this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2023
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I built a M3 MBP just to see how much money a mxed out unit would be.
M3 14" MBP Max chip with all the cores 128GB RAM 8TB storage
$4700
That's about the cost of my last MBP and iPhone pair, two times over. At that point, why even go for a laptop, vs. what would clearly be a high end desktop station?
*Wonders what a maxed out MBP costs.
*pics the 14”…
Maxed out 16” is $7,199.- (ex Apple care)
Maxed out 14” is $6,899.- … (I think you missed something)
Am I confused, or are you confidently asserting that desktop systems are objectively superior to laptops?
they are. (unless we're talking about Mac only, which are not as repairable or upgradable)
desktop allow for a far better modularity, and reparability, far more ports, PCIe expansions like sound cards, etc.
If my screen breaks or I'd rather use a bigger one, I just buy a monitor and plug it in. If my CPU dies or is no more enough for my use case, I'll just buy a better one while still using every other component. If I need more hard drives, I'll just buy more SATA cables. If I need better sound, I'll buy a sound card.
those features are dealbreakers. laptops will never be able to compete with a real desktop.
Desktops are superior even if only for the better cooling options, allowing your chips to sustain higher clockspeeds for longer without the machine sounding like a jet taking off
Aside from all of that, desktops are also far less constrained. If you have a CPU whose performance scales well with power (ie not an M2 but maybe an M3) you can slap it in a desktop and be able to give it 500 watts of power and a giant ass cooling setup to enable that performance. You can't do this with the physical constraints required of a laptop.
Are you implying they're not? The only reason anyone even buys laptops is because PCs aren't portable. Otherwise PCs are the best.
The only reason people buy cars instead of tennis shoes is because cars are faster
I feel like a better version of this is to use bycicles and motorcycles. Even with that said fuck tennis shoes boots are where its at.
Not the OP but yes
In terms of performance that is.
Because you can take that high-end computer with you across the room, on a plane, or anywhere else.
Yeah, that’s all true, but who really needs that kind of power?
For some people it’s worth it. For most people? Probably not.
IMHO the MacBook Airs and the M1/2 MBPs are looking pretty good right now.
The people featured in the presentation: music and video production people, medical researchers, machine learning experts. The MacBook Air is their most popular notebook. The MacBook Pro is for people who actually need more (with a new lower-tier MacBook Pro added for morons who insist they need a "pro" model but really don't).
Today I sat in a meeting I didn’t care much for and was able to run my project’s unittests. They take a long time to run, like an hour and a half if run on a single thread. But with an M2 Max I can run it all in ~10 minutes or so, and the power efficiency is such that I don’t have to worry about it. I previously had an XPS 15, and it both took longer and also I could kill it in an hour doing this, so any intensive tasks like this were only for when I had wall power.
It’s definitely not necessary for casual use, but there are definitely use cases that benefit from having a ton of power in a laptop.
Skip apple entirely. The spec out and testing of the new Qualcomm ARM chip releasing in laptops next year looks to have the m3 beat across the board and will definitely end up at a lower price point.
Yes! By all means, buy next years’ mythical chip and instead of this proven one!
It's already been proven. They just had a big live tech press conference where they set up 20 laptops with the chips in them and all had them running windows with a bunch of different benchmarking software (all ones you've heard of if you're in to that sort of thing) to prove the numbers, specs, and functionality, along with having some of their engineers there to answer any questions.
It's not a "next years mythical chip". It's already here and they already proved it was all legitimate and that there were no "embellishments". The laptops from all the different manufacturers that are slated to use the chip are set to sell mid 2024.
When it’s out and independently proven, only then would I say that it’s fair to compare.
Genuine question: and are these slated to have full-fledged Linux compatibility? Because I've had to give up on Windows on Arm because of silliness like Google refusing to make Google Drive, or apps like Affinity/Blender/Fusion360 not having hardware acceleration thanks to Qualcomm's subpar drivers.
They are slated to have it and I they have ran a couple of their laptops displayed in their tech demo on Linux, but im not sure what distro it was on. They have been advertising for Linux and Win 11 compatibility.
That's what I'm waiting for, just that it gets close to Mx performance and has proper Linux support.
Did these chips have a translation in hardware like Rosetta? Or emulation that's almost just as good? Edit: Found a couple things according to Qualcomm's charts it looks interesting https://www.anandtech.com/show/21112/qualcomm-snapdragon-x-elite-performance-preview-a-first-look-at-whats-to-come But from what was observed along with other scores it looks a lot closer https://www.androidauthority.com/snapdragon-x-elite-benchmarks-3380426/
Just for fun, let me buy every upsell, regardless of whether I want or need it.
And then let me compare that to the normal configuration of things I bought...
Why don't you compare apples to apples. Configure an M3 MBP like you would with fairly normal specs?
Well, technically all those computers are Apples, so they're within their rights
Yeah I was trying to make a lame pun