MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max
apple.com
apple.com
I really couldn't be happier. I run a small WFH / Music Production / Photography studio in my basement and I really wanted an always-on always connected computer, for which the Studio has been perfect.
The M2 Air is pretty close to a perfect laptop. My complaints (low audio volume, slighty cramped screen) are absolutely dwarfed by the long list of decades-old issues this laptop just eliminates:
- All day battery life. Basically like the Apple Watch - charge it overnight and it's really good all day with normal workloads (e.g. not rendering video). But it was absolutely surreal the first couple of weeks watching an hour long show while running a dozen apps and seeing the charge go from 100% to like 98%. It makes no sense and I had to adjust work habits.
- Extreme snappiness. It's in every way snappier than my previous computer, a 32GB 2019 MBP. It _might_ be slower on long CPU-bound or RAM-bound workloads, but photo editing is both and it feels faster on the Air.
- Form factor. It's my first Air. I'm not going back. I'm 40+ and keeping extra pounds off my lower back matters for me. The Air, if it's all you're carrying, is barely noticeable.
It's just fantastic. If you were wondering if you can replace an MBP with the Air yet, it's almost certainly a yes (though I wouldn't try all this on 8GB RAM). At $2000, what I paid, it's a revelation.
Also if like me you work on a desktop/laptop Apple setup at your desk, the new continuity features are totally incredible. Working with the studio/air together is totally seamless (You can extend the screens and use the same keyboard/mouse). It just works. Apple really is getting a lot of things exactly right on the software side in the Apple silicon era.
I have a 14" M1 Pro from work and a personal M2 Air and it's always surprising how much heavier the M1 Pro feels from my Air.
And percentages are not at all misleading, the 14” does feel a lot heavier.
Bag, a book, a few pens, a water bottle and cables/headphones/drives is a pretty minimal load that makes a 360g increase a small delta.
By contrast the M1 Pro 14” just tips over into unwieldy. So much so that I regret not just going the whole hog and getting the 16”, since at this weight I prefer to have it sitting on a proper table and could’ve used the extra screen real estate.
I had intended to sell the Air but ended up keeping both, mainly for this very reason. The Pro rarely leaves its dock.
On processing power, I have no doubt the Air would have sufficed.
I was willing to take the weight/size penalty for the ports!
Killing MagSafe has to be the singled DUMBEST product decision anyone ever made.
I'm so glad they finally brought it back.
I'll actually miss the Touch Bar. It's an interesting idea that seems useful, but isn't, except in one very useful case: it's really nice being able to slide the volume to exactly where I want it. With the keys back I'll have to memorize Shift+Option+VolumeUp (or whatever it is).
Thankfully, the computer was perfectly fine.
It is possible. You can ignore the magsafe and power via any of the USB-C ports on the MBPs that also have magsafe, definitely.
On the other hand, my M1 Pro MacBook Pro don't have any problem charging on either side, not like my previous Intel.
In retrospect, I think i would have bought the Air! I somehow thought the Air still had only two USB-Cs, one of which would be occupied by power if plugged in. Which was not enough. Two USB-Cs plus a separate magsafe would, barely, be enough for me.
the price difference is not huge once I put in 16GB of RAM and a 1TB HD. But the smaller size of the Air is nice! I suspect even the Air is enough CPU for me, although the new M2 MBP seems like a lot more CPU I think.
When I'm on the go I only want to bring one charger and cable for backup for every device, which is USB-C. (I don't own an iPhone)
As a photographer and DJ even the MBP runs out of ports pretty quickly, so I had a standing collection of travel hubs for this already + a CalDigit thunderbolt hub for home.
Our 286 (which was the first computer my family owned) also had a 40MB Hard Disk, which seemed like plenty at the time. It could run Windows 3.1 with that, although it wasn't exactly fast.
I've done many drugs and many years since then.
I believe that this computer had a 20MB hard drive, and that I eventually ran Stacker to compress the volume and squeeze out a bit more space. I know for sure that I never got anywhere close to 100MB.
On one of my computers in this era, I managed to get a paperwhite VGA and Windows 3.11 (for workgroups) running despite not meeting product specs. My 40-something brain is not quite reliable enough for me to state this with any certainty.
I currently have an 8GB M1 running with four users logged in. Three users are iTunes media servers, and the fourth is a regular user.
No heavy computing tasks, obviously, but it's absolutely possible to have more than one user logged in.
I'm looking to upgrade, and I want to go for the lowest config M mac that I can get away with for smooth 4k edits.
I plan on getting a re-furb, not sure if I can return one of those...
It’s heavier, and I think thicker, than my 2012 MacBook Pro. Now I expected it to be heavier, but was expecting it to drop back maybe one iteration to MacBook 2014 kind of heft. But we’re a full decade back of beefiness.
I need a big screen though so it’s the only option. Unless they make a nice thin 16 inch air. I am pretty confifent it would sell extremely well.
I'd welcome a 15in or 16in Air. The rumour mill suggests a 15in Air is in the works. However, I'm now used to the 120Hz display of the Max, which I suspect wouldn't be an option for the non-pro models...
Really it's where the beefiness always should have been for the performance class / power envelope they are (and have been) targeting.
But yeah, a large screen thin & light seems like an obvious hole in the lineup.
2012 15in [1]:
- Height: 0.95 inch (2.41 cm)
- Weight: 5.6 pounds (2.56 kg)
2023 16in M2 [2]:
- Height 0.66 inch (1.68 cm)
- Weight (M2 Pro): 4.7 pounds (2.15 kg)
- Weight (M2 Max): 4.8 pounds (2.16 kg)
The battery capacity is still reported as 91%of spec which does not explain this behaviour.
I hope yours holds up better.
I get like 45 minutes battery time out of my 1,5 year old Dell XPS 17. Not even enough for a meeting.
1) Turn off siri suggestions & privacy and all the app watching it does. System Settings -> Siri & Spotlight -> Siri Suggestions & Privacy. It turned it off for every app.
2) Turn off siri all together. System Settings -> Siri & Spotlight -> Ask Siri Toggle
3) Turn off Spotlight for everything you do not need. System Settings -> Siri & Spotlight -> Search Results check boxes
4) Turn off login items. System Settings -> Login items. Remove what you do not need from the list.
5) Turn off run in background items. System Settings -> Login items -> Allow in background
6) Remove items from ~/Library/LaunchAgents/ that you do not need. I had an old docker vnet item that wasn't needed.
Other than #6, you can do the first 5 things on all of your Apple devices and it makes a big difference in battery life. I just did the same steps with my phone and ipad.
I hope this helps your battery life a little bit.
In activity monitor, I also saw that Steam and iStat Menus both hand an "impact" of 50 which made them the top 2, the next had an "impact" of 5.
But I think it must still be something else as it also consumes power in sleep. And I have disabled function to wake up and check mail.
The other was just a straight-up hardware issue with the computer. I'd close the lid close to a low battery and let it stay closed long enough for it to hibernate, and then when I'd open it back up it will have completely drained and I'd get a kernal panic. They replaced it after quite a lot of back and forth until I was able to prove it.
If that's something you do more than once in a while, definitely opt for the Pro. For any other workload that's less than maxing out CPUs, or just bursty, the Air has been excellent.
I still think the M1 Air was a better value overall. And I liked the curves to it more than the M2's boxy design.
For photography work it's been fine. But I haven't done multiple-minute exports since buying it so I can't really say.
I _can_ say that under my normal workloads (coding web apps, office applications open, chrome with say 20 tabs, often playing chess, live streaming / zoom) heat has never been an issue. It's also my DJ computer for gigs and no issues I've noticed there, although it's not on my lap.
Contrasted with the 2019 intel MBP it's again night and day. Heat was very noticeable, as were heat-related throttling issues. It would just grind to a halt under normal workday loads esp when screen casting zoom + having all my normal apps and IDEs running.
Nowadays after the Apple Silicon transition my employer no longer offered an Air. The reason was too few employees wanted it and it was too much trouble to maintain a separate SKU in the inventory for the few of us. Really quite a bummer.
I find that, while more difficult, removing excess poundage from my waistline has a lot more impact on that ... :(
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/01/apple-introduces-new-...
I'm not sure why this Apple marketing point gets repeated so often. The M2 has the same memory support as current Intel chips: 128-bit LPDDR5 6400. Mounting the memory on the same package as the CPU might have some engineering advantages compared to socketed RAM, but it doesnt make the (industry standard) memory any faster.
And given that the whole MacOS is built around various GPU-accelerated frameworks, it kind-of matters a lot.
Though for web browsing both presumably fall solidly under "good enough".
If I was signing up for Tech Support for Relatives, though, I'd _definitely_ go with the Mac; you don't want to be getting phonecalls about Windows 12 or whatever in 2027.
https://community.arm.com/arm-community-blogs/b/architecture...
Most JavaScript isn’t dependent on that specific a feature for performance, however. In most cases what matters more is that they have great memory performance and handle branch-heavy code well.
This is done a LOT in JS because the JITs are actually using integers instead of floats all over the place for improved performance.
The ARM "JS" instruction just encodes the x86 semantics into hardware making the conversion several times faster than doing it in software.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201897
Mac mini (M1, 2020) Apple M1 chip, 16GB unified memory, 2TB SSD Power Consumption Idle Max 6.8 W 39 W
This is 16GB/2TB model, entry level spec should be even lower.
I agree with your point though.
Assuming we see more ~$1600 sales on the M1 Pro 14 inch, that is easily $300 more computer than a $1299 M2 macbook pro.
This is my employer provided MacBook Pro. I hate the experience so much that when it's time for a laptop refresh, I'm going to ask for the Windows option if they haven't upgraded their Mac offering to one that supports two monitors.
I love Apple products -- but I never understood how they could release a "Pro" laptop that supported only one external monitor.
Of course, it's also helpful to know that others have had worse experiences.
0: https://us.moshi.com/products/usb-c-to-displayport-cable?var...
Four TB4 ports is plenty for 99% of people.
In my experience spending big on video cables is only necessary for large distance and bandwidth requirements (like HDMI at 2160p60 over 20 meters).
But it is "just" a software problem, right? So they could come to their senses and change their mind.
It seems insane to me to keep putting DisplayPort ports on computers when we have USB-C, but it also seems insane to ship machines with crippled USB ports that don't support more than one monitor... so I wouldn't be surprised if they fix their OS in this regard.
(Apple being Apple though, the software fix might well "require" an M3 processor....)
They are diversifying their laptop/desktop solutions like crazy. Even a Macbook Air can almost compete with the entry-level version of the Macbook Pro, which is great to be honest.
I heard they are exceptionally good.
Honestly, 7-900$ for a machine that will not get old very soon is not so bad, especially if you already own a screen (which due to WFH you kind of have to have together with a "decent" keyboard, etc.)
Very smart move, honestly.
No idea how you can write that with straight fingers.
I've been holding out for the new one and will be placing an order in a bit. :) The splurge will more than make up for the hours of life I'll save from browsing resource-heavy websites.
In the summer, I love my Studio way more, too, because it generates much less heat. In the Winter, I miss my Intel Pro. It really did heat up my office!!
If you’re pushing the limits, the lifecycle doesn’t matter as you’ll replace annually or whatever anyway.
Also, the Mac mini is very special:
- tiny footprint without external power brick
- very high reliability
- completely inaudible for typical developer usage
- extremely low power usage (the 6 core Intel Mac mini was an exception)
It's the perfect home (or office) server. You can put it into a bookshelf or in a cabinet, it won't run hot, it won't disturb you with noise in the living room.... I just don't know of anything else that fits the bill.
The only shitty thing is that they are charging ridiculous prices for storage, and attaching external storage sucks because it ruins the tiny form factor, and also because the USB-C cables that come with SSD drives tend to easily disconnect in my experience.
So I'll wait for benchmarks. I can recommend the MaxTech channel on Youtube for this sort of stuff.
There's just soldered RAM and storage that can break and can't be replaced (without Apple robbing you).
EDIT: I see they actually do just that for some specific applications.
For as long as I can remember, Apple has compared new products to the previous product. And it is a more sensible approach than picking some arbitrary competitor from a huge collection of possible options, because it gives a fixed frame of reference, one of which many of the target audience are aware of. 6x faster than the previous model is very good marketing.
Yep, my opinion on the matter has changed to the GP comment's.
It seems that Apple's ridiculously impressive consistent year-on-year gains up the M1 were in large part possible because they were behind the state of the art. Now that they've caught up with Intel and AMD we should probably expect the same slower more gradual improvements from Apple that we see from the other companies.
The M2 is underwhelming as its the same 5nm as the M1 was.
But rumors say the M2 pro and max are on the 3nm node. And it took so long for the release, as 3nm was delayed.
Apple has a monopoly right now on 3nm, which is a shame. But if we only got tsmc to fire on all cylinders because apple stuffed them with money, then so be it.
Not disputing this, but even Asahi Linux without GPU acceleration has pretty much whole-day battery life on an M1 Air. I'm not sure how well their kernel manages scheduling on the different cores but I suspect the vast majority of the perf/Watt is on the actual hardware.
It's fascinating to think about. If the Mac is currently a low-margin product, Apple might be forced to stay on one node until the better silicon becomes cheap enough to use in production. If Apple doesn't play their cards right, TSMC could shanghai Apple in the exact same way Intel got stranded in the sea of process enhancement.
https://medium.com/macoclock/is-apple-fleecing-you-a682c851a...
The battery lasts stupid long. Like, the fact that I can bring this thing on a plane or train without worrying if they’ll have working electric sockets is huge. The fact I can stash this thing under a desk with no power available and have it run graphics-intensive projections for a 3-hour theatre show is huge. The fact that I can achieve all that with zero throttling (I turned on High Energy use and never turned it off) is huge. The fact that I can achieve all of that with basically no fan noise is nonsensical.
Like, compared to the 2020 Razer Blade (RTX 2070 Max-Q) I use for work, it’s like a completely different class of device. My Razer Blade spins up like a jet engine under load, requires a cable if I’m going to do anything intense for an hour, underclocks from ~4.4GHz to ~1.5-2.5GHz when on battery (seemingly no way to disable this), and really only beats my MacBook for tasks that specifically require an Nvidia GPU.
Yesterday, there was an article about Intel showing off a "35 watt" chip that was benchmarking better than last year's 125 watt chip. Except, you go into the comments and people note that it'll draw 107 watts for short periods of time - probably just long enough to get good benchmark scores.
The magic of the M-series processors is that they have really great sustainable performance and without needing to draw power and create heat like Intel's. The Razor Blade machines are amazing in how they deal with the amount of heat generated with their liquid cooling and everything (it's quite a design), but as you note it's still a jet-engine sounding machine that requires being tethered to power.
One of the big things that Apple showed off when introducing the M1 Pro/Max was the idea that you could be a creator doing your job and no longer feel like you were tied to a power outlet. Photoshop from a park or edit video wherever you are: you really don't need more power than you'll always have with you.
As I said, I bought the M1 Pro and specifically upgraded to the 8 performance core version of it. I'd always bought the high-watt Intel processors for my MacBook, not the paltry 15W Intel parts. I had a 2020 MacBook Pro with 2.3GHz Core i7 (28W, 10nm) and I'd regularly have it get really hot, the fan often wasn't too loud but it was always a constant drone, and things felt slow.
My next machine is going to be a MacBook Air. I feel like I'm using nothing on this machine. I have 8 performance cores and 2 efficiency cores, but it just feels like there's no point to having that much CPU. It's a really crazy feeling for me. Yes, more performance will be useful for some people, especially people who do video editing, graphics, etc. But damn does all my work never even come close to stressing this thing - something I'd regularly have a problem with on Intel's greatest drawing a lot more power and making a lot more heat just a year before. Intel has made some strides since then and I'm happy that their newer processors are doing well, but for the first time in my life it just feels like I don't care.
I might grab a 3nm laptop from Apple when those come out, but I'm not anxiously awaiting them. I might just wait for whatever comes after TSMC's 3nm process. I am kinda excited that I can go to a MacBook Air.
The hardware is basically equivalent, but unfortunately that's far from the case with the software. It's definitely useable as a home computer if you mainly browse the web or use office apps. But there's a lot of software that just isn't supported on the ipad. It would be pretty useless for me as a software developer.
