The CPUs have zero competition in terms of speed, memory bandwidth. Still blown away no other company has been able to produce Arm server chips that can compete.
I’d be curious to know if this changes that. It’d take a lot more than doubling cores to take out the very high power AMD parts, but this might squeeze them a bit.
Interestingly, AMD has also been investing heavily in unified RAM. I wonder if they have / plan an SoC that competes 1:1 with this. (Most of the parts I’m referring to are set up for discrete graphics.)
Source: https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Ryzen-AI-Max-395-Analysis-...
Cinebench 2024 results.
Somewhere on the internet there is a tdp wattage vs performance x-y plot. There’s a pareto optimal region where all the apple and amd parts live. Apple owns low tdp, AMD owns high tdp. They duke it out in the middle. Intel is nowhere close to the line.
I’d guess someone has made one that includes datacenter ARM, but I’ve never seen it.
Workstations (like the Mac Studio) have traditionally been a space where "enthusiast"-grade consumer parts (think Threadripper) and actual server parts competed. The owner of a workstation didn't usually care about their machine's TDP; they just cared that it could chew through their workloads as quickly as possible. But, unlike an actual server, workstations didn't need the super-high core count required for multitenant parallelism; and would go idle for long stretches — thus benefitting (though not requiring) more-efficient power management that could drive down baseline TDP.
Anyway, I don't think it's comparable really. This thing comes with a fat GPU, NPU, and unified memory. Threadripper is just a CPU.
Anyway the Apple config in the article costs about 5x more than a comparable low end AMD server with 512GB of ram, but adds an NPU. AMD has NPUs in lower end stuff; not sure about this TDP range.
At least judging by the mounts, they want them to be used that way, even though the CPU might not fit with the de facto industry label for "server-grade".
The only use case I can think of is for audio workstations, where people have lots of rack mount equipment, so you can have everything including the computer in the rack. But even for that use case it's quite big.
Right.
It is coming up because we're in a thread about using them as server CPUs. (c.f. "colo", "2U" in OP and OP's child), and the person you're replying to is making the same point you are
For years now, people will comment "these are the best chips, I'd replace all chips with them."
Then someone points out perf/watt is not perf.
Then someone else points out some M-series is much faster than a random CPU.
And someone else points out that the random CPU is not a top performing CPU.
And someone else points out M-series are optimized for perf/watt and it'd suck if it wasn't.
I love my MacBook, the M-series has no competitors in the case it's designed for.
I'd just prefer, at this point, that we can skip long threads rehashing it.
It's a great chip. It's not the fastest, and it's better for that. We want perf/watt in our mobile devices. There's fundamental, well-understood, engineering tradeoffs that imply being great at that necessitates the existence of faster processors.
It's a great chip. It's not the fastest,
There are nice things that Apple has, but as you can see there is significant reality warping going on.
Why does it persist?
Both Passmark and Geekbench are aggregates of a variety of tasks. If you dig into the individual tests that constitute this aggregate score, you will find different platforms perform better, or worse, on certain tests than others. I would wager that, for many applications, only a subset of these tasks are relevant to the performance of the application, yet such benchmark suites distil out all nuance into a single value.
Here is a personal anecdote. I have tried running CASTEP (built from source), a density functional theory calculator, on both an M1 Max MacBook Pro [0], and on a Ryzen 7840HS Lenovo laptop [1]. A cursory glance at those Geekbench results linked might make you expect that the performance is roughly equivalent, but the Ryzen outperforms the Mac by about 4x, a huge difference.
What happens if we try and dig into any particular benchmark to explain this? If you click on any particular benchmark in the Geekbench search lists, you will see they test things like "File Compression", "HTML5 Browser", "Clang". Which of these maps most closely to the sorts of instructions used in CASTEP? Your guess is as good as mine.
If anything, I would say Passmark is quite a bit less abstract about this. Looking at the Mac [2] and Ryzen [3] Passmark results, you can see the Ryzen outperforms the Mac by about 2x on "extended instructions", which appear to involve some matrix math, and also about 2x on "integer math". The Mac, meanwhile, appears to be extremely good at finding prime numbers, at over 3x the speed of the Ryzen. Presumably the Ryzen's balance of instruction performance is more useful for DFT calculations than the Mac's, which perhaps is weaker in areas that might matter for this application, but stronger in areas that might matter for others.
Of course, optimization is likely a component of this. How much effort is put into the OpenBLAS, MPI, etc, implementations on aarch64 darwin vs. x86-64 linux? This is a good question. It is, however, mostly irrelevant to the end consumer, who wishes to consume this software for use in their further research, rather than dig into high-performance computing library optimization.
[0] https://browser.geekbench.com/search?q=7840hs
[1] https://browser.geekbench.com/search?q=m1+max
[2] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Apple+M1+Max+10+Cor...
[3] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+7+PRO+784...
I think PassMark is more honest as well, because it just gives scores for calculation throughput instead of specific tasks. It more closely matches what experience you will get if you have a varied load.
But since it's Apple we are talking about, their users just want to think they have the best and that's all that matters.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_test_info.html
Right from the top it's amateurish stuff: their idea of an integer benchmark to measure "raw" CPU throughput (whatever that means) is to make a bunch of random ints and add/subtract/multiply/divide them.
