Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmspring | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one shaking my head that they kept comparing the M3 chips against M1 chips skipping M2?

Just like the last product release spent more time on huffing their own farts (the Apple Watch is the first of its kind carbon negative product), there is no real innovation or something to garner interest for me here.

View on HN

I think it makes sense in that the people that bought M2 are not likely to be in the market for an M3. The people looking to buy an M3 are likely upgrading from either an M1 or an older Intel based MBP.

A few years ago, I tried to figure out the battery life of the latest iPhone. The comparison page would only say "2 more hours than iPhone X", "4 more hours than iPhone 8", etc. Eventually I worked my way backwards to the iPhone 6 where the battery life was just listed as "—".

https://www.apple.com/iphone-15/specs/

Scroll down to "Power and Battery", about halfway down the page.

There's the obvious, that they want to say higher numbers.

But also, I bought a 16" MacBook Pro M1 Max when it was announced. The M2 Max replacement was announced only 15 months later and didn't seem like a big enough improvement to justify buying. Maybe they know there are a lot of M1 owners with my mindset, and we're who they're pitching.

Not real innovation (when comparing with Windows world) but having support for hardware raytracing now is definitely nice for games.

However, then on the information page they show Myst. Doesn't look spectacular to be honest, probably doesn't make use of hardware raytracing anyways. Having a short video of a fast-paced shooter with hardware ray-tracing support would be more impressive.

I guess it will take some time until games will adopt new Metal graphic APIs for hardware raytracing.

Myst supports ray-traced reflections. I agree that it's not a particularly good show piece though.

Way more people bought in to M1 than M2, so they're a bigger customer base to sell to. But didn't I see something about M3 being 2x faster than M2? I'm sure that's some BS about it being 2x faster in a specific benchmark. But I'm sure it's still a good generational improvement.

Edit: I love seeing what HN will downvote. Absolutely hilarious.

There's a slide comparing them all.

https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Scree...

The focus seemed particularly on people still on intel macbooks and selling them on upgrading. I don't think they would usually reference a product that outdated at this point but they brought it up several times highlighting 11x faster.

The mainstream marketing for iPhone 15 is only highlighting that's its made from titanium... I'm sure there is some innovation in manufacturing, and I do love my 15, but it's devoid of any innovation.

The M2 was a tiny upgrade over the M1 since the 5nm to 4nm step was tiny, 4nm was basically 5nm. The M3 is probably running on TSMC's 3nm which is a huge improvement over both their 5nm and 4nm processes.

I guess they are seeing too many M1s in the wild - you're supposed to upgrade to a new Apple device a d create e-waste.

E-waste? Apple devices retain their value really well. If you don’t hand them down, you sell them.

Are they not supposed to make comparisons? I don't understand what alternative you would like.

I understood they wanted a comparison to the M2, the most recent version. Most people care about “what changed since last version” it’s disingenuous to say “X faster!! (Than an model out date by a year)”

I assume the question is why there are comparisons to M1 instead of only having M2 comparisons.

They compare to M1 because that is their target audience upgrades not M2.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com