Frankly though, I don't want most manufacturers to make ARM machines. While Apple is allowed to monopolize the latest TSMC silicon, it's completely pointless trying to compete with them. May as well focus on delivering a great x86 experience with AMD and switching to something more open like RISC-V when the time comes.
digression: I believe there's no way to disable that because the laptop's battery is physically incapable of reliably supplying the necessary amperage at those higher clock rates. It's an 80 watt-hour battery for a laptop that needs a 200W+ power adapter. The battery can't drain that fast even if it wanted to.
[1]: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/01/apple-unveils-m2-pro-...
I’m not exactly sure how Apple was “behind the state of the art” and has caught up. Can you explain?
The M1 was when they caught up. They were behind the state of the art (of laptop/desktop chip performance) with their A series chips starting with the A4. They gradually caught up over the course of several years to the point that when they released the M1 chip (which was really not that different to the A15) they were slightly ahead.
...but A series chips were never intended for laptops or desktops? And by all accounts, the A series nearly always out-competed comparable QC Snapdragon chips.
Sure, they’re all “Apple Silicon” but the chips should be compared to their equivalents, M-level with Intel/AMD and A-level with Snapdragon/Exonys. We don’t really compare Snapdragon to Core any other time, as they both optimize for vastly different things.
I would also argue that Apple is continuing to make big boosts in their A-level chips compared to their mobile counterparts.
What on earth are you talking about?! Alder Lake was a huge step up for Intel, and Raptor Lake has improved things more than I would have expected as well. Before Alder Lake, Intel's CPUs honestly sucked. AMD still seems to have a modest competitive advantage in terms of efficiency and battery life (making AMD not that far off from where Apple is in hours of practical battery life when doing something other than looking at a static screenshot for hours on end), but Intel makes up for that with performance, and as I recall, Alder Lake is still more efficient than what Intel had before in laptops.
Sapphire Rapids is also a huge innovation compared to what Intel had been doing for years in the server market. Intel has also been introducing some really interesting GPU products now to bring competition to AMD and Nvidia, but it will probably take another generation or two to iron things out. If none of that is "innovation", then I don't know what is!
The last 2 years are the first time Intel has really been innovating in the past 5+ years!
When M1 came out, it was awesome. Since then, Intel and AMD have released processors that are significantly more competitive, while M2 was a mediocre step forward. I appreciate my M2 MBA, but Apple Silicon needs a huge upgrade with M3 to remain competitive.
For a lot of legitimate use cases, there are at least half a dozen Windows laptops coming out right now that I would instantly pick over a MacBook, and the same would not have been said 2 years ago.
Would you mind listing a couple? I'd prefer to buy a Windows machine for my next laptop, but I've been SO burned by hibernation bugs, CPU throttling, battery issues, etc. And I've had an OG 13" M1 MBP from work for the past year or so, and the performance and battery life have been unreal to that point that I'm very much considering one of these 14" M2 MBPs for myself.
In terms of innovative form factors, look at these:
- A laptop with a nice OLED screen and a Color E-ink screen. This seems like an incredible combination, although the 60Hz limit on the OLED screen is unfortunate: https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/5/23541379/lenovo-thinkbook-...
- This dual screen (dual OLED, even!) concept seems like it would be challenging to pull off, but every hands-on review I've seen was really impressed with it, and I can totally see use cases for this: https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/5/23518872/lenovo-yoga-book-...
- The Flow Z13 is like a Microsoft Surface with an actual GPU and a 165Hz display. This one isn't as appealing to me as the two above, but it is neat: https://rog.asus.com/laptops/rog-flow/rog-flow-z13-2023-seri...
In terms of the other category,
- The Acer Swift X 14 comes with a nice 120Hz OLED screen and an RTX 4050, so it seems like a nice, balanced laptop, but I wish it had the option for more than 16GB of RAM: https://youtu.be/va3OmoYHKYs?t=298
- The Flow X13 now comes with up to an RTX 4070 and 165Hz display and up to 32GB of RAM, and this is significantly more compact than the Swift X 14, but the display is not as nice as an OLED. This is also a convertible, so you can use the 360 degree hinge to make it into a tablet: https://rog.asus.com/laptops/rog-flow/rog-flow-x13-2023-seri...
- The new Zephyrus G14 is probably the one I find most exciting, offering a 165Hz MiniLED display that's almost as nice as OLED, as well as up to an RTX 4090 (Laptop) and 32GB of RAM, but it is about the same size as the Swift X 14, so not as small as the Flow X13: https://www.techradar.com/reviews/asus-rog-zephyrus-g14-2023
A number of these also have user-upgradeable RAM, SSD, or both. I really like OLED, so it's great to see so many options for that, and MiniLED is going to be significantly more common this year than it was last year. It would be nice if my M2 MBA offered OLED or MiniLED.
But I'm still really concerned about the consistency of hibernation and sleep so I'm not taking a searingly hot machine out of my bag at 1% battery life. Or the weird quirks of some new hinge or keyboard design that I have to live with for 4+ years of owning a machine.
I'd honestly take half the specs and double the thickness/weight if it meant that my keyboard felt like a keyboard and that I can confidently close the lid at any time and re-open it back to whatever I was doing.
I don't _like_ Apple. But they can do that. And I don't even have to compromise on anything except using macOS (which I can tolerate).
Those have a huge tie in with the software, so I wouldn't expect hardware innovation to help.
I didn’t bother addressing those points because it’s hard to know where things were going wrong without a lot more detail.
Sleep issues are definitely a hallmark of Windows Modern Standby, but one might hope that will be addressed soon. Supposedly Microsoft is looking into it now.
Generally speaking HN's average knowledge on Hardware isn't exactly up to date to say the least.
They then scaled up performance so much that a desktop ARM chip was made. That had never been done on a large scale before. So, no, imo Apple was never behind Intel and AMD, they were never competing in the same space.
And now of course TSMC / Apple haven’t caught up, they have surpassed comparable offerings from Intel.
I'm an enormous fan of the M series. But there is an interesting consequence of a couple of fundamental design decisions.
The M series has huge memory bandwidth but look at its focus on I/O. It reminds me of one of the design decisions of the Alto (memory bus was 3/2 the screen refresh rate, a mind-boggling decision for its time). The fact that the M1 can go in an ipad is insane, but is enabled by the way the M series was designed. Their design for long battery life while drawing onto directly connected displays is unmatched.
However I believe that same decision has hobbled the M1 in a way that may make a Mac Pro version "impossible" (i.e. too much change to be worth doing). M series are optimized to dash rapidly then quickly go to sleep.
I feel the Intel and AMD guys are still thinking of sustained performance, a holdover from the desktop world and its mainframe, or at least minicomputer roots. Psychologically their mobile chips look to me like scaled down desktop machines.
If my belief is right, AMD and Intel aren't really catching up on mobile, while Apple will probably never produce a Mac Pro worth buying (for me they never were, but I'm sure there are people for which they were a great deal).
AMD puts 96 cores into a 360w TDP (not counting spikes that go higher than that) at 3.6GHz. Apple could most likely fit 72 high-performance cores and 36 more efficiency cores into that same 360w TDP.
Given that AMD's chips require much higher clockspeeds to hit the same total performance (nearly 5GHz for Zen 3 to match a 3.2GHz M1), the final product from AMD would likely be quite a bit slower overall.
I believe the real reason for the Mac Pro not hitting the market is their insistence on unified memory. At that size, unified memory and controlling latencies explodes in complexity.
Even worse, the Mac Studio already appeals to most of the higher-end market meaning this $20-50k system probably doesn't have very many buyers either. They could sell such a product in the server market, but they left that market years ago and the reinvestment costs would be massive and very high-risk.
I was nodding along about M2 being a minor bump over M1, but I'm not even sure what you mean here. Apple previously used Intel processors - how is Intel not caught up with Intel?
Apple was key to many many computing technology adoption - USB, Thunderbolt, even early WiFi. Now that they're making their own desktop processors and entire SoC, I think they can move in ways that are not constrained by Intel or other players. It's possible we see the laptop market move more like the smartphone market.
Intel doesn’t really seem to make any strides in low-power designs, they just throw more mid-power cores at the problem to achieve better multi core efficiency as well as manipulate power brackets. Shirt-time (benchmark-relevant) consumption of Intel chips is insane and their published TDP figures are utterly meaningless. AMD has very scalable cores and Zen4 performs admirably at low power, but AMD too falls victim to power inflation to keep pace with Intel.
It seems tacky to me because the M2's competition isn't really 2019 Intel MBPs- it's laptops using modern Intel/AMD CPUs (the M2 may still be better than those, but if that's the case those are the benchmarks they should be giving us)
Granted, I don't think they will 100% kill intel. My guess is, it just won't be public. They will keep a few internal machines that MacOS is minimally functional on so if they ever want to switch back, they already have a base. Would be my guess.
In my case, living in the US, we all do our taxes in the first three-ish months of the year. Last year Turbo Tax told me they wouldn't support my 2013 MBP this tax season, so I decided to wait until fall 2022 and get whatever Apple released. Fall 2022 came without a release, so I've been biting my nails: Turbo Tax won't run on my MBP, and I don't want to upgrade to an "outdated" M1.
(As you can infer, I'm planning on using my next MBP for ~10 years.)
I use FreeTaxUsa, which is entirely online and free for your federal return. I think it may be $15 or so for state returns, but I live in Florida so it's not really something I think about.
You just are unlikely to know/find the rules for optimal results, and the process will take a lot longer.
Not a fan of turbotax, but it's not _necessary_.
https://www.irs.gov/filing/free-file-do-your-federal-taxes-f...
It does some calculations itself, and some you have to do yourself, but it is very easy to use and file online, and get a pdf return to save for yourself.
Any half decent state also has had free online tax return filing for some time now.
https://www.irs.gov/filing/free-file-do-your-federal-taxes-f...
The form-based approach is fine if you like that kind of thing, or just have 1-2 W2s.
Paid Tax-prep software is "worth it" because it simplifies the whole process.
But again, nothing wrong with filling out the forms yourself if you like that kind of thing.
https://www.irs.gov/filing/free-file-do-your-federal-taxes-f...
Any half decent state also offers free online tax returns. If all you are is an employee with stocks/bonds in a brokerage that gives you the necessary forms, it is super easy.
The bigger issue has to do with how US politics work. "What makes sense," is what most countries do: the government sends you a completed tax return and you just verify that it is completed correctly. Due to lobbying, the US government is prohibited from telling you how much tax you owe. Instead, what happens is the government does your taxes for you in secret, and if the amount you pay is significantly different from what they believe you owe, the government sends you a bill with a suggested payment. You don't have to actually pay the amount that they suggest, but if you don't, you better have a darn good reason to explain why the government calculated your tax wrong.
In general, it is to your benefit to err in your favor. The interest rate on a "tax mistake" is extremely low. But, if you accidentally overpay, the government will very rarely send you a refund automatically.
I tried the web version, but I didn't like it.
It's also 4 years old at this point. Where is the comparison to current-gen Intel/AMD?
> Results are compared to previous-generation 2.4GHz 8-core Intel Core i9-based 16-inch MacBook Pro systems with Radeon Pro 5600M graphics with 8GB HBM2, 64GB of RAM, and 8TB SSD.
Edit: at this rate when my previous gen one expires I'm going to think seriously about shifting back to ThinkPads...
The £ is depreciating against the dollar, and wages in the UK have been stagant for 10+ years and are set to remain stagant for another 10 based upon current forecasting.
Based upon current trends countries like Poland and Slovakia are going to overtake the UK on many economic metrics within a generation, which is both a credit to the growth of those countries and the enmourous decline of the UK relative to places like Germany, France, and the US.
Imports are going to just keep getting more and more expensive.
I'll believe that when I see it
>the enmourous decline of the UK relative to places like Germany, France
The UK, Germany and France are declining in lockstep, actually. In different ways but all declining
>the US
Yes this is the killer.
people scraping by outside London see the decades going by and their lot not improving, and eventually the busy beavers crafting messages found the right ones ("the UK is paying so and so much pounds every day to the EU instead of funding the NHS more")
this solved nothing, people scraping by still have low economic productivity. infrastructure development outside London is late by decades (because every time there was a cost increase it slowed down basically, and there were a lot of cost increases - every recession, interest rate cut, Baumol effect, etc meant costs going up)
similarly development inside big cities is stunted because of cost increases.
because a lot of globalization made local services relatively more expensive (this is the Baumol effect basically) and all the affected areas are very labor heavy: NHS (healthcare), education, construction.
then all this recently culminated in idiots getting elected (Boris Johnson, etc) who then made things worse by not doing anything.
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/why-the-uk-is-having-an-ec... - in this paywalled post Noah argues that the UK is going through a mild version of the emerging economy crisis (like Sri Lanka), because its import dependent, trade deficit, capital flight, pegged currency (basically for price stability the Bank of England has to), and lots of borrowing in foreign currency (USD, EUR), and accelerating inflation
You're seeing it right now, if you actually look.
"UK economy could be comparable to “Slovakia” in 10 years - says economist Duncan Weldon"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5g_S9BBtqw
> The UK, Germany and France are declining in lockstep,
Nope.
https://youtu.be/R5g_S9BBtqw?t=155
"Britain is unique among the G7 countries in that GDP per head is still below that when the pandemic hit."
Notice the "unique" bit.
Forgive me but I disregard the predictions made by economists, a class of people who bear no consequences for their predictions.
You may be correct but this proves nothing.
Fans blasting, laggy, hot, three hour battery life. Its a substantial step backwards
Have to check to see how reliable those thinkpads are but I also just enjoyed the physical experience of a Mac (know it's not for everyone and subjective)
But yeah I’ll bitch and moan and just give apple the money like I always do now n
Since then, the 2019 macbook has been having tons of problems, crashing, thermal issues, software issues, keyboard issues. But the 2013 has been working like a dream. My coworkers have many similar experiences.
Mid-2010s was definitely a peak for macbooks. Hopefully M1s/M2s will be another peak.
So it's USD * exchange rate * VAT + pessimism.
Or, in the case of the iPads last time round, a price jump for the exact same product.
http://www.exchangerate.com/charts.html?continent=currency%2...
On the other hand, my M2 Macbook Air is one of the best purchases I've made in a long time, great fanless laptop.
I never really got the appeal of the Mini, because it wasn't specced much better than a MacBook. The Studio seems to be a nice middle ground between a MacBook and a mac Pro, which I know I'll never need.
The appeal is in the form factor: you buy Mini, so you can hang it behind your TV using VESA mount, and you use it to watch Netflix on 65" OLED screen. Or you put it in the corner of the room and use it as a home server. You do not use Mini as laptop replacement :) Although I have to say this: Intel NUCs a quarter of the size of Mini, so much better for both the purposes above.
It's absolutely flawless, and very good value for the price (even with the overpriced RAM)
Lower refresh rate, lower density backlighting etc. Would like the Air form factor with the premium screen
...
> 4. Testing was conducted by Apple in November and December 2022 using preproduction 16-inch MacBook Pro systems with Apple M2 Max, 12-core CPU, 38-core GPU, 96GB of RAM, and 8TB SSD, as well as a production Intel Core i9-based PC system with NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000 graphics with 24GB GDDR6 and the latest version of Windows 11 Pro available at the time of testing, and a production Intel Core i9-based PC system with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti graphics with 16GB GDDR6 and the latest version of Windows 11 Home available at the time of testing. OTOY Octane X 2022.1 on preproduction 16-inch MacBook Pro systems and OTOY OctaneRender 2022.1 on Windows systems were tested using a scene that requires over 40GB of graphics memory when rendered.
Two things:
- The Quadro RTX 6000 shipped in 2018 and the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is a 12GB card vs. the 24GB 3090 or 3090 Ti, much less a 4090. I get that it's a marketing eye-roll claim, and it's cool to see a laptop post up against those specs, but why is Apple even bothering to measure performance against 4-year-old or under-specced cards? I wouldn't expect a 40GB OctaneRender scene to run on a 12GB gaming card or 4-year-old Quadro on any system.
- If 60% of VFX workstations are running Linux vs. 11% of macOS,[1] how does the M2 Max MBP stack up against a garden-variety Linux workstation?
