There are a lot of things to complain about with technology companies these days. Chief among my complaints is that technology companies seem to think they can and should be arbiters of social and moral standards. For the record, they can’t.
I wish that technology companies would just do technology. I’d love it if they all just made their products, improved them, and stayed out of politics and / or social justice.
That’s not the world we live in. It’s futile to wish for these technological behemoths to change.
Even X / Twitter for all it’s fanfare about freedom, has started sending message to people that say things like, “Most authors wouldn’t say this to other people, would you like to edit your post?” The implication being that if you don’t make your post acceptable to their Algorithm your post will be limited in its reach. A.K.A. Censorship.
Apparently calling Shelia Jackson Lee an idiot for saying the moon was made out of gas and the sun might be too hot to live on is a no, no. Even if idiot is exactly the right term.
Meaning for me at least that Twitter is once again losing me. Perhaps that’s a good thing.
Apple is not much better. It’s easy to overlook Apple’s social justice messaging because they’ve always been a closed ecosystem and spent a lot of time breathing the rarified atmosphere of their own farts.
That being said, Apple has generally made products that I liked from a hardware perspective and because of that, I’ve owned multiple generations of Apple products. It doesn’t mean I agree with Apple’s political, ecological, or social justice stance. It means their products work in predicable ways that I understand. For me owning Apple products is not a fashion statement, it’s a practical one.
My current MacBook Pro is about a year old. I find that shocking because usually by the time a machine reaches a year old, there are little things that tell its age. I’m not talking about scratches or stuff like that.
The machine starts to “feel” slow, or the battery doesn’t last long enough, and a ton of little things that individually are nothing but collectively they tell the user the machine is “old”. It’s subtle, but over time, dissatisfaction and boredom set in and you find yourself checking out websites looking for the next new thing.
I’m pleased to say that my MacBook still makes me smile. I run it most of the time in low power mode if I’m on battery. I don’t notice that I’m technically running the processor “slower”. I’m always blow away by how long the battery lasts, even with a combination of teleconferencing, web surfing, and me writing, I have yet to have the battery die before I was done looking at screens for the day.
Running Windows, in VMWare Fusion, either in low power mode or in “normal” mode I’ve noticed a few things. This computer provides buttery smooth operation of Windows, and the fans are either never on, or they’re on at such a low level I don’t hear them. That’s a big difference from my Intel I7 MacBook Pro. On that machine, within a minute of bringing Windows up, the fans were screaming at full power. The battery life isn’t significantly affected, VMWare makes the machine very busy but I think I could still get most of a day out of the battery even running Windows all day long.
Then there’s the speed at which this machine handles rendering Video and Audio versus my older MacBook Pro. The performance is so high, the first few times I rendered something I thought the render had failed because the computer said it was done so fast.
For the sake of this post I did go look at the new M3 lineup. I hadn’t looked at any of the new machines until today. Let’s just say I could probably spend $7,000 on a laptop. However, I’m not sure that I would be any happier with that new hotness than I am with the machine currently in front of me.
That suggests that right now, for my needs, the machine I have will last me quite a while. Fingers crossed, I might get 5 -7 years out of this machine. Who knows? This machine might last me until I kick the bucket.
I’ve been looking for a job for a while and not having any luck. A friend of mine has just started a job search and is having no better luck than I’ve had over the past 4 years.
I suppose this is part of what led me to appreciating my MacBook.
We were talking about podcasting, blogging, and various alternative income methods. It was during that conversation, I thought, “My current laptop has more than enough horsepower to do those kinds of things effortlessly.”
I might need a better quality microphone. I could probably use one of the mics Jerry owned, but I can’t find the interface that would allow me to power and connect a standard XLR cabled mic to my computer. I know we have such a device, but I don’t know where Jerry put it, or if he might have been using it at the Church or Temple.
That’s a pity because we have two very nice microphones.
I’ve got more research to do before I start trying to podcast or whatever, so I’m going to keep looking for that interface. Ideally I might not have to purchase anything.
Who knows? Maybe for once in my life, I’ve actually got exactly what I need, when I need it.
That would be a novel thing to have happen!
Hope your Monday is a good one.
Okay, at least this time Edison was not only clear about the time and date they’d be doing work.
I think Arthur C Clarke wrote a short story about a smart house that I also read as a teen. I seem to recall it was called The Veldt I don’t know if that is correct, but the gist of the story has stuck with me for decades. Essentially it’s an anti-war piece. However, a smart house is the only character in the story. The anti war sentiment is a sting revealed in the tail of the story.