Trump introduced those super high tariffs on every country America is in trade deficit with, which, essentially, means every country.
As a result, those countries are going to introduce reciprocal tariffs on America, which translates into a trade war.
What’s going to happen next is global disentanglement of supply chains based on toxicity. But more directly, some things are going to get more expensive. Expecting them to get more expensive, people will buy the existing stock quickly, and the manufacturers are going to stop supply until the pricing is figured out. This means both scarcity and high prices.
So, obviously, during the weekend I looked into the stuff I will have to buy in the next six months to a year, overlapping with the stuff that’s going to get more expensive within that timeframe, and as a result I bought two Apple laptops. Biljana needs a replacement for her Intel 16″ Macbook Pro from 2019, so she’s getting a 16″ M4 Max Macbook Pro. My 13″ M1 Macbook Air is also due for replacement because I broke the tab key and my eyes aren’t what they used to be so I got myself the 15″ M4 Air, but this time I got 24GB of RAM because 8GB was limiting. Essentially, I just flushed my shopping list for the year because I see no benefits in waiting.
So, yeah, my prognosis for this is that the economy will go down, prices will go up, availability of things will go down, and the general standard of living will be degraded across the West. Also, I expect wars to get much worse, and quickly. Buying laptops is not what you would normally do in those conditions, but I’d rather replace failing hardware now when it’s merely preventative maintenance, than later when it might be a serious problem.
BTW if someone's scratching their head asking why Biljana is getting a proper Macbook Pro and I'm getting a baby blue macbook for Barbie and Ken, that's normal for us. 🙂
It's her main computer so it has to be a proper one, and I'm using Studio M2 Max for all heavy lifting, and my photography laptop is a 16" Lenovo Legion Pro, so the Macbook is essentially a thin and light machine for normal stuff that's not Lightroom, but I still specced it up at the lower end of what can run Lightroom just fine, in case I don't want to carry the heavy beast. We do different things with computers and so we have completely different setups. My M1 Air (krugerrand pink gold) looks like something that would fit well in the Barbie mansion, because I'm secretly a girl. 🙂 Either that, or it's easier to not sit on in the dark, but I'm pretty sure it's because I'm a girl, or a trans lame rhinoceros with a bad temper. I need to look it up.
🙂 about the laptop, Snježana needs a new laptop, if possible one that could run Lightroom easily, any recommendations? She also prefers larger screens, 16 or 17", as it would also be her main computer.
What are the parameters – OS, price…?
If price is no object, then Macbook Pro 16", 36GB RAM, 1TB SSD and external Thunderbolt 4 drive for the image library.
If price is the main constraint, then find a 16" 16:10 ratio 1600p gaming laptop, doesn't have to have top GPU but needs to have top quality panel with full sRGB coverage, ram in sockets, and two nvme sockets. They vary from generation to generation, but if you get a really good one, it can be stellar. I got Lenovo Legion pro 16" with RTX 3070, AMD CPU, and it's excellent. The advantage is that you can have the storage drive internally. The drawback is that you have to have it internally because the ports are much slower than on Macbooks, usually no Thunderbolt but USB 3.2.
The compromise is what I got now, the 15" Air with 24GB RAM and 512 GB SSD. The money is close to the gaming laptop option, but it's much lighter, silent, with incredibly long battery life, RAM is still good enough for Lightroom, and you have two Thunderbolt 4 ports, so fast external storage.
ps. and yes, if it's not a mac, absolutely calibrate the screen because otherwise it will not be good for photo editing. The Macs are calibrated by default. The calibration device and software are additional 150 EUR or so, but it was a big improvement once I got it.
ps2. the storage drive for the photos doesn't have to be Thunderbolt, Samsung T7 is quite fast enough for most cases. Biljana uses it, I use Thunderbolt on my desktop because the library is huge and I want to have the fastest possible access.
