Lion was quite a nice-looking OS, I'll give it credit for that. Though annoyed about its lack of PPC-compatibility, I do remember using a lot of Mountain Lion back in the day, and it still felt like a serviceable OS. Mavericks is when I lost touch.
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Club 11
- Thread starter Amethyst1
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The Marble interface of Lion, replacing Aqua, was originally slated to roll out with Snow Leopard. Reports at the time of the developer preview betas, particularly from January 2009, made mention of Marble as an expected feature of the then-upcoming SL release.
Ultimately, it was pushed back to Lion.
There are a few old mentions floating around, mostly on Web Archive, but here’s one such mention from January 2009, which references a post from here on MR.
Sorry, this sentence made me chuckle
Here's my 11" 2010 2GB MBA happily running Catalina and playing a few HDTV and SDTV recordings courtesy of VLC:
1080p YouTube playback is flawless in Safari but Firefox struggles for some reason.
I can view PDFs in Acrobat Pro DC and open/write documents in Word remarkably quickly and without a trace of sluggishness.
Whilst others regard this machine as slow and unusable, this hasn't been my experience. It holds up extremely well for a wide variety of tasks and with an unsupported operating system whose hardware requirements are supposedly far beyond its specification. For me that's definitely a win.
1080p YouTube playback is flawless in Safari but Firefox struggles for some reason.
I can view PDFs in Acrobat Pro DC and open/write documents in Word remarkably quickly and without a trace of sluggishness.
Whilst others regard this machine as slow and unusable, this hasn't been my experience. It holds up extremely well for a wide variety of tasks and with an unsupported operating system whose hardware requirements are supposedly far beyond its specification. For me that's definitely a win.
I have to say that I did find it less than an optimal UX under Mojave with constant beachballing before slowly loading a webpage. It wasn't unusable but just unresponsive enough for me to not want to persevere with macOS on it. That was with dosdude's patcher. I don't know if OCLP would provide any additional optimisations to make Catalina work better but I might give it a go. As of now, it runs Chrome Flex quite well but I already have a Chromebook with much better battery life so it's just sitting there.
Fair enough.
A late reply - I'd meant to clarify much sooner that my comments were not directed at you but rather the widely held view that the 2010 MBA's (and the MBA range in general) are too underpowered to be of any tangible usage beyond checking emails and working on documents. For example, there is one well known figure within the Mac enthusiast community who shall remain nameless that has pooh-poohed using the MacBook Air under any circumstances, which meant my expectations were quite low when I got the opportunity to play around with them and it was nice to be pleasantly surprised to the contrary.
Did you try out tinkering with OCLP in the end?
This thread hasn't been updated for quite a while, so here's my contribution to get things restarted.
With the same 11" 2010 MBA, I downloaded the latest release of mGBA - the open source Game Boy Advance Emulator and ran it within Catalina.
No option for British English?
Ah well.
The emulator is really straightforward - you can configure everything to your liking and get on with playing GBA titles in next to no time. It immediately recognised my arcade controller and assigning the fire buttons and other controls to my preferred locations was a doddle.
Let's play some games!
Not bad at all!
Sampling the GBA catalogue on a MacBook Air with an arcade controller is great fun. The performance seems to be flawless - my only gripe is that the mouse pointer remains visible during full-screen mode but it's a minor annoyance. H/T to @Amethyst1 for making me aware of this wonderful program. I might send a donation to the team.
Nope. OCLP starts with Big Sur, so the patcher is all there is. Older version of OCLP may have worked with Catalina but even the OCLP developer strongly suggests to use the DD1 patcher with Mojave and Catalina. As of now, it is running Snow Leopard and is as snappy as it can be with that.
This is most peculiar - my 2010 C2D MBA outdoes my 2011 i5 MBA in video playback performance with Amazon's VOD service. Attempting to watch its content on the latter is almost impossible due to sluggishness and stuttering.
I'm wondering if it's because the MBA is running the latest version of Firefox under Catalina (as shown above) - and enjoys improved support in this field whereas the MBP is on 102.9.0 Extended Support Release with High Sierra.
Or perhaps the GeForce 320M has an advantage over the HD 3000 in some form?
