Apple introduces M4 chip
apple.com
apple.com
In case it is not abundantly clear by now: Apple's AI strategy is to put inference (and longer term even learning) on edge devices. This is completely coherent with their privacy-first strategy (which would be at odds with sending data up to the cloud for processing).
Processing data at the edge also makes for the best possible user experience because of the complete independence of network connectivity and hence minimal latency.
If (and that's a big if) they keep their APIs open to run any kind of AI workload on their chips it's a strategy that I personally really really welcome as I don't want the AI future to be centralised in the hands of a few powerful cloud providers.
I happen to think they wouldn't, simply because sending this data back to Apple in any form that they could digest it is not aligned with their current privacy-first strategies. But if they make a device that still works if it stays disconnected, the neat thing is that you can just...keep it disconnected. You don't have to trust them.
Google did some of that on Android, which means open-sourcing their on-device TEE implementation, publishing a paper about it etc.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/12/11/131629/apple-ai-...
It would have to be a huge conspiracy with all Apples employees. And you can easily just listen to the network and see if they do it or not.
Of course we can then worry that companies are breaking the law, but you have to draw the line somewhere… and what have they to gain anyway?
I'm curious: is anyone seriously using apple hardware to train Ai models at the moment? Obviously not the big players, but I imagine it might be a viable option for Ai engineers in smaller, less ambitious companies.
Honestly, you can train basic models just fine on M-Series Max MacBook Pros.
I simply want to point out that these folks don't really care about that. They want a Mac for more reasons than "performance per watt/dollar" and if it's "good enough", they'll pay that Apple tax.
Yes, yes, I know, it's frustrating and they could get better Linux + GPU goodness with an nVidia PC running Ubuntu/Arch/Debian, but macOS is painless for the average science AI/ML training person to set up and work with. There are also known enterprise OS management solutions that business folks will happily sign off on.
Also, $7000 is chump change in the land of "can I get this AI/ML dev to just get to work on my GPT model I'm using to convince some VC's to give me $25-500 million?"
tldr; they're gonna buy a Mac cause it's a Mac and they want a Mac and their business uses Mac's. No amount of "but my nVidia GPU = better" is ever going to convince them otherwise as long as there is a "sort of" reasonable price point inside Apple's ecosystem.
Do you also compare cars by looking at only the super expensive limited editions, with every single option box ticked?
I'd also point out that said 3 year old $1999 Mac Studio that I'm typing this on already runs ML models usefully, maybe 40-50% of the old 3000-series Nvidia machine it replaces, while using literally less than 10% of the power and making a tiny tiny fraction of the noise.
Oh, and it was cheaper. And not running Windows.
For training the Macs do have some interesting advantages due to the unified memory. The GPU cores have access to all of system RAM (and also the system RAM is ridiculously fast - 400GB/sec when DDR4 is barely 30GB/sec, which has a lot of little fringe benefits of it's own, part of why the Studio feels like an even more powerful machine than it actually is. It's just super snappy and responsive, even under heavy load.)
The largest consumer NVidia card has 22GB of useable RAM.
The $1999 Mac has 32GB, and for $400 more you get 64GB.
$3200 gets you 96GB, and more GPU cores. You can hit the system max of 192GB for $5500 on an Ultra, albeit it with the lessor GPU.
Even the recently announced 6000-series AI-oriented NVidia cards max out at 48GB.
My understanding is a that a lot of enthusiasts are using Macs for training because for certain things having more RAM is just enabling.
I keep hearing this meme of Mac's being a big deal in LLM training, but I have seen zero evidence of it, and I am deeply immersed in the world of LLM training, including training from scratch.
Stop trying to meme apple M chips as AI accelerators. I'll believe it when unsloth starts to support a single non-nvidia chip.
But for individual developers it’s an interesting proposition.
And a bigger question is: what if you already have (or were going to buy) a Mac? You prefer them or maybe are developing for Apple platforms.
Upping the chip or memory could easily be cheaper than getting a PC rig that’s faster for training. That may be worth it to you.
Not everyone is starting from zero or wants the fastest possible performance money can buy ignoring all other factors.
It's just more efficient to offload training to cloud Nvidia GPUs
And while the Mac Studio has a lot of memory bandwidth compared to most desktops CPUs, it isn't comparable to consumer GPUs (the 3090 has a bandwidth of ~936GBps) let alone those with HBM.
I really don't hear about anyone training on anything besides NVIDIA GPUs. There are too many useful features like mixed-precision training, and don't even get me started on software issues.
You can't lug around a desktop workstation.
I am honestly shocked Nvidia has been allowed to maintain their moat with cuda. It seems like AMD would have a ton to gain just spending a couple million a year to implement all the relevant ML libraries with a non-cuda back-end.
Intel seems like they could have some interesting stuff in the annoyingly named “OneAPI” suite but I ran it on my iGPU so I have no idea if it is actually good. It was easy to use, though!
That said, inference on apple products is a different story. There's definitely interest in inference on the edge. So far though, nearly everyone is still opting for inference in the cloud for two reasons:
1. There's a lot of extra work involved in getting ML/AI models ready for mobile inference. And this work is different for iOS vs. Android 2. You're limited on which exact device models will run the thing optimally. Most of your customers won't necessarily have that. So you need some kind of fallback. 3. You're limited on what kind of models you can actually run. You have way more flexibility running inference in the cloud.
But you can get an M2 Ultra with 192GB of UMA for $6k or so. It's very hard to get that much GPU memory at all, let alone at that price. Of course the GPU processing power is anemic compared to a DGX Station 100 cluster, but the mac is $143,000 less.
You want your developers to be able to do training locally and they already use Macs? Maybe an upgrade would make business sense. Even if you have beefy servers or the cloud for large jobs.
"No, we should be use cheap commodity abundantly available cpus and orchestrate then behind cloud magic to write our nl translation apps"
or maybe "no we should build purpose built high performance computing hardware to write our nl translation apps"
Or perhaps in the early 70s "is anyone seriously considering personal computer hardware to ...". "no, we should just buy IBM mainframes ..."
I don't know. Im probably super biased. I like the idea of all this training work breaking the shackles of cloud/mainframe/servers/off-end-user-device and migrating to run on peoples devices. It feels "democratic".
For example, running a local model and access to the features of a larger more capable/cloud model are two completely different features therefore there is no "no we should do x instead".
I'd imagine that a dumber local model runs and defers to cloud model when it needs to/if user has allowed it to go to cloud. Apple could not compete on "our models run locally privacy is a bankable feature" alone imo, TikTok install base has shown us enough that users prefer content/features over privacy, they'll definitely still need SoA cloud based models to compete.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/12/11/131629/apple-ai-...
An older example is the “Hey Siri” model, which is fine tuned to your specific voice.
But with regards to on device training, I don’t think anyone is seriously looking at training a model from scratch on device, that doesn’t make much sense. But taking models and fine tuning them to specific users makes a whole ton of sense, and an obvious approach to producing “personal” AI assistants.
A few years ago it wasn’t shared between devices so each device had to do it themselves. I don’t know if it’s shared at this point.
I agree you’re not going to be training an LLM or anything. But smaller tasks limited and scope may prove a good fit.
I feel like people are being a bit naïve here. Apple's "Privacy First" strategy was a marketing spin developed in response to being dead-last in web-development/cloud computing/smart features.
Apple has had no problem changing their standards by 180 degrees and being blatantly anti-consumer whenever they have a competitive advantage to do so.
You would be amazed at the response of some of them when I point out some shit Apple does that make their products clearly lacking for the price, the cognitive dissonance is so strong they don't know how to react in any other way than lying or pretending it doesn't matter.
I have very specific reasons to be annoyed but they are far too many to list them all in a simple post. I was working with and buying Apple stuff before the turn of the millenium and I have worked as an Apple technician and helped way more Apple users than I could care to list. This is my experience and your comment precisely illustrates that.
My comment was about the delusion of privacy first marketing bullshit that they came up with to excuse the limitations of some of their stuff.
But since Apple can't do anything wrong, we are not going anywhere. Whatever, keep on believing.
I'll check myself thanks, but you should check your allegiance to a trillion dollar corp and its bullshit marketing, that's really not useful to anyone but them.
The future is always fungible. Anyone can break whatever trust they've built very quickly. But, like the post you are replying to, I have no qualms about supporting companies that are currently doing things in my interest and don't have any clear strategic incentive to violate that trust.
Edit: that same incentive structure would apply to NVIDIA, afaik
The logic is exactly same as ie Meta claims - we will pseudoanonymize your data, so technically your specific privacy is just yours, see nothing changed. But you are in various target groups for ads, plus we know how 'good' those anon efforts are when money are at play and corporations are only there to earn as much money as possible. Rest is PR.
And Apple's privacy stance is a moat against these other companies making money off of their customer base. So for the cost of pennies on the dollar, they protect their customer base and ward off competition. That's a pretty strong incentive.
Limited firsthand accounts don't really assuage my fears in the way that, say, Android or Linux does.
I'm not saying this to trash Apple - I think it's true of any corporation. If Apple starts losing revenue in 5 years because their LLM isn't good enough because they don't have enough data, they are still going to take it and have some reason justifying why theirs is privacy focused and everyone else is not.
They are the gatekeeper of your data for their benefit not yours.
At minimum, laws around the world prevent companies from knowingly communicating false information to consumers.
And in many countries the rules around privacy are much more stringent.
Talk is cheap and in Apple's case it's part of their PR.
Too many holes.
Because Boeing's issues have nothing to do with privacy or security and since they are not consumer facing have no relevance to what we are talking about.
Apple has never been privacy-first in practice. They give you the illusion of privacy but in reality it's a closed-source system and you are forced to trust Apple with your data.
They also make it a LOT harder than Android to execute your own MITM proxies to inspect what exact data is being sent about you by all of your apps including the OS itself.
If Apple enabled RCS in messages back then, but the recipient was not using RCS, then Google now has the decrypted text message, even when RCS advertises itself as E2EE. With iMessage, at least I know all of my messages are E2EE when I see a blue bubble.
Even now, RCS is available on Android if using Google Messages. Yes, it's pre-installed on all phones, but OEMs aren't required to use it as the default. It opens up more privacy concerns because now I don't know if my messages are secure. At least with the green bubbles, I can assume that anything I send is not encrypted. With RCS, I can't be certain unless I verify the messaging app the recipient is using and hope they don't replace it with something else that doesn't support RCS.
Having iMessage available to everyone regardless of their mobile OS.
Their words or your words?
By what? It's impossible for a process to know for sure if the system is rooted or not. A rooted system can present itself to a process to look like a non-rooted system if it's engineered well enough.
I'd bet that most of these apps probably just check if "su" returns a shell, in which case perhaps all that's needed is to modify the "su" executable to require "su --magic-phrase foobar" before it drops into a root shell, and returns "bash: su: not found" or whatever if called with no arguments.
That was true 20 years ago, but most smartphones these days have cryptograhically-verified boot chains and remote attestation of how the boot went.
The reality is, there's too much to verify, and not enough interest for the "many eyeballs make all bugs shallow" argument.
We are, all of us, forced to trust, forced to go without the genuine capacity to verify. It's not great, and the best we can do is look for incentives and try to keep those aligned.
If you want to, for example, compile a GPS-free version of Android that appears like it has GPS but in reality just sends fake coordinates to keep apps happy thinking they got actual permissions, it's fairly straightforward to make this edit, and you own the hardware so it's within your rights to do this.
Open-source is only part of it; in terms of privacy, being able to see what all is being sent in/out of my device is is arguably more important than open source. Closed source would be fine if they allowed me to easily inject my own root certificate for this purpose. If they aren't willing to do that, including a 1-click replacement of the certificates in various third-party, certificate-pinning apps that are themselves potential privacy risks, it's a fairly easy modification to any open source system.
A screen on my wall that flashes every JSON that gets sent out of hardware that I own should be my right.
I agree; unfortunately it feels as if this ship has not only sailed, but the metaphor would have to be expanded to involve the port at well.
Is it even possible, these days, to have a functioning experience with no surprise network requests? I've tried to limit mine via an extensive hosts file list, but that did break stuff even a decade ago, and the latest version of MacOS doesn't seem to fully respect the hosts file (weirdly it partially respects it?)
> A screen on my wall that flashes every JSON that gets sent out of hardware that I own should be my right.
I remember reading a tale about someone, I think it was a court case or an audit, who wanted every IP packet to be printed out on paper. Only backed down when the volume was given in articulated lorries per hour.
I sympathise, but you're reminding me of that.
Apple is absolutism. Even the so called "enlightened" absolutism is still bad compared to average democracy.
I was one of many who reported a bug in Ubuntu that went un-fixed for years, where the response smelled of nation-state influence: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1359836
And Log4Shell took about 8 years to notice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log4Shell
Thanks for making my point for me.
I'm not saying closed source is a silver bullet.
I'm saying OSS also isn't a silver bullet, it doesn't find everything because there's not enough interest in doing this work.
The Log4j example alone, given it took 8 years, is enough to demonstrate that.
Everything is an illusion of trust, nothing is perfect; all we can do is try to align the interests of those working on projects with the interests of society — which is so hard that it's an entire field of study called "politics".
I would think ease of MITM and privacy are opposing concerns
That's just their way of walled gardening apple customers. Then they can extort devs and other companies dry without any middle-men.
Apple is an amazing powerhouse but also disgustingly elitist and wasteful if not straight up vulgar in its profit motives. There's really zero idealism there despite their romantic and creative legacy.
There's always some straight idiotic limitations in their otherwise incredible machines, with no other purpose than to create planned obsolescence, "PRO" exclusivity and piles e-waste.
I mean yeah, that makes good marketing copy, but its more due to reducing latency and keeping running costs down.
but as this is mostly marketing fluff we'll need to actually see how it performs before casting judgment on how "revolutionary" it is.
On second thought.. maybe it isn't "just like you've been doing on Nvidia cards for a while"
Their primary business goal is to sell hardware. Yes, they’ve diversified into services and being a shopping mall for all, but it is about selling luxury hardware.
The promise of privacy is one way in which they position themselves, but I would not bet the bank on that being true forever.
Seems even more unlikely for non technical users.
It's just their latest market campaign, as far as I can tell. The vast majority of people buy iPhones because of the status it gives.
Marketing aside, all indications point to the iOS platform being the most secure mobile option (imo).
But not only that, Apple CPUs are objectively leagues ahead of their competition in the mobile space. I am still using a IPhone released in 2020 with absolutely no appreciable slow down or losses in perceived performance. Because even a 4 years old IPhone still has specs that don't lag behind by much the equivalent Android phones, I still receive the latest OS updates, and because frankly, Android OS is mess.
If I cared about status, I would have changed my phone already for a new one.
This is a lie. The latest Android SoCs are just as powerful as the A series.
>Because even a 4 years old IPhone still has specs that don't lag behind by much the equivalent Android phones, I still receive the latest OS updates, and because frankly, Android OS is mess.
Samsung and Google offer 7 years of OS and security updates. I believe that beats the Apple policy.
Or am I mistaken here?
On the second part:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPadOS_version_history
The last iPads to stop getting OS updates (including security, to be consistent with what Samsung and Google are pledging) got 7 and 9 years of updates each (5th gen iPad and 1st gen iPad Pro). The last iPhones to lose support got about 7 years each (iPhone 8 and X). 6S, SE (1st), and 7 got 9 and 8 years of OS support with security updates. The 5S (released in 2013) last got a security update in early 2023, so also about 9 years, the 6 (2014) ended at the same time so let's call it 8 years. The 4S, 2011, got 8 years of OS support. 5 and 5C got 7 and 6 years of support (5C was 5 in a new case, so was always going to get a year less in support).
Apple has not, that I've seen at least, ever established a long term support policy on iPhones and iPads, but the numbers show they're doing at least as well as what Samsung and Google are promising to do, but have not yet done. And they've been doing this for more than a decade now.
EDIT:
Reworked the iOS numbers a bit, down to the month (I was looking at years above and rounding, so this is more accurate). iOS support time by device for devices that cannot use the current iOS 17 (so the XS and above are not counted here) in months:
1st - 32
3G - 37
3GS - 56
4 - 48
4S - 93
5 - 81
5C - 69
5S - 112
6 - 100
6S - 102
SE - 96
7 - 90
8 - 78
X - 76
The 8 and X look like regressions, but their last updates were just 2 months ago (March 21, 2024) so still a good chance their support period will increase and exceed the 7 year mark like every model since the 5S. We'll have to see if they get any more updates in November 2024 or later to see if they can hit the 7 year mark.
These are very disingenuous numbers that don't tell the complete story. An iPhone 7 getting a single critical security patch does not take into account the hundreds of security patches it did not receive when it stopped receiving support. It received that special update because Apple likely was told or discovered it was being exploited in the wild.
Google and Samsung now offer 7 years of OS upgrades and 84 months of full security patches. Selectively patching a phone that is out of the support window with a single security patch does not automatically increase its EOL support date.
What we can do today is note that Apple never made a promise, but did provide very long security support for their devices despite that. They've already met or come close to the Samsung/Google pledge (for one device) on almost half their devices, and those are all the recent ones (so it's not a downward trend of good support then bad support, but rather mediocre/bad support to improving and increasingly good support).
Another fun one:
iPhone XS was released in September 2018, it is on the current iOS 17 release. In the absolute worst case of it losing iOS 18 support in September, it will have received 6 full years of support in both security and OS updates. It'll still hit 7 years (comfortably) of security updates. If it does get iOS 18 support in September, then Apple will hit the Samsung/Google pledge 5 years before Samsung/Google can even demonstrate their ability to follow through (Samsung has a chance, but Google has no history of commitment).
I have time to kill before training for a century ride:
Let's ignore everything before iPhone 4S, they had short support periods that's just a fact and hardly worth investigating. This is an analysis of devices released in 2011 and later, when the phones had, mostly, matured as a device so we should be expecting longer support periods. These are the support periods when the phones were able to run the still-current iOS versions, not counting later security updates or minor updates but after the major iOS version had been deprecated. As an example, for the iPhone 4S it had support from 2011-2016. In 2016 its OS, iOS 9, was replaced by iOS 10. Here are the numbers:
4S - 5 years
5 - 5 years
5C - 4 years (decreased, 5 hardware but released a year later in a different case)
5S - 6 years
6 - 5 years (decreased, not sure why)
6S - 7 years (hey, Apple did it! 2015 release, lost iOS upgrades in 2022)
SE(1st) - 5 years (like 5C, 6S hardware but released later)
7 - 6 years (decreased over 6S, not sure why)
8 - 6 years
X - 6 years
BTW, my daily driver is an iPhone 13 and I was coming from an iPhone X. So I'm well aware of the incredible support Apple provides its phones. Although, I would still like to see an 8+ year promise from them.
Neither of these hopes retroactively invalidates the fact that Apple has had a much better track record of supporting old phone models up to this point. Even if you do split hairs about the level of patching some models got in their later years, they still got full iOS updates for years longer than most Android phones got any patches at all, regardless of severity.
This is not an argument that somehow puts Android on top, at best it adds nuance to just how much better iOS support has been up to this point.
Let's also not forget that if Apple wasn't putting this kind of pressure on Google, they wouldn't have even made the promise to begin with, because it's clear how long they actually care to support products with no outside pressure.
My Pixel 4a here is also going strong, only the battery is slowly getting worse. I mean, it's 2024, do phones really still get slow? The 4a is now past android updates, but that was promised after 3 years. But at 350 bucks, it was like 40% less than the cheapest iPhone mini at that time.
Hardware is pretty beefed up but bloat keeps on growing, that is slowing things down considerably.
Only because Apple lost a lawsuit otherwise they'd have kept intentionally slowing it down.
Apple says it made these changes for other reasons, honestly, truly. And if it happened to have the same effect, then that was unfortunate, and unintended.
Only Apple really knows. But there was a slew of changes and reversals following the drama. "Oh, we'll implement notifications now", "Oh, we'll change the peak performance behavior", and "we will change and add additional diagnostics to make sure issues are battery related" certainly has a feel for a bunch of ex post facto rationalization of several things that seem, to me, that if it was truly a battery thing all along, would have been functional requirements.
Theres no “status” to a brand of phone when the cheapest point of entry is comparable and the flagship is cheaper than the alternative flagship.
Marketing in most of europe is chiefly not the same as the US though so maybe its a perspective thing.
I just find it hard to really argue “status” when the last 4 iPhone generations are largely the same and cheaper than the Samsung flagships.
At Elgiganten a Samsung S24 Ultra is 19,490 SEK[0].
The most expensive iPhone 15 pro max is 18,784 SEK at the same store[1].
[0]: https://nya.elgiganten.se/product/mobiler-tablets-smartklock...
[1]: https://nya.elgiganten.se/product/mobiler-tablets-smartklock...
Rich people ask for the latest most expensive iPhone even if they're only going to use WhatsApp and Instagram on it. It's not because of privacy or functionality, it's simply to show off to everyone they can purchase it. Also to not stand out within their peers as the only one without it.
As another content said: it's not an argument, it's a fact here.
There's obviously tons of people who see iPhone as a status item. They're right, because iPhone is expensive and only the rich can buy them. This doesn't mean iPhone is not the best option out there for a person who doesn't want to extensively customize his phone and just use it.
It’s not about if you’ve used android, it’s about if you’ve beeen poor-ish or stingy
To some people those are luxuries- the most expensive phone they buy is a mid-range Motorola for $300 with snapdragon 750g or whatever. They run all the same apps after all, they take photos.
iPhones are simply outside of your budget.
Sure, some people pick up the iPhone because they like the specs, or the apps, or whatever else. That's why I said the majority picks it up for status, not all. But keep in mind nobody's judging the iPhone's specs or capabilities here. We're talking about why people buy it.
Ask any teenager why they want an iPhone. I'd be very surprised if even one said it's because of privacy. It's because of the stupid blue bubble, which is a proxy for status.
I'm pretty sure if Apple released the same phone again with a new name and design, people would still buy it. For the majority, it's not because of features, ease of use, specs, etc: it's status.
It’s like how people who don’t like US and want nothing to do with US still discuss US politics, because it has so much effect everywhere.
(Ironically no enough people discuss China in any coherent level of understanding)
Apple doesn't release new products, they wait until the actual brave and innovating companies have done the exploration and then capitalize on all of their learnings. Because they are never the first movers and they have mountains of cash, they're able to enter the market without the baggage of early adopters. They don't have to worry about maintaining their early prototypes.
Apple doesn't innovate or show leadership, they wait until the innovators have proven that the market is big enough to handle Apple, then they swoop in with a product that combines the visions of the companies that were competing.
Apple is great at what they do, don't get me wrong. And swooping in when the market is right is just good business. Just don't mistake that for innovation or leadership.
Granted, you may have been leaning very heavily on the dictionary definition of "comparable", in that the two numbers are able to be compared. However, when the conclusion of that comparison is "More than twice the price", I think you should lead with that.
Keep in mind, the iPhone SE is using a 3 year old processor, the Samsung A15 was released 5 months ago with a brand new processor.
According to various sites, the Mediatek Dimensity 6100+ is a 6nm update to a core that was released 3 years ago (Dimensity 700 on a 7nm). It's 5-10% faster, likely due to the update from 7 to 6nm, as the cores are the same and run at the same speed. It contains an updated bluetooth chipset (from 5.1 to 5.2) and supports a larger max camera. The camera on the A15 is well below the max size of the previous chipset, however, the increased camera bandwidth should ensure that the camera feels snappier (a common complaint on low-end phones). The process improvement should increase efficiency as well, however, there are not benchmarks that are able to test this.
iPhones are not ubiquitous here, and they're way more expensive than other options.
Who’s at fault for not having built-in messaging that works with rich text, photos, videos, etc?
Google has abandoned more messaging products than I can remember while Apple focused on literally the main function of a phone in the 21st century. And they get shit for it
RCS as currently implemented is iMessage but with a coat of google paint. There is no there there.
Source: I'm an Android user with a lot of iPhones on my in-laws side.
[1] in 2013 they even marketed their “eBeacon” technology as a way for retail stores to monitor and track their customers which…
Privacy wasn’t really a concern because most people didn’t have the privacy eroding device yet. In the years following the Nexus 5 is where smartphones went into geometric growth and the slow realization of the privacy nightmare became apparent
Imho I was really excited to get a Nexus 4 at the time, just a few short years later the shine wore off and I was horrified at the smartphone enabled future. And I have a 40 year background in computers and understand them better than 99 out of 100 users – if I didn’t see it, I can’t blame them either
What a strange statement. I was late to the game with a Nexus S in 2010, and it was really usable.
The alternative is Google / Android devices and OpenAI wrapper apps, both of which usually offer a half baked UI, poor privacy practices, and a completely broken UX when the internet connection isn't perfect.
Pair this with the completely subpar Android apps, Google dropping support for an app about once a month, and suddenly I'm okay with the lesser of two evils.
I know they aren't running a charity, I even hypothesized that Apple just can't build good services so they pivoted to focusing on this fake "privacy" angle. In the end, iPhones are likely going to be better for edge AI than whatever is out there, so I'm looking forward to this.
What exactly are you expecting? The current hype for AI is large language models. The word 'large' has a certain meaning in that context. Much larger that can fit on your phone. Everyone is going crazy about edge AI, what am I missing?
Distributed mixture of experts sounds like an idea. Is anyone doing that?
I’m imagining a lot of these LLM products on phones will be used for live translation. Imagine a large crowd event of folks utilizing live AI translation services being told completely false translations because an actor deployed a 51% attack.
No point asking GPT4 “what time does John’s party start?”, but a local LLM can do better.
If you clone a model and then bake in a more expensive model's correct/appropriate responses to your queries, you now have the functionality of the expensive model in your clone. For your specific use case.
The size of the resulting case-specific models are small enough to run on all kinds of hardware, so everyone's seeing how much work can be done on their laptop right now. One incentive for doing so is that your approaches to problems are constrained by the cost and security of the Q&A roundtrip.
Care to cite these subpar Android apps? The app store is filled to the brim with subpar and garbage apps.
>Google dropping support for an app about once a month
I mean if you're going to lie why not go bigger
>I'm okay with the lesser of two evils.
So the more evil company is the one that pulled out of China because they refused to hand over their users data to the Chinese government on a fiber optic silver plate?
They also had project DragonFly if you remember.
The lesser of two evils is that one company doesn’t try to actively profile me (in order for their ads business to be better) with every piece of data it can find and forces me to share all possible data with them.
Google is famously known to kill apps that are good and used by customers: https://killedbygoogle.com/
As for the subpar apps: there is a massive difference between the network traffic when on the Home Screen between iOS and Android.
The Chinese government has access to the iCloud account of every Chinese Apple user.
>They also had project DragonFly if you remember.
Which never materialized.
>The lesser of two evils is that one company doesn’t try to actively profile me (in order for their ads business to be better) with every piece of data it can find and forces me to share all possible data with them.
Apple does targeted and non targeted advertising as well. Additionally, your carrier has likely sold all of the data they have on you. Apple was also sued for selling user data to ad networks. Odd for a Privacy First company to engage in things like that.
>Google is famously known to kill apps that are good and used by customers: https://killedbygoogle.com/
Google has been around for 26 years I believe. According to that link 60 apps were killed in that timeframe. According to your statement that Google kills an app a month that would leave you 252 apps short. Furthermore, the numbers would indicate that Google has killed 2.3 apps per year or .192 apps per month.
>As for the subpar apps: there is a massive difference between the network traffic when on the Home Screen between iOS and Android.
Not sure how that has anything to do with app quality, but if network traffic is your concern there's probably a lot more an Android user can do than an iOS user to control or eliminate the traffic.
Most of the "Services" on that list are effectively apps, too:
VPN by Google One, Album Archive, Hangouts, all the way back to Answers, Writely, and Deskbar.
I didn't touch hardware, because I think that should be considered separately.
The first of 211 services on that site was killed in 2006.
The first of the 60 apps on that site was killed in 2012.
So even apps alone, 4.28 a year.
But more inclusively, 271 apps or services in 17 years is ~16/year, over one a month.
You need to remind yourself of the site guidelines about assuming the worst. Your comments just come across condescendingly.
Even with the additional apps you've selected it still doesn't come close to the one app per month claim.
>I didn't touch hardware, because I think that should be considered separately.
So why even mention it? Is Apple impervious to discontinuing hardware?
>The first of 211 services on that site was killed in 2006.
So we're talking about services now? Or apps? Or apps and services? The goal posts keep moving.
>You need to remind yourself of the site guidelines about assuming the worst. Your comments just come across condescendingly.
I suggest you also consult the guidelines in regards to calling people names. My comments were never intended to be inferred that way.
Source?
Google podcasts, Stadia, shitton of other discontinued applications?
No, the alternative is Android devices with everything except firmware built from source and signed by myself. And at the same time, being secure, too.
You just can't have this on Apple devices. On Android side choices are limited too, I don't like Google and especially their disastrous hardware design, but their Pixel line is the most approachable one able to do all these.
Heck, you can't even build your own app for your own iPhone without buying another hardware (a Mac, this is not a software issue, this is a legal issue, iOS SDK is licensed to you on the condition of using on Apple hardware only) and a yearly subscription. How is this acceptable at all?
These features work on all the modern desktop browsers and on Android tho!
WebGPU isn't standardized yet. Hell, most of the features people complain about aren't part of any standard, but for some reason there's this sense that if it's in Chrome, it's standard - as if Google dictates standards.
Realistically, given the market share of Chrome and Chromium based browsers, they kind of do.
Because they set the terms of use of the SDK? You're not required to use it. You aren't required to develop for iOS. Just because Google gives it all away for free doesn't mean Apple has to.
Do you have a legal right to write software or run your own software for hardware you bought?
Because it’s very easy to take away a right by erecting aritificial barriers, just like how you could discriminate by race at work, but pretend you are doing something else,
I've never heard of such a thing. Ideally I'd like that, but I don't have such freedoms with the computers in my cars, for example, or the one that operates my furnace, or even for certain parts of my PC.
You aren't allowed to repair the "thing' because the software can detect you changed something and will refuse to boot. And whenever it suits the manufacturer, they will decide when the 'thing' is declared out of support and stops functioning.
I would say you are not an owner then, you (and me) and just suckers that are paying for the party. Maybe it's a lease. But then we also pay when it breaks, so it more of a digital feudalism.
No, obviously not. Do you have a right to run a custom OS on your PS5? Do you have a right to run a custom application on your cable set-top box? Etc. Such a right obviously doesn’t exist and most people generally are somewhere between “don’t care” and actively rejecting it for various reasons (hacking in games, content DRM, etc).
It’s fine if you think there should be, but it continues this weird trend of using apple as a foil for complaining about random other issues that other vendors tend to be just as bad or oftentimes even worse about, simply because they’re a large company with a large group of anti-fans/haters who will readily nod along.
Remember when the complaint was that the pelican case of factory OEM tools you could rent (or buy) to install your factory replacement screen was too big and bulky, meaning it was really just a plot to sabotage right to repair?
https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/21/23079058/apple-self-servi...
