Increasingly Familiar Apple Lust Objects for 2016 and onwards

really? that's insane.

Seems to be? I have a 2017 with 500. That’s crazy if they’d do that. They can’t be assuming everybody would just have a bunch of external drives. I have a thunder bay w 4 drives hooked up and even then I’d rather have more than 256 on internal.

8TB.

Ah, that's for the 3.1Ghz version. The 3.3Ghz and 3.8Ghz models can go higher. Still, crazy.

Up to 2TB in the 3.3 and up to 8TB in the 3.8.

I’m just popping in to say the 12 Pro is the best iPhone I’ve owned since the 4 and it’s largely because it’s the same shape and it’s blue

yeah i got the regular 12 anda week in it's the most enjoyable-to-use device i've probably ever owned

I’m enjoying my 12 pro. I thought the X was the best when I got it but I’m really satisfied with the 12 pro. Straight sides are definitely better.

I agree straight sides are essential if you don't use a case. I'm going to stick with my 1st-gen SE as long as possible. My wife just got the 2nd-gen SE and its slippery as heck without a case on it.

I still wish it had a headphone jack though

I'm returning the 12 regular today and ordering the Pro Max on Friday

As I've mentioned on here before, I drop my SE2 all the time, and that's with quite a grippy case on it. Combination of curved edges, slightly too big to comfortably be extracted from any jacket pocket, and accelerating geriatric clumsiness, I guess.

I've got a full-on cloth case for mine which helps a lot.

Just got the iPad Air which feels heavy and chunky but powerful af compared to the 4 year old one I had.

i am using an old (circa 2015) wacom intuos pro tablet to handwrite things on the macbook pro for various pedagogical purposes. it really sucks over bluetooth and is not much better over usb.

does anyone have experience using the ipad + apple pencil as a wireless writing tablet? is it any good? do you need an ipad pro to do that? my 2015 ipad air still works fine for what i use it for (90% reading and looking at internet) but i wouldn't mind ditching the wacom and it seems like most notetaking apps are geared for ipad to begin with anyway.

I just bought an apple pencil for my kid for his birthday to go with a standard iPad from 2018. Birthday is next week. I'll report back.

Do you mean to use the tablet for writing in real time in an online class? I have had some success with that but not reliably enough. Just writing with the pencil offline works great though, eg for writing comments on student work.

yes that's exactly what i mean

real time writing using (usually) zoom screen share or (less frequently) a shared document

The search for handwritten text in one of the apps I use (Goodnotes, iirc) is creepy-good. I used it a lot before WFH

Yeah I have to use ms teams for that and it worked well in a test session but not during the actual class. I’ll have to retry soon.

i'm using goodnotes, notability and onenote. none are perfect and i'm having trouble making up my mind which to use. notability seems the most stable, probably because it has the fewest features?

OK this M1 MacBook Air looks pretty fast, eh? Or am I being sucked in by hype?

the custom GPU gives me a cynical feeling, but i'll keep an open mind
Apple One finally available btw, time to find some friends who will go in with me

how much does it weigh though

I have Apple One because of my brother, it's cool (as these things go) - the magazine selection is decent, Apple Music is about as annoying as Spotify now, I haven't found any game worth keeping in Arcade though

is News+ worth the extra $10 bump to the top tier? (though even less when split)

how much does it weigh though

― The Bosom Manor Michaelmas Special (silby), Tuesday, November 10, 2020 12:35 PM (fourteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

MBP is same as the prior models, sounds like? might be interesting to see how the Macbook Air performs, it’s a lot lighter and seems to be getting the same chip

I’m kind of boggling at the fact that after decades of collaborating on chips and going with Intel they’ve got a — well, largely through acquisitions and hiring — completely in-house CPU/GPU across almost all the product lines

NHex, if you like magazines, there’s a lot of magazine content on News+ afaict

I think so - the newspapers have the WSJ/Times/LA Times, New Yorker/New Republic/Mother Jones (99% trash now but occasionally good) + general interest like Smithsonian and Outside

Nothing about the 14" MacBook Pro. Oh well.

Nothing about the 14" MacBook Pro. Oh well.

Next year. This was all about getting the new processors into existing hardware (similar to the PowerBook 3500 and the transition to PPC).

The Mini is more interesting than the Air, but only if Apple makes RAM/SSD upgrades user-serviceable (ha) or affordable (haha) - the lower tier stock drives and memory are cruel.

pic.twitter.com/eejTX4wK04

— Paul Hudson (@twostraws) November 10, 2020

(similar to the PowerBook 3500 and the transition to PPC)
nooooooo that would be the PowerBook 5300 and just the model number is enough to make me break a sweat. I suffered with a work-supplied 16MB greyscale passive screen model and it was just hellish, eventually I bought a used 540c with my own money and life was so much better. I wasn't properly healed until the 1400c came along. God those were bad days to be an Apple user.

yr right. I was thinking of first PowerBook G3, not the 5300.

I think you were actually right in the first place - but it was the transition to G3, not to PPC. 5300 was an all new enclosure (and a piece of shit compared to the outgoing 540c), whereas the PB 3500 was a PB3400 with a G3 replacing the PPC 603e or whatever they had.
Of course down the road I was able to switch out the 603 in my 1400c for a G3/350 which was an improvement. I still have that computer, wrote my thesis on it, it's a gem although the screen is failing these days.

... which is what you said in your last post, I shouldn't post after a terrible night's sleep. Sorry.

big sur on thursday? did i hear that right?

anyone know why did the 16" MBP didn't get the new chips? is that coming soon? maybe they're still working on mini-LED displays?

I think the plan has always been to roll them out on the lighter-use machines and let developers catch up with iMacs and the big MBPs to come next year.

For my uses, I'd have to be sure most music software (lots of small plugin developers) + Lightroom worked well on Silicon before I switched from Intel.

It's a rule in life never to get the first get apple anything. Also I need to be sure R and QGIS run smoothly.

first gen

Except for the first iPhone and first iPod and first air pods which were all great

anyone know why did the 16" MBP didn't get the new chips? is that coming soon? maybe they're still working on mini-LED displays?

― the late great, Tuesday, November 10, 2020 7:48 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

the high end machines aris more complicated because they need an integrated GPU in the SOC that is way, way bigger than what they're used to from the iphone/ipad, or they need to do the hardware/software engineering work to make their silicon work with true external GPUs (memory, pcie, etc.). both approaches are tractable but they're not as easy as sticking a keyboard on a ipad pro and calling it a laptop.

aris=are

"true external" means outside the apple silicon chip, not "outside the enclosure". sorry that was a badly written post.

Speculate all you want, but I'm assuming that Apple's thinking is that the M1 performance is such that eGPUs are unnecessary
https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/11/10/apple-silicon-m1-macs-do-not-support-egpus

Of course down the road I was able to switch out the 603 in my 1400c for a G3/350 which was an improvement. I still have that computer, wrote my thesis on it, it's a gem although the screen is failing these days

The 1400s were remarkably indestructible over the long run. I never owned one, but a college professor did give me one that looked liked it had been hit by a car. Still powered up, I found a used screen on eBay and frankensteined it together.

Still going to hold out for whatever the rumored 14" MBP is next year and am going to keep ignoring/power-cycling through the "Service Battery" warning.

Speculate all you want, but I'm assuming that Apple's thinking

is that the M1 performance is such that eGPUs are unnecessary

If I’m wrong and they aren’t working on a solution to that set of problems, this is the end of the line for the Mac Pro btw.