Are Apple Silicon Macs ‘fast enough’?

[Feek]

At the moment, yes.

In ten years time, the current models probably not, no.

 

[Joe Dohn]

At the moment, yes.

In ten years time, the current models probably not, no.

Depends on your workflow, really.
If all you do is to edit simple MS Office documents, even PCs from 15+ years ago are just fine (with something scaled down to run on them, of course).

 

[toobravetosave]

Since apps and the like will continue to become more bloated and awful we will continually need more processing power

But for 99% yeah it’s already fast enough

 

[ChrisA]

This is the thing, most commonly used software, even running a large language model locally is not that intensive. It’s just referencing and computing stuff from a 1 GB data file of response weights. Computing an LLM yes, that requires most of a data centre, but that’s not something most people will do. Image generation is more intensive I’ve heard.

Of course it depends on your specific use case, but I’m talking about the experience of most of the casual users who browse, do their email, their taxes, work a bit in an office application, maybe do some video conferencing. Interfacing with AI is part of that but so far it hasn’t been heavy lifting. The M1 seems to handle it all with ease, and we can expect the M3 to be 50% faster.

It just seems that the average experience of computing reached the stage of “fast enough to do useful work” many years ago, and now has reached “fast enough to do almost everything smoothly and responsively”. Unless you’re doing heavy lifting like compiling large codebases or rendering big images from a 3D app, it seems like we’ve plateau’ed.

So is there still going to be a need to upgrade? Because in years to come that is just going to result in a lot of processing power sitting idle, being called upon in very short bursts of a few seconds. Arguably that’s already the case.

But "the most commonly used software" changes to take advantage of the improving hardware. For example, I bought a PC in 1982. It was an actual IBM PC with a monochrome screen. It could not do graphics, just 24 rows of 80 characters, in green. on a black background. It had an 8-bit CPU about 16K or RAM and two floppy disk drives. The computer was FAST. It reacted instantly to any input and I did not spend much time waiting for most things.

The reason it was fast is because it did not have to keep a graphical screen outdated, It did not have to render fonts, it did not have to respond to mouse clicks. Then as small computers got faster they started adding things like multiple windows, a mouse, and on-screen font rendering. THis made it possible for non-experts to use computers but I doubt it made creating a document any faster.

What changes is we think of new ways to use computers. The faster hardware opens up new ways of using the computer. This is a slower process than most people think. 1982 was 40 years ago. Change happens on that kind of time scale. 10 years is too soon to see it.

So what will computers be doing in 20 years? Look at robotics, AI and self-driving cars.

I'd guess that in 40 years, the biggest computer you own will be in your car. But cars are parked 90% of the time. Some smart person will figure out how to use all the computers that are in parked cars.

Faster computers will enable fundamental differences i how we use computers, Not trivial things like "my MS Word document opens faster." No, years from now MS Word will offer to write the document for you and then let you review and comment on it. Your car will offer to drive itself to the store and pick up groceries. The computer in your phone, on your desk, in your car, and in the cloud will all be blurred and most non-experts will never know which is which.

 

[Joe Dohn]

No, years from now MS Word will offer to write the document for you and then let you review and comment on it.

Years from now? Are you living under a rock or something?

Humor aside, just look at Microsoft Office Copilot. This is ALREADY possible.

Granted, Copilot is only available to a few select users right now, but GPT recently released a plugin that generates files for you. You can ask it to generate anything automatically, and even specify the layout. It's the "advanced data analysis" plugin.

If you are more savy, you can develop a Microsoft Word add-in that integrates an AI that runs locally (e.g, Llama, Vicuna), that generates content for you and controls your computer to do the formatting. However, you would require a more powerful PC for that.

It's still impressive that you can even do anything at all with a very powerful PC, because anything at this scale, if possible at all 5 years ago, would require a supercomputer (the ones not even a medium-sized company would be able to afford).

