Tag Archives: Apple hardware

And I’m Back

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Well, as back as I ever am these days.

It’s been a busy few weeks, and I just had to let something go. Can’t skip out on work or the cats will start supplementing their diets by nibbling on my extremities. Can’t avoid doing the taxes; the less said about that non-option, the better. And there was other stuff I’m not ready to talk about that also couldn’t wait.

And then there was the other stuff. Stuff I wanted to do, sure, but it took time and attention.

We bought a new mattress, for instance. Our old one was old. As Maggie put it, “old enough to vote, maybe even old enough to drink”. Not that it ever registered to vote (or if it did, we never saw a ballot come in the mail), nor did we ever catch it getting shit-faced in front of the TV*. Mattress shopping in a “post”-COVID environment is nerve-wracking–“who’s been sprawled on this test mattress before me” isn’t a question you want to be asking yourself every five minutes–but I have to say that it was worth it. My back hurts much less now than it did in the days before twelve inches of memory foam entered our lives. And when it comes to nigh-indescribable joy, there isn’t much that can top being able to slide out of bed without springs creaking and the whole mattress shifting when one of us needs to answer a late-night/early morning phone call from Mother Nature.

* Yes, we do have a TV in the bedroom. Doesn’t everyone? I mean, it’s the most comfortable place to kick back and watch hours of programming–as long as your mattress isn’t belching stale beer scent in your face.

The real biggie, though–the thing that has monopolized my so-called free time for the past couple of weeks–is a new computer.

A digression.

Long-time readers may recall that when I started this blog a decade ago(!), I was primarily a Linux user. If I needed Windows for something, I’d either fire up a virtual machine or one of the far too many older machines piled in my office. Before that, I’d bounced from Atari to DOS to early Windows, early Mac, early Linux, back to Windows, back to Linux, and around and around I goes, and where I stops, well, you get the idea.

Over the past few years–since Microsoft introduced WSL (essentially, Linux running inside of Windows), I’ve been moving more and more to Windows Land. Most things I wanted to do were just as easy in Windows 10 as Linux, and for the few that weren’t, WSL has served admirably.

But.

It was time for a change. I’ve been tied to a desktop with my last couple of “main machines”, but I wanted to return to a more portable system. It was a pain in the neck to move my email over to the loyal Surface Go when I needed to be out and about. And to be blunt, the Surface Go’s keyboard really wasn’t suitable for extended typing. A blog post, maybe. A novel, nope.

So I started looking at laptops. And I was seduced.

As of a couple of weeks ago, I’ve once again become an Apple user. Specifically, I found a very good deal on a lightly used MacBook Air–so lightly used that the Apple logo stickers were still in the box. Yes, the new one with an M2. In that lovely Midnight* color. With 8 gigs of RAM and 512 of storage.

* Mind you, it’s not the color I associate with the middle of the night; it’s not nearly dark enough for that. But then, Apple is the company that can declare pink to be “Rose Gold” and have the entire world agree with them, so if they want to call charcoal gray “Midnight”, I’m hardly in a position to dispute the matter.

And, yes, most of the software I need is just as available in Appleville as in Windows Land or Linuxton. Not surprising, that latter: MacOS is, after all, also a UNIX-variant. Call it a second cousin once removed to Linux.

I had the Mac about 90% set up the way I wanted it within two days. Microsoft Office downloaded from the Apple App Store and activated flawlessly when I signed in. Web browsers installed easily and synchronized their settings with the Windows versions. Migrating my email took less than half an hour. Most of the rest of those two days was taken up with finding replacements for smaller programs (a music tag editor, an image viewer that wouldn’t try to take over my entire picture library,…) and tweaking a few tiny Linux command line programs I’d written to run in the Mac’s Terminal*.

* Did you know every Mac has an easily accessible command line? It does, and it works almost identically with it’s Linux brethren. A victory for those of us who would rather type “for i in * ; do [something] ; done” than use mouse clicks to select a bunch of files and do [something] to each one, one at a time.

