What would the M3 need to make you upgrade from an M1?

[Juraj22]

How to improve the M1 MacBook Pro​

1. Under-screen webcam (eliminating the notch)
2. USB-A (it's actually not going away anytime soon, and it's the same height as the HDMI port it has today)
3. Deeper keyboard, up to 1.2-1.5 mm in key travel (up from 1.0 mm today)

1. All under screen webcam produce "not so good" image. I am going to be bold and say, this is not going to happen to have good camera under the display. Technically not possible.

2. Let it die. USB-C is the way to go. Or live a dongle life.

3. Personal preference. Comparing to 2016 models, I actually had to adapt for more key travel. This is a compromise. Current state is good. Current keyboards are good. Please, no touch bar. I have no eyes at the end of my fingers. Muscle memory is a real thing.

I would like to see new arm architecture. Apple was the first one to use arm64, so why the hell it takes so long for them to use armv9? Maybe to many team members left and created startups crating new arm cpus.

Why the hell no 5G on laptops? why I need to use iPhone for connectivity. It is not that stable, battery dies sooner, iPads have it, I want to have it on laptop as well. Laptop are for working outside office, connectivity is important.

More power to the CPU and GPU..well that is incremental anyway. It is safe bet we get it.

More power to neural engine? to run ChatGPT locally? To use it for questions regarding OS features..etc.? That would make a lot of people happy. Current performance is probably not good enough. Disk space for it is not enough. Models are in tens of GB. 256GB SSD will not cut it.

Current ports are ok, no need for more.

Better camera or mics? Maybe, but current ones are more than good enough.

FaceID would be nice, if technically possible. Thickness of display is the limitation, however, maybe new processes solve this in future.

Better price? Not going to happen. Apple pricing model is rigid. Also, far more expensive outside US.

Better base configuration? Eventually we get it. But I don't buy base configurations anyway.

I would like to have laptop lighter. Current 16' Max is a bit heavy. On the move, it is better to have lighter laptop.

 

[257Loner]

1. All under screen webcam produce "not so good" image. I am going to be bold and say, this is not going to happen to have good camera under the display. Technically not possible.

An under-screen webcam is exactly what the iPhone is about to have, and then the Mac models will follow with the same technology. (Just as the Mac notch followed the iPhone notch.)

2. Let it die. USB-C is the way to go. Or live a dongle life.

USB-C is the dongle life. Adopt USB-A, and there's no dongle to worry about.

3. Personal preference. Comparing to 2016 models, I actually had to adapt for more key travel. This is a compromise. Current state is good. Current keyboards are good. Please, no touch bar. I have no eyes at the end of my fingers. Muscle memory is a real thing.

Of course it's personal preference! The MacBook Pro is a premium laptop. People wouldn't pay money for them unless they catered to people's preferences.

 

[TechnoMonk]

GPU, GPU, GPU

Apple has proven it can compete, and often surpass intel and AMD in the CPU department. However, Nvidia is the king in the GPU market and Apple really needs to push harder on this front. Ray tracing also needs to come to the Mac too.

Apple needs GPU options that are on par with 4070, 4080, 4090 for them to truly wipe the floor.

NVidia is benchmark king, however Apple with unified memory is the only option for some of my workflows. 4090 runs out of memory or just crashes. I would love to see Apple add some tensor cores and beef up GPU to go with unified memory. Nvidia is limited with GPU memory.

 

[Juraj22]

An under-screen webcam is exactly what the iPhone is about to have, and then the Mac models will follow with the same technology. (Just as the Mac notch followed the iPhone notch.)


USB-C is the dongle life. Adopt USB-A, and there's no dongle to worry about.


Of course it's personal preference! The MacBook Pro is a premium laptop. People wouldn't pay money for them unless they catered to people's preferences.

1. Wishful thinking. Will not happen.

2. Correct. But that is most likely not going to happen.

3. Correct. But we may agree that keyboards in 2021 pro models are good, right?

 

[Jorbanead]

NVidia is benchmark king, however Apple with unified memory is the only option for some of my workflows. 4090 runs out of memory or just crashes. I would love to see Apple add some tensor cores and beef up GPU to go with unified memory. Nvidia is limited with GPU memory.

Curious what workflows? Totally agree that Apple has the memory advantage. I’d really love to see this matched with Nvidia-like performance. They would dominate the market if they could do this.

 

[257Loner]

3. Correct. But we may agree that keyboards in 2021 pro models are good, right?

Better than the butterfly keyboards, yes. But I don't like them as much as my Retina MacBook Pro's keyboard.

 

[VertPin]

The firing of Tim Cook and a re-commitment to focusing on making something for real computers instead of phones.

Did you stumble into this thead by accident, and completely forget about the M series chips (especially the new MBP's)?

 

[Siliconguy]

USB-C is the dongle life. Adopt USB-A, and there's no dongle to worry about.

True. The two usb C devices I own are a USB C to A dongle and a media hub which has USB-A ports and an SD card slot.

 

[thefourthpope]

The firing of Tim Cook and a re-commitment to focusing on making something for real computers instead of phones.

Does it have to be both, or would you just accept one?

 

[teknikal90]

higher performance with lower power consumption + bigger battery in a 15" fanless chassis + low energy LCD display = the perfect machine.

 

[darkduke]

M1 Max owner here. I will likely get an M3 if
1) 24-hour battery (At least 30-40% increase in battery life compared to M1)
2) M3 in a 12-inch chassis (yea, I want the MacBook!)
3) No price hike.

 

[Danfango]

I would like 30% off the price.

 

[spnc]

16TB SSD is the only thing I need to upgrade from M1 to M3.

 

[MasterHowl]

Nothing.

