Hi,
It's time for a new Mac.
My venerable 2015 Macbook Pro is getting to be a bit too slow for use; it was maxed out when I bought it (2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7, 16GB ram, AMD Radeon R9 M370X). My (ex) employers Macbook pro isn't a huge amount better, again maxed out (2019 i9, 32GB RAM). I will ask more detailed questions in specialised forums, but thought I'd ask here too.
I'm setting out on my own development wise and need something that will work well for the following projects:
- Swift development for iPhone (Swift UI, Rive for animations)
--- my current machine is way too slow to run the emulator properly now (this wasn't a problem four/five years ago - but I guess things have moved on quite a bit)
- local deep learning using PyTorch. For the most part I'll use compute resources in the cloud when working on paid projects, but for personal experiments it's really useful to be able to refine models locally and run inference on small test sets. I work with small language models mostly (again, any large language model work will need to be cloud based), but also do some computer vision work (preprocessing with OpenCV, deep learning models from there)
--- The latest PyTorch is now Apple silicon compatible, I'm assuming it only uses the neural engine. Is it worth boosting the graphics card at all though?
- game development using Unity/Unreal. Until now I've only done sprite based games, but I'd like to move to 3d games so I'll be using Daz3d and Blender for model creation (well, mostly tweaking existing assets).
- rendering some stills in Daz3d or Blender, may be running them through stable diffusion to add photorealism.
--- Here's perhaps the only bit I'm less sure of. Macs seem like the wrong tool for the job here. Daz3d uses Nvidia iRay, and the cpu only version is slow as hell. Rendering a single small image on my 2015 mac takes hours - it really should take minutes. Is the right solution here just to get an nvidia powered PC or linux box?
- I also am a hobbyist musician, writing dub house and techno and some ambient. Here I'm fortunate to have a lot of hardware synths and outboard, so I'm sure the most basic mac would be more than enough for my needs. But there are a couple of soft synths that have caught my eye: Arturia Pigments and Novum.
Many thanks!
It's time for a new Mac.
My venerable 2015 Macbook Pro is getting to be a bit too slow for use; it was maxed out when I bought it (2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7, 16GB ram, AMD Radeon R9 M370X). My (ex) employers Macbook pro isn't a huge amount better, again maxed out (2019 i9, 32GB RAM). I will ask more detailed questions in specialised forums, but thought I'd ask here too.
I'm setting out on my own development wise and need something that will work well for the following projects:
- Swift development for iPhone (Swift UI, Rive for animations)
--- my current machine is way too slow to run the emulator properly now (this wasn't a problem four/five years ago - but I guess things have moved on quite a bit)
- local deep learning using PyTorch. For the most part I'll use compute resources in the cloud when working on paid projects, but for personal experiments it's really useful to be able to refine models locally and run inference on small test sets. I work with small language models mostly (again, any large language model work will need to be cloud based), but also do some computer vision work (preprocessing with OpenCV, deep learning models from there)
--- The latest PyTorch is now Apple silicon compatible, I'm assuming it only uses the neural engine. Is it worth boosting the graphics card at all though?
- game development using Unity/Unreal. Until now I've only done sprite based games, but I'd like to move to 3d games so I'll be using Daz3d and Blender for model creation (well, mostly tweaking existing assets).
- rendering some stills in Daz3d or Blender, may be running them through stable diffusion to add photorealism.
--- Here's perhaps the only bit I'm less sure of. Macs seem like the wrong tool for the job here. Daz3d uses Nvidia iRay, and the cpu only version is slow as hell. Rendering a single small image on my 2015 mac takes hours - it really should take minutes. Is the right solution here just to get an nvidia powered PC or linux box?
- I also am a hobbyist musician, writing dub house and techno and some ambient. Here I'm fortunate to have a lot of hardware synths and outboard, so I'm sure the most basic mac would be more than enough for my needs. But there are a couple of soft synths that have caught my eye: Arturia Pigments and Novum.
Many thanks!
