Apple introduces M4 chip

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/05/apple-introduces-m4-chip/

by excsn • 2 years ago

1588 2046 2 years ago

apple.com

stjo• 2 years ago

Only in the new iPads though, no word when it'll be available in Macs.

speg• 2 years ago

In the video event, Tim mentions more updates at WWDC next month - I suspect we will see a M4 MacBook Pro then.

atonse2• 2 years ago

Haven't they been announcing Pros and Max's around December? I don't remember. If they're debuting them at WWDC I'll definitely upgrade my M1. I don't even feel the need to, but it's been 2.5 years.

throwaway59592• 2 years ago

Hopefully in the Mac Mini at WWDC.

ramboldio• 2 years ago

if only macOS would run on iPad..

user90131313• 2 years ago

All that power so ipad stays limited like a toy.

Eun• 2 years ago

then a lot of people would buy it, including me :-)

vbezhenar3• 2 years ago

Please no. I don't want no touch support in macOS.

jwells896• 2 years ago

It might work if running in Mac mode required a reboot (no on the fly switching between iOS and macOS) and a connected KB+mouse, with the touch part of the screen (aside from Pencil usage) turning inert in Mac mode.

Otherwise yes, desktop operating systems are a terrible experience on touch devices.

Nevermark2• 2 years ago

Because it would be so great you couldn’t help using it? /h

What would be the downside to other’s using it?

I get frustrated that Mac doesn’t respond to look & pinch!

jonhohle• 2 years ago

Why would you need it? Modern iPads have thunderbolt ports (minimally USB-C) and already allow keyboards, network adapters, etc. to be connected. It would be like an iMac without the stand and an option to put it in a keyboard enclosure. Sounds awesome.

pquki45• 2 years ago

That's your argument of not allowing others to use MacOS on an iPad?

tcfunk• 2 years ago

I'd settle for some version of xcode, or some other way of not requiring a macOS machine to ship iOS apps.

JimDabell• 2 years ago

Swift Playgrounds, which runs on the iPad, can already be used to build an app and deploy it to the App Store without a Mac.

hot_gril4• 2 years ago

It needs a regular web browser too.

havaloc• 2 years ago

Maybe this June there'll be an announcement, but like Lucy with the football, I'm not expecting it. I would instabuy if this was the case, especially with a cellular iPad.

swozey3• 2 years ago

Yeah, I bought one of them a few years ago planning to use it for a ton of things.

Turns out I only use it on flights to watch movies because I loathe the os.

umanwizard3• 2 years ago

They make a version of iPad that runs macOS, it is called a MacBook Pro.

zuminator• 2 years ago

MacBook Pros have touchscreens and Apple Pencil compatibility now?

ranyefet• 2 years ago

Just give us support for virtualization and we could install Linux on it and use it for development.

LeoPanthera4• 2 years ago

UTM can be built for iOS.

tosh2• 2 years ago

Did they mention anything about RAM?

tosh2• 2 years ago

faster memory bandwidth

zamadatix6• 2 years ago

The announcement video also highlighted "120 GB/s unified memory bandwidth". 8 GB/16 GB depending on model.

dmitshur• 2 years ago

I don't think they included it in the video, but https://www.apple.com/ipad-pro/specs/ says it's 8 GB of RAM in 256/512 GB models, 16 GB RAM in 1/2 TB ones.

Takennickname4• 2 years ago

Why even have an event at this point? There's literally nothing interesting.

antipaul2• 2 years ago

Video showing Apple Pencil Pro features was pretty sick, and I ain't even an artist

Takennickname4• 2 years ago

The highlight of the event was a stylus?

gardaani• 2 years ago

I think they are over-engineering it. I have never liked gestures because it's difficult to discover something you can't see. A button would have been better than an invisible squeeze gesture.

throwaway114604• 2 years ago

2x better performance per watt is not interesting? Wow, what a time to be alive.

LoganDark4• 2 years ago

To me, cutting wattage in half is not interesting, but doubling performance is interesting. So performance per watt is actually a pretty useless metric since it doesn't differentiate between the two.

of course efficiency matters for a battery-powered device, but I still tend to lean towards raw power over all else. Others may choose differently, which is why other metrics exist I guess.

Takennickname4• 2 years ago

That's bullshit. Does that mean they could have doubled battery life if they kept the performance the same? Impossible.

praseodym3• 2 years ago

"With these improvements to the CPU and GPU, M4 maintains Apple silicon’s industry-leading performance per watt. M4 can deliver the same performance as M2 using just half the power. And compared with the latest PC chip in a thin and light laptop, M4 can deliver the same performance using just a fourth of the power."

That's an incredible improvement in just a few years. I wonder how much of that is Apple engineering and how much is TSMC improving their 3nm process.

cs7022• 2 years ago

Potentially > 2x greater battery life for the same amount of compute!

That is pretty crazy.

Or am I missing something?

krzyk• 2 years ago

Wait a bit. M2 wasn't as good as the hype was.

eqvinox4• 2 years ago

Sadly, this is only processor power consumption, you need to put power into a whole lot of other things to make an useful computer… a display backlight and the system's RAM come to mind as particular offenders.

Hamuko2• 2 years ago

Comparing the tech specs for the outgoing and new iPad Pro models, that potential is very much not real.

Old: 28.65 Wh (11") / 40.88 Wh (13"), up to 10 hours of surfing the web on Wi-Fi or watching video.

New: 31.29 Wh (11") / 38.99 Wh (13"), up to 10 hours of surfing the web on Wi-Fi or watching video.

Dibby053• 2 years ago

2x efficiency vs a 2 year old chip is more or less in line with expectations (Koomey's law). [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koomey%27s_law

BurningFrog2• 2 years ago

Is the CPU/GPU really dominating power consumption that much?

onlyrealcuzzo3• 2 years ago

On one hand, it's crazy. On the other hand, it's pretty typical for the industry.

Average performance per watt doubling time is 2.6 years: https://newsroom.arm.com/blog/performance-per-watt#:~:text=T....

praseodym3• 2 years ago

M2 was launched in June 2022 [1] so a little under 2 years ago. Apple is a bit ahead of that 2.6 years, but not by much.

[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/06/apple-unveils-m2-with...

luyu_wu3• 2 years ago

Note that performance per watt is 2x higher at both chips peak performance. This is in many ways an unfair comparison for Apple to make.

faeriechangling6• 2 years ago

It's a shame performance per watt doesn't double every 2.6 years for modems and screens.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 2 years ago

I wonder how much of that is Apple engineering and how much is TSMC improving their 3nm process.

I think Apple's design choices had a huge impact on the M1's performance but from there on out I think it's mostly due to TSMC.

izacus10• 2 years ago

Apple usually massively exaggerates their tech spec comparison - is it REALLY half the power use of all times (so we'll get double the battery life) or is it half the power use in some scenarios (so we'll get like... 15% more battery life total) ?

alphakappa• 2 years ago

Any product that uses this is more than just the chip, so you cannot get a proportional change in battery life.

illusive4080• 2 years ago

From their specs page, battery life is unchanged. I think they donated the chip power savings to offset the increased consumption of the tandem OLED

aledalgrande• 2 years ago

Well battery life would be used by other things too right? Especially by that double OLED screen. "best ever" in every keynote makes me laugh at this point, but it doesn't mean that they're not improving their power envelope.

philistine5• 2 years ago

Quickly looking at the press release, it seems to have the same comparisons as in the video. None of Apple's comparisons today are between the M3 and M4. They are ALL comparing the M2 and M4. Why? It's frustrating, but today Apple replaced a product with an M2 with a product with an M4. Apple always compares product to product, never component to component when it comes to processors. So those specs are far more impressive than if we could have numbers between the M3 and M4.

cletus• 2 years ago

IME Apple has always been the most honest when it makes performance claims. LIke when they said an Macbook Air would last 10+ hours and third-party reviewers would get 8-9+ hours. All the while, Dell or HP would claim 19 hours and you'd be lucky to get 2 eg [1].

As for CPU power use, of course that doesn't translate into doubling battery life because there are other components. And yes, it seems the OLED display uses more power so, all in all, battery life seems to be about the same.

I'm interested to see an M3 vs M4 performance comparison in the real world. IIRC the M3 was a questionable upgrade. Some things were better but some weren't.

Overall the M-series SoCs have been an excellent product however.

[1] https://www.laptopmag.com/features/laptop-battery-life-claim...

EDIT: added link

bagels• 2 years ago

CPU is not the only way that power is consumed in a portable device. It is a large fraction, but you also have displays and radios.

coldtea2• 2 years ago

Apple might use simplified and opaque plots to drive their point, but they all too often undersell the differences. Indepedent reviews for example find that they not just hit the mark Apple mentions for things like battery but that often do slightly better...

michaelmior• 2 years ago

is it REALLY half the power use of all times (so we'll get double the battery life)

I'm not sure what you mean by "of all times" but half the battery usage of the processor definitely doesn't translate into double the battery life since the processor is not the only thing consuming power.

smith70182• 2 years ago

You wouldn’t necessarily get twice the battery life. It could be less than that due to the thinner body causing more heat, a screen that utilizes more energy, etc

mcv2• 2 years ago

I don't know, but the M3 MBP I got from work already gives the impression of using barely any power at all. I'm really impressed by Apple Silicon, and I'm seriously reconsidering my decision from years ago to never ever buy Apple again. Why doesn't everybody else use chips like these?

wwilim• 2 years ago

Isn't 15% more battery life a huge improvement on a device already well known for long battery life?

can16358p• 2 years ago

Apple is one of the few companies that underpromise and overdeliver and never exaggerate.

Compared to the competition, I'd trust Apple much more than the Windows laptop OEMs.

VelesDude3• 2 years ago

If there is any dishonesty, I would wager it is a case of it can double the battery life in low power scenarios. Can go twice as long when doing word processing for instance. Can potentially idle a lot lower

Petersipoi2• 2 years ago

so we'll get double the battery life

This is an absurd interpretation. Nobody hears that and says "they made the screen use half the energy".

mvkel3• 2 years ago

And here it is in an OS that can't even max out an M1!

That said, the function keys make me think "and it runs macOS" is coming, and THAT would be extremely compelling.

a_vanderbilt10• 2 years ago

We've seen a slow march over the last decade towards the unification of iOS and macOS. Maybe not a "it runs macOS", but an eventual "they share all the same apps" with adaptive UIs.

criddell• 2 years ago

And here it is in an OS that can't even max out an M1

Do you really want your OS using 100% of CPU?

underdeserver• 2 years ago

What function keys?

bitwize• 2 years ago

Ultimately, does it matter?

Michelin-starred restaurants not only have top-tier chefs. They have buyers who negotiate with food suppliers to get the best ingredients they can at the lowest prices they can. Having a preferential relationship with a good supplier is as important to the food quality and the health of the business as having a good chef to prepare the dishes.

Apple has top-tier engineering talent but they are also able to negotiate preferential relationships with their suppliers, and it's both those things that make Apple a phenomenal tech company.

makeitdouble2• 2 years ago

Qualcomm is also with TSMC and their newer 4nm processor is expected to stay competitive with the M series.

If the magic comes mostly from TSMC, there's a good chance for these claims to be true and to have a series of better chips coming on the other platforms as well.

GeekyBear3• 2 years ago

They don't mention which metric is 50% higher.

However, we have more CPU cores, a newer core design, and a newer process node which would all contribute to improving multicore CPU performance.

Also, Apple is conservative on clock speeds, but those do tend to get bumped up when there is a new process node as well.

philistine5• 2 years ago

Actually, TSMC's N3E process is somewhat of a regression on the first-generation 3nm process, N3. However, it is simpler and more cost-efficient, and everyone seems to want to get out of that N3 process as quickly as possible. That seems to be the biggest reason Apple released the A17(M3) generation and now the M4 the way they did.

The N3 process is in the A17 Pro, the M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max. The A17 Pro name seems to imply you won't find it trickle down on the regular iPhones next year. So we'll see that processor only this year in phones, since Apple discontinues their Pro range of phones every year; only the regular phones trickle downrange lowering their prices. The M3 devices are all Macs that needed an upgrade due to their popularity: the Macbook Pro and Macbook Air. They made three chips for them, but they did not make an M3 Ultra for the lower volume desktops. With the announcement of an M4 chip in iPads today, we can expect to see the Macbook Air and Macbook Pro upgraded to M4 soon, with the introduction of an M4 Ultra to match later. We can now expect those M3 devices to be discontinued instead of going downrange in price.

That would leave one device with an N3 process chip: the iMac. At its sale level, I wouldn't be surprised if all the M3 chips that will go into it will be made this year, with the model staying around for a year or two running on fumes.

GeekyBear3• 2 years ago

The signs certainly all point to the initial version of N3 having issues.

For instance, Apple supposedly required a deal where they only paid TSMC for usable chips per N3 wafer, and not for the entire wafer.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/report-apple-is-savi...

dhx2• 2 years ago

N3E still has a +9% logic transistor density increase on N3 despite a relaxation to design rules, for reasons such as introduction of FinFlex.[1] Critically though, SRAM cell sizes remain the same as N5 (reversing the ~5% reduction in N3), and it looks like the situation with SRAM cell sizes won't be improving soon.[2][3] It appears more likely that designers particularly for AI chips will just stick with N5 as their designs are increasingly constrained by SRAM.

[1] https://semiwiki.com/semiconductor-manufacturers/tsmc/322688...

[2] https://semiengineering.com/sram-scaling-issues-and-what-com...

[3] https://semiengineering.com/sram-in-ai-the-future-of-memory/

mensetmanusman4• 2 years ago

Also the thousands of suppliers that have improved their equipment and supplies that feed into the tsmc fabs.

tuckerpo• 2 years ago

It is almost certainly half as much power in the RMS sense, not absolute.

smrtinsert2• 2 years ago

Breathtaking

beeboobaa33• 2 years ago

And compared with the latest PC chip in a thin and light laptop, M4 can deliver the same performance using just a fourth of the power

It can deliver the same performance as itself at just a fourth of the power than it's using? That's incredible!

nblgbg• 2 years ago

That doesn't seem to reflect in the battery life of these. They have the same exact battery life. Does it mean it's not entirely accurate? Since they don't indicate the battery capacity in their specs, it's hard to confirm this.

davidee• 2 years ago

I haven't paid too much attention today, but what I did see with the iPad Pro was that they're using an OLED display (maybe even some kind of double layer OLED for increased brightness if I'm understanding the marketing jargon?).

I believe that OLED is much more power hungry than the previous display type (LED backlit LCD of some type?). I could be wrong, but in TV land that's the case...

Could explain, at least partly, why run time isn't greatly increased.

hmottestad7• 2 years ago

They made the battery on the 13" 5% smaller than the previous generation. They also write that they tested the device with auto-brightness disabled and brightness set at 50%. Not sure who the brightness slider works on the new iPads since the iPhones don't get max brightness unless auto-brightness is enabled. So 50% might be 1000/2=500 nits on the M4 iPad Pro and 600/2=300 nits on the M2 iPad Pro, or they might both be about 300 nits.

thih93• 2 years ago

They mention just M2 and M4 - curious, how does M3 fit into that?

I.e. would it sit between, or closer to M2 or M4?

tyrd12• 2 years ago

Considering the cost difference would that still make M4 better. Whatever the savings in power are offset by the price?

mlhpdx• 2 years ago

I’m far from an expert in Apple silicon, but this strikes me as having some conservative improvements. And in-depth info out there yet?

Lalabadie2• 2 years ago

2x the performance per watt is a great improvement, though.

refulgentis3• 2 years ago

Clever wording on their part: 2x performance per watt over M2. Took me a minute, had to reason through this is their 2nd generation 3nm chip, so it wasn't from a die shrink, then go spelunking.

jeffbee2• 2 years ago

This claim can only be evaluated in the context of a specific operating point. I can 6x the performance per watt of the CPU in this machine I am using by running everything on the efficiency cores and clocking them down to 1100MHz. But performance per watt is not the only metric of interest.

gmm1990• 2 years ago

It surprised me they called it an M4 vs an M3 something. The display engine seems to be the largest change I don't know what that looked like on previous processors. Completely hypothesizing but could be a significant efficiency improvement if its offloading display stuff.

aeonik• 2 years ago

3 isn't a power of two, maybe the M8 is next.

duxup• 2 years ago

I'd rather they just keep counting up than some companies where they get into wonky product line naming convention hell.

It's ok if 3 to 4 is or isn't a big jump, it's the next one is really all I want to know. If I need to peek at the specs, the name really won't tell me anything anyhow and I'll be on a webpage.

shepherdjerred4• 2 years ago

I expect the pro/max variants will be more interesting. The improvements do look great for consumer devices, though.

Findecanor• 2 years ago

I'm guessing that the "ML accelerator" in the CPU cores means one of ARM's SME extensions for matrix multiplication. SME in ARM v8.4-A adds dot product instructions. v8.6-A adds more, including BF16 support.

https://community.arm.com/arm-community-blogs/b/architecture...

hmottestad7• 2 years ago

Apple has the NPU (also called Apple Neural Engine), which is specific hardware for running inference. Can't be used for LLMs though at the moment, maybe the M4 will be different. They also have a vector processor attached to the performance cluster of the CPU, they call the instruction set for it AMX. I believe that that one can be leveraged for faster LLM inferencing.

https://github.com/corsix/amx

EduardoBautista• 2 years ago

The 256gb and 512gb models have 8gb of ram. The 1tb and 2tb models have 16gb. Not a fan of tying ram to storage.

https://www.apple.com/ipad-pro/specs/

praseodym3• 2 years ago

And also one less CPU performance core for the lower storage models.

05• 2 years ago

Well, they have to sell the dies with failed cores somehow..

Laaas• 2 years ago

The economic reasoning behind this doesn't make sense to me.

What do they lose by allowing slightly more freedom in configurations?

fallat• 2 years ago

The reasoning is money. Come on.

blegr4• 2 years ago

It forces you to buy multiple upgrades instead of just the one you need.

jessriedel2• 2 years ago

I think it’s a price discrimination technique.

a_vanderbilt10• 2 years ago

Margins and profit. Less variations in production makes for higher efficiency. Segmenting the product line can push consumers to purchase higher tiers of product. It's iOS anyways, and the people who know enough to care how much RAM they are getting are self-selecting for those higher product tiers.

vinkelhake2• 2 years ago

It's just Apple's price ladder. The prices on their different SKUs are laid out carefully so that there's never a too big of a jump to the next level.

https://talkbackcomms.com/blogs/news/ladder

naravara• 2 years ago

Logistical efficiencies mostly. It ends up being a lot of additional SKUs to manage, and it would probably discourage people from moving up a price tier if they would have otherwise. So from Apple’s perspective they’re undergoing more hassle (which costs) for the benefit of selling you lower margin products. No upside for them besides maybe higher customer satisfaction, but I doubt it would have moved the needle on that very much.

izacus10• 2 years ago

They push you to buy the more expensive model with higher margins.

This is what they did when I was buying iPad Air - it starts with actually problematically low 64GB of Storage... and the 256GB model is the next one with massive price jump.

It's the same kind of "anchoring" (marketing term) that car dealers use to lure you into deciding for their car based on the cheapest 29.999$ model which with "useful" equipment will end you costing like 45.000$

gehsty• 2 years ago

Fewer iPad SKUs = more efficient manufacturing and logistics, at iPad scale probably means a very real cost saving.

michaelt• 2 years ago

Because before you know it you're Dell and you're stocking 18 different variants of "Laptop, 15 inch screen, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD" and users are scratching their heads trying to figure out WTF the difference is between a "Latitude 3540" a "Latitude 5540" and a "New Latitude 3550"

abtinf• 2 years ago

The GP comment can be misleading because it suggests Apple is tying storage to ram. That is not the case (at least not directly).

The RAM and system-on-chip are tied together as part of the system-on-package. The SoP is what enables M chips to hit their incredible memory bandwidth numbers.

This is not an easy thing to allow configuration. They can’t just plug a different memory chip as a final assembly step before shipping.

They only have two SoPs as part of this launch: 9-core CPU with 8gb, and 10-core CPU with 16gb. The RAM is unified for cpu/gpu (and I would assume neural engine too).

Each new SoP is going to reduce economies of scale and increase supply chain complexity. The 256/512gb models are tied to the first package, the 1/2tb models are tied to the second. Again, these are all part of the PCB, so production decisions have to be made way ahead of consumer orders.

Maybe it’s not perfect for each individual’s needs, but it seems reasonable to assume that those with greater storage needs also would benefit from more compute and RAM. That is, you need more storage to handle more video production so you are probably more likely to use more advanced features which make better use of increased compute and RAM.

dragonwriter2• 2 years ago

What do they lose by allowing slightly more freedom in configurations?

