9 ms·

What’s amazing is that in the past I’ve felt the need to upgrade within a few years. New video format or more demanding music software is released that slows t

• OskarS 2y ago
  Yep, the same, M1 Pro from 2021. It's remarkable how snappy it still feels years later, and I still virtually never hear the fan. The M-series of chips is a really remarkable achievement in hardware.
• extr 2y ago
  I've owned an M1 MBP base model since 2021 and I just got an M3 Max for work. I was curious to see if it "felt" different and was contemplating an upgrade to M4. You know what? It doesn't really feel different. I think my browser opens about 1 second faster from a cold start. But other than that, no perceptible difference day to day.
  • charliebwrites 2y ago
    This is how I feel about the last few iPhones as well I upgraded from a 13 pro to a 15 pro expecting zippier performance and it feels almost identical if not weirdly a bit slower in rendering and typing I wonder what it will take to make Mac/iOS feel faster
    • alwillis 2y ago
      > I upgraded from a 13 pro to a 15 pro expecting zippier performance and it feels almost identical if not weirdly a bit slower in rendering and typing I went from an iPhone 13 mini to an iPhone 16 and it's a significant speed boost.
      • lawgimenez 2y ago
        I went from 12 to 15 pro max, the difference is significant. I can listen to Spotify while shooting from the camera. On my old iPhone 12, this is not possible.
        • jonhohle 2y ago
          I think that says more about Spotify than your phone.
          • stevenjgarner 2y ago
            Test Spotify against YouTube Music (and others) - I personally see no reason for Spotify when I have YouTube Premium, which performs with less overhead.
            • lancesells 2y ago
              Maybe they have friends and family on Spotify
        • pacifika 2y ago
          I’m sure you’re right but that’s pretty unreal.
    • microtonal 2y ago
      I think the only upgrade now is from a non-Pro to Pro, since a 120Hz screen is noticeably better than a 60Hz screen (and a borderline scam that a 1000 Euro phone does not have 120Hz). The new camera button is kinda nice though.
      • matwood 2y ago
        > The new camera button is kinda nice though. I was initially indifferent about the camera button, but now that I'm used to it it's actually very useful.
    • tomjen3 2y ago
      I upgraded my iPhone 13 pro to the 16 pro and it was overall really nice - but it was the better use of hardware, the zoom camera, etc. The CPU? Ah, never really felt a difference.
    • doublerabbit 2y ago
      XR to 13, as I don't want the latest and didn't want to loose my jailbreak. Infuriated by the 13. The 3.5mm audio thunder bolt adapters disconnect more often than usual. All I need to do is tap the adapter and it disconnects. And that Apple has now stopped selling them is even more infuriating, it's not a faulty adapter.
      • internet2000 2y ago
        It’s probably because of the jailbreak.
        • HumblyTossed 2y ago
          How would that woller out his port?
      • HumblyTossed 2y ago
        > The 3.5mm thunder bolt adapters The what? is this the adapter for 3.5mm headphones? If so, you don't have to get Apple made dongles. Third parties make them also.
        • Kirby64 2y ago
          Or just buy the actual Apple adapter from any number of other vendors. Best Buy still has plenty in stock, for instance. I'd guess the GPs actual problem is lint in the Lightning port though. Pretty common, relatively easy to clean out too, especially compared to USB-C.
          • doublerabbit 2y ago
            I'm in the EU. Third party ones cost the same as authentic Apple ones. If not more. Regardless of either, they both have the same fault. The connector between the phone and the adapter is poor. It could just be a fault with my phone but I have no way of proving this.
            • 2y ago
    • andrei_says_ 2y ago
      16 pro has a specialized camera button which is a game changer for street / travel photography. I upgraded from 13 pro and use that. But no other noticeable improvements. Maybe Apple intelligence summarizing wordy emails.
    • thenthenthen 2y ago
      > I wonder what it will take to make Mac/iOS feel faster I know, disabling shadows and customisable animation times ;) On a jailbroken phone I once could disable all animation delays, it felt like a new machine (must add that the animations are very important and generally great ux design, but most are just a tad too slow)
  • ToucanLoucan 2y ago
    Can confirm. I have an M2 Air from work and an M1 Pro for personal, and tbh, both absolutely fly. I haven't had a serious reason to upgrade. The only reason I do kind of want to swap out my M1 Pro is because the 13" screen is a wee small, but I also use the thing docked more often than not so it's very hard to justify spending the money.
