Laptop or Macbook? Always been a Desktop user, apple scares me

[BONES]

What I don't like about Finder is its inconsistent behaviour. On Windows, every file open and file save dialog is an Explorer window with all the same features you get in Explorer. OTOH, on macOS, the open/save dialogs are cut-down, with only some of the functionality of a Finder window.

[Jac459]

https://www.pcworld.com/article/393822/ ... -4000.html

Sorry but you don't seems very neutral here. .your benchmarks is comparing the m1... an almost 3 years old cpu.

The m2 pro is more than 2 times faster, and it will manage that with much much less whats so basically less heat and better battery life.

[FapFilter]

Sorry but you don't seems very neutral here.
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The m2 pro is more than 2 times faster,

woot?!

[Jac459]

The m2 pro is more than 2 times faster than the m1.

Your second benchmark take the m1 as reference

Your first benchmark takes the m1 pro.

So none of your benchmarks takes the latest cpu of apple, the m2 pro.

And in your benchmarks, you see that the power consumption is 115 what for the pc peak vs 40...

It is a 10 nanometers technology, it is just less good than a 5 nanometers technology...

Then for the scalling as you said, your PC is HD. If you settle for HD I agree there is no issue. If you try a 4k screen in windows, you will have enormous scaling issues.

But anyway, I am not an apple fan. There is many things that I prefere with Windows... But the cpu technology is not one of them.

[Jac459]

Any shortcut to start the finder? I didn't find.

Just slap a paw down across Option+Command+Space

Thank you sir!

[Jac459]

Sorry but you don't seems very neutral here.
....
....
....
The m2 pro is more than 2 times faster,

woot?!

Actually the latest i9 laptop is still 10% faster on peak than the m2 pro, but look at power consumption:
TDP
Pc: 125 W
Mac: 30 W
Max. Boost TDP
Pc: 253 W
Mac: -

So basically it is 30w vs 253 Watts in peaks.

It isn't manageable on battery and in practice your computer will be burning hot even with a fan blowing full speed.

I was there. I was having a razer with a much better screen than my current mbp and a much better design... but the performance was bad because it was throttling and unusable if not on sector...

So I am not saying pc laptops are bad, just you have to be sure of your use case.
If your use case is to work with your laptop on your ... lap, unplugged. Factually it is a no brainer, go for the mac.
If your use case is to be plugged, you just have to be sure of the temperature management.

[jamcat]

Somehow I am still sort of struggling.
In particular with the finder. I am so used to type "Windows" + E and get Explorer. I don't like the views of finder at all. Did you manage to get a more "explorer" like experience?

In Finder, I set View > as Icons. "As List" also works for a Windows-like view if you prefer that better.
I have "Use Groups" checked and I Group By > Name.

In my Toolbar, I have the Path tool showing so I can see the folder hierarchy like Windows.

The one problem I have is I always click the Launchpad instead of the Finder when I want to bring up a folder, because the current Launchpad icon looks like a folder full of files to me.

Thanks I will try that. Any shortcut to start the finder? I didn't find.

Something else you need to do…
In Finder preferences > Advanced:

Keep folders on top:
☑ In windows when sorting by name

[Jac459]

Something else you need to do…
In Finder preferences > Advanced:

Keep folders on top:
☑ In windows when sorting by name

Thanks, awesome.

[PieBerger]

No contest for me personally. My desktop is PC and probably always will be, but my laptops are MacBooks and probably always will be, at least until Windows can run on something comparable to AS.

My M1 Air competes with 4yo PC desktop (similar no. cores and 16GB RAM) on performance, but requires zero cooling and is thus completely silent, weighs about 2kg and can go pretty anywhere I go. My PC cost £2k at the time vs £1,400 I paid for my Air. Of course there are PC laptops that compete on raw performance, at the same price point, but at the expense of heat and noise, which given the choice I'd rather not have to put up with. I use my laptop without any interface and imo Core Audio with onboard sound beats any PC onboard with shitty ASIO drivers. I use a Fireface on my desktop and RME have the ASIO drivers in the business, so there's no issue there.

