You keep saying "slower". MHz slower? How are you measuring this supposed difference?
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Other Starting to appreciate some bits of the Intel-Mac era.
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LOL... I know. 1984 user here. 40 years! Gosh I'm old now. I was at a time when I can actually call an OS Engineer at Apple and talk. Some sent me patches to fix an OS issue with System 6, 7, 8, 9... No more. Plus we usually bashed Microsoft for "copying" the Mac. Then INTEL chips later on. Now on MR it seems people just like to bash each other. LOL!!!
This is not what I was talking about. You are picking these things in isolation and out of context. I am talking about e tire systems. Once you have a concrete goal, things change.
In Apples case, the goal is designing a system comprising a bunch of heterogeneous accelerators. Each of these need to have fast access to data, ideally to the same data (so that you can use them simultaneously). This means you need a fast memory system. And this system not only has to be fast, but also affordable, energy efficient, and small enough to fit into a compact laptop. Are you aware of any compact, affordable modular memory solution that can deliver hundreds of GB/s data bandwidth? Because I am not.
The problem is not new of course, and various solutions exist. There is HBM2 (expensive and not the most power efficient), GDDR (extremely power hungry and requires massive parallelism to function well). There are server mainboards with many RAM channels and replaceable RAM (very expensive, very large, very power-hungry). None of these work in a laptop.
Check out the new Nvidia Grace+Hopper designs. Intel has also started offering HBM2 as part of the CPU package in latest server chips (still combined with standard RAM). As compute density demands go up, we will need faster memory, which is not compatible with modularity.
I have to admit that I have never read any license created by Apple, and I'm not a lawyer.
When I see that people can swap the same part from the same model of Mac, then I can call them the owners of this computer.
On the other hand, people that can't swap even a motherboard without Apple's aproval are users that rent computers from Apple.
In both cases, they can sell them, but I'm not sure if M Mac users have ever owned them.
In my view, Apple shiffted from selling to renting computers. I think it is a more serious issue for us.
I hope that one of you is a lawyer and it can explain it.
It's more important than anything in this discussion.
When I see that people can swap the same part from the same model of Mac, then I can call them the owners of this computer.
On the other hand, people that can't swap even a motherboard without Apple's aproval are users that rent computers from Apple.
In both cases, they can sell them, but I'm not sure if M Mac users have ever owned them.
In my view, Apple shiffted from selling to renting computers. I think it is a more serious issue for us.
I hope that one of you is a lawyer and it can explain it.
It's more important than anything in this discussion.
Slower as in both less data moved per unit of time and longer wait to get the data after request.
Mx Ultra for example offers 800GB/s of memory bandwidth. A PCIe 5 attached memory unit would only offer around 60GB/s (my number might be off by a factor of 2)
Why PCIe connection? You're making weird comparisons to make a point that isn't valid. Socket the same RAM they currently solder and directly connect the die to the socket. It's the SAME RAM whether it's on die or socketed. Unified memory is not related to being soldered or not. You seem to be blurring together different concepts, intentionally or otherwise.
So in terms of speed, as the actual speed as measured in GHz is the same, you're offering up bandwidth? What application does insane bandwidth have on a MacBook? Even Apple are reducing it in their newer devices as it doesn't serve a purpose to the overwhelming majority of applications that might run on a personal computer.
We all did it
And laughed at jokes like these.
Now take a look at our Mac OS. It's not funny anymore
I would say that you own it, it’s just disposable, like a razor or a toothbrush or cellular telephone.
I think this is a great line of inquiry. And I agree that there should be a solid legal framework clarifying these issues. Right now ownership of things like computers or cars can be a really messy concept.
