95 ms·
Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max
- mkl 3y agoStrange that they mostly compare performance to M1, not M2. Probably means it's not as much faster than M2 as they would like.
- EAtmULFO 3y agoExactly. I imagine most of the benefit of the new 3nm process is related to power draw. I'll bet the memory is the same stuff as the prior generation though, given those specs haven't seemed to change at all.
- ezfe 3y agoThey compared it to both, and most people upgrading will have an M1 so it's the more apt comparison (and of course, a bigger number).
- Angostura 3y agoDon't forget that there are no M2 iMacs
- guax 3y agoIts on the release linked. 15% faster than m2 for P-cores and 30% for e-cores, which is misleading, because it has 2 more of them so they're not necessarily that much faster. For me, still on m1 is good news, one more generation I can skip without feeling too much FOMO. Graphics improvement are irrelevant since im not gaming on them and cpu difference is fine for being just <40% overall.
- MisterBiggs 3y agoIt's frustrating that they don't refresh the whole line at once. I'm in the market for a new mac mini but now I feel forced to hold off until it gets its refresh.
- tripdout 3y agoYou mean a Mac :P
- ehPReth 3y agocharacter limit :P
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- momothereal 3y agoSomething tells me it will get shortened to "Apple unveils M3" soon
- s3p 3y agoA Mac can also be called a personal computer if i'm not mistaken
- raimue 3y agoIn the 2000s, Apple ran a big campaign with the phrase "I'm a Mac - I'm a PC" to highlight the difference.
- snickerbockers 3y agoYeah but then it's not the "most advanced chip" anymore.
- minimaxir 3y ago> Additionally, support for up to 128GB of memory unlocks workflows previously not possible on a laptop, such as AI developers working with even larger transformer models with billions of parameters. The presentation explicitly highlighted this very randomly, without showing how AI development actually works. I know Apple has put more effort into Apple Silicon support for PyTorch but is it there yet?
- wmf 3y agoAre the cool kids using GGML?
- minimaxir 3y agoAlso that.
- hnfong 3y agoFWIW, the main developer of GGML apparently runs a M2 Ultra himself. Apple Silicon is a first class citizen on GGML and runs fast. See eg. https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/16o4ka8/running_ggufs_on_an_m1_ultra_is_an_interesting/ https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/16o4ka8/running...
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y agono, GGUF
- mardifoufs 3y agoI'm pretty sure pytorch supports it OOTB. In my experience it works even better than ROCM
- nextos 3y agoI don't think it is? But I would love to be wrong. Cheap mobile Nvidia cards outperform regular M2 chips on small learning tasks. M3 Max might be a contender, but Metal is far from CUDA yet? A laptop M3 Max looks like it can compete with a Nvidia 3070. It's an unfair comparison as Nvidia is a huge desktop heat/energy hog and Apple M chips are really efficient. Let's see how desktop M3 chips fare.
- starshadowx2 3y agoInteresting that the Myst remake is being used specifically as an example, with how the original was created on Macs using HyperCard.
- brundolf 3y agoYeah, I thought that was a little poetic :) Especially since (and this just occurred to me), in a roundabout way the original may have been the first Mac game to ever use raytracing (in its pre-rendering)
- salzig 3y agoThat one, and Sketchup really confused me.
- aorth 3y ago> Myst I was just coming here to ask about the Myst reference, since I played that 25 (?) years ago and wondered why they mentioned it. So there's a remake?
- scrlk 3y agoBase 14" M3 MBP comes with 8 GB RAM at $1599 USD. That's pretty stingy.
- nateb2022 3y agoEspecially when a 13" M2 MBA with 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD comes in at $1499.
- Willish42 3y agoAnd yet _still_ 8GB of RAM as the baseline. It's probably as profitable as it is evil / misleading.
- sosodev 3y agoCalling it evil is a bit of a stretch.
- 3c6bYDXLMj 3y agoHyperbole like this is necessary for people to justify the extreme negative emotions they feel about a computer they’ll never buy having specifications that they disapprove of.
- Willish42 3y agoI'll admit "evil" is a stretch but I was thinking in terms of the amount of e-waste this causes due to insufficient RAM hurting the longevity of a $~2k+ computer e.g. https://www.globaldata.com/data-insights/technology-media-and-telecom/apple-waste-generation-2095979/ https://www.globaldata.com/data-insights/technology-media-an...
- spacecadet 3y agoIs it? Its pretty evil to overcharge and prey on a customer base who doesn't know any better, but would benefit from a more usable starting point, oh say 16... Tims a finance guy, they are kinda evil by default.
- adocomplete 3y agoI purchased a fully maxed out M2 Max MacBook Pro when it was announced like 6 months ago. I knew it was going to be outdated eventually, but within 6 months, wow. Did not expect that.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mayoff 3y agoYou can feel slightly less bad. M2 Max was announced in January, 10 months ago.
- chii 3y agoi mean, if the machine does the job you purchased it for, is it really outdated? Unless the job it is doing is to be the best and latest, as a status symbol...
- spike021 3y agoYeah, I still have an M1 Mini and it does everything I ask of it pretty handily. The most intense work being rendering edited photos out of Lightroom while watching videos and web browsing around the same time.
- adocomplete 3y agoOh I'm super happy with it - it has handled everything I've thrown at it and then some and I'm not planning on upgrading anytime soon. But I feel like with the M2 Pro's having such a short shelf life, what that means for long term support.
- amelius 3y agoThis is cool, where can I buy the chips and read their datasheets?
- kube-system 3y ago"unveil" !== "give you datasheets and provide components" e.g. https://www.space.com/spacex-drone-ship-a-shortfall-of-gravitas https://www.space.com/spacex-drone-ship-a-shortfall-of-gravi...
- Rebelgecko 3y agoI don't think the datasheets are available but you can buy them at https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoI just want the chip, not the computer.
- Rebelgecko 3y agoI think the chip is the computer
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoThat's the problem.
- Rebelgecko 3y agoWhat problem are you trying to solve?
- mepian 3y agoThe problem of using an Nvidia GPU, maybe.
- jdprgm 3y agoI don't understand why they don't update the entire lineup whenever a new chip comes out, especially if really only swapping the chip in the macbook pro and imac here. On a separate note does anyone have any insight on how unified memory compares to vram in the context of machine learning performance? Considering an H100 with 80GB costs like $30k a maxed out macbook pro with 128gb unified memory for $5k is interesting. Is it remotely comparable or compelling for large models considering realistically most prosumers are capped at the 24gb nvidia cards for anything resembling a reasonable budget.
- osti 3y agoThey just updated their macbook air and mac studios and mac pros like 6 months ago? If they updated right now, the previous owners would feel utterly screwed over.
- jdalgetty 3y agoYup I bought an m2 mbp about 3 weeks ago.
- TylerE 3y agoFeels like it's moved super fast. I just bought an M1 Studio earlier this year.
- nomel 3y agoAlmost four years now, for M1. I get the impression that people are used to Intel’s stagnation that we were stuck with for some time.
- icedchai 3y agoOnly 3, unless you're counting the developer boxes? M1 machines were released in November 2020. However, M1 Pro and M1 Max were released only 2 years ago. Things are definitely picking up now...
- ls612 3y agoM3 Max looks like the top tier GPU is a 40 series rival am I missing something?
- base698 3y agoAlso, how's pytorch?
- foolfoolz 3y agodriver and developer support
- choppaface 3y agoIt's not a 40 series rival without CUDA. Probably great at inference though.
- jayd16 3y agoWhy do you say that? I'm sure its good but why do you specifically call out the 40s?
- appleaday1 3y agoSo MacBook Air chads win this round.
- throw0101a 3y agoI'd prefer if there'd be higher RAM limits for each variant: * ~~Ultra~~ Max probably has an adequate limit with "up to" 128GB * Pro would be nicer to have "up to" (say) 64GB, rather than 'only' 36GB * Base perhaps "up to" 32GB, rather than 24GB There are some situations (running a VM or three with different OS(es)) where there really isn't a substitute for more bits.
- jshier 3y agoMax is the one with the 128GB limit. We'll see what the limit is for the M3 Ultra, possibly 256GB.
- kube-system 3y agoIMO, if I'm doing that heavy of a workload, I'd rather SSH to a server instead of trying to do it on hardware optimized to work on a battery.
- throw0101a 3y agoIt doesn't have to be "heavy": just running a browser in a different OS may need a minimal amount of RAM (even if the 1-2 assigned vCPU/cores are mostly idle).
- kube-system 3y ago24GB or 36GB can run a browser in a VM.
- hmottestad 3y agoIt’s also nice to just run it locally. No need to move your code and data. Debugging is a breeze. And you don’t need to pay for a server and a laptop. But naturally, if you want to run on 128 cores and 4TB of ram, then you can’t do that in a laptop anyway.
- faeriechangling 3y agoI would rather avoid swapping between machines because it's unnecessary complexity when laptops are already so fast.
- 300bps 3y agoHow did Apple become so successful making high-end CPU chips on their own so quickly?
- beckingz 3y agoProbably billions of dollars in R&D and extremely clear executive guidance?
- PedroBatista 3y agoWhat is "quickly" for you? They don't "make" them, they design it.
- kube-system 3y ago20 years ago, Palo Alto Semiconductor was founded, and 15 years ago, Apple bought them in order to start building their own CPUs.
