141–150 of 551 posts
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You’re not the only one — but just curious where this skepticism comes from. This is M 4 — Apple has now made four generations of chips and each one were class leading upon release. What more do you need to see?
In power efficiency maybe, but not top performance
I'll admit to some reflexive skepticism here. I know GeekBench at least used to be considered an entirely unserious indicator of performance and any discussion relating to its scores used to be drowned out by people explaining why it was so bad. Do those criticisms still hold? Are serious people nowadays taking Geekbench to be a reasonably okay (though obviously imperfect) performance metric?
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I do wonder if PC desktops will eventually move to a similar design. I have a 7800x3d on my desktop, and the thing is a beast but between it and the 3090 I basically have a space heater in my room
I sincerely believe that the market for desktop PCs is completely coopted by the gaming machines. They do not care one whit about machine size or energy efficiency, with only one concern in mind: bare performance. This means they buy ginormous machines, incredibly inefficient CPUs and GPUs, with cavernous internals to chuck heat out with no care for decibels. But they spend voriously. And so the desktop PC market is…
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I get that argument, but it comes across as hugely disingenuous to me especially when couched with so much glitz and glamour and showmanship. They're aim is to present these things as huge quantum leaps in performance and it's only if you look into the details that it's clear that they're not and they're fudging the figures to make them look better than they are. "New Car 2025 has a simply incredible top speed 30x gr…
Yet you do not propose an alternative theory that makes sense. Our point: Apple is laser-focused on comparing with laptops that are 4-5 year old. That's usually when Mac users start thinking about upgrading. They're building their marketing for them. It causes issues when directly trying to compare with the last generation. Your point: Apple shouldn't be glamorous and a good showman when marketing their products beca…
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Both of those chips cost more than an mac mini. 170W !!!!! The mac is, what, 20W?
The CPUs aren't cheap, but they don't cost more than the Mac mini. The Mac mini will definitely draw more than 20W. TDP numbers can also not be compared between manufacturers at all. And last but not least, for a single core test, maximum power consumption is irrelevant.
OEM price for the Intel one is $599, same cost as an M4 Mini. The AMD one is $649.
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Why is so hard for people to understand why apple did that? They want the people who are still clinging to intel mac to convert finally. And as for m1 comparisons, people are not changing laptops every year and that is the cohort of m users that is the most likely to upgrade. It's smart to do what apple did.
I get that argument, but it comes across as hugely disingenuous to me especially when couched with so much glitz and glamour and showmanship. They're aim is to present these things as huge quantum leaps in performance and it's only if you look into the details that it's clear that they're not and they're fudging the figures to make them look better than they are. "New Car 2025 has a simply incredible top speed 30x gr…
Just like the phone comparisons are from more than one year ago, the computer comparisons (which are even more expensive) make more sense to be from more than one year ago. I don't see why you wouldn't target the exact people you're trying to get to upgrade...
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Yet you do not propose an alternative theory that makes sense. Our point: Apple is laser-focused on comparing with laptops that are 4-5 year old. That's usually when Mac users start thinking about upgrading. They're building their marketing for them. It causes issues when directly trying to compare with the last generation. Your point: Apple shouldn't be glamorous and a good showman when marketing their products beca…
The alternative theory is they are trumping up the numbers in a disingenuous way to make it sound better than it is.
- who is likely to upgrade.
- target advertising at those people.
Seems eminently sensible to me.
Good enough to be used for gaming? Really want Apple to get into that because dealing with Windows sucks.
That depends on what you want to play and what other things that suck that you’re willing to tolerate. The GPUs in previous M chips aren’t beating AMD or NVidia’s top offerings on anything except VRAM but you can definitely play games with them. Apple has released their Game Porting Toolkit a couple years ago which is basically like Wine/Proton in Linux and if you’re comfortable with Wine and approximately what a Ste…
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I do wonder if PC desktops will eventually move to a similar design. I have a 7800x3d on my desktop, and the thing is a beast but between it and the 3090 I basically have a space heater in my room
I sincerely believe that the market for desktop PCs is completely coopted by the gaming machines. They do not care one whit about machine size or energy efficiency, with only one concern in mind: bare performance. This means they buy ginormous machines, incredibly inefficient CPUs and GPUs, with cavernous internals to chuck heat out with no care for decibels. But they spend voriously. And so the desktop PC market is…
That's why the default advice if you're looking for 'value' is to buy a gaming console to complement your laptop. Both will excel at their separate roles for a decade without requiring much in the way of upgrades.
The desktop pc market these days is a luxury 'prosumer' market that doesn't really care about value as much. It feels like we're going back to the late 90's, early 2000's.
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Indeed, the $1599 M4 Pro Mac mini beats the current $3999 M2 Ultra Mac Studio on GeekBench 6 multi-core: https://www.macrumors.com/2024/10/31/m4-pro-chip-benchmark-r...
Back in the early 90s, when Apple was literally building their first product line with the Mac, they would come out with their second big honking powerhouse Mac: the Macintosh IIx. It blew everything out of the water. Then they would come out with their next budget all-in-one machine. But computing was improving so fast, with prices for components dropping so quickly, that the Macintosh SE/30 ended up as impressive a…