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LionArcher posted:So 2015 is the best of the old ones to buy? I think that's what most people say. I just bought a late 2013 one as my first ever MBP and it kinda rules. Really just get whatever works for you.
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May 27, 2019 19:50
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Krispy Wafer posted:Remember when we used to carry around Mac Mini’s with 2 hours of battery life and think we were living in the future? The keyboards on those were easily removable compared to the non-removable Powerbook counterpart.
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May 27, 2019 19:51
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Electric Bugaloo posted:When did the Mac mini have any battery life?
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May 27, 2019 19:59
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Electric Bugaloo posted:When did the Mac mini have any battery life? The joke is that the old iBooks were as thick as the current Mac Mini, but were considered very thin and light for their time. crazysim posted:The keyboards on those were easily removable compared to the non-removable Powerbook counterpart. I thought even the last powerbooks let you remove the keyboard if you knew which 2 or 3 keys had screws under them.
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May 27, 2019 20:00
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I found a charger for $11 shipped to my door so we'll see what this baby can do in about 7 to 10 days. I may still have the restore CD's for Jaguar. WTF was the official browser before Safari? IE for Mac? Netscape? Comedy Lynx option? If I buy a new keyboard then I'll be spending about half what the iBook is worth. I may try and remove the keyboard and run it via a USB input providing it can even recognize anything made in the last decade. I think that's some kind of video out port on the side and Lord knows I have a vast selection of random proprietary Apple video-out adapters. Krispy Wafer fucked around with this message at 20:07 on May 27, 2019 |
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May 27, 2019 20:02
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I think Rossman lives in his own personal hell. Imagine knowing that much stuff about something he clearly despises.
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May 27, 2019 20:03
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LionArcher posted:So 2015 is the best of the old ones to buy? LionArcher posted:So Louis rossman just dropped a video on how he recommends the 2014 MacBook Pro over the 2015 because of the sata cable failing? I’ve never heard of this and I wanted a 2015 because you can plug into a 4K display... should I rethink? Thoughts thread? Mmm, Rossman knows his poo poo from an engineering point of view. IMHO he has never regularly maintained a MacBook from a software every day point of view like his customers. So there's poo poo he'll never get. BTW there have been no SATA cable on any MacBook Pros since 2012. Late 2013 models and up to 2015s have been proprietary PCIe slots close enough to industry standard that you can use a line swapping adapter to use off the shelf M.2 form factor NVMe SSDs. That cable he decried as constantly failing is a keyboard / trackpad flex cable that I might have had to swap out once in years of servicing MBPs. To each his own I guess.
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May 27, 2019 20:20
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American McGay posted:The joke was that it's the size of a Mini. The battery life comment was separate. 
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May 27, 2019 20:23
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Krispy Wafer posted:WTF was the official browser before Safari? IE for Mac? Netscape? Comedy Lynx option? Netscape at first, then IE.
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May 27, 2019 21:38
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Binary Badger posted:Mmm, Rossman knows his poo poo from an engineering point of view. IMHO he has never regularly maintained a MacBook from a software every day point of view like his customers. So there's poo poo he'll never get. Thanks thread and especially you Badger. I’ll grab a used 2015 in good shape in the $700 range and call it a day till 2021 (if they fix the keyboard and come out with a 14 inch model). Also general weird thread heads up. Interfacelift has always had amazing wallpaper, but over the last six months it’s been off and online a lot. It’s back up, and I just went and download a few hundred new wallpapers before it goes away again . If you like good photos for your desktops, grab em while you can. LionArcher fucked around with this message at 22:53 on May 27, 2019 |
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May 27, 2019 22:46
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Krispy Wafer posted:I found a charger for $11 shipped to my door so we'll see what this baby can do in about 7 to 10 days. I may still have the restore CD's for Jaguar. Is that a G3? My G4 doesn't have that little reset button… Anyway, depending on your OS version, it would come with Netscape, or IE, or some combination of the two. Assuming you want to actually visit a webpage that has been updated since 1998, however, you'll probably want something more modern (although IE 5.whatever works surprisingly well). If you drag yourself up to Tiger or Leopard, you want TenFourFox (the processor-appropriate version, of course), otherwise Classilla is the most modern version you'll get (it's technically an OS 9 browser, but it's probably your best bet if you're on Panther or earlier. It isn't updated nearly as often as TenFourFox, though. Its icon is also way, way better) I want to say that video-out is mini-vga, but I don't remember. I'm pretty sure around then they actually shipped with a vga adapter, because I can't imagine having gone out of my way to get one myself, and I know I have one somewhere. If you're that curious, lowendmac.com will be glad to tell you in detail.