1: https://drive.google.com/file/d/15b-4GMTSEE9tyqeQdBfy_LZnxQI...
So I still don't know why their benchmark is a 2.5-year-old laptop.
I'm also noticing that Apple didn't list the generation of i9 in that marketing disclaimer, so this makes me think they're also possibly comparing against 2- to 3-year-old CPUs.
> Testing was conducted by Apple in November and December 2022 using preproduction 16-inch MacBook Pro systems with Apple M2 Max, 12-core CPU, 38-core GPU, 96GB of RAM, and 8TB SSD, as well as a production Intel Core i9-based PC system with NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000 graphics with 24GB GDDR6 and the latest version of Windows 11 Pro available at the time of testing, and a production Intel Core i9-based PC system with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti graphics with 16GB GDDR6 and the latest version of Windows 11 Home available at the time of testing.
To be clear, NVIDIA (and Intel) use identical names for their desktop parts and for their laptop versions. There is the 3080 Ti (GA102-225-A1) which has 10240 shaders clocked at 1365 mhz and a 350 watt TDP, and the 3080 Ti (GA103) for laptops which has 7424 shaders clocked at (up to) 1230 mhz and a (up to) 150 watt TDP. The former does about 305 fps in userbench and the latter does 193 fps. (Until it thermal throttles) https://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Nvidia-RTX-3080-Ti/Rating/4115 https://gpu.userbenchmark.com/SpeedTest/1775790/NVIDIA-GeFor... There is an equivalent bait and switch for the Intel i9 desktop vs mobile.
It's unfortunate that Apple isn't making themselves 100% entirely clear on this, but to be fair, neither is the competition.
I see the RTX 6000 Ada and A6000 in both the hero image and the first products listed. The Quadro 6000's a 24GB 4,608 CUDA-core PCIe 3x16 card[1] and the A6000 is a 10,752 CUDA-core 48GB PCIe 4x16 card.[2]
I know NVIDIA's branding and product line naming sucks, but those clearly aren't the same cards, or even same generation of card.
1: https://www.nvidia.com/content/dam/en-zz/Solutions/design-vi...
2: https://www.nvidia.com/content/dam/en-zz/Solutions/design-vi...
Though there's one detail: Apple probably couldn't have tested against the new "Ada" one because it's not even available yet, so they still tested against the best available workstation GPU, unless I'm missing something.
"Notify Me" button on the page for RTX 6000 Ada says "You will receive an email when the new NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada Generation graphics card becomes available." I think it's unrealistic to expect companies to benchmark against future products. (not saying you expect that haha)
"PCs can't even run this!" ....when using a PC with specs too low to run the specific thing we chose to do.
"Mac's can't even run notepad.exe!" would be fair using Apple's approach to these kind of claims (i.e. choosing to run software with requirements that you know they cannot meet)
I'll admit I haven't gone spelunking down the specialist laptop manuafacturer sites, but on the surface it seems to be not an unrealistic claim.
[1] https://store.nvidia.com/en-gb/geforce/store/laptop/?page=1&... [2] https://www.box.co.uk/82TD000WUK-Lenovo-Legion-7-Intel-Core-...
> creators can work on scenes so large that PC laptops can’t even run them
You can't open a 40GB scene entirely in GPU RAM on any single-GPU system, laptop or otherwise, because there aren't any 40GB+ GPUs.
But you can open a 40GB Octane demo scene with out-of-core loading enabled on a Windows laptop with 64GB of RAM. Hell, Otoy has a demo from 2018 of a Windows system loading and editing that "worst-case" 40GB scene entirely out-of-core at 60fps.[1]
So the suggestion is that the M2 is doing it without enabling out-of-core loading because all system RAM is in-core. Which is cool, and something Otoy's CEO was boasting on the M1 MBP's release day two years ago.[2]
So why bother going through the motions of benchmarking anything like this against 2+-year-old systems, just to make a claim the M1 also made, just less precisely?
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xE3J56pabk
2: https://twitter.com/JulesUrbach/status/1326922973790367750
The second revision of the A100 has 80 GiB of memory: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/a100/
If you could run ML models properly on that machine, it would be pretty nice for inference on larger models. Now, of course, Apple being Apple they expect you to hand-code ML algos in Swift (lol. lmao.) but still, 96GB of VRAM is 96 GB of VRAM.
Edit: Just to clarify, I understand that this has 400 gbs of bandwidth, not 3,2 tbs like an Nvidia Accelerator with the same size. But the latter costs tens of thousands and requires, well, a whole datacenter probably. This allows you to run some GPT-X or Diffusion model on your laptop. In theory.
The unified memory architecture is a bliss and they are talking the truth about some popular contemporary workloads being out of the reach of the most PC.
"MacBook Pro with M2 Pro features a 10- or 12-core CPU with up to eight high-performance and four high-efficiency cores for up to 20 percent greater performance over M1 Pro. "
"MacBook Pro with M2 Max pushes workflows to the extreme with a much larger GPU featuring up to 38 cores and delivering up to 30 percent greater graphics performance over M1 Max"
- Rendering titles and animations in Motion is up to 80 percent faster1 than the fastest Intel-based MacBook Pro and up to 20 percent faster5 than the previous generation.
- Compiling in Xcode is up to 2.5x faster^1 than the fastest Intel-based MacBook Pro and nearly 25 percent faster^5 than the previous generation.
- Image processing in Adobe Photoshop is up to 80 percent faster^1 than the fastest Intel-based MacBook Pro and up to 40 percent faster^5 than the previous generation.
Those numbers are somewhat surprising since they're for M2 Pro, and later on in they say the M2 Max, presumably faster than the M2 Pro, "delivers up to 20 percent greater performance over M1 Max."
However if you're an Intel MBP holdout, those are the folks who are the target market for this announcement. I have both (M1 Air, 15" 2018 MBP) and I've stopped using my Intel MBP despite it's bigger screen and better storage/RAM.
For reference my 2016 MacBook Pro had 16GB RAM so it was surprising to me that 6 years later I would be unable to buy one with 16 GB of RAM. So while the CPUs are amazing what the hell are Apple doing selling machines with such little amounts of RAM?
But I'm not willing to pay the prices on the UK website. I think an M3 Air with 32GB will be my next purchase.
The limiting factor was the VRAM. The M1 has the ability to use more VRAM than your typical gaming GPU because of the shared RAM.
I see this as a big advantage.
[1] https://sebastianraschka.com/blog/2022/pytorch-m1-gpu.html
- Turning on "Low Power Mode" when on Battery gives me roughly 10h of battery life. Functionally this is more than good enough for me.
- Backlight leakage around the keys feels janky
- It's pretty hard to pick it up unless you get it by the back vent, also yeah, it's heavy
- The resolution is pretty weird. I wish it were really 4k, then bumping it down to FHD with an integer scale would make sense. As it is, the integer scale is 1512x982, which many websites think (including some you might build!) is a tablet.
- Viewing angles on the screen are not at IPS levels. At regular usage distances you can definitely see a difference around the outer 1/3 of the screen.
- Dark text on a light background is different than light text on a dark background. When I do `set bg=light` in Vim I usually need to use a thicker font or turn on antialiasing.
I think most people should get the M2 Air (or the M1 even). I have a couple of reasons that going 14 max makes sense for me: I moved abroad and my brother and I keep in touch via gaming (a lot of Steam games, etc. work pretty well on it), and I'm planning on getting back into music. Otherwise, I would argue that:
- the IPS screen on the Air is better for text
- the Air's battery life is another class
- the Air is much lighter
- the Air's resolution is more mainstream and usable
Some Air things are dealbreakers. M1 tops out at 16GB, M2 at 24, and they only do 1 external monitor. But w/e.
In one recent case, a family member was about to buy an entire new laptop because their old one was feeling very sluggish. I checked it out and realized that the fan had completely died and the system was constantly thermally throttling. A $12 replacement fan (and a thorough cleaning and CPU repaste) allowed them to put off a $1k+ purchase for at least a couple more years.
(I suppose having fixed the fan though means I could get a little more for it on eBay.)
I could have the same problems. I’ve never cleaned the laptop either..heh. I am a programmer so I am not afraid of hardware.
If I were you, I would just get a refurbished M1 MacBook Air from Apple, instead of spending $200 on the battery.
Running the battery down to below 30% might also be a good idea, but only after it's somewhere fireproof.
Edit: here's some more info: https://www.reddit.com/r/spicypillows/comments/gebotv/faq_wh...
To answer your question, though, I've learned from iFixit guides, youtube videos, just taking things apart and tinkering with them, etc. Apple uses some oddball screws sometimes, but you can get a toolkit with everything you need for $30 or less.
I'm more of a software guy, but I mess with hardware occasionally. (I'm also willing to pay a professional if I feel like it's over my head.)
Having no fan is an absolute game changer not just because of dust, but this way I can have the machine running near its thermal ceiling for extended amounts of time without going crazy from the fan noise, very handy when gaming, which I wouldn't want to do on the other Macbooks for that reason. I had to put a CPU indicator into the menubar because there's no way to hear high load anymore, so it's very easy to miss that Steam has crashed again and is now keeping all cores maxed etc. The silence really nice when using it in a quiet space, e.g. for tethered shooting without disturbing people, or in the quiet coach of a train, absolutely love it. I'd recommend the one with fewer GPU cores since that might give you slightly worse graphics, but it'll thermal throttle later and less overall when gaming or rendering.
Other differences that aren't as drastic as the specs suggest include the display, which other than the difference in real estate, I can't say I've ever really noticed to be worse, it looks gorgeous despite its significantly lower specs. The 16" has very nice sound for a laptop, but the Air sounds way better than anything that thin should, it's better than the stereo speakers in my Dell monitor, fine for a quick round of casual gaming and the like. Connectivity might be a dealbreaker (esp. the single external display), but it fits what I need well (except for the SD card reader, would love to have that). And it's pretty lightweight, very sturdy, thin, compact, which is what ultimately made me pick it, much more suitable for travelling and having it in a backpack when cycling and the like. It'll even run off a tiny 30W power bricklet!
That's odd, I've never noticed that on my 14". Websites usually choose layouts according to width and 1512 is well into desktop territory.
the Air's resolution is more mainstream and usable
The Air is 2560x1664, and at the default (non-integer, so less sharp) scaling it presents as 1470x956 which is also non-standard and lower than the MBP.
Edit: I wrote this elsewhere but the DPI is low enough that native is usable for me. I might bump it down a notch, but dunno.
- The 14" Pro's native resolution is 3024x1964, which means at 1512w you're getting perfect doubling of the pixels. The M2 air is natively 2560x1664 but it defaults to 1470x956, so you don't get that clean doubling and the sharpness suffers IMO. You can drop it down to 1280w to increase sharpness but the cost in screen real estate is significant. I'm not sure understand your point about the Air's resolution being more mainstream or usable
- The black levels on the MPB's mini-LED LCD screen are vastly better than the M2 Air.
- As someone who's only used MPBs over the last 10 years, the speakers on the Air sound truly awful — tinny, harsh, low volume. Not just for music, but I found listening to a podcast or watching a TV show to be fatiguing and unsatisfying.
- I upgraded my Air's SSD because the default SSD is slow, so the price was $1500+tax; Best Buy was running a sale on MBP 14" that put it at $1600+tax, so all told the significant price gap was almost entirely negated.
I use the incredible SwitchResX [0] so you can get the res and refresh rate you want. I wear contacts so I tend to use screens at native resolution, and I'd probably either have the Air at native or one tick down. Native on the 14" is too small even for me (this is less font size and more low-contrast UIs though), but I had my 2018 MBP 16" at native and it was pretty good, so maybe what I'm complaining about doesn't apply to that size.
Black levels are good, but I suspect the blooming is responsible for the difference between dark on light and light on dark. If I were in video or photography this might be a good tradeoff, but for Vim it's not ideal--I'd prefer an IPS.
I'll also say my MBP was $3,700, so jumping down to the M2 Air (24GB, 2TB) is a $1,200 savings. There's a lot you can do with configurations, but higher end MBPs are just in their own class. I justify it by saying "well of course I would spend $5/day to use a computer, which is about 2 years, and if I stretch it out to 3 it's a pretty good upgrade cycle (plus resale maybe).
Because they didn't help to create it.
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliance_for_Open_Media
Not sure why you think that
> It seems their AOM membership is mostly a signal to the license cartels that eventually "paying for codecs is not going to be ok, unless you give us a good deal".
Yeah, I really hope this isn't the case. A universal, free, open codec like AV1 would be great to have.
There is some evidence[1] of Apple adding support at least.
[1] https://www.neowin.net/news/apple-may-finally-be-adding-av1-...
It's the ability to connecting two displays via one cable.
Any 5+ year old PC has support for it. But your $3,000 Macbook Pro doesn't.
-> are TB cables => is DP (Display Port)
OWC hub is optional, scheme works without it the same. I use the hub to connect also external 10G network and a card reader.
NB: not an advice to buy BenQ PD3220U, see this: https://www.reddit.com/r/BenQ/comments/qsmvn2/pd3220u_kvm_bu... No solution so far. BenQ thinks it's the Apple bug, Apple probably thinks something, but doesn't tell.
My Caldigit TS4 charges my macbook at 90W, has 2 x 27" monitors running at 120hz (i could go higher but i can't perceive the difference so i'll save the bandwidth), has 2 external drives and can read my SD card to import photos. The thing has so many ports and if you have lots of peripherals it doesn't matter how many ports your laptop has as you'll not want to bother plugging them in and out if you move around a lot (I do). I can't rate the TS4 highly enough.
It would be nice if apple made a good, trusted docking station that just works with their laptops.
Or just buy the TS4 and you never have to worry. It’s by far the best reviewed and reliable.
For Python, Python itself is rarely the problem, but more often some older libraries that don't have wheels for M1 Mac, or incompatibilities. Upgrading your dependencies, if it's an option, is often enough.
Asdf + PDM are also nice tools to work with multiple projects/Py versions easily.
I haven't heard of either of these but they seem interesting. I'll look into them. Thanks.
*EDIT* Oh, man! I've just been using just pip like a muggle, until now.
Latest Docker Desktop and Lima VM can take advantage on the new feature. It makes running amd64 containers significantly faster.
Here is a very short manual how to setup Docker with Lima VM and Rosetta https://gist.github.com/akrylysov/7c1ea3bac409da2758e525f2f8...
[1]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/run...
Seriously thinking about getting a fast AMD Linux box to run Docker workloads network-locally, I'm working from home 99.9% of the time anyway.
That all being said I don't have an M1 (or an M2 for that matter) so I don't know if Podman works "well" on it.
More details here to avoid spamming this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34374176
And to be honest, the whole concept of a Mac Pro goes against the design philosophy of Apple Silicon. The whole point of those chips is to maximize efficiency by having everything on-die or very close to the chip. For example, the M2 Max has like eight memory channels in a laptop - you could not do that even with CAMM[1] modules.
A desktop machine without replaceable RAM or slots that can accommodate GPUs is going to be a nonstarter no matter how good the the SoC's integrated accelerators are. A significant chunk of the cost of the Mac Pro is just the fancy desktop case, specifically designed to accommodate lots of expansion cards and compute accelerators. If you don't care about slots, you can just buy a Mac Studio for less money than the Pro. If you do want slots, only being able to plug in storage and I/O devices and nothing else is going to be a huge drag.
[0] Apple Silicon PCIe controllers have a unique limitation in that they prohibit accessing external memory devices. This is why Thunderbolt eGPUs don't work - the M1 and M2 can't actually write to the memory on the GPUs.
[1] Compression Attached Memory Module, a JEDEC standard for a thin dual-channel RAM card promoted by Dell to allow socketed high-performance RAM on business laptops.
I thought the major reason was simply lack of drivers.
When I consider that I can use direct mapped M.2 storage over Thunderbolt; or use 100GBit network cards over Thunderbolt 4 (with a PCIe adapter) I wouldn't think that I was limited to mapping memory in the SoC.