Very few programs do a high volume of either integer multiply or divide. And when they do, they generally aren't doing it on random numbers. This is the kind of thing which gives synthetic benchmarks their highly deserved bad rep. It might be even worse than Dhrystone MIPs, and believe me, in benchmark nerd circles, that is a fucking diss.
If you look up Geekbench's docs, you'll find that it's all about real-world compute tasks. For example, one of the int tests in their suite is to compile a reference program with the Clang compiler. Compilers are a reasonably good litmus test of integer performance; they heavily stress the CPU features most responsible for high integer performance in this day and age. (Branch prediction, memory prefetching, out-of-order execution, speculation, that kind of thing.)
You claimed that PassMark reflects "complex" software, and Geekbench doesn't. However, I would be willing to bet that Clang alone is far more complex than all of PassMark's CPU benchmarks put together, whether you measure by SLOC or program structure.
Note that none of this has anything to do with Mac vs PC. Passmark is simply a bad benchmark that should not be used, period. That said, there are a bunch of warning signs that PassMark's ports to everything outside its native x86 Windows are probably quite sloppy, so it's even less useful for crossplatform comparisons.
https://medium.com/silicon-reimagined/performance-delivered-...
Passmark is an outdated benchmark that isn't updated to use ARM instructions.
The M4 Max had great, I would argue the best at time of release, single core results on Geekbench.
That is a different claim from M4 line has the top single thread performance in the world.
I'm curious:
You're signalling both that you understand the fundamental tradeoff ("Apple doesn't make server-grade CPUs") and that you are talking about something else (follow-up with M4 family has top single-thread performance)
What drives that? What's the other thing you're hoping to communicate?
If you are worried that if you leave it at "Apple doesn't make server-grade CPUs", that people will think M4s aren't as great as they are, this is a technical-enough audience, I think we'll understand :) It doesn't come across as denigrating the M-series, but as understanding a fundamental, physically-based, tradeoff.
This?
https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/power_performance.html#sc...
I'm not sure how those benchmarks translate to common real world use cases.
It reminds me of the 1990s when my old school was using Sun machines based on the 68k series and later SPARC and we were blown away with the toaster-sized HP PA RISC machine that was used for student work for all the CS classes.
Then Linux came out and it was clear the 386 trashed them all in terms of value and as we got the 486 and 586 and further generations, the Intel architecture trashed them in every respect.
The story then was that Intel was making more parts than anybody else so nobody else could afford to keep up the investment.
The same is happening with parts for phones and TSMC's manufacturing dominance -- and today with chiplets you can build up things like the M3 Ultra out of smaller parts.
Then, one day, we built a 5 machine amd athlon xp linux cluster for $2000 ($400/machine) that beat all the unix and windows server hardware by at least 10x on $/perf.
It’s nice that we have more than one viable cpu vendor these days, though it seems like there’s only one viable fab company.
For what we needed, five 32 bit address spaces was enough DRAM. The individual CPU parts were way more than 20% as fast, and the 100Mbit switch was good enough.
(The data basically fit in ram, so network transport time to load a machine was bounded by 4GiB / 8MiB / sec = 500 seconds. Also, the hard disks weren’t much faster than network back then.)
I think it goes something like:
- 2106x/EV4: 34-bit physical, 43-bit virtual
- 21164/EV5: 40-bit physical, 43-bit virtual
- 21264/EV6: 44-bit physical, 48-bit virtual
The 21364/EV7 likely has the same characteristics as EV6, but the hardware reference manual seems to have been lost to time...
Digital struggled with the microprocessor transition because they didn't want to kill their cash cow minicomputers with microcomputer-based replacements. They went with the 64-bit Alpha because they wanted to rule the high end in the CMOS age. And they did, for a little while. But the mass market caught up.
VMS is the only OS (that I know of) that uses all 4 processor privilege modes.
Side note: The 21064 has such bizarre IPR mappings, the read values have lots of bits scrambled around compared to their write counterparts. This is likely a hardware design decision affecting the programmer's model, if I had to guess.
One thing I remember about Alpha though was how bad the output from gcc was. Then DEC released a version of their own compilers that was command line compatible with gcc. That changed everything for open source stuff.
On the other hand, you can do without display support if you’re only using it as a server. And I think USB Ethernet dongles might work for the time being?
My understanding is there are dozens of people working on it.
my understanding was this was an open secret though, seems pretty obvious to anyone with technical knowhow who watches their videos
Apple’s whole m.o. is to take FOSS software, repackage it and sell it. They don’t want people using it directly.
Having things consistently work is much cheaper than down days caused by your ancient equipment. Apple’s SSDs will make it to 5 years no problem - and more likely, 10-15 years.
Fast forward 2 years: The $50-$250K machines have a 100% drive failure rate, and some poor bastard has to fly from data center to data center to swap the $60 drive for a $120 one, then re-rack and re-image each machine.
Anyway, soldering a decent SSD to the motherboard board would actually improve reliability at all those places.
If they were soldered onto those systems you talk about, all those would have had to be replaced instead of just having the drive swapped out and re-imaged.
