Apple launched the M2 Pro and the M2 Max

[Lakados]

That might be true at the consumer level, but nVidia has been showing off Grace, and I'm fairly sure most of the server/high-end compute market is interested.

If Apple wanted to, they could probably re-enter the server market. I just don't think they have an interest in the support part of the market that top end vendors need to have. The irony there is that Mac Mini's are getting used a lot as dev servers.

If Apple wanted to yeah they could no problem, but then they would need to develop and maintain a closed-source Linux distribution, otherwise they would be releasing too much information about their platform which would be a huge boost to all those groups trying to get Linux on the M platform, which Apple does not want.
Apple is unique in that they are a services platform, not a hardware one, they just make sure that its hardware is in a state that it can offer the "best" experience for its services.
The Mac Mini is a great little dev box, it is a beefed-up iPad Pro, and anything that runs smoothly there will work on the iPad platform in a nearly identical fashion while being generally inexpensive. If you wake up one day and you want to make an app, then it really is your best option.

 

[Mchart]

That video from before was just idiotic.

And yes - I don't touch my PC anymore unless it's for more demanding games. All of my office work, all of my coding, all of my YouTube/whatever watching, is all off the MacBook which I've used without issue. The games that run on macOS I generally play on the MacBook as well - Like Civ 6, lighter-weight games, etc. Obviously no one here is suggesting that a Mac can replacing a gaming PC. However, some of us have the income to afford both a Mac and a PC. I haven't touched Windows now for anything other than the more demanding games ever since getting my M1 Max.

The biggest reason I made the switch, beyond the excellent integration of MacOS with iOS, is the fact that I get a normal Unix style CLI with MacOS. When you work with Linux all day long it's nice to have a OS like MacOS that really isn't all that different under the hood.

 

[UnknownSouljer]

If Apple wanted to yeah they could no problem, but then they would need to develop and maintain a closed-source Linux distribution, otherwise they would be releasing too much information about their platform which would be a huge boost to all those groups trying to get Linux on the M platform, which Apple does not want.

They would continue to run macOS server. Just like the 2008 X-Serve.

Granted that limits who they could sell these machines to, but before they exited the market the last time they did get a set of devoted users to the platform that ran those machines until Apple stopped supporting them. At that time the landscape was a lot different than now. Those machines were primarily used as file servers.

If they wanted to get back in, then they'd have to also get into compute to have a competitve product (which it's obvious they could easily do) and I think virtualization of macOS and iOS instances would also be obvious.

Apple is unique in that they are a services platform, not a hardware one, they just make sure that its hardware is in a state that it can offer the "best" experience for its services.

Right. Well that and they realized very specifically last time that they didn't want to get into enterprise support. While Apple does have the "skillset" to build that team, the ROI just isn't there. They make more money from phones than Dell does from servers (I actually don't know if that's true or not, but I'll assume it is considering the valuation of the two companies and the hordes of literal billions of dollars that Apple has tucked away).

I read some analysis about the death of the X-Serve. And basically mostly because of things like Enterprise support I doubt they'll ever get back into it.

The Mac Mini is a great little dev box, it is a beefed-up iPad Pro, and anything that runs smoothly there will work on the iPad platform in a nearly identical fashion while being generally inexpensive. If you wake up one day and you want to make an app, then it really is your best option.

Yup. And you don't even have to buy one. Just have someone spin it up for you when you want to run tests.

 

[DukenukemX]

Perhaps you should look at the numbers and not go off of percentages. Even on a single chip the SSD far outstrips every SATA SSD.

Who the hell uses SATA SSD in 2023?

You'd have to have specific applications that are I/O intensive for it to matter. It's 2800MB/s~ vs 1400MB/s~ (rounded down even) on a single chip vs dual chip M2 Mini. Or 4900MB/s~ vs 2900 MB/s~ (also rounded down) on the Macbook Pro.

You mean like video editing, something the Apple silicon is good at and even the M1's pushed their SSD speeds to the limit?

I highly doubt anyone buying a base level MPB will notice NVME Gen 3 speeds as being "slow".

Yea but that's not the problem. Apple's M2's are slower than their M1's. Especially when I can buy a Gen 4 NVME that's faster and 1TB for $90, and can be installed on most Windows laptops.

Or you could have Apple repair it.

Apple doesn't repair shit.

Considering we're on year 2+ of ARM Mac's and I haven't heard of anyone having a problem (even on 8GB machines that are stuck having to swap constantly), I'm not sweating it.

Get out of the rock you've been hiding under.
https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxfK-t2EiJDnZTNQ_2dl42Epi3V1HTkA1o

Also, normal people get rid of their desktops/laptops every 3-5 years on the outside.

Just about when the SSD fails. You do know what planned obsolescence is right?

 

[UnknownSouljer]

Who the hell uses SATA SSD in 2023?

This is a joke right? You're the PC guy who goes on and on and on about using machines for forever and upgrading them with newer hardware. Do you actually believe the things you say or is it just for show? It seems like you are agreeing with us that people dump their machines regularly and therefore don't have "older" machines that use M.2 SATA drives or regular SATA drives?
Because if so, case closed, we can just stop the discussion here. DukenukemX finally agrees that "planned obsolescence" isn't' a thing and no one uses a computer past 5 years. Also making discussion about SSD wear virtually moot.

You mean like video editing, something the Apple silicon is good at and even the M1's pushed their SSD speeds to the limit?

A few things:
1.) Video editing doesn't do that. The fastest an HDD has to go is limited to how many bits per second the files have to be played back. There isn't infinite scaling here. Even on incredibly high bit-rate files you'll likely be capped by something else long before read speed.
2.) You're talking about a machine that only has 512GB of storage. That's what you're complaining about. So in context, what video editor would ever be able to use the internal drives to edit footage off of? Maybe if you're editing highly compressed h.265 files that are 1080p (which wouldn't require a fast HDD to begin with). If that's NOT what you're saying, and this is only needing to support the software being fast, well then that matters almost not at all. Most if not all of the app will sit in RAM and also not require the HDD.
3.) No editor works off the internal drive for practicality reasons. For footage that is actually shot in some sort of RAW format, it takes up in the order of Terabytes of storage space. 6k ProRes RAW HQ is 50minutes for 1TB (ask me how I know). And believe me 50 minutes is short for virtually any and all filming work. It's specifically large RAW files that would benefit from faster throughput. But you'd also have to have a machine capable of decoding fast enough as well. Again, debating about this when you only have 512GB of internal storage is meaningless.

Yea but that's not the problem. Apple's M2's are slower than their M1's.

And? You've failed to show how that actually matters.

EDIT: Here you like Linus so much, this is his commentary on it. His entire M2 review centers on two things: 1.) Thermals and if they actually matter. 2.) Just how big of a downgrade is the SSD from the base M1 to the base M2 MBA.
Want to know the tl;dw? The base M2 is faster in all productivity benchmarks vs the base M1. He even states in the video, the slower SSD didn't really matter. There is virtually no use case for the faster SSD even though you keep harping about it.


The best part about the testing is the "control" 13" Dell XPS. Even in gaming the XPS isn't meaningfully faster than the MBA. Tomb Raider isn't even native Metal.

Especially when I can buy a Gen 4 NVME that's faster and 1TB for $90, and can be installed on most Windows laptops.

And? You're aware Thunderbolt and external NVME drives are a thing right? That is actually how an editor would work. Me being an example of that.
If you're wealthy and an editor and need to support a team needing access to the files simultaneously you use a home server and serve up 10Gb/E. If you're somewhere in the middle then there are quite a few different DAS units.

Point is, no matter what when a single project is 1+TB, you're never operating internally. It's literally not practical otherwise. If you're someone like Linus who you love to bring up: he shoots on RED RAW. I would bet most of their YouTube videos in RAW form are probably 5TB+.

Apple doesn't repair shit.

How dense are you? There are literally millions of people who have used AppleCare and gotten repairs.
You have to be actively looking only at things that confirm your bias' to believe that "no one has gotten repairs from Apple." I've gotten repairs from Apple. Up to and including full system board replacements; for free even.

