[HN Gopher] Apple introduces M4 chip
___________________________________________________________________
Apple introduces M4 chip
Author : excsn
Score : 1539 points
Date : 2024-05-07 14:37 UTC (2 days 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.
| gorbypark wrote:
| This is what I want, but with an iPhone (with an iPad would
| be cool, too). Sell me some insanely expensive dock with a
| USB-C display port output for a monitor (and a few more for
| peripherals) and when the phone is plugged in, it becomes
| macOS.
| 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.
| pquki4 wrote:
| That's your argument of not allowing others to use MacOS on
| an iPad?
| 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
| swozey wrote:
| Oh, I see what I'm doing wrong now. If I hold it down it
| highlights it and gives me the "edit letter/line" thing,
| and then if I let go I get the Copy option. I guess in
| the past I've seen it highlight the word and just stopped
| before it got to that point.
|
| Thanks!
| 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.
| echoangle wrote:
| You know the main point of the event was the release of
| new iPads, right?
| 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.
| 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....
| modeless wrote:
| Yeah and M2 was on N5P vs M1's N5, but it was still N5.
| M4 is still N3.
| 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).
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Tsmc being the biggest let them experiment at 10x the
| rate. It turns out they had the right business model that
| Intel didn't notice was there, it just requires
| dramatically lower margins and higher volumes and far
| lower paid engineers.
| 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.
| sangnoir wrote:
| LineageOS has an elegant solution for OLED burn in:
| imperceptibly shift persistent UI elements my a few
| pixels over time
| 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
| superb_dev wrote:
| The max brightness of the desktop is gonna be lower than
| the actual max brightness of the panel, because the panel
| needs to support HDR content. That brightness would be
| too much for most cases
| ProfessorLayton wrote:
| This was a photo of my MBA 15" which doesn't have an HDR
| capable screen afaik. Additionally, this artifacting
| happens at all brightness levels, including the lowest.
|
| It also just doesn't seem ideal that some apps (iOS)
| appear much brighter than the rest of the system. HDR
| support in macOS is a complete mess, although I'm not
| sure if Windows is any better.
| 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.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| It's a shame performance per watt doesn't double every 2.6
| years for modems and screens.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Watts per pixel probably did something close for a long
| time for screens.
|
| Same for Watts per bit.
|
| There's just a lot more pixels and bits.
| 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.
| jakjak123 wrote:
| The manufacturer often targets a tdp that is reasonable
| for thermals and battery life, but the cpu package is
| often the same.
| seec wrote:
| Yeah, but the difference is that you usually don't get
| people arguing that it's the same thing or that it can be
| performance competitive in the long run. When it comes to
| Apple stuff, people say some irrational stuff that is
| totally bonkers...
| 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
| jurmous wrote:
| Likely there is also a smaller battery as the iPad Pro is
| quite a bit thinner
| 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.
| oblio wrote:
| Apple's the ONLY tech company that doesn't compare
| products to their competitors.
|
| The intensity of the reality distortion field and hubris
| is mind boggling.
|
| Turns out, you fell for it.
| 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.
| paulmd wrote:
| speaking of which, whatever happened to qualcomm's
| bizarre assertion that ARM was pulling a _sneak move_ in
| all its new licensing deals to outlaw third-party IP
| entirely and force ARM-IP-only?
|
| there was one quiet "we haven't got anything like that in
| the contract we're signing with ARM" from someone else,
| and then radio silence. And you'd _really think_ that
| would be major news, because it 's massively impactful on
| pretty much everyone, since one of the major use-cases of
| ARM is as a base SOC to bolt your custom proprietary
| accelerators onto...
|
| seemed like obvious bullshit at the time from a company
| trying to "publicly renegotiate" a licensing agreement
| they probably broke...
| 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.
| placeholderTest wrote:
| The AX series, which is what iPads were using before the
| M series, were precisely the chip family that got
| rebranded as the M1, M2, etc.
|
| The iPads always had a lot of power, people simply
| started paying more attention when the chip family was
| ported to PC.
| MBCook wrote:
| Yeah. I was just using the A to M chip name transition as
| an easy landmark to compare against.
| 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.
| r00fus wrote:
| That's my point - if there's a real on-device LLM it may
| be much more usable with the latest chip.
| 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.
| windowsrookie wrote:
| I have a 2018 15" MBP, and an M1 Air and honestly they
| both perform about the same. The only noticeable
| difference is the MBP takes ~3 seconds to wake from sleep
| and the M1 is instant.
| 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...
| jimbokun wrote:
| Was simply a phrase to acknowledge that Jobs was better
| at giving demos than anyone who ever lived.
| 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.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| The G4 was a really good chip if you used photoshop. It
| took intel awhile to catch up.
| 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...
| actionfromafar wrote:
| The PS2 was used in supercomputing clusters.
| 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.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| G4 was 1998, Core Duo was 2006, 8 years isn't bad.
| georgespencer wrote:
| That is a long time - bet it felt even longer to the poor
| PowerBook DRI at Apple who had to keep explaining to
| Steve Jobs why a G5 PowerBook wasn't viable!
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Ya, I really wanted a G5 but power and thermals weren't
| going to work and IBM/Moto weren't interested in making a
| mobile version.
| Vvector wrote:
| Blaming a company TODAY for marketing from the 1990s is
| crazy.
| leptons wrote:
| Except they still do the same kind of bullshit marketing
| today.
| 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
| anaisbetts wrote:
| Citation needed?
| astrange wrote:
| Don't know if I'm allowed to. It's not that special
| though.
| 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.
| Phrodo_00 wrote:
| None of that seems to be high loads or stuff that needs a
| lot of ram.
| 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.
| brokencode wrote:
| For "always" to be true, the behavior needs to extend to
| the present date. Otherwise, it's only true to say "used
| to".
| 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.
| ajross wrote:
| It's just amazing that this kind of nonsense persists.
| There were no significant benchmarks, "scientific" or
| otherwise, at the time or since showing that kind of
| behavior. The G4 was a dud. Apple rushed out some
| apples/oranges comparisons at launch (the one you link
| appears to be the bit where they compared a SIMD-
| optimized tool on PPC to generic compiled C on x86,
| though I'm too lazy to try to dig out the specifics from
| stale links), and the reality distortion field did the
| rest.
| 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.
| hinkley wrote:
| You're working hard to miss the point there.
|
| Dell and IBM were lying about battery life before OSX was
| even a thing and normal people started buying MacBooks.
| Dell and IBM will be lying about battery life when the
| sun goes red dwarf.
|
| Reviewers and individuals like me have _always_ been able
| to get 90% of Apple's official battery times without
| jumping through hoops to do so. "If you were very
| careful" makes sense for an 11% difference. A ten hour
| difference is fucking bullshit.
| dmz73 wrote:
| So you are saying that Dell with Intel CPU could get
| longer battery life than Mac with M1? What does that say
| about quality of Apple engineering? Their marketeering is
| certainly second to none.
| 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.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| It did not get anywhere close to a 3090 in any test when
| the 3090 was running at full power. They were only
| comparable at specific power usage thresholds.
| 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?
| fragmede wrote:
| or VMs. they should be getting way better out of that.
| kagakuninja wrote:
| Apple switched to Intel chips 20 years ago. Who fucking
| cares about PowerPC?
|
| Today, Apple Silicon is smoking all but the top end Intel
| chips, while using a fraction of the power.
| 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.
| hinkley wrote:
| Before macOS became NextStep it was practically a
| different company. I've been using Apple hardware for 21
| years, when they got a real operating system. Even the G4
| did better than the laptop it replaced.
| 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.
| hinkley wrote:
| I wonder if it's like webpages. The numbers are
| calculated before marketing adds the crapware and ruins
| all of your hard work.
| 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.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > echo 1 | sudo tee
| /sys/devices/system/cpu/intel_pstate/no_turbo
|
| Isn't that going to torch performance? My i9-9900 has a
| base frequency of 3.6 Ghz and a turbo of 5.0 Ghz.
| Disabling the turbo would create a 28% drop in
| performance.
|
| I suppose if everything else on the system is configured
| to use as little power as possible, then it won't even be
| noticed. But seeing as CPUs underclock when idle (I've
| seen my i9 go as low as 1.2 Ghz), I'm not sure disabling
| turbo makes a significant impact except when your CPU is
| being pegged.
| bvrmn wrote:
| That's the point. I have no performance bottleneck with
| no_turbo. My i5 tends to turn on turbo mode and increased
| power demand (heat leaks) even if it's no needed. For
| example with no_turbo laptop is always cold and fan
| basically stays silent. With turbo it easily gets 40C
| warm while watching YT or doing my developer stuff,
| building docker containers and so.
| 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..
| ben-schaaf wrote:
| Frankly that sounds like you got a lemon. Even the most
| inefficient gaming laptops get over an hour _under a full
| gaming workload_.
| 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.
| hinkley wrote:
| I had to work my ass off on my Fujitsu Lifebook to get
| 90% of the estimate, even on Linux. I even worked on a
| kernel patch for the Transmeta CPU, based on unexploited
| settings in the CPU documentation, but it came to no or
| negligible difference in power draw, which I suppose is
| why Linus didn't do it in the first place.
| 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.
| hinkley wrote:
| I've never known a time when Dell, IBM, Sony, Toshiba,
| Fujitsu, Alien, weren't lying through their teeth about
| battery times.
|
| What time period are you thinking about for Apple? I've
| been using their laptops since the last G4 which is
| twenty years. They've always been substantially more
| accurate about battery times.
| ruszki wrote:
| The problem with arguing about battery life this way is
| that it's highly dependent on usage patterns.
|
| For example I would be surprised if there is any laptop,
| which is sufficiently fast for my usage, and it's battery
| life is more than 2-3 hours top. Heck, I have several
| laptops and all of them dies in one-one and a half hours.
| But of course, I never optimized for battery life, so who
| knows. So in my case, all of them are lying equally. I
| don't even check battery life for 15 years now. It's a
| useless metric for me, because all of them are shit.
|
| But of course for people who don't need to use VMs, run
| several "micro"services at once, have constant internet
| transfer and have 5+ Intellij project open at the same
| time which caching several millions LOC, while gazillion
| web pages are open, maybe there is a difference, for me
| it doesn't matter whether it's one or one and a half
| hours.
| 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.
| bmitc wrote:
| > IME Apple has always been the most honest when it makes
| performance claims.
|
| In nearly every single release, their claims are well above
| actual performance.
| 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.
| mcv wrote:
| Over the weekend, I accidentally left my work M3
| unplugged with caffeinate running (so it doesn't sleep).
| It wasn't running anything particularly heavy, but still,
| on Monday, 80% charge left.
|
| That's mindblowing. Especially since my personal laptop
| is a Thinkpad X1 Extreme. I can't leave that unplugged at
| all.
| 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.
| VelesDude wrote:
| If there is any dishonesty, I would wager it is a case of it
| can double the battery life in low power scenarios. Can go
| twice as long when doing word processing for instance. Can
| potentially idle a lot lower
| Petersipoi wrote:
| > so we'll get double the battery life
|
| This is an absurd interpretation. Nobody hears that and says
| "they made the screen use half the energy".
| 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...
| superb_dev wrote:
| There are so many artists who exclusively work on their
| iPad. It does seem cumbersome for a whole studio to use
| iPads, but they can be a powerhouse for an individual
| dialup_sounds wrote:
| It seems weirdly arbitrary to say that tools people have
| been using in production aren't "production tools".
| 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.
| fsflover wrote:
| > At this point, there's two fundamentally different
| types of computing that will likely never be mergeable in
| a satisfactory way.
|
| This is a completely artificial creation by Apple and
| Google to extract more money from you. Nothing technical
| prevents one from using a full OS on a phone today.
|
| Sent from my Librem 5 running desktop GNU/Linux.
| 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.
| ukuina wrote:
| > Palm devices were a pleasure to use.
|
| RIP Graffiti.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| >Unlike MS that went with the Big Bang in your face
| approach that was oh-so successful.
|
| It was kind of successful, touchscreen laptops see pretty
| big sales nowadays. I don't know what crack they were
| smoking with Windows 8.0 though.
| 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?
| ric2b wrote:
| They mean that this OS only runs iPad apps, it doesn't let
| you run the kind of software you expect to take full
| advantage of the CPU.
| underdeserver wrote:
| What function keys?
| kstrauser wrote:
| The new Magic Keyboard has a laptop-style row of function
| keys (and esc!).
| 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.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Point taken. I used "stay" as in, their next
| rumored/leaked chip wouldn't be an single anomalous
| success but the start of a trend that could expand to the
| X2, X3 Elite chips coming after.
|
| Basically we'd need some basis to believe they'll be
| progressively improving at more or less the same pace as
| Intel's or Apple's chips to get on board with ARM laptops
| for Windows/linux.
|
| Otherwise I don't see software makers care enough to port
| their build to ARM as well.
| 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.
| davidee wrote:
| I haven't paid too much attention today, but what I did see
| with the iPad Pro was that they're using an OLED display
| (maybe even some kind of double layer OLED for increased
| brightness if I'm understanding the marketing jargon?).
|
| I believe that OLED is much more power hungry than the
| previous display type (LED backlit LCD of some type?). I
| could be wrong, but in TV land that's the case...
|
| Could explain, at least partly, why run time isn't greatly
| increased.
| 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?
| tyrd12 wrote:
| Considering the cost difference would that still make M4
| better. Whatever the savings in power are offset by the price?
| 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.
| blegr wrote:
| It's not about the price of upgrades though, it's about
| their bundling together and the ridiculously stingy base
| specs that often make the upgrade non-optional. People
| who buy a base MacBook Air probably aren't thinking about
| keeping it for 8 years or using it for heavy workloads.
| foldr wrote:
| Sure, but bundling them together reduces the supply chain
| complexity and reduces Apple's costs. If the options were
| more fine grained, Apple would sell even less of each
| model and it would be even less worth their while.
|
| Also, I _have_ seen lots of people on HN complain about
| the price itself, even if it 's not what you yourself
| object to.
| sneak wrote:
| That's not what "force" means.
| blegr wrote:
| Yes, but you understood what I meant since you could
| assert that it's not what it means.
| 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/
| izacus wrote:
| Not sure if you're pretending to not know, but all
| previous base iPad models were 64GB.
| 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.
| nomel wrote:
| > but isn't a tablet just a media consumption device
|
| In my sphere, everyone with an iPad uses it for the Apple
| Pencil and/or video editing. Raw files for drawings get
| surprisingly big, once you get up into the many tens of
| layers, considering an artist can draw a few a day.
| 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.
| sneak wrote:
| It benefits Apple to not have people thinking about or
| worrying about the amount of ram in their iPad. The OS
| doesn't surface it anywhere.
| 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.
| tomxor wrote:
| Even on the Atari ST you would use a "RAM disk" when
| working with "large" data before manually flushing it to
| a floppy. Some people would use the trashcan icon to
| emphasise the need to manually flush... Not quite a
| cache, but the concept was there.
| 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.
| marshray wrote:
| People without the "large amount of storage model" need
| to record video from the camera too.
|
| The justifications I see are to reduce the number of
| models needed to stock and to keep the purchasing
| decision simple for customers. These are very good
| reasons.
| 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
| astrange wrote:
| This post starts with "then" but isn't responsive to
| anything I said.
| 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.
| thejazzman wrote:
| If that were the case why do they bother with an iPad,
| iPad Air, iPad Pro, iPhone SE, iPhone, iPhone Pro, iPhone
| Pro Max, ... each with their own number of colors and
| storage variations.
|
| But no 16GB without more SSD? lol?
| 0x457 wrote:
| iPad Air was created to make a new price category.
|
| The iPhone SE exists because there is a market for this
| form factor. If you look at the specs, you would notice
| it uses hardware previously used by more expensive
| models.
|
| > iPhone, iPhone Pro, iPhone Pro Max
|
| Again, different customers for different form-factors.
| These phones differ more than just SoC in them.
|
| You understand that having N different colors of iPads is
| different from having N different SoCs for the same model
| of an iPad.
| 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?
| BitBanging wrote:
| IIRC SSD manufacturers are likely to store a mapping table
| of LBAs (logical block addresses) to PBAs (physical block
| addresses) in the DRAM or Host Memory Buffer.
|
| Some calculation like:
|
| total storage size / page size per LBA (512B or 4KiB
| usually) * mapping data structure size
| inkyoto wrote:
| > SSD manufacturers are likely to store a mapping table
| of LBAs (logical block addresses) to PBAs (physical block
| addresses) in the DRAM or Host Memory Buffer.
|
| Are LBA's a thing on SSD's nowadays? I thought it was the
| legacy of the spinning rust.
|
| SSD's operate on memory pages of the flash memory, and
| the page management is a complicated affair that is also
| entirely opaque to the host operating system due to the
| behind the scenes page remapping. Since flash memory is
| less durable (in the long term), the SSD's come
| overprovisioned and the true SSD capacity is always more
| (up to a double if my memory serves me well). The SSD
| controller also runs an embedded RTOS that monitors
| failures in flash chips and proactively evacuates and
| remaps ailing flash memory pages onto the healthy ones.
| Owing to this behaviour, the memory pages that the SSD
| controller reports back to the operating system have
| another, entirely hidden, layer of indirection.
| BitBanging wrote:
| Yep, LBAs are the primary addressing scheme in the NVMe
| spec, written into every single IO command. I would
| imagine there could be a better way, but NVMe & OS
| support still carries some baggage from SATA HDDs -> SATA
| SSDs -> NVMe SSDs.
|
| As you mentioned, over-provisioning and other NAND flash
| memory health management techniques like garbage
| collection and wear leveling are needed for usable modern
| SSDs. Modern SSD controllers are complex beasts having
| 3-7 microprocessor cores (probably double digit core
| counts now with PCIe 5.0), encryption engines, power &
| thermal management, error correction, multiple hardware
| PHYs, etc.
|
| Example product sheet:
| https://www.marvell.com/content/dam/marvell/en/public-
| collat...
| surajrmal wrote:
| On a physical level, flash deals with pages and erase
| blocks. NVMe has LBAs defined but it's always been an
| awkward legacy thing.
| 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.
| zipping1549 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.
|
| And that decision somehow turns into making budget
| conscious people's UX shittier? How is that a reason not to
| make 16gb RAM, which is almost a bare minimum in 2024,
| available to everyone?
| nbsande wrote:
| If I'm understanding your point correctly that wouldn't
| prevent them from offering higher ram specs for the lower
| storage eg. 512 gig macs. So it seems like it is just price
| gouging
| 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.
| wtallis wrote:
| Mind the difference between GB and Gb.
| tuetuopay wrote:
| DDR5 DIMMs and LPDDR chips as in the MacBooks are not the
| same beasts at all.
|
| A DIMM is 8 or 16 chips (9/18 is ECC), while the LPDDR is
| a single chip for the same storage. The wild density
| difference in chip capacity (512MB or 1GB vs 8GB) makes a
| huge difference, and how a stick can be sold at retail
| for cheaper than the bare LPDDR chip in volume.
| 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.
| luyu_wu wrote:
| The point you're missing is that it's about the future. I
| generally agree, but it's obvious everything becomes more
| RAM intensive as time goes on. Hell, even games can take
| more than 8 GB of purely VRam these days.
| 6SixTy wrote:
| It's really not weird. The more you charge for the base
| product and upgrades, serving the bare minimum becomes
| less acceptable. It also doesn't help that the 4GB base
| models from years past aged super quickly compared to
| it's higher end cousins.
| 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.
| jonfromsf wrote:
| The bigger problem is when you need a new machine fast,
| the apple store doesn't have anything but the base models
| in stock. In my org we bought a machine for a new
| developer who was leaving town, and were forced to buy an
| 8gb machine because the store didn't have other options
| (it was going to be a 2 week wait). As you can imagine,
| the machine sucked for running Docker etc and we had to
| sell it on facebook marketplace for a loss.
| gorbypark wrote:
| I've never encountered an actual Apple Store not having
| specced up machines on hand (maybe not EVERY possible
| configuration, but a decent selection). If you go to a
| non-Apple retailer, afaik, they are limited to the base
| spec machines (RAM wise), it's not even a matter of them
| being out of stock. If you want anything other than 8GB
| (or whatever the base amount is for that model) of RAM
| you need to go through Apple directly. This was the case,
| at least in Canada a few years ago, correct me if I'm
| wrong/things have changed.
| 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.
| oblio wrote:
| Well, there are how many browser out there? 50? And
| opening tabs with something like Tree Style Tabs still is
| the best user experience.
|
| > It takes quite a bit of discipline to close down tabs
| to a more manageable numbers.
|
| Or you just click the little chevron in Tree Style Tabs
| or equivalent and 100 tabs are just hidden in the UI.
| 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.
| oblio wrote:
| I'm fairly sure that if you open up the web messengers,
| Gmail, etc, the browser can't and won't unload them,
| because they're active in the background.
|
| It's fairly easy to hit a few GB of RAM used up just with
| those.
| 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.
| gs17 wrote:
| My exact-ish headache, I have to check my free disk space
| before launching Docker.
| kalleboo wrote:
| Yeah personally I find cheaping out on the storage far
| more egregious than cheaping out on the RAM. Even if you
| have most things offloaded onto the cloud, 128 GB was not
| even enough for that, and the 256 GB is still going to be
| a pain point even for many casual home users, and at the
| price point of Apple machines it's inexcusable to not add
| another $25 of flash
| 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.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Forgot to mention that it must be completely silent.
| 6SixTy wrote:
| Asking for a machine with "insane battery life, amazing
| performance, great screen and one of the lightest
| chassis" and oh, it must be completely silent is a loaded
| set of demands. Apple in the current market is
| essentially the only player that can actually make a
| laptop that can meet your demands, at least without doing
| a bunch of research into something that's equivalent and
| hoping the goal posts don't move again.
| paulmd wrote:
| this is extremely funny in the context of the protracted
| argument up-thread about what you could reasonably be
| comparing the macbook air against.
|
| like, the $359 acer shitbox _probably doesn 't do all the
| exact same thing as the MBA either_, but that's actually
| ok and really only demonstrates the MBA is an
| unaffordable luxury product, basically the same as a
| gold-plated diamond-encrusted flip-phone.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40292839
|
| Not your circus, not your clowns, but this is sort of the
| duality of apple: "it's all marketing and glitz, a luxury
| product, there's no reason to buy it, and the fact that
| they have a better product only PROVES it" vs "of course
| no PC manufacturer could possibly be expected to offer a
| top-notch 120hz mini-LED screen, a good keyboard, great
| trackpad, good speakers, and good SOC performance in a
| thin-n-light..."
| 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"
| _gabe_ wrote:
| Race car _drivers_. They _are_ pros. Professional
| drivers. They definitely know how to drive a car much
| more efficiently than I do, or anyone that's just into
| cars. I assume the race car engineers are the pros at
| rebuilding engines.
|
| And as for the parent comment's point, being into cars
| doesn't mean you're as good as a professional race car
| driver.
| 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.
| brailsafe wrote:
| 10 years the ago the default for macbook pros was 4GB,
| and those started showing their age very quickly for what
| was not a small amount of money.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| I'm not sure that's true:
|
| https://support.apple.com/en-us/111942
| brailsafe wrote:
| Hmm, unexpected. I was quite sure my partner's 2015 mbp
| was sitting at 4gb, but you win this one! ;)
|
| Edit: I confirmed that I was indeed wrong, but the payoff
| isn't great anyway because that just means that yes in
| fact they've kept the exact same ram floor for 10 years.
| Insane.
| 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.
| leptons wrote:
| That's all well and good but nowhere did OP mention that
| it was an Apple computer at all. All they mentioned was
| this:
|
| >"I have a spare laptop with only 8GB of RAM"
| 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.
| erksa wrote:
| I have the base M2 air with 8gb ram, and it's really been
| perfect for working on. The only time things have become an
| issue is dual user accounts being logged in at the same
| time. Which is very preventable.
| hypercube33 wrote:
| Problem is yes it does run but it's probably paging to disk
| more than you think. I wonder if that lowers both
| performance and battery life.
| trog wrote:
| Half my organisation runs on 8GB Chromebooks. We were
| testing one of our app changes the other day and it
| performed better on the Chromebook than it did on my i7
| machine with 32GB.
| tamrix wrote:
| Fine just doesn't cut it for a premium machine you expect
| to last a few years at least. It's honestly just marketed
| so you want to spend extra and upgrade. Let's be real.
| jeffhuys wrote:
| It will last more than a few years, AND it's marketed so
| you want to spend extra.
| walteweiss wrote:
| I bought a second-hand office-grade PC recently, about a
| year ago. It was about $10 to $15, had no disks (obviously)
| and just 2 GB of DDR3 RAM. Also, an integrated GPU with
| some low-grade Intel CPU (Pentium, if I'm not wrong). Even
| the generation isn't current, it's about a decade old, a
| bit more.
|
| I put a spare 120 GB SSD, a cheap no-name brand that was
| just lying around for some testing purposes. Found the
| similar off-the-shelf DDR3 2 GB RAM stick. I thought the
| RAM was faulty, turned out it's in a working condition, so
| I put it there.
|
| I need the computer for basic so-called office work (a
| browser, some messengers, email client and a couple of
| other utilities). I thought I'd buy at least two 4GB RAM
| sticks after I test it, so you know, 8 GB is just the bare
| imaginable minimum! I have my 16 GBs everywhere since, idk,
| maybe 2012 or something.
|
| And you know what?! It works very well with 4 GB of RAM and
| default Fedora (it's 40 now, but I started with 38, iirc).
| It has the default Gnome (also, 46 now, started with 44,
| iirc). And it works very well!
|
| It doesn't allow me to open a gazillion of browser tabs,
| but my workflow is designed to avoid it, so I have like 5
| to 10 open simultaneously.
|
| Before throwing Fedora at the PC, I thought I would just
| install a minimal Arch Linux with swaywm and be good. But I
| decided I don't want to bother, and I'll just buy 8 GB
| later on, and be done with it.
|
| And here I am, having full-blown Gnome and just 4 GB of
| RAM. I don't restrict myself too much, the only time I
| notice it's not my main PC is when I want to do some heavy
| web-browsing (e.g. shopping on some different heavy
| websites with many tabs opened). Then it slows down
| significantly, till I close the unnecessary tabs or apps.
| All the software is updated and current, so it's not like
| it's some ancient PC from 00's.
|
| Also, I have my iPad Pro 12,9 1st Gen with just 4 GB of RAM
| too, and I never feel it's slow for me.
|
| I understand that some tasks would require a lot of RAM,
| and it's not for everyone. Having a lot of RAM everywhere,
| I'm quite used to not thinking of it at all for a
| significant part of my career (for over a decade now), so I
| may have something opened for weeks that I don't have any
| need for.
|
| So, it's 2024, and I'm surprised to say that 4 GB of RAM is
| plenty when you're focused on some tasks and don't
| multitask heavily. Which never productive for me at least.
| I even noticed that I enjoy my low-memory PC even more, as
| it reminds me with its slowdowns that I'm entering the
| multitasking state.
|
| I use swaywm on my Arch Linux laptop, and most of the time
| it's less than 3-4 Gb (I have 16 Gb).
| paulddraper wrote:
| > 8gb is actually 100% perfectly fine
|
| Thus making your three other machines 400% perfectly fine?
| cubefox wrote:
| > 8GB of RAM is fine for 95% of the population and the
| other 5% can buy something more expensive.
|
| This argument is self defeating in the context of the M4
| announcement. "Average consumers" who don't need 16 GB of
| RAM don't need an M4 either. But people who _do_ need an M4
| chip probably also need 16 GB of RAM.
|
| I think actually more people need 16 GB of RAM rather than
| a top M4 chip. Having only 8 GB can be a serious limitation
| in some memory heavy circumstances, while having (say) an
| M2 SoC rather than an M4 SoC probably doesn't break any
| workflow at all, it just makes it somewhat slower.
| 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.
| tamrix wrote:
| Why can't they just make it 12gb? It will sell far easier.
| It's all soldered on anyway.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| It probably has a 128 bit buswidth. You need 32 bit per
| memory chip, so you end up with 4 chips.
|
| 3 GB ram chips probably exist, but are definitely not
| common.
| TheBigSalad wrote:
| The point is: 8GB of RAM is really, really cheap. Like $20
| retail.
| trvz wrote:
| Unlike seemingly everyone making this claim, I have used an
| M1 Mac mini with 8GB RAM. It's fine, and certainly not
| useless.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Is the base M1 Macbook Air "useless"?
| sambazi wrote:
| > 8gb of ram
|
| not again
| paulddraper wrote:
| Sadly so
| 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.
| sneak wrote:
| People don't generally run out of storage that often. I
| think perhaps you overestimate how much local data everyday
| people store.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| The iPod Classic had spinning rust. Don't pretend it's
| comparable with a modern SSD.
| marshray wrote:
| I just checked, and my iPhone is using 152 GB of storage.
|
| I have years of photos and videos on there. Apparently the
| 256 GB model was the right choice for me?
| sneak wrote:
| It stores lower res proxies on the device and full res in
| iCloud, iirc.
| elAhmo wrote:
| Only if it is explicitly turned on.
|
| I have the 256 GB model as well, full resolution of 5+
| years of photos (around 20k), around 200 GB used, 180 on
| iCloud via Family Sharing.
| emodendroket wrote:
| I agree, the new iPad should have a spinning platter hard
| drive.
| ilikehurdles wrote:
| If 15 years of technological progress can't find it cost
| effective to fit more than 256gb of solid state storage in
| a $1000 device, then what are we even doing here?
|
| A 1 TB consumer-oriented SSD is about $50 today. At Apple's
| manufacturing scale, do you have any doubt that the cost to
| them is nearly negligible?
| 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?
| pquki4 wrote:
| I think that is very obvious. You have a browser window and
| a few apps open -- messaging, youtube, email, podcast etc.
| When you switch between apps and eventually back to your
| browser, you don't want the page to reload due to other
| apps eating up the memory. As simple as that. It's about
| having a good experience.
| sneak wrote:
| Phones and tablets are effectively single-tasking. They don't
| need much more ram than that in practice.
|
| I use my iPad Pro constantly for heavy stuff and I don't know
| how much ram is in it; it has never been something I needed
| to think about. The OS doesn't even expose it.
| filleduchaos wrote:
| Is a Pixel 8 a mid-range Android phone? Mine shipped with 8GB
| of RAM, and even with my frankly insane Chrome habits (I'm
| currently sitting at around 200 tabs) I'm only using about
| five and half gigabytes, _and_ it runs a hell of a lot
| smoother than other phones with more RAM that I 've used.
|
| There's absolutely nothing a mobile device does that should
| require that much memory. That shitty OEMs bloat the hell out
| of their ROMs and slap on more memory to match isn't a good
| thing or something to emulate in my opinion.
| 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
| Chilko wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Exactly - laughed at first but it quickly made sense if
| they are prioritizing decent webcam quality. Before my M1
| Pro 14 I had a Dell XPS 13 that also had tiny bezels but
| squeezed the camera into the very thin top bezel. The
| result was a terrible webcam that I gladly traded for a
| notch and a better camera quality.
|
| However, that Dell did still fit Windows Hello (face
| unlock) capability into that small bezel, so the absence
| of FaceID despite having the notch is a bit shit.
| 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.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| You really shouldn't trade-in your laptop on the basis of
| trying to maximise its trade-in value, that doesn't make
| economic sense.
|
| You should be incentivised by trying to minimise
| depreciation. You incur the greatest amount of
| depreciation closest to the date of purchase, so the
| longer you go between purchases, the less depreciation
| you'll realise.
|
| If I expected to say get, $450 after 1 year, and $250
| after 2 years. By trading in every 2 years, I'm getting a
| laptop that's a bit older, but you're also saving
| $14.58/month on depreciation. If the year after that
| becomes $150, you'd be saving $22.22/month. If the price
| is worth it is subjective, I'm just saying going for
| maximal trade in value doesn't really make sense, since
| you save more money the lower the trade-in value you get.
| 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
| jasonjmcghee wrote:
| Good to know- also didn't know about that tool.
| Appreciate it!
| 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?
| _ph_ wrote:
| They are for those tasks, where you do need high
| performance. Where you would wait for your device
| instead. A few tasks require all cpu power you can get,
| so that is what the performance cores are for. But most
| of the time, it will consume a fraction of that power.
| mort96 wrote:
| My _whole point_ is that iPadOS is such that there 's
| really nothing useful to do with that performance. No
| task an iPad can do requires CPU power (except for
| _maybe_ playing games but that 'll throttle the M4 to
| hell and back anyway).
