Thinking about a new Mac...

[mark]

I was a CISCO iOS router geek.

[jon-nyc]

Might have been. I did both in the very early 90s.

[Klaus]

@axtremus said in Thinking about a new Mac...:

All configuration is stored in a plain text file

Nothing old school about that. It’s the only reasonable option. One can use JSON or XML or whatnot to make parsing easier. And of course graphical editors are still possible. But few things are worse than binary files that can only be edited using one particular crappy editor that cannot be scripted etc.

[Axtremus]

@klaus said in Thinking about a new Mac...:

Nothing old school about that. It’s the only reasonable option.

Using text format to store config per se is not old school. Putting all config in one file is. It’s more typical these days to see different functional components use separate config files.

[Aqua Letifer]

@george-k said in Thinking about a new Mac...:

It looks like there's a significant difference between the 7-core GPU and the 8-core GPU in the MacBook Air.

About $250 difference.

For someone like me, whose needs are pretty basic, is it worth the premium in price?

Note: The price difference doesn't account for the SSD storage difference.

I just pulled the trigger. I'm tired of wrestling the shit out of my Surface just to do basic tasks.

I got the one on the right simply because I need the machine to just damn work, every day, for the next five years. I also got the memory upgrade but not the storage.

[George K]

@aqua-letifer good for you!

Let us know how it works out, please! @Klaus has said that 16GB of RAM is inadequate. However, I've read that with the new chip, even 8GB is good for most "routine" stuff. The battery life is also another big deal.

Just looking at cost, the MacBook Air, with an external monitor still comes out just a bit cheaper than the iMac if similarly spaced (RAM and SSD), but the convenience of portability is a big factor. The Mac mini is still cheaper, but no portability.

OTOH, for my needs, my iPad does everything I need for portability.

My only concern is the I/O - I have an external 4-bay hard drive enclosure that houses all of my 1) Music/Books 2) Time Machine 3) Time Machine 4) Additional backup. I also need to hook up keyboard and mouse. The mini would do the job, but the portability of the MacBook Air is a strong pull, as long as I can get everything I have now.

I'll probably wait until later this next year and see how the rumored new iMacs spec out. As I've said, my eyes probably won't suffer for a slightly inferior display and I might save a couple of hundred bucks by going with the mini or Air.

[Aqua Letifer]

@george-k said in Thinking about a new Mac...:

@aqua-letifer good for you!
Let us know how it works out, please!

I'll be giving it a pretty decent test once it shows up. As a bit of a comparison:

My Surface's specs are all about about half of what the new Air will have. And the Surface mostly works. Mostly.

• It edits video okay (but lags a lot when it's 4k)
• Illustrator works almost seamlessly
• InDesign's completely fine
• But for some reason, Photoshop sucks a fat one. I don't know why, either, I'm not doing anything too crazy with it.

With double everything and an M1, I really don't think I'm going to run into problems. And although I'm not running a Bitcoin empire or whatever the hell it is Mark and Klaus do with their machines, I'll likely be using mine a little heavier than you might, so I'll let you know how it runs.

Expected delivery date is February 9, though.

[Klaus]

@george-k said in Thinking about a new Mac...:

@Klaus has said that 16GB of RAM is inadequate. However, I've read that with the new chip, even 8GB is good for most "routine" stuff.

It's not "inadequate". But I had 16GB of RAM in my laptop in 2010. Would you still be happy with a harddrive from 2010? Why are you happy with a memory configuration from 2010?

RAM is dirt cheap these days, and it makes a big difference in performance in many situations (even if only having many browser windows open). It's one of the best "bang for the buck" investments - way better than, say, a higher clock frequency in the CPU.

[George K]

@klaus said in Thinking about a new Mac...:

RAM is dirt cheap these days, and it makes a big difference in performance in many situations (even if only having many browser windows open). It's one of the best "bang for the buck" investments - way better than, say, a higher clock frequency in the CPU.

I understand all that, and I agree. I always, always, upgraded the RAM in my machines (I even bumped my Atari 800 from 16K to 48K - and that upgrade was about $400 in 1982).

However, with the M1 chip, tests are showing that under moderately high load, 8GB is more than adequate.

