New M1 Pro/Max Macbook Pro laptops

They look really nice.  A good selection of ports, full size SD card slot, Magsafe 3, a kickass display (though let's not forget that Godforsaken notch), and to top it all off, we have a proper keyboard.

Only thing I found somewhat funny is when they were measuring its thickness, they clearly didn't include the thickness of the rubber feet.

Overall, it looks like a solid machine.  That said, I'll probably not upgrade from my Dell Latitude 5290 anytime soon.

You could not pay me to use a modern Mac. I hate Mac OS regardless, but the earlier Macbook were built pretty damned solid. They are not that common here but I still have several customers still running 2009 - 2012 ish era Macs with no problems. I see more serious internal hardware failure with the new Macs than the old. Either the build quality is significantly poorer, or the super compact designs impede airflow and that causes problems. Have a model from last year at my shop now where the touchpad and keyboard have completely died for no reason. Also the more time goes on, the more Apple intentionally engineers their products to be borderline if not outright unfixable when problems happen, even intentionally using low melting point solder on logic boards to make board repairs harder.

35 minutes ago, Murdoch said:

I hate Mac OS

But I thought horses loved Apples? ;^) :^P

But maybe not rotten apples! :P

The notch has so many jokes that can be m██████out it, but I will show some restraint.

That said, there's actually a lot to like about macOS.  It makes an incredible first impression and seems like it's more well "put together" than the other operating systems.  Trouble is that when it goes bad, it goes bad in mysterious ways where various features and subsystems stop working as expected for no obvious reason.  Also, OS updates take an incredibly long time to download and install compared to Windows, and updating to the latest macOS has a much greater chance of screwing up your applications and taking away convenient functionality.

But the the thing that kills it for me is the Apple premium price.  The "prosumer" Macs are much more expensive than they used to be, and I simply cannot convince myself to spend the extra money on a Mac these days, whereas a decade ago it was an actual debate.

13 hours ago, Zilch said:

They look really nice.  A good selection of ports, full size SD card slot, Magsafe 3, a kickass display (though let's not forget that Godforsaken notch), and to top it all off, we have a proper keyboard.

Yeah, addressed a lot of the downsides vs a PC.

It's incredible what they've done with the switch to ARM. I think they're going to be untouchable CPU performance-wise for maybe a year and a half in laptop world. Detest their hypery (up to 13x faster graphics? so it's going to be about 3ish times faster than a PS5?), nauseating branding, attitude towards backwards compatibility, ecosystem lock-in and all the rest. But they're the only manufacturer IMO where you know everything included is going to be at least good. Screen, speakers, mic, touchpad, camera. Keyboard I'm not keen on, but that's hugely personal.

5 hours ago, AlexMax said:

But the the thing that kills it for me is the Apple premium price.  The "prosumer" Macs are much more expensive than they used to be, and I simply cannot convince myself to spend the extra money on a Mac these days, whereas a decade ago it was an actual debate.

Just thinking about it - who, aside from Apple would dare selling a $2500 computer with just 16 GB of RAM and a measly 512 GB SSD...?

For that price I'd expect double that amount on both accounts.

11 minutes ago, holaareola said:

But they're the only manufacturer IMO where you know everything included is going to be at least good. Screen, speakers, mic, touchpad, camera. Keyboard I'm not keen on, but that's hugely personal. 

IMO that's a story of the past. I've heard some real horror stories about the later Mac generations after Apple decided to make them unrepairable.

Yes, as long as these things work, they are good - but how long are they going to work and what will happen if they stop working?

26 minutes ago, Graf Zahl said:

 

Just thinking about it - who, aside from Apple would dare selling a $2500 computer with just 16 GB of RAM and a measly 512 GB SSD...?

For that price I'd expect double that amount on both accounts.

 

 

IMO that's a story of the past. I've heard some real horror stories about the later Mac generations after Apple decided to make them unrepairable.

Yes, as long as these things work, they are good - but how long are they going to work and what will happen if they stop working?

