Bits and bytes and stickers

[garote]

I make my weird cerebral living on a laptop, often hooked to a large monitor. I used to have a dedicated machine for the large monitor, but about five years ago I got fed up with dragging my digital life between two places and consolidated.

I could only make that move because I found a way to keep playing spiffy high-power games on the laptop: I bought an eGPU, and stuck that between the large monitor and the lappy. Now I could use the eGPU to render a zillion triangles a second in the universe of Skyrim, and then disconnect from it and ride out to a cafe, and sip expensive coffee as I compute around my fellow monks. The best of both worlds.



Apple moved away from the Intel chip quite a while ago, and the eGPU needs an Intel chip to operate. So I was stuck with the same laptop for five years. That's five years of very hard use. That lappy has been hauled in a bicycle bag around nine countries, and it's been a workhorse at home. During the COVID summer of 2020, I hauled it to the park by the Campanile with two giant batteries and ran the thing full blast all day, draining both batteries and the internal one in about six hours, for five days each week.



Now the thing heats up in an instant, and throttles way down and stays there. Detaching from the eGPU means shutting the machine entirely down, or it will crash as soon as I close the lid. Last month I left it on the desk compiling code and when I returned five minutes later it was frozen with the screen off, requiring a hard reset. After a dozen more episodes just like that, I was finally convinced to upgrade.

But that means throwing away the eGPU. You just can't use an eGPU with an Apple chip. It's architecturally impossible. You can't even run an ARM version of Windows 11 in a virtualized environment and plug the eGPU into that. If you move to one of their new laptops, your tin can full of space-age 3D pixie dust shuts down and transforms into a little trophy, rewarding you for participating in the march of obsolescence. It does still generate waste heat though, so your cat will enjoy lounging on it.

So I spent a ridiculous amount of money, and bought a 14-inch M2 laptop with 12 cores and a hilarious amount of memory. It weighs slightly more than the old one, which annoys me a great deal. But I'm rolling with it because none of Apple's lighter machines can deal with sustained workloads.



Just today I began the process of migrating the stickers over, because after four days of testing I was finally convinced that I could do what I needed with this new machine.



Two things about it impress me way beyond what I was expecting:

The battery lasts a long, long time. I'm used to my old lappy going critical in about two hours. This machine uses tiny amounts of power. I have no idea how long it really takes to drain the battery because I haven't gotten it down by even half, after working with it all day.

And dang, the speed increase is just shocking. I opened one of my old projects in VSCode the other day - five hundred interconnected F# files - and instead of churning full-blast in Ionide for two minutes to resolve all the symbols in the editor like the old machine did, it fired up all 12 cores in one huge burst and the symbols resolved in ten seconds, and then it dropped back to low power. The case registered a tiny increase in heat, which went away without the fans even turning on. Things have changed in five years...

There's more real estate for stickers on this machine, and some of the old ones feel played out. Time to go hunting again!

Comments

[zeugma92]

Nice. Six months ago I splurged on a gently-used 10-core MacBook Pro from 2021 with 64GB of RAM, largely because I was tired of Ableton having a seizure every time I wanted to load up anything more resource-intensive than Pigments. Orchestral patches? A synthesizer doing real-time modulation on samples? Forget it. The new machine has been so incredible to use that I can barely unglue myself from it some days. Worth every penny of every thousand of dollars.

On another note, I find it super interesting that you move your stickers over! How do you even do that? I just leave the old ones on the old one.

[garote]

That's how I feel, and to be honest it annoys me a little. I knew the transition to so-called "Apple Silicon" was going to let them optimize a lot, but I wasn't expecting a boost like this. I thought that was hype.

It's the low-power state that amazes me. I plug in a cable and close the lid, and almost all the time it stays so cool that if I placed my hand on it, I wouldn't even know it was running.

And they managed to take a lot of the glitches out of tethering that my old laptop had even without the eGPU. I plug in one cable, keeping the lid closed, and the machine shows the login screen on the display in less than a second, while also finding the mouse, keyboard, ethernet, DAC, and three SSD drives. Later on if I rip the cable out, the thing actually responds correctly and goes to sleep since the lid is still shut. The old lappy always screwed that up and I'd find it grinding away inside my laptop sleeve 20 minutes later or just panicked with a chunk taken out of the battery.

