Increasingly Familiar Apple Lust Objects for 2016 and onwards

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.

I'm still waiting to be sure everything works fine w/ catalina. There were so many issues I'm hoping to skip it altogether and hope Big Sur is better and everybody gets on board. Yesterday's roll out brought my entire company to a standstill so that's not promising.

As it stands, I'm noticing a work-related email asking to hold off on installation due to security software compatibility. Which, fair! If nothing else I'll have the technical side on my end settled and can just wait on work to give the all-clear.

The IT dept at my company also told us to wait on Big Sur...wish I had a separate machine for personal use I guess

I'm still on Mojave. Is there any reason for me to upgrade?

Never went to Catalina either because of a few 32-bit apps. Maybe it's time to bite the bullet... or not

i would not install the x.0.0 or x.0.1 of any macOS. give it a few months imo.

install it day 1 u cowards

no I'm asking if I should install Catalina

None that I can see except it’s purty

Installed Big Sur earlier today. Seems to be running smoothly on a 2019 iMac. Relieved not to have the Music app bug of early Catalina where it would be fetching artwork for hours. The only issue I've noticed so far is that Maps seems to take an incredibly long time to open.

The overall look seems not that different - unless i'm completely unobservant. There is a fairly useless control centre icon in the top right. I'm sure I'll have forgotten in a couple of days that the OS has changed.

pro max just arrived...it's huuuuuge

Same here. It really is enormous. Amazing to read things on though, and camera is turning out to be miles better than the XS.

(I have seen a recurrence of an old bug from the first days of Live Photos where it makes the blur as you put the phone down into the key frame, though)

High Sierra chugging along fine over here

Still on regular old Sierra on a 2014 mbp! Anything later fucks with the Nvidia card mine's got, supposedly.

I hate Apple's harassing upgrade now notifications so much.

Sorry, half the software I says not to upgrade, you're gonna have to chill the fuck out Mr. Cook.

Went all in on Day One. I reformatted my Time Machine drives to APFS. Full backups really really fast now finally.

Are you backing up to SSD or a spinning disc

APFS is good yes

lmao ok wow this OS is incredibly fugly

why is there so much ... empty space everywhere?

also they weirdly seem to have made half the stuff more skeumorphic and half the stuff less skeumorphic ... make up your damn mind!!

Snappin mad pix wit dis new cam

Are you backing up to SSD or a spinning disc

Spinning disk.

New UI is both good and bad. Dark mode looks great on a big monitor, empty and crowded simultaneously on something like Mail.

i don't know if i like it or not, but it's nice that the UX feels like it's getting some attention. reminds me a little of when os x first came out and jobs kept talking about how it was all 'lickable'. everything feels very candy-like.

re: skeumorphism i feel like they're trying to split the difference and it mainly works? i was never a fan of the entirely flat effect - like some schmindie casual mobile game graphics. the subtle shading makes the icons pop a little. it's more approachable and friendly imo.

very small font on mail subject lines in my inbox now! and i would love to get rid of 'favourite' mailboxes. i have it set up the way i like already, thanks - don't need you deciding what my favourites are.

Tomorrow’s forecast of rain portends an imminent installation of this candy azz sh1t

would like a little less space overall but hey

Paused plans to buy the new MacBook Air until there’s a supported docker and some benchmarks of intel docker images.

I have a 13 year old 27” iMac and a 7-8 year old 17” Mac Book Pro. The iMac has a DVD drive. I still purchase physical media whenever possible.

Which would you upgrade first?

idk, depends what you want to do

could just get a sweet mbp and a decent monitor/external drive

They made 27'' iMacs in 2007?

I had a similar thought regarding the 17” m b p , which was last made in 2012

I have a 13 year old 27” iMac and a 7-8 year old 17” Mac Book Pro. The iMac has a DVD drive. I still purchase physical media whenever possible.

Which would you upgrade first?

iMac Pro is majestic, buy one.

15yo daughter is constantly on at me to get her a Mac. I think it stems from a trip to a Cash Converters last year where she was amazed to see MacBooks for under £300 - but pretty sure they were Unibody 2011-12 refurbs. She's doing a lot of graphic design with Adobe Illustrator for school, and her entry-level W10 laptop can't hack it. (For all the remote learning this year, the school issued Chromebooks, but for Creative Cloud apps, the kids are on their own). Am I right in thinking she'd be seriously underwhelmed by what a 2012 Mac (esp one with less than 8GB RAM) can do with resource-hungry Adobe apps in 2020? Esp with a sub-FHD screen. Better off spending the money on a reasonably well-specced Windows laptop from the last couple of years?

If I were an Adobe user I’d rather have one of those than anything else you could get for £300.

You might be able to upgrade the ram to 16gb yourself with a Philips head on Mac that old. Check ifixit.

What kind of Adobe apps are we talking about. Lightroom and photoshop she’ll be fine. Rendering and video maybe not so much.

I have two daughters with very similar requirements. I've found that the retina MacBook Pros are the min spec (so, late 2012 for the 15", and late 2013 for the 13"), and for Adobe stuff, 8GB RAM is the bare minimum (it can't be upgraded in those models). Likewise a 256 GB SSD (although they can be upgraded if you are tech capable or can pay for it). Here in Aus I have found those for about £300 equivalent locally and on eBay, but had to be patient.
If you're searching through listings, anything with a CD drive in it is pre-retina. Anything older can't run the current OS (and probably not the current Adobe suite either). But 8GB/256GB is the minimum RAM and storage.

When my work desktop blew up I replaced it with a Lenovo laptop that was $500 (from Costco) - 15.4" screen, 9th gen core i7 processor, 1TB SSD, 16GB RAM (user upgradeable, I think). Can't imagine a comparably valued Mac being remotely as useful.

The speakers suck, it's not a Retina screen (but still perfectly fine for using Photoshop and InDesign to make flyers and stuff) and the trackpad took some getting used to vs. Apple's - but OTOH, the keyboard is better and it has a number pad on the right hand side.

I think she has access to some kind of shared Student All Apps plan, but hasn't installed more than Ai or Ps. Half-convinced most of her issues are down to just bloat and garbage on a laptop she's hammered for non-school stuff for several years (I did a regedit search for Amazon Assistant so I could properly uninstall it, and that immediately improved things). If a teenager's PC is like their bedroom, yada yada... I don't spend that much time with the girls, so it's hard to get to bottom of these things.

All her recent video editing she just, er, delegated to me in iMovie cos there wasn't a chance Prem Pro would run on her machine. (I have a mid-2015 MBP15R).

So, yeah, InDesign, Illustrator, Prem Pro, Photoshop, Lightroom, I guess? She's welcome to call upon my 12 years of experience of doing the same bloody thing to every photograph in Lr if she wants.

I was also thinking 2013- Retina w/8GB was minimum, and official reseller refurbs of those are £500+. That gets you an awful lot of 2018-19 W10 machine.

xxp

Check the support situation. You’re right on the edge of macs that are too old to upgrade to Catalina, and Adobe no longer sells/supports some of their older pre Catalina versions.