Haven't they been announcing Pros and Max's around December? I don't remember. If they're debuting them at WWDC I'll definitely upgrade my M1. I don't even feel the need to, but it's been 2.5 years.
It might work if running in Mac mode required a reboot (no on the fly switching between iOS and macOS) and a connected KB+mouse, with the touch part of the screen (aside from Pencil usage) turning inert in Mac mode.
Otherwise yes, desktop operating systems are a terrible experience on touch devices.
> It might work if running in Mac mode required a reboot (no on the fly switching between iOS and macOS) and a connected KB+mouse, with the touch part of the screen (aside from Pencil usage) turning inert in Mac mode.
Sounds like strictly worse version of Macbook. Might be useful for occasional work, but I expect people who would use this mode continuously just to switch to Macbook.
The biggest market would be for travelers who essentially want a work/leisure toggle.
It’s not too uncommon for people to carry both an iPad and MacBook for example, but a 12.9” iPad that could reboot into macOS to get some work done and then drop back to iPadOS for watching movies or sketching could replace both without too much sacrifice. There’s tradeoffs, but nothing worse than what you see on PC 2-in-1’s, plus no questionable hinges to fail.
This is what I want, but with an iPhone (with an iPad would be cool, too). Sell me some insanely expensive dock with a USB-C display port output for a monitor (and a few more for peripherals) and when the phone is plugged in, it becomes macOS.
Why would you need it? Modern iPads have thunderbolt ports (minimally USB-C) and already allow keyboards, network adapters, etc. to be connected. It would be like an iMac without the stand and an option to put it in a keyboard enclosure. Sounds awesome.
You're probably correct about it being hard to make a decent iOS app in Swift Playgrounds, but it's definitely not a toy
I use it for work several times per week. I often want to test out some Swift API, or build something in SwiftUI, and for some reason it's way faster to tap it out on my iPad in Swift Playgrounds than to create a new project or playground in Xcode on my Mac — even when I'm sitting directly in front of my Mac
The iPad just doesn't have the clutter of windows and communication open like my mac does that makes it hard to focus on resolving one particular idea
I have so many playground files on my iPad, a quick glance at my project list: interactive gesture-driven animations, testing out time and date logic, rendering perceptual gradients, checking baseline alignment in SF Symbols, messing with NSFilePresenter, mocking out a UI design, animated text transitions, etc
Maybe this June there'll be an announcement, but like Lucy with the football, I'm not expecting it. I would instabuy if this was the case, especially with a cellular iPad.
I just went to store.apple.com and specced out a 13" iPad Pro with 2TB of storage, nano-texture glass, and a cell modem for $2,599.
MacBook Pros start at $1,599. There's an enormous overlap in the price ranges of the mortal-person models of those products. It's not like the iPad Pro is the cheap alternative to a MBP. I mean, I couldn't even spec out a MacBook Air to cost as much.
I don't think they included it in the video, but https://www.apple.com/ipad-pro/specs/ says it's 8 GB of RAM in 256/512 GB models, 16 GB RAM in 1/2 TB ones.
I think they are over-engineering it. I have never liked gestures because it's difficult to discover something you can't see. A button would have been better than an invisible squeeze gesture.
I used Android phones forever until the iphone 13 came out and I switched to IOS because I had to de-Google my life completely after they (for no reason at all, "fraud" that I did not commit) blocked my Google Play account.
The amount of things I have to google to use the phone how I normally used Android is crazy. So many gestures required with NOTHING telling you how to use them.
I recently sat around a table with 5 of my friends trying to figure out how to do that "Tap to share contact info" thing. Nobody at the table, all long term IOS users, knew how to do it. I thought that if we tapped the phones together it would give me some popup on how to finish the process. We tried all sorts of tapping/phone versions until we realized we had to unlock both phones.
And one of the people there with the same phone as me (13 pro) couldn't get it to work at all. It just did nothing.
And the keyboard. My god is the keyboard awful. I have never typoed so much, and I have no idea how to copy a URL out of Safari to send to someone without using the annoying Share button which doesn't even have the app I share to the most without clicking the More.. button to show all my apps. Holding my finger over the URL doesn't give me a copy option or anything, and changing the URL with their highlight/delete system is terrible. I get so frustrated with it and mostly just give up. The cursor NEVER lands where I want it to land and almost always highlights an entire word when I want to make a one letter typo fix. I don't have big fingers at all. Changing a long URL that goes past the length of the Safari address bar is a nightmare.
I'm sure (maybe?) that's some option I need to change but I don't even feel like looking into it anymore. I've given up on learning about the phones hidden gestures and just use it probably 1/10th of how I could.
Carplay, Messages and the easy-to-connect-devices ecosystem is the only thing keeping me on it.
Oh, I see what I'm doing wrong now. If I hold it down it highlights it and gives me the "edit letter/line" thing, and then if I let go I get the Copy option. I guess in the past I've seen it highlight the word and just stopped before it got to that point.
To me, cutting wattage in half is not interesting, but doubling performance is interesting. So performance per watt is actually a pretty useless metric since it doesn't differentiate between the two.
of course efficiency matters for a battery-powered device, but I still tend to lean towards raw power over all else. Others may choose differently, which is why other metrics exist I guess.
Huh, never considered cooling. I suppose that contributes to the device's incredible thinness. Generally thin-and-light has always been an incredible turnoff for me, but tech is finally starting to catch up to thicker devices.
Thin and light is easier to cool. The entire device is a big heat sink fin. Put another way, as the device gets thinner, the ratio of surface area to volume goes to infinity.
If you want to go thicker, then you have to screw around with heat pipes, fans, etc, etc, to move the heat a few cm to the outside surface of the device.
That's not why thin-and-light bothers me. Historically, ultrabooks and similarly thin-and-light focused devices have been utterly insufferable in terms of performance compared to something that's even a single cm thicker. But Apple Silicon seems extremely promising, it seems quite competitive with thicker and heavier devices.
I never understood why everyone [looking at PC laptop manufacturers] took thin-and-light to such an extreme that their machines became basically useless. Now Apple is releasing thin-and-light machines that are incredibly powerful, and that is genuinely innovative. I hadn't seen something like that from them since the launch of the original iPhone, that's how big I think this was.
That's not exactly true, just the other day Snazzy lab complained about a MBP M3 Max throttling and making a lot of fan noise.
Those are barely competitive with the heavier but more powerful gaming/creation laptops Apple's aficionados keep deriding (if it has a 4090 it's not even competitive).
They have focused on mobility (power consumption and size) at the cost of everything else.
For this exact reason their desktop offering is really not competitive with offering around the same prices in the PC world. The only thing they do better is size (considering you can make a 3-4L top of the line PC; the Mac Studio isn't even impressive) and power consumption. But who actually cares, even if using a desktop heavily its consumption is dwarfed by most other use in a typical house, so whatever?
Thin and light are indeed a small use case overall and people who care about that have a ton of decently good options in the PC world already. It's not like the performance per watt benefits of Apple Silicon is really that relevant to most potential customers. If one is content enough with such a laptop, using it for the typical light task, thin and light PC laptops are just small enough, silent enough and have good enough battery life for the most part.
It means a lot to me, because cutting power consumption in half for millions of devices means we can turn off power plants (in aggregate). It’s the same as lightbulbs; I’ll never understand why people bragged about how much power they were wasting with incandescents.
>cutting power consumption in half for millions of devices means we can turn off power plants
It is well known that software inefficiency doubles every couple years, that is, the same scenario would take 2x as much compute, given entire software stack (not disembodied algorithm which will indeed be faster).
The extra compute will be spent on a more abstract UI stack or on new features, unless forced by physical constraints (e.g. inefficient batteries of early smartphone), which is not the case at present.
That's weird - if software gets 2x worse every time hardware gets 2x better, why did my laptop in 2010 last 2 hours on battery while the current one lasts 16 doing much more complex tasks for me?
Elsewhere in the comments, it is noted Apple's own estimates are identical despite allegedly 2x better hardware.
Aside, 2 hours is very low even for 2010. There's a strongly usability advantage for going to 16. But going from 16 to 128 won't add as much. The natural course of things is to converge on a decent enough number and 'spend' the rest on more complex software, a lighter laptop etc.
I have dimmable LED strips around my rooms, hidden by cove molding, reflecting off the whole ceiling, which becomes a super diffuse, super bright “light”.
I don’t boast about power use, but they are certainly hungry.
For that I get softly defuse lighting with a max brightness comparable to outdoor clear sky daylight. Working from home, this is so nice for my brain and depression.
First, only CPU power consumption is reduced, not other components, second, I doubt tablets contribute significantly to global power consumption, so I think no power plants will be turned off.
Intel to M1 is an entire architectural switch where even old software couldn't be run and had to be emulated.
This is a small generational upgrade that doesn't necessitate an event.
Other companies started having events like this because they were copying apples amazing events. Apples events now are just parodies of what Apple was.
"With these improvements to the CPU and GPU, M4 maintains Apple silicon’s industry-leading performance per watt. M4 can deliver the same performance as M2 using just half the power. And compared with the latest PC chip in a thin and light laptop, M4 can deliver the same performance using just a fourth of the power."
That's an incredible improvement in just a few years. I wonder how much of that is Apple engineering and how much is TSMC improving their 3nm process.
That's because M2 was on the same TSMC process generation as M1. TSMC is the real hero here. M4 is the same generation as M3, which is why Apple's marketing here is comparing M4 vs M2 instead of M3.
Actually, M4 is reportedly on a more cost-efficient TSMC N3E node, where Apple was apparently the only customer on the more expensive TSMC N3B node; I'd expect Apple to move away from M3 to M4 very quickly for all their products.
Saying tsmc is a hero ignores the thousands of suppliers that improved everything required for tsmc to operate. Tsmc is the biggest, so they get the most experience on all the new toys the world’s engineers and scientists are building.
It's almost as if every part of the stack -- from the uArch that Apple designs down to the insane machinery from ASML, to the fully finished SoC delivered by TSMC -- is vitally important to creating a successful product.
But people like to assign credit solely to certain spaces if it suits their narrative (lately, Apple isn't actually all that special at designing their chips, it's all solely the process advantage)
Saying TSMC's success is due to their suppliers ignores the fact that all of their competitors failed to keep up despite having access to the same suppliers. TSMC couldn't do it without ASML, but Intel and Samsung failed to do it even with ASML.
In contrast, when Apple's CPU and GPU competitors get access to TSMC's new processes after Apple's exclusivity period expires, they achieve similar levels of performance (except for Qualcomm because they don't target the high end of CPU performance, but AMD does).
Tsmc being the biggest let them experiment at 10x the rate. It turns out they had the right business model that Intel didn’t notice was there, it just requires dramatically lower margins and higher volumes and far lower paid engineers.
Sadly, this is only processor power consumption, you need to put power into a whole lot of other things to make an useful computer… a display backlight and the system's RAM come to mind as particular offenders.
backlight is now the main bottleneck for consumption heavy uses. I wonder what are the main advancements that are happening there to optimize the wattage.
Is the iPad Pro not yet on OLED? All of Samsung's flagship tablets have OLED screens for well over a decade now. It eliminates the need for backlighting, has superior contrast and pleasant to ise in low-light conditions.
I'm not sure how OLED and backlit LCD compare power-wise exactly, but OLED screens still need to put off a lot of light, they just do it directly instead of with a backlight.
The iPad that came out today finally made the switch. iPhones made the switch around 2016. It does seem odd how long it took for the iPad to switch, but Samsung definitely switched too early: my Galaxy Tab 2 suffered from screen burn in that I was never able to recover from.
If the usecases involve
working on dark terminals all day or watching movies with dark scenes or if the general theme is dark, may be the new oled display will help reduce the display power consumption too.
QD-OLED is an engineering improvement, i.e. combining existing researched technology to improve the result product. I wasn't able to find a good source on what exactly it improves in efficiency, but it's not a fundamental improvement in OLED electrical→optical energy conversion (if my understanding is correct.)
In general, OLED screens seem to have an efficiency around 20≈30%. Some research departments seem to be trying to bump that up [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-05671-x] which I'd be more hopeful on…
…but, honestly, at some point you just hit the limits of physics. It seems internal scattering is already a major problem; maybe someone can invent pixel-sized microlasers and that'd help? More than 50-60% seems like a pipe dream at this point…
…unless we can change to a technology that fundamentally doesn't emit light, i.e. e-paper and the likes. Or just LCD displays without a backlight, using ambient light instead.
Dang, yeah, this is the opposite of what I had in mind
I was thinking, like, a couple hundred dollar Kindle the size of a big iPad I can plug into a laptop for text-editing out and about. Hell, for my purposes I'd love an integrated keyboard.
Basically a second, super-lightweight laptop form-factor I can just plug into my chonky Macbook Pro and set on top of it in high-light environments when all I need to do is edit text.
Honestly not a compelling business case now that I write it out, but I just wanna code under a tree lol
I think we're getting pretty close to this. The Remarkable 2 tablet is $300, but can't take video input and software support for non-notetaking is near non-existent. There's even a keyboard available. Boox and Hisense are also making e-ink tablets/phones for reasonable prices.
If that existed as a drop-in screen replacement on the framework laptop and with a high refresh rate color gallery 3 panel, then I'd buy it at that price point in a heart beat.
I can't replace my desktop monitor with eink because I occasionally play video games. I can't use a 2nd monitor because I live in a small apartment.
I can't replace my laptop screen with greyscale because I need syntax highlighting for programming.
Maybe the $100 nano-texture screen will give you the visibility you want. Not the low power of a epaper screen though.
Hmm, emacs on an epaper screen might be great if it had all the display update optimization and "slow modem mode" that Emacs had back in the TECO days. (The SUPDUP network protocol even implemented that at the client end and interacted with Emacs directly!)
AMD gpus have "Adaptive Backlight Management" which reduces your screen's backlight but then tweaks the colors to compensate. For example, my laptop's backlight is set at 33% but with abm it reduces my backlight to 8%. Personally I don't even notice it is on / my screen seems just as bright as before, but when I first enabled it I did notice some slight difference in colors so its probably not suitable for designers/artists. I'd 100% recommend it for coders though.
Strangely, Apple seems to be doing the opposite for some reason (Color accuracy?), as dimming the display doesn't seem to reduce the backlight as much, and they're using a combination of software dimming, even at "max" brightness.
Evidence can be seen when opening up iOS apps, which seem to glitch out and reveals the brighter backlight [1]. Notice how #FFFFFF white isn't the same brightness as the white in the iOS app.
The max brightness of the desktop is gonna be lower than the actual max brightness of the panel, because the panel needs to support HDR content. That brightness would be too much for most cases
This was a photo of my MBA 15" which doesn't have an HDR capable screen afaik. Additionally, this artifacting happens at all brightness levels, including the lowest.
It also just doesn't seem ideal that some apps (iOS) appear much brighter than the rest of the system. HDR support in macOS is a complete mess, although I'm not sure if Windows is any better.
I don't expect an M4 macbook to last any longer than an M2 macbook of otherwise similar specs; they will spend that extra power budget on things other than the battery life specification.
Unfortunately Apple only ever thinks about battery life in terms of web surfing and video playback, so we don't get official battery-life figures for anything else. Perhaps you can get more battery life out of your iPad Pro web surfing by using dark mode, since OLEDs should use less power than IPS displays with darker content.
It's not weird when you consider that browsing the web or watching videos has the CPU idle or near enough, so 95% of the power draw is from the display and radios.
The OLED likely adds a fair bit of draw; they're generally somewhat more power-hungry than LCDs these days, assuming like-for-like brightness. Realistically, this will be the case until MicroLEDs are available for non-completely-silly money.
OLED will use less for a screen of black and LCD will use less for a screen of white. Now, take whatever average of what content is on the screen and for you, it may be better or may be worse.
White background document editing, etc., will be worse, and this is rather common.
No, they have a "battery budget". It the CPU power draw goes down that means the budget goes up and you can spend it on other things, like a nicer display or some other feature.
When you say "up to 10 hours" most people will think "oh nice that's an entire day" and be fine with it. It's what they're used to.
Turning that into 12 hours might be possible but are the tradeoffs worth it? Will enough people buy the device because of the +2 hour battery life? Can you market that effectively? Or will putting in a nicer fancy display cause more people to buy it?
We'll never get significant battery life improvements because of this, sadly.
Yeah double the PPW does not mean double the battery, because unless you're pegging the CPU/SOC it's likely only a small fraction of the power consumption of a light-use or idle device, especially for an SOC which originates in mobile devices.
Doing basic web navigation with some music in the background, my old M1 Pro has short bursts at ~5W (for the entire SoC) when navigating around, a pair of watts for mild webapps (e.g. checking various channels in discord), and typing into this here textbox it's sitting happy at under half a watt, with the P-cores essentially sitting idle and the E cores at under 50% utilisation.
With a 100Wh battery that would be a "potential" of 150 hours or so. Except nobody would ever sell it for that, because between the display and radios the laptop's actually pulling 10~11W.
On my M1 air, I find for casual use of about an hour or so a day, I can literally go close to a couple weeks without needing to recharge. Which to me is pretty awesome. Mostly use my personal desktop when not on my work laptop (docked m3 pro).
If they maintain that pace, it will start compounding incredibly quickly. If we round to 2 years vs 2.5 years, after just a decade you're an entire doubling ahead.
Apple usually massively exaggerates their tech spec comparison - is it REALLY half the power use of all times (so we'll get double the battery life) or is it half the power use in some scenarios (so we'll get like... 15% more battery life total) ?
That is fault of the devs. Because optimization for dedicated graphic cards is a either integrated in the game engine or they just have a version for rtx users.
I mean, I remember Apple comparing the M1 Ultra to Nvidia's RTX 3090. While that chart was definitely putting a spin on things to say the least, and we can argue from now until tomorrow about whether power consumption should or should not be equalised, I have no idea why anyone would expect the M1 Pro (an explicitly much weaker chip) to perform anywhere near the same.
Also what games are you trying to play on it? All my M-series Macbooks have run games more than well enough with reasonable settings (and that has a lot more to do with OS bugs and the constraints of the form factor than with just the chipset).
It's not just games. There is in fact not a lot of stuff that Apple Silicon can run well.
In theory you get great battery life, to use software nobody wants to use or to take longer to run stuff that is not running well.
The problem is two-fold, first the marketing bullshit does not match the reality and second the Apple converted will lie without even thinking about it to justify the outrageous price.
There are a lot of things I like about Apple hardware but the reality is that they can charge so much because there is a lot of mythology around their products and it just doesn't add up.
Now if only they be bothered to actually make software great (and not simpleton copies of what already exists), there would be an actual valid reason to unequivocally recommend their stuff but they can't be bothered since they already make too much money as it is.
I’ve not seen discussion that Apple likely scales performance of chips to match the use profile of the specific device it’s used in. An M2 in an iPad Air is very likely not the same as an M2 in an MBP or Mac Studio.
Yeah, but the difference is that you usually don't get people arguing that it's the same thing or that it can be performance competitive in the long run.
When it comes to Apple stuff, people say some irrational stuff that is totally bonkers...
Surprisingly, I think it is: I was going to comment that here, then checked Geekbench, single core scores match for M2 iPad/MacBook Pro/etc. at same clock speed. i.e. M2 "base" = M2 "base", but core count differs, and with the desktops/laptops, you get options for M2 Ultra Max SE bla bla.
Well battery life would be used by other things too right? Especially by that double OLED screen. "best ever" in every keynote makes me laugh at this point, but it doesn't mean that they're not improving their power envelope.
Quickly looking at the press release, it seems to have the same comparisons as in the video. None of Apple's comparisons today are between the M3 and M4. They are ALL comparing the M2 and M4. Why? It's frustrating, but today Apple replaced a product with an M2 with a product with an M4. Apple always compares product to product, never component to component when it comes to processors. So those specs are far more impressive than if we could have numbers between the M3 and M4.
Apple was comparing the power envelope (already a complicated concept) of their GPU against a 3090. Apple wanted to show that the peak of their GPU's performance was reached with a fraction of the power of a 3090. What was terrible was that Apple was cropping their chart at the point where the 3090 was pulling ahead in pure compute by throwing more watts at the problem. So their GPU was not as powerful as a 3090, but a quick glance at the chart would completely tell you otherwise.
Ultimately we didn't see one of those charts today, just a mention about the GPU being 50% more efficient than the competition. I think those charts are beloved by Johny Srouji and no one else. They're not getting the message across.
Plenty of people on HN thought that M1 GPU is as powerful as 3090 GPU, so I think the message worked very well for Apple.
They really love those kind of comparisons - e.g. they also compared M1s against really old Intel CPUs to make the numbers look better, knowing that news headlines won't care for details.
They compared against really old intel CPUs because those were the last ones they used in their own computers! Apple likes to compare device to device, not component to component.
Yes, can't remember the precise combo either, there was a solid year or two of latent misunderstandings.
I eventually made a visual showing it was the same as claiming your iPhone was 3x the speed of a Core i9: Sure, if you limit the power draw of your PC to a battery the size of a post it pad.
Similar issues when on-device LLMs happened, thankfully, quieted since then (last egregious thing I saw was stonk-related wishcasting that Apple was obviously turning its Xcode CI service into a full-blown AWS competitor that'd wipe the floor with any cloud service, given the 2x performance)
> I like the comparison between much older hardware with brand new to highlight how far we came.
That's ok, but why skip the previous iteration then? Isn't the M2 only two generations behind? It's not that much older. It's also a marketing blurb, not a reproducible benchmark. Why leave out comparisons with the previous iteration even when you're just hand-waving over your own data?
In this specific case, it's because iPad's never got the M3. They're literally comparing it with the previous model of iPad.
There were some disingenuous comparisons throughout the presentation going back to A11 for the first Neural Engine and some comparisons to M1, but the M2 comparison actually makes sense.
I wouldn't call the comparison to A11 disingenuous, they were very clear they were talking about how far their neural engines have come, in the context of the competition just starting to put NPUs in their stuff.
I mean, they compared the new iPad Pro to an iPod Nano, that's just using your own history to make a point.
Fair point—I just get a little annoyed when the marketing speak confuses the average consumer and felt as though some of the jargon they used could trip less informed customers up.
Yes, kinda annoying. But on the other hand, given that apple releases a new chip every 12 months, we can grant them some slack here. Given that from AMD, Intel or nvidia we see usually a 2 year cadence.
And yet they seem to be the only people picking the apparently "Low Hanging Fruit" in ARM land. We'll see about Qualcomm's Nuvia-based stuff, but that's been "nearly released" for what feels like years now, but you still can't buy one to actually test.
And don't underestimate the investment Apple made - it's likely at a similar level to the big x86 incumbents. I mean AMD's entire Zen development team cost was likely a blip on the balance sheet for Apple.
> We'll see about Qualcomm's Nuvia-based stuff, but that's been "nearly released" for what feels like years now, but you still can't buy one to actually test.
That's more bound by legal than technical reasons...
speaking of which, whatever happened to qualcomm's bizarre assertion that ARM was pulling a sneak move in all its new licensing deals to outlaw third-party IP entirely and force ARM-IP-only?
there was one quiet "we haven't got anything like that in the contract we're signing with ARM" from someone else, and then radio silence. And you'd really think that would be major news, because it's massively impactful on pretty much everyone, since one of the major use-cases of ARM is as a base SOC to bolt your custom proprietary accelerators onto...
seemed like obvious bullshit at the time from a company trying to "publicly renegotiate" a licensing agreement they probably broke...
Again, not saying that they are easy (or cheap!) problems to solve, but that there are more relatively easy problems in the ARM space than the x86 space.
That’s why Apple can release a meaningfully new chip every year where it takes several for x86 manufacturers
They don't care as much for the ARM stuff because software development investment vastly outweighs the chip development costs.
Sure, maybe they can do better but at what cost and for what? The only thing Apple does truly better is performance per watt which is not something that is relevant for a large part of the market.
x86 stuff is still competitive performance wise, especially in the GPU department where Apple attempts are rather weak compared to what is on offer across the pond.
The Apple Silicon switch cost a large amount of developer effort for optimisation, and in the process a lot of software compatibility was lost, it took a long time to get even the most popular softwares to get properly optimized and some software house even gave up on supporting macOS because it just wasn't worth the man hour investment considering the tiny market.
This is why I am very skeptical about the Qualcomm ARM stuff, it needs to be priced extremely well to have a chance, if consumers do not pick it up in droves, no software port is going to happen in a timely manner and it will stay irrelevant.
Considering the only thing much better than the current x86 offering is the performance per watt, I do not have a lot of hope, but I may be pleasantly surprised.
Apple aficionados keep raving about battery life but it's not really something a lot of people care about (appart for smartphones, where Apple isn't doing any better than the rest of industry).
I’m vaguely considering this but entirely for the screen. The chip has been irrelevant to me for years, it’s long past the point where I don’t notice it.
A series was definitely not good enough. Really depends on what you're using it for. Netflix and web? Sure. But any old HDR tablet, that can maintain 24Hz, is good enough for that.
These are 2048x2732 with 120Hz displays, that support 6k external displays. Gaming and art apps push them pretty hard. From the iPad user in my house, goin from the 2020 non M* iPad to a 2023 M2 iPad made a huge difference for the drawing apps. Better latency is always better for drawing, and complex brushes (especially newer ones), selections, etc, would get fairly unusable.
For gaming, it was pretty trivial to dip well below 60Hz with a non M* iPad, with some of the higher demand games like Fortnight, Minecraft (high view distance), Roblox (it ain't what it used to be), etc.
But, the apps will always gravitate to the performance of the average user. A step function in performance won't show up in the apps until the adoption follows, years down the line. Not pushing the average to higher performance is how you stagnate the future software of the devices.
You’re right, it’s good enough for me. That’s what I meant but I didn’t make that clear at all. I suspect a ton of people are in a similar position.
I just don’t push it at all. The few games I play are not complicated in graphics or CPU needs. I don’t draw, 3D model, use Logic or Final Cut or anything like that.
I agree the extra power is useful to some people. But even there we have the M1 (what I’ve got) and the M2 models. But I bet there are plenty of people like me who mostly bought the pro models for the better screen and not the additional grunt.
I don't know who would prefer to do music or video editing on smaller display, without keyboard for shortcuts, without proper file system and with problematic connectivity to external hardware. Sure, it's possible, but why? Ok, maybe there's some usecase on the road where every gram counts, but that seems niche.
They know that anyone who has bought an M3 is good on computers for a long while. They're targeting people who have m2 or older macs. People who own an m3 are basically going to buy anything that comes down the pipe, because who needs an m3 over an m2 or even an m1 today?
I’m starting to worry that I’m missing out on some huge gains (M1 Air user.) But as a programmer who’s not making games or anything intensive, I think I’m still good for another year or two?
I have an M1 Air and I test drove a friend's recent M3 Air. It's not very different performance-wise for what I do (programming, watching video, editing small memory-constrained GIS models, etc)
I wanted to upgrade my M1 because it was going to swap a lot with only 8 gigs of RAM and because I wanted a machine that could run big LLMs locally. Ended up going 8G macbook air M1 -> 64G macbook pro M1. My other reasoning was that it would speed up compilation, which it has, but not by too much.
The M1 air is a very fast machine and is perfect for anyone doing normal things on the computer.
You're not going to be missing out on much. I had the first M1 Air and recently upgraded to an M3 Air. The M1 Air has years of useful life left and my upgrade was for reasons not performance related.
The M3 Air performs better than the M1 in raw numbers but outside of some truly CPU or GPU limited tasks you're not likely to actually notice the difference. The day to day behavior between the two is pretty similar.
If your current M1 works you're not missing out on anything. For the power/size/battery envelope the M1 Air was pretty awesome, it hasn't really gotten any worse over time. If it does what you need then you're good until it doesn't do what you need.
I have a 2018 15" MBP, and an M1 Air and honestly they both perform about the same. The only noticeable difference is the MBP takes ~3 seconds to wake from sleep and the M1 is instant.
Well, the obvious answer is that those with older machines are more likely to upgrade than those with newer machines. The market for insta-upgraders is tiny.
edit: And perhaps an even more obvious answer: there are no iPads that contained the M3, so the comparison would be more useless. The M4 was just launched today exclusively in iPads.
Doesn't seem plausible to me that Apple will release a "M3 variant" that can drive "tandem OLED" displays. So probably logical to package whatever chip progress (including process improvements) into "M4".
And it can signal that "We are serious about iPad as a computer", using their latest chip.
Logical alignment to progresses in engineering (and manufacturing) packaged smartly to generate marketing capital for sales and brand value creation.
Wonder how the newer Macs will use these "tandem OLED" capabilities of the M4.
IME Apple has always been the most honest when it makes performance claims. LIke when they said an Macbook Air would last 10+ hours and third-party reviewers would get 8-9+ hours. All the while, Dell or HP would claim 19 hours and you'd be lucky to get 2 eg [1].
As for CPU power use, of course that doesn't translate into doubling battery life because there are other components. And yes, it seems the OLED display uses more power so, all in all, battery life seems to be about the same.
I'm interested to see an M3 vs M4 performance comparison in the real world. IIRC the M3 was a questionable upgrade. Some things were better but some weren't.
Overall the M-series SoCs have been an excellent product however.
> IME Apple has always been the most honest when it makes performance claims
That's just laughable, sorry. No one is particularly honest in marketing copy, but Apple is for sure one of the worst, historically. Even more so when you go back to the PPC days. I still remember Jobs on stage talking about how the G4 was the fasted CPU in the world when I knew damn well that it was half the speed of the P3 on my desk.
You can claim Apple is dishonest for a few reasons.
1) Graphs often are unannotatted.
2) Comparisons are rarely against latest generation products. (their argument for that has been that they do not expect people to upgrade yearly, so its showing the difference of their intended upgrade path).
3) They have conflated performance, for performance per watt.
However, when it comes to battery life, performance (for a task) or specification of their components (screens, ability to use external displays up to 6k, port speed etc) there are almost no hidden gotchas and they have tended to be trustworthy.
The first wave of M1 announcements were met with similar suspicion as you have shown here; but it was swiftly dispelled once people actually got their hands on them.
*EDIT:* Blaming a guy who's been dead for 13 years for something they said 50 years ago, and primarily it seems for internal use is weird. I had to look up the context but it seems it was more about internal motivation in the 70’s than relating to anything today, especially when referring to concrete claims.
I remember that Apple used to wave around these SIMD benchmarks showing their PowerPC chips trouncing Intel chips. In the fine print, you'd see that the benchmark was built to use AltiVec on PowerPC, but without MMX or SSE on Intel.
Apple marketed their PPC systems as "a supercomputer on your desk", but it was nowhere near the performance of a supercomputer of that age. Maybe similar performance to a supercomputer from the 1970's, but that was their marketing angle from the 1990's.
From https://512pixels.net/2013/07/power-mac-g4/: the ad was based on the fact that Apple was forbidden to export the G4 to many countries due to its “supercomputer” classification by the US government.
It seems that US government was buying too much into tech hypes at the turn of the millenium. Around the same period PS2 exports were also restricted [1].
