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M4 MacBook Pro

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Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#751

Post by cjbprime »

kristianp wrote: post #725
cjbprime wrote: post #609

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…

q4 or q5 quantization. Edit: Actually you'd want q3 to fit a 200B model into 128GB of RAM. e.g. this one is about 140GB https://huggingface.co/lmstudio-community/DeepSeek-V2.5-GGUF...

Wouldn't it be incredibly misleading to say you can interact with an LLM, when they really mean that you can lossy-compress it to like 25% size where it becomes way less useful and then interact with that?

(Isn't that kind of like saying you can do real-time 4k encoding when you actually mean it can do real-time 720p encoding and then interpolate the missing pixels?)

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#752

Post by mitchell209 »

traceroute66 wrote: post #658
abrookewood wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their repair policy, from what I can see, is a thinly veiled attempt to get you to either pay for Apple Care or to upgrade. I got a quote to repair a colleague's MacBook Pro, less than 2 years old, which has apparent 'water damage' and which they want AUD $2,500 to repair! Of course that makes no sense, so we're buying a new one ...

> to get you to either pay for Apple Care The problem with many self-repair people is they effectively value their time at zero. I value my time realistically, i.e. above zero and above minimum wage. It is therefore a no brainer for me to buy AppleCare every ... single ..time. It means I can just drop it off and let someone else deal with messing around. I also know how much hassle it is. Like many techies, I spent p…

How often do you actually need a repair from Apple? I used to buy AppleCare but stopped in the last few years and have yet to need any repairs done except a battery replacement on a 14 Pro that I was giving to family.

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#754

Post by nextos »

linguae wrote: post #713
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…

Why not both? Why can’t we have a good usability experience AND control? In fact, we used to have that via the Mac hardware and software of the 1990s and 2000s, as well as NeXT’s software and hardware. There was a time when Apple’s hardware was user-serviceable; I fondly remember my 2006 MacBook, with easily-upgradable RAM and storage. I also remember a time when Mac OS X didn’t have notarization and when the App Sto…

NeXT was great and Mac OS X was also nice and had a lovely indie and boutique app ecosystem during the mid-to-late 2000s. Sadly, iOS stole the focus. However, the OP argues Linux usability is bad, which I think is an outdated POV. It really depends on your setup and usecases. For many development usecases, Linux is superior to macOS.

I run NixOS on a plain X11 environment with a browser, an editor and a terminal. It's really boring. For my favorite development stacks, everything works. Flakes make workflow easy to reproduce, and it's also easy to make dramatic setup changes at OS level thanks to declarativeness and immutability.

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#755

Post by dgellow »

joshdavham wrote: post #620

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.

Depends if it is a personal machine or paid by your company. 5+ years is what I generally expect from an apple laptop (been using them since around 2007-2009) if I own. For an M1-3 that could be a bit longer. If it is paid by your company, then whenever you have the budget :)

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#756

Post by philsnow »

qubitcoder wrote: post #588
jader201 wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You'll be glad you did. I loved my 2015 MBP. I even drove 3 hours to the nearest Best Buy to snag one. That display was glorious. A fantastic machine. I eventually gave it to my sister, who continued using it until a few years ago. The battery was gone, but it still worked great. When you upgrade, prepare to be astonished. The performance improvement is difficult to convey. It's akin to traveling by horse and buggy.…

The performance jump between a top-of-the-line intel MBP (I don't remember the year, probably 2019) and the m1 max I got to replace it.. was rather like the perf jump between spinning disks and SSDs.

When I migrated all my laptops to SSDs (lenovos at the time, so it was drop-dead simple), I thought to myself, "this is a once-in-a-generation feeling". I didn't think I would ever be impressed by a laptop's speed ever again. It was nice to be wrong.

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#757

Post by sib »

TIPSIO wrote: post #93

These chips are incredible. Even my M1 MBP from 2020 still feels so ridiculously fast for everyday basic use and coding. Is an upgrade really worth it?

I do a lot of (high-end mirrorless camera, ~45MP, 14 bits/pixel raw files) photo processing. There are many individual steps in Photoshop, Lightroom, or various plug-ins that take ~10 seconds on my M1 Max MBP. It definitely doesn't feel fast. I'm planning to upgrade to one of these.

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#758

Post by nkmskdmfodf »

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…

> I am thrilled to shell out thousands and thousands of dollars to purchase a machine that feels like it really belongs to me, from a company that respects my data and has aligned incentives.

You either have have very low standards or very low understanding if you think a completely closed OS on top of completely closed hardware somehow means it 'really belongs' to you, or that your data/privacy is actually being respected.

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#759

Post by FuckButtons »

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.

I’ve had something similar happen as a bug when I was using a python sound device and calling numpy functions inside its stream callback. Took me a long time to figure out that numpy subroutines that drop the GIL would cause the audio stream to stall.

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#760

Post by nkmskdmfodf »

hilux wrote: post #573
dmz73 wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mac OS calls home every time you execute an application. Apple is well on its way to ensure you can only run things they allow via app store, they would probably already be there if it wasn't for the pesky EU. If you send your computer/phone to Apple for repair you may get back different physical hardware. Those things very much highlight that "your" Apple hardware is not yours and that privacy on Apple hardware does…

> 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…

> And for me, the idea that they might replace my aging phone with a newer unit, is a big plus.

It's called a warranty and not at all exclusive to apple whatsoever?

> Those people should stick to Linux, so that they can have a terrible usability experience ALL the time, but feel more "in control," or something.

Maybe you should stick to reading and not commenting, if this is the best you can do.

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