Flip Flopping between macOS and Windows

[pshufd]

Here's where gaming laptops have a major downside. Those GPUs need lots of power, and they also generate a lot of heat, so fan noise is a major thing.

I fired up my Razer (I7 9750H/RTX 2070) to run benchmarks to compare that laptop with the studio - after hours of updates, I realized at how used to the quietness I got with my desktops (even my pc desktop) and how ungainly large the brick was. This is running a relatively low powered CPU (compared to later generations) and GPU yet those fans were annoying. I'm not sure how I was so used to them back in the day. I never got used to lugging the power brick with me, but it was something I did often.

AMD has some really nice offerings, and while the Thinkpad T14s isn't a gaming laptop, I was able to run some of my games fairly decently. What I likked about that was the smaller brick, light design, and thinkpad quality. I'm a big fan of thinkpads, and I'll grab the thinkpad before I think about my M1 MBP

One of my requirements is a 4k display (the MacBook Pro 16 falls a little short there which is one reason I bought the portable monitor). I do not need a lot of GPU horsepower and my desktop has a GTX 1050 ti. But there are assumptions in laptops that when you want one thing that's considered premium, you want everything premium. So I was looking at the ProArt 16. It is available with a 4k OLED display and a 4060 which is not too crazy on power. And it has the Ryzen 9 AI 370 which I really like. But it has the 200 watt power brick. There are 28 watt laptops that use the same CPU.

In my office days, I bought extra Apple charging bricks and left them in the office. So I have several MagSafe I and MagSafe II chargers in the basement. I didn't have to bring the charger back and forth to the office. People in the office with Macs would also borrow them if they forgot their bricks.

A ProArt might work if I could verify that an Anker 65 watt brick would provide enough power for my workload. I'd have to buy one to try it out. They have them at Best Buy for $2K and open box for $1,400 so it looks like people routinely buy these to try out and return them if they don't work out. One of the problems with going from a MacBook Pro is the stuff you miss.

 

[pshufd]

One of my financial sites is apparently blocking Downie now for video downloads. I've been using this for years to record the morning videos and then listening to them on walks.

So I looked into downloading them via screen recording and tried it with the speakers on my iMac Pro but the sound is awful doing it that way. Then I started looking into how to record the screen using internal audio and it always involves third-party products, most of them which do way more than what I want.

So I looked at Windows 11. It has Xbox-Live built-in and the program has a built-in screen recorder that captures internal audio for streaming your game play. And it's times like this when I really like having macOS and Windows at the same time.

I did try running it in a virtual machine on my Mac Studio using the screen snippet tool on Windows but it didn't work. The audio wasn't captured.