MacBook adventures

[Aaron44126]

Fed up with Windows.  Tried Linux for a while, and while successful in using it, I found myself frustrated a bit by the lack of professional software (MS Office, Adobe, etc.) and just the amount of tinkering that I had to do to get things working the way that I wanted.  Now, I've decided to give macOS a go, so I went and bought a MacBook Pro.

 

Background:

I'm familiar with macOS so I don't feel like I am going in blind.  For many years I was a sysadmin and managed a bunch of Macs, even though I never used one as a "daily driver" myself.  That's been a while ago now, though, and I have not spent any serious time with an "Apple Silicon" Mac before now.

 

Following up on the Linux thread, I figured that I would start this one and just sort of write about things that I've run into, positives and negatives.  Maybe it will help out anyone else who is considering a similar transition.

 

First impressions — positive.

• Setup is super easy, as you'd expect.  But, it did offer to transfer data off of a Windows PC and I did not try using that function to see how well it works.
• The mini-LED display is easily the best laptop display that I have ever seen.  Super bright, good colors, deep blacks.  (Though I will mention that I've never used an OLED laptop display.)
• I poked around "Settings" and mostly was able to set it up to behave how I want, with some exceptions mentioned below.  I did find the Settings app to be a bit odd, with stuff not being in the place that I would expect or hidden behind secondary menus that you have to press a button to access.
• The battery life, holy cow.  I'm not used to a system with an "all day" battery.  I spent the better part of an hour sitting on the couch, detached from an outlet, and figured out how to install VMware Fusion, build a Windows-on-ARM ISO, and install it.  I was not being especially careful with regards to battery life and had the display brightness turned up pretty high, but when I was done, the battery was still reporting 94% capacity.  (So, I do have a local Windows VM set up now.)  It seems like it could last through a workday on battery power.  At this very moment I am on my work PC but SSH'ed into the Mac, which has been sitting unplugged with the lid shut for over an hour (not sleeping), and it is reporting 100% capacity with 20 hours of life remaining.  We'll see if this holds up over time or if the battery starts draining "more quickly" as it gets lower.
• I haven't heard even a whisper from the system fan yet (except while running Cinebench), and yet the system is cool to the touch.  (My Precision 7770 would definitely be warm, even if it had just been sitting idle with the fans running at low speed, and I never felt comfortable running it with the lid shut because the display panel would get hot.)
• I got a Cinebench score of just under 15,000 (multi-core ten minutes), which is in line with what I got on the Precision 7770 before tweaking.  The fan was only barely audible during this test so I wonder if there is some "kick it into high performance" setting that I haven't found yet.  Unlike with the Precision, the score went up slightly as the ten minutes went on rather than down, so it doesn't seem to be hitting a short-term throttle limit.
• I've been using brew install --cask (app name) from the terminal to install a lot of things.  This should give a "Linux package manager" type experience for keeping stuff up to date.  Homebrew has tons of packages, for full commercial apps in addition to UNIX-y command line tools.
• I do have an iPhone so I am enjoying the integrated experience with messages, photos, maps, and even weather settings and content being just "the same" on both devices.

 

First impressions — negative.

