I know they are a phone company, but I think they should focus on local models software, not only hardware.
My 100k company only buys Mac laptops and you're calling them a phone company. Such an odd comment.
Its called cope...
Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra
981–990 of 1001 posts
Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra
#982Apple still has the best hardware so I moved to it for the last few years, but the closed software ecosystem is terrible for taking advantage of it. I wasn't able to debug network errors (restartin my Mac worked), Metal was missing low level disassembly / debugging tools (there is some hard to use UI), but the worst thing was the inflexible windowing system. Even getting all the window handles on all screens/desktops…
I don't understand how absolutely basic things are not possible on Mac OS. Switching between two windows easily, displaying hidden files in the finder... These things would be way easier to solve than building the next generation hardware.
Switching between program is command+tab
Between windows in a program is command+~
Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra
#983Earlier quoted context omitted.
> a little sluggish > surprised by how quick it felt Aren't these properties of the (G)UI rather than of the processor? I've been using systems 20 years ago that were super snappy. The same software would still be snappy today obviously. But the software has become bloated to the point that you need to run the latest generation of CPUs such that things are not sluggish. In principle you don't need 32-core GHz CPUs to…
> " the software has become bloated " Casey Muratori has a 20 minute talk on YouTube called "Clean code, horrible performance"[1]. Using an oft-repeated example in C++ he rewrites it uncleanly and then benchmarks. Removing Classes/subclasses/polymorphism: 1.5x faster. That overhead was like reducing an iPhone 14 to an iPhone 11 performance. Replacing Encapsulation with a table-driven calculation: 10x faster. That ove…
Yes, but that's a game developers perspective. Hardware performance is not be-all end-all (an argument can be made on environmental reasons that it should be - but bear with me in the first instance).
Software is a tool working within a socio-technical system. Some systems have low user workflow diversity and a low rate of change - a game being a perfect example. Games get patched, but the diversity is purely in user data, not in feature use - everyone uses the same engine, the same textures, the same game logic. Some systems have high user workflow diversity - such as business software.
Pair that with the fact that games, due to the nature of the system, have to optimise for low latency AND they run on the edge - and it's natural that the primary optimisation will be for CPU cycles. For business software, for which distributional advantage of running it through web + the high rate of feature change that is a result of the specification being opaque and a moving target - means you have plenty networking latency that can hide your CPU latency for long after it becomes a true problem for you.
Not to mention that "clean code" optimises for developer churn and business priority shift (which is a luxury games which are an upfront investement don't have) as a result of accelerating industry of software technology and greater saturation of developers.
Had software remained the domain of the same number of practitioners such as I'll leave as exercise for the reader what pushing AI into the software development equation does for the system and inevitable hardware throughput implications.
Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra
#984Earlier quoted context omitted.
They aren't a phone company, and haven't been ever. They're a hardware company first
More like an "ecosystem company". It's the Hardware, Software and Services in combination. None would work without the other (to reach the scale apple is)
Probably too young if it was easy these companies would still be around I miss them SGI, Sun, Digital, Acorn, particularly SGI and Acorn. All were roadkill of Wintel.
Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra
#985Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with you that this is a noticeable effect, but I have a hard time figuring out why it is, especially on Macs with the sealed system volume (which should make the operating system files bit-for-bit identical between a freshly set up Mac and one you've been using for years). Certainly it could come from the accumulation of cruft in /Library and ~/Library, but you can clean that up too.
One reason is the ssd. A heavily used ssd is just slower than a new one.
Thermal performance degrades too. Paste breaks down over 2 to 5 years, you'll thermal throttle more often and more quickly than when new after a few years.
Phase change thermal pads help with this, extending that timeline out beyond 5+ years but still will eventually degrade.
There's all kinds of other hardware things we don't usually think about that can start having an actual performance impact after ~3-5 years too. Battery, obviously, as it degrades can limit your peak wattage, the power delivery capacitors lose capacitance over the years and develop more resistance impacting maximum clock states, fan bearings wear out, you get vacuum leaks in copper heat pipes, and micro-fissures in soldering.
Granted, most of it is going to be software but its easy to forget that hardware degrades, and degrades relatively quickly especially in higher power systems.
This is why repairability and user serviceability is so important. If you can't open up and swap parts in your machine easily, a $10 consumable turns it into $2,000+ ewaste.
Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra
#986Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In principle you don't need 32-core GHz CPUs to move a window around on a screen without it feeling sluggish I think the snappiness is less this, and more about the speed to open a file, how quickly chrome pops open when you open it etc. I assume this is a combination of hardware and how fast SSD->RAM is due to the SOC, but software will certinaly play a big part too.
> I assume this is a combination of hardware and how fast SSD->RAM is due to the SOC, but software will certinaly play a big part too. That is exactly what I'm talking about. Sorry, you are completely off. My machine 20 years ago was not an SOC and didn't have an SSD either. It was fast as lightning to open a window. What does this have to do with SSD? Or an SOC? It's all because the software is incredibly bloated, a…
> My machine 20 years ago was not an SOC and didn't have an SSD either. It was fast as lightning to open a window.
I never understand what people exactly mean by claims like this. I very vividly remember double clicking some executable, and then immediately hearing the HDD start to spin, and waiting with baited breath to see if it will spawn a window or silently fail, as programs on Windows 98 (the only option for personal computers at the time) often did.
So what exactly was snappy? Nothing that runs off a HDD is ever snappy.
Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra
#987Earlier quoted context omitted.
