (for
| a task) or specification of their components (screens,
| ability to use external displays up to 6k, port speed
| etc) there are almost no hidden gotchas and they have
| tended to be trustworthy.
|
| The first wave of M1 announcements were met with similar
| suspicion as you have shown here; but it was swiftly
| dispelled once people actually got their hands on them.
|
| *EDIT:* Blaming a guy who's been dead for 13 years for
| something they said 50 years ago, and primarily it seems
| for internal use is weird. I had to look up the context
| but it _seems_ it was more about internal motivation in
| the 70's than relating to anything today, especially when
| referring to concrete claims.
| Brybry wrote:
| "This thing is incredible," Jobs said. "It's the first
| supercomputer on a chip.... We think it's going to set
| the industry on fire."
|
| "The G4 chip is nearly three times faster than the
| fastest Pentium III"
|
| - Steve Jobs (1999) [1]
|
| [1] https://www.wired.com/1999/08/lavish-debut-for-
| apples-g4/
| dijit wrote:
| Thats cool, but literally last millennium.
|
| And again, the guy has been dead for the better part of
| _this_ millennium.
|
| What have they shown of any product currently on the
| market, especially when backed with any concrete claim,
| that has been proven untrue-
|
| _EDIT:_ After reading your article and this one:
| https://lowendmac.com/2006/twice-as-fast-did-apple-lie-
| or-ju... it looks like it was true in floating point
| workloads.
| mort96 wrote:
| Interesting, by what benchmark did you compare the G4 and
| the P3?
|
| I don't have a horse in this race, Jobs lied or bent the
| truth all the time so it wouldn't surprise me, I'm just
| curious.
| dblohm7 wrote:
| I remember that Apple used to wave around these SIMD
| benchmarks showing their PowerPC chips trouncing Intel
| chips. In the fine print, you'd see that the benchmark
| was built to use AltiVec on PowerPC, but without MMX or
| SSE on Intel.
| 0x457 wrote:
| Ah so the way Intel advertises their chips. Got it.
| mort96 wrote:
| Yeah, and we rightfully criticize Intel for the same and
| we distrust their benchmarks
| mc32 wrote:
| Didn't he have to use two PPC procs to get the equivalent
| perf you'd get on a P3?
|
| Just add them up, it's the same number of Hertz!
|
| But Steve that's two procs vs one!
|
| I think this is when Adobe was optimizing for
| Windows/intel and was single threaded, but Steve put out
| some graphs showing better perf on the Mac.
| leptons wrote:
| Apple marketed their PPC systems as "a supercomputer on
| your desk", but it was nowhere near the performance of a
| supercomputer of that age. Maybe similar performance to a
| supercomputer from the 1970's, but that was their
| marketing angle from the 1990's.
| galad87 wrote:
| From https://512pixels.net/2013/07/power-mac-g4/: the ad
| was based on the fact that Apple was forbidden to export
| the G4 to many countries due to its "supercomputer"
| classification by the US government.
| m000 wrote:
| It seems that US government was buying too much into tech
| hypes at the turn of the millenium. Around the same
| period PS2 exports were also restricted [1].
|
| [1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-
| xpm-2000-apr-17-fi-20482...
| georgespencer wrote:
| > Apple marketed their PPC systems as "a supercomputer on
| your desk"
|
| It's certainly fair to say that _twenty years ago_ Apple
| was marketing some of its PPC systems as "the first
| supercomputer on a chip"[^1].
|
| > but it was nowhere near the performance of a
| supercomputer of that age.
|
| That was not the claim. Apple did not argue that the G4's
| performance was commensurate with the state of the art in
| supercomputing. (If you'll forgive me: like, _fucking
| obviously?_ The entire reason they made the claim is
| precisely because the latest room-sized supercomputers
| with leapfrog performance gains were in the news very
| often.)
|
| The claim was that the G4 was capable of sustained
| gigaflop performance, and therefore met the narrow
| technical definition of a supercomputer.
|
| You'll see in the aforelinked marketing page that Apple
| compared the G4 chip to UC Irvine's Aeneas Project, which
| in ~2000 was delivering 1.9 gigaflop performance.
|
| This chart[^2] shows the trailing average of various
| subsets of super computers, for context.
|
| This narrow definition is also why the machine could not
| be exported to many countries, which Apple leaned
| into.[^3]
|
| > Maybe similar performance to a supercomputer from the
| 1970's
|
| What am I missing here? Picking perhaps the most famous
| supercomputer of the mid-1970s, the Cray-1,[^4] we can
| see performance of 160 MFLOPS, which is 160 million
| floating point operations per second (with an 80 MHz
| processor!).
|
| The G4 was capable of delivering ~1 GFLOP performance,
| which is a billion floating point operations per second.
|
| Are you perhaps thinking of a different decade?
|
| [^1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20000510163142/http://w
| ww.apple....
|
| [^2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_supercompu
| ting#/med...
|
| [^3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20020418022430/https://
| www.cnn.c...
|
| [^4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-1#Performance
| leptons wrote:
| >That was not the claim. Apple did not argue that the
| G4's performance was commensurate with the state of the
| art in supercomputing.
|
| This is _marketing_ we 're talking about, people see
| "supercomputer on a chip" and they get hyped up by it.
| Apple was 100% using the "supercomputer" claim to make
| their luddite audience think they had a performance
| advantage, which they did not.
|
| > The entire reason they made the claim is
|
| The reason they marketed it that way was to get people to
| part with their money. Full stop.
|
| In the first link you added, there's a photo of a Cray
| supercomputer, which makes the viewer equate Apple =
| Supercomputer = _I am a computing god if I buy this
| product_. Apple 's marketing has always been a bit shady
| that way.
|
| And soon after that period Apple jumped off the PPC
| architecture and onto the x86 bandwagon. Gimmicks like
| "supercomputer on a chip" don't last long when the
| competition is far ahead.
| threeseed wrote:
| I can't believe Apple is marketing their products in a
| way to get people to part with their money.
|
| If I had some pearls I would be clutching them right now.
| georgespencer wrote:
| > This is marketing we're talking about, people see
| "supercomputer on a chip" and they get hyped up by it.
|
| That is _also_ not in dispute. I am disputing your
| specific claim that Apple somehow suggested that the G4
| was of commensurate performance to a modern
| supercomputer, which does not seem to be true.
|
| > Apple was 100% using the "supercomputer" claim to make
| their luddite audience think they had a performance
| advantage, which they did not.
|
| This is why context is important (and why I'd appreciate
| clarity on whether you genuinely believe a supercomputer
| from the 1970s was anywhere near as powerful as a G4).
|
| In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century,
| megapixels were a proxy for camera quality, and megahertz
| were a proxy for processor performance. More MHz = more
| capable processor.
|
| This created a problem for Apple, because the G4's
| SPECfp_95 (floating point) benchmarks crushed Pentium III
| at lower clock speeds.
|
| PPC G4 500 MHz - 22.6
|
| PPC G4 450 MHz - 20.4
|
| PPC G4 400 MHz - 18.36
|
| Pentium III 600 MHz - 15.9
|
| For both floating point and integer benchmarks, the G3
| and G4 outgunned comparable Pentium II/III processors.
|
| You can question how this translates to real world use
| cases - the Photoshop filters on stage were real, but
| others have pointed out in this thread that it wasn't an
| apples-to-apples comparison vs. Wintel - but it is
| inarguable that the G4 had some performance advantages
| over Pentium at launch, and that it met the (inane)
| definition of a supercomputer.
|
| > The reason they marketed it that way was to get people
| to part with their money. Full stop.
|
| Yes, marketing exists to convince people to buy one
| product over another. That's why companies do marketing.
| IMO that's a self-evidently inane thing to say in a
| nested discussion of microprocessor architecture on a
| technical forum - especially when your interlocutor is
| establishing the historical context you may be unaware of
| (judging by your comment about supercomputers from the
| 1970s, which I am surprised you have not addressed).
|
| I didn't say "The reason Apple markets its computers," I
| said "The entire reason they made the claim [about
| supercomputer performance]..."
|
| Both of us appear to know that companies do marketing,
| but only you appear to be confused about the specific
| claims Apple made - given that you proactively raised
| them, and got them wrong - and the historical backdrop
| against which they were made.
|
| > In the first link you added, there's a photo of a Cray
| supercomputer
|
| That's right. It looks like a stylized rendering of a
| Cray-1 to me - what do you think?
|
| > which makes the viewer equate Apple = Supercomputer = I
| am a computing god if I buy this product
|
| The Cray-1's compute, as measured in GFLOPS, was
| approximately 6.5x lower than the G4 processor.
|
| I'm therefore not sure what your argument is: you started
| by claiming that Apple deliberately suggested that the G4
| had comparable performance to a modern supercomputer.
| That isn't the case, and the page you're referring to
| contains imagery of a much less performant supercomputer,
| as well as a lot of information relating to the history
| of supercomputers (and a link to a Forbes article).
|
| > Apple's marketing has always been a bit shady that way.
|
| All companies make tradeoffs they think are right for
| their shareholders and customers. They accentuate the
| positives in marketing and gloss over the drawbacks.
|
| Note, too, that Adobe's CEO has been duped on the page
| you link to. Despite your emphatic claim:
|
| > Apple was 100% using the "supercomputer" claim to make
| their luddite audience think they had a performance
| advantage, which they did not.
|
| The CEO of Adobe is quoted as saying:
|
| > "Currently, the G4 is significantly faster than any
| platform we've seen running Photoshop 5.5," said John E.
| Warnock, chairman and CEO of Adobe.
|
| How is what you are doing materially different to what
| you accuse Apple of doing?
|
| > And soon after that period Apple jumped off the PPC
| architecture and onto the x86 bandwagon.
|
| They did so when Intel's roadmap introduced Core Duo,
| which was significantly more energy-efficient than
| Pentium 4. I don't have benchmarks to hand, but I suspect
| that a PowerBook G5 would have given the Core Duo a run
| for its money (despite the G5 being significantly older),
| but only for about fifteen seconds before thermal
| throttling and draining the battery entirely in minutes.
| Vvector wrote:
| Blaming a company TODAY for marketing from the 1990s is
| crazy.
| brokencode wrote:
| Have any examples from the past decade? Especially in the
| context of how exaggerated the claims are from PC and
| Android brands they are competing with?
| lynndotpy wrote:
| Apple recently claimed that RAM in their Macbooks is
| equivalent to 2x the RAM in any other machine, in defense
| of the 8GB starting point.
|
| In my experience, I can confirm that this is just not
| true. The secret is heavy reliance on swap. It's still
| the case that 1GB = 1GB.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| > The secret is heavy reliance on swap
|
| You are entirely (100%) wrong, but, sadly, NDA...
| ethanwillis wrote:
| How convenient :)
| monsieurbanana wrote:
| Regardless of what you can't tell, he's absolutely right
| regarding Apple's claims: saying that a 8gb mac is as
| good as a 16gb non-mac is laughable.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| That was never said. They said 8gb mac is similar to a
| 16gb non-Mac
| Zanfa wrote:
| My entry-level 8GB M1 Macbook Air beats my 64GB 10-core
| Intel iMac in my day-to-day dev work.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Memory compression isn't magic and isn't exclusive to
| macOS.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| I suggest you go and look HOW it is done in apple silicon
| macs, and then think long and hard why this might make a
| huge difference. Maybe Asahi Linux guys can explain it to
| you ;)
| sudosysgen wrote:
| I understand that it can make a difference to performance
| (which is already baked into the benchmarks we look at),
| I don't see how it can make a difference to compression
| ratios, if anything in similar implementations (ex:
| console APUs) it tends to lead to worse compression
| ratios.
|
| If there's any publicly available data to the contrary
| I'd love to read it. Anecdotally I haven't seen a
| significant difference between zswap on Linux and macOS
| memory compression in terms of compression ratios, and on
| the workloads I've tested zswap tends to be faster than
| no memory compression on x86 for many core machines.
| lynndotpy wrote:
| I do admit the "reliance on swap" thing is speculation on
| my part :)
|
| My experience is that I can still tell when the OS is
| unhappy when I demand more RAM than it can give. MacOS is
| still relatively responsive around this range, which I
| just attributed to super fast swapping. (I'd assume
| memory compression too, but I usually run into this
| trouble when working with large amounts of poorly-
| compressible data.)
|
| In either case, I know it's frustrating when someone is
| confidently wrong but you can't properly correct them, so
| you have my apologies
| brokencode wrote:
| Sure, and they were widely criticized for this. Again,
| the assertion I was responding to is that Apple does this
| "laughably" more than competitors.
|
| Is an occasional statement that they get pushback on
| really worse than what other brands do?
|
| As an example from a competitor, take a look at the
| recent firestorm over Intel's outlandish anti-AMD
| marketing:
|
| https://wccftech.com/intel-calls-out-amd-using-old-cores-
| in-...
| ajross wrote:
| > Sure, and they were widely criticized for this. Again,
| the assertion I was responding to is that Apple does this
| "laughably" more than competitors.
|
| FWIW: the language upthread was that it was laughable to
| say Apple was the _most_ honest. And I stand by that.
| brokencode wrote:
| Fair point. Based on their first sentence, I
| mischaracterized how "laughable" was used.
|
| Though the author also made clear in their second
| sentence that they think Apple is one of the worst when
| it comes to marketing claims, so I don't think your
| characterization is totally accurate either.
| rahkiin wrote:
| There is also memory compression and their insane swap
| speed due to SoC memory and ssd
| anaisbetts wrote:
| Every modern operating system now does memory compression
| astrange wrote:
| Some of them do it better than others though.
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| Apple uses Magic Compression.
| adamomada wrote:
| Not sure what windows does but the popular method on e.g.
| fedora is to split memory into main and swap and then
| compress swap. It could be more efficient the way Apple
| does it by not having to partition main memory.
| throwaway744678 wrote:
| This is a revolution
| seec wrote:
| Ye that was hilarious, my basic workload borders on the
| 8GB limit not even pushing it. They have fast swap but
| nothing beats real ram in the end, and considering their
| storage pricing is as stupid as their RAM pricing it
| really makes no difference.
|
| If you go for the base model, you are in for a bad time,
| 256GB with heavy swap and no dedicated GPU memory (making
| the 8GB even worse) is just plain stupid.
|
| This what the Apple fanboys don't seem to get, their base
| model at somewhat affordable price are deeply incompetent
| and if you start to load it up the pricing just do not
| make a lot of sense...
| n9 wrote:
| You know that RAM in these machines is more different
| than the same as "RAM" in a standard PC? Apple's SoC RAM
| is more or less part of the CPU/GPU and is super fast.
| And for obvious reasons cannot be added to.
|
| Anyway, I manage a few M1 and M3 machines with 256/8
| configs and they all run just as fast as 16 and 32
| machines EXCEPT for workloads that need more than 8GB for
| a process (virtualization) or workloads that need lots of
| video memory (Lightroom can KILL an 8GB machine that
| isn't doing anything else...)
|
| The 8GB is stupid discussion isn't "wrong" in the general
| case, but it is wrong for maybe 80% of users.
| ajross wrote:
| > EXCEPT for workloads that need more than 8GB for a
| process
|
| Isn't that exactly the upthread contention: Apple's magic
| compressed swap management is still _swap management_
| that replaces O(1) fast(-ish) DRAM access with thousands+
| cycle page decompression operations. It may be faster
| than storage, but it 's still extremely slow relative to
| a DRAM fetch. And once your working set gets beyond your
| available RAM you start thrashing just like VAXen did on
| 4BSD.
| kcartlidge wrote:
| > _If you go for the base model, you are in for a bad
| time, 256GB with heavy swap and no dedicated GPU memory
| (making the 8GB even worse) is just plain stupid ...
| their base model at somewhat affordable price are deeply
| incompetent_
|
| I got the base model M1 Air a couple of years back and
| whilst I don't do much gaming I do do C#, Python, Go,
| Rails, local Postgres, and more. I also have a (new last
| year) Lenovo 13th gen i7 with 16GB RAM running Windows 11
| and the performance _with the same load_ is night and day
| - the M1 walks all over it whilst easily lasting 10hrs+.
|
| _Note that I 'm not a fanboy; I run both by choice. Also
| both iPhone and Android._
|
| The Windows laptop often gets sluggish and hot. The M1
| never slows down and stays cold. There's just no
| comparison (though the Air keyboard remains poor).
|
| I don't much care about the technical details, and I know
| 8GB isn't a lot. I care about the _experience_ and the
| underspecced Mac wins.
| cwillu wrote:
| If someone is claiming "<foo> has always <barred>", then
| I don't think it's fair to demand a 10 year cutoff on
| counter-evidence.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Clearly it isn't the case that Apple has always been more
| honest than their competition, because there were some
| years before Apple was founded.
| windowsrookie wrote:
| While certainly misleading, there were situations where
| the G4 was incredibly fast for the time. I remember being
| able to edit Video in iMove on a 12" G4 Laptop. At that
| time there was no equivalent x86 machine.
| jmull wrote:
| If you have to go back 20+ years for an example...
| n9 wrote:
| Worked in an engineering lab at the time of the G4
| introduction and I can contest that the G4 was a very,
| very fast CPU for scientific workloads.
|
| Confirmed here:
| https://computer.howstuffworks.com/question299.htm (and
| elsewhere.)
|
| A year later I was doing bonkers (for the time) photoshop
| work on very large compressed tiff files and my G4 laptop
| running at 400Mhz was more than 2x as fast as PIIIs on my
| bench.
|
| Was it faster all around? I don't know how to tell. Was
| Apple as honest as I am in this commentary about how it
| mattered what you were doing? No. Was it a CPU that was
| able to do some things very fast vs others? I know it
| was.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > ME Apple has always been the most honest when it makes
| performance claims.
|
| Okay, but your example was about battery life:
|
| > LIke when they said an Macbook Air would last 10+ hours
| and third-party reviewers would get 8-9+ hours. All the
| while, Dell or HP would claim 19 hours and you'd be lucky
| to get 2 eg [1]
|
| And even then, they exaggerated their claims. And your link
| doesn't say anything about HP or Dell claiming 19 hour
| battery life.
|
| Apple has definitely exaggerated their performance claims
| over and over again. The Apple silicon parts are fast and
| low power indeed, but they've made ridiculous claims like
| comparing their chips to an nVidia RTX 3090 with completely
| misleading graphs
|
| Even the Mac sites have admitted that the nVidia 3090
| comparison was completely wrong and designed to be
| misleading: https://9to5mac.com/2022/03/31/m1-ultra-gpu-
| comparison-with-...
|
| This is why you have to take everything they say with a
| huge grain of salt. Their chip may be "twice" as power
| efficient in some carefully chosen unique scenario that
| only exists in an artificial setting, but how does it fare
| in the real world? That's the question that matters, and
| you're not going to get an honest answer from Apple's
| marketing team.
| vel0city wrote:
| You're right, its not 19 hours claimed. It was more than
| even that.
|
| > HP gave the 13-inch HP Spectre x360 an absurd 22.5
| hours of estimated battery life, while our real-world
| test results showed that the laptop could last for 12
| hours and 7 minutes.
| seaal wrote:
| the absurdness was difference in claimed battery life vs
| actual battery life. 19 vs 2 is more absurd than 22.5 vs
| 12
|
| > Speaking of the ThinkPad P72, here are the top three
| laptops with the most, er, far out battery life claims of
| all our analyzed products: the Lenovo ThinkPad P72, the
| Dell Latitude 7400 2-in-1 and the Acer TravelMate P6
| P614. The three fell short of their advertised battery
| life by 821 minutes (13 hours and 41 mins), 818 minutes
| (13 hours and 38 minutes) and 746 minutes (12 hours and
| 26 minutes), respectively.
|
| Dell did manage to be one of the top 3 most absurd claims
| though.
| ribit wrote:
| M1 Ultra did benchmark close to 3090 in some synthetic
| gaming tests. The claim was not outlandish, just largely
| irrelevant for any reasonable purpose.
|
| Apple does usually explain their testing methodology and
| they don't cheat on benchmarks like some other companies.
| It's just that the results are still marketing and should
| be treated as such.
|
| Outlandish claims notwithstanding, I don't think anyone
| can deny the progress they achieved with their CPU and
| especially GPU IP. Improving performance on complex
| workloads by 30-50% in a single year is very impressive.
| moogly wrote:
| > IME Apple has always been the most honest when it makes
| performance claims.
|
| I guess you weren't around during the PowerPC days...
| Because that's a laughable statement.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| All I remember is tanks in the commercials.
|
| We need more tanks in commercials.
| oblio wrote:
| I have no idea who's down voting you. They were lying
| through their teeth about CPU performance back then.
|
| A PC half the price was smoking their top of the line
| stuff.
| seec wrote:
| That's funny you say that, because this is precisely the
| time, I started buying Macs (I got a Pismo PowerBook G3
| gifted and then bought an iBook G4). And my experience
| was that for sure, if you put as much money into a PC
| than in a Mac you would get MUCH better performance.
|
| What made it worth it at the time (I felt) was the
| software. Today I'm really don't think so, software has
| improved overall in the industry and there is not a lot
| of things "Mac specific" that makes it a clear-cut
| choice.
|
| As for the performance I can't believe all the Apple
| silicon hype. Sure, it gets good battery life given you
| use strictly Apple software (or software optimized for it
| heavily) but in mixed workload situation it's not that
| impressive.
|
| Using the M2 MacBook Pro of a friend I figured I could
| get maybe 4-5 hours out of its best case scenario which
| is better than the 2-3 hours you would get from a PC
| laptop but also not that great considering the price
| difference.
|
| And when it comes to performance it is extremely unequal
| and very lackluster for many things. Like there is more
| lag launching Activity Monitor on a 2K++ MacBook Pro than
| launching task manager on a 500 PC. This is a small
| somewhat stupid example but it does tell the overall
| story.
|
| They talk a big game but in reality, their stuff isn't
| that performant in the real world.
|
| And they still market games when one of their 2K laptops
| plays Dota 2 (a very old, relatively ressource efficient
| game) worse than a cheapo PC.
| skydhash wrote:
| > Using the M2 MacBook Pro of a friend I figured I could
| get maybe 4-5 hours out of its best case scenario which
| is better than the 2-3 hours you would get from a PC
| laptop but also not that great considering the price
| difference.
|
| Any electron apps on it?
| dylan604 wrote:
| Oh those megahertz myths! Their marketing department is
| pretty amazing at their spin control. This one was right
| up there with "it's not a bug; it's a feature" type of
| spin.
| syncsynchalt wrote:
| > IME Apple has always been the most honest when it makes
| performance claims
|
| Yes and no. They'll always be honest with the claim, but
| the scenario for the claimed improvement will always be
| chosen to make the claim as large as possible, sometimes
| with laughable results.
|
| Typically something like "watch videos for 3x longer
| <small>when viewing 4k h265 video</small>" (which means
| they adapted the previous gen's silicon which could only
| handle h264).
| moooo99 wrote:
| They are pretty honest when it comes to battery life
| claims, they're less honest when it comes to benchmark
| graphs
| underlogic wrote:
| I don't think less honest covers it and can't believe
| anything their marketing says after the 3090 claims.
| Maybe it's true, maybe not. We'll see from the reviews.
| Well assuming the reviewers weren't paid off with an
| "evaluation unit".
| bvrmn wrote:
| BTW I get 19 hours from DELL XPS and Latitude. It's Linux
| with custom DE and Vim as IDE though.
| amarka wrote:
| I get about 21 hours from mine, it's running Windows but
| powered off.
| bee_rider wrote:
| This is why Apple can be slightly more honest about their
| battery specs, they don't have the OS working against
| them. Unfortunately most DELLs XPS will be running
| Windows, so it is still misleading to provide specs based
| on what the hardware could do if not sabotaged.
| wklm wrote:
| can you share more details about your setup?
| bvrmn wrote:
| Archlinux, mitigations (spectre alike) off, X11, OpenBox,
| bmpanel with only CPU/IO indicator. Light theme
| everywhere. Opera in power save mode. `powertop --auto-
| tune` and `echo 1 | sudo tee
| /sys/devices/system/cpu/intel_pstate/no_turbo` Current
| laptop is Latitude 7390.
| ribit wrote:
| Right, so you are disabling all performance features and
| effectively turning your CPU into a low-end low-power
| SKU. Of course you'd get better battery life. It's not
| the same thing though.
| fransje26 wrote:
| I get 20 minutes from my Dell (not the XPS), with Vim.
| When it was brand-new, I got 40 minutes. A piece of hot
| garbage, with an energy-inefficient intel cpu..
| bee_rider wrote:
| Controlling the OS is probably a big help there. At least,
| I saw lots of complaints about my zenbook model's battery
| not hitting the spec. It was easy to hit or exceed it in
| Linux, but you have to tell it not to randomly spin up the
| CPU.
| izacus wrote:
| > LIke when they said an Macbook Air would last 10+ hours
| and third-party reviewers would get 8-9+ hours.
|
| For literal YEARS, Apple battery life claims were a running
| joke on how inaccurate and overinflated they were.
| nabakin wrote:
| Maybe for battery life, but definitely not when it comes to
| CPU/GPU performance. Tbf, no chip company is, but Apple is
| particularly egregious. Their charts assume best case
| multi-core performance when users rarely ever use all cores
| at once. They'd have you thinking it's the equivalent of a
| 3090 or that you get double the frames you did before when
| the reality is more like 10% gains.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Yeah, the assumption seems to be that using less battery by
| one component means that the power will just magically go
| unused. As with everything else in life, as soon as
| something stops using a resource something else fills the
| vacuum to take advantage of the resource.
| treflop wrote:
| Apple is always honest but they know how to make you
| believe something that isn't true.
| bagels wrote:
| CPU is not the only way that power is consumed in a portable
| device. It is a large fraction, but you also have displays
| and radios.
| coldtea wrote:
| Apple might use simplified and opaque plots to drive their
| point, but they all too often undersell the differences.
| Indepedent reviews for example find that they not just hit
| the mark Apple mentions for things like battery but that
| often do slightly better...
| michaelmior wrote:
| > is it REALLY half the power use of all times (so we'll get
| double the battery life)
|
| I'm not sure what you mean by "of all times" but half the
| battery usage of the processor definitely doesn't translate
| into double the battery life since the processor is not the
| only thing consuming power.
| smith7018 wrote:
| You wouldn't necessarily get twice the battery life. It could
| be less than that due to the thinner body causing more heat,
| a screen that utilizes more energy, etc
| mcv wrote:
| I don't know, but the M3 MBP I got from work already gives
| the impression of using barely any power at all. I'm really
| impressed by Apple Silicon, and I'm seriously reconsidering
| my decision from years ago to never ever buy Apple again. Why
| doesn't everybody else use chips like these?
| jacurtis wrote:
| I have an M3 for my personal laptop and an M2 for my work
| laptop. I get ~8 hours if I'm lucky on my work laptop, but
| I have attributed most of that battery loss to all the
| "protection" software they put on my work laptop that is
| always showing up under the "Apps Using Significant Power"
| category in the battery dropdown.
|
| I can have my laptop with nothing on screen, and the
| battery still points to TrendMicro and others as the cause
| of heavy battery drain while my laptop seemingly idles.
|
| I recently upgraded my personal laptop to the M3 MacBook
| pro and the difference is astonishing. I almost never use
| it plugged in because I genuinely get close to that 20 hour
| reported battery life. Last weekend I played a AAA Video
| Game through Xbox Cloud Gaming (awesome for mac gamers btw)
| and with essentially max graphics (rendered elsewhere and
| streamed to me of course), I got sucked into a game for
| like 5 hours and lost only 8% of my battery during that
| time, while playing a top tier video game! It really blew
| my mind. I also use GoLand IDE on there and have managed to
| get a full day of development done using only about 25-30%
| battery.
|
| So yeah, whatever Apple is doing, they are doing it right.
| Performance without all the spyware that your work gives
| you makes a huge difference too.
| bee_rider wrote:
| For the AAA video game example, I mean, it is interesting
| how far that kind of tech has come... but really that's
| just video streaming (maybe slightly more difficult
| because latency matters?) from the point of view of the
| laptop, right? The quality of the graphics there have
| more-or-less nothing to do with the battery.
| jhickok wrote:
| I think the market will move to using chips like this, or
| at least have additional options. The new Snapdragon SOC is
| interesting, and I would suspect we could see Google and
| Microsoft play in this space at some point soon.
| wwilim wrote:
| Isn't 15% more battery life a huge improvement on a device
| already well known for long battery life?
| can16358p wrote:
| Apple is one of the few companies that underpromise and
| overdeliver and never exaggerate.
|
| Compared to the competition, I'd trust Apple much more than
| the Windows laptop OEMs.
| mvkel wrote:
| And here it is in an OS that can't even max out an M1!
|
| That said, the function keys make me think "and it runs macOS"
| is coming, and THAT would be extremely compelling.
| a_vanderbilt wrote:
| We've seen a slow march over the last decade towards the
| unification of iOS and macOS. Maybe not a "it runs macOS",
| but an eventual "they share all the same apps" with adaptive
| UIs.
| asabla wrote:
| I think so too. Especially after the split from iOS to
| ipados. Hopefully they'll show something during this year's
| WWDC
| DrBazza wrote:
| They probably saw the debacle that was Windows 8 and
| thought merging a desktop and touch OS is a decade-long
| gradual task, if that is even the final intention.
|
| Unlike MS that went with the Big Bang in your face approach
| that was oh-so successful.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| People have complained about why Logic Pro / Final Cut
| wasn't ported to the iPad Pro line. The obvious answer is
| that making workflows done properly take time.
| a_vanderbilt wrote:
| Even with the advantage of time, I don't think Microsoft
| would have been able to do it. They can't even get their
| own UI situated, much less adaptive. Windows 10/11 is
| this odd mishmash of old and new, without a consistent
| language across it. They can't unify what isn't even
| cohesive in the first place.
| mvkel wrote:
| I'd be very surprised if Apple is paying attention to
| anything that's happening with windows. At least as a
| divining rod for how to execute.
| bluescrn wrote:
| At this point, there's two fundamentally different types
| of computing that will likely never be mergeable in a
| satisfactory way.
|
| We now have 'content consumption platforms' and 'content
| creation platforms'.
|
| While attempts have been made to try and enable some
| creation on locked-down touchscreen devices, you're never
| going to want to try and operate a fully-featured version
| of Photoshop, Maya, Visual Studio, etc on them. And if
| you've got a serious workstation with multiple large
| monitors and precision input devices, you don't want to
| have dumbed-down touch-centric apps forced upon you
| Win8-style.
|
| The bleak future that seems likely is that the 'content
| creation platforms' become ever more niche and far more
| costly. Barriers to entry for content creators are raised
| significantly as mainstream computing is mostly limited
| to locked-down content consumption platforms. And Linux
| is only an option for as long as non-locked-down hardware
| is available for sensible prices.
| eastbound wrote:
| On the other hand, a $4000 mid-game Macbook doesn't have
| a touchscreen and that's a heresy. Granted, you can get
| the one with the emoji bar, but why interact using touch
| on a bar when you could touch the screen directly?
|
| Maybe the end game for Apple isn't the full convergence,
| but just having a touch screen on the Mac.
| bluescrn wrote:
| Why would you want greasy finger marks on your Macbook
| screen?
|
| Not much point having a touchscreen on a Macbook (or any
| laptop really), unless the hardware has a 'tablet mode'
| with a detachable or fold-away keyboard.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Mouse and keyboard is still a better interface for A LOT
| of work. I have yet to find a workflow for any of my
| professional work that would be faster or easier if you
| gave me a touchscreen.
|
| There are plenty of laptops that do have touchscreens,
| and it has always felt more like a gimmick than a useful
| hardware interface.
| dialup_sounds wrote:
| Kinda weird to exclude Procreate, Affinity, Final Cut,
| Logic, etc. from your definition of content creation. The
| trend has clearly been more professional and creative
| apps year over year and ever more capable devices to run
| them on. I mean, you're right that nobody wants to use
| Photoshop on the iPad, but that's because there are
| better options.
|
| Honestly, the biggest barrier to creativity is thinking
| you need a specific concept of a "serious workstation" to
| do it. Plenty of people are using $2k+ desktops just to
| play video games.
| bluescrn wrote:
| In these cases, it still seems that tablet-based tools
| are very much 'secondary tools', more of a sketchpad to
| fiddle with ideas while on the move, rather than
| 'production tools'.
|
| Then there's the whole dealing with lots of files and
| version control side of things, essential for working as
| part of a team. Think about creating (and previewing, and
| finally uploading) a very simple web page, just HTML and
| a couple of images, entirely on an iPad. While it's
| probably quite possible these days, I suspect the
| workflow would be abysmal compared to a 'proper computer'
| where the file system isn't hidden from you and where
| you're not constantly switching between full-screen apps.
|
| And that's before you start dealing with anything with
| significant numbers of files in deep directory
| structures, or doing more technical image creation (e.g.
| dealing with alpha channels). And of course, before
| testing your webpage on all the major browsers. Hmm...
