Blog

Short blog posts, journal entries, and random thoughts. Topics include a mix of personal and the world at large.

This one is still fine

Today, Apple announced the fourth-generation of their beloved MacBook Pro with Apple Silicon. I am sure the latest and greatest from Cupertino is amazing and expensive. However, Apple made the mistake of making Apple Silicon so damn good to begin with. It’s almost like All-Clad selling me stainless-steel cookware: I never have to buy another one again.

I am typing this out on my first-generation M1 Max MacBook Pro, and I absolutely do not feel any iota of sluggishness. There’s no incentive to upgrade to the new M4 Max MacBook Pro, other than bragging about the numbers on the spec sheet. (Though the all-black color introduced in last year’s model is kind of delicious.) Thunderbolt 5? It’s not like Thunderbolt 3 is slow.

It is good to see Apple keeping a yearly cadence now to updating their laptop lineup. Anyone buying one at any time throughout the year can be sure that it won’t be made obsolete for a long time. Remember back when the Mac Pro went over 1200 days since the last update? You can’t in good conscience recommend someone to buy one when a computer is that old. Especially a Mac running on Intel chips.

Because Apple Silicon is so awesome since inception, a not so secret hack when Apple updates the Mac lineup is that customers can buy old stock of previous versions at a solid discount. MacBook Pro laptops with the M3 chips are still state-of-the-art capable. A discounted one of those - once the M4 MacBook Pros hit the shelves - is the smart buy if you are pinching pennies in this economy.

I'm here. I'm back

After six years of using the standard sized iPhone, it’s really nice to be back to the one with the bigger screen. Not since my iPhone XS Max got unceremoniously taken away by the Feds for reasons totally not of my fault (no sarcasm) have I bought the larger iPhone. This iPhone 16 Pro Max I got last Friday, sitting at a 6.9 inch (nice) diagonal screen, is just about the biggest I would want a smartphone to be. Anything more and it’s a tablet.

The increased screen real estate is instantly better for typing. I’m noticeably making fewer typos tapping away on the larger keyboard. Another plus is reading books on the Kindle app: more space for text, less page flipping. The experience is so good that I can forgo using the iPad for reading. Content from the web and Youtube fills up the larger canvas beautifully. Why did I go so long in between giant iPhones? Oh right, I didn’t want to pay the $100 price premium. Hashtag broke boy.

Obviously, the iPhone 16 Pro Max is not as pocket-able as the non-Max version. Even as a manly man with manly pockets in his never-skinny manly jeans, the Max iPhone is cumbersome to carry. Before doing any motion that involves bending over or squatting down - like tying my shoes - I must take the phone out. Otherwise I risk it slipping out of the pocket, damaging that pristine titanium frame. The best way to carry the iPhone 16 Pro Max is in the hand, but don’t do that on public transportation, because some thug will for sure snatch it out of your hand and exit swiftly at the stop.

Another con with the Max iPhone is the difficultly of one-handed operation. I have to perform this juggle with the phone in order to position my fingers to reach the stuff at the top half of the display. Apple has a solution for this since the iPhone 6, but for some reason I prefer to do the finger juggle than the simple swiping shortcut.

Smartphones with giant screens: I like it a lot. It’s good to be back using one.

The digital driving you

Apple iPhone users in California can now add their driver license onto the wallet app. Supposedly, we can use this mobile license at TSA checkpoints at select airports (including my local SFO). I don’t know about you, but I will for sure still bring my actual driver license. I wouldn’t want to miss a flight on the off chance that TSA refuses to accept the digital version (or the scanner goes down). The same way I still carry at least one physical credit card with me, just in case the digital cards momentarily stop working. Or my iPhone dies a sudden death.

It’s kind of iffy, isn’t it? To put everything important into one singular failure point. A thing that runs on battery is liable to fail at anytime, without rhyme or reason. I can understand those who would never take an electric vehicle on a long road trip. Let’s say my iPhone stops working while I am out driving. But my driver license and insurance information is stored on the device! Does that mean I can’t legally drive - whilst carrying a nonfunctioning phone?

That’s not going to be a problem until a time when law enforcement accepts the digital California driver license. As of right now, we still have to bring the physical card with us out on the road.

Not that anyone should hand over their smartphone to a cop so willingly. I think the idea is to eventually have officers be able to scan our digital licenses? The same way we tap our phones at pay terminals in a store. This would be great a car dealership. No longer can sleazy salespeople hold your license hostage while they browbeat you into buying a car at their price. You want to see my driver license? Here, scan the this. I think that would be brilliant.

It's still an iPad

My first reaction to the new iPads announced today is: my god these things are expensive. Not that the new iPad Air and iPad Pro has increased in price, mind you - one of the few things that hasn’t price inflated in recent years. It just never occurred to me how damn pricey those models are compared to the base poverty-spec iPad (9th generation) that I have ($309 with the education discount). I was and still am not the target audience to spend $999 (starting) for an iPad Pro.

And honestly, who is? A thousand dollars is main-computing-device kind of money. It is far too steep to pay for a secondary tablet. An iPad Pro (the old one and the new one) certainly has the computing horsepower to be a primary device, but I wonder deeply who is using it as such. Every single person I know, their tablet is a secondary (or tertiary, if we count the smartphone) thing for media-consumption.

