M1 Macs

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Ascender
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Re: M1 Macs

Post by Ascender »

Mito Man wrote: Wed Dec 09, 2020 11:38 am I’ve jumped ship a year earlier than planned due to the battery life and efficiency as among other things I’m testing to see how viable it is to live on a 1.3 kwh battery and 250w solar panel. Old MacBook Retina was pulling 20 watts with a fully charged battery. New base spec MacBook Air is pulling 4-7 and barely gets warm doing usual tasks. The screen has the same number of pixels I think but it is noticeably nicer too.
The new screen is 100 nites brighter than last year's Air and has a P3 colour gamut as well as True Tone.

The only time I've been able to get the Air to heat up at all, was when I used a beta build of Handbrake to encode a file. Other than that, it stays totally cool and I'm amazed by how many things I can have open on this with zero slowdown.

I did try Football Manager 2021 and it runs very well - way better than it did on much more powerful MBPs.
Cheers,

Mike.
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Re: M1 Macs

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Nathan wrote: Wed Dec 09, 2020 3:11 pm
Mito Man wrote: Wed Dec 09, 2020 11:38 am I’m testing to see how viable it is to live on a 1.3 kwh battery and 250w solar panel.
Why, when you're quite wasteful anyway ?
I’m building an off grid tiny house which I’d like to be able to use for a half week at a time without energy worries. The added bonus of having the USB C power cable means I can bypass the 230v mains inverter so it’s 20% more efficient again.
How about not having a sig at all?
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Re: M1 Macs

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A couple of months or so down the line and the MacBook Air is hands down one of the best Macs I've ever owned. Battery life & performance are still incredible and the fact its fan-less is so nice.

I've got some work for a client to do involving Cisco which is a good time as I'm re-doing some certifications so need to run some virtual labs. This is where the M1 fails at the moment and you also get into some limitations of the Mac. None of the VMs I have will run on an M1, so that means Intel, but also something with a decent number of cores to run them and also let me do my work.

In the last week I've bought and returned an old Mac Mini (schoolboy error as it only had two cores); a 2008 Mac Pro tower (8 cores, but came with only half the advertised RAM and was limited in OS meaning none of the virtualisation software would run); a 2018 Mac Mini from Apple (6 cores, 64GB RAM, but I could fry an egg on the top of it when it wasn't doing much at all).

Options are build a Hackintosh or get a Windows machine with cores, but I've not got the time or the inclination for that at the moment so am now looking at the "trashcan" Mac Pros which you can chuck a 12 core Xeon in to. Unfortunately, they, like every other Mac Pro, seem to hold their values very well....
Cheers,

Mike.
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Re: M1 Macs

Post by Nathan »

Ascender wrote: Mon Feb 08, 2021 11:03 pm 2018 Mac Mini from Apple (6 cores, 64GB RAM, but I could fry an egg on the top of it when it wasn't doing much at all
Sounds like its broken, mine ran very cool
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Re: M1 Macs

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Nathan wrote: Mon Feb 08, 2021 11:20 pm
Ascender wrote: Mon Feb 08, 2021 11:03 pm 2018 Mac Mini from Apple (6 cores, 64GB RAM, but I could fry an egg on the top of it when it wasn't doing much at all
Sounds like its broken, mine ran very cool
Yeah, doesn't sound right does it? Sitting here with a reasonable number of standard apps open, all cores are sitting at 80° or so - I'm not actually doing anything CPU-intensive at all.
Cheers,

Mike.
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Re: M1 Macs

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Has it been opened to upgrade the RAM ?
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Re: M1 Macs

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Nathan wrote: Tue Feb 09, 2021 1:15 pm Has it been opened to upgrade the RAM ?
It has....

Worth taking it apart and re-seating RAM?
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Mike.
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Re: M1 Macs

Post by Nathan »

Did you do it ?

My mates ran hot and it was the shield over the RAM making contact

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Re: M1 Macs

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Nathan wrote: Tue Feb 09, 2021 1:42 pm Did you do it ?

My mates ran hot and it was the shield over the RAM making contact

Image
Yip, I did it myself, happy I didn't make an arse of it but will check anyway, thanks for the tip.
Cheers,

Mike.
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Re: M1 Macs

Post by simon_g »

Ascender wrote: Mon Feb 08, 2021 11:03 pm Options are build a Hackintosh or get a Windows machine with cores, but I've not got the time or the inclination for that at the moment so am now looking at the "trashcan" Mac Pros which you can chuck a 12 core Xeon in to. Unfortunately, they, like every other Mac Pro, seem to hold their values very well....
Depends on what you need but I mostly do lab VMs in the cloud these days. Unless you need more than 32GB RAM , it's hard to spend more than $1/hour on Azure or AWS VMs.
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Re: M1 Macs

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simon_g wrote: Tue Feb 09, 2021 3:59 pm
Ascender wrote: Mon Feb 08, 2021 11:03 pm Options are build a Hackintosh or get a Windows machine with cores, but I've not got the time or the inclination for that at the moment so am now looking at the "trashcan" Mac Pros which you can chuck a 12 core Xeon in to. Unfortunately, they, like every other Mac Pro, seem to hold their values very well....
Depends on what you need but I mostly do lab VMs in the cloud these days. Unless you need more than 32GB RAM , it's hard to spend more than $1/hour on Azure or AWS VMs.
Yeah, I've been doing my AWS certs recently so that was a thought, but people haven't had great success with the Cisco ones apparently. TBH, I need a desktop/home server machine of some sort anyway, so I've just bought a secondhand Mac Pro on eBay.

Apple's lineup is always strange when it comes to desktops, but if you don't want an all-in-one, its a Mac Mini or Mac Pro (6/7K starting price?) with nothing in between.
Cheers,

Mike.
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Re: M1 Macs

Post by Nathan »

I know of a Mac Pro 2013, 12 Core, 64GB RAM, 2TB SSD £1750
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Re: M1 Macs

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Nathan wrote: Wed Feb 10, 2021 11:00 am I know of a Mac Pro 2013, 12 Core, 64GB RAM, 2TB SSD £1750
Poor timing, I bought one last night along with a CPU and memory to make it up to that spec! This one has the D500 gpus. Total cost was just under £1400 which isn't bad value given the core count and what it would cost to upgrade a Mac Mini.

It looks like there were an awful lot of base models sold and never upgraded, presumably by people who just wanted the (IMO) cool design. So you can either buy a base model and the upgrades, or pay more for a higher-spec model. I had a spreadsheet comparing about 15 up for sale and whichever way you go it ends up at about £1500, so comes down to path of least resistance and gpu choice.
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Re: M1 Macs

Post by Nathan »

Fair enough

These work perfectly with regular PC NVME's but ESXi doesn't like non standard Apple SSDs

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/1x-PCI-E-x4- ... SwKThe944n
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Re: M1 Macs

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Nathan wrote: Wed Feb 10, 2021 12:36 pm Fair enough

These work perfectly with regular PC NVME's but ESXi doesn't like non standard Apple SSDs

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/1x-PCI-E-x4- ... SwKThe944n
Thanks for the link.... depending how much I like the machine I might end up switching out the SSD in it.
Cheers,

Mike.
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