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Apple’s 2016 in review

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Re: Apple’s 2016 in review

#391

Post by exadeci »

matt4077 wrote: post #198
richardboegli wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the Macbook Pro was meant to be for Power Users?

I have no idea what these self-annoited "professionals" do, but it's actually quite difficult to get the MacBook Pro to its limits. Doing webdev or using Xcode it's hard to ever notice any delay. But maybe I'm just a noob who isn't professional enough to suddenly discover that life just isn't worth it without 32GB of RAM.

You got your answer in your question: "webdev". If you use After Effects it's recommended to allow it 8GB of ram so you have 8 left, your browser takes 3 to 5GB, you now have 3 to 5 left but usually you have photoshop that needs to be running too so remove 2GB and now you are really tight on memory.

Re: Apple’s 2016 in review

#392

Post by yoz-y »

falcolas wrote: post #330
yoz-y wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I would like to know is how we got here - that some NEED 32GB of RAM in a laptop. Scouring the web for some time shows me that in 2015 it was quite hard to get a non-gaming laptop with 32GB of ram. Now, there are quite a lot of voices that cry that it is some bare minimum. To me it seems that more people now prefer laptops to desktops and it is annoying to sacrifice performance for portability. The lack of…

> One thing I would like to know is how we got here - that some NEED 32GB of RAM in a laptop Inefficient programs with shiny GUIs. OSX + GPU + Chrome + Hipchat alone consume over half of the available memory on my machine right now. And that's just the software which supports my development, no editors, compilers or VMs. Start to throw in modern editors, VMs (software which behaves very poorly when swapped out), comp…

I run a virtual machine (to which I allocate 8GB), Qt Creator, chrome, safari, slack, iTunes, Skype, Sourcetree (all of the apps that are deemed to be memory hogs) and some more support tools, and I still have memory to spare. I have the impression that macOS has got really efficient with memory management. On windows, I never keep so many applications open (mostly due to non-existing window management)

Re: Apple’s 2016 in review

#393

Post by yoz-y »

daxelrod wrote: post #384
yoz-y wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bollocks, I have a 16GB ram MBP from 2014, running a VM all the time and compiling on both the VM and the host OS. No problems there. The 32GB might be more comfortable for some, but I have hard time figuring out how something so exclusive has now become a necessity.

I generally expect to use a Mac for 4-5 years after I've purchased it. I've added memory to every Mac I've owned so far at some point in its lifecycle. I have a hard time believing that in 2021 16GB of RAM will still be sufficient.

That is a valid concern. I'd like to believe that at some point we will shift back to developing for performance. At home I have been using a 2009 mbp with 4GB of ram and only upgraded it to 8 last year. I have still managed to put an app to the store with it (before the upgrade).

Re: Apple’s 2016 in review

#394

Post by dx034 »

bergers89 wrote: post #320
dx034 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. There's one other major phone OS out there (Android), with the majority of phones made by less than a dozen companies. Linux and Windows are the only other choices when it comes to operating systems for computers, and few companies manufacture high-end laptops with acceptable quality. The only company selling everything is probably Microsoft, where you can buy a laptop from the manufacturer of the OS. But…

hp elitebooks, thinkpads, toshiba's notebooks are all well designed. You can throw anything on it.. linux, bsd unix or windows. You have a variety of distributions or bsd os'es. i don't know what you're talking about phones: there are plenty of phone vendors out there, too. Instead of whining about a company, it would be better to move on and decide what you need and buy that.

Yes, but you'll still have a Microsoft OS, HP laptop, Google phone, etc. What many people (including me) like about Apple that you have/had a well designed ecosystem for all your devices, where hardware and software are made to work well with each other. No one else can really provide that.

Re: Apple’s 2016 in review

#395

Post by intoverflow2 »

exodust wrote: post #357
intoverflow2 wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recently made the same decision myself to use CUDA too. After months of considering hacked open thunderbolt enclosures that nearly cost the same as a PC anyway I just switched. I now measure my 3D render times in seconds not double digit minutes. There is no doubt in my mind that if the trashcan mac had Nvidia GPUs I would have just saved up and spent over double I spent on this PC even if it had worse performance. I…

Can I ask what sort of rendering you're doing? Do you mean animation or still images... what software? I find that between different software you can get vastly differing render times. Also, for really serious and large work aren't people using render farms now anyway?

Doing animation and still (admittedly haven't produced anything yet as I've only had this setup running for a week) mostly motion graphics and advertising focused.

I'm working in Cinema 4D and Octane render (render engine built from the ground up for GPU) with a single GTX 1080, coming from a 2.7 i5 MBP with no dedicated GPU the difference isn't even comparable.

Good idea of what you can expect from a single 1080+Octane is in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGXmsUnbPCM

The industry is at a bit of a crossroads from what I can see, of course huge studios have investments in render farms and CPU based tech but for individuals and Being able to run a renderer on your desktop machine that can show the end result in near real time completely changes your workflow. It's no longer just using experience to make guesses with lighting and materials then waiting minutes to see if your hypothesis was correct.