To illustrate how complicated this can be, let's look at a laptop. You are purchasing a device, but essential part of its functionality is comprised by a software that you do not own — various firmwares and controller microcodes, the OS, the interfacing protocols etc. You also do not own the internal encryption keys. Now, I believe you are right that the idea of ownership would at very minimum require that you can swap parts between the same models. And I think you can actually do that with the current Apple lineup (people did swap RAM and storage successfully). However, there is also a potential problem. What if someone else swaps a part without your knowledge, and the new part has been manipulated to a malicious end (e.g. imagine a storage unit that copies your data to a remote location)? That is, how can you ensure that only you can swap parts and the swapping of parts has been done according to your will? This is where we get to the question of replacement vs. authorization. To upgrade your argument, ownership should at minimum mean the right of replacement authorization. But authorization requires an authorization mechanism, which in this case would be a vendor. Apple already does this for iPhone parts, where part ID is recorded and authorized to ensure that the repair has been done rightfully and correctly. And so on and so forth. There are many venues to explore this argument. E.g. what are the limits of the authorization mechanism? What are the limits of part compatibility that should work? Are you as owner of hardware entitled to do device manipulations that would potentially expose trade secrets of the manufacturer (e.g. reverse-engineer the encryption keys)? And so on.
I really wish a bunch of competent, motivated lawyers and activists would sit down and hammer this framework out. Unfortunately, I don't think this will actually happen. People seem to be more interested in chasing superfluous aspects of the regulations instead of thinking how this stuff should work to everyone's benefit.
What do GHz have to do with this? Memory has frequency, but it's rarely used to quantify memory performance, since the actual performance depends on implementation. You can have memory devices that run at the same frequency but have very different performance (in fact, you already have this on the Mac).
Many application come to my mind, from software development to content creation. In my specific case, my data analysis and software development pipelines massively benefit from the very high CPU memory bandwidth on a Mac. It's pretty much the only computer that can saturate over 100GB/s on a single thread, which is great for many scientific and development workflows.
They are reducing it, but they are increasing bandwidth of other subsystems as well as memory system efficiency. For example, on my M1 Max I could never get a GPU program access more than 350GB/s out of 400GB/s the RAM is capable of. On my M3 Max (30 core version) I get the full 300GB/s. Also, M1 Max GPU L2 cache seems to top at 1200GB/s, while M3 can do 1500GB/s in my tests.
You quoted a post where I was specifically referring to memory extendibility via PCIe. This is a new technology developed specifically for the next-gen servers, e.g. https://www.micron.com/solutions/server/cxl
These two devices don't need any approval from a company when you want to fix them. Cellular phones are often part of services that you frequently pay monthly, and later, you can sell these devices.
I wonder if Apple decided to change the license for their M Macs. In this case, they offer it as part of different services, and you have the right to use this device under some conditions. In practice, you don't pay for a product but for services related to them.
Are there any law regulations when a company has to use words like rent instead of buy?
When you swap a part from the exact model of Mac, it requires their permission. I would call it a service from a company. When they stop supporting a computer, you can't fix it without their approval.
Do you think the Apple license agreement allows users to fix their computers when the warranty expires?
In this case, I wonder if the license defines any restrictions to don't do it. I guess their existence could prove users paid for services that aren't longer offered by a company.
these past 3 days i needed to use that trusty
Macbook Air 2010 with Mountain Lion (which is faster that High Sierra)
for typing in Japanese, accurate graphic design in CS4 and making gifs.
I could not perform those tasks with Affinity Design or both the Mac M1s.
is there a way i can reward that great macbook air 2010?
Macbook Air 2010 with Mountain Lion (which is faster that High Sierra)
for typing in Japanese, accurate graphic design in CS4 and making gifs.
I could not perform those tasks with Affinity Design or both the Mac M1s.
is there a way i can reward that great macbook air 2010?
Bandwidth is very important for tasks that are GPU bound, indeed. The data science work you mention- how many people in that industry work with Macs? Near zero here in Germany.
I’m not in the industry, I’m in academia. Anyway, is your argument here? That Apple should stop giving CPU a lot of bandwidth because there are no German data scientists who use Macs? 😉
Apple's own chip design only started with the A4 in the iPhone 4 (45 nm, 32-bit, 800 MHz). For years Apple played catch-up while maintaining power-efficiency and then finally overtaking Intel desktop CPUs in single-core performance and leading on 3nm technology.