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May 27, 2019 23:08
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There's also iCab if it's gotta be running MacOS 8 or 9, now exists in a form that runs up to current macOSes.
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May 27, 2019 23:34
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LionArcher posted:So 2015 is the best of the old ones to buy? So I thought I'd come around back to this and try to give you an informative rant about 2015 rMBPs. First, let's list the cons of 2015 models- some apply to the 2013/14s as well. 1- Fixed RAM. You get either 8 or 16 GB, full stop. 2- Old GPUs. Great for Netflix / HTML playback, not great for up and coming HEVC/HEIC formats. 3 - Weight: 3.46-3.5 lbs for the 13-inchers, 4.46 lbs for the 15-inchers; 2016-2019 models have been 3.02 lbs and 4.02 lbs respectively. Now, the pros: 1- Fixability- with a Pentalobe and a Torx T5 you can open it up and get a lot done. You can swap a lot of cables on your own if you are careful, and you can easily re-apply the thermal compound on your CPU; Apple's application is usually a job whose quality ranks up there with a 2-year old slapping down a spoonful of pureed carrots onto their high chair table. Newer than 2016 requires a special rig, cut-resistant gloves. 2- Storage Expandability - since the Late 2013 models to the Early and Mid 2015 models, Apple has used a proprietary PCIe slot and their own design of SSDs that fit into those slots. Luckily, all that is needed is a simple adapter that translates Apple's pin positions to that of the current M.2 SSD standard; the most popular and reliable one can be found from Sintech, who sells them on Amazon for anywhere from $15 and up. You can buy a Samsung 970 EVO or similar modern M.2 SSD and plug it into the adapter, then put the adapter into Apple's SSD slot, and it should work like a charm. Also, MacBook Airs since the mid-2013 models right up to the 2017 model (but NOT the 2018 newfangled Air) can also be upgraded with the same adapter. 3- Since a 2015 is newer anyway, it'll be more likely to be in good condition over a 2013/2014, though that is to say if you find a 2013/2014 rMBP/MBA that has been babied and looked after, good for you. 4- A loving decent keyboard that works. 5- Still USB 3.0, normal A ports, Thunderbolt 1 or 2 depending, and loving MagSafe 2 that they actually had commercials touting its loving existence. With the new USB-C ports, we're back to shorting out your laptop/destroying at least the port if someone trips on the cord. Apple's answer evidently is to hire armed guards whose sole purpose is to keep people from approaching within 10 yards of your laptop lying on the coffee table. However, there are some caveats: 1- These NVMe SSDs are only supported by Sierra and up. For most modern SSDs you need at least High Sierra. 2- Your BootROM must be updated to at least the level provided by macOS Sierra 10.12.6 or High Sierra 10.13.6 to be safe. 3- 2013 and 2014 models of all machines don't have a native NVMe driver, so you have to shut off hibernation and alter your sleep settings with these SSDs. 2015 models have this support in their BootROM, so to them the full hibernation/sleep capabilities are supported even on most non-Apple SSDs. I'm sure someone with similar janitoring experience will call bullshit on some of the finer points, but these are the reasons I can safely think of. Noted that Louis Rossmann probably knows about the adapters, but never ever ever loving mentions them; he probably considers them unsupported third party garbage hacks not worth even bringing up since he hates Macs so much, but I've been running several Late 2013-Early 2015 rMBPs with these adapters for what, about three years or so and haven't had any issues except: 4- updates to the BootROM don't work with anything other than Apple SSDs or Samsung SSDs that are close to Apple's spec. I keep an Apple SSUBX and a Samsung SM951 SSD around whenever I do a major update, BootROMs have not failed to apply for me on Samsung's SM951, which apparently is close enough to Apple's OEM drives that Apple's OS update routines don't give a poo poo. These updates supposedly fix things, tweak your startup code, enhance your romantic life, etc. Nobody really knows but they have been updating BootROMs with every new High Sierra / Mojave point release and Security Update so its probably very important to make sure they get applied since the newer OS release will be expecting them to be installed. So, to sum up, a 2015 rMBP is probably your best bet. If you get the 15-inch, it'll run an upgraded SSD at speeds around 23/2400 MB/sec since it's a PCIe 3.0 x4 bus, the 13-inch only has a PCIe 2.0 x4 bus so drive speeds will be be likely around 1400/1700 MB/sec. Binary Badger fucked around with this message at 00:24 on May 28, 2019 |