Also, that didn't stop Linus. Don't you know, he likes Mac's more than Windows now:


And unlike your video talking about a 2017 machine, this video is from 1 month ago.

Get out of the rock you've been hiding under.
https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxfK-t2EiJDnZTNQ_2dl42Epi3V1HTkA1o

This is the most ramblecore video of all time (I watched a good chunk at 2x speed, he talks so slow that it sounded almost regular when at double speed). I'd specifically want to know failure rates. Based on everything he's said, I kind of doubt what he's talking about is people hitting the write limit. His example of a 2019 MBP, talked about all 6 chips failing at the same time when the user put their machine to sleep. I would more or less guess something else caused his clients SSDs to fail. And it's also obvious that it was a pretty isolated use case. Again, without failure rates this is meaningless. If .0001% machines fail after 3+ years we can more or less ignore all of this.

Just about when the SSD fails. You do know what planned obsolescence is right?

You can put any label you want on it. This is consumer behavior. It doesn't matter if we're talking Windows, Chromebook, Linux, or Mac. People and businesses replace their hardware on a schedule. There has been extensive research done on this subject. In fact I've linked you to a bunch of it which you ignored the last time. You're unwilling to accept that most users aren't you.
Except when it comes to SATA SSD's I guess? I guess literally everyone has dumped all machines prior to that. According to you up above.

 

[NightReaver]

Who the hell uses SATA SSD in 2023?

Me? Tons of pc users? They're usually cheaper than PCI-E and are fast enough for most tasks. They work perfectly fine alongside PCI-E drives.

 

[DukenukemX]

The weird thing is Duke's obsession with the unsupported belief that people primarily care about performance for gaming.

I didn't say gaming, at least not in this thread on this forum. I barely talked about the M2 Pro's performance since there aren't a lot of benchmarks yet.

Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of people who buy faster computers with games in mind. But many of us buy speedier systems because they better meet our productivity needs. I regularly juggle several apps at a time for work, including media editing tools — I don't want my computer bogging down if I can avoid it. Even a 'casual' user may not want their computer to choke on multiple apps, or to have enough power for editing family photos and videos for years down the road.

Basically all Apple supporters in this thread.

No one here is suggesting that you buy a Mac primarily for gaming. The library is much smaller, and Apple's GPUs aren't going to threaten high-end AMD or NVIDIA cards. But you can do some gaming on them, and for many of us playing the occasional game is good enough. We're willing to make that tradeoff to get a modern Mac's other advantages, such as strong general performance (particularly for media editing), super-quiet operation, compact form factors and long battery life. A 14-inch MacBook Pro is a very capable portable editing rig, and won't dramatically throttle on battery power like Windows laptops. A Mac mini is now a pretty solid desktop; the base M2 model is faster, quieter and much smaller than a comparable machine from Dell or HP, while the M2 Pro version is a good creative tool.

The discussion isn't about gaming, it's about how Apple downgrade their M2 Pro's SSD performance compared to the M1. I have argued about compatibility and how it isn't worth buying Apple Macbooks with their silicon when AMD has equivalent performance and batter life without compromising anything.

Oh, and on the NAND question: the evidence suggests it's more likely that Apple is trying to reduce the number of NAND chips at least partly due to supply shortages. You can't get faster storage from a product that isn't shipping.

What evidence? You can't just say things without providing any evidence. I know SSD's are cheaper than ever. I just linked a NVME 4.0 1TB SSD for $90 that's faster than the M2 Pro's 512GB SSD. What you Apple fans don't want to admit is that Apple is pushing you guys to upgrade to the 1TB version which is another $200 more. So either Apple is pushing customers who know to pay $200 more, or Apple is betting their customers are so stupid that they won't notice it, or better yet customers who are going by M1 Pro reviews and are just assuming the M2 Pro will obviously be faster at everything because that's usually a safe assumption to make. Stop defending this company already.

 

[Lakados]

Right. Well that and they realized very specifically last time that they didn't want to get into enterprise support. While Apple does have the "skillset" to build that team, the ROI just isn't there. They make more money from phones than Dell does from servers (I actually don't know if that's true or not, but I'll assume it is considering the valuation of the two companies and the hordes of literal billions of dollars that Apple has tucked away).

I read some analysis about the death of the X-Serve. And basically mostly because of things like Enterprise support I doubt they'll ever get back into it.

Apple isn't shy about the fact they profit around $500 from every iPhone they sell, in 2022 Apple reported that they sold a little north of 235 million iPhones, so that would mean they made around $120B in profits from those sales alone.
In 2022 Dell only reported $102B in sales total.
They aren't even playing the same game at this point.
I mean you can still get the MacOS server in the App store, Apple does still support and maintain it, but they have been gradually stripping functions from it and either integrating them to the OS itself or directing users to other tools that do the job better. I originally had them in my buildings for iOS update caching, so when OS or App updates came along the first iPad to do them cached it on the server then all other updates would just grab them from there instead, saved a ton of bandwidth but in iOS 11 they took that out of server and just added it to the Network/Fileshare settings on the Mac itself, the only catch is now it has to be on the same subnet as the iOS devices.

 

[Lakados]

The discussion isn't about gaming, it's about how Apple downgrade their M2 Pro's SSD performance compared to the M1. I have argued about compatibility and how it isn't worth buying Apple Macbooks with their silicon when AMD has equivalent performance and batter life without compromising anything.

They downgraded the base model for sure which is dirty pool, would it have killed them to use a pair of 128s instead of a single 256, I mean come on.
But AMD has announced that they will have something that is roughly on par or slightly better than the Apple M1/M2 chips. But that relies on Microsoft doing a lot of things to optimize for it as well as OEM partners actually releasing them.
And I mean I love my PC, and I have my Windows built exactly how I want it, but between Microsoft having to make core changes to include chip-specific hardware features, and AMD having to release drivers that work with those features I am not going to hold my breath for something that functions to the same degree of the Apple M platform.
I am 100% sure that on paper and best case scenario, the AMD/Microsoft solution will come out on top, but for the standard run-of-the-mill everyday usage, that requires me to have more faith in Microsoft than I currently do.
Looking at the launch partners though and the fact they have advertised these features with LPDDR5 I am expecting them to be just as soldered down there as they are with Apple, but at least I could change out storage if needed.

 

[Aurelius]

The discussion isn't about gaming, it's about how Apple downgrade their M2 Pro's SSD performance compared to the M1. I have argued about compatibility and how it isn't worth buying Apple Macbooks with their silicon when AMD has equivalent performance and batter life without compromising anything.

Similar performance? That's debatable, especially since comparisons of the 2023 MBP line to modern Ryzen laptops still seem to be rare or non-existent. And besides... try unplugging a Ryzen laptop and let's see how well it handles. Part of the allure of a MacBook Pro is that it won't throttle the CPU and GPU to oblivion while on battery power. If you're a pro photographer in the field or a video editor producing rough cuts while on set, that's an important consideration.

What evidence? You can't just say things without providing any evidence. I know SSD's are cheaper than ever. I just linked a NVME 4.0 1TB SSD for $90 that's faster than the M2 Pro's 512GB SSD. What you Apple fans don't want to admit is that Apple is pushing you guys to upgrade to the 1TB version which is another $200 more. So either Apple is pushing customers who know to pay $200 more, or Apple is betting their customers are so stupid that they won't notice it, or better yet customers who are going by M1 Pro reviews and are just assuming the M2 Pro will obviously be faster at everything because that's usually a safe assumption to make. Stop defending this company already.

It's well-established that there are still NAND memory shortages, and Apple is one of the largest customers for NAND. Also, the chief analyst at SemiAnalysis told iFixit that the 128GB chips Apple was using before are becoming scarcer; it's a lot easier to guarantee supply when you're using two widely available parts instead of four harder-to-get ones.

I'm not denying that Apple has a hefty profit margin baked into its upgrades. I just know that the reality is more nuanced than you'd care to admit. Apple isn't some dastardly villain twirling its mustache; it's a company out to make money, and that includes having a steady supply of components for its products. It does suck that SSD performance on the base MBP is slower, but it's not a catastrophe unless storage is a major bottleneck in your workload. Anything that's mainly CPU- or GPU-dependent will still be faster, to varying degrees.

