Hacker News Reader

Comment by blobbers | Hacker News Reader

The previous ranking article said the M3 ultra was the most powerful chip ever.

Mac ecosystem is starting to feel like the PC world. Just give me 3 options. Cheap, good, and expensive. Having to decide how many dedicated graphic cores for a teenagers laptop is impossible.

View on HN

For chips, Ultra and Max are like their workstation chips or something, right? It seems expected that they should be a little more differentiated, they are specialist, aren’t they?

The way I think about it is if I buy a Max chip I'm getting the performance of the generation that will be released a year later now in the current form factor, and then some.

For example, I got the M1 Max when it was new. A year later the M2 came out. Spec-wise, the M1 Max was still a bit better than the M2 Pro in many regards. To me, getting a Max buys you some future proofing if you or your company can afford it (and you need that kind of performance). I use the Max with a lot of video work, and it's been fantastic.

They have that. On laptops they have the M4, M4 Pro and M4 Max. Cheap, good and expensive.

My buying strategy has been the same since they started soldering RAM: buy the lowest spec CPU/GPU they offer with the amount of RAM I will need (which all but once has always been the maximum RAM they offer, which unfortunately usually means also buying the max CPU/GPU).

If you are in college or school getting a MacBook Air would be best and the size of your screen is going to have a higher impact (13 to 15 inch) than the Dedicated Graphics cores. Would advise not getting an MacBook Pro.

For the teen's laptop, you can simply get the base model. Even a base M1 is more than fast enough.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com