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M4 MacBook Pro

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Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#381

Post by silvr »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #232

I have a 16" M1 Pro with 16 gigs of ram, and it regularly struggles under the "load" of Firebase emulator. You can tell not because the system temp rises, but because suddenly Spotify audio begins to pop, constantly and irregularly. It took me a year to figure out that the system audio popping wasn't hardware and indeed wasn't software, except in the sense that memory (or CPU?) pressure seems to be the culprit.

Whoa! I've been so annoyed by this for years, so interesting that you figured it out. It's the kind of inelegance in design that would have had Steve Jobs yelling at everyone to fix, just ruins immersion in music and had no obvious way to fix.

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#382

Post by jjcm »

BrentOzar wrote: post #9

The M4 Max goes up to 128GB RAM, and "over half a terabyte per second of unified memory bandwidth" - LLM users rejoice.

For context, the 4090 has 1,008 GB/s of bandwidth.

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#383

Post by [deleted] »

carlgreene wrote: post #94

What’s amazing is that in the past I’ve felt the need to upgrade within a few years. New video format or more demanding music software is released that slows the machine down, or battery life craters. Well, I haven’t had even a tinge of feeling that I need to upgrade after getting my M1 Pro MBP. I can’t remember it ever skipping a beat running a serious Ableton project, or editing in Resolve. Can stuff be faster? Tec…

[deleted]

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#384

Post by daco »

Upgraded to a M1 Pro 14 in December 2021, and I still rock it everyday for dev purpose. Apple does great laptop.

The only downsides is that I see a kind of "burnt?" transparent spot on my screen. When connecting to an HDMI cable, the sound does not ouput properly to the TV screen, and makes the video I plat laggy. Wondering if I go to the Apple Store, would fix it?

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#385

Post by mcculley »

jitl wrote: post #378
mcculley wrote: post #87

Still, no matter how much you are willing to spend, you cannot buy a MacBook Pro with an LTE modem, like the ones in the iPhone, iPad, and Watch.

Tethering to an iPhone is so easy though - just select it in the Wifi menu. I'm not sure if I'd ever pay for an LTE modem option. I'm sure it would be better efficiency and performance to have it built-in, but I wouldn't think many people care enough about that small difference to offer it as an option.

I use the tethering quite often. I have for years. It is flaky and burns two batteries instead of one. I agree that many people do not care. Some of us who are traveling a lot are willing to pay for more options.

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#386

Post by mcculley »

trogdor wrote: post #348
mcculley wrote: post #87

Still, no matter how much you are willing to spend, you cannot buy a MacBook Pro with an LTE modem, like the ones in the iPhone, iPad, and Watch.

I wonder if one of the obstacles is the amount of data that would likely be used. Most cellular carriers offer unlimited on-device data plans, but they cap data for tethering. Integrating an LTE modem into a laptop essentially requires a mobile data plan with unlimited tethering - which, AFAIK, doesn’t exist at the moment. I’m not sure why.

I think the biggest obstacle is the Qualcomm patents. There is no good reason why a MacBook Pro cannot have a feature that Dells have.

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#387

Post by dvno42 »

mattfrommars wrote: post #216

Does anyone know if there is a way to use Mac without the Apple bloatware? I genuinely want to use it as primary machine but with this Intel MacBook Pro I have, I absolutely dislike FaceTime, IMessage, the need to use AppStore, Apple always asking me have a Apple user name password (which I don't and have zero intention), block Siri, and all telemetry stuff Apple has backed in, stop the machine calling home, etc. Thi…

You can use OSX without an Apple account and paired with a 3rd party host based firewall (Little Snitch), the OS usually stays out of your way (imo). Bundled apps can be removed after disabling SIP (file integrity) but there are downsides/maintenance to that route.

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#388

Post by tarruda »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #302
carlgreene wrote: post #94

What’s amazing is that in the past I’ve felt the need to upgrade within a few years. New video format or more demanding music software is released that slows the machine down, or battery life craters. Well, I haven’t had even a tinge of feeling that I need to upgrade after getting my M1 Pro MBP. I can’t remember it ever skipping a beat running a serious Ableton project, or editing in Resolve. Can stuff be faster? Tec…

I think regretting Mac upgrades is a real thing, at least for me. I got a 32G Mac mini in January to run local LLMs. While it does so beautifully, there are now smaller LLMs that run fine on my very old 8G M1 MacBook Pro, and these newer smaller models do almost all of what I want for NLP tasks, data transformation, RAG, etc. I feel like I wasted my money.

Small models retain much less of the knowledge they were trained on, especially when quantized.

One good use case for 32gb Mac is being able to run 8b models at full precision, something that is not possible with 8-16gb macs

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#389

Post by schainks »

RobinL wrote: post #154

Can anyone comment on the viability of using an external SSD rather than upgrading storage? Specifically for data analysis (e.g. storing/analysing parquet files using Python/duckdb, or video editing using divinci resolve). Also, any recommendations for suitable ssds, ideally not too expensive? Thank you!

With a thunderbolt SSD you'll think your external drive is an internal drive. I bought one of these (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0BGYMHS8Y) for my partner so she has snappy photo editing workflows with Adobe CC apps. Copying her 1TB photo library over took under 5 min.

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#390

Post by AtlasBarfed »

carlgreene wrote: post #94

What’s amazing is that in the past I’ve felt the need to upgrade within a few years. New video format or more demanding music software is released that slows the machine down, or battery life craters. Well, I haven’t had even a tinge of feeling that I need to upgrade after getting my M1 Pro MBP. I can’t remember it ever skipping a beat running a serious Ableton project, or editing in Resolve. Can stuff be faster? Tec…

I don't think there's any sort of processor for the last 10 years. It really makes me feel like I need to upgrade.

What I do know is that Linux constantly breaks stuff. I don't even think it's treading water. These are interfaces are actively getting worse.

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