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M4 MacBook Pro

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651–660 of 1001 posts

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#651

It pains me deeply that they used Autodesk Fusion in one of the app screenshots. It is by far the worst piece of software I use on Mac OS. Wish the nano-texture display was available when I upgraded last year. The last MacBook I personally bought was in 2012 when the first retina MBP had just released. I opted for the "thick" 15" high-res matte option. Those were the days...

Wait really? I love Fusion 360. I suppose I use it on Windows though. Is it significantly worse on Mac?

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#652
post #641

The single core performance looks really fast. Chip | Geekbench Score (Process) ---- | ------------------------ M1 | 2,419 (5nm) M2 | 2,658 (5nm) M3 | 3,076 (3nm) M4* | 3,810 (3nm) In my experience, single-core CPU is the best all-around indicator of how "fast" a machine feels. I feel like Apple kind of buried this in their press release. M4 benchmark source: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/8171874

> I feel like Apple kind of buried this in their press release The press release describes the single core performance as the fastest ever made, full stop: "The M4 family features phenomenal single-threaded CPU performance with the world’s fastest CPU core" The same statement is made repeatedly across most the new M4 line up marketing materials. I think thats enough to get the point across that its a pretty quick mac…

Exactly my point. Saying something is the fastest ever is marketing code (at least to me) for minor improvement over the previous generation.

If you're 30% faster than the previous generation, I'd rather see that because my assumption is it's 5%.

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#653
post #456

Just replaced for the first time battery on my Macbook Pro 2015 Retina. Feel so good using such an old piece of hardware.

Which MacOS version? I upgraded to a newer one and it crawled to a halt, it's unusable now. UI is insanely laggy. It's sitting in a drawer gathering dust now

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#654
post #535

I really respect Apple's privacy focused engineering. They didn't roll out _any_ AI features until they were capable of running them locally, and before doing any cloud-based AI they designed and rolled out Private Cloud Compute. You can argue about whether it's actually bulletproof or not but the fact is, nobody else is even trying, and have lost sight of all privacy-focused features in their rush to ship anything a…

Privacy is the new obscenity. What does privacy even mean to you concretely? Answer the question with no additional drama, and I guarantee you either Apple doesn’t deliver what you are asking for, or you are using services from another company, like Google, in a way that the actions speak that you don’t really care about what you are asking for.

There's some weird[1] laws around privacy in Australia, where government departments are blocked from a bunch of things by law. From my perspective as a citizen, this just results in annoyance such as having to fill out forms over and over to give the government data that they already have.

I heard a good definition from my dad: "Privacy for me is pedestrians walking past my window not seeing me step out of the shower naked, or my neighbours not overhearing our domestic arguments."

Basically, if the nude photos you're taking on your mobile phone can be seen by random people, then you don't have privacy.

Apple encrypts my photos so that the IT guy managing the storage servers can't see them. Samsung is the type of company that includes a screen-capture "feature" in their TVs so that they can profile you for ad-targeting. I guarantee you that they've collected and can see the pictures of naked children in the bathtub from when someone used screen mirroring from their phone to show their relatives pictures of their grandkids. That's not privacy.

Sure, I use Google services, but I don't upload naked kid pictures to anything owned by Alphabet corp, so no problem.

However, I will never buy any Samsung product for any purpose because they laugh and point at customer expectations of privacy.

[1] Actually not that weird. Now that I've worked in government departments, I "get" the need for these regulations. Large organisations are made up of individuals, and both the org and the individual people will abuse their access to data for their own benefit. Many such people will even think they're doing the "right thing" while destroying freedom in the process, like people that keep trying to make voting systems traceable... so that vote buying will become easy again.

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. I've never kept any laptop as long as I've kept the M1. I was more or less upgrading yearly in the past because the speed increases (both in the G4 and then Intel generations) were so significant. This M1 has exceeded my expectations in every category, it's faster quieter and cooler than any laptop i've ever owned. I've had this laptop since release in 2020 and I have nearly 0 complaints with it. I wouldn't upgr…

How do you justify this kind of recurring purchases, even with selling your old device? I don't get the behaviour or the driving decision factor past the obvious "I need the latest shiny toy" (I can't find the exact words to describe it, so apologies for the reductive description). I have either assembled my own desktop computers or purchased ex corporate Lenovo over the years with a mix of Windows (for gaming obviou…

It's really very easy, honestly.

My laptop is my work life and my personal life.

I spend easily 100 hours a week using it not-as-balanced-as-it-should-be between the two.

I don't buy them because I need something new, I buy them because in the G4/Intel era, the iterations were massive and even a 20 or 30% increase in speed (which could be memory, CPU, disk -- they all make things faster) results in me being more productive. It's worth it for me to upgrade immediately when apple releases something new, as long as I have issues with my current device and the upgrade is enough of a delta.

M1 -> M2 wasn't much of a delta and my M1 was fine. M1 -> M3 was a decent delta, but, my M1 was still fine. M1 -> M4 is a huge delta (almost double) and my screen is dented to where it's annoying to sit outside and use the laptop (bright sun makes the defect worse), so, I'm upgrading. If I hadn't dented the screen the choice would be /a lot/ harder.

