A friend has asked about new Macs, they work predominantly using Adobe CS and all that shite, and their current Intel Mac is falling apart at the seams. Aren’t we all.
I’ve not heard good things about the new architecture and wondering if Mac OS has been falling out of fashion with the creative types - is this fake news or no?
Anyone have one or any thoughts?
Please give it a day or two before this inevitably turns into a Foxconn diss thread, and then the criticism of the CCP and their Covid policy fanx
You’ve not heard good things about the new ARM architecture? Would be curious what circles you hang out in, but in software developer circles they have a very good reputation (from myself included).
I have an M1 Pro 14" and it works incredibly well for fairly heavy development work and 10 hours of battery life.
I don’t professionally run Adobe products, but Photoshop and Lightroom for personal stuff flies on it as well
I have the M2 MacBook, just as a replacement for my 2012 MacBook (which still works fine, just couldn’t update the the latest Adobe). For my needs I upgraded the RAM to 16gb, the hard drive is fine as I have lots of storage at home.
My main work horse is an iMac with an i7 intel and 32gb ram, for work a use Illustrator, Photoshop, Indesign and a few other bits of specialist print software.
In my none scientific test the M2 deals with all the same files the intel can, even with half the ram. This is 4 or 5gb illustrator files with embedded and linked images, rendering files for final production and various other things that can get a bit resource hungry.
In answer to this, a few years ago the company I work for noticed how seldom they had to replace the Macs compared to the other computers. They did one of them cost thingies and are now replacing all the office and sales computers with Apple hardware.
I’ve got an M2 MacBook. It’s performed flawlessly for the mild data crunching I’ve done. All the creative industry people I know have nothing but good things to say about the new Apple silicon based machines. My feeling is they’re more popular than ever.
If the software you use is hardware intensive and has native Apple Silicon support, I’d say go for it.
If it does not, or you are just using a browser/document editor to work, I’d say not worth paying the Apple tax.
You can turn this off as soon as you set up the Mac, it even asked you if you want to, also in system setting / security, you can turn off the phone home.
I have not seen updates that Apple has changed this in the last few years. This data collection cannot be turned off, at least not easily. Other data collection maybe, but not this.
It’s called Xprotect. Xprotect cannot be disabled through user-accessible settings.
I think most mac user would be surprised by a similar priced pc… With maybe a 3070ti or 3080 rtx… I have a few and they leave the apples in the dust when it comes to heavy lifting.
It’s in analytics and improvements, it actually an opt in now not an opt out. It has always been able to opt out it was just a little hidden before.
They have even introduced a lockdown mode for extreme security but this has its own restrictions due to the way websites and some apps work (looking at you Facebook and google).
The IT guys have monitors on our network,
in order of worst to best (generalisation as some individual kit is locked better than others).
the android tablets, boxes and phones are the leakiest,
then the windows boxes are second
Apple comes in 3rd
finally the Unix / Linux boxes send the information they want, when they want and thats it.
I will say I use all 3 systems for work and I was all for Windows and Unix until osx came out.
Now I would stick to Mac as I get 8 years work life from Apple as to 4years from a windows box at the same spec/ price.
Its not the hardware fault as we run the same spec for unix and get 10 years, these do the real hard work but it’s not pretty (its a bastard to set up, but once it is and running right just forget about it until a bit of hardware fails).
You can turn it off, also you can set it to ignore certificates so it will allow apps from any developer downloaded form any place you like (or keep it running and just add an exception for individual apps).
If it fails an app you can just go to security settings and it will ask if you want to bypass for this app.
As said I have and do use all 3 main systems and can separate hardware from software issues (over the years I have also run windows on apple hardware, and used Mac clones). Unix/linux is the most stable secure but with that is the difficulty in setting up, Apple is a good middle ground especially for the average user, Windows has lost its way and become fat and bloated sitting on the sofa. If you can spend some time sorting out windows, turning stuff off and stripping out all the unwanted extras, you have a lot better and more stable system.
I’m not an expert on all this, thats why we have an IT department, anything I need to sort out I just google or Usenet back in the day.
Back to CPU I feel the M2 is one of the best out at the moment for most users, as for graphics cards etc they use the same anyway apple or other computer brands.
If you’re working in a creative field and don’t play games or use Solidworks or any other windows only Apps, I would go for apple otherwise I would use windows.
Autodesk seams to be running more stable on Macs at work than the windows machines, this is not a scientific comparison and I seldom use it, but it’s one of the reasons for the changeover at work.
Um…i could be wrong here but isnt Apple using an intergrated gpu, it is good for intergrated, but is nothing like a dedicated gpu and for the price you would want dedicated, just to push high res display even, i think the m2 gpu is using image upscaling which is really not good for production purposes. In the past where they have used dedicated gpu it has often been a nerfed x60 series.
As for the… My apple lasts 10 years… I have 8 and 12 year old pc laptops… I have changed one to an ssd but otherwise they are going strong. If you give em a clean every few years they seem to last. I think 1 reason pcs get replaced more often is because its cheap to upgrade.
Stability: in reality i find nearly all computers very stable. I mean 99.9999 stable. When a pc is unstable for me. Its often because im pushing super heavy demands like 4k raytraced renders with motion blur etc… In autodesk most computers apple or pc will not even open these size files, This is not normal user experiance.
I dont mean to attack apple or apple users, i guess my point is perceived value and that the claims of stabilty / longevity are becoming non issues with modern machines. Every os seems to have “oh you need to click here then deselect this then restart gotchas” so they all seem complex to the unitiated which are becoming more common as most people just use cellphones.
I spilt beer on my M1 MacBook Air watching World Cup game, cost me 6000nt to replace keyboard
That hurt.
I used to mock Macolytes until I was gifted iMac 12 years ago, my son still uses with a SSD upgrade, that was simple to carry out, never Windows for me ever again.
They have integrated and dedicated depending on what you buy.
We find its software specs, as soon as you contact support, the first thing they ask is the spec of the machine, followed with your below our current recommended minimum spec.
The company I worked for don’t like to spend money, they worked out using apple was cheeper over the 4 year cycle, they supply the hardware and software we just use it.
Our department has always used all 3 systems its the nature of the job, as we work with client supplied files as well as self generated, so we have to cover everything.
To me a computer is just a tool to get a job done and the one I have to fuss around less with is apple. Before osx I preferred working with windows. I’m not really stuck to one camp or the other which ever tool makes my job easier I will use.
If your having trouble with your renders I would recommend setting up a cheep Nix box or converting an old windows box. We had a couple old Sun Micro boxes that were rasterising and rendering files and was still used in production for over 10years.
oh ok… was a bit hard to find info on latest M2 was thinking of getting one after i saw your thread and obviously i didn’t research properly.
i agree, just get the job done,
its more my problem of using unstable plugins in conjunction with heavy meshsmooths/particle systems bound to warps etc… this can often push overhead into 5 hours per frame…, often just have to dial something back a bit and its fine, rendering = quality vs overhead…hahah
