Blog

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

Don't touch my laptop

Are there people out there that actually buy plane tickets using their smartphones? That’s a crazy concept to me. I need the security and confidence of a full-blown computer in order to feel safe about plopping down thousands of my hard-earned dollars. Millennials who grew up with the Internet remain scarred by less-than-reliable mobile versions of websites. Kids these days don’t know about the anxiety of the spinning loading wheel after you’ve pressed the checkout button.

Even though these days smartphone apps and mobile Internet is just as reliable as the “full size” counterparts, I still can’t trust it for the important stuff. Whether I’m making hotel reservations or doing the taxes, it has to be done on the MacBook Pro.

Speaking of Apple’s laptop line: there’s a new one announced today. A slimmer MacBook Pro with an OLED display. And for the very first time in the long legendary line, an Apple laptop features a touchscreen. I think it’s going to be a strong incentive for people to upgrade. In my line of IT support work, I can’t count the times the number of users have tried to manipulate a Mac laptop using touch, only for me to remind them that it’s not a touchscreen. Scorn, as Steve Jobs has famously done, at the ill ergonomics of touchscreen laptops, I reckon the user case for them is not insignificant.

After all, everything else electronics that we use are almost all touch-based.

I am not one of those people. I absolutely loathe any sort of blemish on my laptop screen. I keep it clean religiously, though not with Apple’s famously specific polishing cloth. It is unthinkable for me to willingly add fingerprints onto the display, no matter how useful it may be to manipulate the UI with the fingers.

Not that I can afford the new OLED MacBook Pros anyways. To replace my current M1 MacBook Pro 16-inch, I’d have to part with $3,400 of my human monies for the new one. And that’s before adding additional memory and storage space, which is practically a necessity. I rather use that $3,400 for a vacation to Asia.

Man maths

I was perfectly content with my iPhone 16 Pro Max… until I saw reviews of the new iPhone 18 Pro series. New to the latest iPhone are updates to the photographic styles - essentially fancy filters for photos taken with the phone. I’ve been a fan of photographic styles since this very iPhone 16 Pro Max was launched with the ability to customize the default tone mapping. I can (finally) toggle the color and dial back the crunchiness that iPhone photos have sort of become notorious for.

New to the iPhone 18 Pro line is more tone options, one of which is film. Right along with the prevailing photography zeigeist, I adore the look of film. My primary shooter is a Fujifilm XT-5. Nostalgia Neg is my preferred film simulation, and I am fully happy with the JPEG files that are straight out of the camera. These days, Adobe Lightroom for me is more of a collation app than heavy editing.

I always thought it would be nice for the iPhone to have such a film simulation out of the box using the native camera app. I didn’t think it would happen, but by god Apple did it! I wasn’t at all planning to spend $1,200 for a new phone this year, yet the mighty corporation from Cupertino has done it again.

This is where a bit of girl man maths comes in. Firstly, thanks to the chronic memory chip shortage caused by the AI boom, both models of the iPhone 18 Pro series has increased in price by $100. I skirted that extra cost by downsizing from the Max model of my iPhone 16 Pro to the regular sized iPhone 18 Pro. Same price as the old phone, just smaller screen real estate. A necessary sacrifice.

Secondly, my existing iPhone 16 Pro Max is fully functional and unblemished, so a perfect trade-in candidate. That knocks the price down by $610. Third, I opted out of buying AppleCare for the new phone, which I bought and carried on the old one. As someone who takes care of his stuff really well, the extra insurance is a needless financial outlay. So, save some additional money there.

Lastly, for the first time in my iPhone owning life, I bought a third-party case. $50 (plus tax) for Apple’s first-party case is ludicrously expensive, given there are so many Chinese-made options on Amazon that are just as nice, for about $15. Even if the third-party case doesn’t last as long, there’s enough money difference to buy two more before equaling the price of one Apple case.

That’s how I do man maths: make a big purchase, then find small ways to alleviate the total expenditure.

When it was fast

There’s a new release of macOS version 27, and I have to say it’s the first time my M1 Max MacBook Pro is starting to feel sluggish. (The latest Apple chip is the M6.) Adobe Lightroom importing doesn’t feel as snappy as before. More than one Google Chrome tab? Forget about it.

And that’s the problem with computer chips chasing after better performance year after year. The software running on those chips expand to fill the provided bandwidth. Hardware and software progresses symbiotically. With more power, comes more code to use that extra power.

Older hardware gets forsaken and disregarded. My M1 laptop fully supports macOS 27, but let’s be honest, macOS 27 is written for a newer and faster platform. Why wouldn’t Apple optimize their newest operating system to run maximally with their latest hardware? They then throttle down the performance to fit the smaller performance envelopes of the older stuff. Game developers aren’t using the less powerful XBOX Series S as the benchmark; they code for the Series X, then scale it back for the poverty XBOX.

Just as Series S does not run games as well as Series X, my M1 MacBook Pro isn’t running macOS 27 as smoothly as an M5 MacBook Pro. By design.

It didn’t feel this way at first, of course. Any current model year Mac computer feels completely speedy and snappy when first purchased. Even Intel-powered Macs, horrendously slow by today’s standards, was fully adequate when launched. It’s after the first year of ownership, and subsequent years later, when the OS upgrades accumulate, that the sluggishness creeps in. Until about five years later and you feel compelled to upgrade because it all just feels a bit slow.

I will not be buying a new computer this year. The ongoing war in Iran and the latent inflation to come (we haven’t yet seen the full results of the oil shock), it’s important to have reserves for the truly necessary. Because those necessities will and are costing more.

We're all paying for it

You know RAM prices have truly gone off the deep end when Apple of all companies is raising prices on their products. The same Apple that famously already charges a premium for extra storage and memory. It seems even those fat margins are not enough to swallow the hyper inflation of semiconductor chips due to the supposedly AI revolution. It now costs $1999 for the base MacBook Bro, up from $1699. Kind of insane.

I guess this M1 Max MacBook Pro of mine will solider on until it literally dies.

All eyes now turn to the annual September iPhone event. Will the iPhone get a price bump for the first time in a long time? Place your bets at your prediction market platform of choice.

AI has been cashing checks and making promises (still a solution looking for a problem if you ask me), and yet the downstream negative effects are burdened by everyone. We’re all paying for it, just so Silicon Valley can keep on minting fresh new millionaires and bilionaires. An iPad for grandmother is now $150 more expensive - thanks to AI-caused inflation, even though AI won’t touch her everyday life in the slightest. Our utility bills keep going higher thanks to data centers drawing energy the equivalent of entire cities.

Whether you use Chat-GPT or not, you’re paying for it one way or another. That’s not very fair, is it?

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.