For instance, this is a very fast and well configured Windows option which can also work as a gaming machine: https://www.hgspot.hr/laptop-dell-g16-7630-i9-13900hx-32gb-1tb-ssd-rtx4070-8gb-16-qhdplus240hz-backlit-ubuntu-274069519-n1162
i9-13900HX/32GB/1TB SSD/RTX4070 8GB/16"QHD+240Hz,
It's 2249 EUR.
This is the economical Macbook option: https://store.com.hr/proizvodi/macbook-air-15?option_values%5B%5D=1365&option_values%5B%5D=1352&option_values%5B%5D=13&option_values%5B%5D=908&option_values%5B%5D=1366
MacBook Air 15", 24GB/512GB
It's 2199 EUR.
One would say, the choice is obvious: the Windows machine must be stronger, it has better cooling, Lightroom is a demanding task, it must be a lot faster. Not so fast:
Geekbench 6
i9-13900HX, single 2586, multi 14345
M4 10-core, single 3879, multi 15004
So yeah, the Macbook has faster CPU, the cooling is a factor but the i9 actually needs it so it might actually run as hot or hotter, the RAM is a factor but according to tests it's important that it's above 16GB. 24GB is very good, 36GB is great, 48GB doesn't contribute anything.
Just for reference, to show what kind of insane machines those are, here's the geekbench 6 result for my Studio M2 Max:
single 2803, multi 14882.
This means that the ultra-thin M4 Air has the CPU power of my rock crusher machine, with the difference of course being that the desktop has 32GB RAM and not 24, and it has an enormous cooler that enables it to work at 100% forever without either throttling or making a sound. In short bursts, the thin laptop should be as fast, though, and Lightroom is for the most part exactly that: import raw files from the card, convert to DNG (if you're doing that) and generate previews, this takes a minute and then you're having very short bursts of speed separated by idling. Then you export finished files, that also takes a second per file, and you're done. Sure, every year or so you need to do something with the whole library and that can take a while. Rendering videos is more demanding, in a sense that it takes longer at 100%, but photo editing is "I need all the power in the world" for a minute, and then "yawn".
That’s sort of insane, still can’t get used to the fact that fanless machines like Air can have desktop performance 🙂
Do these geekbench number translate to real world perception?
Is new Air 4 really fast in Lightroom as Studio 2?
At least in those quick bursts – I understand Studio will take edge in moment Air 4 reaches thermal unit, but that should not happen when going through photos, making adjustments and exporting couple of them.
I don't actually know; Božo bought them in Zagreb and they are waiting for us to come and put on the summer tyres next week. What I know is from my experience with M1 Air and a machine that has similar geekbench score, the Lenovo Legion 5 pro.
The practical speed doing all the normal task is the same, they are both snappy as all fuck, everything is instantaneous. The difference is, the Lenovo has 32 GB RAM, which means that it can run Lightroom without limitations, especially since it has two internal NVMe drives, which means that both the catalogue and library are on a gen4 NVMe, which means that it's only somewhat slower than the Studio, and it's almost imperceptible, while the M1 Air has 8GB RAM and it can run Lightroom only marginally, and the 13" screen size is even more of a restriction since you can't really see anything – not the photo, not the tools. It's just not working properly on a screen smaller than 15". I did run it on the 15" MBP and the user interface worked fine.
So, my extrapolation based on this is as follows:
The M4 air will only get really hot in Lightroom if you're doing massive-parallel tasks, such as imports, exports and big catalogue work such as "create full size previews for year 2024". That's where it will overheat and throttle, but so did the 15" MBP. So, for all intents and purposes, in all other tasks you will get unlimited speed, since the limitation is normally the number of cores and the amount of RAM it can allocate for each core to let it work. If there's not enough RAM, the number of cores doesn't matter. RAM is the primary bottleneck for Lightroom, then core count and general CPU throughput, and of course storage speed, where speed of the drive holding the catalogue matters more than the speed of the drive holding the raw files.
