Additional copies of the things they do have. Lower tier chips don't have 16 CPU cores, 40 GPU cores, and 128 GB RAM on a 400 GB/s bus, because they are deliberate compromises. The differences between the M3 and the M2 or between the M3 Pro and the M2 Pro tell more about what the bureaucrats think will sell than about generation-to-generation improvements.
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Did Apple rush an 'inferior' SOC to market ?
- Thread starter ProgRocker
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He's probably had to delay his first purchase several times because of news and rumors that the next revision of a given thing would be better.
The target audience for these chips is primarily Mac users still on Intel. If you have an M1 like me, then you could consider it. But even I am not feeling the need to upgrade. Pro and Max versions of the M1 and M2 should not really be thinking about this unless you know you can get a good ROI out of it. Of course, if you have the money and it's not a burden and you want to treat yourself, you are more than welcome to do so. M6 or M7 is looking like my time when I will be in the market.
I would say you didn't bother watching the video and created your own reaction bait post instead.
Just don’t wait for reviews ever. Less stress and more energy to enjoy what you have purchased. No one should seek for purchase decision validation anywhere and to anyone. By that I mean if you have decided to buy something, just buy.
Reaction bait…
Being true to oneself doesn’t mean one wants reaction bait. Besides, MacRumors (fortunately) has no function to “push” posts with more reaction scores to the top. So why bother?
M3 does appear to be a botch job. An M3 Pro that stagnated or went backwards is embarrassing. They shouldn't have released that chip unless offering it as part of a reduced price system. Upgrades that don't improve upon the prior generation are a disaster.
Fantastic upgrade or mild upgrade? Why would anyone with an M1 need to get this? It's not that much of a jump.
At this point, M3P is like the M3 Plus if you need the extra display or extra TB port.
But it's not an engineering issue, it's just a marketing shenanigan to push you towards the Max.
They could have released an M3P as perfect middle point between the M3 and M3M. They just decided not to.
From the lineup it's also missing the 16" model with M3P and 1TB and you have to BTO or upgrade. Simply unexcusable.
Nobody will buy the M3P with upgraded 36GB RAM and gimped 512GB SSD.
We have multi-core CPU improvements of almost 2x over M1 Max and most likely 3x improvement in rendering performance. There are plenty of users for whom these are substantial upgrades.
Things need to be consistent. As of the end of 2023, if you need a new computer....NEED is the keyword here people....you will be getting an M3 chip and will achieve the maximum support life currently. Why would you be in favor of someone getting an older chip? So what if the improvements are small. Ray-tracing alone is a nice benefit (speaking as someone who doesn't like ray-tracing even). And it seems they are pushing the Max and hopefully the Ultra harder this generation which I LOVE to see.
If the base M1 is good enough for everything a basic user needs, why do we get SO WORKED UP about the small improvements? What we need to do is focus more on the Max and Ultra side of the chips. M1 and M2 still don't compete too well with the likes of a 13900k in some ways. Apple NEEDS to be better in the high end and NOT in the low end.
If the base M1 is good enough for everything a basic user needs, why do we get SO WORKED UP about the small improvements? What we need to do is focus more on the Max and Ultra side of the chips. M1 and M2 still don't compete too well with the likes of a 13900k in some ways. Apple NEEDS to be better in the high end and NOT in the low end.
I agree with all of that. My previous comment was about the M3 Pro chip, not M3 Pro MacBook Pro, by the way... though, it is fair to say the M3 Pro MacBook Pro stagnated in the same way its chip did.
It's for views. Everyone said "WAIT for M3 when its 3nm...THEN you will be happy!!!" Now they are saying to wait again!
I did not get past the first 30 seconds to know I didn't want to watch anymore.
The M3 Pro is almost certainly not stagnating because of the process - it is far more likely that Apple wanted to increase margins so the old Pro had to go. By creating more space between the Pro and the Max and shrinking the space between the M3 and M3 Pro and by reducing the transistor count of the Pro they maximize margins in all directions.
A sad state of affairs that the business guys would request a gimped "Pro" chip. I think you're probably right, as depressing as that is. Why even have an event to announce fast chips, when 1/3 of the chips mentioned didn't even slightly increase over the fairly uninspiring M2 family? Just to announce some models now come in black?!
Going back a few years, did anyone expect Apple to manage only a ~20% increase on the M1 Pro by almost 2024??
For the non jaded amongst us, Apple just introduced the most powerful *portable* (meaning it retains full speed on battery) computers out there.
These things are going to be everywhere in Video Villages, and there simply isn’t another high end machine out there that can handle medical imaging the way the top MacBook Pros can…and on the go to boot.
For the people these machines are targeted to, they’re simply staggering.
I know a lot of the spec nerds here seem to be upset that their gaming hobby isn’t the end all and be all of what workstation class laptops can do, but that’s your problem. These things are mightily enticing for the *workflows* they’re actually targeted at.