| _ph_ wrote:
| Every time you perform complex computations on images or
| video, you need any bit of performance you can get.
| mort96 wrote:
| No?
| 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.
| mort96 wrote:
| They could start by making it possible to use the iPads
| for something by opening up iPadOS
| pertymcpert wrote:
| You didn't answer my question.
| 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.
| mort96 wrote:
| But they _do_ get used. And they take up space on die.
| pertymcpert wrote:
| When do they get used?
| mort96 wrote:
| I don't know the details of iOS's scheduler or how it
| decides which tasks should go on which kind of core, but
| the idea is to put tasks which benefit from high
| performance on the P-cores, right?
| _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.
| janandonly wrote:
| Then the lower price point of the iPad should entice you more
| now.
| mort96 wrote:
| When the A12Z is too powerful, the M2 is as well
| drexlspivey wrote:
| Meanwhile the mac mini is still on M2
| bombcar wrote:
| So is the studio.
| 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.
| cromka wrote:
| It irks me they didn't print even tiniest F denotations
| on the functional keys.
| 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.
| nomel wrote:
| "Prevented from coding" is just not true. There are many
| python IDEs, Swift Playgrounds, etc. Pythonista, and the
| like, are neat because you get full access to all the
| iPhone sensors.
| amjnsx wrote:
| And maybe that's fine? Look at it from the opposite side.
| All those artists complaining about how terrible macbooks
| are because you can't draw on them.
| 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?
| nomel wrote:
| So, the product may not fit your use case or preference.
| That's ok. Others love it. That's also ok.
|
| What's silly is thinking that a device that makes
| everyone happy is somehow trivial, or that a device
| _intentionally_ made with a specific type of interface is
| bad because of that intent. If things were as bad or as
| trivial as some people suggest, someone else would have
| made a successful competing product by now, rather than
| the string failures across the industry, from those who
| have tried.
| Nathanba wrote:
| what you are describing is a certainly some kind of
| professional but we should look from a higher vantage
| point. A professional in any field will ultimately want
| to customize their tool or make their own tools and that
| is not possible with ipads or even really software on
| ipads. It is a massive step backwards to sit in a walled,
| proprietary garden and claim that these people are
| productive professionals as if they are comparable to the
| previous generation of professionals. They may be in some
| sense but from a more historical, higher viewpoint they
| all seem herded into tightly controlled, corporate tools
| that will be taken from them whenever it is convenient
| for someone else. Ipad users are effectively like vmware
| users who are just waiting for a Broadcom moment. The
| price hike will always come eventually, the support will
| always drop at some point. It is all borrowed time, tools
| someone else controls and makes. It might be necessary in
| a world where we all need to make money but to positively
| support it is something else entirely.
| nomel wrote:
| > A professional in any field will ultimately want to
| customize their tool or make their own tools
|
| I suspect you're a programmer. This is _not_ the
| perspective or reality of most professional users. Most
| professional apps are not, themselves, customizable. Most
| professional users do not make their own tools, or want
| to. If you're a programmer, you'll understand this,
| because that's why you're employed: they want you to do
| it.
| Topfi wrote:
| Sorry to be pedantic, but I feel that the distinction is
| important, that seems more like a UX than a programming
| job. Too often, UX, UI, coding, documentation, etc. are
| thrown together, viewed as tasks that can be handled by
| the same people interchangeably and it rarely yields
| great results, in part because programmers often start
| out with expectations that can differ from the vast
| majority of users.
|
| Also, "most" and "any" aren't all too helpful in this
| discussion (not directed at anyone in particular, these
| can be read in comments throughout this thread) because
| there are going to be countless examples in either
| direction, but from my limited experience, I have seen
| professionals in various spaces, some which very much
| prefer a default workflow and others that heavily
| customize. I know talented professional programmers doing
| great work in the out-of-the-box setup of VSCode combined
| with GitHub Desktop, etc. but also have seen graphic
| designers, video editors, and even people focused purely
| on writing text that have created immensely impressive
| workflows, stringing macros together and relying heavily
| on templates and their preferred folder structures. Even
| on iPad OS, people can have their custom-tailored
| workflow regarding file placement, syncing with cloud
| storage, etc., just in a restricted manner and for what
| it's worth, I sometimes prefer using Alight Motion for
| certain video editing tasks on my smartphone over
| grabbing my laptop.
|
| I have seen and feel strongly that any professional from
| any field can have a customized workflow and can benefit
| from the ability to customize their toolset, even those
| outside programming, but I also feel equally strongly
| that sane defaults must remain and the "iPad way of doing
| things", as much as I in my ancient mid-twenties will
| never fully adapt to it, must remain for people who
| prefer and thrief in that environment.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Define most professional apps.
|
| A lot of professional applications include some form of
| scripting engine.
| nomel wrote:
| Sure, which most professionals don't use. If you think
| the average professional can program, or use scripting
| engines, it's because you're a HN user, and probably a
| programmer, not an average professional, and less likely
| one that uses an iPad.
|
| But, there's nothing technically stopping an app
| developer from implementing any of this, including
| desktop level apps. Compute, keyboard/mouse, and stylus
| is ready. I think the minuscule market that would serve
| is what's stopping them.
| Nathanba wrote:
| It has nothing to do with programming, I know mechanics
| who complain about car models where the manuals costs
| massive amounts of money if they are even allowed to get
| it at all and it takes weeks to order them. This should
| be a familiar story in every field. Do artists not have
| ateliers full of custom brushes, things they found work
| for them and they customized? Not to mention that artists
| these days are Maya, Autodesk and Photoshop users. Is
| that pen really powerful enough? Because a pen is really
| close to a mouse pointer anyway, so why even stick to an
| ipad then, you can simple buy a pen and board for the
| desktop computer. This is not about whether I am a
| programmer or not, this is about why some praise and use
| Apple devices for professionals even though they are not
| the best choice.
| nomel wrote:
| > A professional in any field will ultimately want to
| customize their tool or make their own tools and that is
| not possible with ipads or even really software on iPads.
|
| I was responding to this main point.
|
| Every professional drawing app, on the iPad, allows you
| to make your own brushes. There's no limitation there.
| That's just a fundamental requirement of a drawing app.
| They're not customizing the workflow or tool/apps
| _itself_ , which is what I thought you were referring to.
|
| > make their own tools
|
| This requires programming, does it not? Do you have some
| examples?
|
| > why some praise and use Apple devices for professionals
| even though they are not the best choice.
|
| Especially for drawing, I think it would be best to ask
| the professionals why they chose a ~1lb iPad in their
| backpack with a pixel perfect stylus, over a desktop
| computer and mouse. The answers might surprise you.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Just because people love it, doesn't mean that it can't
| be better. It also doesn't mean that current way of doing
| things is efficient.
|
| > What's silly is thinking that a device that makes
| everyone happy is somehow trivial, or that a device
| intentionally made with a specific type of interface is
| bad because of that intent.
|
| Add a proper native terminal, proper virtualization
| framework a la what we have on Mac, side loading and
| third party browser support with plugins and you'll shut
| up 99% of complaining users here.
|
| > If things were as bad or as trivial as some people
| suggest, someone else would have made a successful
| competing product by now, rather than the string failures
| across the industry, from those who have tried.
|
| Right, let me use my couple billion change in R&D to
| create iPad compatible system with all that I've
| mentioned before.
| lm28469 wrote:
| > Just because people love it, doesn't mean that it can't
| be better.
|
| Better for who ? They sell like hot cakes, 50+ millions
| of them per year
|
| According to google there are 25m software devs in the
| world, even if half (extremely generous) of them would
| buy a new ipad every single year (extremely generous) if
| they implemented what you ask it isn't going to change
| much for apple, ipads are like 10% of their revenues. So
| at best we're talking of 3% revenue increase
|
| > 99% of complaining users here.
|
| 99% of not much is nothing for apple, they're already
| printing money too fast to know what to do with it
| wiseowise wrote:
| If all you care about is revenue - sure, don't see any
| point arguing with you. It'll end with "it's not going to
| yield additional revenue".
| aqfamnzc wrote:
| Yeah, apparently some people book flights from their
| phones!? Nah man, that's a laptop activity. I'd never spend
| more than a couple hundred dollars on my phone. Haha
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| I watched someone do some incredibly impressive modelling on
| an iPad Pro via shapr3D, and yeah, it was a young person.
|
| I'm into the idea of modelling like this, or drawing, but the
| reality is I spend most of my time and money on a desktop
| work station because the software I need most is there. I'm
| totally open to iPads being legit work machines, but they're
| still too limited (for me) to make the time and cash
| investment for the transition.
|
| You're definitely right though. People are doing awesome work
| on them without the help of a traditional desktop or laptop
| computer.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| The examples given are _always_ artists, whose jobs are
| actively on the chopping block due to AI models and systems
| which _checks notes_ don 't even run that effectively on
| apple hardware yet!
|
| Of course, SWE jobs are on the chopping block for the same
| reasons, but I claim that AI art models are ahead of AI
| coding models in terms of quality and flexibility.
| GeneralMaximus wrote:
| > Welcome to being old!
|
| This has nothing to do with age. I have an iPad Pro that I
| barely use because it has been designed for use cases that I
| just don't have.
|
| I don't do any digital art, don't take handwritten notes, and
| don't need to scan and/or mark up documents very often. I
| don't edit photos or videos often enough to need a completely
| separate device for the task.
|
| I mostly use my computers for software development, which is
| impossible on an iPad. I tried running my dev tools inside an
| iSH session, and also on a remote Linux box that I could SSH
| into. It wasn't a great experience. Why do this when I could
| just run VS Code or WebStorm on a Mac?
|
| I also write a lot -- fiction, blog posts, journal entries,
| reading notes -- which should technically be possible to do
| well on the iPad. In practice there just aren't enough
| powerful apps for serious long-form writing on a tablet.
| Microsoft Word on iPad lacks most of the features of its
| desktop counterpart, Scrivener doesn't support cloud sync
| properly, iA Writer is too limited if you're writing anything
| over a few thousand words, and Obsidian's UI just doesn't
| work well on a touch device. The only viable app is Ulysses,
| which is ... okay, I guess? If it floats your boat.
|
| I sometimes do music production. This is now possible on the
| iPad via Logic Pro. I suppose I could give it a try, but what
| does that get me? I already own an Ableton license and a
| couple of nice VSTs, none of which transfers over to the
| iPad. I can also download random third-party apps to
| manipulate audio on my Mac, or mess around with Max4Live, or
| use my Push 2 to make music. Again, this stuff doesn't work
| on an iPad and it never will, because the APIs to enable
| these things simply don't exist.
|
| There are tons of people who use Windows because they need to
| use proprietary Windows-based CAD software. Or people who
| need the full desktop version of Excel to do their jobs. Or
| academics and researchers who need Python/R to crunch data.
| All of these people might LOVE to use something like these
| new iPads, but they can't because iPadOS just can't meet
| their use cases.
|
| I really like the idea of a convertible tablet that can
| support touch, stylus, keyboard, and pointer input. The iPad
| does a great job at being this device as far as hardware and
| system software is concerned. But unfortunately, it's too
| limited for a the kinds of workflows people using
| laptops/desktops need to do.
| themagician wrote:
| It's okay. It happens to all of us.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| It's not a matter of being young or old, it's that iPadOS is
| not tooled to be a productive machine for software
| developers, but IS tooled to be productive machine for
| artists.
| robsh wrote:
| I have the faintest of hope that WWDC will reveal a new hybrid
| Mac/iPad OS. If it ever happens I won't hesitate to buy an iPad
| Pro.
| 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.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> If you don 't want a computing appliance then don't
| buy an iPad._
|
| If you _do_ want a computing appliance, then there 's
| nothing wrong with having a machine that _could_ be
| reprogrammed that you simply choose _not_ to reprogram.
| Please stop advocating for a worse world for the rest of
| us when it doesn 't benefit you in the slightest to have
| a machine that you don't control.
| taylodl wrote:
| Stop being so damned melodramatic. I'm not advocating for
| a "worse world for the rest of us." There are a
| _plethora_ of choices for machines that aren 't
| appliances. In fact, _the overwhelming majority_ of
| machines are programmable. Apple thinks the market wants
| a computing appliance. The market will decide. Meanwhile,
| you have lots of other choices.
| 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.
| kibwen wrote:
| This is a false dichotomy. There's nothing stopping
| anyone from shipping a device with software that works,
| but that can still be reprogrammed.
| 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
| zipping1549 wrote:
| It's not optimizing. It's opening. If I buy a $2,000
| hardware I should be able to do whatever I want with it.
| 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?
| kibwen wrote:
| Then I wish you the best of luck in your fight. In the
| meantime, don't drag _me_ down or tell me that I 'm wrong
| just because you, personally, don't want something that I
| want that also doesn't harm you in the slightest.
| 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.
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| set and rep protocol?
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| I just have a bar in my apartment in a doorway. Sometimes
| when I walk by I do 3 - 8 pull ups, then go on my way. Do
| that a few times a day and you're doing pretty good.
| Sometimes I'll do a few L pull ups as well.
|
| If I'm doing pull ups in the gym I'll do 3 sets of 7.
| That's the most I can do at the moment.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| The average HN based-boy apple user has almost negative arm
| strength. You're asking them to start with pull ups? They
| need to be able to do a real push-up first!
| 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?)
| dmitrygr wrote:
| search amazon for matte glass screen protectors. thank me
| later
| 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.
| beacon294 wrote:
| I loved my 2017 ipad pro but I retired it because I noticed
| my productivity went way down and my consumption went way up.
| seuraughty wrote:
| Yeah I had the same experience and ultimately got rid of an
| M1 iPad Pro for an M3 MacBook Air. I still have the ease
| and portability for watching videos while doing the dishes
| or on an airplane, with the added benefit of a keyboard and
| OS for productivity in case the muse visits.
| 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.
| ionwake wrote:
| Thanks bro
| 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...
| sniggers wrote:
| It is being optimized, it's just that the optimization is
| geared towards vacuuming money from brainwashed pockets
| instead of making a product that's worth the money.
| 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
| gnabgib wrote:
| Depending on where, a lot of electronics "recyclers" are
| actually resellers. Some of them are even cheeky enough to
| deny electronics they know they can't resell (If they're
| manned.. many are cage-drops in the back of eg Staples)
| 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.
| paulmd wrote:
| ok but now get this: what if we started a program where
| people prepay part of the repair with an initial fee, and
| then for a couple years they can have their laptop repaired
| at a reduced, fixed price? That helps secure the supply
| chain. You could then partner with a retail computer store
| (or start your own!) and have a network of brick-and-mortar
| stores with subject-matter experts to perform the repairs as
| well as more minor troubleshooting etc. It'd basically be
| like healthcare, but for your computer!
|
| I think if you partnered with a major computer brand, that
| kind of thing could really be huge. Maybe someone like
| framework perhaps. Could be a big brand discriminator - bring
| that on-site service feel to average consumers.
| 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.
| slashdev wrote:
| I went there, they give me insructions to print labels
| they'll send me, find a box, pad it appropriately, attach
| the labels and then ship it.
|
| It's going in the landfill.
| skupig wrote:
| You being unwilling to spend the barest amount of effort
| to recycle it is your problem, not Apple's.
| slashdev wrote:
| If they took it at their store, fine. If they want me to
| take an hour to go print a label (I don't have a
| printer), and then another hour to package it up and ship
| it. I'll pass.
|
| They also say to erase the data before shipping it -
| which I can't do.
| _zoltan_ wrote:
| sounds to me like a you problem.
| urda wrote:
| As another commenter put that I also agree with:
|
| You being unwilling to spend the barest amount of effort
| to recycle it is your problem, not Apple's.
| crazygringo wrote:
| First you said they don't accept recycling.
|
| Now you claim you "went there" and discovered they _do_
| accept recycling but only if you mail it.
|
| One of those is necessarily false, since I doubt you went
| to the Apple Store in between your comments.
|
| However, I suspect _both_ your claims are wrong, because
| Apple stores _absolutely_ accept old devices to recycle
| directly. (They _also_ provide mail-in options for people
| who don 't have one they can visit directly.)
|
| From your many comments, it seems like you have an
| ideological axe to grind that somehow your device can't
| be recycled, despite abundant evidence to the contrary
| and lots of people here trying to help you.
| 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.
| slashdev wrote:
| Every system has vulnerabilities. Plus that password I
| used has been in dataleaks. I don't trust it.
| lm28469 wrote:
| If you're that paranoid you cannot trust any software or
| hardware you haven't designed yourself
| slashdev wrote:
| I trust the stuff I design least of all
| xvector wrote:
| It will be easy to break in time. Eventually you'll just
| be able to use a tool that shines a laser at the right
| bit and breaks the rate limiting. We've already seen
| similar attacks on hardware wallets previously thought
| invulnerable.
|
| I don't think any cryptography has stood the test of
| time. It's unlikely anything today will survive post-
| quantum.
| kalleboo wrote:
| > _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. _
|
| The Mac Pro does not have a soldered-in SSD. They even sell
| user-replaceable upgrades.
| https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MR393AM/A/apple-2tb-ssd-u...
| bustling-noose wrote:
| Get a heat gun and remove the NAND. Then sell the rest of it to
| a local repair store or just give them for free if it's an old
| Mac Pro. The parts in your Mac Pro are something someone can
| reuse to restore their Mac Pro instead of a landfill. Not every
| part is security related. Also Apple may take the Mac Pro
| itself and give you store credit cause they do recycle it.
| jpalawaga wrote:
| i don't think you can do that. there was just a video on here
| last week of a repair shop drilling the memory out, as that
| was the only way to remove it without damaging the
| motherboard.
| bigdict wrote:
| 38 TOPS in the Neural Engine comes dangerously close to the
| Microsoft requirement of 40 TOPS for "AI PCs".
| ycsux wrote:
| That's a good reason why they didn't release it as Mac Book M4
| 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 $10 from Amazon?
| 999900000999 wrote:
| I have more USB hubs than I can count.
|
| You still only have one point of failure for the entire
| device that can't be easily fixed.
|
| And most midi controllers work fine via USB or Bluetooth
| bombcar wrote:
| I wish it had two USB C ports, one on the bottom and one on
| the side. Even if they only really were one internally at
| least you'd have more mounting options.
| tootie wrote:
| I have an iPad that predates M1 and it's also fine. It's a
| media consumption device and that's about it.
| kalleboo wrote:
| The USB-C port is on it's own separate board, so it's
| repairable with minimal waste
| https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iPad+Pro+12.9-Inch+5th+Gen+USB-...
| 999900000999 wrote:
| It's only 100$ or so to repair which isn't as bad as I
| thought.
|
| https://simplyfixable.com/blog-detail/ipad-charging-port-
| rep...
|
| But it's still not something I'd do on my own.
| 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
| kalleboo wrote:
| Pretty much, yeah
| https://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#iPad_Mini
| 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?
| ulfw wrote:
| It's the non-Pro, non-Max chip. How many performance cores do
| you expect?
|
| Bigger shocker is only three cores alive in the 256GB and 512GB
| models paired with 8GB
| 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.
| transpute wrote:
| Nuvia/Qualcomm Elite X aspires to beat M3 and launches in 2
| weeks.
|
| Now Apple can keep their crown with this early M4 launch.
| 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.
| pquki4 wrote:
| I have a 3rd gen iPad Pro 12.9 for reading and other light
| activity. I haven't found any reason to upgrade for the past
| few years. I don't see myself getting another iPad unless this
| one dies or if Apple actually unlocks the potential of the
| hardware.
| 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.
| kalleboo wrote:
| The export progress dialog says "Keep Final Cut Pro open
| until the export is complete", and the standard iPadOS
| limitations are that background tasks are killed after either
| 10 minutes or when some foreground app wants more RAM. So it
| it's not instantly cancelled but it's a precarious workflow
| compared to on a Mac.
| 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.
| wayoverthecloud wrote:
| Does it still work great?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Yes. It doesn't need a lot of horsepower to browse the
| web, read and edit PDFs, edit spreadsheets, and video
| call.
|
| Obviously, the newer laptops are much more smooth and
| responsive.
| daft_pink wrote:
| Honestly only reason I want a studio is because I run
| several monitors and my Mac Mini can't run all my
| monitors unless I use displaylink, which doesn't allow me
| to run any HDCP protected content and is just glitchy and
| hacky in general.
|
| I think for the past 10 years you are correct, but I
| think we are currently entering the AI age and the base
| M4 has 38 TOPS (trillion operations per second) and we
| aren't going to be able to run the AI models on device
| with lower latency that they will surely be releasing
| this summer without a more recent chip, so I don't think
| things are as future proof as they used to be.
|
| But that's not really the point, the point is that I
| don't want to spend $4k to buy a Mac Studio with an M2
| chip while the M3 Macbook Pro has on par performance and
| the iPad has an M4. Apple should come up with a better
| update strategy then randomly updating devices based on
| previous update cycles.
| 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.
| aurareturn wrote:
| I think it would be simpler to compare cost/transistor.
| pulse7 wrote:
| This is true, but... RTX 4090 has only 24GB RAM and M3
| can run with 192GB RAM... A game changer for largest/best
| models...
| talldayo wrote:
| CUDA features unified memory that is only limited by the
| bandwidth of your PCIe connector:
| https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/unified-memory-cuda-
| beginn...
|
| People have been tiling 24gb+ models on a single (or
| several) 3090/4090s for a while now.
| trvz wrote:
| That's for OpenCL, Apple gets higher scores through
| Metal.
| talldayo wrote:
| And Nvidia annihilates _those_ scores with CUBlas. I 'm
| going to play nice and post the OpenCL scores since both
| sides get a fair opportunity to optimize for it.
| trvz wrote:
| Actually, I'd like to see Nvidia's highest Geekbench
| scores. Feel free to link them.
|
| It's stupid to look at OpenCL when that's not what's used
| in real use.
| 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
| anvuong wrote:
| This comment needs to be downvoted more. TFLOPS is not TOPS,
| this comparison is meaningless, the 4090 is about 40x TOPS of
| the M4.
| 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.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| Interestingly enough, Llama3 suffers more performance
| loss than Llama2 did at identical quantizations.
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.14047
|
| There's some speculation that a net trained for more
| epochs on more data learns to pack more information into
| the weights, and so does worse when weight data is
| degraded.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Most claims of "nearly as good results" are massively
| overblown.
|
| Even the so called "good" quants of huge models are
| extremely crippled.
|
| Nothing is ever free, and even going from 16 to 8bit will
| massively reduce the quality of your model, no matter
| whatever their hacked benchmarks claim.
|
| No, it doesn't help because of "free regularization"
| either. Dropout and batch norm were also placebo BS that
| didn't actually help to back in the day when they were
| still being used.
| fennecfoxy wrote:
| Quantization is reducing the number of bits to store a
| parameter for a machine learning model.
|
| Put simple, a parameter is a number that determines how
| likely it is that something will occur, ie if the number
| is < 0.5 say "goodbye" otherwise say "hello".
|
| Now, if the parameter is a 32bit (unsigned) integer it
| can have a value of 0-4,294,967,296.
|
| If you were using this 32bit value to represent physical
| objects, then you could represent 4,294,967,296 objects
| (each object gets given its own number).
|
| However a lot of the time in machine learning, after
| training you can find that not quite so many different
| "things" need to be represented by a particular
| parameter, so if say you were representing types of fruit
| with this parameter (Google says there are over 2000
| types of fruit, but let's just say there are exactly
| 2000). In that case 4,294,967,296/2000 means there are
| 2.1 million distinct values we assign each fruit, which
| is such a waste! Our perfect case would be that we use a
| number that only represents 0-2000 in the smallest way
| for this job.
|
| Now is where quantization comes in, where the size of the
| number we use to represent a parameter is reduced, saving
| memory size at the expense of a small performance hit of
| the model accuracy - it's known that many models don't
| really take a large accuracy hit from this, meaning that
| the way the parameter is used inside the model doesn't
| really need/take advantage of being able to represent so
| many values.
|
| So what we do is say, reduce that 32bit number to 16, or
| 8, or 4 bits. We go from being able to represent billions
| or millions of distinct values/states to maybe 16 (with
| 4bit quantization) and then we benchmark the model
| performance against the larger version with 32bit
| parameters - often finding that what training has decided
| to use that parameter for doesn't really need an
| incredibly granular value.
| pulse7 wrote:
| Current 2 bit quant models are useless. Smaller models
| yield better results.
| 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
| thejazzman wrote:
| the M3 was released Oct 30, 2023 the M4 was released May
| 7, 2024
|
| [disco stu] if these trends continue, the M5 will be out
| on November 14, 2024
| 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.
| davej wrote:
| Apple will also introduce the "Pro" line of their M4
| chips later in the year and I expect that they will
| improve the Neural Engine further.
| 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?
| dmitrygr wrote:
| perf >= M3 _while_ power consumption <= M3, while booted
| Linux and, say 50%: streaming a video on youtube.com over
| wifi at min brightness, 50% compiling some C project in a
| loop, minimum brightness from and to internal SSD.
|
| Compared to macOS on M3 doing the same
| transpute wrote:
| its_a_trap.jpg :)
|
| At Qualcomm SoC launch, OSS Linux can't possibly compete
| with the deep pockets of optimized-shenanigan Windows
| "drivers" or vertically integrated macOS on Apple
| Silicon.
|
| But the incumbent landscape of Arm laptops for Linux is
| so desolate, that it can only be improved by the arrival
| of multiple Arm devices from Tier 1 PC OEMs based on a
| single SoC family, with skeletal support in mainline
| Linux. In time, as with Asahi reverse engineering of
| Apple firmware interfaces, we can have mainline Linux
| support and multiple Linux distros on enterprise Arm
| laptops.
|
| One risk for MS/Asus/HP/Dell/Lenovo devices based on
| Qualcomm Nuvia/Oryon/EliteX is that Qualcomm + Arm
| licensing fees could push device pricing into "premium"
| territory. The affordable Apple Macbook Air, including
| used M1 devices, will provide price and performance
| competition. If enterprises buy Nuvia laptops in volume,
| then Linux will have a used Arm laptop market in 2-3
| years.
|
| So.. your test case might be feasible after a year or two
| of Linux development and optimization. Until then, WSL2
| on Windows 11 could be a fallback. For iPad Pro users
| desperate for portable Linux/BSD VM development with long
| battery life, Qualcomm-based Arm laptops bring much
| needed competition to Apple Silicon. If Nuvia devices can
| run multiple OSS operating systems, it's already a win
| for users, making possible the Apple-impossible. Ongoing
| performance improvements will be a bonus.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| That's the point! In two years m5 will exit.
|
| But I'm happy to take that bet with "Linux" replaced with
| "windows"
| transpute wrote:
| Since the hardware already exists and has been
| benchmarked privately, this is less of a bet and more of
| an information asymmetry. So let's assume you would win
| :) Next question is why - is it a limitation of the SoC,
| power regulators, motherboard design, OS integration, Arm
| licensing, Apple patents, ..?
| 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.
| transpute wrote:
| It's been rumored for years that a touch-optimized
| version of macOS has been in development for use within
| iOS VMs.
| ninkendo wrote:
| Never. Not ever, ever ever.
|
| Apple currently has 5 major build trains: macOS, iOS,
| watchOS, tvOS (which also runs HomePod), and visionOS.
| Huge amounts of the code are already the same between
| them: they literally just build the same stuff with
| different build settings... except for the UI. The UI has
| actually unique stuff in each train.
|
| This has become more true over time... teams are likely
| sick of not having certain dependencies on certain
| trains, so they're becoming more identical at the
| foundation/framework level every release.
|
| Saying they'll make a macOS with a touch UI is like
| saying Honda is finally going to make a motorcycle with
| four wheels and a full car frame. The UI is the
| differentiating factor in the OS's. Everything else has
| already converged or is rapidly doing so.
|
| If the goal is to support macOS apps on iOS then there's
| a dilemma: how do you suddenly make apps that are
| designed from the ground up for a mouse, good for touch?
| The answer is you don't: you just make the rest of the
| system identical (make the same APIs available
| everywhere) and ask developers to make the UI parts
| different.
|
| I could _almost_ believe that they'd make a macOS VM
| available for use with a keyboard and mouse within iOS.
| But to me it'd make more sense to do a sort of reverse
| version of how iOS apps are supported on macOS... where
| macOS apps are run natively on the iPad, but rendered
| with the iPad's window management (modulo whatever
| multitasking features they still need to implement to
| make this seamless) and strictly require a keyboard and
| mouse to be in this mode. There's just no reason to make
| a VM if you're doing this: you can just run the binary
| directly. The kernel is the same, the required frameworks
| are the same. No VM is needed.
| transpute wrote:
| VMs are needed by professional developers who want to run
| CLI tools and services (e.g. web server, database)
| without the security restrictions of iOS, while retaining
| the OS integrity of the iPad Pro device.
|
| Even if a macOS VM had only a CLI terminal and a few core
| apps made by Apple, using a Swift UI framework that was
| compatible with a touch interface, it would be a huge
| step forward for iPad owners who are currently limited to
| slow and power-expensive emulation (iSH, ashell). Apple
| could create a new app store or paid upgrade license
| entitlement for iOS-compatible macOS apps, so that users
| can pay ISVs for an app version with iOS touch input.
| ninkendo wrote:
| What you're talking about sounds great but it's not "a
| touch optimized version of macOS". You're describing a
| CLI environment in a sandbox.
|
| Apple will never ever take macOS and change its UI to be
| optimized for touch. Or at least if they do, it's time to
| sell the stock. They already have a touch UI, and it's
| called iOS. They're converging the two operating systems
| by making the underlying frameworks the same... the UI is
| literally the only thing they _shouldn't_ converge.
| transpute wrote:
| _> subvert the App Store and Apple Rent._
|
| EU and US regulators are slowly eroding that service
| monopoly.
|
| _> Fantastic hardware_
|
| Hopefully Apple leadership stops shackling their hardware
| under the ho-hum service bus.
|
| It's been rumored for years that a touch-optimized
| version of macOS has been in development for use in iOS
| VMs. With the launch of M4 1TB 16GB iPad Pros for $2K
| (the price of two MacBook Airs), Apple can sell
| developers the freedom to carry one device instead of
| two, without loss of revenue,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40287922
| zarzavat wrote:
| I bet that touch-optimized macOS will never see the light
| of day, or if it does it will be insanely crippled. Too
| much of an existential threat to Apple's stock price.
|
| Apple is in the midst of a cold war with regulators now.
| Every new feature will be scrutinized to check that it
| offers no threat to their golden goose if regulators
| force them to open it up. Allowing one type of VM means
| that regulators could force them to allow any type of VM.
| 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.
| tyre wrote:
| Which sales channels?
| transpute wrote:
| _> They could leave ipadOS alone and create a bespoke
| OS._
|
| Asahi Linux already runs on Apple Silicon.
|
| The EU could try to unlock Apple device boot of owner-
| authorized operating systems.
| intrasight wrote:
| That's another path to having a real OS. And more likely
| to be realized.
| 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
| simonsquiff wrote:
| What's sad about the Air is that it's only a 60hz screen.
| I'm spoilt now with 120hz on the first gen iPad Pro, the
| iPad needs it even more than phones (and they need it).
| So I'm not a demanding user in all other ways but the Air
| is not satisfying to me, yet.
| 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.
| srg0 wrote:
| With Logic Pro for iPad they now have applications for all
| their traditional Mac use cases on iPad. If anything, it
| feels like Apple is pushing for a switch from low-tier Macs
| to iPad Pro.
|
| And they surely can sell more gadgets and accessories for an
| iPad than for a laptop.
