MacOS Monterey 12.01 -> 12.1 now

[edro]

What is GST?

I think my M1 Air was about 2K with Apple Care and Magic Mouse 2..... I was looking at a Lenovo loaded to the gills for well over 2K as far as a Win alternative..... Finally decided on the Air M1 8/8 cores, 16G, 1T..... Love it....

I had had enough of wading through Intel processor specs and crap. Too many different processors... I was leaning toward an i9 but finally got out of thinking about that Win/Intel rabbit hole.... Glad I did...

 

[efstop]

What is GST?

I think my M1 Air was about 2K with Apple Care and Magic Mouse 2..... I was looking at a Lenovo loaded to the gills for well over 2K as far as a Win alternative..... Finally decided on the Air M1 8/8 cores, 16G, 1T..... Love it....

I had had enough of wading through Intel processor specs and crap. Too many different processors... I was leaning toward an i9 but finally got out of thinking about that Win/Intel rabbit hole.... Glad I did...

GST is Goods & Services Tax. It varies by province. Here in Ontario it's 13%, 5% for the Feds, 8% for the provincials. Alberta and the territories have no provincial sales tax so GST is a mere 5%. The Maritime provinces have a 10% sales tax so GST is 15%.

This isn't the first time I was tempted by a Macbook Air, but the first time (7 years ago), the Dell smoked the Mac with screen res and CPU speed. Prices were about par, the Dell slightly more. In 2015,a Macbook Air with the lid open looked like a 386 with it's 1" bezel so Dell was an easy choice.

 

[KStopper65]

I've been looking over laptop prices. A Macbook Air with 16GB and 1TB is $2150 CAD. That's mid priced between the Intel equipped ones I've considered. A Dell XPS with a Core i7, 16 GB and a 512 is on for $1500 (No 1TB option) and a non-touch 1920 x 108 screen. The whopper is the Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 9 with a Core i7, 16 GB and 1TB at $2867.40. Ouch. Plus 13% GST on all of them.

The Dell is the most reasonably priced Intel, where the Lenovo is $2400 with only an i5 and 8GB/512. My current laptop is a 7 yr old XPS with 8GB/500 and the only issue is a new Dell Battery is $199 CAD vs $53-90 for a generic.
Still want a new laptop but the Tele I want is only $40 more than the Dell. Decisions, decisions...

Mac is the way to go unless you game. The extra you are paying is for the software. Get an Air, it is capable of most tasks.

 

[edro]

OS on my Air has proven to be as reliable and consistent as back in the farm running BSDI Unix and X on all the boxen. Like BSDI Unix, everything seems to be 'rat now'....

My shop office machine is a badass Ryzen box with plenty of RAM.... It is a badass.... Response time is still behind the M1 Air though... Common substrate is cool.... No eleventy-seven tri-states all over the damn board is cool too... I remember looking a prints thinking 'they're faster now than old 74xxx tech but to think relatively about the 9ns PDT through a simple inverter and apply that to isolation control of every bus, not counting the actual logic shit, and there is some serious time wasted just waiting for the train to show up..... M1 tech does away with a ton of that.... Makes more difference than one might think. Imagine having the little short crumbsnatcher/curtain climber/dog. door between ever single room in your house where you must open and close them every single time. Doesn't take much time for 'once' but do them hard maths and there is a lot of time wasted dicking with 'gates'.... Think of most everything moved into one unbroken floorspace....quicker response.... Drops 'work' too. (Work in electrical is Power in watts. M1 tech is extremely low power.)

AMD will do AMD Ryzen w/ 'AMD' built boards from hell soon I would imagine....and sometime down the road, Intel will.....

I full expect AMD machines to slam the market one day.... I would not be surprised if 'run any OS you want on em' to be the rule.... Were I Cheeze at Apple, I wouldn't give a shit abut anything Intel does... I would watch AMD and Samsung like a hawk....

 

[TheX]

OS on my Air has proven to be as reliable and consistent as back in the farm running BSDI Unix and X on all the boxen. Like BSDI Unix, everything seems to be 'rat now'....

My shop office machine is a badass Ryzen box with plenty of RAM.... It is a badass.... Response time is still behind the M1 Air though... Common substrate is cool.... No eleventy-seven tri-states all over the damn board is cool too... I remember looking a prints thinking 'they're faster no than old 74xxx tech but to think relatively about the 9ns PDT through a simple inverter and apply that to isolation control of every bus, not counting the actual logic shit, and there is some serious time wasted just waiting for the train to show up..... M1 tech does away with a ton of that.... Makes more difference than one might think. Imagine having the little short crumbsnatcher/curtain climber/dog. door between ever single room in your house where you must open and close them every single time. Doesn't take much time for 'once' but do them hard maths and there is a lot of time wasted dicking with 'gates'.... Think of most everything in one unbroken floorspace.... Drops 'work' too. (Work in electical is Power in watts. M1 tech is extremely low power.)

AMD will do AMD Ryzen w/ boards from hell soon I would imagine....and sometime down the road, Intel will.....

