Visconti

Just wondering if y'all have some views on the new Macbook Pros. Worth it? Some general compare & contrast to the prior gen & new Airs?

angetenar

I have a M1 Pro MBP. It is quite good. Do you have a specific reason that you would want a Pro instead of an Air? I got the Pro because of the SD card port and additional USB-C ports, and because I do a reasonable amount of computational work.

Polytonic

I have two MBPs, M1 Pro (work-issued) and M1 Max (personal). These machines are incredible. I have yet to hear the fan on either machine, and I run pretty computationally intensive workloads. Compared to the previous generation of Intel Macs, I would not hesitate to upgrade (unless you desperately need to dual-boot Windows).

What I will say is that MBPs are pretty heavy. If "thin and light" are important to you, and your workload consists mostly of "browsing the internet" and "word processing" then consider the M2 Air.

Visconti

Ah, mostly because the many of the programs I use run best with 16 GBs of RAM; and, I just didn't like the extra cost of the Air with the 8 gig addition. Value wise, it seems as if the Pros are a better buy given the specs, at least to me. Also, would prefer HDMI2 and hook up to a pair of 4Ks or 8Ks when using a docking bay.

angetenar

Yeah go for it then. My MBP has been a pleasure to use.

aztimm

I got a new MBP last year after a ~10 year old MB Air died on me. I guess I should have updated this thread with what I ended up doing:
Replace MacBook Air battery -v- Replace Computer

It is slightly heavier, but I think the new Air would have been also. Overall, it is a great machine.

Costco and Sam's seem to regularly have these on sale; if not right now, wait a week or so and check back, unless you need it ASAP.

Rukes

If you just want a comparison of M1 vs M2 for the MacBook Pro:
M2 is roughly 30% faster, which might not mean much considering how big of a jump M1 was. If you are doing any GPU intensive use like video editing, thats where you might see a bigger benefit of the M2 over M1.

M2 has WiFi 6E while M1 has WiFi 6, so M2 is a little more future proof.

M2 supports up to 96GB of ram, vs 64 on M1.

M1 is just fine and the only reason to upgrade to M2 is if you need the extra ram or better GPU, which are pretty specific use cases.

Visconti

Ah, not upgrading but rather looking to just buy a new laptop which may double as a desktop for certain work-related purposes, now that all of the programs are run professionally appear to offer a native Mac ARM version. Mind as well since 4K & 8K screens are becoming more mainstream these days.

Admittedly, I hate Windows and just want an opportunity to stop having to use it. I'm equally comfortable with either OS, but much prefer the simple elegance of the Mac one.

0xeb

If you've never had hands on a M-series chip machine--go for it. For existing users, this year's upgrade is pretty minor and there is no reason to upgrade from a 2021 M1 Pro/Max MBP. Rumors say that the next gen chip will be 3nm.

Visconti

My current Macbook is still running legacy Intel chips because some of my professional programs would only run on the Intel based chips. Now that all the programs I require have made the transition to run on the new ARM CPUs, I could just opt for Macs moving forward without having to deal with Windows, virtual machines, or any of those hassles.

StuckInYYZ

Something to consider (this has been popping up in a few reviews)... Drive throughput has been trashed due to the "consolidation" of the storage chips. For base models, you're looking at half the transfer rates (this includes the Mac Mini as well). You need to up the storage to get the speed back to something comparable (and even then it's usually still slower). Depending on what you do, this could affect you.

Also, keep in mind the airs are passively cooled notebooks (vs the pros which are actively cooled).

When I'm scripting, neither will really affect me. But if I'm running VMs to test things, the storage speed and the cooling will... I suspect you're somewhere inbetween.

Visconti

Thanks for the heads up on the drive throughput issue, something I'd never have considered without your pointing it out. I had to resort to running some VMs (used and prefer VMWare) but these days with all of my necessary programs running on the new Mac CPUs, it's likely no longer an issue and something I'd much rather avoid.

You're right, I'm definitely somewhere in between. For whatever reason, the financial based programs I run don't appear to be coded very efficiently; in other words, they're relatively small in scope but over time just suck up resources like a vacuum. So, hence I require the extra RAM and probably a dedicated GPU would help, because these programs are just not written very well, in my layman's estimation.

Finally, yeah, the passive cooling is one of the reasons I've been avoiding the new Airs. Perhaps, my views here are outdated, but I'm from a time when heat is the number one mortal enemy for performance (I actually have a liquid cooling solution for my dedicated desktop) especially in a laptop with confined quarters. So, rightly or wrongly, I'd at the very least want an effective heat sink and much prefer fans--give me noise over throttling.

StuckInYYZ

No worries. I'm looking at getting a Mac Mini for my homelab and news about this started popping up in the last few days (since people started receiving their units). Since my use cases are kinda unique at the moment, this raised a few of my alerts.

Does your finance app use a database? That's usually where the culprit is. If it does utilize an old style database, I'd check to see if there is a maintenance component. Many database apps don't truly delete obsolete records. Instead, it just flags the data and ignores it. Back in the olden days, you'd have to shut down, back up the database and then run a compression app that removes the obsolete data.

Same (although I try not to skimp on those components). Laptops use heat pipes and vapour chambers which should suffice as long as you can maintain airflow (eg, don't use a laptop on top of your comforter or bed. Apple uses a decent system, but based on your use case, I suspect it won't tax the system too much. I'm not a big fan of liquid cooling. Still too easy to cook your system if the liquid pump stops working. Then the maintenance is annoying. Give me an air cooled system anytime (just don't skimp on the components... and have the proper components).

Visconti

This is probably what's most likely causing the issue. At this point, I'm really not sure how to fix the issue and just have to reboot every once in a while to make it manageable. While extra RAM & GPU may help, it certainly doesn't resolve it. But, at least, they can now run on Mac ARM CPUs, which is something, I suppose.

StuckInYYZ

If you need to reboot to recover, it sounds like an SQL issue...SQL has an annoying habit of not releasing system resources when it technically doesn't need them and keeps requesting new resources as time goes by. The only way to release those resources is to reboot the computer or cluster. There is a workaround for this, but depends on your app. With clusters I have worked with, the DBA would have to set ram and CPU resource reservations in the server software. You still need to reboot, but you don't run the risk of the OS crashing as often.

MacOS might better manage resources, but the same issue is likely to happen.