MacBook Pro - M2 or M3

[Jedi Master]

15 hours ago, kye said:

there was just too many hurdles to overcome with the need to sync two computers.

I sync more than two without much hassle (I have seven desktop computers scattered around the house). It’s easily done with the right software (although mine are all Windows and FreeBSD boxes, but I’m sure there’re similar tools for MacOS).

[kye]

9 hours ago, Jedi Master said:

I sync more than two without much hassle (I have seven desktop computers scattered around the house). It’s easily done with the right software (although mine are all Windows and FreeBSD boxes, but I’m sure there’re similar tools for MacOS).

When I made the move from Windows to Mac, the primary reason I did that was I wanted to use a computer, but not have a part time job as a systems administrator, which is what Windows forces you to do in order to just use the computer.

I was stunned at the time how much time I used to have to spend on the computer not doing the things I wanted to do, but doing technical things to enable those things to be done.  TBH I'm over that, so while I'm perfectly capable of managing the IT of a medium sized business, I'd rather just use the computer for what I want to use it for, and not have to troubleshoot an array of file and network management infrastructure.

[Emanuel]

3 hours ago, kye said:

When I made the move from Windows to Mac, the primary reason I did that was I wanted to use a computer, but not have a part time job as a systems administrator, which is what Windows forces you to do in order to just use the computer.

I was stunned at the time how much time I used to have to spend on the computer not doing the things I wanted to do, but doing technical things to enable those things to be done.  TBH I'm over that, so while I'm perfectly capable of managing the IT of a medium sized business, I'd rather just use the computer for what I want to use it for, and not have to troubleshoot an array of file and network management infrastructure.

Where's the double like button?! ; ) oh God, how is it possible you to be me? ;- ) Isn't it? Yes, it is possible. Why? There's a name for: Windows by Microsoft. Two people in separate parts of the world having exactly the same feeling, ipsis verbis. Their achievement! These stupid professionals there think we live for them. They take the money from us for their daily job and put us to work on their behalf. We who have paid for it.

[Thpriest]

I have a Macbook Pro M1 Pro 16” with 16gb ram. The screen is great and in general it’s a good computer but I’d definitely get at least 32gb of ram if I were ti buy it again. Running out of ram is the computer’s biggest weakness.

[Jay60p]

For anyone doing 3D modeling, animation, rendering, the M3 is a major
Update due to the new ray tracing acceleration.  

I decided against an M2 Studio to wait for next year’s M3 Studio:

PCs with a Nvidia GPU card were always faster than a Mac for rendering 3D animation, for the same reasons PCs are faster in gaming.

But now Neo Chan’s video demonstrates that his M3 laptop is roughly equal to his PC with a RTX4090 for 3D work. Here it was faster in rendering a Blender scene:

The point is, M3 is much faster than M2 for 3D work. For those who want to do 3D in OSX it looks like a game changer.

[Jedi Master]

17 hours ago, kye said:

When I made the move from Windows to Mac, the primary reason I did that was I wanted to use a computer, but not have a part time job as a systems administrator, which is what Windows forces you to do in order to just use the computer.

Interesting. I made the move in the opposite direction because my Mac Pros would always get slower and more unstable with every new version of MacOS. In the decade since I switched, I’ve had practically zero issues with Windows.

I think the statement that you need to be a part time system administrator to use a Windows computer is hyperbole. If you have good, mainstream hardware, Windows doesn’t require any more sysadm work than MacOS. If you have weird, or old hardware, then yes, you’ll probably have more issues than with a computer where one company controls both the hardware and the OS.

 

[kye]

On 12/2/2023 at 7:21 PM, Thpriest said:

I have a Macbook Pro M1 Pro 16” with 16gb ram. The screen is great and in general it’s a good computer but I’d definitely get at least 32gb of ram if I were ti buy it again. Running out of ram is the computer’s biggest weakness.

Since we started using SSDs the RAM limitations were much less impactful, but WOW does OSX fall apart if you run out of SSD space!  It becomes a struggle to even use the computer to delete some files and recover, things just unravel..

On 12/3/2023 at 2:16 AM, Jedi Master said:

Interesting. I made the move in the opposite direction because my Mac Pros would always get slower and more unstable with every new version of MacOS. In the decade since I switched, I’ve had practically zero issues with Windows.

