Anyone using 2019 MacBookPro?

Discuss anything related to audio or music production.
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svankov
Posts: 13
Joined: Sat Jul 06, 2019 6:49 pm

Anyone using 2019 MacBookPro?

Post by svankov » Tue Oct 22, 2019 4:36 am

Have the 2.4ghz 8-core on the way. Not looking forward to the butterfly keyboard but I can live with it. Curious to hear what you think of it, if you have one. Surprisingly, I'm not finding much discussion about it.

How's the fan noise? Have you experienced any throttling? If you upgraded from an earlier MBP, did you find the performance boost significant? Anything about it that makes you regret the purchase?

I'm upgrading from a 2014 2.5ghz quad i7, which has served me well but starting to show its age.

Thanks!

sinusblitz
Posts: 1
Joined: Sat Nov 23, 2019 2:36 pm

Re: Anyone using 2019 MacBookPro?

Post by sinusblitz » Sat Nov 23, 2019 3:16 pm

Upgraded from a Mid-2012 MacBook Pro (maxed to: 16GB, 4x2.4GHz i7).
Now I'm using the maxed version of the 2019 MacBook Pro (32GB RAM, 8x2.4GHz i9).
Overall, the performance advantage is huge. Fan noise is calm. (actually it proofed already how loud it can be, but usually it never is)
I don't like the butterfly too, but it's not that important for me, as I almost always use it on a dock.

But: Currently I'm facing strange results. Don't know the exact reason by now. From time to time the whole system seems to stall. It happens every few hours. Sometimes minutes. Sometimes only a short noise - like if the latency was too low. (changing latency changes nothing) Most of the times audio completely stops for about a second. Worst cases result in loss of my audio interface (RME UFX). Ableton tells me, that "the device only has input channels" then. Sometimes I see the colored rotating ball mousecursor. Just restarting Ableton does not help. In most cases I have to do a full reboot. Once it was enough to hard-reset the audio interface.

After I could not find any conclusion, I thought it's maybe something with the power and bought an UPS. It did not change anything.
By the way: this MacBook is the cleanest setup I ever had. There is nothing installed beside Ableton, Max, some interface drivers and Vmware Fusion. I banned everything which is not related to audio production into virtual machines. Ah yes and I stayed on Mojave until now.

The virtual machines show similar behaviour. Every few hours, minutes or whatever, the machines freeze for a second. Sometimes, there is the colored rotating ball mousecursor too. The only difference is, that - beside I hate waiting for something without knowing any reason - the virtual machine is not dependant on anything like realtime like Ableton is, so after the stall, everything is fine again.

My current guess points to throttling. I really do not have an idea how to proof that. I did not see anything notable in Activity Monitor. Is there a way to see, at which time the CPU was throttling down? Or even if it is throttled right now? I know some tools on 30EUR Raspberry, but none on my 6000EUR MacBook.

I would really appreciate any idea what to change, how to monitor or anything else which could fix that problem for me.
It would also be very helpful to get further responses of MacBook Pro 2019 owners.

Cheers!

TLW
Posts: 809
Joined: Thu Aug 23, 2018 2:37 am

Re: Anyone using 2019 MacBookPro?

Post by TLW » Sat Nov 23, 2019 4:12 pm

Intel’s power gadget can be useful for showing what the cpu is doing in real time. Power used, clock, temperature etc.
Live 10 Suite, 2020 27" iMac, 3.6 GHz i9, MacOS Catalina, RME UFX, assorted synths, guitars and stuff.

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