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by 7speter 772 days ago
Apple could just make lower tier macbooks but mac fanboys wouldnt be able to ask “but what about apples quarterly profits?”

Most macbooks dont need high memory bandwidth, most users are using their macs for word processing, excel and vscode.
3 comments
pmontra 771 days ago
As a non Mac reference, I work on a HP laptop from 2014. It was a high end laptop by then. It's between 300 and 600 Euro refurbished now.

I expanded it to 32 GB RAM, 3 TB SSD but it's still a i7 4xxx with 1666 MHz RAM. And yet it's OK for Ruby, Python, Node, PostgreSQL, docker. I don't feel the need to upgrade. I will when I'll get a major failure and no spare parts to fix it.

So yes, low end Macs are probably good for nearly everything.

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sliken 772 days ago
Even low end gaming, simulations, and even fun webGL toys can require a fair amount of memory bandwidth with an iGPU, like apple's M series. It also helps quite a bit for inference. I MBP with a M3 max can run models requiring multiple GPUs on a desktop and still get decent perf for single users.
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consp 771 days ago
> I MBP with a M3 max can run models requiring multiple GPUs on a desktop and still get decent perf for single users.

Good for your niche case, the other 99.8% still only does web and low performance desktop applications (which includes IDEs)

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teaearlgraycold 772 days ago
Yes but Apple’s trying to build an ecosystem where users get highly quality, offline, low latency AI computed on their device. Today there’s not much of that. And I don’t think they even really know what’s going to justify all of that silicon in the neural engine and the memory bandwidth.

Imagine 5 years from now people have built whole stacks on that foundation. And then competing laptops need to ship that compute to the cloud, with all of the unsolvable problems that come with that. Privacy, service costs (ads?), latency, reliability.

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jwells89 772 days ago
Apple is also deliberately avoiding having “celeron” type products in their lineup because those ultimately mar the brand’s image due to being kinda crap, even if they’re technically adequate for the tasks they’re used for.

They instead position midrange products from 1-2 gens ago as their entry level which isn’t quite as cheap but is usually also much more pleasant to use than the usual bargain basement stuff.

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