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MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max

apple.com

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Re: MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max

#331

Post by goosedragons »

Spooky23 wrote: post #86
goosedragons wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren't though. The fact that they are ridiculously comparing performance to the 3 year old at this point final Intel MacBook (which was a dog turd) in their press release with some very cherry picked benchmarks suggests things aren't quite as good as they could be. Why are they talking about 3+ old parts and not the current competition?

They are trying to drive the replacement cycle quickly for customers who are operating a defective MacBook with a keyboard that will fail. If they convince you to trade in the old one, they take that off the market and make cash.

The fastest Intel MBP ever made already had the scissor key keyboard and not butterfly.

Re: MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max

#332

Post by itslennysfault »

optymizer wrote: post #153
dchuk wrote: post #14

It’s crazy how far ahead Apple is getting in the laptop game with these new chips. I have the first gen MacBook Pro with the M1 Pro (ok maybe they’re not winning the naming game), and it’s a perfect computer. Battery life is literally all day, every single action is instant, I have zero regard for many apps or tabs I have open. It’s just perfect. I have literally traveled with just a 30 watt anker brick for my phone…

The hardware is indeed great. The software experience is getting worse imo, particularly when upgrading. It used to be rock solid for me. The m1 worked without any issues for 2 months. I upgraded yesterday to macOS Ventura: * Upgrade finished but laptop froze. Hard reset. * On first boot, the new System Settings failed to load icons, then froze. Trying to quit it froze the OS. Hard reset. * I left the laptop plugged…

I feel like people have ALWAYS had problems when upgrading MacOS (or OSX). However, those problems aren't with the OS itself usually, but 3rd party software that lags. For that reason I always intentionally lag 1 major version behind. I'll upgrade to Ventura whenever the next version is released. Been doing this forever and can't recommend it highly enough.

Re: MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max

#333

Post by mynameisvlad »

masklinn wrote: post #312
mynameisvlad wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC, Apple offered (offers? I haven’t checked) the 13” M1 which was based on the previous chassis, then launched the 14/16” on the new one.

Well yes but that new chassis, with magsafe, 3xUSB-C, HDMI, and SD, was launched in 2021, with the M1-based 14" and 16". The M2-based 13" still has two USB-C on the same side and no SD: https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-13/specs/

The comment you replied to says that their MacBook M1 does not have those features.

It does not have an SD card slot not MagSafe because it was a 13” M1 MacBook Pro. Nobody claimed that their MacBook was the latest chassis, just that it had an M1.

> The M2-based 13" still has two USB-C on the same side and no SD

One can easily interpret their comment to say that they are happy it still has USB-C on both sides. Most non-MacBooks have one or two ports, generally on one side only. With the addition of other ports, Apple could have very well removed some of the USB-C ports.

I’m not sure why you are trying to insist that they don’t know their own laptop. They even provided you a link showing the model did in fact exist.

Re: MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max

#334

Post by nicoburns »

objclxt wrote: post #294
nicoburns wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m not exactly sure how Apple was “behind the state of the art” and has caught up. Can you explain? The M1 was when they caught up. They were behind the state of the art (of laptop/desktop chip performance) with their A series chips starting with the A4. They gradually caught up over the course of several years to the point that when they released the M1 chip (which was really not that different to the A15) they w…

> They were behind the state of the art (of laptop/desktop chip performance) with their A series chips starting with the A4 ...but A series chips were never intended for laptops or desktops? And by all accounts, the A series nearly always out-competed comparable QC Snapdragon chips.

They weren't... but evidence is that that's only because they didn't have competitive performance for those applications. Once the performance caught up they did choose to put them in laptops and desktops.

Re: MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max

#336

Post by dagmx »

shrubble wrote: post #127

The ThinkPad P15 gen 1, shipped in 2020 with 128gb RAM available... for example: https://www.techradar.com/news/this-is-the-best-value-128gb-... So I don't see why Apple would make the claim that their 96gb setup can load models that PC laptops can't...

Did it ship with 128GB available to the GPU? That’s part of the claim, because this has a huge amount of RAM that both the CPU+GPU can access.

Re: MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max

#337

Post by BrandonS113 »

TheKnack wrote: post #286
optymizer wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hardware is indeed great. The software experience is getting worse imo, particularly when upgrading. It used to be rock solid for me. The m1 worked without any issues for 2 months. I upgraded yesterday to macOS Ventura: * Upgrade finished but laptop froze. Hard reset. * On first boot, the new System Settings failed to load icons, then froze. Trying to quit it froze the OS. Hard reset. * I left the laptop plugged…

For both iOS and Macos (and Windows for that matter) it's a good idea to backup everything and reinstall the OS from scratch for each major version. Yes it's a headache but it will prevent 10x more headaches that result from upgrading from a previous major version. Many of the problems people have with Apple OS upgrades are issues that happen during the process of converting configurations from one version to the nex…

I have a mac that has only been upgraded between what 20 major versions and migrated between 6 macs since 2003, never an issue small or large. Never reinstalled from scratch. You must have had bad luck.

Re: MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max

#339

Post by xpe »

astrojams wrote: post #277
superkuh wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things may be great on the high end of Apple's M1/M2 laptops given they actually have enough ram for simple tasks. But those are also insanely expensive. At the low end Apple is actively ripping off users providing computers which can't even edit photos. My father, a long time apple user, decided to get an Apple M1 to replace his old Apple macbook. He bought the M1 8GB model (without consulting me). Turns out that th…

I believe that the M1 architecture is such that you don't actually need as much RAM as an older model computer. It is a system on a chip so moving data between RAM and storage is so fast that it can swap between the two without much performance degradation.

> It is a system on a chip so moving data between RAM and storage is so fast that it can swap between the two without much performance degradation.

How much faster? I’m not sure what your specific point of comparison is.

Sure, the SoC provides many advantages, many due to Apple’s UMA (Apple’s Unified Memory Architecture) but the system is still limited by storage speed and latency.

But if we’re talking about the relative performance difference between solid state memory (i.e. SSDs, if that is the correct technical term here) and UMA RAM, I’d expect* a significant difference, perhaps (1) an order of magnitude in terms of latency and (2) 2X to 5X in terms of bandwidth. Not to mention that excessive SSD writes would be unwise.

Now I will admit, if there are large parts of the operating system that don’t need to linger / lurk / creep around in RAM, they could be swapped out. And they might even be kept on SSD and not have to be rewritten at all except for patches and upgrades.

* This is a guess based on ‘usual’ data-locality rules of thumb, hopefully allowing for Apple architecture somewhat. I’m happy to be educated / corrected.

Re: MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max

#340

Post by nicoburns »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #306
nicoburns wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m not exactly sure how Apple was “behind the state of the art” and has caught up. Can you explain? The M1 was when they caught up. They were behind the state of the art (of laptop/desktop chip performance) with their A series chips starting with the A4. They gradually caught up over the course of several years to the point that when they released the M1 chip (which was really not that different to the A15) they w…

Yeah, as the other person says, it’s weird to combine A-level chips which were mobile only (minus that short stint where they put it in a Mac Mini before the M1 was ready) with the M-level chips. Sure, they’re all “Apple Silicon” but the chips should be compared to their equivalents, M-level with Intel/AMD and A-level with Snapdragon/Exonys. We don’t really compare Snapdragon to Core any other time, as they both opti…

I thought the M-level and A-level chips are pretty much identical CPU cores (just different numbers of them). As such it seems reasonable to me to compare single-threaded performance between A-level and Intel/AMD (making allowances for power envelopes). And indeed one could compare Snapdragon, except they're quite far behind.
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