I guess I can use an iPad as my primary machine, but it’s definitely far from ideal. I would be working around its limitations (such as poor windows/app management, not great multi-tasking, and cumbersome file management), rather than a MacBook Pro performing exactly what I need out of a computer. Apple sure wants people to use the iPad Pro as the main computer (being the control center for a four-iPhone multi-cam recording is freaking cool), though I remain skeptical there exist such users. I will continue to recommend to others that the best iPad is the very base model.

I plan to use my 9th-generation unit for many more years to come. This is not the year to be dumping money into nice-to-have gadgets. Not in this economy, not at these interest rates. Well actually, the interest rate would be zero because the Apple Card offers zero-percent financing. Hmmm…

The laptop part of a laptop

I’ve owned this fantastically engineered Apple MacBook Pro 16-inch (M1 Max) for two and a half years now. The laptop has spent most of that time docked to an external monitor. On a recent curious check with the coconutBattery app, this very MacBook Pro I am typing on has only got 14 battery cycles on it. Perhaps I should have bought a Mac mini instead…

Ah yes, I remember why I bought a beefy Mac laptop instead of a desktop. If life situation ever changes, and I need to move in quick order, a laptop is far easier to haul around with me. My entire digital life in a four and half pound machine. I would sell the monitor and the extra nice-to-have peripherals, and take just the MacBook Pro.

It used to be that it’s superbly unhealthy for laptop batteries to be constantly plugged into power. At my work, I’ve seen plenty of bulging batteries due to users never using their laptops as a laptop. However, in recent years, Apple has done a tremendous job in managing its laptop batteries - automatically - within the operating system. MacOS learns the usage pattern and adjusts the charge levels accordingly. My MacBook Pro is kept at a 80 percent charge at all times, because I never take unplug it from the monitor.

I was pleasantly surprised to read in the same coconutBattery report the battery still has 96% of its design capacity. To put it another way: it has only degraded 4% from new. I am very happy with that. Barring some unexpected monetary windfall that probably should go towards investments, I plan to use this M1 Max MacBook Pro for many more years. It’s good to see the battery is self-managed for maximum longevity.

What the heck are you doing, Windows laptop manufacturers?

I would like a better keyboard

The annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is happening right now in Las Vegas. The particular segment I always enjoy to read about is PC laptops. A bit of window shopping, you know? My daily-driver laptop is a 202116-inch MacBook Pro (M1 Max), and it’s interesting to see what the Windows side has to offer. Can there be a compelling enough PC product to sway me out of a decade plus loyalty to team Apple?

I am still waiting.

There is one component in modern PC laptops that I do wish Apple offered on its MacBook line: a better keyboard. As an often typist (see: this blog), a laptop with a solid typing experience is a must for me. After the butterfly keyboard debacle, the MacBook lineup has finally returned to a keyboard with good feel and reliability. I still have not found another non-Apple laptop than can match a MacBook for key-deck solidity.

What certain PC laptops do offer though, is better key switches. Mechanical keyboards are super popular these days (except for your office mates who have to hear all that click-clacking from your typing), and certain laptop-makers offer laptops with really thin-profile mechanical keys. My dream typing-focused laptop would be a 13-inch MacBook Air fitted with such keys. Most dreams never come true, obviously.

Other than that, I do not want for anything else with my 16-inch MacBook Pro that the PC camp can sway me over. The build-quality is absolute precision, the 120 Hz mini-LED display is bright and gorgeous, and the M1 Max still chews through everything I need it to do. Best of all, the battery life is unparalleled. In terms of performance per unit of energy, PC laptops have yet to be in even the same neighborhood ever since Apple switched over to its own silicon. It remains amazing to see that after a full work-day, there’s still half battery left on my work-issue M2 MacBook Pro.

I’ve literally heard users complain about the drastically reduced battery life when we give them an Intel-era MacBook Pro, whilst their Apple Silicon MacBook Pro is in service. Horrible batter life is a feature, not a bug, sir.

Day of updates

First world problem: it’s always a tiresome day when Apple rolls out software updates to all its products. Each one has to download its respective update, prepare it, install, then restart. The whole process takes about 45 minutes, during which I am deprived of functional usage. Thumb twiddling is a great exercise!

Of course, the real problem is I own too many things from Apple - that’s why updating takes so long. Not one, but two laptops (granted, one is from work). There’s my beloved iPhone, and an iPad. Two sets of AirPods (though these update whenever, automatically). An Apple TV 4K and a HomePod mini. Finally, there’s the newly-purchased Apple Watch, which oddly needs to be actively charging in order to run updates. These things all delightfully enrich my life, to which I am sure Tim Cook is very happy about.

But just a humble request to Apple: stagger the software updates to different days, for different device type. It’s such a chore to update all my Apple products at once.

What isn’t a chore is deciding to not upgrade to the refreshed MacBook Pros. The M3/Pro/Max chips in the new refresh may be two generations newer than the M1 Max in my current MacBook Pro, but functionally the delta is mere icing on the cake. The M1 Max chip still chews through everything I can throw at it, a testament to how great the first-generation Apple Silicon chips was and still are. There’s zero enticement to upgrade, not even the new black color. Truly gone are the days when I bought a new MacBook Pro for three straight years…