Honestly glad I went with the 15" M2 MacBook Air when it came out. This is a very modest spec bump over the M2 Airs.
Less RAM than my toaster
Sure but when you can do a thousand disk I/O operations in less time than it takes to draw to an LCD screen… is the user going to notice that not everything is in RAM?
Apple has been progressively moving things out of RAM and onto the SSD for about ten years now. Try running modern MacOS on a spinning rust hard drive and it’s completely unusable these days.
I’ve been using the same 16GB of RAM on my Mac workstations for the last 10 years and I have more memory headroom every year. Right now I’ve got two Linux Virtual Machines running on my Mac and I still have so much free memory that 6GB are being used as a filesystem cache (so… a lot of those SSD file reads which would be plenty fast enough, aren’t even going to hit the SSD).
If all you do is browse the web… 8GB is plenty. And it also improves battery life - Apple doesn’t publish stats but it’s common for RAM to draw more power than these laptops can afford with only a 50Wh battery. I’d like to see a test, but I bet upgrading from 8GB to 24GB comes with a considerable real world battery life penalty.
It’s too early for third party tests on this model, but the old had the same “up to 18 hours” marketing and third party tests found it lasts between 3 hours playing CPU/GPU intensive games and 30 hours if you really stretch the battery and don’t do much (e.g. just read an ebook in a dark room with low screen brightness). You’re not going to get anywhere near the highest numbers even under light load with fully upgraded RAM, since it draws quite a bit of power even when it’s idle.
8gb is not enough for these machines. Not in the slightest.‘. When you just want to „lightly browse the web“ you don’t need an M3 Chip.
Why would you buy the 8gb version? No one is forcing you to.
That’s why I didn’t. But that is not the argument. The argument is that 8gb is not enough for a machine like this, especially when compared to cpu and gpu power.
Yeah, onto an SSD that will eventually die and is not user replaceable. It really is incredible how some consumers will defend this type of bullshit.
RAM can die too. Most user replaceable stuff is slow in comparison. I’m will wait for no computer.
Yeah, just start any Minecraft modpack and you have something worse than a toaster on a Mac
Only if you’re using an x86 version of Java. I have quite a few modpacks and realistic shaders and get 100+ fps using Azul’s Zulu JDK on a M2.
I remember back in like 2010 there was discussion of RAM that only uses electricity for the actively used RAM, or free memory doesn’t use electricity. I’m guessing nothing has come of that.
I have a MacBook for work with only 16GB of RAM and I’m constantly running into problems of not having enough and my computer running slowly because of it. Credit where credit is due though, they did an amazing job of making it so when I’m having to use 16GB of swap space, my computer doesn’t come to a screeching halt. That doesn’t change the fact that I don’t have enough to run the applications I need to on a day to day basis.
Sad to see the m1 air be discontinued! My first mac actually, and it continues to be an absolute workhorse. I like the wedge a lot vs the sharp corners on the new ones. Stoked to see the new models have a similar price however
Same, im not normally one to worry about aesthetics, but the thin wedge is a really nice shape
I wonder how the thermals will be. My M3 max definitely runs hotter than my M1 Max did, but isn’t a problem with a fan
Are you sure you’re measuring that right?
My understanding is with a fixed workload (e.g. compress a specific video file as part of a youtube video upload) then the M3 is faster, draws less battery power, and generates less heat.
But if you play a computer game with M1 running at 30fps but the M3 runs at 60fps… then yeah, the M3 will be hotter and draw more power. But it’s also doing twice as much work. Drop the graphics settings down, so that the M1 and M3 are both able to hit 60fps (in a game where you can cap the frame rate), then the M3 will be cooler and use less power.
And the difference could be significant, especially if the M3 is fast enough to shut down the performance cores and do everything on the “efficiency cores”. Those cores use a lot less power since they are designed to run on an smartphone sized battery.
While you’re definitely right the M3 is more efficient for day to day, all I know is when I boot up BG3 the fans are launder than they were on my M1, and ofc I’m going to push both machines to their max that’s what I paid for!
how does bg3 play on a non-pro/max machine? Is it doable?