> Apple marketed their PPC systems as "a supercomputer on your desk"
It's certainly fair to say that twenty years ago Apple was marketing some of its PPC systems as "the first supercomputer on a chip"[^1].
> but it was nowhere near the performance of a supercomputer of that age.
That was not the claim. Apple did not argue that the G4's performance was commensurate with the state of the art in supercomputing. (If you'll forgive me: like, fucking obviously? The entire reason they made the claim is precisely because the latest room-sized supercomputers with leapfrog performance gains were in the news very often.)
The claim was that the G4 was capable of sustained gigaflop performance, and therefore met the narrow technical definition of a supercomputer.
You'll see in the aforelinked marketing page that Apple compared the G4 chip to UC Irvine’s Aeneas Project, which in ~2000 was delivering 1.9 gigaflop performance.
This chart[^2] shows the trailing average of various subsets of super computers, for context.
This narrow definition is also why the machine could not be exported to many countries, which Apple leaned into.[^3]
> Maybe similar performance to a supercomputer from the 1970's
What am I missing here? Picking perhaps the most famous supercomputer of the mid-1970s, the Cray-1,[^4] we can see performance of 160 MFLOPS, which is 160 million floating point operations per second (with an 80 MHz processor!).
The G4 was capable of delivering ~1 GFLOP performance, which is a billion floating point operations per second.
>That was not the claim. Apple did not argue that the G4's performance was commensurate with the state of the art in supercomputing.
This is marketing we're talking about, people see "supercomputer on a chip" and they get hyped up by it. Apple was 100% using the "supercomputer" claim to make their luddite audience think they had a performance advantage, which they did not.
> The entire reason they made the claim is
The reason they marketed it that way was to get people to part with their money. Full stop.
In the first link you added, there's a photo of a Cray supercomputer, which makes the viewer equate Apple = Supercomputer = I am a computing god if I buy this product. Apple's marketing has always been a bit shady that way.
And soon after that period Apple jumped off the PPC architecture and onto the x86 bandwagon. Gimmicks like "supercomputer on a chip" don't last long when the competition is far ahead.
> This is marketing we're talking about, people see "supercomputer on a chip" and they get hyped up by it.
That is also not in dispute. I am disputing your specific claim that Apple somehow suggested that the G4 was of commensurate performance to a modern supercomputer, which does not seem to be true.
> Apple was 100% using the "supercomputer" claim to make their luddite audience think they had a performance advantage, which they did not.
This is why context is important (and why I'd appreciate clarity on whether you genuinely believe a supercomputer from the 1970s was anywhere near as powerful as a G4).
In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, megapixels were a proxy for camera quality, and megahertz were a proxy for processor performance. More MHz = more capable processor.
This created a problem for Apple, because the G4's SPECfp_95 (floating point) benchmarks crushed Pentium III at lower clock speeds.
PPC G4 500 MHz - 22.6
PPC G4 450 MHz - 20.4
PPC G4 400 MHz - 18.36
Pentium III 600 MHz – 15.9
For both floating point and integer benchmarks, the G3 and G4 outgunned comparable Pentium II/III processors.
You can question how this translates to real world use cases – the Photoshop filters on stage were real, but others have pointed out in this thread that it wasn't an apples-to-apples comparison vs. Wintel – but it is inarguable that the G4 had some performance advantages over Pentium at launch, and that it met the (inane) definition of a supercomputer.
> The reason they marketed it that way was to get people to part with their money. Full stop.
Yes, marketing exists to convince people to buy one product over another. That's why companies do marketing. IMO that's a self-evidently inane thing to say in a nested discussion of microprocessor architecture on a technical forum – especially when your interlocutor is establishing the historical context you may be unaware of (judging by your comment about supercomputers from the 1970s, which I am surprised you have not addressed).
I didn't say "The reason Apple markets its computers," I said "The entire reason they made the claim [about supercomputer performance]…"
Both of us appear to know that companies do marketing, but only you appear to be confused about the specific claims Apple made – given that you proactively raised them, and got them wrong – and the historical backdrop against which they were made.
> In the first link you added, there's a photo of a Cray supercomputer
That's right. It looks like a stylized rendering of a Cray-1 to me – what do you think?
> which makes the viewer equate Apple = Supercomputer = I am a computing god if I buy this product
The Cray-1's compute, as measured in GFLOPS, was approximately 6.5x lower than the G4 processor.
I'm therefore not sure what your argument is: you started by claiming that Apple deliberately suggested that the G4 had comparable performance to a modern supercomputer. That isn't the case, and the page you're referring to contains imagery of a much less performant supercomputer, as well as a lot of information relating to the history of supercomputers (and a link to a Forbes article).
> Apple's marketing has always been a bit shady that way.
All companies make tradeoffs they think are right for their shareholders and customers. They accentuate the positives in marketing and gloss over the drawbacks.
Note, too, that Adobe's CEO has been duped on the page you link to. Despite your emphatic claim:
> Apple was 100% using the "supercomputer" claim to make their luddite audience think they had a performance advantage, which they did not.
The CEO of Adobe is quoted as saying:
> “Currently, the G4 is significantly faster than any platform we’ve seen running Photoshop 5.5,” said John E. Warnock, chairman and CEO of Adobe.
How is what you are doing materially different to what you accuse...
That is a long time – bet it felt even longer to the poor PowerBook DRI at Apple who had to keep explaining to Steve Jobs why a G5 PowerBook wasn't viable!
My iBook G4 was absolutely crushed by my friends Wintel laptops that they bought for half as much.
Granted it was more carriable and had somewhat better battery life (needed it cause how much longer was needed to do stuff) but really performance was not a good reason to go with Apple hardware, and that still holds true as far as I'm concerned.
Have any examples from the past decade? Especially in the context of how exaggerated the claims are from PC and Android brands they are competing with?
I suggest you go and look HOW it is done in apple silicon macs, and then think long and hard why this might make a huge difference. Maybe Asahi Linux guys can explain it to you ;)
I understand that it can make a difference to performance (which is already baked into the benchmarks we look at), I don't see how it can make a difference to compression ratios, if anything in similar implementations (ex: console APUs) it tends to lead to worse compression ratios.
If there's any publicly available data to the contrary I'd love to read it. Anecdotally I haven't seen a significant difference between zswap on Linux and macOS memory compression in terms of compression ratios, and on the workloads I've tested zswap tends to be faster than no memory compression on x86 for many core machines.
I do admit the "reliance on swap" thing is speculation on my part :)
My experience is that I can still tell when the OS is unhappy when I demand more RAM than it can give. MacOS is still relatively responsive around this range, which I just attributed to super fast swapping. (I'd assume memory compression too, but I usually run into this trouble when working with large amounts of poorly-compressible data.)
In either case, I know it's frustrating when someone is confidently wrong but you can't properly correct them, so you have my apologies
Fair point. Based on their first sentence, I mischaracterized how “laughable” was used.
Though the author also made clear in their second sentence that they think Apple is one of the worst when it comes to marketing claims, so I don’t think your characterization is totally accurate either.
Not sure what windows does but the popular method on e.g. fedora is to split memory into main and swap and then compress swap. It could be more efficient the way Apple does it by not having to partition main memory.
Ye that was hilarious, my basic workload borders on the 8GB limit not even pushing it.
They have fast swap but nothing beats real ram in the end, and considering their storage pricing is as stupid as their RAM pricing it really makes no difference.
If you go for the base model, you are in for a bad time, 256GB with heavy swap and no dedicated GPU memory (making the 8GB even worse) is just plain stupid.
This what the Apple fanboys don't seem to get, their base model at somewhat affordable price are deeply incompetent and if you start to load it up the pricing just do not make a lot of sense...
You know that RAM in these machines is more different than the same as "RAM" in a standard PC? Apple's SoC RAM is more or less part of the CPU/GPU and is super fast. And for obvious reasons cannot be added to.
Anyway, I manage a few M1 and M3 machines with 256/8 configs and they all run just as fast as 16 and 32 machines EXCEPT for workloads that need more than 8GB for a process (virtualization) or workloads that need lots of video memory (Lightroom can KILL an 8GB machine that isn't doing anything else...)
The 8GB is stupid discussion isn't "wrong" in the general case, but it is wrong for maybe 80% of users.
> EXCEPT for workloads that need more than 8GB for a process
Isn't that exactly the upthread contention: Apple's magic compressed swap management is still swap management that replaces O(1) fast(-ish) DRAM access with thousands+ cycle page decompression operations. It may be faster than storage, but it's still extremely slow relative to a DRAM fetch. And once your working set gets beyond your available RAM you start thrashing just like VAXen did on 4BSD.
Exactly!
Load a 4GB file and welcome the beach ball spinner any time you need to context switch to another app.
I don't know how they don't realize that because it's not really hard to get there.
But when I was enamored with Apple stuff in my formative years, I would gladly ignore that or brush it off so I can see where they come from, I guess.
It's not as different as the marketing would like you to think. In fact, for the low-end models even the bandwidth/speed isn't as big of a deal as they make it out to be, especially considering that bandwidth has to be shared for the GPU needs.
And if you go up in specs the bandwidth of Apple silicon has to be compared to the bandwidth of a combo with dedicated GPU. The bandwidth of dedicated GPUs is very high and usually higher than what Apple Silicon gives you if you consider the RAM bandwidth for the CPU.
It's a bit more complicated but that's marketing for you. When it comes to speed Apple RAM isn't faster than what can be found in high-end laptops (or desktops for that matter).
> If you go for the base model, you are in for a bad time, 256GB with heavy swap and no dedicated GPU memory (making the 8GB even worse) is just plain stupid ... their base model at somewhat affordable price are deeply incompetent
I got the base model M1 Air a couple of years back and whilst I don't do much gaming I do do C#, Python, Go, Rails, local Postgres, and more. I also have a (new last year) Lenovo 13th gen i7 with 16GB RAM running Windows 11 and the performance with the same load is night and day - the M1 walks all over it whilst easily lasting 10hrs+.
Note that I'm not a fanboy; I run both by choice. Also both iPhone and Android.
The Windows laptop often gets sluggish and hot. The M1 never slows down and stays cold. There's just no comparison (though the Air keyboard remains poor).
I don't much care about the technical details, and I know 8GB isn't a lot. I care about the experience and the underspecced Mac wins.
Not individually, no. Though it's often done simultaneously.
That said you're right about lots of RAM in that I wouldn't bother using the 8GB M1 Air for Docker or running LLMs (it can run SD for images though, but very slowly). Partly that's why I have the Lenovo. You need to pick the right machine for the job at hand.
I don't know about your Lenovo and how your particular workload is handled by Windows.
And I agree that in pure performance, the Apple Silicon Macs will kill it; however, I am really skeptical that an 8GB model would give you a better experience overall.
Faster for long compute operations sure, but then you have to deal with all the small slowdown from constant swapping. Unless you stick to a very small amounts of apps and very small amounts of tabs at the same time (which is rather limiting) I don't know how you do it.
I don't want to call you a liar but maybe you are emotionally attached (just like I am sometimes) to the device to realize it, or maybe the various advantages of the Mac make you ignore the serious limitations that come with it.
Everyone has their own sets of tradeoffs but my argument is that you can deal with the 8GB Apple Silicon devices you are very likely to be well served by a much cheaper device anyway (like half as cheap).
All I can say is I have both and I use both most days. In addition to work-issued Windows laptops, so I have a reasonable and very regular comparison. And the comparative experience is exactly as I described. Always. Every time.
> you have to deal with all the small slowdown from constant swapping
That just doesn't happen. As I responded to another post, though, I don't do Docker or LLMs on the M1 otherwise you'd probably be right.
> Unless you stick to a very small amounts of apps and very small amounts of tabs at the same time
It's really common to have approaching 50+ tabs open at once. And using Word is often accompanied by VS Code, Excel, Affinity Designer, DotNet, Python, and others due to the nature of what I'm doing. No slowdown.
> maybe you are emotionally attached
I am emotionally attached to the device. Though as a long-time Mac, Windows, and Linux user I'm neither blinkered nor tribal - the attachment is driven by the experience and not the other way around.
> maybe the various advantages of the Mac make you ignore the serious limitations that come with it
There are indeed limitations. 8GB is too small. The fact that for what I do it has no impact doesn't mean I don't see that.
> you can deal with the 8GB Apple Silicon devices you are very likely to be well served by a much cheaper device anyway (like half as cheap)
I already have better Windows laptops than that, and I know that going for a Windows laptop that's half as cheap as the entry level Air would be nothing like as nice because the more expensive ones already aren't (the Lenovo was dearer than the Air).
---
To conclude, you have to use the right tool for the job. If the nature of the task intrinsically needs lots of RAM then 8GB is not good enough. But when it is enough it runs rings around equivalent (and often 'better') Windows machines.
While certainly misleading, there were situations where the G4 was incredibly fast for the time. I remember being able to edit Video in iMove on a 12" G4 Laptop. At that time there was no equivalent x86 machine.
A year later I was doing bonkers (for the time) photoshop work on very large compressed tiff files and my G4 laptop running at 400Mhz was more than 2x as fast as PIIIs on my bench.
Was it faster all around? I don't know how to tell. Was Apple as honest as I am in this commentary about how it mattered what you were doing? No. Was it a CPU that was able to do some things very fast vs others? I know it was.
It's just amazing that this kind of nonsense persists. There were no significant benchmarks, "scientific" or otherwise, at the time or since showing that kind of behavior. The G4 was a dud. Apple rushed out some apples/oranges comparisons at launch (the one you link appears to be the bit where they compared a SIMD-optimized tool on PPC to generic compiled C on x86, though I'm too lazy to try to dig out the specifics from stale links), and the reality distortion field did the rest.
Funny you mention that machine I still have one of those laying around.
It was a very cool machine indeed with a very capable graphics card but that's about it.
It did some things better/faster than a Pentium III PC but only if you went for the bottom of the barrel unit and crippled the software support (MMX just like another reply mentioned).
On top of that Intel increased frequency faster than Apple could handle. And after the release of the Pentium 4, the G4s became very noncompetitive so fast that one would question what could save Apple (later, down the road, Intel it turns out).
They tried to salvage it with the G5s but those came with so many issues that even their bi-proc water-cooled were just not keeping up. I briefly owned of those after repairing it for "free" using 3 of them, supposedly dead; the only thing worth a dam in that was the GPU. Extremely good hardware in many ways but also very weak for so many things that it had to be used only for very specific tasks, otherwise a cheap Intel PC was much better.
Which is precisely why right after they went with Intel. After years of subpar performance on laptops because they were stuck at G4 (not even high frequency).
Now I know from your other comments that you are a very strong believer and I'll admit that there were many reasons to use a Mac (software related) but please stop pretending they were performance competitive because that's just bonkers. If they were, the Intel switch would never have happend in the first place...
> ME Apple has always been the most honest when it makes performance claims.
Okay, but your example was about battery life:
> LIke when they said an Macbook Air would last 10+ hours and third-party reviewers would get 8-9+ hours. All the while, Dell or HP would claim 19 hours and you'd be lucky to get 2 eg [1]
And even then, they exaggerated their claims. And your link doesn't say anything about HP or Dell claiming 19 hour battery life.
Apple has definitely exaggerated their performance claims over and over again. The Apple silicon parts are fast and low power indeed, but they've made ridiculous claims like comparing their chips to an nVidia RTX 3090 with completely misleading graphs
This is why you have to take everything they say with a huge grain of salt. Their chip may be "twice" as power efficient in some carefully chosen unique scenario that only exists in an artificial setting, but how does it fare in the real world? That's the question that matters, and you're not going to get an honest answer from Apple's marketing team.
You're right, its not 19 hours claimed. It was more than even that.
> HP gave the 13-inch HP Spectre x360 an absurd 22.5 hours of estimated battery life, while our real-world test results showed that the laptop could last for 12 hours and 7 minutes.
the absurdness was difference in claimed battery life vs actual battery life. 19 vs 2 is more absurd than 22.5 vs 12
> Speaking of the ThinkPad P72, here are the top three laptops with the most, er, far out battery life claims of all our analyzed products: the Lenovo ThinkPad P72, the Dell Latitude 7400 2-in-1 and the Acer TravelMate P6 P614. The three fell short of their advertised battery life by 821 minutes (13 hours and 41 mins), 818 minutes (13 hours and 38 minutes) and 746 minutes (12 hours and 26 minutes), respectively.
Dell did manage to be one of the top 3 most absurd claims though.
Dell and IBM were lying about battery life before OSX was even a thing and normal people started buying MacBooks. Dell and IBM will be lying about battery life when the sun goes red dwarf.
Reviewers and individuals like me have always been able to get 90% of Apple’s official battery times without jumping through hoops to do so. “If you were very careful” makes sense for an 11% difference. A ten hour difference is fucking bullshit.
So you are saying that Dell with Intel CPU could get longer battery life than Mac with M1? What does that say about quality of Apple engineering? Their marketeering is certainly second to none.
M1 Ultra did benchmark close to 3090 in some synthetic gaming tests. The claim was not outlandish, just largely irrelevant for any reasonable purpose.
Apple does usually explain their testing methodology and they don’t cheat on benchmarks like some other companies. It’s just that the results are still marketing and should be treated as such.
Outlandish claims notwithstanding, I don’t think anyone can deny the progress they achieved with their CPU and especially GPU IP. Improving performance on complex workloads by 30–50% in a single year is very impressive.
It did not get anywhere close to a 3090 in any test when the 3090 was running at full power. They were only comparable at specific power usage thresholds.
Different chips are generally compared at similar power levels, ime. If you ran 400 watts through an M1 Ultra and somehow avoid instantly vaporizing the chip in the process, I'm sure it wouldn't be far behind the 3090.
Ok but that doesn't matter if you can't actually run 400 watts through an M1 Ultra. If you wanna compare how efficient a chip is, sure, that's a great way to test. But you can't make the claim that your chip is as good as a 3090 if the end user is never going to see the performance of an actual 3090
That's funny you say that, because this is precisely the time, I started buying Macs (I got a Pismo PowerBook G3 gifted and then bought an iBook G4). And my experience was that for sure, if you put as much money into a PC than in a Mac you would get MUCH better performance.
What made it worth it at the time (I felt) was the software. Today I'm really don't think so, software has improved overall in the industry and there is not a lot of things "Mac specific" that makes it a clear-cut choice.
As for the performance I can't believe all the Apple silicon hype. Sure, it gets good battery life given you use strictly Apple software (or software optimized for it heavily) but in mixed workload situation it's not that impressive.
Using the M2 MacBook Pro of a friend I figured I could get maybe 4-5 hours out of its best case scenario which is better than the 2-3 hours you would get from a PC laptop but also not that great considering the price difference.
And when it comes to performance it is extremely unequal and very lackluster for many things. Like there is more lag launching Activity Monitor on a 2K++ MacBook Pro than launching task manager on a 500 PC. This is a small somewhat stupid example but it does tell the overall story.
They talk a big game but in reality, their stuff isn't that performant in the real world.
And they still market games when one of their 2K laptops plays Dota 2 (a very old, relatively ressource efficient game) worse than a cheapo PC.
> Using the M2 MacBook Pro of a friend I figured I could get maybe 4-5 hours out of its best case scenario which is better than the 2-3 hours you would get from a PC laptop but also not that great considering the price difference.
Yes, but I stopped caring about electron apps some time ago. You can't just drop or ignore useful software to satisfy Apple marketing.
Just like you can't just ignore Chrome for Safari to satisfy the autonomy claims, because Chrome is much more useful and better at quite a bit of things.
I went the way of only Apple and Apple optimized software for quite a while but I just can't be bothered anymore, considering the price of the hardware and nowadays the price of subscription software.
And this is exactly my argument I you use the hardware in a very specific way, you get there but it is very limiting, annoying and inacceptable considering the pricing.
It's like saying that a small city car gets more gas mileage when what one needs is actually a capable truck. It's not strictly wrong but also not very helpful.
I think the Apple Silicon laptops are very nice if you can work within the limitations, but the moment you start pushing on those you realize they are not really worth the money.
Just like the new iPad Pro they released; completely awesome hardware but how many people can actually work within the limitations of iPad OS to make the price not look like a complete ripoff. Very few I would argue.
Oh those megahertz myths! Their marketing department is pretty amazing at their spin control. This one was right up there with "it's not a bug; it's a feature" type of spin.
Before macOS became NextStep it was practically a different company. I’ve been using Apple hardware for 21 years, when they got a real operating system. Even the G4 did better than the laptop it replaced.
> IME Apple has always been the most honest when it makes performance claims
Yes and no. They'll always be honest with the claim, but the scenario for the claimed improvement will always be chosen to make the claim as large as possible, sometimes with laughable results.
Typically something like "watch videos for 3x longer <small>when viewing 4k h265 video</small>" (which means they adapted the previous gen's silicon which could only handle h264).
I don't think less honest covers it and can't believe anything their marketing says after the 3090 claims. Maybe it's true, maybe not. We'll see from the reviews. Well assuming the reviewers weren't paid off with an "evaluation unit".
This is why Apple can be slightly more honest about their battery specs, they don’t have the OS working against them. Unfortunately most DELLs XPS will be running Windows, so it is still misleading to provide specs based on what the hardware could do if not sabotaged.
Archlinux, mitigations (spectre alike) off, X11, OpenBox, bmpanel with only CPU/IO indicator. Light theme everywhere. Opera in power save mode. `powertop --auto-tune` and `echo 1 | sudo tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/intel_pstate/no_turbo` Current laptop is Latitude 7390.
Right, so you are disabling all performance features and effectively turning your CPU into a low–end low–power SKU. Of course you’d get better battery life. It’s not the same thing though.
> echo 1 | sudo tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/intel_pstate/no_turbo
Isn't that going to torch performance? My i9-9900 has a base frequency of 3.6 Ghz and a turbo of 5.0 Ghz. Disabling the turbo would create a 28% drop in performance.
I suppose if everything else on the system is configured to use as little power as possible, then it won't even be noticed. But seeing as CPUs underclock when idle (I've seen my i9 go as low as 1.2 Ghz), I'm not sure disabling turbo makes a significant impact except when your CPU is being pegged.
That's the point. I have no performance bottleneck with no_turbo. My i5 tends to turn on turbo mode and increased power demand (heat leaks) even if it's no needed. For example with no_turbo laptop is always cold and fan basically stays silent. With turbo it easily gets 40C warm while watching YT or doing my developer stuff, building docker containers and so.
I get 20 minutes from my Dell (not the XPS), with Vim. When it was brand-new, I got 40 minutes. A piece of hot garbage, with an energy-inefficient intel cpu..
Controlling the OS is probably a big help there. At least, I saw lots of complaints about my zenbook model’s battery not hitting the spec. It was easy to hit or exceed it in Linux, but you have to tell it not to randomly spin up the CPU.
I had to work my ass off on my Fujitsu Lifebook to get 90% of the estimate, even on Linux. I even worked on a kernel patch for the Transmeta CPU, based on unexploited settings in the CPU documentation, but it came to no or negligible difference in power draw, which I suppose is why Linus didn’t do it in the first place.
I’ve never known a time when Dell, IBM, Sony, Toshiba, Fujitsu, Alien, weren’t lying through their teeth about battery times.
What time period are you thinking about for Apple? I’ve been using their laptops since the last G4 which is twenty years. They’ve always been substantially more accurate about battery times.
The problem with arguing about battery life this way is that it's highly dependent on usage patterns.
For example I would be surprised if there is any laptop, which is sufficiently fast for my usage, and it's battery life is more than 2-3 hours top. Heck, I have several laptops and all of them dies in one-one and a half hours. But of course, I never optimized for battery life, so who knows. So in my case, all of them are lying equally. I don't even check battery life for 15 years now. It's a useless metric for me, because all of them are shit.
But of course for people who don't need to use VMs, run several "micro"services at once, have constant internet transfer and have 5+ Intellij project open at the same time which caching several millions LOC, while gazillion web pages are open, maybe there is a difference, for me it doesn't matter whether it's one or one and a half hours.
You should try a MacBook Pro someday. It would still last all day with that workload. I had an XPS at work and it would last 1.5 hrs. My Apple laptop with the same workload lasts 6-8 hours easily. I never undocked the dell because of the performance issues. I undock the mac all the time because I can trust it to last.
Nothing too crazy I don't think. A bunch of standard Electron applications, a browser, a terminal - that's pretty much it. Sometimes Dockers, but I always kill it when I'm done.
Maybe for battery life, but definitely not when it comes to CPU/GPU performance. Tbf, no chip company is, but Apple is particularly egregious. Their charts assume best case multi-core performance when users rarely ever use all cores at once. They'd have you thinking it's the equivalent of a 3090 or that you get double the frames you did before when the reality is more like 10% gains.
Yeah, the assumption seems to be that using less battery by one component means that the power will just magically go unused. As with everything else in life, as soon as something stops using a resource something else fills the vacuum to take advantage of the resource.
Apple might use simplified and opaque plots to drive their point, but they all too often undersell the differences. Indepedent reviews for example find that they not just hit the mark Apple mentions for things like battery but that often do slightly better...
> is it REALLY half the power use of all times (so we'll get double the battery life)
I'm not sure what you mean by "of all times" but half the battery usage of the processor definitely doesn't translate into double the battery life since the processor is not the only thing consuming power.
You wouldn’t necessarily get twice the battery life. It could be less than that due to the thinner body causing more heat, a screen that utilizes more energy, etc
I don't know, but the M3 MBP I got from work already gives the impression of using barely any power at all. I'm really impressed by Apple Silicon, and I'm seriously reconsidering my decision from years ago to never ever buy Apple again. Why doesn't everybody else use chips like these?
I have an M3 for my personal laptop and an M2 for my work laptop. I get ~8 hours if I'm lucky on my work laptop, but I have attributed most of that battery loss to all the "protection" software they put on my work laptop that is always showing up under the "Apps Using Significant Power" category in the battery dropdown.
I can have my laptop with nothing on screen, and the battery still points to TrendMicro and others as the cause of heavy battery drain while my laptop seemingly idles.
I recently upgraded my personal laptop to the M3 MacBook pro and the difference is astonishing. I almost never use it plugged in because I genuinely get close to that 20 hour reported battery life. Last weekend I played a AAA Video Game through Xbox Cloud Gaming (awesome for mac gamers btw) and with essentially max graphics (rendered elsewhere and streamed to me of course), I got sucked into a game for like 5 hours and lost only 8% of my battery during that time, while playing a top tier video game! It really blew my mind. I also use GoLand IDE on there and have managed to get a full day of development done using only about 25-30% battery.
So yeah, whatever Apple is doing, they are doing it right. Performance without all the spyware that your work gives you makes a huge difference too.
For the AAA video game example, I mean, it is interesting how far that kind of tech has come… but really that’s just video streaming (maybe slightly more difficult because latency matters?) from the point of view of the laptop, right? The quality of the graphics there have more-or-less nothing to do with the battery.
Over the weekend, I accidentally left my work M3 unplugged with caffeinate running (so it doesn't sleep). It wasn't running anything particularly heavy, but still, on Monday, 80% charge left.
That's mindblowing. Especially since my personal laptop is a Thinkpad X1 Extreme. I can't leave that unplugged at all.
Apple quote 18h of Apple TV playback or 12h of web browsing so I will call a large amount of bullshit on that.
Even considering the marketing, best case scenario you would be between 27 and 41% battery consumption for 5h of runtime.
The actual number will be lower than that because you probably don't use the MBP at the low brightness they use for marketing benchmarks and game streaming constantly requires power for the wifi chip (video can buffer, hence the lower consumption).
There is no way to say this nicely, but can you stop lying ?
I think the market will move to using chips like this, or at least have additional options. The new Snapdragon SOC is interesting, and I would suspect we could see Google and Microsoft play in this space at some point soon.
If there is any dishonesty, I would wager it is a case of it can double the battery life in low power scenarios. Can go twice as long when doing word processing for instance. Can potentially idle a lot lower
We've seen a slow march over the last decade towards the unification of iOS and macOS. Maybe not a "it runs macOS", but an eventual "they share all the same apps" with adaptive UIs.
They probably saw the debacle that was Windows 8 and thought merging a desktop and touch OS is a decade-long gradual task, if that is even the final intention.
Unlike MS that went with the Big Bang in your face approach that was oh-so successful.
People have complained about why Logic Pro / Final Cut wasn't ported to the iPad Pro line. The obvious answer is that making workflows done properly take time.
Even with the advantage of time, I don't think Microsoft would have been able to do it. They can't even get their own UI situated, much less adaptive. Windows 10/11 is this odd mishmash of old and new, without a consistent language across it. They can't unify what isn't even cohesive in the first place.
At this point, there's two fundamentally different types of computing that will likely never be mergeable in a satisfactory way.
We now have 'content consumption platforms' and 'content creation platforms'.
While attempts have been made to try and enable some creation on locked-down touchscreen devices, you're never going to want to try and operate a fully-featured version of Photoshop, Maya, Visual Studio, etc on them. And if you've got a serious workstation with multiple large monitors and precision input devices, you don't want to have dumbed-down touch-centric apps forced upon you Win8-style.
The bleak future that seems likely is that the 'content creation platforms' become ever more niche and far more costly. Barriers to entry for content creators are raised significantly as mainstream computing is mostly limited to locked-down content consumption platforms. And Linux is only an option for as long as non-locked-down hardware is available for sensible prices.
On the other hand, a $4000 mid-game Macbook doesn’t have a touchscreen and that’s a heresy. Granted, you can get the one with the emoji bar, but why interact using touch on a bar when you could touch the screen directly?
Maybe the end game for Apple isn’t the full convergence, but just having a touch screen on the Mac.
Why would you want greasy finger marks on your Macbook screen?
Not much point having a touchscreen on a Macbook (or any laptop really), unless the hardware has a 'tablet mode' with a detachable or fold-away keyboard.
Mouse and keyboard is still a better interface for A LOT of work. I have yet to find a workflow for any of my professional work that would be faster or easier if you gave me a touchscreen.
There are plenty of laptops that do have touchscreens, and it has always felt more like a gimmick than a useful hardware interface.
Kinda weird to exclude Procreate, Affinity, Final Cut, Logic, etc. from your definition of content creation. The trend has clearly been more professional and creative apps year over year and ever more capable devices to run them on. I mean, you're right that nobody wants to use Photoshop on the iPad, but that's because there are better options.
Honestly, the biggest barrier to creativity is thinking you need a specific concept of a "serious workstation" to do it. Plenty of people are using $2k+ desktops just to play video games.
In these cases, it still seems that tablet-based tools are very much 'secondary tools', more of a sketchpad to fiddle with ideas while on the move, rather than 'production tools'.
Then there's the whole dealing with lots of files and version control side of things, essential for working as part of a team. Think about creating (and previewing, and finally uploading) a very simple web page, just HTML and a couple of images, entirely on an iPad. While it's probably quite possible these days, I suspect the workflow would be abysmal compared to a 'proper computer' where the file system isn't hidden from you and where you're not constantly switching between full-screen apps.
