That's just laughable, sorry. No one is particularly honest in marketing copy, but Apple is for sure one of the worst, historically. Even more so when you go back to the PPC days. I still remember Jobs on stage talking about how the G4 was the fasted CPU in the world when I knew damn well that it was half the speed of the P3 on my desk.
In my experience, I can confirm that this is just not true. The secret is heavy reliance on swap. It's still the case that 1GB = 1GB.
Is an occasional statement that they get pushback on really worse than what other brands do?
As an example from a competitor, take a look at the recent firestorm over Intel’s outlandish anti-AMD marketing:
https://wccftech.com/intel-calls-out-amd-using-old-cores-in-...
FWIW: the language upthread was that it was laughable to say Apple was the most honest. And I stand by that.
Though the author also made clear in their second sentence that they think Apple is one of the worst when it comes to marketing claims, so I don’t think your characterization is totally accurate either.
If you go for the base model, you are in for a bad time, 256GB with heavy swap and no dedicated GPU memory (making the 8GB even worse) is just plain stupid.
This what the Apple fanboys don't seem to get, their base model at somewhat affordable price are deeply incompetent and if you start to load it up the pricing just do not make a lot of sense...
Anyway, I manage a few M1 and M3 machines with 256/8 configs and they all run just as fast as 16 and 32 machines EXCEPT for workloads that need more than 8GB for a process (virtualization) or workloads that need lots of video memory (Lightroom can KILL an 8GB machine that isn't doing anything else...)
The 8GB is stupid discussion isn't "wrong" in the general case, but it is wrong for maybe 80% of users.
Isn't that exactly the upthread contention: Apple's magic compressed swap management is still swap management that replaces O(1) fast(-ish) DRAM access with thousands+ cycle page decompression operations. It may be faster than storage, but it's still extremely slow relative to a DRAM fetch. And once your working set gets beyond your available RAM you start thrashing just like VAXen did on 4BSD.
And if you go up in specs the bandwidth of Apple silicon has to be compared to the bandwidth of a combo with dedicated GPU. The bandwidth of dedicated GPUs is very high and usually higher than what Apple Silicon gives you if you consider the RAM bandwidth for the CPU.
It's a bit more complicated but that's marketing for you. When it comes to speed Apple RAM isn't faster than what can be found in high-end laptops (or desktops for that matter).
I got the base model M1 Air a couple of years back and whilst I don't do much gaming I do do C#, Python, Go, Rails, local Postgres, and more. I also have a (new last year) Lenovo 13th gen i7 with 16GB RAM running Windows 11 and the performance with the same load is night and day - the M1 walks all over it whilst easily lasting 10hrs+.
Note that I'm not a fanboy; I run both by choice. Also both iPhone and Android.
The Windows laptop often gets sluggish and hot. The M1 never slows down and stays cold. There's just no comparison (though the Air keyboard remains poor).
I don't much care about the technical details, and I know 8GB isn't a lot. I care about the experience and the underspecced Mac wins.
That said you're right about lots of RAM in that I wouldn't bother using the 8GB M1 Air for Docker or running LLMs (it can run SD for images though, but very slowly). Partly that's why I have the Lenovo. You need to pick the right machine for the job at hand.
And I agree that in pure performance, the Apple Silicon Macs will kill it; however, I am really skeptical that an 8GB model would give you a better experience overall. Faster for long compute operations sure, but then you have to deal with all the small slowdown from constant swapping. Unless you stick to a very small amounts of apps and very small amounts of tabs at the same time (which is rather limiting) I don't know how you do it. I don't want to call you a liar but maybe you are emotionally attached (just like I am sometimes) to the device to realize it, or maybe the various advantages of the Mac make you ignore the serious limitations that come with it.
Everyone has their own sets of tradeoffs but my argument is that you can deal with the 8GB Apple Silicon devices you are very likely to be well served by a much cheaper device anyway (like half as cheap).
> you have to deal with all the small slowdown from constant swapping
That just doesn't happen. As I responded to another post, though, I don't do Docker or LLMs on the M1 otherwise you'd probably be right.
