[dijit]

To be clear:

1) Apple releases incremental upgrades! Why won't they make huge strides every year so I can upgrade!

2) People who upgrade every year are sheeps!

3) Apple support devices for longer than Android, that's nice! (yes, not Windows though).

4) God, why do their benchmarks compare devices that are 3-5y old?!

Apple is marketing to people who have devices that are old, because they are old.

"Hey, you noticed things are slow? Well, this thing is a lot faster" is pretty good marketing if it's true, nobody except the very wealthy are dropping thousands of euros/dollars on a new device for 10% performance gains, however if it's twenty-three times the performance of the Mac I currently own? Maybe it's enough to convince me or someone like my Mum to splurge on a new device.

Maybe my current Mac is not "good enough" anymore when 23x is the number on the box if I buy new.

It's fair to compare with devices that you expect actual people to actually upgrade from, there's a lot of Intel macbook airs in the field.

Heck, even some professionals are still on Intel macs: https://www.production-expert.com/production-expert-1/25-of-...

[throw0101d]

> 2) People who upgrade every year are sheeps!

> 3) Apple support devices for longer than Android, that's nice!

> 4) God, why do their benchmarks compare devices that are 3-5y old?!

2 and 4 kind of contradict each other.

I wouldn't be surprised that the average upgrade cycle for a lot of folks is in that 3-5 year range, for both personal and corporate buyers.

[stringsandchars]

> I wouldn't be surprised that the average upgrade cycle for a lot of folks is in that 3-5 year range, for both personal and corporate buyers.

My personal laptop is a 2014 MacBook Pro. I'll be buying one of these new M4 Airs, and comparing to an 11-year-old computer.

[karlshea]

As someone that had a 2011 MacBook Pro for I think 9 years and loved it, be glad you’ve skipped over the whole butterfly keyboard/Touch Bar era.

I now have an M2 Air and have zero complaints, it’s the best computing device I’ve ever owned. You’re going to really enjoy the M4.

[ownagefool]

yeah, managed to eeek about 10 years from minimum spec 2013 mbp

[WillAdams]

Since graduating from college in 1993, working in the graphic design industry full-time through 2019, I had two brand-new Macs (a PowerMac G3/800MHz, and a G5), the balance were hand-me-downs from other employees --- the G5 in particular was especially long-lasting, though ultimately it was supplemented by an Intel iMac.

Each year when Apple came out with new machines, we would make a game of putting together a dream machine --- ages ago, that could easily hit 6 figures, these days, well, a fully-configured Mac Studio is $14,099 and a Pro Display w/ stand and nano texture adds $6,998 or so.

[pqtyw]

> these days, well, a fully-configured Mac Studio is $14,099

Not surprising considering the CPU in the fastest "desktop" Mac before today was slower than an old Intel chips you can buy for ~$350 (e.g. the 14700k).

[mrexroad]

TBH, for non-tech folks that upgrade cycle has likely stretched a good bit beyond 3-5 years. 3-5 was the norm 10 years ago, but I’d wager needs-driven upgrades, opposed to marketing driven, are closer to 7-10 years outside of obvious niches.

Sample size one: My spouse is using either a 2013 MBA and wants to upgrade, mostly b/c the enshitification of web sites. Basic productivity was okay-ish for her work (document creation, pdfs, spreadsheets, etc), but even Gmail now suffers with more than a tab.

Edit: thinking more, I don’t know if I agree with myself here.

[pqtyw]

> Apple is marketing to people who have devices that are old, because they are old.

It still makes claims like that arbitrary and meaningless. What does "23x faster" even mean, it's not like there are that many people who are upgrading from an Intel MBA yet are also fulltime Cinebench/etc. testers.

> It's fair to compare

Well yes. It's reasonably fair (realistically its not like any of those people this is targeted at would feel a difference between 10x, 15x or 30x) and obviously smart.

[latexr]

> What does "23x faster" even mean

The measurements are in the linked footnote, they tested the “Super Resolution” upscaling feature of Pixelmator Pro.

[Spunkie]

The point is that benchmark is pretty useless and likely does not line up to what a user that is still running a intel air would expect the word "faster" even means.

When normal users are thinking "faster" they are really thinking about snappiness/responsiveness, not number crunching.

[pqtyw]

Those benchmarks seem to be more GPU based as well. e.g. something like Geekbench (not that it's necessarily that representative either) is just 2-3x faster.

https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-apple_m4-vs-intel_...

[pqtyw]

Well yeah, I understand that this is based on some specific benchmark. Yet it's still some random arbitrary number effectively picked to mislead consumers.

Especially when for the M1 (2x faster) they decided to use an entirely different Photoshop benchmark YET they they still show it alongside the 23x for the Pixelmator one (presumably the M4 is NOT 2x faster than the M1 there..).

That's just objectively slimy (even if mostly harmless) marketing...

Also presumably Pixelmator's "Super Resolution" and Photoshop's "radial blur, content aware scale, diffuse, find edges" are also mostly GPU bound these days? Which again.. might not be the best indicator for "performance" for most consumers.

Edit: Looking at some more general benchmarks the the i7 (I7-1060NG7) from the last Intel MBA is "only" 4x (Geekbench MT), ~2.7x (Single-Core) or 2x (Cinebench single core) slower than the M4. Picking some highly specific "benchmark" that's several times higher than that is just dishonest.

[kimbernator]

It's hardly the same person saying all of these things, though. Are you just annoyed at the variety of opinions that come from people on the internet?