481–490 of 782 posts
I got an M1 Macbook Pro, and yeah, the processor is fast and cool and all that, but the most absolutely wonderful thing about it by far is that there's no touchbar!
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A major factor in achieving excellent battery life coupled with relatively good performance & responsiveness, on Apple products, is the OS. That holds for both Macs and iDevices.
There are several android phones that compete with the iphone 13 pro performance wise, while running a much less optimized os. Likewise in the desktop world, the single core performance of the M1 is on par with top of the line chips, and M2 will be the same, and intel and amd work fine on linux. Apples decision to keep a locked box has nothing to do with performance, solely to do with keeping people in the ecosystem…
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Am I the only one who just ignored the touchbar and didn't take it as a personal affront?
Your finger never slipped and hit the "play" button by mistake, blasting the last song you played at max volume directly into your ear. Happened dozens of times in the first year of having a touchbar (work laptop, not my decision), super jarring every time. Decades of having a physical "play" function button hooked up to do the same thing and it didn't happen once.
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Display Stream Compression (DSC) is fine. It is not a "diminished experience". DSC is visually lossless. Instead, those docks use a technology called DisplayLink which has nothing to do with DSC. DisplayLink means that external monitors are basically "software" displays that are tremendously slower and often very limited in resolutions and frame rates. Having any DisplayLink display connected also breaks HDCP and can…
The relevant standard is proprietary, but Wikipedia quotes it, confirming that "visually lossless" is marketing lies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DisplayPort#Display_Stream_Com...
There are always people like "audiophiles" who claim to be able to distinguish impossibly small differences, and there is perhaps a very small number of people with exceptional hearing who actually do... but 320kbps compressed audio is "audibly lossless" for most of the population. The exact same thing applies here, by all appearances. I'm sure there are mp3 test cases where the compression does something terrible, just like with DSC... that just isn't what people actually encounter day to day.
I can't see the second study linked which is on IEEE, but if you look at the fist one, Figure 4 shows that DSC was "visually lossless" in almost all test cases. Let me quote one thing from that study:
> As described above, the HDR content was selected to challenge the codecs, in spite of this both DSC 1.2a and VDC-M performed very well. This finding is consistent with previous series of experiments using SDR images.
So, this testing was done with samples that would challenge the codecs... and they still did great. It doesn't appear to be "marketing lies" at all. It appears to be a genuine attempt to describe a technology that enables new capabilities while dealing with the imperfect limitation in bandwidth of the available hardware.
Do you have some terrible personal experience with DSC to share? Did you do a blind test so that you weren't aware of whether DSC was enabled or not when making your judgments? Are you aware that almost all non-OLED monitors (especially high refresh rate) always have artifacts around motion, even without DSC?
I haven't personally had a chance to test out DSC other than perhaps some short experiences, which is why I based my initial comment on googling what other people experienced and how Wikipedia describes it. You pointed me to a study which seems to confirm that DSC is perfectly fine.
Edit: Also the pro is missing the magsafe charger. Are they phasing out the 13" pro?
I'm not surprised they are keeping the M1 Air alive. That thing is a great price/performance combo in a very light and portable wrapper. It's been $850-$900 multiple times at Costco, Bestbuy or Microcenter. Also, the first computer where getting the upgraded hard drive (512GB or 1TB) really helps with the low ram because of the integration bus they have with the drive for swap. It's fast.
The price increases are a kick in the shins though. 20% more for 18% more performance. The M1 generation looks to be a bit of an "introductory offer" to get people looking at apple who otherwise wouldn't have... once they have established their mindshare as being a performance leader worth considering over x86, they can raise prices back up.
M2 starting at $1200 looks pretty nice to me. Avoids many of the corners cut on the competition like: plastic chassis, tiny trackpad, poor fans that get noisier in the first year, poor Intel iGPU, poor battery life, etc.
It's very interesting to think the processor releases were holding back the Mac for so long. They are on the cusp on turning Macs into annual upgrades - with meaningful performance upgrades tied to the OS, just like they've done for a decade with the A series / iOS releases. This is firing on all cylinders. The organizational structure and performance is a marvel for this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A major factor in achieving excellent battery life coupled with relatively good performance & responsiveness, on Apple products, is the OS. That holds for both Macs and iDevices.
There are several android phones that compete with the iphone 13 pro performance wise, while running a much less optimized os. Likewise in the desktop world, the single core performance of the M1 is on par with top of the line chips, and M2 will be the same, and intel and amd work fine on linux. Apples decision to keep a locked box has nothing to do with performance, solely to do with keeping people in the ecosystem…
[0]: https://browser.geekbench.com/ios_devices/iphone-13-pro [1]: https://browser.geekbench.com/android_devices/samsung-sm-s90...
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100% agree. The last generation of MacBook pros with intel processors were virtually unusable for zoom calls or any intensive processing power tasks.
This is really funny considering how high people were about their MacBook pros during this era.