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MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max

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Re: MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max

#451

Post by dividedbyzero »

JLCarveth wrote: post #178
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…

Look into Gallium Nitride (GaN) chargers. I got a 100W charging brick on Amazon for a little over $100CAD (a bit pricy yes), with 3 USB-C, 1 USB-A. There are cheaper models with less ports / wattage as well. A single brick fast-charges my M2 Macbook Air, my Phone, headphones.

Those things are crazy compact. I have a tiny Anker 30W single USB-C charger for my M2 Macbook Air and iPhone for when I don't expect to need a charger and it's hard to not lose it because it's so lightweight and small. The cable is a lot heavier and bulkier and I already bought the lightest one I could find.

Re: MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max

#452

Post by flenserboy »

ianai wrote: post #409
KMnO4 wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last version that was 100% forward progress for me was Snow Leopard, which was essentially the performance/bug fix revision of Leopard. The Windows 7 from Vista equivalent. Every update since then has felt slow, or introduced bugs. Perhaps it was because Snow Leopard came on a physical disk, so they couldn't "just ship it".

I think it’s time for them to do an OS upgrade like SL again. Just bug fixes. But this time they need to do it across all their devices too.

Not just one — two release cycles focused solely on bugs & performance are really in order. The sheer amount of change, necessary and otherwise, that has been dropped on the macOS in recent years has left things a right mess under the hood. Shoot, one release cycle alone should be focused on fixing/reversing the attempts to iOSify the Mac. The controls are wrong, the spacing is wrong, the appearance is wrong. Things are not consistent, and they do not work as the rest of the OS gives reason to expect.

Re: MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max

#453

Post by hra5th »

api wrote: post #77
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…

A VM on the Mac will run longer on battery with less heat than a Linux installation on a native Linux x64 laptop. Of course if you need to have your laptop be x64 to match cloud architecture then that's different. Or you could just use ARM in the cloud and save even more carbon emissions.

If you need to interact with connected peripherals from the linux environment a VM is still usually a much less productive experience. I do a lot of embedded development, and while it is often possible to do USB passthrough to connected boards, lots of things don't work the same as they do when running Linux natively, and I have never found it to be a seamless experience (on VirtualBox or VMWare)

Re: MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max

#454

Post by klelatti »

nicoburns wrote: post #100
jchw wrote: post #34

It's worrying that they are shying away from specifying generational improvements or at least comparing to it's competitors. The "fastest Intel MacBook" is not really the competitor for an M2 MacBook Pro, it's a predecessor. But I'd rather hear about generational improvements from M1, especially because both Intel and AMD seem to be making great strides in the low power space lately.

It's no secret that Apple's M2 series processors are a pretty minor improvement over the M1 series. Expect much bigger improvements in the M3 series which will likely be using TSMC's 3nm process (and then probably only minor improvements again for the M4 series). It seems that Apple's ridiculously impressive consistent year-on-year gains up the M1 were in large part possible because they were behind the state of the…

You’re right in that TSMC / Samsung were for many years behind the state of the art, and by extension so was the technology that Apple was using. Apple’s CPUs defined the state of the art for mobile though.

And now of course TSMC / Apple haven’t caught up, they have surpassed comparable offerings from Intel.

Re: MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max

#455

Post by lynndotpy »

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…

I should note that I consider this is one of the biggest flaws with MacOS. It really should not require someone to pick together disparate pieces of software to come to a state of usability.

It's like using Arch Linux, except the software costs money, is proprietary, and people choose Arch because they would prefer their own config over the comforts and defaults provided by other distros.

Configuring a MacOS machine might require spending over $100 on usability software, providing personal information to a myriad of companies (Tools like IINA or iTerm2 are the exception and not the default.), and even after all that you still have a variety of unfixable usability issues.

KeyboardMaestro is $36 and BetterTouchTool is $22. With KeyboardMaestro, it's not clear what the license is (which makes it concerning for use in the workplace.)

> For almost every missing feature or annoyance in Macos, someone else has had the same thought and developed a solution.

I do appreciate the effort, but this isn't true. You can no longer disable blocking animations in MacOS, there is no Spaces API for instantly moving a window from one desktop to another, etc. And any of this can break with a MacOS update, and there's no easy way to automatically configure a fresh install. (IME, MacOS users use Time Machine backups rather than a fresh-install bash script.)

From someone used to the comforts of Linux, MacOS takes a huge amount of effort and expenditure to only get 20% of the way there.