  • stringsandchars 2y ago
    > It doesn't really feel different. My work machine was upgraded from an M1 with 16GB of RAM to an M3 Max with 36GB and the difference in Xcode compile times is beyond belief: I went from something like 1-2 minutes to 15-20 seconds. Obviously if opening a browser is the most taxing thing your machine is doing the difference will be minimal. But video or music editing, application-compiling and other intensive tasks, then the upgrade is PHENOMENAL.
    • Aeolun 2y ago
      I very much enjoy being able to start compilation and just seeing results fly by.
    • fwip 2y ago
      I think most of that difference is going to be the huge increase in performance core count between the base chip and the Max (from 4 to 12). The RAM certainly doesn't hurt though!
    • eropple 2y ago
      FWIW I think that's more the core count than anything. I have a M1 Max as a personal machine and an M3 Max at work and while the M3 Max is definitely faster, it isn't world-beating.
    • jcgrillo 2y ago
      My current work machine is M1 Max 64Gb and it's the fastest computer I've ever used. Watching rust code compile makes me laugh out loud it's so quick. Really curious what the newer ones are like, but tbh I don't feel any pressure to upgrade (could just be blissfully ignorant).
  • jcalabro 2y ago
    I've found compile times on large C++ code bases to be the only thing I really notice improving. I recently upgraded my work machine from a 2017 i7 to a shiny new Ryzen 9 9950x and my clean compile times went from 3.5 minutes to 15 seconds haha. When I compile with an M2 Max, it's about 30s, so decent for a laptop, but also it was 2x the price of my new desktop workstation.
  • thadk 2y ago
    The biggest difference I’ve seen is iPad Sidecar mode works far more reliably with the M3 Max than the M1 Max. There have been incremental improvements in speed and nits too, but having Sidecar not randomly crash once a day once on M3 was very nice.
• hughrj 2y ago
  IMO Apple Silicon is just that good; have played No Man’s Sky on a new MB Air 13” at 1080p and mid to high settings. An MB Air with an M3 and no fan out gamed my old gtx 1080 box which stuttered on NMS size games all the time Shows just how poorly Intel has done. That company should be razed to the ground figuratively and the infrastructure given to a new generation of chip makers; the last one is clearly out of their element
• renewiltord 2y ago
  The M1 series was too good. Blows Intel Macs out of the water. But I still have an M1 Max. It’s fantastic.
• kristofferR 2y ago
  Yeah, I feel like Apple has done the opposite of planned obsolescence with the M chips. I have a Macbook Air M1 that I'd like to upgrade, but they're not making it easy. I promised myself a couple of years ago I'll never buy a new expensive computing device/phone unless it supports 120 hertz and Wi-Fi 7, a pretty reasonable request I think. I got the iPhone 16 Pro, guess I can wait another year for a new Macbook (hopefully the Air will have a decent display by then, I'm not too keen to downgrade the portability just to get a good display).
  • JimDabell 2y ago
    > Yeah, I feel like Apple has done the opposite of planned obsolescence with the M chips. They always have. If you want an objective measure of planned obsolescence, look at the resale value. Apple products hold their resale value better than pretty much every competitor because they stay useful for far longer.
  • rbanffy 2y ago
    Apple equipment always last a long time and retain value on the second-hand market.
    • spyckie2 2y ago
      Not true. Look at how little supercharged intel apples are going for in Facebook marketplace. The quality stuff retains value, not brand.
      • zinckiwi 2y ago
        Comparing against the intel era is a bit apples (excuse me) to oranges. Technical generation gaps aside, Apple products hold value well.
        • spyckie2 2y ago
          So the intel era is not Apple products? Butterfly keyboard is not an Apple invention? They have the highest product quality of any laptop manufacturer, period. But to say that all Apple products hold value well is simply not true. All quality products hold value well, and most of Apples products are quality. I guarantee you that if Apple produced a trashy laptop it would have no resell value. Again, the quality holds the value not the brand.
• maxvisser 2y ago
  Same for me. The only reason to replace it, is that my M1 pro’s SSD or battery will go bad or if I accidentally drop the machine and something breaks.
