Month: November 2023

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The post Steve Jobs era of Apple has been hard on me.  I was such an Apple fanboi that I had friends who called me iRyan.  I used Macs to design and print the inserts and labels to make the first Nuclear Gopher albums when I was a teenager.  I bought the very first iMac the day it came out.  For years I blogged using a vintage Powerbook 170, the perfect portable writing machine.  I owned each of the first seven generations of iPhone and multiple iPods and iPads.  When they stopped making products that I found appealing, I didn’t really know what to do about it because I didn’t like the alternatives all that much either.  The iPhone went first, I moved to Android when they ditched the headphone jack and I still have no regrets on that score but, frankly, I despise smartphones in general so that wasn’t a very painful switch and I still prefer a phone with expandable storage and a corded headphone option and I will keep buying those as long as they are available.

The real problem was my beloved Mac and the fact that Apple let it languish as an afterthought for a decade starting around 2012.  Zero innovations.  Nothing.  They didn’t even try.  Touch UI?  Nope.  Convertible form factor?  Nope.  Reasonable minimums of RAM or SSD?  Not on your life and screw you for asking.  When they did make changes, they were generally for the worst, not the better.  Removing features and ports and wrecking perfectly good keyboards.  I’m not the only one who felt this way (https://www.wired.com/story/macbook-pro-ports-magsafe-design/). When the time came to replace my MacBook Pro as a daily driver, I looked around and found that a Lenovo Yoga was my best available option.  Thinner, lighter, faster, cheaper, better, and it even switched from laptop to tablet.  My first purchase of a Windows laptop in over 20 years.  I still love that machine.

When Apple announced the switch to making their own proprietary silicon I was a naysayer because it seemed to me that the strategy of Mac marginalization was reaching it’s ultimate end game.  The Mac would be a closed platform with a proprietary chip, limited to an App Store like the other Apple devices, not a proper computer for creative types but rather a “device” without the freedom that differentiates a proper computing platform from a device. I saw the transition to making their own chips from a cynical perspective and I.  Was.  Wrong.

The reason Apple went this direction wasn’t to sideline the Mac, it was to inject new life into it by giving it a performance lead that will be practically impossible for anybody else to catch up to any time soon.  I figured on Apple chips being roughly equivalent to Intel chips but proprietary.  It seemed to be the only way Apple could wring more money out of their ecosystem, find ways to profit more from their existing fanbase by closing the system off.  I just didn’t count on the fact that Apple had gotten so good at making high-performing low power chips that the Mac would become the market performance leader to an extent that it will shake the entire industry.

Apple didn’t just make a proprietary chip, they made one that outperforms everything else out there in terms of performance-per-watt.  The Apple M chips aren’t simply proprietary, they are spectacularly fast and they use very little power.  I am writing this on an M1 Pro Mac, it’s 9:36 PM, I have been using the machine since 8:00 this morning without plugging it in and it’s still got hours of battery life remaining.  That’s a genuinely new thing.  I’ve never spent an entire day working on a machine without plugging it in and still had power to spare.  And it’s not as if it’s like my e-book reader, low power consumption equaling low speed.  This is the fastest computer in the house by the GeekBench tests I ran.  I put this up against my Ryzen 7 powered gaming PC and it outperformed it easily.

At the end of it all, Apple was let down by Intel and that would have kept the Mac in the doldrums for many years to come.  Rather than attempt to innovate on color, form factor, etc. or risk cannibalizing iPad sales by incorporating touch into the Mac (the very things I wished that they would do), they chose to invest heavily in becoming the world’s leading chip maker via iPad and iPhone development, let the Mac collect dust over in the corner and then, when it was clear that they could make processors that were better than anything anybody else was making, move the Mac to the new architecture.  That was a long and, to me, annoying process as a Mac fan but suddenly the Mac is Back.

The new lineup of M3 Macs are the first machines in 10 years that have got my attention.  They are no longer constrained by meager RAM, they default to 1TB of internal storage (FINALLY), they have all the connections a person could want (MagSafe, an SD card slot, a headphone jack, no more dongles, it’s 2012 all over again…), they run forever without even needing to be plugged in, and they are the fastest laptops money can buy, period.  No, they don’t have touch but they also don’t have the stupid Touchbar.  No, they are not upgradeable but my 10 year old MBP tells me that I should be able to expect a seriously long useful life for a machine this powerful.  Yes, they are the exact same form factor they have been forever but so are televisions, maybe that’s just what a laptop should be, I dunno.  The convertible IS cooler but…  So, point is, they haven’t exactly re-invented the laptop, it’s more a reversion to what was working before they went off the rails but wayyyyyy more powerful.  If you want a laptop to do video editing, audio production, software development, and writing (the things I do on a regular basis), they are suddenly the best option again for the first time in a decade.  The keyboard doesn’t even suck anymore.  I did not see that coming but boy am I happy about it.

