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M3 Macs: there's more to performance than counting cores

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Re: M3 Macs: there's more to performance than counting cores

#411

Post by wubrr »

claytongulick wrote: post #410
wubrr wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I had my first laptop (PC) in the mid 80s, and have been writing software on various hardware configurations for 30 years, so maybe I just need a bit more reality I guess? Yes, sounds like you've been drinking apple koolaid and fanboying over bullshit for 40 years. > This is a silly discussion. What's silly is reading through comments of multiple people discussing actual issues they face with macs, completely ignor…

> Yes, sounds like you've been drinking apple koolaid and fanboying over bullshit for 40 years I mentioned that I switch back and forth between PC and Mac, depending on what's better at the time - so you're pretty far off the mark. Regardless, why are you responding with such anger and venom? > What's silly is ... I'd like to suggest that you take a moment to reflect on how you treat others. Even a stranger online. I…

> Regardless, why are you responding with such anger and venom?

Any 'anger and venom' is completely imagined by you.

> This community frowns on personal attacks,

Really? What personal attacks? Please point out exactly where I've personally attacked you.

> we try to focus on comments that are informative and add to the discussion.

You mean like your comments in this chain? Where you dismiss the entire conversation as 'silly', based on nothing but your own personal, anecdotal experience? If it's silly, no need to participate. Your comments are rude, condescending and add nothing of substance to the discussion.

Re: M3 Macs: there's more to performance than counting cores

#412

Post by [deleted] »

_gabe_ wrote: post #395
BigJ1211 wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By default it jumps to the workspace that application is opened up on.

I’m not about to factory reset my machine to see what the defaults are, but I haven’t messed with any settings. It’s probably just another bug.

[deleted]

Re: M3 Macs: there's more to performance than counting cores

#413

Post by claytongulick »

wubrr wrote: post #411
claytongulick wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, sounds like you've been drinking apple koolaid and fanboying over bullshit for 40 years I mentioned that I switch back and forth between PC and Mac, depending on what's better at the time - so you're pretty far off the mark. Regardless, why are you responding with such anger and venom? > What's silly is ... I'd like to suggest that you take a moment to reflect on how you treat others. Even a stranger online. I…

> Regardless, why are you responding with such anger and venom? Any 'anger and venom' is completely imagined by you. > This community frowns on personal attacks, Really? What personal attacks? Please point out exactly where I've personally attacked you. > we try to focus on comments that are informative and add to the discussion. You mean like your comments in this chain? Where you dismiss the entire conversation as…

@dang - wubrr is a newish account, I've reviewed their other comments/threads and they all seem fine, if a bit inflammatory. This one is off the rails though. I'll stop participating. Probably best if this whole thread is deleted (starting with my original comment), it adds no value.

Re: M3 Macs: there's more to performance than counting cores

#414

Post by wubrr »

claytongulick wrote: post #413
wubrr wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Regardless, why are you responding with such anger and venom? Any 'anger and venom' is completely imagined by you. > This community frowns on personal attacks, Really? What personal attacks? Please point out exactly where I've personally attacked you. > we try to focus on comments that are informative and add to the discussion. You mean like your comments in this chain? Where you dismiss the entire conversation as…

@dang - wubrr is a newish account, I've reviewed their other comments/threads and they all seem fine, if a bit inflammatory. This one is off the rails though. I'll stop participating. Probably best if this whole thread is deleted (starting with my original comment), it adds no value.

Are you like an aspiring moderator? Nobody asked you to review anyone's comments or comment on anything.

Save this petty nonsense for reddit.

Re: M3 Macs: there's more to performance than counting cores

#415

Post by seec »

user_7832 wrote: post #317
marmaduke wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious, I had a 2020 SE daily and never had a OOM, how do you do it?

I still use a 2020SE and experience apps reloading all the time. I cannot keep more than 2 apps reliably in memory at any point. This includes Safari, youtube, reddit (honestly a poorly made app), spotify etc - fairly "common" ones.

