Alleged M4 MacBook Pro unboxing video

https://www.macrumors.com/2024/10/06/alleged-m4-macbook-pro-unboxing-video/

by TaurenHunter • 2 years ago

84 109 2 years ago

macrumors.com

takoid• 2 years ago

M1 -> M2: 2301 -> 2598 = 12.91% increase

M2 -> M3: 2598 -> 3082 = 18.63% increase

M3 -> M4: 3082 -> 3864 = 25.37% increase

Assuming the M4 Geekbench score is legit, it’s interesting to see that the jump from M3 to M4 has the largest percentage increase in single-core performance since the M1 came out. The M1 -> M2 and M2 -> M3 upgrades were solid, but the 25.37% jump from M3 -> M4 is much more significant. It makes you wonder if we’ll keep seeing even bigger performance leaps with future releases, or if there’s something specific about this generation that’s driving such a large gain. Will Apple keep increasing performance at this rate, or is this an exception?

Retr0id• 2 years ago

Plausibly a large part of the perf bump comes from the SVE and SME extensions, for workloads that can put them to use.

gigatexal• 2 years ago

Will they keep this up? Probably. Indefinitely? Likely not. But look at what it’s done. There are compelling ARM hardware outside of Apple now due to the renaissance in performance that this am series chip has shown.

I’ve an M3 max and now I can’t wait to see what an M4 max will do. 256GB ram in the top end laptop? 25-50% more cores?

kev009• 2 years ago

That's a good point.. I wonder how much network effect this has on substantiating ARM in server space too. Vendors have been trying that since the early twenty-teens and it was not going anywhere fast until Apple shipped the M1. I don't think it is a direct cause->correlation, but the existence of high powered dev machines running clang and gcc certainly lowers a lot of frictions even in higher level languages like Go.

cheema33• 2 years ago

There are compelling ARM hardware outside of Apple now

Not only that, this may have finally forced Intel to innovate. Their new Lunar Lake CPUs coming out now are actually competitive with Apple chips for both performance and power. I thought I might not see X86 become competitive again in my lifetime.

throw7374• 2 years ago

Those are nice numbers. But in reality Air M2 had worse performance, because cooling system was much worse.

hggigg2• 2 years ago

Numbers are plausible. The M4 iPad is close to an i9-14900k in single thread.

I’ll buy an M4 mini when one comes out to replace my M1.

hulitu• 2 years ago

The M4 iPad is close to an i9-14900k in single thread.

For how many microseconds ? /s

ChrisMarshallNY• 2 years ago

Same here.

I have been using an M1Max 14-inch for the last few years, but I seldom undock it, so an M4 Mini would be good. I don't really need the raw power of the Studio.

From what I hear, the next Mini could actually be "mini."

leecb• 2 years ago

I wonder how much of this increase is solely enabled by TSMC process upgrades, either through higher clock speeds or increased number of transistors per core? It's kind of interesting that every iteration of the M series has corresponded to a change of TSMC process.

M1: 16 billion transistors at 3.2 GHz on TSMC N5

M2: 20 billion transistors at 3.7 GHz on TSMC N5P

M3: 25 billion transistors at 4.05 GHz on TSMC N3B

M4: 28 billion transistors at ?? GHz on TSMC N3E

dagmx5• 2 years ago

N3E is slightly less efficient than N3B though, it just has higher yields.

bhouston2• 2 years ago

Will Apple keep increasing performance at this rate, or is this an exception?

I want to believe that but a lot of the performance gains have been the result of frequency boosting and you can not do that forever.

What is the current limit to that? Probably around 5Ghz right?

They are squeezing more out of the silicon but the frequency has been the primary contributor recently.

