11 ms·
Pretty good considering the level of R&D that went into pushing their new ARM M2 platform across their entire computing line. We just started buying M2 Macs at
by aetherspawn 3y ago
Pretty good considering the level of R&D that went into pushing their new ARM M2 platform across their entire computing line.
We just started buying M2 Macs at work, and oh boy, they are lightning fast, robust refined HW and the battery life is incredible. It’s a check-mate for the personal computing industry, pending they get their enterprise MDM features in shape (ie Intune) and get more apps ported to macOS.
For those wondering, just in the last few months you can now bind a M2 Mac to InTune and remotely manage most things. You can’t login to the system with Office365 email yet (coming soon), however you can block personal AppleIDs, push a managed AppleID that uses Office365 SSO without any third-party plugins, and remotely track every device using FindMy. And yes since it supports InTune you can push and deploy endpoint protection and company apps.
- _ea1k 3y agoThe M2 seems incredible. It is the first thing in a long time that has tempted me to try out a Mac. The price is high, but is the performance worth it? 32GB of unified memory would be nice.
- catchnear4321 3y agotake a look at apple’s return policy. you’re invited to take it for a test drive, just don’t treat it like a rental car.
- bombcar 3y agoOr if you're near an Apple Store, go in and ask if you can play around - if they'r not busy they'll often let you download stuff onto the demo machines, etc. They can easily reset them. And then buy a refurbished one on the Apple Card to save a bit of cheddar™. https://www.apple.com/shop/product/FNWE3LL/A/refurbished-16-inch-macbook-pro-apple-m2-max-chip-with-12%E2%80%91core-cpu-and-38%E2%80%91core-gpu-silver?fnode=5f411fe84e6a0be22d7a37c33df1d6bf43ba6c58bf356f22b2cec46df060f65a54d80a50bbe3d7826667dfd9fa327623a6c8940492d389cd107a144d00f8ce2c37af95a649ebba8567348b8f7812a68a https://www.apple.com/shop/product/FNWE3LL/A/refurbished-16-...
- root_axis 3y agoI bought the 13inch m2 air a few months back and it's awesome. Super sleek design and feel, awesome keyboard, no touchbar, and also magsafe. It's really good. I actually hate MacOS and use a framework for 60% of my day (my work machine), but I have to admit the m2 is just a pleasure. I've used Macs extensively for years because that's what most companies provide for software hires, but the m2 air was the first Mac I've ever purchased with my own money, and I don't regret it.
- rbanffy 3y ago> no touchbar I actually liked it. Too bad it’s an evolutionary dead end and never made it to the desktop keyboards. And I even liked the one without an ESC key.
- riatin 3y agoI think it is, definitely. Have recently upgraded and it's immediately noticeable from the old Intel-based Macs. Much improved compute speed + battery life, barely noticeable battery drain. I'm a very happy customer.
- rbanffy 3y agoIt’s impressive moving from an x86 Mac. From an x86 Windows, it’s mind-blowing.
- schmookeeg 3y agoI'm a career-long PC guy and had an excellent watercooled "Battlestation". I dipped my toe in with the M1 Mini, then an M1 Max MBP... and my battlestation now has like 1/4" of dust on it. It helps that most of my work anymore is AWS Console or VSCode, which does just fine on either. There are a few games that it won't play, and..... that's about it. I'm still surprised at how quickly that happened. Worth a try, the M2 mini is cheap and easy, and the 8gb/256gb config was "enough" for me. I honestly didn't even notice the bump moving to the max 64gb/2tb. Doing it over, I'd probably do an Air with 16 or 24gb and be happy as a clam. $0.02 :)
- jakear 3y agoI'm happy as a clam on my 16gb M1 air. One hidden nice feature is how cheap and easy DIY repairs are. To date I've replaced my battery, monitor, and speakers (my lifestyle involves very rough handling of the machine), and everything about it was downright trivial, with cheap parts readily accessible and iFixit's walkthroughs very comprehensive.
