But hey, if you’re upset that Apple isn’t making it so you can read my 1k text post 0.1 nanoseconds faster than the previous chip. Cry harder.
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M3 Pro Chip Barely Faster Than M2 Pro in Unverified Benchmark Result
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Or maybe you desire to scroll more than 6% faster through your Insta feed, so you can hate yourself even more that you don’t have the imaginary life that’s being forced into you.
Apple should make a chip 100% faster, so you can doom scroll and really do your self esteem in. Like a good little consumer
Apple should make a chip 100% faster, so you can doom scroll and really do your self esteem in. Like a good little consumer
It's really good marketing to upsell the M3 Max for people who're on the fence of the M3 Pro.
Here’s an interesting fact for you all. Do you know what totally trashes the speed increase from the M2 to the M3 when browsing the web.
By absolute magnitudes. A lowly raspberry pi connected to your router, that acts as your DNS server. A simple lockup table that resolves all adverts and tracker domains to null.
And that lowly little chip in the raspberry PI will be like you’ve upgraded not just M2 to an M3, but to an M10 and beyond, and will do so for EVERY device connected to your network..
And it doesn’t even have gigabyte ethernet to achieve all of this. It has 100 Ethernet.
It’s like upgrading every single device you own. AND closing the curtains so the nosey gits outside can‘t stalk you.
By absolute magnitudes. A lowly raspberry pi connected to your router, that acts as your DNS server. A simple lockup table that resolves all adverts and tracker domains to null.
And that lowly little chip in the raspberry PI will be like you’ve upgraded not just M2 to an M3, but to an M10 and beyond, and will do so for EVERY device connected to your network..
And it doesn’t even have gigabyte ethernet to achieve all of this. It has 100 Ethernet.
It’s like upgrading every single device you own. AND closing the curtains so the nosey gits outside can‘t stalk you.
But hey, if you want to brag you’re getting your adverts and being tracked 40% faster than you was yesterday.
Be my guest
Be my guest
Not true. TSMC jacked up the price of 3nm wafers by 25% over the cost of the previous 5nm process Apple was using on the M2 series. News stories had Apple rebelling against the enormous price increase, but they ended up sucking it up, seeing as TSMC is really the only game in town. Even Intel dropped their own fab processes to go with TSMC. The M3 Pro costs considerably more than the M2 Pro, even with fewer transistors. Yet they kept the price the same. With inflation, how does this increase margins, at least on the chip? We don’t know if they found cost savings elsewhere, but they certainly didn’t save any with their new SoC’s.
The main reason there are fewer transistors is because the chip was a complete redesign and e-cores need fewer transistors than p-cores. In prior M-series versions, you could see the pictures of the Pro and Max chips and you could tell the Pro chip was merely a Max chip with the bottom cut off where there would have been extra GPU cores since the Pro and Max had identical everything else. Now when you look at the pictures, they look nothing similar. Both chips are very different designs.
Watch it, many of us greybeards are Blackbeards that have survived long enough to gain lots of life experiences.
It’s a synthetic benchmark so not worth paying any attention to, need to wait for the REAL world speed comparisons in actual workloads to see how bad or good the difference is. Will be very interesting to see….
That can have more to do with upgrade cycles than perceived value.
Price per wafer increase of 25% vs a transistor density increase of 58% means that the cost per transistor went down. Which means that they are making more margin per transistor. So, no, it doesn't cost more.
I don't think we need to worry about Apple's margins since dumping Intel 😅
Apple has deliberately moved the performance of the M3 Pro closer to the base M3 and further from the M3 Max compared to the M2 family. Fewer performance cores and narrower memory bandwidth compared to the M2 Pro. That’s simply a fact. I’m not speculating about why. Prople can draw their own conclusions - and will, based on Apple’s behavior in recent years.
so let me get this straight, Apple makes the M3 Pro better performing while having less performance cores and less memory bandwidth and everyone is engaged and upset. We can also assume that the CPU will be more efficient too. If anything, Apple deserves applaud for pulling it off.
It isn't true at all.
The value of the Pro didn't exist in a vacuum, it was always relative to the base model.
The size of the performance increase moving to from the base model to the pro got smaller this generation.
That is disappointing.
See my last few posts. The value doesn't exist in a vacuum, it is relative to the base model.
