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I had to search where Trinidad and Tobago is 😊 Sounds like an interesting country. I hope this Covid mess is gone soon and businesses are back to normal.

OTOH I discovered the beauty of WFH and luckily our company allows us to switch permanently to it which is what I chose. If something, I can take a rest between tasks and play the piano for example 😀

Yea man is real stress.

I worked relief pharmacy in 18 dispensaries throughout the country , crazy shifts. different place every day. and saved up.

In the starting phases of my pharmacy I had to work 12 hours shifts 6 days a week and 8 hr shifts on Sundays for 2 years..

We had a flood so half my goods was destroyed.
Then we had Covid..
Earthquake which broke some stuff
There was a damn snake that crawled into my dispensary..

Well I freaked out and bawl down de place
Literally ended up on top the cash register.

The hijabi customer wanted to know what the heck was wrong with me

Naturally the guy next to her had a cutlass in his car because this is Trinidad after all. So he got it and killed the snake.

5 whack on his head. blood spatter everywhere. dispensary smelled fresh for a whole week,


What am I forgetting..

oh exploding juices incident.
Too much to type here about that

Then we had a thief for a worker which I had to let go obviously.

Then the landlord jacked up prices to the point where we were gonna be out of business so we had to move the pharmacy further up road.

And that's just work

Let's not even get into family drama and living arrangements in the past few years.

Lived in a small room in the back of the pharmacy for a while lol... that was fun.

lol..

I'm just taking things as it comes now.



After all the stress and bs, I'm treating myself to the Mac.

sorry I'm not selling it to make cash.

It would make more sense from a cash flow perspective to sell it in a few months but really I need something to keep my sanity.

Maybe I'm just a crappy businessman lol..

At least when it comes to medicine though, not to boast but I know my stuff and have a loyal clientele.

Biggest issue atm is folks just really have very little and what little they got they have to spend on basic necessities such as food.

Meds come after if ever. Escalating drug prices is terrible atm.

and then there is the whole counterfeit industry that is messing with legitimate pharmacy business.

When all is said and done.

I'm keeping my Mac unless it is absolutely necessary to sell it.

Plus if I go to sell my Mac my wife would kill me..

She wants me to keep it. She is very supportive of my music and anything related to it. Gotta admit she is awesome...

wow I really need to drink less coffee..

Mta88, I spilled my coffee reading about the snake. And all. Although I shouldn't have laughed... Apologies. But you are good with stories, comes very natural

I really hope things go well for you and Trinidad and Tobago 🤞🏻

Can I ask where "down south" is? Another country I guess?

Maybe read the last few posts where we discuss that in details 😀

CG? He lives on the on the South Island (Trinidad). So I’m interested in where “south” is. Another country perhaps.

I see, I got it 👍🏻

Thanks man.

Lol it’s fine that’s my usual response when I vent about the pharmacy.
My customers does be rolling when I talk about it lol.

Sometimes I think they just come to buy their meds because they enjoy my unusual experiences over the past couple years.


The damn snake was spread out all comfy across the tiles like he own the place.

What made it worse was it was a pitch black snake against white tiles
Which made no sense they generally don’t like tiles because it’s smooth and cold to touch. But it was two weeks after the huge flood we suffered ..

Life yes. When it rains it pours… and then it floods… and then ure screwed.

The island is divided into North, Central and South.

I live in Central.

If the pharmacy crashes I have contingencies in place but it would be nice if it lives.

Can always go back and do relief pharmacy it pays pretty good. And everyone knows me because I’ve literally worked in every section of the island.

For Christ sake I work up Moka side in the nothern range mountains close to the maracas beach lol.
I didn’t care I enjoyed the drive


Put my sweat and tears into this place though.
It’s always nice to be self employed, even if u ain’t making much.

We run a household of 4, soon to be five on very little, groceries only come up to around 1200TT a month

Save a bunch by cooking.

Water and electricity here is pretty cheap
For the time being at least.

The way things heading them donkey and them in power selling everything out to the Chinese. Let’s hope someone knocks some sense into them we r heading down a bad road as a country.

But let’s not get into politics. It’s the same everywhere. No offense to any one who is honest and into politics I’m sure ure out there lol.



My wife and I has a good support system on her side as well so we should be ok
Can’t say the same for many citizens living in Trinidad at the moment.

Mind u the frickin snake decided to grace me with his royal presence 7:30 in the night.

It’s not like the US.

7:30pm here is pitch dark and I was working alone in the pharmacy with the radio off..

I’m sure the neighbors heard me I sort of echoed when I bawl down the place but really could u blame me?

I hate snakes.

Learned about them in toxicology classes we have 4 venomous snakes in Trinidad so I am supposed to be able to identify them

When when I see one I all that knowledge goes straight out the window and I just run for my life

Whether it’s a harmless horsewhip or a poisonous Mapapee..

