It's worrying that they are shying away from specifying generational improvements or at least comparing to it's competitors. The "fastest Intel MacBook" is not really the competitor for an M2 MacBook Pro, it's a predecessor. But I'd rather hear about generational improvements from M1, especially because both Intel and AMD seem to be making great strides in the low power space lately.
It's no secret that Apple's M2 series processors are a pretty minor improvement over the M1 series. Expect much bigger improvements in the M3 series which will likely be using TSMC's 3nm process (and then probably only minor improvements again for the M4 series).
It seems that Apple's ridiculously impressive consistent year-on-year gains up the M1 were in large part possible because they were behind the state of the art. Now that they've caught up with Intel and AMD we should probably expect the same slower more gradual improvements from Apple that we see from the other companies.
Yes, the year over year improvements were 90% just the tsmc node changes. But the ridiculous (and IMO amazing) performance per watt is a mix of iOS/macOS and their chip design. Those efficiency cores are unmatched, paired with the right scheduling from the OS.
The M2 is underwhelming as its the same 5nm as the M1 was.
But rumors say the M2 pro and max are on the 3nm node. And it took so long for the release, as 3nm was delayed.
Apple has a monopoly right now on 3nm, which is a shame. But if we only got tsmc to fire on all cylinders because apple stuffed them with money, then so be it.
In the beginning I thought the “performance per watt” thing was just folks who want Apple to be better clinging to a stat that made it look like that was the case. But in late 2021 I was long overdue for an upgrade, so I got an M1 Max MacBook Pro and holy hell, now I get it.
The battery lasts stupid long. Like, the fact that I can bring this thing on a plane or train without worrying if they’ll have working electric sockets is huge. The fact I can stash this thing under a desk with no power available and have it run graphics-intensive projections for a 3-hour theatre show is huge. The fact that I can achieve all that with zero throttling (I turned on High Energy use and never turned it off) is huge. The fact that I can achieve all of that with basically no fan noise is nonsensical.
Like, compared to the 2020 Razer Blade (RTX 2070 Max-Q) I use for work, it’s like a completely different class of device. My Razer Blade spins up like a jet engine under load, requires a cable if I’m going to do anything intense for an hour, underclocks from ~4.4GHz to ~1.5-2.5GHz when on battery (seemingly no way to disable this), and really only beats my MacBook for tasks that specifically require an Nvidia GPU.
> underclocks from ~4.4GHz to ~1.5-2.5GHz when on battery (seemingly no way to disable this)
digression: I believe there's no way to disable that because the laptop's battery is physically incapable of reliably supplying the necessary amperage at those higher clock rates. It's an 80 watt-hour battery for a laptop that needs a 200W+ power adapter. The battery can't drain that fast even if it wanted to.
Yea, I upgraded to an M1 Pro and it's truly amazing. I used to always look at benchmarks and always want to upgrade to the newest thing that was coming out. Now I have a laptop that feels like it just works. It doesn't get hot, I've never heard the fan, and just so many of the typical worries/concerns just aren't there for me anymore.
Yesterday, there was an article about Intel showing off a "35 watt" chip that was benchmarking better than last year's 125 watt chip. Except, you go into the comments and people note that it'll draw 107 watts for short periods of time - probably just long enough to get good benchmark scores.
The magic of the M-series processors is that they have really great sustainable performance and without needing to draw power and create heat like Intel's. The Razor Blade machines are amazing in how they deal with the amount of heat generated with their liquid cooling and everything (it's quite a design), but as you note it's still a jet-engine sounding machine that requires being tethered to power.
One of the big things that Apple showed off when introducing the M1 Pro/Max was the idea that you could be a creator doing your job and no longer feel like you were tied to a power outlet. Photoshop from a park or edit video wherever you are: you really don't need more power than you'll always have with you.
As I said, I bought the M1 Pro and specifically upgraded to the 8 performance core version of it. I'd always bought the high-watt Intel processors for my MacBook, not the paltry 15W Intel parts. I had a 2020 MacBook Pro with 2.3GHz Core i7 (28W, 10nm) and I'd regularly have it get really hot, the fan often wasn't too loud but it was always a constant drone, and things felt slow.
