It’s silly Apple force this annual cycle on Macs and Mx chips too. Just as it is for macOS. Nobody says they have to have a new Mx CPU or new Macs every 12 months. Nobody says they have to release a major version of macOS every year. They are putting themselves in this situation and it’s not helpful in terms of QA or customer satisfaction. The only thing it does accomplish (apart from pleasing their marketing drones) is to obsolete certain systems earlier.
I think we’d be perfectly fine getting a new Mx chip every ~ 2 years if OTOH that also meant sizable gains in either performance or battery life. That would also allow Apple to update various lines on their own schedules. Not all systems need to receive the latest and greatest Mx chip at the same time. It makes sense that a MBP or Mac Studio are upgraded on a more aggressive schedule than say a budget 24" iMac.
Not only will a 14" MBP get you a better keyboard, it will also offer far better battery life, much nicer screen and speakers, substantially less heat, and less noise compared to your 2017 Intel 15" MBP. You’ll love the 14" M3.
It’s genius-level marketing. The annual cycle is like fall TV premiere season used to be, with months of speculation and rumors coming, breathless announcement sessions, and then the actual airing of the shows (the analogy fails a bit there because most of the shows would get cancelled). It builds a rhythm and expectation that helps make it incredible news and helps Apple dominate the cycle repeatedly. We’re literally at the point where media outlets are actually basically begging Apple for an event (there’s been a wave of stories over the last few years where people essentially say “Hey, isn’t it time for an event?” at the beginning of September, etc). The invitations get parsed over and analyzed. The only one better at this kind of marketing is Taylor Swift (hmm, maybe Tim Cook should start showing up for Chiefs games?)
Does it have drawbacks in other terms? Of course! But it means that Apple thrives as a business, something I’m highly in favor of, and that allows them to do something like develop their own chips in ways that has leapfrogged Intel.
Side notes:
While people complain about there being more bugs or dropping customer satisfaction, I’ve not seen actual evidence for either of those being worse than previously – ie, not anecdata about specific bugs or someone complaining online about how they don’t like this. Does that evidence exist? IE, rate of serious bugs per Mac OS release? A survey of customer satisfaction?
I think the transition from Intel means we’re going to see Apple obsoleting older models pretty quickly so they can close the door on non-Apple Silicon machines.
I agree, but two things are at play here: user perspectives and business sense.
From a functionality user perspective, new OS updates yearly are a source of frustration, as you have loads of ‘newness’ to spend hours of your time working out… Is the new OS stable enough to update (on release, or point 1/2/3)?; are my apps compatible and work properly on the new OS?; are any of the new features worth using and if so then working out how to use them or not; changing workflows to fit new features; and so on. This is all quite annoying in many aspects as we know, given our main task is trying to use machines to, ya know, get things done!
IMO, these changes are much more pronounced with macOS than the other Apple OS’s, as users almost certainly mass store data on their Macs (often with externals), likely synced via iCloud (or other service) for download and usage more ad-hoc on iOS/iPadOS, given how iOS stores data somewhat differently (and yes, I know you can store purely locally on iOS, it’s just that most users probably don’t). So on macOS users are always much more wary of things not working properly, or items wrongly being deleted in the background they didn’t notice much later that have disappeared due to some bug, or simply changes that screw-up how our minds understand using something. This all creates additional cognitive load and potential levels of stress, so yes, doing this each and every year is burdensome.
However, the marketing user perspective and related business perspective is the expectation of new stuff regularly, like it or not. How regularly is the question? iPhones are obvs the biggest item, so Apple have to release new ones no matter what every September now, as the ‘marketplace’ (press/stock market/users expectations) all expect them, with sales dwindling in the few months beforehand (accessories are now part of this, especially Apple Watch, which is effectively an extra cherry-on-the-cake sale for Apple and deliberately released to generate extra income at exactly the same time as new iPhones). The marketing has to include new OS’s with new features, otherwise what’s the need for all this new hardware improvement?