> Unless you stick to a very small amounts of apps and very small amounts of tabs at the same time
It's really common to have approaching 50+ tabs open at once. And using Word is often accompanied by VS Code, Excel, Affinity Designer, DotNet, Python, and others due to the nature of what I'm doing. No slowdown.
> maybe you are emotionally attached
I am emotionally attached to the device. Though as a long-time Mac, Windows, and Linux user I'm neither blinkered nor tribal - the attachment is driven by the experience and not the other way around.
> maybe the various advantages of the Mac make you ignore the serious limitations that come with it
There are indeed limitations. 8GB is too small. The fact that for what I do it has no impact doesn't mean I don't see that.
> you can deal with the 8GB Apple Silicon devices you are very likely to be well served by a much cheaper device anyway (like half as cheap)
I already have better Windows laptops than that, and I know that going for a Windows laptop that's half as cheap as the entry level Air would be nothing like as nice because the more expensive ones already aren't (the Lenovo was dearer than the Air).
---
To conclude, you have to use the right tool for the job. If the nature of the task intrinsically needs lots of RAM then 8GB is not good enough. But when it is enough it runs rings around equivalent (and often 'better') Windows machines.
You are entirely (100%) wrong, but, sadly, NDA...
My experience is that I can still tell when the OS is unhappy when I demand more RAM than it can give. MacOS is still relatively responsive around this range, which I just attributed to super fast swapping. (I'd assume memory compression too, but I usually run into this trouble when working with large amounts of poorly-compressible data.)
In either case, I know it's frustrating when someone is confidently wrong but you can't properly correct them, so you have my apologies
If there's any publicly available data to the contrary I'd love to read it. Anecdotally I haven't seen a significant difference between zswap on Linux and macOS memory compression in terms of compression ratios, and on the workloads I've tested zswap tends to be faster than no memory compression on x86 for many core machines.
I don't have a horse in this race, Jobs lied or bent the truth all the time so it wouldn't surprise me, I'm just curious.
1) Graphs often are unannotatted.
2) Comparisons are rarely against latest generation products. (their argument for that has been that they do not expect people to upgrade yearly, so its showing the difference of their intended upgrade path).
3) They have conflated performance, for performance per watt.
However, when it comes to battery life, performance (for a task) or specification of their components (screens, ability to use external displays up to 6k, port speed etc) there are almost no hidden gotchas and they have tended to be trustworthy.
The first wave of M1 announcements were met with similar suspicion as you have shown here; but it was swiftly dispelled once people actually got their hands on them.
*EDIT:* Blaming a guy who's been dead for 13 years for something they said 50 years ago, and primarily it seems for internal use is weird. I had to look up the context but it seems it was more about internal motivation in the 70’s than relating to anything today, especially when referring to concrete claims.
"The G4 chip is nearly three times faster than the fastest Pentium III"
- Steve Jobs (1999) [1]
[1] https://www.wired.com/1999/08/lavish-debut-for-apples-g4/
And again, the guy has been dead for the better part of this millennium.
What have they shown of any product currently on the market, especially when backed with any concrete claim, that has been proven untrue-
EDIT: After reading your article and this one: https://lowendmac.com/2006/twice-as-fast-did-apple-lie-or-ju... it looks like it was true in floating point workloads.
Just add them up, it’s the same number of Hertz!
But Steve that’s two procs vs one!
[1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-apr-17-fi-20482...
It's certainly fair to say that twenty years ago Apple was marketing some of its PPC systems as "the first supercomputer on a chip"[^1].
> but it was nowhere near the performance of a supercomputer of that age.
That was not the claim. Apple did not argue that the G4's performance was commensurate with the state of the art in supercomputing. (If you'll forgive me: like, fucking obviously? The entire reason they made the claim is precisely because the latest room-sized supercomputers with leapfrog performance gains were in the news very often.)
The claim was that the G4 was capable of sustained gigaflop performance, and therefore met the narrow technical definition of a supercomputer.