 

[DukenukemX]

But AMD has announced that they will have something that is roughly on par or slightly better than the Apple M1/M2 chips. But that relies on Microsoft doing a lot of things to optimize for it as well as OEM partners actually releasing them.

Also Linux. A lot of leaks for upcoming AMD and Intel hardware comes from Linux because of the amount of code AMD and Intel give. Where's as Apple's Silicon...

And I mean I love my PC, and I have my Windows built exactly how I want it, but between Microsoft having to make core changes to include chip-specific hardware features, and AMD having to release drivers that work with those features I am not going to hold my breath for something that functions to the same degree of the Apple M platform.

Fun fact, Apple Silicon supposedly has support for Ray-Tracing and yet it isn't implemented.

I am 100% sure that on paper and best case scenario, the AMD/Microsoft solution will come out on top, but for the standard run-of-the-mill everyday usage, that requires me to have more faith in Microsoft than I currently do.

Or Linux.

Looking at the launch partners though and the fact they have advertised these features with LPDDR5 I am expecting them to be just as soldered down there as they are with Apple, but at least I could change out storage if needed.

I'm sure some of them will be, but there's going to be some that won't be. AMD clearly lists the 7040 as DDR5/LPDDR5 which means you can have both. AMD's 7045 will be DDR5 only.

 

[lopoetve]

The point is that the M2 Pro has a slower SSD compared to the M1 Pro due to Apple being cheap. It's also going to wear down faster due to less chips to deal with the wear. We're talking about a $2,000 starting price, for a laptop that has cost cutting in order to save Apple a few dollars per laptop. It's not even a small amount, as its 40% slower read speeds.

It's still well over 2GB/s. Like I said - the buyers don't care, and it's still more than fast enough to accomplish the outcome desired. If you don't like it, either buy something else, or buy the larger upgrade with higher performance. Make an educated choice for yourself, or advise people who ask appropriately.

I also heard Apple is into recycling but clearly that's a lie when all these soldered on SSD's inevitably fail and you have to junk a laptop.

Lots of people like you saying they rarely use their PC but I think you're all lying, especially after seeing what this guy went through to use his Macbook.

Why would I game on a laptop? If you're buying a laptop to game on you're accepting major compromises to begin with. If you're buying an Apple laptop to game on, you're either an imbecile, or trying to make crappy youtube content. Buy the right tool for the job.

Heck, my workstation isn't the greatest for gaming either - a Threadripper 3960X can't even keep the 6800XT fed all the time, even in benchmarks - that's why I have a gaming system. The workstation is for other tasks.

You know what also isn't good for gaming? A raspberry pi. Does a lot of useful things though!

 

[Lakados]

Fun fact, Apple Silicon supposedly has support for Ray-Tracing and yet it isn't implemented.

Its implemented Ray tracing and AI were some of the big features of the Metal 3 launch and is currently supported on the following.

• iPhone and iPad: Apple A13 Bionic or later
• Mac: Apple silicon (M1 or later), AMD Radeon Pro Vega series, AMD Radeon Pro 5000/6000 series, Intel Iris Plus Graphics series, Intel UHD Graphics 630.

It's currently used in Resident Evil Village, No Man's Sky, and Grid Legends.
Probably lots of little iOS games and such as well as it is very easy to implement shadows using the Metal 3 ray tracing APIs, and is supposedly easier and faster to implement it that way than using raster methods.

 

[lopoetve]

The weird thing is Duke's obsession with the unsupported belief that people primarily care about performance for gaming.

Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of people who buy faster computers with games in mind. But many of us buy speedier systems because they better meet our productivity needs. I regularly juggle several apps at a time for work, including media editing tools — I don't want my computer bogging down if I can avoid it. Even a 'casual' user may not want their computer to choke on multiple apps, or to have enough power for editing family photos and videos for years down the road.

Yup. I run a @#$@ load of VMS - but at home, not on the road (one system doesn't buy me much, even travelling). There really aren't laptops made that can do the things I need to do in terms of compute - from Apple, or Intel, or AMD - but that's why I run them on servers and high-powered workstations and access them through a laptop. And you know what? I could do my job just perfectly fine with an M1 MBA. I like that I have an M1 Pro MBP - more horsepower is nice when I do have to do some quick video work (generally your average "talk to the webcam while running slides or an ipad-based whiteboard" crap) to throw up, or to fiddle through something someone sent me that is already mostly-done, but if I have to do serious work I'm tied up at home with any of the all-flash NAS that I have. And if I was going to be doing REALLY serious video work ever, I'd get an Apple Studio and an external TB enclosure - store the raw work on the NAS when not needed, and in-progress work on the TB enclosure. Upload/backup final product from there to S3, and upload to youtube or wherever internally that I need the final work. But fortunately, I generally pass it off to someone to "make pretty" before it gets to that point (yay having paid editors and marketing people!).

Work systems for work, gaming systems for having fun.

No one here is suggesting that you buy a Mac primarily for gaming. The library is much smaller, and Apple's GPUs aren't going to threaten high-end AMD or NVIDIA cards. But you can do some gaming on them, and for many of us playing the occasional game is good enough. We're willing to make that tradeoff to get a modern Mac's other advantages, such as strong general performance (particularly for media editing), super-quiet operation, compact form factors and long battery life. A 14-inch MacBook Pro is a very capable portable editing rig, and won't dramatically throttle on battery power like Windows laptops. A Mac mini is now a pretty solid desktop; the base M2 model is faster, quieter and much smaller than a comparable machine from Dell or HP, while the M2 Pro version is a good creative tool.

Oh, and on the NAND question: the evidence suggests it's more likely that Apple is trying to reduce the number of NAND chips at least partly due to supply shortages. You can't get faster storage from a product that isn't shipping.

Heck, I don't even need that - although sure, I guess it's nice to have. If I'm on the road, I'm generally either working (no time to game, and by the end of the day I'm fried - plus my iPad does just fine, or I could get a switch), or I'm on vacation - in which case, WTF am I playing games on a laptop? Go enjoy the vacation!

I grant that others do game on the road - so either don't buy an Apple, or understand what you're getting into with it.

Who the hell uses SATA SSD in 2023?

Got close to 100 of them currently in use - there's about 20T of them within 25' of me, plus another 80T of SAS, and about 10T of NVMe, and about 40T of Optane. Outside of that the rest are in another site chewing away on data. Great IOPS/capacity for low $$ - SAS is faster, but unless you're doing heavy DB work even a SATA SSD is quick enough. NVMe is for size constraints or boot devices or passthrough, or the super-fast video work (NVMe cache on our high-end NAS). And before you say "well duh, work" - this is all my personal stuff and side project that is self-funded. Use the right tool for the right job.

You mean like video editing, something the Apple silicon is good at and even the M1's pushed their SSD speeds to the limit?

Yea but that's not the problem. Apple's M2's are slower than their M1's. Especially when I can buy a Gen 4 NVME that's faster and 1TB for $90, and can be installed on most Windows laptops.

Sure. Find me a laptop that thin and light, with X86, and an M2 slot. A normal one - because the surface ones and the like, if they have a slot, use 2230 instead of 2280 like that one. The ones that tend to have full 2280 slots are much heavier and thicker - because they're designed for a different use case. There's more than one use case out there.

Apple doesn't repair shit.

Never had an issue so far. One logic board, one watch, and one phone in 13 years between two people. Most done very fast too.

Just about when the SSD fails. You do know what planned obsolescence is right?

You know what depreciation cycles are, right?

This is a joke right? You're the PC guy who goes on and on and on about using machines for forever and upgrading them with newer hardware. Do you actually believe the things you say or is it just for show? It seems like you are agreeing with us that people dump their machines regularly and therefore don't have "older" machines that use M.2 SATA drives or regular SATA drives?
Because if so, case closed, we can just stop the discussion here. DukenukemX finally agrees that "planned obsolescence" isn't' a thing and no one uses a computer past 5 years. Also making discussion about SSD wear virtually moot.