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| > Barriers to entry for content creators are raised
| significantly as mainstream computing is mostly limited
| to locked-down content consumption platforms. And Linux
| is only an option for as long as non-locked-down hardware
| is available for sensible prices.
|
| Respectfully, I disagree partially. It has never been
| easier or more affordable to get into creating content.
| You can create cinema grade video with used cameras that
| sell for a few hundred dollars. You can create pixar
| level animation on open source software, and a pretty
| cheap computer. A computer that can edit a 4k video costs
| less than the latest iPhone. There are people that create
| plenty of content with just a phone. Simply put it is
| orders of magnitude cheaper and easier to create content
| than it was less than two decades ago, which is why we
| are seeing so much content getting made. I used to work
| for a newspaper and it used to be a lot harder and more
| expensive to produce audio visual media.
|
| My strong feeling is that the problem of content being
| locked into platforms has precious little to do with
| consumption oriented hardware, and more to do with the
| platforms. Embrace -> extinguish -> exlcusivity ->
| enshittify seems to be the model behind basically
| anything that hosts user content these days.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| You're right about the reason but wrong about the
| timeline: Jobs saw Windows XP Tablet Edition and built a
| skunkworks at Apple to engineer a tablet that did not
| require a stylus. This was purely to spite a friend[0] of
| his that worked at Microsoft and was very bullish on XP
| tablets.
|
| Apple then later took the tablet demo technology, wrapped
| it up in a _very_ stripped-down OS X with a different
| window server and UI library, and called it iPhone OS.
| Apple was very clear from the beginning that Fingers Can
| 't Use Mouse Software, Damn It, and that the whole ocean
| needed to be boiled to support the new user interface
| paradigm[1]. They even have very specific UI rules
| _specifically_ to ensure a finger never meets a desktop
| UI widget, including things like iPad Sidecar just not
| forwarding touch events at all and only supporting
| connected keyboards, mice, and the Apple Pencil.
|
| Microsoft's philosophy has always been the complete
| opposite. Windows XP through 7 had tablet support that
| amounted to just some affordances for stylus users
| layered on top of a mouse-only UI. Windows 8 was the
| first time they took tablets seriously, but instead of
| just shipping a separate tablet OS or making Windows
| Phone bigger, they turned it into a parasite that ate the
| Windows desktop from the inside-out.
|
| This causes awkwardness. For example, window management.
| Desktops have traditionally been implemented as a shared
| data structure - a tree of controls - that every app on
| the desktop can manipulate. Tablets don't support this:
| your app gets one[2] display surface to present their
| whole UI inside of[3], and that surface is typically
| either full-screen or half-screen. Microsoft solved this
| incongruity by shoving the entire Desktop inside of
| another app that could be properly split-screened against
| the new, better-behaved tablet apps.
|
| If Apple _were_ to decide "ok let's support Mac apps on
| iPad", it'd have to be done in exactly the same way
| Windows 8 did it, with a special Desktop app that
| contained all the Mac apps in a penalty box. This is so
| that they didn't have to add support for all sorts of
| incongruous, touch-hostile UI like floating toolbars,
| floating pop-ups, global menus, five different ways of
| dragging-and-dropping tabs, and that weird drawer thing
| you're not supposed to use anymore, to iPadOS. There
| really isn't a way to gradually do this, either. You can
| gradually add _feature parity_ with macOS (which they
| should), but you can 't gradually find ways to make
| desktop UI designed by third-parties work on a tablet.
| You either put it in a penalty box, or you put all the
| well-behaved tablet apps in their own penalty boxes, like
| Windows 10.
|
| Microsoft solved Windows 8's problems by going back to
| the Windows XP/Vista/7 approach of just shipping a
| desktop for fingers. Tablet Mode tries to hide this, but
| it's fundamentally just window management automation, and
| it has to handle all the craziness of desktop. If a
| desktop app decides it wants a floating toolbar or a
| window that can't be resized[4], Tablet Mode has to honor
| that request. In fact, Tablet Mode needs a lot of
| heuristics to tell what floating windows pair with which
| apps. So it's a lot more awkward for tablet users in
| exchange for desktop users having a usable desktop again.
|
| [0] Given what I've heard about Jobs I don't think Jobs
| was psychologically capable of having friends, but I'll
| use the word out of convenience.
|
| [1] Though the Safari team was way better at building
| compatibility with existing websites, so much so that
| this is the one platform that doesn't have a deep
| mobile/desktop split.
|
| [2] This was later extended to multiple windows per app,
| of course.
|
| [3] This is also why popovers and context menus _never_
| extend outside their containing window on tablets. Hell,
| also on websites. Even when you have multiwindow, there
| 's no API surface for "I want to have a control floating
| on top of my window that is positioned over here and has
| this width and height".
|
| [4] Which, BTW, is why the iPad has no default calculator
| app. Before Stage Manager there was no way to have a
| window the size of a pocket calculator.
| pram wrote:
| Clip Studio is one Mac app port I've seen that was
| literally the desktop version moved to the iPad. It
| uniquely has the top menu bar and everything. They might
| have made an exception because you're intended to use the
| pencil and not your fingers.
| Bluecobra wrote:
| Honestly, using a stylus isn't that bad. I've had to
| support floor traders for many years and they all still
| use a Windows-based tablet + a stylus to get around.
| Heck, even Palm devices were a pleasure to use. Not sure
| why Steve was so hell bent against them, it probably had
| to do with his beef with Sculley/Newton.
| skohan wrote:
| Unfortunately I think "they share all the same apps" will
| not include a terminal with root access, which is what
| would really be needed to make iPad a general purpose
| computer for development
|
| It's a shame, because it's definitely powerful enough, and
| the idea of traveling with just an iPad seems super
| interesting, but I imagine they will not extend those
| features to any devices besides macs
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| I mean, it doesn't even have to be true "root" access.
| Chromebooks have a containerized linux environment, and
| aside from the odd bug, the high end ones are actually
| great dev machines while retaining the "You spend most of
| your time in the browser so we may as well bake that into
| the OS" base layer.
| a_vanderbilt wrote:
| I actually do use a Chromebook in this way! Out of all
| the Linux machines I've used, that's why I like it. Give
| me a space to work and provide an OS that I don't have to
| babysit or mentally maintain.
| presides wrote:
| Been a while since I've used a chromebook but iirc
| there's ALSO root access that's just a bit more difficult
| to access, and you do actually need to access it from
| time to time for various reasons, or at least you used
| to.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| You're thinking of Crouton, the old method of using linux
| on a Chromebook (which involved disabling boot protection
| and setting up a second linux install in a chroot, with a
| keybind that allowed you to toggle between the two
| environments). It was including a
|
| Crostini is the new containerized version that is both
| officially supported and integrated into ChromeOS
| 0x457 wrote:
| I will settle for: you can connect 2 monitors to iPad and
| select audio device sound is going through. If can run
| IntelliJ and compile rust on the iPad, I would promise to
| upgrade to the new iPad Pro as soon as it is released every
| time.
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| Agreed, this will be the way forward in the future. I've
| already seen one of my apps (Authy) say "We're no longer
| building a macOS version, just install the iPad app on your
| mac".
|
| That's great, but you need an M series chip in your mac for
| that to work so backwords compatibility only goes back a
| few years at this point, which is fine for corporate
| upgrade cycles but might be a bit short for consumers at
| this time. But it will be fine in the future.
| beeboobaa3 wrote:
| Until an "iPhone" can run brew, all my developer tools,
| steam, epic games launcher, etc it's hardly interesting.
| plussed_reader wrote:
| The writing was on the wall with the introduction of Swift,
| IMO. Since then it's been over complicating the iPad and
| dumbing down the macOS interfaces to attain this goal. So
| much wasted touch/negative space in macOS since Catalina to
| compensate for fingers and adapative interfaces; so many
| hidden menus and long taps squirreled away in iOS.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Maybe not a "it runs macOS", but an eventual "they share
| all the same apps" with adaptive UIs_
|
| M-class MacBooks can already run many iPhone and iPad apps.
| criddell wrote:
| > And here it is in an OS that can't even max out an M1
|
| Do you really want your OS using 100% of CPU?
| bitwize wrote:
| Ultimately, does it matter?
|
| Michelin-starred restaurants not only have top-tier chefs. They
| have buyers who negotiate with food suppliers to get the best
| ingredients they can at the lowest prices they can. Having a
| preferential relationship with a good supplier is as important
| to the food quality and the health of the business as having a
| good chef to prepare the dishes.
|
| Apple has top-tier engineering talent but they are also able to
| negotiate preferential relationships with their suppliers, and
| it's both those things that make Apple a phenomenal tech
| company.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Qualcomm is also with TSMC and their newer 4nm processor is
| expected to stay competitive with the M series.
|
| If the magic comes mostly from TSMC, there's a good chance
| for these claims to be true and to have a series of better
| chips coming on the other platforms as well.
| hot_gril wrote:
| This info is much more useful than a comparison to
| restaurants.
| 0x457 wrote:
| Does Qualcomm have any new CPU cores besides that one they
| can't make ARM due to licensing?
| transpute wrote:
| The one being announced on May 20th at Computex?
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40288969
| stouset wrote:
| "Stay" competitive implies they've _been_ competitive.
| Which they haven't.
|
| I'm filing this into the bin with all the other "This next
| Qualcomm chip will close the performance gap" claims made
| over the past decade. Maybe this time it'll be true. I
| wouldn't bet on it.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| They don't mention which metric is 50% higher.
|
| However, we have more CPU cores, a newer core design, and a
| newer process node which would all contribute to improving
| multicore CPU performance.
|
| Also, Apple is conservative on clock speeds, but those do tend
| to get bumped up when there is a new process node as well.
| philistine wrote:
| Actually, TSMC's N3E process is somewhat of a regression on the
| first-generation 3nm process, N3. However, it is simpler and
| more cost-efficient, and everyone seems to want to get out of
| that N3 process as quickly as possible. That seems to be the
| biggest reason Apple released the A17(M3) generation and now
| the M4 the way they did.
|
| The N3 process is in the A17 Pro, the M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max.
| The A17 Pro name seems to imply you won't find it trickle down
| on the regular iPhones next year. So we'll see that processor
| only this year in phones, since Apple discontinues their Pro
| range of phones every year; only the regular phones trickle
| downrange lowering their prices. The M3 devices are all Macs
| that needed an upgrade due to their popularity: the Macbook Pro
| and Macbook Air. They made three chips for them, but they did
| not make an M3 Ultra for the lower volume desktops. With the
| announcement of an M4 chip in iPads today, we can expect to see
| the Macbook Air and Macbook Pro upgraded to M4 soon, with the
| introduction of an M4 Ultra to match later. We can now expect
| those M3 devices to be discontinued instead of going downrange
| in price.
|
| That would leave one device with an N3 process chip: the iMac.
| At its sale level, I wouldn't be surprised if all the M3 chips
| that will go into it will be made this year, with the model
| staying around for a year or two running on fumes.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| The signs certainly all point to the initial version of N3
| having issues.
|
| For instance, Apple supposedly required a deal where they
| only paid TSMC for usable chips per N3 wafer, and not for the
| entire wafer.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/report-apple-is-
| savi...
| dehrmann wrote:
| My read on the absurd number of Macbook M3 SKUs was that
| they had yield issues.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| There is also the fact that we currently have an iPhone
| generation where only the Pro models got updated to chips
| on TSMC 3nm.
|
| The next iPhone generation is said to be a return to form
| with all models using the same SOC on the revised version
| of the 3nm node.
|
| > Code from the operating system also indicates that the
| entire iPhone 16 range will use a new system-on-chip -
| t8140 - Tahiti, which is what Apple calls the A18 chip
| internally. The A18 chip is referenced in relation to the
| base model iPhone 16 and 16 Plus (known collectively as
| D4y within Apple) as well as the iPhone 16 Pro and 16 Pro
| Max (referred to as D9x internally)
|
| https://www.macrumors.com/2023/12/20/ios-18-code-four-
| new-ip...
| dhx wrote:
| N3E still has a +9% logic transistor density increase on N3
| despite a relaxation to design rules, for reasons such as
| introduction of FinFlex.[1] Critically though, SRAM cell
| sizes remain the same as N5 (reversing the ~5% reduction in
| N3), and it looks like the situation with SRAM cell sizes
| won't be improving soon.[2][3] It appears more likely that
| designers particularly for AI chips will just stick with N5
| as their designs are increasingly constrained by SRAM.
|
| [1] https://semiwiki.com/semiconductor-
| manufacturers/tsmc/322688...
|
| [2] https://semiengineering.com/sram-scaling-issues-and-what-
| com...
|
| [3] https://semiengineering.com/sram-in-ai-the-future-of-
| memory/
| sroussey wrote:
| SRAM has really stalled. I don't think 5nm was much better
| than 7nm. On ever smaller nodes, sram will be taking up a
| larger and larger percent of the entire chip. But the cost
| is much higher on the smaller nodes even if the performance
| is not better.
|
| I can see why AMD started putting the SRAM on top.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| It wasn't immediately clear to me why SRAM wouldn't scale
| like logic. This[1] article and this[2] paper sheds some
| light.
|
| From what I can gather the key aspects are that decreased
| feature sizes lead to more variability between
| transistors, but also to less margin between on-state and
| off-state. Thus a kind of double-whammy. In logic
| circuits you're constantly overwriting with new values
| regardless of what was already there, so they're not as
| sensitive to this, while the entire point of a memory
| circuit is to reliably keep values around.
|
| Alternate transistor designs such as FinFET, Gate-all-
| around and such can provide mitigation of some of this,
| say by reducing transistor-to-transistor variability by a
| factor, but can't get around root issue.
|
| [1]: https://semiengineering.com/sram-scaling-issues-and-
| what-com...
|
| [2]:
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9416021/
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Also the thousands of suppliers that have improved their
| equipment and supplies that feed into the tsmc fabs.
| tuckerpo wrote:
| It is almost certainly half as much power in the RMS sense, not
| absolute.
| smrtinsert wrote:
| Breathtaking
| beeboobaa3 wrote:
| > And compared with the latest PC chip in a thin and light
| laptop, M4 can deliver the same performance using just a fourth
| of the power
|
| It can deliver the same performance as itself at just a fourth
| of the power than it's using? That's incredible!
| nblgbg wrote:
| That doesn't seem to reflect in the battery life of these. They
| have the same exact battery life. Does it mean it's not
| entirely accurate? Since they don't indicate the battery
| capacity in their specs, it's hard to confirm this.
| thih9 wrote:
| They mention just M2 and M4 - curious, how does M3 fit into
| that?
|
| I.e. would it sit between, or closer to M2 or M4?
| mlhpdx wrote:
| I'm far from an expert in Apple silicon, but this strikes me as
| having some conservative improvements. And in-depth info out
| there yet?
| Lalabadie wrote:
| 2x the performance per watt is a great improvement, though.
| refulgentis wrote:
| Clever wording on their part: 2x performance per watt over
| M2. Took me a minute, had to reason through this is their 2nd
| generation 3nm chip, so it wasn't from a die shrink, then go
| spelunking.
| jeffbee wrote:
| This claim can only be evaluated in the context of a specific
| operating point. I can 6x the performance per watt of the CPU
| in this machine I am using by running everything on the
| efficiency cores and clocking them down to 1100MHz. But
| performance per watt is not the only metric of interest.
| gmm1990 wrote:
| It surprised me they called it an M4 vs an M3 something. The
| display engine seems to be the largest change I don't know what
| that looked like on previous processors. Completely
| hypothesizing but could be a significant efficiency improvement
| if its offloading display stuff.
| aeonik wrote:
| 3 isn't a power of two, maybe the M8 is next.
| duxup wrote:
| I'd rather they just keep counting up than some companies
| where they get into wonky product line naming convention
| hell.
|
| It's ok if 3 to 4 is or isn't a big jump, it's the next one
| is really all I want to know. If I need to peek at the specs,
| the name really won't tell me anything anyhow and I'll be on
| a webpage.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| I expect the pro/max variants will be more interesting. The
| improvements do look great for consumer devices, though.
| Findecanor wrote:
| I'm guessing that the "ML accelerator" in the CPU cores means
| one of ARM's SME extensions for matrix multiplication. SME in
| ARM v8.4-A adds dot product instructions. v8.6-A adds more,
| including BF16 support.
|
| https://community.arm.com/arm-community-blogs/b/architecture...
| hmottestad wrote:
| Apple has the NPU (also called Apple Neural Engine), which is
| specific hardware for running inference. Can't be used for
| LLMs though at the moment, maybe the M4 will be different.
| They also have a vector processor attached to the performance
| cluster of the CPU, they call the instruction set for it AMX.
| I believe that that one can be leveraged for faster LLM
| inferencing.
|
| https://github.com/corsix/amx
| EduardoBautista wrote:
| The 256gb and 512gb models have 8gb of ram. The 1tb and 2tb
| models have 16gb. Not a fan of tying ram to storage.
|
| https://www.apple.com/ipad-pro/specs/
| praseodym wrote:
| And also one less CPU performance core for the lower storage
| models.
| 05 wrote:
| Well, they have to sell the dies with failed cores somehow..
| Laaas wrote:
| The economic reasoning behind this doesn't make sense to me.
|
| What do they lose by allowing slightly more freedom in
| configurations?
| fallat wrote:
| The reasoning is money. Come on.
| blegr wrote:
| It forces you to buy multiple upgrades instead of just the
| one you need.
| jessriedel wrote:
| But why does this make them more money than offering
| separate upgrades at higher prices?
|
| I do think there is a price discrimination story here, but
| there are some details to be filled in.
| foldr wrote:
| It's not obvious to me that Apple does make a significant
| amount of money by selling upgrades. Almost everyone buys
| the base model. The other models are probably little more
| than a logistical pain in the butt from Apple's
| perspective. Apple has to offer more powerful systems to
| be credible as a platform, but I wouldn't be surprised if
| the apparently exorbitant price of the upgrades reflects
| the overall costs associated with complicating the
| production and distribution lines.
| jessriedel wrote:
| I think it's a price discrimination technique.
| a_vanderbilt wrote:
| Margins and profit. Less variations in production makes for
| higher efficiency. Segmenting the product line can push
| consumers to purchase higher tiers of product. It's iOS
| anyways, and the people who know enough to care how much RAM
| they are getting are self-selecting for those higher product
| tiers.
| vinkelhake wrote:
| It's just Apple's price ladder. The prices on their different
| SKUs are laid out carefully so that there's never a too big
| of a jump to the next level.
|
| https://talkbackcomms.com/blogs/news/ladder
| naravara wrote:
| Logistical efficiencies mostly. It ends up being a lot of
| additional SKUs to manage, and it would probably discourage
| people from moving up a price tier if they would have
| otherwise. So from Apple's perspective they're undergoing
| more hassle (which costs) for the benefit of selling you
| lower margin products. No upside for them besides maybe
| higher customer satisfaction, but I doubt it would have moved
| the needle on that very much.
| izacus wrote:
| They push you to buy the more expensive model with higher
| margins.
|
| This is what they did when I was buying iPad Air - it starts
| with actually problematically low 64GB of Storage... and the
| 256GB model is the next one with massive price jump.
|
| It's the same kind of "anchoring" (marketing term) that car
| dealers use to lure you into deciding for their car based on
| the cheapest 29.999$ model which with "useful" equipment will
| end you costing like 45.000$
| aeyes wrote:
| Honest question: What data do you store on an iPad Air? On
| a phone you might have some photos and videos but isn't a
| tablet just a media consumption device? Especially on iOS
| where they try to hide the filesystem as much as possible.
| izacus wrote:
| No data, but iOS apps have gotten massive, caches have
| gotten massive and install a game or two and 64GB is
| gone.
|
| Not to mention that occasionally is nice to have a set of
| downloaded media available for vacation/travel and 64GB
| isn't enough to download week worth of content from
| Netflix.
|
| This is why this is so annoying - you're right, I don't
| need 512GB or 256GB. But I'd still like to have more than
| "You're out of space!!" amount.
| trogdor wrote:
| Where is 64GB coming from?
| izacus wrote:
| The base iPad Air model - the one the price is most
| quoted - is 64GB.
| trogdor wrote:
| No it's not.
|
| https://www.apple.com/ipad-air/specs/
| nozzlegear wrote:
| I've had the original iPad Pro with 64gb since it first
| released and have somehow never run out of storage. Maybe
| my problem is that I don't download games. I'd suggest
| using a USB drive for downloaded media though if you're
| planning to travel. All of the media apps I use (Netflix,
| YouTube, Crunchyroll, etc.) support them. That's worked
| well for me and is one reason I was comfortable buying
| the 64gb model.
| sroussey wrote:
| How do you get Netflix to use an external drive?
| nozzlegear wrote:
| Sorry, I thought I had done this with Netflix but I tried
| it just now and couldn't find the option. Then I googled
| it and it looks like it was never supported, I must've
| misremembered Netflix being an option.
| imtringued wrote:
| As he said, you buy excess storage so that you don't have
| to think about how much storage you are using. Meanwhile
| if you barely have enough, you're going to have to play
| data tetris. You can find 256GB SSDs that sell for as low
| as 20EUR. How much money is it worth to not worry about
| running out of data? Probably more than the cost of the
| SSD at these prices.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Email, password manager, iOS keychain, photos, videos,
| etc should all be there if synced to iCloud.
| maxsilver wrote:
| > What data do you store on an iPad Air?
|
| Games. You can put maybe three or four significant games
| on an iPad Air before it maxes out. (MTG Arena is almost
| 20GB all on it's own, Genshin Impact is like 40+ GB)
| jdminhbg wrote:
| > isn't a tablet just a media consumption device?
|
| This is actually most of the storage space -- videos
| downloaded for consumption in places with no or bad
| internet.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Surely it supports USB OTG? Or is that just an Android
| thing[1]?
|
| [1]: https://liliputing.com/you-can-use-a-floppy-disk-
| drive-with-...
| izacus wrote:
| Even on Android you can't download streaming media to OTG
| USB storage.
| adamomada wrote:
| Once again, pirates win, paying customers lose
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Yes. However, applications have to be specifically
| written to use external storage, which requires popping
| open the same file picker you use to interact with non-
| Apple cloud storage. If they store data in their own
| container, then that can only ever go on the internal
| storage, iCloud, or device backups. You aren't allowed to
| rugpull an app and move its storage somewhere else.
|
| I mean, what would happen if you yanked out the drive
| while an app was running on it?
| wincy wrote:
| We use PLEX for long trips in the car for the kids. Like
| 24 hour drives. We drive to Florida in the winter and the
| iPads easily run out of space after we've downloaded a
| season or two of Adventure Time and Daniel Tiger.
|
| I could fit more if I didn't insist on downloading
| everything 1080p I guess.
| skydhash wrote:
| VLC or Infuse + external storage.
| lozenge wrote:
| iPad OS is 17 GB and every app seems to think it'll be
| the only one installed.
| gehsty wrote:
| Fewer iPad SKUs = more efficient manufacturing and logistics,
| at iPad scale probably means a very real cost saving.
| michaelt wrote:
| Because before you know it you're Dell and you're stocking 18
| different variants of "Laptop, 15 inch screen, 16GB RAM,
| 512GB SSD" and users are scratching their heads trying to
| figure out WTF the difference is between a "Latitude 3540" a
| "Latitude 5540" and a "New Latitude 3550"
| gruez wrote:
| I can't tell whether this is serious or not. Surely adding
| independently configurable memory/storage combinations
| won't confuse the user, any more than having configurable
| storage options don't make the user confused about what
| iphone to get?
| its_ethan wrote:
| Configuring your iPhone storage is something every
| consumer has a concept of, it's some function of "how
| many pictures can I store on it"? When it comes to
| CPU/GPU/RAM and you're having to configure all three, the
| average person is absolutely more likely to be confused.
|
| It's anecdotal, but 8/10 people that I know over the age
| of 40 would have no idea what RAM or CPU configurations
| even theoretically do for them. This is probably the case
| for _most_ iPad purchasers, and Apple knows this - so why
| would they provide expensive /confusing configurability
| options just for the handful of tech-y people who may
| care? There are still high/med/low performant variations
| that those people can choose from, any the number of
| people for whom that would sour them away from a sale is
| vanishingly small, and they would be likely to not even
| be looking at Apple in the first place
| skeaker wrote:
| Yes, the additional $600 they make off of users who just
| want extra RAM is just an unfortunate side effect of the
| unavoidable process of not being Dell. Couldn't be any
| other reason.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Apple already fixed this with the Mac: they stock a handful
| of configurations most likely to sell, and then everything
| else is a custom order shipped direct from China. The
| reason why Apple has to sell specific RAM/storage pairs for
| iPads is that they don't have a custom order program for
| their other devices, so everything _has_ to be an SKU,
| _and_ has to sell in enough quantity to justify being an
| SKU.
| abtinf wrote:
| The GP comment can be misleading because it suggests Apple is
| tying storage to ram. That is not the case (at least not
| directly).
|
| The RAM and system-on-chip are tied together as part of the
| system-on-package. The SoP is what enables M chips to hit
| their incredible memory bandwidth numbers.
|
| This is not an easy thing to allow configuration. They can't
| just plug a different memory chip as a final assembly step
| before shipping.
|
| They only have two SoPs as part of this launch: 9-core CPU
| with 8gb, and 10-core CPU with 16gb. The RAM is unified for
| cpu/gpu (and I would assume neural engine too).
|
| Each new SoP is going to reduce economies of scale and
| increase supply chain complexity. The 256/512gb models are
| tied to the first package, the 1/2tb models are tied to the
| second. Again, these are all part of the PCB, so production
| decisions have to be made way ahead of consumer orders.
|
| Maybe it's not perfect for each individual's needs, but it
| seems reasonable to assume that those with greater storage
| needs also would benefit from more compute and RAM. That is,
| you need more storage to handle more video production so you
| are probably more likely to use more advanced features which
| make better use of increased compute and RAM.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > What do they lose by allowing slightly more freedom in
| configurations?
|
| More costs everywhere in the chain; limiting SKUs is a big
| efficiency from manufacturing to distribution to retail to
| support, and it is an easy way (for the same reason) to
| improve the customer experience, because it makes it a lot
| easier to not be out of or have delays for a customer's
| preferred model, as well as making the UI (online) or
| physical presentation (brick and mortar) for options much
| cleaner.
|
| Of course, it can feel worse if you you are a power user with
| detailed knowledge of your particular needs in multiple
| dimensions and you feel like you are paying extra for
| features you don't want, but the efficiencies may make that
| feeling an illusion -- with more freedom, you would being
| paying for the additional costs that created, so a higher
| cost for the same options and possibly just as much or more
| for the particular combination option you would prefer with
| multidimensional freedom as for the one with extra features
| without it. Though that counterfactual is impossible to test.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Several things:
|
| 1. Having more SKUs is expensive, for everything from
| planning to inventory management to making sure you have
| enough shelf space at Best Buy (which you have to negotiate
| for). Chances are good that stores like Best Buy and Costco
| would only want 2 SKUs anyway, so the additional configs
| would be a special-order item for a small number of
| consumers.
|
| 2. After a certain point, adding more options actually
| _decreases_ your sales. This is confusing to people who think
| they 'd be more likely to buy if they could get exactly what
| they wanted, but what you're not seeing is the legions of
| casual consumers who are thinking about maybe getting an
| iPad, but would get overwhelmed by the number of options.
| They might spend days or weeks asking friends which model to
| get, debating about whether to spend extra on this upgrade or
| that, and eventually not buying it or getting an alternative.
| If you simplify the lineup to the "cheap one" and the "high
| end one" then people abandon most of that overhead and just
| decide what they want to pay.
|
| The biggest thing tech people miss is that they're not the
| core consumers of these devices. The majority go to casual
| consumers who don't care about specifying every little thing.
| They just want to get the one that fits their budget and move
| on. Tech people are secondary.
| samatman wrote:
| It's fairly absurd that they're still selling a 256gb "Pro"
| machine in the first place.
|
| That said, Apple's policy toward SKUs is pretty consistent: you
| pay more money and you get more machine, and vice versa. The
| MacBooks are the only product which has separately configurable
| memory / storage / chip, and even there some combinations
| aren't manufactured.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> It's fairly absurd that they're still selling a 256gb
| "Pro" machine in the first place.
|
| My guess is they want you to use their cloud storage and pay
| monthly for it.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| That doesn't make any sense.
|
| I'm not storing my Docker containers and `node_modules` in
| the cloud.
|
| Pro isn't just images and videos.
| davedx wrote:
| This is a tablet not a laptop
| skydhash wrote:
| Or use an external storage. I'd be wary of using my iPad as
| primary storage anyway. It's only work in progress and
| currently watching/reading media.
| samatman wrote:
| If that were the goal (I don't think it is), they'd be
| better off shipping enough storage to push people into the
| 2TB tier, which is $11 vs. $3 a month for 200GB.
|
| I said this in a sibling comment already, but I think it's
| just price anchoring so that people find the $1500 they're
| actually going to pay a bit easier to swallow.
| dijit wrote:
| Real creative pros will likely be using a 10G Thunderbolt NIC
| to a SAN; local video editing is not advised unless it's only
| a single project at a time.
|
| Unless you are a solo editor.
| azinman2 wrote:
| I have a 256G iPhone. I think I'm using like 160G. Most stuff
| is just in the cloud. For an iPad it wouldn't be any
| different, modulo media cached for flights. I could see some
| cases like people working on audio to want a bunch stored
| locally, but it's probably in some kind of compressed format
| such that it wouldn't matter too much.
|
| What is your concern?
| samatman wrote:
| I don't know about 'concern' necessarily, but it seems to
| me that 512GB for the base Pro model is a more realistic
| minimum. There are plenty of use cases where that amount of
| storage is overkill, but they're all served better by the
| Air, which come in the same sizes and as little as 128GB
| storage.
|
| I would expect most actual users of the Pro model, now that
| 13 inch is available at the lower tier, would be working
| with photos and video. Even shooting ProRes off a pro
| iPhone is going to eat into 256 pretty fast.
|
| Seems like that model exists mainly so they can charge
| $1500 for the one people are actually likely to get, and
| still say "starts at $1299".
|
| Then again, it's Apple, and they can get away with it, so
| they do. My main point here is that the 256GB model is bad
| value compared to the equivalent Air model, because if you
| have any work where the extra beef is going to matter, it's
| going to eat right through that amount of storage pretty
| quick.
| its_ethan wrote:
| I think you're underestimating the number of people who
| go in to buy an iPad and gravitate to the Pro because it
| looks the coolest and sounds like a luxury thing. For
| those people, who are likely just going to use it for web
| browsing and streaming videos, the cheapest configuration
| is the only one they care about.
|
| That type of buyer is a very significant % of sales for
| iPad pros. Despite the marketing, there are really not
| that many people (as a % of sales) that will be pushing
| these iPad's anywhere even remotely close to their
| computational/storage/spec limits.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Honestly though, that's basically every tablet you cant change
| the ram, you get what you get and thats it. Maybe they should
| call them by different names like Pro Max for the ones with
| 16GB in order to make it more palatable? Small psychological
| hack.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| The Samsung tablets at least still retain the SD card slot,
| so you can focus more on the desired amount of RAM and not
| worry too much about the built-in storage size.
| Teever wrote:
| It would be cool if regulators mandated that companies like
| Apple are obligated to provide models of devices with SD
| card slots and a seamless way to integrate this storage
| into the OS/applications.
|
| That combined with replaceable batteries would go a long
| way to reduce the amount of ewaste.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| And then people would stick alphabet-soup SD cards into
| their devices and complain about performance and data
| integrity, it's enough of a headache in the Android world
| already (or has been before Samsung and others finally
| decided to put in enough storage for people to not rely
| on SD cards any more).
|
| In contrast, Apple's internal storage to my knowledge
| always is very durable NVMe, attached logically and
| physically directly to the CPU, which makes their
| shenanigans with low RAM size possible in the first place
| - they swap like hell but as a user you barely notice it
| because it's so blazing fast.
| Teever wrote:
| Yeah jackasses are always gonna jackass. There's still a
| public interest in making devices upgradable for the
| purpose of minimizing e-waste.
|
| I'd just love to buy a device with a moderate amount of
| unupgreadable SSD and an SD slot so that I can put a more
| memory in it later so the device can last longer.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Agreed but please with something other than microSD
| cards. Yes, microSD Express is a thing, but both cards
| and hosts supporting it are rare, the size format doesn't
| exactly lend itself to durable flash chips, thermals are
| questionable, and even the most modern microSD Express
| cards barely hit 800 MB/sec speed, whereas Apple's stuff
| has hit twice or more that for years [2].
|
| [1] https://winfuture.de/news,141439.html
|
| [2] https://9to5mac.com/2024/03/09/macbook-
| air-m3-storage-speeds...
| davedx wrote:
| Not everything has to be solved by regulators. The walled
| garden is way more important to fix than arbitrary
| hardware configurations
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Doesn't iPad come with an USB-C port nowadays? You can
| attach an external SD card reader.
| amlib wrote:
| Just like I don't want an umbilical cord hanging out of
| me just to perform the full extent of my bodily
| functions, I also wouldn't want a dongle hanging off my
| tablet for it to be deemed usable.
| paulpan wrote:
| I don't think it's strictly for price gouging/segmentation
| purposes.
|
| On the Macbooks (running MacOS), RAM has been used as data
| cache to speed up data read/write performance until the actual
| SSD storage operation completes. It makes sense for Apple to
| account for with higher RAM spec for the 1TB/2TB
| configurations.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| > RAM has been used as data cache to speed up data read/write
| performance until the actual SSD storage operation completes.
|
| I'm pretty sure that's what all modern operating systems are
| doing.
| eddieroger wrote:
| Probably, but since we're talking about an Apple product,
| comparing it to macOS make sense, since they all share the
| same bottom layer.
| 0x457 wrote:
| Not, probably, that just how any "modern" OS works. It
| also uses RAM as a cache to avoid reads from storage,
| just like any other modern OS.
|
| Apple uses it for segmentation and nothing else.
|
| Modern being - since the 80s.
| wheybags wrote:
| I'm writing this from memory, so some details may be wrong
| but: most high end ssds have dram caches on board, with a
| capacitor that maintains enough charge to flush the cache
| to flash in case of power failure. This operates below the
| system page cache that is standard for all disks and oses.
|
| Apple doesn't do this, and use their tight integration to
| perform a similar function using system memory. So there is
| some technical justification, I think. They are 100% price
| gougers though.
| beambot wrote:
| One company's "Price Gouging" is another's "Market
| Segmentation"
| gaudystead wrote:
| > writing this from memory
|
| Gave me a chuckle ;)
| kllrnohj wrote:
| Using host memory for SSD caches is part of the NVMe
| spec, it's not some Apple-magic-integration thing:
| https://www.servethehome.com/what-are-host-memory-buffer-
| or-...
|
| It's also still typically just worse than an actual dram
| cache.