You'll see in the aforelinked marketing page that Apple compared the G4 chip to UC Irvine’s Aeneas Project, which in ~2000 was delivering 1.9 gigaflop performance.
This chart[^2] shows the trailing average of various subsets of super computers, for context.
This narrow definition is also why the machine could not be exported to many countries, which Apple leaned into.[^3]
> Maybe similar performance to a supercomputer from the 1970's
What am I missing here? Picking perhaps the most famous supercomputer of the mid-1970s, the Cray-1,[^4] we can see performance of 160 MFLOPS, which is 160 million floating point operations per second (with an 80 MHz processor!).
The G4 was capable of delivering ~1 GFLOP performance, which is a billion floating point operations per second.
Are you perhaps thinking of a different decade?
[^1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20000510163142/http://www.apple....
[^2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_supercomputing#/med...
[^3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20020418022430/https://www.cnn.c...
This is marketing we're talking about, people see "supercomputer on a chip" and they get hyped up by it. Apple was 100% using the "supercomputer" claim to make their luddite audience think they had a performance advantage, which they did not.
> The entire reason they made the claim is
The reason they marketed it that way was to get people to part with their money. Full stop.
In the first link you added, there's a photo of a Cray supercomputer, which makes the viewer equate Apple = Supercomputer = I am a computing god if I buy this product. Apple's marketing has always been a bit shady that way.
And soon after that period Apple jumped off the PPC architecture and onto the x86 bandwagon. Gimmicks like "supercomputer on a chip" don't last long when the competition is far ahead.
If I had some pearls I would be clutching them right now.
That is also not in dispute. I am disputing your specific claim that Apple somehow suggested that the G4 was of commensurate performance to a modern supercomputer, which does not seem to be true.
> Apple was 100% using the "supercomputer" claim to make their luddite audience think they had a performance advantage, which they did not.
This is why context is important (and why I'd appreciate clarity on whether you genuinely believe a supercomputer from the 1970s was anywhere near as powerful as a G4).
In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, megapixels were a proxy for camera quality, and megahertz were a proxy for processor performance. More MHz = more capable processor.
This created a problem for Apple, because the G4's SPECfp_95 (floating point) benchmarks crushed Pentium III at lower clock speeds.
PPC G4 500 MHz - 22.6
PPC G4 450 MHz - 20.4
PPC G4 400 MHz - 18.36
Pentium III 600 MHz – 15.9
For both floating point and integer benchmarks, the G3 and G4 outgunned comparable Pentium II/III processors.
You can question how this translates to real world use cases – the Photoshop filters on stage were real, but others have pointed out in this thread that it wasn't an apples-to-apples comparison vs. Wintel – but it is inarguable that the G4 had some performance advantages over Pentium at launch, and that it met the (inane) definition of a supercomputer.
> The reason they marketed it that way was to get people to part with their money. Full stop.
Yes, marketing exists to convince people to buy one product over another. That's why companies do marketing. IMO that's a self-evidently inane thing to say in a nested discussion of microprocessor architecture on a technical forum – especially when your interlocutor is establishing the historical context you may be unaware of (judging by your comment about supercomputers from the 1970s, which I am surprised you have not addressed).
I didn't say "The reason Apple markets its computers," I said "The entire reason they made the claim [about supercomputer performance]…"
Both of us appear to know that companies do marketing, but only you appear to be confused about the specific claims Apple made – given that you proactively raised them, and got them wrong – and the historical backdrop against which they were made.
> In the first link you added, there's a photo of a Cray supercomputer
That's right. It looks like a stylized rendering of a Cray-1 to me – what do you think?
> which makes the viewer equate Apple = Supercomputer = I am a computing god if I buy this product
The Cray-1's compute, as measured in GFLOPS, was approximately 6.5x lower than the G4 processor.
I'm therefore not sure what your argument is: you started by claiming that Apple deliberately suggested that the G4 had comparable performance to a modern supercomputer. That isn't the case, and the page you're referring to contains imagery of a much less performant supercomputer, as well as a lot of information relating to the history of supercomputers (and a link to a Forbes article).