I'd be interested in your comments, my fellow Club 11 members.
I'm wondering if it's because the MBA is running the latest version of Firefox under Catalina (as shown above) - and enjoys improved support in this field whereas the MBP is on 102.9.0 Extended Support Release with High Sierra.
Or perhaps the GeForce 320M has an advantage over the HD 3000 in some form?
I'd be interested in your comments, my fellow Club 11 members.
Bit off topic here, but what are your thoughts on Picard S3? I've watched the first 5 (Ep 6 isn't available yet) and it has been really good. Seems like with Terry Matalas in a much bigger role, things are going much better.This is most peculiar - my 2010 C2D MBA outdoes my 2011 i5 MBA in video playback performance with Amazon's VOD service. Attempting to watch its content on the latter is almost impossible due to sluggishness and stuttering.
I'm wondering if it's because the MBA is running the latest version of Firefox under Catalina (as shown above) - and enjoys improved support in this field whereas the MBP is on 102.9.0 Extended Support Release with High Sierra.
Or perhaps the GeForce 320M has an advantage over the HD 3000 in some form?
I'd be interested in your comments, my fellow Club 11 members.
I see you're only at Ep 1, so I won't go spoil anything here, but it gets even better the further the plot unfolds
What resolution is it running at? The 11" is 768p if I'm not mistaken, so 720 then? Not sure how well the 320M does with modern video streaming, with offline content I've found 720p runs quite well on it. I think in some cases the 320M does outperform the 3000, but then IIRC the HD 3000 in the 11" only has 256MB compared to the 512MB on my MBP.
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This is most peculiar - my 2010 C2D MBA outdoes my 2011 i5 MBA in video playback performance with Amazon's VOD service. Attempting to watch its content on the latter is almost impossible due to sluggishness and stuttering.
I'm wondering if it's because the MBA is running the latest version of Firefox under Catalina (as shown above) - and enjoys improved support in this field whereas the MBP is on 102.9.0 Extended Support Release with High Sierra.
Or perhaps the GeForce 320M has an advantage over the HD 3000 in some form?
I'd be interested in your comments, my fellow Club 11 members.
Not a Club 11 member (yet), but…
The thing I’d test, if it were possible (and one wanted to futz with it) is to have a partition on the 2011 which meets the same 10.15/FF110 specs and running a side-by-side on the same video (assuming the RAM for both are in the same neighbourhood). Off-hand, it doesn’t make sense that there would be such discrepancy even if the HD 3000 was a step back from third-party GPUs. Then again, it would also be worth investigating whether video decoding is handled by hardware or software on both, and whether it’s the CPU assigned to the work or the GPU.
Beyond that, I honestly don’t know.
May also have something to do with the patchers as hardware acceleration can be buggy sometimes, might be worth trying High Sierra to see how it performs. Could possibly be a bit better on a native OS.
If I read @TheShortTimer ’s description correctly, the patched 2010 MBA with the GeForce 320M running FF110 on Catalina is the one doing well with the video, whereas the un-patched 2011 with iGPU running FF102ESR on High Sierra is the one having trouble here.
The other thing I’d ponder is whether the prefs.js for each FF build have the same settings, optimizations or not, throughout.
How much could that affect video performance though? Are there any hardware video encoding variables inside it?
The only working hypotheses I have are there were video decoding improvements made to the very latest version of Firefox; there are optimizations manually different with one prefs.js versus the other; or else the OpenCore configuration for the GeForce 320M on the C2D is really remarkable.
Beyond that, I have no ideas.
The 320M is likely just more powerful than HD3000 in some respects.
Of course some benches show an advantage for the 2011s, so it may have depended on whether the games were CPU or GPU bound.
As for the VRAM comment, my 2011 MBA has 4GB (and accordingly assigns 384MB to the GPU) but it's also the i7, so that may pose an issue for a comparison, but I'm willing to look at it if needed. It's also just running 10.13.
Of course some benches show an advantage for the 2011s, so it may have depended on whether the games were CPU or GPU bound.
As for the VRAM comment, my 2011 MBA has 4GB (and accordingly assigns 384MB to the GPU) but it's also the i7, so that may pose an issue for a comparison, but I'm willing to look at it if needed. It's also just running 10.13.
