M4 MacBook Pro

(apple.com)

580 points | by tosh6 小时前

84 comments

  • lukev1 小时前
    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 and everything on my device to OpenAI or Gemini.

    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.

    • dmz7344 分钟前
      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 not actually exist, sure they may not share that data with other parties but they definitely do not respect your privacy or act like you own the hardware you purchased. Apple marketing seems to have reached the level indoctrination where everyone just keeps parroting what Apple says as an absolute truth.
      • hilux30 分钟前
        > 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 people.

        Can Apple please every single tech nerd 100% of the time? No. 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.

        • onepointsixC18 分钟前
          What makes you think it would be a new one as opposed to a refurbished used one.
          • Cthulhu_15 分钟前
            If the parts show no signs of wear and tear, what is the difference? Theseus' iPhone.
          • hilux5 分钟前
            > What makes you think it would be a new one

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

          • reaperducer7 分钟前
            What makes you think it would be a new one as opposed to a refurbished used one.

            Because some got sued for doing that once, and people including myself are in line to get checks from it.

      • wslh20 分钟前
        Even if I have analytics disabled?

        Genuinely asking: are there any specifics on this? I understand that blocking at the firewall level is an option, but I recall someone here mentioning an issue where certain local machine rules don’t work effectively. I believe this is the issue [1]. Has it been “fixed”?

        [1] https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/01/14/apple-drops-exclu...

      • leokennis38 分钟前
        At the very least Apple are better than Microsoft, Windows and the vendors that sell Windows laptops when it comes to respecting user experience and privacy.
        • HeckFeck15 分钟前
          I switched to iPhone after they added the tracker blocking to the OS.

          Everything is a tradeoff.

          I’d love to live in the F droid alt tech land, but everything really comes down to utility. Messaging my friends is more important than using the right IM protocol.

          Much as I wish I could convince everyone I know and have yet to meet to message me on Signal or whatever, that simply isn’t possible. Try explaining that I am not on Whatsapp or insta to a girl I’ve just met…

          Also it is nice to spend basically no time maintaining the device, and have everything work together coherently. Time is ever more valuable past a certain point.

      • lukev30 分钟前
        I mean, the security features are pretty well documented. The FBI can't crack a modern iPhone even with Apple's help. A lot of the lockdowns are in service of that.

        I'm curious: what hardware and software stack do you use?

        • misiek0823 分钟前
          FBI and Apple „can't”, but 3rd party do and they do it cheaper every day.
          • lukev18 分钟前
            They do not.
    • paulryanrogers1 小时前
      > 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.

      • lukev53 分钟前
        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.

        Regarding screw tightening... if they ever completely remove the ability to run untrusted code, yes, then I'll admit I was wrong. But I am more than happy to have devices be locked down by default. My life has gotten much easier since I got my elderly parents and non-technical siblings to move completely to the Apple ecosystem. That's the tradeoff here.

        • orf9 分钟前
          One of the most underrated macOS features is the screen sharing app - it’s great for seamless tech support with parents.

          It works via your keychain and your contacts, and the recipient gets a little notification to allow you to view their screen.

          That’s it - no downloads, no login, no 20 minutes getting a Remote Desktop screen share set up.

        • amelius20 分钟前
          > My life has gotten much easier since I got my elderly parents and non-technical siblings to move completely to the Apple ecosystem. That's the tradeoff here.

          Yeah, but this is hacker news.

      • arzke58 分钟前
        > How true is this when they devices are increasingly hostile to user repair and upgrades?

        Not sure what you mean exactly by this, but to me their Self Service Repair program is a step in the right direction.

        • sqeaky53 分钟前
          It was mandated by right to repair laws, it provides the absolute minimum, and they've attempted the price out people wanting to do repairs. The only way it could be more hostile to users is by literally being illegal.

          They could go out of their way to make things actually easy to work on and service, but that has never been the Apple Way. Compare to framework or building your own PC, or even repairing a laptop from another OEM.

      • superb_dev55 分钟前
        Apple also left a very convenient hole in their boot loader to allow running another OS. Linux works pretty well these days
        • bogantech5 分钟前
          * As long as you don't want to use any external displays
        • schaefer22 分钟前
          * on M1 and M2 variants.
      • reaperducer5 分钟前
        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.

      • jeffybefffy51951 分钟前
        Considering you need an Apple ID to log into the hardware, id argue Apple gatekeeps that ownership pretty tightly.
        • lukev49 分钟前
          This isn't true.

          edit: also, unless you are the digital equivalent of "off the grid", I would argue most people are going to need some sort of cloud-based identity anyway for messaging, file-sharing, etc. iCloud is far and away the most secure of the options available to most users, and the only one that uses full end-to-end encryption across all services.

          • JadeNB32 分钟前
            > edit: also, unless you are the digital equivalent of "off the grid", I would argue most people are going to need some sort of cloud-based identity anyway for messaging, file-sharing, etc. iCloud is far and away the most secure of the options available to most users, and the only one that uses full end-to-end encryption across all services.

            "You need some cloud-based identity, and this is the best one," even granting its premises, doesn't make being forced into this one a good thing. I'm an Apple user, but there are plenty of people I need to message and share files with who aren't in the Apple ecosystem.

            • reaperducer3 分钟前
              doesn't make being forced into this one a good thing

              But you're not forced. You completely ignored the other response in order to continue grinding an axe.

        • ale429 分钟前
          It's optional and very easy to skip. Not like the requirement for a MS account on Windows 11, which is also skippable but not by the average user.
      • syndicatedjelly30 分钟前
        > MacOS also tightens the screws on what you can run and from where, or at least require more hoop jumping over time.

        Can you explain what you mean by this? I have been doing software development on MacOS for the last couple of years and have found it incredibly easy to run anything I want on my computer from the terminal, whenever I want. Maybe I'm not the average user, but I use mostly open-source Unix tooling and have never had a problem with permissions or restrictions.

        Are you talking about packaged applications that are made available on the App Store? If so, sure have rules to make sure the store is high-quality, kinda like how Costco doesn't let anyone just put garbage on their shelves

    • doctorpangloss6 分钟前
      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.
    • riazrizvi51 分钟前
      The approach that the big platforms have to producing their own versions of very successful apps cannibalizes their partners. This focus on consumer privacy by Apple is the company's killer competitive advantage in this particular area, IMO. If I felt they were mining me for my private business data I'd switch to Linux in heartbeat. This is what keeps me off Adobe, Microsoft Office, Google's app suite, and apps like Notion as much as possible.
    • victor10655 分钟前
      I agree 100% with this.

      Amongst all the big tech companies Apple is the closest you will get to if you want Privacy.

    • wslh25 分钟前
      I understand we will be able to disable that just in case? I don't want a Microsoft Windows telemetry dejavu.
    • amelius23 分钟前
      > 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.

      • ants_everywhere14 分钟前
        They've certainly engaged in a lot of privacy theater before. For example

        > Apple oversells its differential privacy protections. "Apple’s privacy loss parameters exceed the levels typically considered acceptable by the differential privacy research community," says USC professor Aleksandra Korolova, a former Google research scientist who worked on Google's own implementation of differential privacy until 2014. She says the dialing down of Apple's privacy protections in iOS in particular represents an "immense increase in risk" compared to the uses most researchers in the field would recommend.

        https://www.wired.com/story/apple-differential-privacy-short...

      • lukev4 分钟前
        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.

  • the_king11 分钟前
    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

    • lukev1 分钟前
      It's not really buried... their headline stat is that it's 1.8x faster than the M1, which is actually a bigger improvement than the actual Geekbench score shows (it would be a score of 4354).
    • tomcam5 分钟前
      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.

  • flkiwi2 小时前
    The weird thing about these Apple product videos in the last few years is that there are all these beautiful shots of Apple's campus with nobody there other than the presenter. It's a beautiful stage for these videos, but it's eerie and disconcerting, particularly given Apple's RTO approach.
    • davidczech1 小时前
      I think it’s usually filmed on weekends
      • monocasa1 小时前
        You would just think that with a brand so intrinsically wrapped around the concept of technology working for and with the people that use it, you'd want to show the people who made it if you're going to show the apple campus at all.

        It kind of just comes off as one of those YouTube liminal space horror videos when it's that empty.

        • hammock1 小时前
          The Apple brand is - foundationally - pretty solitary.

          Think about the early ipod ads, just individuals dancing to music by themselves. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dSgBsCVpqo

          You can even go back to 1983 "Two kinds of people": a solitary man walks into an empty office, works by himself on the computer and then goes home for breakfast. https://youtu.be/4xmMYeFmc2Q

          • flkiwi37 分钟前
            It's a strange conflict. So much of their other stuff is about togetherness mediated by technology (eg, facetime). And their Jobs-era presentations always ended with a note of appreciation for the folks who worked so hard to make the launch happen. But you're right that much of the brand imagery is solitary, right up to the whole "Here's to the crazy ones" vibe.

            It's weirdly dystopian. I didn't realize it bothered me until moments before my comment, but now I can't get it out of my head.

        • Cthulhu_11 分钟前
          If only in some shots, but they are such a valuable company that they simply cannot afford the risk of e.g. criticism for the choice of people they display, or inappropriate outfits or behaviour. One blip from a shareholder can cost them billions in value, which pisses off other shareholders. All of their published media, from videos like this to their conferences, are highly polished, rehearsed, and designed by committee. Microsoft and Google are the same, although at least with Google there's still room for some comedy in some of their departments: https://youtu.be/EHqPrHTN1dU
        • filoleg39 分钟前
          > You would just think that with a brand so intrinsically wrapped around the concept of technology working for and with the people that use it, you'd want to show the people who made it if you're going to show the apple campus at all.

          I would think that a brand that is at least trying to put some emphasis on privacy in their products would also extend the same principle to their workforce. I don’t work for Apple, but I doubt that most of their employees would be thrilled about just being filmed at work for a public promo video.

        • matrix871 小时前
          > the concept of technology working for and with the people that use it

          > liminal space horror

          reminds me of that god awful crush commercial

          • LeafItAlone20 分钟前
            I had not seen that one, so I looked it up.

            This was reminder to me that art is subjective. I don’t get the outrage. I kinda like it.

          • asadm1 小时前
            they apologized for that one.
  • cjbprime3 分钟前
    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 200GB RAM quantized down to "q8", and these laptops don't have 200GB RAM.

  • jcmontx6 小时前
    > "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

    • zmmmmm1 分钟前
      It's annoyingly good! I want to upgrade, but especially having splurged on 64Gb RAM, I have very little justifiable reason.
    • mirchiseth1 分钟前
      reading this for my late 2013 MBP. It is so old that I can't install the latest of Darktable on it.
    • AdamJacobMuller3 小时前
      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 upgrade except the increase in memory is great, I don't want to have to shut down apps to be able to load some huge LLMs, and, I ding'ed the top case a few months ago and now there's a shadow on the screen in that spot in some lighting conditions which is very annoying.

      I hope (and expect) the M4 to last just as long as my M1 did.

      • jader2011 小时前
        > 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.

        • qubitcoder17 分钟前
          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. And then hopping into a modern jetliner, flying first class.

          It's not just speed. Display quality, build quality, sound quality, keyboard quality, trackpad, ports, etc., have all improved considerably.

        • 0wis1 小时前
          If we are going this way… I still use a mid-2012 MBP as my main workstation.

          Last one with upgrade capabilities, now it has two fast SSDs and maximum Ram. I changed the battery once.

          Only shame is that it doesn’t get major MacOS upgrades anymore.

          Still good enough to browse the web, do office productivity and web development.

          12 years of good use, I am not sure I can get so much value anywhere now

          • PostLogical1 小时前
            Same setup here except I use Opencore Legacy Patcher so I’m on the latest OS as well. Works amazingly well.
        • oceanplexian29 分钟前
          I still have my 2015, and it lived just long enough to keep me going until the death of the touch bar and horrible keyboard, which went away when I immediately bought the M1 Pro on release day.
        • ptmcc1 小时前
          My 2015 15" MBP is also still kickin, is/was an absolutely fabulous unit. Was my work machine for 3-4 years, and now another almost-6 years as my personal laptop. My personal use case is obviously not very demanding but it's only now starting to really show its age.

          I also have a M1 from work that is absolutely wonderful, but I think it's time for me to upgrade the 2015 with one of these new M4s.

          The longevity of Macbooks is insanely good.

        • chrisweekly1 小时前
          My wife still uses my 2012 MBP 15 retina as her daily driver. The battery's terrible but everything else works fine.
        • JohnBooty1 小时前
          My 2015 MBP would probably have been totally fine for development... except for the Docker-based workflows that everybody uses now.

          Rebuilding a bunch of Docker images on an older intel mac is quite the slow experience if you're doing it multiple times per day.

        • nicolas_t1 小时前
          Ah my 2013 mbp died in 2019. It was the gpu. No way to repair it for cheap enough so I had to replace it with a 2019 mbp which was the computer I kept the shortest (I hated the keyboard).
          • Jaxan1 小时前
            My 2011 MBP died in 2023, it was used daily but very slow at the end of its life.
      • touristtam1 小时前
        How do you justify this kind of recurring purchases, even with selling your old device? I don't get the behaviour or the driving decision factor past the obvious "I need the latest shiny toy" (I can't find the exact words to describe it, so apologies for the reductive description).

        I have either assembled my own desktop computers or purchased ex corporate Lenovo over the years with a mix of Windows (for gaming obviously) and Linux and only recently (4 years ago) been given a MBP by work as they (IT) cannot manage Linux machines like they do with MacOS and Windows.

        I have moved from an intel i5 MBP to a M3 Pro (?) and it makes me want to throw away my dependable ThinkPad/Fedora machine I still uses for personal projects.

        • qubitcoder10 分钟前
          Apple has a pretty good trade-in program. If you have an Apple card, it's even better (e.g. the trade-in value is deducted immediately, zero interest, etc.).

          Could you get more money by selling it? Sure. But it's hard to be the convenience. They ship you a box. You seal up the old device and drop it off at UPS.

          I also build my desktop computers with a mix of Windows and Linux. But those are upgraded over the years, not regularly.

        • szundi1 小时前
          There are 2 things I was always spending money on, if I felt is not the almost best achievable: my bed and my laptop. Even the phone can be 4 years old iPhone, but the laptop must be best and fast. My sleep is also pretty important. Everything else is just "eco".
        • 1 小时前
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        • szundi1 小时前
          In my country you can buy a device and write off in 2 years, VAT reimbursed, then scrap it from the books and you sell it to people without tax payed to people who otherwise would pay a pretty hefty VAT. This decreases your loss of value to like half.
        • nwhnwh1 小时前
          Consuming... for some people, is done for it's own sake.
      • LeafItAlone17 分钟前
        >I've never kept any laptop as long as I've kept the M1

        What different lives we live. This first M1 was in November 2020. Not even four years old. I’ve never had a [personal] computer for _less_ time than that. (Work, yes, due to changing jobs or company-dictated changes/upgrades)

      • halfmatthalfcat27 分钟前
        My 2019 i9 going strong as ever. With 64gb ram, really don’t need to upgrade for at least a couple more years.
      • garyrob1 小时前
        "I've had this laptop since release in 2020 and I have nearly 0 complaints with it."

        Me too. Only one complaint. After I accidentally spilled a cup of water into it on an airplane, it didn't work.

        (However AppleCare fixed it for $300 and I had a very recent backup. :) )

        • samtheprogram26 分钟前
          If you don’t have AppleCare, it costs $1400+. M2 Pro here that I’m waiting to fix or upgrade because of that.

          What’s more annoying is that I’d jus to get a new one and recycle this one, but the SSD is soldered on. Good on you for having a backup.

          Do not own a Mac unless you bought it used or have AppleCare.

          • garyrob14 分钟前
            Yeah, I always have AppleCare. I view it as part of the cost of a mac (or iPhone).

            And yeah, this incident reminded me of why it's important to back up as close to daily as you can, or even more often during periods when you're doing important work and want to be sure you have the intermediate steps.

    • shade5 小时前
      I have the OG 13" MBP M1, and it's been great; I only have two real reasons I'm considering jumping to the 14" MBP M4 Pro finally:

      - More RAM, primarily for local LLM usage through Ollama (a bit more overhead for bigger models would be nice)

      - A bit niche, but I often run multiple external displays. DisplayLink works fine for this, but I also use live captions heavily and Apple's live captions don't work when any form of screen sharing/recording is enabled... which is how Displaylink works. :(

      Not quite sold yet, but definitely thinking about it.

      • bombcar1 小时前
        The M1 Max supports more than one external display natively, which is also an option.
    • leokennis35 分钟前
      I still use my MacBook Air M1 and given my current workloads (a bit of web development, general home office use and occasional video editing and encoding) I doubt I’ll need to replace it in the coming 5 years. That’ll be an almost 10 year lifespan.
    • misiek0821 分钟前
      M1 Pro compared to Intel was so big step ahead that I suppose we all are still surprised and excited. Quiet, long battery life and better performance. By a lot! I wonder if M4 really feels that much faster and better - having M1 Pro I'm not going to change quickly, but maybe Mac Mini will land some day.
      • Cthulhu_9 分钟前
        Honestly it was a game changer. Before I'd never leave the house without a charger, nowadays I rarely bring it with me on office days, even with JS / front-end workloads.

        (of course, everyone else has a macbook too, there's always someone that can lend me a charger. Bonus points that the newer macbooks support both magsafe and USB-C charging. Added bonus points that they brought back magsafe and HDMI ports)

    • JohnBooty1 小时前
      Amen. I got a crazy deal on a brand new 2020 M1 Max MBP with 64GB/2TB in 2023.

      This is the best machine I have ever owned. It is so completely perfect in every way. I can't imagine replacing it for many many years.

      • markus_zhang1 小时前
        Congratulations, just curious what is the deal?
        • giik50 分钟前
          At the end of 2023 BH Photo Video was selling the M1 Max 16” 64G/2TB for 2,499. It’s the lowest I’ve ever seen it anywhere and I got one myself.
      • 1 小时前
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    • stetrain5 小时前
      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.

      • Cthulhu_4 分钟前
        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 <5% of users).

        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.

    • medion9 分钟前
      Except for the usb c charge port - magcharge was the best invention and I’ll never understand why it was removed.
    • drewbitt5 小时前
      And my 2020 Intel Macbook Air was a bad purchase. Cruelly, the Intel and M1 Macbook Air released within 6 months of each other.
      • rconti5 小时前
        In early 2020, I had an aging 2011 Air that was still struggling after a battery replacement. Even though I "knew" the Apple Silicon chips would be better, I figured a 2020 Intel Air would last me a long time anyway, since my computing needs from that device are light, and who knows how many years the Apple Silicon transition will take take anyway?

        Bought a reasonably well-specced Intel Air for $1700ish. The M1s came out a few months later. I briefly thought about the implication of taking a hit on my "investment", figured I might as well cry once rather than suffer endlessly. Sold my $1700 Intel Air for $1200ish on craigslist (if I recall correctly), picked up an M1 Air for about that same $1200 pricepoint, and I'm typing this on that machine now.

        That money was lost as soon as I made the wrong decision, I'm glad I just recognized the loss up front rather than stewing about it.

        • cantsingh5 小时前
          Exact same boat here. A friend and I both bought the 2020 Intel MBA thinking that the M1 version was at least a year out. It dropped a few months later. I immediately resold my Intel MBA seeing the writing on the wall and bought a launch M1 (which I still use to this day). Ended up losing $200 on that mis-step, but no way the Intel version would still get me through the day.

          That said...scummy move by Apple. They tend to be a little more thoughtful in their refresh schedule, so I was caught off guard.

          • drewbitt5 小时前
            When I saw the M1s come out, I thought that dev tooling would take a while to work for M1, which was correct. It probably took a year for most everything to be compiled for arm64. However I had too little faith in Rosetta and just the speed upgrade M1 really brought. So what I mean to say is, I still have that deadweight MBA that I only use for web browsing :)
      • chrizel5 小时前
        Oh yes, my wife bought a new Intel MBA in summer 2020... I told her at the time Apple planned its own chip, but it couldn't be much better than the Intel one and surely Apple will increase prices too... I was so wrong.
      • ElCapitanMarkla5 小时前
        Yeah I’m in the same boat. I had my old mid 2013 Air for 7 years before I pulled the trigger on that too. I’ll be grabbing myself an M4 Pro this time
    • JumpCrisscross1 小时前
      I have the same one, but everyone I know with an M series Mac says the same thing. These are the first machines in a long time built to not only last a decade but be used for it.
    • d1str06 小时前
      Same. My MBP and M1 Air are amazing machines. But I’m now also excited that any future M chip replacement will be faster and just as nice.

      The battery performance is incredible too.

    • BenFranklin1006 小时前
      I got a refurbed M1 iPad Pro 12.9” for $900 a couple years ago and have been quite pleased. I still have a couple of years life in it I estimate.
  • BrentOzar6 小时前
    The M4 Max goes up to 128GB RAM, and "over half a terabyte per second of unified memory bandwidth" - LLM users rejoice.
    • losvedir1 小时前
      I'm curious about getting one of these to run LLM models locally, but I don't understand the cost benefit very well. Even 128GB can't run, like, a state of the art Claude 3.5 or GPT 4o model right? Conversely, even 16GB can (I think?) run a smaller, quantized Llama model. What's the sweet spot for running a capable model locally (and likely future local-scale models)?
      • brandall1057 分钟前
        You'll be able to run 72B models w/ large context, lightly quantized with decent'ish performance, like 20-25 tok/sec. The best of the bunch are maybe 90% of a Claude 3.5.

