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.

If I were to choose the destination for a birthday trip, I probably wouldn’t choose Cleveland. However, that’s what Inna wanted. At least it’s easily accessible from home. Here’s a quick trip report.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: I wouldn’t call it disappointing, but it was spotty. A third of the building was closed and under construction. The layout was chaotic and confusing, so we probably missed some of the exhibits, but we saw nothing from numerous major acts like the Who, Michael Jackson, Kiss, the Bee Gees, Abba, Pink Floyd, Duran Duran... While entire walls were devoted to some acts, superstars like Elton John and Madonna were represented by one item each. But then what would you expect from an institution that is only now getting around to inducting Joan Baez, ELO, Journey, and Yes? Overall I give it a C+.

Spent a lot of time around Market Square. Ice cream at Mitchell’s was awesome. Killed time playing Codename Pictures and Forbidden Island at the Tabletop Board Game Cafe. Had a good dinner at the Great Lakes Brewpub, where Inna ordered and mostly stared at their flight/sampler of twelve five-ounce beers. Salivated a lot while browsing the huge West Side Market meat and produce stalls, where Inna (after some tribulation) eventually fulfilled her quest for a slab of strawberry cassatta from Cake Royale.

Returned downtown and checked into our hotel before the main event: a punk concert at the House of Blues by Inna’s adolescent idols, the Damned. They seemed tighter than previous performances, and overall it was a good show despite an iffy mixing job. Not so good was the rain-soaked walk back to the hotel afterward, nor the 3am fire alarm and building evacuation later that night.

After a decent hotel breakfast, we stopped by a mall in Mayfield Heights to hit the World Market (an internationally-focused grocery store) with an unplanned bonus bra shopping expedition.

Other than Inna’s desire to see the Damned, nothing about Cleveland was a must-see by any stretch of the imagination; however, we enjoyed the trip, got a nice break from our regular daily routine, and had fun together.

Then, after a night’s sleep, we got up and hit Pittsburgh’s amateur Art All Night exhibit, which we both found engaging, then enjoyed a damned savory lunch at Salem Halal on the Strip and a lovely walk around the Highland Park reservoir.

Nice weekend with the little woman.

I’m really bored, so I guess I’ll write about last Thursday’s purchase.

I decided I needed a tiny little point & shoot digital camera to take with me on the bike, and especially for next month’s Pan-Mass Challenge. And, of course, it would also be handy to carry around, to catch the shots I see when I leave the 70-pound dSLR at home.

My criteria were (1) size, (2) image stabilization, (3) cost, and (4) maybe some sort of movie mode. I wound up picking up a Nikon Coolpix S200.

I played with it a little bit last weekend, and am mostly pleased with the results. Size-wise, it’s smaller than an Altoids tin. Cost-wise, it was tolerable, although I could have gotten it cheaper had I bought online rather than at Bromfield Camera. Movie mode far exceeded my vague desire: it can do 640x480 at 30 fps, plus it has stop-motion and time-lapse modes that I may try playing with.

You can see a couple shots I took up in Maine this weekend here.

The only minor disappointment is the image stabilization, which I thought was optical, but is actually digital, which is not as desirable. Still, it’s got to be a huge improvement over my near-worthless cameraphone, even if it is another device to carry.

I’ve gone out and done some on-bike tests, both to see how it performs and to get familiar with operating it while piloting a moving vehicle. I think it went well, so you can expect to see more and better pictures of this year’s PMC ride, and maybe a video or two of the more interesting bits!

I love the people who make up these questions…

Do you like to shop? Why or why not?

Honestly, I would enjoy shopping, if it weren’t for the fact that other people are always shopping at the same time. I just hate having to wade through piles of aimless, slow-walking midgets.
 

What was the last thing you purchased?

Some tortellini dish, a burger, a Mike’s spiked lemonade, an oatmeal stout, and some “mud pie” dessert thing at Boston Beer Works. If meals don’t count, then a green highlighter, a red Sharpie, and a new DargonZine notebook for 2004.
 

Do you prefer shopping online or at an actual store? Why?

Depends on the product. Online is generally preferred, but I wouldn’t buy clothes or anything needing fitting online. And there are products which require more research than can be performed online.
 

Did you get an allowance as a child? How much was it?

Can you remind me again exactly when I was a child? I probably got about five bucks.
 

What was the last thing you regret purchasing

Lots of things, if by “regret” you mean I wish I hadn’t had to spend the cash on it. Otherwise, probably some horrid chocolate milk that had coconut in it. Might have been Quik brand; I always buy Hershey’s fat free and cut it with plain milk.