Apple Introduces M2 Ultra
apple.com
apple.com
The products do come at a bit of a premium, but, in my experience, it's well earned and is a premium experience as well. There have been occasional periods of sub-par hardware, but generally (and especially current generation) Apple's hardware is extremely well designed and durable.
On top of that, I don't get the software engineer aversion to paying for quality tools. How many hours a year do you spend on a computer? How many hours over the lifetime of the computer will you spend? Even if devs weren't generally in top income brackets it would still be easily justifiable to spend several thousand dollars on tools that you were happy with.
Again, I completely understand not wanting to go with Apple in order to have much finer grained control over your system. But if Apple is selling what you're buying, then the pricing is more than fair imho.
They also wanted another $3,000 for an 8TB SSD. Similarly, I was able to buy a 4xM.2 PCI card, and populate it with 4 x 2TB SSDs for under $1,500. Furthermore my PCI setup is faster than the Apple system drive (7GBps versus 5.5).
Apple-to-apple (heh) comparison is tricky in this case since I don’t see LPDDR5 laptop chips for sale on their own, and this is a soldered-on-laptop chip so DIY after buying isn’t feasible, but an entire 32GB DDR5 desktop set can be had for about $100, so even if the low-power laptop form-factor commanded a premium, that’s still pretty egregious.
Dell is similar: for a desktop they want $200 to bump from 16GB to 32GB DDR5.
Apple might be a bit more daring with those prices than some PC manufacturers, but it’s hardly a behavior unique to them.
The pricing may be standard (a bit higher if we're honest) but the bigger issue is how far Apple goes to make you pay that premium. It borders malicious. It's also not great for waste, considering upgrading is near impossible.
Not "always". This is an artifact of the MacBook Air modern "appliance" era of Apple (and laptops / computing in general) where thin and light bodied laptops and compactness are the highest priorities, prized above self-service, upgradability, etc.
PowerBooks, by contrast, were amazingly and easily upgradable. You didn't even have to open up the case to do a memory upgrade — the keyboard just popped right up.
Two decades ago, the Framework laptop would have never needed to exist. And for the most part, likewise with Hackintoshes.
If anything, the rest of the industry has been moving in Apple’s direction with these kinds of limitations. They’re not more evil than their competition, they’re just ahead of the curve.
I agree Apple takes it further with the gouging than others. We should absolutely complain about it and criticize them for gouging! My criticism of the “Apple Tax” complaint is that 1. Nobody ever complains nearly as vociferously about other manufacturers doing similar stuff, and 2. The particular way people complain about Apple’s behavior is always phrased to kind of imply it’s unique and not just a more egregious form of a common behavior.
Sure AMD Epyc, Intel Xeon, Threadripper Pro and similar to improve memory bandwidth, but at a substantial penalty in size and power.
Today AM5 boards max out at 128GB, so to beat that it seems that you must go and shop at places where you must request a quote to help them know how much you can be charged.
As a long time Linux and macOS user, I don't agree. Even though macOS is more polished than your average Linux desktop environment, it's really very hard to ignore the unjustified markup. Nowadays I can buy a miniPC with a Ryzen5 and 32GB of RAM for around 400€, but the cheapest Mac mini nowadays sells for over 700€ and comes with 8GB of RAM and an absurd 256GB SSD. Moreover, a Mac mini tops up at 24GB of RAM, and for that you need to pay an additional 460€ for your weak 256GB HD box.
The M2 GPU is roughly the performance of the notebook edition of the RTX3060.
To get a MiniPC with one of those it is over $1200! https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004771159431.html
I feel your comment reads too much like fanboy excuses. CPU is not the only or even main requirement. I personally want to max out on RAM and HD. I can buy a mini PC with 32GB of RAM and a 500GB nvie for 400€. With a Mac, I need to spend almost twice that to only get 25% of te RAM and 50% of that HD space.
This was the norm since Apple shipped Intel core i5 Mac minis.
There is no way around this. Apple price gouges their kit. It's irrelevant how you feel they fare n artificial benchmarks.
How do you define price gouging?
Why is it wrong for a company to sell their product for the highest price people are willing to pay?
The M2 Mac mini's RAM is integrated into the SoC package, which has some advantages (good memory bandwidth, no copying between CPU and GPU RAM) and disadvantages (expensive, non-upgradable DRAM tiers.) Internal flash storage is basically non-upgradable as well (though you can easily plug in external thunderbolt m.2 storage.)
It also doesn't currently run Windows natively, nor does it support eGPUs.
I'm not sure any Mac mini model was ever much of a competitor to cheaper PCs, but mini PCs have gotten a lot better over time, probably inspired somewhat by the Mac mini, while the mini has followed in the footsteps of other Mac models by adopting Apple Silicon and unified memory.
