Waiting for and/or enjoying my M1 Pro/Max MBP thread…

Trying to get this back on topic.

I was able to "trick" the offspring into revealing which color iMac she wants. She has been saving up to buy a new one. Her current MBP is from 2018 and it has been a great machine. She is asking for a new iPhone for Christmas, but I am going to buy her the iMac instead and let her buy her own phone.*

So it was ordered about 10 minutes ago: a purple iMac with 16GB Ram and the 1TB SSD. Apple says it will be here by the 23rd.

* Funny story about her phones. From the time she was in middle school, I grew tired of hearing about issues with her phone. We had decided to move from ATT to Verizon, so over Thanksgiving 2015 we went to the Verizon store to get new phones. But when it came time to get hers, I asked the guy to bring out 3 of them. He was a bit confused but did it. I told her to pick one and from that point forward, any issues she might have are all on her because she picked it. She spent way more time than needed to pick one of the identical boxes, but she finally did it. The guy still works at that store and still remembers me because of that. :)
 
Now that order times are normalizing I am thinking about getting an MBP14. I'm thinking about 32GB RAM +1TB SSD vs. 16GB RAM and 2TB SSD combos. Has anybody here ever had a memory bottleneck? My 16GB MBA has >4GB free at all times, no issues. I also think that these SSDs are so fast, their speed for paging is hardly a practical bottleneck. Does anybody think this will change in the next 5 years?
 
P_X said:
Now that order times are normalizing I am thinking about getting an MBP14. I'm thinking about 32GB RAM +1TB SSD vs. 16GB RAM and 2TB SSD combos. Has anybody here ever had a memory bottleneck? My 16GB MBA has >4GB free at all times, no issues. I also think that these SSDs are so fast, their speed for paging is hardly a practical bottleneck. Does anybody think this will change in the next 5 years?
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I went with the 14" 32 GB RAM + 1TB SSD. I'm currently using 26/32 running Xcode, 3 browsers, Open office and a couple of Remote Desktop sessions. It comes with Monterey, and has known issues with older printers, particularly Samsung drivers in my case.
 
Herdfan said:
I was able to "trick" the offspring into revealing which color iMac she wants.
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I would've bought her the grey one, and 5 shades of spraypaint. The best part about it is that if she changes her mind later, she still has the other cans of spraypaint ready to use!

P_X said:
Now that order times are normalizing I am thinking about getting an MBP14. I'm thinking about 32GB RAM +1TB SSD vs. 16GB RAM and 2TB SSD combos. Has anybody here ever had a memory bottleneck? My 16GB MBA has >4GB free at all times, no issues. I also think that these SSDs are so fast, their speed for paging is hardly a practical bottleneck. Does anybody think this will change in the next 5 years?
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I'm assuming you mean bottleneck as in a lack of RAM, rather than throughput, right? If it's the former, it depends upon your use case, but I'd say 32 gig is more than enough for the next 5 years. If it's the latter, you have absolutely nothing to worry about. When it comes to the amount of available bandwidth between the CPU, GPU, and RAM, the M1 currently has no competition.
 
P_X said:
Now that order times are normalizing I am thinking about getting an MBP14. I'm thinking about 32GB RAM +1TB SSD vs. 16GB RAM and 2TB SSD combos. Has anybody here ever had a memory bottleneck? My 16GB MBA has >4GB free at all times, no issues. I also think that these SSDs are so fast, their speed for paging is hardly a practical bottleneck. Does anybody think this will change in the next 5 years?
Click to expand...

Personally I don’t think that much is going to change with regards to the requirements for RAM. What do you usually work on when you use your Mac?
 
I am curious about that image processor, which they put in the A14. Is there any way to determine whether they put that into the Pro/Max, as we would assume they would?
 
Yoused said:
I am curious about that image processor, which they put in the A14. Is there any way to determine whether they put that into the Pro/Max, as we would assume they would?
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Considering how tightly intertwined it is with the rest of the CPU architecture, I wouldn't see any reason why they'd remove it for the Macs, but I imagine it's use would be limited on a laptop.

Those image processors are primarily used to filter and correct photos at the moment of capture, right?
 
