What has changed in CPU cores in M3 chips? | Hacker News Reader

What has changed in CPU cores in M3 chips?

eclecticlight.co

211 pointszdw305 comments

It's absolutely mind boggling that such a powerful processor can run at a power envelope less than 10 watts!

If the rumors about LLM stuff baked into Siri on the next iPhone are true, it will be interesting see how they make the most use of the hardware with that.

Good Lord this may the brain transplant she has needed for so long.

I thought you were piling on a human and felt a bit outraged.

Siri deserves more slander than you delivered.

I'm really hoping for a complete replacement. Talk about a product that went downhill over time.

Literally changes throughout the day from sort of working to insulting me by doing the opposite ("turn on the kitchen lights" -> all lights in the house turn off)

What's interesting is the A17 Neural Engine is about twice as powerful as it in on the M3 series - 35 TOPS vs. 18.

It's rumored the difference is to aid in photography and possibly Face ID, but of course this will be helpful for any onboard inference.

even if that's true, the A series neural engine is much worse than the M series, I'll say it wrong, but it can only do 32bit inference (or something like that) where M series can do 64bit, so A series can run LLM but has a series of limitations that M series doesn't.

Practically speaking, most models today infer at 8bit or 16bit (sometimes, rarely 32). You don't see an empirical lift at more bits of precision. Size of the memory is far more important.

If we're talking about the results, is there any reason to think it should make a difference at all?

Sometimes gradients are small but meaningful, if you constrain them to too few bits / degrees of freedom they'll be unable to backprop successfully. This can hamper training and therefore results quality.

You can also think about it as compounding errors - at any one weight index the bit values might not be too meaningful, but cascaded over a lot of tensor multiplications they will be.

Oh I was thinking we were talking about the same calculations on different hardware.

I think next year's refreshes across the board will have a different architecture so the neural engine has a lot more access to RAM so that models with larger parameters can be used and faster

I don't believe that's true, regardless of what you mean by "can run at a power envelope".

The M1/M2/M3 use 20-25 Watt at peak, but only 10% of that when idle. (But that's only in the notebooks – it goes beyond that in the Mac mini.)

The M3 Pro is basically 50% more of everything than the M3, so I'd reuse that multiplier to guess its power levels.

Parent (and the article) are talking about power per core.

Too slow to be useful for anything interesting.

Too expensive to be useful for any IOT or general computing.

I'm sure its really useful that one time you couldn't take a flight to a location and didn't have a car so you took a bus and that bus was made in 1990 and didn't have 120V outlets retrofitted and you decided to work for 12 hours straight on things that never used GPU.

Haha true that. It's really limited in terms of how well it can be integrated, however I really wish Apple would make some socket version of this(in future )for general consumers or atleast OEMs , it would be hugely successful.

The chances are close to impossible since it's Apple, and the architecture will need lot's of changes or the OEMs will have to change their motherboard design drastically to support a socketed M series chip ( storage controller, memory controller are all on the SOC)

Predictively you got massively downvoted but I don't understand how that is not the sentiment. People are really irrational around Apple stuff. Funniest thing is that I like macOS enough that I would buy their crap if it wasn't so absurdly expansive because of RAM pricing. I'm willing to let go of gaming and GPU apps (wasn't many in macOS anyway, because there were historically behind) but come on, not at this price... The battery life argument is a mystery to me. I wish they would figure out this would much better in a product like the Watch, instead of wasting power for useless computation, graphics or what have you...

Without taking away from how cool that is, the Threadripper 7980X manages to run at just 3.4W/core according to GamersNexus [1]

It's pretty amazing where everyone (other than Intel) is on the perf/W scale.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDEUOoWTzGw

I don’t know but I’m curious: I’d imagine at that many cores you’re probably reaching the limits of how much power the socket can realistically get? I know some motherboards have that supplemental power port.

Yeah motherboards for threadripler have extra power supply connections.

I believe there's a the option to connect two

https://videocardz.com/newz/amd-threadripper-pro-7995wx-96-c...

World record on cinebench with liquid nitrogen pulled 1.6kW

As I understand it, the main issue is cooling the damn thing. Socket SP5 can do up to 700W, and that's all emitted from a heatspreader 72mm x 75mm.

Getting the power into it isn't trivial, but it's not rocket science either. When the socket has 6000 pins, you can spare a few hundred for power.

I'm totally flummoxed by the graphs in the "P v E" section. Shouldn't "Total Time" remain constant-ish until the number of threads exceed the number of cores? Why does time increase linearly with the number of threads on a multi-core system? Or is "Total Time" here "CPU Time" and not wall clock time?

Yeah. It would make sense if he was running them serially and he sort of says that - "...show a near-perfect linear relationship, with each thread fully occupying one core for a period of 1.3 seconds". But that's not what he says elsewhere - "...so 6 threads will fully load a 6-core P cluster". It really doesn't come together, does it.

This is definitely the case on other processors. I’ve written a program to detect the number of cores by using that fact.

Agreed. I don't understand it either. If running two tasks on two cores takes twice as long, then I'm better off running two tasks one after another on a single core. But if it's CPU time is the interesting result that the increased clock on the E-core when task is assigned means that assigning task to E-core doubles throughput so that two tasks spend equal CPU time as one task?

That's interesting but it wasn't clear to me.

By “Total time” on the y axis” I assume that the time for all the threads is summed, otherwise the label “Time” would suffice.

Just an observation, I have an M1 Max and M3 Pro. The M3 Pros battery seems to drain much much faster than my M1 when watching YT. Wonder if this P core thing has anything to do with it.

From the independent battery tests I've seen the battery life should be noticeably better. Did you take a look at Activity Monitor to see if something is using high CPU?

Can you link to any one of the tests you've seen? I'm seeing similar results though for different reasons; and it's too early for me to call.

>...From the independent battery tests I've seen...

This test for example shows the longest battery life they have ever measured: https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/apple-macbook-pro-14-inch-2023...

> In our video rundown test, the 14-inch Pro lasted even longer, crossing the 30-hour threshold, becoming the longest-lasting laptop we've ever tested.

In this video they compare the M2 Pro and M3 Pro and the M3 Pro has more battery remaining at the end of the video: https://youtu.be/aQvsZQ3QBiU

Same for this video where they compare M1 Max, M2 Max and M3 Max: https://youtu.be/BWeuhxnWDl0

I'll re-test. I don't use the M3 often, so it could be something else like spotlight running in the background that's causing the drain.

FWIW, I've noticed Chrome uses considerably more power than Safari when watching Youtube - about 3 watts - when having one video playing in the foreground. Just to be aware in case you switch between them.

I'm seeing a bit better battery life in general on my 16" M3 Max than I did on my former 16" M1 Pro.

M3 has AV1 hardware decoding built in, it should increase battery life in theory. Check the codec used by YT using stats for nerds.

But no encoding :(

This extension lets you enable/disable codecs on YouTube[1]. It's also available for Chromium-based browsers, as well.

From what I've seen, though, is that M3 machines tend to consume more power than the M1 generation.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/h264ify/

I believe Youtube just uses VP9 if you don't have AV1 hardware decoding. At least that's what consistently happens on my Mac using various browsers.

Could AV1 be more costly to decode, even in hardware, compared to VP9?

There is no web standard to list what codecs are hardware accelerated—good for fingerprinting resistance, bad for battery.

Browsers can just limit the codecs they claim to support to those that the system supports in hardware.

I believe that's what Safari did for a while with VP8 or VP9 – it was only available while plugged in on my old Mac if I remember correctly. There was a developer option called "support VP9 even on battery power" or something similar.

You can force AV1 through YT settings. https://www.youtube.com/account_playback

Is AV1 more energy efficient than h264?

Sure, AV1 is the better, newer codec, but h264 has been around for a long time and is certainly implemented very efficiently in the HW decoder.

What browser are you using? Safari?

Is it draining or just not charging to 100% (optimized charging)?