The mini is a perfectly decent Apple Silicon Mac, and compares favorably with the older intel Mac minis in terms of performance, but I'd spring for 16GB of RAM (at least) for my use cases.
I don't see the point of your comment. It matters nothing if you underline design differences if in the end you can get a cheaper minipc that's upgradeable and ships with more memory, and you can't do anything about your Mac mini other than scrap it and buy a more expensive model.
> The mini is a perfectly decent Apple Silicon Mac
That's all fine and dandy if you artificially limit comparisons to Apple's product line.
Once you step out of that artificial constraint, you get a wealth of miniPCs which have a smaller form factorz are cheaper, have more RAM and HD, are upgradeable and maintainable, and in some cases have more computational power as a whole.
It's justified if people pay it.
>Nowadays I can buy a miniPC with a Ryzen5 and 32GB of RAM for around 400€, but the cheapest Mac mini nowadays sells for over 700€ and comes with 8GB of RAM and an absurd 256GB SSD.
So what's the problem?
If you like running Linux on your Ryzen5 miniPC with 32GB of RAM for 400€, you're more than free to do that. Apple's not stopping you.
Not really. The point is that Apple's products are overpriced, and in particular the Apple Mini underperforms and simply isn't competitive when compared to today's alternatives. I repeat, a mini PC with 8GB of RAM and a 256GB HD on the market for over 700€ simply doesn't compete with miniPCs with Ryzen or Intel i7 or even i5 that ship with 500GB HDs and at least 16GB of RAM which can cost 200 or 300€ less.
Even if they could make the same money by lowering prices (and increasing volume), it'd be a terrible idea based on how consumer behavior and status seeking actually works. If the quality were the same and the product were far cheaper, consumers wouldn't want it as much. The absolute worst place to be in any market tends to be the middle, you go to the middle to die. High margins provide a margin for error in business, it's invaluable.
And I'm happy to pay for quality tools, but I'm not spending $20 for copy-paste (edit: hyperbole. Every time I find some missing simple functionality that is available for free and easy on Linux, the Apple equivalent is available on the app store for a significant charge. Some games are simply more expensive on iOS than elsewhere because the developers know Apple users will pay more). Apple is still largely in the "luxury designer product with a consumer base of 10% historical savvy users who prefer it and 90% rich kids who like the logo and don't mind flushing money down the drain for a brand".
This is a complete lie. I've used PCs for 30 years and I'm not an apple fanboy but when you actually look at the market, there's only very few products that can compete to the macbooks to begin with and they're always in the same price range or more expensive.
> charges exorbitant prices for modest upgrades (currently $200 difference between 8 and 16 GB RAM.
This is true, but it's also true in the PC world. And PC laptops increasingly come with soldered RAMs so you don't even have the advantage of upgrading it yourself anymore.
And looking at the Framework laptop shop right now, I see a 16GB DDR4 DIMM for $60, and you can throw in a standard M.2 storage module. Maybe Framework is just singularly better, but that's still a reason to not buy Apple for me.
This is just being pedantic. "Mac vs PC" is just a widely known way to distinguish between Mac's and non-Mac's.
> And looking at the Framework laptop shop right now, I see a 16GB DDR4 DIMM for $60, and you can throw in a standard M.2 storage module. Maybe Framework is just singularly better, but that's still a reason to not buy Apple for me.
Ok now instead of looking at number of GB of RAM you get per price and show me quality and efficiency between these. I'm no hardware nerd/genius but from what I understand the Apple Silicon was out performing even what Apple CLAIMED in their keynotes and that caused everyone to scramble because they couldn't sit on their thumbs anymore. (Cough Intel)
So yeah, you may get same numbers of RAM, but that RAM isn't equal.
To be fair to Apple, theirs is LPDDR5 rather than DDR4, and it’s built into the SOC so it’s a different product.
You can currently only buy a system with 16gb of DDR5 from framework as part of a preorder bundle, not separately, and that’s a c£400 bump which makes the system much more expensive than the mac.
To be fair to framework, they are going to release a separate ddr5 module according to their store which will be cheaper than the Mac option, but if you are buying right now (which is what counts) then Mac is cheaper.
So basically you'll exploit the charitable developer who spent countless hours developing the software rather than pay them a fair price for their work. This is why people develop for Apple platforms first - because the people who buy Apple will actually pay them for their time and labour.
I am a programmer, and I contribute plenty of FOSS code. Very often, I find a solution with some issues and submit PRs. I'm not arrogant enough to do a couple hours of work and charge $20 per download for it, and I'm not a useful enough idiot to work for free for Apple, so I guess that bars me from doing the same on MacOS (even though I have to work with it for work). I guess if some of my code is general enough, some well-meaning Apple FOSS users can port it over.
