My new setup as of November is an M2 Air (16GB /1 TB) and an base model M1 Studio.
I really couldn't be happier. I run a small WFH / Music Production / Photography studio in my basement and I really wanted an always-on always connected computer, for which the Studio has been perfect.
The M2 Air is pretty close to a perfect laptop. My complaints (low audio volume, slighty cramped screen) are absolutely dwarfed by the long list of decades-old issues this laptop just eliminates:
- All day battery life. Basically like the Apple Watch - charge it overnight and it's really good all day with normal workloads (e.g. not rendering video). But it was absolutely surreal the first couple of weeks watching an hour long show while running a dozen apps and seeing the charge go from 100% to like 98%. It makes no sense and I had to adjust work habits.
- Extreme snappiness. It's in every way snappier than my previous computer, a 32GB 2019 MBP. It _might_ be slower on long CPU-bound or RAM-bound workloads, but photo editing is both and it feels faster on the Air.
- Form factor. It's my first Air. I'm not going back. I'm 40+ and keeping extra pounds off my lower back matters for me. The Air, if it's all you're carrying, is barely noticeable.
It's just fantastic. If you were wondering if you can replace an MBP with the Air yet, it's almost certainly a yes (though I wouldn't try all this on 8GB RAM). At $2000, what I paid, it's a revelation.
Also if like me you work on a desktop/laptop Apple setup at your desk, the new continuity features are totally incredible. Working with the studio/air together is totally seamless (You can extend the screens and use the same keyboard/mouse). It just works. Apple really is getting a lot of things exactly right on the software side in the Apple silicon era.
To reiterate your point about RAM for anyone wondering: don’t get the 8gb version! I’ve run 3 Apple Silicon Macs in different configs since 2020. Real-world performance on a range of different workloads is substantially worse than the 16gb version. Don’t even think about having more than one user logged in!
I have used the 2020 M1 air with 8Gb since last summer without any issues as a documents/productivity suite and web application development tool. There are zero complaints here. I had a Core i9 with 16GB of ram MBP before it. This feels just as fast.
It really depends on how you are using it. If you are primarily a single-tasker, then the 8GB should be enough. A lot of people just use one app at a time. I imagine that most people on this forum would be more technical and more likely to be multi-taskers where the extra RAM would matter more.
I’d be so up for a 16 inch ‘air’. I so love my M1 Pro Max MacBook, but Christ it’s heavy.
It’s heavier, and I think thicker, than my 2012 MacBook Pro. Now I expected it to be heavier, but was expecting it to drop back maybe one iteration to MacBook 2014 kind of heft. But we’re a full decade back of beefiness.
I need a big screen though so it’s the only option. Unless they make a nice thin 16 inch air. I am pretty confifent it would sell extremely well.
I sympathise. I have a 16in M1 Max, coming from an LG Gram 17. I can't fault the power of it, but the heft isn't ideal for me.
I'd welcome a 15in or 16in Air. The rumour mill suggests a 15in Air is in the works. However, I'm now used to the 120Hz display of the Max, which I suspect wouldn't be an option for the non-pro models...
I am as happy with my 13” M1 mbp 2020 as you with your. My only gripe is that the screen is too small and more importantly after two years I went from a stellar 21h battery life to 13h for lightweight work and it now also seems to drain on sleep.
And it seems to lose charge quicker under load.
The battery capacity is still reported as 91%of spec which does not explain this behaviour.
I recently noticed a decline in battery on my M1. It is ridiculous to complain about 10h battery life but the decline was noticeable. I fixed it by:
1) Turn off siri suggestions & privacy and all the app watching it does. System Settings -> Siri & Spotlight -> Siri Suggestions & Privacy. It turned it off for every app.
2) Turn off siri all together. System Settings -> Siri & Spotlight -> Ask Siri Toggle
3) Turn off Spotlight for everything you do not need. System Settings -> Siri & Spotlight -> Search Results check boxes
4) Turn off login items. System Settings -> Login items. Remove what you do not need from the list.
5) Turn off run in background items. System Settings -> Login items -> Allow in background
6) Remove items from ~/Library/LaunchAgents/ that you do not need. I had an old docker vnet item that wasn't needed.
Other than #6, you can do the first 5 things on all of your Apple devices and it makes a big difference in battery life. I just did the same steps with my phone and ipad.
I wonder if you have installed software over that time period that is doing a lot in the background. I'd check activity monitor and see if there is anything suspicious.
I had some major battery and charging issues while sleeping with 2 older macs that were a challenge to isolate. It turned out that in one case, the charging brick itself had started having problems and couldn't keep up with how quickly docker was demanding power. Got that replaced under warranty.
The other was just a straight-up hardware issue with the computer. I'd close the lid close to a low battery and let it stay closed long enough for it to hibernate, and then when I'd open it back up it will have completely drained and I'd get a kernal panic. They replaced it after quite a lot of back and forth until I was able to prove it.
I have a M1 air and with basically the same comments. The con is that it's no longer the newest air out there, pro being that I had it since November 2020 and I really don't have a single complaint with the hardware.
As a photographer and DJ even the MBP runs out of ports pretty quickly, so I had a standing collection of travel hubs for this already + a CalDigit thunderbolt hub for home.
I'm really looking to get a similar setup. I don't think they would do a refresh to the Studio this year, or if they do, it would probably come at the end of the year.
How is the heat? I've heard from anecdotal reports that under heavy workloads, the M2 Air can get super hot, and so Pro is the way to go if you're using heavy workloads. But you're doing music/photo production, etc, so I wonder if you agree. I know that's not the same as video.
Well I do light music production - mostly on the Studio.
For photography work it's been fine. But I haven't done multiple-minute exports since buying it so I can't really say.
I _can_ say that under my normal workloads (coding web apps, office applications open, chrome with say 20 tabs, often playing chess, live streaming / zoom) heat has never been an issue. It's also my DJ computer for gigs and no issues I've noticed there, although it's not on my lap.
