In this test I take my Apple dongle (heh heh) and hook up the following things to the Air:
Asus 24″ monitor via HDMI
Logitech M720 Marathon mouse (using USB Type-A wireless receiver)
CTRL mechanical keyboard via USB-C
I’ve done similar with the MacBook Po in the past and the good news is everything simply works as expected. The default mouse tracking speed is set in a way that I am convinced it is meant to test your patience as it very slowly and carefully tracks across the screen. But that is easily adjusted.
The monitor works fine and looks good once True Tone is turned off. Every time I connect an Apple laptop to this thing it makes me want a 4K monitor. Someday.
The keyboard just works, as expected.
So until my dock arrives, I can use this jury-rigged system to use the Air for writing and such activities. And I will.
Starting tomorrow. Or maybe the next day. Definitely by the weekend.
I’m not kidding. Just watch.
Also, I have added a few more apps:
Discord. Intel-only but runs fine. It’s mainly a chat program, so it doesn’t have to do a lot (I don’t plan on streaming games from the MacBook Air, though that could prove modestly amusing)
Day One. Maybe I’ll finally commit to this journaling thing and record my darkest thoughts for all the world to never see but wonder about. Until I re-post everything to this blog.
This is not a full review, as I’ve only had my 2020 M1-based MacBook Air for a day, but I can give a few impressions.
First, yes, I got a replacement for my 2016 MacBook Pro just a few weeks shy of its four-year free keyboard replacement offer ending.
After mulling over the differences between the equivalent MacBook Pro replacement and the Air, I opted to go with the Air because:
The Air costs a fair bit less, allowing me to increase the ram and storage without spending more
They have the exact same M1 chip, so general performance is pretty much identical
The Air only loses out on sustained performance, something my use case would rarely if ever hit
As a bonus to the above, the Air has no fan, so is completely silent
The Touch Bar still seems like a goofy, unnecessary idea
The extra battery life of the Pro is nice, but the Air is already way better than what I had before, so the improvement in the Pro is not worth the price premium
Setting up the Air was pretty straightforward. I have made a new rule this time, which I plan to strictly enforce (until I stop):
Only install programs I am actually using, not ones I might use or may eventually need to install. Slim (installs) is in. So far I have installed:
Firefox
Edge (to have a Chromium-flavored browser handy)
Ulysses
OneDrive
And that’s it!
For Firefox, I started with the current non-native version, but it was just janky enough to drive me to use the 84.0a beta, which is M1 native. The two issues I encountered were crashes on quitting and searches not working. Annoying and I could have probably managed, but the beta has been stable and runs fast.
Ulysses is M1 native. Edge and OneDrive are running under Rosetta 2 translation, but they both seem fine. So software-wise, I haven’t had any major issues, or nothing that couldn’t be fixed fairly easily.
I set up Touch ID and it is fast. FAST. Pretty much instant. But having the system unlock with the Apple Watch is even better.
The system wakes up almost instantly, too.
Battery life so far seems very good, though I haven’t really used the Air enough to give it a proper workout.
I selected Silent Clicking for the trackpad, but can still hear it click. Maybe I need to reboot? Maybe silent means kind of silent.
Oh, and the keyboard. This feels much closer to the keyboard on my old 2013 MacBook Air. It is still clicky (and clicks notably with my caveman typing style), but the clicks are much softer, because there is actual travel now. It no longer feels like pounding your fingertips into hard, unyielding plastic. It’s what the 2016 keyboard should have been. Better late than never, I suppose.
I’ve ordered a dock for the Air and in a few days will ship off my Mac mini for trade-in, so the Air will be doubling both as my laptop (for the future days when people can take laptops outside their homes again) and as a desktop machine, where simply plugging one cable from the dock to a Thunderbolt port should be all I need to get it working with an external monitor, keyboard, mouse and all that stuff.
So far it seems pretty good. We’ll see how it holds up over the long term. My MacBook Pro still works, but I can’t say I ever enjoyed typing on it. Considering it was my primary writing tool for a few years, that was a bit of a problem. Hopefully the Air will be a better overall experience.
Something funny happened last Saturday. Well, it technically started before that, so let me back up even further.
We journey way back to the days of 2014, when U.S. presidents weren’t sociopaths and pandemics hadn’t been around for almost a hundred years. It was a simpler time.
In December, I upgraded my 16 GB iPhone 5C to a 64 GB iPhone 6. The new phone was bigger (but not too big), faster and all that good stuff.