I am fairly certain that code compilation workloads will be the same speed or slower on the new M3 Pro when compared to the M2 Pro. There are going to be plenty of workloads where the M3 Pro is no faster than M2 Pro and that is because of Apple’s choice to move the Pro SKU down in the overall performance stack.
M2 -> M3: 20 -> 25 Billion transistors (20% increase)
M2 Max - M3 Max: 67 -> 96 Billion transistors (28% increase)
M2 Pro -> M3 Pro: 40 -> 37 Billion transistors (9% decrease)
Edit: While per wafer costs went up relative to N5 the N3 node is less expensive per transistor, by reducing the number of transistors but keeping the price the same Apple increases their margins on the Pro
…buy the specs you need for the job. That’s what buyers are supposed to do.
We can strategize online about product lineups, naming conventions, etc, but it doesn’t mean a damn thing to people buying computers to do a specific task.
If you need the Max, who gives one iota of **** about the base or Pro variants?
Additionally, let’s see what the actual usage results are at the end of the day. Benchmarks are meaningless as SoC’s and UMA have destroyed the notion of purely looking at theoretical single thread/mutithread benchmark results.
Is there any other machine out there than can offer up to 128 GB of GPU memory?
We aren’t actually arguing that people shouldn’t buy a machine to do a specific task, or that the these aren’t going to be good chips… that is not what we are talking about so your post mostly misses the point.
Also, Geekbench 6 multi-core Clang benchmark performs code compilation, a real world task that is a very good estimate of the improvement vs the previous generation that people who use their machine for code compilation can expect - we use benchmarks to estimate generation over generation improvements and look at specific sub-benchmarks to see if that works out in favour or not.
If quantitative results don’t matter to you I really don’t know what to say, your kind of just arguing that the newer generation will be better at everything across the board because it is newer…
They reduced transistor count by 3 billion transistors on the Pro, that is the complaint here, the base M3 and M3 Max both increased transistor count leading to straightforward increases in GPU and CPU performance.
While the M3 Pro will have higher single threaded performance without question it is unclear how much better it’s multi core and GPU performance will be vs M2 Pro. The M3 Pro has a smaller memory bus which will hurt the GPU, and it has two fewer performance CPU cores which will hurt multi-core.
We don’t have benchmarks yet but until we do our best guesses based on Apple’s claimed 15% single core and 30% multi core improvements are that the M3 Pro will at best equal the M2 Pro in multi-core performance.
Edit: as you’ll note from my signature, I do care quite a bit about the pro as that is the machine I use currently and was thinking about upgrading to. Unfortunately if the M3 Pro doesn’t offer substantial increases in multicore vs the M2 Pro then there is no point and I’ll probably wait for M4 Pro.
Edit 2: People going from M1 -> M3 are going to see a fairly substantial 30% single core improvement and about 31% in GPU improvement (plus all the other bells and whistles). People going from M1 Max to M3 Max see a huge improvement. If the M1 Pro to M3 Pro is about the same multi core improvement as M1 Pro to M2 Pro, what is the point?
I guess I just don’t understand the mindset of *regular* users who have some sort of desire to upgrade their computer every 2 years. I get it if you’re doing *work* that pushes the limitations of the device, but the vast majority of people here seem to be upset that there’s not enough of an improvement year over year to justify upgrading from an M1 (let alone the bizarre notion of coming from an M2!).
I ask those people, if not being used in a professional context…why in the world do you people buy thousands of dollars worth of phones and computers so often?
Maybe I’m a different mindset? I buy a computer every 6+ years, and because I get that much use out of them I don’t think twice about buying the config that makes sense for that. Same with my phone. I’m on a new 13 mini because this is my phone for 5+ years (I’ll replace the battery myself at some point).
Apple is well aware of the longer upgrade cycles of Macs, and that’s who they’re explicitly targeting right now. Moving to Apple silicon from Intel is a massive leap forward in any context, so I truly don’t understand those here who are upset that Apple hasn’t pulled off generational uplifts that just isn’t possible in the entire industry.
But back to the topic of this thread, any notion of “rushing” out a new CPU is absolutely nonsense given the timeframes it takes to get chip fabrication up and running. This floor plan was settled well over a year ago…
I ask those people, if not being used in a professional context…why in the world do you people buy thousands of dollars worth of phones and computers so often?
Maybe I’m a different mindset? I buy a computer every 6+ years, and because I get that much use out of them I don’t think twice about buying the config that makes sense for that. Same with my phone. I’m on a new 13 mini because this is my phone for 5+ years (I’ll replace the battery myself at some point).
Apple is well aware of the longer upgrade cycles of Macs, and that’s who they’re explicitly targeting right now. Moving to Apple silicon from Intel is a massive leap forward in any context, so I truly don’t understand those here who are upset that Apple hasn’t pulled off generational uplifts that just isn’t possible in the entire industry.
But back to the topic of this thread, any notion of “rushing” out a new CPU is absolutely nonsense given the timeframes it takes to get chip fabrication up and running. This floor plan was settled well over a year ago…