Ornoth

After eight years of reliable service, it was time to replace my primary laptop, a 2012 MacBook Pro. It had been my first non-work Mac, and I gave it a lengthy review after buying it.

Back then, I luckily bought the last model before Apple made numerous user-hostile changes to their laptops, such as their unreliable butterfly keyboard, sub-par graphics, eliminating all user-serviceable or upgradeable components, and many other revisions I’ll mention below.

So having avoided those pain points, I wasn’t predisposed against ordering another MBP when the old one wilted. And rather than go back to a Windows machine, I opted to replace like with like.

Let me start my review with the machine’s good points. They’re quickly enumerated:

• A 16" screen in the same form factor as my old machine’s 15” display (smaller bezels). And my first Retina display.
• After more than five years, but Apple begrudgingly reverted from that fragile butterfly keyboard back to their older scissor-switch keyboard.
• Touch ID: a dedicated fingerprint reader as an option for user authentication.
• Graphics performance has improved, which is good for Zwifting.

And that’s it. That’s all the improvements Apple made to their flagship laptop over the past eight years.

Now on to all the bad points. That'll take a lot more time to cover...

• The machine has no external ports but the uncommon USB-C. No ethernet port, no standard USB-A, Mini USB, or Micro USB ports, no SD card or MicroSD card readers, no MiniDisplay port, no HDMI port. If you want to connect anything, you have to buy a separate adapter for each peripheral, all of which are obscenely overpriced.
• I had a ton of problems setting up my external monitors. The first problem was that I got the wrong dongle, because although Thunderbolt and Mini DisplayPort are incompatible, they both use the exact same connector! Oh and Apple doesn’t sell a Mini DisplayPort dongle anyways. Once I purchased the right dongle from a third party, my other monitor still wouldn’t work until I replaced its previously-functional Mini DisplayPort cable with an HDMI cable.
• On top of that, the MBP has a documented overheating problem when driving external monitors. That’s awesome!
• No DVD reader or writer. Another separate expense… plus another dongle.
• The power cord now comes in three pieces sold individually, and the machine only ships with two of them. The cord extension is another separate expense. With all three pieces, a spare power cord will now run you an extortionate $133. Plus it no longer uses the excellent MagSafe connector, so there’s no longer any light to visually indicate that the machine is connected to power and whether it’s fully charged or not.
• Matte screens are no longer available. Glare, reflections, and fingerprints come standard, thanks to Apple’s “design” team.
• Apple has removed the entire row of dedicated function keys and replaced them with a flat LCD with virtualized buttons. No, you can’t have them back. And although Apple says you can force virtual Fkeys to appear on an app-by-app basis, of course that doesn’t work with Zwift or VirtualBox: the two apps where I use Fkeys the most.
• The laptop camera is still limited to a myopic 720p, no improvement over pre-2010 webcams.
• Thanks to the timing rather than any fault of Apple, I’ll be missing out on several upcoming enhancements to the MBP, including the migration to Apple silicon, MiniLED displays, Wifi 6, 5G, Face ID, and touchscreens. On the other hand, that’s a lot of new features that Apple will probably completely fuck up. My previous laptop was also the model before major changes, and in the end that was a fortuitous thing.
• Migration Assistant, which supposedly easily moves your old stuff onto your new machine simply doesn’t work. Twice I connected the two machines via wifi, and both times the process hung within the first few minutes. Then I tried running it from a USB hard drive containing my last Time Machine backup, and that hung. In fact, it hung so badly that the machine wouldn’t even boot afterward! I had to boot in emergency recovery mode, reformat the SSD drive, and waste several hours reinstalling the entire operating system from scratch! I eventually succeeded in transferring a few basic settings from the TM backup, but still had to move the overwhelming majority of my old data manually.
• Similar story with moving my Time Machine backups from my old backup drive to the new one. Theoretically, you should just be able to copy the files over and resume backups. However, the MacOS file manager (the cutesy-named “Finder”) cannot handle large numbers of files, and aborted 8 hours into a copy operation. So I fell back to the commandline utility “rsync”, which similarly failed, this time after running for 14 hours. Like the Migration Assistant, these are dedicated programs that cannot do the one thing they exist to perform.

So much for the vaunted tagline “It’s Apple; it just works”. I could just have a apoplectic fit and die from the irony of that statement.

On the plus side, I’ve finally settled in and the machine is mostly working. But due to Apple’s unnecessarily lengthy order fulfillment, user-hostile hardware, and bug-ridden software it took me three weeks to get up and running on my new machine. That’s simply not acceptable.

I’m skeptical whether I’ll ever buy another Apple product. Their machines, which were once the best on the market, are handicapped by bug-ridden software and shortsighted, petty tactics to drive short-term sales at the cost of flexibility, maintainability, ease of use, overall cost, and (ultimately) user satisfaction.

As a young upstart back in 1984, Apple took on the faceless behemoth of IBM and eventually defeated them. But Apple became the exact thing they once denigrated so vociferously: a hard-to-use, bug-ridden, closed computing environment managed by a greedy, shortsighted, soulless company that exists solely to redistribute wealth from their unfortunate users to their shareholders.

