RustyBug wrote:
You mention drivers ... any issues or concerns with printer drivers to be aware of? I suspect that area is solid, but it raises the question to quirks, etc.
It shouldn't be, as that's pretty standard stuff but no personal experience.
I basically don't use macros or VBA. Those files are exported from sql server so I can import them to python and R for basic machine learning.
If you use add-ons, maybe you should check if they are compatible. My work PC used to have Oracle Hyperion add-ons for Excel but personally I don't use any add-ons and haven't installed that on a Mac.
RustyBug wrote:
I assume you mean the Mac version of Excel.
I don't do a lot of macros or VBA. My "push" is more database (SAP export, etc) oriented and multiple Pivot Tables in Excel, vs. an actual database.
Does the switch from Intel > M1, M2 have any relevance / concern for Excel on a Mac (vs. Intel)?
dordek wrote:
... but for now my mouse isn't an Apple mouse and it doesn't look like it ever will be.
My mouse isn't an Apple mouse because it's an Apple Trackpad. This allows desktops to enjoy the same input scheme as the laptops. The second mouse key is encoded as a two-finger press. On macOS, the acceleration factor of all pointer devices can be adjusted in System Preferences. That includes PC mice like Logitech (I own a G Pro with 12000 DPI).
RustyBug wrote:
So, in the realm of my exploration into Mac ... I came a cross a question that I posed to the store where I got the rental (one data point). I'd like to pose the same question here to get additional perspective. It seems that perspective my be part of things along the way to a better understanding / experience.
Previously I've asked the question of what makes a Mac better than a PC, and got all kinds of answers about hardware / software compatibility, security, integration among devices, system stability, etc. But, given that I've not had issues with those things in PC (using ThinkPads), the answers have always fallen a bit flat for me. So, it still lingers in me to understand the differentiation that yields so much enthusiasm for the Mac. So, I've revised the question (gotta ask the right question, to get the right answer) a bit ... owing to that maybe I've been asking the wrong question.
The question:
"Since way back when ... I've always heard that Mac's are the better choice for creatives (or that Macs were made for creatives). What is it about a Mac, that makes it such that creatives and Mac's are "two peas in a pod", or "made for each other" ... that they go together better than creatives on a PC?"
Looking forward to hearing the different thoughts. ...Show more →
I'd heard mac was better, but I took a video class in 2008. The college lab outfitted with high end macs, I'm no expert but looked like the latest or close. Really annoying that I couldn't go to My Computer and go to folder and files, at least I asked and they said you couldn't. One even crashed! My xp machine never really did that. Although other OS might be different.
One guy made it sound like it's easier for people who have a hard time using computers. But I dont, really. I hate them but I've taken programming classes etc.
AmbientMike wrote:
I'd heard mac was better, but I took a video class in 2008. The college lab outfitted with high end macs, I'm no expert but looked like the latest or close. Really annoying that I couldn't go to My Computer and go to folder and files, at least I asked and they said you couldn't. One even crashed!
This is factually incorrect. You can look at the file structure all day long to your heart's content.
rattymouse wrote:
This is factually incorrect. You can look at the file structure all day long to your heart's content.
Agreed, but it does help if you enable in Finder Preferences to have all your drives, internal and external, automatically show up on your desktop. It sound like whoever gave that advice knew a lot less about the Mac OS than they thought they did.
rattymouse wrote:
This is factually incorrect. You can look at the file structure all day long to your heart's content.
Maybe you could, but at the time, I looked, and I couldn't figure it out. So I asked, they said you couldn't. ?
I'm not sure if Final Cut available other than mac then but it's pretty expensive anyway. Macs just didn't seem better, so I didn't get into them. Tried them, not that impressed. At some point I think the architecture of the processor or something supposed to be better, but I think that's more in the distantpast. 90's or maybe not quite that far back. If someone sees an advantage go for it but I'm not heavy pp'er anyway.
Mike - The architecture of the chips has taken a quantum leap forward with the introduction of the M1 and forthcoming M2 chips from Apple. Just go read about them. Amazing, and even more amazing that they did it using a fraction of the power that the Intel chips were using, which leads to much longer battery life in the laptops and much cooler operating temperatures in both desktops and laptops.