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| That is called a buffer/page cache and has existed in
| operating systems since the 1980s.
| riazrizvi wrote:
| No this is caching with SSDs, it's not the same league.
| btown wrote:
| With hardware where power-off is only controlled by
| software, battery life is predictable, and large amounts of
| data like raw video are being persisted, they might have a
| very aggressive version of page caching, and a large amount
| of storage may imply that a scale-up of RAM would be
| necessary to keep all the data juggling on a happy path.
| That said, there's no non-business reasons why they
| couldn't extend that large RAM to smaller storage systems
| as well.
| astrange wrote:
| It's unified memory which means the SSD controller is also
| using the system memory. So more flash needs more memory.
| spixy wrote:
| Then give me more memory. 512gb storage with 16gb ram
| gruez wrote:
| How does that justify locking the 16GB option to 1TB/2TB
| options?
| 0x457 wrote:
| Since memory is on their SoC it makes it challenging to
| maintain multiple SKUs. This segmentation makes to me as a
| consumer.
| lozenge wrote:
| The write speed needs to match what the camera can output or
| the WiFi/cellular can download. It has nothing to do with the
| total size of the storage.
| bschne wrote:
| Shouldn't the required cache size be dependent on throughput
| more so than disk size? It does not necessarily seem like
| you'd need a bigger write cache if the disk is bigger, people
| who have a 2TB drive don't read/write 2x as much in a given
| time as those with a 1TB drive. Or am I missing something?
| hosteur wrote:
| > I don't think it's strictly for price gouging/segmentation
| purposes.
|
| I think it is strictly for that purpose.
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| Do people not understand that Apple's 'price gouging' is
| about UX? A person who has the money to buy a 1TB iPad is
| worth more than average customer. A 16GB RAM doubtlessly
| results in a faster UX and that person is more likely to
| continue purchasing.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| If these things will ever get MacOS support it will be useless
| with 8 GB of Ram.
|
| Such a waste of nice components.
| greggsy wrote:
| This comes up frequently. 8GB is sufficient for most casual
| and light productivity use cases. Not everyone is a power
| user, in fact, most people aren't.
| regularfry wrote:
| My dev laptop is an 8GB M1. It's fine. Mostly.
|
| I can't run podman, slack, teams, and llama3-8B in
| llama.cpp at the same time. Oddly enough, this is rarely a
| problem.
| prepend wrote:
| It's the "Mostly" part that sucks. What's the price
| difference between 8 and 16? Like $3 in wholesale prices.
|
| This just seems like lameness on Apple's part.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| It's not quite like that. Apple's RAM is in the SoC
| package, it might be closer to 20$, but still.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| They have always done this, for some reason people buy it
| anyway, so they have no incentive to stop doing it.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > What's the price difference between 8 and 16? Like $3
| in wholesale prices.
|
| Your estimates are not even close. You can't honestly
| think that LPDDR5 at leading edge speeds is only $3 per
| 64 Gb (aka 8GB), right?
|
| Your estimate is off my an order of magnitude. The memory
| Apple is using is closer to $40 for that increment, not
| $3.
|
| And yes, they include a markup, because nobody is
| integrating hardware parts and selling them at cost. But
| if you think the fastest LPDDR5 around only costs $3 for
| 8GB, that's completely out of touch with reality.
| moooo99 wrote:
| Even if taking raising market prices into account, your
| estimate for the RAM module price is waaaaaaay off.
|
| You can get 8GB of good quality DDR5 DIMMs for 40$, there
| is no way in hell that Apple is paying anywhere near
| that.
|
| Going from 8 to 16GBs is probably somewhere between 3-8$
| purely in material costs for Apple, not taking into
| account any other costs associated
| smarx007 wrote:
| GP said "LPDDR5" and that Apple won't sell at component
| prices.
|
| You mention DIMMs and component prices instead. This is
| unhelpful.
|
| See https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/memory/mem
| ory/774... for LPDDR5 prices. You can get a price of
| $48/chip at a volume of 2000 chips. Assuming that Apple
| got a deal of $30-40-ish at a few orders of magnitude
| larger order is quite fair. Though it certainly would be
| nicer if Apple priced 8GB increments not much above
| $80-120.
| moooo99 wrote:
| I am aware that there are differences, I just took RAM
| DIMMs as a reference because there is a >0% chance that
| anyone reading this has actually ever bought a comparable
| product themselves.
|
| As for prices, the prices you cited are not at all
| comparable. Apple is absolutely certainly buying directly
| from manufacturers without a middleman since we're
| talking about millions of units delivered each quarter.
| Based on those quantities, unit prices are guaranteed to
| be substantially lower than what DigiKey offers.
|
| Based on what little public information I was able to
| find, spot market prices for LPDDR4 RAM seem to be
| somewhere in the 3 to 5$ range for 16GB modules. Let's be
| generous and put LPDDR5 at tripe the price with 15$ a
| 16GB module. Given the upgrade price for going from 8 to
| 16GB is 230 EUR Apple is surely making a huge profit on
| those upgrades alone by selling an essentially unusable
| base configuration for a supposed "Pro" product.
| flawsofar wrote:
| Local LLMs are sluggish on my M2 Air 8GB,
|
| but up until these these things I felt I could run
| whatever I wanted, including Baldur's Gate 3.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Same here. My secondary laptop is 8GB of RAM and it's
| fine.
|
| As devs and power users we'll always have an edge case
| for higher RAM usage, but the average consumer is going
| to be perfectly fine with 8GB of RAM.
|
| All of these comments about how 8GB of RAM is going to
| make it "unusable" or a "waste of components" are absurd.
| camel-cdr wrote:
| Programming has a wierd way of requirering basically
| nothing some times, but other times you need to build the
| latest version of your toolchain, or you are working on
| some similarly huge project that takes ages to compile.
|
| I was using my 4gb ram pinebook pro in public transport
| yesterday, and decided to turn of all cores except for a
| single Cortex-A53, to safe some battery. I had no
| problems for my usecase of a text editor + shell to
| compile for doing some SIMD programming.
| internet101010 wrote:
| At this point I don't think the frustration has much to
| do with the performance but rather RAM is so cheap that
| intentionally creating a bottleneck to extract another
| $150 from a customer comes across as greedy, and I am
| inclined to agree. Maybe the shared memory makes things
| more expensive but the upgrade cost has always been
| around the same amount.
|
| It's not quite in the same ballpark as showing apartment
| or airfare listings without mandatory fees but it is at
| the ticket booth outside of the stadium.
| oblio wrote:
| I imagine you don't have browsers with many tabs.
| adastra22 wrote:
| I could never understand how people operate with more
| than a dozen or so open tabs.
| touristtam wrote:
| Those are the type of "I'll go back later to it", The
| workflow on modern browser is broken. Instead of
| leveraging the bookmark functionality to improve the UX,
| we have this situation of user having 50+ tabs open,
| because they can. It takes quite a bit of discipline to
| close down tabs to a more manageable numbers.
| robin_reala wrote:
| The number of tabs you have doesn't correlate to the
| number of active web views you have, if you use any
| browser that unloads background tabs while still saving
| their state.
| GOONIMMUNE wrote:
| how many is "many"? I'm also on an M1 Mac 8 GB RAM and I
| have 146 chrome tabs open without any issues.
| gs17 wrote:
| Mine is 8GB M1 and it is not fine. But the actual issue
| for me isn't RAM as much as it is disk space, I'm pretty
| confident if it wasn't also the 128 GB SSD model it would
| handle the small memory just fine.
|
| I'm still getting at least 16 GB on my next one though.
| regularfry wrote:
| Yeah, that's definitely a thing. Podman specifically eats
| a lot.
| Pikamander2 wrote:
| That would be fine if the 8GB model was also _priced_ for
| casual and light productivity use cases. But alas, this is
| Apple we 're talking about.
| wiseowise wrote:
| MacBook Air starts at 1,199 euro. For insane battery
| life, amazing performance, great screen and one of the
| lightest chassis. Find me comparable laptop, I'll wait.
| touristtam wrote:
| The screen is the killer. you can have a nice-ish 2nd
| corporate laptop with decent and swappable battery on
| which you can install a decent OS (non Windows) and get
| good milage but the screen is something else.
| dialup_sounds wrote:
| Most people that consider themselves "power users" aren't
| even power users, either. Like how being into cars doesn't
| make you a race car driver.
| 0x457 wrote:
| Race car drivers think they are pros and can't even
| rebuild the engine in their car.
|
| There are different categories of "power users"
| wvenable wrote:
| Isn't this the "Pro" model?
| reustle wrote:
| > If these things will ever get MacOS support
|
| The Macbook line will get iPadOS support long before they
| allow MacOS on this line. Full steam ahead towards the walled
| garden.
| bluescrn wrote:
| iOS has become such a waste of great hardware, especially
| in the larger form factor of the iPad.
|
| M1 chips, great screens, precise pencil input and keyboard
| support, but we still aren't permitted a serious OS on it,
| to protect the monopolistic store.
|
| App Stores have beeen around long enough to prove that
| they're little more than laboratories in which to carry out
| accelerated enshittification experimentation. Everything so
| dumbed down and feature-light, yet demanding subscriptions
| or pushing endless scammy ads. And games that are a
| shameless introduction to gambling addiction, targeted at
| kids.
|
| Most of the 'apps' that people actually use shouldn't need
| to be native apps anyway, they should be websites. And now
| we get the further enshittification of trying to force
| people out of the browser and into apps, not for a better
| experience, but for a worse one, where more data can be
| harvested and ads can't so easily be blocked...
| arecurrence wrote:
| If the iPad could run Mac apps when docked to Magic
| Keyboard like the Mac can run iPad apps then there may be a
| worthwhile middle ground that mostly achieves what people
| want.
|
| The multitasking will still be poor but perhaps Apple can
| do something about that when in docked mode.
|
| That said, development likely remains a non-starter given
| the lack of unix tooling.
| Aurornis wrote:
| I have a minimum of 64GB on my all my main developer machines
| (home, work, laptop), but I have a spare laptop with only 8GB
| of RAM for lightweight travel.
|
| Despite the entire internet telling me it would be "unusable"
| and a disaster and a complete disaster, it's actually 100%
| perfectly fine. I can run IDEs, Slack, Discord, Chrome, and
| do dev work without a problem. I can't run a lot of VMs or
| compile giant projects with 10 threads, of course, but for
| typical work tasks it's just fine.
|
| And for the average consumer, it would also be fine. I think
| it's obvious that a lot of people are out of touch with
| normal people's computer use cases. 8GB of RAM is fine for
| 95% of the population and the other 5% can buy something more
| expensive.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| For me personally, it's not an issue of being out of touch.
| I did, in fact, use a 2014 Macbook with an i5 CPU and 16 GB
| of RAM for nearly a decade and know how often I hit swap
| and/or OOM on it even without attempting multicore
| shenanigans which its processor couldn't have managed
| anyway.
|
| It's rather an issue of selling deliberately underpowered
| hardware for no good reason other than to sell actually up-
| to-date versions for a difference in price that has no
| relation to the actual availability or price of the
| components. The sheer disconnect from any kind of reality
| offends me as a person whose job and alleged primary
| competency is to recognize reality then bend it to one's
| will.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| I don't think we ever were at a point in computing were
| you could buy a high-end (even entry level macbooks have
| high-end pricing) laptop with the same amount of ram as
| you could 10 years earlier.
|
| 8 GB were the standard back then.
| elaus wrote:
| But why did you configure 3 machines with 64+ GB, if 8 GB
| RAM are "100% perfectly fine" for typical work tasks?
|
| For me personally 16 or 32 GB are perfectly fine, 8 GB was
| too little (even without VMs) and I've never needed 64 or
| more. So it's curious to see you are pretty much exactly
| the opposite.
| joshmanders wrote:
| > But why did you configure 3 machines with 64+ GB, if 8
| GB RAM are "100% perfectly fine" for typical work tasks?
|
| Did you miss this part prefixing that sentence?
|
| > I can't run a lot of VMs or compile giant projects with
| 10 threads, of course
| leptons wrote:
| Be honest, that 8GB computer isn't running MacOS, is it.
| adastra22 wrote:
| That's the standard configuration of a MacBook Air.
| grecy wrote:
| I'm editing 4k video and thousands of big RAW images.
|
| The used M1 MacBook Air I just bought is by far the fastest
| computer I have ever used.
| jiehong wrote:
| People always complain dev should write more efficient
| software, so maybe that's one way!
|
| At least, chrome wouldn't run that many tabs on iPad for sure
| if it used the same engine as desktop chrome
| leptons wrote:
| These specific model of tablets won't ever get MacOS support.
| Apple will tell you when you're allowed to run MacOS on a
| tablet, and they'll make you buy a new tablet specifically
| for that.
| sambazi wrote:
| > 8gb of ram
|
| not again
| ilikehurdles wrote:
| The iPod classic had 160 GB of storage fifteen years ago.
|
| No device should be measuring storage in the gigabytes in 2024.
| Let alone starting at $1000 offering only 256GB. What
| ridiculousness.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| So browse the web and play modern games on an iPod classic
| vrick wrote:
| To be fair the ipod classic used a platter drive and ipads
| are high speed SSD storage. That being said, it's been years
| of the same storage options and at those prices it should be
| much higher, along with their iCloud storage offerings.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| The iPod Classic had spinning rust. Don't pretend it's
| comparable with a modern SSD.
| intrasight wrote:
| "Think Different" ;)
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > 8gb of ram.
|
| WTF? Why so little? That's insane to me, that's the amount of
| RAM you get with a mid-range android phone.
| MyFirstSass wrote:
| We've reached a point where their chips has become so amazing
| they have to introduce "fake scarcity" and "fake limits" to
| sell their pro lines, while dividing their customers into
| haves and havenots, while actively stalling the entire field
| for the masses.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Yes, but we're talking about the "pro" version here which
| makes even less sense!
| its_ethan wrote:
| You could, alternatively, read less malice into the
| situation and realize that the _majority of people buying
| an iPad pro don 't even need 8gb of RAM_ to do what they
| want to do with the device (web browsing + video
| streaming).
| deergomoo wrote:
| I'm not defending Apple's absurd stinginess with RAM (though
| I don't think it's much of an issue on an iPad given how
| gimped the OS is), but I've never understood why high-end
| Android phones have 12/16+ GB RAM.
|
| What needs that amount on a phone? 8GB on a desktop is...well
| it's not great, but it's _usable_ , and usable for a damn
| sight more multi-tasking than you would ever do on a
| smartphone. Is it just because you need to look better on the
| spec sheet, like the silly camera megapixel wars of the
| 2010s?
| sroussey wrote:
| "The next-generation cores feature improved branch prediction,
| with wider decode and execution engines for the performance
| cores, and a deeper execution engine for the efficiency cores.
| And both types of cores also feature enhanced, next-generation ML
| accelerators."
| gwd wrote:
| I wonder to what degree this also implies, "More opportunities
| for speculative execution attacks".
| sroussey wrote:
| I thought the same thing when I read it, but considering the
| attacks were known when doing this improvement, I hope that
| it was under consideration during the design.
| anentropic wrote:
| I wish there was more detail about the Neural Engine updates
| sroussey wrote:
| Agreed. I think they just doubled the number of cores and
| called it a day, but who knows.
| a_vanderbilt wrote:
| Fat decode pipelines have historically been a major reason for
| their performance lead. I'm all for improvements in that area.
| snapcaster wrote:
| Apple was really losing me with the last generation of intel
| macbooks but these m class processors are so good they've got me
| locked in all over again
| atonse wrote:
| The M1 Max that I have is easily the greatest laptop I've ever
| owned.
|
| It is fast and handles everything I've ever thrown at it (I got
| 32 GB RAM), it never, ever gets hot, I've never heard a fan in
| 2+ years (maybe a very soft fan if you put your ear next to
| it). And the battery life is so incredible that I often use it
| unplugged.
|
| It's just been a no-compromise machine. And I was thinking of
| upgrading to an M3 but will probably upgrade to an M4 instead
| at the end of this year when the M4 maxes come out.
| grumpyprole wrote:
| Unlike the PC industry, Apple is/was able to move their
| entire ecosystem to a completely different architecture,
| essentially one developed exactly for low power use. Windows
| on ARM efforts will for the foreseeable future be plagued by
| application support and driver support. It's a great shame,
| as Intel hardware is no longer competitive for mobile
| devices.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Now that there's the 13 inch iPad I am praying they remove
| the display notch on the Macbooks. It's a little wacky when
| you've intentionally cut a hole out of your laptop screen
| just to make it look like your phones did 2 generations ago
| and now you sell a tablet with the same screen size without
| that hole.
| tiltowait wrote:
| I really hate the notch[0], but I do like that the screen
| stretches into the top that would otherwise be entry. It's
| unsightly, but we did gain from it.
|
| [0] Many people report that they stop noticing the notch
| pretty quickly, but that's never been the case for me. It's
| a constant eyesore.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| A big issue with the thin bezels I am now noticing is you
| lose what used to be a buffer for fingerprints from
| opening the lid.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| What I've done is use a wallpaper that is black at the
| top. On the MBP's OLED screen that means the black bezel
| perfectly blends into the now black menu bar. It's pretty
| much a perfect solution but the problem it's solving is
| ridiculous IMO.
| doctor_eval wrote:
| I do the same, I can't see the notch and got a surprise
| the other day when my mouse cursor disappeared for a
| moment.
|
| I don't get the hate for the notch tho. The way I see it,
| they pushed the menus out of the screen and up into their
| own dedicated little area. We get more room for content.
|
| It's like the touchbar for menus. Oh, ok, now I know why
| people hate it. /jk
| adamomada wrote:
| Here's a handy free utility to automate this for you:
| https://topnotch.app
|
| Personally I never see the desktop background so I just
| set desktop to Black, it's perfect for me.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Thanks!
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Thats surprising you haven't heard the fans. Must be the use
| case. There's a few games that will get it quite hot and
| spool up the fans. I have also noticed its got somewhat poor
| sleep management and remains hot while asleep. Sometimes I
| pick up the computer for the first time that day and its
| already very hot from whatever kept it out of sleep with a
| shut lid all night.
| artificialLimbs wrote:
| Not sure what app you've installed to make it do that, but
| I've only experienced the opposite. Every Windows 10 laptop
| I've owned (4 of them) would never go to sleep and turn my
| bag into an oven if I forgot to manually shut down instead
| of closing the lid. Whereas my M1 MBP has successfully gone
| to sleep every lid close.
| deergomoo wrote:
| The Windows 10 image my employer uses for our Dell
| shitboxes has sleep completely disabled for some reason I
| cannot possibly comprehend. The only options in the power
| menu are Shut Down, Restart, and Hibernate.
|
| If I forget to hibernate before I put it in my bag it
| either burns through its battery before the next day, or
| overheats until it shuts itself down. If I'm working from
| home and get up to pee in the night, I often walk past my
| office and hear the fans screaming into an empty room,
| burning god knows how much electricity. Even though the
| only thing running on it was Slack and an editor window.
|
| It's an absolute joke of a machine and, while it's a few
| years old now, its original list price was equivalent to
| a very well specced MacBook Pro. I hope they were getting
| a substantial discount on them.
| paxys wrote:
| They keep making iPads more powerful while keeping them on the
| Fisher-Price OS and then wonder why no one is buying them for
| real work.
|
| Who in their right mind will spend $1300-$1600 on this rather
| than a MacBook Pro?
| throwaway2562 wrote:
| This.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Everyone knows the Fisher-Price OS is Windows XP (aka
| Teletubbies OS, on account of Bliss). iPads run Countertop OS
| (on account of their flat design).
| hedora wrote:
| You can install linux on the one with a fixed hinge and
| keyboard, but without a touchscreen. It's the "book" line
| instead of the "pad" line.
|
| I'm also annoyed that the iPad is locked down, even though it
| could clearly support everything the macbook does.
|
| Why can't we have a keyboard shortcut to switch between the
| iPad and Mac desktops or something?
| PreInternet01 wrote:
| > M4 makes the new iPad Pro an outrageously powerful device for
| artificial intelligence
|
| Yeah, well, I'm an enthusiastic M3 user, and I'm sure the new AI
| capabilities are _nice_ , but hyperbole like this is just
| _asking_ for snark like "my RTX4090 would like a word".
|
| Other than that: looking forward to when/how this chipset will be
| available in Macbooks!
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| Although as I undserstand m3 chips with more VRAM handle larger
| LLMs better because they can load more into VRAM compared to
| 4090.
| freedomben wrote:
| This is true, but that is only an advantage when running a
| model larger than the VRAM. If your models are smaller,
| you'll get substantially better performance in a 4090. So it
| all comes down to which models you want to run.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| It seems like 13b was running fine on 4090, but when I
| tried all the more fun or intelligent ones became very slow
| and would have peformed better on m3.
| PreInternet01 wrote:
| Yes, M3 chips are _available_ with 36GB unified RAM when
| embedded in a MacBook, although 18GB and below are the _norm
| for most models_.
|
| And even though the Apple press release does not even
| _mention_ memory capacity, I can _guarantee_ you that it will
| be even less than that on an iPad (simply because RAM is very
| battery-hungry and most consumers won 't care).
|
| So, therefore my remark: it will be interesting to see how
| this chipset lands in MacBooks.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| But M3 Max should able to support up to 128gb.
| SushiHippie wrote:
| Disclosure: I personally don't own any apple devices, except a
| work laptop with an M2 chip
|
| I think a comparison to the 4090 is unfair, as there is no
| laptop/tablet with an rtx 4090 and the power consumption of a
| 4090 is at ~450W on average
| PreInternet01 wrote:
| > I think a comparison to the 4090 is unfair
|
| No, when using wording like "outrageously powerful", that's
| exactly the comparison you elicit.
|
| I'd be fine with "best in class" or even "unbeatable
| performance per Watt", but I can absolutely _guarantee_ you
| that an iPad does not outperform any current popular-with-
| the-ML-crowd GPUs...
| simonbarker87 wrote:
| Seeing an M series chip launch first in an iPad must be result of
| some mad supply chain and manufacturing related hangovers from
| COVID.
|
| If the iPad had better software and could be considered a first
| class productivity machine then it would be less surprising but
| the one thing no one says about the iPads is "I wish this chip
| were faster"
| asddubs wrote:
| Well, it also affects the battery life, so it's not entirely
| wasted on the ipad
| margalabargala wrote:
| Maybe they're clocking it way down. Same performance, double
| the battery life.
| cjauvin wrote:
| I very rarely wish the battery of my iPad Pro 2018 would last
| longer, as it's already so good, even considering the age
| factor.
| 0x457 wrote:
| Yeah, I don't think about charging my iPad throughout the
| day, and I constantly use it. Maybe it's in the low 20s
| late at night, but it never bothered me.
| Zigurd wrote:
| My guess is that the market size fit current yields.
| a_vanderbilt wrote:
| I think this is the most likely explanation. Lower volume for
| the given product matches supply better, and since it's
| clocked down and has a lower target for GPU cores it has
| better yields.
| hajile wrote:
| They already released all their macbooks and latest iphone on
| N3B which is the worst-yielding 3nm from TSMC. I doubt yields
| are the issue here.
|
| It's suspected that the fast release for M4 is so TSMC can
| move away from the horrible-yielding N3B to N3E.
|
| Unfortunately, N3E is less dense. Paired with a couple more
| little cores, an increase in little core size, 2x larger NPU,
| etc, I'd guess that while M3 seems to be around 145mm2, this
| one is going to be quite a bit larger (160mm2?) with the size
| hopefully being offset by decreased wafer costs.
| DanHulton wrote:
| I'm wondering if it's because they're hitting the limits of the
| architecture, and it sounds way better to compare M4 vs M2 as
| opposed to vs M3, which they'd have to do if it launched in a
| Macbook Pro.
| mason55 wrote:
| Eh, they compared the M3 to the M1 when they launched it.
| People grumbled and then went on with their lives. I don't
| think they'd use that as a reason for making actual product
| decisions.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| To me it just feels like a soft launch.
|
| You probably have people (like myself) trying to keep up with
| the latest MacBook Air who get fatigued having to get a new
| laptop every year (I just upgraded to the M3 not too long ago,
| from the M2, and before that... the M1... is there any reason
| to? Not really...), so now they are trying to entice people who
| don't have iPads yet / who are waiting for a reason to do an
| iPad upgrade.
|
| For $1,300 configured with the keyboard, I have no clue what
| I'd do with this device. They very deliberately are keeping
| iPadOS + MacOS separate.
| low_common wrote:
| You get a new laptop every year?
| Teever wrote:
| If you replace your laptop every year or two and sell the
| old one online you can keep on the latest technology for
| only a slight premium.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| I'm sort of "incentivized" to by Apple because as soon as
| they release a new one, the current device you have will be
| at "peak trade in value" and deteriorate over time.
|
| It's a negligible amount of money. It's like, brand new
| $999, trade in for like $450. Once a year... $550
| remainder/12 months is $45.75/mo to have the latest and
| greatest laptop.
| fwip wrote:
| How much is a 2-year old laptop worth? Because if you buy
| a new laptop every two years and don't even sell the old
| one, you're only spending $500 a year, which is less than
| you are now.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's not terribly expensive if you trade-in or otherwise
| sell or hand down the previous.
|
| I went from M1 to M1 Pro just to get more displays.
| mvkel wrote:
| I think (hope) wwdc changes this. The function keys on the
| Magic Keyboard give me hope.
|
| Also, you know you don't HAVE to buy a laptop every year,
| right?
| jasonjmcghee wrote:
| Still using my M1 Air and had no interest in updating to M3.
| Battery life has dropped a fair amount, but still like 8+
| hours. That's going to be the trigger to get a new one. If
| only batteries lasted longer.
| foldr wrote:
| I don't think it costs that much to have the battery
| replaced compared to the price of a new laptop.
| jasonjmcghee wrote:
| Curious how much it would cost. I think parts are on the
| order of $150? So maybe $4-500 for official repair?
|
| If I can hold out another year or two, would probably end
| up just getting a new one
| foldr wrote:
| Oh no, it's way less than that. It should be about $159.
| You can get an estimate here:
| https://support.apple.com/en-us/mac/repair
| baq wrote:
| I feel like I bought the M1 air yesterday. Turns out it was
| ~4 years ago. Never felt the need to upgrade.
| dialup_sounds wrote:
| Interestingly, Apple still sells M1 Airs through Walmart,
| but not their own website.
| Toutouxc wrote:
| Same here, my M1 Air still looks and feels like a brand new
| computer. Like, I still think of it as "my new MacBook".
| It's my main machine for dev work and some hobby
| photography and I'm just so happy with it.
| wil421 wrote:
| The only reason I upgraded is my wife "stole" my M1 air. I
| bought a loaded M3 MBP and then they came out with a 15"
| Air with dual monitor capabilities. Kinda wish I had the
| air again. It's not like I move it around much but the form
| factor is awesome.
| skohan wrote:
| I love the air form factor. I do serious work on it as
| well. I have used a pro, but the air does everything I
| need without breaking a sweat, and it's super convenient
| to throw in a bag and carry around the house.
| alexpc201 wrote:
| To offer something better to those who have an iPad Pro M2 and
| a more powerful environment to run heavier games.
| andrewmunsell wrote:
| My current assumption is that this has to do with whatever "AI"
| Apple is planning to launch at WWDC. If they launched a new
| iPad with an M3 that wasn't able to sufficiently run on-device
| LLMs or whatever new models they are going to announce in a
| month, it would be a bad move. The iPhones in the fall will
| certainly run some new chip capable of on-device models, but
| the iPads (being announced in the Spring just before WWDC) are
| slightly inconveniently timed since they have to announce the
| hardware before the software.
| owenpalmer wrote:
| interesting theory, we'll see what happens!
| eitally wrote:
| My guess is that the M4 and M3 are functionally almost
| identical so there's no real reason for them to restrict the
| iPad M4 launch until they get the chip into the MacBook / Air.
| mort96 wrote:
| To be honest, I wish my iPad's chip was slower! I can't do
| anything other than watch videos and use drawing programs on an
| iPad, why does it need a big expensive power hungry and
| environmentally impactful CPU when one 1/10 the speed would do?
|
| If I could actually _do_ something with an iPad there would be
| a different discussion, but the operating system is so
| incredibly gimped that the most demanding task it 's really
| suited for is .. decoding video.
| Shank wrote:
| > Why does it need a big expensive power hungry and
| environmentally impactful CPU when one 1/10 the speed would
| do?
|
| Well, it's not. Every process shrink improves power
| efficiency. For watching videos, you're sipping power on the
| M4. For drawing...well if you want low latency while drawing,
| which generally speaking, people do, you...want the processor
| and display to ramp up to compensate and carry strokes as
| fast as possible?
|
| Obviously if your main concern is the environment, you
| shouldn't upgrade and you should hold onto your existing
| model(s) until they die.
| mort96 wrote:
| From what I can tell, the 2020 iPad has perfectly fine
| latency while drawing, and Apple hasn't been advertising
| lower latencies for each generation; I think they pretty
| much got the latency thing nailed down. Surely you could
| make something with the peak performance of an A12Z use
| less power on average than an M4?
|
| As for the environmental impact, whether I buy or don't buy
| this iPad (I won't, don't worry, my 2020 one still works),
| millions of people will. I don't mind people buying
| powerful machines when the software can make use of the
| performance, but for iPad OS..?
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| The M4 is built on the newest, best, most expensive
| process node (right?). They've got to amortize out those
| costs, and then they could work on something cheaper and
| less powerful. I agree that they probably won't, and
| that's a shame. But still, the M4 is most likely one of
| the best options for the best use of this new process
| node.
| steveridout wrote:
| I'm under the impression that this CPU is faster AND more
| efficient, so if you do equivalent tasks on the M4 vs an
| older processor, the M4 should be less power hungry, not
| more. Someone correct me if this is wrong!
| mort96 wrote:
| It's more power efficient than the M3, sure, but surely it
| could've been even more power efficient if it had worse
| performance simply from having fewer transistors to switch?
| It would certainly be more environmentally friendly at the
| very least!
