macOS and Mac Software: We still exist!

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > macOS and Mac Software: We still exist!

Hasturtium: May 19, 2020; And that year, for his birthday, he got six pink ping pong balls in a little pink backpack.

Can I assume OpenGL and OpenCL have been cast into the void for ARM macOS? I can't imagine they made the cut after being formally deprecated, no matter how much I disagree with Apple's decision.

# ¿ Jul 7, 2020 19:15

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# ¿ May 14, 2024 17:35

Hasturtium: May 19, 2020; And that year, for his birthday, he got six pink ping pong balls in a little pink backpack.

Wild EEPROM posted:

I have a 2013 and youtube is the most demanding thing it does, and wow it is demanding because of the dumb codec that they use

Install the h264ify extension in your browser and watch as your rock �n roll dreams of reasonable CPU overhead come true.

# ¿ Aug 5, 2021 14:15

Hasturtium: May 19, 2020; And that year, for his birthday, he got six pink ping pong balls in a little pink backpack.

Bob Morales posted:

Is Safari just pure trash now and runs YouTube like sucking poo poo through a straw or do I need up upgrade my 2017 MBP?

Google pushes VP9 now by default, and it's probably being decoded by your CPU instead of your 2017-era GPU. That's going to make for a hot-running, power-eating bad time for you, but it's less work for Google and they do not care about your experience because doing it saves them a lot of bandwidth at scale. Use a browser that supports the h264ify extension, which will force YouTube to send an h.264 stream. That will make it possible for your browser to use your GPU's dedicated decoding block for handling video. Your experience will be much nicer for it.

As for the other guy using Chrome, it's a resource-gobbling pig and Google isn't your friend. If you've got other options, use 'em.

Hasturtium fucked around with this message at 18:13 on Dec 28, 2021

# ¿ Dec 28, 2021 18:02

Hasturtium: May 19, 2020; And that year, for his birthday, he got six pink ping pong balls in a little pink backpack.

duck monster posted:

Finally whoever the cnt was that stole my utterly attrocious late 2016 MBP gets whats coming to him (No updates and the keyboard still sucks. Oh well, in my imagination he's suffering, that laptop was awful. Truth be told the thing was probably scrapped for parts since it never popped up on find my mac. Cops reckoned with the new macs they just parts bin them since the find my mac snitching is not worth the danger to them.).

Anyway.

I had a *weird* experience with an update today. The machine (M1 max most recent iteration mbp) just went black all of a sudden with no warning and launched into the full black scrreen apple and mystery progress bar, resetting 4-5 times over about half an hour. I'm worring the SSD has fritzed or something but it turned out it was doing a full blown OS upgrade. When it came back it was now fully upgraded by the right hand thunderbolt port didnt work and it wasnt recognizing its own power port. Reset a couple of times, no joy. Turned it off and went outside and smashed a bong and fumed. Came back, turned it off, it went into recovery(?) menu, asked for password, reset AGAIN and then came back fully working. Will keep an eye on it but..... so far so good? I'm guessing whatever passes for an SMC on an M1 mac just needed to be reset or something.

There�s no SMC in the M1 Macs, but it�s possible there was either a firmware upgrade being applied behind the scenes or a new driver was misbehaving at first boot. It seems rude that an OS upgrade was auto-applied without requesting permission. That�s the thing I�d hunt down to make sure it didn�t happen again.

Sorry about your crappy laptop. At least you�re free of it.

# ¿ Jun 7, 2022 17:09

Hasturtium: May 19, 2020; And that year, for his birthday, he got six pink ping pong balls in a little pink backpack.

Binary Badger posted:

So initial reports from the OCLP devs appear to indicate that macOS Ventura has been purposely written using x86 commands that are only properly interpreted by post-Haswell CPUs.. (AVX2) so pre-Late 2013 Macs will likely not see any support for a while.

On top of that, graphics acceleration appears to be non-functional for any pre-Skylake GPUs; the only shitcanned Macs that seem to be able to run Ventura with GPU enabled are 2016 rMBPs.

It also appears that attempting to use a created USB installer will not work to do a clean install reliably; at the moment the only way to do one for Ventura is wipe, install Monterey, then run the Ventura upgrade.

Whaddya want for an OS in only its second beta?

Minor point of correction: Haswell was the first CPU with support for AVX2, so there may be hope for someone with that vintage of Mac. Beyond that� I suspect they�ve removed support for GPUs that don�t support what Metal 3 needs outright, and used it as an excuse to render another swathe of Macs obsolete.

# ¿ Jun 24, 2022 15:08

Hasturtium: May 19, 2020; And that year, for his birthday, he got six pink ping pong balls in a little pink backpack.

thetzar posted:

I remember that scuttlebutt at the time around the Apple/nVidia split was about nVidia being loose-lipped the leaking unannounced Apple products. The likely thought being that Apple tried to get nVidia to heel and get more locked down, and nVidia said something insulting about Apple�s size.

As with all internet rumors, there is no evidence and likely less truth. But drat if that ghosting doesn�t FEEL personal.

