The M4 is looking like a very strong generation for Apple Silicon. According to leaked Geekbench scores likely posted by...
On raw performance might, the M4 really does live up to Apple’s promises, should deliver. Single core is up about 20% compared to all M3 chips and more than 40% compared to M2. The generational computational leap from the previous M2 iPad Pro is at least a 42% jump on single-core and multi-core.
Market segregation is worth it for them and the chips will be used in plenty of other hardware anyway, so dumping them in iPads doesn’t hurt, even if it’s mostly just marketing fit the products, nor does it necessitate a product change.
Perhaps with a more robust OS, such as Linux or macOS the battery and thermals would just not suffice?
I mean, an iPad is basically a larger phone, which I think can get hot enough if pushing it to its limit
Also I don't think the RAM would be enough for intensive tasks, the device as it is could be pretty good for gaming though, if only the title list wouldn't be a shit for the most part.
But at the same time, a MacBook Air doesn't seem much bigger compared to the biggest iPad available.
I get it if you’re doing photo editing on an iPad. That stuff is still a CPU hog.
That said, the M3 is on an end-of-life manufacturing process, and now that these things are getting updated every 2 years, it just makes sense to put the M3’s successor in this thing. A Pro M2 is going to stick out like a sore thumb in 2 years, and the M3s are going to start to disappear from the line up soon.
That's why they also announced a multi camera synced video editing functionality on the iPad version of Final Cut Pro. In theory it can make use of the CPU with a ton of compute involved in video editing, especially with many source videos. Other than that, though, it's hard to marry that overpowered hardware with underpowered software.
I have a slew of raspberry pi’s kicking around, doing various things. I also have a name brand NAS that reportedly lets you run other software, including containerized apps, but their implementation is whack and doesn’t work super well.
I want to get a more powerful machine for use as a replacement server. I’d like to spin up my own LLM tools, use it to with software
like photoprism to auto tag my pictures, or even spin up Frigate on it.
My leading contender had been either a Jetson Orin nano or a system with the core ultra 155h chip. But now I might have to wait until they announce/release M4 Mac minis - which is really annoying because I want instant gratification for my half-baked ideas.
Now you have the time to actually write up a design document and let your half-baked idea become a fully cooked one before you drop a bunch of cash on it
We’ll find out the future of iPadOS in one month! They have raised the price on the pro models, hopefully they have a big ass update readied up or alll the reviewers are gonna say the same thing “great hardware let down by shit software”
If Lenovo was really clever they’d now spend some money on creating a Linux Desktop that is as polished and usable as MacOS and use truly Retina-level displays.
I’m ready to ditch Apple like I’ve never been before.
In general, I would love for any OEM to step in and provide similar build quality to a Mac.. doesn’t even have to be Lenovo (who IMO are a pale imitation of IBM’s line of laptops).
The Lenovo additions to the Thinkpad lines (like the foldable ones or tablet-hybrids) are pretty horrible, the classic ones are still good (T, P)
The Ultrabook X carbon or whatever they’re called are also ok for the weight.
I bought a used P51 and love developing on it because using Docker on an OS where it’s natively integrated is a game changer, but at the same time looking at the ugly font rendering on a dim 4k screen with huge 1 inch bezels spoils it again. Developing on a Mac feels less like work because of their attention to design.
I don't use apple's stuff but alternatives to X86 could be the future. The one thing they need is compatibility with X86 software otherwise mass adoption is heavily crippled. It doesn't matter as much for Apple's stuff since their whole ecosystem is under strict control but for general purpose consumer hardware that compatibility is required first.
You seem to not be using open source software packaged for multiple architectures or which can be built for your binary target. Most people will be just using a browser and an office suite.
Yea, obviously, that's the case for most people. A lot of people for who a chromebook would be enough would not be effected, yea but for example software that isn't getting new updates and like all gaming would just not work on other architectures currently.
I have a friend who said on his M2 MacBook, even before the Apple Silicon build of Factorio released, the game ran better in x86 emulation than on his previous machine. And much cooler.
The battery life and thermals that come out of these powerful ARM chips are amazing, and anything that can be multithreaded is going to perform brilliantly on these chips.
Obviously for stuff where thermals and power consumption aren’t as important the gains aren’t as large, but I can’t remember the last time I worked on an actual desktop machine rather than a laptop with or without a docking station.
That heavily depends on what the previous machine was. Like factorio runs on my laptop without taxing the system much more than just idling and on my desktop I can't even tell it's running based on performance monitoring. So yea, I'm not sure factorio is a good indicator.
Whoever can afford this can already afford the laptop alternatives. My guess is that this will be a convenient "nice to have" item whenever bringing along a tablet over a laptop feels like less of a hassle.
In Geekbench, yes. From other reporting I've seen the major improvements here are from Scalable Matrix Extensions being on the M4, which Geekbench supports. Real world performance of which would be limited to certain scenarios and require application support for SME.
No, but the metric is performance at that power-draw. And I don't know that it's the best there, even. But I'm excited for what it means for the future of my platform (MacOS).
I see a lot of "Apple says" here. I'll believe it when I see it. And not on their shitty graphs with no numbers and comparing it to 4 year old processors.