A few things:
1.) Video editing doesn't do that. The fastest an HDD has to go is limited to how many bits per second the files have to be played back. There isn't infinite scaling here. Even on incredibly high bit-rate files you'll likely be capped by something else long before read speed.
2.) You're talking about a machine that only has 512GB of storage. That's what you're complaining about. So in context, what video editor would ever be able to use the internal drives to edit footage off of? Maybe if you're editing highly compressed h.265 files that are 1080p (which wouldn't require a fast HDD to begin with). If that's NOT what you're saying, and this is only needing to support the software being fast, well then that matters almost not at all. Most if not all of the app will sit in RAM and also not require the HDD.
3.) No editor works off the internal drive for practicality reasons. For footage that is actually shot in some sort of RAW format, it takes up in the order of Terabytes of storage space. 6k ProRes RAW HQ is 50minutes for 1TB (ask me how I know). And believe me 50 minutes is short for virtually any and all filming work. It's specifically large RAW files that would benefit from faster throughput. But you'd also have to have a machine capable of decoding fast enough as well. Again, debating about this when you only have 512GB of internal storage is meaningless.

Yup. Linus showed off the massive ZFS arrays they use in a few of his videos. Impressive bits of kit!

EDIT: Here you like Linus so much, this is his commentary on it. His entire M2 review centers on two things: 1.) Thermals and if they actually matter. 2.) Just how big of a downgrade is the SSD from the base M1 to the base M2 MBA.
Want to know the tl;dw? The base M2 is faster in all productivity benchmarks vs the base M1. He even states in the video, the slower SSD didn't really matter. There is virtually no use case for the faster SSD even though you keep harping about it.


The best part about the testing is the "control" 13" Dell XPS. Even in gaming the XPS isn't meaningfully faster than the MBA. Tomb Raider isn't even native Metal.

And? You're aware Thunderbolt and external NVME drives are a thing right? That is actually how an editor would work. Me being an example of that.
If you're wealthy and an editor and need to support a team needing access to the files simultaneously you use a home server and serve up 10Gb/E. If you're somewhere in the middle then there are quite a few different DAS units.

Point is, no matter what when a single project is 1+TB, you're never operating internally. It's literally not practical otherwise. If you're someone like Linus who you love to bring up: he shoots on RED RAW. I would bet most of their YouTube videos in RAW form are probably 5TB+.

Sounds about right from his other videos on it. He also did one showing off hte network upgrades to the editor stations to give them faster access.

How dense are you? There are literally millions of people who have used AppleCare and gotten repairs.
You have to be actively looking only at things that confirm your bias' to believe that "no one has gotten repairs from Apple." I've gotten repairs from Apple. Up to and including full system board replacements; for free even.

Also, that didn't stop Linus. Don't you know, he likes Mac's more than Windows now:


And unlike your video talking about a 2017 machine, this video is from 1 month ago.


This is the most ramblecore video of all time (I watched a good chunk at 2x speed, he talks so slow that it sounded almost regular when at double speed). I'd specifically want to know failure rates. Based on everything he's said, I kind of doubt what he's talking about is people hitting the write limit. His example of a 2019 MBP, talked about all 6 chips failing at the same time when the user put their machine to sleep. I would more or less guess something else caused his clients SSDs to fail. And it's also obvious that it was a pretty isolated use case. Again, without failure rates this is meaningless. If .0001% machines fail after 3+ years we can more or less ignore all of this.

Sadly, no one publishes externally their internal failure rates

You can put any label you want on it. This is consumer behavior. It doesn't matter if we're talking Windows, Chromebook, Linux, or Mac. People and businesses replace their hardware on a schedule. There has been extensive research done on this subject. In fact I've linked you to a bunch of it which you ignored the last time. You're unwilling to accept that most users aren't you.
Except when it comes to SATA SSD's I guess? I guess literally everyone has dumped all machines prior to that. According to you up above.

I didn't say gaming, at least not in this thread on this forum. I barely talked about the M2 Pro's performance since there aren't a lot of benchmarks yet.

You posted a video about a guy having trouble gaming on his macbook.

Basically all Apple supporters in this thread.
View attachment 545601

Nope. Panel 6 is "fast enough for what I'm doing."

 

[Lakados]

You know what also isn't good for gaming? A raspberry pi. Does a lot of useful things though!

Lots of useful things, like run my Comodor64, NES, Sega, SNES, Sega Genesis, Gameboy, Gameboy Advance, and DosBox. Recently managed to get an image for the original Sam and Max Hit the Road, and Full Throttle so yeah. I would not say they are not good for gaming.

 

[lopoetve]

Lots of useful things, like run my Comodor64, NES, Sega, SNES, Sega Genesis, Gameboy, Gameboy Advance, and DosBox. Recently managed to get an image for the original Sam and Max Hit the Road, and Full Throttle so yeah. I would not say they are not good for gaming.

Not by modern standards though! It has to run Shadow of the Tomb Raider!! And Fortnite!

I use one as a monitoring and cron tool - runs on battery for something like 12 hours - talks to a couple of temp monitors too.

 

[DukenukemX]

It's still well over 2GB/s. Like I said - the buyers don't care, and it's still more than fast enough to accomplish the outcome desired. If you don't like it, either buy something else, or buy the larger upgrade with higher performance. Make an educated choice for yourself, or advise people who ask appropriately.

As far as I'm concerned a Core2Duo is good enough for most of the tasks people use on their computers, but that doesn't mean you should be given one in 2023. Apple is banking on stupid customers who either don't know anything about the hardware they buy, or are too cheap to pay the extra $200 to get 40% more speed and double their storage. No one should excuse Apple for this. They did this with the M2 and now they're doing it with the M2 Pro, but with a respectable amount of 512GB storage.

Why would I game on a laptop?

Because sometimes you're out of town and need to log in to raid so 24 other people aren't screwed. Or you're place got flooded and you can't afford a desktop PC just yet.

Its implemented Ray tracing and AI were some of the big features of the Metal 3 launch and is currently supported on the following.

• iPhone and iPad: Apple A13 Bionic or later
• Mac: Apple silicon (M1 or later), AMD Radeon Pro Vega series, AMD Radeon Pro 5000/6000 series, Intel Iris Plus Graphics series, Intel UHD Graphics 630.

It's currently used in Resident Evil Village, No Man's Sky, and Grid Legends.
Probably lots of little iOS games and such as well as it is very easy to implement shadows using the Metal 3 ray tracing APIs, and is supposedly easier and faster to implement it that way than using raster methods.

Really getting tired of this. As of right now, NONE of those games support hardware ray tracing on Apple, and only Resident Evil Village currently has a native Apple port. Gonna break this down with evidence that I know you guys hate so much, but it has to be done. I don't want you guys to spread false information.

1. Resident Evil Village has no Ray Tracing on Apple. Digital Foundry said it. Done. https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxVprOUQbEVwrt8v26tkPQF5rE5s-tvU6X
2. No Man's Sky Apple port hasn't been released yet. If people are playing the Windows version on Mac with Ray-Tracing then it's through LunenGI, which uses simplified software based ray tracing.
3. Grid Legends on PC has no Ray-Tracing support. This game isn't even out yet on Apple. If the PC version has no Ray-Tracing then there's no hope for the Apple version.

Apple has never had working hardware Ray-Tracing and probably never will on the M1's and M2's. If Apple said it could, it doesn't mean it will. It's marketing crap to help Apple owners not feel like they're stuck in 2016. For a company that's more on top of things compared to AMD and Microsoft, they sure are behind on Ray-Tracing implementation.

 

[Lakados]

Really getting tired of this. As of right now, NONE of those games support hardware ray tracing on Apple, and only Resident Evil Village currently has a native Apple port. Gonna break this down with evidence that I know you guys hate so much, but it has to be done. I don't want you guys to spread false information.