More costs everywhere in the chain; limiting SKUs is a big efficiency from manufacturing to distribution to retail to support, and it is an easy way (for the same reason) to improve the customer experience, because it makes it a lot easier to not be out of or have delays for a customer’s preferred model, as well as making the UI (online) or physical presentation (brick and mortar) for options much cleaner.

Of course, it can feel worse if you you are a power user with detailed knowledge of your particular needs in multiple dimensions and you feel like you are paying extra for features you don't want, but the efficiencies may make that feeling an illusion — with more freedom, you would being paying for the additional costs that created, so a higher cost for the same options and possibly just as much or more for the particular combination option you would prefer with multidimensional freedom as for the one with extra features without it. Though that counterfactual is impossible to test.

Aurornis7• 2 years ago

Several things:

1. Having more SKUs is expensive, for everything from planning to inventory management to making sure you have enough shelf space at Best Buy (which you have to negotiate for). Chances are good that stores like Best Buy and Costco would only want 2 SKUs anyway, so the additional configs would be a special-order item for a small number of consumers.

2. After a certain point, adding more options actually decreases your sales. This is confusing to people who think they'd be more likely to buy if they could get exactly what they wanted, but what you're not seeing is the legions of casual consumers who are thinking about maybe getting an iPad, but would get overwhelmed by the number of options. They might spend days or weeks asking friends which model to get, debating about whether to spend extra on this upgrade or that, and eventually not buying it or getting an alternative. If you simplify the lineup to the "cheap one" and the "high end one" then people abandon most of that overhead and just decide what they want to pay.

The biggest thing tech people miss is that they're not the core consumers of these devices. The majority go to casual consumers who don't care about specifying every little thing. They just want to get the one that fits their budget and move on. Tech people are secondary.

sneak6• 2 years ago

It benefits Apple to not have people thinking about or worrying about the amount of ram in their iPad. The OS doesn’t surface it anywhere.

samatman3• 2 years ago

It's fairly absurd that they're still selling a 256gb "Pro" machine in the first place.

That said, Apple's policy toward SKUs is pretty consistent: you pay more money and you get more machine, and vice versa. The MacBooks are the only product which has separately configurable memory / storage / chip, and even there some combinations aren't manufactured.

phkahler2• 2 years ago

> It's fairly absurd that they're still selling a 256gb "Pro" machine in the first place.

My guess is they want you to use their cloud storage and pay monthly for it.

dijit4• 2 years ago

Real creative pros will likely be using a 10G Thunderbolt NIC to a SAN; local video editing is not advised unless it’s only a single project at a time.

Unless you are a solo editor.

azinman2• 2 years ago

I have a 256G iPhone. I think I’m using like 160G. Most stuff is just in the cloud. For an iPad it wouldn’t be any different, modulo media cached for flights. I could see some cases like people working on audio to want a bunch stored locally, but it’s probably in some kind of compressed format such that it wouldn’t matter too much.

What is your concern?

giancarlostoro5• 2 years ago

Honestly though, that's basically every tablet you cant change the ram, you get what you get and thats it. Maybe they should call them by different names like Pro Max for the ones with 16GB in order to make it more palatable? Small psychological hack.

dotnet00• 2 years ago

The Samsung tablets at least still retain the SD card slot, so you can focus more on the desired amount of RAM and not worry too much about the built-in storage size.

paulpan2• 2 years ago

I don't think it's strictly for price gouging/segmentation purposes.

On the Macbooks (running MacOS), RAM has been used as data cache to speed up data read/write performance until the actual SSD storage operation completes. It makes sense for Apple to account for with higher RAM spec for the 1TB/2TB configurations.

pantalaimon• 2 years ago

RAM has been used as data cache to speed up data read/write performance until the actual SSD storage operation completes.

I'm pretty sure that's what all modern operating systems are doing.

__turbobrew__• 2 years ago

That is called a buffer/page cache and has existed in operating systems since the 1980s.

gruez2• 2 years ago

How does that justify locking the 16GB option to 1TB/2TB options?

lozenge2• 2 years ago

The write speed needs to match what the camera can output or the WiFi/cellular can download. It has nothing to do with the total size of the storage.

bschne• 2 years ago

Shouldn't the required cache size be dependent on throughput more so than disk size? It does not necessarily seem like you'd need a bigger write cache if the disk is bigger, people who have a 2TB drive don't read/write 2x as much in a given time as those with a 1TB drive. Or am I missing something?

hosteur• 2 years ago

I don't think it's strictly for price gouging/segmentation purposes.

I think it is strictly for that purpose.

Aerbil3132• 2 years ago

Do people not understand that Apple's 'price gouging' is about UX? A person who has the money to buy a 1TB iPad is worth more than average customer. A 16GB RAM doubtlessly results in a faster UX and that person is more likely to continue purchasing.

nbsande• 2 years ago

If I'm understanding your point correctly that wouldn't prevent them from offering higher ram specs for the lower storage eg. 512 gig macs. So it seems like it is just price gouging

KeplerBoy5• 2 years ago

If these things will ever get MacOS support it will be useless with 8 GB of Ram.

Such a waste of nice components.

greggsy• 2 years ago

This comes up frequently. 8GB is sufficient for most casual and light productivity use cases. Not everyone is a power user, in fact, most people aren’t.

reustle• 2 years ago

If these things will ever get MacOS support

The Macbook line will get iPadOS support long before they allow MacOS on this line. Full steam ahead towards the walled garden.

Aurornis7• 2 years ago

I have a minimum of 64GB on my all my main developer machines (home, work, laptop), but I have a spare laptop with only 8GB of RAM for lightweight travel.

Despite the entire internet telling me it would be "unusable" and a disaster and a complete disaster, it's actually 100% perfectly fine. I can run IDEs, Slack, Discord, Chrome, and do dev work without a problem. I can't run a lot of VMs or compile giant projects with 10 threads, of course, but for typical work tasks it's just fine.

And for the average consumer, it would also be fine. I think it's obvious that a lot of people are out of touch with normal people's computer use cases. 8GB of RAM is fine for 95% of the population and the other 5% can buy something more expensive.

jiehong• 2 years ago

People always complain dev should write more efficient software, so maybe that’s one way!

At least, chrome wouldn’t run that many tabs on iPad for sure if it used the same engine as desktop chrome

leptons6• 2 years ago

These specific model of tablets won't ever get MacOS support. Apple will tell you when you're allowed to run MacOS on a tablet, and they'll make you buy a new tablet specifically for that.

tamrix2• 2 years ago

Why can't they just make it 12gb? It will sell far easier. It's all soldered on anyway.

trvz3• 2 years ago

Unlike seemingly everyone making this claim, I have used an M1 Mac mini with 8GB RAM. It's fine, and certainly not useless.

emodendroket2• 2 years ago

Is the base M1 Macbook Air "useless"?

sambazi• 2 years ago

8gb of ram

not again

paulddraper2• 2 years ago

Sadly so

ilikehurdles2• 2 years ago

The iPod classic had 160 GB of storage fifteen years ago.

No device should be measuring storage in the gigabytes in 2024. Let alone starting at $1000 offering only 256GB. What ridiculousness.

dmitrygr9• 2 years ago

So browse the web and play modern games on an iPod classic

vrick• 2 years ago

To be fair the ipod classic used a platter drive and ipads are high speed SSD storage. That being said, it's been years of the same storage options and at those prices it should be much higher, along with their iCloud storage offerings.

LeoPanthera4• 2 years ago

The iPod Classic had spinning rust. Don't pretend it's comparable with a modern SSD.

marshray2• 2 years ago

I just checked, and my iPhone is using 152 GB of storage.

I have years of photos and videos on there. Apparently the 256 GB model was the right choice for me?

emodendroket2• 2 years ago

I agree, the new iPad should have a spinning platter hard drive.

hi-v-rocknroll12• 2 years ago

When you can buy a 256 GiB SD card for $40 or an actual 256 GiB SATA SSD for $20.

iPad Pros should come with 1-16 TiB of SSD, and 16-128 GiB of RAM.

intrasight4• 2 years ago

"Think Different" ;)

littlestymaar3• 2 years ago

8gb of ram.

WTF? Why so little? That's insane to me, that's the amount of RAM you get with a mid-range android phone.

MyFirstSass2• 2 years ago

We've reached a point where their chips has become so amazing they have to introduce "fake scarcity" and "fake limits" to sell their pro lines, while dividing their customers into haves and havenots, while actively stalling the entire field for the masses.

deergomoo4• 2 years ago

I'm not defending Apple's absurd stinginess with RAM (though I don't think it's much of an issue on an iPad given how gimped the OS is), but I've never understood why high-end Android phones have 12/16+ GB RAM.

What needs that amount on a phone? 8GB on a desktop is...well it's not great, but it's usable, and usable for a damn sight more multi-tasking than you would ever do on a smartphone. Is it just because you need to look better on the spec sheet, like the silly camera megapixel wars of the 2010s?

sneak6• 2 years ago

Phones and tablets are effectively single-tasking. They don’t need much more ram than that in practice.

I use my iPad Pro constantly for heavy stuff and I don’t know how much ram is in it; it has never been something I needed to think about. The OS doesn’t even expose it.

filleduchaos3• 2 years ago

Is a Pixel 8 a mid-range Android phone? Mine shipped with 8GB of RAM, and even with my frankly insane Chrome habits (I'm currently sitting at around 200 tabs) I'm only using about five and half gigabytes, and it runs a hell of a lot smoother than other phones with more RAM that I've used.

There's absolutely nothing a mobile device does that should require that much memory. That shitty OEMs bloat the hell out of their ROMs and slap on more memory to match isn't a good thing or something to emulate in my opinion.

sroussey7• 2 years ago

“The next-generation cores feature improved branch prediction, with wider decode and execution engines for the performance cores, and a deeper execution engine for the efficiency cores. And both types of cores also feature enhanced, next-generation ML accelerators.”

gwd• 2 years ago

I wonder to what degree this also implies, "More opportunities for speculative execution attacks".

sroussey7• 2 years ago

I thought the same thing when I read it, but considering the attacks were known when doing this improvement, I hope that it was under consideration during the design.

anentropic• 2 years ago

I wish there was more detail about the Neural Engine updates

sroussey7• 2 years ago

Agreed. I think they just doubled the number of cores and called it a day, but who knows.

a_vanderbilt10• 2 years ago

Fat decode pipelines have historically been a major reason for their performance lead. I'm all for improvements in that area.

snapcaster• 2 years ago

Apple was really losing me with the last generation of intel macbooks but these m class processors are so good they've got me locked in all over again

atonse2• 2 years ago

The M1 Max that I have is easily the greatest laptop I've ever owned.

It is fast and handles everything I've ever thrown at it (I got 32 GB RAM), it never, ever gets hot, I've never heard a fan in 2+ years (maybe a very soft fan if you put your ear next to it). And the battery life is so incredible that I often use it unplugged.

It's just been a no-compromise machine. And I was thinking of upgrading to an M3 but will probably upgrade to an M4 instead at the end of this year when the M4 maxes come out.

grumpyprole• 2 years ago

Unlike the PC industry, Apple is/was able to move their entire ecosystem to a completely different architecture, essentially one developed exactly for low power use. Windows on ARM efforts will for the foreseeable future be plagued by application support and driver support. It's a great shame, as Intel hardware is no longer competitive for mobile devices.

teaearlgraycold7• 2 years ago

Now that there's the 13 inch iPad I am praying they remove the display notch on the Macbooks. It's a little wacky when you've intentionally cut a hole out of your laptop screen just to make it look like your phones did 2 generations ago and now you sell a tablet with the same screen size without that hole.

kjkjadksj9• 2 years ago

Thats surprising you haven’t heard the fans. Must be the use case. There’s a few games that will get it quite hot and spool up the fans. I have also noticed its got somewhat poor sleep management and remains hot while asleep. Sometimes I pick up the computer for the first time that day and its already very hot from whatever kept it out of sleep with a shut lid all night.

hi-v-rocknroll12• 2 years ago

M1 Max here too. I don't see the point of if/when M4 Max comes out as an upgrade because these updates are too frequent and too small in performance bumps to be justified. Not speed, RAM, storage, or features are a limiting factor. They're going to have to create more "only works on X" iDevice upgrade lock-in killer features to get people to upgrade artificially and unnecessarily.

paxys2• 2 years ago

They keep making iPads more powerful while keeping them on the Fisher-Price OS and then wonder why no one is buying them for real work.

Who in their right mind will spend $1300-$1600 on this rather than a MacBook Pro?

throwaway2562• 2 years ago

This.

wizzwizz4• 2 years ago

Everyone knows the Fisher-Price OS is Windows XP (aka Teletubbies OS, on account of Bliss). iPads run Countertop OS (on account of their flat design).

hedora2• 2 years ago

You can install linux on the one with a fixed hinge and keyboard, but without a touchscreen. It’s the “book” line instead of the “pad” line.

I’m also annoyed that the iPad is locked down, even though it could clearly support everything the macbook does.

Why can’t we have a keyboard shortcut to switch between the iPad and Mac desktops or something?

PreInternet013• 2 years ago

M4 makes the new iPad Pro an outrageously powerful device for artificial intelligence

Yeah, well, I'm an enthusiastic M3 user, and I'm sure the new AI capabilities are nice, but hyperbole like this is just asking for snark like "my RTX4090 would like a word".

Other than that: looking forward to when/how this chipset will be available in Macbooks!

mewpmewp23• 2 years ago

Although as I undserstand m3 chips with more VRAM handle larger LLMs better because they can load more into VRAM compared to 4090.

freedomben9• 2 years ago

This is true, but that is only an advantage when running a model larger than the VRAM. If your models are smaller, you'll get substantially better performance in a 4090. So it all comes down to which models you want to run.

PreInternet013• 2 years ago

Yes, M3 chips are available with 36GB unified RAM when embedded in a MacBook, although 18GB and below are the norm for most models.

And even though the Apple press release does not even mention memory capacity, I can guarantee you that it will be even less than that on an iPad (simply because RAM is very battery-hungry and most consumers won't care).

So, therefore my remark: it will be interesting to see how this chipset lands in MacBooks.

SushiHippie• 2 years ago

Disclosure: I personally don't own any apple devices, except a work laptop with an M2 chip

I think a comparison to the 4090 is unfair, as there is no laptop/tablet with an rtx 4090 and the power consumption of a 4090 is at ~450W on average

PreInternet013• 2 years ago

I think a comparison to the 4090 is unfair

No, when using wording like "outrageously powerful", that's exactly the comparison you elicit.

I'd be fine with "best in class" or even "unbeatable performance per Watt", but I can absolutely guarantee you that an iPad does not outperform any current popular-with-the-ML-crowd GPUs...

simonbarker87• 2 years ago

Seeing an M series chip launch first in an iPad must be result of some mad supply chain and manufacturing related hangovers from COVID.

If the iPad had better software and could be considered a first class productivity machine then it would be less surprising but the one thing no one says about the iPads is “I wish this chip were faster”

asddubs• 2 years ago

Well, it also affects the battery life, so it's not entirely wasted on the ipad

margalabargala• 2 years ago

Maybe they're clocking it way down. Same performance, double the battery life.

cjauvin• 2 years ago

I very rarely wish the battery of my iPad Pro 2018 would last longer, as it's already so good, even considering the age factor.

Zigurd• 2 years ago

My guess is that the market size fit current yields.

a_vanderbilt10• 2 years ago

I think this is the most likely explanation. Lower volume for the given product matches supply better, and since it's clocked down and has a lower target for GPU cores it has better yields.

hajile• 2 years ago

They already released all their macbooks and latest iphone on N3B which is the worst-yielding 3nm from TSMC. I doubt yields are the issue here.

It's suspected that the fast release for M4 is so TSMC can move away from the horrible-yielding N3B to N3E.

Unfortunately, N3E is less dense. Paired with a couple more little cores, an increase in little core size, 2x larger NPU, etc, I'd guess that while M3 seems to be around 145mm2, this one is going to be quite a bit larger (160mm2?) with the size hopefully being offset by decreased wafer costs.

DanHulton• 2 years ago

I'm wondering if it's because they're hitting the limits of the architecture, and it sounds way better to compare M4 vs M2 as opposed to vs M3, which they'd have to do if it launched in a Macbook Pro.

mason55• 2 years ago

Eh, they compared the M3 to the M1 when they launched it. People grumbled and then went on with their lives. I don't think they'd use that as a reason for making actual product decisions.

MuffinFlavored4• 2 years ago

To me it just feels like a soft launch.

You probably have people (like myself) trying to keep up with the latest MacBook Air who get fatigued having to get a new laptop every year (I just upgraded to the M3 not too long ago, from the M2, and before that... the M1... is there any reason to? Not really...), so now they are trying to entice people who don't have iPads yet / who are waiting for a reason to do an iPad upgrade.

For $1,300 configured with the keyboard, I have no clue what I'd do with this device. They very deliberately are keeping iPadOS + MacOS separate.

low_common• 2 years ago

You get a new laptop every year?

mvkel3• 2 years ago

I think (hope) wwdc changes this. The function keys on the Magic Keyboard give me hope.

Also, you know you don't HAVE to buy a laptop every year, right?

jasonjmcghee3• 2 years ago

Still using my M1 Air and had no interest in updating to M3. Battery life has dropped a fair amount, but still like 8+ hours. That's going to be the trigger to get a new one. If only batteries lasted longer.

baq• 2 years ago

I feel like I bought the M1 air yesterday. Turns out it was ~4 years ago. Never felt the need to upgrade.

alexpc2015• 2 years ago

To offer something better to those who have an iPad Pro M2 and a more powerful environment to run heavier games.

andrewmunsell• 2 years ago

My current assumption is that this has to do with whatever "AI" Apple is planning to launch at WWDC. If they launched a new iPad with an M3 that wasn't able to sufficiently run on-device LLMs or whatever new models they are going to announce in a month, it would be a bad move. The iPhones in the fall will certainly run some new chip capable of on-device models, but the iPads (being announced in the Spring just before WWDC) are slightly inconveniently timed since they have to announce the hardware before the software.

owenpalmer2• 2 years ago

interesting theory, we'll see what happens!

eitally• 2 years ago

My guess is that the M4 and M3 are functionally almost identical so there's no real reason for them to restrict the iPad M4 launch until they get the chip into the MacBook / Air.

mort9620• 2 years ago

To be honest, I wish my iPad's chip was slower! I can't do anything other than watch videos and use drawing programs on an iPad, why does it need a big expensive power hungry and environmentally impactful CPU when one 1/10 the speed would do?

If I could actually do something with an iPad there would be a different discussion, but the operating system is so incredibly gimped that the most demanding task it's really suited for is .. decoding video.

Shank• 2 years ago

Why does it need a big expensive power hungry and environmentally impactful CPU when one 1/10 the speed would do?

Well, it's not. Every process shrink improves power efficiency. For watching videos, you're sipping power on the M4. For drawing...well if you want low latency while drawing, which generally speaking, people do, you...want the processor and display to ramp up to compensate and carry strokes as fast as possible?

Obviously if your main concern is the environment, you shouldn't upgrade and you should hold onto your existing model(s) until they die.

steveridout• 2 years ago

I'm under the impression that this CPU is faster AND more efficient, so if you do equivalent tasks on the M4 vs an older processor, the M4 should be less power hungry, not more. Someone correct me if this is wrong!

kylehotchkiss7• 2 years ago

Environmentally impactful CPU when one 1/10 the speed would do

Apple's started to roll out green energy charging to devices: https://support.apple.com/en-us/108068

If I had to ballpark estimate this, your iPad probably uses less energy per year than a strand of incandescent holiday lights does in a week. Maybe somebody can work out that math.

aurareturn5• 2 years ago

To be honest, I wish my iPad's chip was slower! I can't do anything other than watch videos and use drawing programs on an iPad, why does it need a big expensive power hungry and environmentally impactful CPU when one 1/10 the speed would do?

A faster SoC can finish the task with better "work done/watt". Thus, it's more environmentally friendly. Unless you're referring to the resources dedicated to advancing computers such as the food engineers eat and the electricity chip fabs require.

_ph_5• 2 years ago

It has 6 efficiency cores. Every single of them is extremely power efficient, but still faster than an iPad 2-3 generations back. So unless you go full throttle, a M4 is going to be by far the most efficient CPU you can have.

janandonly• 2 years ago

Then the lower price point of the iPad should entice you more now.

drexlspivey• 2 years ago

Meanwhile the mac mini is still on M2

bombcar4• 2 years ago

So is the studio.

themagician4• 2 years ago

Welcome to being old!

Watch a 20-year old creative work on an iPad and you will quickly change your mind. Watch someone who has, "never really used a desktop, [I] just use an iPad" work in Procreate or LumaFusion.