I think the statement that you need to be a part time system administrator to use a Windows computer is hyperbole. If you have good, mainstream hardware, Windows doesn’t require any more sysadm work than MacOS. If you have weird, or old hardware, then yes, you’ll probably have more issues than with a computer where one company controls both the hardware and the OS.

I moved from PC to Mac in 2012, and at the time the experience was night and day.  Since then OSX has definitely become far less reliable.  The phrase "it just works" was definitely true, but since then that's stopped being the case - I think that started with the update that broke a bunch of people's WIFI (something to do with Airdrop I think).

I also understand that Windows has mostly sorted itself out as well, so that's true also.

I have a background in tech and at the time I knew that Windows was fiddly because I was sick of having to fix this thing or that thing, but it wasn't until I actually switched that I really understood the difference.  It was like I used to have an angry neighbour who would come and interrupt what I was doing every few days, waste my time, make me angry, and would then go away and I'd have to calm down and remember what I was meant to be doing....  and then all-of-a-sudden they moved away!  At first you don't notice it directly, but then you're like "oh wait... hang on!" and things are suddenly much nicer 🙂 

For the few things that I have wanted to do that weren't natively supported since switching to Mac, I can just bring up a command prompt and have the full power of a unix implementation, which is spectacular.  Having DOS sitting underneath Windows is a poor substitute if you want to do something that the OS doesn't provide functionality for.  It likely depends on what you want to do of course, but the combination of Apple's design simplicity (and forced workflows) and Unix underneath seems like a better experience than Windows and DOS underneath it.

[Emanuel]

You rock @kye You're the kind of technical expertise skilled individual at professional level no matter how amateur sometimes you claim to be LOL : P every film producer would like to have nearby! : ) When/if you'll decide to come closer, let people here know! ;- )

[Emanuel]

5 hours ago, kye said:

Since we started using SSDs the RAM limitations were much less impactful, but WOW does OSX fall apart if you run out of SSD space!  It becomes a struggle to even use the computer to delete some files and recover, things just unravel..

On that SSD comment, I hope that thunderbolt port may let people go on cheap as far as internal SSD concerns RAM aspect aside... Am I right?

[Jedi Master]

18 hours ago, kye said:

Having DOS sitting underneath Windows is a poor substitute if you want to do something that the OS doesn't provide functionality for.  

DOS hasn’t been “sitting underneath Windows” since at least the Windows 95 days 28 years ago.

If you’re just talking about a command shell, then yes, the old command line interface has been obsolete for a long time now. It’s replacement, PowerShell, is as capable as bash, or any other shell on a UNIX box.

[kye]

14 hours ago, Emanuel said:

On that SSD comment, I hope that thunderbolt port may let people go on cheap as far as internal SSD concerns RAM aspect aside... Am I right?

People definitely use external SSDs to augment their internal storage, but there are limitations to that kind of thing.

1 hour ago, Jedi Master said:

DOS hasn’t been “sitting underneath Windows” since at least the Windows 95 days 28 years ago.

If you’re just talking about a command shell, then yes, the old command line interface has been obsolete for a long time now. It’s replacement, PowerShell, is as capable as bash, or any other shell on a UNIX box.

At the time you needed about a dozen third-party utilities to be able to do all the things that you wanted.  When I moved to the Mac I did a bunch of googling about "how do I do X in OSX" and read a bunch of tutorials on how to switch, and at the end of it I realised instead of needing a dozen third-party utilities I only needed 1 or 2.  That was an interesting observation.  I realise things likely changed in the meantime as Windows gradually added things.  

Maybe it was just a point-in-time thing.  Maybe it was just because I already knew how to use unix, so using things like piping and regular expressions etc was all stuff I knew how to do.

Every time there was a new version of Windows it took a bunch of hours to deal with the fallout of things not working the same etc, and that time requirement just stopped when I made the switch.  It was something I really noticed at the time.

I'm not trying to say that either one is better or worse, and if I had to switch platforms then I'm sure I'd be fine and would see some new things I like as well as some annoyances too.  

