Apple Introduces M4 Pro and M4 Max | Hacker News Reader

Apple Introduces M4 Pro and M4 Max

apple.com

91 pointsgriffinli41 comments

I'm happy that Apple continues to push forward, but I suspect my M1 Max from 2021 will last me a decade or more. It's just a beast of a machine.

I hope they're also working on redesigning the MacBook Pro to feature a display without a notch. I'd buy that instantly.

Seriously, I keep waiting for the FOMO to kick in but the M1 is still so great that I don’t have any.

The only hiccups I ever have are resolving Swift result builder types…perhaps SwiftUI is just a big ploy to burn up all the extra CPU cycles.

I held onto my M1 Air for almost 4 years and only upgraded because the LCD somehow developed some random screen-dooring issues. It was always completely capable for what I needed though I do appreciate the additional real estate afforded by its 15" M3 replacement.

I was a huge Swift fan but SwiftUI and the changes supporting it in the language got me to switch to Rust for all my personal projects

I’ll admit the builder DSL stuff is a bit of a Turing tarpit for me. I may have wasted the day yesterday trying to implement a BNF grammar DSL.

Same. I can't imagine much heavier use than what I have done to this thing for the past 3+ years, and it still just literally does everything I ask of it. I've never even kept a laptop this long; up until now I would upgrade every two years since it's my primary money-making tool. But I have zero reason to upgrade currently.

Yep. I moved from an M1 Air to M2 MBP but only for RAM and creature comforts (size, display, sound etc.)

Even on the fanless Air performance was more than enough for the moderate dev work I threw at it.

iPhones have been more powerful than they needed to be for years; it's great to see this phenomenon in Macs.

> I suspect my M1 Max from 2021 will last me a decade or more

I’m still happy on my 2020 M1 normie MacBook Pro.

I had one of those for work, recently got one of the newer MacBooks and the performance feels the same to me. Both were flawless.

What did change is almost everything else. Much better speakers, more ports, more external displays, no Touch Bar and probably some other stuff I forgot. Not worth buying a new laptop over though.

I had ordered an M3 Max 14 inches with 48GB, 1TB, with 16-Core CPU, 40-Core GPU. When I picked up the device last week, the sales person told me I had the right to return it within 14 days because the M4 models were to be released soon. I had paid almost 4600 EUR for that.

Today I happily ordered the M4 Max with 64 GB with otherwise same specs for 4600 EUR!!! Yay! Will return the other device happily.

Thanks @Apple for a huge increase in specs for not even 100 EUR more :)

PS: I just needed the RAM, as my M2/16GB constantly was using swap memory of up to 16GB and was really slow for my taste. I don't do "heavy weight lifting" with it, just leave all apps and tabs open :D

PPS: I use VS Code, Emacs, Firefox (eats my RAM super fast :), and a ton of other apps, and in Firefox I use lots of web based apps (Figma, Lucid chart, Canva and some more)

This is me. My wife's old intel air was finally getting slow enough she was willing to replace it. Ordered a 2023 M3 Pro for her on Monday (that was even on sale!) knowing the refund window was ~2 weeks. Today, ordered a 2024 M4 Pro for the same price and better specs. (M3Pro, 512GB, 18GB ram -> M4Pro, 512GB, 24GB ram).

Meanwhile my M1 is still a racehorse for 90% of my use cases

I doubt I'll upgrade anytime soon, but at this rate when I do need to, I feel like I'm just going to get a Max because of how happy I've been with the base M1 Pro (just upgraded the RAM a step).

That is if I don't just suddenly decide to replace the batteries (relatively cheap from the apple authorized store compared to a full upgrade).

But will it run Cyberpunk 2077 (yes, seriously)?

https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/30/24283651/cyberpunk-2077-...

I played 40ish hours of Cyberpunk 2077 on m3 M3 Max MBP under crossover. Runs fine on medium/high settings.

Probably! It runs on a steam deck

ive still never thrown anything at my m1 max that it couldn't handle

Yep, even though the 2.2x is a bug upgrade, I’m not actually sure that’s compelling enough? When the M1 Max won’t do usually I turn to a server with 4-10x the corecount…

It even handles ollama no prob.

Why aren't they benching it against the M3?

Good question. Random guess: there are a lot of M1 holdouts they're trying to encourage to upgrade?

There are a few such comments here already!

The customer base on M1 is larger and more likely to be interested in upgrading. The M1 Air was only discontinued in March and is still for sale through Walmart and Costco. Not to mention the resale market created by all the people that moved to M2 and M3. There are tons of M1s out there. It is probably the most relevant comparison they could make, even though we're accustomed to seeing previous-gen benchmarks on everything.

Sadly these days it's a waste to upgrade a single generation. There's very few workloads that work poorly on gen x-1 and work well on gen x.

So while frustrating to people that want to geek out on the tiny details, the real market for Apple is people not using Apple silicon and maybe the M1 users. Upgrading from M2 or M3 isn't worth it. Thus the comparisons with Intel Macs and M1s.

Think of this more as marketing. The realistic benchmarks that matter to the rest of us will be out shortly: https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks

It makes sense as the group that are most likely to upgrade are using M1 or below, the others will wait for few more generations

- less impressive results

- most people don't care because they're not contemplating upgrading after one year

- those who care will find the benchmarks elsewhere

I like the M1 comparisons. They got some free improvements from the x86 -> ARM transition but everything past that is on them, so it's interesting to see how far they've come.

But that aside I agree it feels like marketing slime to tout improvements over 3 gens ago. At least include comparisons to last gen. Preferably with numbers on the chart.

People who bought M3 arent the target customers. It's those who jumped into the M architecture first with the M1s.

Around announcements like these I always look for good deals on the previous models. Anyone know any particularly good deals for M2 or M3 based macs now?

A top-level M4 Max w/ 128GB of unified memory is a beast for local LLM inference. It means we could see an M4 Ultra with 256GB of memory!

I think theoretically you could run inference on Llama 3.1 405B (4 bit) on a Mac Studio which is kinda nuts.

How do these compare in performance to the M3 Pro and M3 Max?

Seems like the M4 Max has the same "specs" as the M3 Max. Same core count, gpu code count, and memory amount.

What’s the case for new MacBook Pros? The design hasn’t changed since the M1 as far as I know, and maybe even earlier with the x86 Retina display MacBook Pro. These minor specification changes don’t make real life use much better. When will Apple do a bigger redesign?

Any chance these will be competitive against dedicated gaming PCs with rtx 40xx and 50xx cards?

Graphics performance, no. AI, also probably no. Especially if you're talking the higher end RTX cards that cost as much as these laptops. But they'll run editors, compilers, browsers, etc as well or better than a dedicated rig.

Lol no. AI peak perf difference (in int8) between this and 4090 is over 15x.

> It’s up to 1.8x faster than M1, so multitasking across apps like Safari and Excel is lightning fast

Is multitasking across a web browser and Excel slow on any CPU nowadays?

More seriously, though, it probably shows that CPU speed is not the bottleneck for most tasks nowadays.

Interesting that GPU core counts and max memory remained static from M3 Max at 40 and 128 respectively, cost saving measure to account for the bump from 8 -> 16gb at the low end of the line?

Equipping the MBA with 16 gigs but maintaining M2 and M3 cpus, thats's an interesting take. I do pity folks who got those with 8 gigs. Their resale value just went down a lot.

Dupe of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41995701 (171 comments)

Not exactly. Apple released 2 press releases today, the article you link to is about the laptops, this discussion is about the CPUs.

The HN dupe algebra goes by something like 'is the discussion going to be more or less the same'.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com