Mac Vs PC (2022 edition)
- Thread starter cybershot
- Start date
danski
"vibey"
I have a wired one of these with an app I can’t remember the name of for shortcuts and stuff
www.trackballmouse.org
Ah, steermouse SteerMouse
Elecom M-HT1DRBK HUGE Wireless Trackball - Trackball Mouse Reviews
Full review of the Elecom M-HT1DRBK HUGE Wireless Trackball. Photos and comparison to the Kensington, CST and other Elecom trackballs.
www.trackballmouse.org
Ah, steermouse SteerMouse
mwgdrwg
Be a Pisces. Jam.
Yes I am
High Voltage
In the top 97% of Urban's most interesting posters
Ummm! you "right click" - the mouse has two buttons . . . unless you're asking about right clicking equivalent on a track pad, in which case . . . good luck, never used a track pad in a production environment, always a mouse and always a corded mouse*So. How do you right click on a Mac? Asking for a friend.
[*from my cold dead hands]
pseudonarcissus
fluttering and dancing
cybershot
Well-Known Member
I've not had much chance to play with it as been a busy weekend. My initial thoughts are it's fucking awesome! (and so it should be for the price) MacOS is tons easier to use than when I last had a Mac Mini at work, which wasn't the best specced Mac Mini (it had been around for quite a while at that point)
I can't believe how good the speakers are, Music and films sound incredible. Like I'm actually listening with a high quality soundbar. The screens great. Other than that not had chance to put it through anything intensive yet. I could harp on how it hands off stuff from iPhone/Watch/Airpods easily, but I'd just sound like an elitist cunt.
Last edited:
elbows
Well-Known Member
The speakers are indeed wonderful, as is the overall experience. Its quite the leap in terms of performance-thermals. Makes me hate the entire x86 windows dominant era even more, restores some of the feel and spirit of home computing pre PC domination, apart from the price and certain aspects of Apples control freakery!
Unless of course you want the very best in graphics speeds. Macs aren’t superior there. Possibly CPU also but haven’t looked into it tbh.
editor
hiraethified
It's all an infinitely infantile argument anyway. There's plenty of top level professionals using Macs/PCs/Linux or even Chromebooks and if they're happy with the performance, then it's clearly the best for them.
teuchter
je suis teuchter
Their users are though.
It used to be said that Mac was the better operating system for creative work (Windows has never been geared that way really) which was true twenty years ago. But things have changed since then and Mac isn’t necessarily the obvious choice it used to be. There’s been an exodus of 3D artists from Mac to PC since Nvidia’s 2x series came about along with GPU based renderers such as Octane and Redshift. It’s night and day compared with CPU based rendering. And of course, PC’s allow for multiple GPUs, should one fancy that.
Last edited:
editor
hiraethified
Depends on what you were doing though. Macs clearly had a big advantage back in the day in some areas - particularly music/video production - but twenty years ago I was producing graphics and working on very high profile websites in the UK and US on PCs.
With almost all of the big programs being released on PCs from the late 1990s onwards, I was happy using either platform although for web handcoding, I found HomeSite to be way better than the Mac equivalent of the time (BBEdit),
teuchter
je suis teuchter
I think this is true but a lot of people seem to reckon further generations of the M1 chips are going to change things quite rapidly quite soon.
This will suit me because I do do 3D stuff, and the kind of thing I do doesn't really require the very highest performance machines, but it's certainly been visible in the past decade or so (basically since Apple stopped really taking the Mac Pro seriously) that there has been a move to PC for this kind of work. And that's not good news for me because the more the Mac userbase declines, the less of a priority they are for the software producers. I've had to become used to the fact that certain things now get released for the PC version before the Mac version, or the Mac version just has certain things not well optimised, or missing. So, it's in my interest for Apple to attract back some of that top end userbase even if I amn't chasing the same specs as they are. (Also I can buy their secondhand macs cheap a couple of years after they upgrade to whatever's newest)
Yeah I was thinking why it dominated music studios - nothing worse than being in the middle of recording something only for some other windows operation to kick in and disrupt everything. Mac OS had that stuff set as higher priority. A producer mate of mine used an Atari ST with Cubase for sequencing which was apparently better still.
elbows
Well-Known Member
Intensive realtime 3D stuff is my main dev focus and I've been able to get what I need with this gen of Macbook Pros, albeit using the Max version that has an eye watering pricetag.