Contrasted with the 2019 intel MBP it's again night and day. Heat was very noticeable, as were heat-related throttling issues. It would just grind to a halt under normal workday loads esp when screen casting zoom + having all my normal apps and IDEs running.
If you do sustained work, like render or transcode video, the Air only goes full tilt for 5-10 minutes then starts throttling until you stop doing the heavy work.
If that's something you do more than once in a while, definitely opt for the Pro. For any other workload that's less than maxing out CPUs, or just bursty, the Air has been excellent.
I still think the M1 Air was a better value overall. And I liked the curves to it more than the M2's boxy design.
Speaking of form factor I am really surprised more people don't want an Air. My work laptop (purchased by my employer) was an Air in the Intel days, and I loved it even though it was dog slow. It didn't bother me because I basically only need a browser and ssh. And, I bike to work so weight reduction matters.
Nowadays after the Apple Silicon transition my employer no longer offered an Air. The reason was too few employees wanted it and it was too much trouble to maintain a separate SKU in the inventory for the few of us. Really quite a bummer.
Did your employer provide a speced up Air or just the base model. Last time I only chose the Pro because it had twice the ram and storage otherwise I would have went with the Air.
You can, but honestly, if you can afford 24GB, go for it. Remember that unlike in the Intel days, the GPU uses main memory for its RAM. (Well, I guess integrated Intel GPUs did some of that, too.) That can be painful when you've got a few clips in the timeline and some plug-in wants to have multiple copies of each frame for doing its processing. (Like it applies a blur, then mixes that with the original, or whatever.) I have a 16GB MacMini I sometimes edit video on, and it works, but there are times when things get choppy/slow. I also have a Studio with 64GB, and it's smooth as butter. (I mean it's possible to load it up so it slows down, but it takes a lot more to do so.)
I used FCP on an M1 Air with _8gb_ to edit 4K videos for over a year. Assuming you have enough fast storage (or are happy to use a proxy workflow), it certainly can be done, although everyone’s workflow is different. Assuming no storage speed bottleneck, timeline scrubbing was smooth up to about 2x forward or backward, from memory - after that you hit decoder limits. Proxy workflow gets around that too, though. Render times on even the M1 were a big jump over Intel chips. If Apple has a 2-week return policy where you are, why not give a 16gb M2 Air a try and see if it meets your particular needs?
I don't do this specifically, but if you can go without $2k for a few weeks you can take advantage of Apple's permissive return policy and just demo for IIRC 14 days.
How come in all these new announcement threads there is always someone talking about how their current setup is great. Good for you, really happy for you. It's not really relevant to the discussion right?
Its relevant because if current setup for people in various scenarios is working great more folks can compare their requirement relevant to them. They may decide to go for newer version which can be even better or buy older version if available and save some money in process.
The lack of dedicated DisplayPort ports is fairly disappointing to me since their implementation is just "native DisplayPort output over USB‑C" and it doesn't support MST, so you can only do one displayport signal per port, even with a thunderbolt 4 hub with some bidirectional USB-C <-> Displayport cables.
This obdurate refusal to support MST is indeed awful (and, actually, a minor one of the few reasons I mainly stopped using Macs).
But it is "just" a software problem, right? So they could come to their senses and change their mind.
It seems insane to me to keep putting DisplayPort ports on computers when we have USB-C, but it also seems insane to ship machines with crippled USB ports that don't support more than one monitor... so I wouldn't be surprised if they fix their OS in this regard.
(Apple being Apple though, the software fix might well "require" an M3 processor....)
They are diversifying their laptop/desktop solutions like crazy. Even a Macbook Air can almost compete with the entry-level version of the Macbook Pro, which is great to be honest.
I heard they are exceptionally good.
Honestly, 7-900$ for a machine that will not get old very soon is not so bad, especially if you already own a screen (which due to WFH you kind of have to have together with a "decent" keyboard, etc.)
I was thinking about throwing some last gen parts into an old tower/PSU I have to build a desktop for inlaws since they are stuck on a 10year old hand down laptop. This is a good package at that price (599$) - power consumption is likely nothing, MacOS included in price, small and quiet - will comfortably browse the internet, play videos, etc. for the next 5+ years. I won't be able to repair it out of warranty so that's a bummer- but at such low price and their usage pattern I guess I can live with the risk.
I hear you, but in Europe it's around 700€, which also buys a pretty solid windows or linux laptop. If you're not locked in to mac, a comparably priced laptop with intel 12 gen CPU, 16GB RAM and a RTX 3050, which is arguably a lot more versatile machine.
I think I would like Mac's more if they weren't so absurdly overpriced (approx. 25%+ over US prices) here in Europe.
Here in Austria we have 20% VAT, and US prices are typically without tax. So the 25% price difference is really just a 5% price difference, which is still shitty, but not as horrendous as you make it seem.
Also, the Mac mini is very special:
- tiny footprint without external power brick
- very high reliability
- completely inaudible for typical developer usage
- extremely low power usage (the 6 core Intel Mac mini was an exception)
It's the perfect home (or office) server. You can put it into a bookshelf or in a cabinet, it won't run hot, it won't disturb you with noise in the living room.... I just don't know of anything else that fits the bill.
The only shitty thing is that they are charging ridiculous prices for storage, and attaching external storage sucks because it ruins the tiny form factor, and also because the USB-C cables that come with SSD drives tend to easily disconnect in my experience.
Apple silicon macbooks have one property that no windows or linux laptop will ever be able to give me. I use my MacBook to take notes in class, work on my CS homework, etc, so I spent most of my time in Firefox or VS Code. I charge my laptop once a week.
I'm likely going to order one of their Minis with the top CPU option and 32gb ram for audio production here. I've got an 2018 i7 model which is fine, but this one should set me for a _long_ time.