  • rbanffy 2y ago
    I am replacing a Dell laptop because the case is cracking, not because it's too slow (it isn't lightning fast, of course, but it sure is fast enough for casual use).
  • fckgw 2y ago
    I replaced my M1 Air battery last year and it's still going like a champ. $129 for another 3 years of life is a bargain.
• rbanffy 2y ago
  A lot of my work can be easily done with a Celeron - it's editing source, compiling very little, running tests on Python code, running small Docker containers and so on. Could it be faster? Of course! Do I need it to be faster? Not really. I am due to update my Mac mini because my current one can't run Sonoma, but, apart from that, it's a lovely little box with more than enough power for me.
  • klooney 2y ago
    How's the performance of Gmail on the Celeron? That's always my sticking point for older computers. The fancy web applications really drag.
    • rbanffy 2y ago
      Not great. Works well with Thunderbird or Evolution though. And yes. Web apps are not really great on low-spec machines.
  • mysteria 2y ago
    I still use Ivy Bridge and Haswell workstations (with Linux, SSD and discrete GPU) as my daily drivers and for the things I do they still feel fast. Honestly a new Celeron probably beats them performance wise. The modern AMD or Intel desktops I've tried obviously are much faster when performing large builds and such but for general computing, web browsing, and so forth I literally don't feel much of a difference. Now for mobile devices it's a different story due to the increased efficiency and hence battery life.
• jchw 2y ago
  Laptops in general are just better than they used to be, with modern CPUs and NVMe disks. I feel exactly the same seeing new mobile AMD chips too, I'm pretty sure I'll be happy with my Ryzen 7040-based laptop for at least a few years. Apple's M1 came at a really interesting point. Intel was still dominating the laptop game for Windows laptops, but generational improvements felt pretty lame. A whole lot of money for mediocre performance gains, high heat output and not very impressive battery. The laptop ecosystem changed rapidly as not only the Apple M1 arrived, but also AMD started to gain real prominence in the laptop market after hitting pretty big in the desktop and data center CPU market. (Addendum: and FWIW, Intel has also gotten a fair bit better at mobile too in the meantime. Their recent mobile chipsets have shown good efficiency improvements.) If Qualcomm's Windows on ARM efforts live past the ARM lawsuit, I imagine a couple generations from now they could also have a fairly compelling product. In my eyes, there has never been a better time to buy a laptop. (Obligatory: I do have an M2 laptop in my possession from work. The hardware is very nice, it beats the battery life on my AMD laptop even if the AMD laptop chews through some compute a bit faster. That said, I love the AMD laptop because it runs Linux really well. I've tried Asahi on an M1 Mac Mini, it is very cool but not something I'd consider daily driving soon.)
  • dijit 2y ago
    > Laptops in general are just better than they used to be, with modern CPUs and NVMe disks. I feel exactly the same seeing new mobile AMD chips too, I'm pretty sure I'll be happy with my Ryzen 7040-based laptop for at least a few years. You say that, but I get extremely frustrated at how slow my Surface Pro 10 is (with an Ultra 7 165U). It could be Windows of course, but this is a much more modern machine than my Macbook Air (M1) and feels like it's almost 10 years old at times in comparison. - despite being 3-4 years newer.
    • jchw 2y ago
      It's true that Linux may be a bit better in some cases, if you have a system that has good Linux support, but I think in most cases it should never make a very substantial difference. On some of the newer Intel laptops, there are still missing power management features anyways, so it's hard to compare. That said, Intel still has yet to catch up to AMD on efficiency unfortunately, they've improved generationally but if you look at power efficiency benchmarks of Intel CPUs vs AMD you can see AMD comfortably owns the entire top of the chart. Also, as a many-time Microsoft Surface owner, I can also confirm that these devices are rarely good showcases for the chipsets inside of them: they tend to be constrained by both power and thermal limits. There are a lot of good laptops on the market, I wouldn't compare a MacBook, even a MacBook Air, a laptop, with a Surface Pro, a 2-in-1 device. Heck, even my Intel Surface Laptop 4, a device I kinda like, isn't the ideal showcase for its already mediocre 11th gen Intel processor... The Mac laptop market is pretty easy: you buy the laptops they make, and you get what you get. On one hand, that means no need to worry about looking at reviews or comparisons, except to pick a model. They all perform reasonably well, the touchpad will always be good, the keyboard is alright. On the other hand, you really do get what you get: no touchscreens, no repairability, no booting directly into Windows, etc.