ARM has several different classes of memory access mappings; the normal one is called... well, Normal. I/O and storage is mapped using Device mappings, which don't cache reads and can be further divided into how little the CPU is allowed to try and optimize writes[1]. GPUs need Normal memory because applications written for modern graphics APIs expect to be able to map GPU memory into themselves and read and write to it like CPU memory.
The ARM spec for I/O is that you are always allowed to use whatever mapping type the device needs, and that less-strict mappings should, in the worst case, "fall back" to stricter ones. Apple handles this differently; the SoC fabric requires you use the specific device mapping that it expects for a particular device, and if you try to use something looser or stricter than what it wants, it will drop the transaction and raise an exception. And of course the SoC fabric will not allow Normal memory reads or writes to hit a PCIe device.
As far as the Asahi Linux team is aware, there isn't a way from the CPU to turn off this behavior. It's also not the only implementation of PCIe on ARM that locks out PCIe memory. Raspberry Pi 4's PCIe support[3] also has the same design flaw. If it was just a driver problem, someone would have ported AMDGPU to ARM and ran it on Asahi Linux by now, and we'd be posting cool benchmarks between the internal and external GPUs.
You don't notice this problem for I/O or storage because those never need to be mapped as Normal.
[0] And probably still skipping over more details, since I'm not an ARM expert. This is just what I've gleaned from reading other kernel developers' Mastodon and Twitter feeds.
[1] Which, BTW, the M1 also screws up. You're supposed to be able to pick posted writes[2] or non-posted writes; Apple Silicon specifically refuses transaction types that don't match what the hardware expects.
See https://lore.kernel.org/linux-arm-kernel/20210120132717.3958... for more info.
[2] Write instructions finish before the write is actually sent to the device.
[3] Yes, it has PCIe. One lane of it, used to drive an external USB 3 controller. You can of course repurpose it for other things.
I'd consider that very low because you've got a lot of eyeballs trying to get the most out of a COTS easily available hardware. The goal is to make it the best-in-class Linux support. Personally, I believe it can be done.
I follow their progress with great interest, as some of the non-technical limitations of the macbook (OLED and touchscreen) could easily be fixed.
At a certain point, vendor cooperation becomes outright necessary. Asahi has come a long way, but getting to "best-in-class Linux support" takes more than community effort with commodity hardware. Stalled-out projects like Nouveau don't lend a lot of hope for the future.
Obviously there would be a penalty for off-die memory access, but I'm sure somebody cleverer than me could think of a nice way of architecting such a beast.
By doing this, massively multithreaded workloads would not see any real impact...as long as you don't need to send anything card-to-card. Finally, (assuming the M2 Ultra maxes out at 192Gb ram ) this enables adding in 1 to maybe 6 M2 Ultras, topping out just over 1TB ram. This almost starts to work but will fail if your tasks can't be cleanly cut up into 192GB chunks, maybe that's the magic of that controller.
The biggest differences between v2 and v3 of MagSafe are:
• v3 is 1 mm longer (doesn't fit v2 models)
• v3 supports PD 3.1
...is that all?
> Thunderbolt 4 Type-C ports
...these do NOT support PD 3.1, correct?
https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/qi2-the-new-standard-for-wi...
edit: should've rtfa'd, its the laptop magsafe
Apple has MagSafe connectors for charging on laptops, which was the original MagSafe. The name comes from the connector being magnetic, and being "safe" since tripping over the cable would make it disconnect without pulling your laptop off the table. They discontinued this in favour of charging through USB-C cables/ports a while back.
They then introduced magnetic charging for iPhones, similar to (but IIRC not exactly) their Qi charging support. This reused the MagSafe name since they didn't have any products with it. The evolution of this is speculated to be incorporated and standardised as Qi2.
Then they introduced the MagSafe charging connector back to their laptops (but updated), and so confusingly there's two basically unrelated features both called MagSafe. Maybe that'll get cleared up a bit once Qi2 comes out.
Also, the laptop side is on it's third iteration, so at this point "MagSafe" is more of a category than a specific connector.
On the 16" M1 Pros, you could do magsafe charging at 140W (using higher wattage negotiated USB PD), however the USB-C ports were limited to 100W (96W?) and did not offer the full 140W charging using USB-C.
Using a USB-C to USB-C cable (with the same charger) gets 100W charging instead because of a limitation on the laptop side (USB PD 3.1 on the MagSafe port vs USB PD 3.0 on the USB-C ports).
Hopefully they're fixed that for this iteration of MBP, but I haven't seen that explicitly claimed anywhere.
Some discussion here is saying the MagSafe will charge at 140W, while the USB-C ports will only charge at 100W, so it will be a bit slower.
for example: https://www.techradar.com/news/this-is-the-best-value-128gb-...
So I don't see why Apple would make the claim that their 96gb setup can load models that PC laptops can't...
Apple dynamically scales the GPU memory while Windows GPU memory must be reserved. If you have 64GB of Ram and want 32GB of VRAM you now...always.... have 32GB of system memory.
But furthermore...that iGPU is like 1/10th the performance of an M1 Max lol, absolutely nobody should EVER do this on an iGPU. Their argument is that on a dedicated card you just can't do this.
Beyond this, newer iGPUs like the RX680M are comparable in performance to an M1 Pro. Certainly sufficient for any model visualization task, since that's what we're talking about.
The only other application where this could be relevant would be 3D rendering, where the 780M would win by a large margin due to RT acceleration.
I don’t know of any AMD G series equipped laptops with that much memory , but admittedly I haven’t looked closely at the options.
Then there’s the issue of memory sharing of actual data resources. Albeit, this is down to Software, but more software for Mac can assume shared memory to take advantage of it, versus other brands because iGPUs have historically been very limited.
> Albeit, this is down to Software, but more software for Mac can assume shared memory to take advantage of it, versus other brands because iGPUs have historically been very limited.
AFAIK there is no such software that only supports Macs. You can query these features at runtime, and it's easier to do so than to rewrite your renderer for Metal.
I didn’t say the software needed to only support Mac, but if they have a metal backend (as many things have multiple backends) they know they can spend the time to get a bigger ROI due to the number of shared memory macs as a percentage of all macs.
What makes you say this? Have you speced two systems lately? Last I did, the MacBook was comparable to cheaper for the price/performance. Of course, a 10lb mobile desktop with a 30 minute battery was closest.
What comparable notebook do you have in mind?
It seems crazy to me that in 2023 Apple offer a £2,699.00 laptop with just 512Gb of non-upgradable storage.
Looking at Dell's Precision line bundled with Ubuntu, they might be user upgradable but they're still roughly a similar ball park to Apple price wise.
Personally I'm going to need to see some full package benchmarks before I can form an opinion and will be weeping either way.
The PC industry uses wildly inflated prices, especially MSRP. A more realistic price for laptops can be found on various deal sites. A comparable Dell, Lenovo, or HP laptop will cost about .5-.6 of the equivalent macbook pro price. The vast majority of laptops, even after accounting for 1-2 TB of storage and 32 GB RAM cost less than $1.5k. MBPs start around $2k.
I’ve actually been considering an M1 MBP from a deal site in the UK. They seem to be about £300 off MSRP at the moment.
I think the other 364 days of the year are more relevant, since Black Friday sales often have extremely limited quantities, and are anything it predictable.
People are claiming 4-6 hours on the hidpi display version. That’s definitely not comparable. I leave my charger at home with my M1.
I disagree. The whole package should be compared, because that's what you're paying for. If 2x battery life cost a few hundred more, it's a no brainer, for me.
edit: We're out of reply depth, but this all started with "they're ridiculously expensive" and ended with "there's nothing else in the market".
The complete package is reasonably priced, when compared to other systems. If you completely ignore one part of the package, then sure, you can find something comparable, as my initial comment pointed out with the portable desktop replacements.
But the price on the shelf is for the complete package.
This comes out to $440/year.
I could probably sell it on eBay for $3-400 (actual recent sales data), bringing that cost down to <$400/year.
What are you comparing it to cost-wise?
The 220ppi Apple displays looked like deep-fried dukey to me suddenly; it bugged me all day, every day after that. YEMV, but the text rendering 280ppi Dell was phenomenally crisper, better looking, and less blurry. It's something you can't unsee.
I'm not sure that there are any HDMI 2.1 displays on the market yet at 31-32" (I haven't checked out this year's CES coverage yet), but these new Macs (MBP and Mini) mark the first non-"Intel Mac with an eGPU" machines from Apple that support 8K.
To me, that's the most interesting thing about them.
Aren't pretty much all cameras at least 1080p by now? I'd expect a top of the line laptop to have a multi-megapixel camera able to push 240fps for slowmo and windowing abilities to allow software zoom while still outputting a high enough resolution feed that someone viewing on another macbook pro can't see the pixels (ie. more than 1080p please!).
Heck, on a top of the line macbook, you could even have cameras on each corner so that clever processing could be done to get multiple angles and automatically pretend to have a 2nd cameraman for closeups from another angle.
Can anyone provide insight why Apple didn't put more effort into cameras?
I'm guessing companies have found that it's always a trade-off between camera quality and bezel size, and a thinner bezel impresses people more than a better camera.
I find Apple webcams perform better in video calls than most/all others, so they don't really have much to worry about. If you do want some insanely high quality "webcam", you could buy that magsafe gimmick they showed off last year that allows you to use your iPhone's back cameras as the webcam for your MacBook.
As a bonus, they (after a bit of processing) output 3d information, allowing them to use the same system for face ID etc.
You can get up to 4K on external cameras or on a few desktop monitors with thick cases but those cameras are much too large for laptop cases.
I assume because for users who need more than a basic webcam, Apple has Continuity Camera¹². And of course there are lots of people at the high-end using DSLRs as their webcam.
¹ https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213244 ² https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209037
In any case, I personally don't really care how much fine detail my friends and coworkers can see when I'm talking with them. If I were a streamer or something I might care, but those people probably have dedicated hardware. I think for the average person 1080p is enough
Why ?
Most people use their laptop webcams for Skype with friends or Zoom/Teams with colleagues. The camera is merely a means to display your face to others and I doubt anyone else (especially on work sessions) gives a shit about what your image looks like.
Do people really need to stare at your wrinkles, nose-hair and unshaven face in 8k ? Most people also use their webcam in godawful lighting conditions, so it matters even less.
Added to which, in relation to the MacBook Pros, the clue is in the name "Pro". People will be buying it as a work machine. Who cares about the webcam (or indeed, if you look at certain other web-forums where people are complaining about the lack of Space Gray 16-inch ...who cares about the colour !).
Stick in some decent and cheap camera, and put the money into stuff that matters like computing capabilities, RAM, storage, networking, screen, etc.
More seriously, there just isn't room in the 2-3mm thick screen to put a better camera and lens.
I'd also note that megapixels aren't everything. My nearly decade-old Logitech C920 will run circles around the webcam in any laptop webcam I've seen.
Sadly, Apple knows exactly how to get my money from me.
Only 3, the HDMI out is limited to 4K.
That’s the “base” M1/M2. The M Pro supports 2, and the M Max 4, up to 6k (except for the 4th display on the Max, because HDMI).
M2P is also limited to a single display if you need 8K (not sure the M1P supported that at all).
The OS puts menu items and icons in that bonus space, freeing up _more_ of the uninterrupted rectangular main body of your screen for your apps.
I think if you go into fullscreen mode with an app, it'll blank out the area to either side of the notch and just use the main screen space (or maybe that's configurable for notch-aware software to decide? IDK)
I also suspect that the design was intended for Face ID, but that obviously hasn't happened yet. I'd keep touch ID, thank you very much.
That notch is a very clever way to expand the size of the screen without increasing the size of the case. There is very little downside. that middle part of the menu bar is not used by most apps. When there are more menu items, the system automatically skips over that notch.
This seems like a cheap shot, if I'm being honest.
It could be that the recent events in China made that announcement tricky, and given the worrying speculation, Apple wanted to reassure people.
My conspiracy theory / gut reaction is they want to hide this launch? or at least don't want too many eyes on it? I don't know why I think this but yeah. I have no insider information. This is an unsubstantiated guess.
So I guess my question is, what’s the expected lifespan of their SSDs? My current laptop will turn 11 this year, and after battery and ssd replacement it still works great. Can I reasonably expect the same lifespan from macbooks?
Something has to have gone wrong for it to have burned up 95% of it's life in ~5 years of normal usage.
I imagine the Mac marketing team now, giddy happy at the thought of increasingly ridiculous M-Mac to Best-Intel-Mac comparisons over the next 10 years. The claims will either come across as helpfully deceptive (for Apple), or as a funny inside joke (for informed customers).
Intel desperately needs to create their own bootleg Intel-Macs to defend against this sneaky Monty Python marketing strategy!
If you have a computer you can still use the move is definitely to cancel. Then either buy the new shiny or buy the older models (unused or refurb) at a reduced price. These M processors are so good that for me, the ones currently shipping are perfectly fine.
The perf gain should be circa 20%, but in Europe prices got a noticeable bump due to the strong USD (relatively).
(Depending on your definition of compression, my monitor shows more colors than there are particles in the Universe at 1 billion frames per second. It's just that there's a little bit of quality loss from the compression.)
The 14” and 16” MacBook Pros have M1 Pro and M1 Max processors and they support more video streams. The M1 Pro supports 2 external displays and the M1 Max supports 4.
1 — https://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/kb/gpu-performance-previ...
Any idea the performance delta between the M1 Max and M2 Pro? Wondering if I should trade my new system in for the new Mac Mini Pro...
I own a Mac Mini M1 and a Macbook Pro 16" M1 (the later given to me by my employer), and as a software engineer - I don't feel that the current M1 processor is limiting me in any way.
I, however, wanted to get a MacBook for personal use to be more mobile. And postponed my purchase until the release of new Macbooks with one anticipation - lighter devices. Instead I got a new CPU with a bunch of abstract claims by Apple on performance (which for me was never an issue) - in the EXACT same for factor. Same bulky width. Same heavy weight.
Before I got M1 macbook, I've had the opportunity to use Intel 15" and later Intel 13" macbooks. They were thin and light.
The first thing, after the speed of M1, that comes into mind with ARM based macbooks - is the bulkiness.
And so I naturally, assumed, that Apple will try to reduce the bulkiness. I just don't see the point of pumping raw processing speed every year, because not everyone needs it. And my general feeling is that apple is moving away from mid-range machines - light, portable, fast enough - to a high range and ultra-high range machines instead. Not everyone who uses a Mac is rendering 4k videos all day long, and I'd appreciate having a lighter, thinner laptop on the expense of raw processing speed.
I have a Mac Mini M1 driving a 4k screen on my desk-facing wall. Exactly zero complaints! These M-series chips are really great.
I will probably replace the Mini with an M2 Ultra Studio, if one comes out soon, but I can't say I really need it.
(I highly recommend getting screens off desks and onto walls. Large 4K TVs are cheap. Less clutter, frees up desk space, easy to see & read from anywhere in the room, makes giving demos easy, and -< big bonus for me >- I don't need reading glasses to see it!)
AppleCare is one of my favourite "features" that comes with every apple product.
£1725 as of today:
the £ was at a record low in September though it has gained back somewhat since then. Still down a lot more than historical levels. http://www.exchangerate.com/charts.html?continent=currency%2...
For my daily coding workflow, the fan never even spins. This is Docker, many containers, many many windows.
With docker on, battery lasts a fair bit. Without it on, running on bare metal, could last me days.
* 32GB RAM would not have been sufficient, glad I went for 64.
* CPU is exceptional, but significant gains would be seen with more power (or code/process optimisation): unit tests (Robolectric) still break the 'flow' threshold (1s). Xcode compiles + full test suite runs break the 'attention' threshold (10s).
* GPU is occasionally useful, but I don't do much ML/video work
Usage:
* I have enough RAM to keep 3 IDEs open + various electron apps + Office Suite + Windows/Ubuntu VM + 2/3 phone emulators + up to a few hundred Chrome Tabs. Fans are silent and laptop is cold.
* Fans spin heavily when running a full unit test suite (JVM/Android)
* Fans spin heavily when gaming (via Parallels)
* Fans spin slightly when running Stable Diffusion
I owe first generation M1 Air and it has been an incredible machine for 99% of the population. For the MBP crowd, the 15% improvement is IMO not worth the $
A 12 or 16TB configurable SSD would be nice.
