I just purchased a 16" MacBook Pro with the M1 Pro chip. Is there an external Blu-Ray player that works with this machine. I’ve previously been using MacBook Pro Retina 15-inch Early 2013 with a Sonnet Echo 15 Thunderbolt 2 dock that has a blu-ray player/reader/writer that works just fine.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
Get a TB3 to TB2 dongle from Apple and it will just work like before.
~45USD - other vendors are available.
Thanks. I’ve got the adapter on order from Apple. Won’t get the MacBook until April 4th and then I’ll see who everything works.
I will be moving my Echo 15 (w/BluRay) to a Mac Studio. When it gets here we can compare notes.
BTW, I have had sleep and random shutdown issues w/ the Echo 15 and my Darth Vader Signature Mac Pro under Monterey 12.2 (was fine in 12.1). The last three 12.3 public betas have fixed it. However, the public betas have broken ColorSync with my Canon Pro-10.
So how are your Mac Studio and Echo 15 getting along? So far, mine are good. Some intermittent sleep issues (reported on several sites) common to any external drives on the Mac Studio. It seems to work better on some ports than others, but none are perfect. Bus 2, Bus 1, and Bus 5 seem most reliable. Playing “Musical Ports” can temporarily clear up the issue, but, so far, not persistently. Apple supposedly has recognized the issue. Have ripped some CD’s w/ the optical drive, but nothing Blu-Ray.
The switchover to my MacBook Pro 16" (M1 Pro) was very smooth. The new machine recognized the Echo 15 via the adapter cable and I was able to access the blu ray drive as well as its internal hard drive. I don’t keep the Echo connected all the time because it’s much quieter without it being turned on. I had used the Echo as an ethernet port for the previous MacBook but I’m wireless now. I don’t have blu ray player software any longer so I can’t play a blu ray movie but I never did that before.
I was pleasantly surprised that my Apple DVD drive worked via an adapter cable and I was able to rip a cd and dvd as well as watch a movie.
I reloaded all my software and copied my data files from the old Mac rather than do an update because I wanted to clean up on the detritus left behind by eight years of computing. There was a lot of software I no longer use so it was nice to have a lean machine again,. Boots up in seconds.
All in all a good experience.
“I don’t keep the Echo connected all the time because it’s much quieter without it being turned on.”
That was true w/ my Mac Pro as well, but I’m sharing my music library off the Echo 15, so not an option. (I did swap in a quieter third party fan into the Echo awhile back, which helped, but it was still not as quiet as the Mac Pro or the Studio.) But I bet you don’t see the intermittent sleep issues either.
My biggest surprise in migration was having to rebuild the AppleScript I’ve run at startup (for years). It had already been having some timing issues w/ Monterey, so it was awhile before I figured out that now it was just an Intel vs. M1 issue… ;~}
No sleep issues. I’ve got my Scan Snap S1300i connected to a thunderbolt to USB adapter and other than the scanning program not being able to be loaded in the menubar (I access via the dock now) there were no problems.
And I have a Samsung T5 portable SSD connected via usb3 cable to another thunderbolt port which I use for my daily Carbon Copy Clone backup. No issues.
The last Thunderbolt port I leave open and attach adapter cables as needed if I use an old flash drive or the Echo 15.
I do not know if this is new or I just hadn’t noticed, but when the screen is sleeping and the CPU has failed to sleep, it is actually RETRYING SLEEP ~EVERY 50 seconds.
Every 50 seconds the fans will shut down, the power LED’s on my peripherals will blink, and then it all comes back up again (except the display, most of the time). Doesn’t seem healthy. I gave up and checked “Prevent your Mac…”
I’ve seen this in the past with other Mac laptops.
It means that some peripheral (in my experience, a USB hard drive or a third-party USB keyboard) is waking up the computer just after it goes to sleep each time.
The only solution I found that worked was to stop using the offending peripherals. WRT the keyboard, it was a very old MacAlly unit - I replaced it with an Apple keyboard. WRT the hard drive, I switched its connection from USB to FireWire (the enclosure had both ports) and the problem went away.
WRT your system, I think you’re going to have to just eliminate devices one at a time until you find the culprit (don’t forget to check whether a hub or dock might be the cause). Once you do, see if you can get a firmware update for it. If not, then hopefully it is something you can easily replace (like a keyboard or USB hub) and not something expensive (like a Thunderbolt dock or an external SSD).
Whenever I have trouble sleeping, I read this web page. Sometimes it helps.
Either one of two Thunderbolt peripherals will cause it. Both worked fine under Monterey on my recently retired (sniffle…) Mac Pro. If I shuffle the ports they are connected to, sleep may work for a few hours or even a day, before going south again. No updates available.
According to pmset the culprit is “powerd.” Not sure where to go with that… ;-{
Thanks, all.
PS. My wife’s 14" M1 MacBook Pro has the same sleep issues.