This makes sense to me. Very few people are upgrading the M2 laptops they bought earlier this year. I'm finally in the market to move from Intel because visionPro dev requires Apple Silicon. Also - last Intel laptops were less than 4 years ago. Even as a power user I only upgrade every 3-5 years - regular users even less.
They compared to both in all the charts I saw. I expect most people with any interest in upgrading are on M1 or lower, so it makes sense from that POV.
This is either to make the performance improvement bigger or to target user with m1 because they know most of their users are still using m1? (Me included with M1 pro and M1 max)
The perf difference though is still impressive compared to m2. It is bigger than the m2 > m1 upgrade
this year’s model is this many percentage points faster than the first chance they had to ditch the intel mac, and the mental math for converting whatever they internalized to decide to hold out to a comparison against the m3 should be easy.
some early adopters will salivate, some will pull the trigger, but the holdouts should be near their breaking points. the fear of shipping dates slipping due to early adopters with fomo will drive holdouts further towards the cliff.
I feel like it's Apple realizing (I mean they likely already knew it, but this is sorta publicly saying it) that people are not going to upgrade their Mac's every year like many do for iPhones. Or likely even every 2 years.
So I think the focus on Intel and M1 (but still showing M2 but just not saying it out loud) was the right call.
I wouldn't be surprised if when the M4 roles around we are still hearing about M1, but maybe they drop intel by that point.
Even 2% I would not call "virtually no one". 232 million iPhones were sold in 2022, 2% of that is still 4 million iPhones.
However looking at another survey of specifically iPhone users I see as high as 36%.
Going further, of those that upgrade every year how many of those are getting the highest pro models?
Or are subscribed to Apple iPhone Upgrade Program. Even if they are a lower portion of the population they are a consistent and important part of the population.
Both, and also some to the old Intel machines. This is probably more relevant for actual purchasers; approximately no-one would be going from M2 to M3.
First thing I noticed since I'm sitting here in Mountain View looking at a nice sunset just above the horizon (or specifically, the Santa Cruz mountains), so nope, not close to dark yet. Maybe another hour.
Its just so strange to me that they can release some of the most powerful and efficient hardware we have ever seen, and show it off by telling us we can now (checks notes…) check off tasks in a widget on our desktop.
> They really shouldn't mention the weather until they fix that app.
After your edit: What a pity! I thought to have just read a great one-liner about the climate crisis and how tech people want to solve everything applying tech.
My biggest pet peeve: Apple has decided to convey low/high temperatures different than standard. Every major weather agency and app advertises the daily low as the low temperature during the night following the advertised high. Apple, on the other hand, advertises the lowest temperature during that calendar day.
This is a small but crucial difference. If I want to know the coldest temperature it will reach tonight, I need to look at the hourly forecast, because it's quite possibly that the low for today will be for 1am this morning (the past) whilst the low for tomorrow will be 11pm tomorrow, without an advertised daily low for tonight.
At times it seems very averse to tell me about perception on the main screen ... EXCEPT the notifications where it sends me double notifications about rain, snow, whatever all the time, and it's right maybe 15% of the time, maybe.
Apple's lack of serious long-term dedication to 3D gaming is such a self-own that makes their 3D gaming benchmarks feel weak & thin.
I'm hopeful the Game Porting Toolkit + advances in this years macOS (Gaming Mode, better support with MoltenVK and SPIRV-Cross, etc) start a publishing shift toward macOS as a target platform, but I can absolutely see Apple taking their foot off the gaming gas pedal again.
I was just reading something related to that (can't remember the text) but the gist was that improvement in hardware do not follows software as they try to limit the control that the user has over that hardware.
My own impressions after 4 years with apple devices is that there is no expert mode on the Mac. It, and the iPhone and the iPad, are computing appliances, something you use to get work done. They either work for you, or they don't. The mac is more flexible than the others, but the whole ecosystem is trending towards making your workflows fitting the tools, not the tools fitting to the workflow.
You can go and find a solution for most of the shackles, but then you're likely to break down the whole system as it was not designed to be that way. The mac is fragile in terms of customizability. It's not that it's preventing running software, it's that it may break down if you do! (not that the others are better, but at least they're trying to be more resilient).
You can bypass notarization easily and SIP. By opaque apps you mean everything is not open source? What do you want to be able to do “unsolder the memory from the chip”?
Transparent apps for me means configurable up to the option of deleting them and replacing it for someone else. Instead of the tight coupling we have now in MacOS, I'd like to have federated applications bound by protocols instead of needing to update the whole system to add a single feature or fix a bug. I don't think you can delete stock apps without disabling SIP or something.
I don't need to unsolder the chips, or do anything hardware wise, but I'd like to be able to use the hardware without the OS if needs be. That's why I say it's an appliance. It makes sense in terms of business, but it's not like the user is free to use the device how he wants.
> What the heck are you talking about? What types of apps do you think you can’t find alternatives for on the Mac?
It's not about finding alternatives. I did for a lot of mac's default. It's about replacing the default option. On Ubuntu, you can remove the default login screen and use KDE's panel alongside the i3 window manager. Because they're not tightly coupled together. Imagine if you could have replace the MacOs top bar, because it is a program that just answers to some IPC protocol? Or the window manager would expose windows and their placements so you could script a layout without the accessibility workaround.
> And why wouldn’t you want SIP by default?
I want it, which is why it's not disabled on my computers. But I'd like to set my own snapshot of what I meant to preserve instead of Apple's.
> Do you run your Linux box using root?
I don't but I'm always a real sudoer and I have the capability to do `su root` anytime.
As I've said, it's about expert mode, not something on by default, but that can be and the system has been built to support it.