- sosodev 3y agoThey've been doing this for years. It was just mobile only at first.
- kccoder 3y agoThey've been designing the A-series chips in iPhone and iPad since the A4 in 2010.
- CodeArtisan 3y agoA4 was still using ARM cores from Samsung. A6 was the first SoC with Apple cores.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jws 3y agoBring in people with expertise, buy outside expertise where you can, focus on the product you actually want instead of the product that will appeal to every possible use case for every possible customer that the chip marketing team can imagine, don't sweat where you can put the margin line between chip and system integrator, because they are both you. I suspect any $2,600,000,000,000 company could pull it off, if they moved first.
- addaon 3y agoWhat's with the 36 GB option? The other memory configs (16 GB, 64 GB) are still clean powers of two. Size suggests that they're using ECC-capable memory but using the extra width intended to support ECC for data... but why would this only apply to a single size? Part availability? EDIT: Digging this a bit, it's not (one or more) 72-bit wide busses with 2^32 words as I'd expect as a gray-beard, it's (probably) six 32-bit wide busses with 6 GiB per bus; and this use of 1.5 * 2^N deep memories has become relatively common with the use of IC stacking, with 12 power-of-two sized ICs stacked in a single package (instead of the more "comfortable" 8 high or 16 high stacks of the same ICs giving powers of two).
- fastball 3y agoI prefer that tbh. If I'm frequently saturating 16GB of memory in the previous gen and it is time for an upgrade, I probably don't need literally double the memory, but 24GB would be nice.
- LeoPanthera 3y ago64 GB chips that failed testing? That's one way to increase yield. Clive Sinclair did that trick back in the 80s.
- willk 3y agoIntel and AMD do that now with processors.
- minimaxir 3y agoApple did binning back with the original M1. (either 7-core or 8-core models)
- sys_64738 3y agoUncle Clive.
- addaon 3y agoDoesn't look like it. Memory ICs are tested before packaging, and then are packaged in stacks. While I'm sure there's some loss in packaging, probably not enough to justify this level of binning; and most of the failures that would happen at this stage would potentially interfere with signal integrity for the whole stack. Instead, it looks like after the 8-high stacks that I knew about, manufacturers went to 12-high stacks. There are 16-high stacks available too, but looks like there's a lot more backside thinning needed to keep the same Z height so cost goes up disproportionately and 12-highs are a reasonably sweet spot for capacity per dollar.
- LeSaucy 3y agoOK they got me, time to upgrade off my i9 MacBook Pro.
- osti 3y agoPretty underwhelming a bit like the A16 release. They basically upped the frequency in A16 and that's how they got their single core performance improvement, not much of an IPC increase to speak of. Looks like the it will be the same story here given the performance numbers Apple gave. A16 also came with a power consumption increase so the 3nm process from TSMC is disappointing as well.
- frant-hartm 3y agoIsn't this typical tick-tock move? Don't change too many things at once - they are moving to the new process so probably not too many changes in the architecture, only increase in frequency for same power consumption allowed by the better process.
- osti 3y agoNow it's more like tick-tock-tock with m1, m2 and m3.
- faizshah 3y agoIt’s kind of strange their benchmark for “Machine Learning Programmers” is “Simulation of Dynamical Systems in MATLAB.” Seems like they could have capitalized better by using a generative ai inference benchmark.
- behnamoh 3y agoMaybe they know M3 is not up for that kind of task.
- bredren 3y agoPossibly this, but also consider Apple is playing major catch up with generative AI. I could see avoiding mention just to keep it a bit further from the mind of reviewers.
- behnamoh 3y agoCould be, but people are already using M2 Ultra for LLM stuff and like it. Seems like Apple would double down on that.
- bredren 3y agoI agree the machines have been good to run various ML models that aren’t running on other PCs in their category. (Though, shrinking the resource requirements seems like a never ending exercise.) Apple likes to wait until it can announce something with a most around it. In this case, more compute isn’t enough, I don’t think.
- aurareturn 3y agoiPhone 15 Pro NPU can do 35 TOPS. M3 can only do 18 TOPS. That's why they didn't focus on ML in the video.
- machinekob 3y agoIts big question mark with 35 TOPS, because its extremly limited and hard to achive.
- anemoiac 3y agoCan we use more than one external display yet?
- rwc 3y agoOf course. Have been since M1 Max. My MacBook Pro M1 Max powers two external displays.
- anemoiac 3y agoWith a MBP, sure. I don’t want a machine that large however. I have both a 14” Pro and a 15” Air that feels significantly smaller than its “smaller” counterpart…
- dml2135 3y agoSeemingly no. So far it looks like (someone please correct me if I’m wrong): - M3, 1 external display - M3 Pro, 2 external displays - M3 Max, 4 external displays This has to be a product differentiation decision at this point, right? Is there any serious technical limitation against more displays in the base chip, that Apple has not been able to solve in three generations?
- aduitsis 3y agoMac Mini with the M2 Pro can drive 3 monitors, Macbook Pro with the M2 Pro only 2.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- edandersen 3y agoThe new M3 base model, along with only supporting one external display also loses a Thunderbolt port. A new shell / chassis just to remove a port. Courage!
- ezfe 3y agoThe M3 base model replaces a computer with two thunderbolt ports. It now has MagSafe, 2 thunderbolt ports, HDMI, and SDXC. How is that a downgrade?
- hnburnsy 3y ago>Rendering speeds are now up to 2.5x faster than on the M1 family of chips.1 The CPU performance cores and efficiency cores are 30 percent and 50 percent faster than those in M1, respectively, and the Neural Engine is 60 percent faster than the Neural Engine in the M1 family of chips. WTH, was Apple sandbagging on the M1?
- chipgap98 3y agoThese are the new 3nm chips from TSMC, right?
- Jensson 3y agoThey didn't say, but since their A17 is 3nm this is almost guaranteed to be 3nm. The 3nm process is the big improvement, the M1 and M2 were TSMC 5nm and 4nm which was basically the same thing. The performance improvements here is roughly what you would expect if you knew the specs of TSMC 3nm chips.
- Detrytus 3y agoThey DID say it, right at the beginning. All the M3 chips are 3nm.
- TillE 3y agoThe A17 Pro benchmarks are extremely disappointing, so I don't think 3nm is actually doing much.
- lynguist 3y agoSignificantly faster absolute single core CPU performance than a 12900K is pretty good and not disappointing at all. I find the improvements in A17 Pro substantial.
- faeriechangling 3y ago5nm vs 3nm and three years of progress. Intel's e-cores have been seeing more generation over generation uplift compared to their p-cores so nothing about this strikes me as anything unexpected. When the m1 came out details about the m3 were well known and that this was going to be a pretty big generation for performance improvements. I think the surprising thing was that m2 got pretty close to m3 in situations which were not as thermally constrained.
- perryizgr8 3y ago> Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max, the most advanced chips for a PC Nice! When can I order these most advanced PC chips for my next build? Do they have any kind of upgrade path for existing AMD/Intel users? I don't mind starting over too! Exciting times.
- coldtea 3y ago>When can I order these most advanced PC chips for my next build? If you have several billion dollars to convince them to sell them for you as standalone chip, very soon!
- mepian 3y agoI'd be very interested in a standalone ATX board with M3, that's the only way I'm going to buy an Apple desktop.
- jmspring 3y agoAm I the only one shaking my head that they kept comparing the M3 chips against M1 chips skipping M2? Just like the last product release spent more time on huffing their own farts (the Apple Watch is the first of its kind carbon negative product), there is no real innovation or something to garner interest for me here.
- teaearlgraycold 3y agoWay more people bought in to M1 than M2, so they're a bigger customer base to sell to. But didn't I see something about M3 being 2x faster than M2? I'm sure that's some BS about it being 2x faster in a specific benchmark. But I'm sure it's still a good generational improvement. Edit: I love seeing what HN will downvote. Absolutely hilarious.
- zamalek 3y agoI guess they are seeing too many M1s in the wild - you're supposed to upgrade to a new Apple device a d create e-waste.
- hotnfresh 3y agoE-waste? Apple devices retain their value really well. If you don’t hand them down, you sell them.
- wsc981 3y agoNot real innovation (when comparing with Windows world) but having support for hardware raytracing now is definitely nice for games. However, then on the information page they show Myst. Doesn't look spectacular to be honest, probably doesn't make use of hardware raytracing anyways. Having a short video of a fast-paced shooter with hardware ray-tracing support would be more impressive. I guess it will take some time until games will adopt new Metal graphic APIs for hardware raytracing.
- sosodev 3y agoMyst supports ray-traced reflections. I agree that it's not a particularly good show piece though.
- xnx 3y agoIn the same way that Wikipedians rush to update the pages of recently dead celebrities, I'm surprised there isn't a similar rush to update pages like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_silicon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_silicon around events like this.
- renewiltord 3y agoWe do. I was just at my day job. If someone else doesn't get to it this evening, I'll add something.
- clouddrover 3y ago> And, a new media engine now includes support for AV1 decode, providing more efficient and high-quality video experiences from streaming services. It's taken years but AV1 has ended up everywhere.
- Diti 3y agoSadly, only a handful of GPUs out there have hardware AV1 encoding chips. If I read the product page correctly, that new M3 architecture still cannot encode AV1 from hardware.
