[HN Gopher] M4 MacBook Pro
___________________________________________________________________
M4 MacBook Pro
Author : tosh
Score : 627 points
Date : 2024-10-30 15:00 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.apple.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.apple.com)
| scrlk wrote:
| Nano-texture option for the display is nice. IIRC it's the first
| time since the 2012 15" MBP that a matte option has been offered?
|
| I hope that the response times have improved, because it has been
| quite poor for a 120 Hz panel.
| ant6n wrote:
| They brought back the matte screen! Omg. The question is, will
| they have that for the air.
|
| (I tend to feel if you want something specialized, you gotta
| pay for the expensive model)
| pcdoodle wrote:
| Yes. It's finally back.
| lapcat wrote:
| > IIRC it's the first time since the 2012 15" MBP that a matte
| option has been offered?
|
| The so-called "antiglare" option wasn't true matte. You'd
| really have to go back to 2008.
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| Love the nano-texture on the Studio Display, but my MacBooks
| have always suffered from finger oil rubbing the screen from
| the keys. Fingerprint oil on nano-texture sounds like a recipe
| for disaster.
|
| For my current laptop, I finally broke down and bought a
| tempered glass screen protector. It adds a bit of glare, but
| wipes clean -- and for the first time I have a one-year-old
| MacBook that still looks as good as new.
| jonah wrote:
| I put a thin screen cleaner/glasses cleaner cloth on the
| keyboard whenever I close the lid. That keeps the oils off
| the screen as well as prevents any pressure or rubbing from
| damaging the glass.
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| I tried that, unfortunately didn't work for me at all.
| sroussey wrote:
| The iPad has nano texture and I find it does a much better
| job with oily fingerprints.
| jhickok wrote:
| My one concern is that nano-texture apple displays are a little
| more sensitive to damage, and even being super careful with my
| MBPs I get the little marks from the keyboard when you carry
| the laptop with your hand squeezing the lid and bottom (a
| natural carry motion).
| coolspot wrote:
| Put a facial tissue over keyboard before closing the lid.
| mattlondon wrote:
| Macs - they just work.
| thom wrote:
| It's also on the iPad Pro. Only downside is you really do need
| the right cloth to be able to clean it.
| umanwizard wrote:
| I believe the laptop ships with the cloth. That said, it is
| annoying to have to remember to always keep that one cloth
| with your laptop.
| dcchambers wrote:
| > Now available in space black and silver finishes.
|
| No space grey?!
| billti wrote:
| I don't think they had Space Grey on the M3 models either. That
| was initially my preference, but I went with the Black and
| quite like it.
| matsz wrote:
| Wonder how good are those for LLMs (compared to M3 Pro/Max)...
| They talk about the Neural Engine a lot in the press release.
| Lalabadie wrote:
| I'm not sure we can leverage the neural cores for now, but
| they're already rather good for LLMs, depending on what metrics
| you value most.
|
| A specced out Mac Studio (M2 being the latest model as of
| today) isn't cheap, but it can run 180B models, run them fast
| for the price, and use <300W of power doing it. It idles below
| 10W as well.
| opjjf wrote:
| It seems they also update the base memory on MacBook Air:
|
| > MacBook Air: The World's Most Popular Laptop Now Starts at 16GB
|
| > MacBook Air is the world's most popular laptop, and with Apple
| Intelligence, it's even better. Now, models with M2 and M3 double
| the starting memory to 16GB, while keeping the starting price at
| just $999 -- a terrific value for the world's best-selling
| laptop.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| Ohh, good catch. Sneaking that into the MBP announcement. I
| skimmed the page and missed that. So a fourth announcement
| couched within the biggest of the three days.
| jsheard wrote:
| Every M-series device now comes with at least 16GB, except for
| the base iPad Pro, right?
| MBCook wrote:
| At least all the M4 Macs. I'm not sure of every older M
| config has been updated, though at least some have been.
| fckgw wrote:
| The only older configs that Apple sells are the M2 and M3
| Airs, which were bumped. Everything else is now on M4, or
| didn't have an 8gb base config (Mac Studio, Mac Pro)
| fckgw wrote:
| Correct, every Mac computer starts at 16gb now. 256gb/512gb
| iPad Pro is 8gb, 1tb/2tb is 16gb.
| abhinavk wrote:
| > while keeping the starting price at just $999 -- a terrific
| value for the world's best-selling laptop
|
| Only in US it seems. India got a price increase by $120.
| electriclove wrote:
| Wow, I didn't expect them to update the older models to start
| at 16GB and no price increase. I guess that is why Amazon was
| blowing the 8GB models out at crazy low prices over the past
| few days.
| bronco21016 wrote:
| Costco was selling MB Air M2 8 GB for $699! Incredible deal.
|
| I've been using the exact model for about a year and I rarely
| find limitations for my typical office type work. The only
| time I've managed to thermally throttle it has been with some
| super suboptimal Excel Macros.
| __rito__ wrote:
| I was seeing $699 MB Air M1 8 GB on Amazon India a week
| ago.
| porphyra wrote:
| I'm waiting for the 16 GB M2 Air to be super cheap to pick
| one up to use with Asahi Linux!
| bhouston wrote:
| But no update to a M4 for the MacBook Air yet unfortunately. I
| would love to get an M4 MacBook Air with 32GB.
|
| I believe the rumor is that the MacBook Air will get the update
| to M4 in early spring 2025, February/March timeline.
| nsbk wrote:
| This is the machine I'm waiting for. Hopefully early 2025
| rbanffy wrote:
| There are still a couple days left this week.
| jq-r wrote:
| There really isn't a chance they'll update the same
| product twice in a week.
| rbanffy wrote:
| They haven't officially updated it. They just
| discontinued the smaller model.
| jq-r wrote:
| It would make more sense to discontinue the smaller model
| along with some other updates to the line. Or in other
| words, Air won't receive any other updates this week
| unfortunately.
| 39896880 wrote:
| They said there would be three announcements this week
| and this is the third
| sroussey wrote:
| They did? The tweet that announced stuff from the head of
| marketing did not mention 3 days.
|
| That said, I believe you. Some press gets a hands-on on
| Wednesday (today) so unless they plan to pre-announce
| something (unlikely) or announce software only stuff, I
| think today is it.
| rbanffy wrote:
| That's disappointing. I was expecting a new Apple TV
| because mine needs replacement and I don't really feel
| inclined to get one that's due for an upgrade very soon.
|
| Also, Studio and Pro are hanging there.
| coder543 wrote:
| The current-gen Apple TV is already overpowered for what
| it does, and extremely nice to use. I can think of very
| few changes I would like to see, and most of them are
| purely software.
| int_19h wrote:
| I really wish it had some way to connect USB storage
| directly.
| coder543 wrote:
| Mine has 128GB of onboard storage... but Apple still bans
| apps from downloading video, which annoys me.
|
| The streaming apps virtually all support downloading for
| offline viewing on iPhone, but the Apple TV just becomes
| a paperweight when the internet goes out, because I'm not
| allowed to use the 128GB of storage for anything.
|
| If they're not going to let you use the onboard storage,
| then it seems unlikely for them to let you use USB
| storage. So, first, I would like them to change their app
| policies regarding internal storage, which is one of the
| purely software improvements I would like to see.
| int_19h wrote:
| I use a dedicated NAS as a Plex server + Plex app on
| Apple TV itself for local streaming, which _generally_
| works fine. Infuse app can also index and stream from
| local sources.
|
| But there are some cases like e.g. watching high-res
| high-FPS fractal zoom videos (e.g.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cgp2WNNKmQ) where even
| brief random skipped frames from other things trying to
| use WiFi at the same time can be really noticeable and
| annoying.
| coder543 wrote:
| I do strongly recommend using Ethernet, unless you have
| the WiFi-only model, but gotcha.
| 39896880 wrote:
| "This is a huge week for the Mac, and this morning, we
| begin a series of three exciting new product
| announcements that will take place over the coming days,"
| said Apple's hardware engineering chief John Ternus, in a
| video announcing the new iMac.
| sroussey wrote:
| Ah, thanks. I was referring to last weeks Tweet. I didn't
| watch the iMac video.
| brewmarche wrote:
| Given that the Mini and iMac have received support for one
| more additional external display (at 60Hz 6K), I hope we'll
| see the same on the MBA M4.
| ant6n wrote:
| The big question for me is whether they will have a matte
| option for the Air. I want a fanless machine with a matte
| screen.
|
| Unfortunately Apple won't tell you until the day they sell
| the machines.
| davio wrote:
| 1TB+ iPad Pro can be a fanless machine with a matte screen
| ant6n wrote:
| See that's the thing. Given that somehow you need 1TB to
| get the matte screen, I feel like Apple is using it as a
| way to upsell. It would indicate that perhaps Apple won't
| offer a matte MacBook Air.
| twilo wrote:
| Great news. The pro is kinda of heavy for my liking so the Air
| is the way to go
| Analemma_ wrote:
| I think spec-wise the Air is good enough for almost everyone
| who isn't doing video production or running local LLMs, I
| just wish it had the much nicer screen that the Pro has. But
| I suppose they have to segregate the product lines somehow.
| int_19h wrote:
| It's not just the weight - Air is also fanless (and still
| runs cold).
|
| And yes, with enough RAM, it is a surprisingly good dev
| laptop.
| jq-r wrote:
| Really too bad you cannot upgrade to 32GB RAM though =(
| nsteel wrote:
| But still just 256GB SSD Storage. PS200 for the upgrade to
| 512GB (plus a couple more GPU cores that I don't need. Urgh.
| DrBenCarson wrote:
| It's stationary. Just get a Thunderbolt NVMe drive and leave
| it plugged in
| jq-r wrote:
| Why buy a laptop then if you're lugging all those external
| hard drives?
| lancesells wrote:
| Just invest in the model with more storage then?
| nsteel wrote:
| Right, and back round we go: PS200 for that is terrible
| value.
|
| And it's still only 512GB! The M4 version coming in the
| new year will surely bump this up to something more
| sensible.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Well, the issue for me with memory on these new models is that
| for the Max, it ships with 36GB and NO expandable memory
| option. To get more memory that's gated behind a $300 CPU
| upgrade (plus the memory cost).
| yurishimo wrote:
| It'll be interesting to see the reaction of tech commentators
| about this. So many people have been screaming at Apple to
| increase the base RAM and stop price gouging their customers on
| memory upgrades. If Apple Intelligence is the excuse the
| hardware team needed to get the bean counters on board, I'm not
| going to look a gift horse in the mouth!
| sroussey wrote:
| So we can scream about the lousy base storage, which is the
| same as my phone. Yikes.
| criddell wrote:
| It wouldn't surprise me if people typically use more
| storage on their phone than their computer. The phone
| should probably have a higher base storage than the base
| storage of their laptops.
| alberth wrote:
| I guess that implies the MacBook Air won't be updated this
| week.
|
| Makes me wonder what else will be updated this week (Studio or
| Mac Pro)?
| modeless wrote:
| I've seen a lot of people complaining about 8GB but honestly my
| min spec M1 Air has continued to be great. I wouldn't hesitate
| to recommend a refurb M1 8GB Air for anyone price conscious.
| hiatus wrote:
| If only they would bring back the 11" Air.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| Im sorry but any laptop that costs $1000 should come with 64
| gigs minimum, or expandable slots.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| Tell me you are poor without telling me you are poor.
|
| Just kidding! As an Apple Shareholder I feel like you should
| take what Apple gives you and accept the price. ;)
| abnry wrote:
| How viable is Asani Linux these days? MacBook hardware looks
| amazing.
| dcchambers wrote:
| No support for M3 or M4 powered machines currently.
|
| > All Apple Silicon Macs are in scope, as well as future
| generations as development time permits. We currently have
| support for most machines of the M1 and M2 generations.[^1][^2]
|
| [^1]: https://asahilinux.org/about/
|
| [^2]: https://asahilinux.org/fedora/#device-support
| kristofferR wrote:
| Have anyone tried it recently, specifically the trackpad? I
| tried the Fedora variant a few months ago on my M1 Macbook and
| it was horrible to use the trackpad, it felt totally foreign
| and wrong.
| philistine wrote:
| I feel you, but Apple's trackpad prowess is not an easy thing
| to copy. It's one of those things I never expect anyone else
| to be able to replicate the level of deep integration between
| the hardware and software.
|
| It's 2024, and I still see most Windows users carrying a
| mouse to use with their laptop.
| drhodes wrote:
| btw, there is a recent interview with an Asani dev focusing on
| GPUs, worth a listen for those interested in linux on apple
| silicon. The reverse engineering effort required to pin down
| the GPU hardware was one of the main topics.
|
| https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2024/10/15/linux-apple-...
| jitl wrote:
| For many years I treated Windows or macOS as a hypervisor - if
| you love Linux but want the Mac hardware, instant sleep & wake,
| etc, putting a full screen VM in Parallels or similar is imo
| better than running Linux in terms of productivity, although it
| falls short on "freedom".
| umanwizard wrote:
| I do the same thing, but there are two big caveats:
|
| 1. Nested virtualization doesn't work in most virtualization
| software, so if your workflow involves running stuff in VMs
| it is not going to work from within another VM. The exception
| is apparently now the beta version of UTM with the Apple
| Virtualization backend, but that's highly experimental.
|
| 2. Trackpad scrolling is emulated as discrete mouse wheel
| clicks, which is really annoying for anyone used to the
| smooth scrolling on macOS. So what I do is use macOS for most
| browsing and other non-technical stuff but do all my coding
| in the Linux VM.
| BrentOzar wrote:
| The M4 Max goes up to 128GB RAM, and "over half a terabyte per
| second of unified memory bandwidth" - LLM users rejoice.
| manaskarekar wrote:
| The M3 Max was 400GBps, this is 540GBps. Truly an outstanding
| case for unified memory. DDR5 doesn't come anywhere near.
| vid wrote:
| It's not "DDR5" on its own, it's a few factors.
|
| Bandwidth (GB/s) = (Data Rate (MT/s) * Channel Width (bits) *
| Number of Channels) / 8 / 1000
|
| (8800 MT/s * 64 bits * 8 channels) / 8 / 1000 = 563.2 GB/s
|
| This is still half the speed of a consumer NVidia card, but
| the large amounts of memory is great, if you don't mind
| running things more slowly and with fewer libraries.
| cjbprime wrote:
| Right, the nvidia card maxes out at 24GB.
| manaskarekar wrote:
| Thanks, but just to put things into perspective, this
| calculation has counted 8 channels which is 4 DIMMs and
| that's mostly desktops (not dismissing desktops, just
| highlighting that it's a different beast).
|
| Most laptops will be 2 DIMMS (probably soldered).
| wtallis wrote:
| Desktops are _two_ channels of 64 bits, or with DDR5 now
| four (sub)channels of 32 bits; either way, mainstream
| desktop platforms have had a total bus width of 128 bits
| for decades. 8x64 bit channels is only available from
| server platforms. (Some high-end GPUs have used 512-bit
| bus widths, and Apple 's Max level of processors, but
| those are with memory types where the individual channels
| are typically 16 bits.)
| sliken wrote:
| I think you are confusing channels and dimms.
|
| The vast majority of any x86 laptop or desktops are 128
| bits wide. Often 2x64 bit channels up till last year or
| so, now 4x32 bit DDR5 in the last year or so. There are
| some benefits to 4 channels over 2, but generally you are
| still limited by 128 bits unless you buy a Xeon, Epyc, or
| Threadripper (or Intel equiv) that are expensive, hot,
| and don't fit in SFFs or laptops.
|
| So basically the PC world is crazy behind the 256, 512,
| and 1024 bit wide memory busses apple has offered since
| the M1 arrived.
| wtallis wrote:
| > (8800 MT/s * 64 bits * 8 channels) / 8 / 1000 = 563.2
| GB/s
|
| Was this example intended to describe any particular
| device? Because I'm not aware of anything that operates at
| 8800 MT/s, especially not with 64-bit channels.
| sliken wrote:
| M4 max in the MBP (today) and in the Studio at some later
| date.
| wtallis wrote:
| That seems unlikely given the mismatched memory speed
| (see the parent comment) and the fact that Apple uses
| LPDDR which is typically 16 bits per channel. 8800MT/s
| seems to be a number pulled out of thin air or bad
| arithmetic.
| sliken wrote:
| Heh, ok, maybe slightly different. But apple spec claims
| 546GB/sec which works out to 512 bits (64 bytes) * 8533.
| I didn't think the point was 8533 vs 8800.
|
| I believe I saw somewhere that the actual chips used are
| LPDDR5X-8533.
|
| Effectively the parents formula describes the M4 max,
| give or take 5%.
| sliken wrote:
| Fewer libraries? Any that a normal LLM user would care
| about? Pytorch, ollama, and others seem to have the normal
| use cases covered. Whenever I hear about a new LLM seems
| like the next post is some mac user reporting the
| token/sec. Often about 5 tokens/sec for 70B models which
| seems reasonable for a single user.
| vid wrote:
| Is there a normal LLM user yet? Most people would want
| their options to be as wide as possible. The big ones
| usually get covered (eventually), and there are distinct
| good libraries emerging for Mac only (sigh), but last I
| checked the experience of running every kit (stable
| diffusion, server-class, etc) involved overhead for the
| Mac world.
| Y-bar wrote:
| > This is still half the speed of a consumer NVidia card,
| but the large amounts of memory is great, if you don't mind
| running things more slowly and with fewer libraries.
|
| But it has more than 2x longer battery life and a better
| keyboard than a GPU card ;)
| jsheard wrote:
| It's not the memory being unified that makes it fast, it's
| the combination of the memory bus being extremely wide and
| the memory being extremely close to the processor. It's the
| same principle that discrete GPUs or server CPUs with onboard
| HBM memory use to make their non-unified memory go ultra
| fast.
| smith7018 wrote:
| I thought "unified memory" was just a marketing term for
| the memory being extremely close to the processor?
| hollerith wrote:
| I thought it meant that both the GPU and the CPU can
| access it. In most systems, GPU memory cannot be accessed
| by the CPU (without going through the GPU); and vice
| versa.
| layer8 wrote:
| CPUs access GPU memory via MMIO (though usually only a
| small portion), and GPUs can in principle access main
| memory via DMA. Meaning, both can share an address space
| and access each other's memory. However, that wouldn't be
| called Unified Memory, because it's still mediated by an
| external bus (PCIe) and thus relatively slower.
| bobmcnamara wrote:
| Are they cache coherent these days? I feel like any
| unified memories should be.
| jsheard wrote:
| No, unified memory usually means the CPU and GPU (and
| miscellaneous things like the NPU) all use the same
| physical pool of RAM and moving data between them is
| essentially zero-cost. That's in contrast to the usual PC
| setup where the CPU has its own pool of RAM, which is
| unified with the iGPU if it has one, but the _discrete_
| GPU has its own independent pool of VRAM and moving data
| between the two pools is a relatively slow operation.
|
| An RTX4090 or H100 has memory extremely close to the
| processor but I don't think you would call it unified
| memory.
| refulgentis wrote:
| I don't quite understand one of the finer points of this,
| under caffeinated :) - if GPU memory is extremely close
| to the CPU memory, what sort of memory would not be
| extremely close to the CPU?
| jsheard wrote:
| I think you misunderstood what I meant by "processor",
| the memory on a discrete GPU is very close to the _GPUs_
| processor die, but very far away from the CPU. The GPU
| may be able to read and write its own memory at 1TB /sec
| but the CPU trying to read or write that same memory will
| be limited by the PCIe bus, which is glacially slow by
| comparison, usually somewhere around 16-32GB/sec.
|
| A huge part of optimizing code for discrete GPUs is
| making sure that data is streamed into GPU memory
| _before_ the GPU actually needs it, because pushing or
| pulling data over PCIe on-demand decimates performance.
| refulgentis wrote:
| I see, TL;DR == none; and processor switches from
| {CPU,GPU} to {GPU} in the 2nd paragraph. Thanks!
| metadat wrote:
| I was curious so I looked it up:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDR5_SDRAM (info from the first
| section):
|
| > DDR5 is capable of 8GT/s which translates to 64 GB/s (8
| gigatransfers/second * 64-bit width / 8 bits/byte = 64 GB/s)
| of bandwidth per DIMM.
|
| So for example if you have a server with 16 DDR5 DIMMs
| (sticks) it equates to 1,024 GB/s of total bandwidth.
|
| DDR4 clocks in at 3.2GT/s and the fastest DDR3 at 2.1GT/s.
|
| DDR5 is an impressive jump. HBM is totally bonkers at 128GB/s
| per DIMM (HBM is the memory used in the top end Nvidia
| datacenter cards).
|
| Cheers.
| sroussey wrote:
| Yes, and wouldn't it be bonkers if the M4 Max supported HBM
| on desktops?
| reliabilityguy wrote:
| > So for example if you have a server with 16 DDR5 DIMMs
| (sticks) it equates to 1,024 GB/s of total bandwidth.
|
| Not quite as it depends on number of channels and not on
| the number of DIMMs. An extreme example: put all 16 DIMMs
| on single channel, you will get performance of a single
| channel.
| Rohansi wrote:
| Apple is using LPDDR5 for M3. The bandwidth doesn't come from
| unified memory - it comes from using many channels. You could
| get the same bandwidth or more with normal DDR5 modules if
| you could use 8 or more channels, but in the PC space you
| don't usually see more than 2 or 4 channels (only common for
| servers).
|
| Unrelated but unified memory is a strange buzzword being used
| by Apple. Their memory is no different than other computers.
| In fact, every computer without a discrete GPU uses a unified
| memory model these days!
| manaskarekar wrote:
| Yes, it's just easier to call it that without having to
| sprinkle asterisks at each mention of it :)
|
| And yes, the impressive part is that this kind of bandwidth
| is hard to get on laptops. I suppose I should have been a
| bit more specific in my remark.
| binary132 wrote:
| I read all that marketing stuff and my brain just sees APU.
| I guess at some level, that's just marketing stuff too, but
| it's not a new idea.
| sroussey wrote:
| Eh... not quite. Maybe on an Instinct. Unified memory
| means the CPU and CPU means they can do zero copy to use
| the same memory buffer.
|
| Many integrated graphics segregate the memory into CPU
| owned and GPU owned, so that even if data is on the same
| DIMM, a copy still needs to be performed for one side to
| use what the other side already has.
|
| This means that the drivers, etc, all have to understand
| the unified memory model, etc. it's not just hardware
| sharing DIMMs.
| binary132 wrote:
| I was under the impression PS4's APU implemented unified
| memory, and it was even referred to by that name[1].
|
| APUs with shared everything are not a new concept, they
| are actually older than programmable graphics
| coprocessors...
|
| https://www.heise.de/news/Gamescom-Playstation-4-bietet-
| Unif...
| sunshowers wrote:
| I believe that at least on Linux you get zero-copy these
| days. https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-
| AOMP-19.0-2-Compiler
| sliken wrote:
| The new idea is having 512 bit wide memory instead of PC
| limitation of 128 bit wide. Normal CPU cores running
| normal codes are not particularly bandwidth limited.
| However APUs/iGPUs are severely bandwidth limited, thus
| the huge number of slow iGPUs that are fine for browsing
| but terrible for anything more intensive.
|
| So apple manages decent GPU performance, a tiny package,
| and great battery life. It's much harder on the PC side
| because every laptop/desktop chip from Intel and AMD use
| a 128 bit memory bus. You have to take a huge step up in
| price, power, and size with something like a thread
| ripper, xeon, or epyc to get more than 128 bit wide
| memory, none of which are available in a laptop or mac
| mini size SFF.
| reliabilityguy wrote:
| > instead of PC limitation of 128 bit wide
|
| Memory interface width of modern CPUs is 64-bit (DDR4)
| and 32+32 (DDR5).
|
| No CPU uses 128b memory bus as it results in overfetch of
| data, i.e., 128B per access, or two cache lines.
|
| AFAIK Apple uses 128B cache lines, so they can do much
| better design and customization of memory subsystem as
| they do not have to use DIMMs -- they simply solder DRAM
| to the motherboard, hence memory interface is whatever
| they want.
| sliken wrote:
| > Memory interface width of modern CPUs is 64-bit (DDR4)
| and 32+32 (DDR5).
|
| Sure, per channel. PCs have 2x64 bit or 4x32 bit memory
| channels.
|
| Not sure I get your point, yes PCs have 64 bit cache
| lines and apple uses 128. I wouldn't expect any
| noticeable difference because of this. Generally cache
| miss is sent to a single memory channel and result in a
| wait of 50-100ns, then you get 4 or 8 bytes per cycle at
| whatever memory clock speed you have. So apple gets twice
| the bytes per cache line miss, but the value of those
| extra bytes is low in most cases.
|
| Other bigger differences is that apple has a larger page
| size (16KB vs 4KB) and arm supports a looser memory
| model, which makes it easier to reach a large fraction of
| peak memory bandwidth.
|
| However, I don't see any relationship between Apple and
| PCs as far as DIMMS. Both Apple and PCs can (and do)
| solder dram chips directly to the motherboard, normally
| on thin/light laptops. The big difference between Apple
| and PC is that apple supports 128, 256, and 512 bit wide
| memory on laptops and 1024 bit on the studio (a bit
| bigger than most SFFs). To get more than 128 bits with a
| PC that means no laptops, no SFFs, generally large
| workstations with Xeon, Threadrippers, or Epyc with
| substantial airflow and power requirements
| Rohansi wrote:
| FYI cache lines are 64 bytes, not bits. So Apple is using
| 128 bytes.
|
| Also important to consider that the RTX 4090 has a
| relatively tiny 384-bit memory bus. Smaller than the M1
| Max's 512-bit bus. But the RTX 4090 has 1 TB/s bandwidth
| and significantly more compute power available to make
| use of that bandwidth.
| sliken wrote:
| Ugh, should have caught the bit vs byte, thanks.
|
| The M4 max is definitely not a 4090 killer, does not
| match it in any way. It can however work on larger models
| than the 4090 and have a battery that can last all day.
|
| My memory is a bit fuzzy, but I believe the m3 max did
| decent on some games compared to the laptop Nvidia 4070
| (which is not the same as the desktop 4070). But highly
| depended on if the game was x86-64 (requiring emulation)
| and if it was DX11 or apple native. I believe apple
| claims improvements in metal (the Apple's GPU lib) and
| that the m4 GPUs have better FP for ray tracing, but no
| significant changes in rasterized performance.
|
| I look forward to the 3rd party benchmarks for LLM and
| gaming on the m4 max.
| jsheard wrote:
| > The new idea is having 512 bit wide memory instead of
| PC limitation of 128 bit wide.
|
| It's not really a new idea, just unusual in computers.
| The custom SOCs that AMD makes for Playstation and Xbox
| have wide (up to 384-bit) unified memory buses, very
| similar to what Apple is doing, with the main distinction
| being Apples use of low-power LPDDR instead of the faster
| but power hungrier GDDR used in the consoles.
| atq2119 wrote:
| Yeah, a lot of it is just market forces. I guess going to
| four channels is costly for the desktop PC space and
| that's why that didn't happen, and laptops just kind of
| followed suite. But now that Apple is putting pressure on
| the market, perhaps we'll finally see quad channel
| becoming the norm in desktop PCs? Would be nice...
| oDot wrote:
| Isn't unified memory* a crucial part in avoiding signal
| integrity problems?
|
| Servers do have many channels but they run relatively
| slower memory
|
| * Specifically, it being on-die
| wtallis wrote:
| "Unified memory" doesn't really imply anything about the
| memory being located on-package, just that it's a shared
| pool that the CPU, GPU, etc. all have fast access to.
|
| Also, DRAM is _never_ on- _die_. On-package, yes, for
| Apple 's SoCs and various other products throughout the
| industry, but DRAM manufacturing happens in entirely
| different fabs than those used for logic chips.
| kube-system wrote:
| System memory DRAM never is, but sometimes DRAM is
| technically included on CPU dies as a cache
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EDRAM
| wtallis wrote:
| It's mostly an IBM thing. In the consumer space, it's
| been in game consoles with IBM-fabbed chips. Intel's use
| of eDRAM was on a separate die (there was a lot that was
| odd about those parts).
| Tepix wrote:
| For comparison, a Threadripper Pro 5000 workstation with 8x
| DDR4 3200 has 204.8GB/s of memory bandwidth. The
| Threadripper Pro 7000 with DDR5-5200 can achieve 325GB/s.
|
| And no, manaskarekar, the M4 Max does 546 GB/s not GBps
| (which would be 8x less!).
| wtallis wrote:
| > And no, manaskarekar, the M4 Max does 546 GB/s not GBps
| (which would be 8x less!).
|
| GB/s and GBps mean the same thing, though GB/s is the
| more common way to express it. Gb/s and Gbps are the
| units that are 8x less: _b_ its vs _B_ ytes.
| hmottestad wrote:
| Thanks for the numbers. Someone here on hackernews got me
| convinced that a Threadripper would be a better
| investment for inference than a MacBook Pro with a M3
| Max.
| leptons wrote:
| B = Bytes, b = bits.
|
| GB/s is the same thing as GBps
|
| The "ps" means "per second"
| rbanffy wrote:
| > (only common for servers).
|
| On PC desktops I always recommend getting a mid-range tower
| server precisely for that reason. My oldest one is about 8
| years old and only now it's showing signs of age (as in not
| being faster than the average laptop).