Yes, I do. That was and continues to be a valid complaint, among all other anti-repair schemes Apple have come up with over the years. DRM for parts, complete unavailability of some commonly repaired parts, deliberate kneecapping of "Apple authorized service providers", leveraging the US customs to seize shipments of legitimate and/or unlabeled replacement parts as "counterfeits", gaslighting by official representatives on Apple's own forums about data recovery, sabotaging right to repair laws, and even denial of design issues[1] to weasel out of warranty repair just to name a few.
All with the simple anti-competitive goal of making third party repair (both authorized and independent) a less attractive option due to artificially increased prices, timelines to repair, or scaremongering about privacy.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/12/weakened-right-to-re...
https://www.pcgamer.com/ifixit-says-apples-iphone-14-is-lite...
[1] Butterfly keyboards, display cables that were too short and failed over time
No, it doesn’t - because you can simply not use the tools if you don’t want. You can just order a $2 spudger off Amazon if you want, you don’t need the tools at all.
It continues to be a completely invalid complaint that shows just how bad-faith the discussion about apple has become - it literally costs you nothing to not use the tools if you want, there is no downside to having apple make them available to people, and yet you guys still find a way to bitch about it.
Moreover, despite some “bold” proclamations from the haters… no android vendors ever ended up making their oem tooling available to consumers at all. You have to use the Amazon spudger on your pixel, and you will fuck up the waterproofing when you do your repair, because the android phone won’t seal properly against water without the tools either. IPX sixtywho!?
It’s literally a complete and total net positive: nothing was taken away from you, and you don’t need to use it, and it makes your life easier and produces a better repair if you want it. Apple went out of their way to both make the tooling available to normies who want to rent it or people who want to buy it for real. And people still bitch, and still think they come off better for having done so. Classic “hater” moment, in the Paul Graham sense. Anti-fanboys are real.
https://paulgraham.com/fh.html
Literally, for some people - the pelican cases with the tools are too big and heavy. And that’s enough to justify the hate.
Again, great example of the point I was making in the original comment: people inserting their random hobby horse issues using apple as a foil. You don’t like how phones are made in general, so you’re using apple as a whipping boy for the issue even if it’s not really caused or worsened by the event in question etc. Even if the event in question is apple making that issue somewhat better, and is done worse by all the other vendors etc. Can’t buy tooling for a pixel at all, doing those repairs will simply break waterproofing without it, and you’re strictly better off having the ability to get access to the tooling if you decide you want it, but apple offering it is a flashpoint you can exploit for rhetorical advantage.
I think the dirty little secret here is that an iPhone is just about the only phone, apart from maybe some of the really nice Google and Samsung flagships, that anyone wants to repair, because they're bloody expensive. Which is fine and dandy but then do kindly park your endless bemoaning of the subjects of e-waste and non-repairable goods, when Android by far and away is the worse side of that equation, with absolute shit tons of low yield, crap hardware made, sold, and thrown away when the first software update renders it completely unusable (if it wasn't already, from the factory).
Perhaps you haven't noticed, but once you tally up overpriced parts together with their oversized, heavy, expensive rental of tools that you don't need, you end up with a sum that matches what you would pay to have it repaired by Apple - except you're doing all of the work yourself.
A curious consumer who has never repaired a device, but might have been interested in doing so, will therefore conclude that repairing their own device is 1. Far too complicated, thanks to an intimidating-looking piece of kit that they recommend, but is completely unnecessary, and 2. Far too expensive, because Apple prices these such that the repair is made economically nonviable.
So yes, I still believe that this is Apple fighting the anti-repair war on a psychological front. You're giving them benefit of the doubt even though they've established a clear pattern of behavior that demonstrates their anti-repair stance beyond any reasonable doubt - although you dance around the citations and claim that I'm being unreasonable about Apple genuinely making the repair situation "better".
Futhermore, I'm not a fanboy or anti-fanboy of any company. The only thing I'm an anti-fanboy of are anti-consumer practices. If Apple changed some of their practices I'd go out and buy an iPhone and a Macbook tomorrow.
The fact that I pointed out that Apple is hostile against repair does not mean that I endorse Google, Samsung, or any other brand - they all suck when it comes to repair, yet you're taking it as a personal attack and calling me names for it.
It can be difficult to handle the intimation that maybe there is the mirror image of the "brainless apple sheeple" too. Haters exist - people who are not able to approach a situation fairly and are just relentlessly negative because they hate X thing too. Negative parasocial attachment is just as much of a thing as a positive one.
And when you get to the point of "literally making the tools available is bad because the pelican cases are too heavy" you have crossed that rubicon. I am being very very polite here, but you are not being rational, and you are kinda having an emotional spasm over someone disagreeing with you on the internet.
Yes, if you want OEM parts and you rent OEM tooling it's probably going to come close to OEM cost. That isn't discriminatory, if the prices are fair+reasonable, and objectively they pretty much are. $49 to rent the tools, and have them shipped both ways, etc, is not an unreasonable ask.
Not having a viable business model for your startup doesn't mean the world is wrong. It means you don't have a viable business idea. And yeah, if you are renting the tools as a one-off, and counting your personal time as having some value (or labor cost in a business), then you probably are not going to get costs that are economical with a large-scale operator with a chain operation and an assembly-line repair shop with repair people who do nothing but repair that one brand. That's not Apple's fault.
What we ultimately come down to with your argument is "apple is killing right-to-repair by being too good at repair and providing too cheap repairs such that indie shops can no longer make a margin" and I'm not sure that's actionable in a social sense of preventing e-waste. People getting their hardware repaired cheaply is good. Long parts lifetimes are good. Etc.
Being able to swap in shitty amazon knockoff parts is a whole separate discussion, of course. And afaik that is going to be forced by the EU anyway, consequences be damned. So what are you complaining about here?
edit: Describing others as "bitching", "bad faith", and "hater", runs afoul of half of the guidelines on this site. That comment somehow isn't moderated, but mine is called out for crossing into flamewar?
Even if I hadn't, though, we need you to follow the rules regardless of what anybody else is doing, and the same goes for every user here. Pointing a finger at the other person isn't helpful.
As noxious as that whole thing is, it’s literally the law. I agree the outcome is horrifying of course… stallman was right all along, it’s either your device or it’s not.
And legally speaking, we have decided it’s ok to go with “not”.
Sure, as a SWE I'm not going to buy a computer unable to run my own code. A smartphone is an ergonomic portable computer, so I say no to iPhone and would like to remind others who didn't have a deep think into this about it.
Because as you described, the only alternatives that exist are terrible experiences for basically everyone, so people are happy to pay to license a solution that solves their problems with minimal fuss.
Any number of people could respond to “use Android devices with everything except firmware built from source and signed by myself” with the same question.
Normal users will not do this. Just because many of the people here can build and sign a custom Android build doesn't mean that is a viable commercial alternative. It is great that is an option for those of us who can do it, but don't present it as a viable alternative to the iOS/Google ecosystems. The fraction of people who can and will be willing to do this is really small. And even if you can do it, how many people will want to maintain their custom built OSes?
Unfortunately a lot of the "freedom" crowd think that unless you want to be an 80s sysadmin you don't deserve security or privacy. Or computers.
a maxim that seems to hold true at every level of computing is that users will not care about security unless forced into caring
with privacy they may care more, but they are easily conditioned to assume it's there or that nothing can be realistically be done about losing it
There are a couple caveats:
1. It is still a bit tricky for a non-technical person to install. Should not be a problem if they know somebody who can help, though. There's been some progress making the process more user friendly recently (e.g. WebUSB-based GrapheneOS installer).
2. There are some papercuts if you don't install Google services on your phone. microG [2] helps with most but some still remain. My main concern with this setup is that I can't use Google Pay this way, but having to bring my card with me every time seems like an acceptable trade off to me.
[2]: https://microg.org/
I wouldn't bet on this long term, since it fully relies on Google hardware, and Google's long-term strategy is to remove your freedom piece by piece, cash on it, not to support it.
The real alternative is GNU/Linux phones, Librem 5 and Pinephone, without any ties to greedy, anti-freedom corporations.
There are people who don't know how to use file explorer, new generation grows up in a world of iPhones without ever seeing file system. Any other bright ideas?
Apple's definitely pulling a "Heinz" move with privacy, and it is true that they're doing a better job of it overall, but Google's not completely horrible either.
https://store.google.com/intl/en/ideas/articles/pixel-featur...
In any case iPhone probably don't have enough memory to run a 3.25B model? e.g. 15 pro only have 8 GB (and Gemini Nano seems to only work on the 12GB Pixel 8 Pro) and 14 has only 6GB, that hardly seems sufficient for even a small LLM if you still you want to run the full OS and other apps at the same time.
Providing services is arguably at odds with privacy since a service with access to all the data can provide a better service than one without so there will be a tension between trying to provide the best services, fueling their growth, and privacy.
My point was that it's interesting how we can frame a service business "extracting fees" to imply wrongdoing. When it's pretty normal for all services to charge ongoing fees for ongoing delivery.
And as someone who presumably provides services for a living, what additional regulations would you like to be subject to?
Until we figure out how to have guarantees of forever, the best we can realistically do is evaluate companies and their products by their behavior now weighted by their behavior in the past.
Somewhat true but things are changing. While there are plenty of “luxury” Apple devices like Vision Pro or fully decked out MacBooks for web browsing we no longer live in a world where tech are just lifestyle gadgets. People spend hours a day on their phones, and often run their life and businesses through it. Even with the $1000+/2-3y price tag, it’s simply not that much given how central role it serves in your life. This is especially true for younger generations who often don't have laptops or desktops at home, and also increasingly in poorer-but-not-poor countries (say eg Eastern Europe). So the iPhone (their best selling product) is far, far, far more a commodity utility than typical luxury consumption like watches, purses, sports cars etc.
Even in the higher end products like the MacBooks you see a lot of professionals (engineers included) who choose it because of its price-performance-value, and who don’t give a shit about luxury. Especially since the M1 launched, where performance and battery life took a giant leap.
Apple is selling hardware and scaling AI by utilizing it is simply a smart move.
Instead of building huge GPU clusters, having to deal with NVIDIA for GOUs (Apple kicked NVIDIA out years ago because of disagreements), Apple is building mainly on existing hardware.
This is in other terms utilizing CPU power.
On the other hand this helps their marketing keeping high price points when Apple now is going to differentiate their COU power and therefore hardware prices over AI functionality correlating with CPU power. This is also consistent with Apple stopping the MHz comparisons years ago.
Also, Siri, and consider: you’re scaling AI on apple’s hardware, too, you can develop your own local custom AI on it, there’s more memory available for linear algebra in a maxed out MBP than the biggest GPUs you can buy.
They scale the VRAM capacity with unified memory and that plus a ton of software is enough to make the Apple stuff plenty competitive with the corresponding NVIDIA stuff for the specific task of running big AI models locally.
But this hardly applies to 95% if not more people of all people running Apple's hardware, the fastest CPU/GPU isn't worth much if you can fit any at least marginally useful LLM model on the 8GB (or less on iPhones/iPads) of memory that you device has?
My 15 year old Sony laptop can do better.
Even if Microsoft on Mac is an unmitigated dumpster fire, this is ridiculous.
I avoid using it whenever possible. If people email me, it’d better not be urgent.
The M1 air was only released in November 2020. With a bit of slop in the numbers, its very possible the parent poster bought an intel mac just before the M1 launched.
Still doesn't take a minute to launch Outlook, but I understand your pain.
I keep hoping it will die, because it would be replaced with an M-series MBP and they are way, way, WAY faster than even the best Intel MBP.
It is Microsoft. I could rant all day about the dumpster fire that is the "NEW Microsoft Teams (Work or School)"
It's like the perfect shining example of how MS doesn't give a flaming fuck about their end users.
And while my particular problems might be partially because I am on MacOS, I observe Windows-using colleagues have just as many problems joining meetings (either total refusal, no audio, or sharing issues). So I think using Teams as a measure of any computer is probably not warranted.
(In fact I DO have a spare 13 year old laptop hanging around that still gets used for web browsing, mail and stuff. It is not slow.)
It's fascinating to me how people are still attached to the hardware upgrade cycle as an idea that matters, and yet for a huge chunk of people and scenarios, basically an SSD, 8gb of RAM and an Intel i5 from a decade ago could have been the end of computing history with no real loss to productivity.
I honestly look at people who use Apple or Windows with a bit of pity, because those ecosystems would just give me more stuff to worry about.
Windows requires a VM, like WSL, for a lot of people, and Linux lacks commercial support. macOS strikes a good balance in the middle that makes it a pretty compelling choice.
Sure, Wine exists, but it’s not something I’d want to rely on for a business when there are alternatives like macOS which will offer native support.
Apple fanboys like to talk about how cool and long lasting a MacBook Air is but a 500 bucks Chromebook will do just as well while allowing pretty much 90% of the use cases. Sure, the top end power is much lower but at the same time considering the base RAM/storage combo Apple gives it is not that relevant. If you starting loading it up, that puts the pricing in an entirely different category and in my opinion the MacBook Air becomes seriously irrelevant when compared to serious computing devices in the same price range...
A Chromebook "does the job" but it's closer to a thin client than a workstation. A lot of the job is done remotely and you may not want that.
If the only thing you care about are battery life (only if you plan to use it lightly on the go, because even the high-end Apple Silicon sucks decent amount of power at full tilt) and privacy I guess they are decent enough.
This is my argument: the base models are at the same time overkill and too limited considering the price and the high-end models are way too expensive for what they bring to the table.
Apple has a big relevancy problem because of how they put a stupid pricing ladder on everything, but that is just my opinion, I guess. As long as they keep making a shit ton of cash it doesn't matter, I suppose. But if the relevant people stop buying Macs because they make no sense, it will become apparent why it matters sooner or later...
And AFAIK, Google dictates 10+h of battery life with mixed web browsing for all Chromebooks.
And if we are talking about expensive high-end hardware, mini-LED is worse than OLED found in those machines anyway so it's not like if that would be a strong argument.
no, i’m a big fan of OLED, but for a laptop, especially a non gaming one, the extra brightness and lack of burn in concern makes it better.
Sure, the MacBook Air is better built and will do some things better but those things are not extremely relevant for someone who would be satisfied by an entry level MacBook Air, because while an MBA has some very nice attributes, in the end everything is limited by its RAM/storage (and to a lesser degree, ports).
For a concrete example, in my country the cheaper MacBook Air you can get is the old M1 design at 1k€, then there is the M2 refresh at 1.2k€ and M3 variant at 1.3k€.
But you can get an Asus Chromebook Plus for 600€ that has either the same amount of RAM and storage or more RAM (16Gb) or more storage (512Gb) depending on the variant you end up with. The display is worse (100 nits less bright and worse resolution) but slightly bigger (14") and that may matter more to many people. It has an older Intel i5 (you can find some AMD options for better efficiency) but it hardly matters for the vast majority of people who just want a laptop to do the basics (basically the target of a MacBook Air). Its battery life would be a bit worse than an MBA but not in a way that can be relevant for the vast majority of customers. One major advantage it has over an MBA is better ports selection, with an HDMI port, a USB A port and an SD card reader on top of the 2 Thunderbolt/USB C ports the MBA has, allowing a dongle free life without having to buy anything else, providing much better utility. That can be way more relevant for many peoples than a better build quality (that I would argue do not even bring better longevity, since with Apple you are hostage of the software support anyway).
You see I am not against MacBooks; in fact, I would advise purchasing a MacBook Pro for some specific use case.
But the reality is that the entry level Apple hardware is rather compromised for its price, and if someone would be satisfied by that choice, I'm arguing that there is another choice (worse on paper, better in some ways) but at half the price (40% off minimum).
If you start loading up a MacBook Air, you end up in MacBook Pro price territory and it doesn't make a lot of sense to not add the 100-200 more to get the much better machine.
I know from experience that entry level Apple hardware is a terrible deal, both because I made the mistake myself or I had to help/fix the issues for other people that made those choices. I have a cousin who remind me every time how much he fucking hates his entry level iMac (an old one with a compromised Fusion Drive and minimum RAM) even though it was rather expensive compared to most computers. My answer is always the same: you spent a lot, but not enough, because with Apple you do not deserve a good experience if you don't go above and beyond in your spending.
In my opinion it is way more disingenuous to advocate for entry-level Apple hardware to people who would be very much satisfied with products costing half as much. The value is just not there, Apple went way too far in the luxury territory in locking down everything and creating a pricing ladder that is engineered to confuse and upsell customers to extract as much money as possible.
For someone who really needs a computer to do more intense work, provided they can work around the tradeoffs of Apple Silicon/macOS and they are willing to spend a large amount of cash, Apple has some great hardware for sure. For everyone else the value is extremely questionnable, especially since they are going full steam ahead into services subscription and the software can be lacking in some ways that will require purchasing even more stuff, the total cost of ownership doesn't make sense anymore. For example, their iPhone SE is absolutely terrible, at 500€ you pay for 6 years old technology with small screen compared to the footprint, terrible battery life, etc. A 500€ mid-range Android is so much better in so many ways that it is just stupid at this point...
As for OLED, I don't think burn-in is a significant concern anymore, and if it is I would argue that you are using it too much like a desktop. In my country you could buy 2 decent OLED laptops for the price of an entry-level MacBook Pro anyway so it doesn't matter as much (and replacing displays of hardware manufacturers other than Apple is much easier and cheaper, so there is that). I think the MacBook Pros are very good for some niche applications, but at viable minimum 2.23k€ price (16Gb RAM/512GB storage) there are a lot of good options so it really requires a careful analysis of actual use case. If you do things related to 3D or engineering it is probably not worth it...
I could see a front end dev needing Photoshop for some things, if they don’t have a design team to give them assets.
There are also security software the company says laptops must have which isn’t available for Linux. They only buy and deploy this stuff with Windows and macOS in mind.
A couple weeks ago on HN I saw someone looking for a program to make a demo of their app (I think). The comments were filled with people recommending an app on macOS that was apparently far and away the best option, and many were disappointed by the lack of availability elsewhere. I find there are a lot of situations like this, where I might be able to get the job done on another OS, but the software I actually want to use is on macOS. Obviously this one is a matter of taste to some degree.
It’s not as big an issue as it was 20 years ago, but it’s still an issue for in many environments.
So this can be done. I don't expect the IT support to help me with any Linux issues.
My excuse for using Linux? It makes me more effective at developing software.
WSL is also nice for Bash scripting, but it's not necessary.
It is a check box in the "Add Features" panel. There is nothing to install or setup. Certainly not for linting, unless, again, you're using a Linux tool chain.
But if you are, just check the box. No setup beyond VS Code, bashrc, vimrc, and your tool chain. Same as you would do on Mac.
If anything, all the Mac specific quirks make setting up the Linux tool chains much harder. At least on WSL the entire directory structure matches Linux out of the box. The tool chains just work.
While some of the documentation is in its infancy, the workflow and versatility of cross platform development on Windows, I think, is unmatched.
I would love to buy Apple hardware, but not from Apple. I mean: M2 13 inch notebook with access to swap/extend memory and storage, regular US keyboard layout and proper desktop Linux (Debian, Alpine, Mint, PopOS!, Fedora Cinamon) or windows. MacOS and the Apple eco system just gets in your way when you're just trying to maintain a multi-platform C++/Java/Rust code base.
Stay classy, Hacker News
Being wrong is no big deal. Being unable to be right is often a very big deal.
Feel free to correct me and share successfull cases with wsl1 and containers
It's great having a chip that is so much different than what our production infrastructure uses.
It looks like Apple's silicon and software is really good for those doing audio/video. Why people like it for dev is mostly a mystery to me. Though I know a few people who don't really like it but are just intimidated by Linux or just can't handle the small UX differences.
Asahi Linux is shockingly great on Apple Silicon hardware, though.
My builds are faster, laptop stays cooler, and battery lasts longer. I love it.
If I was building desktop apps I assume it would be a less pleasant experience like you mention.
There’s quirks to either OS.
Eg when on Gnome it drives me mad that it won’t focus a recently launched apps.
On macOS it annoys me that I have install a 3rd party util to move windows around.
Meh, you just adapt after a while.
The UX differences are absolutely massive. Even after daily-driving that thinkpad for months, Gnome always felt kinda not quite finished. Maybe KDE is better, but it didn't have Wayland support when I was setting that machine up, which made it a non-starter.
The real killer though is battery life. I can work literally all day unplugged on the mbp and finish up with 40-50% remaining. When i'm traveling these days, i don't even bring a power cable with me during the day. The thinkpad, despite my best efforts with powertop, the most aggressive frequency scaling i could get, and a bunch of other little tricks, lasts 2 hours.
There are niceties about Linux too. Package management is better and the docker experience is _way_ better. Overall though, i'd take the apple silicon macbook 10 times out of 10.
I used a Mac for awhile back in 2015 but it never really stood out to me UX-wise, even compared to Gnome. All I really need to do is open a few windows and then switch between them. In i3 or Sway, opening and switching between windows is very fast and I never have to drag stuff around.
I think the culprit is more likely the power hungry intel CPU in your yoga?
Going on a slight tangent; I've tried but do not like the mac keyboards, they feel very shallow to me, hence why I'm still using my old T480s. The newer thinkpad laptop keyboards all seem to be going that way though (going thinner), much to my dismay. Perhaps a P14s is my next purchase, despite it's bulk.
Anybody with a framework 13 want to comment on their keyboard?
This echoes my experiences for anything that needs power management. Not just that the battery life is worse, but that it degrades quickly. In two years it’s barely usable. I’ve seen this with non-Apple phones and laptops. iPhone otoh is so good these days you don’t need to upgrade until EOL of ~6 years (and even if you need it battery is not more expensive than any other proprietary battery). My last MacBook from 2011 failed a couple of years ago only because of a Radeon GPU inside with a known hw error.
> There are niceties about Linux too.
Yes! If you haven’t tried in years, the Linux desktop experience is awesome (at least close enough) for me – a dev who CAN configure stuff if I need to but find it excruciatingly menial if it isn't related to my core work. It’s really an improvement from a decade ago.
Examples?
My first gen ThinkPad Nano X1 would be an excellent laptop, if it weren’t for the terrible battery life even in power save mode (which as an aside, slows it down a lot) and its need to spin up a fan to do something as trivial as driving a rather pedestrian 2560x1440 60hz display.
It feels almost like priorities are totally upside down for x86 laptop manufacturers. I totally understand and appreciate that there are performance oriented laptops that aren’t supposed to be good with battery life, but there’s no good reason for there being so few ultraportable and midrange x86 laptops that have good battery life and won’t fry your lap or sound like a jet taking off when pushed a little. It’s an endless sea of mediocrity.
Modern language tooling (Go, Rust et al) allows one to build and test on any architecture, and the native macOS virtualization (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization) provides remarkably better performance compared to Docker (which is a better explanation for its fading from daily use).
Your "trend" may, in fact, not actually reflect the reality of how cloud development works at scale.
And I don't know a single macOS developer that "lean(s) on the team member who is on Linux" to leverage tools that are already present on their local machine. My own development environments are IDENTICAL across all three major platforms.
If you deploy on docker (or Kubernetes) on Linux in production, then ideally you should be using docker on your local system as well. Which, for Windows or MacOS users, requires a Linux VM as well.
I know you mean well, though.
There is no Docker on macOS without a hypervisor layer - period - and a VM, though there are multiple possible container runtimes not named Docker that are suitable for devops-y local development deployments (which will always, of course, be constrained in comparison to the scale of lab / staging / production environments). Some of these can better leverage the Rosetta 2 translation layer that Apple provides, than others.
Specifically what confused me in your comment was that you were saying Docker on Mac was superseded by their new native virtualization, which just doesn't make sense to me, for the reasons I was bringing up. I still don't understand what you were trying to say; replacing docker with podman or containerd or something else still doesn't have anything to do with virtualization or Rosetta, or at least I don't see the connection.
I should also say that I don't think anyone really means specifically docker when they talk about it, they probably mean containerization + image repos in general.
So even if all developers of your team are using Linux, unless you want to waste money by ignoring arm64 instances on cloud computing, you'll have to setup cross compilation.
I actually rejected a job offer when heard I will be given a macbook pro.
Apple, been the most closed company these days, should be avoided as much as you can, not to mention its macos is useless for linux developers like me, anything else is better.
its keyboard is dumb to me(that stupid command/ctrl key difference), can not even mouse-select and paste is enough for me to avoid Macos at all costs.
Now the performance of Mx Macs convinced me to switch, and I'll die on the hill of Android for life
Probably best for you both.
I don't even know what you mean by mouse-select and paste.
Presumably they mean linux-style text select & paste, which is done by selecting text and then clicking the middle mouse button to paste it (no explicit "copy" command).
macOS doesn't have built-in support for this, but there are some third-party scripts/apps to enable it.
For example: https://github.com/lodestone/macpaste
Then there's Docker. Running amd64 containers on Apple silicon is slow for obvious reasons. Running arm64 containers is fast, but the actual environment you will be deploying to is almost certainly amd64, so if you're using that locally for dev & test purposes, you can get some surprises in prod. Windows, of course, will happily run amd64 natively.
that’s up to your team of course, but graviton is generally cheaper than x86 instances nowadays and afaik the same is true on google and the other clouds.
For most devs, doing crud stuff or writing high-level scripting languages, this isn't really a problem. For some devs, working on time-sensitive problems or with strict baseline performance requirements, this is important. For devs developing device drivers, emulation can only get you so far.
No, I said you won’t always be deploying on amd64. Because arm64 is now the cheapest option and generally faster than the sandy bridge vcpu unit that amd64 instances are indexed against (and really, constrained to, intentionally, by AWS).
I never said anything about graviton not being arm64.
Very quickly remedied by installing the GNU versions of those commands, ie: "brew install coreutils findutils" (etc)
Then you'll have exactly the same command line switches as on Linux.
For what it's worth, I've had a good success rate at politely asking to be given an equivalent laptop I can put linux on, or provide my own device. I've never had to outright reject an offer due to being required to use a Mac. At worst I get "you'll be responsible for making our dev environment work on your setup".
Only one time did I interview with a place where I asked if I'd be given a choice what hardware/OS I could use. The response was "We use Windows". My response was, "no we do not. Either I will not be using Windows with you, or I will not be using Windows NOT with you". I didn't get an offer. I was cool with it.
Pretty much everything going wrong with provisioning involves going extra weird on hw (usually for cheap supplier) and/or pushing weird third party "security" crapware.
Literally best keyboard shortcuts out of all major OSes. I don't know what weird crab hands you need to have to comfortably use shortcuts on Windows/Linux. CMD maps PERFECTLY on my thumb.
I.e the same functionality exists with no draw backs and money was no object.
And they chose Windows? Seriously why?
I don't know what to say except resign to the fact that the world is fundamentally unfair, and you won't ever get to run the A/B experiment that you want. So yes, Windows it is !
The only problem is that Apple is even worse at communicating issues than Microsoft is.
[1] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-wa...
[2] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-fi...
[3] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-sa...
[4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2019/06/12/microsof...
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/22/windows_10_update_kil...
With Apple, it's usually just crickets... nothing in the release notes, no official statements, nothing. It's just trial and error for the users to see if a particular update fixed the issue.
> where non-Apple monitors and other 3rd party hardware just stops working after minor updates and then starts working again after another update, without any official statement from Apple that there was a problem and a fix?
At least my WiFi doesn't turn off indefinitely during sleep until I power cycle whole laptop because of a shitty driver.
Not that the degree means much, I learnt 90% of what I know on the job. It certainly helped get my foot in through the university brand, and alumni network.
You can call yourself anything you want Doctor, Lawyer, Engineer. I have the freedom to think my own thoughts too.
There was brief sidestep from late 1980s to early 2010s (~2012) where the term "software engineer" came into vogue and completely ran orthogonal to "proficiency in calculus". I mean, literally 99% of software engineers never learned calculus!
But it's nice to see that ever since ~2015 or so (and perhaps even going forward) proficiency in calculus is rising to the fore. We call those "software engineers" "ML Engineers" nowadays, ehh fine by me. And all those "computers" are not people anymore -- looks like carefully arranged sand (silicon) in metal took over.
I wonder if it's just a matter of time before the carefully-arranged-sand-in-metal form factor will take over the "engineer" role too. One of those Tesla/Figure robots becomes "proficient at calculus" and "proficient at calculations" better than "people".
Reference: [1]: I took the terms "engineer" and "computer" literally out of the movie "Hidden Figures" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Figures#Plot
It looks like ever since humankind learned calculus there was an enormous benefit to applying it in the engineering of rockets, aeroplanes, bridges, houses, and eventually "the careful arrangement of sand (silicon)". Literally every one of those jobs required learning calculus at school and applying calculus at work.
Might be just my Eastern Europe background where it was all just "Math" and both equations (that's Algebra I guess) and simpler functions/analysis (Calculus?) are taught in elementary school around age 14 or 15.
Maybe I'm missing/forgetting something - I think I used Calculus more during electrical engineering than for computer/software engineering.
>I think I used Calculus more during electrical engineering than for computer/software engineering.
I think that was OPs point - most engineering disciplines teach it.
It was not really necessary through all of the app developers eras. In fact, it’s so much so the case that many software engineers graduating from 2000-2015 or so work as software engineers without a degree in BS. Rather, they could drop the physics & calculus grind and opt for a BA in computer science. They then went on to become proficient software engineers in the industry.
It’s only after the recent advances of AI around 2012/2015 did a proficiency in calculus become crucial to software engineering again.
I mean, there’s a whole rabbit hole of knowledge on the reason why ML frameworks deal with calculating vector-Jacobian or Jacobian-vector products. Appreciating that and their relation to gradient is necessary to design & debug frameworks like PyTorch or MLX.
Sure, I will concede that a sans-calculus training (BA in Computer Science) can still be sufficiently useful to working as an ML engineer in data analytics, api/services/framework design, infrastructure, systems engineering, and perhaps even inference engineering. But I bet all those people will need to be proficient in calculus the more they have to deal with debugging models.
I don’t mean to disregard other branches of math — of course they’re useful — but calculus stands out in specific _applicability_ to engineering.
Literally every single branch of engineering. All o then. Petrochemical engineering to Biotech. They all use calculus as a fundamental block of study.
Discovering new drugs using Pk/Pd modeling is driven by modeling then drug<->pathogen repo as cycles using Lotka models.
Im not saying engineers dont need to learn stats or arithmetic. IMO those are more fundamental to _all_ fields, janitors or physicians or any field really. But calculus is fundamental to engineering alone.
Perhaps, a begrudging exception I can make is its applications in Finance.
But every other field where people build rockets, cars, airplanes, drugs, or ai robots, you’d need proficiency in calculus just as much as you’d need proficiency in writing or proficiency in arithmetic.
I've come to appreciate the fact that domain knowledge has a more dominant role in solving a problem than technical/programming knowledge. I often wonder how s/w could align with other engineering practices in terms of approach design in a standardized way so we can just churn out code w/o an excessive reliance on quality assurance. I'm really hoping visual programming is going to be the savior here. It might allow SMEs and Domain experts to utilize a visual interface to implement their ideas.
Its interesting how python dominated C/C++ in the case of the NumPy community. One would have assumed C/C++ to be a more a natural fit for performance oriented code. But the domain knowledge overpowered technical knowledge and eventually people started asking funny questions like
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41365723/why-is-my-pytho...
My strong “opinion” here comes from an observation that while calculus may have been a required subject of study in awarding engineering degrees, the reality is, people didn’t really study it. They just brushed through a couple of pages and wrote a few tests/exams.
