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Is your workplace shifting towards Apple Silicon laptops as well?
- Thread starter roach1245
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I work in academia in the US with a PhD and, like all my colleagues here or in Europe, I am still better off financially than the vast majority of the population (in the US, let alone the world).
You absolutely don't need rich parents - just look up median salaries (let alone the intangible benefits such as the amount of freedom you have in academia to spend your time - even to make money on the side). Nothing to complain about unless you want to belong to the top 0.0001% earners and have that Google AI PhD salary.
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Some of the professors I knew in academia were well off given that they had government grants or special funds from companies.
In our company, they used to offer licenses for Parallels and Windows for Mac users. Now they have transitioned to offering an Azure-hosted Windows instance that you remote into. I don’t recall the name of that service, but they did that to make it easier for those with Apple Silicon. That might be an option for your son, if his organization is willing to go in that direction. Otherwise, a second box dedicate to Windows is a very direct solution.
He does cloud stuff there too so he has access to Windows and Linux VMs but I guess that sometimes he prefers to work on a local system. He has his own 2014 MacBook Pro too - it's just that he switched to my 2014 MacBook Pro when his 2015 went south.
Most PhDs don't end up being professors I believe. A lot of them end up being researchers only. And even professors don't make that much money. They get tenured which means they can't really get fired. The job security is nice but the actual pay isn't that high.
We do our cloud at where I work and we have Citrix and Windows VDI from Azure for all our Windows needs, we are one of the biggest Enterprises in the world (in the food sector) and we have Linux/Mac options
They have to do most of their cloud locally too. Their datasets would be expensive to move to and from external cloud systems. I don't know the infrastructure of how they access their servers.
I tend to see them being used on the unclassified side of house. Not sure if they are cleared for classified data processing. DoD has guides, I haven’t looked at them recently though.
My boss wanted us to come up with a single hardware standard that would suffice as a replacement to the previous four Macs that we were deploying:
- base model MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2020, Four Thunderbolt 3 Ports)
- base model MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2019)
- MacBook Pro (16-inch 2019) CTO with 2.3GHz 9th Gen Core i9; 32GB of RAM, 1TB SSD, and some form of AMD Radeon 5500M
- iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2020) CTO with varying configurations (I don't believe we ever had one consistent config).
Prior to this, I had wanted to see if our base model MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2020, Four Thunderbolt 3 Ports) could be replaced with a CTO configuration of the MacBook Pro (13-inch, M1, 2020) with the RAM and SSD to match that of the former and my tests with about eight of those machines were pretty much successful across the board, once I got JAMF Pro to start deploying Rosetta silently. Though, I later realized that, for those users, I could've given them an M1 Air even with 7 GPU cores and with that same RAM and SSD configuration and it still would've been night and day better than that MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2020, Four Thunderbolt 3 Ports) model.
Though, once the MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2019) was discontinued and replaced with the MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2021), that's when my boss's edict of "one model to rule them all" came to pass. We ultimately settled on a MacBook Pro (14-inch, 2021) configuration that has the version of the M1 Pro that has the 10-core CPU (8P; 2E) and 14-core GPU with 32GB of RAM and 512GB SSD. The idea was that we don't want our users storing enough locally to fill a 512GB SSD, but we also want enough RAM so that each of these could easily last the full five to seven years that our refresh cycles usually last. On paper, it would outperform every other Mac, including the MacBook Pro (13-inch, M1, 2020) that I had eight of to test with and all of the iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2020) configurations that we had.
I was key in getting consensus among the department around this specific configuration. In hindsight, I kind of regret it. The vast majority of our users don't need something this powerful. A 7 GPU Core, 16GB of RAM, and 512GB equipped M1 Air would've fit the bill for most of them. And for those that it wouldn't suffice for (primarily our video editors and graphics team; no more than 50 of our approximately 250 Mac users), we should've had a configuration of MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2021) and/or Mac Studio (2022). It would have saved us a ton of money and been a more optimal spread of resources. I doubt we'll make any changes to the "one model to rule them all" or our choice of said model until the MacBook Pro (14-inch, 2021) is inevitably discontinued. If I'm still around at that point, I'll try to propose a different strategy going forward and hope that there's traction on that.
As for app compatibility, we've never had any issues. Rosetta 2 has worked perfectly for every Intel-only App we've ever needed to use. I can't speak to that with regards to the developers on our team (most of whom are in India and all of whom are still on some form of MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2019)). But, for everyone else, there's been no issue whatsoever. The only annoying thing we had to contend with was Adobe making custom installer packages that were either Intel or Apple Silicon and not allowing the former to be able to even install on an Apple Silicon Mac with Rosetta 2 already in tow (and completely regardless as to whether or not the enclosed app was Intel-only or Universal). But Adobe has since released the ability to make Universal installers and all of our Adobe installer packages made since then use that format.