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| High end servers now have 12 ddr5 channels.
| sliken wrote:
| Yes, you could buy a brand new (announced weeks ago) AMD
| Turin. 12 channels of DDR5-6000, $11,048 and 320 watts
| (for the CPU) and get 576GB/sec peak.
|
| Or you could buy a M3 max laptop for $4k, get 10+ hour
| battery life, have it fit in a thin/light laptop, and
| still get 546GB/sec. However those are peak numbers.
| Apple uses longer cache lines (double), large page sizes
| (quadruple), and a looser memory model. Generally I'd
| expect nearly every memory bandwidth measure to win on
| Apple over AMD's turin.
| Rohansi wrote:
| AnandTech did bandwidth benchmarks for the M1 Max and was
| only able to utilize about half of it from the CPU, and
| the GPU used even less in 3D workloads because it wasn't
| bandwidth limited. It's not all about bandwidth.
| https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-
| performanc...
| sliken wrote:
| Indeed. RIP Anandtech. I've seen bandwidth tests since
| then that showed similar for newer generations, but not
| the m4. Not sure if the common LLM tools on mac can use
| CPU (vector instructions), AMX, and Neural engine in
| parallel to make use of the full bandwidth.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| CXL memory is also a thing.
| janwas wrote:
| FWIW I ran a quick test of gemma.cpp on M3 Pro with 8
| threads. Similar PaliGemma inference speed to an older
| AMD (Rome or Milan) with 8 threads. But the AMD has more
| cores than that, and more headroom :)
| ciupicri wrote:
| I doubt you'll get 10+ hours on battery if you utilize it
| at max. I don't even know if it can really sustain the
| maximum load for more than a couple of minutes because of
| thermal or some other limits.
| sunshowers wrote:
| You lose out on things like expandability (more storage,
| more PCIe lanes) and repairability though. You are also
| (on M4 for probably a few years) compelled to use macOS,
| for better or worse.
|
| There are, in my experience, professionals who want to
| use the best tools someone else builds for them, and
| professionals who want to keep iterating on their tools
| to make them the best they can be. It's the difference
| between, say, a violin and a Eurorack. Neither's better
| or worse, they're just different kinds of tools.
| sunshowers wrote:
| Yeah memory bandwidth is one of the really unfortunate
| things about the consumer stuff. Even the 9950x/7950x,
| which are comfortably workstation-level in terms of
| compute, are bound by their 2 channel limits. The other day
| I was pricing out a basic Threadripper setup with a 7960x
| (not just for this reason but also for more PCIe lanes),
| and it would cost around $3000 -- somewhat out of my
| budget.
|
| This is one of the reasons the "3D vcache" stuff with the
| giant L3 cache is so effective.
| astrange wrote:
| > In fact, every computer without a discrete GPU uses a
| unified memory model these days!
|
| On PCs some other hardware (notably the SSD) comes with its
| own memory. But here it's shared with the main DRAM too.
|
| This is not necessarily a performance improvement, it can
| avoid copies but also means less is available to the CPU.
| mort96 wrote:
| This is a case for on-package memory, not for unified
| memory... Laptops have had unified memory forever
|
| EDIT: wtf what's so bad about this comment that it deserves
| being downvoted so much
| willseth wrote:
| Intel typically calls their iGPU architecture "shared
| memory"
| mort96 wrote:
| Hm it seems like they call it unified memory too, at
| least in some places, have a look at 5.7.1 "Unified
| Memory Architecture" in this document: https://www.intel.
| com/content/dam/develop/external/us/en/doc...
| Intel processor graphics architecture has long pioneered
| sharing DRAM physical memory with the CPU. This
| unified memory architecture offers [...]
|
| It more or less seems like they use "unified memory" and
| "shared memory" interchangeably in that section
| Detrytus wrote:
| I think "Unified" vs "shared" is just something Apple
| marketing department came up with.
|
| Calling something "shared" makes you think: "there's not
| enough of it, so it has to be shared".
|
| Calling something "unified" makes you think: "they are
| good engineers, they managed to unify two previously
| separate things, for my benefit".
| mort96 wrote:
| I don't think so? That PDF I linked is from 2015, way
| before Apple put focus on it through their M-series
| chips... And the Wikipedia article on "Glossary of
| computer graphics" has had an entry for unified memory
| since 2016: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gl
| ossary_of_compu...
|
| For Apple to have come up with using the term "unified
| memory" to describe this kind of architecture, they
| would've needed to come up with it at least before 2016,
| meaning A9 chip or earlier. I have paid some attention to
| Apple's SoC launches through the years and can't recall
| them touting it as a feature in marketing materials
| before the M1. Do you have something which shows them
| using the term before 2016?
|
| To be clear, it wouldn't surprise me if it has been used
| by others before Intel did in 2015 as well, but it's a
| starting point: if Apple hasn't used the term before
| then, we know for sure that they didn't come up with it,
| while if Apple did use it to describe A9 or earlier,
| we'll have to go digging for older documents to determine
| whether Apple came up with it
| astrange wrote:
| There are actual differences but they're mostly up to the
| drivers. "Shared" memory typically means it's the same
| DRAM but part of it is carved out and can only be used by
| the GPU. "Unified" means the GPU/CPU can freely allocate
| individual pages as needed.
| jedisct1 wrote:
| Is it GBps or Gbps?
| convexstrictly wrote:
| GB per second
| garciasn wrote:
| We run our LLM workloads on a M2 Ultra because of this. 2x the
| VRAM; one-time cost at $5350 was the same as, at the time, 1
| month of 80GB VRAM GPU in GCP. Works well for us.
| manaskarekar wrote:
| If the 2x multiplier holds up, the Ultra update should bring
| it up to 1080GBps. Amazing.
| SirMaster wrote:
| There isn't even an M3 Ultra. Will there be an M4 Ultra?
| tromp wrote:
| That would make the most sense for the next Mac Studio
| version.
| mpweiher wrote:
| And the week isn't over...
| smith7018 wrote:
| They announced earlier in the week that there will only
| be three days of announcements
| int_19h wrote:
| There were rumors that the next Mac Studio will top out
| at 512Gb RAM, too.
|
| Good news for anyone who wants to run 405B LMs locally...
| hmottestad wrote:
| At some point there should be an upgrade to the M2 Ultra.
| It might be an M4 Ultra, it might be this year or next
| year. It might even be after the M5 comes out. Or it
| could be skipped in favour of the M5 Ultra. If anyone
| here knows they are definitely under NDA.
| bushbaba wrote:
| About 10-20% of my companies gpu usage is inference dev. Yes
| horribly not efficient usage of resources. We could upgrade
| the 100ish devs who do this dev work to M4 mbp and free up
| gpu resources
|
| Smart move by Apple
| sgt101 wrote:
| You have another one with a network gateway to provide hot
| failover?
|
| Right?
| ithkuil wrote:
| High availability story for AI workloads will be a problem
| for another decade. From what I can see the current
| pressing problem is to get stuff working quickly and
| iterate quickly.
| alfonsodev wrote:
| Can you elaborate, are those workflows in queue or can they
| serve multiple users in parallel ?
|
| I think it's super interesting to know real life workflows
| and performance of different LLMs and hardware, in case you
| can direct me to other resources. Thanks !
| garciasn wrote:
| Our use case is atypical, based on what others seem to
| require. While we serve multiple requests in parallel, our
| workloads are not 'chat'.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Right now, there are 0.90$ per hour H100 80gbs that you can
| rent.
| charlescurt123 wrote:
| comparing a laptop to a A100 (312 teraFLOPS) or H100 (~1P
| FLOPS) server is a stretch to say the least.
|
| An M2 is according to a reddit post around 27 tflops
|
| So < 1/10 the performance of just computation. let alone the
| memory.
|
| What workflow would use something like this?
| hajile wrote:
| They aren't going to be using fp32 for inferencing, so
| those FP numbers are meaningless.
|
| Memory and memory bandwidth matters most for inferencing.
| 819.2 GB/s for M2 Ultra is less than half that of A100, but
| having 192GB of RAM instead of 80gb means they can run
| inference on models that would require THREE of those A100s
| and the only real cost is that it takes longer for the AI
| to respond.
|
| 3 A100 at $5300/mo each for the past 2 years is over
| $380,000. Considering it worked for them, I'd consider it a
| massive success.
|
| From another perspective though, they could have bought 72
| of those Ultra machines for that much money and had most
| devs on their own private instance.
|
| The simple fact is that Nvidia GPUs are massively
| overpriced. Nvidia should worry a LOT that Apple's private
| AI cloud is going to eat their lunch.
| garciasn wrote:
| The total usable VRAM w/unified 192GB is ~184GB as we
| still have the OS running w/8GB available to it, so it
| would be ~2.3x, not 3x; but, otherwise, you're spot on.
| Inviz wrote:
| I have M3 Max with 128GB of ram, it's really liberating.
| sfn42 wrote:
| I have 32gb and I've never felt like I needed more.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Obviously you're not a golfer.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzhKEHDR_rc :-) Thanks
| for that, I think I will watch The Big Lebowski tonight!
| moffkalast wrote:
| Far out, man
|
| :P
| umanwizard wrote:
| Having 128GB is really nice if you want to regularly run
| different full OSes as VMs simultaneously (and if those
| OSes might in turn have memory-intensive workloads running
| on them).
|
| Somewhat niche case, I know.
| doctoboggan wrote:
| This is definitely tempting me to upgrade my M1 macbook pro. I
| think I have 400GB/s of memory bandwidth. I am wondering what
| the specific number "over half a terabyte" means.
| rsanek wrote:
| 540
| moffkalast wrote:
| Well it's more like pick your poison, cause all options have
| caveats:
|
| - Apple: all the capacity and bandwidth, but no compute to
| utilize it
|
| - AMD/Nvidia: all the compute and bandwidth, but no capacity to
| load anything
|
| - DDR5: all the capacity, but no compute or bandwidth (cheap
| tho)
| Dibby053 wrote:
| Why was this downvoted?
| moffkalast wrote:
| To quote an old meme, "They hated Jesus because he told
| them the truth."
| thimabi wrote:
| At least in the recent past, a hindrance was that MacOS limited
| how much of that unified memory could be assigned as VRAM.
| Those who wanted to exceed the limits had to tinker with kernel
| settings.
|
| I wonder if that has changed or is about to change as Apple
| pivots their devices to better serve AI workflows as well.
| segmondy wrote:
| Need more memory, 256GB will be nice. MistralLarge is 123B.
| Can't even give a quantized Llama405B a drive. LLM users
| rejoice. LLM power users, weep.
| jjcm wrote:
| For context, the 4090 has 1,008 GB/s of bandwidth.
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| ... but only 1/4 of the actual memory, right ?
|
| The M4-Max I just ordered comes with 128GB of RAM.
| culi wrote:
| you'd probably save money just paying for a VPS. And you
| wouldn't cook your personal laptop as fast. Not that people
| nowadays keep their electronics for long enough for that to
| matter :/
| losvedir wrote:
| I'm curious about getting one of these to run LLM models
| locally, but I don't understand the cost benefit very well.
| Even 128GB can't run, like, a state of the art Claude 3.5 or
| GPT 4o model right? Conversely, even 16GB can (I think?) run a
| smaller, quantized Llama model. What's the sweet spot for
| running a capable model locally (and likely future local-scale
| models)?
| brandall10 wrote:
| You'll be able to run 72B models w/ large context, lightly
| quantized with decent'ish performance, like 20-25 tok/sec.
| The best of the bunch are maybe 90% of a Claude 3.5.
|
| If you need to do some work offline, or for some reason the
| place you work blocks access to cloud providers, it's not a
| bad way to go, really. Note that if you're on battery, heavy
| LLM use can kill your battery in an hour.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| Lots of discussion and testing of that over on
| https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/, worth following if
| you're not already.
| jfoster wrote:
| Have they published this ahead of other pages or is it just me?
|
| The linked Apple Store page says "MacBook Pro blasts forward with
| the M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max chips" so it seems like the old
| version of the page still?
| jasongill wrote:
| yes, it's not anywhere but the press release at this time
| jfoster wrote:
| Looks like it's updated now.
| jasongill wrote:
| yep, just updated a second ago
| Hamuko wrote:
| I noticed the same, but it looks like the pre-order link now
| gives me M4 chips instead of M3.
| jerojero wrote:
| Finally they're doing starting memory at 16gb.
|
| Looking at how long the 8gb lasted it's a pretty sure bet that
| now you won't need to upgrade for a good few years.
|
| I mean, I have a MacBook air with 16gb of ram and it's honestly
| working pretty well to this day. I don't do "much" on it though
| but not many people do.
|
| I'd say the one incentive a MacBook Pro has over the air is the
| better a screens and better speakers. Not sure if it's worth the
| money.
| efields wrote:
| My hypothesis is Apple is mostly right about their base model
| offerings.
|
| > I mean, I have a MacBook air with 16gb of ram and it's
| honestly working pretty well to this day. I don't do "much" on
| it though but not many people do.
|
| If an HN user can get along with 16gb on their MacBook Air for
| the last X years, most users were able to get by with 8gb.
| skellington wrote:
| It's just a tactic to get a higher average price while being
| able to advertise a lower price. What makes it infuriating is
| memory is dirt cheap. That extra 8GB probably costs them $10
| at most, but would add to utility and longevity of their
| hardware quite a bit.
|
| They are supposed to be "green" but they encourage
| obsolescence.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| They align need with more CPU and margin. Apple wants as
| few SKUs as possible and as much margin as possible.
|
| 8GB is fine for most use cases. Part of my gig is managing
| a huge global enterprise with six figures of devices.
| Metrics demonstrate that the lower quartile is ok with 8GB,
| even now. Those devices are being retired as part of the
| normal lifecycle with 16GB, which is better.
|
| Laptops are 2-6 year devices. Higher end devices always get
| replaced sooner - you buy a high end device because the
| productivity is worth spending $. Low end tend to live
| longer.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| People looking for low prices buy PC, they don't even
| consider Mac. Then they can have a computer with all the
| "higher numbers", which is more important than getting
| stuff done.
| axelthegerman wrote:
| > pretty sure bet that now you won't need to upgrade for a good
| few years.
|
| Or you could get a framework and you could actually upgrade
| parts that are worth upgrading - instead of upgrade as in
| buying a new one
| ativzzz wrote:
| I bought a framework back in 2020 or so and really wish I
| just waited a little longer and spent a few hundred bucks
| more on the M1.
|
| It's fine, but the issue is linux sleep/hibernate - battery
| drain. To use the laptop after a few days, I have to plug it
| in and wait for it to charge a little bit because the battery
| dies. I have to shut it down (not just close the screen)
| before flying or my backpack becomes a heater and the laptop
| dies. To use a macbook that's been closed for months I just
| open it and it works. I'll pay double for that experience. If
| I want a computer that needs to be plugged in to work I have
| a desktop for that already. The battery life is not good
| either.
|
| Maybe it's better now if I take the time to research what to
| upgrade, but I don't have the time to tinker with
| hardware/linux config like I did a few years ago.
| jerojero wrote:
| I don't mind spending a thousand bucks every 7 years to
| upgrade my laptop. I've had this macbook air since 2020 and
| besides the speakers don't being the best... I have no
| complaints.
|
| I don't really see a world where this machine doesn't last me
| a few more years. If there's anything i'd service would be
| the battery, but eh. It lasts more than a few hours and I
| don't go out much.
| fsflover wrote:
| > while protecting their privacy
|
| This is misleading:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25074959
|
| "macOS sends hashes of every opened executable to some server of
| theirs"
| ilikepi wrote:
| > This is misleading: ...
|
| To be fair, the link in this story is to a press release.
| Arguably there are probably many things in it that can be
| considered "misleading" in certain contexts.
| moffkalast wrote:
| What's the deal with running Linux on these anyway? Could one
| conceivably set up an M4 mini as headless server? I presume
| Metal would be impossible to get working if MacOS uses
| proprietary drivers for it...
| wmf wrote:
| Metal doesn't exist under Linux but OpenGL and Vulkan work.
| tomrod wrote:
| This is the first compelling Mac to me. I've used Macs for a few
| clients and muscle memory is very deeply ingrained for linux
| desktops. But with local LLMs finally on the verge of usability
| along with sufficient memory... I might need to make the jump!
|
| Wish I could spin up a Linux OS on the hardware though. Not a
| bright spot for me.
| d1str0 wrote:
| Check out Asahi linux
| aidenfoxivey wrote:
| You totally can after a little bit of time waiting for M4
| bringup!
|
| https://asahilinux.org
|
| It won't have all the niceties / hardware support of MacOS, but
| it seamlessly coexists with MacOS, can handle the GPU/CPU/RAM
| with no issues, and can provide you a good GNU/Linux
| environment.
| p_j_w wrote:
| Asahi doesn't work on M3 yet after a year. It's gonna be a
| bit before M4 support is here.
| quux wrote:
| IIRC one of the major factors holding back M3 support was
| the lack of a M3 mini for use in their CI environment. Now
| that there's an M4 mini hopefully there aren't any
| obstacles to them adding M4 support
| mmcnl wrote:
| Why would that matter? You can use a MacBook in CI too?
| umanwizard wrote:
| How? What cloud providers offer it? MacStadium and AWS
| don't.
|
| I guess you could have a physical MBP in your house and
| connect it to some bring-your-own-infrastructure CI
| setup, but most people wouldn't want to do that.
| mmcnl wrote:
| I meant using a physical device indeed.
| wtallis wrote:
| Cloud providers don't seem too relevant to a discussion
| of CI _for kernel and driver development_.
| umanwizard wrote:
| Why not?
| wtallis wrote:
| How do you imagine that a cloud computing platform
| designed around running Macs with macOS would work for
| testing an entirely different OS running on bare metal on
| hardware that doesn't have a BMC, and usefully catching
| and logging frequent kernel panics and failed boots?
|
| It's a pretty hard problem to partially automate for
| setups with an engineer in the room. It doesn't sound at
| all feasible for an unattended data center setup that's
| designed to host Xcode for compiling apps under macOS.
| manmal wrote:
| GitHub's self hosted runners are as painless as they can
| get, and the Mac Mini in my basement is way faster than
| their hosted offering.
| umanwizard wrote:
| "a little bit of time" is a bit disingenuous given that they
| haven't even _started_ working on the M3.
|
| (This isn't a dig on the Asahi project btw, I think it's
| great).
| BenFranklin100 wrote:
| Off topic, but I'm very interested in local LLMs. Could you
| point me in the right direction, both hardware specs and
| models?
| thrownblown wrote:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/
| https://www.reddit.com/r/SillyTavernAI/
| BenFranklin100 wrote:
| Thanks to both of you!
| doctoboggan wrote:
| In general for local LLMs, the more memory the better. You
| will be able to fit larger models in RAM. The faster CPU will
| give you more tokens/second, but if you are just chatting
| with a human in the loop, most recent M series macs will be
| able to generate tokens faster than you can read them.
| int_19h wrote:
| That also very much depends on model size. For 70B+ models,
| while the tok/s are still fast enough for realtime chat,
| it's not going to be generating faster than you can read
| it, even on Ultra with its insane memory bandwidth.
| noman-land wrote:
| Get as much RAM as you can stomach paying for.
| touristtam wrote:
| Have a look at ollama? I think there is a vscode extension to
| hook into local LLM if you are so inclined:
| https://ollama.com/blog/continue-code-assistant
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| You can spin up a Unix OS. =) It's even older than Linux.
| umanwizard wrote:
| NextSTEP which macOS is ultimately based on is indeed older
| than Linux (first release was 1989). But why does that
| matter? The commenter presumably said "Linux" for a reason,
| i.e. they want to use Linux specifically, not any UNIX-like
| OS.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| Sure. But not everybody. That's how I ended up on a Mac. I
| needed to develop for Linux servers and that just sucked on
| my windows laptop (I hear it's better now?). So after dual
| booting fedora on my laptop for several months I got a
| MacBook and I've never looked back.
| tomrod wrote:
| BSD is fun (not counting MacOS in the set there), but no, my
| Unix experiences have been universally legacy hardware
| oversubscribed and undermaintained. Not my favorite place to
| spend any time.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I miss Linux, it respected me in ways that MacOS doesn't. But
| maintaining a sane dev environment on linux when my co-workers
| on MacOS are committing bash scripts that call brew... I am
| glad that I gave up that fight. And yeah, the hardware sure is
| nice.
| tomrod wrote:
| IIRC brew supports linux, but it isn't a package manager I
| pay attention to outside of some very basic needs. Way too
| much supply chain security domain to cover for it!
| jcmontx wrote:
| > "up to 1.8x faster when compared to the 16-inch MacBook Pro
| with M1 Pro"
|
| I insist my 2020 Macbook M1 was the best purchase I ever made
| d1str0 wrote:
| Same. My MBP and M1 Air are amazing machines. But I'm now also
| excited that any future M chip replacement will be faster and
| just as nice.
|
| The battery performance is incredible too.
| BenFranklin100 wrote:
| I got a refurbed M1 iPad Pro 12.9" for $900 a couple years ago
| and have been quite pleased. I still have a couple of years
| life in it I estimate.
| stetrain wrote:
| Yep. That's roughly 20% per generation improvement which ain't
| half-bad these days, but the really huge cliff was going from
| Intel to the M1 generation.
|
| M1 series machines are going to be fine for years to come.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| It feels like M1 was the revolution, subsequent ones
| evolution - smaller fabrication process for improved energy
| efficiency, more cores for more power, higher memory
| (storage?) bandwidth, more displays (that was a major and
| valid criticism for the M1 even though in practice >1
| external screens is a relatively rare use case for <5% of
| users).
|
| Actually wasn't M1 itself an evolution / upscale of their A
| series CPUS that by now they've been working on since...
| before 2010, the iPhone 4 was the first one with their own
| CPU, although the design was from Samsung + Intrinsity, it
| was only the A6 that they claimed was custom designed by
| Apple.
| drewbitt wrote:
| And my 2020 Intel Macbook Air was a bad purchase. Cruelly, the
| Intel and M1 Macbook Air released within 6 months of each
| other.
| rconti wrote:
| In early 2020, I had an aging 2011 Air that was still
| struggling after a battery replacement. Even though I "knew"
| the Apple Silicon chips would be better, I figured a 2020
| Intel Air would last me a long time anyway, since my
| computing needs from that device are light, and who knows how
| many years the Apple Silicon transition will take take
| anyway?
|
| Bought a reasonably well-specced Intel Air for $1700ish. The
| M1s came out a few months later. I briefly thought about the
| implication of taking a hit on my "investment", figured I
| might as well cry once rather than suffer endlessly. Sold my
| $1700 Intel Air for $1200ish on craigslist (if I recall
| correctly), picked up an M1 Air for about that same $1200
| pricepoint, and I'm typing this on that machine now.
|
| That money was lost as soon as I made the wrong decision, I'm
| glad I just recognized the loss up front rather than stewing
| about it.
| cantsingh wrote:
| Exact same boat here. A friend and I both bought the 2020
| Intel MBA thinking that the M1 version was at least a year
| out. It dropped a few months later. I immediately resold my
| Intel MBA seeing the writing on the wall and bought a
| launch M1 (which I still use to this day). Ended up losing
| $200 on that mis-step, but no way the Intel version would
| still get me through the day.
|
| That said...scummy move by Apple. They tend to be a little
| more thoughtful in their refresh schedule, so I was caught
| off guard.
| drewbitt wrote:
| When I saw the M1s come out, I thought that dev tooling
| would take a while to work for M1, which was correct. It
| probably took a year for most everything to be compiled
| for arm64. However I had too little faith in Rosetta and
| just the speed upgrade M1 really brought. So what I mean
| to say is, I still have that deadweight MBA that I only
| use for web browsing :)
| chrizel wrote:
| Oh yes, my wife bought a new Intel MBA in summer 2020... I
| told her at the time Apple planned its own chip, but it
| couldn't be much better than the Intel one and surely Apple
| will increase prices too... I was so wrong.
| ElCapitanMarkla wrote:
| Yeah I'm in the same boat. I had my old mid 2013 Air for 7
| years before I pulled the trigger on that too. I'll be
| grabbing myself an M4 Pro this time
| shade wrote:
| I have the OG 13" MBP M1, and it's been great; I only have two
| real reasons I'm considering jumping to the 14" MBP M4 Pro
| finally:
|
| - More RAM, primarily for local LLM usage through Ollama (a bit
| more overhead for bigger models would be nice)
|
| - A bit niche, but I often run multiple external displays.
| DisplayLink works fine for this, but I also use live captions
| heavily and Apple's live captions don't work when any form of
| screen sharing/recording is enabled... which is how Displaylink
| works. :(
|
| Not quite sold yet, but definitely thinking about it.
| bombcar wrote:
| The M1 Max supports more than one external display natively,
| which is also an option.
| AdamJacobMuller wrote:
| Yep.
|
| I've never kept any laptop as long as I've kept the M1. I was
| more or less upgrading yearly in the past because the speed
| increases (both in the G4 and then Intel generations) were so
| significant. This M1 has exceeded my expectations in every
| category, it's faster quieter and cooler than any laptop i've
| ever owned.
|
| I've had this laptop since release in 2020 and I have nearly 0
| complaints with it.
|
| I wouldn't upgrade except the increase in memory is great, I
| don't want to have to shut down apps to be able to load some
| huge LLMs, and, I ding'ed the top case a few months ago and now
| there's a shadow on the screen in that spot in some lighting
| conditions which is very annoying.
|
| I hope (and expect) the M4 to last just as long as my M1 did.
| jader201 wrote:
| > I've never kept any laptop as long as I've kept the M1.
|
| My 2015 MBP would like to have a word.
|
| It's the _only_ laptop purchase I've made. I still use it to
| this day, though not as regularly.
|
| I will likely get a new MBP one of these days.
| ptmcc wrote:
| My 2015 15" MBP is also still kickin, is/was an absolutely
| fabulous unit. Was my work machine for 3-4 years, and now
| another almost-6 years as my personal laptop. My personal
| use case is obviously not very demanding but it's only now
| starting to really show its age.
|
| I also have a M1 from work that is absolutely wonderful,
| but I think it's time for me to upgrade the 2015 with one
| of these new M4s.
|
| The longevity of Macbooks is insanely good.
| 0wis wrote:
| If we are going this way... I still use a mid-2012 MBP as
| my main workstation.
|
| Last one with upgrade capabilities, now it has two fast
| SSDs and maximum Ram. I changed the battery once.
|
| Only shame is that it doesn't get major MacOS upgrades
| anymore.
|
| Still good enough to browse the web, do office productivity
| and web development.
|
| 12 years of good use, I am not sure I can get so much value
| anywhere now
| PostLogical wrote:
| Same setup here except I use Opencore Legacy Patcher so
| I'm on the latest OS as well. Works amazingly well.
| nicolas_t wrote:
| Ah my 2013 mbp died in 2019. It was the gpu. No way to
| repair it for cheap enough so I had to replace it with a
| 2019 mbp which was the computer I kept the shortest (I
| hated the keyboard).
| Jaxan wrote:
| My 2011 MBP died in 2023, it was used daily but very slow
| at the end of its life.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| My 2015 MBP would probably have been _totally fine_ for
| development... except for the Docker-based workflows that
| everybody uses now.
|
| Rebuilding a bunch of Docker images on an older intel mac
| is quite the slow experience if you're doing it multiple
| times per day.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| My wife still uses my 2012 MBP 15 retina as her daily
| driver. The battery's terrible but everything else works
| fine.
| thenaturalist wrote:
| It's extremely easy to replace the battery.
|
| Anything you can buy online ships with all required screw
| drivers and dozen of Youtube videos or ifixit will give
| you step by step instructions.
|
| 10-15 minutes and you'll have the old battery replaced
| all by yourself.
|
| It's that simple.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| I still have my 2015, and it lived _just_ long enough to
| keep me going until the death of the touch bar and horrible
| keyboard, which went away when I immediately bought the M1
| Pro on release day.
| thenaturalist wrote:
| Exactly same story here.
|
| For it's time, the 2015 model was a fantastic package:
| reliable and robust in form and function.
|
| Would've kept going on it had Apple silicon and 14 inch
| not come around.
|
| Barring super niche LLM use cases, I don't see why one
| would need to upgrade.
| qubitcoder wrote:
| You'll be glad you did. I loved my 2015 MBP. I even drove 3
| hours to the nearest Best Buy to snag one. That display was
| glorious. A fantastic machine. I eventually gave it to my
| sister, who continued using it until a few years ago. The
| battery was gone, but it still worked great.
|
| When you upgrade, prepare to be astonished.
|
| The performance improvement is difficult to convey. It's
| akin to traveling by horse and buggy. And then hopping into
| a modern jetliner, flying first class.
|
| It's not just speed. Display quality, build quality, sound
| quality, keyboard quality, trackpad, ports, etc., have all
| improved _considerably_.
