fwiw, i cant remember the last time i saw a company go back more than a generation in their own comparison. Apple is saying here as much as they're not saying here. M2->M3 may not be a compelling upgrade story.
The vast majority of Mac users go years between upgrades. For any other vendor it might seem weird to show several comparisons going back multiple generations (M1 and x86), but for the macOS ecosystem it makes perfect sense since only a very tiny slice of M2 users will be upgrading.
Windows has distinct groups: the people who buy whatever costs $700 at Costco every 10 years / when it breaks don’t care but there’s also a vocal enthusiast community who do upgrade frequently. That group gets more attention since it’s a profitable niche and gaming generates a lot of revenue.
I used buy a $700 Windows laptop every 18 months in the 2000s. Then I got fed up with them just falling apart and switched to Macbooks. My 2013 purchase is still alive and being used by the kids.
In the 2000s, I went through a wide variety of PC laptops (Lenovo, Toshiba, Dell, Alienware, Sony, etc.) all within the range of $1200-$6500 and they all died within 3 years (except for the cheapest one which was a Lenovo with Linux). Some died within a year.
When my first Macbook lasted for more than 3 or 4 years I was surprised that I was upgrading before it died. I went through many upgrades with almost zero issues(one HDD failure, one battery failure). I still have a 2012 Macbook Pro that I've since installed Linux on.
When I bought the first touchbar Macbook (late 2015?) I spent around $6k maxing out the options, and I was surprised at how totally trash it was. Hardware QC issues were shocking: particles under the screen from manufacturing, keys stuck within the first hour of usage, external monitor issues, touchbar issues...
Did you buy a macbook for $700? That was a pretty low price back then which meant you were buying devices made to a price. Buying a Macbook is one solution, another would have been to spend more money on a higher quality Wintel system.
Yeah, the quality of PC laptops has improved but that really just means you can get closer to equivalent quality at equivalent pricing. I've heard people claim to have saved a ton but every single time I used one there was some noticeable quality decrease, which I find kind of refreshing as a reminder that the market does actually work pretty well.
Windows users buy whatever, from so many brands, that it doesn't matter how often they upgrade, they're likely to not upgrade from the same vendor anyway (so that the comparison to its older generations to be meaningful in the first place).
> and what makes you think windows users update their devices every single generation?
They don't, but the difference is that Windows users generally don't know or care about processor generations. In contrast, it's common for Mac users to know they have an "old" Intel-based Pro, an M1 Air, etc., and to use that knowledge to help determine when it might be time to upgrade.
You can test this by asking Windows users what CPU they have. For the few who know and who have an Intel CPU, you can ask what their Brand Modifier¹ (i3/i5/i7) is. If they know that, you can ask what the 5-digit number following the Brand Modifier is — the first two digits are the Generation Indicator¹. I'd be surprised if more than 0.01% of Windows users know this.
Intel's CPU naming strategy used to drive me nuts when trying to talk to anyone at work who knew "just enough to be dangerous." Why is X so slow on this machine, it's got an [6 year old, dual core] i5! It runs fine on my laptop and that's only an [1 year old, quad-core] i3!
> it's common for Mac users to know they have an "old" Intel-based Pro, an M1 Air, etc., and to use that knowledge to help determine when it might be time to upgrade.
Not at all. I've worked with FANG developers with brand new M1 MBPs that had no idea what 'm1' meant until something broke.
How are they scummy? The M3 vs. M2 performance improvements they showed looked pretty modest.
My interpretation while watching the event is that this is a company persuading x86 holdouts to upgrade to Apple Silicon, and maybe some M1 users as well.
It’s absolutely not, and that’s fine. The video has statements that the machines are made to “last for years” and they want to save natural resources be making long lasting machines.
I’m currently at 4 to 5 years on laptops and 3 to 4 years on phones, and even then I hand them over to kids/friends/family who get a bit more use out of them.
Huh. So they used to do this, but looking at the M series chips it seems like the architecture assumes the CPU-GPU-RAM are all on the same chip and hooked into each other, which enables zero copy. Someone more well versed in hardware could explain if this is even possible.
Expandable internal storage would be nice, yeah. But I get the sealed, very tightly packed chassis they’re going for.