> Load your current Mac up with the apps you normally use together when working, and watch their use in Activity Monitor’s CPU History window. If its P cores are fully occupied much of the time, and that workload often spills over to the E cores, then you should aim for an M3 with more P cores

Author mentions we can use Activity monitor to see where are apps running, in P or E cores, but I am unable to see this. Can anyone share how to check this? Running the latest Sonoma update

Window -> CPU History ⌘3

Thanks, I was looking at the CPU tab and thought something changed in the CPU Load in the bottom.

You can double click the cpu graph at the bottom of the process list, which is probably quicker than going through the menu bar.

Semi-related fun fact: if you open Activity Monitor with sudo from the command line, you get a lot more metrics and knobs to turn.

How exactly do you do this? When I try sudo <binary path> it immediately sigkills with a "launch constraint violation". And I tried on 10.8 from back before SIP was a thing, and didn't see any difference in terms of the per-process metrics I could sort by.

Launch an app bundle with open(1).

This works for me (macOS 13.5):

    sudo '/System/Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor.app/Contents/MacOS/Activity Monitor'

But it's certainly possible that I'm forgetting about some protection I had to disable to make it work.

According to my notes, the reason I saved this command is because it let me see the list of open files and ports. But I'm actually not seeing those when running it now...

You can get open files and ports even without sudo for non-root processes by just hitting cmd+i. Maybe running with sudo might allow you to sample or get files for processes owned by root (presumably the info is same as what you'd get with lsof though). (And by ports it seems to mean network ports. If you want mach ports, you can use lsmp).

That doesn't work on MacOS 14. It fails with a code signing violation. You need to use open(1) for app bundles.

Ye, quite a few apps don't function correctly if you run the executable directly.

  sudo open /System/Applications/Utilities/Activity\ Monitor.app

    sudo open -a Activity\ Monitor

If you want to see this per-process instead of in aggregate, xcode instruments cpu counters can show you which core a thread is running on.

You know what did change, is sales people straight up lying to customers faces about M3/ARM software support.

The M3 might be nice silicon, but robbing existing customers of what they had before is borderline bait-and-switch. The only reason people even cared about the proprietary M3 was Apples name is in front of it.

Apple might be able to draw in more performance software ports, but so far the end users either love the M3... or were very annoyed to lose a chunk of their daily workflow.

Hopefully it gets better with time, but some Apple fans were sure surprised how fast the ecosystem shrank on ARM. =)

What specific software did you lose?

The M3 does amazing in many perf, but virtualization of x86 like the old intel cpu units is SOL performance wise. Other options are also technically illegal to deploy (win11 ARM emulation of x86 is patchy/grey-area given licenses) in commercial settings. Note, 86box for M3/ARM is a lifesaver for many (backup/dump hardware configuration), and just reminded me to donate something nice to their coffee fund. =)

The FOSS tool ports are often on ARM, but a lot of small/mid sized projects just don't bother to keep up with Apples evolving whimsical ecosystem. Feels like we are getting haunted by PowerPC. =)

Yes! Behind all the hype, I was really surprised when Apple launched the M series. I was wondering how such a huge company can remove support for an architecture in such a small span of time(MS's legacy support has ruined us all?)

It wasn't just Virtualization that got jettisoned, but simple interoperability like default NTFS write support. They made it very unfriendly for users to figure out, and vendors would only give product specific driver support.

Also, poof! what happened to Pantone calibrated standards... lol..

MacOS is now losing features, but maybe 3rd party utilities can keep the OS un-Nerf'd long enough to be useful.

Don't get me wrong, some users seem happy sandboxed with fewer options... other folks... not so much. =)

Rosetta, plus the fact that M-series was so much better than intel macs, made the transition period relatively painless until native ARM support became standard (almost). Also, the tight control of its ecosystem allows Apple to do things like that more easily. Plus that, basically, they had enough experience already with iPhones' SoCs and OS (the macs' SoC were based on the iPhones' ones).

Exactly which use-case did you find "better" on the M3, because I am genuinely biased to believe only information appliance users are enjoying the ecosystem.

i.e. functionally equivalent to a phone or iPad, and shouldn't cost like a high-end laptop given it is functionally a Chromebook.

I think you are exaggerating a bit, but tbh I had a very similar attitude towards macs before, because at work we were forced to use some mac computers which I found insufferable at the time. Hardware-wise we had some pretty much ridiculous iMacs with HDD bought in like 2019 - internal HDDs as main drives should have been banned at that point. Software-wise, issues with OS updates, library versions, and too bloated interface.

It was only once I got my M1 air that I realised that macos was not the problem, but rather how the computers were configured, shared between people and used. Eg I just share my shell configurations and tools with my linux systems, iterm is great, homebrew is pretty fine for me, tools like rectangle making the window interface much more usable. There are occasional issues, annoying security restrictions that you have to manually waive all the time, OS updates that break things, but at least it does not force you to update in the middle of you having to run something important like windows do. And the default macos office apps are lightweight, and decent enough that I do not need to some bloated office software. Work-wise, all the computational software I use runs fine, and only if I need to use intense and long parallelised computations I may use my desktop (or cloud). I am pretty sure an ipad or an iphone would run a lot of stuff pretty ok, if they were not limited by their OS and peripheral support.

In any case, the main reason I got into macs anyway was the lack of fan noise. I do not think I can go back to any other laptop that makes so much noise again. I share my office with others and get constant reminder how it sounds like. Heck I am playing BG3 on my M1 macbook air. I can't do that on a chromebook, and neither anywhere else without a fan. My friend has a laptop with rtx 3070 and it sounds like a jet engine when we play together.

Keep in mind I ported a lot of glue code between Debian and MacOS ecosystems (and handling Apples interesting versions of CLI disk image mounting). When important people come into my office pissed they got misled by a sales clerk... I assure you no one is exaggerating the severity of the situation.

The fact is Win11 and MacOS share far more paradigms now (ignoring Win11 being almost unusable even on a PC)

And yes, ARM can be very nice when the graphics acceleration part also works. My point was one is going to have limited options from what they are used to on previous hardware (CAD, IDE, games, apps, etc.). The M1 and M3 cpubenchmark/passmark scores are respectable, if you luck out with a working port of your favorite program.

And yeah, I also sampled a GIGABYTE/AORUS RTX 3070 Laptop I booted up about 10 times this year, while it sucks in every metric I need (I rate it worse than an Asus EEE on build quality)... it is very quiet and the CUDA performance is respectable for a mobile demo unit (its only redeeming quality). Your friend may have a bad SSD brand cooking away, or its very possible something fell off (wish I was joking here).

BG3 is too scary for me to play, but it does look fun. =)

"or were very annoyed to lose a chunk of their daily workflow."

That is the current experience of the 3 engineers with M3 laptops at my work. Two apps they usually use are not working properly or at all. One's already pulled out their old M2 and gotten back to work.

You have my sympathy, and I hope the project artifacts folder is still exportable.

Best regards =)

Unfortunate name collision with Cortex-M3 cores.

I was expecting some new silicon area optimization revision like Cortex-M0 to Cortex-M0+, which seemed to open the floodgates to usable sub-0.2usd 32bit ARM microcontrollers.

>If you already have an Apple silicon Mac and are wondering whether to upgrade to an M3 model

I see comments like this in various reviews. Are there really people out there who would replace a Macbook Pro M1 or M2 with a M3 just to get something a bit faster? What are they doing that is so performance critical?

My last Macbook Pro is a 2014. I still find it usable for development work, and I'm only replacing it because of other hardware failures.

I am still rocking a 2012 MBP. I even have a PPC MacMini but it now runs Linux. I have no idea who is upgrading from a M1/M2 to M3 or why they would

I work with a lot of 4K elements and video in Apple Motion, After Effects, and other applications. The better the chip the faster things go, especially previews and encoding. Every second ends up counting.

I can see why others like me may upgrade. But I’m not going to bother just yet.

Funny how "genius" people on a "genius" forum can't fathom how people do other things than write text in a text editor.

You'd be surprised at just how slow running zellij in iTerm was on an Intel MBP. Somehow in 2023 we've managed to create resource hungry text interfaces.

