OV9

The reviews are starting to come in. What I wasn't expecting was how effective the new Apple Silicon Macs are under Rosetta; it seems that the most basic Macbook Air is better than even the top end iMacs or 16" Macbook Pros for photo editing and gaming, all without even having a fan and without optimised apps yet. I wondered if the hype was too much so waited until yesterday before ordering one (a base Air) for my stepdaughter who is studying photography. Glad I waited.

I'm impressed with Rosetta though; that was my main reason for waiting until the reviews were in before ordering.

I bought an Air earlier in the year, maybe I should have waited. D'oh.

Also - disappointed this thread is not a review of burgers from various motorway services on the way north

I have a bit of M5 and M6 burger experience, but I'm not a big fan of Leicester Forest East, Watford Gap or Toddington

No doubt the M2 next year will be twice as good and make me wish I'd waited, but it's for her 18th birthday so waiting isn't an option

I thought you’d come across a motorway convoy of the owners club....

What is that, a £100mil convoy?

I've been looking at new Macs to replace my partner's aging iMac for her studio. Probably end up getting her a Macbook for christmas.

ZedLeg wrote: ↑Thu Nov 19, 2020 10:57 am Probably end up getting her a Macbook for christmas.

Don't buy anything but an M1 version now.

The performance and battery life is insane - proper instant-on and instant-loading of apps, just like an iPad. So yeah, their entry level laptop now performs as well (simplified) as their previous £3000+ 16" model. Makes you wonder how fast the higher-tier MacBook Pros and desktops will be.

*goes off to check when my work Mac is due for replacement*

Big Sur is the last MacOS that my 2013 MacBook Pro will support so I may have to jump ship soon. It’s still very fast though for the usual office documents, and amateur 4k video and photo editing which makes me wonder wtf the average Joe must be doing to need that much power.

Mito Man wrote: ↑Thu Nov 19, 2020 1:12 pm Big Sur is the last MacOS that my 2013 MacBook Pro will support so I may have to jump ship soon. It’s still very fast though for the usual office documents, and amateur 4k video and photo editing which makes me wonder wtf the average Joe must be doing to need that much power.

I know so many people who always buy MacBook Pros but who could get by on the entry-level Macbook.

The combination of Mac cpus & software now seems incredible for power & efficiency. Even for those entry-level machines, things happen instantaneously. Also, there's various things which will now run faster on a Mac, through the Rosetta emulation, than they did natively on Intel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5ib4oo5pPQ

Just had a look at benchmarks, some pretty decent numbers there (genuinely), and Rosetta2 looks like a bloody good system given what it has to do.

Definitely an improvement over the PowerPC to Intel Rosetta days!

Using one is a bit strange and it really does feel like one of those big leaps forward in tech that I've not seen in a while. The machine is incredibly responsive & snappy - apps just load almost instantaneously - but the whole thing from apps, to the OS are buttery smooth. No matter how many apps I open, it just keeps on performing like it does with one open. The battery seems determined to not drain - I've been working on it for hours and have also done all the usual setup stuff on it (which is nice without fans kicking-in when you install Office or sync files for the first time) - things like iCloud photo sync are a notorious battery and cpu drain.

RIP Virtualbox and x86 guests. (Yes, I have a few on my MBP)

I noticed some discounting on Amazon already at the weekend - £100 off the 512GB Air, for instance. I was expecting them to be hard to get before Christmas after all the positive reviews.

Simon wrote: ↑Mon Nov 23, 2020 9:13 pm RIP Virtualbox and x86 guests. (Yes, I have a few on my MBP)

Yeah, that's a bit of a pain for the time being. I'm sure it will get sorted one way or another soon.

I don't rely on VMs every day so thankfully am OK as I have another machine here I can use.

I was getting very confused there for 5mins. Rosetta to me is this clicky

Digital Preservation software (that runs about as well as their cookie preference settings do) but is industry standard for heritage organisations preserving digital data. I thought for a moment Apple might have been the first tech company to give a flying fuck about how to preserve data way into the future, but no...

Good to know the new Macs are amazing though- will be interesting to see what that means for their higher end products.

Whether they can scale the architecture up 'up and out' (faster GHz, more cores) is one of the big questions at the moment.

Having vertical integration will undoubtedly help though.

Beany wrote: ↑Tue Nov 24, 2020 1:34 pm Whether they can scale the architecture up 'up and out' (faster GHz, more cores) is one of the big questions at the moment.

Having vertical integration will undoubtedly help though.

I think they'll smash it out the park to be honest. There was some skepticism about how these first ones would be, but the results are pretty incredible although shouldn't be a surprise if you look at the performance of the iPad/iPhone and then realise the engineers can basically lift many of the thermal constraints they have in those smaller form factors.

I sat down to do some work and studying last night and did about 6 hours with loads of apps open, streaming some music in the background and used under 10% of the battery.

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.

I read that Apple claim it can game so I installed Steam but the software isn’t optimised so it runs terribly. Gave it half a chance with a pretty average game in terms of specifications required - KSP. It runs well for a few minutes but then the base of the laptop gets extremely hot and it slows to a stutter so ideally it could do with a fan. It works fine on the old MacBook which has 1gb of VRAM. I don’t care about Mac gaming and was just curious so that’s as far as I took it before uninstalling the whole thing.

Otherwise I only use it for cloud based stuff and it’s great in that regard and I no longer need to carry a power brick or cable.

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 ?