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| > The battery was gone, but it still worked great.
|
| A family 2018 Macbook Air got a second life with a
| battery replacement. Cheap kit from Amazon, screwdrivers
| included, extremely easy to do. Still in use, no
| problems.
| grahamj wrote:
| I loved my 2015 MBP, probably the best machine Apple made,
| overall, until arguably the 2019 16" (read: after the
| butterfly keyboard debacle)
|
| Traded it for an M1 Air in 2021 and was astonished at how
| much faster it was. It even blew away my 2019 16" from
| work.
|
| You're going to be even more blown away!
| grecy wrote:
| I loved my 2015 MBP too.
|
| I recently replaced it with a used MBA M1, 16GB, 2TB.
|
| It's insane how much faster it is, how long the battery
| lasts and how cool and silent it is. Completely different
| worlds.
| smileysteve wrote:
| I've just replaced a 2012 i5 mbp, and used it for Dev work
| and presentations into 2018.
|
| It has gotten significantly slower the last 2 years, but
| the more obvious issue is the sound, inability to virtual
| background, and now lack of software updates.
|
| But if you had told me I'd need to replace it in 2022 I
| wouldn't believe you
| touristtam wrote:
| How do you justify this kind of recurring purchases, even
| with selling your old device? I don't get the behaviour or
| the driving decision factor past the obvious "I need the
| latest shiny toy" (I can't find the exact words to describe
| it, so apologies for the reductive description).
|
| I have either assembled my own desktop computers or purchased
| ex corporate Lenovo over the years with a mix of Windows (for
| gaming obviously) and Linux and only recently (4 years ago)
| been given a MBP by work as they (IT) cannot manage Linux
| machines like they do with MacOS and Windows.
|
| I have moved from an intel i5 MBP to a M3 Pro (?) and it
| makes me want to throw away my dependable ThinkPad/Fedora
| machine I still uses for personal projects.
| nwhnwh wrote:
| Consuming... for some people, is done for it's own sake.
| szundi wrote:
| There are 2 things I was always spending money on, if I
| felt is not the almost best achievable: my bed and my
| laptop. Even the phone can be 4 years old iPhone, but the
| laptop must be best and fast. My sleep is also pretty
| important. Everything else is just "eco".
| szundi wrote:
| In my country you can buy a device and write off in 2
| years, VAT reimbursed, then scrap it from the books and you
| sell it to people without tax payed to people who otherwise
| would pay a pretty hefty VAT. This decreases your loss of
| value to like half.
| qubitcoder wrote:
| Apple has a pretty good trade-in program. If you have an
| Apple card, it's even better (e.g. the trade-in value is
| deducted immediately, zero interest, etc.).
|
| Could you get more money by selling it? Sure. But it's hard
| to be the convenience. They ship you a box. You seal up the
| old device and drop it off at UPS.
|
| I also build my desktop computers with a mix of Windows and
| Linux. But those are upgraded over the years, not
| regularly.
| AdamJacobMuller wrote:
| It's really very easy, honestly.
|
| My laptop is my work life and my personal life.
|
| I spend easily 100 hours a week using it not-as-balanced-
| as-it-should-be between the two.
|
| I don't buy them because I need something new, I buy them
| because in the G4/Intel era, the iterations were massive
| and even a 20 or 30% increase in speed (which could be
| memory, CPU, disk -- they all make things faster) results
| in me being more productive. It's worth it for me to
| upgrade immediately when apple releases something new, as
| long as I have issues with my current device and the
| upgrade is enough of a delta.
|
| M1 -> M2 wasn't much of a delta and my M1 was fine. M1 ->
| M3 was a decent delta, but, my M1 was still fine. M1 -> M4
| is a huge delta (almost double) and my screen is dented to
| where it's annoying to sit outside and use the laptop
| (bright sun makes the defect worse), so, I'm upgrading. If
| I hadn't dented the screen the choice would be /a lot/
| harder.
|
| I love ThinkPads too. Really can take a beating and keep on
| going. The post-IBM era ones are even better in some
| regards too. I keep one around running Debian for Linux-
| emergencies.
| garyrob wrote:
| "I've had this laptop since release in 2020 and I have nearly
| 0 complaints with it."
|
| Me too. Only one complaint. After I accidentally spilled a
| cup of water into it on an airplane, it didn't work.
|
| (However AppleCare fixed it for $300 and I had a very recent
| backup. :) )
| samtheprogram wrote:
| If you don't have AppleCare, it costs $1400+. M2 Pro here
| that I'm waiting to fix or upgrade because of that.
|
| What's more annoying is that I'd jus to get a new one and
| recycle this one, but the SSD is soldered on. Good on you
| for having a backup.
|
| Do not own a Mac unless you bought it used or have
| AppleCare.
| garyrob wrote:
| Yeah, I always have AppleCare. I view it as part of the
| cost of a mac (or iPhone).
|
| And yeah, this incident reminded me of why it's important
| to back up as close to daily as you can, or even more
| often during periods when you're doing important work and
| want to be sure you have the intermediate steps.
| elzbardico wrote:
| I've been using portable macs for the last 25 years.
|
| Never had AppleCare or any other extended warranty
| program.
|
| Did just fine up to now.
| garyrob wrote:
| Interesting. I have found occasion to use it for pretty
| much every Mac I've owned since the 1980s! I'm not sure
| how much money it's saved compared to just paying for
| repairs when needed, but I suspect it may come out to:
|
| 1) a slight overall savings, though I'm not sure about
| that. 2) a lack of stress when something breaks. Even if
| there isn't an overall savings, for me it's been worth it
| because of that.
|
| Certainly, my recent Mac repair would have cost $1500 and
| I only paid $300, and I think I've had the machine for
| about 3 years, so there's a savings there but
| considerably less recent stress. That's similar to the
| experience I've had all along, although this recent
| expense would have probably been my most-expensive repair
| ever.
| AdamJacobMuller wrote:
| "SSD is soldered on" is a bit of glossing over of the
| issue with the M-series Macs.
|
| Apple is putting raw NAND chips on the board (and yes
| soldering them) and the controller for the SSD is part of
| the M-series chip. Yes, apple could use NVMe here if you
| ignore the physical constraints and ignore fact that it
| wouldn't be quite as fast and ignore the fact that it
| would increase their BOM cost.
|
| I'm not saying Apple is definitively correct here, but,
| it's good to have choice and Apple is the only company
| with this kind of deeply integrated design. If you want a
| fully modular laptop, go buy a framework (they are great
| too!) and if you want something semi-modular, go buy a
| ThinkPad (also great!).
| grahamj wrote:
| The problem is those other options won't run macOS. If
| the OS is a given then there's no choice.
|
| Day to day I don't mind but when needs change or
| something breaks it's unfortunate to have to replace the
| whole machine to fix it.
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| My 2019 i9 going strong as ever. With 64gb ram, really don't
| need to upgrade for at least a couple more years.
| AdamJacobMuller wrote:
| I had the 2019 i9. The power difference and the cooling
| difference is astounding from the 2019 to the M1 (and the
| M1 is faster).
|
| I actually use my laptop on my lap commonly and I think the
| i9 was going to sterilize me.
| grahamj wrote:
| yeah I had the 8-core i9 and I was shocked at how much
| faster my M1 Air was when I got it. No fan and still
| acing the old MBP!
|
| Now on M2 MBP and will probably be using it for a very
| long time.
| icedchai wrote:
| I had an 2019 i9 for a work laptop. It was absolutely
| awful, especially with the corporate anti-virus / spyware
| on it that brought it to a crawl. Fans would run
| constantly. Any sort of Node JS build would make it sound
| like a jet engine.
| LeafItAlone wrote:
| >I've never kept any laptop as long as I've kept the M1
|
| What different lives we live. This first M1 was in November
| 2020. Not even four years old. I've never had a [personal]
| computer for _less_ time than that. (Work, yes, due to
| changing jobs or company-dictated changes/upgrades)
| AdamJacobMuller wrote:
| My work computer is my personal computer. I easily spend
| 100+ hours a week using it.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| Amen. I got a crazy deal on a brand new 2020 M1 Max MBP with
| 64GB/2TB in 2023.
|
| This is the best machine I have ever owned. It is so completely
| perfect in every way. I can't imagine replacing it for many
| many years.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Congratulations, just curious what is the deal?
| giik wrote:
| At the end of 2023 BH Photo Video was selling the M1 Max
| 16" 64G/2TB for 2,499. It's the lowest I've ever seen it
| anywhere and I got one myself.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| I have the same one, but everyone I know with an M series Mac
| says the same thing. These are the first machines in a long
| time built to not only last a decade but be used for it.
| leokennis wrote:
| I still use my MacBook Air M1 and given my current workloads (a
| bit of web development, general home office use and occasional
| video editing and encoding) I doubt I'll need to replace it in
| the coming 5 years. That'll be an almost 10 year lifespan.
| misiek08 wrote:
| M1 Pro compared to Intel was so big step ahead that I suppose
| we all are still surprised and excited. Quiet, long battery
| life and better performance. By a lot! I wonder if M4 really
| feels that much faster and better - having M1 Pro I'm not going
| to change quickly, but maybe Mac Mini will land some day.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Honestly it was a game changer. Before I'd never leave the
| house without a charger, nowadays I rarely bring it with me
| on office days, even with JS / front-end workloads.
|
| (of course, everyone else has a macbook too, there's always
| someone that can lend me a charger. Bonus points that the
| newer macbooks support both magsafe and USB-C charging. Added
| bonus points that they brought back magsafe and HDMI ports)
| medion wrote:
| Except for the usb c charge port - magcharge was the best
| invention and I'll never understand why it was removed.
| microtherion wrote:
| It's the other way around, isn't it? MagSafe was removed in
| the 2016-2019 model years (not sure why; maybe to shave off
| another bit of thickness?), and then brought back in 2020 to
| MacBook Pro and 2022 to MacBook Air.
|
| Personally, I practically never use MagSafe, because the
| convenience of USB C charging cables all over the house
| outweighs the advantages of MagSafe for me.
| smileysteve wrote:
| Pro tip, USB c magnetic adapter is cheap and works well
| enough
| zmmmmm wrote:
| It's annoyingly good! I want to upgrade, but especially having
| splurged on 64Gb RAM, I have very little justifiable reason.
| mirchiseth wrote:
| reading this for my late 2013 MBP. It is so old that I can't
| install the latest of Darktable on it.
| boogieknite wrote:
| Agree, even without whisky (this whisky:
| https://getwhisky.app).
|
| With whisky i feel like id never need anything else. That said,
| the benchmark jump in the m4 has me thinking i should save up
| and grab a refurb in a year or two
| shrubble wrote:
| Disingenuous to mention the x86 based MacBooks as a basis for
| comparison in their benchmarks; they are trying to conflate
| current-gen Intel with what they shipped more than 4 years ago.
|
| Are they going to claim that 16GB RAM is equivalent to 32GB on
| Intel laptops? (/sarc)
| wiremine wrote:
| It could see it as disingenuous, or a targeted message to those
| users still on those older x86 machines.
| Yabood wrote:
| Exactly how I read it. I have an intel model, and the press
| release felt like a targeted ad.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| Lot's of people don't upgrade on the cadence that users on this
| forum do. Someone was mentioning yesterday that they are trying
| to sell their Intel Mac {edit: on this forum] and asking advice
| on getting the best price. Someone else replied that they still
| had a 2017 model. I spoke to someone at my job (I'm IT) who
| told me they'd just ordered a new iMac to replace one that is
| 11 years old. There's no smoke and mirrors in letting such
| users know what they're in for.
| izacus wrote:
| Right, it's obviously that, not a marketing trick to make
| numbers look much bigger while comparing to old CPUs and
| laptops :)
| alsetmusic wrote:
| Given that they also compare it to an M1 in the same aside,
| I'd say you're wrong.
|
| > Up to 23.8x faster basecalling for DNA sequencing in
| Oxford Nanopore MinKNOW when compared to the 16-inch
| MacBook Pro with Core i9, and up to 1.8x faster when
| compared to the 16-inch MacBook Pro with M1 Pro.
| postexitus wrote:
| I have a 2013 Macbook Air as a casual browsing machine that's
| still going strong (by some definition of it) after a battery
| replacement.
| michaelmueller wrote:
| Yup, I'm a developer who still primarily works on a 2018
| Intel Mac. Apple's messaging felt very targeted towards me.
| Looking forward to getting the M4 Max as soon as possible!
| trogdor wrote:
| Oh, wow. You are in for a treat.
|
| The only downside is that your computer will no longer
| double as a space heater :p
| orangecat wrote:
| Indeed. The one positive feature of the 2019 MBP I
| briefly had to use was that my cat loved taking naps on
| it.
| hu3 wrote:
| They are going to milk these horrendous crazy hot x86 thermally
| throttled macs performance comparisons for a decade.
| musictubes wrote:
| Ben Bejarin said that around 50% of the installed base is still
| using Macs with Intel chips. You'll keep hearing that
| comparison until that number goes down.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _All MacBook Pro models feature an HDMI port that supports up
| to 8K resolution, a SDXC card slot, a MagSafe 3 port for
| charging, and a headphone jack, along with support for Wi-Fi 6E
| and Bluetooth 5.3._
|
| No Wifi 7. So you get access to the 6 GHz band, but not some of
| the other features (preamble punching, OFDMA):
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_7
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_6E
|
| The iPhone 16s do have Wifi 7. Curious to know why they skipped
| it (and I wonder if the chipsets perhaps do support it, but it's
| a firmware/software-not-yet-ready thing).
| sroussey wrote:
| Yeah, this threw me as well. When the iMac didn't support WiFi
| 7, I got a bit worried. I have an M2, so not going to get this,
| but the spouse needs a new Air and I figure that everything
| would have WiFi 7 by then, and now I don't think so.
| carstenhag wrote:
| Faster is always nice, makes sense. But do you really need
| WiFi 7 features/speed? I don't know when I would notice a
| difference (on a laptop) between 600 or 1500 Mbit/s (just as
| an example). Can't download much anyhow as the storage will
| get full in minutes.
| iknowstuff wrote:
| Call of Duty is 200GB
| mort96 wrote:
| How frequently are you downloading CoD on your Mac?
| nomel wrote:
| Wifi 6 can do up to 4.8Gbps. Even at half of that, you're
| going to be limited by a 2Gbps fiber line.
|
| The real use is transferring huge files within the LAN.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _But do you really need WiFi 7 features /speed?_
|
| One of the features is preamble punching, which is useful
| in more dense environments:
|
| * https://community.fs.com/article/how-preamble-puncturing-
| boo...
|
| * https://www.ruckusnetworks.com/blog/2023/wi-fi-7-and-
| punctur...
|
| MLO helps with resiliency and the improved OFDMA helps with
| spectrum efficiency as well. It's not just about speed.
| fwip wrote:
| Thanks for those explainers.
| ygouzerh wrote:
| It looks like few people only are using Wifi 7 for now. Maybe
| they are going to include it in the next generation when more
| people will use it.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _It looks like few people only are using Wifi 7 for now._
|
| Machines can last and be used for years, and it would be a
| presumably very simple way to 'future proof' things.
|
| And though the IEEE spec hasn't officially been ratified as I
| type this, it is set to be by the end of 2024. Network
| vendors are also shipping APs with the functionality, so in
| coming years we'll see a larger and larger infrastructure
| footprint going forward.
| canucker2016 wrote:
| Yeah, I thought that was weird. None of the Apple announcements
| this week had WiFi7 support, just 6E.
|
| https://www.tomsguide.com/face-off/wi-fi-6e-vs-wi-fi-7-whats...
|
| Laptops/desktops (with 16GB+ of memory) could make use of the
| faster speed/more bandwidth aspects of WiFi7 better than
| smartphones (with 8GB of memory).
| 404mm wrote:
| The lack of Wifi7 is a real bummer for me. I was hoping to
| ditch the 2.5Gbe dongle and just use WiFi.
| mort96 wrote:
| Hm why? Is 6E really so much worse than 7 in practice that 7
| can replace wired for you but 6E can't? That's honestly
| really weird to me. What's the practical difference in
| latency, bandwidth or reliability you've experienced between
| 6E and 7?
| 404mm wrote:
| I don't have any 6E device so I cannot really tell for sure
| but from what I read, 6E gets you to a bit over 1Gbit in
| real world scenario. 7 should be able to replace my 2.5Gbe
| dongle or at least get much closer to it. I already have
| routers WiFi 7 Eeros on a 2.5Gbe wired backbone.
| mort96 wrote:
| I guess it makes sense if what you do is extremely
| throughput-focused... I always saw
| consistency/reliability and latency as the benefits of
| wired compared to wireless, the actual average throughput
| has felt fast enough for a while on WiFi but I guess
| other people may have different needs
| cojo wrote:
| I was quite surprised by this discrepancy as well (my new
| iPhone has 7, but the new MBP does not).
|
| I had just assumed that for sure this would be the year I
| upgrade my M1 Max MBP to an M4 Max. I will not be doing so
| knowing that it lacks WiFi 7; as one of the child comments
| notes, I count on getting a solid 3 years out of my machine, so
| future-proofing carries some value (and I already have WiFi7
| access points), and I download terabytes of data in some weeks
| for the work I do, and not having to Ethernet in at a fixed
| desk to do so efficiently will be a big enough win that I will
| wait another year before shelling out $6k "off-cycle".
|
| Big bummer for me. I was looking forward to performance gains
| next Friday.
| pazimzadeh wrote:
| they hold their value well so you could buy it this year and
| sell it next year when you buy the new one. you'd probably
| only lose ~$500
| cojo wrote:
| Good point! I hadn't looked at how resale value holds up.
| Maybe I will do that after all... thanks for the
| suggestion!
| nightski wrote:
| I find it very odd that the new iMac has WiFi 7 but this does
| not... Also it is so aggravating they compare to 3 generations
| ago and not the previous generation in the marketing stats. It
| makes the entire post nearly useless.
| parsimo2010 wrote:
| It is very aggravating, but if they advertised a comparison to
| last year's model and showed you small performance gains you
| might not want to buy it.
|
| A more charitable interpretation is that Apple only thinks that
| people with computers a few years old need to upgrade, and they
| aren't advertising to people with a <1 year old MacBook Pro.
| klausa wrote:
| The iMac doesn't have WiFi 7.
| commandersaki wrote:
| New 12MP Center Stage Camera. Will it support 4k?
| perfect-blue wrote:
| I don't think so. They would have made that a huge deal.
| Almondsetat wrote:
| The 12MP will be used for better framing, there is still almost
| no use case for 4k quality video conferencing
| bearjaws wrote:
| It is truly sad how bad Zoom / Google Meet / Teams are when
| it comes to video quality.
|
| I look at my local source vs the recording, and I am baffled.
|
| After a decade of online meeting software, we still stream
| 480p quality it seems.
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| I mean you can easily create your own fully meshed P2P
| group video chat in your browser just using a little bit of
| JS that would support everyone running 4k, but it will fail
| the moment you get more than 3-8 people as each persons
| video stream is eating 25mbps for every side of a peer
| connection (or 2x per edge in the graph.)
|
| A huge part of group video chat is still "hacks" like
| downsampling non-speaking participants so the bandwidth
| doesn't kill the connection.
|
| As we get fatter pipes and faster GPUs streaming will
| become better.
|
| edit: I mean... I could see a future where realtime video
| feeds never get super high resolution and everything
| effectively becomes a relatively seemless AI recreation
| where only facial movement data is transmitted similar to
| how game engines work now.
| sroussey wrote:
| FaceTime has great quality. Unfortunately, as you age you
| start to hate the quality.
| Almondsetat wrote:
| When I have a full team of people with 1080p webcams and a
| solid connection I can notice the quality. Most of the time
| not everyone fulfills those requirements and the
| orchestrator system has to make do
| musictubes wrote:
| 4k for videoconferencing is nuts. The new camera should be an
| improvement over the old. Plus, being able to show your actual,
| physical desktop can be Andy too. Using your iPhone as the
| webcam will still probably give you the best quality especially
| if you are in a lower light situation.
| minimaxir wrote:
| Tech specs confirm only 1080p recording.
| zurfer wrote:
| If I remember correctly, the claim was that M3 is 1.6x faster
| than M1. M4 is now 1.8x faster than M1.
|
| It sounds more exciting than M4 is 12.5% faster than M3.
| tonygiorgio wrote:
| So far I'm only reading comments here about people wow'd by a
| lot of things it seemed that M3 pretty much also had. Not
| seeing anything new besides "little bit better specs"
| MBCook wrote:
| The M4 is architecturally better than the M3, especially on
| GPU features IIRC, but you're right it's not a total blow
| out.
|
| Not all products got the M3, so in some lines this week is
| the first update in quite a while. In others like MBP it's
| just the yearly bump. A good performing one, but the yearly
| bump.
| sliken wrote:
| Yes, upgrading from a m3 max to a m4 max would be a waste.
| jumping_frog wrote:
| Maybe they are highlighting stats which will help people
| upgrade. Few will upgrade from M3 to M4. Many from M1 to M4.
| That's my guess.
| azinman2 wrote:
| Most people buying a new MacBook don't have the previous
| version, they're going much further back. That's why you see
| both intel and m1 comparisons.
| IshKebab wrote:
| No it isn't. It's because 1.8x faster sounds better than 12%
| faster.
|
| Back when Moore's law was still working they didn't skip
| generations like this.
| stephenr wrote:
| Back when Moores las was still working they didn't release
| three subsequent versions of the same product in 22 months.
| IshKebab wrote:
| The M1 was released 4 years ago.
| stephenr wrote:
| Both the M2 and M3 MBP were released in 2023.
| nabakin wrote:
| It does and it gets even worse when you realize those stats are
| only true under very specific circumstances, not typical
| computer usage. If you benchmarked based on typical computer
| usage, I think you'd only see gains of 5% or less.
| tigen wrote:
| Anyone know of articles that deep dive into "snappiness" or
| "feel" computer experiences?
|
| Everyone knows SSDs made a big difference in user experience.
| For the CPU, normally if you aren't gaming at high settings
| or "crunching" something (compiling or processing video etc.)
| then it's not obvious why CPU upgrades should be making much
| difference even vs. years-old Intel chips, in terms of that
| feel.
|
| There is the issue of running heavy JS sites in browsers but
| I can avoid those.
|
| The main issue seems to be how the OS itself is optimized for
| snappiness, and how well it's caching/preloading things. I've
| noticed Windows 10 file system caching seems to be not very
| sophisticated for example... it goes to disk too often for
| things I've accessed recently-but-not-immediately-prior.
|
| Similarly when it comes to generating heat, if laptops are
| getting hot even while doing undemanding office tasks with
| huge periods of idle time then basically it points to stupid
| software -- or let's say poorly balanced (likely aimed purely
| at benchmark numbers than user experience).
|
| https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m1-vs-amd-
| ryzen-...
| canucker2016 wrote:
| Looking at
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M4#Comparison_with_other...
|
| M4 is built with TSMC's 2nd Gen 3nm process. M3 is on the 1st
| gen 3nm.
|
| For the base M3 vs base M4:
|
| - the CPU (4P+4E) & GPU (8) core counts are the same
|
| - NPU perf is slightly better for M4, I think, (M4's 38TOPS @
| INT8 vs M3's 18TOPS @ INT16)
|
| - Memory Bandwidth is higher for M4 (120 GB/s vs 102.4 GB/s)
|
| - M4 has a higher TDP (22W vs 20W)
|
| - M4 has higher transistor count (28B vs 25B)
| dsv3099i wrote:
| If your goal is to sell more MBPs (and this is marketing
| presentation) then, judging by the number of comments that have
| the phrase "my M1" and the top comment, it seems like M1 vs M4
| is the right comparison to make. Too many people are sticking
| with their M1 machines. Including me.
|
| It's actually interesting to think about. Is there a speed
| multiplier that would get me off this machine? I'm not sure
| there is. For my use case the machine performance is not my
| productivity bottleneck. HN on the otherhand... That one needs
| to be attenuated. :)
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| There aren't _that_ many people that upgrade something like an
| MBP every year, most of us keep them longer than that.
|
| I've just ordered an (almost) top-of-the-range MBP Max, my
| current machine is an MBP M1-max, so the comparisons are pretty
| much spot-on for me.
|
| Selling the M1 Ultra Studio to help pay for the M4 MBP Max, I
| don't think I need the Studio any more, with the M4 being so
| much faster.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| I have to admit, 4 generations in, 1.8x is decent but slightly
| disappointing all the same.
|
| I'd really like to justify upgrading, but a $4k+ spend needs to
| hit greater than 2x for me to feel it's justified. 1.8x is
| still "kind of the same" as what I have already.
| smallstepforman wrote:
| The adjectives in the linked article are nausiating. Apple's
| marketing team fail as decent humans writting such drivel.
|
| Give us data, tell us whats new, and skip the nonsense buzz
| filling adjectives.
|
| To quote Russell Brand, just say he sat down, not that he placed
| his luscious ass in silk covered trousers on a velvetly smooth
| chair, experiencing pleasure as the strained thigh muscles
| received respite after gruelling on their feet watching a lush
| sunset in a cool summers evening breeze.
| Veen wrote:
| I'm not sure Russel Brand is the best ambassador for plain
| English.
| astrange wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6p0W4ZsLXw
| empath75 wrote:
| Most people buying macs don't care about specs, they care about
| _what they can do_.
| fckgw wrote:
| I don't think you understand what a press release is.
| kps wrote:
| While we're bashing Apple marketing: `:prefers-color-scheme` is
| a11y. Take your fucking fashion statements elsewhere.
| david_allison wrote:
| > MacBook Pro with M4 Max enables:
|
| > Up to 4.6x faster build performance when compiling code in
| Xcode when compared to the 16-inch MacBook Pro with Intel Core
| i9, and up to 2.2x faster when compared to the 16-inch MacBook
| Pro with M1 Max.
|
| OK, that's finally a reason to upgrade from my M1.
| dagmx wrote:
| Announcement video as well
|
| https://youtu.be/G0cmfY7qdmY?si=vbgIr8zn9EzB2Xam
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| I'm pleased that the Pro's base memory starts at 16 GB, but
| surprised they top out at 32 GB:
|
| > _...the new MacBook Pro starts with 16GB of faster unified
| memory with support for up to 32GB, along with 120GB /s of memory
| bandwidth..._
|
| I haven't been an Apple user since 2012 when I graduated from
| college and retired my first computer, a mid-2007 Core2 Duo
| Macbook Pro, which I'd upgraded with a 2.5" SSD and 6GB of RAM
| with DDR2 SODIMMs. I switched to Dell Precision and Lenovo
| P-series workstations with user-upgradeable storage and memory...
| but I've got 64GB of RAM in the old 2019 Thinkpad P53 I'm using
| right now. A unified memory space is neat, but is it worth
| sacrificing that much space? I typically have a VM or two
| running, and in the host OS and VMs, today's software is hungry
| for RAM and it's typically cheap and upgradeable outside of the
| Apple ecosystem.
| jsheard wrote:
| > I'm pleased that the Pro's base memory starts at 16 GB, but
| surprised they top out at 32 GB:
|
| That's an architectural limitation of the base M4 chip, if you
| go up to the M4 Pro version you can get up to 48GB, and the M4
| Max goes up to 128GB.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| The "base level" Max is limited at 36GB. You have to get the
| bigger Max to get more.
| latortuga wrote:
| The new mac mini also has an M4 Pro that goes up to 64GB.
