Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

M4 MacBook Pro

apple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

541–550 of 1001 posts

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#541

Post by unsupp0rted »

duped wrote: post #435
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.

This kind of sounds like someone is abusing perf cores and high priority threading in your stack. iirc, on MacOS audio workgroup threads are supposed to be scheduled with the highest (real time) priority on p cores, which shouldn't have issues under load, unless someone else is trying to compete at the same priority.

There is some discussion online on whether this happens when you have a Rosetta app running in the background somewhere (say a util you got via Homebrew, for example).

Even when I remove all "Intel" type apps in activity monitor, I still experience the issue though.

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#542

Post by szundi »

touristtam wrote: post #488
AdamJacobMuller wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. I've never kept any laptop as long as I've kept the M1. I was more or less upgrading yearly in the past because the speed increases (both in the G4 and then Intel generations) were so significant. This M1 has exceeded my expectations in every category, it's faster quieter and cooler than any laptop i've ever owned. I've had this laptop since release in 2020 and I have nearly 0 complaints with it. I wouldn't upgr…

How do you justify this kind of recurring purchases, even with selling your old device? I don't get the behaviour or the driving decision factor past the obvious "I need the latest shiny toy" (I can't find the exact words to describe it, so apologies for the reductive description). I have either assembled my own desktop computers or purchased ex corporate Lenovo over the years with a mix of Windows (for gaming obviou…

In my country you can buy a device and write off in 2 years, VAT reimbursed, then scrap it from the books and you sell it to people without tax payed to people who otherwise would pay a pretty hefty VAT. This decreases your loss of value to like half.

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#543

Post by chrisweekly »

jader201 wrote: post #483
AdamJacobMuller wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. I've never kept any laptop as long as I've kept the M1. I was more or less upgrading yearly in the past because the speed increases (both in the G4 and then Intel generations) were so significant. This M1 has exceeded my expectations in every category, it's faster quieter and cooler than any laptop i've ever owned. I've had this laptop since release in 2020 and I have nearly 0 complaints with it. I wouldn't upgr…

> I've never kept any laptop as long as I've kept the M1. My 2015 MBP would like to have a word. It’s the only laptop purchase I’ve made. I still use it to this day, though not as regularly. I will likely get a new MBP one of these days.

My wife still uses my 2012 MBP 15 retina as her daily driver. The battery's terrible but everything else works fine.

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#544

Post by hajile »

charlescurt123 wrote: post #508
garciasn wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We run our LLM workloads on a M2 Ultra because of this. 2x the VRAM; one-time cost at $5350 was the same as, at the time, 1 month of 80GB VRAM GPU in GCP. Works well for us.

comparing a laptop to a A100 (312 teraFLOPS) or H100 (~1P FLOPS) server is a stretch to say the least. An M2 is according to a reddit post around 27 tflops So What workflow would use something like this?

They aren't going to be using fp32 for inferencing, so those FP numbers are meaningless.

Memory and memory bandwidth matters most for inferencing. 819.2 GB/s for M2 Ultra is less than half that of A100, but having 192GB of RAM instead of 80gb means they can run inference on models that would require THREE of those A100s and the only real cost is that it takes longer for the AI to respond.

3 A100 at $5300/mo each for the past 2 years is over $380,000. Considering it worked for them, I'd consider it a massive success.

From another perspective though, they could have bought 72 of those Ultra machines for that much money and had most devs on their own private instance.

The simple fact is that Nvidia GPUs are massively overpriced. Nvidia should worry a LOT that Apple's private AI cloud is going to eat their lunch.

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#546

Post by [deleted] »

touristtam wrote: post #488
AdamJacobMuller wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. I've never kept any laptop as long as I've kept the M1. I was more or less upgrading yearly in the past because the speed increases (both in the G4 and then Intel generations) were so significant. This M1 has exceeded my expectations in every category, it's faster quieter and cooler than any laptop i've ever owned. I've had this laptop since release in 2020 and I have nearly 0 complaints with it. I wouldn't upgr…

How do you justify this kind of recurring purchases, even with selling your old device? I don't get the behaviour or the driving decision factor past the obvious "I need the latest shiny toy" (I can't find the exact words to describe it, so apologies for the reductive description). I have either assembled my own desktop computers or purchased ex corporate Lenovo over the years with a mix of Windows (for gaming obviou…

[deleted]

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#547

Post by kvczor »

hartator wrote: post #345

I’m really excited about the nano-texture display option. It’s essentially a matte coating, but the execution on iPad displays is excellent. While it doesn’t match the e-ink experience of devices like the Kindle or ReMarkable, it’s about 20-30% easier on the eyes. The texture feels also great (even though it’s less relevant for a laptop), and the glare reduction is a welcome feature. I prefer working on the MacBook s…

How is the contrast? The HDR content? Any downsides?

I will upgrade to M4 Pro and really hate the glare when I travel (and I do that a lot) but at the same time I don't want to lose any quality that the MBP delivers which is quite excellent imho

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#548

Post by [deleted] »

redundantly wrote: post #75
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #55

I'm pleased that the Pro's base memory starts at 16 GB, but surprised they top out at 32 GB: > ...the new MacBook Pro starts with 16GB of faster unified memory with support for up to 32GB, along with 120GB/s of memory bandwidth... I haven't been an Apple user since 2012 when I graduated from college and retired my first computer, a mid-2007 Core2 Duo Macbook Pro, which I'd upgraded with a 2.5" SSD and 6GB of RAM with…

The M4 tops off at 32 GB The M4 Pro goes up to 48 GB The M4 Max can have up to 128 GB

[deleted]

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#549

Post by arzke »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #540
lukev wrote: post #535

I really respect Apple's privacy focused engineering. They didn't roll out _any_ AI features until they were capable of running them locally, and before doing any cloud-based AI they designed and rolled out Private Cloud Compute. You can argue about whether it's actually bulletproof or not but the fact is, nobody else is even trying, and have lost sight of all privacy-focused features in their rush to ship anything a…

> to purchase a machine that feels like it really belongs to me How true is this when they devices are increasingly hostile to user repair and upgrades? MacOS also tightens the screws on what you can run and from where, or at least require more hoop jumping over time.

> How true is this when they devices are increasingly hostile to user repair and upgrades?

Not sure what you mean exactly by this, but to me their Self Service Repair program is a step in the right direction.

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#550

Post by brandall10 »

losvedir wrote: post #514
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.

I'm curious about getting one of these to run LLM models locally, but I don't understand the cost benefit very well. Even 128GB can't run, like, a state of the art Claude 3.5 or GPT 4o model right? Conversely, even 16GB can (I think?) run a smaller, quantized Llama model. What's the sweet spot for running a capable model locally (and likely future local-scale models)?

You'll be able to run 72B models w/ large context, lightly quantized with decent'ish performance, like 20-25 tok/sec. The best of the bunch are maybe 90% of a Claude 3.5.

If you need to do some work offline, or for some reason the place you work blocks access to cloud providers, it's not a bad way to go, really. Note that if you're on battery, heavy LLM use can kill your battery in an hour.

Post reply on HN