Re: Apple’s 2016 in review

#396

Post by kalleboo »

nicolas_t wrote: post #114

I went from almost never needing to restart my mac (with Snow Leopard) to having to restart it a couple of times a week with Sierra. The UI just becomes totally unresponsive (the cursor stops moving, the time in the menu bar stops ticking and the spinning wheel stops spinning) and needs a restart. And I don't even have things like SIMBL installed (I used to with snow leopard, not anymore). I just have Karabiner eleme…

I would look for hardware errors - I haven't had to reboot my MBP outside of system updates since back when Mavericks had buggy graphics drivers. And I have all kinds of crap running.

Re: Apple’s 2016 in review

#397

Post by DoofusOfDeath »

secabeen wrote: post #362
DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's one piece of anecdata, not for a "dev" but for another high-end use case: professional photography. My wife is a professional photographer. Her current photo-editing computer is a Windows 7 desktop with 16 GB of RAM. We know Windows 7's days are numbered, so we're starting to think about her next editing computer. The two most obvious options are (a) some Apple product, or (b) a computer running Windows 10. He…

Looks like the only blocker for Windows 10 is the "minimal unplanned downtime." Although Windows 10 does have mandatory updates, I have yet to see one that requires immediate and sudden reboots. Yes, if you get prompted for an update reboot and delay it a few times, the system will eventually force the update, but a simple workflow change of rebooting the system every night when you're done working with it and are go…

I'm not particularly concerned about unplanned reboots. The real issue is some Windows 10 updates have caused problems which made the computers unusable until remediated.

There are some points in the business calendar where 1-2 days of downtime is catastrophic. For example, shortly before the deadline for submitting highschool senior photographs to the yearbook publisher.

If we could purchase a version of Windows 10 which allowed her to delay installing updates for 1-2 months until a crunch time is over, that would probably be acceptable.

AFAIK only Windows 10 Enterprise allows that, and I'm not aware of any legal way we can get that.

If we do have to go the Windows 10 route, my contingency plan is to look into setting up a firewall (external to the Windows 10 box) that blocks all relevant Microsoft IP addresses.

Re: Apple’s 2016 in review

#398

Post by DoofusOfDeath »

pdimitar wrote: post #380
DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's one piece of anecdata, not for a "dev" but for another high-end use case: professional photography. My wife is a professional photographer. Her current photo-editing computer is a Windows 7 desktop with 16 GB of RAM. We know Windows 7's days are numbered, so we're starting to think about her next editing computer. The two most obvious options are (a) some Apple product, or (b) a computer running Windows 10. He…

The "immediate forced reboots" on Windows 10 are vastly overhyped and received much more negative press than they should have. I am yet to experience a reboot when I didn't want it. Anecdotal for sure but I've set my inactive hours inside Win10's settings and never had a problem. Windows 10 is your best answer. It's gonna be supported very long and it's a 99.9% painless upgrade from Windows 7. Definitely invest in a…

I mentioned this in another post, but the issue with updates isn't that they're immediate, it's they they're forced.

My wife needs her system to be stable during certain points in the yearly business calendar, and an unavoidable, potentially-breaking update is a serious concern.

But why Windows 10 rather than Windows 8? Both will receive security updates for a long time, and (AFAIK) Windows 8 doesn't have the issue of unavoidable pushed updates.

The only real downside I know of to Windows 8 is its bad UI, but I'm told there are 3rd-party shell replacements which approximate the Windows 7 interface.

Re: Apple’s 2016 in review

#399

Post by DoofusOfDeath »

daxelrod wrote: post #381
DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's one piece of anecdata, not for a "dev" but for another high-end use case: professional photography. My wife is a professional photographer. Her current photo-editing computer is a Windows 7 desktop with 16 GB of RAM. We know Windows 7's days are numbered, so we're starting to think about her next editing computer. The two most obvious options are (a) some Apple product, or (b) a computer running Windows 10. He…

For (3) check local independent repair shops. I know of several Apple-authorized repair shops that rent inexpensive loaners while they're working on your computer.

Thanks for the tip!

Re: Apple’s 2016 in review

#400

Post by exodust »

intoverflow2 wrote: post #395
exodust wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I ask what sort of rendering you're doing? Do you mean animation or still images... what software? I find that between different software you can get vastly differing render times. Also, for really serious and large work aren't people using render farms now anyway?

Doing animation and still (admittedly haven't produced anything yet as I've only had this setup running for a week) mostly motion graphics and advertising focused. I'm working in Cinema 4D and Octane render (render engine built from the ground up for GPU) with a single GTX 1080, coming from a 2.7 i5 MBP with no dedicated GPU the difference isn't even comparable. Good idea of what you can expect from a single 1080+Oct…

Thanks for info. Yes the live render previewing is getting quite nice.
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