        If you need to do some work offline, or for some reason the place you work blocks access to cloud providers, it's not a bad way to go, really. Note that if you're on battery, heavy LLM use can kill your battery in an hour.

      • SkyMarshal34 分钟前
        Lots of discussion and testing of that over on https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/, worth following if you're not already.
    • manaskarekar6 小时前
      The M3 Max was 400GBps, this is 540GBps. Truly an outstanding case for unified memory. DDR5 doesn't come anywhere near.
      • Rohansi6 小时前
        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 other computers. In fact, every computer without a discrete GPU uses a unified memory model these days!

        • rbanffy5 小时前
          > (only common for servers).

          On PC desktops I always recommend getting a mid-range tower server precisely for that reason. My oldest one is about 8 years old and only now it's showing signs of age (as in not being faster than the average laptop).

        • throwaway484763 小时前
          High end servers now have 12 ddr5 channels.
          • sliken3 小时前
            Yes, you could buy a brand new (announced weeks ago) AMD Turin. 12 channels of DDR5-6000, $11,048 and 320 watts (for the CPU) and get 576GB/sec peak.

            Or you could buy a M3 max laptop for $4k, get 10+ hour battery life, have it fit in a thin/light laptop, and still get 546GB/sec. However those are peak numbers. Apple uses longer cache lines (double), large page sizes (quadruple), and a looser memory model. Generally I'd expect nearly every memory bandwidth measure to win on Apple over AMD's turin.

            • Rohansi2 小时前
              AnandTech did bandwidth benchmarks for the M1 Max and was only able to utilize about half of it from the CPU, and the GPU used even less in 3D workloads because it wasn't bandwidth limited. It's not all about bandwidth. https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...
              • sliken1 小时前
                Indeed. RIP Anandtech. I've seen bandwidth tests since then that showed similar for newer generations, but not the m4. Not sure if the common LLM tools on mac can use CPU (vector instructions), AMX, and Neural engine in parallel to make use of the full bandwidth.
            • ciupicri1 小时前
              I doubt you'll get 10+ hours on battery if you utilize it at max. I don't even know if it can really sustain the maximum load for more than a couple of minutes because of thermal or some other limits.
            • janwas1 小时前
              FWIW I ran a quick test of gemma.cpp on M3 Pro with 8 threads. Similar PaliGemma inference speed to an older AMD (Rome or Milan) with 8 threads. But the AMD has more cores than that, and more headroom :)
            • throwaway484761 小时前
              CXL memory is also a thing.
        • binary1325 小时前
          I read all that marketing stuff and my brain just sees APU. I guess at some level, that’s just marketing stuff too, but it’s not a new idea.
          • sliken5 小时前
            The new idea is having 512 bit wide memory instead of PC limitation of 128 bit wide. Normal CPU cores running normal codes are not particularly bandwidth limited. However APUs/iGPUs are severely bandwidth limited, thus the huge number of slow iGPUs that are fine for browsing but terrible for anything more intensive.

            So apple manages decent GPU performance, a tiny package, and great battery life. It's much harder on the PC side because every laptop/desktop chip from Intel and AMD use a 128 bit memory bus. You have to take a huge step up in price, power, and size with something like a thread ripper, xeon, or epyc to get more than 128 bit wide memory, none of which are available in a laptop or mac mini size SFF.

            • jsheard4 小时前
              > The new idea is having 512 bit wide memory instead of PC limitation of 128 bit wide.

              It's not really a new idea, just unusual in computers. The custom SOCs that AMD makes for Playstation and Xbox have wide (up to 384-bit) unified memory buses, very similar to what Apple is doing, with the main distinction being Apples use of low-power LPDDR instead of the faster but power hungrier GDDR used in the consoles.

              • atq21196 分钟前
                Yeah, a lot of it is just market forces. I guess going to four channels is costly for the desktop PC space and that's why that didn't happen, and laptops just kind of followed suite. But now that Apple is putting pressure on the market, perhaps we'll finally see quad channel becoming the norm in desktop PCs? Would be nice...
            • reliabilityguy4 小时前
              > instead of PC limitation of 128 bit wide

              Memory interface width of modern CPUs is 64-bit (DDR4) and 32+32 (DDR5).

              No CPU uses 128b memory bus as it results in overfetch of data, i.e., 128B per access, or two cache lines.

              AFAIK Apple uses 128B cache lines, so they can do much better design and customization of memory subsystem as they do not have to use DIMMs -- they simply solder DRAM to the motherboard, hence memory interface is whatever they want.

              • sliken4 小时前
                > Memory interface width of modern CPUs is 64-bit (DDR4) and 32+32 (DDR5).

                Sure, per channel. PCs have 2x64 bit or 4x32 bit memory channels.

                Not sure I get your point, yes PCs have 64 bit cache lines and apple uses 128. I wouldn't expect any noticeable difference because of this. Generally cache miss is sent to a single memory channel and result in a wait of 50-100ns, then you get 4 or 8 bytes per cycle at whatever memory clock speed you have. So apple gets twice the bytes per cache line miss, but the value of those extra bytes is low in most cases.

                Other bigger differences is that apple has a larger page size (16KB vs 4KB) and arm supports a looser memory model, which makes it easier to reach a large fraction of peak memory bandwidth.

                However, I don't see any relationship between Apple and PCs as far as DIMMS. Both Apple and PCs can (and do) solder dram chips directly to the motherboard, normally on thin/light laptops. The big difference between Apple and PC is that apple supports 128, 256, and 512 bit wide memory on laptops and 1024 bit on the studio (a bit bigger than most SFFs). To get more than 128 bits with a PC that means no laptops, no SFFs, generally large workstations with Xeon, Threadrippers, or Epyc with substantial airflow and power requirements

                • Rohansi2 小时前
                  FYI cache lines are 64 bytes, not bits. So Apple is using 128 bytes.

                  Also important to consider that the RTX 4090 has a relatively tiny 384-bit memory bus. Smaller than the M1 Max's 512-bit bus. But the RTX 4090 has 1 TB/s bandwidth and significantly more compute power available to make use of that bandwidth.

                  • sliken1 小时前
                    Ugh, should have caught the bit vs byte, thanks.

                    The M4 max is definitely not a 4090 killer, does not match it in any way. It can however work on larger models than the 4090 and have a battery that can last all day.

                    My memory is a bit fuzzy, but I believe the m3 max did decent on some games compared to the laptop Nvidia 4070 (which is not the same as the desktop 4070). But highly depended on if the game was x86-64 (requiring emulation) and if it was DX11 or apple native. I believe apple claims improvements in metal (the Apple's GPU lib) and that the m4 GPUs have better FP for ray tracing, but no significant changes in rasterized performance.

                    I look forward to the 3rd party benchmarks for LLM and gaming on the m4 max.

          • sroussey5 小时前
            Eh… not quite. Maybe on an Instinct. Unified memory means the CPU and CPU means they can do zero copy to use the same memory buffer.

            Many integrated graphics segregate the memory into CPU owned and GPU owned, so that even if data is on the same DIMM, a copy still needs to be performed for one side to use what the other side already has.

            This means that the drivers, etc, all have to understand the unified memory model, etc. it’s not just hardware sharing DIMMs.

        • manaskarekar5 小时前
          Yes, it's just easier to call it that without having to sprinkle asterisks at each mention of it :)

          And yes, the impressive part is that this kind of bandwidth is hard to get on laptops. I suppose I should have been a bit more specific in my remark.

        • oDot5 小时前
          Isn't unified memory* a crucial part in avoiding signal integrity problems?

          Servers do have many channels but they run relatively slower memory

          * Specifically, it being on-die

          • wtallis5 小时前
            "Unified memory" doesn't really imply anything about the memory being located on-package, just that it's a shared pool that the CPU, GPU, etc. all have fast access to.

            Also, DRAM is never on-die. On-package, yes, for Apple's SoCs and various other products throughout the industry, but DRAM manufacturing happens in entirely different fabs than those used for logic chips.

            • kube-system4 小时前
              System memory DRAM never is, but sometimes DRAM is technically included on CPU dies as a cache

              https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EDRAM

              • wtallis2 小时前
                It's mostly an IBM thing. In the consumer space, it's been in game consoles with IBM-fabbed chips. Intel's use of eDRAM was on a separate die (there was a lot that was odd about those parts).
        • Tepix5 小时前
          For comparison, a Threadripper Pro 5000 workstation with 8x DDR4 3200 has 204.8GB/s of memory bandwidth. The Threadripper Pro 7000 with DDR5-5200 can achieve 325GB/s.

          And no, manaskarekar, the M4 Max does 546 GB/s not GBps (which would be 8x less!).

          • wtallis5 小时前
            > And no, manaskarekar, the M4 Max does 546 GB/s not GBps (which would be 8x less!).

            GB/s and GBps mean the same thing, though GB/s is the more common way to express it. Gb/s and Gbps are the units that are 8x less: bits vs Bytes.

          • 4 小时前
            undefined
          • hmottestad4 小时前
            Thanks for the numbers. Someone here on hackernews got me convinced that a Threadripper would be a better investment for inference than a MacBook Pro with a M3 Max.
          • leptons3 小时前
            B = Bytes, b = bits.

            GB/s is the same thing as GBps

            The "ps" means "per second"

      • metadat6 小时前
        I was curious so I looked it up:

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDR5_SDRAM (info from the first section):

        > DDR5 is capable of 8GT/s which translates to 64 GB/s (8 gigatransfers/second * 64-bit width / 8 bits/byte = 64 GB/s) of bandwidth per DIMM.

        So for example if you have a server with 16 DDR5 DIMMs (sticks) it equates to 1,024 GB/s of total bandwidth.

        DDR4 clocks in at 3.2GT/s and the fastest DDR3 at 2.1GT/s.

        DDR5 is an impressive jump. HBM is totally bonkers at 128GB/s per DIMM (HBM is the memory used in the top end Nvidia datacenter cards).

        Cheers.

        • reliabilityguy4 小时前
          > So for example if you have a server with 16 DDR5 DIMMs (sticks) it equates to 1,024 GB/s of total bandwidth.

          Not quite as it depends on number of channels and not on the number of DIMMs. An extreme example: put all 16 DIMMs on single channel, you will get performance of a single channel.

        • sroussey5 小时前
          Yes, and wouldn’t it be bonkers if the M4 Max supported HBM on desktops?
      • jsheard6 小时前
        It's not the memory being unified that makes it fast, it's the combination of the memory bus being extremely wide and the memory being extremely close to the processor. It's the same principle that discrete GPUs or server CPUs with onboard HBM memory use to make their non-unified memory go ultra fast.
        • smith70186 小时前
          I thought “unified memory” was just a marketing term for the memory being extremely close to the processor?
          • jsheard5 小时前
            No, unified memory usually means the CPU and GPU (and miscellaneous things like the NPU) all use the same physical pool of RAM and moving data between them is essentially zero-cost. That's in contrast to the usual PC setup where the CPU has its own pool of RAM, which is unified with the iGPU if it has one, but the discrete GPU has its own independent pool of VRAM and moving data between the two pools is a relatively slow operation.

            An RTX4090 or H100 has memory extremely close to the processor but I don't think you would call it unified memory.

            • refulgentis4 小时前
              I don't quite understand one of the finer points of this, under caffeinated :) - if GPU memory is extremely close to the CPU memory, what sort of memory would not be extremely close to the CPU?
              • jsheard4 小时前
                I think you misunderstood what I meant by "processor", the memory on a discrete GPU is very close to the GPUs processor die, but very far away from the CPU. The GPU may be able to read and write its own memory at 1TB/sec but the CPU trying to read or write that same memory will be limited by the PCIe bus, which is glacially slow by comparison, usually somewhere around 16-32GB/sec.

                A huge part of optimizing code for discrete GPUs is making sure that data is streamed into GPU memory before the GPU actually needs it, because pushing or pulling data over PCIe on-demand decimates performance.

                • refulgentis4 小时前
                  I see, TL;DR == none; and processor switches from {CPU,GPU} to {GPU} in the 2nd paragraph. Thanks!
          • hollerith5 小时前
            I thought it meant that both the GPU and the CPU can access it. In most systems, GPU memory cannot be accessed by the CPU (without going through the GPU); and vice versa.
            • layer84 小时前
              CPUs access GPU memory via MMIO (though usually only a small portion), and GPUs can in principle access main memory via DMA. Meaning, both can share an address space and access each other’s memory. However, that wouldn’t be called Unified Memory, because it’s still mediated by an external bus (PCIe) and thus relatively slower.
      • vid6 小时前
        It's not "DDR5" on its own, it's a few factors.

        Bandwidth (GB/s) = (Data Rate (MT/s) * Channel Width (bits) * Number of Channels) / 8 / 1000

        (8800 MT/s * 64 bits * 8 channels) / 8 / 1000 = 563.2 GB/s

        This is still half the speed of a consumer NVidia card, but the large amounts of memory is great, if you don't mind running things more slowly and with fewer libraries.

        • wtallis5 小时前
          > (8800 MT/s * 64 bits * 8 channels) / 8 / 1000 = 563.2 GB/s

          Was this example intended to describe any particular device? Because I'm not aware of anything that operates at 8800 MT/s, especially not with 64-bit channels.

          • sliken4 小时前
            M4 max in the MBP (today) and in the Studio at some later date.
            • wtallis2 小时前
              That seems unlikely given the mismatched memory speed (see the parent comment) and the fact that Apple uses LPDDR which is typically 16 bits per channel. 8800MT/s seems to be a number pulled out of thin air or bad arithmetic.
              • sliken1 小时前
                Heh, ok, maybe slightly different. But apple spec claims 546GB/sec which works out to 512 bits (64 bytes) * 8533. I didn't think the point was 8533 vs 8800.

                I believe I saw somewhere that the actual chips used are LPDDR5X-8533.

                Effectively the parents formula describes the M4 max, give or take 5%.

        • Y-bar3 小时前
          > This is still half the speed of a consumer NVidia card, but the large amounts of memory is great, if you don't mind running things more slowly and with fewer libraries.

          But it has more than 2x longer battery life and a better keyboard than a GPU card ;)

        • sliken4 小时前
          Fewer libraries? Any that a normal LLM user would care about? Pytorch, ollama, and others seem to have the normal use cases covered. Whenever I hear about a new LLM seems like the next post is some mac user reporting the token/sec. Often about 5 tokens/sec for 70B models which seems reasonable for a single user.
          • vid4 小时前
            Is there a normal LLM user yet? Most people would want their options to be as wide as possible. The big ones usually get covered (eventually), and there are distinct good libraries emerging for Mac only (sigh), but last I checked the experience of running every kit (stable diffusion, server-class, etc) involved overhead for the Mac world.
        • cjbprime6 小时前
          Right, the nvidia card maxes out at 24GB.
        • manaskarekar6 小时前
          Thanks, but just to put things into perspective, this calculation has counted 8 channels which is 4 DIMMs and that's mostly desktops (not dismissing desktops, just highlighting that it's a different beast).

          Most laptops will be 2 DIMMS (probably soldered).

          • wtallis5 小时前
            Desktops are two channels of 64 bits, or with DDR5 now four (sub)channels of 32 bits; either way, mainstream desktop platforms have had a total bus width of 128 bits for decades. 8x64 bit channels is only available from server platforms. (Some high-end GPUs have used 512-bit bus widths, and Apple's Max level of processors, but those are with memory types where the individual channels are typically 16 bits.)
          • sliken4 小时前
            I think you are confusing channels and dimms.

            The vast majority of any x86 laptop or desktops are 128 bits wide. Often 2x64 bit channels up till last year or so, now 4x32 bit DDR5 in the last year or so. There are some benefits to 4 channels over 2, but generally you are still limited by 128 bits unless you buy a Xeon, Epyc, or Threadripper (or Intel equiv) that are expensive, hot, and don't fit in SFFs or laptops.

            So basically the PC world is crazy behind the 256, 512, and 1024 bit wide memory busses apple has offered since the M1 arrived.

      • jedisct11 小时前
        Is it GBps or Gbps?
      • mort965 小时前
        This is a case for on-package memory, not for unified memory... Laptops have had unified memory forever

        EDIT: wtf what's so bad about this comment that it deserves being downvoted so much

        • willseth49 分钟前
          Intel typically calls their iGPU architecture "shared memory"
          • mort9640 分钟前
            Hm it seems like they call it unified memory too, at least in some places, have a look at 5.7.1 "Unified Memory Architecture" in this document: https://www.intel.com/content/dam/develop/external/us/en/doc...

                Intel processor graphics architecture has long pioneered
                sharing DRAM physical memory with the CPU.
                This unified memory architecture offers [...]
            
            It more or less seems like they use "unified memory" and "shared memory" interchangeably in that section
            • Detrytus14 分钟前
              I think "Unified" vs "shared" is just something Apple marketing department came up with.

              Calling something "shared" makes you think: "there's not enough of it, so it has to be shared".

              Calling something "unified" makes you think: "they are good engineers, they managed to unify two previously separate things, for my benefit".

          • 42 分钟前
            undefined
    • garciasn6 小时前
      We run our LLM workloads on a M2 Ultra because of this. 2x the VRAM; one-time cost at $5350 was the same as, at the time, 1 month of 80GB VRAM GPU in GCP. Works well for us.
      • alfonsodev6 小时前
        Can you elaborate, are those workflows in queue or can they serve multiple users in parallel ?

        I think it’s super interesting to know real life workflows and performance of different LLMs and hardware, in case you can direct me to other resources. Thanks !

        • garciasn5 小时前
          Our use case is atypical, based on what others seem to require. While we serve multiple requests in parallel, our workloads are not 'chat'.
      • manaskarekar6 小时前
        If the 2x multiplier holds up, the Ultra update should bring it up to 1080GBps. Amazing.
        • SirMaster5 小时前
          There isn't even an M3 Ultra. Will there be an M4 Ultra?
          • hmottestad3 小时前
            At some point there should be an upgrade to the M2 Ultra. It might be an M4 Ultra, it might be this year or next year. It might even be after the M5 comes out. Or it could be skipped in favour of the M5 Ultra. If anyone here knows they are definitely under NDA.
          • tromp5 小时前
            That would make the most sense for the next Mac Studio version.
            • int_19h3 小时前
              There were rumors that the next Mac Studio will top out at 512Gb RAM, too.

              Good news for anyone who wants to run 405B LMs locally...

            • mpweiher4 小时前
              And the week isn't over...
              • smith70182 小时前
                They announced earlier in the week that there will only be three days of announcements
      • charlescurt1231 小时前
        comparing a laptop to a A100 (312 teraFLOPS) or H100 (~1P FLOPS) server is a stretch to say the least.

        An M2 is according to a reddit post around 27 tflops

        So < 1/10 the performance of just computation. let alone the memory.

        What workflow would use something like this?

        • hajile1 小时前
          They aren't going to be using fp32 for inferencing, so those FP numbers are meaningless.

          Memory and memory bandwidth matters most for inferencing. 819.2 GB/s for M2 Ultra is less than half that of A100, but having 192GB of RAM instead of 80gb means they can run inference on models that would require THREE of those A100s and the only real cost is that it takes longer for the AI to respond.

          3 A100 at $5300/mo each for the past 2 years is over $380,000. Considering it worked for them, I'd consider it a massive success.

          From another perspective though, they could have bought 72 of those Ultra machines for that much money and had most devs on their own private instance.

          The simple fact is that Nvidia GPUs are massively overpriced. Nvidia should worry a LOT that Apple's private AI cloud is going to eat their lunch.

      • bushbaba6 小时前
        About 10-20% of my companies gpu usage is inference dev. Yes horribly not efficient usage of resources. We could upgrade the 100ish devs who do this dev work to M4 mbp and free up gpu resources

        Smart move by Apple

      • Der_Einzige5 小时前
        Right now, there are 0.90$ per hour H100 80gbs that you can rent.
      • sgt1016 小时前
        You have another one with a network gateway to provide hot failover?

        Right?

        • ithkuil6 小时前
          High availability story for AI workloads will be a problem for another decade. From what I can see the current pressing problem is to get stuff working quickly and iterate quickly.
    • jjcm3 小时前
      For context, the 4090 has 1,008 GB/s of bandwidth.
      • spacedcowboy2 小时前
        ... but only 1/4 of the actual memory, right ?

        The M4-Max I just ordered comes with 128GB of RAM.

    • Inviz6 小时前
      I have M3 Max with 128GB of ram, it's really liberating.
      • sfn426 小时前
        I have 32gb and I've never felt like I needed more.
        • umanwizard5 小时前
          Having 128GB is really nice if you want to regularly run different full OSes as VMs simultaneously (and if those OSes might in turn have memory-intensive workloads running on them).

          Somewhat niche case, I know.

        • moffkalast6 小时前
          Obviously you're not a golfer.
    • culi1 小时前
      you'd probably save money just paying for a VPS. And you wouldn't cook your personal laptop as fast. Not that people nowadays keep their electronics for long enough for that to matter :/
    • thimabi6 小时前
      At least in the recent past, a hindrance was that MacOS limited how much of that unified memory could be assigned as VRAM. Those who wanted to exceed the limits had to tinker with kernel settings.

      I wonder if that has changed or is about to change as Apple pivots their devices to better serve AI workflows as well.

