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

Apple introduces M4 chip

apple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

821–830 of 1001 posts

Re: Apple introduces M4 chip

#821

Post by aqfamnzc »

aurareturn wrote: post #530
themagician wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Welcome to being old! Watch a 20-year old creative work on an iPad and you will quickly change your mind. Watch someone who has, "never really used a desktop, [I] just use an iPad" work in Procreate or LumaFusion. The iPad has amazing software. Better, in many ways, than desktop alternatives if you know how to use it. There are some things they can't do, and the workflow can be less flexible or full featured in some…

I'm with you. I think HN (and conversational internet) disproportionally contains more laptop people than the public. A lot of of the younger generation does all their work on their phone and tablet and does not have a computer.

Yeah, apparently some people book flights from their phones!? Nah man, that's a laptop activity. I'd never spend more than a couple hundred dollars on my phone. Haha

Re: Apple introduces M4 chip

#822

Post by lynx23 »

andsoitis wrote: post #539
rsp1984 wrote: post #457

Together with next-generation ML accelerators in the CPU, the high-performance GPU, and higher-bandwidth unified memory, the Neural Engine makes M4 an outrageously powerful chip for AI. In case it is not abundantly clear by now: Apple's AI strategy is to put inference (and longer term even learning) on edge devices. This is completely coherent with their privacy-first strategy (which would be at odds with sending dat…

> In case it is not abundantly clear by now: Apple's AI strategy is to put inference (and longer term even learning) on edge devices. This is completely coherent with their privacy-first strategy (which would be at odds with sending data up to the cloud for processing). Their primary business goal is to sell hardware. Yes, they’ve diversified into services and being a shopping mall for all, but it is about selling lu…

Every company is selling one thing or another, and nothing is going to last forever. I really fail to see what, except for generic negativity, your comment adds to anything.

Re: Apple introduces M4 chip

#823

Post by smallstepforman »

As an engineer, I find it extremelly frustrating to read Apple’s marketing speak. It almost sounds like ChatGPT and StarTrek techno-babble. Engineers cannot stomach reading the text, and non engineers wont bother reading it anyway.

Whats wrong with plain old bullet-points and sticking to the technical data?

Re: Apple introduces M4 chip

#824

Post by dimask »

smallstepforman wrote: post #823

As an engineer, I find it extremelly frustrating to read Apple’s marketing speak. It almost sounds like ChatGPT and StarTrek techno-babble. Engineers cannot stomach reading the text, and non engineers wont bother reading it anyway. Whats wrong with plain old bullet-points and sticking to the technical data?

The target audience is neither engineers nor general public; these announcements are meant for tech journalists/youtubers etc to refer to when writing or talking about it.

Re: Apple introduces M4 chip

#825

Post by gigatexal »

wmf wrote: post #795
gigatexal wrote: post #657

Anyone know if the ram multiples of the M4 are better than the M3? Example: could a base model M4 sport more than 24GB of ram?

The M3 can support 64 GB but Apple artificially limits it to 24 GB. There's no telling when they will decide to uncripple it.

How did you come up with that? Based on the core layouts or something?

Regarding crippling I only went with a max because I wanted more ram. I would have loved to have gone with an M3 pro but 36GB wasn’t enough.

Re: Apple introduces M4 chip

#826

Post by [deleted] »

NorwegianDude wrote: post #264

> M4 has Apple’s fastest Neural Engine ever, capable of up to 38 trillion operations per second, which is faster than the neural processing unit of any AI PC today. I always wonder what crazy meds Apple employees are on. Two RTX 4090s is quite common for hobbyist use, and that is 1321 TOPS each, making two over 69 times more than what Apple claims to be the fastest in the world. That performance is literally less tha…

[deleted]

Re: Apple introduces M4 chip

#827

Post by nox101 »

klabb3 wrote: post #620
andsoitis wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In case it is not abundantly clear by now: Apple's AI strategy is to put inference (and longer term even learning) on edge devices. This is completely coherent with their privacy-first strategy (which would be at odds with sending data up to the cloud for processing). Their primary business goal is to sell hardware. Yes, they’ve diversified into services and being a shopping mall for all, but it is about selling lu…

> but it is about selling luxury hardware. Somewhat true but things are changing. While there are plenty of “luxury” Apple devices like Vision Pro or fully decked out MacBooks for web browsing we no longer live in a world where tech are just lifestyle gadgets. People spend hours a day on their phones, and often run their life and businesses through it. Even with the $1000+/2-3y price tag, it’s simply not that much gi…

price-performance is not a thing for a vast majority of users. Sure I'd like a $40k car but I can only afford a $10k car. It's not nice but it gets me from a to b on my min-wage salary. Similarly, I know plenty of friends and family. They can either get 4 macs for $1000 each (mom, dad, sister, brother) so $4k. Or they can get 4 windows PCs for $250 so $1k total.

The cheap Windows PCs suck just like a cheap car sucks (ok, they suck more), but they still get the job done. You can still browse the web, read your email, watch a youtube video, post a youtube video, write a blog, etc.. My dad got some HP celeron. It took 4 minutes to boot. It still ran though and he paid probably $300 for it vs $999 for a mac. He didn't have $999.

Re: Apple introduces M4 chip

#828

Post by chipdart »

rsp1984 wrote: post #457

Together with next-generation ML accelerators in the CPU, the high-performance GPU, and higher-bandwidth unified memory, the Neural Engine makes M4 an outrageously powerful chip for AI. In case it is not abundantly clear by now: Apple's AI strategy is to put inference (and longer term even learning) on edge devices. This is completely coherent with their privacy-first strategy (which would be at odds with sending dat…

> This is completely coherent with their privacy-first strategy (...)

I think you're trying too hard to rationalize this move as pro-privacy and pro-consumer.

Apple is charging a premium for hardware based on performance claims, which they need to create relevance and demand for it.

There is zero demand for the capacity for running computationally demanding workloads beyond very niche applications, for what classifies as demanding for the consumer-grade hardware being sold for the past two decades.

If Apple offloads these workloads to the customer's own hardware, they don't have to provide this computing capacity themselves. This means no global network of data centers, no infrastructure, no staff, no customer support, no lawyer, nothing.

More importantly, Apple claims to be pro privacy but their business moves are in reality in the direction of ensuring that they are in sole control of their users' data. Call it what you want but leveraging their position to ensure they hold a monopoly over a market created over their userbase is not a pro privacy move, just like Apple's abuse of their control over the app store is not a security move.

Re: Apple introduces M4 chip

#829

Post by sneak »

blegr wrote: post #53
Laaas wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The economic reasoning behind this doesn't make sense to me. What do they lose by allowing slightly more freedom in configurations?

It forces you to buy multiple upgrades instead of just the one you need.

That’s not what “force” means.

Re: Apple introduces M4 chip

#830

Post by sneak »

Laaas wrote: post #43
EduardoBautista wrote: post #13

The 256gb and 512gb models have 8gb of ram. The 1tb and 2tb models have 16gb. Not a fan of tying ram to storage. https://www.apple.com/ipad-pro/specs/

The economic reasoning behind this doesn't make sense to me. What do they lose by allowing slightly more freedom in configurations?

It benefits Apple to not have people thinking about or worrying about the amount of ram in their iPad. The OS doesn’t surface it anywhere.
Post reply on HN