> After 2021's mind-blowing release of Apple M1 Silicon [sic], we're left a little bit underwhelmed with this year's nominal performance bump in the M2 Pro and M2 Macs chipsets.
From time immemorial, Apple's new releases have only ever had incremental performance gains from the previous release of whatever model. It has always been this way, and it is true of the M1 and of the M2. What is mind-blowing about M1 is its efficiency, and that Apple switched platforms seamlessly while still incrementally increasing CPU performance. I don't understand why anyone expects things to change and to see a massive increase in performance at every model refresh when that has never ever happened. Yet at every new Apple release, there's always this disappointment from pundits and people who should know better that the new machine isn't exponentially more performant than the last model. What is causing this?!
Reviewers online aren’t particularly well informed. They think they are because many of them sort-of-kinda understand the devices they’re talking about at a high level, but they’re not really familiar with how it works and what the constraints are.
M2 has very predictable performance, on a line with all other CPU gains in recent years.
M1 had a lot of low hanging fruit to reach for that standardised architectures aren’t able to mimic for fear of breaking things (co-located memory, purpose-built buses, function-specific co-processing). And then they got on a node no-one else could get on due to their backlog.
I watched that kinda cringe LTT mea culpa video over the PS5 storage architecture a while back and I was a little taken aback at how much of the basics he didn’t really seem to understand, even in his apology video.
These very bespoke systems can take some really innovative steps with custom compression hardware and expanded bus space.
It’s not Intel or AMD that can’t keep up with Apple, it’s the standards they build their hardware on.
This is what we see with M2 vs M1 considering the die-to-die interconnects and even before M1 Max/Ultra etc were getting shipped things like the AIC being present twice already did show us the amount of significant changes a single cycle (and even within a cycle!) can bring if you don't have the ball-and-chain of legacy standards to keep around for over three decades. We are pretty much living in the future here, getting consumer products with features that were bleeding edge and never seen before in servers just a couple of years ago.
Backwards compatibility can be nice, but if implemented backwards it starts hurting your hardware development (and software adoption) pretty bad.
As for reviewers/writers having bad takes, this keeps happening as long as they don't understand the goal that things were designed for. It's easy to always assume that big bad hardware corp made it so that you get the worst possible product for the highest possible price, but if we just take hardware pairing for a moment, this gives you two things: zero-trust guarantees ("just because the hardware is plugged in doesn't mean we trust it") and actual production (you have to actually have the keys to decrypt anything or prove ownership to the system, it's not just some pinky swear). As a downside, as long as PKI is the least-worst option we have for doing this, it means that Apple fully controls this (same as Intel with ME/BROM and AMD with BROM and AGESA), for which nobody really seems to have an alternate solution yet. Luckily for the big hardware companies, most users don't care and aren't really affected by it either. Unlike tractor repairs (those things tend to break frequently enough to warrant end-user expertise), the overlap of people that are in need of repairs and the people that have the expertise to do it is extremely thin.
Right now, Intel and AMD are having trouble. AMD is comparing their new Ryzen processor to last year's M1 Pro. I think this might become ordinary unless Intel and AMD abandon x86/amd64, users of 30yo software be damned, and release their own ARM chips. Then Apple will sweat.
I'm not sure what's up here but I think the points you're making in this thread are mostly opposite reality. Each of the M1 products has been a big step up from the preceding versions in almost every respect and especially performance. If there is a respect in which the M1 is derivative and predictable it's that it is a fairly incremental step from the A12X, which itself was a very strong performer. It's been fairly obvious since the A7 that Apple was lining up to do a chip for Macs, just a question of when. Intel's designs are ok but not great, they have been struggling with execution problems including on the fab side for years going back to around 2016. AMD's chips are pretty good now and their lack of mobile and desktop market share has nothing to do with technology. ARM architecture by itself is not significant performance advantage or competitive advantage at all, and there's no real secret sauce in Apple's chip program other than tight focus, a long time horizon, and massive amounts of cash. And CPU performance growth is slower than it once was as anyone who remembers the road from the 286 to the Pentium Pro can attest. I'll leave a quantitative comment about yearly perf growth in one of those threads. Edit: And efficiency and performance are essentially the same thing in laptops where getting rid of heat is the biggest limit on sustaining throughput for multiple minutes.
I don't know what's up with your comment, but you more or less contradict yourself. First of all, the switch to Apple Silicon, from each specific model, brought about a 30% increase in single core performance and a 40% increase in multi-core performance. It's a few more percents than the increases in performance from the second to last Apple Intels to the last Apple Intels, which was a few more percents performance than the third to the last Intels to the second to last Intels. Seeing the trend here? Apple's releases were never twice as fast as the last revision of a particular model. I'm pretty sure that's true of every hardware provider, Dell, HP, Acer, whatever. New models are always incrementally more performant than the last generation of that particular model. That is the way it's always been, so it shouldn't be such a surprise when the M2 Max is only 30% performant than the M1 Max in whatever model machine that was upgraded.
Now here is your contradiction:
> Each of the M1 products has been a big step up from the preceding versions in almost every respect and especially performance.
> ARM architecture by itself is not significant performance advantage or competitive advantage at all, and there's no real secret sauce in Apple's chip program other than tight focus, a long time horizon, and massive amounts of cash. And CPU performance growth is slower than it once was as anyone who remembers the road from the 286 to the Pentium Pro can attest.
These statements conflict. I agree with your second statement. Regarding Apple Silicon, the leap forward was in power efficiency, in the platform switch, which by itself was pretty amazing, the performance increases are NOT 200% increases across the board on all models. Apple Silicon is roughly a third faster than the previous Apple Intel model generation, up a small amount of increase from the previous Intel generation to the last, and if you go back through the models you'll see these performance gains have been increasing, but the gains are incrementally faster on an incremental performance gain at each generation. This shouldn't be surprising. What is surprising is you and everyone raving about the massive performance gains that aren't there. There is a performance gain, but it is not earth-shattering, like if each gen was performing twice as fast as the previous. They're not, and they won't, if they ever do, for years if not decades. The refreshes are always incremental, Apple Silicon is no exception.