I can’t work without my dual-monitor setup: one big one for whatever I’m actively doing and a smaller one off to the side to hold my email so I can just glance over at it from time to time. The Air officially only supports one external display. Enter a hub that uses some sweet software trickery to support a second external screen. Works like magic. So now I have to figure out what I’m going to put on the third screen–the one built into the MacBook.

You want to hear something funny? The one thing that took the longest and threatened to entirely derail my Macgration was this blog. Seriously.

Another digression.

This blog runs on a platform called WordPress. About two years ago, WordPress made a major change to the software’s built-in editor. I won’t bore you with the details, but the result of the change was that I could no longer write my posts offline in whatever tool I wanted to use, save it on my own hard drive, and then copy it up to the blog. I had to use their new editor, which I found totally incomprehensible and which didn’t (and still doesn’t) allow for a local save. I nearly gave up the blog. And then I discovered that there was a way to hook Word into WordPress.

It’s true: the day was, in actual fact, saved by Microsoft.

Guess what doesn’t work in the Macintosh version of Word. Again, to avoid boring you, I won’t go into the reasons why it doesn’t work. Nor will I go through all the gyrations I went through trying to either make it work or find an acceptable replacement.

Long story short, remember what I said up above about using a virtual machine on Linux to run the occasional Windows program I couldn’t do without? I’m doing that again.

A small (30GB or so) chunk of the hard drive holds a Windows virtual machine with nothing but Microsoft Office installed. Word is hooked into WordPress* and I’m able to write my posts, save them on my computer, and hit the Publish button, just like before.

Once again, the day is saved by Microsoft.

Anyway.

I mentioned up above that the new machine has 8GB of memory. I was worried that wouldn’t be enough, but you know what? It seems to be plenty. As I write this, I’ve got the Windows virtual machine going, a video playing for background noise, four web browsers open to various pages I’ve been consulting, my email, two Terminal sessions doing things via remote connections to my Windows and Linux machines, and about half a dozen utility programs doing things like monitoring my available memory.

It’s all running smoothly. If the computer is swapping programs in and out of working memory, it’s doing it so smoothly and quietly that I can’t see it happening. No audio or video skips, no hesitation switching over to the email or toggling from one browser to another.

Let me close here with a couple of quotes from old blog posts:

There’s been a longstanding perception that Apple computers feel slow … No matter how fast the computer is getting work done, the user interface has often felt sluggish … I can’t imagine an M1 Ultra machine feeling sluggish.

I can’t speak for the M1 Ultra, but boy-howdy does this M2 feel the exact antithesis of sluggish.

There’s a notch at the top of the display for the camera … I kind of like the idea. Gives more physical space for the screen, and if you’ve got so much stuff in your Menu Bar that it runs into the notch, you probably ought to slim things down a bit anyway.

At the moment, I count 18 things in my Menu Bar, including the clock. Works just fine on the big monitor, where there’s no notch. Over on the built-in screen, though, only the clock and 12 icons are visible. Picture me blushing. I’ve at least arranged them so the ones that get hidden are the ones I’m least likely to need. Nobody really uses their Dropbox and OneDrive Menu Bar icons, right?

And, finally:

But with the exception of the shared photos mess, I’m genuinely impressed with what’s coming. Maybe not quite enough to buy a Mac, and definitely not enough to replace my Pixel phone with an iPhone.

I’m still not anywhere within seventeen million parsecs of getting an iPhone.

Apple Hardware Redux

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And here we are again, talking about Apple’s latest hardware releases. Another symptom of a weird year. I mean, isn’t this about the sixteenth time?

Anyway, this announcement is for the first Macs running Apple’s own CPU–with the distinctive moniker “M1”–instead of one made by Intel.