Final Cut and Logic Pro are indeed both Mac only. Logic is a mere $200, a fraction of what ProTools will run you, M1 native and very very capable. Final Cut is $300, exactly the same amount that DaVinci ReSolve Studio sells for. Avid Media Composer is something like $1299. Logic is a joy to use and integrates so well into the Mac OS. It's what I'll be using all afternoon and tomorrow recording Gee for a children's band record today and some sort of movie soundtrack queue tomorrow.
The M1's are efficient but if performance is what you care about, they get annihilated in most performance comparisons with Intel's 12th gen, even when using software updated to run natively on the M1 where applicable. The M1 can do certain things that it's specifically optimized for very efficiently, but it's not a particularly fast CPU relative to what else is available.
The M1 only runs cool if you aren't stressing it, just like most other CPUs. If you stress it, it can still easily hit 100C. If it's designed for it, it's not a big deal, but temperatures very much depend on your workload. Most laptop chassis are designed around those temperatures when running at maximum performance and that's usually when the CPU starts to throttle.
Here is a long list of benchmarks compared to a 12900HK from a well respected reviewer. The Intel part is obviously a higher wattage chip, but if performance is your main concern, that doesn't matter too much:
&ab_channel=Jarrod%27sTech
If you don't want to watch the video, the 12900HK is:
1000% faster with AES encryption/decryption
131% faster in Handbrake
75% faster in Corona
60-65% faster in 7Zip and Vray
48% faster in Blender
41.5% faster in Cinebench
35% faster in DaVinci Resolve
24% faster in Cinebench R23
7% faster in Adobe Premiere
Removing the 1000% outliers, it's about 40% faster on average in all programs tested (Instead of 150% faster).
The M1 is a great little CPU if you are firmly in Apple's ecosystem and do some very specific things. Their performance claims are greatly exaggerated by Apple in their presentations however.
Here's another short video that does a good job of deconstructing their GPU claims as well:
&t=610s&ab_channel=TechNotice
Anyway, before committing to a M series processor, just make sure you know what you're getting and look at objective testing for the specific programs you plan to use rather than any of Apple's promotional materials. If you want decent power in a small form factor with good battery life and you're fine being restricted to the Apple ecosystem for best performance, they're a fine option. If you want the best performance, they are not even close in most cases, albeit at a higher power consumption.
Also, there are plenty of Windows laptops that can get 15-20+ hours of battery life depending on what you're doing with them. Again, I am not saying the M1 CPU is in any way bad, but some people talk about it like it is some kind of miracle CPU that can replace a high-end desktop or laptop and that's simply not the case for most tasks. The M1 value proposition is above average performance in some very specific scenarios with good overall efficiency.
CanadaMark wrote:
If you want the best performance, they are not even close in most cases, albeit at a higher power consumption.
Not to mention a higher price: If you're going to spend $4,200 on a Windows laptop, you'd certainly hope it vastly outperforms a Mac that costs $2,500.
For me, the only real marvel in Apple's new lineup is the Air (M1 and M2) models: I have yet to find a fanless Windows laptop that comes anywhere close to their performance and battery life at anywhere near that price point. It seems to be a niche that Apple occupies alone, at least for now. My main application for it would be recording music, as I'm often in the same room as the musicians (indeed I am often one of the musicians) so fanless is important. The fan on my ThinkPad has only come on once during five years of recording with it, but knowing that it could come on is a distracting source of stress.
bjhurley wrote:
Not to mention a higher price: the Windows laptop in the first test you posted was about twice the price of the Mac. If you're going to spend $4K on a laptop, you'd certainly hope it vastly outperforms something that costs half that amount.
For me, the only real marvel in Apple's new lineup is the Air (M1 and M2) models: I have yet to find a fanless Windows laptop that comes anywhere close to their performance and battery life at anywhere near that price point. It seems to be a niche that Apple occupies alone, at least for now. My main application for it would be recording music, as I'm often in the same room as the musicians (indeed I am often one of the musicians) so fanless is important. The fan on my ThinkPad has only come on once during five years of recording with it, but knowing that it could come on is a distracting source of stress....Show more →
That was just one example - something like a 12700H (~95% as fast as a 12900HK, and probably faster for sustained workloads too) can be had far cheaper. Even Intel's 12th gen U-series (low wattage) CPUs compare favorably to the M1. You absolutely do not need to spend $4K to get performance that far exceeds the M1 in many common tasks, but they will use more power.