- IndySun 3y ago> I've replaced my battery, monitor, and speakers... I have many 2015 MacBook Pro's. All tour. All are almost permanently on. I replaced the battery on two machines last year. Speakers fine. Screen fine. Are you implying the relatively young M1 Air is so badly made, the speakers, monitors, AND battery have already needed to be replaced?
- swores 3y agoRead the sentence after the one you quoted in their comment and you'll see they clearly weren't blaming the laptop.
- piva00 3y ago> Are you implying the relatively young M1 Air is so badly made, the speakers, monitors, AND battery have already needed to be replaced? > my lifestyle involves very rough handling of the machine No, it's not badly made, GP seems to be a huge exception. Please, read the full comment... My M1 Air has been around since launch, have traveled with it just throwing inside bags, dropped a few times, sat on, etc., it still works 100% fine without any part swap, and looks almost pristine with just a tiny scratch on one of the edges from a drop.
- karaterobot 3y agoI'm about due to upgrade my 2017 Air, and it'll be to a 13" M2 Air. I would have done it already, but every time I price it out and see that they want to charge me $300 for 256 gigs of storage, I get a little offended and close the tab. As with every Apple purchase I make, it'll just come down to necessity, after the old one finally breaks. I'll hold my nose and pay the Apple tax, knowing that they think of me as a sucker, and they're probably right.
- Retric 3y agoYep you get an extra 25% GPU and an extra 256 gigs of storage for 300$. Dammit price discrimination. I realize buying the cheaper option frequently is the better option with Apple prices but they really know how to price in storage anxiety.
- aetherspawn 3y agoOne caveat! You must buy the M2 Pro (14" or larger, non-air) model to get 2 external screens. We bought the wrong model to start with (13" M2 regular) and spent a week messing around with ours trying to get it to work with our 2 external displays when we rang Apple and they explained the difference between M2 Regular and M2 Pro. If you were buying one for yourself and budget was of no value, note the 13" and 14" are virtually the same physical size, and yet the design and technical capabilities of the 14" model are far and beyond ... I wrote off the 13" as a loss and paid the difference myself, and now use it as a laptop at home :) Old design, yes, but it was such a nice piece of kit, no way I was gonna send it back to Apple!
- chi_features 3y agoI believe multiple screens are possible, even on the M1 MBA, you just need a docking station. Officially some don't support multiple screens, but there are mainstream solutions to this in the form of docking stations, just not sure why Apple doesn't even so much as hint that it's possible. It's a really unclear process!
- aetherspawn 3y ago
- throwaway106382 3y agoI’m on an M1 Max Mac Studio with 64gb of ram, it’s absolutey wonderful. Best workstation I’ve ever owned, bar none.
- nextos 3y agoMy understanding from benchmarks is that M1 and M2 have an excellent performance / energy consumption ratio. But in terms of raw performance, many Intel and AMD options can still deliver more. Another very interesting aspect of Apple's CPUs is that they offer a lot more performance than the competition for entry models. I cannot find anything that matches a Mac Mini M2. Sadly, Asahi does not support the M2 yet. Regarding the Mac Studio, I had heard complaints about noisy fans. Can you comment on that?
- phyrex 3y agoI have never once heard the fans in my Mac Studio
- throwaway106382 3y agoPersonally, I've never heard them. It's dead silent and i'm constantly running CPU intensive build pipelines and heavy CPU bound sql queries on it.
- jliptzin 3y agoI love mine too
- metaphor 3y ago> The price is high, but is the performance worth it? The numbers reflect Mac revenue down -24.2% YoY to date; if it's worth it, the market certainly hasn't voted with their wallets yet.
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- adamm255 3y agoMy M1 2020 is great for battery life, can’t imagine what these are like! Those MDM functions have been available in other MDM platforms for ages. Microsoft has been consistently bad at Mac management, I think mostly it’s they don’t care.
- aetherspawn 3y agoYeah there was Jamf, but especially at a small company ~5-10-ish people, having to deal with a provider where you have to go through a sales person is such a pain. They have minimum license buys and deprio you if you're small... Now that it's natively supported just between Apple and MS, you can on-board yourself in about 1 day without talking to anyone, and the whole platform costs $0 if you have Office365 E3 already.