It's interesting to me how much comradery and work for the general community is done in the open for and among Linux and BSD users with only the expectation that others will do the same for them, but many Apple users I've run into are like you, treating the simple desire to make things better for people with absolute derision and disgust. I guess if you aren't maximizing profit, why do anything at all, right?
How do you know it took whoever "a couple of hours of work"? How much time and effort do they have to put in to maintaining the software? And how much training and work did it take to get them to the point of being able to make the program in the first place?
> Ever heard the story of Picasso and the napkin? Legend has it that Picasso was at a Paris market when an admirer approached and asked if he could do a quick sketch on a paper napkin for her. Picasso politely agreed, promptly created a drawing, and handed back the napkin — but not before asking for a million Francs.
> The lady was shocked: “How can you ask for so much? It took you five minutes to draw this!” “No”, Picasso replied, “It took me 40 years to draw this in five minutes.”
It's not about maximising profit, it's about people getting paid for their time and work.
And you got the audacity to complain that some people try to make a living while providing a presumably valuable service/app for their users. "Treating the simple desire to make things better for people with absolute derision and disgust" eh?
Basically the company is hostile to anyone threatening their control, they're the champion of closed source and proprietary much more than IBM ever was.
The thing is it often isn't. I mean there are many vendors way worse then Apple. But it often just seems/looks/feels to be extremely well designed and durable. But if you ask someone with expertise they often can point out docents of "corners cut" which are not well designed and hurt durability. E.g. for saving some mm of high, some cents of production cost, some very small amount of weight, or likely but not provable intentional fragility to enforce their ecosystem. IMHO it's very clear that reliability and stability are secondary and looks and feel are main priority.
Doesn't mean that they don't have some very good engines giving their best to make things durable but when other constraints matter more it can be hard.
But it puts the reason ability of their sometimes very excessive premium prices in question.
Especially if you learn of they squeeze out their supply chain in ethical extremely questionable ways while hypocritically pretending to care about issue like child labor (if you squeeze your assembly line provider so hard that they can only make profit by using child labor and disgusting working conditions then no you do not care about child labor no matter how many times you force them to sign a contract where they agree to not use child labor and have proper working conditions).
That said, I agree that Apple’s strategy of maximising shareholder returns by squeezing their supply chain to just under breaking point is disgusting and that they are ethically culpable for the inevitable results. They’re probably not alone in this, but they have the most market power and probably push it the furthest. This is definitely an instance where you can hate the player and the game.
In other videos he shows how Apple puts display data lines right next to high-voltage lines instead of separating them with a ground line, which means you’ll fry the board if you get a tiny bit of moisture in that area.
So you will notice these cut corners when your device breaks and the repair costs almost as much as the original device.
the problems with the kind of corners apple tends to cut is that they don't matter until they do (i.e. just for a small set of users) in which case you often run into fun things like needing whole motherboard replacements or similar which tends to mean getting anew laptop and hoping you did a data backup properly and apple repair doing everything they can to push off any blame (i.e. cost).
I mean it's not worse then other laptops, definitely not.
But for the price a "developer laptop" costs I would expect more (i.e. _lowest possible spec_ of M2 14" which allows 64GiB of RAM + 2TB SSD == 4619€). Mainly I would expect better service when it comes to repair, especially if it's needed due to not so perfect design of Apple. I mean that price are 2 and a half Framwork semi 14" laptops with maxed out Ryzen CPU and 64GiB or RAM + 2 TB SSD. For most (but not all) use cases this Framework laptop will perform comparable. And sure the Framework laptop isn't as good as Apple but it's not "just half as good" (assuming the .5 missing framework laptop is for a hypothetical expensive OS license) and Framework isn't even "cheap" for what you get ... the balance is just not right.
I mean if they did other things to fill the gap like very good flexible support, actually ethical supply chain handling and/or similar it would be reasonable price I would love to pay (well and put Linux on it, but implicitly paying for a hypothetical OS license is my issue).
It's well designed, yes, but it's certainly not durable. The entire device will have to get scrapped and replaced if even the slightest thing goes wrong with any of it.
Looking at the price estimator, battery service is like $250. That's not cheap.
iPad had similar ill fated designs. I went to replace the battery of an iPad Pro and was offered a new one for the price of the battery, as a standard procedure (it's glued to the motherboard under all the other components, so no in-store replacement)
Completely unsupported by Apple. Doesn't get OS updates or security updates. No apps get updates for it anymore through the App Store.
Saying that using a 2010 computer when it's an Apple computer is actually one of the worst arguments you can make in this context. Virtually any other computer running any other OS is more supported.
With Dell there's the Inspirons
With HP there's the Pavillion
With Lenovo there's Ideapads and Yoga's and stuff.