- brucethemoose2 3y agoDecode everywhere is still great. Encode for h264 and HEVC was slow too. It basically never even happened for VP9 outside of phones, AFAIK.
- _kb 3y agoWhich is likely fine. As a codec it's weighted towards distribution, not live encoding.
- melikeburgers 3y agoMy favorite part was when Tim Apple teased the new M3 parmesan cheese grater. https://i.postimg.cc/TYpx7SVf/Screen-Shot-2023-10-30-at-8-48-14-PM.png https://i.postimg.cc/TYpx7SVf/Screen-Shot-2023-10-30-at-8-48...
- bischofs 3y agoThey kept mentioning performance relative to intel Macs which makes me think there is a large cohort of people sticking to their x86 rigs due to compatibility. Being able to run an x86 linux or windows VM is still a requirement for me.
- jki275 3y agoI'm also still running an i9. I can't justify buying a new one since my 2019 model is still running strong!
- lbourdages 3y agoI can't relate. I would probably have upgraded my i9 as soon as the M1 Pros were announced if it hadn't been my employer's property. I had constant thermal throttling from the instant I booted the damn thing. Worst laptop I ever had.
- jki275 3y agoMine runs warm a lot. I was looking through M1s on eBay today, I might pull the trigger. I just have a hard time spending 4 grand on a new laptop when the one I have does everything I need it to. I had an M1 at work for a while, it was amazing and I loved it.
- goshx 3y ago2019 i7 here and I’m still very happy with it. I can’t justify the purchase.
- pier25 3y agoWho knows but my guess is that the x86 requirement is probably for a minority of users. Lots of people are probably sticking to Intel Macs simply because the averege user doesn't care about performance and will keep using a computer until it dies.
- TillE 3y agoIt's only been 3 years since the M1, most people aren't buying new computers that frequently. Windows for ARM runs well on Apple Silicon, and has its own translation layer for x86 software. It should be fine unless you need specific x86-only drivers.
- sosodev 3y agoWhat's the deal with "dynamic caching"? I wish they would have talked about it more. It sounds like they're reducing memory allocations by only allocating what is actually needed.
- iAMkenough 3y agoYou got it. Instead of letting software developers allocate a static cache with overhead that eats a little into the unified memory, the Mac gets to decide how to dynamically allocate and release cache for graphics. They said it would be "transparent to developers," but not really sure what that means exactly.
- MBCook 3y agoIt seemed like Metal was probably measuring it under the covers and adjusting things as opposed to asking the programmer to figure it out.
- teppic 3y agoThey said it was done in hardware, so not Metal alone.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- aurareturn 3y agoI take "transparent to developers" as something developers don't have to worry about. It's done automatically.
- ribit 3y agoFrom what I understand this is about assigning GPU resources (such as register files and other on-core memory) to shaders. Imagine you have a complex shader that has two paths, a frequently taken fast one that needs X bytes of on-chip memory to function and a rarely taken slow path that needs Y bytes (Y > X). Usually this stuff is statically partitioned, so you have to provision Y bytes for the slow path to run this shader. With dynamic partitioning, the shader will only allocate Y bytes if the slow path is hit, which frees the resources to load up more concurrent shader programs and improve the shader occupancy. This stuff is only really relevant if you are dealing with complex uber-shaders and recursive function invocations, both of which are fairly common in raytracing pipelines.
- koito17 3y agoOne thing that left me a bit confused was the comparison against Intel Macs. Although I am still using an Intel 16-inch MacBook, I really wanted to see how the M3 fared against the M2, not Intel and M1. I think it's no surprise the M3 exceeds the Intel Core i7-9750H in basically all of Apple's own benchmarking. My real question, which will probably be answered next week, is how it compares to the generation right before it. My work laptop is a 14-inch MacBook Pro and I've been impressed with the battery life considering all of the containers that run (on Kubernetes!) as part of my dev workflow. I guess Apple deciding to compare Intel and M1 was to try to convince existing MacBook users to upgrade to the latest generation CPUs.
- pram 3y agoThere were comparisons to the M1 and M2 in the presentation, and indeed the linked website.
- nblgbg 3y agoThe M3 chips are 30% faster than the M2 chips for efficiency cores and 15% faster for performance cores. The overall performance is still impressive and there is no alternative to M*s when compared with performance per watt. But others have caught up, for example https://www.amd.com/en/products/apu/amd-ryzen-9-7940hs https://www.amd.com/en/products/apu/amd-ryzen-9-7940hs is very good.
- Jensson 3y ago> But others have caught up You mean others now got to use TSMC's 4nm process? These new M3 chips are probably on the 3nm process, Apple is still a generation ahead here. It looks like Apples aim is to always stay a generation ahead of its competition, I wonder how long they can keep that up since they aren't running their own fabs.
- blovescoffee 3y agoThey are literally on the 3nm process. They say so in the video.
- graphe 3y agoJust as Qualcomm shows it's chips are getting better, Apple pounces! The layout looks very different from m2, it must have been delayed. Does anyone know if it's using HBM3?
- BirAdam 3y agoNah, it’s LPDDR5X
- varispeed 3y agoThat looks impressive, but why they show animations at so low fps as a demonstration of performance? Surely they should play it at 60 or more fps...
- antipaul 3y agoNot sure exactly, but the whole thing was "shot on iPhone" so maybe related
- miohtama 3y ago> With the M3 family of chips, hardware-accelerated ray tracing comes to the Mac for the first time. Ray tracing models the properties of light as it interacts with a scene, allowing apps to create extremely realistic and physically accurate images. This, along with the new graphics architecture, allows pro apps to deliver up to 2.5x the speed of the M1 family of chips. Does this mean we can finally play Cyberpunk 2077 on a laptop? Is it going to be anywhere near as powerful as desktop Nvidia cards?
- etchalon 3y agoNo. It's nowhere near as powerful as desktop Nvidia cards. It's about as powerful as a PS5.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ranguna 3y agoI'd be impressed if it was as powerful as a ps5.
- guax 3y agoIt could be theoretically as powerful as a ps5 but not nearly as performant. Game studios are not spending any time optimising for apple silicon and dumping tons of dev hours to make sure it runs smooth on the console. Sony uses its custom graphics API (GNM and GNMX) and custom shader language and x86 platform. Xbox uses DirectX. Apple went in on its own route with Metal. That widens the gap.
- quyleanh 3y agoSo they remove MacBook 13 inch and replace with MacBook 14 inch as base. Many people will see the $500 off. Good selling strategy. Btw, I didn't see the comparison with M2 chip. Could anyone give me the reference for that? Thank you.
- xuki 3y agoThey had multiple slides for M1/M2/M3 in the video. M3 is around 15% faster than M2 in most benchmark (according to Apple).
- quyleanh 3y agoThank you.
- faeriechangling 3y agoI just felt the continued existence of the 13" MacBook Pro was just confusing because it was very arguably worse than the 13" MacBook Air even without considering the price.
- lhl 3y agoApple launched M2 MBPs only in January. I wonder if Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite (benchmarking now, but not in products until mid-2024) drove some of the timing on this launch: https://www.windowscentral.com/hardware/laptops/qualcomm-brings-the-receipts-snapdragon-x-elite-gets-benchmarked-proves-it-beats-apples-m2-processor https://www.windowscentral.com/hardware/laptops/qualcomm-bri...
- b0b10101 3y agoother way around i suspect. qualcomm knew this event was coming and wanted to front-run's apple's announcement. especially as the macs ship much sooner...
- re-thc 3y agoM2 was late rather than M3 being early.
- BirAdam 3y agoFrom what I’ve heard from folks connected with Apple, M3 was designed some time ago and TSMC delays on 3NM are why M2 happened at all. So, Apple is releasing M3 later than they’d have liked, and I expect we will see the M4 refresh faster than we would have otherwise.
- hajile 3y agoOryon seems like it's going to be very competitive with the very underwhelming M3 design.
- threeseed 3y agoARM on Windows is going to be irrelevant for at least a decade likely forever. There is a long-standing culture with the Mac that (a) backwards compatibility is minimal, (b) developers need to always keep their code current and (c) users should expect constant turnover in the platform. None of that exists on Windows. And when we last saw Windows on ARM the outcomes were that this wasn't going to change. Which means it will never be a transition rather a fragmentation of Windows ecosystem into two equal parts. Making it far less compelling for everyone.
- Kye 3y agoIt's shiny but I think I'll stick to my upgradable RAM and two m2 slots + a RTX 3070ti and i7-12700H for a fraction of the price. Something at Apple broke when they switched to their own silicon outside iPad and iPhone. They turned around the slow march toward parity on price:performance/RAM/storage and went screaming in the other direction. I really wanted to switch to mac when I was shopping for a new system earlier this year, but the prices were and remain ridiculous.
- dmitrygr 3y agoI tried to find a laptop with the specification you just mentioned that could last 20 hours on battery. Didn’t.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoYep. But, me and everyone I know keeps their laptops plugged in most of the time at work or at home, so not everyone needs all day battery life.
- blep-arsh 3y agoI didn't care much about the battery life but not having to be tethered to the nearest wall wart is unexpectedly convenient even when working from home. I also appreciate the laptop not being a hot air blower.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoI use laptop at my desk at home or my desk at the office where the power cable is within reach so it's always plugged in. What use would be 20h of battery life for me? I don't do the whole coding in the coffee shop or on the beach lifestyle, and even if I did, 8h of battery life is plenty for that since I can't spend 20h in the coffee shop. There's probably a bunch of workers who are always on the road like contractors for whom this is a benefit.
