I get it, I update my iPhone every single year but we are outliers and they won't, or likely can't, update the products enough to satisfy those needs entirely... you just have to accept the updates are incremental. The M1 MBA to M2 MBA at least came with the design change.
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Apple M3 Pro Chip Has 25% Less Memory Bandwidth Than M1/M2 Pro
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I get it, I update my iPhone every single year but we are outliers and they won't, or likely can't, update the products enough to satisfy those needs entirely... you just have to accept the updates are incremental. The M1 MBA to M2 MBA at least came with the design change.
Better for Apple sales because even though IMO it's insane, some people do indeed upgrade laptops yearly, which phones and watches don't need to be either, but it also hits the holiday season which are generally significant sales periods. Back to school sales push/events sits 'in between' at summer to summer end/fall start, and in an ideal world they won't miss either due to 'in a few months there will be newer.'
It probably makes the most sense to refresh the MBA and not-really-a-pro lowest end MBP start of summer, and MBPs in fall to hit both seasons with 'new.'
I feel your pain. And I am perfectly fine with my M1-Max MacBook now and for years to come
Yeah, this is what happens when you force yourself to release something new every single year. This feels more like an M2S than an M3.
The entire chip design also changed, so wait for the real world tests.
Single threaded performance will also have a boost, which is always a welcome change even if multithreaded scores stay relatively similar on the non-Max models.
M2 felt like M1S to me. Does that make this M1SS? 😂 For real, the M1 family was too good for Apple, came at the perfect time for COVID sales bump. Now they have to deal with not only shrinking sales but also 3nm yield struggles. This release was bound to be underwhelming in some way or another, and they clearly determined it was financially better to go ahead and put it out there earlier than later. Good idea to stagger pro/consumer release, to let mass-market Air/Mini products with lower margins line up with improving 3nm yields (iMac being low volume enough to not matter, and they may have had thermal issues trying to stuff the M2 in it, so it was overdue).
The M1 was so far ahead of its time that it was ridiculous. Especially for single threaded performance, which Intel/AMD couldn't even touch at the time.
Now, Intel and AMD have really caught up on that front, and are even outperforming the M2 in single threaded performance on some of their higher end SKUs. Unfortunately for Intel, this comes at a pretty dramatic cost for power consumption, as they've relied on raising clock speeds through the roof to do it.
The competition really heated up for Apple in terms of raw performance (without regard to power consumption) though.
I disagree. All this shows is that this is an actually revamped architecture, not just a bump up of the M1/M2 design. It is the result of Apple's culture of allowing themselves to cut off legacy baggage, to achieve actual improvements. Users shouldn't give a rat's behind about specs that are internal to the SoC, what matters is the real-life performance of that SoC. If changing the architecture in ways that reduces performance in one area but improves performance in another area, is allowing better overall performance, that is a good thing.
A good analogy here is the objection to electric cars. Many people don't want to go electric unless they get EXACTLY THE SAME as their petrol car, plus some new advantages. They don't want to give up something in one area, to gain bigger improvements in other areas. Not allowing setbacks in one area to move ahead in others, would make electric cars worse than they are.
Based on this logic, people should be fine with 50GB/s of memory bandwidth because Mail and Safari together aint gonna use up too much RAM, right?
Reminds me of what Intel did back when they were way ahead of AMD, and grown complacent.
History may as well be repeating itself it seems. One leap forward, and you just walk slowly for the next leap, rinse and repeat.
Cant expect more from a literal bean counter leadership.
It's true. The power consumption can be a dealbreaker for mobile work, though. Anyone who works on battery power knows how massively better Apple Silicon laptops are, since they don't underclock one bit when unplugged, and yet they still get huge battery life. The PC laptop market is still at least 3-4 years behind in this regard, which is crazy.
But, when we're talking laptops, disregarding power consumption is daft. Try asking a Windows fan which laptop to buy to get a mostly silent laptop with good battery life, to run MS Office with decent performance. You'll just get a blank stare, and some mumbling about gaming. Heard a podcast recently where a highly competent laptop reviewer was trying to sum up which laptop to buy for various use cases, and the answer for "Windows laptop with good battery life", the answer was "yeah, you're F***ed".
How true, While some people whine, measurbate, and spout conspiracy theories about crippling models to drive people to buy more expensive ones, the rest of us will imply go about using our machines and not worry about meaningless differences.
A machine is about more than specs, it's about how it performs in real world use.
You're not wrong. Especially when you consider that these laptops usually can't deliver their max performance in sustained conditions, and often throttle on battery.
Intel still has a lot to catch up on in the laptop space.
I'm definitely on the give us more RAM team now that an iPHONE has 8GB
Yea, they probably should have upgraded the base to 12GB on the Mac IMO.
I'm kinda iffy as to why a traditional desktop/laptop SoC needs a "Neural Engine" anyway, but then again I have Siri turned off everywhere.
It's also used for certain image processing things, effects for video/video calls, text searching for photos, etc. Apple does find ways to make use of it, although I never really saw it as a game changer for the kinds of things I do personally.
Everyone's workflow is different, and everyone has their own pet peeve about something that Apple should add for free. I think it's fine that there is a base level that's too small for most people, and then you decide where to upgrade. Just realise that the actual price is higher than the advertised one. Very similar to buying a car, quite rarely should you really actually get the base model. My point is, stop complaining about the value of the model that doesn't have what you need, and start focusing on the value of the model that actually does what you want. It makes a LOT more sense to complain about the price of a product you want, rather than the price of a product you don't want.
And yet still M1 macbook 8gb bought at 800$ kick ass of everything in photoshop, capture one... People buy smart and what you truely need
The M1 14" MBP I got over a year ago will do just fine.
I got AppleCare+ with this one as I plan on keeping it for a while. I'm a casual user who likes to "future proof" my purchase. At least as far as laptops go.
Some people say AppleCare+ isn't worth it. That may be so. But on the items I plan on keeping for a while that have high costs to repair (MBP and Watch Ultra) I'm just buying piece of mind. Particularly since the coverage includes accidental damage. I'm more inclined to take my laptop out of the "comfort zone" because of it.
Since these are items I plan to keep for several years (3+) I think it's worth it.
What an absolutely logical read of the situation. Thank you for putting it out there. Because some of these conspiracy theories making the rounds are truly bizarre lol it seems so straightforward why App,e is making the comparisons they are. Why are some people unable to see it?
Was not the M3 expected to be a architecture step? My biggest concern when the more or less fantastic M1 was released that it would hard to scale things up. And it seems like so. Intel and AMD have made huge steps and are now a lot faster than apple. (But way less efficient). But this wont do in the long run, they need to keep up with competition.