My next machine is going to be a MacBook Air. I feel like I'm using nothing on this machine. I have 8 performance cores and 2 efficiency cores, but it just feels like there's no point to having that much CPU. It's a really crazy feeling for me. Yes, more performance will be useful for some people, especially people who do video editing, graphics, etc. But damn does all my work never even come close to stressing this thing - something I'd regularly have a problem with on Intel's greatest drawing a lot more power and making a lot more heat just a year before. Intel has made some strides since then and I'm happy that their newer processors are doing well, but for the first time in my life it just feels like I don't care.
I might grab a 3nm laptop from Apple when those come out, but I'm not anxiously awaiting them. I might just wait for whatever comes after TSMC's 3nm process. I am kinda excited that I can go to a MacBook Air.
Stories like yours made me upgrade my home computer to an iPad Air 2022. It’s basically an M1 laptop with a touch screen, and when you pair it with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, and attach it to an external display, it feels like a full pc.
The hardware is basically equivalent, but unfortunately that's far from the case with the software. It's definitely useable as a home computer if you mainly browse the web or use office apps. But there's a lot of software that just isn't supported on the ipad. It would be pretty useless for me as a software developer.
Correct, it’s not a good tool for programmers, but many other jobs it’s a great tool: photo organization and editing, video editing, note taking, learning and playing music (connected to a guitar), writing and dictating texts (Dropbox paper), creating texts and presentations (ms office or pages/keynote), reading news (browser, Flipboard, get pocket), watching videos/Netflix/prime, controlling music on the HomePod mini, banking, home control (control thermostat).
The only reason I still have a laptop is software development.
I use the slightly older 14” macbook at work and since I’m always in different meeting rooms, and only at my desk for half the day I charge it like I charge my phone. If I notice it’s low, I charge it when I go for lunch or whatever.
Well in that case: whether it’s the CPU, or the way CPU/GPU/RAM are tightly coupled on the SoC, or the 4Kish MiniLED screen (which never seems to be dim), or some sort magic glue between the battery cells… Apple is doing something spectacular, and other manufacturers need to figure out how to do it too.
Most signs point to it being hardware-related. Without any Mac-specific optimization, the Asahi folks got fairly long runtimes out of the CPU (which makes sense, ARM has low idle draws).
Frankly though, I don't want most manufacturers to make ARM machines. While Apple is allowed to monopolize the latest TSMC silicon, it's completely pointless trying to compete with them. May as well focus on delivering a great x86 experience with AMD and switching to something more open like RISC-V when the time comes.
I agree with your sentiment for the most part. I would love to see someone take RISC-V or Power seriously to compete in the consumer space with an ISA. However, I don't think Power is quiet cheap enough and Risc-V just isn't there yet. So I'd like to see someone throw their hat seriously in the ARM ring until Power becomes cheap enough or RISC-V gets there. Plenty of people producing Intel/AMD machines, we have too many there.
I think the ChromeOS world has done a pretty good job of getting there. Yes, it's not quite as impressive as the Powerbooks, but they're able to get surprisingly close with a much smaller budget.
> But the ridiculous (and IMO amazing) performance per watt is a mix of iOS/macOS and their chip design.
Not disputing this, but even Asahi Linux without GPU acceleration has pretty much whole-day battery life on an M1 Air. I'm not sure how well their kernel manages scheduling on the different cores but I suspect the vast majority of the perf/Watt is on the actual hardware.
According to Apple's press release^1, at least the M2 Pro is fabbed on a 'second generation 5nm' process. Since the power/cores/performance claims seem to be sub-linear going to the M2 Max, I'd expect it continues to share the same node.
It's worth noting that TSMC is looking to exploit Apple's demand for the hottest silicon. The latest reports suggest that they'll cut the prices to lure in others, so Apple will be forced to ante-up or stay on an old process: https://www.techspot.com/news/97269-tsmc-may-cut-3nm-wafer-p...