That's my setup and I was thinking exactly same; Mini M2 Pro with 32GB RAM would be perfect for me. Except that I don't have too many complaints with my current machine which I feel can easily work just fine for at least 2 more years.
Whilst I am utterly impressed with my M1 Pro; they are comparing to the "fastest Intel-based MacBook Pro" which is 4 years old when Intel was struggling anyway. Not at all representative of what they could have done with the latest Intel or AMD silicon.
Yeah, it's a bit cherry picked, especially since the last gen Intel based macbooks had horrible throttling and fan maxing out issues... I think the cooling design was insufficient, or they should have lowered the max voltage slightly.
Funny, I felt personally targeted in the release video. I have a 2019 MBP I have been waiting to upgrade, and I suspect a more than a few others are in the same situation.
They do also give, further down the page, some comparison with the M1 MAX, saying 20% faster (except for memory bandwidth which is twice as fast at 200GB/sec).
They comparison exists because the majority of buyers will probably have an Intel-based Macbook Pro. From a marketing perspective, it is more useful to focus on how much faster it is than that product than it would be to focus on how much faster it is than some-very-specific Windows laptop, or an M1 Pro.
It's worrying that they are shying away from specifying generational improvements or at least comparing to it's competitors. The "fastest Intel MacBook" is not really the competitor for an M2 MacBook Pro, it's a predecessor. But I'd rather hear about generational improvements from M1, especially because both Intel and AMD seem to be making great strides in the low power space lately.
It's no secret that Apple's M2 series processors are a pretty minor improvement over the M1 series. Expect much bigger improvements in the M3 series which will likely be using TSMC's 3nm process (and then probably only minor improvements again for the M4 series).
It seems that Apple's ridiculously impressive consistent year-on-year gains up the M1 were in large part possible because they were behind the state of the art. Now that they've caught up with Intel and AMD we should probably expect the same slower more gradual improvements from Apple that we see from the other companies.
Yes, the year over year improvements were 90% just the tsmc node changes. But the ridiculous (and IMO amazing) performance per watt is a mix of iOS/macOS and their chip design. Those efficiency cores are unmatched, paired with the right scheduling from the OS.
The M2 is underwhelming as its the same 5nm as the M1 was.
But rumors say the M2 pro and max are on the 3nm node. And it took so long for the release, as 3nm was delayed.
Apple has a monopoly right now on 3nm, which is a shame. But if we only got tsmc to fire on all cylinders because apple stuffed them with money, then so be it.
Apple’s M1 chips already offered improvements compared to their previous generation Intel chips, and Intel hasn’t exactly been innovating in the last 2 years. By all accounts, they have been ahead of Intel, at the very least.
I’m not exactly sure how Apple was “behind the state of the art” and has caught up. Can you explain?
20% improvement is substantial even if not worth an upgrade. Add the same for next iteration and it the gap gets sizeable and harder to resist. I'm actually reliefer i can keep my less than a month old 16 inch since it was 700 euro cheaper than a new M2 pro and not worth returning for 20% improvement
> It seems that Apple's ridiculously impressive consistent year-on-year gains up the M1 were in large part possible because they were behind the state of the art.
I was nodding along about M2 being a minor bump over M1, but I'm not even sure what you mean here. Apple previously used Intel processors - how is Intel not caught up with Intel?
Apple was key to many many computing technology adoption - USB, Thunderbolt, even early WiFi. Now that they're making their own desktop processors and entire SoC, I think they can move in ways that are not constrained by Intel or other players. It's possible we see the laptop market move more like the smartphone market.
You’re right in that TSMC / Samsung were for many years behind the state of the art, and by extension so was the technology that Apple was using. Apple’s CPUs defined the state of the art for mobile though.
And now of course TSMC / Apple haven’t caught up, they have surpassed comparable offerings from Intel.
> Now that they've caught up with Intel and AMD...
I'm an enormous fan of the M series. But there is an interesting consequence of a couple of fundamental design decisions.
The M series has huge memory bandwidth but look at its focus on I/O. It reminds me of one of the design decisions of the Alto (memory bus was 3/2 the screen refresh rate, a mind-boggling decision for its time). The fact that the M1 can go in an ipad is insane, but is enabled by the way the M series was designed. Their design for long battery life while drawing onto directly connected displays is unmatched.
However I believe that same decision has hobbled the M1 in a way that may make a Mac Pro version "impossible" (i.e. too much change to be worth doing). M series are optimized to dash rapidly then quickly go to sleep.
I feel the Intel and AMD guys are still thinking of sustained performance, a holdover from the desktop world and its mainframe, or at least minicomputer roots. Psychologically their mobile chips look to me like scaled down desktop machines.
If my belief is right, AMD and Intel aren't really catching up on mobile, while Apple will probably never produce a Mac Pro worth buying (for me they never were, but I'm sure there are people for which they were a great deal).
Apple was never competing in the same space as Intel and AMD. From the beginning, Apple made ARM-based RISC chips. Intel and AMD used their own x86-64 architecture. Apple's was great for iPhones because of power efficiency. They were able to improve their chip designs so much that they smoked the competition away with the release of their first fusion chip (iPhone 7 I believe) and have been miles ahead of everyone else since.
They then scaled up performance so much that a desktop ARM chip was made. That had never been done on a large scale before. So, no, imo Apple was never behind Intel and AMD, they were never competing in the same space.
They did say 20% faster CPU and 30% faster GPU than M1 series in the same thermal envelope.
Intel doesn’t really seem to make any strides in low-power designs, they just throw more mid-power cores at the problem to achieve better multi core efficiency as well as manipulate power brackets. Shirt-time (benchmark-relevant) consumption of Intel chips is insane and their published TDP figures are utterly meaningless. AMD has very scalable cores and Zen4 performs admirably at low power, but AMD too falls victim to power inflation to keep pace with Intel.
They do give some numbers vs M1s, but most people actually considering buying this will be coming from the Intel ones (no-one replaces their laptop every year) so it makes sense to labour those in the marketing material.
