Ah yea, we all know that a real pro computer must be at least 5kg, made out of black plastic, have a really really poor ergonomy and fall apart each time you look at it weirdly.
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M2 is really just m1.1 (Update, I was wrong).
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Ah yea, we all know that a real pro computer must be at least 5kg, made out of black plastic, have a really really poor ergonomy and fall apart each time you look at it weirdly.
And the RGB lights, can’t be a pro computer without a wash of color!
It makes absolutely zero difference what Apple called this year's silicon revision. Mx, Ax, Wx, etc. are just marketing names. It's all Apple's silicon and they can call it whatever they want.
My advice would be to stop fretting over what's called what and just evaluate the hardware that's available when the time comes for a new computer. Only you can make the call as to when that is. Waste of time to be offended by naming conventions though.
My advice would be to stop fretting over what's called what and just evaluate the hardware that's available when the time comes for a new computer. Only you can make the call as to when that is. Waste of time to be offended by naming conventions though.
To be honest, the plumbing under my sinks looks nowhere this good, so props to those PC builders who make these custom solutions. Your example is a tad too gaudy for my taste, but to each their own.
On the other hand, rainbow cascading RGB keyboards, giant fins and vents in 2” thick laptops with swoops edges just look terrible compared to any Apple laptop, or even a Dell Precision.
when you will run Apple.you can call them whatever you want...for now, the marketing term is M2 and not what you want/think
This! It's all a marketing issue. M2 sounds way better than M1.5 and since it follows the A-series chip every year, just makes sense.
Cairo 😊Technically, Windows 11 is still Windows 7. Or is it Vista? I forget
And, with recent inflation, the recent price of the Air is about half inflation and they are unlikely to reduce the price below that.
You do know that the numbers in M1 and M2 are ordinal, not a scaler?
It is not a measure of any tangible quantity, it just indicates in which order the chips were released.
Not every SoC has to be a revolution. M2 is a solid update over M1, specially in graphics.
intel 8 years on Gen 5.7 then!
I don’t get why any of this matters. There’s literally no point discussing this stuff. If you want it. Buy it. If you don’t. Don’t. Who cares what the name of the chip is? It’s not like you will be sitting there typing an email saying “man writing this email is reminding me that this really should be an M1.1 and not an M2, because my typing is only 10% faster than before!”.
Jokes aside, it doesn’t matter. Buy what you can afford and what you need.
Jokes aside, it doesn’t matter. Buy what you can afford and what you need.
Hahaha I get the feeling some M1 owners really want to feel they’re not missing out on much. And yeah in reality one chip generation is usually not enough of a difference. So don’t worry, your old machine is fine.
2 sounds so much higher than 1 but you can essentially think of it as A14X vs A15X if it makes it feel better. Remember that is the naming scheme they used for this class of chips when they were only used in iPads.
Of course if you’ve followed the chip industry at all during the last two decades you know that performance and power efficiency increases don’t necessarily just follow a change of production node. Usually adapted architecture on a mature node yields the same kind of progress as when they switch to a new one. Like in this case. A solid 20%. I’d expect M3 to do a similar jump.
Another notable example was Intel Haswell’s power efficiency compared to the previous Ivy Bridge. Both 22nm. Architectural changes.
2 sounds so much higher than 1 but you can essentially think of it as A14X vs A15X if it makes it feel better. Remember that is the naming scheme they used for this class of chips when they were only used in iPads.
Of course if you’ve followed the chip industry at all during the last two decades you know that performance and power efficiency increases don’t necessarily just follow a change of production node. Usually adapted architecture on a mature node yields the same kind of progress as when they switch to a new one. Like in this case. A solid 20%. I’d expect M3 to do a similar jump.
Another notable example was Intel Haswell’s power efficiency compared to the previous Ivy Bridge. Both 22nm. Architectural changes.
20% boost is indeed not a bad step, but:
- does your M1 feel too slow for you?
- also, at least regarding the MBA: it still needs to show how well it can utilize that extra power under real conditions: at the moment i don't see it as totally unrealistic that it's theoretical advantages could be smaller than expected if it has to throttle harder under sustained load.
- does your M1 feel too slow for you?
- also, at least regarding the MBA: it still needs to show how well it can utilize that extra power under real conditions: at the moment i don't see it as totally unrealistic that it's theoretical advantages could be smaller than expected if it has to throttle harder under sustained load.
A bit, yes, but M2 Pro/Max/Ultra variants are expected. I think Apple just had to slow down the transition due to the pandemic and the chip shortages. Thus making it feel the M2 less meaningful than what it would have felt say, on the fall of 2021. We already passed the 2 year mark and the high-end Mac Mini and the Mac Pro are still on Intel. And the larger iMac is MIA.
Now we’re looking at 2024 for the M3, and the shipping times of current Macs are counted in weeks or months instead of days. I do however believe a 20% CPU increase along a 35% GPU increase every 18-24 months to be sufficient to keep Apple on top of things if sustained.
I think you’re treating transistor size as something akin to how we used to treat the bit-ness of processors. Does the move to a 3nm process mean Apple may be able to make performance gains? Sure, but it probably won’t be anywhere near the same ballpark as the gains they got from moving off of Intel and onto Apple Silicon. Remember how Intel’s Tick-tock process worked? They’d introduce a new architecture one year and then dye shrink it the next. There are performance gains from dye shrinks, but the M2 being 5nm instead of 3nm doesn’t make it any less of an M2. Plus, the M series appears to be on an 18 to 24 month cycle, not a 12 month, so the M3 likely won’t be out until 2024. (But if you’ve got an M1 Mac and you’re looking to upgrade this year to an M2 Mac, then clearly you’ve got more money than me [and possibly less sense], so maybe you could see about sending some of that money my way?
)Yeah, it doesn't affect how good or bad Macs are technically, but the Mx processor branding is a mess. First, we have the entirely avoidable "Mountain Lion syndrome" of "Pro", and then "Max"... and then "Ultra"... (Y'know, "Ultra" must have been on the roadmap when they picked "Max"...) and we've yet to see what goes in the actual Mac Pro (M2 even-more-Ultra-er?).
Using "pro" in the chip names at all is stupid when you're already using that to denominate models, and are going to have a MacBook Pro with a not-pro Mx...
Then we have using the processor generation as the main identifier - leading to the M2 being less powerful than the M1 Pro...
Then not having a suffix for the base Mx processor... so you can't just refer to the M1 Pro, Max and Ultra as 'M1 Processors'.
The problem is that what works for iPhone doesn't work for Mac - there's a new iPhone every year, regular as clockwork, and the latest iPhone range - even if it comes in regular/pro/max versions - always has the latest A-series processor, which is always an all-round better version of the previous A-series processor. The Mac just doesn't work that way - there are multiple models, aimed at different markets on widely varying release cycles.
The iPad is a bit of a complication but people aren't really agonising "do I get an iPad or an iPhone" the way they might ask "Do I get a MBA, 13" MBP or a 14" MBP...".
This is one case where Intel have the better idea, at least in general: establish i3, i5, i7, i9 and Xeon as part of the branding that just refers to the target application and stays the same from generation to generation. So "12th Gen i3 vs. 11th Gen i7" still makes it very clear that you're comparing a new entry-level processor with an older one aimed at more demanding applications. More expert buyers will always dig deeper into the specs, but the 'first glance' is much more informative.
(NB: that's as far as I'll defend Intel - it all goes a bit runny when you get into the huge number of different SKUs they offer under the name ' Nth Gen i5' - but then Apple doesn't have that problem with it's much simpler range of SoCs).