671–680 of 1001 posts
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Well it's more like pick your poison, cause all options have caveats: - Apple: all the capacity and bandwidth, but no compute to utilize it - AMD/Nvidia: all the compute and bandwidth, but no capacity to load anything - DDR5: all the capacity, but no compute or bandwidth (cheap tho)
Why was this downvoted?
Question to more senior Mac users: how do you usually decide when to upgrade? I bought my first Macbook pro about a year and a half ago and it's still working great.
My previous Macbook was a Pro model from 2015, I waited 6 years to finally upgrade to an M1 Air because of the awful touchbar models they had in between (though I'm still using the 2015 Pro for personal stuff, in fact right now. It's upgraded to the latest macOS using OpenCore and it still runs great). But I would say upgrade every 3-5 years depending on heavy a professional user you are.
Because it made the esc key useless for touch typists and because, as a vi user, I hit esc approximately a bazillion times per day I mapped caps lock to esc.
Now my fingers don't travel as far to hit esc.
I still use that mapping even on my regular keyboards and my current non-touch-bar macs.
Thanks touchbar macs, rest in peace.
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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.
Traded it for an M1 Air in 2021 and was astonished at how much faster it was. It even blew away my 2019 16" from work.
You're going to be even more blown away!
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I'd add that although I find it a bit dirty, the computers are obviously still amazing. It's just a bit bizarre that the lower spec cpu offers the customer the option to change the ram quantity. More specifically, going from the M4 Pro to the M4 Max removes the option to change the ram from 36gb, whereas sticking with the Pro lets you select 48gb or 24gb, unless you choose the max Max. If I pre-order the Mac Mini wit…
I think any idea that Apple doesn't thoroughly understand the capacity, value, market, price tradeoff is untenable. The most obvious view is that Apple price gouges on storage. But this seems too simplistic. My conjecture is that there's an inescapable tension between supply (availabilty/cost) sales forecasts, technological churn, and roadmaps that leads them to want to somewhat subsidize the lowest end, and place a…
They're really burying the lede here - magic trackpad and magic keyboard finally have USB-C :)
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The M3 Max was 400GBps, this is 540GBps. Truly an outstanding case for unified memory. DDR5 doesn't come anywhere near.
Apple is using LPDDR5 for M3. The bandwidth doesn't come from unified memory - it comes from using many channels. You could get the same bandwidth or more with normal DDR5 modules if you could use 8 or more channels, but in the PC space you don't usually see more than 2 or 4 channels (only common for servers). Unrelated but unified memory is a strange buzzword being used by Apple. Their memory is no different than ot…
On PCs some other hardware (notably the SSD) comes with its own memory. But here it's shared with the main DRAM too.
This is not necessarily a performance improvement, it can avoid copies but also means less is available to the CPU.
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> 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…
It could help to compare to other makers for a minute: if you need to repair your Surface Pro, you can easily remove the SSD from the tray, send your machine and stick it back when it comes repaired (new or not) And most laptops at this point have removable/exchangeable storage. Except for Apple.
Apple has full-disk encryption backed by the secure enclave so its not by-passable.
Sure their standard question-set asks you for your password when you submit it for repair.
But you don't have to give it to them. They will happily repair your machine without it because they can boot their hardware-test suite off an external device.
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> 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.
Actually Apple has stated they are allowing security researchers to look at their infrastructure DIRECTLY.
Looking at a bunch of PCBs doesn't tell you much.
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> 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.
Of course I wish the hardware were somehow more open, but to a large extent, it's directly because of hardware based privacy features. If you allowed third-party components without restraint, there'd be no way to prevent someone swapping out a component. Lock-in and planned obsolescence are also factors, and ones I'm glad the EU (and others) are pushing back here. But it isn't as if there are no legitimate tradeoffs.…
Some of us are old enough to remember the era of the officially authorised Apple clones in the 90's.
Some of us worked in hardware repair roles at the time.
Some of us remember the sort of shit the third-party vendors used to sell as clones.
Some of us were very happy the day Apple called time on the authorised clone industry.
The tight-knit integration between Apple OS and Apple Hardware is a big part of what makes their platform so good. I'm not saying perfect. I'm just saying if you look at it honestly as someone who's used their kit alongside PCs for many decades, you can see the difference.
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