    • doctoboggan6 小时前
      This is definitely tempting me to upgrade my M1 macbook pro. I think I have 400GB/s of memory bandwidth. I am wondering what the specific number "over half a terabyte" means.
    • moffkalast6 小时前
      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)

      • Dibby0531 小时前
        Why was this downvoted?
    • 6 小时前
      undefined
    • segmondy5 小时前
      Need more memory, 256GB will be nice. MistralLarge is 123B. Can't even give a quantized Llama405B a drive. LLM users rejoice. LLM power users, weep.
  • kristianp43 分钟前

       > MacBook Pro with M4 Pro is up to 3x faster than M1 Pro (13)
       > (13) Testing conducted by Apple from August to October 2024 using preproduction 16-inch MacBook Pro systems with Apple M4 Pro, 14-core CPU, 20-core GPU, 48GB of RAM and 4TB SSD, and production 16-inch MacBook Pro systems with Apple M1 Pro, 10-core CPU, 16-core GPU, 32GB of RAM and 8TB SSD. Prerelease Redshift v2025.0.0 tested using a 29.2MB scene utilising hardware-accelerated ray tracing on systems with M4 Pro. Performance tests are conducted using specific computer systems and reflect the approximate performance of MacBook Pro.
     
    So they're comparing software that uses raytracing present in the M3 and M4, but not in the M1. This is really misleading. The true performance increase for most workloads is likely to be around 15% over the M3. We'll have to wait for benchmarks from other websites to get a true picture of the differences.

    Edit: If you click on the "go deeper on M4 chips", you'll get some comparisons that are less inflated, for example, code compilation on pro:

        14-inch MacBook Pro with M4  4.5x
        14-inch MacBook Pro with M3  3.8x
        13-inch MacBook Pro with M1  2.7x
    
    So here the M4 Pro is 67% faster than the M1 Pro, and 18% faster than the M3 Pro. It varies by workload of course.

    No benchmarks yet, but this article gives some tables of comparative core counts, max RAM and RAM bandwidths: https://arstechnica.com/apple/2024/10/apples-m4-m4-pro-and-m...

  • RobinL5 小时前
    Can anyone comment on the viability of using an external SSD rather than upgrading storage? Specifically for data analysis (e.g. storing/analysing parquet files using Python/duckdb, or video editing using divinci resolve).

    Also, any recommendations for suitable ssds, ideally not too expensive? Thank you!

    • muro1 小时前
      Don't bother with thunderbolt 4, go for USB 4 enclosure instead - I've got a Jeyi one. Any SSD will work, I use a Samsung 990 pro inside. It was supposed to be the fastest you can get - I get over 3000MB/s.

      Here is the rabbit hole you might want to check out: https://dancharblog.wordpress.com/2024/01/01/list-of-ssd-enc...

    • pier255 小时前
      It's totally fine.

      With a TB4 case with an NVME you can get something like 2300MB/s read speeds. You can also use a USB4 case which will give you over 3000MB/s (this is what I'm doing for storing video footage for Resolve).

      With a TB5 case you can go to like 6000MB/s. See this SSD by OWC:

      https://www.owc.com/solutions/envoy-ultra

      • spopejoy1 小时前
        I'm a little sus of owc these days, their drives are way expensive, never get any third-party reviews or testing, and their warranty is horrible (3 years). I've previously swore by them so it's a little disappointing
    • joshvm3 小时前
      Basically any good SSD manufacturer is fine, but I've found that the enclosure controller support is flaky with Sonoma. Drives that appear instantly in Linux sometimes take ages to enumerate in OSX, and only since upgrading to Sonoma. Stick with APFS if you're only using it for Mac stuff.

      I have 2-4TB drives from Samsung, WD and Kingston. All work fine and are ridiculously fast. My favourite enclosure is from DockCase for the diagnostic screen.

    • trogdor4 小时前
      > Also, any recommendations for suitable ssds, ideally not too expensive?

      I own a media production company. We use Sabrent Thunderbolt external NVMe TLC SSDs and are very happy with their price, quality, and performance.

      I suggest you avoid QLC SSDs.

    • __mharrison__1 小时前
      I edit all my video content from a USB-attached SSD with Resolve on my MBP.

      My only complaint is that Apple gouges you for memory and storage upgrades. (But in reality I don't want the raw and rendered video taking up space on my machine).

    • rbanffy5 小时前
      The USB-C ports should be quite enough for that. If you are using a desktop Mac, such as an iMac, Mini, or the Studio and Pro that will be released later this week, this is a no-brainer - everything works perfectly.
    • spopejoy1 小时前
      I had a big problem with crucial 4tb ssds recently, using them as time machine drives. The first backup would succeed, the second would fail and the disk would then be unrepairable in disk utility, which also will refuse to format to non-apfs (and an apfs reformat wouldn't fix it).

      Switched to samsung t9s, so far so good.

    • thejazzman5 小时前
      i go with the acasis thunderbolt enclosure and then pop in an nvme of your choice, but generic USB drives are pretty viable too ... thunderbolt can be booted from, while USB can't

      i tried another brand or 2 of enclosures and they were HUGE while the acasis was credit card sized (except thickness)

    • schainks3 小时前
      With a thunderbolt SSD you'll think your external drive is an internal drive. I bought one of these (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0BGYMHS8Y) for my partner so she has snappy photo editing workflows with Adobe CC apps. Copying her 1TB photo library over took under 5 min.
    • AlphaWeaver5 小时前
      I've used a Samsung T5 SSD as my CacheClip location in Resolve and it works decently well! Resolve doesn't always tolerate disconnects very well, but when it's plugged in things are very smooth.
    • Tepix5 小时前
      Run your current workload on internal storage and check how fast it is reading and writing.

      For video editing - even 8K RAW - you don't need insanely fast storage. A 10GBit/s external SSD will not slow you down.

    • DrBenCarson3 小时前
      Get something with Thunderbolt and you’ll likely never notice a difference
  • throw0101a6 小时前
    > All MacBook Pro models feature an HDMI port that supports up to 8K resolution, a SDXC card slot, a MagSafe 3 port for charging, and a headphone jack, along with support for Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3.

    No Wifi 7. So you get access to the 6 GHz band, but not some of the other features (preamble punching, OFDMA):

    * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_7

    * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_6E

    The iPhone 16s do have Wifi 7. Curious to know why they skipped it (and I wonder if the chipsets perhaps do support it, but it's a firmware/software-not-yet-ready thing).

    • cojo2 小时前
      I was quite surprised by this discrepancy as well (my new iPhone has 7, but the new MBP does not).

      I had just assumed that for sure this would be the year I upgrade my M1 Max MBP to an M4 Max. I will not be doing so knowing that it lacks WiFi 7; as one of the child comments notes, I count on getting a solid 3 years out of my machine, so future-proofing carries some value (and I already have WiFi7 access points), and I download terabytes of data in some weeks for the work I do, and not having to Ethernet in at a fixed desk to do so efficiently will be a big enough win that I will wait another year before shelling out $6k “off-cycle”.

      Big bummer for me. I was looking forward to performance gains next Friday.

    • canucker20164 小时前
      Yeah, I thought that was weird. None of the Apple announcements this week had WiFi7 support, just 6E.

      https://www.tomsguide.com/face-off/wi-fi-6e-vs-wi-fi-7-whats...

      Laptops/desktops (with 16GB+ of memory) could make use of the faster speed/more bandwidth aspects of WiFi7 better than smartphones (with 8GB of memory).

    • ygouzerh4 小时前
      It looks like few people only are using Wifi 7 for now. Maybe they are going to include it in the next generation when more people will use it.
      • throw0101a3 小时前
        > It looks like few people only are using Wifi 7 for now.

        Machines can last and be used for years, and it would be a presumably very simple way to 'future proof' things.

        And though the IEEE spec hasn't officially been ratified as I type this, it is set to be by the end of 2024. Network vendors are also shipping APs with the functionality, so in coming years we'll see a larger and larger infrastructure footprint going forward.

    • 404mm4 小时前
      The lack of Wifi7 is a real bummer for me. I was hoping to ditch the 2.5Gbe dongle and just use WiFi.
      • mort963 小时前
        Hm why? Is 6E really so much worse than 7 in practice that 7 can replace wired for you but 6E can't? That's honestly really weird to me. What's the practical difference in latency, bandwidth or reliability you've experienced between 6E and 7?
        • 404mm2 小时前
          I don’t have any 6E device so I cannot really tell for sure but from what I read, 6E gets you to a bit over 1Gbit in real world scenario. 7 should be able to replace my 2.5Gbe dongle or at least get much closer to it. I already have routers WiFi 7 Eeros on a 2.5Gbe wired backbone.
          • mort962 小时前
            I guess it makes sense if what you do is extremely throughput-focused... I always saw consistency/reliability and latency as the benefits of wired compared to wireless, the actual average throughput has felt fast enough for a while on WiFi but I guess other people may have different needs
    • sroussey4 小时前
      Yeah, this threw me as well. When the iMac didn’t support WiFi 7, I got a bit worried. I have an M2, so not going to get this, but the spouse needs a new Air and I figure that everything would have WiFi 7 by then, and now I don’t think so.
      • carstenhag3 小时前
        Faster is always nice, makes sense. But do you really need WiFi 7 features/speed? I don't know when I would notice a difference (on a laptop) between 600 or 1500 Mbit/s (just as an example). Can't download much anyhow as the storage will get full in minutes.
  • tomrod6 小时前
    This is the first compelling Mac to me. I've used Macs for a few clients and muscle memory is very deeply ingrained for linux desktops. But with local LLMs finally on the verge of usability along with sufficient memory... I might need to make the jump!

    Wish I could spin up a Linux OS on the hardware though. Not a bright spot for me.

    • aidenfoxivey6 小时前
      You totally can after a little bit of time waiting for M4 bringup!

      https://asahilinux.org

      It won't have all the niceties / hardware support of MacOS, but it seamlessly coexists with MacOS, can handle the GPU/CPU/RAM with no issues, and can provide you a good GNU/Linux environment.

      • p_j_w6 小时前
        Asahi doesn't work on M3 yet after a year. It's gonna be a bit before M4 support is here.
        • quux5 小时前
          IIRC one of the major factors holding back M3 support was the lack of a M3 mini for use in their CI environment. Now that there's an M4 mini hopefully there aren't any obstacles to them adding M4 support
          • mmcnl5 小时前
            Why would that matter? You can use a MacBook in CI too?
            • umanwizard4 小时前
              How? What cloud providers offer it? MacStadium and AWS don't.

              I guess you could have a physical MBP in your house and connect it to some bring-your-own-infrastructure CI setup, but most people wouldn't want to do that.

              • mmcnl1 小时前
                I meant using a physical device indeed.
      • umanwizard5 小时前
        "a little bit of time" is a bit disingenuous given that they haven't even started working on the M3.

        (This isn't a dig on the Asahi project btw, I think it's great).

    • __MatrixMan__4 小时前
      I miss Linux, it respected me in ways that MacOS doesn't. But maintaining a sane dev environment on linux when my co-workers on MacOS are committing bash scripts that call brew... I am glad that I gave up that fight. And yeah, the hardware sure is nice.
      • tomrod3 小时前
        IIRC brew supports linux, but it isn't a package manager I pay attention to outside of some very basic needs. Way too much supply chain security domain to cover for it!
    • lowbloodsugar5 小时前
      You can spin up a Unix OS. =) It’s even older than Linux.
      • umanwizard5 小时前
        NextSTEP which macOS is ultimately based on is indeed older than Linux (first release was 1989). But why does that matter? The commenter presumably said "Linux" for a reason, i.e. they want to use Linux specifically, not any UNIX-like OS.
        • lowbloodsugar17 分钟前
          Sure. But not everybody. That’s how I ended up on a Mac. I needed to develop for Linux servers and that just sucked on my windows laptop (I hear it’s better now?). So after dual booting fedora on my laptop for several months I got a MacBook and I’ve never looked back.
      • tomrod3 小时前
        BSD is fun (not counting MacOS in the set there), but no, my Unix experiences have been universally legacy hardware oversubscribed and undermaintained. Not my favorite place to spend any time.
    • BenFranklin1006 小时前
      Off topic, but I’m very interested in local LLMs. Could you point me in the right direction, both hardware specs and models?
      • touristtam1 小时前
        Have a look at ollama? I think there is a vscode extension to hook into local LLM if you are so inclined: https://ollama.com/blog/continue-code-assistant
      • doctoboggan5 小时前
        In general for local LLMs, the more memory the better. You will be able to fit larger models in RAM. The faster CPU will give you more tokens/second, but if you are just chatting with a human in the loop, most recent M series macs will be able to generate tokens faster than you can read them.
        • int_19h3 小时前
          That also very much depends on model size. For 70B+ models, while the tok/s are still fast enough for realtime chat, it's not going to be generating faster than you can read it, even on Ultra with its insane memory bandwidth.
      • noman-land4 小时前
        Get as much RAM as you can stomach paying for.
    • d1str06 小时前
      Check out Asahi linux
  • LeifCarrotson6 小时前
    I'm pleased that the Pro's base memory starts at 16 GB, but surprised they top out at 32 GB:

    > ...the new MacBook Pro starts with 16GB of faster unified memory with support for up to 32GB, along with 120GB/s of memory bandwidth...

    I haven't been an Apple user since 2012 when I graduated from college and retired my first computer, a mid-2007 Core2 Duo Macbook Pro, which I'd upgraded with a 2.5" SSD and 6GB of RAM with DDR2 SODIMMs. I switched to Dell Precision and Lenovo P-series workstations with user-upgradeable storage and memory... but I've got 64GB of RAM in the old 2019 Thinkpad P53 I'm using right now. A unified memory space is neat, but is it worth sacrificing that much space? I typically have a VM or two running, and in the host OS and VMs, today's software is hungry for RAM and it's typically cheap and upgradeable outside of the Apple ecosystem.

    • jsheard6 小时前
      > I'm pleased that the Pro's base memory starts at 16 GB, but surprised they top out at 32 GB:

      That's an architectural limitation of the base M4 chip, if you go up to the M4 Pro version you can get up to 48GB, and the M4 Max goes up to 128GB.

      • latortuga2 小时前
        The new mac mini also has an M4 Pro that goes up to 64GB.
      • FireBeyond5 小时前
        The "base level" Max is limited at 36GB. You have to get the bigger Max to get more.
    • redundantly6 小时前
      The M4 tops off at 32 GB

      The M4 Pro goes up to 48 GB

      The M4 Max can have up to 128 GB

      • ldoughty5 小时前
        It seems you need the M4 Max with the 40-core GPU to go over 36GB.

        The M4 Pro with 14‑core CPU & 20‑core GPU can do 48GB.

        If you're looking for ~>36-48GB memory, here's the options:

        $2,800 = 48GB, Apple M4 Pro chip with 14‑core CPU, 20‑core GPU

        $3,200 = 36GB, Apple M4 Max chip with 14‑core CPU, 32‑core GPU

        $3,600 = 48GB, Apple M4 Max chip with 16‑core CPU, 40‑core GPU

        So the M4 Pro could get you a lot of memory, but less GPU cores. Not sure how much those GPU cores factor in to performance, I only really hear complaints about the memory limits... Something to consider if looking to buy in this range of memory.

        Of course, a lot of people here probably consider it not a big deal to throw an extra 3 grand on hardware, but I'm a hobbyist in academia when it comes to AI, I don't big 6-figure salaries :-)

      • 59 分钟前
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      • SparkyMcUnicorn6 小时前
        It doesn't look this cut and dry.

        M4 Max 14 core has a single option of 36GB.

        M4 Max 16 core lets you go up to 128GB.

        So you can actually get more ram with the Pro than the base level Max.

    • post-it6 小时前
      I haven't done measurements on this, but my Macbook Pro feels much faster at swapping than any Linux or Windows device I've used. I've never used an M.2 SSD so maybe that would be comparable, but swapping is pretty much seamless. There's also some kind of memory compression going on according to Activity Monitor, not sure if that's normal on other OSes.
      • thimabi5 小时前
        Yes, other M.2 SSDs have comparable performance when swapping, and other operating systems compress memory, too — though I believe not as much as MacOS.

        Although machines with Apple Silicon swap flawlessly, I worry about degrading the SSD, which is non-replaceable. So ultimately I pay for more RAM and not need swapping at all.

        • post-it2 小时前
          Degrading the SSD is a good point. This is thankfully a work laptop so I don't care if it lives or dies, but it's something I'll have to consider when I eventually get my own Mac.
    • fckgw6 小时前
      On the standard M4 processor. If you move the M4 Pro it tops out at 48gb or moving to the M4 Max goes up to 128gb.
      • 419957016 小时前
        Weird that the M4 Pro in the Mac mini can go up to 64GB. Maybe a size limitation on the MBP motherboard or SOC package?
        • _diyar5 小时前
          Probably just Apple designing the pricing ladder.
      • Tepix5 小时前
        The 96GB RAM option of the M3 Max disappeared.
    • Octoth0rpe6 小时前
      The max memory is dependent on which tier M4 chip you get. The M4 max chip will let you configure up to 128gb of ram
      • MaxDPS5 小时前
        It looks like the 14 core M4 Max only allows 36GB of ram. The M4 Pro allows for up to 48GB. It's a bit confusing.
    • 6 小时前
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  • xyst1 小时前
    > … advanced 12MP … camera

    wot, m8? Only Apple will call a 12 megapixel camera “advanced”. Same MPs as an old iPhone 6 rear camera.

    Aside from that, it’s pretty much the same as the prior generation. Same thickness in form factor. Slightly better SoC. Only worth it if you jump from M1 (or any Intel mbp) to M4.

    Would be godlike if Apple could make the chip swappable. Buy a Mac Studio M2 Ultra Max Plus. Then just upgrade SoC on an as needed basis.

    Would probably meet their carbon neutral/negative goals much faster. Reduce e-waste. Unfortunately this is an American company and got to turn profit. Profit over environment and consumer interests.

    • hypercube331 小时前
      I feel like if they pushed Win32/Gaming on Apple Mx hardware it'd give at least a single reason for people to adopt or upgrade their devices to new models. I know for sure I'd be on board if everything that ran on my steam deck ran on a mac game wise, since that's holding me back from dropping the cash. I still think I'll get a mini though.
      • pradn33 分钟前
        Valve is trying to obsolete Windows, so they can prevent Microsoft from interfering with Steam. Apple could team up with them, and help obsolete Windows for a very large percentage of game-hours.

        There will always be a long tail of niche Windows games (retro + indie especially). But you can capture the Fortnite (evergreen) / Dragon Age (new AAA) audience.

      • optymizer1 小时前
        My only explanations for the lack of gaming support (see historical lack of proper OpenGL support) while still supporting high end graphics use cases (film editing, CAD, visual effects) are:

        1) Either Apple wants to maintain the image of the Macbook as a "serious device", and not associate itself with the likes of "WoW players in their mom's basement".

        2) Microsoft worked something out with Apple, where Apple would not step significantly on the gaming market (Windows, Xbox). I can't think of another reason why gaming on iOS would be just fine, but abysmal on MacOS. Developers release games on MacOS _despite_ the platform.

        • Epicism1 小时前
          Steve Jobs was historically against gaming on apple devices and, I believe, went so far as to try to remove them from the Apple Store. Apple is only recently starting to introduce gaming seriously back into the platform.
          • Apocryphon1 小时前
            Would be incredibly fascinating to consider what if Bungie was never bought by Microsoft and Halo ended up a Mac title first. It would've severely capped the influence of the game (and maybe its quality), even after it would have been ported to PC. Would Halo have even been imported to Xbox? On the flip side, if it somehow managed to capture considerable success- would it have forced Jobs and Apple to recognize the importance of the gaming market? Either way, the entire history of video games would be altered.
        • SSLy54 分钟前
          It's funny because they directly advertise performance in WoW in M4 presskit https://imgur.com/CoBGQ0b
    • hammock1 小时前
      The Thinkpad webcam is only 5MP. Many other PCs have much less.
    • matja1 小时前
      Especially because pixel count is a meaningless metric by itself. 12MP is the same as a Nikon D3, which if it could replicate the results of I would be happy with!
    • mrtksn1 小时前
      Megapixels is nothing more than the number of sample points. There's so much more to image quality than the number of samples.

      I blame the confusion to PC&Android marketing people who were pushing for years and years the idea that the higher the megapixel digits the better the camera is. Non-Apple customers should be really pissed of for the years of misinformation and indoctrination on false KPI.

      The marketing gimmicks pushed generations of devices to optimize for meaningless numbers. At times, even Apple was forced to adopt those. Such a shame.

    • rimliu1 小时前
      Not pixel count determines whether camera is advanced or not.
  • mattegan2 小时前
    It pains me deeply that they used Autodesk Fusion in one of the app screenshots. It is by far the worst piece of software I use on Mac OS.

    Wish the nano-texture display was available when I upgraded last year. The last MacBook I personally bought was in 2012 when the first retina MBP had just released. I opted for the "thick" 15" high-res matte option. Those were the days...

  • opjjf6 小时前
    It seems they also update the base memory on MacBook Air:

    > MacBook Air: The World’s Most Popular Laptop Now Starts at 16GB

    > MacBook Air is the world’s most popular laptop, and with Apple Intelligence, it’s even better. Now, models with M2 and M3 double the starting memory to 16GB, while keeping the starting price at just $999 — a terrific value for the world’s best-selling laptop.

