Gyroscopic Investing

One of my best friends just bought the Macbook Air today. 1TB and 16GB of RAM! Here it is next to a 2015 15" Macbook pro.


Will be running some fun benchies soon.

Looking forward to the benchmarks.
Will be interesting to see how far things have progressed from 2017

Still remember my Winstone 97 benchmark of 33 for a 200Mhz Pentium classic back in the dinosaur days.....

I'm currently investigating the GPU performance delta between the low end MBA and the high end MBA. The high end machine has 8 cores active while the low end machine has 7.

People on forums have been benchmarking the different units, but I have yet to see a thorough comparison from a very reputable source. By most accounts the performance difference should be about 5 to 10%, but there's one fellow in this thread who has been clocking fairly substantial double digit performance deltas. The community seems to suspect that this is due to a difference in thermal throttling rather than the discrepancy in core count per se. It's possible that thermal throttling impacts the 7 core machine more substantially than the other.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/ho ... 457/page-2

All told, the difference in price between equally specced 7 vs 8 core machines is 50 bucks or so in most markets. I would take the 8 cores.

Smith1776 wrote: ↑Sat Nov 21, 2020 12:26 pm I'm currently investigating the GPU performance delta between the low end MBA and the high end MBA. The high end machine has 8 cores active while the low end machine has 7.

People on forums have been benchmarking the different units, but I have yet to see a thorough comparison from a very reputable source. By most accounts the performance difference should be about 5 to 10%, but there's one fellow in this thread who has been clocking fairly substantial double digit performance deltas. The community seems to suspect that this is due to a difference in thermal throttling rather than the discrepancy in core count per se. It's possible that thermal throttling impacts the 7 core machine more substantially than the other.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/ho ... 457/page-2

All told, the difference in price between equally specced 7 vs 8 core machines is 50 bucks or so in most markets. I would take the 8 cores.

I regularly use what I find here to make extremely quick decisions as to whether or not I want to buy a given computer. My main interest is in the actual power rating of the CPU.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/

Vinny

Geek Bench scores. Just to reiterate, this is the MacBook Air with 8 active GPU cores, 16GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD.

For comparison
For fun https://www.redhill.net.au/ig.html

Holy crap.

Okay. I'm sold. I've setup my apple cart with a mac air 16gigs of ram and 2Tb of storage.
Now, I just have to figure out where I will be mid December so that I can place the order.

Mark Leavy wrote: ↑Sat Nov 21, 2020 11:53 pm Okay. I'm sold. I've setup my apple cart with a mac air 16gigs of ram and 2Tb of storage.
Now, I just have to figure out where I will be mid December so that I can place the order.

YES. ALL HAIL APPLE SILICON.

https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macb ... -late-2020
https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks

Any more updates / experiences with the new M1 MacBooks / MacBook Airs?

I need to get one soon. The low end Air probably meets my basic needs, but thinking about future proofing a bit by get 16GB RAM / 512GB HD / 8 Core GPU.

[Edit: Hmm; can get the Air with 512GB HD and 8-core graphics for $50 less than the Pro with 256GB HD. Do lose out on screen brightness, fan, battery life, ... Decisions, decisions. Considering I keep my computers for so long I should probably just pay more for the Pro, but analysis paralysis]

This may be useful.
https://www.isc.upenn.edu/how-to/notebo ... Mid-weight

Any news on delivery dates? So far, it doesn't seem that I can pick one up at an Apple store and delivery dates are far enough in the future that I can't predict where I will be.

Mark Leavy wrote: ↑Sun Dec 06, 2020 10:58 pm Any news on delivery dates? So far, it doesn't seem that I can pick one up at an Apple store and delivery dates are far enough in the future that I can't predict where I will be.

I think it depends on what you get.

Base Air is 8-15 days from Apple (free shipping); Best Buy claims they have some colors in stock in some locations.

That's what I'm leaning towards, so the only one I know. Does seem like customized options have longer waits.

I ordered an M1 Macbook Pro a couple weeks ago and it's supposed to arrive in another week. I'll definitely report to the group once I get it!

I was a bit worried about the timing of the trade-in for my old laptop, because that got processed a lot faster. It looks like I will have no more than a few days of overlap, which is very tight. Especially because I want to completely wipe the hard drive on the old machine before sending, and that's a nontrivial operation.

WiseOne wrote: ↑Mon Dec 07, 2020 7:49 am Especially because I want to completely wipe the hard drive on the old machine before sending, and that's a nontrivial operation.

For sensitive data, we used to degauss the hard drives prior to physical destruction. If you're trading in your old laptop, perhaps your IT department has a degausser. Only takes a couple of minutes to render the hard drive unreadable. Of course the drive will need to be reformatted prior to reuse

Did a quick search and got this link, but I'm sure there will be services that will provide a wipe while you wait service. We did this over 30 years ago https://www.protondata.com

Writing zeroes should be perfectly sufficient, unless you're the specific target of an investigation by a major government. It will probably take a few hours.

I'm not sure that degaussing is better. There's no guarantee how much remains readable. The best is to write all zeroes, then all ones, then random data, over and over.

