khm
I have now completed two full working weeks with an M4-processor Apple laptop running MacOS. I had heard a lot about how amazing and fast these things are, and let me tell you: no

utter horseshit, the speed is pretty unremarkable (it's fine) but the OS itself reminds me of 2007-era linux (nothing works quite right, random UI elements lag, text scaling doesn't meaningfully work, every program comes with a quirks list because each model is apparently differently broken)
Feb 28 at 12:57amWeb
Show threadcancelFeb 28

@khm they seemed really fast if you were coming from Windows 10 or an Intel Mac where the OS and bad software overhead had totally swamped the performance of Intel and AMD chips at the time.

The M-series was a sudden jump up in processor speed. After a couple of years, the software gained enough new slowness to match the previous slowness running on Intel.

Show threadcancelFeb 28
@khm occasionally you will find a place where some software can enter an inner loop, like rendering audio or video or something, and it's like "oh shit this is fast" but that's about it. Otherwise, it feels dog slow because of all the bloat/crud/haywire background tasks/ads/bugs.
Show threadcancelFeb 28
@khm also, this is not a joke suggestion: see if you can get your corpo to let you "downgrade" to macOS 15 or 14. (I think your hardware supports it?) It's still got a bunch of bloat/slowness but at least the UI isn't as crazy fucked up.
Show threadcancelFeb 28
@khm unless you don't care, which is a reasonable position to take for some issued laptop, since it's kind of their problem if it sucks and slows you down.
Show threadkhmFeb 28
this is extremely sobering news, since the machine is currently running MacOS 15, and constantly harasses me to upgrade

I will not, since fucking up the computer requires me to ship it across the country for work to reimage, but now I dread the coming Change
Show threadcancelFeb 28
@khm that's a pretty incredible unplanned punchline
Show threadpixxFeb 28

@cancel
Yeah i was gonna say i heard good things about m1, not m4, and the software has gotten drastically worse since then

I'm curious what performance would look like with, say, that 2007 era linux ;)

@khm

Show threadkhmFeb 28
this explanation makes a lot of sense to me
Show threadthe vessel of morgannaFeb 28
@khm @cancel tis one of the cardinal rules of commercial software development: a new fast CPU is only fast for 6 months until the software bloat can play catchup with it. it's like middle managers see all this new performance on the table, and decide to bog down their apps until its just perfectly sluggish.
in context of ARMs, the M1 was an incredible leap at the time and beat anything intel had in an equivalent power envelope, but the market has moved on since then
Show threadkhmFeb 28
my desktop is a dual 6138 monster so I don't expect any slim laptop like this to hang with it

but like my main laptop is an rk3588 and it's so much nicer to use because the software isn't as stupid

CC: @[email protected]
Show threadcancelFeb 28

@khm @astraleureka Mac is used only for audio production stuff, because its medium core count, high per-core performance is a pretty good sweet spot for audio tasks (where it can be hard to multithread stuff depending on how things are routed in an audio pipeline.) It's an M1 Pro model and is running a years-old OS. I don't plan to ever update it again, and it spends most of its time with everything firewalled or completely offline.

I don't plan to buy another Mac unless the software does a big 180. Linux audio is... probably good enough I can use it. WINE can run most of this stuff better than actual Windows, now.

Show threadcancelFeb 28
@khm @astraleureka this should have started with "My Mac" and not "Mac" haha, oops.
Show threadC.Feb 28

@khm

Thank you for this. I had a similar experience with an earlier M-processor machine, where the Tame Apple Press were reporting it was clearly a million times faster than any x86 machine etc etc, I got one for a very specific purpose, and ...

It was slow. Not just "not a million times faster than an equivalent x86", but actually noticeably slower than an x86 machine that cost half as much (and came with four times as much storage, but that's another Apple gripe).

#propaganda #cult #CultOfJobs #Apple #TameApplePress