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May 28, 2019 00:19
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Binary Badger posted:There's also iCab if it's gotta be running MacOS 8 or 9, now exists in a form that runs up to current macOSes. Yes, when I was staging a g4 iMac several years ago iCab was the only PPC app that was still even remotely up to date. It’s a little remarkable how quickly PPC apps disappeared.
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May 28, 2019 00:35
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Krispy Wafer posted:Yes, when I was staging a g4 iMac several years ago iCab was the only PPC app that was still even remotely up to date. PPC Macs were the best Apple had done in a long time but they weren’t nearly as successful at growing market share and user base as any of the Intel Macs. There were comparably very few of them and their use died out super quick for all that everyone knows a PPC user who held on for years and there’s so much fondness for those generations.
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May 28, 2019 01:07
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Binary Badger posted:So I thought I'd come around back to this and try to give you an informative rant about 2015 rMBPs. Yeah. This is my backup computer slash road computer. I run a publishing company and 90 percent of my time I just am in word or pages. I will go with 16gig though because I do some photoshop work too
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May 28, 2019 01:29
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Some other things I wanted to mention- Apple seems to know that the Late 2013-Mid 2015 rMBPs are special- enough that they're literally six years old but haven't been declared obsolete in the US yet (as of a month ago). (Early 2013's are though..) That means they're still supported to a degree and you can still get batteries and repairs for them. Apple also still stocks both MagSafe and MagSafe 2 AC adapters at most Apple Stores for all levels: 45W for Airs, 60W for 13-inchers, 85W for 15-inchers. Apple is obviously still making money from these parts. I'd only worry about the Late 2013-2015 models when the last vestiges of them (the AC adapters) go away from the Apple physical and Online Stores.
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May 28, 2019 02:01
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2015 is my personal favorite because of the force touch trackpad
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May 28, 2019 02:13
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Binary Badger posted:Some other things I wanted to mention- Yeah, my plan is to get one in good condition and cheap (thinking 16 gig, 256gig ssd) and then take it to Apple to get the battery replace. Boom, new battery, new keyboard. I’ll grab an extra charger to be on the safe side too
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May 28, 2019 02:16
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Krispy Wafer posted:Yes, when I was staging a g4 iMac several years ago iCab was the only PPC app that was still even remotely up to date. Yeah, iCab remained useful surprisingly long, but I think I was running into security issues last time I tried using it. I think the problem is it has modern-enough security capabilities that they're recognized, but not modern enough for most https sites to be willing to use. What's really remarkable to me is that people are still churning out PPC stuff. It's mostly browsers, like tenfourfox, and roccat browser for some reason still has a ppc build. (I'd recommend that, but it works off webkit, so you need to do a lot of fiddling with leopard webkit to get it to recognize certificates and stuff). And there's usually someone fighting with mplayer and stuff to get youtube functional. Hell, a couple years back someone cracked coreplayer so there's a nice, lightweight video player. (Also VLC churned out a ppc release like five years ago, for some reason). It is really annoying is how quickly PPC apps fell off the face of the internet, though. If it's not on macintosh garden, you're probably never going to find a copy of whatever software you vaguely remember liking.