• dawnerd 2y ago
  Guess that’s why most of their comparisons are with the older Intel Macs.
  • Cthulhu_ 2y ago
    And M1 from 4 years ago instead of M3 from last year; while a 2x speed improvement in the benchmarks they listed is good, it also shows that the M series CPUs see incremental improvements, not exponential or revolutionary. I get the feeling - but a CPU expert can correct me / say more - that their base design is mostly unchanged since M1, but the manufacturing process has improved (leading to less power consumption/heat), the amount of cores has increased, and they added specialized hardware for AI-related workloads. That said, they are in a very comfortable position right now, with neither Intel, AMD, or another competitor able to produce anything close to the bang-for-watt that Apple is managing. Little pressure from behind them to push for more performance.
    • Zafira 2y ago
      Their sales pitch when they released the M1 was that the architecture would scale linearly and so far this appears to be true. It seems like they bump the base frequency of the CPU cores with every revision to get some easy performance gains (the M1 was 3.2 GHz and the M3 is now 4.1 GHz for the performance cores), but it looks like this comes at the cost of it not being able to maintain the performance; some M3 reviews noted that the system starts throttling much earlier than an M1.
    • saagarjha 2y ago
      Apple updates their microarchitecture with each bump.
• jart 2y ago
  I hate to say it but that's like a boomer saying they never felt the need to buy a computer, because they've never wished their pen and paper goes faster. Or a UNIX greybeard saying they don't need a Mac since they don't think its GUI would make their terminal go any faster. If you've hit a point in your life where you're no longer keeping up with the latest technological developments like AI, then of course you don't need to upgrade. A Macbook M1 can't run half the stuff posted on Hugging Face these days. Even my 128gb Mac Studio isn't nearly enough.
  • rconti 2y ago
    I think the difference is that AI is a very narrow niche/hobby at the moment. Of course if you're in that niche having more horsepower is critical. But your boomer/greybeard comparisons fall flat because they're generally about age or being set in your ways. I don't think "not being into AI image generation" is (currently) about being stuck in your ways. To me it's more like 3d printing as a niche/hobby.
    • ach9l 2y ago
      on ai being a niche/hobby at the moment... feels like something a unix greybeard would say about guis in the late 70s...
      • jart 2y ago
        Or what a prokaryote would say about eukaryotes.
        • alluro2 2y ago
          Seems like we've reached the "AI bro" phase...
          • jart 2y ago
            Using the term "bro" assumes that all AI supporters are men. This erases the fact that many women and nonbinary people are also passionate about AI technology and are contributing to its development. By using "AI bro" as an insult, you are essentially saying that women and nonbinary people are not welcome in the AI community and that our contributions don't matter. https://www.reddit.com/r/aiwars/comments/13zhpa7/the_misogyny_of_using_ai_bro_as_a_pejorative/ https://www.reddit.com/r/aiwars/comments/13zhpa7/the_misogyn...
• JyB 2y ago
  Same feeling. The jump from all the previous laptops I owned to an M1 was an incredible jump. The thing is fast, has amazing battery life and stays cold. Never felt the need to upgrade.
• fstephany 2y ago
  I have the same feeling performance-wise with the laptop I bought in 2020 with a Ryzen 7 4800H. But it's a heavy brick with a short battery life compared to the M1/2/3 Mac.
• bhouston 2y ago
  > I haven’t had even a tinge of feeling that I need to upgrade after getting my M1 Pro MBP. I upgraded my M1 MBP to a MacBook Air M3 15" and it was a major upgrade. It is the same weight but 40% faster and so much nicer to work on while on the sofa or traveling. The screen is also brighter. I think very few people actually do need the heavy MBPs, especially not the web/full-stack devs who populate Hacker News. EDIT: The screens are not different in terms of brightness.
  • 05 2y ago
    Pretty sure Air displays don't support HDR, are they really brighter?
    • bhouston 2y ago
      I am not sure. I notice a difference. Maybe it is just screen age related?