It’s more like something that would be nice to have because experts will always wants to build tools that will fit them, not just take something off the shelf. It’s like the kindle reader which are perfectly fine for reading books, but some people want the perfect experience (according to them). So they will jailbreak it and install koreader which is the expert mode of reading ebooks.
I like Apple’s hardware. And I use the software. But it’s always a convenience for me, not something that fits how my mind would like to use it.
With no disrespect to Steve, we might have to settle on a better standard of computation than one that was designed to reinforce a trillion-dollar business model.
> Imagine if you could have replace the MacOs top bar, because it is a program that just answers to some IPC protocol?
That is irrelevant in the bigger scheme of things. I grew out of that tinkering phase after I was a student running Gentoo for a few years. Eventually most of us just need to get shit done. The default top bar is fine. It works. Virtually no one gives a f*** about replacing that. You are in the 0.0000001% and Apple will never cater to that. You can install Asahi Linux on Mac and play with the login screen there.
If you want to spend your time being productive/in the zone that’s what you want. Your workflows are in the music or movie production or graphic/3D app, etc… Macs always were about running apps and doing all your work there.
It’s like the difference between having a car for mechanics projects and racing vs actually needing to go from A to B reliably when you need it.
I get why they are calling out vs M1/Intel as this is primarily targeted at getting folks to upgrade but it is kind of annoying that they aren't emphasizing the incremental vs the last generation. Also, the callout to AI developers to get an ok GPU but with 128 GB of unified RAM is pretty smart.
For training you want the best NVIDIA card you can afford. Doesn't make much sense to use a laptop for training IMHO. There is an argument that the M3 Max is the best non-datacenter chip for inference with the ability to scale to 128 GB of memory.
Something like a better screen, wireless, camera, weight reduction, ports, gaming initiative, I don’t know, something more exciting than just a spec bump.
> Basecalling for DNA sequencing in Oxford Nanopore MinKNOW is up to 20x faster than the fastest Intel-based MacBook Pro and up to 36 percent faster than the 16‑inch MacBook Pro with M1 Pro.
What does the average consumer know about basecalling?
I mean, they are still selling just consumer electronics. Scientists and industry use Linux and Windows, and speed isn't the main reason.
There's an entire industry of consumer products that take massive amounts of compute called "gaming". Apple could have showed off the chips performance at that.
Or at least something like photo or video editing?
> I mean, they are still selling just consumer electronics. Scientists and industry use Linux and Windows
Anyone who's worked at a research university knows Macs are popular among professors, researchers and students. These folks also start companies and work in industry and they generally don't switch platforms unless it's absolutely necessary.
A lot of marketing is aspirational though. People want what the pros use. If it's their top hobby or they aspire to becoming one of those pros... then they want the best, no limits if they can afford it. Even if many of those buyers realistically never will hit those limits.
I suspect that impulse sells a lot of MBPs, DSLRs back in the day, Photoshop licenses, sports cars, high end ski gear, etc. etc.
As expected, this aged perfectly well for the M3 3 year prediction [0] and the competition is already left in the dust before they tried catching up towards the M1.
Now that Apple Silicon has stabilized for software support, it looks like a great upgrade from those stuck on Intel laptops since 2020 or below.
Not really? Qualcomm just showed off benchmarks beating M2 and all we have to go off is Apple's dubious relative graphs that have been essentially lies before (3090). We will see how they really stack up when both are in shipping products.
It already exists? You can buy ARM Windows devices right now. I'm typing this on one. The x86/x64 emulator is pretty good but performance is limited by the slower CPUs.
We can already use the Windows x86/x64 emulator. Unless you have specifics that Snapdragon X Elite performs worse under it than current chips we can expect about 60% the performance. Rosetta 2 is about 75%. Based on Qualcomm's Geekbench 6 numbers it'll have about the same x86/x64 performance as the M1.
If you watched the video then you'd have seen most of the slides also featuring M2 comparisons. Though, not very impressive changes. Not enough for me to upgrade at least.
is this why m2 mackbook pro has such terrible pixel response times? swiping work spaces becomes a blurry mess, not seen displays this bad since we moved from CRT to LCD
Going to be looking for outside validation of that Max GPU performance before making a buy decision, I think. Biggest hopes for this generation were dramatically better GPU performance--and Apple says they've got it--but we'll have to see how that actually pans out.
I was also hoping for a fourth USB4/TB4 port, which doesn't seem to be coming. Oh well.
From a marketing/product positioning perspective, I liked that Apple was focusing on performance per watt as their main selling metric. Yes it's fast and you can likely advertise on that alone, but the per-watt performance is just leagues ahead of everyone else, especially with them being the first to release with TSMC's 3nm fab.
The 22hr advertised battery life is definitely a side effect of this. I'm super curious how long it ends up lasting in real-world tests.
Today, we saw independent benchmarks of Qualcomm's new 4nm chip that provided 50% (Geekbench) to 100% (Cinebench) more multicore performance than M2, while using 23W. And it can efficiently encode AV1. Maybe M4 will catch up.
Well, benchmarks are nice. But a processor is not an end user product. How do you think this is going to be as a product once you put it in a PC running Windows - especially as Microsoft struggles trying to get third party apps on ARM and MS’s own substandard x86 emulator
I had a Thinkpad X13s for a while that worked quite well except for a video issue (used pawn shop purchases are a risk like that). Firefox, Edge, and MS Office worked great natively on ARM. LibreOffice worked just fine via the MS x86 emulator. And the X13s had the old Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 with less than half the performance. Granted, I wasn't doing any heavy lifting with it the month I had it.
I mainly got it to test out my PortableApps.com stuff running under ARM. I'm doing it now on a Macbook Air M1 with Windows 11 running under UTM.
I got it to handle 3 things: a laptop I can use as a laptop for basic stuff and to use to remote in to my development desktop at home, a Windows ARM machine I can test my Windows x86/x64/ARM64 software on, and a Mac to test out my software running under macOS via Wineskin. It's a little clunky but it works for all 3.