With Apple, their cheapest laptop is comparable to a business laptop (Elitebook, Latitude), and their most expensive laptops are comparable to the "creator" laptops like Dell XPS or HP ZBook -- except the Apple computers have better build quality than those.
But people only look at the spec sheet and claim it's overpriced.
Apple are definitely guilty of gouging the price of upgrades, but that's just business sense, if you need the update then you have to trade how much it's worth to you- it's just that other manufacturers do not do that.
With Dell, by contrast, I can buy an Inspiron or a Latitude or a workstation, then wipe out the pre-loaded Windows junk and install the Linux distro of my choice, and it works fine. Then if I don't like the included SSD size, I can easily pop it open and install a bigger Samsung one that I bought on Amazon. And having a Dell laptop doesn't pressure me in any way to own a Dell cellphone (which doesn't exist anyway), or vice versa.
I haven't upgraded my intel macbook pro from 2019 just because the ram and ssd upgrade are irritatingly expensive, but eventually I'm sure it'll be tolerable somehow, either because my current one has become wildly too slow or because the cost comes down.
I have no reason to buy an iPhone, so I don't, what's the problem?
Yeah. So it's just that people don't complain about other manufacturers.
Because nobody expects the quality from these manufacturers like they do from Apple, so they don't get uppity about the price.
They want Apple quality without Apple premium, or "to have their cake and eat it too"
The only saving grace for Apple here is that all other manufacturers outcompete them on the unforgivable sins front.
Software and such has taken a bit of a dive of late imo but it’s still a viable platform for devs to sell apps and services into. So shrug.
For one the difficulty they engineer into their devices when it comes to repairing and servicing them.
Then there's the use of child and/or slave labor.
(if a child or a slave is making a product I expect it to be priced as such then/s)
Removal or weird choices in terms of ports and which cables you may use.
Question becomes for an independent software developer whether it's better to write off $7k or $3k and have $4k more in your pocket.
Edit: Thank you apple fan boys for your downvotes! :D
It doesn't make it any better, but let's keep in mind that this is true for ALL current laptop brands unfortunately. They all come from the same factories.
If anything I trust Apple more to audit their supply chain for human rights violations that I would trust eg Dell or Lenovo (and I use those brands exclusively myself).
I trust Apple to behave like a for-profit business. I've seen Apple make changes when it's benefited them (because their image matters to their customers).
And of all the OEMs they have always been the most aggressive at auditing their supply chain.
edit: Here's more to back my point:
https://9to5mac.com/2023/05/22/iphone-maker-wistron-quits/
If Apple isn't paying it's manufacturers enough to turn a profit then how long until a manufacturer cuts corners and abuses labor to make money?
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/20/apple-u...
It's called the "price". Unlike taxes, you can choose to not buy it and not pay it.
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=brand%20tax
It's not meant to imply that it's exactly the same thing as a tax. It's meant to suggest that e.g. Apple hardware is significantly higher margin than alternatives, an affordance allowed due to the reputation conveyed by the brand.
Like all analogies and metaphors, it does not imply equality, so showing how the two things are actually different isn't very interesting or constructive unless the statement being made hinges on wrongly comparing aspects that don't line up (doesn't seem to.)
Calling it a tax implies there's no added value, which is entirely false. If their products are more expensive for a similarly capable device from another manufacturer (that's a big if), it's because Apple's products have a reputation for being higher quality. Many people will always be willing to pay a lot more for a little more quality, in the least.
That said, the evidence that Apple has difficult to justify prices is definitely present in their product line. Love it or hate it, it's extremely difficult to justify a $1,000 monitor stand; even if it's actually not a result of high margins, it's really hard to see how they can add so much value into the concept of a reticulating monitor stand that it would be worth such a price tag. Or perhaps the $700 caster kit for the Mac Pro (a price that hasn't changed: I looked!) They may be the nicest casters ever made, but if it's an option you happen to want, the price from Apple is $700. They don't offer a cheaper option, so that's what you get with Apple. You may want it anyways, because well, it's just so nice and you don't care. That's fine, but that's definitely what most people call the "Apple Tax".
It is extremely difficult in same sense as I'd find difficult to justify million dollar home / 100K car with custom finishes and pleasing interiors. Are they really need to for basic dwelling and transporting from point A->B? Nope. However any reasonable person would set me right pointing out that I am in market of 400K home and 30K car.
But when it comes to tech product people have this thought that pricing should be what they have calculated is correct. And any reasonable person would agree to it.
If you live outside the US, however, you can probably get away with this as the total value is likely under the customs exemption threshold, or if you use the device for a bit before you get on the plane, you can claim it's "used".
As a Washingtonian, I would always list and pay use taxes on my purchases from the Portland Apple Store cough if I ever shopped there before.
Compared to the price of Two very good nvidia cards and the PC to host it I think the price is reasonable for running Linux on high end Apple Hardware.