I realise today things are much more ubiquitous.  Probably every software package I use would be available on both platforms, and the hardware might be better on the Windows side now too.  I've had a constant stream of Windows laptops since then for my day job and they seem to work ok.

[Emanuel]

4 hours ago, kye said:

People definitely use external SSDs to augment their internal storage, but there are limitations to that kind of thing.

I'm afraid so, hence my question... I wonder not only because their expensive SSD storage but what else is left other than external storage route via thunderbolt?

[Jedi Master]

7 hours ago, kye said:

People definitely use external SSDs to augment their internal storage, but there are limitations to that kind of thing.

At the time you needed about a dozen third-party utilities to be able to do all the things that you wanted.  When I moved to the Mac I did a bunch of googling about "how do I do X in OSX" and read a bunch of tutorials on how to switch, and at the end of it I realised instead of needing a dozen third-party utilities I only needed 1 or 2.  That was an interesting observation.  I realise things likely changed in the meantime as Windows gradually added things.  

Maybe it was just a point-in-time thing.  Maybe it was just because I already knew how to use unix, so using things like piping and regular expressions etc was all stuff I knew how to do.

Every time there was a new version of Windows it took a bunch of hours to deal with the fallout of things not working the same etc, and that time requirement just stopped when I made the switch.  It was something I really noticed at the time.

I'm not trying to say that either one is better or worse, and if I had to switch platforms then I'm sure I'd be fine and would see some new things I like as well as some annoyances too.  

I realise today things are much more ubiquitous.  Probably every software package I use would be available on both platforms, and the hardware might be better on the Windows side now too.  I've had a constant stream of Windows laptops since then for my day job and they seem to work ok.

Yes, Unix does have a lot of put-together-the-parts utilities that run in pipelines to do useful stuff. Windows never really had that kind of ecosystem, but there have been utilities added over the years that do most of the things Unix utilities do.

Recent Windows versions have WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) which supports running a Linux distro in Windows, and then you have access to all of the Unix tools like grep, sed, awk, diff, etc.

I mostly don’t use them much these days anyway because development tools like Visual Studio provide such a rich environment for developing code that they’re not necessary. The other tool I use heavily, Vivado, not so much ☹️

[kye]

4 hours ago, Emanuel said:

I'm afraid so, hence my question... I wonder not only because their expensive SSD storage but what else is left other than external storage route via thunderbolt?

It depends on what you want to do with it.

For most people it's great.  On my MBP the external SSD tests as fast as the internal one (2500MB/s read and write), and that's over USB, not even thunderbolt.

The only challenge comes when you run out of space on the internal one and have already moved all your files onto external drives, just because various software likes to keep things in directories that you often don't get to choose, for example if you install games through something like Steam then I think they want to be on the local drive.

You can side-step some of these things, but you're getting into technical territory here of complicated command-line stuff, which is beyond most people.

1 hour ago, Jedi Master said:

Yes, Unix does have a lot of put-together-the-parts utilities that run in pipelines to do useful stuff. Windows never really had that kind of ecosystem, but there have been utilities added over the years that do most of the things Unix utilities do.

Recent Windows versions have WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) which supports running a Linux distro in Windows, and then you have access to all of the Unix tools like grep, sed, awk, diff, etc.

I mostly don’t use them much these days anyway because development tools like Visual Studio provide such a rich environment for developing code that they’re not necessary. The other tool I use heavily, Vivado, not so much ☹️

One example that I was thinking of when I was writing a previous reply was the ability in unix to create a symbolic link from anywhere on the file system to anywhere else, which is incredibly useful for moving things to external drives to free up space on the local SSD for example, and doing it in such a way that the OS doesn't know and doesn't throw a fit.  When you mentioned powershell I googled it and it seems that it supports some of this stuff, which is cool - that must have come later.  Also, searching for files using grep etc was always really handy.

I used PCs all through my computer science degree, and so became aware of the various scripting capabilities of DOS and shell scripts and writing shell scripts was just always so much easier than trying to write them in DOS and having to download some new third-party utility in order to do stuff that was really straight-forward in unix.

 

[Emanuel]

1 hour ago, kye said:

It depends on what you want to do with it.

For most people it's great.  On my MBP the external SSD tests as fast as the internal one (2500MB/s read and write), and that's over USB, not even thunderbolt.