 

[MayaUser]

At the moment, yes they are, even the M1 family...but after the release Monday of M3 family, i think M1 family will no longer be fast enough

 

[Bodhitree]

Faster computers will enable fundamental differences i how we use computers, Not trivial things like "my MS Word document opens faster." No, years from now MS Word will offer to write the document for you and then let you review and comment on it. Your car will offer to drive itself to the store and pick up groceries. The computer in your phone, on your desk, in your car, and in the cloud will all be blurred and most non-experts will never know which is which.

Its true there was a point where computers became small enough to become smartphones, which was a combination of shrinking components and increasing speed and lower power usage. Similarly there was a point where the most common computer became a laptop. Maybe there is something to Humane’s AI Pin design, after all.

But I think that “my MS Word document opens faster” is a non-trivial metric by which to measure progress, it does matter in the pleasure of using the computer, the smooth responsiveness of the thing. I’m currently trying to convince my father, who is 75, of the benefits of a new and faster computer, but he doesn’t seem to value this aspect of owning one.

 

[Joe Dohn]

I’m currently trying to convince my father, who is 75, of the benefits of a new and faster computer, but he doesn’t seem to value this aspect of owning one.

And that is the key issue. To many people, a computer is just not very important. Maybe your father's computer is fast enough and he would like to prioritize something else in his life other than having documents opening ever-so-slightly faster.

 

[pshufd]

Yes. My constraints the past few years are the number of monitors supported and RAM.

 

[theorist9]

You're assuming users will always find ways to push and use that extra power, but that's not really true. Many, MANY users will stick to basic tasks (e.g, the write email-use office-chat triad).

The only way I see regular users pushing it would be if computers came with built-in AI and did the AI tasks locally (so the AI will do everything for them), but even that can only go so far.

I would risk saying your average mom and pop users have reached a plateau a LONG time ago.

You're quoting my point no. 2 and, nope, there I'm not assuming power users. Instead, I had in mind routine usage.

I have an 8 y.o (2015) midrange PC laptop, and it's slow for basic tasks with current versions of Windows and MS Office. One sees similar effects running older Macs on the latest supported OS.

As I said, this is because older computers aren't sufficiently powerful to run current OS's and apps well, even for routine use.

 

[Joe Dohn]

You're quoting my point no. 2 and, nope, there I'm not assuming power users. Instead, I had in mind routine usage.

I have an 8 y.o (2015) midrange PC laptop, and it's slow for basic tasks with current versions of Windows and MS Office. One sees similar effects running older Macs on the latest supported OS.

As I said, this is because older computers aren't sufficiently powerful to run current OS's and apps well, even for routine use.

My daily driver was from 2014, but it was pretty good for image editing, office and light gaming (no AAA, unfortunately). I've only recently maxed out the RAM because I needed to handle very large files.
Turns out even a somewhat okay-ish, old graphics card can make a difference, and an SSD is critical. It can make the computer seem like new.

I've decided to leave it aside for now because the ROG Ally does everything better, but I only feel a difference with heavy tasks. With light tasks (browsing, 30+ to 60+ page DOCX files), it's hard to notice anything at all. I was even running Windows 11 there, which is not supported by default, and there are no issues with speed.

 

[richmlow]

Two points, both fairly obvious:

1) It depends on what you're doing. For instance, I do a lot of work in Mathematica, a program that is typically used interactively--you might try using it to solve an equation, look at the result and, based on that, decide what the next step should be. I often run into evaluations that take several minutes to complete. For such tasks, ideally you'd want your computer to be at least 100x faster (!), so your wait time would be 6 secs instead of 10 minutes.

2) Even if you are fine with how fast your computer runs now, you always want them to be getting faster. You might argue there's no practical point in caring about, say, the fact that next year's machine is 20% faster, since that's not a difference you're going to notice. So you might say they should devote resources to something else. But you need to think about the long term. If we took that attitude every year, then 10 years from now we'd be where we are now. By contrast, as @JPack pointed out, software is always adding capability (and, yes, bloat as well), which means that you need computers to keep getting faster just to keep up. That seemingly insignificant 20% yearly increase gives you a computer that's 1.2^10 = 6x faster a decade from now. And trust me, you are going to want that extra speed to run the next decade's software. If you don't believe me, try running today's software (both OS and apps) on a computer a decade old. It works, sure, but it's hardly optimum.

