Blog

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

Not enough memory

The generic, no suffix iPad is the best iPad for most people. I have the 9th-generation version, and it’s a great media consumption device. You know, for when I don’t want to turn on the TV, can’t be bothered with my MacBook Pro, or take the iPhone off the charger. First world problems demand first world solutions. We need devices with different display sizes to suit our immediate tastes, damn it!

Let me then continue to complain in a first world way: the standard iPad does not have enough RAM. The 3 GB in my iPad is paltry, and the 4 GB the 10th-generation now comes as standard is not that much better. The problem is using browser with lots of tabs open. There isn’t enough memory to keep everything on memory. Jumping between tabs can include lots of reloading. You had a spot in an article where you were reading? Well, you just lost it.

I’ve been eyeing an upgrade to the iPad Air with 8 GB of RAM, but the frugal me cannot force open the wallet. After all, I do have a MacBook Pro with 32 GB of memory. I could always use that for tab-intensive duties.

There’s got to be an end with memory inflation? The first laptop I ever bought - a 2007 MacBook - came with 2 GB of RAM. In 2025, the cheapest MacBook Air comes with 16 GB. It’s a chicken or the egg question: are apps truly demanding more memory, or are developers being lazy in building memory-hungry apps without a care? We’ve been joking about Google Chrome tabs using an absurd amounts of memory since tabs were a thing, and yet it seems the fix hasn’t ever come from the browser side! Manufacturers simply kept adding more RAM into their devices.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be jumping between tabs. Focus on one thing at a time, am I right?

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.

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?

Build another PC?

In a fit of nostalgia, I’ve been toying with the idea of building a PC. I used to be a huge custom PC enthusiast. I built my first custom Pentium 4 machine back in middle school. I’ve done a dual AMD processor build, back before multiple cores on a single die was a thing. The last PC I built was used as a media center connected to an HDTV. That one got confiscated by the Feds (it wasn’t me). Since then, I’ve been entirely on the Mac platform.

Obviously I don’t exactly need a PC. This M1 MacBook Pro I’m typing on is my main computer. The LG TV I have has its own operating system, so I don’t need a PC for that either (besides, far easier and cheaper to buy a streaming stick from Apple/Amazon/Google). I don’t need a PC to game, either: there’s a PlayStation 5 for that.

So building a new PC in the year 2023 would be a pure vanity project for me. What I really miss is the craftsmanship and meticulousness that go with putting all the components together. There’s a tactile art to proper cable management and fitting the parts in harmony. It’s as close to building a car for those of us lacking the skill and money to build our own car. The satisfactory joy from pressing the power button and the PC coming to life for the very first time. That’s what I miss.

Of course, in this economy, I’m not spending money on what is essentially an art project. As mentioned, I have no use for a built PC. And these days I’m trying to eliminate as much superfluous stuff as possible. I shall be content with living vicariously through the people building PCs on YouTube.

Buy as much storage

These days, the standard configuration of computers we buy at work comes with 512 gigabytes of internal storage. You may think that’s plenty, but it really isn’t. After we put the standard suite of apps (such as Adobe Creative Cloud and Microsoft Office), the users have about 430 gigabytes or so to use. More than enough if you only play in the land of spreadsheets and powerpoint presentations. But nobody lives like that anymore. High quality media files dominate our life, including academia.

Those media files take up a lot of storage. A single photograph from an iPhone can be up to 10 megabyte in size. 4K video at 60 frames-per-second - the standard recording resolution of the latest smartphones - takes up a whopping 750 megabytes per minute. An instructor makes a class submit video for an assignment, downloads them all to view, and there goes countless gigabytes of storage space taken up. And as we know, not everyone is so diligent in pruning old files.

There’s another problem: users treat these work computers as their personal devices. They would sign-in to their personal iCloud or Google accounts, sync their entire digital life, and boom - there goes another chunk of storage. Exacerbating the issue on the macOS side is the nefarious category of “system files”. These are working files the operating system uses to, well, operate. However big it is is however big it is - the end user cannot prune or change it. As of this writing, the system files on my MacBook Pro is using over 60 gigabytes.

I remember a time when a MacBook only came with 80 GB of storage in total!

Back in the old days, the conventional wisdom when buying a computer is to buy more processing power and memory amount than you currently need - for supposed future proofing. These days, even the bog standard poverty-spec laptop is plenty powerful enough to last the user for years. What they should optimize for then is to spec and buy as much storage space as they can afford. I paid plenty of hundreds extra to have two terabyte of storage on my MacBook Pro. And honestly, I wished I’d bought even more: it’s already more than half full, and I’ve only owned the laptop for a little over a year!

Utilitarian longevity

At work we deal with plenty of computers of varying vintage. A constant I’ve seen is just how robust Mac desktops can be. We’re still comfortably deploying machines dating as fast back as 2015! Can’t say the same about Mac laptops, however: those tend to get absolutely abused. Any MacBook Air/Pro with the dreaded butterfly keyboard returns to us fairly useless. iMacs on the hand, because of their unmoving nature, will simply solider on until Apple ceases support in the latest macOS update.

These days I’m all about functional things lasting a long time. Which is to say I’m trying to be the type of person who keeps stuff for an extended period, instead of replacing them with the latest new shiny thing soon as it is available. Today is as good a day as any to start. I’m still going to trade in my iPhone for a new one every year, but at least the old phone goes back to Apple to live another day for a new master. Last week I returned a pair of AirPods Max headphones, instead choosing to keep using a pair of Bose QC35 headphones that’s been with me since the mid 2010s.

There will be no computer upgrade for me this year as well. I’ve trade in for a new MacBook Pro for the past three years, and the trend stops now. I don’t care how awesome the M2-powered MacBook Pros will be this year - I’m not switching! This M1 Max 16-inch MacBook Pro costs a whole lot of money, and it is still plenty fast for my purposes. I’m looking to get at least five years out of this one. Besides, my general workflow these days involves nothing heavy: a browser to access the Internet is all I need, really. I’m typing this right onto Squarespace’s CMS!

The reason we can still deploy 2015 iMacs into the field is precisely because the typical user only needs it to access the Internet. Add in Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat to the mix, and that’s pretty much all there is to it. I reckon those iMacs can be of service for at least three more years. A decade of use! Now that’s longevity.

Ya'll nasty

Working in IT tech support, I’ve seen my fair share of absolutely filthy computers coming in for service. As someone who keeps my own stuff pristinely clean, I can’t fathom how others live with the grime that’s on their laptops. Dust and food particles all over the keyboard deck; fingerprints and oil on the screen surface. Needless to say, I wear gloves before I handle the laptops. Even before these COVID times.

I think there’s a spectrum of bothersome in relation to how dirty something is to people. Everybody can objectively attest to what clean is. No one would accept a brand new out of the box computer that’s full of dust. However, filthiness level is entirely subjective. A single smudge would bother the heck out of me, while others can live with a display full of fingerprints.

On that note, I always wondered why people feel the need to touch their screens (hence the fingerprints left over). Then I realized most are not. The dirt on the screen is actually caused by the keyboard deck. You type out an email with your grubby fingers whilst in the middle of eating a sandwich. That oily imprint then gets transferred to the screen when the laptop is closed. Mystery solved. The rest of you are filthy and dirty.

Every laptop that comes into my hands at work, I clean them up nicely before commencing service. Not because I’m doing the users a solid. It’s more for me because I don’t like working on a dirty laptop. Indeed, many of them remark on how clean their computer is upon returning to them. Like I said, we can all objectively agree to what absolute clean is. It’s the level of unclean that’s seemingly in dispute!