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)

@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.

this explanation makes a lot of sense to me
@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
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]

@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.

@khm @astraleureka this should have started with "My Mac" and not "Mac" haha, oops.