It's fascinating to think about. If the Mac is currently a low-margin product, Apple might be forced to stay on one node until the better silicon becomes cheap enough to use in production. If Apple doesn't play their cards right, TSMC could shanghai Apple in the exact same way Intel got stranded in the sea of process enhancement.
I'm not so sure that's true. Linux seems to handle these SoCs fine as well. The secret sauce in that regard seem much more in the very large amount of co-processors rather then the OS itself.
Apple’s M1 chips already offered improvements compared to their previous generation Intel chips, and Intel hasn’t exactly been innovating in the last 2 years. By all accounts, they have been ahead of Intel, at the very least.
I’m not exactly sure how Apple was “behind the state of the art” and has caught up. Can you explain?
> Intel hasn’t exactly been innovating in the last 2 years.
What on earth are you talking about?! Alder Lake was a huge step up for Intel, and Raptor Lake has improved things more than I would have expected as well. Before Alder Lake, Intel's CPUs honestly sucked. AMD still seems to have a modest competitive advantage in terms of efficiency and battery life (making AMD not that far off from where Apple is in hours of practical battery life when doing something other than looking at a static screenshot for hours on end), but Intel makes up for that with performance, and as I recall, Alder Lake is still more efficient than what Intel had before in laptops.
Sapphire Rapids is also a huge innovation compared to what Intel had been doing for years in the server market. Intel has also been introducing some really interesting GPU products now to bring competition to AMD and Nvidia, but it will probably take another generation or two to iron things out. If none of that is "innovation", then I don't know what is!
The last 2 years are the first time Intel has really been innovating in the past 5+ years!
When M1 came out, it was awesome. Since then, Intel and AMD have released processors that are significantly more competitive, while M2 was a mediocre step forward. I appreciate my M2 MBA, but Apple Silicon needs a huge upgrade with M3 to remain competitive.
For a lot of legitimate use cases, there are at least half a dozen Windows laptops coming out right now that I would instantly pick over a MacBook, and the same would not have been said 2 years ago.
> For a lot of legitimate use cases, there are at least half a dozen Windows laptops coming out right now that I would instantly pick over a MacBook, and the same would not have been said 2 years ago.
Would you mind listing a couple? I'd prefer to buy a Windows machine for my next laptop, but I've been SO burned by hibernation bugs, CPU throttling, battery issues, etc. And I've had an OG 13" M1 MBP from work for the past year or so, and the performance and battery life have been unreal to that point that I'm very much considering one of these 14" M2 MBPs for myself.
> Would you mind listing a couple? I'd prefer to buy a Windows machine for my next laptop, but I've been SO burned by hibernation bugs, CPU throttling, battery issues, etc.
Those have a huge tie in with the software, so I wouldn't expect hardware innovation to help.
CPU throttling and battery issues aren’t necessarily related to software at all, but “battery issues” is very nebulous, and I expect (problematic) CPU throttling to be less of an issue with the more efficient chips and cooling solutions that we have now.
I didn’t bother addressing those points because it’s hard to know where things were going wrong without a lot more detail.
Sleep issues are definitely a hallmark of Windows Modern Standby, but one might hope that will be addressed soon. Supposedly Microsoft is looking into it now.
For me, there are basically two "categories" of new Windows laptops that I'm excited about: innovative form factors, and compact laptops with RTX 40-series GPUs. As much as Nvidia has been charging ridiculous prices for desktop GPUs, it looks like laptops using their GPUs aren't going to cost crazy amounts this year, and DLSS 3 Frame Generation should be a huge benefit for laptop gaming.
In terms of innovative form factors, look at these:
- This dual screen (dual OLED, even!) concept seems like it would be challenging to pull off, but every hands-on review I've seen was really impressed with it, and I can totally see use cases for this: https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/5/23518872/lenovo-yoga-book-...
- The Acer Swift X 14 comes with a nice 120Hz OLED screen and an RTX 4050, so it seems like a nice, balanced laptop, but I wish it had the option for more than 16GB of RAM: https://youtu.be/va3OmoYHKYs?t=298
- The Flow X13 now comes with up to an RTX 4070 and 165Hz display and up to 32GB of RAM, and this is significantly more compact than the Swift X 14, but the display is not as nice as an OLED. This is also a convertible, so you can use the 360 degree hinge to make it into a tablet: https://rog.asus.com/laptops/rog-flow/rog-flow-x13-2023-seri...