DeathArrow• 2 years ago

I don't think Geekbench is a relevant benchmark for laptops. I would look at other benchmarks such as Cinebench, before drawing any conclusions.

saagarjha4• 2 years ago

Why not?

satvikpendem4• 2 years ago

25% faster M4 chip: The box lists this 14-inch MacBook Pro as having an M4 chip with a 10-core CPU, whereas the current model has the M3 chip with an 8-core CPU. An alleged Geekbench 6 benchmark result shared by the YouTube channel behind this leak suggests that the M4 chip will be up to 25% faster than the M3 chip. Apple already introduced the M4 chip in the iPad Pro in May, and it indeed has up to a 10-core CPU and up to 25% faster performance compared to the M3 chip.
16GB of RAM: It was previously rumored that 16GB of RAM could become the minimum for all future Macs, and the alleged packaging indeed suggests that the next 14-inch MacBook Pro would start with 16GB of RAM, unless it is somehow a built-to-order configuration that will be offered on Apple's online store.
Three Thunderbolt 4 ports: The box suggests the base 14-inch MacBook Pro will have three Thunderbolt 4 ports, up from two Thunderbolt 3 ports on the current model.
Space Black: The box suggests that Space Black would become a color option for the base 14-inch MacBook Pro, whereas it is currently exclusive to models configured with the M3 Pro or M3 Max chip.

Aside, I still have an M1 Pro 16", is it worth upgrading to an M3 (or future M4)? It feels like my M1 can still do everything I need it to (coding, compiling, running emulators for mobile development), but for those that did upgrade, do you feel it was worth it, or are the gains incremental?

nfriedly• 2 years ago

It feels like my M1 can still do everything I need it to

I think you answered your own question: No, you don't need the upgrade.

(I'm in the same boat as you, for what it's worth. My wife and I both have M1 machines, and they both do what we need, so we're not upgrading.)

darnfish• 2 years ago

Still interested to know the answer to this Q tho:

for those that did upgrade, do you feel it was worth it, or are the gains incremental?

LoganDark• 2 years ago

I think you answered your own question: No, you don't need the upgrade.

They asked if it would be worth it, not if they needed it.

ValentineC• 2 years ago

I'd upgrade not for the specs, but just for MagSafe.

usefulcat2• 2 years ago

It is nice to have magsafe back. Without that I'd be paranoid that the USB sockets would wear out over time from constantly being used for charging.

satvikpendem4• 2 years ago

My 16" M1 MacBook Pro currently already has MagSafe.

adastra222• 2 years ago

What version of the M1? I just “upgraded” from an M1 Max to a M3 device. The single core performance is higher on paper, but I don’t really notice it. I do notice the fewer cores. If you are on a base model, it may be worth upgrading to a Pro or Max CPU.

satvikpendem4• 2 years ago

M1 Pro, the 16" MacBooks (and by extension, all MacBook Pros) only have Pro or Max chips, not base.

pr337h4m• 2 years ago

16GB of RAM could become the minimum for all future Macs

If true, this would be a big deal for local LLM inference.

Farbklex• 2 years ago

I am an android dev who works with an M1 Pro 14" on some client and private projects and I also use an M3 Pro 16" provided by one client for a specific project.

I can't tell the performance apart. Everything is absolutely good enough on both machines.

gyomu• 2 years ago

OLED should be coming to MacBook Pros within a year or two. If your current laptop still works for your needs, I’d wait for that to upgrade.

slater• 2 years ago

Reminds me a bit of those blurry photos of fake iProducts ca. 2005, taken in a blue elevator or loading dock. Anyone remember those?

monroewalker• 2 years ago

Still using an Intel MacBook Pro. Time for an M3 or wait for M4?

Aeolun• 2 years ago

M3 is already a massive improvement, but since prices don’t really get lower as time goes on, you might as well buy the M4 when it is fresh?

kylec• 2 years ago

At this point wait for the M4, seems like it's going to drop in a month or so, and then get that. Though truth be told you could jump to an M4 MacBook Air and still get better performance than your Intel machine. Most people do not need the "Pro" or "Max" chips, even professionals.

saagarjha4• 2 years ago

M4 MacBook Air is rumored for next year.

adastra222• 2 years ago

If the M4 really is coming out in a month, wait. Either get a 25% improvement “for free” (compared to what you’d pay now), or get a used one for cheaper as people with more money than sense rush to upgrade.