> a little sluggish > surprised by how quick it felt Aren't these properties of the (G)UI rather than of the processor? I've been using systems 20 years ago that were super snappy. The same software would still be snappy today obviously. But the software has become bloated to the point that you need to run the latest generation of CPUs such that things are not sluggish. In principle you don't need 32-core GHz CPUs to…
> " the software has become bloated " Casey Muratori has a 20 minute talk on YouTube called "Clean code, horrible performance"[1]. Using an oft-repeated example in C++ he rewrites it uncleanly and then benchmarks. Removing Classes/subclasses/polymorphism: 1.5x faster. That overhead was like reducing an iPhone 14 to an iPhone 11 performance. Replacing Encapsulation with a table-driven calculation: 10x faster. That ove…
While I agree with a lot of what he says (complexity and layers of abstraction impact performance), it's probably worth noting that his examples are not necessarily relevant to all software.
Does my web browser feel slow because of pointer indirection or virtual function calls? Or is it because I have to download 15 MB of Javascript to load this page, which then goes out to 35 other domains to fetch other Javascript and ads and CSS?
In the insanely tight compute loop that he's looking at all of those things definitely make a difference, but a lot of software is slow not because it's inefficiently written (which it probably is) but because it's inefficiently designed and it's doing too much.
In a game engine, where you have 16ms to do 100% of your simulation work, update all your state, and then send all the data out to be rendered, definitely this sort of thing is an issue. In an Electron app? There are a thousand other things that are wasting far more of your time and responsiveness than the misguided 'cleanliness' of your code.
Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra
#988Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah... my solution for the last 3 decades (with a grain of salt) has been to buy the most expensive decked out Apple laptop every 6 years and never, ever update the OS. This is in line with my philosophy about shoes: I only own 5 copies of one pair (4 in boxes in my closet until I wear the current ones out). Rolling everything over to a new dev environment every 6 years is annoying but manageable. This way I took a…
I should have done this with my 2020 Intel Macbook Pro. Now it's basically unusable and spins rainbow wheels constantly, because the OS is apparently garbage for an Intel system.
I had the same experience as you. I bought a super-fast 10-core iMac 27” with 72 GB of RAM in 2020. It ran beautifully until the moment I “upgraded” to Tahoe, when it instantly became unusably slow.
This cost me half a day wiping the disk, restoring the original OS, and then carefully upgrading back to Sequoia. Now it works well again, but I am counting the days to when Linux is the only way to continue using this great piece of hardware.
Another anecdote: a few years ago I was offered a shiny new never-before-used iPad for free by a client (a telco). There was only one catch, I was told: it was a few generations old. It had sat in its box on a shelf unopened for several years. I thought it might be useful at least as an e-reader, but I soon realized why it was now useless: I could not find a single app in the App Store that would install on it because every app required a “newer OS” (which wasn’t available). Most websites also refused to talk to its old (non-upgradable) web browser. Well played, Apple.
Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra
#989Earlier quoted context omitted.
> " the software has become bloated " Casey Muratori has a 20 minute talk on YouTube called "Clean code, horrible performance"[1]. Using an oft-repeated example in C++ he rewrites it uncleanly and then benchmarks. Removing Classes/subclasses/polymorphism: 1.5x faster. That overhead was like reducing an iPhone 14 to an iPhone 11 performance. Replacing Encapsulation with a table-driven calculation: 10x faster. That ove…
Yes, but that's a game developers perspective. Hardware performance is not be-all end-all (an argument can be made on environmental reasons that it should be - but bear with me in the first instance). Software is a tool working within a socio-technical system. Some systems have low user workflow diversity and a low rate of change - a game being a perfect example. Games get patched, but the diversity is purely in user…
> "you have plenty networking latency that can hide your CPU latency"
Does this excuse making 75 network calls instead of 5? Or knowing that you make a lot of network calls but designing the code as if they were instant and have the bandwidth of a local SSD?
> "Not to mention that "clean code" optimises for developer churn" "structure code not optimising for brain shift, because they'd hold the context in their heads."
Based on what studies or evidence is this optimised or optimal? How is it easier to work through code which is atomised and abstracted until there appears to be nowhere that anything actually happens, where the method and variable and parameter names are long compound words, where everything is multiple layers of indirection and generalised, and you have to hold all that context in your head?
Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra
#990Rumors say that Apple will only release M6 base variant and skips M6 Pro, M6 Max and M6 Ultra variants to concentrate all efforts to create a good AI capable M7: "According to reports from Bloomberg, Apple will be skipping its M6 Pro, M6 Max, and M6 Ultra chips to accelerate development of the M7 chip. That means the only chip to be released from the M6 family will be the base M6. The reason for this break with tradi…
Their chip release cycle doesn't make any sense to me. Compared to their other hardware like iPhones or Apple Watches they just release a new chip when they feel like it. It might have a pro, ultra, or max version, or it might not. Sometimes that better version only releases when the next generation of the silicon is already out. I think that they really need some structure in their releases.
The difference makes a lot of sense to me.
The phones are watches are primarily sold on annual leases through carriers. And no one is buying them for the chips, it's all camera and form factor.
The macs, on the other hand, can more easily swap between chips in manufacturing. And the form factor is pretty static. So Apple, in a race to have the best chip in the field at any given time, is just releasing them as soon as they're ready.
I agree the whole "m5 max > m6" is confusing, but I think they figure only the nerds who learn the specifics are going to care anyway.