Another thing is that the memory consumption is under 20W when idle and 100W when compiling the Linux Kernel. I think you make up the money just in electricity after a few years.
So, 10x faster than my Macbook, nearly exactly. While using 10x the power. Utilizing larger batching with the extra 3090 vram can actually result in even more throughput.
But I find it interesting that it winds up being nearly the same in images-per-$.
Apple’s marketing about how they compare to nVidia GPUs has been exaggerated, to put it lightly.
A pair of high end nVidia GPUs will be substantially faster than an M2 Ultra. They don’t really compare.
> I think you make up the money just in electricity after a few years.
You might want to check those numbers. At least where I live, I’d have to burn almost a thousand watts constantly at idle 24/7 for several years to start marking up the electricity premium.
The power savings is great, but it’s not going to justify spending thousands of dollars more. I love the quietness of my M1/M2 machines, but I’m under no illusions that I’m saving money by using them.
By how much?
I currently use macos, the software is tolerable, but when I need some serious computation power the server is running Linux. You can have more cores, you can have more memory, what else do you need?
don't matter for many applications but for some
and the it's a server unit you are buying not a prosumer desktop (with a ryzen CPU you get 2 channels, threadripper 4 channels and 8 with a threadripper pro)
Why do you believe that the "Apple hardware tax" here is being applied to some pieces of aluminium, rather than to their extremely-high-CapEx investment into a new SoC?
I would bet money that when the Mac Pro logic board becomes available as a component through the repair program, that a replacement of it will be 90-95% of the cost of replacing the full machine.
Sometimes it does seem to be applied to pieces of aluminum, like the $999 stand for the Pro Display XDR.
But your point is a good one that many people seem to forget: a lot of the tax is to recoup their massive investment in developing their own Apple Silicon SoCs as well as the OS and other software.
Apple's profit margin says otherwise. :)
> Apple net profit margin as of March 31, 2023 is 24.49%.
Let's put it this way: it would be a lot harder for Apple to do what it wants if it didn't have a stupendous amount of cash to fund it. That money pile means that they can shoulder the risks of their own plans, and the fact that they just pile on more and more profit every year just means these plans are largely successful.
If it's just chiclet keyboards you like there are no shortage of those. Logitech's MX Keys for example.
If you've got a high end current generation Intel or AMD workstation processor plus an RTX 4090, you've got a more powerful and probably cheaper system than Apple's desktops that have the M2 Ultra (which start at $4000).
Performance per watt is where Apple Silicon shines, so the only thing a Windows/Linux user should have envy over is the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. I would personally stay away from Apple's desktops even though I like macOS well enough.
the main issue I would have with buying such system is repair-ability
For one the questionable anti-repair, e.g. what they did with hard drives on their last desktop systems. I mean wtf. do you mean I can't just easily replace a worn hard drive that is a _must have basic essential feature for commercial usage in larger scale.
for the other that fact that RAM can not be replaced at all, which is most times not an issue for desktop systems on normal consumer use, but is an issue for a workstation system which might run 24/7 for most days on high utilization
Linux is awesome on the desktop but the only place where we are lagging behind is the laptop space.
As you point out, the power efficiency isn't as great a benefit in a desktop form factor where cooling is a lot easier to accomplish.
Wasn’t everybody against systemd?
>"(...) further than ever"
>"(...) largest and most (...) Apple has ever created"
>"(...) the most powerful (...) ever made"
>"performance to a whole new level (...)"
You can say this thing at every release, what's the point? Of course you aren't going to release product which is going to be slower, right?
Don't ask me why, but it's Apple's thing, and I'm not aware of any other major company that does it in quite the same way. You can find plenty of parodies of it on YouTube if you want.
*In cold climates, on a fresh install, cabled.
Comparing old-when-they-came-out-and-that-was-still-a-while-ago Intel chips to current-gen MX chips is borderline unethical.
You’ll also always find a footnote on such claims explaining testing methodology. See for example the long list at https://www.apple.com/macbook-air-13-and-15-m2/#footnote-1.
But I think they make a subtle dig at many other consumer products.
I have seen too many examples, where the "latest" product is inferior to previous-gen.
EG:
- A few car models I am familiar with had adaptive cruise control a few years ago, standard. Now, you need some expensive package. Definitely not "our best model xyz ever"
- Consumer appliances like refrigerators and washing machines just get more expensive, and more complicated, and crappier.
- A key. A friggin door key. How can you make a "next-gen" key that is worse than a piece of metal? Hello, every "digital" key fob. They SUCK! Slow, cumbersome, annoying sounds. Did I say slow? No, many keys are not "the best ever key".
- Ever update Microsoft Windows to a new version? Through today, I am scarred that an "update" to a device will be a regress.
So yea, when Apple says "our best ever", it may sound obvious and trite.