The iPad has amazing software. Better, in many ways, than desktop alternatives if you know how to use it. There are some things they can't do, and the workflow can be less flexible or full featured in some cases, but the speed at which some people (not me) can work on an iPad is mindblowing.

I use a "pro" app on an iPad and I find myself looking around for how to do something and end up having to Google it half the time. When I watch someone who really knows how to use an iPad use the same app they know exactly what gesture to do or where to long tap. I'm like, "How did you know that clicking on that part of the timeline would trigger that selection," and they just look back at you like, "What do you mean? How else would you do it?"

There is a bizarre and almost undocumented design langauge of iPadOS that some people simply seem to know. It often pops up in those little "tap-torials" when a new feature roles out that I either ignore or forget… but other people internalize them.

quasarj• 2 years ago

They can have my keyboard when they pry it from my cold dead hands! And my mouse, for that matter.

aurareturn5• 2 years ago

I'm with you. I think HN (and conversational internet) disproportionally contains more laptop people than the public.

A lot of of the younger generation does all their work on their phone and tablet and does not have a computer.

steve_adams_86• 2 years ago

I watched someone do some incredibly impressive modelling on an iPad Pro via shapr3D, and yeah, it was a young person.

I’m into the idea of modelling like this, or drawing, but the reality is I spend most of my time and money on a desktop work station because the software I need most is there. I’m totally open to iPads being legit work machines, but they’re still too limited (for me) to make the time and cash investment for the transition.

You’re definitely right though. People are doing awesome work on them without the help of a traditional desktop or laptop computer.

Der_Einzige5• 2 years ago

The examples given are always artists, whose jobs are actively on the chopping block due to AI models and systems which checks notes don't even run that effectively on apple hardware yet!

Of course, SWE jobs are on the chopping block for the same reasons, but I claim that AI art models are ahead of AI coding models in terms of quality and flexibility.

GeneralMaximus2• 2 years ago

Welcome to being old!

This has nothing to do with age. I have an iPad Pro that I barely use because it has been designed for use cases that I just don't have.

I don't do any digital art, don't take handwritten notes, and don't need to scan and/or mark up documents very often. I don't edit photos or videos often enough to need a completely separate device for the task.

I mostly use my computers for software development, which is impossible on an iPad. I tried running my dev tools inside an iSH session, and also on a remote Linux box that I could SSH into. It wasn't a great experience. Why do this when I could just run VS Code or WebStorm on a Mac?

I also write a lot -- fiction, blog posts, journal entries, reading notes -- which should technically be possible to do well on the iPad. In practice there just aren't enough powerful apps for serious long-form writing on a tablet. Microsoft Word on iPad lacks most of the features of its desktop counterpart, Scrivener doesn't support cloud sync properly, iA Writer is too limited if you're writing anything over a few thousand words, and Obsidian's UI just doesn't work well on a touch device. The only viable app is Ulysses, which is ... okay, I guess? If it floats your boat.

I sometimes do music production. This is now possible on the iPad via Logic Pro. I suppose I could give it a try, but what does that get me? I already own an Ableton license and a couple of nice VSTs, none of which transfers over to the iPad. I can also download random third-party apps to manipulate audio on my Mac, or mess around with Max4Live, or use my Push 2 to make music. Again, this stuff doesn't work on an iPad and it never will, because the APIs to enable these things simply don't exist.

There are tons of people who use Windows because they need to use proprietary Windows-based CAD software. Or people who need the full desktop version of Excel to do their jobs. Or academics and researchers who need Python/R to crunch data. All of these people might LOVE to use something like these new iPads, but they can't because iPadOS just can't meet their use cases.

I really like the idea of a convertible tablet that can support touch, stylus, keyboard, and pointer input. The iPad does a great job at being this device as far as hardware and system software is concerned. But unfortunately, it's too limited for a the kinds of workflows people using laptops/desktops need to do.

faeriechangling6• 2 years ago

It's not a matter of being young or old, it's that iPadOS is not tooled to be a productive machine for software developers, but IS tooled to be productive machine for artists.

robsh• 2 years ago

I have the faintest of hope that WWDC will reveal a new hybrid Mac/iPad OS. If it ever happens I won’t hesitate to buy an iPad Pro.

Lalabadie2• 2 years ago

Key values in the press release:

- Up to 1.5x the CPU speed of iPad Pro's previous M2 chip

- Octane gets up to 4x the speed compared to M2

- At comparable performance, M4 consumes half the power of M2

- High-performance AI engine, that claims 60x the speed of Apple's first engine (A11 Bionic)

mrtesthah2• 2 years ago

- Up to 1.5x the CPU speed of iPad Pro's previous M2 chip

What I want to know is whether that ratio holds for single-core performance measurements.

mrtesthah2• 2 years ago

Here’s the benchmark:

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/apple-m4-sco...

codedokode3• 2 years ago

Up to 1.5x the CPU speed

Doesn't it mean "1.5x speed in rare specific tasks which were hardware optimized, and 1x ewerywhere else"?

rsynnott2• 2 years ago

I mean, we'll have to wait for proper benchmarks, but that would make it a regression vs the M3, so, er, unlikely.

BurningFrog2• 2 years ago

At this point I read "up to" as "not"...

stonemetal12• 2 years ago

Apple claimed M3 was 1.35 the speed of the M2. So the M3 vs M4 comparison isn't that impressive. Certainly not bad by any means, just pointing out why it is compared to the M2 here.

SkyPuncher4• 2 years ago

While I completely agree with your point, the M chips is a series of chips. The iPad M2 is different than the MBP M2 or the MacBook Air.

It’s all just marketing to build hype.

kjkjadksj9• 2 years ago

People make this comment after every single m series release. Its true for intel too, worse even. Changes between like 8th and 9th and 10th gen were like nill, small clock bump same igpu even.

frankchn• 2 years ago

The other reason it is compared to the M2 is that there are no iPads with M3s in them, so it makes sense to compare to the processor used in the previous generation product.

tiltowait3• 2 years ago

It seems pretty reasonable to compare it against the last-model iPad, which it's replacing.

dsign• 2 years ago

M4 makes the new iPad Pro an outrageously powerful device for artificial intelligence.

Isn’t there a ToS prohibition about “custom coding” in iOS? Like, the only way you can ever use that hardware directly is for developers who go through Apple Developer Program, which last time I heard was bitter lemon? Tell me if I’m wrong.

freedomben9• 2 years ago

Well, this is the heart of the "appliance" model. iPads are appliances. You wouldn't ask about running custom code on your toaster or your blender, so you shouldn't ask about that for your iPad. Also all the common reasons apply: Security and Privacy, Quality Control, Platform Stability and Compatibility, and Integrated User Experience. All of these things are harmed when you are allowed to run custom coding.

(disclaimer: My personal opinion is that the "appliance" model is absurd, but I've tried to steel-man the case for it)

jebarker• 2 years ago

Lots of people ask about running custom code on other appliances. I think they call them hackers.

kibwen4• 2 years ago

You wouldn't ask about running custom code on your toaster or your blender, so you shouldn't ask about that for your iPad.

Of course I would, and the only reason other people wouldn't is because they're conditioned to believe in their own innate powerlessness.

If you sell me a CPU, I want the power to program it, period.

shepherdjerred4• 2 years ago

If I could deploy to my blender as easily as I can to AWS, then I would _definitely_ at least try it.

paxys2• 2 years ago

An appliance manufacturer isn't doing an entire press event highlighting how fast the CPU on the appliance is.

ben-schaaf2• 2 years ago

I appreciate the steel-man. A strong counter argument for me is that you actually can run any custom code on an iPad, as long as it's in a web-browser. This is very unlike an appliance where doing so is not possible. Clearly the intention is for arbitrary custom code to run on it, which makes it a personal computer and not an appliance (and should be regulated as such).

eqvinox4• 2 years ago

As with any Apple device — or honestly, any computing device in general — my criteria of evaluation would be the resulting performance if I install Linux on it. (If Linux is not installable on the device, the performance is zero. If Linux driver support is limited, causing performance issues, that is also part of the equation.)

NB: those are my criteria of evaluation. Very personally. I'm a software engineer, with a focus on systems/embedded. Your criteria are yours.

(But maybe don't complain if you buy this for its "AI" capabilities only to find out that Apple doesn't let you do anything "unapproved" with it. You had sufficient chance to see the warning signs.)

pbronez• 2 years ago

It looks like Asahi Linux can run on Apple Silicon iPads… but you have to use an exploit like checkm8 to get past the locked bootloader

https://www.reddit.com/r/AsahiLinux/comments/ttsshm/asahi_li...

killerstorm• 2 years ago

It means you can deliver AI apps to users. E.g. generate images.

sergiotapia2• 2 years ago

You're not wrong. It's why I don't use apple hardware anymore for work or play. On Android and Windows I can build and install whatever I like, without having to go through mother-Apple for permission.

wishfish• 2 years ago

There's the potential option of Swift Playgrounds which would let you write / run code directly on the iPad without any involvement in the developer program.

philipwhiuk• 2 years ago

C'mon man, it's 2024, they can't just not mention AI in a press release.

fallingsquirrel• 2 years ago

Is it just me or is there not a single performance chart here? Their previous CPU announcements have all had perf-per-watt charts, and that's conspicuously missing here. If this is an improvement over previous gens, wouldn't they want to show that off?

a_vanderbilt10• 2 years ago

Since Intel->M1 the performance gains haven't been the headliners they once were, although the uplifts haven't been terrible. It also lets them hide behind the more impressive sounding multiplier which can reference something more specific but not necessarily applicable to broader tasks.

giancarlostoro5• 2 years ago

Call me crazy, but I want all that power in a 7" tablet. I like 7" tablets most because they feel less clunky to carry around and take with you. Same with 13" laptops, I'm willing to sacrifice on screen real estate for saving myself from the back pain of carrying a 15" or larger laptop.

Some of this is insanely impressive. I wonder how big the OS ROM (or whatever) is with all these models. For context, even if the entire OS is about 15GB, in order to get some of these features locally just for an LLM on its own, its about 60GB or more, for something ChatGPT esque. Which requires me to spend thousands on a GPU.

Apologies for the many thoughts, I'm quite excited by all these advancements. I always say I want AI to work offline and people tell me I'm moving the goalpost, but it is truly the only way it will become mainstream.

onlyrealcuzzo3• 2 years ago

Call me crazy, but I want all that power in a 7" tablet

Aren't phones getting close to 7" now? The iPhone pro is 6.2", right?

jsheard• 2 years ago

Yeah, big phones have become the new small tablet.

https://phonesized.com/compare/#2299,156

Take away the bezels on the tablet and there's not a lot of difference.

giancarlostoro5• 2 years ago

I'm not a huge fan of it, but yeah they are. I actually prefer my phones to be somewhat smaller.

jwells896• 2 years ago

Biggest difference is aspect ratio. Phones are taller and less pleasant to use in landscape, tablets are more square and better to use in landscape.

You could technically make a more square phone but it wouldn’t be fun to hold in common positions, like up to your ear for a call.

ChrisMarshallNY2• 2 years ago

I've been using the iPad Mini for years.

I'd love to see them add something to that form factor.

I do see a lot of iPad Minis out there, but usually, as part of dedicated systems (like PoS, and restaurant systems).

On the other hand, I have heard rumblings that Apple may release an even bigger phone, which I think might be overkill (but what do I know. I see a lot of those monster Samsung beasts, out there).

Not sure that is for me. I still use an iPhone 13 Mini.

I suspect that my next Mac will be a Studio. I guess it will be an M4 Studio.

wiredfool3• 2 years ago

I loved my ipad mini. It's super long in the tooth now, and I was hoping to replace it today. oh well...

giancarlostoro5• 2 years ago

I wanted to buy a Mini, but they had not updated the processors for them when I was buying, and they cost way more than a regular iPad at the time, I wanted to be budget conscious. I still sometimes regret not just going for the Mini, but I know eventually I'll get one sooner or later.

You know whats even funnier, when the mini came out originally, I made fun of it. I thought it was a dumb concept, oh my ignorance.

r0fl• 2 years ago

The next iPhone pro max will be 6.9 inches

That fits all your wants

sulam• 2 years ago

If your back is hurting from the ~1lb extra going from 13" to 15", I would recommend some body weight exercises. Your back will thank you, and you'll find getting older to be much less painful.

Regarding a small iPad, isn't that the iPad mini? 8" vs 7" is pretty close to what you're asking for.

teaearlgraycold7• 2 years ago

I highly recommend doing pull-ups for your posture and health. It was shocking to me how much the state of my spine improved after doing pull-ups as a daily exercise.

alexpc2015• 2 years ago

You can’t have all that power in a 7” tablet because the battery will last half hour.

JohnBooty3• 2 years ago

Well, maybe. The screen (and specifically the backlight) is a big drain. Smaller screen = less drain.

Foobar85682• 2 years ago

I am not a large person by any means, yet I have no problem to carry a MBP 16...But then I have a backpack and not a messenger like bag, which I would agree, would be a pain to carry.

_akhe10• 2 years ago

I always say I want AI to work offline

I'm with you, I'm most excited about this too.

Currently building an AI creative studio (make stories, art, music, videos, etc.) that runs locally/offline (https://github.com/bennyschmidt/ragdoll-studio). There is a lot of focus on cloud with LLMs but I can't see how the cost will make much sense for involved creative apps like video creation, etc. Present day users might not have high-end machines, but I think they all will pretty soon - this will make them buy them the way MMORPGs made everyone buy more RAM. Especially the artists and creators. Remember, Photoshop was once pretty difficult to run, you needed a great machine.

I can imagine offline music/movies apps, offline search engines, back office software, etc.

ant6n2• 2 years ago

I’ve got an iPad mini. The main issue is the screen scratches. The other main issue is the screen is like a mirror, so it can’t be used everywhere to watch videos (which is the main thing the iPad is useful for). The third main issue is that videos nowadays are way too dark and you can’t adjust brightness/gamma on the iPad to compensate.

(Notice a theme?)

dmitrygr9• 2 years ago

search amazon for matte glass screen protectors. thank me later

notatoad• 2 years ago

a 7" tablet was a really cool form factor back in the day when phones were 4".

but when 6.7" screens on phones are common, what really is the point of a 7" tablet?

Aurornis7• 2 years ago

Call me crazy, but I want all that power in a 7" tablet. I like 7" tablets most because they feel less clunky to carry around and take with you.

iPhone Pro Max screen size is 6.7" and the the upcoming iPhone 16 Pro Max is rumored to be 6.9" with 12GB of RAM. That's your 7" tablet right there.

The thing is - You're an extreme edge case of an edge case. Furthermore, I'm guessing if Apple did roll out a 7" tablet, you'd find some other thing where it isn't exactly 100% perfectly meeting your desired specifications. For example, Apple is about to release a high powered 6.9" tablet-like device (the iPhone 16 Pro Max) but I'm guessing there's another reason why it doesn't fit your needs.

Which is why companies like Apple ignore these niche use cases and focus on mainstream demands. The niche demands always gain a lot of internet chatter, but when the products come out they sell very poorly.

daniel31x132• 2 years ago

Well at the end of the day the processors are bottlenecked by its OS. What real value does an iPad bring that a typical iPhone + Mac combo misses? (Other than being a digital notebook…)

cooper_ganglia• 2 years ago

Digital artist's can get a lot of use out of it, I'd assume. The Apple Pencil seems pretty nice with the iPad.

daniel31x132• 2 years ago

This. If you’re anything other than a digital artist/someone who genuinely prefers writing over typing, an iPad is just an extra tool for you to waste your money on.

I had one of the earlier versions and this was pretty much its only use case…

JohnBooty3• 2 years ago

I wound up getting a 2019 iPad Pro for 50% off, so $500 or so. Thought I would use it as a work/play hybrid.

Surprisingly (at least to me) I feel that I've more than gotten my money's worth out of it despite it being almost entirely strictly a consumption device.

I tote it around the house so I can watch or listen to things while I'm doing other things. It's also nice to keep on the dining room table so I can read the news or watch something while we're eating. I could do every single one of these things with my laptop, but... that laptop is my primary work tool. I don't like to carry it all over the place, exposing it to spills and dust, etc.

The only real work-related task is serving as a secondary monitor (via AirPlay) for my laptop when I travel.

$500 isn't pocket change, but I've gotten 48 months of enjoyment and would expect at least another 24 to 36 months. That's about $6 a month, or possibly more like $3-4 per month if I resell it eventually.

Worth it for me.

beacon294• 2 years ago

I loved my 2017 ipad pro but I retired it because I noticed my productivity went way down and my consumption went way up.

hot_gril4• 2 years ago

My wife has a new iPad for grad school, and I'm convinced it's mainly an extra category for some customers to spend more money on if they already have a Mac and iPhone. The school supplied it, then she spent $400+ on the keyboard and other damn dongles to bring the hardware sorta up to par with a laptop, hoping to replace her 2013 MBP.

In the end, she still has to rely on the MBP daily because there's always something the iPad can't do. Usually something small like a website not fully working on it.

tiltowait3• 2 years ago

I often prefer (as in enjoy) using my iPad Pro over my 16" M1 MBP, but I think the only thing my iPad is actually better for is drawing.

pier25• 2 years ago

This is great but why even bother with the M3?

The M3 Macs were released only 7 months ago.

ls612• 2 years ago

Probably they had some contractual commitments with TSMC and had to use up their N3B capacity somehow. But as soon as N3E became available it’s a much better process overall.

a_vanderbilt10• 2 years ago

Ramping up production on a new die also takes time. The lower volume and requirements of the M4 as used in the iPad can give them time to mature the line for the Macs.

SkyPuncher4• 2 years ago

So far, I haven’t seen any comparison between the iPad M4 and the computer M3. Everything was essentially compared to the last iPad chip, the M2.

Your laptop M3 chip is still probably more powerful than this. The laptop M4 will be faster, but not groundbreaking faster.

lopkeny12ko• 2 years ago

I always wonder how constraining it is to design these chips subject to thermal and energy limitations. I paid a lot of money for my hardware and I want it to go as fast as possible. I don't want my fans to be quiet, and I don't want my battery life to be 30 minutes longer, if it means I get more raw performance in return. But instead, Apple's engineers have unilaterally decided to handicap their own processors for no real good reason.

Workaccount2• 2 years ago

The overwhelming majority of people who buy these devices will just use them to watch netflix and tiktok. Apple is well aware of this.

boplicity• 2 years ago

Why not go with a Windows based device? There are many loud and low-battery life options that are very fast.

jwells896• 2 years ago

Yeah, one of my biggest frustrations as a person who likes keeping around both recent-ish Mac and Windows/Linux laptops is that x86 laptop manufacturers seem to have a severe allergy to building laptops that are good all-rounders… they always have one or multiple specs that are terrible, usually heat, fan noise, and battery life.

Paradoxically this effect is the worst in ultraportables, where the norm is to cram in CPUs that run too hot for the chassis with tiny batteries, making them weirdly bad at the one thing they’re supposed to be good at. Portability isn’t just physical size and weight, but also runtime and if one needs to bring cables and chargers.

On that note, Apple really needs to resurrect the 12” MacBook with an M-series or even A-series SoC. There’d be absolutely nothing remotely comparable in the x86 ultraportable market.

etchalon• 2 years ago

The reason is because battery life is more important to the vast majority of consumers.

jupp0r2• 2 years ago

Thermal load has been a major limiting design factor in high end CPU design for two decades (remember Pentium 4?).

Apart from that, I think you might me in a minority if you want a loud, hot iPad with a heavy battery to power all of this (for a short time, because physics). There are plenty of Windows devices that work exactly like that though if that's really what makes you happy. Just don't expect great performance either, because of diminishing returns of using higher power and also because the chips in these devices usually suck.

shepherdjerred4• 2 years ago

You're in the minority

Perceval• 2 years ago

Most of what Apple sells goes into mobile devices: phone, tablet, laptop. In their prior incarnation, they ran up real hard against the thermal limits of what they could put in their laptops with the IBM PowerPC G5 chip.

Pure compute power has never been Apple's center of gravity when selling products. The Mac Pro and the XServe are/were minuscule portions of Apple's sales, and the latter product was killed after a short while.