I completely agree!

I also use Mathematica to help in my research. My Mathematica programs which run for hours on today's Apple Silicon computers could never have been run on a Mac, one decade ago.


richmlow

 

[klasma]

The question is, will there be another such an ah-ha moment, when computers double in speed again compared to the M1? Or are we now truly at the point where more speed doesn’t really matter anymore?

I suspect the opposite will happen: Software inefficiency will catch up to the hardware again, so at some point you’ll be back to your 2011 state of just “fast enough to do things”.

 

[theorist9]

My daily driver was from 2014, but it was pretty good for image editing, office and light gaming (no AAA, unfortunately). I've only recently maxed out the RAM because I needed to handle very large files.
Turns out even a somewhat okay-ish, old graphics card can make a difference, and an SSD is critical. It can make the computer seem like new.

I've decided to leave it aside for now because the ROG Ally does everything better, but I only feel a difference with heavy tasks. With light tasks (browsing, 30+ to 60+ page DOCX files), it's hard to notice anything at all. I was even running Windows 11 there, which is not supported by default, and there are no issues with speed.

It sounds like this is a case of YMMV. Included in this is that different people have different tolerances for responsiveness, including with routine tasks.

 

[pshufd]

You're quoting my point no. 2 and, nope, there I'm not assuming power users. Instead, I had in mind routine usage.

I have an 8 y.o (2015) midrange PC laptop, and it's slow for basic tasks with current versions of Windows and MS Office. One sees similar effects running older Macs on the latest supported OS.

As I said, this is because older computers aren't sufficiently powerful to run current OS's and apps well, even for routine use.

I use a 2015 iMac 27 for office stuff and it's fine. I run production work on an M1 Studio. The computer cost $200 - my other option was to get a fourth Dell Ultrasharp 4k 27 inch monitor for $600 and this solution works a lot better as it came with 32 GB of RAM so it saves RAM on the Studio. I can run everything on an old iMac except for production and my Windows VM.

 

[theorist9]

I use a 2015 iMac 27 for office stuff and it's fine. I run production work on an M1 Studio. The computer cost $200 - my other option was to get a fourth Dell Ultrasharp 4k 27 inch monitor for $600 and this solution works a lot better as it came with 32 GB of RAM so it saves RAM on the Studio. I can run everything on an old iMac except for production and my Windows VM.

That 2015 iMac is a desktop machine so it's going to have the GPU power to handle modern OS graphics in a way that a 2015 laptop won't. But it will feel slower eventually as well. Also, what OS are you running?

I have a 2014 15" MBP and, even though it's a BTO with the fastest available processor, it feels slow even for routine office work compared to my 2019 iMac. Like I said earlier, this may be a case of YMMV, since different people have different tolerances for slower responsiveness.

 

[pshufd]

That 2015 iMac is a desktop machine so it's going to have the GPU power to handle modern OS graphics in a way that a 2015 laptop won't. Also, what OS are you running?

I have a 2014 15" MBP and, even though it's a BTO with the fastest available processor, it feels slow even for routine office work compared to my 2019 iMac. Like I said earlier, this may be a case of YMMV, since different people have different tolerances for slower responsiveness.

I'm running Monterey on it.

I also have a 2014 MacBook Pro 15 that's loaned out to a relative for work and a 2015 MacBook Pro 2.5 Ghz AMD Graphics that's the backup for my 2021 M1 Pro MacBook Pro 16. I am shopping for a 2019 or 2020 iMac 27 to replace the 2015 but I'm not in any hurry. I basically like to let the price come to me. Apple releasing new iMacs kills the used prices of the old ones.

 

[theorist9]

I'm running Monterey on it.

I also have a 2014 MacBook Pro 15 that's loaned out to a relative for work and a 2015 MacBook Pro 2.5 Ghz AMD Graphics that's the backup for my 2021 M1 Pro MacBook Pro 16. I am shopping for a 2019 or 2020 iMac 27 to replace the 2015 but I'm not in any hurry. I basically like to let the price come to me. Apple releasing new iMacs kills the used prices of the old ones.

