I have a new MacBook Air

[Ken Rennie]

My not terribly old windows laptop melted and so I have bought a new MacBook Air. At one point I used to use 4 completely different operating systems in the same day, Mac, Windows3 (I think), Atari a windows based system from Xerox, Mac OS was based on the same thing and BBC an early ARM based system. Unfortunately I am much older and my brain is finding it difficult to get to grips with the Mac but I will persevere. If you get any odd messages it could be me just pressing the wrong button. The laptop is a thing of beauty with a terrific keyboard but I can't find things. I will need to download files onto the SSD to see how fast it is and whether I can use it to run Photoshop/ Lightroom quickly, running from my NAS is just too slow. Ken

 

[Jameel Hyder]

Congratulations Ken. I also recently picked up a new MacBook Pro with the M1 processor. Needed to replace my laptop and agonized a lot between a Dell XPS and this. My desktop is Windows 11 which is what I am most comfortable with. Some of the Topaz plugins are still not native M1 so need to use them within Rosetta (which is an intel emulator). So far I am happy with the decision. Battery life is great and so is the processing power.

 

[JimFox]

Wow Ken!

I totally get you with the different operating systems, I do recall those days myself since I did lot's of programming back in the day.

I would never get a Mac, and wouldn't take one if anyone gave one to me. I still harbor too much ill will towards Apple in regards to how they used to brow beat and sue anyone who dared make any parts to work with the Macs back in the day. So that's just my issue, and why I will only support Window PC's with their open architecture.

But with that said, I know lot's of people do use Mac's who don't harbor old grudges, or perhaps that were not involved with computers in their infancy like I was. So I hope you get everything figured out, I am sure you will.

 

[AlanLichty]

Nice new toy Ken. I am yet another former IT guy who has supported PCs and Macs since they first came out and right up until I retired 7 years ago. I was mostly a unix guy so for me both PCs and Macs were toys until Apple switched to using a unix kernel underneath a graphics interface with OSX. I switched to Macs since I could keep using unix in xterm windows to support my work as a network and unix systems admin. Apple used to supply the whole GNU software suite including the compilers but recently buried that under their own software development suite. Happily I retired and don't care about programming any more.

The current releases of Topaz DeNoise AI and Sharpen AI do have native support for the M1 processors according to their web site. I still have an older Intel based MacBook Pro as my laptop but I am in need of a new desktop machine with at least double the 16GB I have in my MacBook Pro. I am scratching my head over the new Studio desktop Apple just introduced since I can configure one for 64GB of RAM.

I think you will find that the biggest hurdle to getting used to the Mac interface is overthinking what is needed to get things done.

 

[Ken Rennie]

Wow Ken!

I totally get you with the different operating systems, I do recall those days myself since I did lot's of programming back in the day.

I would never get a Mac, and wouldn't take one if anyone gave one to me. I still harbor too much ill will towards Apple in regards to how they used to brow beat and sue anyone who dared make any parts to work with the Macs back in the day. So that's just my issue, and why I will only support Window PC's with their open architecture.

But with that said, I know lot's of people do use Mac's who don't harbor old grudges, or perhaps that were not involved with computers in their infancy like I was. So I hope you get everything figured out, I am sure you will.

Jim I worked as an engineer for IBM from 1972 to 1975 so I have a history with computers. I built my desktop with top notch components a few years back but it is now starting to show its age especially using AI progs. Ken