Archive for April 8, 2022

Friday, April 8, 2022

Upgrading to a 14-inch MacBook Pro With a Studio Display

I upgraded my 27-inch iMac (2017) to a 14-inch MacBook Pro (10-core M1 Pro, 32 GB of RAM, 2 TB SSD). Most of the time, I plan to run it in clamshell mode, sitting in a BookArc, connected to a Studio Display and a 30-inch Dell display (non-Retina).

I did Migration Assistant over Thunderbolt. It took at least half an hour to come up with a time estimate, which as usual was longer than a day, but it eventually completed in about 5 hours. I think this is about how long it takes me to do a fresh clone to a spinning hard drive. I was expecting SSD-to-SSD to be much faster (as it is with Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper).
Touch ID, at least so far, seems much more reliable than on my 16-inch (Intel) MacBook Pro. Of course, I won’t be using it much due to clamshell mode.
I immediately noticed how much better the smaller trackpad is compared with the 16-inch MacBook Pro, though I would prefer even smaller, like on the MacBook Air.
Even in light mobile use so far, I am so happy to be rid of the Touch Bar. The keyboard is OK—not as good as some of the pre-butterfly models.
The Studio Display is…fine. Honestly, I find it a little harder to read than the iMac’s display. Maybe the coating is different, or perhaps I’m just not used to it yet. (If iMacs still supported target display mode, I could have just kept using the iMac.) The speakers are good. It’s much shorter than the iMac, and I’m now staring at some cable clutter that was previously hidden by the iMac’s chin. The shipping box is impressive, with moving parts and cardboard rather than styrofoam.
I’m disappointed in both the Studio Display’s camera and the MacBook Pro’s. The color is better than with the iMac’s camera, but they both look very processed, and without much detail. Both are worse than the front-facing camera on an old iPhone, even though the Studio Display is about 3/4 inch thick and so likely had room to spare. I don’t like Center Stage. It was kind of cool that when I shifted to one side I didn’t go off camera. But then when I shifted back I was mostly cut off, as it kept showing the space where I was no longer sitting. So, the camera does not seem to be working as designed, and in my opinion is optimizing for the wrong use case. For this price, why doesn’t it at least have an old iPhone SE’s back camera? (Apple has promised camera improvements with a future software update, but I don’t think the hardware gives it much to work with.)
My Dell display doesn’t work when connected to the Studio Display via a USB-C-to-DisplayPort cable. I have to connect it directly to the MacBook Pro’s Thunderbolt port. (I also tried HDMI-to-HDMI, but the picture quality was terrible.) It’s much more reliable than with the iMac, though. Plugging it in works every time, and much more quickly. I no longer have the problem of the display being visible to macOS but showing a black screen, which necessitated multiple reboots and cable swaps. ~~I no longer have the Big Sur/Monterey glitch where the menu bar on the non-Retina display was sometimes drawn at double size.~~ I do have a strange issue where, after reboot, the windows on the Dell get restored 100 pixels or so to the left of where they should be.
I haven’t figured out how to power on the MacBook Pro when it’s in clamshell mode. The computer itself has no external power button. I’ve read that it’s supposed to detect when an external display powers on, or when you plug it into an external display, but this didn’t work with my Dell display’s power button. The Studio Display also has no power button—it’s supposed to detect being plugged into a computer that’s on. So, it seems like each is waiting for the other, and the only thing I can do is clear off my desk, open up the MacBook Pro, and close it again before it gets far enough into the boot process that it will try to put some windows on the internal display.
I forgot to export my Little Snitch configuration—it never transfers with a clone—and so have been getting lots of prompts.
Both Mail and the Dock started out showing iWork icons for my Word and Excel files. This persisted through several reboots, even though I never launched the iWork apps. I was able to fix it by clearing the IconServices cache and then using killall Dock.
I seems to be stuck with an ugly desktop picture during boot and login, despite resetting the ones I want in System Preferences and even creating a /LibraryCaches/com.apple.desktop.admin.png.
Time Machine offered to let me inherit the backups from my iMac, whereas in the past I had to do this with tmutil. I’m not entirely sure what this did. For the local backup, it took a long time to compare everything, but at the end everything seems normal. My backup history goes back more than a year, and I have about the same amount of free space as before. It even renamed the backup drive for me, so that “imac17 Time Machine” became “mbp22 Time Machine.” For my network Time Machine backup, it renamed the .sparsebundle (but not the drive containing it). It spent a long time deleting old backups, even though there should have been plenty of free space, and it has reported copying 500 GB so far, which is impossible in that time frame over Wi-Fi. The drive itself shows 2.2 TB free, which is much more than expected, so it seems to have deleted stuff that it shouldn’t have.
Arq wouldn’t finish launching and kept reporting “Invalid configuration files.” I had to run a shell script to delete all its files and reinstall. This required re-entering all my storage locations. It then dowloaded my backup settings from the cloud, and I was able to adopt the old backups. My SMTP passwords should still have been in the keychain, but I had to re-enter them. It then had to re-cache all the information about my back-up sets. With everything reconfigured, though, it seemed to properly figure out which files did not need to be re-copied.
Performance of the MacBook Pro is interesting. Booting and updating macOS are way faster. Safari and Lightroom feel faster. Mail launches instantly. But, in general (non-development) use, it is nowhere close to the “even the regular M1 is faster than I know what to do with” that I’ve heard many users report. I don’t hear the fan, but it does get warmer than expected, and I probably wouldn’t want it on my lap when wearing shorts. Overall, it’s great to have this much power in such a small Mac, but it’s not the giant leap I was expecting.