I hardly ever get any pressure on the 32GB RAM on the Studio, half of it is holding cache and only half is doing any real work. What happens when Lightroom is doing a massive task, I don't honestly know because I didn't check, but I would expect the 24GB to be nearly as fast for most things, because it will just use less space for cache, and from what I've seen in tests, it will be somewhat slower than the 32GB machine, but not by much; where it actually falls apart is 16GB, because apparently with 16GB there's not enough RAM to go around for massive parallel tasks, and the cores are "starved". This makes everything demanding last twice as long as the 24GB version, with 36GB things are somewhat faster but it's no longer drastic, and with 48GB it's a negligible improvement. This means avoid 16GB for lightroom, 24GB is fine and economical, 36GB is better, and 48GB doesn't help with anything.
ps. what does all that actually mean in practice, in expected speed? It means that the 24GB M4 Air is going to run Lightroom fast enough to process 61MP files from A7RV and the drop in speed compared to the M2 Studio Max is going to be single digit percentage.
On the other hand, the 16" M4 Pro Max with 36GB RAM is expected to be 20-40% faster than the M2 Studio Max. This means that the Air is already fast enough, and the Pro is a fucking rocket ship. However, it's more than twice the money, and the Air is already not inexpensive. The warning is, if you get the Pro with 24GB RAM, the gains compared to the Air are going to be in the single-digit percentages, while the price will be much higher, so if you get the Pro model, get one with enough RAM to let it breathe.
I am seriously considering only Air M1 upgrade with screen size as primary driver for change because I am getting blind, fast and with constant back issues I tend to work more on Air than I did before.
So, I do not have performance issue on M1 Air (I have 16/512 version) as much a I have screen size issues.
And my 13" Air M1 will be huge upgrade to Petra who has one of old Airs, do not even remember which one.
As for main computer … if money will allow, I would rather get Mac Mini M4 or Studio M4 than MBP since I do not need new MBP if I get Air M4 and I can get performance I could use for MUCH less money.
Also, compared to Air, I find 16" MBP a tad too heavy and chunky to be everyday "lap"top – it seems more suited to sit on desktop and occasionally be used on lap.
Problem is … I do not really feel like I miss anything with my M1 MBP.
Sure, I could use more RAM for Docker and Lightroom but I can live just fine as it is, since I use neither super extensively.
Only reason for upgrade my main computer would be this "scare" of increasing prices and I can't yet decide if that is a valid reason 🙂
Yeah, that. 🙁
I thought it was valid enough to get Biljana her laptop now rather than later this year, since the logic of uncertainty is that things will only get worse, and she needs it since the one she's using is on the lower limits of still usable for what she's doing with it. Then Božo recommended that I get myself one as well and I thought about it and decided that it's a good idea since the same logic applies.
I think this expectation can be an issue for people who haven't tried the M1 Air before and will say "oh please, a machine this powerful without a fan will just cook itself, it's completely pointless". However, that's not how it works. In reality, the way Air performs is closer to how an iPhone performs – yes, it occasionally gets warm, but if you're expecting it to actually get hot enough to throttle and reduce performance, that's not happening – it did happen to me once, though, when I used it to fly the drone in very strong sunlight and the combination of sun on the black device and its own heat just cooked it. That's basically how Air works, for those who didn't use it. In normal use, like watching Youtube on full screen, where a normal laptop gets hot and the fan audibly blows, the Air is cold, actually unpleasantly cold in winter. Strong tasks, such as OS indexing the filesystem post-install get it slightly warm, to the point where it's no longer unpleasantly cold. You need to do really insane shit to get it really hot, like running valley benchmark in a loop, or transcoding multiple hours of video in handbrake, or building some huge codebase. So, basically, it's cold by default, warm under heavy load, and only overheats if you're using it for shit nobody sane would do on anything less than a desktop supercomputer.
This is lot of information and You got me thinking 🙂 Ok, well I guess money is not too limited, but not in a price range of 7RM5, so 2000-2500 should be fine. Screen size should be 16" min. But all in all, knowing Snježana's preferences for very expensive stuff, once she puts her fingers on Macbook pro 16" she probably won't let go (If I'm lucky she won't like the operating system 🙂
Snježana always wants to chew on things IRL by herself before buying, and I can see how that's going to end 🙂
I have one more question about display, what kind of monitor do you use for Your desktop?