Apple's engineers have unilaterally decided to handicap their own processors for no real good reason

This is a misunderstanding of what the limiting factor is of Apple products' capability. The mobile devices all have battery as the limfac. The processors being energy efficient in compute-per-watt isn't a handicap, it's an enabler. And it's a very good reason.

wiseowise28• 2 years ago

I don't want my fans to be quiet, and I don't want my battery life to be 30 minutes longer

I agree with you. I don’t want fans to be quiet, I want them completely gone. And with battery life too, not 30 minutes, but 300 minutes. Modern chips are plenty fast, developers need to optimize their shit instead of churning crapware.

pxc2• 2 years ago

Given that recent Apple laptops already have solid all-day battery life, with such a big performance per watt improvement, I wonder if they'll end up reducing how much battery any laptops ship with to make them lighter.

asadotzler• 2 years ago

No, because battery life isn't just about the CPU. The CPU sits idle most of the time and when it's not idle, it's at workloads like 20% or whatever. It's the screens that eat batteries because they're on most or all of the time and sucking juice. Look at Apple's docs and you'll see the battery life is the exact same as the previous model. They have a battery budget and if they save 10% on CPU, they give that 10% to a better screen or something. They can't shrink the battery by half until they make screens twice as efficient, not CPUs which account for only a small fraction of power draw.

zenethian• 2 years ago

This is pretty awesome. I wonder if it has a fix for the the GoFetch security flaw?

ionwake2• 2 years ago

Sorry to be a noob, but does anyone have a rough estimate of when this m4 chip will be in a macbook air or macbook pro?

a_vanderbilt10• 2 years ago

If I had to venture a guess, maybe WWDC '24 that's coming up.

ionwake2• 2 years ago

Thanks bro

slashdev14• 2 years ago

I've got a Mac Pro paperweight because the motherboard went. It's going to the landfill. I can't even sell it for parts because I can't erase the SSD. If they didn't solder everything to the board you could actually repair it. When I replace my current Dell laptop, it will be with a repairable framework laptop.

stuff4ben• 2 years ago

Just because you lack the skills to fix it, doesn't mean it's not repairable. People desolder components all the time to fix phones and ipads and laptops.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNKNjy3CoZ4

nicce2• 2 years ago

In this case, you need to find working motherboard without soldered parts to be able to fix it cost efficiently. Otherwise you need to buy factory component (for extra price, with soldered components...)

AzzyHN• 2 years ago

Any other computer I could simply replace the motherboard with several other compatible motherboards, no soldering or donor board needed.

slashdev14• 2 years ago

There’s always some wiseass saying “skill issue”

ipqk• 2 years ago

hopefully at least electronics recycling.

slashdev14• 2 years ago

Where do you usually take it for that?

If I find a place in walking distance, maybe.

slashdev14• 2 years ago

Nothing close enough, I checked

gnabgib• 2 years ago

Depending on where, a lot of electronics "recyclers" are actually resellers. Some of them are even cheeky enough to deny electronics they know they can't resell (If they're manned.. many are cage-drops in the back of eg Staples)

kjkjadksj9• 2 years ago

Even repairable only buys you a few years repairability that actually makes sense. For example something similar happened to me, lost the mac mobo on a pre solder addiction model. Only thing is guess how much a used mobo is for an old mac: nearly as much as the entire old mac in working shape. It makes no sense to repair it once the computer hits a certain age between the prices of oem parts and the depreciation of computers.

paulmd12• 2 years ago

ok but now get this: what if we started a program where people prepay part of the repair with an initial fee, and then for a couple years they can have their laptop repaired at a reduced, fixed price? That helps secure the supply chain. You could then partner with a retail computer store (or start your own!) and have a network of brick-and-mortar stores with subject-matter experts to perform the repairs as well as more minor troubleshooting etc. It’d basically be like healthcare, but for your computer!

I think if you partnered with a major computer brand, that kind of thing could really be huge. Maybe someone like framework perhaps. Could be a big brand discriminator - bring that on-site service feel to average consumers.

kylehotchkiss7• 2 years ago

Why don't you take it to the Apple Store to recycle it instead of dropping it in the trash can?

slashdev14• 2 years ago

They don’t accept computers for recycling. That’s what I found when I looked it up

acdha6• 2 years ago

I can't even sell it for parts because I can't erase the SSD

The SSD is encrypted with a rate-limited key in the Secure Enclave - unless someone has your password they’re not getting your data.

slashdev14• 2 years ago

Not worth the liability. I’d rather the landfill and peace of mind than the money

kalleboo8• 2 years ago

I can't even sell it for parts because I can't erase the SSD. If they didn't solder everything to the board you could actually repair it.

The Mac Pro does not have a soldered-in SSD. They even sell user-replaceable upgrades. https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MR393AM/A/apple-2tb-ssd-u...

bustling-noose• 2 years ago

Get a heat gun and remove the NAND. Then sell the rest of it to a local repair store or just give them for free if it's an old Mac Pro. The parts in your Mac Pro are something someone can reuse to restore their Mac Pro instead of a landfill. Not every part is security related. Also Apple may take the Mac Pro itself and give you store credit cause they do recycle it.

jpalawaga• 2 years ago

i don't think you can do that. there was just a video on here last week of a repair shop drilling the memory out, as that was the only way to remove it without damaging the motherboard.

hi-v-rocknroll12• 2 years ago

Remove the SSD card/chips and recycle the rest as e-waste. It's not hard to not throw toxic shit into landfill if you try the least.

bigdict• 2 years ago

38 TOPS in the Neural Engine comes dangerously close to the Microsoft requirement of 40 TOPS for "AI PCs".

ycsux2• 2 years ago

That's a good reason why they didn't release it as Mac Book M4

9999000009993• 2 years ago

I'm extremely happy with my M1 iPad.

The only real issue is aside from the screen eventually wearing out ( it already has a bit of flex), I can't imagine a reason to upgrade. It's powerful enough to do anything you'd use an iPad for. I primarily make music on mine, I've made full songs with vocals and everything ( although without any mastering - I think this is possible in Logic on iPad).

It's really fun for quick jam sessions, but I can't imagine what else I'd do with it. IO is really bad for media creation, you have a single USB C port( this bothers me the most, the moment that port dies it becomes E Waste), no headphone jack...

MuffinFlavored4• 2 years ago

Any apps that work with MIDI controller on iPad?

Also, can't you just use a USB-C hub for like $10 from Amazon?

9999000009993• 2 years ago

I have more USB hubs than I can count.

You still only have one point of failure for the entire device that can't be easily fixed.

And most midi controllers work fine via USB or Bluetooth

tootie• 2 years ago

I have an iPad that predates M1 and it's also fine. It's a media consumption device and that's about it.

kalleboo8• 2 years ago

The USB-C port is on it's own separate board, so it's repairable with minimal waste https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iPad+Pro+12.9-Inch+5th+Gen+USB-...

9999000009993• 2 years ago

It's only 100$ or so to repair which isn't as bad as I thought.

https://simplyfixable.com/blog-detail/ipad-charging-port-rep...

But it's still not something I'd do on my own.

onetimeuse92304• 2 years ago

As an amateur EE it is so annoying that they reuse names of already existing ARM chips.

ARM Cortex-M4 or simply M4 is quite popular ARM architecture. I am using M0, M3 and M4 chips from ST on a daily basis.

jupp0r2• 2 years ago

It's not like the practice of giving marketing names to chips is generally a world of logical sanity if you look at Intel i5/i7/i9 etc.

zerohp• 2 years ago

As a professional EE, I know that ARM Cortex-M4 is not a chip. It's an embedded processor that is put into an SOC (which is a chip), such as the STM32-family from ST.

diogenescynic• 2 years ago

So is the iPad mini abandoned due to the profit margins being too small or what? I wish they'd just make it clear so I could upgrade without worrying a mini replacement will come out right after I buy something. And I don't really understand why there are so many different iPads now (Air/Pro/Standard). It just feels like Apple is slowly becoming like Dell... offer a bunch of SKUs and barely differentiated products. I liked when Apple had fewer products but they actually had a more distinct purpose.

downrightmike2• 2 years ago

They refresh it like every 3 years

kalleboo8• 2 years ago

Pretty much, yeah https://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#iPad_Mini

grzeshru3• 2 years ago

Are these M-class chips available to be purchased on Digi-Key and Mouser? Do they have data sheets and recommended circuitry? I’d love to play with one just to see how difficult it is to integrate compared to, say, an stm8/32 or something.

exabrial2• 2 years ago

absolutely not, and even if they were, they are not documented in the least bit and require extraordinary custom OS and other BLOBs to run

grzeshru3• 2 years ago

Darn it. Oh well.

downrightmike2• 2 years ago

lol

metaltyphoon• 2 years ago

Legit made me chuckle

culopatin• 2 years ago

Did you really expect a yes?

grzeshru3• 2 years ago

I didn’t know what to expect. I thought they may license it to other companies under particular clauses or some such.

tibbydudeza• 2 years ago

4P cores only ???.

a_vanderbilt10• 2 years ago

I'm hoping the higher efficiency gains and improved thermals offset that. The efficiency cores tend to have more impact on the Macs where multitasking is heavier.

antonkochubey2• 2 years ago

It's a tablet/ultrabook chip, are you expecting an Threadripper in them?

ulfw• 2 years ago

It's the non-Pro, non-Max chip. How many performance cores do you expect?

Bigger shocker is only three cores alive in the 256GB and 512GB models paired with 8GB

treesciencebot2• 2 years ago

~38 TOPS at fp16 is amazing, if the quoted number if fp16 (ANE is fp16 according to this [1] but that honestly seems like a bad choice when people are going smaller and smaller even at the higher level datacenter cards so not sure why apple would use it instead of fp8 natively)

[1] https://github.com/hollance/neural-engine/blob/master/docs/1...

imtringued3• 2 years ago

For reference. The llama.cpp people are not going smaller. Most of those models run on 32 bit floats with the dequantization happening on the fly.

haunter• 2 years ago

I love when Gruber is confidently wrong https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/04/28/m4-ipad-pros-gu...

alberth• 2 years ago

Especially about Gurman, who he loves to hate on.

atommclain• 2 years ago

Never understood the animosity, especially because it seems to only go one direction.

MBCook19• 2 years ago

As a longtime reader/listener I don’t see him as hating Gurman at all.

bombcar4• 2 years ago

Wasn't it relatively well known that the M3 is on an expensive process and quickly getting to an M4 on a cheaper/higher yield process would be worth it?

MBCook19• 2 years ago

Yes but Apple has never gone iPad first on a new chip either, so I was with him in that I assumed it wouldn’t be what they would do.

“Let’s make all our Macs look slower for a while!”

So I was surprised as well.

TillE2• 2 years ago

or Apple’s silicon game is racing far ahead of what I considered possible

Gruber's strange assumption here is that a new number means some major improvements. Apple has never really been consistent about sticking to patterns in product releases.

tiffanyh2• 2 years ago

This is a major improvement (over the M3).

It's on a new fab node size.

It also have more CPU cores than it's predessor (M3 with 8-core vs M4 with 10-cores).

qwertyuiop_• 2 years ago

Does anyone know how much of this giant leap performance as Apple puts it is really useful and perceived by end users of iPad. I am thinking gaming, art applications on iPad. What other major ipad use cases are out there that need this kind of performance boost.

musictubes• 2 years ago

Making music. The iPad is much better for performing than a computer. There is a huge range of instruments, effects, sequencers, etc. available on the iPad. Things like physical modeling and chained reverb can eat up processor cycles so more performance is always welcomed.

Both Final Cut Pro and Davinci resolve can also use as much power as you can give them though it isn’t clear to me why you’d use an iPad instead of a Mac. They also announced a crazy multicam app for iPads and iPhones that allows remote control of a bunch of iPhones at the same time.

_akhe10• 2 years ago

I imagine running LLMs and other AI models to produce a variety of art, music, video, etc.

pquki45• 2 years ago

I have a 3rd gen iPad Pro 12.9 for reading and other light activity. I haven't found any reason to upgrade for the past few years. I don't see myself getting another iPad unless this one dies or if Apple actually unlocks the potential of the hardware.

troupo2• 2 years ago

"The M4 is so fast, it'll probably finish your Final Cut export before you accidentally switch apps and remember that that cancels the export entirely. That's the amazing power performance lead that Apple Silicon provides." #AppleEvent

https://mastodon.social/@tolmasky/112400245162436195

dlivingston• 2 years ago

Ha. That really highlights how absurd the toy of iPadOS is compared to the beasts that are the M-series chips.

It's like putting a Ferrari engine inside of a Little Tikes toy car. I really have no idea who the target market for this device is.

LeoPanthera4• 2 years ago

This is a straight-up lie, yes? Switching apps doesn't cancel the export.

troupo2• 2 years ago

Can neither confirm nor deny :) I've seen people complain about this on Twitter and Mastodon though.

It's possible people are running into iOS limitations: it will kill apps when it thinks there's not enough memory.

kalleboo8• 2 years ago

The export progress dialog says "Keep Final Cut Pro open until the export is complete", and the standard iPadOS limitations are that background tasks are killed after either 10 minutes or when some foreground app wants more RAM. So it it's not instantly cancelled but it's a precarious workflow compared to on a Mac.

satertek• 2 years ago

Are there enough cores to allow user switching?

daft_pink3• 2 years ago

Who would buy a MacBook Air or mini or studio today with its older chips?

rc_mob• 2 years ago

people on a budget

alexpc2015• 2 years ago

People with a Macbook. You use the Macbook to work and the iPad to play, read, movies, draw, etc. plus you can use it as a second monitor for the Macbook.

antonkochubey2• 2 years ago

Someone who needs a MacBook Air or mini or studio, not an iPad

daft_pink3• 2 years ago

I'm just venting that their processor strategy doesn't make much sense. The iPad gets the M4, but the Mini and Studio and Mac Pro are still on M2 and the MacBooks are on M3.

They've essentially undercut every Mac they currently sell by putting the M4 in the iPad and most people will never use that kind of power in an iPad.

If you are going to spend $4k on a Mac don't you expect it to have the latest processor?

shepherdjerred4• 2 years ago

Am I wrong, or is raytracing on an iPad an _insane_ thing to announce? As far as I know, raytracing is the holy grail of computer graphics.

It's something that became viable on consumer gaming desktops just a few years ago, and now we have real-time ray tracing on a tablet.

vvvvvvvvvvvvv• 2 years ago

iPhones with A17 already have hardware ray tracing. Few applications/games support it at present.

bluescrn6• 2 years ago

Gotta make the loot boxes look even shinier, keep the gamblers swiping those cards.

luyu_wu3• 2 years ago

Why would it be? They announced the same for the A17 in the iPhone. Turns out it was a gimmick that caused over 11W of power draw. Raytracing is a brute force approach that cannot be optimized to the same level as rasterization. For now at least, it is unsuitable for mobile devices. Now if we could use the RT units for Blender that'd be great, but it's iPad OS...

pshc• 2 years ago

It is kind of crazy to look back on. In the future we might look forward to path tracing and more physically accurate renderers. (Or perhaps all the lighting will be hallucinated by AI...?)

alexpc2015• 2 years ago

I understand that they have delayed the announcement of these iPads until the M4 is ready, otherwise there is nothing interesting to offer to those who have an iPad Pro M2. I don't see the convenience of having a MacBook M3 and an iPad M4. If I can't run Xcode on an iPad M4, the MacBook is the smartest option; it has a bigger screen, more memory, and if you complement it with an iPad Air, you don't miss out on anything.

dhx2• 2 years ago

M2's Neural Engine had 15TOPS, M3's 18TOPS (+20%) vs. M4's 38TOPS (+111%).

In transistor counts, M2 had 20BTr, M3 25BTr (+25%) and M4 has 28BTr (+12%).

M2 used TSMC N5P (138MTr/mm2), M3 used TSMC N3 (197MTr/mm2, +43%) and M4 uses TSMC N3E (215MTr/mm2, +9%).[1][2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nm_process#%225_nm%22_proces...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3_nm_process#%223_nm%22_proces...

ttul2• 2 years ago

An NVIDIA RTX 4090 generates 73 TFLOPS. This iPad gives you nearly half that. The memory bandwidth of 120 GBps is roughly 1/10th of the NVIDIA hardware, but who’s counting!

kkielhofner• 2 years ago

TOPS != TFLOPS

RTX 4090 Tensor 1,321 TOPS according to spec sheet so roughly 35x.

RTX 4090 is 191 Tensor TFLOPS vs M2 5.6 TFLOPS (M3 is tough to find spec).

RTX 4090 is also 1.5 years old.

lemcoe9• 2 years ago

The 4090 costs ~$1800 and doesn't have dual OLED screens, doesn't have a battery, doesn't weigh less than a pound, and doesn't actually do anything unless it is plugged into a larger motherboard, either.

brigade• 2 years ago

It would also blow through the iPad’s battery in 4 minutes flat

jocaal2• 2 years ago

The memory bandwidth of 120 GBps is roughly 1/10th of the NVIDIA hardware, but who’s counting

Memory bandwidth is literally the main bottleneck when it comes to the types of applications gpus are used for, so everyone is counting

anvuong• 2 years ago

This comment needs to be downvoted more. TFLOPS is not TOPS, this comparison is meaningless, the 4090 is about 40x TOPS of the M4.

bearjaws• 2 years ago

We will have M4 laptops running 400B parameter models next year. Wild times.

visarga2• 2 years ago

And they will fit in the 8GB RAM with 0.02 bit quant

adrian_b5• 2 years ago

The Most Powerful Neural Engine Ever

While it is true that the claimed performance for M4 is better than for the current Intel Meteor Lake and AMD Hawk Point, it is also significantly lower (e.g. around half) than the AI performance claimed for the laptop CPU+GPU+NPU models that both Intel and AMD will introduce in the second half of this year (Arrow Lake and Strix Point).

whynotminot4• 2 years ago

will introduce

Incredible that in the future there will be better chips than what Apple is releasing now.

intrasight4• 2 years ago

The Most Powerful Neural Engine Ever

that would be my brain still - at least for now ;)

spxneo4• 2 years ago

damn bro thanks for this

here i am celebrating not pulling the trigger on M2 128gb yesterday

now im realizing M4 ain't shit

will wait a few more months for what you described. will probably wait for AMD

Given that Microsoft has defined that only processors with an NPU with 45 TOPS of performance or over constitute being considered an 'AI PC',

so already with 77 TOPS it just destroys M4. Rumoured to hit the market in 2 months or less.

thadk• 2 years ago

I suppose all the easier for the M4 Ultra to surpass at WWDC when it double or quadruples the iPad's core count-oriented specs.

paulpan2• 2 years ago

The fact that TSMC publishes their own metrics and target goals for each node makes it straightforward to compare the transistor density, power efficiency, etc.

The most interesting aspect of the M4 is simply it's debuting on the iPad lineup, whereas historically it's always been on the iPhone (for A-series) and Macbook (for M-series). Makes sense given low expected yielded for the newest node for one of Apple's lower volume products.

For the curious, the original TSMC N3 node had a lot of issues plus was very costly so makes sense to move away from it: https://www.semianalysis.com/p/tsmcs-3nm-conundrum-does-it-e...

spenczar5• 2 years ago

iPads are actually much higher volume than Macs. Apple sells about 2x to 3x as many tablets as laptops.

Of course, phones dwarf both.

srg0• 2 years ago

With Logic Pro for iPad they now have applications for all their traditional Mac use cases on iPad. If anything, it feels like Apple is pushing for a switch from low-tier Macs to iPad Pro.

And they surely can sell more gadgets and accessories for an iPad than for a laptop.

barbariangrunge• 2 years ago

My m2 pro is already more powerful than I can use. The screen is too small to do big work like using a daw or doing video editing, the Magic Keyboard is uncomfortable so I stopped writing on it. All that processing power, I don’t know what it will be used for on a tablet without even a good file system. Lousy ergonomics

exabrial2• 2 years ago

All I want is more memory bandwidth at lower latency. I've learnt that's the vast majority of felt responsiveness today. I could care less about AI and Neural Engine party tricks, stuff I might use once a day or week.

_akhe10• 2 years ago

Bring on AI art, music, & games!

oxqbldpxo• 2 years ago

All this powerful hardware on a laptop computer is like driving a Ferrari at 40 mph. It is begging for better use. If apple ever releases an ai robot that's going to change everything. Long ways to go, but when it arrives, it will be chatgptx100.

adonese• 2 years ago

imaging a device so powerful as this new ipad, yet so useless. it baffles me that we have this great hardware only the software bit is lacking

tiffanyh2• 2 years ago

Nano-Texture

I really hope this comes to all Apple products soon (iPhones, all iPads, etc).

It's some of the best anti-reflective tech I've seen that keeps color and brightness deep & bright.

kylehotchkiss7• 2 years ago

Will be interesting to see how it holds up on devices that get fingerprints and could be scratched though. Sort of wish Apple would offer it as a replaceable screen film.

adultSwim• 2 years ago

When they stopped offering matte displays I switched to Thinkpads. I'd really like an Air but can't imagine looking at myself all day.

rnikander• 2 years ago

Any hope for a new iPhone SE? My 1st gen's battery is near dead.

api• 2 years ago

Looks great. Now put it in a real computer. Such a waste to be in a jailed device that can’t run anything.

obnauticus• 2 years ago

Looks like their NPU (aka ANE) takes up about 1/3 of the die area of the GPU.