Maybe not at the same power consumption, but I'm sure mid-range Xeons and EPYCs mop the floor with the M3 Ultra in CPU performance. What the M3 Ultra has that nobody else comes close is a decent GPU near a pool of half a terabyte of RAM.
FYI Apple runs Linux in their DC, so no Apple hardware in their own servers.
This is silly. Given the performance per watt, the M series would be great in a data center. As you all know, electricity for running the servers and cooling for the servers are the two biggest ongoing costs for a data center; the M series requires less power and runs more efficiently than the average Intel or AMD-based server.
> FYI Apple runs Linux in their DC, so no Apple hardware in their own servers.
That's certainly no longer the case. Apple announced their Private Cloud Compute [1] initiative—Apple designed servers running Apple Silicon to support Apple Intelligence functions that can't run on-device.
BTW, Apple just announced a $500 billion investment [2] in US-based manufacturing, including a 250,000 square foot facility to make servers. Yes, these will obviously be for their Private Cloud Compute servers… but it doesn't have to be only for that purpose.
From the press release:
As part of its new U.S. investments, Apple will work with manufacturing partners to begin production of servers in Houston later this year. A 250,000-square-foot server manufacturing facility, slated to open in 2026, will create thousands of jobs.
Previously manufactured outside the U.S., the servers that will soon be assembled in Houston play a key role in powering Apple Intelligence, and are the foundation of Private Cloud Compute, which combines powerful AI processing with the most advanced security architecture ever deployed at scale for AI cloud computing. The servers bring together years of R&D by Apple engineers, and deliver the industry-leading security and performance of Apple silicon to the data center.
Teams at Apple designed the servers to be incredibly energy efficient, reducing the energy demands of Apple data centers — which already run on 100 percent renewable energy. As Apple brings Apple Intelligence to customers across the U.S., it also plans to continue expanding data center capacity in North Carolina, Iowa, Oregon, Arizona, and Nevada.
[1]: https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
[2]: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/02/apple-will-spend-more...
Security practitioners and academics: https://github.com/enovella/TEE-reversing/ https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-10859-trustzone-m_eh_breaking_ar... https://www.blackhat.com/docs/us-15/materials/us-15-Shen-Att... https://i.blackhat.com/USA-19/Thursday/us-19-Peterlin-Breaki...
Sorry you could not cite an attack demonstrated on x86 and not on ARM or vice versa. Well, maybe TikTag (https://github.com/compsec-snu/tiktag) was demonstrated against ARM MTE, since you mention, and Pacman (https://pacmanattack.com/) against PAC. I was hoping for an actual response, no offense.
Our business "only" sees about 1,000-25,000 req/min, our message brokers transmit MAX 25k msg/s. Easily handled by a rack of 10 servers for redundancy.
We are not Google and we don't pretend to be, so we don't care about power, as the difference is a few dollars a month.
With all my love and respect for "Apple rumors" writers; this was always "I read five blogposts about CPU design and now I'm an expert!" territory.
The speculation was based on the M3 Maxes die shots not having the interposer visible, which... implies basically nothing whether that _could have_ been supported in an M3 Ultra configuration; as evidenced by the announcement today.
No M3 has thunderbolt 5.
This is a new chip with M3 marketing. I’d expect this from Intel, not Apple.
The press-release even calls TB5 out: >Each Thunderbolt 5 port is supported by its own custom-designed controller directly on the chip.
Given that they're doing the same on A-series chips (A18 Pro with 10Gbps USB-C; A18 with USB 2.0); I imagine it's just relatively simple to swap the I/O blocks around and they're doing this for cost and/or product segmentation reasons.
Which, at this point, why not just use M4 as a base?
I imagine that making those chips is quite a bit more involved than just taking the files for M3 Max, and copy-pasting them twice into a new project.
I imagine it just takes more time to design/verify/produce them; especially given they're not selling very many of them, so they're probably not super-high-priority projects.
Or the sort of thing you put onto a successor when you had your fingers crossed that the spec and hardware would finalize in time for your product launch but the fucking committee went into paralysis again at the last moment and now your product has to ship 4 months before you can put TB 5 hardware on shelves. So you put your TB4 circuitry on a chip that has the bandwidth to handle TB5 and you wait for the sequel.
Apple could either create a 2U rack hardware and support Linux (and I mean Apple supporting it, not hobbysts), or have a build of Darwin headless that could run on that hardware. But in the later case, we probably wouldn't have much software available (though I am sure people would eventually starting porting software to it, there is already MacPorts and Homebrew and I am sure they could be adapted to eventually run in that platform).
But Apple is also not interested in that market, so this will probably never happen.
they're just a tiny company with shareholders who are really tired of never earning back their investments. give 'em a break. I mean they're still so small that they must protect themselves by requiring that macs be used for publishing iPhone and iPad applications.
I mean, that's usually how it works though. When IBM launched the PS/2, they didn't support anything other than PC-DOS and OS/2, Microsoft had to make MS-DOS work for it (I mean... they did get support from IBM, but not really), the 386BSD and Linux communities brought the engineering effort without IBM's involvement.
When Apple was making Motorola Macs, they may have given Be a little help, but didn't support any other OSes that appeared. Same with PowerPC.