Your math doesn't line up at all with the numbers you linked for the 13" Pro, and I've not mentioned anything about 200% (or 2x which by the way is different), so let's look at the real numbers. A 50%+ perf bump after a decade that averaged 13% a year doesn't seem very smooth to me. 13% actually overstates the situation, progress slowed towards 2020 and the mid-2020 i7 update vs mid-2019 i7 only gained 7%. It seems pretty fair to call the M1 jump "big."
As for the second, that's not a contradiction. ARM ISA has very little to do with Apple's in-house processor performance. If they had stuck with PowerPC they could have achieved roughly the same thing (on a technical basis, licensing is a whole separate issue and likely the biggest driver of the switch to ARM).
AMD announced at CES first week of January. The M1 Pro and M1 Max were introduced in October 2021, the M1 Ultra mid March 2022, and the M2 over last summer, 2022. Apple announced the M2 Pro and M2 Max January 17th. What I expect is for AMD to abandon backwards compatibility, which is a trap and has been holding back their's and Intel's processor designs for, let's see, decades, and design their own ARM chips to actually compete with Apple Silicon rather than embarrassingly announce a chip that barely beats an Apple chip that is nearing EOL.
Regardless of whether a new chip from AMD is an evolution of their previous chips or a radical shift in strategy, when announcing it they have to compare it against the competition that actually exists at that time, even if the competitors are on a different schedule.
Well good for AMD. I certainly didn't intend to rain on their parade. The point I was making was that at this moment, no one competes with Apple. But maybe today they compete with the Apple of October 2021.
I doubt Apple will sweat. Intel and AMD aren't going to come out with an ARM based chip that's twice as fast as an M1, and their partners who manufacture the actual devices will have a harder time creating their own SOC - I guess Samsung would be well placed to do it, but they'd be as likely to just bypass Intel/AMD anyway. It's not like Apple competes on top performance.
I'm puzzled why you think that. Apple doesn't compete with Intel and AMD. If those companies produced a better ARM chip they'd be happy to sell it to Apple. Even a non ARM chip, Apple has shown they'll switch.
What would make Apple sweat at this point? Google must have when it seemed like they were going to produce high end consumer versions of ChromeOS laptops and Android phones. That's the kind of integrated experience that would compete with enough money behind it to get somewhere. Google blew that one though.
I'm not like pro Apple, I just don't think they care that much what Intel does.
This is inaccurate, the performance gains over intel 9 Macbook Pro on the higher end Mac Pro's (Max and Ultra) are not incremental. Depending on the task it can be twice as fast (e.g.: real time video editing of heigh bit depth, high resolution video). But a general boost in overall performance is visible in even synthetic benchmarks - e.g.: from 1250 to 1745 in Geekbench. A 43% increase. Moreover a perceived boost to performance was notable to even the most casual users in boot time, general OS responsiveness and file copying between the intel and M1 generations. I agree that it's not reasonable to expect this to continue as M1 develops.
> This is inaccurate, the performance gains over intel 9 Macbook Pro on the higher end Mac Pro's (Max and Ultra) are not incremental.
You are comparing apples and oranges. Within specific model releases, MacBook Pro vs next MacBook Pro, Mac Pro vs. next Mac Pro, and every single other Apple model release compared to it's previous and subsequent releases, the performance gains have always been incremental. I don't understand how anyone could expect it to be otherwise.
If you say that Intel MacBook Pro is a different product category from Arm MacBook Pro, then yes, gains are incremental within a product category.
The parent is arguing that really, these are the same product category. If you bought, say, a middle-of-the-road MacBook Pro every time a new one was announced, you’d see a huge jump in performance (more than just incremental) when moving from Intel to M1, then a return to incremental improvement from M1 to M2.
I’m pretty convinced by them. I think that Apple has done such a good job of compatibility that all MacBook Pros are essentially the same product category. And the M1 performance improvement really was a step change over Intel.
> gains over intel 9 Macbook Pro on the higher end Mac Pro's
I'm saying you can't compare a MBP to a Mac Pro, like you tried to do, because that wasn't my claim. My claim is that the first Apple Silicon MBP was only an incremental increase in performance from the last Intel MBP. And I am saying this is true, within specific model lines, for everything Apple ever released. And I don’t have specific knowledge of this, but I would assume it is true for every other computer and platform, that each subsequent generation of model is a little faster than the last, and not twice as fast or even 50% faster.
> M1 MacBook Air was 2-3x as fast as previous model. MacBook Pro was closer to 2x.
Incorrect. The Late 2020 M1 MacBook Air has just under a 35% performance increase in single core performance over the Early 2020 i7 MacBook Air, though nearly a 2.5x increase in multicore performance[1] (because it has more cores). That doesn't make it 2-3 times faster as the single core performance is a bottleneck, but its multicore performance increase is certainly impressive, it just means the Air's small formfactor was hamstrung by Intel multicore and got to breath a little in the platform switch with more cores, not that the last Intel models are 2-3 times slower than the first Apple Silicon models. That's absurd. The MBP has much less impressive performance increases in the platform switch compared to Air. Looking at the last and fastest intel MBP, the 13-inch mid-2020, and comparing to the first M1, the 13-inch Late-2020, the performance increased[2] about 30% in single core performance and increased 40% in multicore performance, which is typical of the performance increases between the last Intel and first Apple Silicon selections of most other Mac models.
Geekbench isn't showing you the complete picture. Its running time is short so it doesn't stress the thermal management capabilities of the device like the real-world benchmarks I posted do.