• Plugging in wired headphones, I noticed a sort of "hum" or "low buzz" noise in the background.  It did not matter if the headphones were connected by 3.5mm or USB-C, so at first I thought that the headphones were at fault, but further testing indicated that it was definitely the MacBook.  The buzz would stop if I touched my hand to the chassis, or if I disconnected the power cable and ran on battery power.  Grounding issue!  As it turns out, this is a common MacBook issue.  They shipped the system with a two-prong power adapter that does not include a ground connection.  You can swap out the end bit with a cable that includes the ground connection, which "should" take care of this issue (...if they offer one for whatever outlet type you have in your region — I saw someone post that the UK version of this cable does include the grounding pin on the outlet side, but it is not actually connected to anything on the power brick side).  I am picking one up today, so we will see.
• Apple is stubborn about the way that they want the system to work in some ways.  For example, the system automatically goes to "sleep" shortly after it hits whatever idle threshold you have set for the display to power off.  There is an option to disable this behavior when on AC power, but no option to disable automatic sleep on battery power (without also disabling automatic power off of the display, which I do want).  I had to install a third-party tool to have system stay awake "forever" on battery power.  (.......If the battery can last all day, why not?  I might leave the laptop unplugged somewhere in my house and want to access a file from my work laptop, or from my phone.)
  • ...At least "sleep" actually works well, something I never had success with under Linux.
• They also stubbornly adjust the display brightness down when I connect or disconnect from AC power.  It will not remember what I had set for either state.  This despite disabling all of the "automatic brightness" / "dim brightness on battery" toggles that I could find in Settings.  I should be able to work around this with a background shell script.  (...Really used to doing this sort of thing from Linux...)
• Similarly, I had to fight with the "scroll direction".  There are two toggles in the Settings UI to reverse scrolling for the touchpad and for the mouse, but it is the same toggle (flipping one also flips the other).  So if you want scrolling to work one way on the touchpad and the other way on the mouse, you can't do that.  This was also solved with a third-party app which inverts the mouse scroll wheel.
• There is potential for some funny backlight issues with the mini-LED display's different dimming zones.  I noticed it most clearly when observing the mouse cursor over a completely black background.  You can see a "glow" around the cursor as its zone is lit up but not the surrounding zones.
• Microsoft problem — I installed Microsoft Office using the installer from their web site and all of the Office apps crashed immediately on launch.  Couldn't figure out how to get past that.  I uninstalled it and installed the versions of the apps pulled from the App Store instead.  Those seem to work fine.

 

Haven't tried any games yet.  I'm not planning to mess with the "Apple Game Porting Toolkit" until Sonoma releases in the fall.  I'm hoping that some third-party tooling around it matures (looks like they are working on support in Heroic Games Launcher for example).  There's enough stuff that I can run native or in an emulator to keep me happy until then.

[saturnotaku]

Unfortunately there are a lot of things in macOS that require third-party software, which we take for granted in Windows and/or Linux. Setting independent scroll direction for the touchpad and a mouse is a big one that I absolutely hate. Still, I generally prefer using it over Windows and will happily switch back full-time if the AGPT takes off and/or Crossover is able to support DirectX 12 games. We're still a ways off from that happening - at least 12-18 months at this point I wager. I'm hoping by then the M3 series of processors will offer a good bump in performance with a similar number of CPU and GPU cores. I also hold out hope that there will be a revised mini-LED display for the MacBook Pro that offers faster pixel response times.

[Sandy Bridge]

Nooooo, you are going to the dark side!

 

Although homebrew is nice.  I think I like it more than apt/yum/apt-get/etc. because I don't have to think about which distro I'm on ("is this an apt distro or an apt-get distro?"), and I don't have to type sudo.

 

How's the keyboard nowadays?  My trust in Apple's ability to design a keyboard evaporated the first day I used a butterfly keyboard, and has yet to return.  It hasn't helped that employers keep issuing me Macs with butterfly keyboards, it's like if I kept getting pre-SP1 Vista machines, or was always running Windows ME.

 

The headphone issue is both surprising and not surprising.  Apple always used to have top-notch DACs in their iPods and iPhones, until they took the "courageous" decision to remove the 3.5mm jack.  Apparently they have not kept up the quality on the remaining devices that still have them.  Does it have the issue while it's on battery as well, or just on AC?  Annoying though, I'd have thought as expensive as Macs are they could get that right, Dell has it figured out.  But maybe they think everyone is always using Beats by Dr. Dre bluetooth headphones.