I have an M1 macbook air because it was the only one without the bar. I've been waiting for this for a long time!
Looks like if i had waited, I could have paid the same price for faster CPU with more cores, faster wifi, and 8K HDMI output.
I guess that's how it goes.
But looks like I mis-spoke, the thing was actually ordered Dec 29, delivered Dec 30.
So actually two and a half weeks, a few days past 14, which does look like the return deadline in USA. I found a "check return eligibility" button... yep, nope.
Basically, connecting two displays via one cable.
An 5 year old PC supports it. Sad.
Apple's got good CPU and battery life, but unless the core features are present, I really don't care.
Here, 0/4 of my core features are present. It's certainly nice hardware, but it's not for me.
Thanks for the share.
@temptemptemp111 you seem to be shadowbanned, but your comment is spot on: OLED is about comfort. Sometimes I like working at night, sometimes in the daytime. I want a gorgeous screen that doesn't hurt my eyes, that can go very bright or very dark.
Having a powerful CPU is irrelevant when working on the console. Having days of battery life is irrelevant when having a plug nearby.
Would I take a powerful CPU and better battery life? Of course! But only if it was a bonus: for my specific usecase, there's 0 benefit from using a Mac. I'm sorry if that's hurtful to apple fanboys - you certainly have a wonderful machine if you care about battery life, a powerful CPU, and if you carry a cellphone with you at all times. I don't mean to be hurtful: I just have different tastes and priorities.
Like, I refuse to use or carry a cellphone except on very specific circumstances. Replacing my laptop with a Mac would be a net negative, as having a 5G or LTE modem in my laptop is more valuable to me than a long battery life: integrated cellular connectivity enable me to spend 1h at a coffee shop without wifi: there're various options for PCs (Microsoft Go, Thinkpads, Dell...) but 0 option for a MacOS laptop with an internal modem.
I'm looking at the Ryzen Thinkpad with great interest! But so far I haven't found one with both the screen I like (OLED) and the keyboard I like (pageup and pagedown around the up key), but as soon as I get 4/4 of my core requirements I'll move to AMD, as a Xeon is a bit power hungry :)
Totally this! I'd put OLED and even 4k in there too.
And I'd say that's true even for console work: 4k is great as it gets me crispy fonts in my terminal :)
It's a net positive, as I use Windows so I don't have the DPI compatibility issues that still plague Linux distributions (especially with multiple displays)
> integrated cellular connectivity enable me to spend 1h at a coffee shop without wifi
So you go a hour + without the ability to make phone calls or return texts? Can you dial 911 on your laptop if an emergency happens while on the way to the coffee shop? Does the coffee shop not have Wi-Fi or do you not use public Wi-Fi? How much is the additional data line for your laptop? Is it just data or voice too?
Yes. Actually, that's most of my days too, as I rarely have a cellphone turned on, even when I'm at home. I've done my best to remove that from my life.
So that's also true when I leave home, except in super specific circumstances.
> Can you dial 911 on your laptop if an emergency happens while on the way to the coffee shop?
I think I might be able to, even if they don't guarantee service? TBH I don't care about that much: if an emergency happens to me, either I'll be unconscious and someone else will have to call 911 for me anyway, or I'll remain conscious and then I can decide what to do.
> Does the coffee shop not have Wi-Fi or do you not use public Wi-Fi?
Most of them do, but I don't like looking for the password/asking for it/fighting connectivity issues. It's too much of a hassle.
Instead, I type Win-A, click on "cellular" - and that's it: I'm online and everything works! Even if I only took my laptop and paid for a coffee! If offers a unique peace of mind: no distractions, no interruptions!
> How much is the additional data line for your laptop?
I don't remember the exact price, but quite cheap, about 20 a month. I mostly use it for ssh outside home.
> Is it just data or voice too?
It's just data, as voice requires some specific audio and call routing that's tricky. But if you use skype or google voice, you can do voicecalls.
The P7x P5x and some of the previous P1 have Xeons and ECC, so it's 4/4 core requirements.
So I take it on the chin and I laugh all the way to my sofa with my ECC OLED 4K dual NVME "wonderful keyboard" thinkpad in my hands :)
Different people like different things. If they're happy to get a Macbook Pro with a M2 Pro, I'm happy for them too!
Even compared to the Samsung-built OLED in my iPhone 14 Pro, just massively different tuning.
32gb - 128gb all have the same utility for me, with expanded utility beginning at 128gb
Today, they announce m2 pro models hehe
Cores are still identical, M2P just has 2 more E cores compared to M1P so in some edge cases it should behave a touch better.
On the shop page the angle is available to see no touch-bar.
Most backend devs these days use Docker, and serious Docker usage on M1/M2 macs isn't really possible due to bugs and super slow performance.
I was doing benchmarks and for our workloads images would build several times slower as well as our test suites.
We had many devs in our company buy the shiny macbooks only having to return them due to incompatibilities with Docker.
My computer journey was Windows -> Linux -> Macos, now more than decade later I am returning back to Windows, because WSL is a total blessing.
If you're using ARM64 containers, then it works pretty well, for the most part.
> Yesterday a new @Docker For Mac version was released that will virtualize Intel containers with Rosetta instead of emulating them.
I have literally traveled with just a 30 watt anker brick for my phone and used it to trickle charge my MacBook overnight and I’m good to go.
From what hardware POV you are correct, I wish though Apple would adopt Carbon Magnesium chasis that thinkpad uses. For same 16inch size, Thinkpad is noticeably lighter. I can happy lug my P1 Gen5(16 inch) model anywhere, whereas 16inch macbook pro is hefty.
- No nagware (no Apple Music pop-ups, advertisements for safari, login nag in settings, et. al)
- Built-in package manager
- Having (relative) parity between production and development
Between those three, you probably couldn't pay me to go back to MacOS. Adding my own package manager, disabling ads and making my Mac into a Linux-equivalent machine is possible, but it's a lot of work to maintain and set up.
If I was a creative and used Adobe/Microsoft tools, I might be a little nicer to MacOS. As a programmer though? I haven't felt the desire to use a Mac since Mojave existed.
The Linux built in package manager is only ok. It often lags behind in versions of things I need. I ended up using Homebrew on both Mac and Linux. For the cases the Linux built-in package manager is too out of date I use Homebrew. It's not perfect on either system.
> - Having (relative) parity between production and development
For certain classes of development this is a big deal.
For my container work it doesn't really matter. I'm running Rancher Desktop and doing container based dev in the VM. Windows, Linux, or Mac doesn't matter as the host.
> - No nagware (no Apple Music pop-ups, advertisements for safari, login nag in settings, et. al)
I must have learned to ignore this as I've had Macs for a couple decades now.
On the flip side, a lot of business software I must use for work isn't available on Linux. I think this is the biggest problem for GNU/Linux as a general OS. There's some biz software that just doesn't run there.
Homebrew is down-right bad. There are certainly worse Linux package managers (pacman... looking at you), but if you're using MacOS I'd highly recommend giving Nix a try. Less muss-and-fuss, and stopped me from sending my Macbook on a swim in the local river.
> For my container work it doesn't really matter.
That's fine, it doesn't really for me either. The nice part (for me) is the native Docker and fantastic filesystem support. Whereas MacOS feels like a product I'm turning into a tool, Linux systems tend to feel like a tool out-of-box. Different strokes for different folks though, it really just depends on what you want out of a computer.
> I must have learned to ignore this
I must have learned to appreciate living without it, then. It's pretty jarring returning to a monetized OS like Windows 11 or Monterey for me.
> a lot of business software I must use for work isn't available on Linux
Oh yeah, for sure. Like I said in my previous comment, I wouldn't use Linux if I was a lawyer or a video editor. That being said though, pretty much everything I've used in the modern enterprise is browser-based. You don't need a native Jira app or a custom .DMG to run git. Arguably, everything you need is shipped right with most Linux distros.
I won't (and haven't) argued that Linux is perfect, but MacOS is converging with the Windows and Google school of desktop design. It worries me, and it's part of why I left MacOS in the first place. Photoshop is nice, but living on a computer that feels like a rented hotel room isn't very satisfying to me. Again, different strokes.
Curious why? I used to dabble with it and others.
A few macs ago (maybe around 2017), I switched to a strategy of “either the AppStore or brew”. I’ve never had a problem with anything from brew since. I install some productivity tools, standard OS tooling (Inkscape, Gimp, Libre), everything I need to develop for Python, Android, various embedded arm platforms, Elixir/Erlang. I even add some extra tools for Swift development.
It's a bit like comparing cakes. Homebrew is a frosted sheet cake, whereas Macports is that nice double-layer box mix your mom used to make. Nix is a coconut-dusted 6-layer wedding cake that hides a 10 course meal under the fondant. They're all delicious, but I have a hard time going back to the sheet cake nowadays.
No such thing. What distributions did you have experience with? And what distributions are you running on your production systems?
I’d also not be opposed to a package manager more geared towards making sure things work without fuss than trying to reduce redundancy. I don’t really mind if there’s multiple versions of whatever lib installed if that’s what it takes. Storage is cheap, my patience isn’t.
In theory flatpak and such should meet that need, but the implementation is so much more quirky and troublesome compared to e.g. Mac application bundles.
I do this on NixOS (and used Nix to do the same thing on MacOS). It's really great, but the up-front work of configuring everything can be a bit steep. The end result is pretty nice though - your environments are all sym-linked together from a common package store, and you can group together certain environments/package sets to update independently of one another. The icing on the cake is the rollback feature, where you can go back through the generations of your environment (until the packages get GCed).
It's not perfect (and it would test your patience), but Nix is an interesting commitment to the philosophy of using as much disk space as possible. I'm hopeful that someday it will be the de-facto package manager for Mac systems.
I have a Macbook Air M1 2020 and a Thinkpad X1 Carbon 7th Gen (4 years old!) running Linux Mint.
I have upgraded the Thinkpad's Battery, RAM (16GB), and SSD (500GB) for the cost of the parts. I will not be able to do that on the Macbook. Ever.
For what I do (browsing, videos, some writing and research) the only benefit to the Macbook is slightly better battery life. I have more software option on the Thinkpad for sure and it does not want to control everything I do.
I paid WAY less for the thinkpad and I get pretty much the same performance for my needs.
The THRUTH is that most people are being way oversold computing power and paying a premium for it because they are locked into the platform.
And just yesterday for some reason Safari vanished and re-arranged my bookmarks for no reason.
Getting my MacBook ready to sell as a matter of fact.
In my mind it is stupid (and poor marketing) that the linux community is not crushing Apple with cheap, fast laptops.
That is not how the economics of laptops work.
Most people don't want a Linux laptop. Call it inertia, but it is a fact that most people buy Windows laptops.
Most of the premium market consumers prefer Apple.
And most people who prefer Linux aren't paying a premium right now.
So you have three sets that do not overlap, and there is nothing the community can do about that in the short to medium term, anyway.
On my old MBP I get regularly nagged to update to Monterey. Despite it not being supported.
On my iPhone it wouldn't stop nagging me to accept changes to the iCloud T&Cs. There was no permanent opt out. You could say no for a bit and then it would go back to nagging you.
Same with Apple Music.
Currently my iPhone nags me to disable background running of Garmin Connect, so that I loose integration with my Garmin watch.
None of this endears Apple to me and is definitely a consideration for my next purchase.
I really miss the desktop environments available on Linux. KDE is great, and even Gnome beats MacOS. You can't even move windows between desktops with a keyboard shortcut on MacOS. The desktop experience on MacOS is a "death by a thousand cuts" situation. E.g. Popup dialogues will rearrange your windows (e.g. if the popup is wider than your window, to remain centered, it will move the underlying window and I'm not joking.) E.g. Mouse acceleration can't be turned off, which makes MacOS pretty awful for any mouse-centric workflows. E.g. Blocking animations that fundamentally can't be turned off.
That's on top of things that aren't necessarily faults with MacOS, such as getting used to different keyboard shortcuts.
On Linux, I get native Docker, up-to-date coreutils (they're different on MacOS), more precompiled versions of software I use, and having the Linux desktop software that I prefer. (Finder is frustrating, Gedit or Kate for text editing is great, GIMP is much nicer on Linux, etc.) I also miss KDEConnect.
I don't use Xcode, but as I understand, updating it messes with git and python.
But the battery life really is amazing enough to make it worth it. I'm really excited for Asahi to progress to a point that I'm comfortable using it.
https://forum.keyboardmaestro.com/t/move-frontmost-window-to...
My biggest gripe with Mac OS X is the window manager. I want to be able to ALT+right-click anywhere on a window to be able to move it around, alt+left-click anywhere on a window to resize it. I want to be able to click the dock icon for an app I'm using and have the most recently used window of that app come to the foreground instead of however it makes that decision. I'd love to get preview thumbnails of windows when hovering over icons in the doc so that I can select the window I want. Right-click plus reading window titles takes longer to find the window I need.
I want to be able to customize my fonts because I have a hard time reading text on my QHD external monitor.
I want a terminal that doesn't suck (and yes I use iterm2, it still sucks because I can't quickly jump to the end / beginning of a line to edit a command).
I want to be able to select text to copy to clipboard and use my middle mouse button to paste and I want that to work for all programs.
I want to be able to hold ctrl plus use the mouse wheel to zoom in / out of web pages on chrome ... something Linux and Windows both do out of the box but it just doesn't work on Mac OS X.
I want to be able to customize all of this and not feel like I'm locked in to "the Apple way" of doing things.
I lot of this is just familiarity and getting really used to a particular DE over decades of use and taking little things for granted. If all you've ever used is a Mac then I'm sure you've figured out how to be hyper-productive on that DE. I just find it strange that, from a company that somehow positioned itself as UX leaders ... I find that I'm 1/10th as productive on my work Macbook as I am on any nix device (and while Mac might use a heavily modified NetBSD kernel IIRC and have zsh and bash ... it feels very different from a nix machine to me).
Hold keys and click to move a window: https://mmazzarolo.com/blog/2022-04-16-drag-window-by-clicki.... I love it. Bind it to a mouse button with USB Overdrive for extra convenience.
In the terminal, use emacs-style bindings like ctrl-A and ctrl-E to move to the beginning and end of lines. On the Mac, Home and End are for beginning and ends of documents.
Use USB Overdrive or Steermouse to bind mouse buttons to whatever you want, including Paste. Select-to-copy might be impossible, though you could certainly do select-and-click-to-copy.
Cheers!
It's like using Arch Linux, except the software costs money, is proprietary, and people choose Arch because they would prefer their own config over the comforts and defaults provided by other distros.
Configuring a MacOS machine might require spending over $100 on usability software, providing personal information to a myriad of companies (Tools like IINA or iTerm2 are the exception and not the default.), and even after all that you still have a variety of unfixable usability issues.
KeyboardMaestro is $36 and BetterTouchTool is $22. With KeyboardMaestro, it's not clear what the license is (which makes it concerning for use in the workplace.)
> For almost every missing feature or annoyance in Macos, someone else has had the same thought and developed a solution.
I do appreciate the effort, but this isn't true. You can no longer disable blocking animations in MacOS, there is no Spaces API for instantly moving a window from one desktop to another, etc. And any of this can break with a MacOS update, and there's no easy way to automatically configure a fresh install. (IME, MacOS users use Time Machine backups rather than a fresh-install bash script.)
From someone used to the comforts of Linux, MacOS takes a huge amount of effort and expenditure to only get 20% of the way there.
There is no counterpart for Hammerspoon/KeyboardMaestro for macOS and AutoHotkey for Windows in Linux.
That said, that makes sense. I don't have experience with AHK or HammerSpoon, but I'd expect this functionality to be very dependent on the display server and overall desktop environment.
You summed it up nicely!
Sadly even with all the apps like hammerspoon, tiling wms and others, there are lots of stuff you can't customize in the macOS environment.
I also don't have to worry (or at least I think that I don't) that the Linux kernel or my distro silently introduces a hack for their programs to bypass my firewall and VPN because they couldn't fix some bugs by the company-mandated release date:
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/apple-nixes-...
1. I had hard time fighting openssl installed by Homebrew and getting Python to use it. On Linux - this is never an issue. In general IMO using homebrew is fairly tedious.