    • electriclove6 小时前
      Wow, I didn't expect them to update the older models to start at 16GB and no price increase. I guess that is why Amazon was blowing the 8GB models out at crazy low prices over the past few days.
      • bronco210165 小时前
        Costco was selling MB Air M2 8 GB for $699! Incredible deal.

        I’ve been using the exact model for about a year and I rarely find limitations for my typical office type work. The only time I’ve managed to thermally throttle it has been with some super suboptimal Excel Macros.

        • porphyra4 小时前
          I'm waiting for the 16 GB M2 Air to be super cheap to pick one up to use with Asahi Linux!
        • __rito__5 小时前
          I was seeing $699 MB Air M1 8 GB on Amazon India a week ago.
    • bhouston6 小时前
      But no update to a M4 for the MacBook Air yet unfortunately. I would love to get an M4 MacBook Air with 32GB.

      I believe the rumor is that the MacBook Air will get the update to M4 in early spring 2025, February/March timeline.

      • nsbk5 小时前
        This is the machine I'm waiting for. Hopefully early 2025
        • brewmarche3 小时前
          Given that the Mini and iMac have received support for one more additional external display (at 60Hz 6K), I hope we’ll see the same on the MBA M4.
        • rbanffy5 小时前
          There are still a couple days left this week.
          • 398968805 小时前
            They said there would be three announcements this week and this is the third
            • sroussey5 小时前
              They did? The tweet that announced stuff from the head of marketing did not mention 3 days.

              That said, I believe you. Some press gets a hands-on on Wednesday (today) so unless they plan to pre-announce something (unlikely) or announce software only stuff, I think today is it.

              • 398968805 小时前
                "This is a huge week for the Mac, and this morning, we begin a series of three exciting new product announcements that will take place over the coming days," said Apple's hardware engineering chief John Ternus, in a video announcing the new iMac.
                • sroussey4 小时前
                  Ah, thanks. I was referring to last weeks Tweet. I didn’t watch the iMac video.
              • rbanffy5 小时前
                That's disappointing. I was expecting a new Apple TV because mine needs replacement and I don't really feel inclined to get one that's due for an upgrade very soon.

                Also, Studio and Pro are hanging there.

                • coder5434 小时前
                  The current-gen Apple TV is already overpowered for what it does, and extremely nice to use. I can think of very few changes I would like to see, and most of them are purely software.
                  • int_19h3 小时前
                    I really wish it had some way to connect USB storage directly.
                    • coder5433 小时前
                      Mine has 128GB of onboard storage... but Apple still bans apps from downloading video, which annoys me.

                      The streaming apps virtually all support downloading for offline viewing on iPhone, but the Apple TV just becomes a paperweight when the internet goes out, because I'm not allowed to use the 128GB of storage for anything.

                      If they're not going to let you use the onboard storage, then it seems unlikely for them to let you use USB storage. So, first, I would like them to change their app policies regarding internal storage, which is one of the purely software improvements I would like to see.

                      • int_19h1 小时前
                        I use a dedicated NAS as a Plex server + Plex app on Apple TV itself for local streaming, which generally works fine. Infuse app can also index and stream from local sources.

                        But there are some cases like e.g. watching high-res high-FPS fractal zoom videos (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cgp2WNNKmQ) where even brief random skipped frames from other things trying to use WiFi at the same time can be really noticeable and annoying.

                        • coder5431 小时前
                          I do strongly recommend using Ethernet, unless you have the WiFi-only model, but gotcha.
          • jq-r5 小时前
            There really isn't a chance they'll update the same product twice in a week.
            • rbanffy5 小时前
              They haven't officially updated it. They just discontinued the smaller model.
              • jq-r3 小时前
                It would make more sense to discontinue the smaller model along with some other updates to the line. Or in other words, Air won't receive any other updates this week unfortunately.
      • ant6n3 小时前
        The big question for me is whether they will have a matte option for the Air. I want a fanless machine with a matte screen.

        Unfortunately Apple won’t tell you until the day they sell the machines.

        • davio2 小时前
          1TB+ iPad Pro can be a fanless machine with a matte screen
          • ant6n1 小时前
            See that’s the thing. Given that somehow you need 1TB to get the matte screen, I feel like Apple is using it as a way to upsell. It would indicate that perhaps Apple won’t offer a matte MacBook Air.
    • jsheard6 小时前
      Every M-series device now comes with at least 16GB, except for the base iPad Pro, right?
      • fckgw6 小时前
        Correct, every Mac computer starts at 16gb now. 256gb/512gb iPad Pro is 8gb, 1tb/2tb is 16gb.
      • MBCook6 小时前
        At least all the M4 Macs. I’m not sure of every older M config has been updated, though at least some have been.
        • fckgw5 小时前
          The only older configs that Apple sells are the M2 and M3 Airs, which were bumped. Everything else is now on M4, or didn't have an 8gb base config (Mac Studio, Mac Pro)
    • nsteel5 小时前
      But still just 256GB SSD Storage. £200 for the upgrade to 512GB (plus a couple more GPU cores that I don't need. Urgh.
      • DrBenCarson5 小时前
        It’s stationary. Just get a Thunderbolt NVMe drive and leave it plugged in
        • jq-r3 小时前
          Why buy a laptop then if you're lugging all those external hard drives?
          • lancesells2 小时前
            Just invest in the model with more storage then?
    • hiatus4 小时前
      If only they would bring back the 11" Air.
    • alsetmusic6 小时前
      Ohh, good catch. Sneaking that into the MBP announcement. I skimmed the page and missed that. So a fourth announcement couched within the biggest of the three days.
    • modeless4 小时前
      I've seen a lot of people complaining about 8GB but honestly my min spec M1 Air has continued to be great. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend a refurb M1 8GB Air for anyone price conscious.
    • yurishimo5 小时前
      It'll be interesting to see the reaction of tech commentators about this. So many people have been screaming at Apple to increase the base RAM and stop price gouging their customers on memory upgrades. If Apple Intelligence is the excuse the hardware team needed to get the bean counters on board, I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth!
      • sroussey5 小时前
        So we can scream about the lousy base storage, which is the same as my phone. Yikes.
        • criddell3 小时前
          It wouldn't surprise me if people typically use more storage on their phone than their computer. The phone should probably have a higher base storage than the base storage of their laptops.
    • abhinavk6 小时前
      > while keeping the starting price at just $999 — a terrific value for the world’s best-selling laptop

      Only in US it seems. India got a price increase by $120.

    • alberth5 小时前
      I guess that implies the MacBook Air won't be updated this week.

      Makes me wonder what else will be updated this week (Studio or Mac Pro)?

    • twilo5 小时前
      Great news. The pro is kinda of heavy for my liking so the Air is the way to go
      • int_19h3 小时前
        It's not just the weight - Air is also fanless (and still runs cold).

        And yes, with enough RAM, it is a surprisingly good dev laptop.

        • jq-r3 小时前
          Really too bad you cannot upgrade to 32GB RAM though =(
      • Analemma_5 小时前
        I think spec-wise the Air is good enough for almost everyone who isn't doing video production or running local LLMs, I just wish it had the much nicer screen that the Pro has. But I suppose they have to segregate the product lines somehow.
    • FireBeyond5 小时前
      Well, the issue for me with memory on these new models is that for the Max, it ships with 36GB and NO expandable memory option. To get more memory that's gated behind a $300 CPU upgrade (plus the memory cost).
    • Der_Einzige5 小时前
      [flagged]
    • ActorNightly2 小时前
      Im sorry but any laptop that costs $1000 should come with 64 gigs minimum, or expandable slots.
      • georgeecollins2 小时前
        Tell me you are poor without telling me you are poor.

        Just kidding! As an Apple Shareholder I feel like you should take what Apple gives you and accept the price. ;)

  • pw6hv2 小时前
    Just replaced for the first time battery on my Macbook Pro 2015 Retina. Feel so good using such an old piece of hardware.
    • zubiaur2 小时前
      I love mine, it has a fresh battery OEM battery as well. Runs the latest OS with OpenCore Legacy. But it's starting to get a bit annoying. Usable, but it is starting to feel slowish, the fan kicks up frequently.

      I might still keep it another year or so, which is a testament to how good it is and how relative little progress has happened in almost 10 years.

      • a2l3aQ34 分钟前
        If I still had my 2015 I would have applied some liquid metal TIM by now, I did a paste refresh and that worked very well to get the fan under control.
      • talldayo1 小时前
        If it's got a full function row, it will probably work just fine under Linux. My 2014 MBP chugged pretty hard with OpenCore but handles modern Linux distros much better.
  • wkyleg4 小时前
    What's the consensus regarding best MacBooks for AI/ML?

    I've heard it's easier to just use cloud options, but I sill like the idea of being able to run actual models and train them on my laptop.

    I have a M1 MacBook now and I'm considering trading in to upgrade.

    I've seen somewhat conflicting things regarding what you get for the money. For instance, some reports recommending a M2 Pro for the money IIRC.

    • ZeroCool2u4 小时前
      Training is not practical. For inference they're pretty great though, especially if you go up in the specs and add a bunch of memory.
  • scrlk6 小时前
    Nano-texture option for the display is nice. IIRC it's the first time since the 2012 15" MBP that a matte option has been offered?

    I hope that the response times have improved, because it has been quite poor for a 120 Hz panel.

    • lapcat6 小时前
      > IIRC it's the first time since the 2012 15" MBP that a matte option has been offered?

      The so-called "antiglare" option wasn't true matte. You'd really have to go back to 2008.

    • Eric_WVGG6 小时前
      Love the nano-texture on the Studio Display, but my MacBooks have always suffered from finger oil rubbing the screen from the keys. Fingerprint oil on nano-texture sounds like a recipe for disaster.

      For my current laptop, I finally broke down and bought a tempered glass screen protector. It adds a bit of glare, but wipes clean — and for the first time I have a one-year-old MacBook that still looks as good as new.

      • sroussey4 小时前
        The iPad has nano texture and I find it does a much better job with oily fingerprints.
      • jonah5 小时前
        I put a thin screen cleaner/glasses cleaner cloth on the keyboard whenever I close the lid. That keeps the oils off the screen as well as prevents any pressure or rubbing from damaging the glass.
        • Eric_WVGG3 小时前
          I tried that, unfortunately didn't work for me at all.
    • jhickok5 小时前
      My one concern is that nano-texture apple displays are a little more sensitive to damage, and even being super careful with my MBPs I get the little marks from the keyboard when you carry the laptop with your hand squeezing the lid and bottom (a natural carry motion).
      • coolspot1 小时前
        Put a facial tissue over keyboard before closing the lid.
    • 6 小时前
      undefined
    • thom5 小时前
      It's also on the iPad Pro. Only downside is you really do need the right cloth to be able to clean it.
      • umanwizard5 小时前
        I believe the laptop ships with the cloth. That said, it is annoying to have to remember to always keep that one cloth with your laptop.
    • ant6n6 小时前
      They brought back the matte screen! Omg. The question is, will they have that for the air.

      (I tend to feel if you want something specialized, you gotta pay for the expensive model)

    • pcdoodle6 小时前
      Yes. It's finally back.
  • unsupp0rted5 小时前
    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.

    • duped3 小时前
      This kind of sounds like someone is abusing perf cores and high priority threading in your stack. iirc, on MacOS audio workgroup threads are supposed to be scheduled with the highest (real time) priority on p cores, which shouldn't have issues under load, unless someone else is trying to compete at the same priority.
      • unsupp0rted1 小时前
        There is some discussion online on whether this happens when you have a Rosetta app running in the background somewhere (say a util you got via Homebrew, for example).

        Even when I remove all "Intel" type apps in activity monitor, I still experience the issue though.

    • maxioatic5 小时前
      I have a 14" M1 Max with 32gb of ram for work, and it does that popping noise every once it a while too! I've always wondered what was causing it.
      • SSLy4 小时前
        Im relatively surprised modern Macs have same buffer underrun issue I had on intel laptops with pulseaudio 7+ years back.
    • zaptrem3 小时前
      This happens whenever I load up one of our PyTorch models on my M1 MBP 16gb too. I also hate the part where if the model (or any other set of programs) uses too much RAM the whole system will sometimes straight up hang and then crash due to kernel watchdog timeout instead of just killing the offender.
    • silvr3 小时前
      Whoa! I've been so annoyed by this for years, so interesting that you figured it out. It's the kind of inelegance in design that would have had Steve Jobs yelling at everyone to fix, just ruins immersion in music and had no obvious way to fix.
  • zja3 小时前
    > MacBook Air is the world’s most popular laptop, and with Apple Intelligence, it’s even better. Now, models with M2 and M3 double the starting memory to 16GB, while keeping the starting price at just $999 — a terrific value for the world’s best-selling laptop.

    This is nice, and long overdue.

  • zurfer6 小时前
    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.

    • dsv3099i3 小时前
      If your goal is to sell more MBPs (and this is marketing presentation) then, judging by the number of comments that have the phrase "my M1" and the top comment, it seems like M1 vs M4 is the right comparison to make. Too many people are sticking with their M1 machines. Including me.

      It's actually interesting to think about. Is there a speed multiplier that would get me off this machine? I'm not sure there is. For my use case the machine performance is not my productivity bottleneck. HN on the otherhand... That one needs to be attenuated. :)

    • spacedcowboy2 小时前
      There aren't that many people that upgrade something like an MBP every year, most of us keep them longer than that.

      I've just ordered an (almost) top-of-the-range MBP Max, my current machine is an MBP M1-max, so the comparisons are pretty much spot-on for me.

      Selling the M1 Ultra Studio to help pay for the M4 MBP Max, I don't think I need the Studio any more, with the M4 being so much faster.

    • zmmmmm4 分钟前
      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.

    • azinman26 小时前
      Most people buying a new MacBook don’t have the previous version, they’re going much further back. That’s why you see both intel and m1 comparisons.
      • IshKebab2 小时前
        No it isn't. It's because 1.8x faster sounds better than 12% faster.

        Back when Moore's law was still working they didn't skip generations like this.

        • stephenr1 小时前
          Back when Moores las was still working they didn't release three subsequent versions of the same product in 22 months.
          • IshKebab1 小时前
            The M1 was released 4 years ago.
            • stephenr41 分钟前
              Both the M2 and M3 MBP were released in 2023.
    • canucker20164 小时前
      Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M4#Comparison_with_other...

      M4 is built with TSMC's 2nd Gen 3nm process. M3 is on the 1st gen 3nm.

      For the base M3 vs base M4:

      - the CPU (4P+4E) & GPU (8) core counts are the same

      - NPU perf is slightly better for M4, I think, (M4's 38TOPS @ INT8 vs M3's 18TOPS @ INT16)

      - Memory Bandwidth is higher for M4 (120 GB/s vs 102.4 GB/s)

      - M4 has a higher TDP (22W vs 20W)

      - M4 has higher transistor count (28B vs 25B)

    • nabakin5 小时前
      It does and it gets even worse when you realize those stats are only true under very specific circumstances, not typical computer usage. If you benchmarked based on typical computer usage, I think you'd only see gains of 5% or less.
      • tigen3 小时前
        Anyone know of articles that deep dive into "snappiness" or "feel" computer experiences?

        Everyone knows SSDs made a big difference in user experience. For the CPU, normally if you aren't gaming at high settings or "crunching" something (compiling or processing video etc.) then it's not obvious why CPU upgrades should be making much difference even vs. years-old Intel chips, in terms of that feel.

        There is the issue of running heavy JS sites in browsers but I can avoid those.

        The main issue seems to be how the OS itself is optimized for snappiness, and how well it's caching/preloading things. I've noticed Windows 10 file system caching seems to be not very sophisticated for example... it goes to disk too often for things I've accessed recently-but-not-immediately-prior.

        Similarly when it comes to generating heat, if laptops are getting hot even while doing undemanding office tasks with huge periods of idle time then basically it points to stupid software -- or let's say poorly balanced (likely aimed purely at benchmark numbers than user experience).

        https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m1-vs-amd-ryzen-...

    • tonygiorgio6 小时前
      So far I’m only reading comments here about people wow’d by a lot of things it seemed that M3 pretty much also had. Not seeing anything new besides “little bit better specs”
      • MBCook6 小时前
        The M4 is architecturally better than the M3, especially on GPU features IIRC, but you’re right it’s not a total blow out.

        Not all products got the M3, so in some lines this week is the first update in quite a while. In others like MBP it’s just the yearly bump. A good performing one, but the yearly bump.

      • sliken4 小时前
        Yes, upgrading from a m3 max to a m4 max would be a waste.
    • jumping_frog6 小时前
      Maybe they are highlighting stats which will help people upgrade. Few will upgrade from M3 to M4. Many from M1 to M4. That's my guess.
  • dr_kiszonka5 小时前
    > "Up to 7x faster image processing in Affinity Photo"

    Great to see Affinity becoming so popular that it gets acknowledged by Apple.

    • sunnybeetroot1 小时前
      Affinity has been mentioned many times by Apple in their product videos
  • hartator4 小时前
    I’m really excited about the nano-texture display option.

    It’s essentially a matte coating, but the execution on iPad displays is excellent. While it doesn’t match the e-ink experience of devices like the Kindle or ReMarkable, it’s about 20-30% easier on the eyes. The texture feels also great (even though it’s less relevant for a laptop), and the glare reduction is a welcome feature.

    I prefer working on the MacBook screen, but I nearly bought an Apple Studio Display XDR or an iPad as a secondary screen just for that nano-texture finish. It's super good news that this is coming to the MacBook Pro.

    • dkarbayev3 小时前
      Do you actually have to wipe the screen with the included special cloth? The screen on all of the macbooks that I've had usually get oily patches because of the contact with keycaps, so I have to wipe the screen regularly.
      • hartator2 小时前
        I wipe all my devices with regular paper towels with a tad of water. Including my $5k Apple XDR display.

        I am probably not the best example to emulate lol.

    • kvczor1 小时前
      How is the contrast? The HDR content? Any downsides?

      I will upgrade to M4 Pro and really hate the glare when I travel (and I do that a lot) but at the same time I don't want to lose any quality that the MBP delivers which is quite excellent imho

    • cedws3 小时前
      Does it make much difference for looking at code?
      • hartator3 小时前
        Yes, the main goal is to be easier on the eyes IMO.

        It's easier to read on it.

  • twalla5 小时前
    They're really burying the lede here - magic trackpad and magic keyboard finally have USB-C :)
    • DerekL2 小时前
      That was announced on Monday, with the new iMacs.
  • resters1 小时前
    It's hard to imagine ay reason why I would not want to keep upgrading to a new MPB every few years -- my M3 MBP is by far the best laptop I've owned thanks to the incredible battery life.

    Of course I'm rooting for competition, but Apple seems to be establishing a bigger and bigger lead with each iteration.

    • spease1 小时前
      I don’t see the yearly releases as saying you have to upgrade. Rather, having a consistent cadence makes it easier for the supply chain, and the short iteration time means there’s less pressure to rush something in half-baked or delay a release.
    • telesilla1 小时前
      My M1 laptop from early 2022 is too good for me to care about upgrading right now, I loaded it up with 64GB ram and it's still blazing. What benefit would I really notice? My heavy apps loading a couple of seconds faster?
  • thimabi6 小时前
    Nice to see they increased the number of performance cores in the M4 Pro, compared to the M3 Pro. Though I am worried about the impact of this change on battery life on the MBPs.

    Another positive development was bumping up baseline amounts of RAM. They kept selling machines with just 8 gigabytes of RAM for way longer than they should have. It might be fine for many workflows, but feels weird on “pro” machines at their price points.

    I’m sure Apple has been coerced to up its game because of AI. Yet we can rejoice in seeing their laptop hardware, which already surpassed the competition, become even better.

    • snjnlsn5 小时前
      I'm curious why they decided to go this route, but glad to see it. Perhaps ~4 efficiency cores is simply just enough for the average MBP user's standard compute?

      In January, after researching, I bought an apple restored MBP with an M2 Max over an M3 Pro/Max machine because of the performance/efficiency core ratio. I do a lot of music production in DAWs, and many, even Apple's Logic Pro don't really make use of efficiency cores. I'm curious about what restraints have led to this.. but perhaps this also factors into Apple's choice to increase the ratio of performance/efficiency cores.

      • thimabi5 小时前
        > Perhaps ~4 efficiency cores is simply just enough for the average MBP user's standard compute?

        I believe that’s the case. Most times, the performance cores on my M3 Pro laptop remain idle.

        What I don’t understand is why battery life isn’t more like that of the MacBook Airs when not using the full power of the SOC. Maybe that’s the downside of having a better display.

        • umanwizard5 小时前
          > Most times, the performance cores on my M3 Pro laptop remain idle.

          Curious how you're measuring this. Can you see it in Activity Monitor?

          > Maybe that’s the downside of having a better display.

          Yes I think so. Display is a huge fraction of power consumption in typical light (browsing/word processing/email) desktop workloads.

          • thimabi4 小时前
            > Curious how you're measuring this. Can you see it in Activity Monitor?

            I use an open source app called Stats [1]. It provides a really good overview of the system on the menu bar, and it comes with many customization options.

            [1]: https://github.com/exelban/stats

          • netruk443 小时前
            > Curious how you're measuring this. Can you see it in Activity Monitor?

            Yes, processor history in the activity monitor marks out specific cores as Performance and Efficiency.

