I had a 2015 M5, it was easily one of the best Macs I've owned. Ultra-ultra-ultra portable, I had great battery life with mine, and it was as fast as my 2013 Macbook Pro. I used it as my daily driver for 3 years before I got a new job (and a new work-issued laptop). Paired with a monitor that provided USB-C power (there were a few at the time, I got one of the Philips displays) it got me through several sizeable web dev projects. It's only just been retired, as the battery finally made it unusable, and now its logic board (and 2 others: my wife's 2015 Macbook and a lucky score on eBay) are part of a 3-machine cluster with Ubuntu installed, because why not... each one just has a USB-c power/ethernet dongle plugged into it, and I've got a little compute cluster that punches way above its weight for the amount of space it takes up (and the power it consumes, which is very little, especially with the display removed).
If you could buy SBCs based on the m5, I'd eat them up.
Some say this brave adventurer met his end when the 5110 fought back against the insult to its sacred internals.
Others say bestowing the power of 4G on a device as formidable as the 5110 opened a portal to realms hitherto unknown, to which our hero travelled, and we'll meet him again someday.
But my guess? He's still out there, trying to make the dream of a 4G-enabled 5110 a reality. And I still have hope for a "Part 2".
I survived with a 12" Macbook and a solitary USB-C port. The one difference is that I did have an audio jack as well.
I found a monitor that had a USB-C connection with charging, a USB hub, ethernet etc. (of which there were very few back in 2015). When I was somewhere other than my own desk, the Apple HDMI dongle was more than good enough.
The only "this sucks" scenario was when I had the opportunity to use multiple external models, but couldn't. Aside from that, I don't regret getting that laptop.
No, I don't believe that it would be. In terms of "calories expended over distance", it'd be pretty close, but we're made for endurance, not raw speed. From what I understand, the energy budget of the human body is tuned for 2 things: neurological activity (the energy consumption of which far exceeds any other animal on earth) and endurance.
It's what makes us such terrifying hunters... prey can outrun us but then when they invariably have to stop to recover, we eventually just turn up and they have to keep running again.
So, any activity where you're cranking the ol' powerhouse up to 120% and going for a run is going to incur a cost, both in terms of energy consumption (which, as the post demonstrates, is slightly more efficient than a fast-paced walk), but then also the resultant metabolic waste which needs to be eliminated, which is a process that takes place during recovery in the 24hrs or so after you've completed your "efficient" 7-minute mile, and I don't believe the article takes this into account.
I watched an interesting video recently (I think it was Kurzgesagt?) that talks about the illusion of high-intensity activity vs low-intensity but longer-duration activity.
I got into the game "kinda late" (first PC ran DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.1), and I still cherish and adore the CLI, and can't imagine it ever going away (if it does, a little piece of me will die with it). The look on the faces of a fresh crop of 20-something developers when you pull out a one-liner and/or some regex never gets old, and I still consider myself very unskilled compared to the folks who have lived and breathed bash/csh/zsh/tcsh etc for the past 30-40 years.
"The look on the faces of a fresh crop of 20-something developers"... My equivalent is doing a data reformat or analysis on a big dataset that someone has been struggling with in (please excuse my language) Excel. The data owner's eyes widen and they say something like "Wow! That's so fast and simple! How come I never heard of this stuff?"
Good question about "Old". In Australia there's at least one well-defined cut-off: 75 years. If you're 75 or older:
- when you die your death isn't classed as "premature", and demographers don't assign you any "potential years of life lost"
- you're no longer invited to have screening for bowel, breast or cervical cancer screening (invites go to 50-74 year-olds)
I have:
1. An old i3 running TrueNAS after I decided my QNAP TS-503 was too old and shonky to be able to run Plex;
2. An ex-govt i5-6500 with 32GB RAM for miscellaneous development activities;
3. An RPi 4 that runs prometheus/grafana for monitoring;
4. A Khadas Vim3 that currently runs some crypto-related analytics, but is mostly for fun/experimentation;
5. A 2015 Macbook (12") that's been gutted all the way down to the logic board, with a combination power/ethernet dongle hanging off it, running Linux as a headless machine for more mucking around/non-serious stuff;
6. A work-issued Macbook Pro (M1 Pro);
7. A Windows desktop with a Ryzen 5 2600, 32GB RAM, a 2Tb nvme and a 1660Ti for gaming;
8. Aforementioned QNAP TS-503 gathering dust.
If I'd change anything, I'd turn the Khadas into a media PC and plug it into my TV and retire my broken old AppleTV (some older generation that doesn't allow installing apps), I'll inherit my wife's 12" Macbook and add wire it up the same way as the other one, and then get rid of the i5 and bring the power consumption down a bit (the Core M-5 in the 12" Macbook is surprisingly powerful, and with the I/O on the Macbook, it'd beat the i5 hands-down, aside from the RAM limitations). At some point I'd love to build a small cluster of ARM boards when they step up in capability a bit (and when I can find some reasonably priced ones that can support 32GB RAM or more), and then any dev stuff I do can run in minikube or something similar. I'd like to play around with RISC-V at some point too.
For your purposes... I'd recommend a thin formfactor with a decent CPU, 64GB RAM and as much storage as you can stuff into it, then run TrueNAS.
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