221–230 of 1001 posts
Are these M-class chips available to be purchased on Digi-Key and Mouser? Do they have data sheets and recommended circuitry? I’d love to play with one just to see how difficult it is to integrate compared to, say, an stm8/32 or something.
absolutely not, and even if they were, they are not documented in the least bit and require extraordinary custom OS and other BLOBs to run
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Apple usually massively exaggerates their tech spec comparison - is it REALLY half the power use of all times (so we'll get double the battery life) or is it half the power use in some scenarios (so we'll get like... 15% more battery life total) ?
Quickly looking at the press release, it seems to have the same comparisons as in the video. None of Apple's comparisons today are between the M3 and M4. They are ALL comparing the M2 and M4. Why? It's frustrating, but today Apple replaced a product with an M2 with a product with an M4. Apple always compares product to product, never component to component when it comes to processors. So those specs are far more impr…
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To me it just feels like a soft launch. You probably have people (like myself) trying to keep up with the latest MacBook Air who get fatigued having to get a new laptop every year (I just upgraded to the M3 not too long ago, from the M2, and before that... the M1... is there any reason to? Not really...), so now they are trying to entice people who don't have iPads yet / who are waiting for a reason to do an iPad upg…
Still using my M1 Air and had no interest in updating to M3. Battery life has dropped a fair amount, but still like 8+ hours. That's going to be the trigger to get a new one. If only batteries lasted longer.
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If these things will ever get MacOS support it will be useless with 8 GB of Ram. Such a waste of nice components.
This comes up frequently. 8GB is sufficient for most casual and light productivity use cases. Not everyone is a power user, in fact, most people aren’t.
I can't run podman, slack, teams, and llama3-8B in llama.cpp at the same time. Oddly enough, this is rarely a problem.
Seeing an M series chip launch first in an iPad must be result of some mad supply chain and manufacturing related hangovers from COVID. If the iPad had better software and could be considered a first class productivity machine then it would be less surprising but the one thing no one says about the iPads is “I wish this chip were faster”
"With these improvements to the CPU and GPU, M4 maintains Apple silicon’s industry-leading performance per watt. M4 can deliver the same performance as M2 using just half the power. And compared with the latest PC chip in a thin and light laptop, M4 can deliver the same performance using just a fourth of the power." That's an incredible improvement in just a few years. I wonder how much of that is Apple engineering a…
Apple usually massively exaggerates their tech spec comparison - is it REALLY half the power use of all times (so we'll get double the battery life) or is it half the power use in some scenarios (so we'll get like... 15% more battery life total) ?
As for CPU power use, of course that doesn't translate into doubling battery life because there are other components. And yes, it seems the OLED display uses more power so, all in all, battery life seems to be about the same.
I'm interested to see an M3 vs M4 performance comparison in the real world. IIRC the M3 was a questionable upgrade. Some things were better but some weren't.
Overall the M-series SoCs have been an excellent product however.
[1]: https://www.laptopmag.com/features/laptop-battery-life-claim...
EDIT: added link
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It's fairly absurd that they're still selling a 256gb "Pro" machine in the first place. That said, Apple's policy toward SKUs is pretty consistent: you pay more money and you get more machine, and vice versa. The MacBooks are the only product which has separately configurable memory / storage / chip, and even there some combinations aren't manufactured.
>> It's fairly absurd that they're still selling a 256gb "Pro" machine in the first place. My guess is they want you to use their cloud storage and pay monthly for it.
I'm not storing my Docker containers and `node_modules` in the cloud.
Pro isn't just images and videos.
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To me it just feels like a soft launch. You probably have people (like myself) trying to keep up with the latest MacBook Air who get fatigued having to get a new laptop every year (I just upgraded to the M3 not too long ago, from the M2, and before that... the M1... is there any reason to? Not really...), so now they are trying to entice people who don't have iPads yet / who are waiting for a reason to do an iPad upg…
You get a new laptop every year?
It's a negligible amount of money. It's like, brand new $999, trade in for like $450. Once a year... $550 remainder/12 months is $45.75/mo to have the latest and greatest laptop.