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M3 vs. M4 Chip Buyer's Guide: How Much Better Really Is M4?

I don't think the overall performance matters to most customers. The real question is how soon will Apple artificially start withholding features that would otherwise work perfectly fine on M3s, or prematurely drop support altogether.
 
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FoxyKaye said:
Super happy with my M3 Max MacBook Pro - I don't push it to the limit, save for the occasional delve into Final Cut Pro, so it's really an investment in durability over time for me. Really cool to see the M series of chips advancing at the rate that they are - by the time my M3 is feeling long in the tooth, the actual and perceived upgrade in speed and efficiency should be incredible. I admit I was skeptical when Apple first decided to roll its own chips, especially after the G5 to Intel transition paid off as handsomely as it did, but so far the few remaining Intel-based apps I have on my laptop have no perceivable performance degradation whatsoever. This is also the first laptop where I've not needed to have any installation of Windows available for specific tools and systems that have finally migrated to Apple silicon, which is a bonus.
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Curious if / when MacOS stops supporting non apple silicon apps?
 
Will take more thought, but I think I'm leaning toward the M4 Max here. A lot of the things I can think of that "make me wait" are mostly single or limited # core operations. And 16 is still a lot of fast cores.
 
TechTexan said:
Curious if / when MacOS stops supporting non apple silicon apps?
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It's coming - they did the same thing with the original Rosetta. I'll rue this day, though, for Rosetta 2 - many of the "legacy" Intel apps (including the original Baldur's Gate) run just fine on the M3 Max, and I could only assume would continue to do so on the M4, M5, and so on. Also - Intel chips just weren't powerful enough to handle the complex legacy PPC apps, but the M-Series is entirely different.
 
On paper M4 will definitely be better. But don’t think the end user is going to notice any difference on day to day activities on a MacBook Air or an iPad Pro
 
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bigandtasty said:
Please do a comparison of M1 vs M4. There's where we can see how ripping these new chips are between when M series chips first came out and where they are at today. Would love to see just how far they've come in terms of performance.
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@MacRumors I'd love for you to extend this and show a similar chart comparing all of the M-series chips.
 
polaris20 said:
Slightly OT, but is there an overall chart that shows what chips are based on what? M3 based on A17 Pro, for example.
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This isn't really true. It's more accurate to say that both A17 and M3 use same-generation cores. A17 shipped first, but the M3 isn't based on it.

Going forward, it's very likely that this will become more obvious, as A and M series chips diverge more and more, including more differences in CPU (and possibly GPU) cores. Apple is showing more willingness in the last year or so to spend more time on each one, rather than just using a single core for everything - for example, the caches differences in the A18 and A18Pro.

It's not at all clear than the M4 and A18 cores are identical, though they are obviously very close.
 
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