All of the support for alternative OSes has always come from the community, whether that's volunteers or a commercial interest with cash to burn. Why should that change for Apple silicon?
Apple briefly supported a Linux distribution on PowerPC Macs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MkLinux.
> they're still so small that they must protect themselves by requiring that macs be used for publishing iPhone and iPad applications.
They're not talking about Apple's silicon as a target, but as a development platform.
It really is. Even if they themselves won't bring back their old XServe OS variant, I'd really appreciate it if they at least partnered with a Linux or BSD (good callout, ryao) dev to bring a server OS to the hardware stack. The consumer OS, while still better (to my subjective tastes) than Windows, is increasingly hampered by bloat and cruft that make it untenable for production server workloads, at least to my subjective standards.
A server OS that just treats the underlying hardware like a hypervisor would, making the various components attachable or shareable to VMs and Containers on top, would make these things incredibly valuable in smaller datacenters or Edge use cases. Having an on-prem NPU with that much RAM would be a godsend for local AI acceleration among a shared userbase on the LAN.
I’m continually surprised Apple doesn’t just donate something like 0.1% of their software development budget to proton and the asahi projects. It’d give them a big chunk of the gaming and server markets pretty much overnight.
I guess they’re too busy adding dark patterns that re-enable siri and apple intelligence instead.
Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't use that feature (I prefer self-hosting it all myself), but for folks like my family members, it'd be a killer addition to the lineup that makes my life supporting them much easier.
HomeKit networking existed in Eero briefly. I put that in a lot of casual Apple homes. Seemed like missed oppty for Apple to let Amazon buy Eero, a more "spiritual successor" to the Airports.
Ubiquiti is decently priced, especially for niche hardware, unlike Apple. Fundamentally they diverge on the way to do things...
For SMBs or Edge deployments where redundancy isn't as critical or budgets aren't as large, this is an incredibly compelling offering...if Apple actually had a competent server OS to layer on top of that hardware, which it does not.
If they did, though...whew, I'd be quaking in my boots if I were the usual Enterprise hardware vendors. That's a damn frightening piece of competition.
That nvidia GPU setup will actually have the compute grunt to make use of the RAM, though, which this M3 Ultra probably realistically doesn't. After all, if the only thing that mattered was RAM then the 2TB you can shove into an Epyc or Xeon would already be dominating the AI industry. But they aren't, because it isn't. It certainly hits at a unique combination of things, but whether or not that's maximally useful for the money is a completely different story.
It all depends on the workload you want to run.
Write me an AWS CloudFormation file that does the following:
* Deploys an Amazon Kubernetes Cluster
* Deploys Busybox in the namespace "Test1", including creating that Namespace
* Deploys a second Busybox in the namespace "Test3", including creating that Namespace
* Creates a PVC for 60GB of storage
* 21.28 seconds for "Thinking"
* 0.22s to the first token
* 18.65 tokens/second over 1484 tokens in its responses
* 1m:23s from sending the input to completion of the output
* 10.88 seconds for "thinking"
* 0.04s to first token
* 58.02 tokens/second over 1905 tokens in its responses
* 0m:34s from sending the input to completion of the output
Sure, the desktop machine performs better, as would a datacenter server jam-packed full of Blackwell GPUs, but that's not what's exciting about Apple's implementation. It's the efficiency of it all, being able to handle modern models on comparatively "weaker" hardware most folks would dismiss outright. That's the point I was trying to make.
Also Apple isn't unique in having an NPU in a laptop. Fucking everyone does at this point.
The point is that, in terms of practical usage, the M3 Ultra is uniquely competent and highly affordable in a sea of enterprise technology that is decidedly not. I tried to demonstrate why I'm excited about it by pointing out the similar performance of a battery-powered, four-year-old laptop and a quite gargantuan gaming PC that's pulling over 500W from the wall, as an example of what several years of additional refinements and improvements to the architecture was expected to bring.
The point is that it's affordable, more flexible in deployment, and more efficient than similarly-specced datacenter servers specifically designed for inference. For the cost of a single decked-out Dell or HP rackmount server, I can have five of these Mac Studios with M3 Ultra chips - and without the need for substantial cooling, noise isolation, or other datacenter necessities. If the marketing copy is even in the same ballpark as actual performance, that's easily enough inference to serve an office of fifty to a hundred people or more, depending on latency tolerances; if you don't mind "queuing" work (like CurrentCo does with their internal Agents), one of those is likely enough for a hundred users.
That's the excitement. That's the point. It's not the fastest, it's not the cheapest, it's just the most balanced.
I have Apple hardware but it sucks for anything AI, buying it for that purpose is just extremely dumb, just like buying Macs for engineering CADs or things of the sort.
If you are buying Macs and it's not for media production related reasons you are doing something wrong.
I continue to be in awe of the lengths some people will go just to fling insults and shake out some salt. We're, what, ten layers deep? With all the context above, the best you have to contribute to the discussion are baseless accusations and ageist insults?
Your finite time would have been better spent on literally anything else, than actively seeking out a comment just to throw subjective, unsubstantiated shade around. C'mon, be better.
Apple is the master at creating desire and building narrative in their customers' mind about the many things their devices would allow them to do. It's very aspirational and in practice most of the Macs get used for things that could have been done with a much cheaper option.