My original set was a regular full-fat Windows laptop, a super-cheap used Galaxy Book Go Gen1, and a used Intel Mac Mini. I later replaced the Windows laptops with the Thinkpad 13s. If it hadn't had video issues, I'd still be using that. But a used base model Macbook Air M1 serves the purpose for now.
I'll likely switch back to an Apple Silicon Mac Mini and a Windows laptop of some sort later as I much prefer a Windows laptop to my current Macbook.
I don't use Windows. The Raspberry Pi has great Linux support, and the Linux Geekbench scores were even higher than in Windows. Unfortunately, I couldn't find Linux Geekbench scores in the 23W configuration.
This also shows the power of marketing. ChromeOS is a subset of Linux -- it doesn't do anything you couldn't always have done with Ubuntu. But for years people said that normal people don't want Linux, it doesn't run their apps, they can't use it.
One company shows up with a marketing budget and it's got triple the market share and is now up to the level that Mac traditionally held when all of the things "nobody makes for Linux" because "nobody uses it" supported that.
We're also at the point where things like bank websites don't "officially" support Linux, but as a general rule they don't have any problems on it, and if they did have problems it would be a problem the bank has to deal with instead of a problem the customer has to deal with.
Without the ecosystem who wants Windows? And what will it do for reputation of the vendor or Microsoft when people can't run their apps.
People are already buying non Apple ARM laptops. They are called Chromebooks. They can run Linux apps and Android apps. And thats more than most consumers would expect.
Many schools in the US provide their students with laptops and Chromebook is the overwhelming favorite. The student has to return the laptop at the end of the year. As an anecdote, I know of no one who bought a Chromebook for personal use. My friends, colleagues and acquaintances are buying Macs or Windows machines if they want a laptop, iPads or Android tablets if they just want a tablet.
In a way, Google's strategy of getting Chromebooks into schools may have backfired as they're largely seen as kids' computers.
They are in use by the millions in schools. I have one and I really like, can run android apps, chrome web browser, and in the crostini linux system I can run any apps, dev tools, web browsers, emacs, and it is native. I like it better than raw linux because of the built in android support.
I gave chromeos laptops to my family because they aren't trustworthy. Now they have reliable laptops and don't get virus infections or os problems.
That's a complicated story. No one really wants surveillance capitalism. I don't think google copies what I'm doing on my chromebook, but almost every website has google tracking. Chrome has google tracking. You can use non-chrome browsers on chrome os, they are all there via the linux subsystem. You can also run the android ones.
I can not fathom the level of incompetence by vendors to want to install Windows on ARM devices.
1. The only reason you make people deal with Windows is backwards compatibility.
2. When you advertise it as a Windows laptop people will expect to be able to run their apps (they expect backwards compatibility). RIP your reputation and support inbox.
Yes, it will be harder to sell when it runs Linux. But it's the correct expectations management and at least it will suck less.
Oh well. This is what Google will do with their Chromebooks. Windows on ARM has the same future as the Windows Phone.
It's slower and one of the main things people want Windows to run is games. Also, games are one of the things emulation systems are most likely to break, because games use all kinds of weird performance hacks and come with heinous anti-cheat systems.
Intel and AMD should get ahead of the curve and put some real support behind desktop linux, which has an actual path to ARM adoption for a much larger portion of its software.
But then again at least one of them should have been doing that 20 years ago.
What you didn't mention is that the Snapdragon X Elite has 12 high performance cores, making it a M2 Max competitor and not an M2 competitor, at least on the CPU side. The GPU is disappointing with no ray tracing support.
I am going to go out on a limb and suggest that Qualcomm's pre-production benchmarks are of no value and the actual performance of real devices will be worse than Apple.
To be fair, I don't think many would have trusted that Apple's M1 chips were going to be as good as they were before they were actually in consumers hands. I'll reserve judgement too until that's the case.
That’d be pretty incredible if it plays out in reality once products are released. Though it sounds too good to be true.
I’m skeptical since Qualcomm has failed for years to catch up to Apple processors in the smartphone market. So why would their first effort in desktop processors be so much better?
There's actually a good reason. In short, a large portion of the apple silicon team ended up leaving a few years ago to could start a new company named Nuvia. Their goal was to produce high performance chips for the enterprise/server market, and they had some very aggressive performance targets [1].
Then, in early 2021 Qualcomm ended up acquiring Nuvia, and these new chips are the first showings of this acquisition. Naturally there's a lot of hype since said team represents a lot of the talent that made apple silicon so good in the first place.
Apple Silicon was great because Apple had invested huge amounts of resources for a decade on smartphone processors first, not because they had some kind of geniuses on the project.
It is no doubt promising that Qualcomm has brought in more talent, but it still takes time and effort to turn that into a best-in-class product. I’m not saying it’s impossible, though I’ll be skeptical of the hype until I see a real product.
Sure, but they’ve been behind the whole time. It’s not like they’ve been trading blows each generation with Apple.
If the premise is that Qualcomm hired a team of super talented engineers who can build a product that competes with Apple, then those engineers will still need time to develop a product.
Again, maybe their new processors will be everything they claim. It’s possible for this to happen. I’m just not willing to buy into the hype yet.
> Apple Silicon was great because Apple had invested huge amounts of resources for a decade on smartphone processors first, not because they had some kind of geniuses on the project.
Given that they were confident enough to leave and start their own company, I'm not sure this is true. Indeed I wouldn't discount the value of high talent density.
> I’ll be skeptical of the hype until I see a real product.
They have shown real hardware demos [1] to reviewers already, and the numbers look solid. Obviously there are no comparisons vs M3 yet, but it seems promising.