Other things are less cyclical, hence delays in iPads this year. But at the moment at least, Apple is heavily invested in pushing M-series Mac adoption, as it’s quite clear they’re releasing regular new chips in a sustained effort to push users away from older Intel machines and onto M-series ones. Then you have the issue of matching chips between iOS devices and Macs now, with essentially the same underlying architecture for both arriving at the same time, which again the marketplace can see, and therefore expects Apple to do, both matching user and market expectations. Realistically, it looks like this is the new normal given this, so new machines have to have those new OS’s, matching the marketing reality new iPhones are in.
Interesting first performance figures for the new M3.
Its P core clocks in 26% higher than M1 (4.05 GHz vs. 3.2 GHz), so remaining gains are due to actual design improvements. M3 single-core comes in around 3k in Geekbench, so ~30% higher than M1 (~2300). But multicore is much more impressive obviously due to all the other changes:
M3: ~11,700 (+20% vs. M2, +41% vs. M1)
M2: ~9,700 (+17% vs. M1)
M1: ~8,315
Multicore M3 Max shows a staggering 21,084 (peak recording) which is truly impressive considering M2 Ultra (with Ultra ~= 2x Max) on average just matches that. For multicore, M3 Max beats M2 Max by ~45% and M1 Max by a whopping ~73%.
M1 was released Nov 2020. So we’re seeing ~ 30-41% raw gains in 3 years but without increasing power or decreasing battery life. Pretty sweet.
Competitors are starting to catch up - Samsung is getting ready to release a 4 nm process PC chip that supposedly matches the M2, with tons more neural core capacity, presumably interesting for AI uses. Intel and AMD won’t stand still, either. Apple really has no reason not to continue pressing on while they have a lead like this.
And most consumers (90%+?) just don’t care. They but a new computer every x years and don’t really pay attention to incremental model releases. We all manage with yearly updates to vehicle models as well. It seems weird for Apple not to improve their most powerful laptop and processor as often as yearly if they are able to do just that. We’re all smart - we’ll figure out which upgrades are right for us.
Nor is anybody telling them to. What people are saying is to release a new Mac when the CPU for that line is ready rather than on some fixed schedule determined by marketing apparatchiks. In hindsight, M2 was clearly late and nobody really felt it made a whole lot of sense to update a mid range product on a 10-month schedule. However, keeping the Studio/Pro and high-end MBPs on the latest and greatest is imperative, regardless if it happens to fall on Sep/Oct or not.
Yes, there’s definitely this too. The likes of Qualcomm and NVidia are no slouches, Apple’s leap past Intel needs forward momentum to build a sense of inevitability.
I’ve seen no evidence that M or A processor upgrades are marketing-driven at all, and I don’t think I’ve seen anyone complain about yearly upgrades to Macs besides you really. In fact, there used to be a lot more griping in the Intel years when Apple didn’t update their line when Intel had processor improvements that would have fit.
“ iPhone sales made up approximately 48.5 percent of Apple’s total revenue in the third quarter of the company’s fiscal year 2023. iPhone sales usually contribute to half or more than half of Apple’s overall sales revenue. Apple’s other businesses such as the Apple Watch and the iTunes Store have been bringing in growing shares of revenues, from around five percent in 2017 to over ten percent in the third quarter of FY 2023.”
Having brand new, super duper, gorgeous and powerful new iPhones, Macs, iPads, etc., debut around holiday and back to school seasons every year is one of the biggest reasons why Apple continues to be an extremely profitable industry leader. The more iPhones, Macs, etc. they can sell, the bigger the profits on their bottom line. They release new models in the fall because it’s back to school and start of the holiday shopping season, always the very best sales times for consumer and b2b retailers.
The marketing apparatchiks are the ones who help Apple make billions a year. I remember when Apple couldn’t advertise its way out of a paper bag and I much prefer this, thanks.
It’ll be interesting on when they release M4-series chips using the N3E 3-nanometre process – will they be on a Mac (and iPhone 16 Pros A18 chip) a year from now in Autumn 2024 on this new annual schedule?
Closer to home, as I previously mentioned, when do people think we’ll see the Mini and Studio/Pro updates to these new M3-series?