I love ThinkPads too. Really can take a beating and keep on going. The post-IBM era ones are even better in some regards too. I keep one around running Debian for Linux-emergencies.

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#656
post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mac OS calls home every time you execute an application. Apple is well on its way to ensure you can only run things they allow via app store, they would probably already be there if it wasn't for the pesky EU. If you send your computer/phone to Apple for repair you may get back different physical hardware. Those things very much highlight that "your" Apple hardware is not yours and that privacy on Apple hardware does…

> Mac OS calls home every time you execute an application Consulting a certificate revocation list is a standard security feature, not a privacy issue.

Further, there is a CRL/OCSP cache — which means that if you're running a program frequently, Apple are not receiving a fine-grained log of your executions, just a coarse-grained log of the checks from the cache's TTL timeouts.

Also, a CRL/OCSP check isn't a gating check — i.e. it doesn't "fail safe" by disallowing execution if the check doesn't go through. (If it did, you wouldn't be able to run anything without an internet connection!) Instead, these checks can pass, fail, or error out; and erroring out is the same as passing. (Or rather, technically, erroring out falls back to the last cached verification state, even if it's expired; but if there is no previous verification state — e.g. if it's your first time running third-party app and you're doing so offline — then the fallback-to-the-fallback is allowing the app to run.)

Remember that CRLs/OCSP function as blacklists, not whitelists — they don't ask the question "is this certificate still valid?", but rather "has anyone specifically invalidated this certificate?" It is by default assumed that no, nobody has invalidated the certificate.

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. I've never kept any laptop as long as I've kept the M1. I was more or less upgrading yearly in the past because the speed increases (both in the G4 and then Intel generations) were so significant. This M1 has exceeded my expectations in every category, it's faster quieter and cooler than any laptop i've ever owned. I've had this laptop since release in 2020 and I have nearly 0 complaints with it. I wouldn't upgr…

>I've never kept any laptop as long as I've kept the M1 What different lives we live. This first M1 was in November 2020. Not even four years old. I’ve never had a [personal] computer for _less_ time than that. (Work, yes, due to changing jobs or company-dictated changes/upgrades)

My work computer is my personal computer. I easily spend 100+ hours a week using it.

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#658
post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mac OS calls home every time you execute an application. Apple is well on its way to ensure you can only run things they allow via app store, they would probably already be there if it wasn't for the pesky EU. If you send your computer/phone to Apple for repair you may get back different physical hardware. Those things very much highlight that "your" Apple hardware is not yours and that privacy on Apple hardware does…

Their repair policy, from what I can see, is a thinly veiled attempt to get you to either pay for Apple Care or to upgrade. I got a quote to repair a colleague's MacBook Pro, less than 2 years old, which has apparent 'water damage' and which they want AUD $2,500 to repair! Of course that makes no sense, so we're buying a new one ...

> to get you to either pay for Apple Care

The problem with many self-repair people is they effectively value their time at zero.

I value my time realistically, i.e. above zero and above minimum wage. It is therefore a no brainer for me to buy AppleCare every ... single ..time. It means I can just drop it off and let someone else deal with messing around.

I also know how much hassle it is. Like many techies, I spent part of my early career repairing people's PCs. Even in big PC tower cases with easy accessibility to all parts its still a fucking horrific waste of time. Hence these days I'm very happy to let some junior at Apple do it for the cost of an AppleCare contract.

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The M3 Max was 400GBps, this is 540GBps. Truly an outstanding case for unified memory. DDR5 doesn't come anywhere near.

Apple is using LPDDR5 for M3. The bandwidth doesn't come from unified memory - it comes from using many channels. You could get the same bandwidth or more with normal DDR5 modules if you could use 8 or more channels, but in the PC space you don't usually see more than 2 or 4 channels (only common for servers). Unrelated but unified memory is a strange buzzword being used by Apple. Their memory is no different than ot…

Yeah memory bandwidth is one of the really unfortunate things about the consumer stuff. Even the 9950x/7950x, which are comfortably workstation-level in terms of compute, are bound by their 2 channel limits. The other day I was pricing out a basic Threadripper setup with a 7960x (not just for this reason but also for more PCIe lanes), and it would cost around $3000 -- somewhat out of my budget.

This is one of the reasons the "3D vcache" stuff with the giant L3 cache is so effective.

Re: M4 MacBook Pro

#660
post #583
post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mac OS calls home every time you execute an application. Apple is well on its way to ensure you can only run things they allow via app store, they would probably already be there if it wasn't for the pesky EU. If you send your computer/phone to Apple for repair you may get back different physical hardware. Those things very much highlight that "your" Apple hardware is not yours and that privacy on Apple hardware does…

Even if I have analytics disabled? Genuinely asking: are there any specifics on this? I understand that blocking at the firewall level is an option, but I recall someone here mentioning an issue where certain local machine rules don’t work effectively. I believe this is the issue [1]. Has it been “fixed”? [1] https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/01/14/apple-drops-exclu...

> Even if I have analytics disabled?

Yeah because what’s being sent is not analytics but related to notarizarion, verifying the app’s integrity (aka is it signed by a certificate known to Apple?)

This came to light a few years ago when the server went down and launching apps became impossible to slow…

https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/12/mac-apps-not-opening/

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