But it is way past time to upgrade your Intel Mac to Apple Silicon. The difference is night and day.

bigtex• 2 years ago

Probably have a chance at getting a nice discount on a refurb/discontinued model after the M4 comes out.

salojoo• 2 years ago

You should wait for M5 to get M4 for a discount

latchkey• 2 years ago

I'm still on a M1 max pro, and it was a massive increase. Night and day.

behnamoh3• 2 years ago

I want to know its bandwidth. How does it compare to Nvidia 4090? If it exceeds that (at least in the Max/Ultra model), it'll be huge; we'll suddenly have solid +190GB of VRAM (technically URAM) to run multiple LLMs on.

andersa2• 2 years ago

That comparison doesn't make sense. If you want 192GB VRAM, then that is the size of 8 4090s, so to make it competitive, the bandwidth also needs to be 8 times higher. Or 8TB/s in this case.

behnamoh3• 2 years ago

This is so wrong I don't even need to correct it.

klohto2• 2 years ago

What are you talking about? Why would you multiply the bandwidth? 8 4090s is still 1000GB/s. While the M2 Ultra is 800GB/s with a top of 192GB VRAM. Metal can access ~155GB, so you need a bit more, but your comparison makes absolutely zero sense.

FootballMuse2• 2 years ago

I guess Thunderbolt 5 will have to wait until M5.

imeron• 2 years ago

I do wonder if they can continue improving interconnect specs as with Thunderbolt 4 the cable seems to be already the limiting factor. It’s thick, expensive and only available in very short lengths.

WithinReason• 2 years ago

Thunderbolt was supposed to be optical originally, maybe it's time. There are rumors of PCIE 7 being optical too.

FootballMuse2• 2 years ago

100% it is an looming adoption challenge. The same problem exists with finding verified DisplayPort 2.1 80Gbps cables.

Optical interconnects might be the only way forward.

pier254• 2 years ago

I was hoping Apple would get into TB5 for the M4 Macs.

bzzzt2• 2 years ago

I'm very interested in your use case where 40Gbit/s is not more than enough.

pier254• 2 years ago

You don't really have 40gbits for data transfer in tb3/4. A good chunk is reserved for display port data.

Even when using USB4 I still haven't seen an ssd case that can use all that bandwidth.

Use case is video editing and maybe even egpu for Blender.

fulafel3• 2 years ago

All of networking, SSDs, eGPUs would go faster than that today, nevermind during the lifespan of the device or concurrent use of those.

(Current SSDs and Ethernet seem to go at about 100 Gbit/s, GPU external buses are an order of magnitude up from there)

tivert2• 2 years ago

Man, the sanctions against Russia really aren't working. They're even getting US technology before it's released to Americans!

boffinAudio2• 2 years ago

Sanctions never work, they are a crime against humanity because they only ever effect the lower classes of the target nation, and never its ruling class who are responsible for the acts being sanctioned in the first place.

It is a broken approach to democracys' biggest failure: its lack of otherwise effective diplomacy when forced to engage with non-aligned foreign nations.

whamlastxmas• 2 years ago

Sanctions absolutely cost the wealthy lots of money. It maybe doesn’t impact their quality of life but does cost them a lot of money, and we know how much they like money.

fulafel3• 2 years ago

The recent case of Iran under COVID is an example of this: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/iran-the-double-jeopardy-...

spockz3• 2 years ago

I have one gripe with these awesome machines, the cpu core scheduling. As part of developing our application we run benchmarks. Now every so often we get strange performance dips that I can only attribute to either or both the load generation process or the application process temporarily being scheduled on an efficiency core.

On macOS native there would be profilers I could use to at least detect it. But when using docker that gets all smudged into a single vm process.

