Trick or M3-treat? - Apple’s pre-Halloween “Scary Fast” virtual event

[saltycaramel]

Summary

Come next Monday (October 30th at 5:00 pm PT) Apple is going to release a pre-recorded Mac-centric virtual event, in an unusual evening time slot. 
And in an even more unusual move, we might see both the M3 and the M3 Pro/Max unveiled on the same day.

 

Quotes

Quote

Apple this morning sent out invites for its upcoming “Scary Fast” virtual event, set for October 30. Along with being scheduled for All Hallows’ Eve-Eve, the tagline could well be a reference to new silicon. Perhaps the new M3 chip is scheduled to arrive in time for what will most likely be the company’s last big event before gift buying season is in full force.

Regardless of what they’re packing, new Macs seem like a lock for the big online event. After all, the company’s computers didn’t get much love at the recent iPhone event, and Apple’s almost certainly going to belatedly commemorate macOS Sonoma with some compatible hardware.

That’s certainly in line with recent reports that stock has been running low for MacBook Pros and iMacs — the two primary candidates for refresh. Of course, a MacBook Pro would likely arrive with a Pro or Max chip. If those come in the form of the M3 chip, it would be breaking with the six month release cycle the company established with the M2.

Sources
https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/24/apple-sends-out-invites-for-scary-fast-event-new-macs-could-be-on-the-way/
 

YouTube stream placeholder:

 

My thoughts

That escalated quickly.

Last week, it looked like the M3 was a 2024 thing, and the M3 Pro/Max even more so.

Now it looks like we could even get new 14”/16” MacBook Pros in the same calendar year. (One thing to keep in mind: the January 2023 MBPs were originally slated to be released in October 2022)

 

Additionally, unveiling the 15-20W-class SoC (M3) and the 30-45W-class SoC (M3 Pro/Max) together is pretty unusual, Apple usually leaves each unveiling some breathing space to bathe in media/consumer attention. 

 

On the other hand, if we only based our predictions on established track record we would have never predicted (and, in fact, we didn’t) stuff like the A17 Pro and the iPhone pivoting to AAA gaming. Or we would never predict (except Mark Gurman spoiled that for us) that this time around, for the first time ever, the M3 Max is not only going to get more GPU but also more CPU in it compared to the M3 Pro.

 

Back to the event, a refreshed 24” iMac is a given after almost 900 days of M1 limbo. Of course all the Mac peripherals switching from Lightning to usb-c. Maybe even new usb-c AirPods Max 2?

 

We’ll see, come back Monday evening (it’s gonna be weird not hearing Cook’s signature “Good mooorning!”) for some 3nm and ray tracing love for Macs!

 

ps: looks like that Snapdragon X Elite on-paper Geekbench single-core dominance may last for a whole six days. 

 

 

 

[Dracarris]

Really curious to see how much faster/more energy-efficient they will manage to make these over the M2 counterparts.

[maplepants]

My work just ordered me an M1 pro Macbook. lol

 

Still a good machine, but probably the funniest timing our upgrade cycle could have had.

[Obioban]

Been waiting on an updated iMac or Mac Mini for a new family computer, to replace our 2011 iMac, so decent odds I'll be ordering something!

[Kisai]

5 hours ago, Dracarris said:

Really curious to see how much faster/more energy-efficient they will manage to make these over the M2 counterparts.

If it has hardware AV1 encoding, I would pick up a M3 Macmini up just to do video editing. Right now we're stuck in a situation where the Mac's can't encode AV1, and the PC's can't encode ProRes, so it's one hell of a waste of someone's time one way or the other.

 

[Commodus]

1 hour ago, Obioban said:

Been waiting on an updated iMac or Mac Mini for a new family computer, to replace our 2011 iMac, so decent odds I'll be ordering something!

Your patience is exemplary... I'm feeling the strain on a 2019 27-inch iMac, so I can only imagine what it's like with a 2011 machine. An M3-powered iMac would be an excellent family computer.

[RejZoR]

Whole Qualcomm's ARM chipsets for PC's are entirely irrelevant and not even competition for Apple. What are you going to run on that? Windows for ARM? Microsoft has been trying that for like 15+ years and it's still a trainwreck. Poor app selection and whatever runs on translation layer for x86 is basically unusable. Meanwhile Macs were 90% operational on launch and after 1 year they basically migrated and resolved all the compatibility issues. Apple did in 1 year + whatever production behind the scenes was compared to Microsoft's 15 years and they still have nothing to show.

 

I'd love to have ARM laptop, but they are just in no state to be usable. I have no clue how is the situation with Linux though. Is situation better there? I run Manjaro on all my laptops and it's working like a champ even on low end Pentium N6000 (4x E-cores).

[Obioban]

1 hour ago, Commodus said:

Your patience is exemplary... I'm feeling the strain on a 2019 27-inch iMac, so I can only imagine what it's like with a 2011 machine. An M3-powered iMac would be an excellent family computer.

Ha. Well, I don't use it much, myself, so easy to be strong. I have an AS laptop that I use with a studio display as my primary

[HenrySalayne]

I would really like to be blown away by some massive IPC improvements and a "scary fast" M3 processor, but I doubt it. This will most likely be a small step forward, not a giant leap.

[RejZoR]

22 minutes ago, HenrySalayne said:

I would really like to be blown away by some massive IPC improvements and a "scary fast" M3 processor, but I doubt it. This will most likely be a small step forward, not a giant leap.

