> > In case it is not abundantly clear by now: Apple'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).
> Their primary business goal is to sell hardware.
There is no contradiction here. No need for luxury. Efficient hardware scales, Moore's law has just been rewritten, not defeated.
Power efficiency combined with shared and extremely fast RAM, it is still a formula for success as long as they are able to deliver.
By the way, M-series MacBooks have crossed bargain territory by now compared to WinTel in some specific (but large) niches, e.g. the M2 Air.
They are still technically superior in power efficiency and still competitive in performance in many common uses, be it traditional media decoding and processing, GPU-heavy tasks (including AI), single-core performance...
This is it. An M series air is an incredible machine for most people - people who likely won’t ever write a line of js or use a GPU. Email, banking, YouTube, etc ona device with incredible battery and hardware that will likely be useful for a decade is perfect. The average user hasn’t even heard of HN.
It's great for power users too. Most developers really enjoy the experience of writing code on Macs. You get a Unix based OS that's just far more usable and polished than a Linux laptop.
If you're into AI, there's objectively literally no other laptop on the planet that is competitive with the GPU memory available on an MBP.
depends on your workload. RAM and passive cooling are the most likely issues but afaik an M2/M3 with 16GiB still performs a lot better than an similarly priced x64 laptop. Active cooling doesn't mean no throttling either.
If you don't explicitly want a laptop, a 32GB M2 Pro Mac Mini would be a good choice I think.
Personally i only have used MBPs so far.
But the M-series Air are not remotely comparable to the old Intel Airs, that's for sure :)
> Their primary business goal is to sell hardware.
There is no contradiction here. No need for luxury. Efficient hardware scales, Moore's law has just been rewritten, not defeated.
Power efficiency combined with shared and extremely fast RAM, it is still a formula for success as long as they are able to deliver.
By the way, M-series MacBooks have crossed bargain territory by now compared to WinTel in some specific (but large) niches, e.g. the M2 Air.
They are still technically superior in power efficiency and still competitive in performance in many common uses, be it traditional media decoding and processing, GPU-heavy tasks (including AI), single-core performance...
By the way, this includes web technologies / JS.