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M4 MacBook Pro

apple.com

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Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#601

Post by doctorpangloss »

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…

Privacy is the new obscenity. What does privacy even mean to you concretely? Answer the question with no additional drama, and I guarantee you either Apple doesn’t deliver what you are asking for, or you are using services from another company, like Google, in a way that the actions speak that you don’t really care about what you are asking for.

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#602

Post by bogantech »

superb_dev wrote: post #551
paulryanrogers wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Apple also left a very convenient hole in their boot loader to allow running another OS. Linux works pretty well these days

* As long as you don't want to use any external displays

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#603

Post by reaperducer »

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?

I can neither repair nor upgrade my electric car, my furniture, or my plumbing. But they all still belong to me.

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#604

Post by hilux »

onepointsixC wrote: post #584
hilux wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you send your computer/phone to Apple for repair you may get back different physical hardware. I happen to be in the midst of a repair with Apple right now. And for me, the idea that they might replace my aging phone with a newer unit, is a big plus. As I think it would be for almost everyone. Aside from the occasional sticker, I don't have any custom hardware mods to my phone or laptop, and nor do 99.99% of peo…

What makes you think it would be a new one as opposed to a refurbished used one.

> What makes you think it would be a new one

Did I say it would be a "new one"?

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#605

Post by tomcam »

the_king wrote: post #593

The single core performance looks really fast. Chip | Geekbench Score (Process) ---- | ------------------------ M1 | 2,419 (5nm) M2 | 2,658 (5nm) M3 | 3,076 (3nm) M4* | 3,810 (3nm) In my experience, single-core CPU is the best all-around indicator of how "fast" a machine feels. I feel like Apple kind of buried this in their press release. M4 benchmark source: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/8171874

I don't know much about modern Geekbench scores, but it that chart seems to show that M1s are still pretty good? It appears that M4 is only about 50% faster. Somehow I would expect more like 100% improvement.

Flameproof suit donned. Please correct me because I'm pretty ignorant about modern hardware. My main interest is playing lots of tracks live in Logic Pro.

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#606

Post by zmmmmm »

zurfer wrote: post #38

If I remember correctly, the claim was that M3 is 1.6x faster than M1. M4 is now 1.8x faster than M1. It sounds more exciting than M4 is 12.5% faster than M3.

I have to admit, 4 generations in, 1.8x is decent but slightly disappointing all the same.

I'd really like to justify upgrading, but a $4k+ spend needs to hit greater than 2x for me to feel it's justified. 1.8x is still "kind of the same" as what I have already.

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#607

Post by Cthulhu_ »

stetrain wrote: post #149
jcmontx wrote: post #20

> "up to 1.8x faster when compared to the 16-inch MacBook Pro with M1 Pro" I insist my 2020 Macbook M1 was the best purchase I ever made

Yep. That's roughly 20% per generation improvement which ain't half-bad these days, but the really huge cliff was going from Intel to the M1 generation. M1 series machines are going to be fine for years to come.

It feels like M1 was the revolution, subsequent ones evolution - smaller fabrication process for improved energy efficiency, more cores for more power, higher memory (storage?) bandwidth, more displays (that was a major and valid criticism for the M1 even though in practice >1 external screens is a relatively rare use case for Actually wasn't M1 itself an evolution / upscale of their A series CPUS that by now they've been working on since... before 2010, the iPhone 4 was the first one with their own CPU, although the design was from Samsung + Intrinsity, it was only the A6 that they claimed was custom designed by Apple.

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#608

Post by lukev »

amelius wrote: post #579
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…

> Private Cloud Compute That's such a security theater. As long as nobody can look inside their ICs, nobody knows what's really happening there.

That's a fine bit of goalpost shifting. They state that they will make their _entire software stack_ for Private Cloud Compute public for research purposes.

Assuming they go through with that, this alone puts them leagues ahead of any other cloud service.

It also means that to mine your data the way everyone else does, they would need to deliberately insert _hardware_ backdoors into their own systems, which seems a bit too difficult to keep secret and a bit too damning a scandal should it be discovered...

Occam's razor here is that they're genuinely trying to use real security as a competitive differentiator.

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#609

Post by cjbprime »

Does anyone understand this claim from the press release?

> M4 Max supports up to 128GB of fast unified memory and up to 546GB/s of memory bandwidth, which is 4x the bandwidth of the latest AI PC chip. This allows developers to easily interact with large language models that have nearly 200 billion parameters.

Having more memory bandwidth is not directly helpful in using larger LLM models. A 200B param model requires at least 200GB RAM quantized down from the original precision (e.g. "bf16") to "q8" (8 bits per parameter), and these laptops don't even have the 200GB RAM that would be required to run inference over that quantized version.

How can you "easily interact with" 200GB of data, in real-time, on a machine with 128GB of memory??

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#610

Post by zmmmmm »

jcmontx wrote: post #20

> "up to 1.8x faster when compared to the 16-inch MacBook Pro with M1 Pro" I insist my 2020 Macbook M1 was the best purchase I ever made

It's annoyingly good! I want to upgrade, but especially having splurged on 64Gb RAM, I have very little justifiable reason.
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