I write text in a text editor all day but would still upgrade my machine on a regular basis. I have a Threadripper and use all 32 cores everyday. I'm still debating on whether or not to upgrade to the new generation released yesterday. 4 year old CPUs are not speedy.

the battery life is really good

Over the years I've gone through a Core2 MacBook, a 2011 MBP, a 2015 MBP, and now a 14" 2023 M2 Pro as each wore out physically over the years. Generally the charging systems and keyboards degraded severely by the 5 year mark. The 2015 had all those problems as well as janky graphics issues, but I used it until its SSD died recently.

Aside from performance it's hard to overstate just how quiet the current MacBook Pro is. The 2015 got noisy pretty easily especially if I had to switch to the discrete GPU, and anything heavier than 1080p30 in Firefox would cause the fans to go bonkers. By most accounts the last of the Intel models were worse. This one? After a few hours of transcoding video the fans still only spin up to a quiet whisper.

What I don't hear anyone talk about is the rigidity. You could hear the 2015 creak and flex if you picked it up with one hand. The 2023 just feels like a solid chunk of metal.

For all of its warts, this is probably my favorite hardware of the bunch. The software (macos 14) is utter garbage though. That's the culmination of lots of poor design choices over the years and nearly non-existent quality control.

I upgraded from an M1 pro to an M3 max. it's a nice upgrade.

I'd like to do the same. I want to upgrade to 4TB SSD, as I'm at the limit all the time and I spend a lot of time moving data from the laptop to NAS and back. With the upgrade, I'll get a M3 max for the peace of mind - it will be ridiculously expensive anyway.

I just switched from 16" 2019 i9 -> 16" M3 pro and 2 weeks later still stunned at how amazing of a machine it is. I do a lot of c++ dev for $dayjob and my current project which took 1m45s to full rebuild on i9 is down to ~25s on m3. Without a fan turning on or barely getting warm. Its _magical_. I still get caught off guard by the chassis being cold when first placed on my lap.

The issue is that the 2019 MBP16 were crap. Especially the higer i7/i9 models had thermal throttling issues when connected to an external monitor.

My 3000€ i7 mbp16 2019 recently died and I replaced it with an "interim" base model, 650€ MacMini M2. The jump is huge, that freakin Mini beats my 3yo (I bought it in 2020) decked out MBP that constantly spun fans. While intended as Interim until M3 MBPs where announced, I see no reason to upgrade right now.

I remember getting this jump accidentally - I bought a M1 Mac Mini for porting stuff too and for testing, and building on it was twice as fast as my 2018 15" i7. And it was silent doing it. Pity it was only the 8GB base spec, because it would have made an amazing main machine!

I used to have a 16" i9 for a previous job. It was absolutely terrible. Any sort of build process would cause the fans to spin up. It sounded like a jet engine taking off. The corporate malware scanner didn't help it much, either, as it slowed processing even more.

I just disassembled mine a few days ago and cleaned it out completely. Before that, my fans would literally max out with almost nothing running. Now, they stay silent pretty much all the time (until I do something really intensive). Still thinking about an upgrade to Apple silicon now, though.

I'm using a MBP 2019 16" at the moment, and I can't upgrade yet. Hopefully I get to move over to the apple silicon laptops in the next couple years!

Pro no, Air however yep, I'm one of them. Big performance boost from the base M1 to the M3 Pro.

Me too. I get every second generation. Air is so cheap, why not. The business apps I run used to require a Macbook Pro to run. Now the 13" air does it beautifully, and with amazing portability. I often have to carry 2 laptops when traveling. So before with an MBP 16" and 2nd laptop, it was damn heavy.

I’m very curious why do you have to carry two laptops? If that’s not the case that you carry the second laptop for the other person. If you use the two, then I’m very curious of your use-case.

Not who you asked but you might find it interesting regardless.

I've had a development role with an AV company where I'd periodically go on site a couple times a year to assist with shows to test real world scenarios or lend a hand just to see things in action ("production deployments" in both senses of the phrase, as well as to see actual users and behaviors in the moment. Time management, stress, and risk in a live event is something you can't really grok without having experienced it). Assuming the role of a show producer for those trips I would have two redundant company laptops to run the show that I carried but weren't mine specifically, while I had my personally-assigned work laptop with me to work remotely with. And if it was a long enough trip to warrant it, my personal laptop also to keep those activities separated. If new OS updates were being tested and deployed, add in a tertiary show laptop for that. There are carry-on sized Pelican cases that handle it fine. You might be surprised at the sheer amount of stuff AV professionals tote around the world, on top of the ridiculous amount of cargo that gets shipped via freight directly to venues. Going through airport security with two to five laptops was an average Thursday for many of the people I interacted with at that job.

Oh wow, yeah, that’s a curious scenario. I am aware of people that don’t use even a smartphone (still!), and there are people who routinely travel with five laptops!

I consult to a company that only allows company issued laptops to connect to their network and prohibits use of company issued laptop for personal use.

Ah, so it’s one work issued laptop and one personal then. Very typical, but I forgot about that use-case.

M1 to M2 Pro for the 96GB which is nice for LLMs/AI.

Or you could buy a car...?

Apple RAM premium is outrageous.

While the premium is indeed high, the total cost of the tool even at the premium is quite low. I think you can get the 14 M3 Max fairly decked out at around $5-7k. Not even close to a new car these days.

Maybe I am in the minority but I see it as a tool. My workflows work well in MacOS, I like the build quality of the tool. My replacement timeline is generally pretty long. The value this tool generates is massive compared to the cost of it.

I remember how often coworkers would joke about the cost of a Kinesis keyboard. They would die if they were a mechanic.

Amazing that windows systems are so bad that people are justified in buying a $7k laptop instead of a 4x 4090 + threadripper super computer.

What are you talking about? Just the four cards is $10k, and then you still need to buy the rest of the computer. And you probably can’t take it with you and use it from the coffee shop or the couch.

And yes, Windows systems are bad. They shipped broken TouchID for years, and they don’t trust you to turn off OneDrive (and will re-enable at every turn). Edge just gave me a toolbar yesterday that looked like browser chrome, but was actually a GamePass ad. I’m just pulling the easiest examples, listen to Windows Weekly for a full enumeration.

I think GP used "windows" in lowercase to refer to all windowing operating systems, not just the MS one?

Do people actually care about costs this low for business use? Thats just a minor cost.

Certainly there is a line to when it makes sense to compare costs but we are talking about sub $10k costs for a tool that lets say has a 3 year life for a business, so $3300 per year or $275 per month. I would think most of the individuals on this forum are generating more than $275 of value per month on their laptop.

Its less about justifying and more that the cost is meaningless compared to the value. There is some intersection of objective and subjective analysis here, I don't care if you want a $10k laptop that runs linux.

> Do people actually care about costs this low for business use? Thats just a minor cost.

Yes, in many places outside of SV, they do. $10k is slightly less than what I paid for my car, it’s more than a year of rent and is more than some (unfortunate) people in this country make in a year. And this is still Europe, a country with paved roads, fiber internet and free healthcare.

I do my job on a $1700 MacBook, I could probably do it on a $300 Thinkpad and I personally could go and buy a $10k laptop, but my girlfriend would without doubt leave me on the very same day.

Surprisingly, I care about things like battery life, noise and being able to put a laptop on my lap without the heat ensuring that there will never be any little Scarfaces

Well, I can’t charge $150+/hour for using a car…

A car that cheap will nickle and dime you until you've spend 5x its initial price. If you dont get lucky and it dies on you before your money was better spent by car mechanics.

In this context, Nvidia's VRAM premium (enterprise SKU premium) is high too.

Why not wait for M4?

Depends on your workload and what you're doing. This is an extreme example, but Marco Arment over on ATP discussed going from a top-o-the-line M1 to top-o-the-line M3, and saw his Xcode build time for his app (Overcast) get nearly cut in half (I believe he said 19 seconds to 11 seconds). For something that happens several times a day and is a critical and interruptive step in his workflow, yeah, he found it meaningful.

I make music mostly for fun and my m1 is barely keeping up with Logic Pro and the plugins I'm running, which are amp sims, various typical mixing plugins, and virtual drums. I'm not even using a crazy number of tracks at any given moment.

Given that a 7MHz Amiga 500 could mix eight tracks in CPU in real time, this is a very sad state of affairs. Your M1 is how many thousand times faster?