Would be interesting to see how much they’re _actually_ utilizing the NPU versus their GPU for AI workloads.

noiv• 2 years ago

I got somewhat accustomed to new outrageous specs every year, but reading near the end that by 2030 Apple plans to be 'carbon neutral across the entire manufacturing supply chain and life cycle of every product' makes me hope one day my devices are not just a SUV on the data highway.

gavin_gee• 2 years ago

I'm still rocking an iPad 6th generation. It's a video consumption device only. A faster CPU doesn't enable any new use cases.

The only reason is the consumer's desire to buy more.

cyberpunk• 2 years ago

New oled does look like quite a nice display though...

doctor_eval4• 2 years ago

Yep I have an OLED TV but was watching a movie on my (M1) iPad Pro last night, and realised how grey the blacks were.

Once you see it, etc.

nortonham• 2 years ago

and I still have a an original iPad Air first gen.....still works for basic things. Unsupported by apple now, but still usable.

rvalue• 2 years ago

No mention of battery life. They keep making stuff thin, and unupgradeable. What's the point of buying an apple device that is going to wear out in 5 years?

namdnay• 2 years ago

To be fair every MacBook I’ve had has lasted 10 years minimum

seec30• 2 years ago

That will also be true for any laptop that is not bottom of the barrel and got taken care of correctly by its owner. I have non techies' friends using Windows laptops who greatly outlived any Mac laptop because of software support anyway, and as long as they are content with the performance they still work just fine.

The MacBook's lasting longer is just a meme at this point, any laptop of comparable price/performance will last just as long if you don't trash for some reason.

TillE2• 2 years ago

Battery replacement costs $200. It's not like you just have to throw it in the trash if the battery dies.

EugeneOZ• 2 years ago

1Tb model = €2750.

For iPad, not an MBP laptop.

JodieBenitez2• 2 years ago

And here I am with my MB Air M1 with no plan to upgrade whatsoever because I don't need to...

(yes, I understand this is about iPad, but I guess we'll see these M4 on the MB Air as well ?)

_akhe10• 2 years ago

You'll want to upgrade to produce generative content - you just don't know it yet.

JodieBenitez2• 2 years ago

I don't do such things, not on my laptop anyways. I'll upgrade when the battery capacity is worn out, that's the only reason I can foresee.

NorwegianDude4• 2 years ago

M4 has Apple’s fastest Neural Engine ever, capable of up to 38 trillion operations per second, which is faster than the neural processing unit of any AI PC today.

I always wonder what crazy meds Apple employees are on. Two RTX 4090s is quite common for hobbyist use, and that is 1321 TOPS each, making two over 69 times more than what Apple claims to be the fastest in the world. That performance is literally less than 1 % of a single H200.

Talk about misleading marketing...

akshayt• 2 years ago

They are referring to integrated npus in current cpus like in the intel cote ultra.

They explicitly mentioned in the event that the industry refers to the neural engine as a NPU

mort9620• 2 years ago

But the word they used isn't "NPU" or "neural engine" but "AI PC"??? If I build a PC with a ton of GPU power with the intention of using that compute for machine learning then that's an "AI PC"

NorwegianDude4• 2 years ago

The text clearly states faster than any AI PC, not that its faster than any NPUs integrated into a CPU.

They could have written it correctly, but that sounds way less impressive, so instead they make up shit to make it sound very impressive.

janalsncm2• 2 years ago

I’ve never heard anyone refer to an NPU before. I’ve heard of GPU and TPU. But in any case, I don’t know the right way to compare Apple’s hardware to a 4090.

syntaxing• 2 years ago

Definitely misleading but they’re talking about “AI CPU” rather than GPUs. They’re pretty much taking a jab at Intel.

talldayo10• 2 years ago

Watching this site recover after an Apple press release is like watching the world leaders deliberate Dr. Strangelove's suggestions.

make3• 2 years ago

(A H200 is a five digits datacenter GPU without a display port, it's not what they mean by PC, but your general point still stands)

MBCook19• 2 years ago

That’s not a neural processing unit. It’s a GPU.

They said they had the fastest NPU in a PC. Not the fastest on earth (one of the nVidia cards, probably). Not the fastest way you could run something (probably a 4090 as you said). Just the fastest NPU shipping in a PC. Probably consumer PC.

It’s marketing, but it seems like a reasonable line to draw to me. It’s not like when companies draw a line like “fastest car under $70k with under 12 cylinders but available in green from the factory”.

NorwegianDude4• 2 years ago

Of course a GPU from Nvidia is also a NPU. People are spending billions each month on Nvidia, because it's a great NPU.

The fact is that a GPU from Nvidia is a much faster NPU than a CPU from Apple.

It is marketing as you say, but it's misleading marketing, on purpose. They could have simply written "the fastest integrated NPU of any CPU" instead. This is something Apple often does on purpose, and people believe it.

adrian_b5• 2 years ago

Both Intel's and AMD's laptop CPUs include NPUs, and they are indeed slower than M4.

Nevertheless, Apple's bragging is a little weird, because both Intel and AMD have already announced that in a few months they will launch laptop CPUs with much faster NPUs than Apple M4 (e.g. 77 TOPS for AMD), so Apple will hold the first place for only a very short time.

snypher• 2 years ago

But I can't just say I have "the world's fastest GXZ", when GXZ is just some marketing phrase. If we're willing to accept a GPU ~= NPU then it's just a meaningless claim.

phren0logy• 2 years ago

I have a MacBook M2 and a PC with a 4090 ("just" one of them) - the VRAM barrier is usually what gets me with the 4090 when I try to run local LLMs (not train them). For a lot of things, my MacBook is fast enough, and with more RAM, I can run bigger models easily. And, it's portable and sips battery.

The marketing hype is overblown, but for many (most? almost all?) people, the MacBook is a much more useful choice.

ProllyInfamous• 2 years ago

Expanding on this, I have an M2Pro (mini) & a tower w/GPU... but for daily driving the M2Pro idles at 15-35W whereas the tower idles at 160W.

Under full throttle/load, even though the M2Pro is rated as less-performant, it is only using 105W — the tower/GPU are >450W!

SkyPuncher4• 2 years ago

All of the tech specs comparisons were extremely odd. Many things got compared to the M1, despite the most recent iPad having the M2. Heck, one of the comparisons was to the A11 chip that was introduced nearly 7 years ago.

I generally like Apple products, but I cannot stand the way they present them. They always hide how it compares against the directly previous product.

Aurornis7• 2 years ago

It's a marketing trick. They're talking about NPUs specifically, which haven't really been rolled out on the PC side.

So while they're significantly slower than even casual gaming GPUs, they're technically the fastest NPUs on the market.

It's marketing speak.

kllrnohj3• 2 years ago

It's still lower than Qualcomm's Snapdragon Elite X (45 TOPS)

smith70182• 2 years ago

You’re calling $3,600 worth of GPUs “quite common for hobbyist use” and then comparing an iPad to a $40,000 AI-centric GPU.

sudosysgen5• 2 years ago

It's almost 70x more powerful. A 4 year old 3070 laptop was cheaper when it came out and has about 200 TOPS, 7 times as much. It's just factually incorrect to call it "faster than any AI PC", it's far slower than a cheaper laptop from 4 years ago.

password54321• 2 years ago

Just two 4090s? If you don't have at least 8 4090s do not even call yourself a hobbyist.

numpad02• 2 years ago

Also the 38 TOPS figure is kind of odd. Intel had already shown laptop CPUs with 45 TOPS NPU[1] though it hasn't shipped, and Windows 12 is rumored to require 40 TOPS. If I'm doing math right, (int)38 falls short of both.

1: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/intel-says-l...

kllrnohj3• 2 years ago

Snapdragon Elite X is 45 TOPS as well, so Apple's isn't even the fastest ARM-based SoC NPU

citizenpaul• 2 years ago

This is standard apple advertising.The best whatever in the world that is the same as some standard thing with a different name. Apple is like clothing makers that "vanity size" their clothes. If you dont know that basically means a size 20 is 30 size 21 is 31 and so on.

Neural processing unit is basically a made up term at this point so of course they can have the fastest in the world.

DeathArrow• 2 years ago

Apple always had the fastest, the biggest, the best. Or at least they have to claim that to justify the price premium.

Previous iPads had the best screens in a tablet even if they weren't oleds. Now that they finally use oleds, they have the best oled screens and the best screens in a tablet.

ProfessorZoom• 2 years ago

Apple Pencil Pro...

Apple Pencil Ultra next?

Apple Pencil Ultra+

Apple Pencil Pro Ultra XDR+

tsunamifury• 2 years ago

Its really saying something about how the tech sector has shifted due to the recent AI wave that Apple is announcing a chipset entirely apart from a product.

This has never happened to my knowledge in this companies history? I could be wrong though, even the G3/G4s were launched as PowerMacs.

pram2• 2 years ago

They’ve done it for every single M processor release.

wmf5• 2 years ago

The M4 was announced with the iPad Pro that uses it.

marinhero2• 2 years ago

I get frustrated seeing this go into the iPad and knowing that we can't get a shell, and run our own binaries there. Not even as a VM like [UserLAnd](https://userland.tech). I could effectively travel with one device less in my backpack but instead I have to carry two M chips, two displays, batteries, and so on...

It's great to see this tech moving forward but it's frustrating to not see it translate into a more significant impact in the ways we work, travel and develop software.

_akhe10• 2 years ago

Think the play is "consumer AI". Would you really write code on an iPad? And if you do, do you use an external keyboard?

e44858• 2 years ago

Tablets are the perfect form factor for coding because you can easily mount them in an ergonomic position like this: https://mgsloan.com/posts/comfortable-airplane-computing/

Most laptops have terrible keyboards so I'd be using an external one either way.

marinhero2• 2 years ago

Yes. If I’m plugging it to a thunderbolt dock I’d expect it to work like a MacBook Air

LeoPanthera4• 2 years ago

UTM can be built for iOS.

zamadatix6• 2 years ago

Hypervisor.framework is not exposed without a jailbreak which makes this quite limited in terms of usability and functionality.

xyst3• 2 years ago

best you can hope for is cpu pass through. Gl with using the rest of the chip

xyst3• 2 years ago

yup - im honestly tired of the Apple ~~~jail~~~ ecosystem.

I love the lower power usage/high efficiency of ARM chips but the locked down ecosystem is a drag.

Just the other day, I was trying to get gpu acceleration to work within a vm on my m1 mac. I think it’s working? But compared to native it’s slow.

I think it’s just a misconfig, somewhere (ie, hypervisor or qemu or UTM or maybe the emulation service in vm).

On other systems (intel/amd + nvidia/radeon) this is more or less a “pass through” but on mac it’s a different beast.

paulmd12• 2 years ago

gpu passthrough for VMs is not supported on apple silicon period afaik. there may be some "native" renderer built on top of metal but apple doesn't support SR-IOV or "headless passthrough".

https://chariotsolutions.com/blog/post/apple-silicon-gpus-do...

otoh no, it is not "more or less [automatic]" in other hardware either, SR-IOV has been on the enthusiast wishlist for a ridiculously long time now because basically nobody implements it (or, they restrict it to the most datacenter-y of products).

intel iGPUs from the HD/UHD Intel Graphics Technology era have a concept called GVT-g which isn't quite SR-IOV but generally does the thing. Newer Xe-based iGPUs do not support this, nor do the discrete graphics cards.

AMD's iGPUs do not have anything at all afaik. Their dGPUs don't even implement reset properly, which is becoming a big problem with people trying to set up GPU clouds for AI stuff - a lot of times the AMD machines will need a hard power reset to come back.

NVIDIA GPUs do work properly, and do implement SR-IOV properly... but they only started letting you do passthrough recently, and only 1 VM instance per card (so, 1 real + 1 virtual).

Curious what you're using (I'm guessing intel iGPU or nvidia dGPU) but generally this is still something that gets Wendell Level1techs hot and bothered about the mere possibility of this feature being in something without a five-figure subscription attached.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLK_i-TQ3kQ

It does suck that Apple refuses to implement vulkan support (or sign graphics drivers), I think that's de-facto how people interact with most "hardware accelerated graphics" solutions in vmware or virtualbox, but SR-IOV is actually quite a rare feature, and "passthrough" is not sufficient here since the outer machine still needs to use the GPU as well. The feature point is SR-IOV not just passthrough.

transpute18• 2 years ago

Not even as a VM

WWDC is next month. There's still a chance of iPadOS 18 including a Hypervisor API for macOS/Linux VMs on M4 iPads.

monocularvision• 2 years ago

I hope for this every single year. I just don’t see it happening. But I hope I am wrong.

ragazzina2• 2 years ago

instead I have to carry two M chips

What's the incentive for Apple to unify them, since you've already given them the money twice?

therealmarv2• 2 years ago

So why should I buy any Apple Laptop with M3 chip now (if I'm not in hurry)? lol

MBCook19• 2 years ago

That’s why a lot of people weren’t expecting this an even questioned Mark Gurman’s article saying it would happen.

_ph_5• 2 years ago

If you are not in a hurry, you almost never should buy new hardware as the next generation will be around the corner. On the other side, it could be up to 12 months, until the M4 is available across the line. And for most tasks, a M3 is a great value too. One might watch how many AI features that would benefit from a M4 are presented at WWDC. But then, the next Mac OS release won't be out before October.

therealmarv2• 2 years ago

The Macbook Airs with M3 have been launched 2 months ago. 2 months is really not that long ago, even in the Apple universe. For sure I'm waiting on what happens on WWDC!

wiseowise28• 2 years ago

They’ve just released MacBook Air 15 inch, new one is at least a year away.

czbond• 2 years ago

Any idea when M4 will be in a mac pro?

asow926• 2 years ago

Why are we running these high end CPUs on tablets without the ability to run pro apps like Xcode?

Until I can run Xcode on an iPad (not Swift Playgrounds), it's a pass for me. Hear me out: I don't want to bring both an iPad and Macbook on trips, but I need Xcode. Because of this, I have to pick the Macbook every time. I want an iPad, but the iPad doesn't want me.

elpakal• 2 years ago

"It's not you, it's me" - Xcode to the iPad

asow926• 2 years ago

In all seriousness, you're right. Sandboxing Xcode but making it fully featured is surely a nightmare engineering problem for Apple. However, I feel like some kind of containerized macOS running in the app sandbox could be possible.

al_borland8• 2 years ago

WWDC is a month away. I’m hoping for some iPadOS updates to let people actually take advantage of the power they put in these tablets. Apple has often released new hardware before showing off new OS features to take advantage of it.

I know people have been hoping for that for a long time, so I’m not holding my breath.

asow926• 2 years ago

My guess is that WWDC will be more focused on AI this year, but I will remain hopeful.

data-ottawa• 2 years ago

I’ve been hoping for the same thing since I bought my M1 iPad just before WWDC.

As much as I’d like the OLED screen and lighter weight, I don’t have any compelling argument to buy a new one.

smrtinsert2• 2 years ago

Yep I have also no use for a touch screen device of that size. Happy to get an m4 mac air or whatever it will be called but I'm done with pads.

kjkjadksj9• 2 years ago

Didn’t you want to play a reskinned bejewelled or subway surfer with 8k textures?

Naomarik• 2 years ago

Didn't have to look long to find a comment mirroring how I feel about these devices. To me it feels like they're just adding power to an artificially castrated device I can barely do anything with. See no reason to upgrade from my original iPad Pro that's not really useful for anything. Just an overpowered device running phone software.

asow926• 2 years ago

I feel the same way. I just can't justify upgrading from my 10.5" Pro from years ago. It's got pro motion and runs most apps fine. Sure, the battery isn't great after all these years, but it's not like it's getting used long enough to notice.

pulse74• 2 years ago

"device I can barely do anything with" -> Apple can do anything with iPads, but we - regular SW developers - are cut off... :)

MuffinFlavored4• 2 years ago

I don't want to bring both an iPad and Macbook on trips, but I need ______

Why not just make the iPad run MacOS and throw iPadOS into the garbage?

asow926• 2 years ago

I like some UX aspects of iPadOS, but need the functionality of macOS for work.

kylehotchkiss7• 2 years ago

Visual studio code running from remote servers seemed like it was making great progress right until the AI trendiness thing took over... and hasn't seemed to advance much since. Hopefully the AI thing cools down and the efforts on remote tooling/dev environments continues onwards.

deergomoo4• 2 years ago

If we're going down that route then what's the point in putting good hardware in the device? It might as well just be a thin client. Having the same SoCs as their laptops and desktops but then relegating the iPad to something that needs to be chained to a "real" computer to do anything useful in the development space seems like a tremendous waste of potential.

pquki45• 2 years ago

If we are talking about running from remote servers, my 2018 iPad Pro with A12Z (or whatever letter) can do that almost just as well.

cromka2• 2 years ago

AI? You mean like copilot and stuff? That runs locally?

Otherwise why would it be an obstacle here?

timmg• 2 years ago

Just wait until you buy an Apple Vision Pro...

[It's got the same restrictions as an iPad, but costs more than a MacBookPro.]

gpm4• 2 years ago

This is in fact the thing that stopped me from buying an Apple Vision Pro.

deergomoo4• 2 years ago

I've been saying this for years, I would love to get a desktop Mac and use an iPad for the occasional bit of portable development I do away from a desk, like when I want to noodle on an idea in front of the TV.

I'm very happy with my MacBook, but I don't like that the mega expensive machine I want to keep for 5+ years needs to be tied to a limited-life lithium battery that's costly and labour intensive to replace, just so I can sometimes write code in other rooms in my house. I know there's numerous remote options but...the iPad is right there, just lemme use it!

pjot• 2 years ago

I’ve had success using cloud dev environments with an iPad - the key for me was also using a mouse and keyboard - after things weren’t _that_ different

mtoner23• 2 years ago

get a macbook then? they are similarly price to an ipad pro

lll-o-lll• 2 years ago

Is there no RDP equivalent for mac? Just RDP into your main workstation?

moistoreos• 2 years ago

I've been giving some thought to this. I wonder if an iPad would suffice in front of the tv and just ssh into a Mac Mini for dev work. I'd love an iPad but I can't justify it either because of the limitation of hardware capabilities. I also don't really want to purchase two machines just for dev tasks and travel. But, I think having that kind of lifestyle will be expensive no matter the approach.

w1nst0nsm1th2• 2 years ago

I love and hate Apple as almost everyone else and have an iPad for 'consultation' only (reading, browsing, video), but on Android, you have IDEs for games dev (Godot), real android apps IDE (through F-Droid), Python, Java and C/C++ IDE (through Android Store) which are close enough of the Linux way...

So the iPad devices could handle that too if Apple allowed it...

Once Apple will enforce the European Union requirement to allow 'sideloading' on iPad, maybe we will be able to have nice things also on it.

That could also be a good thing for Apple himself. A lot of people in Europe have a bad opinion of Apple (partly?) because of the closed (walled) garden of iPad/iOS and other technology/IP which make their portable devices apart of the Android ecosystem.

paulcole• 2 years ago

As hard as it might be to believe, software developers are not the “pros” Apple is choosing to appeal to with the iPad Pro.

Other jobs exist!

People with disposable income who just want to buy the nicest/most expensive thing exist!

mcfedr• 2 years ago

I got an iPad a couple of years ago, was really disappointed by the how limited it felt in what I could do. Not to mention the awful app store.

codercotton• 2 years ago

macOS should be an iPadOS app. The hardware is ready! Have a folder mapped into iPadOS Files. Not sure much else is needed.

0x38B• 2 years ago

“…but the iPad doesn’t want me” is exactly it; I used iPad from the very first one - that chunky, hard-edged aluminum and glass slate, and remained a heavy user up until a few years ago. For half a decade, the iPad was my only computer on the go. I spent two years abroad with a 12.9” Pro.

The conclusion I came to was that I loved the hardware but found the software a huge letdown for doing real work; I tried SSHing into VPSs and the like, but that wasn’t enough.

But man, the power in these thin, elegant devices is huge, and greater with the M4 chips. If Asahi ran on the M4 iPads I’d probably give it a go! – in an alternate dream universe, that is…

asow926• 2 years ago

This might be possible someday: https://ipadlinux.org/

eterevsky• 2 years ago

They are talking about iPad Pro as the primary example of M4 devices. But iPads don't really seem to be limited by performance. Nobody I know compiles Chrome or does 3D renders on an iPad.

SkyPuncher4• 2 years ago

It’s all marketing toward people who aspire to be these creative types. Very, few people actually need it but it feels good when the iPad Air is missing a few key features that push you to the Pro.