1. Resident Evil Village has no Ray Tracing on Apple. Digital Foundry said it. Done. https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxVprOUQbEVwrt8v26tkPQF5rE5s-tvU6X
2. No Man's Sky Apple port hasn't been released yet. If people are playing the Windows version on Mac with Ray-Tracing then it's through LunenGI, which uses simplified software based ray tracing.
3. Grid Legends on PC has no Ray-Tracing support. This game isn't even out yet on Apple. If the PC version has no Ray-Tracing then there's no hope for the Apple version.

Apple has never had working hardware Ray-Tracing and probably never will on the M1's and M2's. If Apple said it could, it doesn't mean it will. It's marketing crap to help Apple owners not feel like they're stuck in 2016. For a company that's more on top of things compared to AMD and Microsoft, they sure are behind on Ray-Tracing implementation.

well fuck...
Unreal posted this as their official response to why their engines don't do ray tracing on Mac.
"Unreal Engine has implemented Apple's Metal API for using their GPUs. However, we have not implemented Metal' ray-tracing functions because Apple has not released any hardware-accelerated ray-tracing support so far. The difference between hardware-accelerated ray-tracing and non-accelerated ray- tracing is the difference between rendering a single image in minutes instead of hours. We are researching ways to bring Apple computer users the speed and capabilities of our Path Tracer, so we are not waiting on Apple to solve this problem."

Blender 3.1 does ray tracing on the M chips, but it renders like you would expect it to given there is apparently no dedicated accelerator. Based on a quick glance over the blender benchmarks the M1 Ultra is about 1/10'th the ray tracing performance of an RTX 3060 Mobile. So not usable for gaming in any way.

 

[Mchart]

As far as I'm aware the current ARM based hardware can't do raytracing. The neural cores are in the chips, but they only support very specific input functions and couldn't do raytracing. There were rumors that Apple wanted to enable raytracing with the M2 generation, but couldn't due to some failures in engineering and they missed the deadlines. It will likely be in the M3 chips though.

Lack of raytracing in hardware is a valid complaint against the Mac hardware, but really not a deal breaker. No one is buying a Mac for raytracing right now.

Finally, if we're going to talk gaming - The M1 Max / M2 Max (even pro's really) have reasonable performance in Mac supported titles. It's not like Mac's back in the PowerPC days where gaming was pretty much next to nothing. Also - The ARM Mac's will run every iOS title out there which is also a huge perk if you're already invested in the iOS ecosystem. One of my most played PC games (War Thunder) works brilliant on my M1 Max, so it's worked out for me.

 

[lopoetve]

As far as I'm concerned a Core2Duo is good enough for most of the tasks people use on their computers, but that doesn't mean you should be given one in 2023. Apple is banking on stupid customers who either don't know anything about the hardware they buy, or are too cheap to pay the extra $200 to get 40% more speed and double their storage. No one should excuse Apple for this. They did this with the M2 and now they're doing it with the M2 Pro, but with a respectable amount of 512GB storage.

2GB/s isn't fast enough for anything normal you'd be doing? What, precisely, are you using the rest of the speed for, given that real world tests show very little difference for almost any normal task (including most games) between a SATA SSD and NVMe, which tends to be almost an order of magnitude difference instead of 40%?

Because sometimes you're out of town and need to log in to raid so 24 other people aren't screwed. Or you're place got flooded and you can't afford a desktop PC just yet.

Ah yes. On vacation and still need to raid, so sayeth the addict.

And if my place got flooded, I'd have already ordered new PC parts - wouldn't take any longer than waiting for a laptop I ordered to show up, because I'm not sitting around with a gaming laptop doing ~nothing~ while I live on the side of a hill that is a good 6 miles from the nearest 1000 year flood plain... But sure, suggest gaming laptops as flood insurance, I guess. I'd rather wait for that potential rare occurrence and enjoy a real gaming PC instead.

 

[sphinx99]

The weird thing is Duke's obsession with the unsupported belief that people primarily care about performance for gaming.

Well, this is why professionals should not deign to engage in debate with "gamer" or "fanboy" types like him. There's a fundamental impedance mismatch and no amount of rational debate is going to cross that divide between their biases and objective reality. For the bulk of humanity it's a simple matter of a trade study to fit individual needs against available options in a data-driven manner, but for someone like Duke, it's emotional and religious and decisions are to be made on faith alone.

It's better to ignore and move on.

 

[DukenukemX]

2GB/s isn't fast enough for anything normal you'd be doing? What, precisely, are you using the rest of the speed for, given that real world tests show very little difference for almost any normal task (including most games) between a SATA SSD and NVMe, which tends to be almost an order of magnitude difference instead of 40%?

You're missing the point. Yes it's fast enough, but this is a $2,000 laptop that most other laptops with a M.2 slot could not only outperform but would allow for upgradeability. Better question is would Apple's bottom line notice the $3 they could have spent on the NAND chip that was needed to get another 40%?

Ah yes. On vacation and still need to raid, so sayeth the addict.

This is personal experience as literally one of the best WoW classic players in the world. The mention of a guy who's out of town is the #1 Rogue in the world, and the guy who has his apartment flooded is the #1 Warrior in the world.

Lack of raytracing in hardware is a valid complaint against the Mac hardware, but really not a deal breaker. No one is buying a Mac for raytracing right now.

That's not the point. Lots of people here are giving Apple features that don't exist. Saying things like how Apple's hardware+software connection allows for better integration compared to AMD+Microsoft. That's clearly not the case.

 

[Mchart]

You're missing the point. Yes it's fast enough, but this is a $2,000 laptop that most other laptops with a M.2 slot could not only outperform but would allow for upgradeability. Better question is would Apple's bottom line notice the $3 they could have spent on the NAND chip that was needed to get another 40%?

This is personal experience as literally one of the best WoW classic players in the world. The mention of a guy who's out of town is the #1 Rogue in the world, and the guy who has his apartment flooded is the #1 Warrior in the world.

That's not the point. Lots of people here are giving Apple features that don't exist. Saying things like how Apple's hardware+software connection allows for better integration compared to AMD+Microsoft. That's clearly not the case.

It clearly is the case for Apple specific software like Logic, Final Cut, etc, but yes, Apple is Apple. They don't make it easy for 3rd party developers who are used to making X86/DirectX/Vulkan, and Apple is ARM/Metal now.

 

[lopoetve]

You're missing the point. Yes it's fast enough, but this is a $2,000 laptop that most other laptops with a M.2 slot could not only outperform but would allow for upgradeability. Better question is would Apple's bottom line notice the $3 they could have spent on the NAND chip that was needed to get another 40%?

That chip costs a lot more than $3, and you should know it. That aside, if you don’t want it, don’t buy it. The folks who care know about the performance and either won’t buy it, or would upgrade. That doesn’t make it a bad product, just not the product for you.

This is personal experience as literally one of the best WoW classic players in the world. The mention of a guy who's out of town is the #1 Rogue in the world, and the guy who has his apartment flooded is the #1 Warrior in the world.

So buy a gaming laptop then if you really need to. Given that those are the number 1 players in the world, they have different priorities than the rest of us - which you should recognize. Personally I haven’t cared about raiding with a group since 2006, so that’s not a priority for me or literally billions of other people. No one here is saying a MacBook is the best for gaming or should even be bought for that, but most people don’t care about buying a system just for gaming - or even that as a high priority.

 

[Mchart]

Funny that WoW is brought up - Because WoW is actually one of the few AAA games out there that actually runs fairly good on the ARM hardware. If you had a M1/M2 based Mac you could easily play that game on the go and be just fine. Again, you wouldn't buy a MacBook for gaming, but for that specific title you'll be just fine on a Mac in this case..

 

[UnknownSouljer]

You're missing the point. Yes it's fast enough, but this is a $2,000 laptop that most other laptops with a M.2 slot could not only outperform but would allow for upgradeability. Better question is would Apple's bottom line notice the $3 they could have spent on the NAND chip that was needed to get another 40%?

Respectfully (and I do say so sincerely), I think you're the one missing the point. Here is the breakdown:
1.) Would it have been better if Apple would have had 2x 256GB chips rather than 1x 512GB? Yes.
2.) Do we all, even as Apple users, wish Apple would have done 1? Yes.
3.) Does it actually matter in any real use case?: No.