This benchmark shows the difference in performance of the M2 devices when you run them for a long period:
Let's base our opinions on facts. Taking the 13" Pro example the annualized growth in single thread performance from the 2008 model to the last Intel model is about 13.2%. The increase from the last Intel to the M1 model was about 41% (multi-threaded around 67% faster). Way outside the typical progress from before the M1. Now the Macs live on the trajectory of Apple's in-house silicon which will probably slow to 10-20% improvement per year but which has for the last decade sat way above the Intel trajectory for laptop performance.
Yes. And you're making it overly complicated. Look at the benchmarks[1] for one single model, the 13" mid-2020 MBP, single core performance is 1213. Now look at the very next generation of that machine, the 13" late-2020 MBP M1, single core performance is 1708. What percentage of 1213 would you need to add to 1213 to make it equal 1708? About 40% of 1213 then added to 1213 would give you 1708, so the increase in performance in single core for this model jumping from Intel to Apple Silicon M1 is a 40% increase, not 150% or whatever.
Take a look at what was written in the reply more carefully. There’s no mention of the word “increase” that you added. Simply that the machine is 150% of the previous version (ie 50% increase).
I don't know what you're looking at, but all in-model benchmarks support my claim, i.e. for any specific particular model compared to it's next generation you will never see an exponential gain in performance, nor even a doubling of performance, but only incremental gains in performance not yet breaching a 35% increase, which going from the 2018 Mac mini to the 2020 Mac mini comes close to, but it isn't just true of the minis, its true of all models.
The first Arm versus the last Intel? Base model versus base model. It’s an awful lot more than 35%, particularly in multi core. And it’s quiet and cool. It’s a massive generational leap.
With the Air, the single core performance increase is just under 35% from the last Intel to the first Apple Silicon. The multicore performance increased nearly 250%, due to more cores in Apple Silicon, but before you get too impressed, this is due to the fact that Air is too small to fit as many Intel cores, and does not translate to a machine that is 2-3 times faster because of the importance of single core performance. No other Mac saw as large a performance increase, and generally it's under 35% increase in single core performance and less than 40% increase in multicore performance, and that's because all the other Mac models are large enough to hold an equal number of Intel cores vs Apple Silicon. Air is just too small, so it's still not a generational leap, it's just that more Apple Silicon cores fit in the Air.
You seem to be doing a lot of gymnastics to try to put the chips on a level playing field, but this doesn't make any sense to me at all.
They're fundamentally different architectures, so when the Air experiences the jump in performance that it did, you can't just hand wave that away because "well if Intel had smaller and cooler cores, it wouldn't be as big of a difference".
On the contrary - this is the entire point.
Anecdotally, my 1st gen M1 air is significantly faster at almost every task when compared to my last-gen i9 16" MacBook Pro.
It seems your argument is just that some increments are smaller than other increments? It seems the primary point is that the move to M1 was a much larger jump than most jumps.
Anyone who has been purchasing Apple hardware over the years experienced this in a very practical sense.
The Air does not work as a counter example. It is one model, one single model saw performance increases of 150% in multicore performance, and understanding why is important, because NONE of the other models saw anywhere near that performance increase and much closer to 30%-40% increases across the board. And the level of these increases is slightly more than the increases seen from the second to last gen Intels and the last gen Intels. And those performance increases were slightly more than the third to the last Intels to the second to the last Intels. And the further you go back, the smaller the performance gains are, but fundamentally all of these performance gains are incremental and not abrupt. They follow Apple's trend of increasing performance incrementally at each new release.
I’m looking at a Geekbench of 1707 for the 2020 M1 and 1113 for the 2020 i7, 1048 for the 2020 i5 and 972 for the 2020 i3 (as shown in the link I provided). That’s an increase of over 50% in single core performance versus the i7, more than 60% versus the i5, and 75% if you compare to the i3.
Am I looking at the wrong machines? How are you comparing?
But M1 did provide fundamental increase in performance. It had only 4 performance cores, yet it could build my code 1.5 times faster than the mightiest i9 of the time.
> But M1 did provide fundamental increase in performance.
No it didn't. Look at the Mac mini benchmarks.[0] It is a smooth curve of increasing performance from the oldest models up to the M1. Performance is increasing faster, as should be expected, but the increases in performance from model to model are incremental, always resulting in "experts" being surprised and disappointed. M1 Mac mini is not ten or five times faster than the 2018 Mac mini, and not even twice as fast. It is 26% faster in multicore performance and 36% faster in single core performance. These are increments, not massive leaps in performance.
Are you looking at the link you posted? A 36% (quoting your number) single-core increase over the 2018 model would mean a score jump from 1098 to 1493. The real number is 1715 (a 56% increase instead). You may argue that's just incremental too, but what would your threshold be?
And let's be honest — synthetic benchmarks are bullshit. In this thread, you have a number of different people describing their experience of how much the perceived performance gains were, and how they didn't feel incremental. You are bending over backwards to try and dismiss those, and I don't get why. My perception, between having a maxed out 16" Intel MBP and getting an M1 mini at the time, was nothing short of "holy shit, this thing smokes my $4000 machine". Call it incremental; call it whatever feels right to you, but I know what it felt like. My sample size of 1 analysis is: it was not incremental at all.
I agree that claims of 5x and 10x are probably exaggerated a bit. An awful lot of people were trading in a dual core i5 (Air), or a quad core i3 (mini) or i5 (MBP or Mini) for an M1. You could pay more for a six core i5 or i7 in the mini, and those models performed much better than the lower price points...
Coming from the lower end of the product line, the M1 was an incredible upgrade, and the price point really didn't change (I paid 997 for the Intel, $949 for the M1). I swapped an Intel Air for a M1 Air, and could build Go and Node apps in 25% of the time it took the Intel Air... and could do so all day on battery.
It is an incremental increase in performance compared to the last incremental release. Performance increases should get larger and larger, and more and more frequently, that is how computing technology advances, along a logarithmic curve yet bounded by Moore's Law and the limits of what can be done with the technology of the hour. But there was never once a 100% increase in performance or even a 50% increase in performance between one model and its immediate next revision. And that many seem to be expecting this is tremendously unrealistic.