In America there’s plethora of expert software engineers who opt for a bachelors degree in computer science that is a BA not a BS.
I think that’s complete totally reasonable thing to do if you don’t want to grind out the physics and calculus courses. They are super hard after all. And let’s face it, all of the _useful to humanity_ work in software doesn’t require expertise in physics or calculus, at least until now.
With AI going forward it’s hard to say. If more of the jobs shift over to model building then yes perhaps a back to basics approach of calculus proficiency could be required.
I guess I just enjoy things more when I can count them.
Calculus was important during the world wars because it means we could throw shells to the enemy army better, and that was an important issue during that period.
Nowadays, calculus is just a stepping stone to more relevant mathematics.
Both are math, and both are still incredibly important. Rockets haven't gone out of style.
Todays ML frameworks grapple with the problem of “jacobian-vector products” & “vector-jacobian product” as a consequence of understanding the interplay between gradients & derivative; and the application of the “chain rule”. All of those 3 concepts are fundamentally understood by being proficient in calculus.
While I’m being the hype-man for calculus I don’t mean to say proficiency in linear algebra or statistics is in any “less necessary” or “less useful” or “less challenging” or “less..” in any way.
I’m merely stating that, historically, calculus has been the unique branch of study for engineering. Statistics has always found value in many fields — business, finance, government policy etc.
Sure Linear algebra is one of those unique fields too — I kinda like to think of it as “algebra” in general and perhaps its utility has flowed in tandem with calculus. Idk. I haven’t thought super hard about it.
When I started doing this "Internet stuff" we were called "webmasters", and job would actually include what today we call: - DevOps - Server/Linux sysadmin - DB admin - Full stack (backend and frontend) engineer
And I might have forgot some things.
There's little things too, like some people using gaming peripherals (multi-button MMO mice and left hand controllers, etc.) for editing, which might not be compatible with OSX.
And also, if you're mucking around with two 32 inch 4k monitors and a 16 inch Wacom it might start to feel a little ridiculous trying to save space with a Mac Pro.
I am not an artist and also dislike multiple monitors, though I will employ two of them on occasion.
My reasons are:
If the window and application management doesn't suck, one display is all one needs.
With cheap multiple displays and touch devices came an ongoing enshitification of app and window management. (And usually dumber focus rules)
Having to turn my head x times a day sucks.
Once it works, Linux is more reliable than Windows. And virtual desktops have always worked better on Linux than on Windows. So I disagree with you on that front.
* In my case, this means I had to get an Anker HDMI adapter, instead of any random brand.
Maybe as long as you don't need working fractional scaling with different DPI monitors, which is nothing fancy now.
I think engineers using software should not be seen as an endorsement. They seem to have an incredible tolerance for bad UI.
People hate software that they're forced to use. Professionals are better at tolerating crapware, because there's usually sunk cost fallacy involved.
Well actually, I use FreeBSD as my daily driver (on a used ThinkPad I bought for 300 euros), and I love it. :D
</painfully earnest nerd>
okay, now you're going to tell me that FreeBSD is in the "software nobody uses" category isn't it?
Disguising it as an "observation" is even more ridiculous.
Nah, I'm good. Believe what you want to believe my friend.
Irelevant.
Firstly, it's a tool, not a social media platform designed to sell ads and farm clicks, it needs to be utilitarian and that's it, like a power drill or a pickup truck, not look pretty since they're not targeting consumers but solving a niche set of engineering problems.
Secondly, the engineers are not the ones paying for that software so their individual tolerance is irelevant since their company pays for the tools and for their tolerance to those tools, being part of the job description and the pay.
Unless you run your own business , you're not gonna turn down lucrative employment because on site they provide BOSCH tools and GM trucks while you personally prefer the UX of Makita and Toyota. If those tools' UX slows down the process and makes the project take longer it's not my problem, my job is to clock in at 9 and clock out at 5, that's it, it's the company's problem to provide the best possible tools for the job, if they can.
Where can I find one of those jobs?
But since you asked, Google is famous for low workloads. Or Microsoft. Or any other old and large slow moving company with lots of money, like IBM, Intel, SAP, ASML, Airbus, DHL, Siemens, manufacturing, aerospace, big pharma, transportation, etc. No bootstrapped "agile" start-ups and scale-ups, or failing companies that need to compete in a race to the bottom.
Depends mostly on where you live though.
> I think engineers using software should not be seen as an endorsement.
They may be locked in, which just forces things. Not an endorsement.
However, they may also be really productive with whatever it is. This could be an endorsement.
In CAD, as an example, there are often very productive interaction models that seem obtuse, or just bad to people learning the tools first time.
Often improving on first time ramp ups to competence nearly always impacts the pro user too.
Where it plays out this way, I have always thought the UI was good in that the pros can work at peak efficiency. It is hard to beat them.
Fact is the task complexity footprint is just large enough to make "good", as in simple, intuitive interfaces not possible.
My MBP has been running without any restart for over a month.
I am not meaning software is engineering or not.
It is a fact, in terms of cost, that software and bridge building are, most of the time very different activities with very different goals and cost-benefit ratios.
All those things count when taking decisions about the level of standardization.
About standards... there are lots also and widely used, from networking to protocols, data transfer formats... with well-known strengths and limitations.
It feels to me that you're bitter or had more than one bad experience. Perhaps you keep working with, or come across, bad Engineers as your generalising is inaccurate.
IETF RFCs soon number over 10K; Java, win32, the Linux kernel syscall API are famous for backward compatibility
not to mention the absurd success of standard libraries of Python, Rust, PHP and certain "standard" projects like Django, React, and ExpressJS
> (how many libraries do you need for arrays and vectors and guis and buttons and text boxes and binary trees and sorting, yada yada?)
considering the design space is enormous and the tradeoffs are not trivial ... it's good to have libraries that fundamentally solve the similar thing but in different context-dependent ways
arguably we are using too many libraries and not enough problem-specific in-situ DSLs (see the result of Alan Kay's research the STEPS project at VPRI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32966987 )
Many if not most computational problems are fundamentally about data and data transformation under constraints - Throughput, Memory, Latency, etc, etc. And for the situations where the tradeoffs are non-trivial, solving this problem is purely about domain knowledge regarding the nature of the data (video codec data, real-time sensor data, financial data, etc) not about programming expertise.
The various ways to high level architect the overall design in terms of client/server, P2P, distributed vs local, threading model, are, IME are not what I would call crazy complicated. There are standard ways of implementing various variations of the overall design which sadly because of a overall roll-your-own mindset, most devs are reluctant to adopt someone elses design. Part of that is that we don't have a framework of knowledge that allows us to build a library for these designs in our head where we can just pick one thats right for our usecase.
I don't agree with your characterization of the design space as 'enourmous'. I'd say most programmers just need to know a handful of design types because they're not working on high performance, low latency, multi-million endpoint scalable projects where as you say things can get non-trivial.
I'll give a shot at an analogy (I'm hoping the nitpickers are out to lunch). The design space for door knob is enormous because of the various hand shapes, disability constraints, door sizes, applications, security implications, etc. And yet we've standardize d on a few door knob types for most homes which you can go out and buy and install yourself. The special case bank vaults and prisons and other domains solve it their own way.
I worked for one of the UKs leading architecture / construction firms writing software and also am an amature mechanic.
You'd be amazed at how many gasket types, nuts, bolts, fasteners, unfasters, glues, concretes, bonding agents and so on ... all invented for edge preferences and most of which could be used interchangably.
Also standards? Hah. They're an absolute shitshow in any engineering effort.
I mean ... even just units of measure. C'mon.
I've set up my OS exactly as I want it. (I use arch btw ;-))
Obviously doesn’t apply to all engineers.
I do networking stuff and macOS is on par with Windows - I can't live on it without running into bugs or very questionable behavior for longer than a week. Same as Windows.
> I do networking stuff
Me too, but probably very different stuff. I’m doing p2p stuff over tcp and am affected mostly by sock options, buffer sizes, tcp options etc.
I like apple hardware, but their OS is fucking atrocious. In the year 2024 it still doesn't have a native volume mixer, or any kind of sensible window management shortcuts. Half the things on it have to be fixed with paid software. Complete joke of an OS, if it were up to me I'd stick a linux distro on top of the hardware and be happy
I think they don't because they have an incentive to not do so: they get a cut on all the software you have to purchase on the App Store to make up for it. It might not look like a lot, but if a large portions of Mac users need to buy a 5-10 bucks app to fix the windows management problems, it becomes serious money at 15-30% cut on millions of purchases...
And this is precisely the problem with Apple today. They are not honest enough to fix or improve the stuff they sell at a very high price, both because they sell it anyway and because they put in place many incentives for themselves to not do so.
There is the running meme of the iPad calculator but macOS could also use some care on the calculator/grapher not having received serious attention in decades. At the price they sell their stuff that would seem like a given, but considering they'll make money on the apps you buy to improve that situation, they'll never do so.
After using Apple App Stores for so many years, I wish I didn't, the convenience really isn't worth the cost down the road...
I know engineers from a FANG that picked MacBook pros in spite of the specs and only because of the bling/price tag. Them they spent their whole time using it as a remote terminal for Linux servers, and they still complained about the thing being extremely short on RAM and HD.
One of them even tried to convince their managers to give the vision pro a try, even though there was zero use cases for it.
Granted, they drive multiple monitors well with a single USB-C plug, at least with specific combinations of monitors and hubs.
It's high time that the "Apple sells high end gear" shtick is put to rest. Even their macOS treadmill is becoming tiring.
Yes, there are 2k+ laptops from Dell/Lenovo that match and exceed a similarly priced MacBook in pure power, but usually lack battery life and/or build quality.
I can't do that on Windows without either wrestling with PowerShell or WSL2
in case Apple would come up with the idea to take an ipad as external compute unit that would be amazing... just double your ram, compute and screen with it in such a lightweight form factor... should be possible if they want
Also the nice thing for headphones within apple is, that the airpods automatically switch to where the attention is... meaning e.g., in case I watch something on the laptop and pick up an iphone call (no matter if via phone or any app) the airpod automatically switches
I owned a MacBook Pro with the dreaded butterfly keyboard. It was shit.
How many USB ports do the new MacBook air have? The old ones had two. And shipped with 8GB of RAM? These are shit-tier specs.
The 2020 MacBook pros had a nice thing: USB-C charging, and you could charge the from either side. Current models went back to MagSafe, only on one side. The number of USB ports is still very low.
But the are shiny. I guess that counts as quality.
I agree, the butterfly keyboard was shitty but I absolutely love the keyboard on the 2020 rev. It's still not as great as my mechanical desktop keyboard, but for a laptop keyboard it's serious chef's kiss. Also, I have yet to find a trackpad that is anywhere as good as the Macbook. Precision trackpads are still way way worse.
Finally, the thing that always beings me back to MBPs (vs Surfacebooks or Razers) is battery life. I typically get a good 10+ hours on my MBP. Battery life on my old Razer Blade and Surfacebooks were absolutely comically horrible.
However there are two awesome things about my work MBP I would really want from my ThinkPad:
Magsafe charger - too many close calls!
And the track pad.
I can't work properly without an external mouse on my ThinkPad. But on the MBP everything just has the right size, location, proportions and handling on the track pad. I had a mouse for the MBP too but I stopped using it!
Yea, the butterfly was utter shit. And they fucked up the touchbar by not just putting it on TOP of the existing F-keys.
But the rest of the laptop was still well machined :D
I am the one paying for my MacBook Pro, because my company is a self-funded business. I run my entire business on this machine and I love it. I always buy the fastest CPU possible, although I don't max out the RAM and SSD.
Amusingly enough, I talked to someone recently about compilation speeds and that person asked my why I don't compile my software (Clojure and ClojureScript) on "powerful cloud servers". Well, according to Geekbench, which always correlates very well with my compilation speeds, there are very few CPUs out there that can beat my M3 Max, and those aren't easily rentable as bare-metal cloud servers. Any virtual server will be slower.
So please, don't repeat the "MacBooks are for spoiled people who don't have to pay for them" trope. There are people for whom this is simply the best machine for the job at hand.
Incidentally, I checked my financials: a 16" MBP with M3 and 64GB RAM, amortized over 18 months (very short!) comes out to around $150/month. That is not expensive at all for your main development machine that you run your business on!
Which, incidentally, is probably about 10x less than you would spend compiling your software on "powerful cloud servers". :-)
I mean Hetzner has a reputation for renting bare metal servers at the cheapest price in the market. Try AX102 which has very close performance to a M3 Max (CPU only): https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-ax/
While the OP's solution has a lot of advantages like being able to own the device and including GPU, but at least we do have cloud servers with comparable costs available.
Worth noting: the monthly cost is close to my 18-month amortized cost.
I use Debian + FreeBSD on my personal PCs though.
For dev (at least backend and devops), macOS is not that great.
Still, I just don't think it's that burdensome to get containers running on MacOS, it's just annoying that it happens to work worse than on Windows or Linux. Ignoring the hardware, the only real advantage to MacOS development is when you're targeting Apple products with what you're developing.
Not all teams run tons of containers on personal computers. All our servers are running on AWS. I rarely ssh into anything.
I like the fact that OS X is based on UNIX, and not some half-assed bullshit bolted onto Windows. I still have bad memories of trying to use Cygwin 15 years ago. Apparently WSL is an improvement, but I don't care.
Mac runs all the software I need, and it has real UNIX shells.
The vast majority of the software engineers in big companies (that employ a lot more people than big tech and startups combined) who use Java and C# also have predominately Windows laptops (as their employers can manage Windows laptops a lot easier, have agreements with vendors like Dell to buy them with a discount, have software like AV that doesn't support MacOS, etc.).
On top of that MacBooks don't have the best screens and are not the best built. Many Windows laptops have OLED screens or 4K IPS screens. There are premium Windows laptops made out of magnesium and carbon fiber.
Every company I've worked for during the last 12 years gives out MacBook Pros. And I've been developing using Scala / Java for the last 20 years.
Employers manage Macs just fine, this isn't 1999. There have been studies showing that Macs have lower IT maintenance costs compared to Windows.
I admit that I haven't dealt with Windows devices in a long time, maybe there are some good ones available now, but I find your statements to be beyond belief. Apple Silicon Macs have blown the doors off the competition, out performing all but top-end Intel laptops, while using a fraction of the power (and I never even hear the fans come on).
I am happy to not support Apple's ecosystem and use a minimally worse laptop from a different brand.
The same is true of the ipad which is just a miraculous piece of hardware constrained by an impotent operating system.
The cheap Windows PCs suck just like a cheap car sucks (ok, they suck more), but they still get the job done. You can still browse the web, read your email, watch a youtube video, post a youtube video, write a blog, etc.. My dad got some HP celeron. It took 4 minutes to boot. It still ran though and he paid probably $300 for it vs $999 for a mac. He didn't have $999.
> The cheap Windows PCs suck […], but they still get the job done
For desktop, totally. Although I would still wipe it with Ubuntu or so because Windows is so horrible these days even my mom is having a shit time with only browsing and video calls.
A random laptop however is a different story. Except for premium brands (closer to Apple prices) they tend to have garbage battery life, infuriating track pad, massive thermal issues, and preloaded with bloatware. Apple was always better here, but now with the lower power/heat of the ARM chips, they got soooo much better overnight.
To the person with no budget, all that doesn't matter. They'll still get let $250 laptop and put up with the garbage battery life (find a power outlet), infuriating trackpad (buy an external mouse for $10), bloatware (most users don't know this and just put up with it), etc....
I agree Apple is better. But if your budget is $250 and not $1k then you get what you can get for $250 and continue to feed your kids and pay your rent.
I notice your use of the weasel word "just".
We undoubtedly live in a world where Apple products are sold as lifestyle gadgets. Arguably it's more true today than it ever was. It's also a world where Apple's range of Veblen goods managed to gain footing in social circles to an extent that we have kids being bullied for owning Android phones.
Apple's lifestyle angle is becoming specially relevant because they can no longer claim they sell high-end hardware, as the difference in specs between Apple's hardware and product ranges from other OEMs is no longer noticeable. Apple's laughable insistence on shipping laptops with 8GB of RAM is a good example.
> Even in the higher end products like the MacBooks you see a lot of professionals (engineers included) who choose it because of its price-performance-value, and who don’t give a shit about luxury.
I don't think so, and that contrasts with my personal experience. All my previous roles offered a mix of MacBooks and windows laptops, and MacBooks were opted by new arrivals because they were seen as perks and the particular choice of windows ones in comparison were not as impressive, even though they out-specced Apple's offering (mid-range HP and Dell). In fact in a recent employee's review their main feedback was that the MacBook pro line was under-specced because at best it shipped with only 16GB of RAM while the less impressive HP ones already came with 32GB. In previous years, they called for the replacement of the MacBook line due to the rate of keyboard malfunctions. Meaning, engineers were purposely picking the underperforming option for non-technical reasons.
Also, I think you’re misunderstanding what a Veblen good is and the difference between “premium” and “luxury.” Apple does not create luxury or “Veblen” goods like for example, LVMH.
An easy way to discern the difference between premium and luxury — does the company advertise the product’s features or price?
For example, a Chanel handbag is almost entirely divorced from its utility as a handbag. Chanel doesn’t advertise features or pricing, because it’s not about the product’s value or utility, it’s what it says about your personal wealth that you bought it. That’s a Veblen good.
Apple heavily advertises features and pricing. Because they sell premium products that are not divorced from their utility or value.
I own a MacBook Air, I won't be buying another purely because the moment I need to upgrade anything or repair anything it's effectively ewaste.
Fiddler on windows works flawlessly.
Most CS professionals who write code have no idea what it takes to build a desktop, so the hardware that they chose is pretty much irrelevant because they aren't specifically choosing for hardware. The reason Apple gets bought is mostly by anyone, including tech people, is because of ecosystem. The truth is, nobody really care that much about actual specs as long as its good enough to do basic stuff, and when you are indifferent to the actual difference but all your friends are in the ecosystem, the choice is obvious.
You can easily see this yourself: ask these "professionals" about the details of the Apple Neural engine, and its a very high chance that they will repeat some marketing material, while failing to mention that Apple does not publish any real docs for ANE, you have to sign your code to run on ANE, and you have to basically use Core ML to utilize the ANE. I.e if they really cared about inference, all of them would be buying laptops with discrete 4090s for almost the same price.
Meanwhile, if you look at people who came from EE/ECE (who btw on the average are far better coders than people with CS background, based on my 500+ interviews in the industry across several sectors), you see a way larger skew towards Android/custom built desktops/windows laptops running Linux. If you lived and breathed Linux and low level OS, you tend appreciate all the power and customization that it gives you because you don't have to go learn how to do things.
The signing of binaries is a part of adult developer life, and is certainly required for the platforms you mention as well.
Unquestionably, battery life on 4090-based laptops sucks on a good day, and if you're working long hours, the last thing you want to have to do is park yourself next to your 350W adapter just to get basic work done.
Very much not true. Not to make this personal, but this is exactly what Im talking about Apple fans not understanding hardware.
Linux has been through the ringer of fighting its way to general use, and because of its open source nature and constant development. So in terms of working well, it has been optimized for hardware WAY further than Apple, which is why you find it on servers, personal desktops, phones, portable gaming devices, and even STM32 Cortex bldc control boards, all of which run different hardware.
Apple doesn't optimize for general use, it optimizes for a specific business case. In the case of Apple silicon, it was purely battery life which brings more people in to the ecosystem. Single core performance is on par with all the other chips, because the instruction set doesn't actually matter (https://chipsandcheese.com/2021/07/13/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-...), multi core is behind, Mac Os software is still a pile of junk (Rosetta still isn't good across the board), computers are not repairable, you have no privacy since Apple collects a shitload of telemetry for themselves, e.t.c and so on.
And, Apple has no incentive to make any of this better - prior to Apple Silicon, people were still buying Intel Macs with worse specs and performance for the same price, all for the ecosystem and vanity. And not only was the Macos still terrible (and much slower), you also had hardware failures like plugging in a wrong USBC hub would blow the chip and brick your Mac, butterfly keyboards failing, and questionable decisions like virtual esc keys.
>The signing of binaries is a part of adult developer life,
...for professional use, and the private key holder should be the person who wrote that software. I hope you understand how ridiculous it is to ask a developer to sign code using the manufacturers key to allow them to run that code on a machine that they own.
>Unquestionably, battery life on 4090-based laptops sucks on a good day,
Well yea, but you are not buying that laptop for battery life. Also, with Ryzen cpus and 4090s, most get like 6-8 hours depending on use due to Nvidia Prime, which is pretty good for travel, especially if you have a backpack with a charging brick.
If you want portability, there are plenty of lighter weight option like Lenovo Yoga which can get 11-12 hours of battery life for things like web browsing.
Apple is popular in the US because a) luxury brands hold sway b) they goad customers into bullying non-customers (blue/green chats) and c) they limit features and customizability in favor of simpler interfaces.
It's popular with developers because a) performance is valuable even at Apples steep cost b) it's Unix-based unlike Windows so shares more with the Linux systems most engineers are targeting.
Here I feel that I-hate-apple crowd is just stuck with this notion of luxury overpriced brand when it is clearly not the case. Apple has superior hardware at better price points. Last time I was doing shopping for a laptop, I could get similar features only at a 30% - 40% price premium in other brands.
I am typing this on an apple M2 air and try finding similar performance under 2000 USD in other brands. The responsiveness, the (mostly) sane defaults and superior rendering and fonts make it worth it. The OS does not matter so much as it used to do in 2004 and the fact that I have a unix terminal in 2024 is just incidental. I have turned off auto updates and I do not use much of phone integration apart from taking backups and photo copying.
I switched to an iPhone in 2022 from a 200 US$ Samsung handset. Here, I would say that not everyone needs an iPhone. My old phone used to do all the tricks I need on this one. However, the camera is really and photos are really great. If I buy an iPhone next time, it would be just for the photos it takes.
(FWIW my opinion is it is a human right, I just think Tim Cook is full of shit.)
What Apple calls privacy more often than not is just putting lipstick on the pig that is their anticompetitive walled garden.
Pretty much everybody in SV who works in privacy rolls their eyes at Apple. They talk a big game but they are as full of shit as Meta and Google - and there’s receipts to prove it thanks to this DoJ case.
Apple want to sell high end hardware. On-device computation is a better user experience, hands down.
That said, Siri is utter dogshit so on-device dogshit is just faster dogshit.
The idea that user behavior or consumer choice will change any of this is basically discredited in practice. It will always been cat and mouse until the point that CEOs go to jail, then it will stop.
I have used both. I think the Mac experience is significantly better. No one is looking at me.
How is something that is twice as expensive as the competition not a luxury device?
EDIT: Because there's repeated confusion in the replies: I am not saying that a MacBook Air is not objectively a better device. I'm saying it is better by metrics that fall strictly into the "luxury" category.
Better build quality, system-on-a-chip, better OS, better battery life, aluminum case—all of these are luxury characteristics that someone who is looking for a functional device that meets their needs at a decent price won't have as dealbreakers.
https://www.amazon.com/HP-Pavilion-i7-11370H-Micro-Edge-Anti...
The point isn't that the MacBook Air isn't better by some metrics than PC laptops. A Rolls-Royce is "better" by certain metrics than a Toyota, too. What makes a device luxury is if it costs substantially more than competing products that the average person would consider a valid replacement.
MacBook Air (2022): https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-air-2022
Ryzen 5 5500U (CPU): https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/amd-ryzen-5-5500u
Ryzen 5 5500U (APU, similar laptop): https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/compute/6751456
But what is that, exactly? If you look at all aspects of a laptop: CPU, RAM, SSD, battery life, screen quality, build quality, touchpad, OS, and put them in order of importance for the average consumer, what would be on top? I don't think it's the tech specs.
For instance, I would be willing to bet that for a large number of consumers, battery life is far more important than the tech specs, which means that a valid replacement for their MacBook must have equivalent battery life. You also have to consider things like the expected lifespan of the laptop and its resale value to properly compare their costs. It's not simple.
Closer to $999 then $500.
https://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-IdeaPad-Ryzen5-5500U-1920x1080...
An 18 hour battery life is a luxury characteristic, not something penny pinchers will typically be selecting on.
Apple likes to overcharge for storage, but the drives are _really_ good.
As I said in another comment:
The point isn't that the MacBook Air isn't better by some metrics than PC laptops. A Rolls-Royce is "better" by certain metrics than a Toyota, too. What makes a device luxury is if it costs substantially more than competing products that the average person would consider a valid replacement.
Except Apple wanted $3,000 for 7TB of SSD (considering the base price already included 1TB).
Instead, I bought a 4xM.2 PCI card, and 4 2TB Samsung Pro SSDs.
I paid $1,300 for it, got to keep the 1TB "system" SSD.
And I get faster speeds from it, 6.8GBps versus 5.5GBps off the system drive.
For $2,000 I could have got the PCI 4.0 version and SSDs, and get 26GBps.
... for an eye watering $3,000 over the exact same spec Mac Studio.
I liked my cheesegrater, though I didn't like the heat output.
And I cannot justify that. I sacrificed half the throughput (2800MBps) for $379 and got an external 4 x M.2 TB3 enclosure.
Oh, and a USB 3 hub to replace one I had installed in the cheesegrater to augment the built in ports. $400 give or take.
Like I say Audi is a luxury car because a Toyota costs less than half as much, and you ask "what about a Toyota with leather seats"?
My experiences (multiple) with Genius Bar have been decidedly more "meh" to outright frustrating, versus "luxury", oftentimes where I know more than the Genius.
Logic Board issues where on a brand new macOS install I could reproducibly cause a kernel panic around graphics hardware. There was an open recall (finally, after waiting MONTHS) on this. It covered my Mac. But because it passed their diagnostic tool, they would only offer to replace the board on a time and materials basis.
I had a screen delamination issue. "It's not that bad - you can't see it when the screen is on, and you have to look for it". Huh. Great "luxury" experience.
And then the multiple "we are going to price this so outrageously, and use that as an excuse to try to upsell". Like the MBA that wouldn't charge due to a circuit issue. Battery fine, healthy. Laptop, fine, healthy, on AC. Just couldn't deliver current to the battery. Me, thinking sure, $300ish maybe with a little effort.
"That's going to be $899 to repair. That's only $100 less than a new MBA, maybe we should take a look at some of the new models?" Uh, no. I'm not paying $900 for a laptop that spends 99% (well, 100% now) of its life on AC power.
Nobody is away from a power source for longer than 18 hours. MOST people don't need the performance that a macbook air has, their NEEDS would be met by a raspberry pi... that is, basic finances, logging into various services, online banking, things that first world citizens "rely" on.
The definition of luxury is "great comfort and extravagance", and every current Apple product fits that definition. Past Apple definitely had non-luxury products, as recently as the iPhone C (discontinued 10 years ago)... but Apple has eliminated all low-value options from their lineup.
M-series Macs is when MacBooks stopped sucking at battery life without sleeping and wrecking state every moment they could.
Most people, when given the pitch you just gave me for a 2x increase in price, will choose the cheaper item, just like they choose the cheaper car.
[edit] I mean sure there are people who just want the Apple logo, I’m not saying there are zero of those, but they’re also excellent, reliable tools (by the standards of computers—so, still bad) and a good chunk of their buyers are there for that. Even the ones who only have a phone.
The equivalent from Apple would currently run me $3200. If I'm willing to compromise to 24GB of RAM I can get one for $2200.
What makes an Apple device a luxury item isn't that it's more expensive, it's that no matter what specs you pick it will always be much more expensive than equivalent specs from a non-luxury provider. The things that Apple provides are not the headline stats that matter for a tool-user, they're luxury properties that don't actually matter to most people.
Note that there's nothing wrong with buying a luxury item! It's entirely unsurprising that most people on HN looking at the latest M4 chip prefer luxury computers, and that's fine!
The devices are great and feel great. Definitely high quality (arguably, luxury!). The OS leaves a lot to be desired for me.
Got a job in dual-platform mobile dev and was issued a MacBook. Exposure to dozens of phones and tablets from both ecosystem. I was converted within a year.
(I barely customize anything these days, fwiw—hit the toggle for “caps as an extra ctrl”, brew install spectacle, done. Used to have opinions about my graphical login manager, use custom icon sets, all that stuff)
On the phone side, I guess you would call Samsung and Google luxury providers? On the laptop side there are a number of differentiating features that are of general interest.
> The things that Apple provides are not the headline stats that matter for a tool-user, they're luxury properties that don't actually matter to most people
Things that might matter to regular people (and tool users):
- design and build for something you use all day
- mic and speakers that don't sound like garbage (very noticeable and relevant in the zoom/hybrid work era)
- excellent display
- excellent battery life
- seamless integration with iPhone, iPad, AirPods
- whole widget: fewer headaches vs. Windows (ymmv); better app consistency vs. Linux
- in-person service/support at Apple stores
It's hard to argue that Apple didn't reset expectations for laptop battery life (and fanless performance) with the M1 MacBook Air. If Ryzen has caught up, then competition is a good thing for all of us (maybe not intel though...) In general Apple isn't bleeding edge, but they innovate with high quality, very usable implementations (wi-fi (1999), gigabit ethernet (2001), modern MacBook Pro design (2001), "air"/ultrabook form factors (2008), thunderbolt (2011), "retina" display and standard ssd (2012), usb-c (2016), M1: SoC/SiP/unified memory/ARM/asymmetric cores/neural engine/power efficiency/battery life (2020) ...and occasionally with dubious features like the touchbar and butterfly keyboard (2016).)
How much does it weight? Battery life? Screen quality? Keyboard? Speakers?
Here lies the rub, ARE those the stats that matter? Or does the screen, touchpad, speakers, battery life, software, support services, etc. matter more?
I feel people just TOTALLY gloss over the fact that Apple is crushing the competition in terms of trackpads + speakers + battery life, which are hardly irrelevant parts of most people's computing experience. Many people hardly use their computers to compute - they mostly use them to input and display information. For such users, memory capacity and processing performance ARE frills, and Apple is a market leader where it's delivering value.
Also even in compute, apple is selling computers with a 512-bit or 1024-bit LPDDR5x bus for a lower price than you can get from the competition. Apple is also frequently leading the pack in terms of compute/watt. This has more niche appeal, but I've seen people buy Apple to run LLM inferencing 24/7 while the Mac Studio sips power.
Im a Linux guy but am forced to use Mac's and windows every now and then.
Windows has outpaced macos for a decade straight.
Macos looks like it hasn't been updated in years. It's constantly bugging me for passwords for random things. It is objectively the worst OS. I'd rather work on a Chromebook.
Maybe the only reason why Windows outpaced macos in this for you is because Windows started as crap and is now barely looks like a proper OS?
https://ntdev.blog/2021/02/06/state-of-the-windows-how-many-...
Thank God Mac hasn't changed that much. I absolutely love its UI.
A good deal on a luxury item still gets you a luxury item.
And if we want to compare Walmart to Walmart, this thing currently runs for $359 and has 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, and a CPU that benchmarks slightly faster than the M2:
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Acer-Aspire-3-15-6-inch-Laptop-AM...
