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The M series macbooks are amazing machines. I don't want to take away from them at all, but I recently realized I can get the same power that a 3k Macbook pro h
by askonomm 3y ago
The M series macbooks are amazing machines. I don't want to take away from them at all, but I recently realized I can get the same power that a 3k Macbook pro has with about 1k when I build my own PC (excluding the screen), and with it full upgradeability making for a much better bang for a buck, and illustrating how ridiculous the MacBook prices are. I mean they charge $400 for an extra terabyte of storage, when I can get around 6TB for the same price.
But, unfortunately you can't build your own notebooks that would remain compact and decent, so now I just use a cheap laptop as a thin client that remotely connects to my PC.
- com2kid 3y agoFor people wanting to do LLM work at home, a fully loaded MacBook has more memory available to it than anything else a consumer can buy. All in a laptop form factor (versus Nvidia GPUs). A small market, sure, but one they have on lock down.
- LoganDark 3y agoNot to mention that this memory is also VRAM. You can have over 100GB of it, in an age where just 80GB of VRAM in a single card costs over $13,000.
- ric2b 3y agoYou can do the same with any integrated GPU on an Intel or AMD processor. Actually you can go well beyond that amount of memory.
- wtallis 3y agoThe integrated GPUs Intel and AMD are shipping don't really have enough performance to be worth the trouble, and the configs that support 100+ GB of RAM and have integrated GPUs don't have much memory bandwidth (running at speeds like 6400MT/s is a lot harder with multiple ranks of memory).
- remexre 3y agoGoogling suggests Intel's A770M has 16.79 TFLOPS, M3 Max's GPU has 16.4 TFLOPS?
- wtallis 3y agoIntel's Arc A770M is a discrete GPU with only 16GB of DRAM. It is not to be confused with the "UHD Graphics 770" found in their top desktop processors. The discrete graphics is on the order of 16x larger and faster than the desktop integrated graphics, and the latter is the only one that can plausibly be said to have access to 100+ GB of RAM.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- LoganDark 3y agoA770M can come with only 12GB, too. And it's GDDR6, not "just" DRAM (although it technically still counts).
- aurareturn 3y agoTflops isn't a reliable way to measure GPU performance anymore. For example. Nvidia Tflop numbers for their new GPUs are 4-5x the performance of 2080Ti but in actual performance, it's like 2x only.
- LoganDark 3y agoNormal DRAM (i.e. not GDDR) is far too slow to facilitate this, you're basically limited by the CPU's cache if you want to reach a level of performance even remotely comparable to a GPU that has GDDR or HBM.
- wtallis 3y agoGDDR isn't as special as you think, and it's special in exactly the opposite way that HBM is special. HBM achieves high bandwidth by using extremely large bus widths running at fairly slow speeds per pin. GDDR achieves high bandwidth by running at very high speeds per pin and using medium to large bus widths. Desktop CPUs using DDR5 have low memory bandwidth because they have narrow bus widths (128bit total) at low speeds. Server CPUs use the same memory at the same per-pin speeds but with much larger bus widths to achieve total bandwidth comparable to a mid-range GPU but supporting orders of magnitude more memory capacity. Apple's high-end chips likewise uses significantly larger bus widths than desktop CPUs, combined with slightly per-pin speeds (LPDDR rather than DDR) to also reach GPU-like total bandwidth. I don't think it's accurate to single out any one of the above technologies as being the "normal" DRAM. GDDR, LPDDR, and DDR are all fairly different from each other and all quite mainstream.
- LoganDark 3y agoGDDR is "special" because it's far closer to the GPU die. System memory isn't that close to the CPU, so any integrated GPU won't be able to make as good use of it as a dedicated GPU with co-located VRAM.
- wtallis 3y ago> GDDR is "special" because it's far closer to the GPU die. LPDDR is always at least as close to the processor, and is often in-package so significantly closer. HBM is always in-package. But all of that is a red herring, because the distance is only loosely correlated with performance and is a completely irrelevant metric if you've already accounted for bus width and clock rate.