A consistent 10% improvement at a regular cadence is already exponential growth. Ever-increasing improvements at an ever-increasing frequency would look exponential on a log plot. I don't know how you could possibly expect that and then complain that other people are crazy for expecting exponential growth.
For the last 5 years and the next 5, I expect less than 30% performance increases from one gen model to the next. But it took 20 years to get to that level. A decade ago it was 15% increases in performance between gens.
I'm not sure if this changes anything here but when I think about performance at least for laptops but even for other products I think not just actual CPU operations but energy efficiency as well.
I do agree that Apple's CPU releases are incremental updates (and mostly always have been), but when I used an M-series Mac for the first time it was a step grade upgrade from the previous gen even if it's somehow not accounted for in CPU performance metrics (though I think it will be if you account for energy as well).
Yup. Apple really set the bar. I’ve never expected battery life like this from my laptop. Now that I know I can get the same(or better) performance with much higher efficiency, I’m never going back.
My laptop doesn’t heat up anymore. It doesn’t die. If it has fans, they’re absolutely silent. All this, and I haven’t had to change my workload at all.
No one cared (not entirely true, but for most) until Apple made power efficiency relevant. There were efficient processors prior to Apple Silicon. No one (again, exaggerating) cared until Apple made them care.
> No one cared (not entirely true, but for most) until Apple made power efficiency relevant. There were efficient processors prior to Apple Silicon. No one (again, exaggerating) cared until Apple made them care.
I don't think that's really true.
The major cause for the failure of the macbook was a lack of power efficiency. Intel just didn't make a performant enough low power chip to make the concept work outside of a small group of people who value portability over everything else.
But even beyond that, there have been frequent complaints of Apple's laptops running hot. Those complaints don't necessarily show up in benchmark numbers, but I've run across them many, many times.
I think he's referring specifically to the most recent machine branded simply MacBook, with no Air or Pro suffix. That was a 12" fanless notebook introduced in 2015, a few years before the MacBook Air got a Retina Display upgrade.
for all of the commenters, i'm fairly sure the macbook being referred to is the 12-inch macbook. that was absolutely a failure due to lack of a power efficient and performant cpu
Choose any other model. It is true for all of them, always. Though performance gains are getting larger and larger over time, each subsequent release of any model is an incremental performance bump from the last. Not just true with Apple hw, true for all hw. IOW, we have not seen a leap in performance of 100% or even 50%, from one model to its next revision, and idk that we will.
that's just not true. Take any of the last Macbook Pro Intel (maxed out) models and compare it to a similarly priced M1 Max. The difference in real world usage is night and day - although a lot of it is caused by the horrible thermal throttling, that made the Intel models almost unusable. It was definitely the biggest performance boost I have ever seen going from one generation to the next.
Example: On the last Intel MBP I could barely run Teams with video, the Intel Macbooks (I tried many) got immediately super hot and started throttling to a point that made the machines unusable. The M1 Max doesn't even turn on the fan.
> Take any of the last Macbook Pro Intel (maxed out) models and compare it to a similarly priced M1 Max.
What you have done is leap frog a couple generations there. Compare the benchmarks[0] of one model of the last Intel MBP, say the 2019 13" MBP (MacBookPro15,4) and the very next generation of that model, the 13" 2020 M1 MBP (MacBookPro17,1) and you will see it is an incremental increase in performance, a 36% performance increase in single core and a 40% increase in multicore performance. Impressive, but these are not exponential gains in performance nor even a doubling of performance, like what everyone seems to expect between the benchmarks of M1 and M2, and in fact this foolishness is not new, and has been going on since 68k models were new, all through the PPC era, into the Intel era up to today.
I'm talking about this 1 generation jump (the 13" models have usually been limited in multi-core options, only now with the introduction of the 14" MBP they offer the exact same options as the 16"):
And the real world usage implication feel even more crazy than the numbers look like.
Also, even the one you linked looks crazy. Almost 40% increase - when did you ever get something like this in a year to year upgrade?
Additionally these benchmarks don't really tell about the thermal throttling problems the Intel machines had, which are completely gone with Apple Silicon. So all in all I'd definitely not call the Apple Silicon jump incremental - for the Apple hardware it was revolutionary.
tbf the mightiest i9 mobile chip at the time was pretty bad, thermal wise and throttled extremly fast, besides that it was basically offered for ultrabooks...
I mean the m1 did draw only half or even less power than the mightiest i9 mobile chip at the time (and still does lol)
* It uses a fabrication process that noone has gotten their hands on yet. These have always been massive jumps, and giving access to that node to AMD and Intel gets them to similar performance (actually, they already are at similar performance with the same gen).
* You're buying an un-upgradeable SoC. Soldered on everything means fast interconnect, while others have to play ball with standards that allow me to change components whenever I want.
* It's a pretty damn good CPU.
So, out of these three, Apple is responsible for 1/3. Dump an i9 on a SoC with a 3nm process and it'll eat the M1 alive. There's no "fundamental" increase.
I'm not sure this is true, looking at say the i7-1260P in the XPS 13 it appears to turn in performance similar to the base M2 and half the battery life. M2 Max is twice as fast as the i7 and still 2x-3x the battery life, though also twice as expensive. I don't see any case that Intel's designs are somehow better than anyone else's let alone enough to "eat alive" any competitor design on equal process.
the fab process is their for grabs not by accident, they made the right call to invest in a longterm relationship with tsmc long time ago, so they have dibs on all cutting edge tech.
un-upgradable SoC is a strategic design choice so which is basically part of the third reason which is their responsibility as you pointed out.
So basically their success with m1,m2, etc is a well done implementation of a very ambitious strategy to disrupt the market. I don't see why it should be disputed.
I think you’re saying I shouldn’t be impressed that my M1 machine is much faster than my previous Intel machine, while having 3x the battery life, because Apple cheated or something.
