MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max • Hacker News Board

Re: MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max

#311

Post by mbreese » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 3:48 PM UTC

_fzslm wrote: post #71

gnufied wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have both a latest generation Thinkpad P1 Gen5 and Macbook Pro 16 inch M1 pro and while it is true that Macbook comes pretty close to being a perfect laptop, I still miss the productivity of a Linux laptop (for backend dev work). From what hardware POV you are correct, I wish though Apple would adopt Carbon Magnesium chasis that thinkpad uses. For same 16inch size, Thinkpad is noticeably lighter. I can happy lug my…

iTerm2 and lima [1] with a ARM64 Linux virtual machine w/ Rosetta (so I can still run x86_64 Linux code!) enabled me to fall in love with my MacBook Pro in this regard. i feel more productive than on a Linux machine now. MacOS is not without its developer power tools, if you dig around enough! [1] https://github.com/lima-vm/lima

Don't forget about the related project colima[1] that makes it easier to run Docker containers from a Mac command prompt using a lima VM to host the containers. I'm not convinced on using volumes with colima yet, but it does make using dev containers a lot easier with Mac native VS Code.

[1] https://github.com/abiosoft/colima

Re: MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max

#312

Post by masklinn » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 3:49 PM UTC

mynameisvlad wrote: post #219

masklinn wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of that was already on the M1 versions of the same laptops though wasn’t it?

IIRC, Apple offered (offers? I haven’t checked) the 13” M1 which was based on the previous chassis, then launched the 14/16” on the new one.

Well yes but that new chassis, with magsafe, 3xUSB-C, HDMI, and SD, was launched in 2021, with the M1-based 14" and 16".

The M2-based 13" still has two USB-C on the same side and no SD: https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-13/specs/

Re: MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max

#313

Post by clint » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 3:49 PM UTC

superkuh wrote: post #231

dchuk wrote: post #14

It’s crazy how far ahead Apple is getting in the laptop game with these new chips. I have the first gen MacBook Pro with the M1 Pro (ok maybe they’re not winning the naming game), and it’s a perfect computer. Battery life is literally all day, every single action is instant, I have zero regard for many apps or tabs I have open. It’s just perfect. I have literally traveled with just a 30 watt anker brick for my phone…

Things may be great on the high end of Apple's M1/M2 laptops given they actually have enough ram for simple tasks. But those are also insanely expensive. At the low end Apple is actively ripping off users providing computers which can't even edit photos. My father, a long time apple user, decided to get an Apple M1 to replace his old Apple macbook. He bought the M1 8GB model (without consulting me). Turns out that th…

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Re: MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max

#314

Post by gspencley » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 3:49 PM UTC

TheKnack wrote: post #235

lynndotpy wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For my experience, as a longtime Linux user who got a MBP: I really miss the desktop environments available on Linux. KDE is great, and even Gnome beats MacOS. You can't even move windows between desktops with a keyboard shortcut on MacOS. The desktop experience on MacOS is a "death by a thousand cuts" situation. E.g. Popup dialogues will rearrange your windows (e.g. if the popup is wider than your window, to remain…

Apps like Keyboard Maestro or BetterTouchTool can resolve almost every Macos usability complaint that I've heard. Keyboard Maestro can move windows between desktops with a keyboard shortcut, for example, and there are multiple ways to disable mouse acceleration. For almost every missing feature or annoyance in Macos, someone else has had the same thought and developed a solution. https://forum.keyboardmaestro.com/t/m…

Can it resolve me not being able to use MATE as the desktop environment?

My biggest gripe with Mac OS X is the window manager. I want to be able to ALT+right-click anywhere on a window to be able to move it around, alt+left-click anywhere on a window to resize it. I want to be able to click the dock icon for an app I'm using and have the most recently used window of that app come to the foreground instead of however it makes that decision. I'd love to get preview thumbnails of windows when hovering over icons in the doc so that I can select the window I want. Right-click plus reading window titles takes longer to find the window I need.

I want to be able to customize my fonts because I have a hard time reading text on my QHD external monitor.

I want a terminal that doesn't suck (and yes I use iterm2, it still sucks because I can't quickly jump to the end / beginning of a line to edit a command).

I want to be able to select text to copy to clipboard and use my middle mouse button to paste and I want that to work for all programs.

I want to be able to hold ctrl plus use the mouse wheel to zoom in / out of web pages on chrome ... something Linux and Windows both do out of the box but it just doesn't work on Mac OS X.

I want to be able to customize all of this and not feel like I'm locked in to "the Apple way" of doing things.