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| The most environmentally friendly thing to do is to keep
| your A12Z for as long as you can, ignoring the annual
| updates. And when the time comes that you must do a
| replacement, get the most up to date replacement that
| meets your needs. Change your mindset - you are not
| required to buy this one, or the next one.
| mort96 wrote:
| Of course, I'm not buying this one or any other until
| something breaks. After all, my _current_ A12Z is way too
| powerful for iPadOS. It just pains me to see amazing
| feats of hardware engineering like these iPads with M4 be
| completely squandered by a software stack which doesn 't
| facilitate more demanding tasks than decoding video.
|
| Millions of people will be buying these things regardless
| of what I'm doing.
| _ph_ wrote:
| Look at the efficiency cores. They are all you are
| looking for.
| mort96 wrote:
| I agree!
|
| So what are the performance cores doing there?
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| > Environmentally impactful CPU when one 1/10 the speed would
| do
|
| Apple's started to roll out green energy charging to devices:
| https://support.apple.com/en-us/108068
|
| If I had to ballpark estimate this, your iPad probably uses
| less energy per year than a strand of incandescent holiday
| lights does in a week. Maybe somebody can work out that math.
| mort96 wrote:
| The environmental concerns I have aren't really power
| consumption. Making all these CPUs takes _a lot_ of
| resources.
| pertymcpert wrote:
| How do you suggest they make new iPads for people who
| want them? Someone has to make new CPUs and if you can
| improve perf/W while you're doing so you might as well.
| aurareturn wrote:
| >To be honest, I wish my iPad's chip was slower! I can't do
| anything other than watch videos and use drawing programs on
| an iPad, why does it need a big expensive power hungry and
| environmentally impactful CPU when one 1/10 the speed would
| do?
|
| A faster SoC can finish the task with better "work
| done/watt". Thus, it's more environmentally friendly. Unless
| you're referring to the resources dedicated to advancing
| computers such as the food engineers eat and the electricity
| chip fabs require.
| mort96 wrote:
| A faster and more power hungry SoC can finish the task with
| better work done per joule if it is fast enough to offset
| the extra power consumption. It is my understanding that
| this is often not the case. See e.g efficiency cores
| compared to performance cores in these heterogeneous
| design; the E cores can get more done per joule AFAIU. If
| my understanding is correct, then removing the P cores from
| the M4 chip would let it get more work done per joule.
|
| Regardless, the environmental impact I'm thinking about
| isn't mainly power consumption.
| pertymcpert wrote:
| The P cores don't get used if they're not needed. You
| don't need to worry. Most of your every use and
| background work gets allocated to E cores.
| _ph_ wrote:
| It has 6 efficiency cores. Every single of them is extremely
| power efficient, but still faster than an iPad 2-3
| generations back. So unless you go full throttle, a M4 is
| going to be by far the most efficient CPU you can have.
| drexlspivey wrote:
| Meanwhile the mac mini is still on M2
| themagician wrote:
| Welcome to being old!
|
| Watch a 20-year old creative work on an iPad and you will
| quickly change your mind. Watch someone who has, "never really
| used a desktop, [I] just use an iPad" work in Procreate or
| LumaFusion.
|
| The iPad has amazing software. Better, in many ways, than
| desktop alternatives _if_ you know how to use it. There are
| some things they can 't do, and the workflow can be less
| flexible or full featured in some cases, but the speed at which
| some people (not me) can work on an iPad is mindblowing.
|
| I use a "pro" app on an iPad and I find myself looking around
| for how to do something and end up having to Google it half the
| time. When I watch someone who really knows how to use an iPad
| use the same app they know exactly what gesture to do or where
| to long tap. I'm like, "How did you know that clicking on that
| part of the timeline would trigger that selection," and they
| just look back at you like, "What do you mean? How else would
| you do it?"
|
| There is a bizarre and almost undocumented design langauge of
| iPadOS that some people simply seem to know. It often pops up
| in those little "tap-torials" when a new feature roles out that
| I either ignore or forget... but other people internalize them.
| quasarj wrote:
| They can have my keyboard when they pry it from my cold dead
| hands! And my mouse, for that matter.
| themagician wrote:
| Oh, I'm with you. But the funny thing is, they won't even
| want it.
|
| I have two iPads and two pencils--that way each iPad is
| never without a penicl--and yet I rarely use the pencil. I
| just don't think about it. But then when I do, I'm like,
| "Why don't I use this more often? It's fantastic."
|
| I have tried and tried to adapt and I can not. I need a
| mouse, keyboard, seperate numpad, and two 5K Displays to
| mostly arrive at the same output that someone can do with a
| single 11" or 13" screen and a bunch of differnt spaces
| that can be flicked through.
|
| I desperatedly wanted to make the iPad my primary machine
| and I could not do it. But, honestly, I think it has more
| to do with me than the software. I've become old and
| stubborn. I want to do things my way.
| skydhash wrote:
| > "Why don't I use this more often? It's fantastic."
|
| PDF marking and procreate are my main uses for it. And
| using the ipad on a flat surface.
| Terretta wrote:
| Magic Keyboard is both, and the current (last, as of today)
| iteration is great.
|
| It is just fine driving Citrix or any web app like
| VSCode.dev.
| btown wrote:
| The existence of vscode.dev always makes me wonder why
| Microsoft never released an iOS version of VSCode to get
| more users into its ecosystem. Sure, it's almost as
| locked down as the web environment, but there's a lot of
| space in that "almost" - you could do all sorts of things
| like let users run their code, or complex extensions, in
| containers in a web view using
| https://github.com/ktock/container2wasm or similar.
| aurareturn wrote:
| I'm with you. I think HN (and conversational internet)
| disproportionally contains more laptop people than the
| public.
|
| A lot of of the younger generation does all their work on
| their phone and tablet and does not have a computer.
| Tiktaalik wrote:
| If those younger folks are as the parent says in the
| creative sector.
|
| iPad has been a workflow gamechanger for folks who use
| photoshop etc but users are still prevented from coding on
| it.
| themagician wrote:
| It's actually come a long way. The workflow is still...
| sub-optimal, but there are some really _nice_ terminal
| apps (LaTerminal, Prompt, ShellFish, iSH) which are
| functional too. Working Copy is pretty dope for working
| with git once you get you adapt to it.
|
| I do most of my dev on a Pi5 now, so actually working on
| the iPad is not that difficult.
|
| If they ever release Xcode for iPadOS that would be a
| true gamechanger.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Majority of people don't know what programming is and do
| shitton of manual things that can be automated by a simple
| bash/Python script, so what?
| Lalabadie wrote:
| Key values in the press release:
|
| - Up to 1.5x the CPU speed of iPad Pro's previous M2 chip
|
| - Octane gets up to 4x the speed compared to M2
|
| - At comparable performance, M4 consumes half the power of M2
|
| - High-performance AI engine, that claims 60x the speed of
| Apple's first engine (A11 Bionic)
| mrtesthah wrote:
| > _- Up to 1.5x the CPU speed of iPad Pro 's previous M2 chip_
|
| What I want to know is whether that ratio holds for single-core
| performance measurements.
| codedokode wrote:
| > Up to 1.5x the CPU speed
|
| Doesn't it mean "1.5x speed in rare specific tasks which were
| hardware optimized, and 1x ewerywhere else"?
| rsynnott wrote:
| I mean, we'll have to wait for proper benchmarks, but that
| would make it a regression vs the M3, so, er, unlikely.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| At this point I read "up to" as "not"...
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| Apple claimed M3 was 1.35 the speed of the M2. So the M3 vs M4
| comparison isn't that impressive. Certainly not bad by any
| means, just pointing out why it is compared to the M2 here.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| While I completely agree with your point, the M chips is a
| series of chips. The iPad M2 is different than the MBP M2 or
| the MacBook Air.
|
| It's all just marketing to build hype.
| astrange wrote:
| No, it's the same as the MB Air.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| People make this comment after every single m series release.
| Its true for intel too, worse even. Changes between like 8th
| and 9th and 10th gen were like nill, small clock bump same
| igpu even.
| frankchn wrote:
| The other reason it is compared to the M2 is that there are
| no iPads with M3s in them, so it makes sense to compare to
| the processor used in the previous generation product.
| tiltowait wrote:
| It seems pretty reasonable to compare it against the last-
| model iPad, which it's replacing.
| dsign wrote:
| > M4 makes the new iPad Pro an outrageously powerful device for
| artificial intelligence.
|
| Isn't there a ToS prohibition about "custom coding" in iOS? Like,
| the only way you can ever use that hardware directly is for
| developers who go through Apple Developer Program, which last
| time I heard was bitter lemon? Tell me if I'm wrong.
| freedomben wrote:
| Well, this is the heart of the "appliance" model. iPads are
| _appliances_. You wouldn 't ask about running custom code on
| your toaster or your blender, so you shouldn't ask about that
| for your iPad. Also all the common reasons apply: Security and
| Privacy, Quality Control, Platform Stability and Compatibility,
| and Integrated User Experience. All of these things are harmed
| when you are allowed to run custom coding.
|
| (disclaimer: My personal opinion is that the "appliance" model
| is absurd, but I've tried to steel-man the case for it)
| jebarker wrote:
| Lots of people ask about running custom code on other
| appliances. I think they call them hackers.
| freedomben wrote:
| I think you're reinforcing Apple's point about how security
| is harmed by allowing custom code.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> You wouldn 't ask about running custom code on your
| toaster or your blender, so you shouldn't ask about that for
| your iPad._
|
| Of course I would, and the only reason other people wouldn't
| is because they're conditioned to believe in their own innate
| powerlessness.
|
| If you sell me a CPU, I want the power to program it, period.
| freedomben wrote:
| I mean this sincerely, are you really an Apple customer
| then? I feel exactly the same as you, and for that reason I
| don't buy Apple products. They are honest about what they
| sell, which I appreciate.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Some arguments are that you shouldn't be able to create
| appliances, only general purpose machines.
| taylodl wrote:
| Ever notice people don't build their own cars anymore?
| They used to even up through the 60's. I mean ordering a
| kit or otherwise purchasing all the components and
| building the car. Nowadays it's very rare that people do
| that.
|
| I'm old enough to remember when people literally built
| their own computers, soldering iron in hand. People
| haven't done that since the early 80's.
|
| Steve Jobs' vision of the Mac, released in 1984, was for
| it to be a computing appliance - "the computer for the
| rest of us." The technology of the day prevented that.
| Though they pushed that as hard as they could.
|
| Today's iPad? It's the fulfillment of Steve Jobs'
| original vision of the Mac: a computing appliance. It
| took 40 years, but we're here.
|
| If you don't want a computing appliance then don't buy an
| iPad. I'd go further and argue don't buy any tablet
| device. Those that don't want computing appliances don't
| have to buy them. It's not like laptops, or even
| desktops, are going anywhere anytime soon.
| nordsieck wrote:
| > Some arguments are that you shouldn't be able to create
| appliances, only general purpose machines.
|
| I sincerely hope that you live as much of your life in
| that world as possible.
|
| Meanwhile, I'll enjoy having a car I don't have to mess
| with every time I start it up.
| bluescrn wrote:
| In a world concerned with climate change, we should see
| many of these 'appliances' as inherently wasteful.
|
| On top of the ugly reality that they're designed to
| become e-waste as soon as the battery degrades.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Can you do that to your car infotainment system btw?
| blacklion wrote:
| Why not?
|
| It MUST (RFC2119) be airgapped from ABS and ECU, of
| course.
| taylodl wrote:
| _> If you sell me a CPU, I want the power to program it,
| period._
|
| Uhhh, there are CPUs in your frickin' wires now, dude!
| There are several CPUs in you car for which you generally
| don't have access. Ditto for your fridge. Your microwave.
| Your oven. Even your toaster.
|
| We're literally awash in CPUs. You need to update your
| thinking.
|
| Now, if you said something like "if you sell me a general-
| purpose computing device, then I want the power to program
| it, period" then I would fully agree with you. BTW, _you
| can_ develop software for your own personal use on the
| iPad. It 's not cheap or easy (doesn't utilize commonly-
| used developer tooling), but it can be done without having
| to jump through any special hoops.
|
| Armed with that, we can amend your statement to "if you
| sell me a general-purpose computing device, then I want the
| power to program it using readily-available, and commonly-
| utilized programming tools."
|
| I think that statement better captures what I presume to be
| your intent.
| talldayo wrote:
| > but it can be done without having to jump through any
| special hoops.
|
| You are really stretching the definition of "special
| hoops" here. On Android sideloading is a switch hidden in
| your settings menu; on iOS it's either a municipal
| feature or a paid benefit of their developer program.
|
| Relative to every single other commercial, general-
| purpose operating system I've used, I would say yeah,
| Apple practically defines what "special hoops" look like
| online.
| duped wrote:
| I do actually want the ability to program the CPUs in my
| car the same way I'm able to buy parts and mods for every
| mechanical bit in there down to the engine. In fact we
| have laws about that sort of thing that don't apply to
| the software.
| umanwizard wrote:
| That may be your personal preference, but you should accept
| that 99% of people don't care about programming their
| toaster, so you're very unlikely to ever make progress in
| this fight.
| mort96 wrote:
| 99% of people don't care about programming anything, that
| doesn't make this gatekeeping right.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| You aren't wrong but businesses aren't in the market to
| optimize for 1% their customers
| timothyduong wrote:
| Could apply this for anything complex and packaged.
|
| I'm annoyed that I can't buy particular engines off the
| shelf and use them in my bespoke approach, why dont car
| manufacturers give the approach that crate engine
| providers do?
| doctor_eval wrote:
| Yeah, if I have to program my toaster, I'm buying a new
| toaster.
|
| I write enough code during the day to make me happy. I
| really don't want to be thinking about the optimal
| brownness of my bagel.
| owenpalmer wrote:
| the desire to program one's toaster is the most HN thing
| I've seen all day XD
| BrianHenryIE wrote:
| I really wish I could program my dishwasher because it's
| not cleaning very well and if I could add an extra rinse
| cycle I think it would be fine.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Start by cleaning the filters
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| And engineer your own bagel setting without buying a bagel
| model? Dream on.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| If I could deploy to my blender as easily as I can to AWS,
| then I would _definitely_ at least try it.
| paxys wrote:
| An appliance manufacturer isn't doing an entire press event
| highlighting how fast the CPU on the appliance is.
| worthless-trash wrote:
| If its advertised like a general purpose computer,
| expectations should be met.
| freedomben wrote:
| Agree completely. I think it's absurd that they talk about
| technical things like CPU and memory in these
| announcements. It seems to me like an admission that it's
| not really an "appliance" but trying to translate Apple
| marketing into logical/coherent concepts can be a
| frustrating experience. I just don't try anymore.
| ben-schaaf wrote:
| I appreciate the steel-man. A strong counter argument for me
| is that you actually _can_ run any custom code on an iPad, as
| long as it 's in a web-browser. This is very unlike an
| appliance where doing so is not possible. Clearly the
| intention is for arbitrary custom code to run on it, which
| makes it a personal computer and not an appliance (and should
| be regulated as such).
| freedomben wrote:
| That's a fair point, although (steel-manning) the "custom
| code" in the browser is severely restricted/sandboxed,
| unlike "native" code would be. So from that perspective,
| you could maybe expand it to be like a toaster that has
| thousands of buttons that can make for hyper-specific
| stuff, but can't go outside of the limits the manufacturer
| built in.
| eqvinox wrote:
| As with any Apple device -- or honestly, any computing device
| in general -- my criteria of evaluation would be the resulting
| performance if I install Linux on it. (If Linux is not
| installable on the device, the performance is zero. If Linux
| driver support is limited, causing performance issues, that is
| also part of the equation.)
|
| NB: those are _my_ criteria of evaluation. _Very personally._ I
| 'm a software engineer, with a focus on systems/embedded. Your
| criteria are yours.
|
| (But maybe don't complain if you buy this for its "AI"
| capabilities only to find out that Apple doesn't let you do
| anything "unapproved" with it. You had sufficient chance to see
| the warning signs.)
| pbronez wrote:
| It looks like Asahi Linux can run on Apple Silicon iPads...
| but you have to use an exploit like checkm8 to get past the
| locked bootloader
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/AsahiLinux/comments/ttsshm/asahi_li.
| ..
| killerstorm wrote:
| It means you can deliver AI apps to users. E.g. generate
| images.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| You're not wrong. It's why I don't use apple hardware anymore
| for work or play. On Android and Windows I can build and
| install whatever I like, without having to go through mother-
| Apple for permission.
| wishfish wrote:
| There's the potential option of Swift Playgrounds which would
| let you write / run code directly on the iPad without any
| involvement in the developer program.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| C'mon man, it's 2024, they can't just not mention AI in a press
| release.
| fallingsquirrel wrote:
| Is it just me or is there not a single performance chart here?
| Their previous CPU announcements have all had perf-per-watt
| charts, and that's conspicuously missing here. If this is an
| improvement over previous gens, wouldn't they want to show that
| off?
| a_vanderbilt wrote:
| Since Intel->M1 the performance gains haven't been the
| headliners they once were, although the uplifts haven't been
| terrible. It also lets them hide behind the more impressive
| sounding multiplier which can reference something more specific
| but not necessarily applicable to broader tasks.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Call me crazy, but I want all that power in a 7" tablet. I like
| 7" tablets most because they feel less clunky to carry around and
| take with you. Same with 13" laptops, I'm willing to sacrifice on
| screen real estate for saving myself from the back pain of
| carrying a 15" or larger laptop.
|
| Some of this is insanely impressive. I wonder how big the OS ROM
| (or whatever) is with all these models. For context, even if the
| entire OS is about 15GB, in order to get some of these features
| locally just for an LLM on its own, its about 60GB or more, for
| something ChatGPT esque. Which requires me to spend thousands on
| a GPU.
|
| Apologies for the many thoughts, I'm quite excited by all these
| advancements. I always say I want AI to work offline and people
| tell me I'm moving the goalpost, but it is truly the only way it
| will become mainstream.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| > Call me crazy, but I want all that power in a 7" tablet
|
| Aren't phones getting close to 7" now? The iPhone pro is 6.2",
| right?
| jsheard wrote:
| Yeah, big phones have become the new small tablet.
|
| https://phonesized.com/compare/#2299,156
|
| Take away the bezels on the tablet and there's not a lot of
| difference.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I'm not a huge fan of it, but yeah they are. I actually
| prefer my phones to be somewhat smaller.
| jwells89 wrote:
| Biggest difference is aspect ratio. Phones are taller and
| less pleasant to use in landscape, tablets are more square
| and better to use in landscape.
|
| You could technically make a more square phone but it
| wouldn't be fun to hold in common positions, like up to your
| ear for a call.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I've been using the iPad Mini for years.
|
| I'd love to see them add something to that form factor.
|
| I do see _a lot_ of iPad Minis out there, but usually, as part
| of dedicated systems (like PoS, and restaurant systems).
|
| On the other hand, I have heard rumblings that Apple may
| release an _even bigger_ phone, which I think might be overkill
| (but what do I know. I see a lot of those monster Samsung
| beasts, out there).
|
| Not sure that is for me. I still use an iPhone 13 Mini.
|
| I suspect that my next Mac will be a Studio. I guess it will be
| an M4 Studio.
| wiredfool wrote:
| I loved my ipad mini. It's super long in the tooth now, and I
| was hoping to replace it today. oh well...
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I wish they would stop doing this weird release cycle where
| some of their tablets don't get the updated chips. It's
| really frustrating. Makes me hesitant to buy a tablet if I
| feel like it could get an upgrade a week later or whatever.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| It certainly seems less than ideal for pro/prosumer
| buyers who care about the chips inside.
|
| I would guess that Apple doesn't love it either; one
| suspects that the weird release cycle is at least
| partially related to availability of chips and other
| components.
| wiredfool wrote:
| I probably would have pulled the trigger on a price drop,
| but at 600+eur for an old version, I'm just not as into
| that, as I really expect it to be lasting many years.
| Menu_Overview wrote:
| I was ready to buy one today, too. Disappointing.
|
| I miss my old iPad mini 4. I guess I could try the 11"
| iPad, but I think I'd prefer it to be smaller.
| wiredfool wrote:
| Yeah, We've got a full sized iPad here and it's really
| strange to hold and use. It's all what you're used to.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I wanted to buy a Mini, but they had not updated the
| processors for them when I was buying, and they cost way more
| than a regular iPad at the time, I wanted to be budget
| conscious. I still sometimes regret not just going for the
| Mini, but I know eventually I'll get one sooner or later.
|
| You know whats even funnier, when the mini came out
| originally, I made fun of it. I thought it was a dumb
| concept, oh my ignorance.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I have an iPad Pro 13", and never use it (It's a test
| machine).
|
| I use the Mini daily.
|
| It's a good thing they made the Pro lighter and thinner.
| May actually make it more useful.
| ectospheno wrote:
| I have access to multiple iPad sizes and I personally only
| use the mini. Is almost perfect. Last year of its long life
| cycle you start to feel the age of the processor but still
| better than holding the larger devices. Can't wait for it
| to be updated again.
| r0fl wrote:
| The next iPhone pro max will be 6.9 inches
|
| That fits all your wants
| sulam wrote:
| If your back is hurting from the ~1lb extra going from 13" to
| 15", I would recommend some body weight exercises. Your back
| will thank you, and you'll find getting older to be much less
| painful.
|
| Regarding a small iPad, isn't that the iPad mini? 8" vs 7" is
| pretty close to what you're asking for.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| I _highly_ recommend doing pull-ups for your posture and
| health. It was shocking to me how much the state of my spine
| improved after doing pull-ups as a daily exercise.
| alexpc201 wrote:
| You can't have all that power in a 7" tablet because the
| battery will last half hour.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| Well, maybe. The screen (and specifically the backlight) is a
| big drain. Smaller screen = less drain.
| Foobar8568 wrote:
| I am not a large person by any means, yet I have no problem to
| carry a MBP 16...But then I have a backpack and not a messenger
| like bag, which I would agree, would be a pain to carry.
| bschmidt1 wrote:
| > I always say I want AI to work offline
|
| I'm with you, I'm most excited about this too.
|
| Currently building an AI creative studio (make stories, art,
| music, videos, etc.) that runs locally/offline
| (https://github.com/bennyschmidt/ragdoll-studio). There is a
| lot of focus on cloud with LLMs but I can't see how the cost
| will make much sense for involved creative apps like video
| creation, etc. Present day users might not have high-end
| machines, but I think they all will pretty soon - this will
| make them buy them the way MMORPGs made everyone buy more RAM.
| Especially the artists and creators. Remember, Photoshop was
| once pretty difficult to run, you needed a great machine.
|
| I can imagine offline music/movies apps, offline search
| engines, back office software, etc.
| ant6n wrote:
| I've got an iPad mini. The main issue is the screen scratches.
| The other main issue is the screen is like a mirror, so it
| can't be used everywhere to watch videos (which is the main
| thing the iPad is useful for). The third main issue is that
| videos nowadays are way too dark and you can't adjust
| brightness/gamma on the iPad to compensate.
|
| (Notice a theme?)
| notatoad wrote:
| a 7" tablet was a really cool form factor back in the day when
| phones were 4".
|
| but when 6.7" screens on phones are common, what really is the
| point of a 7" tablet?
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Call me crazy, but I want all that power in a 7" tablet. I
| like 7" tablets most because they feel less clunky to carry
| around and take with you.
|
| iPhone Pro Max screen size is 6.7" and the the upcoming iPhone
| 16 Pro Max is rumored to be 6.9" with 12GB of RAM. That's your
| 7" tablet right there.
|
| The thing is - You're an extreme edge case of an edge case.
| Furthermore, I'm guessing if Apple did roll out a 7" tablet,
| you'd find some other thing where it isn't exactly 100%
| perfectly meeting your desired specifications. For example,
| Apple _is_ about to release a high powered 6.9 " tablet-like
| device (the iPhone 16 Pro Max) but I'm guessing there's another
| reason why it doesn't fit your needs.
|
| Which is why companies like Apple ignore these niche use cases
| and focus on mainstream demands. The niche demands always gain
| a lot of internet chatter, but when the products come out they
| sell very poorly.
| daniel31x13 wrote:
| Well at the end of the day the processors are bottlenecked by its
| OS. What real value does an iPad bring that a typical iPhone +
| Mac combo misses? (Other than being a digital notebook...)
| cooper_ganglia wrote:
| Digital artist's can get a lot of use out of it, I'd assume.
| The Apple Pencil seems pretty nice with the iPad.
| daniel31x13 wrote:
| This. If you're anything other than a digital artist/someone
| who genuinely prefers writing over typing, an iPad is just an
| extra tool for you to waste your money on.
|
| I had one of the earlier versions and this was pretty much
| its only use case...
| JohnBooty wrote:
| I wound up getting a 2019 iPad Pro for 50% off, so $500 or so.
| Thought I would use it as a work/play hybrid.
|
| Surprisingly (at least to me) I feel that I've more than gotten
| my money's worth out of it _despite_ it being almost entirely
| strictly a consumption device.
|
| I tote it around the house so I can watch or listen to things
| while I'm doing other things. It's also nice to keep on the
| dining room table so I can read the news or watch something
| while we're eating. I could do every single one of these things
| with my laptop, but... that laptop is my _primary work tool._ I
| don 't like to carry it all over the place, exposing it to
| spills and dust, etc.
|
| The only real work-related task is serving as a secondary
| monitor (via AirPlay) for my laptop when I travel.
|
| $500 isn't pocket change, but I've gotten 48 months of
| enjoyment and would expect at least another 24 to 36 months.
| That's about $6 a month, or possibly more like $3-4 per month
| if I resell it eventually.
|
| Worth it for me.
| hot_gril wrote:
| My wife has a new iPad for grad school, and I'm convinced it's
| mainly an extra category for some customers to spend more money
| on if they already have a Mac and iPhone. The school supplied
| it, then she spent $400+ on the keyboard and other damn dongles
| to bring the hardware sorta up to par with a laptop, hoping to
| replace her 2013 MBP.
|
| In the end, she still has to rely on the MBP daily because
| there's always _something_ the iPad can 't do. Usually
| something small like a website not fully working on it.
| tiltowait wrote:
| I often prefer (as in enjoy) using my iPad Pro over my 16" M1
| MBP, but I think the only thing my iPad is actually better for
| is drawing.
| pier25 wrote:
| This is great but why even bother with the M3?
|
| The M3 Macs were released only 7 months ago.
| ls612 wrote:
| Probably they had some contractual commitments with TSMC and
| had to use up their N3B capacity somehow. But as soon as N3E
| became available it's a much better process overall.
| a_vanderbilt wrote:
| Ramping up production on a new die also takes time. The lower
| volume and requirements of the M4 as used in the iPad can
| give them time to mature the line for the Macs.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| So far, I haven't seen any comparison between the iPad M4 and
| the computer M3. Everything was essentially compared to the
| last iPad chip, the M2.
|
| Your laptop M3 chip is still probably more powerful than this.
| The laptop M4 will be faster, but not groundbreaking faster.
| lopkeny12ko wrote:
| I always wonder how _constraining_ it is to design these chips
| subject to thermal and energy limitations. I paid a lot of money
| for my hardware and I want it to go as fast as possible. I don 't
| want my fans to be quiet, and I don't want my battery life to be
| 30 minutes longer, if it means I get _more raw performance_ in
| return. But instead, Apple 's engineers have unilaterally decided
| to handicap their own processors for no real good reason.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| The overwhelming majority of people who buy these devices will
| just use them to watch netflix and tiktok. Apple is well aware
| of this.
| boplicity wrote:
| Why not go with a Windows based device? There are many loud and
| low-battery life options that are very fast.
| jwells89 wrote:
| Yeah, one of my biggest frustrations as a person who likes
| keeping around both recent-ish Mac and Windows/Linux laptops
| is that x86 laptop manufacturers seem to have a severe
| allergy to building laptops that are good all-rounders...
| they always have one or multiple specs that are terrible,
| usually heat, fan noise, and battery life.
|
| Paradoxically this effect is the worst in ultraportables,
| where the norm is to cram in CPUs that run too hot for the
| chassis with tiny batteries, making them weirdly bad at the
| one thing they're supposed to be good at. Portability isn't
| just physical size and weight, but also runtime and if one
| needs to bring cables and chargers.
|
| On that note, Apple really needs to resurrect the 12" MacBook
| with an M-series or even A-series SoC. There'd be absolutely
| nothing remotely comparable in the x86 ultraportable market.
| etchalon wrote:
| The reason is because battery life is more important to the
| vast majority of consumers.
| jupp0r wrote:
| Thermal load has been a major limiting design factor in high
| end CPU design for two decades (remember Pentium 4?).
|
| Apart from that, I think you might me in a minority if you want
| a loud, hot iPad with a heavy battery to power all of this (for
| a short time, because physics). There are plenty of Windows
| devices that work exactly like that though if that's really
| what makes you happy. Just don't expect great performance
| either, because of diminishing returns of using higher power
| and also because the chips in these devices usually suck.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| You're in the minority
| Perceval wrote:
| Most of what Apple sells goes into mobile devices: phone,
| tablet, laptop. In their prior incarnation, they ran up real
| hard against the thermal limits of what they could put in their
| laptops with the IBM PowerPC G5 chip.
|
| Pure compute power has never been Apple's center of gravity
| when selling products. The Mac Pro and the XServe are/were
| minuscule portions of Apple's sales, and the latter product was
| killed after a short while.
|
| > Apple's engineers have unilaterally decided to handicap their
| own processors for no real good reason
|
| This is a misunderstanding of what the limiting factor is of
| Apple products' capability. The mobile devices all have battery
| as the limfac. The processors being energy efficient in
| compute-per-watt isn't a handicap, it's an enabler. And it's a
| very good reason.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > I don't want my fans to be quiet, and I don't want my battery
| life to be 30 minutes longer
|
| I agree with you. I don't want fans to be quiet, I want them
| completely gone. And with battery life too, not 30 minutes, but
| 300 minutes. Modern chips are plenty fast, developers need to
| optimize their shit instead of churning crapware.
| pxc wrote:
| Given that recent Apple laptops already have solid all-day
| battery life, with such a big performance per watt improvement, I
| wonder if they'll end up reducing how much battery any laptops
| ship with to make them lighter.
| asadotzler wrote:
| No, because battery life isn't just about the CPU. The CPU sits
| idle most of the time and when it's not idle, it's at workloads
| like 20% or whatever. It's the screens that eat batteries
| because they're on most or all of the time and sucking juice.
| Look at Apple's docs and you'll see the battery life is the
| exact same as the previous model. They have a battery budget
| and if they save 10% on CPU, they give that 10% to a better
| screen or something. They can't shrink the battery by half
| until they make screens twice as efficient, not CPUs which
| account for only a small fraction of power draw.
| zenethian wrote:
| This is pretty awesome. I wonder if it has a fix for the the
| GoFetch security flaw?
| ionwake wrote:
| Sorry to be a noob, but does anyone have a rough estimate of when
| this m4 chip will be in a macbook air or macbook pro?
| a_vanderbilt wrote:
| If I had to venture a guess, maybe WWDC '24 that's coming up.
| slashdev wrote:
| I've got a Mac Pro paperweight because the motherboard went. It's
| going to the landfill. I can't even sell it for parts because I
| can't erase the SSD. If they didn't solder everything to the
| board you could actually repair it. When I replace my current
| Dell laptop, it will be with a repairable framework laptop.
| stuff4ben wrote:
| Just because you lack the skills to fix it, doesn't mean it's
| not repairable. People desolder components all the time to fix
| phones and ipads and laptops.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNKNjy3CoZ4
| nicce wrote:
| In this case, you need to find working motherboard without
| soldered parts to be able to fix it cost efficiently.
| Otherwise you need to buy factory component (for extra price,
| with soldered components...)
| slashdev wrote:
| Yeah, it's not worth it
| AzzyHN wrote:
| Any other computer I could simply replace the motherboard
| with several other compatible motherboards, no soldering or
| donor board needed.
| kaba0 wrote:
| It's almost like "any other computer" is not thin as a
| finger, packed to the brim with features that require
| miniaturization.
|
| Can you just fix an F1 engine with a wrench?
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| I'm not sure which gen Mac Pro they have, but the current
| ones aren't that much thinner than the OG cheese grater
| Macs from 15 years ago.
|
| In fact the current Gen is bigger than the trashcan ones
| by quite a bit (although IIRC the trash can Macs had user
| replaceable SSDs and GPUs)
| mort96 wrote:
| That stuff makes it more difficult to work on, but it
| doesn't make it impossible for Apple to sell replacement
| motherboards... nor does making a "thin desktop" require
| soldering on SSDs, M.2 SSDs are plenty thin for any small
| form factor desktop use case.
| slashdev wrote:
| They do it deliberately. They want you to throw it out
| and buy a new one
| hot_gril wrote:
| It's not that small: https://www.cnet.com/a/img/resize/65
| 262f62ac0f1aa5540aca7cf9...
|
| I totally missed that they released a new Apple Silicon
| Mac Pro. Turns out it has PCIe slots.
| slashdev wrote:
| My Dell laptop is much more repairable. I changed the RAM
| and added second SSD myself.
| sniggers wrote:
| The mental gymnastics Apple fanboys will do to defend
| being sold garbage are amazing.
| its_ethan wrote:
| The inability to appreciate when optimizing a design
| means not using COTS parts that Apple "haters" do is also
| amazing...
| slashdev wrote:
| There's always some wiseass saying "skill issue"
| ipqk wrote:
| hopefully at least electronics recycling.
| slashdev wrote:
| Where do you usually take it for that?
|
| If I find a place in walking distance, maybe.