            Example: https://i.redd.it/f87yv7eoqyh91.jpg

            • umanwizard3 小时前
              Wow, I didn't even realize you could double-click the CPU graph on the main screen to open that view.
  • TIPSIO6 小时前
    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?

    • jitl5 小时前
      I don’t think it will “feel” much faster like the Intel -> M1 where overall system latency especially around swap & memory pressure got much much better.

      If you do any amount of 100% CPU work that blocks your workflow, like waiting for a compiler or typechecker, I think M1 -> M4 is going to be worth it. A few of my peers at the office went M1->M3 and like the faster compile times.

      Like, a 20 minute build on M1 becoming a 10 minute build on M4, or a 2 minute build on M1 becoming a 1 minute build on M4, is nothing to scoff at.

    • thimabi5 小时前
      I guess it’s only worth it for people who would really benefit from the speed bump — those who push their machines to the limit and work under tight schedules.

      I myself don’t need so much performance, so I tend to keep my devices for many, many years.

  • abnry6 小时前
    How viable is Asani Linux these days? MacBook hardware looks amazing.
    • dcchambers6 小时前
      No support for M3 or M4 powered machines currently.

      > All Apple Silicon Macs are in scope, as well as future generations as development time permits. We currently have support for most machines of the M1 and M2 generations.[^1][^2]

      [^1]: https://asahilinux.org/about/

      [^2]: https://asahilinux.org/fedora/#device-support

    • drhodes6 小时前
      btw, there is a recent interview with an Asani dev focusing on GPUs, worth a listen for those interested in linux on apple silicon. The reverse engineering effort required to pin down the GPU hardware was one of the main topics.

      https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2024/10/15/linux-apple-...

    • jitl5 小时前
      For many years I treated Windows or macOS as a hypervisor - if you love Linux but want the Mac hardware, instant sleep & wake, etc, putting a full screen VM in Parallels or similar is imo better than running Linux in terms of productivity, although it falls short on “freedom”.
      • umanwizard5 小时前
        I do the same thing, but there are two big caveats:

        1. Nested virtualization doesn't work in most virtualization software, so if your workflow involves running stuff in VMs it is not going to work from within another VM. The exception is apparently now the beta version of UTM with the Apple Virtualization backend, but that's highly experimental.

        2. Trackpad scrolling is emulated as discrete mouse wheel clicks, which is really annoying for anyone used to the smooth scrolling on macOS. So what I do is use macOS for most browsing and other non-technical stuff but do all my coding in the Linux VM.

    • kristofferR6 小时前
      Have anyone tried it recently, specifically the trackpad? I tried the Fedora variant a few months ago on my M1 Macbook and it was horrible to use the trackpad, it felt totally foreign and wrong.
      • philistine5 小时前
        I feel you, but Apple's trackpad prowess is not an easy thing to copy. It's one of those things I never expect anyone else to be able to replicate the level of deep integration between the hardware and software.

        It's 2024, and I still see most Windows users carrying a mouse to use with their laptop.

  • carlgreene6 小时前
    What’s amazing is that in the past I’ve felt the need to upgrade within a few years.

    New video format or more demanding music software is released that slows the machine down, or battery life craters.

    Well, I haven’t had even a tinge of feeling that I need to upgrade after getting my M1 Pro MBP. I can’t remember it ever skipping a beat running a serious Ableton project, or editing in Resolve.

    Can stuff be faster? Technically of course. But this is the first machine that even after several years I’ve not caught myself once wishing that it was faster or had more RAM. Not once.

    Perhaps it’s my age, or perhaps it’s just the architecture of these new Mac chips are just so damn good.

    • jchw5 小时前
      Laptops in general are just better than they used to be, with modern CPUs and NVMe disks. I feel exactly the same seeing new mobile AMD chips too, I'm pretty sure I'll be happy with my Ryzen 7040-based laptop for at least a few years.

      Apple's M1 came at a really interesting point. Intel was still dominating the laptop game for Windows laptops, but generational improvements felt pretty lame. A whole lot of money for mediocre performance gains, high heat output and not very impressive battery. The laptop ecosystem changed rapidly as not only the Apple M1 arrived, but also AMD started to gain real prominence in the laptop market after hitting pretty big in the desktop and data center CPU market. (Addendum: and FWIW, Intel has also gotten a fair bit better at mobile too in the meantime. Their recent mobile chipsets have shown good efficiency improvements.)

      If Qualcomm's Windows on ARM efforts live past the ARM lawsuit, I imagine a couple generations from now they could also have a fairly compelling product. In my eyes, there has never been a better time to buy a laptop.

      (Obligatory: I do have an M2 laptop in my possession from work. The hardware is very nice, it beats the battery life on my AMD laptop even if the AMD laptop chews through some compute a bit faster. That said, I love the AMD laptop because it runs Linux really well. I've tried Asahi on an M1 Mac Mini, it is very cool but not something I'd consider daily driving soon.)

      • dijit5 小时前
        > Laptops in general are just better than they used to be, with modern CPUs and NVMe disks. I feel exactly the same seeing new mobile AMD chips too, I'm pretty sure I'll be happy with my Ryzen 7040-based laptop for at least a few years.

        You say that, but I get extremely frustrated at how slow my Surface Pro 10 is (with an Ultra 7 165U).

        It could be Windows of course, but this is a much more modern machine than my Macbook Air (M1) and feels like it's almost 10 years old at times in comparison. - despite being 3-4 years newer.

        • jchw5 小时前
          It's true that Linux may be a bit better in some cases, if you have a system that has good Linux support, but I think in most cases it should never make a very substantial difference. On some of the newer Intel laptops, there are still missing power management features anyways, so it's hard to compare.

          That said, Intel still has yet to catch up to AMD on efficiency unfortunately, they've improved generationally but if you look at power efficiency benchmarks of Intel CPUs vs AMD you can see AMD comfortably owns the entire top of the chart. Also, as a many-time Microsoft Surface owner, I can also confirm that these devices are rarely good showcases for the chipsets inside of them: they tend to be constrained by both power and thermal limits. There are a lot of good laptops on the market, I wouldn't compare a MacBook, even a MacBook Air, a laptop, with a Surface Pro, a 2-in-1 device. Heck, even my Intel Surface Laptop 4, a device I kinda like, isn't the ideal showcase for its already mediocre 11th gen Intel processor...

          The Mac laptop market is pretty easy: you buy the laptops they make, and you get what you get. On one hand, that means no need to worry about looking at reviews or comparisons, except to pick a model. They all perform reasonably well, the touchpad will always be good, the keyboard is alright. On the other hand, you really do get what you get: no touchscreens, no repairability, no booting directly into Windows, etc.

          • thrw42A8N3 小时前
            I boot Windows on my Mac M1 just fine. Just yesterday I played Age of Empires 3.
            • jchw3 小时前
              I changed the wording to be "booting directly" to clarify that I'm not including VMs. If I have to explain why that matters I guess I can, but I am pretty sure you know.
              • thrw42A8N3 小时前
                I am genuinely interested, why does it matter? The performance is more than good enough even to run a Visual Studio (not Code).
                • jchw3 小时前
                  If the roles were reversed would you still need an explanation? e.g. If I could run macOS inside of a VM on Windows and run things like Final Cut and XCode with sufficient performance, would you think there's no benefit to being able to boot macOS natively?
                  • thrw42A8N2 小时前
                    Booting natively means you need real drivers, which don't exist for Windows on Mac as well as for macOS on PC. It'd be useless. Just use the VM, it's good.

                    And it's not the same - running Windows natively on Mac would seriously degrade the Mac, while running macOS on a PC has no reason to make it worse than with Windows. Why not buy a PC laptop at that point? The close hardware/OS integration is the whole point of the product. Putting Windows into a VM lets you use best of both.

                    • jchw2 小时前
                      The question was a hypothetical. What if the macOS VM was perfect? If it was perfect, would it then not matter if you couldn't just boot into macOS?

                      I'm pretty sure you would never use a Windows PC just to boot into a macOS VM, even if it was flawless. And there are people who would never boot a Mac, just to boot into a Windows VM, even if it was flawless. And no, it's not flawless. Being able to run a relatively old strategy game is not a great demonstration of the ability generally play any random Windows game. I have a Parallels and VMWware Fusion license (well... Had, anyway), and I'm a long time (20 years) Linux user, I promise that I am not talking out my ass when it comes to knowing all about the compromises of interoperability software.

                      To be clear, I am not trying to tell you that the interoperability software is useless, or that it doesn't work just fine for you. I'm trying to say that in a world where the marketshare of Windows is around 70%, a lot of people depend on software and workflows that only work on Windows. A lot of people buy PCs specifically to play video games, possibly even as a job (creating videos/streaming/competing in esports teams/developing video games and related software) and they don't want additional input latency, lower performance, and worse compatibility.

                      Even the imperfections of virtual machines aside, some people just don't like macOS. I don't like macOS or Windows at all. I think they are both irritating to use in a way that I find hard to stomach. That doesn't mean that I don't acknowledge the existence of many people who very much rely on their macOS and Windows systems, the software ecosystems of their respective systems, and the workflows that they execute on those systems.

                      So basically, aside from the imperfections of a virtual machine, the ability to choose to run Windows as your native operating system is really important for the obvious case where it's the operating system you would prefer to run.

                      • thrw42A8N2 小时前
                        I still don't understand why would you buy a Mac if you want to run Windows.
                        • jchw1 小时前
                          Exactly. You wouldn't.
      • acomjean5 小时前
        I’ll agree the AMD laptops from the past couple of years are really impressive. They are fast enough that I’ve done some bioinformatics work on one.

        Battery life is decent.

        At this point I’m not switching from laptop Linux. The machines can even game (thanks proton/steam)

        • caycep5 小时前
          the office Ryzen thinkpads we have are ok...but they're definitely no M1 MacBook Air or Pro...
          • jchw5 小时前
            If we're mostly concerned about CPU grunt, it's really hard to question the Ryzen 7040, which like the M1, is also not the newest generation chip, though it is newer than the M1 by a couple of years. Still, comparing an M1 MacBook Pro with a Framework 16 on Geekbench:

            https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-pro-14-inch-2021-...

            https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/4260192

            Both of these CPUs perform well enough that most users will not need to be concerned at all about the compute power. Newer CPUs are doing better but it'd be hard to notice day-to-day.

            As for other laptop features... That'll obviously be vendor-dependent. The biggest advantage of the PC market is all of the choices you get to make, and the biggest disadvantage of the PC market is all of the choices you have to make. (Edit: Though if anyone wants a comparison point, just for sake of argument, I think generally the strongest options have been from ASUS. Right now, the Zephyrus G16 has been reviewing pretty good, with people mostly just complaining that it is too expensive. Certainly can't argue with that. Personally, I run Framework, but I don't really run the latest-and-greatest mobile chipsets most of the time, and I don't think Framework is ideal for people who want that.)

            • ikari_pl4 小时前
              what about heat and noise?

              those are another two reasons why I can't ignore Apple Silicon

              • jchw4 小时前
                Ultimately it'll be subjective, but the fans don't really spin up on my Framework 16 unless I push things. Running a game or compiling on all cores for a while will do the trick. The exact battery life, thermals and noise will be heavily dependent on the laptop; the TDP of modern laptop CPUs is probably mostly pretty comparable so a lot of it will come down to thermal design. Same for battery life and noise, depends a lot on things other than the CPU.
      • wing-_-nuts3 小时前
        >Laptops in general are just better than they used to be, with modern CPUs and NVMe disks.

        I've had my xps 13 since 2016. Really the only fault I have against it nowadays is that 8gb of ram is not sufficient to run intellij anymore (hell, sometimes it even bogs down my 16gb mbp).

        Now, I've also built an absolute beast of a workstation with a 7800x3d, 64gb ram, 24 gb vram and a fast ssd. Is it faster than both? Yeah. Is my old xps slow enough to annoy me? Not really. Youtube has been sluggish to load / render here lately but I think that's much more that google is making changes to make firefox / ublock a worse experience than any fault of the laptop.

        • xethos2 小时前
          Regarding Youtube, Google is also waging a silent war against Invidious. It's to the point that even running helper scripts to trick Youtube isn't enough (yet). I can't imagine battling active and clever adversaries speeds up Youtube page loads as it runs through its myriad checks that block Invidious.
      • bjackman3 小时前
        I only do coding & browsing so maybe I'm a weak example but I find this even with my pretty old Intel laptops these days.

        My Skylake one (I think that would be 6 years old now?) is doing absolutely fine. My Broadwell one is starting to feel a little aged but perfectly usable, I wouldn't even _consider_ upgrading it if I was in the bottom 95% of global income.

        Compiling is very slow on these, but I think I'd avoid compilation on my laptop even if I had a cutting edge CPU?

        • jchw2 小时前
          Depends. I used to offload almost all compilation tasks, but now I only really do this if it's especially large. If I want to update my NixOS configuration I don't bother offloading it anymore. (NixOS isn't exactly Gentoo or anything, but I do have some overrides that necessitate a decent amount of compilation, mainly dogfooding my merge requests before they get merged/released.)

          YMMV.

      • sangnoir3 小时前
        > If Qualcomm's Windows on ARM efforts live past the ARM lawsuit

        FWIW, Qualcomm cancelled orders of its Windows devkit and issued refunds before the lawsuit. That is probably not a good sign

      • chx4 小时前
        I am on Intel TGL currently and can't wait for Strix Halo next year. That is truly something else, it's nothing we have seen in notebooks before iGPU wise.
        • jchw3 小时前
          I've had a couple of Tiger Lake laptops, a Thinkpad and I believe my Surface Laptop 4. Based on my experience with current AMD mobile chipsets, I can only imagine the Strix Halo will be quite a massive uplift for you even if the generational improvements aren't impressive.
    • extr6 小时前
      I've owned an M1 MBP base model since 2021 and I just got an M3 Max for work. I was curious to see if it "felt" different and was contemplating an upgrade to M4. You know what? It doesn't really feel different. I think my browser opens about 1 second faster from a cold start. But other than that, no perceptible difference day to day.
      • stringsandchars4 小时前
        > It doesn't really feel different.

        My work machine was upgraded from an M1 with 16GB of RAM to an M3 Max with 36GB and the difference in Xcode compile times is beyond belief: I went from something like 1-2 minutes to 15-20 seconds.

        Obviously if opening a browser is the most taxing thing your machine is doing the difference will be minimal. But video or music editing, application-compiling and other intensive tasks, then the upgrade is PHENOMENAL.

        • eropple3 小时前
          FWIW I think that's more the core count than anything. I have a M1 Max as a personal machine and an M3 Max at work and while the M3 Max is definitely faster, it isn't world-beating.
        • jcgrillo2 小时前
          My current work machine is M1 Max 64Gb and it's the fastest computer I've ever used. Watching rust code compile makes me laugh out loud it's so quick. Really curious what the newer ones are like, but tbh I don't feel any pressure to upgrade (could just be blissfully ignorant).
        • Aeolun4 小时前
          I very much enjoy being able to start compilation and just seeing results fly by.
        • fwip4 小时前
          I think most of that difference is going to be the huge increase in performance core count between the base chip and the Max (from 4 to 12). The RAM certainly doesn't hurt though!
      • charliebwrites5 小时前
        This is how I feel about the last few iPhones as well

        I upgraded from a 13 pro to a 15 pro expecting zippier performance and it feels almost identical if not weirdly a bit slower in rendering and typing

        I wonder what it will take to make Mac/iOS feel faster

        • alwillis5 小时前
          > I upgraded from a 13 pro to a 15 pro expecting zippier performance and it feels almost identical if not weirdly a bit slower in rendering and typing

          I went from an iPhone 13 mini to an iPhone 16 and it's a significant speed boost.

          • lawgimenez4 小时前
            I went from 12 to 15 pro max, the difference is significant. I can listen to Spotify while shooting from the camera. On my old iPhone 12, this is not possible.
            • jonhohle4 小时前
              I think that says more about Spotify than your phone.
              • stevenjgarner3 小时前
                Test Spotify against YouTube Music (and others) - I personally see no reason for Spotify when I have YouTube Premium, which performs with less overhead.
                • lancesells2 小时前
                  Maybe they have friends and family on Spotify
            • pacifika2 小时前
              I’m sure you’re right but that’s pretty unreal.
        • andrei_says_4 小时前
          16 pro has a specialized camera button which is a game changer for street / travel photography. I upgraded from 13 pro and use that. But no other noticeable improvements. Maybe Apple intelligence summarizing wordy emails.
        • danieldk5 小时前
          I think the only upgrade now is from a non-Pro to Pro, since a 120Hz screen is noticeably better than a 60Hz screen (and a borderline scam that a 1000 Euro phone does not have 120Hz).

          The new camera button is kinda nice though.

          • matwood4 小时前
            > The new camera button is kinda nice though.

            I was initially indifferent about the camera button, but now that I'm used to it it's actually very useful.

        • thenthenthen4 小时前
          > I wonder what it will take to make Mac/iOS feel faster

          I know, disabling shadows and customisable animation times ;) On a jailbroken phone I once could disable all animation delays, it felt like a new machine (must add that the animations are very important and generally great ux design, but most are just a tad too slow)

        • tomjen34 小时前
          I upgraded my iPhone 13 pro to the 16 pro and it was overall really nice - but it was the better use of hardware, the zoom camera, etc.

          The CPU? Ah, never really felt a difference.

        • doublerabbit4 小时前
          XR to 13, as I don't want the latest and didn't want to loose my jailbreak.

          Infuriated by the 13.

          The 3.5mm audio thunder bolt adapters disconnect more often than usual. All I need to do is tap the adapter and it disconnects.

          And that Apple has now stopped selling them is even more infuriating, it's not a faulty adapter.

          • qubitcoder3 小时前
            I realize this isn't your particular use case. But with newer iPhones, you can use USB-C directly for audio. I've been using the Audio Technica ATH-M50xSTS for a while now. The audio quality is exceptional. For Slack/Team/Zoom calls, the sidetone feature plays your voice back inside the headphones, with the level being adjustable via a small toggle switch on the left side. That makes all the difference, similar to transparency/adaptive modes on the AirPod Pro 2s (or older cellphones and landlines).

            I use a small Anker USB-A to USB-C adapter [1]. They're rock solid.

            As great as the AirPod Pro 2s are, a wired connection is superior in terms of reliability and latency. Although greatly improved over the years, I still have occasional issues connecting or switching between devices.

            Out of curiosity, what's the advantage of a jailbroken iPhone nowadays? I'd typically unlock Android phones in the past, but I don't see a need on iOS today.

            Interestingly, the last time I used Android, I had to sideload Adguard (an adblocker). On the App Store, it's just another app alongside competing adblockers. No such apps existed in the Play Store to provide system-level blocking, proxying, etc. Yes, browser extensions can be used, but that doesn't cover Google's incessant quest to bypass adblockers (looking at you Google News).

            [0] https://www.audio-technica.com/en-us/ath-m50xsts [1] https://www.amazon.com/Adapter-Anker-High-Speed-Transfer-Not...

            • doublerabbit2 小时前
              > Out of curiosity, what's the advantage of a jailbroken iPhone nowadays? I'd typically unlock Android phones in the past, but I don't see a need on iOS today.

              I have custom scripts, Ad blocking without VPNs, Application firewalls.

              I enjoy having most-full control of my device.

          • HumblyTossed4 小时前
            > The 3.5mm thunder bolt adapters

            The what? is this the adapter for 3.5mm headphones? If so, you don't have to get Apple made dongles. Third parties make them also.

            • Kirby643 小时前
              Or just buy the actual Apple adapter from any number of other vendors. Best Buy still has plenty in stock, for instance.

              I'd guess the GPs actual problem is lint in the Lightning port though. Pretty common, relatively easy to clean out too, especially compared to USB-C.

              • doublerabbit2 小时前
                I'm in the EU. Third party ones cost the same as authentic Apple ones. If not more.

                Regardless of either, they both have the same fault.

                The connector between the phone and the adapter is poor. It could just be a fault with my phone but I have no way of proving this.

                • Kirby642 小时前
                  Third party ones are almost certainly not as good as the actual Apple ones. The Apple one has remarkably good quality for its price.

                  I suspect this sounds like a problem with your specific phone. Never had a problem with any lightning accessories myself.

            • doublerabbit2 小时前
              Yes, which have the same fault as Apple authentic adapters which cost the same amount if not more.
          • internet20004 小时前
            It’s probably because of the jailbreak.
      • jcalabro2 小时前
        I've found compile times on large C++ code bases to be the only thing I really notice improving. I recently upgraded my work machine from a 2017 i7 to a shiny new Ryzen 9 9950x and my clean compile times went from 3.5 minutes to 15 seconds haha. When I compile with an M2 Max, it's about 30s, so decent for a laptop, but also it was 2x the price of my new desktop workstation.
      • ToucanLoucan5 小时前
        Can confirm. I have an M2 Air from work and an M1 Pro for personal, and tbh, both absolutely fly. I haven't had a serious reason to upgrade. The only reason I do kind of want to swap out my M1 Pro is because the 13" screen is a wee small, but I also use the thing docked more often than not so it's very hard to justify spending the money.
    • crystal_revenge4 小时前
      On the other side, as someone doing a lot of work in the GenAI space, I'm simultaneously amazed that I can run Flux [dev] on my laptop and use local LLMs for a variety of tasks, while also wishing that I had more RAM and more processing power, despite having a top of the line M3 max MBP.