But other companies can't say this for _so many of their product lines_...
Touch Bar - most intuitive ever?
Butterfly keyboard - thinnest ever?
Bendy iPhone - lightest ever?
Antennagate - sleekest design?
Definitely thinnest. Still terrible. I don’t recall if they even attempted “best ever” with that keyboard. I suppose perhaps they would have said that about the laptops that included these keyboards …
My point is “thinnest” can be true without being “best ever.”
> I have seen too many examples, where the "latest" product is inferior to previous-gen.
You mean like when they removed the headphone jack? Or the magsafe laptop charging port, before adding it again years later? Yes, Apple made many improvements but they still mess up a lot and their software has just as many bugs (I use Mac OS for less than a year and already discovered three easily reproducible bugs/crashes in preinstalled applications).
But you can release stuff that is thicker[0] - which must have been hard to swallow for Apple, even if just 0.5mm thicker.
[0]: https://www.ifixit.com/News/36480/theres-something-new-in-th...
I mean, Apple did just this with the SSDs in the lowest tier MacBooks with the M2 launch. They were about 1/2 the speed of the prior generation.
Sure you can, you could release a product which is tad slower but much cheaper than flagship. Typically some cores are binned in the higher end chip to make it lower performance, you could launch the lower end chip later separately .
It was also normal to launch a lower performance chip but that has less idle or total power draw. M1 and M2 series are fundamentally that, there are better performing chips ( by core or total ) than M1, M2 but none at their power draw.
Even with the Intel i-series, you're not looking at the model name to make a purchase decision. You're looking at the technical specs.
Non-sequential naming also gives them the flexibility to shift new products into the category over time. They do this with the M1/M2 in the iPad.
I think it is hard to justify a ranking that puts anything above “max” unless you are designing for Spinal Tap.
In the end this spurring Intel to innovate, but will it be enough?
I realize there are some Linux' running on Apple H/W, but due to do the closed nature (H/W specs anyone?) it will already be inferior to MacOS.
I have a MacBook from work, and strongly dislike (hate?) MacOS.
Unbiased benchmarks need to be compared. Apple's press release doesn't compare performance to x86 with quantitative benchmarks and that is intentional. Don't just believe Apple when they tell us that this is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
For one thing, both Nvidia and AMD kick the pants out of Apple's graphics solution. Nothing comes close to touching the RTX 4090.
High memory workloads are completely off the table with Apple systems now. The previous Intel Mac Pro could handle more memory (1.5TB compared to 192GB), and it was modular.
Apple Silicon only really shines in performance per watt, but once you need a higher level of performance you reach a point where Apple has no product to compete. In a desktop environment, the advantages of Apple Silicon get whittled away.
I'm using Asahi Linux on my M1 because I dislike MacOS.
I would already recommend it for a Mac Mini but not for a MacBook.
- CPU idle (they are trying to hack it into the their forked kernel but it will be a long way for proper support by Linux)
- Sleep (not even Apple’s deep sleep)
Not involved with the project. I read about this a couple of weeks ago. Could be outdated already.
"We now have a cpuidle driver, which significantly lowers idle power consumption by enabling deep CPU sleep. You should also get better battery runtime both idle and during sleep, especially on M1 Pro/Max machines.
Thanks to the cpuidle driver, s2idle now works properly, which should fix timekeeping issues causing journald to crash."
[1] https://social.treehouse.systems/@AsahiLinux/110497512340479...
I went into the BIOS and enabled S3 sleep though, since it's sold as a Windows machine and Microsoft is pushing the new hybrid sleep stuff really hard.
Docker on mac does really truly suck, namespaces in Linux is truly the killer app for the kernel, maybe Apple will adopt a port of runj one day.
The new AMD and Intel CPUs are fine. There's a reason Apple never dares to mention them in their marketing shows - they always ignore things that are competitive.
Your FOMO reaction is exactly the emotional reaction their ads are meant to trigger - they're dialed in to manipulate you into this feeling to feel bad about not owning their products.
https://chaos.social/@marcan@treehouse.systems/1104910318986...
> I realize there are some Linux' running on Apple H/W, but due to do the closed nature (H/W specs anyone?) it will already be inferior to MacOS.
By that argument you could also say that Linux will always be inferior to Windows on the desktop
Those will be very cool!
Technically they both have datacenter focused, M2 Ultra esque APUs too (the MI300 and Falcon Shores). Intel delayed and then canceled the CPU part due to a lack of demand (it is now just a big GPU). The MI300 was HPC only, but AMD is trying to spin it as a more general AI product now.
The compile time for a debug build of LLVM and MLIR is basically the same on those machines, the desktop machine only winning by a little bit. Roughly 10 minutes. Yes, of course desktop vs. laptop is unfair, but it's also a 3.5 year old chip.