SSDs are another layer of complexity: SSDs have "extra" storage which is used for caching etc. So your 100GB SSD might actually have, say, 125GB of storage. So writing 100GB of zeroes to your 125GB drive wouldn't get everything. However, what's left would likely be very fragmented, would not have a coherent filesystem (most likely), and the individual chips would have to be removed and examined. Again, that would only happen in a serious and targeted investigation.

Really the best thing is to always, always encrypt your entire drive. That way, destroying the encryption key is effectively very close to wiping the whole drive. Even if the encryption key is on the drive itself, zeroing such a drive would leave a hopelessly unintelligible mess.

OK, I've had my new M1 Macbook Pro for about a week....

I got the memory & processor upgrades, but decided to stick with a 500 Gb drive. I can always upgrade it, but meantime I'm happy to rely on cloud storage with smart sync. The files I work with regularly fit easily into this drive.

I haven't yet fired up a big Matlab job, but the machine is very fast with the routine tasks I've done so far AND I have yet to hear to fan going. The laptop stays cool no matter what, including during zoom meetings when my old laptop would get too hot to put on my lap. Also, Big Sur is worth getting. The menu bar reorganization is much superior to prior OS's. The screen is great (or maybe just a lot cleaner and shinier than my old one) and the keyboard was an easy transition from my 2013 as it's exactly the same. I'll definitely report back after I've done some serious computing work (unfortunately right now it's all about admin stuff).

The migration from the old laptop worked perfectly. I've been hanging on to the old one for a bit (it's slated for trade-in) just in case something got missed, but so far nothing has.

Oh and also....I love the touchbar. Really love it. It fills up with commands specific to the app you're running, so you have the option of using it for common functions instead of having to navigate with the mouse, point & click etc. Also love the touch ID, it works even when your finger is wet, which is more than I can say for the iPhone version.

The biggest negative so far: the mousepad is too sensitive. It's difficult to do things like select blocks of text to delete or copy/paste, and I even struggle sometimes with routine tasks like emailing. I've been experimenting with the available controls in Preferences, but they don't help. I guess I'll just have to get used to it and rely on my brain's automatic motor learning capabilities to adapt.

Finally an unrelated word to the wise: if you upgrade to Microsoft Office 2019, realize that it is NOT able to read any files created with pre-2016 Office versions. Even the recover text mode won't work. I found a workaround, to email the file to myself and use my organization's Web Outlook's document preview to recover the contents. I assume that works because it's still 2016 software. Google docs hopefully will work also. Either way, that is a major & epic fail Microsoft!!!!

WiseOne wrote: ↑Mon Dec 14, 2020 1:20 pm OK, I've had my new M1 Macbook Pro for about a week....

I got the memory & processor upgrades, but decided to stick with a 500 Gb drive.
...
...

Is that just a conventional hard drive or one of those fusion things. I don't really care about the processor* but I always get maximum RAM and an SSD.

*Of course in this thread it's the whole point, but I haven't bought a new model yet. It'll be an "ok" processor by the time I buy it.

dualstow wrote: ↑Mon Dec 14, 2020 3:05 pm

WiseOne wrote: ↑Mon Dec 14, 2020 1:20 pm OK, I've had my new M1 Macbook Pro for about a week....

I got the memory & processor upgrades, but decided to stick with a 500 Gb drive.
...
...

Is that just a conventional hard drive or one of those fusion things. I don't really care about the processor* but I always get maximum RAM and an SSD.

*Of course in this thread it's the whole point, but I haven't bought a new model yet. It'll be an "ok" processor by the time I buy it.

It's an SSD. And yes, with you on the RAM. I got the maximum for the M1 option.

Ok, you have the Ferrari of Macbooks now.

She's leaving us in the dust! Better saddle up and get with the program.

Screen Shot 2020-12-15 at 8.01.53 AM.png

Mountaineer wrote: ↑Tue Dec 15, 2020 7:04 am She's leaving us in the dust! Better saddle up and get with the program.

{ sports car } Screen Shot 2020-12-15 at 8.01.53 AM.png

I'll do my best, Mountaineer!

WiseOne wrote: ↑Mon Dec 14, 2020 1:20 pm OK, I've had my new M1 Macbook Pro for about a week....

I got the memory & processor upgrades, but decided to stick with a 500 Gb drive. I can always upgrade it, but meantime I'm happy to rely on cloud storage with smart sync. The files I work with regularly fit easily into this drive.

<snip>

Thanks for the report WiseOne

I got the base M1 MacBook Air about a week ago (deciding factor for me for which model to get: I was impatient, and it was the quickest delivery (spending time taking care of my dad; had no computer other than phone). And, it's probably fine for my needs. If it turns into not having the horsepower I need, I could trade it in and think of it as a rental fee....

It's fast. It's cool. It's shiny



I definitely haven't pushed it -- email, YouTube, one Zoom call, a little bit of Netflix, trying to recover my dads iPhone (alas, had to go to an Apple store in a Mall to get that resolved; ugh).

Great battery life. TouchID. yup, works great for me as well. I like the tapered design

I changed my background to NOT have so much red (I used a picture of Big Sur). Using night shift.

I didn't migrate, but setup was easy with my existing Apple ID.

I do need to consolidate my files and decide what I want to copy over.

I still need to get a password manager (I didn't have my password for here ; I did try to reset it, but I never got an email)

Now to figure out the accessories to get....