I full expect AMD machines to slam the market one day.... I would not be surprised if 'run any OS you want on em' to be the rule.... Were I Cheeze at Apple, I wouldn't give a shit abut anything Intel does... I would watch AMD and Samsung like a hawk....

AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 64-core 5995WX processor. What more could a person need.

 

[TXOldRedRocker]

OS on my Air has proven to be as reliable and consistent as back in the farm running BSDI Unix and X on all the boxen. Like BSDI Unix, everything seems to be 'rat now'....

Well, macOS is based on FreeBSD, via NeXTSTEP. So maybe that helps. I do 90% of my coding at the BSD level. I try to stay away from that Cocoa crap.

The kernel group at Apple has done a somewhat decent job on improving the BSD code, while keeping it somewhat stable over the years. It had lots of limitations when they bought NeXT. There was a time period where the head of the CoreOS group (BSD layer) was a putz and that layer got pretty bad. The guy in charge of CoreOS now is a friend of over 20 years and he is really sharp. He's done an excellent job fixing up the lower level OS layers.

The BSD C/C++ memory management was written by Avie Tevanian back at Carnegie Mellon, before he joined NeXT and then Apple. It sucked then, and it sucks now. One of the reasons it's good to restart fairly often. Helps recover lost memory. That's why all the products I (we) create use a memory manager I wrote in the 90's that still kicks ass. If I say so myself.

 

[edro]

AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 64-core 5995WX processor. What more could a person need.

I think we will see some marriage of MPU/GPU/Motherboard, all AMD in an AMD box one of these days.... It's inevitable to me. AMD will have to go the Apple route and build the entire board assemble itself....and if AMD does that, the could build their own machines from hell.... Laptops and similar to Mac Mini platform.... Low power, doesn't need a big ass mondo wattage power supply, cabinet size and component spacing reqs (heat vs volume) just did the 'Honey I shrunk the little rat bastid kids' dance...

 

[efstop]

Mac is the way to go unless you game. The extra you are paying is for the software. Get an Air, it is capable of most tasks.

I don't game, but I don't want all the Apple software. My most often used program is the free Irfanview photo editor. It doesn't run on Mac OS.

 

[edro]

use a memory manager

Windows mem alloc has always been a sore subject with a lot of folks....

"Can I borrow your screwdriver?"
---- Where's my damn screwdriver you borrowed? Give me my damn screwdriver back. ---
"What screwdriver? I've seen no screwdriver. Can I borrow your screwdriver?"

 

[dspelman]

I needed to upgrade my Mac environment recently, and spent a kajillion dollars getting things current, including a 1 TB iPad Pro 12.9" M1, which I'd figured would be my portable solution.

Toward the end of things, I looked around and realized that I need a bog-stock laptop as well, because the iPad can't run stock Mac software. It wouldn't be doing gaming, didn't need to have a monster screen, etc. And the lowest-spec M1 MacBook Air was $850. I'd just tossed out four of my old Lenova/IBM Windows laptops, all of which cost a small fortune, most of which were still bog-slow.

Holy crap -- that little thing is a beast. I'd been used to laptops that take a while to boot up, that need auxiliary fan units to keep from igniting a desktop (or your lap), that slow down when you unplug them and that slow down when they get hot (which was pretty much all the time. This thing snaps on when you start it up, applications are up *now*, and it runs cool. It runs the same speed plugged in or not, and I haven't yet experienced a slowdown related to heat. I wasn't expecting much with only 8 GB of RAM, but it's blisteringly fast, even when you push it.

I haven't run into anything that won't run because of the M1, but I keep getting told that some of the apps that aren't native will run even faster when the developers get them switched over.

I've not been a trackpad fan, but I made a concerted effort with this one, and it's paid off. I can actually leave the house without a power brick, mouse, mouse pad, auxiliary fan unit, etc. Battery power usage so far is stellar and the screen is amazingly sharp, bright, and colors are pretty much accurate.

 

[SteveC]

AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 64-core 5995WX processor. What more could a person need.

 

[TXOldRedRocker]

Windows mem alloc has always been a sore subject with a lot of folks....

"Can I borrow your screwdriver?"
---- Where's my damn screwdriver you borrowed? Give me my damn screwdriver back. ---
"What screwdriver? I've seen no screwdriver. Can I borrow your screwdriver?"

Corporate culture of engineering at MS has always been horrible for the consumer. Before Apple/NeXT the corporate culture of engineering at Apple was fantastic for consumers. Post NeXT acquisition, the engineering culture has been sliding downhill in the direction of an MS-style. Sad and frustrating. I've had some mild mannered face to face discussions about this with some Apple managers. Also a few heated ones.

And, a few with some friends that left Apple because of it.

 

[efstop]

I like an OS I can mess with, although I don't bother with Windows geek stuff much anymore.

