Oh yes, Rome is exciting!
Have a look at this - upgrading Ram isnāt as straight forward as I thought itād beā¦ āItās clearly designed to discourage users to upgrade Ram - unlike past Mac miniāsā
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Thanks, that video is quite useful! Doing the RAM upgrade seems a bit annoying but still doable.
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Are AMD Chips laptops Linux friendly?
Do Linux distros include all the required drivers for this chipsets?
I have a Lenovo with finger print reader and finally gave up trying to make it work. Of course I donāt need it but itās nice to have.
What are your comments,
Best regards
Yes AMD chips work with Linux. Finger print readers on laptops are known not to work due to drivers.
Regarding AMD, they let out more details on Rome today:
https://semiaccurate.com/2018/11/09/amds-rome-is-indeed-a-monster/
(For those who donāt know that web site, the guy is extremely opinionated, very negative about Intel, and in the 2 years since I started reading the site he has turned out to be right every single time he posted something negative about Intel, so I trust his opinion that starting in 2019 AMD is going to take a huge lead on Intel in server performanceā¦)
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Thought Iād link this here. Very interesting take on the Apple::Intel relationship. Plus look at those iPad Pro benchmarks! Apple seriously need to give them an OS that can use all that ooomph!
From that article:
The new Air is exactly that: the MacBook most people should buy, and exactly the MacBook everyone has been asking Apple to make.
Yes, but not at that ridiculous price 
IMO 16GB ram and 512GB HD is minimum for a modern computer unless you are a casual user or rely on things like iCloud 
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More friendly than any other, they even open source the great majority (trying for all depending on what they are allowed to release) their drivers, such as the AMD Radeon driver is open sourced into Mesa.
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For those interested in the Airā¦
Donāt Buy the New MacBook Air
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I watched that along with a few of his other videos. Canāt say I disagree, there doesnāt seem to be many advantages for the Air over the Pro. I think the only one that Iād factor in would be the newer and hopefully more reliable keyboard.
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Another scathing video - this time about the Mac Mini:
And I have to say, I have changed my mind since saying this:
That was probably one of their best live events/launches Iāve seen in a long while
On paper, it all looked good, but the price/performance appears to be worse than it ever has been for Apple products. I would love to get a 2018 MBA but I refuse to do so on principle! I love Apple products, but I canāt stand companies that screw their customers - what happened to good, honest business - where companies care about their customers? 
The above video: āDonāt buy the MacBook Airā is showing that even though the MacBook 12" is a little more āexpensiveā than the new MBA, itās performing more stably ā and if you really need a lightweight machine you should probably buy the 12" variant anyway since the MBA has fans which can get clogged if you often use it on a sofa or a bedā¦
My main gripe with Appleās computers are the subpar CPUs. If I want a desktop machine with a solid CPU I either have to buy the maxed out iMac 27" 5k (ā¬5000) or any of the iMac Pro variants which are quite expensive and the maximum configuration goes to ā¬14000.
Everything else uses i5 CPUsā¦ Seriously!
As it is, we have no affordable options if we want to develop on a programmer-friendly desktop Mac. 
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After using Macbook 2017 (non-touch bar) for 6 months (in comparison with 2 years using 2015 macbook pro):
Cons:
- I donāt know why, but newer generation of macbooks (air and pro) are so easy to get hot. Right now, with my Macbook Pro 2017, Iām just coding some Elixir and JS with emacs and browsing the web with Firefox. The machineās fan is buzzing like crazy. Looking at Activity Monitor, nothing, no app/program that has significant CPU usage. This never happened to my 2015 macbook pro.
- The keyboard is awful. Really awful. Not exaggerating here, but the typing is so loud, *clack *click *clack.
- Battery life is disappointing. Portability has its price.
Pros:
- Portability. It is lighter than the 2015 model.
- Trackpad is better.
The graphic quality is probably the same. I play Dota 2. Not much difference.
I wonder if itās more to do with latest OS releases? I donāt think theyāre anywhere near as efficient as they make out.
I notice my fans go overdrive when:
- Doing a time machine back up via usb
- Downloading any large files off the internet
- Using graphically intensive programs
- Lots of tabs in safari
Iām still on High Sierra. Mojave is nothing more than cosmetic stuffs.
This 2017 macbook pro is definitely worse than 2015 model.
battery life => downgraded 
ports (HDMI, USB2, etc) => downgraded (letās hope they wonāt remove the headphone jack)
keyboard => downgraded
magsafe => removed
graphic (3D gaming) => stagnated
webcam quality => stagnated
But hey, at least Macbooks work all right, unlike Windows that keeps doing blue screen of death without clear reason.
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The fans working more might be related to your SSD being encrypted. I turned off my encryption; if I lose my MacBook, I am screwed anyway.
Mojave fixed a bunch of security problems though, donāt stay on an older version of macOS.
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Yeah good point - encryption is on!
Why have you turned it off? At least if itās on your content canāt be accessed by anyone else - without it anyone can access your content even without your passwordā¦
Well, turned out that I lied.
I mistook the FileVault encryption being on for the reason my MBP was regularly turning its fans to 6000RPM. I was wrong though; it simply wasnāt cleaned for a while. So I brought it to a local service shop where they dusted it and changed its thermal paste. Shortly after I re-enabled FileVault and still havenāt had any overheating / fans-on-overdrive problems.
My bad, sorry! In my defense, I remember reading a few people in the Apple forums claiming their MacBooks started spinning the fans less after turning off FileVault. But yeah, I am not gonna do that. I have company data, some database dumps and proprietary code on my machines; they have to be encrypted else I am being unprofessional.
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