More practically, it should help with battery life. My understanding is energy usage scales non-linearly with demand. A more powerful chip running at 10% may be more battery efficient than a less powerful chip running at 20%

FredPret• 2 years ago

Why does a tablet have a camera bump!? Just take out the camera. And let me run VSCode and a terminal.

kylehotchkiss7• 2 years ago

The new document scanning functionality the camera bump helps enable is really nice. That previously required third party apps, which started out great (Swiftscan) then got greedy and turned into monthly subscriptions. I will happily enjoy Apple erasing entire categories of simple apps that turned one time purchases into monthly subscriptions.

hi-v-rocknroll12• 2 years ago

Install RustDesk app and get a BT keyboard and mouse. Problem solved! ;D

visarga2• 2 years ago

LLaMA 3 tokens/second please, that's what we care about.

_akhe10• 2 years ago

Hahah yes

mlboss• 2 years ago

Only spec that I care about

amai• 2 years ago

16GB RAM ought to be enough for anybody! (Tim Cook)

bmurphy1976• 2 years ago

I love these advances and I really want a new iPad but I can't stand the 10"+ form factor. When will the iPad Mini get a substantial update?

radicaldreamer• 2 years ago

Unfortunate that they got rid of the SIM card slot, Google Fi only supports physical sims for their "data only" sim feature.

Dowwie• 2 years ago

Can anyone explain where the media engine resides and runs?

wmf5• 2 years ago

The whole iPad is basically one chip so... the media engine is in the M4. AFAIK it's a top-level core not part of the GPU but Marcan could correct me.

nojvek• 2 years ago

I am awaiting the day when a trillion transistors will be put on a mobile device chewing 5W of peak power.

It's going to be a radical future.

vivzkestrel• 2 years ago

any benchmarks of how it stacks up to m1, m2 and m3?

TheRealGL• 2 years ago

Who wrote this? "A fourth of the power", what happened to a quarter of the power?

lenerdenator• 2 years ago

So long as it lets me play some of the less-intense 00's-10's era PC games in some sort of virtualization framework at decent framerates one day, and delivers great battery life as a backend web dev workstation-on-the-go the next, it's a good chip. The M2 Pro does.

rsp1984• 2 years ago

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.

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).

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.

If (and that's a big if) they keep their APIs open to run any kind of AI workload on their chips it's a strategy that I personally really really welcome as I don't want the AI future to be centralised in the hands of a few powerful cloud providers.

krunck• 2 years ago

Yes, that would be great. But without the ability for us to verify this who's to say they won't use the edge resources(your computer and electricity) to process data(your data) and then send the results to their data center? It would certainly save them a lot of money.

astrange7• 2 years ago

You seem to be describing face recognition in Photos like it's a conspiracy against you. You'd prefer the data center servers looking at your data?

IggleSniggle4• 2 years ago

When you can do all inference at the edge, you can keep it disconnected from the network if you don't trust the data handling.

I happen to think they wouldn't, simply because sending this data back to Apple in any form that they could digest it is not aligned with their current privacy-first strategies. But if they make a device that still works if it stays disconnected, the neat thing is that you can just...keep it disconnected. You don't have to trust them.

chem832• 2 years ago

+1 The idea that it's on device, hence it's privacy-preserving is Apple's marketing machine speaking and that doesn't fly anymore. They have to do better to convince any security and privacy expert worth their salt that their claims and guarantees can be independently verified on behalf of iOS users.

Google did some of that on Android, which means open-sourcing their on-device TEE implementation, publishing a paper about it etc.

robbomacrae3• 2 years ago

They already do this. It's called federated learning and its a way for them to use your data to help personalize the model for you and also (to a much lesser extent) the global model for everyone whilst still respecting your data privacy. It's not to save money, it's so they can keep your data private on device and still use ML.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/12/11/131629/apple-ai-...

victorbjorklund2• 2 years ago

If you trust that Apple doesn't film you with the camera when you use the phone while sitting on the toilet. Why wouldn't you trust Apple now?

It would have to be a huge conspiracy with all Apples employees. And you can easily just listen to the network and see if they do it or not.

joelthelion• 2 years ago

n case it is not abundantly clear by now: Apple's AI strategy is to put inference (and longer term even learning)

I'm curious: is anyone seriously using apple hardware to train Ai models at the moment? Obviously not the big players, but I imagine it might be a viable option for Ai engineers in smaller, less ambitious companies.

andrewmcwatters2• 2 years ago

Yes, it can be more cost effective for smaller businesses to do all their work on Mac Studios, versus having a dedicated Nvidia rig plus Apple or Linux hardware for your workstation.

Honestly, you can train basic models just fine on M-Series Max MacBook Pros.

Q6T46nT668w6i3m• 2 years ago

Yes, there’re a handful of apps that use the neural engine to fine tune models to their data.

alfalfasprout2• 2 years ago

Not really (I work on AI/ML Infrastructure at a well known tech company and talk regularly w/ our peer companies).

That said, inference on apple products is a different story. There's definitely interest in inference on the edge. So far though, nearly everyone is still opting for inference in the cloud for two reasons:

1. There's a lot of extra work involved in getting ML/AI models ready for mobile inference. And this work is different for iOS vs. Android 2. You're limited on which exact device models will run the thing optimally. Most of your customers won't necessarily have that. So you need some kind of fallback. 3. You're limited on what kind of models you can actually run. You have way more flexibility running inference in the cloud.

deanishe• 2 years ago

Isn't Apple hardware too expensive to make that worthwhile?

cafed00d7• 2 years ago

I like to think back to 2011 and paraphrase what people were saying: "Is anyone seriously using gpu hardware to write nl translation software at the moment?"

"No, we should be use cheap commodity abundantly available cpus and orchestrate then behind cloud magic to write our nl translation apps"

or maybe "no we should build purpose built high performance computing hardware to write our nl translation apps"

Or perhaps in the early 70s "is anyone seriously considering personal computer hardware to ...". "no, we should just buy IBM mainframes ..."

I don't know. Im probably super biased. I like the idea of all this training work breaking the shackles of cloud/mainframe/servers/off-end-user-device and migrating to run on peoples devices. It feels "democratic".

dylan6044• 2 years ago

Does one need to train an AI model on specific hardware, or can a model be trained in one place and then used somewhere else? Seems like Apple could just run their fine tuned model called Siri on each device. Seems to me like asking for training on Apple devices is missing the strategy. Unless of course, it's just for purely scientific $reasons like "why install Doom on the toaster?" vs doing it for a purpose.

robbomacrae3• 2 years ago

I don't think this is what you meant but it matches the spec: federated learning is being used by Apple to train models for various applications and some of that happens on device (iphones/ipads) with your personal data before its hashed and sent up to the mothership model anonymously.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/12/11/131629/apple-ai-...

avianlyric• 2 years ago

Apple are. Their “Personal Voice” feature fine tunes a voice model on device using recordings of your own voice.

An older example is the “Hey Siri” model, which is fine tuned to your specific voice.

But with regards to on device training, I don’t think anyone is seriously looking at training a model from scratch on device, that doesn’t make much sense. But taking models and fine tuning them to specific users makes a whole ton of sense, and an obvious approach to producing “personal” AI assistants.

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/104993

legitster3• 2 years ago

This is completely coherent with their privacy-first strategy (which would be at odds with sending data up to the cloud for processing).

I feel like people are being a bit naïve here. Apple's "Privacy First" strategy was a marketing spin developed in response to being dead-last in web-development/cloud computing/smart features.

Apple has had no problem changing their standards by 180 degrees and being blatantly anti-consumer whenever they have a competitive advantage to do so.

seec30• 2 years ago

Don't bother the fanboys have an Apple can't do anything wrong/malicious. At this point it's closer to a religion than ever.

You would be amazed at the response of some of them when I point out some shit Apple does that make their products clearly lacking for the price, the cognitive dissonance is so strong they don't know how to react in any other way than lying or pretending it doesn't matter.

IggleSniggle4• 2 years ago

Of course! The difference is that, for the time being, my incentives are aligned with theirs in regards to preserving my privacy.

The future is always fungible. Anyone can break whatever trust they've built very quickly. But, like the post you are replying to, I have no qualms about supporting companies that are currently doing things in my interest and don't have any clear strategic incentive to violate that trust.

Edit: that same incentive structure would apply to NVIDIA, afaik

robbomacrae3• 2 years ago

Having worked at Apple I can assure you it's not just spin. It's nigh on impossible to get permission to even compare your data with another service inside of Apple and even if you do get permission the user ids and everything are completely different so theres no way to match up users. Honestly its kind of ridiculous the lengths they go to and makes development an absolute PITA.

croes2• 2 years ago

It isn't privacy if Apple knows.

They are the gatekeeper of your data for their benefit not yours.

jajko2• 2 years ago

Yes at the end its just some data representing user's trained model. Is there a contractual agreement with users that apple will never ever transfer a single byte of those, otherwise huge penalties will happen? If not, its pinky PR promise that sounds nice.

dheera3• 2 years ago

This is completely coherent with their privacy-first strategy

Apple has never been privacy-first in practice. They give you the illusion of privacy but in reality it's a closed-source system and you are forced to trust Apple with your data.

They also make it a LOT harder than Android to execute your own MITM proxies to inspect what exact data is being sent about you by all of your apps including the OS itself.

deadmutex• 2 years ago

Yeah, given that they resisted putting RCS in iMessage so long, I am a bit skeptical about the whole privacy narrative. Especially when Apple's profit is at odds with user privacy.

ben_w4• 2 years ago

You say that like open source isn't also an illusion of trust.

The reality is, there's too much to verify, and not enough interest for the "many eyeballs make all bugs shallow" argument.

We are, all of us, forced to trust, forced to go without the genuine capacity to verify. It's not great, and the best we can do is look for incentives and try to keep those aligned.

wan23• 2 years ago

Apple has never been privacy-first in practice They also make it a LOT harder than Android to execute your own MITM proxies

I would think ease of MITM and privacy are opposing concerns

sergiotapia2• 2 years ago

privacy-first strategy

That's just their way of walled gardening apple customers. Then they can extort devs and other companies dry without any middle-men.

MyFirstSass2• 2 years ago

I've been saying the same thing since ANE and the incredible new chips with shared ram, suddenly everyone could run capable local models - but then Apple decided to be catastrophically stingy once again putting ridiculous 8gb's of ram in these new iPads' and their new macbook air's destroying having a widespread "intelligent local siri" because now half the new generation can't run anything.

Apple is an amazing powerhouse but also disgustingly elitist and wasteful if not straight up vulgar in its profit motives. There's really zero idealism there despite their romantic and creative legacy.

There's always some straight idiotic limitations in their otherwise incredible machines, with no other purpose than to create planned obsolescence, "PRO" exclusivity and piles e-waste.

KaiserPro• 2 years ago

This is completely coherent with their privacy-first strategy (which would be at odds with sending data up to the cloud for processing).

I mean yeah, that makes good marketing copy, but its more due to reducing latency and keeping running costs down.

but as this is mostly marketing fluff we'll need to actually see how it performs before casting judgment on how "revolutionary" it is.

lunfard000• 2 years ago

Prob beacuse they are like super-behind in the cloud space, it is not like they wouldn't like to sell the service. They ignored photos privacy quite a few times in the icloud.

dylan6044• 2 years ago

is it surprising since they effectively given the finger to data center hardware designs?

jablongo• 2 years ago

So for hardware accelerated training with something like PyTorch, does anyone have a good comparison between Metal vs Cuda, both in terms of performance and capabilities?

s1k3s• 2 years ago

For everyone else who doesn't understand what this means, he's saying Apple wants you to be able to run models on their devices, just like you've been doing on nvidia cards for a while.

nomel11• 2 years ago

I think he's saying they want to make local AI a first class, default, capability, which is very unlike buying a $1k peripheral to enable it. At this point (though everyone seems to be working on it), other companies need to include a gaming GPU in every laptop, and tablet now (lol), to enable this.

Petersipoi2• 2 years ago

Awesome. I'm going to go tell my mom she can just pull her Nvidia card out of her pocket at the train station to run some models.

On second thought.. maybe it isn't "just like you've been doing on Nvidia cards for a while"

andsoitis• 2 years ago

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. Yes, they’ve diversified into services and being a shopping mall for all, but it is about selling luxury hardware.

The promise of privacy is one way in which they position themselves, but I would not bet the bank on that being true forever.

bamboozled2• 2 years ago

As soon as the privacy thing goes away, I'd say a major part of their customer base goes away too. Most people use android so they don't get "hacked" if Apple is doing the hacking, I'd just buy a cheaper alternative.

serial_dev• 2 years ago

It doesn't need to stay true forever.

The alternative is Google / Android devices and OpenAI wrapper apps, both of which usually offer a half baked UI, poor privacy practices, and a completely broken UX when the internet connection isn't perfect.

Pair this with the completely subpar Android apps, Google dropping support for an app about once a month, and suddenly I'm okay with the lesser of two evils.

I know they aren't running a charity, I even hypothesized that Apple just can't build good services so they pivoted to focusing on this fake "privacy" angle. In the end, iPhones are likely going to be better for edge AI than whatever is out there, so I'm looking forward to this.

nox1014• 2 years ago

Their primary business is transitioning to selling services and extracting fees. It's their primary growth

stouset2• 2 years ago

Nothing is true forever. Google wasn’t evil forever, Apple won’t value privacy forever.

Until we figure out how to have guarantees of forever, the best we can realistically do is evaluate companies and their products by their behavior now weighted by their behavior in the past.

klabb35• 2 years ago

but it is about selling luxury hardware.

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+/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'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.

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.

hehdhdjehehegwv2• 2 years ago

As a privacy professional for many, many years this is 100% correct. Apple wouldn’t be taking billions from Google for driving users to their ad tracking system, they wouldn’t give the CCP access to all Chinese user data (and maybe beyond), and they wouldn’t be on-again-off-again flirting with tailored ads in Apple News if privacy was a “human right”.

(FWIW my opinion is it is a human right, I just think Tim Cook is full of shit.)

What Apple calls privacy more often than not is just putting lipstick on the pig that is their anticompetitive walled garden.

Pretty much everybody in SV who works in privacy rolls their eyes at Apple. They talk a big game but they are as full of shit as Meta and Google - and there’s receipts to prove it thanks to this DoJ case.

Apple want to sell high end hardware. On-device computation is a better user experience, hands down.

That said, Siri is utter dogshit so on-device dogshit is just faster dogshit.

kortilla2• 2 years ago

The MacBook Air is not a luxury device. That meme is out of date

moritzwarhier2• 2 years ago

> 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...

By the way, this includes web technologies / JS.

jimbokun2• 2 years ago

For all their competitors it’s not true right now.

VelesDude3• 2 years ago

I think it was Paul Thurrott on Windows Weekly podcast who said that all these companies don't really care about privacy. Apple takes billions of dollar a year to direct data towards Google via the search defaults. Clearly privacy has a price. And I suspect it will only get worse with time as they keep chasing the next quarter.

Tim Cook unfortunately is so captured in that quarterly mindset of 'please the share holders' that it is only a matter of time.

raincole• 2 years ago

Privacy is a luxury today so yeah selling luxury hardware and promise of privacy form a coherent business position.

ngcc_hk• 2 years ago

If you average out it is quite not expensive. Unlike android phone or let us not talk about android tablet.

The important is that a good starting ai learning platform is what … most apple does not touch those price.

Hence with privacy it is a good path.

You do not want communism even if it is not expensive in the short term.

sneak6• 2 years ago

It’s not even true now. Apple (and by the extension USG and CCP) can read ~every iMessage. The e2ee is backdoored.

pompino19• 2 years ago

The promise of privacy is one way in which they position themselves, but I would not bet the bank on that being true forever.

They failed with their ad-business so this is a nice pivot. I'll take it, I'm not usually a cheerleader for Apple, but I'll support anyone who can erode Google's surveillance dominance.

m4633• 2 years ago

The promise of privacy

I have very little faith in apple in this respect.

For clarity, just install little snitch on your machine, and watch what happens with your system. Even without being signed in with an apple id and everything turned off, apple phones home all the time.

lynx233• 2 years ago

Every company is selling one thing or another, and nothing is going to last forever. I really fail to see what, except for generic negativity, your comment adds to anything.

jsxlite• 2 years ago

I wouldn't bank on that being true forever after 2012. A corporation is goal are vastly determined by the corporate structure.

Refusing23• 2 years ago

Their 2nd largest revenue source (at ... 20-25%, below only the iphone) is software services.

iCloud, App store revenue, apple tv, and so on

ActorNightly5• 2 years ago

The promise of privacy is one way in which they position themselves, but I would not bet the bank on that being true forever.

Everyone seems to have forgotten about the Celebrity iCloud photo leak.

8fingerlouie• 2 years ago

but it is about selling luxury hardware.

While Apple is first and foremost a hardware company, it has more or less always been about the "Apple experience". They've never "just" been a hardware company.

For as long as Apple has existed, they've done things "their way" both with hardware and software, though they tend to want to abstract the software away.

If it was merely a question of selling hardware, why does iCloud exist ? or AppleTV+, or Handoff ? or iMessage, or the countless other seemingly small life improvements that somehow the remainder of the industry cannot seem to figure out how to do well.

Just a "simple" thing as switching headphones seamlessly between devices is something i no longer think about, it just happens, and it takes a trip with a Windows computer and a regular bluetooth headset to remind me how things used to be.

As part of their "privacy first" strategy, iMessage also fits in nicely. Apple doesn't have to operate a huge instant messaging network, which undoubtedly is not making a profit, but they do, because having one entry to secure, encrypted communication fits well with the Apple Experience. iMessage did so well at abstracting the ugly details of encryption that few people even think about that that's what the blue bubble is actually about, it more or less only means your message is end to end encrypted. As a side effect you can also send full resolution images (and more), but that's in no way unique to iMessage.

thefz• 2 years ago

The promise of privacy is one way in which they position themselves, but I would not bet the bank on that being true forever.

Everybody so quick to forget Apple was/is part of PRISM like any other company.

heresie-dabord• 2 years ago

The promise of privacy is one way in which they position themselves, but I would not bet the bank on that being true forever.

Indeed.

Privacy starts with architectural fundamentals that are very difficult to retrofit...

If a supplier of products has not built the products this way, it would be naive to bet bank or farm on the supplier. Even if there were profound motivation to retrofit.

Add to this the general tendency of the market to exploit its customers.

oorza• 2 years ago

The promise of privacy is one way in which they position themselves, but I would not bet the bank on that being true forever.

There are a ton of us out here that consciously choose Apple because of their position on privacy. I have to imagine they know how many customers they'll lose if they ever move on this, and I want to believe that it's a large enough percentage to prevent it from happening. Certainly my circle is not a useful sample, but the Apple people in it are almost all Apple people because of privacy.

Guthur• 2 years ago

That is not where Apple's growth has been for quite some time, it's services. And because of that I'll be awaiting the economic rental strategy to come at any moment.

ethagknight2• 2 years ago

Nearly 1/4th of their revenue is Apple services, and its their primary source of revenue growth to feed the beast.

dabbz• 2 years ago

When I was at Apple for a short time, there was a small joke I hear from the ex-amazonians there who would say "What's the difference between an Apple software engineer and an Amazon software engineer? The Amazon engineer will spin up a new service on AWS. An Apple engineer will spin up a new app". Or something along those lines. I forget the exact phrasing. It was a joke that Apple's expertise is in on-device features, whereas Amazon thrives in the cloud services world.

amelius3• 2 years ago

What do you mean luxury? Samsung produces phones that are 2x more expensive and are more luxurious.

E.g. Apple still doesn't offer a flipphone that turns into a tablet when you open it.

veunes5• 2 years ago

The promise of privacy is one way in which they position themselves

Yep, the claim to prioritize privacy is a key selling point for them

SpaceManNabs9• 2 years ago

This comment is odd. I wouldn't say it is misleading, but it is odd because it borders on such definition.

Apple's AI strategy is to put inference (and longer term even learning) on edge devices

This is pretty much everyone's strategy. Model distillation is huge because of this. This goes in line with federated learning. This goes in line with model pruning too. And parameter efficient tuning and fine tuning and prompt learning etc.

This is completely coherent with their privacy-first strategy

Apple's marketing for their current approach is privacy-first. They are not privacy first. If they were privacy first, you would not be able to use app tracking data on their first party ad platform. They shut it off for everyone else but themselves. Apple's approach is walled garden first.

Processing data at the edge also makes for the best possible user experience because of the complete independence of network connectivity

as long as you don't depend on graph centric problems where keeping a local copy of that graph is prohibitive. Graph problems will become more common. Not sure if this is a problem for apple though. I am just commenting in general.