Who said I was buying an M3 Pro? I got an M3 Max. I was never planning on buying a Pro and certainly wouldn’t upgrade from an M2 Pro. I wouldn’t have bought an M3 Max if I had an M2 Max either. I skipped that generation. Unless you’re a YouTuber whose job is to review Macs, people don’t upgrade their laptops every iteration. You must have missed the post where I said Apple was willing to forgo sales on the Pro just to fix it’s bad lineup, which was exactly the same thing Apple did with the new segmentation strategy on the iPhones versus iPhone Pros when they left the iPhone 14 with the same chip as the previous year with only a single GPU core added. They needed to fix the iPhone line which had them too close to each other, and knew their iPhone 14 line would suffer that year as a result. I’ll bet the iPhone 15 sales, as a percentage of iPhones sold, is a lot better now with better segmentation.
The M3 Pro is still better than the M2 Pro, even with a 6% increase in multicore scores with a host of other improvements, including GPU, neural engine, media engine, RAM amounts, and power savings. And TSMC is charging them a lot more per wafer. So I ask, what increased margins when Apple didn’t raise their price on the Pros? And what’s worse? Still faster, still same price. They didn’t make the M3 Pro worse. They just didn’t improve it as much as the M3 or M3 Max. My advice is to not buy an M3 Pro unless you’re coming from an Intel machine or an M1 Pro. Of course, I also advise against buying a significantly boosted M3 Max if you have an M2 Max.
In order to fix their segmentation problems, one of the chips has to get less of an upgrade than the others. The iPhone 14 suffered from really bad sales just as the M3 Pro likely will as well. Nobody’s praising the M3 Pro. They’re just explaining that Apple has to fix their line up problems, which they caused in the past by making the M1/2 Pro and M1/2 Max too close to each other. The consequence is that the M3 Pro is going to suffer in comparison. From a market perspective, it had to be done.
Next year, I had predicted Apple would do the same with the iPad line with people complaining about the Air being too close to the Pros, explaining why Apple released no iPads this year. And voila, a day later, MacRumors has an article that Apple is planning to revise their entire iPad line. Was I prescient? No, all I had to do was to see what Apple was doing with their other product lines and know they had to fix similar problems with the iPad line. Next year, one of their iPads may end up suffering poor sales due to the rebalancing of their line.
They did not need to decrease the value of the Pro in order to do increase product differentiation, this is your post hoc justification and not objective fact.
They increased the value of the Max by adding 4 P-cores... adequately differentiating it from the Pro, the Max already offered double the GPU power of the Pro so it was already very well differentiated in all other areas.
Isn’t this really aimed at Intel users or M1 users? It’s not like a person needs to upgrade their $3k laptop ever processor iteration do they? I expect them to only be marginally faster each time.
More people are being interested in how/when Apple will embrace gaming than people actually realizing it’s a difficult feat because they keep being closed as a platform. Game developers and studios won’t bother at all until Apple starts doing the heavy lifting.
They’ll just keep throwing sand to your eyes about gaming being the focus and do the bare minimum.
He‘s not right about increased margins. Did you forget that TSMC jacked up the price of 3nm wafer over the 5nm wafer, going from $16,000 per wafer to $20,000? Analysts estimated the cost of the A17 Pro to be nearly double that of the A16. You can probably expect the cost of the M3 Pro to be significantly higher than that of the M2 Pro. An 8% reduction in die size isn’t going to offset a 25% increase in costs.
I don't think this Apple did this deliberately. They are just throwing on some Apple marketing on their top notch logistic skills so they can please the shareholders. That's all.
The M3 Pro is probably crippled (performance wise), because that's the best they can get out of TSMC. This might change if the newer N3P fabrication process will be available. But right now they seem to throw anything they can get their hands on into M3 Max CPU's.
I really don't understand why Apple keeps doing this. Either take gaming really seriously, or just stop mentioning it. They have been flirting with gaming for ages. I recall John Carmack on an Apple event 15 years ago.
Now I know, on iOS you could say that gaming is a big succes. But it's no way on par with PC and console gaming. What would REALLY make sense ro me is some kind of a partnership with Nintendo. Nintendo gets to use M3/M4/Mwhatever processor technology, and in return macOS gets some of the Nintendo titles running natively and exclusively on a Mac.