- The new Zephyrus G14 is probably the one I find most exciting, offering a 165Hz MiniLED display that's almost as nice as OLED, as well as up to an RTX 4090 (Laptop) and 32GB of RAM, but it is about the same size as the Swift X 14, so not as small as the Flow X13: https://www.techradar.com/reviews/asus-rog-zephyrus-g14-2023
A number of these also have user-upgradeable RAM, SSD, or both. I really like OLED, so it's great to see so many options for that, and MiniLED is going to be significantly more common this year than it was last year. It would be nice if my M2 MBA offered OLED or MiniLED.
Thanks for sharing all these! I'm in total agreement with you that there's an insane amount of cool stuff and innovation happening in the OEM laptop/tablet/hybrid space.
But I'm still really concerned about the consistency of hibernation and sleep so I'm not taking a searingly hot machine out of my bag at 1% battery life. Or the weird quirks of some new hinge or keyboard design that I have to live with for 4+ years of owning a machine.
I'd honestly take half the specs and double the thickness/weight if it meant that my keyboard felt like a keyboard and that I can confidently close the lid at any time and re-open it back to whatever I was doing.
I don't _like_ Apple. But they can do that. And I don't even have to compromise on anything except using macOS (which I can tolerate).
> I’m not exactly sure how Apple was “behind the state of the art” and has caught up. Can you explain?
The M1 was when they caught up. They were behind the state of the art (of laptop/desktop chip performance) with their A series chips starting with the A4. They gradually caught up over the course of several years to the point that when they released the M1 chip (which was really not that different to the A15) they were slightly ahead.
Yeah, as the other person says, it’s weird to combine A-level chips which were mobile only (minus that short stint where they put it in a Mac Mini before the M1 was ready) with the M-level chips.
Sure, they’re all “Apple Silicon” but the chips should be compared to their equivalents, M-level with Intel/AMD and A-level with Snapdragon/Exonys. We don’t really compare Snapdragon to Core any other time, as they both optimize for vastly different things.
I would also argue that Apple is continuing to make big boosts in their A-level chips compared to their mobile counterparts.
I thought the M-level and A-level chips are pretty much identical CPU cores (just different numbers of them). As such it seems reasonable to me to compare single-threaded performance between A-level and Intel/AMD (making allowances for power envelopes). And indeed one could compare Snapdragon, except they're quite far behind.
> They were behind the state of the art (of laptop/desktop chip performance) with their A series chips starting with the A4
...but A series chips were never intended for laptops or desktops? And by all accounts, the A series nearly always out-competed comparable QC Snapdragon chips.
They weren't... but evidence is that that's only because they didn't have competitive performance for those applications. Once the performance caught up they did choose to put them in laptops and desktops.
I think A chips were quite considerably ahead of low-power Intel chips (e.g. the i7 in MBA) several years before M1 was released. But I guess they didn't believe they could scale it up to compete with higher power i7/i9s shipped in pro macbooks.
I mean that's true. But that doesn't prevent comparing performance of natively compiled ARM binaries in A chips vs natively compiled x64 binaries on x64 chips.
20% improvement is substantial even if not worth an upgrade. Add the same for next iteration and it the gap gets sizeable and harder to resist. I'm actually reliefer i can keep my less than a month old 16 inch since it was 700 euro cheaper than a new M2 pro and not worth returning for 20% improvement
> It seems that Apple's ridiculously impressive consistent year-on-year gains up the M1 were in large part possible because they were behind the state of the art.
I was nodding along about M2 being a minor bump over M1, but I'm not even sure what you mean here. Apple previously used Intel processors - how is Intel not caught up with Intel?
Apple was key to many many computing technology adoption - USB, Thunderbolt, even early WiFi. Now that they're making their own desktop processors and entire SoC, I think they can move in ways that are not constrained by Intel or other players. It's possible we see the laptop market move more like the smartphone market.