We move forward three years to 2017. The U.S. president is now a sociopath, but there’s still no pandemic, so not totally awful. My iPhone 6 is starting to sputter a bit, performance-wise, though the battery is still fine for my modest needs. I decided to upgrade to an iPhone 8. Other than a faster processor and support for wireless charging, it is functionally the same phone.
We move forward again to May 2018 when I get a kidney infection. This is not nearly as fun as getting a new phone. I lose over five pounds. I am forced to walk much slower than normal, because my innards hurt if I walk faster (my usual pace). This leads to a little bit of serendipity.
As I stroll the neighbourhood, I begin to notice more and more details–flower beds, fruit-bearing trees and so on. I take out my phone and start taking pictures.
I take a lot of pictures.
In 2017, I took 510 photos. In 2018 that jumps to 1,149, and it stays that high (or higher) after.
We now catch up to the fall of 2020. My iPhone 8 is about the same age as my iPhone 6 was when it got replaced. Unlike the 6, the 8 still performs well, thanks to Apple’s CPU improvements. The battery, though, has suffered terribly. Is it due to taking so many more pictures? Hijinks related to wireless charging? Just generally a lot more use? I don’t know.
What I do know is that now, in November 2020, the battery on the phone is so bad I can’t go out for more than an hour without needing a power bank to revive it. So I made the sensible decision to replace it and conveniently, Apple has an entire line of new phones for me to choose from (I loves me Apple Watch too much to consider Android at this time).
At this point, you may be wondering, what does any of this have to do with getting a camera? I will explain.
Last Saturday Nic and I went to the Reifel Bird Sanctuary. Knowing my phone was likely to poop out, I did two things:
I brought along an Anker power bank that could fully charge the phone up to six times
I dug out my 12-year-old Canon Powershot point-and-shoot camera and charged it up to bring along, just in case
My initial plan was to use the camera as a backup in case the phone died. The phone did, in fact, die. I found I could tether it to the power bank and still take pictures, though (sort of like having a portable generator for it), so what I ended up doing was taking a lot of pictures with the phone, then the same shots with the camera to see how they’d compared. What I found was:
The camera still takes pretty good photos!
The 3x optical zoom allowed me to get shots that were impossible with the iPhone
Some of the photos from the camera were actually superior to those from the phone (some were not)
All of these–but especially the optical zoom–instilled in me a sudden yearning I did not have before. I wanted a standalone camera again. Surely this is madness, I thought. Do I really need a dedicated camera for most of the pictures I take? No. Would it allow me to take pictures I currently can’t? Yes! Would the pictures in general be better than what I’d get with a phone, even a fancy new iPhone 12? Yes again.
So now I want a camera, and I am starting to research models. My main criteria:
Must offer specs that put it above a smartphone, otherwise what’s the point?
Spec 1: High pixel count (iPhone cameras are 12 megapixel)
Spec 2: Good optical zoom. I’m thinking at least 8x but more is better
Spec 3: Must be capable of good night/low light shots
Spec 3: Must cost no more than around $1,000 because I’m not going full prosumer crazy here
I am starting by looking at point-and-shoot cameras that generally come with a single lens but still offer good quality, then seeing what else may be out there.
Oh, and I’m still getting a new phone, but now I may not need the best camera since a good camera will likely suffice. Look for a rambling long post about the new iPhones soon™.
UPDATE, September 5, 2023: Three years later and "I suppose someone out there uses it or Microsoft would have turfed it by now" comes back to haunt me, like a slightly annoying ghost. Microsoft has announced that WordPad is being deprecated and will be removed from Windows in some unspecified future update. Story here: For the first time in 40 years, Windows will ship without built-in word processor
WordPad has been part of Windows since forever, or at least a very long time, and given its name, it seems like it’s been meant for people who need something like Notepad, but fancier, and who are unable or unwilling to buy Microsoft Word (or Office).
I have never been once of those people because I’ve had some version of Word dating back to Word 6.0, which came out in 1993. I’ve only opened WordPad out of curiosity over the years and only opened it today when I saw someone on a forum mention that it’s still included in Windows 10–and it is!
I suppose someone out there uses it or Microsoft would have turfed it by now, like they tried to do with Paint, until they discovered that people actually used Paint or at least had unhealthy, possibly nostalgic attachment to it. I have no such attachment to WordPad, but perhaps I should find its presence reassuring, should I let my subscription lapse and find myself with the urge to draft a letter in Comic Sans.
Yes, 25 years ago on this day, August 24, 1995, Windows 95 was released. This might be the only time in history that a computer operating system was a genuine media event.