      • 05 2y ago
        They supposedly have the same base brightness (500 nits), with Pro allowing up to 1000 in HDR mode (and up to 1600 peak). Air doesn't support 120Hz refresh either. There's an app that allows to unlock max brightness on Pros (Vivid)[0] even without HDR content (no affiliation). HDR support is most noticeable when viewing iPhone photos and videos, since iPhones shoots in HDR by default. [0] https://www.getvivid.app https://www.getvivid.app
        • bhouston 2y ago
          I just looked at it again side by side and I think they are actually the same. Not sure why I earlier thought they were different.
        • nottorp 2y ago
          On a tangent, if I have a M3 pro laptop how do I test HDR? Download a test movie from where, play it with what? I may or may have not seen HDR content accidentally, but I’m not sure.
• rconti 2y ago
  It's so nice being able to advise a family member who is looking to upgrade their intel Mac to something new, and just tell them to buy whatever is out, not worry about release dates, not worry about things being out of date, and so on. The latest of whatever you have will be so much better than the intel one, and the next advances will be so marginal, that it's not even worth looking at a buyer's guide.
  • baq 2y ago
    M3 Air with 16gb (base config as of today) is potentially a decade’s worth of computer. Amazing value.
    • chamomeal 2y ago
      Base 16gb is absolutely wild. My base m2 air with 8gb is almost enough to handle anything I’d ever want it to without zero slowdown. A 16gb model for about a thousand bucks?? I can’t believe how far macbooks have come in the last few years
    • yborg 2y ago
      Except Apple won't support it that long :/
• 1R053 2y ago
  probably the next update wave is coming from the need of AI features for more local memory and compute. The software is just not there yet in usual tasks but it's just a question of time I guess. Of course there will be the pressure to do that in the cloud as usual, but local compute will always remain a market. and probably it's good that at least one of the big players has a business model that supports driving that forward
• prmoustache 2y ago
  > Perhaps it’s my age, or perhaps it’s just the architecture of these new Mac chips are just so damn good. I feel the same of my laptop of 2011 so I guess it is partly age (not feeling the urge to always have the greatest) and partly it is non LLM and gaming related computing is not demanding enough to force us to upgrade.
  • data-ottawa 2y ago
    I think the last decade had an explosion in the amount of resources browsers needed and used (partly workloads moving over, partly moving to more advanced web frameworks, partly electron apps proliferating). The last few years Chrome seems to have stepped up energy and memory use, which impacts most casual use these days. Safari has also become more efficient, but it never felt bloated the way Chrome used to.
• fullspectrumdev 2y ago
  Tbf, the only thing I miss with my M2 MacBook is the ability to run x86_64 VM’s with decent performance locally. I’ve tried a bunch of ways to do this - and frankly the translation overhead is absolute pants currently. Not a showstopper though, for the 20-30% of complete pain in the ass cases where I can’t easily offload the job onto a VPS or a NUC or something, I just have a ThinkPad.
• turnsout 2y ago
  Same boat—I'm on a lowly M1 MacBook Air, and haven't felt any need to upgrade (SwiftUI development, video editing, you name it), which is wild for a nearly 4 year-old laptop.
• frantathefranta 2y ago
  Out of curiosity and also because I'm wondering which specification to potentially buy in the future, how much RAM does your MBP have?
• nhumrich 2y ago
  I dont think this has anything to do with the hardware. I think we have entered an age where users in general are not upgrading. As such, software can't demand more and more performance. The M1 came out at a time where mostly all hardware innovation had staggered. Default RAM in a laptop has been 16G for over 5 years. 2 years ago, you couldn't even get more than 16 in most laptops. As such, software hardware requirements havent changed. So any modern CPU is going to feel overpowered. This isn't unique to M1's.
  • vlovich123 2y ago
    That’s because today’s hw is perfectly capable of running tomorrow’s software at reasonable speed. There aren’t huge drivers of new functionality that needs new software. Displays are fantastic, cellular speeds are amazing and can stream video, battery life is excellent, UIs are smooth with no jankiness, and cameras are good enough. Why would people feel the need to upgrade? And this applies already to phones. Laptops have been slowing for even longer.