Are you sure that what the Amiga was doing with 8 tracks is equivalent to what Logic is doing? I'd guess there is more to compare than just the number of tracks involved.

Yes but I think there's a point: hardware horsepower is undoubtedly capable of handling such workloads. I'm not knocking on Logic, but for 'fun' projects especially I find it impossible to believe that the hardware listed is the problem.

VSTs didn't even exist when Amgias were relevant. Each of those tracks was not running a virtual synthesizer, convolutional reverb, parametric EQ, compressor, amp sim, etc.. A modern DAW is simulating an entire studio worth of hardware, not just an eight channel mixer. One of these laptops can mix hundreds of tracks without issue; it's the plugins that require more power.

There's a chance it's a logic bug or one plugin having some issues, I suppose

All plugins are certainly not made equal. Some I've used are surprisingly bad performance-wise for what they do, while others are just genuinely computation-heavy.

Did you have an Intel Mac before? If so, did you have the same workflow with the same amount of plugins or did you expand your usage based on the laptop capabilities? Just curious about “workflow creep” because I’m wondering if I should get an M[1..9].

My rule for Logic Pro is that it will expand to make any computer you run it on "just barely keep up".

Xcode and SwiftUI is one answer.

I’m tempted to upgrade my M1 Pro to an M3 Max.

Reports suggest id halve my build times and then some.

... how long are your build times? If your build times are high enough to really affect your productivity, I feel like there are much cheaper (and environmentally friendly) ways to halve them

(Not an ios developer, have worked with ios teams) Swift build times are notoriously awful. I don't know if most developers have much influence over that.

They are okish a lot slower than c but still reasonable if you dont use tons of generics/macros and other heavy stuff.

Still it could be a lot better.

like what? genuinely curious. building native apps is notoriously painful

Most places are unable to beat silicon advances to improve their build times.

What's the point of posting this and providing zero examples of how?

How could I possibly provide any advice. Of course build times are gonna be very specific to each project. I could tell you "just rewrite it in rust" but that obviously wouldn't be helpful

I'd be happy to hear them :-)

Ditching SwiftUI and going back to Obj-C would absolutely slash my build times ;-) But who wants to do that!

The productivity gain is all about instant feedback and developer flow.

It might be hard to justify on paper to an IT Manager in charge of budgets when you add up the minutes.

But as I work for myself, it's easier.

As for environmental concerns, well, two year used Macbooks don't go in the trash. Used Macbooks have very long lives in my experience!

How much RAM do you need for fast Xcode + Swift UI development?

Nobody knows.

Since the release of Xcode 15 it feels like the answer is, "More than 16 GB".

Geekbench for an M1 Pro multi-core is 11643, while the M3 Max (16 core) has a pref of: 21387. That would be a major upgrade so yeah, it is probably worth it of you can afford it.

All stats from here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1i5dBe_rsiNaQATH-D-Pj...

> Single Core Pref

should be single core Perf, short for "performance"?

They’re not doing anything critical, the people who upgrade for that minor bump are the fanatics who upgrade their cellphone every year for a minor megapixel bump. It’s fashion tech to the benefit of non-work related needs.

Yes because people couldn’t possible have workloads that benefit from a 30% speed up or have bill rates that justify it.

The option to have 128GB RAM for stable diffusion and local LLMs.

Since 8GB unified memory is "equivalent to a 16GB non Mac" Is 128GB unified memory MacBook basically a 256GB Nvidia GPU(s)?

They are not equivalent - it's pure marketing BS.

> Since 8GB unified memory is "equivalent to a 16GB non Mac"

Yeah, right.

Not in the machine learning world ;-) You'd need to switch to marketing workloads to make 8GB = 16GB.

I think that one is mostly marketing but there's a grain of truth in terms of the combined effect of unified memory (which is fast as hell) and macOS memory compression. But I wouldn't put 8 GB past similar to 10-12 GB on another system without these features.

Say I want to launch a vm with 8GB reserved memory. On a 10-12 GB machine I would have 2 to 4GB of memory left to actually allocate to the system. I don't see how unified memory magically fixes this. It's actually worse because even more memory has to be shared with the GPU.

This is like saying a 8GB disk is actually like a 10-12GB disk elsewhere.

it’s not my thing but there are certainly tech enthusiasts and even brand specific enthusiasts that like details like this as they do try to get “the best” from their tech.

so probably it’s not for everyone but i guess there is value in knowing how big of a bump the newest model gives.

> Are there really people out there who would replace a Macbook Pro M1 or M2 with a M3 just to get something a bit faster?

Are there really people who buy a new car every 2 years?

Yes. Yes there are.

Some people like to have the newest stuff and don't mind living paycheck to paycheck to do so. Or maybe they're rich.

There are some people who just waste their money, but there are also a wide difference in the value people get from their cars and computers. Someone billing $500 per hour is going to be a lot more willing to upgrade their computer for even a small improvement. They may even keep a spare computer just to make sure they have minimum downtime if something goes wrong. Someone who just uses their computer to watch youtube videos may be fine keeping their computer until it stops working.

That's totally fair as well.

However.

I expect that the majority of people who upgrade their computer regularly can't justify it as a business expense. But I could be wrong.

When I got Amazoned a couple of months ago and didn’t have a personal computer at all, a side contract fell into my lap where I billed $150/hour. (Don’t cry for me. I found a full time job 3 weeks later).

I recouped the cost of the M2 MacBook Air 24GB RAM/1TB in less than 15 hours worth of work - taking my after tax rate into account.

My work was not compute intensive so the Air was fine. But I would definitely pay for a 30% improvement at that bill rate.

Excuse me, but why? If your work takes longer on a slower computer, you can bill more. But if you can complete two projects in the same time on a faster computer, you work harder but can't bill more. This only seems to work if you bill $150/project but if you bill hourly it doesn't work out. Yet you and the parent comment have said this, what am I missing?

If you are billing at $150 per hour, people are probably counting on you to not be someone who would think, "If I keep a slower computer, I could bill for more because the client would pay for the time I spend waiting for my computer."

Imagine you go to see a lawyer who is charging you $750 per hour, but instead of using a computer, they are writing everything out by hand and then personally using a typewriter to type up their notes. You ask why they don't use a computer and they point out that they can make more money by billing you for the time it takes to use slower technologies.

Might you consider a different lawyer?

> "probably counting on you to not be someone who would think, "If I keep a slower computer, I could bill for more because the client would pay for the time I spend waiting for my computer.""

And yet, regardless of how moral it is, the calculation seems correct - billing at $150 an hour means things which take longer, get you more money. Two people have claimed that a faster computer will earn them more money, while describing a situation wherein a faster computer will earn them less money. It doesn't make sense.

With your lawyer comparison it's easy to see paper and tyepwriter; are you suggesting that customers know whether contractors are using an Apple M1 or an Apple M3, and have an idea of how much time that ought to change the quote by, and would consider a different contractor based on the computer they are using? I doubt clients have that insight or interest. Are you saying they buy Apple M3 because they are more moral contractors and it's the right thing to do? Even if it is more moral, I find that unlikely to be the reason since the argument was explicitly "it makes me more money" not "it saves my customers money".

> "people are probably counting on you to not be someone who would think, "If I keep a slower computer, I could bill for more because the client would pay for the time I spend waiting for my computer.""

I think people would see you upgrading your M1 to an M3 and decide you were being extravagant and therefore charging them too much, and leave for a competitor who is more frugal. Far more than they would decide you were a con artist because you didn't have the latest and greatest. Are you saying that the reason to invest in a new top of the line Apple laptop is to compete on a race-to-the-bottom where you can undercut competing quotes? That also feels unlikely - you could likely do that more effectively with a second hand AMD Ryzen desktop than a new Macbook Pro (something the well-informed customer would know) and that people competing in a race to be cheapest tend to aggressively penny-pinch rather than aggressively spend on the best.

Well first, no one racing to get the cheapest pays $150/hour. You pay $150/hour for someone with unique expertise.

And good luck taking that AMD Ryzen desktop on a customer site.

