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I purposely refrained from commenting earlier because I needed time to frame my thoughts and discussing with some of my other fellow photographers who are also into technology.

Ultimately though, I just feel that this is yet again another case of Reddit taking something, and then overblowing it to insanely ridiculous proportions. Samsung (and many tech reviewers) themselves probably didn't help the situation by mismanaging expectations, but this just feels like a whole lot of hot air. 

1) The "revelation" that this user has claimed to unearth with obvious effect is not at all a revelation. In fact, none of this is new. Smartphone cameras, over the past half-decade (or longer) have made extensive (and increasing) use of ML-based processing algorithms and whatnot to help improve the perceived quality of the final image, even for information that the sensor itself might be unable to capture convincingly. Superimposing details on objects like the moon is also not really all that new. Really, everyone's getting worked up on something a competent smartphone camera has been able to do for the past half-decade, or longer.

2) Why are people so suddenly obsessed with shooting (bad quality) moon pictures on their phones? Especially when you can find literally hundreds upon thousands of moon pictures online that look exactly the same. I understand this fad will eventually die off, but the obsession over this is ridiculous.

3) They know this feature can be disabled, no? So I don't understand the whole outrage. It's not like it is being forced to be applied all the damn time.

49 minutes ago, Zodiark1593 said:

From an objective standpoint, a Macbook is the “best” laptop, but the tradeoffs (beyond of course, the price) are quite steep. If you’re a gamer at all, losing x86 is a borderline non-starter, and Macbooks are quite a bad offender in proprietary, difficult-to-replace components and expandability. 
 

The gaming bit is a big shame, because the GPU in M1 and M2 series are actually quite good, and could otherwise make mincemeat of the vast majority of what Steam offers. However, without Bootcamp, options are quite limited, and you lose out on a lot of flexibility with PC gaming. 

Pretty much why I continue to have my desktop, amongst other reasons. I don't game anymore, or at least as much as I used to, hence why I don't have a gaming laptop anymore, and never considered one lately, but for the times where I'm at home and just want to kick back for a bit, that's where my desktop comes in.

I genuinely don't think Mac gaming is going to go much farther than running iPad games alongside a handful of actual quality AAA-level games, which is truly unfortunate. I'm willing to be proved wrong, but Macs have never been a good platform for gaming.

8 minutes ago, maartendc said:

I thought the same thing, untill I realised that it is "unified" memory. Meaning it also serves as VRAM. That is pretty darn cool, and 96 GB of VRAM would enable certain scenario's that would be very difficult to do on even a very powerful dedicated laptop GPU. Nvidia mobile GPU's seem to max out at 16GB.

 

Not sure how the M2's GPU compares in terms of speed otherwise to like an Nvidia professional grade laptop GPU though?

Well yeah, but this is true of M1 as well. The M2 is essentially having the core M1 architecture but having its A14-based components upgraded to A15-based ones, alongside some other updates. It's a specbump.

Like I said in my original post, this is a release that is 100% designed to target those who are still using Intel-based MacBook Pros. If you already own the 2021 M1-based 14"/16" model, there is little in this refresh that warrants an upgrade, unless for whatever reason, you really need WiFI 6E, HDMI 2.1 or the 96GB RAM config.

96GB of RAM in a machine that can be directly accessed by both the CPU and GPU is cool, but it is also absolutely a hyper-niche usecase. I just use mine as a photo-editing workstation, and 32GB has been working fine.

51 minutes ago, Commodus said:

Sorry for the confusion! I wouldn't use aftermarket SSD prices as comparisons (odds are that $40 SSD is much slower), but I will agree that Apple is baking in a hefty profit margin. Thankfully the Mac mini supports Thunderbolt 4/USB 4, so any reasonably quick external SSD should be enough if you're looking to expand.

That's the strategy I'm going with my MBP. I have the base storage config and currently work off a 2TB Samsung T7 Shield SSD.

The cost to upgrade the internal drive is absolutely ridiculous, and the fact that it is soldered continues to be a pet peeve. I'm willing to put up with that for the battery life and on-battery performance at the moment because there hasn't yet been a direct alternative with the same benefits, but it is frankly beyond silly at this point to have the whole SSD be soldered, when M.2 drives can offer pretty much the same speed and whatnot.

The machine has been great so far, but it doesn't mean it's perfect.

2 hours ago, saltycaramel said:

 

I just think they struck the right price/substance balance for the “barebonest” of the barebone basic Macs. 

You'd be surprised at how much you can get away with doing on a machine with a mere 8GB.