Yep. A lot of this thread feels like I’m being gaslit into believing the M1 machines were not the ridiculously huge jumps we all knew they were at the time.
I don’t really care about benchmarks, these things have allowed me to do twice the work with half as much pain. That’s not incremental.
Maybe they’re not great processors and it’s just Apple cheating in software/process-node/whatever. Great! Let me know when other manufacturers figure out how to cheat in software/process-node/whatever and I’ll consider them.
They're not a ridiculously large jump, not on the overall scale of performance. There's nothing in an M1 that we couldn't do before, or haven't done before. High end SoCs have always had insane performance. However, slap literally any high end CPU of today on a SoC and you get the same results. Apple didn't invent new tech, didn't create performance out of thin air.
However, they did just force you to buy a new $2000 machine next time you want to upgrade in 3 years because it's a single, monolithic block.
>Let me know when other manufacturers figure out how to cheat in software/process-node/whatever and I’ll consider them.
Unfortunately, they all accept to be part of a greater ecosystem that doesn't attempt to fuck you over by being un-upgradable and incompatible with each other, so cheating is out of the way.
> slap literally any high end CPU of today on a SoC and you get the same results.
They should do that!
> they did just force you to buy a new $2000 machine next time you want to upgrade in 3 years because it's a single, monolithic block.
You’re absolutely right. I love my really fast, cold-running, forever-battery monolithic block. I’m very happy to pay ($2000/365/3 = $1.82) per day for it, minus the resale value it’ll still have.
I understand the value of the ideals regarding end-user upgrades, but at the end of the day the tradeoffs just don’t make sense for me.
I hope you are correct as I’m all for competition and don’t really care about Architectures. In my own experience it’s the thermals and power use that are the most impressive parts or the M-series.
Pundits criticize, that's what they do. It's impossible for anything to ever be "perfect". If a product is simple then it can be criticized for not having enough features, if it's full of features it can be criticized for not being simple enough. And when everything's pretty much fine, the standard criticism is "the new version hasn't changed/improved enough". (While when lots of things change/improve, it becomes "but is it too different/incompatible for people used to the old version?!")
The job of a pundit isn't to try to provide any kind of objective or even consistent truth. It's just to provide talking points than turn into headlines that drive clicks.
The pundits, as people, absolutely know better. But that's not their job as a paid pundit. Their job is to drive clicks and comments and engagement.
Yes, and most pundits can’t think about target markets. How often have you read a review of a luxury car / computer / resort from someone who works hard to make $50k/year, and their complaint is that the product is too expensive?
We all have different financial situations. Tell me what’s good and bad about a product and let me decide if it’s “worth it” for the price point.
> From time immemorial...only ever had...always been this way...don't understand why anyone expects...that has never ever happened...should know better...
iPad 2 a year after iPad 1 had 2x faster CPU, 9x faster GPU, 2x RAM, weighed 15% less, was up to 33% thinner in every dimension, and had longer battery life.
iPad is not a Mac, and you're massively exaggerating. The iPad had a single core CPU, iPad 2 a dual core. Mystery solved there. The GPU was not 9 times faster![1] DDR2 RAM, released 8 years before the iPad 2, is twice as fast as DDR. You should be complaining about the iPad not having DDR2 rather than being amazed at the performance leap between subsequent generations, which, btw, was indeed incremental.
Am I missing something, or is there literally nothing in your link that actually provides a performance comparison between those two GPUs?
Also, how does the stuff about DDR vs DDR2 RAM fit into this conversation at all? What you're responding to seems to be a claim about RAM capacity rather than speed.
Apple switched from ARM Cortex A8 to A9. There were a lot of improvements.
The change from in order to out of order was huge. L2 cache doubled to 1MB. Memory bandwidth doubled. The FPU got properly pipelined too. RAM also doubled to 512MB.
In combination, this translates into 20% better integer performance and double the FPU performance. This is pretty close to what other chips saw moving to A9.
For stuff like web browsing, that FPU update basically doubled performance and made the iPad 2 much more useful to consumers.
On the GPU front, Apple themselves made the 9x claim, but Anandtech showed closer to 6x. That’s still a massive improvement. If something was limited by the previous 256MB RAM, that 9x number becomes very believable.
This is not even remotely true. The increase between performance in A5 vs A6 was greater than 100%. Or the 41% increase in Geekbench multi from the A10 to the A11. Versus the 14% increase in multi-core from last year's iPhone to the current one.
The performance has never increased by the same amount year over year. It improves drastically in some years, and modestly in others. People get disappointed when Apple fails to deliver the performance gains they have in years past.
Edit: Also the [sic] is unnecessary. Just say you don't like the publication if you disagree with their writing that much.
I have an allergic reaction to what I think of as constant editorializing on everything these days. Feels like everything has to have a label as underwhelming or amazing. There was an iFixit video a bit ago where they made a weird comment "oh no where is the heat spreader!?!?" like it was missing or amazing ... they were holding it.
Not that those comments can't be on point, but it feels like everything now has something like that.
And yeah efficiency is the impressive part of those chips.
Thanks for saying this. It’s a bit toxic if reviewers are constantly demanding immense change, immense improvements. Small incremental gains are great. We’re mired in spectacular technology. If anything, software practices and efficiency are the parts that most need to catch up.
That's why there's a market for old Macs. I acquired two quad-core 2012 Mac minis in 2021, which is quite the upgrade from my 2010 MacBook Pro. But the low-end Apple Silicon minis are so cheap I don't know how I can avoid owning one within the next year.
Apple picks and chooses what it wants to showcase, but their marketing is reasonably honest in the details. The problem comes from misinterpretation of what they are showcasing, "30 times faster performance in some Photoshop filter," doesn't say anything about whether the machine is faster overall at everything than some bizarre whitebox someone built that is missing expensive Mac features. But, in general, at release, more often than not Macs have been the fastest performing machine at that moment, though within a few months they're no longer faster than such and such PC, and Macs have a long wait between in-model releases. There were 4 years between the 2014 Mac mini and 2018 model, and 6 years between the 2013 Mac Pro and the 2019 Mac Pro. That's a lot of time for the competition.
