Thank you ... nice to see the relative improvements. I had the Mac mini i3 w/o any eGPU ... the improvement to any M series chip was quite amazing ... hardly need a comparison when you think of the Intel versus the M series era ... but your table is proof that we have gained so much capability. Is there a Score per watt (to compare computational efficiency)?
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M3 iMac Rant
- Thread starter TrenttonY
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Maybe there is but I have not seen an actual chart on power consumption per use.
Just comparison between the M1, M2 and now M3.
Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max, the most advanced chips for a personal computer
M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max feature groundbreaking technologies that deliver dramatically increased performance and unleash new capabilities for Mac.
www.apple.com
The efficiency of the M chips continues to improve and I just like the silence with my base M3 and my lite usage. I am sure I could have kept my M1 iMac to do what I want but this M3 iMac seems a little faster and more efficient.
Yeah, it's a disappointing update all around. Simply throwing a new chip in wasn't enough when it needed other improvements.
It's a bit of a grey area, offering a new model of computer, but with existing peripherals? I suspect Apple will simply get their act together and add USB-C when the next iMac is released in a year or two (or 3)... unless sales are so low they simply give up on it. Would still expect the peripherals to get USB-C before 2026 either way.
The pro and max chips will generally consume more energy ... don't know about old max vs new max with battery life ... I don't own a laptop ... interesting, but haven't looked at those at all. I just thought that for my 'lite' tasks the regular M3 iMac will be faster than the M1 iMac ... or the M3 can complete more tasks than the M1 iMac in the same time. So, the new generation M3 iMac gives me more capability.
I have an M3 iMac and quite like it. I have several "lightning" cables and they even give you a new color coded one, so that is really only a "gotta bitch about something" problem.
Honestly, if all you do is the Internet, Mail, Messages and the like...all mostly consumptive things...you can't tell the performance difference between the former Intel iMac and the newer iMac. The 27", especially, remains a great machine. But the 24" is nicer than my old 21". Progress, man. You won't win the fight against it.
Honestly, if all you do is the Internet, Mail, Messages and the like...all mostly consumptive things...you can't tell the performance difference between the former Intel iMac and the newer iMac. The 27", especially, remains a great machine. But the 24" is nicer than my old 21". Progress, man. You won't win the fight against it.
My "new" M3 iMac ... my hybrid set-up ... the M4 Mac mini is using the iMac screen via Screen Sharing.
I agree about the 27" iMacs being beautiful machines and they still have great life. I picked up a 27" iMac 2015 for 150 bucks from an off-lease reseller. These machines are majestic for my use case and a bargain in my mind.
Yes ... I guess somebody could crack an iMac to the internal cable but to me it would be sort of stupid to ignore the use of basically the M3 and then the M4 for their individual processing schemes ... I wish to use the M4 for the batch AI training.