Apple: Comparing The M3 Laptops With The M2 Laptops -- Scary Fast -- October 31, 2023

Locator: 45882APPLE.

It is impossible to articulate the "jump" from the M2 laptops to the M3 laptops just announced. Maybe this will help.

Again, the M3 laptops are not for "you and me." Their target audience:

• Hollywood film industry (directors, producers, editors, cinematographers, animators, etc.)
• biomedical researchers; and,
• serious gamers and game developers.

My primary laptop, a Macbook Air. If I'm reading this correctly, a "2018" design -- five years old -- and a single core. A single CPU / core. GPUs? I have no idea but probably none, but rather just a graphics card. No unified memory.

Unified memory? Explained here. When you hear Tim Cook say "unified memory," that's codespeak / euphemism for Apple Silicon which has 1000% replaced Intel in Apple computers.

I have an M1 MacBook Air which I bought maybe a year ago when it went on sale for a short period of time. I feel guilty using it because my current Intel-MacBook Air works just fine. 

I have no idea why I'm "saving" the M1 MacBook Air but I just hate to quit using anything that is still perfectly good and meets all my needs.

Anyway, enough of that. Look at the M3 laptops vs the M2 laptops.

The M3 family:

As a reminder, prior to the "M3" announcement, earlier this year it was the M2 chip.

If nothing else, compare the huge jump in "unified memory": 8GB vs 128GB. That explains the audible gasp I heard when the Apple spokesman introduced the M3 MAX.

From CNBC:

• Apple announced three new chips, all under the broader M3 product banner. The current generation of chips is the M2.
• There is an entry-level M3, a 40% faster M3 Pro, and a 250% faster M3 Max chip for AI developers and 3D artists.
• Apple says all M3 chips can get up to 22 hours of battery life on a laptop.
• The M3 has a 8 core central processing unit and up to a 10 core graphics processing unit.
• The M3 Pro has a 12 core CPU and an 18 core GPU.
• The M3 Max has a 16 core CPU and as many as 40 cores on its GPU. Apple says it can be used for developing artificial intelligence software.
• Apple says that its current-generation GPUs are 1.8 times as fast as the GPUs on the M2 chips.
• Apple says its CPU cores on the M3 are 15% faster than M2 CPU performance cores for heavy workloads. The M3 processor is 60% faster than its M1 processor, Apple said.
• The new chips are built on a 3 nanometer process, which is currently the most advanced semiconductor manufacturing technology from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.

From social media after the M3 announcement:

Chips, semiconductor: link here.

• Home page for tech: link here.
• The cloud: link here.  
• Streaming: link here. Streaming wars.
• Spatial computing: link here.
• Generative AI: link here. 
• Apple Silicon: link here.