It is still possible to get PC laptops with more GPU grunt than the Max, but at the expense of more weight and heat and noise, and from what I understand the GPU performance of the PCs drops notably when used on battery alone, and that isnt the case with these new macs.
It still involves a compromise on my part, I can still get a higher framerate by using a desktop PC with a 2080ti instead. But its a significant boost compared to where macs had been languishing at with regards 3D graphics for a long time. The adaptive framerate on these macs has also been quite well done, and when I am not using up all the GPU trying to run 3D fluid sims at ever higher simulation grid resolutions, its quite nice to see what a 120fps screen can bring to the party.
Not sure why anyone would want to do a 3D render, on a laptop, on battery alone tbh 
cybershot
Well-Known Member
I'm amazed it took 3 pages for it to start becoming a willy wangle show.
Anyway. I tried 14 day Trial of latest Parellels this evening, because I miss Windows so much (joke) it's very slick and auto installs Windows 11, but yes, it's the ARM version as reported and some apps just aren't ready yet, and some I guess just may never be. It will be an interesting year I think for ARM. The CPU shortage issue is giving them ground in the PC market which they possibly weren't expecting. My work place has started buying ARM laptops, but I don't think our procurement department has done due diligence here. Unless we give them to the most basic of users who just need Windows and an Office suite, I suspect many are going to be throwing them back at IT Dept. This plus the fact no one has even asked me to build a task sequence in Config Manager to build these things yet. So erm, I look forward to being told I need to urgently do that.
Anyway. I tried 14 day Trial of latest Parellels this evening, because I miss Windows so much (joke) it's very slick and auto installs Windows 11, but yes, it's the ARM version as reported and some apps just aren't ready yet, and some I guess just may never be. It will be an interesting year I think for ARM. The CPU shortage issue is giving them ground in the PC market which they possibly weren't expecting. My work place has started buying ARM laptops, but I don't think our procurement department has done due diligence here. Unless we give them to the most basic of users who just need Windows and an Office suite, I suspect many are going to be throwing them back at IT Dept. This plus the fact no one has even asked me to build a task sequence in Config Manager to build these things yet. So erm, I look forward to being told I need to urgently do that.
elbows
Well-Known Member
I'm doing realtime 3D, not renders.Not sure why anyone would want to do a 3D render, on a laptop, on battery alone tbh
Reasons I prefer to use a laptop is that I like the portability, I like the relatively quiet nature of this macbook pro, and I dont like to consume many hundreds of watts while messing around with stuff for many hours per day. One day I might like the portability for other reasons including being able to go and show people what Im doing without having to lunk around a large tower PC.
It hasn’t really. Discussing tech advancements is interesting and useful Bly true fanbois would be offended. I’m PC because that’s what I’m used to. Mac always had the better operating system plus a ‘it just works’ ethos which has largely remained true.
It’s possible to do real-time renders. But understood you’re not doing that. I’d like to get into the simulation side of 3D. I was going to learn Houdini as a mental test to self but no time to really.
elbows
Well-Known Member
Reasons for my dislike of windows varied over time. At one grim stage its because I didnt like living with the uncertainty of whether a windows update would get stuck of break stuff, or that I might turn on my PC only to discover that the registry corrupted. Eventually my hate for Windows was sponsored more by the lingering memories of having to do tech support for many horrible windows machines in an office environment, it was eroding my general joy of computing and I did not want to be reminded of that shit when I used my own computer in my own time.