Yeah that's the actual truth, but Apple fanboys will tell you otherwise. Even though I use an iPhone/Apple Watch/Mac Mini I regularly have to explain to many of them what kind of nonsense Apple puts their user through considering the price they sell their devices. They always have some pretty dumb excuse, so sad it is really frustrating. And it's all in the name of margin. They put severe limitation in their already expensive base device for the sole purpose of maximizing margin and upselling. Because 100B of profit per year is not enough of course. If you look at it as a user, the massive profit they have been making did not translate to anything better, in fact quite the reverse. Personally, I'm out of there. They finally squeezed me out, I guess I'm a bad customer, I'm not willing to spend enough money. But fine so I am going to spend my cash elsewhere.

In defense of the poorly made apps, it just is a reflection of the general market. Mid-range Android phone have double the amount of RAM of entry level iPhone at half the price. The pressure to optimize is not very strong and I can't blame them. It's not worth spending hours of expensive engineering time on optimisation. It would still have limitations and at some point when you need more RAM to fit more data, you just need more RAM, you cannot "optimise" the problem away. All of this would be solved by more/bigger RAM chips that cost a dollar at worst. If Apple wasn't so greedy it would be a non-issue. So I think those developer have the right mindset, fuck Apple and if you are an Apple user either you spend more for the real deal or go look somewhere else for a more sensibly priced device.

Re: M3 Macs: there's more to performance than counting cores

#416

Post by seec »

mdasen wrote: post #197
flashback2199 wrote: post #108

I don't see apple silicon in macs having been the right decision a decade from now because competing toe to toe with the entire semis industry on architecture has never worked before except in iphone where they had a huge first mover advantage.

I certainly thought this back in 2012 when Apple started designing their own mobile CPU cores. How could Apple compete with ARM's designs which would have much greater economies of scale or with Qualcomm who would be shipping way more units than Apple? More than a decade later and it's proven to be a durable competitive advantage. I would point out that Apple had no first mover advantage with the iPhone. Apple was us…

It's kind of funny seeing the Intel iGPU being bashed even though the basic GPU in the low-end M chips is barely better. In fact it can run less display and since it is Metal only, many games will run worse. But I guess Intel iGPUs are bad yes, the point is they were never supposed to be anything else than display drivers... Intel actually made GPUs and even though they were drivers issues, they are pretty decent for the price, everything considered.

As for the rest, Apple enjoyed a lead in the phone chips for a while, but a lot of it is related to the cash at hand and the possibility to sell most of your products at very high margin. Androids didn't invest as much money, because there is significantly less people willing to put as much cash in a phone if it doesn't come with the "social status" thing Apple has. And now even though the Qualcomm chips are somewhat worse than Apple's, it doesn't matter for the vast majority of people. In the end Apple went and chased premium margin instead of volume and I think it's going to bite them in the ass in the long term because in technology volume and network effect are what matters. There are many "superior" technologies that disappeared or never really took off just because of that, so I doubt Apple will fare much better. I think it's all downhill from here and by the time they notice they actually have to compete on price they will have lost the war since there will be less people willing to go for the non-standard. But then we will hear about how their competitors are villain monopolist oppressing them even though they had the money and means to pursue a more general competitive approach.

Apple fans seems to believe they are winning with their efficient chips but as far as I am concerned, they are losing everywhere it matters. High performance desktop, device convergences, cloud, AI, gaming, 3D focused softwares... They still have 3 OS and laughed at Microsoft unifying strategy, but now a Surface can run both desktop software and more mobile optimized software gracefully and you still have to run a half assed iOS "big" version on a 1k+ iPad Pro.

Time will tell...