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| My m2 pro is already more powerful than I can use. The screen
| is too small to do big work like using a daw or doing video
| editing, the Magic Keyboard is uncomfortable so I stopped
| writing on it. All that processing power, I don't know what it
| will be used for on a tablet without even a good file system.
| Lousy ergonomics
| 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.
| adultSwim wrote:
| When they stopped offering matte displays I switched to
| Thinkpads. I'd really like an Air but can't imagine looking at
| myself all day.
| 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 ?)
| bschmidt1 wrote:
| You'll want to upgrade to produce generative content - you just
| don't know it yet.
| JodieBenitez wrote:
| I don't do such things, not on my laptop anyways. I'll
| upgrade when the battery capacity is worn out, that's the
| only reason I can foresee.
| 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.
| max51 wrote:
| when they made up that term, they also made up a TOPS
| requirement that is higher than what the m4 has. It's not
| by much, but technically the m4 is not even fast enough
| to qualify as an AI PC.
| 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.
| stetrain wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I don't own any Apple stock, at least not directly. I'm
| not defending Apple, just trying to understand what their
| claim is. Apple does plenty of consumer un-friendly
| things but they aren't dumb and they have good lawyers so
| they tend not to directly lie about things in product
| claims.
| NorwegianDude wrote:
| Fair enough. You are correct that Apple aren't dumb, but
| they do mislead as much as they can in marketing, and by
| their own words from previous court cases you're not a
| reasonable person if you think it's facts.
|
| In this case they do straight up lie, without a question.
| There is no reasonable explanation for the claim. If they
| had some absurd meaning behind it then they should have
| put a footnote on it.
| 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.
| max51 wrote:
| If you want to adopt this new terminology, remember that
| Intel and Microsoft have a requirement of 40 TOPS for "AI
| PCs". How can the m4 be faster than any AI PC if it's too
| slow to even qualify as one?
| pertymcpert wrote:
| Source? IIRC that 40 TOPS was just Microsoft saying that
| was the requirement for "next gen" AI PCs, not a
| requirement for any AI PC to be classed as one.
| 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.
| pulse7 wrote:
| It is NOT the fastest available today. I have a 1 year
| old PC bellow my desk which does faster neural network
| processing than M4. It has an Intel CPU and NVIDIA 4090.
| It runs Llama 7B models MUCH faster than any Apple's
| chip. And it is a PC. I am sorry, but the sentence "It's
| the fastest available today." is a straightforward lie...
| 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.
| snypher wrote:
| But I can't just say I have "the world's fastest GXZ", when
| GXZ is just some marketing phrase. If we're willing to accept
| a GPU ~= NPU then it's just a meaningless claim.
| 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.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| It's still lower than Qualcomm's Snapdragon Elite X (45 TOPS)
| 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.
| 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...
| kllrnohj wrote:
| Snapdragon Elite X is 45 TOPS as well, so Apple's isn't even
| the fastest ARM-based SoC NPU
| 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.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Apple always had the fastest, the biggest, the best. Or at
| least they have to claim that to justify the price premium.
|
| Previous iPads had the best screens in a tablet even if they
| weren't oleds. Now that they finally use oleds, they have the
| best oled screens and the best screens in a tablet.
| 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.
| pram wrote:
| They've done it for every single M processor release.
| wmf wrote:
| The M4 was announced with the iPad Pro that uses it.
| 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.
| marinhero wrote:
| Yes. If I'm plugging it to a thunderbolt dock I'd expect it
| to work like a MacBook Air
| 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.
| xyst wrote:
| best you can hope for is cpu pass through. Gl with using the
| rest of the chip
| xyst wrote:
| yup - im honestly tired of the Apple ~~~jail~~~ ecosystem.
|
| I love the lower power usage/high efficiency of ARM chips but
| the locked down ecosystem is a drag.
|
| Just the other day, I was trying to get gpu acceleration to
| work within a vm on my m1 mac. I think it's working? But
| compared to native it's slow.
|
| I think it's just a misconfig, somewhere (ie, hypervisor or
| qemu or UTM or maybe the emulation service in vm).
|
| On other systems (intel/amd + nvidia/radeon) this is more or
| less a "pass through" but on mac it's a different beast.
| paulmd wrote:
| gpu passthrough for VMs is not supported on apple silicon
| period afaik. there may be some "native" renderer built on
| top of metal but apple doesn't support SR-IOV or "headless
| passthrough".
|
| https://chariotsolutions.com/blog/post/apple-silicon-gpus-
| do...
|
| otoh no, it is not "more or less [automatic]" in other
| hardware either, SR-IOV has been on the enthusiast wishlist
| for a ridiculously long time now because basically nobody
| implements it (or, they restrict it to the most datacenter-y
| of products).
|
| intel iGPUs from the HD/UHD Intel Graphics Technology era
| have a concept called GVT-g which isn't quite SR-IOV but
| generally does the thing. Newer Xe-based iGPUs do not support
| this, nor do the discrete graphics cards.
|
| AMD's iGPUs do not have anything at all afaik. Their dGPUs
| don't even implement reset properly, which is becoming a big
| problem with people trying to set up GPU clouds for AI stuff
| - a lot of times the AMD machines will need a hard power
| reset to come back.
|
| NVIDIA GPUs do work properly, and do implement SR-IOV
| properly... but they only started letting you do passthrough
| recently, and only 1 VM instance per card (so, 1 real + 1
| virtual).
|
| Curious what you're using (I'm guessing intel iGPU or nvidia
| dGPU) but generally this is still something that gets Wendell
| Level1techs hot and bothered about the mere _possibility_ of
| this feature being in something without a five-figure
| subscription attached.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLK_i-TQ3kQ
|
| It does suck that Apple refuses to implement vulkan support
| (or sign graphics drivers), I think that's de-facto how
| people interact with most "hardware accelerated graphics"
| solutions in vmware or virtualbox, but SR-IOV is actually
| quite a rare feature, and "passthrough" is not sufficient
| here since the outer machine still needs to use the GPU as
| well. The feature point is SR-IOV not just passthrough.
| transpute wrote:
| _> Not even as a VM_
|
| WWDC is next month. There's still a chance of iPadOS 18
| including a Hypervisor API for macOS/Linux VMs on M4 iPads.
| monocularvision wrote:
| I hope for this every single year. I just don't see it
| happening. But I hope I am wrong.
| transpute wrote:
| 2022, https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/10/20/apple-
| rumored-to-...
|
| _> A leaker has claimed that Apple is working on a version
| of macOS exclusive for the M2 iPad Pro ... the exclusivity
| to M2 iPad Pro could be a marketing push. If the feature is
| only available on that iPad, more people would buy it._
|
| Based on the M4 announcement, vMacOS could be exclusive to
| the 1TB/2TB iPad Pro with 16GB RAM that would be helpful
| for VMs.
| Kelteseth wrote:
| At this point, you would have a better chance of running
| your own apps by relocating to the EU ;)
| ragazzina wrote:
| > instead I have to carry two M chips
|
| What's the incentive for Apple to unify them, since you've
| already given them the money twice?
| 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.
| data-ottawa wrote:
| I've been hoping for the same thing since I bought my M1 iPad
| just before WWDC.
|
| As much as I'd like the OLED screen and lighter weight, I
| don't have any compelling argument to buy a new one.
| 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.
| al_borland wrote:
| Something has changed with how the iPads behave at rest.
| When I got my first iPad in 2010 I could leave it for
| weeks, pick it up, and it would hardly use any battery at
| all. Today, it seems like my iPad mini will eat 10% or more
| per day just sitting on a table untouched. I don't like
| leaving it plugged in all the time, but with it being dead
| every time I go to pick it up, I simply stop picking it up.
|
| Even a good battery isn't that good. That seems to be a
| software problem.
|
| My only theory is it's turning on the screen every time it
| gets a notification. However, I have a case that covers the
| screen, which should keep the screen off in my opinion. I
| have thought about disabling 100% of the notification, but
| without a global toggle that seems pretty annoying to do.
| easton wrote:
| My guess is something to do with Find My/ offline
| finding. That would cause it to wake up all the time,
| maybe Apple thought it was worth the trade off.
| transpute wrote:
| _> Today, it seems like my iPad mini will eat 10% or more
| per day just sitting on a table untouched._
|
| That's abnormal.
|
| If it's malware, do a clean reinstall from DFU mode using
| Apple Configurator on a Mac.
| al_borland wrote:
| My last 2 or 3 iPads have been this way. I'd be surprised
| if it was malware.
| transpute wrote:
| It's unusual. Do they lose battery even in airplane mode?
|
| What does Settings > Battery > "Battery Usage by App"
| show as the top consumers of power?
|
| Does "Low Power Mode" make any difference?
| al_borland wrote:
| I'll have to play more with it for the other things. I
| haven't invested much time in troubleshooting, since it
| seemed like that's the way iPads just are now. Hopefully
| that's not actually true.
|
| When I looked at the top battery consumers in the past
| there wasn't anything that stood out. I think home screen
| was at the top. It wasn't one or two apps killing it with
| background activity.
| transpute wrote:
| _> home screen was at the top_
|
| Since the biggest battery consumption associated with
| home screen is the display, and users are only briefly on
| the home screen, before using it to navigate elsewhere,
| home screen should be near the bottom (1%) of power
| consumption.
| pulse7 wrote:
| "device I can barely do anything with" -> Apple can do
| anything with iPads, but we - regular SW developers - are cut
| off... :)
| filleduchaos wrote:
| Software developers are not the only professionals to
| exist, and are far from being the market for tablets of all
| things.
| 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.
| pquki4 wrote:
| If we are talking about running from remote servers, my 2018
| iPad Pro with A12Z (or whatever letter) can do that almost
| just as well.
| cromka wrote:
| AI? You mean like copilot and stuff? That runs locally?
|
| Otherwise why would it be an obstacle here?
| 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
| mtoner23 wrote:
| get a macbook then? they are similarly price to an ipad pro
| lll-o-lll wrote:
| Is there no RDP equivalent for mac? Just RDP into your main
| workstation?
| mycall wrote:
| https://support.apple.com/en-il/guide/mac-help/mh11848/mac
| moistoreos wrote:
| I've been giving some thought to this. I wonder if an iPad
| would suffice in front of the tv and just ssh into a Mac Mini
| for dev work. I'd love an iPad but I can't justify it either
| because of the limitation of hardware capabilities. I also
| don't really want to purchase two machines just for dev tasks
| and travel. But, I think having that kind of lifestyle will
| be expensive no matter the approach.
| 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!
| mcfedr wrote:
| I got an iPad a couple of years ago, was really disappointed by
| the how limited it felt in what I could do. Not to mention the
| awful app store.
| codercotton wrote:
| macOS should be an iPadOS app. The hardware is ready! Have a
| folder mapped into iPadOS Files. Not sure much else is needed.
| 0x38B wrote:
| "...but the iPad doesn't want me" is exactly it; I used iPad
| from the very first one - that chunky, hard-edged aluminum and
| glass slate, and remained a heavy user up until a few years
| ago. For half a decade, the iPad was my only computer on the
| go. I spent two years abroad with a 12.9" Pro.
|
| The conclusion I came to was that I loved the hardware but
| found the software a huge letdown for doing real work; I tried
| SSHing into VPSs and the like, but that wasn't enough.
|
| But man, the power in these thin, elegant devices is huge, and
| greater with the M4 chips. If Asahi ran on the M4 iPads I'd
| probably give it a go! - in an alternate dream universe, that
| is...
| 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.
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| The new document scanning functionality the camera bump helps
| enable is really nice. That previously required third party
| apps, which started out great (Swiftscan) then got greedy and
| turned into monthly subscriptions. I will happily enjoy Apple
| erasing entire categories of simple apps that turned one time
| purchases into monthly subscriptions.
| 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.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| The huge amount of optimizations available on Nvidia and
| _not_ available on Apple make the reduced VRAM worth it,
| because even the most bloated of foundation models will
| have some magical 0.1bit quantization technique be
| invented by a turbo-nerd which only works on Nvidia.
|
| I keep hearing this meme of Mac's being a big deal in LLM
| training, but I have seen zero evidence of it, and I am
| deeply immersed in the world of LLM training, including
| training from scratch.
|
| Stop trying to meme apple M chips as AI accelerators.
| I'll believe it when unsloth starts to support a single
| non-nvidia chip.
| MBCook wrote:
| If you work for a company willing to shell out sure there
| are better options.
|
| But for individual developers it's an interesting
| proposition.
|
| And a bigger question is: what if you already have (or
| were going to buy) a Mac? You prefer them or maybe are
| developing for Apple platforms.
|
| Upping the chip or memory could easily be cheaper than
| getting a PC rig that's faster for training. That may be
| worth it to you.
|
| Not everyone is starting from zero or wants the fastest
| possible performance money can buy ignoring all other
| factors.
| arvinsim wrote:
| Agreed. Although inference is good enough on the Mac,
| there is no way I am training on them at all.
|
| It's just more efficient to offload training to cloud
| Nvidia GPUs
| singhrac wrote:
| Yeah, and I think people forget all the time that
| inference (usually batch_size=1) is memory bandwidth
| bound, but training (usually batch_size=large) is usually
| compute bound. And people use enormous batch sizes for
| training.
|
| And while the Mac Studio has a lot of memory bandwidth
| compared to most desktops CPUs, it isn't comparable to
| consumer GPUs (the 3090 has a bandwidth of ~936GBps) let
| alone those with HBM.
|
| I really don't hear about anyone training on anything
| besides NVIDIA GPUs. There are too many useful features
| like mixed-precision training, and don't even get me
| started on software issues.
| 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.
| bee_rider wrote:
| AMD doesn't really seem inclined toward building
| developer ecosystems in general.
|
| Intel seems like they could have some interesting stuff
| in the annoyingly named "OneAPI" suite but I ran it on my
| iGPU so I have no idea if it is actually good. It was
| easy to use, though!
| jimmySixDOF wrote:
| There are quite a few back and forth X/Twitter storms in
| teacups between George Hotz / tinygrad and the AMD
| management about opening up the firmware for custom ML
| integrations to replace CUDA but last I checked they were
| running into walls
| skohan wrote:
| I don't understand why you would need custom firmware. It
| seems like you could go a long way just implementing
| back-ends for popular ML libraries in openCL / compute
| shaders
| whimsicalism wrote:
| smaller businesses have no business having a dedicated GPU
| rig of any kind
| 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.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Yeah. It's good with YOLO and Dino though. My M2 Max can
| compute Dino embeddings faster than a T4 (which is the
| GPU in AWS's g4dn instance type).
| ein0p wrote:
| MLX will probably be even faster than that, if the model
| is already ported. Faster startup time too. That's my
| main pet peeve though: there's no technical reason why
| PyTorch couldn't be just as good. It's just underfunding
| and neglect
| whimsicalism wrote:
| t4's are like 6 years old
| 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?
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| Mobile can be more efficient. But you're making big
| tradeoffs. You are very limited in what you can actually
| run on-device. And ultimately you're also screwing over
| your user's battery life, etc.
| 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.
| MBCook wrote:
| You want to buy a bunch of new equipment to do training?
| Yeah Mac's aren't going to make sense.
|
| You want your developers to be able to do training locally
| and they already use Macs? Maybe an upgrade would make
| business sense. Even if you have beefy servers or the cloud
| for large jobs.
| 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".
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| I remember having lunch with a speech recognition
| researcher who was using GPUs to train DNNs to do speech
| recognition in 2011. It really was thought of as niche back
| then. But the writing was on the wall I guess in the
| results they were getting.
| diego_sandoval wrote:
| AMD didn't read the wall, unfortunately.
| fennecfoxy wrote:
| I don't think of examples really apply, because it's more a
| question of being on "cutting edge" vs personal hardware.
|
| For example, running a local model and access to the
| features of a larger more capable/cloud model are two
| completely different features therefore there is no "no we
| should do x instead".
|
| I'd imagine that a dumber local model runs and defers to
| cloud model when it needs to/if user has allowed it to go
| to cloud. Apple could not compete on "our models run
| locally privacy is a bankable feature" alone imo, TikTok
| install base has shown us enough that users prefer
| content/features over privacy, they'll definitely still
| need SoA cloud based models to compete.
| 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
| MBCook wrote:
| They already do some "simple" training on device. The
| example I can think of is photo recognition in the photo
| library. It likely builds on something else but being able
| to identify which phase is your grandma versus your
| neighbor is not done in Apple's cloud. It's done when your
| devices are idle and plugged into power.
|
| A few years ago it wasn't shared between devices so each
| device had to do it themselves. I don't know if it's shared
| at this point.
|
| I agree you're not going to be training an LLM or anything.
| But smaller tasks limited and scope may prove a good fit.
| 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.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _due to customer lock-in_ "
|
| Their words or your words?
| int_19h wrote:
| "moving iMessage to Android will hurt us more than help
| us."
| 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.
| kotaKat wrote:
| On top of that, rooted devices are denied access to it,
| which means Google is now gatekeeping a "carrier" service
| on top of that even more.
| dheera wrote:
| > rooted devices are denied access to it
|
| By what? It's impossible for a process to know for sure
| if the system is rooted or not. A rooted system can
| present itself to a process to look like a non-rooted
| system if it's engineered well enough.
|
| I'd bet that most of these apps probably just check if
| "su" returns a shell, in which case perhaps all that's
| needed is to modify the "su" executable to require "su
| --magic-phrase foobar" before it drops into a root shell,
| and returns "bash: su: not found" or whatever if called
| with no arguments.
| hollerith wrote:
| >A rooted system can present itself to a process to look
| like a non-rooted system if it's engineered well enough.
|
| That was true 20 years ago, but most smartphones these
| days have cryptograhically-verified boot chains and
| remote attestation of how the boot went.
| 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.
| msla wrote:
| Open Source is how that XZ hack got caught.
| ben_w wrote:
| Selection bias -- everyone only knows about the bugs that
| do get caught.
|
| I was one of many who reported a bug in Ubuntu that went
| un-fixed for years, where the response smelled of nation-
| state influence:
| https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1359836
|
| And Log4Shell took about _8 years to notice_ :
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log4Shell
| 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.
| Petersipoi wrote:
| Awesome. I'm going to go tell my mom she can just pull her
| Nvidia card out of her pocket at the train station to run
| some models.
|
| On second thought.. maybe it isn't "just like you've been
| doing on Nvidia cards for a while"
| 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.
| kernal wrote:
| Sure. They also pledged to support Chromebooks for 10
| years. My point being is that I don't think they'll be
| clawing back their new hardware support windows anytime
| soon. Their data indicates that these devices were used
| well beyond their initial support window metrics so it
| was in their, and their users, best interest to keep them
| updated as long as they possibly could. 3 years of OS
| updates and 4 years of security updates was always the
| weak link in their commitment to security. And this
| applies to all of their devices including the A series -
| something I don't see other Android OEM's even matching.
|
| BTW, my daily driver is an iPhone 13 and I was coming
| from an iPhone X. So I'm well aware of the incredible
| support Apple provides its phones. Although, I would
| still like to see an 8+ year promise from them.
| 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.
| kernal wrote:
| I agree. This is the type of competition I like to see
| between these two companies. In the end the consumer wins
| regardless of which one you buy. Google has also promised
| 10 years of Chromebook support, so they've clearly got
| the message on the importance of supporting hardware much
| longer than a lot of people would use them for.
| elzbardico wrote:
| Google can't keep a product alive. You're welcome to
| believe on their promises of extended support after all
| those years of shitty updates policies.
| 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.
| noname120 wrote:
| This has been debunked.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| .... by Apple.
| noname120 wrote:
| See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batterygate
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Right. "By Apple".
|
| Apple says it made these changes for other reasons,
| honestly, truly. And if it happened to have the same
| effect, then that was unfortunate, and unintended.
|
| Only Apple really knows. But there was a slew of changes
| and reversals following the drama. "Oh, we'll implement
| notifications now", "Oh, we'll change the peak
| performance behavior", and "we will change and add
| additional diagnostics to make sure issues are battery
| related" certainly has a feel for a bunch of ex post
| facto rationalization of several things that seem, to me,
| that if it was truly a battery thing all along, would
| have been functional requirements.
| 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.
| Draiken wrote:
| Yes, by pure statistics you are probably rich compared to
| everyone else. The average software developer salary is
| way bigger than the average salary for the entirety of
| the US. Let's not even mention compared to the rest of
| the world.
|
| Sure, some people pick up the iPhone because they like
| the specs, or the apps, or whatever else. That's why I
| said the majority picks it up for status, not all. But
| keep in mind nobody's judging the iPhone's specs or
| capabilities here. We're talking about why people buy it.
|
| Ask any teenager why they want an iPhone. I'd be very
| surprised if even one said it's because of privacy. It's
| because of the stupid blue bubble, which is a proxy for
| status.
|
| I'm pretty sure if Apple released the same phone again
| with a new name and design, people would still buy it.
| For the majority, it's not because of features, ease of
| use, specs, etc: it's status.
| 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)
| hatsix wrote:
| You're absolutely right, I'm so glad that Apple was the
| first company to release a phone with a touch screen, or
| a phone with an app store, or a smart watch or a VR
| headset.
|
| Apple doesn't release new products, they wait until the
| actual brave and innovating companies have done the
| exploration and then capitalize on all of their
| learnings. Because they are never the first movers and
| they have mountains of cash, they're able to enter the
| market without the baggage of early adopters. They don't
| have to worry about maintaining their early prototypes.
|
| Apple doesn't innovate or show leadership, they wait
| until the innovators have proven that the market is big
| enough to handle Apple, then they swoop in with a product
| that combines the visions of the companies that were
| competing.
|
| Apple is great at what they do, don't get me wrong. And
| swooping in when the market is right is just good
| business. Just don't mistake that for innovation or
| leadership.
| hatsix wrote:
| The cheapest point of entry is absolutely not comparable.
| The cheapest new iPhone on apple.com is $429. The
| cheapest new Samsung on samsung.com is $199 (They do have
| a phone listed for $159, but it's button says "Notify
| Me").
|
| Granted, you may have been leaning very heavily on the
| dictionary definition of "comparable", in that the two
| numbers are able to be compared. However, when the
| conclusion of that comparison is "More than twice the
| price", I think you should lead with that.
|
| Keep in mind, the iPhone SE is using a 3 year old
| processor, the Samsung A15 was released 5 months ago with
| a brand new processor.
| molszanski wrote:
| Is this brand new cpu faster or more energy efficient?
| hatsix wrote:
| Yes.
|
| According to various sites, the Mediatek Dimensity 6100+
| is a 6nm update to a core that was released 3 years ago
| (Dimensity 700 on a 7nm). It's 5-10% faster, likely due
| to the update from 7 to 6nm, as the cores are the same
| and run at the same speed. It contains an updated
| bluetooth chipset (from 5.1 to 5.2) and supports a larger
| max camera. The camera on the A15 is well below the max
| size of the previous chipset, however, the increased
| camera bandwidth should ensure that the camera feels
| snappier (a common complaint on low-end phones). The
| process improvement should increase efficiency as well,
| however, there are not benchmarks that are able to test
| this.
| 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
| pseudalopex wrote:
| Most of the world doesn't care about built in. Apple
| decided against iMessage on Android for lock in. Android
| had RCS in 2019.
| int_19h wrote:
| Apple get shit for it because they made it a proprietary
| protocol for which clients are not available on anything
| except their own hardware. The whole point of messaging
| is that it should work with all my contacts, not just
| those who drank the Apple-flavored Kool-Aid.
| paulmd wrote:
| Google's protocol is proprietary too - their encryption
| extension makes it inaccessible for anyone else and
| google will not partner or license (companies have
| tried).
|
| RCS as currently implemented is iMessage but with a coat
| of google paint. There is no there there.
| int_19h wrote:
| Google should get plenty of shit too for closing down
| GTalk in the first place. It's not an either-or. Big tech
| in general hates open protocols and interoperability for
| consumer stuff; Apple is just the most egregious offender
| there.
| 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.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| No, it really is just snobbery.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Be aware that iPhones degrade MMS more than necessary and
| the only reason seems to be to punish Android use.
| 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?
| mr_toad wrote:
| Using RAG a smaller local LLM combined with local data
| (e.g. your emails, iMessages etc) can be useful than a
| large external LLM that doesn't have your data.
|
| No point asking GPT4 "what time does John's party
| start?", but a local LLM can do better.
| jwells89 wrote:
| This is why I think Apple's implementation of LLMs is
| going to be a big deal, even if it's not technically as
| capable. Just making Siri better able to converse (e.g.
| ask clarifying questions) and giving it the context
| offered by user data will make it dramatically more
| useful than silo'd off remote LLMs.
| 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.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Most of the "Services" on that list are effectively apps,
| too:
|
| VPN by Google One, Album Archive, Hangouts, all the way
| back to Answers, Writely, and Deskbar.
|
| I didn't touch hardware, because I think that should be
| considered separately.
|
| The first of 211 services on that site was killed in
| 2006.
|
| The first of the 60 apps on that site was killed in 2012.
|
| So even apps alone, 4.28 a year.
|
| But more inclusively, 271 apps or services in 17 years is
| ~16/year, over one a month.
|
| You need to remind yourself of the site guidelines about
| assuming the worst. Your comments just come across
| condescendingly.
| kernal wrote:
| >Most of the "Services" on that list are effectively
| apps, too:
|
| Even with the additional apps you've selected it still
| doesn't come close to the one app per month claim.
|
| >I didn't touch hardware, because I think that should be
| considered separately.
|
| So why even mention it? Is Apple impervious to
| discontinuing hardware?
|
| >The first of 211 services on that site was killed in
| 2006.
|
| So we're talking about services now? Or apps? Or apps and
| services? The goal posts keep moving.
|
| >You need to remind yourself of the site guidelines about
| assuming the worst. Your comments just come across
| condescendingly.
|
| I suggest you also consult the guidelines in regards to
| calling people names. My comments were never intended to
| be inferred that way.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > The Chinese government has access to the iCloud account
| of every Chinese Apple user.
|
| Source?
| wiseowise wrote:
| > I mean if you're going to lie why not go bigger
|
| Google podcasts, Stadia, shitton of other discontinued
| applications?
| 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)
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Those are only available in the EU, and Apple has been
| huffing and puffing even here.
| dns_snek wrote:
| Notice that parent never talked about _publishing_ apps,
| just _building_ and running apps on their own device.
| "Publishing on AltStore" (or permanently running the app
| on your own device in any other way) still requires a
| $100/year subscription as far as I'm aware.
| 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.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I didn't like it when Microsoft dominated browsers, and
| I'm no happier now. I've stopped using Chrome.
| notpushkin wrote:
| Just curious - what are you using now?
| feisuzhu wrote:
| I've been using Firefox since the Quantum version is out.
| It feels slightly slower to Chrome but it's negligible to
| me. Otherwise I can't tell a difference (except some
| heavy web based Office like solutions screaming 'Your
| browser is not supported!' but actually works fine).
| 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.
| simfree wrote:
| Firefox has an implementation of WebGPU, why is Safari
| missing in action?
| 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.
| paulmd wrote:
| > Do you have a legal right to write software or run your
| own software for hardware you bought?
|
| No, obviously not. Do you have a right to run a custom OS
| on your PS5? Do you have a right to run a custom
| application on your cable set-top box? Etc. Such a right
| obviously doesn't exist and most people generally are
| somewhere between "don't care" and actively rejecting it
| for various reasons (hacking in games, content DRM, etc).
|
| It's fine if you think there _should_ be, but it
| continues this weird trend of using apple as a foil for
| complaining about random other issues that other vendors
| tend to be just as bad or oftentimes even worse about,
| simply because they're a large company with a large group
| of anti-fans /haters who will readily nod along.
|
| Remember when the complaint was that the pelican case of
| factory OEM tools you could rent (or buy) to install your
| factory replacement screen was _too big and bulky_ ,
| meaning it was really just a plot to sabotage right to
| repair?
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/21/23079058/apple-self-
| servi...
| dns_snek wrote:
| > Remember when the complaint was that the pelican case
| of factory OEM tools you could rent (or buy) to install
| your factory replacement screen was too big and bulky,
| meaning it was really just a plot to sabotage right to
| repair?
|
| Yes, I do. That was and continues to be a valid
| complaint, among all other anti-repair schemes Apple have
| come up with over the years. DRM for parts, complete
| unavailability of some commonly repaired parts,
| deliberate kneecapping of "Apple authorized service
| providers", leveraging the US customs to seize shipments
| of legitimate and/or unlabeled replacement parts as
| "counterfeits", gaslighting by official representatives
| on Apple's own forums about data recovery, sabotaging
| right to repair laws, and even denial of design issues[1]
| to weasel out of warranty repair just to name a few.
|
| All with the simple anti-competitive goal of making third
| party repair (both authorized and independent) a less
| attractive option due to artificially increased prices,
| timelines to repair, or scaremongering about privacy.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/12/weakened-right-
| to-re...
|
| https://www.pcgamer.com/ifixit-says-apples-iphone-14-is-
| lite...
|
| [1] Butterfly keyboards, display cables that were too
| short and failed over time
| paulmd wrote:
| > Yes, I do. That was and continues to be a valid
| complaint,
|
| No, it doesn't - because you can simply not use the tools
| if you don't want. You can just order a $2 spudger off
| Amazon if you want, you don't need the tools at all.
|
| It continues to be a completely invalid complaint that
| shows just how bad-faith the discussion about apple has
| become - it literally costs you nothing to not use the
| tools if you want, there is no downside to having apple
| make them available to people, and yet you guys still
| find a way to bitch about it.
|
| Moreover, despite some "bold" proclamations from the
| haters... no android vendors ever ended up making their
| oem tooling available to consumers at all. You _have_ to
| use the Amazon spudger on your pixel, and you _will_ fuck
| up the waterproofing when you do your repair, because the
| android phone won't seal properly against water without
| the tools either. IPX sixtywho!?
|
| It's literally a complete and total net positive: nothing
| was taken away from you, and you don't need to use it,
| and it makes your life easier and produces a better
| repair if you want it. Apple went out of their way to
| both make the tooling available to normies who want to
| rent it or people who want to buy it for real. And people
| still bitch, and still think they come off better for
| having done so. Classic "hater" moment, in the Paul
| Graham sense. Anti-fanboys are real.
|
| https://paulgraham.com/fh.html
|
| Literally, for some people - the pelican cases with the
| tools are too big and heavy. And that's enough to justify
| the hate.
|
| Again, great example of the point I was making in the
| original comment: people inserting their random hobby
| horse issues using apple as a foil. You don't like how
| phones are made in general, so you're using apple as a
| whipping boy for the issue even if it's not really caused
| or worsened by the event in question etc. Even if the
| event in question is apple _making that issue somewhat
| better,_ and is done worse by all the other vendors etc.
| Can't buy tooling for a pixel _at all_ , doing those
| repairs will simply break waterproofing without it, and
| you're strictly better off having the ability to get
| access to the tooling if you decide you want it, but
| apple offering it is a flashpoint you can exploit for
| rhetorical advantage.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| > Moreover, despite some "bold" proclamations from the
| haters... no android vendors ever ended up making their
| oem tooling available to consumers at all. You have to
| use the Amazon spudger on your pixel, and you will fuck
| up the waterproofing when you do your repair, because the
| android phone won't seal properly against water without
| the tools either. IPX sixtywho!?
|
| I think the dirty little secret here is that an iPhone is
| just about the only phone, apart from maybe some of the
| really nice Google and Samsung flagships, that anyone
| _wants_ to repair, because they 're bloody expensive.
| Which is fine and dandy but then do kindly park your
| endless bemoaning of the subjects of e-waste and non-
| repairable goods, when Android by far and away is the
| worse side of that equation, with absolute shit tons of
| low yield, crap hardware made, sold, and thrown away when
| the first software update renders it completely unusable
| (if it wasn't already, from the factory).
| dns_snek wrote:
| Could you chill with the relentless insults? I'd
| appreciate it.
|
| Perhaps you haven't noticed, but once you tally up
| overpriced parts together with their oversized, heavy,
| expensive rental of tools _that you don 't need_, you end
| up with a sum that matches what you would pay to have it
| repaired by Apple - except you're doing all of the work
| yourself.
|
| A curious consumer who has never repaired a device, but
| might have been interested in doing so, will therefore
| conclude that repairing their own device is 1. Far too
| complicated, thanks to an intimidating-looking piece of
| kit that they recommend, but is completely unnecessary,
| and 2. Far too expensive, because Apple prices these such
| that the repair is made economically nonviable.
|
| So yes, I still believe that this is Apple fighting the
| anti-repair war on a psychological front. You're giving
| them benefit of the doubt even though they've established
| a clear pattern of behavior that demonstrates their anti-
| repair stance beyond any reasonable doubt - although you
| dance around the citations and claim that I'm being
| unreasonable about Apple genuinely making the repair
| situation "better".
|
| Futhermore, I'm not a fanboy or anti-fanboy of any
| company. The only thing I'm an anti-fanboy of are anti-
| consumer practices. If Apple changed some of their
| practices I'd go out and buy an iPhone and a Macbook
| tomorrow.
|
| The fact that I pointed out that Apple is hostile against
| repair does not mean that I endorse Google, Samsung, or
| any other brand - they all suck when it comes to repair,
| yet you're taking it as a personal attack and calling me
| names for it.
