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Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max

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Re: Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max

#531

Post by rewmie »

fastball wrote: post #369
rewmie wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Because the productivity gains from upgrading can be quite large relative to the cost of upgrading, esp when you factor in the average salary in this community. I spend 8-10 hours on my Macbook every day. The amount of time I've saved / productivity I've gained by things just running faster and by being more mobile (much longer battery life) is huge compared to the $2000 price tag. Frugality is good but there are som…

> Because the productivity gains from upgrading can be quite large relative to the cost of upgrading, esp when you factor in the average salary in this community.

You see, this is simply not true. At all. By far.

I have a cheap Intel laptop released 8-10 years ago. It shipped with 8GB of RAM and 4 cores. I bought it on a clearance sale for around $500. I use it still to this day to work on webapps, including launching half a dozen services with Docker Compose. The only time I experience any type of slowdown is when I launch IntelliJ.

I also have new kit, including a M2 MacBook.

There is absolutely nothing I can do with my M2 laptop that I cannot do well with my cheap old Intel laptop. Nothing. The only issue I have with my old laptop is battery life, and that's just because I don't bother replacing it.

Please do point out a single concrete example of "productivity gains" that I would get by spending $2k on a new laptop.

Re: Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max

#532

Post by fsloth »

polishTar wrote: post #324
photonerd wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Plausibly they thought market is saturated with M1:s and targeted this to entice M1 users to switch.

Re: Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max

#533

Post by numpad0 »

spiralpolitik wrote: post #334
lathiat wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really, really wish they would fix this silly display scan-out limitation. I gave them a (frustrating) pass on the M1 given it was the first evolution from iPhone/iPad where it wouldn't have mattered. But seems silly to have made it all the way to the M3. Wanting to dock onto two displays even at the low end doesn't seem like such a niche use-case. I'm sure there is some kind of technical explanation but both Intel…

The technical explanation is that on the base M1/M2 SoC there is one Thunderbolt bus that supports 2 display outputs. On the MacBook Air one output is connected to the internal display leaving one output for an external display. (The Mac Mini that uses the same SoC is limited to 2 external displays for the same reason) To support more displays they would have to add support for a second Thunderbolt bus to the base So…

There's no reason a whole Thunderbolt bus is needed for every two displays. It's just Apple's decision to build their GPU that way.

And to not support industry standard NVIDIA GPU on ARM Macs, too. 1 GPU typically supports 5 output over as little bandwidth as PCIe x1.

Re: Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max

#534

Post by artdigital »

smith7018 wrote: post #127
artdigital wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use a maxed-out M1 Max and have 0 complaints. There was never a task where I felt the memory or CPU performance was not enough

I have the same M1 Max as a personal machine and just got a maxed out M2 Max for work. The M2 Max does feel faster through daily use but that could also be related to the new install?

I periodically reinstall mine and keep the battery healthy

Re: Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max

#535

Post by gnicholas »

huytersd wrote: post #495
internet2000 wrote: post #158

Earlier 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.

I’m an Intel strangler because it’s the only way I can have Mac and Windows on the same machine. Am I the only person that really needs this? Parallels has trash performance.

Hilarious typo — I picture someone throttling an Intel machine (which sadly throttles you right back).

Re: Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max

#537

Post by TillE »

mdasen wrote: post #210

An interesting thing about the M2 Pro and M3 Pro is that they shifted away from being mostly performance cores. The M1 Pro was either 6+2 P+E or 8+2 P+E. The M2 Pro was either 6+4 or 8+4. The new M3 Pro is either 5+6 or 6+6. Apple has been shifting away from performance cores with each generation. M1 Pro: 75-80% P-cores; M2 Pro: 60-67% P-cores; M3 Pro: 45-50% P-cores. This shows up when you look at Geekbench results.…

> maybe it's thermal throttling

The GPU is a very large fraction of the thermal output these SoCs are engineered to handle, so there really shouldn't be any throttling if you're only loading the CPU.

Re: Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max

#538

Post by paulmd »

lathiat wrote: post #520
spiralpolitik wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The technical explanation is that on the base M1/M2 SoC there is one Thunderbolt bus that supports 2 display outputs. On the MacBook Air one output is connected to the internal display leaving one output for an external display. (The Mac Mini that uses the same SoC is limited to 2 external displays for the same reason) To support more displays they would have to add support for a second Thunderbolt bus to the base So…

Right, but why can't you disable the internal display to run 2 external displays? That wouldn't be an unreasonble compromise but seems not possible.

M1/M2 only has 1 native HDMI pixel pipe in any form, I think? Apple uses the HDMI PHY to drive the screen on tablets, and the screen on laptops. Base-tier M1/M2 also only have a single displayport pixel pipe, and Pro/Max get +1/+2 respectively.

The base-tier chips are designed as high-volume tablet chips first and foremost, with ultramobility crossover capability.

Using DisplayLink or certain kinds of thunderbolt multimonitor are possible while running outside the pixel pipe or running multiple monitors on a single pixel pipe (this is not MST which is multiple pixel pipes on a single stream). But yeah it's ugly especially on a base-tier processor with this eating cycles/dumping heat. You're running the hardware encoder at least.

Discord had this weird error if you tried to enable the screen/audio capture, it tries to launch something and fails and the solution is you need to manually install "airfoil" because it's an audio capture module that discord licensed. you don't have to fully install it but the audio driver is the part that discord uses and that goes first (has to be allowed as a kext, ie non-secure mode). theoretically a kernel-level capture like that could be a ton faster than userland, I think that's the on-label use of airfoil.

Re: Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max

#539

Post by elseless »

flippy_flops wrote: post #245

Am 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.

In my opinion, the biggest problem with Apple’s external displays is their 60 Hz refresh rate. That’s half of what their own iPhone (!) and MacBook pro models support, and is a far cry from the 240 Hz (albeit at lower resolutions) displays that are starting to pop up from other manufacturers.

Re: Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max

#540

Post by grupthink »

rewmie wrote: post #281
photonerd wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> Depends. Is it faster? The devil tends to be in the details. More precisely, in the benchmark details. I think Apple provided none other than the marketing blurb. In the meantime, embarrassingly parallel applications do benefit from having more performant cores.

Heh, I recall seeing many posts arguing against benchmarks when all Macs equipped with an M2/8GB/256GB SSD scored much, much lower than the M1/8GB/256GB SSD. People said the synthetic benchmarks were not representative of real world use and you'd never notice the difference. 'Twas a battle of the optimists, pessimists, and realists. In reality, 'twas just Apple cutting costs in their newer product.
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