- 3y ago
- sharms 3y agoIt looks like these models won't be as useful for LLM inference which are heavily memory bandwidth constrained. The Macbook Pro page shows M3 at 100GB/s,150GB/s, and 300GB/s vs M2 at 200GB/s and 400GB/s. 400GB/s is available for M3 if you opt for the high gpu config, but interesting to see it go down across all of these models.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- minimaxir 3y agoThe presentation mentioned dynamic GPU caching: that seems like something transformer models would like.
- monocasa 3y agoCould be, but I'd like to hear more information about what it actually entails. My gut feeling is that it's kind of like Z compression, but using the high amount of privileged software (basically a whole RTOS) they run on the GPU to dynamically allocate pages so that scare quotes "vram" allocations don't require giant arenas. If that's the case, I'm not sure that ML will benefit. Most ML models are pretty good about actually touching everything they allocate, in which case, lazy allocations won't help you much and may actually get in the way startup latency.
- brucethemoose2 3y agoIn addition to what mono said, llama.cpp allocates everything up front with "--mlock" Llama.cpp (and MLC) have to read the all the model weights from RAM for every token. Batching aside, there's no way around that.
- Art9681 3y agoMlock is an optional parameter: github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/tree/master/examples/main#mlock
- kivlad 3y agoA few things I noticed, as I'm seeing the variety of SKUs becoming more complex. - Note that memory bandwidth is down. M2 Pro had 200GB/s, M3 Pro only has 150GB/s. M3 Max only has 400GB/s on the higher binned part. - Just like the low-spec M3 14" has one fewer Thunderbolt port, it also doesn't officially support Thunderbolt 4 (like M1/M2 before it) - The M3 Pro loses the option for an 8TB SSD. Likely because it was a low volume part for that spec. - The M3 Pro actually has more E-cores than the Max (6 vs 4). Interesting to see them take this away on a higher-specced part; seems like Intel wouldn't do this
- polishTar 3y agoIn addition to the reduced memory bandwidth, the M3 pro also loses 2 performance cores for only 2 more efficiency cores. M2 pro: 8 performance cores + 4 efficiency cores. M3 pro: 6 performance cores + 6 efficiency cores. Not a great trade... I'm not sure the M3 pro can be considered an upgrade
- photonerd 3y agoDepends. Is it faster? Then it's an upgrade. Has the CPU industry really managed to pull off it's attempt at a bs coup that more cores always === better? I thought we'd learned our lesson with the silly Mhz Myth already?
- throwaway2037 3y agoLet me re-write your post with the opposite view. Both are unconvincing. << Depends. Is it faster? Then it's an upgrade. Has the CPU industry really managed to pull off it's attempt at a bs coup that more MHz always === better? I thought we'd learned our lesson with the silly cores Myth already? >>
- akerl_ 3y agoI think you're misreading the comment you're replying to. Both "more cores is always better" and "more MHz is always better" are myths.
- totallywrong 3y agoWhat I really miss in my work issued M1 Pro isn't more power, it's the keyboard in those 2010s models.
- chi_features 3y agoI agree. And the longevity of them specifically for me. My M1 (MBP and MBA) keyboards shine after a few weeks' of activity whereas no shining on older MBPs with a decade of use – it reeks of a quality degradation.
- FullyFunctional 3y ago100% this. My work-M2 MBP is barely a few month old, but the keyboard already looks very worn out :( OT: I love my M1 MBA and really hate the new style which seems to cut into my wrists and arms :(
- NoPicklez 3y ago110% I still use my Macbook Pro from 2011 and when using brand new Macs, I can't help my miss my home Macbook pro
- Zetobal 3y agoSelling a tick for a tock.
- mdasen 3y agoAn interesting thing about the M2 Pro and M3 Pro is that they shifted away from being mostly performance cores. The M1 Pro was either 6+2 P+E or 8+2 P+E. The M2 Pro was either 6+4 or 8+4. The new M3 Pro is either 5+6 or 6+6. Apple has been shifting away from performance cores with each generation. M1 Pro: 75-80% P-cores; M2 Pro: 60-67% P-cores; M3 Pro: 45-50% P-cores. This shows up when you look at Geekbench results. A 10-core M2 Pro (6+4) gets 12,100 while a 10-core M1 Pro (8+2) gets 12,202. The 12-core M2 Pro (8+4) gets 14,221. That's a 16.5% increase from having 20% more cores. In some ways, this feels like an odd result. Adding two additional M2 P-cores gets Apple a comparatively small result over the 10-core M2 Pro (less than the average core performance). However, adding two efficiency cores over the M1 Pro gives them the same 16.5% boost over the 8+2 M1 Pro. If I had to guess, maybe it's thermal throttling when running the benchmark. If the additional P-cores can't truly be P-cores under 100% load, then their impact shows up less. Likewise, if the E-cores can match P-core performance under heavy thermal load, then it could show up as being roughly equivalent in the benchmark. I wonder if real-world scenarios end up differing from benchmarks in a meaningful way around this. For example, core-pinning can be useful for warm caches and in a real-world scenario you might have a process the OS tries to pin to P-core-1 that has spikes in utilization while another process is pinned to P-core-2 with similar spikes. So both get the performance of a P-core and warm caches while the thermal load isn't that high so the P-cores are still at their peak performance (unlike a benchmark that's trying to use all cores as much as possible at the same time). Maybe this is a business decision more than something based around how the chip performs. The big selling point of the M1/M2 Max was graphics (maybe the extra RAM as well). You could get the same CPU in the Pro or Max. Now the M3 Pro is a 5+6 or 6+6 CPU while the M3 Max is 10+4. 67-100% more performance cores becomes a selling point for the M3 Max even for those who might not care about graphics as much.
- TillE 3y ago> maybe it's thermal throttling The GPU is a very large fraction of the thermal output these SoCs are engineered to handle, so there really shouldn't be any throttling if you're only loading the CPU.
- jeffybefffy519 3y ago
- knodi 3y agoCan i just have fucking 3-4 monitors support on the bottom line pro model. ffs apple
- jchook 3y agoOn the power consumption vs performance ratios, every chart showed the M3 cranking at higher overall power usage than the M1 when under load. One of my favorite things about my M1 is the battery life. I wonder how the actual battery life will compare for the different market segments.
- nomel 3y agoYou can always turn on low power mode. I do this for extra long days.
- qaq 3y agoWould be fun to see pgbench for M3 Max mbp
- coverband 3y agoAnd still starting at 8GB of RAM… Disappointed.
- paustint 3y agoSeriously.... My 16gb MacBook pro M1 work machine runs out of memory constantly. I had a MacBook air 8gb and it was useless, it would freeze constantly and have crackly audio. I found that 24GB ram is really the minimum that is usable on M-series when doing any type of basic work. Likely an output of so many electron based apps which are memory hungry, but if the memory is supposedly "really fast" then I would expect better performance. Never had the issue with Intel. But with a nice bit or memory, the performance is really nice.
- skybrian 3y agoA contrasting data point: I have an 8gb M2 and haven’t noticed any problem yet that made me wish I had more memory. I’m not using it for work, though.
- kanwisher 3y agoYou are only person in thread that says this. I still have one laptop is a M1 air 16gb. Still fastest computer I have ever owned outside of my MBP, I really only mbp for AI training everything else runs great on air still
- sgt 3y agoI'm on 16GB which seems plenty - running many JetBrain's IDE's at the same time, browsers, VM's etc. I know people with the 8GB version and they are fine too. Could be that your machine is faulty somehow and that it's not the RAM but something else.
- wickedsickeune 3y agoI'm using Unity (uber wasteful) and Rider (Java) and an M1 air with 8GB is fine, no slowdown whatsoever* (compared to my desktop with 32GB on Windows). RAM is not the bottleneck in *NIX OSes, unless you do something that specifically requires a lot of RAM (eg machine learning) *compiling is slower, but the desktop has a much faster CPU
- flippy_flops 3y agoAm i the only one who is frustrated with the mac monitor options these days? I don't know anyone who uses a 27" desktop monitor, much less a 24". What year is it? And $5k for a 32" is insulting.
- etchalon 3y agoYou can use non-Apple monitors with a Mac. Apple's monitors are only worth getting if you're incredibly picky about very specific things.
- yreg 3y agoThe “correct” retina resolutions are 4k at 24", 5k at 27" and 6k at 32". Apple won't make a display that doesn't align to that, since macOS doesn't handle anything else perfectly.
- flippy_flops 3y agothe new iMac is 4.5k at 24"
- elseless 3y agoIn my opinion, the biggest problem with Apple’s external displays is their 60 Hz refresh rate. That’s half of what their own iPhone (!) and MacBook pro models support, and is a far cry from the 240 Hz (albeit at lower resolutions) displays that are starting to pop up from other manufacturers.
- artimaeis 3y agoWhat size monitor do you believe to be most common? Anecdotally it seems the 27" monitor is finally overtaking the 24" monitors, but those seem to still be standard at more corporate companies. I wish Apple had succeeded in getting 27" monitors to be 5k resolution across the board -- but that ship seems to have long since sailed.
