Review: The fastest of the M4 MacBook Pros might be the least interesting one | Hacker News Reader

Review: The fastest of the M4 MacBook Pros might be the least interesting one

arstechnica.com

36 pointsfreeqaz35 comments

Nice machines, but $600 for an extra 16GB of ram and an extra 512GB of storage is theft.

My new AMD linux laptop compiles my projects faster than my old M1, and that's good enough for me. It has 32GB of ram, 4tb of storage, and was half the price of the equivalent Macbook. Apple may make the best laptops right now, but other manufacturers are closing the gap.

Yeah that is just insane.

I saw some videos from China [1] where people were upgrading the storage in the new M4 Mac Minis. The Mac Mini's SSD is on a removable pcb but it is raw nand flash as opposed to, say, typical m2 2230 SSDs that have a built-in controller. So they had to desolder it. But getting someone in China to desolder and upgrade the SSD to 2 TB is like 90% cheaper than buying it from Apple.

[1] http://xhslink.com/a/o0tLp4thqsDZ

Is there really much point though? With thunderbolt 5 external storage seems really viable.

I haven't found any Thunderbolt 5 enclosures for sale yet, though.

Even thunderbolt 4 hubs are few and far between, and mostly dissapointing

The speed difference between doesn't matter for disk speeds though. Absolute top speed is 3 Gbps per chip, so even Thunderbolt 1 should max out 2 chips, with it's 10 Gbps transfer speed. Thunderbolt 4 should max out more than 10 NAND storage chips.

External storage is technically viable, but then it's yet another device and yet another cable contributing to the unholy mess on your desk. If there are no functional reasons to have an external device, it's just better to have an internal one.

There is nothing stopping a third party vendor from making a compatible PCB with a larger NAND flash - since it doesn’t need a controller it could even be cheaper than a classic SSD

How much realistic battery life do you get?

Can you hear the fans spin in a typical week?

About 8 hours. That is the biggest sacrifice I make by not going with a Macbook. But fwiw I'm on Arch, I haven't spent any time on battery optimization config. I'm sure I could get a few extra hours if I played with the configs.

If time is money, how much would it cost you to play with those configs vs getting the MacBook? Every time I've done the math, I end up leaning towards the MacBook.

Eh, if I was always on an airplane I might get it, but I'm almost always near an outlet when I work.

Totally, we all have different tradeoffs. I'm glad you're enjoying your laptop!

I'm on Fedora and it took essentially no time for me to apply FW's recommended battery life configs[1]. (I think on Fedora they just recommend default settings.) I don't feel the need to play around with anything at all; I get more than adequate battery life and no drain while suspended.

It's not exactly comparable to my MBP, but neither is the cost! The FW cost me about $1,100 all-in and the MBP was $2,900 (both 32GB/1TB).

1: https://knowledgebase.frame.work/optimizing-fedora-battery-l...

It’s expensive and it’s good that other options are available, it’s not insanely expensive though, the people that need the upgrade often make 6 figure salaries and can afford the upgrade although they might not like the idea of paying it, I personally hate it but I know when I buy the machine will last me at least 5 years, which is good enough for me.

I took a different route and went with a Framework laptop. I'll be interested to see how long it takes for it to fully ship of Theseus.

my M1 Max cost $7500 three years ago, was looking forward to the M4 Max..... last year. As in, wish the M3 had these specs, specifically 128gb RAM and this memory bandwidth.

This is unfortunately too late, to justify recouping costs and buying a new M4 Max.

Primarily because I would be using it for large language model inference at higher parameters. What's happened in just one year is that LLM's have gotten muuuch smaller. Llama 3.2 3B only takes 3GB of RAM at 8 bit quantizing. And in addition to that, cost per token in the cloud has subsequently plummuted 99.9% too. Its just not economical.

But yes, I could afford it but no longer a justification. My 64GB RAM M1 Max is going to be future proof for a while.

I'm always interested in what else is out there on the market and how people evaluate them, which did you get?

I'm personally looking at the middle tier M4 Pro 16" 14/20 with 48gb of ram to replace my 2019 13" i5 with 16gb and 256gb ssd.

It's somewhat frustrating, but although technically I can get by with my current machine, it's starting to feel foolish and needlessly frustrating to hang onto it longer, it's just so sluggish these days. Maybe I'd feel differently if I had got a more higher-end one 5 years ago. Windows remains as my old gaming PCs OS, idk that I'd want to contend with it daily for work or anything unless the software required it, but then I'd probably just upgrade the bits in my PC and stick with my older mac laptop for basic personal use.

