Month: November 2019

I have this perpetual unwritten deal with Apple… Since the earliest days, every time I’ve purchased an Apple gizmo someone at Apple takes note of this and within a few weeks they inevitably announce some new paradigm of product that renders what I just bought obsolete.

Every. Single. Time… And this has gone on for decades now, so I know this will happen and even somewhat plan for it.

This time around it was the MacBook Pro that I purchased about three months ago. It’s a really nice laptop, and all of the diligent research I did on it pointed to it being the latest refresh of the design, with the latest hardware and newest bells and whistles — and it would be the pinnacle for at least a couple of years.

Ha! Tech reviewers apparently don’t know of my deal with Apple.

So I purchased the 15.6″ MacBook Pro and started the timer… Three weeks to the day Apple announced they would be bringing out a 16″ MacBook Pro that would be twice the laptop of the one that I had just purchased.

Damn it Apple…

Anyway, knowing this would happen I’d made arrangements with a friend of mine who has been using a hand-me-down Mac Pro I sold him like a decade ago. If Apple released a new-hotness laptop, I would sell him the one I just got to replace his antique for $500 less than I paid for it.

And, long story short, I picked up my new custom-made 16″ Macbook Pro last evening and handed over the old one to said friend.

The new laptop is a 2.4 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i9 with 32 GB of 2667 MHz DDR4 ram, 2TB of SSD storage, and an 8Gig AMD Radeon Pro 5500M GPU in it. 

The biggest difference between the new laptop and the old though is Apple finally conceding that power users don’t care about how “thin and light” the machine is; they bought it for work, and that work will push the device to its limits routinely — so stop frittering about with tiny little heatsinks and fancy half-millimeter travel keyboards, and just make it beefy enough to run balls-out 24/7. 😀

I’ve been using my MacBook Pro exclusively for about three months now, carrying it back and forth to work, using it at home, writing, building 3D models, texturing, doing art, music, and video — and other than a few issues with OSX trying too hard to help it’s been great!

I’m still not a fan of “do everything” operating systems… An OS exists to run user software on user hardware, that’s it. Everything else tends to be sub-par bloat.

But OSX is still better than Windows in that regard — and has less creepy user spying too.

I have “upgraded” the laptop slightly. First was an external thunderbolt-3 PCIe enclosure for my old 1.2TB Intel 750 SSD, which is now used for “Time Machine” backups. Then I picked up a CalDigit TS3 Thunderbolt-3 dock which connects the PCIe enclosure and all of my peripherals to the laptop when I’m at home. I was also using the CalDigit to run my 34″ ultrawide monitor.

I had been holding off on the eGPU upgrade until Apple finished the AMD NAVI drivers, which they did last week with 10.15.1 — so there is now a Powercolor “Game Center” eGPU box housing an AMD 5700XT on my desk as well. And now the ultrawide monitor is plugged into the eGPU.

While Thunderbolt-3 is limited to basically PCIe x4, the 5700XT is still several times the performance of the Vega 20 GPU in the laptop — which makes SecondLife a bit easier to work with. 🙂

The latest acquisition is a Wacom Cintiq Pro 13″ which replaced my decade-old Intuos4.

I’d originally decided to just replace the Intuos4 with a new one (the old one has gotten a bit shaky on the right side of the active area…), but Wacom’s prices are kind of crazy and they still want $500 for the Intuos… The Cintiq was basically the same size, has a built-in screen, and was only $200 more —  and I’ve always wanted to try drawing directly on what I’m working on digitally… So here we are.

I’m still getting used to the ‘directly on the screen’ thing, but so far so good. I’ve been right hand on the mouse/digitizer/pen and eyes on the monitor since the late 80’s, so there’s a bit of re-learning to do. But I’m still adaptable. 🙂