- bmitc 3y ago"the most advanced chips for a personal computer", says Apple. This is not an objective statement.
- Detrytus 3y agoName the more advanced chip then... Intel and AMD fall short.
- NoPicklez 3y agoLike another commenter said, what is the definition of "Advanced" in this context
- bmitc 3y agoWouldn't make more sense for Apple to define and backup what they mean as the most advanced? Also, Apple's products never hold up to the specs they quote in their marketing material any way. I'm not sure why you are taking their own post as fact, when Apple is one of the most blatant over marketing companies around. And even if it was true, it doesn't matter because Apple is obsessed with placing their chips in the most thermally constrained form factors as possible.
- aurareturn 3y agoApple routinely sandbags their performance in marketing slides. The actual performance is usually 1-2% better actually. Probably because they're the most visible company in the world and don't want to get sued. AMD/Intel meanwhile will cherry pick benchmarks and way overpromise.
- Toutouxc 3y ago> Apple's products never hold up to the specs they quote in their marketing material any way For example?
- postalrat 3y agoWhat's the budget?
- pier25 3y agoSo what about that Cinema4D rendering performance that showed 2x vs the M2 Max? Was that GPU or CPU?
- vidoc 3y agoI suspect most of the side by side comparisons, including this one, were GPU.
- etchalon 3y agoApple's biggest problem may be how good the M1 laptops were. I have a 14' M1 Max and there's no task in my workflow that's slow enough that I feel any real need to upgrade.
- shanghaikid 3y agoM3 should not be in the macbook pro line. it only support one external display, should this laptop be called 'pro'
- Toutouxc 3y agoWhat does the number of external displays have to do with the laptop being "pro", whatever that means? My Air drives a single 43" screen at home, I literally can't fit more screens on my desk. At the office anyone can grab a screen (they're nice, 4K and around 27-30" I think), some people use them, some don't (e.g. people with 16" MacBooks).
- WillPostForFood 3y agoLove the improvement on the CPUs, but I was hoping for bigger iMacs and smaller Macbooks. I work at home on a 27" iMac, and on the road on a 12", 2 pound Macbook. We are years into the M generation of chips, and iMacs are still stuck at 24", and laptops are minimum 3 pounds and 13".
- daft_pink 3y agoI feel very disappointed that the laptops lack decent i/o. They spend all this time talking about how advanced the GPU is, but it's a $1,600 laptop that can only power one external display or a 2,000 laptop that can only power two displays? Plus they are nerfing the desktops by only offering the all-in-ones with m2, so you can walk into a store and want to buy any other desktop now you are paying a huge premium for outdated tech :( I was really hoping for FaceID and better display support, but I don't feel there was any compelling reason to upgrade anything. If you preferred Windows before, you probably still prefer Windows. If you have an M processor there is no compelling reason to upgrade. If you were thinking about getting a Studio or a mini, you should probably just wait until they update the processor.
- daft_pink 3y ago[flagged]
- sanitycheck 3y agoWould you walk into a church and start telling people God doesn't exist? It's an Apple thread!
- daft_pink 3y agoI really appreciate this comment. LOL
- mdavidn 3y ago> Plus they are nerfing the desktops by only offering the all-in-ones with m2 I'm confused by this statement. The iMacs leapfrogged M2. The new models shipping next month will have regular M3 chips, replacing M1 models.
- daft_pink 3y agosorry, it's a typo and it won't let me edit it now. I meant that they only desktop they upgrade to m3 is the iMac and all the other desktops are thousands of dollars with the old processor... so like Mac Studio for $2,000 that I need to buy to power all my monitors now is using an old outdated processor.
- alberth 3y agoBlack MacBook Some folks are going to lose their marbles that Apple released a black MacBook Pro.
- NoPicklez 3y ago"The industry’s first 3-nanometer chips for a personal computer debut a next-generation GPU architecture and deliver dramatic performance improvements, a faster CPU and Neural Engine, and support for more unified memory" This reads horribly in my opinion
- Aloha 3y agoWell, thats annoying. I just bought a M2 Max 16" MBP in mid September. I wouldn't have expected a new revision in the same year. I also swear apple used to have a policy for this situation, but I can't find it now.
- yreg 3y agoAlways check this page before purchasing Apple hw https://buyersguide.macrumors.com/ https://buyersguide.macrumors.com/
- Aloha 3y agoI mean, I did. https://web.archive.org/web/20230912190332/https://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#MacBook_Pro_16 https://web.archive.org/web/20230912190332/https://buyersgui... Neutral looked pretty good to me.
- lucasyvas 3y agoAs someone who prefers the MacBook Pro feature set (Pro Motion, namely), but doesn't need the best processor, I'd be fine with the 14 inch Pro, M3. But that model doesn't come in Space Black. Well played, you son of a bitch. Well played. They've mastered the art of the pricing ladder and it's fairly aggravating.
- geodel 3y agoWell, you mention you mainly care for feature set. What kind of feature is body color that would affect functionality. In fact I feel any kind of scratch would be worse on space black as compared to gray or silver.
- webprofusion 3y agoIf it doesn't run Windows, is it really a PC?
- jlokier 3y agoPCs and Windows are not synonymous. PCs didn't start running Windows until they were nearly 10 years old, and then Windows was just an option. Shortly after Windows became popular, Linux emerged too and some people were running Linux on their PCs instead. There have been many other OSes on PCs over the years. I've owned and used many PCs, yet hardly ever needed to use Windows. Even when I developed software that ran in Windows, including games, I used Linux to do the development :)
- avereveard 3y agoCan they drive two monitors this time?
- fckgw 3y agoThe 14" and 16" Macbook Pros have always been able to drive 2+ displays. The new ones updated today continue this feature. Hope this helps.
- avereveard 3y agoNot at all. Version of MacBook Pro with the M1 and M2 base chip can only drive one external monitor. And 600$ upgrade for the privilege of having a second external monitor is one hell of a step.
- foldr 3y agoYou're talking about the 13" model (now retired). As the previous poster said, the models that have been upgraded here have always been able to drive two displays.
- russelg 3y agoThe new base Macbook Pro M3 cannot drive two external displays. If you get all nit-picky you can say it drives two displays, as long as one of them is the internal display.
- foldr 3y agoAh, I see. I think this corresponds to the price drop, right? You can now get a 14" M3 MacBook Pro without a 'Pro' chip, whereas previously that price point was occupied by the 13" model. So essentially, for a given price point, your external display options have not changed much.
- avereveard 3y ago
- brucethemoose2 3y agoIs this still ARMv8? I think ARMv9 SKUs from others are just around the corner, and that's going to be a pain point for Apple.
- lynguist 3y agohttps://developer.arm.com/documentation/102378/0201/Armv8-x-and-Armv9-x-extensions-and-features https://developer.arm.com/documentation/102378/0201/Armv8-x-... Apple implements all armv8.5 features and some 8.6 features. The 9.0 competitors are at the same level as 8.5. Cortex-X4 is at 9.2 which is not yet in any SoC. The only difference between armv8.5 and armv9.0 is one single extension that is required on 9.0, namely SVE2 (scalable vector extensions 2).
- brucethemoose2 3y agoSVE2 is the big one.
- amusingimpala75 3y agoJust wait for M3 Ultra which in past generations is literally just 2 Maxs. Imagine 256 of GB unified RAM (oh and I guess the 32-core CPU and 80-core GPU, though those aren't as impressive). Really would love to know how much that is going to cost
- tpurves 3y agoThe ultras don't make a lot of sense for most professionals when, at that price point a threadripper and a 4090 would still eat it for lunch.
- faeriechangling 3y agoWhile that may be true, it's not really an apples to apple comparison. The m2 Mac Studio right now at $2400 for the 64gb model is cheaper than most anything new if you want 64gb unified pool of gpu memory other than the $2000 Nvidia 64gb Jetson AGX Orin which is much slower. A threadripper based system is physically freaking large, and loud, and incredibly vram constrained. It of course is going to absolutely destroy the Mac Studio in most situations because it's better than the Mac Studio in most metrics, but honestly I'm very excited by the prospect of future Macs with gobs of memory, although I'm concerned at how Apple isn't generationally improving memory bandwidth.
- pentagrama 3y agoThe M1 bar here shouldn't be at the middle? https://www.apple.com/newsroom/images/2023/10/Apple-unveils-M3-M3-Pro-and-M3-Max/article/Apple-M3-chip-series-efficiency-cores-comparison-231030_big.jpg.small_2x.jpg https://www.apple.com/newsroom/images/2023/10/Apple-unveils-...
- whycombagator 3y agoNo, that would be 100% if it was
- yreg 3y agoI miss the 27" iMac. It was (is) such a neat mac and it was even a reasonable deal considering it came with a nice screen.
- davidcollantes 3y agoI was hoping—if not expecting—to see a refresh of the 27” iMac; I was ready to buy one! It disappointed me they simply upgraded the current 24”. The new 24” are lovely, but I will miss the real estate (still using a "Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2015” one).
- brendannee 3y agoWhich M3 configuration is the best price/performance option for an average developer? Is there an obvious best choice?
- bredren 3y agoNot that I can see. I spec’d this: SoC: 11-core CPU, 14-core GPU, 16-core NE Memory: 18 GB Disk Space: 1 TB SSD Power: 70 Watt Price: $2199 I personally would go for the 36GB Ram on this, bump the processor to the 12/18 core set and go for 2TB drive but the price skyrockets with these additions. FWIW, MBA M2 fully loaded is a very sound laptop.
