Speed improvements from running Xojo on M1 Mac

Yes, especially mine … :poop: … now I hate you all even more … :face_with_symbols_over_mouth:

: :grin:

Unless you really need the trade value, keep the 2019. Use that for your virtualization platform. Windows testing is more complicated than just “a version of Windows” and you’ll probably want to maintain Windows 7, Windows 10, and Windows 11 VMs.

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I hadn’t noticed - but I’m using my old MBP now, and its fan is running even though all I’m doing is browsing the web and doing a little texting. The new one is indeed dead silent, I don’t know what it would take to get its fans running - or maybe they’re just dead silent, too?

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I’d agree in a world where my income was such to allow me to do so - at the moment though things are a little tough so I need to make the decision to either future proof myself for a number of years and get a performance gain or live with the 2019 MBP and if things improve then go buy an M1 based solution.

The other consideration is at 2 years old the MacBook has done a lot of work and I don’t have cover on it so if it breaks I am in trouble.

What would be the value of the MBP do you think - MBP 15.3” Touchbar - i7, 16GB, 256GB Storage. ?

Get your serial number and check for yourself: Apple Trade In - Apple. In my experience, their prices have been better than third parties. Since yours is a 2019, it’s probably got a good amount of value on it. I think if money is tight, keep what you have. That 2019 will serve you better than a MacBook Air, especially since virtualization is a concern. Yes, you don’t have a way to test on M1, but if you can’t have both, stick with the Intel for now.

This is not m1 specific, but many of us are seeing good speedupd by pre-unzipping plugins - See Unzipped Plugins - still possible? - #51 by Mike_D

Another improvement is to deal with external images loaded when needed, not dropped on the Navigation pane.

In the case of App.icns, your gain is 11MB for a single icon (a macOS Icon fully populated).

Your project load / save time will drop significantly after that siùp^le modification.

Ask if this is not crystal clear.

You’ll get a G for your 2019 right now if it’s in reasonable shape (you just won’t get it from a dealer as a trade-in). The jump from that to a new M1 starts to look less insurmountable after you get the check for your old one in hand.

Even though I am fortunate enough to have a new M1 MacBook Pro, I still do lots of work on my Mac mini 2012 (I stuck a big screen on it and when you get to be my age a big screen becomes more and more necessary for some stuff). It runs my Python IDE and the only reason I stopped using Visual Studio on it is that the new version doesn’t support High Sierra (because the new Xcode doesn’t).

You’ll still get plenty of use out of the 2019. My 2012 runs all my music and graphics production programs too. So does my 2015 MacBook Pro. Except for the operating system constraints, these things seem to last for an awfully long time.

I still have that too; but the 2012 won’t go past dual 2560x1440 displays. Which I used for years, but when one died the cost of replacing it vs going to a 40" 4k TV was only about $20 USD. So I went that route and never looked back – except that I cannot do 4k on a 2012 mini. You need at least the 2014 mini to do that. So now my 2012 mini just runs headless to perform various tasks. Replaced the 5400rpm drive with internal SDD nearly a decade ago, and the thing hums along just fine.

When I got my Mac Mini M1 last year, I ran GeekBench on my previous 2015 27" iMac, and on it. It was simply twice as fast.

For a good comparison, it should be done single core, since Xojo apps are single core. Note that multiple cores performances may be important when compiling, since Xojo uses several cores in that case.

https://browser.geekbench.com/search?q=mac+mini

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I don’t have to worry about my elderly devices handling 4K because I’m not that ambitious. My old 43 inch HD TV is just fine. By the time it kicks the bucket, maybe 4K will have come down to HD prices and I’ll pick up one rather than surf and code on my existing fleet of old second hand monitors.