    • slowmovintarget 2y ago
      Until everything starts running local inference. A real Siri that can operate your phone for you, and actually do things like process cross-app conditions ("Hey Siri, if I get an email from my wife today, notify me, then block out my calendar for the afternoon.") would use those increased compute and memory resources easily. Apple has been shipping "neural" processors for a while now, and when software with local inference starts landing, Apple hardware will be a natural place for it. They'll get to say "Your data, on your device, working for you; no subscription or API key needed."
      • vlovich123 2y ago
        That's a very big maybe. The LLM experience locally is currently very very different from the hosted models most people play with. The future is still very uncertain.
  • mixmastamyk 2y ago
• stouset 2y ago
  I feel exactly the same. The one thing that would get me to pull the trigger on a newer one is if they start supporting SVE2 instructions, which would be super useful for a specific programming project I’ve been playing with.
• fellowniusmonk 2y ago
  I got an MBP M1 with 32gb of RAM. It'll probably be another 2-3 years or longer before I feel the pressure to upgrade if not longer. I've even started gaming (something I dropped nearly 20 years ago when I switched to mac) again due to Geforce Now, I just don't see the reason. Frankly though, if the mac mini was a slightly lower price point I'd definitely create my own mac mini cluster for my AI home lab.
• mattgreenrocks 2y ago
  My 2019 Intel MBP is getting long in the tooth. These M4 Pros look great to me. The base model is perfect. Now to decide between the M3/M4 Air and the M4 Pro.
  • charliebwrites 2y ago
    I’m using the M3 Air 13 in (splurged for 24 GB of RAM, I’m sure 16 is fine) to make iOS apps in Xcode and produce music in Ableton and it’s been more than performant for those tasks Only downside is the screen. The brightness sort of has to be maxed out to be readable and viewing at a wrong angle makes even that imperfect That said it’s about the same size / weight as an iPad Pro which feels much more portable than a pro device
• digitalsushi 2y ago
  when the hardware wait time is the same as the duration of my impulsive decisions i no longer have a hardware speed problem, i have a software suggestion problem
• jrochkind1 2y ago
  I bought my M1 Pro MBP in 2021. Gave it 16G of RAM and a 1TB HD. I plan to keep it until circa 2031.
  • jrochkind1 2y ago
    Ironically, the day after I posted that my trackpad on my 2021 M1 Pro MBP stopped working. Doh!
• gniv 2y ago
  I've had Macs before, from work, but there is something about the M1 Pro that feels like a major step up. Only recently I noticed some slowness. I think Google Photos changed something and they show photos in HDR and it causes unsmooth scrolling. I wonder if it's something fixable on Google's side though.
• microtonal 2y ago
  Same. I used to upgrade every 1.5 years or so. But with every Apple Silicon generation so far I have felt that there are really no good reasons to upgrade. I have a MacBook M3 Pro for work, but there are no convincing differences compared to the M1 Pro. In fact, I bought a highly discounted Mac Studio with M1 Ultra because the M1 is still so good and it gives me 10Gbit ethernet, 20 cores and a lot of memory. The only thing I am thinking about is going back to the MacBook Air again since I like the lighter form factor. But the display, 24 GiB max RAM and only 2 Thunderbolt ports would be a significant downgrade.
• sylens 2y ago
  Agreed. Also rocking a M1 Pro MBP and can’t see myself replacing it until it dies
• AISnakeOil 2y ago
  This is how it feels to own a desktop computer.
• matwood 2y ago
  Same. I have an M1 Max 64GB. It has great battery life and I never feel myself waiting on anything. Such an amazing computer all around.
• crazygringo 2y ago
  Yup, honestly the main reason I'd like to upgrade from my M1 MBA is the newer webcams are 1080p instead of 720p, and particularly much better in low light like in the evening. Has nothing whatsoever to do with CPU/memory/etc.
  • rafaelmn 2y ago
    If you're in the ecosystem get an iphone mount - image quality is unreal compared to anything short of some fancy DSLR setup - it is some setup but not much with magnets in iphone.
• mark_l_watson 2y ago
  I think regretting Mac upgrades is a real thing, at least for me. I got a 32G Mac mini in January to run local LLMs. While it does so beautifully, there are now smaller LLMs that run fine on my very old 8G M1 MacBook Pro, and these newer smaller models do almost all of what I want for NLP tasks, data transformation, RAG, etc. I feel like I wasted my money.