This resonates a lot with what I've experienced using my base model 2010 MacBook Air versus similar Macs with higher clocked CPUs and more RAM. I would never have thought a 1.4 ghz Core 2 Duo with a measly 2 GB RAM would perform so well in day-to-day usage vs. my higher clocked MacBook and MacBook Pro with double the memory.
< trollface >
Shouldn’t all those early 2011 MacBook Pros running the Radeon HD GPUs be bench-scored at zero since those GPUs all fail?
< /trollface >
Bit off topic here, but what are your thoughts on Picard S3? I've watched the first 5 (Ep 6 isn't available yet) and it has been really good. Seems like with Terry Matalas in a much bigger role, things are going much better.
I see you're only at Ep 1, so I won't go spoil anything here, but it gets even better the further the plot unfolds
At the time of that screenshot I was only at episode 1.
I've since watched all the episodes that are currently available.
My thoughts are that Picard was patchy during seasons 1 and 2 - as has been much of Star Trek after Berman (for all his faults, he saved TNG and the franchise from Roddenberry's misdirection.) That's not to say S1&2 didn't have good or even great moments because that would be an unfair assessment but there was some unforgivably lazy writing on show during S2 that even those who are mildly familiar with TNG would immediately recognise as illogical and also disdainful towards the very subject matter.
There were several scenes which I'm surprised Stewart and Goldberg didn't object to because of the continuity issues that they create. Though I have to admit that I'd love to see a graphic novel or animated series based on the military campaigns of...
General Picard in the altered timeline where he slays among others Gul Dukat, Gen. Martok, Sarek of Vulcan and Zek: the Grand Negus of Ferenginar!
However, I've really enjoyed season 3 because the writing appears to possess a superior grasp of what made TNG and DS9 so stellar. The reintroduction and death of one particular character within a single episode felt jarring though but it's still head and shoulders above the previous seasons and I'm feeling optimistic that this rebound will continue to the finale.
You are correct: its resolution is 1366x768:
The MBA's 320M plays all of my 720/1080 video files without issue and as this topic demonstrates, it's flawless with Amazon's VOD service at the max HD resolution. As are other sites. I've also seen that YouTube content plays at 1080p50 whilst on the MacBook Pro, the resolution often drops to 720p - even though I have an ultra-fast fibre optic connection. It's worth pointing out that the MacBook Air doesn't struggle with Amazon when tasked with displaying the VOD content at the higher resolution of 1080p on my HDTV via HDMI.
Which is a strange state of affairs because on paper the MacBook Air is unquestionably the underdog...
...the MBP has a superior CPU, six times the RAM and double the VRAM.
That's a good idea but I'd need to free up some HDD space on the 2011 MBP before I could install Catalina - or purchase a larger HDD... I could also run this test with my 2011 i5 MBA which uses the HD 3000 as well and currently has High Sierra installed.
That's right.
The patched 2010 C2D MBA with a GeForce 320M iGPU running Catalina is outperforming the 2011 i5 MBP with a HD 3000 on High Sierra when it comes to viewing Amazon's VOD service. I've constantly had to switch the former when it comes to watching anything on Amazon Prime because the latter doesn't appear to be up to the task.
Good point.
I could see what happens if I switch to FF111 on the MBP but I'd probably need to get rid of FF ESR because I've seen in the past that things become very messy when you have two iterations of the browser installed...
That's a good idea but I'd need to free up some HDD space on the 2011 MBP before I could install Catalina - or purchase a larger HDD... I could also run this test with my 2011 i5 MBA which uses the HD 3000 as well and currently has High Sierra installed.
Hold up… is the MBP running from a rusty spinner or solid state?
As a safeguard, duplicate the profile directory for a fallback. The slightly annoying thing about the way FF handles profiles, via the .ini, makes it impossible to have two profile directories with different randomized-character names, and each version of FF referring to discrete .ini files on which profile to use at launch.
A spinner but hardly rusty.
With the assistance of a eGPU, I can play 4K UHD files on the MBP from the HDD so that's not the culprit. If anything, it makes the problems with Amazon and Firefox ESR all the more perplexing.