Traditionally Apple's marketing compared against the previous generation, not multiple generations old hardware.
It seems tacky to me because the M2's competition isn't really 2019 Intel MBPs- it's laptops using modern Intel/AMD CPUs (the M2 may still be better than those, but if that's the case those are the benchmarks they should be giving us)
I didn't buy an M1 because I didn't want the "first" Apple processor. Maybe it's just my bias from seeing lots of Intel competitors come-and-go? I don't really care about specific improvements, I just want all the minor things that the engineers didn't get to finish the first time around.
In my case, living in the US, we all do our taxes in the first three-ish months of the year. Last year Turbo Tax told me they wouldn't support my 2013 MBP this tax season, so I decided to wait until fall 2022 and get whatever Apple released. Fall 2022 came without a release, so I've been biting my nails: Turbo Tax won't run on my MBP, and I don't want to upgrade to an "outdated" M1.
(As you can infer, I'm planning on using my next MBP for ~10 years.)
I know it's already purchased so not a big deal, but if anyone is in a similar situation, there are other free and/or well-featured tax processing tools.
I use FreeTaxUsa, which is entirely online and free for your federal return. I think it may be $15 or so for state returns, but I live in Florida so it's not really something I think about.
“ MacBook Pro with M2 Pro features a 10- or 12-core CPU with up to eight high-performance and four high-efficiency cores for up to 20 percent greater performance over M1 Pro.”
Performance will be comparable to top Zen4 mobile CPUs at 45W TDP, just that Apple will use 50-60% less power in single-core and 20-30% power in multi core. That’s about it.
Edit: I no-longer hold this opinion as I missed that there's already been an M1 MacBook Pro and it should be comparing to that.
For as long as I can remember, Apple has compared new products to the previous product. And it is a more sensible approach than picking some arbitrary competitor from a huge collection of possible options, because it gives a fixed frame of reference, one of which many of the target audience are aware of. 6x faster than the previous model is very good marketing.
Honestly, I think this is also partly them patting themselves (or their silicon team) on the back for a job well done. And as everyone else has said, their competitor is the fastest Intel/AMD chips if they're trying to win market share.
Does anyone know "the fastest Intel-based MacBook Pro" means? In my mind, I've always pictured them using the 16" i9 model that throttled before it could hit the boost clock, let alone sustain it.
> Results are compared to previous-generation 2.4GHz 8-core Intel Core i9-based 16-inch MacBook Pro systems with Radeon Pro 5600M graphics with 8GB HBM2, 64GB of RAM, and 8TB SSD.
My guess would also be the 2019 16" Pro, the last one released before the M1 wave. That happens to be the one I have now, I'm still pretty happy with it! Great battery life, doesn't get lava hot unless I have a bunch of plugins going in Ableton or something else demanding.
I had that machine for about 6 months and found the swapping between nvidia and integrated graphics to cause such unbearable graphical glitches [1] (well from my self-diagnosed OCD-influenced perspective, anyway), that I sold it on Craigslist for a $500 loss immediately.
I'm afriad you are going to need to get used to it.
The £ is depreciating against the dollar, and wages in the UK have been stagant for 10+ years and are set to remain stagant for another 10 based upon current forecasting.
Based upon current trends countries like Poland and Slovakia are going to overtake the UK on many economic metrics within a generation, which is both a credit to the growth of those countries and the enmourous decline of the UK relative to places like Germany, France, and the US.
Imports are going to just keep getting more and more expensive.
The pound has gone to shit and the UK price includes VAT. Take away VAT and use current exchange rates and you are paying a $200 premium in the UK, so 10% above US price is actually a smaller difference than it has been in the recent past when the pound was $1.5 but the only difference between the two price lists was changing a $ for a £.
I do get sticker shock at the prices, but I have to say I still use my 2015 MBP for dev work and it's been serving me well. That's quite the longevity... I'd hope if I got an M2 (thinking about upgrading in a year or two), that it lasts a similar duration. ~8 years, I wouldn't mind shelling out that price, especially since it pays me back so quickly (some consulting work).
Have to check to see how reliable those thinkpads are but I also just enjoyed the physical experience of a Mac (know it's not for everyone and subjective)
I used a 2013 MBP for work, and when work upgraded me to a 2019 MBP I kept the 2013 for myself.
Since then, the 2019 macbook has been having tons of problems, crashing, thermal issues, software issues, keyboard issues. But the 2013 has been working like a dream. My coworkers have many similar experiences.
Mid-2010s was definitely a peak for macbooks. Hopefully M1s/M2s will be another peak.
I ran thinkpads for years. There is a nice market for previous generation ones new in box with 3 year next business day warranties for stupid money. I got my daughter a 13 month old T495s for £600 for example. That’s still under warranty now.
But yeah I’ll bitch and moan and just give apple the money like I always do now n
A new Thinkpad x1 with an i7, 16gb ram and 1tb ssd is at £2400. And you cant get more than 16gb of ram. imho the MacBook Pro is not unreasonable expensive.
While the value of the £ has rebounded somewhat since a low in September, it is still much below what it was just a couple of years ago. Apple is basing it’s prices in USD and that has hit the £ and the Euro over the last six months or so.
Yeah, I get that it’s a reflection of the state of things but it doesn’t make it any less disheartening. I just expect every new generation of their products to come with a £100-400 price jump now.
Or, in the case of the iPads last time round, a price jump for the exact same product.
Same for me, I bought it thinking I'd use my desktop more anyway so I wanted something very light, fanless and with long lasting battery – and I've ended up using it as my daily driver since the summer.
It's absolutely flawless, and very good value for the price (even with the overpriced RAM)
My personal machine is a 2014 13" MBP. I haven't needed to replace it, but that time is coming relatively soon. I've been contemplating just going with an MBA instead of a MBP for my next machine. I don't do so much heavy lifting that I think I need it. It's a weird feeling because I think of myself as a "power user" and in the past that always meant getting the most computer you could afford. Now I'm not so sure...