The A11 Bionic in the iPhone 8 was the first chip with Apple's own GPU (3-cores). Only now the M3 added Raytracing. Nonetheless the GPU performance of an M2 Ultra was already as fast as a GeForce RTX 4060 Ti. It's not outlandish to believe that Apple will eventually compete with the fastest GPUs in the market. I don't know how Nvidia wants to increase performance with all the heat they're already generating?
At what? Open cl, which macOS practically doesn’t use anymore anyway?
Last gen amd gpus demolish every apple gpu in metal benchmarks, apple’s own api.
Apple and intel are neck and neck at single core currently
For now.
Apple A17 Pro SoC: Single-core performance within reach of Intel i9-13900K
A phone processor versus a 253 watt desktop CPU for 623 €.
They are not neck and neck.
Aaand I think it's best we put this conversation to sleep at this point, as we'll just go back round in circles again if I reply to you any more in this thread. Kind regards.
Performance wise they are
Also my 14700k cost the equivalent of just under 400 euro, not 623
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I’m taking note here. I’m noting the contrast between an extreme edge case you present (data science within the academy is on that edge) against the low-brow mockery you kept (t)rolling out earlier during this discussion.
It was not constructive to watch you double-down on mocking thread participants who raised (and re-iterated) everyday/quotidian use-cases of ongoing utility for extant hardware (of which there’s plenty still in circulation and plenty of uses which don’t require excessive, quote-unquote, “horsepower”) — to extend product lifespans beyond turnstiles of synthetic obsolescence set in place by a manufacturer.
You revealed a bit about what your background is. In collegial spirit, I’ll do the same.
My (inter)disciplinary background is, in great part, focussed on ecological restoration, urban impact analysis, and environmental life cycle analysis. How this relates to consumers is in the seven-stage environmental life cycle of all materials humans use for extracting value (and how we have a famously long history of poor stewardship around satisfying the latter stages in this analysis). Neglect toward the less lucrative, less thrilling stages — like our waste — mushrooms into a mess which we, the self-aware inhabitants of the same shared rock, can no longer avoid and must deal with today and now.
So whereas you may argue for a certain edge case (which, yes, some of Apple’s current products meet your very specific, but quantitatively uncommon needs), these bear a limited relationship to the mean (or averaged) case of consumers who, as part of their consumer buying sway, are imploring hardware companies like Apple to acknowledge and repond to how proprietary components; tamping down components with needless cryptography; and downgrading priority of parts interchangeability are immanently hostile to consumers and, with growing awareness, immanently hostile to what we are bequeathing as a species — one self-aware enough to know better than how we’re behaving.
It’s not about a bunch of nerdy people in a basement doing the kind of stuff you may have done as a skint enthusiast in some basement some twenty years ago. (That was your deal.)
It’s that everyday users — with work to do, jobs to fulfil, deadlines to meet — are not pliantly aboard with the direction which one manufacturer, Apple, are taking. Theirs is one of demanding consumers, including longtime customers, to forgo the ways they get their work done because it doesn’t comport with what the company expect (and want) now from their consumers. It’s ignoring how the mean consumer wants to keep their product(s) working smoothly for a very long time; to be able to have them grow alongside their needs; and who has an emergent awareness that we can’t go on with a culture of disposability and expect, simultaneously, to leave something viable for any who survive us.
Parts interchangeability and not tamping down components with needless, proprietary cryptography are two asks by these consumers. Many are repeat consumers over decades and have the buying power to go with it, as well as the leverage to order buying decisions for workplaces they oversee — workplaces which may not be in tech fields.
These asks are not exceptional, and technology doesn’t come to a halt because it happens to be modular or based on industry standards. USB didn’t grind the industry to a halt; PCIe didn’t, either. And where would industry be without the IEEE 802.11 working group or standardized voltages for power rails?
This ask may mean selling two lines of products — a professional, premium line able to handle high-demand edge tasks in fields as yours, and a general line whose specs don’t necessitate TB/s rates for GPU calculations. Apple once did this. They haven’t for a very long time. Apple’s post-2005 marketing game of slapping “Pro” onto products is no more meaningful or substantive than a automaker slapping “Special”, “Limited”, or “Sport” onto a line of vehicles.