Renzatic said:
Those image processors are primarily used to filter and correct photos at the moment of capture, right?
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I imagine they also handle compression/decompression. Imagine if, for every jpeg your browser loads, the cpu does not have to decompress it but can offload that task to a cp. That would be a lot less dicking around for a given core, and if it is fast enough, would allow compressed images to reside in memory rather than having to be fluffed out for quick accessibility.
 
Yoused said:
I imagine they also handle compression/decompression. Imagine if, for every jpeg your browser loads, the cpu does not have to decompress it but can offload that task to a cp. That would be a lot less dicking around for a given core, and if it is fast enough, would allow compressed images to reside in memory rather than having to be fluffed out for quick accessibility.
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The gains would be pretty slight overall, but it could be of those "every little bit helps" type situations.
 
Renzatic said:
Considering how tightly intertwined it is with the rest of the CPU architecture, I wouldn't see any reason why they'd remove it for the Macs, but I imagine it's use would be limited on a laptop.

Those image processors are primarily used to filter and correct photos at the moment of capture, right?
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Apple seems to be using them for the webcam in M1-based laptops, at least.
 
ericwn said:
Personally I don’t think that much is going to change with regards to the requirements for RAM. What do you usually work on when you use your Mac?
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These days? Email, word, powerpoint, preview and safari, and a little bit of R-studio. My typical use scenario is having 20 pdfs open, Zotero (ref manager) and word. For open source data analysis I have a desktop that I SSH into to execute bash scripts using CUDA... For proprietary work data, I use a virtual machine.

TBH, the MBA is more than enough for all this:D It would be nice if I could use the laptop to replace my CUDA desktop.
 
If by Image Processor you mean DSP, the A Series has had one for several generations now. In the M1 it handles among other things enhancement of the webcam (which is why the 720p webcam on the MBA for example looks much better than its raw power would suggest).

The M1 Pro and Max not only have the DSP, ML and other blocks you see in M1 but they added encode and decode blocks for a lot of different types of media; in essence these SOCs have built in Afterburner technology.
 
Yoused said:
Trawling is with a net. Trolling is with baited lines. That image looks like trolling rather than trawling.
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It's actually a missed opportunity for me. I could have added in some additional trolling by using an image depicting trawling, while referring to it as trolling, which would still be correct, in a manner of speaking.
 
I've encountered an annoying problem with my MBP:

forums.macrumors.com

16" M1 Max - can't connect charging cable when laptop is shut down?

I encountered a strange problem today. Yesterday evening, I shut down my 16" M1 Max MBP as usual after using it for most of the day, so this evening when I went to use it again, I knew it was off and I also knew that I had been using the battery so I set it on my desk and attached the MagSafe...
forums.macrumors.com forums.macrumors.com

It seems to be a known issue that only affects the 140W charger. I'm hoping a software update fixes it! Having to start up the computer to plug in the charging cable is bonkers.
 
Looks to be a software issue relating to the fast charging negotiation. Should be fixed soon.

On a side note, just bought a third M1 mac for our house - my kid’s ancient (2011?) 11” MBA died, so i am buying her an M1 MBA for christmas. She mostly just plays Minecraft and writes stories on google docs, so it’s overkill.
 
TBL said:
It seems to be a known issue that only affects the 140W charger. I'm hoping a software update fixes it! Having to start up the computer to plug in the charging cable is bonkers.
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While it's a problem, there's a very simple solution which is weirdly under-discussed in that MR thread: just stop turning the computer off. Sleep is nearly as low-power as off, and the computer will be ready right away when you open it.
 
mr_roboto said:
While it's a problem, there's a very simple solution which is weirdly under-discussed in that MR thread: just stop turning the computer off. Sleep is nearly as low-power as off, and the computer will be ready right away when you open it.
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I'm surprised to hear people still regularly turn their computers off these days.
 
ericwn said:
Only on MR, for sure.
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It's all these damn kids these days. Back in my time, you couldn't just put a computer to sleep. Hell, you couldn't even shut it down from the OS. You had to tell it to power down, wait a second for it to say it was safe to shut off, then press a button on your computer.

...and god forbid you accidentally press the Turbo button while shutting down. You would DIE!
 
Eh, I just like to turn computers off. It seems to cause a "reset" and solve certain problems that occur in the course of using one. I turn my computers off at the end of the day--always have.
 
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