That makes me feel good. I ordered a M2 MacBook Air last week knowing that Apple might release new MacBook Pros at any time. I have family coming to visit and most Apple products are significantly cheaper from where they are vs where I live, so I was hesitant about what to do. Looking at the prices, I think I made the right choice. A 32GB MacBook Pro 14 w/ 1TB would be about $1500 USD more than the MacBook Air M2 with 24GB and 1TB, since I'd have to order it from here. Obviously the extra ports and RAM would be nice, but not that nice!
Possibly, although the M2 Pro mini almost entirely cannibalizes the base Studio. For the same $2000 you can get the the mini with the same memory and storage, a significantly faster CPU (12 core M2 vs 10 core M1) and approximately equal GPU (19 core M2 vs 24 core M1). The Studio now only makes sense if you need the M1 Ultra or lots of memory.
Yeah, I understand from a product perspective, but the studio feels like a bit of a weird product to me, I'd much rather either buy a mini form factor for the size, or just get a proper desktop machine (since the Mac Pro has been outdated for a while)
If you were to go over 32GB of RAM you are probably better off switching to the very similar Mac Studio with the M1 Max which can go to 64GB. If you want an M2-based SOC, I suspect that the Mac Studio will get an upgrade later in the spring.
I really hope the next Macbook Air supports multiple external monitors, that's the only thing holding me back from it right now. I know there are DisplayLink solutions but not sure how well they would work.
I didn't even notice the mac mini bump. Got mine in aug 2021 - more ram would be nice. And with medium drive, that puts it at ~ $2k. At that price, I'm more tempted to go back to the laptop world.
> With up to 96GB of unified memory in the M2 Max model, creators can work on scenes so large that PC laptops can’t even run them.4
...
> 4. Testing was conducted by Apple in November and December 2022 using preproduction 16-inch MacBook Pro systems with Apple M2 Max, 12-core CPU, 38-core GPU, 96GB of RAM, and 8TB SSD, as well as a production Intel Core i9-based PC system with NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000 graphics with 24GB GDDR6 and the latest version of Windows 11 Pro available at the time of testing, and a production Intel Core i9-based PC system with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti graphics with 16GB GDDR6 and the latest version of Windows 11 Home available at the time of testing. OTOY Octane X 2022.1 on preproduction 16-inch MacBook Pro systems and OTOY OctaneRender 2022.1 on Windows systems were tested using a scene that requires over 40GB of graphics memory when rendered.
Two things:
- The Quadro RTX 6000 shipped in 2018 and the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is a 12GB card vs. the 24GB 3090 or 3090 Ti, much less a 4090. I get that it's a marketing eye-roll claim, and it's cool to see a laptop post up against those specs, but why is Apple even bothering to measure performance against 4-year-old or under-specced cards? I wouldn't expect a 40GB OctaneRender scene to run on a 12GB gaming card or 4-year-old Quadro on any system.
- If 60% of VFX workstations are running Linux vs. 11% of macOS,[1] how does the M2 Max MBP stack up against a garden-variety Linux workstation?
It's not? Are you getting A/B tested or something?
I see the RTX 6000 Ada and A6000 in both the hero image and the first products listed. The Quadro 6000's a 24GB 4,608 CUDA-core PCIe 3x16 card[1] and the A6000 is a 10,752 CUDA-core 48GB PCIe 4x16 card.[2]
I know NVIDIA's branding and product line naming sucks, but those clearly aren't the same cards, or even same generation of card.
Apple have caveated the comparison by specifying "PC laptops" and according to NVidia's own site [1], and clicking through to see the actual specs [2], there aren't any currently available that out-spec a 16GB 3080 Ti.
I'll admit I haven't gone spelunking down the specialist laptop manuafacturer sites, but on the surface it seems to be not an unrealistic claim.
> creators can work on scenes so large that PC laptops can’t even run them
You can't open a 40GB scene entirely in GPU RAM on any single-GPU system, laptop or otherwise, because there aren't any 40GB+ GPUs.
But you can open a 40GB Octane demo scene with out-of-core loading enabled on a Windows laptop with 64GB of RAM. Hell, Otoy has a demo from 2018 of a Windows system loading and editing that "worst-case" 40GB scene entirely out-of-core at 60fps.[1]
So the suggestion is that the M2 is doing it without enabling out-of-core loading because all system RAM is in-core. Which is cool, and something Otoy's CEO was boasting on the M1 MBP's release day two years ago.[2]
So why bother going through the motions of benchmarking anything like this against 2+-year-old systems, just to make a claim the M1 also made, just less precisely?
With the recent Stable Diffusion boom, It's been funny that the tutorials requirements look like this: Some beefy workstation hardware or Macbook Air M1.
The unified memory architecture is a bliss and they are talking the truth about some popular contemporary workloads being out of the reach of the most PC.
"PCs can't even run this!" ....when using a PC with specs too low to run the specific thing we chose to do.
"Mac's can't even run notepad.exe!" would be fair using Apple's approach to these kind of claims (i.e. choosing to run software with requirements that you know they cannot meet)
I wonder what the breakdown of software used for VFX is in this report? There are tools like Adobe After Effects that doesn't run in Linux. I know about Fusion and Nuke, but wish the report recorded what software was being run on each OS.
Apple has a point tho: what PC laptop or what typical PC for that matter (and that price) can give you 96 GB of VRAM?
If you could run ML models properly on that machine, it would be pretty nice for inference on larger models.
Now, of course, Apple being Apple they expect you to hand-code ML algos in Swift (lol. lmao.) but still, 96GB of VRAM is 96 GB of VRAM.
Edit: Just to clarify, I understand that this has 400 gbs of bandwidth, not 3,2 tbs like an Nvidia Accelerator with the same size. But the latter costs tens of thousands and requires, well, a whole datacenter probably.