It may not be obvious to you but it's somewhat funny seeing you rationalise all kinds of dreams of what this machine could potentially be when in practice the people who would really be working on the kind of stuff you are talking about don't even consider them viable for many good reasons.
It's not that those machines cannot potentially do it, it's just that they don't really fit the goal very well.
A lot like people buying Cybertruck to "haul" stuff when they are a lot more option that are just plain better and make a lot more economic/practical sense.
It's OK to desire the thing and be excited about it but it really doesn't serve anyone to rationalise it so hard, you are lying to yourself as much as everyone else, it's not healthy.
If that was not clear, people working on AI stuff professionally really don't have to deal with a Mac Studio, they have access to better stuff. If you want to get one personally to experiment/toy around it's ok but it's not going to be this amazing thing for AI.
I am thinking that 7 A100's would be the lowest price for that, and that would be $80k with good discounts.
In Intel's case, there's ample coverage of the company's lack of direction and complacency on existing hardware, even as their competitors ate away at their moat, year after year. AMD with their EPYC chips taking datacenter share, Apple moving to in-house silicon for their entire product line, Qualcomm and Microsoft partnering with ongoing exploration of ARM solutions. A lack of competency in leadership over that time period has annihilated their lead in an industry they used to single-handedly dictate, and it's unlikely they'll recover that anytime soon. So in a sense, Intel cannot make a similar product, in a timely manner, that competes in this segment.
As for AMD, it's a bit more complicated. They're seeing pleasant success in their CPU lineup, and have all but thrown in the towel on higher-end GPUs. The industry has broadly rallied around CUDA instead of OpenCL or other alternatives, especially in the datacenter, and AMD realizes it's a fool's errand to try and compete directly there when it's a monopoly in practice. Instead of squandering capital to compete, they can just continue succeeding and working on their own moat in the areas they specialize in - mid-range GPUs for work and gaming, CPUs targeting consumers and datacenters, and APUs finding their way into game consoles, handhelds, and other consumer devices or Edge compute systems.
And that's just getting into the specifics of those two companies. The reality is that any vendor who hasn't already unveiled their own chips or accelerators is coming in at what's perceived to be the "top" of the bubble or market. They'd lack the capital or moat to really build themselves up as a proper competitor, and are more likely to just be acquired in the current regulatory environment (or lack thereof) for a quick payout to shareholders. There's a reason why the persistent rumor of Qualcomm purchasing part or whole of Intel just won't die: the x86 market is rather stagnant, churning out mediocre improvements YoY at growing pricepoints, while ARM and RISC chips continue to innovate on modern manufacturing processes and chip designs. The growth is not in x86, but a juggernaut like Qualcomm would be an ideal buyer for a "dying" or "completed" business like Intel's, where the only thing left to do is constantly iterate for diminishing returns.
Lowest latency of DDR5-6400 on normal PC starting at 60ns+
Lowest latency of VRAM on GeForce RTX 4090 starting at 14 ns
Lowest latency of Apple M1 Memory starting at 5 ns, its more like L3 cache
And on Apple M chip, this ultrafast memory is available for CPU, GPU and NPU.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc... https://chipsandcheese.com/p/microbenchmarking-nvidias-rtx-4...
There is also "parity" in other products like a MacBook Pro from £1,599 / $1,599 or an iPhone 16 from £799 / $799. £9,699 / $9,499 is worse than that!
You know that £9,699 are over $12k, right?
https://digitalspaceport.com/how-to-run-deepseek-r1-671b-ful...
between 4.25 to 3.5 TPS (tokens per second) on the Q4 671b full model.
This will run it at 40 tokens/s based on rough calculation. Q4 quant. 37b active parameters.
5x higher price for 10x higher performance.
If you've ever used git, svn, or an IDE side by side on corporate Windows versus Apple I don't know why you would ever go back.
The custom build would work great though, and even moreso in a server room and as well continues to reveal by comparison how excessively Apple prices it's components.
> If you've ever used git, svn, or an IDE side by side
I still reach for Windows, even though it's a dogshit OS. I would rather use WSL to write and deploy a single app, as opposed to doing my work in a Linux VM or (god forbid) writing and debugging multiple versions just to support my development runtime. If I'm going to use an ad-encumbered commercial service-slop OS, I might as well pick the one that doesn't actively block my work.
I just want a break from MacOS, I'll be buying a Thinkpad and will probably never come back. This isn't my moaning, I understand it's their market, but if their hardware supported Linux (especially dual booting) or Docker native, I'd probably be buying Apple for the next decade and now I just won't be.
Since the M series of ARM processors didn’t come out until 2020, that would make a lot of sense.
The HP Elitebook was on Ubuntu's list of compatible tested laptops and came in hundreds of dollars less than a Thinkpad. Most of the comparably priced on sale T14's I could find were all crap Intel spec'd ones.
Months in I don't regret it at all and Linux support has been fantastic even for a fairly newer Ryzen chip and not the latest kernel. (I stick to LTS releases of most Distros) Shoving in 4TB of NVME storage and 96GB of DDR5 should I feel the need to upgrade would still put me only around $1300 invested in this machine.