2. Debugging of stuff running on Linux. Sometimes logging is not enough and while remote debugging can be made to work (I mainly use Goland), it is pretty fiddly and does not work reliably.
I am not new to Mac or anything tbh. I used to use Mac about 5 years ago exclusively and then Linux for next 5 years and now using Mac again. IMO for kind of work I do - Linux is just leaps ahead of Mac.
Some window manager in linux are more like window manager frameworks, like AwesomeWM, that lets you customize its behavior via lua scripting. It's extremely powerful and allows you to get exactly the behavior you want.
But this part of linux is pretty niche stuff for sure though haha.
I wouldn't say I'm more productive thanks to this, but I'm way happier using a system I can set up so that it behaves how I want, instead of having to follow rules I don't agree with and can't change.
- desktop environment that is either sane (i.e. doesn't center align panels with variable number of controls like dock does) or can be customized
- keyboard without missing buttons, with actual button travel yet not touching the screen when closed
- option of a screen that doesn't double as mirror
I upgraded from the 13" M1 Air to the 14" MacBook Pro M1 Max
While Blender performance (rendering especially) is much faster, I sorely miss the MacBook Air's portability. The 14" is built like a brick. Compile times are faster, video editing is nicer with more RAM in the Pro, but it's a really tough call given just how different the weight is
I did love the M1 Air though! Probably the best laptop I've ever used pound-for-pound.
Under that configuration I've found 32GB to be just within the limit of usability. 16GB are just not enough. Also, for some virtualized Docker workflows, there is that known issue of slow File interaction through the Mac/virtualized file system, which makes working with say Magento, Drupal or simlar software REALLY slow.
As a comparison, I've also got a 2011 intel MacBookPro with 16GB RAM. That one is running Linux Mint. Docker performance is almost transparent, and the system runs pretty snappy for development.
With that said, the air is nice. It’s just not worth it to save 160 grams for my use case.
How do these sound to you?
I honestly don't know how Active Directory got so popular when it sucks so much on anything that is not Windows.
I honestly don't know how Final Cut Pro got so popular when it sucks so much on anything that is not OS X.
The population that uses Active Directory lives almost exclusively on Windows.
The population that uses FCP lives almost exclusively on MacOS (OSX is dead, long live OSX)
The population that uses Docker does not live exclusively on Linux. In fact, a minority of developers works on Linux laptops, even when they target it for deployment. It's a larger minority than in other sectors, but it's definitely a minority, not even a relative majority. The population of (web) developers is possibly the most evenly-distributed of all, in terms of OS.
If someone was trying to run FCP on an OS X VM on a linux box, what would you tell them?
It's not the fault of docker or linux containers that people insist on trying to use the technology on another unsupported operating system.
Obviously, it's the fault of people - as I said in the comment above: I'm surprised it got so popular among people, considering how much it sucks on the platforms lots of them use.
The whole idea of using Docker for dev boxes is to eliminate the cross platform dependency issues and make it easier for everyone, without maintaining wikis for each OS version. We don't use Docker at work because of the non-Linux performance issues.
Running the docker daemon in a linux VM on your OS X system and then complaining about performance is silly.
I will say that a lot of the software I run in Docker has an aarch64 bundle... there are a few things that don't. There's now a beta version of Docker Desktop that includes Rosetta support, which should dramatically help for x86_64 images. I also have found that the FS I/O is not great, but getting better.
(prior job was using M1 Max, current is windows+wsl)
The new 14" model is only slightly bigger than the 13" (.4"x.4" bigger and .5lb heavier) and supports up to 96GB of RAM so may be a reasonable consolation if those size and weight compromises are tolerable for you. Additionally, you'd get a better screen, keyboard, more ports, better wifi and bluetooth, and more CPU & GPU capacity. Of course cost will also go up quite a bit.
It would also help if the virtualization story on Macs improved so that you wouldn't need to have all that RAM just to compensate.
More details here to avoid spamming this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34374176
Of course if you need to have your laptop be x64 to match cloud architecture then that's different. Or you could just use ARM in the cloud and save even more carbon emissions.
The fact that Asahi is such a popular project is a pretty strong indicator of how much room for improvement MacOS has, to put it as politely as I can. Personally, I wouldn't even consider buying a new Mac if there wasn't any good alternate native OS available.
First, it's great to hear from Real World people like you about their Asahi Linux experience. It sounds like the baseline is done and now they will pick away at the remaining pieces.
Real question: What is the driver for Asahi Linux to exist at all? Please don't think I am trolling when I ask this question. At 10,000ft, any sane person would say: "Why? It's Apple. Let them do them: Mac OS X." I expect Asahi Linux folks to reply: "Well, duh: Because."
Is it unlocking the insane performance per watt of Apple Mx chips for Linux?
Is it enabling the world's greatest laptops for Linux?
Is it the pure technical challenge of reverse engineering a closed hardware system?
Is it everything?
I am really curious to hear what people think.
This has been the world we've had since the concept of "IBM compatible" existed. Some people prefer Windows (because of available software, or ease of use) and some people prefer Linux (e.g. for efficiency, customisability or desire to run open source software). Why should that choice be tied to whether you've bought, HP, Lenovo or another manufacturer?
Apple has made some amazing laptop hardware, but Mac OS doesn't suit everyone. So well done to the Asahi Linux team for trying to take us back to that world of choice.
I'm not disagreeing with your point, but Apple's foray into broadly standard hardware is the exception for them. Sadly.
...almost 20 years?
Ideally it should run everywhere but in my experience you'll never get a positive Linux Desktop experience unless you tailor your hardware purchases to the Linux world - this usually means choosing a laptop that tons of other linux users are using, so the bugs are getting found and fixed, and documentation exists.
The key here is that it should at least run on the most popular laptop brands. It should run on Macbook Pro because it's incredibly popular hardware choice for software/technical people.
I only use the Macbook Pro. The speed, battery life, coolness (to the touch), and quietness make it extremely difficult to have any desire to pick up the ThinkPad.
But I'd still be more productive with Linux.
Also, their ARM laptop is only available with Windows.
Screen was a bit better in most ways, keyboard was massively better, and the 16” was lighter (barely) than my 14”.
That said, I ran Win11 (my work environment requires Win) and MacOS is a straight upgrade to that IMO.
I do miss that machine though.
Using Mint, Elementary or whichever GUI distribution you would like to use with the Linux kernel has completely different tradeoffs in terms of GUI, which implies different productivity levels.
There is more. Even with the best case scenario you need to customise the GUI much more than you need to customise MacOS, for example energy management is a bit a of problem for most Linux based distros.
This simply happens because Apple owns the whole vertical from HW to GUI and they focus on the user. They have done this for decades. There is no such entity in the non-Apple world and this means there is more work for the user when trying to create a working environment.
Lenovo would crush Apple if it partnered with the Linux Community and made a cheap (in price!) everyday laptop for the consumer and focused on privacy and no lock in.
No it wouldn’t.
Users (the 99%) don’t care about privacy, tech, etc. They happily give their data up to TikTok (the CCP), Meta, Google, Amazon, Apple, etc. The Snowden revelations were met with a shrug or “I have nothing to hide”. This is well beyond established at this point (these platforms have billions of users).
They also don’t care about lock in - they just want stuff that works and adds as much as it can to their lives in as little effort as possible. The Apple ecosystem is incredibly successful because it does this exceedingly well. They view lock in as a positive - “All my stuff just works together - here’s more money Apple”.
The average person cares as much and is as involved in all of this as I am in understanding how my light switch is related to the function and operation of a nuclear reactor. The amount of care, time, thought, and energy I put into that is the cumulative total of the three seconds I spend interacting with light switches everyday.
I’m not disparaging users. I use the nuclear reactor analogy because I don’t care, I don’t need to care, and I shouldn’t have to care. I, (like most people) have only so much bandwidth for time, energy, and passion. I leave worrying and caring about all of that up to everyone from the people who mine uranium to the electrician that wires up the switches.
On HN we're the uranium miners, nuclear physicists, power companies, linemen, and electricians. We're the few people who do know and care about any of this "tech stuff".
Probably the biggest myth about Apple these days, that it just works. Can I tell you the countless hours I have spent helping friends with their Apple and iPhone issues?
And besides, as technicians, our job is to GET PEOPLE to care about this stuff and lead by example. What good is trying to convince someone to not use Apple products if you are buying the latest Apple product?
And in my opinion, Google products "just work" much better and are more open to multiple routes of access to your data. At that, they are way better than Apple.
As the "tech guy" for most non-tech savvy people in my life I can count on fingers the number of times anyone has asked me for help with their Apple products. For the most part I look around and see people easily and happily using their Air Pods, iPhones, iPads, iWatches, and Mac Books.
Yes there are occasional minor issues and bugs but everyone knows to do a little dance of "turn it off, turn it back on", disconnect and reconnect, etc. Just like when I get in my car occasionally, I turn it on, and the infotainment display is wonky. I shut the car off, open the door, turn it back on, and say "Hmm, that was weird". Then I move on with my day. I simply won't accept that these kinds of occasional minor issues don't exist in the Google/Android ecosystem.
In the rare occasion something more significant has come up with Apple products and it's not a five minute or less fix I point them to the Apple Store and let them deal with it. Where's the equivalent for Google, Android, etc? I don't want to get into yet another tired Apple v Android "debate" here on HN but (for me) that's reason enough for me to recommend Apple products for most people.
As far as access to data, again, they don't care. How many GDPR or other requests do you think Facebook has gotten for dumps of people's data? I'm sure it's 1% or less of their user base. Again, as long as people can sign-in to their iCloud account that counts as "access to their data" to them.
It's perfectly fine if you see part of our role is evangelizing these things. For me I don't want to be "that guy" who's a half-step from the cryptobro cousin at Thanksgiving trying to get everyone to buy bitcoin. I'll occasionally drop things like "Oh Tiktok, say hi to China for me" or "If the service is free it's because you're the product" but I avoid harping and evangelizing. To use my power analogy I wouldn't walk into someone's house and start talking about how they should really be using Cree bulbs or Leviton switches. If someone has interest and wants to get into getting big tech out of their life, Linux, or XYZ light bulbs and power switches more power to them but I'm not going to push.
I don't think any amount of education or preaching I'd do is going to get someone to switch from Android to Apple (or vice-versa), Windows/Mac to Linux, pull Alexa out of their house, cancel their social media accounts, etc. Plus, just like crypto, if they do follow my advice I'll get to hear all about it in the event anything negative happens. No thanks but again - if you want to try to fight the good fight I support it.
All the GUI productivity apps run better on a Mac—image editors, IDEs / text editors, apps like Slack or Zoom or whatever.
My introduction was to use nix instead of brew and ignore the whole "declarative configuration" aspect. It took me a while to get comfortable enough with that part of the ecosystem, but that's irrelevant to my point.
Give nix a try, use it like you'd use brew. Ignore the declarative configuration stuff for a bit.
My brew list is intentionally very short and my faffing about desire is limited.
Generally I use brew to pull in asdf (https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf) to install programming languages/tooling, it works flawlessly.
I use Pipx (https://github.com/pypa/pipx) to install python thingies (such as yt-dlp) as a cli.
Go and Rust handle binaries in their languages beautifully and without issues.
When you have some time might be worth it to start over. Don't use brew to install/manage your python, try it like how I wrote.
I never used brew to install or manage my python precisely because it gave me so many issues.
I’m constantly fighting Brew on all three computers where Brew is installed. Yes, I have wiped them, the problem is Brew, it is not the particular installation. If it were a problem with one particular installation of Brew, then it would not suddenly become a problem on a new fresh install of Brew.
The idea that you would need to wipe anything to start over is just bizarre to me in the first place. One of the many problems with Brew. Brew is extremely slow and it is prone to doing things that I do not want it to do without explaining why it is doing them or how I can alter its behavior (why is it installing package X? why is it updating right now?). Sometimes when I install a package, I get a spurious failure, and I need to re-run the installation command. Sometimes I just want to install one package, but it goes through “brew update”—which is extremely slow.
EDIT: I doubt your question is in good faith considering the 'cult' comment, but to answer your question at face value regarding benefit the first one that comes to mind is being able to have multiple versions of the same package and being able to rollback to previous versions if something breaks. This also means you can have package A depend on package B v1, and package C depend on package B v2, and both can coexist. If this is not something that's valuable to you, that's fine too. The other killer feature is being able to install dependencies for a project/repository if it uses nix - just clone, cd, and run `nix develop` and you'll have all the dependencies available.
Yes, I understand the multiple versions of the same package thing - Go/Rust have package managers that quite reliably solve that problem. Pipx also to a certain extent solves that problem.
Brew is useful mostly for casks (browsers, mac apps, fonts) which don't usually call for multiple versions.
I'm sure it is a hairy problem for some combination of languages/tools but I guess I'm somehow completely side stepping it. Perhaps I'm more likely to encounter it if I treated my laptop as a server because that seems more like where Nix might shine as a sort of ansible/chef/puppet on steroids ;)
# search for a package called `foo`
nix search nixpkgs foo
# install package foo, user-wide
nix-env -i foo
You can also test-drive a package without committing to it, e.g. you want to try the program `cowsay` but only want to use it once:
nix-shell -p cowsay
cowsay
exit
If they convince you to trade in the old one, they take that off the market and make cash.
Both Intel and AMD has done great job with their processors recently.
“With M2 Pro on MacBook Pro: Rendering titles and animations in Motion is up to 80 percent faster1 than the fastest Intel-based MacBook Pro and up to 20 percent faster5 than the previous generation.
Compiling in Xcode is up to 2.5x faster1 than the fastest Intel-based MacBook Pro and nearly 25 percent faster5 than the previous generation.
Image processing in Adobe Photoshop is up to 80 percent faster1 than the fastest Intel-based MacBook Pro and up to 40 percent faster5 than the previous generation.”
Apple has literally never posted “here’s a ream of benchmarks vs the Dell XPS XYZ and HP modelnumbersneeze738462” — pretending this is indicative of some grand conspiracy to hide performance deficiencies of these new M2 models the way GP is, is silly.
More realistically, this is one of the more drab ways apple announces products. They didn’t even have a presentation or anything. So they’re clearly not marketing with the same goals in mind as a presentation. I’d say the intended audience here are people already going to buy the latest model because they’re in the apple ecosystem.
Not that I’m inclined to defend a multi trillion dollar company, of course. It’s just pithy to hop into this sort of thread and grind the old axe against apple.
https://www.apple.com/ca/newsroom/2020/11/introducing-the-ne...
They talk all about how it's faster than 98% of PC laptops sold. When they are in the lead or feel they are then they do.
Apple is now facing the same struggle as AMD and Intel. They have a generational processor product that relies on new silicon to get faster, and they can't get new silicon fast enough. The M2 was basically just a wattage-bump of the M1, and looking at the performance increase/processor count, I'm inclined to call the Pro/Max the same thing. You're telling me you added 2 cores to a 10 core system for a 20% performance increase? Wow, color me surprised.
The whole thing feels like Apple's lack of humility here is biting them in the ass. There's nothing wrong with paving your own path in the tech industry, but mocking your competitors is not what a reasonably-educated analyst does. It's what someone in marketing does.
The linked website for this discussion is marketing.
Mostly, it's ironic that Apple is comparing themselves to a company that they want so desperately to escape. And, once you do run the math on their actual year-over-year improvements, it's not that different from AMD or Intel. And Apple is increasing their power consumption to hit those numbers. It's quite literally square one in a sense, just with a different CPU architecture and a different manufacturer.
They are selling to professionals, but probably not ones that speak your exact language. Having a solid understanding of hardware puts you into a small small minority of professionals that this was meant to be for. This is the same for Intel and AMD marketing: hardcore tech people are not the target audience for this material.
Professional:
1. relating to or belonging to a profession.
2. engaged in a specified activity as one's main paid occupation rather than as a pastime.
Professional writers using a word processor might not understand what "hardware-accelerated H.264" means, yet there it is on their website under Air! Are those for "hardcore tech" people?