This allows you to run some GPT-X or Diffusion model on your laptop. In theory.
I think Apple is making a point that their GPU has 96GB of ram which no enthusiast PC Card can touch. The A100 (2020) goes to 80GB but is $15K (but also much much faster). So if you need that extra 16GB…
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I really couldn't be happier. I run a small WFH / Music Production / Photography studio in my basement and I really wanted an always-on always connected computer, for which the Studio has been perfect.
The M2 Air is pretty close to a perfect laptop. My complaints (low audio volume, slighty cramped screen) are absolutely dwarfed by the long list of decades-old issues this laptop just eliminates:
- All day battery life. Basically like the Apple Watch - charge it overnight and it's really good all day with normal workloads (e.g. not rendering video). But it was absolutely surreal the first couple of weeks watching an hour long show while running a dozen apps and seeing the charge go from 100% to like 98%. It makes no sense and I had to adjust work habits.
- Extreme snappiness. It's in every way snappier than my previous computer, a 32GB 2019 MBP. It _might_ be slower on long CPU-bound or RAM-bound workloads, but photo editing is both and it feels faster on the Air.
- Form factor. It's my first Air. I'm not going back. I'm 40+ and keeping extra pounds off my lower back matters for me. The Air, if it's all you're carrying, is barely noticeable.
It's just fantastic. If you were wondering if you can replace an MBP with the Air yet, it's almost certainly a yes (though I wouldn't try all this on 8GB RAM). At $2000, what I paid, it's a revelation.
Also if like me you work on a desktop/laptop Apple setup at your desk, the new continuity features are totally incredible. Working with the studio/air together is totally seamless (You can extend the screens and use the same keyboard/mouse). It just works. Apple really is getting a lot of things exactly right on the software side in the Apple silicon era.
I currently have an 8GB M1 running with four users logged in. Three users are iTunes media servers, and the fourth is a regular user.
No heavy computing tasks, obviously, but it's absolutely possible to have more than one user logged in.
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It’s heavier, and I think thicker, than my 2012 MacBook Pro. Now I expected it to be heavier, but was expecting it to drop back maybe one iteration to MacBook 2014 kind of heft. But we’re a full decade back of beefiness.
I need a big screen though so it’s the only option. Unless they make a nice thin 16 inch air. I am pretty confifent it would sell extremely well.
2012 15in [1]:
- Height: 0.95 inch (2.41 cm)
- Weight: 5.6 pounds (2.56 kg)
2023 16in M2 [2]:
- Height 0.66 inch (1.68 cm)
- Weight (M2 Pro): 4.7 pounds (2.15 kg)
- Weight (M2 Max): 4.8 pounds (2.16 kg)
[1]: https://support.apple.com/kb/SP694?locale=en_US
[2]: https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-14-and-16/specs/
Really it's where the beefiness always should have been for the performance class / power envelope they are (and have been) targeting.
But yeah, a large screen thin & light seems like an obvious hole in the lineup.
I'd welcome a 15in or 16in Air. The rumour mill suggests a 15in Air is in the works. However, I'm now used to the 120Hz display of the Max, which I suspect wouldn't be an option for the non-pro models...
The battery capacity is still reported as 91%of spec which does not explain this behaviour.
I hope yours holds up better.
1) Turn off siri suggestions & privacy and all the app watching it does. System Settings -> Siri & Spotlight -> Siri Suggestions & Privacy. It turned it off for every app.
2) Turn off siri all together. System Settings -> Siri & Spotlight -> Ask Siri Toggle
3) Turn off Spotlight for everything you do not need. System Settings -> Siri & Spotlight -> Search Results check boxes
4) Turn off login items. System Settings -> Login items. Remove what you do not need from the list.
5) Turn off run in background items. System Settings -> Login items -> Allow in background
6) Remove items from ~/Library/LaunchAgents/ that you do not need. I had an old docker vnet item that wasn't needed.
Other than #6, you can do the first 5 things on all of your Apple devices and it makes a big difference in battery life. I just did the same steps with my phone and ipad.
I hope this helps your battery life a little bit.
I get like 45 minutes battery time out of my 1,5 year old Dell XPS 17. Not even enough for a meeting.
The other was just a straight-up hardware issue with the computer. I'd close the lid close to a low battery and let it stay closed long enough for it to hibernate, and then when I'd open it back up it will have completely drained and I'd get a kernal panic. They replaced it after quite a lot of back and forth until I was able to prove it.
On processing power, I have no doubt the Air would have sufficed.
I was willing to take the weight/size penalty for the ports!
Killing MagSafe has to be the singled DUMBEST product decision anyone ever made.
I'm so glad they finally brought it back.
As a photographer and DJ even the MBP runs out of ports pretty quickly, so I had a standing collection of travel hubs for this already + a CalDigit thunderbolt hub for home.
I find that, while more difficult, removing excess poundage from my waistline has a lot more impact on that ... :(
I have a 14" M1 Pro from work and a personal M2 Air and it's always surprising how much heavier the M1 Pro feels from my Air.
For photography work it's been fine. But I haven't done multiple-minute exports since buying it so I can't really say.
I _can_ say that under my normal workloads (coding web apps, office applications open, chrome with say 20 tabs, often playing chess, live streaming / zoom) heat has never been an issue. It's also my DJ computer for gigs and no issues I've noticed there, although it's not on my lap.
Contrasted with the 2019 intel MBP it's again night and day. Heat was very noticeable, as were heat-related throttling issues. It would just grind to a halt under normal workday loads esp when screen casting zoom + having all my normal apps and IDEs running.
If that's something you do more than once in a while, definitely opt for the Pro. For any other workload that's less than maxing out CPUs, or just bursty, the Air has been excellent.
I still think the M1 Air was a better value overall. And I liked the curves to it more than the M2's boxy design.
