Love the OS, hate the machine

[Romain_H]

The problem with these x86 laptops is that hardware has gotten more powerful in the last few years while the battery technology hasn’t caught up.

None of them can run the dGPU on battery power alone for example. What’s the use of RTX 3xxx in my laptop if I cannot use it while I am not plugged in?

I agree. The other poster‘s claim that ASi is toooo powerhungry looks even more ridiculous in this light

 

[mi7chy]

The problem with these Mac laptops is that hardware has gotten more powerful in the last few years while the battery technology hasn’t caught up.

True. Crashes after 56 minutes, somewhere inbetween it mucks with your game graphics settings then dies after 1 hour 36 mins then you have a dead laptop away from wall outlet. Too bad FAA doesn't allow strapping on a bigger than 100Wh battery.

Crash

Mucks with game graphics settings

Dead battery

 

[kasakka]

Hackintosh PC offers much more performance than any real Mac at much lower price plus you can multi-boot Windows and Linux. That's why Apple wants to kill of x64 Macs since it also eliminates the increasingly popular Hackintosh.

Apple does not care one bit about Hackintosh. The people willing to build one are most likely the people who would not buy Apple machines in the first place, e.g would not buy a Mac Pro even if Hackintosh was not possible.

For any people using their machine for professional work, maintaining a Hackintosh system is just extra effort spent for what? Saving some money on components? That amounts to nothing over time vs just buying a Mac that can do what you need.

Hackintosh is not "increasingly popular". If anything it's becoming increasingly less viable. Nvidia already no longer supplies drivers for MacOS and similarly I expect newer Intel and AMD processors to become more and more incompatible with it. Eventually Apple will release an Apple Silicon -only version of MacOS and that's the end of the line for Hackintosh.

I used Hackintosh for a few years. Eventually I got tired dual booting to Windows when I wanted to play games and even my work could be just done on Windows so I stopped using Hackintosh. I had the time and the will to tinker around to get everything working but the older I get the more I'd rather take the easy road and spend money to get something I don't have to try to fix for every software update. For me it's easier to just own a desktop PC and a Macbook Pro.

I don't love a lot of things about Apple hardware despite liking MacOS. A Mac Studio would tick a lot of boxes for me if it wasn't for things like a 2022 machine with only HDMI 2.0 output and storage you cannot upgrade without sacrificing Thunderbolt connections for external SSD enclosures when in any sane system you'd just put in a larger drive.

 

[lepidotós]

Can always OpenCore an older Mac, Ventura works on a surprising number of Haswell and newer Macs, and has even shown boot potential on MacPro3,1+ -- which runs Monterey just fine.
Or you could get a Framework laptop and install helloSystem on it.​

 

[theorist9]

Also part of the entire point of the M1 macs is the fast integration between the ram, processor and ssd. They are all on the chip which makes them even faster.

That's true for the CPU and GPU, but not for the SSD—the SSD storage in the Studio is removable, indicating that it could be upgradeable, but Apple doesn't allow you to do so.*

The RAM falls into a grey area, where the RAM controllers are on-die, but the RAM chips themselves are off-die. I could buy an argument from Apple about how the RAM still can't be upgradeable because it needs to be soldered, but that's clearly not the case for the SSD's in the Studio.

*And here's how Apple blocks this: An SSD consists, essentially, of a controller plus storage. In the Studio, Apple has separated the two: The removable part is storage only, while the controller stays with the device. Additionally, Apple has keyed each controller to only work with a certain size of storage. So, if you have two Studios, both with, say, 1 TB storage, you can remove the storage from both Studios, swap them between devices, and they will both work fine.

However, suppose you have two Studios with with, say, 1 TB and 2 TB of storage, respectively. If you try putting the 2TB of storage into the Studio that came with only 1 TB, it won't work, thus precluding an upgrade. [This system likely also precludes aftermarket companies from producing storage upgrades for the Studio.]

Apple tried a simpler version of this with the 2019 iMac: It used full M.2 NVMe SSD's, but Apple swapped their pin layout so you couldn't install a non-Apple device. A clever company then built an inexpensve adapter for this, allowing one to put larger SSDs into the iMac if you ran out of room. With the 2020 iMac, Apple soldered in the SSD, precluding this upgrade.

I'm not sure why Apple decided to leave the storage in the Studio removable; maybe they want to allow for an easy repair if the drive goes bad.