Youtube sites like this tend to always hype the results of their “tests” whether those are reaslistic scenarios or not and to exagerate any small differences into “catastrophic“ headlines. It gets more clicks that way.
Last edited:
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Did Apple take a wrong turn?
- Thread starter Wando64
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
They rushed the M2, plain and simple.
They needed to wait for 3nm to become available.
The cheap SSD problem could’ve easily been solved by not penny pinching.
Seems like the entire M2 Air lineup is a quick cash grab.
They needed to wait for 3nm to become available.
The cheap SSD problem could’ve easily been solved by not penny pinching.
Seems like the entire M2 Air lineup is a quick cash grab.
I don’t think M2 was rushed, but it’s clearly a minor improvement over M1. Apple didn’t want to still be on the M1 going into 2023, so they released M2 which takes the 5nm process about as far as it can go. If you already have an M1 mac it‘s not worth going to M2 unless you really want the redesigned Air.
Agreed with this. What Apple did with the M1 was an epiphany, but that can't be expected EVER M chip. They still have a sizable lead over their competitors.
However, I may stand corrected on my conclusion. Someone else mentioned a different load setup where the CPU and GPU were both fully loaded which caused the fan to run at maximum.
Proposal:
Why don't you test Cinebench and 3D Mark together?
Please report afterwards.
Why don't you test Cinebench and 3D Mark together?
Please report afterwards.
Well the M2 MBP is not an M2 Air. That laptop has not yet been released. Given that the A15 the M2 is based on was announce almost a year ago, I don't think you can say the M2 was rushed.
Isn't that a bit of a stretch? As you know, when you say "workstation" you're talking about the highest-end mobile CPUs, like (on the consumer side), the i9-12900HK. That CPU is comparable (in performance—not, of course, efficiency) to the M1 Max; the M2 simply isn't in the running.
You'd also need to get an M1 Max to get connectivity and multi-monitor support comparable to that of an H-series workstation.
Sure, for single-threaded tasks it's as fast as a workstation, but this whole discussion is about multi-threaded tasks (i.e., tasks where you can see throttling).
GB doesn't have average results for the i9-12900HK, so I just did a search for both the i9-12900HK and the M1 Max, scanned through the first page of results, and took the highest from each. I did this to make their sourcing roughly comparable (that's why the scores you see here for the M1 Max are a bit higher than GB's average scores).
Last edited:
Meh. Some chip generation are going to be a lot faster while others will be a little faster. The M2 is great for people still on Intel while people with M1s should just wait for the M3s. Computers aren't phones, you don't have to upgrade ever other year.
You have to take this channel with a grain of salt. He posts some good info but doesn't give context to much of it and seems very confused about other stuff. It's clickbait IMO... I don't see real world scenrios duplicating this. If your job is a professional benchmarker then I don't think the M2 Air is a good choice.
Absolutely nonsensical. I won't waste a minute more to elaborate what I meant by that.
Just to toss out a possibility… If the workload needed to lean a lot on swap (very possible with a system only having 8GB of DRAM for both CPU and GPU processing 8K footage) there’s added heat from the storage subsystem — many of us know SSDs can get plenty toasty. And with Apple having the storage controller as part of the SoC, at least some of the extra heat is flooding a very concentrated and otherwise already very heat soaked area.
Cooling is a losing battle for (probably) every ultra thin laptop.
These stupid click bait youtube videos aren’t worth their salt.
Nobody who is serious about 3D rendering is using a slim laptop.
Real world usage is the only test information that matters.
That's the problem with those videos, they run benchmarks but provide zero guidance or wisdom about how real-world those benchmarks are. Similarly, no one who is importing and exporting a lot of or big files, tasks which would be impacted by the slower SSD, is doing it to a tiny 256GB internal drive which is probably mostly full already. They're using a fast external SSD.
Don't buy an MBAir expecting to push it like the 14"MBP just so you can save a bit of money.
Yep. $300USD is a small price to pay for all of the 14's benefits.
Agreed. I'd pay that for the better screen alone, never mind the faster processor, better ports, magsafe, fast charging...
In a RAM starved situation when the machine is thrashing I expect the added heat from the storage subsystem to be offset by the CPU cores running cooler when they are spending much or most of their time waiting for the storage to page in the data they are waiting for.
I was referring to tasks dominated by single-core performance and where caches/RAM bandwidth plays a larger role than multicore throughput. For example, many of my colleagues primarily work with R, LaTeX and Excel. Very few of their workloads take advantage of the parallel throughput offered by M1 Max or a 12900HK. But I can assure you that an M2 MacBook Air will compile a large non-trivial R markdown based paper faster than any 12900HK machine.
Under my normal use it did, so you have to kind of qualify that statement a bit more.
I could overheat an 16/1TB M1 Air when editing a batch of photos in Lightroom. And that is normal use.
Last edited:
I missed this in the other post -- it throttled much more than 10% in my usage. IT frequently was over 100C, which is about where your 10% is, my MBA got as high as 118C with major throttling. I had to get rid of it...
Apple's options are underclocking the system, make the laptop larger and/or get better cooling.
Yes, it doesn’t matter if a 256/512 GB drive is slower. The drive is too small for any serious pro who is going to load their Macs down will big projects.
Besides that basically no app can really saturate 7GB/s and most apps can’t even saturate 2GB/s.