| paulmd wrote:
| Actually to be fully clear, in many cases you have an
| anti-right: literally not only do you not have a right,
| but it's illegal to circumvent technological restrictions
| intended to prevent the thing you want to do.
|
| As noxious as that whole thing is, it's literally the
| law. I agree the outcome is horrifying of course...
| stallman was right all along, it's either your device or
| it's not.
|
| And legally speaking, we have decided it's ok to go with
| "not".
| rfoo wrote:
| > You aren't required to develop for iOS.
|
| Sure, as a SWE I'm not going to buy a computer unable to
| run my own code. A smartphone is an ergonomic portable
| computer, so I say no to iPhone and would like to remind
| others who didn't have a deep think into this about it.
| 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?
| rodgerd wrote:
| > Normal users will not do this. J
|
| Unfortunately a lot of the "freedom" crowd think that
| unless you want to be an 80s sysadmin you don't deserve
| security or privacy. Or computers.
| muyuu wrote:
| the main reason the masses don't have privacy and
| security-centred systems is that they don't demand them
| and they will trade it away for a twopence or for the
| slightest increment in convenience
|
| a maxim that seems to hold true at every level of
| computing is that users will not care about security
| unless forced into caring
|
| with privacy they may care more, but they are easily
| conditioned to assume it's there or that nothing can be
| realistically be done about losing it
| notpushkin wrote:
| I, an engineer, am not doing this myself, too. There is a
| middle ground though: just use a privacy-oriented Android
| build, like DivestOS. [1]
|
| There are a couple caveats:
|
| 1. It is still a bit tricky for a non-technical person to
| install. Should not be a problem if they know somebody
| who can help, though. There's been some progress making
| the process more user friendly recently (e.g. WebUSB-
| based GrapheneOS installer).
|
| 2. There are some papercuts if you don't install Google
| services on your phone. microG [2] helps with most but
| some still remain. My main concern with this setup is
| that I can't use Google Pay this way, but having to bring
| my card with me every time seems like an acceptable trade
| off to me.
|
| [1]: https://divestos.org/
|
| [2]: https://microg.org/
| int_19h wrote:
| The biggest problem with these kinds of setups is usually
| the banking apps which refuse to run if it's not "safe".
| fsflover wrote:
| > No, the alternative is Android devices with everything
| except firmware built from source and signed by myself
|
| I wouldn't bet on this long term, since it fully relies
| on Google hardware, and Google's long-term strategy is to
| remove your freedom piece by piece, cash on it, not to
| support it.
|
| The real alternative is GNU/Linux phones, Librem 5 and
| Pinephone, without any ties to greedy, anti-freedom
| corporations.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > 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.
|
| There are people who don't know how to use file explorer,
| new generation grows up in a world of iPhones without
| ever seeing file system. Any other bright ideas?
| 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
| brookst wrote:
| There is tons of regulation of services? Everything from
| fraud / false advertising to disclosure of fees to length
| and terms of contracts. What regulation do you think is
| missing?
|
| And as someone who presumably provides services for a
| living, what additional regulations would you like to be
| subject to?
| 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.
| klabb3 wrote:
| Did you reply to the right comment? Feels like we're
| talking about different things altogether.
| bingbingbing777 wrote:
| What AI is Apple scaling?
| bionhoward wrote:
| Seen MLX folks post on X about nice results running local
| LLMs. https://github.com/ml-explore/mlx
|
| Also, Siri, and consider: you're scaling AI on apple's
| hardware, too, you can develop your own local custom AI
| on it, there's more memory available for linear algebra
| in a maxed out MBP than the biggest GPUs you can buy.
|
| They scale the VRAM capacity with unified memory and that
| plus a ton of software is enough to make the Apple stuff
| plenty competitive with the corresponding NVIDIA stuff
| for the specific task of running big AI models locally.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| Engineers use MacBook pros because it's the best built
| laptop, the best screen, arguably the best OS and most
| importantly - they're not the ones paying for them.
| BobbyTables2 wrote:
| I have one and hate it with a passion. A MacBook Air
| bought new in the past 3 years should be able to use
| Teams (alone) without keeling over. Takes over a minute
| to launch Outlook.
|
| My 15 year old Sony laptop can do better.
|
| Even if Microsoft on Mac is an unmitigated dumpster fire,
| this is ridiculous.
|
| I avoid using it whenever possible. If people email me,
| it'd better not be urgent.
| riddlemethat wrote:
| I avoid using Outlook on any device, but I wouldn't
| complain about my Surface tablet's performance based on
| how poorly iTunes performs...
| josephg wrote:
| Is it an Apple silicon or Intel machine? Intel macs are
| crazy slow - especially since the most recent few
| versions of macOS. And especially since developers
| everywhere have upgraded to an M1 or better.
| saagarjha wrote:
| No MacBook Air from the last 3 years is Intel-based
| josephg wrote:
| You could certainly still buy new intel macbooks 3 years
| ago from Apple. Plenty of people did - particularly given
| a lot of software was still running through rosetta at
| the time.
|
| The M1 air was only released in November 2020. With a bit
| of slop in the numbers, its very possible the parent
| poster bought an intel mac just before the M1 launched.
| jlarcombe wrote:
| Yeah it's such a shame how much the performance has been
| affected by recent macOS. I kept my 2019 Mac Book Pro on
| Catalina for years because everyone else was
| complaining... finally upgraded directly to Sonoma and
| the difference in speed was night and day!
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Sounds a bit like my Intel MBP, in particular after they
| (the company I work for) installed all the lovely
| bloatware/tracking crap IT thinks we need to be subjected
| to. Most of the day the machine runs with the fans
| blasting away.
|
| Still doesn't take a minute to launch Outlook, but I
| understand your pain.
|
| I keep hoping it will die, because it would be replaced
| with an M-series MBP and they are way, way, WAY faster
| than even the best Intel MBP.
| WWLink wrote:
| > Even if Microsoft on Mac is an unmitigated dumpster
| fire, this is ridiculous.
|
| It is Microsoft. I could rant all day about the dumpster
| fire that is the "NEW Microsoft Teams (Work or School)"
|
| It's like the perfect shining example of how MS doesn't
| give a flaming fuck about their end users.
| larkost wrote:
| I will pile on on MS Teams. I am on a Mac and
| periodically have to fight it because it went offline on
| me for some reason and I am no longer getting messages.
| Slightly less annoying is when my iPhone goes to sleep
| and Teams on my iPhone then sets my status to "Away",
| even though I am actively typing on Teams on my computer.
|
| And while my particular problems might be partially
| because I am on MacOS, I observe Windows-using colleagues
| have just as many problems joining meetings (either total
| refusal, no audio, or sharing issues). So I think using
| Teams as a measure of any computer is probably not
| warranted.
| bigboy12 wrote:
| I suppose you like bloatware and ads in your taskbar and
| 49 years of patch Tuesday. Have fun with that. I'll take
| Mac over any windows.
| 486sx33 wrote:
| Outlook (old) is okay on Mac Teams is a dumpster fire on
| every platform
| safety1st wrote:
| Meanwhile here I am, running linux distros and XFCE on
| everything. My hardware could be a decade old and I
| probably wouldn't notice.
|
| (In fact I DO have a spare 13 year old laptop hanging
| around that still gets used for web browsing, mail and
| stuff. It is not slow.)
| freedomben wrote:
| Indeed, I have a 15-year-old desktop computer that is
| still running great on Linux. I upgraded the RAM to the
| maximum supported by the motherboard, which is 8 GB, and
| it has gone through three hard drives in its life, but
| otherwise it is pretty much the same. As a basic web
| browsing computer, and for light games, it is fantastic.
| safety1st wrote:
| It also performs pretty well for the particular brand of
| web development I do, which basically boils down to
| running VS Code, a browser, and a lot of ssh.
|
| It's fascinating to me how people are still attached to
| the hardware upgrade cycle as an idea that matters, and
| yet for a huge chunk of people and scenarios, basically
| an SSD, 8gb of RAM and an Intel i5 from a decade ago
| could have been the end of computing history with no real
| loss to productivity.
|
| I honestly look at people who use Apple or Windows with a
| bit of pity, because those ecosystems would just give me
| more stuff to worry about.
| kolinko wrote:
| That's not an issue with Macboom but with MS. MS has an
| incentive to deliver such a terrible experience on macs.
| int_19h wrote:
| MS has literally thousands of managers running Outlook
| and Teams on their company-provided ARM MacBooks daily.
| kagakuninja wrote:
| Teams is shit, and hangs and crashes on my Mac. I blame
| Microsoft for that.
| al_borland wrote:
| And they can typically setup their dev environment
| without a VM, while also getting commercial app support
| if they need it.
|
| Windows requires a VM, like WSL, for a lot of people, and
| Linux lacks commercial support. macOS strikes a good
| balance in the middle that makes it a pretty compelling
| choice.
| ensignavenger wrote:
| There are a plethora of companies offering commercial
| support for various Linux distributions.
| al_borland wrote:
| I was thinking more about software like the Adobe suite,
| Microsoft Office, or other closed source software that
| hasn't released on Linux. Electron has made things a bit
| better, but there are still a lot of bigs gaps for the
| enterprise, unless the company is specifically choosing
| software to maintain Linux support for end users.
|
| Sure, Wine exists, but it's not something I'd want to
| rely on for a business when there are alternatives like
| macOS which will offer native support.
| rob74 wrote:
| Most people don't need the Adobe Suite, and the web
| version of M$-Office is more than Ok for occasional use.
| Most other enterprise software are web apps too nowadays,
| so it's much less relevant what OS your machine is
| running than it was ten years ago...
| seec wrote:
| Yep, that's pretty much it.
|
| Apple fanboys like to talk about how cool and long
| lasting a MacBook Air is but a 500 bucks Chromebook will
| do just as well while allowing pretty much 90% of the use
| cases. Sure, the top end power is much lower but at the
| same time considering the base RAM/storage combo Apple
| gives it is not that relevant. If you starting loading it
| up, that puts the pricing in an entirely different
| category and in my opinion the MacBook Air becomes
| seriously irrelevant when compared to serious computing
| devices in the same price range...
| close04 wrote:
| There's still a huge market for people who want higher
| end hardware and to run workloads locally, or put a
| higher price on privacy. For people who want to keep
| their data close to their chest, and particularly now
| with the AI bloom, being able to perform all tasks on
| device is more valuable than ever.
|
| A Chromebook "does the job" but it's closer to a thin
| client than a workstation. A lot of the job is done
| remotely and you may not want that.
| nolist_policy wrote:
| Not at all, a Chromebook let's you run Linux apps. I can
| run full blown IDEs locally without problems. And yes,
| that is with 8Gb ram, ChromeOS has superb memory
| management.
| hollerith wrote:
| Since the full blown IDE is running in a Linux VM, don't
| you mean, "Linux has superb memory management"?
| nolist_policy wrote:
| Well, Google developed and deployed MGLRU to Chromebooks
| long before upstreamed it. Plus they use some magic to
| check the MGLRU working set size inside the VMs and
| balance everything.
| hollerith wrote:
| Now I see. Interesting. (I'm planning to switch to
| ChromeOS, BTW.)
| pokerface_86 wrote:
| what chromebooks come with a mini LED HDR screen and
| insane battery life? i'd love to know
| nolist_policy wrote:
| No mini LED, but you can configure the HP Elite Dragonfly
| Chromebook with a 1000 nits IPS display.
|
| And AFAIK, Google dictates 10+h of battery life with
| mixed web browsing for all Chromebooks.
| pokerface_86 wrote:
| 1000 nits is useless without HDR.
| pokerface_86 wrote:
| and backlight control
| gytdev wrote:
| Excel is essential and in most businesses that I worked
| with, most of the accounting and business side is run on
| it. I switched to Windows from Linux just because of
| Excel when WSL came out. If Linux would have Excel and
| Photoshop that would be a no brainer to choose it, but
| that will never happen
| qalmakka wrote:
| You usually don't need either for software development
| though, and if you do the free or online alternatives are
| often good enough for the rare occasions you need them.
| If you are a software developer and you have to spend
| significant time using Office it means you either are
| developing extensions for Office or your company
| management is somewhat lacking and you are forced to
| handle things you should not (like bureaucracy for
| instance).
| al_borland wrote:
| Where I'm at my email is in Outlook. Having to use the
| web version sounds annoying. I also end up getting a lot
| of information in spreadsheets. Having to move all that
| to the online version to open also sounds annoying. The
| online version is also more limited, which could lead to
| issues.
|
| I could see a front end dev needing Photoshop for some
| things, if they don't have a design team to give them
| assets.
|
| There are also security software the company says laptops
| must have which isn't available for Linux. They only buy
| and deploy this stuff with Windows and macOS in mind.
|
| A couple weeks ago on HN I saw someone looking for a
| program to make a demo of their app (I think). The
| comments were filled with people recommending an app on
| macOS that was apparently far and away the best option,
| and many were disappointed by the lack of availability
| elsewhere. I find there are a lot of situations like
| this, where I might be able to get the job done on
| another OS, but the software I actually want to use is on
| macOS. Obviously this one is a matter of taste to some
| degree.
|
| It's not as big an issue as it was 20 years ago, but it's
| still an issue for in many environments.
| wojciii wrote:
| I use Linux for work with the MS apps used in a browser.
| I use one specific app using a remote desktop .. also
| using a browser.
|
| So this can be done. I don't expect the IT support to
| help me with any Linux issues.
|
| My excuse for using Linux? It makes me more effective at
| developing software.
| overgard wrote:
| If you mean WSL for containers, macOS needs a VM too. If
| youre doing C++ macOS dev tools are .. bleak. Great for
| webdev though
| al_borland wrote:
| WSL for normal stuff. My co-worker is on Windows and had
| to setup WSL to get a linter working with VS Code. It
| took him a week to get it working the first time, and it
| breaks periodically, so he needs to do it all over again
| every few months.
| trimethylpurine wrote:
| I'm developing on Windows for Windows, Linux, Android,
| and web, including C, Go, Java, TSQL and MSSQL
| management. I do not necessarily need WSL except for C.
| SSH is built directly into the Windows terminal and is
| fully scriptable in PS.
|
| WSL is also nice for Bash scripting, but it's not
| necessary.
|
| It is a check box in the "Add Features" panel. There is
| nothing to install or setup. Certainly not for linting,
| unless, again, you're using a Linux tool chain.
|
| But if you are, just check the box. No setup beyond VS
| Code, bashrc, vimrc, and your tool chain. Same as you
| would do on Mac.
|
| If anything, all the Mac specific quirks make setting up
| the Linux tool chains much harder. At least on WSL the
| entire directory structure matches Linux out of the box.
| The tool chains just work.
|
| While some of the documentation is in its infancy, the
| workflow and versatility of cross platform development on
| Windows, I think, is unmatched.
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| This. I have to onboard a lot of students to our analysis
| toolchain (Nuclear Physics, ROOT based, C++). 10 years
| ago I prayed that the student has a Mac, because it was
| so easy. Now I pray they have Windows, because of WSL.
| The tool chain is all compiled from source. Pretty much
| every major version, but often also minor versions, of
| macos break the compilation of ROOT. I had several
| release upgrades of Ubuntu that only required a
| recompile, if that, and it always worked.
| int_19h wrote:
| Unless he is doing Linux development in the first place,
| that sounds very weird. You most certainly don't need to
| set up WSL to lint Python or say JS in VSCode on Windows.
| pjmlp wrote:
| As Windows/UNIX developer, I only use WSL for Linux
| containers.
| overgard wrote:
| That sounds wild, you can run bash and unix utils on
| windows with minimal fuss without WSL. Unless that linter
| truly needed linux (and i mean, vscode extensions are
| typescript..) that sounds like overkill
| Noumenon72 wrote:
| Don't you need Cygwin or Git Bash if you don't use WSL?
| That's kind of fussy.
| repelsteeltje wrote:
| | This!
|
| I would love to buy Apple hardware, but not from Apple. I
| mean: M2 13 inch notebook with access to swap/extend
| memory and storage, regular US keyboard layout and proper
| desktop Linux (Debian, Alpine, Mint, PopOS!, Fedora
| Cinamon) or windows. MacOS and the Apple eco system just
| gets in your way when you're just trying to maintain a
| multi-platform C++/Java/Rust code base.
| pineaux wrote:
| WSL is not a VM. Edit: TIL WSL2 is a VM. I develop on mac
| and linux computers so should have kept my mouth shut
| anyways
| worthless-trash wrote:
| Hey, you learned and corrected yourself, dont be so hard
| on yourself mate.
| tomcam wrote:
| Username highly inaccurate ;)
| ddingus wrote:
| Seriously! I agree. They just modeled the best discussion
| with some of the highest value there is.
|
| Being wrong is no big deal. Being unable to be right is
| often a very big deal.
| shandor wrote:
| Just to make sure your TIL is complete, do note that
| Linux containers are VMs _also_ on MacOS :)
| forty wrote:
| What do you mean without a VM? I guess you don't count
| docker/podman as VMs then?
| BytesAndGears wrote:
| Likely that most devs want to use Unix tools -- terminal,
| etc.
| dualboot wrote:
| Those aren't VMs -- they're containers.
| Hasu wrote:
| Only on Linux - on MacOS and Windows, you have to do
| virtualization for containers.
| anArbitraryOne wrote:
| And the M1 chip on mine really alters productivity. Every
| time we want to update a library, we need some kind of
| workaround.
|
| It's great having a chip that is so much different than
| what our production infrastructure uses.
| gibolt wrote:
| This should be a temporary problem solved with time. The
| battery and performance gains are completely worth most
| workarounds required.
| anArbitraryOne wrote:
| Not worth it at all. I rarely use battery power, so I'd
| rather have an intel or AMD chip with more cores and a
| higher clock speed at the expense of the battery. Oh, and
| an OS that can actually manage its windows, and customize
| keyboard settings, and not require an account to use the
| app store
| nxicvyvy wrote:
| This hasn't been true for a long time.
| resonious wrote:
| M* has caused nothing but trouble for most mac user
| engineers I know (read: most engineers I know) who
| upgraded. Now not only are they building software for a
| different OS, they're building for a different
| architecture! They do all of their important compute in
| Docker, wasting CPU cycles and memory on the VM. All for
| what: a nice case? nice UI (that pesters you to try
| Safari)?
|
| It looks like Apple's silicon and software is really good
| for those doing audio/video. Why people like it for dev
| is mostly a mystery to me. Though I know a few people who
| don't really like it but are just intimidated by Linux or
| just can't handle the small UX differences.
| AtomicOrbital wrote:
| I strongly suggest putting in the time to learn how to
| install and maintain a linux laptop ... Ubuntu 24.04 is a
| great engineer platform
| daviddever23box wrote:
| It is, provided that the hardware vendor has reasonably
| decent support for power management, and you're willing
| to haul around an AC adapter if not. In general, I really
| like AMD hardware with built-in graphics for this, or
| alternately, Intel Tiger Lake-U based hardware.
|
| Asahi Linux is shockingly great on Apple Silicon
| hardware, though.
| spullara wrote:
| 1) macs are by far the best hardware and also performance
| running intel code is faster than running intel code on
| the previous intel macs:
| https://discourse.slicer.org/t/hardware-is-apple-m1-much-
| fas... 2) they should use safari to keep power usage low
| and browser diversity high
| khaki54 wrote:
| It's basically required for iOS development. Working
| around it is extremely convoluted any annoying
| resonious wrote:
| I forgot to mention that as an obvious exception. Of
| course developing for Apple is best on Apple hardware.
| niij wrote:
| In my experience as a backend services Go developer (and
| a bit of Scala) the switch to arm has been mostly
| seamless. There was a little config at the beginning to
| pull dual-image docker images (x64 and arm) but that was
| a one time configuration. Otherwise I'm still targeting
| Linux/x64 with Go builds and Scala runs on the JVM so
| it's supported everywhere anyway; they both worked out of
| the box.
|
| My builds are faster, laptop stays cooler, and battery
| lasts longer. I love it.
|
| If I was building desktop apps I assume it would be a
| less pleasant experience like you mention.
| phlakaton wrote:
| The pain for me has been in the VM scene, as VirtualBox
| disappeared from the ecosystem with the switch to ARM.
| herval wrote:
| I don't know a single engineer who had issues with M
| chips, and most engineers I know (me included) benefited
| considerably from the performance gains, so perhaps your
| niche isn't that universal?
| resonious wrote:
| My niche is Ruby on Rails web dev, which is definitely
| not universal, but not all that narrow either!
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| You must have an unusual setup because, between Rosetta
| and rosetta in Virtualization.framework VMs (configurable
| in Docker Desktop or Rancher Desktop), I've never had
| issues running intel binaries on my Mac
| Lio wrote:
| I'm doing Ruby on Rails dev too. I don't notice a hige
| difference between macOS and Linux for how I work.
|
| There's quirks to either OS.
|
| Eg when on Gnome it drives me mad that it won't focus a
| recently launched apps.
|
| On macOS it annoys me that I have install a 3rd party
| util to move windows around.
|
| Meh, you just adapt after a while.
| herval wrote:
| what's wrong w/ Rails on M chips? I don't recall having
| had much trouble with it (except w/ nokogiri bindings
| right when the M1 was first available, but that's a given
| for any new release of OSX)
| jetpks wrote:
| I'm an engineer that has both an apple silicon laptop
| (mbp, m2) and a linux laptop (arch, thinkpad x1 yoga.) I
| choose the mac every day of the week and it's not even
| close. I'm sure it's not great for specific engineering
| disciplines, but for me (web, rails, sre) it really can't
| be beat.
|
| The UX differences are absolutely massive. Even after
| daily-driving that thinkpad for months, Gnome always felt
| kinda not quite finished. Maybe KDE is better, but it
| didn't have Wayland support when I was setting that
| machine up, which made it a non-starter.
|
| The real killer though is battery life. I can work
| literally all day unplugged on the mbp and finish up with
| 40-50% remaining. When i'm traveling these days, i don't
| even bring a power cable with me during the day. The
| thinkpad, despite my best efforts with powertop, the most
| aggressive frequency scaling i could get, and a bunch of
| other little tricks, lasts 2 hours.
|
| There are niceties about Linux too. Package management is
| better and the docker experience is _way_ better. Overall
| though, i'd take the apple silicon macbook 10 times out
| of 10.
| resonious wrote:
| Interesting. I do similar (lots of Rails) but have pretty
| much the opposite experience (other than battery life -
| Mac definitely wins there). Though I use i3/Sway more
| than Gnome. The performance of running our huge monolith
| locally is much better for Linux users than Mac users
| where I work.
|
| I used a Mac for awhile back in 2015 but it never really
| stood out to me UX-wise, even compared to Gnome. All I
| really need to do is open a few windows and then switch
| between them. In i3 or Sway, opening and switching
| between windows is very fast and I never have to drag
| stuff around.
| xarope wrote:
| I'd like to offer a counterpoint, I have an old'ish T480s
| which runs linuxmint, several lxd containers for traefik,
| golang, python, postgres and sqlserver (so not even
| dockerized, but full VMs running these services), and I
| can go the whole morning (~4-5 hours).
|
| I think the culprit is more likely the power hungry intel
| CPU in your yoga?
|
| Going on a slight tangent; I've tried but do not like the
| mac keyboards, they feel very shallow to me, hence why
| I'm still using my old T480s. The newer thinkpad laptop
| keyboards all seem to be going that way though (going
| thinner), much to my dismay. Perhaps a P14s is my next
| purchase, despite it's bulk.
|
| Anybody with a framework 13 want to comment on their
| keyboard?
| freedomben wrote:
| I really like the keyboards on my frameworks. I have both
| the 13 and the new 16, and they are pretty good. Not as
| good as the old T4*0s I'm afraid, but certainly usable.
| klabb3 wrote:
| > The thinkpad, [...], lasts 2 hours.
|
| This echoes my experiences for anything that needs power
| management. Not just that the battery life is worse, but
| that it _degrades_ quickly. In two years it's barely
| usable. I've seen this with non-Apple phones and laptops.
| iPhone otoh is so good these days you don't need to
| upgrade until EOL of ~6 years (and even if you need it
| battery is not more expensive than any other proprietary
| battery). My last MacBook from 2011 failed a couple of
| years ago only because of a Radeon GPU inside with a
| known hw error.
|
| > There are niceties about Linux too.
|
| Yes! If you haven't tried in years, the Linux _desktop_
| experience is awesome (at least close enough) for me - a
| dev who CAN configure stuff if I need to but find it
| excruciatingly menial if it isn 't related to my core
| work. It's really an improvement from a decade ago.
| pompino wrote:
| >The UX differences are absolutely massive.
|
| Examples?
| jwells89 wrote:
| Battery life followed by heat and fan noise have been my
| sticking points with non-mac laptops.
|
| My first gen ThinkPad Nano X1 would be an excellent
| laptop, if it weren't for the terrible battery life even
| in power save mode (which as an aside, slows it down a
| _lot_ ) and its need to spin up a fan to do something as
| trivial as driving a rather pedestrian 2560x1440 60hz
| display.
|
| It feels almost like priorities are totally upside down
| for x86 laptop manufacturers. I totally understand and
| appreciate that there are performance oriented laptops
| that aren't supposed to be good with battery life, but
| there's no good reason for there being so few
| ultraportable and midrange x86 laptops that have good
| battery life and won't fry your lap or sound like a jet
| taking off when pushed a little. It's an endless sea of
| mediocrity.
| landswipe wrote:
| This is going to change once Arm on Linux becomes a thing
| with Qualcomm's new jazz. I am mostly tethered to a dock
| with multiple screens. I have been driving Ubuntu now for
| over 4 years full time for work.
| freedomben wrote:
| Interestingly enough, the trend I am seeing is all the
| MacBook engineers moving back to native development
| environments. Basically, no longer using docker. And just
| as expected, developers are getting bad with docker and
| are finding it harder to use. They are getting more and
| more reliant on devops help or to lean on the team member
| who is on Linux to handle all of that stuff. We were on a
| really great path for a while there in development where
| we were getting closer to the ideal of having development
| more closely resemble production, and to have developers
| understand the operations tools. Now we're cruising
| firmly in the opposite direction because of this Apple
| switch to arm. Mainly it wouldn't bother me so much if
| people would recognize that they are rationalizing
| because they like the computers, but they don't. They
| just try to defend logically a decision they made
| emotionally. I do it too, every human does, but a little
| recognition would be nice.
| int_19h wrote:
| It's not even a problem with MacBooks as such. They are
| still excellent consumer devices (non-casual gaming
| aside). It's this weird positioning of them as the
| ultimate dev laptop that causes so many problems, IMO.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Why would excellent machine be blamed for shitty
| software?
| int_19h wrote:
| Because machines are tools meant to perform tasks, and
| part of that is being interoperable with other tools and
| de facto standards in the relevant field. For dev work,
| today, MacBook is not good at it.
| daviddever23box wrote:
| Remember, though, that the binaries deployed in
| production environments are not being built locally on
| individual developer machines, but rather in the cloud,
| as reproducible builds securely deployed from the cloud
| to the cloud.
|
| Modern language tooling (Go, Rust et al) allows one to
| build and test on any architecture, and the native macOS
| virtualization (https://developer.apple.com/documentation
| /virtualization) provides remarkably better performance
| compared to Docker (which is a better explanation for its
| fading from daily use).
|
| Your "trend" may, in fact, not actually reflect the
| reality of how cloud development works at scale.
|
| And I don't know a single macOS developer that "lean(s)
| on the team member who is on Linux" to leverage tools
| that are already present on their local machine. My own
| development environments are IDENTICAL across all three
| major platforms.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Virtualization and Docket are orthogonal technologies.
| The reason you use docker, especially in dev, is to have
| the exact same system libraries, dependencies, and
| settings on each build. The reason you use virtualization
| is to access hardware and kernel features that are not
| present on your hardware or native OS.
|
| If you deploy on docker (or Kubernetes) on Linux in
| production, then ideally you should be using docker on
| your local system as well. Which, for Windows or MacOS
| users, requires a Linux VM as well.
| daviddever23box wrote:
| It seems that you're trying to "educate" me on how
| containers and virtualization work, when in fact I've
| been doing this for a while, on macOS, Linux and Windows
| (itself having its own Hyper-V pitfalls).
|
| I know you mean well, though.
|
| There is no Docker on macOS without a hypervisor layer -
| period - and a VM, though there are multiple possible
| container runtimes not named Docker that are suitable for
| devops-y local development deployments (which will
| always, of course, be constrained in comparison to the
| scale of lab / staging / production environments). Some
| of these can better leverage the Rosetta 2 translation
| layer that Apple provides, than others.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I'm sorry that I came up as patronizing, I was more so
| trying to explain my confusion and thought process rather
| than to teach you about virtualization and containers.
|
| Specifically what confused me in your comment was that
| you were saying Docker on Mac was superseded by their new
| native virtualization, which just doesn't make sense to
| me, for the reasons I was bringing up. I still don't
| understand what you were trying to say; replacing docker
| with podman or containerd or something else still doesn't
| have anything to do with virtualization or Rosetta, or at
| least I don't see the connection.
|
| I should also say that I don't think anyone really means
| specifically docker when they talk about it, they
| probably mean containerization + image repos in general.
| eloisant wrote:
| We have to cross-compile anyway because now we're
| deploying to arm64 Linux (AWS Graviton) in addition to
| x86 Linux.
|
| So even if all developers of your team are using Linux,
| unless you want to waste money by ignoring arm64
| instances on cloud computing, you'll have to setup cross
| compilation.
| wubrr wrote:
| No, no, no, yes.
| synergy20 wrote:
| no, no, NO and yes.
|
| I actually rejected a job offer when heard I will be
| given a macbook pro.
|
| Apple, been the most closed company these days, should be
| avoided as much as you can, not to mention its macos is
| useless for linux developers like me, anything else is
| better.
|
| its keyboard is dumb to me(that stupid command/ctrl key
| difference), can not even mouse-select and paste is
| enough for me to avoid Macos at all costs.
| 486sx33 wrote:
| I think I had similar feelings but took an open mind and
| love my m2 pro Sometimes an open mind reaps rewards
| friend
| gibolt wrote:
| I selected Mac + iOS devices when a job offered a choice,
| specifically to try out the option, while personally
| sticking with Windows and Android.
|
| Now the performance of Mx Macs convinced me to switch,
| and I'll die on the hill of Android for life
| insaneirish wrote:
| > I actually rejected a job offer when heard I will be
| given a macbook pro.
|
| Probably best for you both.
| fastball wrote:
| macOS is clearly better for linux devs than Windows,
| given it is unix under-the-hood.
|
| I don't even know what you mean by mouse-select and
| paste.