Nvidia tends to blow up its strategic relationships with partners over financial issues. With the Xbox they got into a tiff over royalties on the GPUs they sold Microsoft, who responded in passive-aggressive fashion by withholding the Direct3D 9 specifications from them prior to release. Nvidia tried to guess which course Microsoft would take, and that resulted in the mixed mode precision performance fiasco known as the GeForce FX series. I�m not quite sure what the issue with Apple was, but I think it was rooted in the debacle of Nvidia�s transition to lead-free solder around the G80/GeForce 8000 series, and repeated heating/cooling resulting in bad solder joints. I don�t know if Nvidia and Sony ever got into a slap fight over the PS3, but it wouldn�t surprise me if that was relatively smooth sailing - since the Cell couldn�t handle all the GPU duties Sony planned, they contracted Nvidia for a barely modified GeForce (7900GTX?). And Nintendo bought an off the shelf Shield derivative for the Switch, which is pretty low drama in terms of potential relationship-impacting snafus.

# ¿ Jun 24, 2022 23:56

Hasturtium: May 19, 2020; And that year, for his birthday, he got six pink ping pong balls in a little pink backpack.

MeinPanzer posted:

I bought a M1 Macbook Air with 8GB of memory a year and a half ago and it's great except that I've had a persistent problem with choppiness/a shuddery frame rate after I've been using it for a while (I've updated to Monterey 12.4 btw). Generally if I restart it goes away, but it's starting to get really annoying. From what I gather this is a persistent problem that has something to do with RAM usage and the SSD.

Any suggestions as to how to solve this?

It�s probably just swapping. When you reboot you�re flushing the contents of memory, and it cruises along for a while after login until too much is loaded, macOS starts paging to swap again, and the cycle continues. Can you see what your memory load looks like in the Activity Monitor? Definitely check this when your system starts stutterstepping again.

# ¿ Jun 27, 2022 13:10

Hasturtium: May 19, 2020; And that year, for his birthday, he got six pink ping pong balls in a little pink backpack.

MeinPanzer posted:

Huh, ok thanks. I mainly just use it at the moment to read the internet on Chrome, play some minor games (MTG Arena mostly), and occasionally use Photoshop, so it sounds like the best way to manage this is to switch from Chrome to Safari and to shut down/restart more regularly? Is it true that this significantly shortens the lifespan of the SSD?

It can, for sure. You�ll probably want to play musical chairs with your apps more than you do - one big app at a time and closing whatever you�re not using entirely will make a difference. Switching to Safari definitely won�t hurt, Chrome doesn�t give a poo poo about saving memory.

# ¿ Jun 27, 2022 13:21

Hasturtium: May 19, 2020; And that year, for his birthday, he got six pink ping pong balls in a little pink backpack.

It�s high time for something better than the �I Can�t Believe It�s Not iTunes!� Music.app experience. I wouldn�t care if it was written in Fortran, just improve it.

# ¿ Jul 6, 2022 01:08

Hasturtium: May 19, 2020; And that year, for his birthday, he got six pink ping pong balls in a little pink backpack.

Endymion FRS MK1 posted:

I have a very stupid question. I�m brand new to MacOS, just got an M2 Air. I have an external drive I used on my Windows PC that has all of my retro game roms. Surely I can�t just plug and play to copy the stuff over to my Mac�s storage right?

I can�t imagine why that wouldn�t work. Is the drive formatted as something besides exFAT, FAT32, or NTFS?

edit: As The Lord Bude says below, reading (and, by extension, copying) the data shouldn�t be a problem. MacOS doesn�t support writing to an NTFS volume, but otherwise you should be good to go for this use case.

Hasturtium fucked around with this message at 18:28 on Jul 20, 2022

# ¿ Jul 20, 2022 18:12

Hasturtium: May 19, 2020; And that year, for his birthday, he got six pink ping pong balls in a little pink backpack.

unknown posted:

Nope. It's because of templates. They built tonnes of legal documents into templates and they want to keep using them because no one wants to pay for them to be redone. (that being said, most wp offices are gone and no one actually uses it any more except for the 90yo neighbourhood lawyer who hasn't changed in 30 years.)

This is correct. There was also a certain level of mystique that persisted for longer than it should have surrounding the Reveal Codes functionality, which people adopted as some kind of Rosetta Stone for understanding what the word processor was really doing instead of a feature adopted to let you manually work around WordPerfect�s janky formatting tags that weren�t possible to see and fix otherwise. I remember WP being on the way out in law firms all the way back in 2005, so as unknown says it�d only survive on a rare and willfully obstinate basis now.

# ¿ Jan 18, 2023 02:55

Hasturtium: May 19, 2020; And that year, for his birthday, he got six pink ping pong balls in a little pink backpack.

After a brief fling with a MacBook Air around 2014 I�m back using an M2 16/512 Air and adore it. Currently my plan is also to get a baseline M2 Studio before long, which is likely to be delightfully more than I need for at least five years. But I�ll confess: I�ve been using Windows since 3.1 and have been handy with Linux for nearly a quarter of a century, but most of my in-depth experience with macOS has been in academic setting or is so old it doesn�t reflect anything contemporary.