They are not limited to the App Store as I had feared either.  The M-Macs are the first actual professional grade machines Apple has made in so so so long…  I’m late coming to this confession not out of pride, no, I’m happy to be proven wrong, but because I had to use one for a while to see the difference.

I didn’t sit out the last 10 years of Apple machines.  I have been using them for work this whole time and I have continued to use my trusty 2012 MacBook Pro as well.  The laptop I was using when I left my last job was one of the final Intel-powered MBP laptops and it was…  fine.  I swapped out a Thinkpad for it and it, you know, worked and stuff.  Wasn’t noticeably faster or better, just ran macOS instead of Windows.  Yawn.  But a few weeks back I started using an M1 Pro for work and I’m like..  Ahhhhh.  I see.  The penny has dropped.  I am convert.

I’m slow sometimes.

As a software developer person I think it’s absolutely vital for Apple to have a pro level laptop again because they have the Vision Pro headset platform coming out and these are the machines that will be used by geeks like me to write software for that platform.  It wouldn’t have been possible with Yet Another Intel Laptop.  They needed something different and the ARM-powered M-chips are apparently the thing.

So, while I do actually love my foldable Yoga machine with the touchscreen and all that, I will be returning to the Mac as my daily driver.  Not yet, not today, but probably with the next revision.  The M4 or whatever.  I’m looking forward to it.  (I’m still sticking with Android though until they bring out an iPhone with an SD card slot and a headphone jack.)

As a side note…  The reason I think these machines will shake up the industry is not simply that they are very fast or that they use RISC processors.  That was true back when the PowerMacs roamed the earth.  Those were non-Intel compatible, RISC-based, and very fast for their time.  No, the reason is because of ARM.  The Apple M-chips are based on the Acorn RISC Machine (ARM) chip architecture.  So are the iPhones, iPads, and also most of the devices you own including Chromebooks and all those Android phones.  It’s already the case that ARM chips power most of the mobile computing world, people just don’t think about it much.  ARM is an alternative chip instruction set to the Intel X86 instruction set and all you really need to know is that Intel is kinda screwed here.  The performance-per-watt of these Macs is suddenly causing everybody to want to move from Intel to ARM and thanks to years of mobile devices being based on ARM, there isn’t really anything stopping the transition.  Windows will be running on ARM-powered machines too and, presumably, the Apple head start in this space won’t last forever but it’s a helluva head start.  Windows machines with ARM chips will appear that will be just as fast and powerful as the Macs but it will take some time.  This is going to be one of those big sea changes in the industry that happen every now and then but it’s going to sneak up on people in general.  I don’t think a lot of people saw “everybody moving to ARM processors” on their computer industry bingo cards but the fact is that it just makes sense.  This is the way to make chips that are very very fast and very very power efficient and it’s technology that is proven and easy to license.  Anybody can make an ARM chip and almost everybody does.  Now Apple has shown just how powerful those chips can be and it will be hard to defend the old architecture when it’s last advantage, performance, is gone.

I’m just glad there is finally a Mac worthy of the lineage back on the market and it’s just in time for all the creative endeavors I have in mind with the return of Nuclear Gopher.  Awesome.

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I am a firm believer in doing the work required to maintain mental plasticity and for me this means writing.

I don’t have much of a publishing track record, I will admit.  My only commercially published writing was over 20 years ago and was related to technical topics.  My personal journal entries from the 2002-2006 period, covering the time period in which I lost my religious faith, have been available as a free Creative-Commons licensed e-book for years over on archive.org, but that’s about it.  Most of my writing never leaves the confines of my personal journal.

And that’s OK.  Writing is a joy.  It is a tool.  It is a way to explore inner space.  I’ve been a writer for almost as long as I’ve been a reader, the vast majority of my time spent on this earth.

The two forms of writing that I share with the world most often and most effectively are blog entries such as this one and songs that I write.  Both of these public forms of writing stem from my personal writing practice which I learned by reading books by writer and teacher Natalie Goldberg.  The two books that sparked my interest in writing practice were “Writing Down The Bones” and “Wild Mind: Living the Writer’s Life”.  I’ve since had the pleasure of meeting Natalie and thanking her for the massive impact those two books have had on my creative, personal, and professional life.