I have the m3 max, but my partner has an m2 air (24gb memory) we’ve been playing together and it plays great! For the air settings on mostly high and ultra except shadows at medium, resolution set to native on the built in display with FSR set to performance taa on and a frame rate cap of 30. It holds a very solid 30 for extended sessions. Turning the settings lower than high/ultra don’t seem to have any performance benefit so it didn’t seem worth it to try and hit 60, which is ok for a game like this. I wouldn’t try playing it on a 4k monitor/tv or anything like that, which my m3 max has no trouble with at perfect 60 with everything turned the max, fsr on quality. I bet an m3 pro would be able to hit 60 on the built in display, maybe not on a 4k monitor.
The M2 was basically just an overclocked M1 with a few extra cores and it ran fine with it’s reduced cooling capacity. The M3, especially tuned down for the Air should perform great for what it is.
I’ve seen YouTube videos of people putting thermal tape inside of it and getting better performance and less heat.
I’m nervous about long term battery health with that mod, also lap comfort
Does anyone know if the M3 MacBook Pro (not M3 pro CPU, fucking Apple) will support the dual display with the laptop screen closed? It’s stupid that that wasn’t a feature in the older models.
My brother in Christ, that is literally in the byline of the OP. Just click the link before commenting, I beg you.
I did. Where does it say the pro gets the feature? I don’t care about the air.
So your takeaway is that the Air will have a feature the Pro doesn’t. Good luck out there buddy, I have a feeling you’re in for a rough life.
That’s literally the current situation unless Apple pushes out an update before Friday’s launch.
You’re barking up the wrong tree by asking how many displays the CPU supports. The CPU is not involved in displays at all.
It’s the GPU that matters, and the M3 MacBook Pro is available with GPUs ranging from “barely good enough” to “holy fuck that’s a lot of compute for a laptop”.
The entry level GPU configuration can drive a single external display. The high end can have four external displays. The mid range can do two.
I agree, it was clearer in the old days when the CPU and GPU were separate line items on the order page… but if you go to the tech specs page and scroll down to “Display Support” for a full page of text explaining in perfectly clear language exactly what each configuration supports.
It’s not as simple as just “what GPU” either — it also depends on the specs of your display (for example, is it HDMI or Thunderbolt? Does it run at 60Hz or faster? Is it 4K or higher? Those things matter and Apple doesn’t even detail all of it, for example Display Stream Compression can free up a lot of bandwidth. If your display needs 64 Gigabits per second… such as this one then even at the high end you can only have one of them on Apple’s most expensive laptop. I have no sympathy - that’s a $300,000 display that doesn’t even come with an actual display (you need to pay someone to build the wall for you and that might cost even more). Perhaps you should consider a Mac Studio instead? It can drive three of those projectors.
But back to reality, I do feel your pain. I’ve got two Macs on my desk, with Universal Control to share a single keyboard/mouse between them, because neither of my Macs can drive enough displays for the work I do. I can’t wait to upgrade to a better GPU and go back to using a single computer. They are available now - but not as cheap as I’d like.
It’s a complete SOC. CPU, GPU, RAM all integrated into one unit on the motherboard. When people talk about the “M3” in the MacBook Pro they’re talking about all 3 things at once.
My MacBook M1 Pro does 2 monitors closed. I even have a usb dongle for a third monitor. Am I misreading your question?
Your dongles probably have display link adapters in them. Display link works, but destroys your CPU since all the graphics are rendered there.
My CPU is doing just fine. Also, it’s just for log files, so it’s not doing too much anyway.
Huh? My 2019 mbp can do that, without display link.
It’s an infamous Apple silicon limitation
Yes, they said it’s coming soon via software update.
https://9to5mac.com/2024/03/04/14-inch-m3-macbook-pro-multi-display-support/
That’s awesome. Sadly it’s M3 exclusive, but I didn’t have any hope for it coming to the M1. We have 50+ of those machines at work and a few people want dual display without the display link compromise.