The major feature of the new CPU, at least from Apple’s perspective, is that it combines all of the silicon into one convenient package. It’s not just a CPU, in other words. It’s also the security manager, the memory, the input/output controller, the machine-learning “Neural Engine”, and sixty ‘leven other things.

That allows for smaller motherboards, lowers the cost of production, and may simplify repairs.

On the down side, it also eliminates certain upgrades. Specifically, increasing the RAM isn’t going to be possible. Apple is confident that, rather than upgrading their machines when they get older, the majority of their customers just replace them. Which is probably a safe bet, given the cost of Apple-compatible memory.

There are three new machines: a MacBook Air, a MacBook Pro, and–the biggest surprise of the day–a Mac Mini. Interestingly, while the MacBooks will be selling at the same price point as the Intel-based models they’re replacing, the Mini will be $100 cheaper. Since I’m on record as considering the previous generation of Minis to be significantly overpriced, this is definitely an improvement.

Worthy of note: the Air and the Pro are nearly identical. The only differences, as far as anyone can tell until we get our hands on the machines, is that the Pro has a cooling fan–which may allow it to run faster for longer stretches than the fanless Air*–and at least some models will have faster graphics processing.

* Now there’s an irony for you: a mobile computer named “Air” that doesn’t move air around.

Accompanying the new machines is, of course, a new Mac operating system. Big Sur will be out tomorrow for all Macs (at least all made in the last five years or so).

It’s got the usual laundry list of new features: new look and feel, new privacy features, and so on, ad infinitum. The biggie, at least if you buy Apple’s thinking, is that it can run iPhone and iPad apps.

Was anybody really asking for that?

Granted, Google’s done a nice job in allowing Android apps to run on Chromebooks; they’ve shown the idea can be done well. But Apple’s history in cross-platform app support isn’t encouraging. Let’s be blunt here: the iPad came out in 2010. And yet, the best it can do when running an iPhone-only app is to show it at double its normal size with little support for rotation. And Apple hasn’t done much to encourage developers to add iPad-functionality.

To be fair, Google has done a lousy job of convincing developers to support Android table-specific apps either. But the wide variety in Android phone capabilities forces Google’s infrastructure, and thus phone-oriented apps, to be more flexible in terms of resolution and layout than is the case in Apple’s world.

I have a feeling we’re going to see a lot of people experiment with iOS apps on their MacBooks, decide the experience isn’t all that great, and give up. Developers will then say “Hey, nobody’s using apps on their computers; why should we waste time and effort on making it better?”

Bottom line: The new Macs sound good, but even with Apple’s experience in custom-designed silicon–the M1 is, after all, a variation of what’s been running iPhones and iPads for years–there are going to be teething problems.

Similarly, even if you ignore Big Sur’s need to support those new devices alongside the existing Intel devices, it’s still a major revision to the Mac OS (major enough that Apple is declaring it version 11 after seventeen years of version 10). Remember how rough the transition to Catalina was last year, when the biggest change was the move to eliminate 32-bit apps?

My advice is to wait until at least 11.0.2 to upgrade–Apple is already working on 11.0.1; odds are they won’t start building in fixes for real-world problems in the new Macs until 11.0.2 at the earliest.

And unless you’re comfortable dealing with random computer misbehavior, hold off buying an M1 Mac for at least six months to give Apple time to work out–or work around–the inevitable hardware bugs.

SAST 12

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Welcome to the twelfth production of Short Attention Span Theater. This installment is brought to you, not by hay fever and inconveniently draped felines, but by Like Herding Cats. I’m deeply enmeshed in what I hope will be the final revision, and don’t want to take the time to develop complete thoughts about much of anything right now.

Act One: Apple introduced new hardware earlier this week. No, not iPhones; that was back in September. The latest goodies-to-be are a new MacBook Air, a new iPad Pro, and a new Mac Mini.

I don’t have any particularly strong feelings about the laptop and tablet. I’ve never used a MacBook of any sort, and while the iPad Pro sounds like a nice bit of gear, it’s way to rich for my wallet–and massively overpowered for my tablet needs.