Nothing picks up an old computer like a swap from a hard drive (especially a 2.5 inch 5400 RPM) to a halfway decent SSD. For a hundred bucks and change I can hand a customer a brand new machine just by eliminating those moving parts. Especially if the Mini’s got some headroom. Mine can run a file/DNS/VNC/email server and a VPN with tons of horsepower to spare. Like you, I can’t imagine retiring such a useful multi-purpose device. They’re still asking pretty good money for them too, Otherwise I’d have eight of them.

Not only did replacing my failing 27" 2560x1440 only cost about $20 more to jump to 40" 4k, the energy savings compared to my 27 inch “energy saver” model has already paid for the new TV. New TVs take a fraction of the power of old second had monitors – even if LCD/LED and “energy saver” at the time.

I too have a fleet of old monitors, but there is literally no reason to use them anymore – they cost more to plug in and run than to replace.

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Though I’m happy with my old 1080p TV as a TV (basketball games look great on it though photos do suffer), I’m not a fan of how text looks compared to even an average computer monitor. Considering the relative energy savings per square inch, 4K is indeed starting to look good. Too bad I crushed the piggy bank into powder with this obscenely expensive MacBook purchase (for which I am not in the least sorry for).

Yes, don’t use a TV less than 4K as a monitor. But even a cheap 4K TV should look pretty good, if running at 4K. Which a 2012 mac mini cannot do, but 2014 can. I quite literally barely paid more for a 40" 4k tv than a 27" 2560x1440 replacement monitor. And the energy savings paid for the new TV.

Would a real 4k or 5k monitor look better yet? Sure, but I was going cheap. And using mostly for IDE and similar work, not photo/video editing and graphic design. IMHO, for the price it was a no brainer.

YMMV.

No one’s going to care about this, but I noticed I stuck an extra “for” at the end of my previous post’s last sentence. When attempting to edit, the web page told me that I had posted too long ago and my sad error could not be rectified. So posterity will just have to adopt to a world where poor grammar is perpetuated needlessly.

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Sorry to be off-topic. Should I send this message privately? I debated but this may help others like me.

You can flag your post and ask a moderator to edit/fix what you need want. Click the 3 dots below your post and click the Flag icon.

English is not my first language and by far is not something I do perfectly. I do us
Grammarly to try to avoid many errors.

When I was quoting you, it reported this:
image
It may help you or others that want to have fewer errors. I don’t think is perfect but without it, I’m sure my posts should contain many more errors.

Hope this helps.

I’m resurrecting this thread because I’ve just run some tests on my wife’s shiny new Mac Studio, which is running the M1 Max with 64GB of RAM and 8TB of storage.

Here’s how long it takes each of the following Macs to run a debug build of my desktop project in Xojo 2022.1.1:

  • 2017 iMac, quad-core i7: 92 seconds
  • M1 MacBook Air: 67 seconds
  • M1 Max Mac Studio: 50 seconds

Xojo’s only able to use a single processor core for most of the time it takes to run a debug build, so once again I’d like to highlight this feature request and ask you to up-vote it if you’d benefit from it.

Can anyone at Xojo comment on how feasible it is to take advantage of multiple processor cores at more stages of the debug build process?

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We’d also like to see Xojo adopt some changes to their Workers class to make it easier for us (Xojo customers) to add multi-core processing to our applications. I’ve spoken at length in the past about the features that I’d like to see.

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As the owner of an iMac Pro the only time I have seen multiple cores used (other than Workers and Console apps) is in Aggressive building. Even then it doesn’t seem to use all the available cores.

If someone gets the potential new M2 Mac Pro, it will have way more grunt than mine, but will Xojo use it all?

I would like multiple cores usage when examining Plugins, debugging all apps, building apps (use all cores), and when running Web Apps (could we have one core per Session and put idle Sessions to sleep?).

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I see multiple cores being used only near the end of launching a debug build, when a few houdiniassistant processes start running.

I’d love to see all of that too, but running debug builds is the biggest disruption to my concentration at the moment. Launching Xojo and building apps happens less frequently and not normally when I’m in the middle of a code → test → repeat cycle.