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| On most Linux environments: text you highlight with the
| mouse (or highlight by double/triple clicking) can be
| "pasted" by middle-clicking.
| Cyphase wrote:
| And it's a separate clipboard from Ctrl+C/right-click-
| and-copy. The number of times I miss that on non-Linux...
| Lio wrote:
| Personally, I use tmux on both Linux and macOS to get
| multiple clipboards and the mouse behaviour I'm used to.
| Reason077 wrote:
| > _" I don't even know what you mean by mouse-select and
| paste."_
|
| Presumably they mean linux-style text select & paste,
| which is done by selecting text and then clicking the
| middle mouse button to paste it (no explicit "copy"
| command).
|
| macOS doesn't have built-in support for this, but there
| are some third-party scripts/apps to enable it.
|
| For example: https://github.com/lodestone/macpaste
| int_19h wrote:
| On Windows these days, you get WSL, which is actual
| Linux, kernel and all. There are still some differences
| with a standalone Linux system, but they are far smaller
| than macOS, in which not only the kernel is completely
| different, but the userspace also has many rather
| prominent differences that you will very quickly run
| afoul of (like different command line switches for the
| same commands).
|
| Then there's Docker. Running amd64 containers on Apple
| silicon is slow for obvious reasons. Running arm64
| containers is fast, but the actual environment you will
| be deploying to is almost certainly amd64, so if you're
| using that locally for dev & test purposes, you can get
| some surprises in prod. Windows, of course, will happily
| run amd64 natively.
| paulmd wrote:
| > the actual environment you will be deploying to is
| almost certainly amd64
|
| that's up to your team of course, but graviton is
| generally cheaper than x86 instances nowadays and afaik
| the same is true on google and the other clouds.
| aforwardslash wrote:
| Arm is an ISA, not a family of processors. You may expect
| Apple chips and Graviton to be wildly different, and
| perform completely different in the same scenario. In
| fact, most Arm cpus also have specific extensions that
| are not found in other manufacturers. So yes, while both
| recognize a base set of instructions, thats about it -
| expect that everything else is different. I know, amd64
| is also technically an ISA, but you have 2 major
| manufacturers, with very similar and predictable
| performance characteristics. And even then, sometimes
| something on AMD behaves quite differently from Intel.
|
| For most devs, doing crud stuff or writing high-level
| scripting languages, this isn't really a problem. For
| some devs, working on time-sensitive problems or with
| strict baseline performance requirements, this is
| important. For devs developing device drivers, emulation
| can only get you so far.
| paulmd wrote:
| What are you responding to here?
|
| No, I said you won't always be deploying on amd64.
| Because arm64 is now the cheapest option and generally
| faster than the sandy bridge vcpu unit that amd64
| instances are indexed against (and really, constrained
| to, intentionally, by AWS).
|
| I never said anything about graviton not being arm64.
| aforwardslash wrote:
| Its not about price, its about compatibility. Just
| because software compiles in a different ISA doesnt mean
| it behaves the same way. But if that isn't obvious to
| you, good for you.
| Reason077 wrote:
| > _" userspace also has many rather prominent differences
| ... (like different command line switches for the same
| commands)."_
|
| Very quickly remedied by installing the GNU versions of
| those commands, ie: "brew install coreutils findutils"
| (etc)
|
| Then you'll have exactly the same command line switches
| as on Linux.
| ekimekim wrote:
| > I actually rejected a job offer when heard I will be
| given a macbook pro.
|
| For what it's worth, I've had a good success rate at
| politely asking to be given an equivalent laptop I can
| put linux on, or provide my own device. I've never had to
| outright reject an offer due to being required to use a
| Mac. At worst I get "you'll be responsible for making our
| dev environment work on your setup".
| nobleach wrote:
| I've had 50/50. These days I'm fairly okay with just
| taking the Macbook Pro. I did have one instance where I
| got one my first week and used my Dell XPS with Linux the
| entire 10 months I was at the place. I returned the
| Macbook basically unused.
|
| Only one time did I interview with a place where I asked
| if I'd be given a choice what hardware/OS I could use.
| The response was "We use Windows". My response was, "no
| we do not. Either I will not be using Windows with you,
| or I will not be using Windows NOT with you". I didn't
| get an offer. I was cool with it.
| fooblaster wrote:
| what amazing laptop must an employer give you to not be
| summarily rejected?
| synergy20 wrote:
| any thing runs Linux,even wsl2 is fine,no macos is the
| key. and yes it costs the employer about half of the
| expensive Apple devices that can not even be upgraded,
| its hardware is as closed as its software.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Employers typically also care about costs like "how hard
| is it to provision the devices" and "how long is the
| useful life of this" or "can I repurpose an old machine
| for someone else".
| p_l wrote:
| Provisioning is a place where Windows laptops win hands
| down, though.
|
| Pretty much everything going wrong with provisioning
| involves going extra weird on hw (usually for cheap
| supplier) and/or pushing weird third party "security"
| crapware.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > its keyboard is dumb to me(that stupid command/ctrl key
| difference)
|
| Literally best keyboard shortcuts out of all major OSes.
| I don't know what weird crab hands you need to have to
| comfortably use shortcuts on Windows/Linux. CMD maps
| PERFECTLY on my thumb.
| pompino wrote:
| "Engineers" - ironically the term used in the software
| industry for people who never standardize anything, solve
| the same problem solved by other "engineers" over and
| over again (how many libraries do you need for arrays and
| vectors and guis and buttons and text boxes and binary
| trees and sorting, yada yada?) while making the same
| mistakes and learning the hard way each time, also
| vehemently argue about software being "art" might like
| OSX, but even that is debatable. Meanwhile actual
| Engineers (the ones with the license) the people who need
| CAD and design tools for building bridges and running
| manufacturing plants stay far away from OSX.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| If you look at creative pros such as photographers and
| Hollywood 'film' editors, VFX artists, etc. you will see
| a lot of Windows and Linux as people are more concerned
| about getting absolute power at a fair price and don't
| care if it is big, ugly. etc.
| pompino wrote:
| Oh, I'm sure there are lots of creatives who use OSX, so
| I don't mean to suggest nobody uses OSX, so I'll admit it
| was a bit in jest to poke fun at the stereotype. I'm
| definitely oldschool - but to me It's a bit cringe to
| hear "Oh, I'm an engineer.." or "As an engineer.." from
| people sit at a coffee shop writing emails or doing the
| most basic s/w dev work. I truly think silicon valley
| people would benefit from talking to technical people who
| are building bridges and manufacturing plants and cars
| and hardware and chips and all this stuff on
| r/engineeringporn that everyone takes for granted. I
| transitioned from s/w to hardcore manufacturing 15 years
| ago, and it was eye opening, and very humbling.
| shykes wrote:
| "silicon valley people would benefit from talking to
| people who build chips", that's a good one!
| pompino wrote:
| It would be funny, if it wasn't also sad to see the
| decline.
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| I'd assume a lot of this is because you can't get the
| software on MacOS. Not a choice. Who is choosing to use
| Windows 10/11 where you get tabloid news in the OS by
| default? Or choosing to hide the button to create local
| user accounts?
| pompino wrote:
| People overwhelmingly choose windows world-wide to get
| shit done. That answers the who.
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| So the same software exists on multiple platforms, there
| are no legacy or hardware compatibility considerations,
| interoperability considerations, no budget
| considerations, and the users have a choice in what they
| use?
|
| I.e the same functionality exists with no draw backs and
| money was no object.
|
| And they chose Windows? Seriously why?
| pompino wrote:
| We use the sales metrics and signals available to us.
|
| I don't know what to say except resign to the fact that
| the world is fundamentally unfair, and you won't ever get
| to run the A/B experiment that you want. So yes, Windows
| it is !
| goosedragons wrote:
| More choice in hardware. More flexibility in hardware. UI
| preferences. You can't get a Mac 2 in 1 or a Mac foldable
| or a Mac gaming notebook or a Mac that weighs less than a
| kilogram. You can't get a Mac with an OLED screen or a
| numpad. Some people just prefer the Windows UI too. I
| usually use Linux but between MacOS and Windows, I prefer
| the latter.
| steve1977 wrote:
| Who is choosing to use macOS, where non-Apple monitors
| and other 3rd party hardware just stops working after
| minor updates and then starts working again after another
| update, without any official statement from Apple that
| there was a problem and a fix?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| So what, Windows does the same. Printers [1], WiFi [2],
| VPN [3], Bluetooth devices [4], audio [5] - and that's
| just stuff I found via auto-completing "windows update
| breaks" on Google in under 5 minutes.
|
| The only problem is that Apple is even worse at
| communicating issues than Microsoft is.
|
| [1] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/micro
| soft-wa...
|
| [2] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/micro
| soft-fi...
|
| [3] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/micro
| soft-sa...
|
| [4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2019/06/12/m
| icrosof...
|
| [5] https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/22/windows_10_upd
| ate_kil...
| steve1977 wrote:
| The big difference is that Microsoft - at least usually -
| confirms and owns the issues.
|
| With Apple, it's usually just crickets... nothing in the
| release notes, no official statements, nothing. It's just
| trial and error for the users to see if a particular
| update fixed the issue.
| lupire wrote:
| That's anti-competitive and frustrating, but not an
| argument against the value of a pure Apple hardware
| ecosystem.
| steve1977 wrote:
| Which was not the point. The question was who would be
| choosing Windows over macOS. I would and this is one of
| the reasons why.
| wiseowise wrote:
| I do. Because for all issues it has, it is still much
| better than whatever Windows has to offer.
|
| > where non-Apple monitors and other 3rd party hardware
| just stops working after minor updates and then starts
| working again after another update, without any official
| statement from Apple that there was a problem and a fix?
|
| At least my WiFi doesn't turn off indefinitely during
| sleep until I power cycle whole laptop because of a
| shitty driver.
| wiseowise wrote:
| You seem to have some romanticized notion of engineers
| and deeply offended by someone calling themselves
| engineer. Why do you even care if someone sits at a
| coffee shop writing emails and calls themselves engineer?
| You think it somehow dilutes prestige of word "engineer"?
| Makes it less elite or what?
| pompino wrote:
| "deeply offended" - My default response to imposters is
| laughter. Call yourself Lord, King, President, Doctor,
| Lawyer whatever - doesn't matter to me. I'd suggest you
| to lighten up.
| lupusreal wrote:
| They hate you because you speak the truth. Code monkeys
| calling themselves engineers really is funny.
| zaphirplane wrote:
| Do you have an engineering degree ?
| pompino wrote:
| Yes, a bachelors and a masters.
|
| Not that the degree means much, I learnt 90% of what I
| know on the job. It certainly helped get my foot in
| through the university brand, and alumni network.
|
| You can call yourself anything you want Doctor, Lawyer,
| Engineer. I have the freedom to think my own thoughts
| too.
| cafed00d wrote:
| I always likened "engineers"[1] to "people who are
| proficient in calculus"; and "computers"[1] to "people
| who are proficient at calculations".
|
| There was brief sidestep from late 1980s to early 2010s
| (~2012) where the term "software engineer" came into
| vogue and completely ran orthogonal to "proficiency in
| calculus". I mean, literally 99% of software engineers
| never learned calculus!
|
| But it's nice to see that ever since ~2015 or so (and
| perhaps even going forward) proficiency in calculus is
| rising to the fore. We call those "software engineers"
| "ML Engineers" nowadays, ehh fine by me. And all those
| "computers" are not people anymore -- looks like
| carefully arranged sand (silicon) in metal took over.
|
| I wonder if it's just a matter of time before the
| carefully-arranged-sand-in-metal form factor will take
| over the "engineer" role too. One of those Tesla/Figure
| robots becomes "proficient at calculus" and "proficient
| at calculations" better than "people".
|
| Reference: [1]: I took the terms "engineer" and
| "computer" literally out of the movie "Hidden Figures"
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Figures#Plot
|
| It looks like ever since humankind learned calculus there
| was an enormous benefit to applying it in the engineering
| of rockets, aeroplanes, bridges, houses, and eventually
| "the careful arrangement of sand (silicon)". Literally
| every one of those jobs required learning calculus at
| school and applying calculus at work.
| hyperadvanced wrote:
| Most software engineering just doesn't require calculus,
| though it does benefit from having the understanding of
| functions and limit behaviors that higher math does. But
| if you look at a lot of meme dev jobs they've
| transitioned heavily away from the crypto craze of the
| past 5 years towards "prompt engineering" or the like to
| exploit LLMs in the same way that the "Uber for X" meme
| of 2012-2017 exploited surface level knowledge of JS or
| API integration work. Fundamentally, the tech ecosystem
| desires low skill employees, LLMs are a new frontier in
| doing a lot with a little in terms of deep technical
| knowledge.
| techcode wrote:
| Why pointing out Calculus as opposed to just Math?
|
| Might be just my Eastern Europe background where it was
| all just "Math" and both equations (that's Algebra I
| guess) and simpler functions/analysis (Calculus?) are
| taught in elementary school around age 14 or 15.
|
| Maybe I'm missing/forgetting something - I think I used
| Calculus more during electrical engineering than for
| computer/software engineering.
| pompino wrote:
| True, we learnt calculus before college in my home
| country - but it was just basic stuff. But I learnt a lot
| more of it including partial derivatives in first year of
| engineering college.
|
| >I think I used Calculus more during electrical
| engineering than for computer/software engineering.
|
| I think that was OPs point - most engineering disciplines
| teach it.
| cafed00d wrote:
| Yeah computer science went through this weird offshoot
| for 30-40 years where calculus was simply taught because
| of tradition.
|
| It was not really necessary through all of the app
| developers eras. In fact, it's so much so the case that
| many software engineers graduating from 2000-2015 or so
| work as software engineers without a degree in BS.
| Rather, they could drop the physics & calculus grind and
| opt for a BA in computer science. They then went on to
| become proficient software engineers in the industry.
|
| It's only after the recent advances of AI around
| 2012/2015 did a proficiency in calculus become crucial to
| software engineering again.
|
| I mean, there's a whole rabbit hole of knowledge on the
| reason why ML frameworks deal with calculating vector-
| Jacobian or Jacobian-vector products. Appreciating that
| and their relation to gradient is necessary to design &
| debug frameworks like PyTorch or MLX.
|
| Sure, I will concede that a sans-calculus training (BA in
| Computer Science) can still be sufficiently useful to
| working as an ML engineer in data analytics,
| api/services/framework design, infrastructure, systems
| engineering, and perhaps even inference engineering. But
| I bet all those people will need to be proficient in
| calculus the more they have to deal with debugging
| models.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| In my central european university we've learned "Real
| Analysis" that was way more concerned about theorems and
| proofs rather than "calculating" something - if anything,
| actually calculating derivatives or integrals was a
| warmup problem to the meat of the subject.
| cafed00d wrote:
| Calculus, because all of engineering depends critically
| on the modeling of real world phenomena using ordinary or
| partial differential equations.
|
| I don't mean to disregard other branches of math -- of
| course they're useful -- but calculus stands out in
| specific _applicability_ to engineering.
|
| Literally every single branch of engineering. All o then.
| Petrochemical engineering to Biotech. They all use
| calculus as a fundamental block of study.
|
| Discovering new drugs using Pk/Pd modeling is driven by
| modeling then drug<->pathogen repo as cycles using Lotka
| models.
|
| Im not saying engineers dont need to learn stats or
| arithmetic. IMO those are more fundamental to _all_
| fields, janitors or physicians or any field really. But
| calculus is fundamental to engineering alone.
|
| Perhaps, a begrudging exception I can make is its
| applications in Finance.
|
| But every other field where people build rockets, cars,
| airplanes, drugs, or ai robots, you'd need proficiency in
| calculus just as much as you'd need proficiency in
| writing or proficiency in arithmetic.
| pompino wrote:
| Hmm, that is an interesting take. Calculus does seems
| like the uniting factor.
|
| I've come to appreciate the fact that domain knowledge
| has a more dominant role in solving a problem than
| technical/programming knowledge. I often wonder how s/w
| could align with other engineering practices in terms of
| approach design in a standardized way so we can just
| churn out code w/o an excessive reliance on quality
| assurance. I'm really hoping visual programming is going
| to be the savior here. It might allow SMEs and Domain
| experts to utilize a visual interface to implement their
| ideas.
|
| Its interesting how python dominated C/C++ in the case of
| the NumPy community. One would have assumed C/C++ to be a
| more a natural fit for performance oriented code. But the
| domain knowledge overpowered technical knowledge and
| eventually people started asking funny questions like
|
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41365723/why-is-my-
| pytho...
| chasd00 wrote:
| there was some old commercial that had the tagline
| "performance is nothing without control". If you can't
| put the technology to work on your problems then the
| technology, no matter how incredible, is worthless to
| you.
| cafed00d wrote:
| I agree a hundred percent that domain knowledge is the
| single most dominant influence to problem solving
| expertise.
| ido wrote:
| That 99% guess seems high considering calculus is
| generally a required subject when studying computer
| science (or software engineering) at most universities I
| know of.
| germandiago wrote:
| In mine it was mandarory, there were 9 + 9 + 4.5 credits
| of only calculus itself. There was way more: discrete
| math, algebra...
| cafed00d wrote:
| You're right it's a total guess. It's based on my
| experience in the field.
|
| My strong "opinion" here comes from an observation that
| while calculus may have been a required subject of study
| in awarding engineering degrees, the reality is, people
| didn't really study it. They just brushed through a
| couple of pages and wrote a few tests/exams.
|
| In America there's plethora of expert software engineers
| who opt for a bachelors degree in computer science that
| is a BA not a BS.
|
| I think that's complete totally reasonable thing to do if
| you don't want to grind out the physics and calculus
| courses. They are super hard after all. And let's face
| it, all of the _useful to humanity_ work in software
| doesn't require expertise in physics or calculus, at
| least until now.
|
| With AI going forward it's hard to say. If more of the
| jobs shift over to model building then yes perhaps a back
| to basics approach of calculus proficiency could be
| required.
| GeneralMaximus wrote:
| This checks out. I'm a software developer who took math
| all through high school and my first three years of
| college. I barely scraped through my calculus exams, but
| I excelled at combinatorics, probability, matrix math,
| etc. (as long as it didn't veer into calculus for some
| reason).
|
| I guess I just enjoy things more when I can count them.
| Shorel wrote:
| For this engineering, I think calculus is not the main
| proficiency enhancer you claim it to be. Linear Algebra,
| combinatorics, probability and number theory are more
| relevant.
|
| Calculus was important during the world wars because it
| means we could throw shells to the enemy army better, and
| that was an important issue during that period.
|
| Nowadays, calculus is just a stepping stone to more
| relevant mathematics.
| lupire wrote:
| Calculus is continuous, analog math. Digital Computers
| use discrete math.
|
| Both are math, and both are still incredibly important.
| Rockets haven't gone out of style.
| cafed00d wrote:
| Calculus has never gone out of style ;)
|
| Todays ML frameworks grapple with the problem of
| "jacobian-vector products" & "vector-jacobian product" as
| a consequence of understanding the interplay between
| gradients & derivative; and the application of the "chain
| rule". All of those 3 concepts are fundamentally
| understood by being proficient in calculus.
|
| While I'm being the hype-man for calculus I don't mean to
| say proficiency in linear algebra or statistics is in any
| "less necessary" or "less useful" or "less challenging"
| or "less.." in any way.
|
| I'm merely stating that, historically, calculus has been
| the unique branch of study for engineering. Statistics
| has always found value in many fields -- business,
| finance, government policy etc.
|
| Sure Linear algebra is one of those unique fields too --
| I kinda like to think of it as "algebra" in general and
| perhaps its utility has flowed in tandem with calculus.
| Idk. I haven't thought super hard about it.
| barrenko wrote:
| You have precisely captured why I got interested in AI.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| Aren't you supposed to learn calculus to be able to
| understand what O(n) even is? Is it not a standard part
| of a CS major?
| aae42 wrote:
| They also drive trains
| nineteen999 wrote:
| Maybe we need a new moniker "webgineer". The average
| HN/FAANG web programmer does appear to vastly
| overestimate the value of their contributions to the
| world.
| peterleiser wrote:
| 1999 indeed! I haven't heard that term since around 1999
| when I was hired as a "web engineer" and derisively
| referred to myself as a "webgineer". I almost asked if I
| could change my title to "sciencematician".
| techcode wrote:
| Have we done full circle?
|
| When I started doing this "Internet stuff" we were called
| "webmasters", and job would actually include what today
| we call: - DevOps - Server/Linux sysadmin - DB admin -
| Full stack (backend and frontend) engineer
|
| And I might have forgot some things.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| People who cobble together new printers or kettles
| overestimate the value of their contributions to the
| world too. The delineation isn't between JS devs and JPL
| or ASML engineers.
| mogiddy55 wrote:
| From what I've heard (not an OSX user) Windows is the
| best operating system for multiple screens; OSX and Linux
| glitch way more. Most anyone doing 3D sculpture or
| graphics/art on a professional level will eventually move
| to working with 2-3 screens, and since there are no
| exclusively Mac design programs, OSX will be suboptimal.
|
| There's little things too, like some people using gaming
| peripherals (multi-button MMO mice and left hand
| controllers, etc.) for editing, which might not be
| compatible with OSX.
|
| And also, if you're mucking around with two 32 inch 4k
| monitors and a 16 inch Wacom it might start to feel a
| little ridiculous trying to save space with a Mac Pro.
| egypturnash wrote:
| I've been doing art on a pro level for twenty five years
| and I dislike multiple monitors.
| mogiddy55 wrote:
| I am just commenting about what I've seen at concept
| artist desks / animation studios / etc.
| ddingus wrote:
| Why is that?
|
| I am not an artist and also dislike multiple monitors,
| though I will employ two of them on occasion.
|
| My reasons are:
|
| If the window and application management doesn't suck,
| one display is all one needs.
|
| With cheap multiple displays and touch devices came an
| ongoing enshitification of app and window management.
| (And usually dumber focus rules)
|
| Having to turn my head x times a day sucks.
| Shorel wrote:
| Besides Windows having more drivers for USB adapters than
| Linux*, which is a reflection of the market, I find Linux
| having much fewer glitches using multiple screens.
|
| Once it works, Linux is more reliable than Windows. And
| virtual desktops have always worked better on Linux than
| on Windows. So I disagree with you on that front.
|
| * In my case, this means I had to get an Anker HDMI
| adapter, instead of any random brand.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| >I find Linux having much fewer glitches using multiple
| screens.
|
| Maybe as long as you don't need working fractional
| scaling with different DPI monitors, which is nothing
| fancy now.
| Toutouxc wrote:
| Nitpick: it hasn't been called "OS X" for almost eight
| years now, starting with macOS Sierra.
| tlrobinson wrote:
| Who do you think writes those CAD and design tools that
| help "actual engineers" solve the same problems over and
| over?
| pompino wrote:
| Would you like me to explain how it works to you? I'm not
| sure why you added a question mark.
| what wrote:
| Yes, they were asking you a question. Do you not
| understand question marks?
| bee_rider wrote:
| I did EE in college but we mostly just used Windows
| because the shitty semi-proprietary SPICE simulator we
| had to use, and stuff like that, only supported Windows.
| The company that makes your embedded processor might only
| support Windows (and begrudgingly at that).
|
| I think engineers using software should not be seen as an
| endorsement. They seem to have an incredible tolerance
| for bad UI.
| pompino wrote:
| You seem to be suggesting that a chunk of the hundreds of
| millions of people who use a UI that you don't like,
| secretly hate it or are forced to tolerate it. Not a
| position I'd personally want to argue or defend, so I'll
| leave it at that.
| paulmd wrote:
| What an oddly aggressive and hostile response to such a
| banal observation. Yes, millions of people use software
| they hate, all the time, that's wildly uncontroversial.
| pompino wrote:
| Its not an "observation" its someone making it up. Why
| are you so upset if I disagree?
| wiseowise wrote:
| Making up what? Go drop by your nearby shop. My hair
| styling constantly complains about management software
| that they use and quality of payment integration. At work
| I constantly hear complaints about shitty, slow IDEs. At
| optician store guy been complaining about inventory
| system.
|
| People hate software that they're forced to use.
| Professionals are better at tolerating crapware, because
| there's usually sunk cost fallacy involved.
| d0mine wrote:
| There are only two types of software: those that people
| hate and those that nobody uses (a paraphrase)
| pompino wrote:
| This is not a reasonable way to infer the sentiment of
| hundreds of millions of people in different countries,
| different business, different situations, etc, etc.
|
| Disguising it as an "observation" is even more
| ridiculous.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Indeed I'm not ready to defend it, it is just an
| anecdote. I expected the experience of using crappy
| professional software to be so universal that I wouldn't
| have to.
| pompino wrote:
| Sure, and this is where I will ask you post a list of
| "good" professional software so I can google all the bugs
| in that software :)
|
| Nah, I'm good. Believe what you want to believe my
| friend.
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| _> They seem to have an incredible tolerance for bad UI._
|
| Irelevant.
|
| Firstly, it's a tool, not a social media platform
| designed to sell ads and farm clicks, it needs to be
| utilitarian and that's it, like a power drill or a pickup
| truck, not look pretty since they're not targeting
| consumers but solving a niche set of engineering
| problems.
|
| Secondly, the engineers are not the ones paying for that
| software so their individual tolerance is irelevant since
| their company pays for the tools and for their tolerance
| to those tools, being part of the job description and the
| pay.
|
| Unless you run your own business , you're not gonna turn
| down lucrative employment because on site they provide
| BOSCH tools and GM trucks while you personally prefer the
| UX of Makita and Toyota. If those tools' UX slows down
| the process and makes the project take longer it's not my
| problem, my job is to clock in at 9 and clock out at 5,
| that's it, it's the company's problem to provide the best
| possible tools for the job, if they can.
| macintux wrote:
| > my job is to clock in at 9 and clock out at 5
|
| Where can I find one of those jobs?
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| It was figuratively. Obviously everyone has different
| working hours/patterns depending on job market, skill set
| and personal situation.
|
| But since you asked, Google is famous for low workloads.
| Or Microsoft. Or any other old and large slow moving
| company with lots of money, like IBM, Intel, SAP, ASML,
| Airbus, DHL, Siemens, manufacturing, aerospace, big
| pharma, transportation, etc. No bootstrapped "agile"
| start-ups and scale-ups, or failing companies that need
| to compete in a race to the bottom.
|
| Depends mostly on where you live though.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Do you disagree with the sentence before the one you
| quoted? I think we basically agree, you came up with a
| bunch of reasons that
|
| > I think engineers using software should not be seen as
| an endorsement.
| ddingus wrote:
| Is it truly bad UI?
|
| They may be locked in, which just forces things. Not an
| endorsement.
|
| However, they may also be really productive with whatever
| it is. This could be an endorsement.
|
| In CAD, as an example, there are often very productive
| interaction models that seem obtuse, or just bad to
| people learning the tools first time.
|
| Often improving on first time ramp ups to competence
| nearly always impacts the pro user too.
|
| Where it plays out this way, I have always thought the UI
| was good in that the pros can work at peak efficiency. It
| is hard to beat them.
|
| Fact is the task complexity footprint is just large
| enough to make "good", as in simple, intuitive interfaces
| not possible.
| fecal_henge wrote:
| I'd say a lot of engineers (bridges, circuit boards,
| injection mouldings) are kept far away from OSX (and
| linux). Honestly, I'd just love a operating system that
| doesn't decide its going to restart itself periodically!
| wiseowise wrote:
| > Honestly, I'd just love a operating system that doesn't
| decide its going to restart itself periodically!
|
| My MBP has been running without any restart for over a
| month.
| wiseowise wrote:
| You can shit all you want on so called "engineers", but
| they are the one who make the CAD you're talking about
| that "real engineers" use. So get off your high horse.
| germandiago wrote:
| I challenge you to take those people who make bridges to
| build full software.
|
| I am not meaning software is engineering or not.
|
| It is a fact, in terms of cost, that software and bridge
| building are, most of the time very different activities
| with very different goals and cost-benefit ratios.
|
| All those things count when taking decisions about the
| level of standardization.
|
| About standards... there are lots also and widely used,
| from networking to protocols, data transfer formats...
| with well-known strengths and limitations.
| pauby wrote:
| In my 30+- year career I can confidently say that
| Software Engineers look towards standardisation by
| default as it makes their lives easier.
|
| It feels to me that you're bitter or had more than one
| bad experience. Perhaps you keep working with, or come
| across, bad Engineers as your generalising is inaccurate.
| pas wrote:
| > who never standardize anything
|
| IETF RFCs soon number over 10K; Java, win32, the Linux
| kernel syscall API are famous for backward compatibility
|
| not to mention the absurd success of standard libraries
| of Python, Rust, PHP and certain "standard" projects like
| Django, React, and ExpressJS
|
| > (how many libraries do you need for arrays and vectors
| and guis and buttons and text boxes and binary trees and
| sorting, yada yada?)
|
| considering the design space is enormous and the
| tradeoffs are not trivial ... it's good to have libraries
| that fundamentally solve the similar thing but in
| different context-dependent ways
|
| arguably we are using too many libraries and not enough
| problem-specific in-situ DSLs (see the result of Alan
| Kay's research the STEPS project at VPRI -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32966987 )
| pompino wrote:
| I'd argue almost all NEW library development is about
| politics and platform ownership. Every large company
| wants to be the dependency that other projects tie into.
| And if you don't want to hitch your wagon to google or
| facebook or whoever, you roll your own.
|
| Many if not most computational problems are fundamentally
| about data and data transformation under constraints -
| Throughput, Memory, Latency, etc, etc. And for the
| situations where the tradeoffs are non-trivial, solving
| this problem is purely about domain knowledge regarding
| the nature of the data (video codec data, real-time
| sensor data, financial data, etc) not about programming
| expertise.
|
| The various ways to high level architect the overall
| design in terms of client/server, P2P, distributed vs
| local, threading model, are, IME are not what I would
| call crazy complicated. There are standard ways of
| implementing various variations of the overall design
| which sadly because of a overall roll-your-own mindset,
| most devs are reluctant to adopt someone elses design.
| Part of that is that we don't have a framework of
| knowledge that allows us to build a library for these
| designs in our head where we can just pick one thats
| right for our usecase.
|
| I don't agree with your characterization of the design
| space as 'enourmous'. I'd say most programmers just need
| to know a handful of design types because they're not
| working on high performance, low latency, multi-million
| endpoint scalable projects where as you say things can
| get non-trivial.
|
| I'll give a shot at an analogy (I'm hoping the nitpickers
| are out to lunch). The design space for door knob is
| enormous because of the various hand shapes, disability
| constraints, door sizes, applications, security
| implications, etc. And yet we've standardize d on a few
| door knob types for most homes which you can go out and
| buy and install yourself. The special case bank vaults
| and prisons and other domains solve it their own way.
| sirsinsalot wrote:
| You're kidding yourself if you don't think that
| mechanical, structural or any other engineers don't do
| the same thing. They do.
|
| I worked for one of the UKs leading architecture /
| construction firms writing software and also am an
| amature mechanic.
|
| You'd be amazed at how many gasket types, nuts, bolts,
| fasteners, unfasters, glues, concretes, bonding agents
| and so on ... all invented for edge preferences and most
| of which could be used interchangably.
|
| Also standards? Hah. They're an absolute shitshow in any
| engineering effort.
|
| I mean ... even just units of measure. C'mon.
| cpill wrote:
| not machines learning Devs
| OtomotO wrote:
| If it weren't for the OS I would've bought a MacBook
| instead of a Lenovo laptop.
|
| I've set up my OS exactly as I want it. (I use arch btw
| ;-))
| nirse wrote:
| Same, but on gentoo :-p
| ZiiS wrote:
| Arch works fairly well on Apple silicon now, though
| Fedora is easier/recomended. Limited emulation due to the
| 16KB pages and no thunderbolt display out.
| tlrobinson wrote:
| I don't think it's at all unreasonable for an engineer
| using a device for 8+ hours every day to pay an
| additional, say, 0.5% of their income (assuming very
| conservatively $100,000 income after tax, $1,000 extra
| for a MacBook, 2 year product lifespan) for the best
| built laptop, best screen, and best OS.
| yunobcool wrote:
| $100,000 after tax does not seem conservative to me (at
| least outside the US).
| tlrobinson wrote:
| $50,000 income, 4 year product lifespan?
|
| Obviously doesn't apply to all engineers.
| rfoo wrote:
| > and best OS
|
| I do networking stuff and macOS is on par with Windows -
| I can't live on it without running into bugs or very
| questionable behavior for longer than a week. Same as
| Windows.
| klabb3 wrote:
| What stuff is weird? I have so far had very good
| experiences with Apple (although not iOS yet). Almost
| everything I do on my Linux workstation works on Mac too.
| Windows though is beyond horrible and different in every
| way.
|
| > I do networking stuff
|
| Me too, but probably very different stuff. I'm doing p2p
| stuff over tcp and am affected mostly by sock options,
| buffer sizes, tcp options etc.
| sensanaty wrote:
| > Best OS
|
| I like apple hardware, but their OS is fucking atrocious.
| In the year 2024 it still doesn't have a native volume
| mixer, or any kind of sensible window management
| shortcuts. Half the things on it have to be fixed with
| _paid software_. Complete joke of an OS, if it were up to
| me I 'd stick a linux distro on top of the hardware and
| be happy
| chipdart wrote:
| > Engineers use MacBook pros because it's the best built
| laptop, the best screen, arguably the best OS and most
| importantly - they're not the ones paying for them.
|
| I know engineers from a FANG that picked MacBook pros in
| spite of the specs and only because of the bling/price
| tag. Them they spent their whole time using it as a
| remote terminal for Linux servers, and they still
| complained about the thing being extremely short on RAM
| and HD.
|
| One of them even tried to convince their managers to give
| the vision pro a try, even though there was zero use
| cases for it.
|
| Granted, they drive multiple monitors well with a single
| USB-C plug, at least with specific combinations of
| monitors and hubs.
|
| It's high time that the "Apple sells high end gear"
| shtick is put to rest. Even their macOS treadmill is
| becoming tiring.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| The build quality of Apple laptops is still pretty
| unmatched in every price category.
|
| Yes, there are 2k+ laptops from Dell/Lenovo that match
| and exceed a similarly priced MacBook in pure power, but
| usually lack battery life and/or build quality.
