Increasingly Familiar Apple Lust Objects for 2016 and onwards

a little bit out of loop on this stuff - for a lightroom library, what’s the performance hit of having it sit on 1. external ssd or 2. external spinny magnet drive vs. the internal ssd?

unless the library is well over 2TB, don't get a spinning external disk. they're big and slow.

get an nvme stick and enclosure if this is for a desktop, or just pay the storage tax if this is for a laptop. it's a rip off but it simplifies software and hardware a lot.

my thinking when i paid an insane amount ($600?) to max out storage on my m1 air (to 2TB, way more than i need): i cannot make these changes after market and my last macbook air lasted 8 years.

I wanted this mac studio for years, since I have my own and better monitor already, but ended up getting a macbook pro m1 max. At least I can move it around.

question that possibly no one has any answer to:

I’m pondering the jump to a new MBP for work. There’s a thin slice of my current work that requires Windows. It sounds like the Windows Insider ARM build works really well with Parallels on the current M1/macOS setup. What’s the chance that Microsoft decides they’re going to just drop support or cut off that version from download?

Presumably Parallels is interested in getting licensing worked out so they can eventually sell a bundle?

don't know, but i can't imagine *MS* making arm support (broadly defined) worse in 2021. seems more likely that apple would break something via security improvements.

siracusa runs windows on his mac pro (he plays destiny), so he occasionally refers to windows difficulties on ask atp, and is switching to apple silicon soon (might be waiting for the pro). maybe he'll get into it.

thank god it’s siracusa and not you-know-who 🤣

Gabneb?

it's a much better display

Ha no sorry it isn’t, I was looking at the pro xdr!

My god, it's a desktop computer. I never thought Apple would make another.

(No the other two don't count, exercise left to the reader.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyT_hqrSzxI

I haven’t really paid attention to these new things but I did just get a refurb of the lowest spec M1 MacBook Air. I haven’t had an apple laptop in many years, but it’s just a joy to use.

Only $850! Cheaper than my phone.

Sometimes I still can’t believe I worked on this. It was a strange and really cool time in user interface design. https://t.co/4fb8ghDnhf

— Sebastiaan de With (@sdw) March 11, 2022

Bah. That was a shit time in UI design.

I saw someone non ironically using a 4 or 4S this week

I use a 4S daily, but only as a music player for my car

Was anyone else besides Apple doing that weird felt/leather replication thing in their UIs?

http://images.nintendolife.com/screenshots/59263/large.jpg

eh not really an example but i'll take the joke

third time lucky posting this. "skeuomorphic"

https://99designs.com.au/blog/creative-inspiration/truly-lickable-skeuomorphic-designs/

i have digital synths in linux made to look like the synths they replicate but that's a different thing, a copy of an actual thing, not a style.

https://99designs-blog.imgix.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/skeuomorphism-10.jpg?auto=format&q=60&fit=max&w=930

a bunch of old Windows junk had skeuomorphic bits, but the macOS X/early iOS apps did it a bit better. I also don’t really miss it at all

Two months in and my M1 Pro MPB 14" is a strong contender for the best laptop I've owned. I've gone most of the day on battery and rarely go below 70%. Fan hasn't come on once. Gawd just the increase in graphics switching to a second monitor alone. I think I'm going to accumulate a couple extra days of life just from now having to wait around on that.

I feel exactly the same about mine. It could do with being smaller – I've got too used to having an MacBook Air – but I'm not sure what I'd want to give up about it to make it so.

not letting myself buy a new MBP (to replace my late 2016 MBP) until I finish my taxes

but I am letting myself configure one on the store. apparently Windows gaming via Parallels is shit, so there's no reason for me to get a Max. 16" Pro, 16Gb RAM it shall be.

