Rene Ritchie.. the voice of reason

[Zest28]

Max tech has always been a doosh

No he isn’t. Max Tech is the best Apple reviewer.

Without Max Tech:
- We wouldn’t have known that only the 16” MBP could handle the M1 Max with 32 GPU
- We wouldn’t have known that 14” MBP works up to the 24 GPU option
- Slow SSD in M2 MBP and MBA (which is important when dealing with memory swapping)


If it wasn’t for Max Tech, I now would have been stuck with a base M2 MBA that sucks at swapping which the $999 M1 MBA relied on to still get some descent performance for little money.

 

[DMG35]

This is exactly why I unsubscribed to a lot of tech videos. Too much click-bait nonsense. Although I don't subscribe to Rene anymore either.

 

[mxrider88]

Unwatchable. Slave of apple. Can’t say a thing against it.
It turns everything into a mess of nonsense words shoot out at supersonic speed for no reason.

I am very glad that max tech brought up the topic because apple can’t keep getting away with this behaviour. I wish someone would start calling out so loud also the software bugs that they didn’t fox after several years too.

 

[ApplesAreSweet&Sour]

I find twitter spatter rather trivial in general and inconsequential especially in the world of youtubers exchanging remarks but this exchange made me lol

Clearly I don’t think he does appreciate him since a lot of people felt his video was directed in part at max tech

Should be an interesting awkward dance

The cringe from Rene will be unbearable. If they got on camera together, I couldn't watch. 🫣

 

[MajorFubar]

I'm trying to visualise the cringiness (word?) of both Rene Ritchie and iJustine in the same video.
I don't know why I'm trying to visualise this: it must be evidence of my masochistic side.

 

[ApplesAreSweet&Sour]

Unwatchable. Slave of apple. Can’t say a thing against it.
It turns everything into a mess of nonsense words shoot out at supersonic speed for no reason.

I am very glad that max tech brought up the topic because apple can’t keep getting away with this behaviour. I wish someone would start calling out so loud also the software bugs that they didn’t fox after several years too.

Rene just mad that his spineless Apple promos, disguised as reviews and video essays, are not getting a lot of views by comparison to all the "toxic" channels.

Gee, I wonder why he gets so little traction? Is it perhaps because consumers want to learn something new about a product that the manufacturer doesn't disclose, because they want to go deep in both benchmarks and with real world tests?

Rene provides neither "hot takes", "real world application" tests, nor extensive benchmarks.

He really should change his channel.

 

[mxrider88]

Rene just mad that his spineless Apple promos, disguised as reviews and video essays, are not getting a lot of views by comparison to all the "toxic" channels.

Gee, I wonder why he gets so little traction? Is it perhaps because consumers want to learn something new about a product that the manufacturer doesn't disclose, because they want to go deep in both benchmarks and with real world tests?

Rene provides neither "hot takes", "real world application" tests, nor extensive benchmarks.

He really should change his channel.

Totally agree

 

[Tripps9000]

Wow I love apple products myself and I chose what I think works for me I found this to be so funny there are a lot of people who get angry over such small stuff if this laptop does not work for you send it back or take back to the store and get your money back 😂🤣😆

 

[jeremysteele]

How about "base model SSD is 50% slower"?

Unless you are constantly at 150% memory pressure and are pinging the swapfile with hundreds of MB a second (in which case, you should have thrown $$ at it for more RAM), or you have a habit of transferring TBs of data every second of the day - it won't make a single difference. The vast majority of disk usage these days will barely even test a SATA SSD that maxes out at 500 MB/s.

Sorry to break it to you - but under average use Mac OS isn't reading/writing hundreds of megabytes a second all day long. Opening a 2 GB binary? The speed difference is half a second.

Sure, your machine might cold-boot 3 seconds faster, but that doesn't affect your life, and if it does I would love to know what you do for a living.

In the real world, it will be faster for the average user for the majority of uses. That is all Apple cares about - will the average user be happier with it. If you need extreme speeds, opt for the high end macbook pro.

And this is coming from someone that abuses the crap out of his machines with high disk I/O tasks.

 

[iPadified]

Reviewers need to earn money (clicks) and therefore are not trustworthy. Reviewers are heavily biased and seldom have representative opinions for normal people or for specifics tasks outside of video editing. They can be entertaining but also really embarrassing.

 

[Ethosik]

Unless you are constantly at 150% memory pressure and are pinging the swapfile with hundreds of MB a second (in which case, you should have thrown $$ at it for more RAM), or you have a habit of transferring TBs of data every second of the day - it won't make a single difference. The vast majority of disk usage these days will barely even test a SATA SSD that maxes out at 500 MB/s.

Sorry to break it to you - but under average use Mac OS isn't reading/writing hundreds of megabytes a second all day long. Opening a 2 GB binary? The speed difference is half a second.

Sure, your machine might cold-boot 3 seconds faster, but that doesn't affect your life, and if it does I would love to know what you do for a living.