I worked at Computer City in Coquitlam at the time–the chain disappeared within a few years, imploding after a large expansion across the US and into Canada–but at the time it was possible to go into a store entirely devoted to computer-related stuff. And it wasn’t like Future Shop where other electronics or appliances were sold, it was computer stuff only. Rows of software. Endless aisles of inkjet printers. Miles of parallel port cables ready for purchase.
We had huge stacks of copies of Windows 95 ready to go, in both CD-ROM format and floppy disk (13 floppies in total). We had a setup with two Compaq machines showing how Windows 95 worked with both 4 MB of ram and 8 MB of ram. All of this seems so quaint now (it ran much better with 8 MB, to no surprise. The 4 MB minimum was really meant to make windows 95 look less like a resource hog. Memory was not cheap back then).
Quaint as it seems now, at the time Windows 95 felt like a real breakthrough for Windows and the PC in particular. It ditched the Program and File Managers of Windows 3.1, added the Start button, task bar and system tray–all of which are still part of the Windows 10 UI in 2020. In reality, of course, it heavily mimicked the feel of the Mac’s OS, but had its own vibe, a weird sort of smooth-yet-clunky and sometimes backward compatible thing where it excelled in some regards and fumbled around a bit in others. You had Plug and Play and it sometimes even worked well, but USB support was not in the initial release. We still had mice with balls back then and they plugged into the serial port and speaking of serial ports, IRQ conflicts were still very much a thing with Windows 95. All of its DOS underpinnings couldn’t be entirely hidden (that really didn’t happen until Windows XP shipped six years later–or Windows 2000 the year before if you count it as a successor to 95).
But even though I have undoubtedly blocked memories of things not working right in Windows 95 (native gaming was a bit undeveloped, though it played a mean game of Solitaire), I look back on it fondly. I had just gotten a PC the year before and after a year of running Windows 3.11 for Workgroups, Windows 95 truly felt like the future.
Here’s a shot from an emulator I downloaded today. You can quibble about it, but the UI still looks clean and simple to me–and better than some of the versions that followed (I always found XP a bit overdressed and Windows 8 was a spectacular misfire). Good times, as the kids say.
But I am still using the new Chromium-based Edge, which surprises me. While there are some niggles, there are no showstoppers driving me back to Firefox.
On the other hand, there are a few features of Firefox I miss, but not enough to compel me to go back to it–not yet, anyway.
The funny part is that the only reason I even looked into switching is because Firefox started displaying some squirrely behavior on start-up (it also feels a bit slow to start). Had that never happened, I’d still be using it daily now.
Why am I still using Edge (to be more precise, the new Chromium variant of Edge)? Have I at last gone mad? Did Firefox kick my imaginary dog?
No and no. Well, probably no and no.
I decided to try out other browsers because Firefox was starting to feel a bit sluggish and was exhibiting inconsistent behavior on startup:
Pinned Gmail tab stopped loading Gmail. I actually suspect Google is the villain here, as the pinned Gmail tab still works without issue in Edge. Boo, Google. I am still in the process of moving away from Gmail, so this is probably not a knock against Firefox.
This very blog is my homepage, as I am a secret narcissist. But most of the time Firefox now refuses to load the page, falling back to a new tab page instead. The behavior seems to be worse in Windows 10 than on a Mac running Catalina.
As mentioned already, it starts up quite slow. I figured this was due to the perhaps ironically named extension I use for the new tab page, FVD Speed Dial. But even after disabling it and just having Firefox’s default new tab page load up instead it still takes longer to load. Edge, by comparison, opens in a blink.
A couple of things hinged on me sticking with Edge for more than a day before going back to Firefox, flaws and all:
Consistent behavior on startup.
Faster performance.
No weird issues on any of my usual sites.
I needed to find another new tab page extension to try out in place of FVD Speed Dial.
#1 and #2 have both been fine. #3 has been mostly fine, with a few little quibbles:
Some Twitter embeds will not play video. However, I confirmed the same issue in Firefox, so it’s either a problem on Twitter’s end or an issue with an extension I use in both browsers.
When downloading my Kobo books, Firefox grabs them properly as epub files (and loads them into Adobe Digital Editions), while Edge grabs them as acsm files, which need to be opened first in Adobe Digital Editions, converted and then moved to my iPad into the superior Marvin ereader app. This is more a minor convenience, as it’s really only one extra step. Still, it’s an extra step and extra steps add up over time into gigantic staircases. Or something.