| amias wrote:
| the more the deviate from the BSD core the worse it gets.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| But I can still fire up a terminal and use all of my *nix
| skills to operate.
|
| I can't do that on Windows without either wrestling with
| PowerShell or WSL2
| yayr wrote:
| Apple devices also work quite seamless together. IPads
| for example work great as a second screen wirelessly with
| the MBPs. I'd immediately buy a 14 inch ipad just for
| that, since that is so useful when not on your standard
| desk. Also copy paste between devices or headphones just
| work...
|
| in case Apple would come up with the idea to take an ipad
| as external compute unit that would be amazing... just
| double your ram, compute and screen with it in such a
| lightweight form factor... should be possible if they
| want
| citiguy wrote:
| You can use the iPad as a second monitor on Windows too
| and it works nicely. I also use my airpod pro's with my
| Dell Windows XPS and it's perfect.
| yayr wrote:
| is there now a low latency solution for windows 2nd
| monitor? I was only aware of some software where latency
| is quite bad or one company that provided a wireless HDMI
| / Displayport dongle...
|
| Also the nice thing for headphones within apple is, that
| the airpods automatically switch to where the attention
| is... meaning e.g., in case I watch something on the
| laptop and pick up an iphone call (no matter if via phone
| or any app) the airpod automatically switches
| chipdart wrote:
| > The build quality of Apple laptops is still pretty
| unmatched in every price category.
|
| I owned a MacBook Pro with the dreaded butterfly
| keyboard. It was shit.
|
| How many USB ports do the new MacBook air have? The old
| ones had two. And shipped with 8GB of RAM? These are
| shit-tier specs.
|
| The 2020 MacBook pros had a nice thing: USB-C charging,
| and you could charge the from either side. Current models
| went back to MagSafe, only on one side. The number of USB
| ports is still very low.
|
| But the are shiny. I guess that counts as quality.
| macintux wrote:
| USB-C charging still works with the Pros (driving a M3
| Max), and 3 ports seems reasonable to me.
| nickv wrote:
| I guess we can agree to disagree, but I find the 2020 rev
| Macbook pros have a good number of USB-C ports (2 on the
| left, 1 on the right -- all can do PD), a magsafe
| charger, headphone jack, HDMI port and SD card slot. How
| many USB-C ports do you need? Sometimes I wish there was
| ethernet but I get why it's not there.
|
| I agree, the butterfly keyboard was shitty but I
| absolutely love the keyboard on the 2020 rev. It's still
| not as great as my mechanical desktop keyboard, but for a
| laptop keyboard it's serious chef's kiss. Also, I have
| yet to find a trackpad that is anywhere as good as the
| Macbook. Precision trackpads are still way way worse.
|
| Finally, the thing that always beings me back to MBPs (vs
| Surfacebooks or Razers) is battery life. I typically get
| a good 10+ hours on my MBP. Battery life on my old Razer
| Blade and Surfacebooks were absolutely comically
| horrible.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| I'm absolutely not an Apple person. Privately own zero
| Apple hardware.
|
| However there are two awesome things about my work MBP I
| would really want from my ThinkPad:
|
| Magsafe charger - too many close calls!
|
| And the track pad.
|
| I can't work properly without an external mouse on my
| ThinkPad. But on the MBP everything just has the right
| size, location, proportions and handling on the track
| pad. I had a mouse for the MBP too but I stopped using
| it!
| theshrike79 wrote:
| > I owned a MacBook Pro with the dreaded butterfly
| keyboard. It was shit.
|
| Yea, the butterfly was utter shit. And they fucked up the
| touchbar by not just putting it on TOP of the existing
| F-keys.
|
| But the rest of the laptop was still well machined :D
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| My 15 inch macbook which fried its display twice (didn't
| go to sleep properly and then put in a bagpack and
| overheated. There is no way to see that the sleep didn't
| kick in), and then had the broken display cable problem
| (widespread and Apple wanted $900 for a new display..)
| would disagree. For comparison: The 4k touch display on
| my xps15 that didn't survive a diet coke bath was <$300
| including labor for a guy to show up in my office and
| repair it while I was watching....
| davedx wrote:
| I'm freelance so I've absolutely paid for my last 3
| Macbooks. They're best in class tools and assets for my
| business.
| pjmlp wrote:
| US Engineers, and in countries of similar income, the
| rest of the world is pretty much settled in a mix of
| Windows and GNU/Linux desktop/laptops.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| If we are honest vanity signaling is a large part of it.
| Basically the Gucci bag equivalent for techies.
| lost_womble wrote:
| Honestly not. My tests run WAY faster on Apple Silicon,
| that's all I care about.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| Not being contrarian, but what are you comparing?
| jwr wrote:
| > Engineers use MacBook pros because it's the best built
| laptop, the best screen, arguably the best OS and most
| importantly - they're not the ones paying for them.
|
| I am the one paying for my MacBook Pro, because my
| company is a self-funded business. I run my entire
| business on this machine and I love it. I always buy the
| fastest CPU possible, although I don't max out the RAM
| and SSD.
|
| Amusingly enough, I talked to someone recently about
| compilation speeds and that person asked my why I don't
| compile my software (Clojure and ClojureScript) on
| "powerful cloud servers". Well, according to Geekbench,
| which always correlates very well with my compilation
| speeds, there are very few CPUs out there that can beat
| my M3 Max, and those aren't easily rentable as bare-metal
| cloud servers. Any virtual server will be slower.
|
| So please, don't repeat the "MacBooks are for spoiled
| people who don't have to pay for them" trope. There are
| people for whom this is simply the best machine for the
| job at hand.
|
| Incidentally, I checked my financials: a 16" MBP with M3
| and 64GB RAM, amortized over 18 months (very short!)
| comes out to around $150/month. That is not expensive at
| all for your main development machine that you run your
| business on!
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > comes out to around $150/month.
|
| Which, incidentally, is probably about 10x less than you
| would spend compiling your software on "powerful cloud
| servers". :-)
| renonce wrote:
| For a fair comparison, what about comparing against the
| cheapest "power cloud server"?
|
| I mean Hetzner has a reputation for renting bare metal
| servers at the cheapest price in the market. Try AX102
| which has very close performance to a M3 Max (CPU only):
| https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-ax/
|
| While the OP's solution has a lot of advantages like
| being able to own the device and including GPU, but at
| least we do have cloud servers with comparable costs
| available.
| DenseComet wrote:
| I tried a lot to use remote servers for development when
| I had an Intel MacBook and I found the experience to
| always be so frustrating that I upgraded to the M series.
| Have the tools gotten any better or is vscode remote
| containers still the standard?
| jwr wrote:
| Indeed! That server is very close to my M3 Max. I stand
| slightly corrected :)
|
| Worth noting: the monthly cost is close to my 18-month
| amortized cost.
| dizhn wrote:
| In your case it makes sense to get the most performant
| machine you can get even if it means you're paying a ton
| more for marginal gains. This is not usually true for the
| general public.
| alemanek wrote:
| General public can buy a M1 MacBook Air for $799 if they
| need a laptop at all. An air will serve them well for a
| long time.
| yatz wrote:
| In addition to the hardware, the OSX software is so much
| better with flawless speed, productivity, and
| multitasking with gestures. Try doing the desktop
| switching on the windows. On a flip note, I would gladly
| use the cloud if internet speeds and latency comes down
| to negligible level - we developer are an impatient lot.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| I think relatively few corporations are offering Macs to
| people. It's all bog-standard POS Dells, with locked-down
| Windows images that often do not even allow you to change
| the screensaver settings or the background image, in the
| name of "security." I'd love to be wrong about that.
| barrenko wrote:
| Engineers loving tools is peak HN :).
| BossingAround wrote:
| Arguably the best OS? For what? For browsing the web,
| video editing, etc.? Maybe. For development? Jesus, macOS
| doesn't even have native container support. All the devs
| I know with macOS then either get a second Linux laptop,
| or spend a lot of their time SSHd into a Linux server.
|
| For dev (at least backend and devops), macOS is not that
| great.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| Yeah it's funny for all the hoopla I've heard over the
| glory of MacOS having a REAL UNIX TERMINAL, WSL works
| better in practice simply because it's running an actual
| Linux VM and thus the support is better.
|
| Still, I just don't think it's that burdensome to get
| containers running on MacOS, it's just annoying that it
| happens to work worse than on Windows or Linux. Ignoring
| the hardware, the only real advantage to MacOS
| development is when you're targeting Apple products with
| what you're developing.
| kagakuninja wrote:
| I don't know what you are talking about, I'm a back end
| engineer, and every company I've worked for during the
| last 12 years gives out MacBook pros to all devs. Even
| the game company that used C# and Mono gave out MacBooks
| (and dual booted them, which of course you can't do any
| more; I never bothered with Windows since our servers
| were written in Scala).
|
| Not all teams run tons of containers on personal
| computers. All our servers are running on AWS. I rarely
| ssh into anything.
|
| I like the fact that OS X is based on UNIX, and not some
| half-assed bullshit bolted onto Windows. I still have bad
| memories of trying to use Cygwin 15 years ago. Apparently
| WSL is an improvement, but I don't care.
|
| Mac runs all the software I need, and it has real UNIX
| shells.
| borissk wrote:
| This statement is completely wrong. There are millions of
| engineers in the world and most of them live in countries
| like China, India and Russia. Very few of them use
| MacBooks.
|
| The vast majority of the software engineers in big
| companies (that employ a lot more people than big tech
| and startups combined) who use Java and C# also have
| predominately Windows laptops (as their employers can
| manage Windows laptops a lot easier, have agreements with
| vendors like Dell to buy them with a discount, have
| software like AV that doesn't support MacOS, etc.).
|
| On top of that MacBooks don't have the best screens and
| are not the best built. Many Windows laptops have OLED
| screens or 4K IPS screens. There are premium Windows
| laptops made out of magnesium and carbon fiber.
| kagakuninja wrote:
| I'm an American, so maybe the situation is different
| elsewhere.
|
| Every company I've worked for during the last 12 years
| gives out MacBook Pros. And I've been developing using
| Scala / Java for the last 20 years.
|
| Employers manage Macs just fine, this isn't 1999. There
| have been studies showing that Macs have lower IT
| maintenance costs compared to Windows.
|
| I admit that I haven't dealt with Windows devices in a
| long time, maybe there are some good ones available now,
| but I find your statements to be beyond belief. Apple
| Silicon Macs have blown the doors off the competition,
| out performing all but top-end Intel laptops, while using
| a fraction of the power (and I never even hear the fans
| come on).
| xedrac wrote:
| "best OS" is so subjective here. I'll concede that the
| MacBook hardware is objectively better than any laptop
| I've owned. But it's a huge leap to say Mac OS is
| objectively better than Linux IMO.
| amelius wrote:
| They are perhaps only the best by a very small margin.
|
| I am happy to not support Apple's ecosystem and use a
| minimally worse laptop from a different brand.
| Hammershaft wrote:
| Apple's hardware these days is exceptional but the
| software left wanting in comparison. MacOS feels like
| it's been taking two steps back for every step forward
| for a decade now. I run MacOS, Linux w/ i3, and Windows
| all every day, and outside of aesthetics & apple
| integration MacOS feels increasingly the least coherent
| of the 3.
|
| The same is true of the ipad which is just a miraculous
| piece of hardware constrained by an impotent operating
| system.
| jojobas wrote:
| Spending your life on a phone is still a lifestyle
| "choice".
| nox101 wrote:
| price-performance is not a thing for a vast majority of
| users. Sure I'd like a $40k car but I can only afford a
| $10k car. It's not nice but it gets me from a to b on my
| min-wage salary. Similarly, I know plenty of friends and
| family. They can either get 4 macs for $1000 each (mom,
| dad, sister, brother) so $4k. Or they can get 4 windows PCs
| for $250 so $1k total.
|
| The cheap Windows PCs suck just like a cheap car sucks (ok,
| they suck more), but they still get the job done. You can
| still browse the web, read your email, watch a youtube
| video, post a youtube video, write a blog, etc.. My dad got
| some HP celeron. It took 4 minutes to boot. It still ran
| though and he paid probably $300 for it vs $999 for a mac.
| He didn't have $999.
| klabb3 wrote:
| I'm not saying one or the other is better for your family
| members. But MacBooks last very long. We'll see about the
| M series but for myself for instance I got the M1 air
| without fans, which has the benefit of no moving pieces
| or air inlets, so even better. My last one, a MBP from
| 2011 lasted pretty much 10 years. OS updates are 8-10y.
|
| > The cheap Windows PCs suck [...], but they still get
| the job done
|
| For desktop, totally. Although I would still wipe it with
| Ubuntu or so because Windows is so horrible these days
| even my mom is having a shit time with only browsing and
| video calls.
|
| A random laptop however is a different story. Except for
| premium brands (closer to Apple prices) they tend to have
| garbage battery life, infuriating track pad, massive
| thermal issues, and preloaded with bloatware. Apple was
| always better here, but now with the lower power/heat of
| the ARM chips, they got soooo much better overnight.
| nox101 wrote:
| > A random laptop however is a different story. Except
| for premium brands (closer to Apple prices) they tend to
| have garbage battery life, infuriating track pad, massive
| thermal issues, and preloaded with bloatware. Apple was
| always better here, but now with the lower power/heat of
| the ARM chips, they got soooo much better overnight.
|
| To the person with no budget, all that doesn't matter.
| They'll still get let $250 laptop and put up with the
| garbage battery life (find a power outlet), infuriating
| trackpad (buy an external mouse for $10), bloatware (most
| users don't know this and just put up with it), etc....
|
| I agree Apple is better. But if your budget is $250 and
| not $1k then you get what you can get for $250 and
| continue to feed your kids and pay your rent.
| fragmede wrote:
| But also you don't have to buy new. If I had $250, an
| ancient MacBook might be better than a newer low-end
| windows laptop. Though for my purposes I'd probably get
| an oldish Chromebook and root it.
| chipdart wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I notice your use of the weasel word "just".
|
| We undoubtedly live in a world where Apple products are
| sold as lifestyle gadgets. Arguably it's more true today
| than it ever was. It's also a world where Apple's range of
| Veblen goods managed to gain footing in social circles to
| an extent that we have kids being bullied for owning
| Android phones.
|
| Apple's lifestyle angle is becoming specially relevant
| because they can no longer claim they sell high-end
| hardware, as the difference in specs between Apple's
| hardware and product ranges from other OEMs is no longer
| noticeable. Apple's laughable insistence on shipping
| laptops with 8GB of RAM is a good example.
|
| > 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.
|
| I don't think so, and that contrasts with my personal
| experience. All my previous roles offered a mix of MacBooks
| and windows laptops, and MacBooks were opted by new
| arrivals because they were seen as perks and the particular
| choice of windows ones in comparison were not as
| impressive, even though they out-specced Apple's offering
| (mid-range HP and Dell). In fact in a recent employee's
| review their main feedback was that the MacBook pro line
| was under-specced because at best it shipped with only 16GB
| of RAM while the less impressive HP ones already came with
| 32GB. In previous years, they called for the replacement of
| the MacBook line due to the rate of keyboard malfunctions.
| Meaning, engineers were purposely picking the
| underperforming option for non-technical reasons.
| lynx23 wrote:
| I bought my first Apple product roughly 11 years ago
| explicitly because it had the best accessibility support
| at the time (and that is still true). While I realize you
| only see your slice of the world, I really cringe when I
| see the weasel-word "lifestyle". This "Apple is for the
| rich kids"-fairytale is getting really really old.
| pembrook wrote:
| Apparently you've never used Apple Silicon. There's no PC
| equivalent in terms of specs.
|
| Also, I think you're misunderstanding what a Veblen good
| is and the difference between "premium" and "luxury."
| Apple does not create luxury or "Veblen" goods like for
| example, LVMH.
|
| An easy way to discern the difference between premium and
| luxury -- does the company advertise the product's
| features or price?
|
| For example, a Chanel handbag is almost entirely divorced
| from its utility as a handbag. Chanel doesn't advertise
| features or pricing, because it's not about the product's
| value or utility, it's what it says about your personal
| wealth that you bought it. That's a Veblen good.
|
| Apple _heavily_ advertises features and pricing. Because
| they sell premium products that _are not_ divorced from
| their utility or value.
| arvinsim wrote:
| Macbooks are not bang-for-buck. Most engineers I know buy
| it because it's like Windows but with Unix tools built-in.
| aplummer wrote:
| I would be interested if there exists a single better
| value machine in $ per hour than my partners 2012 MacBook
| Air, which still goes
| jpc0 wrote:
| Any decent laptop from the same era. My parents are using
| both HP ProBooks and Lenovo Thinkpads from that era
| currently and they are working perfectly and maintenance
| costs are lower than the same era macbooks...
|
| I own a MacBook Air, I won't be buying another purely
| because the moment I need to upgrade anything or repair
| anything it's effectively ewaste.
| goguy wrote:
| Not found any good proxy which works well with cisco VPN
| software. Charles and proxyman work intermittently at
| best and require disconnecting from the VPN and various
| such dances.
|
| Fiddler on windows works flawlessly.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| >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.
|
| Most CS professionals who write code have no idea what it
| takes to build a desktop, so the hardware that they chose
| is pretty much irrelevant because they aren't specifically
| choosing for hardware. The reason Apple gets bought is
| mostly by anyone, including tech people, is because of
| ecosystem. The truth is, nobody really care that much about
| actual specs as long as its good enough to do basic stuff,
| and when you are indifferent to the actual difference but
| all your friends are in the ecosystem, the choice is
| obvious.
|
| You can easily see this yourself: ask these "professionals"
| about the details of the Apple Neural engine, and its a
| very high chance that they will repeat some marketing
| material, while failing to mention that Apple does not
| publish any real docs for ANE, you have to sign your code
| to run on ANE, and you have to basically use Core ML to
| utilize the ANE. I.e if they really cared about inference,
| all of them would be buying laptops with discrete 4090s for
| almost the same price.
|
| Meanwhile, if you look at people who came from EE/ECE (who
| btw on the average are far better coders than people with
| CS background, based on my 500+ interviews in the industry
| across several sectors), you see a way larger skew towards
| Android/custom built desktops/windows laptops running
| Linux. If you lived and breathed Linux and low level OS,
| you tend appreciate all the power and customization that it
| gives you because you don't have to go learn how to do
| things.
| daviddever23box wrote:
| Coming from both environments, I'd be wary of making some
| of these assertions, especially when you consider that
| any ecosystem that optimizes software and hardware
| together (from embedded devices all the way to general-
| purpose computing machines) is generally going to perform
| well, given the appropriate engineering focus. This
| applies regardless of (RT)OS / hardware choice, i.e.,
| it's simply common sense.
|
| The signing of binaries is a part of adult developer
| life, and is certainly required for the platforms you
| mention as well.
|
| Unquestionably, battery life on 4090-based laptops sucks
| on a good day, and if you're working long hours, the last
| thing you want to have to do is park yourself next to
| your 350W adapter just to get basic work done.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| >specially when you consider that any ecosystem that
| optimizes software and hardware together (from embedded
| devices all the way to general-purpose computing
| machines) is generally going to perform well, given the
| appropriate engineering focus.
|
| Very much not true. Not to make this personal, but this
| is exactly what Im talking about Apple fans not
| understanding hardware.
|
| Linux has been through the ringer of fighting its way to
| general use, and because of its open source nature and
| constant development. So in terms of working well, it has
| been optimized for hardware WAY further than Apple, which
| is why you find it on servers, personal desktops, phones,
| portable gaming devices, and even STM32 Cortex bldc
| control boards, all of which run different hardware.
|
| Apple doesn't optimize for general use, it optimizes for
| a specific business case. In the case of Apple silicon,
| it was purely battery life which brings more people in to
| the ecosystem. Single core performance is on par with all
| the other chips, because the instruction set doesn't
| actually matter
| (https://chipsandcheese.com/2021/07/13/arm-or-x86-isa-
| doesnt-...), multi core is behind, Mac Os software is
| still a pile of junk (Rosetta still isn't good across the
| board), computers are not repairable, you have no privacy
| since Apple collects a shitload of telemetry for
| themselves, e.t.c and so on.
|
| And, Apple has no incentive to make any of this better -
| prior to Apple Silicon, people were still buying Intel
| Macs with worse specs and performance for the same price,
| all for the ecosystem and vanity. And not only was the
| Macos still terrible (and much slower), you also had
| hardware failures like plugging in a wrong USBC hub would
| blow the chip and brick your Mac, butterfly keyboards
| failing, and questionable decisions like virtual esc
| keys.
|
| >The signing of binaries is a part of adult developer
| life,
|
| ...for professional use, and the private key holder
| should be the person who wrote that software. I hope you
| understand how ridiculous it is to ask a developer to
| sign code using the manufacturers key to allow them to
| run that code on a machine that they own.
|
| >Unquestionably, battery life on 4090-based laptops sucks
| on a good day,
|
| Well yea, but you are not buying that laptop for battery
| life. Also, with Ryzen cpus and 4090s, most get like 6-8
| hours depending on use due to Nvidia Prime, which is
| pretty good for travel, especially if you have a backpack
| with a charging brick.
|
| If you want portability, there are plenty of lighter
| weight option like Lenovo Yoga which can get 11-12 hours
| of battery life for things like web browsing.
| hinkley wrote:
| Most of Apple's money comes from iPhones.
| kmacdough wrote:
| It's not about price-performance value at all. Mac is still
| the most expensive performance. And Apple is only
| particularly popular in the US. Android phones dominate
| most other markets, particularly poor markets.
|
| Apple is popular in the US because a) luxury brands hold
| sway b) they goad customers into bullying non-customers
| (blue/green chats) and c) they limit features and
| customizability in favor of simpler interfaces.
|
| It's popular with developers because a) performance is
| valuable even at Apples steep cost b) it's Unix-based
| unlike Windows so shares more with the Linux systems most
| engineers are targeting.
| rjha wrote:
| I have never been an apple fanboy. Till 2022, I was on
| android phones. Work issued either Thinkpad or XPS
| variants. However, I have owned apple _books_ since 2004
| starting from panther era. I sincerely believe that apple
| provides best features and performance combination in the
| given price for laptops.
|
| Here I feel that I-hate-apple crowd is just stuck with
| this notion of luxury overpriced brand when it is clearly
| not the case. Apple has superior hardware at better price
| points. Last time I was doing shopping for a laptop, I
| could get similar features only at a 30% - 40% price
| premium in other brands.
|
| I am typing this on an apple M2 air and try finding
| similar performance under 2000 USD in other brands. The
| responsiveness, the (mostly) sane defaults and superior
| rendering and fonts make it worth it. The OS does not
| matter so much as it used to do in 2004 and the fact that
| I have a unix terminal in 2024 is just incidental. I have
| turned off auto updates and I do not use much of phone
| integration apart from taking backups and photo copying.
|
| I switched to an iPhone in 2022 from a 200 US$ Samsung
| handset. Here, I would say that not everyone needs an
| iPhone. My old phone used to do all the tricks I need on
| this one. However, the camera is really and photos are
| really great. If I buy an iPhone next time, it would be
| just for the photos it takes.
| tomcar288 wrote:
| you can get a laptop with a much bigger screen and a
| keyboard for as little as 100 to 300$ and it will be much
| much easier to get work done on, than an apple phone. so i
| think apple is still very much a luxury product.
| 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?
| hehdhdjehehegwv wrote:
| At this point call your government representatives and
| ask for new laws, or if you live someplace with laws,
| actual enforcement (looking at you EU).
|
| The idea that user behavior or consumer choice will
| change any of this is basically discredited in practice.
| It will always been cat and mouse until the point that
| CEOs go to jail, then it will stop.
| lynx23 wrote:
| CEOs dont go to jail. If they do, its an exception that
| is not relevant to the game.
| 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.
| ozim wrote:
| I provide laptops to people from time to time. They
| expect to get a MacBook even if company is Windows and
| they don't have any real arguments.
| 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?
|
| EDIT: Because there's repeated confusion in the replies: I
| am _not_ saying that a MacBook Air is not objectively a
| better device. I 'm saying it is better by metrics that
| fall strictly into the "luxury" category.
|
| Better build quality, system-on-a-chip, better OS, better
| battery life, aluminum case--all of these are luxury
| characteristics that someone who is looking for a
| functional device that meets their needs at a decent price
| won't have as dealbreakers.
| 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.
| zlsa wrote:
| I'm not sure a machine that benchmarks half as fast as an
| M2 can be said to be in the same ballpark.
|
| MacBook Air (2022):
| https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-air-2022
|
| Ryzen 5 5500U (CPU):
| https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/amd-
| ryzen-5-5500u
|
| Ryzen 5 5500U (APU, similar laptop):
| https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/compute/6751456
| wiseowise wrote:
| No offense, but you sound like a garbage salesman at flee
| market trying to sell his junk.
| breuleux wrote:
| > the average person would consider a valid replacement
|
| But what is that, exactly? If you look at all aspects of
| a laptop: CPU, RAM, SSD, battery life, screen quality,
| build quality, touchpad, OS, and put them in order of
| importance for the average consumer, what would be on
| top? I don't think it's the tech specs.
|
| For instance, I would be willing to bet that for a large
| number of consumers, battery life is far more important
| than the tech specs, which means that a valid replacement
| for their MacBook must have equivalent battery life. You
| also have to consider things like the expected lifespan
| of the laptop and its resale value to properly compare
| their costs. It's not simple.
| 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.
| hatsix wrote:
| There is no user buying a lowest-tier Macbook Air who
| would be able to tell the difference between the Lenovo
| SSD and the Macbook SSD.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| When I bought my cheesegrater Mac Pro, I wanted 8TB of
| SSD.
|
| Except Apple wanted $3,000 for 7TB of SSD (considering
| the base price already included 1TB).
|
| Instead, I bought a 4xM.2 PCI card, and 4 2TB Samsung Pro
| SSDs.
|
| I paid $1,300 for it, got to keep the 1TB "system" SSD.
|
| And I get faster speeds from it, 6.8GBps versus 5.5GBps
| off the system drive.
|
| For $2,000 I could have got the PCI 4.0 version and SSDs,
| and get 26GBps.
| ukuina wrote:
| Expandability is no longer an option with Apple Silicon.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Not technically true. The Mac Pro 2023 has 6 PCI slots...
|
| ... for an eye watering $3,000 over the exact same spec
| Mac Studio.
|
| I liked my cheesegrater, though I didn't like the heat
| output.
|
| And I cannot justify that. I sacrificed half the
| throughput (2800MBps) for $379 and got an external 4 x
| M.2 TB3 enclosure.
|
| Oh, and a USB 3 hub to replace one I had installed in the
| cheesegrater to augment the built in ports. $400 give or
| take.
| goosedragons wrote:
| They're average. A 512GB M3 MBA gets like 3000MBps for
| read/write. A 1TB Samsung 990 Pro, which costs less than
| the upgrade from 256GB to 512GB on the Air is over twice
| as fast. And on base models Apple skimps and speeds are
| slower.
| 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"?
| FireBeyond wrote:
| I am all in on Apple, to be clear. Mac Pros, multiple
| MBPs, Studio, Pro Display XDR, multiple Watches, phones,
| iPad Pro.
|
| My experiences (multiple) with Genius Bar have been
| decidedly more "meh" to outright frustrating, versus
| "luxury", oftentimes where I know more than the Genius.
|
| Logic Board issues where on a brand new macOS install I
| could reproducibly cause a kernel panic around graphics
| hardware. There was an open recall (finally, after
| waiting MONTHS) on this. It covered my Mac. But because
| it passed their diagnostic tool, they would only offer to
| replace the board on a time and materials basis.
|
| I had a screen delamination issue. "It's not that bad -
| you can't see it when the screen is on, and you have to
| look for it". Huh. Great "luxury" experience.
|
| And then the multiple "we are going to price this so
| outrageously, and use that as an excuse to try to
| upsell". Like the MBA that wouldn't charge due to a
| circuit issue. Battery fine, healthy. Laptop, fine,
| healthy, on AC. Just couldn't deliver current to the
| battery. Me, thinking sure, $300ish maybe with a little
| effort.
|
| "That's going to be $899 to repair. That's only $100 less
| than a new MBA, maybe we should take a look at some of
| the new models?" Uh, no. I'm not paying $900 for a laptop
| that spends 99% (well, 100% now) of its life on AC power.
| hatsix wrote:
| Yes, but having all three of those things (well,
| specs/performance is probably just one thing, but
| treating them as separate as you did means that I don't
| have to do the heavy lifting of figuring out what a third
| thing would actually be) IS, in fact, a luxury.
|
| Nobody is away from a power source for longer than 18
| hours. MOST people don't need the performance that a
| macbook air has, their NEEDS would be met by a raspberry
| pi... that is, basic finances, logging into various
| services, online banking, things that first world
| citizens "rely" on.
|
| The definition of luxury is "great comfort and
| extravagance", and every current Apple product fits that
| definition. Past Apple definitely had non-luxury
| products, as recently as the iPhone C (discontinued 10
| years ago)... but Apple has eliminated all low-value
| options from their lineup.
| sfmike wrote:
| Good question, I think the answer is even at thousands a
| window device battery can't hit 18 hour specs. Can
| someone name a windows device even at 2k+ that acts like
| an M chip? In fact the pricier windows usually mean GPU
| and those have worse battery then cheap windows(my 4090
| is an hour or so off charge)
| p_l wrote:
| Thinkpad X250, admittedly at max specs, did 21 hours in
| 2018. My T470 from 2020 did over 27 hours at max charge.
|
| M-series Macs is when MacBooks _stopped sucking_ at
| battery life without sleeping and wrecking state every
| moment they could.
| vampiresdoexist wrote:
| Build quality, battery life, clean os install, and the
| value held over time has no Windows equivalent even at
| some much higher price points.
| lolinder wrote:
| The same thing can be (and is!) said about luxury car
| brands. That's what makes the MacBook Air a luxury item.
|
| Most people, when given the pitch you just gave me for a
| 2x increase in price, will choose the cheaper item, just
| like they choose the cheaper car.
| vundercind wrote:
| They're tools. This attempt to treat them as luxury goods
| doesn't hold with those. It's entirely common for even
| people who want to do some home repair--let alone
| professionals--but aren't clueless about DIY to spend 2x
| the cheapest option, because they know the cheapest one
| is actually worth $0. More will advocate spending way
| more than 2x, as long as you're 100% sure you're going to
| use it a lot (like, say, a phone or laptop, even for a
| lot of non-computer-geeks). This is true even if they're
| just buying a simple lowish-power impact driver, nothing
| fancy, not the most powerful one, not the one with the
| most features. Still, they'll often not go for the
| cheapest one, because those are generally not even fit
| for their intended purpose.
|
| [edit] I mean sure there are people who just want the
| Apple logo, I'm not saying there are zero of those, but
| they're also excellent, reliable tools (by the standards
| of computers--so, still bad) and a good chunk of their
| buyers are there for that. Even the ones who only have a
| phone.
| lolinder wrote:
| I didn't go for the cheapest option: I'm typing this on a
| laptop that I bought a few months ago for $1200. It has
| an aluminum case, 32GB RAM, an AMD Ryzen CPU that
| benchmarks similar to the M3, and 1TB SSD. I can open it
| up and replace parts with ease.
|
| The equivalent from Apple would currently run me $3200.
| If I'm willing to compromise to 24GB of RAM I can get one
| for $2200.
|
| What makes an Apple device a luxury item isn't that it's
| more expensive, it's that no matter what specs you pick
| it will _always_ be much more expensive than equivalent
| specs from a non-luxury provider. The things that Apple
| provides are _not_ the headline stats that matter for a
| tool-user, they 're luxury properties that don't actually
| matter to most people.
|
| Note that there's nothing wrong with buying a luxury
| item! It's entirely unsurprising that most people on HN
| looking at the latest M4 chip prefer luxury computers,
| and that's fine!
| vundercind wrote:
| Huh. Most of the folks I know on Apple stuff started out
| PC (and sometimes Android--I did) and maybe even made fun
| of Apple devices for a while, but switched after exposure
| to them because they turned out to be far, far better
| tools. And not even much more expensive, if at all, for
| TCO, given the longevity and resale value.
| lolinder wrote:
| Eh, I have to use a MacBook Pro for work because of IT
| rules and I'm still not sold. Might be because I'm a
| Linux person who absolutely must have a fully
| customizable environment, but MacOS always feels so
| limited.