And that's before you start dealing with anything with significant numbers of files in deep directory structures, or doing more technical image creation (e.g. dealing with alpha channels). And of course, before testing your webpage on all the major browsers. Hmm...
There are so many artists who exclusively work on their iPad. It does seem cumbersome for a whole studio to use iPads, but they can be a powerhouse for an individual
But nobody is using iPads as a sole production tool. It's part of the production tooling but it's not exactly an essential part or a part that can't get rid of or replace easily, unlike a "real" computer.
It's rather disingenuous to pretend that an iPad can be sufficient. At its price tag it is still a rather extremely expensive accessory and people pretending otherwise are just full of it. There are enough reviews/testimonies saying as much (even from the diehard fans) for it to be an obvious fact.
> Barriers to entry for content creators are raised significantly as mainstream computing is mostly limited to locked-down content consumption platforms. And Linux is only an option for as long as non-locked-down hardware is available for sensible prices.
Respectfully, I disagree partially. It has never been easier or more affordable to get into creating content. You can create cinema grade video with used cameras that sell for a few hundred dollars. You can create pixar level animation on open source software, and a pretty cheap computer. A computer that can edit a 4k video costs less than the latest iPhone. There are people that create plenty of content with just a phone. Simply put it is orders of magnitude cheaper and easier to create content than it was less than two decades ago, which is why we are seeing so much content getting made. I used to work for a newspaper and it used to be a lot harder and more expensive to produce audio visual media.
My strong feeling is that the problem of content being locked into platforms has precious little to do with consumption oriented hardware, and more to do with the platforms. Embrace -> extinguish -> exlcusivity -> enshittify seems to be the model behind basically anything that hosts user content these days.
> At this point, there's two fundamentally different types of computing that will likely never be mergeable in a satisfactory way.
This is a completely artificial creation by Apple and Google to extract more money from you. Nothing technical prevents one from using a full OS on a phone today.
You're right about the reason but wrong about the timeline: Jobs saw Windows XP Tablet Edition and built a skunkworks at Apple to engineer a tablet that did not require a stylus. This was purely to spite a friend[0] of his that worked at Microsoft and was very bullish on XP tablets.
Apple then later took the tablet demo technology, wrapped it up in a very stripped-down OS X with a different window server and UI library, and called it iPhone OS. Apple was very clear from the beginning that Fingers Can't Use Mouse Software, Damn It, and that the whole ocean needed to be boiled to support the new user interface paradigm[1]. They even have very specific UI rules specifically to ensure a finger never meets a desktop UI widget, including things like iPad Sidecar just not forwarding touch events at all and only supporting connected keyboards, mice, and the Apple Pencil.
Microsoft's philosophy has always been the complete opposite. Windows XP through 7 had tablet support that amounted to just some affordances for stylus users layered on top of a mouse-only UI. Windows 8 was the first time they took tablets seriously, but instead of just shipping a separate tablet OS or making Windows Phone bigger, they turned it into a parasite that ate the Windows desktop from the inside-out.
This causes awkwardness. For example, window management. Desktops have traditionally been implemented as a shared data structure - a tree of controls - that every app on the desktop can manipulate. Tablets don't support this: your app gets one[2] display surface to present their whole UI inside of[3], and that surface is typically either full-screen or half-screen. Microsoft solved this incongruity by shoving the entire Desktop inside of another app that could be properly split-screened against the new, better-behaved tablet apps.
If Apple were to decide "ok let's support Mac apps on iPad", it'd have to be done in exactly the same way Windows 8 did it, with a special Desktop app that contained all the Mac apps in a penalty box. This is so that they didn't have to add support for all sorts of incongruous, touch-hostile UI like floating toolbars, floating pop-ups, global menus, five different ways of dragging-and-dropping tabs, and that weird drawer thing you're not supposed to use anymore, to iPadOS. There really isn't a way to gradually do this, either. You can gradually add feature parity with macOS (which they should), but you can't gradually find ways to make desktop UI designed by third-parties work on a tablet. You either put it in a penalty box, or you put all the well-behaved tablet apps in their own penalty boxes, like Windows 10.
Microsoft solved Windows 8's problems by going back to the Windows XP/Vista/7 approach of just shipping a desktop for fingers. Tablet Mode tries to hide this, but it's fundamentally just window management automation, and it has to handle all the craziness of desktop. If a desktop app decides it wants a floating toolbar or a window that can't be resized[4], Tablet Mode has to honor that request. In fact, Tablet Mode needs a lot of heuristics to tell what floating windows pair with which apps. So it's a lot more awkward for tablet users in exchange for desktop users having a usable desktop again.
[0] Given what I've heard about Jobs I don't think Jobs was psychologically capable of having friends, but I'll use the word out of convenience.
[1] Though the Safari team was way better at building compatibility with existing websites, so much so that this is the one platform that doesn't have a deep mobile/desktop split.
[2] This was later extended to multiple windows per app, of course.
[3] This is also why popovers and context menus never extend outside their containing window on tablets. Hell, also on websites. Even when you have multiwindow, there's no API surface for "I want to have a control floating on top of my window that is positioned over he...
Clip Studio is one Mac app port I’ve seen that was literally the desktop version moved to the iPad. It uniquely has the top menu bar and everything. They might have made an exception because you’re intended to use the pencil and not your fingers.
Honestly, using a stylus isn't that bad. I've had to support floor traders for many years and they all still use a Windows-based tablet + a stylus to get around. Heck, even Palm devices were a pleasure to use. Not sure why Steve was so hell bent against them, it probably had to do with his beef with Sculley/Newton.
Unfortunately I think "they share all the same apps" will not include a terminal with root access, which is what would really be needed to make iPad a general purpose computer for development
It's a shame, because it's definitely powerful enough, and the idea of traveling with just an iPad seems super interesting, but I imagine they will not extend those features to any devices besides macs
I mean, it doesn't even have to be true "root" access. Chromebooks have a containerized linux environment, and aside from the odd bug, the high end ones are actually great dev machines while retaining the "You spend most of your time in the browser so we may as well bake that into the OS" base layer.
I actually do use a Chromebook in this way! Out of all the Linux machines I've used, that's why I like it. Give me a space to work and provide an OS that I don't have to babysit or mentally maintain.
Been a while since I've used a chromebook but iirc there's ALSO root access that's just a bit more difficult to access, and you do actually need to access it from time to time for various reasons, or at least you used to.
You're thinking of Crouton, the old method of using linux on a Chromebook (which involved disabling boot protection and setting up a second linux install in a chroot, with a keybind that allowed you to toggle between the two environments). It was including a
Crostini is the new containerized version that is both officially supported and integrated into ChromeOS
I will settle for: you can connect 2 monitors to iPad and select audio device sound is going through. If can run IntelliJ and compile rust on the iPad, I would promise to upgrade to the new iPad Pro as soon as it is released every time.
Agreed, this will be the way forward in the future. I've already seen one of my apps (Authy) say "We're no longer building a macOS version, just install the iPad app on your mac".
That's great, but you need an M series chip in your mac for that to work so backwords compatibility only goes back a few years at this point, which is fine for corporate upgrade cycles but might be a bit short for consumers at this time. But it will be fine in the future.
The writing was on the wall with the introduction of Swift, IMO. Since then it's been over complicating the iPad and dumbing down the macOS interfaces to attain this goal. So much wasted touch/negative space in macOS since Catalina to compensate for fingers and adapative interfaces; so many hidden menus and long taps squirreled away in iOS.
Michelin-starred restaurants not only have top-tier chefs. They have buyers who negotiate with food suppliers to get the best ingredients they can at the lowest prices they can. Having a preferential relationship with a good supplier is as important to the food quality and the health of the business as having a good chef to prepare the dishes.
Apple has top-tier engineering talent but they are also able to negotiate preferential relationships with their suppliers, and it's both those things that make Apple a phenomenal tech company.
Qualcomm is also with TSMC and their newer 4nm processor is expected to stay competitive with the M series.
If the magic comes mostly from TSMC, there's a good chance for these claims to be true and to have a series of better chips coming on the other platforms as well.
“Stay” competitive implies they’ve been competitive. Which they haven’t.
I’m filing this into the bin with all the other “This next Qualcomm chip will close the performance gap” claims made over the past decade. Maybe this time it’ll be true. I wouldn’t bet on it.
Point taken. I used "stay" as in, their next rumored/leaked chip wouldn't be an single anomalous success but the start of a trend that could expand to the X2, X3 Elite chips coming after.
Basically we'd need some basis to believe they'll be progressively improving at more or less the same pace as Intel's or Apple's chips to get on board with ARM laptops for Windows/linux.
Otherwise I don't see software makers care enough to port their build to ARM as well.
Actually, TSMC's N3E process is somewhat of a regression on the first-generation 3nm process, N3. However, it is simpler and more cost-efficient, and everyone seems to want to get out of that N3 process as quickly as possible. That seems to be the biggest reason Apple released the A17(M3) generation and now the M4 the way they did.
The N3 process is in the A17 Pro, the M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max. The A17 Pro name seems to imply you won't find it trickle down on the regular iPhones next year. So we'll see that processor only this year in phones, since Apple discontinues their Pro range of phones every year; only the regular phones trickle downrange lowering their prices. The M3 devices are all Macs that needed an upgrade due to their popularity: the Macbook Pro and Macbook Air. They made three chips for them, but they did not make an M3 Ultra for the lower volume desktops. With the announcement of an M4 chip in iPads today, we can expect to see the Macbook Air and Macbook Pro upgraded to M4 soon, with the introduction of an M4 Ultra to match later. We can now expect those M3 devices to be discontinued instead of going downrange in price.
That would leave one device with an N3 process chip: the iMac. At its sale level, I wouldn't be surprised if all the M3 chips that will go into it will be made this year, with the model staying around for a year or two running on fumes.
There is also the fact that we currently have an iPhone generation where only the Pro models got updated to chips on TSMC 3nm.
The next iPhone generation is said to be a return to form with all models using the same SOC on the revised version of the 3nm node.
> Code from the operating system also indicates that the entire iPhone 16 range will use a new system-on-chip – t8140 – Tahiti, which is what Apple calls the A18 chip internally. The A18 chip is referenced in relation to the base model iPhone 16 and 16 Plus (known collectively as D4y within Apple) as well as the iPhone 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max (referred to as D9x internally)
N3E still has a +9% logic transistor density increase on N3 despite a relaxation to design rules, for reasons such as introduction of FinFlex.[1] Critically though, SRAM cell sizes remain the same as N5 (reversing the ~5% reduction in N3), and it looks like the situation with SRAM cell sizes won't be improving soon.[2][3] It appears more likely that designers particularly for AI chips will just stick with N5 as their designs are increasingly constrained by SRAM.
SRAM has really stalled. I don’t think 5nm was much better than 7nm. On ever smaller nodes, sram will be taking up a larger and larger percent of the entire chip. But the cost is much higher on the smaller nodes even if the performance is not better.
I can see why AMD started putting the SRAM on top.
It wasn't immediately clear to me why SRAM wouldn't scale like logic. This[1] article and this[2] paper sheds some light.
From what I can gather the key aspects are that decreased feature sizes lead to more variability between transistors, but also to less margin between on-state and off-state. Thus a kind of double-whammy. In logic circuits you're constantly overwriting with new values regardless of what was already there, so they're not as sensitive to this, while the entire point of a memory circuit is to reliably keep values around.
Alternate transistor designs such as FinFET, Gate-all-around and such can provide mitigation of some of this, say by reducing transistor-to-transistor variability by a factor, but can't get around root issue.
That doesn't seem to reflect in the battery life of these. They have the same exact battery life. Does it mean it's not entirely accurate? Since they don't indicate the battery capacity in their specs, it's hard to confirm this.
I haven't paid too much attention today, but what I did see with the iPad Pro was that they're using an OLED display (maybe even some kind of double layer OLED for increased brightness if I'm understanding the marketing jargon?).
I believe that OLED is much more power hungry than the previous display type (LED backlit LCD of some type?). I could be wrong, but in TV land that's the case...
Could explain, at least partly, why run time isn't greatly increased.
They made the battery on the 13" 5% smaller than the previous generation. They also write that they tested the device with auto-brightness disabled and brightness set at 50%. Not sure who the brightness slider works on the new iPads since the iPhones don't get max brightness unless auto-brightness is enabled. So 50% might be 1000/2=500 nits on the M4 iPad Pro and 600/2=300 nits on the M2 iPad Pro, or they might both be about 300 nits.
Clever wording on their part: 2x performance per watt over M2. Took me a minute, had to reason through this is their 2nd generation 3nm chip, so it wasn't from a die shrink, then go spelunking.
This claim can only be evaluated in the context of a specific operating point. I can 6x the performance per watt of the CPU in this machine I am using by running everything on the efficiency cores and clocking them down to 1100MHz. But performance per watt is not the only metric of interest.
It surprised me they called it an M4 vs an M3 something. The display engine seems to be the largest change I don't know what that looked like on previous processors. Completely hypothesizing but could be a significant efficiency improvement if its offloading display stuff.
I'd rather they just keep counting up than some companies where they get into wonky product line naming convention hell.
It's ok if 3 to 4 is or isn't a big jump, it's the next one is really all I want to know. If I need to peek at the specs, the name really won't tell me anything anyhow and I'll be on a webpage.
I'm guessing that the "ML accelerator" in the CPU cores means one of ARM's SME extensions for matrix multiplication. SME in ARM v8.4-A adds dot product instructions. v8.6-A adds more, including BF16 support.
Apple has the NPU (also called Apple Neural Engine), which is specific hardware for running inference. Can't be used for LLMs though at the moment, maybe the M4 will be different. They also have a vector processor attached to the performance cluster of the CPU, they call the instruction set for it AMX. I believe that that one can be leveraged for faster LLM inferencing.
It's not obvious to me that Apple does make a significant amount of money by selling upgrades. Almost everyone buys the base model. The other models are probably little more than a logistical pain in the butt from Apple's perspective. Apple has to offer more powerful systems to be credible as a platform, but I wouldn't be surprised if the apparently exorbitant price of the upgrades reflects the overall costs associated with complicating the production and distribution lines.
It’s not about the price of upgrades though, it’s about their bundling together and the ridiculously stingy base specs that often make the upgrade non-optional. People who buy a base MacBook Air probably aren’t thinking about keeping it for 8 years or using it for heavy workloads.
Sure, but bundling them together reduces the supply chain complexity and reduces Apple's costs. If the options were more fine grained, Apple would sell even less of each model and it would be even less worth their while.
Also, I have seen lots of people on HN complain about the price itself, even if it's not what you yourself object to.
Margins and profit. Less variations in production makes for higher efficiency. Segmenting the product line can push consumers to purchase higher tiers of product. It's iOS anyways, and the people who know enough to care how much RAM they are getting are self-selecting for those higher product tiers.
Logistical efficiencies mostly. It ends up being a lot of additional SKUs to manage, and it would probably discourage people from moving up a price tier if they would have otherwise. So from Apple’s perspective they’re undergoing more hassle (which costs) for the benefit of selling you lower margin products. No upside for them besides maybe higher customer satisfaction, but I doubt it would have moved the needle on that very much.
They push you to buy the more expensive model with higher margins.
This is what they did when I was buying iPad Air - it starts with actually problematically low 64GB of Storage... and the 256GB model is the next one with massive price jump.
It's the same kind of "anchoring" (marketing term) that car dealers use to lure you into deciding for their car based on the cheapest 29.999$ model which with "useful" equipment will end you costing like 45.000$
Honest question: What data do you store on an iPad Air? On a phone you might have some photos and videos but isn't a tablet just a media consumption device? Especially on iOS where they try to hide the filesystem as much as possible.
No data, but iOS apps have gotten massive, caches have gotten massive and install a game or two and 64GB is gone.
Not to mention that occasionally is nice to have a set of downloaded media available for vacation/travel and 64GB isn't enough to download week worth of content from Netflix.
This is why this is so annoying - you're right, I don't need 512GB or 256GB. But I'd still like to have more than "You're out of space!!" amount.
I've had the original iPad Pro with 64gb since it first released and have somehow never run out of storage. Maybe my problem is that I don't download games. I'd suggest using a USB drive for downloaded media though if you're planning to travel. All of the media apps I use (Netflix, YouTube, Crunchyroll, etc.) support them. That's worked well for me and is one reason I was comfortable buying the 64gb model.
Sorry, I thought I had done this with Netflix but I tried it just now and couldn't find the option. Then I googled it and it looks like it was never supported, I must've misremembered Netflix being an option.
As he said, you buy excess storage so that you don't have to think about how much storage you are using. Meanwhile if you barely have enough, you're going to have to play data tetris. You can find 256GB SSDs that sell for as low as 20€. How much money is it worth to not worry about running out of data? Probably more than the cost of the SSD at these prices.
Games. You can put maybe three or four significant games on an iPad Air before it maxes out. (MTG Arena is almost 20GB all on it's own, Genshin Impact is like 40+ GB)
Yes. However, applications have to be specifically written to use external storage, which requires popping open the same file picker you use to interact with non-Apple cloud storage. If they store data in their own container, then that can only ever go on the internal storage, iCloud, or device backups. You aren't allowed to rugpull an app and move its storage somewhere else.
I mean, what would happen if you yanked out the drive while an app was running on it?
We use PLEX for long trips in the car for the kids. Like 24 hour drives. We drive to Florida in the winter and the iPads easily run out of space after we’ve downloaded a season or two of Adventure Time and Daniel Tiger.
I could fit more if I didn’t insist on downloading everything 1080p I guess.
> but isn't a tablet just a media consumption device
In my sphere, everyone with an iPad uses it for the Apple Pencil and/or video editing. Raw files for drawings get surprisingly big, once you get up into the many tens of layers, considering an artist can draw a few a day.
Because before you know it you're Dell and you're stocking 18 different variants of "Laptop, 15 inch screen, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD" and users are scratching their heads trying to figure out WTF the difference is between a "Latitude 3540" a "Latitude 5540" and a "New Latitude 3550"
I can't tell whether this is serious or not. Surely adding independently configurable memory/storage combinations won't confuse the user, any more than having configurable storage options don't make the user confused about what iphone to get?
Configuring your iPhone storage is something every consumer has a concept of, it's some function of "how many pictures can I store on it"? When it comes to CPU/GPU/RAM and you're having to configure all three, the average person is absolutely more likely to be confused.
It's anecdotal, but 8/10 people that I know over the age of 40 would have no idea what RAM or CPU configurations even theoretically do for them. This is probably the case for most iPad purchasers, and Apple knows this - so why would they provide expensive/confusing configurability options just for the handful of tech-y people who may care? There are still high/med/low performant variations that those people can choose from, any the number of people for whom that would sour them away from a sale is vanishingly small, and they would be likely to not even be looking at Apple in the first place
Yes, the additional $600 they make off of users who just want extra RAM is just an unfortunate side effect of the unavoidable process of not being Dell. Couldn't be any other reason.
Apple already fixed this with the Mac: they stock a handful of configurations most likely to sell, and then everything else is a custom order shipped direct from China. The reason why Apple has to sell specific RAM/storage pairs for iPads is that they don't have a custom order program for their other devices, so everything has to be an SKU, and has to sell in enough quantity to justify being an SKU.
The GP comment can be misleading because it suggests Apple is tying storage to ram. That is not the case (at least not directly).
The RAM and system-on-chip are tied together as part of the system-on-package. The SoP is what enables M chips to hit their incredible memory bandwidth numbers.
This is not an easy thing to allow configuration. They can’t just plug a different memory chip as a final assembly step before shipping.
They only have two SoPs as part of this launch: 9-core CPU with 8gb, and 10-core CPU with 16gb. The RAM is unified for cpu/gpu (and I would assume neural engine too).
Each new SoP is going to reduce economies of scale and increase supply chain complexity. The 256/512gb models are tied to the first package, the 1/2tb models are tied to the second. Again, these are all part of the PCB, so production decisions have to be made way ahead of consumer orders.
Maybe it’s not perfect for each individual’s needs, but it seems reasonable to assume that those with greater storage needs also would benefit from more compute and RAM. That is, you need more storage to handle more video production so you are probably more likely to use more advanced features which make better use of increased compute and RAM.
> What do they lose by allowing slightly more freedom in configurations?
More costs everywhere in the chain; limiting SKUs is a big efficiency from manufacturing to distribution to retail to support, and it is an easy way (for the same reason) to improve the customer experience, because it makes it a lot easier to not be out of or have delays for a customer’s preferred model, as well as making the UI (online) or physical presentation (brick and mortar) for options much cleaner.
Of course, it can feel worse if you you are a power user with detailed knowledge of your particular needs in multiple dimensions and you feel like you are paying extra for features you don't want, but the efficiencies may make that feeling an illusion — with more freedom, you would being paying for the additional costs that created, so a higher cost for the same options and possibly just as much or more for the particular combination option you would prefer with multidimensional freedom as for the one with extra features without it. Though that counterfactual is impossible to test.
1. Having more SKUs is expensive, for everything from planning to inventory management to making sure you have enough shelf space at Best Buy (which you have to negotiate for). Chances are good that stores like Best Buy and Costco would only want 2 SKUs anyway, so the additional configs would be a special-order item for a small number of consumers.
2. After a certain point, adding more options actually decreases your sales. This is confusing to people who think they'd be more likely to buy if they could get exactly what they wanted, but what you're not seeing is the legions of casual consumers who are thinking about maybe getting an iPad, but would get overwhelmed by the number of options. They might spend days or weeks asking friends which model to get, debating about whether to spend extra on this upgrade or that, and eventually not buying it or getting an alternative. If you simplify the lineup to the "cheap one" and the "high end one" then people abandon most of that overhead and just decide what they want to pay.
The biggest thing tech people miss is that they're not the core consumers of these devices. The majority go to casual consumers who don't care about specifying every little thing. They just want to get the one that fits their budget and move on. Tech people are secondary.
It's fairly absurd that they're still selling a 256gb "Pro" machine in the first place.
That said, Apple's policy toward SKUs is pretty consistent: you pay more money and you get more machine, and vice versa. The MacBooks are the only product which has separately configurable memory / storage / chip, and even there some combinations aren't manufactured.
If that were the goal (I don't think it is), they'd be better off shipping enough storage to push people into the 2TB tier, which is $11 vs. $3 a month for 200GB.
I said this in a sibling comment already, but I think it's just price anchoring so that people find the $1500 they're actually going to pay a bit easier to swallow.
Real creative pros will likely be using a 10G Thunderbolt NIC to a SAN; local video editing is not advised unless it’s only a single project at a time.
I have a 256G iPhone. I think I’m using like 160G. Most stuff is just in the cloud. For an iPad it wouldn’t be any different, modulo media cached for flights. I could see some cases like people working on audio to want a bunch stored locally, but it’s probably in some kind of compressed format such that it wouldn’t matter too much.
I don't know about 'concern' necessarily, but it seems to me that 512GB for the base Pro model is a more realistic minimum. There are plenty of use cases where that amount of storage is overkill, but they're all served better by the Air, which come in the same sizes and as little as 128GB storage.
I would expect most actual users of the Pro model, now that 13 inch is available at the lower tier, would be working with photos and video. Even shooting ProRes off a pro iPhone is going to eat into 256 pretty fast.
Seems like that model exists mainly so they can charge $1500 for the one people are actually likely to get, and still say "starts at $1299".
Then again, it's Apple, and they can get away with it, so they do. My main point here is that the 256GB model is bad value compared to the equivalent Air model, because if you have any work where the extra beef is going to matter, it's going to eat right through that amount of storage pretty quick.
I think you're underestimating the number of people who go in to buy an iPad and gravitate to the Pro because it looks the coolest and sounds like a luxury thing. For those people, who are likely just going to use it for web browsing and streaming videos, the cheapest configuration is the only one they care about.
That type of buyer is a very significant % of sales for iPad pros. Despite the marketing, there are really not that many people (as a % of sales) that will be pushing these iPad's anywhere even remotely close to their computational/storage/spec limits.
Honestly though, that's basically every tablet you cant change the ram, you get what you get and thats it. Maybe they should call them by different names like Pro Max for the ones with 16GB in order to make it more palatable? Small psychological hack.
The Samsung tablets at least still retain the SD card slot, so you can focus more on the desired amount of RAM and not worry too much about the built-in storage size.
It would be cool if regulators mandated that companies like Apple are obligated to provide models of devices with SD card slots and a seamless way to integrate this storage into the OS/applications.
That combined with replaceable batteries would go a long way to reduce the amount of ewaste.
And then people would stick alphabet-soup SD cards into their devices and complain about performance and data integrity, it's enough of a headache in the Android world already (or has been before Samsung and others finally decided to put in enough storage for people to not rely on SD cards any more).
In contrast, Apple's internal storage to my knowledge always is very durable NVMe, attached logically and physically directly to the CPU, which makes their shenanigans with low RAM size possible in the first place - they swap like hell but as a user you barely notice it because it's so blazing fast.
Yeah jackasses are always gonna jackass. There's still a public interest in making devices upgradable for the purpose of minimizing e-waste.
I'd just love to buy a device with a moderate amount of unupgreadable SSD and an SD slot so that I can put a more memory in it later so the device can last longer.
Agreed but please with something other than microSD cards. Yes, microSD Express is a thing, but both cards and hosts supporting it are rare, the size format doesn't exactly lend itself to durable flash chips, thermals are questionable, and even the most modern microSD Express cards barely hit 800 MB/sec speed, whereas Apple's stuff has hit twice or more that for years [2].
Just like I don't want an umbilical cord hanging out of me just to perform the full extent of my bodily functions, I also wouldn't want a dongle hanging off my tablet for it to be deemed usable.
I don't think it's strictly for price gouging/segmentation purposes.
On the Macbooks (running MacOS), RAM has been used as data cache to speed up data read/write performance until the actual SSD storage operation completes. It makes sense for Apple to account for with higher RAM spec for the 1TB/2TB configurations.
Even on the Atari ST you would use a "RAM disk" when working with "large" data before manually flushing it to a floppy. Some people would use the trashcan icon to emphasise the need to manually flush... Not quite a cache, but the concept was there.
I'm writing this from memory, so some details may be wrong but: most high end ssds have dram caches on board, with a capacitor that maintains enough charge to flush the cache to flash in case of power failure. This operates below the system page cache that is standard for all disks and oses.
Apple doesn't do this, and use their tight integration to perform a similar function using system memory. So there is some technical justification, I think. They are 100% price gougers though.
With hardware where power-off is only controlled by software, battery life is predictable, and large amounts of data like raw video are being persisted, they might have a very aggressive version of page caching, and a large amount of storage may imply that a scale-up of RAM would be necessary to keep all the data juggling on a happy path. That said, there’s no non-business reasons why they couldn’t extend that large RAM to smaller storage systems as well.
People without the "large amount of storage model" need to record video from the camera too.
The justifications I see are to reduce the number of models needed to stock and to keep the purchasing decision simple for customers. These are very good reasons.
If that were the case why do they bother with an iPad, iPad Air, iPad Pro, iPhone SE, iPhone, iPhone Pro, iPhone Pro Max, ... each with their own number of colors and storage variations.
iPad Air was created to make a new price category.
The iPhone SE exists because there is a market for this form factor. If you look at the specs, you would notice it uses hardware previously used by more expensive models.
> iPhone, iPhone Pro, iPhone Pro Max
Again, different customers for different form-factors. These phones differ more than just SoC in them.
You understand that having N different colors of iPads is different from having N different SoCs for the same model of an iPad.
Shouldn't the required cache size be dependent on throughput more so than disk size? It does not necessarily seem like you'd need a bigger write cache if the disk is bigger, people who have a 2TB drive don't read/write 2x as much in a given time as those with a 1TB drive. Or am I missing something?
IIRC SSD manufacturers are likely to store a mapping table of LBAs (logical block addresses) to PBAs (physical block addresses) in the DRAM or Host Memory Buffer.
Some calculation like:
total storage size / page size per LBA (512B or 4KiB usually) * mapping data structure size
> SSD manufacturers are likely to store a mapping table of LBAs (logical block addresses) to PBAs (physical block addresses) in the DRAM or Host Memory Buffer.
Are LBA's a thing on SSD's nowadays? I thought it was the legacy of the spinning rust.
SSD's operate on memory pages of the flash memory, and the page management is a complicated affair that is also entirely opaque to the host operating system due to the behind the scenes page remapping. Since flash memory is less durable (in the long term), the SSD's come overprovisioned and the true SSD capacity is always more (up to a double if my memory serves me well). The SSD controller also runs an embedded RTOS that monitors failures in flash chips and proactively evacuates and remaps ailing flash memory pages onto the healthy ones. Owing to this behaviour, the memory pages that the SSD controller reports back to the operating system have another, entirely hidden, layer of indirection.
Yep, LBAs are the primary addressing scheme in the NVMe spec, written into every single IO command. I would imagine there could be a better way, but NVMe & OS support still carries some baggage from SATA HDDs -> SATA SSDs -> NVMe SSDs.
As you mentioned, over-provisioning and other NAND flash memory health management techniques like garbage collection and wear leveling are needed for usable modern SSDs. Modern SSD controllers are complex beasts having 3-7 microprocessor cores (probably double digit core counts now with PCIe 5.0), encryption engines, power & thermal management, error correction, multiple hardware PHYs, etc.
Do people not understand that Apple's 'price gouging' is about UX? A person who has the money to buy a 1TB iPad is worth more than average customer. A 16GB RAM doubtlessly results in a faster UX and that person is more likely to continue purchasing.
> Do people not understand that Apple's 'price gouging' is about UX? A person who has the money to buy a 1TB iPad is worth more than average customer. A 16GB RAM doubtlessly results in a faster UX and that person is more likely to continue purchasing.
And that decision somehow turns into making budget conscious people's UX shittier? How is that a reason not to make 16gb RAM, which is almost a bare minimum in 2024, available to everyone?
If I'm understanding your point correctly that wouldn't prevent them from offering higher ram specs for the lower storage eg. 512 gig macs. So it seems like it is just price gouging
This comes up frequently. 8GB is sufficient for most casual and light productivity use cases. Not everyone is a power user, in fact, most people aren’t.
> What’s the price difference between 8 and 16? Like $3 in wholesale prices.
Your estimates are not even close. You can't honestly think that LPDDR5 at leading edge speeds is only $3 per 64 Gb (aka 8GB), right?
Your estimate is off my an order of magnitude. The memory Apple is using is closer to $40 for that increment, not $3.
And yes, they include a markup, because nobody is integrating hardware parts and selling them at cost. But if you think the fastest LPDDR5 around only costs $3 for 8GB, that's completely out of touch with reality.
GP said "LPDDR5" and that Apple won't sell at component prices.
You mention DIMMs and component prices instead. This is unhelpful.
See https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/memory/memory/774... for LPDDR5 prices. You can get a price of $48/chip at a volume of 2000 chips. Assuming that Apple got a deal of $30-40-ish at a few orders of magnitude larger order is quite fair. Though it certainly would be nicer if Apple priced 8GB increments not much above $80-120.