Immediately I think of the jump from iPad to iPad 2. That was a night and day experience because of the memory and processor jump. But that kind of leap was a one time thing that is the exception.
Wouldn't you consider FaceID to be a step jump in tech? I didn't know IR scanning was a feasible consumer tech before that. Even M1 was the same, right?
What a silly hill to die on. Some releases are certainly more exciting perf wise than others. Usually excitement is tied to some technology upgrade like SSD or new ram or some such thing. This is a boring upgrade.
I didn't die on this hill, I pioneered it and conquered it. I'm developing it. See the difference? What is silly is expecting an exponential increase in performance from one generation model to the next. That never happens, not at Apple, not anywhere.
I don't understand why we should be impressed when GPU, single-core and multi-core power consumption has gone up. Apple cut off Intel and AMD so they could stop bumping the wattage for marginal performance increases. Ironically, now Apple is the one stranded on a unique manufacturing process, and AMD/Intel are the ones reducing their wattage.
It's not disappointing, but it's hardly impressive. Once again; this is the world's largest company, and we're freaking out over TDP trades for performance. It reminds me of the people in the 90s who would shill Disney's theme park tech; maybe it's cool on a technical level, but these people have billions of dollars. What's impressive is running Linux on unsupported hardware or single-handedly getting a copy of the no-fly list. I can't be bothered to give a fuck about Apple spending 18 months to make a 40% faster GPU that consumes 20% more power.
> Ironically, now Apple is the one stranded on a unique manufacturing process, and AMD/Intel are the ones reducing their wattage.
That's not irony. Irony is that, right now, no other hw manufacturer can compete with Apple. I don't think Intel or AMD will ever be able to compete again until they abandon x86/amd64 and release their own ARM chip. Apple will not sweat before that happens.
AMD does just fine competing with Apple, they had chips competing with the M1 on 7nm silicon, 18 months before the M1 hit shelves. Intel is shaken, but their roadmap is starting to look competitive again for the first time since Skylake. Apple's only defense was their control over the 5nm node, which is gone now. We have 4nm GPUs that make Apple's offerings look like toys, and the 5nm AMD APUs are highly competitive with even Apple's highest-end chip.
Apple made the right choice abandoning Intel on the 10nm node, but they don't have a roadmap from here besides "get better silicon". The competition is hot, and I don't think either my next laptop or desktop will be ARM based (unless someone out-performs Apple).
Right now, AMD is showcasing a processor, the Ryzen 7040, and proudly comparing it to last year's M1 Pro using cherry picked benchmarks. That's how its going to go from now on. They have nothing to compete with M1 Max or Ultra, or Apple's current flagship processor, M2 Max, and by the time they do, Apple will have left the M2 Ultra behind and will have the M3 Max as their flagship processor. That isn't competing, that is chasing.
Is that not impressive? AMD is proving that they can engineer an x86 CPU that's comparable to ARM on the same silicon. That's kinda crazy, especially once you consider that it's roughly the same power envelope as M1/M2.
If we're only getting more 20-30% spec bumps every 18 months from Apple, it sounds like the race is pretty close.
I honestly don't see ARM as an advance in performance over Intel/AMD. It's more an advance in efficiency. Intel and AMD can make faster processors, I just don't think their power draw can compete with ARM, and I don't understand why they don't abandon placing such a premium on backwards compatibility. Just who is running 35yo platform-specific software?! They're holding everything up. EOL them. Move on.
I think that's a convenient marketing justification for the fact that they can't get better silicon. There's every reason in the world to make the M1 look obsolete if you can, but the bum-rush for TSMC's 4nm process may have locked that option out.
In time we'll see if there are greater improvements coming. Something tells me that we're never going to see a performance leap comparable to the 10nm -> 5nm one, though.
It's not a marketing justification. It's the product strategy that underpins the iPhone/iPads growth.
The whole approach centres around consumers feeling like if they do purchase a cheaper M1 model that it is a great, future-proof device and not an obsolete one.
Right, and how did they take that into account when they lambasted the Cronenberg i9 Macbooks for the sake of selling M1s?
To Apple, marketing and product strategy are deeply synergistic. It is for every company at their scale, and especially when you have to sell something direct-to-consumer.
I'm going through the Apple self repair process currently and it has been excellent. I spilled coffee that managed to get inside my Mac Studio (via the front ports) and it stopped powering up. I downloaded the self repair manual and followed the instructions to disassemble it; found coffee on the power supply which may have caused the problem. I ordered a replacement power supply from the very well organized self repair order site. I was also happy to see that they promote recycling by giving you a good amount of money back if you send the old parts in. I'll find out on Monday if my theory about the power supply is correct :)
I don't know how much of this is due to the new regulations, but it has been a very smooth process.
Update: It worked! The power supply arrived (along with the adhesives that they provided for the bottom black ring - I'd forgotten to order those I guess they just include them with all orders?). After a 10 minute replacement the studio is back up and running.
In the automotive industry, replacement auto parts are often sold with a deposit called a core charge that is refunded when the old part is returned to the seller.
It’s quite common for cell phone repair shops to send the damaged screens back for a buyback. They can reuse a lot of good OEM components on a display assembly.
Usually with liquid damage it's possible to clean and dry the component thoroughly using isopropyl alcohol and it can work again. Did you give that a try?
Yes, thanks (my comment above is the short version). I cleaned where I found coffee with 99% isopropyl alcohol and qtips. No go unfortunately. When it happened I wasn't thinking and left the Studio turned on while I cleaned up everything else, I'd imagine that did not help.
Apple is being credited with providing self service repair resources. Shouldn’t we also be crediting the regulations (or threat of regulations) that’s forcing them to behave better?