The thing is, I use a Xiaomi 41" TV as my primary display and a Philips 24" IPS LED as my secondary display, So they need calibration I guess? What kind of calibration device should I buy for that?
The difference in screen size between 15" air and 16" pro is negligible, I recommend seeing them in person to check. I think they have iStyle in Split, they should have samples on display. What shocked me is that the 14" pro sounds close to 15" air in size, but it's not, it's almost the same as 13" air, while 15" air is almost the same size as the 16" pro.
I have a 43" 4k LG IPS display.
I have i1 display, but Spyder5 or whatever it's called is as good. Just pay attention that the calibration software exists for the OS you want.
Tnx! I'll take her to iStyle tomorow 🙂
So, it comes down to this:
https://www.links.hr/hr/laptop-hp-omen-17-db0015nm-ryzen-7-8845hs-32gb-1tb-ssd-nvidia-geforce-rtx-4070-173-qhd-240hz-ips-bez-os-crni-0101012024
and MacBook air. I'm going to iStyle now, so Snježana can see it IRL
Done, MacBook air bought!
I expected something along those lines. 🙂 Windows laptops are positively last century compared to them. How much RAM and SSD did you get?
24/512 🙂 didn't have 32/1tb.
screen is great, size is great, weight is great. I must say, general feel is way better than clunky, big, oversized gaming laptop. So yeah, just as my first impression on Ipad after android tablets.
The funniest thing is, it will likely run faster and cooler than that gaming laptop. 🙂
Now you just have to get an external ssd for the Lightroom library.
Any recommendations?
That would depend on the size of the library, size of the files, expected growth of the library and tolerance for speed. The elegant solution, if you don't mind speeds 50% greater than SATA drives, is Samsung T7, 2TB or more.
The "fuck money" solution, if you want NVMe speeds over Thunderbolt, is to get the Acasis thunderbolt 4 case for NVME from Amazon, and also WD SN850X drive to go inside. That would give you the speed of internal NVMe drive over Thunderbolt, and is backward compatible to USB, at lower speed of course. Format the drive to APFS (Apple filesystem). Works best on a Mac, but isn't readable on Windows unless you buy the Paragon driver.
I really really like it! This is so much better than that horrible HP machine we saw before. For the first time in 20 years I am actually sitting in the front of the laptop. Happy. 🙂
And your photos look amazing on it!
🙂 Yes, that's why we pay all that money to Apple.
It's interesting that the only thing that I use, and is manufactured in America, are Apple devices, which are actually manufactured in Asia (Vietnam, India and China), and only formally wrapped in American corporate cellophane. Also, I use their software – Lightroom, for instance, and they took care to have all the operating systems and CPUs under their control. Transitioning IT away from America would be a hard and thankless task, and I'm certainly not going to be among the early adopters of that.
Photographic equipment is mostly all made in Japan, with some from China and South Korea, and negligible amounts from Europe. Would I replace Japanese cameras and lenses with Chinese? Only if they are good enough, and they seem to be making strides in that direction – Viltrox, 7artisans and so on. They are not there yet, but they will be. The new Viltrox 50mm f/2 lens is on par with the best optics from Sony and Canon, but it's only one lens.
So, now Trump said "just kidding, it's 90 days delay of tariffs, but only for those who bend over", so what's that going to do? Well, since China and the EU introduced their own tariffs, they can either cancel those and bend over (unlikely in case of China, which is already seriously pissed of at America and they see this as a deliberate insult to their nation), or continue on the course of escalation, which is unlikely to work in case of Europe which already committed suicide on American orders by separating itself from Russian energy and market.
