I really want the next MacBook Pro to support driving two 4K monitors over thunderbolt and have an option to buy 32 gigs of ram.
I think that dual 4K is the old way, single 6K/8K ultra wides are the future.
That said I am rocking the dual 4Ks on the Mac Mini M1 and it works great: https://twitter.com/BenHouston3D/status/1384693982249340935
No idea if it's the monitor of the laptop, but it's the exact same problem and hopefully hardware doesn't glitch in such a consistent way and it can be fixed in software.
Neither monitor supports Thunderbolt. But I run off of a USB-C to Display Port cable and one is using the HDMI port. Both run at 60Hz as it is HDMI 2.
The amount of available screen space at 1:1 is refreshing (not as crazy as imagined though), but it makes me realize how grainy "normal" monitors are. In some years 8K TVs might be cheap enough for an upgrade, but on that time scale I can see VR being a serious contender as well (it's really good already).
The last time I tried a large format display, I couldn't move back far enough to make it work but I really loved working in 4k without scaling.
It's so big that I actually don't sit in the middle but to the left of the display. I use the right of the display as a second monitor.
As an aside, I have the Philips Momentum (model 436M6VBPAB) which is sold as a monitor but can double as a TV. It has HDR, which is very nice in a light office. I suspect it is no longer produced in any significant quantities. The price has been going up.
> they are grainy up close
Hmm, maybe it's its "TV-ness", but the individual pixels look pretty sharp to me at a close look (no quantum dots or weird pentile arrangement, that should definitely be looked out for), but I have no other low DPI display to compare it to. My reasoning was always "it's just an LCD panel, why would it be different" and so far I feel proven right.
> I also wonder if it's good for your eyes to focus on something that's constantly far away
My appeal-to-nature-argument would be that the natural human mix would probably have been much heavier towards looking into the distance than it is now (see the massive rise of near-sightedness in cities), so it can only be better than what we're currently doing.
There are few differences between a 4K 42" screen and 4 1080P 21" screens: the smaller screens can be angled, they have bezels, and are probably more expensive in aggregate.
I run it at 3840 x 2160 and use a trackball to get around. I like it a lot. LCD TV screens do not work well extremely close up but an OLED is fine even at 12" away. Text in the corner of an LCD TV is dim and poorly defined but on an OLED it is just like it would be on a 55" sheet of paper.
Of course I was concerned that the OLED screen would burn in, but it was an older TV so I took a chance.
Most days the computer and TV are on for about 12 hours. I have run them like this for 14 months now. There is no burn in at all. The overall brightness is slowly declining, but it has been doing that since I got it in 2016. (LG OLED55B6P)
Most TV's have a "gaming" setting that doesn't try to "improve" the video feed and just passes it through.
I can slide the desk out of the way when I want things back to normal in my living room.
Sure but the Air and MBP already support 6k external displays.
They don’t support 2x4K.
I’ve been using an ultrawide since 2015 but have almost always had a second side monitor with it. The period where I didn’t have a second monitor was short as having a separate monitor has always come in handy. All of the extra space on an ultrawide is great but when you’re doing something that takes the whole screen, it still leaves you in the same position you would be with a single 16:9 display.
TBF my old setup was a decade old so it was merely a 24" (1920x1200) and a 19" (1280x1024 in portrait).
Though my new display has a much larger logical size, the inability to put something fullscreen on one of the monitors (whether the small one or the large one, depending on the content) is definitely one of the drawbacks I had a hard time getting used to, not only can it be inconvenient, it actually wastes space as I can't get rid of window decorations, which putting e.g. a video player or browser window in fullscreen allowed.
that said, i have no issue with your choice. for some applications (eg video editing is the default choice for ads of UW monitors) it is really better.
i do have issue with you denigrating 2 monitors. it is not at all "an old hack".
I personally prefer the visual break as I find it useful for creating fixed 'work areas': terminals/xterms, browser, mail, etc.
I'd strongly consider getting a 6k monitor, or maybe a 5k2k ultrawide if I didn't already have two my two Dell 27inch 4ks.
In the near future 16:9 8ks are going to be standard (too bad it won't be 16:10) but right now you can get a decent triple 4k monitor setup for half of what an 8k monitor costs.
IMO ultra-wide is great for productivity in a situational sense but it sucks for gaming and media consumption. Also getting proper support for ultra-wide to be standard is probably going to take another decade.
I think there's something to be said for each monitor being a separate entity. I think some people will still prefer multiple monitors over ultra-wide even when support for ultra-wide is a solved problem.