I think you unjustifiably downplay how much of a selling point a screen that looks great (or at least decent) on the floor is. And I know tons of devs that put up with the 45% NTSC abominations on Thinkpads that aren’t even suitable for casual photo editing or web media, just because you make do with that doesn’t automatically make a halfway decent display on a laptop a “luxury”.
Sorry, but don’t buy the “everything that isn’t a $300 econo shit laptop is luxury” thesis repeated ad nauseum.
But the definition of luxury varies a lot by product category. Still, high-end and luxury are separate concepts, which ven when they do overlap.
It is true though that luxury goods are, often, top of the line as well. Cars and watches are often examples of this. Clothes are a much more mixed bag, with some luxury brands using excellent materials and craftsmanship, while others use flashy design and branding with mediocre materials and craftsmanship.
Exactly where Apple sits is very debatable in my experience. I would personally say that many of their products are far too affordable and simple to be considered luxury products - the iPhone in particular. The laptops I'm less sure about.
This comes up so often in these flame wars where people are really saying “I do/don’t think you need that feature” and won’t accept that other people aren’t starting from the same point. I remember in the 90s reading some dude on Fidonet arguing that Macs were overpriced because they had unnecessary frills like sound cards and color displays; I wasn’t a Mac user then but still knew this was not a persuasive argument.
I'm seeing significant differences in the performance between Acer Aspire A315 to M2 Macbook Air; the Acer is ~33% of the M2 for 50% the price.
https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/5942766?baselin...
$999 amortized over 3 years is $30/mo which is less than what even middle class people spend on coffee.
> 3.92 lb
Battery life
> 6.5 h
Probably half of that.
Fans that sound like jet engine, screen quality which would force me to stab my eyes, speakers sounding worse than a toilet, plastic build.
I'm not convinced.
> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40292804
tl;dr is that Walmart is also selling an Acer for $359 that beats that device on every headline metric.
It's nice to know that I could get the old-gen model for slightly cheaper, but that's still an outrageous price if the MacBook Air isn't to be considered a luxury item.
8gb of ram was pathetic in 2018, and is SUPER pathetic in 2024.
These products may not offer you much value and you don't have to buy them. Clearly plenty of people and institutions bought them because they believed they offered the best value to them.
Try this:
No one calls a Toyota Camry with base options luxury but it works well for a long time and has good quality.
The features that Apple adds on top of that are strictly optional. You can very much prefer them and think that they're essential, but that doesn't make it so. Some people feel that way about leather seats.
You can buy a version of <insert product here> from Walmart at 1/2 price of a "normal" retailer. Does that mean every "normal" retailer is actually a luxury goods dealer?
Is my diner a luxury restaurant because a burger costs twice as much as McDonald's?
Stop the silliness.
So for me, yes, MacBook Airs, like the lovely M1 I'm writing this on (I love my job!) are luxury goods.
Just because Ferraris cost half a million doesn't mean a 50k BMW isn't luxury.
That's for the 8GB model (which is already too low unless you use your Mac for the same use cases as you would use an iPad), 16GB is $200 extra.
What percent of that retailer's products does that comparison apply to?
If it's more than half then yeah that's probably a luxury goods dealer.
Equivalent device?! Find me Windows laptop in ANY price category that can match weight, fanless design, screen quality, battery life, speakers quality and battery life of Air.
Cost comparisons alone are stupid. And “this AMD benchmarks the same as an M2” is a useless comparison since regular people don’t buy laptops for raw compute power.
> Their primary business goal is to sell hardware.
There is no contradiction here. No need for luxury. Efficient hardware scales, Moore's law has just been rewritten, not defeated.
Power efficiency combined with shared and extremely fast RAM, it is still a formula for success as long as they are able to deliver.
By the way, M-series MacBooks have crossed bargain territory by now compared to WinTel in some specific (but large) niches, e.g. the M2 Air.
They are still technically superior in power efficiency and still competitive in performance in many common uses, be it traditional media decoding and processing, GPU-heavy tasks (including AI), single-core performance...
By the way, this includes web technologies / JS.
If you're into AI, there's objectively literally no other laptop on the planet that is competitive with the GPU memory available on an MBP.
If you don't explicitly want a laptop, a 32GB M2 Pro Mac Mini would be a good choice I think.
Personally i only have used MBPs so far.
But the M-series Air are not remotely comparable to the old Intel Airs, that's for sure :)
Tim Cook unfortunately is so captured in that quarterly mindset of 'please the share holders' that it is only a matter of time.
What matters to me is that they continue to see privacy as something they can sell in order to make money.
I do hope that those working in these companies actually building the tools do care. But unfortunately, it seems that corruption is an emergent property of complexity.
Apple is in the position to build a competing search product, but the amount Google pays is the amount of money they would have to earn from it, and that is improbable even if it means they can set their own search engine as default.
The important is that a good starting ai learning platform is what … most apple does not touch those price.
Hence with privacy it is a good path.
You do not want communism even if it is not expensive in the short term.
They failed with their ad-business so this is a nice pivot. I'll take it, I'm not usually a cheerleader for Apple, but I'll support anyone who can erode Google's surveillance dominance.
I have very little faith in apple in this respect.
For clarity, just install little snitch on your machine, and watch what happens with your system. Even without being signed in with an apple id and everything turned off, apple phones home all the time.
iCloud, App store revenue, apple tv, and so on
Everyone seems to have forgotten about the Celebrity iCloud photo leak.
While Apple is first and foremost a hardware company, it has more or less always been about the "Apple experience". They've never "just" been a hardware company.
For as long as Apple has existed, they've done things "their way" both with hardware and software, though they tend to want to abstract the software away.
If it was merely a question of selling hardware, why does iCloud exist ? or AppleTV+, or Handoff ? or iMessage, or the countless other seemingly small life improvements that somehow the remainder of the industry cannot seem to figure out how to do well.
Just a "simple" thing as switching headphones seamlessly between devices is something i no longer think about, it just happens, and it takes a trip with a Windows computer and a regular bluetooth headset to remind me how things used to be.
As part of their "privacy first" strategy, iMessage also fits in nicely. Apple doesn't have to operate a huge instant messaging network, which undoubtedly is not making a profit, but they do, because having one entry to secure, encrypted communication fits well with the Apple Experience. iMessage did so well at abstracting the ugly details of encryption that few people even think about that that's what the blue bubble is actually about, it more or less only means your message is end to end encrypted. As a side effect you can also send full resolution images (and more), but that's in no way unique to iMessage.
Everybody so quick to forget Apple was/is part of PRISM like any other company.
Indeed.
Privacy starts with architectural fundamentals that are very difficult to retrofit...
If a supplier of products has not built the products this way, it would be naive to bet bank or farm on the supplier. Even if there were profound motivation to retrofit.
Add to this the general tendency of the market to exploit its customers.
There are a ton of us out here that consciously choose Apple because of their position on privacy. I have to imagine they know how many customers they'll lose if they ever move on this, and I want to believe that it's a large enough percentage to prevent it from happening. Certainly my circle is not a useful sample, but the Apple people in it are almost all Apple people because of privacy.
E.g. Apple still doesn't offer a flipphone that turns into a tablet when you open it.
Yep, the claim to prioritize privacy is a key selling point for them
> Apple's AI strategy is to put inference (and longer term even learning) on edge devices
This is pretty much everyone's strategy. Model distillation is huge because of this. This goes in line with federated learning. This goes in line with model pruning too. And parameter efficient tuning and fine tuning and prompt learning etc.
> This is completely coherent with their privacy-first strategy
Apple's marketing for their current approach is privacy-first. They are not privacy first. If they were privacy first, you would not be able to use app tracking data on their first party ad platform. They shut it off for everyone else but themselves. Apple's approach is walled garden first.
> Processing data at the edge also makes for the best possible user experience because of the complete independence of network connectivity
as long as you don't depend on graph centric problems where keeping a local copy of that graph is prohibitive. Graph problems will become more common. Not sure if this is a problem for apple though. I am just commenting in general.
> If (and that's a big if) they keep their APIs open to run any kind of AI workload on their chips
Apple does not have a good track record of this; they are quite antagonistic when it comes to this topic. Gaming on apple was dead for nearly a decade (and pretty much still is) because steve jobs did not want people gaming on macs. Apple has eased up on this, but it very much seems that if they want you to use their devices (not yours) in a certain way, then they make it expensive to do anything else.
Tbf, I don't blame apple for any of this. It is their strategy. Whether it works or not, it doesn't matter. I just found this comment really odd since it almost seemed like evangelism.
edit: weird to praise apple for on device training when it is not publicly known if they have trained any substantial model even on cloud.
I think this is being too charitable on the state of "everyone". It's everyone's goal. Apple is actively achieving that goal, with their many year strategy of in house silicon/features.
So are other companies, with their many year strategy of actually building models that accessible to the public.
yet Apple is "actively" achieving the goal without any distinct models.
You can already run those open weight models on Apple devices, on edge, with huge improvements on the newer hardware. Why is a distinct model required? Do the rumors appease these thoughts?
If others are making models, with no way to actually run them, that's not a viable "on edge" strategy, since it involves waiting for someone else to actually accomplish the goal first (as is being done by Apple).
It absolutely is. Model distillation will still be pertinent. And so will be parameter efficient tuning for edge training. I cannot emphasize more how important this is. You will need your own set of weights. If apple wants to use open weights, then sure. Ignore this. Don't seem like they want to long-term... And even if they use open weights, they will still be behind other companies have done model distillation and federated learning for years.
> Why is a distinct model required?
Ask apple's newly poached AI hires this question. Doesn't seem like you would take an answer from me.
> If others are making models, with no way to actually run them
Is this the case? People have been running distilled llamas on rPis with pretty good throughput.
I'm sorry, but we're talking about "on edge" here though. Those other companies have no flipping hardware to run it "on edge", in a "generic" way, which is the goal. Apple's strategy involves the generic.
> If apple wants to use open weights
This doesn't make sense. Apple doesn't dictate the models you can use with their hardware. You can already accelerate LLAMA with the neural engines. You can download the app right now. You can already deploy your models on edge, on their hardware. That is the success they're achieving. You cannot effectively do this on competitor hardware, with good performance, from "budget" to "Pro" lineup, which is a requirement of the goal.
> they will still be behind other companies have done model distillation and federated learning for years.
What hardware are they running it on? Are they taking advantage of Apple (or other) hardware in their strategy? Federated learning is an application of "on edge", it doesn't *enable* on edge, which is part of Apple's strategy.
> Ask apple's newly poached AI hires this question. Doesn't seem like you would take an answer from me.
Integrating AI in their apps/experience is not the same as enabling a generic "on edge", default, capability in all Apple devices (which they have been working towards for years now). This is the end goal for "on edge". You seem to be talking about OS integration, or something else.
> People have been running distilled llamas on rPis with pretty good throughput.
Yes, the fundamental limitation there being hardware performance, not the model, with that "pretty good" making the "pretty terrible" user experience. But, there's also nothing stopping anyone from running these distilled (a requirement of limited hardware) models on Apple hardware, taking advantage of Apples fully defined "on edge" strategy. ;) Again, you can run llamas on Apple silicon, accelerated, as I do.
Maybe? This is why I responded to:
> It's everyone's goal. Apple is actively achieving that goal
This is is the issue I found disagreeable. Other organizations and individual people are achieving that goal too. Google says GPT-Nano is going to device, and if the benchmarks are to be believed, if it runs at that level, their work so far is also actively achieving that goal. Meta has released multiple distilled models that people have already proven to run inference at the device level. It cannot be argued that meta is not actively achieving that goal either. They don't have to release the hardware because they went a different route. I applaud Apple for the M chips. They are super cool. People are still working on using them so Apple can realize that goal too.
So when you go to the statement that started this
> Apple's AI strategy is to put inference (and longer term even learning) on edge devices
Multiple orgs also share this. And I can't say that one particular org is super ahead of the others. And I can't elevate apple in that race because it is not clear that they are truly privacy-focused or that they will keep APIs open.
> You cannot effectively do this on competitor hardware, with good performance, from "budget" to "Pro" lineup, which is a requirement of the goal
Why do you say you cannot do this with good performance? How many tokens do you want for a device? Is 30T/s enough? You can do that on laptops running small mixtral.
> What hardware are they running it on? Are they taking advantage of Apple (or other) hardware in their strategy?
I don't know. I have nothing indicating necessarily apple or nvidia or otherwise. Do you?
> [Regarding the rest]
Sure, my point is that they definitely have an intent for bespoke models. And why I raised the point that not all computation will be feasible on edge for the time being. My point with what raised this particular line of inquiry is whether a pure edge experience truly enables the best user experience. And also why I raised the point about Apple's track record of open APIs. Which is why "actively achieving" is something that I put doubt on. And I also cast doubt on apple being privacy focused. Just emphasize tying it back to the reason I even commented.
The biggest players in commercial AI models at the moment - OpenAI and Google - have made absolutely no noise about pushing inference to end user devices at all. Microsoft, Adobe, other players who are going big on embedding ML models into their products, are not pushing those models to the edge, they’re investing in cloud GPU.
Where are you picking up that this is everyone’s strategy?
Read what their engineers say in public. Unless I hallucinated years of federated learning.
Also apple isn't even a player yet and everyone is discussing how they are moving stuff to the edge lol. Can't critique companies for not being on the edge yet when apple doesn't have anything out there.
How can they have a privacy first strategy when they operate an Ad network and have their Chinese data centers run by state controlled companies?
(assuming companies won't easily share all their models for this kind of effort)
You mean .. with their said privacy-first strategy
You’re trusting the third party at training time, to build the model. But you’re not trusting it at inference time (or at least, you don’t have to, since you can airgap inference).
I can see a smaller model trained to do that may work well enough, however, I've never seen any real working examples of this work, that rabit device is heading in that direction, but it's mostly vaporware now.
It can even be third party services sending ad candidates directly to your phone and then the on-device AI chooses which is relevant.
Privacy is a contract not the absence of a clear business opportunity. Just look at how Apple does testing internally today. They have no more respect for human privacy than any of their competitors. They just differentiate through marketing and design.
Is this the same apple whose devices do not work at all unless you register an apple account?
The advertising ID is useless as of App Tracking Transparency.
Google and Samsung have been building it too, at different speeds.
Intel and AMD seem further behind (at the moment) unless the user has a strong GPU, which is especially uncommon on the most popular kind of computer: laptops.
And if you’re not one of those four companies… you probably don’t have much capable consumer edge hardware.
Watch out for being able to using ai on your local machine and those ai services using telemetry to send your data (recorded conversations, for instance) to their motherships.
This doesn’t require Ai and I am not aware of any instances of this happening today, so what exactly are we watching out for?
Now the subscription is 20$ a month and the API price is accessible. What will happen when they all decide to x100 or x1000 the price of their API ? All the companies that got rid of people in favor of AI, might have lost the knowledge as well. This is dangerous and might kill a lot of companies no ?
The big differences today that stood out to me were adopting AI as a term (they used machine learning before) and repeating the term AI everywhere they could shove it in since that’s obviously what the street wants to hear.
That’s all that was different. And I’m not surprised they emphasized it given all the weird “Apple is behind on AI“ articles that have been going around.
Does it matter that each token takes additional milliseconds on the network if the local inference isn't fast? I don't think it does.
The privacy argument makes some sense, if there's no telemetry leaking data.
It will take a long time before you can put performant inference on edge device.
Just download one of the various open source large(st) langage model and test it on your desktop...
Compute power and memory and storage requirements are insane if you want decent result... I mean not just Llama gibberish.
Until such requirement are satisfied, distant model are the way to go, at least for conversational model.
Aside llm, AlphaGo would not run on any end user device, by a long shot, even if it is an already 'old' technology.
I think 'neural engine' on end user device is just marketing nonsense at this current state of the art.
That work needs to be done anyways and Apple is doing it in the cleanest way possible. What’s an alternative in your mind, just don’t do the processing? That sounds like making progress towards being green. If you’re making claims of green washing you need to be able to back it up with what alternative would actually be “green”.
Sometimes, but parallelization has a cost. The power consumption from 400,000,000 iPhones downloading a 2gb LLM is not negligible, probably more than what you'd consume running it as a REST API on a remote server. Not to mention slower.
The random ads in most phone games are much worse on my battery life.
Keep downloadin' those ads. This is what Apple wants from you, a helpless and docile revenue stream. Think Different or stay mad.
Not much of a gamer anyway, just an observation when I tried a couple apparently dodgy games.
Not sure why your reply wasn’t related to your original comment. Felt rather knee-jerk reactionary to me instead. Oh well.
This doesn't make any sense.
> If you’re making claims of green washing you need to be able to back it up with what alternative would actually be “green”.
Sometimes there isn't an alternative. In which case you don't get to look green, sorry. The person critiquing greenwashing doesn't need to give an alternative, why would that be their job? They're just evaluating whether it's real or fake.
Though in this case using renewable energy can help.
Baselessly calling every greening and sustainability effort “greenwashing”, especially when there’s practically no thought put into what the alternative might be, is trite and borderline intellectually dishonest. They don’t want to have a conversation about how it could be improved, they just want to interject “haha that’s stupid, corporations are fooling all of you sheeple” from their place of moral superiority. This shit is so played out.
Baseless? The foundation of this accusation is rock solid. Offloading the exact same computation to another person so your energy numbers look better is not a greening or sustainability effort.
Fake green should always be called greenwashing.
You don't need to suggest an improvement to call out something that is completely fake. The faker doesn't get to demand a "conversation".
You've seen a bunch of people be incorrectly dismissive and decided that dismissiveness is automatically wrong. It's not.
For an extreme example, imagine a company installs a "pollution-preventing boulder" at their HQ. It's very valid to call that greenwashing and walk away. Don't let them get PR for nothing. If they were actually trying, and made a mistake, suggest a fix. But you can't fix fake.
Yes, I consider it baseless for the following reasons:
- First, consider the hardware running in data centers, and the iDevices running at the edge – the iPhones, iPads and presumably Macs. There's a massive difference in power consumption between a data center full of GPUs, and whatever the equivalent might be in iDevices. Few chips come close to Apple's M-series in power usage.
- Second, Apple's commitment to making those devices carbon neutral by 2030; I'm unaware of any commitment to make cloud compute hardware carbon neutral, but I'll admit that I don't really keep up with that kind of hardware so I could be totally wrong there.
- Third, consider that an AI compute service (I'm not sure what you call it) like OpenAI is always running and crunching numbers in its data center, while the iDevices are each individually running only when needed by the user.
- Fourth, the people who own the iDevices may charge them using more sustainable methods than would power a data center. For example, Iowa – where I live – generates 62% of its energy from wind power and nearly two-thirds of its total energy from renewable resources [1], whereas California only gets 54% of its energy from renewable resources. Of course this cuts both ways, there are plenty of states or even countries that get most of their power from coal, like Ohio.
That said, neither of us have any real numbers on these things so the best either of us can do is be optimistic or pessimistic. But I'd rather do that and have a discussion about it, instead of dismiss it out of hand like everyone else does by saying "haha dumb, get greenwashed".
You're right that improvements don't need to be suggested to have a conversation about greening/greenwashing. My irritation lies more in the fact that it's almost a trope at this point that you can click into the comments on any HN story that mentions greening/sustainability, and there will be comments calling it fake greenwashing. I don't disagree that it's easy for a company to greenwash if they want to, but it's tiring to see everything called greenwashing without applying any critical thinking. Everyone wants to be so jaded about corporations that they'll never trust a word about it.
[1] Although this two-thirds total includes the bio-fuel ethanol, so I feel like it shouldn't be included.
2. That's an interesting angle.
3. It's the same total amount, and both will go idle when there's less demand.
4. I think the average data center gets cleaner energy than the average house but I can't find a proper comparison so maybe that's baseless.
Also as far as I'm aware, inference takes significantly fewer resources when you can batch it.
> but it's tiring to see everything called greenwashing without applying any critical thinking
That does sound tiring, but in this particular case I think there was sufficient critical thinking, and it was originally brought up as just a possibility.
At the end of the day, AI workloads in the cloud will always be a lot more compute effective however, meaning lowered combined footprint. However, in the server based model, there is more incentive to pre-compute (waste inference) things to make them appear snappy on device. Analogous would be all that energy spent doing video encoding for YouTube videos that never get watched. Although, it's "idle" resources for budgeting purposes.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/09/apple-unveils-its-fir...
> "Apple defines high-quality credits as those from projects that are real, additional, measurable, and quantified, with systems in place to avoid double-counting, and that ensure permanence."
Apple then pledged to buy carbon credits from a company called Verra. In 2023, an investigation found that more than 90% of Verra's carbon credits are a sham. Notably, Apple made their pledge after the results of this investigation were known - so much for their greenwashing.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/revealed...
Apple doesn’t have to build the data centers. Apple doesn’t have to buy the AI capacity themselves (even if from TSMC for Apple designed chips). Apple doesn’t have to have the personnel for the data centers or the air conditioning. They don’t have to pay for all the network bandwidth.
There are benefits to the user to having the AI run on their own devices in terms of privacy and latency as mentioned by the GP.
But there are also benefits to Apple simply because it means it’s no longer their resources being used up above and beyond electricity.
I keep reading about companies having trouble getting GPUs from the cloud providers and that some crypto networks have pivoted to selling GPU access for AI work as crypto profits fall.
Apple doesn’t have to deal with any of that. They have underused silicon sitting out there ready to light up to make their customers happy (and perhaps interested in buying a faster device).
I was trying to say that there was still a cost to using their own chips for server AI because they still had to pay to have them made so they weren’t “free” because they’re Apple products as opposed to buying nVidia parts.
You’re right, there is a cost to them to put the AI stuff on end user chips too since die space isn’t free and extra circuits mean fewer chips fit per wafer.
If you're on battery, you don't want to do LLM inference on a laptop. Hell, you don't really want to do transcription inference for that long - but would be nice not to have to send it to a data center.
It’s usually a more powerful device such as a router or mini server between LAN and internet.
I think they'll have another LLM on a server (maybe a deal for openai/gemini) that the one on the device can use like ChatGPT uses plugins.
But on device Apple have a gigantic advantage. Rabbit and Humane are good ideas humbled by shitty hardware that runs out of battery, gets too hot, has to connect to the internet to do literally anything.
Apple is in a brilliant position to solve all those things.
I hope they announce something good at WWDC
So many of these are only deployed in US and so if you're say in country Australia not only do you have all your traffic going to the US but it will be via slow and intermittent cellular connections.
It makes using services like LLMs unusably slow.
I miss the 90s and having applications and data reside locally.
I find it hard to understand the edge usecase for text-based models.
Generally an LLM seems to take about 3s or more to respond, and the network delay to the US is a couple of hundred milliseconds.
The network delay seems minimal compared to the actual delay of the LLM.
** when you live in the USA
Or at least, a good enough internet connection to send plaintext.
> * when you live in the USA
Even from Australia to USA is just ~300ms of latency for first token and then the whole thing can finish in ~1s. And making that faster doesn't require on-device deployment, it just requires a server in Australia - which is obviously going to be coming if it hasn't already for many providers.
I'm curious to hear more about this. My experience has been that inference speeds are the #1 cause of delay by orders of magnitude, and I'd assume those won't go down substantially on edge devices because the cloud will be getting faster at approximately the same rate.
Have people outside the US benchmarked OpenAI's response times and found network lag to be a substantial contributor to slowness?
groq is way better for inference speeds btw
Humane had lag and they used voice chat which is a bad UX paradigm. VUI is bad because it adds lag to the information within the medium. Listening to preambles and lists are always slower than a human eyes ability to scan a page of text. Their lag is not due to LLMs, which can be much faster than whatever they did.
We should remind ourselves that an iPhone can likely suffer similar battery and heat issues - especially if it’s running models locally.
User: "What is this thing?"
Pin: "I'll have a look what that is" (It feels this response has to come from a server)
Pin: "It's a <answer>" (The actual answer)
We're still a bit away from iPhone running anything viable locally, even small models today you can almost feel the chip creaking under the load they're incurring on it and the whole phone begins to choke.
Ironic, given that AI requires lots of VRAM.
With the ai cores on phones they can cover your average user use cases with a light model without the server expense.
[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/how-prevent-ai-power-usage-secrets
That is a marketing and advertising strategy.
- credit card required to install free apps such as the "private" Signal messenger
- location required just to show me the weather in a static place, lol
- claims to be e2e but apple controls all keys and identities
- basically sells out all users' icloud data in china, and totally doesn't do the same in the US, because tim pinky swears
- everything is closed source
Make no mistake, they're just waiting for the right MBA to walk through the door, see the sky high value of their users and start chop shopping that.
Enshitiffication is always available to the next CEO, and this is just going to be more and more tempting as the value of the walled garden increases.
One thing to remember is that they understand the value of long-term investments. They aren’t going to beat Google and Facebook at advertising and have invested billions in a different model those companies can’t easily adopt, and I’m sure someone has done the math on how expensive it would be to switch.
Do not believe what they say, watch what they do.
Multimodal agent setups are going to be data center/home-lab only for at least the next five years.
Apple isn't about to put 80GB on VRAM in an iPad for about 15 reasons.
It could, if it chose to, continue to recognize all voices but at the same time limit the things the non-owner could ask for based on owner preferences.
That's one particular set of trade-offs, but not necessarily the best. Eg if your network connection and server processing speed is sufficiently faster than your local processing speed, the latency would be higher for doing it locally.
Local inference can also use more battery power. And you need a more beefy device, all else being equal.
I think you're trying too hard to rationalize this move as pro-privacy and pro-consumer.
Apple is charging a premium for hardware based on performance claims, which they need to create relevance and demand for it.
There is zero demand for the capacity for running computationally demanding workloads beyond very niche applications, for what classifies as demanding for the consumer-grade hardware being sold for the past two decades.
If Apple offloads these workloads to the customer's own hardware, they don't have to provide this computing capacity themselves. This means no global network of data centers, no infrastructure, no staff, no customer support, no lawyer, nothing.
More importantly, Apple claims to be pro privacy but their business moves are in reality in the direction of ensuring that they are in sole control of their users' data. Call it what you want but leveraging their position to ensure they hold a monopoly over a market created over their userbase is not a pro privacy move, just like Apple's abuse of their control over the app store is not a security move.
Apple's AI strategy is to put inference (and longer term even learning) on edge devices...only for Apple stuff.
There is a big difference. ANE right now is next to useless for anything not Apple.
I can't even find a way to resume playing whatever Audible book I was last playing. "Siri play audible" or something. As far as I know, this is impossible to do.
Agreed on the UX improvements though.
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38783112
Transcript of Security Now podcast episode discussing the issue: https://www.grc.com/sn/sn-955.htm
I know a shop who's doing this and it's a very promising approach. The ability to offload the costs of cloud GPU time is a tremendous advantage. That's to say nothing of the decreased latency, increased privacy, etc. The glaring downside is that you are dependent upon your users to be willing and able to run native apps (or possibly WASM, I'm not sure) on bleeding edge hardware. However, for some target markets (e.g. video production, photography, designers, etc.) it's a "safe" assumption that they will be using the latest and greatest Macs.
I've also been hearing people talk somewhat seriously about setting up their own training/inference farms using Macs because, at least for now, they're more readily available and cheaper to buy/run than big GPUs. That comes with a host of ops problems but it still may prove worthwhile for some use cases and addresses some of the same privacy concerns as edge computing if you're able to keep data/computation in-house.
Run away from these temptations. You will never truly own the hardware anyway.
https://nitter.esmailelbob.xyz/tim_cook/status/1787864325258...
I don't think there is enough information here for that to be a true claim - it is possible to send the input used for inference, to the cloud, while computing the result locally. It is also possible to store the input used for inference while offline, and send that later when the device is online.
That's an incredible improvement in just a few years. I wonder how much of that is Apple engineering and how much is TSMC improving their 3nm process.
That is pretty crazy.
Or am I missing something?
https://www.trendforce.com/news/2024/05/06/news-apple-m4-inc....
But people like to assign credit solely to certain spaces if it suits their narrative (lately, Apple isn't actually all that special at designing their chips, it's all solely the process advantage)
In contrast, when Apple's CPU and GPU competitors get access to TSMC's new processes after Apple's exclusivity period expires, they achieve similar levels of performance (except for Qualcomm because they don't target the high end of CPU performance, but AMD does).
In general, OLED screens seem to have an efficiency around 20≈30%. Some research departments seem to be trying to bump that up [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-05671-x] which I'd be more hopeful on…
…but, honestly, at some point you just hit the limits of physics. It seems internal scattering is already a major problem; maybe someone can invent pixel-sized microlasers and that'd help? More than 50-60% seems like a pipe dream at this point…
…unless we can change to a technology that fundamentally doesn't emit light, i.e. e-paper and the likes. Or just LCD displays without a backlight, using ambient light instead.
[0] https://onyxboox.com/boox_mirapro
edit: "25, not "27
I was thinking, like, a couple hundred dollar Kindle the size of a big iPad I can plug into a laptop for text-editing out and about. Hell, for my purposes I'd love an integrated keyboard.
Basically a second, super-lightweight laptop form-factor I can just plug into my chonky Macbook Pro and set on top of it in high-light environments when all I need to do is edit text.
Honestly not a compelling business case now that I write it out, but I just wanna code under a tree lol
It is nice for some very specific use cases. (They're in the publishing/typesetting business. It's… idk, really depends on your usage patterns.)
Other than that, yeah, the technology just isn't there yet.
I can't replace my desktop monitor with eink because I occasionally play video games. I can't use a 2nd monitor because I live in a small apartment.
I can't replace my laptop screen with greyscale because I need syntax highlighting for programming.
Hmm, emacs on an epaper screen might be great if it had all the display update optimization and "slow modem mode" that Emacs had back in the TECO days. (The SUPDUP network protocol even implemented that at the client end and interacted with Emacs directly!)
Evidence can be seen when opening up iOS apps, which seem to glitch out and reveals the brighter backlight [1]. Notice how #FFFFFF white isn't the same brightness as the white in the iOS app.
It also just doesn't seem ideal that some apps (iOS) appear much brighter than the rest of the system. HDR support in macOS is a complete mess, although I'm not sure if Windows is any better.
I don't expect an M4 macbook to last any longer than an M2 macbook of otherwise similar specs; they will spend that extra power budget on things other than the battery life specification.
Old: 28.65 Wh (11") / 40.88 Wh (13"), up to 10 hours of surfing the web on Wi-Fi or watching video.
New: 31.29 Wh (11") / 38.99 Wh (13"), up to 10 hours of surfing the web on Wi-Fi or watching video.
Knowing nothing else about the technology, I assumed that would make OLED displays more efficient.
White background document editing, etc., will be worse, and this is rather common.
When you say "up to 10 hours" most people will think "oh nice that's an entire day" and be fine with it. It's what they're used to.
Turning that into 12 hours might be possible but are the tradeoffs worth it? Will enough people buy the device because of the +2 hour battery life? Can you market that effectively? Or will putting in a nicer fancy display cause more people to buy it?
We'll never get significant battery life improvements because of this, sadly.
Doing basic web navigation with some music in the background, my old M1 Pro has short bursts at ~5W (for the entire SoC) when navigating around, a pair of watts for mild webapps (e.g. checking various channels in discord), and typing into this here textbox it's sitting happy at under half a watt, with the P-cores essentially sitting idle and the E cores at under 50% utilisation.