M2 was rather meh jump and more of a refresh. M3 might be the big leap, especially given there are talks about "moar of everything" which might be significant, after all in compute, scaling is pretty much linear. Add 4 cores to existing 4 cores and it'll be 2x faster just from that. Add IPC improvements and leap will be even greater.

[HenrySalayne]

11 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

M2 was rather meh jump and more of a refresh. M3 might be the big leap, especially given there are talks about "moar of everything" which might be significant, after all in compute, scaling is pretty much linear. Add 4 cores to existing 4 cores and it'll be 2x faster just from that. Add IPC improvements and leap will be even greater.

Adding a few more cores is not exciting at all...

 

Lately AMD and Intel (ignoring 14th gen ) are on much steeper trajectories considering inter-generational improvements in comparison to Apple. 

[Helpful Tech Witch]

6 minutes ago, HenrySalayne said:

Lately AMD and Intel (ignoring 14th gen ) are on much steeper trajectories considering inter-generational improvements in comparison to Apple. 

You cant say anything from 2 products about the performance trajectory 

[Obioban]

9 minutes ago, HenrySalayne said:

Adding a few more cores is not exciting at all...

 

Lately AMD and Intel (ignoring 14th gen ) are on much steeper trajectories considering inter-generational improvements in comparison to Apple. 

Also 5nm to 3nm (and likely the next gen 3nm process, compared to the 3nm process used on the A17 Pro).

AND adding hardware ray tracing.

AND AV1 hardware.

and the already mentioned increase in core count.

 

M1 and M2 were both 5nm. In Intel terms, M1 was the tick and M2 was the tock. M3 is tick again.

 

AND M3 is the most badass processor name.

 

[Paul Thexton]

2 hours ago, Obioban said:

AND M3 is the most badass processor name.

My lardy bum should probably wait for the M5

[Obioban]

12 hours ago, Paul Thexton said:

My lardy bum should probably wait for the M5

Ha. 

 

My wife drives our M5, I drive the M3. 

[leadeater]

16 hours ago, HenrySalayne said:

Adding a few more cores is not exciting at all...

 

Lately AMD and Intel (ignoring 14th gen ) are on much steeper trajectories considering inter-generational improvements in comparison to Apple. 

It is a lot easier to get improvements when you have more to improve. Sure Apple typically has a fab node advantage but that wasn't really so true before Intel dropped the ball on their fabs, which is now looking very strong again and on good path. Anyway a near one to one transplant of Apple's microarchitecture over to x86 just wouldn't be as good as it is over on ARM with an OS and Apps made for that, you'd have to have such a beefy front end and tons of cache just to try and use such wide execution cores. Which on that note whenever someone goes XYZ can do ABC with only n number of cores I have to roll my eyes since core counts don't matter as much as what's in the cores and total amount of execution capabilities.

 

(It's like the car world arguments over which is the best engine platform)

 

All these big companies have just as talented people in them but no one, two or even three different things will make you much better than the rest since product design matters a lot.

 

Thing is each of these big three kind of target different areas in the computer hardware market in terms of archecture design because they have different products in mind.

 

Anyway node shrinks are always the most interesting, so I'm eager to see just what the M3 will be.

[leadeater]

16 hours ago, Obioban said:

AND M3 is the most badass processor name.

Apple Limited Edition M3 CSL? BMW probably wouldn't allow it though haha

[captain_to_fire]

42 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Apple Limited Edition M3 CSL? BMW probably wouldn't allow it though haha

inb4 Apple copies Intel's confusing naming scheme

/jk

 

M3-3300U

M3 Pro-3400H

M3 Pro-3500HX

M3 Max-3600HX

M3 Max-3700HX

[leadeater]

24 minutes ago, captain_to_fire said:

inb4 Apple copies Intel's confusing naming scheme

/jk

 

M3-3300U

M3 Pro-3400H

M3 Pro-3500HX

M3 Max-3600HX

M3 Max-3700HX

Should of made that first one the M3-3900U which would be slower than the M3 Pro-3500HX 

[saltycaramel]

 

[Paul Thexton]

That’ll be midnight in the UK… Might get myself an evening nap in before hand.

[saintlouisbagels]

I somewhat impulse-purchased the Mac Studio M2 Ultra on October 13 because I was running out of RAM on my MBP M1 Pro 16GB and it was getting frustrating for Lightroom and Photoshop. I feel like I'm doing something wrong since it seems like a lot of people say they're fine with Lightroom/Photoshop on M1 Airs.

 

I'm kind of hoping there isn't a huge spec bump for M3, but also I'm reminding myself that nothing I do will ever approach saturation of the M2 Ultra/64GB RAM for the next several years lol.

[WolframaticAlpha]

On 10/25/2023 at 8:18 PM, RejZoR said:

Windows

Hey! Windows for Arm is totally a thing. You shan't speak bad of WoA/s

 

It is unreal how bad WoA is though. I tried using it and I have computers from 2/15 that ran x86 stuff better than it did.

[Thaldor]

On 10/26/2023 at 2:09 PM, leadeater said:

Apple Limited Edition M3 CSL? BMW probably wouldn't allow it though haha

I would believe BMW being totally into it, I wouldn't suspect a second BMW jumping in and moving the charging port to the undercarriage just to sell BMW M3 Ultra Racing Jack for extra $5,000 (not included in the price of the car, using any other jack to turn your car on it's side to access the charging port will void the warranty).

[saltycaramel]

T minus 9 minutes.