      But it is wild that two years ago running any sort of useful genAI stuff on a MBP was more-or-less a theoretical curiosity, and already today you can easily run models that would have exceeded SotA 2 years ago.

      Somewhat ironically, I got into the "AI" space a complete skeptic, but thinking it would be fun to play with nonetheless. After 2 years of daily work with this models I'm starting to be increasingly convinced they are going to become increasingly disruptive. No AGI, but it will certainly reduce a lot of labor and enable things that we're really feasible before. Best of all, it's clear a lot of this work will be doable from a laptop!

      • tomcam2 小时前
        I would love to hear more about what exactly you think will be disruptive. I don’t know the LLM world very well.
      • bayofpigs1 小时前
        [dead]
    • bhouston5 小时前
      > I haven’t had even a tinge of feeling that I need to upgrade after getting my M1 Pro MBP.

      I upgraded my M1 MBP to a MacBook Air M3 15" and it was a major upgrade. It is the same weight but 40% faster and so much nicer to work on while on the sofa or traveling. The screen is also brighter.

      I think very few people actually do need the heavy MBPs, especially not the web/full-stack devs who populate Hacker News.

      EDIT: The screens are not different in terms of brightness.

      • macNchz1 小时前
        > I think very few people actually do need the heavy MBPs, especially not the web/full-stack devs who populate Hacker News.

        I can fairly easily get my M1 Air to have thermal issues while on extended video calls with some Docker containers running, and have been on calls with others having the same issue. Kind of sucks if it's, say, an important demo. I mostly use it as a thin client to my desktop when I'm away from home, so it's not really an issue, but if I were using it as a primary device I'd want a machine with a fan.

      • tebbers4 小时前
        Looked at it but ruled out the Air due to lack of ports and limited RAM upgrades.
      • 055 小时前
        Pretty sure Air displays don't support HDR, are they really brighter?
        • bhouston5 小时前
          I am not sure. I notice a difference. Maybe it is just screen age related?
          • 055 小时前
            They supposedly have the same base brightness (500 nits), with Pro allowing up to 1000 in HDR mode (and up to 1600 peak).

            Air doesn't support 120Hz refresh either.

            There's an app that allows to unlock max brightness on Pros (Vivid)[0] even without HDR content (no affiliation).

            HDR support is most noticeable when viewing iPhone photos and videos, since iPhones shoots in HDR by default.

            [0] https://www.getvivid.app

            • bhouston5 小时前
              I just looked at it again side by side and I think they are actually the same. Not sure why I earlier thought they were different.
            • nottorp4 小时前
              On a tangent, if I have a M3 pro laptop how do I test HDR? Download a test movie from where, play it with what?

              I may or may have not seen HDR content accidentally, but I’m not sure.

              • qubitcoder37 分钟前
                You can search for videos on YouTube and filter by HDR. Apple TV shows are typically in HDR (Dolby Vision). Here are a couple of examples:

                [0] Hawaii LG Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBJzp-y4BHA [1] Nature Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFFGbZIqi3U

                YouTube shows a small red "HDR" label on the video settings icon for actual HDR content. For this label to appear, the display must support HDR. With your M3 Pro, the HDR label should appear in Chrome and Safari.

                You can also right-click on the video to enable "Stats for nerds" for more details. Next to color, look for "smpte2084 (PQ) / bt2020". That's usually the highest-quality HDR video [2,3].

                You can ignore claims such as "Dolby Vision/Audio". YouTube doesn't support those formats, even if the source material used it. When searching for videos, apply the HDR filter afterward to avoid videos falsely described as "HDR".

                Keep in mind that macOS uses a different approach when rendering HDR content. Any UI elements outside the HDR content window will be slightly dimmed, while the HDR region will use the full dynamic range.

                I consider Vivid [4] an essential app for MacBook Pro XDR displays.

                Once installed, you can keep pressing the "increase brightness" key to go beyond the default SDR range, effectively doubling the brightness of your display without sacrificing color accuracy. It's especially useful outdoors, even indoors, depending on the lighting conditions. And fantastic for demoing content to colleagues or in public settings (like conference booths).

                [2] https://www.benq.com/en-us/knowledge-center/knowledge/bt2020... [3] https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/32320 (see section 4) [4] https://www.getvivid.app/

              • inDigiNeous1 小时前
                You can just search for HDR videos in Youtube.
      • rizzaxc5 小时前
        the Air doesn't have ProMotion right? that feature is non-negotiable on any display for me nowadays
        • grujicd4 小时前
          For me faster refresh rate is noticeable on phone or ipad where you scroll all the time. On a laptop you don't have that much smooth scrolling. For me it's a non issue on laptop, not even once I wished it had faster refresh. While I always notice when switching between Pro and non Pro iPad.
        • sroussey5 小时前
          I have ProMotion on my MBP and iPhone but… it’s ok? Honestly, I use an older computer or iPhone temporarily and don’t notice a difference.

          I’m looking forward to the day I notice the difference so I can appreciate what I have.

          • danieldk4 小时前
            I find 60Hz on the non-Pro iPhone obnoxious since switching to 120Hz screens. On the other hand, I do not care much about 60Hz when it comes to computer screens. I think touch interfaces make low refresh rates much more noticeable.
            • nottorp4 小时前
              I wonder. Do you do a lot of doom scrolling?

              I can’t understand the people who notice the 120 hz adaptive refresh whatever and one guess is their use is a lot twitchier than mine.

              • danieldk2 小时前
                No doomscrolling at all. Even when switching between home screens is like it's dropping frames left and right (it's not of course, but that's what it looks like coming from 120Hz). A Galaxy A54 that we still have in the house that was just over 300 Euro feels much smoother than my old iPhone 15 that cost close to 1000 Euro because it has a 120Hz screen.

                Even 90Hz (like on some Pixels) is substantially better than the iPhone's 60Hz.

              • 3 小时前
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    • nsxwolf3 小时前
      My 2019 i9 flagship MBP is just so, so terrible, and my wife's M1 MacBook Air is so, so great. I can't get over how much better her computer is than mine.
    • rbanffy5 小时前
      A lot of my work can be easily done with a Celeron - it's editing source, compiling very little, running tests on Python code, running small Docker containers and so on. Could it be faster? Of course! Do I need it to be faster? Not really.

      I am due to update my Mac mini because my current one can't run Sonoma, but, apart from that, it's a lovely little box with more than enough power for me.

      • mysteria2 小时前
        I still use Ivy Bridge and Haswell workstations (with Linux, SSD and discrete GPU) as my daily drivers and for the things I do they still feel fast. Honestly a new Celeron probably beats them performance wise.

        The modern AMD or Intel desktops I've tried obviously are much faster when performing large builds and such but for general computing, web browsing, and so forth I literally don't feel much of a difference. Now for mobile devices it's a different story due to the increased efficiency and hence battery life.

      • klooney5 小时前
        How's the performance of Gmail on the Celeron? That's always my sticking point for older computers. The fancy web applications really drag.
        • rbanffy5 小时前
          Not great. Works well with Thunderbird or Evolution though.

          And yes. Web apps are not really great on low-spec machines.

    • rconti5 小时前
      It's so nice being able to advise a family member who is looking to upgrade their intel Mac to something new, and just tell them to buy whatever is out, not worry about release dates, not worry about things being out of date, and so on.

      The latest of whatever you have will be so much better than the intel one, and the next advances will be so marginal, that it's not even worth looking at a buyer's guide.

      • baq5 小时前
        M3 Air with 16gb (base config as of today) is potentially a decade’s worth of computer. Amazing value.
        • chamomeal4 小时前
          Base 16gb is absolutely wild. My base m2 air with 8gb is almost enough to handle anything I’d ever want it to without zero slowdown.

          A 16gb model for about a thousand bucks?? I can’t believe how far macbooks have come in the last few years

    • tshaddox1 小时前
      > Perhaps it’s my age

      I always catch myself in this same train of thought until it finally re-occurs to me that "no, the variable here is just that you're old." Part of it is that I have more money now, so I buy better products that last longer. Part of it is that I have less uninterrupted time for diving deeply into new interests which leads to always having new products on the wishlist.

      In the world of personal computers, I've seen very few must-have advances in adulthood. The only two unquestionable big jumps I can think of off hand are Apple's 5K screens (how has that been ten years?!) and Apple Silicon. Other huge improvements were more gradual, like Wi-Fi, affordable SSDs, and energy efficiency. (Of course it's notable that I'm not into PC gaming, where I know there has been incredible advances in performance and display tech.)

    • davidhariri4 小时前
      I think this is confirmed by the fact software vendors are still not taking advantage of ARM chips maximum performance.

      Where this might shift is as we start using more applications that are powered by locally running LLMs.

    • noman-land4 小时前
      I would normally never upgrade so soon after getting an M1 but running local LLMs is extremely cool and useful to the point where I'd want the extra RAM and CPU to run larger models more quickly.
      • astrostl3 小时前
        I'm bumping from a still-excellent M1 MAX / 64GB to M4 MAX / 128GB, mostly for local GenAI. It gives me some other uplift and also enables me to sell this system while it's still attractive. I'm able to exhaust local 7B models fairly easily on it.
      • yieldcrv4 小时前
        I have a 64gb M1 Max and already do that

        but yes, I was looking at and anticipating the max RAM on the M4 as well as the max memory speed

        128gb and 546GB/s memory bandwidth

        I like it, I don't know yet on an upgrade. But I like it. Was hoping for more RAM actually, but this is nice.

    • 3 小时前
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    • zitterbewegung3 小时前
      I agree with you about not needing to upgrade but, it still stands that IMHO Apple is better off with upgrading or even having the need to upgrade with competition. (Also it's really good that Macs now have 16GB of ram by default). As I have had my M1 14.2 Max I believe that the only reason I would want to upgrade is that I can configure it with 128GB of ram which allows you to load newer AI models on device.

      The MacBook Pro seems like it does have some quality of life improvements such as Thunderbolt 5, the camera is now a center stage (follows you) 14 megapixel camera now all of them have three USB-C ports and the battery life claims of 22-24 hours. Regardless if you want a MacBook Pro and you don't have one there is now an argument on not just going to buy the previous model.

    • nhumrich5 小时前
      I dont think this has anything to do with the hardware. I think we have entered an age where users in general are not upgrading. As such, software can't demand more and more performance. The M1 came out at a time where mostly all hardware innovation had staggered. Default RAM in a laptop has been 16G for over 5 years. 2 years ago, you couldn't even get more than 16 in most laptops. As such, software hardware requirements havent changed. So any modern CPU is going to feel overpowered. This isn't unique to M1's.
      • vlovich1235 小时前
        That’s because today’s hw is perfectly capable of running tomorrow’s software at reasonable speed. There aren’t huge drivers of new functionality that needs new software. Displays are fantastic, cellular speeds are amazing and can stream video, battery life is excellent, UIs are smooth with no jankiness, and cameras are good enough.

        Why would people feel the need to upgrade?

        And this applies already to phones. Laptops have been slowing for even longer.

        • slowmovintarget5 小时前
          Until everything starts running local inference. A real Siri that can operate your phone for you, and actually do things like process cross-app conditions ("Hey Siri, if I get an email from my wife today, notify me, then block out my calendar for the afternoon.") would use those increased compute and memory resources easily.

          Apple has been shipping "neural" processors for a while now, and when software with local inference starts landing, Apple hardware will be a natural place for it. They'll get to say "Your data, on your device, working for you; no subscription or API key needed."

          • vlovich1232 小时前
            That's a very big maybe. The LLM experience locally is currently very very different from the hosted models most people play with. The future is still very uncertain.
      • mixmastamyk5 小时前
        I standardized on 16gb for my laptops over 10 years ago. I keep a late 2013 MBP with 16 for testing projects on, separate from my main Linux box.

        Getting an extra five years of longevity (after RAM became fixed) for an extra 10% was a no-brainer imho.

      • samatman3 小时前
        I upgraded from the last 16" MBP Intel sold to the first 16" MBP M1 available.

        It is absolutely, 100%, no doubt in my mind: the hardware.

    • OskarS5 小时前
      Yep, the same, M1 Pro from 2021. It's remarkable how snappy it still feels years later, and I still virtually never hear the fan. The M-series of chips is a really remarkable achievement in hardware.
    • madeofpalk4 小时前
      Work just upgraded my M1 Pro to M3 Pro and I don't notice any difference except for now having two laptops.
    • gniv5 小时前
      I've had Macs before, from work, but there is something about the M1 Pro that feels like a major step up.

      Only recently I noticed some slowness. I think Google Photos changed something and they show photos in HDR and it causes unsmooth scrolling. I wonder if it's something fixable on Google's side though.

    • jrochkind15 小时前
      I bought my M1 Pro MBP in 2021. Gave it 16G of RAM and a 1TB HD. I plan to keep it until circa 2031.
    • pjmlp4 小时前
      I have a 2009 and a 2018 Windows laptops.

      The only reason the 2009 one now gets little use, is its motherboard now has some electronic issues, otherwise it would serve me perfectly well.

    • danieldk5 小时前
      Same. I used to upgrade every 1.5 years or so. But with every Apple Silicon generation so far I have felt that there are really no good reasons to upgrade. I have a MacBook M3 Pro for work, but there are no convincing differences compared to the M1 Pro.

      In fact, I bought a highly discounted Mac Studio with M1 Ultra because the M1 is still so good and it gives me 10Gbit ethernet, 20 cores and a lot of memory.

      The only thing I am thinking about is going back to the MacBook Air again since I like the lighter form factor. But the display, 24 GiB max RAM and only 2 Thunderbolt ports would be a significant downgrade.

    • erickhill3 小时前
      I have an MBP M1 Max and the only time I really feel like I need more oomph is when I'm doing live previews and/or rendering in After Effects. I find myself having to clear the cache constantly.

      Other than that it cruises across all other applications. Hard to justify an upgrade purely for that one issue when everything else is so solid. But it does make the eyes wander...

    • matthoiland3 小时前
      I feel the same way about my M1 Macbook Air ... it's such a silly small and powerful machine. I've got money to upgrade, I just have no need. It's more than enough for even demanding Logic sessions and Ollama for most 8b models. I love it.
    • 7ewis3 小时前
      I have exactly the same experience, usually after 3 years I'm desperate for new Mac but right now I genuinely think I'd prefer not to change. I have absolutely no issues with my M1 Pro, battery and performance is still great.
    • mark_l_watson4 小时前
      I think regretting Mac upgrades is a real thing, at least for me. I got a 32G Mac mini in January to run local LLMs. While it does so beautifully, there are now smaller LLMs that run fine on my very old 8G M1 MacBook Pro, and these newer smaller models do almost all of what I want for NLP tasks, data transformation, RAG, etc. I feel like I wasted my money.
      • tarruda3 小时前
        Small models retain much less of the knowledge they were trained on, especially when quantized.

        One good use case for 32gb Mac is being able to run 8b models at full precision, something that is not possible with 8-16gb macs

        • Eugr2 小时前
          Or better run quantized 14B or even 32B models...
      • fwip2 小时前
        You can sell it, get most of your money back.
      • xenospn4 小时前
        Which ones in particular? I have an M2 air with 8GB, and doing some RAG development locally would be fantastic. I tried running Ollama with llama3.2 and it predictably bombed.
    • 1R0535 小时前
      probably the next update wave is coming from the need of AI features for more local memory and compute. The software is just not there yet in usual tasks but it's just a question of time I guess. Of course there will be the pressure to do that in the cloud as usual, but local compute will always remain a market.

      and probably it's good that at least one of the big players has a business model that supports driving that forward

    • dagw4 小时前
      The only reason I'd want to upgrade my M1 Pro MBP is because I kind of need more RAM and storage. The fact that I'm even considering a new laptop just for things that before could have been a trivial upgrade is quite illuminating.
    • frantathefranta5 小时前
      Out of curiosity and also because I'm wondering which specification to potentially buy in the future, how much RAM does your MBP have?
    • HumblyTossed4 小时前
      But this ad is specifically for you! (Well, and those pesky consumers clinging on to that i7!):

      > Up to 7x faster image processing in Affinity Photo when compared to the 13‑inch MacBook Pro with Core i7, and up to 1.8x faster when compared to the 13-inch MacBook Pro with M1.

    • kromokromo4 小时前
      100% agree on this. Ive had this thing for 3 years and I still appreciate how good it is. Of course the M4 tingles my desire for new cool toys, but I honestly don´t think I would notice much difference with my current use.
    • prmoustache5 小时前
      > Perhaps it’s my age, or perhaps it’s just the architecture of these new Mac chips are just so damn good.

      I feel the same of my laptop of 2011 so I guess it is partly age (not feeling the urge to always have the greatest) and partly it is non LLM and gaming related computing is not demanding enough to force us to upgrade.

      • data-ottawa5 小时前
        I think the last decade had an explosion in the amount of resources browsers needed and used (partly workloads moving over, partly moving to more advanced web frameworks, partly electron apps proliferating).

        The last few years Chrome seems to have stepped up energy and memory use, which impacts most casual use these days. Safari has also become more efficient, but it never felt bloated the way Chrome used to.

    • jcelerier2 小时前
      Interesting, I have a M2 Pro Mac Mini and I hit limits literally every day
      • bzzzt2 小时前
        All hardware has limits. Which ones are you hitting every day?
    • sylens5 小时前
      Agreed. Also rocking a M1 Pro MBP and can’t see myself replacing it until it dies
    • stouset5 小时前
      I feel exactly the same. The one thing that would get me to pull the trigger on a newer one is if they start supporting SVE2 instructions, which would be super useful for a specific programming project I’ve been playing with.
    • clairegraham3 小时前
      Same. The upgrade from my Intel MBP to the M1 Pro 2011 was huge, but I haven't felt the need to upgrade at all.
    • dawnerd5 小时前
      Guess that’s why most of their comparisons are with the older Intel Macs.
      • Cthulhu_5 小时前
        And M1 from 4 years ago instead of M3 from last year; while a 2x speed improvement in the benchmarks they listed is good, it also shows that the M series CPUs see incremental improvements, not exponential or revolutionary. I get the feeling - but a CPU expert can correct me / say more - that their base design is mostly unchanged since M1, but the manufacturing process has improved (leading to less power consumption/heat), the amount of cores has increased, and they added specialized hardware for AI-related workloads.

        That said, they are in a very comfortable position right now, with neither Intel, AMD, or another competitor able to produce anything close to the bang-for-watt that Apple is managing. Little pressure from behind them to push for more performance.

        • Zafira2 小时前
          Their sales pitch when they released the M1 was that the architecture would scale linearly and so far this appears to be true.

          It seems like they bump the base frequency of the CPU cores with every revision to get some easy performance gains (the M1 was 3.2 GHz and the M3 is now 4.1 GHz for the performance cores), but it looks like this comes at the cost of it not being able to maintain the performance; some M3 reviews noted that the system starts throttling much earlier than an M1.

    • JyB5 小时前
      Same feeling. The jump from all the previous laptops I owned to an M1 was an incredible jump. The thing is fast, has amazing battery life and stays cold. Never felt the need to upgrade.
    • renewiltord5 小时前
      The M1 series was too good. Blows Intel Macs out of the water. But I still have an M1 Max. It’s fantastic.
    • jfoster3 小时前
      I expect this trend to begin reversing as we start getting AI models that are intended to run locally.
    • andrei_says_4 小时前
      I got 6+ years out of my last intel MacBook Pro and expect at least the same from my M1 Max. Both have MagSafe and hdmi output :)
    • matwood4 小时前
      Same. I have an M1 Max 64GB. It has great battery life and I never feel myself waiting on anything. Such an amazing computer all around.
    • fstephany5 小时前
      I have the same feeling performance-wise with the laptop I bought in 2020 with a Ryzen 7 4800H.

      But it's a heavy brick with a short battery life compared to the M1/2/3 Mac.

    • mattgreenrocks5 小时前
      My 2019 Intel MBP is getting long in the tooth. These M4 Pros look great to me.

      The base model is perfect. Now to decide between the M3/M4 Air and the M4 Pro.

      • charliebwrites5 小时前
        I’m using the M3 Air 13 in (splurged for 24 GB of RAM, I’m sure 16 is fine) to make iOS apps in Xcode and produce music in Ableton and it’s been more than performant for those tasks

        Only downside is the screen. The brightness sort of has to be maxed out to be readable and viewing at a wrong angle makes even that imperfect

        That said it’s about the same size / weight as an iPad Pro which feels much more portable than a pro device

    • AISnakeOil5 小时前
      This is how it feels to own a desktop computer.
    • maxvisser5 小时前
      Same for me. The only reason to replace it, is that my M1 pro’s SSD or battery will go bad or if I accidentally drop the machine and something breaks.
      • rbanffy5 小时前
        I am replacing a Dell laptop because the case is cracking, not because it's too slow (it isn't lightning fast, of course, but it sure is fast enough for casual use).
      • fckgw5 小时前
        I replaced my M1 Air battery last year and it's still going like a champ. $129 for another 3 years of life is a bargain.
    • fullspectrumdev5 小时前
      Tbf, the only thing I miss with my M2 MacBook is the ability to run x86_64 VM’s with decent performance locally.

      I’ve tried a bunch of ways to do this - and frankly the translation overhead is absolute pants currently.