I am aware that there are differences, I just took RAM DIMMs as a reference because there is a >0% chance that anyone reading this has actually ever bought a comparable product themselves.
As for prices, the prices you cited are not at all comparable. Apple is absolutely certainly buying directly from manufacturers without a middleman since we're talking about millions of units delivered each quarter. Based on those quantities, unit prices are guaranteed to be substantially lower than what DigiKey offers.
Based on what little public information I was able to find, spot market prices for LPDDR4 RAM seem to be somewhere in the 3 to 5$ range for 16GB modules. Let's be generous and put LPDDR5 at tripe the price with 15$ a 16GB module. Given the upgrade price for going from 8 to 16GB is 230 EUR Apple is surely making a huge profit on those upgrades alone by selling an essentially unusable base configuration for a supposed "Pro" product.
DDR5 DIMMs and LPDDR chips as in the MacBooks are not the same beasts at all.
A DIMM is 8 or 16 chips (9/18 is ECC), while the LPDDR is a single chip for the same storage. The wild density difference in chip capacity (512MB or 1GB vs 8GB) makes a huge difference, and how a stick can be sold at retail for cheaper than the bare LPDDR chip in volume.
The point you're missing is that it's about the future. I generally agree, but it's obvious everything becomes more RAM intensive as time goes on. Hell, even games can take more than 8 GB of purely VRam these days.
It's really not weird. The more you charge for the base product and upgrades, serving the bare minimum becomes less acceptable. It also doesn't help that the 4GB base models from years past aged super quickly compared to it's higher end cousins.
Programming has a wierd way of requirering basically nothing some times, but other times you need to build the latest version of your toolchain, or you are working on some similarly huge project that takes ages to compile.
I was using my 4gb ram pinebook pro in public transport yesterday, and decided to turn of all cores except for a single Cortex-A53, to safe some battery. I had no problems for my usecase of a text editor + shell to compile for doing some SIMD programming.
At this point I don't think the frustration has much to do with the performance but rather RAM is so cheap that intentionally creating a bottleneck to extract another $150 from a customer comes across as greedy, and I am inclined to agree. Maybe the shared memory makes things more expensive but the upgrade cost has always been around the same amount.
It's not quite in the same ballpark as showing apartment or airfare listings without mandatory fees but it is at the ticket booth outside of the stadium.
The bigger problem is when you need a new machine fast, the apple store doesn't have anything but the base models in stock. In my org we bought a machine for a new developer who was leaving town, and were forced to buy an 8gb machine because the store didn't have other options (it was going to be a 2 week wait). As you can imagine, the machine sucked for running Docker etc and we had to sell it on facebook marketplace for a loss.
I've never encountered an actual Apple Store not having specced up machines on hand (maybe not EVERY possible configuration, but a decent selection). If you go to a non-Apple retailer, afaik, they are limited to the base spec machines (RAM wise), it's not even a matter of them being out of stock. If you want anything other than 8GB (or whatever the base amount is for that model) of RAM you need to go through Apple directly. This was the case, at least in Canada a few years ago, correct me if I'm wrong/things have changed.
Those are the type of "I'll go back later to it", The workflow on modern browser is broken. Instead of leveraging the bookmark functionality to improve the UX, we have this situation of user having 50+ tabs open, because they can. It takes quite a bit of discipline to close down tabs to a more manageable numbers.
The number of tabs you have doesn’t correlate to the number of active web views you have, if you use any browser that unloads background tabs while still saving their state.
Mine is 8GB M1 and it is not fine. But the actual issue for me isn't RAM as much as it is disk space, I'm pretty confident if it wasn't also the 128 GB SSD model it would handle the small memory just fine.
I'm still getting at least 16 GB on my next one though.
Yeah personally I find cheaping out on the storage far more egregious than cheaping out on the RAM. Even if you have most things offloaded onto the cloud, 128 GB was not even enough for that, and the 256 GB is still going to be a pain point even for many casual home users, and at the price point of Apple machines it's inexcusable to not add another $25 of flash
Both are disgusting for the price asked. It would be a lot easier to excuse all the other compromises if the base was 16/512, which would cost Apple like 50 bucks tops per machine.
But greed is unlimited, I guess.
MacBook Air starts at 1,199 euro. For insane battery life, amazing performance, great screen and one of the lightest chassis. Find me comparable laptop, I’ll wait.
The screen is the killer. you can have a nice-ish 2nd corporate laptop with decent and swappable battery on which you can install a decent OS (non Windows) and get good milage but the screen is something else.
Asking for a machine with "insane battery life, amazing performance, great screen and one of the lightest chassis" and oh, it must be completely silent is a loaded set of demands. Apple in the current market is essentially the only player that can actually make a laptop that can meet your demands, at least without doing a bunch of research into something that's equivalent and hoping the goal posts don't move again.
this is extremely funny in the context of the protracted argument up-thread about what you could reasonably be comparing the macbook air against.
like, the $359 acer shitbox probably doesn't do all the exact same thing as the MBA either, but that's actually ok and really only demonstrates the MBA is an unaffordable luxury product, basically the same as a gold-plated diamond-encrusted flip-phone.
Not your circus, not your clowns, but this is sort of the duality of apple: "it's all marketing and glitz, a luxury product, there's no reason to buy it, and the fact that they have a better product only PROVES it" vs "of course no PC manufacturer could possibly be expected to offer a top-notch 120hz mini-LED screen, a good keyboard, great trackpad, good speakers, and good SOC performance in a thin-n-light..."
Race car drivers. They are pros. Professional drivers. They definitely know how to drive a car much more efficiently than I do, or anyone that’s just into cars. I assume the race car engineers are the pros at rebuilding engines.
And as for the parent comment’s point, being into cars doesn’t mean you’re as good as a professional race car driver.
iOS has become such a waste of great hardware, especially in the larger form factor of the iPad.
M1 chips, great screens, precise pencil input and keyboard support, but we still aren't permitted a serious OS on it, to protect the monopolistic store.
App Stores have beeen around long enough to prove that they're little more than laboratories in which to carry out accelerated enshittification experimentation. Everything so dumbed down and feature-light, yet demanding subscriptions or pushing endless scammy ads. And games that are a shameless introduction to gambling addiction, targeted at kids.
Most of the 'apps' that people actually use shouldn't need to be native apps anyway, they should be websites. And now we get the further enshittification of trying to force people out of the browser and into apps, not for a better experience, but for a worse one, where more data can be harvested and ads can't so easily be blocked...
I feel sorry you got downvoted so much. But it looks like nowadays people don't like to hear the truth, at least when it comes to Apple stuff.
I feel bad about all this because I advised my mother to buy an iPad Pro as it was sold as a laptop replacement but it never materialized anywhere near expectations and ended being an expensive mistake that can only offer compromised workflows with limitations that do not even come close to a MacBook she was used to (even in Apple own apps, even something like the Page app, yes).
I think the iPad would be a fine device, if only they didn't try to upsell it and stopped pretending it is a "Pro" thing.
If the whole lineup would get OLED displays, more RAM across the board and decent base storage for media at a more honest price it would be an easy recommendation.
As it is, the entry level is lackluster because of the display (if you only buy for content consumption it is better to go with an Android OLED options) and the high-end variant are just stupid expensive for what they will actually allow you to do.
But too many Apple customers have drunk the Kool-Aid so they don't have to care much about the reality and we just get expensive bullshit.
If the iPad could run Mac apps when docked to Magic Keyboard like the Mac can run iPad apps then there may be a worthwhile middle ground that mostly achieves what people want.
The multitasking will still be poor but perhaps Apple can do something about that when in docked mode.
That said, development likely remains a non-starter given the lack of unix tooling.
I have a minimum of 64GB on my all my main developer machines (home, work, laptop), but I have a spare laptop with only 8GB of RAM for lightweight travel.
Despite the entire internet telling me it would be "unusable" and a disaster and a complete disaster, it's actually 100% perfectly fine. I can run IDEs, Slack, Discord, Chrome, and do dev work without a problem. I can't run a lot of VMs or compile giant projects with 10 threads, of course, but for typical work tasks it's just fine.
And for the average consumer, it would also be fine. I think it's obvious that a lot of people are out of touch with normal people's computer use cases. 8GB of RAM is fine for 95% of the population and the other 5% can buy something more expensive.
For me personally, it’s not an issue of being out of touch. I did, in fact, use a 2014 Macbook with an i5 CPU and 16 GB of RAM for nearly a decade and know how often I hit swap and/or OOM on it even without attempting multicore shenanigans which its processor couldn’t have managed anyway.
It’s rather an issue of selling deliberately underpowered hardware for no good reason other than to sell actually up-to-date versions for a difference in price that has no relation to the actual availability or price of the components. The sheer disconnect from any kind of reality offends me as a person whose job and alleged primary competency is to recognize reality then bend it to one’s will.
I don't think we ever were at a point in computing were you could buy a high-end (even entry level macbooks have high-end pricing) laptop with the same amount of ram as you could 10 years earlier.
Hmm, unexpected. I was quite sure my partner's 2015 mbp was sitting at 4gb, but you win this one! ;)
Edit: I confirmed that I was indeed wrong, but the payoff isn't great anyway because that just means that yes in fact they've kept the exact same ram floor for 10 years. Insane.
But why did you configure 3 machines with 64+ GB, if 8 GB RAM are "100% perfectly fine" for typical work tasks?
For me personally 16 or 32 GB are perfectly fine, 8 GB was too little (even without VMs) and I've never needed 64 or more. So it's curious to see you are pretty much exactly the opposite.
I have the base M2 air with 8gb ram, and it's really been perfect for working on. The only time things have become an issue is dual user accounts being logged in at the same time. Which is very preventable.
Half my organisation runs on 8GB Chromebooks. We were testing one of our app changes the other day and it performed better on the Chromebook than it did on my i7 machine with 32GB.
Fine just doesn't cut it for a premium machine you expect to last a few years at least. It's honestly just marketed so you want to spend extra and upgrade. Let's be real.
I bought a second-hand office-grade PC recently, about a year ago. It was about $10 to $15, had no disks (obviously) and just 2 GB of DDR3 RAM. Also, an integrated GPU with some low-grade Intel CPU (Pentium, if I’m not wrong). Even the generation isn’t current, it’s about a decade old, a bit more.
I put a spare 120 GB SSD, a cheap no-name brand that was just lying around for some testing purposes. Found the similar off-the-shelf DDR3 2 GB RAM stick. I thought the RAM was faulty, turned out it’s in a working condition, so I put it there.
I need the computer for basic so-called office work (a browser, some messengers, email client and a couple of other utilities). I thought I’d buy at least two 4GB RAM sticks after I test it, so you know, 8 GB is just the bare imaginable minimum! I have my 16 GBs everywhere since, idk, maybe 2012 or something.
And you know what?! It works very well with 4 GB of RAM and default Fedora (it’s 40 now, but I started with 38, iirc). It has the default Gnome (also, 46 now, started with 44, iirc). And it works very well!
It doesn’t allow me to open a gazillion of browser tabs, but my workflow is designed to avoid it, so I have like 5 to 10 open simultaneously.
Before throwing Fedora at the PC, I thought I would just install a minimal Arch Linux with swaywm and be good. But I decided I don’t want to bother, and I’ll just buy 8 GB later on, and be done with it.
And here I am, having full-blown Gnome and just 4 GB of RAM. I don’t restrict myself too much, the only time I notice it’s not my main PC is when I want to do some heavy web-browsing (e.g. shopping on some different heavy websites with many tabs opened). Then it slows down significantly, till I close the unnecessary tabs or apps. All the software is updated and current, so it’s not like it’s some ancient PC from 00’s.
Also, I have my iPad Pro 12,9 1st Gen with just 4 GB of RAM too, and I never feel it’s slow for me.
I understand that some tasks would require a lot of RAM, and it’s not for everyone. Having a lot of RAM everywhere, I’m quite used to not thinking of it at all for a significant part of my career (for over a decade now), so I may have something opened for weeks that I don’t have any need for.
So, it’s 2024, and I’m surprised to say that 4 GB of RAM is plenty when you’re focused on some tasks and don’t multitask heavily. Which never productive for me at least. I even noticed that I enjoy my low-memory PC even more, as it reminds me with its slowdowns that I’m entering the multitasking state.
I use swaywm on my Arch Linux laptop, and most of the time it’s less than 3–4 Gb (I have 16 Gb).
> 8GB of RAM is fine for 95% of the population and the other 5% can buy something more expensive.
This argument is self defeating in the context of the M4 announcement. "Average consumers" who don't need 16 GB of RAM don't need an M4 either. But people who do need an M4 chip probably also need 16 GB of RAM.
I think actually more people need 16 GB of RAM rather than a top M4 chip. Having only 8 GB can be a serious limitation in some memory heavy circumstances, while having (say) an M2 SoC rather than an M4 SoC probably doesn't break any workflow at all, it just makes it somewhat slower.
These specific model of tablets won't ever get MacOS support. Apple will tell you when you're allowed to run MacOS on a tablet, and they'll make you buy a new tablet specifically for that.
To be fair the ipod classic used a platter drive and ipads are high speed SSD storage. That being said, it's been years of the same storage options and at those prices it should be much higher, along with their iCloud storage offerings.
I can do it without even trying. I can't fit all of just any one of all of my music, shows, documentaries, books, or movies on any {i,iPad,tv,watch,vision}OS device ever made.
You haven't seen the size of my music, TV, or movie collection then. We have the technology to put it all on my phone and it should be cheaper, but it's not because of an absurd, money-and-design-only consumerist monoculture from the head bean counter who drifted far afield of the cool practicality and leadership of SJ.
Couldn't agree more. Cook deserves so much hate for what he did to Apple. I'm astounded people still worship Apple like nothing has changed at all.
All the changes under the Cook leadership are appalling and reveal what is definitely one of the worse character you can get as a leader. At this point even Bill Gates looks like a good guy in comparison.
The fundamental problem is TC and most of his immediate subordinates lack creative vision and the boldness to experiment and move beyond past wins that SJ shepherded. Apple needs a new leader who is both cool and interested in daring to take greater leaps of enriching the lives of users. First steps should be to give access to PCB circuit diagrams like computers of the 1970's, access to individual components for purchase by anyone through an "Amazon"-like supply chain, and access to security chip purchase and "recalibration" for verified owners. The works of art used as workhorses should be like an old Mercedes: able to keep going for years and treasured rather than fragile and disposable.
If 15 years of technological progress can’t find it cost effective to fit more than 256gb of solid state storage in a $1000 device, then what are we even doing here?
A 1 TB consumer-oriented SSD is about $50 today. At Apple’s manufacturing scale, do you have any doubt that the cost to them is nearly negligible?
We've reached a point where their chips has become so amazing they have to introduce "fake scarcity" and "fake limits" to sell their pro lines, while dividing their customers into haves and havenots, while actively stalling the entire field for the masses.
You could, alternatively, read less malice into the situation and realize that the majority of people buying an iPad pro don't even need 8gb of RAM to do what they want to do with the device (web browsing + video streaming).
I'm not defending Apple's absurd stinginess with RAM (though I don't think it's much of an issue on an iPad given how gimped the OS is), but I've never understood why high-end Android phones have 12/16+ GB RAM.
What needs that amount on a phone? 8GB on a desktop is...well it's not great, but it's usable, and usable for a damn sight more multi-tasking than you would ever do on a smartphone. Is it just because you need to look better on the spec sheet, like the silly camera megapixel wars of the 2010s?
I think that is very obvious. You have a browser window and a few apps open -- messaging, youtube, email, podcast etc. When you switch between apps and eventually back to your browser, you don't want the page to reload due to other apps eating up the memory. As simple as that. It's about having a good experience.
I don't know how they didn't realize that. Maybe they just don't use their phone as much as they think.
I freaking hate my iPhone Mini for that, load a YouTube video, a few tabs and a note and boom you are in for a reload every 3-context switch. It's disgusting for a phone that launched at a price too close to 1Keur for my liking.
And no, I'm not going to drop over 1keur on a stupid smartphone just to be able to load more than 5 tabs and a note without constant reloading when I'm just trying to do research in a shop to inform a purchasing decision.
I bought it solely for the form factor in the first place, but I really regret considering all the shortcomings that came with the price.
But if Apple think they are smartass, I'll have the last laugh by not buying their hardware again. My next smartphone is definitely going to have over 8Gb of RAM, just not from Apple.
Phones and tablets are effectively single-tasking. They don’t need much more ram than that in practice.
I use my iPad Pro constantly for heavy stuff and I don’t know how much ram is in it; it has never been something I needed to think about. The OS doesn’t even expose it.
Is a Pixel 8 a mid-range Android phone? Mine shipped with 8GB of RAM, and even with my frankly insane Chrome habits (I'm currently sitting at around 200 tabs) I'm only using about five and half gigabytes, and it runs a hell of a lot smoother than other phones with more RAM that I've used.
There's absolutely nothing a mobile device does that should require that much memory. That shitty OEMs bloat the hell out of their ROMs and slap on more memory to match isn't a good thing or something to emulate in my opinion.
“The next-generation cores feature improved branch prediction, with wider decode and execution engines for the performance cores, and a deeper execution engine for the efficiency cores. And both types of cores also feature enhanced, next-generation ML accelerators.”
I thought the same thing when I read it, but considering the attacks were known when doing this improvement, I hope that it was under consideration during the design.
The M1 Max that I have is easily the greatest laptop I've ever owned.
It is fast and handles everything I've ever thrown at it (I got 32 GB RAM), it never, ever gets hot, I've never heard a fan in 2+ years (maybe a very soft fan if you put your ear next to it). And the battery life is so incredible that I often use it unplugged.
It's just been a no-compromise machine. And I was thinking of upgrading to an M3 but will probably upgrade to an M4 instead at the end of this year when the M4 maxes come out.
Unlike the PC industry, Apple is/was able to move their entire ecosystem to a completely different architecture, essentially one developed exactly for low power use. Windows on ARM efforts will for the foreseeable future be plagued by application support and driver support. It's a great shame, as Intel hardware is no longer competitive for mobile devices.
Now that there's the 13 inch iPad I am praying they remove the display notch on the Macbooks. It's a little wacky when you've intentionally cut a hole out of your laptop screen just to make it look like your phones did 2 generations ago and now you sell a tablet with the same screen size without that hole.
I really hate the notch[0], but I do like that the screen stretches into the top that would otherwise be entry. It's unsightly, but we did gain from it.
[0] Many people report that they stop noticing the notch pretty quickly, but that's never been the case for me. It's a constant eyesore.
What I've done is use a wallpaper that is black at the top. On the MBP's OLED screen that means the black bezel perfectly blends into the now black menu bar. It's pretty much a perfect solution but the problem it's solving is ridiculous IMO.
I do the same, I can’t see the notch and got a surprise the other day when my mouse cursor disappeared for a moment.
I don’t get the hate for the notch tho. The way I see it, they pushed the menus out of the screen and up into their own dedicated little area. We get more room for content.
It’s like the touchbar for menus. Oh, ok, now I know why people hate it. /jk
> The way I see it, they pushed the menus out of the screen and up into their own dedicated little area. We get more room for content.
Exactly - laughed at first but it quickly made sense if they are prioritizing decent webcam quality. Before my M1 Pro 14 I had a Dell XPS 13 that also had tiny bezels but squeezed the camera into the very thin top bezel. The result was a terrible webcam that I gladly traded for a notch and a better camera quality.
However, that Dell did still fit Windows Hello (face unlock) capability into that small bezel, so the absence of FaceID despite having the notch is a bit shit.
Thats surprising you haven’t heard the fans. Must be the use case. There’s a few games that will get it quite hot and spool up the fans. I have also noticed its got somewhat poor sleep management and remains hot while asleep. Sometimes I pick up the computer for the first time that day and its already very hot from whatever kept it out of sleep with a shut lid all night.
Not sure what app you’ve installed to make it do that, but I’ve only experienced the opposite. Every Windows 10 laptop I’ve owned (4 of them) would never go to sleep and turn my bag into an oven if I forgot to manually shut down instead of closing the lid. Whereas my M1 MBP has successfully gone to sleep every lid close.
The Windows 10 image my employer uses for our Dell shitboxes has sleep completely disabled for some reason I cannot possibly comprehend. The only options in the power menu are Shut Down, Restart, and Hibernate.
If I forget to hibernate before I put it in my bag it either burns through its battery before the next day, or overheats until it shuts itself down. If I'm working from home and get up to pee in the night, I often walk past my office and hear the fans screaming into an empty room, burning god knows how much electricity. Even though the only thing running on it was Slack and an editor window.
It's an absolute joke of a machine and, while it's a few years old now, its original list price was equivalent to a very well specced MacBook Pro. I hope they were getting a substantial discount on them.
M1 Max here too. I don't see the point of if/when M4 Max comes out as an upgrade because these updates are too frequent and too small in performance bumps to be justified. Not speed, RAM, storage, or features are a limiting factor. They're going to have to create more "only works on X" iDevice upgrade lock-in killer features to get people to upgrade artificially and unnecessarily.
> M4 makes the new iPad Pro an outrageously powerful device for artificial intelligence
Yeah, well, I'm an enthusiastic M3 user, and I'm sure the new AI capabilities are nice, but hyperbole like this is just asking for snark like "my RTX4090 would like a word".
Other than that: looking forward to when/how this chipset will be available in Macbooks!
This is true, but that is only an advantage when running a model larger than the VRAM. If your models are smaller, you'll get substantially better performance in a 4090. So it all comes down to which models you want to run.
It seems like 13b was running fine on 4090, but when I tried all the more fun or intelligent ones became very slow and would have peformed better on m3.
Yes, M3 chips are available with 36GB unified RAM when embedded in a MacBook, although 18GB and below are the norm for most models.
And even though the Apple press release does not even mention memory capacity, I can guarantee you that it will be even less than that on an iPad (simply because RAM is very battery-hungry and most consumers won't care).
So, therefore my remark: it will be interesting to see how this chipset lands in MacBooks.
No, when using wording like "outrageously powerful", that's exactly the comparison you elicit.
I'd be fine with "best in class" or even "unbeatable performance per Watt", but I can absolutely guarantee you that an iPad does not outperform any current popular-with-the-ML-crowd GPUs...
Seeing an M series chip launch first in an iPad must be result of some mad supply chain and manufacturing related hangovers from COVID.
If the iPad had better software and could be considered a first class productivity machine then it would be less surprising but the one thing no one says about the iPads is “I wish this chip were faster”
Yeah, I don't think about charging my iPad throughout the day, and I constantly use it. Maybe it's in the low 20s late at night, but it never bothered me.
I think this is the most likely explanation. Lower volume for the given product matches supply better, and since it's clocked down and has a lower target for GPU cores it has better yields.
They already released all their macbooks and latest iphone on N3B which is the worst-yielding 3nm from TSMC. I doubt yields are the issue here.
It's suspected that the fast release for M4 is so TSMC can move away from the horrible-yielding N3B to N3E.
Unfortunately, N3E is less dense. Paired with a couple more little cores, an increase in little core size, 2x larger NPU, etc, I'd guess that while M3 seems to be around 145mm2, this one is going to be quite a bit larger (160mm2?) with the size hopefully being offset by decreased wafer costs.
I'm wondering if it's because they're hitting the limits of the architecture, and it sounds way better to compare M4 vs M2 as opposed to vs M3, which they'd have to do if it launched in a Macbook Pro.
Eh, they compared the M3 to the M1 when they launched it. People grumbled and then went on with their lives. I don't think they'd use that as a reason for making actual product decisions.
You probably have people (like myself) trying to keep up with the latest MacBook Air who get fatigued having to get a new laptop every year (I just upgraded to the M3 not too long ago, from the M2, and before that... the M1... is there any reason to? Not really...), so now they are trying to entice people who don't have iPads yet / who are waiting for a reason to do an iPad upgrade.
For $1,300 configured with the keyboard, I have no clue what I'd do with this device. They very deliberately are keeping iPadOS + MacOS separate.
I'm sort of "incentivized" to by Apple because as soon as they release a new one, the current device you have will be at "peak trade in value" and deteriorate over time.
It's a negligible amount of money. It's like, brand new $999, trade in for like $450. Once a year... $550 remainder/12 months is $45.75/mo to have the latest and greatest laptop.
How much is a 2-year old laptop worth? Because if you buy a new laptop every two years and don't even sell the old one, you're only spending $500 a year, which is less than you are now.
You really shouldn't trade-in your laptop on the basis of trying to maximise its trade-in value, that doesn't make economic sense.
You should be incentivised by trying to minimise depreciation. You incur the greatest amount of depreciation closest to the date of purchase, so the longer you go between purchases, the less depreciation you'll realise.
If I expected to say get, $450 after 1 year, and $250 after 2 years. By trading in every 2 years, I'm getting a laptop that's a bit older, but you're also saving $14.58/month on depreciation. If the year after that becomes $150, you'd be saving $22.22/month. If the price is worth it is subjective, I'm just saying going for maximal trade in value doesn't really make sense, since you save more money the lower the trade-in value you get.
Still using my M1 Air and had no interest in updating to M3. Battery life has dropped a fair amount, but still like 8+ hours. That's going to be the trigger to get a new one. If only batteries lasted longer.
Same here, my M1 Air still looks and feels like a brand new computer. Like, I still think of it as "my new MacBook". It's my main machine for dev work and some hobby photography and I'm just so happy with it.
The only reason I upgraded is my wife “stole” my M1 air. I bought a loaded M3 MBP and then they came out with a 15” Air with dual monitor capabilities. Kinda wish I had the air again. It’s not like I move it around much but the form factor is awesome.
I love the air form factor. I do serious work on it as well. I have used a pro, but the air does everything I need without breaking a sweat, and it's super convenient to throw in a bag and carry around the house.
My current assumption is that this has to do with whatever "AI" Apple is planning to launch at WWDC. If they launched a new iPad with an M3 that wasn't able to sufficiently run on-device LLMs or whatever new models they are going to announce in a month, it would be a bad move. The iPhones in the fall will certainly run some new chip capable of on-device models, but the iPads (being announced in the Spring just before WWDC) are slightly inconveniently timed since they have to announce the hardware before the software.
My guess is that the M4 and M3 are functionally almost identical so there's no real reason for them to restrict the iPad M4 launch until they get the chip into the MacBook / Air.
To be honest, I wish my iPad's chip was slower! I can't do anything other than watch videos and use drawing programs on an iPad, why does it need a big expensive power hungry and environmentally impactful CPU when one 1/10 the speed would do?
If I could actually do something with an iPad there would be a different discussion, but the operating system is so incredibly gimped that the most demanding task it's really suited for is .. decoding video.
> Why does it need a big expensive power hungry and environmentally impactful CPU when one 1/10 the speed would do?
Well, it's not. Every process shrink improves power efficiency. For watching videos, you're sipping power on the M4. For drawing...well if you want low latency while drawing, which generally speaking, people do, you...want the processor and display to ramp up to compensate and carry strokes as fast as possible?
Obviously if your main concern is the environment, you shouldn't upgrade and you should hold onto your existing model(s) until they die.
From what I can tell, the 2020 iPad has perfectly fine latency while drawing, and Apple hasn't been advertising lower latencies for each generation; I think they pretty much got the latency thing nailed down. Surely you could make something with the peak performance of an A12Z use less power on average than an M4?
As for the environmental impact, whether I buy or don't buy this iPad (I won't, don't worry, my 2020 one still works), millions of people will. I don't mind people buying powerful machines when the software can make use of the performance, but for iPad OS..?
The M4 is built on the newest, best, most expensive process node (right?). They've got to amortize out those costs, and then they could work on something cheaper and less powerful. I agree that they probably won't, and that's a shame. But still, the M4 is most likely one of the best options for the best use of this new process node.
I'm under the impression that this CPU is faster AND more efficient, so if you do equivalent tasks on the M4 vs an older processor, the M4 should be less power hungry, not more. Someone correct me if this is wrong!
It's more power efficient than the M3, sure, but surely it could've been even more power efficient if it had worse performance simply from having fewer transistors to switch? It would certainly be more environmentally friendly at the very least!
The most environmentally friendly thing to do is to keep your A12Z for as long as you can, ignoring the annual updates. And when the time comes that you must do a replacement, get the most up to date replacement that meets your needs. Change your mindset - you are not required to buy this one, or the next one.
Of course, I'm not buying this one or any other until something breaks. After all, my current A12Z is way too powerful for iPadOS. It just pains me to see amazing feats of hardware engineering like these iPads with M4 be completely squandered by a software stack which doesn't facilitate more demanding tasks than decoding video.
Millions of people will be buying these things regardless of what I'm doing.
They are for those tasks, where you do need high performance. Where you would wait for your device instead. A few tasks require all cpu power you can get, so that is what the performance cores are for. But most of the time, it will consume a fraction of that power.
My whole point is that iPadOS is such that there's really nothing useful to do with that performance. No task an iPad can do requires CPU power (except for maybe playing games but that'll throttle the M4 to hell and back anyway).
If I had to ballpark estimate this, your iPad probably uses less energy per year than a strand of incandescent holiday lights does in a week. Maybe somebody can work out that math.
How do you suggest they make new iPads for people who want them? Someone has to make new CPUs and if you can improve perf/W while you're doing so you might as well.
>To be honest, I wish my iPad's chip was slower! I can't do anything other than watch videos and use drawing programs on an iPad, why does it need a big expensive power hungry and environmentally impactful CPU when one 1/10 the speed would do?
A faster SoC can finish the task with better "work done/watt". Thus, it's more environmentally friendly. Unless you're referring to the resources dedicated to advancing computers such as the food engineers eat and the electricity chip fabs require.
A faster and more power hungry SoC can finish the task with better work done per joule if it is fast enough to offset the extra power consumption. It is my understanding that this is often not the case. See e.g efficiency cores compared to performance cores in these heterogeneous design; the E cores can get more done per joule AFAIU. If my understanding is correct, then removing the P cores from the M4 chip would let it get more work done per joule.
Regardless, the environmental impact I'm thinking about isn't mainly power consumption.
I don't know the details of iOS's scheduler or how it decides which tasks should go on which kind of core, but the idea is to put tasks which benefit from high performance on the P-cores, right?
It has 6 efficiency cores. Every single of them is extremely power efficient, but still faster than an iPad 2-3 generations back. So unless you go full throttle, a M4 is going to be by far the most efficient CPU you can have.
Watch a 20-year old creative work on an iPad and you will quickly change your mind. Watch someone who has, "never really used a desktop, [I] just use an iPad" work in Procreate or LumaFusion.
The iPad has amazing software. Better, in many ways, than desktop alternatives if you know how to use it. There are some things they can't do, and the workflow can be less flexible or full featured in some cases, but the speed at which some people (not me) can work on an iPad is mindblowing.
I use a "pro" app on an iPad and I find myself looking around for how to do something and end up having to Google it half the time. When I watch someone who really knows how to use an iPad use the same app they know exactly what gesture to do or where to long tap. I'm like, "How did you know that clicking on that part of the timeline would trigger that selection," and they just look back at you like, "What do you mean? How else would you do it?"