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May 28, 2019 02:35
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LionArcher posted:Yeah, my plan is to get one in good condition and cheap (thinking 16 gig, 256gig ssd) and then take it to Apple to get the battery replace. Boom, new battery, new keyboard. I’ll grab an extra charger to be on the safe side too New battery, keyboard, trackpad. That's what comes in a new Top Case Assembly which is what they install when they change the battery. Another boring bit of trivia, this time involving the MagSafe adapters. You know that poo poo Apple pulled with the 2019 rMBP keyboards? Where they don't change the design but subtly change the composition / materials they use? Same thing happened initially with the first generation MagSafe adapters. The ends of the charging cable, particularly the area near the charging head and the boot would eventually fray and split, sometimes causing short circuits due to exposed wire. They evidently never heard of the term 'strain relief' and until they changed the materials and did subtle adjustments which didn't happen until pretty much the MagSafe 2, adapters would fail and they'd swap them out under a repair program. They were swapping out chargers with incremental improvements until they finally got it right.. after they stopped selling computers with MagSafe/MagSafe 2. 
Binary Badger fucked around with this message at 17:04 on May 28, 2019 |
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May 28, 2019 03:58
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I was wondering why my OWC order hadn’t shipped yet… 
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May 28, 2019 05:02
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Electric Bugaloo posted:PPC Macs were the best Apple had done in a long time but they weren’t nearly as successful at growing market share and user base as any of the Intel Macs. There were comparably very few of them and their use died out super quick for all that everyone knows a PPC user who held on for years and there’s so much fondness for those generations. I think a bigger issue was that computers went obsolete a lot faster before multicore CPU’s became a thing, so those old Macs would have been replaced at a much faster rate. A greater percentage of 5 year old Intel Macs are in service than 5 year old PPC models ever were. But yeah, I loved those old G4’s. I bought one a month before the Intel announcement and never really regretted it. That much.
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May 28, 2019 05:38
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Those G4s ran super hot to the point that the 12" Powerbook would warp from the heat. Also if you used them on your lap you couldn't bear children.
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May 28, 2019 06:02
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Binary Badger posted:(BootROMs) ... supposedly fix things, tweak your startup code, enhance your romantic life, etc. Nobody really knows but they have been updating BootROMs with every new High Sierra / Mojave point release and Security Update so its probably very important to make sure they get applied since the newer OS release will be expecting them to be installed. Intel has recently been shipping a lot of microcode updates to mitigate or fix the new scary family of CPU-based exploits such as Meltdown and Spectre. It's a fair guess that part of what's driving the recent high frequency of Mac BootROM updates is just folding the latest Intel microcode images into the BootROM so that the CPU is as secure as possible as early as possible in the boot process. Since security researchers keep discovering new exploits in this space, look for this to continue for some time. It could eventually have major performance impacts, too. At some point we may have to give up on Hyperthreading if we want to run any untrusted code on our computers at all. Some people already believe it's time, and Apple recently implemented and documented a way of turning HT off...
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May 28, 2019 10:56
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Binary Badger posted:Apple seems to know that the Late 2013-Mid 2015 rMBPs are special- enough that they're literally six years old but haven't been declared obsolete in the US yet (as of a month ago). The late 2013 was refreshed in July 2014 so that’s the earliest possible date of “last manufacture” / sale for Apple. That means it’s not at the 5 year vintage line yet. The mid 2015 was manufactured well into 2016 - mine has an October date IIRC. They sold them until 2018. It’s nowhere near the 5 year vintage line. I don’t think Apple treats them special. In fact even things like iPad 2 which looked like extensions to the vintage designation were actually because the date of last manufacture was far later than the product was the flagship. Has Apple ever broken their rules on vintage designation ?