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| You could try to stick it in the phones drop off thingy at
| target. That's my go to for all non valuable electronics.
| slashdev wrote:
| I don't have that here, but maybe there's something
| similar
| slashdev wrote:
| Nothing close enough, I checked
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Even repairable only buys you a few years repairability that
| actually makes sense. For example something similar happened to
| me, lost the mac mobo on a pre solder addiction model. Only
| thing is guess how much a used mobo is for an old mac: nearly
| as much as the entire old mac in working shape. It makes no
| sense to repair it once the computer hits a certain age between
| the prices of oem parts and the depreciation of computers.
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| Why don't you take it to the Apple Store to recycle it instead
| of dropping it in the trash can?
| slashdev wrote:
| They don't accept computers for recycling. That's what I
| found when I looked it up
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| They accept Apple branded computers for recycling if it has
| no trade in value (they'll try to get you an offer if it
| has any value). I have recycled damaged apple computers at
| the store before without trading in.
| crazygringo wrote:
| They absolutely do. You must have looked it up wrong.
|
| Here:
|
| https://www.apple.com/recycling/nationalservices/
|
| I've even done it before personally with an old MacBook
| that wouldn't turn on.
| acdha wrote:
| > I can't even sell it for parts because I can't erase the SSD
|
| The SSD is encrypted with a rate-limited key in the Secure
| Enclave - unless someone has your password they're not getting
| your data.
| slashdev wrote:
| Not worth the liability. I'd rather the landfill and peace of
| mind than the money
| crazygringo wrote:
| But what liability?
|
| That's the whole _point_ of encrypted storage. There is no
| liability if you used a reasonable password.
|
| Why not accept you _have_ peace of mind and resell on eBay
| for parts?
|
| Assuming you didn't use "password123" or something.
| bigdict wrote:
| 38 TOPS in the Neural Engine comes dangerously close to the
| Microsoft requirement of 40 TOPS for "AI PCs".
| 999900000999 wrote:
| I'm extremely happy with my M1 iPad.
|
| The only real issue is aside from the screen eventually wearing
| out ( it already has a bit of flex), I can't imagine a reason to
| upgrade. It's powerful enough to do anything you'd use an iPad
| for. I primarily make music on mine, I've made full songs with
| vocals and everything ( although without any mastering - I think
| this is possible in Logic on iPad).
|
| It's really fun for quick jam sessions, but I can't imagine what
| else I'd do with it. IO is really bad for media creation, you
| have a single USB C port( this bothers me the most, the moment
| that port dies it becomes E Waste), no headphone jack...
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| Any apps that work with MIDI controller on iPad?
|
| Also, can't you just use a USB-C hub for like $10 from Amazon?
| 999900000999 wrote:
| I have more USB hubs than I can count.
|
| You still only have one point of failure for the entire
| device that can't be easily fixed.
|
| And most midi controllers work fine via USB or Bluetooth
| tootie wrote:
| I have an iPad that predates M1 and it's also fine. It's a
| media consumption device and that's about it.
| onetimeuse92304 wrote:
| As an amateur EE it is so annoying that they reuse names of
| already existing ARM chips.
|
| ARM Cortex-M4 or simply M4 is quite popular ARM architecture. I
| am using M0, M3 and M4 chips from ST on a daily basis.
| jupp0r wrote:
| It's not like the practice of giving marketing names to chips
| is generally a world of logical sanity if you look at Intel
| i5/i7/i9 etc.
| zerohp wrote:
| As a professional EE, I know that ARM Cortex-M4 is not a chip.
| It's an embedded processor that is put into an SOC (which is a
| chip), such as the STM32-family from ST.
| diogenescynic wrote:
| So is the iPad mini abandoned due to the profit margins being too
| small or what? I wish they'd just make it clear so I could
| upgrade without worrying a mini replacement will come out right
| after I buy something. And I don't really understand why there
| are so many different iPads now (Air/Pro/Standard). It just feels
| like Apple is slowly becoming like Dell... offer a bunch of SKUs
| and barely differentiated products. I liked when Apple had fewer
| products but they actually had a more distinct purpose.
| downrightmike wrote:
| They refresh it like every 3 years
| grzeshru wrote:
| Are these M-class chips available to be purchased on Digi-Key and
| Mouser? Do they have data sheets and recommended circuitry? I'd
| love to play with one just to see how difficult it is to
| integrate compared to, say, an stm8/32 or something.
| exabrial wrote:
| absolutely not, and even if they were, they are not documented
| in the least bit and require extraordinary custom OS and other
| BLOBs to run
| grzeshru wrote:
| Darn it. Oh well.
| downrightmike wrote:
| lol
| metaltyphoon wrote:
| Legit made me chuckle
| culopatin wrote:
| Did you really expect a yes?
| grzeshru wrote:
| I didn't know what to expect. I thought they may license it
| to other companies under particular clauses or some such.
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| 4P cores only ???.
| a_vanderbilt wrote:
| I'm hoping the higher efficiency gains and improved thermals
| offset that. The efficiency cores tend to have more impact on
| the Macs where multitasking is heavier.
| antonkochubey wrote:
| It's a tablet/ultrabook chip, are you expecting an Threadripper
| in them?
| treesciencebot wrote:
| ~38 TOPS at fp16 is amazing, if the quoted number if fp16 (ANE is
| fp16 according to this [1] but that honestly seems like a bad
| choice when people are going smaller and smaller even at the
| higher level datacenter cards so not sure why apple would use it
| instead of fp8 natively)
|
| [1]: https://github.com/hollance/neural-
| engine/blob/master/docs/1...
| imtringued wrote:
| For reference. The llama.cpp people are not going smaller. Most
| of those models run on 32 bit floats with the dequantization
| happening on the fly.
| haunter wrote:
| I love when Gruber is confidently wrong
| https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/04/28/m4-ipad-pros-gu...
| alberth wrote:
| Especially about Gurman, who he loves to hate on.
| atommclain wrote:
| Never understood the animosity, especially because it seems
| to only go one direction.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| He spills Apple's secrets. Gruber had him on his podcast
| once and called him a super villain in the Apple's
| universe, or something like this. It was cringeworthy
| MBCook wrote:
| As a longtime reader/listener I don't see him as hating
| Gurman at all.
| bombcar wrote:
| Wasn't it relatively well known that the M3 is on an expensive
| process and quickly getting to an M4 on a cheaper/higher yield
| process would be worth it?
| MBCook wrote:
| Yes but Apple has never gone iPad first on a new chip either,
| so I was with him in that I assumed it wouldn't be what they
| would do.
|
| "Let's make all our Macs look slower for a while!"
|
| So I was surprised as well.
| TillE wrote:
| > or Apple's silicon game is racing far ahead of what I
| considered possible
|
| Gruber's strange assumption here is that a new number means
| some major improvements. Apple has never really been consistent
| about sticking to patterns in product releases.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| This is a major improvement (over the M3).
|
| It's on a new fab node size.
|
| It also have more CPU cores than it's predessor (M3 with
| 8-core vs M4 with 10-cores).
| edward28 wrote:
| It's on TSMC n3E which is a slightly less dense but better
| yielding than the previous n3B.
| qwertyuiop_ wrote:
| Does anyone know how much of this giant leap performance as Apple
| puts it is really useful and perceived by end users of iPad. I am
| thinking gaming, art applications on iPad. What other major ipad
| use cases are out there that need this kind of performance boost.
| musictubes wrote:
| Making music. The iPad is much better for performing than a
| computer. There is a huge range of instruments, effects,
| sequencers, etc. available on the iPad. Things like physical
| modeling and chained reverb can eat up processor cycles so more
| performance is always welcomed.
|
| Both Final Cut Pro and Davinci resolve can also use as much
| power as you can give them though it isn't clear to me why
| you'd use an iPad instead of a Mac. They also announced a crazy
| multicam app for iPads and iPhones that allows remote control
| of a bunch of iPhones at the same time.
| bschmidt1 wrote:
| I imagine running LLMs and other AI models to produce a variety
| of art, music, video, etc.
| troupo wrote:
| "The M4 is so fast, it'll probably finish your Final Cut export
| before you accidentally switch apps and remember that that
| cancels the export entirely. That's the amazing power performance
| lead that Apple Silicon provides." #AppleEvent
|
| https://mastodon.social/@tolmasky/112400245162436195
| dlivingston wrote:
| Ha. That really highlights how absurd the toy of iPadOS is
| compared to the beasts that are the M-series chips.
|
| It's like putting a Ferrari engine inside of a Little Tikes toy
| car. I really have no idea who the target market for this
| device is.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| This is a straight-up lie, yes? Switching apps doesn't cancel
| the export.
| troupo wrote:
| Can neither confirm nor deny :) I've seen people complain
| about this on Twitter and Mastodon though.
|
| It's possible people are running into iOS limitations: it
| _will_ kill apps when it thinks there 's not enough memory.
| satertek wrote:
| Are there enough cores to allow user switching?
| daft_pink wrote:
| Who would buy a MacBook Air or mini or studio today with its
| older chips?
| rc_mob wrote:
| people on a budget
| alexpc201 wrote:
| People with a Macbook. You use the Macbook to work and the iPad
| to play, read, movies, draw, etc. plus you can use it as a
| second monitor for the Macbook.
| antonkochubey wrote:
| Someone who needs a MacBook Air or mini or studio, not an iPad
| daft_pink wrote:
| I'm just venting that their processor strategy doesn't make
| much sense. The iPad gets the M4, but the Mini and Studio and
| Mac Pro are still on M2 and the MacBooks are on M3.
|
| They've essentially undercut every Mac they currently sell by
| putting the M4 in the iPad and most people will never use
| that kind of power in an iPad.
|
| If you are going to spend $4k on a Mac don't you expect it to
| have the latest processor?
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| People who care about having the latest probably are
| waiting already anyway.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Probably 80%+ of the population can do everything they need
| or want to do for the next 5 (maybe even 8) years on an M2
| Air available for less than $1,500.
|
| I write this on a $1,000 late 2015 Intel MacBook Air.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| Am I wrong, or is raytracing on an iPad an _insane_ thing to
| announce? As far as I know, raytracing is the holy grail of
| computer graphics.
|
| It's something that became viable on consumer gaming desktops
| just a few years ago, and now we have real-time ray tracing on a
| tablet.
| vvvvvvvvvvvvv wrote:
| iPhones with A17 already have hardware ray tracing. Few
| applications/games support it at present.
| bluescrn wrote:
| Gotta make the loot boxes look even shinier, keep the gamblers
| swiping those cards.
| luyu_wu wrote:
| Why would it be? They announced the same for the A17 in the
| iPhone. Turns out it was a gimmick that caused over 11W of
| power draw. Raytracing is a brute force approach that cannot be
| optimized to the same level as rasterization. For now at least,
| it is unsuitable for mobile devices. Now if we could use the RT
| units for Blender that'd be great, but it's iPad OS...
| pshc wrote:
| It is kind of crazy to look back on. In the future we might
| look forward to path tracing and more physically accurate
| renderers. (Or perhaps all the lighting will be hallucinated by
| AI...?)
| alexpc201 wrote:
| I understand that they have delayed the announcement of these
| iPads until the M4 is ready, otherwise there is nothing
| interesting to offer to those who have an iPad Pro M2. I don't
| see the convenience of having a MacBook M3 and an iPad M4. If I
| can't run Xcode on an iPad M4, the MacBook is the smartest
| option; it has a bigger screen, more memory, and if you
| complement it with an iPad Air, you don't miss out on anything.
| dhx wrote:
| M2's Neural Engine had 15TOPS, M3's 18TOPS (+20%) vs. M4's 38TOPS
| (+111%).
|
| In transistor counts, M2 had 20BTr, M3 25BTr (+25%) and M4 has
| 28BTr (+12%).
|
| M2 used TSMC N5P (138MTr/mm2), M3 used TSMC N3 (197MTr/mm2, +43%)
| and M4 uses TSMC N3E (215MTr/mm2, +9%).[1][2]
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nm_process#%225_nm%22_proces...
|
| [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3_nm_process#%223_nm%22_proces...
| ttul wrote:
| An NVIDIA RTX 4090 generates 73 TFLOPS. This iPad gives you
| nearly half that. The memory bandwidth of 120 GBps is roughly
| 1/10th of the NVIDIA hardware, but who's counting!
| kkielhofner wrote:
| TOPS != TFLOPS
|
| RTX 4090 Tensor 1,321 TOPS according to spec sheet so roughly
| 35x.
|
| RTX 4090 is 191 Tensor TFLOPS vs M2 5.6 TFLOPS (M3 is tough
| to find spec).
|
| RTX 4090 is also 1.5 years old.
| imtringued wrote:
| Yeah where are the bfloat16 numbers for the neural engine?
| For AMD you can at least divide by four to get the real
| number. 16 TOPS -> 4 tflops within a mobile power envelope
| is pretty good for assisting CPU only inference on device.
| Not so good if you want to run an inference server but that
| wasn't the goal in the first place.
|
| What irritates me the most though is people comparing a
| mobile accelerator with an extreme high end desktop GPU.
| Some models only run on a dual GPU stack of those. Smaller
| GPUs are not worth the money. NPUs are primarily eating the
| lunch of low end GPUs.
| lemcoe9 wrote:
| The 4090 costs ~$1800 and doesn't have dual OLED screens,
| doesn't have a battery, doesn't weigh less than a pound, and
| doesn't actually do anything unless it is plugged into a
| larger motherboard, either.
| talldayo wrote:
| From Geekbench: https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-
| benchmarks
|
| Apple M3: 29685
|
| RTX 4090: 320220
|
| When you line it up like that it's kinda surprising the
| 4090 is _just_ $1800. They could sell it for $5,000 a pop
| and it would still be better value than the highest end
| Apple Silicon.
| nicce wrote:
| A bit off-topic since not applicable for iPad:
|
| Adding also M3 MAX: 86072
|
| I wonder the results if the test would be done on Asahi
| Linux some day. Apple implementation is fairly
| unoptimized AFAK.
| haswell wrote:
| Comparing these directly like this is problematic.
|
| The 4090 is highly specialized and not usable for general
| purpose computing.
|
| Whether or not it's a better value than Apple Silicon
| will highly depend on what you intend to do with it.
| Especially if your goal is to have a device you can put
| in your backpack.
| talldayo wrote:
| I'm not the one making the comparison, I'm just providing
| the compute numbers to the people who _did_. Decide for
| yourself what that means, the only conclusion I made on
| was compute-per-dollar.
| janalsncm wrote:
| And yet it's worth it for deep learning. I'd like to see a
| benchmark training Resnet on an iPad.
| brigade wrote:
| It would also blow through the iPad's battery in 4 minutes
| flat
| jocaal wrote:
| > The memory bandwidth of 120 GBps is roughly 1/10th of the
| NVIDIA hardware, but who's counting
|
| Memory bandwidth is literally the main bottleneck when it
| comes to the types of applications gpus are used for, so
| everyone is counting
| bearjaws wrote:
| We will have M4 laptops running 400B parameter models next
| year. Wild times.
| visarga wrote:
| And they will fit in the 8GB RAM with 0.02 bit quant
| gpm wrote:
| You can get a macbook pro with 128 GB of memory (for nearly
| $5000).
|
| Which still implies... a 2 bit quant?
| freeqaz wrote:
| There are some crazy 1/1.5 bit quants now. If you're
| curious I'll try to dig up the papers I was reading.
|
| 1.5bit can be done to existing models. The 1 bit (and
| less than 1 bit iirc) requires training a model from
| scratch.
|
| Still, the idea that we can have giant models running in
| tiny amounts of RAM is not completely far fetched at this
| point.
| gpm wrote:
| Yeah, I'm broadly aware and have seen a few of the
| papers, though I definitely don't try and track the state
| of the art here closely.
|
| My impression and experience trying low bit quants (which
| could easily be outdated by now) is that you are/were
| better off with a smaller model and a less aggressive
| quantization (provided you have access to said smaller
| model with otherwise equally good training). If that's
| changed I'd be interested to hear about it, but
| definitely don't want to make work for you digging up
| papers.
| moneywoes wrote:
| eli5 quant?
| gpm wrote:
| Quant is short for "quantization" here.
|
| LLMs are parameterized by a ton of weights, when we say
| something like 400B we mean it has 400 billion
| parameters. In modern LLMs those parameters are basically
| always 16 bit floating point numbers.
|
| It turns out you can get nearly as good results by
| reducing the precision of those numbers, for instance by
| using 4 bits per parameter instead of 16, meaning each
| parameter can only take on one of 16 possible values
| instead of one of 65536.
| adrian_b wrote:
| > The Most Powerful Neural Engine Ever
|
| While it is true that the claimed performance for M4 is better
| than for the current Intel Meteor Lake and AMD Hawk Point, it
| is also significantly lower (e.g. around half) than the AI
| performance claimed for the laptop CPU+GPU+NPU models that both
| Intel and AMD will introduce in the second half of this year
| (Arrow Lake and Strix Point).
| whynotminot wrote:
| > will introduce
|
| Incredible that in the future there will be better chips than
| what Apple is releasing now.
| hmottestad wrote:
| Don't worry. It's Intel we're talking about. They may say
| that it's coming out in 6 months, but that's never stopped
| them from releasing it in 3 years instead.
| adrian_b wrote:
| AMD is the one that has given more precise values (77
| TOPS) for their launch, their partners are testing the
| engineering samples and some laptop product listings seem
| to have been already leaked, so the launch is expected
| soon (presentation in June, commercial availability no
| more than a few months later).
| spxneo wrote:
| I literally don't give a fck about Intel anymore they are
| irrelevant
|
| The taiwanese silicon industrial complex deserves our
| dollars. Their workers are insanely hard working and it
| shows in its product.
| benced wrote:
| There's no Taiwanese silicon industrial complex, there's
| TSMC. The rest of Taiwanese fabs are irrelevant. Intel is
| the clear #3 (and looks likely-ish to overtake Samsung?
| We'll see).
| adrian_b wrote:
| The point is that it is a very near future, a few months
| away.
|
| Apple is also bragging very hyperbolically that the NPU
| they introduce right now is faster than all the older NPUs.
|
| So, while what Apple says, "The Most Powerful Neural Engine
| Ever" is true now, it will be true for only a few months.
| Apple has done a good job, so as it is normal, at launch
| their NPU is the fastest. However this does not deserve any
| special praise, it is just normal, as normal as the fact
| that the next NPU launched by a competitor will be faster.
|
| Only if the new Apple NPU would have been slower than the
| older models, that would have been a newsworthy failure. A
| newsworthy success would have been only if the new M4 would
| have had at least a triple performance than it has, so that
| the competitors would have needed more than a year to catch
| up with it.
| whynotminot wrote:
| Is this the first time you're seeing marketing copy? This
| is an entirely normal thing to do. Apple has an advantage
| with the SoC they are releasing today, and they are going
| to talk about it.
|
| I expect we will see the same bragging from Apple's
| competitors whenever they actually launch the chips
| you're talking about.
|
| Apple has real silicon shipping right now. What you're
| talking about doesn't yet exist.
|
| > A newsworthy success would have been only if the new M4
| would have had at least a triple performance than it has,
| so that the competitors would have needed more than a
| year to catch up with it.
|
| So you decide what's newsworthy now? Triple? That's so
| arbitrary.
|
| I certainly better not see you bragging about these
| supposed chips later if they're not three times faster
| than what Apple just released today.
| adrian_b wrote:
| I said triple, because the competitors are expected to
| have a double speed in a few months.
|
| If M4 were 3 times faster than it is, it would have
| remained faster than Strix Point and Arrow Lake, which
| would have been replaced only next year, giving supremacy
| to M4 for more than a year.
|
| If M4 were twice faster, it would have continued to share
| the first position for more than a year. As it is, it
| will be the fastest for one quarter, after which it will
| have only half of the top speed.
| whynotminot wrote:
| And then Apple will release M5 next year, presumably with
| another increase in TOPS that may well top their
| competitors. This is how product releases work.
| spxneo wrote:
| strongly doubt we will see M5 so soon
| handsclean wrote:
| I can't tell what you're criticizing. Yes, computers get
| faster over time, and future computers will be faster
| than the M4. If release cycles are offset by six months
| then it makes sense that leads only last six months in a
| neck-and-neck race. I'd assume after Arrow Lake and Strix
| Point the lead will then go back to M5 in six months,
| then Intel and AMD's whatever in another six, etc. I
| guess that's disappointing if you expected a multi-year
| leap ahead like the M1, but that's just a bad
| expectation, it never happens and nobody predicted or
| claimed it.
| intrasight wrote:
| > The Most Powerful Neural Engine Ever
|
| that would be my brain still - at least for now ;)
| spxneo wrote:
| damn bro thanks for this
|
| here i am celebrating not pulling the trigger on M2 128gb
| yesterday
|
| now im realizing M4 ain't shit
|
| will wait a few more months for what you described. will
| probably wait for AMD
|
| > Given that Microsoft has defined that only processors with
| an NPU with 45 TOPS of performance or over constitute being
| considered an 'AI PC',
|
| so already with 77 TOPS it just destroys M4. Rumoured to hit
| the market in 2 months or less.
| paulpan wrote:
| The fact that TSMC publishes their own metrics and target goals
| for each node makes it straightforward to compare the
| transistor density, power efficiency, etc.
|
| The most interesting aspect of the M4 is simply it's debuting
| on the iPad lineup, whereas historically it's always been on
| the iPhone (for A-series) and Macbook (for M-series). Makes
| sense given low expected yielded for the newest node for one of
| Apple's lower volume products.
|
| For the curious, the original TSMC N3 node had a lot of issues
| plus was very costly so makes sense to move away from it:
| https://www.semianalysis.com/p/tsmcs-3nm-conundrum-does-it-e...
| spenczar5 wrote:
| iPads are actually much higher volume than Macs. Apple sells
| about 2x to 3x as many tablets as laptops.
|
| Of course, phones dwarf both.
| andy_xor_andrew wrote:
| The iPad Pros, though?
|
| I'm very curious how much iPad Pros sell. Out of all the
| products in Apple's lineup, the iPad Pro confuses me the
| most. You can tell what a PM inside Apple thinks the iPad
| Pro is for, based on the presentation: super powerful M4
| chip! Use Final Cut Pro, or Garageband, or other desktop
| apps on the go! Etc etc.
|
| But in reality, who actually buys them, instead of an iPad
| Air? Maybe some people with too much money who want the
| latest gadgets? Ever since they debuted, the general
| consensus from tech reviewers on the iPad Pro has been
| "It's an amazing device, but no reason to buy it if you can
| buy a MacBook or an iPad Air"
|
| Apple really wants this "Pro" concept to exist for iPad
| Pro, like someone who uses it as their daily work surface.
| And maybe _some_ people exist like that (artists?
| architects?) but most of the time when I see an iPad in a
| "pro" environment (like a pilot using it for nav, or a
| nurse using it for notes) they're using an old 2018
| "regular" iPad.
| transpute wrote:
| iPadOS 16.3.1 can run virtual machines on M1/M2 silicon,
| https://old.reddit.com/r/jailbreak/comments/18m0o1h/tutor
| ial...
|
| Hypervisor support was removed from the iOS 16.4 kernel,
| hopefully it will return in iPadOS 18 for at least some
| approved devices.
|
| If not, Microsoft/HP/Dell/Lenovo Arm laptops with
| M3-competitive performance are launching soon, with
| mainline Linux support.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| > Microsoft/HP/Dell/Lenovo Arm laptops with
| M3-competitive performance are launching soon, with
| mainline Linux support.
|
| I have been seeking someone who'll be willing to put
| money on such a claim. I'll bet the other way. Perchance
| you're the person I seek, if you truly believe this?
| transpute wrote:
| Which part - launch timing, multicore performance or
| mainline Linux support?
| zarzavat wrote:
| I presume the sequence of events was: some developer at
| Apple thought it would be a great idea to port hypervisor
| support to iPad and their manager approves it. It gets
| all the way into the OS, then an exec gets wind of it and
| orders its removal because it allows users to subvert the
| App Store and Apple Rent. I doubt it's ever coming back.
|
| This is everything wrong with the iPad Pro in a nutshell.
| Fantastic hardware ruined by greed.
| intrasight wrote:
| Totally agree about "Pro". Imagine if they gave it a real
| OS. Someone yesterday suggested to dual-boot. At first I
| dismissed that idea. But after thinking about it, I can
| see the benefits. They could leave ipadOS alone and
| create a bespoke OS. They certainly have the resources to
| do so. It would open up so many new sales channels for a
| true tablet.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| >artists? architects?
|
| Ding ding ding ding ding! The iPad Pro is useful
| _primarily_ for those people. Or at least it _was_. The
| original selling point of the Pro was that it had[0] the
| Apple Pencil and a larger screen to draw on. The 2021
| upgrade gave the option to buy a tablet with 16GB of RAM,
| which you need for Procreate as that has very strict
| layer limits. If you look at the cost of dedicated
| drawing tablets with screens in them, dropping a grand on
| an iPad Pro and Pencil is surprisingly competitive.
|
| As for every other use case... the fact that all these
| apps have iPad versions now is great, _for people with
| cheaper tablets_. The iPad Air comes in 13 " now and
| that'll satisfy all but the most demanding Procreate
| users _anyway_ , for about the same cost as the Pro had
| back in 2016 or so. So I dunno. Maybe someone at Apple's
| iPad division just figured they need a halo product? Or
| maybe they want to compete with the Microsoft Surface
| without having to offer the flexibility (and
| corresponding jank) of a real computer? I dunno.
|
| [0] sold separately, which is one of my biggest pet
| peeves with tablets
| wpm wrote:
| iPads as a product line sure, but the M4 is only in the
| Pros at the moment which are likely lower volume than the
| MacBook Air.
| exabrial wrote:
| All I want is more memory bandwidth at lower latency. I've learnt
| that's the vast majority of felt responsiveness today. I could
| care less about AI and Neural Engine party tricks, stuff I might
| use once a day or week.
| bschmidt1 wrote:
| Bring on AI art, music, & games!
| oxqbldpxo wrote:
| All this powerful hardware on a laptop computer is like driving a
| Ferrari at 40 mph. It is begging for better use. If apple ever
| releases an ai robot that's going to change everything. Long ways
| to go, but when it arrives, it will be chatgptx100.
| adonese wrote:
| imaging a device so powerful as this new ipad, yet so useless. it
| baffles me that we have this great hardware only the software bit
| is lacking
| tiffanyh wrote:
| Nano-Texture
|
| I really hope this comes to all Apple products soon (iPhones, all
| iPads, etc).
|
| It's some of the best anti-reflective tech I've seen that keeps
| color and brightness deep & bright.
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| Will be interesting to see how it holds up on devices that get
| fingerprints and could be scratched though. Sort of wish Apple
| would offer it as a replaceable screen film.
| rnikander wrote:
| Any hope for a new iPhone SE? My 1st gen's battery is near dead.
| api wrote:
| Looks great. Now put it in a real computer. Such a waste to be in
| a jailed device that can't run anything.
| obnauticus wrote:
| Looks like their NPU (aka ANE) takes up about 1/3 of the die area
| of the GPU.
|
| Would be interesting to see how much they're _actually_ utilizing
| the NPU versus their GPU for AI workloads.
| noiv wrote:
| I got somewhat accustomed to new outrageous specs every year, but
| reading near the end that by 2030 Apple plans to be 'carbon
| neutral across the entire manufacturing supply chain and life
| cycle of every product' makes me hope one day my devices are not
| just a SUV on the data highway.
| gavin_gee wrote:
| I'm still rocking an iPad 6th generation. It's a video
| consumption device only. A faster CPU doesn't enable any new use
| cases.
|
| The only reason is the consumer's desire to buy more.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| New oled does look like quite a nice display though...
| doctor_eval wrote:
| Yep I have an OLED TV but was watching a movie on my (M1)
| iPad Pro last night, and realised how grey the blacks were.
|
| Once you see it, etc.
| nortonham wrote:
| and I still have a an original iPad Air first gen.....still
| works for basic things. Unsupported by apple now, but still
| usable.
| rvalue wrote:
| No mention of battery life. They keep making stuff thin, and
| unupgradeable. What's the point of buying an apple device that is
| going to wear out in 5 years?
| namdnay wrote:
| To be fair every MacBook I've had has lasted 10 years minimum
| TillE wrote:
| Battery replacement costs $200. It's not like you just have to
| throw it in the trash if the battery dies.
| EugeneOZ wrote:
| 1Tb model = EUR2750.
|
| For iPad, not an MBP laptop.
| JodieBenitez wrote:
| And here I am with my MB Air M1 with no plan to upgrade
| whatsoever because I don't need to...
|
| (yes, I understand this is about iPad, but I guess we'll see
| these M4 on the MB Air as well ?)
| NorwegianDude wrote:
| > M4 has Apple's fastest Neural Engine ever, capable of up to 38
| trillion operations per second, which is faster than the neural
| processing unit of any AI PC today.
|
| I always wonder what crazy meds Apple employees are on. Two RTX
| 4090s is quite common for hobbyist use, and that is 1321 TOPS
| each, making two over 69 times more than what Apple claims to be
| the fastest in the world. That performance is literally less than
| 1 % of a single H200.
|
| Talk about misleading marketing...
| akshayt wrote:
| They are referring to integrated npus in current cpus like in
| the intel cote ultra.
|
| They explicitly mentioned in the event that the industry refers
| to the neural engine as a NPU
| mort96 wrote:
| But the word they used isn't "NPU" or "neural engine" but "AI
| PC"??? If I build a PC with a ton of GPU power with the
| intention of using that compute for machine learning then
| that's an "AI PC"
| fwip wrote:
| The technicality they're operating on is that the "AI PC"
| doesn't have a "neural processing unit."
|
| > faster than the neural processing unit of any AI PC
| today.
| mort96 wrote:
| Ah. I guess you could argue that that's technically not
| directly false. That's an impressive level of being
| dishonest without being technically incorrect.
|
| By comparing the non-existent neural engine in your
| typical AI PC, you could claim that the very first SoC
| with an "NPU" is infinitely faster than the typical AI PC
| sroussey wrote:
| The phrase AI PC used by Intel and AMD is about having an
| NPU like in the Intel Ultra chips. These are ML only
| things, and can run without activating the GPU.
