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M3 MacBook Air vs M1 MacBook Air -- Compared
Bullsh!t. There are tons of users out there for whom 256gb of flash and 8gb of RAM is plenty. Most of my family is perfectly happy with such a machine, and happy to spend the money saved on other things. The M1 Air my spouse has ran circles around what she upgraded from, and after nearly 4 years with it sees no need to replace it whatsoever. I will spend more on a machine, as I need the performance and capabilities, but not all users are power users.CheeseFreeze said:
Apple has designed the lowest tier just as a bogus smoke-screen option to make people start climbing the spec ladder.darren mccoy said:
Would you prefer the cheaper option wasn't available? That just means a more expensive starting price.CheeseFreeze said:The real cost for a laptop like this is of-course one that is equipped with 512gb of memory, and if you want to truly leverage its performance, with 16gb of internal memory.
Apple is deliberately equipping it with a measly 256gb so that you are inclined to walk up the ladder, ending up with a ~ EUR 1750 laptop, EUR 250 shy of an entry level Macbook Pro, which in return makes no sense either (and up the ladder you go).
Not climbing it is buying a laptop that will give you problems down the road. 256gb is a terrible option, similar to the 64gb iPad.So yes, a more expensive starting price would have been more fair to the consumer.Apple's pricing on the upgrade stages *is* exorbitant compared to industry component costs, but they shouldn't get rid of their lowest tier nor make it more expensive.
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M3 Ultra Mac Studio rumored to debut in mid-2024 -- without a Mac Pro
I still don't think going beyond Ultra (i.e. 2 Maxes fused together) is going to happen as its a very hard problem that only applies to the high end where its not worth the silicon design and packaging expense to Apple. An external chassis is limited to the performance of Thunderbolt, which is fine for some uses but not ones that require all of the chip's available PCIe lane performance. So a MacPro with internal slots still offers something. I still think that shipping a PCIe card with an M3 Max or Ultra on it so that a MacPro could become a multi-M3 monster is a compelling idea. Especially if they can figure out how to do UMA over PCIe, but potentially even without that by using virtual memory and/or frameworks.tenthousandthings said:Interesting set of comments above. I can't see the Mac Pro getting capabilities that can't also be acquired via external Thunderbolt/PCIe enclosures for the Mac Studio and MacBook Pro. I think that's the unspoken, as-yet unrealized message that the 2023 Mac Pro sends. Its place in the lineup is about convenience, having everything inside a box. It's not about having capabilities no other Mac can reach.
Maybe at one point, early on in the development of Mac silicon, Apple thought an Extreme, quad M-series variant for Mac Pro only would make sense. The original "Jade" leak, which was otherwise 100% correct, suggests that. But that is ancient history now. It dates to before the Mac Studio and, more importantly, to before the A17/M3 graphics architecture. Apple has been driving toward this since at least the A12X in 2018. That October 30 presentation in Brooklyn ("More in the Making") for the iPad Pro is important, and with the benefit of hindsight we can see it is the first major event that foreshadows the transition to A14/M1 -- the executives on stage, which include Anand Shimpi (for the first time, I think, I could be wrong), know there is no turning back. It's a very different feel from 2017, in retrospect.
If they abandoned the M1/M2 Extreme in favor of a different approach, a change in direction that may have been hinted at by Anand Shimpi less than a year ago (February 2023), then Apple has displayed an ability to adapt that is heartening. The whole trajectory from 2017 to the present looks really good in that respect.
I think there's no rush. They need PCIe 5 (let alone 6) and Thunderbolt 5/DisplayPort 2.1 to build this structure, and the industry shift to these standards will progress slowly. But I think it's pretty clear that Apple knows what it is doing. There are signs. For example, there were people all up in arms about how Apple uses PCIe lanes in the 2023 Mac Pro, but those criticisms were all predicated on expectations for PCIe 3 lanes, not PCIe 4. The whole thing was just unbelievably stupid.
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Apple is pushing hard to make the Mac relevant in gaming
This can be changed over time if Apple is serious about it and willing to invest in enticing companies like Valve onto their platforms. It will take numerous years to start building momentum, but once it is rolling then game devs will see the platform as more attractive and worth supporting. The M-series Macs are becoming more numerous quite rapidly, and they are more console-like than PC-like as a target platform. The hardware and drivers are more uniform and consistent, which makes it an easier target for development. If the development barriers are lower (eg Apple’s new porting toolkit) then it expands the potential market at relatively low cost. This makes the platform more interesting for people who want games, which pulls more devs, etc. It becomes a feedback loop that builds the platform over time.bernstein82 said:Lol, as valve so aptly put it this year:
macs aren‘t worth the porting investment. It just doesn‘t make financial sense.
So while apple may want to attract game developers, they are seriously uninterested. While the unified apple platform is huge, they havent even managed to attract cosole/pc games for ios despite things like the backbone one & playstation/xbox controller support.
personally valve would need to bring steam and their proton tech to ios. watching how amazing that works on my linux laptop is just jaw dropping. But then again steam link already works really well.
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New Apple Silicon has arrived with M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max chips
Supply constraints. New processes always have a lower yield which steadily improves as they work out the kinks.gwmac said:I wonder if the reason they don't just update the entire line all at once to the three M3 variants is due to supply constraints or it more related to marketing considerations? Would TSMC even be capable of producing enough M3 chips for the whole line. It seems doubtful since the max won't ship for around a month.
They also have a lot of M2s in the pipeline, so some time to clear those out before moving the other models to M3.
What will be interesting to see is how many generations will be on the 3nm process.
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First M3 benchmarks show big speed improvements over M2
LOL... that's not how this works. Never has, never will. For starters, the process number represents the linear dimension of the smallest feature that the process can create. It does not apply to everything on the chip, plus it is a single dimension whereas chips are 2-dimensional. In theory that means that this shrink ought to allow 2.8x as many devices in the chip (i.e. the number of transistors that is often quoted). But chips are far more than just transistors, and indeed Apple's numbers mention "only" a 37% increase in transistor count (M2Max -> M3Max). And the number of transistors does not linearly relate to performance either -- the reality is far more complex and nuanced. Furthermore, performance is vastly more complex than just one number -- there are a mind blowing number of factors, and greatly depends on what software you need to run. A benchmark gives only a vague snapshot of a computer's capability, unless what you plan to use it for is running that specific benchmark algorithm (which is virtually never the case). Performance is a vast and complex topic, so thinking you can related it to the process number is simply naive.timmillea said:5nM/3nM = 1.6 recurring, suggesting a move from the 5nM process to the 3nM process would yield a 67% improvement in speed/power ratio. We are not seeing that.
As for waiting for a particular process tech, that doesn't make much sense. The continual steady onward march of process tech ended over a decade ago, and now transitions happen with more fits and starts. They are enormously expensive, and bring diminishing returns or additional problems. Predicting what is going happen next year is difficult enough, further projections are worthless at this point.
Your M1-based Mac ought to do you well for years. When it makes sense to upgrade should depend on when it stops doing what you need, or when Apple starts shipping a machine which has a new capability that you need. This has very little to do with the process technologies being used to create it.
