Of course I bought a new 14" MBP with M1 Pro two weeks ago. Looks like if i had waited, I could have paid the same price for faster CPU with more cores, faster wifi, and 8K HDMI output. I guess that's how it goes.
You're inside the return window.
MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max
611–620 of 1001 posts
Re: MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max
#612Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's no secret that Apple's M2 series processors are a pretty minor improvement over the M1 series. Expect much bigger improvements in the M3 series which will likely be using TSMC's 3nm process (and then probably only minor improvements again for the M4 series). It seems that Apple's ridiculously impressive consistent year-on-year gains up the M1 were in large part possible because they were behind the state of the…
Apple was never competing in the same space as Intel and AMD. From the beginning, Apple made ARM-based RISC chips. Intel and AMD used their own x86-64 architecture. Apple's was great for iPhones because of power efficiency. They were able to improve their chip designs so much that they smoked the competition away with the release of their first fusion chip (iPhone 7 I believe) and have been miles ahead of everyone el…
You seem to have a short memory. In the beginning, the Apple I had a 6502.
The Macintosh ran on a Motorola 68000. Power Macintoshes used PowerPC chips.
Then came Intel Macs, they started with 32bit CPUs, then 64bit Intel chips. And finally, we got ARM Macs from Apple.
Re: MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max
#613Re: MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max
#614Is there expected to be a difference in CPU performance between the 12-core M2 Pro and the 12-core M2 Max ?
Re: MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max
#615In the feature list, the most underwhelming item to me is the '1080p FaceTime HD camera'. Aren't pretty much all cameras at least 1080p by now? I'd expect a top of the line laptop to have a multi-megapixel camera able to push 240fps for slowmo and windowing abilities to allow software zoom while still outputting a high enough resolution feed that someone viewing on another macbook pro can't see the pixels (ie. more t…
> In the feature list, the most underwhelming item to me is the '1080p FaceTime HD camera'.
Why ?
Most people use their laptop webcams for Skype with friends or Zoom/Teams with colleagues. The camera is merely a means to display your face to others and I doubt anyone else (especially on work sessions) gives a shit about what your image looks like.
Do people really need to stare at your wrinkles, nose-hair and unshaven face in 8k ? Most people also use their webcam in godawful lighting conditions, so it matters even less.
Added to which, in relation to the MacBook Pros, the clue is in the name "Pro". People will be buying it as a work machine. Who cares about the webcam (or indeed, if you look at certain other web-forums where people are complaining about the lack of Space Gray 16-inch ...who cares about the colour !).
Re: MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max
#616These new ARM chips are almost perfect, the only bad part is... ARM.
Most backend devs these days use Docker, and serious Docker usage on M1/M2 macs isn't really possible due to bugs and super slow performance.
I was doing benchmarks and for our workloads images would build several times slower as well as our test suites.
We had many devs in our company buy the shiny macbooks only having to return them due to incompatibilities with Docker.
My computer journey was Windows -> Linux -> Macos, now more than decade later I am returning back to Windows, because WSL is a total blessing.
Re: MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max
#617Earlier quoted context omitted.
Plenty of laptops with iGPUs that can do this, yes.
...Not exactly and this is a silly comparison anyways Apple dynamically scales the GPU memory while Windows GPU memory must be reserved. If you have 64GB of Ram and want 32GB of VRAM you now...always.... have 32GB of system memory. But furthermore...that iGPU is like 1/10th the performance of an M1 Max lol, absolutely nobody should EVER do this on an iGPU. Their argument is that on a dedicated card you just can't do…
It is not true that iGPU memory always has to be reserved anymore. Some programs and APIs don't support it, but you can address main system memory from many iGPUs and vice-versa. In Vulkan for example you can do this by setting the HOST_COHERENT, HOST_VISIBLE and DEVICE_VISIBLE for a buffer. Of course, this is subject to driver bugs, and you have to be careful with caches that may or may not be shared depending on the specific iGPU.
Beyond this, newer iGPUs like the RX680M are comparable in performance to an M1 Pro. Certainly sufficient for any model visualization task, since that's what we're talking about.
Re: MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max
#618I'm an Air convert after years of using 15" macbook pros. Small, light, amazing battery life. Feels just as fast on all 'normal' tasks. If I'm doing some work that needs a lot of power, even a maxed Pro wouldn't be enough.
Agreed. Now they just need to ship a 15" MBA. It would be the perfect laptop and more than capable for most people and devs. I have the 13" M2 Air and I've realized the screen is just too small for me. Maybe we'll see it this spring?
Re: MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max
#619In the feature list, the most underwhelming item to me is the '1080p FaceTime HD camera'. Aren't pretty much all cameras at least 1080p by now? I'd expect a top of the line laptop to have a multi-megapixel camera able to push 240fps for slowmo and windowing abilities to allow software zoom while still outputting a high enough resolution feed that someone viewing on another macbook pro can't see the pixels (ie. more t…
Contrary opinion: I don't see the need for a high-quality camera on a laptop. I can't think of another good use besides Zoom calls and Facetime and the like, when your counterparties in the meeting are all going to be seeing a scaled-down image anyway.
Stick in some decent and cheap camera, and put the money into stuff that matters like computing capabilities, RAM, storage, networking, screen, etc.
Re: MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max
#620I bought a MBP 14 (max 32, 32GB, 2TB) Dec 2021 and I mostly don't regret it (probably should've only gotten 24 GPU cores and gone silver). Here are some pros and cons I don't think get enough play: - Turning on "Low Power Mode" when on Battery gives me roughly 10h of battery life. Functionally this is more than good enough for me. - Backlight leakage around the keys feels janky - It's pretty hard to pick it up unless…
Another reason the Air is a good choice for most people is that it doesn't have a fan. I've cleaned quite a bit of dust/lint/etc. out of various laptops. Without a fan, that's much less likely to be an issue. In one recent case, a family member was about to buy an entire new laptop because their old one was feeling very sluggish. I checked it out and realized that the fan had completely died and the system was consta…
Ha ha, in my experience you are a downer. Sometimes I like to find a reason for a new purchase. ;-)
(I suppose having fixed the fan though means I could get a little more for it on eBay.)