My point is simply that Apple's promotional materials lead you to believe their M1 CPUs can replace a "traditional" CPU/GPU combo, and do so with much better performance. I know people who genuinely thought they could replace their dedicated video editing desktop PC with a M1 Macbook and get "2X performance". Unfortunately a lot of people drink the kool-aid without actually looking at objective third party testing. The reality is much different, and that is not to say the M1 is a bad CPU, I want to emphasize that, but if you are after performance it's not what most people should be looking at. Apple's #1 priority is always aesthetics. If you're looking for a fan-less machine, that means performance is not the #1 priority, and that is 100% fine - for your application that sounds like a fine choice. That being said, you could easily keep a windows machine silent with a simple custom fan curve assuming you weren't' stressing it too much (doesn't sound like you are if you've only heard your ThinkPad fan once).
"Since way back when ... I've always heard that Mac's are the better choice for creatives (or that Macs were made for creatives). What is it about a Mac, that makes it such that creatives and Mac's are "two peas in a pod", or "made for each other" ... that they go together better than creatives on a PC?"
Looking forward to hearing the different thoughts.
If there is an answer to this question, it probably combines elements of historical fact alongside some of the most effective marketing and advertising ever done, subsequently supported by mass adoption and self-perpetuation in creative sectors.
Historically, Apple has definitely landed some "killer app" features at opportune moments in time, that either enabled unique uses fully unavailable elsewhere, or made those uses better/smoother/easier than on other platforms. Some broad examples:
-Thunderbolt's advent was a massive deal in audio (mixing/sound design/composing) - it allowed for outboard processing hardware with the necessary low latency that was not otherwise possible at the time.
-the launch of MacOS X, with a FreeBSD-based kernel and all the security, filesystem, and architectural benefits that came along with it, was (at the time) a breath of fresh air to the hot mess that was the Win 98/XP/NT fractured OS ecosystem.
-peripheral support was largely better and more consistent, which led to some specific sectors like editorial (at the time led by Avid) centralizing their platforms on Mac.
-the internal (OS) color pipeline has been (and IMO still is) much better in MacOS. Display P3 >>>>> sRGB.
-some things just... work on the Mac side without any intervention, vs. unavoidable tweaking. See HDR and HiDPI implementations across platforms.
-media/video support at any given snapshot in time was consistently in favor of Mac. This gulf widened with the advent and standardization of ProRes codecs, still to this day the de facto format for non-raw acquisition as well as digital intermediate/working format across many production pipelines.
-Apple has consistently exploited controlling the "full loop" of both hardware and software. You see this in particular with displays/laptop/tablet screens, which are good as a baseline and class-leading as one ascends the product line.
-the rollover to M1/Apple Silicon is a very big deal as mentioned elsewhere. The performance per watt and SoC design is class-leading and will continue to allow the platform to be evolved in novel ways that are difficult for x86 architectures to match.
These sorts of features led to a foothold in several spaces, especially design (of all sorts), editorial, audio, and (some) post production, creating a critical mass of adoption. From there, in many of these sectors, it became an expectation that if you wanted to work in these spaces you needed to be savvy with Mac.
Combine the above with a lot of highly effective market positioning as a lifestyle brand and the "cool kid" factor (e.g. "I'm a Mac/I'm a PC"), alongside top-tier product design+hardware engineering, and you start to see the trendline.
Is it universally true? Not at all. The fact that Apple long ago fell out with nVidia (over defects/recalls in supplied mobile GPUs) has definitely created a bit of a blind spot for anything GPU-compute heavy. Game dev, high end VFX/compositing, 3d rendering etc. are largely x86 (and a mix of Linux and Windows).