You're referencing marketing material. All marketing material is to sell the product, usually to a somewhat targeted subset of the buyers. Looking at their sales, and around any office, their marketing, and "Pro" products, appear to be extremely appealing to a large range of professional users. I think this shows that their "Pro" label is appropriate. I'm having trouble understanding why you think it isn't appropriate.
Do you have a notebook in mind that is worthy of a "Pro" label, so I can see what you're baseline is?
Should they buy the Air, or pay the premium for the Pro? After all, they're "hardcore tech" people.
Do you have an example of a notebook where a "Pro" label would be appropriate, as an example, so I can understand where you're coming from?
I do all compiling and heavy testing on servers, so the laptop is just for SSH, analysis software, and regular desktop stuff, for which it is fast enough.
Frankly this speaks volumes about what a sea change the M1 was if people are hoping for a 50% performance increase between CPU generations.
That being said, They are still comparing against the M1 chips here. They aren't only comparing against Intel.
For people who don't mind an ultra-brittle screen or who don't mind paying an extra 20% Apple tax to get their screen replaced when it breaks. Had a M1 Mac. Screen broke overnight. Meanwhile my LG Gram feels way more sturdy and hasn't let me down in years. M1 Mac lasted about 13 months.
Not happy at all with Apple asking 680 EUR to replace the screen on a M1 Mac I paid... 1 000 EUR. 68% after 13 months to replace their shitty screen.
And to get what? Another brittle screen.
Sure, it looks nice. But my LG Gram wins, hands down: I can count on that thing.
Not being pithy but is this a common issue? It's not one I've previously heard people complain about, the screen on my current gen and prior (2012?) MacBook pros but seem very solid so I'm surprised that this is considered a weak point...
Have had an M1 Macbook Pro for 2 years now. Dropped it several times from various heights up to 4ft. Dropped books on it a couple of times. Screen still intact. "ultra-brittle" is nonsense.
(And in the 10 years I've owned Macbooks, never have I broken a screen despite dropping, etc.)
No problems with the screen. Travels with me literally everywhere I can take my backpack. No case.
Are you using your laptop as a frisbee?
As far as Apple tax, you pay for quality tools. In life you get what you pay for.
My Festool Domino was $1200. It makes one particular hole in a piece of wood. It's very, very good at it--but it doesn't replace my tablesaw ($600) or my bandsaw ($700) or my tracksaw ($400) or my drill/driver ($300) or my jointer ($600) or my planer ($900) or my drill press ($500) or or or--and I did not buy particular spendy variants of any of those, except the Domino. (I could've easily spent $2000 on a tablesaw alone.)
Contrast this to a $2500 Macbook Pro, which is a future computer from beyond the moon that can do a ton of revenue-relative work without even kicking on its fans, and can watch Netflix besides. It is also small; it provides all those benefits in a thing that can fit on your coffee table, without the ongoing costs of storing actually expensive tools (edit: as mentioned downthread, for me that's about $550 a month based on my mortgage's square footage calculation).
Computer people complaining about computer costs when they're paid six figures for what they do with them is...it really needs to stop. It's silly.
So...what, then?
But if you do they will wear out.
It's pretty hard to wear out silicon. That's why the batteries are glued in and they're made out of glass. To encourage them to artificially wear them out.
I (try to) buy quality tools but I can't really justify Festool for my bodgy DIY attempts. I can barely justify the Bosch Professional tools I tend to buy instead.
My friend, an actual professional who fitted our kitchen, exclusively uses Festool. He can definitely justify it and swears by it. He says it's quicker and the tools suck up more dust which means less time cleaning up and less exposure to lung disease.
He'd never consider buying a MacBook Pro though as he thinks Apple is for poseurs ...like me.
I'm a professional software engineer and not a hairy arsed builder[1].
I spend roughly 8-10 hours a day on a laptop and I want a nice one. I'm probably going to switch from my Dell running Linux back to a MacBook Pro.
(That's for the shiny logo to make me look cool in coffee shops and not the battery life, performance or general attention to detail obvs.)
With regard to useful lifespan, I have an MBP from 2013 that's still going strong even if the OS updates from Apple are getting sparser.
-
1. This, apparently, is the vernacular used by friends in the trades to describe a "proper" tradesman. You live and learn I guess. ;)
I do agree with your friend about dust collection though, which is why I use the tools I do use. Dust is the absolute worst, and it is worth spending money to solve that problem IMO. The thing about Festool (and also Fein)is that it's good at solving those problems portably, and in that light they're not that expensive. If you aren't a contractor and don't need to bring your entire work life around in a Systainer stack though, something like my 1.5HP Harbor Freight dust collector and a simple dust cyclone can get you very far by themselves. (They are, however, loud.)
I've also gotten into 3D printing I've been building better dust accessories for my other stuff. (For example I've got a set of 4" dust couplers in development that are a WIP but are noticeably better than any of the options I have found online for a reasonable price and that work in a home shop without ducting.)
That said, I have heard frequent gripes from people with newer models about things like hinges, ports coming loose, and keyboards failing - I mean, from my experience with their software quality over the years, I wouldn’t be surprised if their hardware design, while having plenty of great new tech, lacks attention to detail.
As for my own single data point, I have the following in my house and none have had any issues whatsoever: - 2012 inch MacBook Pro - 2017 12 inch MacBook - 2019 MacBook Pro - 2021 Intel MacBook Pro (Company machine) - 2021 M1 MacBook Pro
https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/gua...
" You always have the right to a minimum 2-year guarantee at no cost, regardless of whether you bought your goods online, in a shop or by mail order.
This 2-year guarantee is your minimum right, however national rules in your country may give you extra protection.
If goods you bought anywhere in the EU turn out to be faulty or do not look or work as advertised, the seller must repair or replace them free of charge or give you a price reduction or a full refund. "
And, really, a screen is a screen is a screen; any laptop screen is likely to be about as fragile as any other.
The repair prices are artificially inflated because there is no competition and they don't sell spares, and I think they keep them high on purpose to push their insurance product Apple Care. (Which is a great business for Apple, because the repairs are much cheaper for them than what they charge uninsured customers)
Losing external GPU support with apple silicon has become a major deal. In the age of AI tools like stable diffusion, performance per watt matters less if you lose the capability to scale up these kind of workloads. Gurman's report about the mac pro tower gave us reason to hope on this (that the upcoming mac pro will have eGPU support), but when it comes to MacBooks, let alone the pros, no one knows when/if the support will arrive and when/if nvidia support will be added.
Sure, but developing with Java up-to-16 is much slower with M1/M2 due to ports not being available, and Rosetta having to emulate. Datapoint: We develop plugins for Confluence and it’s about 1 minute to load each page.
I don’t think developing Java 11 is a corner case of using a Mac.
* AWS Corretto: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/corretto/latest/corretto-11-ug/d...
* Eclipse Temurin: https://adoptium.net/temurin/releases/?version=11
* IBM Semeru: https://developer.ibm.com/languages/java/semeru-runtimes/dow...
* Oracle GraalVM: https://github.com/graalvm/graalvm-ce-builds/releases/tag/vm...
Now someone grab my arms before I dump water on this keyboard.
The 13” remains a heavier Air, with two ports on the same side and no magsafe: https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-13/specs/
The M2-based 13" still has two USB-C on the same side and no SD: https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-13/specs/
It does not have an SD card slot not MagSafe because it was a 13” M1 MacBook Pro. Nobody claimed that their MacBook was the latest chassis, just that it had an M1.
> The M2-based 13" still has two USB-C on the same side and no SD
One can easily interpret their comment to say that they are happy it still has USB-C on both sides. Most non-MacBooks have one or two ports, generally on one side only. With the addition of other ports, Apple could have very well removed some of the USB-C ports.
I’m not sure why you are trying to insist that they don’t know their own laptop. They even provided you a link showing the model did in fact exist.
The comment I replied to says that they're drooling over magsafe, sd card, and USB-C on both sides.
My point is that's been available for 18 months at the exact same range position (and a lower price point) as the new laptops.
The updated version of their current laptop doesn't have any of those.
> I’m not sure why you are trying to insist that they don’t know their own laptop.
I'm... not doing that?
> They even provided you a link showing the model did in fact exist.
I'm the only person who provided any link here.
The m1 worked without any issues for 2 months. I upgraded yesterday to macOS Ventura:
* Upgrade finished but laptop froze. Hard reset.
* On first boot, the new System Settings failed to load icons, then froze. Trying to quit it froze the OS. Hard reset.
* I left the laptop plugged in for 12 hours, connected to 2 other displays over USBC. Laptop screen didnt turn on, other monitors did. Unplugged monitors, mashed keys on keyboard, replugged, laptop screen was still off. Hard reset.
I give Apple lots of credit for switching to ARM, but the last time I had this many issues that required a hard reset because the OS became unusable was Windows ME.
I used to praise macOS for its stability. It's still on average very stable, but in the last ~5 years the upgrade experience has not been rock solid anymore. I must have used at least a dozen Macbook Pro/Air and Mac Pro in that time, so I know it's not just 1 buggy laptop.
Would like to avoid Google and don't mind running my own server to manage it so long as I can use the default calendar app on iOS.
(Yes, many things don’t work yet. For personal use it’s fine though)
Why not Linux on much better supported hardware from Lenovo or Dell? It just doesn’t make sense to me to buy such an expensive computer only to remove a core part of the package, Mac OS.
Specific Intel laptops aside, something doesn’t work for each of them either. These days sleep is a big issue with Linux on modern Intel laptops due to Windows Modern Standby. All in all, characterizing Asahi Linux as poorly supported is probably just based on some expectation that does not necessarily match reality. It runs very well and GPU is about the only thing that is missing. Plus, Linux on Macs has always had the advantage of having a big community focused on solving very standardized hardware issues. Once they work they work for everyone out of the box.
I still ditched Apple though, I don't regret having traded battery life for compatibility. Arm64 remains a pain over 2 years later and for many years to come.
I have a Dell Workstation from work (Specifically a Linux supported one, whatever that means) using linux and my personal Macbook Air M1 is running Asahi Linux.
I really ran into no issues, the experience was almost scarily smooth. Everything just works. Sleep is definitely worse than on MacOS but it’s better than my Dell.
I can’t name a single thing that is not equally bad or worse on the Dell.
I guess that’s the benefit of only having to target a very small amount of hardware, it saves time for improving other things.
I remember preferring Linux on PPC to Linux on intel laptops years ago. Apple PPC laptops tended to “just work” with Linux in my experience.
I control some important details, like having 128G of RAM and a dual 4Tb NVMe setup.
It is interesting: I clarify and point out the limits of your (own) control, which you agree with, but you still call me pedantic.
You didn't have to write "everything". You could have said "more".
It is so easy for open source proponents (which I am, but not to an unlimited degree) to fall into these illusions that are entangled with imprecise language.
Perhaps the answer is not to shoot the messenger? Perhaps the cause of the negativity is the realization that we don't have that much control. You knew this at some level, but your choice of language downplays it. The big manufacturers are in the drivers seat, like it or not. This reality is uncomfortable. Better not to mention it, then!
I think we're very much on the same page.
But… I get you. To have a really good experience you need to have a really supported setup and then everything works swimmingly. My work issued thinkpad is the AMD version of the P14s and it’s brilliant.
Upgrading used to be an event. Now it’s a meh-fest of clicking a button, waiting a little, and being unimpressed with the new features thinking “why did I even bother? Total waste of an hour”
If you think that is bad... don't get me started on Screen Time in macOS. It is 100% broken, in every way, for kids and adults, in the most inexplicable ways possible. [Example: The "internet filter" fails open after a few hours. You thought your 8-year-old was only on approved sites? MacOS says yes, but actually no.]
I'm not invaliding your experience, just mentioning that others have different experiences.
Many people chiming-in about the absolutely rock-solid stability of the last few updates, and I'm adding my vote to that.
I have had zero system-crashes or freezes for maybe 2 or even 3 years now. I tend to wait to hear what other people's experiences are, but that waiting-time is getting shorter these days. And the update process is also getting smoother: almost never any need to fix update issues with apps.
If I go back 10 or 15 years, I remember regular kernel panics, tricky restarts into 'safe mode', spinning beachballs, clearing the PRAM (don't even remember what that was about anymore - but it was needed all the time), and so on. It was an ongoing task to keep the OS running.
So this idea that MacOS is "getting worse" is just complete amnesia, in my view. I have never worked with anything so stable and powerful in my entire developer experience over the last 25+ years.
If we're talking about the price of these machines (and especially the measly disks and RAM on the cheapest options) - that's another matter...
If you upgrade from Catalina -> Big Sur -> Monterey -> Ventura, for example, it becomes like a game of telephone. Small issues that happen with converting configurations accumulate. This makes me wonder if Apple tests new versions installed from scratch rather than upgraded over multiple generations like what happens in the real world.
But I've never felt like needing to do that with iOS - the only 'reinstall' occurs when I upgrade devices (and then I restore from iCloud backup). What problems did you run into that were resolved by a clean reinstall of iOS?
Funny to think that it's now Apple who have this problem.
The last true issue I had with apple hardware or software was in 2002-2003ish with a snow iBook that had a motherboard failure, but after that I've had nearly 20 unbroken years of basically fault-free existence which is pretty amazing if you ask me.
If they were to separate their first party app updates and OS updates (release wise, they can still market them together), more people would be able to pinpoint "ok it's not the entire update since I was on it just fine for a month, but actually just the notes app updated yesterday eating battery randomly". At least for cautious users.
While holding back app updates to stabilize the early upgrade experience might work, it's also somewhat contradictory to the idea that they upgraded the apps and their features and upgraded the OS as necessary to support the apps and features.
Every update since then has felt slow, or introduced bugs. Perhaps it was because Snow Leopard came on a physical disk, so they couldn't "just ship it".
My personal record stood at a bit over one week spent observing a dark screen with unmoving progress bar in the hopes that this time it will actually finish the upgrade.
Microsoft does distribute beta versions of Windows for third-parties to test against.
Does apple do the same? If Apple doesn't, then it's Apple's we have to blame it onto.
Much like Windows devs, Apple devs need to pay attention to this. If your livelihood is dependent on a platform, not paying attention is on you.
EVERY OS release will have some issues, and the people who are most impacted are the ones who chime in. If it "just works" for someone, they aren't going to chime in.
This is true of Mac, Windows, Linux, etc. I'd be curious to see a quantitative pre-release breakdown by OS and version. That might be more useful than individual anecdotes, as interesting as those are.
*However* Apple specifically only targets a very small subset of devices. The amount of obvious bugs that slip through in every release upgrade against such a small handful of devices from a company as big as Apple is pretty disappointing
Windows has to run on the overwhelming majority of "weird" x86 devices on the planet. The amount of work they have to put in with their hardware partners is comparatively staggering
My question is still legit: is there an (relatively) unbiased third-party that tracks bugs across major OS releases? Is that a bad question to ask?
It seems weird that these companies which presumably employ some programmers have this convention of bundling up all the bugs together for some nice combinatorial confusion. Everybody knows you keep your code in a working state from commit to commit, so you only have to handle one bug at a time, right?
I've been using macs for a long time and have never had any issues though. I also tend to run the betas very early on.
I don't doubt that you have issues though, I just think they have always been some % of users. And, now that more and more people are using macs that % turns into absolute larger numbers.
Going back to the early osx versions there’s have been weird problems when upgrading with peripherals and stuff plugged in
Permission issues also arise after every upgrade. I purposely wait until the .1 so that other people find all these issues but it's still super annoying.
Yeah, I feel the same. It's 180 degrees from a few years ago, when the MacBook specs were ho-hum but using MacOS was a big benefit (the physical hardware has always been great). The overall software experience with MacOS is now just "okay". The upgrade process is slow and there are a few UI quirks that other OS's just seem to do better.
Had a similar feeling while playing with an old iPod touch running the skeuomorphic/pre-flat iOS when compared with a modern iPhone.
Sorry, that was getting a bit ranty.
What is rose-tinted is the OP's remembering the OSes of a few years ago being great. Mojave and Catalina had a bunch of annoyances and weren't as good at recovering from a bad install or a bad update push as Monterey and Ventura. Not that Monterey and Ventura are great either.
It's amazing how snappy it is. I wish Apple would offer levers to turn off all the new (and laggy) features in their OSes for those of us who just want a computer to be simple and run apps.