- flir 3y agoYou can buy a lot of cloud compute instead of that extra memory though. (I haven't done the math myself, but I'd be curious if anyone has).
- chii 3y agoeven a 5k spend on cloud compute is not going out outlast the expected 3-5 yrs of use that a mac M3 would have.
- Our_Benefactors 3y agoWhat? This is a bizarre apples to oranges comparison. That 5k of compute can do things that aren’t possible on a Mac, like training a model.
- uf00lme 3y agoNot many people use compute 24/7, so if your use cases can be ephemeral than spot/savings plans can be a good saving and using the cloud allows for opex rather than capex controls and taxes
- pulse7 3y agoWait for just 2 days, 17 hours and 18 minutes - and NVIDIA will give you (rumored) 96GB of RAM inside GeForce RTX 4090 TI: https://www.nvidia.com/en-eu/geforce/special-event/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-eu/geforce/special-event/
- doctorpangloss 3y agoThere is no chance the 4090 TI is going to ship with 96GB of VRAM. And besides, it has no NVLink, so it's a stranded asset. It would appear the poster misread reports about the L2 cache (96MB) for the VRAM (24GB).
- cjbprime 3y agoThe lack of nvlink doesn't matter much for LLMs, which can work on distinct layers of the model on completely independent GPUs.
- com2kid 3y agoDoesn't fit in a backpack. Can't take it to a coffee shop. Heck it involves building an entire custom PC around it. Sure the m3 with 128GB of RAM costs $7k, which is an absurd number, but that will run high quality LLMs that can have sci-fi level intelligent conversations. Not a bad price for a laptop capable of doing things that was literally "haha that'll never happen" levels of unimaginable 5 years ago.
- TillE 3y agoI can't find even the sketchiest rumor claiming 96GB of VRAM on a 4090 Ti. That would be more than an H100, which costs around $30k.
- nomel 3y agoAgreed. Estimates put the H100 BOM at around $3k. If they do offer that much memory, they're going to implement some way to make it unattractive, to hold onto that sweet 800% margin [1]. 1. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-makes-1000-profit-on-h100-gpus-report https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-makes-1000-profit-o...
- Affric 3y agoIt will be interesting to see how much further it will be possible for Apple to push their platform. I think the Jobs/Ive legacy that has pushed the thermals ahead of raw compute had given them a massive headstart in the LLM age for both notebooks (obviously) but also desktop (less obviously). With the size of a normal 4090 heat sink the ATX platform is showing its age. The biggest element of any system is a series of huge heat sinks. The graphics card ends up being massive. You have support struts coming out. Giant power supplies. Bespoke connectors. Paying for RAM twice. Apple have a form factor people are comfortable with and haven’t set the bar too high with raw performance. They aren’t hindered by existing designs. The thermals are good. And you pay for it all in one.
- BugsJustFindMe 3y ago> I can get the same power that a 3k Macbook pro has with about 1k when I build my own PC But not, as you acknowledge, a laptop.
- NooneAtAll3 3y agojust ssh from a laptop then, you have 2k of a budget left
- haswell 3y agoThis highly depends on the use case and software involved.
- NooneAtAll3 3y agoremote desktop software is available for all platforms
- rowanG077 3y agoYes and all of them have piss poor usability. I don't want cringe everytime I use the mouse or god forbid type.
- laweijfmvo 3y agoyeah but the best laptop to do this from might also be a used M1 Macbook Air...
- theultdev 3y agoyay, compromises! who needs to work offline anyway.
- askonomm 3y agoOddly I haven't yet needed to work offline in my 12 year career as a software dev. But then again it's not common for internet to go away where I live.