All of the above said... does this any of this apply to or matter for Joe/Jane photographer? Nope. LrC/Ps/C1 all run interchangeably well on Mac/Win with the right underlying hardware. Perhaps a nod to mobile options on the Mac side, and maybe to potential performance per dollar with a fully-loaded multi-GPU windows PC.
AmbientMike wrote:
Maybe you could, but at the time, I looked, and I couldn't figure it out. So I asked, they said you couldn't. ?
I'm not sure if Final Cut available other than mac then but it's pretty expensive anyway. Macs just didn't seem better, so I didn't get into them. Tried them, not that impressed. At some point I think the architecture of the processor or something supposed to be better, but I think that's more in the distantpast. 90's or maybe not quite that far back. If someone sees an advantage go for it but I'm not heavy pp'er anyway.
I've been using Macs since System 7. You could always poke around the hard drive at will. Whoever told you that you could not look at the file structure was ignorant.
CanadaMark wrote:
Here is a long list of benchmarks compared to a 12900HK from a well respected reviewer
&ab_channel=Jarrod%27sTech
I'm afraid I don't think much of this reviewer. He says himself he is "not exactly a programmer". Had he been, he would have found and followed the instructions at blender.org to compile Blender natively for M1 that were available at the time. As it is, he downloaded some 2.x prebuilt version for an Intel machine and then measured the M1 emulating an Intel chip using Rosetta. Furthermore, it was a version still using the deprecated OpenCL/OpenGL GPU API instead of the native Metal one. Apple wrote a Metal layer for Blender and donated it, which appeared in Blender 3.1 a couple of weeks after the video was posted.
In fairness, he did mention the Rosetta emulation (which you did not), but appears unaware of the Metal issue. The Metal issue may or may not also affect the Cinebench benchmark; it does for the very old copy I have. People here might be aware of the large performance gain in e.g. the rotation tool which last week's release of Capture One gained on Intel Macs just by moving from OpenCL to Metal.
Handbrake and the AES benchmark appear to be artefacts of the way those particular programs are optimised for Intel, which he did say (and you didn't). Apple's AES code is going to be faster, and I did notice a paper float by recently where someone improved on that again for M1. It's Apple's AES implementation that matters, because that's what will be used for encryption in networking and of discs.
Adobe Premiere is known to be optimised for Wintel/nVidia. People buy Macs (and bought Intel ones) specifically to use Final Cut Pro, which isn't available for Windows. Premiere is an absurd choice for a benchmark for general publication.
Then there's the benchmark where he admits he doesn't know what it does or means. I would expect a good reviewer to either find out, preferably by reading the source code, or not use it.
You're cherrypicking in failing to mention that the Intel machine's performance drops off when running on battery, while the Mac's doesn't.
Not sure about Metal and Blender stuff ... Sounds not photographic related. Sometimes we don't need a space shuttle to get groceries ... or even a dump truck.
Photomerges in PS (large file operations), etc. Batch processing (multiple volume of files) in converters.
Wish folks would run more photo centric style tests. But, I get it that there's more than PS and LR usage for other kinds of users.
melcat wrote:
I'm afraid I don't think much of this reviewer. He says himself he is "not exactly a programmer". Had he been, he would have found and followed the instructions at blender.org to compile Blender natively for M1 that were available at the time. As it is, he downloaded some 2.x prebuilt version for an Intel machine and then measured the M1 emulating an Intel chip using Rosetta. Furthermore, it was a version still using the deprecated OpenCL/OpenGL GPU API instead of the native Metal one. Apple wrote a Metal layer for Blender and donated it, which appeared in Blender 3.1 a couple of weeks after the video was posted.
In fairness, he did mention the Rosetta emulation (which you did not), but appears unaware of the Metal issue. The Metal issue may or may not also affect the Cinebench benchmark; it does for the very old copy I have. People here might be aware of the large performance gain in e.g. the rotation tool which last week's release of Capture One gained on Intel Macs just by moving from OpenCL to Metal.
Handbrake and the AES benchmark appear to be artefacts of the way those particular programs are optimised for Intel, which he did say (and you didn't). Apple's AES code is going to be faster, and I did notice a paper float by recently where someone improved on that again for M1. It's Apple's AES implementation that matters, because that's what will be used for encryption in networking and of discs.