With a 100Wh battery that would be a "potential" of 150 hours or so. Except nobody would ever sell it for that, because between the display and radios the laptop's actually pulling 10~11W.
Average performance per watt doubling time is 2.6 years: https://newsroom.arm.com/blog/performance-per-watt#:~:text=T....
[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/06/apple-unveils-m2-with...
Same for Watts per bit.
There's just a lot more pixels and bits.
I think Apple's design choices had a huge impact on the M1's performance but from there on out I think it's mostly due to TSMC.
So I've become really suspicious about any claims about performance done by Apple.
Also what games are you trying to play on it? All my M-series Macbooks have run games more than well enough with reasonable settings (and that has a lot more to do with OS bugs and the constraints of the form factor than with just the chipset).
The problem is two-fold, first the marketing bullshit does not match the reality and second the Apple converted will lie without even thinking about it to justify the outrageous price.
There are a lot of things I like about Apple hardware but the reality is that they can charge so much because there is a lot of mythology around their products and it just doesn't add up.
Now if only they be bothered to actually make software great (and not simpleton copies of what already exists), there would be an actual valid reason to unequivocally recommend their stuff but they can't be bothered since they already make too much money as it is.
Single Core: iPad Pro (M2): 2539 Macbook Air (M2): 2596 Macbook Pro (M2): 2645
Multi Core: iPad Pro (M2 8-core): 9631 Macbook Air (M2 8-core): 9654 Macbook Pro (M2 8-core): 9642
So, it appears to be almost the same performance (until it throttles due to heat, of course).
1. https://browser.geekbench.com/ios-benchmarks 2. https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks
Gave me quite a laugh when Apple users started to claim they'd be able to play Cyberpunk 2077 maxed out with maxed out raytracing.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/17/22982915/apple-m1-ultra-r...
Apple was comparing the power envelope (already a complicated concept) of their GPU against a 3090. Apple wanted to show that the peak of their GPU's performance was reached with a fraction of the power of a 3090. What was terrible was that Apple was cropping their chart at the point where the 3090 was pulling ahead in pure compute by throwing more watts at the problem. So their GPU was not as powerful as a 3090, but a quick glance at the chart would completely tell you otherwise.
Ultimately we didn't see one of those charts today, just a mention about the GPU being 50% more efficient than the competition. I think those charts are beloved by Johny Srouji and no one else. They're not getting the message across.
They really love those kind of comparisons - e.g. they also compared M1s against really old Intel CPUs to make the numbers look better, knowing that news headlines won't care for details.
It's not some virtue that causes them to do this.
Apple compared against Intel to encourage their previous customers to upgrade.
There is nothing insidious about this and is in fact standard business practice.
The intensity of the reality distortion field and hubris is mind boggling.
Turns out, you fell for it.
You're explanation is a really baffling case of corporate white knighting.
that's honestly kind of stupid when discussing things like 'new CPU!' like this thread.
I'm not saying the M4 isn't a great platform, but holy cow the corporate tripe people gobble up.
I eventually made a visual showing it was the same as claiming your iPhone was 3x the speed of a Core i9: Sure, if you limit the power draw of your PC to a battery the size of a post it pad.
Similar issues when on-device LLMs happened, thankfully, quieted since then (last egregious thing I saw was stonk-related wishcasting that Apple was obviously turning its Xcode CI service into a full-blown AWS competitor that'd wipe the floor with any cloud service, given the 2x performance)
That's ok, but why skip the previous iteration then? Isn't the M2 only two generations behind? It's not that much older. It's also a marketing blurb, not a reproducible benchmark. Why leave out comparisons with the previous iteration even when you're just hand-waving over your own data?
There were some disingenuous comparisons throughout the presentation going back to A11 for the first Neural Engine and some comparisons to M1, but the M2 comparison actually makes sense.
I mean, they compared the new iPad Pro to an iPod Nano, that's just using your own history to make a point.
that aside, the M4 is about the Neural Engine upgrades over anything (which probably should have been compared to the M3)
That’s not to say that any of these problems are easy, just that there’s probably more lower hanging fruit in ARM land.
And don't underestimate the investment Apple made - it's likely at a similar level to the big x86 incumbents. I mean AMD's entire Zen development team cost was likely a blip on the balance sheet for Apple.
That's more bound by legal than technical reasons...
Launching at Computex in 2 weeks, https://www.windowscentral.com/hardware/laptops/next-gen-ai-...
there was one quiet "we haven't got anything like that in the contract we're signing with ARM" from someone else, and then radio silence. And you'd really think that would be major news, because it's massively impactful on pretty much everyone, since one of the major use-cases of ARM is as a base SOC to bolt your custom proprietary accelerators onto...
seemed like obvious bullshit at the time from a company trying to "publicly renegotiate" a licensing agreement they probably broke...
That’s why Apple can release a meaningfully new chip every year where it takes several for x86 manufacturers
Sure, maybe they can do better but at what cost and for what? The only thing Apple does truly better is performance per watt which is not something that is relevant for a large part of the market.
x86 stuff is still competitive performance wise, especially in the GPU department where Apple attempts are rather weak compared to what is on offer across the pond. The Apple Silicon switch cost a large amount of developer effort for optimisation, and in the process a lot of software compatibility was lost, it took a long time to get even the most popular softwares to get properly optimized and some software house even gave up on supporting macOS because it just wasn't worth the man hour investment considering the tiny market.
This is why I am very skeptical about the Qualcomm ARM stuff, it needs to be priced extremely well to have a chance, if consumers do not pick it up in droves, no software port is going to happen in a timely manner and it will stay irrelevant. Considering the only thing much better than the current x86 offering is the performance per watt, I do not have a lot of hope, but I may be pleasantly surprised.
Apple aficionados keep raving about battery life but it's not really something a lot of people care about (appart for smartphones, where Apple isn't doing any better than the rest of industry).
That’s all. They’re trying to convince iPad users to upgrade.
We’ll see what they do when they get to computers later this year.
I agree that iPad has more interesting software than android for use cases like video or music editing, but I don't do those on a tablet anyway.
I just can't imagine anyone updating their ipad M2 for this except a tiny niche that really wants that more power.
I’m vaguely considering this but entirely for the screen. The chip has been irrelevant to me for years, it’s long past the point where I don’t notice it.
These are 2048x2732 with 120Hz displays, that support 6k external displays. Gaming and art apps push them pretty hard. From the iPad user in my house, goin from the 2020 non M* iPad to a 2023 M2 iPad made a huge difference for the drawing apps. Better latency is always better for drawing, and complex brushes (especially newer ones), selections, etc, would get fairly unusable.
For gaming, it was pretty trivial to dip well below 60Hz with a non M* iPad, with some of the higher demand games like Fortnight, Minecraft (high view distance), Roblox (it ain't what it used to be), etc.
But, the apps will always gravitate to the performance of the average user. A step function in performance won't show up in the apps until the adoption follows, years down the line. Not pushing the average to higher performance is how you stagnate the future software of the devices.
I just don’t push it at all. The few games I play are not complicated in graphics or CPU needs. I don’t draw, 3D model, use Logic or Final Cut or anything like that.
I agree the extra power is useful to some people. But even there we have the M1 (what I’ve got) and the M2 models. But I bet there are plenty of people like me who mostly bought the pro models for the better screen and not the additional grunt.
The iPads always had a lot of power, people simply started paying more attention when the chip family was ported to PC.
Sure this is faster but enough to make people care?
It may depend heavily on what they announce is in the next version of iOS/iPadOS.
The M1 air is a very fast machine and is perfect for anyone doing normal things on the computer.
The M3 Air performs better than the M1 in raw numbers but outside of some truly CPU or GPU limited tasks you're not likely to actually notice the difference. The day to day behavior between the two is pretty similar.
If your current M1 works you're not missing out on anything. For the power/size/battery envelope the M1 Air was pretty awesome, it hasn't really gotten any worse over time. If it does what you need then you're good until it doesn't do what you need.
Well, the obvious answer is that those with older machines are more likely to upgrade than those with newer machines. The market for insta-upgraders is tiny.
edit: And perhaps an even more obvious answer: there are no iPads that contained the M3, so the comparison would be more useless. The M4 was just launched today exclusively in iPads.
And it can signal that "We are serious about iPad as a computer", using their latest chip.
Logical alignment to progresses in engineering (and manufacturing) packaged smartly to generate marketing capital for sales and brand value creation.
Wonder how the newer Macs will use these "tandem OLED" capabilities of the M4.
I don't think this is true. When they launched the M3 they compared primarily to M1 to make it look better.
As for CPU power use, of course that doesn't translate into doubling battery life because there are other components. And yes, it seems the OLED display uses more power so, all in all, battery life seems to be about the same.
I'm interested to see an M3 vs M4 performance comparison in the real world. IIRC the M3 was a questionable upgrade. Some things were better but some weren't.
Overall the M-series SoCs have been an excellent product however.
[1]: https://www.laptopmag.com/features/laptop-battery-life-claim...
EDIT: added link
That's just laughable, sorry. No one is particularly honest in marketing copy, but Apple is for sure one of the worst, historically. Even more so when you go back to the PPC days. I still remember Jobs on stage talking about how the G4 was the fasted CPU in the world when I knew damn well that it was half the speed of the P3 on my desk.
1) Graphs often are unannotatted.
2) Comparisons are rarely against latest generation products. (their argument for that has been that they do not expect people to upgrade yearly, so its showing the difference of their intended upgrade path).
3) They have conflated performance, for performance per watt.
However, when it comes to battery life, performance (for a task) or specification of their components (screens, ability to use external displays up to 6k, port speed etc) there are almost no hidden gotchas and they have tended to be trustworthy.
The first wave of M1 announcements were met with similar suspicion as you have shown here; but it was swiftly dispelled once people actually got their hands on them.
*EDIT:* Blaming a guy who's been dead for 13 years for something they said 50 years ago, and primarily it seems for internal use is weird. I had to look up the context but it seems it was more about internal motivation in the 70’s than relating to anything today, especially when referring to concrete claims.
"The G4 chip is nearly three times faster than the fastest Pentium III"
- Steve Jobs (1999) [1]
[1] https://www.wired.com/1999/08/lavish-debut-for-apples-g4/
And again, the guy has been dead for the better part of this millennium.
What have they shown of any product currently on the market, especially when backed with any concrete claim, that has been proven untrue-
EDIT: After reading your article and this one: https://lowendmac.com/2006/twice-as-fast-did-apple-lie-or-ju...; it looks like it was true in floating point workloads.
I don't have a horse in this race, Jobs lied or bent the truth all the time so it wouldn't surprise me, I'm just curious.
Just add them up, it’s the same number of Hertz!
But Steve that’s two procs vs one!
I think this is when Adobe was optimizing for Windows/intel and was single threaded, but Steve put out some graphs showing better perf on the Mac.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-apr-17-fi-20482...
It's certainly fair to say that twenty years ago Apple was marketing some of its PPC systems as "the first supercomputer on a chip"[^1].
> but it was nowhere near the performance of a supercomputer of that age.
That was not the claim. Apple did not argue that the G4's performance was commensurate with the state of the art in supercomputing. (If you'll forgive me: like, fucking obviously? The entire reason they made the claim is precisely because the latest room-sized supercomputers with leapfrog performance gains were in the news very often.)
The claim was that the G4 was capable of sustained gigaflop performance, and therefore met the narrow technical definition of a supercomputer.
You'll see in the aforelinked marketing page that Apple compared the G4 chip to UC Irvine’s Aeneas Project, which in ~2000 was delivering 1.9 gigaflop performance.
This chart[^2] shows the trailing average of various subsets of super computers, for context.
This narrow definition is also why the machine could not be exported to many countries, which Apple leaned into.[^3]
> Maybe similar performance to a supercomputer from the 1970's
What am I missing here? Picking perhaps the most famous supercomputer of the mid-1970s, the Cray-1,[^4] we can see performance of 160 MFLOPS, which is 160 million floating point operations per second (with an 80 MHz processor!).
The G4 was capable of delivering ~1 GFLOP performance, which is a billion floating point operations per second.
Are you perhaps thinking of a different decade?
[^1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20000510163142/http://www.apple....
[^2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_supercomputing#/med...
[^3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20020418022430/https://www.cnn.c...
This is marketing we're talking about, people see "supercomputer on a chip" and they get hyped up by it. Apple was 100% using the "supercomputer" claim to make their luddite audience think they had a performance advantage, which they did not.
> The entire reason they made the claim is
The reason they marketed it that way was to get people to part with their money. Full stop.
In the first link you added, there's a photo of a Cray supercomputer, which makes the viewer equate Apple = Supercomputer = I am a computing god if I buy this product. Apple's marketing has always been a bit shady that way.
And soon after that period Apple jumped off the PPC architecture and onto the x86 bandwagon. Gimmicks like "supercomputer on a chip" don't last long when the competition is far ahead.
If I had some pearls I would be clutching them right now.
That is also not in dispute. I am disputing your specific claim that Apple somehow suggested that the G4 was of commensurate performance to a modern supercomputer, which does not seem to be true.
> Apple was 100% using the "supercomputer" claim to make their luddite audience think they had a performance advantage, which they did not.
This is why context is important (and why I'd appreciate clarity on whether you genuinely believe a supercomputer from the 1970s was anywhere near as powerful as a G4).
In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, megapixels were a proxy for camera quality, and megahertz were a proxy for processor performance. More MHz = more capable processor.
This created a problem for Apple, because the G4's SPECfp_95 (floating point) benchmarks crushed Pentium III at lower clock speeds.
PPC G4 500 MHz - 22.6
PPC G4 450 MHz - 20.4
PPC G4 400 MHz - 18.36
Pentium III 600 MHz – 15.9
For both floating point and integer benchmarks, the G3 and G4 outgunned comparable Pentium II/III processors.
You can question how this translates to real world use cases – the Photoshop filters on stage were real, but others have pointed out in this thread that it wasn't an apples-to-apples comparison vs. Wintel – but it is inarguable that the G4 had some performance advantages over Pentium at launch, and that it met the (inane) definition of a supercomputer.
> The reason they marketed it that way was to get people to part with their money. Full stop.
Yes, marketing exists to convince people to buy one product over another. That's why companies do marketing. IMO that's a self-evidently inane thing to say in a nested discussion of microprocessor architecture on a technical forum – especially when your interlocutor is establishing the historical context you may be unaware of (judging by your comment about supercomputers from the 1970s, which I am surprised you have not addressed).
I didn't say "The reason Apple markets its computers," I said "The entire reason they made the claim [about supercomputer performance]…"
Both of us appear to know that companies do marketing, but only you appear to be confused about the specific claims Apple made – given that you proactively raised them, and got them wrong – and the historical backdrop against which they were made.
> In the first link you added, there's a photo of a Cray supercomputer
That's right. It looks like a stylized rendering of a Cray-1 to me – what do you think?
> which makes the viewer equate Apple = Supercomputer = I am a computing god if I buy this product
The Cray-1's compute, as measured in GFLOPS, was approximately 6.5x lower than the G4 processor.
I'm therefore not sure what your argument is: you started by claiming that Apple deliberately suggested that the G4 had comparable performance to a modern supercomputer. That isn't the case, and the page you're referring to contains imagery of a much less performant supercomputer, as well as a lot of information relating to the history of supercomputers (and a link to a Forbes article).
> Apple's marketing has always been a bit shady that way.
All companies make tradeoffs they think are right for their shareholders and customers. They accentuate the positives in marketing and gloss over the drawbacks.
Note, too, that Adobe's CEO has been duped on the page you link to. Despite your emphatic claim:
> Apple was 100% using the "supercomputer" claim to make their luddite audience think they had a performance advantage, which they did not.
The CEO of Adobe is quoted as saying:
> “Currently, the G4 is significantly faster than any platform we’ve seen running Photoshop 5.5,” said John E. Warnock, chairman and CEO of Adobe.
How is what you are doing materially different to what you accuse Apple of doing?
> And soon after that period Apple jumped off the PPC architecture and onto the x86 bandwagon.
They did so when Intel's roadmap introduced Core Duo, which was significantly more energy-efficient than Pentium 4. I don't have benchmarks to hand, but I suspect that a PowerBook G5 would have given the Core Duo a run for its money (despite the G5 being significantly older), but only for about fifteen seconds before thermal throttling and draining the battery entirely in minutes.
In my experience, I can confirm that this is just not true. The secret is heavy reliance on swap. It's still the case that 1GB = 1GB.
You are entirely (100%) wrong, but, sadly, NDA...
If there's any publicly available data to the contrary I'd love to read it. Anecdotally I haven't seen a significant difference between zswap on Linux and macOS memory compression in terms of compression ratios, and on the workloads I've tested zswap tends to be faster than no memory compression on x86 for many core machines.
My experience is that I can still tell when the OS is unhappy when I demand more RAM than it can give. MacOS is still relatively responsive around this range, which I just attributed to super fast swapping. (I'd assume memory compression too, but I usually run into this trouble when working with large amounts of poorly-compressible data.)
In either case, I know it's frustrating when someone is confidently wrong but you can't properly correct them, so you have my apologies
Is an occasional statement that they get pushback on really worse than what other brands do?
As an example from a competitor, take a look at the recent firestorm over Intel’s outlandish anti-AMD marketing:
https://wccftech.com/intel-calls-out-amd-using-old-cores-in-...
FWIW: the language upthread was that it was laughable to say Apple was the most honest. And I stand by that.
Though the author also made clear in their second sentence that they think Apple is one of the worst when it comes to marketing claims, so I don’t think your characterization is totally accurate either.
If you go for the base model, you are in for a bad time, 256GB with heavy swap and no dedicated GPU memory (making the 8GB even worse) is just plain stupid.
This what the Apple fanboys don't seem to get, their base model at somewhat affordable price are deeply incompetent and if you start to load it up the pricing just do not make a lot of sense...
Anyway, I manage a few M1 and M3 machines with 256/8 configs and they all run just as fast as 16 and 32 machines EXCEPT for workloads that need more than 8GB for a process (virtualization) or workloads that need lots of video memory (Lightroom can KILL an 8GB machine that isn't doing anything else...)
The 8GB is stupid discussion isn't "wrong" in the general case, but it is wrong for maybe 80% of users.
Isn't that exactly the upthread contention: Apple's magic compressed swap management is still swap management that replaces O(1) fast(-ish) DRAM access with thousands+ cycle page decompression operations. It may be faster than storage, but it's still extremely slow relative to a DRAM fetch. And once your working set gets beyond your available RAM you start thrashing just like VAXen did on 4BSD.
And if you go up in specs the bandwidth of Apple silicon has to be compared to the bandwidth of a combo with dedicated GPU. The bandwidth of dedicated GPUs is very high and usually higher than what Apple Silicon gives you if you consider the RAM bandwidth for the CPU.
It's a bit more complicated but that's marketing for you. When it comes to speed Apple RAM isn't faster than what can be found in high-end laptops (or desktops for that matter).
I got the base model M1 Air a couple of years back and whilst I don't do much gaming I do do C#, Python, Go, Rails, local Postgres, and more. I also have a (new last year) Lenovo 13th gen i7 with 16GB RAM running Windows 11 and the performance with the same load is night and day - the M1 walks all over it whilst easily lasting 10hrs+.
Note that I'm not a fanboy; I run both by choice. Also both iPhone and Android.
The Windows laptop often gets sluggish and hot. The M1 never slows down and stays cold. There's just no comparison (though the Air keyboard remains poor).
I don't much care about the technical details, and I know 8GB isn't a lot. I care about the experience and the underspecced Mac wins.
That said you're right about lots of RAM in that I wouldn't bother using the 8GB M1 Air for Docker or running LLMs (it can run SD for images though, but very slowly). Partly that's why I have the Lenovo. You need to pick the right machine for the job at hand.
And I agree that in pure performance, the Apple Silicon Macs will kill it; however, I am really skeptical that an 8GB model would give you a better experience overall. Faster for long compute operations sure, but then you have to deal with all the small slowdown from constant swapping. Unless you stick to a very small amounts of apps and very small amounts of tabs at the same time (which is rather limiting) I don't know how you do it. I don't want to call you a liar but maybe you are emotionally attached (just like I am sometimes) to the device to realize it, or maybe the various advantages of the Mac make you ignore the serious limitations that come with it.
Everyone has their own sets of tradeoffs but my argument is that you can deal with the 8GB Apple Silicon devices you are very likely to be well served by a much cheaper device anyway (like half as cheap).
> you have to deal with all the small slowdown from constant swapping
That just doesn't happen. As I responded to another post, though, I don't do Docker or LLMs on the M1 otherwise you'd probably be right.
> Unless you stick to a very small amounts of apps and very small amounts of tabs at the same time
It's really common to have approaching 50+ tabs open at once. And using Word is often accompanied by VS Code, Excel, Affinity Designer, DotNet, Python, and others due to the nature of what I'm doing. No slowdown.
> maybe you are emotionally attached
I am emotionally attached to the device. Though as a long-time Mac, Windows, and Linux user I'm neither blinkered nor tribal - the attachment is driven by the experience and not the other way around.
> maybe the various advantages of the Mac make you ignore the serious limitations that come with it
There are indeed limitations. 8GB is too small. The fact that for what I do it has no impact doesn't mean I don't see that.
> you can deal with the 8GB Apple Silicon devices you are very likely to be well served by a much cheaper device anyway (like half as cheap)
I already have better Windows laptops than that, and I know that going for a Windows laptop that's half as cheap as the entry level Air would be nothing like as nice because the more expensive ones already aren't (the Lenovo was dearer than the Air).
---
To conclude, you have to use the right tool for the job. If the nature of the task intrinsically needs lots of RAM then 8GB is not good enough. But when it is enough it runs rings around equivalent (and often 'better') Windows machines.
Confirmed here: https://computer.howstuffworks.com/question299.htm (and elsewhere.)
A year later I was doing bonkers (for the time) photoshop work on very large compressed tiff files and my G4 laptop running at 400Mhz was more than 2x as fast as PIIIs on my bench.
Was it faster all around? I don't know how to tell. Was Apple as honest as I am in this commentary about how it mattered what you were doing? No. Was it a CPU that was able to do some things very fast vs others? I know it was.
On top of that Intel increased frequency faster than Apple could handle. And after the release of the Pentium 4, the G4s became very noncompetitive so fast that one would question what could save Apple (later, down the road, Intel it turns out).
They tried to salvage it with the G5s but those came with so many issues that even their bi-proc water-cooled were just not keeping up. I briefly owned of those after repairing it for "free" using 3 of them, supposedly dead; the only thing worth a dam in that was the GPU. Extremely good hardware in many ways but also very weak for so many things that it had to be used only for very specific tasks, otherwise a cheap Intel PC was much better.
Which is precisely why right after they went with Intel. After years of subpar performance on laptops because they were stuck at G4 (not even high frequency).
Now I know from your other comments that you are a very strong believer and I'll admit that there were many reasons to use a Mac (software related) but please stop pretending they were performance competitive because that's just bonkers. If they were, the Intel switch would never have happend in the first place...
Okay, but your example was about battery life:
> LIke when they said an Macbook Air would last 10+ hours and third-party reviewers would get 8-9+ hours. All the while, Dell or HP would claim 19 hours and you'd be lucky to get 2 eg [1]
And even then, they exaggerated their claims. And your link doesn't say anything about HP or Dell claiming 19 hour battery life.
Apple has definitely exaggerated their performance claims over and over again. The Apple silicon parts are fast and low power indeed, but they've made ridiculous claims like comparing their chips to an nVidia RTX 3090 with completely misleading graphs
Even the Mac sites have admitted that the nVidia 3090 comparison was completely wrong and designed to be misleading: https://9to5mac.com/2022/03/31/m1-ultra-gpu-comparison-with-...
This is why you have to take everything they say with a huge grain of salt. Their chip may be "twice" as power efficient in some carefully chosen unique scenario that only exists in an artificial setting, but how does it fare in the real world? That's the question that matters, and you're not going to get an honest answer from Apple's marketing team.
> HP gave the 13-inch HP Spectre x360 an absurd 22.5 hours of estimated battery life, while our real-world test results showed that the laptop could last for 12 hours and 7 minutes.
> Speaking of the ThinkPad P72, here are the top three laptops with the most, er, far out battery life claims of all our analyzed products: the Lenovo ThinkPad P72, the Dell Latitude 7400 2-in-1 and the Acer TravelMate P6 P614. The three fell short of their advertised battery life by 821 minutes (13 hours and 41 mins), 818 minutes (13 hours and 38 minutes) and 746 minutes (12 hours and 26 minutes), respectively.
Dell did manage to be one of the top 3 most absurd claims though.
Dell and IBM were lying about battery life before OSX was even a thing and normal people started buying MacBooks. Dell and IBM will be lying about battery life when the sun goes red dwarf.
Reviewers and individuals like me have always been able to get 90% of Apple’s official battery times without jumping through hoops to do so. “If you were very careful” makes sense for an 11% difference. A ten hour difference is fucking bullshit.
Apple does usually explain their testing methodology and they don’t cheat on benchmarks like some other companies. It’s just that the results are still marketing and should be treated as such.
Outlandish claims notwithstanding, I don’t think anyone can deny the progress they achieved with their CPU and especially GPU IP. Improving performance on complex workloads by 30–50% in a single year is very impressive.
I guess you weren't around during the PowerPC days... Because that's a laughable statement.
We need more tanks in commercials.
A PC half the price was smoking their top of the line stuff.
What made it worth it at the time (I felt) was the software. Today I'm really don't think so, software has improved overall in the industry and there is not a lot of things "Mac specific" that makes it a clear-cut choice.
As for the performance I can't believe all the Apple silicon hype. Sure, it gets good battery life given you use strictly Apple software (or software optimized for it heavily) but in mixed workload situation it's not that impressive.
Using the M2 MacBook Pro of a friend I figured I could get maybe 4-5 hours out of its best case scenario which is better than the 2-3 hours you would get from a PC laptop but also not that great considering the price difference.
And when it comes to performance it is extremely unequal and very lackluster for many things. Like there is more lag launching Activity Monitor on a 2K++ MacBook Pro than launching task manager on a 500 PC. This is a small somewhat stupid example but it does tell the overall story.
They talk a big game but in reality, their stuff isn't that performant in the real world.
And they still market games when one of their 2K laptops plays Dota 2 (a very old, relatively ressource efficient game) worse than a cheapo PC.
Any electron apps on it?
I went the way of only Apple and Apple optimized software for quite a while but I just can't be bothered anymore, considering the price of the hardware and nowadays the price of subscription software.
And this is exactly my argument I you use the hardware in a very specific way, you get there but it is very limiting, annoying and inacceptable considering the pricing.
It's like saying that a small city car gets more gas mileage when what one needs is actually a capable truck. It's not strictly wrong but also not very helpful.
I think the Apple Silicon laptops are very nice if you can work within the limitations, but the moment you start pushing on those you realize they are not really worth the money. Just like the new iPad Pro they released; completely awesome hardware but how many people can actually work within the limitations of iPad OS to make the price not look like a complete ripoff. Very few I would argue.
Today, Apple Silicon is smoking all but the top end Intel chips, while using a fraction of the power.
Yes and no. They'll always be honest with the claim, but the scenario for the claimed improvement will always be chosen to make the claim as large as possible, sometimes with laughable results.
Typically something like "watch videos for 3x longer <small>when viewing 4k h265 video</small>" (which means they adapted the previous gen's silicon which could only handle h264).
Isn't that going to torch performance? My i9-9900 has a base frequency of 3.6 Ghz and a turbo of 5.0 Ghz. Disabling the turbo would create a 28% drop in performance.
I suppose if everything else on the system is configured to use as little power as possible, then it won't even be noticed. But seeing as CPUs underclock when idle (I've seen my i9 go as low as 1.2 Ghz), I'm not sure disabling turbo makes a significant impact except when your CPU is being pegged.
For literal YEARS, Apple battery life claims were a running joke on how inaccurate and overinflated they were.
What time period are you thinking about for Apple? I’ve been using their laptops since the last G4 which is twenty years. They’ve always been substantially more accurate about battery times.
For example I would be surprised if there is any laptop, which is sufficiently fast for my usage, and it's battery life is more than 2-3 hours top. Heck, I have several laptops and all of them dies in one-one and a half hours. But of course, I never optimized for battery life, so who knows. So in my case, all of them are lying equally. I don't even check battery life for 15 years now. It's a useless metric for me, because all of them are shit.
But of course for people who don't need to use VMs, run several "micro"services at once, have constant internet transfer and have 5+ Intellij project open at the same time which caching several millions LOC, while gazillion web pages are open, maybe there is a difference, for me it doesn't matter whether it's one or one and a half hours.
In nearly every single release, their claims are well above actual performance.
I'm not sure what you mean by "of all times" but half the battery usage of the processor definitely doesn't translate into double the battery life since the processor is not the only thing consuming power.
I can have my laptop with nothing on screen, and the battery still points to TrendMicro and others as the cause of heavy battery drain while my laptop seemingly idles.
I recently upgraded my personal laptop to the M3 MacBook pro and the difference is astonishing. I almost never use it plugged in because I genuinely get close to that 20 hour reported battery life. Last weekend I played a AAA Video Game through Xbox Cloud Gaming (awesome for mac gamers btw) and with essentially max graphics (rendered elsewhere and streamed to me of course), I got sucked into a game for like 5 hours and lost only 8% of my battery during that time, while playing a top tier video game! It really blew my mind. I also use GoLand IDE on there and have managed to get a full day of development done using only about 25-30% battery.
So yeah, whatever Apple is doing, they are doing it right. Performance without all the spyware that your work gives you makes a huge difference too.
That's mindblowing. Especially since my personal laptop is a Thinkpad X1 Extreme. I can't leave that unplugged at all.
Even considering the marketing, best case scenario you would be between 27 and 41% battery consumption for 5h of runtime. The actual number will be lower than that because you probably don't use the MBP at the low brightness they use for marketing benchmarks and game streaming constantly requires power for the wifi chip (video can buffer, hence the lower consumption).
There is no way to say this nicely, but can you stop lying ?
Compared to the competition, I'd trust Apple much more than the Windows laptop OEMs.
This is an absurd interpretation. Nobody hears that and says "they made the screen use half the energy".
That said, the function keys make me think "and it runs macOS" is coming, and THAT would be extremely compelling.
Unlike MS that went with the Big Bang in your face approach that was oh-so successful.
We now have 'content consumption platforms' and 'content creation platforms'.
While attempts have been made to try and enable some creation on locked-down touchscreen devices, you're never going to want to try and operate a fully-featured version of Photoshop, Maya, Visual Studio, etc on them. And if you've got a serious workstation with multiple large monitors and precision input devices, you don't want to have dumbed-down touch-centric apps forced upon you Win8-style.
The bleak future that seems likely is that the 'content creation platforms' become ever more niche and far more costly. Barriers to entry for content creators are raised significantly as mainstream computing is mostly limited to locked-down content consumption platforms. And Linux is only an option for as long as non-locked-down hardware is available for sensible prices.
Maybe the end game for Apple isn’t the full convergence, but just having a touch screen on the Mac.
Not much point having a touchscreen on a Macbook (or any laptop really), unless the hardware has a 'tablet mode' with a detachable or fold-away keyboard.