Depends where. If you are a professor at a top university, you can make $200k+. Some even make more than $500k+ per year.
Interesting. Here the choice between Air versus Pro/Max was mainly determined by the fact that the latter can support more than 1 external monitor (most of the people here use at least 2).
It's still insane that the Macbook Air from 2012 was able to drive 2 external monitors through its Thunderbolt ports but the Macbook Air 2022 can only do one (disregarding software hacks such as DisplayLink) but alright - will forgive Apple for that predatory business practice given that the Apple Silicon laptops in general are such wonderful machines.
All engineering is about tradeoffs. The M1 has 16 billion transistors and the M2 has 20 billion. Those transistors are being used for a variety of subsystems on the SoC. To add more displays, Apple would either have to add more transistors or take something away on the SoC. Apple made the decision that for the lowest end Apple silicon SoC, only having one external display was the best solution for the price and features that they did include. Personally, I would find another external display more useful than a ProRes encoder/decoder on the M2 but Apple obviously doesn't agree.
Yeah that's true. Just wondering how much effort (transistors) would it take to support >1 external monitor given that this was already possible on the 2012 M1 Air, and given that the 2022 Air does have 2 Thunderbolt 4 lanes so it shouldn't be a bottleneck data-wise.
Seems to me more like a strategic decision to artificially limit this to get more people to buy the M1 Pro / M1 Max (which are incredible laptops nonetheless) rather than a serious hardware-trade-off dilemma (just like the whole Stage Manager debacle with it not being 'possible' on iPad Pros from 2018 - although the same feature was already possible on Pentiums from 20 years ago).
But yeah if supporting > 1 external monitor really has such an impact on the chip's design that it had to be dropped because of other features - I am no expert on this - then I rest my case.
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There is some speculation that Apple includes a lot more frame buffer memory than other designs. The idea is to keep memory contention low and not require the use of unified memory. No one knows if it is true though.
We're about 70% Mac 30% Lenovo w/ Linux at my workplace, or at least in my team (there's a few Windows users elsewhere). Of those Macs though most are late 2019 i7 MBP's with a few months still left on their warranties, however all our new starters can choose a M1 Air or M1 Pro 16" if they like.
We do also have Lenovo desktops that we can install whatever we want on, most people install their preferred Linux flavour and use them as places to pin their long lived SSH/tmux sessions to and SSH in from their laptops.
We do also have Lenovo desktops that we can install whatever we want on, most people install their preferred Linux flavour and use them as places to pin their long lived SSH/tmux sessions to and SSH in from their laptops.
Yeah, the vast majority of our users are remote and working from home. Very few need or even have space for more than one external display and those that do are exactly the kinds of folks that we ought to be sending an M1 Pro or M1 Max Mac to anyway.
Yeah, it seems like a silly limitation to have on your low-end Mac when your graphics are still otherwise REALLY GOOD compared to that of any Intel integrated graphics that went into any of the Intel MacBook Airs, let alone any of the Intel 13" MacBook Pros.
what kids seem not to understand the last 10 years windows servers have been replaced with Linux servers especially in smaller business once Microsoft went to yearly fee for using their server small businesses have lo Linux Servers the last few years!
As a matter of policy, I do not discuss or reveal anything identifiable about employers, especially current ones. That said...
In my last job, the ONLY platform(s) represented were x86_64-based systems running anything from Windows XP to Windows 8.1, and a few (maybe... I think) Win10 systems. These are all remote-deployed systems spread across all the stores, and around the world.
My present position is a support role, not entirely unlike yours, and from what I can tell, I believe there's a fairly equal representation of both Windows- and macOS-based systems. Linux systems used by the folk I talk to are very rare indeed, and unfortunately there is a limiting factor as special security and VPN software have to be installed to do much of anything, and the security components used have no installers for any Linux distribution.
In the (now distant) past, I've worked for newspapers, magazines, and printshops, almost all of whom are now and have for a long time been out of business. At the time, they were 99% Mac shops (the 1% representing that computer or couple computers in accounting) and today if they were still around, it wouldn't be inconceivable they could well be Windows shops or maybe even 50/50 because Adobe's and Quark's software as far as I know work just as well in Windows as in macOS.
I think the cloud providers and Docker containers have driven a lot of the server side Linux deployments.