 

And yes, the sleep settings while on battery (and while on AC, but connected to an external display that has been switched off) can be infuriating compared to Windows.  I've left a work Mac running with its screen on all weekend in the laundry room so it would finish a long-running script; no actual reason for the screen to be on besides the settings not allowing me to set it to turn off the screen but not go to sleep.  I tried giving it Caffeine (a third-party program that worked well back in the El Capitan days), but by Monterey macOS appears to have built up a tolerance.  One of my colleagues tried Amphetamine (a different third-party program), I can't remember if it worked better for him than Caffeine did for me.  But such strong drugs shouldn't be necessary when one more option in the Settings are would solve the problem.

[Aaron44126]

@Sandy Bridge
 

I tried Amphetamine and it did work, but it had another issue which was causing the screen saver to trigger when it shouldn’t (like while watching a long video). The preferred solution these days seems to be an app called “NoSleep” which I am trying next. There is also a built-in terminal command called “caffeinate” whose job is to prevent various idle/sleep conditions from triggering which might do the trick.

 

The new “scissor switch” keyboard is a step up from “butterfly” for sure. I wish it had more “depth” but otherwise don’t have a complaint with it yet. ….Other than that I basically have to learn a whole new set of keyboard shortcuts. And that I’d still like a numeric keypad.

 

The headphone buzz issue did not occur when running on battery. It also disappeared when I hooked up the grounded power cable. So, easily solved for an extra $20 😕

 

I’m now traveling so I don’t have time to mess with it much but I will eventually be back with more observations.

[Aaron44126]

Gaming first impressions.

 

No issues connecting a PS5 DualSense controller.  I had to toggle support on in Steam before it would work with Steam games.  I do find it a bit obnoxious that gamepad input causes the keyboard backlight to illuminate, if you have it set to time out on inactivity.  I'll have to do something to disable the keyboard backlight while gaming.

 

First off, I started Shadow of the Tomb Raider which is a few years old at this point, but a reasonably high-end game (graphically speaking) and has a Mac version.  At 2336x1510 resolution, and graphics settings at the "highest" preset, it runs fluidly at ≈70-90 FPS in all scenes.  Not bad, considering that the system doesn't even have a "discrete GPU" and it is also running through the Rosetta 2 x64->ARM emulator.  "ProMotion" (VRR) seems to work fine and the game looks great with this setup.  I did find that loading times seem a bit longer than I would have expected, though.

 

Some games use the "modern" full-screen API introduced in Mac OS X 10.7 and they get launched isolated on a separate "virtual desktop", but some games use older APIs and behave more like Windows games, taking over the main desktop for the duration of the run.  (You can still Command+Tab out in most cases to get to the desktop while the game is running.)  Games that want to run using the entire display (rather than at 16:9 ratio) can blow up into the camera "notch" area, and to avoid this you can set a compatibility flag on those games to "scale the app to below the camera area".  When you do this, the entire desktop is shrunk down a little bit while the game is running so that it can fit below the camera notch.  The effective resolution and aspect ratio do not change when this happens, so this also means that some black border is added to the left and right side of the display in addition to the top.  (It looks pretty black with the mini-LED system in place so it is hard to notice unless the game is running a dark scene and the backlight bleeds out into the cropped black area a little bit.)

 

I ran a number of Steam games that have Mac ports and didn't have any issues firing them up.  I also installed the Battle.net app and StarCraft and StarCraft II, those work fine.  I have not tried running Windows games through CrossOver or Apple GPTK yet.  I will probably hold off on that until macOS Sonoma is out, since it looks like that is a requirement for the current version of GPTK.

 

I did try running Switch games through Ryujinx.  Compatibility is a bit lower than it was for me with yuzu on Windows, but it looks like macOS support has been improving rapidly over the past few months so hopefully that trend will continue.  There are a number of games that work fine ... once the shader cache is built up a bit.  Shader stutter is much more apparent than it was on Windows with either Ryujinx or yuzu.  That probably can't be avoided unless they add a proper Metal renderer, which I would not expect any time soon, but maybe it will improve as MoltenVK and SPIRV-Cross mature.  One nifty thing is that as the Switch also has an ARM CPU, Ryujinx can run some games in "hypervisor" mode, so the game's ARM instructions run natively on the Apple CPU without a CPU emulator/interpreter/JIT thing in between.

