brianm

sflocal said:

timmillea said:

The article is full of comments and opinions that will be out of date extremely soon. 

Apple subsidised the CD-ROM optical drive market before PC users knew of their existence and discontinued them just as PC users expected them as standard. Thunderbolt 5 is another forward-thinking but transitory spec. 

The Mac Studio has always been a hideous monstrosity and the kindest thing would be to end it. The new Mac mini, finally relieved in terms of historic size requirements to accommodate an optical drive is the way to go. The Mac Studio was half marketing and half a cover-up over the lack of a new Mac Pro. Apple have made plenty of missteps with Mac over the last five or so years. They make their money from iPhone and 'services' now and appear to have betrayed their core DNA. 

While I do believe the Mac Studio was a Mac Pro replacement, I don't see how a footprint the size of the Mac mini will handle the higher thermal temps of the Max/Ultra chips.  I see the Mac Studio continuing with the higher-tier chips.

Apple will have to do something groundbreaking to continue with the Mac Pro.   

Having done a fair bit of testing of the M4 and M4 Pro mini's, you are correct.  Even with High Performance on with the M4 Pro where it is an option to get the aggressive fan (which gets audible) - the M4 Pro still gets hot  to the touch (and internal temperatures) under sustained usage.
The hot to touch is likely because the power supply is directly under the top surface, and it has also picked up the M4/M4 Pro heat (from CPU, GPU or both) that then combines with the power supply heat before getting directed out the bottom back.

By comparison, even under sustained load the M2 Max in a Mac Studio barely needs to raise fan speeds to keep the chips running at a steady temperature - the air coming out the back barely gets warm, the Ultra gets a bit warmer and the fans go a bit faster to keep it steady - but fans still not audible in any sustained performance testing I've done if you are in anything other than a completely quiet room. (I'd suspect they designed for the Ultra, then found they could use the cheaper aluminum heatsink for the Max to save money and still was more than needed to keep it cool - also avoiding the problem with the 2013 Mac Pro where the central cooling system was pretty much at it's thermal limit with the chips at the time - so couldn't scale to more powerful GPUs or CPUs as their power requirements kept climbing)

The Mac Studio general design is a good system for those that need the Chip/ram performance of the Pro tower, without the need of PCIe cards. - at a cheaper price.  When upgrading my own home system, I opted for almost the base model M2 Max Studio instead of an upgraded M2 Pro Mac mini - more performance for around the same price, and it had better cooling. especially when I found a refurb of the specs I wanted in the Studio to save more.

Geekbench's Metal scores on the M4 and M4 Pro don't do justice to its actual 3D performance in several 3D rendering tests and games I've run.  They are a pretty dramatic improvement.
You should also include some actual Power usage info.  In expensive electrical areas, it could be a fair bit saved.

The M1 Max Mac Studio idles at around 10 Watts of power, Typical use is 12-18 watts or so, Peak CPU about 44 Watts running all 10 cores at 100%, running a 3D render (GPU render) that power seems to average 45-50 Watts with peak over 55.  The M1 Max with 24 Core GPU that I have access to scores a 3790 in Cinebench R24 GPU (a 32 Core GPU M1 Max hits around a 4330)

M4 completes the GPU render faster (and in tests like Cinebench R24 it gets a higher score (approx 4100) than the M1 Max 24 Core GPU, and is close to the 32 Core GPU Max. - it idles at 3 watts (under half the M2 Mac mini used at idle), typical usage is 4-9 watts (web/productivity), peak CPU power usage was 36.5 Watts using all cores at 100%,  and in 3D renders/games it averages maybe 25-30 watts of power under load with a peak of 35.5 I was able to hit in a game.  

M4 Pro idle is slightly higher at 3.5 watts, typical use was around 5-13 watts, and peak power during 3D renders or gaming was 61.5watts (all CPU cores at 100% did hit a peak of 71.2 watts). Most of the time it uses less power than the Mac Studio.  in 3D the M4 Pro performance is beyond the M1 Ultra and using Cinebench as an example past the RTX 2070 as well hitting 7762 score (in the range of the GTX 3060, or Radeon 6700-6800) - other rendering software had similar pretty high performance especially when Mesh Shading and Ray Tracing was involved.  Gaming saw similar massive improvements - if Ray Tracing was involved, it had over double the performance of the M1 Max with 24 GPU cores.

Geekbench performance for the M4's are showing up now.

Not as dramatic as the Estimates on your charts, but still good improvements.  It will be a very capable system.
M4 3700-4000 single core, around 15,000 multi-core is close.
metal score of around 58,000

M4 Pro Multi-core hits around 22,000 and Metal it hits around 110,000

Of course, those are just benchmarks, and not real-world apps.  So with some real-world tasks, maybe they hit closer to the 2-3x claims Apple has.

22july2013 said:

How did Red Hook Studios get away without posting any App Privacy Statement on the Apple App Store? And why would this company not want buyers to know how much data they are taking off our computer?

The original version pre-dates the App Privacy rules. and hasn't been updated in 5 years.  If they wanted to do another update to the original version, then it would have to get the App Privacy details to be approved.

This new version this article is about will not be on the App Store  - only Steam, GoG and Epic Game Store.

For Battery runtime, You should also include the "Web browsing numbers" for another indicator of battery runtimes - for the M3 Air that is about 15 hours Wireless Web Browsing.  For the Surface Laptop that is "Up to 13 hours of battery life" for the 13.8", and "Up to 15 hours of battery life" for the 15".

I personally change the power settings on the Apple Silicon MacBooks I use to "Low Power Mode" - "Only on Battery" to get the most runtime while on battery, the tasks I'm doing don't suffer from this mode - if I'm doing anything intensive (compressing large sets of files, working with large graphics or exporting many files, compiling code), I plug it in to get back to fully performance (or change the setting back to Never). It adds over 2 hours runtime to each charge, possibly as much as 4 more when combined with reducing screen brightness.
  - Low Power Mode reduces the maximum clock speed of all cores to about half, and may prioritize efficiency cores more.  In general you get about a 40-60% reduction in maximum performance.

There are more differences in the CPUs as well that explains some of the performance difference.
The M3 8 CPU has 4 Efficiency Cores, and 4 Performance Cores.  Has a TDP of 20 Watts
The P cores use about 20-25 times as much power as the E Cores and provide somewhere around 3x the performance - this does vary though CPU frequency changes frequently in the newer chips as load changes - an E core doing the same task considering it takes something like 3x longer to complete it has to run would still result in about 1/6th to 1/8th the amount of power used. (https://eclecticlight.co/2023/11/27/evaluating-m3-pro-cpu-cores-1-general-performance/ and some other related pages). The efficiency cores do take longer to do the same task, but use substantially less power to do so.  Most background tasks in MacOS use the Efficiency Cores.

The Snapdragon X series does not have efficiency Cores.
So the X Plus has 10 Performance Cores - TDP of 23 Watts
and the X Elite has 12 Performance Cores has a TDP of something like 45 Watts TDP (I've seen at least one article that said up to 80, but that seems too high, ASUS specifically mentions 45 Watts for their model, https://wccftech.com/snapdragon-x-elite-package-power-can-reach-almost-100w/). If it can go higher, that would start to impact battery runtimes.

The Elite TDP puts it more in the range of the M3 Pro - or over it

The M4 with 4 Efficiency and 4 Performance - the single core performance is higher than the X Series, and the Multi-core exceeds the X Plus, and comes within 5-8% of the X Elite.  Its TDP is apparently still 20 Watts.


Tried to do something simple, then kept stumbling on more and more info that made things less simple.