Does anyone know how to detect this? Or better prevent? The only way I found is making a development kernel build to switch the boot core to a performance core and then disable all efficiency core. This is not practical on company hardware.

saagarjha4• 2 years ago

If you quiesce the rest of the VM then you should be able to correlate the CPU usage of the virtualization process to your workload, right?

spockz3• 2 years ago

In our setup we have multiple processes. The application that we are benchmarking itself, plus our the process that generates the load plus any optional dependencies of the application. These all are scheduled over the number of cores of the docker vm. From the outside it is hard to track which internal process was scheduled where.

andruby• 2 years ago

You can use “taskpolicy - b <command>” on MacOS cli to force it on a performance core.

I’ve had to use it when doing benchmarking as I also noticed variations due to migrations.

Not sure if you can combine that with docker though.

spockz3• 2 years ago

Thank you that is nice. I will try tomorrow to see whether it has effect. According to the man page I need `-B`: Move target process out of PRIO_DARWIN_BG.

This will still allow scheduling on both the performance and the efficiency cores though. No way to only pin it to performance cores

x0xMaximus• 2 years ago

Assuming this is real, I can't help but think this could push Apple to accelerate their reduction on Chinese production. Is there any other realistic way this could have leaked other than through a Chinese backdoor?

Are these being made at Quanta or Foxconn? Since the start of the war, there has been a massive increase in sanction evasion through China and Central Asia. I would have to assume Valentin used a connection that has formed over the past 2 years in order to get a North American SKU as Russia's richest YouTube blogger

jnaina• 2 years ago

Apple is now making some of the MacBooks in Vietnam. Quite a bit of the Russian diaspora in Vietnam.

yieldcrv2• 2 years ago

I just want to know max RAM configuration in the laptop form factor, and the memory bandwidth. I would like more than 800Gb/s memory bandwidth

My M1 Max can do everything I want it to, although it maxes out at 64gb RAM. but my use cases expand above 128gb and would change my approach

specifically would allow my machine to act as nodes on more distributed networks, maybe even Solana, and run larger language models - at all and faster

raxxorraxor• 2 years ago

While direct memory access of Macs is nice, they still do have performance issues compared to a PC GPU. Of course the pricing would be entirely different with >128gb here. Seems like Apple is the budget solution now.

I use an adapted LLM on an old M1 macbook air and it runs very well, even for autocompleting code. Image synthesis is quite slow though, even on newer Apple chips.

Hope the moat of nvidia dies soon.

yieldcrv2• 2 years ago

I use lower parameter LLM's on M1's with very little RAM as well.

but 70B+ would be useful for me too

submeta• 2 years ago

In my case going from M2 to M3 with more RAM (from 16 GB to 36 GB) will give me a greater performance increase than going from M2 to M4 both with 16 GB.

bhouston2• 2 years ago

The box is distinctly for an M3 MacBook Pro from the design. Apple has a different screen on each version and the M3 had the black/grey pipes design features in the video.

https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/17g3xh0/leaked_m...

Did Apple reuse the graphics on M4? I suspect not.

Is this a review unit that was released early with unofficial packaging? I didn’t realize Apple did that?

znpy• 2 years ago

“Space black” is considered an upgrade nowadays?

idk1• 2 years ago

I feel like we can say this is not real, I'm leaning in that direction, Apple would rarely launch a new laptop without changing the background image, each new one gets a new wallpaper. It's a core part of making the laptop look new in their marketing and on the boxes.

amanzi• 2 years ago

I'm sure the next MacBook Pro won't have a notch. This was a stupid design decision and was only done to align with the "distinctive" notch of the iPhone. Now that this is gone, I'm sure the next the MacBook Pro will have the same dynamic island thing.

refurb• 2 years ago

My question is - how does a Russian guy get his hands on an unreleased Apple product?

Smuggled out of a factory?

I would have guessed Apple had security locked down tight for new products. I know it's China, but usually dangling "Apple will punish you by pulled future products" is enough incentive.

Alleged M4 MacBook Pro unboxing video

Related Stories