Even though I did buy it, I can't say I can get past the cost of upgrading the various bits, but just decided that I should pick a reasonable option and not stress about it too hard, it'll be a nice change, I might even return it within the window if I feel sufficiently robbed. I couldn't wrap my head around the even more comical Max versions.

Maybe they're just trying to capture missing revenue from us never-iPhone people. It's the only part of the Apple ecosystem I participate in aside from an ancient iPad.

I want to buy a MacBook Pro but the problem I have fundamentally is the increasingly locked down experience they seem to be drifting towards, like the walled gardens on the phone. I feel like I am supporting an ecosystem not aligned to my needs. At the same time, Microsoft isn’t much better with user hostile dark patterns, ands, and things like Recall. It would be nice to have laptops that have the physical build quality and battery life of MacBook Pros but with a Windows 7-10 era OS without all this new anti customer stuff.

I miss old Windows too.

This solidifies my satisfaction with my choice of a mid-spec’d M4 Pro to replace my M1 Air. I wanted more RAM, so I went with the middle option with 24 GB. Similarly, I mostly care about single-core performance, so the Max didn’t seem like a huge deal.

I’m still getting used to the weight of a 14” Pro vs. a 13” Air, but the additional screen size is terrific.

The only thing I’m unsure about is the matte screen option. I saw screenshots that seemed as though contrast gets blown out, so I kept the glossy. I’ve seen others say at normal laptop viewing angles, this is not the case.

I ended up doing roughly the same, except 16", 48gb, 14/20 cpu, and with the matte option that I'm extremely on the fence about having done. In the store I couldn't tell a difference in picture quality even with a photographer pointing out differences and suggesting it wasn't worth it; I'm mainly concerned about damage to the screen from the keyboard and how necessary the cleaning cloth is.

I might go stare at the matte options for a while in-store. Exchange / return period is 14 days. Literally the only time glare matters for me is a few hours per day _if I happen to be using the laptop in one room_, but if I could avoid that problem, it’d be great.

I am paranoid and so pay for AppleCare+, so at least damage wouldn’t be financially devastating, only annoying.

I didn't get the matte option and I have very bright sun in my office, so I went back and switched to the to the matte (glad I did) - anyway - point of my comment is that apple told me the return window is extended to January 9th because of the holiday season stock isn't always regular, so they extend the exchange window during that period, might want to check with your local store but apparently that is the policy across apple in Canada.

Good tip, how's the matte option treating you? I'm seeing various people today with the 14", hard to tell if the new one or an old one with a screen protector, but they're looking a little nasty

gloss is way better if you care about how things look, but as a practicality - I'm a spreadsheet jockey who likes to work from a park, and it's really perfect for that.

It's always worth remembering that a year from now the media will be breathlessly talking about the M5 Macs. These M4 ones are fantastic machines and are a great upgrade for many, and it is nice to see the yearly progress. But most people who already have Apple Silicon computers should probably wait at least another year.

Yeah, each cycle is generally meh over the last. I kept my M1 Air for 4 years, so it’s been quite a large difference. I got issued an M3 Pro for work, which is what made me realize there were some large gains to be had.

> RAM upgrades across the whole lineup. This particularly benefits the $1,599 M4 MacBook Air, which jumps from 8GB to 16GB

The MacBook Air is still an M3 only as the highest end M-processor.

From earlier in the article it's apparent that "Air" is a typo and should be "Pro."

I find the cinebench benchmarks meh, every YouTuber and every publisher uses it, few YouTubers do more of a practical test which is quite more useful. I would like to see a comparison with older models as most people that have an m3 are not considering an upgrade.

It's a fair point, but Apple's also taken a lot of heat for comparing their new models to ancient ones rather than the previous one, so that they can show an even bigger performance jump.

Counterpoint: I see a lot of people in discussion threads talking about if they should upgrade from their M1 purchase. (And I count myself in their number.) It's highly likely Apple knows this, and not too much of a stretch to think they're communicating the number that they think it's important to this customer - how much better it would be if you upgraded today.

It's very predictable at this point that nearly everyone has the same videos, it feels like me trying to not plagiarize Wikipedia in middle school; "I'll change a word here, rephrase a sentence there, done!". Also true in many other content categories, everyone uses the same source material, same review units, same benchmarks, often the same editing style. I'd say it's a negative, but I've been watching less and less of it since noticing the pattern.

Same. For me, I took a program I wrote / am writing that’s extremely CPU and disk intensive, and compared the execution time. It’s 2x faster on an M4 Pro compared to an M1. That’s worth it to me.

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