Opening OmniOutliner documents is still slow, mostly due to file coordination overhead, though I don’t have them stored in iCloud Drive. Mail’s interface still sometimes locks up for 5 seconds when switching between messages. I still get random system-wide freezes, beachballs, and times where the network and storage stop responding for 10–60 seconds. Tiny Mail and OmniFocus AppleScripts that normally take a fraction of a second to run still sometimes take 5–10 seconds of showing red in FastScripts. Finder still beachballs all the time and gets minutes behind at showing the contents of a folder. Disk Utility takes up to 5 minutes before it shows a non-blank window. Drives still sometimes take an hour to mount. Photos still sometimes takes an hour to show new photos that my iPhone had uploaded long ago. Overall, it feels like the software is letting down the hardware.

I’m seeing a big speed improvement with Xcode. The app feels more responsive, and it’s much faster at compiling:

Mac	Processor	Objective-C App	Objective-C	Swift and Objective-C
iMac (27-inch, 2017)	4.2 GHz 4-Core i7	108s	40s	84s
MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2019)	2.3 GHz 8-Core i9	103s	35s	81s
MacBook Pro (14-inch, 2021)	10-core M1 Pro	64s	17s	41s

All times were best-of-three clean builds recorded on macOS 12.3.1 with Xcode 13.3.

“Objective-C App” is the current build of SpamSieve, which is all Objective-C, including the documentation, code signing, and various static checks (some written in Swift), but excluding notarization. My toolchains for LaTeX and reStructuredText are still running in Rosetta, so the new MacBook Pro should actually be a bit faster than shown. (A day after setup, it was also still doing some background work with Spotlight and Time Machine on the efficiency cores while I was compiling.)

“Objective-C” is just the code (and xibs) for SpamSieve, without the other stuff.

“Swift and Objective-C” is a combined target with all the current SpamSieve code as well as the new Swift code (and test code) for the next major version.

Xcode does still take about 6 seconds before it starts running a single test that was already compiled.

Previously:

Update (2022-04-09): Oddly, LaTeX does not seem to be any faster when running natively vs. in Rosetta. The MacBook Pro kernel panicked when logging in from the screen saver. After rebooting, XProtect hung waiting on XPC, and most apps would not respond to clicks until I rebooted again. That fixed the clicking problem, but then TCC said that various apps didn’t have Automation access, even though System Preferences showed them as checked.

Update (2022-04-11): Sir Ruben:

I have dual studio displays and I have noticed (when the screens are off) that the glass is coated with a different colour. One is green tinted and the other is purple tinted. I have looked at my old iMac and that had a purple tint to it also.

I have also found that when wiping the screens with a microfibre cloth the green tinted one grips the microfibre more, but it glides across the purple tinted one more easily.

Update (2022-04-13): I’m having problems with the Studio Display as a USB hub. While cloning to drives that are plugged into a hub attached to the display, my wired keyboard (also plugged into the display) delays some keypresses for a few seconds and repeats others. These are low-RPM spinning hard drives, so I don’t think they are using very much bandwidth. This does not occur when the keyboard is plugged directly into the MacBook Pro, however that uses up its last Thunderbolt port and makes it more ungainly as it now has cables sticking out of both sides of the BookArc. I also had a drive spontaneously unmount when moving the keyboard from the display to a direct connection.

Pierre Igot:

You can defend Apple’s current focus on core hardware performance by saying “a rising tide lifts all boats”, but how do you defend “drives sometimes take an hour to mount” and “up to 5 minutes before it shows a non-blank window”? (My experience too.)

Update (2022-04-19): I’ve now had three spontaneous logouts in less than two weeks. They occurred in different apps, sometimes with the Mac almost idle, so it’s not clear what might have triggered them. I don’t recall this ever happening with the iMac.