I'll miss the battery life of the M1 chips, and I'm going to have to re-learn how to type (CTRL instead of ALT, fn rarely being on the left, I use fn+left instead of CTRL A in terminals) but otherwise, I think I'm done.
I just want decent enough power and no thermal throttling if I do have to hammer it. I make music so the extra ram and space for sample libraries is a big benefit and why I had to keep external SSD's around with my Macs.
My Macbook Air needed a usb fan ziptied to the laptop stand to not throttle at times.
>it seems like rather than trying to give a mac a reasonable go of it as opposed to whatever else, you were trying to instead explore a fundamental difference in how you value technology products
I re-evaluate how I feel about technology pretty often and its caused some shifts for sure. My side hobby is ARM/RiscV low power computing and Apple's move to ARM tickled that hyper efficiency side of my brain, but ultimately failed to keep me interested because of all the downsides upgrade/repairability wise.
Not that I'm discouraging you from switching or anything. If Linux is what you want/need, there's definitely better laptops to be had than a Macbook for that purpose. It's just that weird incompatibilities and having to fight with the operating system on random issues is, at least in my experience, normal when using a linux laptop. Even my T480 which has overall excellent compatibility isn't trouble-free.
Apple Silicon chips are arguably more compatible with Asahi Linux [1], but that's largely in thanks to the hard work of Marcan, who's stepped down as project lead from the project [2].
Overall I still think the right choice is to find a laptop better suited for the purpose of running linux on it, just something that requires more careful consideration than people think. Framework laptops, which seem well suited since ideologically it meshes well with linux users, can be a pain to set up as well.
[2] https://marcan.st/2025/02/resigning-as-asahi-linux-project-l...
I'm sure with tinkering I could eventually get it working, but I'm well past the point of wanting to tinker with hardware and drivers to get Linux working.
Please elucidate.
^ has a lot of elaborations on this subject
Now try the same with notes on a mac. Notes mangles the punctuation and zsh is not bash.
I love diversity in websites, and apps for that matter, but this isn't diversity, it is the uncanny valley between bespoke graphic design and homogeneity.
Say what you want about SwiftUI, but it makes consistent, good looking apps. Unless something has changed, GTK is a usability disaster.
And that's before I get into how much both X11 and wayland suck equally.
There's so much I miss about Linux, but there's so much I don't
The apps are developed by different teams. MacOS apps are containerized. Saying macOS's performance is hindered by Notes.app is like saying that Windows is hindered by Paint.exe. Notes.app is just a default[0]
[0]: though, I dislike saying this because I always feel like I need to mention that even Notes links against a hilarious amount of private APIs that could easily be exposed to other developers but... aren't.
There is no such thing. Tell me, which combination of the 15+ virtual environments, dependency management and Python version managers would you use? And how would you prevent "project collision" (where one Python project bumps into another one and one just stops working)? Example: SSL library differences across projects is a notorious culprit.
Python is garbage and I don't understand why people put up with this crap unless you seriously only run ONE SINGLE Python project at a time and do not care what else silently breaks. Having to run every Python app in its own Docker image (which is the only real solution to this, if you don't want to learn Nix, which you really should, because it is better thanks to determinism... but entails its own set of issues) is not a reasonable compromise.
Was so glad when the Elixir guys came out with this recently, to at least be able to use Python, but in a very controlled, not-insane way: https://dashbit.co/blog/running-python-in-elixir-its-fine
And if you’re genuinely asking, everything’s converging toward uv. If you pick only one, use that and be done with it.
Neither fixed anything. They just make it slightly less painful to deal with python scripts’ constant bitrot.
They also make python uniquely difficult to dockerize.
> They also make python uniquely difficult to dockerize.
RUN pip install uv && uv sync
Do you actually try new Python projects out with git-clone, or do you just use the same 3 Python projects for years at a time (all regularly)?
That might explain the difference in experiences
Thats funny, about 10 years ago I started my career in a startup that had Python business logic running under Erlang (via custom connector) which handled supervision and task distribution, and it looked insane for me at the time.
Even today I think it can be useful but is very hard to maintain, and containers are a good enough way to handle python.
I disagree. My take on that is that they are an ugly enough way to handle Python. And, among other problems, don't permit you to easily mess with the code (one of many reasons why this is ugly). Need access to something stateful from the container app? That's another PITA.
(Not saying Apple should bundle that, but it's the best current answer to running many different Python projects without using something like Docker)
What am I missing?
Also, typically when people say things like
> Tell me, which combination of the 15+ virtual environments, dependency management and Python version managers
It means they have been trapped in a cycle of thinking "just one more tool will surely solve my problem", instead of realising that the tools _are_ the problem, and if you just use the official methods (virtualenv and pip from a stock python install), things mostly just work.
There are reasons to want something more featureful than plain pip. Even without them, pip+virtualenv has been completely usable for, what, 15 years now?
Here's a question- If you don't touch a project in 1 year, do you expect it to still work, or not? If your answer is the latter, then we simply won't see eye-to-eye on this.
that's not good enough. If I'm in the business of writing Python code, I (ideally) don't want to _also_ be in the business of working around Python design deficiencies. Either solve the problem definitively, or do not try to solve the problem at all, because the middle road just leads to endless headaches for people WHILE ALSO disincentivizing a better solution.
