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!

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Seasons greeting.

The best MacBook Air

I think I’ve found the perfect writing instrument: a 2015 11.6-inch MacBook Air.

I use to have one back in the day. Until I unceremoniously left it in a bin passing through TSA checkpoint at San Francisco International. I probably should have gone back after my trip to claim it at the lost and found, but I was far too cavalier with money in my 20s. Lost a thousand dollar notebook? No big deal, I’ll just buy another one.

And I did. In came a Microsoft Surface Pro 4, a device I hardly ever used and sold it a few years later towards buying an iMac.

Thanks to work, I recently came into a used unit of the 11.6-inch MacBook Air. This particular one even beefier than my lost poverty-spec version: a maximum 4 GB of memory and 256 GB of storage, a tremendous premium back in 2015. At 2.36 pounds, it’s the second lightest Mac laptop ever, behind only the retina screen 12-inch MacBook introduced in 2015. That one weights just two pounds, but has a huge fatal flaw: the god-awful “butterfly” keyboard.

In contrast, the keyboard on the second-generation MacBook Air might be the best Apple has ever made. Full keys with appropriate height and travel. The smaller 11.6-inch unibody aluminum chassis - compared to the larger 13-inch version - offers a wonderfully strong deck with almost zero flex. It’s perfect for someone like me who strikes super hard on the keys.

A laptop from 2015 is decidedly obsolete for anything but word processing and light internet browsing. This is why this 11.6-inch MacBook Air is perfect for purely writing. There isn’t anything else to distract me! The screen is so relatively small I’m not even tempted to fire up YouTube on Safari. I wrote all 3,500 words of my 2022 reflections post using the laptop. I intend to use it for all long form stuff going forward.

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Glass and concrete.

Dead batteries

As the university prepares for the return of in-person classes for the fall semester, some of the staff and faculty have started to trickle back on campus. But there’s a problem: their computers have been turned off since pre-pandemic, some 16 months earlier. No issues with the iMacs as they work fine once plugged back into power. The Dell PC towers, however, aren’t so convenient.

PC motherboards have a CMOS battery that provide just enough power for the board to remember its settings. If the battery were to run out of juice, say, during a pandemic when the PC is without power for more than a year, the motherboard is effectively reset. This becomes a problem when users boot it up for the first time in a long time, as the internal BIOS clock will be incorrect (and won’t boot further with an incorrect time), and also the hard-drive won’t be recognized.

Our department will then get the call and we would have to physical go to these users’ offices to replace the CMOS battery, and toggle everything back as it were. Tedious. Why can’t everybody use Mac computers to make all our lives easier?

Once we get the PC (and Macs too, honestly) back up and running, there’s another problem: the software is horrendously out of date. Performing updates to the apps and the operating system is at least another few hours. God forbid your PC is old enough to have a spinning hard-drive instead of solid-state; it’ll take the entire work-day for everything to sync back together and working correctly.

Solution? Well, let’s first agree to not have another pandemic. Then, opt for a laptop next time you’re given the option of a new work computer.

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Happy dragon.

Apple silicon Macs

Let’s talk a bit about the Macs with Apple silicon. Announced last week and releasing this week, there’s new MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac Mini equipped with Apple’s M1 chip, a derivative from its illustrious line of A series chips that’s been powering iPhones and iPads for a decade. Long story short: Apple is abandoning Intel because the chipmaker is unable to produce CPUs with the power and efficiency that Apple requires. Apple’s own in-house team has done such a fantastic job with the iPhone chips that porting it to the Mac platform is the next logical leap.

And the benchmarks show the M1 is simply amazing. Single and multi-thread scores equalling or better than Intel’s latest 11th generation chips, with only the very top-of-line still holding a slight advantage (I can cherish my Intel-powered 16-inch MacBook Pro for quite a bit longer). Keep in mind the M1 represents only the “entry level” product from Apple, and it does this amazing performance with incredible power efficiency - battery life on the new laptops is well above 10 hours. The M1 MacBook Air doesn’t even have system fan.