There are plenty of laptops that do have touchscreens, and it has always felt more like a gimmick than a useful hardware interface.
Honestly, the biggest barrier to creativity is thinking you need a specific concept of a "serious workstation" to do it. Plenty of people are using $2k+ desktops just to play video games.
Then there's the whole dealing with lots of files and version control side of things, essential for working as part of a team. Think about creating (and previewing, and finally uploading) a very simple web page, just HTML and a couple of images, entirely on an iPad. While it's probably quite possible these days, I suspect the workflow would be abysmal compared to a 'proper computer' where the file system isn't hidden from you and where you're not constantly switching between full-screen apps.
And that's before you start dealing with anything with significant numbers of files in deep directory structures, or doing more technical image creation (e.g. dealing with alpha channels). And of course, before testing your webpage on all the major browsers. Hmm...
It's rather disingenuous to pretend that an iPad can be sufficient. At its price tag it is still a rather extremely expensive accessory and people pretending otherwise are just full of it. There are enough reviews/testimonies saying as much (even from the diehard fans) for it to be an obvious fact.
Respectfully, I disagree partially. It has never been easier or more affordable to get into creating content. You can create cinema grade video with used cameras that sell for a few hundred dollars. You can create pixar level animation on open source software, and a pretty cheap computer. A computer that can edit a 4k video costs less than the latest iPhone. There are people that create plenty of content with just a phone. Simply put it is orders of magnitude cheaper and easier to create content than it was less than two decades ago, which is why we are seeing so much content getting made. I used to work for a newspaper and it used to be a lot harder and more expensive to produce audio visual media.
My strong feeling is that the problem of content being locked into platforms has precious little to do with consumption oriented hardware, and more to do with the platforms. Embrace -> extinguish -> exlcusivity -> enshittify seems to be the model behind basically anything that hosts user content these days.
This is a completely artificial creation by Apple and Google to extract more money from you. Nothing technical prevents one from using a full OS on a phone today.
Sent from my Librem 5 running desktop GNU/Linux.
Apple then later took the tablet demo technology, wrapped it up in a very stripped-down OS X with a different window server and UI library, and called it iPhone OS. Apple was very clear from the beginning that Fingers Can't Use Mouse Software, Damn It, and that the whole ocean needed to be boiled to support the new user interface paradigm[1]. They even have very specific UI rules specifically to ensure a finger never meets a desktop UI widget, including things like iPad Sidecar just not forwarding touch events at all and only supporting connected keyboards, mice, and the Apple Pencil.
Microsoft's philosophy has always been the complete opposite. Windows XP through 7 had tablet support that amounted to just some affordances for stylus users layered on top of a mouse-only UI. Windows 8 was the first time they took tablets seriously, but instead of just shipping a separate tablet OS or making Windows Phone bigger, they turned it into a parasite that ate the Windows desktop from the inside-out.
This causes awkwardness. For example, window management. Desktops have traditionally been implemented as a shared data structure - a tree of controls - that every app on the desktop can manipulate. Tablets don't support this: your app gets one[2] display surface to present their whole UI inside of[3], and that surface is typically either full-screen or half-screen. Microsoft solved this incongruity by shoving the entire Desktop inside of another app that could be properly split-screened against the new, better-behaved tablet apps.
If Apple were to decide "ok let's support Mac apps on iPad", it'd have to be done in exactly the same way Windows 8 did it, with a special Desktop app that contained all the Mac apps in a penalty box. This is so that they didn't have to add support for all sorts of incongruous, touch-hostile UI like floating toolbars, floating pop-ups, global menus, five different ways of dragging-and-dropping tabs, and that weird drawer thing you're not supposed to use anymore, to iPadOS. There really isn't a way to gradually do this, either. You can gradually add feature parity with macOS (which they should), but you can't gradually find ways to make desktop UI designed by third-parties work on a tablet. You either put it in a penalty box, or you put all the well-behaved tablet apps in their own penalty boxes, like Windows 10.
Microsoft solved Windows 8's problems by going back to the Windows XP/Vista/7 approach of just shipping a desktop for fingers. Tablet Mode tries to hide this, but it's fundamentally just window management automation, and it has to handle all the craziness of desktop. If a desktop app decides it wants a floating toolbar or a window that can't be resized[4], Tablet Mode has to honor that request. In fact, Tablet Mode needs a lot of heuristics to tell what floating windows pair with which apps. So it's a lot more awkward for tablet users in exchange for desktop users having a usable desktop again.
[0] Given what I've heard about Jobs I don't think Jobs was psychologically capable of having friends, but I'll use the word out of convenience.
[1] Though the Safari team was way better at building compatibility with existing websites, so much so that this is the one platform that doesn't have a deep mobile/desktop split.
[2] This was later extended to multiple windows per app, of course.
[3] This is also why popovers and context menus never extend outside their containing window on tablets. Hell, also on websites. Even when you have multiwindow, there's no API surface for "I want to have a control floating on top of my window that is positioned over here and has this width and height".
[4] Which, BTW, is why the iPad has no default calculator app. Before Stage Manager there was no way to have a window the size of a pocket calculator.
RIP Graffiti.
It was kind of successful, touchscreen laptops see pretty big sales nowadays. I don't know what crack they were smoking with Windows 8.0 though.
It's a shame, because it's definitely powerful enough, and the idea of traveling with just an iPad seems super interesting, but I imagine they will not extend those features to any devices besides macs
Crostini is the new containerized version that is both officially supported and integrated into ChromeOS
That's great, but you need an M series chip in your mac for that to work so backwords compatibility only goes back a few years at this point, which is fine for corporate upgrade cycles but might be a bit short for consumers at this time. But it will be fine in the future.
M-class MacBooks can already run many iPhone and iPad apps.
Do you really want your OS using 100% of CPU?
Michelin-starred restaurants not only have top-tier chefs. They have buyers who negotiate with food suppliers to get the best ingredients they can at the lowest prices they can. Having a preferential relationship with a good supplier is as important to the food quality and the health of the business as having a good chef to prepare the dishes.
Apple has top-tier engineering talent but they are also able to negotiate preferential relationships with their suppliers, and it's both those things that make Apple a phenomenal tech company.
If the magic comes mostly from TSMC, there's a good chance for these claims to be true and to have a series of better chips coming on the other platforms as well.
I’m filing this into the bin with all the other “This next Qualcomm chip will close the performance gap” claims made over the past decade. Maybe this time it’ll be true. I wouldn’t bet on it.
Basically we'd need some basis to believe they'll be progressively improving at more or less the same pace as Intel's or Apple's chips to get on board with ARM laptops for Windows/linux.
Otherwise I don't see software makers care enough to port their build to ARM as well.
However, we have more CPU cores, a newer core design, and a newer process node which would all contribute to improving multicore CPU performance.
Also, Apple is conservative on clock speeds, but those do tend to get bumped up when there is a new process node as well.
The N3 process is in the A17 Pro, the M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max. The A17 Pro name seems to imply you won't find it trickle down on the regular iPhones next year. So we'll see that processor only this year in phones, since Apple discontinues their Pro range of phones every year; only the regular phones trickle downrange lowering their prices. The M3 devices are all Macs that needed an upgrade due to their popularity: the Macbook Pro and Macbook Air. They made three chips for them, but they did not make an M3 Ultra for the lower volume desktops. With the announcement of an M4 chip in iPads today, we can expect to see the Macbook Air and Macbook Pro upgraded to M4 soon, with the introduction of an M4 Ultra to match later. We can now expect those M3 devices to be discontinued instead of going downrange in price.
That would leave one device with an N3 process chip: the iMac. At its sale level, I wouldn't be surprised if all the M3 chips that will go into it will be made this year, with the model staying around for a year or two running on fumes.
For instance, Apple supposedly required a deal where they only paid TSMC for usable chips per N3 wafer, and not for the entire wafer.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/report-apple-is-savi...
The next iPhone generation is said to be a return to form with all models using the same SOC on the revised version of the 3nm node.
> Code from the operating system also indicates that the entire iPhone 16 range will use a new system-on-chip – t8140 – Tahiti, which is what Apple calls the A18 chip internally. The A18 chip is referenced in relation to the base model iPhone 16 and 16 Plus (known collectively as D4y within Apple) as well as the iPhone 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max (referred to as D9x internally)
https://www.macrumors.com/2023/12/20/ios-18-code-four-new-ip...
[1] https://semiwiki.com/semiconductor-manufacturers/tsmc/322688...
[2] https://semiengineering.com/sram-scaling-issues-and-what-com...
[3] https://semiengineering.com/sram-in-ai-the-future-of-memory/
I can see why AMD started putting the SRAM on top.
From what I can gather the key aspects are that decreased feature sizes lead to more variability between transistors, but also to less margin between on-state and off-state. Thus a kind of double-whammy. In logic circuits you're constantly overwriting with new values regardless of what was already there, so they're not as sensitive to this, while the entire point of a memory circuit is to reliably keep values around.
Alternate transistor designs such as FinFET, Gate-all-around and such can provide mitigation of some of this, say by reducing transistor-to-transistor variability by a factor, but can't get around root issue.
[1]: https://semiengineering.com/sram-scaling-issues-and-what-com...
It can deliver the same performance as itself at just a fourth of the power than it's using? That's incredible!
I believe that OLED is much more power hungry than the previous display type (LED backlit LCD of some type?). I could be wrong, but in TV land that's the case...
Could explain, at least partly, why run time isn't greatly increased.
I.e. would it sit between, or closer to M2 or M4?
What do they lose by allowing slightly more freedom in configurations?
I do think there is a price discrimination story here, but there are some details to be filled in.
Also, I have seen lots of people on HN complain about the price itself, even if it's not what you yourself object to.
This is what they did when I was buying iPad Air - it starts with actually problematically low 64GB of Storage... and the 256GB model is the next one with massive price jump.
It's the same kind of "anchoring" (marketing term) that car dealers use to lure you into deciding for their car based on the cheapest 29.999$ model which with "useful" equipment will end you costing like 45.000$
Not to mention that occasionally is nice to have a set of downloaded media available for vacation/travel and 64GB isn't enough to download week worth of content from Netflix.
This is why this is so annoying - you're right, I don't need 512GB or 256GB. But I'd still like to have more than "You're out of space!!" amount.
Games. You can put maybe three or four significant games on an iPad Air before it maxes out. (MTG Arena is almost 20GB all on it's own, Genshin Impact is like 40+ GB)
This is actually most of the storage space -- videos downloaded for consumption in places with no or bad internet.
[1]: https://liliputing.com/you-can-use-a-floppy-disk-drive-with-...
I mean, what would happen if you yanked out the drive while an app was running on it?
I could fit more if I didn’t insist on downloading everything 1080p I guess.
In my sphere, everyone with an iPad uses it for the Apple Pencil and/or video editing. Raw files for drawings get surprisingly big, once you get up into the many tens of layers, considering an artist can draw a few a day.
It's anecdotal, but 8/10 people that I know over the age of 40 would have no idea what RAM or CPU configurations even theoretically do for them. This is probably the case for most iPad purchasers, and Apple knows this - so why would they provide expensive/confusing configurability options just for the handful of tech-y people who may care? There are still high/med/low performant variations that those people can choose from, any the number of people for whom that would sour them away from a sale is vanishingly small, and they would be likely to not even be looking at Apple in the first place
The RAM and system-on-chip are tied together as part of the system-on-package. The SoP is what enables M chips to hit their incredible memory bandwidth numbers.
This is not an easy thing to allow configuration. They can’t just plug a different memory chip as a final assembly step before shipping.
They only have two SoPs as part of this launch: 9-core CPU with 8gb, and 10-core CPU with 16gb. The RAM is unified for cpu/gpu (and I would assume neural engine too).
Each new SoP is going to reduce economies of scale and increase supply chain complexity. The 256/512gb models are tied to the first package, the 1/2tb models are tied to the second. Again, these are all part of the PCB, so production decisions have to be made way ahead of consumer orders.
Maybe it’s not perfect for each individual’s needs, but it seems reasonable to assume that those with greater storage needs also would benefit from more compute and RAM. That is, you need more storage to handle more video production so you are probably more likely to use more advanced features which make better use of increased compute and RAM.
More costs everywhere in the chain; limiting SKUs is a big efficiency from manufacturing to distribution to retail to support, and it is an easy way (for the same reason) to improve the customer experience, because it makes it a lot easier to not be out of or have delays for a customer’s preferred model, as well as making the UI (online) or physical presentation (brick and mortar) for options much cleaner.
Of course, it can feel worse if you you are a power user with detailed knowledge of your particular needs in multiple dimensions and you feel like you are paying extra for features you don't want, but the efficiencies may make that feeling an illusion — with more freedom, you would being paying for the additional costs that created, so a higher cost for the same options and possibly just as much or more for the particular combination option you would prefer with multidimensional freedom as for the one with extra features without it. Though that counterfactual is impossible to test.
1. Having more SKUs is expensive, for everything from planning to inventory management to making sure you have enough shelf space at Best Buy (which you have to negotiate for). Chances are good that stores like Best Buy and Costco would only want 2 SKUs anyway, so the additional configs would be a special-order item for a small number of consumers.
2. After a certain point, adding more options actually decreases your sales. This is confusing to people who think they'd be more likely to buy if they could get exactly what they wanted, but what you're not seeing is the legions of casual consumers who are thinking about maybe getting an iPad, but would get overwhelmed by the number of options. They might spend days or weeks asking friends which model to get, debating about whether to spend extra on this upgrade or that, and eventually not buying it or getting an alternative. If you simplify the lineup to the "cheap one" and the "high end one" then people abandon most of that overhead and just decide what they want to pay.
The biggest thing tech people miss is that they're not the core consumers of these devices. The majority go to casual consumers who don't care about specifying every little thing. They just want to get the one that fits their budget and move on. Tech people are secondary.
That said, Apple's policy toward SKUs is pretty consistent: you pay more money and you get more machine, and vice versa. The MacBooks are the only product which has separately configurable memory / storage / chip, and even there some combinations aren't manufactured.
My guess is they want you to use their cloud storage and pay monthly for it.
I'm not storing my Docker containers and `node_modules` in the cloud.
Pro isn't just images and videos.
I said this in a sibling comment already, but I think it's just price anchoring so that people find the $1500 they're actually going to pay a bit easier to swallow.
Unless you are a solo editor.
What is your concern?
I would expect most actual users of the Pro model, now that 13 inch is available at the lower tier, would be working with photos and video. Even shooting ProRes off a pro iPhone is going to eat into 256 pretty fast.
Seems like that model exists mainly so they can charge $1500 for the one people are actually likely to get, and still say "starts at $1299".
Then again, it's Apple, and they can get away with it, so they do. My main point here is that the 256GB model is bad value compared to the equivalent Air model, because if you have any work where the extra beef is going to matter, it's going to eat right through that amount of storage pretty quick.
That type of buyer is a very significant % of sales for iPad pros. Despite the marketing, there are really not that many people (as a % of sales) that will be pushing these iPad's anywhere even remotely close to their computational/storage/spec limits.
That combined with replaceable batteries would go a long way to reduce the amount of ewaste.
In contrast, Apple's internal storage to my knowledge always is very durable NVMe, attached logically and physically directly to the CPU, which makes their shenanigans with low RAM size possible in the first place - they swap like hell but as a user you barely notice it because it's so blazing fast.
I'd just love to buy a device with a moderate amount of unupgreadable SSD and an SD slot so that I can put a more memory in it later so the device can last longer.
[1] https://winfuture.de/news,141439.html
[2] https://9to5mac.com/2024/03/09/macbook-air-m3-storage-speeds...
On the Macbooks (running MacOS), RAM has been used as data cache to speed up data read/write performance until the actual SSD storage operation completes. It makes sense for Apple to account for with higher RAM spec for the 1TB/2TB configurations.
I'm pretty sure that's what all modern operating systems are doing.
Apple uses it for segmentation and nothing else.
Modern being - since the 80s.
Apple doesn't do this, and use their tight integration to perform a similar function using system memory. So there is some technical justification, I think. They are 100% price gougers though.
Gave me a chuckle ;)
It's also still typically just worse than an actual dram cache.
The justifications I see are to reduce the number of models needed to stock and to keep the purchasing decision simple for customers. These are very good reasons.
But no 16GB without more SSD? lol?
The iPhone SE exists because there is a market for this form factor. If you look at the specs, you would notice it uses hardware previously used by more expensive models.
> iPhone, iPhone Pro, iPhone Pro Max
Again, different customers for different form-factors. These phones differ more than just SoC in them.
You understand that having N different colors of iPads is different from having N different SoCs for the same model of an iPad.
Some calculation like:
total storage size / page size per LBA (512B or 4KiB usually) * mapping data structure size
Are LBA's a thing on SSD's nowadays? I thought it was the legacy of the spinning rust.
SSD's operate on memory pages of the flash memory, and the page management is a complicated affair that is also entirely opaque to the host operating system due to the behind the scenes page remapping. Since flash memory is less durable (in the long term), the SSD's come overprovisioned and the true SSD capacity is always more (up to a double if my memory serves me well). The SSD controller also runs an embedded RTOS that monitors failures in flash chips and proactively evacuates and remaps ailing flash memory pages onto the healthy ones. Owing to this behaviour, the memory pages that the SSD controller reports back to the operating system have another, entirely hidden, layer of indirection.
As you mentioned, over-provisioning and other NAND flash memory health management techniques like garbage collection and wear leveling are needed for usable modern SSDs. Modern SSD controllers are complex beasts having 3-7 microprocessor cores (probably double digit core counts now with PCIe 5.0), encryption engines, power & thermal management, error correction, multiple hardware PHYs, etc.
Example product sheet: https://www.marvell.com/content/dam/marvell/en/public-collat...
I think it is strictly for that purpose.
And that decision somehow turns into making budget conscious people's UX shittier? How is that a reason not to make 16gb RAM, which is almost a bare minimum in 2024, available to everyone?
Such a waste of nice components.
I can't run podman, slack, teams, and llama3-8B in llama.cpp at the same time. Oddly enough, this is rarely a problem.
This just seems like lameness on Apple’s part.
Your estimates are not even close. You can't honestly think that LPDDR5 at leading edge speeds is only $3 per 64 Gb (aka 8GB), right?
Your estimate is off my an order of magnitude. The memory Apple is using is closer to $40 for that increment, not $3.
And yes, they include a markup, because nobody is integrating hardware parts and selling them at cost. But if you think the fastest LPDDR5 around only costs $3 for 8GB, that's completely out of touch with reality.
You can get 8GB of good quality DDR5 DIMMs for 40$, there is no way in hell that Apple is paying anywhere near that.
Going from 8 to 16GBs is probably somewhere between 3-8$ purely in material costs for Apple, not taking into account any other costs associated
You mention DIMMs and component prices instead. This is unhelpful.
See https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/memory/memory/774... for LPDDR5 prices. You can get a price of $48/chip at a volume of 2000 chips. Assuming that Apple got a deal of $30-40-ish at a few orders of magnitude larger order is quite fair. Though it certainly would be nicer if Apple priced 8GB increments not much above $80-120.
As for prices, the prices you cited are not at all comparable. Apple is absolutely certainly buying directly from manufacturers without a middleman since we're talking about millions of units delivered each quarter. Based on those quantities, unit prices are guaranteed to be substantially lower than what DigiKey offers.
Based on what little public information I was able to find, spot market prices for LPDDR4 RAM seem to be somewhere in the 3 to 5$ range for 16GB modules. Let's be generous and put LPDDR5 at tripe the price with 15$ a 16GB module. Given the upgrade price for going from 8 to 16GB is 230 EUR Apple is surely making a huge profit on those upgrades alone by selling an essentially unusable base configuration for a supposed "Pro" product.
A DIMM is 8 or 16 chips (9/18 is ECC), while the LPDDR is a single chip for the same storage. The wild density difference in chip capacity (512MB or 1GB vs 8GB) makes a huge difference, and how a stick can be sold at retail for cheaper than the bare LPDDR chip in volume.
but up until these these things I felt I could run whatever I wanted, including Baldur’s Gate 3.
As devs and power users we'll always have an edge case for higher RAM usage, but the average consumer is going to be perfectly fine with 8GB of RAM.
All of these comments about how 8GB of RAM is going to make it "unusable" or a "waste of components" are absurd.
I was using my 4gb ram pinebook pro in public transport yesterday, and decided to turn of all cores except for a single Cortex-A53, to safe some battery. I had no problems for my usecase of a text editor + shell to compile for doing some SIMD programming.
It's not quite in the same ballpark as showing apartment or airfare listings without mandatory fees but it is at the ticket booth outside of the stadium.
> It takes quite a bit of discipline to close down tabs to a more manageable numbers.
Or you just click the little chevron in Tree Style Tabs or equivalent and 100 tabs are just hidden in the UI.
It's fairly easy to hit a few GB of RAM used up just with those.
I'm still getting at least 16 GB on my next one though.
like, the $359 acer shitbox probably doesn't do all the exact same thing as the MBA either, but that's actually ok and really only demonstrates the MBA is an unaffordable luxury product, basically the same as a gold-plated diamond-encrusted flip-phone.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40292839
Not your circus, not your clowns, but this is sort of the duality of apple: "it's all marketing and glitz, a luxury product, there's no reason to buy it, and the fact that they have a better product only PROVES it" vs "of course no PC manufacturer could possibly be expected to offer a top-notch 120hz mini-LED screen, a good keyboard, great trackpad, good speakers, and good SOC performance in a thin-n-light..."
There are different categories of "power users"
And as for the parent comment’s point, being into cars doesn’t mean you’re as good as a professional race car driver.
The Macbook line will get iPadOS support long before they allow MacOS on this line. Full steam ahead towards the walled garden.
M1 chips, great screens, precise pencil input and keyboard support, but we still aren't permitted a serious OS on it, to protect the monopolistic store.
App Stores have beeen around long enough to prove that they're little more than laboratories in which to carry out accelerated enshittification experimentation. Everything so dumbed down and feature-light, yet demanding subscriptions or pushing endless scammy ads. And games that are a shameless introduction to gambling addiction, targeted at kids.
Most of the 'apps' that people actually use shouldn't need to be native apps anyway, they should be websites. And now we get the further enshittification of trying to force people out of the browser and into apps, not for a better experience, but for a worse one, where more data can be harvested and ads can't so easily be blocked...
I feel bad about all this because I advised my mother to buy an iPad Pro as it was sold as a laptop replacement but it never materialized anywhere near expectations and ended being an expensive mistake that can only offer compromised workflows with limitations that do not even come close to a MacBook she was used to (even in Apple own apps, even something like the Page app, yes).
I think the iPad would be a fine device, if only they didn't try to upsell it and stopped pretending it is a "Pro" thing. If the whole lineup would get OLED displays, more RAM across the board and decent base storage for media at a more honest price it would be an easy recommendation.
As it is, the entry level is lackluster because of the display (if you only buy for content consumption it is better to go with an Android OLED options) and the high-end variant are just stupid expensive for what they will actually allow you to do.
But too many Apple customers have drunk the Kool-Aid so they don't have to care much about the reality and we just get expensive bullshit.
The multitasking will still be poor but perhaps Apple can do something about that when in docked mode.
That said, development likely remains a non-starter given the lack of unix tooling.
Despite the entire internet telling me it would be "unusable" and a disaster and a complete disaster, it's actually 100% perfectly fine. I can run IDEs, Slack, Discord, Chrome, and do dev work without a problem. I can't run a lot of VMs or compile giant projects with 10 threads, of course, but for typical work tasks it's just fine.
And for the average consumer, it would also be fine. I think it's obvious that a lot of people are out of touch with normal people's computer use cases. 8GB of RAM is fine for 95% of the population and the other 5% can buy something more expensive.
It’s rather an issue of selling deliberately underpowered hardware for no good reason other than to sell actually up-to-date versions for a difference in price that has no relation to the actual availability or price of the components. The sheer disconnect from any kind of reality offends me as a person whose job and alleged primary competency is to recognize reality then bend it to one’s will.
8 GB were the standard back then.
Edit: I confirmed that I was indeed wrong, but the payoff isn't great anyway because that just means that yes in fact they've kept the exact same ram floor for 10 years. Insane.
For me personally 16 or 32 GB are perfectly fine, 8 GB was too little (even without VMs) and I've never needed 64 or more. So it's curious to see you are pretty much exactly the opposite.
Did you miss this part prefixing that sentence?
> I can't run a lot of VMs or compile giant projects with 10 threads, of course
>"I have a spare laptop with only 8GB of RAM"
The used M1 MacBook Air I just bought is by far the fastest computer I have ever used.
I put a spare 120 GB SSD, a cheap no-name brand that was just lying around for some testing purposes. Found the similar off-the-shelf DDR3 2 GB RAM stick. I thought the RAM was faulty, turned out it’s in a working condition, so I put it there.
I need the computer for basic so-called office work (a browser, some messengers, email client and a couple of other utilities). I thought I’d buy at least two 4GB RAM sticks after I test it, so you know, 8 GB is just the bare imaginable minimum! I have my 16 GBs everywhere since, idk, maybe 2012 or something.
And you know what?! It works very well with 4 GB of RAM and default Fedora (it’s 40 now, but I started with 38, iirc). It has the default Gnome (also, 46 now, started with 44, iirc). And it works very well!
It doesn’t allow me to open a gazillion of browser tabs, but my workflow is designed to avoid it, so I have like 5 to 10 open simultaneously.
Before throwing Fedora at the PC, I thought I would just install a minimal Arch Linux with swaywm and be good. But I decided I don’t want to bother, and I’ll just buy 8 GB later on, and be done with it.
And here I am, having full-blown Gnome and just 4 GB of RAM. I don’t restrict myself too much, the only time I notice it’s not my main PC is when I want to do some heavy web-browsing (e.g. shopping on some different heavy websites with many tabs opened). Then it slows down significantly, till I close the unnecessary tabs or apps. All the software is updated and current, so it’s not like it’s some ancient PC from 00’s.
Also, I have my iPad Pro 12,9 1st Gen with just 4 GB of RAM too, and I never feel it’s slow for me.
I understand that some tasks would require a lot of RAM, and it’s not for everyone. Having a lot of RAM everywhere, I’m quite used to not thinking of it at all for a significant part of my career (for over a decade now), so I may have something opened for weeks that I don’t have any need for.
So, it’s 2024, and I’m surprised to say that 4 GB of RAM is plenty when you’re focused on some tasks and don’t multitask heavily. Which never productive for me at least. I even noticed that I enjoy my low-memory PC even more, as it reminds me with its slowdowns that I’m entering the multitasking state.
I use swaywm on my Arch Linux laptop, and most of the time it’s less than 3–4 Gb (I have 16 Gb).
Thus making your three other machines 400% perfectly fine?
This argument is self defeating in the context of the M4 announcement. "Average consumers" who don't need 16 GB of RAM don't need an M4 either. But people who do need an M4 chip probably also need 16 GB of RAM.
I think actually more people need 16 GB of RAM rather than a top M4 chip. Having only 8 GB can be a serious limitation in some memory heavy circumstances, while having (say) an M2 SoC rather than an M4 SoC probably doesn't break any workflow at all, it just makes it somewhat slower.
At least, chrome wouldn’t run that many tabs on iPad for sure if it used the same engine as desktop chrome
3 GB ram chips probably exist, but are definitely not common.
not again
No device should be measuring storage in the gigabytes in 2024. Let alone starting at $1000 offering only 256GB. What ridiculousness.
I have years of photos and videos on there. Apparently the 256 GB model was the right choice for me?
I have the 256 GB model as well, full resolution of 5+ years of photos (around 20k), around 200 GB used, 180 on iCloud via Family Sharing.
All the changes under the Cook leadership are appalling and reveal what is definitely one of the worse character you can get as a leader. At this point even Bill Gates looks like a good guy in comparison.
A 1 TB consumer-oriented SSD is about $50 today. At Apple’s manufacturing scale, do you have any doubt that the cost to them is nearly negligible?
iPad Pros should come with 1-16 TiB of SSD, and 16-128 GiB of RAM.
WTF? Why so little? That's insane to me, that's the amount of RAM you get with a mid-range android phone.
What needs that amount on a phone? 8GB on a desktop is...well it's not great, but it's usable, and usable for a damn sight more multi-tasking than you would ever do on a smartphone. Is it just because you need to look better on the spec sheet, like the silly camera megapixel wars of the 2010s?
I freaking hate my iPhone Mini for that, load a YouTube video, a few tabs and a note and boom you are in for a reload every 3-context switch. It's disgusting for a phone that launched at a price too close to 1Keur for my liking. And no, I'm not going to drop over 1keur on a stupid smartphone just to be able to load more than 5 tabs and a note without constant reloading when I'm just trying to do research in a shop to inform a purchasing decision.
I bought it solely for the form factor in the first place, but I really regret considering all the shortcomings that came with the price.
But if Apple think they are smartass, I'll have the last laugh by not buying their hardware again. My next smartphone is definitely going to have over 8Gb of RAM, just not from Apple.
I use my iPad Pro constantly for heavy stuff and I don’t know how much ram is in it; it has never been something I needed to think about. The OS doesn’t even expose it.
There's absolutely nothing a mobile device does that should require that much memory. That shitty OEMs bloat the hell out of their ROMs and slap on more memory to match isn't a good thing or something to emulate in my opinion.
In transistor counts, M2 had 20BTr, M3 25BTr (+25%) and M4 has 28BTr (+12%).
M2 used TSMC N5P (138MTr/mm2), M3 used TSMC N3 (197MTr/mm2, +43%) and M4 uses TSMC N3E (215MTr/mm2, +9%).[1][2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nm_process#%225_nm%22_proces...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3_nm_process#%223_nm%22_proces...
RTX 4090 Tensor 1,321 TOPS according to spec sheet so roughly 35x.
RTX 4090 is 191 Tensor TFLOPS vs M2 5.6 TFLOPS (M3 is tough to find spec).
RTX 4090 is also 1.5 years old.
What irritates me the most though is people comparing a mobile accelerator with an extreme high end desktop GPU. Some models only run on a dual GPU stack of those. Smaller GPUs are not worth the money. NPUs are primarily eating the lunch of low end GPUs.
Apple M3: 29685
RTX 4090: 320220
When you line it up like that it's kinda surprising the 4090 is just $1800. They could sell it for $5,000 a pop and it would still be better value than the highest end Apple Silicon.
Adding also M3 MAX: 86072
I wonder the results if the test would be done on Asahi Linux some day. Apple implementation is fairly unoptimized AFAK.
The 4090 is highly specialized and not usable for general purpose computing.
Whether or not it's a better value than Apple Silicon will highly depend on what you intend to do with it. Especially if your goal is to have a device you can put in your backpack.
People have been tiling 24gb+ models on a single (or several) 3090/4090s for a while now.
It's stupid to look at OpenCL when that's not what's used in real use.
Memory bandwidth is literally the main bottleneck when it comes to the types of applications gpus are used for, so everyone is counting
Which still implies... a 2 bit quant?
1.5bit can be done to existing models. The 1 bit (and less than 1 bit iirc) requires training a model from scratch.
Still, the idea that we can have giant models running in tiny amounts of RAM is not completely far fetched at this point.