My personal setup now is a 28" 4k@60hz, a 32" 1440P@240hz as a primary and a 24" 1440p@144hz. I have my work computer, my desktop, a mac-mini, a switch, and a PS4 running off of them so having separate monitors is ideal for me.
Ultra-wides and super-ultrawides are cool, but IMO they aren't as practical yet.
There's support, and then there's that support being so flawless that its the same quality of experience you would get with a standard aspect ratio. Each of us has our own standard of what's good enough. Its working out for you but the people I game with that were using ultra-wide monitors switched back due to the number of issues they were having, as recently as last year. I did some research myself when I was upgrading my monitor and some of the games I played would have had issues so or me personally it wasn't good enough.
Another thing to consider is a lot of game content is designed with standard aspect ratios in mind, so whether expanding the viewpoint makes it better is going to be a personal standard. It will be interesting to see if UW monitors do become a standard in a couple of decades whether game developers start specifically making content that utilizes the extra space to offer something that isn't possible with existing games.
Example: https://i.pcmag.com/imagery/articles/07toBDd6lpyucCyM0xWrcQv...
Also, with two screens, I can adjust the angle between them to be more or less severe.
Also, 2 monitors means more choice in layout; for example, my 2nd monitor is in portrait orientation.
I work on mac all day and on my 1440p widescreen I am constantly trying to put stuff so I can use everything I want to at the same time. `[Code|App|Docs]` is so common we ought to be able to split a wide screen 3 ways the way we do a normal 2.
I was using Spectacle before, but I think the project died, and Rectangle is what I use now.
This year we should see a lot of CPU manufacturers change to (LP)DDR5 for memory - high end Samsung and Qualcomm SoCs are already using LPDDR5. It's a safe bet Apple is also switching to LPDDR5 which would put the upper limit on 64GB for the M2. This is notably still lower than the 128GB you can put in the current 27" iMac (for an eye watering $2600 extra), but is an amount far more pro users can live with.
The real issue is not shipping the M1 with LPDDR5 support. We already have tons of Qualcomm phones and even Intel processors shipping with since last year. If Apple had done the same, we wouldn’t be talking about this today.
I brought this up before but it was pointed out to me that the only manufacturer of LPDDR5 last year was Samsung, which was producing not-completely-standardized LPDDR5 at the time and probably didn't have enough spare volume for Apple anyway. Having 12GB LPDDR4X modules from one vendor (24GB total) probably is not enough reason for Apple to switch up their supply chain either, not for the M1 at least.
And, to be fair, I think Apple did get away with shipping low memory computers by targeting only their cheapest computers.
I think we as programmers have lost sight of how a single gif in memory is about the same size as a whole docker container.
Go check out the resource usage. Yes, it involves virtualization, but the stripped down virtualized kernel uses very little resources. Getting that information is a bit complicated by the fact that it's difficult to see the difference between the virtualized kernel and it's applications in a way that's consistent with the host OS, but it's really in the dozens of megabytes range of overhead for something like docker on mac.
Just to check, I opened simultaneous projects in Logic Pro and Ableton Live, I have a Rust project open in VSCode (Electron), compiling Erlang again, I have Slack, Discord, Signal, and Hey running (all Electron apps), and I have Firefox open with Twitter, Hacker News, Facebook (a dozen tabs, just for good measure), Instagram, FBM, Techmeme, NYTimes, CNN, and MSNBC. This is a 15" 2018 MBP with a 6-core i7 and 16GB of RAM, and the CPU is working pretty hard but RAM usage is currently at just over 12GB.
Safari shows a memory warning when a tab uses ~2GB memory, and can be too aggressive about it.
Yes, she was getting both. To the point that I asked her to keep activity monitor running in the background so we could see who the problem applications were.
I'm not sure why this is in question.
If "compressed" or "swap space" approach 32GB+/64GB+ (depends on amount of physical memory installed) that can do it, but running out of disk space is a more common problem.
Of course, quitting the top app in the memory list probably is going to fix the issue.
I had to have her leave activity monitor open in the corner because it was running so slow it wouldn't open.
Everyone raves about how 8GB machines feel, but the massive SSD usage and pitiful lifespan shows that there’s not a free lunch here. 16GB (or a 24GB option) goes a long way toward preventing early death. I actually suspect they’ll be launching a free SSD replacement program in the next couple years.
I’ve also heard claims from a couple devs that side-by-side comparisons with their x86 macs show a massive increase in RAM usage for the same app for whatever reason. I’d guess that’s solvable, but could contribute even more to the SSD problem. On the bright side, all this seems to indicate a great pre-fetch and caching algorithm.
