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New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip

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Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip

#51

Post by microtonal »

the-grump wrote: post #14
dangoodmanUT wrote: post #9

it's so clear that they limit it to 24GB to prevent cannibalization of the macbook pro. I personally could go for a M3 base chip with 64GB or 128GB of memory.

And, of course, it starts at 8GB of RAM to nudge you up from $1100 to $1300/$1500. At which point you might as well spring for the Pro. I can't fault the business logic but as someone who'd only use a Mac for occasional iOS development, this nudging upward dissuades me from pursuing that idea altogether.

I still want a MacBook Air with 32GB RAM or more. The Air is lighter and more compact than the Pro. (I currently use a MacBook Pro because of the memory limit on the Air.)

Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip

#53

Post by Analemma_ »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #30

For anyone having issues with only one external display at once, DisplayLink adapters work very well, allowing you to connect much more displays if you need them.

Maybe things are better in the Apple Silicon days, but I tried using an external "carry it with you" monitor that used DisplayLink on an old Intel MacBook and it was an endless stream of headaches. Frequently the computer just wouldn't see the monitor at all until I restarted both of them, custom settings like color and rotation would often reset, etc. The DisplayLink drivers seemed like total shit.

Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip

#54

Post by brucethemoose2 »

bearjaws wrote: post #2

I am most interested to see if the M4 chip will dramatically improve performance of local LLMs. I like M1 Pro so far with models up to 30-70b parameters, but the memory bandwidth is my current limit. With a large jump in unified memory and bandwidth we could see 120b parameter models running on a laptop. As a side note, why does Apple continue to reference the Intel MacBook Air... It's over 6 years old now, no shit t…

Apple could dramatically improve performance if they just tasked one Metal engineer on llama.cpp. Like, just to finish up flash attention and quantum KV cache, and optimize the Metal kernels.

I wouldn't be surprised if they could double performance.

I know Apple is pushing MLX, and MLC-LLM is fast too, but in practice most Mac users (I think) are using llama.cpp based stacks.

Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip

#55

Post by lancesells »

brigadier132 wrote: post #40
retskrad wrote: post #3

I can't tell the difference between my new M1 Max MacBook Pro and the new M3 Max Macbook Pro. Corporations have become pros at exploiting our human psychology. Their ads can make you believe that the smallest bump in improvements will make your older computer appear useless in comparison. That's why it's for the best if you avoid ads as much as possible.

> I can't tell the difference between my new M1 Max MacBook Pro and the new M3 Max Macbook Pro I don't know why you bought a new one. You can have two ways to look at this, one way is your ultra pessimistic view, my view is I don't need to upgrade my laptop ever 2 years anymore. Before the M1 Max I was upgrading so often because intel macbooks sucked so much. Now I can comfortably say I'm keeping my M1 Max for a deca…

I'm on my first M1 but even with intel I got 5 to 6 years out of the Macbook Air.

Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip

#57

Post by jmull »

retskrad wrote: post #3

I can't tell the difference between my new M1 Max MacBook Pro and the new M3 Max Macbook Pro. Corporations have become pros at exploiting our human psychology. Their ads can make you believe that the smallest bump in improvements will make your older computer appear useless in comparison. That's why it's for the best if you avoid ads as much as possible.

> That's why it's for the best if you avoid ads as much as possible.

I wouldn't exactly just avoid them, though most are useless, so it's not a bad idea. You just want to understand what they are... even honest ones will only present information that is a reason to buy.

E.g., when I saw the iPhone 15 ads and the best thing they could say about was that it had some titanium, I knew it was a product I could ignore. (Not that I have an iPhone 14 either, but I already knew that one wasn't worth an upgrade to me).

Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip

#58

Post by zer0zzz »

elthran wrote: post #19
zuhsetaqi wrote: post #6

Most interesting change: > Support for up to two external displays: MacBook Air with M3 now supports up to two external displays when the laptop lid is closed …

Apple Cynic/Windows user here with a genuine question - why is this interesting? I'm currently looking at my wife's old corporate-issued windows laptop, which is running 2 external monitors as well as it's own display - am I missing something here, or is this just a case of Apple being held to different standards to other manufacturers in terms of feature parity?

It’s interesting because the whole M# line started with a smart phone and built a pc out of that. As a result it has some unfortunate restrictions that aren’t there when you build a machine out of capable yet pretty clunky intel hardware. I don’t doubt there are similar tradeoffs in the WoS world but I’m not aware of what they are specifically.

The restriction I am most annoyed with these days is the lack of external GPU passthrough. I’m not even sure the asahi Linux folks have gotten that working yet.

So folks are probably just happy they’re not having to deal with as many compromises and tradeoffs (they get to have their PC that works almost just like a smartphone but does more things their intel machine could now). That’s totally understandable.

Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip

#59

Post by dghlsakjg »

bearjaws wrote: post #2

I am most interested to see if the M4 chip will dramatically improve performance of local LLMs. I like M1 Pro so far with models up to 30-70b parameters, but the memory bandwidth is my current limit. With a large jump in unified memory and bandwidth we could see 120b parameter models running on a laptop. As a side note, why does Apple continue to reference the Intel MacBook Air... It's over 6 years old now, no shit t…

I'm a senior software dev that is still using the last of the intel macs (granted a maxed out 16" not an air).

These kind of comparisons are still valid for me. There are plenty of others less technical than me that want these too. The youngest intel Airs only just aged out of applecare coverage last year, and for most casual users getting 4 years out of an Apple computer is totally expected.

Re: New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip

#60

Post by skyyler »

gxs wrote: post #39
elthran wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple Cynic/Windows user here with a genuine question - why is this interesting? I'm currently looking at my wife's old corporate-issued windows laptop, which is running 2 external monitors as well as it's own display - am I missing something here, or is this just a case of Apple being held to different standards to other manufacturers in terms of feature parity?

This is far from a "genuine" question. It's easy to deduce that it's a big deal for macbook air users because it wasn't possible before. It's easy to deduce both from the article and from other comments here, which presumably you read if you're going through the trouble of responding to someone else's comment. I typically despise this type of question, where you're obviously trying to make a point but playing dumb an…

It seems like their question struck a nerve. Did you really feel it necessary to bring up hot political issues to explain why it's interesting that the new apple laptops can drive two external displays?

Just for clarity, it's so far from novel in the world of windows laptops that it's genuinely confusing why that would be an advertised feature.

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