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.

O-taaay… first week back in the working world. Impressions?

After taking two years off, Monday I started working for www.edvisors.com, a small company that provides information and tools to help students navigate the admissions, financial aid, and loans tangle surrounding higher ed. So far it seems like a good group of people, and the company is growing after surviving some challenges resulting from 2008’s big credit crisis.

As a marketing/product company, it’s quite a change from the consulting lifestyle, but I think it’ll be a positive. Since much of their business moves in step with the academic calendar, hours and stress levels should be more predictable. And there’s essentially no travel, which is both good and bad, as you might imagine.

Although they have some properties that are oriented toward grad students, the majority of their user base are high schoolers and undergrads, so their user demographic has huge implications for site design. Although there’s not much happening in the mobile space yet, it’s definitely being talked about, which is really exciting to me both as a designer and developer.

My title is UI Team Lead, which means I have some degree of strategic input, which fits with my level of experience, but I’m still expected to do plenty of the hands-on coding work that I love. There’s some people management, but it’s really a team environment, and it’s too small to get all crazy about hierarchy.

At around two dozen people, the company sometimes feels similar to my previous tenure at Business Innovation. But unlike BI there’s a frontend practice whose design methodology and process I can help build.

As a minor sideline, the company funds a separate charitable education foundation that was founded by the owner and his father, who was a prominent educator and administrator. It funds local and national educational opportunities, especially for disadvantaged youth.

Technically, they’re a PHP shop and are mostly using the Kohana framework. It’s also a Mac shop, which is going to be a change for me, tho not a huge one. The transition is made easier by the fact that they gave me a MacBook Pro i7, which has two 2.66 GHz cores and 8GB of memory; in other words, the machine screams! It’s delivering 3 times the work as the Dell Latitude that Optaros gave me, and nearly 10x what I can get from my personal Lenovo Z60m. And that’s after I throttled it back to run at only 80 percent capacity!

The office is right in the middle of Quincy Center, so it’s a bearable 40-minute T ride (Green to Red) and reasonably bikeable. It’s 12 miles each way, which is pretty equivalent to my old commute to BI in Woburn. When I ride, I’ll mostly follow the Outriders route, which includes a short section of the Neponset River Trail, which is cool. On the other hand, it also includes Morrissey Boulevard and Granite Ave, which are both nightmarish major arteries, which may drive me to take a more inland route thru JP. It should provide some good base miles this spring, but there are no hills, and the urban streetscape won’t permit real interval training.

So how do I like it after Week One? So far, so good. I think it has a lot of promise, and I’ve yet to uncover any obvious sources of trouble. Of course, I’m sure my attitude will be more effusively positive at the end of the month, when that first infusion of cash hits my balance sheet!

I’ve needed a new laptop for years. I bought my Vaio back in June of 2000, and five years equates to three or four generations in laptop-years. Of course, I was out of work for three of those years, so I didn’t feel I could afford to buy a new machine.

All that changed after I started work innovating buses last year at Bus-Innovation. By autumn, my financial house was in order enough so that I felt I could finally swing a (by now desperately needed) laptop upgrade.

After a lot of research, I ordered a Dell last November. It was a very sweet machine, but it wouldn’t run off battery power. After talking to no less than 15 CSRs—at first to fix the problem, then later in a vain attempt to get Dell to honor their “no questions asked” return policy—I finally gave them their accursed machine back and was refunded my money.

Of course, that wasted a couple months of time, both in the research I’d done and the new research necessary to decide on a new machine (there was, of course, absolutely no way in hell I was ordering anything from Dell).

Earlier, I’d dismissed IBM because they didn’t make a single widescreen notebook model, but I learned that they’d recently come out with one that looked pretty reasonable. So on December 20th I ordered one, reveling in the substantial discount that I got through my IBM employee friend, pookfreak.

I had to place my order by phone because I wanted a configuration that wasn’t available via their web site. At that time, I was told that it’d be “at least four weeks” before the machine could be shipped, because it was a very popular model. Okay, well… I’ll live.

Of course, four weeks later, the ship date was pushed out another four weeks, which placed it in the middle of my Seoul trip. I was hoping it would arrive while I was out of the country, but instead, they extended the ship date another fortnight. At that point, I sent an email to my sales rep, stating that they shouldn’t be taking orders for laptops if they couldn’t deliver them within three months of order.

Eight days later—Friday—I received my order: a shiny new Lenovo (IBM) StinkPad Z60m. 2 Ghz, 2 GB memory, 100 GB hard drive, 15.4“ LCD operating at 1680 x 1050 px. The machine appears to be getting good reviews.

Of course, given my experience with the Dell, I’m being a bit cautious about migrating to the StinkPad before I’ve done a full system acceptance test. In the two days I’ve had it, I’ve verified that it’s generally working well. There have been a couple system hiccups, but for the most part it’s being fully functional.

My biggest concern is the keyboard, which is surprising since IBM is renowned for the quality of their keyboards. However, there are some issues. It suffers the same problem of the Dell of having the Insert/Delete and Home/End and PgUp/PgDn keys buried in an unintuitive utility section at upper right. And for some blazingly stupid reason, they decided to make the Fn key the leftmost key in the bottom row. That displaces the frequently-used Ctrl key, which makes using Ctrl-key based editing a royal pain. Basically, the keyboard is going to take some real getting used to.

However, everything else seems fine, and so far it’s passing the burn-in test. And I’ve enjoyed finally having a capable machine again. A good example of that is the fact that I’m writing this entry from my couch rather than my desk. See, the Vaio stopped working off battery power some years ago, so it’s tethered to the AC power outlet at my desk. Just being able to run off battery is an immense gain, but on top of that, even if I shut the Vaio down and moved it to another outlet, I’d lose Internet connectivity because it lacks a wireless LAN card. The StinkPad, of course, comes with wireless networking by default, which is another huge benefit, and the reason why I can post this entry from my couch, or the kitchen, or the bedroom… finally! And let’s not even mention the potential for actually playing DVDs…

So although I’m still taking my time and making sure everything about the new machine is going to work out, so far it’s going well, and I’m pretty happy with the box. Considering how much time I spend on the computer, this should have a very substantial impact upon my quality of life. Happy day!