They paid for you at that rate with an M2, you said you would "definitely pay for a 30% improvement" - that suggests you would be done in less time and able to bill less money, and if you were on-site you couldn't even hide it from them and pocket the difference - so why would you? That's the bit which makes no sense.

I said I would pay for a 30% improvement - meaning if it would have improved my productivity or even just be less irritating.

Most of my time is spent between the AWS console and VS Code writing Python and Node. A faster computer wouldn’t speed that up.

And I'm asking why you would, when that appears to lead to lower income in the situation you described. Will you explain?

If you are optimizing for making the current job take longer, then you should use a slower computer. However, if the reason people will pay you $150 per hour is because you are 10 times faster than the person who costs $50 per hour, you want to keep your speed as high as possible because that it what creates the long term demand for your services.

You need to be rich to afford a new computer every 3 years?

At Apple's prices, yeah.

I sit on desktops for 5 years+ with modest opportunistic upgrades, and I consider that extravagant.

I think people forget that $4k+ for a computer is Quadro workstation territory.

I guess if you are paying 4k+ for your computer it makes sense to push out your next purchase. I'm usually paying ~2k.

IDK. My 3090/7800X3D desktop, assembled new, was ~$2K. That's a very premium computer.

And that's with the general Nvidia price gouging these days, and paying a premium for ITX as well.

$2K is very expensive for a PC.

$4k is a little or a lot depending on your circumstance. Assume three individuals that make the same income.

- One of them supports a family of 3 on one income. - One of them is single and supports only themselves. - One of them is married with dual-income and no kids.

This has nothing to do with wealth.

There are also those who can afford it but don't see the value add. There better be some serious value add for me to spend $4k IMO. Others are a bit loose with their money which is their prerogative.

I really only upgrade if my current PC cannot do a thing that I need it to do.

> I think people forget that $4k+ for a computer is Quadro workstation territory.

M3 MacBook Pro 16" is $2499, roughly the same as an equivalent Dell XPS / Precision laptop (for the same price Dell typically has half the screen resolution, much worse battery life, and more RAM)

Divide $2499 over five years, that's $500 per year. Not expensive on a developer salary in high income countries. It's a business expense.

That's... not really a great comparison. New Asus G14s/G15s are more similar to MBPs and much more competitively priced.

No. That's cheap plastic gamer junk. Those are toys. Different market segment. Not comparable. MacBook Pro competes with high end professional laptops, not consumer gaming laptops. Dell Precision with 4k screen is what you would compare it to.

Yeah, I dunno about that either. I have a 2020 G14, and its a fantastic piece of hardware. Honestly its overbuilt, except for the display (which I understand they have improved in more recent models).

You're right, it's good value for what it is, not a piece of junk. But it doesn't compete in the same segment.

If you sell your 3yo computer you are gonna get a decent price, so upgrading a 4k computer every 3 years is not the same as spending 4k every 3 years. Though, it highly depends on the initial configuration, and the additional premiums you pay to apple for ram etc do not seem to scale so well in the second hand market.

That said, I do not find much appeal to upgrade unless there is a specific reason myself. But there seems to be something in apple customer culture where people upgrade for the mere sake of stuff like new design or colour.

Median household income globally is about $10k, it's about 2 months household income worth.

Or maybe they work with computers in a business full time and the price of a new computer is minor compared to the income it's used to produce, especially if it's tax deductible, such that it's a valid business decision if the improvements are barely more than marginal.

M2, no, virtually none. The earliest M1s are three years old now, so may be up for replacement under some corporate refresh policies. A lot of corporates still _kind_ of live in the past, hearkening back to a time when a three year old laptop was largely unusable (and might well be _physically_ falling apart; general manufacture quality of this sort of thing has improved a lot in the last 20 years).

In the late noughties I worked for a smallish company where engineers got MBPs and everyone else got mid-range PC business laptops (I think Dell or someone?) The failure rate on the PC laptops was just astonishing; they were practically disposable. The failure rate of the MBPs was higher than you'd see today, though not as bad. Replacing machines in under 3 years was the norm because many of them didn't _work_ after 3 years.

Three years is also when AppleCare expires. That’s enough for some people/corporations to upgrade

Two to three years is also when laptops become a 0 value asset in the books in at least some jurisdictions (not sure about the US tho.) At which point it makes a ton of sense to get rid of it (e.g. sell or give it away to the employee.)

It may also be tax depreciation related.

2016-era MBPs failed in about three years though because the keys would fall off the keyboard or stop responding.

my 3 year old corporate HP feels like its been at end of life since the windows 11 upgrade. The 2 year old M1Max MBP feels indestructible and still has hilariously long battery life and crushes basically everything I ask of it.

I might mention that many at HP use Macs at home.

And seems like they don’t plan to make the HP experience similar to Macs.

A chance was thrown away when Palm was bought out and later sold to LG.

There is very little vision at HP & HPE.

> The earliest M1s are three years old now, so may be up for replacement under some corporate refresh policies.

Yup. It's hmm should I upgrade now or wait next year for a juicy M4 model? (some corporate refresh policies let you buy your old work computer at a heavily reduced price, giving you an incentive to get a good work computer)

Macrumors says buy now, based on the expected wait time for an update from Apple. But we already know it would be at least a year until the M4 would be released.

https://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#MacBook_Pro_16

> The earliest M1s are three years old now, so may be up for replacement under some corporate refresh policies

If anyone knows where I can be downstream of these M1's (website, other old stock websites) please let me know. I would like to procure 1 or 2 on the cheap. Esp an M1 Pro.

I've only used it to get a phone, but backmarket has a lot of old apple machines listed. I'm real tempted to get a 2013 trashcan mac pro, but I just don't know what I would do with it.

That's a good site. Unfortunately, they do not ship to Canada. Will need to look at them later when I visit the US. I have a service that provides a US address but no immediate trips planned.

Whoever I bought the phone from shipped it real slowly, and backmarket doesn't seem to have a lot of control over that. So if you decide to do that, be sure to order a couple weeks ahead of time at least.

Thanks. Good to know. Will plan accordingly.

Do a video where you turn it into an actual trash can

I believe SSDs are soldered onto the motherboard for M1 laptops + M1 mac mini, I wonder how bad of an issue it is when considering used M1s.

Can’t imagine it’s a big issue; the SSD on my 7.5 year old Skylake MBP is cheerfully claiming 96% lifetime remaining, and seems to be fine. The days of SSDs self-destructing after a couple of years seems to be largely behind us, at least for consumer applications; even low-end stuff has a decent practical lifetime these days.

Very much depends how it was used. You might be able to tell with the SMART report.

I've been trying to get our IT manager to bend the knee on our own policy

We ship our laptops off to some company who gives us some nominal amount for I assume the scrap value of the machine, then we can donate it to a charity

I'd be happy to "buy" an M1 Air with a cracked screen and run it as a headless Asahi Linux box for a hundred bucks or something. But he won't budge

This is hard to change because its a policy that affects finance, legal, infosec, and it.

Finance has been depreciating those laptops as capital assets and if youre going to buy one from the company that means its not depreciated, and they need to amend their taxes.

Legal and security are concerned about the data and dont know how to prove the encryption really worked and the keys are gone, but the recycling company has insurance and certifications “proving” they dispose of things properly.

You don’t need to amend your taxes to sell a fully depreciated asset.

Sometime you can accelerate depreciation, so you would have to amend in that case.

Last I checked loaded M1 Airs were going for $600 on FleaBay.

I was all set to upgrade to an M3 Pro until I saw the weird SKU binning for the higher memory models and remembered that my M1 Air still does everything that I need it to do and more. I originally bought it strictly for music production but have since used it more generally as I have to use Apple machines for work... I'll probably end up keeping it for another two years and swinging back to a nice Thinkpad with Mint or similar as my dev machine as there are insane deals on 7840-based Lenovos right now.

Imho M1 airs are the best bang for buck as mid-whatever-range laptops. Especially if one finds a 16gb one. Crazy if you think that before, the base macbook air you could get at the same original price would be a mere i3 one, while m1 actually competes well in raw performance with i7. Unless somebody wants something specific that M2/3 have that M1 does not, M1's price/performance ratio is hard to beat.