In the real world, it will be faster for the average user for the majority of uses. That is all Apple cares about - will the average user be happier with it. If you need extreme speeds, opt for the high end macbook pro.

And this is coming from someone that abuses the crap out of his machines with high disk I/O tasks.

Exactly this. My gosh this has been the biggest mountain out of a molehill I have ever seen. I can do video editing work still on my 2010 Mac Pro running SATA SSDs which BTW are running in SATA 2 speeds. Oh and that system has only 8GB which is slower RAM than what we have today. But it’s all sky is falling everywhere and saying how horribly “slow” a 1GB/s+ drive is. Meanwhile I max out on that one system at ~220MB/s.

SSDs even running in SATA2 have the same advantage of quick access times no spinning disk. And you are THIS UNGODLY UPSET due to swap performance, you need more than 8GB of RAM. Period. My mom doesn’t care about this stuff. That is who the target audience is.

 

[Turribeach]

Unless you are constantly at 150% memory pressure and are pinging the swapfile with hundreds of MB a second (in which case, you should have thrown $$ at it for more RAM), or you have a habit of transferring TBs of data every second of the day - it won't make a single difference. The vast majority of disk usage these days will barely even test a SATA SSD that maxes out at 500 MB/s.

Sorry to break it to you - but under average use Mac OS isn't reading/writing hundreds of megabytes a second all day long. Opening a 2 GB binary? The speed difference is half a second.

Sure, your machine might cold-boot 3 seconds faster, but that doesn't affect your life, and if it does I would love to know what you do for a living.

In the real world, it will be faster for the average user for the majority of uses. That is all Apple cares about - will the average user be happier with it. If you need extreme speeds, opt for the high end macbook pro.

And this is coming from someone that abuses the crap out of his machines with high disk I/O tasks.

Sorry but I think tou are missing the point. The deniers of the SSD issue claim that this does not affect real world use and most users won't notice. So here is my evidence:

42.5 GB file transfer from External SSD
M2 MBP 256GB: 2:17
M2 MBP 512GB: 0:23

Lightroom Classix 50x 42MP Export (with Safari open with 10 tabs)

M2 MBP 256GB: 6:49
M2 MBP 512GB: 3:13

5min 4K HEVC Export (with Safari open with 10 tabs)

M2 MBP 256GB: 4:23
M2 MBP 512GB: 2:50

Source:

So what part of these real world tests are toxic benchmarks? I use all of the above tools on my daily workflows and I see them as real world as they could possibly be. Also the performance difference is massive. I don't see how any of this is toxic.

 

[dizmonk]

Wow... sometimes I really don't get this board. One video about benchmarks and people are pissed... I don't get it...

 

[thadoggfather]

its funny how amidst all Rene's ramblings, he didn't even acknowledge that some people have a right to feel a bit ripped on the base M2 Air model especially if coming from M1 Air base: paying more for less.

Why would he care, he gets pampered by Apple with freebies and probably has a disposable income to feed the machine. Who really cares about peasant users, right?


Dude went at lengths to make benchmarking standards seem impractical with tons of word salad, when Apple could've just continued to use two NANDs like they had before.

 

[ascender]

Sorry but I think tou are missing the point. The deniers of the SSD issue claim that this does not affect real world use and most users won't notice. So here is my evidence:

42.5 GB file transfer from External SSD
M2 MBP 256GB: 2:17
M2 MBP 512GB: 0:23

Lightroom Classix 50x 42MP Export (with Safari open with 10 tabs)

M2 MBP 256GB: 6:49
M2 MBP 512GB: 3:13

5min 4K HEVC Export (with Safari open with 10 tabs)

M2 MBP 256GB: 4:23
M2 MBP 512GB: 2:50

So what part of these real world tests are toxic benchmarks? I use all of the above tools on my daily workflows and I see them as real world as they could possibly be. Also the performance difference is massive. I don't see how any of this is toxic.

Benchmarks are objective measurements of a computer's performance. So of course they're useful and informative as well as being-of interest to people like us. Nobody can deny the facts of benchmarks, but they sometimes don't tell the full story as it will translate in to real world use of a machine.

I think where they maybe become a bit irrelevant is when they are being used to measure the relative performance of a computer like the Air, which is targeted-at and typically bought by people who will never stress it to the point where they'll notice, or care how fast it does something.

I'd wager that your average MacBook Air buyer, especially of that base machine, will never ever use Lightroom, export 4K footage or have a 45GB file to transfer. And if they do, it will be once in a blue moon, when they won't care how long it takes.

If this was all happening on the MacBook Pro, then it would really be a big story. So it is a story, but I do think its more nuanced than is perhaps being portrayed in some of the YouTube videos in particular.

Thanks to @Turribeach for pointing out my mistake, those benchmarks above are for the M2 TouchBar MacBook Pro, not the Air.

 

[AndyMacAndMic]

Wow... sometimes I really don't get this board. One video about benchmarks and people are pissed... I don't get it...

