Mac 2020 M1

Hello

I bought the new Apple MacBook Pro M1.

I’ve had issues with this computer spinning on the rainbow wheel during the simplest of tasks, such as zooming in on a drawing. The old Mac I traded in (2013) never did this.

Contacted Apple, we did OS re-install as a suggested fix.

This “M1” was advertised as 'the fastest in the land" so to speak and even with OS re-install I’m still getting the rainbow wheel upon a simple drawing zoom - once in front of a customer where I had to cancel the meeting because I couldn’t continue working.

Apple (a random employee) suggested it’s possibly SketchUp that is the problem.

Would anyone have any thoughts, experience, advice on this topic?

I regret trading in the old 2013 model.

Cheers

Daniel

Search results for ‘mac M1’ - SketchUp Community

Not seeing much on there aside from excitement of the new M1 release back in Nov 2020. The lighting fast speed Apple suggests with this new chip never happened on my computer.

It’s not as simple as just “faster” suggests (but marketing likes to put things simple).

There exists strong bias on what benchmarks you select. Benchmarks focus on different computing workloads and a processor shown to be good in one is not necessarily good in another. Ideally you sell your product by choosing a benchmark that makes it look good.

Then there is the issue of compatibility. SketchUp 2020 hasn’t been released for M1 and it’s not listed in the system requirements. I would not consider it to be save for presentations or production-ready. Since SketchUp 2020 is running in an emulator and did not receive any touches for M1 from SketchUp developers (it was released before Apple’s dev-kits), the experience is in the sole responsibility of how good Apple’s emulator is.

Then there is the issue of optimization. While the original paradigms used by the Intel architecture have several downsides, it is optimized to the limits of what is possible (complex instruction set, but mitigated internally using clever pipelining and the opposed reduced instruction set). Math libraries and computational frameworks have had decades of time to become optimized for Intel processors. Software using these frameworks can benefit out-of-the box from that speed.

Now Apple’s new architecture may be the better hardware, but the ecosystem can not fully exploit it for years to come. Yes, you hear positive reports for selected applications in the emulator, as well as popular ported applications. But a port makes an application just compatible. If it relies on other libraries and years of optimizations, it might take again years to achieve that level of optimization. As an example, some workloads like in data science actually do not perform well on M1.

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Thank you

Thanks for taking the time to give this great information

Even if the performance was only marginally better the battery life is so good that it has been very worth it on that end. I have not used SketchUp yet as I use it mainly at work on a PC but for photo editing and Mathematica use it has been tremendous. I am really enjoying it.

Hi

I also bought the new Apple MacBook Pro M1 a while back.

I had issues with this computer spinning on the rainbow wheel during the simplest of tasks, such as zooming in on a drawing. The old Mac I traded in (2013) never did this.

I contacted Apple, we did OS re-install as a suggested fix.

This did improve things and you might call Apple support (download the App) to do the same without leaving your house (remote, over the phone fix).

Even so, this computer has quirks and isn’t that great in my experience.