If someone can show me a premium Windows laptop i.e. good quality aluminium body, that runs cool and quiet (like silent quiet), even under heavy load with performance greater than or equal to the base M1 chip, for less than or equal to £1,400 (I begrudgingly paid the premium for 16GB RAM and 512GB storage), I'll hear you out, genuinely

[Jac459]

No contest for me personally. My desktop is PC and probably always will be, but my laptops are MacBooks and probably always will be, at least until Windows can run on something comparable to AS.

My M1 Air competes with 4yo PC desktop (similar no. cores and 16GB RAM) on performance, but requires zero cooling and is thus completely silent, weighs about 2kg and can go pretty anywhere I go. My PC cost £2k at the time vs £1,400 I paid for my Air. Of course there are PC laptops that compete on raw performance, at the same price point, but at the expense of heat and noise, which given the choice I'd rather not have to put up with. I use my laptop without any interface and imo Core Audio with onboard sound beats any PC onboard with shitty ASIO drivers. I use a Fireface on my desktop and RME have the ASIO drivers in the business, so there's no issue there.

If someone can show me a premium Windows laptop i.e. good quality aluminium body, that runs cool and quiet (like silent quiet), even under heavy load with performance greater than or equal to the base M1 chip, for less than or equal to £1,400 (I begrudgingly paid the premium for 16GB RAM and 512GB storage), I'll hear you out, genuinely

I have a similar mindset.
Actually this M1 story remind me my computer science university training a few ... years ago (it was before 2000). At this time my teacher in CPU architecture was trashing the CISC architecture (ie: AMD and Intel) and was advocating how the RISC architecture is superior... At this time there was no consumer RISC ship (maybe Motorola if I remember well).

Then the RISC mobile chips came, snapdragon and apple A-chip then M1, and the rest is history.

I really believe AMD and Intel are just living a slow death if they don't pivot also to the RISC architecture.

[sjm]

I would really strongly recommend that you try out using a Mac for a few days before switching OS. You might be like me, and really, really hate the OS. Or you might not care. Or you might think it's great. That's all personal perference, but it would be a real shame to drop a huge chunk of change on something only to realise that you absolutely loathe the OS and find it a massive productivity killer.

Personally, I find MacOS is about 20 years behind Windows in terms of overall QoL, with the caveat that you'll not notice a lot of the issues if you are a casual user. The window management is unbelieveably bad and shortcuts are not ergonomic at all - there's a lot of very poor design decisions that make the experience highly frustrating to a "power user". I'm not talking about the shortcuts being different, or Ctrl and Command being swapped around - you can easily fix that yourself in a few minutes. I'm talking about managing windows when you have multiple browser Windows opened and shortcuts that require you to take the hand of the mouse to execute, when you typically want to use them while using the mouse.

But remember that I've had the Mac hoisted on me in an enterprise environment. It's really not geared for that - Windows is absolutely king in that space for a reason. If all you need is a single browser window and your DAW running, you'll probably not notice a lot of the annoyances. The windows management issues only really manifest themselves when you are constantly switching between apps and particularly multiple windows in the same app. Basically, if you're a one or two windows at a time guy, Mac will probably feel fine. If you typically have 10-20 windows open and like having multiple browser windows open (which I need to do my job), it's a nightmare.

The magic/cursed mouse is also a point of contention. I hate it. Some people love it. 95% of the people at work have a bog-standard mouse that behaves the same as under Windows because they hate it too. The Mac afficonados all use the magic mouse and swear by it. Once again, you might find it clicks with you. It didn't click with me, and ended up losing me work on a few occasions before I ditched it for good.

The trackpad is fine - way better than some Windows laptops for sure (looking at you Lenovo) - but I've never liked those things one way or another. So a decent trackpad is still something I'm never going to use unless I'm only firing up the machine for 3 minutes to do just 1 thing.

As a side note, the Mac also seems to crash a lot more than Windows ever did, but that's obviously purely anecdotal. My experience in this regard isn't necessarily indicative of other people's.

There are definitely some advantages to a Mac - no need for ASIO, they're very quiet etc. as listed above. So don't think I'm taking a big dump on them per se, just pointing out that there's a lot more you want to consider than technical specifications, i.e. will it work for you?