- devwastaken 3y agoWhile true, desktops are often difficult to carry around and use while mobile. It also doesn't have the benefits of macOS. I can get Linux desktops to be decent, but Mac feels and looks like a finished Linux desktop OS. Apple charges big prices for MacBook pro's because they know other corps will foot the bill, they're work equipment like a tractor. The significantly less expensive MacBook air is the choice if this isn't the case. I still love building PC's but honestly their main use now is either for server work or graphically heavy gaming.
- talentedcoin 3y ago“Benefits” of macOS? What are they — the pointless yearly updates? The OCD changes to chrome year after year? The declining stability?
- katbyte 3y agoPolished os with *nix underneath. Osx is closer to Linux then windows is and imho more polished then most Linux desktop environments. I don’t find the yearly updates pointless? They keep adding new things and it’s also been stable for me for years. Also what do changes to chrome have to do with apple/osx?
- declaredapple 3y agoOsx is very literally unix, and it's extremely polished compared to linux desktop environments out of the box. (yes I know some people have no issues with their linux desktops but I've used it over 15 years and it's NOT nearly as seemless as OSX) They're also extremely well sandboxed and have become increasingly more focused on security the last few years (in some ways annoyingly so). > Also what do changes to chrome have to do with apple/osx? Maybe parent meant chrome as in "OSX is focused continously updating it's shiny ui"?
- alpaca128 3y agoI've been using an M2 Macbook and M1 Mini for a while now and I can't confirm those statements about polish. The dock's icon scaling animation under the mouse cursor freezes in place at least once every few days. To this day the Stage Manager has a bug where pulling a minimized window to the front can throw it across the screen, with most of the window landing outside the visible screen area. For a few months I could reliably freeze the screenshot app by clicking 2-3 of the UI's buttons in an order that occurred during normal use. If I open more than ~10-15 images at once in the preinstalled preview app it often opens two or three windows instead of one and randomly distributes the pictures across those. More than ~50 image files can cause an error message and partial failure to open the files. In the first month after getting my Macbook, the "Open Anyway" button in the settings always crashed the settings app the first time after trying to start a new program. Turning off the second connected screen left windows on that screen inaccessible and I couldn't disable/remove the screen in the settings, and I could still move the cursor to the second screen while it was turned off. Clicking an 8GB video file in the file selection dialog spawned a ThumbnailExtension process that allocated 25GB memory within seconds and if not killed the process kept running for a minute after the file chooser was already closed...on a system with 8GB RAM, so it swapped 20GB. The file saving dialog is frozen as long as any connected HDD hasn't yet spun up, no matter if I want to save the file on that drive or not. That's the things I can remember right now within a bit over one year of use. No, I don't think Mac OS' desktop is more polished than the best current Linux distros, though the OS stayed stable through upgrades, which I can't say about Windows 10 and some Linux systems. Imho the M1-3 Macbooks are still the best laptops currently available. But the desktop UI is clearly not as stable as iOS has been for me.
- mattwad 3y agoit was always mac for laptops, pc for desktop for me. I guess there's something to be said when the vendor owns all the parts, including the OS.
- DistractionRect 3y agoI've been doing this since college. It just makes sense. You can build a desktop + a cheap laptop for half. I don't have to really worry about how what I'm doing affects battery life because it's consist as a thin client. It's cheap to replace if it gets lost/stolen/broken. It's cheaper to upgrade as needed, and I don't have to replace the whole machine when I do. I get all the portability of a laptop and all the power of a desktop, and money to spare.
- nomel 3y ago> because it's consist as a thin client. I've tried going this route, but LTE just isn't good enough, yet.
- GeekyBear 3y agoIf you're price sensitive and don't care if you end up with a desktop, used M1 Mac Minis are in the $300 to $500 range. You don't have to spend 3K.
- askonomm 3y agoI'm mostly interested in upgradeability and the cost of parts. With Macs I'll just have to buy totally new Macs every time to upgrade, but with a PC I can swap out RAM, SSD, GPU, etc however I want for a fraction of the price that it costs to upgrade Macs.