It is about a bit more than one video. Did you see all the threads on MR about the M2 Air base model performance? Members are tumbling over each other. Polarizing stuff it seems...

 

[thadoggfather]

Members are tumbling over each other.

Not everything that's a polarizing Apple topic, especially calling out obvious cheapness on their side they have to shuffle and dance around with a nebulous PR statement, necessarily has to be an Aaron Sorkin melodrama.

It's people just discussing things, *you* have interpreted 'tumbling' and Rene has interpreted 'toxicity.'

'Some people are mean on the internet' - Sure, and welcome to the 1990's, enjoy your stay.

Anecdotally-
Doesn't bother me that it doesn't bother people that have base M2 Air don't care.
And doesn't make me care more, people that have the base M2 air that do care about these sorts of things.

if I did cave on a base M2 Air begrudgingly, life would go on. If I skipped this gen, life would also still go on. These products don't have emotions, and the people making them do but they get paid handsomely for what they do so I don't feel all that bad - they'll live. Plus most likely engineers didn't make the decision, but some suit did so they could have a nicer bonus this year. Would take 2 seconds to realize the implications of what they're doing, with one NAND instead of two.

 

[RaphaZ]

I don't know those Youtubers, but I don't rely on benchmarking to make my decisions. They are a factor, among many others.

But the most important thing is: Youtubers are unwatchable. They say the same crap, the same recycled arguments of enterprises. Their histeria with factors that doesn't matter (like if a Computer is 5% thinner or 5% darker, repeating benchmarks, etc) makes me crazy.

 

[Turribeach]

If this was all happening on the MacBook Pro, then it would really be a big story. So it is a story, but I do think its more nuanced than is perhaps being portrayed in some of the YouTube videos in particular.

Dude the benchmarks are for the MBP - aka MacBookPro!

 

[AndyMacAndMic]

Not everything that's a polarizing Apple topic, especially calling out obvious cheapness on their side they have to shuffle around with a nebulous PR statement, necessarily has to be an Aaron Sorkin melodrama.

It's people just discussing things, *you* have interpreted 'tumbling' and Rene has interpreted 'toxicity.'

'Some people are mean on the internet' - Sure, and welcome to the 1990's, enjoy your stay.

Anecdotally-
Doesn't bother me that it doesn't bother people that have base M2 Air don't care.
And doesn't make me care more, people that have the base M2 air that do care about these sorts of things.

if I did cave on a base M2 Air begrudgingly, life would go on. If I skipped this gen, life would also still go on. These products don't have emotions, and the people making them do but they get paid handsomely for what they do - they'll live.

You need to interpret this in context to the post I answered to someone who was thinking this is all about this one video.
I was not value judging and not shocked either. Just observing and trying to provide some context. You conclude a lot from my answer which simply is not there.

 

[ascender]

Dude the benchmarks are for the MBP - aka MacBookPro!

Sorry, I didn't notice! My bad.

 

[darngooddesign]

So what part of these real world tests are toxic benchmarks? I use all of the above tools on my daily workflows and I see them as real world as they could possibly be. Also the performance difference is massive. I don't see how any of this is toxic.

In the real world of a 256GB drives where you might have only half the drive free and want to make sure that you have around 100GB free for application swap, you're not transferring/exporting 50GB or more to your internal only to transfer it again to your external? Your exporting to your project folder which is on an external drive. That's why its not a real-world benchmark.

I asked MaxTech to do a video running benchmarks but with a fast external drive to see how much the internal SSD affects actual system performance. That is a realistic, real-world test.

PS: No one is actually denying that the M2's 256GB SSD is significantly slower than the M1's 256GB SSD.

 

[thadoggfather]

You need to interpret this in context to the post I answered to someone who was thinking this is all about this one video.
I was not value judging and not shocked either. Just observing and trying to provide some context. You conclude a lot from my answer which simply is not there.

'Users are tumbling over each other' is a bit hyperbolic, is it not?

That's what Rene would lead you to believe, that we are now in SSD Wars gearing up for the battlefield.

We're just customers.

 

[DavidChoux]

So let’s break this down: Some people are upset by the fact that certain configurations of M2 systems do not perform as well as similarly configured M1 systems.

Another group of people are just as upset that there is a group of people upset by that, besides it not having any direct impact on their opinion.

Fantastically put. And to add to that, the second group says the first group's concerns are invalid because "the target audience" won't care.

Remember folks, it's all about considering the needs of the "target audience" of the M2 Air, which arguably none of us here are yet we somehow know what they require.

 

[nastysailboat]

Exactly right.

It’s just a further extension of excuse making on Apple’s behalf to suggest that benchmarking should be dismissed or that it’s creating “toxicity” around the messaging and marketing for a product.

Rene seems to have no low point on how far he’ll go to carry water for Apple

Running a benchmark that doesn’t hit the different parts of the chip is like running a windows only app on a Mac and saying the Mac is bad cause it doesn’t run that app this is a different chip than an intel machine has why wouldn’t it require a different benchmark.