Month: February 2026

The All-Mess Olympics are finally concluded, to my chagrin. I don’t know why this seemed like so much fun – perhaps because we were finally back in a Winter Olympics area instead of trying to cram it into the same totalitarian capital that hosted the Summer Olympics 14 years earlier, perhaps because it was finally possible to watch everything on the global feed if you didn’t need to be live, perhaps because I just needed a little more light in the darkness.

The last Winter Olympics wrapped up just as I was about to turn 50, and then we had the invasion of Ukraine, and there we were in London for three weeks. And in so many ways it felt like a high point, in retrospect. It felt just fine to be 50, it felt alive, it felt like maybe we had made it through the dark of the last three or six or ten years and come to a new equilibrium we could live with. And then we got home and things started to decay within months.

The winter games always resonate more with me than the summer games. It’s that glimpse into another world of ice and snow and speed and grace that we wish we could live in, the same way it’s special to disappear to Tahoe every year (when we aren’t snowed out of being able to get there). I have the markers of memory in 1980, 1988, 1994 and almost every Winter Olympics thereafter. I don’t know what I’ll look back and remember from this middle fortnight of February 2026, but I’ll remember it as light enough to push back the dark for a little while, and as always, I’m grateful for the opportunity to escape again.

So for about a year, the Great Mentioner has been kicking around the closest thing to a surefire recession indicator: a cheap Apple laptop. What makes this interesting is that for the first time in almost twenty years, it would be a purpose-built inexpensive laptop rather than last generation’s base model for the low. In fact, if the Great Mentioner is to be believed, it is built around the chipset of the iPhone 16 series – in other words, the same A18 SoC that drives my mobile phone.

This is interesting for a couple of reasons. For one, it suggests that’s the minimum RAM and firepower required for Apple Intelligence, which is the table stakes for Cupertino hardware these days: 8 GB RAM (or a thousand times as much as my first Mac) and processor performance somewhere between the M1 and M3 (which in turn would make it comparable with my work laptop). Not to mention the economy of scale that comes with having been punching this chipset out for two years already, although one wonders how it scales up to a larger display. The Great Mentioner has it on 12.9”, slightly smaller than the MacBook Air, which means that we are looking at that most unexpected of things: a return of the Scottish Laptop, the MacBook, only with far more firepower than a Core M and with a price point commensurate with that power. And possibly even more than one single port, an undersupported USB-C, which meant at the time that there was no way to buy a MacBook and an iPhone and connect them.

I don’t really need and can’t justify a personal laptop. That said, a personal laptop would not have to do that much – Signal, MarsEdit, Safari for streaming, maybe Zoom or Facetime, and Kentucky Route Zero – assuming that there’s any way to run it when Rosetta support for Intel code goes away in two years. It would also mean, once and for all, the complete obliteration of any personal data on my work laptop for good. And the A18 in the body of a 12” laptop should have functionally infinite battery life.

Basically this would be the iPhone 16 in laptop form. Which…you could do worse, especially for less than the price of the iPhone 16. My only concern is that the notional price point will suffer from the AI-driven hyperinflation of RAM costs, and then, do you really want to invest in a laptop with only 8 GB of RAM in 2026? Especially when it has to run macOS and not iOS? If this is really the plan, shouldn’t the plan be a 10” iPad with a Bluetooth keyboard? And yet, that was a clearly inferior solution to an actual laptop in Prague two years ago.

Something to mull over, anyway.

For the second year in a row, I am giving up buying stuff online for Lent. Because that has again become a distracion, a form of self-medication and an expensive one. I don’t even really have justification for the moleskin trap blazer, except that it’s part and parcel of my search for 100% the right thing that ends up with my owning half a dozen 80% things.

Thing is, I have so many of those things that I don’t actually use, some of which I didn’t even get out of the packaging for a while. I have Nerf blasters that need to be shot. I have modular 3-d printed Nerf blasters that can be made new with a different $4 barrel. I’m finally down to one “everyday” lightsaber, although it’s no Mace Windu. I ordered a handful of stray Nerf parts and added them to the refuse of my advent calendars to craft my own little creation, complete with a Lego version of myself at 60 trying to recapture my youth in DC. I have more Yeti stuff than I could possibly use, mostly limited to two in regular use: a 25 ounce mug for work and short range drives and bringing home ice in the evening, and the 16 oz moon dust that is my at-home go-to because of the way the tactile feel reinforces the feeling of not-at-work. It adds to the escape.

Because you have to make a hole in the night to hide from the world. I keep trying to pare it down – the nearer dive bar downtown is a cheaper night out than the pub in Cupertino, and walking to the local and back for one pint is cheaper still, and cheapest of all is home in the shed on a Sunday night. There are plenty of books to get through, the fire pit is replaced and works, the Olympics are back for mess and distraction for two weeks…

I’m bearing down on 54. Next year is another step into the transition – one with more discounts, perhaps a couple more legal protections (for as long as those last), the age at which I was prepared to decamp to Cañada Cove and work remotely for the rest of my career. Which, honestly – if they’d just let me go back to working remotely even three days a week, my quality of life would be so much improved. If allowed to work from home permanently, I would almost be willing to keep this job to the end. And that is the frustration: it would have taken so little to make this the life I have grown to want, and instead we have to struggle through this madness. 

so 54 is about learning to make a hole in the world and hide from the misery. Not escape, because as i said once before in this space, it’s not escape if you have to come back. There may be no escape, but there is a way to live deliberately in spite of everything. And that is what I hope to craft in the next year so that when it’s time to start clicking the 55-64 category, I’ll have things to do there.