And if you really want all-out performance, there are still AMD ThreadRippers, which should easily beat an M2 Ultra in almost all multi-threaded workloads.
(Details on the benchmark run: Building LLVM from source using precompiled LLVM 15 downloaded from the official website, debug build, only clang;mlir;lld projects, using mold/sold linker on Linux/Mac respectively, ninja build tool).
I'd suggest buying a Starlabs Starfighter laptop maybe, it's crazy fast, super open and has a great battery life akin to macbooks.
I'd also say that Microsoft isn't "pushing" for Windows on ARM. Rather, they're adding support for Windows on ARM with very little weight behind it.
This is where things get into a chicken-or-egg problem. There's no reason to buy a Qualcomm/Windows ARM laptop given that an Intel laptop will perform a lot better, have better compatibility, and not have to emulate x86/64 for all the apps that developers won't port to ARM. Given that there's little reason for someone to buy an ARM laptop and only 1 of those reasons is under Qualcomm's control (making a better laptop processor), there's little reason for Qualcomm to make a better laptop processor. Given all that, over the medium-term (say, 2-5 years), there's little reason for Microsoft to devote a lot of effort to Windows on ARM.
When Apple introduced M1, they gave users a chip that was way better than what Intel was offering. It was night and day. Everyone knew that there wouldn't be Intel Macs in a few years so we all bought ARM Macs and developers ported things to ARM (as users knew they would). By contrast, no one in the Windows world is betting that ARM is the future of Windows - not users when buying, not developers when compiling, and not chip makers when making processors. Without commitment, there's little chance for success and no one is willing to truly commit.
If you want Linux on ARM, you can go out and buy a Pinebook. The problem is that you aren't getting a flagship CPU. You're getting mediocre 2016 hardware. Even if you got a Qualcomm 8cx Gen 3 meant for laptops, it's half the speed of an M2 (regular, not Pro or Ultra) and slower than what Intel will be selling you.
The problem is that the options for non-Apple ARM laptops are just poor. Even if you could get the best Qualcomm has to offer, you wouldn't buy it because you could get a better Intel machine - and not have to deal with compatibility issues and emulation. Sure, Windows on ARM can run x86/64 code, but there are always things that don't quite work or work very slowly or chew through RAM or battery because you're on Windows/ARM and no one is expecting that.
You can run Linux on ARM today, but there just aren't ARM machines that are compelling to use that aren't coming from Apple (save for some stuff like the Raspberry Pi).
It's interesting to see that Apple is explicitly targeting the M2 Ultra as an alternative to GPUs for machine learning.
I think it is great for consumers for Nvidia to have a competitor in this space. If you wanted to do ML, you really didn't have much of an option other than Nvidia, which allowed Nvidia to do things like disable certain features in consumer GPUs even though the hardware was capable and limit RAM. Having Apple as a competitor in the consumer space will force them to up their game.
This is why fanless M2 MacBook Airs are regularly loading models 5k dollar PCs might choke on - you can get 24gb of unified memory, while almost all high end consumer GPUs top out at 16gb.
The obvious counter point is an M2 MacBook in 14/16 inch size, where wallet permitting you can have up to 96gb of unified memory too...
I simply chose the Air in my example earlier because its incredible you can have that level of performance in ostensibly an entry level passively cooled machine.
But yeah the M2 MacBooks are incredible for local LLMs for their price. Nvidia doesn't have any consumer-level priced accelerators with that much memory.
> It's interesting to see that Apple is explicitly targeting the M2 Ultra as an alternative to GPUs for machine learning.
For many purposes the limiting factor on local LLMs is the amount of VRAM. nVidias with 64GB+ are insanely expensive (unless you're a funded startup). The ability of Apple Sillicon GPUs to use system RAM for the GPUs is a game-changer.
It'd be a lot more of a game change if Apple didn't continue its tradition of charging extortionate prices for ram.
The software support is terrible, of course, which is the biggest limitation, but Apple clearly wants to be in that realm as well.
Under /System/Library/Video/Plug-Ins/AppleVideoDecoder.bundle there's a Info.plist, inside there are references to AV1, below that is VTIsHardwareAccelerated = true.
AVD refers to Apple Silicon HW decoder. Side note, GVA means Intel, VCP means AMD.
I guess it will be like the situation of VP9. It was available at first via a special entitlement to YouTube iOS app [1] (com.apple.developer.coremedia.allow-alternate-video-decoder-selection) and later opened to all apps.
References: 1. https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apple-m1-vp9-av1-decodi...
Microsoft withheld AVIF (AV1 image format) support from Edge despite the fact that Chrome/Chromium support it and Microsoft said it was due to licensing issues (https://toot.cafe/@slightlyoff/109899372183448386). It is finally getting support, but clearly there was something Microsoft's lawyers were worried about. It's possible that Apple has some similar concerns, despite the fact that AVIF is supported for Safari. Maybe Apple thinks that some portions of AV1 that are only in video are problematic.