[saturnotaku]

Yes, I believe Sonoma is required for the AGPT to work properly. Someone released a patching utility to allow the GPT's emulation layers to work within the confines of Crossover so you're basically getting the best of both worlds. Apple also recently put out an updated build of the toolkit to address some bugs, which was a surprise considering I wasn't expecting such a thing to happen so soon after the initial release, if ever.

[Aaron44126]

1 hour ago, saturnotaku said:

Yes, I believe Sonoma is required for the AGPT to work properly. Someone released a patching utility to allow the GPT's emulation layers to work within the confines of Crossover so you're basically getting the best of both worlds. Apple also recently put out an updated build of the toolkit to address some bugs, which was a surprise considering I wasn't expecting such a thing to happen so soon after the initial release, if ever.

 

Yeah, like I mentioned in another thread, the fact that GPTK is a thing at all baffles me and I'm not sure where Apple is going with it.  Putting all of that work in for an emulation environment that devs aren't even allowed to use to ship games doesn't make sense, unless they have some other future plans for it?  I am wondering if they will use it to offer a tool to allow ordinary users to run Windows games at some point, but that doesn't fully make sense either, as Apple would definitely rather that devs make proper ports so that their hardware can be used at its full potential.

 

I do think that GPTK being a thing means that Apple intends to keep Rosetta 2 around for a good long while.  (Otherwise, again, why would they put in this effort if it is just going to be thrown away in a couple of years...?)

 

I did see that there was an updated 1.0.2 version (I think that the original version would work in Ventura but the new one will not), and I also saw that people have worked out how to get it working within CrossOver, though that currently seems a bit hacky to me (even though it "works").  I am hoping that between now and the release of Sonoma, some tooling will build up around it or maybe CrossOver will offer official support.  CrossOver is due to release version 23 in "late summer" and they are clearly paying attention to GPTK.

 

There's another new project called Whisky that seems to be getting some attention.  (It is basically a Wine/GPTK GUI frontend.)

 

What would be amazing is if Valve would wake up and offer something similar to what they have going on Linux to allow Windows versions of games to be fired off through Wine right from the native Steam client; I'm not holding my breath for that, though, as the Mac Steam client seems to be an afterthought for them at this point.

[Aaron44126]

On 7/2/2023 at 1:04 AM, Sandy Bridge said:

And yes, the sleep settings while on battery (and while on AC, but connected to an external display that has been switched off) can be infuriating compared to Windows.

 

Eh.  Forget third-party apps.  You can do some terminal magic.

 

This fully disables sleep.  The system will not sleep when the lid is shut or under any other circumstance.

sudo pmset -a disablesleep 1

 

If you do this, you will notice that the "Sleep" command is even greyed out in the top-left Apple menu.

 

Get it back by doing:

sudo pmset -a disablesleep 0

 

The change is immediate, no need to reboot or anything.

 

While sleep is disabled, a script like this can be used to put the system to sleep.

sudo pmset -a disablesleep 0

pmset sleepnow

sleep 3

sudo pmset -a disablesleep 1

 

I noticed that while sleep is disabled, the screen will not turn off if you shut the lid.  You can lock the system and then the screen will power off after a few moments, so no big deal really.  Fortunately, macOS will not activate the screen in this case if you happen to move the mouse.  You have to actually interact with the keyboard or touchpad.

 

I added "pmset" to the sudoers config so I can script all of this stuff and it won't ask me for a password or fingerprint scan when I put the system to sleep.  I'm also using pmset scripts to switch the system between "low power", "high power", and "automatic" performance modes.

 

 

One minor annoyance is that the system automatically powers on or wakes up if you open the lid of press any button on the keyboard.  (The dedicated power button is kind of pointless.)  There doesn't seem to be a way to disable this.  There was an NVRAM "AutoBoot" variable you could tweak to disable this behavior for Intel Macs, but the same method doesn't work for Apple Silicon Macs.