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| The max memory is dependent on which tier M4 chip you get. The
| M4 max chip will let you configure up to 128gb of ram
| MaxDPS wrote:
| It looks like the 14 core M4 Max only allows 36GB of ram. The
| M4 Pro allows for up to 48GB. It's a bit confusing.
| post-it wrote:
| I haven't done measurements on this, but my Macbook Pro feels
| much faster at swapping than any Linux or Windows device I've
| used. I've never used an M.2 SSD so maybe that would be
| comparable, but swapping is pretty much seamless. There's also
| some kind of memory compression going on according to Activity
| Monitor, not sure if that's normal on other OSes.
| thimabi wrote:
| Yes, other M.2 SSDs have comparable performance when
| swapping, and other operating systems compress memory, too --
| though I believe not as much as MacOS.
|
| Although machines with Apple Silicon swap flawlessly, I worry
| about degrading the SSD, which is non-replaceable. So
| ultimately I pay for more RAM and not need swapping at all.
| post-it wrote:
| Degrading the SSD is a good point. This is thankfully a
| work laptop so I don't care if it lives or dies, but it's
| something I'll have to consider when I eventually get my
| own Mac.
| redundantly wrote:
| The M4 tops off at 32 GB
|
| The M4 Pro goes up to 48 GB
|
| The M4 Max can have up to 128 GB
| SparkyMcUnicorn wrote:
| It doesn't look this cut and dry.
|
| M4 Max 14 core has a single option of 36GB.
|
| M4 Max 16 core lets you go up to 128GB.
|
| So you can actually get more ram with the Pro than the base
| level Max.
| ldoughty wrote:
| It seems you need the M4 Max with the 40-core GPU to go over
| 36GB.
|
| The M4 Pro with 14-core CPU & 20-core GPU can do 48GB.
|
| If you're looking for ~>36-48GB memory, here's the options:
|
| $2,800 = 48GB, Apple M4 Pro chip with 14-core CPU, 20-core
| GPU
|
| $3,200 = 36GB, Apple M4 Max chip with 14-core CPU, 32-core
| GPU
|
| $3,600 = 48GB, Apple M4 Max chip with 16-core CPU, 40-core
| GPU
|
| So the M4 Pro could get you a lot of memory, but less GPU
| cores. Not sure how much those GPU cores factor in to
| performance, I only really hear complaints about the memory
| limits... Something to consider if looking to buy in this
| range of memory.
|
| Of course, a lot of people here probably consider it not a
| big deal to throw an extra 3 grand on hardware, but I'm a
| hobbyist in academia when it comes to AI, I don't big
| 6-figure salaries :-)
| fckgw wrote:
| On the standard M4 processor. If you move the M4 Pro it tops
| out at 48gb or moving to the M4 Max goes up to 128gb.
| 41995701 wrote:
| Weird that the M4 Pro in the Mac mini can go up to 64GB.
| Maybe a size limitation on the MBP motherboard or SOC
| package?
| _diyar wrote:
| Probably just Apple designing the pricing ladder.
| Tepix wrote:
| The 96GB RAM option of the M3 Max disappeared.
| wslh wrote:
| I really like these new devices, but I've found that the latest
| MacBook Air (M3) is sufficient for my needs as a manager and
| casual developer. My MacBook Pro M1 Max has essentially become a
| desktop due to its support for multiple monitors, but since the
| Mac Mini M4 Pro can also support up to three external displays,
| I'm considering selling the MacBook Pro and switching to the
| Mini. I've also noticed that the MacBook Pro's battery, as a
| portable device, is less efficient in terms of
| performance/battery (for my usage) compared to the MacBook Air.
|
| Regarding LLMs, the hottest topic here nowadays, I plan to either
| use the cloud or return to a bare-metal PC.
| doctoboggan wrote:
| Does anyone know of any good deals on the older models of apple
| laptops? Now is usually a great time to purchase (a still very
| capable) older model.
| 2wrist wrote:
| The refurbished store is always a good place to have a look
| through.
| fckgw wrote:
| Most retailers have had the older models on closeout for a few
| weeks now. Best Buy, Amazon and Costco have had the M3 models
| for a few hundred off depending on models.
| tencentshill wrote:
| The M-series macbooks depreciate in value far slower than any
| of the Intel models. M1 base models can still sell for nearly
| $1k. It's difficult to find a really good deal.
| bigtex wrote:
| Watch SlickDeals. I think it was this time last year where lots
| of refurbs/2 generation old machines were going for massive
| discounts. Granted they were M1 machines, but some had 64GB RAM
| and 4TB drives for like $2700. Microcenter and B&H are good
| ones to watch as well.
| commandersaki wrote:
| Hm, the M3 MacBook Pro had a 96GB of ram model (which is what I
| have). I wonder why it's not an option with the M4.
| maxioatic wrote:
| It is interesting they only support 64gb and then jump to
| 128gb. It seems like a money play since it's $1,000 to upgrade
| for 128, and if you're running something that needs more than
| 64 (like LLMs?) you kind of have no choice.
| sliken wrote:
| M2 pro has 256 bit wide memory, mostly benefiting the GPU perf.
|
| M3 pro has 192 bit wide memory, GPU improvements mostly offset
| the decrease in memory bandwidth. This leads to memory options
| like 96GB.
|
| M4 pro has 256 bit wide memory, thus the factor of 2 memory
| options.
| wtallis wrote:
| The 96GB option was with the M2 Max and M3 Max chips, not the
| M2 Pro or M3 Pro.
|
| DRAM chips don't just come in power of two sizes anymore. You
| can even buy 24GB DDR5 DIMMs.
| thimabi wrote:
| Nice to see they increased the number of performance cores in the
| M4 Pro, compared to the M3 Pro. Though I am worried about the
| impact of this change on battery life on the MBPs.
|
| Another positive development was bumping up baseline amounts of
| RAM. They kept selling machines with just 8 gigabytes of RAM for
| way longer than they should have. It might be fine for many
| workflows, but feels weird on "pro" machines at their price
| points.
|
| I'm sure Apple has been coerced to up its game because of AI. Yet
| we can rejoice in seeing their laptop hardware, which already
| surpassed the competition, become even better.
| snjnlsn wrote:
| I'm curious why they decided to go this route, but glad to see
| it. Perhaps ~4 efficiency cores is simply just enough for the
| average MBP user's standard compute?
|
| In January, after researching, I bought an apple restored MBP
| with an M2 Max over an M3 Pro/Max machine because of the
| performance/efficiency core ratio. I do a lot of music
| production in DAWs, and many, even Apple's Logic Pro don't
| really make use of efficiency cores. I'm curious about what
| restraints have led to this.. but perhaps this also factors
| into Apple's choice to increase the ratio of
| performance/efficiency cores.
| thimabi wrote:
| > Perhaps ~4 efficiency cores is simply just enough for the
| average MBP user's standard compute?
|
| I believe that's the case. Most times, the performance cores
| on my M3 Pro laptop remain idle.
|
| What I don't understand is why battery life isn't more like
| that of the MacBook Airs when not using the full power of the
| SOC. Maybe that's the downside of having a better display.
| umanwizard wrote:
| > Most times, the performance cores on my M3 Pro laptop
| remain idle.
|
| Curious how you're measuring this. Can you see it in
| Activity Monitor?
|
| > Maybe that's the downside of having a better display.
|
| Yes I think so. Display is a huge fraction of power
| consumption in typical light (browsing/word
| processing/email) desktop workloads.
| thimabi wrote:
| > Curious how you're measuring this. Can you see it in
| Activity Monitor?
|
| I use an open source app called Stats [1]. It provides a
| really good overview of the system on the menu bar, and
| it comes with many customization options.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/exelban/stats
| umanwizard wrote:
| Cool, thanks for the tip!
| netruk44 wrote:
| > Curious how you're measuring this. Can you see it in
| Activity Monitor?
|
| Yes, processor history in the activity monitor marks out
| specific cores as Performance and Efficiency.
|
| Example: https://i.redd.it/f87yv7eoqyh91.jpg
| umanwizard wrote:
| Wow, I didn't even realize you could double-click the CPU
| graph on the main screen to open that view.
| mcculley wrote:
| Still, no matter how much you are willing to spend, you cannot
| buy a MacBook Pro with an LTE modem, like the ones in the iPhone,
| iPad, and Watch.
| trogdor wrote:
| I wonder if one of the obstacles is the amount of data that
| would likely be used.
|
| Most cellular carriers offer unlimited on-device data plans,
| but they cap data for tethering. Integrating an LTE modem into
| a laptop essentially requires a mobile data plan with unlimited
| tethering - which, AFAIK, doesn't exist at the moment. I'm not
| sure why.
| mcculley wrote:
| I think the biggest obstacle is the Qualcomm patents. There
| is no good reason why a MacBook Pro cannot have a feature
| that Dells have.
| wpm wrote:
| Integrating an LTE modem into an iPad requires a mobile data
| plan, and thats about it. It's not "tethered" if its built
| into the device.
|
| I've always heard that patent disputes were at the root of
| the lack of a modem option. Apple had a prototype MacBook Pro
| back in the early Intel days IIRC but it was never released.
|
| Maybe if Apple ever gets their in-house modems working, we'll
| see them on all of the product lines, but until then, it's a
| niche use case that likely isn't causing them to lose a ton
| of sales.
| trogdor wrote:
| > It's not "tethered" if its built into the device.
|
| I understand that. My point is that I think an LTE modem in
| a laptop might reasonably use far more data than an LTE
| modem in a phone or tablet. Most people who download and/or
| upload very large files do so on their computer rather than
| their mobile devices.
| mcculley wrote:
| Dell laptops can be configured with LTE modems.
|
| There is no reason macOS cannot have some option for
| throttling usage by background updates when connected
| over LTE. iPads have an LTE option.
|
| That carriers have not figured out how to charge me by
| the byte over all my devices instead of per device is
| really not a big issue to me. I would like to pay for an
| LTE modem and the necessary bandwidth.
|
| My intuition is that when Apple has their own LTE modem
| and is not dependent on Qualcomm, a MacBook Pro will have
| an option similar to that for Dell power users.
| jitl wrote:
| Tethering to an iPhone is so easy though - just select it in
| the Wifi menu. I'm not sure if I'd ever pay for an LTE modem
| option. I'm sure it would be better efficiency and performance
| to have it built-in, but I wouldn't think many people care
| _enough_ about that small difference to offer it as an option.
| mcculley wrote:
| I use the tethering quite often. I have for years. It is
| flaky and burns two batteries instead of one. I agree that
| many people do not care. Some of us who are traveling a lot
| are willing to pay for more options.
| Detrytus wrote:
| It's not about efficiency or performance, it's about not
| having to own the iPhone in the first place. Just put a SIM
| card inside the laptop and forget about it. Windows laptops
| can even seamlessly switch between wifi and LTE depending on
| which one is available. But of course Apple would never allow
| that because they want to force you to own the full set of
| Apple devices. Laptop being self-sufficient would be against
| their policy.
|
| Not to mention that in the US the cell phone carriers
| artificially limit tethering speed or put data caps on it
| when you tether from your phone. You have to buy a dedicated
| data-only plan and modem.
| azinman2 wrote:
| No wifi 7? Are others shipping it?
| kristofferR wrote:
| Yup, Wi-Fi 7 devices have been shipping for over a year. My
| Odin 2 portable game console has Wi-Fi 7.
| electriclove wrote:
| Strange because their latest iPhones do have Wifi 7
| TIPSIO wrote:
| These chips are incredible. Even my M1 MBP from 2020 still feels
| so ridiculously fast for everyday basic use and coding.
|
| Is an upgrade really worth it?
| thimabi wrote:
| I guess it's only worth it for people who would really benefit
| from the speed bump -- those who push their machines to the
| limit and work under tight schedules.
|
| I myself don't need so much performance, so I tend to keep my
| devices for many, many years.
| jitl wrote:
| I don't think it will "feel" much faster like the Intel -> M1
| where overall system latency especially around swap & memory
| pressure got much much better.
|
| If you do any amount of 100% CPU work that blocks your
| workflow, like waiting for a compiler or typechecker, I think
| M1 -> M4 is going to be worth it. A few of my peers at the
| office went M1->M3 and like the faster compile times.
|
| Like, a 20 minute build on M1 becoming a 10 minute build on M4,
| or a 2 minute build on M1 becoming a 1 minute build on M4, is
| nothing to scoff at.
| carlgreene wrote:
| What's amazing is that in the past I've felt the need to upgrade
| within a few years.
|
| New video format or more demanding music software is released
| that slows the machine down, or battery life craters.
|
| Well, I haven't had even a tinge of feeling that I need to
| upgrade after getting my M1 Pro MBP. I can't remember it ever
| skipping a beat running a serious Ableton project, or editing in
| Resolve.
|
| Can stuff be faster? Technically of course. But this is the first
| machine that even after several years I've not caught myself once
| wishing that it was faster or had more RAM. Not once.
|
| Perhaps it's my age, or perhaps it's just the architecture of
| these new Mac chips are just so damn good.
| extr wrote:
| I've owned an M1 MBP base model since 2021 and I just got an M3
| Max for work. I was curious to see if it "felt" different and
| was contemplating an upgrade to M4. You know what? It doesn't
| really feel different. I think my browser opens about 1 second
| faster from a cold start. But other than that, no perceptible
| difference day to day.
| charliebwrites wrote:
| This is how I feel about the last few iPhones as well
|
| I upgraded from a 13 pro to a 15 pro expecting zippier
| performance and it feels almost identical if not weirdly a
| bit slower in rendering and typing
|
| I wonder what it will take to make Mac/iOS feel faster
| alwillis wrote:
| > I upgraded from a 13 pro to a 15 pro expecting zippier
| performance and it feels almost identical if not weirdly a
| bit slower in rendering and typing
|
| I went from an iPhone 13 mini to an iPhone 16 and it's a
| significant speed boost.
| lawgimenez wrote:
| I went from 12 to 15 pro max, the difference is
| significant. I can listen to Spotify while shooting from
| the camera. On my old iPhone 12, this is not possible.
| jonhohle wrote:
| I think that says more about Spotify than your phone.
| stevenjgarner wrote:
| Test Spotify against YouTube Music (and others) - I
| personally see no reason for Spotify when I have YouTube
| Premium, which performs with less overhead.
| lancesells wrote:
| Maybe they have friends and family on Spotify
| pacifika wrote:
| I'm sure you're right but that's pretty unreal.
| danieldk wrote:
| I think the only upgrade now is from a non-Pro to Pro,
| since a 120Hz screen is noticeably better than a 60Hz
| screen (and a borderline scam that a 1000 Euro phone does
| not have 120Hz).
|
| The new camera button is kinda nice though.
| matwood wrote:
| > The new camera button is kinda nice though.
|
| I was initially indifferent about the camera button, but
| now that I'm used to it it's actually very useful.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| I upgraded my iPhone 13 pro to the 16 pro and it was
| overall really nice - but it was the better use of
| hardware, the zoom camera, etc.
|
| The CPU? Ah, never really felt a difference.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| XR to 13, as I don't want the latest and didn't want to
| loose my jailbreak.
|
| Infuriated by the 13.
|
| The 3.5mm audio thunder bolt adapters disconnect more often
| than usual. All I need to do is tap the adapter and it
| disconnects.
|
| And that Apple has now stopped selling them is even more
| infuriating, it's not a faulty adapter.
| internet2000 wrote:
| It's probably because of the jailbreak.
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| How would that woller out his port?
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| > The 3.5mm thunder bolt adapters
|
| The what? is this the adapter for 3.5mm headphones? If
| so, you don't have to get Apple made dongles. Third
| parties make them also.
| Kirby64 wrote:
| Or just buy the actual Apple adapter from any number of
| other vendors. Best Buy still has plenty in stock, for
| instance.
|
| I'd guess the GPs actual problem is lint in the Lightning
| port though. Pretty common, relatively easy to clean out
| too, especially compared to USB-C.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| I'm in the EU. Third party ones cost the same as
| authentic Apple ones. If not more.
|
| Regardless of either, they both have the same fault.
|
| The connector between the phone and the adapter is poor.
| It could just be a fault with my phone but I have no way
| of proving this.
| Kirby64 wrote:
| Third party ones are almost certainly not as good as the
| actual Apple ones. The Apple one has remarkably good
| quality for its price.
|
| I suspect this sounds like a problem with your specific
| phone. Never had a problem with any lightning accessories
| myself.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Yes, which have the same fault as Apple authentic
| adapters which cost the same amount if not more.
| qubitcoder wrote:
| I realize this isn't your particular use case. But with
| newer iPhones, you can use USB-C directly for audio. I've
| been using the Audio Technica ATH-M50xSTS for a while
| now. The audio quality is exceptional. For
| Slack/Team/Zoom calls, the sidetone feature plays your
| voice back inside the headphones, with the level being
| adjustable via a small toggle switch on the left side.
| That makes all the difference, similar to
| transparency/adaptive modes on the AirPod Pro 2s (or
| older cellphones and landlines).
|
| I use a small Anker USB-A to USB-C adapter [1]. They're
| rock solid.
|
| As great as the AirPod Pro 2s are, a wired connection is
| superior in terms of reliability and latency. Although
| greatly improved over the years, I still have occasional
| issues connecting or switching between devices.
|
| Out of curiosity, what's the advantage of a jailbroken
| iPhone nowadays? I'd typically unlock Android phones in
| the past, but I don't see a need on iOS today.
|
| Interestingly, the last time I used Android, I had to
| sideload Adguard (an adblocker). On the App Store, it's
| just another app alongside competing adblockers. No such
| apps existed in the Play Store to provide system-level
| blocking, proxying, etc. Yes, browser extensions can be
| used, but that doesn't cover Google's incessant quest to
| bypass adblockers (looking at you Google News).
|
| [0] https://www.audio-technica.com/en-us/ath-m50xsts [1]
| https://www.amazon.com/Adapter-Anker-High-Speed-Transfer-
| Not...
| doublerabbit wrote:
| > Out of curiosity, what's the advantage of a jailbroken
| iPhone nowadays? I'd typically unlock Android phones in
| the past, but I don't see a need on iOS today.
|
| I have custom scripts, Ad blocking without VPNs,
| Application firewalls.
|
| I enjoy having most-full control of my device.
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| 16 pro has a specialized camera button which is a game
| changer for street / travel photography. I upgraded from 13
| pro and use that. But no other noticeable improvements.
| Maybe Apple intelligence summarizing wordy emails.
| thenthenthen wrote:
| > I wonder what it will take to make Mac/iOS feel faster
|
| I know, disabling shadows and customisable animation times
| ;) On a jailbroken phone I once could disable all animation
| delays, it felt like a new machine (must add that the
| animations are very important and generally great ux
| design, but most are just a tad too slow)
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| Can confirm. I have an M2 Air from work and an M1 Pro for
| personal, and tbh, both absolutely fly. I haven't had a
| serious reason to upgrade. The only reason I do kind of want
| to swap out my M1 Pro is because the 13" screen is a wee
| small, but I also use the thing docked more often than not so
| it's very hard to justify spending the money.
| stringsandchars wrote:
| > It doesn't really feel different.
|
| My work machine was upgraded from an M1 with 16GB of RAM to
| an M3 Max with 36GB and the difference in Xcode compile times
| is beyond belief: I went from something like 1-2 minutes to
| 15-20 seconds.
|
| Obviously if opening a browser is the most taxing thing your
| machine is doing the difference will be minimal. But video or
| music editing, application-compiling and other intensive
| tasks, then the upgrade is PHENOMENAL.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I very much enjoy being able to start compilation and just
| seeing results fly by.
| fwip wrote:
| I think most of that difference is going to be the huge
| increase in performance core count between the base chip
| and the Max (from 4 to 12). The RAM certainly doesn't hurt
| though!
| eropple wrote:
| FWIW I think that's more the core count than anything. I
| have a M1 Max as a personal machine and an M3 Max at work
| and while the M3 Max is definitely faster, it isn't world-
| beating.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| My current work machine is M1 Max 64Gb and it's the fastest
| computer I've ever used. Watching rust code compile makes
| me laugh out loud it's so quick. Really curious what the
| newer ones are like, but tbh I don't feel any pressure to
| upgrade (could just be blissfully ignorant).
| jcalabro wrote:
| I've found compile times on large C++ code bases to be the
| only thing I really notice improving. I recently upgraded my
| work machine from a 2017 i7 to a shiny new Ryzen 9 9950x and
| my clean compile times went from 3.5 minutes to 15 seconds
| haha. When I compile with an M2 Max, it's about 30s, so
| decent for a laptop, but also it was 2x the price of my new
| desktop workstation.
| thadk wrote:
| The biggest difference I've seen is iPad Sidecar mode works
| far more reliably with the M3 Max than the M1 Max. There have
| been incremental improvements in speed and nits too, but
| having Sidecar not randomly crash once a day once on M3 was
| very nice.
| OskarS wrote:
| Yep, the same, M1 Pro from 2021. It's remarkable how snappy it
| still feels years later, and I still virtually never hear the
| fan. The M-series of chips is a really remarkable achievement
| in hardware.
| renewiltord wrote:
| The M1 series was too good. Blows Intel Macs out of the water.
| But I still have an M1 Max. It's fantastic.
| kristofferR wrote:
| Yeah, I feel like Apple has done the opposite of planned
| obsolescence with the M chips.
|
| I have a Macbook Air M1 that I'd like to upgrade, but they're
| not making it easy. I promised myself a couple of years ago
| I'll never buy a new expensive computing device/phone unless it
| supports 120 hertz and Wi-Fi 7, a pretty reasonable request I
| think.
|
| I got the iPhone 16 Pro, guess I can wait another year for a
| new Macbook (hopefully the Air will have a decent display by
| then, I'm not too keen to downgrade the portability just to get
| a good display).
| JimDabell wrote:
| > Yeah, I feel like Apple has done the opposite of planned
| obsolescence with the M chips.
|
| They always have. If you want an objective measure of planned
| obsolescence, look at the resale value. Apple products hold
| their resale value better than pretty much every competitor
| because they stay useful for far longer.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Apple equipment always last a long time and retain value on
| the second-hand market.
| spyckie2 wrote:
| Not true. Look at how little supercharged intel apples are
| going for in Facebook marketplace.
|
| The quality stuff retains value, not brand.
| zinckiwi wrote:
| Comparing against the intel era is a bit apples (excuse
| me) to oranges. Technical generation gaps aside, Apple
| products hold value well.
| spyckie2 wrote:
| So the intel era is not Apple products? Butterfly
| keyboard is not an Apple invention?
|
| They have the highest product quality of any laptop
| manufacturer, period. But to say that all Apple products
| hold value well is simply not true. All quality products
| hold value well, and most of Apples products are quality.
|
| I guarantee you that if Apple produced a trashy laptop it
| would have no resell value.
|
| Again, the quality holds the value not the brand.
| rbanffy wrote:
| It's expected Intel-based Macs would lose value quickly
| considering how much better the M1 models were. This
| transition was bigger than when they moved from PowerPC
| to Intel.
| microtherion wrote:
| One complicating factor in the case of the Intel Macs is
| that an architectural transition happened after they came
| out. So they will be able to run less and less new
| software over the next couple of years, and they lack
| most AI-enabling hardware acceleration.
|
| That said, they did suffer from some self inflicted
| hardware limitations, as you hint. One reason I like the
| MBP is the return of the SD card slot.
| babblingdweeb wrote:
| Similar for me. MacBook Air M1 (8 cpu / 8 gpu; 16 GB
| RAM)...running in or out of clamshell with a 5k monitor, I
| rarely notice issues. Typically, if I'm working very
| inefficiently (obnoxious amount of tabs with Safari and
| Chrome; mostly web apps, Slack, Zoom, Postman, and vscode),
| I'll notice a minor lag during a video call while screen
| sharing...even then, it still keeps up.
|
| (Old Pentium Pro, PII, multi chip desktop days) -- When I did
| a different type of work, I would be in love with these new
| chips. I just don't throw as much at my computer anymore
| outside of things being RAM heavy.
|
| The M1 (with 16 GB ram) is really an amazing chip. I'm with
| you, outside of a repair/replacement? I'm happy to wait for
| 120hz refresh, faster wifi, and longer battery life.
| maxvisser wrote:
| Same for me. The only reason to replace it, is that my M1 pro's
| SSD or battery will go bad or if I accidentally drop the
| machine and something breaks.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I am replacing a Dell laptop because the case is cracking,
| not because it's too slow (it isn't lightning fast, of
| course, but it sure is fast enough for casual use).
| fckgw wrote:
| I replaced my M1 Air battery last year and it's still going
| like a champ. $129 for another 3 years of life is a bargain.
| rbanffy wrote:
| A lot of my work can be easily done with a Celeron - it's
| editing source, compiling very little, running tests on Python
| code, running small Docker containers and so on. Could it be
| faster? Of course! Do I need it to be faster? Not really.
|
| I am due to update my Mac mini because my current one can't run
| Sonoma, but, apart from that, it's a lovely little box with
| more than enough power for me.
| klooney wrote:
| How's the performance of Gmail on the Celeron? That's always
| my sticking point for older computers. The fancy web
| applications really drag.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Not great. Works well with Thunderbird or Evolution though.
|
| And yes. Web apps are not really great on low-spec
| machines.
| mysteria wrote:
| I still use Ivy Bridge and Haswell workstations (with Linux,
| SSD and discrete GPU) as my daily drivers and for the things
| I do they still feel fast. Honestly a new Celeron probably
| beats them performance wise.
|
| The modern AMD or Intel desktops I've tried obviously are
| much faster when performing large builds and such but for
| general computing, web browsing, and so forth I literally
| don't feel much of a difference. Now for mobile devices it's
| a different story due to the increased efficiency and hence
| battery life.
| jchw wrote:
| Laptops in general are just better than they used to be, with
| modern CPUs and NVMe disks. I feel exactly the same seeing new
| mobile AMD chips too, I'm pretty sure I'll be happy with my
| Ryzen 7040-based laptop for at least a few years.