- aurareturn 3y agoFor an average dev, I'd honestly skip the M3 and go buy a 15" MBA with 16GB RAM.
- Toutouxc 3y agoLiterally every single Apple Silicon MacBook with 16 GB of RAM can easily run your IDE, one or two VMs and/or some containers, your messaging app of choice and your browser. That's more than enough for most dev jobs out there. If your job actually requires more RAM or CPU grunt, you'll probably know. SoC, RAM and storage upgrades are kind of expensive from Apple, so the base models are always the most cost effective.
- nxobject 3y agoOn a related note, and on a personal level, my heart goes out to Johny Srouji and the Apple team in Herzliya. War is horrible, and I hope every reservist called up comes back to do magic at Apple.
- footlose_3815 3y agoLetting Apple lead things in the market has gotten us to a very ugly space in personal computing. These are prohibitively expensive devices that for 95% of the use cases, a chromebook would be better-suited. All those intel machines that were so impressive in 2019 are running like crap now. All going according to plan, I'm sure. I manage a fleet of about 200 of these things. They are easy to manage, and oh-so-nice to look at, but boy, they are a huge waste of money. These things should only be used by engineers and creatives. Yawn.
- ptmcc 3y agoRight, that is what the "Pro" moniker in Macbook Pro means
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- maverick11 3y agoI'm looking for advice as I was planning to purchase the 14" M2 Pro MacBook, but I've noticed that the M3 Pro MacBook Pro has been recently released. I'm uncertain about which one to choose, and I'm seeking assistance in making a decision.
- NotYourLawyer 3y agoAnd still no 27 inch iMacs. Strange decision, that’s a great size.
- gnicholas 3y agoIs it me, or does the "space black" not look that dark? I have a Macbook Air in "midnight black" or whatever it's called, and it seems darker than this hue, at least from watching the video.
- gnicholas 3y ago"No matter what your passions are in work or in life, there's a Macbook Pro that's perfect for you." For the vast majority of Apple customers, Macbook Airs are plenty powerful. They're also lighter weight, and significantly cheaper.
- trekkie1024 3y agoLooks like the latest MBA is only 0.1 lbs less than the equivalent MBP at 3.4 lbs. Feels like they used to be lighter.
- geerlingguy 3y agoThey also used to feel a lot thinner, with the taper at the front edge. I don't like my M2 MacBook Air nearly as much as the M1, in terms of the physical feel and dimensions.
- bredren 3y agoI had four or five gens of MBA over the years and generally agree. The new form factor is just not the same. It is much more like a how I'd envision design on some modern "Macbook" proper. But the Air brand has been so successful, I think they just called it that knowing it would help move units. That said, I use MBA M2 for my main machine and its so powerful and has such a fantastic battery life it is still the best Mac I've had since 2015 MBA.
- lynguist 3y agoI use an MBA M2 15in 24GB as my main and I agree. I really enjoy the wedge shape of the original MBA that was maintained until the 2020 MBA M1, they feel better to my wrists than the 13 in MBA M2. The 15in MBA M2 however feels to me like a 2012 15in MBP (I had one of those as well). Except for the relative lack of ports which didn’t bother me too much so far.
- coder543 3y agoHow are you determining "equivalent"? I don't agree with your conclusion at all. My M2 MBA is 2.7lbs. The 14" MBP starts at 3.4lbs. That is a very noticeable 26% increase. 0.44 inches thick versus 0.61 inches thick is also noticeable. I have a 14" MBP for work, so I have plenty of first hand experience with both devices. The screen sizes of the relevant laptops are as follows: MBA (13in): 13.6 inches MBP (14in): 14.2 inches (+0.6in vs 13in MBA) MBA (15in): 15.3 inches (+1.1in vs 14in MBP) The 13-inch and 14-inch are significantly closer in size than the 14-inch and 15-inch. To add an additional spec for clarity, by my math the relative screen areas are as follows: MBA (13in): 84.36 square inches MBP (14in): 91.63 square inches (+8.6% vs 13in MBA) MBA (15in): 106.24 square inches (+16% vs 14in MBP) Why would the "equivalent" be the 15-inch MBA? Even though I obviously believe the 13-inch MBA is a closer match (as the specs above clearly show), the 15-inch MBA does still manage to be thinner and (barely) lighter than the 14-inch MBP, even while offering a significantly larger screen, which is impressive to be sure.
- smeagull 3y agoBut it's not a PC, it's a mac.
- keyle 3y agoThe best feature to me is really the battery life and the quietness of the laptop. That's a game changer for me. I can work from anywhere comfortable, without burning my palms or legs and in silence. I remember working on a PC laptop years ago and as soon as you pressed F5 the fans came on cranking for a couple of seconds, it was farcical.
- brucethemoose2 3y agoThere are Windows laptops with fantastic cooling setups. My old G14 can run fanless, and they've improved the cooling even more in subsequent generations. The thing Macs really excel at atm is long, sustained workloads on battery... Other than gaming.
- gnicholas 3y agoInteresting that the whole presentation was shot on an iPhone. I've been wondering when they'd make that leap.
- PakG1 3y agoI got a new M2 Pro 16" just a few weeks ago. I was pissed when I discovered that a new M3 Pro was coming out. Reading all the comments here, I feel a bit better.
- RIMR 3y ago"Graphics-intensive games like Myst have incredibly realistic lighting, shadows, and reflections, thanks to the next-generation GPU of M3" This is the funniest thing I have ever seen in an Apple press release. Myst came out in 1993, and the "graphics-intensive" version of Myst that they are demonstrating is clearly realMyst which came out in February 2014, just a few months shy of a decade ago. Meanwhile, my wife is happily playing Baldur's Gate 3 on her M1 Mac. Could they really not get the sign-off from any other studio but Cyan on this? No shade against Myst, it is one of the best games ever produced, but this is not how you do a graphics demo... ---- EDIT: Just now learning that there is yet another Myst remake from 2021 made in Unreal. It turns out I have played this version, but I did it on a Meta Quest 2, so I thought I was just playing a VR port of realMyst because it looked equally bad.
- wtallis 3y agoThe realMyst from 2014 was actually realMyst: Masterpiece Edition, the Unity engine remake of the original realMyst from 2000 that used Cyan's own 3D engine (later used in Uru and Myst 5). So Myst has to be one of the most-remade and ported games in the industry: five major iterations just on PC.
- alphanullmeric 3y agoSomehow Apple never has supply issues, meanwhile the good half of Lenovo’s ryzen 7040 series is not available in North America.
- AlexandrB 3y ago> Graphics-intensive games like Myst have incredibly realistic lighting, shadows, and reflections, thanks to the next-generation GPU of M3. I thought this was funny considering the original Myst can run on a modern toaster. I'm guessing they're referring to a new Myst re-release?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bluSCALE4 3y agoYeah, it's pretty pathetic they keep bringing up Myst. I definitely highlighted it as a laughing point when summarizing it to others.
- zoogeny 3y agoFinally time to upgrade my 2017 i7. For over 1 year the battery meter has said "Service Recommended" and in the last 2-3 months multiple key caps are literally falling off and regularly get jammed while I try to type. I figure the 16" with M3 Max and 64 GB is a good machine that will last me 5-6 years but I'm not sure if I should pony up for the 2TB storage upgrade. I just pray this revision won't have some unexpected problems. I'm actually glad it seems to only be a spec bump so I won't be taking on any new tech. Hopefully any issues have been shaken out from the M1 and M2 releases.
- brailsafe 3y agoIt's harder than ever to be excited to spend money on an upgrade, despite the overall machine being better than ever. RAM and SSD upgrades are comically expensive in Canada, maybe the former of which being slightly more justifiable. $500 for the ram upgrade $750 to ugrade from 512gb to 2tb, so really I'd be paying something like $1000 on just basic storage. It's kind of insulting.
- zoogeny 3y agoYes, totally agree, which is why I'm waffling over the upgrade. From 1TB to 2TB is $500 CAD extra. It is just so insanely out of line with the actual cost of the memory. I'm looking at Amazon NVMe SSD and a decent looking 2TB drive is in the range of $150 CAD! I don't care how high quality whatever it is they are using is ... that is ridiculous markup. And since everything is soldered nowadays it isn't practical to buy and install oneself. My current HD is 500 GB and I have ~140 GB free. But I've also turned up the iCloud offloading feature, stored larger media files like videos on an external SSD and a few times gone through folders removing files to clean up space. I suppose if I want to play around with ML models then I should just bite the bullet and get more space. Fair play to Apple knowing how to squeeze every last cent out of their wannabe pro users.
- brailsafe 3y agoI priced out a 14" and chose the minimum options that enable 64gb, and it comes to $4974 before tax with 512gb of storage. 512 to 1TB is that aforementioned $250 extra, or the $750 extra for 2TB, bringing it to nearly six grand before tax. Going from 64gb to 128gb adds an additional $1000. A lot of that price comes from the required upgrade of the base model cpu to the best cpu. I'll give them some credit and say that a very mid-tier upgrade from my 16gb ram intel mbp 13" to the now baseline 18gb 14" wouldn't be excruciatingly expensive and probably a great machine, but ram is being eaten up harder and faster than ever. At minimum, as a non-ML (unemployed) software dev, the 36gb is minimum I'd expect to be practical over the next 5 years
- whatever1 3y agoI think the M series laptops were the first full manifestation of the laptop idea. Instant sleep/resume, great input devices and monitor, cpu power at will without overheating or loud fan, super fast shock resistant storage, 20+ hours of battery life, no battery drain when off. It took us 30 years but we finally have it. Now let’s hope WIntel can also catch up soon.