> A lot of corporates still _kind_ of live in the past, hearkening back to a time when a three year old laptop was largely unusable

With the amount of nannyware and spyware these corporations load up on your laptop it actually does feel pretty unusable. The difference in performance between my personal 4 year old laptop and my corporate 3 year old laptop is ridiculous.

The corporate laptop has so many antiviruses and stuff running all the time that it feels like a 2000’s era windows machine that’s been exposed to the internet for too long.

My work makes us Delinea (Thycotic) PAM which is single process and blocks all OS calls to check if you have privilege to run/execute a command. Additionally, we have to run CrowdStirke, Netspoke, Windows Defender, and some type of “inventory scanner” app. My work laptop is much more powerful than any of my personal personal computers on paper, but the nannyware slows everything to a halt (64 GB RAM, 12 cores).

It’s very painful to not have local admin rights on a Windows machine if you’re a developer. We can’t even install Docker or make changes to it without “help” from our non-developer IT staff.

Our dev machines (mostly Mac) are also locked down, thankfully we have “Admin By Request” which works better than calling in IT at least.

Fire up an ABR session, do your admin stuff, close the session. A minor hassle and it gives IT a paper trail for later (and probably pings someone if certain software names come up during a session).

My current jobsite still uses vista era laptops with 4GB of memory, a battery that dies within minutes if not plugged in, and a painfully slow spindle drive. A 3 year old computer would be a luxury here.

> My current jobsite still uses vista era laptops with 4GB of memory, a battery that dies within minutes if not plugged in, and a painfully slow spindle drive. A 3 year old computer would be a luxury here.

That sounds bad enough that I wouldn’t want to work for such a firm.

Are you you in a computer-centric discipline or a construction site?

My M1 Pro still feels super fast...

the corporate thing reminds me of my professor back in college - they'd upgrade him to the latest/greatest Power Mac each year, only for him to boot it up and terminal into his VMS machine and launch min...

Don't forget that corps also have financial reasons for constant upgrades. Buying new hardware is a great way to reduce taxable profits. There's also the amortization on write offs, and other accounting words I've heard people say but don't pretend to fully grok.

Also, decent way to lessen the beatings to improve moral since who doesn't like getting new hardware?

This reminds me of seinfeld scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEL65gywwHQ

Anyway, for the bottom line of your company I think it rarely makes sense to frivolously spend more just to decrease your tax burden. There's smarter ways to spend money.

> Also, decent way to lessen the beatings to improve moral since who doesn't like getting new hardware?

In many organizations, budgets are ‘use it or loose it.’ The money has to be spent otherwise you may not be able to ask for the same amount or an increase.

I recall getting a new laptop because it was close to the end of the fiscal year and there was a chunk of money that needed to be spent. It wasn’t that my current machine wasn’t useable but it was old enough to qualify me for a new laptop.

There was always someone with something older I could pass my ‘old’ machine too.

>Buying new hardware is a great way to reduce taxable profits.

Can anyone explain this to me?

There are ways that you can lower your tax liability with different types of deductions. Some of that is investment back into the company with things like computer hardware.

That’s a fantastic point, but I can also think of two more.

Let’s say you were thinking of an M2 but knew this was coming. The difference between the M3 and M2 may tell you it’s worth getting the newer M3 or the (now cheaper) M2.

Or perhaps you saw the M2 wasn’t a big leap. You want to replace your older laptop but didn’t want to get an M2 because it wasn’t a big leap over the M1 in many respects. This info would tell you if it was a big leap (buy now!) or you might as well hold off another year if you can.

The other reason is simply making it interesting. If every article was comparing to a 5-6 year old laptop, the answer would almost always be “it’s amazing!” Even if that’s what most people come from it’s a boring story. But year to year variation is much higher.

My wife “stole” my M1 Air. At the time, it was good to see a comparison between the M1/M2. I order custom spec ones but for someone who doesn’t they may want to buy a generation old to save me.

However, I agree on the phrasing. The amount of people who are upgrading yearly is much smaller than people who would buy a generation older Mac to save money.

The M1/M2/M3 base models all have only 8GB of RAM. Someone who cheaped out on a first-gen model to test the waters (even if they didn't necessarily go for 8GB) might now be looking to upgrade, and if they're buying used then all three CPU generations are worth considering.

This is me

I have an 8GB M1 Air for the sole reason that I was so excited I decided to go with the model I could get on release day instead of waiting a month. Not the wisest decision.

I figured I'd replace it at M2, and then at M3. But to be honest even with the 8GB it's fine enough still. I don't use it for much heavy lifting but it works ok-ish for that in a pinch. And for day to day personal use it's fine. So every year I go through the cycle where I *want* to replace it and then convince myself I don't really need it. I already have a monster machine for my work stuff, having extra horsepower for my personal machine would be nice but ....

I'm sure M4 is the generation I'll upgrade. Just wait :)

I recently bought my wife a new Air and the only reason why I went with the M2 version was the nicer screen. Otherwise the M1/8GB would be more than fine for what she needs.

Apple also still sells everything but the M1 Pro/Max/Ultra brand new in various devices too.

Used market is full of those 8 GB models

apple always sells the base-tier model the most, by a pretty significant margin. especially in MBA or mac mini. all the big-box stores like bestbuy and costco carry that model, and it usually sees further sales. So it's hard to say that it's specifically people being upset about ram vs just the expected distribution given the bayesian prior.

but yea 8gb is barely acceptable except as a pure consumption laptop. TBH even 16/256 is too small for anyone who's posting here, some npm/rubygems/pipenv/gradle/docker packages will eat that right up.

This is what happened in my case. I had an 8GB Air and while the CPU performance was incredible, it lacked the RAM to fully take advantage of it. I upgraded to a 16GB M2 Mac Mini. I consider it to be the perfect UNIX machine for my use case. If I need to access it on the go I remote in from a cheapo laptop.

I replaced a 16GB Intel MacBook Pro with an 8GB refurb M1 Air and regretted it within weeks. (Due to the initial claims about M1 using less memory and that the M1 destroyed my Intel's Javascript performance.)

Turns out that my 8GB machine would slow down significantly when hitting the RAM limit. This was expecially noticeable when running Final Cut Pro (almost unusable) or Photo Mechanic + Photoshop (I'd have to quit one to run the other). I tolerated this situation until the M2 Airs came out and I maxed it to 24GB RAM, and have been beyond happy with it since then!

My partner now has my 8GB M1 and it works perfectly for her.

I replaced my M1 macbook pro because with 16 GB of ram I was constantly swapping.

Most average HNers should get 32 or 64 Gb. You can use a 16 Gb machine but you'll be limited.

I bought a M2 Mac Mini with 16 Gb to test the platform. There's a Studio with 64 Gb in my future ;)

You assume that “most HNers” use their computers outside of work and a work provided laptop for anything processor or memory intensive.

I use mine exclusively for a side contract and that’s the only reason I bought it. I’m either using VSCode with Python or Node and occasionally to build Lambdas in a Docker Amazon Linux 2 container.

If I need more compute than that on my side project, I spin up a Cloud 9 instance on my client’s account.

If you only do Facebook you don't need a computer at all?

"Most HNers" mess with things I think.

So you think most “HNers” spend most of their waking time outside of work on computers outside of gaming?

The last thing I want to do is look at a computer for free and do anything “productive” after spending all day at work.

Yes, people with too much money to spare like a couple of Mac podcasters.

Not everyones a developer. M1 vs M3 performance boost for video editing seems like a decent upgrade. I'm still on M1 and I spent £4k+ on specced up MBP 14 inch. Its not struggling but it doesn't perform well when editing 4k with one layer of effects in DaVinci.

I was wondering about the improvement for photo and video editing, but that would be more of a function of the GPU than the CPU, wouldn't it? I certainly need more than 8GB of RAM for photo editing... memory pressure slows down Photoshop and Lightroom.

I have 64GB of ram, doesnt seem like its enough for Lightroom either. I think M3 has more GPU cores btw.

I just took delivery of a new-in-the-box MacBook Pro M1 Max with 64 GB RAM (cyber Monday deal)... hopefully Lightroom Classic is much faster with this hardware!