My use case is typical (in that it's very light). I use my M1 MacBook Air for (1) writing, (2) admin, and (3) editing .raw files in Photos. I came from a 2014 MacBook Pro and I absolutely love my new Air!

 

[Heat_Fan89]

The firing of Tim Cook and a re-commitment to focusing on making something for real computers instead of phones.

That doesn't explain how my base M2 Mini is twice as fast as my 2018 i5 Mini that has 16GB of RAM. Sometimes it's not always about specs. Intel is now building their CPU's to mimic what Apple is doing with their SOC's. Intel calls them efficient low power cores. However it takes a lot of power to drive the latest Intel desktop CPU's.

 

[speedyraf]

2 lb. ultraportable, USB-C on both sides as two plug-ins sometimes won't fit when needed at the same time with the current configuration, 1 USB-A port for our still needed older devices, RAM upgradeability, the capability for it to work with my hearing aids via Bluetooth like my iPhone

 

[Warped9]

If RAM is user upgradable then doesn’t that defeat the advantages of unified RAM?

 

[h.gilbert]

1. Wishful thinking. Will not happen.

Wishful thinking thinking you know for certain what Apple will or won't do

 

[Dismayed]

It has to go to '11'.

 

[Rafterman]

If RAM is user upgradable then doesn’t that defeat the advantages of unified RAM?

Perhaps some day there will be a solution similar to X-Box X series, where you can upgrade storage, with the same speed and performance as the internal, with a plug-in module and it all appears as one storage. A sort of "RAM extension" slot, maybe a RAM plugin slot on the motherboard.

 

[Juraj22]

Wishful thinking thinking you know for certain what Apple will or won't do

It is not apple who is making cameras. It is Sony. And I don't see anything under the display from them. Also, it is technically hard, if not impossible.

Some cameras under the display are already used in android phones, and resulting photos are not good. Not even usable for 200$ phone. Maybe for 100$ phone it is ok, but generation that is using tiktok, instagram..etc. would simply call it "very bad".
Remember camera in studio display? It is barely acceptable. Apple is the company were a lot of people expect top quality.

 

[MallardDuck]

Personaly I can't think of anything that an M3 MBP could offer that would make me feel its viable to upgrade from my M1. An OLED screen would tempt me, but I'd probably still wait for an M4 or M5.

Good question. Beyond bragging rights, what is there that we really need? Others may have different needs, but I'm right there with you - and maybe not even an M4 or M5. Losing support for the next new OS is the must-upgrade trigger, but short of that?

A touchscreen certainly isn't something I want (in fact, I'd actively choose to not have one). Most of the other things are really software (fixing the USB subsystem is high on my list).

I just don't see anything remotely compelling - a speed/spec bump certainly isn't it. Neither is wifi 6e, built in 5g (which I'd actively choose against), or more cores. I'm on a Max now, so 64GB is plenty for my workload. Don't need an upgraded HDMI port because I'm all USB-C for monitors these days. I use those external monitors 90%+ of the time, so no screen or keyboard bumps are worthwhile. Oh, and I have zero interest upgrading just for more power efficiency. Even fully loaded my machine uses less power than 2 100watt light bulbs, and when running a normal load it's less than a single 75 watt. Ditto on battery life - I don't have any use for more than I have now.

The only thing I really can't do is play windows games, so the thing that comes to mind is eGPU support, but only if it worked with Win 11 Virtual machines and made a big difference. If not, then meh, count me out and I'll stick with my shadow account. FWIW, I'm at the same point on the iPad - the only thing that'll trigger an upgrade is when they *finally* put the camera in landscape mode (and even then, given the economy, I'm not in a rush).

I do think this might be why Cook is pushing so hard (see article this morning) to release the AR headset. The rest of the products have reached a point where annual spec bumps have diminishing real-world usability impact, and we're likely to have a huge chunk of the apple user base in the 'good enough for me' camp, especially given the impending recession.

 

[MallardDuck]

NVidia is benchmark king, however Apple with unified memory is the only option for some of my workflows. 4090 runs out of memory or just crashes. I would love to see Apple add some tensor cores and beef up GPU to go with unified memory. Nvidia is limited with GPU memory.

For gaming at least, the hardware is going to remain underutilized until they either give up on metal and port DirectX to MacOS or pay the game developers to port the code to metal. For other creative apps, sure, there's a benefit there, but the number of users who can take full advantage of it is small (not saying they shouldn't offer it - just looking at the market). For most of the ML world, especially open source projects, they simply aren't going to build for a second architecture anytime soon, unless Apple does it for them.

 

[spnc]

That is going to be a while.

I have several RAID 0 SSDs that range from 4 TB to 32 TB. They are insanely expensive. (The 32 TB Thunderblade is around $7K.)

It's $6k (and by the way the online reviews aren't great). The other problem I have with RAID is: "Up to" (alledgedly btw..) 2800MB/s Read & 2450MB/s Write, it's nowhere near the fixed 7'000MB/s I get with local Apple SSD. I use hi-res video contents and heavy audio librairies for music production that can't afford to be stored on slower disks and remotely.

16TB will definitely be the next move. SanDisk presented higher models of their USB sticks at CES already.

I don't how people can cope with so little disk space in 2023. I have 12/13TB of data so obviously this is my only limitation with MBPs as of today. I don't care how much it will cost, I'll just buy it because my workflow has no price tag.

 

[AltecX]

I'm amazed how many want a new chassis already. This is the most functional MacBook I've had in YEARS. I don't need any crap dongles anymore except for a NIC adapter. I can't think of any reason I'd ever want it changed unless it's for a thermal throttle reason or to add back a NIC. My MacBook is finally just as functional as a ThinkPad again.