> Apple's marketing has always been a bit shady that way.
All companies make tradeoffs they think are right for their shareholders and customers. They accentuate the positives in marketing and gloss over the drawbacks.
Note, too, that Adobe's CEO has been duped on the page you link to. Despite your emphatic claim:
> Apple was 100% using the "supercomputer" claim to make their luddite audience think they had a performance advantage, which they did not.
The CEO of Adobe is quoted as saying:
> “Currently, the G4 is significantly faster than any platform we’ve seen running Photoshop 5.5,” said John E. Warnock, chairman and CEO of Adobe.
How is what you are doing materially different to what you accuse Apple of doing?
> And soon after that period Apple jumped off the PPC architecture and onto the x86 bandwagon.
They did so when Intel's roadmap introduced Core Duo, which was significantly more energy-efficient than Pentium 4. I don't have benchmarks to hand, but I suspect that a PowerBook G5 would have given the Core Duo a run for its money (despite the G5 being significantly older), but only for about fifteen seconds before thermal throttling and draining the battery entirely in minutes.
Confirmed here: https://computer.howstuffworks.com/question299.htm (and elsewhere.)
A year later I was doing bonkers (for the time) photoshop work on very large compressed tiff files and my G4 laptop running at 400Mhz was more than 2x as fast as PIIIs on my bench.
Was it faster all around? I don't know how to tell. Was Apple as honest as I am in this commentary about how it mattered what you were doing? No. Was it a CPU that was able to do some things very fast vs others? I know it was.
On top of that Intel increased frequency faster than Apple could handle. And after the release of the Pentium 4, the G4s became very noncompetitive so fast that one would question what could save Apple (later, down the road, Intel it turns out).
They tried to salvage it with the G5s but those came with so many issues that even their bi-proc water-cooled were just not keeping up. I briefly owned of those after repairing it for "free" using 3 of them, supposedly dead; the only thing worth a dam in that was the GPU. Extremely good hardware in many ways but also very weak for so many things that it had to be used only for very specific tasks, otherwise a cheap Intel PC was much better.
Which is precisely why right after they went with Intel. After years of subpar performance on laptops because they were stuck at G4 (not even high frequency).
Now I know from your other comments that you are a very strong believer and I'll admit that there were many reasons to use a Mac (software related) but please stop pretending they were performance competitive because that's just bonkers. If they were, the Intel switch would never have happend in the first place...
Okay, but your example was about battery life:
> 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]
And even then, they exaggerated their claims. And your link doesn't say anything about HP or Dell claiming 19 hour battery life.
Apple has definitely exaggerated their performance claims over and over again. The Apple silicon parts are fast and low power indeed, but they've made ridiculous claims like comparing their chips to an nVidia RTX 3090 with completely misleading graphs
Even the Mac sites have admitted that the nVidia 3090 comparison was completely wrong and designed to be misleading: https://9to5mac.com/2022/03/31/m1-ultra-gpu-comparison-with-...
This is why you have to take everything they say with a huge grain of salt. Their chip may be "twice" as power efficient in some carefully chosen unique scenario that only exists in an artificial setting, but how does it fare in the real world? That's the question that matters, and you're not going to get an honest answer from Apple's marketing team.
Apple does usually explain their testing methodology and they don’t cheat on benchmarks like some other companies. It’s just that the results are still marketing and should be treated as such.
Outlandish claims notwithstanding, I don’t think anyone can deny the progress they achieved with their CPU and especially GPU IP. Improving performance on complex workloads by 30–50% in a single year is very impressive.
> HP gave the 13-inch HP Spectre x360 an absurd 22.5 hours of estimated battery life, while our real-world test results showed that the laptop could last for 12 hours and 7 minutes.
> Speaking of the ThinkPad P72, here are the top three laptops with the most, er, far out battery life claims of all our analyzed products: the Lenovo ThinkPad P72, the Dell Latitude 7400 2-in-1 and the Acer TravelMate P6 P614. The three fell short of their advertised battery life by 821 minutes (13 hours and 41 mins), 818 minutes (13 hours and 38 minutes) and 746 minutes (12 hours and 26 minutes), respectively.
