Probably buying base MacBook Pro 14"

MKBHD making me feel much better about getting into M1 Max this past month….


View: https://youtu.be/ZWgr7qP6yhY?feature=shared

EDIT: I think I have top 'liked' comment on that video. I'm internet famous everybody.

He seems very jaded lately. He doesn’t get excited about much anymore. There were some video editing projects that would choke on the M1 Max that are butter on the M2 Max (on my friend’s laptops). It was night and day. Marques doesn’t really do very much video editing himself anymore. He has a team for that. He said himself he does light video editing now. I don’t really think this laptop is for him and his comment about games was empty and pointless. He doesn’t even use the new features of the M3 and didn’t test them at all. As much as I’ve generally respected his thoughts on things, his review was one of the laziest and shortest I’ve ever seen from him.
 
He seems very jaded lately. He doesn’t get excited about much anymore.
You can find performance differences yes, but If you spent $4000 on an M1 Max, and then a year later can afford to spend another $4000 on an M2 Max and then another year later afford to spend another $4000 for M3 Max, you're in a class of buyer that Marques isn't trying to address anyway. And that person already knows who they are and they're going to buy regardless of the review.

Marques is addressing people who are on previous M chips or previous Intel Macs and saying "move to Apple silicon if you haven't yet, but if you have already you don't need to upgrade" is pretty fair advice. Just rewatch his conclusion from 7:47-8:55.

There were some video editing projects that would choke on the M1 Max that are butter on the M2 Max (on my friend’s laptops).
I'm sure there are. I'm on M1 Max and I'd have to say the only way I can get it to slow down so far is by trying to stack a bunch of effects and trying to play back in real time at native resolution (even doing a denoising + renoising pass plays back almost at native in 6k, which is double the resolution of 4k, pretty crazy). Or in transcoding specifically to 12-bit h.265 (in my case from PRR). Something like PRR to PR or h.256 whether long-gop or all-intra to any form of ProRes happens so absurdly quickly it almost feels SSD limited and not chip performance limited. It isn’t in actuality, but it’s fast enough to feel that way.

It was night and day. Marques doesn’t really do very much video editing himself anymore. He has a team for that. He said himself he does light video editing now.
Sure. But he does edit his pieces on the road, which was when laptop editing for him was happening in the first place. VS his previous machine for travel which was a maxed out 2017 iMac Pro.

I don’t really think this laptop is for him and his comment about games was empty and pointless. He doesn’t even use the new features of the M3 and didn’t test them at all. As much as I’ve generally respected his thoughts on things, his review was one of the laziest and shortest I’ve ever seen from him.
I think you're not paying attention to Apple's messaging then. Because to a certain degree he was "forced" to talk about that talking point.
 
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Okay, I had half a day of working/playing around with it. Setup and getting everything up and running was much easier this time since I already had the basics down. As mentioned earlier when I had the M2 Pro, Internet browsing is SUPER snappy on this thing. Completely destroys my desktop PC when it comes to Internet browsing speed and snappiness. This is with using Safari on macOS 14.1.1. My score on Speedometer 2.1 is 100 points higher (which is a massive difference for this benchmark) with the M3 Pro than with the M2 Pro. As I noticed with the 14" M2 Pro, the screen is simply awesome and blows away my 27" ASUS PQ279Q in picture/image quality. Overall, yes I am going to stick with it and sell my desktop PC (which is now going to be 12 years old this January). I don't game these days and I won't miss not really having the ability to game. In the worst case scenario, I could just get a PlayStation 5 later on if I do come across some game that I just must play or build a new desktop PC just for gaming.

Oh, and the Space Black color is awesome. I like how it changes hue depending on the lighting conditions and also when looking at it from different angles. Happy I got this over Silver.
 
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Okay, I had half a day of working/playing around with it. Setup and getting everything up and running was much easier this time since I already had the basics down. As mentioned earlier when I had the M2 Pro, Internet browsing is SUPER snappy on this thing. Completely destroys my desktop PC when it comes to Internet browsing speed and snappiness. This is with using Safari on macOS 14.1.1. My score on Speedometer 2.1 is 100 points higher (which is a massive difference for this benchmark) with the M3 Pro than with the M2 Pro. As I noticed with the 14" M2 Pro, the screen is simply awesome and blows away my 27" ASUS PQ279Q in picture/image quality. Overall, yes I am going to stick with it and sell my desktop PC (which is now going to be 12 years old this January). I don't game these days and I won't miss not really having the ability to game. In the worst case scenario, I could just get a PlayStation 5 later on if I do come across some game that I just must play or build a new desktop PC just for gaming.
I'm glad you like it.

Oh, and the Space Black color is awesome. I like how it changes hue depending on the lighting conditions. Happy I got this over Silver.
I went to go see the Space Black color in person before pulling the trigger. It definitely looks fantastic.

I'll hopefully be getting mine soon. 😬

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Shoganai, what specs and screen size did you get?