The software _design_ however… yes, Apple is sliding. The new Settings is a mess. It’s so disorienting, even when I put aside the fact that I had used the old, NeXT-derived one for 20 years. You just can’t find anything without search, which adds steps.
There is a relative lack of attention to polish, discoverability, and charm. It’s all just made to be slick and shiny now.
As I age and switch constantly between OSes and devices for work, search has increasingly become my primary way of finding settings and whatnot. The part of my brain that remembers things spacially just doesn’t bother anymore.
- “General” is a trash fire of hodgepodge
- “Home Screen” & “Wallpaper” are separate top-levels
In general, the top level items are grouped by task, but the tasks aren’t labeled but instead implied:
- Radio signals (Airplane Mode, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth)
- Noise & distractions (Notifications, Sounds, Focus, Screen Time)
- Input, output, and appearance (General, Control Center, Display, … Touch ID, …)
- Purchasing (App Store, Wallet & Apple Pay)
- Apple apps (except for the first, Passwords)… Mail, Contacts, Calendar, …
- Apple apps with media (Music, TV, Photos, …)
- All the other apps
But for a corporation making these decisions, I would venture that the questions around how iOS should do it better are a separate concern from this merging the iOS way into the Mac way.
Every day i have to fight my macbook to get it to work properly. It’s slow to start up and external display is a daily struggle.
And this is a 2019 i9, not some old slow machine
The adverts in particular.
What adverts? Apple Music? iCloud Storage? Apple TV? Oh wait those are macOS
Maybe it’s normal for OS X but my Linux experience is pretty much the opposite - rock solid, everything is fast, and nothing breaks. Granted the hardware does seem really good (except for slow anything to do with x86 and a useless GPU that can’t play games or do VR).
Then it'll occasionally get into a state where it tells me it's connected to the network but doesn't have Internet access and it must be a problem with the network (I know it's not because I have other devices connected to the same network that work fine). To get out of this, I have to turn WiFi off and back on again but Apple in there infinite wisdom has decided if I turn it off and back on too quickly, I must've done so by mistake and so they don't actually ever turn it off. So I have to turn it off, wait some unknown period of time (I usually wait 30s), and then turn it back on. Drives me crazy.
In the end, every morning when I get to work, I expect it to be roughly 5 minutes between when I arrive and when I'm actually online.
My personal computer running Linux has never had such a ridiculous issue (it does occasionally have issues but they're usually fixable after a quick Google search) but somehow everyone claims Apple just works and Linux is to much of a pain.
(Or call support, I guess.)
You must get a high quality USB-C cable though. I got Anker brand cable. Previous cable I had lying around the house would only give me 60hz
My father, a long time apple user, decided to get an Apple M1 to replace his old Apple macbook. He bought the M1 8GB model (without consulting me). Turns out that the Apple M1 w/8GB uses ~4GB of that just to run the OS and if you happen to install adobe creative cloud there goes another 2GB and if you use some other "darkroom-alike" program to open a 20MB photo suddenly you're out of RAM and the software starts crashing.
Apple M1 8GB computers, stuffing the cache with their rosetta translation and lack of native software, cannot even edit photos. They're only good for surfing the web and sending email. Apple selling these as actual functioning general purpose laptops is a fraud.
I've been on an 8GB M1 for two years, running Adobe CC the entire time. I've edited absolutely massive photos - Gigabyte TIFFs, batch processing, etc - and never had any crashes.
In fact I've done the above while playing HD video from YouTube with 40 tabs open and not experienced so much as a hiccup.
This is not how this works
How much faster? I’m not sure what your specific point of comparison is.
Sure, the SoC provides many advantages, many due to Apple’s UMA (Apple’s Unified Memory Architecture) but the system is still limited by storage speed and latency.
But if we’re talking about the relative performance difference between solid state memory (i.e. SSDs, if that is the correct technical term here) and UMA RAM, I’d expect* a significant difference, perhaps (1) an order of magnitude in terms of latency and (2) 2X to 5X in terms of bandwidth. Not to mention that excessive SSD writes would be unwise.
Now I will admit, if there are large parts of the operating system that don’t need to linger / lurk / creep around in RAM, they could be swapped out. And they might even be kept on SSD and not have to be rewritten at all except for patches and upgrades.
* This is a guess based on ‘usual’ data-locality rules of thumb, hopefully allowing for Apple architecture somewhat. I’m happy to be educated / corrected.
All that aside, it's borderline criminal any new computer is being sold with 8GB RAM. This is 2023 for crying out loud. Do you want a 56K modem to go along with your miniscule amount of memory?
If I didn't have experience with higher-specced Macs in the past the experience would be enough to make me swear off ever using Macs again.
> open a 20MB photo suddenly you're out of RAM and the software starts crashing
Have an M1 laptop with Photoshop and Lightroom and need to edit 16-bit film-scans from a 6x12 that are more than a GIGABYTE each and have had zero issues.
The only reason I got a Mac for the first time is because the 8GB had good value. I would never buy the higher-end Macs because spending that much money on a fragile thing that cannot be upgraded is ridiculous to me.
Now I’m on an M2 Air and I don’t see myself needing to upgrade in the next 2-3 years.
I can say the exact same thing for my Linux XPS, in fairness. My M1 battery will last longer, for sure, but both will last a whole work day. But because the M1 can't run Linux to a good standard, it's mostly just used to test/debug OSX related issues.
Yeah, battery is great, not arguing that. But if you use heavy web apps and do a lot of VC, half day is best you can get.
But that's also irrelevant. Whole day of battery, if you don't use heavy apps is very different from whole day of battery.
It's part of Wirth's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law
Time from "push button" to "something happens on screen", was faster 20 years ago in some aspects.
Has turned a bit on my M2 Air it seems though.
I happen to have 2 identical monitors, and a third I can't use on a macbook pro with m1 pro. They're in H configuration, portrait, landscape, portrait (last two are apparently the same model though different years)
The mac constantly confuses the two identical monitors (one is rotated 270 degrees so it ain't great). I've tried two USB video card adapters; one wouldn't work at all, one from Plugable couldn't rotate the missing monitor (rotated 90 degrees). If I asked it to drive the middle horizontal monitor, it mirrors with the matching monitor (again an issue because it's rotated 270 degrees)
drives me nuts, there's no fix, it's a gamble which orientation it'll choose. making things worse - it also won't wake from sleep without a lot of trickery with the lid closed (only reliable method I've found is re-attaching the power cable... not great when I need to do this daily).
my old intel mac? hit the spacebar on my usb keyboard to wake up. no issues with 3 monitors, and could even drive the internal display with it.
I don't care about 2 external 4k screens -- some of us are still on 1080p and don't care. how did we regress like this?
I consider getting a MBP, but quite frankly I wonder if I could really let it crunch "pro" workloads over night, because either they have infinitly silent active cooling (doubtful) or they throttle the thing (bad). If I pay for top notch hardware I want to have it crunch at full blast for as long as I desire, if I need it.
The last thing I want is a burn mark on my laptop screen because of static parts of my IDEs and such.
So I consider it flashy for TVs and monitors.
What? In what universe is this true? They spent generations of macbooks on flashy keyboards that didn't work, etc.
Trying to pain Apple's inability to keep up in certain area as them trying to care about longevity is hilarious. In the end - it's not about longevity at all, it's almost certainly about whether they can get it at the price point they want, in the volume they want.
That's it.
Considering I buy a new MacBook every decade and they just endure the torture I put them through (I don’t abuse them though), I can say that they are pretty well built machines.
Same is true for my 7 year iPhone cycle.
I pay similar price to top tier laptops of other big brands, and get what I pay for. Use it for a decade, move the machine to spare and get a new one. When one does this with a thinkpad, we applaud them. When someone does it with a MacBook, we don’t believe them. Funny.
So they do sacrifice for flashiness?
> "I buy a new MacBook every decade"
Oh, a lot has happened in the last decade. This is an anecdote about 1 or 2 machines you've owned.
I’m currently using a 2014 MacBook Pro and a 2020 M1 MacBook Air. I have also seen and supported a lot of intermediate machines at work. We don’t service them unless somebody spills something liquid on their keyboards.
So, while I owned a few of these things, I have seen and supported way more machines, and my judgement stands based on this experience.
Longevity is a mistake? New things aren't flashy technologies?
> "we forgive them for trying if they are not Apple"
Believe it or not, every so often Google hardware get criticized! MotionSense was...a mistake made while trying new things.
No. Let's not move the goalposts. Those are two different things. One is not incorporating not mature technologies into the product, the other is trying to push a known technology further. They tried and failed for 4 years, and gave up.
If OLED was already a mature technology for large HiDPI panels and TVs, people wouldn't have been doing panel endurance tests, and TV manufacturers wouldn't hide panel-life sucking balance and recalibration features into their products.
I have used a couple of Macs with butterfly switch keyboards. The problem was not the switch idea itself, but how the key depth has been reduced to make it thinner. They have gone beyond the comfortable depth for speed typing and made a mistake. Also, the minuscule tolerances made it susceptible to jamming due to dirt I didn't like the keyboards with butterfly switches, to be honest. The depth and weight in 2020 MacBook Air (M1) is much, much better.
Yes. We criticize every company, but I think everything should be balanced. I'm not a fanboy of any company. There are ones which I enjoy using, and ones I don't prefer to use. The gist is, I try to objectively reflect my opinion on my comments, and I get replies in the tone of "my experience does not match to yours, so you're most probably lying", I'm genuinely disappointed. Because I never think the other party is not telling the truth. I'm just pointing out and saying "I'm in that state, so it's possible". But I never discount others' state and/or experience.
> "We criticize every company"
Oh, we walked that one back too
The first we and second we is different. You are pulling these sentences out of context, again.
First we is a group which criticizes nothing but Apple. Second we is another group which try to be objective.
> The first we and second we is different [sic]
Nope, objective critics criticize Apple and other companies when they make terrible decisions. Apple's vendor lock-in means that people that use a lot of Apple products are typically defensive and will make excuses for them. Google fans do the same. I'm typing this on an Apple product...
Butterfly keyboards and MotionSense both worked poorly.
As far as I remember, I also criticized butterfly keyboard switches up there. I'm also not afraid to criticize the tools I like a lot, too. I have also praised and criticized IBM, Lenovo, HP, Apple and numerous devices at other places.
I have never experienced MotionSense, so I can't talk about that.
Sent from my MacBook Air.
Hah! That gave me a good chuckle.
There's nothing that screams "longevity" as going out of your way to make all devices utterly irreparable.
Let's see, it's 2023, hmmmm, seems the machine is coming up on 11 years. IDK about you but I think 11 years is incredible longevity for a laptop. You know, it just might be that making the machine "irreparable" has been key to its longevity.
It’s dirty, but not frayed and working as well as the first day.
Edit: Do you need photos? :)
I guess if u keep a laptop stationary at your desk and plugged in at all times, then it could last 11 years. Although the very expensive 8gb of ram from back then is basically useless today.
While USB has resettable fuses and whatnot to protect itself, every protection circuit has its limits. There are even tools which can nuke the whole mainboards by charging capacitors and dumping all that energy to data lines.
> I guess if u keep a laptop stationary at your desk and plugged in at all times, then it could last 11 years.
Yes. Mine has seen quite a few countries and spent considerable amount of time trying to cool itself off while I'm developing my Ph.D. and try to get every bit of performance from its processor, all while using my first Mac's power adapter.
While I take care of my computer the best I can, it's not a "house PC" in any sense.
I've taken my MBP everywhere, criss-crossing the United States. I've connected it to many different presentation devices where I've been a speaker at conferences. I've connected to many different networks - including hard-wired ethernet. Not exactly stationary and kept on a desk. I can't even remember how many times it's been dropped while in my backpack - from table top heights. I think it has taken quite a bit of abuse.
> Although the very expensive 8gb of ram from back then is basically useless today.
Yes it is - and it has nothing to do with being soldered into the motherboard. It's too slow for today. I'm not going to take that RAM and install it on an M2 machine, for example - too slow. Honestly, on this point you're just whining.
Obviously we're swapping anecdotes, but you'll see there's a lot of people still running the 2012 MBP Retina machines. Those things were tanks! The other machine that also appears to be a tank is the 2015 MBP. Lots of people are still running those machines too. Maybe Apple has "on" years and "off" years? Wouldn't surprise me as many other manufacturers do.
30-pin connector is in fact a compact ribbon cable with plethora of interfaces and signals (analog audio i/o, FireWire, USB, Video, etc.) [0]. Lightning replaces this with a single digital bus which can be configured for plethora of things [1]. And the connector is both much smaller in both host and cable side, too.
For example, Lightning to video out adapters download a firmware from the host and boot first, then they negotiate the protocol and they start talking. Similarly, Lightning to 30-pin converter is a high-quality A/V station inside a small shell. It contains all the hardware required to expand lightning port to a full-capability 30 pin connector [2].
This is why also Apple is hesitant to convert Lightning devices to USB-C. Because it's not a simple USB port disguised in a reversible 8 pin connector. It's a whole software/hardware stack which allows port and connection to morph and adapt.
The port's introduction was indeed flashy, but I guess it was iterated for a couple of years inside Apple before introduction, I guess. So, the technology was already mature and boring before it's rolled out.
Another similar technology is "quick burst charging" (Charge 5 mins for 2 hours of use kind of thing). Pioneered by Sony almost a decade ago, now offered by everybody else (Apple, JBL, Philips, etc. on their rechargeable devices). The feature is flashy, but it's matured for over a decade by Sony before everybody jumped the bandwagon.
[0]: https://www.theiphonewiki.com/wiki/30-pin_Connector [1]: https://nyansatan.github.io/lightning/ [2]: https://www.techinsights.com/blog/apple-lightning-30-pin-ada...
What new Apple products can you buy today without a USB-C port, besides their phone? iPencils maybe?
It's not what expected, it’s disappointing, and I’ll switch to a new type of display as soon as possible.
OLEDs have problems with burn-in and lower maximum brightness.
Eventually, Apple is planning to get to microLED which can combine the best characteristic of OLED and Mini-LED without the downsides.
The Galaxy Book has a Samsung OLED (I also had a Galaxy Chromebook 4K OLED), it is a beautiful display with up to 400 nits brightness....
The 14 inch macbook pro lays a massive beatdown on it in an extremely hardcore way: Up to 1000 nits full display brightness with HDR capabilities up to 1,600 nits.
OLED displays are limited on peak brightness and it is brutal when you see it, the Macbook Pro 14 actually reduces peak brightness to 100 more than a standard OLED display to save battery. but grab a tweak like this: https://www.getvivid.app/ and you can crank it all the way up to 1000.
The rumors say that Apple plans to use a two layer OLED with essentially two OLED arrays one of top of the other. The reason for this is to stabilize the display as medium sized OLED are made with flexible substrate and can warp under some conditions. The dual layer is also suppose to allow greater brightness and to help prevent burn-in (perhaps by running each layer with less brightness).
If they intended a 27" iMac I think you would have seen it already.
At this point I think you either go with the 24" one or something like the mini with an external monitor of whatever size you like.
I understand the old (simple and brilliant) four-quadrant is not going to fit anymore, but this is just the opposite extreme.
You can customize any of these with the specs you need on their website.
What’s better, ultra or pro?
Not that I find the naming any good but Max v Ultra would have been more of a head scratcher.
The Max is a Pro with (up to) double the number of GPU cores (and memory controllers), the Ultra is two maxes stapled together: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/03/apples-m1-ultra-tape...
But even Max kinda stinks because it's basically the same word as "Macs". Max Macs, Macs Max. Ugh
Then, this is also used - completely unrelated to the CPU in there - in the iPhone line-up, in a whole new mixed-up level ("look at my new iPhone Pro Max Ultra!"), as well as randomly for other hardware (AirPod Max?).
What a mess. Actually, this is worse then 90s Apple.
So which is better, the 13500HX, or the 1365UE? What about the 13620H?
What about the 13900/13900F/13900E/13900H/13900HK/13900T/13900TE/13900HX/13900K/13900KF/13900KS? Which is better? And the 13905H is clearly better than all of them because higher = better right?
Intel has an absolute shit naming scheme.