Node has better dependency management than Python- And that's really saying something.
The thing is, most people who are writing python code are not in the business of writing python code. They're students, scientists, people with the word "business" or "analyst" in their title. They have bigger fish to fry than learning a different language ecosystem.
It took 30 years to get them to switch from excel to python. I think it's unrealistic to expect that they're going to switch from python any time soon. So for better or worse, these are problems that we have to solve.
I've had plenty of problems with node, for example. You mentioned nix, which is much better, but also comes with tons of hard trade-offs.
If a packaging tool doesn't do what i wanted, but I can understand why, and ultimately the tool is not to blame, that's fine by me. The issues I can think of fit reasonably well within this scope:
- requirement version conflicts: packages are updated by different developers, so sometimes their requirements might not be compatible with each other. That's not pip's fault, and it tells you what the problem is so you can resolve it.
- code that's not compatible with updated packages: this is mainly down to requirement versions which are specified too loosely, and not the fault of pip. If you want to lock dependencies to exact versions (like node does by default) you can do this too (with requirements.txt). It's a bit harsh to blame pip for not doing this for you, it's like blaming npm for not committing your package.lock. It would be better if your average python developer was better at this.
- native library issues: some packages depend on you having specific libraries (and versions thereof) installed, and there's not much that pip can do about that. This is where your "ssl issues" come from. This is pretty common in python because it's used so much as "glue" between native libraries -- all the most fun packages are wrappers around native code. This has got a lot better in the past few years with manylinux wheels (which include native libraries). These require a lot of non-python-specific work to build, so i don't blame pip where they don't exist.
It's not perfect, but it's not a big enough deal to rant about or reject entirely if you would otherwise get a lot of value out of the ecosystem.
I avoid writing python, so I’m usually the “other people” in that sentence.
That's optimistic. What if the system Python gets upgraded? For some reason, Python libraries tend to be super picky about the Python versions they support (not just Python 2 vs 3).
2. If you mean MDM, there are several good options. Screen sharing and SSH are build in.
3. In what sense?
4. `uv python install whatever` is infinitely better than upgrading on the OS vendor’s schedule.
5. What does that affect?
The same way Windows users run them. In a linux VM.
You don't get real on-hardware containerization.
It is definitely odd that Macs have no native container support, though, especially when you learn that Windows does.
Honestly I don't know what XNU/Darwin is good for. It doesn't do anything especially well compared to *BSD, Linux, and NT.
Not disagreeing though.
That's using a Linux VM. The idea people are asking about is native process isolation. Yes you'd have to rebuild Docker containers based on some sort of (small) macOS base layer and Homebrew/Macports, but hey. Being able to even run nodejs or php with its thousands of files natively would be a gamechanger in performance.
What would robust python support oob look like?
Honest question: why do you want this in MacOS? Do you understand what docker does? (it's fundamentally a linux technology, unless you are asking for user namespaces and chroot w/o SIP on MacOS, but that doesn't make sense since the app sandbox exists).
MacOS doesn't have the fundamental ecosystem problems that beget the need for docker.
If the answer is "I want to run docker containers because I have them" then use orbstack or run linux through the virtualization framework (not Docker desktop). It's remarkably fast.
Anyone wanting to run and manage their own suite of Macs to build multiple massive iOS and Mac apps at scale, for dozens or hundreds or thousands of developers deploying their changes.
xcodebuild is by far the most obvious "needs native for max perf" but there are a few other tools that require macOS. But obviously if you have multiple repos and apps, you might require many different versions of the same tools to build everything.
Sounds like a perfect use case for native containers.
I have a small rackmounted rendering farm using mac minis, which outperform everything in the Intel world, even order of magnitude more expensive.
I run macOS on my personal and development computers for over a decade and I use Linux since inception on server side.
My experience: running server-side macOS is such a PITA it's not even funny. It may even pretend it has ssh while in fact the ssh server is only available on good days and only after Remote Desktop logged in at least once. Launchd makes you wanna crave systemd. etc, etc.
So, about docker. I would absolutely love to run my app in a containerized environment on a Mac in order to not touch the main OS.
In Linux, it means something very specific: a user/mount/pid/network namespace, overlayfs to provide a rootfs, chroot to pivot to the new root to do your work, and port forwarding between the host/guest systems.
On MacOS I don't know what containerization means short of virtualization. But you have virtualization on MacOS already, so why not use that?
Also I want to run the latest OS with all security patches on the host while having a stable and known macOS version in a container given how developer-hostile Apple is.
Or you can package your app as a .app and not worry about it, there's no "pollution" when everything is bundled.
Of course, I had a LOM/KVM and redundant networking etc. They were substantially more reliable than the Dell equipment that I used in my day job for sure.
Software-wise it's much different to an expected behavior. For example, macOS won't let you in over SSH until you log in via Remote Desktop. You'll get "connection closed" immediately.
Or sometimes it will.
And that depends not on the count of connection attempts or anything you can do locally but rather on the boot process somehow. Sometimes it boots in a way that permits ssh, sometimes not. The same computer, the same OS.