My impression and experience trying low bit quants (which could easily be outdated by now) is that you are/were better off with a smaller model and a less aggressive quantization (provided you have access to said smaller model with otherwise equally good training). If that's changed I'd be interested to hear about it, but definitely don't want to make work for you digging up papers.
LLMs are parameterized by a ton of weights, when we say something like 400B we mean it has 400 billion parameters. In modern LLMs those parameters are basically always 16 bit floating point numbers.
It turns out you can get nearly as good results by reducing the precision of those numbers, for instance by using 4 bits per parameter instead of 16, meaning each parameter can only take on one of 16 possible values instead of one of 65536.
There's some speculation that a net trained for more epochs on more data learns to pack more information into the weights, and so does worse when weight data is degraded.
Even the so called "good" quants of huge models are extremely crippled.
Nothing is ever free, and even going from 16 to 8bit will massively reduce the quality of your model, no matter whatever their hacked benchmarks claim.
No, it doesn't help because of "free regularization" either. Dropout and batch norm were also placebo BS that didn't actually help to back in the day when they were still being used.
Put simple, a parameter is a number that determines how likely it is that something will occur, ie if the number is < 0.5 say "goodbye" otherwise say "hello".
Now, if the parameter is a 32bit (unsigned) integer it can have a value of 0-4,294,967,296.
If you were using this 32bit value to represent physical objects, then you could represent 4,294,967,296 objects (each object gets given its own number).
However a lot of the time in machine learning, after training you can find that not quite so many different "things" need to be represented by a particular parameter, so if say you were representing types of fruit with this parameter (Google says there are over 2000 types of fruit, but let's just say there are exactly 2000). In that case 4,294,967,296/2000 means there are 2.1 million distinct values we assign each fruit, which is such a waste! Our perfect case would be that we use a number that only represents 0-2000 in the smallest way for this job.
Now is where quantization comes in, where the size of the number we use to represent a parameter is reduced, saving memory size at the expense of a small performance hit of the model accuracy - it's known that many models don't really take a large accuracy hit from this, meaning that the way the parameter is used inside the model doesn't really need/take advantage of being able to represent so many values.
So what we do is say, reduce that 32bit number to 16, or 8, or 4 bits. We go from being able to represent billions or millions of distinct values/states to maybe 16 (with 4bit quantization) and then we benchmark the model performance against the larger version with 32bit parameters - often finding that what training has decided to use that parameter for doesn't really need an incredibly granular value.
While it is true that the claimed performance for M4 is better than for the current Intel Meteor Lake and AMD Hawk Point, it is also significantly lower (e.g. around half) than the AI performance claimed for the laptop CPU+GPU+NPU models that both Intel and AMD will introduce in the second half of this year (Arrow Lake and Strix Point).
Incredible that in the future there will be better chips than what Apple is releasing now.
The taiwanese silicon industrial complex deserves our dollars. Their workers are insanely hard working and it shows in its product.
Apple is also bragging very hyperbolically that the NPU they introduce right now is faster than all the older NPUs.
So, while what Apple says, "The Most Powerful Neural Engine Ever" is true now, it will be true for only a few months. Apple has done a good job, so as it is normal, at launch their NPU is the fastest. However this does not deserve any special praise, it is just normal, as normal as the fact that the next NPU launched by a competitor will be faster.
Only if the new Apple NPU would have been slower than the older models, that would have been a newsworthy failure. A newsworthy success would have been only if the new M4 would have had at least a triple performance than it has, so that the competitors would have needed more than a year to catch up with it.
I expect we will see the same bragging from Apple's competitors whenever they actually launch the chips you're talking about.
Apple has real silicon shipping right now. What you're talking about doesn't yet exist.
> A newsworthy success would have been only if the new M4 would have had at least a triple performance than it has, so that the competitors would have needed more than a year to catch up with it.
So you decide what's newsworthy now? Triple? That's so arbitrary.
I certainly better not see you bragging about these supposed chips later if they're not three times faster than what Apple just released today.
If M4 were 3 times faster than it is, it would have remained faster than Strix Point and Arrow Lake, which would have been replaced only next year, giving supremacy to M4 for more than a year.
If M4 were twice faster, it would have continued to share the first position for more than a year. As it is, it will be the fastest for one quarter, after which it will have only half of the top speed.
[disco stu] if these trends continue, the M5 will be out on November 14, 2024
that would be my brain still - at least for now ;)
here i am celebrating not pulling the trigger on M2 128gb yesterday
now im realizing M4 ain't shit
will wait a few more months for what you described. will probably wait for AMD
> Given that Microsoft has defined that only processors with an NPU with 45 TOPS of performance or over constitute being considered an 'AI PC',
so already with 77 TOPS it just destroys M4. Rumoured to hit the market in 2 months or less.
The most interesting aspect of the M4 is simply it's debuting on the iPad lineup, whereas historically it's always been on the iPhone (for A-series) and Macbook (for M-series). Makes sense given low expected yielded for the newest node for one of Apple's lower volume products.
For the curious, the original TSMC N3 node had a lot of issues plus was very costly so makes sense to move away from it: https://www.semianalysis.com/p/tsmcs-3nm-conundrum-does-it-e...
Of course, phones dwarf both.
I'm very curious how much iPad Pros sell. Out of all the products in Apple's lineup, the iPad Pro confuses me the most. You can tell what a PM inside Apple thinks the iPad Pro is for, based on the presentation: super powerful M4 chip! Use Final Cut Pro, or Garageband, or other desktop apps on the go! Etc etc.
But in reality, who actually buys them, instead of an iPad Air? Maybe some people with too much money who want the latest gadgets? Ever since they debuted, the general consensus from tech reviewers on the iPad Pro has been "It's an amazing device, but no reason to buy it if you can buy a MacBook or an iPad Air"
Apple really wants this "Pro" concept to exist for iPad Pro, like someone who uses it as their daily work surface. And maybe some people exist like that (artists? architects?) but most of the time when I see an iPad in a "pro" environment (like a pilot using it for nav, or a nurse using it for notes) they're using an old 2018 "regular" iPad.
Hypervisor support was removed from the iOS 16.4 kernel, hopefully it will return in iPadOS 18 for at least some approved devices.
If not, Microsoft/HP/Dell/Lenovo Arm laptops with M3-competitive performance are launching soon, with mainline Linux support.
I have been seeking someone who’ll be willing to put money on such a claim. I’ll bet the other way. Perchance you’re the person I seek, if you truly believe this?
Compared to macOS on M3 doing the same
At Qualcomm SoC launch, OSS Linux can't possibly compete with the deep pockets of optimized-shenanigan Windows "drivers" or vertically integrated macOS on Apple Silicon.
But the incumbent landscape of Arm laptops for Linux is so desolate, that it can only be improved by the arrival of multiple Arm devices from Tier 1 PC OEMs based on a single SoC family, with skeletal support in mainline Linux. In time, as with Asahi reverse engineering of Apple firmware interfaces, we can have mainline Linux support and multiple Linux distros on enterprise Arm laptops.
One risk for MS/Asus/HP/Dell/Lenovo devices based on Qualcomm Nuvia/Oryon/EliteX is that Qualcomm + Arm licensing fees could push device pricing into "premium" territory. The affordable Apple Macbook Air, including used M1 devices, will provide price and performance competition. If enterprises buy Nuvia laptops in volume, then Linux will have a used Arm laptop market in 2-3 years.
So.. your test case might be feasible after a year or two of Linux development and optimization. Until then, WSL2 on Windows 11 could be a fallback. For iPad Pro users desperate for portable Linux/BSD VM development with long battery life, Qualcomm-based Arm laptops bring much needed competition to Apple Silicon. If Nuvia devices can run multiple OSS operating systems, it's already a win for users, making possible the Apple-impossible. Ongoing performance improvements will be a bonus.
But I’m happy to take that bet with “Linux” replaced with “windows”
This is everything wrong with the iPad Pro in a nutshell. Fantastic hardware ruined by greed.
Apple currently has 5 major build trains: macOS, iOS, watchOS, tvOS (which also runs HomePod), and visionOS. Huge amounts of the code are already the same between them: they literally just build the same stuff with different build settings… except for the UI. The UI has actually unique stuff in each train.
This has become more true over time… teams are likely sick of not having certain dependencies on certain trains, so they’re becoming more identical at the foundation/framework level every release.
Saying they’ll make a macOS with a touch UI is like saying Honda is finally going to make a motorcycle with four wheels and a full car frame. The UI is the differentiating factor in the OS’s. Everything else has already converged or is rapidly doing so.
If the goal is to support macOS apps on iOS then there’s a dilemma: how do you suddenly make apps that are designed from the ground up for a mouse, good for touch? The answer is you don’t: you just make the rest of the system identical (make the same APIs available everywhere) and ask developers to make the UI parts different.
I could almost believe that they’d make a macOS VM available for use with a keyboard and mouse within iOS. But to me it’d make more sense to do a sort of reverse version of how iOS apps are supported on macOS… where macOS apps are run natively on the iPad, but rendered with the iPad’s window management (modulo whatever multitasking features they still need to implement to make this seamless) and strictly require a keyboard and mouse to be in this mode. There’s just no reason to make a VM if you’re doing this: you can just run the binary directly. The kernel is the same, the required frameworks are the same. No VM is needed.
Even if a macOS VM had only a CLI terminal and a few core apps made by Apple, using a Swift UI framework that was compatible with a touch interface, it would be a huge step forward for iPad owners who are currently limited to slow and power-expensive emulation (iSH, ashell). Apple could create a new app store or paid upgrade license entitlement for iOS-compatible macOS apps, so that users can pay ISVs for an app version with iOS touch input.
Apple will never ever take macOS and change its UI to be optimized for touch. Or at least if they do, it’s time to sell the stock. They already have a touch UI, and it’s called iOS. They’re converging the two operating systems by making the underlying frameworks the same… the UI is literally the only thing they shouldn’t converge.
I like the fact that a number of iPad and iPhone apps now run on macOS without a simulator or any ceremony. While they are touch-optimized, they're easy enough to use with a pointing device. The gotcha to such mythical OS convergence is the inverse is untrue since a desktop UI is unusable 1:1 on a tablet with the coarser granularity of tapping and less keyboard access.
Perhaps OS-level AI in the future will be able to automatically follow design guidelines and UX rules and generate a usable UI (Storyboards or such View parts) on any platform given a description of data, its importance, and a description of what it should try to look like.
EU and US regulators are slowly eroding that service monopoly.
> Fantastic hardware
Hopefully Apple leadership stops shackling their hardware under the ho-hum service bus.
It's been rumored for years that a touch-optimized version of macOS has been in development for use in iOS VMs. With the launch of M4 1TB 16GB iPad Pros for $2K (the price of two MacBook Airs), Apple can sell developers the freedom to carry one device instead of two, without loss of revenue, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40287922
Apple is in the midst of a cold war with regulators now. Every new feature will be scrutinized to check that it offers no threat to their golden goose if regulators force them to open it up. Allowing one type of VM means that regulators could force them to allow any type of VM.
Asahi Linux already runs on Apple Silicon.
The EU could try to unlock Apple device boot of owner-authorized operating systems.
Ding ding ding ding ding! The iPad Pro is useful primarily for those people. Or at least it was. The original selling point of the Pro was that it had[0] the Apple Pencil and a larger screen to draw on. The 2021 upgrade gave the option to buy a tablet with 16GB of RAM, which you need for Procreate as that has very strict layer limits. If you look at the cost of dedicated drawing tablets with screens in them, dropping a grand on an iPad Pro and Pencil is surprisingly competitive.
As for every other use case... the fact that all these apps have iPad versions now is great, for people with cheaper tablets. The iPad Air comes in 13" now and that'll satisfy all but the most demanding Procreate users anyway, for about the same cost as the Pro had back in 2016 or so. So I dunno. Maybe someone at Apple's iPad division just figured they need a halo product? Or maybe they want to compete with the Microsoft Surface without having to offer the flexibility (and corresponding jank) of a real computer? I dunno.
[0] sold separately, which is one of my biggest pet peeves with tablets
A lot of teachers now project their iPad screen wirelessly in class, sometimes almost to the exclusion of any other teaching method.
I value the high performance both for everyday ease of use and specifically for screen recordings.
It is not a laptop replacement; it is a wonderful complement.
And they surely can sell more gadgets and accessories for an iPad than for a laptop.
Until I can run Xcode on an iPad (not Swift Playgrounds), it's a pass for me. Hear me out: I don't want to bring both an iPad and Macbook on trips, but I need Xcode. Because of this, I have to pick the Macbook every time. I want an iPad, but the iPad doesn't want me.
I know people have been hoping for that for a long time, so I’m not holding my breath.
As much as I’d like the OLED screen and lighter weight, I don’t have any compelling argument to buy a new one.
Even a good battery isn’t that good. That seems to be a software problem.
My only theory is it’s turning on the screen every time it gets a notification. However, I have a case that covers the screen, which should keep the screen off in my opinion. I have thought about disabling 100% of the notification, but without a global toggle that seems pretty annoying to do.
That's abnormal.
If it's malware, do a clean reinstall from DFU mode using Apple Configurator on a Mac.
What does Settings > Battery > "Battery Usage by App" show as the top consumers of power?
Does "Low Power Mode" make any difference?
When I looked at the top battery consumers in the past there wasn’t anything that stood out. I think home screen was at the top. It wasn’t one or two apps killing it with background activity.
Since the biggest battery consumption associated with home screen is the display, and users are only briefly on the home screen, before using it to navigate elsewhere, home screen should be near the bottom (1%) of power consumption.
Why not just make the iPad run MacOS and throw iPadOS into the garbage?
Otherwise why would it be an obstacle here?
[It's got the same restrictions as an iPad, but costs more than a MacBookPro.]
I'm very happy with my MacBook, but I don't like that the mega expensive machine I want to keep for 5+ years needs to be tied to a limited-life lithium battery that's costly and labour intensive to replace, just so I can sometimes write code in other rooms in my house. I know there's numerous remote options but...the iPad is right there, just lemme use it!
So the iPad devices could handle that too if Apple allowed it...
Once Apple will enforce the European Union requirement to allow 'sideloading' on iPad, maybe we will be able to have nice things also on it.
That could also be a good thing for Apple himself. A lot of people in Europe have a bad opinion of Apple (partly?) because of the closed (walled) garden of iPad/iOS and other technology/IP which make their portable devices apart of the Android ecosystem.
Other jobs exist!
People with disposable income who just want to buy the nicest/most expensive thing exist!
The conclusion I came to was that I loved the hardware but found the software a huge letdown for doing real work; I tried SSHing into VPSs and the like, but that wasn’t enough.
But man, the power in these thin, elegant devices is huge, and greater with the M4 chips. If Asahi ran on the M4 iPads I’d probably give it a go! – in an alternate dream universe, that is…
I always wonder what crazy meds Apple employees are on. Two RTX 4090s is quite common for hobbyist use, and that is 1321 TOPS each, making two over 69 times more than what Apple claims to be the fastest in the world. That performance is literally less than 1 % of a single H200.
Talk about misleading marketing...
They explicitly mentioned in the event that the industry refers to the neural engine as a NPU
> faster than the neural processing unit of any AI PC today.
By comparing the non-existent neural engine in your typical AI PC, you could claim that the very first SoC with an "NPU" is infinitely faster than the typical AI PC
https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/14/23998215/intel-core-ultr...
So going by the intended usage of this marketing rubbish, the comparison Apple is making isn’t to GPUs. It’s to Intel’s chips that like Apple’s, integrate, CPU, GPU, and NPU. They just don’t name drop Intel anymore when they don’t have to.
Of course, Apple has had an NPU in their SoC since the first iPhone with FaceID.
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/intel-shares...
It might be a marketing term by Microsoft, but that is just dumb, and has nothing to do with what Apple says. If this was in relation to Microsofts "AI PC" then Apple should have written "Slower than ANY AI PC." instead, as the minimum requirements for "AI PC by Microsoft" seems to be 45 TOPS, and the M4 is too slow to qualify by the Microsoft definition.
Are you heavily invested in Apple stock or somehting? When a company clearly lies and tries to mislead people, call them out on it, don't defend them. Companies are not your friend. Wtf.
This isn't a nice thing to say.
I don't own any Apple stock, at least not directly. I'm not defending Apple, just trying to understand what their claim is. Apple does plenty of consumer un-friendly things but they aren't dumb and they have good lawyers so they tend not to directly lie about things in product claims.
In this case they do straight up lie, without a question. There is no reasonable explanation for the claim. If they had some absurd meaning behind it then they should have put a footnote on it.
They could have written it correctly, but that sounds way less impressive, so instead they make up shit to make it sound very impressive.
It’s the term Microsoft, Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm decided to rally around. No need to get upset at Apple for using the same term as reference for comparison.
Ps. Nvidia also doesn’t like the term because of precisely what you said. But it’s not Apple that decided to use this term.
They said they had the fastest NPU in a PC. Not the fastest on earth (one of the nVidia cards, probably). Not the fastest way you could run something (probably a 4090 as you said). Just the fastest NPU shipping in a PC. Probably consumer PC.
It’s marketing, but it seems like a reasonable line to draw to me. It’s not like when companies draw a line like “fastest car under $70k with under 12 cylinders but available in green from the factory”.
The fact is that a GPU from Nvidia is a much faster NPU than a CPU from Apple.
It is marketing as you say, but it's misleading marketing, on purpose. They could have simply written "the fastest integrated NPU of any CPU" instead. This is something Apple often does on purpose, and people believe it.
It just happens to be it’s good at neural stuff too.
There’s another difference too. Apple’s NPU is integrated in their chip. Intel and AMD are going the same. A 4090 is not integrated into a CPU.
I’m somewhat guessing. Apple said NPU is the industry term, honestly I’d never heard it before today. I don’t know if the official definition draws a distinction that would exclude GPUs or not.
I simply think the way Apple presented things seemed reasonable. When they made that claim the fact that they might be comparing against a 4090 never entered my mind. If they had said it was the fastest way to run neural networks I would have questioned it, no doubt. But that wasn’t the wording they used.
There is no actual distinction. A GPU with Tensor cores(=matmul units) really does have an NPU just as much as a CPU with an NPU (=matmul units).
Yes, and so does the M4.
> It just happens to be it’s good at neural stuff too.
No, it's no coincidence. Nvidia has been focusing on neural nets, same as Apple.
> There’s another difference too. Apple’s NPU is integrated in their chip.
The neural processing capabilities of Nvidia products(Tensor Cores) are also integrated in the chip.
> A 4090 is not integrated into a CPU.
Correct, but nobody ever stated that. Apple stated that M4 was faster than any AI PC today, not that it's the fastest NPU integrated into a CPU. And by the way, the M4 is also a GPU.
> I don’t know if the official definition draws a distinction that would exclude GPUs or not.
A NPU can be a part of a GPU, a CPU or it's own chip.
> If they had said it was the fastest way to run neural networks I would have questioned it,
They said fastest NPU, neural processing unit. It's the term Apple and a few others use for their AI accelerator. The whole point of a AI accelerator is performance and efficiency. If something does a better job at it then it's a better AI accelerator.
Nevertheless, Apple's bragging is a little weird, because both Intel and AMD have already announced that in a few months they will launch laptop CPUs with much faster NPUs than Apple M4 (e.g. 77 TOPS for AMD), so Apple will hold the first place for only a very short time.
It’s the fastest available today. And when they release something faster (M4 Pro or Mac or Ultra or whatever) they’ll call that the fastest.
Seems fair to me.
The marketing hype is overblown, but for many (most? almost all?) people, the MacBook is a much more useful choice.
Under full throttle/load, even though the M2Pro is rated as less-performant, it is only using 105W — the tower/GPU are >450W!
I generally like Apple products, but I cannot stand the way they present them. They always hide how it compares against the directly previous product.
So while they're significantly slower than even casual gaming GPUs, they're technically the fastest NPUs on the market.
It's marketing speak.
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/news/what-i...
In that context it seems fair to make the comparison between a MacBook and the PC version which is closest on perf/watt rather than absolute performance on a space heater.
1: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/intel-says-l...
Neural processing unit is basically a made up term at this point so of course they can have the fastest in the world.
Previous iPads had the best screens in a tablet even if they weren't oleds. Now that they finally use oleds, they have the best oled screens and the best screens in a tablet.
If the iPad had better software and could be considered a first class productivity machine then it would be less surprising but the one thing no one says about the iPads is “I wish this chip were faster”
It's suspected that the fast release for M4 is so TSMC can move away from the horrible-yielding N3B to N3E.
Unfortunately, N3E is less dense. Paired with a couple more little cores, an increase in little core size, 2x larger NPU, etc, I'd guess that while M3 seems to be around 145mm2, this one is going to be quite a bit larger (160mm2?) with the size hopefully being offset by decreased wafer costs.
You probably have people (like myself) trying to keep up with the latest MacBook Air who get fatigued having to get a new laptop every year (I just upgraded to the M3 not too long ago, from the M2, and before that... the M1... is there any reason to? Not really...), so now they are trying to entice people who don't have iPads yet / who are waiting for a reason to do an iPad upgrade.
For $1,300 configured with the keyboard, I have no clue what I'd do with this device. They very deliberately are keeping iPadOS + MacOS separate.
It's a negligible amount of money. It's like, brand new $999, trade in for like $450. Once a year... $550 remainder/12 months is $45.75/mo to have the latest and greatest laptop.
You should be incentivised by trying to minimise depreciation. You incur the greatest amount of depreciation closest to the date of purchase, so the longer you go between purchases, the less depreciation you'll realise.
If I expected to say get, $450 after 1 year, and $250 after 2 years. By trading in every 2 years, I'm getting a laptop that's a bit older, but you're also saving $14.58/month on depreciation. If the year after that becomes $150, you'd be saving $22.22/month. If the price is worth it is subjective, I'm just saying going for maximal trade in value doesn't really make sense, since you save more money the lower the trade-in value you get.
I went from M1 to M1 Pro just to get more displays.
Also, you know you don't HAVE to buy a laptop every year, right?
If I can hold out another year or two, would probably end up just getting a new one
If I could actually do something with an iPad there would be a different discussion, but the operating system is so incredibly gimped that the most demanding task it's really suited for is .. decoding video.
Well, it's not. Every process shrink improves power efficiency. For watching videos, you're sipping power on the M4. For drawing...well if you want low latency while drawing, which generally speaking, people do, you...want the processor and display to ramp up to compensate and carry strokes as fast as possible?
Obviously if your main concern is the environment, you shouldn't upgrade and you should hold onto your existing model(s) until they die.
As for the environmental impact, whether I buy or don't buy this iPad (I won't, don't worry, my 2020 one still works), millions of people will. I don't mind people buying powerful machines when the software can make use of the performance, but for iPad OS..?
Millions of people will be buying these things regardless of what I'm doing.
So what are the performance cores doing there?
Apple's started to roll out green energy charging to devices: https://support.apple.com/en-us/108068
If I had to ballpark estimate this, your iPad probably uses less energy per year than a strand of incandescent holiday lights does in a week. Maybe somebody can work out that math.
A faster SoC can finish the task with better "work done/watt". Thus, it's more environmentally friendly. Unless you're referring to the resources dedicated to advancing computers such as the food engineers eat and the electricity chip fabs require.
Regardless, the environmental impact I'm thinking about isn't mainly power consumption.
Watch a 20-year old creative work on an iPad and you will quickly change your mind. Watch someone who has, "never really used a desktop, [I] just use an iPad" work in Procreate or LumaFusion.
The iPad has amazing software. Better, in many ways, than desktop alternatives if you know how to use it. There are some things they can't do, and the workflow can be less flexible or full featured in some cases, but the speed at which some people (not me) can work on an iPad is mindblowing.
I use a "pro" app on an iPad and I find myself looking around for how to do something and end up having to Google it half the time. When I watch someone who really knows how to use an iPad use the same app they know exactly what gesture to do or where to long tap. I'm like, "How did you know that clicking on that part of the timeline would trigger that selection," and they just look back at you like, "What do you mean? How else would you do it?"
There is a bizarre and almost undocumented design langauge of iPadOS that some people simply seem to know. It often pops up in those little "tap-torials" when a new feature roles out that I either ignore or forget… but other people internalize them.
I have two iPads and two pencils—that way each iPad is never without a penicl—and yet I rarely use the pencil. I just don't think about it. But then when I do, I'm like, "Why don't I use this more often? It's fantastic."
I have tried and tried to adapt and I can not. I need a mouse, keyboard, seperate numpad, and two 5K Displays to mostly arrive at the same output that someone can do with a single 11" or 13" screen and a bunch of differnt spaces that can be flicked through.
I desperatedly wanted to make the iPad my primary machine and I could not do it. But, honestly, I think it has more to do with me than the software. I've become old and stubborn. I want to do things my way.
PDF marking and procreate are my main uses for it. And using the ipad on a flat surface.
It is just fine driving Citrix or any web app like VSCode.dev.
A lot of of the younger generation does all their work on their phone and tablet and does not have a computer.
iPad has been a workflow gamechanger for folks who use photoshop etc but users are still prevented from coding on it.
I do most of my dev on a Pi5 now, so actually working on the iPad is not that difficult.
If they ever release Xcode for iPadOS that would be a true gamechanger.
What's silly is thinking that a device that makes everyone happy is somehow trivial, or that a device intentionally made with a specific type of interface is bad because of that intent. If things were as bad or as trivial as some people suggest, someone else would have made a successful competing product by now, rather than the string failures across the industry, from those who have tried.
I suspect you’re a programmer. This is not the perspective or reality of most professional users. Most professional apps are not, themselves, customizable. Most professional users do not make their own tools, or want to. If you’re a programmer, you’ll understand this, because that’s why you’re employed: they want you to do it.
Also, "most" and "any" aren't all too helpful in this discussion (not directed at anyone in particular, these can be read in comments throughout this thread) because there are going to be countless examples in either direction, but from my limited experience, I have seen professionals in various spaces, some which very much prefer a default workflow and others that heavily customize. I know talented professional programmers doing great work in the out-of-the-box setup of VSCode combined with GitHub Desktop, etc. but also have seen graphic designers, video editors, and even people focused purely on writing text that have created immensely impressive workflows, stringing macros together and relying heavily on templates and their preferred folder structures. Even on iPad OS, people can have their custom-tailored workflow regarding file placement, syncing with cloud storage, etc., just in a restricted manner and for what it's worth, I sometimes prefer using Alight Motion for certain video editing tasks on my smartphone over grabbing my laptop.
I have seen and feel strongly that any professional from any field can have a customized workflow and can benefit from the ability to customize their toolset, even those outside programming, but I also feel equally strongly that sane defaults must remain and the "iPad way of doing things", as much as I in my ancient mid-twenties will never fully adapt to it, must remain for people who prefer and thrief in that environment.
A lot of professional applications include some form of scripting engine.
But, there's nothing technically stopping an app developer from implementing any of this, including desktop level apps. Compute, keyboard/mouse, and stylus is ready. I think the minuscule market that would serve is what's stopping them.
I was responding to this main point.
Every professional drawing app, on the iPad, allows you to make your own brushes. There's no limitation there. That's just a fundamental requirement of a drawing app. They're not customizing the workflow or tool/apps itself, which is what I thought you were referring to.
> make their own tools
This requires programming, does it not? Do you have some examples?
> why some praise and use Apple devices for professionals even though they are not the best choice.
Especially for drawing, I think it would be best to ask the professionals why they chose a ~1lb iPad in their backpack with a pixel perfect stylus, over a desktop computer and mouse. The answers might surprise you.
> What's silly is thinking that a device that makes everyone happy is somehow trivial, or that a device intentionally made with a specific type of interface is bad because of that intent.
Add a proper native terminal, proper virtualization framework á la what we have on Mac, side loading and third party browser support with plugins and you’ll shut up 99% of complaining users here.
> If things were as bad or as trivial as some people suggest, someone else would have made a successful competing product by now, rather than the string failures across the industry, from those who have tried.
Right, let me use my couple billion change in R&D to create iPad compatible system with all that I’ve mentioned before.
Better for who ? They sell like hot cakes, 50+ millions of them per year
According to google there are 25m software devs in the world, even if half (extremely generous) of them would buy a new ipad every single year (extremely generous) if they implemented what you ask it isn't going to change much for apple, ipads are like 10% of their revenues. So at best we're talking of 3% revenue increase
> 99% of complaining users here.
99% of not much is nothing for apple, they're already printing money too fast to know what to do with it
I’m into the idea of modelling like this, or drawing, but the reality is I spend most of my time and money on a desktop work station because the software I need most is there. I’m totally open to iPads being legit work machines, but they’re still too limited (for me) to make the time and cash investment for the transition.
You’re definitely right though. People are doing awesome work on them without the help of a traditional desktop or laptop computer.
Of course, SWE jobs are on the chopping block for the same reasons, but I claim that AI art models are ahead of AI coding models in terms of quality and flexibility.
This has nothing to do with age. I have an iPad Pro that I barely use because it has been designed for use cases that I just don't have.
I don't do any digital art, don't take handwritten notes, and don't need to scan and/or mark up documents very often. I don't edit photos or videos often enough to need a completely separate device for the task.
I mostly use my computers for software development, which is impossible on an iPad. I tried running my dev tools inside an iSH session, and also on a remote Linux box that I could SSH into. It wasn't a great experience. Why do this when I could just run VS Code or WebStorm on a Mac?
I also write a lot -- fiction, blog posts, journal entries, reading notes -- which should technically be possible to do well on the iPad. In practice there just aren't enough powerful apps for serious long-form writing on a tablet. Microsoft Word on iPad lacks most of the features of its desktop counterpart, Scrivener doesn't support cloud sync properly, iA Writer is too limited if you're writing anything over a few thousand words, and Obsidian's UI just doesn't work well on a touch device. The only viable app is Ulysses, which is ... okay, I guess? If it floats your boat.
I sometimes do music production. This is now possible on the iPad via Logic Pro. I suppose I could give it a try, but what does that get me? I already own an Ableton license and a couple of nice VSTs, none of which transfers over to the iPad. I can also download random third-party apps to manipulate audio on my Mac, or mess around with Max4Live, or use my Push 2 to make music. Again, this stuff doesn't work on an iPad and it never will, because the APIs to enable these things simply don't exist.
There are tons of people who use Windows because they need to use proprietary Windows-based CAD software. Or people who need the full desktop version of Excel to do their jobs. Or academics and researchers who need Python/R to crunch data. All of these people might LOVE to use something like these new iPads, but they can't because iPadOS just can't meet their use cases.
I really like the idea of a convertible tablet that can support touch, stylus, keyboard, and pointer input. The iPad does a great job at being this device as far as hardware and system software is concerned. But unfortunately, it's too limited for a the kinds of workflows people using laptops/desktops need to do.
It's great to see this tech moving forward but it's frustrating to not see it translate into a more significant impact in the ways we work, travel and develop software.
Most laptops have terrible keyboards so I'd be using an external one either way.
I love the lower power usage/high efficiency of ARM chips but the locked down ecosystem is a drag.
Just the other day, I was trying to get gpu acceleration to work within a vm on my m1 mac. I think it’s working? But compared to native it’s slow.
I think it’s just a misconfig, somewhere (ie, hypervisor or qemu or UTM or maybe the emulation service in vm).
