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The M3 MacBook Pro range is so sneaky that I'm thinking of ditching Apple

https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/features/the-m3-macbook-pro-range-is-so-sneaky-that-im-thinking-of-ditching-apple

The M3 MacBook Pro range is frustrating, confusing, and appears to be designed to trick me into spending more

This article really resonated with me. I currently have a 2019 16" i9 MacBook Pro and looking for what the M3 upgrade would be was really frustrating. No clear path and all of the options cost way more than my current machine.

12 comments

anonymous69

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If buying a MacBook Pro is giving you a hard time, I can’t imagine what kind of meltdown you would have trying to pick out a Dell, HP, or parts for a self build.

superfes

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I don't think that's really the gist here, I shopped for M2/M3 before, and the prices are stupid, buy a cheaper one, which you feel like won't be enough for the lifetime you want to use it for, or go all out and hope that it is what you wanted for however long you need it.

By the time you get to storage, which you can never change, you're stuck deciding if you go with what you feel you need, or go big and pay big.

The entire model is broken, and 8GB of RAM by default is also really really stupid, unless all you do is email and browse the web, but you shouldn't be buying a pro model if you're just needing a larger phone >_>

So you get stuck, do I pay for the future and hope it's big enough for all the years I want to use it, or am I okay buying another laptop in less than 2-3 years just because I can't change it afterward?

I understand your sentiment, I don't mind building and maintaining my own PCs, the biggest problem with the newest MacBooks is that you're stuck with your purchase, for better or worse until you get another one.

This might not be a big deal for people with light workloads and low usage, but for some of us, it makes it really hard to say yes to their prices, not knowing if it's going to be enough for 4-5 years.

Reverendender

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You are spot on. Anonymous69’s comment is bad, and they should feel bad.

abhibeckert

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Coming from an i9? An M1 with 8GB of RAM would be significantly faster for most things.

Look - the reality is it's not going to be clear cut. How much faster it is will depend on the individual task you're working on. There are massive differences and not just in terms of architecture. For example the i9 tends to burst at high speed then throttle to a much lower speed. Apple silicon tends to start off sipping power and ramps up to high speed only after you've given it a sustained workload.

That makes them really hard to compare on a benchmark. Apple Silicon tends to really shine on tasks that take 15 minutes to complete (those often take hours on Intel). The Intel chip tends to shine on tasks that take just a few seconds (and a lot of the popular benchmarks test those, with deliberate breaks to let the CPU cool down).

On a Windows machine you'll have faster, more expensive RAM devoted to graphics (DDR 6) and still-very-fast (but not as fast) RAM devoted to memory (DDR 5). Apple's Unified memory is all the fast expensive type which means the graphics will be borrowing your main memory (though it's the slightly slower and less power-hungry kind sort designed for laptops).

Apple uses HBM memory, which is very fast, though exactly how fast depends on the model:

An M3 Max will have HBM3 running at 3.2 Terabytes per second
The fastest i9 Apple ever sold (sounds like you have that) used 2666Mhz DDR4 running at 90 Gigabytes per second
That's 35x faster.

But an even bigger difference is in the caches. For example your i9 probably has 16MB of L3 cache (newer i9s have more, but you're not using a recent model right now). The early Apple Silicon chips had zero L3 cache. Instead they had massive amounts of L2 cache. More L2 than you have for L3. And L2 cache is a lot faster than L3. It's also obviously orders of magnitude faster than 2666Mhz DDR4 (which is what your i9 will use for a lot of operations that are in the L2 cache on a newer Mac). The M3 models still have more L2 cache than your i9 has L3, but on top of that they also have a bunch of L3 cache (again, more than you have now).

And when you're comparing DDR4 to L2 cache you'll see real world performance for common operations, such as low level memory management in the swift language, being thousands of times faster. Sometimes ten thousand times or more.

And of course there are some things that are slower. Once it all comes out in a wash though, I think you'll be really happy with whatever you get. Why not just try one?

tcgoetz

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Look - the reality is it’s not going to be clear cut. How much faster it is will depend on the individual task you’re working on.

For sure. I don't doubt it will be a faster machine. Most of my issue are about the costs for the incremental upgrades. The base machines all come with to little memory and ssd. The upgrades cost way too much for what you're getting. My high end 2019 macbook pro cost ~ $2500. A high end macbook pro now cost ~ $4000. I would expect the new machine to last for four years like the last one did. I have a 1TB ssd now. It's 3/4 full. The biggest consumer of space is my primary photo catalog. If I upgrade my camera in the next four years the megapixels will probably double and space will fill up even faster. The upgrade from a 1TB ssd to a 2TB ssd is $400. That's way out of line with ssd costs anywhere else. And yes, I only keep my primary data on the laptop and push everything else of to my NAS.

hperrin

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I don’t know why you’re getting downvoted. Nothing you said was unreasonable.

kirklennon

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I work with drones, which means I work with 4K video. I'm a photography writer, which means I work with photos. I'm just the kind of creative who ought to have a MacBook Pro.

Not really. This honestly isn't that complicated, and editing 4K video isn't particularly taxing by modern standards. They should get the 15" M2 MacBook Air. Probably spring for 512GB storage. It's $1,499 and it's a certain to be a big upgrade over their current Mac. Problem solved.

conciselyverbose

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I'm all for "8GB is horseshit". There's a reason it's built onto the chip though. But past that the idea that having multiple levels of performance is bad is stupid.

And so is the idea that 4 grand on a laptop that will meaningfully save you work time is a huge deal. It it's a hobby that doesn't make you money, just let it be slower.

whodatdair

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I was interested until I got to the end of the article where they pivot to the sponsored links for non-apple video editing laptops - kinda makes the article seem disingenuous

Reverendender

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I’ve been an Apple user for 17 years. And this is some bullshit.

hperrin

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A lot of this is why I don’t use a MacBook as my main laptop now that I work for myself. I wanted a laptop with 2TB, and when I bought my Acer laptop, I only needed 512GB. So, I took it apart, took out the old drive and put in a 2TB NVMe. That’s not possible with a MacBook. I’ve also added more RAM in my laptop as my needs have changed. Also not possible with a MacBook.

I have a MacBook Air that I use to build the iPhone and Mac versions of my apps, and that’s about all it does. It was the cheapest MacBook when I bought it, and I chose it because I knew I’d never actually be doing any work on it. It’s not a bad machine, but it will never get any better than it is right now.

But hey, my business partner wanted a Mac to actually work on, so I bought her a $3000+ MacBook. Was it worth it? No. But that’s what she wanted, and yeah, Apple pressured me into getting nearly the top of the line MacBook, because in 6 years, if it’s a lower spec, she’ll just need a whole new laptop. It will not grow with her, so she needs the maximum capability she could conceivably need at the end of its expected lifetime. And that sucks.

Nogami

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Wow that website is horribly written. Pure garbage.