By the way, I am not sure if I want to get a mouse for this. I always got a mouse when working on Windows laptops. The trackpad on this thing is awesome so I am not sure if a mouse will be better?
 
Shoganai, what specs and screen size did you get?
I just went with the base 16” Max with 36 GB RAM and 1 TB of storage.

By the way, I am not sure if I want to get a mouse for this. I always got a mouse when working on Windows laptops. The trackpad on this thing is awesome so I am not sure if a mouse will be better?
Yes, the trackpads on Macs are in a class of their own. I still use a mouse at my desk, though.
 
I just went with the base 16” Max with 36 GB RAM and 1 TB of storage.


Yes, the trackpads on Macs are in a class of their own. I still use a mouse at my desk, though.
What mouse will you be using with it when at your desk?
 
I've been using IINA exclusively for a while now. It's very simple and fast. https://iina.io/
Yeah, we talked about it earlier in the thread when discussing media players. I'm relatively new to it, as I just stumbled on it while looking for players. And I'm very happy with it. Mostly because it's properly colour managed and deals with HDR properly as well as being very light weight and utilizing metal. I used VLC + QT for so long, I just hadn't looked for alternatives in a while. Quiz in his search also stumbled upon it independently as he was also looking for apps on his first macOS journey.
 
Yeah, we talked about it earlier in the thread when discussing media players. I'm relatively new to it, as I just stumbled on it while looking for players. And I'm very happy with it. Mostly because it's properly colour managed and deals with HDR properly as well as being very light weight and utilizing metal. I used VLC + QT for so long, I just hadn't looked for alternatives in a while. Quiz in his search also stumbled upon it independently as he was also looking for apps on his first macOS journey.
Another video player I really enjoy is Infuse: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/infuse-video-player/id1136220934

It's not free though. It's 10 dollars a year. It can handle huge libraries and it automatically pulls images/cover art and other data from online and lets you download missing subtitles and whatnot. It can also connect to things like seedboxes and cloud storage services.
 
Another video player I really enjoy is Infuse: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/infuse-video-player/id1136220934

It's not free though. It's 10 dollars a year. It can handle huge libraries and it automatically pulls images/cover art and other data from online and lets you download missing subtitles and whatnot. It can also connect to things like seedboxes and cloud storage services.
Haha, I think we talked about that one too. I only play local stuff and don't have a huge database of video files so I'm happy with a "VLC like" player. If I ever get around to creating some sort of home media server, I'll take a look at this again. But for me, something light weight is what I'm happy with.

I mentioned a long time ago being an audio enthusiast and using Foobar2000 on PC as something I missed (it's on Mac now, but I thought it would never come). Anyway, say that to say that I liked Foobar all those years for it's wide format compatibility and light-weight. I just have never needed more. Certainly I don't mind paying $10 a year if the utility is good when the time comes.
 
Do you guys remove leftover files (whether through the use of a third-party "cleaner" app or manually) after uninstalling/deleting an app or just let them be? I know UnknownSouljer said to not worry about it but I thought I'd still ask.
 
Do you guys remove leftover files (whether through the use of a third-party "cleaner" app or manually) after uninstalling/deleting an app or just let them be? I know UnknownSouljer said to not worry about it but I thought I'd still ask.
Look, if you want to do it, go ahead. You keep asking about it.

My suggestion was mainly based on two (sorta 3) things:
1.) Whether it matters from a practical perspective or not. They in and of themselves do not affect anything in terms of loading background tasks at boot and/or will not slow anything down as there is no registry etc.
2.) Whether eliminating the files would recoup enough drive space to be worth the effort or not. Each system file is generally speaking kilobytes in size. You'd have to install and then want to uninstall 100's if not 1000's of apps for them to add up to anything meaningful in terms of drive space. And even while experimenting, I highly doubt you'll get through more than 20 or so.
3.) (Sorta 3), I would just not install any app cleaning app on principle. They are almost always scams at best and could contain malware at worst. There may be some drive cleaning app out there that has been verified to not be that, but I don't think it is worth the effort to figure that out.

So, because they don't affect the OS and they're tiny, I personally feel like it's not worth getting neurotic over. If you want to be neurotic and track down every file for whatever reason you have, that's fine. Go ahead and do it. It's not as if you'll hurt the computer if you do.
 
Do you guys remove leftover files (whether through the use of a third-party "cleaner" app or manually) after uninstalling/deleting an app or just let them be? I know UnknownSouljer said to not worry about it but I thought I'd still ask.
Yes. I use the Find Any File app. And I'll occasionally run Onyx about once a month for maintenance.
 
I've started to really love this MacBook Pro. My grasp of macOS improves everyday. I've been spending far more time on it than my desktop PC (which I put up for sale).
 
I've started to really love this MacBook Pro. My grasp of macOS improves everyday. I've been spending far more time on it than my desktop PC (which I put up for sale).

I bought my daughter an M Macbook Air this past week, I am very impressed by it too.. I might buy my own and dump my windows laptop..