Yeah, great prices can be had on 27" 19/20 iMacs right now. And if you get the 2019 you can upgrade the SSD, since it's slotted (requires openng up the machine, but my local campus bookstore, which is an authorized Apple service ctr, did that for ~$100). I put a 2 TB WD SN850 in mine. But you may not be able to run a supported OS on them starting a few years from now.

One downside of the 2019 is you can't stream Netflix 4k on it, because it doesn't have the hardware to implement the required anti-piracy restrictions. I believe you can with the 2020, though.

 

[pshufd]

Yeah, great prices can be had on 27" 19/20 iMacs right now. And if you get the 2019 you can upgrade the SSD (requires openng up the machine, but my local campus bookstore, which is an authorized Apple service ctr, did that for ~$100). I put a 2 TB WD SN850 in mine. But you may not be able to run a supported OS on them starting a few years from now.

I'm fine with running unsupported operating systems. I have 2009 and 2010 iMacs as well and a 2007 MacBook Pro and a PowerMac G5.

 

[theorist9]

I'm fine with running unsupported operating systems. I have 2009 and 2010 iMacs as well and a 2007 MacBook Pro and a PowerMac G5.

Unfortunately for me, given my heavy usage, even with Office my 2019 i9 iMac seems slow compared the the M1 Pro MBP I've got on loan. But replacing my iMac with AS, with it's 27" Retina screen, 128 GB RAM, and 2 TB SSD, would run me $6,800 at retail. That's b/c you currently need an Ultra to get that kind of RAM. Hopefully we'll see that level of RAM on the Max with M3 or M4.

 

[pshufd]

Unfortunately for me, given my heavy usage, even with Office my 2019 i9 iMac seems slow compared the the M1 Pro MBP I've got on loan. But replacing my iMac with AS, with it's 27" Retina screen, 128 GB RAM, and 2 TB SSD, would run me $6,800 at retail. That's b/c you currently need an Ultra to get that kind of RAM. Hopefully we'll see that level of RAM on the Max with M3 or M4.

I don't need that much compute, RAM or local SSD space but Apple charges an arm and a leg for that stuff. An Intel Mac Pro would be possible but I don't know that used market. Probably still not cheap.

 

[theorist9]

I don't need that much compute, RAM or local SSD space but Apple charges an arm and a leg for that stuff. An Intel Mac Pro would be possible but I don't know that used market. Probably still not cheap.

Most of my stuff is SC, and thus an Intel Mac Pro would actually be slower than my iMac.

 

[Joe Dohn]

It sounds like this is a case of YMMV. Included in this is that different people have different tolerances for responsiveness, including with routine tasks.

But my device is not unresponsive at all. With my SSD, it pretty much feels brand new (except for AAA games, of course).

 

[theorist9]

But my device is not unresponsive at all. With my SSD, it pretty much feels brand new (except for AAA games, of course).

Yes, for you. My experience is different, even for routine tasks. That's why I said this looks like a YMMV situation .

 

[MajorFubar]

In years to come all this will be irrelevant because computers won't exist as we currently know them where the heavy lifting is carried out locally and determined by the specification of your computer. Computers will just be windows (pardon the pun) to a virtual machine that you access through terabit internet, OS and all. Processing power, storage capacity and RAM will be things you subscribe to on monthly or yearly plans; your machine itself will only need whatever is the absolute bare minimum processing power required to shuttle huge amounts of data to and from the internet. Playing AAA games will require no greater graphics-ability or number-crunching ability on your local machine than your TV currently needs to stream and display a 4K movie.

Sounds far-fetched? Not really. Try telling someone in 1993 that by 2023 features in your new car will be enabled or disabled remotely over the internet by the manufacturer depending on whether you subscribe to optional services. The future of computing (probably of everything) will be wholly subscription-based, to keep you in the honey-trap of perpetual payment.