I was going to change my M1 for an M3 because I like the black one :)

Chaotic Neutral

mkbhd's review is that the m3 isn't black enough to be considered black.

It's black enough for me!

That's for your local BLM chapter to decide, not you!

Also, isn't using a black laptop by non-black person an act of cultural appropriation?

Apple should at least test your familiarity with Critical Race Theory before selling you one. /s

It’s contextualizatipn positioning. And a few.

Marques Brownlee has been rocking an M1 Pro laptop and ordered an M3. Which he cancelled after he got his review unit. He’s got enough money to not think hard about it but he cancelled anyway. Which stands as an interesting data point.

I upgraded from a MacMini M1 (Geekbench multicore pref: 8425) to an MacMini M2 Pro with 12 cores (Geekbench multicore pref: 14431.) That was definitely worth it.

The only upgrade for the M3 line I would make would be to an M3 Max 16 core (Geekbench multicore pref: 21387) or an upcoming M3 Ultra 32 core (probably a Geekbench multicore pref: ~30000), but it is very expensive and probably not available in the MacMini form factor, so I will hold off for now.

All stats from here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1i5dBe_rsiNaQATH-D-Pj...

I know the whole "carbon footprint" thing was designed to allow big companies and governments to pretend that 7 billion people need to individually decide to change their lifestyles, to fully understand the environmental implications of the various consumer choices they make and assumes that environmentally-friendly options are already available in all cases ...

But the carbon footprint of some people I see here must be astronomical.

I at least hope they sell/give away those machines to keep them in circulation. I'd be a real shame to have modern and environmentally expensive hardware like that be torn apart for scrap metal in a recycling facility. Many tech companies love the "eco-friendly" trade in programs that essentially serve to take working, used devices out of circulation.

For my personal machine I have a relatively new ThinkPad running linux that works perfectly well for everything that I do.

Ever since it came out I want to buy a MacBook with these new chips as my personal machine. But I haven't yet bought one because I don't need one.

Or I'll buy it when my ThinkPad dies. (Weird laughter).

And then over here I read about people replacing laptops every other year or so, and I wonder why I am the way I am.

It's mostly governments that need to change because they control land use policy. This is up to individual decisions of those 7 billion people though, because that's how voting works.

An environmentalist friend told me that my use of Terrapass is pointless and that there's no point attempting to reduce my footprint because big companies are the cause of it. So I stopped worrying about both things. This is fortunate because I've increased the amount of flying I do these days. Usually, environmentalists get in the way of things, so I was quite pleased that here was this positive development.

I did something fairly out of character for myself and replaced a six-month-old M2 MBP with a brand new MBP with an M3 Max. I attribute it to three factors:

1. I went with 16 GB of RAM on the M2 and sort of regretted it from day one. I have 36 GB on the M3 and feel much more comfortable about that in a machine I plan to use for the next 5-7 years.

2. Apple gave me what I thought was a very generous trade-in offer on the M2 - something like 90% of what I paid for it, even after half a year’s use. At that value, it basically felt like a wash going from the old computer to a new one, and I was just paying for the substantial upgrade on the old machine (Max-level processor, bigger SSD, quite a bit more memory).

3. I thought the darker color looked neat. That said, it’s much subtler than I imagined, and I wouldn’t have considered this as a factor.

Of course, the truly hilarious thing is that I don’t do anything at all intensive on my computer so I’d be just fine with just about anything. But what can I say, I like to know I could if I wanted to.

> 1. I went with 16 GB of RAM on the M2 and sort of regretted it from day one. I have 36 GB on the M3 and feel much more comfortable about that in a machine I plan to use for the next 5-7 years.

Very fair; part of the reason I went with 64GB on my ThinkPad, and Apple makes this configuration almost cost prohibitive.

It's not *almost* cost prohibitive, here (in France) a max spec Apple laptop cost about 8500€. Ridiculous.

That's a lot of money for a laptop. But its roughly the same as single intercontinental business class flight.

Computers are very, very cheap.

8500€ for a business class flight? Maybe first class.

SFO<->NZ business class is easily $US10k+ which should put it above 8500euro

> But its roughly the same as single intercontinental business class flight.

And most people (even in first world countries) never go on a single one of those in their lives. Even most businesses never purchase one.

I can't think of ANY airplane ticket that costs 5000 EUR, not to mention 8500.

Oh very easy to find. London to San Francisco, AA, business class, this Monday returning Thursday, 9700 EUR. Not even a flexible ticket

Google Flights says that’s a typical price

Direct with BA is €14k

Though neither of course a price a business would usually pay, due to contracts for special pricing and booking a bit more in advance

Long range business class tickets are easily that, if not more.

Apple prices in France are insane, partially because of how Apple adapt the dollar to euros, and the 20% VAT. Heck, at the time I got my 16Gb 14" M1 Pro plus an iPhone 11 mini for 50€ cheaper in Japan than just the laptop in France, in part thanks to a generous "back to school" offer.

What do you mean by max spec? In my country the 16inch, M3 Max, 128GB RAM, 8TB SSD is 9666 EUR[1] - France seems a lot cheaper.

[1] My country does not use EUR, i calculated it based on the current exchange rate.

I was hoping SSDs would be fast and durable enough these days to make ram redundant but here we are, back to the past in terms of price per kb

Game engines can be pretty hefty (especially the big 3D ones like Unity or Unreal), you can always find benefit from faster CPU/GPU/RAM with this type of dev work. This is the only reason I'm tempted to upgrade my M1 Max.

Yeah, most M-series are plenty fast I think. Just upgraded from a 2018 Intel Macbook to the M3 Max and the change is very noticeable. Hope and plan to keep using this machine again for 5+ years or so.

Different strokes for different folks, but I have a higher bar than "usable" for tools that my income relies upon. A moderate improvement in experience (whether performance, screen, storage speed, or merely that a key on the keyboard no longer "feels weird") warrants frequent upgrades of my main machine, yes.

Compilation speed difference between 2015 15" mbp and M1 Pro 14" was truly profound. I could compile in a time it takes to make and drink a coffee what previously took half night.

I have a MacBook pro m1. I'm considering an upgrade, but not for CPU. What I really need is more memory. This computer is not capable of doing any real load of development work without running out of memory. It's insanely frustrating.

Consooming <NEW PRODUCT> is critical, the performance capabilities are just a nice bonus.

I picked up a 16gb M1 Pro about as soon as they came out. It was unbelievable for the first year, basic React web stack work.

Now I'm working on a project that requires about six Docker images, and we made a questionable choice about Typescript packages for typing our API responses. The Docker consumes most of my RAM, and even when it's turned off, there's a visible different in the IDE between mine and my M2 equipped coworkers whenever a document that uses this dumb lib is opened.

So anyway I'm picking up an M3 Max next week.

Selling the M1? My email is in my bio. Thanks

When you need a high end laptop for web development, what a sad state of affairs...

Because, JavaScript.

No, in this case it is docker. Last I remembered, docker on macs run in a VM

An alternative to leaning on your laptop that way is to use a 2nd headless system to do builds, run tests, host containers, etc. It can be more economical over time and better DX to use this [semi-] dumb terminal approach, depending on specifics of your workflow.

If you need docker, just get a Linux laptop, it really works way better.

6 docker instances... I didn't click on this thread to be offended.

People here are jumping through hoops to justify these purchases. I don’t get it.

It is completely OK to want to have nice things in your life. It is OK to invest in yourself. It is OK to place a high value (2021 vs 2023 Mac) or any value (2014 Mac vs 2023 Mac) on your time.

Maybe the shocked reactions are a result of currency conversions, but when you factor in trade in value, the M1 to M3 upgrade isn’t much more expensive than an iPhone.

Over the course of two years, the Mac is no more expensive than a gym membership (actually quite a lot less depending on the gym) and probably gets a lot more use.

But there I go justifying again. If personal computing is your hobby or your passion, you should spend your hard-earned money on what you want.

It's not about about having "nice things" or affordability for me. I try to minimize upgrades mainly out of concern for e-waste and other externalities of manufacture, and because setting up the environment on new hardware is a time sink. Picking appropriate hardware for a use case is also part of that. I won't buy a threadripper workstation to game & watch YouTube on, for instance. It's okay to be passionate about responsible spending, too.