There is a bizarre and almost undocumented design langauge of iPadOS that some people simply seem to know. It often pops up in those little "tap-torials" when a new feature roles out that I either ignore or forget… but other people internalize them.
Oh, I'm with you. But the funny thing is, they won't even want it.
I have two iPads and two pencils—that way each iPad is never without a penicl—and yet I rarely use the pencil. I just don't think about it. But then when I do, I'm like, "Why don't I use this more often? It's fantastic."
I have tried and tried to adapt and I can not. I need a mouse, keyboard, seperate numpad, and two 5K Displays to mostly arrive at the same output that someone can do with a single 11" or 13" screen and a bunch of differnt spaces that can be flicked through.
I desperatedly wanted to make the iPad my primary machine and I could not do it. But, honestly, I think it has more to do with me than the software. I've become old and stubborn. I want to do things my way.
The existence of vscode.dev always makes me wonder why Microsoft never released an iOS version of VSCode to get more users into its ecosystem. Sure, it's almost as locked down as the web environment, but there's a lot of space in that "almost" - you could do all sorts of things like let users run their code, or complex extensions, in containers in a web view using https://github.com/ktock/container2wasm or similar.
It's actually come a long way. The workflow is still… sub-optimal, but there are some really nice terminal apps (LaTerminal, Prompt, ShellFish, iSH) which are functional too. Working Copy is pretty dope for working with git once you get you adapt to it.
I do most of my dev on a Pi5 now, so actually working on the iPad is not that difficult.
If they ever release Xcode for iPadOS that would be a true gamechanger.
"Prevented from coding" is just not true. There are many python IDEs, Swift Playgrounds, etc. Pythonista, and the like, are neat because you get full access to all the iPhone sensors.
And maybe that's fine? Look at it from the opposite side. All those artists complaining about how terrible macbooks are because you can't draw on them.
So, the product may not fit your use case or preference. That's ok. Others love it. That's also ok.
What's silly is thinking that a device that makes everyone happy is somehow trivial, or that a device intentionally made with a specific type of interface is bad because of that intent. If things were as bad or as trivial as some people suggest, someone else would have made a successful competing product by now, rather than the string failures across the industry, from those who have tried.
what you are describing is a certainly some kind of professional but we should look from a higher vantage point. A professional in any field will ultimately want to customize their tool or make their own tools and that is not possible with ipads or even really software on ipads. It is a massive step backwards to sit in a walled, proprietary garden and claim that these people are productive professionals as if they are comparable to the previous generation of professionals. They may be in some sense but from a more historical, higher viewpoint they all seem herded into tightly controlled, corporate tools that will be taken from them whenever it is convenient for someone else. Ipad users are effectively like vmware users who are just waiting for a Broadcom moment. The price hike will always come eventually, the support will always drop at some point. It is all borrowed time, tools someone else controls and makes. It might be necessary in a world where we all need to make money but to positively support it is something else entirely.
> A professional in any field will ultimately want to customize their tool or make their own tools
I suspect you’re a programmer. This is not the perspective or reality of most professional users. Most professional apps are not, themselves, customizable. Most professional users do not make their own tools, or want to. If you’re a programmer, you’ll understand this, because that’s why you’re employed: they want you to do it.
Sorry to be pedantic, but I feel that the distinction is important, that seems more like a UX than a programming job. Too often, UX, UI, coding, documentation, etc. are thrown together, viewed as tasks that can be handled by the same people interchangeably and it rarely yields great results, in part because programmers often start out with expectations that can differ from the vast majority of users.
Also, "most" and "any" aren't all too helpful in this discussion (not directed at anyone in particular, these can be read in comments throughout this thread) because there are going to be countless examples in either direction, but from my limited experience, I have seen professionals in various spaces, some which very much prefer a default workflow and others that heavily customize. I know talented professional programmers doing great work in the out-of-the-box setup of VSCode combined with GitHub Desktop, etc. but also have seen graphic designers, video editors, and even people focused purely on writing text that have created immensely impressive workflows, stringing macros together and relying heavily on templates and their preferred folder structures. Even on iPad OS, people can have their custom-tailored workflow regarding file placement, syncing with cloud storage, etc., just in a restricted manner and for what it's worth, I sometimes prefer using Alight Motion for certain video editing tasks on my smartphone over grabbing my laptop.
I have seen and feel strongly that any professional from any field can have a customized workflow and can benefit from the ability to customize their toolset, even those outside programming, but I also feel equally strongly that sane defaults must remain and the "iPad way of doing things", as much as I in my ancient mid-twenties will never fully adapt to it, must remain for people who prefer and thrief in that environment.
Sure, which most professionals don't use. If you think the average professional can program, or use scripting engines, it's because you're a HN user, and probably a programmer, not an average professional, and less likely one that uses an iPad.
But, there's nothing technically stopping an app developer from implementing any of this, including desktop level apps. Compute, keyboard/mouse, and stylus is ready. I think the minuscule market that would serve is what's stopping them.
It has nothing to do with programming, I know mechanics who complain about car models where the manuals costs massive amounts of money if they are even allowed to get it at all and it takes weeks to order them. This should be a familiar story in every field. Do artists not have ateliers full of custom brushes, things they found work for them and they customized? Not to mention that artists these days are Maya, Autodesk and Photoshop users. Is that pen really powerful enough? Because a pen is really close to a mouse pointer anyway, so why even stick to an ipad then, you can simple buy a pen and board for the desktop computer. This is not about whether I am a programmer or not, this is about why some praise and use Apple devices for professionals even though they are not the best choice.
> A professional in any field will ultimately want to customize their tool or make their own tools and that is not possible with ipads or even really software on iPads.
I was responding to this main point.
Every professional drawing app, on the iPad, allows you to make your own brushes. There's no limitation there. That's just a fundamental requirement of a drawing app. They're not customizing the workflow or tool/apps itself, which is what I thought you were referring to.
> make their own tools
This requires programming, does it not? Do you have some examples?
> why some praise and use Apple devices for professionals even though they are not the best choice.
Especially for drawing, I think it would be best to ask the professionals why they chose a ~1lb iPad in their backpack with a pixel perfect stylus, over a desktop computer and mouse. The answers might surprise you.
Just because people love it, doesn’t mean that it can’t be better. It also doesn’t mean that current way of doing things is efficient.
> What's silly is thinking that a device that makes everyone happy is somehow trivial, or that a device intentionally made with a specific type of interface is bad because of that intent.
Add a proper native terminal, proper virtualization framework á la what we have on Mac, side loading and third party browser support with plugins and you’ll shut up 99% of complaining users here.
> If things were as bad or as trivial as some people suggest, someone else would have made a successful competing product by now, rather than the string failures across the industry, from those who have tried.
Right, let me use my couple billion change in R&D to create iPad compatible system with all that I’ve mentioned before.
> Just because people love it, doesn’t mean that it can’t be better.
Better for who ? They sell like hot cakes, 50+ millions of them per year
According to google there are 25m software devs in the world, even if half (extremely generous) of them would buy a new ipad every single year (extremely generous) if they implemented what you ask it isn't going to change much for apple, ipads are like 10% of their revenues. So at best we're talking of 3% revenue increase
> 99% of complaining users here.
99% of not much is nothing for apple, they're already printing money too fast to know what to do with it
Yeah, apparently some people book flights from their phones!? Nah man, that's a laptop activity. I'd never spend more than a couple hundred dollars on my phone. Haha
I watched someone do some incredibly impressive modelling on an iPad Pro via shapr3D, and yeah, it was a young person.
I’m into the idea of modelling like this, or drawing, but the reality is I spend most of my time and money on a desktop work station because the software I need most is there. I’m totally open to iPads being legit work machines, but they’re still too limited (for me) to make the time and cash investment for the transition.
You’re definitely right though. People are doing awesome work on them without the help of a traditional desktop or laptop computer.
The examples given are always artists, whose jobs are actively on the chopping block due to AI models and systems which checks notes don't even run that effectively on apple hardware yet!
Of course, SWE jobs are on the chopping block for the same reasons, but I claim that AI art models are ahead of AI coding models in terms of quality and flexibility.
This has nothing to do with age. I have an iPad Pro that I barely use because it has been designed for use cases that I just don't have.
I don't do any digital art, don't take handwritten notes, and don't need to scan and/or mark up documents very often. I don't edit photos or videos often enough to need a completely separate device for the task.
I mostly use my computers for software development, which is impossible on an iPad. I tried running my dev tools inside an iSH session, and also on a remote Linux box that I could SSH into. It wasn't a great experience. Why do this when I could just run VS Code or WebStorm on a Mac?
I also write a lot -- fiction, blog posts, journal entries, reading notes -- which should technically be possible to do well on the iPad. In practice there just aren't enough powerful apps for serious long-form writing on a tablet. Microsoft Word on iPad lacks most of the features of its desktop counterpart, Scrivener doesn't support cloud sync properly, iA Writer is too limited if you're writing anything over a few thousand words, and Obsidian's UI just doesn't work well on a touch device. The only viable app is Ulysses, which is ... okay, I guess? If it floats your boat.
I sometimes do music production. This is now possible on the iPad via Logic Pro. I suppose I could give it a try, but what does that get me? I already own an Ableton license and a couple of nice VSTs, none of which transfers over to the iPad. I can also download random third-party apps to manipulate audio on my Mac, or mess around with Max4Live, or use my Push 2 to make music. Again, this stuff doesn't work on an iPad and it never will, because the APIs to enable these things simply don't exist.
There are tons of people who use Windows because they need to use proprietary Windows-based CAD software. Or people who need the full desktop version of Excel to do their jobs. Or academics and researchers who need Python/R to crunch data. All of these people might LOVE to use something like these new iPads, but they can't because iPadOS just can't meet their use cases.
I really like the idea of a convertible tablet that can support touch, stylus, keyboard, and pointer input. The iPad does a great job at being this device as far as hardware and system software is concerned. But unfortunately, it's too limited for a the kinds of workflows people using laptops/desktops need to do.
It's not a matter of being young or old, it's that iPadOS is not tooled to be a productive machine for software developers, but IS tooled to be productive machine for artists.
Apple claimed M3 was 1.35 the speed of the M2. So the M3 vs M4 comparison isn't that impressive. Certainly not bad by any means, just pointing out why it is compared to the M2 here.
People make this comment after every single m series release. Its true for intel too, worse even. Changes between like 8th and 9th and 10th gen were like nill, small clock bump same igpu even.
The other reason it is compared to the M2 is that there are no iPads with M3s in them, so it makes sense to compare to the processor used in the previous generation product.
> M4 makes the new iPad Pro an outrageously powerful device for artificial intelligence.
Isn’t there a ToS prohibition about “custom coding” in iOS? Like, the only way you can ever use that hardware directly is for developers who go through Apple Developer Program, which last time I heard was bitter lemon? Tell me if I’m wrong.
Well, this is the heart of the "appliance" model. iPads are appliances. You wouldn't ask about running custom code on your toaster or your blender, so you shouldn't ask about that for your iPad. Also all the common reasons apply: Security and Privacy, Quality Control, Platform Stability and Compatibility, and Integrated User Experience. All of these things are harmed when you are allowed to run custom coding.
(disclaimer: My personal opinion is that the "appliance" model is absurd, but I've tried to steel-man the case for it)
I mean this sincerely, are you really an Apple customer then? I feel exactly the same as you, and for that reason I don't buy Apple products. They are honest about what they sell, which I appreciate.
Ever notice people don't build their own cars anymore? They used to even up through the 60's. I mean ordering a kit or otherwise purchasing all the components and building the car. Nowadays it's very rare that people do that.
I'm old enough to remember when people literally built their own computers, soldering iron in hand. People haven't done that since the early 80's.
Steve Jobs' vision of the Mac, released in 1984, was for it to be a computing appliance - "the computer for the rest of us." The technology of the day prevented that. Though they pushed that as hard as they could.
Today's iPad? It's the fulfillment of Steve Jobs' original vision of the Mac: a computing appliance. It took 40 years, but we're here.
If you don't want a computing appliance then don't buy an iPad. I'd go further and argue don't buy any tablet device. Those that don't want computing appliances don't have to buy them. It's not like laptops, or even desktops, are going anywhere anytime soon.
> If you don't want a computing appliance then don't buy an iPad.
If you do want a computing appliance, then there's nothing wrong with having a machine that could be reprogrammed that you simply choose not to reprogram. Please stop advocating for a worse world for the rest of us when it doesn't benefit you in the slightest to have a machine that you don't control.
Stop being so damned melodramatic. I'm not advocating for a "worse world for the rest of us." There are a plethora of choices for machines that aren't appliances. In fact, the overwhelming majority of machines are programmable. Apple thinks the market wants a computing appliance. The market will decide. Meanwhile, you have lots of other choices.
> If you sell me a CPU, I want the power to program it, period.
Uhhh, there are CPUs in your frickin' wires now, dude! There are several CPUs in you car for which you generally don't have access. Ditto for your fridge. Your microwave. Your oven. Even your toaster.
We're literally awash in CPUs. You need to update your thinking.
Now, if you said something like "if you sell me a general-purpose computing device, then I want the power to program it, period" then I would fully agree with you. BTW, you can develop software for your own personal use on the iPad. It's not cheap or easy (doesn't utilize commonly-used developer tooling), but it can be done without having to jump through any special hoops.
Armed with that, we can amend your statement to "if you sell me a general-purpose computing device, then I want the power to program it using readily-available, and commonly-utilized programming tools."
I think that statement better captures what I presume to be your intent.
> but it can be done without having to jump through any special hoops.
You are really stretching the definition of "special hoops" here. On Android sideloading is a switch hidden in your settings menu; on iOS it's either a municipal feature or a paid benefit of their developer program.
Relative to every single other commercial, general-purpose operating system I've used, I would say yeah, Apple practically defines what "special hoops" look like online.
I do actually want the ability to program the CPUs in my car the same way I'm able to buy parts and mods for every mechanical bit in there down to the engine. In fact we have laws about that sort of thing that don't apply to the software.
That may be your personal preference, but you should accept that 99% of people don't care about programming their toaster, so you're very unlikely to ever make progress in this fight.
Could apply this for anything complex and packaged.
I’m annoyed that I can’t buy particular engines off the shelf and use them in my bespoke approach, why dont car manufacturers give the approach that crate engine providers do?
Then I wish you the best of luck in your fight. In the meantime, don't drag me down or tell me that I'm wrong just because you, personally, don't want something that I want that also doesn't harm you in the slightest.
Agree completely. I think it's absurd that they talk about technical things like CPU and memory in these announcements. It seems to me like an admission that it's not really an "appliance" but trying to translate Apple marketing into logical/coherent concepts can be a frustrating experience. I just don't try anymore.
I appreciate the steel-man. A strong counter argument for me is that you actually can run any custom code on an iPad, as long as it's in a web-browser. This is very unlike an appliance where doing so is not possible. Clearly the intention is for arbitrary custom code to run on it, which makes it a personal computer and not an appliance (and should be regulated as such).
That's a fair point, although (steel-manning) the "custom code" in the browser is severely restricted/sandboxed, unlike "native" code would be. So from that perspective, you could maybe expand it to be like a toaster that has thousands of buttons that can make for hyper-specific stuff, but can't go outside of the limits the manufacturer built in.
As with any Apple device — or honestly, any computing device in general — my criteria of evaluation would be the resulting performance if I install Linux on it. (If Linux is not installable on the device, the performance is zero. If Linux driver support is limited, causing performance issues, that is also part of the equation.)
NB: those are my criteria of evaluation. Very personally. I'm a software engineer, with a focus on systems/embedded. Your criteria are yours.
(But maybe don't complain if you buy this for its "AI" capabilities only to find out that Apple doesn't let you do anything "unapproved" with it. You had sufficient chance to see the warning signs.)
You're not wrong. It's why I don't use apple hardware anymore for work or play. On Android and Windows I can build and install whatever I like, without having to go through mother-Apple for permission.
There's the potential option of Swift Playgrounds which would let you write / run code directly on the iPad without any involvement in the developer program.
Is it just me or is there not a single performance chart here? Their previous CPU announcements have all had perf-per-watt charts, and that's conspicuously missing here. If this is an improvement over previous gens, wouldn't they want to show that off?
Since Intel->M1 the performance gains haven't been the headliners they once were, although the uplifts haven't been terrible. It also lets them hide behind the more impressive sounding multiplier which can reference something more specific but not necessarily applicable to broader tasks.
Call me crazy, but I want all that power in a 7" tablet. I like 7" tablets most because they feel less clunky to carry around and take with you. Same with 13" laptops, I'm willing to sacrifice on screen real estate for saving myself from the back pain of carrying a 15" or larger laptop.
Some of this is insanely impressive. I wonder how big the OS ROM (or whatever) is with all these models. For context, even if the entire OS is about 15GB, in order to get some of these features locally just for an LLM on its own, its about 60GB or more, for something ChatGPT esque. Which requires me to spend thousands on a GPU.
Apologies for the many thoughts, I'm quite excited by all these advancements. I always say I want AI to work offline and people tell me I'm moving the goalpost, but it is truly the only way it will become mainstream.
I'd love to see them add something to that form factor.
I do see a lot of iPad Minis out there, but usually, as part of dedicated systems (like PoS, and restaurant systems).
On the other hand, I have heard rumblings that Apple may release an even bigger phone, which I think might be overkill (but what do I know. I see a lot of those monster Samsung beasts, out there).
Not sure that is for me. I still use an iPhone 13 Mini.
I suspect that my next Mac will be a Studio. I guess it will be an M4 Studio.
I wish they would stop doing this weird release cycle where some of their tablets don't get the updated chips. It's really frustrating. Makes me hesitant to buy a tablet if I feel like it could get an upgrade a week later or whatever.
It certainly seems less than ideal for pro/prosumer buyers who care about the chips inside.
I would guess that Apple doesn't love it either; one suspects that the weird release cycle is at least partially related to availability of chips and other components.
I probably would have pulled the trigger on a price drop, but at 600+eur for an old version, I'm just not as into that, as I really expect it to be lasting many years.
I wanted to buy a Mini, but they had not updated the processors for them when I was buying, and they cost way more than a regular iPad at the time, I wanted to be budget conscious. I still sometimes regret not just going for the Mini, but I know eventually I'll get one sooner or later.
You know whats even funnier, when the mini came out originally, I made fun of it. I thought it was a dumb concept, oh my ignorance.
I have access to multiple iPad sizes and I personally only use the mini. Is almost perfect. Last year of its long life cycle you start to feel the age of the processor but still better than holding the larger devices. Can’t wait for it to be updated again.
If your back is hurting from the ~1lb extra going from 13" to 15", I would recommend some body weight exercises. Your back will thank you, and you'll find getting older to be much less painful.
Regarding a small iPad, isn't that the iPad mini? 8" vs 7" is pretty close to what you're asking for.
I highly recommend doing pull-ups for your posture and health. It was shocking to me how much the state of my spine improved after doing pull-ups as a daily exercise.
I just have a bar in my apartment in a doorway. Sometimes when I walk by I do 3 - 8 pull ups, then go on my way. Do that a few times a day and you’re doing pretty good. Sometimes I’ll do a few L pull ups as well.
If I’m doing pull ups in the gym I’ll do 3 sets of 7. That’s the most I can do at the moment.
The average HN based-boy apple user has almost negative arm strength. You're asking them to start with pull ups? They need to be able to do a real push-up first!
I am not a large person by any means, yet I have no problem to carry a MBP 16...But then I have a backpack and not a messenger like bag, which I would agree, would be a pain to carry.
Currently building an AI creative studio (make stories, art, music, videos, etc.) that runs locally/offline (https://github.com/bennyschmidt/ragdoll-studio). There is a lot of focus on cloud with LLMs but I can't see how the cost will make much sense for involved creative apps like video creation, etc. Present day users might not have high-end machines, but I think they all will pretty soon - this will make them buy them the way MMORPGs made everyone buy more RAM. Especially the artists and creators. Remember, Photoshop was once pretty difficult to run, you needed a great machine.
I can imagine offline music/movies apps, offline search engines, back office software, etc.
I’ve got an iPad mini. The main issue is the screen scratches. The other main issue is the screen is like a mirror, so it can’t be used everywhere to watch videos (which is the main thing the iPad is useful for). The third main issue is that videos nowadays are way too dark and you can’t adjust brightness/gamma on the iPad to compensate.
How does one differentiate between cheap and good products? How do I know they actually work? How does one know they don‘t destroy the coating on apple devices?
Apple doesn‘t even sell an official matte screen protector last I checked.
> Call me crazy, but I want all that power in a 7" tablet. I like 7" tablets most because they feel less clunky to carry around and take with you.
iPhone Pro Max screen size is 6.7" and the the upcoming iPhone 16 Pro Max is rumored to be 6.9" with 12GB of RAM. That's your 7" tablet right there.
The thing is - You're an extreme edge case of an edge case. Furthermore, I'm guessing if Apple did roll out a 7" tablet, you'd find some other thing where it isn't exactly 100% perfectly meeting your desired specifications. For example, Apple is about to release a high powered 6.9" tablet-like device (the iPhone 16 Pro Max) but I'm guessing there's another reason why it doesn't fit your needs.
Which is why companies like Apple ignore these niche use cases and focus on mainstream demands. The niche demands always gain a lot of internet chatter, but when the products come out they sell very poorly.
Well at the end of the day the processors are bottlenecked by its OS. What real value does an iPad bring that a typical iPhone + Mac combo misses? (Other than being a digital notebook…)
This.
If you’re anything other than a digital artist/someone who genuinely prefers writing over typing, an iPad is just an extra tool for you to waste your money on.
I had one of the earlier versions and this was pretty much its only use case…
I wound up getting a 2019 iPad Pro for 50% off, so $500 or so. Thought I would use it as a work/play hybrid.
Surprisingly (at least to me) I feel that I've more than gotten my money's worth out of it despite it being almost entirely strictly a consumption device.
I tote it around the house so I can watch or listen to things while I'm doing other things. It's also nice to keep on the dining room table so I can read the news or watch something while we're eating. I could do every single one of these things with my laptop, but... that laptop is my primary work tool. I don't like to carry it all over the place, exposing it to spills and dust, etc.
The only real work-related task is serving as a secondary monitor (via AirPlay) for my laptop when I travel.
$500 isn't pocket change, but I've gotten 48 months of enjoyment and would expect at least another 24 to 36 months. That's about $6 a month, or possibly more like $3-4 per month if I resell it eventually.
Yeah I had the same experience and ultimately got rid of an M1 iPad Pro for an M3 MacBook Air. I still have the ease and portability for watching videos while doing the dishes or on an airplane, with the added benefit of a keyboard and OS for productivity in case the muse visits.
My wife has a new iPad for grad school, and I'm convinced it's mainly an extra category for some customers to spend more money on if they already have a Mac and iPhone. The school supplied it, then she spent $400+ on the keyboard and other damn dongles to bring the hardware sorta up to par with a laptop, hoping to replace her 2013 MBP.
In the end, she still has to rely on the MBP daily because there's always something the iPad can't do. Usually something small like a website not fully working on it.
Probably they had some contractual commitments with TSMC and had to use up their N3B capacity somehow. But as soon as N3E became available it’s a much better process overall.
Ramping up production on a new die also takes time. The lower volume and requirements of the M4 as used in the iPad can give them time to mature the line for the Macs.
I always wonder how constraining it is to design these chips subject to thermal and energy limitations. I paid a lot of money for my hardware and I want it to go as fast as possible. I don't want my fans to be quiet, and I don't want my battery life to be 30 minutes longer, if it means I get more raw performance in return. But instead, Apple's engineers have unilaterally decided to handicap their own processors for no real good reason.
Yeah, one of my biggest frustrations as a person who likes keeping around both recent-ish Mac and Windows/Linux laptops is that x86 laptop manufacturers seem to have a severe allergy to building laptops that are good all-rounders… they always have one or multiple specs that are terrible, usually heat, fan noise, and battery life.
Paradoxically this effect is the worst in ultraportables, where the norm is to cram in CPUs that run too hot for the chassis with tiny batteries, making them weirdly bad at the one thing they’re supposed to be good at. Portability isn’t just physical size and weight, but also runtime and if one needs to bring cables and chargers.
On that note, Apple really needs to resurrect the 12” MacBook with an M-series or even A-series SoC. There’d be absolutely nothing remotely comparable in the x86 ultraportable market.
Thermal load has been a major limiting design factor in high end CPU design for two decades (remember Pentium 4?).
Apart from that, I think you might me in a minority if you want a loud, hot iPad with a heavy battery to power all of this (for a short time, because physics). There are plenty of Windows devices that work exactly like that though if that's really what makes you happy. Just don't expect great performance either, because of diminishing returns of using higher power and also because the chips in these devices usually suck.
Most of what Apple sells goes into mobile devices: phone, tablet, laptop. In their prior incarnation, they ran up real hard against the thermal limits of what they could put in their laptops with the IBM PowerPC G5 chip.
Pure compute power has never been Apple's center of gravity when selling products. The Mac Pro and the XServe are/were minuscule portions of Apple's sales, and the latter product was killed after a short while.
> Apple's engineers have unilaterally decided to handicap their own processors for no real good reason
This is a misunderstanding of what the limiting factor is of Apple products' capability. The mobile devices all have battery as the limfac. The processors being energy efficient in compute-per-watt isn't a handicap, it's an enabler. And it's a very good reason.
> I don't want my fans to be quiet, and I don't want my battery life to be 30 minutes longer
I agree with you. I don’t want fans to be quiet, I want them completely gone. And with battery life too, not 30 minutes, but 300 minutes.
Modern chips are plenty fast, developers need to optimize their shit instead of churning crapware.
Given that recent Apple laptops already have solid all-day battery life, with such a big performance per watt improvement, I wonder if they'll end up reducing how much battery any laptops ship with to make them lighter.
No, because battery life isn't just about the CPU. The CPU sits idle most of the time and when it's not idle, it's at workloads like 20% or whatever. It's the screens that eat batteries because they're on most or all of the time and sucking juice. Look at Apple's docs and you'll see the battery life is the exact same as the previous model. They have a battery budget and if they save 10% on CPU, they give that 10% to a better screen or something. They can't shrink the battery by half until they make screens twice as efficient, not CPUs which account for only a small fraction of power draw.
I've got a Mac Pro paperweight because the motherboard went. It's going to the landfill. I can't even sell it for parts because I can't erase the SSD. If they didn't solder everything to the board you could actually repair it. When I replace my current Dell laptop, it will be with a repairable framework laptop.
Just because you lack the skills to fix it, doesn't mean it's not repairable. People desolder components all the time to fix phones and ipads and laptops.
In this case, you need to find working motherboard without soldered parts to be able to fix it cost efficiently. Otherwise you need to buy factory component (for extra price, with soldered components...)
That stuff makes it more difficult to work on, but it doesn't make it impossible for Apple to sell replacement motherboards... nor does making a "thin desktop" require soldering on SSDs, M.2 SSDs are plenty thin for any small form factor desktop use case.
It is being optimized, it's just that the optimization is geared towards vacuuming money from brainwashed pockets instead of making a product that's worth the money.
Depending on where, a lot of electronics "recyclers" are actually resellers. Some of them are even cheeky enough to deny electronics they know they can't resell (If they're manned.. many are cage-drops in the back of eg Staples)
Even repairable only buys you a few years repairability that actually makes sense. For example something similar happened to me, lost the mac mobo on a pre solder addiction model. Only thing is guess how much a used mobo is for an old mac: nearly as much as the entire old mac in working shape. It makes no sense to repair it once the computer hits a certain age between the prices of oem parts and the depreciation of computers.
ok but now get this: what if we started a program where people prepay part of the repair with an initial fee, and then for a couple years they can have their laptop repaired at a reduced, fixed price? That helps secure the supply chain. You could then partner with a retail computer store (or start your own!) and have a network of brick-and-mortar stores with subject-matter experts to perform the repairs as well as more minor troubleshooting etc. It’d basically be like healthcare, but for your computer!
I think if you partnered with a major computer brand, that kind of thing could really be huge. Maybe someone like framework perhaps. Could be a big brand discriminator - bring that on-site service feel to average consumers.
Thats basically applecare+ already. You pay like $100 upfront to get things like your phone screen fixed for $29 instead of $129. So it works out in your favor if you are one to go through a few phone screens per device. Past couple phones I've had I'm under 1 screen per phone's life on average so it works in my favor not to get applecare+ and just pay out of pocket the few times I go through a screen.
They accept Apple branded computers for recycling if it has no trade in value (they'll try to get you an offer if it has any value). I have recycled damaged apple computers at the store before without trading in.
If they took it at their store, fine. If they want me to take an hour to go print a label (I don't have a printer), and then another hour to package it up and ship it. I'll pass.
They also say to erase the data before shipping it - which I can't do.
That's mostly my conclusion, unfortunately, also. There is also some nonzero culpability of cost of time-money-hassle Apple and local municipalities shift onto the owner too.
Now you claim you "went there" and discovered they do accept recycling but only if you mail it.
One of those is necessarily false, since I doubt you went to the Apple Store in between your comments.
However, I suspect both your claims are wrong, because Apple stores absolutely accept old devices to recycle directly. (They also provide mail-in options for people who don't have one they can visit directly.)
From your many comments, it seems like you have an ideological axe to grind that somehow your device can't be recycled, despite abundant evidence to the contrary and lots of people here trying to help you.
It will be easy to break in time. Eventually you'll just be able to use a tool that shines a laser at the right bit and breaks the rate limiting. We've already seen similar attacks on hardware wallets previously thought invulnerable.
I don't think any cryptography has stood the test of time. It's unlikely anything today will survive post-quantum.
Get a heat gun and remove the NAND. Then sell the rest of it to a local repair store or just give them for free if it's an old Mac Pro. The parts in your Mac Pro are something someone can reuse to restore their Mac Pro instead of a landfill. Not every part is security related. Also Apple may take the Mac Pro itself and give you store credit cause they do recycle it.
i don't think you can do that. there was just a video on here last week of a repair shop drilling the memory out, as that was the only way to remove it without damaging the motherboard.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 558 ms ] threadOtherwise yes, desktop operating systems are a terrible experience on touch devices.
Sounds like strictly worse version of Macbook. Might be useful for occasional work, but I expect people who would use this mode continuously just to switch to Macbook.
It’s not too uncommon for people to carry both an iPad and MacBook for example, but a 12.9” iPad that could reboot into macOS to get some work done and then drop back to iPadOS for watching movies or sketching could replace both without too much sacrifice. There’s tradeoffs, but nothing worse than what you see on PC 2-in-1’s, plus no questionable hinges to fail.
What would be the downside to other’s using it?
I get frustrated that Mac doesn’t respond to look & pinch!
