thx evry1 for the input,
after some more research I try to get hold of an
allmost unused 2023 16" Macbook Pro M2 with 16gb ram and 512gb storage.
a second hand store not far away is selling it for about 600 € less than a new one. I consider this a good deal.
any advice what I should check before buying it? ( the battery is at 97% with 28 cycles)
Used Mac: check the physical ports, make sure they function. Like any used device.
But in particular: make sure the computer wasn’t previously provisioned to some organization and not de-authorized. System Preferences > Profiles should show “no profiles installed”.
You can always reset back to nothing, can’t you? Won’t that get rid of any past crapware on there?
No, it writes to firmware and must be ‘disenrolled’. Item #7 in the link here.
Actually, Stephan – or anyone else – this is a terrific short writeup on everything to check when buying a used mac.
Some of you will recall that I journeyed into Windows, but I’m back on Mac.
I had a 2011 17" MBP that finally died in 2018, which led me to purchase what I think was the last version of the Intel MBP. That thing practically melted on my lap running VCV. The fans were screaming. It also had a problem with its T2 chip, which its touchbar ‘screen’ required; this caused audio glitches and was much discussed on audio forums. No firmware updates were able to cure it.
I needed a laptop and bought a powerful HP Zbook, which is a massive, heavy beast of a machine and a legbreaker. It was fine with VCV, but Windows is just so monstrously painful with audio, MIDI, OSC, etc. On a Mac, everything is seamless, and routing audio, etc., is so easy - hardware, software, whatever you want to do with it. Your iPad and iPhone just work with it.
I bought a first gen M1 MBP and am overjoyed with it in comparison. I’ve been on 32Gb since 2011 and only ever got out-of-memory messages when I have many tens of browser tabs that I have forgotten about. I never had any problems with not having enough memory with samplers or editing videos.
You won’t regret moving to an ARM Mac; you’ll just kick yourself for not having done it before 
thank you all for your advice.
I’m writing this post from my new MacBook Pro 2022 M1 16gb 512 14" ( it still got a 1 year warranty for exchange at my home) .
I have it now for 2 hours and try to learn how to use it,
but I can say VCV runs fine!
one question tho, can I install VCV for Rosetta and VCV for Arm both parallel on it?
I know I have seen ppl here install both arm and Rosetta, although I don’t know the details. But a nice now mac and already wanting to run abandonware on it? ok…
I think they will drop the rosetta version as soon as ALL the IMPORTANT modules are ARM64 ready
Sure, but the abandoned modules are really that important to ppl? In know Instruo modules are cool (some of them), but there are an awful lot of other good one. Why not just use Surge instead? If the devs can’t be bothered to update them after a year or so, why depend on them?
Congratulations!
Yes, but if using Rack Pro I’m pretty sure that you can only use one of them in the DAW, and that should be the last one you install. So say you want to use Intel DAW and therefor Intel Rack Pro in it, you would first install the ARM version of Rack, then rename it to e.g. “VCV Rack 2 Pro ARM.app”, and then install the Intel version of Rack.
I doubt that. There are still a lot of Rack users on Intel Mac’s and I believe there were still Intel Mac’s being sold new as late as 6 months ago.
I was more thinking about the users… they will not install 2 versions of Rack when they don’t have to, so when All the modules are ready for ARM64, what’s the use of installing the x64 version? (when on a M1 M2 or M3 etc) 
Of course predicting what APL will do is a fools game, but I’m a fool, so… It doesn’t really matter that they made intel macs recently. What matters is that when the M1 came out there were a significant number of apps that hadn’t ported. Now all apps are ported, so there is no “need” for Rosetta.
The only things that haven’t been ported are almost by definition abandonware, yes?
Some of them sure but otherwise just slow moving or awaiting developer back from AWOL (hi Antonio). Jason from Instruo said a couple of days ago on Facebook that Instruo will definately be ported to ARM, it’s just not been a top priority for them.
I meant in the context of Apple deciding to discontinue Rosetta. I think we would both agree that the availability of Instruo modules would not be a significant factor in Apple’s decision making.
I was thinking of starting a laptop thread too, looking at replacing my Dell G7 gaming machine from late 2019 this year. It’s a 4.7Ghz i7 so runs fairly complex patches but the fan noise is annoying, and it only lasts an hour or so running VCV on battery. Seems the concensus is Mac and that’s fine, I’m not keen on Apple but don’t have any allegiance to a particular OS or chip manufacturer. Couple of points though:
Is the new M3 chip any better for VCV? Any thoughts on the new Intel Meteor Lake CPUs?
Also I read somewhere that Apple claim performance is as good on battery as it is plugged in. What’s people’s experience of this? I can’t run my patches unless I’m on mains, especially processing external audio, it breaks up straight away on battery. Meteor Lake seems gimmicky to me, neural processor, AI etc…single core speed/performance is still the main factor. So I’ll probably go Macbook pro, but still a lot of research to do.
Found this interesting, quite thorough and worth a look.
that is a good video. tx.
Yeah, good video and good test. My take-aways:
Not all manufacturers have fully honed in on how to use a big.LITTLE architecture like Apple Silicon to the max. It’s not completely surprising and it means that, as has always been the case, and especially where multicore performance is concerned - that when you ask “is this CPU faster than that CPU?” the answer is “maybe, but what software are you using?”.
If your need is largely driven by single-core performance, which a lot of software is, and here I would to a large extent include Rack standalone, M2 is better than M1 and M3 is better than M2.
If your need is largely driven by multi-core performance, such as lots of tracks in a DAW, then depending on the software used an M1 can actually be better than an M2, and an M2 better than an M3. This is obviously a curious fact.
It would be interesting to take a deep dive into the considerations of Apple to decrease the ratio of performance/efficiency cores. I haven’t read their technical materials so don’t know.
But bottom line, and this has actually always been the case: Know your chips, know your workload and know your software. Simple blanket answers such as “X is better than Y” have a not insignificant chance of simply being wrong or misleading. As always, only testing reveals the real answer.
So in the light of the above - if running Rack standalone, with max. 3-4 threads, probably yes but not by a huge margin. If running Rack Pro in a DAW, then maybe yes but depends on the DAW, as can be seen in the video, but not by a huge margin.
I think the best way of viewing the evolution of M1->M2->M3 machines is incremental improvements to performance across the board - CPU and memory performance, efficiency, battery life, GPU performance etc. but with the caveats that especially where multi-core performance is concerned, your software is a significant factor. Also note that there are now 4 stratas of the Apple Silicon chips (standard to Ultimate, or something), and especially where multicore and graphics is concerned that choice is quite significant, but with moderate graphics consumption and largely single-core software, such as Rack standalone, it hardly matters.
I believe that macOS is simply tuned to mostly run full tilt on battery as well as powered, unlike Intel machines and Windows which typically throttle performance a lot on battery, out of shere necessity, simply because the Apple chips run so much more cooler and efficient. So the battery life of the new Macs is insanely good, but you should still count on plugging it in after a while, just later than a Windows machine.
Past doesn’t predict future etc but with ppc to intel it was 4-5 years from last ppc on sale to an os which didn’t have the then-Rosetta.
I think last Intel Mac left Apple Store last year so my guess is 3/4 years of Rosetta available in the os at least.