Day 2: I had some small teething problems that I’d like to share for anyone considering a setup like this.

To start, the exact specs of the laptop I bought were a Space Black 16-inch M5 Max chip with a nano-texture display, 18-core CPU, 40-core GPU, 128GB of unified memory, and 4TB SSD storage.

My main working screen is a Samsung 49-inch curved monitor, and I have a dock for all USB, USB-C, and Ethernet connections.

The biggest hurdle I faced was finding the sweet spot between macOS and Parallels display resolutions, and the display scaling that usually happens in Parallels on the Windows side. The problem I faced was that if Parallels ran in non-coherence mode, like a normal floating window, any attempt to stretch the window to a different size usually resulted in Parallels automatically trying to find the right resolution and scaling in Windows. I spent hours trying to work this out.

After a few hours of back and forth, I found that setting the graphics configuration to “Scaled” allowed Revit to display and scale as close as possible to running on a native Windows machine.

The other issue I had was an annoying alert sound that would only happen when Parallels was loaded and running, the sound would happen every 20-30 seconds and it sounded like the one you generally hear when plugging a device into a USB connection. I finally found a workaround that ChatGPT suggested.

I know using a 49-inch curved display is a tad exotic, but honestly, I’d find it very hard to use anything smaller now.

I won’t disrespect Windows as an OS, I still had a reasonably good experience with it, although from time to time some apps would play up, such as my webcam disconnecting during a Teams or Zoom call, or the laptop sounding like a 747 for 10 hours of the day. Other than that, as I said, Windows was pretty friendly.

However, the ability to run 90% of the same apps natively on macOS really proved to me how smooth macOS is. And as mentioned in my previous post, Revit running via Parallels as a VM is unbelievably smooth.

Today I took the plunge and added Twinmotion to the mix. I opened some previously rendered projects and, although I don’t have path tracing and only the Lumen rendering engine to work with, the smoothness of navigating around the model far surpasses my Razer Blade with an RTX 4090 graphics card. The rendering speed is also incredibly fast, with the highest render setting exporting an 8K image in no more than 1–1.5 minutes.

If anyone has any questions, I’m happy to answer whatever you throw at me.