I had quite a bit of computer issues lately, and mostly with my main desktop PC (a Ryzen 5900x/Nvidia 1080ti gaming/workstation system): most of them were stupid things, like something misconfigured in UEFI/BIOS after an update that made the PC wake from sleep randomly, or Windows “fast startup” not allowing the computer to sleep, but the worst are the stability issues – random crashes and BSOD, and I’m afraid all points to the CPU, which is either overheating, or shows stability issues due to heat damage. The root cause of this seems to be an AIO watercooling unit that has a nasty habit of leaving a coin-sized spot on the middle of the CPU contact-free, probably because something deforms when the pump is screwed onto the CPU too tightly or something of the sort. In any case, the computer randomly crashes from once in a few days to several times in a day, and this basically makes the computer just unreliable enough for me not to be able to use it for anything serious. Also, the fact that Windows 11 looks more like a perpetually self-updating machine than anything else, also contributed to my annoyance, and the machine is so power-inefficient that it significantly heats the room in summer, forcing the AC to work harder and thus waste even more power.
While this machine will eventually get fixed when the parts arrive, I decided to do a side-grade (a word for something that’s neither an upgrade nor a downgrade, but replacement with something different but equally powerful) and replace it in the function of my main computer by a Mac Studio.
I was quite busy with the transition – first I tried to unsuccessfully resolve the Windows machine’s stability issues by formatting and reinstalling the OS and all the apps, then had more stupid Windows issues when I tried to move the NVMe from one socket to another and the Windows refused to boot after that, so I had to fix the issue from the recovery console and in the most obscure ways possible, then the Mac arrived and I eventually had to do a clean install because Lightroom didn’t want to work when I did a recovery from another computer’s backup drive, then all kind of obscure things had to be installed, and I basically spent several weeks dealing with computers and the pointless issues they caused. For instance, there is a bug in the Apple Mail application on the Mac OS Ventura and it is widely reported on the web, but nobody in Cupertino seems to be working on it, probably because they don’t think it exists, because it doesn’t show if you upgraded from an earlier OS version, however when you do a clean install, as I did, the junk mail controls and custom filters don’t get saved and are lost on app restart. I fixed the problem by copying 3 files from my laptop:
~/Library/Mail/V10/MailData/RulesActiveState.plist ./SyncedRules.plist ./UnsyncedRules.plist
This is a trivial issue, but each such thing takes an hour or two to diagnose and fix, and I feel as if I’ve been reduced to fixing pointless computer shit and doing very little productive work the computers are meant to do, and I also need to maintain quite a bit of IT skill just to keep everything running, and moving to a Mac might reduce at least some of this pointless hassle, because I don’t think it can be outright removed without abandoning the whole thing.
In the meantime, the Mac is silent, blows out cool air under load, doesn’t use almost any electricity in normal work, updates much less often than the Windows box, and is as blazing fast as that 12-core Ryzen monstrosity with water cooling. Also, the DAC on its headphone jack is absolutely stellar, audibly better than the Schiit Modi 3 I’ve been using to connect the Windows box to the NAD. The second great thing about the Mac are the ports – there are lots of them, and they are high speed, which kind of matters, because the Windows machine only had one USB A 3.1 Gen 2 port, and one USB C connector of the same speed; all the other ports are slower. On the Mac, the slowest USB ports are USB 3.1 Gen 2, it has both USB A and C varieties, and the fast ports are Thunderbolt 4, allowing me to connect external NVMe drives at speeds equivalent to the internal drive. I already have a 4TB NVMe and the enclosure for it in the mail, and that’s going to be the storage drive for Lightroom. The drawback is that all the upgrades are necessarily external, because it doesn’t have any internal upgrade ability. I would expect to be able to at least change/add NVMe drives and RAM, but no, this thing is as upgradable as an iPhone. That’s a real shame and a continuation in a long line of steps backwards Apple was taking, from fully upgradable machines where you could replace hard drives and RAM modules, to this. However, to be honest, the thing with the computer industry is that upgrades are no longer much of a concern these days, and you can take a five or even ten year old computer and it will run fine. Just remember that ten years ago it was 2013, and the computer of the day was this. I have a mid-2015 version of that, and it’s noticeably slower than the modern hardware, but still runs everything I throw at it just fine. Basically, I replaced it long before it became defunct, and that’s the thing – you can take a 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD machine from ten years ago, and it will still run a modern OS, run modern apps, and upgrading the storage and RAM won’t really solve the main reasons why you might want to replace it. There were times when you had to constantly upgrade your machine just to keep up, and the upgrades were truly huge and relevant every six months or so. This is no longer the case, and a modern high-end machine might actually not need internal upgrades in its expected life cycle of five years.
Whether this civilisation will last that long, is a much more important question.