What I really miss in my work issued M1 Pro isn't more power, it's the keyboard in those 2010s models.
110% I still use my Macbook Pro from 2011 and when using brand new Macs, I can't help my miss my home Macbook pro
Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max
321–330 of 1001 posts
Re: Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm personally always near a wall socket. My laptop is mostly a desktop. When I'm out and need to use the battery, it's only for a few hours. Do people really need >8h battery life?
It’s a huge nice-to-have. Moving from a decently beefy laptop to a MacBook has been night and day for me in terms of (a) not worrying about windows smart sleep (or whatever it’s called) waking my laptop so it’s warm and dead when I go to use it a few hours later and (b) not worrying about my laptop being dead when I open it after the weekend. (a) should have been fixed years ago but still randomly happens on my partn…
> (a) not worrying about windows smart sleep (or whatever it’s called) waking my laptop so it’s warm and dead when I go to use it a few hours later
MacBooks can run into the same problem if you have AirPods. I don't know WHAT the exact logic is, but the number of times I've used my AirPods at night, with the last pair being to my phone and the AirPods now connecting to my work laptop instead, causing a series of blares from MS Teams, Outlook and a ton of other notifications, people on Teams seeing me being "active" despite it being middle of the night... annoying as fuck.
I don't get why it seems to be impossible to tell the MacBook to not wake up from any kind of Bluetooth event. I get that this is the default because Apple wants trackpads, keyboards and mice to wake up a laptop... but I'd REALLY love to be able to turn that off because I don't use either of these three.
Re: Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max
#323What's with the 36 GB option? The other memory configs (16 GB, 64 GB) are still clean powers of two. Size suggests that they're using ECC-capable memory but using the extra width intended to support ECC for data... but why would this only apply to a single size? Part availability? EDIT: Digging this a bit, it's not (one or more) 72-bit wide busses with 2^32 words as I'd expect as a gray-beard, it's (probably) six 32-…
They've been doing more multiples of 6/12 lately, I supposed it's related to the available chip sizes for the LPDDR5X. M2 and M3 go up to 24GB M3 Pro is available in 18GB and 36GB M3 Max is available in 36GB, 48GB, 64GB, 96GB, and 128GB
Maybe it's either triple channel or bank switching? Mac Pro 5,1 were triple channel too.
Re: Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
In addition to the reduced memory bandwidth, the M3 pro also loses 2 performance cores for only 2 more efficiency cores. M2 pro: 8 performance cores + 4 efficiency cores. M3 pro: 6 performance cores + 6 efficiency cores. Not a great trade... I'm not sure the M3 pro can be considered an upgrade
Depends. Is it faster? Then it's an upgrade. Has the CPU industry really managed to pull off it's attempt at a bs coup that more cores always === better? I thought we'd learned our lesson with the silly Mhz Myth already?
I guess we'll have to wait for benchmarks but I did find this interesting:
Apple's PR release for M2 pro: "up to 20 percent greater performance over M1 Pro"
Apple's announcement for M3 pro: "up to 20 percent faster than M1 Pro" (they didn't bother to compare it to M2 pro)
Re: Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max
#325As someone who prefers the MacBook Pro feature set (Pro Motion, namely), but doesn't need the best processor, I'd be fine with the 14 inch Pro, M3.
But that model doesn't come in Space Black. Well played, you son of a bitch. Well played.
They've mastered the art of the pricing ladder and it's fairly aggravating.
Re: Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any reason for not upgrading?
> Any reason for not upgrading? Why is this sort of question always framed as if people have to provide a justification for not buying a new model, as if spending money on the new shiny without any reason is normal or desirable? We live in a day and age where hardware bought a decade ago still packs enough punch to run most of today's software without any hiccup. Why would anyone waste their cash to replace something…
It is an honest question.
For some background in my thinking, it is because today's announcement really focused on Intel users. My semi-educated guess is that Apple did a whole bunch of user studies and realized there are a lot of people out there, like the OP, who haven't upgraded yet, hence the focus. As a result, I'm genuinely curious why this person hasn't upgraded.
And for my own personal experience, the upgrade/switch from intel to m*, is night and day better ergonomics as a developer. It isn't just some shiny new toy or a waste in cash. For the same reason professional mechanics in F1 don't use shitty tools to work on their cars. Or tour de france racers aren't using 30lbs Huffy bikes.
TLDR: I don't give a f'ck if you don't happen to upgrade, that's your choice. I'm just curious about why.
Re: Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
It also appears they've dropped the memory bandwidth from 200GB/s on the M1/M2 Pro to 150MB/s on the M3 Pro, and you have to upgrade to the tippy top M3 Max chip to get the full 400MB/s bandwidth experienced on the M1/M2 Max chips.
I remember getting one of those shiny aluminum MacBooks in 2009. Then MacBooks turned plastic and the aluminum ones became MacBook Pro's. Is this a thing Apple does? I'm not an Apple customer for many years now.
The plastic MacBooks were only made 2006–2010.
Re: Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max
#328Am i the only one who is frustrated with the mac monitor options these days? I don't know anyone who uses a 27" desktop monitor, much less a 24". What year is it? And $5k for a 32" is insulting.
You can use non-Apple monitors with a Mac.
Apple's monitors are only worth getting if you're incredibly picky about very specific things.
Re: Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
The M2 Ultra tops out at 800GB/s unified memory bandwidth. A 4090, on the other hand, has 1,008 GB/s. On the PC side, dual-channel DDR4-6400 offers a bandwidth of 102 GB/s.
They're not really directly comparable due to the architectural differences, right? For pure rendering workflows I'm sure the 4090 is faster, but for anything that hits the CPU ...
Yes, the tiled-based architecture of their "GPU" is undeniably less performant. Even comparing to lesser GPUs.
Re: Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max
#330> Additionally, support for up to 128GB of memory unlocks workflows previously not possible on a laptop, such as AI developers working with even larger transformer models with billions of parameters. The presentation explicitly highlighted this very randomly, without showing how AI development actually works. I know Apple has put more effort into Apple Silicon support for PyTorch but is it there yet?
I don't think it is? But I would love to be wrong. Cheap mobile Nvidia cards outperform regular M2 chips on small learning tasks. M3 Max might be a contender, but Metal is far from CUDA yet? A laptop M3 Max looks like it can compete with a Nvidia 3070. It's an unfair comparison as Nvidia is a huge desktop heat/energy hog and Apple M chips are really efficient. Let's see how desktop M3 chips fare.
Although pytorch is in python, some ML features in SoTA libraries are coded against CUDA and complains if you don't have a CUDA device.
A lot of things work out of the box with pytorch on mps, but not everything, and it can be frustrating to figure what works and what doesn't while you have a bunch of other moving parts shifting under your feet due to how fast the whole thing is moving.
That said, llama.cpp (aka "ggml") on M1/M2 Mac is very robust. If you just want to run inference (as opposed to training) of models and you're comfortable with a Mac, there's really no reason to go out and by an nVidia card.
FWIW, some numbers I found on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/16o4ka8/running...