|
| Apple's M1 came at a really interesting point. Intel was still
| dominating the laptop game for Windows laptops, but
| generational improvements felt pretty lame. A whole lot of
| money for mediocre performance gains, high heat output and not
| very impressive battery. The laptop ecosystem changed rapidly
| as not only the Apple M1 arrived, but also AMD started to gain
| real prominence in the laptop market after hitting pretty big
| in the desktop and data center CPU market. (Addendum: and FWIW,
| Intel has also gotten a fair bit better at mobile too in the
| meantime. Their recent mobile chipsets have shown good
| efficiency improvements.)
|
| If Qualcomm's Windows on ARM efforts live past the ARM lawsuit,
| I imagine a couple generations from now they could also have a
| fairly compelling product. In my eyes, there has never been a
| better time to buy a laptop.
|
| (Obligatory: I do have an M2 laptop in my possession from work.
| The hardware is very nice, it beats the battery life on my AMD
| laptop even if the AMD laptop chews through some compute a bit
| faster. That said, I love the AMD laptop because it runs Linux
| really well. I've tried Asahi on an M1 Mac Mini, it is very
| cool but not something I'd consider daily driving soon.)
| dijit wrote:
| > Laptops in general are just better than they used to be,
| with modern CPUs and NVMe disks. I feel exactly the same
| seeing new mobile AMD chips too, I'm pretty sure I'll be
| happy with my Ryzen 7040-based laptop for at least a few
| years.
|
| You say that, but I get extremely frustrated at how slow my
| Surface Pro 10 is (with an Ultra 7 165U).
|
| It could be Windows of course, but this is a much more modern
| machine than my Macbook Air (M1) and feels like it's almost
| 10 years old at times in comparison. - despite being 3-4
| years newer.
| jchw wrote:
| It's true that Linux may be a bit better in some cases, if
| you have a system that has good Linux support, but I think
| in most cases it should never make a very substantial
| difference. On some of the newer Intel laptops, there are
| still missing power management features anyways, so it's
| hard to compare.
|
| That said, Intel still has yet to catch up to AMD on
| efficiency unfortunately, they've improved generationally
| but if you look at power efficiency benchmarks of Intel
| CPUs vs AMD you can see AMD comfortably owns the entire top
| of the chart. Also, as a many-time Microsoft Surface owner,
| I can also confirm that these devices are rarely good
| showcases for the chipsets inside of them: they tend to be
| constrained by both power and thermal limits. There are a
| lot of good laptops on the market, I wouldn't compare a
| MacBook, even a MacBook Air, a laptop, with a Surface Pro,
| a 2-in-1 device. Heck, even my Intel Surface Laptop 4, a
| device I kinda like, isn't the ideal showcase for its
| already mediocre 11th gen Intel processor...
|
| The Mac laptop market is pretty easy: you buy the laptops
| they make, and you get what you get. On one hand, that
| means no need to worry about looking at reviews or
| comparisons, except to pick a model. They all perform
| reasonably well, the touchpad will always be good, the
| keyboard is alright. On the other hand, you really do get
| what you get: no touchscreens, no repairability, no booting
| directly into Windows, etc.
| thrw42A8N wrote:
| I boot Windows on my Mac M1 just fine. Just yesterday I
| played Age of Empires 3.
| jchw wrote:
| I changed the wording to be "booting directly" to clarify
| that I'm not including VMs. If I have to explain why that
| matters I guess I can, but I am pretty sure you know.
| thrw42A8N wrote:
| I am genuinely interested, why does it matter? The
| performance is more than good enough even to run a Visual
| Studio (not Code).
| jchw wrote:
| If the roles were reversed would you still need an
| explanation? e.g. If I could run macOS inside of a VM on
| Windows and run things like Final Cut and XCode with
| sufficient performance, would you think there's no
| benefit to being able to boot macOS natively?
| thrw42A8N wrote:
| Booting natively means you need real drivers, which don't
| exist for Windows on Mac as well as for macOS on PC. It'd
| be useless. Just use the VM, it's good.
|
| And it's not the same - running Windows natively on Mac
| would seriously degrade the Mac, while running macOS on a
| PC has no reason to make it worse than with Windows. Why
| not buy a PC laptop at that point? The close hardware/OS
| integration is the whole point of the product. Putting
| Windows into a VM lets you use best of both.
| jchw wrote:
| The question was a hypothetical. What if the macOS VM was
| perfect? If it was perfect, would it then not matter if
| you couldn't _just_ boot into macOS?
|
| I'm pretty sure you would never use a Windows PC just to
| boot into a macOS VM, even if it was _flawless_. And
| there are people who would never boot a Mac, just to boot
| into a Windows VM, even if it was _flawless_. And no, it
| 's not flawless. Being able to run a relatively old
| strategy game is not a great demonstration of the ability
| generally play any random Windows game. I have a
| Parallels and VMWware Fusion license (well... Had,
| anyway), and I'm a long time (20 years) Linux user, I
| promise that I am not talking out my ass when it comes to
| knowing all about the compromises of interoperability
| software.
|
| To be clear, I am not trying to tell you that the
| interoperability software is useless, or that it doesn't
| work just fine for you. I'm trying to say that in a world
| where the marketshare of Windows is around 70%, a lot of
| people depend on software and workflows that only work on
| Windows. A lot of people buy PCs specifically to play
| video games, possibly even as a job (creating
| videos/streaming/competing in esports teams/ _developing_
| video games and related software) and they don 't want
| additional input latency, lower performance, and worse
| compatibility.
|
| Even the imperfections of virtual machines aside, some
| people just don't _like_ macOS. _I_ don 't _like_ macOS
| or Windows at all. I think they are both irritating to
| use in a way that I find hard to stomach. That doesn 't
| mean that I don't acknowledge the existence of many
| people who very much rely on their macOS and Windows
| systems, the software ecosystems of their respective
| systems, and the workflows that they execute on those
| systems.
|
| So basically, aside from the imperfections of a virtual
| machine, the ability to _choose_ to run Windows as your
| native operating system is really important for the
| obvious case where it 's the operating system you would
| prefer to run.
| thrw42A8N wrote:
| I still don't understand why would you buy a Mac if you
| want to run Windows.
| jchw wrote:
| Exactly. You wouldn't.
| acomjean wrote:
| I'll agree the AMD laptops from the past couple of years are
| really impressive. They are fast enough that I've done some
| bioinformatics work on one.
|
| Battery life is decent.
|
| At this point I'm not switching from laptop Linux. The
| machines can even game (thanks proton/steam)
| caycep wrote:
| the office Ryzen thinkpads we have are ok...but they're
| definitely no M1 MacBook Air or Pro...
| jchw wrote:
| If we're mostly concerned about CPU grunt, it's really
| hard to question the Ryzen 7040, which like the M1, is
| also not the newest generation chip, though it _is_ newer
| than the M1 by a couple of years. Still, comparing an M1
| MacBook Pro with a Framework 16 on Geekbench:
|
| https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-
| pro-14-inch-2021-...
|
| https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/4260192
|
| Both of these CPUs perform well enough that most users
| will not need to be concerned at all about the compute
| power. Newer CPUs are doing better but it'd be hard to
| notice day-to-day.
|
| As for other laptop features... That'll obviously be
| vendor-dependent. The biggest advantage of the PC market
| is all of the choices you get to make, and the biggest
| disadvantage of the PC market is all of the choices you
| have to make. (Edit: Though if anyone wants a comparison
| point, just for sake of argument, I think generally the
| strongest options have been from ASUS. Right now, the
| Zephyrus G16 has been reviewing pretty good, with people
| mostly just complaining that it is too expensive.
| Certainly can't argue with that. Personally, I run
| Framework, but I don't really run the latest-and-greatest
| mobile chipsets most of the time, and I don't think
| Framework is ideal for people who want that.)
| ikari_pl wrote:
| what about heat and noise?
|
| those are another two reasons why I can't ignore Apple
| Silicon
| jchw wrote:
| Ultimately it'll be subjective, but the fans don't really
| spin up on my Framework 16 unless I push things. Running
| a game or compiling on all cores for a while will do the
| trick. The exact battery life, thermals and noise will be
| heavily dependent on the laptop; the TDP of modern laptop
| CPUs is probably mostly pretty comparable so a lot of it
| will come down to thermal design. Same for battery life
| and noise, depends a lot on things other than the CPU.
| chx wrote:
| I am on Intel TGL currently and can't wait for Strix Halo
| next year. That is truly something else, it's nothing we have
| seen in notebooks before iGPU wise.
| jchw wrote:
| I've had a couple of Tiger Lake laptops, a Thinkpad and I
| believe my Surface Laptop 4. Based on my experience with
| _current_ AMD mobile chipsets, I can only imagine the Strix
| Halo will be quite a massive uplift for you even if the
| generational improvements aren 't impressive.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| >Laptops in general are just better than they used to be,
| with modern CPUs and NVMe disks.
|
| I've had my xps 13 since 2016. Really the _only_ fault I have
| against it nowadays is that 8gb of ram is not sufficient to
| run intellij anymore (hell, sometimes it even bogs down my
| 16gb mbp).
|
| Now, I've also built an absolute _beast_ of a workstation
| with a 7800x3d, 64gb ram, 24 gb vram and a fast ssd. Is it
| faster than both? Yeah. Is my old xps slow enough to annoy
| me? Not really. Youtube has been sluggish to load / render
| here lately but I think that's much more that google is
| making changes to make firefox / ublock a worse experience
| than any fault of the laptop.
| xethos wrote:
| Regarding Youtube, Google is also waging a silent war
| against Invidious. It's to the point that even running
| helper scripts to trick Youtube isn't enough (yet). I can't
| imagine battling active and clever adversaries _speeds up_
| Youtube page loads as it runs through its myriad checks
| that block Invidious.
| bjackman wrote:
| I only do coding & browsing so maybe I'm a weak example but I
| find this even with my pretty old Intel laptops these days.
|
| My Skylake one (I think that would be 6 years old now?) is
| doing absolutely fine. My Broadwell one is starting to feel a
| little aged but perfectly usable, I wouldn't even _consider_
| upgrading it if I was in the bottom 95% of global income.
|
| Compiling is very slow on these, but I think I'd avoid
| compilation on my laptop even if I had a cutting edge CPU?
| jchw wrote:
| Depends. I _used_ to offload almost all compilation tasks,
| but now I only really do this if it 's especially large. If
| I want to update my NixOS configuration I don't bother
| offloading it anymore. (NixOS isn't exactly Gentoo or
| anything, but I do have some overrides that necessitate a
| decent amount of compilation, mainly dogfooding my merge
| requests before they get merged/released.)
|
| YMMV.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > If Qualcomm's Windows on ARM efforts live past the ARM
| lawsuit
|
| FWIW, Qualcomm cancelled orders of its Windows devkit and
| issued refunds before the lawsuit. That is probably not a
| good sign
| dawnerd wrote:
| Guess that's why most of their comparisons are with the older
| Intel Macs.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| And M1 from 4 years ago instead of M3 from last year; while a
| 2x speed improvement in the benchmarks they listed is good,
| it also shows that the M series CPUs see incremental
| improvements, not exponential or revolutionary. I get the
| feeling - but a CPU expert can correct me / say more - that
| their base design is mostly unchanged since M1, but the
| manufacturing process has improved (leading to less power
| consumption/heat), the amount of cores has increased, and
| they added specialized hardware for AI-related workloads.
|
| That said, they are in a very comfortable position right now,
| with neither Intel, AMD, or another competitor able to
| produce anything close to the bang-for-watt that Apple is
| managing. Little pressure from behind them to push for more
| performance.
| Zafira wrote:
| Their sales pitch when they released the M1 was that the
| architecture would scale linearly and so far this appears
| to be true.
|
| It seems like they bump the base frequency of the CPU cores
| with every revision to get some easy performance gains (the
| M1 was 3.2 GHz and the M3 is now 4.1 GHz for the
| performance cores), but it looks like this comes at the
| cost of it not being able to maintain the performance; some
| M3 reviews noted that the system starts throttling much
| earlier than an M1.
| jart wrote:
| I hate to say it but that's like a boomer saying they never
| felt the need to buy a computer, because they've never wished
| their pen and paper goes faster. Or a UNIX greybeard saying
| they don't need a Mac since they don't think its GUI would make
| their terminal go any faster. If you've hit a point in your
| life where you're no longer keeping up with the latest
| technological developments like AI, then of course you don't
| need to upgrade. A Macbook M1 can't run half the stuff posted
| on Hugging Face these days. Even my 128gb Mac Studio isn't
| nearly enough.
| rconti wrote:
| I think the difference is that AI is a very narrow
| niche/hobby at the moment. Of course if you're in that niche
| having more horsepower is critical. But your boomer/greybeard
| comparisons fall flat because they're generally about age or
| being set in your ways. I don't think "not being into AI
| image generation" is (currently) about being stuck in your
| ways.
|
| To me it's more like 3d printing as a niche/hobby.
| ach9l wrote:
| on ai being a niche/hobby at the moment... feels like
| something a unix greybeard would say about guis in the late
| 70s...
| jart wrote:
| Or what a prokaryote would say about eukaryotes.
| alluro2 wrote:
| Seems like we've reached the "AI bro" phase...
| jart wrote:
| Using the term "bro" assumes that all AI supporters are
| men. This erases the fact that many women and nonbinary
| people are also passionate about AI technology and are
| contributing to its development. By using "AI bro" as an
| insult, you are essentially saying that women and
| nonbinary people are not welcome in the AI community and
| that our contributions don't matter. https://www.reddit.c
| om/r/aiwars/comments/13zhpa7/the_misogyn...
| bilbo0s wrote:
| Huh?
|
| How old are you?
|
| "Bro" has been gender neutral for over a decade. Males
| and females under the age of 25 call each other "bro" all
| the time.
| wtallis wrote:
| Is there an alternative term you would prefer people to
| use when referring to a pattern of behavior perceived as
| a combination of being _too_ excited about AI and being
| unaware (perhaps willfully) that other people can be
| reasonably be much less interested in the hype? Because
| that argument could definitely benefit from being immune
| to deflections based on accusations of sexism.
| jart wrote:
| When I see that someone is excited about something, I
| believe in encouraging them. If you're looking for a more
| polite word to disparage people who love and are
| optimistic about something new, then you're overlooking
| what that says about your character. Also AI isn't just
| another fad like NFTs and web3. This is it. This is the
| big one.
| wtallis wrote:
| > Also AI isn't just another fad like NFTs and web3. This
| is it. This is the big one.
|
| That's _thoroughly_ unconvincing. That kind of talk is
| _exactly_ what so many people are tired of hearing.
| Especially if it 's coming from technically-minded people
| who don't have any reason to be talking like PR drones.
| alluro2 wrote:
| I get that you're probably joking, but - if I use Claude
| / ChatGPT o1 in my editor and browser, on an M1 Pro -
| what exactly am I missing by not running e.g. HF models
| locally? Am I still the greybeard without realising?
| jart wrote:
| It's like asking what you're missing by not using Linux
| if you're using Windows.
| Eugr wrote:
| Privacy? Lots of companies do not allow using public
| chatbots for anything proprietary.
| vundercind wrote:
| Playing with them locally? Yes, of course it's a niche
| hobby. The people doing stuff with them that's not either
| playing with them or developing not just an "AI" product,
| but a specific _sort_ of AI product, are just using
| ChatGPT or some other prepackaged thing that either doesn
| 't run locally, or does, but is sized to fit on ordinary
| hardware.
|
| < 1% of all engagement with a category thing is
| niche/hobby, yes.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| It's something a regular person would say to a Unix
| greybeard, which in and of itself was always and still is
| a very niche hobby.
| ach9l wrote:
| you could not say this better than this.
| gniv wrote:
| > A Macbook M1 can't run half the stuff posted on Hugging
| Face these days.
|
| Example?
| jart wrote:
| LLaMA 3.1 405B
| int_19h wrote:
| Given that models are only going to get larger, and the
| sheer amount of compute required, I think the endgame
| here is dedicated "inference boxes" that actual user-
| facing devices call into. There are already a couple of
| home appliances like these - NAS, home automation servers
| - which have some intersecting requirements (e.g. storage
| for NAS) - so maybe we just need to resurrect the "home
| server" category.
| jart wrote:
| I agree, and if you want to have the opportunity to build
| such a product, then you need a computer whose specs
| today are what a home server would have in four years. If
| you want to build the future you have to live in the
| future. I'm proud to make stuff most people can't even
| run yet, because I know they'll be able to soon. That
| buys me time to polish their future and work out all the
| bugs too.
| chrsw wrote:
| I thought LLaMA 3.1 405B was a relatively huge model. Is
| the size of this model really typical of half the models
| you find on Hugging Face these days?
| mrweasel wrote:
| > If you've hit a point in your life where you're no longer
| keeping up with the latest technological developments like
| AI, then of course you don't need to upgrade.
|
| That's me, I don't give a shit about AI, video editing,
| modern gaming or Kubernetes. That newest and heaviest piece
| of software I care about is VSCode. So I think you're
| absolutely correct. Most things new since Docker and VSCode
| has not contributed massively to how I work and most of the
| things I do could be done just fine 8-10 years ago.
| dsv3099i wrote:
| That's interesting because I would've thought having strong
| local compute was the old way of thinking. I run huge jobs
| that consume very large amounts of compute. But the machines
| doing the work aren't even in the same state I'm in. Then
| again maybe I'm even older as I'm basically on the terminal
| server / mainframe compute model. :)
| nonameiguess wrote:
| So every user of a computer that doesn't create their own
| home-grown ML models is a boomer? This can't possibly be a
| generational thing. Just about everyone on the planet is at a
| place in their life where they don't make their own AIs.
| jart wrote:
| Eventually as the tools for doing it become better they'll
| all want to or need to. By then, most computers will be
| capable of running those tools too. Which means when that
| happens, people will come up another way to push the limits
| of compute.
| danielbln wrote:
| I work with AI models all day every day, keep up with
| everything, love frontier tech, I love and breathe LLMs. And
| I, like OP, haven't seen the need to upgrade from the M1 MBP
| because it runs the small 1-7B models just fine, and anything
| bigger I want on some GPU instance anyway, or I want a
| frontier model which wouldn't run on the newest and biggest
| MBP. So it's not just us Boomers hating on new stuff, the M
| series MacBooks are just really good.
| jart wrote:
| I fully support using Macbooks as a thin client into a
| better computer. So long as it's your computer.
| fstephany wrote:
| I have the same feeling performance-wise with the laptop I
| bought in 2020 with a Ryzen 7 4800H.
|
| But it's a heavy brick with a short battery life compared to
| the M1/2/3 Mac.
| JyB wrote:
| Same feeling. The jump from all the previous laptops I owned to
| an M1 was an incredible jump. The thing is fast, has amazing
| battery life and stays cold. Never felt the need to upgrade.
| bhouston wrote:
| > I haven't had even a tinge of feeling that I need to upgrade
| after getting my M1 Pro MBP.
|
| I upgraded my M1 MBP to a MacBook Air M3 15" and it was a major
| upgrade. It is the same weight but 40% faster and so much nicer
| to work on while on the sofa or traveling. The screen is also
| brighter.
|
| I think very few people actually do need the heavy MBPs,
| especially not the web/full-stack devs who populate Hacker
| News.
|
| EDIT: The screens are not different in terms of brightness.
| 05 wrote:
| Pretty sure Air displays don't support HDR, are they really
| brighter?
| bhouston wrote:
| I am not sure. I notice a difference. Maybe it is just
| screen age related?
| 05 wrote:
| They supposedly have the same base brightness (500 nits),
| with Pro allowing up to 1000 in HDR mode (and up to 1600
| peak).
|
| Air doesn't support 120Hz refresh either.
|
| There's an app that allows to unlock max brightness on
| Pros (Vivid)[0] even without HDR content (no
| affiliation).
|
| HDR support is most noticeable when viewing iPhone photos
| and videos, since iPhones shoots in HDR by default.
|
| [0] https://www.getvivid.app
| bhouston wrote:
| I just looked at it again side by side and I think they
| are actually the same. Not sure why I earlier thought
| they were different.
| nottorp wrote:
| On a tangent, if I have a M3 pro laptop how do I test
| HDR? Download a test movie from where, play it with what?
|
| I may or may have not seen HDR content accidentally, but
| I'm not sure.
| inDigiNeous wrote:
| You can just search for HDR videos in Youtube.
| qubitcoder wrote:
| You can search for videos on YouTube and filter by HDR.
| Apple TV shows are typically in HDR (Dolby Vision). Here
| are a couple of examples:
|
| [0] Hawaii LG Demo:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBJzp-y4BHA [1] Nature
| Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFFGbZIqi3U
|
| YouTube shows a small red "HDR" label on the video
| settings icon for actual HDR content. For this label to
| appear, the display must support HDR. With your M3 Pro,
| the HDR label should appear in Chrome and Safari.
|
| You can also right-click on the video to enable "Stats
| for nerds" for more details. Next to color, look for
| "smpte2084 (PQ) / bt2020". That's usually the highest-
| quality HDR video [2,3].
|
| You can ignore claims such as "Dolby Vision/Audio".
| YouTube doesn't support those formats, even if the source
| material used it. When searching for videos, apply the
| HDR filter afterward to avoid videos falsely described as
| "HDR".
|
| Keep in mind that macOS uses a different approach when
| rendering HDR content. Any UI elements outside the HDR
| content window will be slightly dimmed, while the HDR
| region will use the full dynamic range.
|
| I consider Vivid [4] an essential app for MacBook Pro XDR
| displays.
|
| Once installed, you can keep pressing the "increase
| brightness" key to go beyond the default SDR range,
| effectively doubling the brightness of your display
| without sacrificing color accuracy. It's especially
| useful outdoors, even indoors, depending on the lighting
| conditions. And fantastic for demoing content to
| colleagues or in public settings (like conference
| booths).
|
| [2] https://www.benq.com/en-us/knowledge-
| center/knowledge/bt2020... [3]
| https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/32320 (see section 4) [4]
| https://www.getvivid.app/
| rizzaxc wrote:
| the Air doesn't have ProMotion right? that feature is non-
| negotiable on any display for me nowadays
| sroussey wrote:
| I have ProMotion on my MBP and iPhone but... it's ok?
| Honestly, I use an older computer or iPhone temporarily and
| don't notice a difference.
|
| I'm looking forward to the day I notice the difference so I
| can appreciate what I have.
| danieldk wrote:
| I find 60Hz on the non-Pro iPhone obnoxious since
| switching to 120Hz screens. On the other hand, I do not
| care much about 60Hz when it comes to computer screens. I
| think touch interfaces make low refresh rates much more
| noticeable.
| nottorp wrote:
| I wonder. Do you do a lot of doom scrolling?
|
| I can't understand the people who notice the 120 hz
| adaptive refresh whatever and one guess is their use is a
| lot twitchier than mine.
| danieldk wrote:
| No doomscrolling at all. Even when switching between home
| screens is like it's dropping frames left and right (it's
| not of course, but that's what it looks like coming from
| 120Hz). A Galaxy A54 that we still have in the house that
| was just over 300 Euro feels much smoother than my old
| iPhone 15 that cost close to 1000 Euro because it has a
| 120Hz screen.
|
| Even 90Hz (like on some Pixels) is substantially better
| than the iPhone's 60Hz.
| grujicd wrote:
| For me faster refresh rate is noticeable on phone or ipad
| where you scroll all the time. On a laptop you don't have
| that much smooth scrolling. For me it's a non issue on
| laptop, not even once I wished it had faster refresh. While
| I always notice when switching between Pro and non Pro
| iPad.
| tebbers wrote:
| Looked at it but ruled out the Air due to lack of ports and
| limited RAM upgrades.
| macNchz wrote:
| > I think very few people actually do need the heavy MBPs,
| especially not the web/full-stack devs who populate Hacker
| News.
|
| I can fairly easily get my M1 Air to have thermal issues
| while on extended video calls with some Docker containers
| running, and have been on calls with others having the same
| issue. Kind of sucks if it's, say, an important demo. I
| mostly use it as a thin client to my desktop when I'm away
| from home, so it's not really an issue, but if I were using
| it as a primary device I'd want a machine with a fan.
| bhouston wrote:
| That makes sense from your workflow needs.
|
| I try to avoid docker in general during local dev and
| luckily it has worked out for me even with microservice
| architectures. It reduces dramatically CPU and RAM needs
| and also reduces cycle time.
| rconti wrote:
| It's so nice being able to advise a family member who is
| looking to upgrade their intel Mac to something new, and just
| tell them to buy whatever is out, not worry about release
| dates, not worry about things being out of date, and so on.
|
| The latest of whatever you have will be so much better than the
| intel one, and the next advances will be so marginal, that it's
| not even worth looking at a buyer's guide.
| baq wrote:
| M3 Air with 16gb (base config as of today) is potentially a
| decade's worth of computer. Amazing value.
| chamomeal wrote:
| Base 16gb is absolutely wild. My base m2 air with 8gb is
| _almost_ enough to handle anything I'd ever want it to
| without zero slowdown.
|
| A 16gb model for about a thousand bucks?? I can't believe
| how far macbooks have come in the last few years
| 1R053 wrote:
| probably the next update wave is coming from the need of AI
| features for more local memory and compute. The software is
| just not there yet in usual tasks but it's just a question of
| time I guess. Of course there will be the pressure to do that
| in the cloud as usual, but local compute will always remain a
| market.
|
| and probably it's good that at least one of the big players has
| a business model that supports driving that forward
| prmoustache wrote:
| > Perhaps it's my age, or perhaps it's just the architecture of
| these new Mac chips are just so damn good.
|
| I feel the same of my laptop of 2011 so I guess it is partly
| age (not feeling the urge to always have the greatest) and
| partly it is non LLM and gaming related computing is not
| demanding enough to force us to upgrade.
| data-ottawa wrote:
| I think the last decade had an explosion in the amount of
| resources browsers needed and used (partly workloads moving
| over, partly moving to more advanced web frameworks, partly
| electron apps proliferating).
|
| The last few years Chrome seems to have stepped up energy and
| memory use, which impacts most casual use these days. Safari
| has also become more efficient, but it never felt bloated the
| way Chrome used to.
| fullspectrumdev wrote:
| Tbf, the only thing I miss with my M2 MacBook is the ability to
| run x86_64 VM's with decent performance locally.
|
| I've tried a bunch of ways to do this - and frankly the
| translation overhead is absolute pants currently.
|
| Not a showstopper though, for the 20-30% of complete pain in
| the ass cases where I can't easily offload the job onto a VPS
| or a NUC or something, I just have a ThinkPad.
| turnsout wrote:
| Same boat--I'm on a lowly M1 MacBook Air, and haven't felt any
| need to upgrade (SwiftUI development, video editing, you name
| it), which is wild for a nearly 4 year-old laptop.
| frantathefranta wrote:
| Out of curiosity and also because I'm wondering which
| specification to potentially buy in the future, how much RAM
| does your MBP have?
| nhumrich wrote:
| I dont think this has anything to do with the hardware. I think
| we have entered an age where users in general are not
| upgrading. As such, software can't demand more and more
| performance. The M1 came out at a time where mostly all
| hardware innovation had staggered. Default RAM in a laptop has
| been 16G for over 5 years. 2 years ago, you couldn't even get
| more than 16 in most laptops. As such, software hardware
| requirements havent changed. So any modern CPU is going to feel
| overpowered. This isn't unique to M1's.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| That's because today's hw is perfectly capable of running
| tomorrow's software at reasonable speed. There aren't huge
| drivers of new functionality that needs new software.
| Displays are fantastic, cellular speeds are amazing and can
| stream video, battery life is excellent, UIs are smooth with
| no jankiness, and cameras are good enough.
|
| Why would people feel the need to upgrade?
|
| And this applies already to phones. Laptops have been slowing
| for even longer.
