maplepants

Ok, so you've gotten some correct answers here and now you might be wondering "but how could 2014 me somehow buy a lot of GPU power *without* getting a machine that can really game?". For that, Apple's got you covered with the trash can Mac Pro. You could equip with an 8 core Xeon E5 and dual AMD FirePro D700 GPUs. Users from 2015 reported 70-90 FPS in Battlefield 4. If you bought that thing just to game, you'd probably not be too pumped. But if you needed a Mac Pro anyway, and added the GPUs so that it could be your gaming PC as well, you'd've liked it.

This is the best way to allow access to any home server and what I do with my Mac Studio. The near zero effort method is to use Tailscale or ZeroTier. Especially when you want clients like iPads, phones or other devices with minimal network settings something like ZeroTier or Tailscale is great. I run 20 services my Mac Studio and Linux server and have 0 port forward rules or other holes punched in my router. I just put Tailscale on my phone, iPad, and laptop and it works like a charm.

When it comes to performance on a raspberry pi, nothing beats raspberry pi OS. Just it to boot to a console instead of the desktop and you'll be able to squeeze every drop of performance out of it. The reason why Raspberry Pi OS offers the best performance is because it's written exactly for and only for Raspberry Pi hardware. No generic ARM image can ever compete.

AR mode is supposed to be one of the big features and it only lasts for 90 minutes, ouch. In a lot of ways this product looks cool, but it also seems like good VR experiences can't really be made at this price point. You end up making some pretty significant trade offs in terms of batter life and image quality. The PS VR2 is only as "cheap" as it is because Sony makes so much money selling you the games.

I think you're just misunderstanding the trade-offs being made here. Optimizing for bursty single core workloads like the M2 Macbook Air and the top configs for 13" laptops like Thinkpads do necessarily means that you'll run into thermal problems trying to sustain that load for a sustained period. Changing the clocking the CPU lower or adding a noisy cooler isn't "fixing thermals", it's making different trade-offs. I've got an M1 Macbook Air, and my previous laptop was a Thinkpad with an i7 in it. The fact that neither machine can sustain their peak performance for jobs lasting longer than 10 minutes hasn't bothered me. But I constantly enjoy the benefits of the M1 Air's passive cooling.

Why though? Why should every laptop maker prioritize long running sustained multi-core CPU + GPU loads at the expense of bursty single core performance? Most users (especially Macbook Air shoppers) will care more about single core bursts than they do about workloads that mirror a 30 min Cinebench run.

I think this article is mostly right, but it's missing what I think is the reason *why* PC building has become harder in the last 20 years. The disappearing local PC repair shops, or their shifting focus to enterprise only. Time was you could pop down to your local shop and somebody could help you pick out the parts you need for your budget and aesthetic needs. You: "I'd like a beige tower and monitor please" Shop keeper: "yes, we have many options right over here". The motherboards were also a lot less crowded with heat syncs and other coolers back then. It was easier to see slots and have them described to you. Add the smaller GPUs to the equation and now you've just removed a lot of the pain points from this article. So yeah, it's hard to build a PC. The "building a PC is easy" advice is held over from a time when that was really true. And that was true because PC buyers could get what they needed from a local shop where a good rep could get you from "Is the monitor the PC or this weird box?" to gaming without you ever reading anything about teraflops.

Yeah, you're right. My use of fanless there wasn't quite what I meant. I meant that Apple's choice of passive cooling for the Air and active cooling via fan for the Pro was validated in this video. I disagree here. All laptops are thermally constrained. Engineering teams have to balance how much heat to let the system generate and how to get rid of it. Thermal throttling can be a valid way to keep a system's temps safe. Thinkpads, and other laptops that offer high end single threaded performance often choose to make this trade off for sustained multi-core workloads. Because it allows you to push single core performance (which people feel much more) further. In the Macbook Air, Apple decided to let the peak heat output be such that extended workloads that push the CPU and GPU will result in some thermal throttling. In the Macbook Pro, they decided to put in active cooling system which would have fans spin instead of thermal throttling. The M1/M2 Macbook Air would be a worse laptop than it is now if a noisy cooling solution were added to it, just so that you could run workloads like Cinebench for 30+ minutes without thermal throttling.