Not even the most alarmist estimates suggest that the SSDs on the 8GB machines will start dying after two years!
At the moment the SSD lifetime concerns are little more than FUD. Everything we know is perfectly consistent with these machines having SSD lifetimes of a decade, even with heavy usage.
https://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experi...
700TB was the minimum that any drive in the above link managed. If you used 100gigs of swap per day it would take you two decades to hit that level.
Partly because the GPU works differently, partly because some inaccurate methods of counting memory (Activity Monitor) have cosmetic issues displaying Rosetta processes.
If the nvme drive is fast enough, the filesystem cache is not as noticeably effective, and if you have aggressive “suspend” of processes (like iOS) then lack of RAM capacity does not really impact performance at all. But memory latency, speed and the CPU do.
for me video cache would be really helpful, but after effects and especially premiere right now seem absurdly slow.
premiere especially i can hit play on a non-edited clip in preview and it takes multiple seconds to start... maybe i have a wrong setting somewhere
I think it's quite likely that M2 will have a 128-bit lpddr5 interface. Using widely available modules, this would allow them up to 64GB ram.
Returning it still hurts. I was really hoping for something that would take more than 32GB of RAM but am not surprised that it's still going to be later this year. The guts in the new iMac would be perfect for my Mom if they just offered a 27" replacement too.
Oh well. A few more months won't kill me.
(But seriously though... what is 16gb these days? Looking at process monitor, I think my firefox takes over 5gb now since I have over a thousand tabs in treestyletab, clion + pycharm take another 5gb, parallels vm for some work stuff is another 10gb; if doing any local data science work that's usually at least a dozen gb or a few dozen or more)
A 128GB of a ram in a consumer PC is about $750 dollars (desktop anyway, laptop may be more?). That's less than a single high end consumer gaming GPU. Or a fraction of a Quadro GPU.
So to the extent that developers ever run things on their local hardware (CPU, GPU, whatever) 128GB of RAM is not much of a leap. Or 256GB for Threadripper. It's in the ballpark of having a high-end consumer GPU.
The extra ram in my machine means I can work on the same datasets we use in prod locally, which is a huge productivity boost. Most of our developer time is actually spent building datasets. loading a random sample doesn’t really work when doing time series or spatial transforms and using a time or space limited subset makes description (graphs, maps) a chore. More ram is a huge productivity enabler when working with in memory tools like pandas.
Here's an incomplete and continuously updated list of monitors (not) working with Apple hardware: https://tonsky.me/blog/monitors-mac/
Could you explain what you mean by this? I don't think I understand.
A far cry from the kind of tolerances and sustained high throughput of PCIe.
A 1 Tb Mini with all the SSD write lines benchmarked at
Write: 2,983 MB/Sec Read: 2,710 MB/Sec
That's as fast or faster than Intel Macs, and way higher than most PC SSDs.
That said, Intel mobile CPUs don't have fantastic I/O either, this will matter more when Apple has to scale up to iMac Pro/Mac Pro territory.
"SSD performance" is a very high-level view of I/O, and depends more on the size and configuration of flash chips used than the CPU design.
I have an old Macbook from 2013 that runs Linux now with an Intel integrated GPU and it supports dual 4K monitors at 30Hz. I use the Thunderbolt ports as Mini DisplayPort outputs and connect to two 4K monitors with DisplayPort and it works fine.
The mini can support two external displays. One via thunderbolt at that same 6k and 60Hz and the other a 4k at 60Hz through the HDMI port.
I use the Dell D6000 and I run three (1080p) external monitors in addition to the built in monitor.
I have two Thunderbolt/USB-C monitors that I was hoping to daisy chain with one wire from my Mac. Alas it's not possible.
My hope is power into a dock. Thunderbolt from dock to laptop to power laptop. Thunderbolt/USB-C from dock into first monitor. Second Thunderbolt/USB-C from dock using the DisplayLink tech to second monitor.
I now use an M1 mac mini with two 4k monitors (not from one cable though)
1 monitor (Dell P2715Q) is hooked up using DisplayPort. The other (LG 27” IPS 4K) is using HDMI 2.0. Both are running 4K retina at 60Hz without any issues.
I had so much trouble finding this out before I bought it which is why I am vocal about the fact that it works.
Even their Mac mini doesn't offer a 32 gigs of ram. One of the reasons I had to go with Intel version instead of M1 because at least I could upgrade to 32gb ram myself (plus was cheaper). There is no reason why they can't offer 32 gigs ram on non-laptop lines.
[1] https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-16/specs/
edit: oh right, that's not M1 brainfart