Long story short is that it's not that fun, nor easy, to relearn decades of muscle memory. If you're not heavily reliant on shortcuts, you might care a lot less about switching. And you might find all the annoyances that have me and my colleagues fuming in an enterprise environment are non-issues for your personal use. But definitely try before you buy, because you might not be aware of how much you may need to change your decade-long habits.

[BONES]

Sorry but you don't seems very neutral here. .

Really? I am simply quoting facts, while you are just making stuff up that you cannot possibly back up with anyt5hing even approaching facts.

your benchmarks is comparing the m1... an almost 3 years old cpu.

All the CPUs are three or more years old. AMD has a newer generation, Apple has a newer generation and Intel has two newer generations. I said it was a bit old but what it does is show that the hype was never justified and that hasn't changed, as you can see from the other link I posted, which is for (almost) current gen CPUs. You can dismiss one of the comparisons but not both.

The m2 pro is more than 2 times faster

No, it isn't and absolutely nobody but you has ever said it was. MacRumours says, "in early Geekbench benchmarks, the ‌‌M2‌‌, which runs at 3.49GHz compared to 3.2GHz for the ‌‌M1‌‌, earned a single-core score of 1,919, which is roughly 12 percent faster than the 1,707 single-core score of the ‌‌M1‌‌ 13-inch MacBook Pro. The ‌‌M2‌‌ earned a multi-core score of 8,928, up about 20 percent from the 7,419 score of the ‌‌M1‌‌ model. This is right in line with Apple's claim that the ‌‌M2‌‌ chip is up to 18 percent faster than the ‌‌M1‌."

In case it needs saying, 18% is not "twice as fast" and as Intel's 12th Gen CPUs featured significantly higher power bumps, it's not surprising they have left Apple's silicon in the dust. The newly released 13th Gen are a more modest improvement, offering a similar performance boost to the M2.

Of course, you don't have to take my word for it, here's the article I was referring to -

https://www.macrumors.com/guide/m1-vs-m2-chip/

Their conclusion is particularly interesting - "Overall, the ‌M2‌ chip offers moderate improvements over the ‌M1‌, even if most ‌M1‌ users are unlikely to notice significant improvements when upgrading to the ‌M2‌."

And, just in case doing your own research is too hard for you, here's a newer article that shows the M2 cannot even keep up with a 13th Gen Core i5 -

https://www.imore.com/mac/apples-m2-pro ... benchmarks

Lastly, because a picture paints a thousand words, here are some Cinebench results from cpu-monkey.com. I like Cinebench because it uses an application I use at work every day, so it's a very real-world test.

Cinebench23.jpg

As you can see, the M2 does OK on the single core test, 76% as good isn't disgraceful, but it's result for multi-core is hopeless. Embarrassing, even. Of course, a 13th Gen i9 is going to be eye-wateringly expensive, so in terms of bang for your buck, the M2 is not too bad, although when a Core i5 can beat it, it's not exactly great value, either.

[jamcat]

Something else you need to do…
In Finder preferences > Advanced:

Keep folders on top:
☑ In windows when sorting by name

Thanks, awesome.

Have you tried any of these settings yet?
Are they getting you what you were looking for?

[Jac459]

Oh my...
First can you please try to be less agressive? It could be just a polite discussion even if we disagree.

Second you are misquoting me, is it purposedly? I said the m2 pro is 2 times faster than the m1 (that you are using in one of your benchmark).
So you can send me a lot if links about things I didn't say ... or you can read me.

Actually, the very much deserved hype about them was not about power. It was about power by watt. What do you say about that? Doesn't it translate in real life use cases for you?

For me it does for music production. My kids were calling my razer 15 advanced the helicopter and telling me to brace for take off as the fan was so noisy.

[Jac459]

Something else you need to do…
In Finder preferences > Advanced:

Keep folders on top:
☑ In windows when sorting by name

Thanks, awesome.

Have you tried any of these settings yet?
Are they getting you what you were looking for?

Yes absolutely actually! KVR is magical haha. I am upset against myself not to have been able to find these infos myself but very very happy about those.