I’m not convinced Apple came to the conclusion that it ought to do this for business reasons.
Especially since Lenovo had full disassembly and replacement instructions for quite a few (all?) ThinkPads for years now. There maybe others but Lenovo is the one I know about.
Just last week I upgraded the memory in mine, no repair kit required, just a simple screwdriver.
I've been fixing ThinkPads since the IBM days (my first laptop was a 770x), and I seem to recall reasonable documentation having been available then, too. Or it's possible that it was just so easy to do the most common things (eg separate labeled RAM covers set into the bigger bottom cover) that I never even bothered looking for repair docs and I'm conflating their availability with their lack of necessity.
All products from HP, IBM/Lenovo, Apple and others have these instructions. The matter is not presence but availability to consumer.
I've used a (presumably leaked) 2008 MacBook Pro 15" service guide to disassemble, mend the bent case (due to a bad fall), change the hard drive with a SSD, and put my machine together.
> All products from HP, IBM/Lenovo, Apple and others have these instructions. The matter is not presence but availability to consumer.
I think this is unfair, because precisely what the OP is saying is that in e.g. Lenovo products these instructions have been readily available for customers, sometimes even in the very product manual itself. I have an HP tablet from around 5 years ago where the disassembly instructions came with the printed manual. Also, it requires about 3 tools only, all of which are so standard that except for a suction cap I think they are almost in every household. Compare to this teardown of a much thicker laptop... even for replacing just the battery, I wouldn't have the tools, much less the balls to do it. It's not a surprise that iFixit still gives them a rather low "5" score.
I don't think I'm being unfair to OP, because I'm not putting a counterargument on the table.
I just say that these guides are always produced, but not generally made available to consumers, and that's bad.
I wish every electronic equipment is shipped with a User's Guide and Service Manual out of the factory.
However, both to protect service businesses and due to more integrated nature of newer devices, self-service is becoming more impractical every day. Hope right to repair changes that for the better.
Also, there was an Ask HN about "Declination of Everything", and people objected vehemently. Why we are having this debate now, if nothing is declining?
I also find it interesting that these gestures start to happen when user hardware upgrades have become all but impossible anyway, and the difference between the 8GiB and 32GiB models can be upwards of $1000.
Yeah, let's not lose sight of how the right-to-repair movement made this possible. And we still have long way to go as even iFixit notes:
> There is of course the elephant in the room: parts pairing. As it stands, despite the increasingly repairable designs, the software locks that Apple maintains will result in waste as otherwise-useful components end up in landfills instead of being repurposed. The useful life of our devices will also be limited to Apple’s hardware support—whatever they decide that may be. Once support is dropped for a device, those software locks will remain in place which means even if a third-party manufacturer is willing to step in with replacement parts, those parts may be restricted in functionality.
My biggest complaint about Apple and self repair is that it’s nearly impossible to upgrade RAM or storage on the new Apple Silicon macs. This allows Apple to charge high prices on upgrades. Additionally, I would argue that it lowers the expected life of the device as you have no ability to upgrade in the future.
On the plus side, embedding RAM into SoC is one of the magic tricks of Apple for such massive performance, due to short path lengths. I assume SSD got a similar treatment.
An 16 GB MacBook Pro can live as a development machine (at least for what I develop) for almost a decade, so getting a 64G machine today will not make it obsolete for me till the machine itself dies.
Also, an 16GB MacBook is pretty enough for running a lot of applications, incl. Electron based hogs. MacOS manages its memory pretty well.
The SSDs aren't any faster than consumer NVME M.2 drives. Apple does get to save some pennies because the the SSD controller is in the SoC instead of being on the board with the NAND chips. They've also neutered performance on the M2 base models by only including 1 NAND chip on the board instead of 2 so you no longer get the benefits of striping and faster speeds. To top it off they then charge you $200 to bump a base model 256GB to 512GB which is absolutely ridiculous when you can get a very good 1TB M.2 NVME SSD at retail for less.
While their absolutely is benefits to how they handle their RAM the upgrade prices are nuts. $200 extra for 8GB more, 64GB requires a CPU upgrade and costs $400 extra over 32GB. I've heard the CAMM modules Dell developed and seem poised to replace SO-DIMMs in laptops will allow for faster speeds and replaceable LPDDR too with less Z height and eaiser board design so hopefully we will see an uptick in PC laptops with replaceable memory again.
> They've also neutered performance on the M2 base models by only including 1 NAND chip on the board instead of 2 so you no longer get the benefits of striping and faster speeds.
This is addressed in TFA, which suggests it's a side effect of smaller 128GB modules becoming scarce — or maybe more accurately, "not reliably available at Apple volumes".
The article asks "why is Apple even bothering with a 512GB version?", and the two answers are: (1) To create a cheap-ish "price anchor" config, and (2) as a reasonably-priced choice when price is paramount.
Also, for those who want to do 4K video editing or whatever, it's easy to throw a couple M.2s in an external dual Thunderbolt enclosure¹ to create very large, very fast local storage to complement the 512GB boot/apps/documents drive.
So they should have just boosted the 256GB models to 512GB and 512GB to 1TB. The only model where it makes sense to be this agressive on price is the $600 Mini. Considering you can get a decent 512GB SSD like the 980 at retail, with the SSD controller for less than $50 so you have to wonder how much they're really saving on that $1300 MBA and $2000 MBP? $5? $10?
The way these arguments always seem to end is that the main issue most people have is not the impossibility of upgrades so much as the cost of buying the well-equipped machine in the first place.
I don’t know why manufacturers charge so much for spec bumps (this isn’t limited to Apple). Is it really only because they can?
One reason historically was that the knuckle on the price curve shifted between the time the machine was released and when you upgraded. When a new generation of RAM came on the market, prices often fell rapidly as the process matured and competition set in.