It's even possible that Apple has hardware support for AV1 in their M2 chips and just has it locked away until their lawyers green-light it.
Companies and their lawyers are going to see a lot more claims than we do about this stuff. We know Microsoft was concerned about AVIF, but we have no idea what their licensing concerns were. It might just remain a mystery to us for a while.
2) Does software encoding/decoding block any workflows? Which ones?
2) None, really, the increased use of bandwidth + CPU time is not a blocker per se. In this case y don't need hardware support but it sure as heck wold be nice to use those CPU cycles for something else.
What's even better for the environment is not buying a new computer unless it's actually necessary.. my refurbished M1 Air 8GB still works great - I can comfortably run a Debian VM with Vivaldi & VS Code (doing .NET development), and when I need a GPU for a few hours a month I just use a cloud instance.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/desktop.html
On laptops it looks the same (AMD is 2.x times faster):
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/laptop.html
So where is the astonishing performance Apple claims all the time?
Yes, I know it consumes less power, but my laptop is docked 95% of the time, so I'd rather have more power than more battery life.
In short, it's about balance, which I think is just as important as raw performance for most people.
Their more traditional "vs the rest of the industry" performance claims on laptops aim towards the single thread performance of M2. While maybe not a chart topper a year later, it's quite a far cry from the 2.5x difference you've found there. In the end though, if all you want is the fastest, loudest, most plugged in laptop you can just go out and buy a laptop chassis which accepts desktop CPUs from the likes of Clevo et al.
Note: I have a M1 Air that I love, best computer I've ever owned.
M2 134bn 192GB RAM 800GB/s 3 TFlops? $9,600
H100 80bn 188GB VRAM 900GB/s 60 TFlops $40,000
A100 54bn 80GB VRAM 600GB/s 20 TFlops $10,000
4090 76bn 24GB VRAM 1000GB/s 82 TFlops $1,400
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampere_(microarchitecture)#A10...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nvidia_graphics_proces...
Firstly, I was not particularly impressed with the MacBook Pro cases and haptics. The build quality seems to have deteriorated compared to previous iterations. Granted, this could be a matter of personal preference, but it seems to me that Apple's relentless pursuit of thinness and lightness has come at the expense of the premium, robust feel of their older MacBook models.
As for the haptic feedback, it felt a bit off. Earlier MacBooks had a satisfying clickiness and responsiveness, but that didn't seem to be the case with the current model I tested. I suppose this could be subjective, and perhaps some may prefer the current haptic approach.
On a positive note, the brightness of the screen was impressive - it certainly stood out. Apple has always been at the forefront of display technology and it's evident they are maintaining their standards in that regard.
Comparing with other laptops in the store, I couldn't help but appreciate the Framework's design and user-focused approach even more. Other laptops felt plasticky and cheap in comparison, with subpar build quality and aesthetic.
Despite the MacBook's stellar screen, it's hard to beat the Framework when it comes to customization, repairability, and the ethos of the company. It's a refreshing change in an industry that seems to be moving towards sealed units that discourage user modification and repairs.
The old MacBooks were in a different league altogether, and it's disheartening to see how things have evolved. I would love to see a return to a focus on robust build quality and user experience beyond just raw specifications and form factor.
The 14/16" are significantly thicker and heavier than previous generations, both in actual measurements and in appearance (as they don't taper at the edge like they have since the 2012) I truly cannot imagine looking at that and thinking any part of the design was imagined with the words "thinness and lightness" in the mind.
That ended in the previous generation.
The 12" MacBook and previous-gen (final-gen Intel) MacBook pros were the most beautiful and the most thin/light MacBooks
With the new MB Pros, Apple went with much more compromise towards functionality and quality. I think they are almost flawless – just much more ugly than previous gen!
I am not sure about the Airs – and maybe that's your primary comparison.
I think there was a change in Apple's trackpads around 2015-2017. I'm going off memory, but prior to that, the haptic feedback was more like a motor, and after it was something more like a speaker. I noticed it because I had a 2012 Macbook and bought a Magic Trackpad, and the click had a noticeable difference.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12cza6j1QuSMbc5cOf3pB...
I mean after all this is just a phone in a fancy big case. I mean, they are not too constrained by the size nor the cooling. Extra connections on board add how much, $50?
I'd think the beefiest version wouldn't cost more than $2000. It doesn't have a screen like a laptop etc.
Are you aware that the M2 Ultra isn't in fact a phone, but a SoC?
> I'd think the beefiest version wouldn't cost more than $2000. It doesn't have a screen like a laptop etc.
And it never will. It's a chip.