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M4 MacBook Pro

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Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#141

Post by jchw »

carlgreene wrote: post #94

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? Tec…

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.)

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#142

Post by dawnerd »

carlgreene wrote: post #94

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? Tec…

Guess that’s why most of their comparisons are with the older Intel Macs.

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#143

Post by rbanffy »

maxvisser wrote: post #137
carlgreene wrote: post #94

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? Tec…

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.

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).

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#144

Post by binary132 »

Rohansi wrote: post #107
manaskarekar wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The M3 Max was 400GBps, this is 540GBps. Truly an outstanding case for unified memory. DDR5 doesn't come anywhere near.

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 ot…

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.

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#146

Post by nsbk »

bhouston wrote: post #105
opjjf wrote: post #5

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.

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.

This is the machine I'm waiting for. Hopefully early 2025

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#147

Post by JimDabell »

kristofferR wrote: post #133
carlgreene wrote: post #94

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? Tec…

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 (hop…

> 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.

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#148

Post by thimabi »

post-it wrote: post #69
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #55

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…

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.

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.

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#149

Post by stetrain »

jcmontx wrote: post #20

> "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

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.

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#150

Post by michaelmueller »

alsetmusic wrote: post #35
shrubble wrote: post #22

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)

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…

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!
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