I don't know why you bought a new one. You can have two ways to look at this, one way is your ultra pessimistic view, my view is I don't need to upgrade my laptop ever 2 years anymore.
Before the M1 Max I was upgrading so often because intel macbooks sucked so much. Now I can comfortably say I'm keeping my M1 Max for a decade.
As for being "exploited" by ads, just don't be, stop mindless consumption...
I’m doing most of my daily driving on whatever computer work gives me anyway, this is just the personal dev/audio machine. I do the same with a gaming computer too though, my gaming laptop from like 7 years ago is still going strong. I turn down shiny graphics settings to get good FPS anyway, I care way more about gameplay than visuals.
That's a nice thought but the computer will probably lose security updates in the next 10 years.
And that really annoys me. The press release says that the new computer is "built to last" and I'm sure that's true, physically. I have a 2015 Macbook Pro which works fine (obv. slower than a modern computer but fine for everything I need to do), it does still get security updates (it's two OSs behind the current macOS at the moment), but I think the time until it doesn't is probably measured in months.
As I say, it works perfectly, was indeed "built to last", but I guess I'm going to have to throw it away (bad for the environment) and buy a new one soon?
That also makes me less enthusiastic about dropping huge amounts of money when I do finally buy a new laptop.
It's replacing a 2015 MBP I bought used in 2019, which replaced a 2011 MBA I bought used in about 2013.
If Apple releases on-device AI, this will be an effective way of getting people to upgrade like they used to, but haven't had to recently. For example, I bought Pro-level computers in my younger years, but now would only consider an MBA, mini, or iMac. But they could get me to go for a Pro if it were the only way to get more RAM for better AI performance. It will also likely shorten upgrade cycles since newer computers would have the latest and greatest performance. When I bought my M2 MBA years ago I suspected it would last me a long time. Now I'm not so sure since I don't have a ton of RAM.
I reject this all-or-nothing black and white childish framing of it.
Not comparable. M2 Ultra with 128GB RAM has 800 GB/s bandwidth.
Maximum bandwidth for a DDR5 Intel 14900K system is 89.6 GB/s. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/236773/...
The temps will be completely normal since that is normal operation. TDP is only 80 watts for M2 Ultra.
> You can only get 2tb of storage max i believe, you are probably bottlenecked elsewhere
No. Just no. This is not the issue. The models are loaded into GPU memory.
The $20/month subscription is going to give you access to commercial models, but generally you have to run the open weight models yourself. With the unified RAM you can trivially run the larger 70B+ models.
AI researchers generally have to use CUDA due to how the ecosystem is still mostly CUDA-only for training and fine tuning, but those who need to occasionally use custom/local models for inference will likely find high end Macs being a good fit for their use cases.
Personally, I’m reasonably happy with GPT4 and Github Copilot, and I’ve sometimes used Midjourney, though I cancelled my subscription since I’m not currently generating any images. Are there important apps that I’m missing?
I personally use it mostly to keep tabs on the latest models released on huggingface. There has been a lot of interesting developments since last year, and models have become more and more powerful.
These "pro" machines have always been known for work and productivity, and 8GB just sounds like a piss poor product decision
It's pure ewaste that it exists.
However, you quickly hit throttling if you push for more than a couple minutes at a time (like when you export in Handbrake, it will slow down and only run marginally faster than the M1, in my experience).
I suspect mine would be green almost all the time, even on this almost three year old M1 Max.
Eg: The M3 Max is a substantial improvement over the M2 Max in both CPU and GPU. But the M3 Pro is a moderate improvement at best compared to the M2 Pro.
It's also why you should understand your personal use case and do research. I think this is on you, not Apple. Corpos gonna corpo -- you have to do the research to figure out whether the gains from new chips will actually impact your workflow.
If you bought a M3 Max just to fuck around on Facebook and Hacker News then of course you won't notice a difference. If you are running workloads that actually require that level of performance then you will notice a significant difference. M3 Max is twice as fast at rendering 3D scenes in Cinebench.
For most real-world users, the M3 really is about 30% faster in single-core and 100% faster in multicore. That is really significant for a lot of us, especially software engineers. But the really big speedups mentioned in Apple's marketing are more niche and it takes some savvy to recognize that.
(I'm plenty content with my M1 Max for now and I expect I'll continue to happily use it for a few more years)
I wouldn't exactly just avoid them, though most are useless, so it's not a bad idea. You just want to understand what they are... even honest ones will only present information that is a reason to buy.
E.g., when I saw the iPhone 15 ads and the best thing they could say about was that it had some titanium, I knew it was a product I could ignore. (Not that I have an iPhone 14 either, but I already knew that one wasn't worth an upgrade to me).