 

I ran the system with the screen off (but not sleeping) for nine hours today and the battery level was reported at 89% afterwards.  I wasn't really using it for much, but there were about a dozen apps open, and a Windows VM.

[Aaron44126]

I've had more time to use it, so more impressions.

 

The biggest thing that has struck me is, Apple really knows how to make a laptop.  I mean, setting aside for a moment the fact that there isn't really any modularity to it so you can't upgrade the RAM or storage, and it's not even that straightforward to replace the battery, which is a quite notable downside to me.  And the fact that it doesn't have a numeric keypad for some reason.  As a "PC", it might be a bit of a disappointment, but as a laptop, it is a really nice system to use.

 

Some comparisons with the Dell Precision laptops here because that's what I've been using for the last 10+ years.

 

I have zero complaints about fan behavior.  The fans ramp up when there is a big compute load (but only get about half as loud as my Precision systems did), but otherwise the system is silent during normal use.  Battery life is borderline ridiculous.  I haven't had the battery drop below 50% yet and I'm using the system "unplugged" way more often than I did with the Precision, which I'd be lucky to get 3.5 hours out of if I was being pretty careful.  And there's the fact that it doesn't get hot when idling, whereas my newer Precisions were always on the warm side (especially the bottom/back) which didn't make them that nice to use as laptops.  And lastly, you can use the system at full performance on battery power.  I was playing Shadow of the Tomb Raider yesterday on battery and it still maintained a consistent 60+ FPS at 1500p/"highest" graphics preset.  Now, obviously a situation like that means you can't run on battery for more than a couple of hours.  I only did about 20 minutes and the battery dropped from 80% to 64% during that time.  But, the Precision systems throttle down hard on battery (the GPU especially) so gaming on battery isn't something you can really do.

 

Bottom line, I guess, is that this system strikes a great balance between battery life and performance, and shifting between them depending on what you are doing.  On the "PC" side, you sort of have to pick which model laptop you want based on which of these is more important to you.

 

I do hope new regulations coming out of Europe at least mean that the battery will become easily swappable in future models.  I don't really have any hopes for the RAM and SSD ever being swappable again.  You have to get the system with the specs that you need for the duration of its life.  One thing I'll note is, if you pay for the ongoing AppleCare warranty, they'll replace the battery for you at no cost if the OS triggers the "your battery is degraded and should be replaced" warning.  I'll also note that it attempts to save the battery lifespan by only allowing it to charge higher than 80% once per day.  (You do have the option to force a full charge if you know you're going to need the power.)

 

Another thing that I noticed is that it makes the efficiency cores primary, not the performance cores, which is backwards from how Intel is doing it.  macOS actually seems to take steps to avoid using the performance cores at all unless there is sufficient CPU usage.  There is no way to force a process onto the performance cores, as far as I can tell.

 

Regarding the display.

On 6/29/2023 at 12:58 PM, saturnotaku said:

I also hold out hope that there will be a revised mini-LED display for the MacBook Pro that offers faster pixel response times.

 

When I saw this, I got to looking at the display response times, and saw reviews showing a slow response time of 40+ ms, not a great figure.  I saw people on Reddit complaining about this as well.  It does seem to be better than the M1 models which are even worse.

 

Poking around with this myself, I am not able to see any issues with "ghosting" when scrolling or when watching videos.  The response time is normally fine.  I haven't observed any issues or latency/delay while gaming.  It's not perfect though by any stretch.  Situations when drastic changes to the mini-LED lighting are needed cause visible issues.  For example, an easy one to see is moving the mouse cursor around an all-black background.  The mini-LED lighting seems to be on a slight delay to keep up with where the mouse cursor is.  I've seen practical issues when watching videos that involve a lot of "all black" as well.  Another easy one to see is ending credits to a TV show or something.  If there is no "scrolling" or "fade in/out" and the credits are just popping from one set to the next with an immediate transition, you can see the mini-LED display take a moment to figure out which zones should be lit at each transition.  Also, scenes that involve a lot of darkness and quick transitions can look a little funny.  An example would be the very opening moments of the Foundation season 2 premiere.  There is a quick series of dark black and white shots with moments of black in between, and I could see the mini-LED display "confused" about whether some zones should be lit or not at some parts.  One other thing I've seen is the backlight being a little weird when working in the Windows command prompt in an RDP session, where the command prompt background is all black.