[Axtremus]

Not arguing whether 8GB or 16GB RAM is enough, just reading up a bit on the M1’s “unified memory architecture”:

https://www.macworld.com/article/3597569/m1-macs-memory-isnt-what-it-used-to-be.html

https://www.howtogeek.com/701804/how-unified-memory-speeds-up-apples-m1-arm-macs/

[mark]

My new Graphics card has 16GB of memory.

[Aqua Letifer]

@klaus said in Thinking about a new Mac...:

It's not "inadequate". But I had 16GB of RAM in my laptop in 2010. Would you still be happy with a harddrive from 2010?

False assumption. 16GB of traditional RAM is not the same as 16GB of RAM used by SoC architecture. You can't numerically compare machines from ten years ago to today without taking the hardware changes into consideration.

[Rainman]

I expect my lights to dim every time Mark turns on his machine.

No problems with my computer, 16 gb ram. What I find weird is Windows updates which cause goofy things to occur like rebooting adds opening chrome in pages I viewed weeks ago. I watch and marvel when rebooting, maybe this time Word will open up automatically with a document from weeks ago.

Back to highbrow computer nerd stuff. Interesting to those that follow the thread, even if most of it is like a different language.

[Klaus]

@aqua-letifer said in Thinking about a new Mac...:

@klaus said in Thinking about a new Mac...:

It's not "inadequate". But I had 16GB of RAM in my laptop in 2010. Would you still be happy with a harddrive from 2010?

False assumption. 16GB of traditional RAM is not the same as 16GB of RAM used by SoC architecture. You can't numerically compare machines from ten years ago to today without taking the hardware changes into consideration.

Hu? Of course you can. It doesn't matter where the RAM is located. Things like access times, cache sizes etc. matter, too, but the amount of RAM is maybe the most important parameter, since if you run out of memory, the performance penalty is extreme. Also, neither the M1 nor Intel Core and nor the Intel chips from 2010 are "SoC", so what are you talking about?

[George K]

There’s a line in The Expanse where Avasarala Says something to the effect of “I wish these guys would stop waving their dicks at each other.”

[Aqua Letifer]

@klaus said in Thinking about a new Mac...:

Hu? Of course you can. It doesn't matter where the RAM is located.

They're literally saying the opposite. Read Ax's articles he posted.

[Aqua Letifer]

@george-k said in Thinking about a new Mac...:

There’s a line in The Expanse where Avasarala Says something to the effect of “I wish these guys would stop waving their dicks at each other.”

Not me. I didn't get a monster machine, and Mark and Klaus would find the specs abysmal. But I use my computer more heavily than average, and I'm not at all worried about the new one crapping out on me.

[Klaus]

@george-k said in Thinking about a new Mac...:

There’s a line in The Expanse where Avasarala Says something to the effect of “I wish these guys would stop waving their dicks at each other.”

[Klaus]

@aqua-letifer said in Thinking about a new Mac...:

@klaus said in Thinking about a new Mac...:

Hu? Of course you can. It doesn't matter where the RAM is located.

They're literally saying the opposite. Read Ax's articles he posted.

I did read the articles. The M1's "unified memory architecture" stuff doesn't change any of the considerations for more RAM. It's about sharing the RAM in a more flexible way (which is mostly a moot point if one has an external graphics card). What this basically means is that you run out of RAM on the M1 faster than on traditional architectures. But in any case, it doesn't change anything about the problem that if your applications require X+Y bytes of RAM but you only have X bytes available, you have a big problem.

For instance, if you multiply two numbers that each require, say, 10GB of memory, then a system with 32GB of memory will be orders of magnitude (say, 10x or 100x) faster than a system with 8GB or 16GB of memory, and it doesn't matter one bit whether it is a system from 2010 or an M1 from 2020.

Don't be so easily impressed by tech advertising BS.

[Aqua Letifer]

@klaus said in Thinking about a new Mac...:

which is mostly a moot point if one has an external graphics card

From the article: Like Intel chips with integrated graphics, the M1 chip includes a graphics processor

What this basically means is that you run out of RAM on the M1 faster than on traditional architectures.

Again from the article: But Apple isn’t integrating memory into its systems-on-a-chip out of spite. It’s doing it because it’s an approach that can lead to some dramatic speed benefits. ... because all the aspects of the processor can access all of the system memory, there’s no performance hit when the graphics cores need to access something that was previously being accessed by a processor core. On other systems, the data has to be copied from one portion of memory to another—but on the M1, it’s just instantly accessible.