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My Impressions of the MacBook Pro M4

(michael.stapelberg.ch)
240 points secure | 5 comments | 31 Oct 25 10:13 UTC | HN request time: 0.831s | source
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carbocation ◴[31 Oct 25 18:39 UTC] No.45775242[source]▶
One thing that wasn't mentioned is the max sustained screen brightness for SDR, which is higher on the M4 Pro (1000 nits) compared to the M4 Air or M1 Pro (500 nits).
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flyinglizard ◴[31 Oct 25 19:00 UTC] No.45775471[source]▶
There’s an awesome app called Vivid which just opens the HDR max brightness. I use it all the time with my M3 Pro when working outside and I believe it also works on earlier models.
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whycome ◴[31 Oct 25 19:07 UTC] No.45775547[source]▶
There are so many base features that are inexplicably relegated to 3rd party apps. Like a better finder experience. Or keeping screen on. Or NTFS writing.
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1. zrm ◴[31 Oct 25 19:34 UTC] No.45775831[source]▶
NTFS writing isn't that inexplicable. NTFS is a proprietary filesystem that isn't at all simple to implement and the ntfs-3g driver got there by reverse engineering. Apple doesn't want to enable something by default that could potentially corrupt the filesystem because Microsoft could be doing something unexpected and undocumented.

Meanwhile if you need widespread compatibility nearly everything supports exFAT and if you need a real filesystem then the Mac and Windows drivers for open source filesystems are less likely to corrupt your data.

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2. Dylan16807 ◴[01 Nov 25 04:51 UTC] No.45779336[source]▶
I'll take ntfs-3g over the best implementation of exFAT in a heartbeat. Refusing to write to NTFS for reliability purposes, and thereby pushing people onto exFAT, is shooting yourself in the foot.
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3. zrm ◴[01 Nov 25 06:14 UTC] No.45779605[source]▶
At which point you're asking why Apple doesn't have default support for something like ext4, which is a decent point.

That would both get you easier compatibility between Mac and Linux and solve the NTFS write issue without any more trouble than it's giving people now because then you'd just install the ext4 driver on the Windows machine instead of the NTFS driver on the Mac.

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4. Dylan16807 ◴[01 Nov 25 07:09 UTC] No.45779775{3}[source]▶
Is it that easy to use on Windows these days? I should give it a try.
5. znpy ◴[01 Nov 25 14:52 UTC] No.45782074[source]▶
Apple is likely to be in the position to negotiate nrfs documentation access with Microsoft for a clean-room implementation, with NDAs and everything.

My money is on apple not having the will to do thar.