Is the assumption here Apple has developed a business process for building best-in-class CPUs while treating its engineering workforce as fungible commodities? If so they've succeeded in doing what Intel has been trying to do for decades.
Not one or two Geniuses, but a really good team. They lost supposedly key members of that team which threw them off track. An organisation can recover from this, but it takes time and money. Not everyone likes to work under Apple-like working conditions towards Apple's goals.
> Apple Silicon was great because Apple had invested huge amounts of resources for a decade on smartphone processors first, not because they had some kind of geniuses on the project.
Right, and the guys who learned all the hard-won lessons along the way walked out the door to start a company, bringing along expert knowledge of Apple's designs and processes. And then Qualcomm bought them.
So on a surface level it seems implausible that QC could produce such a chip. But when you zoom out and go "oh, Qualcomm effectively bought Apple's senior chip engineers" it starts to make more sense.
It would be like if Qualcomm's top modem engineers started a company, which Apple bought. And then a couple years later Apple's long-running modem project mysteriously turned a corner and was ready to launch an exceptional modem. Like yeah, no kidding.
So yes, we need to see independent benchmarks and make sure it's not hype. But it's not so unbelievable that Apple's former top engineers could also produce a good a chip for another company. There's nothing magical about the Apple office--it's the engineers.
Engineering something as complex as a CPU is a long process regardless of how smart and experienced your engineers are. I mean, you can certainly speed it up with great talent, but there is still long and hard work to do with any difficult engineering challenge.
I’m not saying there’s something special about Apple other than the scale of their investment over a long period of time.
It’s the same deal for Qualcomm and their 5G modems. Apple no doubt has hired many talented engineers to make a custom 5G modem. But Qualcomm’s modem is still the best one around. It’s hard to catch up because Qualcomm has been investing heavily in that space for a very long time.
Again, that’s not to say Apple won’t ever catch up. Just that I wouldn’t expect that their first effort will be better than Qualcomm’s modems.
Nuvia has been working on this tech for years before being snapped up by Qualcomm. And before that, those same engineers had worked on Apple silicon for years. Why do you keep thinking this is an overnight thing?
To be fair it’s a bit of a myth that only mobile cares about efficiency and thermal management. It is definitely a factor for HPC and server too.
Apple scaled iPhone first designs up to the M* Ultra chips. Going from HPC to a mid wattage laptop is definitely serious work, but I don’t think it’s impossible. Especially with ARM.
The whole point of this thread is that those same Apple engineers made these Qualcomm chips.
Yes. Apple iterated over many, many years. Learning so much along the way about how to make performant, efficient ARM designs.
And then a bunch of the most important of those guys left to start their own company.
And then Qualcomm bought that company.
Y’all are acting like a few college kids from Stanford made Qualcomm a new CPU over their summer internship. “It takes longer than that to make a good CPU.” Yah no shit!
You are taking crazy pills. Making a high performance chip requires more than just having a bunch of talented and experienced engineers. Is it a necessary requirement? Sure! But it’s far from sufficient.
Apple brought on PA Semi and then slowly iterated on actually shipping hardware for years. They didn’t hire PA Semi and have a best-in-class product on the first go.
And those same guys who slowly iterated on shipping hardware for Apple for years are at Qualcomm now.
Are you saying it’s a requirement that these guys ship a crappy chip first? Why? They already know how to make good ones.
Can you tell me what more they need other than their talent and years of experience to make a good chip? Because if it’s just “I demand they make a bad chip now because they’ve changed logos on their corporate polos” I don’t think this conversation has anywhere to go.
Anecdotally, I've been able to use my M2 Max MacBook Pro for 12 hours straight with 50% battery at the end of the day. Nothing intensive, just Chrome, Emacs, Spotify, Slack, Discord, etc.
My 14" M1 Pro rarely got more than 7 hours and my former work 16" M1 Pro more than 9 on a React workflow. When introducing VM work or anything fairly heavy to the mix take 2 hours off each. Typically at 50-60% brightness, have iStat showing load so I can catch any errant processes.
My biggest issue with this release is no published improvements in battery life. 22 hrs is for movie watching. Wireless web - of course very low load - is still 15 for the 16" and 12 for the 14", same as M2 Pro which is each just 1 hour more than the M1 Pro.
I almost never touch the brightness. It does what it wants. Not sure. Looks like it's at about 1/3 right now, but it'd be brighter if it weren't kinda cloudy here, I bet.
Program choices matter a lot. I gained about 30% battery life switching from Chrome to Safari, years back. I do have Teams and MS Outlook running all the time on that machine though, and they're not exactly slim.
Historically, though, focusing on performance per watt is a technique that hardware companies use to distract from otherwise not very impressive concrete performance improvements. You'd expect a new process node and chip shrink to bring modest performance per watt improvements even with largely identical designs. When it comes to GPUs, this has been combined with actually increasing the power draw to make the generational performance improvement look more impressive; so technically, performance per watt would improve, but the footprint would still increase, and yet the performance improvement would still be rather lackluster for any given price bracket. (This especially because you're competing with last generation's current street prices and used prices: if I can get a used M2 machine that's competitive in performance to a new M3 machine in the same price bracket, it might be more worthwhile.)
That's not to say there's no value in focusing on energy efficiency, especially for laptop chips; Apple Silicon was leagues ahead in energy efficiency when it launched, even if the gap is a lot smaller with newer Ryzen mobile chipsets. And speaking of Ryzen, the 5950X is a paragon of performance-per-watt in a desktop chip, which is of course still just as great as it makes it easier to power, cool and overclock. It's more to say that a shift toward focusing on energy efficiency could signal that they may be hitting road blocks in unlocking substantial performance improvements through better chip design alone, which of course makes sense, as its not like you can just linearly come up with design improvements every year forever, and they already came out swinging with their first generation chips.