If (and that's a big if) they keep their APIs open to run any kind of AI workload on their chips

Apple does not have a good track record of this; they are quite antagonistic when it comes to this topic. Gaming on apple was dead for nearly a decade (and pretty much still is) because steve jobs did not want people gaming on macs. Apple has eased up on this, but it very much seems that if they want you to use their devices (not yours) in a certain way, then they make it expensive to do anything else.

Tbf, I don't blame apple for any of this. It is their strategy. Whether it works or not, it doesn't matter. I just found this comment really odd since it almost seemed like evangelism.

edit: weird to praise apple for on device training when it is not publicly known if they have trained any substantial model even on cloud.

nomel11• 2 years ago

This is pretty much everyone's strategy.

I think this is being too charitable on the state of "everyone". It's everyone's goal. Apple is actively achieving that goal, with their many year strategy of in house silicon/features.

jameshart• 2 years ago

Everyone’s strategy?

The biggest players in commercial AI models at the moment - OpenAI and Google - have made absolutely no noise about pushing inference to end user devices at all. Microsoft, Adobe, other players who are going big on embedding ML models into their products, are not pushing those models to the edge, they’re investing in cloud GPU.

Where are you picking up that this is everyone’s strategy?

kernal8• 2 years ago

This is completely coherent with their privacy-first strategy

How can they have a privacy first strategy when they operate an Ad network and have their Chinese data centers run by state controlled companies?

KerrAvon• 2 years ago

How can I have mint choc and pineapple swirl ice cream when there are children starving in Africa?

n94• 2 years ago

... I think that the more correct assertion would be that Apple is a sector leader in privacy. If only because their competitors make no bones about violating the privacy of their customers as it is the basis of thier business model. So it's not that Apple is A+ so much as the other students are getting Ds and Fs.

strangescript2• 2 years ago

The fundamental problem with this strategy is model size. I want all my apps to be privacy first with local models, but there is no way they can share models in any kind of coherent way. Especially when good apps are going to fine tune their models. Every app is going to be 3GB+

tyho• 2 years ago

Foundation models will be the new .so files.

SpaceManNabs9• 2 years ago

I don't think HN understands how important model distillation still is for federated learning. Hype >> substance ITT

Havoc4• 2 years ago

You could always mix and match. Do lighter task on device and outsource to cloud if needed

mr_toad2• 2 years ago

Gemini nano is 1.8B 4 bit parameters, so a little under a GB. And hopefully each app won’t include a full copy of their models.

int_19h12• 2 years ago

You can do quite a lot with LoRA without having to replace all the weights.

macns• 2 years ago

This is completely coherent with their privacy-first strategy

You mean .. with their said privacy-first strategy

ptman• 2 years ago

Apple privacy is marketing https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1039938

xipix• 2 years ago

How is local more private? Whether AI runs on my phone or in a data center I still have to trust third parties to respect my data. That leaves only latency and connectivity as possible reasons to wish for endpoint AI.

chatmasta• 2 years ago

If you can run AI in airplane mode, you are not trusting any third party, at least until you reconnect to the Internet. Even if the model was malware, it wouldn’t be able to exfiltrate any data prior to reconnecting.

You’re trusting the third party at training time, to build the model. But you’re not trusting it at inference time (or at least, you don’t have to, since you can airgap inference).

thefourthchime• 2 years ago

Yes is it completely clear. My guess is they do something like "Siri-powered shortcuts". Where you can ask it to do a couple things and it'll dynamically create a script and execute it.

I can see a smaller model trained to do that may work well enough, however, I've never seen any real working examples of this work, that rabit device is heading in that direction, but it's mostly vaporware now.

_boffin_• 2 years ago

Pretty much my thoughts too. Going to have a model that’s smaller than 3B built in. The’ll have tokens that directly represent functions / shortcuts.

choppaface• 2 years ago

On “privacy”: If Apple owned the Search app versus paying Google, and used their own ad network (which they have for App Store today), Apple will absolutely use your data and location etc to target you with ads.

It can even be third party services sending ad candidates directly to your phone and then the on-device AI chooses which is relevant.

Privacy is a contract not the absence of a clear business opportunity. Just look at how Apple does testing internally today. They have no more respect for human privacy than any of their competitors. They just differentiate through marketing and design.

LtWorf3• 2 years ago

This is completely coherent with their privacy-first strategy

Is this the same apple whose devices do not work at all unless you register an apple account?

yazzku2• 2 years ago

Some people really seem to be truly delusional. It's obvious that the company's "privacy" is a marketing gimmick when you consider the facts. Do people not consider the facts anymore? How does somebody appeal to the company's "privacy-first strategy" with a straight face in light of the facts? I suppose they are not aware of the advertising ID that is embedded in all Apple operating systems. That one doesn't even require login.

kalleboo8• 2 years ago

That's not true though? I reset and set up devices for testing all the time, and you can skip logging into an Apple ID.

aiauthoritydev4• 2 years ago

Edge inference and cloud inference are not mutually exclusive and chances are any serious player would be dipping their toes in both.

MBCook19• 2 years ago

Right. The difference is that Apple has a ton of edge capacity, they’ve been building it for a long time.

Google and Samsung have been building it too, at different speeds.

Intel and AMD seem further behind (at the moment) unless the user has a strong GPU, which is especially uncommon on the most popular kind of computer: laptops.

And if you’re not one of those four companies… you probably don’t have much capable consumer edge hardware.

7speter• 2 years ago

I personally really really welcome as I don't want the AI future to be centralised in the hands of a few powerful cloud providers.

Watch out for being able to using ai on your local machine and those ai services using telemetry to send your data (recorded conversations, for instance) to their motherships.

happyopossum• 2 years ago

and those ai services using telemetry to send your data (recorded conversations, for instance) to their motherships

This doesn’t require Ai and I am not aware of any instances of this happening today, so what exactly are we watching out for?

shinycode• 2 years ago

I agree but for a different reason.

Now the subscription is 20$ a month and the API price is accessible. What will happen when they all decide to x100 or x1000 the price of their API ? All the companies that got rid of people in favor of AI, might have lost the knowledge as well. This is dangerous and might kill a lot of companies no ?

Powdering7082• 2 years ago

Also they don't have to pay either the capex or opex costs for training a model if they get user's devices to train the models

aiauthoritydev4• 2 years ago

I think these days everyone links their products with AI. Today even BP CEO linked his business with AI. Edge inference and cloud inference are not mutually exclusive choices. Any serious provider will provide both and the improvement in quality of services come from you giving more of your data to the service provider. Most people are totally fine with that and that will not change any time sooner. Privacy paranoia is mostly a fringe thing in consumer tech.

twototango• 2 years ago

Hey could i get a source on the BP stuff please. Just curious as I couldn't find anything on the interwebs

MBCook19• 2 years ago

I agree. Apple has been on this path for a while, the first processor with a Neural Engine was the A11 in 2017 or so. The path didn’t appear to change at all.

The big differences today that stood out to me were adopting AI as a term (they used machine learning before) and repeating the term AI everywhere they could shove it in since that’s obviously what the street wants to hear.

That’s all that was different. And I’m not surprised they emphasized it given all the weird “Apple is behind on AI“ articles that have been going around.

gtirloni• 2 years ago

complete independence of network connectivity and hence minimal latency.

Does it matter that each token takes additional milliseconds on the network if the local inference isn't fast? I don't think it does.

The privacy argument makes some sense, if there's no telemetry leaking data.

kshahkshah• 2 years ago

Why is Siri still so terrible though?

w1nst0nsm1th2• 2 years ago

to put inference on edge devices...

It will take a long time before you can put performant inference on edge device.

Just download one of the various open source large(st) langage model and test it on your desktop...

Compute power and memory and storage requirements are insane if you want decent result... I mean not just Llama gibberish.

Until such requirement are satisfied, distant model are the way to go, at least for conversational model.

Aside llm, AlphaGo would not run on any end user device, by a long shot, even if it is an already 'old' technology.

I think 'neural engine' on end user device is just marketing nonsense at this current state of the art.

tweetle_beetle• 2 years ago

I wonder if BYOE (bring your own electricity) also plays a part in their long term vision? Data centres are expensive in terms of hardware, staffing and energy. Externalising this cost to customers saves money, but also helps to paint a green(washing) narrative. It's more meaningful to more people to say they've cut their energy consumption by x than to say they have a better server obselesence strategy, for example.

dyauspitr5• 2 years ago

Why would it be green washing? Aren’t their data centers and commercial operations run completely on renewable energy?

timpetri• 2 years ago

That is an interesting angle to look at it from. If they're gonna keep pushing this they end up with a strong incentive to make the iPhone even more energy efficient, since users have come to expect good/always improving battery life.

At the end of the day, AI workloads in the cloud will always be a lot more compute effective however, meaning lowered combined footprint. However, in the server based model, there is more incentive to pre-compute (waste inference) things to make them appear snappy on device. Analogous would be all that energy spent doing video encoding for YouTube videos that never get watched. Although, it's "idle" resources for budgeting purposes.

benced3• 2 years ago

Apple has committed that all of its products will be carbon-neutral - including emissions from charging during their lifetime - by 2030. The Apple Watch is already there.

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/09/apple-unveils-its-fir...

MBCook19• 2 years ago

I’m not sure it’s that (benched pointed out their carbon commitment) as simple logistics.

Apple doesn’t have to build the data centers. Apple doesn’t have to buy the AI capacity themselves (even if from TSMC for Apple designed chips). Apple doesn’t have to have the personnel for the data centers or the air conditioning. They don’t have to pay for all the network bandwidth.

There are benefits to the user to having the AI run on their own devices in terms of privacy and latency as mentioned by the GP.

But there are also benefits to Apple simply because it means it’s no longer their resources being used up above and beyond electricity.

I keep reading about companies having trouble getting GPUs from the cloud providers and that some crypto networks have pivoted to selling GPU access for AI work as crypto profits fall.

Apple doesn’t have to deal with any of that. They have underused silicon sitting out there ready to light up to make their customers happy (and perhaps interested in buying a faster device).

the_king2• 2 years ago

It makes sense for desktops but not for devices with batteries. I think Apple should introduce a new device for $5-10k that has 400GB of VRAM that all Macs on the network use for ML.

If you're on battery, you don't want to do LLM inference on a laptop. Hell, you don't really want to do transcription inference for that long - but would be nice not to have to send it to a data center.

aborsy2• 2 years ago

What are the example of the edge devices made by Apple?

floam• 2 years ago

MacBook, iPhone, iPad?

dancemethis• 2 years ago

Apple is privacy last, if anything. Forgotten PRISM already?

royaltjames• 2 years ago

Yes this began with the acquisition of xnor.ai. Absolutely amazing what will be done (and is being done) with edge computing.

Pesthuf• 2 years ago

Honestly, if they manage this, they have my money. But to get actually powerful models running, they need to supply the devices with enough RAM - and that's definitely not what Apple like to do.

jonplackett2• 2 years ago

I think it will be a winning strategy. Lag is a real killer for LLMs.

I think they'll have another LLM on a server (maybe a deal for openai/gemini) that the one on the device can use like ChatGPT uses plugins.

But on device Apple have a gigantic advantage. Rabbit and Humane are good ideas humbled by shitty hardware that runs out of battery, gets too hot, has to connect to the internet to do literally anything.

Apple is in a brilliant position to solve all those things.

I hope they announce something good at WWDC

threeseed5• 2 years ago

There really isn't enough emphasis on the downsides of server side platforms.

So many of these are only deployed in US and so if you're say in country Australia not only do you have all your traffic going to the US but it will be via slow and intermittent cellular connections.

It makes using services like LLMs unusably slow.

I miss the 90s and having applications and data reside locally.

whimsicalism6• 2 years ago

Having used groq and other fast LLM services a fair bit, lag seems negligible. You're literally just passing text at close to the speed of light.

lolinder15• 2 years ago

Lag is a real killer for LLMs.

I'm curious to hear more about this. My experience has been that inference speeds are the #1 cause of delay by orders of magnitude, and I'd assume those won't go down substantially on edge devices because the cloud will be getting faster at approximately the same rate.

Have people outside the US benchmarked OpenAI's response times and found network lag to be a substantial contributor to slowness?

vineyardmike2• 2 years ago

I run a few models (eg Llama3:8b) on my 2023 MacBook Air, and there is still a fair bit of lag and delay, compared to a hosted (and much larger) model like Gemini. A large source of the lag is the initial loading of the model into RAM. Which an iPhone will surely suffer from.

Humane had lag and they used voice chat which is a bad UX paradigm. VUI is bad because it adds lag to the information within the medium. Listening to preambles and lists are always slower than a human eyes ability to scan a page of text. Their lag is not due to LLMs, which can be much faster than whatever they did.

We should remind ourselves that an iPhone can likely suffer similar battery and heat issues - especially if it’s running models locally.

throwaway48476• 2 years ago

Apple's AI strategy is to put inference (and longer term even learning) on edge devices

Ironic, given that AI requires lots of VRAM.

lagt_t• 2 years ago

Has nothing to do with privacy, google is also pushing gemini nano to the device. The sector is discovering the diminishing returns of LLMs.

With the ai cores on phones they can cover your average user use cases with a light model without the server expense.

SpaceManNabs9• 2 years ago

don't bother. apple's marketing seems to have won on here. i made a similar point only for people to tell me that apple is the only org seriously pushing federated learning.

zachbee• 2 years ago

If they're doing inference on edge devices, one challenge I see is protecting model weights. If you want to deploy a proprietary model on an edge AI chip, the weights can get stolen via side-channel attacks [1]. Obviously this isn't a concern for open models, but I doubt Apple would go the open models route.

[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/how-prevent-ai-power-usage-secrets

Havoc4• 2 years ago

Nobody is taking particular care protecting weights for edge class models

bmitc3• 2 years ago

[Apple's] privacy-first strategy

That is a marketing and advertising strategy.

moosemess• 2 years ago

- dozens of horrific 0days cves every year because not enough is invested in security, making private virtually impossible

- credit card required to install free apps such as the "private" Signal messenger

- location required just to show me the weather in a static place, lol

- claims to be e2e but apple controls all keys and identities

- basically sells out all users' icloud data in china, and totally doesn't do the same in the US, because tim pinky swears

- everything is closed source

jascination• 2 years ago

I'm a cross-platform app developer and can assure you iOS is much stronger in terms of what data you can/can't get from a user

cyanydeez• 2 years ago

their privacy strategy is to make you feel comfortable with their tech so you don't mind when they shop it around to the highest bidder.

Make no mistake, they're just waiting for the right MBA to walk through the door, see the sky high value of their users and start chop shopping that.

Enshitiffication is always available to the next CEO, and this is just going to be more and more tempting as the value of the walled garden increases.

acdha6• 2 years ago

Yes, it’s possible that they’ll change in the future but that doesn’t make it inevitable. Everything you describe could have happened at any point in the last decade or two but didn’t, which suggests that it’s not “waiting for the right MBA” but an active effort to keep the abusive ones out.

One thing to remember is that they understand the value of long-term investments. They aren’t going to beat Google and Facebook at advertising and have invested billions in a different model those companies can’t easily adopt, and I’m sure someone has done the math on how expensive it would be to switch.

felixding• 2 years ago

This is completely coherent with their privacy-first strategy

Do not believe what they say, watch what they do.

SergeAx• 2 years ago

Then putting only 256gb into their cheaper devices is really bad move. Even simple models like Whisper require hundreds of megabytes of storage.

the_king2• 2 years ago

I'm all for running as much on the edge as possible, but we're not even close to being able to do real-time inference on Frontier models on Macs or iPads, and that's just for vanilla LLM chatbots. Low-precision Llama 3-8b is awesome, but it isn't a Claude 3 replacer, totally drains my battery, and is slow (M1 Max).

Multimodal agent setups are going to be data center/home-lab only for at least the next five years.

Apple isn't about to put 80GB on VRAM in an iPad for about 15 reasons.

ChuckMcM• 2 years ago

Something they should be able to do now, but do not seem to, is to allow you to train Siri to recognize exactly your voice and accent. Which is to say, to take the speech-to-text model that is listening and putting it into the Siri integration API, to both be 99.99% accurate for your speech and to recognize you and only you when it comes to invoking voice commands.

It could, if it chose to, continue to recognize all voices but at the same time limit the things the non-owner could ask for based on owner preferences.

jilijeanlouis• 2 years ago

This is really easy to do: it's just an embedding of your voice. So typically like 10/30 sec max of your voice to configure this. You already do a similar setup for faceId. I agree with you, I don't understand why they don't do it.

eru• 2 years ago

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.

That's one particular set of trade-offs, but not necessarily the best. Eg if your network connection and server processing speed is sufficiently faster than your local processing speed, the latency would be higher for doing it locally.

Local inference can also use more battery power. And you need a more beefy device, all else being equal.

chipdart5• 2 years ago

This is completely coherent with their privacy-first strategy (...)

I think you're trying too hard to rationalize this move as pro-privacy and pro-consumer.

Apple is charging a premium for hardware based on performance claims, which they need to create relevance and demand for it.

There is zero demand for the capacity for running computationally demanding workloads beyond very niche applications, for what classifies as demanding for the consumer-grade hardware being sold for the past two decades.

If Apple offloads these workloads to the customer's own hardware, they don't have to provide this computing capacity themselves. This means no global network of data centers, no infrastructure, no staff, no customer support, no lawyer, nothing.

More importantly, Apple claims to be pro privacy but their business moves are in reality in the direction of ensuring that they are in sole control of their users' data. Call it what you want but leveraging their position to ensure they hold a monopoly over a market created over their userbase is not a pro privacy move, just like Apple's abuse of their control over the app store is not a security move.

carabiner• 2 years ago

iPhone Photos app already does incredible image subject search via ML locally. Versus Android which does it via cloud.

arvinsim3• 2 years ago

If inference on edge devices is their goal, then they would have to rethink their pricing on storage and RAM.

fnord77• 2 years ago

They're a hardware company, so yes, they want to sell thick clients.

ActorNightly5• 2 years ago

Apple's AI strategy is to put inference (and longer term even learning) on edge devices.

Apple's AI strategy is to put inference (and longer term even learning) on edge devices...only for Apple stuff.

There is a big difference. ANE right now is next to useless for anything not Apple.

davedx5• 2 years ago

I think that’s going to change with WWDC

edanm• 2 years ago

And yet Siri is super slow because it does the processing off-device, and is far less useful than it could be because it is cobbled with restrictions.

I can't even find a way to resume playing whatever Audible book I was last playing. "Siri play audible" or something. As far as I know, this is impossible to do.

blegr4• 2 years ago

I hope this means AI-accelerated frameworks get better support on Mx. Unified memory and Metal are a pretty good alternative for local deep learning development.

unusualmonkey• 2 years ago

There is no guarantee that local processing is going to have lower latency than remote processing. Given the huge compute needs of some AI models (e.g. chat gpt) the time saved by using larger compute likely dwarfs the relatively small time need to transmit a request.

wilde• 2 years ago

Ehhh at this point Apple’s privacy strategy is little more than marketing. Sure they’ll push stuff to the edge to save themselves money and book the win, but they also are addicted to the billions they make selling your searches to Google.

Agreed on the UX improvements though.

neilsimp1• 2 years ago

The entire software stack is non-free and closed-source. This means you'd be taking Apple at their word on "privacy". Do you trust Apple? I wouldn't, given their track record.

madeofpalk• 2 years ago

What track record?

garydgregory2• 2 years ago

My cynical view is that doing AI on the client is the only way they can try to keep selling luxury items (jewelry really) and increasing prices for what are essentially and functionally commodity devices.

marticode• 2 years ago

Every chip coming this year (Intel, AMD, Qualcomm) has an AI processor. I am not sure Apple is doing anything special here.

unboxingelf• 2 years ago

Apple is UX-first, not privacy-first.

ethagnawl• 2 years ago

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.

I know a shop who's doing this and it's a very promising approach. The ability to offload the costs of cloud GPU time is a tremendous advantage. That's to say nothing of the decreased latency, increased privacy, etc. The glaring downside is that you are dependent upon your users to be willing and able to run native apps (or possibly WASM, I'm not sure) on bleeding edge hardware. However, for some target markets (e.g. video production, photography, designers, etc.) it's a "safe" assumption that they will be using the latest and greatest Macs.