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/14/23998215/intel-core-
| ultr...
| SllX wrote:
| On paper you're absolutely correct. AI PC is marketing
| rubbish out of Wintel. Apple's doing a direct comparison to
| that marketing rubbish and just accepting that they'll
| probably have to play along with it.
|
| So going by the intended usage of this marketing rubbish,
| the comparison Apple is making isn't to GPUs. It's to
| Intel's chips that like Apple's, integrate, CPU, GPU, and
| NPU. They just don't name drop Intel anymore when they
| don't have to.
| mort96 wrote:
| If they literally just said that the iPad's NPU is faster
| than the NPU of any other computer it'd be fine, I would
| have no issue with it (though it makes you wonder, maybe
| that wouldn't have been true? Maybe Qualcomm or Rockchip
| have SoCs with faster NPUs, so the "fastest of any AI PC"
| qualifier is necessary to exclude those?)
| aurareturn wrote:
| "AI PC" is what Microsoft and the industry has deemed SoCs
| that have an NPU in it. It's not a term that Apple made up.
| It's what the industry is using.
|
| Of course, Apple has had an NPU in their SoC since the
| first iPhone with FaceID.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Microsoft/Intel are trying to push this "AI-enabled PC" or
| whatever for few months, to obsolete laptops without NPU
| stuffed in unused I/O die space of CPU. Apple weaponized
| that in this instance.
|
| 1: https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/12/what_is_an_ai_pc/
| stetrain wrote:
| "AI PC" is a specific marketing term from Intel and
| Microsoft. I don't think their specs include dual RTX
| 4090s.
|
| https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/intel-
| shares...
| oarth wrote:
| An AI PC is a PC suited to be used for AI... Dual 4090 is
| very suited for small scale AI.
|
| It might be a marketing term by Microsoft, but that is
| just dumb, and has nothing to do with what Apple says. If
| this was in relation to Microsofts "AI PC" then Apple
| should have written "Slower than ANY AI PC." instead, as
| the minimum requirements for "AI PC by Microsoft" seems
| to be 45 TOPS, and the M4 is too slow to qualify by the
| Microsoft definition.
|
| Are you heavily invested in Apple stock or somehting?
| When a company clearly lies and tries to mislead people,
| call them out on it, don't defend them. Companies are not
| your friend. Wtf.
| pertymcpert wrote:
| > Are you heavily invested in Apple stock or somehting?
|
| This isn't a nice thing to say.
| NorwegianDude wrote:
| The text clearly states faster than any AI PC, not that its
| faster than any NPUs integrated into a CPU.
|
| They could have written it correctly, but that sounds way
| less impressive, so instead they make up shit to make it
| sound very impressive.
| aurareturn wrote:
| https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/americas-partner-
| blog/2024/0...
|
| It's the term Microsoft, Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm decided
| to rally around. No need to get upset at Apple for using
| the same term as reference for comparison.
|
| Ps. Nvidia also doesn't like the term because of precisely
| what you said. But it's not Apple that decided to use this
| term.
| janalsncm wrote:
| I've never heard anyone refer to an NPU before. I've heard of
| GPU and TPU. But in any case, I don't know the right way to
| compare Apple's hardware to a 4090.
| syntaxing wrote:
| Definitely misleading but they're talking about "AI CPU" rather
| than GPUs. They're pretty much taking a jab at Intel.
| talldayo wrote:
| Watching this site recover after an Apple press release is like
| watching the world leaders deliberate Dr. Strangelove's
| suggestions.
| make3 wrote:
| (A H200 is a five digits datacenter GPU without a display port,
| it's not what they mean by PC, but your general point still
| stands)
| MBCook wrote:
| That's not a neural processing unit. It's a GPU.
|
| They said they had the fastest NPU in a PC. Not the fastest on
| earth (one of the nVidia cards, probably). Not the fastest way
| you could run something (probably a 4090 as you said). Just the
| fastest NPU shipping in a PC. Probably consumer PC.
|
| It's marketing, but it seems like a reasonable line to draw to
| me. It's not like when companies draw a line like "fastest car
| under $70k with under 12 cylinders but available in green from
| the factory".
| NorwegianDude wrote:
| Of course a GPU from Nvidia is also a NPU. People are
| spending billions each month on Nvidia, because it's a great
| NPU.
|
| The fact is that a GPU from Nvidia is a much faster NPU than
| a CPU from Apple.
|
| It is marketing as you say, but it's misleading marketing, on
| purpose. They could have simply written "the fastest
| integrated NPU of any CPU" instead. This is something Apple
| often does on purpose, and people believe it.
| MBCook wrote:
| A GPU does other things. It's designed to do something
| else. That's why we call it a _G_ PU.
|
| It just happens to be it's good at neural stuff too.
|
| There's another difference too. Apple's NPU is integrated
| in their chip. Intel and AMD are going the same. A 4090 is
| not integrated into a CPU.
|
| I'm somewhat guessing. Apple said NPU is the industry term,
| honestly I'd never heard it before today. I don't know if
| the official definition draws a distinction that would
| exclude GPUs or not.
|
| I simply think the way Apple presented things seemed
| reasonable. When they made that claim the fact that they
| might be comparing against a 4090 never entered my mind. If
| they had said it was the fastest way to run neural networks
| I would have questioned it, no doubt. But that wasn't the
| wording they used.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| NVidia GPUs basically have an NPU, in the form of Tensor
| units. They don't just happen to be good at matmul, they
| have specific hardware designed to run neural networka.
|
| There is no actual distinction. A GPU with Tensor
| cores(=matmul units) really does have an NPU just as much
| as a CPU with an NPU (=matmul units).
| oarth wrote:
| > A GPU does other things.
|
| Yes, and so does the M4.
|
| > It just happens to be it's good at neural stuff too.
|
| No, it's no coincidence. Nvidia has been focusing on
| neural nets, same as Apple.
|
| > There's another difference too. Apple's NPU is
| integrated in their chip.
|
| The neural processing capabilities of Nvidia
| products(Tensor Cores) are also integrated in the chip.
|
| > A 4090 is not integrated into a CPU.
|
| Correct, but nobody ever stated that. Apple stated that
| M4 was faster than any AI PC today, not that it's the
| fastest NPU integrated into a CPU. And by the way, the M4
| is also a GPU.
|
| > I don't know if the official definition draws a
| distinction that would exclude GPUs or not.
|
| A NPU can be a part of a GPU, a CPU or it's own chip.
|
| > If they had said it was the fastest way to run neural
| networks I would have questioned it,
|
| They said fastest NPU, neural processing unit. It's the
| term Apple and a few others use for their AI accelerator.
| The whole point of a AI accelerator is performance and
| efficiency. If something does a better job at it then
| it's a better AI accelerator.
| lostmsu wrote:
| You know G in GPU stands for Graphics, right? So if you
| want to play a game of words, NVidia's device dedicated
| to something else is 30 times faster than "fastest"
| Apple's device dedicated specifically to neural
| processing.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| At that point you could just call a GPU a CPU. There are
| manful distinctions to be made based on what the chip is
| used for exclusively.
| adrian_b wrote:
| Both Intel's and AMD's laptop CPUs include NPUs, and they are
| indeed slower than M4.
|
| Nevertheless, Apple's bragging is a little weird, because
| both Intel and AMD have already announced that in a few
| months they will launch laptop CPUs with much faster NPUs
| than Apple M4 (e.g. 77 TOPS for AMD), so Apple will hold the
| first place for only a very short time.
| MBCook wrote:
| But do you expect them to say it's the "soon to be second
| fastest"?
|
| It's the fastest available today. And when they release
| something faster (M4 Pro or Mac or Ultra or whatever)
| they'll call that the fastest.
|
| Seems fair to me.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| Why do you believe that? Announcements about future
| releases, by Intel and AMD, are not current future facts.
| If they deliver, then fine, but you speak like they're
| factual.
| phren0logy wrote:
| I have a MacBook M2 and a PC with a 4090 ("just" one of them) -
| the VRAM barrier is usually what gets me with the 4090 when I
| try to run local LLMs (not train them). For a lot of things, my
| MacBook is fast enough, and with more RAM, I can run bigger
| models easily. And, it's portable and sips battery.
|
| The marketing hype is overblown, but for many (most? almost
| all?) people, the MacBook is a much more useful choice.
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| Expanding on this, I have an M2Pro (mini) & a tower w/GPU...
| but for daily driving the M2Pro idles at 15-35W whereas the
| tower idles at 160W.
|
| Under full throttle/load, even though the M2Pro is rated as
| less-performant, it is only using 105W -- the tower/GPU are
| >450W!
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| All of the tech specs comparisons were extremely odd. Many
| things got compared to the M1, despite the most recent iPad
| having the M2. Heck, one of the comparisons was to the A11 chip
| that was introduced nearly 7 years ago.
|
| I generally like Apple products, but I cannot stand the way
| they present them. They always hide how it compares against the
| directly previous product.
| Aurornis wrote:
| It's a marketing trick. They're talking about _NPU_ s
| specifically, which haven't really been rolled out on the PC
| side.
|
| So while they're significantly slower than even casual gaming
| GPUs, they're technically the fastest _NPUs_ on the market.
|
| It's marketing speak.
| smith7018 wrote:
| You're calling $3,600 worth of GPUs "quite common for hobbyist
| use" and then comparing an iPad to a $40,000 AI-centric GPU.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| It's almost 70x more powerful. A 4 year old 3070 laptop was
| cheaper when it came out and has about 200 TOPS, 7 times as
| much. It's just factually incorrect to call it "faster than
| any AI PC", it's far slower than a cheaper laptop from 4
| years ago.
| astrange wrote:
| "Powerful" isn't the thing that matters for a battery-
| powered device. Power/perf is.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| If they thought that peak performance didn't matter, they
| wouldn't quote peak performance numbers in their
| comparison, and yet they did. Peak performance clearly
| matters, even in battery powered devices: many workloads
| are bursty and latency matters then, and there are
| workloads where you can be expected to be plugged in. In
| fact, one such workload is generative AI which is often
| characterized by burst usage where latency matters a lot,
| which is exactly what these NPUs are marketed towards.
| acdha wrote:
| AI PC is a specific marketing term which Intel is using for
| their NPU-equipped products where they're emphasizing low-
| power AI:
|
| https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/news/what-
| i...
|
| In that context it seems fair to make the comparison
| between a MacBook and the PC version which is closest on
| perf/watt rather than absolute performance on a space
| heater.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Then make a comparison on perf/watt. As it is, we have no
| way of knowing if it's better on a perf/watt basis than
| something like an RTX4050 which is 10 times faster and
| uses about 10 times the power.
|
| The PC version of accelerated AI workloads, in 2024, is a
| GPU with optimized matmul cores. It's the most powerful
| and most efficient way of accelerating neural network
| loads right now. Comparing to a suboptimal implementation
| and making it sound like you're comparing to the industry
| is misleading.
|
| If they are referring to a specific marketing term for a
| single company, they should do so explicitly. Otherwise,
| it's just being misleading, because it's not even
| including Apple's main competition, which is AMD and
| NVidia, and using a generic sounding term.
| password54321 wrote:
| Just two 4090s? If you don't have at least 8 4090s do not even
| call yourself a hobbyist.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Also the 38 TOPS figure is kind of odd. Intel had already shown
| laptop CPUs with 45 TOPS NPU[1] though it hasn't shipped, and
| Windows 12 is rumored to require 40 TOPS. If I'm doing math
| right, (int)38 falls short of both.
|
| 1: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/intel-
| says-l...
| citizenpaul wrote:
| This is standard apple advertising.The best whatever in the
| world that is the same as some standard thing with a different
| name. Apple is like clothing makers that "vanity size" their
| clothes. If you dont know that basically means a size 20 is 30
| size 21 is 31 and so on.
|
| Neural processing unit is basically a made up term at this
| point so of course they can have the fastest in the world.
| ProfessorZoom wrote:
| Apple Pencil Pro...
|
| Apple Pencil Ultra next?
|
| Apple Pencil Ultra+
|
| Apple Pencil Pro Ultra XDR+
| tsunamifury wrote:
| Its really saying something about how the tech sector has shifted
| due to the recent AI wave that Apple is announcing a chipset
| entirely apart from a product.
|
| This has never happened to my knowledge in this companies
| history? I could be wrong though, even the G3/G4s were launched
| as PowerMacs.
| marinhero wrote:
| I get frustrated seeing this go into the iPad and knowing that we
| can't get a shell, and run our own binaries there. Not even as a
| VM like [UserLAnd](https://userland.tech). I could effectively
| travel with one device less in my backpack but instead I have to
| carry two M chips, two displays, batteries, and so on...
|
| It's great to see this tech moving forward but it's frustrating
| to not see it translate into a more significant impact in the
| ways we work, travel and develop software.
| bschmidt1 wrote:
| Think the play is "consumer AI". Would you really write code on
| an iPad? And if you do, do you use an external keyboard?
| e44858 wrote:
| Tablets are the perfect form factor for coding because you
| can easily mount them in an ergonomic position like this:
| https://mgsloan.com/posts/comfortable-airplane-computing/
|
| Most laptops have terrible keyboards so I'd be using an
| external one either way.
| bschmidt1 wrote:
| Those keyboards are absolutely ridiculous, sorry.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| UTM can be built for iOS.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Hypervisor.framework is not exposed without a jailbreak which
| makes this quite limited in terms of usability and
| functionality.
| therealmarv wrote:
| So why should I buy any Apple Laptop with M3 chip now (if I'm not
| in hurry)? lol
| MBCook wrote:
| That's why a lot of people weren't expecting this an even
| questioned Mark Gurman's article saying it would happen.
| _ph_ wrote:
| If you are not in a hurry, you almost never should buy new
| hardware as the next generation will be around the corner. On
| the other side, it could be up to 12 months, until the M4 is
| available across the line. And for most tasks, a M3 is a great
| value too. One might watch how many AI features that would
| benefit from a M4 are presented at WWDC. But then, the next Mac
| OS release won't be out before October.
| therealmarv wrote:
| The Macbook Airs with M3 have been launched 2 months ago. 2
| months is really not that long ago, even in the Apple
| universe. For sure I'm waiting on what happens on WWDC!
| wiseowise wrote:
| They've just released MacBook Air 15 inch, new one is at least
| a year away.
| czbond wrote:
| Any idea when M4 will be in a mac pro?
| asow92 wrote:
| Why are we running these high end CPUs on tablets without the
| ability to run pro apps like Xcode?
|
| Until I can run Xcode on an iPad (not Swift Playgrounds), it's a
| pass for me. Hear me out: I don't want to bring both an iPad and
| Macbook on trips, but I need Xcode. Because of this, I have to
| pick the Macbook every time. I want an iPad, but the iPad doesn't
| want me.
| elpakal wrote:
| "It's not you, it's me" - Xcode to the iPad
| asow92 wrote:
| In all seriousness, you're right. Sandboxing Xcode but making
| it fully featured is surely a nightmare engineering problem
| for Apple. However, I feel like some kind of containerized
| macOS running in the app sandbox could be possible.
| al_borland wrote:
| WWDC is a month away. I'm hoping for some iPadOS updates to let
| people actually take advantage of the power they put in these
| tablets. Apple has often released new hardware before showing
| off new OS features to take advantage of it.
|
| I know people have been hoping for that for a long time, so I'm
| not holding my breath.
| asow92 wrote:
| My guess is that WWDC will be more focused on AI this year,
| but I will remain hopeful.
| smrtinsert wrote:
| Yep I have also no use for a touch screen device of that size.
| Happy to get an m4 mac air or whatever it will be called but
| I'm done with pads.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Didn't you want to play a reskinned bejewelled or subway surfer
| with 8k textures?
| Naomarik wrote:
| Didn't have to look long to find a comment mirroring how I feel
| about these devices. To me it feels like they're just adding
| power to an artificially castrated device I can barely do
| anything with. See no reason to upgrade from my original iPad
| Pro that's not really useful for anything. Just an overpowered
| device running phone software.
| asow92 wrote:
| I feel the same way. I just can't justify upgrading from my
| 10.5" Pro from years ago. It's got pro motion and runs most
| apps fine. Sure, the battery isn't great after all these
| years, but it's not like it's getting used long enough to
| notice.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| > I don't want to bring both an iPad and Macbook on trips, but
| I need ______
|
| Why not just make the iPad run MacOS and throw iPadOS into the
| garbage?
| asow92 wrote:
| I like some UX aspects of iPadOS, but need the functionality
| of macOS for work.
| reddalo wrote:
| iPadOS is still mainly a fork of iOS, a glorified mobile
| interface. They should really switch to a proper macOS
| system, now that the specs allow for it.
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| Visual studio code running from remote servers seemed like it
| was making great progress right until the AI trendiness thing
| took over... and hasn't seemed to advance much since. Hopefully
| the AI thing cools down and the efforts on remote tooling/dev
| environments continues onwards.
| deergomoo wrote:
| If we're going down that route then what's the point in
| putting good hardware in the device? It might as well just be
| a thin client. Having the same SoCs as their laptops and
| desktops but then relegating the iPad to something that needs
| to be chained to a "real" computer to do anything useful in
| the development space seems like a tremendous waste of
| potential.
| timmg wrote:
| Just wait until you buy an Apple Vision Pro...
|
| [It's got the same restrictions as an iPad, but costs more than
| a MacBookPro.]
| gpm wrote:
| This is in fact the thing that stopped me from buying an
| Apple Vision Pro.
| deergomoo wrote:
| I've been saying this for years, I would love to get a desktop
| Mac and use an iPad for the occasional bit of portable
| development I do away from a desk, like when I want to noodle
| on an idea in front of the TV.
|
| I'm very happy with my MacBook, but I don't like that the mega
| expensive machine I want to keep for 5+ years needs to be tied
| to a limited-life lithium battery that's costly and labour
| intensive to replace, just so I can sometimes write code in
| other rooms in my house. I know there's numerous remote options
| but...the iPad is right there, just lemme use it!
| pjot wrote:
| I've had success using cloud dev environments with an iPad -
| the key for me was also using a mouse and keyboard - after
| things weren't _that_ different
| w1nst0nsm1th wrote:
| I love and hate Apple as almost everyone else and have an iPad
| for 'consultation' only (reading, browsing, video), but on
| Android, you have IDEs for games dev (Godot), real android apps
| IDE (through F-Droid), Python, Java and C/C++ IDE (through
| Android Store) which are close enough of the Linux way...
|
| So the iPad devices could handle that too if Apple allowed
| it...
|
| Once Apple will enforce the European Union requirement to allow
| 'sideloading' on iPad, maybe we will be able to have nice
| things also on it.
|
| That could also be a good thing for Apple himself. A lot of
| people in Europe have a bad opinion of Apple (partly?) because
| of the closed (walled) garden of iPad/iOS and other
| technology/IP which make their portable devices apart of the
| Android ecosystem.
| paulcole wrote:
| As hard as it might be to believe, software developers are not
| the "pros" Apple is choosing to appeal to with the iPad Pro.
|
| Other jobs exist!
|
| People with disposable income who just want to buy the
| nicest/most expensive thing exist!
| eterevsky wrote:
| They are talking about iPad Pro as the primary example of M4
| devices. But iPads don't really seem to be limited by
| performance. Nobody I know compiles Chrome or does 3D renders on
| an iPad.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| It's all marketing toward people who aspire to be these
| creative types. Very, few people actually need it but it feels
| good when the iPad Air is missing a few key features that push
| you to the Pro.
|
| More practically, it should help with battery life. My
| understanding is energy usage scales non-linearly with demand.
| A more powerful chip running at 10% may be more battery
| efficient than a less powerful chip running at 20%
| FredPret wrote:
| Why does a tablet have a camera bump!? Just take out the camera.
| And let me run VSCode and a terminal.
| visarga wrote:
| LLaMA 3 tokens/second please, that's what we care about.
| bschmidt1 wrote:
| Hahah yes
| mlboss wrote:
| Only spec that I care about
| amai wrote:
| 16GB RAM ought to be enough for anybody! (Tim Cook)
| bmurphy1976 wrote:
| I love these advances and I really want a new iPad but I can't
| stand the 10"+ form factor. When will the iPad Mini get a
| substantial update?
| radicaldreamer wrote:
| Unfortunate that they got rid of the SIM card slot, Google Fi
| only supports physical sims for their "data only" sim feature.
| Dowwie wrote:
| Can anyone explain where the media engine resides and runs?
| wmf wrote:
| The whole iPad is basically one chip so... the media engine is
| in the M4. AFAIK it's a top-level core not part of the GPU but
| Marcan could correct me.
| nojvek wrote:
| I am awaiting the day when a trillion transistors will be put on
| a mobile device chewing 5W of peak power.
|
| It's going to be a radical future.
| vivzkestrel wrote:
| any benchmarks of how it stacks up to m1, m2 and m3?
| TheRealGL wrote:
| Who wrote this? "A fourth of the power", what happened to a
| quarter of the power?
| lenerdenator wrote:
| So long as it lets me play some of the less-intense 00's-10's era
| PC games in some sort of virtualization framework at decent
| framerates one day, and delivers great battery life as a backend
| web dev workstation-on-the-go the next, it's a good chip. The M2
| Pro does.
| rsp1984 wrote:
| _Together with next-generation ML accelerators in the CPU, the
| high-performance GPU, and higher-bandwidth unified memory, the
| Neural Engine makes M4 an outrageously powerful chip for AI._
|
| In case it is not abundantly clear by now: Apple's AI strategy is
| to put inference (and longer term even learning) on edge devices.
| This is completely coherent with their privacy-first strategy
| (which would be at odds with sending data up to the cloud for
| processing).
|
| Processing data at the edge also makes for the best possible user
| experience because of the complete independence of network
| connectivity and hence minimal latency.
|
| If (and that's a big if) they keep their APIs open to run any
| kind of AI workload on their chips it's a strategy that I
| personally really really welcome as I don't want the AI future to
| be centralised in the hands of a few powerful cloud providers.
| krunck wrote:
| Yes, that would be great. But without the ability for us to
| verify this who's to say they won't use the edge resources(your
| computer and electricity) to process data(your data) and then
| send the results to their data center? It would certainly save
| them a lot of money.
| astrange wrote:
| You seem to be describing face recognition in Photos like
| it's a conspiracy against you. You'd prefer the data center
| servers looking at your data?
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| When you can do all inference at the edge, you can keep it
| disconnected from the network if you don't trust the data
| handling.
|
| I happen to think they wouldn't, simply because sending this
| data back to Apple in any form that they could digest it is
| not aligned with their current privacy-first strategies. But
| if they make a device that still works if it stays
| disconnected, the neat thing is that you can just...keep it
| disconnected. You don't have to trust them.
| chem83 wrote:
| Except that's an unreasonable scenario for a smart phone.
| It doesn't prove that the minute the user goes online it
| won't be egressing data willingly or not.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| I don't disagree, although when I composed my comment I
| had desktop/laptop in mind, as I think genuinely useful
| on-device smartphone-AI is a ways of yet, and who knows
| what company Apple will be by then.
| bee_rider wrote:
| To use a proprietary system and not trust the vendor, you
| have to _never_ connect it. That's possible of course, but
| it seems pretty limiting, right?
| chem83 wrote:
| +1 The idea that it's on device, hence it's privacy-
| preserving is Apple's marketing machine speaking and that
| doesn't fly anymore. They have to do better to convince any
| security and privacy expert worth their salt that their
| claims and guarantees can be independently verified on behalf
| of iOS users.
|
| Google did some of that on Android, which means open-sourcing
| their on-device TEE implementation, publishing a paper about
| it etc.
| robbomacrae wrote:
| They already do this. It's called federated learning and its
| a way for them to use your data to help personalize the model
| for you and also (to a much lesser extent) the global model
| for everyone whilst still respecting your data privacy. It's
| not to save money, it's so they can keep your data private on
| device and still use ML.
|
| https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/12/11/131629/apple-
| ai-...
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| If you trust that Apple doesn't film you with the camera when
| you use the phone while sitting on the toilet. Why wouldn't
| you trust Apple now?
|
| It would have to be a huge conspiracy with all Apples
| employees. And you can easily just listen to the network and
| see if they do it or not.
| xanderlewis wrote:
| I find it somewhat hard to believe that wouldn't be in
| contravention of some law or other. Or am I wrong?
|
| Of course we can then worry that companies are breaking the
| law, but you have to draw the line somewhere... and what
| have they to gain anyway?
| joelthelion wrote:
| >n case it is not abundantly clear by now: Apple's AI strategy
| is to put inference (and longer term even learning)
|
| I'm curious: is anyone seriously using apple hardware to train
| Ai models at the moment? Obviously not the big players, but I
| imagine it might be a viable option for Ai engineers in
| smaller, less ambitious companies.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Yes, it can be more cost effective for smaller businesses to
| do all their work on Mac Studios, versus having a dedicated
| Nvidia rig plus Apple or Linux hardware for your workstation.
|
| Honestly, you can train basic models just fine on M-Series
| Max MacBook Pros.
| nightski wrote:
| A decked out Mac Studio is like $7k for far less GPU power.
| I find that highly unlikely.
| inciampati wrote:
| But you get access to a very large amount of RAM for that
| price.
| softfalcon wrote:
| Don't attack me, I'm not disagreeing with you that an
| nVidia GPU is far superior at that price point.
|
| I simply want to point out that these folks don't really
| care about that. They want a Mac for more reasons than
| "performance per watt/dollar" and if it's "good enough",
| they'll pay that Apple tax.
|
| Yes, yes, I know, it's frustrating and they could get
| better Linux + GPU goodness with an nVidia PC running
| Ubuntu/Arch/Debian, but macOS is painless for the average
| science AI/ML training person to set up and work with.
| There are also known enterprise OS management solutions
| that business folks will happily sign off on.
|
| Also, $7000 is chump change in the land of "can I get
| this AI/ML dev to just get to work on my GPT model I'm
| using to convince some VC's to give me $25-500 million?"
|
| tldr; they're gonna buy a Mac cause it's a Mac and they
| want a Mac and their business uses Mac's. No amount of
| "but my nVidia GPU = better" is ever going to convince
| them otherwise as long as there is a "sort of" reasonable
| price point inside Apple's ecosystem.
| brookst wrote:
| What Linux setup do you recommend for 128GB of GPU
| memory?
| TylerE wrote:
| A non-decked out Mac Studio is a hell of a machine for
| $1999.
|
| Do you also compare cars by looking at only the super
| expensive limited editions, with every single option box
| ticked?
|
| I'd also point out that said 3 year old $1999 Mac Studio
| that I'm typing this on already runs ML models usefully,
| maybe 40-50% of the old 3000-series Nvidia machine it
| replaces, while using literally less than 10% of the
| power and making a tiny tiny fraction of the noise.
|
| Oh, and it was cheaper. And not running Windows.
| bee_rider wrote:
| They are talking about training models, though. Run is a
| bit ambiguous, is that also what you mean?
| TylerE wrote:
| No.
|
| For training the Macs do have some interesting advantages
| due to the unified memory. The GPU cores have access to
| all of system RAM (and also the system RAM is
| _ridiculously_ fast - 400GB /sec when DDR4 is barely
| 30GB/sec, which has a lot of little fringe benefits of
| it's own, part of why the Studio feels like an even more
| powerful machine than it actually is. It's just super
| snappy and responsive, even under heavy load.)
|
| The largest consumer NVidia card has 22GB of useable RAM.
|
| The $1999 Mac has 32GB, and for $400 more you get 64GB.
|
| $3200 gets you 96GB, and more GPU cores. You can hit the
| system max of 192GB for $5500 on an Ultra, albeit it with
| the lessor GPU.
|
| Even the recently announced 6000-series AI-oriented
| NVidia cards max out at 48GB.
|
| My understanding is a that a lot of enthusiasts are using
| Macs for training because for certain things having more
| RAM is just enabling.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Not all of us who own small businesses are out here
| speccing AMD Ryzen 9s and RTX 4090s for workstations.
|
| You can't lug around a desktop workstation.
| skohan wrote:
| > a dedicated Nvidia rig
|
| I am honestly shocked Nvidia has been allowed to maintain
| their moat with cuda. It seems like AMD would have a ton to
| gain just spending a couple million a year to implement all
| the relevant ML libraries with a non-cuda back-end.
| Q6T46nT668w6i3m wrote:
| Yes, there're a handful of apps that use the neural engine to
| fine tune models to their data.
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| Not really (I work on AI/ML Infrastructure at a well known
| tech company and talk regularly w/ our peer companies).
|
| That said, inference on apple products is a different story.
| There's definitely interest in inference on the edge. So far
| though, nearly everyone is still opting for inference in the
| cloud for two reasons:
|
| 1. There's a lot of extra work involved in getting ML/AI
| models ready for mobile inference. And this work is different
| for iOS vs. Android 2. You're limited on which exact device
| models will run the thing optimally. Most of your customers
| won't necessarily have that. So you need some kind of
| fallback. 3. You're limited on what kind of models you can
| actually run. You have way more flexibility running inference
| in the cloud.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Pytorch actually has surprisingly good support for Apple
| Silicon. Occasionally an operation needs to use CPU
| fallback but many applications are able to run inference
| entirely off of the CPU cores.
| rcarmo wrote:
| And there is a lot of work being done with mlx.
| ein0p wrote:
| I've found it to be pretty terrible compared to CUDA,
| especially with Huggingface transformers. There's no
| technical reason why it has to be terrible there though.
| Apple should fix that.
| throwitaway222 wrote:
| Inference on the edge is a lot like JS - just drop a crap
| ton of data to the front end, and let it render.
| gopher_space wrote:
| A cloud solution I looked at a few years ago could be
| replicated (poorly) in your browser today. In my mind the
| question has become one of determining _when_ my model is
| useful enough to detach from the cloud, not whether that
| should happen.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Power for power, any thoughts on what mobile inference
| looks like vs doing it in the cloud?
| deanishe wrote:
| Isn't Apple hardware too expensive to make that worthwhile?
| brookst wrote:
| For business-scale model work, sure.
|
| But you can get an M2 Ultra with 192GB of UMA for $6k or
| so. It's very hard to get that much GPU memory at all, let
| alone at that price. Of course the GPU processing power is
| anemic compared to a DGX Station 100 cluster, but the mac
| is $143,000 less.
| cafed00d wrote:
| I like to think back to 2011 and paraphrase what people were
| saying: "Is anyone seriously using gpu hardware to write nl
| translation software at the moment?"
|
| "No, we should be use cheap commodity abundantly available
| cpus and orchestrate then behind cloud magic to write our nl
| translation apps"
|
| or maybe "no we should build purpose built high performance
| computing hardware to write our nl translation apps"
|
| Or perhaps in the early 70s "is anyone seriously considering
| personal computer hardware to ...". "no, we should just buy
| IBM mainframes ..."
|
| I don't know. Im probably super biased. I like the idea of
| all this training work breaking the shackles of
| cloud/mainframe/servers/off-end-user-device and migrating to
| run on peoples devices. It feels "democratic".
| dylan604 wrote:
| Does one need to train an AI model on specific hardware, or
| can a model be trained in one place and then used somewhere
| else? Seems like Apple could just run their fine tuned model
| called Siri on each device. Seems to me like asking for
| training on Apple devices is missing the strategy. Unless of
| course, it's just for purely scientific $reasons like "why
| install Doom on the toaster?" vs doing it for a purpose.
| xanderlewis wrote:
| It doesn't _require_ specific hardware; you can train a
| neural net with pencil and paper if you have enough time.
| Of course, some pieces of hardware are more efficient than
| others for this.
| robbomacrae wrote:
| I don't think this is what you meant but it matches the spec:
| federated learning is being used by Apple to train models for
| various applications and some of that happens on device
| (iphones/ipads) with your personal data before its hashed and
| sent up to the mothership model anonymously.
|
| https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/12/11/131629/apple-
| ai-...
| avianlyric wrote:
| Apple are. Their "Personal Voice" feature fine tunes a voice
| model on device using recordings of your own voice.
|
| An older example is the "Hey Siri" model, which is fine tuned
| to your specific voice.
|
| But with regards to on device training, I don't think anyone
| is seriously looking at training a model from scratch on
| device, that doesn't make much sense. But taking models and
| fine tuning them to specific users makes a whole ton of
| sense, and an obvious approach to producing "personal" AI
| assistants.
|
| [1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/104993
| legitster wrote:
| > This is completely coherent with their privacy-first strategy
| (which would be at odds with sending data up to the cloud for
| processing).
|
| I feel like people are being a bit naive here. Apple's "Privacy
| First" strategy was a _marketing_ spin developed in response to
| being dead-last in web-development /cloud computing/smart
| features.
|
| Apple has had no problem changing their standards by 180
| degrees and being blatantly anti-consumer whenever they have a
| competitive advantage to do so.
| seec wrote:
| Don't bother the fanboys have an Apple can't do anything
| wrong/malicious. At this point it's closer to a religion than
| ever.
|
| You would be amazed at the response of some of them when I
| point out some shit Apple does that make their products
| clearly lacking for the price, the cognitive dissonance is so
| strong they don't know how to react in any other way than
| lying or pretending it doesn't matter.
| acdha wrote:
| If you're annoyed about quasi-religious behavior, consider
| that your comment has nothing quantifiable and contributed
| nothing to this thread other than letting us know that you
| don't like Apple products for non-specific reasons. Maybe
| you could try to model the better behavior you want to see?
| n9 wrote:
| Your comment is literally more subjective, dismissive, and
| full of FUD than any other on on this thread. Check
| yourself.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| Of course! The difference is that, for the time being, my
| incentives are aligned with theirs in regards to preserving
| my privacy.
|
| The future is always fungible. Anyone can break whatever
| trust they've built _very_ quickly. But, like the post you
| are replying to, I have no qualms about supporting companies
| that are currently doing things in my interest and don 't
| have any clear strategic incentive to violate that trust.
|
| Edit: that same incentive structure would apply to NVIDIA,
| afaik
| jajko wrote:
| I can't agree with your comment. apple has all the
| incentives to monetize your data, that's the whole value of
| Google and Meta. And they are already heading into ad-
| business earning billions last I've checked. Hardware ain't
| selling as much as before, this isn't going to change for
| the better in foreseeable future.
|
| The logic is exactly same as ie Meta claims - we will
| pseudoanonymize your data, so technically your specific
| privacy is just yours, see nothing changed. But you are in
| various target groups for ads, plus we know how 'good'
| those anon efforts are when money are at play and
| corporations are only there to earn as much money as
| possible. Rest is PR.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| Persuasive, thank you
| legitster wrote:
| I'll disagree with your disagreement - in part at least.
| Apple is still bigger than Meta or Google. Even if they
| had a strong channel to serve ads or otherwise monetize
| data, the return would represent pennies on the dollar.
|
| And Apple's privacy stance is a _moat_ against these
| other companies making money off of their customer base.
| So for the cost of pennies on the dollar, they protect
| their customer base and ward off competition. That 's a
| pretty strong incentive.
| robbomacrae wrote:
| Having worked at Apple I can assure you it's not just spin.
| It's nigh on impossible to get permission to even compare
| your data with another service inside of Apple and even if
| you do get permission the user ids and everything are
| completely different so theres no way to match up users.
| Honestly its kind of ridiculous the lengths they go to and
| makes development an absolute PITA.
| briandear wrote:
| As an Apple alum, I can agree with everything you've said.
| legitster wrote:
| That could very well be true, but I also think it could
| change faster than people realize. Or that Apple has the
| ability to compartmentalize (kind of like how Apple can
| advocate for USB C adoption in some areas and fight it in
| others).
|
| I'm not saying this to trash Apple - I think it's true of
| any corporation. If Apple starts losing revenue in 5 years
| because their LLM isn't good enough because they don't have
| enough data, they are still going to take it and have some
| reason justifying why _theirs_ is privacy focused and
| everyone else is not.
| croes wrote:
| It isn't privacy if Apple knows.
|
| They are the gatekeeper of your data for their benefit not
| yours.
| jajko wrote:
| Yes at the end its just some data representing user's trained
| model. Is there a contractual agreement with users that apple
| will never ever transfer a single byte of those, otherwise
| huge penalties will happen? If not, its pinky PR promise that
| sounds nice.
| threeseed wrote:
| Apple publicly documents their privacy and security
| practices.
|
| At minimum, laws around the world prevent companies from
| knowingly communicating false information to consumers.
|
| And in many countries the rules around privacy are much
| more stringent.
| croes wrote:
| I bet Boeing also has documentation about their security
| practices.
|
| Talk is cheap and in Apple's case it's part of their PR.
| bamboozled wrote:
| What is wrong with Boeing's security?