Re: M3 Macs: there's more to performance than counting cores

#417

Post by seec »

wkat4242 wrote: post #279
wkat4242 wrote: post #148

This guy is becoming too much of an apple apologist for me. I've seen him defending pretty bad decisions like John Gruber (who always was) so I've stopped following him like I have Gruber. Also, because I've disagreed so much with Apple's decisions in the past years I've abandoned their ecosystem altogether so I'm also much less invested in the topic. Though I still use a Mac for work as a "least bad" option. Too bad…

Ps I know this is a kinda hot take but everything Apple has rubbed me the wrong way the past 10 years and I'm less and less aligned with Apple fans. I know this doesn't apply to everyone. In 2004 I moved to Mac because it was a powerful and configurable Unix OS with the benefit of a consistent UI (nothing on Linux was there then, it was a mess) and major commercial apps like Office and Photoshop. The latter are still…

I agree. There is more of us by the day. Don't worry, Apple is going to feel it soon enough. We will see in 10 years, Apple strategy will look very stupid because you will be able to get what are today's 2.5K powerful gaming computers for about 1K. Apple computers will be like Porsches, very nice and all but unless you got free money, really not something most people would consider buying. In other words, a niche; very pretty, but still a tiny market.

Re: M3 Macs: there's more to performance than counting cores

#418

Post by musha68k »

astrange wrote: post #358
musha68k wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OOM kills are basically the sole reason for me to upgrade iPhones. Nothing more annoying than force-reloaded/lost state in/between apps while on-the-go and under tight time constraints. Also somewhat true: new lenses are amazing but “computational photography” defaults sometimes less compelling than my old iPhone X’s more “honest” output. I’m going to play around with RAW some more if I get the time for it though.

Apps exiting in the background actually depends on storage size as well as RAM; there's a kind of swap for them but it has a daily disk writes budget.

Yeah I was never above ~180-200GB used storage on my 256GB iPhone X. I splurged on that one as usual.

Sorry ranting, not aimed at your comment at all just as I came back to this context: So I'm definitely a long standing and good customer (often and over many years an "evangelist" for free FWIW). IMO they have been milking us on the memory side of things for a while now though.

Even if I can gladly afford maxed out options I now increasingly do so because I feel "coerced" not because I just want the best. It's not great and gives a sour feeling for no good reason, I used to just love what they have on offer for the money spent. At this point they should just eat into their own margins and bump up to 50% more RAM across the board for most of the devices they are selling. That will not only make entry point customers more happy but also the ones buying their highest margin products. Why does the iPhone 15PM only have 8GB of RAM? I know that in no time my apps as a normal (?) multi tasker will get OOM killed again. The top of the line model just doesn't buy me much longevity in that department. The "toy" that is the Nintendo Switch had 4GB of RAM and came out the same year as my "premium" iPhone X at 3GB. Same kind of memory also IIRC. The next "toy" Switch 2 will apparently have 12GB when it arrives next year, I'm somewhat positive that Apple is already planning for their next PRO to have 10GB RAM max, maybe it will even stay at 8GB... the memory situation has really been ridiculous with them for a while.

Rant over, enjoy the sun :D probably / hopefully wrote this into /dev/null haha.

Re: M3 Macs: there's more to performance than counting cores

#419

Post by euazOn »

Ographer wrote: post #402
euazOn wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was using a secondhand Dell D6000, hoping to connect one 4k monitor natively (dp alt mode) and the rest via DisplayLink. That didnt work, now I’m using cheap docks I bought for ~€50 secondhand from a company called i-Tec (have one at home and one at work). The way I have it set up: the i-tec dock is connected to a regular USB-C hub (from Ugreen). The USB-C hub is also connected to a 4k monitor. This way I connect 1…

Your solution seems like the best so far! I had not thought of doing a mix of native and DisplayLink outputs, that's definitely the best of both worlds. Since I also don't get notified of replies I've been checking back on this comment in hopes that someone had a clever solution like yours. Thanks!

Glad to help! It's really good, especially considering how dirt cheap the M1 Macbook can be these days. It's what I recommend to most people around me shopping for a laptop.
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