 

So, areas of abrupt motion or quick transitions on top of all-black seem to be the problem areas.  This would probably need a switch to OLED or micro-LED to fix.  Otherwise, the display is brilliant.

 

With regards to macOS itself.  Overall, I am finding the experience to be pretty smooth, even though I am still figuring it out somewhat.  (I use to admin a bunch of Macs but never have used one as a "daily driver" until now.)  I'll say that I'm now regularly using the system with 20+ windows open and there is no hitching at all in the UI, it's really smooth.  I have "Time Machine" set up to back up to a network drive and that seems really nice for keeping file history.  (Hourly snapshots for a day, daily snapshots for a month, and weekly snapshots "forever" until the drive runs out of space.  It uses hard links to consolidate identical copies of files in different snapshots without taking up additional space to store them, similar to "Timeshift" on Linux.)  I've had to do some scripting to get system behaviors that I want, like correcting the display backlight setting to my preference when I plug in or disconnect from AC power, automatically locking the session and power off the display if I shut the laptop lid, or automatically switching the system to a 16:10 display mode for gaming so that the "notch" is hidden but I don't get black bars on the left and right side of the display.  This is something that I don't really count as a negative.  I did similar work in both Windows and Linux to work around "idiosyncrasies" of those systems that didn't jive with the behavior that I wanted.

 

I'm normally a mouse guy but I've been making use of the MacBook trackpad.  It's way bigger than any "Windows" trackpad that I have used.  Gestures for scrolling, zooming, switching between multiple desktops, going "back" in the web browser, moving apps out of the way to expose the desktop, and bringing up Launchpad are implemented well really handy.

 

What has sort of surprised me is the ecosystem of slick apps that allow for improving macOS in ways that I think Apple "should" do, but doesn't.  I've been making use of a number of them.  Some examples...

• Rectangle provides window snapping like you would expect, coming from a Windows or Linux system.  Drag a window to the left edge to snap it on the left half of the screen.  Things like that.
• LinearMouse allows you to adjust the behavior of a mouse scroll wheel, which is messed up on macOS.  On Windows and Linux, scrolling the scroll wheel one "notch" scrolls by a fixed amount.  On macOS, they want it to have "acceleration" so the scroll starts out slow but picks up speed the more you go.  I usually scroll by discrete "clicks" of the wheel so I prefer the non-accelerated behavior.  LinearMouse allows you to set it to work this way, reverse the scroll direction if you like, and even control the scroll amount on a per-app basis if you like.
• Bartender lets you clean up the "menu bar" (sort of "system tray" in the top right that fills up with icons reflecting background apps that are running).
• It doesn't seem like its possible to set up "custom resolutions" for the laptop display anymore, but BetterDisplay will allow you to set up a dummy "external" display at any resolution that you like.  You can then set the laptop built-in display mirror the dummy display to force a certain resolution or aspect ratio.  (I've seen at least one game, StarCraft Remastered, that will stretch a 16:9 image to fill the display and mess up the aspect ratio.  This can force the display to stay in 16:9.  It could also be handy for screen recording a video for YouTube or whatever.)
• Almost everything seems to be available through Homebrew so I get a Linux-like package install/upgrade experience.  A lot of utility apps include the "install through Homebrew" command right on their web site.  Homebrew also allows installing Linux-ish terminal tools (i.e. a proper current version of rsync).  I also found terminal utilities through Homebrew to do things like set the display brightness and change the display resolution.