> and because setting up the environment on new hardware is a time sink

If you replace your laptop, don't you just restore a backup and you're ready to go?

Wipe the old machine and sell it and you're net the same amount of ewaste.

Essentially, yes, I'd transfer the account or restore from backup, but depending on the hardware change there may be other yak shaving to do.

I don't believe putting a used laptop on the market is necessarily cutting down e-waste in the same way as not purchasing one, though you make a good point.

imacs are mighty-fine unix workstations, ergonomically speaking. no other brand comes even close, in my opinion, although ubuntu is getting close. throw in ports/homebrew and all the gnu/linux tools i need for servers are at my fingertips. virtual machines scoop up the scraps.

> My last Macbook Pro is a 2014

For those curious: this is running a 3.7GHz 4-core Haswell. That's very roughly the performance that you'd get from a contemporary Alder Lake-N (the E-cores only variant). c.f. this very reasonable mid-range $450 Chromebook: https://store.acer.com/en-us/acer-chromebook-314-cb314-4ht-3...

Unfortunately some very useful Metal profiling/debugging tools [1] are only available on the latest hardware. Funny enough this was always the main reason for me to update, not performance (e.g. not being able to debug Metal shaders on my old Intel Mac was one important reason to finally upgrade to an M1 Mac).

Otherwise I'm still entirely happy with my 2021 minspec M1 MBP.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/tech-talks/111374

If spinning up a dev build on my M1 took 18 seconds, M2 takes 13 seconds, and an M3 takes 8 seconds... and I do this 50-100x per day, then the time saving can certainly be worth it.

> What are they doing that is so performance critical?

Anything related to multimedia processing.

Whether it's video encoding or live audio processing or rendering or whatever.

M1 might be more than fast enough for emails and web development, but multimedia is a whole different beast.

People forget that the "Pro" refers to media professionals, not development professionals. Remember the Touch Bar? It was designed for artists and editors for things like color selection and scrubbing and sound control, not for programmers.

And why on earth would you do that on a laptop to start with?

I'm sure apple not having decent desktops for a decade leaves a mark. I guess I'm surprised people put up with it.

Why wouldn't you want do to that on a laptop? Especially one with a bunch of hardware accelerated codec support and very decent HDR display.

For the same reason literally everybody else uses laptops -- so you can take your work on the go.

You don't think sound producers visit different studios each week?

You don't think video editors have to get work done while they travel?

You don't think multimedia professionals work both at the office and home like the rest of us?

Why wouldn't you do it on a laptop if you can?

Work on a laptop if you must. But don't encode/render etc. on a laptop.

I use my laptop for encoding video all the time.

What's your justification for saying I shouldn't, precisely?

What's next -- I shouldn't use it to compile software either?

If you are buying a new laptop every generation just for it to be bearable just buy a proper machine that can encode it for you.

Bonus points for being able to do it while your laptop is in your bag.

In the United States, internet connectivity is insufficient for uncompressed video footage.

Does people really process uncompressed videos on their laptops?

Yes

Well you might work on projects where the extra performance makes working in the viewport faster. It’s not hard to find graphics workflows where extra resources aren’t useful.

Why would someone need to buy an additional powerful computer if they can do it on directly on their laptop, which needs to be powerful anyway?

> You don't think video editors have to get work done while they travel?

MKBHD used to ship an iMac Pro around before Apple Silicon. :)

I have been moving twice a year (June-September) with an iMac for the last six years and I think it’s been an overcomplication mistake, specially in March 2020.

I thought desktops are more future proof

Because the laptop can also be a desktop when hooked up to a big screen and accessories. But a desktop wont ever be a laptop.

I'm not saying to ditch the laptop, just do the processing on a machine made for it.

And of course use the desktop as your main device when you are at your home/office wherever the desktop is.

I did that for years, moving to a single MBP that can do everything is surprisingly nice

> What are they doing that is so performance critical?

There are close to 100M MacBook users.

People will give you reasons here - because this is a non-representative group - but this is a tiny fraction of their user base.

The main reasons are Apple's marketing and signaling.

I went from an M1 Pro with 32GB of RAM to an M3 Max with 64GB. I had been regretting not getting 64GB of RAM. I plan to keep this machine at least five years, so I traded in while the trade-in value was still relatively high. I find the M3 Max to be dramatically faster. I do a lot of Python development (mostly numerical code, some micro services) and increasingly complex k8s setups. Some of my containers are still AMD64, and while these ran acceptably fast on the M1 Pro, they are MUCH faster on the M3 Max. For example, solving conda environments on a fairly complex container takes about 1/2 the time it seems (about as fast as my work 12th gen i9 Linux laptop). I am very impressed with the jump between the M3 Max and the M1 Pro, and I haven’t even touched the GPU yet.

I have a 2015 MBP with Linux that I miss every single day while using the work M1 Pro with its crappy keyboard and short key travel. The M1 is faster but doesn't impact my work much, and I find macOS really frustrating to use.

I usually skip generations. I bought an M2 a couple months ago. Waiting for sure and largely ignoring the M3 hype. I don’t need to care, so I spend roughly half as much time consuming tech hype as I used to, and spend that extra time reading or touching grass.

I used to upgrade my MacBook every year.

I'm not sure if this is still true, but I found the resale value great enough that it was almost the same cost over time to upgrade annually vs every 3-4 years. Of course if you're only upgrading every 9-10 years, the math changes significantly.

That said, due to changing priorities and needs, my current MBP is from 2018. I am planning to upgrade to an M3 MBP this week.

While my current MBP does what I need, some development processes & platforms I use nowadays are taking more time than I'd like. If it saves me 15 minutes a day, it's a great deal.

I just upgraded my top-spec Intel MBA from 2020 to an M3 Pro MBP.

Adjusted for inflation, the M3 was about 20% more expensive for close to infinitely more performance.

I could see holding on to this M3 Pro as my daily driver for 5-10 years assuming I don't drop it too many times.

I'll probably replace my wife's MBA from 2018 next month for whatever the bottom spec MBA is now.

Reading your comment, my first reaction is “are there really people or there who upgrade not because they want their computer faster?”

Joke aside, for people who read reviews, I don’t think they read it because their computer is dying. So I think it is fitting from the selection bias there to focus on performance improvement. (Like when I buy a car I won’t read a review because I don’t care its performance.)

Creative workflows can often use the extra power, particularly with video.

For me, doing development and office work, I'll be hard pressed to ever replace my M1 Max w/ 64GB. I don't feel like I ever wait for anything.

Usually the upgrade is for better webcam, screen, a fresh keyboard, maybe want more storage, etc. MacBooks hold value, so you can resell them at good prices towards the next gen.

You can configure the M3 models with twice as much RAM (128GB) as the M1 models, that’s quite an upgrade if your workflow is memory intensive. It’s especially compelling for graphics work as that memory is also used as VRAM. A desktop RTX 6000 gets you 48GB of VRAM for $6800.

Depends. Someone might want to go from base M1 to M3 Pro for example.

That said I have an M2 Pro MBP and this thing is a monster.

I have an M1 MBP that from work an a M2 MBA for my home, I don't think I'll need to upgrade for the next decade

I thought M1 was a godlike chip. Why is there a need to upgrade to M1+ 3 years later? For comparison, it took me about 10 years to replace my second gen i7.

There really is no need unless you're doing something where you could always benefit from more juice (e.g. video editing). I compile Rust all day on my base M1 and have no complaints

I think the M1 Pro/16GB is the sweet spot for home development. I have an old Intel Air that I want to upgrade out of but the prices are still a little high. I get the feeling it will not be going much lower since any discounts should have materialized. Will keep looking at the Refurbished page on Apple.

My work machine has those specs. My workloads aren't massive, but it's been able to handle everything I've thrown at it without any issues. It also runs Factorio almost as well as my gaming desktop.

64-128GB is my current minimum due to 30+GB used by docker and a poor rdev story.

Good thing it's a corp laptop.

Woah! I'm glad we've got a good RDEV story, I don't miss the days when I had to deploy half of our infra on my laptop just to test a small change

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