PC or MAC

[upcong]

I want to hear your suggestions, my PC was no longer working yesterday. I am now considering whether to continue using the PC or try the MAC M1. I think everyone can give me some suggestions. Thank you!

[Synthetik]

Are you talking about a desktop machine, or a powerbook kind of thing?

For a powerbook kind of thing, the M1 mac options are pretty nice.   The processor is powerful (even running in rosetta emulation mode), and the battery life is great, and it seems well constructed, but also light.

When you plug it it, you only have 1 more usb port. And you will need to buy their special cable that is not included to use it with most of your usb drives. So that is the weakness, they are very cheap when it comes to adding external ports.

It really only has 4 cores.  They imply in marketing it has more.  the others are kind of special case cores, not something that is going to show up as useable in software that core splits.

They are very smart about cache memory in their system on a chip design, so that lets you get away with using less ram memory than you might think you need.

We also have a Surface portable here. I really want to like it. The fact that it has a touch screen is great.

The trackpad seems broken to me half the time.  Not just me, everyone who uses it here comments on how funky it is.  You need a super light touch when using it.

It also runs super hot.  You might burn yourself if you kept it in your lap.  This is probably due to the intel chip inside.  I'm waiting for real ARM windows machines (they will be coming).

Our graphic designer makes comments along the lines of 'boy, windows sure is ugly'.

You lose all of your finder windows configurations when you restart.  Spatial integrity of your finder window's layout is important to me.  Not that apple hasn't screwed that up over the years as well, but they seem better about trying to keep it when you reboot these days.

Desktops.

We have iMacs everywhere here. I'm surrounded by 4 of them right now.  Great displays, powerful enough to get work done on them, easy to move around, don't take up a ton of space.  Not really designed to be upgradable, or repairable by mere humans without the right special one off tools.

The current iMac Pro is a rip off in my opinion, as are the mac towers.  Too much money for what you actually get inside.

We have a M1 iMac on order, but it has not arrived yet. It is basically a M1 air book with a bigger display on a desktop stand, same insides.  It is a 24 inch display, not a 27 inch display.

Windows. I bought a 10 core windows tower with a Nividia RTX graphics for what a reasonable configuration iMac costs.  Now that has way more processing power in it for the money.

And i can use it as a space heater for my office in the winter since it is basically a space heater when you are using it. Of course i will have to run an air conditioner this summer because of it, so that is not really a feature.

it is of course, infinitely expandable.  With plenty of ports.

So, if you want to use an Nvidia card, then windows is your only choice unless you want to configure a linux machine.  Apple goes out of their way to prevent Nvidia graphics cards from running on their computers these days.

Apple might announce pro M1 iMacs or M1 towers at WWDC in June. So if you care about that kind of system, you might want to hold off on ordering a M1 24 inch iMac and see what if anything is announced.

As far as running Studio Artist goes, your experience on a mac is going to be somewhat smoother overall.  We would like to bring that closer to parity over time, but that is the situation right now if i'm being honest.

[upcong]

Thank you very much for your reply. It seems that Mac is worth trying. I also need to buy another copy of Studio Artist 5.5 for Mac.

[upcong]

I already own the Windows version of Studio Artist 5.0 and Studio Artist 5.5. If I purchase the Mac version, can I choose the upgrade purchase option? Or buy it at the original price?

[Synthetik]

If you send in a tech support ticket with your V5.5. serial number and a request to get a mac install in your myaccount in addition to your windows V5.5. instal, sales can set you up with both installers.

[craig deeley]

Thanks for the Mac or PC feedback John. I also wanted to ask about your experience with M1 machines.

I wonder how well the M1 machines are doing with art software. I won't be upgrading to an M1 based machine at home - but may need to soon at work. Adobes bloated software is making my 2013 (great machine) iMac suffer. SA v5 runs well on the older machines tho - snaps open, only bogs down with sooper/hyper complex Paint Synth presets and hand drawing. Seldom with average presets.

[Synthetik]

I run Studio Artist V5.5 on it every night. It's pretty zippy overall.  And we're running in Rosetta 2 emulation, not a native ARM compile.

I was bummed that they only released 24 inch displays for the ARM iMac.  I think it might be a limitation of their existing chip architecture.  So they need a M1A chip or something like that to push higher resolution displays?  Or it's some weird marketing scheme so they can charge more for 'pro' iMacs with higher res displays later.  We will see if they talk about other machines at WWDC in June.

I have also run alpha builds of Studio Artist that had various memory leak issues on the M1 powerbook, and it handled it really well, even for extreme virtual memory allocations.  With the stock RAM memory, nothing extra added.

I'm going to start using a wireless Wacom tablet with it.  I can talk about that at some point.

One thing about it is that i feel like i really want to shrink some parts of the Studio Artist interface, or offer a preference options so you can choose the sizing. So that on a powerbook you could shrink things to get more working space opened up while still having access to a lot of interactive controls.

[Synthetik]

Arstechnica has a review of the new 24 inch M1 imacs here.  The performance charts where they compare it to a 27 inch intel iMac are interesting.

WWDC is on monday. So we'll see if they announce new M1X chips and perhaps a 30 inch pro iMac based on it.  Or just a 16 inch macbook pro based on it?  Lots of rumors.

Here's some insight into what is going on.  Note apple's sick and twisted attitude towards their developers, including statements by CEO Tim Cook that developers and their software provide no value to the platform.

A developers perspective.

[Synthetik]

No new M1 macs announced at WWDC. So somewhat of a disappointment.  But they can't seem to deliver the M1 iMacs yet in quantity anyway, the ship date for the one we ordered got pushed to the end of June. So even if they had announced 30 inch M1X chip iMacs, getting them would have been a different story.  Fall maybe?  They may announce a 16 inch m1X powerbook first.

[Simon Woods]

I'm using a M1 Mac mini with a 32" LG monitor, (16GBs ram - 500 GBs storage) Very nice to work on in SA.  Everything runs pretty well - hard to compare with other recent machines as my last computer was a 2011 iMac. Its faster than the old one that's for sure, and very stable. I have run 3D software on it and its fast there too - pretty impressed!