Absent fulfilling that, longtime consumers who’ve made valid (and I’d add, strong) cases for maintaining older hardware in continued use are, in their own ways, doing the total environmental life cycle analysis which the manufacturer won’t (though manufacturers, via their marketing communications arm, know how to talk good game: we call what they do “greenwashing”).
Humanity has long been expert around the first four stages — extraction, processing, manufacturing and distribution — and I’ll skip them.
The fifth stage is using the materials in the finished product. We’ve actually gotten worse with this over the last half-century. Extending this stage, something we should be doing anyhow, reduces pressure on the sixth stage, disposal, which too often ends up being shunted to a waste field far afield, out of sight and mind of all who generated it. We, as a species, confront this stage as we would an all-you-can-eat buffet (and it’s why we find ourselves in this planetary crisis). Easing pressure on that is needed now because the seventh stage, reclamation, is our most undeveloped, but the key to interspecies survival — including our own — on this finite, ball-shaped rock.
That’s my angle in this discussion. That’s why I look for ways to keep synthetically obsoleted equipment in purposeful usage — whether for work, research, play, or dork around on Netflix — to prolong that stage, and also to find people who vow to do the same with that which I come upon but make use of myself.
Getting co-operation from (or, in absence of co-operation, mandating through public regulaton) a hardware company to act progressively on the last stages of the environmental life cycle with the same verve they do for the first four? This is not a big ask.
My fear is Apple’s principal shareholders, the ones with the power to make nominations to the board, won’t shake themselves alert to figure this out in time. We can’t go on as we have.
You revealed a bit about what your background is. In collegial spirit, I’ll do the same.
My (inter)disciplinary background is, in great part, focussed on ecological restoration, urban impact analysis, and environmental life cycle analysis. How this relates to consumers is in the seven-stage environmental life cycle of all materials humans use for extracting value (and how we have a famously long history of poor stewardship around satisfying the latter stages in this analysis). Neglect toward the less lucrative, less thrilling stages — like our waste — mushrooms into a mess which we, the self-aware inhabitants of the same shared rock, can no longer avoid and must deal with today and now.
So whereas you may argue for a certain edge case (which, yes, some of Apple’s current products meet your very specific, but quantitatively uncommon needs), these bear a limited relationship to the mean (or averaged) case of consumers who, as part of their consumer buying sway, are imploring hardware companies like Apple to acknowledge and repond to how proprietary components; tamping down components with needless cryptography; and downgrading priority of parts interchangeability are immanently hostile to consumers and, with growing awareness, immanently hostile to what we are bequeathing as a species — one self-aware enough to know better than how we’re behaving.
It’s not about a bunch of nerdy people in a basement doing the kind of stuff you may have done as a skint enthusiast in some basement some twenty years ago. (That was your deal.)
It’s that everyday users — with work to do, jobs to fulfil, deadlines to meet — are not pliantly aboard with the direction which one manufacturer, Apple, are taking. Theirs is one of demanding consumers, including longtime customers, to forgo the ways they get their work done because it doesn’t comport with what the company expect (and want) now from their consumers. It’s ignoring how the mean consumer wants to keep their product(s) working smoothly for a very long time; to be able to have them grow alongside their needs; and who has an emergent awareness that we can’t go on with a culture of disposability and expect, simultaneously, to leave something viable for any who survive us.
Parts interchangeability and not tamping down components with needless, proprietary cryptography are two asks by these consumers. Many are repeat consumers over decades and have the buying power to go with it, as well as the leverage to order buying decisions for workplaces they oversee — workplaces which may not be in tech fields.
These asks are not exceptional, and technology doesn’t come to a halt because it happens to be modular or based on industry standards. USB didn’t grind the industry to a halt; PCIe didn’t, either. And where would industry be without the IEEE 802.11 working group or standardized voltages for power rails?
This ask may mean selling two lines of products — a professional, premium line able to handle high-demand edge tasks in fields as yours, and a general line whose specs don’t necessitate TB/s rates for GPU calculations. Apple once did this. They haven’t for a very long time. Apple’s post-2005 marketing game of slapping “Pro” onto products is no more meaningful or substantive than a automaker slapping “Special”, “Limited”, or “Sport” onto a line of vehicles.