      Not a showstopper though, for the 20-30% of complete pain in the ass cases where I can’t easily offload the job onto a VPS or a NUC or something, I just have a ThinkPad.

    • crazygringo4 小时前
      Yup, honestly the main reason I'd like to upgrade from my M1 MBA is the newer webcams are 1080p instead of 720p, and particularly much better in low light like in the evening.

      Has nothing whatsoever to do with CPU/memory/etc.

      • rafaelmn4 小时前
        If you're in the ecosystem get an iphone mount - image quality is unreal compared to anything short of some fancy DSLR setup - it is some setup but not much with magnets in iphone.
    • JodieBenitez4 小时前
      Ditto... will probably upgrade when the battery is dead !
    • digitalsushi5 小时前
      when the hardware wait time is the same as the duration of my impulsive decisions i no longer have a hardware speed problem, i have a software suggestion problem
    • fellowniusmonk5 小时前
      I got an MBP M1 with 32gb of RAM. It'll probably be another 2-3 years or longer before I feel the pressure to upgrade if not longer. I've even started gaming (something I dropped nearly 20 years ago when I switched to mac) again due to Geforce Now, I just don't see the reason.

      Frankly though, if the mac mini was a slightly lower price point I'd definitely create my own mac mini cluster for my AI home lab.

    • jart5 小时前
      I hate to say it but that's like a boomer saying they never felt the need to buy a computer, because they've never wished their pen and paper goes faster. Or a UNIX greybeard saying they don't need a Mac since they don't think its GUI would make their terminal go any faster. If you've hit a point in your life where you're no longer keeping up with the latest technological developments like AI, then of course you don't need to upgrade. A Macbook M1 can't run half the stuff posted on Hugging Face these days. Even my 128gb Mac Studio isn't nearly enough.
      • mrweasel3 小时前
        > If you've hit a point in your life where you're no longer keeping up with the latest technological developments like AI, then of course you don't need to upgrade.

        That's me, I don't give a shit about AI, video editing, modern gaming or Kubernetes. That newest and heaviest piece of software I care about is VSCode. So I think you're absolutely correct. Most things new since Docker and VSCode has not contributed massively to how I work and most of the things I do could be done just fine 8-10 years ago.

      • dsv3099i2 小时前
        That’s interesting because I would’ve thought having strong local compute was the old way of thinking. I run huge jobs that consume very large amounts of compute. But the machines doing the work aren’t even in the same state I’m in. Then again maybe I’m even older as I’m basically on the terminal server / mainframe compute model. :)
      • rconti5 小时前
        I think the difference is that AI is a very narrow niche/hobby at the moment. Of course if you're in that niche having more horsepower is critical. But your boomer/greybeard comparisons fall flat because they're generally about age or being set in your ways. I don't think "not being into AI image generation" is (currently) about being stuck in your ways.

        To me it's more like 3d printing as a niche/hobby.

        • ach9l5 小时前
          on ai being a niche/hobby at the moment... feels like something a unix greybeard would say about guis in the late 70s...
          • vundercind4 小时前
            Playing with them locally? Yes, of course it's a niche hobby. The people doing stuff with them that's not either playing with them or developing not just an "AI" product, but a specific sort of AI product, are just using ChatGPT or some other prepackaged thing that either doesn't run locally, or does, but is sized to fit on ordinary hardware.

            < 1% of all engagement with a category thing is niche/hobby, yes.

          • alluro24 小时前
            I get that you're probably joking, but - if I use Claude / ChatGPT o1 in my editor and browser, on an M1 Pro - what exactly am I missing by not running e.g. HF models locally? Am I still the greybeard without realising?
            • Eugr2 小时前
              Privacy? Lots of companies do not allow using public chatbots for anything proprietary.
            • jart3 小时前
              It's like asking what you're missing by not using Linux if you're using Windows.
          • nonameiguess2 小时前
            It's something a regular person would say to a Unix greybeard, which in and of itself was always and still is a very niche hobby.
          • jart5 小时前
            Or what a prokaryote would say about eukaryotes.
            • alluro24 小时前
              Seems like we've reached the "AI bro" phase...
              • jart3 小时前
                Using the term "bro" assumes that all AI supporters are men. This erases the fact that many women and nonbinary people are also passionate about AI technology and are contributing to its development. By using "AI bro" as an insult, you are essentially saying that women and nonbinary people are not welcome in the AI community and that our contributions don't matter. https://www.reddit.com/r/aiwars/comments/13zhpa7/the_misogyn...
                • wtallis3 小时前
                  Is there an alternative term you would prefer people to use when referring to a pattern of behavior perceived as a combination of being too excited about AI and being unaware (perhaps willfully) that other people can be reasonably be much less interested in the hype? Because that argument could definitely benefit from being immune to deflections based on accusations of sexism.
                  • jart1 小时前
                    When I see that someone is excited about something, I believe in encouraging them. If you're looking for a more polite word to disparage people who love and are optimistic about something new, then you're overlooking what that says about your character. Also AI isn't just another fad like NFTs and web3. This is it. This is the big one.
                • bilbo0s3 小时前
                  Huh?

                  How old are you?

                  "Bro" has been gender neutral for over a decade. Males and females under the age of 25 call each other "bro" all the time.

      • danielbln2 小时前
        I work with AI models all day every day, keep up with everything, love frontier tech, I love and breathe LLMs. And I, like OP, haven't seen the need to upgrade from the M1 MBP because it runs the small 1-7B models just fine, and anything bigger I want on some GPU instance anyway, or I want a frontier model which wouldn't run on the newest and biggest MBP. So it's not just us Boomers hating on new stuff, the M series MacBooks are just really good.
        • jart1 小时前
          I fully support using Macbooks as a thin client into a better computer. So long as it's your computer.
      • gniv5 小时前
        > A Macbook M1 can't run half the stuff posted on Hugging Face these days.

        Example?

        • jart5 小时前
          LLaMA 3.1 405B
          • int_19h3 小时前
            Given that models are only going to get larger, and the sheer amount of compute required, I think the endgame here is dedicated "inference boxes" that actual user-facing devices call into. There are already a couple of home appliances like these - NAS, home automation servers - which have some intersecting requirements (e.g. storage for NAS) - so maybe we just need to resurrect the "home server" category.
            • jart3 小时前
              I agree, and if you want to have the opportunity to build such a product, then you need a computer whose specs today are what a home server would have in four years. If you want to build the future you have to live in the future. I'm proud to make stuff most people can't even run yet, because I know they'll be able to soon. That buys me time to polish their future and work out all the bugs too.
          • chrsw2 小时前
            I thought LLaMA 3.1 405B was a relatively huge model. Is the size of this model really typical of half the models you find on Hugging Face these days?
      • ach9l5 小时前
        you could not say this better than this.
      • nonameiguess2 小时前
        So every user of a computer that doesn't create their own home-grown ML models is a boomer? This can't possibly be a generational thing. Just about everyone on the planet is at a place in their life where they don't make their own AIs.
        • jart1 小时前
          Eventually as the tools for doing it become better they'll all want to or need to. By then, most computers will be capable of running those tools too. Which means when that happens, people will come up another way to push the limits of compute.
    • AtlasBarfed3 小时前
      I don't think there's any sort of processor for the last 10 years. It really makes me feel like I need to upgrade.

      What I do know is that Linux constantly breaks stuff. I don't even think it's treading water. These are interfaces are actively getting worse.

    • drcongo3 小时前
      I also have an M1 Pro MBP and mostly feel the same. The most tempting thing about the new ones is the space black option. Prior to the M1, I was getting a new laptop every year or two and there was always something wrong with them - butterfly keyboard, Touch Bar etc. This thing is essentially perfect though, it still feels and performs like a brand new computer.
    • turnsout5 小时前
      Same boat—I'm on a lowly M1 MacBook Air, and haven't felt any need to upgrade (SwiftUI development, video editing, you name it), which is wild for a nearly 4 year-old laptop.
    • kristofferR5 小时前
      Yeah, I feel like Apple has done the opposite of planned obsolescence with the M chips.

      I have a Macbook Air M1 that I'd like to upgrade, but they're not making it easy. I promised myself a couple of years ago I'll never buy a new expensive computing device/phone unless it supports 120 hertz and Wi-Fi 7, a pretty reasonable request I think.

      I got the iPhone 16 Pro, guess I can wait another year for a new Macbook (hopefully the Air will have a decent display by then, I'm not too keen to downgrade the portability just to get a good display).

      • rbanffy5 小时前
        Apple equipment always last a long time and retain value on the second-hand market.
        • spyckie25 小时前
          Not true. Look at how little supercharged intel apples are going for in Facebook marketplace.

          The quality stuff retains value, not brand.

          • zinckiwi5 小时前
            Comparing against the intel era is a bit apples (excuse me) to oranges. Technical generation gaps aside, Apple products hold value well.
            • spyckie25 小时前
              So the intel era is not Apple products? Butterfly keyboard is not an Apple invention?

              They have the highest product quality of any laptop manufacturer, period. But to say that all Apple products hold value well is simply not true. All quality products hold value well, and most of Apples products are quality.

              I guarantee you that if Apple produced a trashy laptop it would have no resell value.

              Again, the quality holds the value not the brand.

              • rbanffy4 小时前
                It's expected Intel-based Macs would lose value quickly considering how much better the M1 models were. This transition was bigger than when they moved from PowerPC to Intel.
              • microtherion4 小时前
                One complicating factor in the case of the Intel Macs is that an architectural transition happened after they came out. So they will be able to run less and less new software over the next couple of years, and they lack most AI-enabling hardware acceleration.

                That said, they did suffer from some self inflicted hardware limitations, as you hint. One reason I like the MBP is the return of the SD card slot.

      • babblingdweeb5 小时前
        Similar for me. MacBook Air M1 (8 cpu / 8 gpu; 16 GB RAM)...running in or out of clamshell with a 5k monitor, I rarely notice issues. Typically, if I'm working very inefficiently (obnoxious amount of tabs with Safari and Chrome; mostly web apps, Slack, Zoom, Postman, and vscode), I'll notice a minor lag during a video call while screen sharing...even then, it still keeps up.

        (Old Pentium Pro, PII, multi chip desktop days) -- When I did a different type of work, I would be in love with these new chips. I just don't throw as much at my computer anymore outside of things being RAM heavy.

        The M1 (with 16 GB ram) is really an amazing chip. I'm with you, outside of a repair/replacement? I'm happy to wait for 120hz refresh, faster wifi, and longer battery life.

      • JimDabell5 小时前
        > Yeah, I feel like Apple has done the opposite of planned obsolescence with the M chips.

        They always have. If you want an objective measure of planned obsolescence, look at the resale value. Apple products hold their resale value better than pretty much every competitor because they stay useful for far longer.

      • 5 小时前
        undefined
    • bayofpigs2 小时前
      [dead]
    • hughrj5 小时前
      [dead]
  • mrcwinn4 小时前
    Question without judgement: why would I want to run LLM locally? Say I'm building a SaaS app and connecting to Anthropic using the `ai` package. Would I want to cut over to ollama+something for local dev?
    • andrewmunsell4 小时前
      Data privacy-- some stuff, like all my personal notes I use with a RAG system, just don't need to be sent to some cloud provider to be data mined and/or have AI trained on them
    • jwitthuhn3 小时前
      For me it is consistency. I control the model and the software so I know a local LLM will remain exactly the same until I want to change it.

      It also avoids the trouble of using a hosted LLM that decides to double their price overnight, costs are very predictable.

  • cebert3 小时前
    I wish Apple would let me max out the RAM on a lower performance chip. That’s more valuable to me than more compute.
    • dcchambers3 小时前
      I think it's just one of the tradeoffs of having everything on one SOC. They can only realistically and efficiently make so many versions.
  • mattfrommars5 小时前
    Does anyone know if there is a way to use Mac without the Apple bloatware?

    I genuinely want to use it as primary machine but with this Intel MacBook Pro I have, I absolutely dislike FaceTime, IMessage, the need to use AppStore, Apple always asking me have a Apple user name password (which I don't and have zero intention), block Siri, and all telemetry stuff Apple has backed in, stop the machine calling home, etc.

    This is to mirror tools available in Windows to disable and remove Microsoft bloatware and ad tracing built in.

    • wpm2 小时前
      There is zero iCloud account requirement. You do not need to use the App Store. Gatekeeper can be disabled with a configuration profile key. Telemetry (what little there is) can be disabled with a configuration profile key. Siri can be disabled, all of the generative AI crap can be disabled, yadda yadda yadda, with a configuration profile key. Every background service can be listed and disabled if you disable authenticated-root. Hell, you could disable `apsd` and disable all push notifications too, which require a phone home to Apple.
    • alanwreath4 小时前
      IIRC Apple is a lot less heavy handed wrt service login requirements when compared to Microsoft’s most recent Windows endeavors. And depending on the developer you can get around having to use the App Store at all. Being you’re on an Intel Mac have you considered just using Linux ?
    • derr15 小时前
      You don't need to use AppStore, unless of course you want to use apple software.

      Pretty much all the software I use is from brew.

    • dvno423 小时前
      You can use OSX without an Apple account and paired with a 3rd party host based firewall (Little Snitch), the OS usually stays out of your way (imo). Bundled apps can be removed after disabling SIP (file integrity) but there are downsides/maintenance to that route.
    • sliken2 小时前
      At a linux conference I saw many macbooks. Talked to a few, they just ran linux in a VM full screen for programming and related. Then used OSX for everything else (office, outlook, teams, work enforced apps, etc). They seemed very happy and this encouraged them to not task switch as often.
    • alberth5 小时前
      Do you mean you want to use Apple Silicon without macOS?

      If that's your question, yes - various options exist like https://asahilinux.org

    • WesolyKubeczek5 小时前
      You can totally use it without ever signing in to Apple account. You cannot delete Siri etc, but you can disable parts of it and not use the rest.
      • philistine4 小时前
        There used to be this whole contingent of people who were adamant that Apple's software was too opinionated, bloated, that you couldn't adapt its OS to your needs, and that Apple was far too ingrained in your relationship with your device. That Linux was true freedom, but at least that Windows respected its users

        Then Windows 11 came out.

        • int_19h3 小时前
          I belong to that contingent, and I still stand by the assertion that Apple's software is too opinionated, configurability is unreasonably low, and you have to stick to the Apple ecosystem for many thing to get the most out of it.

          My primary desktop & laptop are now both Macs because of all the malarkey in Win11. Reappearance of ads in Start and Windows Recall were the last straws. It's clear that Microsoft is actively trying to monetize Windows in ways that are inherently detrimental to UX.

          I do have to say, though, that Win11 is still more customizable overall, even though it - amazingly! - regressed below macOS level in some respects (e.g. no vertical taskbar option anymore). Gaming is another major sticking point - the situation with non-casual games on macOS is dismal.

        • mixmastamyk4 小时前
          Happened a lot earlier than 11.
    • philistine4 小时前
      You need to embrace Apple's vision, or use something else. Clearly your goals and Apple's are misaligned, so you will only feel pain when using a Mac.

      Get a PC.

    • mixmastamyk3 小时前
      I gave up on macos when they started making the OS partition read-only. A good security feature in general, but their implementation meant that changing anything became a big set of difficulties and trade-offs.

      That, combined with the icloud and telemetry BS, I'd had enough.

  • doctoboggan6 小时前
    Does anyone know of any good deals on the older models of apple laptops? Now is usually a great time to purchase (a still very capable) older model.
    • bigtex5 小时前
      Watch SlickDeals. I think it was this time last year where lots of refurbs/2 generation old machines were going for massive discounts. Granted they were M1 machines, but some had 64GB RAM and 4TB drives for like $2700. Microcenter and B&H are good ones to watch as well.
    • fckgw5 小时前
      Most retailers have had the older models on closeout for a few weeks now. Best Buy, Amazon and Costco have had the M3 models for a few hundred off depending on models.
    • tencentshill5 小时前
      The M-series macbooks depreciate in value far slower than any of the Intel models. M1 base models can still sell for nearly $1k. It's difficult to find a really good deal.
    • 2wrist5 小时前
      The refurbished store is always a good place to have a look through.
  • Vayu2 小时前
    As it goes for the section where they demoed the assistance from apple intelligence to the researcher creating an abstract and adding pictures to their paper. Is it better or worse to do this? People are already complaining so heavily about dead internet theory with the 'AI voice' being so prominent..
  • mcculley6 小时前
    Still, no matter how much you are willing to spend, you cannot buy a MacBook Pro with an LTE modem, like the ones in the iPhone, iPad, and Watch.
    • jitl3 小时前
      Tethering to an iPhone is so easy though - just select it in the Wifi menu. I'm not sure if I'd ever pay for an LTE modem option. I'm sure it would be better efficiency and performance to have it built-in, but I wouldn't think many people care enough about that small difference to offer it as an option.
      • mcculley3 小时前
        I use the tethering quite often. I have for years. It is flaky and burns two batteries instead of one. I agree that many people do not care. Some of us who are traveling a lot are willing to pay for more options.
      • Detrytus3 小时前
        It's not about efficiency or performance, it's about not having to own the iPhone in the first place. Just put a SIM card inside the laptop and forget about it. Windows laptops can even seamlessly switch between wifi and LTE depending on which one is available. But of course Apple would never allow that because they want to force you to own the full set of Apple devices. Laptop being self-sufficient would be against their policy.

        Not to mention that in the US the cell phone carriers artificially limit tethering speed or put data caps on it when you tether from your phone. You have to buy a dedicated data-only plan and modem.

    • trogdor4 小时前
      I wonder if one of the obstacles is the amount of data that would likely be used.

      Most cellular carriers offer unlimited on-device data plans, but they cap data for tethering. Integrating an LTE modem into a laptop essentially requires a mobile data plan with unlimited tethering - which, AFAIK, doesn’t exist at the moment. I’m not sure why.

      • wpm2 小时前
        Integrating an LTE modem into an iPad requires a mobile data plan, and thats about it. It's not "tethered" if its built into the device.

        I've always heard that patent disputes were at the root of the lack of a modem option. Apple had a prototype MacBook Pro back in the early Intel days IIRC but it was never released.

        Maybe if Apple ever gets their in-house modems working, we'll see them on all of the product lines, but until then, it's a niche use case that likely isn't causing them to lose a ton of sales.

        • trogdor1 小时前
          > It's not "tethered" if its built into the device.

          I understand that. My point is that I think an LTE modem in a laptop might reasonably use far more data than an LTE modem in a phone or tablet. Most people who download and/or upload very large files do so on their computer rather than their mobile devices.

      • mcculley3 小时前
        I think the biggest obstacle is the Qualcomm patents. There is no good reason why a MacBook Pro cannot have a feature that Dells have.
  • thesurlydev4 小时前
    My wallet is trembling.

    On a side note, anyone know what database software was shown during the announcement?

  • henry20231 小时前
    The real question is. Can I plug two monitors to it?
    • michelb1 小时前
      You can. And use your laptop screen as the third one.
  • vishnugupta6 小时前
    Can someone please help me out with this? I'm torn between Mac mini and and MacBook Pro, specifically the CPU spec difference.

    MBP: Apple M4 Max chip with 16‑core CPU, 40‑core GPU and 16‑core Neural Engine

    Mac mini: Apple M4 Pro chip with 14‑core CPU, 20‑core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine

    What kind of workload would make me regret not having bought MBP over Mac mini given the above. Thanks!

    • subarctic3 小时前
      Doesn't it make a bigger difference that one of them is a laptop and one of them is a mini computer that you have to leave plugged in?
    • alberth5 小时前
      Since the only real difference is number of GPUs, it'd be:

      - photo/video editing

      - games, or

      - AI (training / inference)

      that would benefit from the extra GPUs.

      • mixmastamyk4 小时前
        ^3D work - Maya, Blender, etc. Probably would be best on a Studio or workstation if/when those are available again.
    • bhouston6 小时前
      For normal web dev, any M4 CPU is good as it is mostly dependent on single core speed. If you need to compile Unreal Engine (C++ with lots of threads), video processing or 3D rendering, more cores is important.

      I think you need to pick the form factor that you need combined with the use case:

      - Mobility and fast single core speeds: MacBook Air

      - Mobility and multi-core: MacBook Pro with M4 Max

      - Desktop with lots of cores: Mac Studio

      - Desktop for single core: Mac mini

      I really enjoy my MacBook Air M3 24GB for desktop + mobile use for webdev: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41988340

  • bloopernova5 小时前
    Trying to find how many external displays the base model supports. Because corps almost always buy the base model #firstworldproblems

    The base model doesn't support thunderbolt 5.

    And the base model still doesn't support more than 2 external displays without the DisplaySync (not DisplayPort!) hardware+software.

    • fckgw5 小时前
      https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/specs/

      "M4 and M4 Pro

      Simultaneously supports full native resolution on the built-in display at 1 billion colors and:

      Up to two external displays with up to 6K resolution at 60Hz over Thunderbolt, or one external display with up to 6K resolution at 60Hz over Thunderbolt and one external display with up to 4K resolution at 144Hz over HDMI

      One external display supported at 8K resolution at 60Hz or one external display at 4K resolution at 240Hz over HDMI"

    • mmcnl5 小时前
      Two displays with the lid open.

      "The display engine of the M4 family is enhanced to support two external displays in addition to a built-in display."

      https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/10/apple-introduces-m4-p...

  • daco3 小时前
    Upgraded to a M1 Pro 14 in December 2021, and I still rock it everyday for dev purpose. Apple does great laptop.

