I find it very odd that the new iMac has WiFi 7 but this does not... Also it is so aggravating they compare to 3 generations ago and not the previous generation in the marketing stats. It makes the entire post nearly useless.
M4 MacBook Pro
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Re: M4 MacBook Pro
#32Finally they're doing starting memory at 16gb. Looking at how long the 8gb lasted it's a pretty sure bet that now you won't need to upgrade for a good few years. I mean, I have a MacBook air with 16gb of ram and it's honestly working pretty well to this day. I don't do "much" on it though but not many people do. I'd say the one incentive a MacBook Pro has over the air is the better a screens and better speakers. Not…
My hypothesis is Apple is mostly right about their base model offerings.
> I mean, I have a MacBook air with 16gb of ram and it's honestly working pretty well to this day. I don't do "much" on it though but not many people do.
If an HN user can get along with 16gb on their MacBook Air for the last X years, most users were able to get by with 8gb.
Re: M4 MacBook Pro
#33New 12MP Center Stage Camera. Will it support 4k?
Re: M4 MacBook Pro
#34The M4 Max goes up to 128GB RAM, and "over half a terabyte per second of unified memory bandwidth" - LLM users rejoice.
The M3 Max was 400GBps, this is 540GBps. Truly an outstanding case for unified memory. DDR5 doesn't come anywhere near.
It's not "DDR5" on its own, it's a few factors.
Bandwidth (GB/s) = (Data Rate (MT/s) * Channel Width (bits) * Number of Channels) / 8 / 1000
(8800 MT/s * 64 bits * 8 channels) / 8 / 1000 = 563.2 GB/s
This is still half the speed of a consumer NVidia card, but the large amounts of memory is great, if you don't mind running things more slowly and with fewer libraries.
Re: M4 MacBook Pro
#35Disingenuous to mention the x86 based MacBooks as a basis for comparison in their benchmarks; they are trying to conflate current-gen Intel with what they shipped more than 4 years ago. Are they going to claim that 16GB RAM is equivalent to 32GB on Intel laptops? (/sarc)
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 in letting such users know what they're in for.
Re: M4 MacBook Pro
#36The 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.
If the 2x multiplier holds up, the Ultra update should bring it up to 1080GBps. Amazing.
Re: M4 MacBook Pro
#37Finally they're doing starting memory at 16gb. Looking at how long the 8gb lasted it's a pretty sure bet that now you won't need to upgrade for a good few years. I mean, I have a MacBook air with 16gb of ram and it's honestly working pretty well to this day. I don't do "much" on it though but not many people do. I'd say the one incentive a MacBook Pro has over the air is the better a screens and better speakers. Not…
> pretty sure bet that now you won't need to upgrade for a good few years.
Or you could get a framework and you could actually upgrade parts that are worth upgrading - instead of upgrade as in buying a new one
Re: M4 MacBook Pro
#38If I remember correctly, the claim was that M3 is 1.6x faster than M1.
M4 is now 1.8x faster than M1.
It sounds more exciting than M4 is 12.5% faster than M3.
Re: M4 MacBook Pro
#39The 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.
About 10-20% of my companies gpu usage is inference dev. Yes horribly not efficient usage of resources. We could upgrade the 100ish devs who do this dev work to M4 mbp and free up gpu resources
Smart move by Apple
Re: M4 MacBook Pro
#40Disingenuous to mention the x86 based MacBooks as a basis for comparison in their benchmarks; they are trying to conflate current-gen Intel with what they shipped more than 4 years ago. Are they going to claim that 16GB RAM is equivalent to 32GB on Intel laptops? (/sarc)
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…
Right, it's obviously that, not a marketing trick to make numbers look much bigger while comparing to old CPUs and laptops :)