On other systems (intel/amd + nvidia/radeon) this is more or less a “pass through” but on mac it’s a different beast.
https://chariotsolutions.com/blog/post/apple-silicon-gpus-do...
otoh no, it is not "more or less [automatic]" in other hardware either, SR-IOV has been on the enthusiast wishlist for a ridiculously long time now because basically nobody implements it (or, they restrict it to the most datacenter-y of products).
intel iGPUs from the HD/UHD Intel Graphics Technology era have a concept called GVT-g which isn't quite SR-IOV but generally does the thing. Newer Xe-based iGPUs do not support this, nor do the discrete graphics cards.
AMD's iGPUs do not have anything at all afaik. Their dGPUs don't even implement reset properly, which is becoming a big problem with people trying to set up GPU clouds for AI stuff - a lot of times the AMD machines will need a hard power reset to come back.
NVIDIA GPUs do work properly, and do implement SR-IOV properly... but they only started letting you do passthrough recently, and only 1 VM instance per card (so, 1 real + 1 virtual).
Curious what you're using (I'm guessing intel iGPU or nvidia dGPU) but generally this is still something that gets Wendell Level1techs hot and bothered about the mere possibility of this feature being in something without a five-figure subscription attached.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLK_i-TQ3kQ
It does suck that Apple refuses to implement vulkan support (or sign graphics drivers), I think that's de-facto how people interact with most "hardware accelerated graphics" solutions in vmware or virtualbox, but SR-IOV is actually quite a rare feature, and "passthrough" is not sufficient here since the outer machine still needs to use the GPU as well. The feature point is SR-IOV not just passthrough.
WWDC is next month. There's still a chance of iPadOS 18 including a Hypervisor API for macOS/Linux VMs on M4 iPads.
> A leaker has claimed that Apple is working on a version of macOS exclusive for the M2 iPad Pro ... the exclusivity to M2 iPad Pro could be a marketing push. If the feature is only available on that iPad, more people would buy it.
Based on the M4 announcement, vMacOS could be exclusive to the 1TB/2TB iPad Pro with 16GB RAM that would be helpful for VMs.
What's the incentive for Apple to unify them, since you've already given them the money twice?
Some of this is insanely impressive. I wonder how big the OS ROM (or whatever) is with all these models. For context, even if the entire OS is about 15GB, in order to get some of these features locally just for an LLM on its own, its about 60GB or more, for something ChatGPT esque. Which requires me to spend thousands on a GPU.
Apologies for the many thoughts, I'm quite excited by all these advancements. I always say I want AI to work offline and people tell me I'm moving the goalpost, but it is truly the only way it will become mainstream.
Aren't phones getting close to 7" now? The iPhone pro is 6.2", right?
https://phonesized.com/compare/#2299,156
Take away the bezels on the tablet and there's not a lot of difference.
You could technically make a more square phone but it wouldn’t be fun to hold in common positions, like up to your ear for a call.
I'd love to see them add something to that form factor.
I do see a lot of iPad Minis out there, but usually, as part of dedicated systems (like PoS, and restaurant systems).
On the other hand, I have heard rumblings that Apple may release an even bigger phone, which I think might be overkill (but what do I know. I see a lot of those monster Samsung beasts, out there).
Not sure that is for me. I still use an iPhone 13 Mini.
I suspect that my next Mac will be a Studio. I guess it will be an M4 Studio.
I would guess that Apple doesn't love it either; one suspects that the weird release cycle is at least partially related to availability of chips and other components.
I miss my old iPad mini 4. I guess I could try the 11" iPad, but I think I'd prefer it to be smaller.
You know whats even funnier, when the mini came out originally, I made fun of it. I thought it was a dumb concept, oh my ignorance.
I use the Mini daily.
It's a good thing they made the Pro lighter and thinner. May actually make it more useful.
That fits all your wants
Regarding a small iPad, isn't that the iPad mini? 8" vs 7" is pretty close to what you're asking for.
If I’m doing pull ups in the gym I’ll do 3 sets of 7. That’s the most I can do at the moment.
I'm with you, I'm most excited about this too.
Currently building an AI creative studio (make stories, art, music, videos, etc.) that runs locally/offline (https://github.com/bennyschmidt/ragdoll-studio). There is a lot of focus on cloud with LLMs but I can't see how the cost will make much sense for involved creative apps like video creation, etc. Present day users might not have high-end machines, but I think they all will pretty soon - this will make them buy them the way MMORPGs made everyone buy more RAM. Especially the artists and creators. Remember, Photoshop was once pretty difficult to run, you needed a great machine.
I can imagine offline music/movies apps, offline search engines, back office software, etc.
(Notice a theme?)
Apple doesn‘t even sell an official matte screen protector last I checked.
but when 6.7" screens on phones are common, what really is the point of a 7" tablet?
iPhone Pro Max screen size is 6.7" and the the upcoming iPhone 16 Pro Max is rumored to be 6.9" with 12GB of RAM. That's your 7" tablet right there.
The thing is - You're an extreme edge case of an edge case. Furthermore, I'm guessing if Apple did roll out a 7" tablet, you'd find some other thing where it isn't exactly 100% perfectly meeting your desired specifications. For example, Apple is about to release a high powered 6.9" tablet-like device (the iPhone 16 Pro Max) but I'm guessing there's another reason why it doesn't fit your needs.
Which is why companies like Apple ignore these niche use cases and focus on mainstream demands. The niche demands always gain a lot of internet chatter, but when the products come out they sell very poorly.
“Let’s make all our Macs look slower for a while!”
So I was surprised as well.
Now Apple can keep their crown with this early M4 launch.
Gruber's strange assumption here is that a new number means some major improvements. Apple has never really been consistent about sticking to patterns in product releases.
It's on a new fab node size.
It also have more CPU cores than it's predessor (M3 with 8-core vs M4 with 10-cores).
Can you just fix an F1 engine with a wrench?
In fact the current Gen is bigger than the trashcan ones by quite a bit (although IIRC the trash can Macs had user replaceable SSDs and GPUs)
I totally missed that they released a new Apple Silicon Mac Pro. Turns out it has PCIe slots.
If I find a place in walking distance, maybe.
I think if you partnered with a major computer brand, that kind of thing could really be huge. Maybe someone like framework perhaps. Could be a big brand discriminator - bring that on-site service feel to average consumers.
Here:
https://www.apple.com/recycling/nationalservices/
I've even done it before personally with an old MacBook that wouldn't turn on.
It's going in the landfill.
They also say to erase the data before shipping it - which I can't do.
You being unwilling to spend the barest amount of effort to recycle it is your problem, not Apple's.
Now you claim you "went there" and discovered they do accept recycling but only if you mail it.
One of those is necessarily false, since I doubt you went to the Apple Store in between your comments.
However, I suspect both your claims are wrong, because Apple stores absolutely accept old devices to recycle directly. (They also provide mail-in options for people who don't have one they can visit directly.)
From your many comments, it seems like you have an ideological axe to grind that somehow your device can't be recycled, despite abundant evidence to the contrary and lots of people here trying to help you.
The SSD is encrypted with a rate-limited key in the Secure Enclave - unless someone has your password they’re not getting your data.
That's the whole point of encrypted storage. There is no liability if you used a reasonable password.
Why not accept you have peace of mind and resell on eBay for parts?
Assuming you didn't use "password123" or something.
I don't think any cryptography has stood the test of time. It's unlikely anything today will survive post-quantum.
The Mac Pro does not have a soldered-in SSD. They even sell user-replaceable upgrades. https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MR393AM/A/apple-2tb-ssd-u...
Isn’t there a ToS prohibition about “custom coding” in iOS? Like, the only way you can ever use that hardware directly is for developers who go through Apple Developer Program, which last time I heard was bitter lemon? Tell me if I’m wrong.
(disclaimer: My personal opinion is that the "appliance" model is absurd, but I've tried to steel-man the case for it)
Of course I would, and the only reason other people wouldn't is because they're conditioned to believe in their own innate powerlessness.
If you sell me a CPU, I want the power to program it, period.
I'm old enough to remember when people literally built their own computers, soldering iron in hand. People haven't done that since the early 80's.
Steve Jobs' vision of the Mac, released in 1984, was for it to be a computing appliance - "the computer for the rest of us." The technology of the day prevented that. Though they pushed that as hard as they could.
Today's iPad? It's the fulfillment of Steve Jobs' original vision of the Mac: a computing appliance. It took 40 years, but we're here.
If you don't want a computing appliance then don't buy an iPad. I'd go further and argue don't buy any tablet device. Those that don't want computing appliances don't have to buy them. It's not like laptops, or even desktops, are going anywhere anytime soon.
If you do want a computing appliance, then there's nothing wrong with having a machine that could be reprogrammed that you simply choose not to reprogram. Please stop advocating for a worse world for the rest of us when it doesn't benefit you in the slightest to have a machine that you don't control.
I sincerely hope that you live as much of your life in that world as possible.
Meanwhile, I'll enjoy having a car I don't have to mess with every time I start it up.
On top of the ugly reality that they're designed to become e-waste as soon as the battery degrades.
It MUST (RFC2119) be airgapped from ABS and ECU, of course.
Uhhh, there are CPUs in your frickin' wires now, dude! There are several CPUs in you car for which you generally don't have access. Ditto for your fridge. Your microwave. Your oven. Even your toaster.
We're literally awash in CPUs. You need to update your thinking.
Now, if you said something like "if you sell me a general-purpose computing device, then I want the power to program it, period" then I would fully agree with you. BTW, you can develop software for your own personal use on the iPad. It's not cheap or easy (doesn't utilize commonly-used developer tooling), but it can be done without having to jump through any special hoops.
Armed with that, we can amend your statement to "if you sell me a general-purpose computing device, then I want the power to program it using readily-available, and commonly-utilized programming tools."
I think that statement better captures what I presume to be your intent.
You are really stretching the definition of "special hoops" here. On Android sideloading is a switch hidden in your settings menu; on iOS it's either a municipal feature or a paid benefit of their developer program.
Relative to every single other commercial, general-purpose operating system I've used, I would say yeah, Apple practically defines what "special hoops" look like online.
I’m annoyed that I can’t buy particular engines off the shelf and use them in my bespoke approach, why dont car manufacturers give the approach that crate engine providers do?
I write enough code during the day to make me happy. I really don’t want to be thinking about the optimal brownness of my bagel.
NB: those are my criteria of evaluation. Very personally. I'm a software engineer, with a focus on systems/embedded. Your criteria are yours.
(But maybe don't complain if you buy this for its "AI" capabilities only to find out that Apple doesn't let you do anything "unapproved" with it. You had sufficient chance to see the warning signs.)
https://www.reddit.com/r/AsahiLinux/comments/ttsshm/asahi_li...
Please find a way beyond local transformer models to offer a true use case that differentiates the Pro from the Air (ideally development). The second that gets announced, I'd order the 13-inch model straight away. As it stands, Apple's stance is at least saving me from spending 3,5k as I've resigned myself to accept that the best hardware in tablets simply cannot be used in any meaningful way. Xcode would be a start, MacOS a bearable compromise (unless they start to address the instability and bugs I deal with on my MBP, which would make MacOS more than just a compromise), Asahi a ridiculous, yet beautiful pipedream. Fedora on an iPad, the best of hardware and software, at least in my personal opinion.
Ipad revenue has been declining for 9 out of the last 10 quarters.
It's like putting a Ferrari engine inside of a Little Tikes toy car. I really have no idea who the target market for this device is.
It's possible people are running into iOS limitations: it will kill apps when it thinks there's not enough memory.
It is fast and handles everything I've ever thrown at it (I got 32 GB RAM), it never, ever gets hot, I've never heard a fan in 2+ years (maybe a very soft fan if you put your ear next to it). And the battery life is so incredible that I often use it unplugged.
It's just been a no-compromise machine. And I was thinking of upgrading to an M3 but will probably upgrade to an M4 instead at the end of this year when the M4 maxes come out.
[0] Many people report that they stop noticing the notch pretty quickly, but that's never been the case for me. It's a constant eyesore.
I don’t get the hate for the notch tho. The way I see it, they pushed the menus out of the screen and up into their own dedicated little area. We get more room for content.
It’s like the touchbar for menus. Oh, ok, now I know why people hate it. /jk
Exactly - laughed at first but it quickly made sense if they are prioritizing decent webcam quality. Before my M1 Pro 14 I had a Dell XPS 13 that also had tiny bezels but squeezed the camera into the very thin top bezel. The result was a terrible webcam that I gladly traded for a notch and a better camera quality.
However, that Dell did still fit Windows Hello (face unlock) capability into that small bezel, so the absence of FaceID despite having the notch is a bit shit.
Personally I never see the desktop background so I just set desktop to Black, it’s perfect for me.
If I forget to hibernate before I put it in my bag it either burns through its battery before the next day, or overheats until it shuts itself down. If I'm working from home and get up to pee in the night, I often walk past my office and hear the fans screaming into an empty room, burning god knows how much electricity. Even though the only thing running on it was Slack and an editor window.
It's an absolute joke of a machine and, while it's a few years old now, its original list price was equivalent to a very well specced MacBook Pro. I hope they were getting a substantial discount on them.
I really hope this comes to all Apple products soon (iPhones, all iPads, etc).
It's some of the best anti-reflective tech I've seen that keeps color and brightness deep & bright.
- Up to 1.5x the CPU speed of iPad Pro's previous M2 chip
- Octane gets up to 4x the speed compared to M2
- At comparable performance, M4 consumes half the power of M2
- High-performance AI engine, that claims 60x the speed of Apple's first engine (A11 Bionic)
What I want to know is whether that ratio holds for single-core performance measurements.
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/apple-m4-sco...
Doesn't it mean "1.5x speed in rare specific tasks which were hardware optimized, and 1x ewerywhere else"?
It’s all just marketing to build hype.
Apple needs to reinvest in software innovation on the iPad. I don't think my use case for it has evolved in 5 years.
So, perhaps it’s no coincidence that a new iPadOS will be announced in exactly one month.
Here’s hoping anyway!
Whats wrong with plain old bullet-points and sticking to the technical data?
The only real issue is aside from the screen eventually wearing out ( it already has a bit of flex), I can't imagine a reason to upgrade. It's powerful enough to do anything you'd use an iPad for. I primarily make music on mine, I've made full songs with vocals and everything ( although without any mastering - I think this is possible in Logic on iPad).
It's really fun for quick jam sessions, but I can't imagine what else I'd do with it. IO is really bad for media creation, you have a single USB C port( this bothers me the most, the moment that port dies it becomes E Waste), no headphone jack...
Also, can't you just use a USB-C hub for like $10 from Amazon?
You still only have one point of failure for the entire device that can't be easily fixed.
And most midi controllers work fine via USB or Bluetooth
https://simplyfixable.com/blog-detail/ipad-charging-port-rep...
But it's still not something I'd do on my own.
Rumours are that the Mac Studio and Mac Pro will skip M3 and go straight to M4 at WWDC this summer, which would be very interesting. There has also been some talk about an M4 Extreme, but we've heard rumours about the M1 Extreme and M2 Extreme without any of those showing up.
I had one of the earlier versions and this was pretty much its only use case…
Surprisingly (at least to me) I feel that I've more than gotten my money's worth out of it despite it being almost entirely strictly a consumption device.
I tote it around the house so I can watch or listen to things while I'm doing other things. It's also nice to keep on the dining room table so I can read the news or watch something while we're eating. I could do every single one of these things with my laptop, but... that laptop is my primary work tool. I don't like to carry it all over the place, exposing it to spills and dust, etc.
The only real work-related task is serving as a secondary monitor (via AirPlay) for my laptop when I travel.
$500 isn't pocket change, but I've gotten 48 months of enjoyment and would expect at least another 24 to 36 months. That's about $6 a month, or possibly more like $3-4 per month if I resell it eventually.
Worth it for me.
In the end, she still has to rely on the MBP daily because there's always something the iPad can't do. Usually something small like a website not fully working on it.
These are really great uses of AI hardware. All of them benefit the user, where many of the other companies doing AI are somehow trying to benefit themselves. AI as a feature vs AI as a service or hook.
https://9to5mac.com/2024/05/07/new-ipad-pro-missing-specs-ca...
Otherwise yes, desktop operating systems are a terrible experience on touch devices.
Sounds like strictly worse version of Macbook. Might be useful for occasional work, but I expect people who would use this mode continuously just to switch to Macbook.
It’s not too uncommon for people to carry both an iPad and MacBook for example, but a 12.9” iPad that could reboot into macOS to get some work done and then drop back to iPadOS for watching movies or sketching could replace both without too much sacrifice. There’s tradeoffs, but nothing worse than what you see on PC 2-in-1’s, plus no questionable hinges to fail.
What would be the downside to other’s using it?
I get frustrated that Mac doesn’t respond to look & pinch!
I use it for work several times per week. I often want to test out some Swift API, or build something in SwiftUI, and for some reason it's way faster to tap it out on my iPad in Swift Playgrounds than to create a new project or playground in Xcode on my Mac — even when I'm sitting directly in front of my Mac
The iPad just doesn't have the clutter of windows and communication open like my mac does that makes it hard to focus on resolving one particular idea
I have so many playground files on my iPad, a quick glance at my project list: interactive gesture-driven animations, testing out time and date logic, rendering perceptual gradients, checking baseline alignment in SF Symbols, messing with NSFilePresenter, mocking out a UI design, animated text transitions, etc
Turns out I only use it on flights to watch movies because I loathe the os.
MacBook Pros start at $1,599. There's an enormous overlap in the price ranges of the mortal-person models of those products. It's not like the iPad Pro is the cheap alternative to a MBP. I mean, I couldn't even spec out a MacBook Air to cost as much.
How useful this is for free libraries? Can you invoke it from your Python or C++ code in a straightforward manner? Does it not rely on proprietary drivers only available for their own OS?
Both Final Cut Pro and Davinci resolve can also use as much power as you can give them though it isn’t clear to me why you’d use an iPad instead of a Mac. They also announced a crazy multicam app for iPads and iPhones that allows remote control of a bunch of iPhones at the same time.
It's ok if 3 to 4 is or isn't a big jump, it's the next one is really all I want to know. If I need to peek at the specs, the name really won't tell me anything anyhow and I'll be on a webpage.
https://community.arm.com/arm-community-blogs/b/architecture...
Assuming these are BF16 ops, by comparison, an H100 from NVIDIA will do 1979 teraFLOPS BF16.
So this "Neural Engine" from Apple is 50x slower than an H100 PCIe version.
More practically, it should help with battery life. My understanding is energy usage scales non-linearly with demand. A more powerful chip running at 10% may be more battery efficient than a less powerful chip running at 20%
[1]: https://github.com/hollance/neural-engine/blob/master/docs/1...
The only reason is the consumer's desire to buy more.
Once you see it, etc.
(yes, I understand this is about iPad, but I guess we'll see these M4 on the MB Air as well ?)
Curious what steps they will take, or if they shouldn't just continue returning large amounts of cash to shareholders.
They've essentially undercut every Mac they currently sell by putting the M4 in the iPad and most people will never use that kind of power in an iPad.
If you are going to spend $4k on a Mac don't you expect it to have the latest processor?
I write this on a $1,000 late 2015 Intel MacBook Air.
Obviously, the newer laptops are much more smooth and responsive.
I think for the past 10 years you are correct, but I think we are currently entering the AI age and the base M4 has 38 TOPS (trillion operations per second) and we aren’t going to be able to run the AI models on device with lower latency that they will surely be releasing this summer without a more recent chip, so I don’t think things are as future proof as they used to be.
But that’s not really the point, the point is that I don’t want to spend $4k to buy a Mac Studio with an M2 chip while the M3 Macbook Pro has on par performance and the iPad has an M4. Apple should come up with a better update strategy then randomly updating devices based on previous update cycles.
Half the power budget could well translate to a very significant improvement in heat on the device, battery size and other benefits. Could they even dispense with the puck and get the battery back onto the headset for a consumer version that runs at slightly lower resolution and doesn't have the EyeSight feature?
If they could do that for $2000 I think we'd have a totally different ball game for that device.
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/lpddr6-new-beginning-of...
If M4 Max could finally break the 400GBps limit of the past few years and hit 600 GBps, it would be huge for local AI since it could directly translate into inference speedups.
960 GB/s is 3090 level so that's pretty good. I'm curious if the Macbooks right now are actually more so compute limited due to tensor throughput being relatively weak, not sure about real-world perf.
I didn't even realize there is other PC-level hardware with AI-specific compute. What's the AMD and Intel equivalent of Neural Engine? (not that it matters since it seems the GPU where most of the AI workload is handled anyway)
GPUs can also have AI-specific compute (e.g., Nvidia’s tensor cores.)
Put MacOS on iPad Pro, then it gets interesting. The most interesting thing my ipad pros do are look at security cameras or read ODB-II settings on my vehicle. Hell, they can't even maintain an SSH connection correctly. Ridiculous.
I see Apple always show videos of people editing video on their iPad Pro. Who does that??? We use them for watching videos (kids). One is in a car as a mapping system - that's a solid use case. One I gave my Dad and he did know what to do with it - so its collecting dust. And one lives in the kitchen doing recipes.
Functionally, a 4 year old Chromebook is 3x as useful as a new iPad Pro.
It's going to be a radical future.
-using an add-in video card for dom0 gpu
-apple's on-die gpu can be passed through to a qube
-apple's unified memory does not need OS X to adjust the RAM/VRAM wall
Since I doubt these caveats are in play, I think I may be stuck with enterprise hand-me-downs that I can pass through.
I could care less that the M4 chip is in the iPad Pro ... all I use it for is browsing the web, watching movies, playing chess, and posting on Hacker News (and some other social media as well).
If you take it a bit deeper: if an iPad would have keyboard, mouse and MacOS → it would basically be a 10/12 inch macbook.
Don’t get the hype of the performance and being locked to iPad ecosystem
Let that sink in.
And it's really not that great even though it's a welcomed improvement - Microsoft is pushing 45 TOPs as the baseline, you just can't get that in an APU yet (well, at least for the next couple months).
Plus it's beautiful, great to touch hardware.
I don't know how people can still things like that about the Mac, even Windows is better these days.
If Apple ever decides to pivot business to chip manufacturing that allows open access and sale. Then I would revisit.
Always need competition in this space. Especially for low power cpu/gpus.
Anything up to the memory configuration it is limited to. So for base model M4, that likely means you have 8gb of memory with 4-5 of it realistically usable.
The M3 Macs were released only 7 months ago.
Your laptop M3 chip is still probably more powerful than this. The laptop M4 will be faster, but not groundbreaking faster.
But they would rather lie about caring for this use case and they would need to have better GPUs in the first place, but at least it looks like this should be improved with M4.
For all the big talk they give, their GPU in the entry level Apple Silicon chip doesn't even match the power of a current gen console (either PS5 or Xbox series X have better GFLOPS). The Max versions are better but they only come in devices starting at over 2.5k€ starting price (still with lots of compromises most likely) and those get absolutely trounced by hardware at this price point that features dedicated GPUs, obviously.
But they will very much remind you about how great battery life is, because it is all that matters, right? right? (Desktops, hello?)
Unless you can justify one of the Max variants for other things, there is not much point bothering with it. If you really want a Mac, it will still be better, faster and cheaper to just buy the most basic Mac you can get away with and get a console or a custom PC with the rest of the money.
It is very sad, but this is the state of things. Gaming on Apple was never very good, but at least before Apple Silicon there were some variants of iMacs/MBPs that were decent enough and not breaking the bank too much (with Windows support for even better performance).
Would be interesting to see how much they’re _actually_ utilizing the NPU versus their GPU for AI workloads.
Paradoxically this effect is the worst in ultraportables, where the norm is to cram in CPUs that run too hot for the chassis with tiny batteries, making them weirdly bad at the one thing they’re supposed to be good at. Portability isn’t just physical size and weight, but also runtime and if one needs to bring cables and chargers.
On that note, Apple really needs to resurrect the 12” MacBook with an M-series or even A-series SoC. There’d be absolutely nothing remotely comparable in the x86 ultraportable market.
Apart from that, I think you might me in a minority if you want a loud, hot iPad with a heavy battery to power all of this (for a short time, because physics). There are plenty of Windows devices that work exactly like that though if that's really what makes you happy. Just don't expect great performance either, because of diminishing returns of using higher power and also because the chips in these devices usually suck.
Pure compute power has never been Apple's center of gravity when selling products. The Mac Pro and the XServe are/were minuscule portions of Apple's sales, and the latter product was killed after a short while.
> Apple's engineers have unilaterally decided to handicap their own processors for no real good reason
This is a misunderstanding of what the limiting factor is of Apple products' capability. The mobile devices all have battery as the limfac. The processors being energy efficient in compute-per-watt isn't a handicap, it's an enabler. And it's a very good reason.
I agree with you. I don’t want fans to be quiet, I want them completely gone. And with battery life too, not 30 minutes, but 300 minutes. Modern chips are plenty fast, developers need to optimize their shit instead of churning crapware.
Regarding crippling I only went with a max because I wanted more ram. I would have loved to have gone with an M3 pro but 36GB wasn’t enough.
Wow. I remember being assured that we would never reach even low double-digit nanometer processes.
For iPad, not an MBP laptop.
This has never happened to my knowledge in this companies history? I could be wrong though, even the G3/G4s were launched as PowerMacs.
It's something that became viable on consumer gaming desktops just a few years ago, and now we have real-time ray tracing on a tablet.
Cool! Thanks Apple!
I guess this is to be expected given your market position and billions in the bank?
Thanks so much for doing it. We'll definitely buy all your
Yeah, well, I'm an enthusiastic M3 user, and I'm sure the new AI capabilities are nice, but hyperbole like this is just asking for snark like "my RTX4090 would like a word".
Other than that: looking forward to when/how this chipset will be available in Macbooks!
And even though the Apple press release does not even mention memory capacity, I can guarantee you that it will be even less than that on an iPad (simply because RAM is very battery-hungry and most consumers won't care).
So, therefore my remark: it will be interesting to see how this chipset lands in MacBooks.
I think a comparison to the 4090 is unfair, as there is no laptop/tablet with an rtx 4090 and the power consumption of a 4090 is at ~450W on average
No, when using wording like "outrageously powerful", that's exactly the comparison you elicit.
I'd be fine with "best in class" or even "unbeatable performance per Watt", but I can absolutely guarantee you that an iPad does not outperform any current popular-with-the-ML-crowd GPUs...
Who in their right mind will spend $1300-$1600 on this rather than a MacBook Pro?
I’m also annoyed that the iPad is locked down, even though it could clearly support everything the macbook does.
Why can’t we have a keyboard shortcut to switch between the iPad and Mac desktops or something?
Apple Pencil Ultra next?
Apple Pencil Ultra+
Apple Pencil Pro Ultra XDR+
Bigger shocker is only three cores alive in the 256GB and 512GB models paired with 8GB
glad I held out. M4 is going to put downward pressure across all previous gen.
edit: nvm, AMD is coming out with twice the performance of M4 in two months or less. If the M2s become super cheap I will consider it but M4 came far too late. There's just way better alternatives now and very soon.
M4 Pro/Max/Ultra with variants double+ the performance by just scaling cores are probably also going to be announced at WWDC in a month when they also announce their AI roadmap
The amount of things I have to google to use the phone how I normally used Android is crazy. So many gestures required with NOTHING telling you how to use them.
I recently sat around a table with 5 of my friends trying to figure out how to do that "Tap to share contact info" thing. Nobody at the table, all long term IOS users, knew how to do it. I thought that if we tapped the phones together it would give me some popup on how to finish the process. We tried all sorts of tapping/phone versions until we realized we had to unlock both phones.
And one of the people there with the same phone as me (13 pro) couldn't get it to work at all. It just did nothing.
And the keyboard. My god is the keyboard awful. I have never typoed so much, and I have no idea how to copy a URL out of Safari to send to someone without using the annoying Share button which doesn't even have the app I share to the most without clicking the More.. button to show all my apps. Holding my finger over the URL doesn't give me a copy option or anything, and changing the URL with their highlight/delete system is terrible. I get so frustrated with it and mostly just give up. The cursor NEVER lands where I want it to land and almost always highlights an entire word when I want to make a one letter typo fix. I don't have big fingers at all. Changing a long URL that goes past the length of the Safari address bar is a nightmare.
I'm sure (maybe?) that's some option I need to change but I don't even feel like looking into it anymore. I've given up on learning about the phones hidden gestures and just use it probably 1/10th of how I could.
Carplay, Messages and the easy-to-connect-devices ecosystem is the only thing keeping me on it.
Press and hold also allows options elsewhere in iOS
Thanks!
of course efficiency matters for a battery-powered device, but I still tend to lean towards raw power over all else. Others may choose differently, which is why other metrics exist I guess.
If you want to go thicker, then you have to screw around with heat pipes, fans, etc, etc, to move the heat a few cm to the outside surface of the device.
I never understood why everyone [looking at PC laptop manufacturers] took thin-and-light to such an extreme that their machines became basically useless. Now Apple is releasing thin-and-light machines that are incredibly powerful, and that is genuinely innovative. I hadn't seen something like that from them since the launch of the original iPhone, that's how big I think this was.
Those are barely competitive with the heavier but more powerful gaming/creation laptops Apple's aficionados keep deriding (if it has a 4090 it's not even competitive).
They have focused on mobility (power consumption and size) at the cost of everything else.
For this exact reason their desktop offering is really not competitive with offering around the same prices in the PC world. The only thing they do better is size (considering you can make a 3-4L top of the line PC; the Mac Studio isn't even impressive) and power consumption. But who actually cares, even if using a desktop heavily its consumption is dwarfed by most other use in a typical house, so whatever?
Thin and light are indeed a small use case overall and people who care about that have a ton of decently good options in the PC world already. It's not like the performance per watt benefits of Apple Silicon is really that relevant to most potential customers. If one is content enough with such a laptop, using it for the typical light task, thin and light PC laptops are just small enough, silent enough and have good enough battery life for the most part.
It is well known that software inefficiency doubles every couple years, that is, the same scenario would take 2x as much compute, given entire software stack (not disembodied algorithm which will indeed be faster).
The extra compute will be spent on a more abstract UI stack or on new features, unless forced by physical constraints (e.g. inefficient batteries of early smartphone), which is not the case at present.
Aside, 2 hours is very low even for 2010. There's a strongly usability advantage for going to 16. But going from 16 to 128 won't add as much. The natural course of things is to converge on a decent enough number and 'spend' the rest on more complex software, a lighter laptop etc.
I have dimmable LED strips around my rooms, hidden by cove molding, reflecting off the whole ceiling, which becomes a super diffuse, super bright “light”.
I don’t boast about power use, but they are certainly hungry.
For that I get softly defuse lighting with a max brightness comparable to outdoor clear sky daylight. Working from home, this is so nice for my brain and depression.
But as someone else noted, CPU power draw is not the only factor in device battery life. A major one, but not the whole story.
This is a small generational upgrade that doesn't necessitate an event.
Other companies started having events like this because they were copying apples amazing events. Apples events now are just parodies of what Apple was.
The MacBook's lasting longer is just a meme at this point, any laptop of comparable price/performance will last just as long if you don't trash for some reason.
ARM Cortex-M4 or simply M4 is quite popular ARM architecture. I am using M0, M3 and M4 chips from ST on a daily basis.