The only challenge comes when you run out of space on the internal one and have already moved all your files onto external drives, just because various software likes to keep things in directories that you often don't get to choose, for example if you install games through something like Steam then I think they want to be on the local drive.

No games nor leisure stuff, only work related which translates to software and those files you mention in such directories. Not easy to mantain the system much clean to avoid those issues without many skills on computing and alike? I mean because I am not Apple user yet despite a couple of equipment around for home use, but as far as I could understand, the idea is they offer understanding of its maintenance under the regular user viewpoint or am I wrong on this one?

[kye]

2 hours ago, Emanuel said:

No games nor leisure stuff, only work related which translates to software and those files you mention in such directories. Not easy to mantain the system much clean to avoid those issues without many skills on computing and alike? I mean because I am not Apple user yet despite a couple of equipment around for home use, but as far as I could understand, the idea is they offer understanding of its maintenance under the regular user viewpoint or am I wrong on this one?

I'm really talking about advanced stuff in my previous posts, and doing tricky work-arounds for things.  If you simply buy a big enough SSD to hold the operating system and software in the first place then you should be fine.  

A good way to estimate that is to look at the total space you've used on the drive, and then take away the size of any folders that have your own files in them (documents, music, etc) and then you'll know how much space everything else is taking up.  If you're upgrading and going to be using the same software then this should be a good guide for how much space you'll need.  Software installations get larger over time of course, so build in some allowances for that, but otherwise you probably don't ever need to think about it.

Probably the only things that might enter the equation is if you install some software and it decides to install a bunch of sample media libraries, or something like Resolve will render proxy files etc.  For these things you hope that the software will give you the option to specify where to put all those files, but that's not really an Operating System thing, that's a software thing from Adobe or whoever.

[Emanuel]

1 hour ago, kye said:

I'm really talking about advanced stuff in my previous posts, and doing tricky work-arounds for things.  If you simply buy a big enough SSD to hold the operating system and software in the first place then you should be fine.  

A good way to estimate that is to look at the total space you've used on the drive, and then take away the size of any folders that have your own files in them (documents, music, etc) and then you'll know how much space everything else is taking up.  If you're upgrading and going to be using the same software then this should be a good guide for how much space you'll need.  Software installations get larger over time of course, so build in some allowances for that, but otherwise you probably don't ever need to think about it.

Probably the only things that might enter the equation is if you install some software and it decides to install a bunch of sample media libraries, or something like Resolve will render proxy files etc.  For these things you hope that the software will give you the option to specify where to put all those files, but that's not really an Operating System thing, that's a software thing from Adobe or whoever.

It is Resolve but the idea is to guarantee the minimum configuration savings for internal SSD.

And taking advantage of the Thunderbolt port(s) to connect the external SSD storage in order to have access to high resolution video files from there where Resolve will operate.

[eatstoomuchjam]

There's one other consideration with Mac - the smallest SSD usually has about half the performance of all of the other SSD's.

The short answer is to always take at least the one above the smallest (so if the smallest is 256, go at least 512) and make sure you have enough space for whatever files you want to keep locally.  If not, upgrade.  Any modern high-performance external SSD (whether USB 3.x or Thunderbolt) is going to be fast enough for the vast majority of people.

I went with 2TB because I like to be able to temporarily dump things to the internal drive so that I can edit on airplanes or while on a couch/in bed without having an external drive dangling from the side of the computer.  

[Jedi Master]

8 hours ago, kye said:

One example that I was thinking of when I was writing a previous reply was the ability in unix to create a symbolic link from anywhere on the file system to anywhere else, which is incredibly useful for moving things to external drives to free up space on the local SSD for example, and doing it in such a way that the OS doesn't know and doesn't throw a fit.

Windows supports symbolic links. To create them, use the mklink command.

[Emanuel]

9 hours ago, eatstoomuchjam said:

If not, upgrade.

Is it possible on most recent Mac with unified memory?

 

9 hours ago, eatstoomuchjam said:

Any modern high-performance external SSD (whether USB 3.x or Thunderbolt) is going to be fast enough for the vast majority of people.

Even dealing with high resolution video files?