When my computers were out of order during the worst of the pandemic, I had to fall back on a then-10-year-old Acer Aspire that has a Sandy Bridge Core i3 and a mere 6GB of RAM.

Now, I wouldn't edit my photography portfolio on it at all, let alone run Lightroom at all, but for Chrome, Discord, and Zoom sessions all happening at once, it's surprisingly not terrible. I'd actually daresay that it was plenty usable. A lot of why is likely because it has an SSD in it, which it was likely swapping into, but the limited memory didn't really prove to be a huge bottleneck.

I still think we should be seeing these premium-tier machines come with 16GB as the baseline, just because, but I was genuinely surprised how much I could get away with very limited memory when it comes to daily use, especially since all my machines up to that point were 16GB.

All that being said, there are still plenty of benefits to 16GB on the Macs. The first being that you won't be upgrading it after purchase since it's part of the SoC, so you'll want more of it if you plan on keeping it for a while. The second is that the OS does actually cache a good amount into memory for performance benefits.

7 hours ago, Lightwreather JfromN said:

You're seriously underestimating the capacity of these Browsers including Chrome to conserver resources.

I think it's more to do with the fact that unlike before, the performance of SSDs has come quite a ways, to the point where it being swapped to brings little noticeable performance blows.

I've swapped quite a bit on the 32GB M1 Max when doing very heavy tasks (I've actually swapped up to 16GB on it at one point), but I don't really feel an absolutely massive hit in performance. The heavier tasks do definitely start slowing down quite a bit, but just switching between desktops, Spotlight searching, and general use all still feel relatively normal. Obviously, having more physical memory to begin with is still going to be a lot better, but depending on your use case, you might be able to get away with it, so as long as you don't swap too much.

The software itself absolutely plays a role as well, but I think a lot of people don't really realize that with computers basically all coming with half-decent SSDs as standard, using it as a swap drive doesn't bring the entire system slowing to an absolute crawl unlike with spinning drives before.

Feeling pretty eh on this one.

Been using my M1 Max 16" since November, and I still haven't got anything significant to complain about it. 96GB of RAM is nice to have but as someone who predominantly uses their MacBook Pro for photography, that's very overkill (though I understand that there are workloads that absolutely benefit from the RAM).

Everything else is pretty eh. This is absolutely a release designed to get holdouts still on Intel MacBook Pros to upgrade. 

10 hours ago, Imbadatnames said:

You don’t need 16GB on MacOS, 8GB is fine.

I would still spec for 16GB if you plan on using the machine long-term for medium-level productivity at least, especially when you're using apps that are known to be very heavy on memory.

Since it can't be upgraded after purchase, I prefer to get the most of what I can afford at the point of purchase, even if it might be more than what might be needed today.

All comes down to how you plan to use the machine, really.

On 12/21/2022 at 11:53 PM, Elarion said:

but I heard the M2 isn't as good

The M2 Air is an objectively better machine than its predecessor in many ways. It's just that it is also objectively poorer value as well.

To spec an M2 MacBook Air to fit the needs that you specified (such as 512GB of storage and 16GB of memory), you would be within spitting distance of the base-model 14" MacBook Pro, which not only gets you much faster silicon, but also a much nicer screen, dedicated SD card slot + HDMI port, better speakers and some other extras, with a not-so-significant weight and size penalty.

Unless portability is of paramount & absolute importance, the 14" MBP is really the way to go for the price you would pay.

9 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

Galaxy S5 was pretty much sufficient to survive everyday abuse, hell even taking the darn thing to swimming. Anything more than that is plain stupid....

It's more in the sense of "why stop at IP67".

I think it's very possible to do IP68 whilst keeping the device relatively easy to access key components like the battery. IP67 is already more than sufficient for many, it's more in the case of "can we do it further without compromising on repairability".

I've owned my 16" M1 Max MacBook Pro for about a month at this point, and I've so far not had much complaints, going from almost a decade of successive Windows generations from 7 all the way to 11, after a brief stint with macOS (then called OS X) from Snow Leopard to Mavericks.

There's definitely some annoying bits.

• The Magic Mouse is terrible (I own the original and it's just bafflingly bad ergonomically), so I use the MX Master 3S, and it definitely takes a while to adjust the tracking sensitivity and whatnot to my liking mostly due to mouse accel (I have it set to the slowest tracking speed in the OS settings and set the DPI with the Logi app)
• The keyboard is good but the caps lock delay trips me up more often than I would have wanted, and there's unfortunately no real way to change the behavior.
• Most of my apps worked perfectly fine with Apple Silicon, with the majority being already native compatible. Rosetta 2 was a bit mixed though, depending on the app. AfterShoot was flawless, basically working as if it was native, but Topaz Denoise 3.2 was absolute broken to the point of being unusable due to it crashing every time, necessitating an upgrade.

