Everything Apple (the Mac heads thread)

Are you happy with your existing phone? If so, consider getting the battery replaced at an Apple Store. It's not that expensive, and you'll often get an entirely new phone instead (if the battery adhesive in your phone has hardened and can't be removed easily, they'll condemn it and give you a new one, happened to me twice now).

Edit: just noticed you're looking to switch to an iPhone... soz.

About the M1 Max MBP:

It's so good. The 120Hz screen is so silky & creamy, the battery genuinely lasts all day, there's no fucking annoying laggy GPU switching when launching an app that triggers the dGPU on Intel MBPs...

All my fears about Windows/Linux compatibility are now moot. Parallels runs Win11 better than all Intel laptops I've tried, and EVERYTHING I need to use on Windows works, including obscure Chinese video hardware control programs which rely on Silicon Labs/FTDI USB-to-serial drivers (these both now have native arm64 versions).

UTM makes running Linux VMs a breeze, and includes hardware graphics acceleration for macOS VMs the first time ever.

And for my particular use cases, the hardware ProRes video encode/decode engines in the M1 Max are a proper game changer; this £3.5K laptop can play 16x 4K60fps ProRes 4444 videos simultaneously, without breaking a sweat... An order of magnitude more than the bespoke £25K twin media server racks I build for my company. It's nuts.

And to think I just do spreadsheets on mine.

Still; it'll still be a powerhouse in 5 years time.

Son's going hungry. Thanks.

I've got an M2 Air on the way; hoping to plug it into a studio display and do away with my 2017 i7 iMac and my now-struggling 12" MacBook in one hit. Madness.

I was slightly tempted to move from the 16 M1 Max to the M2 Air with beefed up memory.

Not sure it's worth taking the ££ hit on the used market though so will just keep this for the duration.

Interested in your thoughts on it though. Looks like a super capable machine.

Your son will hate me for saying that I’ve been using a simultaneous combo of Photoshop/Illustrator/Premiere continuously since 9am today (it’s almost 5pm now), from the sofa on battery, and still have 20% charge remaining.

My 16” Intel MBP hardly lasted 4 hours doing this, and is so much less snappy.

I am considering an m1 studio to replace my old mac pro, as it'll do most of the higher end editing stuff I'd need to do, but will probably need a desk/workspace to work with it, rather than the dining room table I'm currently using.

Any Mac Studio owners here? Happy with it? Any gripes?

i posted up the thread a few weeks ago when i got mine.
no real update from that apart from the thermal handling which is way better than intel, my partners work macbook pro has been near unusable last couple of days due to the heat and constant fans, mac silicon is way more efficient and the studio is cool to touch so i would imagine the current laptops benefit from this too.

PS update a few weeks ago improved some of the filters like smart sharpen which was very slow as it hadn’t been updated.

my only gripe is not having more than 64gb of ram as i’m sometimes very close to the scratch limit of 45gb and into using the disc. (128gb means buying the Ultra) but the disk read/write speed is super fast so this helps.

don’t regret buying it as it’s made work a lot easier/faster for a minimal outlay compared to a mac pro which is slower.

Thanks very much. Might have access to a small grant to put towards it so think I’ll go for it. Could only stretch to the 32gb option but it would be replacing a 2014 mac mini so it’ll be a huge leap in performance for me

Pretty blissfully happy. Third party software falling into place week by week.

I'm not using heavy software but I have Ableton running 24/7, a lot of chrome with many tabs, Numbers and lots more software and it doesn't hesitate at all.

32GB which I'm using pretty much entirely but don't see any problems. 8GB of that is Luminar, Live & Roon all of which seem pretty resource hungry.

Thanks, sounds like it’ll handle what I need it to

Has anyone had there MacBook keyboard fixed under the recall for the keyboards recently?

Ah my beloved Mighty Mouse has finally bitten the dust! My hand is rejecting this backup Magic Mouse

About a year ago

defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-delay -float 0; defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-time-modifier -int 0;killall Dock

Put this into your Terminal and it makes the dock appear and disappear instantly, SO much nicer!

Isn’t that the same as the auto hide option when you right click on the dock? Great feature.

So I recently did an on location editing gig with a maxed out M1 macbook pro and I'm finally convinced I can ditch the workstation world and run a laptop as my main machine. I'm in urgent need of a new machine but what do we think the chances of an M2 refresh of the 14 and 16 inch versions are?

As much as I want a new machine I'd rather hang on a bit longer if there's a big refresh imminent?

Difficult to say how long it would be for M2 14/16 when the M1 Pro/Max only came out in Late October 21.
They obviously have full control of the product now and may want to follow an annual refresh cycle like their Phones but I'd be amazed if they met that target.

I think the huge leap in performance of the M1 over intel makes waiting for an M2 a bit moot, disk speed and ram will probably have more impact plus how efficient and optimised the software is.

The M1 Ultra has shown to useful in some situations but sometimes no difference or slower.

I edit on the very first 13" M1 MBP and it's a ridiculously capable machine when you think it costs a fraction of custom workstations I've worked on and struggled with more.

I can only imagine how good the Pro or Max version can be off the back of it. In short, while the M2 badge immediately sounds like a step up, I genuinely think that if you need to upgrade quick you won't be held back by going M1 Max and it'll still churn through whatever you through at it for years to come.

Isn’t that the same as the auto hide option when you right click on the dock?

the regular autohide "moves" the dock away and back in, whereas the option above makes it instantly disappear / -reappear

Ahhh gotcha. Will give it a punt.

14 or 16 M1 Max will twat anything you throw at it for the next 5 years at least. Wouldn’t bother waiting.