I’m sorry I don’t care,

I have no shame with this.

Wifey on the other hand.

Well boy.. she not easy.. we had a gigantic centipede the other day..

Naturally I ran.. she take a knife and chop the thing in 3. (She grew up in countryside or as we refer to it in Trinidad,, de bush)

Yeaaa…. I probably shouldn’t have admit to that last part publicly lol… oh well

Apologies for the colloquial "Bad Caribbean English"

It kicks in when I speak to local friends and when I type fast or am telling "stories" loll

Cant edit the thing now because too much time gone now.. ah yes....

Anyways back to the topic at hand..


This M1 is a beast.. I've thrown everything at it and it barely breaks a sweat.. the processor doesn't even cross 32 degrees celsius while mapping 3 difference cancer markers, using messenger, about ten web pages up on medical journals, pages up, and watching Netflix. all the while using Pianoteq in between at 64 buffer rate....

meanwhile the i3 was clocking 99 Degrees celsius when you push it..

I guess that is expected though but wow.. I am officially impressed.

Will test out CFX next and ravenscroft and see how they work..

So far Pianoteq is running perfectly which I'm sorry to say didn't happen with the i3

at 64 buffer rate which may have been overkill, I was getting occasional glitches etc with the newer models, namely the New York steinway and the Bechstein.

In other news the folks that created the m1 have branched off and created their new company. Working to build a chip that they claim will wipe the floor with the m1 and it's successor. They are calling it the phoenix core and it will serve to be a competitor to intel and AMD. Last I heard Qualcomm scooped those guys up for a whopping 1.4Billion US dollars...

Yeehaw. (Forgive my occasional bursts of texan as well I spent a lot of time there and have family that live there... been back and forth as a child)

Can't wait to see how these cpu wars pan out in the coming years..

Enjoy your new M1 Mac Mta88!

Incidentally, I watched this yesterday:



Given my experience with my own M1 Air, I thoroughly agree with this review.

Kind regards,
James
x

Very interesting and enlightening review although I do prefer a larger screen the M1AIR seems like a great match for many.

Terry, I have the MacBook connected up to a Dell 4K monitor when working at home.

Kind regards,
James
x

Is it better to get the 16gb version for music production? I heard that when the ram gets used up it starts using the ssd and I think the video above even mentions that if you go above 200gb ssd, then the laptop starts to slow down.

Yes, when all the memory is used, the operating system send pages of memory on the available disk (SSD on recent computers), which makes some RAM available. A virtual instrument can’t work efficiently with such memory pages « paged out ».

On my PC, 8GB is quite constrained : if I start a browser when my virtual piano is loaded, it can be enough to make some dropouts ! 16GB should be better.

I think for the majority of people, 8GB on the M1 is more than enough. It's super efficient, and the same ways iPhones can be as or more performant and keep more apps in memory than Android devices with 2-3x as much memory. For me, 8GB is MORE than enough to run Garritan CFX, which is a 100+GB VST library. And what's more, it performs even better when you limit it to 512MB or 1GB than if you try to give it even more.

There are cases with extremely heavy workloads when you'd want the 16GB option, but my guess it's that's more rare than you'd think. Most people probably get the RAM upgrade but don't actually need it. A storage/SSD upgrade is almost always helpful though.

Very thorough review ..

Honestly if I were getting the air cheaper than I got this pro for I would have gone for that. Pricing in Trinidad is crazy.

Soon it will be cheaper to fly to the US when the borders are open, open and declare it used, and then fly back to Trinidad to get electronics such as laptops lol.

At least that's where we are heading.

The pro and air are closer than they have ever been before.

And if being bought brand new in the US the air is the better deal hands down..

The only way I was able to trigger the fans in this beast m1 pro was by using folding@home software lol..

Only then it was triggered but I've switched over to World Community Grid and it is a lot less demanding for distributive computing.

I'm amazed at what apple has achieved with this M1

If u got some cash to spare though I do like the pro a bit more.

U get a better charging block(61 watt vs 30watt)

Battery ilfe is a little bit more I think. 20 hours or so vs 17 in the air if I'm not mistaken? I gotta check that

U have a built in fan in case you ever cross the limit for the m1 now or in the future

the extra graphics I think will come in handy and make it a bit more future proof

the screen is brighter. 100nits brighter (big plus for where I work)

and the oled touch strip although sometimes a gimmick is rather handy and very cool at other times.
and is addicting to use .

weight difference is 0.2 pounds to the air which is neither here nor there.

but if I were situated in the US and had to choose between spending 899US and 1199US ..

I'd go with the air

It makes sense and it is very much ahead of it's time.

you were saying when you limit the ram allocation to 512 or 1GB it runs better?

I'll have to try that out thanks.