You’re right in that TSMC / Samsung were for many years behind the state of the art, and by extension so was the technology that Apple was using. Apple’s CPUs defined the state of the art for mobile though.
And now of course TSMC / Apple haven’t caught up, they have surpassed comparable offerings from Intel.
> Now that they've caught up with Intel and AMD...
I'm an enormous fan of the M series. But there is an interesting consequence of a couple of fundamental design decisions.
The M series has huge memory bandwidth but look at its focus on I/O. It reminds me of one of the design decisions of the Alto (memory bus was 3/2 the screen refresh rate, a mind-boggling decision for its time). The fact that the M1 can go in an ipad is insane, but is enabled by the way the M series was designed. Their design for long battery life while drawing onto directly connected displays is unmatched.
However I believe that same decision has hobbled the M1 in a way that may make a Mac Pro version "impossible" (i.e. too much change to be worth doing). M series are optimized to dash rapidly then quickly go to sleep.
I feel the Intel and AMD guys are still thinking of sustained performance, a holdover from the desktop world and its mainframe, or at least minicomputer roots. Psychologically their mobile chips look to me like scaled down desktop machines.
If my belief is right, AMD and Intel aren't really catching up on mobile, while Apple will probably never produce a Mac Pro worth buying (for me they never were, but I'm sure there are people for which they were a great deal).
Apple's CPUs do very well in sustained performance. They fit 8 high-performance CPUs and 2 efficiency cores into a 40w peak power envelope while hitting peak clockspeeds (that 40w includes all the IO, mostly idling GPU, idling NPU, SSD controller, etc). Based on M2, their new chip should be 3.4-3.5GHz with 4 efficiency cores that get 30-40% better IPC all within that same power envelope.
AMD puts 96 cores into a 360w TDP (not counting spikes that go higher than that) at 3.6GHz. Apple could most likely fit 72 high-performance cores and 36 more efficiency cores into that same 360w TDP.
Given that AMD's chips require much higher clockspeeds to hit the same total performance (nearly 5GHz for Zen 3 to match a 3.2GHz M1), the final product from AMD would likely be quite a bit slower overall.
I believe the real reason for the Mac Pro not hitting the market is their insistence on unified memory. At that size, unified memory and controlling latencies explodes in complexity.
Even worse, the Mac Studio already appeals to most of the higher-end market meaning this $20-50k system probably doesn't have very many buyers either. They could sell such a product in the server market, but they left that market years ago and the reinvestment costs would be massive and very high-risk.
Yes but people buying current gen Mac Pros probably value upgradability and want/need discrete GPUs. Just try to imagine how much would Apple charge for 256GB based on M1/M2 pricing.
Apple was never competing in the same space as Intel and AMD. From the beginning, Apple made ARM-based RISC chips. Intel and AMD used their own x86-64 architecture. Apple's was great for iPhones because of power efficiency. They were able to improve their chip designs so much that they smoked the competition away with the release of their first fusion chip (iPhone 7 I believe) and have been miles ahead of everyone else since.
They then scaled up performance so much that a desktop ARM chip was made. That had never been done on a large scale before. So, no, imo Apple was never behind Intel and AMD, they were never competing in the same space.
You seem to have a short memory. In the beginning, the Apple I had a 6502.
The Macintosh ran on a Motorola 68000. Power Macintoshes used PowerPC chips.
Then came Intel Macs, they started with 32bit CPUs, then 64bit Intel chips. And finally, we got ARM Macs from Apple.
They did say 20% faster CPU and 30% faster GPU than M1 series in the same thermal envelope.
Intel doesn’t really seem to make any strides in low-power designs, they just throw more mid-power cores at the problem to achieve better multi core efficiency as well as manipulate power brackets. Shirt-time (benchmark-relevant) consumption of Intel chips is insane and their published TDP figures are utterly meaningless. AMD has very scalable cores and Zen4 performs admirably at low power, but AMD too falls victim to power inflation to keep pace with Intel.
They do give some numbers vs M1s, but most people actually considering buying this will be coming from the Intel ones (no-one replaces their laptop every year) so it makes sense to labour those in the marketing material.