Also, markets don't work well in conditions of this kind of unpredictable environment, so the price of uncertainty is likely to be calculated into the prices, which means everything is going to get more expensive, lowering the standard of living in the West. If the West could start producing their own stuff quickly enough, that would help, but it's unlikely to work, for systemic reasons; basically, people here no longer know how to manufacture things competitively, or at all, and they can't be quickly trained to do so, especially not for the salaries the current market expects to pay for qualified labour.
And that's just the economy, not even mentioning the wars, or the potential natural disasters that can push everything over the edge.
I see that as the main point of these tariffs actually. Not the economic aspect. Trump publicly said: "I'm telling you, these countries are calling us up, kissing my ass." So now we'll be able to see which countries (and peoples) are independent and have dignity. The rest will be doing exactly what Trump said. This is narcissistic abuse, that's what it is.
I get criticized because I am okay with slavery but the slavery I am okay with is a more dignified state than this "freedom" that America is practicing.
Considering how hard his hubris backfired with China now, I guess he'll either have to face very nasty consequences, including possibly war over Taiwan, or he'll be the one kissing Xi's ass, which would be poetic justice.
Also, he thinks he'll be able to avoid this by deceiving Putin into giving him access to rare earths, which is not going to work because Putin will tell him that other matters need to be resolved first – tiny things like NATO being at war with them, the sanctions, piracy etc.
Basically, this whole thing is a lunatic asylum.
Btw, I see that this Tariff war is having a hard impact on prices of gold, and contrary to my expectations they are going down?
Buy the dip! 😎
Either that or wait a few days. 🙂
As expected, gold is now in a spike.
Gold going down as the stock market crashes is just the initial short-term thing caused by traders selling paper gold in order to cover margin calls, and this is merely a paper artefact. Later, gold always grows high after the stock market disasters, but then this spike levels out.
Gold going down as the stock market crashes is just the initial short-term thing caused by traders selling paper gold in order to cover margin calls, and this is merely a paper artefact. Later, gold always grows high after the stock market disasters, but then this spike levels out.
I’m wondering what’s the point of that that Trump is doing here. I guess he considers it to be a stroke of genius but it looks more like a wild shot from the hip hoping to hit the target, whatever that target might be. Seem more like it’d successfully shoot the leg rather than anything else?!
I think those are the erratic moves of desperation, because America is fucked, and everything "conventional" has been tried already, and Trump basically got permission from the people running things in the background to try his stuff because things are fucked anyway and can't really get any worse. Or so they thought before the stock market crashed and damage got to be so bad that somebody likely whispered something in his ear and he seems to be back-tracking on it somewhat. I think the damage is already done and can't be reversed. Most companies are in damage control mode and this will have consequences down the line.
Technically speaking, introducing tariffs is a good move if you're an economically weak country trying to protect its industry against greater rivals, and this describes America well. However, this only works if you have enough military to deter war, which usually follows because more powerful economies don't take it kindly when you block their exports, -> opium wars.
The problem is that this also works only if you have working industry in place that can supply your populace, which America doesn't have, because it's too late, they killed off their manufacturing sector and outsourced everything, and they also have all the systemic reasons that actually caused the outsourcing, such as over-regulation, excessive syndical protection of workforce raising the costs, poor quality of education that can't produce qualified engineers and scientists etc.
The Americans want to make it sound as if they have high-quality people that are being replaced by low-cost, low-quality labour from abroad, but that is not actually the case. They have low quality, high-cost labour, over-regulated state that doesn't allow anything to be done, and they outsourced manufacturing simply because the Asians have more people who understand maths and physics. Even the people in America who are actually doing something are mostly imported because the American system of education can't produce them domestically.
So, the Americans have MBAs and gender studies people, and those generally speaking can't actually produce semiconductors, optics and precise mechanics. They are good for what America exports, which is gay, feminist and transgender nonsense nobody needs. This is why Trump's idea will fail – he assumes America is a competent force that's hampered by outside forces and internal sabotage, and that doesn't conform to reality. The reality is, America is completely incapable of participating in the kind of industrial competition that's going on in the rest of the world.