As a result of 3, we might as well say it was a difference in bugholiomarks for all it makes a difference. It affects 1 SKU with the lowest onboard storage. If you want the faster speed you can have it. And for the 99.9% (if not more, I still can't see a use case for faster speed on 512GB of storage space that would actually make a meaningful difference, and you haven't been able to produce one either) they can more or less ignore the entire controversy.

No offense DNX, but this is just a talking point. Honestly it's boring and not worth discussing, which is why you're not getting a whole lot of traction. If there was a use case in which this mattered it would be an entirely different discussion. However literally all production benchmarks show, base M1 Pro vs base M2 Pro show an uplift, underscoring that this change (despite being 'negative') hasn't affected anything real world at all.

This is personal experience as literally one of the best WoW classic players in the world. The mention of a guy who's out of town is the #1 Rogue in the world, and the guy who has his apartment flooded is the #1 Warrior in the world.

As others have stated, if gaming is their priority than the Macbook Pro is probably not their first choice in piece of hardware. Though WoW is actually one of the few very Metal optimized games and the battery life on an MBP would likely be better than a similarly priced PC laptop, though almost certainly the PC laptop would be faster in that title Apples to Apples. I'd give the MBP the nod in that scenario if those guys "had to" raid while his house didn't have power and tethering to his 4G-5G phone was enough to keep him gaming as the MacBook Pro would easily be able to raid for 10 hours on a full battery without worry (even if on relatively 'potato' graphics, likely medium to maxed out 1080p) whereas I don't think there's a single PC laptop that would be able to do that.

I've never said that everyone should be on a Mac or use macOS. If the primary reason or major secondary reason you buy a computer is for gaming, then absolutely, buy a PC. As always, buy the hardware you need for your use case. As has been discussed by quite a few users in this thread, that isn't the case for a lot of us. Or some have the luxury of being able to afford a gaming PC for play only in addition to Macs for work.

That's not the point. Lots of people here are giving Apple features that don't exist.

That's fair. I didn't do that, but it's obviously a misconception. Though RT is coming. It will be interesting to see how Apple can perform here; I have no doubt that AMD and nVidia discreet solutions will outperform Apple by at least 1 order of magnitude. There is no replacement for displacement. Die size alone gives the nod to nVidia by wide margin. I fully expect Apple to be a distant third, and/or perhaps only support certain RT features.

Saying things like how Apple's hardware+software connection allows for better integration compared to AMD+Microsoft. That's clearly not the case.

This on the other hand, less so. It's obvious how many items Mac's are well integrated on that do function well and are significantly faster. If this wasn't the case we wouldn't be able to point at software like Resolve on a Studio Mac, any of the first party software (FCPX, Logic), etc.

As for something like RT, because they are the only vendor and they control the hardware as the software calls, though I expect pure performance to be less on Mac, I do expect that integration in software will be seamless. And I do expect that what RT features are supported will function well.

It clearly is the case for Apple specific software like Logic, Final Cut, etc, but yes, Apple is Apple. They don't make it easy for 3rd party developers who are used to making X86/DirectX/Vulkan, and Apple is ARM/Metal now.

If you're trying to make software that's on more than just specifically Apple platforms, I agree with you. Apple doesn't make it easier. However if you're making macOS specific software Apple is a lot easier to develop for than Windows.
Apple has some of the best documentation, easiest SDKs, best learning tools, etc of any platform (all provided for for free). It's much easier to get maximum performance out of Apple's hardware. Things like Apple's ProRes decoders have simple calls and Apple's stack does all the work for you. You don't have to try to code for multicore, because it's handled for you. This is why there are so many apps developed on iOS vs Android (that and there is more money to be had on Apple platforms than Android, despite Android being 85%+ of the market). It's also why Apple going wide with processors works so well, because they've designed all of their API's to also scale with multicore. There is almost a linear increase in performance on Macs on Arm with core increases all else being equal. Very little if any software (that isn't synthetic) operates this way on Windows.

It's also why apps like DaVinci Resolve supported things like Apple's Afterburner card inside of a week with a software update without prior notice because all the BM team had to do was integrate the ProRes accelerator calls into their software and they got maximum performance (equal to FCPX). That level of hardware/software integration doesn't happen, at least to that degree, in the Windows PC space.

<nvidia_rant>
In fairness to nVidia they have tried to do similar with things like CUDA to have a lot of hardware integration, but ironically I'd say that nVidia is more self serving with custom API's than Apple is. I'd argue that nVidia not being platform agnostic is a bigger issue in the PC programming space than Apple is with Metal. Having to choose to program for AMD vs nVidia (and soon Intel) hardware being much more detrimental and fragmenting the platform far more than anything Apple does. At least Vulkan can easily be translated to Metal for games. And both Unreal and Unity are already built for macOS and Windows. So if you're using the two biggest game engines, there is no reason to not have a Mac port and make some extra money.
</nvidia_rant>

It's reasons like these optimization why I use Apple products. Because for productivity it performs while giving me absurd battery life.

 

[Lakados]

Funny that WoW is brought up - Because WoW is actually one of the few AAA games out there that actually runs fairly good on the ARM hardware. If you had a M1/M2 based Mac you could easily play that game on the go and be just fine. Again, you wouldn't buy a MacBook for gaming, but for that specific title you'll be just fine on a Mac in this case..

That's mostly because they have gotten rid of all the GL code and replaced it with Metal, WoW was also built entirely in C/C++ and there are compilers for the M platform that are very well-tuned, due to the extremely small hardware profile it targets.

 

[DukenukemX]

That chip costs a lot more than $3, and you should know it. That aside, if you don’t want it, don’t buy it. The folks who care know about the performance and either won’t buy it, or would upgrade. That doesn’t make it a bad product, just not the product for you.

It's the equivalent of Nvidia putting DDR4 in their GTX 1030 instead of GDDR5, and not telling anyone about it. We enthusiasts knew, the reviewers knew, but the people who go buy the product won't know because they Google'd reviews of the GTX 1030 and not the DDR4 version.

If I were in the market for a Apple laptop, I would probably prefer the M1 Pro 512GB over the M2 Pro 512GB, because to me the 40% slower SSD is a bigger problem than the 20% faster M2 Pro is a benefit. Majority of buyers won't know because the majority of the reviews didn't either test the SSD performance or didn't mention the performance difference. Anandtech who did review the M2 Pro and Max didn't mention it, but later did write another article about the SSD performance, which will still be missing in their actual review.

So buy a gaming laptop then if you really need to. Given that those are the number 1 players in the world, they have different priorities than the rest of us - which you should recognize. Personally I haven’t cared about raiding with a group since 2006, so that’s not a priority for me or literally billions of other people. No one here is saying a MacBook is the best for gaming or should even be bought for that, but most people don’t care about buying a system just for gaming - or even that as a high priority.

Stop mentioning gaming, because I've rarely mentioned it myself. The only reason I have is because you guys have and I had to rebuttal due to the stupidity. Again, because it needs to mentioned multiple times, this is the same as Nvidia not telling anyone about the GTX 970's slow 0.5GB portion of their 4GB of VRAM. Apple should clearly mention that the 512GB M2 Pro is slower than their 1TB and higher models, and this goes for the M2's with their 256GB SSD. Apple was fined for this same tactic on their iPhones getting slower over time and told nobody about it until they got caught.

 

[DukenukemX]

Respectfully (and I do say so sincerely), I think you're the one missing the point. Here is the breakdown:
1.) Would it have been better if Apple would have had 2x 256GB chips rather than 1x 512GB? Yes.
2.) Do we all, even as Apple users, wish Apple would have done 1? Yes.
3.) Does it actually matter in any real use case?: No.

Then buy the M1 Pro with 512GB SSD. Does the 20% faster M2 Pro matter over the 40% faster SSD in the M1 Pro? Not to forget that 2x 256GB chips will wear out slower compared to 1x 512GB NAND chip. Realistically nobody needs 20% faster CPU/GPU performance, and the M1 Pro is now cheaper.

