Too many hobbies, not enough focus
Apple capped off a three-day product release extravaganza a couple weeks ago with what to many was its most anticipated product: a “cheap” MacBook. It’s been rumored for years, I wrote about it in November (see how my predictions landed), and it’s finally here. Say hello to MacBook Neo. I’ll get to my thoughts in a bit, but let’s cut to …
The long-rumored low-cost MacBook was released last week as the MacBook Neo. It’s a 13” laptop based on an iPhone chip and offers 8 GB RAM, 256 GB storage, and four color options starting at $599. I’ll post my thoughts about it in a bit after some of the reviews come out, but today I’d like …
Back in the nineties, before USB was the common way to connect everything from keyboards to RAIDs to junk from Temu, SCSI was the king of fast storage connections. Macs had a form of SCSI since the 1986 Mac Plus and an entire ecosystem of hard drives, scanners, and removable storage drives were built around …
The photo above includes some very unique “Macs” that I’ve picked up recently, alongside a real one that I’ve had for a while. Let’s explore them, from left to right: the pico-mac-nano the Maclock, the Wokyis M5, and a real Mac Plus. pico-mac-nano The pico-mac-nano is a functional Macintosh measuring roughly 2 x 2 x 1.5 inches. It embeds …
Ever since the second Steve Jobs era, Apple has been known for its product shots. They’re clean, crisp, detailed, and lit with just the right balance of highlight and shadow to create depth and dimension. They showcase the design of each product and make it enticing and coveted. These are the images that Apple uses …
I enjoy reading old magazines and enjoy looking at their ads as well. There's something about the way they're pitched – the images, the layouts, the specs – that still gets me. I often fall into the trap of looking at the prices and marveling at them, thinking about how "cheap" or "expensive" various systems are. I …
I bought an M1 MacBook Air in 2020 for $1,249. It provided a significant performance boost over my 2016 MacBook Pro, even when running applications that weren't optimized for it. Since then. Apple has released four more generations of its M-series Apple Silicon, nearly doubling performance, but that M1 MacBook Air is still on sale. Not on Apple’s website …
I discovered Simple Beep from an article on 512 Pixels about the iMac G3. It’s a podcast that ran from 2014 to 2021 covering the history of the Macintosh. I started listening from the beginning, learning and reminiscing about the Macintosh startup sound, Hyper Card, Kaleidoscope, At Ease, Apple keyboards, the early internet, icons, Adium, and the …
Apple transitioned to Apple Silicon starting in 2020, replacing the Intel CPUs transitioned to from PowerPC 2006. This book was written during Apple’s first transition: from Motorola 68K to PowerPC in 1994. Why the heck would I read a book from 1994 about a microprocessor that's now two transitions defunct? History! I love history and …
As summer winds into fall I've been doing a mix of things: a bit of organization and a lot of customization. Notion I’ve been using Google Sheets to keep track of my retro museum for at least a decade. I inventory what I buy to understand what I own, what I want to own, and …
Relatively Ambitious 