Tag: MacBookPro15

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. 🙂

In my ongoing downsizing efforts I picked up the new laptop I’ve been spent the better part of a year saving up for; a 2019 model of the 15″ Macbook Pro!

I’m mostly agnostic when it comes to the PC / Mac wars, and have used pretty much everything as a daily driver since my ZX-81 back in the early 80’s (For example, my old SGI Indy is sitting on a shelf right over there…) — so going from a Win10 gaming rig to an OSX laptop isn’t that big of a deal for me.

Yeah — Apple hardware can be somewhat spendy, but that tends to balance out over time as the hardware is so good. I mean, sure, I could have purchased any number of high-end Windows-based laptops for what this cost, but after test driving several… They just weren’t as good.

I’m also a bit old-fashioned and Unix-based operating systems are more my style; so the fact that OSX is basically BSD with a candy-coated interface is a selling point for me.

Anyway, this particular laptop is the 15-inch with an 8-core i9 CPU,16 gigs of ram, 1TB of M.2 storage, and the Vega 20 video card. And somehow that all fits in a box about the thickness of about 20 sheets of paper…

It’s chewed up absolutely everything I’ve thrown at it so far without a problem.

I’m still getting ‘moved in’ — which entails remembering lots of complex passwords, dozens of text messages from web sites to authorize the new cookie for security, and finding equivalent software. But so far so good!

Even the 1.2TB Intel 750-series PCIe SSD from my win10 system, shifted into an external thunderbolt 3 case for use with the laptop, ‘just worked’.

So, that’s the update — and my first post from the new laptop! 😀