Increasingly Familiar Apple Lust Objects for 2016 and onwards

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)

v nice

https://www.singhkays.com/blog/apple-silicon-m1-black-magic/

i like this one:

Apple M1 🤯🚀 pic.twitter.com/REskldpMap

— Mustafa Al Marzooq (@Memo_AlMarzooq) November 18, 2020

waiting for progress on this though https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/7857

well that settles that. guess i'll start saving for the m1 16"

I'm sure this has been mentioned before, but Big Sur feels a lot like it's getting MacOS ready for touch screens. Lots of padding around controls, buttons plenty big enough to hit.

Changing the scaled display resolution on the new #AppleM1 MacBook (left) is absolutely instantaneous 🔥 compared to the delay and screen blanking required by the Intel graphics on the 16 inch MacBook Pro (right) pic.twitter.com/YybbPF09TF

— Daniel Eran Dilger (@DanielEran) November 20, 2020

Like

mmmhmmm

forget #pepsinext, i'm part of #m1generation now

Is changing the resolution a thing people do a lot?

hush

Every time you (dis)connect an external monitor.

But yeah it’s almost pointless showing off, no one ever thought it was slow. This is the kind of minor thing that is only worth the time it takes to fix when you have an architectural clean slate like silicon.

Little things like this are going to make pcs look incredibly primitive. (macOS is still terrible and apple is bad)

home working, the idea of a KVM switch came up. it would solve a problem i have pretty easily i.e. wanting to use a laptop with an existing desktop setup. instead of plugging and unplugging everything each time the laptop user wants to take advantage of the big screen, fullsize keyboard, etc.

i've been looking around and they cost either £30 or like £900. not sure what that extra £870 is getting you...

Alternatively, get a bluetooth keyboard that can pair with multiple devices and a monitor with multiple inputs

I’ve been using the same desk for work and home stuff by having both hooked to the same monitor. Put one to sleep, wake the other up, and I have the (albeit crappy) sound build into the monitor connected to my speakers

I do that. I have iMac on desk and Dell monitor. When I want to use my work laptop I plug in the Dell cable and switch input. Then I usually use a second keyboard because I hate switching Bluetooth connections.

I have an external monitor / hub with a keyboard plugged into it, and a Magic Trackpad (Bluetooth, obv.)

I didn't find a good way to reliably switch the Magic Trackpad between two laptops, other than turning Bluetooth off on one of them. I considered getting a USB Bluetooth dongle, plugging it into a spare port on my monitor, and connecting the trackpad to that, but never got around to it.

This is good if you want a hand wavy explanation of why the M1 is fast and whether intel/amd can catch up https://erik-engheim.medium.com/why-is-apples-m1-chip-so-fast-3262b158cba2

Thanks for that!

Alternatively, get a bluetooth keyboard that can pair with multiple devices and a monitor with multiple inputs

KVM switches still exist!

i think the very expensive ones support multiple 4k monitors and thunderbolt and things like that. they're basically this sort of thing combined with a kvm (which is not to say $900 is reasonable) https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-thunderbolt-dock/.

i would never spend more than $50 on something like that but cool they exist i guess

i'd be tempted to just buy a bunch of cables and a DIY breaker switch before paying that kinda dough. but you don't have to!

once you've used some shitty KVMs you understand why people who need them for daily use will drop hundreds of dollars on a decent one

also I got an M1 Air and I am excite (although I won't get it for weeks yet)

Would it be a nutso suggestion to Remote Desktop into the laptop from the desktop rather then KVM?

Pretty laggy for anything other than basic icon dragging and typing text.
I’d just plug the keyboard into the monitor and buy a second trackpad (e.g. used or refurb).