Mini getting the M3+M3 Pro in January 2024 is reasonably fast if they do this as expected. However to buyers of the Studio & Pro it’s going to seem extremely silly buying if not needed immediately over the next 6-months (especially the Max chip version most likely buy) while waiting for these machines to get the same chips that are clearly already available right now. How does Apple square that circle of delay?
Just because M3 and M3 Pro are available in the numbers needed for mini, does not mean M3 Max is available for MP and Studio. But even so, M2 Ultra roughly matches M3 Max, so any Studio or MP user with an Ultra will have nothing to worry about an M3 Pro in a Mac mini.
They will arrive when they’re ready to ship in appropriate volume. I think if there’s anything we’ve learned so far with M1-M3 is that you buy the Mac you need with the specs you like when you need it. Things like form factor, screen quality, or battery life usually are for more important distinctions than the slight performance gains from Pro to Max or M1 to M2. Apple Silicon just performs much too well for an individual increment to really change the big picture by all that much IMHO.
I was surprised by the M3 Max matching the M2 Ultra, but Howard Oakley is dubious that Geekbench is showing the full picture:
Although we’re going to hear a lot of results from benchmarking apps like Geekbench, remember that the tests they run don’t simulate real-world CPU usage. For instance, they’re designed to run the same processes on each core when being used to measure multicore performance. In reality, macOS should manage distribution of the very different threads running in real-world use, to make best use of the cores available. Benchmark results are but part of the evaluation of performance.
When you hear anyone making claims that the 6P + 6E design of the M3 Pro is merely 50% more than a regular M3 chip with its 4P + 4E, or slightly over half an M3 Max at 12P + 4E, get them to show you their evidence. Measuring and comparing the performance of Apple’s new M3 chips has become much more complicated, and that’s before we’ve even considered the GPU.
Finally, be very wary of what you see in Activity Monitor’s CPU History window. While it does show broad trends in the distribution of workload across different cores, it doesn’t take account of frequency. There’s a world of difference between an E core running at 100% and a frequency of 1 GHz and a P core running at 100% and well over 3 GHz. If you want the full picture, then you have to resort to tools like powermetrics.
Yes we know all that, most should buy if needed. I’m not talking about owners of current machines not having to care about M3 Max being as good as M2 Ultra (though Ultra is double the price, remember!), but rather completely new buyers.
More precisely, I’m obviously talking from a marketing perspective here. Users buying Studios/MP’s are not average joe consumers who don’t really care much, quite the opposite. And they can see the new M3 Max chip is clearly shipping in MBP’s right now, so will be wondering why the (likely most popular) Studio Max doesn’t have these new chips sooner than the expected HALF-A-YEAR(!) from the M2 Studio release. They don’t care if it had been just a day since the M2 Studio’s were released, nor about supply constraints; they can see the next chip is here today in other Macs so they’ll wonder why such a massive wait to put these in Studios/MP’s.
How does Apple square that circle of delay in marketing terms? I don’t believe they can. Which is a problem when you drip-feed-over-time releases of devices such as these that get regularly updated.
Although, it’s not like Apple have always cared in the past about massive gaps between releases, though under different circumstances, given the timeframes they often left between releasing new devices (eg. Mini 2014 to 2018, et al.). So probably they’re not going to care here either.
Oh, that’s depressing. I didn’t find it necessary to replace my early 2008 iMac until 2019, so I wasn’t expecting to replace my present machine (21.5-inch 2019 3.6 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i3) before 2030. It still does everything I want it to at an acceptable speed.
11 years is an astonishing run. I generally feel that anything over 5-6 years is good.
It’s not so much about speed as compatibility and security. Even if you don’t worry about security because the last version of macOS you can run is no longer receiving security updates, at some point, the compatible Web browsers you can run will stop being able to access some websites.
Simply that a $1200 iPhone 15 Pro Max can take the place of a professional video camera that costs $20,000. That’s an incredibly impressive technical feat.
As to who cares, only really professional video people, since the rest of us aren’t buying $20,000 video cameras. That’s my other point—that just because the iPhone can stand in for the camera doesn’t mean that the rest of us can even begin to approximate what Apple did.
A friend who should know says that he suspects the budget for Apple’s Scary Fast presentation would have been in the low seven figures.
