this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
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The whole thing boggles my mind. Keep in mind that a good number of “Pro” users are corporate types running PowerPoint and Excel but certainly wouldn’t stoop to using a consumer model.
Not everyone is in that boat - for example in our theatre we have Mac’s with QLab installed and nothing else. They’re not even connected to the internet.
QLab needs about 250MB of RAM.
Oh, and because reliability is critical (it controls large robots that operate heavy fast moving objects in close proximity to humans) we need two of them. They run next to each other with a big red button you can smash with your fist at any time to seamlessly disconnect one and connect the backup.
A bit of money saved by having less RAM is fine with me. We could afford 16GB (or a lot more) but why waste money on that? Especially when one of the Macs will hopefully never be used except for routine testing to check if it works.
QLab doesn’t run on other operating systems and doesn’t really have any viable alternative either. There’s plenty of professional software that doesn’t need a bunch of memory. This one is essentially just a graphical programming tool that allows artistically talented people to do things that would normally require a software engineer.
But seriously - the MacBook Pro has a HDMI port. Apple’s cheaper laptops are too thin for HDMI, so they obviously don’t have one. If all you do is email and meetings - then HDMI is totally worth it and 8GB is fine. It would be nice if protectors around the world switched to DisplayPort (which can run over USB-C) but that’s not the world we live in.
USB-C to HDMI cables are unreliable in my experience. They might work, but sometimes you get weird issues around areas like detecting the supported list of resolutions/aspect ratios and so on.