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

Nycturne said:
Possibly. It’s also possible that we’ll see the Mac Mini switch to a new chassis across the board when it gets the higher end SoCs.

The original M1 Mini was the only desktop you could get with Apple Silicon for around half a year. I wound up with one as a test/dev platform for Apple Silicon because it was the cheapest way to get hardware for that purpose. I wouldn’t be too surprised if it turns out the current M1 Mini was a stopgap of sorts, so that there was something in this space while the longer term work was ongoing. I do hope they keep the baseline model for folks that just want a small NUC-like desktop, as the M1 Mini has been really good for that.
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There have been rumors for the last year or so of something with a glass top, maybe sort of inspired by the old mac cube.
 
Cmaier said:
There have been rumors for the last year or so of something with a glass top, maybe sort of inspired by the old mac cube.
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Oh, I don’t doubt it. I just more think that the existing chassis is EoL and Apple’s use of it was to make sure a Mini was available day 1 of the transition.
 
Nycturne said:
Oh, I don’t doubt it. I just more think that the existing chassis is EoL and Apple’s use of it was to make sure a Mini was available day 1 of the transition.
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Absolutely agree. Same as the 13“ MBP and the MBA, I believe.
 
Cmaier said:
There have been rumors for the last year or so of something with a glass top, maybe sort of inspired by the old mac cube.
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Glass top would solve the biggest reported problem with the M1 mini that the Bluetooth range and performance is pretty poor. Move the antennas to the top under the glass instead of buried at the bottom behind the bottom foot.
 
Maybe Apple will finally remember the Mac Mini is supposed to be a cheap entry level Mac, design a plastic housing (which can be fun and colorful), and move the base model back to the original $499 price. The whole idea was to attract people to the Mac by making it very cheap for someone to own one if they already had a display, keyboard, and mouse, and Apple seems to have lost sight of that over the years.

Who am I kidding, LOL. But if Apple can make lots of margin off selling a $499 iPhone 11, I'm sure they can do the same with a mini. The mini does need more RAM and flash and a newer and bigger SoC, but less of essentially everything else: no camera sensors and lenses, no cellular modem, no display, etc.
 
mr_roboto said:
Maybe Apple will finally remember the Mac Mini is supposed to be a cheap entry level Mac, design a plastic housing (which can be fun and colorful), and move the base model back to the original $499 price.
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You can still get a cheap i5 Mini for only $1100 – 6 core 8Gb/512Gb – so I think the entry level M1 model is a decent price compared to that.
 
You know, probably a hair brained idea, but I’d love it if they made the top of the mac mini act as a capacitive charging base for iphone, airpods etc…

I regularly forget where I put my lightning charger cable and one less Qi charge pad to buy would be nice!
 
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Just got mine. I'm incredibly happy, though I probably overkilled with both RAM and storage. One thing that cannot be hyped enough on this machine is its speakers. Holy shit, I put down my Beyerdynamic headphones for most of the day and just enjoy "spatial audio stuff". The sound is distributed among the 6 speakers and boy it sounds fun! It even does an enjoyable job with drum and bass and dubtechno, where normally the bass would just disappear on a laptop speaker. The speaker does go down to 100Hz, someone measured it on Reddit. This is probably the lowest physically achievable frequency response. THe headphone out is also quite good, definitely better dynamics (punchier) than that of my 2020 MBA.



UAG now has cases for these.

MacBook Pro 14" (M1 Max / M1 Pro) (2021)

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First time I have found something to complain re my M1 Pro MBP: updating apps on the AppStore (Xcode) takes FOREVER because the installd process is confined to the E cores (and currently fighting with Spotlight for resources). So here I am, with one of the fastest CPUs on earth, actively waiting for hours for an update to install because it's running on the 2GHz low-power cores 😂
 
Andropov said:
First time I have found something to complain re my M1 Pro MBP: updating apps on the AppStore (Xcode) takes FOREVER because the installd process is confined to the E cores (and currently fighting with Spotlight for resources). So here I am, with one of the fastest CPUs on earth, actively waiting for hours for an update to install because it's running on the 2GHz low-power cores 😂
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On one hand, validating signing is generally I/O and crypto bound, so very few apps are complex enough to need the P core during install.

On the other, Apple’s code signing validation is very expensive when it comes to complicated apps, and I don’t know why they haven’t tried to provide some approach to improve this.
 
Andropov said:
First time I have found something to complain re my M1 Pro MBP: updating apps on the AppStore (Xcode) takes FOREVER because the installd process is confined to the E cores (and currently fighting with Spotlight for resources). So here I am, with one of the fastest CPUs on earth, actively waiting for hours for an update to install because it's running on the 2GHz low-power cores 😂
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I don't know if it'll do the trick for installd, but this command makes Time Machine backups run faster by changing the system's scheduling behavior for low priority background threads:

sudo sysctl debug.lowpri_throttle_enabled=0

I always set it back to 1 to restore normal behavior after the slow task completes. Also, it doesn't persist across restart.
 
mr_roboto said:
I don't know if it'll do the trick for installd, but this command makes Time Machine backups run faster by changing the system's scheduling behavior for low priority background threads:

sudo sysctl debug.lowpri_throttle_enabled=0

I always set it back to 1 to restore normal behavior after the slow task completes. Also, it doesn't persist across restart.
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I thought of that as well, but apparently... https://eclecticlight.co/2022/01/24/how-you-cant-promote-threads-on-an-m1/
 
Github gist also seems to suggest it should work for installd as well.

Seems reasonable, as the setting reads as “prevent process demotion” rather than “promote a demoted process”
 
mr_roboto said:
Did you try it? I've used it to accelerate an initial TM backup on M1 hardware, and I'd expect that installd gets roughly the same priority behavior as Time Machine.
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I didn't. Fortunately, I can try again, since apparently I updated to Xcode 13.2.1 less than 12h before Xcode 13.4 dropped 🥲
 
Me, I'm waiting for a Mac Mini that actually has an HDMI 2.1 port (want to recreate the HTPC setup I had in Onterrible). Yes, I actually want to drive my 4k TV at the 120Hz it supports. C'mon Apple!

I'll keep my 2018 15" MBP until it's no longer supported :) (hopefully it's like the last one and I get 7 years before that happens?) :)
 
Finally got mine. I ditched my personal MBP about a year ago and lived off an iPad and .... a year of that I'm ready to come back.

Dropped by my local Apple store and picked up a 16' MBP beauty and wow. It's nice having a personal laptop again. iPad OS is very limited - but I'm keeping my iPad for reading because nothing beats the 11' for reading a book imo. Not cheap but, really hoping to get 5+ years of use out of both the iPad and the MBP.

I use an eGPU (Sonnet 550) with an RX 6600xt with my work MBP and find that keeps the i7 from using the case fans with normal operation. Also allows me to run Parallels and heavy graphics apps pretty nicely (quietly).

With this personal Mac - a clear separation between work and personal time - and I can sit at my desk again without feeling like it's work (remote worker atm).

I had a 13' M1 MBP for a little bit and the battery life on that thing was amazing.

This thing? Blazing fast with M1 Max. Screen is WOW. Speakers are ... wow.
 
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