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May 28, 2019 12:04
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A few months ago I "upgraded" from a base 13" 2015 rMBP to a nearly maxxed out 13" 2015 rMBP with a new battery and it still owns. The only thing I wish I had was a quad core CPU but I'll live for now.
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May 28, 2019 15:49
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I decided to get my Ma a new laptop to replace the 2012 13" Air I handed down to her and grabbed a 2015 15" i7 16/256 MBP off of Swappa. The laptop was clean with no dings and already had the Battery/Keyboard/HD and logic board all replaced by Apple in Jan 2018 and the seller had the receipts, etc so for $950 I was surprised it was still sitting there with only 26 cycles on it compared to similarly priced items with dings and 300+ cycles. The charger cable was a bit yellow, though so I replaced it with a new one. The laptop will do some very intensive work beyond normal browsing/email/chat like dog and quilting video watching along with mahjongg and solitaire playing. I definitely am still very happy with my 2017 MBP 13" i5 16/512 non-touch bar. It's the perfect size for me even though I have to use reading glasses now lol, and the lack of ports hasn't been an issue at all. I wouldn't want a 15" at all. Keyser_Soze fucked around with this message at 16:13 on May 28, 2019 |
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May 28, 2019 16:09
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Keyser_Soze posted:I decided to get my Ma a new laptop to replace the 2012 13" Air I handed down to her and grabbed a 2015 15" i7 16/256 MBP off of Swappa. The laptop was clean with no dings and already had the Battery/Keyboard/HD and logic board all replaced by Apple in Jan 2018 and the seller had the receipts, etc so for $950 I was surprised it was still sitting there with only 26 cycles on it compared to similarly priced items with dings and 300+ cycles. The charger cable was a bit yellow, though so I replaced it with a new one. The laptop will do some very intensive work beyond normal browsing/email/chat like dog and quilting video watching along with mahjongg and solitaire playing. Just wait until she gets annoyed that it’s way heavier than the Air
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May 28, 2019 16:15
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Electric Bugaloo posted:Just wait until she gets annoyed that it’s way heavier than the Air Luckily, it rarely leaves her dining room table, but yeah, it is a tank.
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May 28, 2019 16:28
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BobHoward posted:Intel has recently been shipping a lot of microcode updates to mitigate or fix the new scary family of CPU-based exploits such as Meltdown and Spectre. It's a fair guess that part of what's driving the recent high frequency of Mac BootROM updates is just folding the latest Intel microcode images into the BootROM so that the CPU is as secure as possible as early as possible in the boot process. There's also the matter of the six year old (at least) Xeons in the still currently supported Mac Pro 2012 last generation cheese graters and in certain older rMBPs.. Intel has gone to say there's microcode updates for a certain level of chips which doesn't include the Mac Pros..
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May 28, 2019 17:03
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Linguica posted:A few months ago I "upgraded" from a base 13" 2015 rMBP to a nearly maxxed out 13" 2015 rMBP with a new battery and it still owns. The only thing I wish I had was a quad core CPU but I'll live for now. The 13-inch rMBP with 16 GB, 3.1 GHz i7 is lackluster compared to current generation but it's still a workhorse; I run mine with several VMs comfortably. Having that built-in HDMI is a godsend when I have to watch / display something on a decently large video screen.
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May 28, 2019 17:12
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AMD’s recent media slam dunk is making me wonder about that AMD mac alternate reality that people rumored about with slight fear in their voices back in the lovely Bulldozer days. Supposedly Apple always had AMD-based prototypes on hand to wag at Intel if need be, but now the assumption is that any possible alternative CPUs would come from Apple’s own ARM-based work. Still the idea of a 3900X-based iMac (with the cost savings passed onto the consumer, right?  ) with PCIe 4 GPU and storage sounds pretty appealing right now.
