Apple M3 chip

desiibond said:
Only a supreme idiot will buy base M3 MBP for 1.7L, especially given that M2 Pro MBP will be available on discount for less or the M3 Pro MBP costs 1.99L. I just do not understand some things that Apple does.
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It’s a strategy to push M3 Pro over base M3. Launch a cheaper but not so cheap gimped model so that the next one looks VFM. Marketing 101.
 
alekhkhanna said:
It’s a strategy to push M3 Pro over base M3. Launch a cheaper but not so cheap gimped model so that the next one looks VFM. Marketing 101.
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This is what I do not understand. For a company that talks so much about 'green and environment', this is absolute waste of silicon and other premium materials. Those base M3 MBPs are going to sit on shelves for months. Many of those will be sold sometime next year on Flipkart or Amazon sale for really low cost to clear inventory.
 
desiibond said:
This is what I do not understand. For a company that talks so much about 'green and environment', this is absolute waste of silicon and other premium materials. Those base M3 MBPs are going to sit on shelves for months. Many of those will be sold sometime next year on Flipkart or Amazon sale for really low cost to clear inventory.
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A listed company only cares about profits. Everything else is marketing to make profits.
desiibond said:
This is what I do not understand. For a company that talks so much about 'green and environment', this is absolute waste of silicon and other premium materials. Those base M3 MBPs are going to sit on shelves for months. Many of those will be sold sometime next year on Flipkart or Amazon sale for really low cost to clear inventory.
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Also the base “Pro” model has now increased in price. It was the touchbar MacBook earlier, around 100USD cheaper. Now the base is expensive. So you either go for Air or for the new base.
 
desiibond said:
This is what I do not understand. For a company that talks so much about 'green and environment', this is absolute waste of silicon and other premium materials. Those base M3 MBPs are going to sit on shelves for months. Many of those will be sold sometime next year on Flipkart or Amazon sale for really low cost to clear inventory.
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It is part of the marketing cost. Apple definitely knows how much volume of each variant to produce based on demand and some are meant to be low-volume fillers.

To be honest, every manufacturer writes off certain number of units. If you browse Amazon or Flipkart, you will find numerous 2-3 generation old products still being sold at current generation prices, as if the seller doesn't care about clearing it out at all.
 
desiibond said:
This is what I do not understand. Those base M3 MBPs are going to sit on shelves for months.
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From what I've seen/heard, base MBPs are the ones that sell the most. An employer would compensate either partially or fully the cost of a laptop so most of the younger generation just buy the base model of the latest generation. It's not like they need anything more either, their work either uses native Apple Silicon apps or a browser. I know a significant number of "low level" (25k to 50k per month) Amazon employees who use just the base models for "work purposes."

Back when I was mentoring medical students, it was the same thing. Every new batch had kids showing up with either the base 13" Macbook Pro or some XPS gaming laptop.

Party Monger said:
Si what's the most vfm mac now?
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It's always been the mini if you didn't need portability or a screen.
 
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Got an mba m1 in 2020.
Still runs like a champ with the same battery life and performance as new.
Even though I get a mbp16 recently, I still find myself reaching out for the mba more often
 
So apple has ****ed the M3 pro chip, basically its performance is same or lower than previous m2 pro chip. Gfx is definitely lower on the base chips.

So considering purchasing M2 pro macbook. Any good deals? Main use would be Aftereffects and video editing. I belive 16 gb is the minimum.
 
Party Monger said:
So apple has ****ed the M3 pro chip, basically its performance is same or lower than previous m2 pro chip. Gfx is definitely lower on the base chips.

So considering purchasing M2 pro macbook. Any good deals? Main use would be Aftereffects and video editing. I belive 16 gb is the minimum.
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heh? Where did you get this detail? People just started getting the Macs for review. Wait a week, do not hurry. Hope you are not referring to Geekbench. As you are worried about graphics performance, I believe you need this mainly for graphic intensive work. I am leaning towards M3 Pro features that bring Dynamic Caching, mesh shading, and hardware-accelerated ray tracing. If these can be useful for you, you should let the apps optimize for M3 Pro. Not to forget the extra battery life and power efficiency of these 3nm chips.

The next-generation GPU inside the M3 family of chips represents the largest leap forward in graphics architecture for Apple silicon. It features Dynamic Caching that, unlike traditional GPUs, allocates the use of local memory in hardware in real time. With Dynamic Caching, only the exact amount of memory needed is used for each task. This is an industry first, transparent to developers, and the cornerstone of the new GPU architecture. It dramatically increases the average utilisation of the GPU, which significantly increases performance for the most demanding pro apps and games.
With the M3 family of chips, hardware-accelerated ray tracing comes to the Mac for the first time. Ray tracing models the properties of light as it interacts with a scene, allowing apps to create extremely realistic and physically accurate images. This, along with the new graphics architecture, allows pro apps to deliver up to 2.5x the speed of the M1 family of chips. Game developers can use ray tracing for more accurate shadows and reflections, creating deeply immersive environments. Additionally, the new GPU brings hardware-accelerated mesh shading to the Mac, delivering greater capability and efficiency to geometry processing, and enabling more visually complex scenes in games and graphics-intensive apps. This breakthrough GPU architecture enables all of these enhancements and features while maintaining Apple silicon’s legendary power efficiency. In fact, the M3 GPU is able to deliver the same performance as M1 using nearly half the power, and up to 65 percent more performance at its peak.
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Party Monger said:
So apple has ****ed the M3 pro chip, basically its performance is same or lower than previous m2 pro chip. Gfx is definitely lower on the base chips.