#4 was the big one. There are lots of new tab extensions out there that offer some variation on bookmarks/speed dials. Some of them are very pretty, some offer unique options, some require a subscription to unlock decent features (boo), but all of them usually lacked in some fundamental way. I like what FVD Speed Dial does–it just offers large thumbnails of sites, lets you divide them into groups (in this case, tabs within the new tab page) and offers robust customizations of the page. I thought about sticking with FVD Speed Dial, but I really wanted to try something else. I did try using the built-in Collections, which actually work reasonably well–except they don’t sync between different machines (despite the toggle existing to allow sync) and this is a deal breaker because I am not manually maintaining two (or more) sets of Collections. UPDATE: Collections suddenly started syncing across computers today, like my post scared the feature into working or something. Weird. This is good, but I still prefer the extension I found, which I mention directly below.
After passing on Collections and nearly giving up, I finally came across Toby, which is a weird name, but a good extension.
The presentation is minimal and tidy. The organization is there, this time with collapsible sections instead of tabs), it’s very fast (it syncs between PC and Mac almost instantly) and it’s simple to drag sites into different groups. It has a few little niggles, but overall, it does pretty much what I want, and the clean look really appeals to me.
Overall, I now have Edge running in a way that works the way I want most of the time. It still has a few annoyances, but surprisingly, it mostly gets out of the way, and is pretty speedy to boot. Having it available on Mac and PC is a plus.
I’m not abandoning Firefox, though. In fact, if Toby were available for Firefox, I might be using it right now (the Toby website erroneously claims it works in Firefox and it’s odd no one has corrected this. I suspect it may exist for the pre-Quantum versions of Firefox, but these are now obsolete).
We’ll see how long I live on the Edge (ho ho), but for now I am content to stick with it.
John Gruber posted about a tweet from Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, in which his Apple Watch responds to the question, “What time is it in London?” by showing the time in…London, Ontario.
Gruber later found that his Watch and HomePod both gave different answers, which only underscores how fractured and broken the Siri experience is (if you didn’t click the first link, the HomePod gave the time for London, England.
While this is not the biggest error (or technically an error at all), it demonstrates how sort-of dumb Siri is. When people ask what time it is in London, they are almost certainly asking about London, England. People understand this because London, England is one of the most famous cities in the world (sorry, London, Ontario). But Siri seems to (sometimes, sometimes not) go by proximity and misses the obvious answer.
And is often slow in doing so.
And will sometimes report no connection when there is, in fact, a connection (the servers at Apple apparently lose connection from time to time and Siri will not answer even the most basic questions when it is down).
As a side note, I asked Siri on my watch what time it was in London and it gave the time for London, Ontario. But worse, it didn’t even list the province. It just said “London” because I guess I’m in Canada and should automatically know which London it’s referring to? Even though if I did, I probably wouldn’t be asking what the time was in the first place.
Today at lunch I somehow found myself troubleshooting an intermittent issue with my CTRL keyboard repeating certain letters, usually the E key. This led me to a possible solution: update the firmware. Or more properly, flash the default firmware again.
I downloaded the appropriate files, ran the command and the LEDs on the keyboard turned off, as expected, the command reported Success! as expected, but then nothing else happened. The LEDS never came back on. I tried repeating the steps. I tried resetting the keyboard using a pin in the tiny hole on the bottom of the keyboard where the reset button lives. Nothing.
I then put it aside and started hunting for a replacement keyboard as my current setup really needs a backlit keyboard and none of my other thousand keyboards feature backlighting.
Tonight, I decided to try reviving the keyboard again. More failure followed. I pressed on, though, out of stubbornness or insanity. I decided to download the default firmware file again and it was then I noticed that somehow, I had not been using the default file. How this happened I can’t say. But I followed the steps with the fresh copy of the firmware, and it worked exactly as expected, allowing me to type this post.
I was already wound up over YASUUPSD (Yet Another Screwed Up UPS Delivery), so I suspect that played a factor.
I’m also reading A Complaint-Free World again to help keep my brain calm and relatively happy. We’ll see how that goes.
For now, I’m happy to have my zombie keyboard return to the land of the living.
As a footnote, I’m still looking for another keyboard, so I can have at least a backlit replacement ready to go in case the CTRL keyboard gets accidently tossed into a cement mixer or something.
Attempt #1: Kool Aid Attempt #2: Cooler Attempt #3: Containers. Hooray.
