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:
- Apple Sales Support and Apple Card
- Luna Display to Use an Old iMac 5K As a Display
- New Mac Studio and Studio Display Change Mac Buying Calculus
- Studio Display
- Please Shrink the Trackpad
- MacBook Pro 2021
- Upgrading to a 16-inch MacBook Pro
- My 2017 iMac
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.
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.
See also: Jeff Johnson.
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Hi,
I'm using my 2014 5K Retina iMac as secondary monitor for my 2020 5K Retina iMac without Target Display Mode.
I've tried two solutions: AirServer (limited to 1080p) and the USB-C Luna Display dongle.
Even though the Luna Display offered 5K resolution for the secondary monitor, the connection was too unstable, so I'm OK using AirPlay despite being limited to 1080p.
To be honest, AirPlay is not 100% stable either but good enough for my needs and much easier to manage than having to launch two separate apps, one on the main computer, the other on the secondary one.
Have you ever tried any of those options?
With regard to the migration speed, there was just some discussion in TidBITS Talk about how host-to-host transfers are limited to 10 Gbps by the Thunderbolt spec, rather than the 20 Gbps or 40 Gbps, you get with host-to-peripheral.
https://talk.tidbits.com/t/migration-strategy-for-moving-to-a-new-mac-studio/18684?u=ace
It spent a long time deleting old backups, even though there should have been plenty of free space…
This would have scared the shit out of me and caused me to abort whatever Time Machine was doing.
The unexpected slowness sounds like issues I had with BlockBlock when first using my M1 Pro. Disabling it made everything quick again.
@Adam Interesting. I think that’s still faster than the USB 3 hub that I’ve been using when making clones. So to me it seems like a software issue or overhead due to target disk mode.
@vintner Fortunately, I don’t really trust Time Machine. I have multiple target drives, one of which got rotated to cold storage just before this migration. It’s not clear there would have been a way to fix it, so I just let it finish what it was doing.
@Simon Good to know, but I am not using BlockBlock or any similar utility. My best guess is that it’s related to an APFS snapshot being in use.
Spotlight indexing kept mine slower than usual for a few days then it finished and was up to par with speed reports.
Apple says the Studio Display has "Three downstream USB-C ports (up to 10Gb/s) for connecting peripherals, storage, and networking" (https://www.apple.com/studio-display/specs/), which I think is their way of saying those ports only do USB, not USB-C Alternate Modes, such as DisplayPort, so I'm not surprised it didn't work with USB-C-to-DisplayPort. But the fact that technical people like us are discussing this is a failure of the USB group and Apple to make it clear.
The login background is now part of the Signed System Volume; it unfortunately can't be changed without going through a whole rigamarole of unsealing, modifying, booting a snapshot, and not being able to go back. Sadly.
The lack of Target Display Mode on 5K iMacs is a huge bummer. There’s hundreds of thousands if not millions of them that are going to be dumped. I wish there was a better way to repurpose them.
You can find old 5k iMacs for $500 on Craigslist!
@Eric Any idea why the login background is different on different Macs (with the same macOS version) if it’s part of the SSV?
I have similar thoughts about the performance of the M1.
I have been impressed with what it does in my personal MacBook Air.
When it comes to the MacBook Pros, I'm not sure the Pro/Max/Ultra really does much except help with highly parallelized workloads, which is not really what either of us are doing/needing. Everything seems snappy, no complaints (except docker, but I can't fault the M1 Pro/Max/Ultra for that). Somehow the MBP Max I have used doesn't seem like it's all that much better than the Air. It kind of makes sense given the clock speeds are the same, but the marketing is a little misleading imo. The Max/Ultra chips seem like an over-purchase for anyone other than video editors or animators.
I'm very curious how these chips feel inside of a Mac Studio, given the cooling system. From what I could tell at the Apple Store, it seems like it moves A LOT of air even when idling. There were already dust bunnies building up on the intake vents on the bottom of the unit.
Wasn't expecting to care much about the Studio display, but I was ended up impressed in person.
Strange that you can't wake your MBP when it's in clamshell mode. I just bash away at the spacebar a couple of times until it wakes. Might be because I have a wired keyboard connected to the monitor that also provides power for the MBP.
