OK, this is going to be of minority interest! Still, there are lots of academic users of Macs, and a substantial number of us use some flavour of LaTeX as our document processor for anything serious. So: if you are using TeXShop on a large document and hit "Typeset" on a new retina MacBook, just how well does it cope?
I have a partial draft book on the go, 275 large-format typeset pages, and a lot of category theory diagrams set using Tikz which notoriously slows things down (yep, if I were starting over, I might use another diagrams package, but that's quite another story!). So, averaging a number of runs, here are some relative typesetting speeds of the source code for the book using TeXShop and the 2015 MacTeX installation:
A bit of backstory here. I in fact bought an m3 twelve days ago. I didn't think to do exact timings, sorry, but I did do some side-by-side runs, and then my firm impression was that the MacBook was typesetting a long document no faster than the MacBook Air: and more generally, it was not as brisk a machine as the MBP (fair enough). So I wavered a bit but then returned it and ordered the m7 version instead (still with 256 SSD).
Now, some discussions here have implied that in "ordinary" light use (not gaming or video processing etc.), you wouldn't really notice the difference in speed, so I wasn't at all sure what to expect. Well, I can report that you will notice a significant increased snappiness if your everyday tool as a document processor is LaTeX, and you are typesetting every few minutes as you work. Up to you, of course, whether that is worth the upgrade cost -- but I'm happy to have taken the plunge.
Added: And a few days in, still happy to have made the upgrade, mainly for the LaTeX improvement -- but also e.g. I've had zero lags when web surfing on the m7 compared the occasional spinning beachballs on the m3.
I have a partial draft book on the go, 275 large-format typeset pages, and a lot of category theory diagrams set using Tikz which notoriously slows things down (yep, if I were starting over, I might use another diagrams package, but that's quite another story!). So, averaging a number of runs, here are some relative typesetting speeds of the source code for the book using TeXShop and the 2015 MacTeX installation:
- MacBook Air (13" Mid 2011) 1.7 Ghz Intel Core i5: 32.5 secs
- MacBook Pro (15" Mid 2015) 2.2 GHz Intel Core i7: 20.2 secs
- MacBook (12" Early 2016) 1.3 Ghz Intel Core m7: 24.9 secs
A bit of backstory here. I in fact bought an m3 twelve days ago. I didn't think to do exact timings, sorry, but I did do some side-by-side runs, and then my firm impression was that the MacBook was typesetting a long document no faster than the MacBook Air: and more generally, it was not as brisk a machine as the MBP (fair enough). So I wavered a bit but then returned it and ordered the m7 version instead (still with 256 SSD).
Now, some discussions here have implied that in "ordinary" light use (not gaming or video processing etc.), you wouldn't really notice the difference in speed, so I wasn't at all sure what to expect. Well, I can report that you will notice a significant increased snappiness if your everyday tool as a document processor is LaTeX, and you are typesetting every few minutes as you work. Up to you, of course, whether that is worth the upgrade cost -- but I'm happy to have taken the plunge.
Added: And a few days in, still happy to have made the upgrade, mainly for the LaTeX improvement -- but also e.g. I've had zero lags when web surfing on the m7 compared the occasional spinning beachballs on the m3.
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