If you follow display technology, you probably "know" that "OLED is best". It has the deepest, most "inky" blacks, fast response rates, vivid colors, and makes HDR look uhh-uhhh-mazing. OLED screens show up in smart phones, watches, gaming consoles, and high-end TVs. They're now becoming common in laptop and desktop displays: already available on PCs …
Simple Beep – Ultimate Follow Up Part IV
I've covered a lot of larger topics from the podcasts, but there are a bunch of little things as well. Let's close out with my thoughts on some of the smaller items. Odds & Ends Myst (Episode 16 - June 2015) The hosts mentioned that Hulu had the rights to make a Myst miniseries. This …
Simple Beep – Ultimate Follow Up Part II
In the last installment we reviewed the Butterfly Keyboard and iTunes 13 vaporware. In this edition we'll look at Intel Macs, angry engineers, and AI. Intel Macs Apple completed the transition to Intel in 2006 and Simple Beep celebrated in its January 2016 episode with a look back at the transition. They made some interesting comments and …
iPhone 17 & Apple Watch 10
I’ve had my iPhone 17 Pro and Apple Watch Series 10 for a half a year now. It’s about time for some reviews. iPhone 17 Pro Let’s cut to the chase: the most important feature of the iPhone 17 Pro for me is the color. That’s why I bought it. 1The color is great. I’m …
The Low Cost MacBook: How Did I Do?
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 …
Adaptec SCSI PC Card
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 …
Inflation and a Little AI
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 …
Ruminations on the Low-Cost MacBook
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 …
September Interests
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 …
The 12” MacBook
I really love a small laptop. I’ve owned many Apple laptops and my favorites have been on the smaller side - the 12” PowerBook G4, 13” MacBook Pro, and 14” MacBook Pro. I never owned any of the MacBook Airs because I always wanted the higher performance of the Pros, but I always found them …
Relatively Ambitious 