I knew “scary fast” had to mean some sort of processor bump for hardware, but I was secretly hoping they’d kill off the remaining Lightning ports on their keyboards, trackpads, and mice.
And I was hoping they’d finally redesign that god awful mouse. I don’t know how people live with that thing.
I think they want to force trackpads. I can’t even use a mouse anymore. Feels strange.
Whe I use my Mac I only ever use the track pad, it’s amazing.
I’m a software developer and I’ll still only use the track pad when working at my desk with my monitors.
Still need a mouse for gaming though on the gaming PC.
You mean an external one right? Or are you using a laptop track pad all day with multiple monitors?
It’s me, but it’s also a LOT of other people. Those mice are famously hated by many.
3 nanometer
That’s a silicon lattice just six atoms thick. What a time to be alive!
Nanometers have actually been a marker of generation for quite a while. 3nm is actually 24. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/3_nm_process
Intel does it and it’s annoying. 7mm lithography is actually 10nm. No idea how they get away with false advertising.
That seems… Illegal. Much the same as selling a “foot long” Sub or Hotdog which is only 11".
At the very least it’s misleading.
What are you complaining about? We promised you three but you got 11! Those are bonus nanometers just for you.
Since feature size doesn’t actually matter, The metric that large scale computer consumers use is application performance. The feature size kind of is just a talking point, it’s not really fraud, since it doesn’t have a direct impact on the measurable performance that actually matters.
If I had a 20 nanometer chip that performs better than a 7 nanometer chip, I still have the better chip, and I know in large-scale procurement, you often get free sample chips to run your applications on, to see how performant the new architecture will actually be… And that’ll drive the bulk of the sales
I built a M3 MBP just to see how much money a mxed out unit would be.
M3 14" MBP Max chip with all the cores 128GB RAM 8TB storage
$4700
That’s about the cost of my last MBP and iPhone pair, two times over. At that point, why even go for a laptop, vs. what would clearly be a high end desktop station?
Am I confused, or are you confidently asserting that desktop systems are objectively superior to laptops?
they are. (unless we’re talking about Mac only, which are not as repairable or upgradable)
desktop allow for a far better modularity, and reparability, far more ports, PCIe expansions like sound cards, etc.
If my screen breaks or I’d rather use a bigger one, I just buy a monitor and plug it in. If my CPU dies or is no more enough for my use case, I’ll just buy a better one while still using every other component. If I need more hard drives, I’ll just buy more SATA cables. If I need better sound, I’ll buy a sound card.
those features are dealbreakers. laptops will never be able to compete with a real desktop.
Aside from all of that, desktops are also far less constrained. If you have a CPU whose performance scales well with power (ie not an M2 but maybe an M3) you can slap it in a desktop and be able to give it 500 watts of power and a giant ass cooling setup to enable that performance. You can’t do this with the physical constraints required of a laptop.
Are you implying they’re not? The only reason anyone even buys laptops is because PCs aren’t portable. Otherwise PCs are the best.
The only reason people buy cars instead of tennis shoes is because cars are faster
At that point, why even go for a laptop, vs. what would clearly be a high end desktop station?
Because you can take that high-end computer with you across the room, on a plane, or anywhere else.
Yeah, that’s all true, but who really needs that kind of power?
For some people it’s worth it. For most people? Probably not.
IMHO the MacBook Airs and the M1/2 MBPs are looking pretty good right now.
Yeah, that’s all true, but who really needs that kind of power?
The people featured in the presentation: music and video production people, medical researchers, machine learning experts. The MacBook Air is their most popular notebook. The MacBook Pro is for people who actually need more (with a new lower-tier MacBook Pro added for morons who insist they need a “pro” model but really don’t).
Today I sat in a meeting I didn’t care much for and was able to run my project’s unittests. They take a long time to run, like an hour and a half if run on a single thread. But with an M2 Max I can run it all in ~10 minutes or so, and the power efficiency is such that I don’t have to worry about it. I previously had an XPS 15, and it both took longer and also I could kill it in an hour doing this, so any intensive tasks like this were only for when I had wall power.
It’s definitely not necessary for casual use, but there are definitely use cases that benefit from having a ton of power in a laptop.
Skip apple entirely. The spec out and testing of the new Qualcomm ARM chip releasing in laptops next year looks to have the m3 beat across the board and will definitely end up at a lower price point.
Yes! By all means, buy next years’ mythical chip and instead of this proven one!
It’s already been proven. They just had a big live tech press conference where they set up 20 laptops with the chips in them and all had them running windows with a bunch of different benchmarking software (all ones you’ve heard of if you’re in to that sort of thing) to prove the numbers, specs, and functionality, along with having some of their engineers there to answer any questions.
It’s not a “next years mythical chip”. It’s already here and they already proved it was all legitimate and that there were no “embellishments”. The laptops from all the different manufacturers that are slated to use the chip are set to sell mid 2024.
Did these chips have a translation in hardware like Rosetta? Or emulation that’s almost just as good? Edit: Found a couple things according to Qualcomm’s charts it looks interesting https://www.anandtech.com/show/21112/qualcomm-snapdragon-x-elite-performance-preview-a-first-look-at-whats-to-come But from what was observed along with other scores it looks a lot closer https://www.androidauthority.com/snapdragon-x-elite-benchmarks-3380426/
Just for fun, let me buy every upsell, regardless of whether I want or need it.
And then let me compare that to the normal configuration of things I bought…
Why don’t you compare apples to apples. Configure an M3 MBP like you would with fairly normal specs?
apples to apples
Well, technically all those computers are Apples, so they’re within their rights
The memory maximums are a tad silly. I’d expect …
- M3 up to 32gb
- M3 Pro up to 64gb
- M3 Max ok, this one is ok
The ray tracing is awesome, but minus that I am not eager to move up from my M1 Max.
The memory maximums are going to be more and more important when it comes to local AI applications.
Take language models for an example
To run a 30b model, you need 24gb of video ram to do it fully on the video card. That’s a nvidia 3090 or 4090 today. But in the grand scheme of things, 30b is small. They are going to get much bigger, especially when you want larger contexts which allow the AI to remember more about its interactions with you.
Apples memory is unified, so it can be system ram, or video ram. You’ll be able to easily load a 70b model into a MacBook with 64gb of ram for example, where you’d need 2 3090s or 4090s and a hefty PSU on a current Gen non Mac PC (if you even can with just that)
For the moment, things are better optimized for windows and nvidia hardware, but Apple is encroaching on this space, and their huge amounts of video memory will begin to unlock using and training larger and larger models with each hardware generation.
Expect to see nvidia starting to offer higher video ram cards as well for this exact reason. Maybe even cards tailored to that instead of gaming with really high amounts of ram.
I can’t see local models or hardware needing to scale much past the sizes we already have. Recent models like mistral have shown that we are still far from saturation at current model sizes.
And we only ever needed 64kb of ram.
Even if we have a lot of room to optimize and grow within what we have, we still have so much more to do.
Fully coherent audio and video synthesis for a scene for example.
And these models are being trained on server farms, but thats just because video memory is so expensive to come by.
We’re just starting to crawl, we haven’t even started walking yet on where this is going.
Doesn’t the m2 max allow 196gb of ram? Seems like an odd downgrade. The value in these for me is the unified memory for large ai models, but most consumers may not notice that. Who knows.
M2 release dates.
- M2: June 24, 2022
- M2 Pro and Max: January 17, 2023
- M2 Ultra: June 13, 2023
Damn Apple.
