apple

I just sold an ancient but working iPhone 6 on eBay for $22.50. I got a new-to-me iPhone SE (2nd generation) to replace it for $89 from Gazelle, so my net to move from a phone first released in 2014 to one that was first released in 2020 was $67. My daily driver is an iPhone 14 but there isn’t much that I would miss by using the SE in that capacity.

After about 5 years with my Apple Watch 3, I upgraded to the Apple Watch Ultra. The old watch was still functional but I was intrigued by the longer battery life and the bigger face. The Watch 3 is just about out of support so that was a reason as well. The battery life is noticeably better. With the old watch, I had to make sure I charged it to full daily or else it would run out within 24 hours.

My old 2015 MacBook Pro has finally been retired. The battery was looking suspiciously bloated and I’d rather not start a fire on my desk (or worse, on an airplane). The replacement is a 2020 MacBook Air M1. I debated whether or not it was worth going to a higher end model, but I don’t do much beyond Office apps. My calculation might have been different if I did video editing or something but the most I’ll do is compile a project in XCode and that’s pretty quick.

The new M2 MacBook Air looks very good both aesthetically and perfomance wise. I like the new midnight blue color and the squarish profile just looks solid. However, it’s 20% more than the pretty good M1 MacBook Air. Normally, you would think that the 20% would be money well spent for the newer system, but apparently the M2 has some performance shortcomings so you probably want to spend another $200 for the bigger and faster SSD.

While I soldier on with my 2015 MacBook Pro, I got my daughter a M1 MacBook Air for Christmas. She likes it and it’s a nice upgrade from her vintage MacBook Air. I’m not the only one who did this as Apple had an absolutely great quarter.The most interesting numbers in the report are how strong the M1 Macs have been. Truly stunning performance for a fairly risky (no pun intended) replacement of Intel chips with the Arm-based M-series.

I’ve been using btop for monitoring system usage and statistics on Linux and MacOS. It’s much better than the built in resource monitors and seems to incur less overhead as well. Being able to use the command line to get insights into what processes are taking up resources is very handy. It works great on Ubuntu right out of the box (or, more accurately, sudo apt install btop). It also works on MacOS with brew install btop but the colors don’t work quite right on my system unless I set it to the TTY theme.

There is some current buzz about Apple copying Tile and various and sundry other predations that have been perpetrated against smaller rivals through the platform power they wield in the App Store. This power is an inevitable byproduct of having a successful platform. Important digital platforms tend to capture much of the value in a market. In some cases, they capture almost all the value. This naturally leads to claims of monopoly by rivals who are subjected to what they consider to be unfair play by the platform owner and calls for legal sanction.

As I’ve written before, I’m interested in the Apple M1. I’m due for a new work computer so maybe I’ll get one sooner than later. It seems that progress is being made (or at least a start is being made) on Linux on the M1. The Registry has an article about the Asahi project. It’s a crowdfunded effort to get Linux working on the M1 by Hector Martin who has quite a history with Linux ports to closed systems.

The recently announced mac1.metal instance type on AWS is interesting. I can imagine it would be very useful for building iOS apps and the like that require a Mac or running site tests with the Safari browser. The aren’t running the new M1 chip, but are on some pretty decent Intel i7 processors, so they should be plenty fast. I don’t suppose you care too much about power consumption if it’s in the cloud.

I’m very curious about the new Apple M1. The specs sound really great and the battery life is impressive. However, I don’t need one now and have other things to spend my money on. I probably have about a year or so with my MacBook. It’s slow but seems to still get the job done for what I do with it. Plus, that should give them the time to get more stuff ported natively to the new chip.