Those annoyances aside, this machine is great. It's not the absolute fastest but it definitely feels very, very responsive and when it really mattered, the machine absolutely delivered, even on battery. 

Its battery life is actually pretty great. It actually lasts longer doing photo processing work with Adobe's suite than my ultrabook streaming 1080p video. It playing very nicely with my iPhone and iPad was a nice bonus as well. Used it as a webcam for a research proposal presentation.

Obviously, Macs are not for everyone, and I'm not saying that it's right for you, nor am I saying that you should just embrace the world of Tim Apple (cringe). I'm just explaining my experience with my MacBook Pro so far, in a way that hopefully might fit your questions.

1 minute ago, suicidalfranco said:

and you are forgetting that in the time of the S4, mobile SoC were inneficient and known to over heat, at the time neither google or samsung had started to provide software solutions to increase battery life, that apps become more power hungry has times moves on and that even if you decided to settle with a glued in battery back then, you'd be lucky to find a phone that came with more than 2600 mAh of battery, which was the size of the S4's.

Nah, I hadn't really forgotten just how stupid inefficient these old SoCs used to be. I remembered how much of a hot potato my One M7 was.

It was basically just XPERIAs and some oddball phones at the time where they had larger than average battery capacities of the time. 2100-2600 was about the norm at the time for non-phablets regardless of whether it was sealed in or hidden behind an easily removable back cover.

17 minutes ago, suicidalfranco said:

 

"then again it needed the ability"

as in the phone had to have a replaceable battery to because without it it wouldn't reach a days worth of usage. followed by praise for glued in batteries and battery packs

 

In his defense, the GS4 was never really great with battery. It was par for the course for most non-phablet devices at the time, where it could last a day unless you were in certain circumstances where it would struggle.

The HTC One M7 was even worse. I had one and there were times where it would struggle to reach 4pm on an 8-4 shift. Since it also had a sealed case, it basically needed a battery pack.

On that note though, good battery capacities and being easily replaceable are not mutually exclusive. I feel like Framework is already a good modern example of that on a much grander scale.

4 minutes ago, strajk- said:

About damn time, I always go on a rant whenever adjacent news get posted about this here, screw the madness of using glue everywhere for waterproof ratings, give us screws or pop off slots again, easy to replace batteries NOW.

They can probably retain the IP rating anyway. And probably do it better than the Galaxy S5.

They might not even do it like the older Samsung phones, but something more akin to the iPhone 4, where unscrewing 2 screws and sliding off the glass back was all you needed to do.

7 hours ago, Brooksie359 said:

Well do you see any stores on android that are vastly superior to apples app store? I mean it took alot of time for people to switch off of Microsoft internet explorer even though it sucked and the alternatives were much better. So long as apples app store is good I do not see why the average user would switch to a third party store unless there was some crazy good app that was exclusive to another store. 

It will probably be a similar situation to the Google Play Store.

Where the vast majority will get it off the first-party store, but with a small minority having the option to sideload or install an alternative.

It's still a win for choice either way.

14 hours ago, suicidalfranco said:

so removable battery is the reason why your phone lasts so little, not your use case, no, no, no.

 

22 hours ago, vertigo220 said:

I used to hate when phones switched to built-in batteries, and missed my Galaxy S4 with its ability to swap the battery out and instantly be back to 100%. Then again, it needed that ability since I couldn't get through a single day on one battery.

Bruh? Man's literally said that his old S4 literally needed the ability to swap the battery easily because it would struggle to last the day due to his use case, so he needed a quick battery swap to get back to 100% in seconds.

I did not find a sentence where he attributed his weak battery to the fact that it is easily removable...

You know what? Good.

Even though I haven't cared for battery swapping in years, I'm absolutely tired of devices that basically just break if you just open it up in order to access stuff that you probably want to replace anyway, like the battery.

On 9/4/2021 at 8:20 PM, VectorTech said:

I've been using adobe products for almost a decade now, they're simply the best for almost everything. If you're a student you can get the creative cloud heavily discounted, or you can just pay for the applications you want / need which is fairly inexpensive as well. Also upload one or two of your pictures (before & after) here so we can see what it looks like!

I'm a photographer who uses a lot of Adobe products as part of my workflow, and I have to disagree with your assertion that they are "the best".

