Some Praise of 2023 Mac Pro M2 Ultra and (mostly) macOS Ventura

2023-08-07 • SEND FEEDBACK |
Related: 2019 Mac Pro, Apple, Apple 2023 Mac Pro M2 Ultra, Apple Core Rot, Apple macOS, Apple macOS Ventura, Apple Silicon, command line, GPU, Mac Pro, Photoshop, Terminal.app, video tech

re: Apple Core Rot

Never though you'd read that title? Well, it's exaggerated a bit, but praise where praise is due.

Once the initial sloppy-engineering bugs were worked out in macOS Ventura 13.5, like infinite kernel panics and slow mode after sleep and destroying my admin account on my MacBook Pro and broken screen captures, things have been working pretty well with macOS Ventura and the 2023 Mac Pro M2 Ultra. Meaning there surely are lots of nasty problems left but I am fortunate to not be running into any of them.

The Mostly Good

• The 2023 Mac Pro M2 Ultra is the fastest machine I’ve ever used. And nearly silent, even under heavy CPU and GPU load. Virtually everything runs so fast that I can say it has little effect on my efficiency, which never before in history has been the case.
  Two exceptions remain, one inexcusable since it is clearly poor software engineering: my most important task in Photoshop. The 2nd is Adobe Camera Raw AI Denoise, which is GPU intensive... but I can’t complain as it is far faster than my 28-core 2019 Mac Pro.
• PCIe SSD performance is the best it has ever been. Hoping to get that pair of OWC Accelsior 8M2 PCIe SSDs within a few weeks to see if 40GB/sec is possible.
• Rebooting is reliable and very fast; no more scary-as-hell reboot-5-times as on the 2019 Mac Pro Apple self immolating OS.
• Hashing speed eg data integrity checking via IntegrityChecker Java is twice as fast as my 2019 Mac Pro.

The bad engineering that still intrudes

Fixable, but when or ever?

• Every day, many times a day, Terminal loses its command-key shortcuts and I have to quit and restart it as the only solution which means killing any other operations, so I cannot always do that. What a mess. Since I use Terminal more than any other program and more often, this is a major nuisance.
• Photoshop black window bug. A new behavior in PS that maybe is GPU related.
• Display syncing works better (faster, more reliable in general) but worse if the system is allowed to sleep; the 2nd display takes too long to sync resulting in jumbled icons, windows, palettes all shoveled over to the main display requiring several minutes to clean up.
• Energy-wasting: I cannot use sleep mode because of the point above making such a mess of things.
• Broken/useless Parallels virtual machines. No solution possible except to run on older Intel machines. Parallels could fix this via emulation, but instead makes up marketing lies.