#164

I would think so. What kind of software/hardware are you running in your set?

#165

Ableton Live, but I’m using a lot of midi/max for live devices lets say up to 2 drum racks + 3granulators + 16 expert sleepers plugins and some audio stems per song. Some plugins on the master and that’s about it.

#166

Make sure your devices are spread across as many tracks as possible. Live gives a separate thread to each track, and puts all plugins used by any one track on the same thread.

If you’re heavily using max/m4l i would agree the new mac with more cores might benefit you. Midi itself is extremely lightweight otherwise.

1 Like
#167

About the economy of repairing the Apple products. This needs some emphasis.

4 Likes
#168

after seeing the ifixit score, the answer is no. Just no.

#169

I don’t anticipate this trend reversing with any brand of laptop. Portables in general are moving towards highly integrated production as a means of reducing power consumption and cost. Working in industrial electronics I see the same trend there. The tech industry as a whole is moving this way as manufacturers gain these abilities. Apple leads the way in many cases but if you’ve kept your eye on the other brands they tend to follow suit within a year or two. And a lot of other brands tend to be less available on spare parts a few years out, too, as they often have far more skus. Apple’s fairly streamlined product line means that at least you can get spare parts, expensive though they might be, sometimes a decade into the future. Not sying it’s a good trend. But I don’t think its unique to Apple nor something there is much hope for seeing reversed in the current socio-techo-economic system we’re in.

3 Likes
#170

Agreeing with most of what you have said there, I respectfully disagree in some important aspects. It makes very little difference if the spare parts are available when the machine is so unrepairable as this 16" model. And it’s very very hard to believe that everybody on the market will follow this dumpster dive of removing the ports, soldering in the peripherals, riveting in the keyboard and adding a dedicated chip that occasionally will mess with the audio interfaces via the USB protocol. Maybe it happens but on that day you will see me building my own computers again.

#171

The T2 chip is absolutely essential to modern data security. It’s a similar, but much more advanced, version of what Chromebooks do to provide some semblance of broader system-wide protection. Interfering with I/O, at least in a hopefully transparent manner, is entirely the point. While no system can be totally secure, these chips go a long, and very important way, towards defeating what are increasingly common and feasible attacks. I’m 100% on the side of Apple in this regard: while the road to transparent security is difficult, they’re totally heading in the right direction by trying. I don’t think people really understand exactly how vulnerable almost any system is today to a huge variety of stealth firmware insertions, and how close we are to seeing widespread, untargeted, mass use of such attacks. Apple is trying to take a lead in this regards, and it’s actually for me a big selling point of their hardware and one of the reasons I won’t consider much else out there. Nobody else has shown both the political will nor the technical chops to pull this off at such a system level, not even Google - the Chromebooks are laughably limited in what they can do, in order to fit under the protective umbrella of their secured firmware. Apple’s computers are trying as hard as possible to provide not only greater security, but to do so seamlessly to the total user experience. Sure there are some compromises, but that’s the tradeoff of security at all.

Count me 100% on Apple’s side on this one - data security is only going to be more and more personally important in the decades ahead.

4 Likes
#172

yeah, tell it to your crowd when the audio interface will glitch out in the middle of the show

1 Like
#173

If it’s a choice between security and a functioning computer, then the T2 chip is not fit for purpose.

I had what @t3h described happen on stage… multiple times when I first got my 2018 replacement machine. Thankfully it was a gig where there were tons of other performers, and I was able to physically unplug/replug the interface (the only thing that fixed it) without much noticeable issue. If I was doing a solo show, I would have been fucked.

So in that sense, if it’s a tradeoff between security and functionality, then count me out. (A (physical, literal) brick is pretty secure, when it comes to software hacking, so I could always buy one of those!)

3 Likes
#174

Agreed completely. This trade off is Apple basically telling us the future of computer is pretty much just internet browsing / streaming / downloads and exposing yourself to threats, and no longer using the computer as a production tool to generate things offline. Which is, obviously, absolutely the case and in tune with the general vision the industry wish to impose on us, but also, if that means they can start designing tools where they don’t even take into account our hability to create with them because it’s too much hassle to do it AND make them secure, then it absolutely means we’re starting to lose control of how our machines behave offline, and their usefulness for creative use which is terrible. I know I have a laptop that’s almost strictly for live use, I couldn’t care less about security for it since it’s never online, never has bluetooth, and to the point where the ethernet chip and all wireless chips are deactivated 99% of the time except for a few updates (for live audio latency efficiency mostly, and also just because they’re of no use). I couldn’t care less about it being “secure” it’s a machine meant to create / operate, not share. But somehow, a decision on apple about what the future of computing is means what computing used to be suddenly is less effective, or in the awful cases you described, possibly threatening your hability to perform with it. It’s a shit scenario.

5 Likes
#175

As far as I know (and correct me if I’m wrong) the T2 audio issues have been resolved in a recent macOS update. I’ve never had any issues with my 2019 15" Pro.

3 Likes
#176

No problem here either (so far) with the MBP 16’’ and UAD Apollo. I’ve heard about this issue with the T2 but you’re right I think (pretty sure) it’s been resolved.

#177

They resolved it on Mojave. I never tried it on Catalina, and I don’t think that it’s resolved at all on High Sierra. I use a thunderbolt 3 hub anyway.

#178

Tangentially, does anyone know of a way (via Terminal or whatnot) to completely disable OS-level update notifications? (both for the App Store and OS ones)

I’ve googled it a few times over the year without finding anything that actually did it.

#179

I used this one here regarding the OS:

but you’ll have to take a look in the comment section below to get rid of the red dot.

edit:

from man softwareupdate

–ignore identifier …
Manages the per-machine list of ignored updates. The
identifier is the first part of the item name (before the
dash and version number) that is shown by --list. See
EXAMPLES:

sudo softwareupdate --ignore JavaForOSX

Ignored updates:
(JavaForOSX)

1 Like
#180

Ah, that’s handy. Would be great to have something similar for general “update notifications” too.

I think I found something a while back where you could disable it per-app (if I remember right), but there’s so many things that prompt for update, that that becomes an impossible task.

#181

you can use the --ignore option per app

#182

Yeah that was it. There’s dozens of apps though, so that just gets real messy.

#183

Is Catalina really shitty? I’m about to buy a new Mac and it will come with it…