|
| The devices are great and feel great. Definitely high
| quality (arguably, luxury!). The OS leaves a lot to be
| desired for me.
| vundercind wrote:
| I spent about a decade before switching using Linux as my
| main :-) Mostly Gentoo and Ubuntu (man, it was good in
| the first few releases)
|
| Got a job in dual-platform mobile dev and was issued a
| MacBook. Exposure to dozens of phones and tablets from
| both ecosystem. I was converted within a year.
|
| (I barely customize anything these days, fwiw--hit the
| toggle for "caps as an extra ctrl", brew install
| spectacle, done. Used to have opinions about my graphical
| login manager, use custom icon sets, all that stuff)
| musicale wrote:
| > no matter what specs you pick it will always be much
| more expensive than equivalent specs from a non-luxury
| provider
|
| On the phone side, I guess you would call Samsung and
| Google luxury providers? On the laptop side there are a
| number of differentiating features that are of general
| interest.
|
| > The things that Apple provides are not the headline
| stats that matter for a tool-user, they're luxury
| properties that don't actually matter to most people
|
| Things that might matter to regular people (and tool
| users):
|
| - design and build for something you use all day
|
| - mic and speakers that don't sound like garbage (very
| noticeable and relevant in the zoom/hybrid work era)
|
| - excellent display
|
| - excellent battery life
|
| - seamless integration with iPhone, iPad, AirPods
|
| - whole widget: fewer headaches vs. Windows (ymmv);
| better app consistency vs. Linux
|
| - in-person service/support at Apple stores
|
| It's hard to argue that Apple didn't reset expectations
| for laptop battery life (and fanless performance) with
| the M1 MacBook Air. If Ryzen has caught up, then
| competition is a good thing for all of us (maybe not
| intel though...) In general Apple isn't bleeding edge,
| but they innovate with high quality, very usable
| implementations (wi-fi (1999), gigabit ethernet (2001),
| modern MacBook Pro design (2001), "air"/ultrabook form
| factors (2008), thunderbolt (2011), "retina" display and
| standard ssd (2012), usb-c (2016), M1: SoC/SiP/unified
| memory/ARM/asymmetric cores/neural engine/power
| efficiency/battery life (2020) ...and occasionally with
| dubious features like the touchbar and butterfly keyboard
| (2016).)
| landswipe wrote:
| Once Arm and battery life shift occurs with Linux and
| Windows, they'll (ie. Apple) be on the front foot again
| with something new, that's the beauty of competition.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > It has an aluminum case, 32GB RAM, an AMD Ryzen CPU
| that benchmarks similar to the M3, and 1TB SSD.
|
| How much does it weight? Battery life? Screen quality?
| Keyboard? Speakers?
| Shtirlic wrote:
| Lenovo Thinkpad p14s(t14) gen 4, 7840U, $1300, oled 2.8K
| 400 nits P3, 64gb RAM, 1TB, keyboard excellent, speakers
| shitty(using sony wh-1000xm4), battery(52.5Wh) life not
| good not bad, OLED screen draws huge amount of power.
| weight ~3 lb.
| wiseowise wrote:
| This spec costs 2k euro in NL. Fully specd Air (15 inch)
| is 2,5k euro, with arguably better everything except RAM
| and is completely silent. Doesn't look that much
| different to me in terms of price.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| >The things that Apple provides are not the headline
| stats that matter for a tool-user, they're luxury
| properties that don't actually matter to most people.
|
| Here lies the rub, ARE those the stats that matter? Or
| does the screen, touchpad, speakers, battery life,
| software, support services, etc. matter more?
|
| I feel people just TOTALLY gloss over the fact that Apple
| is crushing the competition in terms of trackpads +
| speakers + battery life, which are hardly irrelevant
| parts of most people's computing experience. Many people
| hardly use their computers to compute - they mostly use
| them to input and display information. For such users,
| memory capacity and processing performance ARE frills,
| and Apple is a market leader where it's delivering value.
|
| Also even in compute, apple is selling computers with a
| 512-bit or 1024-bit LPDDR5x bus for a lower price than
| you can get from the competition. Apple is also
| frequently leading the pack in terms of compute/watt.
| This has more niche appeal, but I've seen people buy
| Apple to run LLM inferencing 24/7 while the Mac Studio
| sips power.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Also, those things aren't even true about Apple devices.
| Apple fanboys have been convinced that their hardware
| really is way better than everything else for decades. It
| has never been true and still isn't.
| lupire wrote:
| Luxury car market is 20% of US car market. Even more
| among people who can afford the option. It's not "most
| people" but it's not an outlier either.
| nxicvyvy wrote:
| Clean os install? You haven't used windows in a while
| have you?
|
| Im a Linux guy but am forced to use Mac's and windows
| every now and then.
|
| Windows has outpaced macos for a decade straight.
|
| Macos looks like it hasn't been updated in years. It's
| constantly bugging me for passwords for random things. It
| is objectively the worst OS. I'd rather work on a
| Chromebook.
| theshackleford wrote:
| I'm not a single operating system guy like you. I use all
| three professionally. I've never had the bizzare struggle
| you describe.
| worthless-trash wrote:
| I think he has different critera on what bothers him,
| thats okay though isn't it. I get a little annoyed at
| anything where I have to use a touchpad, not enough to
| rant about it, but it definitely increases friction
| (haha) in my thought process.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > Macos looks like it hasn't been updated in years.
|
| Maybe the only reason why Windows outpaced macos in this
| for you is because Windows started as crap and is now
| barely looks like a proper OS?
|
| https://ntdev.blog/2021/02/06/state-of-the-windows-how-
| many-...
|
| Thank God Mac hasn't changed that much. I absolutely love
| its UI.
| pompino wrote:
| What metrics are you using for build quality? Admittedly
| I don't know a ton of mac people (I'm an engineer working
| in manufacturing) but the mac people I know, stuff always
| breaks, but they're bragging about how apple took care of
| it for free.
| kotaKat wrote:
| I can walk into many Walmarts in the US right now with
| $699 and walk out with a MBA with the M1. That's a damn
| good deal.
| lolinder wrote:
| That's still ~twice as expensive as the items I linked to
| below, and that's at clearance prices.
|
| A good deal on a luxury item still gets you a luxury
| item.
|
| And if we want to compare Walmart to Walmart, this thing
| currently runs for $359 and has 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, and
| a CPU that benchmarks slightly faster than the _M2_ :
|
| https://www.walmart.com/ip/Acer-Aspire-3-15-6-inch-
| Laptop-AM...
| epcoa wrote:
| Oh dear. 16:10 screen with superior resolution,
| brightness and gamut - and it still gets superior battery
| life driving all those pixels.. that's a headline feature
| that even a non-propellerhead can observe (I was honestly
| surprised when I looked up that Acer screen what a dim,
| narrow piece of shit it is) - notably there are ballpark
| priced systems with better screens.
|
| I think you unjustifiably downplay how much of a selling
| point a screen that looks great (or at least decent) on
| the floor is. And I know tons of devs that put up with
| the 45% NTSC abominations on Thinkpads that aren't even
| suitable for casual photo editing or web media, just
| because you make do with that doesn't automatically make
| a halfway decent display on a laptop a "luxury".
|
| Sorry, but don't buy the "everything that isn't a $300
| econo shit laptop is luxury" thesis repeated ad nauseum.
| int_19h wrote:
| What defines "luxury" exactly if not the combination of
| price and "premium experience"?
| tsimionescu wrote:
| "Luxury" often includes some amount of pure status
| symbols added to the package, and often on what is
| actually a sub-par experience. The quintessential luxury
| tech device were the Vertu phones from just before and
| even early in the smartphone era - mid-range phones tech
| and build quality-wise, with encrusted gems and gold
| inserts and other such bling, sold at several thousand
| dollars (Edit: they actually ranged between a few
| thousand dollars all the way to 50,000+).
|
| But the definition of luxury varies a lot by product
| category. Still, high-end and luxury are separate
| concepts, which ven when they do overlap.
| darkwater wrote:
| You just made up the "sub-par experience" as a defining
| point of a luxury product. A luxury product is defined by
| being a status symbol (check for all Apple devices) and
| especially by its price. A luxury car like a Bentley will
| still you bring from point A to point B like the cheapest
| Toyota.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I didn't say that sub-par experience was a _requirement_
| , I said it was often a part of luxury products. Or, more
| precisely, I should have said that something being of
| excellent build quality and offering excellent, top of
| the line experience is neither sufficient nor necessary
| for being a luxury good.
|
| It is true though that luxury goods are, often, top of
| the line as well. Cars and watches are often examples of
| this. Clothes are a much more mixed bag, with some luxury
| brands using excellent materials and craftsmanship, while
| others use flashy design and branding with mediocre
| materials and craftsmanship.
|
| Exactly where Apple sits is very debatable in my
| experience. I would personally say that many of their
| products are far too affordable and simple to be
| considered luxury products - the iPhone in particular.
| The laptops I'm less sure about.
| darkwater wrote:
| Fair enough. Apple is clearly not in the same luxury
| league like a Bentley or a yatch, but it's totally like a
| Mercedes, to continue with the car analogy. You get a
| "plus" for the extra money but then it's open for debate
| whether that "plus" is worth or not. And it's actually
| the source of many flamewars on the Internet.
| acdha wrote:
| I think the Mercedes comparison (or the more common BMW)
| one is also useful for getting the idea that not every
| manufacturer is competing for the same segments but the
| prices in segments are generally close. No Mercedes is as
| cheap as a Camry but a Lexus is similar.
|
| This comes up so often in these flame wars where people
| are really saying "I do/don't think you need that
| feature" and won't accept that other people aren't
| starting from the same point. I remember in the 90s
| reading some dude on Fidonet arguing that Macs were
| overpriced because they had unnecessary frills like sound
| cards and color displays; I wasn't a Mac user then but
| still knew this was not a persuasive argument.
| lupire wrote:
| Luxury means beauty and comfort, beyond the bare
| necessity of function.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| By that definition, Zara is a luxury clothing brand,
| Braun is a luxury appliance maker, and Renault is a
| luxury car brand. I think it requires significantly more.
| int_19h wrote:
| That would also apply to Apple products then, and
| especially so to their laptops. I actually bought a
| MacBook Air recently and the thing that I like most about
| it is how comfortable the keyboard and especially the
| trackpad is compared even to high-end ThinkPads. And, on
| the other hand, the trackpad on my T14s is certainly
| quite sufficient to operate it, so this comfort that
| MacBook offers is beyond the bare necessity of function.
| positus wrote:
| I doubt I am alone in saying that I would gladly pay
| twice the price to avoid having to use Windows. It's the
| most user-hostile, hand-holdy, second-guess-and-confirm-
| my-explicit-command-ey os I've used to date. And
| bloatware baked in? No thanks.
| neoromantique wrote:
| ...but that is a luxury.
| positus wrote:
| You're probably right. I am in the middle-class, maybe
| lower middle-class, and I live in the US. I have
| advantages and opportunities that many in other
| circumstances do not and I am sincerely grateful for
| them.
| fl0ki wrote:
| Damn right it is.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Windows is pretty shit these days, but it's not the only
| other option. Linux is far more sane than MacOS or
| Windows.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Good news, not using windows is free.
| eigen wrote:
| > this thing currently runs for $359 and has 16GB RAM,
| 512GB SSD, and a CPU that benchmarks slightly faster than
| the M2:
|
| I'm seeing significant differences in the performance
| between Acer Aspire A315 to M2 Macbook Air; the Acer is
| ~33% of the M2 for 50% the price.
|
| https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/5942766?base
| lin...
| darkwater wrote:
| Nowadays (well actually this has been true for the last
| 10 years) a normal user won't care about that extra perf
| ratio. The Aspire is "fast enough".
| antifa wrote:
| I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess we're also looking
| at 10 hr battery vs 1hr battery.
| darkwater wrote:
| No brand new laptop has a 1h battery. Also, battery life
| importance as in "I can work a full day unplugged from
| AC" it's something that affects only a subset of laptop
| users, and mostly during some specific conditions (i.e.
| long travels).
| AdamN wrote:
| That's more like cheap vs middle of the road. There is no
| luxury space in laptops - displays, iPads, and
| workstations maybe but that's it (and those are more pro
| than luxury).
|
| $999 amortized over 3 years is $30/mo which is less than
| what even middle class people spend on coffee.
| amon22 wrote:
| Sorry but linkink Acer crap doesnt help your point.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Weight
|
| > 3.92 lb
|
| Battery life
|
| > 6.5 h
|
| Probably half of that.
|
| Fans that sound like jet engine, screen quality which
| would force me to stab my eyes, speakers sounding worse
| than a toilet, plastic build.
|
| I'm not convinced.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| The Walmart variant was introduced 6 weeks ago to offload
| excess stocks of a four year old discontinued model. I'm
| not sure your argument of "at only 70% of the price of a
| model two generations newer" is the sales pitch you think
| it is.
| vinkelhake wrote:
| Walmart is currently selling Apple's old stock of M1
| Airs. You can get the 8GB 256GB version for $699.
| lolinder wrote:
| See my reply to the person that beat you to it:
|
| > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40292804
|
| tl;dr is that Walmart is _also_ selling an Acer for $359
| that beats that device on every headline metric.
|
| It's nice to know that I could get the old-gen model for
| slightly cheaper, but that's still an outrageous price if
| the MacBook Air isn't to be considered a luxury item.
| zer0zzz wrote:
| It's half the price because by the time the MacBook Air
| dies you're on your second or third acer.
| lolinder wrote:
| My last Acer lasted me six years until I decided to
| replace it for more power (which, notably, I would have
| done with a MacBook by then too). They're not as well
| built as a MacBook, but they're well built enough for the
| average laptop turnover rate.
| zer0zzz wrote:
| That's fair
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| The apple defense force would rather die than admit that
| Apple hardware is overpriced and a bad value.
|
| 8gb of ram was pathetic in 2018, and is SUPER pathetic in
| 2024.
| fl0ki wrote:
| If it was actually bad value they wouldn't sell as high
| as they do and review with as much consumer satisfaction
| as they do.
|
| These products may not offer you much value and you don't
| have to buy them. Clearly plenty of people and
| institutions bought them because they believed they
| offered the best value to them.
| lolinder wrote:
| Agreed. I'd definitely make the same arguments here as I
| would for an Audi. There's clearly a market, and that
| means they're not a bad value _for a certain type of
| person_.
| lupire wrote:
| All I kmow about Audi is that it costd $14,000 to repair
| a scape from a parking garage wall.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| If people were actually rational that might be true, but
| they aren't. Apple survives entirely on the fact that
| they have convinced people they are cool, not because
| they actually provide good value.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Any examples where they don't provide good value?
| wiseowise wrote:
| There's literally dozens of videos show that 8 GB is more
| than enough for casual or even entry level development
| use.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHKIcBWbnjo
| wiseowise wrote:
| > tl;dr is that Walmart is also selling an Acer for $359
| that beats that device on every headline metric.
|
| Try this:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40297295
| zer0zzz wrote:
| what you're arguing is that a product that meets the
| basic criteria of a good product makes it luxury. That
| seems pretty wild to me.
|
| No one calls a Toyota Camry with base options luxury but
| it works well for a long time and has good quality.
| lolinder wrote:
| My Acer Aspire lasted me for tens of thousands of hours
| of use and abuse by small children over 6 years until I
| replaced it this year because I finally felt like I
| wanted more power. _That 's_ the Toyota Camry of laptops.
|
| The features that Apple adds on top of that are strictly
| optional. You can very much prefer them and think that
| they're essential, but that doesn't make it so. Some
| people feel that way about leather seats.
| zer0zzz wrote:
| No, that's a Corolla or a Kia Forte of laptops.
| zombiwoof wrote:
| I bought a used thinkpad x13 for 350 bucks. It won me
| over from my m3 MacBook Pro that costs 4 times as much
| skibbityboop wrote:
| I got a Latitude 9430 on eBay for $520. This thing is an
| amazing laptop and I'd put it right there with the Macs I
| have to work with at dayjob, as far as build
| quality/feel.
| insaneirish wrote:
| > How is something that is twice as expensive as the
| competition not a luxury device?
|
| You can buy a version of <insert product here> from
| Walmart at 1/2 price of a "normal" retailer. Does that
| mean every "normal" retailer is actually a luxury goods
| dealer?
|
| Is my diner a luxury restaurant because a burger costs
| twice as much as McDonald's?
|
| Stop the silliness.
| lolinder wrote:
| All I'm learning from comments like this is that there
| are a _lot_ of people who are very resistant to the idea
| that they buy luxury goods.
| golergka wrote:
| When I buy a Rick Owens coat for $3k, sure it's a luxury
| good. It protects from the elements just the same, I know
| that I overpay only because it looks nice. But when I pay
| the same for the device I need for my work and use for 12
| hours a day, it's not luxury -- it's just common sense.
| I've tried working with Windows and Linux, and I know
| that I'm paying not only for specs, but because the sum
| of all the qualities will result in a much better
| experience -- which will allow me to work (and earn
| money) faster and with less headache.
| antifa wrote:
| $1000 for a laptop that will last 10 years seems crazy to
| call a luxury, when we have Alienware/apple laptops that
| go for 2k to 5k+ and demographics that buys them yearly.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > You can buy a version of <insert product here> from
| Walmart at 1/2 price of a "normal" retailer. Does that
| mean every "normal" retailer is actually a luxury goods
| dealer?
|
| What percent of that retailer's products does that
| comparison apply to?
|
| If it's more than half then yeah that's probably a luxury
| goods dealer.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > The equivalent (based on raw specs) in the PC world
| runs for $300 to $500.
|
| Equivalent device?! Find me Windows laptop in ANY price
| category that can match weight, fanless design, screen
| quality, battery life, speakers quality and battery life
| of Air.
| 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.
| ewhanley wrote:
| This is it. An M series air is an incredible machine for
| most people - people who likely won't ever write a line of
| js or use a GPU. Email, banking, YouTube, etc ona device
| with incredible battery and hardware that will likely be
| useful for a decade is perfect. The average user hasn't
| even heard of HN.
| xvector wrote:
| It's great for power users too. Most developers really
| enjoy the experience of writing code on Macs. You get a
| Unix based OS that's just far more usable and polished
| than a Linux laptop.
|
| If you're into AI, there's objectively literally no other
| laptop on the planet that is competitive with the GPU
| memory available on an MBP.
| wiseowise wrote:
| It's an amazing machine for engineers too.
| LettuceSand12 wrote:
| Are newer airs good enough for development?
| moritzwarhier wrote:
| depends on your workload. RAM and passive cooling are the
| most likely issues but afaik an M2/M3 with 16GiB still
| performs a lot better than an similarly priced x64
| laptop. Active cooling doesn't mean no throttling either.
|
| If you don't explicitly want a laptop, a 32GB M2 Pro Mac
| Mini would be a good choice I think.
|
| Personally i only have used MBPs so far.
|
| But the M-series Air are not remotely comparable to the
| old Intel Airs, that's for sure :)
| jimbokun wrote:
| For all their competitors it's not true right now.
| VelesDude wrote:
| I think it was Paul Thurrott on Windows Weekly podcast who
| said that all these companies don't really care about
| privacy. Apple takes billions of dollar a year to direct data
| towards Google via the search defaults. Clearly privacy has a
| price. And I suspect it will only get worse with time as they
| keep chasing the next quarter.
|
| Tim Cook unfortunately is so captured in that quarterly
| mindset of 'please the share holders' that it is only a
| matter of time.
| cvwright wrote:
| It doesn't matter to me if they "really care" about privacy
| or not. Megacorps don't "really care" about anything except
| money.
|
| What matters to me is that they continue to see privacy as
| something they can sell in order to make money.
| VelesDude wrote:
| Yeah, some poor phrasing on my behalf.
|
| I do hope that those working in these companies actually
| building the tools do care. But unfortunately, it seems
| that corruption is an emergent property of complexity.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| The Google payments are an interesting one; I don't think
| it's a simple "Google pays them to prefer them", but a
| "Google pays them to stop them from building a competitor".
|
| Apple is in the position to build a competing search
| product, but the amount Google pays is the amount of money
| they would have to earn from it, and that is improbable
| even if it means they can set their own search engine as
| default.
| spacebanana7 wrote:
| Apple isn't ethically Mullvad, but they're much better than
| some of their android competitors who allow adverts on the
| lock screen.
| raincole wrote:
| Privacy is a luxury today so yeah selling luxury hardware and
| promise of privacy form a coherent business position.
| ngcc_hk wrote:
| If you average out it is quite not expensive. Unlike android
| phone or let us not talk about android tablet.
|
| The important is that a good starting ai learning platform is
| what ... most apple does not touch those price.
|
| Hence with privacy it is a good path.
|
| You do not want communism even if it is not expensive in the
| short term.
| sneak wrote:
| It's not even true now. Apple (and by the extension USG and
| CCP) can read ~every iMessage. The e2ee is backdoored.
| pompino wrote:
| >The promise of privacy is one way in which they position
| themselves, but I would not bet the bank on that being true
| forever.
|
| They failed with their ad-business so this is a nice pivot.
| I'll take it, I'm not usually a cheerleader for Apple, but
| I'll support anyone who can erode Google's surveillance
| dominance.
| m463 wrote:
| > The promise of privacy
|
| I have very little faith in apple in this respect.
|
| For clarity, just install little snitch on your machine, and
| watch what happens with your system. Even without being
| signed in with an apple id and everything turned off, apple
| phones home all the time.
| transpute wrote:
| You can block 17.0.0.0 at the router, opening up only the
| notification servers. CDNs are a bit harder, but can be
| done with dnsmasq allow/deny of wildcard domains. Apple has
| documentation on network traffic from their devices,
| https://support.apple.com/en-us/101555
| m463 wrote:
| you can also use privoxy and use it in network settings
| lynx23 wrote:
| Every company is selling one thing or another, and nothing is
| going to last forever. I really fail to see what, except for
| generic negativity, your comment adds to anything.
| jsxlite wrote:
| I wouldn't bank on that being true forever after 2012. A
| corporation is goal are vastly determined by the corporate
| structure.
| Refusing23 wrote:
| Their 2nd largest revenue source (at ... 20-25%, below only
| the iphone) is software services.
|
| iCloud, App store revenue, apple tv, and so on
| ActorNightly wrote:
| >The promise of privacy is one way in which they position
| themselves, but I would not bet the bank on that being true
| forever.
|
| Everyone seems to have forgotten about the Celebrity iCloud
| photo leak.
| 8fingerlouie wrote:
| > but it is about selling luxury hardware.
|
| While Apple is first and foremost a hardware company, it has
| more or less always been about the "Apple experience".
| They've never "just" been a hardware company.
|
| For as long as Apple has existed, they've done things "their
| way" both with hardware and software, though they tend to
| want to abstract the software away.
|
| If it was merely a question of selling hardware, why does
| iCloud exist ? or AppleTV+, or Handoff ? or iMessage, or the
| countless other seemingly small life improvements that
| somehow the remainder of the industry cannot seem to figure
| out how to do well.
|
| Just a "simple" thing as switching headphones seamlessly
| between devices is something i no longer think about, it just
| happens, and it takes a trip with a Windows computer and a
| regular bluetooth headset to remind me how things used to be.
|
| As part of their "privacy first" strategy, iMessage also fits
| in nicely. Apple doesn't have to operate a huge instant
| messaging network, which undoubtedly is not making a profit,
| but they do, because having one entry to secure, encrypted
| communication fits well with the Apple Experience. iMessage
| did so well at abstracting the ugly details of encryption
| that few people even think about that that's what the blue
| bubble is actually about, it more or less only means your
| message is end to end encrypted. As a side effect you can
| also send full resolution images (and more), but that's in no
| way unique to iMessage.
| thefz wrote:
| > The promise of privacy is one way in which they position
| themselves, but I would not bet the bank on that being true
| forever.
|
| Everybody so quick to forget Apple was/is part of PRISM like
| any other company.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| > The promise of privacy is one way in which they position
| themselves, but I would not bet the bank on that being true
| forever.
|
| Indeed.
|
| Privacy starts with architectural fundamentals that are very
| difficult to retrofit...
|
| If a supplier of products has not built the products this
| way, it would be naive to bet bank or farm on the supplier.
| Even if there were profound motivation to retrofit.
|
| Add to this the general tendency of the market to exploit its
| customers.
| oorza wrote:
| > The promise of privacy is one way in which they position
| themselves, but I would not bet the bank on that being true
| forever.
|
| There are a ton of us out here that consciously choose Apple
| because of their position on privacy. I have to imagine they
| know how many customers they'll lose if they ever move on
| this, and I want to believe that it's a large enough
| percentage to prevent it from happening. Certainly my circle
| is not a useful sample, but the Apple people in it are almost
| all Apple people because of privacy.
| Guthur wrote:
| That is not where Apple's growth has been for quite some
| time, it's services. And because of that I'll be awaiting the
| economic rental strategy to come at any moment.
| ethagknight wrote:
| Nearly 1/4th of their revenue is Apple services, and its
| their primary source of revenue growth to feed the beast.
| dabbz wrote:
| When I was at Apple for a short time, there was a small joke
| I hear from the ex-amazonians there who would say "What's the
| difference between an Apple software engineer and an Amazon
| software engineer? The Amazon engineer will spin up a new
| service on AWS. An Apple engineer will spin up a new app". Or
| something along those lines. I forget the exact phrasing. It
| was a joke that Apple's expertise is in on-device features,
| whereas Amazon thrives in the cloud services world.
| golergka wrote:
| What would a Google engineer do? Write a design doc or
| sunset a service?
| amelius wrote:
| What do you mean luxury? Samsung produces phones that are 2x
| more expensive and are more luxurious.
|
| E.g. Apple still doesn't offer a flipphone that turns into a
| tablet when you open it.
| 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.
| nomel wrote:
| > And even if they use open weights, they will still be
| behind other companies have done model distillation and
| federated learning for years.
|
| I'm sorry, but we're talking about "on edge" here though.
| Those other companies _have no flipping hardware_ to run
| it "on edge", in a "generic" way, which is the goal.
| Apple's strategy involves the generic.
|
| > If apple wants to use open weights
|
| This doesn't make sense. Apple doesn't dictate the models
| you can use with their hardware. _You can already
| accelerate LLAMA with the neural engines_. You can
| download the app right now. _You can already deploy your
| models on edge, on their hardware_. That _is_ the success
| they 're achieving. You _cannot_ effectively do this on
| competitor hardware, with good performance, from
| "budget" to "Pro" lineup, which is a requirement of the
| goal.
|
| > they will still be behind other companies have done
| model distillation and federated learning for years.
|
| What hardware are they running it on? Are they taking
| advantage of Apple (or other) hardware in their strategy?
| Federated learning is an _application_ of "on edge", it
| doesn't *enable* on edge, which is part of Apple's
| strategy.
|
| > Ask apple's newly poached AI hires this question.
| Doesn't seem like you would take an answer from me.
|
| Integrating AI in _their_ apps /experience is not the
| same as enabling a generic "on edge", default, capability
| in all Apple devices (which they have been working
| towards for years now). This is the end goal for "on
| edge". You seem to be talking about OS integration, or
| something else.
|
| > People have been running distilled llamas on rPis with
| pretty good throughput.
|
| Yes, the fundamental limitation there being hardware
| performance, not the model, with that "pretty good"
| making the "pretty terrible" user experience. But,
| there's also nothing stopping anyone from running these
| distilled (a requirement of limited hardware) models on
| Apple hardware, taking advantage of Apples fully defined
| "on edge" strategy. ;) Again, you can run llamas on Apple
| silicon, accelerated, as I do.
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| > Those other companies have no flipping hardware to run
| it "on edge", in a "generic" way, which is the goal
|
| Maybe? This is why I responded to:
|
| > It's everyone's goal. Apple is actively achieving that
| goal
|
| This is is the issue I found disagreeable. Other
| organizations and individual people are achieving that
| goal too. Google says GPT-Nano is going to device, and if
| the benchmarks are to be believed, if it runs at that
| level, their work so far is also actively achieving that
| goal. Meta has released multiple distilled models that
| people have already proven to run inference at the device
| level. It cannot be argued that meta is not actively
| achieving that goal either. They don't have to release
| the hardware because they went a different route. I
| applaud Apple for the M chips. They are super cool.
| People are still working on using them so Apple can
| realize that goal too.
|
| So when you go to the statement that started this
|
| > Apple's AI strategy is to put inference (and longer
| term even learning) on edge devices
|
| Multiple orgs also share this. And I can't say that one
| particular org is super ahead of the others. And I can't
| elevate apple in that race because it is not clear that
| they are truly privacy-focused or that they will keep
| APIs open.
|
| > You cannot effectively do this on competitor hardware,
| with good performance, from "budget" to "Pro" lineup,
| which is a requirement of the goal
|
| Why do you say you cannot do this with good performance?
| How many tokens do you want for a device? Is 30T/s
| enough? You can do that on laptops running small mixtral.
|
| > What hardware are they running it on? Are they taking
| advantage of Apple (or other) hardware in their strategy?
|
| I don't know. I have nothing indicating necessarily apple
| or nvidia or otherwise. Do you?
|
| > [Regarding the rest]
|
| Sure, my point is that they definitely have an intent for
| bespoke models. And why I raised the point that not all
| computation will be feasible on edge for the time being.
| My point with what raised this particular line of inquiry
| is whether a pure edge experience truly enables the best
| user experience. And also why I raised the point about
| Apple's track record of open APIs. Which is why "actively
| achieving" is something that I put doubt on. And I also
| cast doubt on apple being privacy focused. Just emphasize
| tying it back to the reason I even commented.
| 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.
| smj-edison wrote:
| I believe at least Google is starting to do edge inference
| --take a look at the pixel 8 line-up they just announced.
| It doesn't seem to be emphasized as much, but the tensor G3
| chip certainly has builtin inference.
| losvedir wrote:
| Of course Google is. That's what Gemini Nano is for.
| 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?
| edm0nd wrote:
| Fuck them kids. It's delicious af.
| 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.
| flawsofar wrote:
| And fine tuning datasets will be compressed and sent rather
| than the whole model
| strangescript wrote:
| This would be interesting but also feels a little
| restrictive. Maybe something like LoRa could bridge the
| capability gap but if a competitor then drops a much more
| capable model then you either have to ignore it or bring it
| into your app.
|
| (assuming companies won't easily share all their models for
| this kind of effort)
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| I don't think HN understands how important model distillation
| still is for federated learning. Hype >> substance ITT
| Havoc wrote:
| You could always mix and match. Do lighter task on device and
| outsource to cloud if needed
| mr_toad wrote:
| Gemini nano is 1.8B 4 bit parameters, so a little under a GB.
| And hopefully each app won't include a full copy of their
| models.
| int_19h wrote:
| You can do quite a lot with LoRA without having to replace
| all the weights.
| 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.
| yazzku wrote:
| A "mistake" seems to be putting it lightly when the thing
| has been reiterated multiple times throughout the years,
| but yeah. Seems more like blind dogma. Obviously people
| don't like the facts pointed out to them either as you
| can tell by the down votes on my comment. If I am wrong,
| please tell me how in a reply.
| kalleboo wrote:
| What are the facts that people are not considering?
|
| The advertising ID is useless as of App Tracking
| Transparency.
| kalleboo wrote:
| That's not true though? I reset and set up devices for
| testing all the time, and you can skip logging into an Apple
| ID.
| LtWorf wrote:
| For real usage, not for testing a single app. And I mean
| phones.
| aiauthoritydev wrote:
| Edge inference and cloud inference are not mutually exclusive
| and chances are any serious player would be dipping their toes
| in both.
| MBCook wrote:
| Right. The difference is that Apple has a ton of edge
| capacity, they've been building it for a long time.
|
| Google and Samsung have been building it too, at different
| speeds.
|
| Intel and AMD seem further behind (at the moment) unless the
| user has a strong GPU, which is especially uncommon on the
| most popular kind of computer: laptops.
|
| And if you're not one of those four companies... you probably
| don't have much capable consumer edge hardware.
| 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?
| shinycode wrote:
| I agree but for a different reason.
|
| Now the subscription is 20$ a month and the API price is
| accessible. What will happen when they all decide to x100 or
| x1000 the price of their API ? All the companies that got rid
| of people in favor of AI, might have lost the knowledge as
| well. This is dangerous and might kill a lot of companies no
| ?
| 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.
