<story><title>Apple introduces M4 chip</title><url>https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/05/apple-introduces-m4-chip/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>coffeebeqn</author><text>Engineers use MacBook pros because it’s the best built laptop, the best screen, arguably the best OS and most importantly - they’re not the ones paying for them.</text></item><item><author>klabb3</author><text>&amp;gt; but it is about selling luxury hardware.&lt;p&gt;Somewhat true but things are changing. While there are plenty of “luxury” Apple devices like Vision Pro or fully decked out MacBooks for web browsing we no longer live in a world where tech are just lifestyle gadgets. People spend hours a day on their phones, and often run their life and businesses through it. Even with the $1000+&amp;#x2F;2-3y price tag, it’s simply not that much given how central role it serves in your life. This is especially true for younger generations who often don&amp;#x27;t have laptops or desktops at home, and also increasingly in poorer-but-not-poor countries (say eg Eastern Europe). So the iPhone (their best selling product) is far, far, far more a commodity utility than typical luxury consumption like watches, purses, sports cars etc.&lt;p&gt;Even in the higher end products like the MacBooks you see a lot of professionals (engineers included) who choose it because of its price-performance-value, and who don’t give a shit about luxury. Especially since the M1 launched, where performance and battery life took a giant leap.</text></item><item><author>andsoitis</author><text>&amp;gt; In case it is not abundantly clear by now: Apple&amp;#x27;s AI strategy is to put inference (and longer term even learning) on edge devices. This is completely coherent with their privacy-first strategy (which would be at odds with sending data up to the cloud for processing).&lt;p&gt;Their primary business goal is to sell hardware. Yes, they’ve diversified into services and being a shopping mall for all, but it is about selling luxury hardware.&lt;p&gt;The promise of privacy is one way in which they position themselves, but I would not bet the bank on that being true forever.</text></item><item><author>rsp1984</author><text>&lt;i&gt;Together with next-generation ML accelerators in the CPU, the high-performance GPU, and higher-bandwidth unified memory, the Neural Engine makes M4 an outrageously powerful chip for AI.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;In case it is not abundantly clear by now: Apple&amp;#x27;s AI strategy is to put inference (and longer term even learning) on edge devices. This is completely coherent with their privacy-first strategy (which would be at odds with sending data up to the cloud for processing).&lt;p&gt;Processing data at the edge also makes for the best possible user experience because of the complete independence of network connectivity and hence minimal latency.&lt;p&gt;If (and that&amp;#x27;s a big if) they keep their APIs open to run any kind of AI workload on their chips it&amp;#x27;s a strategy that I personally really really welcome as I don&amp;#x27;t want the AI future to be centralised in the hands of a few powerful cloud providers.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jwr</author><text>&amp;gt; Engineers use MacBook pros because it’s the best built laptop, the best screen, arguably the best OS and most importantly - they’re not the ones paying for them.&lt;p&gt;I am the one paying for my MacBook Pro, because my company is a self-funded business. I run my entire business on this machine and I love it. I always buy the fastest CPU possible, although I don&amp;#x27;t max out the RAM and SSD.&lt;p&gt;Amusingly enough, I talked to someone recently about compilation speeds and that person asked my why I don&amp;#x27;t compile my software (Clojure and ClojureScript) on &amp;quot;powerful cloud servers&amp;quot;. Well, according to Geekbench, which always correlates very well with my compilation speeds, there are very few CPUs out there that can beat my M3 Max, and those aren&amp;#x27;t easily rentable as bare-metal cloud servers. Any virtual server will be slower.&lt;p&gt;So please, don&amp;#x27;t repeat the &amp;quot;MacBooks are for spoiled people who don&amp;#x27;t have to pay for them&amp;quot; trope. There are people for whom this is simply the best machine for the job at hand.&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, I checked my financials: a 16&amp;quot; MBP with M3 and 64GB RAM, amortized over 18 months (very short!) comes out to around $150&amp;#x2F;month. That is not expensive at all for your main development machine that you run your business on!</text></comment>
<story><title>Apple introduces M4 chip</title><url>https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/05/apple-introduces-m4-chip/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>coffeebeqn</author><text>Engineers use MacBook pros because it’s the best built laptop, the best screen, arguably the best OS and most importantly - they’re not the ones paying for them.</text></item><item><author>klabb3</author><text>&amp;gt; but it is about selling luxury hardware.&lt;p&gt;Somewhat true but things are changing. While there are plenty of “luxury” Apple devices like Vision Pro or fully decked out MacBooks for web browsing we no longer live in a world where tech are just lifestyle gadgets. People spend hours a day on their phones, and often run their life and businesses through it. Even with the $1000+&amp;#x2F;2-3y price tag, it’s simply not that much given how central role it serves in your life. This is especially true for younger generations who often don&amp;#x27;t have laptops or desktops at home, and also increasingly in poorer-but-not-poor countries (say eg Eastern Europe). So the iPhone (their best selling product) is far, far, far more a commodity utility than typical luxury consumption like watches, purses, sports cars etc.&lt;p&gt;Even in the higher end products like the MacBooks you see a lot of professionals (engineers included) who choose it because of its price-performance-value, and who don’t give a shit about luxury. Especially since the M1 launched, where performance and battery life took a giant leap.</text></item><item><author>andsoitis</author><text>&amp;gt; In case it is not abundantly clear by now: Apple&amp;#x27;s AI strategy is to put inference (and longer term even learning) on edge devices. This is completely coherent with their privacy-first strategy (which would be at odds with sending data up to the cloud for processing).&lt;p&gt;Their primary business goal is to sell hardware. Yes, they’ve diversified into services and being a shopping mall for all, but it is about selling luxury hardware.&lt;p&gt;The promise of privacy is one way in which they position themselves, but I would not bet the bank on that being true forever.</text></item><item><author>rsp1984</author><text>&lt;i&gt;Together with next-generation ML accelerators in the CPU, the high-performance GPU, and higher-bandwidth unified memory, the Neural Engine makes M4 an outrageously powerful chip for AI.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;In case it is not abundantly clear by now: Apple&amp;#x27;s AI strategy is to put inference (and longer term even learning) on edge devices. This is completely coherent with their privacy-first strategy (which would be at odds with sending data up to the cloud for processing).&lt;p&gt;Processing data at the edge also makes for the best possible user experience because of the complete independence of network connectivity and hence minimal latency.&lt;p&gt;If (and that&amp;#x27;s a big if) they keep their APIs open to run any kind of AI workload on their chips it&amp;#x27;s a strategy that I personally really really welcome as I don&amp;#x27;t want the AI future to be centralised in the hands of a few powerful cloud providers.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pompino</author><text>&amp;quot;Engineers&amp;quot; - ironically the term used in the software industry for people who never standardize anything, solve the same problem solved by other &amp;quot;engineers&amp;quot; over and over again (how many libraries do you need for arrays and vectors and guis and buttons and text boxes and binary trees and sorting, yada yada?) while making the same mistakes and learning the hard way each time, also vehemently argue about software being &amp;quot;art&amp;quot; might like OSX, but even that is debatable. Meanwhile actual Engineers (the ones with the license) the people who need CAD and design tools for building bridges and running manufacturing plants stay far away from OSX.</text></comment>