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14-inch MacBook Pro review: A Mac Pro in your backpack

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Re: 14-inch MacBook Pro review: A Mac Pro in your backpack

#231

Post by upbeat_general »

moneywoes wrote: post #2

Do ARM compatibility issues still exist?

Yes. Most user applications have been updated but plenty of libraries have not been.

Most of the python packages that have significant C deps often have issues compiling (e.g. Scipy, igraph, etc). It's almost always possible to work around these issues but it gets tiring since it's compounded with the usual macOS breaking changes every year. Any binary compiled with AVX-512 instructions (e.g. Tensorflow, MuJoCo, etc.) will also need to be recompiled.

So tl;dr most (but far from all) popular closed source programs have been updated/recompiled for ARM (or at least run decently with Rosetta), but many libraries/open-source projects require some painful recompiling.

Re: 14-inch MacBook Pro review: A Mac Pro in your backpack

#232

Post by upbeat_general »

itg wrote: post #94

I'm curious what specs are software developers planning on getting. From what I've seen, the m1 mba/mbp was good enough for a lot of use cases so I dont see the point of get some specced out mpb. I am currently leaning towards the base model 14" but with 1tb of space.

Getting the 10/16 CPU/GPU with 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage.

The only real uncertainty for me was the GPU, whether to get 14/16 but the difference in cost was small and I figured it might be nice for some physics sims + tensorflow work.

Re: 14-inch MacBook Pro review: A Mac Pro in your backpack

#233

Post by electric_bike »

spicybright wrote: post #217
electric_bike wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should look into the actual implementation of the notch and I think you'll be pleased! Imagine the exact same screen as your 2019 macbook pro, but instead of black bezel on the left and the right of the camera, you have the menu bar instead. Everything beneath the notch is the same size as the screen on previous laptops, so the notch allows for extra space beyond the 16x10 that you're used to. This means when not…

Aside from me thinking it's visually distracting, I get the argument, but if I was really concerned with screen space I'd just get a model with a bigger screen. For my own workflow, I use almost the whole top bar for tool/automation shortcuts, so this is cutting a chunk of my space for such a tiny amount of space added. Right now it's hanging past the left side of my webcam. If it does black out the notch for videos…

> For my own workflow, I use almost the whole top bar for tool/automation shortcuts, so this is cutting a chunk of my space for such a tiny amount of space added.

Yeah I can see how that would be an issue. I think I remember reading that the menu icons would be truncated when there are too many of them, but who knows how that actually works in practice (ie. are they scrollable, or is there an additional menu that you can open).

> Does keeping the top bar black essentially hide the bezel? Or does it just make it not stand out as much?

I'm not entirely sure to be honest. Based on the reviews I've seen when the top is blacked out for a video the notch is basically invisible. So I assume if you have a black menu bar it would be similar to that. That's just based on pictures on the internet though so I'm not actually sure how visible it will be in person.

Re: 14-inch MacBook Pro review: A Mac Pro in your backpack

#234

Post by porcc »

drdaeman wrote: post #216
porcc wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Close to no https://isapplesiliconready.com/for/developer

I wonder about games, and sadly this website doesn't list any. I want a new laptop and those new M1 MBPs look interesting, with low TDP high performance. I primarily use it for development and browsing when I'm not home (I have a family overseas), but I also want to play games now and then. I know Steam has native ARM support and some games I play are ported as well, but I really wonder how much can I get from double…

Games are decent to good, I had a good experience using CrossOver--though I was playing 2d (spelunky, omori at the time). https://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/ Retro emulation is phenomenal, PS1 PSP DS no problem, everything earlier great. YMMV as I have separate gaming machines

Re: 14-inch MacBook Pro review: A Mac Pro in your backpack

#235

Post by tarsinge »

bombcar wrote: post #58
reilly3000 wrote: post #39

Much has already been said about this, but this achievement of shipping a MBP that pro users seem to love is a triumph of user feedback over design purity. I suspect that Jony Ives’ departure may have facilitated this. I suspect it will be a breakout success and I aspire to contribute to their sales figures some day. Of all of Apple’s revenue streams I know their pro products are now merely an afterthought, but they…

What's amusing about the "design purity" is this is basically (from an externals point of view) an upgraded PowerBook G4. Good design isn't limited to "make it look as much like a thin sheet of metal as possible".

