RIHAHN.COM

Tag: MacBookPro16

  • The inevitable computer upgrade

    Last night I ordered a new iMac; what may be the last of the big Intel machines from Apple.

    27″ 5K screen, 3.8Ghz Intel Core i7-10700K, 8gigs of 2666MHz DDR4 ram, a terabyte of SSD, and a Radeon Pro 5700 XT with 16GB of GDDR6.

    I specifically ordered it with the least amount of ram possible because I can upgrade that to 32gigs on my own and for about a quarter of the cost. I went with the i7 versus the i9 because I don’t really do massive multithread work and instead need fewer but faster cores, and the i7 is just that. I also went with 1TB vs something larger as I already have big external drives and terabytes of cloud storage — and the jump from 1TB to 2TB internal was like $400.

    It should arrive between the 13th and 17th of this month — riots willing of course.

    The 16″ MacBook Pro I have now is a stellar laptop and I picked it up because it’s small and fits into my stuff reduction plan. But since I purchased it I’ve added an external GPU, external PCIe box with my old PCIe SSD in it, a 34″ wide aspect monitor, Bose speakers, etc, etc.

    At home the laptop sits on top of the eGPU box, which is about half the size of a regular PC, and has a ton of wiring plugged into it to make all of the external stuff work. All told there’s an entire end-table covered in gear that interfaces to the laptop — or about three times the volume of a 27″ iMac.

    Basically I don’t use the laptop as a laptop — it’s more of a small form-factor computer that I plug lots of stuff into.

    There’s also the complexities of an eGPU; it works, mostly, but having an ATI 5700 XT in the box and connected over thunderbolt only gives the card 4 PCIe lanes — so it’s operating at about half-speed all the time. Which is fine, I didn’t do the eGPU thing for bleeding edge gaming, it was more to reduce the thermal load on the laptop while doing graphically intense things for hours.

    The iMac on the other hand has basically the same card, but operating at full 16-lane PCIe 4.0 speed. So graphically it’s a pretty substantial upgrade and should make Warcraft and Second Life even better. 🙂

    The iMac also has a nice 1080p camera, studio-grade microphones, and some quality speakers built-in… So the many weekly online meetings I have to attend won’t require a random camera stuck to the top of my monitor, and a separate mic and my headphones to limit echo.

    Lastly Apple gave me about $2000 in trade for the laptop, and 0% financing for 12 months — so the new iMac winds up running me about $120 a month for a year. That’s doable.

    And, hey — I took care of both the Christmas and Birthday computer upgrades in one easy purchase — so I’m ahead of the game. 🙂

  • MacBookPro 16,1 Reload…

    Today was spent reloading OS X 10.15.7 on my 2019 16″ MacBook Pro.

    Not as big as the 2004 17″ Powerbook G4 I had years ago, but it’s much, much more powerful. Come to think of it, it’s probably not as big as the 14″ PowerBook G3 I had in the late 90’s either.

    OS X allows you to just move all of your applications and data from machine to machine very easily — but this includes all of the cruft and oddities as well. So the assorted software flotsam in my laptop has been accumulating since I picked up the 15″ MacBook Pro in August of last year.

    I’m also a systems engineer and a programmer, so the innards of my machines get an inordinate amount of poking and prodding, experimental drivers for things, and lots of python and java fragments to do things you’re not supposed to do — and this tends to slowly destabilize things over time… And then there’s Xcode, which does all manner of horrible things to the OS in the name of making iPhone apps…

    All in all the complete wipe and OS reload, even over the congested wifi here at home, only took 20 minutes. Oh, that’s another thing; Mac recovery media resides on the internet, so you just hold down command-R on boot, the firmware connects to wifi/ethernet, and you’re off to the races.

    The rest of the afternoon has been re-installing applications and getting texts on the phone to do the two-factor authentication for dozens of online accounts.

    I make extensive use of Apple’s “iCloud” for backups and data retention, which means all of my browser sites, logins, and passwords were ready to go instantly, as well as all of my calendar and contact data. “iCloud Drive”, the data storage portion of the system wasn’t as finely polished and it took some pointy-hat terminal-wizardry to track down the sync processes, kill them and their data store, and get the sync working again… There was some sort of race condition with pending deletes on the server side and pending syncs on the client side. But the mountains of data that lives on my laptop were eventually restored in short order.

    It’s nice having gigabit fiber here at the house when it comes time to shuffle an entire HD of data from point A to B.

    My backup’s backup is on Backblaze just in case Apple fails me, but it wasn’t needed today…

    So, the sum-total to wipe out and restore my entire life still takes about six hours, even here in the bright and shiny digital future. This basically proves that while processing and data speeds are insane now, so is the amount of data we tend to accumulate — so it balances out.

  • MacBookPro 16,1 – Update…

    It’s been a few weeks since the last entry, so I should post something for posterity…

    The new MacBook Pro laptop is amazing, and I’m with the countless reviews at this point; it’s the laptop Apple should have been making all along.

    Now, I know why they didn’t make this thing all along; 10nm process chips from Intel that have supposed to have been available for like two years now coupled with Apple’s love affair with “single wire” Thunderbolt 3 charging…

    Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) has an upper limit of like 100 watts of power it can supply, so everything in the laptop has to fit within that envelope at peak load — and Intel’s 14nm i9 9980HK consumes about half of that all by itself. Intel’s 10nm process chips would allow more headroom for GPUs both power-wise and thermally — but Intel can’t quite seem to make 10nm work… So Apple has been making due with what they have, and falling behind the tech arms race because of it.

    The new laptop is still limited by USB-C power delivery, but because of AMDs 7nm process 5000 series GPUs (like the 5500 in the laptop), and Apple deciding thin is out and making space for a workable thermal solution (and ditching that butterfly keyboard), the 16″ MacBook Pro is finally “Pro”.

  • MacBookPro 16,1 – More Laptop Shenanigans

    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. 😀