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My Impressions of the MacBook Pro M4

michael.stapelberg.ch

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Re: My Impressions of the MacBook Pro M4

#121

Post by amluto »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #28
rottencupcakes wrote: post #16

It's classic Apple to spend over a decade insisting that that glossy screens were the best option, and then to eventually roll out a matte screen as a "premium" feature with a bunch of marketing around it.

Historically, traditional matte screen finishes exhibited poor optical qualities by scattering ambient light, which tended to wash out colors. This scattering process also affected the light from individual pixels, causing it to refract into neighboring pixels. This reduced overall image quality and caused pixel-fine details, such as small text, to appear smeary on high-density LCDs. In contrast, well-designed glossy…

All of what you say is kind of sort of true in the sense that, if you are in a room with lots of off-axis light hitting your screen and darkness behind you and you yourself are not brightly lit, then the glossy screen is better. And the glossy screen is certainly sharper.

But if there’s a window or something bright behind you, the specular reflection from the glossy and generally not anti reflective coated screen can be so bright and so full of high frequency details that it almost completely obscures the image.

And since I might be trying to work involving text in a cafe as opposed to doing detailed artistic work in a studio, I would much prefer the matte surface.

Re: My Impressions of the MacBook Pro M4

#122

Post by arcanemachiner »

dontlaugh wrote: post #98
daymanstep wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

120Hz is absolutely a noticeable improvement over 60Hz. I have a 60Hz iPhone and a 120Hz iPhone and the 60Hz one is just annoying to use. Everything feels so choppy.

4K too, at anything over 15” or so. I’m always baffled people insist otherwise.

I agree with this, but I use a 43" 4K TV as my monitor... which probably isn't what you meant.

Re: My Impressions of the MacBook Pro M4

#123

Post by dalmo3 »

heavyset_go wrote: post #118
asdff wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the distance I look at my TV screen (about 7 feet from the couch) I can't make out the pixels of the 1080p screen. 4k is lost on me. 2020 vision but I guess that is not enough.

Unless the screen is right in front of your face, video codecs and their parameters matter more than FHD vs UHD, IMO. At least to me, with corrected vision, a high quality 1080p video looks better than streaming quality 4k at the same distance.

Compare apples to apples, e.g. gaming, and the difference is glaring.

Re: My Impressions of the MacBook Pro M4

#124

Post by [deleted] »

m463 wrote: post #23
rottencupcakes wrote: post #16

It's classic Apple to spend over a decade insisting that that glossy screens were the best option, and then to eventually roll out a matte screen as a "premium" feature with a bunch of marketing around it.

I wonder if they will (re)introduce premium keyboards with sculpted keys that self-center your fingers someday. magsafe coming back was nice, maybe more extra ports?

[deleted]

Re: My Impressions of the MacBook Pro M4

#125

Post by dontlaugh »

arcanemachiner wrote: post #122
dontlaugh wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4K too, at anything over 15” or so. I’m always baffled people insist otherwise.

I agree with this, but I use a 43" 4K TV as my monitor... which probably isn't what you meant.

I notice it on my 27” monitor. I’ve seen 15” 4K displays and that’s about the limit where I can see the difference.

My eyesight isn’t perfect, either.

Re: My Impressions of the MacBook Pro M4

#127

Post by jen729w »

dan_can_code wrote: post #95
filoleg wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are so many base features that are inexplicably relegated to 3rd party apps. > Like a better finder experience. > Or keeping screen on. Do you mind linking or naming which tools you use for those 2 purposes? Asking out of pure curiosity, as for keeping the screen on, I just use `caffeinate -imdsu` in the terminal. Previously used Amphetamine, but I ended up having some minor issues with it, and I didn't need…

Not op but raycast is for sure an improvement on the stock finder. https://www.raycast.com/

I use the Finder and Raycast heavily. Raycast is not, and does not sell itself as, a Finder equivalent.

OP: I've tried all the Finder replacements. Path Finder, for example. At the end of the day, I went back to Finder. I always have a single window on screen with the tabs that I use all day. This helps enormously. I show it on YouTube here (direct timestamp link): https://youtu.be/BzJ8j0Q_Ed4?si=VVMD54EJ-XsxkYzm&t=338

You can use Raycast to directly open files. I show that here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKbtoR2q_Ds&t=482s - still doesn't make it a Finder replacement.

Re: My Impressions of the MacBook Pro M4

#128

Post by jen729w »

ericmcer wrote: post #41
__mharrison__ wrote: post #7

Incredible hardware. Love that I can also run local llms on mine. https://github.com/Aider-AI/aider/issues/4526

Can't you run small LLMs on like... a Macbook air M1? Some models are under 1B weights, they will be almost useless but I imagine you could run them on anything from the last 10 years. But yeah if you wanna run 600B+ weights models your gonna need an insane setup to run it locally.

They "run" in the most technical sense, yes. But they're unusably slow.

Re: My Impressions of the MacBook Pro M4

#129

Post by GeekyBear »

rottencupcakes wrote: post #16

It's classic Apple to spend over a decade insisting that that glossy screens were the best option, and then to eventually roll out a matte screen as a "premium" feature with a bunch of marketing around it.

It's certainly on brand for Apple to face widespread criticism in the past for having matte screens as the default (computer magazines of the day found that matte finishes made screens too dim) only to face renewed criticism for dropping the thing they were previously criticized for.

Re: My Impressions of the MacBook Pro M4

#130

Post by Aloisius »

treetalker wrote: post #6

> (When I chose the new laptop, Apple’s M4 chips were current. By now, they have released the first devices with M5 chips.) Does anyone have any feedback on the new M5 models?

I just upgraded from an M1 to an M5 a couple days ago.

It is rather shocking how much faster everything feels given I didn't think my old macbook pro was slow. While I expected xcode builds to be faster (and they are), I was a bit shocked when opening a new firefox tab was instantaneous since I hadn't noticed it wasn't before.

Another thing I didn't expect is that the new speakers have noticeably more bass and can get quite a bit louder.

I didn't get the nano-textured display, because having to adjust the display angle to get colors to render correctly is more annoying than having to do it for glare (I don't work in a high-glare environment).

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