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Evgeny Kuznetsov wrote in ITFor some time now, my home desktop PC needs upgrade; I built it to last, back in the day, but it’s been 12 years, and the age shows. Not to the point of me investing money and effort in once again building “a rig to last”1, but it does show.
I have an opportunity to purchase a 2019 MacBook Pro (16’, one of those with the last amd64-compatible processors)2. And not simply purchase (at a very reasonable price), but test it for a week to make a decision. Here I am, testing, with the decision to make.
Getting Debian to install on this thing took some jumping through hoops but, once installed, it wors smoothly. Some laptop-specific questions remain3 (I heard hibernate isn’t really smooth), yet as a desktop replacement (using an external display and proper keyboard/mouse) it is rather solid. Having proved the concept viable, I’m now trying to assess whether the gear is worth the money.
As a matter of fact, I could have (for about the same price) added memory to my rig (it has 16 GiB compared to MacBook’s 32) and replaced the spinning rust with an SSD (my PC has a small SSD — the big ones were too expensive those days — and a 2TiB HDD for /home). For daily tasks, MacBook is somewhat (not blazingly) faster4, but it only has half-a-terabyte SSD5, and boy, it is noisy! A YouTube video plays as smooth as it is on my PC, but the MacBook gets so hot and noisy as if I tried to recompile the kernel. According to benchmarks, the graphics performance in the games I play should be about the same as with my old rig, and anyway I play less and less year after year…
Also, should anything happen to the MacBook, it isn’t worth repairing. On the other hand, I expect it to work for some time, and then the question can be raised contemplating “doing it properly” once more.
Are the fan noise and the decrease in the disk space worth it? I don’t know.
What else should I test? I still have a couple of days to make the decision…
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The prices are insane these days, I must say. On the other hand, the Moore’s law isn’t what it used to be. ↩︎
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Yep, one of those with touch-bar for F-keys. ↩︎
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The person who invented the touchbar has probably got a raise. Should have got some proper kicking… ↩︎
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For a benchmark, I compiled this very website. My current rig takes about 110 seconds for a full build (no cache), aout 90 seconds when using SSD (there’s a lot of files, and quite some files are getting created). The MacBook Pro takes about 73 seconds, and my work laptop, for comparison, only takes about 52 seconds. ↩︎
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Another urge to revise all the things that should not necessarily be stored locally. ↩︎
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