The other point here is that "performance per watt" is how you get "performance" when single-thread performance is hard, because it lets you fit more cores into the same TDP. The top end EPYC 9754 that will stomp basically anything has a 360W TDP but that's for 128 cores, which is less than 3W/core.
The trouble for Apple is that although you can do this, they're paying the highest bid for first access to TSMC's new process, and doubling the core count would have used that much more die area. Which might have delayed the release as it takes more time to build up stock. So now we're into this weirdness where they give you a 22 hour battery life (how often are people awake for that many hours straight?) but they're getting outperformed by the Ryzen 7000 HX line on the older generation process node because it has more cores.
> Historically, though, focusing on performance per watt is a technique that hardware companies use to distract from otherwise not very impressive concrete performance improvements.
Before Apple came along and made people realize PPW is pretty damn important in the mobile/laptop space.
It's definitely something that at least vendors knew was important. However, ARM/AArch64 chips already decimated x86 in performance per watt even when x86 chips generally had a process advantage. But ARM laptops generally sucked. Yes, the battery life was excellent: even a crummy Samsung Series 5 Chromebook delivered pretty impressive battery life for its light weight and price. But the performance? Yeah it was shit. Good enough for a few tabs of Chrome and nothing more, honestly not so bad. But the calculus for phones definitely worked out in ARM's favor.
But that's the thing. Sufficient performance per watt is very important. Improvements to performance per watt are rarely unwelcome. However... you can mislead people regarding generational improvements when touting performance per watt metrics. If the design didn't actually improve much, a new process node and pumping more power in can cover a bit. Pretty much every vendor does this at some point, and even if Apple isn't currently doing this, pivoting towards touting the efficiency improvements rather than the raw performance is not a good sign, especially considering that these chips go in desktops too, and Apple still has some ground to cover if it wants to compete fully with high end desktop CPUs from the PC market.
perf per watt is not new and it is not just marketing hype, it is the limiting factor for not only notebooks but desktop gpus and cpus. the envelope is power vs. heat vs. performance. increasing perf per watt will let you do more in that envelope, whether it is in a notebook with batteries, or in a desktop with giant coolers holding you back.
yeah it is indefensible to me at this point that the base chips are still limited to one external display.
I was willing to cut them some slack with the original M1 chip, thinking there might be a decent technical reason for it with their first generation of laptop/desktop chips, but three years later it is absurd
> it is indefensible to me at this point that the base chips are still limited to one external display
They’re the base chip for a reason. Why would you add a feature a small fraction of that chip’s users would use when you can use that space for something else?
> Why would you add a feature a small fraction of that chip’s users would use when you can use that space for something else?
Because it is a basic feature! I am not asking for the moon here, I have no idea why the idea that a laptop should support more than one external monitor is controversial on this site.
Not according to Apple. And, frankly, not according to me. Most laptop users will never hook up an external monitor. They don't need to. That's a fair base case.
Also for SD card. I bet that many Macbook users who don't regularly work on photos/videos (e.g. developers) has very little use for SD card reader. And indeed it doesn't exist on MacBook Air. Somehow that is deemed essential on Macbook Pro.
But for $1,599 you must be really deep into Apple's shoe to say 8GB and one external monitor is ok.
I agree that it isn't complicated, for completely different reasons though.
Supporting multiple external monitors is such a basic feature, it is absurd that apple insists on using it to differentiate products.
it's akin to making me shell out $400 extra dollars if I want the laptop to have a trackpad, or if I want both the left and right halves of the screen to work
It is a basic feature. I dare you to find a single laptop not made by Apple with an MSRP of $1000+ that only does a single external monitor that's currently sold. If all your competitors have it, it's table stakes.
Sure SOME people can tolerate it or are dumb enough to reward Apple for it, but it doesn't make a basic feature premium.
Quite a lot. A laptop screen + external monitor is an awkward solution. Display size and pixel density issues make it annoying to navigate the combined desktop environment. I have very little interest in doing so, personally -- if I'm using an external monitor, I'm generally never using my laptop screen.
It's a $1600 laptop. It's sort of excusable on a $400 one. Not $1600 or even $700. Should $2000 be the bar for 2 external monitors? The OLD 2016 13" $1500 could do 2 external monitors. The 2020 Intel i3 MBA which was $999 could do two.
But at least it can use a dongle to utilize 2 or more external monitors. The point is the base M1/M2/M3 cannot use 2 external monitors. At all. No matter how many dongles you buy.
Whatever opinions I have against Apple I just cannot deny their ability to not only innovate but also deliver every year. I wonder just how far into the future they're working on stuff internally at the company. Well done to this company.
It’s like they can do nothing wrong. Everything seems so meticulously worked out and competent. Nothing good can last forever. Wonder how many more good years Apple has left.
Right at the end at the beginning of the credits it said it was shot on an iPhone 15 Pro and edited on a Mac. I think it might have been an MBP M3 Max… flashed by so fast. It’s fascinating that it was shot entirely on a phone.
The thin gradient text they used is out of step with most modern advertising, and even their own, I wonder what kind of advertising/design philosophy they're trying to push
To be honest, Act 3 has ridiculous frame drops on a dedicated GPU. Act 2 is also heavy but Baldur’s Gate (the town) is just very graphically heavy for some reason. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s just that same performance issue.
I'm surprised there's still no pro chip for the iMac, and I guess at this point we should assume there never will be. It's a shame. Give me a 27" M3 Pro with target display mode, and I'd be awfully tempted.
As it is, there's nothing (other than that new color) that tempts me to update from my 16" M1 Pro, but I didn't expect there to be. I suspect I won't be eyeing upgrades until at least M5 and more realistically M6.
that, and the missing 27" iMac, seemed to very keenly indicate that if you want more power or more pixels, Apple will push you to buy a Mini + a Studio Display.