Thanks - I'll do that.
The usage of FF ESR is a legacy to when I ran Snow Leopard on my MacBook 1,1 and it was among the handful of browsers that still supported the OS. Whilst there is the obvious benefit from long-term support for older operating systems (like High Sierra) the downside is that it's several generations behind the main version of FF in terms of the improvements and optimisations that you speculated are at play.
A spinner but hardly rusty.
I don’t wanna be that annoying MR forums member, but that HDD is your bottleneck.
Not even a 7200rpm PATA HDD could hold a candle to a DRAM-less, budget mSATA on my iBook clamshell G3 with ATA-3 protocol of ~25MB/s! In other words: that 7200rpm HDD can’t saturate a SATA III 6Gbps bus, but an SSD with a DRAM cache, like on a WD Red or Blue SATA SSD, can (yes, I’m using one of each in different Intel machines). And for streaming movies, that cached stream is going to need all the speed you can throw at it.
Again, I think the key difference here is in the write/read (in that order) of stream caching-playback, versus just a simple read for a local, 4K UHD clip. Solid state is going to be able to handle the former, and most streaming services these days are, I reckon, accounting that most customers these days are running on devices with solid state storage — be it desktop, laptop, tablet, or phone.
Thanks - I'll do that.
This house, for the same reason, runs only on ESR ever since those 45.9ESR days, for those Macs running High Sierra.
Rightly or wrongly, I treat ESR as probably the most stable of the stable for Firefox.
Second this.
I've had both super cheap, DRAM-less SSD's and new 7200rpm spinners in my A1212 (17" Late 06), and the difference is crazy! While boot up times aren't as different as 4200/5400 to SSD, when you get to the desktop, the SSD machine is ready to open apps right away while the spinner takes a minute or two to launch them.
General tasks also felt noticeably slower on the HDD compared to the SSD, videos (both online and offline) were just laggy enough to be an annoyance. The SSD was the singular upgrade that has uplifted performance on every machine I own. These days, every Intel machine of my has an SSD in it:
A1398 (2015): WD SN570 1TB (it was upgraded to a proper NVMe SSD from a 256GB SSUBX)
A1278 (2011): Crucial MX500 500GB
A1342 (2010): Kingston A400 240GB
A1278 (2009): SanDisk SSD Plus 240GB
A1186 (2007): Kingston A400 240GB
A1212 (2006): Crucial MX500 500GB
The MX500s are really good drives, they have DRAM cache and are extremely fast (for a SATA3 drive). I swear by them. The A400 and SSD Plus are cheaper, DRAM-less drives that are used in my machines that I use less often and/or need an SSD but don't require a high-end drive.
I can say now that the singular reason why the 2010 MBA is faster is because it has an SSD.
The only two Macs I have running right now with DRAM-cached SSDs are the A1261 (running a WD Blue m.2 SATA 500GB blade inside a 2.5-inch adapter), and the A1278 i7 (which, when it arrived a couple of weeks ago, already had a Kingston 240GB SSD with DRAM cache inside it), inside which I also brought in the WD Red SA500 1TB 2.5 from the dying A1278 i5 (basically giving it two DRAM-cached SSDs — one running SL and the other HS). It’s not pokey.
The rest of my gear, with exception to the iMac (still running with the OEM spinner, and will until I get the adhesive kit, faster CPU, extra stick of RAM, and the one, barely used NVMe m.2 I have), use DRAM-less SSDs. For all of them, being PowerPC systems, I don’t think it’s worth the cost of putting DRAM-cached SSDs into any of them (unless they happen to inherit one from one of the current systems when, someday, I upgrade those capacities).
...which makes me slightly sad that 320M Macs never went beyond 2.66 GHz. There was a 2.8 GHz P9700 if the 3.06 GHz T9900's TDP would have been too much for the machines in question (2010 13" MB/MBP; MM). Curiously, Notebookcheck lists an Acer laptop that supposedly shipped with the 320M... and a Nehalem, despite the chipset being for Core 2 Duo only. Probably just a typo (there's a discrete GT 320M as well), or... *x-files theme*
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