  • xenospn 2y ago
    Which ones in particular? I have an M2 air with 8GB, and doing some RAG development locally would be fantastic. I tried running Ollama with llama3.2 and it predictably bombed.
    • mark_l_watson 2y ago
      I would have thought that llama3.2:latest would run OK with 8G. Same for phi3.5:latest
  • tarruda 2y ago
    Small models retain much less of the knowledge they were trained on, especially when quantized. One good use case for 32gb Mac is being able to run 8b models at full precision, something that is not possible with 8-16gb macs
    • Eugr 2y ago
      Or better run quantized 14B or even 32B models...
  • fwip 2y ago
    You can sell it, get most of your money back.
• JodieBenitez 2y ago
  Ditto... will probably upgrade when the battery is dead !
• andrei_says_ 2y ago
  I got 6+ years out of my last intel MacBook Pro and expect at least the same from my M1 Max. Both have MagSafe and hdmi output :)
• HumblyTossed 2y ago
  But this ad is specifically for you! (Well, and those pesky consumers clinging on to that i7!): > Up to 7x faster image processing in Affinity Photo when compared to the 13‑inch MacBook Pro with Core i7, and up to 1.8x faster when compared to the 13-inch MacBook Pro with M1.
• madeofpalk 2y ago
  Work just upgraded my M1 Pro to M3 Pro and I don't notice any difference except for now having two laptops.
• kromokromo 2y ago
  100% agree on this. Ive had this thing for 3 years and I still appreciate how good it is. Of course the M4 tingles my desire for new cool toys, but I honestly don´t think I would notice much difference with my current use.
• noman-land 2y ago
  I would normally never upgrade so soon after getting an M1 but running local LLMs is extremely cool and useful to the point where I'd want the extra RAM and CPU to run larger models more quickly.
  • yieldcrv 2y ago
    I have a 64gb M1 Max and already do that but yes, I was looking at and anticipating the max RAM on the M4 as well as the max memory speed 128gb and 546GB/s memory bandwidth I like it, I don't know yet on an upgrade. But I like it. Was hoping for more RAM actually, but this is nice.
  • astrostl 2y ago
    I'm bumping from a still-excellent M1 MAX / 64GB to M4 MAX / 128GB, mostly for local GenAI. It gives me some other uplift and also enables me to sell this system while it's still attractive. I'm able to exhaust local 7B models fairly easily on it.
• pjmlp 2y ago
  I have a 2009 and a 2018 Windows laptops. The only reason the 2009 one now gets little use, is its motherboard now has some electronic issues, otherwise it would serve me perfectly well.
• davidhariri 2y ago
  I think this is confirmed by the fact software vendors are still not taking advantage of ARM chips maximum performance. Where this might shift is as we start using more applications that are powered by locally running LLMs.
• crystal_revenge 2y ago
  On the other side, as someone doing a lot of work in the GenAI space, I'm simultaneously amazed that I can run Flux [dev] on my laptop and use local LLMs for a variety of tasks, while also wishing that I had more RAM and more processing power, despite having a top of the line M3 max MBP. But it is wild that two years ago running any sort of useful genAI stuff on a MBP was more-or-less a theoretical curiosity, and already today you can easily run models that would have exceeded SotA 2 years ago. Somewhat ironically, I got into the "AI" space a complete skeptic, but thinking it would be fun to play with nonetheless. After 2 years of daily work with this models I'm starting to be increasingly convinced they are going to become increasingly disruptive. No AGI, but it will certainly reduce a lot of labor and enable things that we're really feasible before. Best of all, it's clear a lot of this work will be doable from a laptop!
  • tomcam 2y ago
    I would love to hear more about what exactly you think will be disruptive. I don’t know the LLM world very well.
  • bayofpigs 2y ago
    [dead]
• dagw 2y ago
  The only reason I'd want to upgrade my M1 Pro MBP is because I kind of need more RAM and storage. The fact that I'm even considering a new laptop just for things that before could have been a trivial upgrade is quite illuminating.
