Marvin

chasm said:

My hope is that Apple will keep the team intact and (wishful thinking probably, but) keep the product names.

Apple can probably come up with better names. I think Photomator would be best merged with Photos (like an editor service inside Photos) and they can bring Aperture features in too. With the likes of Aperture, some of the original teams left Apple so they didn't have anyone driving the project.

Pixelmator would then become part of the iWork suite and probably named like the other apps. Microsoft has had MS Paint, a bundled image editor for Mac would be very useful. There was one with the old ClarisWorks/AppleWorks suite:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleWorks

Word processing, drawing, painting, spreadsheet, database, terminal, presentation.



Drawing is more like Illustrator where painting is like Photoshop. Apple doesn't really need their own vector app. Apple made an Image Playground app for AI. They could have this as part of the new image editing app. A name like Canvas/Composition (Image Composer) indicates more what it's for as it can do painting without any photographic components.

9secondkox2 said:

Great step forward. This game is a benchmark for modern graphical capability. 

If Apple is touting this, then they’re feeling pretty great about what the m4 GPU can do. 

The game's marketing page says it will support frame-generation, which hugely increases frame-rate and is needed for the highest-end graphics. An Nvidia 4070 can run this game at upscaled-1440p (720p-native) with pathtracing and frame-gen over 60FPS. M3 Max and M4 Max are around the same as a 4070.

Apple said they are using 2nd-gen raytracing cores in M4 so there must be some improvements there too. The MBP presentation said 2x faster raytracing cores.

In a compatibility layer, Cyberpunk runs pretty smoothly on the Max chips without pathtracing:



A native build should be faster than this.

This video shows the difference frame-gen makes, FPS goes up 50-100%:



Frame-gen is part of AMD's FSR3 and Apple's MetalFX is reported to be based on FSR so the Cyberpunk game will likely use a newer MetalFX. They may apply this to other games like Resident Evil so they run better on mobile.

This is also the same base engine as Witcher 3, which still doesn't have a native Mac port so at least now it has a Metal renderer and can be ported. Witcher 4 will use Unreal 5 so that will already be supported.

Pathtracing is the peak of real-time rendering and can do photorealistic rendering so if Apple can handle this, there's not a higher quality bar to reach.

libertyandfree said:

mpantone said:

Dead_Pool said:

But I thought Macs were so efficient that they needed only 8 GBs?

It was pre-Apple Intelligence.

Many closely watching Apple’s AI efforts expect their LLM to take up around 6GB of RAM leaving little for applications. Increasing RAM to 16GB provides far more headroom which will be crucial if the user enables Apple Intelligence.

This has been heavily covered by tech media despite the fact AppleInsider failed to mention it in this particular article.

 So we actually need 24GB now with AI?  

AI needs as much as possible. 6GB is just for a small LLM, image generation and larger models use more. Stable Diffusion uses around 20GB of memory and goes into swap on a 32GB Mac.

16GB is a good baseline for most people though and a nice upgrade. They pretty much discounted every Mac by $200.

Galfan said:

Is it just me or does the M4 Max feels like a less improvement. Maybe it's because M4 Pro took such a leap I was expecting M4 max to become a 16 and 18 CPU with maybe 32 and 42 GPU cores but it remains the same on core counts as M3 Max......I think I got my hopes up a bit too much

Apple has comparisons to M3 Max on their site, under the 'go deeper' link at the bottom of the popup. Divide M4 amount by M3 amount to get the relative difference:

https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/

M4 Max has about 15% improvement over M3 Max but there are a couple of areas where it's as much as 30%. M4-series uses Armv9 so has faster vector computing. They also have 2nd-gen raytracing cores.

As usual, it's not worth upgrading for a single generation but there's a large jump every 3-4 generations. M4 is 2-3x M1 so people with M1 Max could comfortably move to M4 Pro to get the same performance at lower power and lower price.

robin huber said:

You know what else is nowhere to be found? Where to watch this video. 

It's on Apple's website, linked on the Mac mini page:

https://www.apple.com/105/media/us/mac-mini/2024/58e5921e-f447-487a-a789-3452c23b8400/films/announcement/mac-mini-announcement-tpl-us-2024_16x9.m3u8