I use it for work several times per week. I often want to test out some Swift API, or build something in SwiftUI, and for some reason it's way faster to tap it out on my iPad in Swift Playgrounds than to create a new project or playground in Xcode on my Mac — even when I'm sitting directly in front of my Mac
The iPad just doesn't have the clutter of windows and communication open like my mac does that makes it hard to focus on resolving one particular idea
I have so many playground files on my iPad, a quick glance at my project list: interactive gesture-driven animations, testing out time and date logic, rendering perceptual gradients, checking baseline alignment in SF Symbols, messing with NSFilePresenter, mocking out a UI design, animated text transitions, etc
Turns out I only use it on flights to watch movies because I loathe the os.
MacBook Pros start at $1,599. There's an enormous overlap in the price ranges of the mortal-person models of those products. It's not like the iPad Pro is the cheap alternative to a MBP. I mean, I couldn't even spec out a MacBook Air to cost as much.
The amount of things I have to google to use the phone how I normally used Android is crazy. So many gestures required with NOTHING telling you how to use them.
I recently sat around a table with 5 of my friends trying to figure out how to do that "Tap to share contact info" thing. Nobody at the table, all long term IOS users, knew how to do it. I thought that if we tapped the phones together it would give me some popup on how to finish the process. We tried all sorts of tapping/phone versions until we realized we had to unlock both phones.
And one of the people there with the same phone as me (13 pro) couldn't get it to work at all. It just did nothing.
And the keyboard. My god is the keyboard awful. I have never typoed so much, and I have no idea how to copy a URL out of Safari to send to someone without using the annoying Share button which doesn't even have the app I share to the most without clicking the More.. button to show all my apps. Holding my finger over the URL doesn't give me a copy option or anything, and changing the URL with their highlight/delete system is terrible. I get so frustrated with it and mostly just give up. The cursor NEVER lands where I want it to land and almost always highlights an entire word when I want to make a one letter typo fix. I don't have big fingers at all. Changing a long URL that goes past the length of the Safari address bar is a nightmare.
I'm sure (maybe?) that's some option I need to change but I don't even feel like looking into it anymore. I've given up on learning about the phones hidden gestures and just use it probably 1/10th of how I could.
Carplay, Messages and the easy-to-connect-devices ecosystem is the only thing keeping me on it.
Press and hold also allows options elsewhere in iOS
Thanks!
of course efficiency matters for a battery-powered device, but I still tend to lean towards raw power over all else. Others may choose differently, which is why other metrics exist I guess.
If you want to go thicker, then you have to screw around with heat pipes, fans, etc, etc, to move the heat a few cm to the outside surface of the device.
I never understood why everyone [looking at PC laptop manufacturers] took thin-and-light to such an extreme that their machines became basically useless. Now Apple is releasing thin-and-light machines that are incredibly powerful, and that is genuinely innovative. I hadn't seen something like that from them since the launch of the original iPhone, that's how big I think this was.
Those are barely competitive with the heavier but more powerful gaming/creation laptops Apple's aficionados keep deriding (if it has a 4090 it's not even competitive).
They have focused on mobility (power consumption and size) at the cost of everything else.
For this exact reason their desktop offering is really not competitive with offering around the same prices in the PC world. The only thing they do better is size (considering you can make a 3-4L top of the line PC; the Mac Studio isn't even impressive) and power consumption. But who actually cares, even if using a desktop heavily its consumption is dwarfed by most other use in a typical house, so whatever?
Thin and light are indeed a small use case overall and people who care about that have a ton of decently good options in the PC world already. It's not like the performance per watt benefits of Apple Silicon is really that relevant to most potential customers. If one is content enough with such a laptop, using it for the typical light task, thin and light PC laptops are just small enough, silent enough and have good enough battery life for the most part.
It is well known that software inefficiency doubles every couple years, that is, the same scenario would take 2x as much compute, given entire software stack (not disembodied algorithm which will indeed be faster).
The extra compute will be spent on a more abstract UI stack or on new features, unless forced by physical constraints (e.g. inefficient batteries of early smartphone), which is not the case at present.
Aside, 2 hours is very low even for 2010. There's a strongly usability advantage for going to 16. But going from 16 to 128 won't add as much. The natural course of things is to converge on a decent enough number and 'spend' the rest on more complex software, a lighter laptop etc.
I have dimmable LED strips around my rooms, hidden by cove molding, reflecting off the whole ceiling, which becomes a super diffuse, super bright “light”.
I don’t boast about power use, but they are certainly hungry.
For that I get softly defuse lighting with a max brightness comparable to outdoor clear sky daylight. Working from home, this is so nice for my brain and depression.
But as someone else noted, CPU power draw is not the only factor in device battery life. A major one, but not the whole story.
This is a small generational upgrade that doesn't necessitate an event.
Other companies started having events like this because they were copying apples amazing events. Apples events now are just parodies of what Apple was.
That's an incredible improvement in just a few years. I wonder how much of that is Apple engineering and how much is TSMC improving their 3nm process.
That is pretty crazy.
Or am I missing something?
https://www.trendforce.com/news/2024/05/06/news-apple-m4-inc....
But people like to assign credit solely to certain spaces if it suits their narrative (lately, Apple isn't actually all that special at designing their chips, it's all solely the process advantage)
In contrast, when Apple's CPU and GPU competitors get access to TSMC's new processes after Apple's exclusivity period expires, they achieve similar levels of performance (except for Qualcomm because they don't target the high end of CPU performance, but AMD does).
In general, OLED screens seem to have an efficiency around 20≈30%. Some research departments seem to be trying to bump that up [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-05671-x] which I'd be more hopeful on…
…but, honestly, at some point you just hit the limits of physics. It seems internal scattering is already a major problem; maybe someone can invent pixel-sized microlasers and that'd help? More than 50-60% seems like a pipe dream at this point…
…unless we can change to a technology that fundamentally doesn't emit light, i.e. e-paper and the likes. Or just LCD displays without a backlight, using ambient light instead.
[0] https://onyxboox.com/boox_mirapro
edit: "25, not "27
I was thinking, like, a couple hundred dollar Kindle the size of a big iPad I can plug into a laptop for text-editing out and about. Hell, for my purposes I'd love an integrated keyboard.
Basically a second, super-lightweight laptop form-factor I can just plug into my chonky Macbook Pro and set on top of it in high-light environments when all I need to do is edit text.
Honestly not a compelling business case now that I write it out, but I just wanna code under a tree lol
It is nice for some very specific use cases. (They're in the publishing/typesetting business. It's… idk, really depends on your usage patterns.)
Other than that, yeah, the technology just isn't there yet.
I can't replace my desktop monitor with eink because I occasionally play video games. I can't use a 2nd monitor because I live in a small apartment.
I can't replace my laptop screen with greyscale because I need syntax highlighting for programming.
Hmm, emacs on an epaper screen might be great if it had all the display update optimization and "slow modem mode" that Emacs had back in the TECO days. (The SUPDUP network protocol even implemented that at the client end and interacted with Emacs directly!)
Evidence can be seen when opening up iOS apps, which seem to glitch out and reveals the brighter backlight [1]. Notice how #FFFFFF white isn't the same brightness as the white in the iOS app.
[1] https://imgur.com/a/cPqKivI
It also just doesn't seem ideal that some apps (iOS) appear much brighter than the rest of the system. HDR support in macOS is a complete mess, although I'm not sure if Windows is any better.
I don't expect an M4 macbook to last any longer than an M2 macbook of otherwise similar specs; they will spend that extra power budget on things other than the battery life specification.
Old: 28.65 Wh (11") / 40.88 Wh (13"), up to 10 hours of surfing the web on Wi-Fi or watching video.
New: 31.29 Wh (11") / 38.99 Wh (13"), up to 10 hours of surfing the web on Wi-Fi or watching video.
Knowing nothing else about the technology, I assumed that would make OLED displays more efficient.
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsami.9b10823
White background document editing, etc., will be worse, and this is rather common.
When you say "up to 10 hours" most people will think "oh nice that's an entire day" and be fine with it. It's what they're used to.
Turning that into 12 hours might be possible but are the tradeoffs worth it? Will enough people buy the device because of the +2 hour battery life? Can you market that effectively? Or will putting in a nicer fancy display cause more people to buy it?
We'll never get significant battery life improvements because of this, sadly.
Doing basic web navigation with some music in the background, my old M1 Pro has short bursts at ~5W (for the entire SoC) when navigating around, a pair of watts for mild webapps (e.g. checking various channels in discord), and typing into this here textbox it's sitting happy at under half a watt, with the P-cores essentially sitting idle and the E cores at under 50% utilisation.
With a 100Wh battery that would be a "potential" of 150 hours or so. Except nobody would ever sell it for that, because between the display and radios the laptop's actually pulling 10~11W.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koomey%27s_law
Average performance per watt doubling time is 2.6 years: https://newsroom.arm.com/blog/performance-per-watt#:~:text=T....
[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/06/apple-unveils-m2-with...
Same for Watts per bit.
There's just a lot more pixels and bits.
I think Apple's design choices had a huge impact on the M1's performance but from there on out I think it's mostly due to TSMC.
So I've become really suspicious about any claims about performance done by Apple.
Also what games are you trying to play on it? All my M-series Macbooks have run games more than well enough with reasonable settings (and that has a lot more to do with OS bugs and the constraints of the form factor than with just the chipset).
The problem is two-fold, first the marketing bullshit does not match the reality and second the Apple converted will lie without even thinking about it to justify the outrageous price.
There are a lot of things I like about Apple hardware but the reality is that they can charge so much because there is a lot of mythology around their products and it just doesn't add up.
Now if only they be bothered to actually make software great (and not simpleton copies of what already exists), there would be an actual valid reason to unequivocally recommend their stuff but they can't be bothered since they already make too much money as it is.
Single Core: iPad Pro (M2): 2539 Macbook Air (M2): 2596 Macbook Pro (M2): 2645
Multi Core: iPad Pro (M2 8-core): 9631 Macbook Air (M2 8-core): 9654 Macbook Pro (M2 8-core): 9642
So, it appears to be almost the same performance (until it throttles due to heat, of course).
1. https://browser.geekbench.com/ios-benchmarks 2. https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks
Gave me quite a laugh when Apple users started to claim they'd be able to play Cyberpunk 2077 maxed out with maxed out raytracing.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/17/22982915/apple-m1-ultra-r...
Apple was comparing the power envelope (already a complicated concept) of their GPU against a 3090. Apple wanted to show that the peak of their GPU's performance was reached with a fraction of the power of a 3090. What was terrible was that Apple was cropping their chart at the point where the 3090 was pulling ahead in pure compute by throwing more watts at the problem. So their GPU was not as powerful as a 3090, but a quick glance at the chart would completely tell you otherwise.
Ultimately we didn't see one of those charts today, just a mention about the GPU being 50% more efficient than the competition. I think those charts are beloved by Johny Srouji and no one else. They're not getting the message across.
They really love those kind of comparisons - e.g. they also compared M1s against really old Intel CPUs to make the numbers look better, knowing that news headlines won't care for details.
It's not some virtue that causes them to do this.
Apple compared against Intel to encourage their previous customers to upgrade.
There is nothing insidious about this and is in fact standard business practice.
The intensity of the reality distortion field and hubris is mind boggling.
Turns out, you fell for it.
You're explanation is a really baffling case of corporate white knighting.
that's honestly kind of stupid when discussing things like 'new CPU!' like this thread.
I'm not saying the M4 isn't a great platform, but holy cow the corporate tripe people gobble up.
I eventually made a visual showing it was the same as claiming your iPhone was 3x the speed of a Core i9: Sure, if you limit the power draw of your PC to a battery the size of a post it pad.
Similar issues when on-device LLMs happened, thankfully, quieted since then (last egregious thing I saw was stonk-related wishcasting that Apple was obviously turning its Xcode CI service into a full-blown AWS competitor that'd wipe the floor with any cloud service, given the 2x performance)
That's ok, but why skip the previous iteration then? Isn't the M2 only two generations behind? It's not that much older. It's also a marketing blurb, not a reproducible benchmark. Why leave out comparisons with the previous iteration even when you're just hand-waving over your own data?
There were some disingenuous comparisons throughout the presentation going back to A11 for the first Neural Engine and some comparisons to M1, but the M2 comparison actually makes sense.
I mean, they compared the new iPad Pro to an iPod Nano, that's just using your own history to make a point.
that aside, the M4 is about the Neural Engine upgrades over anything (which probably should have been compared to the M3)
That’s not to say that any of these problems are easy, just that there’s probably more lower hanging fruit in ARM land.
And don't underestimate the investment Apple made - it's likely at a similar level to the big x86 incumbents. I mean AMD's entire Zen development team cost was likely a blip on the balance sheet for Apple.
That's more bound by legal than technical reasons...
Launching at Computex in 2 weeks, https://www.windowscentral.com/hardware/laptops/next-gen-ai-...
there was one quiet "we haven't got anything like that in the contract we're signing with ARM" from someone else, and then radio silence. And you'd really think that would be major news, because it's massively impactful on pretty much everyone, since one of the major use-cases of ARM is as a base SOC to bolt your custom proprietary accelerators onto...
seemed like obvious bullshit at the time from a company trying to "publicly renegotiate" a licensing agreement they probably broke...
That’s why Apple can release a meaningfully new chip every year where it takes several for x86 manufacturers
Sure, maybe they can do better but at what cost and for what? The only thing Apple does truly better is performance per watt which is not something that is relevant for a large part of the market.
x86 stuff is still competitive performance wise, especially in the GPU department where Apple attempts are rather weak compared to what is on offer across the pond. The Apple Silicon switch cost a large amount of developer effort for optimisation, and in the process a lot of software compatibility was lost, it took a long time to get even the most popular softwares to get properly optimized and some software house even gave up on supporting macOS because it just wasn't worth the man hour investment considering the tiny market.
This is why I am very skeptical about the Qualcomm ARM stuff, it needs to be priced extremely well to have a chance, if consumers do not pick it up in droves, no software port is going to happen in a timely manner and it will stay irrelevant. Considering the only thing much better than the current x86 offering is the performance per watt, I do not have a lot of hope, but I may be pleasantly surprised.
Apple aficionados keep raving about battery life but it's not really something a lot of people care about (appart for smartphones, where Apple isn't doing any better than the rest of industry).
That’s all. They’re trying to convince iPad users to upgrade.
We’ll see what they do when they get to computers later this year.
I agree that iPad has more interesting software than android for use cases like video or music editing, but I don't do those on a tablet anyway.
I just can't imagine anyone updating their ipad M2 for this except a tiny niche that really wants that more power.
I’m vaguely considering this but entirely for the screen. The chip has been irrelevant to me for years, it’s long past the point where I don’t notice it.
These are 2048x2732 with 120Hz displays, that support 6k external displays. Gaming and art apps push them pretty hard. From the iPad user in my house, goin from the 2020 non M* iPad to a 2023 M2 iPad made a huge difference for the drawing apps. Better latency is always better for drawing, and complex brushes (especially newer ones), selections, etc, would get fairly unusable.
For gaming, it was pretty trivial to dip well below 60Hz with a non M* iPad, with some of the higher demand games like Fortnight, Minecraft (high view distance), Roblox (it ain't what it used to be), etc.
But, the apps will always gravitate to the performance of the average user. A step function in performance won't show up in the apps until the adoption follows, years down the line. Not pushing the average to higher performance is how you stagnate the future software of the devices.
I just don’t push it at all. The few games I play are not complicated in graphics or CPU needs. I don’t draw, 3D model, use Logic or Final Cut or anything like that.
I agree the extra power is useful to some people. But even there we have the M1 (what I’ve got) and the M2 models. But I bet there are plenty of people like me who mostly bought the pro models for the better screen and not the additional grunt.
The iPads always had a lot of power, people simply started paying more attention when the chip family was ported to PC.
Sure this is faster but enough to make people care?
It may depend heavily on what they announce is in the next version of iOS/iPadOS.
The M1 air is a very fast machine and is perfect for anyone doing normal things on the computer.
The M3 Air performs better than the M1 in raw numbers but outside of some truly CPU or GPU limited tasks you're not likely to actually notice the difference. The day to day behavior between the two is pretty similar.
If your current M1 works you're not missing out on anything. For the power/size/battery envelope the M1 Air was pretty awesome, it hasn't really gotten any worse over time. If it does what you need then you're good until it doesn't do what you need.
Well, the obvious answer is that those with older machines are more likely to upgrade than those with newer machines. The market for insta-upgraders is tiny.
edit: And perhaps an even more obvious answer: there are no iPads that contained the M3, so the comparison would be more useless. The M4 was just launched today exclusively in iPads.
And it can signal that "We are serious about iPad as a computer", using their latest chip.
Logical alignment to progresses in engineering (and manufacturing) packaged smartly to generate marketing capital for sales and brand value creation.
Wonder how the newer Macs will use these "tandem OLED" capabilities of the M4.
I don't think this is true. When they launched the M3 they compared primarily to M1 to make it look better.
As for CPU power use, of course that doesn't translate into doubling battery life because there are other components. And yes, it seems the OLED display uses more power so, all in all, battery life seems to be about the same.
I'm interested to see an M3 vs M4 performance comparison in the real world. IIRC the M3 was a questionable upgrade. Some things were better but some weren't.
Overall the M-series SoCs have been an excellent product however.
[1]: https://www.laptopmag.com/features/laptop-battery-life-claim...
EDIT: added link
That's just laughable, sorry. No one is particularly honest in marketing copy, but Apple is for sure one of the worst, historically. Even more so when you go back to the PPC days. I still remember Jobs on stage talking about how the G4 was the fasted CPU in the world when I knew damn well that it was half the speed of the P3 on my desk.
1) Graphs often are unannotatted.
2) Comparisons are rarely against latest generation products. (their argument for that has been that they do not expect people to upgrade yearly, so its showing the difference of their intended upgrade path).
3) They have conflated performance, for performance per watt.
However, when it comes to battery life, performance (for a task) or specification of their components (screens, ability to use external displays up to 6k, port speed etc) there are almost no hidden gotchas and they have tended to be trustworthy.
The first wave of M1 announcements were met with similar suspicion as you have shown here; but it was swiftly dispelled once people actually got their hands on them.
*EDIT:* Blaming a guy who's been dead for 13 years for something they said 50 years ago, and primarily it seems for internal use is weird. I had to look up the context but it seems it was more about internal motivation in the 70’s than relating to anything today, especially when referring to concrete claims.
"The G4 chip is nearly three times faster than the fastest Pentium III"
- Steve Jobs (1999) [1]
[1] https://www.wired.com/1999/08/lavish-debut-for-apples-g4/
And again, the guy has been dead for the better part of this millennium.
What have they shown of any product currently on the market, especially when backed with any concrete claim, that has been proven untrue-
EDIT: After reading your article and this one: https://lowendmac.com/2006/twice-as-fast-did-apple-lie-or-ju... it looks like it was true in floating point workloads.
I don't have a horse in this race, Jobs lied or bent the truth all the time so it wouldn't surprise me, I'm just curious.
Just add them up, it’s the same number of Hertz!
But Steve that’s two procs vs one!
I think this is when Adobe was optimizing for Windows/intel and was single threaded, but Steve put out some graphs showing better perf on the Mac.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-apr-17-fi-20482...
It's certainly fair to say that twenty years ago Apple was marketing some of its PPC systems as "the first supercomputer on a chip"[^1].
> but it was nowhere near the performance of a supercomputer of that age.
That was not the claim. Apple did not argue that the G4's performance was commensurate with the state of the art in supercomputing. (If you'll forgive me: like, fucking obviously? The entire reason they made the claim is precisely because the latest room-sized supercomputers with leapfrog performance gains were in the news very often.)
The claim was that the G4 was capable of sustained gigaflop performance, and therefore met the narrow technical definition of a supercomputer.
You'll see in the aforelinked marketing page that Apple compared the G4 chip to UC Irvine’s Aeneas Project, which in ~2000 was delivering 1.9 gigaflop performance.
This chart[^2] shows the trailing average of various subsets of super computers, for context.
This narrow definition is also why the machine could not be exported to many countries, which Apple leaned into.[^3]
> Maybe similar performance to a supercomputer from the 1970's
What am I missing here? Picking perhaps the most famous supercomputer of the mid-1970s, the Cray-1,[^4] we can see performance of 160 MFLOPS, which is 160 million floating point operations per second (with an 80 MHz processor!).
The G4 was capable of delivering ~1 GFLOP performance, which is a billion floating point operations per second.
Are you perhaps thinking of a different decade?
[^1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20000510163142/http://www.apple....
[^2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_supercomputing#/med...
[^3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20020418022430/https://www.cnn.c...
[^4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-1#Performance
This is marketing we're talking about, people see "supercomputer on a chip" and they get hyped up by it. Apple was 100% using the "supercomputer" claim to make their luddite audience think they had a performance advantage, which they did not.
> The entire reason they made the claim is
The reason they marketed it that way was to get people to part with their money. Full stop.
In the first link you added, there's a photo of a Cray supercomputer, which makes the viewer equate Apple = Supercomputer = I am a computing god if I buy this product. Apple's marketing has always been a bit shady that way.
And soon after that period Apple jumped off the PPC architecture and onto the x86 bandwagon. Gimmicks like "supercomputer on a chip" don't last long when the competition is far ahead.
If I had some pearls I would be clutching them right now.
That is also not in dispute. I am disputing your specific claim that Apple somehow suggested that the G4 was of commensurate performance to a modern supercomputer, which does not seem to be true.
> Apple was 100% using the "supercomputer" claim to make their luddite audience think they had a performance advantage, which they did not.
This is why context is important (and why I'd appreciate clarity on whether you genuinely believe a supercomputer from the 1970s was anywhere near as powerful as a G4).
In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, megapixels were a proxy for camera quality, and megahertz were a proxy for processor performance. More MHz = more capable processor.
This created a problem for Apple, because the G4's SPECfp_95 (floating point) benchmarks crushed Pentium III at lower clock speeds.
PPC G4 500 MHz - 22.6
PPC G4 450 MHz - 20.4
PPC G4 400 MHz - 18.36
Pentium III 600 MHz – 15.9
For both floating point and integer benchmarks, the G3 and G4 outgunned comparable Pentium II/III processors.
You can question how this translates to real world use cases – the Photoshop filters on stage were real, but others have pointed out in this thread that it wasn't an apples-to-apples comparison vs. Wintel – but it is inarguable that the G4 had some performance advantages over Pentium at launch, and that it met the (inane) definition of a supercomputer.
> The reason they marketed it that way was to get people to part with their money. Full stop.
Yes, marketing exists to convince people to buy one product over another. That's why companies do marketing. IMO that's a self-evidently inane thing to say in a nested discussion of microprocessor architecture on a technical forum – especially when your interlocutor is establishing the historical context you may be unaware of (judging by your comment about supercomputers from the 1970s, which I am surprised you have not addressed).
I didn't say "The reason Apple markets its computers," I said "The entire reason they made the claim [about supercomputer performance]…"
Both of us appear to know that companies do marketing, but only you appear to be confused about the specific claims Apple made – given that you proactively raised them, and got them wrong – and the historical backdrop against which they were made.
> In the first link you added, there's a photo of a Cray supercomputer
That's right. It looks like a stylized rendering of a Cray-1 to me – what do you think?
> which makes the viewer equate Apple = Supercomputer = I am a computing god if I buy this product
The Cray-1's compute, as measured in GFLOPS, was approximately 6.5x lower than the G4 processor.
I'm therefore not sure what your argument is: you started by claiming that Apple deliberately suggested that the G4 had comparable performance to a modern supercomputer. That isn't the case, and the page you're referring to contains imagery of a much less performant supercomputer, as well as a lot of information relating to the history of supercomputers (and a link to a Forbes article).
> Apple's marketing has always been a bit shady that way.
All companies make tradeoffs they think are right for their shareholders and customers. They accentuate the positives in marketing and gloss over the drawbacks.
Note, too, that Adobe's CEO has been duped on the page you link to. Despite your emphatic claim:
> Apple was 100% using the "supercomputer" claim to make their luddite audience think they had a performance advantage, which they did not.
The CEO of Adobe is quoted as saying:
> “Currently, the G4 is significantly faster than any platform we’ve seen running Photoshop 5.5,” said John E. Warnock, chairman and CEO of Adobe.
How is what you are doing materially different to what you accuse...
In my experience, I can confirm that this is just not true. The secret is heavy reliance on swap. It's still the case that 1GB = 1GB.
You are entirely (100%) wrong, but, sadly, NDA...
If there's any publicly available data to the contrary I'd love to read it. Anecdotally I haven't seen a significant difference between zswap on Linux and macOS memory compression in terms of compression ratios, and on the workloads I've tested zswap tends to be faster than no memory compression on x86 for many core machines.
My experience is that I can still tell when the OS is unhappy when I demand more RAM than it can give. MacOS is still relatively responsive around this range, which I just attributed to super fast swapping. (I'd assume memory compression too, but I usually run into this trouble when working with large amounts of poorly-compressible data.)
In either case, I know it's frustrating when someone is confidently wrong but you can't properly correct them, so you have my apologies
Is an occasional statement that they get pushback on really worse than what other brands do?
As an example from a competitor, take a look at the recent firestorm over Intel’s outlandish anti-AMD marketing:
https://wccftech.com/intel-calls-out-amd-using-old-cores-in-...
FWIW: the language upthread was that it was laughable to say Apple was the most honest. And I stand by that.
Though the author also made clear in their second sentence that they think Apple is one of the worst when it comes to marketing claims, so I don’t think your characterization is totally accurate either.
If you go for the base model, you are in for a bad time, 256GB with heavy swap and no dedicated GPU memory (making the 8GB even worse) is just plain stupid.
This what the Apple fanboys don't seem to get, their base model at somewhat affordable price are deeply incompetent and if you start to load it up the pricing just do not make a lot of sense...
Anyway, I manage a few M1 and M3 machines with 256/8 configs and they all run just as fast as 16 and 32 machines EXCEPT for workloads that need more than 8GB for a process (virtualization) or workloads that need lots of video memory (Lightroom can KILL an 8GB machine that isn't doing anything else...)
The 8GB is stupid discussion isn't "wrong" in the general case, but it is wrong for maybe 80% of users.
Isn't that exactly the upthread contention: Apple's magic compressed swap management is still swap management that replaces O(1) fast(-ish) DRAM access with thousands+ cycle page decompression operations. It may be faster than storage, but it's still extremely slow relative to a DRAM fetch. And once your working set gets beyond your available RAM you start thrashing just like VAXen did on 4BSD.
And if you go up in specs the bandwidth of Apple silicon has to be compared to the bandwidth of a combo with dedicated GPU. The bandwidth of dedicated GPUs is very high and usually higher than what Apple Silicon gives you if you consider the RAM bandwidth for the CPU.
It's a bit more complicated but that's marketing for you. When it comes to speed Apple RAM isn't faster than what can be found in high-end laptops (or desktops for that matter).
I got the base model M1 Air a couple of years back and whilst I don't do much gaming I do do C#, Python, Go, Rails, local Postgres, and more. I also have a (new last year) Lenovo 13th gen i7 with 16GB RAM running Windows 11 and the performance with the same load is night and day - the M1 walks all over it whilst easily lasting 10hrs+.
Note that I'm not a fanboy; I run both by choice. Also both iPhone and Android.
The Windows laptop often gets sluggish and hot. The M1 never slows down and stays cold. There's just no comparison (though the Air keyboard remains poor).
I don't much care about the technical details, and I know 8GB isn't a lot. I care about the experience and the underspecced Mac wins.
That said you're right about lots of RAM in that I wouldn't bother using the 8GB M1 Air for Docker or running LLMs (it can run SD for images though, but very slowly). Partly that's why I have the Lenovo. You need to pick the right machine for the job at hand.
And I agree that in pure performance, the Apple Silicon Macs will kill it; however, I am really skeptical that an 8GB model would give you a better experience overall. Faster for long compute operations sure, but then you have to deal with all the small slowdown from constant swapping. Unless you stick to a very small amounts of apps and very small amounts of tabs at the same time (which is rather limiting) I don't know how you do it. I don't want to call you a liar but maybe you are emotionally attached (just like I am sometimes) to the device to realize it, or maybe the various advantages of the Mac make you ignore the serious limitations that come with it.
Everyone has their own sets of tradeoffs but my argument is that you can deal with the 8GB Apple Silicon devices you are very likely to be well served by a much cheaper device anyway (like half as cheap).
> you have to deal with all the small slowdown from constant swapping
That just doesn't happen. As I responded to another post, though, I don't do Docker or LLMs on the M1 otherwise you'd probably be right.
> Unless you stick to a very small amounts of apps and very small amounts of tabs at the same time
It's really common to have approaching 50+ tabs open at once. And using Word is often accompanied by VS Code, Excel, Affinity Designer, DotNet, Python, and others due to the nature of what I'm doing. No slowdown.
> maybe you are emotionally attached
I am emotionally attached to the device. Though as a long-time Mac, Windows, and Linux user I'm neither blinkered nor tribal - the attachment is driven by the experience and not the other way around.
> maybe the various advantages of the Mac make you ignore the serious limitations that come with it
There are indeed limitations. 8GB is too small. The fact that for what I do it has no impact doesn't mean I don't see that.
> you can deal with the 8GB Apple Silicon devices you are very likely to be well served by a much cheaper device anyway (like half as cheap)
I already have better Windows laptops than that, and I know that going for a Windows laptop that's half as cheap as the entry level Air would be nothing like as nice because the more expensive ones already aren't (the Lenovo was dearer than the Air).
---
To conclude, you have to use the right tool for the job. If the nature of the task intrinsically needs lots of RAM then 8GB is not good enough. But when it is enough it runs rings around equivalent (and often 'better') Windows machines.
Confirmed here: https://computer.howstuffworks.com/question299.htm (and elsewhere.)
A year later I was doing bonkers (for the time) photoshop work on very large compressed tiff files and my G4 laptop running at 400Mhz was more than 2x as fast as PIIIs on my bench.
Was it faster all around? I don't know how to tell. Was Apple as honest as I am in this commentary about how it mattered what you were doing? No. Was it a CPU that was able to do some things very fast vs others? I know it was.
On top of that Intel increased frequency faster than Apple could handle. And after the release of the Pentium 4, the G4s became very noncompetitive so fast that one would question what could save Apple (later, down the road, Intel it turns out).
They tried to salvage it with the G5s but those came with so many issues that even their bi-proc water-cooled were just not keeping up. I briefly owned of those after repairing it for "free" using 3 of them, supposedly dead; the only thing worth a dam in that was the GPU. Extremely good hardware in many ways but also very weak for so many things that it had to be used only for very specific tasks, otherwise a cheap Intel PC was much better.
Which is precisely why right after they went with Intel. After years of subpar performance on laptops because they were stuck at G4 (not even high frequency).
Now I know from your other comments that you are a very strong believer and I'll admit that there were many reasons to use a Mac (software related) but please stop pretending they were performance competitive because that's just bonkers. If they were, the Intel switch would never have happend in the first place...
Okay, but your example was about battery life:
> LIke when they said an Macbook Air would last 10+ hours and third-party reviewers would get 8-9+ hours. All the while, Dell or HP would claim 19 hours and you'd be lucky to get 2 eg [1]
And even then, they exaggerated their claims. And your link doesn't say anything about HP or Dell claiming 19 hour battery life.