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| Until everything starts running local inference. A _real_
| Siri that can operate your phone for you, and actually do
| things like process cross-app conditions ( "Hey Siri, if I
| get an email from my wife today, notify me, then block out
| my calendar for the afternoon.") would use those increased
| compute and memory resources easily.
|
| Apple has been shipping "neural" processors for a while
| now, and when software with local inference starts landing,
| Apple hardware will be a natural place for it. They'll get
| to say "Your data, on your device, working for you; no
| subscription or API key needed."
| vlovich123 wrote:
| That's a very big maybe. The LLM experience locally is
| currently very very different from the hosted models most
| people play with. The future is still very uncertain.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| I standardized on 16gb for my laptops over 10 years ago. I
| keep a late 2013 MBP with 16 for testing projects on,
| separate from my main Linux box.
|
| Getting an extra five years of longevity (after RAM became
| fixed) for an extra 10% was a no-brainer imho.
| samatman wrote:
| I upgraded from the last 16" MBP Intel sold to the first 16"
| MBP M1 available.
|
| It is absolutely, 100%, no doubt in my mind: the hardware.
| stouset wrote:
| I feel exactly the same. The one thing that would get me to
| pull the trigger on a newer one is if they start supporting
| SVE2 instructions, which would be super useful for a specific
| programming project I've been playing with.
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| I got an MBP M1 with 32gb of RAM. It'll probably be another 2-3
| years or longer before I feel the pressure to upgrade if not
| longer. I've even started gaming (something I dropped nearly 20
| years ago when I switched to mac) again due to Geforce Now, I
| just don't see the reason.
|
| Frankly though, if the mac mini was a slightly lower price
| point I'd definitely create my own mac mini cluster for my AI
| home lab.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| My 2019 Intel MBP is getting long in the tooth. These M4 Pros
| look great to me.
|
| The base model is perfect. Now to decide between the M3/M4 Air
| and the M4 Pro.
| charliebwrites wrote:
| I'm using the M3 Air 13 in (splurged for 24 GB of RAM, I'm
| sure 16 is fine) to make iOS apps in Xcode and produce music
| in Ableton and it's been more than performant for those tasks
|
| Only downside is the screen. The brightness sort of has to be
| maxed out to be readable and viewing at a wrong angle makes
| even that imperfect
|
| That said it's about the same size / weight as an iPad Pro
| which feels much more portable than a pro device
| digitalsushi wrote:
| when the hardware wait time is the same as the duration of my
| impulsive decisions i no longer have a hardware speed problem,
| i have a software suggestion problem
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| I bought my M1 Pro MBP in 2021. Gave it 16G of RAM and a 1TB
| HD. I plan to keep it until circa 2031.
| gniv wrote:
| I've had Macs before, from work, but there is something about
| the M1 Pro that feels like a major step up.
|
| Only recently I noticed some slowness. I think Google Photos
| changed something and they show photos in HDR and it causes
| unsmooth scrolling. I wonder if it's something fixable on
| Google's side though.
| danieldk wrote:
| Same. I used to upgrade every 1.5 years or so. But with every
| Apple Silicon generation so far I have felt that there are
| really no good reasons to upgrade. I have a MacBook M3 Pro for
| work, but there are no convincing differences compared to the
| M1 Pro.
|
| In fact, I bought a highly discounted Mac Studio with M1 Ultra
| because the M1 is still so good and it gives me 10Gbit
| ethernet, 20 cores and a lot of memory.
|
| The only thing I am thinking about is going back to the MacBook
| Air again since I like the lighter form factor. But the
| display, 24 GiB max RAM and only 2 Thunderbolt ports would be a
| significant downgrade.
| sylens wrote:
| Agreed. Also rocking a M1 Pro MBP and can't see myself
| replacing it until it dies
| AISnakeOil wrote:
| This is how it feels to own a desktop computer.
| matwood wrote:
| Same. I have an M1 Max 64GB. It has great battery life and I
| never feel myself waiting on anything. Such an amazing computer
| all around.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I think regretting Mac upgrades is a real thing, at least for
| me. I got a 32G Mac mini in January to run local LLMs. While it
| does so beautifully, there are now smaller LLMs that run fine
| on my very old 8G M1 MacBook Pro, and these newer smaller
| models do almost all of what I want for NLP tasks, data
| transformation, RAG, etc. I feel like I wasted my money.
| xenospn wrote:
| Which ones in particular? I have an M2 air with 8GB, and
| doing some RAG development locally would be fantastic. I
| tried running Ollama with llama3.2 and it predictably bombed.
| tarruda wrote:
| Small models retain much less of the knowledge they were
| trained on, especially when quantized.
|
| One good use case for 32gb Mac is being able to run 8b models
| at full precision, something that is not possible with 8-16gb
| macs
| Eugr wrote:
| Or better run quantized 14B or even 32B models...
| fwip wrote:
| You can sell it, get most of your money back.
| JodieBenitez wrote:
| Ditto... will probably upgrade when the battery is dead !
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| I got 6+ years out of my last intel MacBook Pro and expect at
| least the same from my M1 Max. Both have MagSafe and hdmi
| output :)
| crazygringo wrote:
| Yup, honestly the main reason I'd like to upgrade from my M1
| MBA is the newer webcams are 1080p instead of 720p, and
| particularly much better in low light like in the evening.
|
| Has nothing whatsoever to do with CPU/memory/etc.
| rafaelmn wrote:
| If you're in the ecosystem get an iphone mount - image
| quality is unreal compared to anything short of some fancy
| DSLR setup - it is some setup but not much with magnets in
| iphone.
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| But this ad is specifically for you! (Well, and those pesky
| consumers clinging on to that i7!):
|
| > Up to 7x faster image processing in Affinity Photo when
| compared to the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Core i7, and up to
| 1.8x faster when compared to the 13-inch MacBook Pro with M1.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Work just upgraded my M1 Pro to M3 Pro and I don't notice any
| difference except for now having two laptops.
| kromokromo wrote:
| 100% agree on this. Ive had this thing for 3 years and I still
| appreciate how good it is. Of course the M4 tingles my desire
| for new cool toys, but I honestly don't think I would notice
| much difference with my current use.
| noman-land wrote:
| I would normally never upgrade so soon after getting an M1 but
| running local LLMs is _extremely_ cool and useful to the point
| where I 'd want the extra RAM and CPU to run larger models more
| quickly.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| I have a 64gb M1 Max and already do that
|
| but yes, I was looking at and anticipating the max RAM on the
| M4 as well as the max memory speed
|
| 128gb and 546GB/s memory bandwidth
|
| I like it, I don't know yet on an upgrade. But I like it. Was
| hoping for more RAM actually, but this is nice.
| astrostl wrote:
| I'm bumping from a still-excellent M1 MAX / 64GB to M4 MAX /
| 128GB, mostly for local GenAI. It gives me some other uplift
| and also enables me to sell this system while it's still
| attractive. I'm able to exhaust local 7B models fairly easily
| on it.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I have a 2009 and a 2018 Windows laptops.
|
| The only reason the 2009 one now gets little use, is its
| motherboard now has some electronic issues, otherwise it would
| serve me perfectly well.
| davidhariri wrote:
| I think this is confirmed by the fact software vendors are
| still not taking advantage of ARM chips maximum performance.
|
| Where this might shift is as we start using more applications
| that are powered by locally running LLMs.
| crystal_revenge wrote:
| On the other side, as someone doing a lot of work in the GenAI
| space, I'm simultaneously amazed that I can run Flux [dev] on
| my _laptop_ and use local LLMs for a variety of tasks, while
| also wishing that I had more RAM and more processing power,
| despite having a top of the line M3 max MBP.
|
| But it is wild that two years ago running any sort of useful
| genAI stuff on a MBP was more-or-less a theoretical curiosity,
| and already today you can easily run models that would have
| exceeded SotA 2 years ago.
|
| Somewhat ironically, I got into the "AI" space a complete
| skeptic, but thinking it would be fun to play with nonetheless.
| After 2 years of daily work with this models I'm starting to be
| increasingly convinced they _are_ going to become increasingly
| disruptive. No AGI, but it will certainly reduce a lot of labor
| _and_ enable things that we 're really feasible before. Best of
| all, it's clear a lot of this work will be doable from a
| laptop!
| tomcam wrote:
| I would love to hear more about what exactly you think will
| be disruptive. I don't know the LLM world very well.
| dagw wrote:
| The only reason I'd want to upgrade my M1 Pro MBP is because I
| kind of need more RAM and storage. The fact that I'm even
| considering a new laptop just for things that before could have
| been a trivial upgrade is quite illuminating.
| erickhill wrote:
| I have an MBP M1 Max and the only time I really feel like I
| need more oomph is when I'm doing live previews and/or
| rendering in After Effects. I find myself having to clear the
| cache constantly.
|
| Other than that it cruises across all other applications. Hard
| to justify an upgrade purely for that one issue when everything
| else is so solid. But it does make the eyes wander...
| jfoster wrote:
| I expect this trend to begin reversing as we start getting AI
| models that are intended to run locally.
| drcongo wrote:
| I also have an M1 Pro MBP and mostly feel the same. The most
| tempting thing about the new ones is the space black option.
| Prior to the M1, I was getting a new laptop every year or two
| and there was always something _wrong_ with them - butterfly
| keyboard, Touch Bar etc. This thing is essentially perfect
| though, it still feels and performs like a brand new computer.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| I don't think there's any sort of processor for the last 10
| years. It really makes me feel like I need to upgrade.
|
| What I do know is that Linux constantly breaks stuff. I don't
| even think it's treading water. These are interfaces are
| actively getting worse.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| I agree with you about not needing to upgrade but, it still
| stands that IMHO Apple is better off with upgrading or even
| having the need to upgrade with competition. (Also it's really
| good that Macs now have 16GB of ram by default). As I have had
| my M1 14.2 Max I believe that the only reason I would want to
| upgrade is that I can configure it with 128GB of ram which
| allows you to load newer AI models on device.
|
| The MacBook Pro seems like it does have some quality of life
| improvements such as Thunderbolt 5, the camera is now a center
| stage (follows you) 14 megapixel camera now all of them have
| three USB-C ports and the battery life claims of 22-24 hours.
| Regardless if you want a MacBook Pro and you don't have one
| there is now an argument on not just going to buy the previous
| model.
| 7ewis wrote:
| I have exactly the same experience, usually after 3 years I'm
| desperate for new Mac but right now I genuinely think I'd
| prefer not to change. I have absolutely no issues with my M1
| Pro, battery and performance is still great.
| matthoiland wrote:
| I feel the same way about my M1 Macbook Air ... it's such a
| silly small and powerful machine. I've got money to upgrade, I
| just have no need. It's more than enough for even demanding
| Logic sessions and Ollama for most 8b models. I love it.
| clairegraham wrote:
| Same. The upgrade from my Intel MBP to the M1 Pro 2011 was
| huge, but I haven't felt the need to upgrade at all.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| My 2019 i9 flagship MBP is just so, so terrible, and my wife's
| M1 MacBook Air is so, so great. I can't get over how much
| better her computer is than mine.
| jcelerier wrote:
| Interesting, I have a M2 Pro Mac Mini and I hit limits
| literally every day
| bzzzt wrote:
| All hardware has limits. Which ones are you hitting every
| day?
| tshaddox wrote:
| > Perhaps it's my age
|
| I always catch myself in this same train of thought until it
| finally re-occurs to me that "no, the variable here is just
| that you're old." Part of it is that I have more money now, so
| I buy better products that last longer. Part of it is that I
| have less uninterrupted time for diving deeply into new
| interests which leads to always having new products on the
| wishlist.
|
| In the world of personal computers, I've seen very few must-
| have advances in adulthood. The only two unquestionable big
| jumps I can think of off hand are Apple's 5K screens (how has
| that been ten years?!) and Apple Silicon. Other huge
| improvements were more gradual, like Wi-Fi, affordable SSDs,
| and energy efficiency. (Of course it's notable that I'm not
| into PC gaming, where I know there has been incredible advances
| in performance and display tech.)
| bhouston wrote:
| Does anyone have benchmarks for the M4 Pro or M4 Max CPUs yet?
| Would love to see Geekbench scores for those.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| Can someone please help me out with this? I'm torn between Mac
| mini and and MacBook Pro, specifically the CPU spec difference.
|
| MBP: Apple M4 Max chip with 16-core CPU, 40-core GPU and 16-core
| Neural Engine
|
| Mac mini: Apple M4 Pro chip with 14-core CPU, 20-core GPU,
| 16-core Neural Engine
|
| What kind of workload would make me regret not having bought MBP
| over Mac mini given the above. Thanks!
| bhouston wrote:
| For normal web dev, any M4 CPU is good as it is mostly
| dependent on single core speed. If you need to compile Unreal
| Engine (C++ with lots of threads), video processing or 3D
| rendering, more cores is important.
|
| I think you need to pick the form factor that you need combined
| with the use case:
|
| - Mobility and fast single core speeds: MacBook Air
|
| - Mobility and multi-core: MacBook Pro with M4 Max
|
| - Desktop with lots of cores: Mac Studio
|
| - Desktop for single core: Mac mini
|
| I really enjoy my MacBook Air M3 24GB for desktop + mobile use
| for webdev: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41988340
| alberth wrote:
| Since the only real difference is number of GPUs, it'd be:
|
| - photo/video editing
|
| - games, or
|
| - AI (training / inference)
|
| that would benefit from the extra GPUs.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| ^3D work - Maya, Blender, etc. Probably would be best on a
| Studio or workstation if/when those are available again.
| subarctic wrote:
| Doesn't it make a bigger difference that one of them is a
| laptop and one of them is a mini computer that you have to
| leave plugged in?
| TIPSIO wrote:
| The keyboard touch button (top right) is objectively hideous and
| looks cheap. My current TouchBar may be useless but at least
| looks nice.
| bloopernova wrote:
| Trying to find how many external displays the base model
| supports. Because corps almost always buy the base model
| #firstworldproblems
|
| The base model doesn't support thunderbolt 5.
|
| And the base model still doesn't support more than 2 external
| displays without the DisplaySync (not DisplayPort!)
| hardware+software.
| fckgw wrote:
| https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/specs/
|
| "M4 and M4 Pro
|
| Simultaneously supports full native resolution on the built-in
| display at 1 billion colors and:
|
| Up to two external displays with up to 6K resolution at 60Hz
| over Thunderbolt, or one external display with up to 6K
| resolution at 60Hz over Thunderbolt and one external display
| with up to 4K resolution at 144Hz over HDMI
|
| One external display supported at 8K resolution at 60Hz or one
| external display at 4K resolution at 240Hz over HDMI"
| mmcnl wrote:
| Two displays with the lid open.
|
| "The display engine of the M4 family is enhanced to support two
| external displays in addition to a built-in display."
|
| https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/10/apple-introduces-m4-p...
| iluvcommunism wrote:
| I have an m3 ultra. I don't think I need to upgrade. I also find
| it amusing they're comparing the m4 to the m1 and i7 processors.
| sroussey wrote:
| There is no M3 Ultra.
| roopepal wrote:
| I find it amusing how you answer your own "question" before
| asking it. Why would they target the marketing material at
| people who already know they aren't going to need to upgrade?
| RobinL wrote:
| Can anyone comment on the viability of using an external SSD
| rather than upgrading storage? Specifically for data analysis
| (e.g. storing/analysing parquet files using Python/duckdb, or
| video editing using divinci resolve).
|
| Also, any recommendations for suitable ssds, ideally not too
| expensive? Thank you!
| thejazzman wrote:
| i go with the acasis thunderbolt enclosure and then pop in an
| nvme of your choice, but generic USB drives are pretty viable
| too ... thunderbolt can be booted from, while USB can't
|
| i tried another brand or 2 of enclosures and they were HUGE
| while the acasis was credit card sized (except thickness)
| rbanffy wrote:
| The USB-C ports should be quite enough for that. If you are
| using a desktop Mac, such as an iMac, Mini, or the Studio and
| Pro that will be released later this week, this is a no-brainer
| - everything works perfectly.
| Tepix wrote:
| Run your current workload on internal storage and check how
| fast it is reading and writing.
|
| For video editing - even 8K RAW - you don't need insanely fast
| storage. A 10GBit/s external SSD will not slow you down.
| AlphaWeaver wrote:
| I've used a Samsung T5 SSD as my CacheClip location in Resolve
| and it works decently well! Resolve doesn't always tolerate
| disconnects very well, but when it's plugged in things are very
| smooth.
| pier25 wrote:
| It's totally fine.
|
| With a TB4 case with an NVME you can get something like
| 2300MB/s read speeds. You can also use a USB4 case which will
| give you over 3000MB/s (this is what I'm doing for storing
| video footage for Resolve).
|
| With a TB5 case you can go to like 6000MB/s. See this SSD by
| OWC:
|
| https://www.owc.com/solutions/envoy-ultra
| spopejoy wrote:
| I'm a little sus of owc these days, their drives are way
| expensive, never get any third-party reviews or testing, and
| their warranty is horrible (3 years). I've previously swore
| by them so it's a little disappointing
| pier25 wrote:
| The only OWC product I own is a TB4 dock and so far it has
| been rock solid.
| trogdor wrote:
| > Also, any recommendations for suitable ssds, ideally not too
| expensive?
|
| I own a media production company. We use Sabrent Thunderbolt
| external NVMe TLC SSDs and are very happy with their price,
| quality, and performance.
|
| I suggest you avoid QLC SSDs.
| schainks wrote:
| With a thunderbolt SSD you'll think your external drive is an
| internal drive. I bought one of these
| (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0BGYMHS8Y) for my partner
| so she has snappy photo editing workflows with Adobe CC apps.
| Copying her 1TB photo library over took under 5 min.
| joshvm wrote:
| Basically any good SSD manufacturer is fine, but I've found
| that the enclosure controller support is flaky with Sonoma.
| Drives that appear instantly in Linux sometimes take ages to
| enumerate in OSX, and only since upgrading to Sonoma. Stick
| with APFS if you're only using it for Mac stuff.
|
| I have 2-4TB drives from Samsung, WD and Kingston. All work
| fine and are ridiculously fast. My favourite enclosure is from
| DockCase for the diagnostic screen.
| DrBenCarson wrote:
| Get something with Thunderbolt and you'll likely never notice a
| difference
| muro wrote:
| Don't bother with thunderbolt 4, go for USB 4 enclosure instead
| - I've got a Jeyi one. Any SSD will work, I use a Samsung 990
| pro inside. It was supposed to be the fastest you can get - I
| get over 3000MB/s.
|
| Here is the rabbit hole you might want to check out:
| https://dancharblog.wordpress.com/2024/01/01/list-of-ssd-enc...
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| I edit all my video content from a USB-attached SSD with
| Resolve on my MBP.
|
| My only complaint is that Apple gouges you for memory and
| storage upgrades. (But in reality I don't want the raw and
| rendered video taking up space on my machine).
| spopejoy wrote:
| I had a big problem with crucial 4tb ssds recently, using them
| as time machine drives. The first backup would succeed, the
| second would fail and the disk would then be unrepairable in
| disk utility, which also will refuse to format to non-apfs (and
| an apfs reformat wouldn't fix it).
|
| Switched to samsung t9s, so far so good.
| dr_kiszonka wrote:
| > "Up to 7x faster image processing in Affinity Photo"
|
| Great to see Affinity becoming so popular that it gets
| acknowledged by Apple.
| sunnybeetroot wrote:
| Affinity has been mentioned many times by Apple in their
| product videos
| prmoustache wrote:
| Am I allowed to work on my laptop if I don't have a PRO cpu?
| mathfailure wrote:
| Only if you work on your hobbies.
| smokey_the_bear wrote:
| I have an M2 Max now, and it's incredible. But it still can't
| handle running xcode's Instruments. I'd upgrade if the M4s could
| run the leaks tool seamlessly, but I doubt any computer could.
| mattfrommars wrote:
| Does anyone know if there is a way to use Mac without the Apple
| bloatware?
|
| I genuinely want to use it as primary machine but with this Intel
| MacBook Pro I have, I absolutely dislike FaceTime, IMessage, the
| need to use AppStore, Apple always asking me have a Apple user
| name password (which I don't and have zero intention), block
| Siri, and all telemetry stuff Apple has backed in, stop the
| machine calling home, etc.
|
| This is to mirror tools available in Windows to disable and
| remove Microsoft bloatware and ad tracing built in.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| You can totally use it without ever signing in to Apple
| account. You cannot _delete_ Siri etc, but you can disable
| parts of it and not use the rest.
| philistine wrote:
| There used to be this whole contingent of people who were
| adamant that Apple's software was too opinionated, bloated,
| that you couldn't adapt its OS to your needs, and that Apple
| was far too ingrained in your relationship with your device.
| That Linux was true freedom, but at least that Windows
| respected its users
|
| Then Windows 11 came out.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Happened a lot earlier than 11.
| int_19h wrote:
| I belong to that contingent, and I still stand by the
| assertion that Apple's software is too opinionated,
| configurability is unreasonably low, and you have to stick
| to the Apple ecosystem for many thing to get the most out
| of it.
|
| My primary desktop & laptop are now both Macs because of
| all the malarkey in Win11. Reappearance of ads in Start and
| Windows Recall were the last straws. It's clear that
| Microsoft is actively trying to monetize Windows in ways
| that are inherently detrimental to UX.
|
| I do have to say, though, that Win11 is still more
| customizable overall, even though it - amazingly! -
| regressed below macOS level in some respects (e.g. no
| vertical taskbar option anymore). Gaming is another major
| sticking point - the situation with non-casual games on
| macOS is dismal.
| alberth wrote:
| Do you mean you want to use Apple Silicon without macOS?
|
| If that's your question, yes - various options exist like
| https://asahilinux.org
| derr1 wrote:
| You don't need to use AppStore, unless of course you want to
| use apple software.
|
| Pretty much all the software I use is from brew.
| alanwreath wrote:
| this ^^
| philistine wrote:
| You need to embrace Apple's vision, or use something else.
| Clearly your goals and Apple's are misaligned, so you will only
| feel pain when using a Mac.
|
| Get a PC.
| alanwreath wrote:
| IIRC Apple is a lot less heavy handed wrt service login
| requirements when compared to Microsoft's most recent Windows
| endeavors. And depending on the developer you can get around
| having to use the App Store at all. Being you're on an Intel
| Mac have you considered just using Linux ?
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| I gave up on macos when they started making the OS partition
| read-only. A good security feature in general, but their
| implementation meant that changing anything became a big set of
| difficulties and trade-offs.
|
| That, combined with the icloud and telemetry BS, I'd had
| enough.
| astrange wrote:
| Not only good security, but it also makes software updates a
| lot faster because you don't have to check if the user has
| randomly changed any system files before patching them.
| dvno42 wrote:
| You can use OSX without an Apple account and paired with a 3rd
| party host based firewall (Little Snitch), the OS usually stays
| out of your way (imo). Bundled apps can be removed after
| disabling SIP (file integrity) but there are
| downsides/maintenance to that route.
| sliken wrote:
| At a linux conference I saw many macbooks. Talked to a few,
| they just ran linux in a VM full screen for programming and
| related. Then used OSX for everything else (office, outlook,
| teams, work enforced apps, etc). They seemed very happy and
| this encouraged them to not task switch as often.
| wpm wrote:
| There is zero iCloud account requirement. You do not need to
| use the App Store. Gatekeeper can be disabled with a
| configuration profile key. Telemetry (what little there is) can
| be disabled with a configuration profile key. Siri can be
| disabled, all of the generative AI crap can be disabled, yadda
| yadda yadda, with a configuration profile key. Every background
| service can be listed and disabled if you disable
| authenticated-root. Hell, you could disable `apsd` and disable
| all push notifications too, which require a phone home to
| Apple.
| sroussey wrote:
| No WiFi 7!
|
| :/
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| I have a 16" M1 Pro with 16 gigs of ram, and it regularly
| struggles under the "load" of Firebase emulator.
|
| You can tell not because the system temp rises, but because
| suddenly Spotify audio begins to pop, constantly and irregularly.
|
| It took me a year to figure out that the system audio popping
| wasn't hardware and indeed wasn't software, except in the sense
| that memory (or CPU?) pressure seems to be the culprit.
| maxioatic wrote:
| I have a 14" M1 Max with 32gb of ram for work, and it does that
| popping noise every once it a while too! I've always wondered
| what was causing it.
| SSLy wrote:
| Im relatively surprised modern Macs have same buffer underrun
| issue I had on intel laptops with pulseaudio 7+ years back.
| silvr wrote:
| Whoa! I've been so annoyed by this for years, so interesting
| that you figured it out. It's the kind of inelegance in design
| that would have had Steve Jobs yelling at everyone to fix, just
| ruins immersion in music and had no obvious way to fix.
| astrange wrote:
| That sounds like an app issue, it might be doing non-
| realtime-safe operations on a realtime thread. But generally
| speaking, if you have an issue, use feedback assistant.
| zaptrem wrote:
| This happens whenever I load up one of our PyTorch models on my
| M1 MBP 16gb too. I also hate the part where if the model (or
| any other set of programs) uses too much RAM the whole system
| will sometimes straight up hang and then crash due to kernel
| watchdog timeout instead of just killing the offender.
| astrange wrote:
| There is an API `proc_setpcontrol` which absolutely noone
| uses which does the thing you want.
|
| It definitely gets unstable in those situations, but you
| probably don't want your scripts randomly OOM killed either.
| duped wrote:
| This kind of sounds like someone is abusing perf cores and high
| priority threading in your stack. iirc, on MacOS audio
| workgroup threads are supposed to be scheduled with the highest
| (real time) priority on p cores, which shouldn't have issues
| under load, unless someone else is trying to compete at the
| same priority.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| There is some discussion online on whether this happens when
| you have a Rosetta app running in the background somewhere
| (say a util you got via Homebrew, for example).
|
| Even when I remove all "Intel" type apps in activity monitor,
| I still experience the issue though.
| twalla wrote:
| They're really burying the lede here - magic trackpad and magic
| keyboard finally have USB-C :)
| DerekL wrote:
| That was announced on Monday, with the new iMacs.
| AdamJacobMuller wrote:
| That's annoying. I really want to fully remove lightning
| connectors from my life, but, my existing magic* devices work
| fine and will probably work fine for another decade or two.
| aquir wrote:
| Would it make sense to upgrade from M2 Pro 16 to M4 Pro 16? (both
| base models) I mean it terms of numbers, more cores, more RAM but
| everything else is pretty much the same. I am looking forward to
| see some benchmarks!
| umanwizard wrote:
| Completely depends on what your workflow is.
| sliken wrote:
| No.
| gigatexal wrote:
| Lolz the M4 max doesn't get anything more than 128GB ram in the
| MacBook? Weird
| gigatexal wrote:
| Cuz of this: was expecting 256GB
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41971726#41972721
| mrcwinn wrote:
| Question without judgement: why would I want to run LLM locally?
| Say I'm building a SaaS app and connecting to Anthropic using the
| `ai` package. Would I want to cut over to ollama+something for
| local dev?
| andrewmunsell wrote:
| Data privacy-- some stuff, like all my personal notes I use
| with a RAG system, just don't need to be sent to some cloud
| provider to be data mined and/or have AI trained on them
| jwitthuhn wrote:
| For me it is consistency. I control the model and the software
| so I know a local LLM will remain exactly the same until I want
| to change it.
|
| It also avoids the trouble of using a hosted LLM that decides
| to double their price overnight, costs are very predictable.
| thesurlydev wrote:
| My wallet is trembling.
|
| On a side note, anyone know what database software was shown
| during the announcement?
| duckmysick wrote:
| What's the timestamp? At 3:43 there's Luna Modeler.
|
| https://www.datensen.com/data-modeling/luna-modeler-for-rela...
| thesurlydev wrote:
| Thanks. That's it. Coincidentally, I found out what it was by
| looking at the actual press release where they had a
| screenshot of it too.