> get the sealed, very tightly packed chassis they’re going for
The Dell XPS 17 is only 0.1 inch thicker yet has fully replaceable RAM and 2(!) m2 slots. I’m pretty sure what Apple is going for is maximizing profit margins over anything else..
I have an XPS 15. And while I liked that I could bring my own SSD and RAM, the build quality is nowhere near a Macbook Pro... like not even in the same galaxy. I had to have it serviced multiple times within the first few weeks. It had to be sent to Texas, and when it returned, one WiFi antenna wouldn't plug into the card, and the light on the front was permanently broken. I could have demanded Dell fix it - and I'd have been even more weeks without my main work laptop. So, by pure numbers/specs? Sure. By real world quality, no way would I favor Dell.
The issue is often comparing apples (heh) to oranges.
I understand the desire for slotted RAM, but the major limiting factor for nearly 10 years was CPU support for more than 16G of RAM. I had 16G of ram in 2011 and it was only 2019 when Intels 9th Gen laptop CPUs started supporting more.
The Dell XPS 17 itself has so many issues that if it was a Macbook people would be chomping at the bit, including not having a reliable suspend and memory issues causing BSOD's. -- reliability of these devices, at least when it comes to memory, might actually be worse and cause a shorter lifespan than if it had been soldered.
Of course it always feels good to buy an underspecced machine and upgrade it a year later, which is what we're trading off.
But it's interesting that we don't seem to have taken issue with BGA CPU mounts in laptops but we did for memory, I think this might be because Apple was one of the first to do it - and we feel a certain way when Apple limits us but not when other companies do.
There’s a lot of flat-out wrong information in this post. For one, even the low-power (U-series) Intel laptop CPUs have suported 32GB+ of memory since at least the 6th generation[1]. Many machines based on these CPUs unofficially support more than that. I have a Thinkpad with an i7-8550u and 64GB of DDR4, and it runs great.
On top of that, the higher-power laptop SKUs have supported 64gb or more since that time as well.
Secondly, it’s silly to claim that having RAM slots somehow makes a computer inherently more unstable. Typically these types of issues are the result of the manufacturer of the machine having bugs in the BIOS/EFI implementation, which are exacerbated by certain brands/types of memory. If you don’t want to mess around with figuring that stuff out, most manufacturers publish a list of officially-tested RAM modules which are not always the cheapest in absolute terms, but are always night-and-day cheaper than Apple’s ridiculous memory pricing.
They haven't made slotted ram or storage on their macbooks since 2012 (retina macbooks removed the slotted ram afaik). It might save on thickness, but I'm not buying the slim chasses argument being the only reason, since they happily made their devices thicker for the M series cpus.
It's not soldered. It used to be, but ever since the M1, it's in-CPU. The ram is actually part of the CPU die.
Needless to say it has batshit insane implications for memory bandwidth.
I've got an M1, and the load time for apps is absolutely fucking insane by comparison to my iMac; there's at least one AAA game whose loading time dropped from about 5 minutes on my quad-core intel, to 5 seconds on my mac studio.
There's just a shitload of text-processing and compiling going on any time a large game gets launched. It's been incredibly good for compiling C++ and Node apps, as well.
I have no excuse for flash, but memory can't really be slotted anymore since SODIMM is crap. High hopes for CAMM making it's way into every other machine 2024!
Given that there is a legally mandated 2-year warranty period at least in Europe, I would be surprised if any laptops weren’t made to “last for years”.
The problem with Apple, however, is that their hardware will long outlive their software support. So if they really want to save natural resources by making long-lasting machines, they should put much more effort into sustained software support.
Is it a problem, though? The vast majority of people skip generation and for them the relevant reference point is what they have, which is going to be hardware from a couple of generations ago. M2 -> M3 does not have to be compelling: the people with M3 devices are a tiny fraction of the market anyway.
I find it interesting how people respond to this. On one side, it’s marketing so it should be taken critically. OTOH, if they stress the improvements over the last generation, people say they create artificial demand and things about sheeple; if they compare to generations before people say that it’s deceptive and that they lost their edge. It seems that some vocal people are going to complain regardless.