So considering purchasing M2 pro macbook. Any good deals? Main use would be Aftereffects and video editing. I belive 16 gb is the minimum.
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I don’t think that’s true. Just don’t go by P/E core count
 
desiibond said:
heh? Where did you get this detail? People just started getting the Macs for review. Wait a week, do not hurry. Hope you are not referring to Geekbench. As you are worried about graphics performance, I believe you need this mainly for graphic intensive work. I am leaning towards M3 Pro features that bring Dynamic Caching, mesh shading, and hardware-accelerated ray tracing. If these can be useful for you, you should let the apps optimize for M3 Pro. Not to forget the extra battery life and power efficiency of these 3nm chips.
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Its plenty clear that they lowered cores or changed performance cores for efficiency cores. Benchmarks show a LOWER graphics score by a decent margin. Someone going from M2 pro base to a M3 pro base will actually get a downgrade not an upgrade. All those extra features are mostly gaming centric. If I wanted a gaming laptop, Id get a gaming laptop not a MAC.

Now dont come at me with the compare equivalent cores offerings argument. Compare the base with base and find out yourself, pricing is actually more for the m3 pro base now. Higher price, lower cores,shittier cores and lower performance. It has been a red light for me since I delayed purchase due to incoming M3 rumours. Apple wanted people to get their MAX chips and create a differentiation. Last years pro chips were really good and an actually good VFM product.

Apple doesnt want to provide any vfm products. They want a linear price to performance ladder that they can make people climb up on. You will start and M3 and you'll find yourself at M3 max (cause perfromance is like 2x priced M2 Ultra from last year.)
With M2 chips, M2 pro was a sweet spot that you could settle on. Now m3 pro has been gimped. Fcuking apple.
alekhkhanna said:
I don’t think that’s true. Just don’t go by P/E core count
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I was actually waiting for the first reviews to make a decision. Now they are out. Just check them. Search for "M3 Macbook pro with M3 pro review -max" And filter videos uploaded in last 1 day. (check the time of the post, dont filter if you're reading this few days later)
 
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Party Monger said:
Its plenty clear that they lowered cores or changed performance cores for efficiency cores. Benchmarks show a LOWER graphics score by a decent margin. Someone going from M2 pro base to a M3 pro base will actually get a downgrade not an upgrade. All those extra features are mostly gaming centric. If I wanted a gaming laptop, Id get a gaming laptop not a MAC.

Now dont come at me with the compare equivalent cores offerings argument. Compare the base with base and find out yourself, pricing is actually more for the m3 pro base now. Higher price, lower cores,shittier cores and lower performance. It has been a red light for me since I delayed purchase due to incoming M3 rumours. Apple wanted people to get their MAX chips and create a differentiation. Last years pro chips were really good and an actually good VFM product.

Apple doesnt want to provide any vfm products. They want a linear price to performance ladder that they can make people climb up on. You will start and M3 and you'll find yourself at M3 max (cause perfromance is like 2x priced M2 Ultra from last year.)
With M2 chips, M2 pro was a sweet spot that you could settle on. Now m3 pro has been gimped. Fcuking apple.

I was actually waiting for the first reviews to make a decision. Now they are out. Just check them. Search for "M3 Macbook pro with M3 pro review -max" And filter videos uploaded in last 1 day. (check the time of the post, dont filter if you're reading this few days later)
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If true, this could very well be in line with what they are doing with iPhones (creating bigger gap between pro and non-pro models). I would rather wait a bit more to understand whether it is bad as most app are not yet optimised for M3 chips.

Coming to your case, what exactly are you going to use the MBP for? Is this for video editing or photo editing? Do you have Intel Mac right now?

This is the most detailed review that has more real world tests done:


SSD : SSDs on new Macs are definitely faster than those in M2 Macs.
Memory: Higher memory for M2 Pro chips (18GB vs 16GB) but slightly lower memory bandwidth.
CPU performance: Consistently better than M2 Pro even though it has lower number of P cores.
GPU performance: All over the place, in some cases better and in most cases is worse.
Workloads that use both CPU and GPU : Consistently better than M2 Pro.
This is comparing 12 core M2 Pro with 12 core M3 Pro. If you take base M2 Pro

Which one to buy? Few months ago, I got the M2 Pro MBP with 12 core CPU and 19 core GPU and 1TB storage for 2.1L (there was offer at imagine store and I grabbed it without a second thought). If you can get it at same price, going for M3 pro does not make sense as there is 30k price difference. Right now M2 Pro 12C/19G/1TB costs 2.5L, but m3 Pro MBP with 12 CPU cores and 18GPU cores costs 10k less (2.4L). Do note that the M3 Pro has far better battery life compared to M2 Pro.

I do strongly feel that the app developers are doing shitty work when it comes to optimising for M-series chips. This shows as in some tests, M1 Pro is faster than M2 Pro and M3 Pro. This is the reason why performance for M3 chips is all over the place.

Why would Apple reduce P cores on M3 Pro? One angle is if Apple is not able to keep the thermals and battery consumption in their desired window in (8+4) configuration. We all know how Apple is paranoid these days about battery life. If the P cores generate more heat and consume more power, the only way to get same or higher battery life compared to M2 Pro MBPs is by rearranging the P+E cores. Do note that 3nm is extremely new and we have seen 15 Pro series overheating (Apple released fix to reduce overheating and it has visible affect on synthetic benchmarks). If this is true, M4 chips would have massive performance difference next year as Apple (and TSMC) would have better understanding of 3nm fabrication.
vishalrao said:
Timely video:

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This is a stupid comparison. Who would downgrade from Pro to base M chip? Also, majority of his tests were synthetic.
 
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Apple Moron3 chip for the stupid: :p

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