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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

#661

Post by lotsofpulp »

jlokier wrote: post #487
lotsofpulp wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wish they would just charge an extra $X for the privilege of using multiple external monitors. They do, you have to pay more for an M3 Pro or M3 Max.

The person you replied to wants the nicer form factor of the MBA with the ability to use multiple external displays. That combo isn't currently offered, and judging from today's M3 specs the next MBA won't likely offer it either. I assume the iMac has the same limitation, which is a bit of a downer for some uses. It would be nice to drive a second monitor and a wall-mounted TV or projector from an iMac in sleek a hom…

My bad, I missed that specification. I would agree with them, it would be nice if you could pay more for a MacBook Air with multiple external display support.

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

#662

Post by rewmie »

grupthink wrote: post #540
rewmie wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Heh, I recall seeing many posts arguing against benchmarks (...)

It's one thing to argue that some real-world data might not be representative all on itself.

It's an entirely different thing to present no proof at all, and just claim "trust me, bro" on marketing brochures.

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

#663

Post by Osiris »

claytongulick wrote: post #412
rickette wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do I need to select the most expensive M3 Max version (the one with 16 cores) to get 48 or 64 gigs of RAM. The M3 Max with 14 cores only allow 36 or 96 gigs. Just let me choose 14 cores and 64 gigs.

This kind of blows my mind. I'm running the lowest spec m1 with 8 gigs of ram for my daily driver. I frequently have tens of chrome browser tabs open across multiple profiles, multiple chrome debuggers, at least two or three VS code instances, multiple high memory nodejs processes, video conferencing, screen sharing and building code all at the same time - and the thing runs smoothly without a hiccup. And does it on…

I have the same one and it’s neigh unusable. The memory is constantly maxed out and it freezes frequently while swapping. I can’t use it. It’s in a drawer somewhere.

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

#664

Post by guax »

mkl wrote: post #44

Strange that they mostly compare performance to M1, not M2. Probably means it's not as much faster than M2 as they would like.

Its on the release linked. 15% faster than m2 for P-cores and 30% for e-cores, which is misleading, because it has 2 more of them so they're not necessarily that much faster.

For me, still on m1 is good news, one more generation I can skip without feeling too much FOMO. Graphics improvement are irrelevant since im not gaming on them and cpu difference is fine for being just <40% overall.

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

#665

Post by Condition1952 »

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.

Parallels is an overpriced rubbish with stupid limitations. I’m switching to WMWare or VMWare as of right now

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

#666

Post by rickdeckard »

3c6bYDXLMj wrote: post #624
rickdeckard wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Given that there has never been any public incidents about it and what we know about similar defaults I would be surprised if Apple is getting less than 95% opt-in rate. A 95% opt-in rate is INSANELY high for any type of usage-stat opt-in, everything above 50% is usually outstanding. What is known about "similar defaults"?

It’s a step in a setup wizard. Whilst it’s explicitly asked, and far from dark pattern territory, it’s designed in such a way that I wouldn’t be surprised by a 95% opt-in rate.

I would be VERY surprised.

To someone with experience in that area of UX, a 95% opt-IN rate is ridiculously high.

A 95% consent-rate would already be hard to achieve as opt-OUT.

For opt-in a 95% rate would require both attention AND consent from 95% of the audience at this stage in the setup wizard.

I highly doubt that it can achieve 95% attention, let alone 95% consent.

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

#667

Post by jwr »

dansalvato wrote: post #575
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.…

I think your last paragraph sounds about right. The Max is a compromise on battery life for those who want the absolute most possible performance, but I think Apple is seeing a much wider audience get the Pro chip. Anecdotally, whenever I see a tech person mention their Apple silicon device, it's almost always a Pro chip. I'm sure only a small fraction of that user base is hitting all cores with a full load on a regu…

I'll be buying the Max this year, upgrading from an M1 Pro. The Max actually started making sense, because there are more performance cores and memory bandwidth is bigger. I don't much care about GPU: I wish Fusion 360 ran faster, but Autodesk doesn't seem to care much about Mac performance. What I do care about is CPU for Clojure development work, and for that the new Max actually makes sense.

In the M1 generation there was no benefit from going from Pro to the Max.

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

#668

Post by steve1977 »

0x6c6f6c wrote: post #200
soulofmischief wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just that, but if you're not running ARM images then it's running a VM for your docker images to boot. It's just mind-blowing how many containers I have running and my laptop is cool to the touch, and at full battery.

This isn't as much the case anymore. There are typically arm64 images available for the more popular images, and anything you build locally is native, unless you're trying to build x86 software. Redis, Memcached, PostgreSQL, MySQL- it's all native arm64 images now.

That only really helps if you also want to deploy on arm64. Developing on one architecture and deploying on another would kind of destroy on of the advantages of containers.

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

#669

Post by OJFord »

photonerd wrote: post #207
elif wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point is more that "is it worth buying this new m3 or should I buy a secondhand m2 for half the price?"

more like "a hundred bucks less". The M1's go for maybe half... if you're lucky. Most are more.

Because there's a newer model, which is now true for the M2 ones too?

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

#670

Post by guax »

etchalon wrote: post #265
miohtama wrote: post #126

> With the M3 family of chips, hardware-accelerated ray tracing comes to the Mac for the first time. Ray tracing models the properties of light as it interacts with a scene, allowing apps to create extremely realistic and physically accurate images. This, along with the new graphics architecture, allows pro apps to deliver up to 2.5x the speed of the M1 family of chips. Does this mean we can finally play Cyberpunk 20…

No. It's nowhere near as powerful as desktop Nvidia cards. It's about as powerful as a PS5.

It could be theoretically as powerful as a ps5 but not nearly as performant. Game studios are not spending any time optimising for apple silicon and dumping tons of dev hours to make sure it runs smooth on the console.

Sony uses its custom graphics API (GNM and GNMX) and custom shader language and x86 platform. Xbox uses DirectX. Apple went in on its own route with Metal. That widens the gap.

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