There was a time when I liked the choice of VJing software on macs more, and was fond of Quartz Composer on the mac. But that scene changed over the years and its been a long time since Apple sadly gave up on Quartz Composer.
There was a time when I liked the choice of VJing software on macs more, and was fond of Quartz Composer on the mac. But that scene changed over the years and its been a long time since Apple sadly gave up on Quartz Composer.
elbows
Well-Known Member
Houdini is powerful but its also acronym hell. SOPS POPs TOPs and CHOPs! Touch Designer is a realtime offshoot from Houdini but it has a wacky UI and many of those same acronyms.
For my purposes I mostly switched to game engines, especially Unity as handles compute shaders quite well and you can write them once and have them compile to various different platforms/graphics APIs. I am not the worlds best programmer and some of my maths is dodgy, but I was able to build heavily upon someone elses 3D fluid simulation (which is more about smoke etc than liquids) that they wrote with compute shaders. I managed to punch above my weight, and this years mission is using Resolume VJ software to send 2D textures into Unity which then turns them into 3D emitter sources for the fluid sim. But now I've reached the stage where my musical abilities are holding me back, since connecting this stuff to audio (and/or sequenced midi) is the entire reason I'm exploring this stuff.
UnderOpenSky
baseline neural therapy
I'm amazed it took 3 pages for it to start becoming a willy wangle show.
Anyway. I tried 14 day Trial of latest Parellels this evening, because I miss Windows so much (joke) it's very slick and auto installs Windows 11, but yes, it's the ARM version as reported and some apps just aren't ready yet, and some I guess just may never be. It will be an interesting year I think for ARM. The CPU shortage issue is giving them ground in the PC market which they possibly weren't expecting. My work place has started buying ARM laptops, but I don't think our procurement department has done due diligence here. Unless we give them to the most basic of users who just need Windows and an Office suite, I suspect many are going to be throwing them back at IT Dept. This plus the fact no one has even asked me to build a task sequence in Config Manager to build these things yet. So erm, I look forward to being told I need to urgently do that.
Don't you have a spare server somewhere you could have a windows VM in for the few things that you really miss? I'm sure nobody will notice an extra one on there if your the boss.
A couple of our guys use Macs as you get to choose your laptop when you've been here a while and as we work in VMs and SSH to linux servers it makes little difference. I've even been told that teams is nicer on a Mac.
elbows
Well-Known Member
Yeah I was making assumptions about what you meant by renders, eg fully pathtraced stuff with very high quality at the expense of how long a single frame takes.
Nvidia obviously used some sleight of hand marketing when introducing the world to their cards that support 'realtime raytracing', although what they managed to achieve was still somewhat impressive. But it wasnt some big leap towards a full realtime, 60fps type world of pathtracing, and they used clever tricks such as realtime denoisers that were based on machine learning in order to get the features they do support to run at interactive framerates without looking too rubbish.
Macs still arent really competitive in that realm yet, although it will still be interesting to see what GPU-based renderers for things like Blender are like on these macs once they've been better optimised. And no doubt some further pro machines that further increase the number of available GPU cores will bring Apple back further into that game, but at very silly prices.
Fair dos. Yeah the engine stuff is coming on leaps and bounds. Unreal also. Again, if I had the time… I’m firing on too many fronts.
elbows
Well-Known Member
Unreal 5 is looking rather impressive so far, though this is an example where some features and development lag behind a bit on the Mac. Although just recently they finally made some fo the built in modelling capabilities in 5 work on the mac, yay.
Its more efficient than Unity in some ways, and doesnt get trapped in corporate development hell as often (I bet Unity are very frustrating to work for). But its also one of the best ways I know of to find out how loud the fans on these new macs can actually become under sustained load - when shaders are compiling in Unreal the macbook pro fans reach levels I havent experienced with most other tasks.
Similar threads