One thing of concern around the interwebs is how much swap usage one may encounter.. especially for 8/256... but at the same time, I saw this thread and this single post which put to bed my concerns.. There are speculations that Apple must be using enterprise grade chips for their SSDs to handle such large write cycles.. thus a theoretical write limit of 1.6 petabyte per 256GB (not 150TB like normal consumer grade stuff)... As I said, this is speculation, but the SMART calculations seem to confirm.. If something does fail, it is likely the controller chip that provides voltage to the NANDs and when it goes out kills the NANDs with overvoltage (covered by Rossman). Still not a bad idea to monitor your write cycles periodically.

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https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/ssd-swap-high-usage-of-terabytes-written.2284893/page-144
 
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Speaking of it, did anyone hear of a worn out SSD in modern Macs? I didn't.
 
I bought my daughter an M Macbook Air this past week, I am very impressed by it too.. I might buy my own and dump my windows laptop..
I think the value propsition that Apple is bringing is far higher than a lot of hardcore PC enthusiasts want to admit. Especially in mobile. But even in desktop, if you're doing certain types of workloads.
One thing of concern around the interwebs is how much swap usage one may encounter.. especially for 8/256... but at the same time, I saw this thread and this single post which put to bed my concerns.. There are speculations that Apple must be using enterprise grade chips for their SSDs to handle such large write cycles.. thus a theoretical write limit of 1.6 petabyte per 256GB (not 150TB like normal consumer grade stuff)... As I said, this is speculation, but the SMART calculations seem to confirm.. If something does fail, it is likely the controller chip that provides voltage to the NANDs and when it goes out kills the NANDs with overvoltage (covered by Rossman). Still not a bad idea to monitor your write cycles periodically.

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https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/ssd-swap-high-usage-of-terabytes-written.2284893/page-144
I think it works reasonably in a pinch, but I think all of us would much rather keep our machines from having to swap constantly. If it has to "sometimes" that's fine, but for basic operations, that's sub-optimal. Even if realistically I'll never reach the max write cycles.
Speaking of it, did anyone hear of a worn out SSD in modern Macs? I didn't.
Depends on who you ask. Louis Rossman famously gets people's broken machines. I have personally never had this issue in a 2015 MBP, 2019 MBP, or now in my 2021 one. And in fairness to the ultra-hardcore right to repair folks, it does create the issue of un-repairability in the event of a faulty SSD. Not necessarily that it has come up to the end of its write cycles which theoretically will never happen in the useful lifespan of the device. But rather in the advent of a hardware failure, there is no recourse. Even a 1% defect rate means there are at least a few thousand people affected every year. While those folks will be made whole under Apple care, it does suck if it fails outside of the repair window. Either through Applecare or Applecare+.

I acknowledge all of these issues, but also at the same time recognize the amount of people affected are incredibly low. And in order for Apple to have a "user replaceable" SSD, there would have to be manufacturers that cater to them. The SSD controller is part of Apple's SOC (which is one of the reasons why swapping RAM to SSD and vice versa can happen so quickly and seamlessly), so arguing for NVME slots would only be useful for "expandable storage" and not the primary drive.

The 2017 iMac Pro and 2019 Mac Pro essentially had these "chips" as being user removable (I assume the 2023 Mac Pro as well), so Apple have done it in the past. However no one made after market drives (partially because Apple's security system doesn't allow it), so the systems only allowed for replacement and not even upgrades. The only move here then would be for Apple to have this on all machines and allow techs to replace the SSD's with aftermarket by resetting the authentication somehow.

I'd welcome that, but I also see why they don't. Mainly because they save in the order of 10's of millions by not having to have a separate PCB or another slot that has to be paid for vs soldering directly onto the mainboard PCB.
 
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How often do you guys shut down and/or restart your Mac? Would shutting down every night before going to bed and booting up in the morning be "harmful" in any way?
 
How often do you guys shut down
Rarely. I only shut down if I'm traveling and I won't be using the machine for the duration of the traveling part of the trip.
and/or restart your Mac?
Only when necessary. And that is not very often. I find my self still doing things that are very x86 like, but ARM seems to be able to gain back all of its resources without needing a restart. So why do it? The only time I do is for software updates and to get weird of rare odd bugs.
Would shutting down every night before going to bed and booting up in the morning be "harmful" in any way?
Theoretically no.
 
How often do you guys shut down and/or restart your Mac? Would shutting down every night before going to bed and booting up in the morning be "harmful" in any way?
The only times I ever restart are when there's an OS update, or I need to restart because a new app installation requires it, or in the extremely rare instance when something is being buggy. You can put your Mac to sleep 99% of the time. I only shut it down if I'm traveling or something. Back when Macs had more moving parts like hard drives, it did increase more wear and tear on the components, but that's not really an issue these days. Do whatever makes you comfortable.
 
Optimized Battery Charging kicked in today (exactly 2 weeks after getting the laptop and using it plugged in all the time).

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