| alexnewman wrote:
| I recently switched back to using homemade desktops for most of
| my work. I've been running Debian on them . Still have my Mac
| laptop for working on the go
| wkyleg wrote:
| What's the consensus regarding best MacBooks for AI/ML?
|
| I've heard it's easier to just use cloud options, but I sill like
| the idea of being able to run actual models and train them on my
| laptop.
|
| I have a M1 MacBook now and I'm considering trading in to
| upgrade.
|
| I've seen somewhat conflicting things regarding what you get for
| the money. For instance, some reports recommending a M2 Pro for
| the money IIRC.
| ZeroCool2u wrote:
| Training is not practical. For inference they're pretty great
| though, especially if you go up in the specs and add a bunch of
| memory.
| the_king wrote:
| To run LLMs locally (Ollama/LLM Notebook), you want as much
| memory as you can afford. For actually training toy models
| yourself for learning/experiments in my experience it doesn't
| matter much. PyTorch is flexible.
| gjvc wrote:
| As a proud user of an ARM3 in 1992, I'm pleased to be able to see
| and say that ARM won in the end.
| astrange wrote:
| ARMv8 is not much like previous ARMs. But it has won - Intel's
| latest x86 extension basically turns it into ARMv8.
|
| https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/t...
| daveisfera wrote:
| Once they get a MacBook Air with an M4, it will become a viable
| option for developers and other users that want/need 2 external
| monitors. Definitely looking forward to that happening.
| uriah wrote:
| The M3 Air does support 2 but only with the lid closed
| brailsafe wrote:
| The base M4 Max only has an option for 36gb of ram!? They're
| doing some sus things with that pricing ladder again. No more
| 96gb option, and then to go beyond 48gb I'd have to spend another
| $1250 CAD on a processor upgrade first, and in doing so lose the
| option to have the now baseline 512gb ssd
| brailsafe wrote:
| I'd add that although I find it a bit dirty, the computers are
| obviously still amazing. It's just a bit bizarre that the lower
| spec cpu offers the customer the option to change the ram
| quantity. More specifically, going from the M4 Pro to the M4
| Max removes the option to change the ram from 36gb, whereas
| sticking with the Pro lets you select 48gb or 24gb, unless you
| choose the max Max. If I pre-order the Mac Mini with the same
| processor, I can select 64gb for the insane price of an
| additional $750cad, but it's just not available on the macbook
| pro M4 Pro.
|
| It would indeed have been nice to see a faster response rate
| screen, even though I value picture quality more, and it also
| would have been nice to see even vaguely different colors like
| the iMac supposedly got, but it seems like a nice spec bump
| year anyway.
| _wire_ wrote:
| I think any idea that Apple doesn't thoroughly understand the
| capacity, value, market, price tradeoff is untenable.
|
| The most obvious view is that Apple price gouges on storage.
| But this seems too simplistic.
|
| My conjecture is that there's an inescapable tension between
| supply (availabilty/cost) sales forecasts, technological
| churn, and roadmaps that leads them to want to somewhat
| subsidize the lowest end, and place a bit of back-pressure on
| consumption at the high-end. The trick is finding the tipping
| point on the curve between growth and over commitment by
| suppliers. Especially, for tightly vertically integrated
| products.
|
| The PC industry is more diffuse and horizontal and so more
| tolerant of fluctuations in supply and demand across a
| broader network of providers and consumers, leading to a
| lower, more even cost structure for components and modules.
|
| In real terms, Apple's products keep costing less, just like
| all computer products. They seem to make a point of holding
| prices on an appearance point of latest tech that's held
| steady since the first Macs: about $2500 for a unit that
| meets the expectations of space right behind the bleeding
| edge while being reliable, useful and a vanguard of trends.
| brailsafe wrote:
| Seems plausible enough to me, but whether there's a
| business case or not isn't my concern as much as how it
| feels to price something out knowing that I'm deliberately
| gouged on arbitrary components instead of the the
| segmentation being somewhat more meaningful. They're
| already reaping very high margins, but by tightly coupling
| quantities of those components to even higher margin
| builds, it feels a bit gross, to the point where I just
| have to accept that I'd have to spend even more excessively
| than in previous years of similar models.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| I'm just some dude, looking at a press release, wondering when
| Tim Apple is gonna be a cool dude and release the MBP in all of
| the colors that they make the iMac in.
|
| APPARENTLY NOT TODAY.
|
| C'mon mannnnn. The 90s/y2k are back in! People want the colorful
| consumer electronics! It doesn't have to be translucent plastic
| like it was back then but give us at least something that doesn't
| make me wonder if I live in the novel The Giver every time I walk
| into a meetup filled with MacBook Pros.
|
| I'm sure the specs are great.
| magarnicle wrote:
| In Apple world black means pro. That's why they give you black
| stickers with pro models and white for everything else.
| hartator wrote:
| I'm really excited about the nano-texture display option.
|
| It's essentially a matte coating, but the execution on iPad
| displays is excellent. While it doesn't match the e-ink
| experience of devices like the Kindle or ReMarkable, it's about
| 20-30% easier on the eyes. The texture feels also great (even
| though it's less relevant for a laptop), and the glare reduction
| is a welcome feature.
|
| I prefer working on the MacBook screen, but I nearly bought an
| Apple Studio Display XDR or an iPad as a secondary screen just
| for that nano-texture finish. It's super good news that this is
| coming to the MacBook Pro.
| cedws wrote:
| Does it make much difference for looking at code?
| hartator wrote:
| Yes, the main goal is to be easier on the eyes IMO.
|
| It's easier to read on it.
| dkarbayev wrote:
| Do you actually have to wipe the screen with the included
| special cloth? The screen on all of the macbooks that I've had
| usually get oily patches because of the contact with keycaps,
| so I have to wipe the screen regularly.
| hartator wrote:
| I wipe all my devices with regular paper towels with a tad of
| water. Including my $5k Apple XDR display.
|
| I am probably not the best example to emulate lol.
| kvczor wrote:
| How is the contrast? The HDR content? Any downsides?
|
| I will upgrade to M4 Pro and really hate the glare when I
| travel (and I do that a lot) but at the same time I don't want
| to lose any quality that the MBP delivers which is quite
| excellent imho
| wcski wrote:
| but does it have touch screen -_-
| e63f67dd-065b wrote:
| > MacBook Air with M2 and M3 comes standard with 16GB of unified
| memory, and is available in midnight, starlight, silver, and
| space gray, starting at $999 (U.S.) and $899 (U.S.) for
| education.
|
| At long last, I can safely recommend the base model macbook air
| to my friends and family again. At $1000 ($900 with edu pricing
| on the m2 model) it really is an amazing package overall.
| daco wrote:
| Upgraded to a M1 Pro 14 in December 2021, and I still rock it
| everyday for dev purpose. Apple does great laptop.
|
| The only downsides is that I see a kind of "burnt?" transparent
| spot on my screen. When connecting to an HDMI cable, the sound
| does not ouput properly to the TV screen, and makes the video I
| plat laggy. Wondering if I go to the Apple Store, would fix it?
| david_allison wrote:
| If you're still under AppleCare+, definitely give it a try
| before it expires.
|
| Personal anecdote: don't get your hopes up. I've had my issues
| rejected as 'no fault found', but it's definitely worth
| spending a bit of time on.
| alexashka wrote:
| The software stack has gotten so bad that no amount of hardware
| can make up for it.
|
| The compile times for Swift, the gigabytes of RAM everything
| seems to eat up.
|
| I closed all my apps and I'm at 10gb of RAM being used - I have
| _nothing_ open.
|
| Does this mean the Macbook Air 8gb model I had 10 years ago would
| basically be unable to just run the operating system alone?
|
| It's disconcerting. Ozempic for terrible food and car-centric
| infrastructure we've created, cloud super-computing and 'AI' for
| coping with this frankenstein software stack.
|
| The year of the Linux desktop is just around the corner to save
| the day, right? Right? :)
| carstenhag wrote:
| Memory doesn't need to be freed until a different software
| needs it.
| alexashka wrote:
| I'm referring to what Activity Monitor app tells me in its
| memory tab - not the underlying malloc/whatever
| implementation being used.
|
| It tells me my computer is using 8gb of RAM after a restart
| and I haven't begun to open or close anything.
|
| Yikes?
| astrange wrote:
| It's very hard to measure memory use because it's reactive
| to how much RAM you have; if you have more then it's going
| to use it. That doesn't necessarily mean there are any
| issues.
| zja wrote:
| > MacBook Air is the world's most popular laptop, and with Apple
| Intelligence, it's even better. Now, models with M2 and M3 double
| the starting memory to 16GB, while keeping the starting price at
| just $999 -- a terrific value for the world's best-selling
| laptop.
|
| This is nice, and long overdue.
| cebert wrote:
| I wish Apple would let me max out the RAM on a lower performance
| chip. That's more valuable to me than more compute.
| dcchambers wrote:
| I think it's just one of the tradeoffs of having everything on
| one SOC. They can only realistically and efficiently make so
| many versions.
| lightoverhead wrote:
| The machine is great! How is its performance for AI model
| training? A lot of library and tools are not built for M series
| chip
| treprinum wrote:
| Poor. My M3 Max/128GB is about 20x slower than 4090. For
| inference it's much better, still much slower than 4090 but it
| enables working with much larger LLMs albeit at ~10t/s (in
| comparison, Threadripper 2990WX/256GB does like 0.25t/s). M4
| Max is likely going to be ~25% faster than M3 Max based on CPU
| perf and memory bandwidth.
| rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote:
| That ad reveal at the end. Someone in the marketing team must
| have started doing CrossFit
| Vayu wrote:
| As it goes for the section where they demoed the assistance from
| apple intelligence to the researcher creating an abstract and
| adding pictures to their paper. Is it better or worse to do this?
| People are already complaining so heavily about dead internet
| theory with the 'AI voice' being so prominent..
| philodeon wrote:
| To sum up the HN wisdom on Apple Silicon Macs:
|
| Before the M4 models: omg, Apple only gives you 8GB RAM in the
| base model? Garbage!
|
| After the M4 models: the previous laptops were so good, why would
| you upgrade?
| hbn wrote:
| We'll be sure to run our future comments by you to make sure no
| one contradicts anyone else.
| pw6hv wrote:
| Just replaced for the first time battery on my Macbook Pro 2015
| Retina. Feel so good using such an old piece of hardware.
| zubiaur wrote:
| I love mine, it has a fresh battery OEM battery as well. Runs
| the latest OS with OpenCore Legacy. But it's starting to get a
| bit annoying. Usable, but it is starting to feel slowish, the
| fan kicks up frequently.
|
| I might still keep it another year or so, which is a testament
| to how good it is and how relative little progress has happened
| in almost 10 years.
| talldayo wrote:
| If it's got a full function row, it will probably work just
| fine under Linux. My 2014 MBP chugged pretty hard with
| OpenCore but handles modern Linux distros much better.
| magarnicle wrote:
| Same, the jump to the last few OS versions is not pleasant.
| Do you get good battery life on Linux with it?
| a2l3aQ wrote:
| If I still had my 2015 I would have applied some liquid metal
| TIM by now, I did a paste refresh and that worked very well
| to get the fan under control.
| switch007 wrote:
| Which MacOS version? I upgraded to a newer one and it crawled
| to a halt, it's unusable now. UI is insanely laggy. It's
| sitting in a drawer gathering dust now
| mattegan wrote:
| It pains me deeply that they used Autodesk Fusion in one of the
| app screenshots. It is by far the worst piece of software I use
| on Mac OS.
|
| Wish the nano-texture display was available when I upgraded last
| year. The last MacBook I personally bought was in 2012 when the
| first retina MBP had just released. I opted for the "thick" 15"
| high-res matte option. Those were the days...
| spiderice wrote:
| Wait really? I love Fusion 360. I suppose I use it on Windows
| though. Is it significantly worse on Mac?
| flkiwi wrote:
| The weird thing about these Apple product videos in the last few
| years is that there are all these beautiful shots of Apple's
| campus with nobody there other than the presenter. It's a
| beautiful stage for these videos, but it's eerie and
| disconcerting, particularly given Apple's RTO approach.
| davidczech wrote:
| I think it's usually filmed on weekends
| monocasa wrote:
| You would just think that with a brand so intrinsically
| wrapped around the concept of technology working for and with
| the people that use it, you'd want to show the people who
| made it if you're going to show the apple campus at all.
|
| It kind of just comes off as one of those YouTube liminal
| space horror videos when it's that empty.
| hammock wrote:
| The Apple brand is - foundationally - pretty solitary.
|
| Think about the early ipod ads, just individuals dancing to
| music by themselves.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dSgBsCVpqo
|
| You can even go back to 1983 "Two kinds of people": a
| solitary man walks into an empty office, works by himself
| on the computer and then goes home for breakfast.
| https://youtu.be/4xmMYeFmc2Q
| flkiwi wrote:
| It's a strange conflict. So much of their other stuff is
| about togetherness mediated by technology (eg, facetime).
| And their Jobs-era presentations always ended with a note
| of appreciation for the folks who worked so hard to make
| the launch happen. But you're right that much of the
| brand imagery is solitary, right up to the whole "Here's
| to the crazy ones" vibe.
|
| It's weirdly dystopian. I didn't realize it bothered me
| until moments before my comment, but now I can't get it
| out of my head.
| matrix87 wrote:
| > the concept of technology working for and with the people
| that use it
|
| > liminal space horror
|
| reminds me of that god awful crush commercial
| asadm wrote:
| they apologized for that one.
| LeafItAlone wrote:
| I had not seen that one, so I looked it up.
|
| This was reminder to me that art is subjective. I don't
| get the outrage. I kinda like it.
| filoleg wrote:
| > You would just think that with a brand so intrinsically
| wrapped around the concept of technology working for and
| with the people that use it, you'd want to show the people
| who made it if you're going to show the apple campus at
| all.
|
| I would think that a brand that is at least trying to put
| some emphasis on privacy in their products would also
| extend the same principle to their workforce. I don't work
| for Apple, but I doubt that most of their employees would
| be thrilled about just being filmed at work for a public
| promo video.
| astrange wrote:
| There are legal issues with it too, or at least they
| think there are. They take down developer presentations
| after a few years partly so they won't have videos of
| random (ex-)employees up forever.
| monocasa wrote:
| What legal issues could arise from a recording of an
| employee publicly representing the company?
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| If only in some shots, but they are such a valuable company
| that they simply cannot afford the risk of e.g. criticism
| for the choice of people they display, or inappropriate
| outfits or behaviour. One blip from a shareholder can cost
| them billions in value, which pisses off other
| shareholders. All of their published media, from videos
| like this to their conferences, are highly polished,
| rehearsed, and designed by committee. Microsoft and Google
| are the same, although at least with Google there's still
| room for some comedy in some of their departments:
| https://youtu.be/EHqPrHTN1dU
| reaperducer wrote:
| I used to think the videos with all of the drone fly-bys was
| cool. But in the last year or so, I've started to feel the same
| as you. Where are all the people? It's starting to look like
| Apple spent a billion dollars building a technology ghost town.
|
| Surely the _entire_ staff can 't be out rock climbing, surfing,
| eating at trendy Asian-inspired restaurants at twilight, and
| having catered children's birthday parties in immaculately
| manicured parks.
| astrange wrote:
| The neighboring city charges $100k per newly constructed unit
| for park maintenance fees. So there actually are a lot of
| nice parks.
|
| https://x.com/maxdubler/status/1778841932141408432
| xyst wrote:
| > ... advanced 12MP ... camera
|
| wot, m8? Only Apple will call a 12 megapixel camera "advanced".
| Same MPs as an old iPhone 6 rear camera.
|
| Aside from that, it's pretty much the same as the prior
| generation. Same thickness in form factor. Slightly better SoC.
| Only worth it if you jump from M1 (or any Intel mbp) to M4.
|
| Would be godlike if Apple could make the chip swappable. Buy a
| Mac Studio M2 Ultra Max Plus. Then just upgrade SoC on an as
| needed basis.
|
| Would probably meet their carbon neutral/negative goals much
| faster. Reduce e-waste. Unfortunately this is an American company
| and got to turn profit. Profit over environment and consumer
| interests.
| hypercube33 wrote:
| I feel like if they pushed Win32/Gaming on Apple Mx hardware
| it'd give at least a single reason for people to adopt or
| upgrade their devices to new models. I know for sure I'd be on
| board if everything that ran on my steam deck ran on a mac game
| wise, since that's holding me back from dropping the cash. I
| still think I'll get a mini though.
| optymizer wrote:
| My only explanations for the lack of gaming support (see
| historical lack of proper OpenGL support) while still
| supporting high end graphics use cases (film editing, CAD,
| visual effects) are:
|
| 1) Either Apple wants to maintain the image of the Macbook as
| a "serious device", and not associate itself with the likes
| of "WoW players in their mom's basement".
|
| 2) Microsoft worked something out with Apple, where Apple
| would not step significantly on the gaming market (Windows,
| Xbox). I can't think of another reason why gaming on iOS
| would be just fine, but abysmal on MacOS. Developers release
| games on MacOS _despite_ the platform.
| Epicism wrote:
| Steve Jobs was historically against gaming on apple devices
| and, I believe, went so far as to try to remove them from
| the Apple Store. Apple is only recently starting to
| introduce gaming seriously back into the platform.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Would be incredibly fascinating to consider what if
| Bungie was never bought by Microsoft and _Halo_ ended up
| a Mac title first. It would 've severely capped the
| influence of the game (and maybe its quality), even after
| it would have been ported to PC. Would _Halo_ have even
| been imported to Xbox? On the flip side, if it somehow
| managed to capture considerable success- would it have
| forced Jobs and Apple to recognize the importance of the
| gaming market? Either way, the entire history of video
| games would be altered.
| SSLy wrote:
| It's funny because they directly advertise performance in
| WoW in M4 presskit https://imgur.com/CoBGQ0b
| pradn wrote:
| Valve is trying to obsolete Windows, so they can prevent
| Microsoft from interfering with Steam. Apple could team up
| with them, and help obsolete Windows for a very large
| percentage of game-hours.
|
| There will always be a long tail of niche Windows games
| (retro + indie especially). But you can capture the Fortnite
| (evergreen) / Dragon Age (new AAA) audience.
| rimliu wrote:
| Not pixel count determines whether camera is advanced or not.
| matja wrote:
| Especially because pixel count is a meaningless metric by
| itself. 12MP is the same as a Nikon D3, which if it could
| replicate the results of I would be happy with!
| mrtksn wrote:
| Megapixels is nothing more than the number of sample points.
| There's so much more to image quality than the number of
| samples.
|
| I blame the confusion to PC&Android marketing people who were
| pushing for years and years the idea that the higher the
| megapixel digits the better the camera is. Non-Apple customers
| should be really pissed of for the years of misinformation and
| indoctrination on false KPI.
|
| The marketing gimmicks pushed generations of devices to
| optimize for meaningless numbers. At times, even Apple was
| forced to adopt those. Such a shame.
| hammock wrote:
| The Thinkpad webcam is only 5MP. Many other PCs have much less.
| hit8run wrote:
| Best time to buy a frame.work Linux Laptop without fomo. I'm done
| with Apple.
| resters wrote:
| It's hard to imagine ay reason why I would not want to keep
| upgrading to a new MPB every few years -- my M3 MBP is by far the
| best laptop I've owned thanks to the incredible battery life.
|
| Of course I'm rooting for competition, but Apple seems to be
| establishing a bigger and bigger lead with each iteration.
| spease wrote:
| I don't see the yearly releases as saying you have to upgrade.
| Rather, having a consistent cadence makes it easier for the
| supply chain, and the short iteration time means there's less
| pressure to rush something in half-baked or delay a release.
| telesilla wrote:
| My M1 laptop from early 2022 is too good for me to care about
| upgrading right now, I loaded it up with 64GB ram and it's
| still blazing. What benefit would I really notice? My heavy
| apps loading a couple of seconds faster?
| nwhnwh wrote:
| The notch makes me sad.
| henry2023 wrote:
| The real question is. Can I plug two monitors to it?
| michelb wrote:
| You can. And use your laptop screen as the third one.
| matrix87 wrote:
| > starting with 16GB of memory
|
| yeah it's about time
| emahhh wrote:
| I'm fighting the urge to get the M4 Pro model so bad right now.
| MaxGripe wrote:
| No OLED yet :(
| nitsky wrote:
| I'm waiting for OLED. Will purchase as soon as they do it.
| lukev wrote:
| I really respect Apple's privacy focused engineering. They didn't
| roll out _any_ AI features until they were capable of running
| them locally, and before doing any cloud-based AI they designed
| and rolled out Private Cloud Compute.
|
| You can argue about whether it's actually bulletproof or not but
| the fact is, nobody else is even trying, and have lost sight of
| all privacy-focused features in their rush to ship anything and
| everything on my device to OpenAI or Gemini.
|
| I am thrilled to shell out thousands and thousands of dollars to
| purchase a machine that feels like it really belongs to me, from
| a company that respects my data and has aligned incentives.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| > to purchase a machine that feels like it really belongs to me
|
| How true is this when they devices are increasingly hostile to
| user repair and upgrades? MacOS also tightens the screws on
| what you can run and from where, or at least require more hoop
| jumping over time.
| arzke wrote:
| > How true is this when they devices are increasingly hostile
| to user repair and upgrades?
|
| Not sure what you mean exactly by this, but to me their Self
| Service Repair program is a step in the right direction.
| sqeaky wrote:
| It was mandated by right to repair laws, it provides the
| absolute minimum, and they've attempted the price out
| people wanting to do repairs. The only way it could be more
| hostile to users is by literally being illegal.
|
| They could go out of their way to make things actually easy
| to work on and service, but that has never been the Apple
| Way. Compare to framework or building your own PC, or even
| repairing a laptop from another OEM.
| superb_dev wrote:
| Apple also left a very convenient hole in their boot loader
| to allow running another OS. Linux works pretty well these
| days
| schaefer wrote:
| * on M1 and M2 variants.
| bogantech wrote:
| * As long as you don't want to use any external displays
| lukev wrote:
| Of course I wish the hardware were somehow more open, but to
| a large extent, it's directly because of hardware based
| privacy features.
|
| If you allowed third-party components without restraint,
| there'd be no way to prevent someone swapping out a
| component.
|
| Lock-in and planned obsolescence are also factors, and ones
| I'm glad the EU (and others) are pushing back here. But it
| isn't as if there are no legitimate tradeoffs.
|
| Regarding screw tightening... if they ever completely remove
| the ability to run untrusted code, yes, then I'll admit I was
| wrong. But I am more than happy to have devices be locked
| down by default. My life has gotten much easier since I got
| my elderly parents and non-technical siblings to move
| completely to the Apple ecosystem. That's the tradeoff here.
| amelius wrote:
| > My life has gotten much easier since I got my elderly
| parents and non-technical siblings to move completely to
| the Apple ecosystem. That's the tradeoff here.
|
| Yeah, but this is hacker news.
| orf wrote:
| One of the most underrated macOS features is the screen
| sharing app - it's great for seamless tech support with
| parents.
|
| It works via your keychain and your contacts, and the
| recipient gets a little notification to allow you to view
| their screen.
|
| That's it - no downloads, no login, no 20 minutes getting a
| Remote Desktop screen share set up.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > I wish the hardware were somehow more open
|
| Some of us are old enough to remember the era of the
| officially authorised Apple clones in the 90's.
|
| Some of us worked in hardware repair roles at the time.
|
| Some of us remember the sort of shit the third-party
| vendors used to sell as clones.
|
| Some of us were very happy the day Apple called time on the
| authorised clone industry.
|
| The tight-knit integration between Apple OS and Apple
| Hardware is a big part of what makes their platform so
| good. I'm not saying perfect. I'm just saying if you look
| at it honestly as someone who's used their kit alongside
| PCs for many decades, you can see the difference.
| jeffybefffy519 wrote:
| Considering you need an Apple ID to log into the hardware, id
| argue Apple gatekeeps that ownership pretty tightly.
| lukev wrote:
| This isn't true.
|
| edit: also, unless you are the digital equivalent of "off
| the grid", I would argue most people are going to need some
| sort of cloud-based identity anyway for messaging, file-
| sharing, etc. iCloud is far and away the most secure of the
| options available to most users, and the only one that uses
| full end-to-end encryption across all services.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > edit: also, unless you are the digital equivalent of
| "off the grid", I would argue most people are going to
| need some sort of cloud-based identity anyway for
| messaging, file-sharing, etc. iCloud is far and away the
| most secure of the options available to most users, and
| the only one that uses full end-to-end encryption across
| all services.
|
| "You need some cloud-based identity, and this is the best
| one," even granting its premises, doesn't make being
| forced into this one a good thing. I'm an Apple user, but
| there are plenty of people I need to message and share
| files with who aren't in the Apple ecosystem.
|
| EDIT: As indicated in the reply (written before I added
| this edit), it sounds like I was ignoring the first part
| of the post, which pointed out that you _aren 't_ forced
| to use it. I agree that that is a sensible, and even
| natural and inevitable, reading. I actually wasn't
| ignoring that part, but I figured the only reason to
| include this edit was to say "that isn't true, but _if it
| were true_ , then it would be OK." (Otherwise, what's the
| point? There's no more complete refutation needed of a
| false point than that it is false.) My argument is that,
| if it were true, then that _wouldn 't_ be OK, even if you
| need a cloud-based identity, and even if iCloud is the
| best one.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _doesn 't make being forced into this one a good thing_
|
| But you're not forced. You completely ignored the other
| response in order to continue grinding an axe.
| ale42 wrote:
| It's optional and very easy to skip. Not like the
| requirement for a MS account on Windows 11, which is also
| skippable but not by the average user.
| spiderice wrote:
| I had to set up a Windows computer for the first time in
| a decade recently, and holy shit did they make it
| difficult to figure out how to do it without a Microsoft
| account.
| syndicatedjelly wrote:
| > MacOS also tightens the screws on what you can run and from
| where, or at least require more hoop jumping over time.
|
| Can you explain what you mean by this? I have been doing
| software development on MacOS for the last couple of years
| and have found it incredibly easy to run anything I want on
| my computer from the terminal, whenever I want. Maybe I'm not
| the average user, but I use mostly open-source Unix tooling
| and have never had a problem with permissions or
| restrictions.
|
| Are you talking about packaged applications that are made
| available on the App Store? If so, sure have rules to make
| sure the store is high-quality, kinda like how Costco doesn't
| let anyone just put garbage on their shelves
| reaperducer wrote:
| _How true is this when they devices are increasingly hostile
| to user repair and upgrades?_
|
| I can neither repair nor upgrade my electric car, my
| furniture, or my plumbing. But they all still belong to me.
| victor106 wrote:
| I agree 100% with this.
|
| Amongst all the big tech companies Apple is the closest you
| will get to if you want Privacy.
| riazrizvi wrote:
| The approach that the big platforms have to producing their own
| versions of very successful apps cannibalizes their partners.
| This focus on consumer privacy by Apple is the company's killer
| competitive advantage in this particular area, IMO. If I felt
| they were mining me for my private business data I'd switch to
| Linux in heartbeat. This is what keeps me off Adobe, Microsoft
| Office, Google's app suite, and apps like Notion as much as
| possible.
| dmz73 wrote:
| Mac OS calls home every time you execute an application. Apple
| is well on its way to ensure you can only run things they allow
| via app store, they would probably already be there if it
| wasn't for the pesky EU. If you send your computer/phone to
| Apple for repair you may get back different physical hardware.
| Those things very much highlight that "your" Apple hardware is
| not yours and that privacy on Apple hardware does not actually
| exist, sure they _may_ not share that data with other parties
| but they definitely do not respect your privacy or act like you
| own the hardware you purchased. Apple marketing seems to have
| reached the level indoctrination where everyone just keeps
| parroting what Apple says as an absolute truth.
| leokennis wrote:
| At the very least Apple are better than Microsoft, Windows
| and the vendors that sell Windows laptops when it comes to
| respecting user experience and privacy.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| I switched to iPhone after they added the tracker blocking
| to the OS.