Apple has definitely exaggerated their performance claims over and over again. The Apple silicon parts are fast and low power indeed, but they've made ridiculous claims like comparing their chips to an nVidia RTX 3090 with completely misleading graphs
Even the Mac sites have admitted that the nVidia 3090 comparison was completely wrong and designed to be misleading: https://9to5mac.com/2022/03/31/m1-ultra-gpu-comparison-with-...
This is why you have to take everything they say with a huge grain of salt. Their chip may be "twice" as power efficient in some carefully chosen unique scenario that only exists in an artificial setting, but how does it fare in the real world? That's the question that matters, and you're not going to get an honest answer from Apple's marketing team.
> HP gave the 13-inch HP Spectre x360 an absurd 22.5 hours of estimated battery life, while our real-world test results showed that the laptop could last for 12 hours and 7 minutes.
> Speaking of the ThinkPad P72, here are the top three laptops with the most, er, far out battery life claims of all our analyzed products: the Lenovo ThinkPad P72, the Dell Latitude 7400 2-in-1 and the Acer TravelMate P6 P614. The three fell short of their advertised battery life by 821 minutes (13 hours and 41 mins), 818 minutes (13 hours and 38 minutes) and 746 minutes (12 hours and 26 minutes), respectively.
Dell did manage to be one of the top 3 most absurd claims though.
Dell and IBM were lying about battery life before OSX was even a thing and normal people started buying MacBooks. Dell and IBM will be lying about battery life when the sun goes red dwarf.
Reviewers and individuals like me have always been able to get 90% of Apple’s official battery times without jumping through hoops to do so. “If you were very careful” makes sense for an 11% difference. A ten hour difference is fucking bullshit.
Apple does usually explain their testing methodology and they don’t cheat on benchmarks like some other companies. It’s just that the results are still marketing and should be treated as such.
Outlandish claims notwithstanding, I don’t think anyone can deny the progress they achieved with their CPU and especially GPU IP. Improving performance on complex workloads by 30–50% in a single year is very impressive.
I guess you weren't around during the PowerPC days... Because that's a laughable statement.
We need more tanks in commercials.
A PC half the price was smoking their top of the line stuff.
What made it worth it at the time (I felt) was the software. Today I'm really don't think so, software has improved overall in the industry and there is not a lot of things "Mac specific" that makes it a clear-cut choice.
As for the performance I can't believe all the Apple silicon hype. Sure, it gets good battery life given you use strictly Apple software (or software optimized for it heavily) but in mixed workload situation it's not that impressive.
Using the M2 MacBook Pro of a friend I figured I could get maybe 4-5 hours out of its best case scenario which is better than the 2-3 hours you would get from a PC laptop but also not that great considering the price difference.
And when it comes to performance it is extremely unequal and very lackluster for many things. Like there is more lag launching Activity Monitor on a 2K++ MacBook Pro than launching task manager on a 500 PC. This is a small somewhat stupid example but it does tell the overall story.
They talk a big game but in reality, their stuff isn't that performant in the real world.
And they still market games when one of their 2K laptops plays Dota 2 (a very old, relatively ressource efficient game) worse than a cheapo PC.
Any electron apps on it?
I went the way of only Apple and Apple optimized software for quite a while but I just can't be bothered anymore, considering the price of the hardware and nowadays the price of subscription software.
And this is exactly my argument I you use the hardware in a very specific way, you get there but it is very limiting, annoying and inacceptable considering the pricing.
It's like saying that a small city car gets more gas mileage when what one needs is actually a capable truck. It's not strictly wrong but also not very helpful.
I think the Apple Silicon laptops are very nice if you can work within the limitations, but the moment you start pushing on those you realize they are not really worth the money. Just like the new iPad Pro they released; completely awesome hardware but how many people can actually work within the limitations of iPad OS to make the price not look like a complete ripoff. Very few I would argue.
Today, Apple Silicon is smoking all but the top end Intel chips, while using a fraction of the power.
Yes and no. They'll always be honest with the claim, but the scenario for the claimed improvement will always be chosen to make the claim as large as possible, sometimes with laughable results.
Typically something like "watch videos for 3x longer <small>when viewing 4k h265 video</small>" (which means they adapted the previous gen's silicon which could only handle h264).
Isn't that going to torch performance? My i9-9900 has a base frequency of 3.6 Ghz and a turbo of 5.0 Ghz. Disabling the turbo would create a 28% drop in performance.
I suppose if everything else on the system is configured to use as little power as possible, then it won't even be noticed. But seeing as CPUs underclock when idle (I've seen my i9 go as low as 1.2 Ghz), I'm not sure disabling turbo makes a significant impact except when your CPU is being pegged.
For literal YEARS, Apple battery life claims were a running joke on how inaccurate and overinflated they were.
What time period are you thinking about for Apple? I’ve been using their laptops since the last G4 which is twenty years. They’ve always been substantially more accurate about battery times.
For example I would be surprised if there is any laptop, which is sufficiently fast for my usage, and it's battery life is more than 2-3 hours top. Heck, I have several laptops and all of them dies in one-one and a half hours. But of course, I never optimized for battery life, so who knows. So in my case, all of them are lying equally. I don't even check battery life for 15 years now. It's a useless metric for me, because all of them are shit.
But of course for people who don't need to use VMs, run several "micro"services at once, have constant internet transfer and have 5+ Intellij project open at the same time which caching several millions LOC, while gazillion web pages are open, maybe there is a difference, for me it doesn't matter whether it's one or one and a half hours.
In nearly every single release, their claims are well above actual performance.
I'm not sure what you mean by "of all times" but half the battery usage of the processor definitely doesn't translate into double the battery life since the processor is not the only thing consuming power.
I can have my laptop with nothing on screen, and the battery still points to TrendMicro and others as the cause of heavy battery drain while my laptop seemingly idles.
I recently upgraded my personal laptop to the M3 MacBook pro and the difference is astonishing. I almost never use it plugged in because I genuinely get close to that 20 hour reported battery life. Last weekend I played a AAA Video Game through Xbox Cloud Gaming (awesome for mac gamers btw) and with essentially max graphics (rendered elsewhere and streamed to me of course), I got sucked into a game for like 5 hours and lost only 8% of my battery during that time, while playing a top tier video game! It really blew my mind. I also use GoLand IDE on there and have managed to get a full day of development done using only about 25-30% battery.
So yeah, whatever Apple is doing, they are doing it right. Performance without all the spyware that your work gives you makes a huge difference too.
That's mindblowing. Especially since my personal laptop is a Thinkpad X1 Extreme. I can't leave that unplugged at all.
Even considering the marketing, best case scenario you would be between 27 and 41% battery consumption for 5h of runtime. The actual number will be lower than that because you probably don't use the MBP at the low brightness they use for marketing benchmarks and game streaming constantly requires power for the wifi chip (video can buffer, hence the lower consumption).
There is no way to say this nicely, but can you stop lying ?
Compared to the competition, I'd trust Apple much more than the Windows laptop OEMs.
This is an absurd interpretation. Nobody hears that and says "they made the screen use half the energy".
That said, the function keys make me think "and it runs macOS" is coming, and THAT would be extremely compelling.
Unlike MS that went with the Big Bang in your face approach that was oh-so successful.
We now have 'content consumption platforms' and 'content creation platforms'.
While attempts have been made to try and enable some creation on locked-down touchscreen devices, you're never going to want to try and operate a fully-featured version of Photoshop, Maya, Visual Studio, etc on them. And if you've got a serious workstation with multiple large monitors and precision input devices, you don't want to have dumbed-down touch-centric apps forced upon you Win8-style.
The bleak future that seems likely is that the 'content creation platforms' become ever more niche and far more costly. Barriers to entry for content creators are raised significantly as mainstream computing is mostly limited to locked-down content consumption platforms. And Linux is only an option for as long as non-locked-down hardware is available for sensible prices.
Maybe the end game for Apple isn’t the full convergence, but just having a touch screen on the Mac.
Not much point having a touchscreen on a Macbook (or any laptop really), unless the hardware has a 'tablet mode' with a detachable or fold-away keyboard.
There are plenty of laptops that do have touchscreens, and it has always felt more like a gimmick than a useful hardware interface.
Honestly, the biggest barrier to creativity is thinking you need a specific concept of a "serious workstation" to do it. Plenty of people are using $2k+ desktops just to play video games.
Then there's the whole dealing with lots of files and version control side of things, essential for working as part of a team. Think about creating (and previewing, and finally uploading) a very simple web page, just HTML and a couple of images, entirely on an iPad. While it's probably quite possible these days, I suspect the workflow would be abysmal compared to a 'proper computer' where the file system isn't hidden from you and where you're not constantly switching between full-screen apps.
And that's before you start dealing with anything with significant numbers of files in deep directory structures, or doing more technical image creation (e.g. dealing with alpha channels). And of course, before testing your webpage on all the major browsers. Hmm...
It's rather disingenuous to pretend that an iPad can be sufficient. At its price tag it is still a rather extremely expensive accessory and people pretending otherwise are just full of it. There are enough reviews/testimonies saying as much (even from the diehard fans) for it to be an obvious fact.
Respectfully, I disagree partially. It has never been easier or more affordable to get into creating content. You can create cinema grade video with used cameras that sell for a few hundred dollars. You can create pixar level animation on open source software, and a pretty cheap computer. A computer that can edit a 4k video costs less than the latest iPhone. There are people that create plenty of content with just a phone. Simply put it is orders of magnitude cheaper and easier to create content than it was less than two decades ago, which is why we are seeing so much content getting made. I used to work for a newspaper and it used to be a lot harder and more expensive to produce audio visual media.
My strong feeling is that the problem of content being locked into platforms has precious little to do with consumption oriented hardware, and more to do with the platforms. Embrace -> extinguish -> exlcusivity -> enshittify seems to be the model behind basically anything that hosts user content these days.
This is a completely artificial creation by Apple and Google to extract more money from you. Nothing technical prevents one from using a full OS on a phone today.
Sent from my Librem 5 running desktop GNU/Linux.
Apple then later took the tablet demo technology, wrapped it up in a very stripped-down OS X with a different window server and UI library, and called it iPhone OS. Apple was very clear from the beginning that Fingers Can't Use Mouse Software, Damn It, and that the whole ocean needed to be boiled to support the new user interface paradigm[1]. They even have very specific UI rules specifically to ensure a finger never meets a desktop UI widget, including things like iPad Sidecar just not forwarding touch events at all and only supporting connected keyboards, mice, and the Apple Pencil.
Microsoft's philosophy has always been the complete opposite. Windows XP through 7 had tablet support that amounted to just some affordances for stylus users layered on top of a mouse-only UI. Windows 8 was the first time they took tablets seriously, but instead of just shipping a separate tablet OS or making Windows Phone bigger, they turned it into a parasite that ate the Windows desktop from the inside-out.
This causes awkwardness. For example, window management. Desktops have traditionally been implemented as a shared data structure - a tree of controls - that every app on the desktop can manipulate. Tablets don't support this: your app gets one[2] display surface to present their whole UI inside of[3], and that surface is typically either full-screen or half-screen. Microsoft solved this incongruity by shoving the entire Desktop inside of another app that could be properly split-screened against the new, better-behaved tablet apps.
If Apple were to decide "ok let's support Mac apps on iPad", it'd have to be done in exactly the same way Windows 8 did it, with a special Desktop app that contained all the Mac apps in a penalty box. This is so that they didn't have to add support for all sorts of incongruous, touch-hostile UI like floating toolbars, floating pop-ups, global menus, five different ways of dragging-and-dropping tabs, and that weird drawer thing you're not supposed to use anymore, to iPadOS. There really isn't a way to gradually do this, either. You can gradually add feature parity with macOS (which they should), but you can't gradually find ways to make desktop UI designed by third-parties work on a tablet. You either put it in a penalty box, or you put all the well-behaved tablet apps in their own penalty boxes, like Windows 10.
Microsoft solved Windows 8's problems by going back to the Windows XP/Vista/7 approach of just shipping a desktop for fingers. Tablet Mode tries to hide this, but it's fundamentally just window management automation, and it has to handle all the craziness of desktop. If a desktop app decides it wants a floating toolbar or a window that can't be resized[4], Tablet Mode has to honor that request. In fact, Tablet Mode needs a lot of heuristics to tell what floating windows pair with which apps. So it's a lot more awkward for tablet users in exchange for desktop users having a usable desktop again.
[0] Given what I've heard about Jobs I don't think Jobs was psychologically capable of having friends, but I'll use the word out of convenience.
[1] Though the Safari team was way better at building compatibility with existing websites, so much so that this is the one platform that doesn't have a deep mobile/desktop split.
[2] This was later extended to multiple windows per app, of course.
[3] This is also why popovers and context menus never extend outside their containing window on tablets. Hell, also on websites. Even when you have multiwindow, there's no API surface for "I want to have a control floating on top of my window that is positioned over he...
RIP Graffiti.
It was kind of successful, touchscreen laptops see pretty big sales nowadays. I don't know what crack they were smoking with Windows 8.0 though.
It's a shame, because it's definitely powerful enough, and the idea of traveling with just an iPad seems super interesting, but I imagine they will not extend those features to any devices besides macs
Crostini is the new containerized version that is both officially supported and integrated into ChromeOS
That's great, but you need an M series chip in your mac for that to work so backwords compatibility only goes back a few years at this point, which is fine for corporate upgrade cycles but might be a bit short for consumers at this time. But it will be fine in the future.
M-class MacBooks can already run many iPhone and iPad apps.
Do you really want your OS using 100% of CPU?
Michelin-starred restaurants not only have top-tier chefs. They have buyers who negotiate with food suppliers to get the best ingredients they can at the lowest prices they can. Having a preferential relationship with a good supplier is as important to the food quality and the health of the business as having a good chef to prepare the dishes.
Apple has top-tier engineering talent but they are also able to negotiate preferential relationships with their suppliers, and it's both those things that make Apple a phenomenal tech company.
If the magic comes mostly from TSMC, there's a good chance for these claims to be true and to have a series of better chips coming on the other platforms as well.
I’m filing this into the bin with all the other “This next Qualcomm chip will close the performance gap” claims made over the past decade. Maybe this time it’ll be true. I wouldn’t bet on it.
Basically we'd need some basis to believe they'll be progressively improving at more or less the same pace as Intel's or Apple's chips to get on board with ARM laptops for Windows/linux.
Otherwise I don't see software makers care enough to port their build to ARM as well.
However, we have more CPU cores, a newer core design, and a newer process node which would all contribute to improving multicore CPU performance.
Also, Apple is conservative on clock speeds, but those do tend to get bumped up when there is a new process node as well.
The N3 process is in the A17 Pro, the M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max. The A17 Pro name seems to imply you won't find it trickle down on the regular iPhones next year. So we'll see that processor only this year in phones, since Apple discontinues their Pro range of phones every year; only the regular phones trickle downrange lowering their prices. The M3 devices are all Macs that needed an upgrade due to their popularity: the Macbook Pro and Macbook Air. They made three chips for them, but they did not make an M3 Ultra for the lower volume desktops. With the announcement of an M4 chip in iPads today, we can expect to see the Macbook Air and Macbook Pro upgraded to M4 soon, with the introduction of an M4 Ultra to match later. We can now expect those M3 devices to be discontinued instead of going downrange in price.
That would leave one device with an N3 process chip: the iMac. At its sale level, I wouldn't be surprised if all the M3 chips that will go into it will be made this year, with the model staying around for a year or two running on fumes.
For instance, Apple supposedly required a deal where they only paid TSMC for usable chips per N3 wafer, and not for the entire wafer.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/report-apple-is-savi...
The next iPhone generation is said to be a return to form with all models using the same SOC on the revised version of the 3nm node.
> Code from the operating system also indicates that the entire iPhone 16 range will use a new system-on-chip – t8140 – Tahiti, which is what Apple calls the A18 chip internally. The A18 chip is referenced in relation to the base model iPhone 16 and 16 Plus (known collectively as D4y within Apple) as well as the iPhone 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max (referred to as D9x internally)
https://www.macrumors.com/2023/12/20/ios-18-code-four-new-ip...
[1] https://semiwiki.com/semiconductor-manufacturers/tsmc/322688...
[2] https://semiengineering.com/sram-scaling-issues-and-what-com...
[3] https://semiengineering.com/sram-in-ai-the-future-of-memory/
I can see why AMD started putting the SRAM on top.
From what I can gather the key aspects are that decreased feature sizes lead to more variability between transistors, but also to less margin between on-state and off-state. Thus a kind of double-whammy. In logic circuits you're constantly overwriting with new values regardless of what was already there, so they're not as sensitive to this, while the entire point of a memory circuit is to reliably keep values around.
Alternate transistor designs such as FinFET, Gate-all-around and such can provide mitigation of some of this, say by reducing transistor-to-transistor variability by a factor, but can't get around root issue.
[1]: https://semiengineering.com/sram-scaling-issues-and-what-com...
[2]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9416021/
It can deliver the same performance as itself at just a fourth of the power than it's using? That's incredible!
I believe that OLED is much more power hungry than the previous display type (LED backlit LCD of some type?). I could be wrong, but in TV land that's the case...
Could explain, at least partly, why run time isn't greatly increased.
I.e. would it sit between, or closer to M2 or M4?
It's ok if 3 to 4 is or isn't a big jump, it's the next one is really all I want to know. If I need to peek at the specs, the name really won't tell me anything anyhow and I'll be on a webpage.
https://community.arm.com/arm-community-blogs/b/architecture...
https://github.com/corsix/amx
https://www.apple.com/ipad-pro/specs/
What do they lose by allowing slightly more freedom in configurations?
I do think there is a price discrimination story here, but there are some details to be filled in.
Also, I have seen lots of people on HN complain about the price itself, even if it's not what you yourself object to.
https://talkbackcomms.com/blogs/news/ladder
This is what they did when I was buying iPad Air - it starts with actually problematically low 64GB of Storage... and the 256GB model is the next one with massive price jump.
It's the same kind of "anchoring" (marketing term) that car dealers use to lure you into deciding for their car based on the cheapest 29.999$ model which with "useful" equipment will end you costing like 45.000$
Not to mention that occasionally is nice to have a set of downloaded media available for vacation/travel and 64GB isn't enough to download week worth of content from Netflix.
This is why this is so annoying - you're right, I don't need 512GB or 256GB. But I'd still like to have more than "You're out of space!!" amount.
https://www.apple.com/ipad-air/specs/
Games. You can put maybe three or four significant games on an iPad Air before it maxes out. (MTG Arena is almost 20GB all on it's own, Genshin Impact is like 40+ GB)
This is actually most of the storage space -- videos downloaded for consumption in places with no or bad internet.
[1]: https://liliputing.com/you-can-use-a-floppy-disk-drive-with-...
I mean, what would happen if you yanked out the drive while an app was running on it?
I could fit more if I didn’t insist on downloading everything 1080p I guess.
In my sphere, everyone with an iPad uses it for the Apple Pencil and/or video editing. Raw files for drawings get surprisingly big, once you get up into the many tens of layers, considering an artist can draw a few a day.
It's anecdotal, but 8/10 people that I know over the age of 40 would have no idea what RAM or CPU configurations even theoretically do for them. This is probably the case for most iPad purchasers, and Apple knows this - so why would they provide expensive/confusing configurability options just for the handful of tech-y people who may care? There are still high/med/low performant variations that those people can choose from, any the number of people for whom that would sour them away from a sale is vanishingly small, and they would be likely to not even be looking at Apple in the first place
The RAM and system-on-chip are tied together as part of the system-on-package. The SoP is what enables M chips to hit their incredible memory bandwidth numbers.
This is not an easy thing to allow configuration. They can’t just plug a different memory chip as a final assembly step before shipping.
They only have two SoPs as part of this launch: 9-core CPU with 8gb, and 10-core CPU with 16gb. The RAM is unified for cpu/gpu (and I would assume neural engine too).
Each new SoP is going to reduce economies of scale and increase supply chain complexity. The 256/512gb models are tied to the first package, the 1/2tb models are tied to the second. Again, these are all part of the PCB, so production decisions have to be made way ahead of consumer orders.
Maybe it’s not perfect for each individual’s needs, but it seems reasonable to assume that those with greater storage needs also would benefit from more compute and RAM. That is, you need more storage to handle more video production so you are probably more likely to use more advanced features which make better use of increased compute and RAM.
More costs everywhere in the chain; limiting SKUs is a big efficiency from manufacturing to distribution to retail to support, and it is an easy way (for the same reason) to improve the customer experience, because it makes it a lot easier to not be out of or have delays for a customer’s preferred model, as well as making the UI (online) or physical presentation (brick and mortar) for options much cleaner.
Of course, it can feel worse if you you are a power user with detailed knowledge of your particular needs in multiple dimensions and you feel like you are paying extra for features you don't want, but the efficiencies may make that feeling an illusion — with more freedom, you would being paying for the additional costs that created, so a higher cost for the same options and possibly just as much or more for the particular combination option you would prefer with multidimensional freedom as for the one with extra features without it. Though that counterfactual is impossible to test.
1. Having more SKUs is expensive, for everything from planning to inventory management to making sure you have enough shelf space at Best Buy (which you have to negotiate for). Chances are good that stores like Best Buy and Costco would only want 2 SKUs anyway, so the additional configs would be a special-order item for a small number of consumers.
2. After a certain point, adding more options actually decreases your sales. This is confusing to people who think they'd be more likely to buy if they could get exactly what they wanted, but what you're not seeing is the legions of casual consumers who are thinking about maybe getting an iPad, but would get overwhelmed by the number of options. They might spend days or weeks asking friends which model to get, debating about whether to spend extra on this upgrade or that, and eventually not buying it or getting an alternative. If you simplify the lineup to the "cheap one" and the "high end one" then people abandon most of that overhead and just decide what they want to pay.
The biggest thing tech people miss is that they're not the core consumers of these devices. The majority go to casual consumers who don't care about specifying every little thing. They just want to get the one that fits their budget and move on. Tech people are secondary.
That said, Apple's policy toward SKUs is pretty consistent: you pay more money and you get more machine, and vice versa. The MacBooks are the only product which has separately configurable memory / storage / chip, and even there some combinations aren't manufactured.
My guess is they want you to use their cloud storage and pay monthly for it.
I'm not storing my Docker containers and `node_modules` in the cloud.
Pro isn't just images and videos.
I said this in a sibling comment already, but I think it's just price anchoring so that people find the $1500 they're actually going to pay a bit easier to swallow.
Unless you are a solo editor.
What is your concern?
I would expect most actual users of the Pro model, now that 13 inch is available at the lower tier, would be working with photos and video. Even shooting ProRes off a pro iPhone is going to eat into 256 pretty fast.
Seems like that model exists mainly so they can charge $1500 for the one people are actually likely to get, and still say "starts at $1299".
Then again, it's Apple, and they can get away with it, so they do. My main point here is that the 256GB model is bad value compared to the equivalent Air model, because if you have any work where the extra beef is going to matter, it's going to eat right through that amount of storage pretty quick.
That type of buyer is a very significant % of sales for iPad pros. Despite the marketing, there are really not that many people (as a % of sales) that will be pushing these iPad's anywhere even remotely close to their computational/storage/spec limits.
That combined with replaceable batteries would go a long way to reduce the amount of ewaste.
In contrast, Apple's internal storage to my knowledge always is very durable NVMe, attached logically and physically directly to the CPU, which makes their shenanigans with low RAM size possible in the first place - they swap like hell but as a user you barely notice it because it's so blazing fast.
I'd just love to buy a device with a moderate amount of unupgreadable SSD and an SD slot so that I can put a more memory in it later so the device can last longer.
[1] https://winfuture.de/news,141439.html
[2] https://9to5mac.com/2024/03/09/macbook-air-m3-storage-speeds...
On the Macbooks (running MacOS), RAM has been used as data cache to speed up data read/write performance until the actual SSD storage operation completes. It makes sense for Apple to account for with higher RAM spec for the 1TB/2TB configurations.
I'm pretty sure that's what all modern operating systems are doing.
Apple uses it for segmentation and nothing else.
Modern being - since the 80s.
Apple doesn't do this, and use their tight integration to perform a similar function using system memory. So there is some technical justification, I think. They are 100% price gougers though.
Gave me a chuckle ;)
It's also still typically just worse than an actual dram cache.
The justifications I see are to reduce the number of models needed to stock and to keep the purchasing decision simple for customers. These are very good reasons.
But no 16GB without more SSD? lol?
The iPhone SE exists because there is a market for this form factor. If you look at the specs, you would notice it uses hardware previously used by more expensive models.
> iPhone, iPhone Pro, iPhone Pro Max
Again, different customers for different form-factors. These phones differ more than just SoC in them.
You understand that having N different colors of iPads is different from having N different SoCs for the same model of an iPad.
Some calculation like:
total storage size / page size per LBA (512B or 4KiB usually) * mapping data structure size
Are LBA's a thing on SSD's nowadays? I thought it was the legacy of the spinning rust.
SSD's operate on memory pages of the flash memory, and the page management is a complicated affair that is also entirely opaque to the host operating system due to the behind the scenes page remapping. Since flash memory is less durable (in the long term), the SSD's come overprovisioned and the true SSD capacity is always more (up to a double if my memory serves me well). The SSD controller also runs an embedded RTOS that monitors failures in flash chips and proactively evacuates and remaps ailing flash memory pages onto the healthy ones. Owing to this behaviour, the memory pages that the SSD controller reports back to the operating system have another, entirely hidden, layer of indirection.
As you mentioned, over-provisioning and other NAND flash memory health management techniques like garbage collection and wear leveling are needed for usable modern SSDs. Modern SSD controllers are complex beasts having 3-7 microprocessor cores (probably double digit core counts now with PCIe 5.0), encryption engines, power & thermal management, error correction, multiple hardware PHYs, etc.
Example product sheet: https://www.marvell.com/content/dam/marvell/en/public-collat...
I think it is strictly for that purpose.
And that decision somehow turns into making budget conscious people's UX shittier? How is that a reason not to make 16gb RAM, which is almost a bare minimum in 2024, available to everyone?
Such a waste of nice components.
I can't run podman, slack, teams, and llama3-8B in llama.cpp at the same time. Oddly enough, this is rarely a problem.
This just seems like lameness on Apple’s part.
Your estimates are not even close. You can't honestly think that LPDDR5 at leading edge speeds is only $3 per 64 Gb (aka 8GB), right?
Your estimate is off my an order of magnitude. The memory Apple is using is closer to $40 for that increment, not $3.
And yes, they include a markup, because nobody is integrating hardware parts and selling them at cost. But if you think the fastest LPDDR5 around only costs $3 for 8GB, that's completely out of touch with reality.
You can get 8GB of good quality DDR5 DIMMs for 40$, there is no way in hell that Apple is paying anywhere near that.
Going from 8 to 16GBs is probably somewhere between 3-8$ purely in material costs for Apple, not taking into account any other costs associated
You mention DIMMs and component prices instead. This is unhelpful.
See https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/memory/memory/774... for LPDDR5 prices. You can get a price of $48/chip at a volume of 2000 chips. Assuming that Apple got a deal of $30-40-ish at a few orders of magnitude larger order is quite fair. Though it certainly would be nicer if Apple priced 8GB increments not much above $80-120.
As for prices, the prices you cited are not at all comparable. Apple is absolutely certainly buying directly from manufacturers without a middleman since we're talking about millions of units delivered each quarter. Based on those quantities, unit prices are guaranteed to be substantially lower than what DigiKey offers.
Based on what little public information I was able to find, spot market prices for LPDDR4 RAM seem to be somewhere in the 3 to 5$ range for 16GB modules. Let's be generous and put LPDDR5 at tripe the price with 15$ a 16GB module. Given the upgrade price for going from 8 to 16GB is 230 EUR Apple is surely making a huge profit on those upgrades alone by selling an essentially unusable base configuration for a supposed "Pro" product.
A DIMM is 8 or 16 chips (9/18 is ECC), while the LPDDR is a single chip for the same storage. The wild density difference in chip capacity (512MB or 1GB vs 8GB) makes a huge difference, and how a stick can be sold at retail for cheaper than the bare LPDDR chip in volume.
but up until these these things I felt I could run whatever I wanted, including Baldur’s Gate 3.
As devs and power users we'll always have an edge case for higher RAM usage, but the average consumer is going to be perfectly fine with 8GB of RAM.
All of these comments about how 8GB of RAM is going to make it "unusable" or a "waste of components" are absurd.
I was using my 4gb ram pinebook pro in public transport yesterday, and decided to turn of all cores except for a single Cortex-A53, to safe some battery. I had no problems for my usecase of a text editor + shell to compile for doing some SIMD programming.
It's not quite in the same ballpark as showing apartment or airfare listings without mandatory fees but it is at the ticket booth outside of the stadium.
> It takes quite a bit of discipline to close down tabs to a more manageable numbers.
Or you just click the little chevron in Tree Style Tabs or equivalent and 100 tabs are just hidden in the UI.
It's fairly easy to hit a few GB of RAM used up just with those.
I'm still getting at least 16 GB on my next one though.
like, the $359 acer shitbox probably doesn't do all the exact same thing as the MBA either, but that's actually ok and really only demonstrates the MBA is an unaffordable luxury product, basically the same as a gold-plated diamond-encrusted flip-phone.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40292839
Not your circus, not your clowns, but this is sort of the duality of apple: "it's all marketing and glitz, a luxury product, there's no reason to buy it, and the fact that they have a better product only PROVES it" vs "of course no PC manufacturer could possibly be expected to offer a top-notch 120hz mini-LED screen, a good keyboard, great trackpad, good speakers, and good SOC performance in a thin-n-light..."
There are different categories of "power users"
And as for the parent comment’s point, being into cars doesn’t mean you’re as good as a professional race car driver.
The Macbook line will get iPadOS support long before they allow MacOS on this line. Full steam ahead towards the walled garden.
M1 chips, great screens, precise pencil input and keyboard support, but we still aren't permitted a serious OS on it, to protect the monopolistic store.
App Stores have beeen around long enough to prove that they're little more than laboratories in which to carry out accelerated enshittification experimentation. Everything so dumbed down and feature-light, yet demanding subscriptions or pushing endless scammy ads. And games that are a shameless introduction to gambling addiction, targeted at kids.
Most of the 'apps' that people actually use shouldn't need to be native apps anyway, they should be websites. And now we get the further enshittification of trying to force people out of the browser and into apps, not for a better experience, but for a worse one, where more data can be harvested and ads can't so easily be blocked...
I feel bad about all this because I advised my mother to buy an iPad Pro as it was sold as a laptop replacement but it never materialized anywhere near expectations and ended being an expensive mistake that can only offer compromised workflows with limitations that do not even come close to a MacBook she was used to (even in Apple own apps, even something like the Page app, yes).