This also played into sale or discount strategies: if the same model becomes cheaper over time but list pricing doesn’t adjust, you’re making a good bit more from everyone who isn’t price sensitive even if you allow resellers to discount it periodically or offer better pricing to business orders (“free RAM upgrade”).
Because that is how the business model works: You have the entry model to create a customer. Then those who really need more, are gonna pay substantially more. See basically every SaaS product.
> On the plus side, embedding RAM into SoC is one of the magic tricks of Apple for such massive performance, due to short path lengths. I assume SSD got a similar treatment.
Neither RAM nor SSD is embedded in the SoC. The RAM is just soldered on the package. While this makes for slightly shorter path lengths, the only real gain is motherboard footprint.
> While this makes for slightly shorter path lengths, the only real gain is motherboard footprint.
Well, that and the ability to use LPDDR5 in the first place. There’s no such thing as a pluggable LPDDR5 stick; the design decisions around low voltages & high signaling rates make it physically impractical to survive the longer traces and discontinuities involved in the signal traversing a connector.
You're right about RAM, that's my mistake. I never implied that they also embedded SSD into the SoC. I just said that they may have tried to minimize path lengths.
As an old overclocker, I don't believe that this compact soldering is only due to motherboard footprint. It would allow them greatly push the RAM chips to their limits.
Abandoning the common slot/sodimm design also lets them play with the channel configuration, which they'd need to do to achieve the bandwidth they claim for the Pro and Max chips.
It’s only huge in one synthetic benchmark which doesn’t represent what users do: sustained linear writes to storage on the lowest-end model where it went from two chips to one. How often do you need to completely fill the disk in 2 minutes rather than 3? If you did have a situation where you can meaningfully write data that quickly, you’d presumably also have enough data that you’d buy the larger models or you’d be using external storage.
Random I/O is the number most people are affected by and there’s a reason the clickbait commenters never mention that: you don’t see this large an effect and these machines are all more than fast enough for the vast majority of buyers. That will not get you a ton of YouTube impressions so it’s all about a use-case these machines don’t have.
The low performance because of SSD geometry is bad design, that's true (that shouldn't have happened).
On the other hand, I still think that having slots adds a lot of bulk to system design. Considering SSDs have limited life spans, being able to change them makes great sense, but when you dedicate 90% of your footprint to battery, it becomes hard to make them replaceable.
One might argue that HP, Dell and Lenovo offers this, and I suggest buying these machines if that's importance to you. I'm fond of all three companies' higher end designs, but Apple provides more at the same price point, at least for me.
I still wouldn't be impossible for them to throw a DIMM socket in there. Even if the expanded memory is at a higher latency, there would still be many perfectly good applications for it.
It seems like there would be a lot of added complexity in the memory controller for this to happen, if it’s even possible. LPDDR5 is not and will never be available in DIMMs, so you’d be talking to two different signaling standards for the onboard vs the expanded RAM. You could switch to DIMMs across the board, but to keep performance equivalent you’d trade-off a significant chunk of battery life.
I can’t off the top of my head think of any CPU that’s ever supported running different DDR standards side-by-side simultaneously (there were some dual DDR2/DDR3 boards back in the day, but it was an either/or proposition).
Stats from the e-commerce vendor in Germany show that Apple's laptops have a fraction of the "in warranty" repair rate, roughly 1 in 200, with many laptops at 1 in 20 or worse.
It's pretty clear that Apple's decisions about manufacturing approaches are not to make iFixit's job harder or easier, but to avoid needing iFixit at all for most users.
I would imagine if Apple machines are all fixed at Apple, but $other machines are not necessarily fixed at $other, then $other’s rates should be even lower.
Storage isn't as much of an issue with Thunderbolt 4.
The connector exceeds what even the fastest NVME SSD can deliver and the form factor of enclosures are small enough that you can simply carry it everywhere.
Thunderbolt 4 is a fast port but a slow bus. It's effectively 4 lanes of PCIe 3.0. High-end consumer SSDs typically expect PCIe 4.0 x4, or twice as much bandwidth. Thunderbolt 5 is supposed to provide that once it's finally released, but by then PCIe 5.0 SSDs will also be out, doubling the bandwidth requirements again.
Perhaps, but it's being done for a real reason (beyond Apple's bottom line)--without sockets, Apple is able to achieve drastically higher memory bandwidth/latency at low power consumption, and the architecture is built around this.
Mitsubishi makes cars, electronics, cameras (Nikon), heavy machinery, and... canned tuna?!
(Actually they spun off their canned food division a few years back under the name Ace of Diamonds, which was then snapped up by some Thai company for a song. Nevertheless...)
Japanese keiretsus are weird, man. In Japan, 7-Eleven does banking.
Ajinomoto, who make [1] the "ABF substrates" mentioned in the article's discussion of DRAM selection for the M2 SOC, and also "HonDashi" and apparently many other brands of foodstuffs.
> We spend a lot of time criticizing Apple for their anti-consumer practices like monopolizing its repair ecosystem with parts pairing, engaging in psychological obsolescence, and lying to congress—among many examples of poor corporate behavior—but here’s one thing they’re finally doing that shows a lot of promise— the Self Service Repair program.
Whoever was on this team at inception and whoever is still running it today - you are an ember of what made Apple, Apple. Thank you sincerely. Truly, you all should be expert witnesses to the antitrust cases to show what exactly it takes to do what everyone is expecting to ‘happen overnight’ done excellently.
From time immemorial, Apple's new releases have only ever had incremental performance gains from the previous release of whatever model. It has always been this way, and it is true of the M1 and of the M2. What is mind-blowing about M1 is its efficiency, and that Apple switched platforms seamlessly while still incrementally increasing CPU performance. I don't understand why anyone expects things to change and to see a massive increase in performance at every model refresh when that has never ever happened. Yet at every new Apple release, there's always this disappointment from pundits and people who should know better that the new machine isn't exponentially more performant than the last model. What is causing this?!