Increasingly Familiar Apple Lust Objects for 2016 and onwards

The Mini is more interesting than the Air, but only if Apple makes RAM/SSD upgrades user-serviceable (ha) or affordable (haha) - the lower tier stock drives and memory are cruel.

pic.twitter.com/eejTX4wK04

— Paul Hudson (@twostraws) November 10, 2020

(similar to the PowerBook 3500 and the transition to PPC)
nooooooo that would be the PowerBook 5300 and just the model number is enough to make me break a sweat. I suffered with a work-supplied 16MB greyscale passive screen model and it was just hellish, eventually I bought a used 540c with my own money and life was so much better. I wasn't properly healed until the 1400c came along. God those were bad days to be an Apple user.

yr right. I was thinking of first PowerBook G3, not the 5300.

I think you were actually right in the first place - but it was the transition to G3, not to PPC. 5300 was an all new enclosure (and a piece of shit compared to the outgoing 540c), whereas the PB 3500 was a PB3400 with a G3 replacing the PPC 603e or whatever they had.
Of course down the road I was able to switch out the 603 in my 1400c for a G3/350 which was an improvement. I still have that computer, wrote my thesis on it, it's a gem although the screen is failing these days.

... which is what you said in your last post, I shouldn't post after a terrible night's sleep. Sorry.

big sur on thursday? did i hear that right?

anyone know why did the 16" MBP didn't get the new chips? is that coming soon? maybe they're still working on mini-LED displays?

I think the plan has always been to roll them out on the lighter-use machines and let developers catch up with iMacs and the big MBPs to come next year.

For my uses, I'd have to be sure most music software (lots of small plugin developers) + Lightroom worked well on Silicon before I switched from Intel.

It's a rule in life never to get the first get apple anything. Also I need to be sure R and QGIS run smoothly.

first gen

Except for the first iPhone and first iPod and first air pods which were all great

anyone know why did the 16" MBP didn't get the new chips? is that coming soon? maybe they're still working on mini-LED displays?

― the late great, Tuesday, November 10, 2020 7:48 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

the high end machines aris more complicated because they need an integrated GPU in the SOC that is way, way bigger than what they're used to from the iphone/ipad, or they need to do the hardware/software engineering work to make their silicon work with true external GPUs (memory, pcie, etc.). both approaches are tractable but they're not as easy as sticking a keyboard on a ipad pro and calling it a laptop.

aris=are

"true external" means outside the apple silicon chip, not "outside the enclosure". sorry that was a badly written post.

Speculate all you want, but I'm assuming that Apple's thinking is that the M1 performance is such that eGPUs are unnecessary
https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/11/10/apple-silicon-m1-macs-do-not-support-egpus

Of course down the road I was able to switch out the 603 in my 1400c for a G3/350 which was an improvement. I still have that computer, wrote my thesis on it, it's a gem although the screen is failing these days

The 1400s were remarkably indestructible over the long run. I never owned one, but a college professor did give me one that looked liked it had been hit by a car. Still powered up, I found a used screen on eBay and frankensteined it together.

Still going to hold out for whatever the rumored 14" MBP is next year and am going to keep ignoring/power-cycling through the "Service Battery" warning.

Speculate all you want, but I'm assuming that Apple's thinking

is that the M1 performance is such that eGPUs are unnecessary

If I’m wrong and they aren’t working on a solution to that set of problems, this is the end of the line for the Mac Pro btw.

Nothing is stopping Apple from making an external GPU with its own memory, right?

It’s probably hard and they haven’t done it before

I wonder if this architecture migration will end up with Macs losing a lot of pro apps.