Having suffered the touchbar 15" for coming-up-to five years, I finally cracked and asked work for a new machine. Standard replacement lifecycle is 3 years but they make it so pointlessly difficult to get a Mac rather than a janky Dell piece of garbage that they can remote configure to run like shit, that it takes me 2 years to psych up for the fight. Hoping the M1 makes life better.

i still love my 2017 touchbar macbook ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The machine itself works OK, but the keyboard had to be replaced (and still sounds like throwing Scrabble tiles in a bucket) and the connectivity is shit, every monitor I've had to connect through quite-expensive dongles has periodically glitched out. We've gradually made our peace I guess.

My 2014mbp fans are getting a little wheezy and I only get 10 minutes of battery life but otherwise the old guy is fine

Still running a 2012 first gen retina model here beside me because I have a major application which can't run on Big Sur. The fan is nattering away and it has a GPU panic every few days, but otherwise gettin' it done. The 2017 will shift to that role if I can downgrade the OS.

2014mbp here too, but I paid a guy round the corner to replace the battery (and remove a ton of dust in the process), so it'll do me for a while yet.

Daughter's 2020 m1 mba is in another league. Only time I get to touch it is if I'm entering my PayPal details to buy something for her. She's had to switch to the Intel version of Ps via Rosetta for her animation work (no video layers in the Apple silicon version), but even that seems to fly along.

My kid has the same mba and yeah I’m PayPal only but nice box

Running a 2020 M1 MBP myself since June and yeah, it's fucking fantastic. I'd been living with a 2013 model until last year and it was still running strong, but the difference is unbelievable.

2019 MBP. it's a piece of shit I literally hate it

2010 MBP still hanging in there, with maxed out RAM and a new-now-old battery. I feel like I should upgrade although my old timer still does the few things I use it for (rather than my iPad)

I use an M1 Air and really like it. Seems really fast and the keyboard is such a pleasure after years of using touch-bar models.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akQB35Am8lI

bit the bullet and ordered a base mac studio with an m1 ultra. tl;dr of the youtube is that the m1 ultra 2x's a lot of lightroom tasks vs. the m1 max. fwiw i currently have a m1 mac mini with 8gb memory that absolutely chokes on lightroom with my workflow.

the price difference is not that bad when you compare it against the mbp, a 14" mbp with a m1 max and identical ram/tb to the base m1 ultra mac studio is $3500. of course you're sacrificing portability and that nice mini LED screen but i'm not really a laptop guy so it'd be wasted on me. plus, ultrafusion! also, i'm committing tax arbitrage by traveling to a tax-free state to buy, now that apple lets you select in-store pickup for future dates, so saving a bit of cash. what'd really be nice is if costco got their supply chain in order - they have the base m1 ultra mac studio for $3800 but it's oos. that's a bargain!

you selling that mac mini? :)

4real loving my 2021 m1 iMac and glad I didn't get suckered into a "pro" model when really I'm just playing paradox games, browsing the internet and pretending to produce music with logic once a year. Happy that their pro stuff is actually for pro's so no more fomo

biggest reason for enjoyment is how nice she looks sitting on my kitchen table. Can't really make a statement like that with a laptop ya know

the mac mini will be transitioned into HTPC duties, although last time I tried I remember there's some weird fuckery about whether you can stream 4K on a desktop vs. a drm locked down apple TV etc.

Sell the mini, get an aTV 4K, so much simpler and better. Plus you get to keep the change. If you want to stream off a server, Infuse is superb and not expensive.

plus phones and iPads as remotes, etc etc

play too much downloaded content to fully commit to an apple tv

That's what Plex is for.

NAS (which is a little long in the tooth but has enough compute power to run the Plex backend) plus Apple TV over here. Works like a charm

AppleTV sees the library on my mac so I can play all music/videos that are on my desktop. Maybe not as powerful as a plex type deal, but does the job for me.

i have a NAS that i never got around to using because it was too complicated.

i have access to my friend's plex and it's cool, but not something i think i'd ever set up. too much work and it feels like oh great, another library to manage and maintain and upkeep - my music library is messy enough as it is!

play too much downloaded content to fully commit to an apple tv