Dell did manage to be one of the top 3 most absurd claims though.
Dell and IBM were lying about battery life before OSX was even a thing and normal people started buying MacBooks. Dell and IBM will be lying about battery life when the sun goes red dwarf.
Reviewers and individuals like me have always been able to get 90% of Apple’s official battery times without jumping through hoops to do so. “If you were very careful” makes sense for an 11% difference. A ten hour difference is fucking bullshit.
I guess you weren't around during the PowerPC days... Because that's a laughable statement.
A PC half the price was smoking their top of the line stuff.
What made it worth it at the time (I felt) was the software. Today I'm really don't think so, software has improved overall in the industry and there is not a lot of things "Mac specific" that makes it a clear-cut choice.
As for the performance I can't believe all the Apple silicon hype. Sure, it gets good battery life given you use strictly Apple software (or software optimized for it heavily) but in mixed workload situation it's not that impressive.
Using the M2 MacBook Pro of a friend I figured I could get maybe 4-5 hours out of its best case scenario which is better than the 2-3 hours you would get from a PC laptop but also not that great considering the price difference.
And when it comes to performance it is extremely unequal and very lackluster for many things. Like there is more lag launching Activity Monitor on a 2K++ MacBook Pro than launching task manager on a 500 PC. This is a small somewhat stupid example but it does tell the overall story.
They talk a big game but in reality, their stuff isn't that performant in the real world.
And they still market games when one of their 2K laptops plays Dota 2 (a very old, relatively ressource efficient game) worse than a cheapo PC.
Any electron apps on it?
I went the way of only Apple and Apple optimized software for quite a while but I just can't be bothered anymore, considering the price of the hardware and nowadays the price of subscription software.
And this is exactly my argument I you use the hardware in a very specific way, you get there but it is very limiting, annoying and inacceptable considering the pricing.
It's like saying that a small city car gets more gas mileage when what one needs is actually a capable truck. It's not strictly wrong but also not very helpful.
I think the Apple Silicon laptops are very nice if you can work within the limitations, but the moment you start pushing on those you realize they are not really worth the money. Just like the new iPad Pro they released; completely awesome hardware but how many people can actually work within the limitations of iPad OS to make the price not look like a complete ripoff. Very few I would argue.
Today, Apple Silicon is smoking all but the top end Intel chips, while using a fraction of the power.
We need more tanks in commercials.
Yes and no. They'll always be honest with the claim, but the scenario for the claimed improvement will always be chosen to make the claim as large as possible, sometimes with laughable results.
Typically something like "watch videos for 3x longer <small>when viewing 4k h265 video</small>" (which means they adapted the previous gen's silicon which could only handle h264).
Isn't that going to torch performance? My i9-9900 has a base frequency of 3.6 Ghz and a turbo of 5.0 Ghz. Disabling the turbo would create a 28% drop in performance.
I suppose if everything else on the system is configured to use as little power as possible, then it won't even be noticed. But seeing as CPUs underclock when idle (I've seen my i9 go as low as 1.2 Ghz), I'm not sure disabling turbo makes a significant impact except when your CPU is being pegged.
For literal YEARS, Apple battery life claims were a running joke on how inaccurate and overinflated they were.
What time period are you thinking about for Apple? I’ve been using their laptops since the last G4 which is twenty years. They’ve always been substantially more accurate about battery times.
For example I would be surprised if there is any laptop, which is sufficiently fast for my usage, and it's battery life is more than 2-3 hours top. Heck, I have several laptops and all of them dies in one-one and a half hours. But of course, I never optimized for battery life, so who knows. So in my case, all of them are lying equally. I don't even check battery life for 15 years now. It's a useless metric for me, because all of them are shit.
But of course for people who don't need to use VMs, run several "micro"services at once, have constant internet transfer and have 5+ Intellij project open at the same time which caching several millions LOC, while gazillion web pages are open, maybe there is a difference, for me it doesn't matter whether it's one or one and a half hours.
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