 

[dspelman]

Corporate culture of engineering at MS has always been horrible for the consumer. Before Apple/NeXT the corporate culture of engineering at Apple was fantastic for consumers. Post NeXT acquisition, the engineering culture has been sliding downhill in the direction of an MS-style. Sad and frustrating. I've had some mild mannered face to face discussions about this with some Apple managers. Also a few heated ones.

And, a few with some friends that left Apple because of it.

Jobs brought his NeXt implementation of Unix with him. The good news is that he also brought innovations like color screens, stereo sound, CDs, Magneto-optical drives, DSPs and more. I was hoping Apple would implement a version of Jean-Louis Gassee's BeOS -- it was leaner, smarter and designed around a graphic user interface while offering a lot of Unix-like features.

Unix has directed both MS and Apple over the years, while both failed to implement some features of Unix environments that I really like.

 

[EasyAce]

Bought this iMac new in November . . .

. . . running Monterey. Got the 12.1 upgrade last week. Running beautifully. Took my CD drive and external hard drive beautifully, too.

 

[cooljuk]

Wait until you try to use Office for Mac on Monterey.

View attachment 582577

I figured I’d give it a shot, as I had a relatively fresh install of Monterey and wouldn’t be out too much effort, even if I had to reinstall.

I installed Word, Excel, and (haven’t tried yet) PowerPoint from Office 2019 with latest updates and no issues or funny business at all so far. Old stuff opens, new stuff is openable by others, no crashes or funky shenanigans.

Now, I’m NOT running Office 365 and I declined all the “work from the cloud” and online features during install of 2019 (the last stand-alone version of Office and still updated/current). Maybe that’s the difference?

 

[SteveC]

Could be -- I don't use any of their cloud garbage.

I plan on giving it a shot after a few more dot releases. For now, I'm perfectly fine.

 

[TXOldRedRocker]

Jobs brought his NeXt implementation of Unix with him. The good news is that he also brought innovations like color screens, stereo sound, CDs, Magneto-optical drives, DSPs and more. I was hoping Apple would implement a version of Jean-Louis Gassee's BeOS -- it was leaner, smarter and designed around a graphic user interface while offering a lot of Unix-like features.

Unix has directed both MS and Apple over the years, while both failed to implement some features of Unix environments that I really like.

Be OS was very unfinished. Very. It was discussed seriously within Apple before the NeXT acquisition. System 7 (and previous) lacked modern features of OSes that were now considered needed. So Apple was really forced to choose between an in-house complete rewrite of Mac OS, acquiring and finishing BeOS, or acquiring/merging with NeXT. They chose two of the three. First, they made a GIANT investment in the Copeland project. In-house new modern OS. (Copeland Project Ref) Which was a huge flop and never saw the light of day. Cost Apple lots of time, and money. System 8, and later, Mac OS 9, had to be written while the NeXT project (MacOS 10) took shape within Apple. Neither were originally planned as being built on top of System 7.

Apple hired the principal architect of BeFS and he worked within the existing file system team for the transition from HFS to HFS+. He's the only one left from the HFS+ team, so he's now the head file system engineer and behind the APFS project, Apple's current file system. The department head for overseeing the File System Group has changed a few times. Each with their own vision. That didn't help. APFS has had two rewrites.

At one time Apple strived for Mac OS X to be complexly POSIX compliant, but later dropped it. Its been a pretty powerful Unix environment for a long time. But now they're trying to merge their desktop OS with the phone, iPad and tv OSes. It's a giant PIA and I hate it.

 

[bilbarstow]

Now, I’m NOT running Office 365 and I declined all the “work from the cloud” and online features during install of 2019 (the last stand-alone version of Office and still updated/current).

This isn't exactly true. As of very recently, you can once again buy Office 365 as a "standalone" license. In "perpetuity". Once again, you can "Own" the Microsoft App Suite. I bought a license and installed it on my new Mac M1 Air. I got it because I have licensed versions (older) still running on my PC's for work, and I wanted the ease and portability of documents between platforms.

 

[dspelman]

Be OS was very unfinished. Very. It was discussed seriously within Apple before the NeXT acquisition. System 7 (and previous) lacked modern features of OSes that were now considered needed. So Apple was really forced to choose between an in-house complete rewrite of Mac OS, acquiring and finishing BeOS, or acquiring/merging with NeXT.

I know it was discussed within Apple, but a lot of the discussion had to do with whether they really wanted to pay what Gasee was asking.There was a culture barrier nearly as high as that keeping Gibson from allowing Epiphone to flourish as anything more than second-rate. The Powers That Be felt that BeOS should be handed to them. As it turned out, they spent a *great* deal more to get Unix where they wanted it. Adding the features they were interested in would have been infinitely cheaper, but they didn't see it that way. I worked for a time with BeOS, and for its time I thought there was huge potential and far less bloat. It took quite a while for processors to make up, with Unix, what speed BeOS already had. IMHO, of course. Apple attempted a rewrite of MacOS over quite a long period of time, and their programmers were simply not up to the task. At the point where they were considering BeOS or Unix, a rewrite of MacOS was a distant third option, and Apple was in a bit of a panic over whether it could be done at all.