That said, I do appreciate Apple replacing the iPad Pro’s Lightening Port with a USB-C port. One less bit of proprietary gear, and more access to existing third-party hardware.

As for the Mini, I’ve got mixed feelings there. I’ve got an original Mac Mini around here someplace. It’s not in use because its power supply has wandered off, but it was a nice piece of kit in its day. I’m glad to see Apple hasn’t killed off the line, but I’m sad to see that they’re changing its emphasis.

The original point of the Mini was to bring in non-Apple users. As such, it was cheap. Cheap to the point of almost entirely forgoing the usual Apple markup. It seems, however, that Apple has decided the Mini has attracted all the Windows users it’s going to, and so they’ve decided to make it a more “professional” machine.

In case you didn’t realize it, in the tech industry, the word professional means “more expensive”. As such, the price has gone up $300. It’s still a good deal for the price, but it’s not as good a deal as it used to be.

Act Two: Our darling president’s latest threatpromise has been getting a lot of press, as usual. No, not that one. No, not that one either. I mean the one about wiping out birthright citizenship.

All the hysterical responses to the effect of “He can’t do that! It’s unconstitutional!” are missing the point.

First of all, “unconstitutional” is what the Supreme Court says it is. If you believe the current lineup of justices is a threat to abortion rights, why would you think they’d be any less of a threat to citizenship?

Secondly, Trump doesn’t care whether he can “do it”. It’s a distraction. Just the latest of many. When was the last time you saw any news about Russian interference in the upcoming election?

Third, nobody can actually stop him from issuing a proclamationan executive order. He may well go ahead and do it, on the theory that even if it doesn’t squeeze past the Supreme Court, it’ll be tied up there for months, leaving everyone scared–the administration’s preferred mental state–and providing the Republicans with the chance to spin the battle as “Democrats are soft on immigration.”

Third-and-a-halfth, if there is an executive order, you can be sure it’ll be written to exclude children whose parents are from countries that aren’t on Trump’s shit list. Because there’s nothing the administration would like better than than to divide the opposition by carving out a block of people who are going to feel like they dodged a bullet. Those are the ones who’ll be shouting the loudest about how Trump’s not such a bad guy after all…

Act Three: We end this production on a cheerier note.

The Austin Lounge Lizards are still doing their thing, thirty-eight years down the road (only eighteen years less than the Rolling Stones!)

Maggie and I went to last night’s show at the Freight and Salvage* in Berkeley. The band’s had a line-up change since the last time we saw them, which suggests that it’s been too long since we last went to one of their shows. It happens. The current group seems solid, though.

* Temporarily renamed the “Fright and Savage”. Though we were disappointed to see that the e and l on their neon sigh were left uncovered.

Granted, there were a few rough edges here and there, but to be fair, it’s probably been two decades or more since some of those songs were on their setlist.

The Lizards have tried out a number of things over the years–you can get damn stale doing the same thing over and over (Rolling Stones, anyone?)–including flirtations with folk, gospel, rap, and a few other styles that are currently eluding me.

The current experiment is with medleys, pairing (and sometimes tripling and quadling) selections from their back catalog with songs from across the rock and roll era–all in their inimitable bluegrass style. By and large, it works. I didn’t know the world needed a bluegrass rendition of Radiohead’s “Creep,” but now that we have one, I’m convinced we’re all better for the experience. (For the record, “Creep” goes very nicely with “Shallow End of the Gene Pool,” an instrumental take on The Stones’ “Paint It, Black,” and The Doors’ “When You’re Strange.”)

The current California mini-tour hits Winters tonight, Felton tomorrow, Culver City on Saturday, and winds up with an Election Night show in Houston, TX. Yeah, I know Houston isn’t in California–and thank all the deities for that–but that’s the Lizards for you. If you can make one of the shows, do it. Show some support for an American icon.