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Comment by zurfer | Hacker News Reader

If I remember correctly, the claim was that M3 is 1.6x faster than M1. M4 is now 1.8x faster than M1.

It sounds more exciting than M4 is 12.5% faster than M3.

If your goal is to sell more MBPs (and this is marketing presentation) then, judging by the number of comments that have the phrase "my M1" and the top comment, it seems like M1 vs M4 is the right comparison to make. Too many people are sticking with their M1 machines. Including me.

It's actually interesting to think about. Is there a speed multiplier that would get me off this machine? I'm not sure there is. For my use case the machine performance is not my productivity bottleneck. HN on the otherhand... That one needs to be attenuated. :)

Most people buying a new MacBook don’t have the previous version, they’re going much further back. That’s why you see both intel and m1 comparisons.

No it isn't. It's because 1.8x faster sounds better than 12% faster.

Back when Moore's law was still working they didn't skip generations like this.

Back when Moores las was still working they didn't release three subsequent versions of the same product in 22 months.

The M1 was released 4 years ago.

Both the M2 and M3 MBP were released in 2023.

There aren't that many people that upgrade something like an MBP every year, most of us keep them longer than that.

I've just ordered an (almost) top-of-the-range MBP Max, my current machine is an MBP M1-max, so the comparisons are pretty much spot-on for me.

Selling the M1 Ultra Studio to help pay for the M4 MBP Max, I don't think I need the Studio any more, with the M4 being so much faster.

It does and it gets even worse when you realize those stats are only true under very specific circumstances, not typical computer usage. If you benchmarked based on typical computer usage, I think you'd only see gains of 5% or less.

Anyone know of articles that deep dive into "snappiness" or "feel" computer experiences?

Everyone knows SSDs made a big difference in user experience. For the CPU, normally if you aren't gaming at high settings or "crunching" something (compiling or processing video etc.) then it's not obvious why CPU upgrades should be making much difference even vs. years-old Intel chips, in terms of that feel.

There is the issue of running heavy JS sites in browsers but I can avoid those.

The main issue seems to be how the OS itself is optimized for snappiness, and how well it's caching/preloading things. I've noticed Windows 10 file system caching seems to be not very sophisticated for example... it goes to disk too often for things I've accessed recently-but-not-immediately-prior.

Similarly when it comes to generating heat, if laptops are getting hot even while doing undemanding office tasks with huge periods of idle time then basically it points to stupid software -- or let's say poorly balanced (likely aimed purely at benchmark numbers than user experience).

https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m1-vs-amd-ryzen-...

Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M4#Comparison_with_other...

M4 is built with TSMC's 2nd Gen 3nm process. M3 is on the 1st gen 3nm.

For the base M3 vs base M4:

- the CPU (4P+4E) & GPU (8) core counts are the same

- NPU perf is slightly better for M4, I think, (M4's 38TOPS @ INT8 vs M3's 18TOPS @ INT16)

- Memory Bandwidth is higher for M4 (120 GB/s vs 102.4 GB/s)

- M4 has a higher TDP (22W vs 20W)

- M4 has higher transistor count (28B vs 25B)

So far I’m only reading comments here about people wow’d by a lot of things it seemed that M3 pretty much also had. Not seeing anything new besides “little bit better specs”

The M4 is architecturally better than the M3, especially on GPU features IIRC, but you’re right it’s not a total blow out.

Not all products got the M3, so in some lines this week is the first update in quite a while. In others like MBP it’s just the yearly bump. A good performing one, but the yearly bump.

Yes, upgrading from a m3 max to a m4 max would be a waste.

Maybe they are highlighting stats which will help people upgrade. Few will upgrade from M3 to M4. Many from M1 to M4. That's my guess.

They actually omitted M2 from a lot of the comparisons, which isn't surprising because M3 was only 10-15% faster.

I have to admit, 4 generations in, 1.8x is decent but slightly disappointing all the same.

I'd really like to justify upgrading, but a $4k+ spend needs to hit greater than 2x for me to feel it's justified. 1.8x is still "kind of the same" as what I have already.

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