 

[Mchart]

Then buy the M1 Pro with 512GB SSD. Does the 20% faster M2 Pro matter over the 40% faster SSD in the M1 Pro? Not to forget that 2x 256GB chips will wear out slower compared to 1x 512GB NAND chip. Realistically nobody needs 20% faster CPU/GPU performance, and the M1 Pro is now cheaper.

I’d buy the M2 with the slower SSD if that was my only option. It’s 20-30% faster across the board cpu/GPU. Most people wouldn’t notice the hit in storage speed. It’s still a nvme with low latency, and we’re still talking high bandwidth regardless.

Anyone who actually cares that much about storage speed internal is getting a M2 max anyways which is 1TB baseline.

 

[lopoetve]

It's the equivalent of Nvidia putting DDR4 in their GTX 1030 instead of GDDR5, and not telling anyone about it. We enthusiasts knew, the reviewers knew, but the people who go buy the product won't know because they Google'd reviews of the GTX 1030 and not the DDR4 version.

That had a real-world, non-benchmark impact. This doesn't really.

If I were in the market for a Apple laptop, I would probably prefer the M1 Pro 512GB over the M2 Pro 512GB, because to me the 40% slower SSD is a bigger problem than the 20% faster M2 Pro is a benefit. Majority of buyers won't know because the majority of the reviews didn't either test the SSD performance or didn't mention the performance difference. Anandtech who did review the M2 Pro and Max didn't mention it, but later did write another article about the SSD performance, which will still be missing in their actual review.

Fine. It's slower. Maybe they advertise it then. Won't affect sales.

Stop mentioning gaming, because I've rarely mentioned it myself. The only reason I have is because you guys have and I had to rebuttal due to the stupidity. Again, because it needs to mentioned multiple times, this is the same as Nvidia not telling anyone about the GTX 970's slow 0.5GB portion of their 4GB of VRAM. Apple should clearly mention that the 512GB M2 Pro is slower than their 1TB and higher models, and this goes for the M2's with their 256GB SSD. Apple was fined for this same tactic on their iPhones getting slower over time and told nobody about it until they got caught.

We mention gaming because other than that, there's nothing my ARM MacBook can't do like an x86 one can - and it's the thing you harped on the last time over and over again.

So I'll pose the same question I posed last time - what is it that would make me need to buy an x86 laptop? What benefit would that give me, or the literally millions of people buying M1/M2 systems, over said MacBook/MacBook pro? What is it I can't run on there that I would want to run on x86?

Then buy the M1 Pro with 512GB SSD. Does the 20% faster M2 Pro matter over the 40% faster SSD in the M1 Pro? Not to forget that 2x 256GB chips will wear out slower compared to 1x 512GB NAND chip. Realistically nobody needs 20% faster CPU/GPU performance, and the M1 Pro is now cheaper.

I would have no issue buying an M2 Pro with the 512G drive, except I, as a rule of thumb, don't ever buy 512G systems anymore - I always start at 1T. If the 1T had lower speed, I'd still buy it. There's nothing I'm going to do on that drive that will be affected by that performance, and I really don't care about endurance since the rest of the system will be old well before that becomes any kind of issue. I killed my first ever set of SSDs just 6 months ago - after 5 years as RW cache on a hybrid synology running a steady-state 40-50k IOPS for almost that entire time, and those were cheap 250G crucials.

And yes, I'd take the extra CPU horsepower over the drive speed - I've got plenty of absurdly fast storage externally if I need it somehow, and if I ever have to do serious video editing again, I'll be connecting up to it again. TBolt means I've got FC, 25G ethernet, or 40G direct-connect to just about anything I'd want to talk to.

I’d buy the M2 with the slower SSD if that was my only option. It’s 20-30% faster across the board cpu/GPU. Most people wouldn’t notice the hit in storage speed. It’s still a nvme with low latency, and we’re still talking high bandwidth regardless.

Anyone who actually cares that much about storage speed internal is getting a M2 max anyways which is 1TB baseline.

Yup, or connecting up externally, since that's much more cost effective for large-capacity and / or high-performance...

 

[DukenukemX]

I’d buy the M2 with the slower SSD if that was my only option. It’s 20-30% faster across the board cpu/GPU. Most people wouldn’t notice the hit in storage speed. It’s still a nvme with low latency, and we’re still talking high bandwidth regardless.

Why would the same people notice the 20% CPU/GPU performance and not the 40% SSD read performance? Realistically applications will launch 40% faster on the M1 Pro, which is huge. If you're doing video editing then the faster write speeds are more important. When Linus Tech Tips reviewed the M1's video editing performance, they said the SSD was a limiting factor.

Anyone who actually cares that much about storage speed internal is getting a M2 max anyways which is 1TB baseline.

Most people since that's why Apple did this. It's meant to save money for Apple, which yes it'll be around $3 of savings per device but when you're pushing millions of units the savings add up quickly. Most people would buy the base model, and this is also a tactic to push people to aim higher when purchasing these machines if they were somehow aware.

 

[Lakados]

Most people since that's why Apple did this. It's meant to save money for Apple, which yes it'll be around $3 of savings per device but when you're pushing millions of units the savings add up quickly. Most people would buy the base model, and this is also a tactic to push people to aim higher when purchasing these machines if they were somehow aware.

I'm sure with all the metrics Apple collects they figured it wouldn't have a noticeable impact for 95% of the users who are using the base models, and for the remaining 5% of users it would impact they could use it as a way to force an upsell on them going forward. I mean it cuts costs and generates more sales in the process, from their perspective it's a win-win. Casual users aren't going to be going from an M1 to an M2 anyways, that's way too short an upgrade cycle, the M2 is going to users who were holding out on the M1 because they didn't want the first-gen parts.

 

[idiomatic]

Moonlighting at an gym and the whoe place is running on a 2011 iMac. I bunged in some new ram and cleaned out the dust bunnies and it flies. It was choking on chrome, but now its very happy and the office thinks I'm a wizard.

I build high end machines because I'm bored tbh. Its a hobby. I can edit 4k video on my phone. Its kind of depressing in a way.

 

[D-EJ915]

I read some analysis about the death of the X-Serve. And basically mostly because of things like Enterprise support I doubt they'll ever get back into it.

Apple had essentially no support at all for it. My company used to have a client that had us for their windows side but they did in-house for their apple products and had an entire room full of mac pros and xserve machines because it was faster and cheaper to have like 10 xserve spares on-site. I'm used to companies having spare laptops but never seen anybody with that sort of thing for desktops or servers lol.

 

[LukeTbk]

Why would the same people notice the 20% CPU/GPU performance and not the 40% SSD read performance? Realistically applications will launch 40% faster on the M1 Pro, which is huge

This sound like an exceptional claim to me, specially when talking about those sequential read speed, I would expect other things than raw sequential read to be the main bottleneck:

Between the 512 vs 1 gig according to reviewer: Boot time was also pretty identical — I turned the two devices on side by side a number of times. And I didn’t see much of a difference when it came to opening any of the apps I normally use, including Chrome, Safari, Messages, Photos, Activity Monitor, Slack, Music, etc.

On PC That a benchmark of opening photoshop, opening 14 different image and doing 7 operations:
https://www.guru3d.com/index.php?ct=articles&action=file&id=53184

A 3.4 gig per second drive will not make you go 8 times faster than a regular sata ssd (or even hdd) to about anyhing of the sort, what remotely common application would see a 40% opening faster on a slower cpu between those 2 speeds ?

Having to read 1 gig on an app launch would be a lot and even that would be of little of time difference between fast drive, even if it would be 2 gig.

 

[UnknownSouljer]

Then buy the M1 Pro with 512GB SSD.

I would never make that move other than for cost reasons.

Does the 20% faster M2 Pro matter over the 40% faster SSD in the M1 Pro?

Yes.

Not to forget that 2x 256GB chips will wear out slower compared to 1x 512GB NAND chip.

512GB is 512GB. The maximum wear level is exactly the same regardless of if it's two chips or one.

Realistically nobody needs 20% faster CPU/GPU performance, and the M1 Pro is now cheaper.

Why would the same people notice the 20% CPU/GPU performance and not the 40% SSD read performance? Realistically applications will launch 40% faster on the M1 Pro, which is huge.

