Increasingly Familiar Apple Lust Objects for 2016 and onwards

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.

Several 13" at the right spec around £300 on eBay UK - if you buy thru PayPal you have some cover. Once they reach the retina era there are few moving parts to go wrong, but of course GPUs and batteries fail (not economical to replace either).
Elder daughter just upgraded to macOS 11 on her 2014 MBP13 (and the late 2013 is also able to) so there's a bit of life yet.

(and both are running Catalina, any retina machine can)

Good points, all - thanks.

feeling like I should start an ilx classifieds to sell my 13” macbook pro that’s still reasonable

this is a screenshot of part of my sidebar right now on big sur.

https://i.imgur.com/RnYZKAp.png

to be fair that's partially self-inflicted. i ran into permissions problems with superduper after installing. could not fix them. so i used disk utility to erase my external for a fresh backup. however, i didn't erase the 'volume group' - i erased the data volume of the overall external disk container. then i tried superduper again and somehow this happened.

(i also have backblaze as a secondary backup for this volume, so don't worry, you paranoid backuppers!)

Got my hands on a mini today and it seems more..user friendly than the pro max, which i returned as it’s just impossible to use one handed without feeling like my hands are in gym class doing calisthenics all day

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

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Sunday, November 15, 2020 10:59 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

not inside docker, but these are good https://mjtsai.com/blog/2020/11/16/performance-of-rosetta-2-on-apple-m1/

in Big Sur my Mail app decided to not show any windows. I tried everything to get it to display an inbox, a new message window, something. At one point I right-clicked on the dock icon and chose 'Show All Windows' and it kind of blurred most of the screen and displayed a message right in the middle that said 'No windows available'. Spooky shit! No, they weren't in another workspace. I restarted Mail, restarted the computer, still no windows. Eventually I hit on 'create new mailbox', which had the effect of jogging everything. I called it 'Adam'. I'm not sure who I had in mind. But once everything was back I deleted Adam. Sorry Adam.

Here's another one. If I'm in another app and I click on the Mail icon in the Dock, it doesn't bring it to the front. The app name in the upper left corner doesn't change either.

Ugh, Catalina is buggy enough for me, thanks.

catalina was fine for me!

have started using time machine though because superduper isn't compatible w big sur yet (TIL)

I haven't noticed much with Big Sur, aside from rounded edges on everything. I don't want my pics to have rounded edges in filmstrip mode in Finder! Trivial stuff.
Funnily enough, I gave up on Mail years ago, and just went back to having pinned tabs in Safari for Yahoo/Gmail - but now, I've decided to re-link the accounts. Seems...ok?

I think I use my Mac in a clunky inefficient way anyway (if I wanted to launch something, Cmd+Space and start typing; if I want to switch apps, Cmd+Tab; Spaces and stuff are *there* but a bit lost on me).

that sounds pretty efficient, Steady Mike. sadly cmd-tab doesn’t work to bring my Mail to the front, either

It's all just muscle memory at this point. I feel sympathy for all my (very remote) Client Rep and Account Coordinator colleagues that we try to make work "more efficiently" with all our back-end dev and UI clean-up, and Zoom presentations and initiatives... and it all goes nowhere. Cos ppl like to do what they like to do, even if it involves swearing. About 10% are excited about the One Cool New Trick but most want to get through the day.

Anyway, *that* was a digression!

The 12 pro in silver looks really great, especially the edges, very latter day 3PO

(and both are running Catalina, any retina machine can)