Nowadays after the Apple Silicon transition my employer no longer offered an Air. The reason was too few employees wanted it and it was too much trouble to maintain a separate SKU in the inventory for the few of us. Really quite a bummer.
I'm looking to upgrade, and I want to go for the lowest config M mac that I can get away with for smooth 4k edits.
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https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/01/apple-introduces-new-...
But it is "just" a software problem, right? So they could come to their senses and change their mind.
It seems insane to me to keep putting DisplayPort ports on computers when we have USB-C, but it also seems insane to ship machines with crippled USB ports that don't support more than one monitor... so I wouldn't be surprised if they fix their OS in this regard.
(Apple being Apple though, the software fix might well "require" an M3 processor....)
I agree with your point though.
They are diversifying their laptop/desktop solutions like crazy. Even a Macbook Air can almost compete with the entry-level version of the Macbook Pro, which is great to be honest.
I heard they are exceptionally good.
Honestly, 7-900$ for a machine that will not get old very soon is not so bad, especially if you already own a screen (which due to WFH you kind of have to have together with a "decent" keyboard, etc.)
Very smart move, honestly.
No idea how you can write that with straight fingers.
Also, the Mac mini is very special:
- tiny footprint without external power brick
- very high reliability
- completely inaudible for typical developer usage
- extremely low power usage (the 6 core Intel Mac mini was an exception)
It's the perfect home (or office) server. You can put it into a bookshelf or in a cabinet, it won't run hot, it won't disturb you with noise in the living room.... I just don't know of anything else that fits the bill.
The only shitty thing is that they are charging ridiculous prices for storage, and attaching external storage sucks because it ruins the tiny form factor, and also because the USB-C cables that come with SSD drives tend to easily disconnect in my experience.
So I'll wait for benchmarks. I can recommend the MaxTech channel on Youtube for this sort of stuff.
There's just soldered RAM and storage that can break and can't be replaced (without Apple robbing you).
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It seems that Apple's ridiculously impressive consistent year-on-year gains up the M1 were in large part possible because they were behind the state of the art. Now that they've caught up with Intel and AMD we should probably expect the same slower more gradual improvements from Apple that we see from the other companies.
The M2 is underwhelming as its the same 5nm as the M1 was.
But rumors say the M2 pro and max are on the 3nm node. And it took so long for the release, as 3nm was delayed.
Apple has a monopoly right now on 3nm, which is a shame. But if we only got tsmc to fire on all cylinders because apple stuffed them with money, then so be it.
I’m not exactly sure how Apple was “behind the state of the art” and has caught up. Can you explain?
I was nodding along about M2 being a minor bump over M1, but I'm not even sure what you mean here. Apple previously used Intel processors - how is Intel not caught up with Intel?
Apple was key to many many computing technology adoption - USB, Thunderbolt, even early WiFi. Now that they're making their own desktop processors and entire SoC, I think they can move in ways that are not constrained by Intel or other players. It's possible we see the laptop market move more like the smartphone market.
And now of course TSMC / Apple haven’t caught up, they have surpassed comparable offerings from Intel.
I'm an enormous fan of the M series. But there is an interesting consequence of a couple of fundamental design decisions.
The M series has huge memory bandwidth but look at its focus on I/O. It reminds me of one of the design decisions of the Alto (memory bus was 3/2 the screen refresh rate, a mind-boggling decision for its time). The fact that the M1 can go in an ipad is insane, but is enabled by the way the M series was designed. Their design for long battery life while drawing onto directly connected displays is unmatched.
However I believe that same decision has hobbled the M1 in a way that may make a Mac Pro version "impossible" (i.e. too much change to be worth doing). M series are optimized to dash rapidly then quickly go to sleep.
I feel the Intel and AMD guys are still thinking of sustained performance, a holdover from the desktop world and its mainframe, or at least minicomputer roots. Psychologically their mobile chips look to me like scaled down desktop machines.
If my belief is right, AMD and Intel aren't really catching up on mobile, while Apple will probably never produce a Mac Pro worth buying (for me they never were, but I'm sure there are people for which they were a great deal).
They then scaled up performance so much that a desktop ARM chip was made. That had never been done on a large scale before. So, no, imo Apple was never behind Intel and AMD, they were never competing in the same space.
Intel doesn’t really seem to make any strides in low-power designs, they just throw more mid-power cores at the problem to achieve better multi core efficiency as well as manipulate power brackets. Shirt-time (benchmark-relevant) consumption of Intel chips is insane and their published TDP figures are utterly meaningless. AMD has very scalable cores and Zen4 performs admirably at low power, but AMD too falls victim to power inflation to keep pace with Intel.
It seems tacky to me because the M2's competition isn't really 2019 Intel MBPs- it's laptops using modern Intel/AMD CPUs (the M2 may still be better than those, but if that's the case those are the benchmarks they should be giving us)
EDIT: I see they actually do just that for some specific applications.
In my case, living in the US, we all do our taxes in the first three-ish months of the year. Last year Turbo Tax told me they wouldn't support my 2013 MBP this tax season, so I decided to wait until fall 2022 and get whatever Apple released. Fall 2022 came without a release, so I've been biting my nails: Turbo Tax won't run on my MBP, and I don't want to upgrade to an "outdated" M1.
(As you can infer, I'm planning on using my next MBP for ~10 years.)
I use FreeTaxUsa, which is entirely online and free for your federal return. I think it may be $15 or so for state returns, but I live in Florida so it's not really something I think about.
It's also 4 years old at this point. Where is the comparison to current-gen Intel/AMD?
For as long as I can remember, Apple has compared new products to the previous product. And it is a more sensible approach than picking some arbitrary competitor from a huge collection of possible options, because it gives a fixed frame of reference, one of which many of the target audience are aware of. 6x faster than the previous model is very good marketing.
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> Results are compared to previous-generation 2.4GHz 8-core Intel Core i9-based 16-inch MacBook Pro systems with Radeon Pro 5600M graphics with 8GB HBM2, 64GB of RAM, and 8TB SSD.