- goosedragons 3y agoStill no M2 iMac...
- alwillis 3y agoIt’s going straight to the M3.
- TX81Z 3y agoI’ve got a stack of 24 Mac minis, $600 a pop. With barely any power draw, and killer compute, it’s a steal.
- dkasper 3y agocurious what type of workload this would be good for?
- rbanffy 3y agoDon’t know about them, but I build and manage clusters so I can build and manage clusters. I have one of 4 RPi Zero Ws that right now runs a Docker Swarm with Hercules running VM370. And Squid proxy because I don’t want it polluting the Wi-Fi network for no good reasons. The cluster is named Gibson.
- TX81Z 3y agoNodes in a distributed system, polling server for tasks.
- dkasper 3y agobut why mac for this? Is it really more cost effective than cheap linux boxes?
- TX81Z 3y agoPerformance per watt on an M2 is better than anything else you can buy. Barely generates heat. Considering for $600 each and I don’t need to spec anything out and can just drive to the Apple Store any time I need a few more and it’s really useful for a home business cluster.
- 29athrowaway 3y agoApple products are also: - a checkmate to most 3rd party external monitors. - a checkmate to the right of repair. - a checkmate to the environment. - a checkmate to most hardware terminology (they will create their own so you cannot compare products) - a checkmate to modularity.
- noirbot 3y agoI really don't see how they're much worse than the average in their industry for almost any of those. Mac Mini, Studio, and Pro all want an external monitor, and that's essentially the same product lines any other company would sell an external monitor on. With the iMac being a smaller part of the line, they're maybe even more in line with the rest of the competition on monitors. I literally own a Framework. I care about this stuff in general, but it's not like they're making equal or worse products. What Apple is getting out of their M# processor lines is insane. Honestly, it's questionable if my modular laptop is better for the environment with how much more power I have to spend charging it vs. most of Apple's options, given that I've generally kept using my laptops for 5-7 years at least. I've thrown away way more e-waste on my fully modular external monitor Windows/Linux desktop than I've thrown away Apple products over the years. Modular essentially means "throw away some of your parts regularly". What else am I supposed to do with a 6 year old CPU and Motherboard? I could run it as a server, but I don't need to consume that power for anything really, so it just sits in a closet for years until I throw it out. Anecdotally, I was between buying a M1 Macbook Air and a Framework 2 years ago. I'm already curious about upgrading my Framework to the new AMD mainboard/CPU set. I can almost promise you if I'd bought the M1 Air, I wouldn't even be considering an upgrade for another 2-3 years. Repair/upgradeability also makes it way easier to impulsively generate e-waste. Because you keep editing in more stuff - I'm really not sure I can blame them on the "making new hardware terminology" line. It really doesn't seem like it's so you can't compare it. There's plenty of benchmarks comparing it. They clearly went to ARM because it got them a ton of compute power on very little power. Yes, it can't compare to an old Intel chip the same way, but there's plenty of folks pursuing this line, and it seems like it's been well worthwhile.
- JohnBooty 3y agoa checkmate to most 3rd party external monitors. Can you elaborate?
- yieldcrv 3y agoM1 Max here looking forward to the M3. just for the RAM at this point, for me nothing changes between 64gb - 128gb (aside from recent LLMs) but 128gb+ opens up additional applications for me, aside from that I think incremental improvements in GPU and other special purpose processors will be intriguing in conjunction with the RAM boosts I have a hunch that 2024 or 2025 chipsets will give more RAM to the neural engine for very fast AI output. Will we still be using "tokens per second" by then? Who knows. But I think there will be OS level inclusion of models by then and Apple machines will have a consumer level chipset leaps ahead of others, in mobile and laptop form factors.
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- pknomad 3y agoWdym? Jamf already fills the macOS enterprise MDM space.
- willio58 3y agoApple's hardware is second to none, really great time to be a mac user honestly. What would make it even better would be if the software caught up a bit. It feels like MacOS is in the in-between where it wants to be like iOS but it doesn't really feel like it's been done "right". Things like stage manager are a great example of this.