Why this is slightly annoying is a bit tangled. Partly because having the machine be so much more powerful makes me want to do more things with it in my backlog of projects, and I've been kind of despairing lately at how much time I already spend messing with projects on a computer. And partly because it has so much more memory and speed that programs that felt bloated and poorly written on the old machine feel fine on this one, and that means that the developers who make these programs are not feeling the pain I was used to, and will never be motivated to optimize their software. Hence Slack, a freaking chat program that is basically the equivalent of Trillian, takes up 500 megabytes on disk and A GIGABYTE OF MEMORY. (Trillian, by the way, even in its up-to-date modern incarnation, takes up 30MB on disk.)

It's text-based communication in a bunch of tabs. WHAT DO YOU NEED A GIGABYTE OF MEMORY FOR? That's excruciatingly poor optimization. You have to be downright hostile to the idea of saving memory to get to that point.

[zeugma92]

As a friend once said to me: “to screw up pizza, you really have to do it on purpose.”

[thewayne]

I LOVE your sticker collection! The Dr Who pair are great, and I do remember the Beagle Bros. I go back to the original Apple ][ days and earlier, the first computer that I bought was a TRS-80 Model 100, which I still have and it still works! It runs on 4xAA batteries, I bunged a cable together to connect a 6 VDC lantern battery to it and it ran for like almost six months on it! The wonders of an 80C85 CPU and an LCD display!

I don't have a collection of stickers on my laptop, this is the gelskin on my current 2023 MBP:
http://waynewestphotography.com/gallery/upload/2018/12/13/20181213211621-8c59dbc1.jpg

This is my 2015 MBP's skin:
http://waynewestphotography.com/gallery/upload/2019/07/21/20190721175235-d8cdbcaa.jpg

The latter is at White Sands, NM (I think that might have been a film, not digital, shot: I don't recall), the former is from the Trestle just below Cloudcroft, NM. The entire valley was socked in, but it was clear at Cloudcroft, which is at almost 9,000'. It was interesting driving in to work that day!

Unfortunately my photography web site seems to be broken, the software that runs my gallery is throwing a PHP error, I'm going to have to find out what's going on there.

Later!

[garote]

I love both those photos. The first reminds me of the forests by the sea where I grew up... Always a layer of marine mist creeping in. Dang I haven't been down there in a while. Perhaps it's time for a drive...

PHP error eh? Forced upgrade by your web host broke something maybe?

My granddad had a TRS-80. It's where I got my first taste of programming. From there, Apple IIe, and Apple IIgs...
It occurs to me you might enjoy this: http://garote.bdmonkeys.net/merryo_trolls/index.html
I just finished asembling it a few days ago, after it languished in a half-finished state for ~20 years...

[thewayne]

I saw that IIgs article on Slashdot or somewhere over the weekend!  You hit the big time! Yeah, those pix were taken in my proverbial back yard.  It's nice up here, but my wife has a blood disorder that is probably going to necessitate our moving to low altitude within a couple of years.

[garote]

I'm intrigued that you saw it. I know Slashdot used to be a big deal 20+ years ago, but I figured that getting something posted there these days was the equivalent of getting it posted on a respectably-sized Facebook group.

Does the blood disorder cause the production of red blood cells with very small iron cores? That was the disorder an ex of mine had, and the only solution we found that worked consistently was direct injections of bio-available iron into her bloodstream...

[thewayne]

No, it's a problem with too may RBCs.  She has to take a chemo pill that destroys red blood cells.  It's a weird disorder.  We live at 9,000' - she's an astronomer.  It's normal for people living up here to develop larger and more RBCs to carry more oxygen.  But she has far too many.  The only treatment is to take chemo, or phlebotomy to reduce the amount of blood in her.  It's not a difficult to treat condition, but it can turn into leukemia later in life. This is the Slashdot story: The Apple IIgs: On a Machine This Slow, You Had To Get Weird - Slashdot

[garote]

Blarg, that sounds like an absolute pain. :( Especially for an astronomer!

[thewayne]

Yeah, she may have to completely leave her field for which she earned a PhD.  Not good times.

[garote]

Is there a way to do research by telepresence, driving telescopes robotically from a place with thicker air?

[thewayne]

That's how her telescope operates!  She and her team sets up instruments, refills them with LN, monitor the weather, open the dome, etc.  Then remote observers from around the world - literally! - sign on and study/collect data on objects.  The telescope has been operated from every continent except Antarctica, including from within China and Iran!  There was a French uni that loved working with them because they could lecture during their "day" while conducting observations real-time! We're looking at possibilities, including continuing running a specific program for NASA that she's the sole expert on, or possibly doing Python programming that needs to be done.  She's a decade below Social Security retirement, unknown if a doc would vet her for medical disability.