439 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 401 ms ] threadThe perf difference though is still impressive compared to m2. It is bigger than the m2 > m1 upgrade
this year’s model is this many percentage points faster than the first chance they had to ditch the intel mac, and the mental math for converting whatever they internalized to decide to hold out to a comparison against the m3 should be easy.
some early adopters will salivate, some will pull the trigger, but the holdouts should be near their breaking points. the fear of shipping dates slipping due to early adopters with fomo will drive holdouts further towards the cliff.
So I think the focus on Intel and M1 (but still showing M2 but just not saying it out loud) was the right call.
I wouldn't be surprised if when the M4 roles around we are still hearing about M1, but maybe they drop intel by that point.
However looking at another survey of specifically iPhone users I see as high as 36%.
Going further, of those that upgrade every year how many of those are getting the highest pro models?
Or are subscribed to Apple iPhone Upgrade Program. Even if they are a lower portion of the population they are a consistent and important part of the population.
Charitably, its more realistic. Not many people upgrading from M2 to M3.
I guess they never said it was a live-streamed presentation..
After your edit: What a pity! I thought to have just read a great one-liner about the climate crisis and how tech people want to solve everything applying tech.
This is a small but crucial difference. If I want to know the coldest temperature it will reach tonight, I need to look at the hourly forecast, because it's quite possibly that the low for today will be for 1am this morning (the past) whilst the low for tomorrow will be 11pm tomorrow, without an advertised daily low for tonight.
At times it seems very averse to tell me about perception on the main screen ... EXCEPT the notifications where it sends me double notifications about rain, snow, whatever all the time, and it's right maybe 15% of the time, maybe.
no one intends to play it.
that it can be played is the important part.
I'm hopeful the Game Porting Toolkit + advances in this years macOS (Gaming Mode, better support with MoltenVK and SPIRV-Cross, etc) start a publishing shift toward macOS as a target platform, but I can absolutely see Apple taking their foot off the gaming gas pedal again.
My own impressions after 4 years with apple devices is that there is no expert mode on the Mac. It, and the iPhone and the iPad, are computing appliances, something you use to get work done. They either work for you, or they don't. The mac is more flexible than the others, but the whole ecosystem is trending towards making your workflows fitting the tools, not the tools fitting to the workflow.
- Opaque apps
- Locked down hardware
- SIP,...
You can go and find a solution for most of the shackles, but then you're likely to break down the whole system as it was not designed to be that way. The mac is fragile in terms of customizability. It's not that it's preventing running software, it's that it may break down if you do! (not that the others are better, but at least they're trying to be more resilient).
I don't need to unsolder the chips, or do anything hardware wise, but I'd like to be able to use the hardware without the OS if needs be. That's why I say it's an appliance. It makes sense in terms of business, but it's not like the user is free to use the device how he wants.
And why wouldn’t you want SIP by default? This is what can happen when you disable SIP.
https://community.gigperformer.com/t/be-careful-if-you-use-a...
This was a known issue that Google later on fixed.
Do you run your Linux box using root?
It's not about finding alternatives. I did for a lot of mac's default. It's about replacing the default option. On Ubuntu, you can remove the default login screen and use KDE's panel alongside the i3 window manager. Because they're not tightly coupled together. Imagine if you could have replace the MacOs top bar, because it is a program that just answers to some IPC protocol? Or the window manager would expose windows and their placements so you could script a layout without the accessibility workaround.
> And why wouldn’t you want SIP by default?
I want it, which is why it's not disabled on my computers. But I'd like to set my own snapshot of what I meant to preserve instead of Apple's.
> Do you run your Linux box using root?
I don't but I'm always a real sudoer and I have the capability to do `su root` anytime.
As I've said, it's about expert mode, not something on by default, but that can be and the system has been built to support it.
Steve loved talking about the intersection of humanities with technology. I think he'd proudly agree Apple computers are meant to be appliances
I like Apple’s hardware. And I use the software. But it’s always a convenience for me, not something that fits how my mind would like to use it.
You can script window layout with Applescript or JavaScript. You’ve literally been able to do that since the 90a.
If you had the programming chops, there is nothing stopping you from replacing the menu bar.
That is irrelevant in the bigger scheme of things. I grew out of that tinkering phase after I was a student running Gentoo for a few years. Eventually most of us just need to get shit done. The default top bar is fine. It works. Virtually no one gives a f*** about replacing that. You are in the 0.0000001% and Apple will never cater to that. You can install Asahi Linux on Mac and play with the login screen there.
It’s like the difference between having a car for mechanics projects and racing vs actually needing to go from A to B reliably when you need it.
M2 weren't, and Metal support on Torch was sketchy. Getting better lately, though.
Oddly no gaming demos which people expected.
What does the average consumer know about basecalling?
I mean, they are still selling just consumer electronics. Scientists and industry use Linux and Windows, and speed isn't the main reason.
Or at least something like photo or video editing?
Also, are 'average' consumers watching this kind of marketing? I suspect not, only enthusiast nerds like us are?
Anyone who's worked at a research university knows Macs are popular among professors, researchers and students. These folks also start companies and work in industry and they generally don't switch platforms unless it's absolutely necessary.
I suspect that impulse sells a lot of MBPs, DSLRs back in the day, Photoshop licenses, sports cars, high end ski gear, etc. etc.
Now that Apple Silicon has stabilized for software support, it looks like a great upgrade from those stuck on Intel laptops since 2020 or below.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25549796
It already exists? You can buy ARM Windows devices right now. I'm typing this on one. The x86/x64 emulator is pretty good but performance is limited by the slower CPUs.
All indications are that the Windows x86 emulator has relatively bad performance.
