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M4 MacBook Pro

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Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#221

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…

> 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 Air doesn't have ProMotion right? that feature is non-negotiable on any display for me nowadays

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#222
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

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)

the office Ryzen thinkpads we have are ok...but they're definitely no M1 MacBook Air or Pro...

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#225

The M4 Max goes up to 128GB RAM, and "over half a terabyte per second of unified memory bandwidth" - LLM users rejoice.

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.

Right now, there are 0.90$ per hour H100 80gbs that you can rent.

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#226

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…

> 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.

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.

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#227

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. Thi…

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.

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#228

New 12MP Center Stage Camera. Will it support 4k?

The 12MP will be used for better framing, there is still almost no use case for 4k quality video conferencing

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.

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#229

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. Thi…

Do you mean you want to use Apple Silicon without macOS?

If that's your question, yes - various options exist like https://asahilinux.org

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Air doesn't have ProMotion right? that feature is non-negotiable on any display for me nowadays

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.

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