Re: MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max

#456

Post by ggregoire »

nvarsj wrote: post #173
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…

Def the opposite experience for me software wise. Latest joy is chrome hanging whenever tabs are moved. Things randomly seem to crash all the time. Maybe it’s normal for OS X but my Linux experience is pretty much the opposite - rock solid, everything is fast, and nothing breaks. Granted the hardware does seem really good (except for slow anything to do with x86 and a useless GPU that can’t play games or do VR).

It's obviously not "normal". I don't have any of the issues you are mentioning.

Re: MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max

#457

Post by dwighttk »

victor106 wrote: post #299
garyrob wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My own experience is different. \Years ago I would wait at least 6 months or more before doing a mac upgrade because of the inevitable problems. With Ventura I didn't even wait for the first point release, and had no problems whatsoever. (I did have two complete backups handy just in case.) I'm not invaliding your experience, just mentioning that others have different experiences.

This has been my experience as well. One of the first times I had zero issues with a major Mac OS upgrade.

I turned on auto updates and haven’t seen any problems since.

Re: MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max

#458

Post by citrusybread »

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…

software experience is funky, and I am really disappointed by the lack of support for external monitors...

I happen to have 2 identical monitors, and a third I can't use on a macbook pro with m1 pro. They're in H configuration, portrait, landscape, portrait (last two are apparently the same model though different years)

The mac constantly confuses the two identical monitors (one is rotated 270 degrees so it ain't great). I've tried two USB video card adapters; one wouldn't work at all, one from Plugable couldn't rotate the missing monitor (rotated 90 degrees). If I asked it to drive the middle horizontal monitor, it mirrors with the matching monitor (again an issue because it's rotated 270 degrees)

drives me nuts, there's no fix, it's a gamble which orientation it'll choose. making things worse - it also won't wake from sleep without a lot of trickery with the lid closed (only reliable method I've found is re-attaching the power cable... not great when I need to do this daily).

my old intel mac? hit the spacebar on my usb keyboard to wake up. no issues with 3 monitors, and could even drive the internal display with it.

I don't care about 2 external 4k screens -- some of us are still on 1080p and don't care. how did we regress like this?

Re: MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max

#459

Post by fruit2020 »

itslennysfault wrote: post #332
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…

I feel like people have ALWAYS had problems when upgrading MacOS (or OSX). However, those problems aren't with the OS itself usually, but 3rd party software that lags. For that reason I always intentionally lag 1 major version behind. I'll upgrade to Ventura whenever the next version is released. Been doing this forever and can't recommend it highly enough.

Just look at the Ventura settings window dude. How are they so sloppy that it cannot even scale properly, not commenting here about how ugly the experience is. At least make it scale a bit. Oh, and I did not say that it even has a lag when it loads, on a fresh login with no apps.

Re: MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max

#460

Post by trynewideas »

> With up to 96GB of unified memory in the M2 Max model, creators can work on scenes so large that PC laptops can’t even run them.4

...

> 4. Testing was conducted by Apple in November and December 2022 using preproduction 16-inch MacBook Pro systems with Apple M2 Max, 12-core CPU, 38-core GPU, 96GB of RAM, and 8TB SSD, as well as a production Intel Core i9-based PC system with NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000 graphics with 24GB GDDR6 and the latest version of Windows 11 Pro available at the time of testing, and a production Intel Core i9-based PC system with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti graphics with 16GB GDDR6 and the latest version of Windows 11 Home available at the time of testing. OTOY Octane X 2022.1 on preproduction 16-inch MacBook Pro systems and OTOY OctaneRender 2022.1 on Windows systems were tested using a scene that requires over 40GB of graphics memory when rendered.

Two things:

- The Quadro RTX 6000 shipped in 2018 and the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is a 12GB card vs. the 24GB 3090 or 3090 Ti, much less a 4090. I get that it's a marketing eye-roll claim, and it's cool to see a laptop post up against those specs, but why is Apple even bothering to measure performance against 4-year-old or under-specced cards? I wouldn't expect a 40GB OctaneRender scene to run on a 12GB gaming card or 4-year-old Quadro on any system.

- If 60% of VFX workstations are running Linux vs. 11% of macOS,[1] how does the M2 Max MBP stack up against a garden-variety Linux workstation?

1: https://drive.google.com/file/d/15b-4GMTSEE9tyqeQdBfy_LZnxQI...

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