Microsoft Office for Mac is not as "good" as I thought it would be.  It's a step down from the Windows version.  Outlook is very stripped down.  It doesn't support "Tasks" in the same way that the Windows version does (it just wants me to use Microsoft To Do, basically), and not all of the rules for junk mail handling are exposed (ability to mange the "safe recipients" list is missing for example).  Also, it will prefer to "copy" mail instead of "move" it if you drag-and-drop a piece of mail to a folder that belongs to a different account, unless you hold down the "Command" key while doing the drag-and-drop.  I actually ended up dumping Outlook for Apple's built-in "Mail" app, and I'll use the Windows version of Outlook when I need to do some specific tasks.  I'm also trying the Apple Calendar for my personal calendar, which offers better syncing with my phone and watch anyway.  Excel seems to have its zoom level set too low by default; everything seems a bit small.  OneNote is OK, I have been using it over the Windows version most of the time, but I do wish there was an option to put tabs "on top" like the Windows version has.  Publisher and Visio are completely missing, I have to use the Windows versions for those.  I was a little bit pleasantly surprised to find that Microsoft does now ship an ARM64 version of Office for Windows, so it is able to run in my Windows/ARM VM without x64 translation needed.

 

That's it for now.  Still happily moving forward with the discovery and setup.

[saturnotaku]

The fact that you can still get full performance out of an Apple silicon Mac, for several hours no less, while running off the battery is truly a remarkable feat of engineering. 

 

Regarding the MS Office suite, if you use it regularly and for complex tasks, you truly are better off emulating it in a Windows VM. I've used Macs on and off since the late 90s, and those versions of Word, Excel, et al have always been moderately to significantly behind their Windows counterparts. That's never going to change.

[Aaron44126]

Terrible luck with laptop displays.  Every single personal laptop that I have ever purchased has come with or developed a display issue that I had to have serviced, be it stuck pixels or debris stuck in the LCD or whatever.  Actually, a new display issue with my Precision 7770 was part of what kicked me into switching to the MacBook.

 

(This is just personal systems.  My work systems have always been fine ...)

 

Anyway, as it turns out, the MacBook Pro is no exception.  Last week I noticed a "bright spot" on the MacBook Pro.  Only visible on a bright background, it covered way more than a few pixels, being about three-quarters of an inch tall and one-quarter of an inch wide.  It may have been new or it may have just taken a while for me to notice since I normally use "dark mode" applications.

 

I took it to the Apple Store and the tech there easily saw the issue when I pointed it out and didn't give me any grief about having the display replaced.  I left the laptop with them on Friday, and they promptly sent it to a service depot in Tennessee where the display replacement was performed on Saturday.  I just got it back now (Tuesday) because the service depot couldn't ship it out until Monday.  A letter says that the display panel was replaced, and also the "lid angle sensor" which they said had physical damage...?  I was not charged anything for the repair.

 

So, four-day turnaround, but it could have been two-day if there wasn't a weekend in there.  I was mostly kept on-edge by inconsistent tracking updates, both on the end of Apple and UPS.  For example, UPS tracking showed it moving through the system early this morning but it never showed "out for delivery", so I was sure that it had missed the truck and I'd be waiting another day.  But then it just showed up at my door... without the driver knocking for a signature... even though "signature required" is printed right here on the shipping label.

 

Anyway.  I hope that was my last laptop display replacement?  (Ha.)

[kojack]

They damaged the angle sensor for sure while doing the repair. If you damaged it, You would have been charged. Either way, hope it all works for you moving forward. I was 95% sure I was going to move to all mac for my systems. But, After trying 4 different models at staples, I am 100 percent passing on them. The lag there is when opening programs like safari, mail, photos and more is the deal breaker. My inspiron is faster than the mac for doing normal things.  I could not stand the lag when clicking on a program just to have the mac sit there with a white screen and the monochrome beachball spinning. 

 

I would have chaulked it up to the single machine, but 4 different models all did the same thing.  

[Aaron44126]

4 hours ago, kojack said:

The lag there is when opening programs like safari, mail, photos and more is the deal breaker. My inspiron is faster than the mac for doing normal things.  I could not stand the lag when clicking on a program just to have the mac sit there with a white screen and the monochrome beachball spinning.