(though tbh this is not a new thing from Apple, they did this even back when Jobs was around...)
I was also hoping for a fourth USB4/TB4 port, which doesn't seem to be coming. Oh well.
The 22hr advertised battery life is definitely a side effect of this. I'm super curious how long it ends up lasting in real-world tests.
I mainly got it to test out my PortableApps.com stuff running under ARM. I'm doing it now on a Macbook Air M1 with Windows 11 running under UTM.
You just named a few apps that are on Macs.
My original set was a regular full-fat Windows laptop, a super-cheap used Galaxy Book Go Gen1, and a used Intel Mac Mini. I later replaced the Windows laptops with the Thinkpad 13s. If it hadn't had video issues, I'd still be using that. But a used base model Macbook Air M1 serves the purpose for now.
I'll likely switch back to an Apple Silicon Mac Mini and a Windows laptop of some sort later as I much prefer a Windows laptop to my current Macbook.
One company shows up with a marketing budget and it's got triple the market share and is now up to the level that Mac traditionally held when all of the things "nobody makes for Linux" because "nobody uses it" supported that.
We're also at the point where things like bank websites don't "officially" support Linux, but as a general rule they don't have any problems on it, and if they did have problems it would be a problem the bank has to deal with instead of a problem the customer has to deal with.
Without the ecosystem who wants Windows? And what will it do for reputation of the vendor or Microsoft when people can't run their apps.
People are already buying non Apple ARM laptops. They are called Chromebooks. They can run Linux apps and Android apps. And thats more than most consumers would expect.
Is this a US thing where your school buys you a laptop?
It is a thing that is essentially an equivalent of an employer-provided work laptop, but for students and provided by their school.
In a way, Google's strategy of getting Chromebooks into schools may have backfired as they're largely seen as kids' computers.
I gave chromeos laptops to my family because they aren't trustworthy. Now they have reliable laptops and don't get virus infections or os problems.
1. The only reason you make people deal with Windows is backwards compatibility.
2. When you advertise it as a Windows laptop people will expect to be able to run their apps (they expect backwards compatibility). RIP your reputation and support inbox.
Yes, it will be harder to sell when it runs Linux. But it's the correct expectations management and at least it will suck less.
Oh well. This is what Google will do with their Chromebooks. Windows on ARM has the same future as the Windows Phone.
But then again at least one of them should have been doing that 20 years ago.
Where did you see that there was no ray tracing support? Qualcomm introduced hardware accelerated ray tracing in the previous generation.
I’m skeptical since Qualcomm has failed for years to catch up to Apple processors in the smartphone market. So why would their first effort in desktop processors be so much better?
Then, in early 2021 Qualcomm ended up acquiring Nuvia, and these new chips are the first showings of this acquisition. Naturally there's a lot of hype since said team represents a lot of the talent that made apple silicon so good in the first place.
[1]: https://images.anandtech.com/doci/15967/N2.png
It is no doubt promising that Qualcomm has brought in more talent, but it still takes time and effort to turn that into a best-in-class product. I’m not saying it’s impossible, though I’ll be skeptical of the hype until I see a real product.
Doesn't that also describe what Qualcomm has been doing?
If the premise is that Qualcomm hired a team of super talented engineers who can build a product that competes with Apple, then those engineers will still need time to develop a product.
Again, maybe their new processors will be everything they claim. It’s possible for this to happen. I’m just not willing to buy into the hype yet.
Given that they were confident enough to leave and start their own company, I'm not sure this is true. Indeed I wouldn't discount the value of high talent density.
> I’ll be skeptical of the hype until I see a real product.
They have shown real hardware demos [1] to reviewers already, and the numbers look solid. Obviously there are no comparisons vs M3 yet, but it seems promising.
[1]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/21112/qualcomm-snapdragon-x-e...
Again, it seems promising, but we’ll find out a lot more once a product is actually released that can be fully benchmarked and reviewed.
Right, and the guys who learned all the hard-won lessons along the way walked out the door to start a company, bringing along expert knowledge of Apple's designs and processes. And then Qualcomm bought them.
So on a surface level it seems implausible that QC could produce such a chip. But when you zoom out and go "oh, Qualcomm effectively bought Apple's senior chip engineers" it starts to make more sense.
It would be like if Qualcomm's top modem engineers started a company, which Apple bought. And then a couple years later Apple's long-running modem project mysteriously turned a corner and was ready to launch an exceptional modem. Like yeah, no kidding.
So yes, we need to see independent benchmarks and make sure it's not hype. But it's not so unbelievable that Apple's former top engineers could also produce a good a chip for another company. There's nothing magical about the Apple office--it's the engineers.
I’m not saying there’s something special about Apple other than the scale of their investment over a long period of time.
It’s the same deal for Qualcomm and their 5G modems. Apple no doubt has hired many talented engineers to make a custom 5G modem. But Qualcomm’s modem is still the best one around. It’s hard to catch up because Qualcomm has been investing heavily in that space for a very long time.
Again, that’s not to say Apple won’t ever catch up. Just that I wouldn’t expect that their first effort will be better than Qualcomm’s modems.
Taken at face value, that story is hard to reconcile with a sudden pivot to mobile.
Apple scaled iPhone first designs up to the M* Ultra chips. Going from HPC to a mid wattage laptop is definitely serious work, but I don’t think it’s impossible. Especially with ARM.
The whole point of this thread is that those same Apple engineers made these Qualcomm chips.
Yes. Apple iterated over many, many years. Learning so much along the way about how to make performant, efficient ARM designs.
And then a bunch of the most important of those guys left to start their own company.
And then Qualcomm bought that company.
Y’all are acting like a few college kids from Stanford made Qualcomm a new CPU over their summer internship. “It takes longer than that to make a good CPU.” Yah no shit!