So what are some apps and tools I should familiarize myself with, the things that really play to the platform�s strengths? I�ve been pretty happy cobbling together a workflow that�s mostly platform-agnostic on the Air, but the Studio�s beefy enough that I don�t wanna miss something cool if I haven�t heard about it.

# ¿ Oct 26, 2023 01:00

Hasturtium: May 19, 2020; And that year, for his birthday, he got six pink ping pong balls in a little pink backpack.

Subjunctive posted:

Thunderbird is pretty decent these days, I use it on Windows. It�s come a long way.

Yeah, I�ve been using it in Linux for months. Just plunks along, stable feature set, doesn�t pee in my Cheerios or pull weird misbehavior. I keep putting off installing it to my M2 Air but I predict similar behavior there.

# ¿ Dec 1, 2023 22:40

Hasturtium: May 19, 2020; And that year, for his birthday, he got six pink ping pong balls in a little pink backpack.

For me, nothing has topped one of my best friends� attempts to have Siri update an appointment years ago:

# ¿ Dec 3, 2023 20:19

Hasturtium: May 19, 2020; And that year, for his birthday, he got six pink ping pong balls in a little pink backpack.

Anybody have experience with SheepShaver or Basilisk II on Apple Silicon? I know the former has working JIT for ARM64, and have heard really good things about performance, but it�s always good to get corroboration from people who know.

# ¿ Dec 4, 2023 15:29

Hasturtium: May 19, 2020; And that year, for his birthday, he got six pink ping pong balls in a little pink backpack.

Tippis posted:

Finally bit the bullet and updated to Sonoma since, in spite of early rumblings about issues with some core apps, most of them seemed to have been updated to work.

But oh dear� just when you thought it was safe to get back into the water. Tons of apps that fail to redraw their windows or specific elements properly; apps that lose their colouring the instant they lose focus after launch; apps being completely befuddled by the screen coordinate system and not knowing where their windows are (with the window snapping to a completely new position when moved, and with attached sub-windows and similar elements showing up completely detached from their main window); random slowdowns on draws for things that should be utterly trivial (and which still don't take a massive amount of cpu or any other resource).

Some light googling seems to suggest that Apple did s bunch of updating to the window drawing system and that a whole slew of odd behaviours can be traced back to this. None of it is mission-critical for me � maybe aside from not knowing the remaining mine count in minesweeper � but it gets� annoying. So I thought I'd ask the thread if this is a know thing, if the internet is right about the underlying cause, and/or if it's just one of those �wait it out and eventually apps will probably be updated� things, so I don't have to start finding unique solutions for every problem.

The only thing I�ve run into is a dumb bug where Command+Tab stopped working outright and wouldn�t start again until I�d rebooted. Also that weird thing where performance of my xscreensaver modules slowed to a crawl after the Sonoma upgrade, forcing jwz to issue an update to work around the new behavior - apparently tied to something involving the OS�s new screensavers. I still like it better than Windows!

# ¿ Dec 18, 2023 01:28

Hasturtium: May 19, 2020; And that year, for his birthday, he got six pink ping pong balls in a little pink backpack.

smr posted:

So, I�ve been using a Mac Studio attached to a 4k Dell 144hz monitor (G3223Q) via an Amazon USB-C to full-size DisplayPort cable and running at 2560x1440x144hz in bliss for months.

Today, had to reboot the Studio to clear some other issues and now it�s topping out at 60hz.

Anybody have any suggestions for anything I can try to force 144hz back into the mix? 60hz sucks.

Do these cables go� partially bad or something ever? It�s not under any stress and hasn�t had any impacts.

Tried the other USB-C ports on the studio, 60hz on all of �em.

Not sure what else I could even try but hoping maybe somebody else has some ideas�

Kinda sounds like the cable�s gone bad. If you have a spare to swap in, I�d try it.

# ¿ Jan 8, 2024 23:55

Hasturtium: May 19, 2020; And that year, for his birthday, he got six pink ping pong balls in a little pink backpack.

Subjunctive posted:

not enough people here with vivid memories of pre-tab browsing, clearly

I remember keeping multiple workspaces in an old X11 window manager (Enlightenment 16, maybe?) with a web browser window or two in each of them and toggling back and forth that way. It was that, or just keep shuffling between them in Windows like a stack of cards. Tabs are a killer feature for multitasking.

# ¿ Feb 29, 2024 21:15

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# ¿ May 14, 2024 17:35

Hasturtium: May 19, 2020; And that year, for his birthday, he got six pink ping pong balls in a little pink backpack.

Peteyfoot posted:

I have a bunch of 3840x2160 120 FPS HEVC videos. What software can I use to batch crop them to 2732x2048?

Yep, seconding Handbrake. Create a custom profile to output your video to 2048p, then simply add each video you want with an output filename, save to the queue, and when you�ve added them all, run the queue. It�s great for fire and forget bulk conversions.

# ¿ Mar 7, 2024 01:56

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > macOS and Mac Software: We still exist!