EDIT: Honestly, LukeTBK covers this better in the post before this one than I do. But the conclusion is exactly the same. A 40% increase in read speed does not equal a 40% increase in load time. In fact side by side testing above shows there is virtually no perceivable or empirical difference (within margin of error). We're talking about the order of milliseconds.

Whereas completing your Octane render or Davinci Resolve Render 20% faster would literally save minutes. On a render that would normally take 2 hours, a 20% increase in performance shaves off 24 minutes. If you do transcoding of your files (say from h.265 to ProRes 422), that could save again dozens of minutes for every project worked on where the SSD speed increase would save a few milliseconds. Those CPU and GPU upgrades are meaningful, where the SSD speed is empirically not.

If the base M2 Pro and base M1 Pro costed the same, you'd be a fool to pick the M1 Pro based on the SSD being faster. The cost saving is literally the only reason to pick the older machine at this point.

Spoiler: EDIT: What I said originally, but just read LukeTBK's post above.

Okay, so you're literally avoiding looking at all M1 Pro vs M2 Pro base vs base benchmarks then, because the M2 Pro base is faster than the M1 Pro base in literally all productivity tests.

You keep harping on how this is a big deal, but can't point to a single application that would actually benefit from the increased speed. I've literally given you the numbers, it's the difference between: 4900MB/s~ vs 2900 MB/s~ read speed. There is extremely high diminishing returns on read speeds from an SSD. But there isn't for CPU/GPU speed.

You honestly think that people don't want 20% more GPU/CPU performance where it matters in things like Resolve or Octane? 20% speed increase means your 2 hour Octane renders 24 minutes faster. 20% speed increase is the difference between having another multi-cam stream vs not. It actually increases the capabilities of the machine in a meaningful way. If you don't think people want their work to complete significantly faster I don't know what to tell you.

Frankly as has been mentioned to you: most people won't notice the difference in between an SATA SSD and an NVME one regardless of Gen 2/3/4. The difference in time to load apps is on an SATA SSD vs NVME is 1 to 2 seconds. Again, saving 1 to 2 seconds (the difference between 500MB/s and 2900MB/s) vs 24 minutes is obvious. When discussing 2900MB/s (PCI Gen 3 speeds) vs 4900MB/s (Gen4), that gap is vanishingly small when it comes to app launching. We're talking about milliseconds here. There is no human that I could put both of these machines in front of that would notice a difference in app launching in A/B testing. Only if they had them side by side and had empirical measurements.

You literally can't point to a single application use case that needs faster SSD speeds. Because it doesn't exist. Once an application is in RAM, the SSD ceases to matter. The CPU and GPU however, continue to matter.
To put it another way. This is the difference between having a 13700k + 4080 + gen4 NVME vs 13900k + 4090 + gen3 NVME. There is no situation where the Gen3 NVME holds back the significantly faster CPU/GPU. I would take the second system every time all else being equal. That's essentially what we're talking about here M1 Pro base vs M2 Pro base.

If you're doing video editing then the faster write speeds are more important.

For the second time: no one edits from the internal drive. It's not practical; you cannot fit a meaningful amount of clips onto 512GB of space, especially considering the OS and apps also live on that same drive.
If your movie files are small enough to fit on that drive and edit from, then that means they're incredibly low bitrate. Meaning write speeds and read speeds won't really matter. An SATA SSD at 500MB/s would still be plenty fast enough. The M2 Pro base at 2900MB/s is overkill for that application.

When Linus Tech Tips reviewed the M1's video editing performance, they said the SSD was a limiting factor.

I'd love you to link that, because I'm 99% sure you're talking about the base level M1, and specifically NOT the M1 Pro, which is a totally different class of machine. The M1 Pro isn't limited in any way by the SSD for video editing.

Most people since that's why Apple did this. It's meant to save money for Apple, which yes it'll be around $3 of savings per device but when you're pushing millions of units the savings add up quickly. Most people would buy the base model, and this is also a tactic to push people to aim higher when purchasing these machines if they were somehow aware.

If their goal was actually nefarious like you seem to think, then they WOULD advertise the speed difference to get people to upgrade. But they don't say anything at all about the speed difference, which tells me they don't think the speed difference is worth mentioning as a tactic to get people to upgrade. It's in fact their lack of discussion about the subject that's telling. If you go to their configurator, there is literally no mention about increasing drive size to get better read/writes. LukeTBK's post showing the testing as well punctuates how little this matters for 99.9999% of users.

 

[DukenukemX]

I'm sure with all the metrics Apple collects they figured it wouldn't have a noticeable impact for 95% of the users who are using the base models, and for the remaining 5% of users it would impact they could use it as a way to force an upsell on them going forward. I mean it cuts costs and generates more sales in the process, from their perspective it's a win-win. Casual users aren't going to be going from an M1 to an M2 anyways, that's way too short an upgrade cycle, the M2 is going to users who were holding out on the M1 because they didn't want the first-gen parts.

It will cut costs, but it won't generate more sales. Whatever the reason, it isn't justified for an asking price of $2,000. Apple should be at least putting this info as small print somewhere for consumers.

This sound like an exceptional claim to me, specially when talking about those sequential read speed, I would expect other things than raw sequential read to be the main bottleneck:

The 40% is exactly what the Anandtech article said, so it's their claim not mine.

Between the 512 vs 1 gig according to reviewer: Boot time was also pretty identical — I turned the two devices on side by side a number of times. And I didn’t see much of a difference when it came to opening any of the apps I normally use, including Chrome, Safari, Messages, Photos, Activity Monitor, Slack, Music, etc.

What reviewer, who? There's a lot of Apple fanboy reviewers that don't do actual testing, and just spew nonsense on the spot. I expect a better review soon from Linux Tech Tips, which is sad that I'm hoping for them to review something. I would rather it be Hardware Unboxed but, they rarely delve into Apple products.

On PC That a benchmark of opening photoshop, opening 14 different image and doing 7 operations:
https://www.guru3d.com/index.php?ct=articles&action=file&id=53184

A 3.4 gig per second drive will not make you go 8 times faster than a regular sata ssd (or even hdd) to about anyhing of the sort, what remotely common application would see a 40% opening faster on a slower cpu between those 2 speeds ?

You took a benchmark that's not related to Apple products to prove this doesn't matter. There's a lot more that goes into SSD testing than running Photoshop.

 

[Lakados]

It will cut costs, but it won't generate more sales. Whatever the reason, it isn't justified for an asking price of $2,000. Apple should be at least putting this info as small print somewhere for consumers.

Not more numerically, but somebody who wanted to upgrade their Mac and is convinced it will make a difference they need isn’t not going to buy a Mac, they will pay the extra money for the upgrade, which isn’t small. So not more sales but more upsales from the base model.

 

[UnknownSouljer]

It will cut costs, but it won't generate more sales. Whatever the reason, it isn't justified for an asking price of $2,000. Apple should be at least putting this info as small print somewhere for consumers.

You still haven't produced anything that shows it matters in anything that isn't synthetic.

The 40% is exactly what the Anandtech article said, so it's their claim not mine.

Love a link. I see no posts that they have related to M2 other than just talking about the material from Apple.

https://www.anandtech.com/tag/apple-m2

What reviewer, who? There's a lot of Apple fanboy reviewers that don't do actual testing, and just spew nonsense on the spot. I expect a better review soon from Linux Tech Tips, which is sad that I'm hoping for them to review something. I would rather it be Hardware Unboxed but, they rarely delve into Apple products.

Repeatedly I've posted info showing base M2 Pro is faster than base M1 Pro in literally everything other than synthetic benchmarks that only look at IOPS. Real world? Zero appreciable difference in pretty much all testing I've seen. What have you seen to the contrary? Saying something is 40% slower, while also not being able to show that it matters in the real world is the definition of pointless.

You took a benchmark that's not related to Apple products to prove this doesn't matter. There's a lot more that goes into SSD testing than running Photoshop.

Okay, at least this test is "something". You have shown nothing. What app is limited by "only" a 2900MB/s SSD? No theories, show us the testing.