On a related note, and on a personal level, my heart goes out to Johny Srouji and the Apple team in Herzliya. War is horrible, and I hope every reservist called up comes back to do magic at Apple.
Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max
391–400 of 1001 posts
Re: Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max
#392Love the improvement on the CPUs, but I was hoping for bigger iMacs and smaller Macbooks. I work at home on a 27" iMac, and on the road on a 12", 2 pound Macbook. We are years into the M generation of chips, and iMacs are still stuck at 24", and laptops are minimum 3 pounds and 13".
I feel similar to you, but I don't think we are going to see another high end iMac. Apple wants us to get Studios.
Re: Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max
#393Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any reason for not upgrading?
Fiscal prudence?
To me, "personal daily driver" sounds like where you'd do online banking. A MacBook from 2015 can't run any OS newer than Big Sur, which is EOL right about now. And it sounds really imprudent to do online banking from an insecure device.
Re: Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max
#394Earlier quoted context omitted.
The M3 chips are 30% faster than the M2 chips for efficiency cores and 15% faster for performance cores. The overall performance is still impressive and there is no alternative to M*s when compared with performance per watt. But others have caught up, for example https://www.amd.com/en/products/apu/amd-ryzen-9-7940hs is very good.
> But others have caught up You mean others now got to use TSMC's 4nm process? These new M3 chips are probably on the 3nm process, Apple is still a generation ahead here. It looks like Apples aim is to always stay a generation ahead of its competition, I wonder how long they can keep that up since they aren't running their own fabs.
Oryon seems to have caught up in performance despite being on N4 (which is just 5nm++), but it's an ARM design from the guys who made M1 in the first place.
M3 seems like it generally underwhelms. A17 had like a 3% increase in IPC. They didn't discuss battery much and I suspect that's because ramping the clockspeeds to over 4GHz isn't so good for the battery benchmarks.
The most worrying part is the transistor count. M3 Max gets quite a bit higher transistor count, but M3 is only 37B transistors while M1 was 33.7B. Apple and/or N3 absolutely suck here.
Looks like I might be keeping my M1 system for yet another upgrade cycle.
Re: Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max
#395I'd prefer if there'd be higher RAM limits for each variant: * ~~Ultra~~ Max probably has an adequate limit with "up to" 128GB * Pro would be nicer to have "up to" (say) 64GB, rather than 'only' 36GB * Base perhaps "up to" 32GB, rather than 24GB There are some situations (running a VM or three with different OS(es)) where there really isn't a substitute for more bits.
IMO, if I'm doing that heavy of a workload, I'd rather SSH to a server instead of trying to do it on hardware optimized to work on a battery.
It’s also nice to just run it locally. No need to move your code and data. Debugging is a breeze. And you don’t need to pay for a server and a laptop.
But naturally, if you want to run on 128 cores and 4TB of ram, then you can’t do that in a laptop anyway.
Re: Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max
#396Well, thats annoying. I just bought a M2 Max 16" MBP in mid September. I wouldn't have expected a new revision in the same year. I also swear apple used to have a policy for this situation, but I can't find it now.
Always check this page before purchasing Apple hw https://buyersguide.macrumors.com/
Re: Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max
#397Earlier quoted context omitted.
I bought a top spec Intel mac a month before the M1 came out. Just sold that computer for 1/3 it's original price :\
1/3 is pretty good for a used computer, TBH. I usually get like 20% or less... sometimes they're hard to even give away.
Fair, this one was in literally perfect condition though. No scratches / damage and a brand new battery.
Re: Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max
#398Letting Apple lead things in the market has gotten us to a very ugly space in personal computing. These are prohibitively expensive devices that for 95% of the use cases, a chromebook would be better-suited.
All those intel machines that were so impressive in 2019 are running like crap now. All going according to plan, I'm sure.
I manage a fleet of about 200 of these things. They are easy to manage, and oh-so-nice to look at, but boy, they are a huge waste of money.
These things should only be used by engineers and creatives. Yawn.
Re: Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max
#399Earlier quoted context omitted.
I imagine the amount of people upgrading from an M2 Mac will be close to 0, while there's a lot of Intel stragglers out there.
Intel straggler here. And I'll remain one until Linux runs flawlessly on the newer generation. I have an older Thinkpad as my main workhorse and a now quite old Macbook air for on the road, it's battery has been shot for a long time but it still works quite good when plugged in and I'm too much of a miser to have it replaced. But if there is a way to run a full Linux distro on the newer hardware then I'll probably bu…
Replace it yourself using iFixit instructions and parts. Just screws and plugs, easy peasy.
Re: Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max
#400Earlier quoted context omitted.
64 GB chips that failed testing? That's one way to increase yield. Clive Sinclair did that trick back in the 80s.
Doesn't look like it. Memory ICs are tested before packaging, and then are packaged in stacks. While I'm sure there's some loss in packaging, probably not enough to justify this level of binning; and most of the failures that would happen at this stage would potentially interfere with signal integrity for the whole stack. Instead, it looks like after the 8-high stacks that I knew about, manufacturers went to 12-high…
There are non power of two sized DRAM dies in production these days; it's not purely a matter of stacking (and stacking doesn't make it any easier to have something in between one die per channel and two dies per channel). You can get 24GB single-rank and 48GB dual-rank DDR5 UDIMMs compared to a year ago when the options were 16GB and 32GB; no stacking at all, just going from 16Gbit to 24Gbit per die. But LPDDR has been doing this for longer due to demand in the smartphone market.