In my interests, the M series GPU has been revolutionary. The sheer raw memory at its price point with its bandwidth allows folks to run LLM’s and diffusion models on their own laptops! Metal isn’t an issue as its a delight to work with unlike Vulkan which has had 0 impact on ML and is barely present in gaming compared to other modern API’s (same could be said for Metal but Metal is actually really popular for ML compared to Vk)
Given you show an interest in ML I do wonder why so dismissive of the resources available.
Metal is a great API compared to all other others. It has an amazing toolset available for it. Games not adopting it isn’t as much a API design flaw as it is an incentives one.
His point is, that the GPUs in Macs are almost useless, because nothing/nobody uses them properly.
That’s what the last paragraph meant: GPUs are good for gaming and AI. Gaming is (currently) practically not present on Macs and for actual AI purposes the (integrated) GPUs are a bit weak.
Especially if you factor in costs, the memory upgrades needed to run all the fancy models are more expensive than buying a top notch GPU with more memory and a more powerful, dedicated GPU.
That means, advertising the GPU in Macs is moot, since nobody who values GPUs will be impressed. That’s like advertising how much weight a VW Polo can haul. Might be impressive for the size, but if hauling capacity is important to you, you won’t be impressed by it and buy a proper car for the job.
Absolutely agree with the lack of use of metal. On the gaming front, I think noone cares about the API as much as people need a flaw to point out. Most developers use abstractions over it. What I think Apple really sucks so bad at is the app distribution aspect for macOS. Ironic given how well it is done on iOS! Given Baldur’s Gate 3 hype right now, Divinity Original Sins 2 would do with a real good marketing via emails, push notifications and engagement with the publisher to promote it more, right? But zilch. New games drop with 0 marketing despite notifications for hilariously ill-suited Apple Arcade games for macOS. Apple sucks at promotion of apps now. Thats it. No Man’s Sky is out for mac, so where do I get it? Steam but not macOS? What? It was a feature in your keynote for consumers and developers a year ago LoL
For AI-ML, this is tough to answer because Apple just isn’t as present in the Python ecosystem as can be and hence provides libraries for others to build upon. That has worked out best for users IMHO as it’s very tough to compete with nvidia on the API front.
You’re focussing way too much on Metal and APIs, that’s not the problem. Apple delivers enough APIs that work perfectly fine and MacOS is absolutely a good python dev platform.
To boil it down really hard: Apple tries to impress with GPU performance, but for anyone who actually cares about performance, that spec sheet is pretty weak. The GPU is fine for a laptop, but who uses laptops for anything that involves hard GPU workloads?
In my interests, the M series GPU has been revolutionary. The sheer raw memory at its price point with its bandwidth allows folks to run LLM’s and diffusion models on their own laptops! Metal isn’t an issue as its a delight to work with unlike Vulkan which has had 0 impact on ML and is barely present in gaming compared to other modern API’s (same could be said for Metal but Metal is actually really popular for ML compared to Vk)
Given you show an interest in ML I do wonder why so dismissive of the resources available. Metal is a great API compared to all other others. It has an amazing toolset available for it. Games not adopting it isn’t as much a API design flaw as it is an incentives one.
His point is, that the GPUs in Macs are almost useless, because nothing/nobody uses them properly.
That’s what the last paragraph meant: GPUs are good for gaming and AI. Gaming is (currently) practically not present on Macs and for actual AI purposes the (integrated) GPUs are a bit weak.
Especially if you factor in costs, the memory upgrades needed to run all the fancy models are more expensive than buying a top notch GPU with more memory and a more powerful, dedicated GPU.
That means, advertising the GPU in Macs is moot, since nobody who values GPUs will be impressed. That’s like advertising how much weight a VW Polo can haul. Might be impressive for the size, but if hauling capacity is important to you, you won’t be impressed by it and buy a proper car for the job.
Absolutely agree with the lack of use of metal. On the gaming front, I think noone cares about the API as much as people need a flaw to point out. Most developers use abstractions over it. What I think Apple really sucks so bad at is the app distribution aspect for macOS. Ironic given how well it is done on iOS! Given Baldur’s Gate 3 hype right now, Divinity Original Sins 2 would do with a real good marketing via emails, push notifications and engagement with the publisher to promote it more, right? But zilch. New games drop with 0 marketing despite notifications for hilariously ill-suited Apple Arcade games for macOS. Apple sucks at promotion of apps now. Thats it. No Man’s Sky is out for mac, so where do I get it? Steam but not macOS? What? It was a feature in your keynote for consumers and developers a year ago LoL
For AI-ML, this is tough to answer because Apple just isn’t as present in the Python ecosystem as can be and hence provides libraries for others to build upon. That has worked out best for users IMHO as it’s very tough to compete with nvidia on the API front.
You’re focussing way too much on Metal and APIs, that’s not the problem. Apple delivers enough APIs that work perfectly fine and MacOS is absolutely a good python dev platform.
To boil it down really hard: Apple tries to impress with GPU performance, but for anyone who actually cares about performance, that spec sheet is pretty weak. The GPU is fine for a laptop, but who uses laptops for anything that involves hard GPU workloads?