- Galaxeblaffer 3y agothe thing is though, that you can actually resell your old Mac when buying a new one. not like a pc that's basically worthless the moment you take it out of the store. the upgrading thing is kind of a myth since the new hardware coming out will often be incompatible with the old hardware you have..
- nightski 3y agoIt's most definitely not a myth. I upgrade a component or two every year around Black Friday. This same machine has been evolving for a decade and many spare parts have been handed down to family members.
- hajile 3y agoSome stuff swaps out a little at a time, but something like the massive AM5 swap has you changing 3 of the 4 most expensive parts (CPU, RAM, and Motherboard) of your machine at the same time.
- satvikpendem 3y agoBut you can resell those parts as well... Not sure why this thread is assuming you can resell Macs but not PC components.
- Unfrozen0688 3y agoGamers like me have known this for ages. The reason I am in IT is that I save money and built my own desktop from parts. Even now its waaaaaay better in price to performance, you can freely have any peripherals you want, any x86 OS etc...
- Galaxeblaffer 3y agoWhat you pay for is the form factor, the silence, the nice and cool temperatures, the battery life and the ability to actually use the damn thing without being plugged in. added bonus as a dev and a creator is the unified memory, hardware decoding for modern codecs line h265(something that is weirdly missing from nvidia gpu's) and of course the beautiful screen. if this stuff doesn't matter to you, then i agree it's a waste of money i recently bought my first MacBook ever (M3 Max) and all i can say is that this machine is liberating. I've been jumping from pc to pc every couple of years from Dell xps to razor blade, thermo nuclear piece of shit to a customized clevo 10kg brick almost taking off from the table running too many tabs in chrome. all i can say is that these new M chip machines are on another level, truly amazing.
- nightski 3y agoI feel lucky I don't care about any of those things, it's nice just using a desktop with a large beautiful screen.
- ScoobleDoodle 3y agoMy Clevo’s cooling fan is also super loud, which ramps up too frequently like many open tabs or playing video and light weight games. Unfortunately I forgot to look into the audio decibels detail when buying this most recent laptop.
- Guillaume86 3y ago> hardware decoding for modern codecs line h265(something that is weirdly missing from nvidia gpu's) not sure what you're talking about, nvidia GPUs have h265 support: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_NVDEC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_NVDEC
- Galaxeblaffer 3y agowell.. my rtx 3080 doesn't, at least not 10 bit 4:4:2
- treprinum 3y agoTry to use 128GB M3 Max to run LLaMA2 70B inference and enjoy the sound of airplanes taking off while your battery is dead in 1 hour...
- EugeneOZ 3y agoSure, sure. Some pathetic 1080p monitor, or a monitor with ridiculous pixel density and an awful TN matrix. Some oven-like CPU and “turn off your heater” GPU. And, because you are talking about laptops (you are not comparing laptops to desktop computers, surely), it will be a 3-5kg monster. But cheaper, hurray!
- hajile 3y agoLet's see * $450 -- 12-core Zen 4 * $250 -- x670 motherboard * $130 -- 48gb RAM * $100 -- 1TB SSD * $170 -- 750w PSU * $130 -- case * $600 -- 3070 GPU * $80 -- CPU air cooler * $200 -- Windows * $100 -- so-so speakers, mouse, keyboard, etc. We're very close to $2200 if we go with solid, midrange stuff and don't include a monitor. The cost to apple self-repair guys for a 16" mini-LED display is $670 with Apple offering around $100 back if they'll turn in the old screen. If we add in $600 for the monitor cost, we're up to $2800 while the 16" MBP we compared to is actually $4000. The savings of a desktop are there, but they aren't what you make them out to be. If we look at a comparable laptop with good build quality like a Lenove Thinkpad, we're going to pay as much or more. For the same price, we'll have terrible battery life and our performance when not plugged in will drop off a cliff.
- manmal 3y agoBut this build is not only equivalent to an M3 MacBook - it’s probably 2+x as powerful when it comes to CPU and GPU. There are cheaper ways to build an equivalent machine.