    The only downsides is that I see a kind of "burnt?" transparent spot on my screen. When connecting to an HDMI cable, the sound does not ouput properly to the TV screen, and makes the video I plat laggy. Wondering if I go to the Apple Store, would fix it?

    • david_allison3 小时前
      If you're still under AppleCare+, definitely give it a try before it expires.

      Personal anecdote: don't get your hopes up. I've had my issues rejected as 'no fault found', but it's definitely worth spending a bit of time on.

  • e63f67dd-065b3 小时前
    > MacBook Air with M2 and M3 comes standard with 16GB of unified memory, and is available in midnight, starlight, silver, and space gray, starting at $999 (U.S.) and $899 (U.S.) for education.

    At long last, I can safely recommend the base model macbook air to my friends and family again. At $1000 ($900 with edu pricing on the m2 model) it really is an amazing package overall.

  • david_allison6 小时前
    > MacBook Pro with M4 Max enables:

    > Up to 4.6x faster build performance when compiling code in Xcode when compared to the 16‑inch MacBook Pro with Intel Core i9, and up to 2.2x faster when compared to the 16‑inch MacBook Pro with M1 Max.

    OK, that's finally a reason to upgrade from my M1.

  • hermitcrab1 小时前
    Does it still come with a crappy 1 year warranty?
  • philodeon2 小时前
    To sum up the HN wisdom on Apple Silicon Macs:

    Before the M4 models: omg, Apple only gives you 8GB RAM in the base model? Garbage!

    After the M4 models: the previous laptops were so good, why would you upgrade?

    • hbn1 小时前
      We'll be sure to run our future comments by you to make sure no one contradicts anyone else.
  • emahhh1 小时前
    I'm fighting the urge to get the M4 Pro model so bad right now.
  • azinman26 小时前
    No wifi 7? Are others shipping it?
    • electriclove6 小时前
      Strange because their latest iPhones do have Wifi 7
    • kristofferR6 小时前
      Yup, Wi-Fi 7 devices have been shipping for over a year. My Odin 2 portable game console has Wi-Fi 7.
  • 5 小时前
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  • commandersaki6 小时前
    Hm, the M3 MacBook Pro had a 96GB of ram model (which is what I have). I wonder why it's not an option with the M4.
    • sliken4 小时前
      M2 pro has 256 bit wide memory, mostly benefiting the GPU perf.

      M3 pro has 192 bit wide memory, GPU improvements mostly offset the decrease in memory bandwidth. This leads to memory options like 96GB.

      M4 pro has 256 bit wide memory, thus the factor of 2 memory options.

      • wtallis45 分钟前
        The 96GB option was with the M2 Max and M3 Max chips, not the M2 Pro or M3 Pro.

        DRAM chips don't just come in power of two sizes anymore. You can even buy 24GB DDR5 DIMMs.

    • maxioatic4 小时前
      It is interesting they only support 64gb and then jump to 128gb. It seems like a money play since it's $1,000 to upgrade for 128, and if you're running something that needs more than 64 (like LLMs?) you kind of have no choice.
  • rTX5CMRXIfFG2 小时前
    That ad reveal at the end. Someone in the marketing team must have started doing CrossFit
  • lightoverhead3 小时前
    The machine is great! How is its performance for AI model training? A lot of library and tools are not built for M series chip
    • treprinum1 小时前
      Poor. My M3 Max/128GB is about 20x slower than 4090. For inference it's much better, still much slower than 4090 but it enables working with much larger LLMs albeit at ~10t/s (in comparison, Threadripper 2990WX/256GB does like 0.25t/s). M4 Max is likely going to be ~25% faster than M3 Max based on CPU perf and memory bandwidth.
  • daveisfera4 小时前
    Once they get a MacBook Air with an M4, it will become a viable option for developers and other users that want/need 2 external monitors. Definitely looking forward to that happening.
    • uriah3 小时前
      The M3 Air does support 2 but only with the lid closed
  • smokey_the_bear5 小时前
    I have an M2 Max now, and it's incredible. But it still can't handle running xcode's Instruments. I'd upgrade if the M4s could run the leaks tool seamlessly, but I doubt any computer could.
  • dagmx6 小时前
  • sroussey5 小时前
    No WiFi 7!

    :/

  • nwhnwh1 小时前
    The notch makes me sad.
  • lenerdenator4 小时前
    I'm just some dude, looking at a press release, wondering when Tim Apple is gonna be a cool dude and release the MBP in all of the colors that they make the iMac in.

    APPARENTLY NOT TODAY.

    C'mon mannnnn. The 90s/y2k are back in! People want the colorful consumer electronics! It doesn't have to be translucent plastic like it was back then but give us at least something that doesn't make me wonder if I live in the novel The Giver every time I walk into a meetup filled with MacBook Pros.

    I'm sure the specs are great.

  • commandersaki6 小时前
    New 12MP Center Stage Camera. Will it support 4k?
    • musictubes5 小时前
      4k for videoconferencing is nuts. The new camera should be an improvement over the old. Plus, being able to show your actual, physical desktop can be Andy too. Using your iPhone as the webcam will still probably give you the best quality especially if you are in a lower light situation.
    • Almondsetat5 小时前
      The 12MP will be used for better framing, there is still almost no use case for 4k quality video conferencing
      • bearjaws5 小时前
        It is truly sad how bad Zoom / Google Meet / Teams are when it comes to video quality.

        I look at my local source vs the recording, and I am baffled.

        After a decade of online meeting software, we still stream 480p quality it seems.

        • Almondsetat4 小时前
          When I have a full team of people with 1080p webcams and a solid connection I can notice the quality. Most of the time not everyone fulfills those requirements and the orchestrator system has to make do
        • sroussey4 小时前
          FaceTime has great quality. Unfortunately, as you age you start to hate the quality.
        • fellowniusmonk4 小时前
          I mean you can easily create your own fully meshed P2P group video chat in your browser just using a little bit of JS that would support everyone running 4k, but it will fail the moment you get more than 3-8 people as each persons video stream is eating 25mbps for every side of a peer connection (or 2x per edge in the graph.)

          A huge part of group video chat is still "hacks" like downsampling non-speaking participants so the bandwidth doesn't kill the connection.

          As we get fatter pipes and faster GPUs streaming will become better.

          edit: I mean... I could see a future where realtime video feeds never get super high resolution and everything effectively becomes a relatively seemless AI recreation where only facial movement data is transmitted similar to how game engines work now.

    • perfect-blue6 小时前
      I don't think so. They would have made that a huge deal.
    • minimaxir4 小时前
      Tech specs confirm only 1080p recording.
  • MaxGripe1 小时前
    No OLED yet :(
  • matsz6 小时前
    Wonder how good are those for LLMs (compared to M3 Pro/Max)... They talk about the Neural Engine a lot in the press release.
    • Lalabadie6 小时前
      I'm not sure we can leverage the neural cores for now, but they're already rather good for LLMs, depending on what metrics you value most.

      A specced out Mac Studio (M2 being the latest model as of today) isn't cheap, but it can run 180B models, run them fast for the price, and use <300W of power doing it. It idles below 10W as well.

  • bhouston6 小时前
    Does anyone have benchmarks for the M4 Pro or M4 Max CPUs yet? Would love to see Geekbench scores for those.
  • jerojero6 小时前
    Finally they're doing starting memory at 16gb.

    Looking at how long the 8gb lasted it's a pretty sure bet that now you won't need to upgrade for a good few years.

    I mean, I have a MacBook air with 16gb of ram and it's honestly working pretty well to this day. I don't do "much" on it though but not many people do.

    I'd say the one incentive a MacBook Pro has over the air is the better a screens and better speakers. Not sure if it's worth the money.

    • efields6 小时前
      My hypothesis is Apple is mostly right about their base model offerings.

      > I mean, I have a MacBook air with 16gb of ram and it's honestly working pretty well to this day. I don't do "much" on it though but not many people do.

      If an HN user can get along with 16gb on their MacBook Air for the last X years, most users were able to get by with 8gb.

      • skellington6 小时前
        It's just a tactic to get a higher average price while being able to advertise a lower price. What makes it infuriating is memory is dirt cheap. That extra 8GB probably costs them $10 at most, but would add to utility and longevity of their hardware quite a bit.

        They are supposed to be "green" but they encourage obsolescence.

        • Spooky235 小时前
          They align need with more CPU and margin. Apple wants as few SKUs as possible and as much margin as possible.

          8GB is fine for most use cases. Part of my gig is managing a huge global enterprise with six figures of devices. Metrics demonstrate that the lower quartile is ok with 8GB, even now. Those devices are being retired as part of the normal lifecycle with 16GB, which is better.

          Laptops are 2-6 year devices. Higher end devices always get replaced sooner - you buy a high end device because the productivity is worth spending $. Low end tend to live longer.

        • carlosjobim5 小时前
          People looking for low prices buy PC, they don't even consider Mac. Then they can have a computer with all the "higher numbers", which is more important than getting stuff done.
    • axelthegerman6 小时前
      > pretty sure bet that now you won't need to upgrade for a good few years.

      Or you could get a framework and you could actually upgrade parts that are worth upgrading - instead of upgrade as in buying a new one

      • ativzzz5 小时前
        I bought a framework back in 2020 or so and really wish I just waited a little longer and spent a few hundred bucks more on the M1.

        It's fine, but the issue is linux sleep/hibernate - battery drain. To use the laptop after a few days, I have to plug it in and wait for it to charge a little bit because the battery dies. I have to shut it down (not just close the screen) before flying or my backpack becomes a heater and the laptop dies. To use a macbook that's been closed for months I just open it and it works. I'll pay double for that experience. If I want a computer that needs to be plugged in to work I have a desktop for that already. The battery life is not good either.

        Maybe it's better now if I take the time to research what to upgrade, but I don't have the time to tinker with hardware/linux config like I did a few years ago.

      • jerojero4 小时前
        I don't mind spending a thousand bucks every 7 years to upgrade my laptop. I've had this macbook air since 2020 and besides the speakers don't being the best... I have no complaints.

        I don't really see a world where this machine doesn't last me a few more years. If there's anything i'd service would be the battery, but eh. It lasts more than a few hours and I don't go out much.

  • hit8run1 小时前
    Best time to buy a frame.work Linux Laptop without fomo. I’m done with Apple.
  • 6 小时前
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  • hackerbeat1 小时前
    Can we just get a 32 inch iMac, please?

    I'm getting tired of everything else being updated yet the product most needed is completely being neglected, and for years already.

    And no, I don't wanna buy a separate tiny screen for thousands of dollars.

    I'm also not interested in these tiny cubes you deem to be cool.

  • gjvc4 小时前
    As a proud user of an ARM3 in 1992, I'm pleased to be able to see and say that ARM won in the end.
  • TIPSIO6 小时前
    The keyboard touch button (top right) is objectively hideous and looks cheap. My current TouchBar may be useless but at least looks nice.
  • wslh6 小时前
    I really like these new devices, but I’ve found that the latest MacBook Air (M3) is sufficient for my needs as a manager and casual developer. My MacBook Pro M1 Max has essentially become a desktop due to its support for multiple monitors, but since the Mac Mini M4 Pro can also support up to three external displays, I’m considering selling the MacBook Pro and switching to the Mini. I’ve also noticed that the MacBook Pro’s battery, as a portable device, is less efficient in terms of performance/battery (for my usage) compared to the MacBook Air.

    Regarding LLMs, the hottest topic here nowadays, I plan to either use the cloud or return to a bare-metal PC.

  • wcski3 小时前
    but does it have touch screen -_-
  • matrix871 小时前
    > starting with 16GB of memory

    yeah it's about time

  • aquir5 小时前
    Would it make sense to upgrade from M2 Pro 16 to M4 Pro 16? (both base models) I mean it terms of numbers, more cores, more RAM but everything else is pretty much the same. I am looking forward to see some benchmarks!
    • umanwizard5 小时前
      Completely depends on what your workflow is.
    • sliken4 小时前
      No.
  • alexnewman4 小时前
    I recently switched back to using homemade desktops for most of my work. I’ve been running Debian on them . Still have my Mac laptop for working on the go
  • shrubble6 小时前
    Disingenuous to mention the x86 based MacBooks as a basis for comparison in their benchmarks; they are trying to conflate current-gen Intel with what they shipped more than 4 years ago.

    Are they going to claim that 16GB RAM is equivalent to 32GB on Intel laptops? (/sarc)

    • alsetmusic6 小时前
      Lot's of people don't upgrade on the cadence that users on this forum do. Someone was mentioning yesterday that they are trying to sell their Intel Mac {edit: on this forum] and asking advice on getting the best price. Someone else replied that they still had a 2017 model. I spoke to someone at my job (I'm IT) who told me they'd just ordered a new iMac to replace one that is 11 years old. There's no smoke and mirrors in letting such users know what they're in for.
      • michaelmueller5 小时前
        Yup, I'm a developer who still primarily works on a 2018 Intel Mac. Apple's messaging felt very targeted towards me. Looking forward to getting the M4 Max as soon as possible!
        • trogdor4 小时前
          Oh, wow. You are in for a treat.

          The only downside is that your computer will no longer double as a space heater :p

          • orangecat2 小时前
            Indeed. The one positive feature of the 2019 MBP I briefly had to use was that my cat loved taking naps on it.
      • postexitus6 小时前
        I have a 2013 Macbook Air as a casual browsing machine that's still going strong (by some definition of it) after a battery replacement.
      • izacus6 小时前
        Right, it's obviously that, not a marketing trick to make numbers look much bigger while comparing to old CPUs and laptops :)
        • alsetmusic3 小时前
          Given that they also compare it to an M1 in the same aside, I'd say you're wrong.

          > Up to 23.8x faster basecalling for DNA sequencing in Oxford Nanopore MinKNOW when compared to the 16-inch MacBook Pro with Core i9, and up to 1.8x faster when compared to the 16-inch MacBook Pro with M1 Pro.

    • musictubes4 小时前
      Ben Bejarin said that around 50% of the installed base is still using Macs with Intel chips. You’ll keep hearing that comparison until that number goes down.
    • hu36 小时前
      They are going to milk these horrendous crazy hot x86 thermally throttled macs performance comparisons for a decade.
    • wiremine6 小时前
      It could see it as disingenuous, or a targeted message to those users still on those older x86 machines.
      • Yabood5 小时前
        Exactly how I read it. I have an intel model, and the press release felt like a targeted ad.
  • 4 小时前
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  • jfoster6 小时前
    Have they published this ahead of other pages or is it just me?

    The linked Apple Store page says "MacBook Pro blasts forward with the M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max chips" so it seems like the old version of the page still?

    • jasongill6 小时前
      yes, it's not anywhere but the press release at this time
      • jfoster6 小时前
        Looks like it's updated now.
        • jasongill6 小时前
          yep, just updated a second ago
    • Hamuko6 小时前
      I noticed the same, but it looks like the pre-order link now gives me M4 chips instead of M3.
  • fsflover6 小时前
    > while protecting their privacy

    This is misleading:

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25074959

    "macOS sends hashes of every opened executable to some server of theirs"

    • ilikepi6 小时前
      > This is misleading: ...

      To be fair, the link in this story is to a press release. Arguably there are probably many things in it that can be considered "misleading" in certain contexts.

    • moffkalast6 小时前
      What's the deal with running Linux on these anyway? Could one conceivably set up an M4 mini as headless server? I presume Metal would be impossible to get working if MacOS uses proprietary drivers for it...
      • wmf5 小时前
        Metal doesn't exist under Linux but OpenGL and Vulkan work.
    • whynotminot6 小时前
      [flagged]
  • nightski6 小时前
    I find it very odd that the new iMac has WiFi 7 but this does not... Also it is so aggravating they compare to 3 generations ago and not the previous generation in the marketing stats. It makes the entire post nearly useless.
    • parsimo20106 小时前
      It is very aggravating, but if they advertised a comparison to last year's model and showed you small performance gains you might not want to buy it.

      A more charitable interpretation is that Apple only thinks that people with computers a few years old need to upgrade, and they aren't advertising to people with a <1 year old MacBook Pro.

    • klausa5 小时前
      The iMac doesn’t have WiFi 7.
  • dcchambers6 小时前
    > Now available in space black and silver finishes.

    No space grey?!

    • billti6 小时前
      I don't think they had Space Grey on the M3 models either. That was initially my preference, but I went with the Black and quite like it.
  • adgxh6 小时前
    [flagged]
  • vid6 小时前
    [flagged]
    • Shekelphile4 小时前
      If you’re willing to buy from a retailer you can usually get two or three year financing terms. sell it at the end of the payment term for half (or more) of what you paid in total and get a new one on a similar plan if you want.

      don’t think it’s wise though, i bought a base m1 pro mbp when it launched and don’t feel a need to upgrade at all yet. i’m holding off for a few more years to grab whenever the next major increase in local llm capability and battery life comes.

    • Ancapistani4 小时前
      They have a business lease program - it's super easy to sign up for, and it's not like you have to have an LLC or something.
      • vid1 小时前
        To all these comments, I'm not talking practically for myself, I'm talking about what a revolutionary "think different" company would do for its users and projection into the world. Starting with taking away the friction of changing models and the impact of all these product lines, which sometimes instantly become less valuable (2023's "8GB is more than enough"), would be a good start, and Apple if anyone could amortize this on behalf of their userbase.

        Another observation; I've travelled the world and rarely see people who could use robust, secure products the most (vulnerable people) using Apple products. They're all packing second-tier Samsung or LG Androids and old Windows notebooks (there are decent Samsung, LG, Android, Windows products, but that's not what they have access to).

    • acyou6 小时前
      If you're willing to play, here are plenty of lenders who will finance this purchase.

      If it affects your earning power to that extent, you should probably pony up and save in the long run, probably just a few years until you see returns.

      Caste system usually can't be bypassed by paying a monthly subscription fee.

      I will note that making it a subscription will tend to increase the overall costs, not decrease. In an environment with ready access to credit, I think offering on a subscription basis is worse for consumers?

    • mjlee6 小时前
      I'm not sure about the caste system enforcement idea you have, but plenty of places (including Apple) lease MacBook Pros to businesses.
    • infecto6 小时前
      Huh? My m1 is still kicking strong with little to no reason to upgrade.

      If it matters that much to you just sell the old one and buy the new. That's your subscription.

  • alexashka3 小时前
    The software stack has gotten so bad that no amount of hardware can make up for it.

    The compile times for Swift, the gigabytes of RAM everything seems to eat up.

    I closed all my apps and I'm at 10gb of RAM being used - I have nothing open.

    Does this mean the Macbook Air 8gb model I had 10 years ago would basically be unable to just run the operating system alone?

    It's disconcerting. Ozempic for terrible food and car-centric infrastructure we've created, cloud super-computing and 'AI' for coping with this frankenstein software stack.

    The year of the Linux desktop is just around the corner to save the day, right? Right? :)

    • carstenhag3 小时前
      Memory doesn't need to be freed until a different software needs it.
      • alexashka2 小时前
        I'm referring to what Activity Monitor app tells me in its memory tab - not the underlying malloc/whatever implementation being used.

        It tells me my computer is using 8gb of RAM after a restart and I haven't begun to open or close anything.

        Yikes?

  • prmoustache5 小时前
    Am I allowed to work on my laptop if I don't have a PRO cpu?
    • mathfailure4 小时前
      Only if you work on your hobbies.
  • gigatexal4 小时前
    Lolz the M4 max doesn’t get anything more than 128GB ram in the MacBook? Weird
  • smallstepforman6 小时前
    The adjectives in the linked article are nausiating. Apple’s marketing team fail as decent humans writting such drivel.

    Give us data, tell us whats new, and skip the nonsense buzz filling adjectives.

    To quote Russell Brand, just say he sat down, not that he placed his luscious ass in silk covered trousers on a velvetly smooth chair, experiencing pleasure as the strained thigh muscles received respite after gruelling on their feet watching a lush sunset in a cool summers evening breeze.

    • kps4 小时前
      While we're bashing Apple marketing: `:prefers-color-scheme` is a11y. Take your fucking fashion statements elsewhere.
    • Veen6 小时前
      I'm not sure Russel Brand is the best ambassador for plain English.
    • fckgw6 小时前
      I don't think you understand what a press release is.
    • empath756 小时前
      Most people buying macs don't care about specs, they care about _what they can do_.
  • iluvcommunism5 小时前
    I have an m3 ultra. I don’t think I need to upgrade. I also find it amusing they’re comparing the m4 to the m1 and i7 processors.
    • roopepal2 小时前
      I find it amusing how you answer your own "question" before asking it. Why would they target the marketing material at people who already know they aren't going to need to upgrade?
    • sroussey4 小时前
      There is no M3 Ultra.
  • brailsafe4 小时前
    The base M4 Max only has an option for 36gb of ram!? They're doing some sus things with that pricing ladder again. No more 96gb option, and then to go beyond 48gb I'd have to spend another $1250 CAD on a processor upgrade first, and in doing so lose the option to have the now baseline 512gb ssd
    • brailsafe2 小时前
      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 with the same processor, I can select 64gb for the insane price of an additional $750cad, but it's just not available on the macbook pro M4 Pro.

      It would indeed have been nice to see a faster response rate screen, even though I value picture quality more, and it also would have been nice to see even vaguely different colors like the iMac supposedly got, but it seems like a nice spec bump year anyway.

    • 3 小时前
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