• erickhill 2y ago
  I have an MBP M1 Max and the only time I really feel like I need more oomph is when I'm doing live previews and/or rendering in After Effects. I find myself having to clear the cache constantly. Other than that it cruises across all other applications. Hard to justify an upgrade purely for that one issue when everything else is so solid. But it does make the eyes wander...
• jfoster 2y ago
  I expect this trend to begin reversing as we start getting AI models that are intended to run locally.
• drcongo 2y ago
  I also have an M1 Pro MBP and mostly feel the same. The most tempting thing about the new ones is the space black option. Prior to the M1, I was getting a new laptop every year or two and there was always something wrong with them - butterfly keyboard, Touch Bar etc. This thing is essentially perfect though, it still feels and performs like a brand new computer.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• AtlasBarfed 2y ago
  I don't think there's any sort of processor for the last 10 years. It really makes me feel like I need to upgrade. What I do know is that Linux constantly breaks stuff. I don't even think it's treading water. These are interfaces are actively getting worse.
• zitterbewegung 2y ago
  I agree with you about not needing to upgrade but, it still stands that IMHO Apple is better off with upgrading or even having the need to upgrade with competition. (Also it's really good that Macs now have 16GB of ram by default). As I have had my M1 14.2 Max I believe that the only reason I would want to upgrade is that I can configure it with 128GB of ram which allows you to load newer AI models on device. The MacBook Pro seems like it does have some quality of life improvements such as Thunderbolt 5, the camera is now a center stage (follows you) 14 megapixel camera now all of them have three USB-C ports and the battery life claims of 22-24 hours. Regardless if you want a MacBook Pro and you don't have one there is now an argument on not just going to buy the previous model.
• 7ewis 2y ago
  I have exactly the same experience, usually after 3 years I'm desperate for new Mac but right now I genuinely think I'd prefer not to change. I have absolutely no issues with my M1 Pro, battery and performance is still great.
• matthoiland 2y ago
  I feel the same way about my M1 Macbook Air ... it's such a silly small and powerful machine. I've got money to upgrade, I just have no need. It's more than enough for even demanding Logic sessions and Ollama for most 8b models. I love it.
• clairegraham 2y ago
  Same. The upgrade from my Intel MBP to the M1 Pro 2011 was huge, but I haven't felt the need to upgrade at all.
• nsxwolf 2y ago
  My 2019 i9 flagship MBP is just so, so terrible, and my wife's M1 MacBook Air is so, so great. I can't get over how much better her computer is than mine.
• jcelerier 2y ago
  Interesting, I have a M2 Pro Mac Mini and I hit limits literally every day
  • bzzzt 2y ago
    All hardware has limits. Which ones are you hitting every day?
    • jcelerier 2y ago
      - RAM: 32GB is just not enough. I have firefox open with a mere 60-ish tabs and RSS is already at 21GB. I add my IDE and building a c++ app at -j10 and I start getting OOMs left and right, I have to close my browser whenever I build. - Graphics: the GPU and compute capabilities are definitely not there when comparing to NVidia mid-range offering, it's more akin to a laptop 2060. - Can only do 3 video outputs at most while there are enough hardware outputs for 5. The CPU is definitely fast though !
      • bzzzt 2y ago
        > I have firefox open with a mere 60-ish tabs and RSS is already at 21GB. Isn't that just Firefox deciding to let things stay in memory because the memory is there? Anyway, Safari seems to run fine with 8Gb and will unload inactive tabs. > building a c++ app at -j10 Strange you're getting OOM errors instead of more swapping. But why insist on running 10 tasks at the same time then?
• bayofpigs 2y ago
  [dead]
• tshaddox 2y ago
  > Perhaps it’s my age I always catch myself in this same train of thought until it finally re-occurs to me that "no, the variable here is just that you're old." Part of it is that I have more money now, so I buy better products that last longer. Part of it is that I have less uninterrupted time for diving deeply into new interests which leads to always having new products on the wishlist. In the world of personal computers, I've seen very few must-have advances in adulthood. The only two unquestionable big jumps I can think of off hand are Apple's 5K screens (how has that been ten years?!) and Apple Silicon. Other huge improvements were more gradual, like Wi-Fi, affordable SSDs, and energy efficiency. (Of course it's notable that I'm not into PC gaming, where I know there has been incredible advances in performance and display tech.)