Then after you login on screen sharing and log out, macOS will let you in over ssh. For a few days. And then again will force you to login via GUI. Or maybe not. I have no idea what makes it.
I have trouble reading macOS logs or understanding it. It spews a few log messages per second even idle. If you grep ssh these messages contain zero actionable data, like "unsuccessful attempt" or similar.
Another complaint is that launchd reports the same "I/O error" on absolutely all error situations, from syntax error in plist to corrupt binary. Makes development and debugging of launchagents very fun.
Former Transmission user here.
I realise you didn't ask, but you might find some improvements in qBittorrent.
And let's be clear, it wasn't the app that had problems, the Apple Remote Desktop connection to the machine failed when the speeds got above 40MB/s and the network interface stopped working around 80MB/s.
I think Transmission works perfectly fine. I've been using it for 10+ years with no issues at all on Linux.
I forgot to mention this is a Mac mini/Intel (2018).
Transmission is just a small, floating window with your downloads. Click for more. It fits in the macOS vibe. But I'm a person that fully adopted the original macOS "way of working" - kicked the full-screen habit I had in windows and never felt better.
Can I ask, why would you go FROM Transmission to qBittorrent?
In my case: some torrents wouldn't find known-good seeds in Transmission but worked fine in qBittorrent; there's reasonable (but not perfect) support for libtorrent 2.0 in qBittorrent; my download speeds and overall responsiveness is anecdotally better in qBittorrent, and; I make use of some of the nitty gritty settings in qBittorrent.
The Apple ecosystem is a walled garden.
It's worth adding the M3 Ultra has 819GB/s memory bandwidth [1]. For comparison the RTX 5090 is 1800GB/s [2]. That's still less but the M4 Mac Minis have 120-300GB/s and this will limit token throughput so 819GB/s is a vast improvement.
For $9500 you can buy a M3 Ultra Mac Studio with 512GB of unified memory. I think that has massive potential.
[1]: https://www.apple.com/mac-studio/specs/
[2]: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/graphics-cards/50-serie...
> Apple’s custom-built UltraFusion packaging technology uses an embedded silicon interposer that connects two M3 Max dies across more than 10,000 signals, providing over 2.5TB/s of low-latency interprocessor bandwidth, and making M3 Ultra appear as a single chip to software.
The comment was that the press had reported that the interposer wasn't available. This obviously uses some form of interposer, so the question is if the press missed it, or Apple has something new.
It sounds like they're using TSMC's new LSI (Local Si Interconnect) technology, which is their version of Intel's EMIB. It's essentially small islands of silicon, just around the inter-chip connections, embedded within the organic substrate. This gives the advantages of silicon interconnect, without the cost and size restrictions of a silicon interposer. It would not be visible from just looking at the package.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16031/tsmcs-version-of-emib-l...
https://semianalysis.com/2022/01/06/advanced-packaging-part-...
what internal AI efforts?
Apple Intelligence is bunkers, and Apple MLX framework remains a hobby project for Apple
If so, this is hardly a hobby project.
It may not be effective, but there is serious cash behind this.
They are using OpenAI for now but in couple months they will own the full chain of value.
1. Small models running locally with well-established tool interfaces (“app intents”)
2. Large models running in a bespoke cloud that can securely and quickly load all relevant tokens from a device before running inference
No AI lab is even close to what Apple is trying to deliver in the next ~12 months
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/apple-macbook-pro-14-laptop-m3-...
Apple is very good at marketing, a lot less at delivering actual value, especially if it's not about hardware.
It’s their spin of the Google strategy of targeting providjng services to their enterprise GCP customer. I think we’ll see more out of them long term.
They also own distribution to the wealthiest and most influential people in the world
Don’t get lost in recency bias
I assume that there's a community of developers focusing on leveraging this hardware instead of complaining about the operating system.
I love Apple but they love to speak in half truths in product launches. Are they saying the M3 Ultra is their first Thunderbolt 5 computer? I don't recall seeing any previous announcements.
(NB: I've been long on AAPL since $7 a share but I'm also allergic to bullshit)
M1 Max - 24 to 32 GPU cores
M2 Max - 30 to 38 GPU cores
M3 Max - 30 to 40 GPU cores
M4 Max - 32 to 40 GPU cores
I also looked up the announcement dates for the Max and the Ultra variant in each generation.
M1 Max - October 18, 2021
M1 Ultra - March 8, 2022
M2 Max - January 17, 2023
M2 Ultra - June 5, 2023
M3 Max - October 30, 2023
M3 Ultra - March 12, 2025
M4 Max - October 30, 2024
> My guess is that Apple developed this chip for their internal AI efforts
As good a guess as any, given the additional delay between the M3 Max and Ultra being made available to the public.
The theory that the M3 Ultra was being produced, but diverted for internal use makes as much sense as any theory I've seen.
It makes at least as much sense as the "TSMC had difficulty producing enough defect free M3 Max chips" theory.
That Said, 512GB of unified ram with access to the NPU is absolutely a game changer. My guess is that Apple developed this chip for their internal AI efforts, and are now at the point where they are releasing it publicly for others to use. They really need a 2U rack form for this though.
This hardware is really being held back by the operating system at this point.