- Saris 3y agoIt's kind of surprising that Intel (or I guess x86 in general) still has basic issues with sleep, laptops waking up in your bag and that kind of thing. The forced modern standby thing they're doing has only made it worse.
- PennRobotics 3y agoMy Intel NUC was unresponsive and overheating when I came home from work today. It's the second one I have. The first was exchanged because it would overheat and become unresponsive. It doesn't have anything running while asleep except background services and Firefox. There are several support notes about sleep problems and overheating, so I know I'm not alone. No combination of BIOS or OS settings should make it possible to overheat while asleep---especially not the defaults! (Notably, overheating occurs equally in Windows or any of the 5 Linux distros I've installed in the past two years.) It's particularly disappointing when the computer is made by the processor company. There's no excuse---no missing documentation or inability to test side effects. Expecting peerless hardware support was THE reason I went with Intel instead of any other small-form-factor PC. Honestly, at this point, if I want Windows, I'll probably run Parallels on a Mac. I hate Mac. That's where I stand with Intel and Microsoft.
- Saris 3y agoYeah overheating ever is just poor hardware design, not enough cooling.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- znpy 3y agoIt seems that the 13” macbook pro (m1, non air) is gone for good?
- adrianmsmith 3y agoAnd with it the touchbar I guess?
- densh 3y agoGood riddance. No matter how much they pushed it was an utter failure that should have never left their research lab.
- jnsaff2 3y agoWhats the point of re-parroting Apple PR and include: "the most advanced x" for each new generation something Apple? I get it that they must say it but for the rest of us it's pretty obvious that they would say and it would make sense to develop something that will be less advanced than the stuff you already have. You might make different trade offs but you surely would not do whatever the equivalent of de-growth be in computing.
- gigatexal 3y agoWhat an underwhelming event especially since the M3 is worse than the M2 in some aspects. I was hoping for some Mac Pro news or an iMac Pro or other such things.
- alpaca128 3y ago> The CPU performance cores and efficiency cores are 30 percent and 50 percent faster than those in M1 ...or 15% and 30% faster than M2 according to their graph further down, so it's basically another M2-level upgrade.
- Cloudef 3y agoApple should develop framework motherboards. Also their ridiculous upselling practices are in the full swing again.
- 1f60c 3y agoIt’s strange that Vision Pro suddenly no longer has the current chip. (But it’s possible that they announced it with the M2 and started working on putting in the M3 as soon as it became available internally.)
- mlajtos 3y agoI think AVP will have M3. All of the new features screams AVP.
- hendry 3y agoWill Maccy be as fast as dmenu on my old Thinkpad is what I need to know as a M1 Pro user
- jl6 3y agoI’m sure I remember Apple using Myst to sell Performa Macs in 1995. Some things never change.
- icemelt8 3y agoI so wish these beautiful beasts ran all the games for windows like Proton / Steam Deck :(
- unclejack 3y agoThese are still going to be used in laptops with soldered flash chips for the SSD. Apple's laptops aren't meant to be used by people who expect to repair their laptop when the storage fails. Many people don't have access to replacement chips and services to have the flash chips found on the board replaced. It's as if their hardware is meant to be e-waste. The RAM is still not ECC. They focus so much on the shallow marketing without shipping anything which makes a difference.
- benterix 3y agoThe point is, they don't want people to fix or upgrade their hardware, and they will fight to defend this strategy. Give me one reason why they should to it, from their perspective. If they have them glued, the equipment has shorter life and customers need to purchase a new one quicker. And since they can't replace components themselves, they have to pay exorbitant prices for 16 GB RAM or 1 TB storage that is cheaper than ever. These are nice machines, though, and I buy one for building iOS apps every couple of years - but usually 1-2 generations later so that the pricing is more reasonable.
- unclejack 3y agoThis puts the dot on the i quite nicely. It's all about the sales.
- rollcat 3y ago> It's as if their hardware is meant to be e-waste. But the chassis is made from 100% recycled aluminum!~ On a serious note, Apple has a simple and working strategy, to which they're 100% committed: repair only in authorized service points, otherwise recycle. Making devices user-repairable adds costs and compromises on specs; you can't put a number on the disks being replaceable as easily as you can put a number on size, IO bandwidth, or number of write cycles, and numbers is what looks good on benchmarks. You also have to consider Apple's scale: they have literally billions of deployed devices (everything from AirPods to Mac Pros) that they need to support, so what could work for a different vendor won't necessarily work for them. (I don't necessarily agree with that strategy from end-user POV, merely pointing out the context.)
- epolanski 3y agoNot buying an 8GB laptop in 2024, and I have zero intentions of paying the 300 euros markup to double it. Those macbooks can stay on the shelf for me.
- thomastraum 3y agono one does any heavy graphics work a mac anymore. especially for their showcases of rendering... its all nvidia GPU based for creation and rendered on farms anyway. Same with resolve. Apple is so dumb.
- creativenolo 3y agoDefinitely not no one. Nvidia and the likes of Redshift democratised heavy 3D rendering. Here we are now with Apple using Redshift in their promotional pitch. There are plenty of cloud options for ‘heavy graphics’ but for the act of creating with feedback loops it seems to suffice.
- esseti 3y agoSo among all the Mac now, what's the best buy?
- therealmarv 3y agoWonder if the unified memory (up to 128GB) makes it much better for machine learning / AI things? On a Windows laptop you get maximum a Nvidia 4090 and with 18GB of RAM for the GPU. Do I miss something? I wished I had more insight on Apple architecture support from the AI frameworks out there.
- irusensei 3y agoI have an 16GB M1 Pro and it's a great machine. I want to jump the shark on a M3 max. Feels like some computer that should last 4-5 years much like my m1. However I keep an ugly ass full AMD Asus ROG laptop running Linux for gaming. I want to wait for the dust to settle on the Proton-like compatbility layer feature. I know crossover exists but past experiences lead me to believe is not as compatible as Proton. Back in 2021 I've tested various programs that worked well on Proton but not so well in Crossover. Hopefully the Metal enhancements fix it.
- ukd1 3y agoYa I'm on an M1 Max with 64G of ram, and it's still great. I know the M2 and M3 now (for Max) have more memory bandwidth, which is attractive, but otherwise...meh.
- bbkane 3y agoHopefully, but at least from my (non-professional) perspective, Apple makes it difficult to make software for macOS - no support for cross platform gfx apis (opengl, vulkan - requires physical Mac to publish, no support for emulation
- wslh 3y agoReally love the pace of Apple innovations. Nowadays, I am biased towards battery and weight (MacBook Air) if it is for portability and the other line of notebooks are converted into desktops via TB exactly because of weight and battery life. I feel the difference in battery use from one to the other. The Air seems like it has "infinite battery" evn when the others use Mx processors. Also waiting for a great Linux port battery/weight wise.
- kmlx 3y agoi’ve had the 16gb ram macbook air for 3 years now and it’s still an incredible machine considering lightness, battery, and passive cooling.
- wslh 3y agoAh! Thanks! I forgot to mention passive cooling. I am old enough to receive the heat of a new notebook. This is when "mechanic physics" tend to zero. I would add that my MacBook Air received an smoothie of strawberry, mango, and orange over its keyboard and also fell off a few times from more than a meter. BTW, I don't consider myself an Apple fan but really appreciate different form factors and real innovations. Hope others to follow. I think using several operating systems opens your mind.
- Eldandan 3y agoI was seriously considering an m3 pro for the space black color until I confirmed it wasn't passively cooled. An extra monitor would be nice at work but the air is just too great as a laptop.
- subpixel 3y agoOther than the fact that I can’t upgrade the OS and increasingly vendors only support M-series chips there is nothing wrong with my Intel MacBook Pro.
- Gast 3y agoIf you are not running latest, your system might not be fully patched: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/10/apple-clarifies-security-update-policy-only-the-latest-oses-are-fully-patched/amp/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/10/apple-clarifies-secu... So there are downsides to not upgrading.
- subpixel 3y agoOh I know - my complaint is that the hardware is good to go, but I'm forced to buy new hardware. The obsolescence is built-in.
- sourabhv 3y agoSeems like apple's software is lagging far behind their hardware. To this day I can't reliably use Facetime for a call. Often times its ringing on my mac but the other use gets nothing. Maybe take some time to fix your software as well, apple?
- katspaugh 3y agoAll the videos on that page are so slow and choppy on my 2019 MacBook Pro 16" in Safari. If not intentional, their marketing should do it every time they want customers to upgrade.
- davidmurdoch 3y agoStockholm Syndrome?
- Sporktacular 3y agoI want to see low level instructions baked in to allow reliable, performant and efficient real-time emulation of win/x86 software, especially games. As in, I don't care about what chip is inside, I want my game library to just work.
- Fethbita 3y agoI have found some deals on M1 Max Macbook Pros with 10-core CPU, 32-core GPU, 64GB RAM and 2TB storage. Does it make sense to go with those or with base M3 Pro with 11-core CPU, 14-core GPU, 18GB RAM 512GB storage which is the same price?