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| > What is wrong with Boeing's security?
|
| Too many holes.
| threeseed wrote:
| But what does that have to do with the price of milk in
| Turkmenistan.
|
| Because Boeing's issues have nothing to do with privacy
| or security and since they are not consumer facing have
| no relevance to what we are talking about.
| dheera wrote:
| > This is completely coherent with their privacy-first strategy
|
| Apple has never been privacy-first in practice. They give you
| the illusion of privacy but in reality it's a closed-source
| system and you are forced to trust Apple with your data.
|
| They also make it a LOT harder than Android to execute your own
| MITM proxies to inspect what exact data is being sent about you
| by all of your apps including the OS itself.
| deadmutex wrote:
| Yeah, given that they resisted putting RCS in iMessage so
| long, I am a bit skeptical about the whole privacy narrative.
| Especially when Apple's profit is at odds with user privacy.
| notaustinpowers wrote:
| From my understanding, the reason RCS was delayed is
| because Google's RCS was E2EE only in certain cases (both
| users using RCS). But also because Google's RCS runs
| through Google servers.
|
| If Apple enabled RCS in messages back then, but the
| recipient was not using RCS, then Google now has the
| decrypted text message, even when RCS advertises itself as
| E2EE. With iMessage, at least I know all of my messages are
| E2EE when I see a blue bubble.
|
| Even now, RCS is available on Android if using Google
| Messages. Yes, it's pre-installed on all phones, but OEMs
| aren't required to use it as the default. It opens up more
| privacy concerns because now I don't know if my messages
| are secure. At least with the green bubbles, I can assume
| that anything I send is not encrypted. With RCS, I can't be
| certain unless I verify the messaging app the recipient is
| using and hope they don't replace it with something else
| that doesn't support RCS.
| vel0city wrote:
| You know what would really help Apple customers increase
| their privacy when communicating with non-Apple devices?
|
| Having iMessage available to everyone regardless of their
| mobile OS.
| notaustinpowers wrote:
| Agreed. While I have concerns regarding RCS, Apple's
| refusal to make iMessage an open platform due to customer
| lock-in is ridiculous and anti-competitive.
| fabrice_d wrote:
| How is RCS a win on the privacy front? It's not even e2e
| encrypted in an interoperable way (Google implementation is
| proprietary).
| acdha wrote:
| RCS is a net loss for privacy: it gives the carriers
| visibility into your social graph and doesn't support end
| to end encryption. Google's PR campaign tried to give the
| impression that RCS supports E2EE but it's restricted to
| their proprietary client.
| ben_w wrote:
| You say that like open source isn't also an illusion of
| trust.
|
| The reality is, there's too much to verify, and not enough
| interest for the "many eyeballs make all bugs shallow"
| argument.
|
| We are, all of us, forced to trust, forced to go without the
| genuine capacity to verify. It's not great, and the best we
| can do is look for incentives and try to keep those aligned.
| dheera wrote:
| I don't agree with relying on the many eyeballs argument
| for security, but from a privacy standpoint, I do think at
| least the availability of source to MY eyeballs, as well as
| the ability to modify, recompile, and deploy it, is better
| than "trust me bro I'm your uncle Steve Jobs and I know
| more about you than you but I'm a good guy".
|
| If you want to, for example, compile a GPS-free version of
| Android that appears like it has GPS but in reality just
| sends fake coordinates to keep apps happy thinking they got
| actual permissions, it's fairly straightforward to make
| this edit, and you own the hardware so it's within your
| rights to do this.
|
| Open-source is only part of it; in terms of privacy, being
| able to see what all is being sent in/out of my device is
| is arguably more important than open source. Closed source
| would be fine if they allowed me to easily inject my own
| root certificate for this purpose. If they aren't willing
| to do that, including a 1-click replacement of the
| certificates in various third-party, certificate-pinning
| apps that are themselves potential privacy risks, it's a
| fairly easy modification to any open source system.
|
| A screen on my wall that flashes every JSON that gets sent
| out of hardware that I own should be my right.
| ben_w wrote:
| > Open-source is only part of it; in terms of privacy,
| being able to see what all is being sent in/out of my
| device is is arguably more important than open source.
|
| I agree; unfortunately it feels as if this ship has not
| only sailed, but the metaphor would have to be expanded
| to involve the port at well.
|
| Is it even possible, these days, to have a functioning
| experience with no surprise network requests? I've tried
| to limit mine via an extensive hosts file list, but that
| _did_ break stuff even a decade ago, and the latest
| version of MacOS doesn 't seem to fully respect the hosts
| file (weirdly it _partially_ respects it?)
|
| > A screen on my wall that flashes every JSON that gets
| sent out of hardware that I own should be my right.
|
| I remember reading a tale about someone, I think it was a
| court case or an audit, who wanted every IP packet to be
| printed out on paper. Only backed down when the volume
| was given in articulated lorries per hour.
|
| I sympathise, but you're reminding me of that.
| ajuc wrote:
| Open source is like democracy. Imperfect and easy to fuck
| up, but still by far the best thing available.
|
| Apple is absolutism. Even the so called "enlightened"
| absolutism is still bad compared to average democracy.
| wan23 wrote:
| > Apple has never been privacy-first in practice > They also
| make it a LOT harder than Android to execute your own MITM
| proxies
|
| I would think ease of MITM and privacy are opposing concerns
| sergiotapia wrote:
| > privacy-first strategy
|
| That's just their way of walled gardening apple customers. Then
| they can extort devs and other companies dry without any
| middle-men.
| MyFirstSass wrote:
| I've been saying the same thing since ANE and the incredible
| new chips with shared ram, suddenly everyone could run capable
| local models - but then Apple decided to be catastrophically
| stingy once again putting ridiculous 8gb's of ram in these new
| iPads' and their new macbook air's destroying having a
| widespread "intelligent local siri" because now half the new
| generation can't run anything.
|
| Apple is an amazing powerhouse but also disgustingly elitist
| and wasteful if not straight up vulgar in its profit motives.
| There's really zero idealism there despite their romantic and
| creative legacy.
|
| There's always some straight idiotic limitations in their
| otherwise incredible machines, with no other purpose than to
| create planned obsolescence, "PRO" exclusivity and piles
| e-waste.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > This is completely coherent with their privacy-first strategy
| (which would be at odds with sending data up to the cloud for
| processing).
|
| I mean yeah, that makes good marketing copy, but its more due
| to reducing latency and keeping running costs down.
|
| _but_ as this is mostly marketing fluff we 'll need to
| actually see how it performs before casting judgment on how
| "revolutionary" it is.
| lunfard000 wrote:
| Prob beacuse they are like super-behind in the cloud space, it
| is not like they wouldn't like to sell the service. They
| ignored photos privacy quite a few times in the icloud.
| dylan604 wrote:
| is it surprising since they effectively given the finger to
| data center hardware designs?
| jablongo wrote:
| So for hardware accelerated training with something like
| PyTorch, does anyone have a good comparison between Metal vs
| Cuda, both in terms of performance and capabilities?
| s1k3s wrote:
| For everyone else who doesn't understand what this means, he's
| saying Apple wants you to be able to run models on their
| devices, just like you've been doing on nvidia cards for a
| while.
| nomel wrote:
| I think he's saying they want to make local AI a first class,
| _default_ , capability, which is _very_ unlike buying a $1k
| peripheral to enable it. At this point (though everyone seems
| to be working on it), other companies need to include a
| gaming GPU in every laptop, _and tablet_ now (lol), to enable
| this.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > In case it is not abundantly clear by now: Apple's AI
| strategy is to put inference (and longer term even learning) on
| edge devices. This is completely coherent with their privacy-
| first strategy (which would be at odds with sending data up to
| the cloud for processing).
|
| Their primary business goal is to sell hardware. Yes, they've
| diversified into services and being a shopping mall for all,
| but it is about selling luxury hardware.
|
| The promise of privacy is one way in which they position
| themselves, but I would not bet the bank on that being true
| forever.
| bamboozled wrote:
| As soon as the privacy thing goes away, I'd say a major part
| of their customer base goes away too. Most people use android
| so they don't get "hacked" if Apple is doing the hacking, I'd
| just buy a cheaper alternative.
| Draiken wrote:
| At least here in Brazil, I've never heard such arguments.
|
| Seems even more unlikely for non technical users.
|
| It's just their latest market campaign, as far as I can
| tell. The vast majority of people buy iPhones because of
| the status it gives.
| everly wrote:
| They famously had a standoff with the US gov't over the
| Secure Enclave.
|
| Marketing aside, all indications point to the iOS
| platform being the most secure mobile option (imo).
| elzbardico wrote:
| This is a prejudiced take. Running AI tasks locally on
| the device definitely is a giant improvement for the user
| experience.
|
| But not only that, Apple CPUs are objectively leagues
| ahead of their competition in the mobile space. I am
| still using a IPhone released in 2020 with absolutely no
| appreciable slow down or losses in perceived performance.
| Because even a 4 years old IPhone still has specs that
| don't lag behind by much the equivalent Android phones, I
| still receive the latest OS updates, and because frankly,
| Android OS is mess.
|
| If I cared about status, I would have changed my phone
| already for a new one.
| kernal wrote:
| >Apple CPUs are objectively leagues ahead of their
| competition in the mobile space
|
| This is a lie. The latest Android SoCs are just as
| powerful as the A series.
|
| >Because even a 4 years old IPhone still has specs that
| don't lag behind by much the equivalent Android phones, I
| still receive the latest OS updates, and because frankly,
| Android OS is mess.
|
| Samsung and Google offer 7 years of OS and security
| updates. I believe that beats the Apple policy.
| martimarkov wrote:
| Strangle Android 14 seems to not be available for s20
| phone which was released in 2020?
|
| Or am I mistaken here?
| Jtsummers wrote:
| > Samsung and Google offer 7 years of OS and security
| updates. I believe that beats the Apple policy.
|
| On the second part:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPadOS_version_history
|
| The last iPads to stop getting OS updates (including
| security, to be consistent with what Samsung and Google
| are pledging) got 7 and 9 years of updates each (5th gen
| iPad and 1st gen iPad Pro). The last iPhones to lose
| support got about 7 years each (iPhone 8 and X). 6S, SE
| (1st), and 7 got 9 and 8 years of OS support with
| security updates. The 5S (released in 2013) last got a
| security update in early 2023, so also about 9 years, the
| 6 (2014) ended at the same time so let's call it 8 years.
| The 4S, 2011, got 8 years of OS support. 5 and 5C got 7
| and 6 years of support (5C was 5 in a new case, so was
| always going to get a year less in support).
|
| Apple has not, that I've seen at least, ever established
| a long term support policy on iPhones and iPads, but the
| numbers show they're doing at least as well as what
| Samsung and Google are _promising_ to do, but have not
| yet done. And they 've been doing this for more than a
| decade now.
|
| EDIT:
|
| Reworked the iOS numbers a bit, down to the month (I was
| looking at years above and rounding, so this is more
| accurate). iOS support time by device for devices that
| cannot use the current iOS 17 (so the XS and above are
| not counted here) in months: 1st - 32
| 3G - 37 3GS - 56 4 - 48 4S - 93
| 5 - 81 5C - 69 5S - 112 6 - 100
| 6S - 102 SE - 96 7 - 90 8 - 78
| X - 76
|
| The average is 72.5 months, just over 6 years. If we
| knock out the first 2 phones (both have somewhat
| justifiable short support periods, massive hardware
| changes between each and their successor) the average
| jumps to just shy of 79 months, or about 6.5 years.
|
| The 8 and X look like regressions, but their last updates
| were just 2 months ago (March 21, 2024) so still a good
| chance their support period will increase and exceed the
| 7 year mark like every model since the 5S. We'll have to
| see if they get any more updates in November 2024 or
| later to see if they can hit the 7 year mark.
| kernal wrote:
| >The last iPads to stop getting OS updates (including
| security, to be consistent with what Samsung and Google
| are pledging) got 7 and 9 years of updates each (5th gen
| iPad and 1st gen iPad Pro). The last iPhones to lose
| support got about 7 years each (iPhone 8 and X). 6S, SE
| (1st), and 7 got 9 and 8 years of OS support with
| security updates. The 5S (released in 2013) last got a
| security update in early 2023, so also about 9 years, the
| 6 (2014) ended at the same time so let's call it 8 years.
| The 4S, 2011, got 8 years of OS support. 5 and 5C got 7
| and 6 years of support (5C was 5 in a new case, so was
| always going to get a year less in support).
|
| These are very disingenuous numbers that don't tell the
| complete story. An iPhone 7 getting a single critical
| security patch does not take into account the hundreds of
| security patches it did not receive when it stopped
| receiving support. It received that special update
| because Apple likely was told or discovered it was being
| exploited in the wild.
|
| Google and Samsung now offer 7 years of OS upgrades and
| 84 months of full security patches. Selectively patching
| a phone that is out of the support window with a single
| security patch does not automatically increase its EOL
| support date.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| They made that pledge for the Pixel 8 (2023). Let's
| revisit this in 2030 and see what the nature of their
| support is at that point and how it compares to Apple's
| support for iPhone devices. We can't make a real
| comparison since they haven't done anything yet, only
| made promises.
|
| What we can do _today_ is note that Apple never made a
| promise, but did provide very long security support for
| their devices despite that. They 've already met or come
| close to the Samsung/Google pledge (for one device) on
| almost half their devices, and those are all the recent
| ones (so it's not a downward trend of good support then
| bad support, but rather mediocre/bad support to improving
| and increasingly good support).
|
| Another fun one:
|
| iPhone XS was released in September 2018, it is on the
| current iOS 17 release. In the absolute worst case of it
| losing iOS 18 support in September, it will have received
| 6 full years of support in both security and OS updates.
| It'll still hit 7 years (comfortably) of security
| updates. If it does get iOS 18 support in September, then
| Apple will hit the Samsung/Google pledge 5 years before
| Samsung/Google can even demonstrate their ability to
| follow through (Samsung has a chance, but Google has no
| history of commitment).
|
| I have time to kill before training for a century ride:
|
| Let's ignore everything before iPhone 4S, they had short
| support periods that's just a fact and hardly worth
| investigating. This is an analysis of devices released in
| 2011 and later, when the phones had, mostly, matured as a
| device so we should be expecting longer support periods.
| These are the support periods when the phones were able
| to run the still-current iOS versions, not counting later
| security updates or minor updates but after the major iOS
| version had been deprecated. As an example, for the
| iPhone 4S it had support from 2011-2016. In 2016 its OS,
| iOS 9, was replaced by iOS 10. Here are the numbers:
| 4S - 5 years 5 - 5 years 5C
| - 4 years (decreased, 5 hardware but released a year
| later in a different case) 5S - 6 years
| 6 - 5 years (decreased, not sure why) 6S
| - 7 years (hey, Apple did it! 2015 release, lost iOS
| upgrades in 2022) SE(1st) - 5 years (like 5C, 6S
| hardware but released later) 7 - 6 years
| (decreased over 6S, not sure why) 8 - 6
| years X - 6 years
|
| The 6S is a bit of an outlier, hitting 7 years of full
| support running the current iOS. 5C and SE(1st) both got
| less total support, but their internals were the same as
| prior phones and they lost support at the same time as
| them (this is reasonable, if annoying, and does drag down
| the average). So Apple has clearly trended towards 6
| years of full support, the XS (as noted above) will get
| at least 6 years of support as of this coming September.
| We'll have to see if they can get it past the 7 year
| mark, I know they haven't promised anything but the trend
| suggests they can.
| fl0ki wrote:
| I look forward to these vendors delivering on their
| promises, and I look forward to Apple perhaps formalizing
| a promise with less variability for future products.
|
| Neither of these hopes retroactively invalidates the fact
| that Apple has had a much better track record of
| supporting old phone models up to this point. Even if you
| do split hairs about the level of patching some models
| got in their later years, they still got full iOS updates
| for years longer than most Android phones got any patches
| at all, regardless of severity.
|
| This is not an argument that somehow puts Android on top,
| at best it adds nuance to just how _much_ better iOS
| support has been up to this point.
|
| Let's also not forget that if Apple wasn't putting this
| kind of pressure on Google, they wouldn't have even made
| the promise to begin with, because it's clear how long
| they actually care to support products with no outside
| pressure.
| patall wrote:
| > I am still using a IPhone released in 2020 with
| absolutely no appreciable slow down or losses in
| perceived performance.
|
| My Pixel 4a here is also going strong, only the battery
| is slowly getting worse. I mean, it's 2024, do phones
| really still get slow? The 4a is now past android
| updates, but that was promised after 3 years. But at 350
| bucks, it was like 40% less than the cheapest iPhone mini
| at that time.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| > I mean, it's 2024, do phones really still get slow?
|
| Hardware is pretty beefed up but bloat keeps on growing,
| that is slowing things down considerably.
| moneywoes wrote:
| what about security updates?
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| > I am still using a IPhone released in 2020 with
| absolutely no appreciable slow down or losses in
| perceived performance.
|
| Only because Apple lost a lawsuit otherwise they'd have
| kept intentionally slowing it down.
| dijit wrote:
| I never understood this argument.
|
| Theres no "status" to a brand of phone when the cheapest
| point of entry is comparable and the flagship is cheaper
| than the alternative flagship.
|
| Marketing in most of europe is chiefly not the same as
| the US though so maybe its a perspective thing.
|
| I just find it hard to really argue "status" when the
| last 4 iPhone generations are largely the same and
| cheaper than the Samsung flagships.
|
| At Elgiganten a Samsung S24 Ultra is 19,490 SEK[0].
|
| The most expensive iPhone 15 pro max is 18,784 SEK at the
| same store[1].
|
| [0]: https://nya.elgiganten.se/product/mobiler-tablets-
| smartklock...
|
| [1]: https://nya.elgiganten.se/product/mobiler-tablets-
| smartklock...
| pompino wrote:
| Its not an argument, just ask why people lust after the
| latest iPhones in poor countries. They do it because they
| see rich people owning them. Unless you experience that,
| you won't really understand it.
| Draiken wrote:
| My take is that it's like a fashion accessory. People buy
| Gucci for the brand, not the material or comfort.
|
| Rich people ask for the latest most expensive iPhone even
| if they're only going to use WhatsApp and Instagram on
| it. It's not because of privacy or functionality, it's
| simply to show off to everyone they can purchase it. Also
| to not stand out within their peers as the only one
| without it.
|
| As another content said: it's not an argument, it's a
| fact here.
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| I have an iPhone so I guess I qualify as a rich person by
| your definition. I am also a software engineer. I cannot
| state enough how bogus that statement is. I've used both
| iPhone and Android, and recent flagships. iPhone is by
| far the easiest one to use. Speaking in more objective
| terms, iPhones have a coherent UI which maintains its
| consistency both throughout the OS and over the years.
| They're the most dumbed down phones and easiest to
| understand. I recommend iPhone to all my friends and
| relatives.
|
| There's obviously tons of people who see iPhone as a
| status item. They're right, because iPhone is expensive
| and only the rich can buy them. This doesn't mean iPhone
| is not the best option out there for a person who doesn't
| want to extensively customize his phone and just use it.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > iPhone and Android, and recent flagships. iPhone is by
| far the easiest one to use. Speaking in more objective
| terms, iPhones have a coherent UI
|
| It's not about if you've used android, it's about if
| you've beeen poor-ish or stingy
|
| To some people those are luxuries- the most expensive
| phone they buy is a mid-range Motorola for $300 with
| snapdragon 750g or whatever. They run all the same apps
| after all, they take photos.
|
| iPhones are simply outside of your budget.
| hindsightbias wrote:
| It's fashion and the kids are hip. But there is an
| endless void of Apple haters here who want to see it
| burn. They have nothing in common with 99.9% of the
| customer base.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| I was thinking about this for a while, the problem is not
| about apple, it's the fact that the rest of the industry
| is gutless, and has zero vision or leadership. Whatever
| Apple does, the rest of the industry will follow or
| oppose - but will be defined by it.
|
| It's like how people who don't like US and want nothing
| to do with US still discuss US politics, because it has
| so much effect everywhere.
|
| (Ironically no enough people discuss China in any
| coherent level of understanding)
| briandear wrote:
| The vast majority of people don't. They buy because the
| ecosystem works. Not sure how I get status from a phone
| that nobody knows I have. I don't wear it on a chain.
| Draiken wrote:
| Could it possibly be different in Brazil?
|
| iPhones are not ubiquitous here, and they're way more
| expensive than other options.
| jamesmontalvo3 wrote:
| Maybe true for a lot of the HN population, but my teenagers
| are mortified by the idea of me giving them android phones
| because then they would be the pariahs turning group
| messages from blue to green.
| WheatMillington wrote:
| This is a sad state of affairs.
| adamomada wrote:
| Interesting that some people would take that as an Apple
| problem and others would take it as a Google problem
|
| Who's at fault for not having built-in messaging that
| works with rich text, photos, videos, etc?
|
| Google has abandoned more messaging products than I can
| remember while Apple focused on literally the main
| function of a phone in the 21st century. And they get
| shit for it
| simonh wrote:
| I'm in Europe and everyone uses WhatsApp, and while
| Android does gave higher share over here, iPhone still
| dominate the younger demographics. I'm not denying
| blue/green is a factor in the US but it's not even a
| thing here. It's nowhere near the only it even a dominant
| reason iPhones are successful with young people.
| adamc wrote:
| Snobbery is an expensive pastime.
| lolinder wrote:
| And just to elaborate on this: it's not just snobbery
| about the color of the texts, for people who rely on
| iMessage as their primary communication platform it
| really is a severely degraded experience texting with
| someone who uses Android. We Android users have long
| since adapted to it by just avoiding SMS/MMS in favor of
| other platforms, but iPhone users are accustomed to just
| being able to send a video in iMessage and have it be
| decent quality when viewed.
|
| Source: I'm an Android user with a lot of iPhones on my
| in-laws side.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Apple only pivoted into the "privacy" branding relatively
| recently [1] and I don't think that many people came for
| that reason alone. In any case, most are now trapped into
| the walled garden and the effort to escape is likely big
| enough. And there's no escape anyway, since Google will
| always make Android worse in that regard...
|
| [1] in 2013 they even marketed their "eBeacon" technology
| as a way for retail stores to monitor and track their
| customers which...
| adamomada wrote:
| Ca 2013 was the release of the Nexus 5, arguably the
| first really usable android smartphone.
|
| Privacy wasn't really a concern because most people
| didn't have the privacy eroding device yet. In the years
| following the Nexus 5 is where smartphones went into
| geometric growth and the slow realization of the privacy
| nightmare became apparent
|
| Imho I was really excited to get a Nexus 4 at the time,
| just a few short years later the shine wore off and I was
| horrified at the smartphone enabled future. And I have a
| 40 year background in computers and understand them
| better than 99 out of 100 users - if I didn't see it, I
| can't blame them either
| mkl wrote:
| > Ca 2013 was the release of the Nexus 5, arguably the
| first really usable android smartphone.
|
| What a strange statement. I was late to the game with a
| Nexus S in 2010, and it was really usable.
| adamomada wrote:
| Define usable. Imho before Nexus 4 everything was crap,
| Nexus 4 barely was enough (4x1.4 GHz), Nexus 5 (4x2.2GHz)
| plus software at the time (post-kitkat) was when it was
| really ready for mainstream
| moneywoes wrote:
| is that still the case?
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| I'd say from my experience the average Apple users care
| less about privacy then the general public. It's a status
| symbol first and foremost 99% of what people do on their
| phones is basically identical on both platforms at this
| point.
| serial_dev wrote:
| It doesn't need to stay true forever.
|
| The alternative is Google / Android devices and OpenAI
| wrapper apps, both of which usually offer a half baked UI,
| poor privacy practices, and a completely broken UX when the
| internet connection isn't perfect.
|
| Pair this with the completely subpar Android apps, Google
| dropping support for an app about once a month, and suddenly
| I'm okay with the lesser of two evils.
|
| I know they aren't running a charity, I even hypothesized
| that Apple just can't build good services so they pivoted to
| focusing on this fake "privacy" angle. In the end, iPhones
| are likely going to be better for edge AI than whatever is
| out there, so I'm looking forward to this.
| jocaal wrote:
| > better for edge AI than whatever is out there, so I'm
| looking forward to this
|
| What exactly are you expecting? The current hype for AI is
| large language models. The word 'large' has a certain
| meaning in that context. Much larger that can fit on your
| phone. Everyone is going crazy about edge AI, what am I
| missing?
| jchanimal wrote:
| It fits on your phone, and your phone can offload battery
| burning tasks to nearby edge servers. Seems like the path
| consumer-facing AI will take.
| jitl wrote:
| Quantized LLMs can run on a phone, like Gemini Nano or
| OpenLLAMA 3B. If a small local model can handle simple
| stuff and delegate to a model in the data center for
| harder tasks and with better connectivity you could get
| an even better experience.
| SmellTheGlove wrote:
| > If a small local model can handle simple stuff and
| delegate to a model in the data center for harder tasks
| and with better connectivity you could get an even better
| experience.
|
| Distributed mixture of experts sounds like an idea. Is
| anyone doing that?
| cheschire wrote:
| Sounds like an attack vector waiting to happen if you
| deploy enough competing expert devices into a crowd.
|
| I'm imagining a lot of these LLM products on phones will
| be used for live translation. Imagine a large crowd event
| of folks utilizing live AI translation services being
| told completely false translations because an actor
| deployed a 51% attack.
| jagger27 wrote:
| I'm not particularly scared of a 51% attack between the
| devices attached to my Apple ID. If my iPhone splits
| inference work with my idle MacBook, Apple TV, and iPad,
| what's the problem there?
| moneywoes wrote:
| what about in situations with no bandwidth?
| callalex wrote:
| In the hardware world, last year's large has a way of
| becoming next year's small. For a particularly funny
| example of this, check out the various letter soup names
| that people keep applying to screen resolutions. https://
| en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_resolution_standards...
| gopher_space wrote:
| > Everyone is going crazy about edge AI, what am I
| missing?
|
| If you clone a model and then bake in a more expensive
| model's correct/appropriate responses to your queries,
| you now have the functionality of the expensive model in
| your clone. For your specific use case.
|
| The size of the resulting case-specific models are small
| enough to run on all kinds of hardware, so everyone's
| seeing how much work can be done on their laptop right
| now. One incentive for doing so is that your approaches
| to problems are constrained by the cost and security of
| the Q&A roundtrip.
| kernal wrote:
| >subpar Android apps
|
| Care to cite these subpar Android apps? The app store is
| filled to the brim with subpar and garbage apps.
|
| >Google dropping support for an app about once a month
|
| I mean if you're going to lie why not go bigger
|
| >I'm okay with the lesser of two evils.
|
| So the more evil company is the one that pulled out of
| China because they refused to hand over their users data to
| the Chinese government on a fiber optic silver plate?
| martimarkov wrote:
| Google operates in China albeit via their HK domain.
|
| They also had project DragonFly if you remember.
|
| The lesser of two evils is that one company doesn't try
| to actively profile me (in order for their ads business
| to be better) with every piece of data it can find and
| forces me to share all possible data with them.
|
| Google is famously known to kill apps that are good and
| used by customers: https://killedbygoogle.com/
|
| As for the subpar apps: there is a massive difference
| between the network traffic when on the Home Screen
| between iOS and Android.
| kernal wrote:
| >Google operates in China albeit via their HK domain.
|
| The Chinese government has access to the iCloud account
| of every Chinese Apple user.
|
| >They also had project DragonFly if you remember.
|
| Which never materialized.
|
| >The lesser of two evils is that one company doesn't try
| to actively profile me (in order for their ads business
| to be better) with every piece of data it can find and
| forces me to share all possible data with them.
|
| Apple does targeted and non targeted advertising as well.
| Additionally, your carrier has likely sold all of the
| data they have on you. Apple was also sued for selling
| user data to ad networks. Odd for a Privacy First company
| to engage in things like that.
|
| >Google is famously known to kill apps that are good and
| used by customers: https://killedbygoogle.com/
|
| Google has been around for 26 years I believe. According
| to that link 60 apps were killed in that timeframe.
| According to your statement that Google kills an app a
| month that would leave you 252 apps short. Furthermore,
| the numbers would indicate that Google has killed 2.3
| apps per year or .192 apps per month.
|
| >As for the subpar apps: there is a massive difference
| between the network traffic when on the Home Screen
| between iOS and Android.
|
| Not sure how that has anything to do with app quality,
| but if network traffic is your concern there's probably a
| lot more an Android user can do than an iOS user to
| control or eliminate the traffic.
| rfoo wrote:
| > The alternative is Google / Android devices
|
| No, the alternative is Android devices with everything
| except firmware built from source and signed by myself. And
| at the same time, being secure, too.
|
| You just can't have this on Apple devices. On Android side
| choices are limited too, I don't like Google and especially
| their disastrous hardware design, but their Pixel line is
| the most approachable one able to do all these.
|
| Heck, you can't even build your own app for your own iPhone
| without buying another hardware (a Mac, this is not a
| software issue, this is a legal issue, iOS SDK is licensed
| to you on the condition of using on Apple hardware only)
| and a yearly subscription. How is this acceptable at all?
| adamomada wrote:
| The yearly subscription is for publishing your app on
| Apple's store and definitely helps keep some garbage out.
| Running your own app on your own device is basically
| solved with free third party solutions now (see AltStore
| and since a newer method I can't recall atm)
| simfree wrote:
| WebGPU and many other features on iOS are unimplemented
| or implemented in half-assed or downright broken ways.
|
| These features work on all the modern desktop browsers
| and on Android tho!
| Aloisius wrote:
| > WebGPU and many other features
|
| WebGPU isn't standardized yet. Hell, _most_ of the
| features people complain about aren 't part of any
| standard, but for some reason there's this sense that if
| it's in Chrome, it's standard - as if Google dictates
| standards.
| moooo99 wrote:
| > but for some reason there's this sense that if it's in
| Chrome, it's standard - as if Google dictates standards.
|
| Realistically, given the market share of Chrome and
| Chromium based browsers, they kind of do.
| yencabulator wrote:
| Meanwhile, Apple has historically dictated that Google
| can't publish Chrome for iOS, only a reskinned Safari.
| People in glass-walled gardens shouldn't throw stones.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| > Heck, you can't even build your own app for your own
| iPhone without buying another hardware (a Mac, this is
| not a software issue, this is a legal issue, iOS SDK is
| licensed to you on the condition of using on Apple
| hardware only) and a yearly subscription. How is this
| acceptable at all?
|
| Because they set the terms of use of the SDK? You're not
| required to use it. You aren't required to develop for
| iOS. Just because Google gives it all away for free
| doesn't mean Apple has to.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > You aren't required to develop for iOS
|
| Do you have a legal right to write software or run your
| own software for hardware you bought?