I don't have enough data to say really. My anecdotal experience is that for some reason I'm surrounded by Apple users, and while there have been a few trips to the Apple store for repairs, most have had their systems for upward of 3 years before upgrading. Only one system death out of 15 people or so. Actually, one guy chucked his down the stairs and it still worked, only to later kill it with a small amount of beer -- two deaths.  I had a Thinkpad back then, you could spill coffee on that keypad and it would reappear right out of the bottom courtesy of two channels designed for just that occasion. What a system.

6 hours ago, AlexMax said:

The notch has so many jokes that can be m██████out it, but I will show some restraint.

ok i laughed too hard at this

1 hour ago, holaareola said:

It's incredible what they've done with the switch to ARM.

It seems so. Looks like it's going to be another few years of talking myself down from some form of Mac purchase

My wife does moderately resource-intensive design work on her new M1 laptop, often while using Zoom. There are occasional hiccups, like with the key software suites being incompletely migrated to the new architecture and being buggy or running through emulation, but those issues are gradually improving and she's generally pretty happy with it. The key question seems to be how well developers are going to make use of RISC and the new memory model.

I've never owned an Apple device and can't imagine ever wanting one. Open source is always my first choice, though I do have one machine that dual-boots Win 10 for some things. Many of the people I know are Apple users, and from the way they talk about it the primary "value" that Apple offers is lock-in, which I feel speaks volumes about the nature of market incentives.

I also prefer open source.  I use Debian with KDE on my main laptop.  I have a desktop that runs Windows, but that's for other stuff.

It's 'nice' of Apple to keep their work with Darwin open source, but ultimately it completely useless.  Linux is more powerful and better supported.  The rest of macOS is also closed source, which I find somewhat odd.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/M1-Max-vs-RTX-3080-Laptop-GPU-Apple-SoC-excels-in-synthetic-benchmarks-but-flounders-alongside-the-M1-Pro-in-gaming-tests.575086.0.html

I despise Apple for their walled garden approach, lack of repairability, and closed source OS; however I like their silicon; if ever bought an iThingy, I'd run Linux on it.

As an aside, Intel and MICROS~1 could have come up with something like this; indeed the inevitable failure of Itanium was a golden opportunity for AMD to make an Alpha like chip, especially as several DEC scientists jumped ship to AMD, but instead they, like Intel, decided to just do 'more of the same'; certainly AMD's 'more of the same' is far better than Intel's, but it is still the same :(

11 hours ago, Cacodemon345 said:

https://www.notebookcheck.net/M1-Max-vs-RTX-3080-Laptop-GPU-Apple-SoC-excels-in-synthetic-benchmarks-but-flounders-alongside-the-M1-Pro-in-gaming-tests.575086.0.html

They are such bullshitters! That 13x stat immediately stuck out as a steaming pile.

For all that, not too bad for integrated graphics. Albeit with a shocking price/value ratio on the M1 Max machines that's like the bad old days.

On 10/19/2021 at 9:38 PM, holaareola said:

Yeah, addressed a lot of the downsides vs a PC.

 

It's incredible what they've done with the switch to ARM. I think they're going to be untouchable CPU performance-wise for maybe a year and a half in laptop world. Detest their hypery (up to 13x faster graphics? so it's going to be about 3ish times faster than a PS5?), nauseating branding, attitude towards backwards compatibility, ecosystem lock-in and all the rest. But they're the only manufacturer IMO where you know everything included is going to be at least good. Screen, speakers, mic, touchpad, camera. Keyboard I'm not keen on, but that's hugely personal.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/cpu-benchmarks-pre-release-intel-alder-lake-chip-beats-apples-m1-max/

That prediction went off quick. Multi-threaded too! Are Intel back on track?

49 minutes ago, holaareola said:

That prediction went off quick. Multi-threaded too! Are Intel back on track?

I really hope they are!  I've always had a preference for Intel's x86 CPUs.

AMDs laptop chips seems to be a really solid option, especially for battery life.

But what Apple is doing is not all bad.  At the very least they are putting heavy pressure on Intel; forcing them to produce better products!