- whynotminot 3y agoFWIW I dev on an M1 Max MacBook Pro and it’s the best computer I’ve ever owned. Maybe the best thing about these M3 chips is that they’re making those older machines more affordable.
- febrianrendak 3y agoNo, keep the M1 Max. M1 Max has bigger RAM & better GPU compared to M3 Pro.
- semireg 3y agoFwiw, I have a 16" M2 Pro and had a close call with losing it to water damage, so I picked up a M2 Air and it is FASTER than the Pro for most of my jobs (electron/Xcode dev). The Air is so much lighter that I much prefer it to the Pro. The Pro now lives at my desk via TB, and the Air in my backpack for pretty much everything else. Weirdly, when I look at GeekBench browser I see that the M2 Pro should be faster, but at the time I've got screenshots of it being a Pro @ 2.7 GHz and Air @ 3.5 GHz... and I just checked again right now (at my desk) and the Pro is running at 3.29 GHz, so the dynamic CPU scaling must have had an effect. Yet, the actual work doesn't lie, and everything feels super snappy on the Air. Truth to YMMV.
- luxuryballs 3y agoI’ve been wanting to upgrade my 2018 Air but I’m not sure if I’m ready to take the plunge on this new architecture and what I may not be able to do with it… the intel Mac’s keep getting cheaper, and more tempting… has anyone found they couldn’t do something important or even fun on the new M chip? Clearly you can’t run Windows as a virtual machine, which I may seriously want to do for Visual Studio if I get a much more capable Mac.
- selectAll 3y agoIt's quite impressive that the event was filmed on iPhone 15 Pro[1], although it involved professional lighting and various equipment, which is not typical for the average user. With the ability to capture in Log, it's possible that the next iPhone release might be filmed using the very phone that's being unveiled. [1] Source: https://www.youtube.com/live/ctkW3V0Mh-k?t=30m02s https://www.youtube.com/live/ctkW3V0Mh-k?t=30m02s
- SillyUsername 3y agoTldr; Much better than M1, we don't want to compare it to M2 because that highlights it's only an incremental upgrade.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- binarymax 3y ago"Games like Myst have incredibly realistic lighting, shadows, and reflections" Am I missing something here? Is it 1994?
- quux 3y agoThere's an updated remake of Myst with a proper 3d engine and free movement etc. Even so that remake is a few years old now. It's a really odd choice when talking about cutting edge graphics. Maybe Myst was the first game to get an update to adopt the new APIs?
- lowercased 3y agoWhy do some of the chips (m3 pro only?) have 18g and 36g models, vs more traditional 16g and 32g? Can't find any explanation for it, just a lot of reposting of the specs in various sites.
- jonpalmisc 3y agoAlso curious about this.
- quux 3y agoSee this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38078282 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38078282 seems to be based on available LPDDR5X chip sizes?
- dang 3y agoRelated ongoing threads: Apple unveils the new MacBook Pro featuring the M3 family of chips - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38078065 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38078065 Apple supercharges 24‑inch iMac with new M3 chip - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38078068 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38078068
- calini 3y agoApple Magic Keyboard, Mouse and Trackpad are stil Lightning, I cannot believe it
- markjonsona989 3y agoI hear the complaints about incremental updates and not enough reason to upgrade. My opinion is that it doesn't need any updates as it's nearly perfect the way it is. What it needs is a 3 year release cycle instead of yearly. Less e-waste and more visible spec change.
- cududa 3y agoNo, people just need to learn self control. You don’t need a new laptop every year or every 2 years. My current MBP is nearly 8 years old, cost $4,500, and is finally in need of replacement. I just purchased a $4,300 M3. Why should I have to purchase a 3 year old M1
- markjonsona989 3y agoYou wouldn't. You would purchase a 0 year old M3.
- someonehere 3y agoI really hope Apple doesn’t do a yearly cadence with new chips. From all the comments I’m reading here there’s a lot of confusion and misunderstandings about why new chips that seem to underperform or lackluster performance. Maybe Apple should just do every other year for chip upgrades.
- BearOso 3y ago> "Games like Myst have incredibly realistic lighting, shadows, and reflections." So we've finally come full circle. Next step, bring the old CEO back in an advising capacity.
- lexarflash8g 3y agoI'm waiting for the reviews until making a decision -- unfortunately I have a corporate laptop M1 MBP so can't use a personal laptop for work As usual Apple will charge arm+leg for 32gb/1tb config -- and I don't need the graphics really
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- anovikov 3y agoFinally, meaningful amount of RAM in lowest option (which is the only one most shops usually have in stock) for the Pro - 36Gb.
- JaDogg 3y agoWonder by M10 if we have ChatGPT like AI built-into the chip.
- Mrirazak1 3y agoI love Apple but they wasted a 30 minute midnight event in the UK to announce new Mac chips and a new colour of Mac. I think this could’ve been a press release and tech reviews hands on. I don’t think they’ll do this again but it wasn’t that good. Yeah filming was obv. But the event purpose I don’t think made sense for 30 minutes when it could’ve been a press release and tech reviewed hands on.
- tim-hilt 3y agoIt was also showcasing the iPhone 15 Pro camera, as the entire event was filmed with that device
- osigurdson 3y agoI have a ~7 year old 27" iMac. It wasn't that expensive at the time and the screen is still way better than a lot of what is on the market today. Now, it is only available in a 24" version. Is time moving backward?
- camillomiller 3y agoHave you seen in person the new iMac? The performance leap from that is insane. The 4,5K retina screen also fits as much even if not more than your 27-inch
- acdha 3y agoNo, a 4.5K display doesn’t fit more than the 5K display on the 27” iMac. The performance boost is nice but the display is still better. It looks like the market shifts mean they’re assuming people who want bigger displays will buy a separate 5-8K display and connect it to a Mac Mini, which is probably correct. That used to cost more when the third-party market was so limited but that’s improved considerably.
- osigurdson 3y agoI don't understand why they didn't just keep the 27" screen. It isn't like 27" is considered large by today's standards.
- einr 3y agoI guess the high-end iMacs and iMac Pros (remember the iMac Pro? 10 core Xeons upgradable to 512 GB of RAM!) just never sold very well, so they canned the idea of selling iMacs to pro users and instead chose to focus on the lower-end market that was previously served by the 21.5". So it seems to me like the iMac has very much been repositioned as a stylish, basic desktop computer for the home and general office tasks now. No M3 Pro/Max, no bigger monitors, limited I/O, etc. I personally don't really like it because I have labs full of decked-out 27" iMacs that are now kind of left without a clear upgrade path, but I understand what they're doing.
- deagle50 3y agoMaximizing margins for the M3 Pro which makes up a large majority of MBP sales. The transistor count reduction adds up over thousands of 3nm wafers. They are probably getting twice as many M3 Pro chips per wafer over M2 Pro. Nudging power users to the M3 Max doesn't hurt either. Personally, I don't mind trading 2 P-cores for 2 E-cores but the memory nerf annoys me, and I suspect the cache has been nerfed as well.
- brandall10 3y agoI mind it to the point where I cancelled my order (upgrading from an M1 Pro). I'd do the mid-range Max but I imagine the battery life would suffer too much on the 14". It's been pointed that that marketing for the M3 Pro is the same as it was for the M2 Pro earlier this year - up to 20% faster compute than the M1 Pro. As is the wireless web battery life. Sure this will be variable based on the workload, but on average, this is a barely there upgrade. The M4 will likely flip things back due to the yield issue, and there I suspect we'll see compute will improve by 40%+. I also suspect we'll see that upgrade sooner than later (next summer?) as Apple likely wants to get off these chips ASAP.
- deagle50 3y agoDon't blame you on the battery life, we'll have to see if the tiny M3 Pro has brings efficiency benefits without a reduction in real-world performance. I'm fond of the E-cores and my main gripe with my M1 Max is the 2 E-cores being constantly pegged and 2 P-cores always active to compensate, which likely means the first P-core cluster can't sleep. It would be fun to see how 6 E-cores would handle daily tasks but I'm not spending $3k to find out. Only paid 2k for a used full-size M1 Max a over a year ago so I'll likely skip this gen. I get ~6-8 hours of constant use btw.
- brandall10 3y agoAfter seeing the benchmarks I ended up getting a 16" unbinned Max... previously had a 16" M1 Pro as a work machine and think I can be fine dealing with the bulk as my one and only even though I'm regularly on the move. I don't think the e-cores were an actual engineering decision, but a way to reduce transistor count to improve yields without reducing performance. Agreed about 2 being too few. I see the 2 on my M1 Pro regularly pegged as well, but I imagine a 1/4 ratio to be ideal.
- aljgz 3y ago> Graphics-intensive games like Myst have incredibly realistic lighting, shadows, and reflections, thanks to the next-generation GPU of M3. I'm just out of words for this.
- brailsafe 3y agoI think it's quite clever actually, because although it's sort of a laughable technical feat compared to other options for gaming, many of the people who both have the cash to spend on the higher-end mac AND who don't pursue any more modern games on other platforms probably would have been original Myst players
- theGnuMe 3y agoWhat should I buy? Honestly it’s all confusing as hell. 8gb ram seems like too little but increasing it is $$$$.