I would guess they are spreading some money around to avoid that eventuality

they’re got an excellent integrated GPU and are targeting a subset of use cases to accelerate when it comes to creative stuff

but there are a bunch of use cases where discrete, often-upgraded GPUs are necessary and they can’t completely dump that market because it overlaps with a couple of their target user groups

they might just give up on trying to cater to those markets entirely. they definitely don’t care about PC gaming and would rather capture the 2/3 of the gaming market that exists between games that don’t need the newest GPUs on macs and mobile games. machine learning models are needed for a bunch of the ML/AI stuff done on their devices but training those models is something you could do in the cloud and not on device. high-end video editing is still a huge GPU thing, and I wonder if they just want to figure out where the low bar is for “works well enough” and create a machine with extra task-specific modules that can do that stuff similar to the module for the Mac Pro

I have no clue if they even have a GPU endgame, but if they can move machines without having to futz with supporting third-party cards they might go that way

when the transition to intel happened they had Rosetta to make the old apps work with the new architecture - is there something similar in place now?

yup, Rosetta 2 is in play

all this comes at a weird time for me. i just busted the display on my 15" 2015-era MBP, so i'm looking to upgrade. i work with media a lot, so i also want something kinda powerful but relatively inexpensive by apple standards. i'm intrigued by the new fancy M1/silicon stuff, but i really don't want a new machine that has trouble running older apps.

i'm considering waiting until the intel-based mac mini drops in price, then getting one of those, plus a decent 4K display? i'm thinking those two together would equal around $1300-1400, which is about what the new M1-based 13" MBP costs, while still being more powerful, and with a much better and larger display than i've ever had. my current MBP still functions (it's just missing the left .75" on the display and has permanent horizontal distortion lines across the bottom 1.0"), so i can still turn to that when i need something more portable?

xp meant to ask about rosetta 2, as well. did rosetta 1 work well? apple pitches it as the solution to the new architecture not working well with older apps, but i don't believe it

Rosetta 1 was good enough for the most part iirc but I wasn't doing too intense workflows

i have no flow, haha

i basically just use video editing software, photoshop/aftereffects, audio software (logic, etc), and most intensively, 3D 4D stuff like C4D

but i rarely use those all at once. so if rosetta 2 will work an ancient copy of photoshop, cool with me

that's all intensive stuff I would be worried about working on the new chips, honestly

esp Logic

yeah, i think so too. :( do you think there will be a price drop on the intel-based models anytime soon? it's a bummer because the intel-models now seem even more expensive, but they also might be left in the dust in the next few years as they transition?

Yeah but those are Apple/Adobe apps, which will be ported for sure. I worry about Ableton, but I'm guessing they'll bite the bullet.

Looking forward to seeing some actual benchmarks on M1 and M1+Rosetta 2.

Feeling that Apple customer foolishness from buying a MBP16 last year.

rosetta worked shockingly well iirc

I got a MBP16 early this year (I think?) and I’m fine with it

Intel ain’t going anywhere for a while

I don’t think most Ableton components have a lot of hand-optimized assembly code or anything. There will be some fiddling around with code to get it recompiled, I’m sure, but it’s not the effort it could be

They’ll figure out the gpu stuff. It just wasn’t the easy low hanging fruit to start with. Pro line next year.

I think I’m finally going to upgrade my 2013 MacBook Air for the new air. Waiting for a couple of reviews but it looks fine for my purposes.

my partner just bought her first ipad: a 64 gig air.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/10/21559228/apple-new-macbook-air-pro-difference-arm-m1-fan-thermal-performance

knew it

so the Air will probably be an underclocked version of the same chip, and the MBP will have better performance

This weeks ATP goes very deep on the architectural constraints and silicon roadmap

And when I said these integrated gpus can just about drive two monitors but can’t do heavy graphics work I was wrong. They can’t drive two monitors haha (although that seems to be an IO constraint. The gpu units could probably manage it.)

Hmm, in a quandary here. I have a fairly basic Mac mini with a 128 GB internal, in that that's all I need -- my music/video/etc files are on a separate hard drive, and my writing is backed up separately via iCloud and Google Drive. But as a result, in trying to install Big Sur, I apparently don't have enough space to actually put it ON my Mac mini as it stands (I had around 20 GB free, downloading Big Sur install files took me to 11 GB, and now it says I need 24 GB more). Any best options here?

Don’t install Big Sur? 😀

*badumtish*

this ought to get you there, Ned?

https://www.macworld.com/article/3566910/how-to-create-a-bootable-macos-big-sur-installer-drive.html

Don’t install Big Sur? 😀

No Sur!

xpost -- Thanks! I'll give that a whirl.

Be careful. I got an email from UAD saying my audio interface isn’t compatible with Big Sur yet.