|
| Because it's very easy to take away a right by erecting
| aritificial barriers, just like how you could
| discriminate by race at work, but pretend you are doing
| something else,
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| > Do you have a legal right to write software or run your
| own software for hardware you bought?
|
| I've never heard of such a thing. Ideally I'd _like_
| that, but I don 't have such freedoms with the computers
| in my cars, for example, or the one that operates my
| furnace, or even for certain parts of my PC.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| So you bought "a thing' but you can't control what it
| does, how it does it, you don't get to decide what data
| it collects or who can see that data.
|
| You aren't allowed to repair the "thing' because the
| software can detect you changed something and will refuse
| to boot. And whenever it suits the manufacturer, they
| will decide when the 'thing' is declared out of support
| and stops functioning.
|
| I would say you are not an owner then, you (and me) and
| just suckers that are paying for the party. Maybe it's a
| lease. But then we also pay when it breaks, so it more of
| a digital feudalism.
| nrb wrote:
| > How is this acceptable at all?
|
| Because as you described, the only alternatives that
| exist are terrible experiences for basically everyone, so
| people are happy to pay to license a solution that solves
| their problems with minimal fuss.
|
| Any number of people could respond to "use Android
| devices with everything except firmware built from source
| and signed by myself" with the same question.
| mbreese wrote:
| _> No, the alternative is Android devices with everything
| except firmware built from source and signed by myself_
|
| Normal users will not do this. Just because many of the
| people here can build and sign a custom Android build
| doesn't mean that is a viable _commercial_ alternative.
| It is great that is an option for those of us who can do
| it, but don 't present it as a viable alternative to the
| iOS/Google ecosystems. The fraction of people who can and
| will be willing to do this is really small. And even if
| you can do it, how many people will want to maintain
| their custom built OSes?
| cbsmith wrote:
| Google has also been working on (and provides kits for)
| local machine learning on mobile devices... and they run on
| both iOS and Android. The Gemini App does send data in to
| Google for learning, but even that you can opt out of.
|
| Apple's definitely pulling a "Heinz" move with privacy, and
| it is true that they're doing a better job of it overall,
| but Google's not completely horrible either.
| nox101 wrote:
| Their primary business is transitioning to selling services
| and extracting fees. It's their primary growth
| brookst wrote:
| Hey, I'm way ahead of Apple. I sell my services to my
| employer and extract fees from them. Do you extract fees
| too?
| nox101 wrote:
| I'm not sure what you're point is. My point (which I
| failed at), is that Apple's incentives are changing
| because their growth is dependent on services and
| extracting fees so they will likely do things that try to
| make people dependent on those services and find more
| ways to charge fees (to users and developers).
|
| Providing services is arguably at odds with privacy since
| a service with access to all the data can provide a
| better service than one without so there will be a
| tension between trying to provide the best services,
| fueling their growth, and privacy.
| brookst wrote:
| I apologize for being oblique and kind of snarky.
|
| My point was that it's interesting how we can frame a
| service business "extracting fees" to imply wrongdoing.
| When it's pretty normal for all services to charge
| ongoing fees for ongoing delivery.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| It's about the money, it's about perverse incentives and
| propensity of service businesses to get away with unfair
| practices. We have decent laws about your rights as a
| consumer when you buy stuff, but like no regulation of
| services
| adamomada wrote:
| So the new iPad & M4 was just some weekend project that
| they shrugged and decided to toss over to their physical
| retail store locations to see if anyone still bought
| physical goods eh
| stouset wrote:
| Nothing is true forever. Google wasn't evil forever, Apple
| won't value privacy forever.
|
| Until we figure out how to have guarantees of forever, the
| best we can realistically do is evaluate companies and their
| products by their behavior _now_ weighted by their behavior
| in the past.
| klabb3 wrote:
| > but it is about selling luxury hardware.
|
| Somewhat true but things are changing. While there are plenty
| of "luxury" Apple devices like Vision Pro or fully decked out
| MacBooks for web browsing we no longer live in a world where
| tech are just lifestyle gadgets. People spend hours a day on
| their phones, and often run their life and businesses through
| it. Even with the $1000+/2-3y price tag, it's simply not that
| much given how central role it serves in your life. This is
| especially true for younger generations who often don't have
| laptops or desktops at home, and also increasingly in poorer-
| but-not-poor countries (say eg Eastern Europe). So the iPhone
| (their best selling product) is far, far, far more a
| commodity utility than typical luxury consumption like
| watches, purses, sports cars etc.
|
| Even in the higher end products like the MacBooks you see a
| lot of professionals (engineers included) who choose it
| because of its price-performance-value, and who don't give a
| shit about luxury. Especially since the M1 launched, where
| performance and battery life took a giant leap.
| _the_inflator wrote:
| I disagree.
|
| Apple is selling hardware and scaling AI by utilizing it is
| simply a smart move.
|
| Instead of building huge GPU clusters, having to deal with
| NVIDIA for GOUs (Apple kicked NVIDIA out years ago because
| of disagreements), Apple is building mainly on existing
| hardware.
|
| This is in other terms utilizing CPU power.
|
| On the other hand this helps their marketing keeping high
| price points when Apple now is going to differentiate their
| COU power and therefore hardware prices over AI
| functionality correlating with CPU power. This is also
| consistent with Apple stopping the MHz comparisons years
| ago.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| No computers in eastern Europe? WTF? Are you confusing us
| with Indians programming on their phones?
| vr46 wrote:
| Countering a lazy reference with some weird racist
| stereotype was the best you could do?
| hehdhdjehehegwv wrote:
| As a privacy professional for many, many years this is 100%
| correct. Apple wouldn't be taking billions from Google for
| driving users to their ad tracking system, they wouldn't give
| the CCP access to all Chinese user data (and maybe beyond),
| and they wouldn't be on-again-off-again flirting with
| tailored ads in Apple News if privacy was a "human right".
|
| (FWIW my opinion is it is a human right, I just think Tim
| Cook is full of shit.)
|
| What Apple calls privacy more often than not is just putting
| lipstick on the pig that is their anticompetitive walled
| garden.
|
| Pretty much everybody in SV who works in privacy rolls their
| eyes at Apple. They talk a big game but they are as full of
| shit as Meta and Google - and there's receipts to prove it
| thanks to this DoJ case.
|
| Apple want to sell high end hardware. On-device computation
| is a better user experience, hands down.
|
| That said, Siri is utter dogshit so on-device dogshit is just
| faster dogshit.
| moneywoes wrote:
| any private guides for todays smartphone user?
| kortilla wrote:
| The MacBook Air is not a luxury device. That meme is out of
| date
| pseufaux wrote:
| Curious what criteria you're using for using for qualifying
| luxury. It seems to me that materials, software, and design
| are all on par with other more expansive Apple products.
| The main difference is the chipset which I would argue is
| on an equal quality level as the pro chips but designed for
| a less power hungry audience.
| ozim wrote:
| Maybe for you, but I still see sales guys who refuse
| working on WinTel where basically what the do is browse
| internet and do spreadsheets - so mainly just because they
| would not look cool compared to other sales guys rocking
| MacBooks.
| stevage wrote:
| I don't buy this "looking cool" argument.
|
| I have used both. I think the Mac experience is
| significantly better. No one is looking at me.
| lolinder wrote:
| I can't buy a MacBook Air for less than $999, and that's
| for a model with 8GB RAM, an 8-core CPU and 256GB SSD. The
| equivalent (based on raw specs) in the PC world runs for
| $300 to $500.
|
| How is something that is twice as expensive as the
| competition _not_ a luxury device?
| spurgu wrote:
| Really? You can find a laptop with the equivalent of
| Apple Silicon for $3-500? And while I haven't used
| Windows in ages I doubt it runs as well with 8 GB as
| MacOS does.
| lolinder wrote:
| Sure, then try this one from HP with 16GB RAM and a CPU
| that benchmarks in the same ballpark as the M2, for $387:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/HP-Pavilion-i7-11370H-Micro-Edge-
| Anti...
|
| The point isn't that the MacBook Air isn't _better_ by
| some metrics than PC laptops. A Rolls-Royce is "better"
| by certain metrics than a Toyota, too. What makes a
| device luxury is if it costs substantially more than
| competing products that the average person would consider
| a valid replacement.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| How much does it cost to get a device with comparable
| specs, performance, and 18 hour battery life?
|
| Closer to $999 then $500.
| lolinder wrote:
| This CPU benchmarks in the same ballpark as the M2 and it
| runs for $329:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-IdeaPad-
| Ryzen5-5500U-1920x1080...
|
| An 18 hour battery life _is_ a luxury characteristic, not
| something penny pinchers will typically be selecting on.
| outworlder wrote:
| What about the rest of the system? The SSD, for example?
|
| Apple likes to overcharge for storage, but the drives are
| _really_ good.
| lolinder wrote:
| When you're breaking out SSD speeds you're _definitely_
| getting into the "luxury" territory.
|
| As I said in another comment:
|
| The point isn't that the MacBook Air isn't better by some
| metrics than PC laptops. A Rolls-Royce is "better" by
| certain metrics than a Toyota, too. What makes a device
| luxury is if it costs substantially more than competing
| products that the average person would consider a valid
| replacement.
| pquki4 wrote:
| What the point of comparison? Isn't 18 hour battery and
| Genius Bar part of the "luxury"?
|
| Like I say Audi is a luxury car because a Toyota costs
| less than half as much, and you ask "what about a Toyota
| with leather seats"?
| moritzwarhier wrote:
| > > In case it is not abundantly clear by now: Apple's AI
| strategy is to put inference (and longer term even learning)
| on edge devices. This is completely coherent with their
| privacy-first strategy (which would be at odds with sending
| data up to the cloud for processing).
|
| > Their primary business goal is to sell hardware.
|
| There is no contradiction here. No need for luxury. Efficient
| hardware scales, Moore's law has just been rewritten, not
| defeated.
|
| Power efficiency combined with shared and extremely fast RAM,
| it is still a formula for success as long as they are able to
| deliver.
|
| By the way, M-series MacBooks have crossed bargain territory
| by now compared to WinTel in some specific (but large)
| niches, e.g. the M2 Air.
|
| They are still technically superior in power efficiency and
| still competitive in performance in many common uses, be it
| traditional media decoding and processing, GPU-heavy tasks
| (including AI), single-core performance...
|
| By the way, this includes web technologies / JS.
| jimbokun wrote:
| For all their competitors it's not true right now.
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| This comment is odd. I wouldn't say it is misleading, but it is
| odd because it borders on such definition.
|
| > Apple's AI strategy is to put inference (and longer term even
| learning) on edge devices
|
| This is pretty much everyone's strategy. Model distillation is
| huge because of this. This goes in line with federated
| learning. This goes in line with model pruning too. And
| parameter efficient tuning and fine tuning and prompt learning
| etc.
|
| > This is completely coherent with their privacy-first strategy
|
| Apple's marketing for their current approach is privacy-first.
| They are not privacy first. If they were privacy first, you
| would not be able to use app tracking data on their first party
| ad platform. They shut it off for everyone else but themselves.
| Apple's approach is walled garden first.
|
| > Processing data at the edge also makes for the best possible
| user experience because of the complete independence of network
| connectivity
|
| as long as you don't depend on graph centric problems where
| keeping a local copy of that graph is prohibitive. Graph
| problems will become more common. Not sure if this is a problem
| for apple though. I am just commenting in general.
|
| > If (and that's a big if) they keep their APIs open to run any
| kind of AI workload on their chips
|
| Apple does not have a good track record of this; they are quite
| antagonistic when it comes to this topic. Gaming on apple was
| dead for nearly a decade (and pretty much still is) because
| steve jobs did not want people gaming on macs. Apple has eased
| up on this, but it very much seems that if they want you to use
| their devices (not yours) in a certain way, then they make it
| expensive to do anything else.
|
| Tbf, I don't blame apple for any of this. It is their strategy.
| Whether it works or not, it doesn't matter. I just found this
| comment really odd since it almost seemed like evangelism.
|
| edit: weird to praise apple for on device training when it is
| not publicly known if they have trained any substantial model
| even on cloud.
| nomel wrote:
| > This is pretty much everyone's strategy.
|
| I think this is being too charitable on the state of
| "everyone". It's everyone's _goal_. Apple is actively
| achieving that goal, with their many year _strategy_ of in
| house silicon /features.
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| > Apple is actively achieving that goal, with their many
| year strategy of in house silicon/features
|
| So are other companies, with their many year strategy of
| actually building models that accessible to the public.
|
| yet Apple is "actively" achieving the goal without any
| distinct models.
| nomel wrote:
| No. "On edge" is not a model existence limitation, it is
| a hardware capability/existence limitation, by
| definition, and by the fact that, as you point out, the
| models already _exist_.
|
| You can already run those open weight models on Apple
| devices, on edge, with huge improvements on the newer
| hardware. Why is a distinct model required? Do the rumors
| appease these thoughts?
|
| If others are making models, with no way to actually run
| them, that's not a viable "on edge" strategy, since it
| involves waiting for someone else to actually accomplish
| the goal first (as is being done by Apple).
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| > "On edge" is not a model existence limitation
|
| It absolutely is. Model distillation will still be
| pertinent. And so will be parameter efficient tuning for
| edge training. I cannot emphasize more how important this
| is. You will need your own set of weights. If apple wants
| to use open weights, then sure. Ignore this. Don't seem
| like they want to long-term... And even if they use open
| weights, they will still be behind other companies have
| done model distillation and federated learning for years.
|
| > Why is a distinct model required?
|
| Ask apple's newly poached AI hires this question. Doesn't
| seem like you would take an answer from me.
|
| > If others are making models, with no way to actually
| run them
|
| Is this the case? People have been running distilled
| llamas on rPis with pretty good throughput.
| jameshart wrote:
| Everyone's strategy?
|
| The biggest players in commercial AI models at the moment -
| OpenAI and Google - have made absolutely no noise about
| pushing inference to end user devices at all. Microsoft,
| Adobe, other players who are going big on embedding ML models
| into their products, are not pushing those models to the
| edge, they're investing in cloud GPU.
|
| Where are you picking up that this is _everyone's_ strategy?
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| > Where are you picking up that this is everyone's
| strategy?
|
| Read what their engineers say in public. Unless I
| hallucinated years of federated learning.
|
| Also apple isn't even a player yet and everyone is
| discussing how they are moving stuff to the edge lol. Can't
| critique companies for not being on the edge yet when apple
| doesn't have anything out there.
| kernal wrote:
| > This is completely coherent with their privacy-first strategy
|
| How can they have a privacy first strategy when they operate an
| Ad network and have their Chinese data centers run by state
| controlled companies?
| KerrAvon wrote:
| How can I have mint choc and pineapple swirl ice cream when
| there are children starving in Africa?
| n9 wrote:
| ... I think that the more correct assertion would be that
| Apple is a sector leader in privacy. If only because their
| competitors make no bones about violating the privacy of
| their customers as it is the basis of thier business model.
| So it's not that Apple is A+ so much as the other students
| are getting Ds and Fs.
| strangescript wrote:
| The fundamental problem with this strategy is model size. I
| want all my apps to be privacy first with local models, but
| there is no way they can share models in any kind of coherent
| way. Especially when good apps are going to fine tune their
| models. Every app is going to be 3GB+
| tyho wrote:
| Foundation models will be the new .so files.
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| I don't think HN understands how important model distillation
| still is for federated learning. Hype >> substance ITT
| macns wrote:
| > This is completely coherent with their privacy-first strategy
|
| You mean .. with their _said_ privacy-first strategy
| ptman wrote:
| Apple privacy is marketing https://www.eurekalert.org/news-
| releases/1039938
| xipix wrote:
| How is local more private? Whether AI runs on my phone or in a
| data center I still have to trust third parties to respect my
| data. That leaves only latency and connectivity as possible
| reasons to wish for endpoint AI.
| chatmasta wrote:
| If you can run AI in airplane mode, you are not trusting any
| third party, at least until you reconnect to the Internet.
| Even if the model was malware, it wouldn't be able to
| exfiltrate any data prior to reconnecting.
|
| You're trusting the third party at training time, to build
| the model. But you're not trusting it at inference time (or
| at least, you don't have to, since you can airgap inference).
| thefourthchime wrote:
| Yes is it completely clear. My guess is they do something like
| "Siri-powered shortcuts". Where you can ask it to do a couple
| things and it'll dynamically create a script and execute it.
|
| I can see a smaller model trained to do that may work well
| enough, however, I've never seen any real working examples of
| this work, that rabit device is heading in that direction, but
| it's mostly vaporware now.
| _boffin_ wrote:
| Pretty much my thoughts too. Going to have a model that's
| smaller than 3B built in. The'll have tokens that directly
| represent functions / shortcuts.
| choppaface wrote:
| On "privacy": If Apple owned the Search app versus paying
| Google, and used their own ad network (which they have for App
| Store today), Apple will absolutely use your data and location
| etc to target you with ads.
|
| It can even be third party services sending ad candidates
| directly to your phone and then the on-device AI chooses which
| is relevant.
|
| Privacy is a contract not the absence of a clear business
| opportunity. Just look at how Apple does testing internally
| today. They have no more respect for human privacy than any of
| their competitors. They just differentiate through marketing
| and design.
| LtWorf wrote:
| > This is completely coherent with their privacy-first strategy
|
| Is this the same apple whose devices do not work at all unless
| you register an apple account?
| yazzku wrote:
| Some people really seem to be truly delusional. It's obvious
| that the company's "privacy" is a marketing gimmick when you
| consider the facts. Do people not consider the facts anymore?
| How does somebody appeal to the company's "privacy-first
| strategy" with a straight face in light of the facts? I
| suppose they are not aware of the advertising ID that is
| embedded in all Apple operating systems. That one doesn't
| even require login.
| LtWorf wrote:
| Considering the facts is much harder when admitting a
| mistake is involved.
| aiauthoritydev wrote:
| Edge inference and cloud inference are not mutually exclusive
| and chances are any serious player would be dipping their toes
| in both.
| 7speter wrote:
| >I personally really really welcome as I don't want the AI
| future to be centralised in the hands of a few powerful cloud
| providers.
|
| Watch out for being able to using ai on your local machine and
| those ai services using telemetry to send your data (recorded
| conversations, for instance) to their motherships.
| happyopossum wrote:
| > and those ai services using telemetry to send your data
| (recorded conversations, for instance) to their motherships
|
| This doesn't require Ai and I am not aware of any instances
| of this happening today, so what exactly are we watching out
| for?
| Powdering7082 wrote:
| Also they don't have to pay _either_ the capex or opex costs
| for training a model if they get user 's devices to train the
| models
| aiauthoritydev wrote:
| I think these days everyone links their products with AI. Today
| even BP CEO linked his business with AI. Edge inference and
| cloud inference are not mutually exclusive choices. Any serious
| provider will provide both and the improvement in quality of
| services come from you giving more of your data to the service
| provider. Most people are totally fine with that and that will
| not change any time sooner. Privacy paranoia is mostly a fringe
| thing in consumer tech.
| gtirloni wrote:
| _> complete independence of network connectivity and hence
| minimal latency._
|
| Does it matter that each token takes additional milliseconds on
| the network if the local inference isn't fast? I don't think it
| does.
|
| The privacy argument makes some sense, if there's no telemetry
| leaking data.
| kshahkshah wrote:
| Why is Siri still so terrible though?
| w1nst0nsm1th wrote:
| > to put inference on edge devices...
|
| It will take a long time before you can put performant
| inference on edge device.
|
| Just download one of the various open source large(st) langage
| model and test it on your desktop...
|
| Compute power and memory and storage requirements are insane if
| you want decent result... I mean not just Llama gibberish.
|
| Until such requirement are satisfied, distant model are the way
| to go, at least for conversational model.
|
| Aside llm, AlphaGo would not run on any end user device, by a
| long shot, even if it is an already 'old' technology.
|
| I think 'neural engine' on end user device is just marketing
| nonsense at this current state of the art.
| tweetle_beetle wrote:
| I wonder if BYOE (bring your own electricity) also plays a part
| in their long term vision? Data centres are expensive in terms
| of hardware, staffing and energy. Externalising this cost to
| customers saves money, but also helps to paint a green(washing)
| narrative. It's more meaningful to more people to say they've
| cut their energy consumption by x than to say they have a
| better server obselesence strategy, for example.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Why would it be green washing? Aren't their data centers and
| commercial operations run completely on renewable energy?
| ironmagma wrote:
| If you offload data processing to the end user, then your
| data center uses less energy on paper. The washing part is
| that work is still being done and spending energy, just
| outside of the data center.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Which honestly is still good for the environment to have
| the work distributed across the entire electricity grid.
|
| That work needs to be done anyways and Apple is doing it
| in the cleanest way possible. What's an alternative in
| your mind, just don't do the processing? That sounds like
| making progress towards being green. If you're making
| claims of green washing you need to be able to back it up
| with what alternative would actually be "green".
| ironmagma wrote:
| I didn't make any claims, I just explained what the
| parent was saying. There could be multiple ways to make
| it more green: one being not doing the processing, or
| another perhaps just optimizing the work being done. But
| actually, no, you don't need a viable way to be green in
| order to call greenwashing "greenwashing." It can just be
| greenwashing, with no alternative that is actually green.
| timpetri wrote:
| That is an interesting angle to look at it from. If they're
| gonna keep pushing this they end up with a strong incentive
| to make the iPhone even more energy efficient, since users
| have come to expect good/always improving battery life.
|
| At the end of the day, AI workloads in the cloud will always
| be a lot more compute effective however, meaning lowered
| combined footprint. However, in the server based model, there
| is more incentive to pre-compute (waste inference) things to
| make them appear snappy on device. Analogous would be all
| that energy spent doing video encoding for YouTube videos
| that never get watched. Although, it's "idle" resources for
| budgeting purposes.
| benced wrote:
| Apple has committed that all of its products will be carbon-
| neutral - including emissions from charging during their
| lifetime - by 2030. The Apple Watch is already there.
|
| https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/09/apple-unveils-its-
| fir...
| aborsy wrote:
| What are the example of the edge devices made by Apple?
| floam wrote:
| MacBook, iPhone, iPad?
| dancemethis wrote:
| Apple is privacy last, if anything. Forgotten PRISM already?
| royaltjames wrote:
| Yes this began with the acquisition of xnor.ai. Absolutely
| amazing what will be done (and is being done) with edge
| computing.
| Pesthuf wrote:
| Honestly, if they manage this, they have my money. But to get
| actually powerful models running, they need to supply the
| devices with enough RAM - and that's definitely not what Apple
| like to do.
| jonplackett wrote:
| I think it will be a winning strategy. Lag is a real killer for
| LLMs.
|
| I think they'll have another LLM on a server (maybe a deal for
| openai/gemini) that the one on the device can use like ChatGPT
| uses plugins.
|
| But on device Apple have a gigantic advantage. Rabbit and
| Humane are good ideas humbled by shitty hardware that runs out
| of battery, gets too hot, has to connect to the internet to do
| literally anything.
|
| Apple is in a brilliant position to solve all those things.
|
| I hope they announce something good at WWDC
| threeseed wrote:
| There really isn't enough emphasis on the downsides of server
| side platforms.
|
| So many of these are only deployed in US and so if you're say
| in country Australia not only do you have all your traffic
| going to the US but it will be via slow and intermittent
| cellular connections.
|
| It makes using services like LLMs unusably slow.
|
| I miss the 90s and having applications and data reside
| locally.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| >Apple's AI strategy is to put inference (and longer term even
| learning) on edge devices
|
| Ironic, given that AI requires lots of VRAM.
| lagt_t wrote:
| Has nothing to do with privacy, google is also pushing gemini
| nano to the device. The sector is discovering the diminishing
| returns of LLMs.
|
| With the ai cores on phones they can cover your average user
| use cases with a light model without the server expense.
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| don't bother. apple's marketing seems to have won on here. i
| made a similar point only for people to tell me that apple is
| the only org seriously pushing federated learning.
| zincmaster wrote:
| I own M1, A10X and A12X iPad Pros. I have yet to see any of them
| ever max out their processor or get slow. I have no idea why
| anyone would need an M4 one. Sure, it's because Apple no longer
| has M1s being fabbed at TSMC. But seriously, who would upgrade.
|
| Put MacOS on iPad Pro, then it gets interesting. The most
| interesting thing my ipad pros do are look at security cameras or
| read ODB-II settings on my vehicle. Hell, they can't even
| maintain an SSH connection correctly. Ridiculous.
|
| I see Apple always show videos of people editing video on their
| iPad Pro. Who does that??? We use them for watching videos
| (kids). One is in a car as a mapping system - that's a solid use
| case. One I gave my Dad and he did know what to do with it - so
| its collecting dust. And one lives in the kitchen doing recipes.
|
| Functionally, a 4 year old Chromebook is 3x as useful as a new
| iPad Pro.
| jsaltzman20 wrote:
| Who built the M4 chip: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jason-
| salt_ai-apple-semicondu...
| jsaltzman20 wrote:
| Who built the M4 chip? https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jason-
| salt_ai-apple-semicondu...
| doctor_eval wrote:
| Great People Units. OK. Nice recruitment pitch.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> And with AI features in iPadOS like Live Captions for real-
| time audio captions, and Visual Look Up, which identifies objects
| in video and photos, the new iPad Pro allows users to accomplish
| amazing AI tasks quickly and on device. iPad Pro with M4 can
| easily isolate a subject from its background throughout a 4K
| video in Final Cut Pro with just a tap, and can automatically
| create musical notation in real time in StaffPad by simply
| listening to someone play the piano. And inference workloads can
| be done efficiently and privately...
|
| These are really great uses of AI hardware. All of them benefit
| the user, where many of the other companies doing AI are somehow
| trying to benefit themselves. AI as a feature vs AI as a service
| or hook.
| leesec wrote:
| Why are all the comparisons with the M2? Apple did this with the
| M3 -> M1 as well right?
| spxneo wrote:
| almost went for M2 128gb to run some local llamas
|
| glad I held out. M4 is going to put downward pressure across all
| previous gen.
|
| edit: nvm, AMD is coming out with twice the performance of M4 in
| two months or less. If the M2s become super cheap I will consider
| it but M4 came far too late. There's just way better alternatives
| now and very soon.
| winwang wrote:
| I would want to know if the LPDDR6 rumors are substantiated, i.e.
| memory bus details.
|
| https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/lpddr6-new-beginning-of...
|
| If M4 Max could finally break the 400GBps limit of the past few
| years and hit 600 GBps, it would be huge for local AI since it
| could directly translate into inference speedups.
| hmottestad wrote:
| The M4 has increased the bandwidth from 100 to 120 GB/s. The M4
| Max would probably be 4x that at 480 GB/s, but the M4 Ultra
| would be 960 GB/s compared to M2 Ultra at 800 GB/s.
| winwang wrote:
| Dang. +20% is still a nice difference, but not sure how they
| did that. Here's hoping M4 Max can include more tech, but
| that's copium.
|
| 960 GB/s is 3090 level so that's pretty good. I'm curious if
| the Macbooks right now are actually more so compute limited
| due to tensor throughput being relatively weak, not sure
| about real-world perf.
| animatethrow wrote:
| Only iPad Pro has M4? Once upon a time during the personal
| computer revolution in the 1980s, little more than a decade after
| man walked the moon, humans had sufficiently technologically
| developed that it was possible to compile and run programs on the
| computers we bought, whether the computer was Apple (I,II,III,
| Mac), PC, Commodore, Amiga, or whatever. But these old ways were
| lost to the mists of time. Is there any hope this ancient
| technology will be redeveloped for iPad Pro within the next 100
| years? Specifically within Q4 of 2124, when Prime will finally
| offer deliveries to polar Mars colonies? I want to buy an iPad
| Pro M117 for my great-great-great-great-granddaughter but only if
| she can install a C++ 212X compiler on it.
| GalaxyNova wrote:
| I hate how apple tends to make statements about their products
| without clear benchmarks.
| abhayhegde wrote:
| What's the endgame with iPads though? I mainly use it for
| consumption, taking notes and jotting annotations on PDFs. Well,
| it's a significant companion for my work, but I cannot see if
| I've any reason to upgrade from iPad Air 5, especially given the
| incompatibility of the Pencil 2nd gen.
| biscuit1v9 wrote:
| > the latest chip delivering phenomenal performance to the all-
| new iPad Pro What a joke. They have M4 and they still run iOS?
| Why can't they run MacOS instead?
|
| If you take it a bit deeper: if an iPad would have keyboard,
| mouse and MacOS - it would basically be a 10/12 inch macbook.
| jshaqaw wrote:
| The heck do I do with an M4 in an iPad? Scroll hacker news really
| really fast?
|
| Apple needs to reinvest in software innovation on the iPad. I
| don't think my use case for it has evolved in 5 years.
| hmottestad wrote:
| I was hoping they would come out and say "and now developers
| can develop apps directly on their iPads with our new release
| of Xcode" but yeah, no. Don't know if the M4 with just 16GB of
| memory would be very comfortable for any pro workload.
| doctor_eval wrote:
| There's no way Apple would announce major new OS features
| outside of WWDC.
|
| So, perhaps it's no coincidence that a new iPadOS will be
| announced in exactly one month.
|
| Here's hoping anyway!
| hmottestad wrote:
| 120 GB/s memory bandwidth. The M4 Max will probably top out at 4x
| that and the M4 Ultra at 2x that again. The M4 Ultra will be very
| close to 1TB/s of bandwidth. That would put the M4 Ultra in line
| with the 4090.
|
| Rumours are that the Mac Studio and Mac Pro will skip M3 and go
| straight to M4 at WWDC this summer, which would be very
| interesting. There has also been some talk about an M4 Extreme,
| but we've heard rumours about the M1 Extreme and M2 Extreme
| without any of those showing up.
| jgiacjin wrote:
| Is there an sdk to work on gaming with unity with ipad Pro m4?
| gigatexal wrote:
| lol I just got a m3 max and this chip does more than 2x tops than
| my NPU does
| gigatexal wrote:
| Anyone know if the ram multiples of the M4 are better than the
| M3? Example: could a base model M4 sport more than 24GB of ram?
| LtdJorge wrote:
| Not for the iPad (8/16 GB)
| gigatexal wrote:
| Right I was thinking more laptops and desktops but yeah 8/16
| makes a ton more sense for the ipad only.
| thih9 wrote:
| When this arrives in MacBooks, what would that mean in practice?
| Assuming base M4 config (not max, not ultra - those were already
| powerful in earlier iterations), what kind of LLM could I run on
| it locally?
| talldayo wrote:
| > what kind of LLM could I run on it locally?
|
| Anything up to the memory configuration it is limited to. So
| for base model M4, that likely means you have 8gb of memory
| with 4-5 of it realistically usable.
| thih9 wrote:
| > while Apple touts the performance jump of the 10-core CPU found
| inside the new M4 chip, that chip variant is exclusive to the 1
| TB and 2 TB iPad Pro models. Lower storage iPads get a 9-core
| CPU. They also have half the RAM
|
| https://9to5mac.com/2024/05/07/new-ipad-pro-missing-specs-ca...
| ycsux wrote:
| Everyone seems as confused as I am about Apple's strategy here. I
| wasn't sure the M4 existed, now it can be bought in a format
| noone wants. How will this bring in a lot of revenue?
| TheMagicHorsey wrote:
| The only reason I'm buying a new iPad Pro is the screen and
| because the battery on my 2021 iPad Pro is slowly dying.
|
| I could care less that the M4 chip is in the iPad Pro ... all I
| use it for is browsing the web, watching movies, playing chess,
| and posting on Hacker News (and some other social media as well).
| Topfi wrote:
| Generally, I feel that telling a company how to handle a product
| line as successful as the iPads, but I beg you, please make Xcode
| available on iPad OS or provide an optional and separate MacOS
| mode similar to Dex on Samsung tablets. Being totally honest, I
| don't like MacOS that much in comparison to other options, but we
| have to face the fact that even with the M1, the iPads raw
| performance was far beyond the vast majority of laptops and
| tablets in a wide range of use cases, yet the restrictive
| software made that all for naught. Consider that the "average"
| customer is equally happy with and, due to pricing, generally
| steered towards the iPad Air, which are great devices that cover
| the vast majority of use cases essentially identical to the Pro.
|
| Please find a way beyond local transformer models to offer a true
| use case that differentiates the Pro from the Air (ideally
| development). The second that gets announced, I'd order the
| 13-inch model straight away. As it stands, Apple's stance is at
| least saving me from spending 3,5k as I've resigned myself to
| accept that the best hardware in tablets simply cannot be used in
| any meaningful way. Xcode would be a start, MacOS a bearable
| compromise (unless the address recent instability and bugs which
| would make it more than that), Asahi a ridiculous, yet beautiful
| pipedream. Fedora on an iPad, the best of hardware and software,
| at least in my personal opinion.
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