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May 28, 2019 17:15
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Yeah, wouldn't it be great if you could have: The new modular Mac Pro PCIe 4.0 logic board Option of Threadripper, Xeon, or A14 Bionic (or whatever adjective they can think of for next gen) based machine nVidia RTX 2080 Ti onboard RAID controller Probably only gonna get 3 out of 5 from that list. However, supposedly in their forums, Redshift Render cited some NDAs but also said they were not abandoning the Mac platform. Redshift Render totally relies on the CUDA framework to do its job, and on their own system requirements page they are still supporting Sierra and High Sierra (because so far Apple has nixed CUDA on Mojave, or aren't allowing it) but if they say they're NOT dropping support, things could get interesting.. At the same time, supposedly 10.15 is getting a new API for low-level device drivers.. exactly what you would need to create drivers to work with, you know, real GPUs? https://www.idownloadblog.com/2019/04/22/macos-10-15-api-device-drivers/ So hopefully some actual hope from WWDC instead of the usual doom and gloom... Oh, look at this, Apple has a state-of-the-art super testing facility for iPhones.. https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/05/27/apple-has-a-secret-security-facility-devoted-to-stress-testing-iphone-components There's one for the Mac, but it's a condemned outhouse behind the Dining Terraces at the Apple SpaceShip, formerly used to store bones and cooking fat to be converted to biofuel Binary Badger fucked around with this message at 18:25 on May 28, 2019 |
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May 28, 2019 17:37
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Binary Badger posted:Yeah, wouldn't it be great if you could have: Wouldn’t it be great if they released a simple PC tower with PCIe expansion sockets and a Xeon about 4 years ago when it became clear their latest special sauce gimmick design was worthless. It is a 100% guarantee that whatever engineering feat they’ve spent so long on will make the MacPro needlessly expensive, and will have no benefit for almost all users. They can release an ARM Mac in addition to a normal tower MacPro if they want, but no delay is worth it.
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May 28, 2019 18:32
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Binary Badger posted:At the same time, supposedly 10.15 is getting a new API for low-level device drivers.. exactly what you would need to create drivers to work with, you know, real GPUs? This guy is applying some ignorance to galaxy brain a single vague sentence in another site's WWDC rumor article into... something else. Two key things he's not too clued in about : Apple already has this really cool object oriented API for low level (kernel space) device drivers, it's quite good and has been part of OS X from day 1. And, Metal drivers already exist for (some) NVidia GPUs. Basically, the barriers to more recent NVidia cards running well on a modular Mac aren't technical at all.
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May 28, 2019 18:57
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BobHoward posted:This guy is applying some ignorance to galaxy brain a single vague sentence in another site's WWDC rumor article into... something else. It's already been stated by nVidia that it's more of a political barrier. Either way hopefully WWDC will bring news of a sort.. even if it's prelude to a kiss-off for the 2012 cMPs..
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May 28, 2019 19:35
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Apple released a new iPod Touch. They care more about the dead iPod than the Mac Pro.
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May 28, 2019 22:44
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And gave it an A12 Bionic, which makes it computationally better than a Mac Pro But again Apple is only driven by profit, apparently there's plenty of people who don't want an iPhone but want everything it provides -except- a smartphone and are willing to live with WiFi forever. It also wouldn't surprise me if Apple kept the rMBP as it is with speed bumps for another three years because they only want it to be good enough to run Xcode and build iOS projects. Wonder if they've got some hulking iPad Pro XS running Xcode on a special iOS.. Binary Badger fucked around with this message at 23:53 on May 28, 2019 |
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May 28, 2019 23:40
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Binary Badger posted:And gave it an A12 Bionic, which makes it computationally better than a Mac Pro A10
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May 28, 2019 23:40
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