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M4 MacBook Pro

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Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#351

Post by chx »

jchw wrote: post #141
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 m…

I am on Intel TGL currently and can't wait for Strix Halo next year. That is truly something else, it's nothing we have seen in notebooks before iGPU wise.

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#352

Post by trogdor »

michaelmueller wrote: post #150
alsetmusic wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Oh, wow. You are in for a treat.

The only downside is that your computer will no longer double as a space heater :p

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#353

Post by ZeroCool2u »

wkyleg wrote: post #321

What's the consensus regarding best MacBooks for AI/ML? I've heard it's easier to just use cloud options, but I sill like the idea of being able to run actual models and train them on my laptop. I have a M1 MacBook now and I'm considering trading in to upgrade. I've seen somewhat conflicting things regarding what you get for the money. For instance, some reports recommending a M2 Pro for the money IIRC.

Training is not practical. For inference they're pretty great though, especially if you go up in the specs and add a bunch of memory.

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#354

Post by mixmastamyk »

alberth wrote: post #219
vishnugupta wrote: post #104

Can someone please help me out with this? I'm torn between Mac mini and and MacBook Pro, specifically the CPU spec difference. MBP: Apple M4 Max chip with 16‑core CPU, 40‑core GPU and 16‑core Neural Engine Mac mini: Apple M4 Pro chip with 14‑core CPU, 20‑core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine What kind of workload would make me regret not having bought MBP over Mac mini given the above. Thanks!

Since the only real difference is number of GPUs, it'd be: - photo/video editing - games, or - AI (training / inference) that would benefit from the extra GPUs.

^3D work - Maya, Blender, etc. Probably would be best on a Studio or workstation if/when those are available again.

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#355

Post by davidhariri »

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…

I think this is confirmed by the fact software vendors are still not taking advantage of ARM chips maximum performance.

Where this might shift is as we start using more applications that are powered by locally running LLMs.

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#356

Post by xenospn »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #302
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…

I think regretting Mac upgrades is a real thing, at least for me. I got a 32G Mac mini in January to run local LLMs. While it does so beautifully, there are now smaller LLMs that run fine on my very old 8G M1 MacBook Pro, and these newer smaller models do almost all of what I want for NLP tasks, data transformation, RAG, etc. I feel like I wasted my money.

Which ones in particular? I have an M2 air with 8GB, and doing some RAG development locally would be fantastic. I tried running Ollama with llama3.2 and it predictably bombed.

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#357

Post by grujicd »

rizzaxc wrote: post #221
bhouston wrote: post #167

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

For me faster refresh rate is noticeable on phone or ipad where you scroll all the time. On a laptop you don't have that much smooth scrolling. For me it's a non issue on laptop, not even once I wished it had faster refresh. While I always notice when switching between Pro and non Pro iPad.

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#358

Post by crystal_revenge »

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…

On the other side, as someone doing a lot of work in the GenAI space, I'm simultaneously amazed that I can run Flux [dev] on my laptop and use local LLMs for a variety of tasks, while also wishing that I had more RAM and more processing power, despite having a top of the line M3 max MBP.

But it is wild that two years ago running any sort of useful genAI stuff on a MBP was more-or-less a theoretical curiosity, and already today you can easily run models that would have exceeded SotA 2 years ago.

Somewhat ironically, I got into the "AI" space a complete skeptic, but thinking it would be fun to play with nonetheless. After 2 years of daily work with this models I'm starting to be increasingly convinced they are going to become increasingly disruptive. No AGI, but it will certainly reduce a lot of labor and enable things that we're really feasible before. Best of all, it's clear a lot of this work will be doable from a laptop!

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#359

Post by 404mm »

throw0101a wrote: post #27

> All MacBook Pro models feature an HDMI port that supports up to 8K resolution, a SDXC card slot, a MagSafe 3 port for charging, and a headphone jack, along with support for Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3. No Wifi 7. So you get access to the 6 GHz band, but not some of the other features (preamble punching, OFDMA): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_7 * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_6E The iPhone 16s do have Wi…

The lack of Wifi7 is a real bummer for me. I was hoping to ditch the 2.5Gbe dongle and just use WiFi.

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#360

Post by dagw »

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…

The only reason I'd want to upgrade my M1 Pro MBP is because I kind of need more RAM and storage. The fact that I'm even considering a new laptop just for things that before could have been a trivial upgrade is quite illuminating.
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