|
| Everything is a tradeoff.
|
| I'd love to live in the F droid alt tech land, but
| everything really comes down to utility. Messaging my
| friends is more important than using the right IM protocol.
|
| Much as I wish I could convince everyone I know and have
| yet to meet to message me on Signal or whatever, that
| simply isn't possible. Try explaining that I am not on
| Whatsapp or insta to a girl I've just met...
|
| Also it is nice to spend basically no time maintaining the
| device, and have everything work together coherently. Time
| is ever more valuable past a certain point.
| bboygravity wrote:
| That's a low bar for girls IMO (not being able to grasp
| that someone might not want to use Whatsapp or
| Instagram).
| geysersam wrote:
| But why do we have to choose between convenient and open?
| Why are these companies allowed to continue having these
| protected "gardens"? I don't believe a free and truly
| open ecosystem for mobile devices would actually be less
| convenient than iOS or Android. If anything it would be
| vastly better.
| lukev wrote:
| I mean, the security features are pretty well documented. The
| FBI can't crack a modern iPhone even with Apple's help. A lot
| of the lockdowns are in service of that.
|
| I'm curious: what hardware and software stack do you use?
| misiek08 wrote:
| FBI and Apple ,,can't", but 3rd party do and they do it
| cheaper every day.
| lukev wrote:
| They do not.
|
| Edit: I have not posted a source for this claim, because
| what sort of source would be acceptable for a claim of
| the form "X has not occurred"?
|
| If you are going to claim Apple's security model has been
| compromised, you need not only evidence of such a
| compromise but also an explanation for why such an
| "obvious" and "cheap" vulnerability has not been
| disclosed by any number of white or grey-hat hackers.
| dankwizard wrote:
| Yes they do.
| lukev wrote:
| If you're going to claim that random hacking groups
| routinely do something the FBI and NSA claim to be unable
| to do... citation needed.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| An issue with taking their claim at face value is they
| have no incentive to say they can:
|
| - they can keep asking for backdoors to "stop terrorists"
|
| - they're not on the hook if for whatever reason they
| can't access a particular phone in a very mediatized case
|
| - most targets (the not so sophisticated ones at least)
| keep using a device the agencies have proper access to
|
| Regardless of their actual technical means, I don't
| expect we ever get a "we sure can!" kind of public
| boasting any time soon.
| spiderice wrote:
| Jesus, just post a source.
| coldtea wrote:
| the burden on proof is not on him to prove a negative
| bigfudge wrote:
| Is there evidence of this. I'd be interested to know
| more.
| switch007 wrote:
| Cellebrite Premium 7.69.5 iOS Support Matrix from July
| 2024.
|
| https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/14344-cellebrite-premium-
| ju...
| hilux wrote:
| > If you send your computer/phone to Apple for repair you may
| get back different physical hardware.
|
| I happen to be in the midst of a repair with Apple right now.
| And for me, the idea that they might replace my aging phone
| with a newer unit, is a big plus. As I think it would be for
| almost everyone. Aside from the occasional sticker, I don't
| have any custom hardware mods to my phone or laptop, and nor
| do 99.99% of people.
|
| Can Apple please every single tech nerd 100% of the time? No.
| Those people should stick to Linux, so that they can have a
| terrible usability experience ALL the time, but feel more "in
| control," or something.
| onepointsixC wrote:
| What makes you think it would be a new one as opposed to a
| refurbished used one.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| If the parts show no signs of wear and tear, what is the
| difference? Theseus' iPhone.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _What makes you think it would be a new one as opposed to
| a refurbished used one._
|
| Because Apple got sued for doing that once, and people
| including myself are in line to get checks from it.
| bimguy wrote:
| It would depend on a countries consumer laws. I used to
| work for AASP's in Australia and they definitely used
| refurished phones for replacements and refurished parts
| for the Mac repairs. Not everyone who uses this site
| lives in America...
| TheNorthman wrote:
| It's also the rule in the EU.
| hilux wrote:
| > What makes you think it would be a new one
|
| Did I say it would be a "new one"?
| makeitdouble wrote:
| It could help to compare to other makers for a minute: if
| you need to repair your Surface Pro, you can easily remove
| the SSD from the tray, send your machine and stick it back
| when it comes repaired (new or not)
|
| And most laptops at this point have removable/exchangeable
| storage. Except for Apple.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > remove the SSD from the tray, send your machine and
| stick it back when it comes repaired
|
| Apple has full-disk encryption backed by the secure
| enclave so its not by-passable.
|
| Sure their standard question-set asks you for your
| password when you submit it for repair.
|
| But you don't have to give it to them. They will happily
| repair your machine without it because they can boot
| their hardware-test suite off an external device.
| okasaki wrote:
| So why the hell do they ask for it then.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > So why the hell do they ask for it then.
|
| I suppose so they can do a boot test post-repair or
| something like that. I have only used their repair
| process like twice in my life and both times I've just
| automatically said "no" and didn't bother asking the
| question. :)
|
| With Apple FDE, you get nowhere without the password. The
| boot process doesn't pass go. Which catches people out
| when they reboot a headless Mac, the password comes
| before, not after boot even if the GUI experience makes
| you feel otherwise.
| wslh wrote:
| Even if I have analytics disabled?
|
| Genuinely asking: are there any specifics on this? I
| understand that blocking at the firewall level is an option,
| but I recall someone here mentioning an issue where certain
| local machine rules don't work effectively. I believe this is
| the issue [1]. Has it been "fixed"?
|
| [1] https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/01/14/apple-drops-
| exclu...
| angott wrote:
| They're probably referring to the certificate verification
| that happens when you open any notarized application.
| Unless something changed recently, the system phones home
| to ensure its certificate wasn't revoked.
| astrange wrote:
| It doesn't do that on every app launch; there's a cache.
| It does it on the first launch of a binary from a new
| team.
|
| (So multiple binaries with the same team don't check
| either.)
|
| And I'd expect all logging is disabled on the CDN.
| weikju wrote:
| > Even if I have analytics disabled?
|
| Yeah because what's being sent is not analytics but related
| to notarizarion, verifying the app's integrity (aka is it
| signed by a certificate known to Apple?)
|
| This came to light a few years ago when the server went
| down and launching apps became impossible to slow...
|
| https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/12/mac-apps-not-opening/
| robenkleene wrote:
| > Apple is well on its way to ensure you can only run things
| they allow via app store
|
| I don't think Apple's behavior actually reflects this if you
| look closely (although I can certainly see how someone could
| form that opinion):
|
| As a counter example, Apple assisted with their own engineers
| to help port Blender to Metal
| (https://code.blender.org/2023/01/introducing-the-blender-
| met...):
|
| > Around one year ago, after joining the Blender Development
| Fund and seeding hardware to Blender developers, Apple
| empowered a few of its developers to directly contribute to
| the Blender source code.
|
| I'm assuming similar support goes to other key pieces of
| software, e.g., from Adobe, Maxon, etc... but they don't talk
| about it for obvious reasons.
|
| The point being Apple considers these key applications to
| their ecosystem, and (in my estimation at least) these are
| applications that will probably never be included in the App
| Store. (The counterargument would be the Office Suite, which
| is in the App Store, but the key Office application, Excel,
| is a totally different beast than the flagship Windows
| version, that kind of split isn't possible with the Adobe
| suite for example.)
|
| Now what I actually think is happening is the following:
|
| 1. Apple believes the architecture around security and
| process management that they developed for iOS is
| fundamentally superior to the architecture of the Mac. This
| is debatable, but personally I think it's true as well for
| every reason, except for what I'll go into in #2 below. E.g.,
| a device like the Vision Pro would be impossible with macOS
| architecture (too much absolute total complete utter trash is
| allowed to run unfettered on a Mac for a size-constrained
| device like that to ever be practical, e.g., all that trash
| consumes too much battery).
|
| 2. The open computing model has been instrumental in driving
| computing forward. E.g., going back to the Adobe example,
| After Effects plugins are just dynamically linked right into
| the After Effects executable. Third party plugins for other
| categories often work similarly, e.g., check out this
| absolutely wild video on how you install X-Particles on
| Cinema 4D (https://insydium.ltd/support-
| home/manuals/x-particles-video-...).
|
| I'm not sure if anyone on the planet even knows why, deep
| down, #2 is important, I've never seen anyone write about it.
| But all the boundary pushing computing fields I'm interested
| in, which is mainly around media creation (i.e., historically
| Apple's bread-and-butter), seems to depend on it (notably
| they are all also local first, i.e., can't really be handled
| by a cloud service that opens up other architecture options).
|
| So the way I view it is that Apple would love to move macOS
| to the fundamentally superior architecture model from iOS,
| but it's just impossible to do so without hindering too many
| use cases that depend on that open architecture. Apple is
| willing to go as close to that line as they can (in making
| the uses cases more difficult, e.g., the X-Particles video
| above), but not actually willing to cross it.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > Mac OS calls home every time you execute an application
|
| Consulting a certificate revocation list is a standard
| security feature, not a privacy issue.
| derefr wrote:
| Further, there is a CRL/OCSP cache -- which means that if
| you're running a program frequently, Apple are not
| receiving a fine-grained log of your executions, just a
| coarse-grained log of the checks from the cache's TTL
| timeouts.
|
| Also, a CRL/OCSP check isn't a _gating_ check -- i.e. it
| doesn 't "fail safe" by disallowing execution if the check
| doesn't go through. (If it did, you wouldn't be able to run
| anything without an internet connection!) Instead, these
| checks can pass, fail, _or_ error out; and erroring out is
| the same as passing. (Or rather, technically, erroring out
| falls back to the last cached verification state, even if
| it 's expired; but if there is no previous verification
| state -- e.g. if it's your first time running third-party
| app and you're doing so offline -- then the fallback-to-
| the-fallback is allowing the app to run.)
| sgarland wrote:
| With the sheer number of devs who use Macs, there is a 0%
| chance they're going to outright prevent running arbitrary
| executables. Warn / make difficult, sure, but prevent? No.
| abrookewood wrote:
| Their repair policy, from what I can see, is a thinly veiled
| attempt to get you to either pay for Apple Care or to
| upgrade. I got a quote to repair a colleague's MacBook Pro,
| less than 2 years old, which has apparent 'water damage' and
| which they want AUD $2,500 to repair! Of course that makes no
| sense, so we're buying a new one ...
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > to get you to either pay for Apple Care
|
| The problem with many self-repair people is they
| effectively value their time at zero.
|
| I value my time realistically, i.e. above zero and above
| minimum wage. It is therefore a no brainer for me to buy
| AppleCare every ... single ..time. It means I can just drop
| it off and let someone else deal with messing around.
|
| I also know how much hassle it is. Like many techies, I
| spent part of my early career repairing people's PCs. Even
| in big PC tower cases with easy accessibility to all parts
| its still a fucking horrific waste of time. Hence these
| days I'm very happy to let some junior at Apple do it for
| the cost of an AppleCare contract.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > Apple is well on its way to ensure you can only run things
| they allow via app store
|
| I'm very happy to only run stuff approved on Apple's app
| store... _ESPECIALLY_ following their introduction of privacy
| labels for all apps so you know what shit the developer will
| try to collect from you without wasting your time downloading
| it.
|
| Also have you seen the amount of dodgy shit on the more open
| app stores ?
| wslh wrote:
| I understand we will be able to disable that just in case? I
| don't want a Microsoft Windows telemetry dejavu.
| amelius wrote:
| > Private Cloud Compute
|
| That's such a security theater. As long as nobody can look
| inside their ICs, nobody knows what's really happening there.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| They've certainly engaged in a lot of privacy theater before.
| For example
|
| > Apple oversells its differential privacy protections.
| "Apple's privacy loss parameters exceed the levels typically
| considered acceptable by the differential privacy research
| community," says USC professor Aleksandra Korolova, a former
| Google research scientist who worked on Google's own
| implementation of differential privacy until 2014. She says
| the dialing down of Apple's privacy protections in iOS in
| particular represents an "immense increase in risk" compared
| to the uses most researchers in the field would recommend.
|
| https://www.wired.com/story/apple-differential-privacy-
| short...
| lukev wrote:
| That's a fine bit of goalpost shifting. They state that they
| will make their _entire software stack_ for Private Cloud
| Compute public for research purposes.
|
| Assuming they go through with that, this alone puts them
| leagues ahead of any other cloud service.
|
| It also means that to mine your data the way everyone else
| does, they would need to deliberately insert _hardware_
| backdoors into their own systems, which seems a bit too
| difficult to keep secret and a bit too damning a scandal
| should it be discovered...
|
| Occam's razor here is that they're genuinely trying to use
| real security as a competitive differentiator.
| davidczech wrote:
| The first release set should be downloadable now for
| inspection. (It's binaries only, source is released for
| select components)
| davidczech wrote:
| That could be said of any device you own, ever.
| IOT_Apprentice wrote:
| Actually Apple has stated they are allowing security
| researchers to look at their infrastructure DIRECTLY.
| amelius wrote:
| That doesn't mean they get to know what happens inside the
| ICs.
|
| Looking at a bunch of PCBs doesn't tell you much.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| Privacy is the new obscenity. What does privacy even mean to
| you concretely? Answer the question with no additional drama,
| and I guarantee you either Apple doesn't deliver what you are
| asking for, or you are using services from another company,
| like Google, in a way that the actions speak that you don't
| really care about what you are asking for.
| lukev wrote:
| End to end encryption by default, such that the cloud
| provider cannot access my data.
|
| Easy.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| Excellent example of the thing I am lampooning.
|
| > Easy.
|
| Ask someone about privacy without drama, and he can't help
| himself but inject drama.
|
| > End to end encryption by default, such that the cloud
| provider cannot access my data.
|
| This is vague. It was a simple question, and yet: end to
| end encryption of what data, specifically? Which cloud
| provider, Apple?
|
| You sign in with iCloud on all your devices. You use the
| App Store, or any of their DRM-related services. These are
| not end-to-end encrypted, among many parts of the Apple
| ecosystem.
|
| Do you consider all the stuff about the apps you install,
| update and open as "private"? You might mean privacy in the
| sense that you are willing to share private stuff about
| yourself with Google and Apple, but only some sensitive
| information with Meta. And then the only reason Meta
| doesn't know about which apps you have installed, despite
| knowing it in the past, is because Apple changed App Store
| app policies... and maybe that's something that Apple does
| that you might like. The fact that Meta doesn't know about
| what apps you install has nothing to do with end-to-end
| encryption.
|
| But speculating about someone else's definition of privacy
| is fruitless. I don't know what data, besides chat
| messages, is valuable to you to be end-to-end encrypted.
| You use Gmail, which is just as sensitive as your
| iMessages, and Gmail is not end-to-end encrypted, so it's
| not clear you value that as much as you say. You conflated
| concrete with succinct, and were nonetheless vague, and
| couldn't resist drama.
| lukev wrote:
| I think "could a creepy admin see my nudes" or "can my
| messages be mined to create a profile of my preferences"
| are much more practical working definitions of privacy
| than "can someone see that I've installed an app".
|
| End-to-end encryption is certainly the most relevant
| feature for these scenarios.
|
| App store DRM is a red herring, as a developer I can
| still run as much untrusted code on my MBP as I want and
| I don't see that going away any time soon.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| What is a "practical working definition"? Do you mean,
| "here is a list of some concrete things I personally care
| about, because that's what I was asked about, and for the
| sake of argument, I'm going to say that I do not care
| about App Store data."
|
| You keep saying stuff that is trading one vague thing for
| another. This is the problem with "privacy." It means
| whatever the hell you think it means, and only you, and
| you think you are arriving at a "practical working
| definition" that two people can agree on, and you are
| really doing the exact opposite.
|
| Looking at the concrete things you said: "create a
| profile of my preferences"? What does that mean? Your
| preferences for what, things to buy? Are you talking
| about using your messages to determine if some app UI can
| be used as ad inventory, matching a keyword someone has
| bid on? Like I said you use Gmail and this already
| happens, and you haven't stopped using Gmail despite
| knowing this.
|
| And even then, Apple already can create a profile of your
| preferences, for preferences in the sense of things you
| want to buy. It has your App Store data! Knowing what you
| are searching for in the App Store and what you
| downloaded and bought there is very strongly correlated
| with things you may want to buy in the future. They sell
| a bajillion different products and services: your Apple
| Store data isn't end to end encrypted, I'm sure you've
| bought peripherals and iCloud storage, etc.
|
| > "can someone see that I've installed an app"
|
| You say preferences and you didn't say what you mean. One
| meaning of the word preferences: what if you installed
| Grindr?
| lukev wrote:
| You are saying a lot of words but none of them negate the
| point that Apple has a better security posture for users
| than any of the other big tech cos. For any meaningful
| definition of the word "security."
|
| Sure I use gmail, I've been locked in for 15 years.
| Someday I'll get fed up enough to bite the bullet and
| move off it.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| There's some weird[1] laws around privacy in Australia, where
| government departments are blocked from a bunch of things by
| law. From my perspective as a citizen, this just results in
| annoyance such as having to fill out forms over and over to
| give the government data that they already have.
|
| I heard a good definition from my dad: "Privacy for me is
| pedestrians walking past my window not seeing me step out of
| the shower naked, or my neighbours not overhearing our
| domestic arguments."
|
| Basically, if the nude photos you're taking on your mobile
| phone can be seen by random people, then you don't have
| privacy.
|
| Apple encrypts my photos so that the IT guy managing the
| storage servers can't see them. Samsung is the type of
| company that includes a screen-capture "feature" in their TVs
| so that they can profile you for ad-targeting. I guarantee
| you that they've collected and can see the pictures of naked
| children in the bathtub from when someone used screen
| mirroring from their phone to show their relatives pictures
| of their grandkids. That's _not_ privacy.
|
| Sure, I use Google services, but I _don 't upload naked kid
| pictures_ to anything owned by Alphabet corp, so no problem.
|
| However, I will never buy any Samsung product for any purpose
| because they laugh and point at customer expectations of
| privacy.
|
| [1] Actually not that weird. Now that I've worked in
| government departments, I "get" the need for these
| regulations. Large organisations are made up of individuals,
| and both the org and the individual people _will_ abuse their
| access to data for their own benefit. Many such people will
| even think they 're doing the "right thing" while destroying
| freedom in the process, like people that keep trying to make
| voting systems traceable... so that vote buying will become
| easy again.
| geysersam wrote:
| If you're so focused on privacy why don't you just use Linux?
| With Linux you'll actually get real privacy and you'll really
| truly own the system.
|
| Apple takes a 30% tax on all applications running on their
| mobile devices. Just let that sink in. We are so incredibly
| lucky that never happened to PC.
| EthicalSimilar wrote:
| As much as anyone can say otherwise, running Linux isn't just
| a breeze. You will run into issues at some point, you will
| possibly have to make certain sacrifices regarding software
| or other choices. Yes it has gotten so much better over the
| past few years but I want my time spent on my work, not
| toying with the OS.
|
| Another big selling point of Apple is the hardware. Their
| hardware and software are integrated so seamlessly. Things
| just work, and they work well. 99% of the time - there's
| always edge cases.
|
| There's solutions to running Linux distros on some Apple
| hardware but again you have to make sacrifices.
| hackerbeat wrote:
| Can we just get a 32 inch iMac, please?
|
| I'm getting tired of everything else being updated yet the
| product most needed is completely being neglected, and for years
| already.
|
| And no, I don't wanna buy a separate tiny screen for thousands of
| dollars.
|
| I'm also not interested in these tiny cubes you deem to be cool.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Does it still come with a crappy 1 year warranty?
| kristianp wrote:
| > MacBook Pro with M4 Pro is up to 3x faster than M1 Pro (13)
| > (13) Testing conducted by Apple from August to October 2024
| using preproduction 16-inch MacBook Pro systems with Apple M4
| Pro, 14-core CPU, 20-core GPU, 48GB of RAM and 4TB SSD, and
| production 16-inch MacBook Pro systems with Apple M1 Pro, 10-core
| CPU, 16-core GPU, 32GB of RAM and 8TB SSD. Prerelease Redshift
| v2025.0.0 tested using a 29.2MB scene utilising hardware-
| accelerated ray tracing on systems with M4 Pro. Performance tests
| are conducted using specific computer systems and reflect the
| approximate performance of MacBook Pro.
|
| So they're comparing software that uses raytracing present in the
| M3 and M4, but not in the M1. This is really misleading. The true
| performance increase for most workloads is likely to be around
| 15% over the M3. We'll have to wait for benchmarks from other
| websites to get a true picture of the differences.
|
| Edit: If you click on the "go deeper on M4 chips", you'll get
| some comparisons that are less inflated, for example, code
| compilation on pro: 14-inch MacBook Pro with M4
| 4.5x 14-inch MacBook Pro with M3 3.8x 13-inch
| MacBook Pro with M1 2.7x
|
| So here the M4 Pro is 67% faster than the M1 Pro, and 18% faster
| than the M3 Pro. It varies by workload of course.
|
| No benchmarks yet, but this article gives some tables of
| comparative core counts, max RAM and RAM bandwidths:
| https://arstechnica.com/apple/2024/10/apples-m4-m4-pro-and-m...
| the_king wrote:
| The single core performance looks really fast.
| Chip | Geekbench Score (Process) ---- |
| ------------------------ M1 | 2,419 (5nm) M2
| | 2,658 (5nm) M3 | 3,076 (3nm) M4* | 3,810
| (3nm)
|
| In my experience, single-core CPU is the best all-around
| indicator of how "fast" a machine feels. I feel like Apple kind
| of buried this in their press release.
|
| M4 benchmark source: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/8171874
| tomcam wrote:
| I don't know much about modern Geekbench scores, but it that
| chart seems to show that M1s are still pretty good? It appears
| that M4 is only about 50% faster. Somehow I would expect more
| like 100% improvement.
|
| Flameproof suit donned. Please correct me because I'm pretty
| ignorant about modern hardware. My main interest is playing
| lots of tracks live in Logic Pro.
| mjlee wrote:
| Apple claim up to 1.8x in the press release. They're cherry
| picking so 50% in a benchmark seems about right.
| tomcam wrote:
| Appreciate the sanity check.
| the_king wrote:
| That's only single core. I think Logic is pretty optimized to
| use multiple cores (Apple demoed it on the 20 core Xeon Mac
| Pro back in 2019).
|
| But if the M1 isn't the bottleneck, no reason to upgrade.
| tomcam wrote:
| Very good to know, thanks.
| lukev wrote:
| It's not really buried... their headline stat is that it's 1.8x
| faster than the M1, which is actually a bigger improvement than
| the actual Geekbench score shows (it would be a score of 4354).
| the_king wrote:
| Call me cynical, but when I see headlines like "up to 2x
| faster", I assume it's a cherry-picked result on some
| workload where they added a dedicated accelerator.
|
| There's a massive difference between "pretty much every app
| is 80% faster" and "if you render a 4K ProRes video in Final
| Cut Pro it's 3x faster."
| giobox wrote:
| > I feel like Apple kind of buried this in their press release
|
| The press release describes the single core performance as the
| fastest ever made, full stop:
|
| "The M4 family features phenomenal single-threaded CPU
| performance with the world's fastest CPU core"
|
| The same statement is made repeatedly across most the new M4
| line up marketing materials. I think thats enough to get the
| point across that its a pretty quick machine.
| the_king wrote:
| Exactly my point. Saying something is the fastest ever is
| marketing code (at least to me) for minor improvement over
| the previous generation.
|
| If you're 30% faster than the previous generation, I'd rather
| see that because my assumption is it's 5%.
| bluSCALE4 wrote:
| Yeah, better than the glaring, 10x better than i7 Intel
| Mac. Like that's even a valid point of reference.
| pazimzadeh wrote:
| that's interesting, the scores are accelerating? 9.8% better,
| 15.7% better, 23.8% better
| choilive wrote:
| They also explicitly called it out in their announcement videos
| that the M4 has the fastest CPU cores on the market.
| kadomony wrote:
| Conversely, the M3 supposedly has better multi core
| performance? How is that possible?
| wmf wrote:
| It doesn't.
| cjbprime wrote:
| Does anyone understand this claim from the press release?
|
| > M4 Max supports up to 128GB of fast unified memory and up to
| 546GB/s of memory bandwidth, which is 4x the bandwidth of the
| latest AI PC chip. This allows developers to easily interact with
| large language models that have nearly 200 billion parameters.
|
| Having more memory bandwidth is not directly helpful in using
| larger LLM models. A 200B param model requires at least 200GB RAM
| quantized down from the original precision (e.g. "bf16") to "q8"
| (8 bits per parameter), and these laptops don't even have the
| 200GB RAM that would be required to run inference over that
| quantized version.
|
| How can you "easily interact with" 200GB of data, in real-time,
| on a machine with 128GB of memory??
| joshdavham wrote:
| Question to more senior Mac users: how do you usually decide when
| to upgrade?
|
| I bought my first Macbook pro about a year and a half ago and
| it's still working great.
| y7 wrote:
| When it stops working great. My 2014 Macbook is about due for
| an upgrade, mostly due to the GPU struggling with a 4K screen.
| sequoia wrote:
| The 2014 model I bought in early 2015 still works, though the
| battery is dodgy. I did get the motherboard replaced in 2020
| which was pricey, but much cheaper than a new machine.
|
| Is there some reason your current computer isn't working for
| you? If not, why upgrade? Use it as long as you can do so
| practically & easily.
|
| On the other extreme, I knew someone who bought a new MBP with
| maximum RAM specs each year. She'd sell the old one for a few
| hundred less than she paid, then she always had new hardware
| with applecare. It was basically like leasing a machine for
| $400/yr.
| aequitas wrote:
| My previous Macbook was a Pro model from 2015, I waited 6 years
| to finally upgrade to an M1 Air because of the awful touchbar
| models they had in between (though I'm still using the 2015 Pro
| for personal stuff, in fact right now. It's upgraded to the
| latest macOS using OpenCore and it still runs great). But I
| would say upgrade every 3-5 years depending on heavy a
| professional user you are.
| AdamJacobMuller wrote:
| The touchbar was useful in one important way.
|
| Because it made the esc key useless for touch typists and
| because, as a vi user, I hit esc approximately a bazillion
| times per day I mapped caps lock to esc.
|
| Now my fingers don't travel as far to hit esc.
|
| I still use that mapping even on my regular keyboards and my
| current non-touch-bar macs.
|
| Thanks touchbar macs, rest in peace.
| thenaturalist wrote:
| Ask 3 people, get 5 answers.
|
| Got the money, are in the consumerism camp: Switch to latest
| model every year because the camera island changed 5mm.
|
| Got the professional need in games or video and your work isn't
| covering your device: Switch to new model every couple of
| generations.
|
| Be me: I want to extend the lifecycle of things I use. Learn
| how to repair what you own (it's never been as easy), be aware
| of how you can work in today's world (who needs laptop RAM if I
| can spin up containers in the cloud) - I expect to not upgrade
| until a similarly stellar step up in the category of Intel to
| Apple Silicone comes along.
|
| All past Mx versions being mostly compared to Intel baselines:
| Boring. M4 1.8 times faster than M1 Pro: Nice, but no QoL
| change. For the few times I might need it, I can spin up a
| container in the cloud.
|
| My display is excellent.
|
| 14 inch is the perfect screen size.
|
| Battery life is perfect.
| __d wrote:
| Pick a daily cost you're comfortable with. If you're
| contracting at say $500/day, how much are you willing to spend
| on having a responsive machine? $10? $20?
|
| Multiply it out: 220 work days a year * $10/day is $2200 a year
| towards your laptop.
|
| Upgrade accordingly.
| htk wrote:
| People have different passions, I like computers. If I feel a
| new Mac is going to be fun for whatever reason, I consider
| upgrading it. Performance wise they last a long time, so I
| could keep them way longer than I do, but I enjoy newer and
| more capable models. You can always find someone to buy the
| older model. Macs have a great second hand market.
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