I lot of this is just familiarity and getting really used to a particular DE over decades of use and taking little things for granted. If all you've ever used is a Mac then I'm sure you've figured out how to be hyper-productive on that DE. I just find it strange that, from a company that somehow positioned itself as UX leaders ... I find that I'm 1/10th as productive on my work Macbook as I am on any nix device (and while Mac might use a heavily modified NetBSD kernel IIRC and have zsh and bash ... it feels very different from a nix machine to me).

Re: MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max

#315

Post by ZiiS » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 3:49 PM UTC

Whilst I am utterly impressed with my M1 Pro; they are comparing to the "fastest Intel-based MacBook Pro" which is 4 years old when Intel was struggling anyway. Not at all representative of what they could have done with the latest Intel or AMD silicon.

Re: MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max

#316

Post by kaidon » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 3:50 PM UTC

TheKnack wrote: post #286

optymizer wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hardware is indeed great. The software experience is getting worse imo, particularly when upgrading. It used to be rock solid for me. The m1 worked without any issues for 2 months. I upgraded yesterday to macOS Ventura: * Upgrade finished but laptop froze. Hard reset. * On first boot, the new System Settings failed to load icons, then froze. Trying to quit it froze the OS. Hard reset. * I left the laptop plugged…

For both iOS and Macos (and Windows for that matter) it's a good idea to backup everything and reinstall the OS from scratch for each major version. Yes it's a headache but it will prevent 10x more headaches that result from upgrading from a previous major version. Many of the problems people have with Apple OS upgrades are issues that happen during the process of converting configurations from one version to the nex…

This is why I never upgrade my Mac. The lost productivity risk is just not worth it.

Re: MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max

#317

Post by justinsaccount » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 3:50 PM UTC

toyg wrote: post #226

xtracto wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me MacBookPro with M2 chips would be perfect if the 13in model allowed 64GB RAM. My workflow requires me to run Docker (intel images) heavily with several containers. Having a virtualization layer is pretty resource consuming. Usually the Docker + containers I use take around 5GB RAM alone. Under that configuration I've found 32GB to be just within the limit of usability. 16GB are just not enough. Also, for some…

Chances are Docker would be a dog on that 2011 too, if you were on MacOS. I honestly don't know how Docker got so popular when it sucks so much on anything that is not Linux.

> I honestly don't know how Docker got so popular when it sucks so much on anything that is not Linux.

How do these sound to you?

I honestly don't know how Active Directory got so popular when it sucks so much on anything that is not Windows.

I honestly don't know how Final Cut Pro got so popular when it sucks so much on anything that is not OS X.

Re: MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max

#318

Post by recuter » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 3:50 PM UTC

klodolph wrote: post #176

firstSpeaker wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you elaborate what is preventing it from being the perfect backend dev laptop?

I’m not the person you asked—but a ton of developer tooling just runs better on Linux. Installation is usually easier too—on a Mac, there’s Homebrew, but Homebrew doesn’t have the best user experience. All the GUI productivity apps run better on a Mac—image editors, IDEs / text editors, apps like Slack or Zoom or whatever.

What specific developer tooling runs better on linux? If you're one of those Nix masochists I hear that runs on the Mac as well.

Re: MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max

#319

Post by csdvrx » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 3:50 PM UTC

mamby wrote: post #305

csdvrx wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on how I hold my laptop, yes I like to click and scroll with my finger, especially when taking notes or mindmapping. @temptemptemp111 you seem to be shadowbanned, but your comment is spot on: OLED is about comfort. Sometimes I like working at night, sometimes in the daytime. I want a gorgeous screen that doesn't hurt my eyes, that can go very bright or very dark. Having a powerful CPU is irrelevant when wor…

Touchscreen on laptop is like touch on a phone! once you use it you can't go back! but for Apple users only Apple can convince them...

> Touchscreen on laptop is like touch on a phone! once you use it you can't go back!

Totally this! I'd put OLED and even 4k in there too.

And I'd say that's true even for console work: 4k is great as it gets me crispy fonts in my terminal :)

It's a net positive, as I use Windows so I don't have the DPI compatibility issues that still plague Linux distributions (especially with multiple displays)

Re: MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max

#320

Post by slm_HN » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 3:52 PM UTC

geophile wrote: post #271

shusaku wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely such an issue would have been solved with the invention of virtual memory in… the 50s?

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Tell me you don't have anything to contribute other than a weak, ten year old meme without saying that you don't have anything to contribute other than a weak, ten year old meme.