Traditionally Apple's marketing compared against the previous generation, not multiple generations old hardware.
It seems tacky to me because the M2's competition isn't really 2019 Intel MBPs- it's laptops using modern Intel/AMD CPUs (the M2 may still be better than those, but if that's the case those are the benchmarks they should be giving us)
I think the reason for the big push is to get people to switch over. At this point, they are still supporting some Intel macs and needing to try to keep some parity with previous macs is probably just a cost sink now with how their future trajectory is going. Get all the people off the intel macs ASAP so they can drown intel support in the bathtub.
Granted, I don't think they will 100% kill intel. My guess is, it just won't be public. They will keep a few internal machines that MacOS is minimally functional on so if they ever want to switch back, they already have a base. Would be my guess.
Apple is not particularly concerned with competition, it’s all about the upgrades. If you are still on Intel Mac, the numbers look great for an upgrade.
Less is more. I'm guessing the % of M2 customers that are upgrading from an M1 is less than 10%. If ~75% (my guess) of target customers for M2 are Intel mac owners, Apple should focus on them first. They can then do more targeted ads w/ relevant stats to win each subgroup in the remaining 25%
I didn't buy an M1 because I didn't want the "first" Apple processor. Maybe it's just my bias from seeing lots of Intel competitors come-and-go? I don't really care about specific improvements, I just want all the minor things that the engineers didn't get to finish the first time around.
In my case, living in the US, we all do our taxes in the first three-ish months of the year. Last year Turbo Tax told me they wouldn't support my 2013 MBP this tax season, so I decided to wait until fall 2022 and get whatever Apple released. Fall 2022 came without a release, so I've been biting my nails: Turbo Tax won't run on my MBP, and I don't want to upgrade to an "outdated" M1.
(As you can infer, I'm planning on using my next MBP for ~10 years.)
I know it's already purchased so not a big deal, but if anyone is in a similar situation, there are other free and/or well-featured tax processing tools.
I use FreeTaxUsa, which is entirely online and free for your federal return. I think it may be $15 or so for state returns, but I live in Florida so it's not really something I think about.
Any half decent state also offers free online tax returns. If all you are is an employee with stocks/bonds in a brokerage that gives you the necessary forms, it is super easy.
It does some calculations itself, and some you have to do yourself, but it is very easy to use and file online, and get a pdf return to save for yourself.
Any half decent state also has had free online tax return filing for some time now.
I've been using TurboTax for almost 20 years. Yes, I could save a few bucks by doing it a different way, but I learned how to do it one way and I don't want to learn how to do it a different way.
The bigger issue has to do with how US politics work. "What makes sense," is what most countries do: the government sends you a completed tax return and you just verify that it is completed correctly. Due to lobbying, the US government is prohibited from telling you how much tax you owe. Instead, what happens is the government does your taxes for you in secret, and if the amount you pay is significantly different from what they believe you owe, the government sends you a bill with a suggested payment. You don't have to actually pay the amount that they suggest, but if you don't, you better have a darn good reason to explain why the government calculated your tax wrong.
In general, it is to your benefit to err in your favor. The interest rate on a "tax mistake" is extremely low. But, if you accidentally overpay, the government will very rarely send you a refund automatically.
“ MacBook Pro with M2 Pro features a 10- or 12-core CPU with up to eight high-performance and four high-efficiency cores for up to 20 percent greater performance over M1 Pro.”
Performance will be comparable to top Zen4 mobile CPUs at 45W TDP, just that Apple will use 50-60% less power in single-core and 20-30% power in multi core. That’s about it.
Edit: I no-longer hold this opinion as I missed that there's already been an M1 MacBook Pro and it should be comparing to that.
For as long as I can remember, Apple has compared new products to the previous product. And it is a more sensible approach than picking some arbitrary competitor from a huge collection of possible options, because it gives a fixed frame of reference, one of which many of the target audience are aware of. 6x faster than the previous model is very good marketing.
Honestly, I think this is also partly them patting themselves (or their silicon team) on the back for a job well done. And as everyone else has said, their competitor is the fastest Intel/AMD chips if they're trying to win market share.