With the amount of crazy stuff they connect to their network, I'm sure they've got a segmented VLAN or hardware LAN just for stuff like this. Otherwise their channel would be streaming Elon crypto scams all day every day instead of just the one time.

I had the same reaction to the video. I think their decision to make a fanless option and a "Pro" option with a fan was the way to go. At one point in the video he says, about the noise, "we'll get to that later" but they never do. But the end result was probably that their modded Air was way louder than the regular Air and even louder than the Pro. These things are cool, but putting them up against Apple Macbook Air and Pro cooling systems was not a great plan to begin with. If they had pitched me this video idea, I would have suggested that rather than ruin a Macbook they should take some existing, but loud, ultrabook PC and mod these things in to reduce noise / improve cooling. Especially if the goal is to make them look attractive.

Here in Germany some advertising laws changed a few years ago. Now you can’t call something a sale unless it’s actually sold at the previous higher price for 30 days or something similar. Since then sales like Black Friday are very minor. Amazon in particular has taken to pointing out that their prices are cheaper than the “recommended retail price”. It’s a violation of the spirit if not the letter of the law so who knows how long that scam will last.

I think the fact that Nintendo was able to easily port all their big games from Wii U to the Switch almost makes my point for me. If the Wii U gamepad were an important part of the control scheme than these ports would not have been possible. But it was possible, because the Wii U's gamepad was (in TV play mode) just a big controller with a screen you could completely ignore. I played through New Super Mario Bros U on the Wii U and on the Switch and didn't miss the gamepad at all on my Switch play through. Super Mario Galaxy's Switch port feels way more out of place than 3D World. That's the difference of missing system specific controls. I don't know about that. I really liked the way ZombiU used the second screen to raise the tension as you lose situational awareness by doing inventory stuff on the gamepad. But I thought the menu navigation wasn't very good. Maybe that's because it had to work docked with a pro controller, but still. From my experience with the Wii U gamepad it was at it's best when it was a second screen for gameplay that left your TV available. Like the Portal.

I tried so hard to love my Wii U, but it was only any good if you used a pro controller or the TV or the tablet by itself (like the portal). What people disliked about it was the obviously poorly thought out experience of using the touch screen as a controller. Much like the DS the secondary screen was almost exclusively used for information you didn't to see anyway. The portal gets it right by not pretending it will ever be anything than a second screen for your PS5 and by being an optional add on. If the Wii U had been a second screen accessory with the console sold stand alone as the Wii 2, it would have been a hit. And that's what we have here with the PS5 and PS Portal. I've seen lots of posts on Mastodon calling it the "Dadstation" and I think that between parents, and teenagers there's probably a good chunk of PS5 owners whose time that could be spent gaming and time the main TV is available don't always line up well. I don't own a PS5, but I do plan to get a Logitech G Cloud as basically a dedicated Steam Link device that does exactly what the PS Portal does (plus play NHL94).

I roughly match my gaming PC upgrades to game console generations. 8800 GTX > GTX 970 > RTX 3080. It has the benefit of making my upgrades massive. Slight upgrades are a sucker’s game. Waiting close to 10 years and doing a massive upgrade is where it’s at.

The M3 Pro gets 74835 on Geekbench for Metal, and the M1 Max Studio I'm on right now got 101308. That's a real difference, but another thing to consider is how long you want the machine to last you. Right now, the oldest Apple designed CPU they currently support for a major OS is the 7 year A10 on iPadOS. They dropped support for the A9 this year. They support iPads longer than they support phones, and so it's reasonable to guess that they'll support Macs longer than they support iPads. But it's safer to assume that Macs will get the same 8 year support cycle as iPad chips. So, is 5 years of support from the M1 Max enough for you? You're a student so upgrade budgets could be tight. If it is, then save your cash and go for the M1 Max. If you think you'll want to daily drive this laptop after 2028, then get the M3 Pro as it'll probably be supported for 3 years longer than the M1 family.