And because Apple now practically owns the whole stack, the seamless integration between software and hardware means the M1 Macs can get more performance out of a single unit of speed. The supreme fluidity of using a modern iPhones and iPads has come to the Mac as well, which is just fantastic.

I cannot wait for the truly “Pro” products to come out with Apple silicon, offering even more performance, and more than the 16 gigabytes of RAM and 2 terabytes of SSD that the new M1 Macs maxes out on. The only question is what should I buy: a MacBook Pro to replace my current 16-inch machine, or a new, hopefully redesigned iMac to compliment the mobile product? A confounding and fun conundrum to ponder on. I sold my 2017 iMac to consolidate down to a single laptop, so it would be interesting if I reverse the decision.

Intel and the rest of the PC world should be on high notice.

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Hofmeister.

iPad won't replace my laptop

The most prized team in all of computing technology have got to be the silicon group within Apple. The A12X Bionic chip in the latest iPad Pros have shown in benchmarks to be faster than any Mac computer currently on sale that isn’t an iMac Pro or a BTO Macbook Pro, all for the entry price of just $799. Intel is absolutely getting their ass handed to them by Apple. iPhone users have been enjoying the fruits of the A Series chip for many years now, and it surely won’t be long until Apple puts one of those into a Mac.

But that’s in the future; for the present those wonderful and powerful chips reside in the aforementioned iPad Pros. Apple would like consumers to think of them as laptop replacements, and for a considerable amount of people that can indeed be the case, but for me, a person who’ve owned two previous iterations of the iPad (the very first one and the third generation), it remains but a quality content viewing device. For my particular workflow, the iPad simply cannot replace the laptop.

Apple can cram all the performance it wants into the iPad, and it’ll be utterly wasted in my favor because I can’t do serious photo-editing work on the device. No doubt iPads have got some of the most brilliant and accurate displays in any product, making for a brilliant canvas to work on, but it’s still size-limited at 12.9 inch at the maximum. In handling 40+ megapixel RAW files I want the biggest display possible (I miss the old 17-inch Macbook Pro). The new iPad Pros feature USB-C so it can connect up to a 5K display, though the user is still expected to manipulate the UI using the iPad itself, rather than the more convenient mouse.

That’s because iOS still doesn’t feature a pointer: you’re forced to use your fingers at all times, even when connected to a giant display. Great as it may be on the iPhone, iOS simply haven’t evolved quite enough on the iPad to provide a suitable workflow for me. It does bring up a chicken or the egg question: should a device acquiesce to my idiosyncrasies, or should I adapt to the peculiarities of the device instead?

I don’t mind altering habits, but there are some barriers that simply aren’t acceptable. For instance one cannot import photos on an SD card directly into Lightroom mobile; it must go through the iOS Photos app and then import into Adobe; it doesn’t make any sense. External USB storage are not supported at all on the new iPad Pro even with the USB-C port; how and where exactly do Apple want us photographers to perform backups? Please don’t say iCloud.

One last deal-beaker of the iPad that keeps me clutching to a laptop: the typing experience. I write regularly on this website and a proper keyboard is crucial, and the fabric facsimile Apple trots out in their Smart Keyboard Folio isn’t it. I’m not about to carry an extra wireless keyboard with me just for typing. A mac laptop is still the better in that regard, and more importantly it actually fits on the lap, no table necessary.

All of this is to say I hope Apple really get a move on putting the A series chips into the Mac; I have a hunch when the Macbook receives its next refresh, it won’t be running Intel.

What we mean when we tell users we need to perform diagnostics.

Mac Mini and Macbook Air is still alive

And just like that, the longest neglected two products in Apple’s portfolio - sans Mac Pro - finally received updates.

I woke yesterday to the Apple event in Brooklyn still ongoing: it started at 7am, and I tend to wake at 8am. An avid purveyor of Apple products I may be, I was not about to forgo precious sleep time just to watch a keynote. Nevertheless, I hopped on immediately onto MacRumors, ignored the presentation of the new iPad that was ongoing, and went hunting for details on the new Macs earlier in the event.

