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

[leadeater]

We can finally do work on a Mac now? 

[hishnash]

They are going fast, directly into it all at once... M3, M3 pro and M3 Max! 

[captain_to_fire]

5 minutes ago, hishnash said:

They are going fast, directly into it all at once... M3, M3 pro and M3 Max! 

M3 fam now supports AV1 too

[leadeater]

6 minutes ago, hishnash said:

They are going fast, directly into it all at once... M3, M3 pro and M3 Max! 

Geez, slow down. I really hate Apple doesn't allow pause and rewind on their streams.

[Kisai]

On 10/25/2023 at 6:21 AM, Kisai said:

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.

 

Welp, No AV1 encode, but we do get AV1 decode.

 

Overall 80% faster than M1. Mesh shaders and native Raytracing (though none of the RT visuals look like they're more than 30fps.)

 

We're really close enough now that it's making all iGPU, RTX x50/x60 and i3/i5 parts look embarrassing.

[captain_to_fire]

14" MacBook Pro now starts with the M3, not M3 Pro, all chips of the M3 fam supports ray tracing

[hishnash]

2 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Overall 80% faster than M1. Mesh shaders and native Raytracing (though none of the RT visuals look like they're more than 30fps.)

 

I think that always depends on how much RT samples you are doing vs soothing etc hard to compare between scenes due ot this. 

[hishnash]

The memory increase is huge for some professionals .. a laptop with 192GB of memory, and the GPU can access that as well.  

[leadeater]

2 minutes ago, hishnash said:

The memory increase is huge for some professionals .. a laptop with 192GB of memory, and the GPU can access that as well.  

192? Wasn't it 128?

 

Edit:

[saltycaramel]

We've seen everything that was rumored within the 25 minutes mark.

From now on it's uncharted territory.

[captain_to_fire]

24" iMac is just a chip swap

[saltycaramel]

Lol.

It's over.

[hishnash]

That was short!!!

[captain_to_fire]

Bummer that the MacBook Air didn't got the M3 update. So I'm guessing they're going to kill the 13" MacBook Pro this time since the 14" will now start with the vanilla M3.

 

Edit: Yep the 13" Pro is gone

 

Edited October 31, 2023 by captain_to_fire

[Paul Thexton]

No reason for me to update from my M1Max, it’s still way more powerful than I need, but anyone who’s still on an Intel based Mac will be getting an enormous improvement with this generation of chips.

 

I feel bad for 27” iMac users though, no real like-for-like upgrade for them. They’d be better off at this point going mac mini + a non-Apple display (studio display is far too expensive)

[BondiBlue]

3 minutes ago, Paul Thexton said:

No reason for me to update from my M1Max, it’s still way more powerful than I need, but anyone who’s still on an Intel based Mac will be getting an enormous improvement with this generation of chips.

 

I feel bad for 27” iMac users though, no real like-for-like upgrade for them. They’d be better off at this point going mac mini + a non-Apple display (studio display is far too expensive)

Same here. I currently own two recent MacBook Pros. One is a 13" M1 (8GB RAM, 256GB SSD) that Apple gave me as a free replacement for my broken 2017 MBP, and the other is a 16" M1 Max (10C CPU, 32C GPU, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD) that I bought last May. The M1 Max is still a very, very powerful chip for the things I do, so I'll be keeping it for a bit. 

[saltycaramel]

The base memory for the M3 is still 8GB. (but part of it is now used more efficiently by the GPU thanks to dynamic caching I guess? Silver linings..)

 

Keyboard/Mouse/Trackpad for the iMac are still Lightning.

 

Base RAM for the M3 Pro went from 16GB to 18GB. (double that for the Max)

[captain_to_fire]

3 minutes ago, saltycaramel said:

The base memory for the M3 is still 8GB. (but part of it is now used more efficiently by the GPU thanks to dynamic caching I guess? Silver linings..)

Was hoping the rumors were true which said that the base M3 Macs would start with 12GB ram

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Paul Thexton]

4 minutes ago, saltycaramel said:

Keyboard/Mouse/Trackpad for the iMac are still Lightning.

My guess is they won’t get updated until they run out of already manufactured stock. I don’t personally care about the mouse, don’t use one for anything other than gaming, which the Apple mouse is abysmal for. I do have an original 2xAA powered Magic Mouse, it can be useful in specific circumstances but they’re few & far between.

 

What I really want is a way of transplanting the guts of an Apple keyboard (specifically the controller board + fingerprint sensor) in to a mechanical keyboard. Probably not possible, but we can all dream

[Paul Thexton]

9 minutes ago, saltycaramel said:

Base RAM for the M3 Pro went from 16GB to 18GB. (double that for the Max)

The weird number is giving me an eye twitch

[missell]

 

Kinda disappointed there's no M3 Pro/Max iMac, and the max specs are so low (relative to MacBook). was hoping we'd see some form of resurgance of the iMac Pro or 27" iMac.

 

Guess they make less money from that vs a studio display and mac studio or mac mini..

[Commodus]

7 minutes ago, missell said:

 

Kinda disappointed there's no M3 Pro/Max iMac, and the max specs are so low (relative to MacBook). was hoping we'd see some form of resurgance of the iMac Pro or 27" iMac.

 

Guess they make less money from that vs a studio display and mac studio or mac mini..

Rumor goes that a 32-inch iMac Pro is in the pipeline, but not for a while. Me, I just wish Apple had bumped up the base model iMac; 8GB of RAM, 256GB of storage and two ports just doesn't cut it for what's likely a family computer. You really want to buy at least the 16GB/512GB config with the full port array.

[tassadarforaiur]

I can't believe they made a MacBook pro with a non pro CPU, but more than that, it still only having 8gb ram for the base spec feels offensive.

If they want to use Weird numbers, they could have given it 11gb or something. "Pro" products in this day and age should not have single digit ram. Even a base model steam deck has 16gb from the factory.

 

[missell]

5 minutes ago, tassadarforaiur said:

I can't believe they made a MacBook pro with a non pro CPU, but more than that, it still only having 8gb ram for the base spec feels offensive.

If they want to use Weird numbers, they could have given it 11gb or something. "Pro" products in this day and age should not have single digit ram. Even a base model steam deck has 16gb from the factory.

 

Makes me wonder if they're considering moving from the Pro/Air model to a singular "MacBook" model. With the axing of the 13-inch Pro and now non-pro pros.

[AndreiArgeanu]

It's better than last years model I guess.

 

The "up to 10% faster" than M2 pro graphics on the M3 Pro is kinda weird to me, given how much they talked about all their graphics improvements they made and the switch to 3nm you'd think they'd claim more than 10% faster but I guess the 1 less GPU core has some kind of impact on that as well. And again, on the cpu side, the 20% faster than M1 pro and no figures for M2 Pro doesn't give me great confidence on the M3 Pro's standing against the M2 Pro.

 

The M3 Max sees the most improvement overall it seems with 4 extra performance cores and 2 extra gpu cores alongside the architectural improvements.

 

And the M3 just brings forward 20% generational improvement overall it seems, which is a pretty solid generational improvement, not out of this world, but not bad by any means.

 

Out of all of them I think the M3 Pro is a little dissapointing, especially when compared against the generational improvement the M3 and M3 Max bring forward, at least according to Apple's benchmarks.