| twototango wrote:
| Hey could i get a source on the BP stuff please. Just curious
| as I couldn't find anything on the interwebs
| aiauthoritydev wrote:
| https://x.com/zerohedge/status/1787822478686851122
| aiauthoritydev wrote:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/stocks/comments/1cmi5gj/bp_earni
| ngs...
| MBCook wrote:
| I agree. Apple has been on this path for a while, the first
| processor with a Neural Engine was the A11 in 2017 or so. The
| path didn't appear to change at all.
|
| The big differences today that stood out to me were adopting
| AI as a term (they used machine learning before) and
| repeating the term AI everywhere they could shove it in since
| that's obviously what the street wants to hear.
|
| That's all that was different. And I'm not surprised they
| emphasized it given all the weird "Apple is behind on AI"
| articles that have been going around.
| 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.
| talldayo wrote:
| > Which honestly is still good for the environment to
| have the work distributed across the entire electricity
| grid.
|
| Sometimes, but parallelization has a cost. The power
| consumption from 400,000,000 iPhones downloading a 2gb
| LLM is not negligible, probably more than what you'd
| consume running it as a REST API on a remote server. Not
| to mention slower.
| peapicker wrote:
| Downloading 2gb of anything on my iPhone via wifi from my
| in-home gigabit fiber barely puts a dent in my battery
| life let alone much time.
|
| The random ads in most phone games are much worse on my
| battery life.
| talldayo wrote:
| Yeah it's a shame that mobile games are shit when console
| and PC gaming gets taken so serious by comparison. If you
| want to blame that on developers and not Apple's stupid-
| ass policies stopping you from emulating real games, be
| my guest. That's a take I'd love to hear.
|
| Keep downloadin' those ads. This is what Apple wants from
| you, a helpless and docile revenue stream. Think
| Different or stay mad.
| peapicker wrote:
| Blame? Simply saying downloading 2gb isn't the power
| consumption hit you seem to think it is.
|
| Not much of a gamer anyway, just an observation when I
| tried a couple apparently dodgy games.
|
| Not sure why your reply wasn't related to your original
| comment. Felt rather knee-jerk reactionary to me instead.
| Oh well.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > Which honestly is still good for the environment to
| have the work distributed across the entire electricity
| grid.
|
| This doesn't make any sense.
|
| > If you're making claims of green washing you need to be
| able to back it up with what alternative would actually
| be "green".
|
| Sometimes there isn't an alternative. In which case you
| don't get to look green, sorry. The person critiquing
| greenwashing doesn't need to give an alternative, why
| would that be their job? They're just evaluating whether
| it's real or fake.
|
| Though in this case using renewable energy can help.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| > Sometimes there isn't an alternative. In which case you
| don't get to look green, sorry. The person critiquing
| greenwashing doesn't need to give an alternative, why
| would that be their job? They're just evaluating whether
| it's real or fake.
|
| Baselessly calling every greening and sustainability
| effort "greenwashing", especially when there's
| practically no thought put into what the alternative
| might be, is trite and borderline intellectually
| dishonest. They don't want to have a conversation about
| how it could be improved, they just want to interject
| "haha that's stupid, corporations are fooling all of you
| sheeple" from their place of moral superiority. This shit
| is so played out.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| This is what I wanted to get across but you said it so
| much better.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > Baselessly calling every greening and sustainability
| effort "greenwashing", especially when there's
| practically no thought put into what the alternative
| might be
|
| Baseless? The foundation of this accusation is rock
| solid. Offloading the exact same computation to another
| person so your energy numbers look better is _not a
| greening or sustainability effort_.
|
| Fake green should always be called greenwashing.
|
| You don't need to suggest an improvement to call out
| something that is completely fake. The faker doesn't get
| to demand a "conversation".
|
| You've seen a bunch of people be incorrectly dismissive
| and decided that dismissiveness is automatically wrong.
| It's not.
|
| For an extreme example, imagine a company installs a
| "pollution-preventing boulder" at their HQ. It's very
| valid to call that greenwashing and walk away. Don't let
| them get PR for nothing. If they were actually trying,
| and made a mistake, suggest a fix. But you can't fix
| fake.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| > Baseless? The foundation of this accusation is rock
| solid. Offloading the exact same computation to another
| person so your energy numbers look better is not a
| greening or sustainability effort.
|
| Yes, I consider it baseless for the following reasons:
|
| - First, consider the hardware running in data centers,
| and the iDevices running at the edge - the iPhones, iPads
| and presumably Macs. There's a massive difference in
| power consumption between a data center full of GPUs, and
| whatever the equivalent might be in iDevices. Few chips
| come close to Apple's M-series in power usage.
|
| - Second, Apple's commitment to making those devices
| carbon neutral by 2030; I'm unaware of any commitment to
| make cloud compute hardware carbon neutral, but I'll
| admit that I don't really keep up with that kind of
| hardware so I could be totally wrong there.
|
| - Third, consider that an AI compute service (I'm not
| sure what you call it) like OpenAI is always running and
| crunching numbers in its data center, while the iDevices
| are each individually running only when needed by the
| user.
|
| - Fourth, the people who own the iDevices may charge them
| using more sustainable methods than would power a data
| center. For example, Iowa - where I live - generates 62%
| of its energy from wind power and nearly two-thirds of
| its total energy from renewable resources [1], whereas
| California only gets 54% of its energy from renewable
| resources. Of course this cuts both ways, there are
| plenty of states or even countries that get most of their
| power from coal, like Ohio.
|
| That said, neither of us have any real numbers on these
| things so the best either of us can do is be optimistic
| or pessimistic. But I'd rather do that and have a
| discussion about it, instead of dismiss it out of hand
| like everyone else does by saying "haha dumb, get
| greenwashed".
|
| You're right that improvements don't need to be suggested
| to have a conversation about greening/greenwashing. My
| irritation lies more in the fact that it's almost a trope
| at this point that you can click into the comments on any
| HN story that mentions greening/sustainability, and there
| will be comments calling it fake greenwashing. I don't
| disagree that it's easy for a company to greenwash if
| they want to, but it's tiring to see _everything_ called
| greenwashing without applying any critical thinking.
| Everyone wants to be so jaded about corporations that
| they 'll never trust a word about it.
|
| [1] Although this two-thirds total includes the bio-fuel
| ethanol, so I feel like it shouldn't be included.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| 1. Maybe, but wouldn't Apple want to use M-series chips
| to do this either way?
|
| 2. That's an interesting angle.
|
| 3. It's the same total amount, and both will go idle when
| there's less demand.
|
| 4. I think the average data center gets cleaner energy
| than the average house but I can't find a proper
| comparison so maybe that's baseless.
|
| Also as far as I'm aware, inference takes significantly
| fewer resources when you can batch it.
|
| > but it's tiring to see everything called greenwashing
| without applying any critical thinking
|
| That does sound tiring, but in this particular case I
| think there was sufficient critical thinking, and it was
| originally brought up as just a possibility.
| 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...
| dns_snek wrote:
| From your link:
|
| > "Apple defines high-quality credits as those from
| projects that are real, additional, measurable, and
| quantified, with systems in place to avoid double-counting,
| and that ensure permanence."
|
| Apple then pledged to buy carbon credits from a company
| called Verra. In 2023, an investigation found that more
| than 90% of Verra's carbon credits are a sham. Notably,
| Apple made their pledge _after_ the results of this
| investigation were known - so much for their greenwashing.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/reveale
| d...
| MBCook wrote:
| I'm not sure it's that (benched pointed out their carbon
| commitment) as simple logistics.
|
| Apple doesn't have to build the data centers. Apple doesn't
| have to buy the AI capacity themselves (even if from TSMC for
| Apple designed chips). Apple doesn't have to have the
| personnel for the data centers or the air conditioning. They
| don't have to pay for all the network bandwidth.
|
| There are benefits to the user to having the AI run on their
| own devices in terms of privacy and latency as mentioned by
| the GP.
|
| But there are also benefits to Apple simply because it means
| it's no longer their resources being used up above and beyond
| electricity.
|
| I keep reading about companies having trouble getting GPUs
| from the cloud providers and that some crypto networks have
| pivoted to selling GPU access for AI work as crypto profits
| fall.
|
| Apple doesn't have to deal with any of that. They have
| underused silicon sitting out there ready to light up to make
| their customers happy (and perhaps interested in buying a
| faster device).
| vineyardmike wrote:
| I agree with everything you said but the TSMC bit. They are
| quite literally competing with NVidia et al for fab space
| for customers chips. Sure they get the AI bits built-in to
| existing products but surely they're bigger/more expensive
| to manufacture and commit from TSMC because of it.
| MBCook wrote:
| I think we're on the same page.
|
| I was trying to say that there was still a cost to using
| their own chips for server AI because they still had to
| pay to have them made so they weren't "free" because
| they're Apple products as opposed to buying nVidia parts.
|
| You're right, there is a cost to them to put the AI stuff
| on end user chips too since die space isn't free and
| extra circuits mean fewer chips fit per wafer.
| the_king wrote:
| It makes sense for desktops but not for devices with
| batteries. I think Apple should introduce a new device for
| $5-10k that has 400GB of VRAM that all Macs on the network
| use for ML.
|
| If you're on battery, you don't want to do LLM inference on a
| laptop. Hell, you don't really want to do transcription
| inference for that long - but would be nice not to have to
| send it to a data center.
| aborsy wrote:
| What are the example of the edge devices made by Apple?
| floam wrote:
| MacBook, iPhone, iPad?
| bingbingbing777 wrote:
| So laptops are now edge devices?
| MBCook wrote:
| Doesn't it just refer to the end user device as opposed
| to a server somewhere or a middle box?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Last time I looked for the definition, nobody can agree
| on whether client devices count as edge or not.
| aborsy wrote:
| These don't sit on the edge of the internet , and
| typically are not called edge devices.
|
| It's usually a more powerful device such as a router or
| mini server between LAN and internet.
| 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.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Unusably slow? It's like 0.3 seconds to first token and
| then pretty much all of the tokens can follow within a
| second.
|
| I find it hard to understand the edge usecase for text-
| based models.
| EarthMephit wrote:
| Even in Australia is the LLM lag to a server noticable?
|
| Generally an LLM seems to take about 3s or more to respond,
| and the network delay to the US is a couple of hundred
| milliseconds.
|
| The network delay seems minimal compared to the actual
| delay of the LLM.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Having used groq and other fast LLM services a fair bit, lag
| seems negligible. You're literally just passing text at close
| to the speed of light.
| jonplackett wrote:
| * when you have a good internet connection
|
| ** when you live in the USA
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > * when you have a good internet connection
|
| Or at least, a good enough internet connection to send
| plaintext.
|
| > * when you live in the USA
|
| Even from Australia to USA is just ~300ms of latency for
| first token and then the whole thing can finish in ~1s.
| And making that faster doesn't require on-device
| deployment, it just requires a server in Australia -
| which is obviously going to be coming if it hasn't
| already for many providers.
| lolinder wrote:
| > Lag is a real killer for LLMs.
|
| I'm curious to hear more about this. My experience has been
| that inference speeds are the #1 cause of delay by orders of
| magnitude, and I'd assume those won't go down substantially
| on edge devices because the cloud will be getting faster at
| approximately the same rate.
|
| Have people outside the US benchmarked OpenAI's response
| times and found network lag to be a substantial contributor
| to slowness?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| of course not, it's just text. people here are just
| spitballing.
|
| groq is way better for inference speeds btw
| vineyardmike wrote:
| I run a few models (eg Llama3:8b) on my 2023 MacBook Air, and
| there is still a fair bit of lag and delay, compared to a
| hosted (and much larger) model like Gemini. A large source of
| the lag is the initial loading of the model into RAM. Which
| an iPhone will surely suffer from.
|
| Humane had lag _and_ they used voice chat which is a bad UX
| paradigm. VUI is bad because it adds lag to the information
| within the medium. Listening to preambles and lists are
| always slower than a human eyes ability to scan a page of
| text. Their lag is not due to LLMs, which can be much faster
| than whatever they did.
|
| We should remind ourselves that an iPhone can likely suffer
| similar battery and heat issues - especially if it's running
| models locally.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Humane's lag feels down to just bad software design too, it
| almost feels like a two stage thing is happening like it's
| sending your voice or transcription up to the cloud,
| figuring out where it needs to go to get it done, telling
| the device to tell you its about to do that then finally
| doing it. E.g
|
| User: "What is this thing?"
|
| Pin: "I'll have a look what that is" (It feels this
| response has to come from a server)
|
| Pin: "It's a <answer>" (The actual answer)
|
| We're still a bit away from iPhone running anything viable
| locally, even small models today you can almost feel the
| chip creaking under the load they're incurring on it and
| the whole phone begins to choke.
| 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.
| zachbee wrote:
| If they're doing inference on edge devices, one challenge I see
| is protecting model weights. If you want to deploy a
| proprietary model on an edge AI chip, the weights can get
| stolen via side-channel attacks [1]. Obviously this isn't a
| concern for open models, but I doubt Apple would go the open
| models route.
|
| [1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/how-prevent-ai-power-usage-
| secrets
| Havoc wrote:
| Nobody is taking particular care protecting weights for edge
| class models
| bmitc wrote:
| > [Apple's] privacy-first strategy
|
| That is a marketing and advertising strategy.
| moosemess wrote:
| - dozens of horrific 0days cves every year because not enough
| is invested in security, making private virtually impossible
|
| - credit card required to install free apps such as the
| "private" Signal messenger
|
| - location required just to show me the weather in a static
| place, lol
|
| - claims to be e2e but apple controls all keys and identities
|
| - basically sells out all users' icloud data in china, and
| totally doesn't do the same in the US, because tim pinky
| swears
|
| - everything is closed source
| jascination wrote:
| I'm a cross-platform app developer and can assure you iOS is
| much stronger in terms of what data you can/can't get from a
| user
| bmitc wrote:
| That says nothing about what Apple does with data.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| their privacy strategy is to make you feel comfortable with
| their tech so you don't mind when they shop it around to the
| highest bidder.
|
| Make no mistake, they're just waiting for the right MBA to walk
| through the door, see the sky high value of their users and
| start chop shopping that.
|
| Enshitiffication is always available to the next CEO, and this
| is just going to be more and more tempting as the value of the
| walled garden increases.
| acdha wrote:
| Yes, it's possible that they'll change in the future but that
| doesn't make it inevitable. Everything you describe could
| have happened at any point in the last decade or two but
| didn't, which suggests that it's not "waiting for the right
| MBA" but an active effort to keep the abusive ones out.
|
| One thing to remember is that they understand the value of
| long-term investments. They aren't going to beat Google and
| Facebook at advertising and have invested billions in a
| different model those companies can't easily adopt, and I'm
| sure someone has done the math on how expensive it would be
| to switch.
| felixding wrote:
| > This is completely coherent with their privacy-first strategy
|
| Do not believe what they say, watch what they do.
| SergeAx wrote:
| Then putting only 256gb into their cheaper devices is really
| bad move. Even simple models like Whisper require hundreds of
| megabytes of storage.
| the_king wrote:
| I'm all for running as much on the edge as possible, but we're
| not even close to being able to do real-time inference on
| Frontier models on Macs or iPads, and that's just for vanilla
| LLM chatbots. Low-precision Llama 3-8b is awesome, but it isn't
| a Claude 3 replacer, totally drains my battery, and is slow (M1
| Max).
|
| Multimodal agent setups are going to be data center/home-lab
| only for at least the next five years.
|
| Apple isn't about to put 80GB on VRAM in an iPad for about 15
| reasons.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Something they _should_ be able to do now, but do not seem to,
| is to allow you to train Siri to recognize _exactly_ your voice
| and accent. Which is to say, to take the speech-to-text model
| that is listening and putting it into the Siri integration API,
| to both be 99.99% accurate for your speech and to recognize you
| and only you when it comes to invoking voice commands.
|
| It could, if it chose to, continue to recognize all voices but
| at the same time limit the things the non-owner could ask for
| based on owner preferences.
| jilijeanlouis wrote:
| This is really easy to do: it's just an embedding of your
| voice. So typically like 10/30 sec max of your voice to
| configure this. You already do a similar setup for faceId. I
| agree with you, I don't understand why they don't do it.
| eru wrote:
| > 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.
|
| That's one particular set of trade-offs, but not necessarily
| the best. Eg if your network connection and server processing
| speed is sufficiently faster than your local processing speed,
| the latency would be higher for doing it locally.
|
| Local inference can also use more battery power. And you need a
| more beefy device, all else being equal.
| chipdart wrote:
| > This is completely coherent with their privacy-first strategy
| (...)
|
| I think you're trying too hard to rationalize this move as pro-
| privacy and pro-consumer.
|
| Apple is charging a premium for hardware based on performance
| claims, which they need to create relevance and demand for it.
|
| There is zero demand for the capacity for running
| computationally demanding workloads beyond very niche
| applications, for what classifies as demanding for the
| consumer-grade hardware being sold for the past two decades.
|
| If Apple offloads these workloads to the customer's own
| hardware, they don't have to provide this computing capacity
| themselves. This means no global network of data centers, no
| infrastructure, no staff, no customer support, no lawyer,
| nothing.
|
| More importantly, Apple claims to be pro privacy but their
| business moves are in reality in the direction of ensuring that
| they are in sole control of their users' data. Call it what you
| want but leveraging their position to ensure they hold a
| monopoly over a market created over their userbase is not a pro
| privacy move, just like Apple's abuse of their control over the
| app store is not a security move.
| carabiner wrote:
| iPhone Photos app already does incredible image subject search
| via ML locally. Versus Android which does it via cloud.
| arvinsim wrote:
| If inference on edge devices is their goal, then they would
| have to rethink their pricing on storage and RAM.
| fnord77 wrote:
| They're a hardware company, so yes, they want to sell thick
| clients.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| >Apple's AI strategy is to put inference (and longer term even
| learning) on edge devices.
|
| Apple's AI strategy is to put inference (and longer term even
| learning) on edge devices...only for Apple stuff.
|
| There is a big difference. ANE right now is next to useless for
| anything not Apple.
| davedx wrote:
| I think that's going to change with WWDC
| ActorNightly wrote:
| Nah. Apple doesn't have incentive to provide any more dev
| power. It will keep things locked down and charge people
| for Apple branded software products. That has been their
| business for the past decade.
| davedx wrote:
| I think there's always been a tension at Apple between
| keeping everything as locked down as possible and opening
| up parts because they need the developer driven app
| ecosystem. My prediction is Neural Engine is going to
| become more useful to third party developers. I could be
| wrong
| edanm wrote:
| And yet Siri is super slow because it does the processing off-
| device, and is far less useful than it could be because it is
| cobbled with restrictions.
|
| I can't even find a way to resume playing whatever Audible book
| I was last playing. "Siri play audible" or something. As far as
| I know, this is impossible to do.
| blegr wrote:
| I hope this means AI-accelerated frameworks get better support
| on Mx. Unified memory and Metal are a pretty good alternative
| for local deep learning development.
| unusualmonkey wrote:
| There is no guarantee that local processing is going to have
| lower latency than remote processing. Given the huge compute
| needs of some AI models (e.g. chat gpt) the time saved by using
| larger compute likely dwarfs the relatively small time need to
| transmit a request.
| wilde wrote:
| Ehhh at this point Apple's privacy strategy is little more than
| marketing. Sure they'll push stuff to the edge to save
| themselves money and book the win, but they also are addicted
| to the billions they make selling your searches to Google.
|
| Agreed on the UX improvements though.
| neilsimp1 wrote:
| The entire software stack is non-free and closed-source. This
| means you'd be taking Apple at their word on "privacy". Do you
| trust Apple? I wouldn't, given their track record.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| What track record?
| Gh0stRAT wrote:
| They fought the FBI over unlocking iPhones when they could
| have just quietly complied with the request. I'd say they
| have a decent track record.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| They might have been thinking of the recently discovered
| hardware backdoor issue, CVE-2023-38606 (see also
| _Operation Triangulation_ ). There was surprisingly
| little reporting on it.
|
| Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38783112
|
| Transcript of _Security Now_ podcast episode discussing
| the issue: https://www.grc.com/sn/sn-955.htm
| m463 wrote:
| Just install little snitch and you'll see how MUCH gets
| sent back to the mothership. and that is just macos.
| garydgregory wrote:
| My cynical view is that doing AI on the client is the only way
| they can try to keep selling luxury items (jewelry really) and
| increasing prices for what are essentially and functionally
| commodity devices.
| marticode wrote:
| Every chip coming this year (Intel, AMD, Qualcomm) has an AI
| processor. I am not sure Apple is doing anything special here.
| unboxingelf wrote:
| Apple is UX-first, not privacy-first.
| ethagnawl wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I know a shop who's doing this and it's a very promising
| approach. The ability to offload the costs of cloud GPU time is
| a _tremendous_ advantage. That 's to say nothing of the
| decreased latency, increased privacy, etc. The glaring downside
| is that you are dependent upon your users to be willing and
| able to run native apps (or possibly WASM, I'm not sure) on
| bleeding edge hardware. However, for some target markets (e.g.
| video production, photography, designers, etc.) it's a "safe"
| assumption that they will be using the latest and greatest
| Macs.
|
| I've also been hearing people talk somewhat seriously about
| setting up their own training/inference farms using Macs
| because, at least for now, they're more readily available and
| cheaper to buy/run than big GPUs. That comes with a host of ops
| problems but it still may prove worthwhile for some use cases
| and addresses some of the same privacy concerns as edge
| computing if you're able to keep data/computation in-house.
| beestripes wrote:
| Privacy can actually be reduced with on-device ai too. Now,
| without actually sending any data to iCloud apple can still
| have a general idea of what you're doing. Imagine a state has a
| law that makes certain subjects illegal to discuss. They could
| compel apple to have their local AI detect that content and
| then to broadcast a ping in the AirTags network about the user
| and their location. No internet connection required on the
| target.
| amelius wrote:
| In case it is not abundantly clear by now: Apple's strategy is
| to turn developers into slaves.
|
| Run away from these temptations. You will never truly own the
| hardware anyway.
| demondemidi wrote:
| Every embedded company is pushing ML at the edge with inference
| engines. Check out MLPerfTiny. They've been benchmarking all
| sorts of edge AI since 2019.
| msla wrote:
| Privacy from everyone but Apple, certainly.
| 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.
| kalleboo wrote:
| > _AMD is coming out with twice the performance of M4 in two
| months or less_
|
| M4 Pro/Max/Ultra with variants double+ the performance by just
| scaling cores are probably also going to be announced at WWDC
| in a month when they also announce their AI roadmap
| 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.
| wmf wrote:
| LPDDR5-6400 + 20% ~= LPDDR5-7500 (same speed used in
| Intel/AMD laptops)
| 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.
| bschmidt1 wrote:
| It's a 10-core CPU + 10-core GPU + 16-core "NPU" (neural
| processing unit) for AI all on a consumer handheld. It's like a
| Ferrari engine in a Honda Civic - all we know is it's going to
| be fast and hopefully it doesn't catch on fire.
| 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.
| wmf wrote:
| The M3 can support 64 GB but Apple artificially limits it to 24
| GB. There's no telling when they will decide to uncripple it.
| gigatexal wrote:
| How did you come up with that? Based on the core layouts or
| something?
|
| Regarding crippling I only went with a max because I wanted
| more ram. I would have loved to have gone with an M3 pro but
| 36GB wasn't enough.
| wmf wrote:
| 128-bit LPDDR5 supports 64 GB. You can see this in a few
| laptops.
| 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 doesn't make much sense (what
| does my opinion matter vs their success), 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 they start to address the instability and bugs
| I deal with on my MBP, which would make MacOS more than just a
| compromise), Asahi a ridiculous, yet beautiful pipedream. Fedora
| on an iPad, the best of hardware and software, at least in my
| personal opinion.
| ragazzina wrote:
| >a product line as successful as the iPads
|
| Ipad revenue has been declining for 9 out of the last 10
| quarters.
| 1024core wrote:
| > capable of up to 38 trillion operations per second
|
| Assuming these are BF16 ops, by comparison, an H100 from NVIDIA
| will do 1979 teraFLOPS BF16.
|
| So this "Neural Engine" from Apple is 50x slower than an H100
| PCIe version.
| foobiekr wrote:
| The h100 is $80k.
| aetherspawn wrote:
| No numbers on battery life improvements?
| bschmidt1 wrote:
| Anyone know more about the "NPU" (neural processing unit)?
| Basically a GPU specialized for AI?
| Havoc wrote:
| Yeah. Basically specialises in fast matrix operations so
| focused on ai and ML. Vaguely like a gpu minus the graphic
| output and the pipeline needed for that.
| bschmidt1 wrote:
| Awesome thanks. Given it's an iPad I'm guessing that means
| consumer-facing AI which is very cool.
| dev1ycan wrote:
| It's hilarious how they still push the "better for the
| Environment" garbage when they industrially destroy old iphones.
| Havoc wrote:
| They have been working on tech to pull them apart via robots to
| isolate component parts. Unsure if it's in use at scale though
| 0xWTF wrote:
| Dear Apple, please stop focusing on thinner. At this point you're
| selling high-end breakables. To quote Katherine the Great,
| Huzzah!
| tzury wrote:
| "M4 has Apple's fastest Neural Engine ever, capable of up to 38
| trillion operations per second"
|
| Let that sink in.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Built in to a SoC* e.g. a 2060 from 5 years ago had double that
| in tensor cores it just wasn't part of the SoC. Great
| improvement for its type/application, dubious marketing claim
| with the wording.
|
| And it's really not that great even though it's a welcomed
| improvement - Microsoft is pushing 45 TOPs as the baseline, you
| just can't get that in an APU yet (well, at least for the next
| couple months).
| zmmmmm wrote:
| I'm most interested in what this means for the next Vision
| device.
|
| Half the power budget could well translate to a very significant
| improvement in heat on the device, battery size and other
| benefits. Could they even dispense with the puck and get the
| battery back onto the headset for a consumer version that runs at
| slightly lower resolution and doesn't have the EyeSight feature?
|
| If they could do that for $2000 I think we'd have a totally
| different ball game for that device.
| xyst wrote:
| Cool. Too bad it's Apple and it's locked down to Apple products.
|
| If Apple ever decides to pivot business to chip manufacturing
| that allows open access and sale. Then I would revisit.
|
| Always need competition in this space. Especially for low power
| cpu/gpus.
| rustcleaner wrote:
| I really really hope [but doubt] Qubes OS runs on something like
| this with these caveats:
|
| -using an add-in video card for dom0 gpu
|
| -apple's on-die gpu can be passed through to a qube
|
| -apple's unified memory does not need OS X to adjust the RAM/VRAM
| wall
|
| Since I doubt these caveats are in play, I think I may be stuck
| with enterprise hand-me-downs that I can pass through.
| pmayrgundter wrote:
| Am I missing it? 3x faster than an Xbox 10 from 2020 sounds
| "just" like Moore's law growth
|
| Cool! Thanks Apple!
|
| I guess this is to be expected given your market position and
| billions in the bank?
|
| Thanks so much for doing it. We'll definitely buy all your
| mrpippy wrote:
| Today's Xcode 15.4 RC suggests that "Donan" is the M4 core
| codename, and that it may support ARM's SME instructions.
|
| https://mastodon.social/@bshanks/112401605018159567
| SkyMarshal 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 didn't even realize there is other PC-level hardware with AI-
| specific compute. What's the AMD and Intel equivalent of Neural
| Engine? (not that it matters since it seems the GPU where most of
| the AI workload is handled anyway)
| zamadatix wrote:
| AMD/Intel just call it an NPU.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > not that it matters since it seems the GPU where most of the
| AI workload is handled anyway
|
| GPUs can also have AI-specific compute (e.g., Nvidia's tensor
| cores.)
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| I wonder if they've implemented any fixes or mitigations for
| GoFetch (https://gofetch.fail/).
| smallstepforman wrote:
| As an engineer, I find it extremelly frustrating to read Apple's
| marketing speak. It almost sounds like ChatGPT and StarTrek
| techno-babble. Engineers cannot stomach reading the text, and non
| engineers wont bother reading it anyway.
|
| Whats wrong with plain old bullet-points and sticking to the
| technical data?
| dimask wrote:
| The target audience is neither engineers nor general public;
| these announcements are meant for tech journalists/youtubers
| etc to refer to when writing or talking about it.
| zer0zzz wrote:
| Looking forward when these new 10 core M4s end up in cheap mac
| desktops. I hope theres a max ram boost from the existing 24GB.
| JSDevOps wrote:
| Why does this feel like it was hastily added at the last minute?
| Developing a chip like the M4 presumably takes years, so hastily
| incorporating 'AI' to meet the hype and demand could inevitably
| lead to problems.
| mlyle wrote:
| Apple has had "Neural Engine" hardware in their SOCs since
| 2017, and have been building its capabilities every generation.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| Maybe I'm getting blase about the ever improving technical
| capabilities, but I find the most astounding thing is that the M4
| chip, an OLED screen on one side, and aluminium case on the other
| can fit in 5.1mm!
| koksik202 wrote:
| Give me Mac OS bootup on iPad and I am in
|
| Don't get the hype of the performance and being locked to iPad
| ecosystem
| fakelonmusk wrote:
| Why does Apple hurry to push M4 before A18 Pro? Who can support
| the hypotheses below? 1) M3 follows M2 and A16 Pro in part, and
| 2) M4 follows M2 and A17 Pro.
| drstrangevibes wrote:
| yes but will it blend?
| sean_the_geek wrote:
| Seems like we are clearly in the _"post peak Apple"_ era now.
| This update is just for the sake of update; iPad lineup is (even
| more) confusing; iPhone cash-cow continues but at slower growth
| rate; new product launches - ahem! Vision Pro - have seen low to
| negligible adoption; marginal improvements to products so
| consumers are holding out longer on to their devices.
| garydgregory wrote:
| Posts like these directly to the Apple PR dept is just an ad IMO.
| qwerty456127 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.
|
| How useful this is for free libraries? Can you invoke it from
| your Python or C++ code in a straightforward manner? Does it not
| rely on proprietary drivers only available for their own OS?
| zamadatix wrote:
| It's a piece of hardware so it'll have their own driver but you
| can access it through the OS APIs just like any other piece of
| hardware. What's new is the improvement in speed, Apple has
| exposed their NPUs for years. You can e.g. run Stable Diffusion
| on them.
| throwaway1194 wrote:
| I dread using a Mac for any serious work, you lose a lot of the
| advantages of Linux (proper package and window management, native
| containers, built-in drivers for every hardware out there,
| excellent filesystems support, etc). And you get what exactly?
| _zoltan_ wrote:
| Best hardware on the world best desktop OS. I wouldn't trade my
| MBP .
| throwaway1194 wrote:
| Best according to whom and for what reason? Give me some real
| reasons for why it is "best". That's what Apple's marketing
| department would say.
| _zoltan_ wrote:
| I don't need to fiddle with settings and as a developer all
| my tools are there (git, clang, ...). I don't need to care
| about the version of my kernel and can be worry free to
| click update.
|
| Plus it's beautiful, great to touch hardware.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| 8GB RAM?? what is this, 2005? Seriously, how much would it cost
| Apple to start its base M4 model with 16GB RAM.
| achandlerwhite wrote:
| it's an ipad...
| ponorin wrote:
| part of me wonders if the reason apple went with an unusual
| double jump in processor generation is that they are fearing or
| at least trying to delay comparison with other desktop class arm
| processors. wonder if mac lineup will get m4 at all or start with
| m4 pro or something. we'll see.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Doesn't add up, if you fear something about to launch will
| outdo your product in a given segment then you push that launch
| earlier, not later so your competitor is also first to market.
| ethagknight wrote:
| Interesting, it seems Apple knows they are up against the wall
| where there isn't really much more their devices NEED to do. The
| cases that Apple gives for using these devices incredible compute
| is very marginal. Their phones computers and iPads are fantastic
| and mainly limited by physics. I have basically one of
| everything, love it all, and do not feel constrained by the
| devices of the last 3-4 years. Vision and Watch still leave room
| for improvement, but those are small lines. Limited opportunity
| to innovate, hence the Vision being pushed to market without a
| real path forward for customer need/use. Very few people read
| about the latest iPad m4 and think "oh wow my current iPad cant
| do that..."
|
| Curious what steps they will take, or if they shouldn't just
| continue returning large amounts of cash to shareholders.
| stackedinserter wrote:
| All this power and I still can't play decent games on my macbook.
| alanh wrote:
| > 3-nanometer technology
|
| Wow. I remember being assured that we would never reach even low
| double-digit nanometer processes.
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