I've also been hearing people talk somewhat seriously about setting up their own training/inference farms using Macs because, at least for now, they're more readily available and cheaper to buy/run than big GPUs. That comes with a host of ops problems but it still may prove worthwhile for some use cases and addresses some of the same privacy concerns as edge computing if you're able to keep data/computation in-house.

beestripes• 2 years ago

Privacy can actually be reduced with on-device ai too. Now, without actually sending any data to iCloud apple can still have a general idea of what you’re doing. Imagine a state has a law that makes certain subjects illegal to discuss. They could compel apple to have their local AI detect that content and then to broadcast a ping in the AirTags network about the user and their location. No internet connection required on the target.

amelius3• 2 years ago

In case it is not abundantly clear by now: Apple's strategy is to turn developers into slaves.

Run away from these temptations. You will never truly own the hardware anyway.

demondemidi• 2 years ago

Every embedded company is pushing ML at the edge with inference engines. Check out MLPerfTiny. They’ve been benchmarking all sorts of edge AI since 2019.

msla4• 2 years ago

Privacy from everyone but Apple, certainly.

msla4• 2 years ago

Have you seen Apple's latest ad? It's a press crushing the tools and results of human creativity:

https://nitter.esmailelbob.xyz/tim_cook/status/1787864325258...

Pr0ject217• 2 years ago

"Which would be at odds with sending data up to the cloud for processing"

I don't think there is enough information here for that to be a true claim - it is possible to send the input used for inference, to the cloud, while computing the result locally. It is also possible to store the input used for inference while offline, and send that later when the device is online.

zincmaster• 2 years ago

I own M1, A10X and A12X iPad Pros. I have yet to see any of them ever max out their processor or get slow. I have no idea why anyone would need an M4 one. Sure, it's because Apple no longer has M1s being fabbed at TSMC. But seriously, who would upgrade.

Put MacOS on iPad Pro, then it gets interesting. The most interesting thing my ipad pros do are look at security cameras or read ODB-II settings on my vehicle. Hell, they can't even maintain an SSH connection correctly. Ridiculous.

I see Apple always show videos of people editing video on their iPad Pro. Who does that??? We use them for watching videos (kids). One is in a car as a mapping system - that's a solid use case. One I gave my Dad and he did know what to do with it - so its collecting dust. And one lives in the kitchen doing recipes.

Functionally, a 4 year old Chromebook is 3x as useful as a new iPad Pro.

phkahler2• 2 years ago

> And with AI features in iPadOS like Live Captions for real-time audio captions, and Visual Look Up, which identifies objects in video and photos, the new iPad Pro allows users to accomplish amazing AI tasks quickly and on device. iPad Pro with M4 can easily isolate a subject from its background throughout a 4K video in Final Cut Pro with just a tap, and can automatically create musical notation in real time in StaffPad by simply listening to someone play the piano. And inference workloads can be done efficiently and privately...

These are really great uses of AI hardware. All of them benefit the user, where many of the other companies doing AI are somehow trying to benefit themselves. AI as a feature vs AI as a service or hook.

leesec• 2 years ago

Why are all the comparisons with the M2? Apple did this with the M3 -> M1 as well right?

spxneo4• 2 years ago

almost went for M2 128gb to run some local llamas

glad I held out. M4 is going to put downward pressure across all previous gen.

edit: nvm, AMD is coming out with twice the performance of M4 in two months or less. If the M2s become super cheap I will consider it but M4 came far too late. There's just way better alternatives now and very soon.

kalleboo8• 2 years ago

AMD is coming out with twice the performance of M4 in two months or less

M4 Pro/Max/Ultra with variants double+ the performance by just scaling cores are probably also going to be announced at WWDC in a month when they also announce their AI roadmap

winwang2• 2 years ago

I would want to know if the LPDDR6 rumors are substantiated, i.e. memory bus details.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/lpddr6-new-beginning-of...

If M4 Max could finally break the 400GBps limit of the past few years and hit 600 GBps, it would be huge for local AI since it could directly translate into inference speedups.

hmottestad7• 2 years ago

The M4 has increased the bandwidth from 100 to 120 GB/s. The M4 Max would probably be 4x that at 480 GB/s, but the M4 Ultra would be 960 GB/s compared to M2 Ultra at 800 GB/s.

winwang2• 2 years ago

Dang. +20% is still a nice difference, but not sure how they did that. Here's hoping M4 Max can include more tech, but that's copium.

960 GB/s is 3090 level so that's pretty good. I'm curious if the Macbooks right now are actually more so compute limited due to tensor throughput being relatively weak, not sure about real-world perf.

animatethrow• 2 years ago

Only iPad Pro has M4? Once upon a time during the personal computer revolution in the 1980s, little more than a decade after man walked the moon, humans had sufficiently technologically developed that it was possible to compile and run programs on the computers we bought, whether the computer was Apple (I,II,III, Mac), PC, Commodore, Amiga, or whatever. But these old ways were lost to the mists of time. Is there any hope this ancient technology will be redeveloped for iPad Pro within the next 100 years? Specifically within Q4 of 2124, when Prime will finally offer deliveries to polar Mars colonies? I want to buy an iPad Pro M117 for my great-great-great-great-granddaughter but only if she can install a C++ 212X compiler on it.

GalaxyNova• 2 years ago

I hate how apple tends to make statements about their products without clear benchmarks.

_akhe10• 2 years ago

It's a 10-core CPU + 10-core GPU + 16-core "NPU" (neural processing unit) for AI all on a consumer handheld. It's like a Ferrari engine in a Honda Civic - all we know is it's going to be fast and hopefully it doesn't catch on fire.

abhayhegde• 2 years ago

What's the endgame with iPads though? I mainly use it for consumption, taking notes and jotting annotations on PDFs. Well, it's a significant companion for my work, but I cannot see if I've any reason to upgrade from iPad Air 5, especially given the incompatibility of the Pencil 2nd gen.

biscuit1v9• 2 years ago

the latest chip delivering phenomenal performance to the all-new iPad Pro What a joke. They have M4 and they still run iOS? Why can't they run MacOS instead?

If you take it a bit deeper: if an iPad would have keyboard, mouse and MacOS → it would basically be a 10/12 inch macbook.

jshaqaw• 2 years ago

The heck do I do with an M4 in an iPad? Scroll hacker news really really fast?

Apple needs to reinvest in software innovation on the iPad. I don't think my use case for it has evolved in 5 years.

hmottestad7• 2 years ago

I was hoping they would come out and say "and now developers can develop apps directly on their iPads with our new release of Xcode" but yeah, no. Don't know if the M4 with just 16GB of memory would be very comfortable for any pro workload.

doctor_eval4• 2 years ago

There’s no way Apple would announce major new OS features outside of WWDC.

So, perhaps it’s no coincidence that a new iPadOS will be announced in exactly one month.

Here’s hoping anyway!

hmottestad7• 2 years ago

120 GB/s memory bandwidth. The M4 Max will probably top out at 4x that and the M4 Ultra at 2x that again. The M4 Ultra will be very close to 1TB/s of bandwidth. That would put the M4 Ultra in line with the 4090.

Rumours are that the Mac Studio and Mac Pro will skip M3 and go straight to M4 at WWDC this summer, which would be very interesting. There has also been some talk about an M4 Extreme, but we've heard rumours about the M1 Extreme and M2 Extreme without any of those showing up.

jgiacjin• 2 years ago

Is there an sdk to work on gaming with unity with ipad Pro m4?

gigatexal4• 2 years ago

lol I just got a m3 max and this chip does more than 2x tops than my NPU does

gigatexal4• 2 years ago

Anyone know if the ram multiples of the M4 are better than the M3? Example: could a base model M4 sport more than 24GB of ram?

LtdJorge• 2 years ago

Not for the iPad (8/16 GB)

gigatexal4• 2 years ago

Right I was thinking more laptops and desktops but yeah 8/16 makes a ton more sense for the ipad only.

wmf5• 2 years ago

The M3 can support 64 GB but Apple artificially limits it to 24 GB. There's no telling when they will decide to uncripple it.

gigatexal4• 2 years ago

How did you come up with that? Based on the core layouts or something?

Regarding crippling I only went with a max because I wanted more ram. I would have loved to have gone with an M3 pro but 36GB wasn’t enough.

thih93• 2 years ago

When this arrives in MacBooks, what would that mean in practice? Assuming base M4 config (not max, not ultra - those were already powerful in earlier iterations), what kind of LLM could I run on it locally?

talldayo10• 2 years ago

what kind of LLM could I run on it locally?

Anything up to the memory configuration it is limited to. So for base model M4, that likely means you have 8gb of memory with 4-5 of it realistically usable.

thih93• 2 years ago

while Apple touts the performance jump of the 10-core CPU found inside the new M4 chip, that chip variant is exclusive to the 1 TB and 2 TB iPad Pro models. Lower storage iPads get a 9-core CPU. They also have half the RAM

https://9to5mac.com/2024/05/07/new-ipad-pro-missing-specs-ca...

ycsux2• 2 years ago

Everyone seems as confused as I am about Apple's strategy here. I wasn't sure the M4 existed, now it can be bought in a format noone wants. How will this bring in a lot of revenue?

TheMagicHorsey• 2 years ago

The only reason I'm buying a new iPad Pro is the screen and because the battery on my 2021 iPad Pro is slowly dying.

I could care less that the M4 chip is in the iPad Pro ... all I use it for is browsing the web, watching movies, playing chess, and posting on Hacker News (and some other social media as well).

Topfi2• 2 years ago

Generally, I feel that telling a company how to handle a product line as successful as the iPads doesn't make much sense (what does my opinion matter vs their success), but I beg you, please make Xcode available on iPad OS or provide an optional and separate MacOS mode similar to Dex on Samsung tablets. Being totally honest, I don't like MacOS that much in comparison to other options, but we have to face the fact that even with the M1, the iPads raw performance was far beyond the vast majority of laptops and tablets in a wide range of use cases, yet the restrictive software made that all for naught. Consider that the "average" customer is equally happy with and, due to pricing, generally steered towards the iPad Air, which are great devices that cover the vast majority of use cases essentially identical to the Pro.

Please find a way beyond local transformer models to offer a true use case that differentiates the Pro from the Air (ideally development). The second that gets announced, I'd order the 13-inch model straight away. As it stands, Apple's stance is at least saving me from spending 3,5k as I've resigned myself to accept that the best hardware in tablets simply cannot be used in any meaningful way. Xcode would be a start, MacOS a bearable compromise (unless they start to address the instability and bugs I deal with on my MBP, which would make MacOS more than just a compromise), Asahi a ridiculous, yet beautiful pipedream. Fedora on an iPad, the best of hardware and software, at least in my personal opinion.

ragazzina2• 2 years ago

a product line as successful as the iPads

Ipad revenue has been declining for 9 out of the last 10 quarters.

1024core• 2 years ago

capable of up to 38 trillion operations per second

Assuming these are BF16 ops, by comparison, an H100 from NVIDIA will do 1979 teraFLOPS BF16.

So this "Neural Engine" from Apple is 50x slower than an H100 PCIe version.

foobiekr• 2 years ago

The h100 is $80k.

aetherspawn• 2 years ago

No numbers on battery life improvements?

_akhe10• 2 years ago

Anyone know more about the "NPU" (neural processing unit)? Basically a GPU specialized for AI?

Havoc4• 2 years ago

Yeah. Basically specialises in fast matrix operations so focused on ai and ML. Vaguely like a gpu minus the graphic output and the pipeline needed for that.

_akhe10• 2 years ago

Awesome thanks. Given it's an iPad I'm guessing that means consumer-facing AI which is very cool.

dev1ycan• 2 years ago

It's hilarious how they still push the "better for the Environment" garbage when they industrially destroy old iphones.

Havoc4• 2 years ago

They have been working on tech to pull them apart via robots to isolate component parts. Unsure if it’s in use at scale though

0xWTF• 2 years ago

Dear Apple, please stop focusing on thinner. At this point you're selling high-end breakables. To quote Katherine the Great, Huzzah!

tzury• 2 years ago

“M4 has Apple’s fastest Neural Engine ever, capable of up to 38 trillion operations per second”

Let that sink in.

zamadatix6• 2 years ago

Built in to a SoC* e.g. a 2060 from 5 years ago had double that in tensor cores it just wasn't part of the SoC. Great improvement for its type/application, dubious marketing claim with the wording.

And it's really not that great even though it's a welcomed improvement - Microsoft is pushing 45 TOPs as the baseline, you just can't get that in an APU yet (well, at least for the next couple months).

zmmmmm• 2 years ago

I'm most interested in what this means for the next Vision device.

Half the power budget could well translate to a very significant improvement in heat on the device, battery size and other benefits. Could they even dispense with the puck and get the battery back onto the headset for a consumer version that runs at slightly lower resolution and doesn't have the EyeSight feature?

If they could do that for $2000 I think we'd have a totally different ball game for that device.

xyst3• 2 years ago

Cool. Too bad it’s Apple and it’s locked down to Apple products.

If Apple ever decides to pivot business to chip manufacturing that allows open access and sale. Then I would revisit.

Always need competition in this space. Especially for low power cpu/gpus.

rustcleaner• 2 years ago

I really really hope [but doubt] Qubes OS runs on something like this with these caveats:

-using an add-in video card for dom0 gpu

-apple's on-die gpu can be passed through to a qube

-apple's unified memory does not need OS X to adjust the RAM/VRAM wall

Since I doubt these caveats are in play, I think I may be stuck with enterprise hand-me-downs that I can pass through.

pmayrgundter• 2 years ago

Am I missing it? 3x faster than an Xbox 10 from 2020 sounds "just" like Moore's law growth

Cool! Thanks Apple!

I guess this is to be expected given your market position and billions in the bank?

Thanks so much for doing it. We'll definitely buy all your

mrpippy• 2 years ago

Today’s Xcode 15.4 RC suggests that “Donan” is the M4 core codename, and that it may support ARM’s SME instructions.

https://mastodon.social/@bshanks/112401605018159567

SkyMarshal2• 2 years ago

M4 has Apple’s fastest Neural Engine ever, capable of up to 38 trillion operations per second, which is faster than the neural processing unit of any AI PC today.

I didn't even realize there is other PC-level hardware with AI-specific compute. What's the AMD and Intel equivalent of Neural Engine? (not that it matters since it seems the GPU where most of the AI workload is handled anyway)

zamadatix6• 2 years ago

AMD/Intel just call it an NPU.

dragonwriter2• 2 years ago

not that it matters since it seems the GPU where most of the AI workload is handled anyway

GPUs can also have AI-specific compute (e.g., Nvidia’s tensor cores.)

SkyMarshal2• 2 years ago

I wonder if they've implemented any fixes or mitigations for GoFetch (https://gofetch.fail/).

smallstepforman• 2 years ago

As an engineer, I find it extremelly frustrating to read Apple’s marketing speak. It almost sounds like ChatGPT and StarTrek techno-babble. Engineers cannot stomach reading the text, and non engineers wont bother reading it anyway.

Whats wrong with plain old bullet-points and sticking to the technical data?

dimask• 2 years ago

The target audience is neither engineers nor general public; these announcements are meant for tech journalists/youtubers etc to refer to when writing or talking about it.

hi-v-rocknroll12• 2 years ago

Apple is no longer run by SJ. That train has sailed. Marketing and design wank wall-to-wall.

zer0zzz5• 2 years ago

Looking forward when these new 10 core M4s end up in cheap mac desktops. I hope theres a max ram boost from the existing 24GB.

JSDevOps• 2 years ago

Why does this feel like it was hastily added at the last minute? Developing a chip like the M4 presumably takes years, so hastily incorporating 'AI' to meet the hype and demand could inevitably lead to problems.

mlyle• 2 years ago

Apple has had "Neural Engine" hardware in their SOCs since 2017, and have been building its capabilities every generation.

helsinkiandrew• 2 years ago

Maybe I'm getting blasé about the ever improving technical capabilities, but I find the most astounding thing is that the M4 chip, an OLED screen on one side, and aluminium case on the other can fit in 5.1mm!

hi-v-rocknroll12• 2 years ago

Pretty much. We've reached peak technical capabilities and hype. Perhaps new sensors, make it sprout propellers and turn into a UAV that follows you around the room and can never be dropped, or at least make it waterproof to 4m.

koksik202• 2 years ago

Give me Mac OS bootup on iPad and I am in

Don’t get the hype of the performance and being locked to iPad ecosystem

fakelonmusk• 2 years ago

Why does Apple hurry to push M4 before A18 Pro? Who can support the hypotheses below? 1) M3 follows M2 and A16 Pro in part, and 2) M4 follows M2 and A17 Pro.

drstrangevibes• 2 years ago

yes but will it blend?

sean_the_geek• 2 years ago

Seems like we are clearly in the _“post peak Apple”_ era now. This update is just for the sake of update; iPad lineup is (even more) confusing; iPhone cash-cow continues but at slower growth rate; new product launches - ahem! Vision Pro - have seen low to negligible adoption; marginal improvements to products so consumers are holding out longer on to their devices.

garydgregory2• 2 years ago

Posts like these directly to the Apple PR dept is just an ad IMO.

qwerty456127• 2 years ago

M4 has Apple’s fastest Neural Engine ever, capable of up to 38 trillion operations per second, which is faster than the neural processing unit of any AI PC today.

How useful this is for free libraries? Can you invoke it from your Python or C++ code in a straightforward manner? Does it not rely on proprietary drivers only available for their own OS?

zamadatix6• 2 years ago

It's a piece of hardware so it'll have their own driver but you can access it through the OS APIs just like any other piece of hardware. What's new is the improvement in speed, Apple has exposed their NPUs for years. You can e.g. run Stable Diffusion on them.

throwaway11942• 2 years ago

I dread using a Mac for any serious work, you lose a lot of the advantages of Linux (proper package and window management, native containers, built-in drivers for every hardware out there, excellent filesystems support, etc). And you get what exactly?

_zoltan_3• 2 years ago

Best hardware on the world best desktop OS. I wouldn't trade my MBP .

throwaway11942• 2 years ago

Best according to whom and for what reason? Give me some real reasons for why it is "best". That's what Apple's marketing department would say.

insane_dreamer• 2 years ago

8GB RAM?? what is this, 2005? Seriously, how much would it cost Apple to start its base M4 model with 16GB RAM.

achandlerwhite2• 2 years ago

it's an ipad...

ponorin• 2 years ago

part of me wonders if the reason apple went with an unusual double jump in processor generation is that they are fearing or at least trying to delay comparison with other desktop class arm processors. wonder if mac lineup will get m4 at all or start with m4 pro or something. we'll see.

zamadatix6• 2 years ago

Doesn't add up, if you fear something about to launch will outdo your product in a given segment then you push that launch earlier, not later so your competitor is also first to market.

ethagknight2• 2 years ago

Interesting, it seems Apple knows they are up against the wall where there isn't really much more their devices NEED to do. The cases that Apple gives for using these devices incredible compute is very marginal. Their phones computers and iPads are fantastic and mainly limited by physics. I have basically one of everything, love it all, and do not feel constrained by the devices of the last 3-4 years. Vision and Watch still leave room for improvement, but those are small lines. Limited opportunity to innovate, hence the Vision being pushed to market without a real path forward for customer need/use. Very few people read about the latest iPad m4 and think "oh wow my current iPad cant do that..."

Curious what steps they will take, or if they shouldn't just continue returning large amounts of cash to shareholders.

stackedinserter• 2 years ago

All this power and I still can't play decent games on my macbook.

seec30• 2 years ago

They don't care because they can't make money off it. They know very well that Steam would outsell their App Store offering so greatly (with good reasons) if they supported Vulkan that they don't see the point. They push their Metal API not just for the hardware matchup but because it allows them to trap developers into optimizing for their technology only and getting them to sell their games in the App Store. Because the minute devs start looking into options for cross-platform dev/deploy their Metal/App Store combo is just not very enticing compared to the alternative.

But they would rather lie about caring for this use case and they would need to have better GPUs in the first place, but at least it looks like this should be improved with M4.

For all the big talk they give, their GPU in the entry level Apple Silicon chip doesn't even match the power of a current gen console (either PS5 or Xbox series X have better GFLOPS). The Max versions are better but they only come in devices starting at over 2.5k€ starting price (still with lots of compromises most likely) and those get absolutely trounced by hardware at this price point that features dedicated GPUs, obviously.

But they will very much remind you about how great battery life is, because it is all that matters, right? right? (Desktops, hello?)

Unless you can justify one of the Max variants for other things, there is not much point bothering with it. If you really want a Mac, it will still be better, faster and cheaper to just buy the most basic Mac you can get away with and get a console or a custom PC with the rest of the money.

It is very sad, but this is the state of things. Gaming on Apple was never very good, but at least before Apple Silicon there were some variants of iMacs/MBPs that were decent enough and not breaking the bank too much (with Windows support for even better performance).

alanh• 2 years ago

3-nanometer technology

Wow. I remember being assured that we would never reach even low double-digit nanometer processes.

Apple introduces M4 chip

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