- zuhsetaqi 3y agoWhere do you get the 2 times faster from. I doubt it's even close
- Manuel_D 3y agoLaptop performance is often thermally limited due to less airflow. Desktop PCs have big fans and coolers and can handle sustained load better. Bursty loads are less of a disparity, though. But of course, the tradeoff is that it's not portable like a laptop.
- sliken 3y agoVery common on pc laptops, doubly so with discrete GPUs. However Mac laptops seem pretty good about not thermally limiting and are especially at giving same performance when plugged in as when on battery. PC Laptops with discrete GPUs often show huge differences when on battery vs wall power.
- robertjpayne 3y agoThis gets brought up every time someone talks about macOS and MacBooks. Another thing people don’t take into account is the time and thus money saved not dealing with this crap. Building PCs from raw parts is annoying for heaps of people. Warranties are annoying, making sure all the parts fit together is annoying. You’ll spend the extra cost in short order just making sure you have the right parts. Also resell value of MacBooks is very very good. When it’s time to upgrade you typically are losing 20-30% of purchase price at around the 2-3 year mark. Where as PCs are hard to give away at times. Everyone has their own needs but Apples machines for me are a work tool, I need a laptop and nobody comes even close to the quality or peeper dollar spent in the form factor.
- nop_slide 3y agoJust checked my M1 Pro trade in, bought it for $2400 in Jan 2022 and I’m getting offered $1500 for it. So closer to losing 40% of value.
- michaelteter 3y agoYeah, if you ignore many of the benefits the Macbook provides, it is "overpriced" compared to a homebuilt PC. On the other hand, if I consider the benefits you excluded of the Macbook, your $1000 PC is literally worth $0 to me. And by that measure, the Macbook is worth infinitely more than your PC.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- avidphantasm 3y agoNumber of times my MBPs have crashed on wake from sleep: 0 The number of times my last PC crashed on wake from sleep: nearly every time it went to sleep. I ain’t got time to troubleshoot stuff like this. I just need my stuff to work. I also need something portable. I’ve also been using modern macOS for its entire existence and find it vastly superior to Windows (which I have been using since 3.1), and Linux (again, I ain’t got time to troubleshoot hardware).
- artificialLimbs 3y agoYou can make your pc sleep? Bro I haven’t gotten my windows 10 machine to successfully sleep in years. It just wakes itself up (or maybe never goes to sleep) and becomes a toaster oven in my bag.
- KennyBlanken 3y agoOf course you can get better $/performance when you're not paying for something that is extremely optimized for weight and energy efficiency. Also, you don't need to spend $3k on a MBP? I spent ~$1500 for a 16GB system with the higher-tier GPU.
- askonomm 3y ago16GB really isn't enough these days. I put 64 GB in my machine for as little as 200 EUR. How much would that cost in Apple land? Extra 1000?
- acdha 3y ago16GB isn’t enough for Windows. macOS is surprisingly more efficient - it’s not just swapping to their faster storage, either: lots of attention to detail everywhere means that you see less memory pressure across the board. Even using VSC, Teams, and Podman heavily, 16GB has plenty of headroom. The reason you can’t update the RAM on Apple silicon is the engineering tradeoff they made to have it be faster. That required work on the software side – e.g. they added a CPU extension to compress memory pages and updated the OS to use it effectively – but they have the advantage of not needing to coordinate multiple internal feuding factions and outside vendors the way that Microsoft has to.
- askonomm 3y agoI have a 16GB MacBook Pro (M2 Pro chip), and my Linux PC (I don't use Windows) runs a lot smoother than my MacBook does for programming tasks such as running IntelliJ / Android Studio / bunch of docker vm's.
- Razengan 3y ago> (excluding the screen) and the battery, and the better speakers, and the quiet cooling, and USB-C/Thunderbolt 4 that just works (compared to most PC implementations) and of course, macOS