That makes me wonder what a PowerBook G3 (my favorite one but it’s surely nostalgia) inspired design could be.

Re: 14-inch MacBook Pro review: A Mac Pro in your backpack

#236

Post by _xnmw »

fomine3 wrote: post #229
_xnmw wrote: post #159

The most striking benchmark for me as a developer is the disk read/write speed. Wonder why Apple didn't highlight that. Nearly 2x as fast as last year's M1 Air or Intel macs - that sounds amazing to me. As a simple web dev, I thought I would never use any of the extra power available in an M1 Pro/Max, as I never do anything GPU-intensive. However, disk speed is a noticeable factor in day-to-day workloads, even when I…

> However, disk speed is a noticeable factor in day-to-day workloads, even when I'm running an IDE like IntelliJ and indexing a large repo. You may want to check IOPS benchmark rather than throughput.

Thank you, that's the term I was looking for (IOPS benchmark). Do you know how I can test the IOPS speed on a Mac? Looking for a online benchmark, can't find one.

Re: 14-inch MacBook Pro review: A Mac Pro in your backpack

#237

Post by tasogare »

schaefer wrote: post #225
tasogare wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you were really curious you would use MacOS bare metal as shipped out of the box, with Linux running in a VM instead of wishing for premises you know won't happen.

Yes, I really am curious. And NO, your assumptions about what I would do if I really was curious aren't correct. I had a mac book pro around 2011 (OS X snow leopard). half a dozen happy years with it until it was stolen. But these days since Apple is forbidding running MaxOS under virtualization, that's a deal breaker for me.

Apple have not forbidding running MacOS under virtualization for years...

Re: 14-inch MacBook Pro review: A Mac Pro in your backpack

#238

Post by fomine3 »

_xnmw wrote: post #236
fomine3 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, disk speed is a noticeable factor in day-to-day workloads, even when I'm running an IDE like IntelliJ and indexing a large repo. You may want to check IOPS benchmark rather than throughput.

Thank you, that's the term I was looking for (IOPS benchmark). Do you know how I can test the IOPS speed on a Mac? Looking for a online benchmark, can't find one.

https://www.atto.com/disk-benchmark-macOS/ https://www.katsurashareware.com/amorphousdiskmark/

Re: 14-inch MacBook Pro review: A Mac Pro in your backpack

#239

Post by shp0ngle »

jeffbee wrote: post #148
shp0ngle wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and they will never go away entirely You can never run x86 dockers as easily and as quickly as on intel. If you have bunch of scripts in some deployment/development pipeline that depend on docker being x86, they will fail. Other things…I’m not sure about October 2021, but last time I looked, R was still only available through Rosetta, because parts of R are in FORTRAN and that does not have native M1 support (ye…

There's no problem with either scipy or numpy running natively on Apple Silicon. The problem is with the 3rd-party package managers, which are all junk, and that's not new: they've always been hot garbage, especially homebrew. Just don't use homebrew, and then after you get used to that, don't use it on x86, either.

There were issues with numpy/scipy because of lapack and fortran. I guess they solved it somehow.

Re: 14-inch MacBook Pro review: A Mac Pro in your backpack

#240

Post by jeffbee »

shp0ngle wrote: post #239
jeffbee wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no problem with either scipy or numpy running natively on Apple Silicon. The problem is with the 3rd-party package managers, which are all junk, and that's not new: they've always been hot garbage, especially homebrew. Just don't use homebrew, and then after you get used to that, don't use it on x86, either.

There were issues with numpy/scipy because of lapack and fortran. I guess they solved it somehow.

There were problems with homebrew finding a fortran compiler for this platform, there were not problems with fortran on macos/arm64 itself. fortran for macos/arm64 has existed since the platform was available. OpenBLAS has worked fine as far as I can tell with `make FC=gfortran`. The only problems have been with package managers.
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