Blog

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

Proud of my people

One of my favorite genre of YouTube videos is car restoration. Channels like M539 Restorations and AutoAlex Cars, where the hosts buy used cars with many problems, then fix them up to be reliably running machines. And sometimes they throw in some tasteful modifications, too. It’s kind of like what I am doing why my Golf GTI that was purchased used. Suffice it to say, there were plenty wrong with it that needed fixing.

A term that's come up rather often in these car restoration videos is “Chinesium”. This references car parts purchased for cheap from China. Perhaps there’s some sort of defending-the-motherland in me; I’m taking the terms Chinesium rather negatively. Yes, there’s plenty cheap quality stuff from China, but in the year of our lord 2026, I hope the stereotype of disposable Chinese junk can be cast into the history books.

Think of the Apple iPhone. Arguably the most important consumer device this century. Where is it made? China. The iPhone certainly does not have a reputation for junk, now does it? Contrarily, it’s one of the most beautifully made products on the planet. Open one up and the inside is just as immaculate as the outside. All of it is put together by the hands of my people. At least until Chinese labor is no longer cost competitive compared to Southeast Asia, and Apple moves product out of the Middle Kingdom entirely.

In reality it simply boils down to supply and demand. There’s whole exhaust systems from China for $150 with questionable quality because customers are buying. Ask China to produce something nice, and the country can deliver with the best of them. The aforementioned iPhone is one example. Another is the slew of lithium battery powered products from the likes of Fanttik and Wolfbox. My Fanttik Slim V8 APEX portable vacuum gets used all the time.

Car parts from China isn’t an automatic negative. Plenty of well-respected brands contract out production there. The TDD magnetic paddles I installed on the GTI is fantastic, and bought on AliExpress. It’s all about having standards. When you ask for quality from China, you can and will get it.

These are beautiful times

We find out that we take modern technologies for granted whenever we interact with the older stuff.

At work I was tasked with erasing some really old iPads. So old that they cannot charge any faster than the rated 10-watts the original charging brick was allotted for. Go from 20% to 80% like our modern supercharging smartphones? Not a chance. It took a solid hour of charge time just to bring one of these vintage iPads back from the depths of battery depletion.

And to think that back when those iPads were new, such slow charging speed felt entirely normal! When there is nothing better to compare to, you think fantastically of what you’ve got in front of you.

An allegory then for being happy with what we already have. Sure you may not be a fan of the current administration, and there’s like yet another war going on in the Middle East. It’s very easy to get sucked into that macro madness. Pincer down onto the very micro - your daily life - and I think there’s much to be grateful for. Especially for those of us living the first world.

The average of us wouldn’t trade places with kings of old. A castle is rather worthless without air conditioning, isn’t it? And let’s not even mention the utter complete non existence of penicillin and anesthetics.

Beware of those who pine for the “good old days.” What they are asking for is not the old days in its entirety. (Because who wants to go back to the 1980s without modern computing?) What they only want is the specific cultural milieu to backup their current agenda. Traditional living? Alright, then: go wake up every morning at 6:00 AM to milk the cows.

The current times are the good old days. We’re already living in it.

Back it up

This is your periodic reminder to please have an up-to-date backup of your data!

The worst part of my job is informing users there’s total data loss. The user can be working on a manuscript on their laptop. An inadvertent hand suddenly knocks over an uncovered drinks bottle. The entirety of the fluids splash onto the keyboard deck. The screen goes blank. The laptop is unresponsive.

The user brings the laptop to us in desperation. Further bad news: it’s a Mac. Apple locks down their computers so securely that if it doesn’t turn on, there’s practically no way to retrieve the data. At least with a typical Windows PC, you can crack it open and pull the hard-drive. Not so with the mighty Macintosh: the drive is soldered on, and locked behind an encryption chip.

There’s nothing to do but wait for the Mac laptop to dry, and pray that it just might spring back to life. Anything short of that, the data is gone. Because of the Mac’s locked-down nature, data recovery services can’t crack it. (Besides, how secure is it if they can?)

But what about the Apple Store? They simply don’t care about user data. Before they perform any repair - under warranty or otherwise - users have to sign an acknowledgment the hard-drive might be wiped. Even if the repair has nothing to do with the internals!

Folks: have a back up, and keep it up to date. The despair of losing the manuscript you’ve worked many months (or years) on is inconceivable.

It's good enough

It is new iPhone season, and this year I am not upgrading. Even though I can easily afford to, my days of getting the latest iPhone model every year is over. The proper adult thing to do is to check if it serves a purpose beyond the glow of a shiny new toy (it’s a lovely glow for sure). Is there a critical fault with my current phone that warrants a change?

It helps the answer quite a bit when the current phone is a still relatively new iPhone 16 Pro. It’s barely one year old at this point, and the internal systems remain zippy and responsive. Battery life is stellar, and it’s got AppleCare+ warranty for another year. Again, no particular reason to switch.

However, Apple knows how to tug at this hobbyist photographer’s heart. The new iPhone 17 Pro has an upgraded telephoto lens. My style of shooting leans towards the longer focal lengths. The typical 24mm to 35mm range (what the wide lens would be on most smartphones) creates incredibly boring photos. The compression and separation you get from telephoto can tell much better story.

I must resist! As much as I would love the new 48 megapixel telephoto lens on the iPhone 17, I have to be content with the lowly 12 megapixel shooter on my iPhone 16. There’s got to be a “good enough” at some point, right? Innovation is great and all, but certain things can simply be allowed to withstand the test of time.

There’s been newer monitors that are better, brighter, more colorful than the Pro Display XDR I bought back in 2020. However, I’ve no desire to replace it because the mini LED technology in the XDR is good enough. Partly also because I paid $5,000 for it…

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?

Poor judgement

Sony recently announced their next generation over-the-ear noise cancelling headphones: the forever stupidly named WH-1000XM6. I’m sure the new cans are better performing and whatnot, but what gets me is the new price. A $50 increase to the already hefty $400 of the previous generation.

$450 for a pair of headphones? Do people realize how much money that is? Think of how many hours you have to work to even net $450 into your deposit account. I’m old enough to remember when premium consumer noise cancelling headphones were in the $300s range. And please spare me with the “Well, if you adjust for inflation…”

Of course, $450 for the Sony cans is still not as insane as the $550 Apple’s been charging for their AirPods Max. Every time I see a student on campus with a pair those, I fail to fathom how one is capable of spending such a large chunk of their income (remember: students) on headphones. $199 for a pair of AirPods Pro (when it’s on sale at third party merchants, which is often) is all the private listening device I need. Travel? The AirPods Pro is vastly smaller than any of the over-the-ear products.

On MKBHD’s review of the Sony WH-1000XM6, he initially bristled at the $50 price increase, but at the end concluded that it’s worth it. I am sorry, but a guy with millions of dollars in net worth is a poor judge of value. Marques is no longer of the proletariat class. He can afford to wipe his ass with $50 bills. Spending $450 on consumer electronics is but a drop in the ocean for him. I don’t think he can appropriately judge worth for the typical consumer netting a few thousands a month in income.

I’m not hating on MKBHD. He deserves all the rewards for his ceaseless hard work. Enjoy your millions, King. I’m simply taking his judgement of value with a carton load of sea salt.

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.