 

That's weird.  If I click on one of these apps to open it, it pops up in less than a second.  Even Photos, where I have many thousands of pictures loaded in.  I can count on one hand the number of times that I've seen the "beach ball" cursor in the last two months.  I wonder if there is something with how they have the demo units configured.

 

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With the recent release of CrossOver 23, I picked up a license and started playing around with it.  I had no trouble installing the Windows version of Steam and downloading a few games.  The games that I tried work fine, but I picked "simple" ones on purpose (example: Sonic Mania)...  More complicated games will require CXPatcher and/or GPTK to work and I am still planning to wait for Sonoma to release before messing around with those.  Even though CrossOver now has limited support for DirectX 12, from what I am reading from other people online, GPTK's support is much better (more smooth framerate / less stuttering reported in games like Diablo IV).

 

Otherwise, I'm reasonably satisfied with the setup that I have going on and still slowly moving over data & workflows.  I recently moved over my Lightroom Classic photo catalog without any difficulty, just had to help it "find" some top-level folders.  I've done some development in Visual Studio, and while it is a bit "different" than the Windows version, I haven't run into any real issues.

 

One "pain point" is that both of my ancient printers are no longer supported.  I have a Samsung B&W laser that flat out won't work with macOS (or Windows on ARM), and a Canon multifunction which I can use for printing but not scanning.  I scan documents frequently, so I've been doing that from Windows.  The blame falls on Samsung and Canon for not keeping up support the operating systems have evolved but these printers are both over 10 years old so I wouldn't necessarily expect support at this point.  They'll have to be replaced eventually.  (The Canon scanner does work with VueScan on macOS, but I have found its OCR capabilities to be lacking.)

[kojack]

20 hours ago, Aaron44126 said:

 

That's weird.  If I click on one of these apps to open it, it pops up in less than a second.  Even Photos, where I have many thousands of pictures loaded in.  I can count on one hand the number of times that I've seen the "beach ball" cursor in the last two months.  I wonder if there is something with how they have the demo units configured.

 

————————————————————————————

 

With the recent release of CrossOver 23, I picked up a license and started playing around with it.  I had no trouble installing the Windows version of Steam and downloading a few games.  The games that I tried work fine, but I picked "simple" ones on purpose (example: Sonic Mania)...  More complicated games will require CXPatcher and/or GPTK to work and I am still planning to wait for Sonoma to release before messing around with those.  Even though CrossOver now has limited support for DirectX 12, from what I am reading from other people online, GPTK's support is much better (more smooth framerate / less stuttering reported in games like Diablo IV).

 

Otherwise, I'm reasonably satisfied with the setup that I have going on and still slowly moving over data & workflows.  I recently moved over my Lightroom Classic photo catalog without any difficulty, just had to help it "find" some top-level folders.  I've done some development in Visual Studio, and while it is a bit "different" than the Windows version, I haven't run into any real issues.

 

One "pain point" is that both of my ancient printers are no longer supported.  I have a Samsung B&W laser that flat out won't work with macOS (or Windows on ARM), and a Canon multifunction which I can use for printing but not scanning.  I scan documents frequently, so I've been doing that from Windows.  The blame falls on Samsung and Canon for not keeping up support the operating systems have evolved but these printers are both over 10 years old so I wouldn't necessarily expect support at this point.  They'll have to be replaced eventually.  (The Canon scanner does work with VueScan on macOS, but I have found its OCR capabilities to be lacking.)

I would have thought the same about the lag, but on macrumors, there are people complaining about the same thing.  So, I am going to sit back and see what m3 brings.  I will return to staples, or the source next to work, and see if the M3 has improved response.  As for the printer situation, yeah, apple claims "it just works"  when they want it to work. I have an old HP photo printer that prints 13 inch wide prints.  I can still use it using drivers off the net and it works fine, but plug it into a mac and NOPE!  Hell that was even back in 2011 when I had my last mac mini.