Adobe Premiere is known to be optimised for Wintel/nVidia. People buy Macs (and bought Intel ones) specifically to use Final Cut Pro, which isn't available for Windows. Premiere is an absurd choice for a benchmark for general publication.
Then there's the benchmark where he admits he doesn't know what it does or means. I would expect a good reviewer to either find out, preferably by reading the source code, or not use it.
You're cherrypicking in failing to mention that the Intel machine's performance drops off when running on battery, while the Mac's doesn't.
RustyBug wrote:
Not sure about Metal and Blender stuff ... Sounds not photographic related.
Blender isn't. It's used for 3D animation by movie studios etc. (e.g. "I Lost my Body"), usually on neither Mac nor Windows but Linux.
Metal is of relevance to us. It's just the way programs on macOS are supposed get at your GPU to draw or especially to do calculations on huge matrices of numbers, which is what photos happen to be, at once. Old programs that get at the GPU some other way – or worse, don't get at it at all – may do things like noise reduction much more slowly.
Sometimes we don't need a space shuttle to get groceries ... or even a dump truck.
Yes, as long as it's fast enough, it's fast enough.
Wish folks would run more photo centric style tests.
Here's a review of the original M1 MacBook Air by someone who actually does serious stills photography (she's a prettty good photographer too):
&t=58s
As I recall, her conclusion was that you could actually use that machine as your primary Photoshop machine. You might want to search her channel for reviews of any particular machine you're considering.
RustyBug wrote:
Not sure about Metal and Blender stuff
Metal does matter to anything involving graphics processing, so that's relevant to photography. It powers hardware graphics acceleration and can make a huge difference in some applications. Blender is for 3D computer graphics, you can ignore that.
As I've noted before, unless you're doing a lot of batch processing, noise removal, stitching panoramas, etc., a very basic machine will be fine. I've been chugging along happily for years on an i5 Mac Mini with 8 gigs of RAM, no speed bumps that I've been able to discern. My i7 ThinkPad performs about equally well. Would I benefit from a more powerful machine? Sure, but I'm not sure I need it; I don't work on deadline and don't sell photos to clients.
melcat wrote:
Blender isn't. It's used for 3D animation by movie studios etc. (e.g. "I Lost my Body"), usually on neither Mac nor Windows but Linux.
Metal is of relevance to us. It's just the way programs on macOS are supposed get at your GPU to draw or especially to do calculations on huge matrices of numbers, which is what photos happen to be, at once. Old programs that get at the GPU some other way – or worse, don't get at it at all – may do things like noise reduction much more slowly.
Yes, as long as it's fast enough, it's fast enough.
Here's a review of the original M1 MacBook Air by someone who actually does serious stills photography (she's a prettty good photographer too):
&t=58s
As I recall, her conclusion was that you could actually use that machine as your primary Photoshop machine. You might want to search her channel for reviews of any particular machine you're considering....Show more →
I’m looking into the M1 or M2 air as my travel system. Currently take an iPad, but these MacBook Air laptops are so light and now with their horsepower and battery life, I could replace my travel iPad and my home workstation with just this one laptop.
Will I be more creative using the Mac air rather than my windows workstation…don’t know, but I know the Mac air will be much more flexible.
Will it make me better or more creative, no expectation. Will the Air be enough for an improved processing experience, might be.
If not, MacBook pro isn't too far behind on size options.
Surface Studio looks interesting in configuration versatility. Unsure about performance though.
chez wrote:
I’m looking into the M1 or M2 air as my travel system. Currently take an iPad, but these MacBook Air laptops are so light and now with their horsepower and battery life, I could replace my travel iPad and my home workstation with just this one laptop.
Will I be more creative using the Mac air rather than my windows workstation…don’t know, but I know the Mac air will be much more flexible.
This allows desktops to enjoy the same input scheme as the laptops. The second mouse key is encoded as a two-finger press. On macOS, the acceleration factor of all pointer devices can be adjusted in System Preferences. That includes PC mice like Logitech (I own a G Pro with 12000 DPI).