Yes, they are the industry standard, but a lot of that isn't because they are the best in the market, but simply because that's what the industry at large is using. Many videographers, editors and cinematographers will know just how behind Premiere and especially After Effects is versus other solutions such as Final Cut and Resolve Studio. And while I personally don't have huge issues utilizing Lightroom Classic and Photoshop together, there are still longstanding issues that linger with them, such as performance chugging when your catalog gets bigger and bigger, and your edits get more and more elaborate. Lightroom/Camera RAW's processing engine also historically has had issues demosaicing Fujifilm X-Trans files unless you utilize the processing-heavy "RAW details" feature.

I used to be a very regular user of Capture One due to its superior processing engine and vastly superior color grading tools, but once Adobe finally overhauled Lightroom's masking engine (with almost fool-proof auto-masking) and gave us the color grading tools that were oh-so-needed eons ago, combined with my photographic needs shifting more towards landscape and architectural photography (which also meant I was more Photoshop-heavy), and Capture One's HDR and panorama merging tools being very unimpressive, finally just led me to go more towards Adobe, and put up with some of its glaring flaws like performance chugging, even on an M1 Max MacBook Pro.

I will still likely get Capture One again in the future because of the aforementioned processing engine, but I'd also just wanna toss in my 2 cents. I don't like Adobe and I think they are far from the best in the industry, but they also just happen to be what works for me the best overall at the moment, although it still has glaring flaws which is making me continue my search for alternatives to use alongside it, preferably with a perpetual option.

I also just realized I replied on a dead thread.....ok.

This laptop stand that I got for my 16" MacBook Pro, which also surprisingly fits my 13" Yoga S7i.

Also yes, I did get a MacBook together with a fabric case.

Just another thing to add.

My Slim 7i 13" just did the Modern Standby thing again, but this time, it's sitting on a table. I unplugged it while it was still awake, but as I mentioned above a few entries, this particular machine stays in "Network Connected" mode no matter what.

Need to add to this.

I just got my Slim 7i back from the repair depot, and ran the powercfg command in cmd. This machine supports S3 sleep in the firmware, but what caught my eye was that S0 sleep was always in "Network Connected" mode, regardless of whether it is plugged-in, or not. So the hypothesis, while valid, doesn't seem to apply to every Windows machine.

46 minutes ago, Blademaster91 said:

I agree, I don't really see what the problem is here as shutting down isn't a problem at all, especially on a laptop with an ssd.

The thing is though, some of us put our laptops to sleep not necessarily because we can't sit through 5-10 seconds of booting up. A lot of us put it to sleep because we want to keep our session in the exact state it was in so that we can quickly resume work when we go back to use the machine.

It's because of this, and the mess with Modern Standby, that I pretty much have to set the system to hibernate when closing the lid, which seems to be the "ideal compromise" at this point. Didn't really have to think much about that with my MacBook Pro, but it's not infallible as well, which is why they did the thing Microsoft somehow undid, which is to allow the user to easily tweak the sleep behavior.

My point still stands though. This is something Microsoft needs to fix, even if it's something simple as allowing the user to easily tweak the sleep behavior.

Modern Standby is probably why my Slim 7i 13" is at the repair depot for the past 2 weeks, and not with me.

I've had more than a few instances where the laptop drained a huge chunk of its battery after just putting it into a bag for a couple once the lid was closed. However, the worst one came after I did what I usually do, which is to charge the machine, then close the lid before putting it into my messenger bag.

After about 15 minutes of driving to a cafe for lunch, I wanted to take the machine out to work on some photos. Instead, what I was greeted with when opening the bag was a strong electronics smell, a bag whose internals are hella warm, and a laptop whose metal exterior is so hot, it could actually have been a burn hazard if you touched it for more than a couple of seconds. I had to actually leave it on the table for 10 minutes before it cooled sufficiently. I also lost over half of my battery in that time. Fantastic.
 

The laptop itself did not die but it later developed a major display issue which may or may not be related, hence the trip to the repair depot. I currently use a 16" MacBook Pro as my main laptop and so far, I've been really pleased.
 

Microsoft, just fix the damn thing for goodness sake. It's been a problem for years already...

18 hours ago, eskamobob1 said:

I was just under the impression that samsung had officialy said we wouldnt get one this gen and was more inclined to believe that than the leak tbh

It looks like the S22 Ultra would basically be the Note22. 

It's sensible IMHO, since the Galaxy Note since the Note5 has been pretty similar to the Galaxy S variant of the same year.

As long as it's stored in its box and not taken outdoors in extreme environments, it's all good.