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.

Stay put and wait

With AI companies buying up all the world’s memory chip supply, it’s tough out here for the average Joe buying or building computers. Our combined economies of scale cannot begin to match a batch order from the likes of OpenAI. So of course you have entire chip companies saying they are bowing out of the consumer business altogether. There’s more than enough money serving B2B. Because fuck us, that’s why.

Just today the base model Mac mini is marked as unavailable at the Apple Store. Too many people are buying them to run LLMs locally. Higher tier models with increased memory and storage are backordered for months. Other manufacturers have computers to sell you immediately, but they’ve raised the pricing tremendously in response to the chip shortage.

It’s simply not a good time for the computing enthusiast. First was the GPU pricing squeeze from years back, and now another critical component is seeing highly inflated prices. If the Strait of Hormuz remains closed for an extended period, other components will surely be affected as well. These companies cannot swallow increased logistics costs for very long. Amazon Prime free shipping might go from two days to four.

As I type this out on my 2021 MacBook Pro, I guess numerically speaking I can use an upgrade. But the current aforementioned computing landscape is so constraining that I reckon it’s prudent to keep waiting if possible. Thankfully the first generation of Apple Silicon chips remain eminently powerful and efficient, even some five years later. I have to say it was smart of me to have the foresight to spec for 32 GB of RAM when I bought this laptop. Even as successive macOS releases use more and more resources, this M1 MacBook Pro is still not running out of memory space.

The memory chip shortage is also affecting memory card prices. I’ve been looking to buy higher capacity SD cards for my camera, but the pricing has ballooned 30 to 40% in the past month. I guess I don’t need the additional space anymore! I rather offload the camera more often than pay the inflated pricing.

Staying put and waiting is the play right now.

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.

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.