5 ms·

What 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

What 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 ago
I 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 ago
My 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 ago
  well.. my rtx 3080 doesn't, at least not 10 bit 4:4:2
treprinum 3y ago
Try 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...
- chii 3y ago
  But at least it runs fast enough, and it's portable too. To run the same llm on other laptops is basically impossible without an external graphics card, or you have to give up the laptop for a desktop. And that still sounds like an airplane taking off.
  - seec 3y ago
    But that's argument absurdum considering the price. Yes, it can do that, but you can also do that much better with a cheaper combo that gets you more actual hardware... Which is exactly what the OP is saying. And I agree, laptops are generally poor value no matter the brand/side. But you can mitigate that by buying a good enough not too expensive notebook and associate a "real" desktop computer with it. At curent Apple price, the laptop convenience factor for almost equivalent workstation is not really worth it for the vast majority of peoples (at least those who have to point with their own money...).
  - treprinum 3y ago
    Fair point, my Zephyrus G14 4090 64+16GB has the same issues, it can run smaller LLaMA2 models much faster than 128GB M3 Max (3x) but 70B one is much slower due to CPU doing half of the layers (10x). So in the end I ended up with both.
- throwaway290 3y ago
  Buying any laptop just for running LLMs may be bad choice. Maxed up spot EC2 instances could be good I heard

nightski 3y ago

I 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 ago

My 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 ago
well.. my rtx 3080 doesn't, at least not 10 bit 4:4:2

treprinum 3y ago

Try 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...

chii 3y ago
But at least it runs fast enough, and it's portable too. To run the same llm on other laptops is basically impossible without an external graphics card, or you have to give up the laptop for a desktop. And that still sounds like an airplane taking off.
- seec 3y ago
  But that's argument absurdum considering the price. Yes, it can do that, but you can also do that much better with a cheaper combo that gets you more actual hardware... Which is exactly what the OP is saying. And I agree, laptops are generally poor value no matter the brand/side. But you can mitigate that by buying a good enough not too expensive notebook and associate a "real" desktop computer with it. At curent Apple price, the laptop convenience factor for almost equivalent workstation is not really worth it for the vast majority of peoples (at least those who have to point with their own money...).
- treprinum 3y ago
  Fair point, my Zephyrus G14 4090 64+16GB has the same issues, it can run smaller LLaMA2 models much faster than 128GB M3 Max (3x) but 70B one is much slower due to CPU doing half of the layers (10x). So in the end I ended up with both.
throwaway290 3y ago
Buying any laptop just for running LLMs may be bad choice. Maxed up spot EC2 instances could be good I heard