I pronounced the word “container” the same way, with the same inflection each time. This is why the reports that say Siri is better than Alexa ring false to me (or they are testing something else, like depth of trivia knowledge). When Alexa fails, it’s usually because it can’t process the command, either because I’m asking something impossible, or just phrasing it in a way that it’s not been programmed to recognize. It could be as simple as omitting a key word.
Siri is different. Siri will sometimes just fail completely, offering up a baffling “no internet connection” error when the internet is right there, or asking me to try again later because maybe someone at Apple has tripped over the server’s power cord again or worse, insisting that I have no such list to add an item to, after which I will ask Siri to show me that list and it does–then still refuses to let me add items to the list because it still doesn’t exist. But more often than these, Siri will misinterpret what I am saying, giving me Kool Aid instead of containers.
It does this often enough that it doesn’t surprise me. It doesn’t even bother me, really, I just accept that it’s part of the whole Siri experience. But Siri has been around since the iPhone 4S (2011)–it really should be a whole lot better than it is. Bad Apple.
First, I realize the ThinkPad X1 Carbon is a business class laptop and business class means expensive. But this pricing just seems silly.
I get newsletters from Lenovo (I have a 6th gen X1 Carbon) and they’ve just announced the 8th gen model, which uses 10th gen Intel CPUs. There’s a lot of generational stuff here. Anyway, I’ve modified part of the newsletter below to highlight my concern.
The thing, though, is what does that absurdly high (starting!) price of $3149 get you? It’s really just standard specs for any decent ultrabook:
8 GB ram
256 GB SSD
14 inch 1920×1080 non-touch display (not even 16:10)
You get a few minor extras like a fingerprint reader (which is pretty standard on ultrabooks now, anyway), the infamous red nub for navigation (which I find a mild irritant when typing), an alleged 19.5 hours of battery life (take this one with a huge grain of salt–like, jumbo salt), a promise of ruggedness (which I can verify from my model) and the rest is really just configurable options, like a privacy screen, touch display and so on.
Now, compare this to the just-updated MacBook Pro 13 inch model (the one with the 10th gen Intel CPUs). It starts at $2399. This is also a lot of money, but it’s $750 less than the X1 Carbon. What do you sacrifice for that?
No USB 3.0 ports
No Wi-Fi 6
Battery life rated at 10 hours instead of “19.5”
Heavier at 3.01 pounds
No shutter on webcam
Aluminum case will dent and scratch when treated roughly
What do you get over the X1?
Four Thunderbolt 3 ports instead of 2
Touch Bar (OK, some might consider this a negative)
13 inch display–smaller, but running at a higher resolution of 2560×1600 and at a more productivity-friendly 16:10 ratio
Wide color support
True tone (display can detect ambient light and adjust automatically)
Faster integrated graphics
16 GB ram (twice as much)
Ram is significantly faster
512 GB SSD (twice as much)
Faster CPU (2.0 GHz vs 1.6 GHz)
Really, unless you absolutely need Windows (which you can still run on the MacBook Pro, actually) or some of the privacy features, or must have Wi-Fi 6 now, the MacBook Pro is not just a better deal, it’s a significantly better deal.
How weird.
But good for Apple. I’ll be posting again about my own laptop possibilities again soon. I will not be considering an 8th gen ThinkPad X1 Carbon.
Today Apple released the updated 13 inch MacBook Pro. As updates go it was pretty tepid. The lower end version is essentially unchanged, still shipping with 8th gen Intel processors, but now with more base storage and the revised Magic keyboard. The magic part is that it’s not prone to fail like the butterfly keyboard. The higher end models include 10th gen processors, but are otherwise pretty much the same as well.
This has led people to speculate that another update is coming later this year, that may include a larger display and other niceties. We shall see.
The important thing here, though, is that with today’s update, Apple is no longer selling any laptops with the butterfly keyboard. From the introduction of the new MacBook in 2015 to today that means that users have been suffering through one of the worst keyboards to ever be fitted into a laptop for five years.
Watching Apple’s flailing attempts to fix the design (multiple times) was painful. And nothing could fix the actual typing experience that some loved, but many actively disliked, or even found uncomfortable (raises hand).
At long last, though, the butterfly keyboard is dead. Hopefully it has taken along with it the obsession with thinness over function that seemed to have Apple designers in its thrall. Yes, the butterfly keyboard was thin. It was also terrible. I still find it amazing that it made it into an actual shipping product (ironically that first product, the new MacBook, was killed after only four years).
Anyway, good job, Apple, for finally purging the butterfly keyboard. But next time don’t make your users suffer through years of a deeply flawed product, OK?
