Paul Cantrell
I’m a reluctant hardware upgrader, but finally got an Apple Silicon machine. And I’m really, really noticing what others have said:
it’s snappy. Really snappy.
It’s snappy in a way that raw speed can’t explain. My perfectly fast Intel machine has lots of little pauses and lurches and burbles that are just…gone. Waking, launching things, plugging in the external display, all just poof! happen.
Paul Cantrell
Why? Again, it’s not just CPU/GPU speed. It feels like there was some OS resource contention, some gear-shifting, some human-scale try-and-wait timer, that’s now eliminated.
Anyone have insight into why this is? I’m genuinely curious.
Paul Cantrell
(It is also worth mentioning that on the CPU/GPU front, the M3 Max is just stupid fast.)
Christopher Mackay 🇨🇦
@inthehands my jump in late 2020 from a Late 2012 MacBook Pro to an M1 MacBook Air was eye-popping. It’s still more than fast enough for editing 4K HDR video in Final Cut.
Paul Cantrell
@tantramar Mine was a jump from medium-high-end 2019 Macbook Pro (a fairly fast upgrade cycle for me), and it was •still• eye-popping
Paul Cantrell
Because nobody asked, other quick thoughts on the new M3 MBP vs my 2019 Intel MBP:
I miss the old machine’s weight (~0.2 kg / 0.5 lbs lighter) and its shape. The curve of the case was so elegant.
The new keyboard is magnificent, even vs post-butterfly MBP.
As much as I wanted to like it, I don’t miss the Touch Bar, with one exception: adjusting brightness on multiple displays.
Dedicated SDXC port: why?? I’d rather have another Thunderbolt.
The notch bothers me •far• less than I’d expected.
Paul Cantrell
All in all: lovely machine, a pleasure to work on, not without tradeoffs (nothing is), but I’m happy I upgraded now.
Paul Cantrell
@schwa
Ah, see, opposite problem here: my daily work life consists of plugging in to half-broken projectors all the time, and so having half-broken dongles in the mix just makes it all miserable!
Jonathan Wight
@inthehands I use the SD port enough that I am happy with it. I'd trade that HDMI for another tbolt though.
Paul Cantrell
@aubilenon
I had mine finagled so that it was effectively blank unless I had the fn key pressed.
I still think it might have eventually succeeded if they’d made it pressure-sensitive (so no spurious touches) and given it haptic feedback just like the trackpad’s. Oh well.
Jesse Morris
@inthehands I was about to go on a rant about how much I hate the touch bar, but since I basically turned it to just always show f-keys a couple years ago I haven't turned my computer off by accident at all, and now it's just pointless instead of actively bad.
Paul Cantrell
@aubilenon I did appreciate having two continuous tracks for adjusting the brightness on two monitors. Actually, that’s pretty much the only thing I miss about it.
Jesse Morris
@inthehands IMO they should've gone with a mechanical action but OLED keycaps.
The most ridiculous thing you could do with it as it was is there was an emoji selector function where you ... just swipe linearly through the whole list of emoji. It was completely unusable to the point of hilarity.
Ron Parsons
@inthehands
How’s the trackpad? For a while it seemed the trackpads were regressing to be almost as bad as the ones on Windows machines.
Paul Cantrell
@ronpar
It’s lovely. And I am fussy about such things.
Benjohn
@aubilenon @inthehands Something I love about the touch bar is it's exactly the kind of thing I think I, and I suspect so many people, might have also got wrong.
Here's the idea! Tried out! Tried at enormous expense! You can actually buy the bloody thing (I mean – you have to, in fact for a few years) and use it and feel just how completely crap that genius idea you had turns out to be. It's okay – don't thank us.
The thing I imagine could work is track pad the size of the whole of the beneath the keyboard aluminium chunk, that's actually an oddly shaped iPad. It's a track pad mostly, with haptics, but it's also a piano keyboard, or a mixing desk, or room lighting interface, or a video splicing thing. Or maybe a drawing interface. Or so many f keys.
Go on Apple! Try my mad idea! Spend a billion on it!
Paul Cantrell
@ronpar
I would of course recommend trying one out yourself, since I don’t know what things you’re sensitive to. But I find it to have exactly the precision and predictability I would expect from a Mac trackpad.
Ron Parsons
@inthehands
That’s good to hear! Thanks for providing the feedback as I expect to replace an old laptop soon and I’m debating which to get.
Paul Cantrell
@ronpar
Pro is a no-brainer for me since it’s my only machine and I mostly use it at one desk or another, but if I traveled a lot, I’d be torn.
Ron Parsons
@inthehands
I will. Debating between the Air and the Pro and that was one of the things to compare between models.
And it isn’t being “fussy”, it’s having high expectations 😉
Paul Cantrell
@crazybutable
Yeah, I do wonder in particular whether core allocation + different memory model + some kind of reduced IO contention for the drive specifically makes Spotlight cause fewer hiccups. “Oops, gotta wait for mdworker for a sec here” would fit the flavor of many of the minor performance hiccups of the Intel machines.
John Wilson
@inthehands the os optimizes background tasks to run on performance cores, and in many cases, will prevent those low level tasks from running on a performance core.
If you have a threaded web browser and you are switching back and forth between that and your IDE, and the OS kicks off a check for updates, then spotlight indexing in the background, and who knows what else, the OS tasks will not be preempting your work
I only notice slowdowns when I run out of ram. Not the case on Intel.
John Flanagan
@inthehands have you tried switching displays resolutions yet? It INSTANT. No brief flicker to black. No jitter. Nothing. Even with an external display attached. It’s such a small thing, but it’s incredibly nice
Paul Cantrell
@jflan Yeah. Just plugging and unplugging the external display still kind of freaks me out.
Paul Cantrell
@EpiphanicSynchronicity
This is a good tip, thanks!
The lack of expandable storage certainly is one of the great failings of the current generation of machines. Likely worth it for the speed tradeoffs, but still…!
Epiphanic Synchronicity
> Dedicated SDXC port: why?
A lot of pro photographers use these machines, but for the rest of us, Transcend (and possibly others) sells cards that fit flush with the cases of the Mx MBPs and can be used to expand the base storage (slower but fine for less used files) or for Time Machine backups.
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