Not a Studio Display though.
@ Kristoffer: I think he's saying he shut it off entirely and wants to turn it on externally. Not sleep/wake; shut down/power on.
> When it comes to the MacBook Pros, I'm not sure the Pro/Max/Ultra really does much except help with highly parallelized workloads
They don't — even the M1 Ultra has the same Firestorm cores at the same 3.2 Ghz clock as the regular M1. However, the memory bandwidth is higher, and even a single core will benefit from that slightly. So in memory-heavy stuff, it'll be a tad faster. (The regular M1 has about 67 GiB/s, whereas the higher ones have hundreds of GiBs/s. AnandTech's measurements show a single core using ~102 GiB/s. https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review/2)
But yes, unless you have very highly parallelized (and/or GPU-focused) workloads, there's really no point in the Ultra. And unless you use the GPU much, there's no point in the Max over the Pro either.
@Kristoffer I use a wired keyboard and can wake it in clamshell mode. But I can’t turn it on if it was shut down.
> 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 realize this maybe isn’t a particularly helpful comment, but these performance issues seem way outside what I’ve come to expect on an M1 Air. It’s probably not an underlying issue with the Mac’s hardware since it has persisted across machines. How many drives do you normally have connected? Admittedly I normally use the machine without external storage attached.
For comparison, here’s the kind of performance I usually see:
· OmniOutliner documents open instantly
· I haven’t used Apple Mail for the past year; MailMate never locks up though
· Rarely see system freezes or beachballs. Haven’t seen any storage responsiveness issues. But I have had the system lock up completely (without a kernel panic) 4 or 5 times on Big Sur
· Finder seems to update folder contents promptly (can’t remember the last time I noticed it not updating)
· Disk mounting usually occurs in seconds, and never takes more than a minute. For example, plugging in a 2TB SanDisk USB-C SSD, with 4 encrypted APFS volumes: each password prompt appears in ~6 seconds. Skipping the first three volumes and mounting the fourth, takes ~6 seconds after entering my password. The mounted volume is ~800 GB with 18 snapshots.
· With the same SSD attached, Disk Utility is ready in under a second.
· I have had issues with Photos before, but none in recent memory
@Ghost I normally have 5 external storage devices attached to the iMac or new MacBook Pro. They are a mix of SSD and spinning hard drives, APFS and HFS+. I also see these issues with my Intel MacBook Pro, which has either zero or one (different) device attached and with the Intel MacBook Air that I use as a server. IIRC, most of the problems started with Big Sur; I think the Apple Mail one may date to Catalina. I didn’t start using Photos until recently (because of problems introduced with Image Capture).
Hi Michael. Thanks for SpamSieve – it makes life better. Looking forward to a native M1 EagleFiler.
I had all kinds of trouble with my M1 Max MBP (got the Max for the 32GB of RAM for serious multitasking including media applications) until I stopped trying to use USB video. I have my M1 Max plugged into a WD D50 dock (both at home and work; the NVME slot is very fast 2.6 MB/sec but make the dock too hot, remove it) and at home where I have three monitors, I've daisychained an Akitio ThunderDock 2 to the WD D50.
The reason to do this is to run two monitors, power and almost unlimited USB via a single cable – theoretically with USB-C video one could have two monitors with a single dock. But then everything gets buggy (as you've noted). For the third monitor in clamshell mode (you could use your M1 Pro built-in screen as the third screen), I use the built-in HDMI port.
What do I do with the other two Thunderbolt ports on the M1 MBP? I use them for Thunderbolt drives.
The single cable for regular use is extremely important as I take the M1 Max back and forth between home and office daily. Dealing with more than a single cable to undock a laptop has always been awful, although MagSafe helped make at least the power part bearable (with a dedicated charger brick at each primary location, and an extra for travel).
My experience has been that any new Mac setup with Migration Assistant always has weird lingering issues.
Have you tried setting up a secondary new user account and testing mounting, etc there?
@CM Yes, I see the same issues in a fresh user account and also on a brand new Mac where I didn’t use Migration Assistant.