[1] https://apple.stackexchange.com/q/411232/79532
Edit: at this rate when my previous gen one expires I'm going to think seriously about shifting back to ThinkPads...
The £ is depreciating against the dollar, and wages in the UK have been stagant for 10+ years and are set to remain stagant for another 10 based upon current forecasting.
Based upon current trends countries like Poland and Slovakia are going to overtake the UK on many economic metrics within a generation, which is both a credit to the growth of those countries and the enmourous decline of the UK relative to places like Germany, France, and the US.
Imports are going to just keep getting more and more expensive.
I'll believe that when I see it
>the enmourous decline of the UK relative to places like Germany, France
The UK, Germany and France are declining in lockstep, actually. In different ways but all declining
>the US
Yes this is the killer.
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So it's USD * exchange rate * VAT + pessimism.
Fans blasting, laggy, hot, three hour battery life. Its a substantial step backwards
Have to check to see how reliable those thinkpads are but I also just enjoyed the physical experience of a Mac (know it's not for everyone and subjective)
Since then, the 2019 macbook has been having tons of problems, crashing, thermal issues, software issues, keyboard issues. But the 2013 has been working like a dream. My coworkers have many similar experiences.
Mid-2010s was definitely a peak for macbooks. Hopefully M1s/M2s will be another peak.
But yeah I’ll bitch and moan and just give apple the money like I always do now n
http://www.exchangerate.com/charts.html?continent=currency%2...
Or, in the case of the iPads last time round, a price jump for the exact same product.
On the other hand, my M2 Macbook Air is one of the best purchases I've made in a long time, great fanless laptop.
It's absolutely flawless, and very good value for the price (even with the overpriced RAM)
Lower refresh rate, lower density backlighting etc. Would like the Air form factor with the premium screen
...
> 4. Testing was conducted by Apple in November and December 2022 using preproduction 16-inch MacBook Pro systems with Apple M2 Max, 12-core CPU, 38-core GPU, 96GB of RAM, and 8TB SSD, as well as a production Intel Core i9-based PC system with NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000 graphics with 24GB GDDR6 and the latest version of Windows 11 Pro available at the time of testing, and a production Intel Core i9-based PC system with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti graphics with 16GB GDDR6 and the latest version of Windows 11 Home available at the time of testing. OTOY Octane X 2022.1 on preproduction 16-inch MacBook Pro systems and OTOY OctaneRender 2022.1 on Windows systems were tested using a scene that requires over 40GB of graphics memory when rendered.
Two things:
- The Quadro RTX 6000 shipped in 2018 and the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is a 12GB card vs. the 24GB 3090 or 3090 Ti, much less a 4090. I get that it's a marketing eye-roll claim, and it's cool to see a laptop post up against those specs, but why is Apple even bothering to measure performance against 4-year-old or under-specced cards? I wouldn't expect a 40GB OctaneRender scene to run on a 12GB gaming card or 4-year-old Quadro on any system.
- If 60% of VFX workstations are running Linux vs. 11% of macOS,[1] how does the M2 Max MBP stack up against a garden-variety Linux workstation?
1: https://drive.google.com/file/d/15b-4GMTSEE9tyqeQdBfy_LZnxQI...
I see the RTX 6000 Ada and A6000 in both the hero image and the first products listed. The Quadro 6000's a 24GB 4,608 CUDA-core PCIe 3x16 card[1] and the A6000 is a 10,752 CUDA-core 48GB PCIe 4x16 card.[2]
I know NVIDIA's branding and product line naming sucks, but those clearly aren't the same cards, or even same generation of card.
1: https://www.nvidia.com/content/dam/en-zz/Solutions/design-vi...
2: https://www.nvidia.com/content/dam/en-zz/Solutions/design-vi...
I'll admit I haven't gone spelunking down the specialist laptop manuafacturer sites, but on the surface it seems to be not an unrealistic claim.
[1] https://store.nvidia.com/en-gb/geforce/store/laptop/?page=1&... [2] https://www.box.co.uk/82TD000WUK-Lenovo-Legion-7-Intel-Core-...
> creators can work on scenes so large that PC laptops can’t even run them
You can't open a 40GB scene entirely in GPU RAM on any single-GPU system, laptop or otherwise, because there aren't any 40GB+ GPUs.
But you can open a 40GB Octane demo scene with out-of-core loading enabled on a Windows laptop with 64GB of RAM. Hell, Otoy has a demo from 2018 of a Windows system loading and editing that "worst-case" 40GB scene entirely out-of-core at 60fps.[1]
So the suggestion is that the M2 is doing it without enabling out-of-core loading because all system RAM is in-core. Which is cool, and something Otoy's CEO was boasting on the M1 MBP's release day two years ago.[2]
So why bother going through the motions of benchmarking anything like this against 2+-year-old systems, just to make a claim the M1 also made, just less precisely?
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xE3J56pabk
2: https://twitter.com/JulesUrbach/status/1326922973790367750
The unified memory architecture is a bliss and they are talking the truth about some popular contemporary workloads being out of the reach of the most PC.
"PCs can't even run this!" ....when using a PC with specs too low to run the specific thing we chose to do.
"Mac's can't even run notepad.exe!" would be fair using Apple's approach to these kind of claims (i.e. choosing to run software with requirements that you know they cannot meet)
If you could run ML models properly on that machine, it would be pretty nice for inference on larger models. Now, of course, Apple being Apple they expect you to hand-code ML algos in Swift (lol. lmao.) but still, 96GB of VRAM is 96 GB of VRAM.
Edit: Just to clarify, I understand that this has 400 gbs of bandwidth, not 3,2 tbs like an Nvidia Accelerator with the same size. But the latter costs tens of thousands and requires, well, a whole datacenter probably. This allows you to run some GPT-X or Diffusion model on your laptop. In theory.
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