Apple brought on PA Semi and then slowly iterated on actually shipping hardware for years. They didn’t hire PA Semi and have a best-in-class product on the first go.
Are you saying it’s a requirement that these guys ship a crappy chip first? Why? They already know how to make good ones.
Can you tell me what more they need other than their talent and years of experience to make a good chip? Because if it’s just “I demand they make a bad chip now because they’ve changed logos on their corporate polos” I don’t think this conversation has anywhere to go.
The Lenovo Thinkpad I was also issued loses like 40% of its charge overnight, while "sleeping"....
My 14" M1 Pro rarely got more than 7 hours and my former work 16" M1 Pro more than 9 on a React workflow. When introducing VM work or anything fairly heavy to the mix take 2 hours off each. Typically at 50-60% brightness, have iStat showing load so I can catch any errant processes.
My biggest issue with this release is no published improvements in battery life. 22 hrs is for movie watching. Wireless web - of course very low load - is still 15 for the 16" and 12 for the 14", same as M2 Pro which is each just 1 hour more than the M1 Pro.
Program choices matter a lot. I gained about 30% battery life switching from Chrome to Safari, years back. I do have Teams and MS Outlook running all the time on that machine though, and they're not exactly slim.
That's not to say there's no value in focusing on energy efficiency, especially for laptop chips; Apple Silicon was leagues ahead in energy efficiency when it launched, even if the gap is a lot smaller with newer Ryzen mobile chipsets. And speaking of Ryzen, the 5950X is a paragon of performance-per-watt in a desktop chip, which is of course still just as great as it makes it easier to power, cool and overclock. It's more to say that a shift toward focusing on energy efficiency could signal that they may be hitting road blocks in unlocking substantial performance improvements through better chip design alone, which of course makes sense, as its not like you can just linearly come up with design improvements every year forever, and they already came out swinging with their first generation chips.
The trouble for Apple is that although you can do this, they're paying the highest bid for first access to TSMC's new process, and doubling the core count would have used that much more die area. Which might have delayed the release as it takes more time to build up stock. So now we're into this weirdness where they give you a 22 hour battery life (how often are people awake for that many hours straight?) but they're getting outperformed by the Ryzen 7000 HX line on the older generation process node because it has more cores.
Before Apple came along and made people realize PPW is pretty damn important in the mobile/laptop space.
But that's the thing. Sufficient performance per watt is very important. Improvements to performance per watt are rarely unwelcome. However... you can mislead people regarding generational improvements when touting performance per watt metrics. If the design didn't actually improve much, a new process node and pumping more power in can cover a bit. Pretty much every vendor does this at some point, and even if Apple isn't currently doing this, pivoting towards touting the efficiency improvements rather than the raw performance is not a good sign, especially considering that these chips go in desktops too, and Apple still has some ground to cover if it wants to compete fully with high end desktop CPUs from the PC market.
A $1600 laptop that can only use a single monitor. Wild.
I was willing to cut them some slack with the original M1 chip, thinking there might be a decent technical reason for it with their first generation of laptop/desktop chips, but three years later it is absurd
They’re the base chip for a reason. Why would you add a feature a small fraction of that chip’s users would use when you can use that space for something else?
Because it is a basic feature! I am not asking for the moon here, I have no idea why the idea that a laptop should support more than one external monitor is controversial on this site.
Not according to Apple. And, frankly, not according to me. Most laptop users will never hook up an external monitor. They don't need to. That's a fair base case.
Also for SD card. I bet that many Macbook users who don't regularly work on photos/videos (e.g. developers) has very little use for SD card reader. And indeed it doesn't exist on MacBook Air. Somehow that is deemed essential on Macbook Pro.
But for $1,599 you must be really deep into Apple's shoe to say 8GB and one external monitor is ok.
If you benefit enough from the 2nd external monitor then you can easily afford and justify the upgrade.
If you’d just like the 2nd external monitor then go nuts and spend your money on the upgrade. Or don’t and buy a different laptop.
Supporting multiple external monitors is such a basic feature, it is absurd that apple insists on using it to differentiate products.
it's akin to making me shell out $400 extra dollars if I want the laptop to have a trackpad, or if I want both the left and right halves of the screen to work
It’s a basic feature to you. To Apple, for whatever reason, it’s a premium feature.
You’d probably be better off with a different laptop if you’re looking for a budget option that meets your needs.
Sure SOME people can tolerate it or are dumb enough to reward Apple for it, but it doesn't make a basic feature premium.
If all you do is tail the competition. Most laptop users don’t use a second monitor. This is a silly gripe.
Go to any software company and see how many people are using dual monitors with their company issues laptops
And many of those developers have dual monitor at home
Same for many other people who work on data/finances/etc who need multiple, large monitors to work efficiently
For Apple laptops the bar is whatever Apple decides it is.
> The 2020 Intel i3 MBA which was $999 could do two
Neat! Buy one of those.
Do you get a buzz for defending the $2tn mega-corp? Why do you do it? What's the point?
That's why I don't give my money to Apple.
Actually it would, my decade old MBP 13 has 3(!) ports for video out.
https://youtu.be/V3dbG9pAi8I?si=XqzYSZVpegOFMDTN
Shot on iPhone Edited on Mac
Additional pro software and hardware used. Special thanks to Blackmagic Design and Beastgrip.
A lot of users are reporting not consistent 30fps on m1 even after larian studio worked with apple eng to port BG3 to mac
As it is, there's nothing (other than that new color) that tempts me to update from my 16" M1 Pro, but I didn't expect there to be. I suspect I won't be eyeing upgrades until at least M5 and more realistically M6.
I wouldn't assume that. It's likely there will be a 32-inch iMac next year running on the M3 Pro or M3 Max.
That doesn't seem as much of a performance gain as expected given the move from 5nm to 3nm.