Fuck Apple!

Now, with all that off my chest, there’s been a bunch of other technological developments over recent months that I’d like to mention. And all of them were more pleasant experiences than dealing with Apple!

Perhaps the most important one is getting a free license of Windows 10 running inside a VirtualBox VM on the new laptop. It seems like an excellent opportunity to begin migrating applications from MacOS back to Windows.

Along with the MacBook (plus four dongles, an additional power brick, a port expander, and two new cables), I also bought a new 10TB backup drive. TEN TERABYTES! In a device the size of a trade paperback (if you remember what those were)! Back in the day, I had to knock down office walls to create a machine room large enough to house eight refrigerator-sized IBM 3380Ds, just to get 20GB of storage: 1/500th the capacity of this little box I’m holding in one hand!

In addition to a couple free Alexa Dot voice assistants, I’ve added several voice-activated smart outlets around the house. The biggest win has been the ability to turn on (or off, I suppose) my big exercise fan without getting off the indoor bike. However, I ought to upgrade those soon, as they’re the only thing limiting our home wifi to 2.4GHz rather than 5GHz.

And although I’ve been tracking my weight, body composition, hydration, blood pressure, and resting heart rate for a decade, I’ve recently upgraded my health data collection. A new wifi-connected scale also collects BMI, bone and muscle mass, and should update my weight in Zwift automatically. And I’ve also purchased a thermometer and pulse oximeter to store temp and O2 saturation (a useful thing for an asthmatic).

So it’s been an interesting year on the tech front. I’m hesitant to jinx it, but hopefully the new laptop will last as long as my well-used old MacBook, which served me very well for eight long years.

A recent visit to the international restaurant chain Texas Roadhouse got me thinking about the evergreen topic of corporate insensitivity.

Throughout the chain, the staff are required to do a country music line dance at least once per hour they work. That’s pretty demeaning in my eyes, but secondary to something else that wigged me out even more.

And that is this: the waitstaff—who are of course being paid well below minimum wage—are required to wear tee shirts that say “I ♥ my job!”

I haven’t known many waitpersons who truly loved their jobs. In fact, most of them were waiting tables because they were trying to keep their heads above water financially and didn’t have any other marketable skills. I can’t imagine many of them would agree with the sentiment expressed by the corporate sloganeering that Texas Roadhouse employees are forced to wear.

Aside from being an intensely new low in demeaning the working class, the thing that irks me here is the amazing myopia or hubris of a corporation that thinks it has the right to assert an individual’s personal opinion and display that opinion publicly. It’s a violation of the employee’s privacy and the separation of one’s work life from one’s personal life.

There’s no meaningful legal difference between those tee shirts and a company putting out a television commercial that shows photographs of employees claiming that they voted for a particular political party or that they support a particular political position. And it’s a very short road from there to requiring that employees look, speak, act, buy, and vote according to the corporation’s demands.

Lest you think that’s a ridiculous assertion, consider that many employers already expect that employees will promote the company’s marketing efforts in social media by using their personal Facebook and Twitter accounts.

What gets lost amidst all this corporate interference in people’s personal lives is that employment is a mutual agreement which is supposed to be in both parties’ interest, and that corporations should both ask and compensate employees for their sacrifices.

In the past, we saw how the labor market changed when corporations transitioned from a lifetime employment model to employment at will. When the corporate world unilaterally decided that company loyalty to the employee was outmoded, they eventually learned that they could no longer assume they would receive the same level of employee loyalty to the company in return. In short, loyalty—like everything else in the employer-employee relationship—is a two-way street.

Now that companies are finding new ways to assert control over their employees’ personal lives, they need to realize that if the company expects to intrude on an employee’s personal life, they also need to make room for the full reality of that employee’s personal life.

Unfortunately, that’s something most companies have yet to learn. I have a friend who is a software engineer. When his company asked its staff for ideas about how employees could further promote the company, he suggested that the best way he could contribute would be to post to a company-sponsored engineering blog, where he could discuss the technical details of some of the innovative work his team had done, giving the company some free credibility in the engineering community.

Needless to say, corporate leadership didn’t want anything to do with promoting the skills and reputation of its engineering team, for fear of losing them to other employers. As a result, my friend’s willingness to promote corporate marketing efforts on his personal Facebook and Twitter accounts—as well as his overall sense of loyalty to the company—have both been correspondingly lowered. Edit: And a few months later, he left the company.

Employment is a transaction which is supposed to be equitable and of mutual benefit. The perpetual efforts of corporations to wrest every last ounce of value from their employees, usually without offering fair compensation, has impact on employee loyalty and retention that is obvious, but which most companies utterly fail to consider.

Texas Roadhouse’s requirement that waitstaff wear tee shirts that say “I ♥ my job!” doesn’t make me want to work there. In fact, quite the opposite: I’m moved to deep sympathy for their staff, who have to work in such a demeaning and humiliating environment created by their overbearing and insensitive employer.