After four inexplicably long years, the much beloved Mac Mini finally gets refreshed. No longer are people suckered into paying the same price for hilariously outdated internals. I’ve fond memories of the Mac Mini because I bought one back in 2014, the last time it got an update until today. It was a relative powerhouse in a tiny package, and the unit served me well in my creative endeavors until it was replaced by a 5K iMac last year. Had today’s refresh been available then, I probably would’ve bought it.

The new Mac Mini receives innards that rival the iMac, as long as you don’t care about graphics performance. It’s got the latest 8th-generation Intel chips, alongside a completely flash storage architecture, featuring up to 64GB of memory and 1.5TB of SSD storage. With an army of IO ports at the back similar to the iMac, the new Mac Mini should make plenty of BYOP (bring your own peripherals) customers happy; even those wanting more graphics can attach an eGPU unit via Thunderbolt 3.

Here’s to hoping Apple doesn’t let this Mac Mini languish unchanged for another four years.

The other Mac product to receive a refresh, a genuine surprise for me, is the Macbook Air. Thought to be in purgatory since the introduction of the Macbook back in 2016, it seems Apple have decided to reharness the immense brand value of what is easily their most popular laptop ever. Essentially an entry-level 13-inch Macbook Pro by a different name, the new Macbook Air changes it up slightly by retaining the iconic tapered design, and adding Touch ID to the keyboard (previously only available on Pro models with the Touch Bar). The new laptop looks fantastic.

Macbook Air with a retina display: we’ve been clamoring for it endlessly, and after many long years Apple finally delivered. As a previous owner of an 11-inch Macbook Air which was unceremoniously forsaken at a TSA checkpoint, I’m dangerously close to plopping down the $1200 necessary for the base new one. If only I wasn’t saving up for a 911…

All of the lines.

I'm learning AutoCad?

I’ve been tasked at work to learn AutoCad software, which is wonderful because I am always up for learning a new skills. AutoCad has been around forever, and in my youth days of P2P and illegal software (statute of limitations have certain ran out, right?) AutoCad was amongst a group of absurdly expensive software (like Maya, 3D Studio Max) that we as teens hardly knew how to use but was incredibly fun to say: yup, I’ve downloaded software worth multiple thousands of dollars. 

As proper functioning adults we of course pay for software (hello, Adobe; hope you’re enjoying my monthly payments) and upon research the purchase price of AutoCad is indeed astronomical:  $1,680 per year. Obviously my work would cover that no issues but keep in mind heavy 3D design work is not our milieu; I’m being directed to learn AutoCad so we can easily draw classroom floor-plans and blueprints. We are not using the software to make any money, which in a normal design firm would suitably justify the hefty entry price. 

Another peculiarity I ran into is that the best version of AutoCad (some would say the only version to get) is the one that runs on Windows PC. That’s a problem because at work I am issued a Macbook Pro. You may say I can run Windows software using Boot Camp but that sounds super unwieldy and someone (not me) would have to pay for the license. There’s an AutoCad for Mac but if the PC version is de facto standard then that’s the one to learn.   

What are the chances work will furnish me a PC on top of the Macbook Pro I already have? 

There’s also the matter of performance. AutoCad rightfully gobbles up lots of computing power and to run it with any modicum of smoothness requires a dedicated graphics card. I had thought about bringing in my Surface Pro 4 from home to do the job but unfortunately it’s only got onboard Intel graphics (notoriously not very good). How dare Microsoft call it a ‘Pro’ level machine. 

If all of this sounds to you like my work haven’t thought it through in what’s exactly required to learn/run AutoCad, well I’m thinking that too. Perhaps that's part of the directive in me gathering the information and making the necessary requests. We shall see.    

You definitely do not need portrait mode to blur stuff out using the iPhone camera.