The writing practice that Natalie teaches approaches writing in a similar way as one might approach running.  You don’t sit and wait for the running bug to strike you, you just pick a time and go to it.  Do the thing for a predetermined time with regularity and let the action of doing the thing change you.  Writing can be like that.  You can just decide that you are going to write, set a timer, cut out distractions, and do it.  Don’t worry about what you think you want to say, just keep words coming until they figure themselves out.  If you make the space for things to be said, you will find that you have things to say.

I adopted this practice, timed writing sessions with no set goal other than being in the moment making words, when I was a teenager.  I have used this practice to write novels, stories, poems, journal entries, blog posts, and song lyrics.  I usually don’t know what I am going to write about before I get started.  I just choose my weapons (computer, fountain pen, typewriter, pencil, what have you…), set a timer, and go at it.  I like using technologies that make editing difficult because it makes me have to be more present in my writing if I can’t just backspace and correct.  Autocorrect of all types is absolutely banned from my writing outside of a business context.

I highly recommend this practice to everybody who is human and capable of recording words via media.  It’s good for you.  It’s good for your mind.

I’m starting to think about finally turning to some of the long dreamt of long form writing projects I have fiddled with over the years.  Getting a proper novel done, writing a memoir, cranking out a couple of the screenplays I have in mind.  I have thought of myself as a writer for ages, I have fairly good proficiency with the essay/blog format and  with songwriting.  I am looking forward to branching out and leveling up my writing game.

The one thing I find is consistently challenging for me is maintaining momentum on larger writing projects over time.  The memoir project, for example, has been nothing but a series of fits and starts for about 10 years.  I’ve written and rewritten and rewritten portions of it so many times.  I don’t even remember what I wrote most of the time, to be honest.  I’m currently reading a book called It’s All Right Now by Charles Chadwick.  The book is a fictional memoir of around 700-ish pages in which not a lot happens and the narrator is not a very interesting person and yet the book is lovely and I am enjoying reading it.

The thing I connect to about the main character, Tom Ripple, is that he just keeps plugging away at writing the record of his life and occasionally, as his perspective changes and time passes, he is tempted to go back and rewrite earlier sections with the benefit of hindsight.  It’s a wonder that anybody ever finishes any sort of memoir given the way life continues to evolve and casts new shadows on old memories but the thing is, if you take writing seriously and just go at it, like the character in this book, you have to make decisions on what to keep, what to throw, what to highlight, what to leave unsaid, when to rewrite and when to leave good enough alone.

This is a lesson I need to internalize in order to write a memoir.  I need to combine the timed, disciplined, focused writing sessions with some ground rules about not revisiting, not rewriting, not revising…  at least not until a complete first draft exists.

So, that’s my new plan with my writing.  I am going to get intentional.  I am going to continue to blog, I am going to continue to write songs, I will obviously continue personal journaling, but I am also going to learn to work on longer projects.  I’ve been writing a lot for a very long time.  I crank out thousands of words that nobody reads every week, sometimes daily.  I think I’m ready to become a memoirist and novelist.  Why not?

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Today I awoke to learn that the funding goal set to launch “Witness Underground” out into the world was reached, two days ahead of schedule.  Not quite under the wire but not exactly a chip shot either.

I will be honest here, I really dislike crowdfunding as a concept, I think social media is a social toxin, and I did not enjoy the actual process.  I really stressed Scott out with my own stress about the process and I feel bad about that.  The whole thing was well out of my personal comfort zone.  That said, there was one upside to the whole thing and that was the amazing coalescence of a community of supporters, well-wishers, and fellow travelers.

Amazing people, big hearts, incredible talents, I am humbled by the support, the enthusiasm, and the love being shown on the Discord server, on social media, in appreciative emails, on video calls, it’s stunning.

I’m speechless.

Decades ago my brother and I started something that grew into something else.  Eighteen years ago I lost it.  And him.  I tried to make peace with those losses.  I went to therapy.  I started a new life.  I wrote hundreds of thousands of words.  I meditated.  I recorded music.  I cried and screamed and tried to figure out what I was going to do with the rest of my life and then this movie happened.  These people happened.  Thanks to this movie and the community of people who have responded to it, a future I never allowed myself to dream could be possible.  I keep waking up in shocked disbelief, like this isn’t happening, can’t be happening.  Nobody gets a second chance like this.

Life doesn’t work that way.

And yet, thanks to a whole bunch of incredible, kind, thoughtful, and supportive people, here we are.

Thank you, everybody.  Thank you so incredibly much.  I’m not good at showing my gratitude but I have more of it than I know what to do with.