Absent fulfilling that, longtime consumers who’ve made valid (and I’d add, strong) cases for maintaining older hardware in continued use are, in their own ways, doing the total environmental life cycle analysis which the manufacturer won’t (though manufacturers, via their marketing communications arm, know how to talk good game: we call what they do “greenwashing”).
Humanity has long been expert around the first four stages — extraction, processing, manufacturing and distribution — and I’ll skip them.
The fifth stage is using the materials in the finished product. We’ve actually gotten worse with this over the last half-century. Extending this stage, something we should be doing anyhow, reduces pressure on the sixth stage, disposal, which too often ends up being shunted to a waste field far afield, out of sight and mind of all who generated it. We, as a species, confront this stage as we would an all-you-can-eat buffet (and it’s why we find ourselves in this planetary crisis). Easing pressure on that is needed now because the seventh stage, reclamation, is our most undeveloped, but the key to interspecies survival — including our own — on this finite, ball-shaped rock.
That’s my angle in this discussion. That’s why I look for ways to keep synthetically obsoleted equipment in purposeful usage — whether for work, research, play, or dork around on Netflix — to prolong that stage, and also to find people who vow to do the same with that which I come upon but make use of myself.
Getting co-operation from (or, in absence of co-operation, mandating through public regulaton) a hardware company to act progressively on the last stages of the environmental life cycle with the same verve they do for the first four? This is not a big ask.
My fear is Apple’s principal shareholders, the ones with the power to make nominations to the board, won’t shake themselves alert to figure this out in time. We can’t go on as we have.
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In 2009 I was able to buy my first Apple Laptop, the 5.3 Model MacBookPro with a 15" Display. DVD Super Drive with double layer capabilities (which I never took advantage of, I believe). This jewel of a laptop came after years of using my dad's old Macintosh Computers (namely first a Macintosh II with an external drive of 80 mb?!?, and then a PowerMac G3, in my first own flat I used a PowerBook 170 or the likes with this giant mouse ball 🙃). I used this laptop for 12 years, upgraded the HDD to a SSD, RAM from 4 to 8 GB. When I learned of a patch to upgrade to newer OS X versions I installed it (Dosdude1?). It newer let me down. I even replaced the battery with a unit from IFixIt which went bad after a really short time. I then put the original battery back in and it served me well over 1 hour on each cycle. Until I left it by the window on top of it's empty neoprene sleeve, and it dropped to the floor like 5 minutes later. Everything worked, but after that the display startet to be unstable until it just fell down and I had to lean it onto book staples to have a decent viewing angle. Then the backlight went black. Last year I got an offer for a M1 MacBook Pro 16" I couldn't resist. Actually the transition didn't feel really like a game changer. Except for the sound (and display) which is insane from these tiny speakers. I miss the keyboard. I loved this keyboard, its sound and travel. It was just fun to type on. And although I didn't like the sun shining through, I miss the glowing apple logo. And of course the new thing is fast and and and. But I can't upgrade it anymore. I just hope it has enough power to receive patches for new OS versions in 8+ years.
After more than 10 years I used to open the lid of my intel MacBookPro and was still stunned like on the first day. With the MagSafe power cord and the new keyboard the M1 version reminds me in many aspects of this first unibody MacBookPro. But it doesn't feel the same. And of course this is all more related to emotions than technology...
What really impresses me is the fact that these machines can until today handle daily tasks (of ordinary users) with just a little investment in small upgrades. It seems to me like a case study in (far away from perfect) ecological sustainability.
After more than 10 years I used to open the lid of my intel MacBookPro and was still stunned like on the first day. With the MagSafe power cord and the new keyboard the M1 version reminds me in many aspects of this first unibody MacBookPro. But it doesn't feel the same. And of course this is all more related to emotions than technology...
What really impresses me is the fact that these machines can until today handle daily tasks (of ordinary users) with just a little investment in small upgrades. It seems to me like a case study in (far away from perfect) ecological sustainability.
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