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 louder 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.
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.
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.
Yes, they said it’s coming soon via software update.
https://9to5mac.com/2024/03/04/14-inch-m3-macbook-pro-multi-display-support/