I think the iPad would be a fine device, if only they didn't try to upsell it and stopped pretending it is a "Pro" thing. If the whole lineup would get OLED displays, more RAM across the board and decent base storage for media at a more honest price it would be an easy recommendation.
As it is, the entry level is lackluster because of the display (if you only buy for content consumption it is better to go with an Android OLED options) and the high-end variant are just stupid expensive for what they will actually allow you to do.
But too many Apple customers have drunk the Kool-Aid so they don't have to care much about the reality and we just get expensive bullshit.
The multitasking will still be poor but perhaps Apple can do something about that when in docked mode.
That said, development likely remains a non-starter given the lack of unix tooling.
Despite the entire internet telling me it would be "unusable" and a disaster and a complete disaster, it's actually 100% perfectly fine. I can run IDEs, Slack, Discord, Chrome, and do dev work without a problem. I can't run a lot of VMs or compile giant projects with 10 threads, of course, but for typical work tasks it's just fine.
And for the average consumer, it would also be fine. I think it's obvious that a lot of people are out of touch with normal people's computer use cases. 8GB of RAM is fine for 95% of the population and the other 5% can buy something more expensive.
It’s rather an issue of selling deliberately underpowered hardware for no good reason other than to sell actually up-to-date versions for a difference in price that has no relation to the actual availability or price of the components. The sheer disconnect from any kind of reality offends me as a person whose job and alleged primary competency is to recognize reality then bend it to one’s will.
8 GB were the standard back then.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/111942
Edit: I confirmed that I was indeed wrong, but the payoff isn't great anyway because that just means that yes in fact they've kept the exact same ram floor for 10 years. Insane.
For me personally 16 or 32 GB are perfectly fine, 8 GB was too little (even without VMs) and I've never needed 64 or more. So it's curious to see you are pretty much exactly the opposite.
Did you miss this part prefixing that sentence?
> I can't run a lot of VMs or compile giant projects with 10 threads, of course
>"I have a spare laptop with only 8GB of RAM"
The used M1 MacBook Air I just bought is by far the fastest computer I have ever used.
I put a spare 120 GB SSD, a cheap no-name brand that was just lying around for some testing purposes. Found the similar off-the-shelf DDR3 2 GB RAM stick. I thought the RAM was faulty, turned out it’s in a working condition, so I put it there.
I need the computer for basic so-called office work (a browser, some messengers, email client and a couple of other utilities). I thought I’d buy at least two 4GB RAM sticks after I test it, so you know, 8 GB is just the bare imaginable minimum! I have my 16 GBs everywhere since, idk, maybe 2012 or something.
And you know what?! It works very well with 4 GB of RAM and default Fedora (it’s 40 now, but I started with 38, iirc). It has the default Gnome (also, 46 now, started with 44, iirc). And it works very well!
It doesn’t allow me to open a gazillion of browser tabs, but my workflow is designed to avoid it, so I have like 5 to 10 open simultaneously.
Before throwing Fedora at the PC, I thought I would just install a minimal Arch Linux with swaywm and be good. But I decided I don’t want to bother, and I’ll just buy 8 GB later on, and be done with it.
And here I am, having full-blown Gnome and just 4 GB of RAM. I don’t restrict myself too much, the only time I notice it’s not my main PC is when I want to do some heavy web-browsing (e.g. shopping on some different heavy websites with many tabs opened). Then it slows down significantly, till I close the unnecessary tabs or apps. All the software is updated and current, so it’s not like it’s some ancient PC from 00’s.
Also, I have my iPad Pro 12,9 1st Gen with just 4 GB of RAM too, and I never feel it’s slow for me.
I understand that some tasks would require a lot of RAM, and it’s not for everyone. Having a lot of RAM everywhere, I’m quite used to not thinking of it at all for a significant part of my career (for over a decade now), so I may have something opened for weeks that I don’t have any need for.
So, it’s 2024, and I’m surprised to say that 4 GB of RAM is plenty when you’re focused on some tasks and don’t multitask heavily. Which never productive for me at least. I even noticed that I enjoy my low-memory PC even more, as it reminds me with its slowdowns that I’m entering the multitasking state.
I use swaywm on my Arch Linux laptop, and most of the time it’s less than 3–4 Gb (I have 16 Gb).
Thus making your three other machines 400% perfectly fine?
This argument is self defeating in the context of the M4 announcement. "Average consumers" who don't need 16 GB of RAM don't need an M4 either. But people who do need an M4 chip probably also need 16 GB of RAM.
I think actually more people need 16 GB of RAM rather than a top M4 chip. Having only 8 GB can be a serious limitation in some memory heavy circumstances, while having (say) an M2 SoC rather than an M4 SoC probably doesn't break any workflow at all, it just makes it somewhat slower.
At least, chrome wouldn’t run that many tabs on iPad for sure if it used the same engine as desktop chrome
3 GB ram chips probably exist, but are definitely not common.
not again
No device should be measuring storage in the gigabytes in 2024. Let alone starting at $1000 offering only 256GB. What ridiculousness.
I have years of photos and videos on there. Apparently the 256 GB model was the right choice for me?
I have the 256 GB model as well, full resolution of 5+ years of photos (around 20k), around 200 GB used, 180 on iCloud via Family Sharing.
All the changes under the Cook leadership are appalling and reveal what is definitely one of the worse character you can get as a leader. At this point even Bill Gates looks like a good guy in comparison.
A 1 TB consumer-oriented SSD is about $50 today. At Apple’s manufacturing scale, do you have any doubt that the cost to them is nearly negligible?
iPad Pros should come with 1-16 TiB of SSD, and 16-128 GiB of RAM.
WTF? Why so little? That's insane to me, that's the amount of RAM you get with a mid-range android phone.
What needs that amount on a phone? 8GB on a desktop is...well it's not great, but it's usable, and usable for a damn sight more multi-tasking than you would ever do on a smartphone. Is it just because you need to look better on the spec sheet, like the silly camera megapixel wars of the 2010s?
I freaking hate my iPhone Mini for that, load a YouTube video, a few tabs and a note and boom you are in for a reload every 3-context switch. It's disgusting for a phone that launched at a price too close to 1Keur for my liking. And no, I'm not going to drop over 1keur on a stupid smartphone just to be able to load more than 5 tabs and a note without constant reloading when I'm just trying to do research in a shop to inform a purchasing decision.
I bought it solely for the form factor in the first place, but I really regret considering all the shortcomings that came with the price.
But if Apple think they are smartass, I'll have the last laugh by not buying their hardware again. My next smartphone is definitely going to have over 8Gb of RAM, just not from Apple.
I use my iPad Pro constantly for heavy stuff and I don’t know how much ram is in it; it has never been something I needed to think about. The OS doesn’t even expose it.
There's absolutely nothing a mobile device does that should require that much memory. That shitty OEMs bloat the hell out of their ROMs and slap on more memory to match isn't a good thing or something to emulate in my opinion.
It is fast and handles everything I've ever thrown at it (I got 32 GB RAM), it never, ever gets hot, I've never heard a fan in 2+ years (maybe a very soft fan if you put your ear next to it). And the battery life is so incredible that I often use it unplugged.
It's just been a no-compromise machine. And I was thinking of upgrading to an M3 but will probably upgrade to an M4 instead at the end of this year when the M4 maxes come out.
[0] Many people report that they stop noticing the notch pretty quickly, but that's never been the case for me. It's a constant eyesore.
I don’t get the hate for the notch tho. The way I see it, they pushed the menus out of the screen and up into their own dedicated little area. We get more room for content.
It’s like the touchbar for menus. Oh, ok, now I know why people hate it. /jk
Exactly - laughed at first but it quickly made sense if they are prioritizing decent webcam quality. Before my M1 Pro 14 I had a Dell XPS 13 that also had tiny bezels but squeezed the camera into the very thin top bezel. The result was a terrible webcam that I gladly traded for a notch and a better camera quality.
However, that Dell did still fit Windows Hello (face unlock) capability into that small bezel, so the absence of FaceID despite having the notch is a bit shit.
Personally I never see the desktop background so I just set desktop to Black, it’s perfect for me.
If I forget to hibernate before I put it in my bag it either burns through its battery before the next day, or overheats until it shuts itself down. If I'm working from home and get up to pee in the night, I often walk past my office and hear the fans screaming into an empty room, burning god knows how much electricity. Even though the only thing running on it was Slack and an editor window.
It's an absolute joke of a machine and, while it's a few years old now, its original list price was equivalent to a very well specced MacBook Pro. I hope they were getting a substantial discount on them.
Who in their right mind will spend $1300-$1600 on this rather than a MacBook Pro?
I’m also annoyed that the iPad is locked down, even though it could clearly support everything the macbook does.
Why can’t we have a keyboard shortcut to switch between the iPad and Mac desktops or something?
Yeah, well, I'm an enthusiastic M3 user, and I'm sure the new AI capabilities are nice, but hyperbole like this is just asking for snark like "my RTX4090 would like a word".
Other than that: looking forward to when/how this chipset will be available in Macbooks!
And even though the Apple press release does not even mention memory capacity, I can guarantee you that it will be even less than that on an iPad (simply because RAM is very battery-hungry and most consumers won't care).
So, therefore my remark: it will be interesting to see how this chipset lands in MacBooks.
I think a comparison to the 4090 is unfair, as there is no laptop/tablet with an rtx 4090 and the power consumption of a 4090 is at ~450W on average
No, when using wording like "outrageously powerful", that's exactly the comparison you elicit.
I'd be fine with "best in class" or even "unbeatable performance per Watt", but I can absolutely guarantee you that an iPad does not outperform any current popular-with-the-ML-crowd GPUs...
If the iPad had better software and could be considered a first class productivity machine then it would be less surprising but the one thing no one says about the iPads is “I wish this chip were faster”
It's suspected that the fast release for M4 is so TSMC can move away from the horrible-yielding N3B to N3E.
Unfortunately, N3E is less dense. Paired with a couple more little cores, an increase in little core size, 2x larger NPU, etc, I'd guess that while M3 seems to be around 145mm2, this one is going to be quite a bit larger (160mm2?) with the size hopefully being offset by decreased wafer costs.
You probably have people (like myself) trying to keep up with the latest MacBook Air who get fatigued having to get a new laptop every year (I just upgraded to the M3 not too long ago, from the M2, and before that... the M1... is there any reason to? Not really...), so now they are trying to entice people who don't have iPads yet / who are waiting for a reason to do an iPad upgrade.
For $1,300 configured with the keyboard, I have no clue what I'd do with this device. They very deliberately are keeping iPadOS + MacOS separate.
It's a negligible amount of money. It's like, brand new $999, trade in for like $450. Once a year... $550 remainder/12 months is $45.75/mo to have the latest and greatest laptop.
You should be incentivised by trying to minimise depreciation. You incur the greatest amount of depreciation closest to the date of purchase, so the longer you go between purchases, the less depreciation you'll realise.
If I expected to say get, $450 after 1 year, and $250 after 2 years. By trading in every 2 years, I'm getting a laptop that's a bit older, but you're also saving $14.58/month on depreciation. If the year after that becomes $150, you'd be saving $22.22/month. If the price is worth it is subjective, I'm just saying going for maximal trade in value doesn't really make sense, since you save more money the lower the trade-in value you get.
I went from M1 to M1 Pro just to get more displays.
Also, you know you don't HAVE to buy a laptop every year, right?
If I can hold out another year or two, would probably end up just getting a new one
If I could actually do something with an iPad there would be a different discussion, but the operating system is so incredibly gimped that the most demanding task it's really suited for is .. decoding video.
Well, it's not. Every process shrink improves power efficiency. For watching videos, you're sipping power on the M4. For drawing...well if you want low latency while drawing, which generally speaking, people do, you...want the processor and display to ramp up to compensate and carry strokes as fast as possible?
Obviously if your main concern is the environment, you shouldn't upgrade and you should hold onto your existing model(s) until they die.
As for the environmental impact, whether I buy or don't buy this iPad (I won't, don't worry, my 2020 one still works), millions of people will. I don't mind people buying powerful machines when the software can make use of the performance, but for iPad OS..?
Millions of people will be buying these things regardless of what I'm doing.
So what are the performance cores doing there?
Apple's started to roll out green energy charging to devices: https://support.apple.com/en-us/108068
If I had to ballpark estimate this, your iPad probably uses less energy per year than a strand of incandescent holiday lights does in a week. Maybe somebody can work out that math.
A faster SoC can finish the task with better "work done/watt". Thus, it's more environmentally friendly. Unless you're referring to the resources dedicated to advancing computers such as the food engineers eat and the electricity chip fabs require.
Regardless, the environmental impact I'm thinking about isn't mainly power consumption.
Watch a 20-year old creative work on an iPad and you will quickly change your mind. Watch someone who has, "never really used a desktop, [I] just use an iPad" work in Procreate or LumaFusion.
The iPad has amazing software. Better, in many ways, than desktop alternatives if you know how to use it. There are some things they can't do, and the workflow can be less flexible or full featured in some cases, but the speed at which some people (not me) can work on an iPad is mindblowing.
I use a "pro" app on an iPad and I find myself looking around for how to do something and end up having to Google it half the time. When I watch someone who really knows how to use an iPad use the same app they know exactly what gesture to do or where to long tap. I'm like, "How did you know that clicking on that part of the timeline would trigger that selection," and they just look back at you like, "What do you mean? How else would you do it?"
There is a bizarre and almost undocumented design langauge of iPadOS that some people simply seem to know. It often pops up in those little "tap-torials" when a new feature roles out that I either ignore or forget… but other people internalize them.
I have two iPads and two pencils—that way each iPad is never without a penicl—and yet I rarely use the pencil. I just don't think about it. But then when I do, I'm like, "Why don't I use this more often? It's fantastic."
I have tried and tried to adapt and I can not. I need a mouse, keyboard, seperate numpad, and two 5K Displays to mostly arrive at the same output that someone can do with a single 11" or 13" screen and a bunch of differnt spaces that can be flicked through.
I desperatedly wanted to make the iPad my primary machine and I could not do it. But, honestly, I think it has more to do with me than the software. I've become old and stubborn. I want to do things my way.
PDF marking and procreate are my main uses for it. And using the ipad on a flat surface.
It is just fine driving Citrix or any web app like VSCode.dev.
A lot of of the younger generation does all their work on their phone and tablet and does not have a computer.
iPad has been a workflow gamechanger for folks who use photoshop etc but users are still prevented from coding on it.
I do most of my dev on a Pi5 now, so actually working on the iPad is not that difficult.
If they ever release Xcode for iPadOS that would be a true gamechanger.
What's silly is thinking that a device that makes everyone happy is somehow trivial, or that a device intentionally made with a specific type of interface is bad because of that intent. If things were as bad or as trivial as some people suggest, someone else would have made a successful competing product by now, rather than the string failures across the industry, from those who have tried.
I suspect you’re a programmer. This is not the perspective or reality of most professional users. Most professional apps are not, themselves, customizable. Most professional users do not make their own tools, or want to. If you’re a programmer, you’ll understand this, because that’s why you’re employed: they want you to do it.
Also, "most" and "any" aren't all too helpful in this discussion (not directed at anyone in particular, these can be read in comments throughout this thread) because there are going to be countless examples in either direction, but from my limited experience, I have seen professionals in various spaces, some which very much prefer a default workflow and others that heavily customize. I know talented professional programmers doing great work in the out-of-the-box setup of VSCode combined with GitHub Desktop, etc. but also have seen graphic designers, video editors, and even people focused purely on writing text that have created immensely impressive workflows, stringing macros together and relying heavily on templates and their preferred folder structures. Even on iPad OS, people can have their custom-tailored workflow regarding file placement, syncing with cloud storage, etc., just in a restricted manner and for what it's worth, I sometimes prefer using Alight Motion for certain video editing tasks on my smartphone over grabbing my laptop.
I have seen and feel strongly that any professional from any field can have a customized workflow and can benefit from the ability to customize their toolset, even those outside programming, but I also feel equally strongly that sane defaults must remain and the "iPad way of doing things", as much as I in my ancient mid-twenties will never fully adapt to it, must remain for people who prefer and thrief in that environment.
A lot of professional applications include some form of scripting engine.
But, there's nothing technically stopping an app developer from implementing any of this, including desktop level apps. Compute, keyboard/mouse, and stylus is ready. I think the minuscule market that would serve is what's stopping them.
I was responding to this main point.
Every professional drawing app, on the iPad, allows you to make your own brushes. There's no limitation there. That's just a fundamental requirement of a drawing app. They're not customizing the workflow or tool/apps itself, which is what I thought you were referring to.
> make their own tools
This requires programming, does it not? Do you have some examples?
> why some praise and use Apple devices for professionals even though they are not the best choice.
Especially for drawing, I think it would be best to ask the professionals why they chose a ~1lb iPad in their backpack with a pixel perfect stylus, over a desktop computer and mouse. The answers might surprise you.
> What's silly is thinking that a device that makes everyone happy is somehow trivial, or that a device intentionally made with a specific type of interface is bad because of that intent.
Add a proper native terminal, proper virtualization framework á la what we have on Mac, side loading and third party browser support with plugins and you’ll shut up 99% of complaining users here.
> If things were as bad or as trivial as some people suggest, someone else would have made a successful competing product by now, rather than the string failures across the industry, from those who have tried.
Right, let me use my couple billion change in R&D to create iPad compatible system with all that I’ve mentioned before.
Better for who ? They sell like hot cakes, 50+ millions of them per year
According to google there are 25m software devs in the world, even if half (extremely generous) of them would buy a new ipad every single year (extremely generous) if they implemented what you ask it isn't going to change much for apple, ipads are like 10% of their revenues. So at best we're talking of 3% revenue increase
> 99% of complaining users here.
99% of not much is nothing for apple, they're already printing money too fast to know what to do with it
I’m into the idea of modelling like this, or drawing, but the reality is I spend most of my time and money on a desktop work station because the software I need most is there. I’m totally open to iPads being legit work machines, but they’re still too limited (for me) to make the time and cash investment for the transition.
You’re definitely right though. People are doing awesome work on them without the help of a traditional desktop or laptop computer.
Of course, SWE jobs are on the chopping block for the same reasons, but I claim that AI art models are ahead of AI coding models in terms of quality and flexibility.
This has nothing to do with age. I have an iPad Pro that I barely use because it has been designed for use cases that I just don't have.
I don't do any digital art, don't take handwritten notes, and don't need to scan and/or mark up documents very often. I don't edit photos or videos often enough to need a completely separate device for the task.
I mostly use my computers for software development, which is impossible on an iPad. I tried running my dev tools inside an iSH session, and also on a remote Linux box that I could SSH into. It wasn't a great experience. Why do this when I could just run VS Code or WebStorm on a Mac?
I also write a lot -- fiction, blog posts, journal entries, reading notes -- which should technically be possible to do well on the iPad. In practice there just aren't enough powerful apps for serious long-form writing on a tablet. Microsoft Word on iPad lacks most of the features of its desktop counterpart, Scrivener doesn't support cloud sync properly, iA Writer is too limited if you're writing anything over a few thousand words, and Obsidian's UI just doesn't work well on a touch device. The only viable app is Ulysses, which is ... okay, I guess? If it floats your boat.
I sometimes do music production. This is now possible on the iPad via Logic Pro. I suppose I could give it a try, but what does that get me? I already own an Ableton license and a couple of nice VSTs, none of which transfers over to the iPad. I can also download random third-party apps to manipulate audio on my Mac, or mess around with Max4Live, or use my Push 2 to make music. Again, this stuff doesn't work on an iPad and it never will, because the APIs to enable these things simply don't exist.
There are tons of people who use Windows because they need to use proprietary Windows-based CAD software. Or people who need the full desktop version of Excel to do their jobs. Or academics and researchers who need Python/R to crunch data. All of these people might LOVE to use something like these new iPads, but they can't because iPadOS just can't meet their use cases.
I really like the idea of a convertible tablet that can support touch, stylus, keyboard, and pointer input. The iPad does a great job at being this device as far as hardware and system software is concerned. But unfortunately, it's too limited for a the kinds of workflows people using laptops/desktops need to do.
- Up to 1.5x the CPU speed of iPad Pro's previous M2 chip
- Octane gets up to 4x the speed compared to M2
- At comparable performance, M4 consumes half the power of M2
- High-performance AI engine, that claims 60x the speed of Apple's first engine (A11 Bionic)
What I want to know is whether that ratio holds for single-core performance measurements.
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/apple-m4-sco...
Doesn't it mean "1.5x speed in rare specific tasks which were hardware optimized, and 1x ewerywhere else"?
It’s all just marketing to build hype.
Isn’t there a ToS prohibition about “custom coding” in iOS? Like, the only way you can ever use that hardware directly is for developers who go through Apple Developer Program, which last time I heard was bitter lemon? Tell me if I’m wrong.
(disclaimer: My personal opinion is that the "appliance" model is absurd, but I've tried to steel-man the case for it)
Of course I would, and the only reason other people wouldn't is because they're conditioned to believe in their own innate powerlessness.
If you sell me a CPU, I want the power to program it, period.
I'm old enough to remember when people literally built their own computers, soldering iron in hand. People haven't done that since the early 80's.
Steve Jobs' vision of the Mac, released in 1984, was for it to be a computing appliance - "the computer for the rest of us." The technology of the day prevented that. Though they pushed that as hard as they could.
Today's iPad? It's the fulfillment of Steve Jobs' original vision of the Mac: a computing appliance. It took 40 years, but we're here.
If you don't want a computing appliance then don't buy an iPad. I'd go further and argue don't buy any tablet device. Those that don't want computing appliances don't have to buy them. It's not like laptops, or even desktops, are going anywhere anytime soon.
If you do want a computing appliance, then there's nothing wrong with having a machine that could be reprogrammed that you simply choose not to reprogram. Please stop advocating for a worse world for the rest of us when it doesn't benefit you in the slightest to have a machine that you don't control.
I sincerely hope that you live as much of your life in that world as possible.
Meanwhile, I'll enjoy having a car I don't have to mess with every time I start it up.
On top of the ugly reality that they're designed to become e-waste as soon as the battery degrades.
It MUST (RFC2119) be airgapped from ABS and ECU, of course.
Uhhh, there are CPUs in your frickin' wires now, dude! There are several CPUs in you car for which you generally don't have access. Ditto for your fridge. Your microwave. Your oven. Even your toaster.
We're literally awash in CPUs. You need to update your thinking.
Now, if you said something like "if you sell me a general-purpose computing device, then I want the power to program it, period" then I would fully agree with you. BTW, you can develop software for your own personal use on the iPad. It's not cheap or easy (doesn't utilize commonly-used developer tooling), but it can be done without having to jump through any special hoops.
Armed with that, we can amend your statement to "if you sell me a general-purpose computing device, then I want the power to program it using readily-available, and commonly-utilized programming tools."
I think that statement better captures what I presume to be your intent.
You are really stretching the definition of "special hoops" here. On Android sideloading is a switch hidden in your settings menu; on iOS it's either a municipal feature or a paid benefit of their developer program.
Relative to every single other commercial, general-purpose operating system I've used, I would say yeah, Apple practically defines what "special hoops" look like online.
I’m annoyed that I can’t buy particular engines off the shelf and use them in my bespoke approach, why dont car manufacturers give the approach that crate engine providers do?
I write enough code during the day to make me happy. I really don’t want to be thinking about the optimal brownness of my bagel.
NB: those are my criteria of evaluation. Very personally. I'm a software engineer, with a focus on systems/embedded. Your criteria are yours.
(But maybe don't complain if you buy this for its "AI" capabilities only to find out that Apple doesn't let you do anything "unapproved" with it. You had sufficient chance to see the warning signs.)
https://www.reddit.com/r/AsahiLinux/comments/ttsshm/asahi_li...
Some of this is insanely impressive. I wonder how big the OS ROM (or whatever) is with all these models. For context, even if the entire OS is about 15GB, in order to get some of these features locally just for an LLM on its own, its about 60GB or more, for something ChatGPT esque. Which requires me to spend thousands on a GPU.
Apologies for the many thoughts, I'm quite excited by all these advancements. I always say I want AI to work offline and people tell me I'm moving the goalpost, but it is truly the only way it will become mainstream.
Aren't phones getting close to 7" now? The iPhone pro is 6.2", right?
https://phonesized.com/compare/#2299,156
Take away the bezels on the tablet and there's not a lot of difference.
You could technically make a more square phone but it wouldn’t be fun to hold in common positions, like up to your ear for a call.
I'd love to see them add something to that form factor.
I do see a lot of iPad Minis out there, but usually, as part of dedicated systems (like PoS, and restaurant systems).
On the other hand, I have heard rumblings that Apple may release an even bigger phone, which I think might be overkill (but what do I know. I see a lot of those monster Samsung beasts, out there).
Not sure that is for me. I still use an iPhone 13 Mini.
I suspect that my next Mac will be a Studio. I guess it will be an M4 Studio.
I would guess that Apple doesn't love it either; one suspects that the weird release cycle is at least partially related to availability of chips and other components.
I miss my old iPad mini 4. I guess I could try the 11" iPad, but I think I'd prefer it to be smaller.
You know whats even funnier, when the mini came out originally, I made fun of it. I thought it was a dumb concept, oh my ignorance.
I use the Mini daily.
It's a good thing they made the Pro lighter and thinner. May actually make it more useful.
That fits all your wants
Regarding a small iPad, isn't that the iPad mini? 8" vs 7" is pretty close to what you're asking for.
If I’m doing pull ups in the gym I’ll do 3 sets of 7. That’s the most I can do at the moment.
I'm with you, I'm most excited about this too.
Currently building an AI creative studio (make stories, art, music, videos, etc.) that runs locally/offline (https://github.com/bennyschmidt/ragdoll-studio). There is a lot of focus on cloud with LLMs but I can't see how the cost will make much sense for involved creative apps like video creation, etc. Present day users might not have high-end machines, but I think they all will pretty soon - this will make them buy them the way MMORPGs made everyone buy more RAM. Especially the artists and creators. Remember, Photoshop was once pretty difficult to run, you needed a great machine.
I can imagine offline music/movies apps, offline search engines, back office software, etc.
(Notice a theme?)
Apple doesn‘t even sell an official matte screen protector last I checked.
but when 6.7" screens on phones are common, what really is the point of a 7" tablet?
iPhone Pro Max screen size is 6.7" and the the upcoming iPhone 16 Pro Max is rumored to be 6.9" with 12GB of RAM. That's your 7" tablet right there.
The thing is - You're an extreme edge case of an edge case. Furthermore, I'm guessing if Apple did roll out a 7" tablet, you'd find some other thing where it isn't exactly 100% perfectly meeting your desired specifications. For example, Apple is about to release a high powered 6.9" tablet-like device (the iPhone 16 Pro Max) but I'm guessing there's another reason why it doesn't fit your needs.
Which is why companies like Apple ignore these niche use cases and focus on mainstream demands. The niche demands always gain a lot of internet chatter, but when the products come out they sell very poorly.
I had one of the earlier versions and this was pretty much its only use case…
Surprisingly (at least to me) I feel that I've more than gotten my money's worth out of it despite it being almost entirely strictly a consumption device.
I tote it around the house so I can watch or listen to things while I'm doing other things. It's also nice to keep on the dining room table so I can read the news or watch something while we're eating. I could do every single one of these things with my laptop, but... that laptop is my primary work tool. I don't like to carry it all over the place, exposing it to spills and dust, etc.
The only real work-related task is serving as a secondary monitor (via AirPlay) for my laptop when I travel.
$500 isn't pocket change, but I've gotten 48 months of enjoyment and would expect at least another 24 to 36 months. That's about $6 a month, or possibly more like $3-4 per month if I resell it eventually.
Worth it for me.
In the end, she still has to rely on the MBP daily because there's always something the iPad can't do. Usually something small like a website not fully working on it.
The M3 Macs were released only 7 months ago.
Your laptop M3 chip is still probably more powerful than this. The laptop M4 will be faster, but not groundbreaking faster.
Paradoxically this effect is the worst in ultraportables, where the norm is to cram in CPUs that run too hot for the chassis with tiny batteries, making them weirdly bad at the one thing they’re supposed to be good at. Portability isn’t just physical size and weight, but also runtime and if one needs to bring cables and chargers.
On that note, Apple really needs to resurrect the 12” MacBook with an M-series or even A-series SoC. There’d be absolutely nothing remotely comparable in the x86 ultraportable market.
Apart from that, I think you might me in a minority if you want a loud, hot iPad with a heavy battery to power all of this (for a short time, because physics). There are plenty of Windows devices that work exactly like that though if that's really what makes you happy. Just don't expect great performance either, because of diminishing returns of using higher power and also because the chips in these devices usually suck.
Pure compute power has never been Apple's center of gravity when selling products. The Mac Pro and the XServe are/were minuscule portions of Apple's sales, and the latter product was killed after a short while.
> Apple's engineers have unilaterally decided to handicap their own processors for no real good reason
This is a misunderstanding of what the limiting factor is of Apple products' capability. The mobile devices all have battery as the limfac. The processors being energy efficient in compute-per-watt isn't a handicap, it's an enabler. And it's a very good reason.
I agree with you. I don’t want fans to be quiet, I want them completely gone. And with battery life too, not 30 minutes, but 300 minutes. Modern chips are plenty fast, developers need to optimize their shit instead of churning crapware.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNKNjy3CoZ4
Can you just fix an F1 engine with a wrench?
In fact the current Gen is bigger than the trashcan ones by quite a bit (although IIRC the trash can Macs had user replaceable SSDs and GPUs)
I totally missed that they released a new Apple Silicon Mac Pro. Turns out it has PCIe slots.
If I find a place in walking distance, maybe.
I think if you partnered with a major computer brand, that kind of thing could really be huge. Maybe someone like framework perhaps. Could be a big brand discriminator - bring that on-site service feel to average consumers.
Here:
https://www.apple.com/recycling/nationalservices/
I've even done it before personally with an old MacBook that wouldn't turn on.
It's going in the landfill.
They also say to erase the data before shipping it - which I can't do.
You being unwilling to spend the barest amount of effort to recycle it is your problem, not Apple's.
Now you claim you "went there" and discovered they do accept recycling but only if you mail it.
One of those is necessarily false, since I doubt you went to the Apple Store in between your comments.
However, I suspect both your claims are wrong, because Apple stores absolutely accept old devices to recycle directly. (They also provide mail-in options for people who don't have one they can visit directly.)
From your many comments, it seems like you have an ideological axe to grind that somehow your device can't be recycled, despite abundant evidence to the contrary and lots of people here trying to help you.
The SSD is encrypted with a rate-limited key in the Secure Enclave - unless someone has your password they’re not getting your data.
That's the whole point of encrypted storage. There is no liability if you used a reasonable password.
Why not accept you have peace of mind and resell on eBay for parts?
Assuming you didn't use "password123" or something.
I don't think any cryptography has stood the test of time. It's unlikely anything today will survive post-quantum.
The Mac Pro does not have a soldered-in SSD. They even sell user-replaceable upgrades. https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MR393AM/A/apple-2tb-ssd-u...