Month: April 2026

So I’ve had the better part of a week with a MacBook Neo, testing it out for work. At one point I was running a stream of an episode of Agents of SHIELD (first season, obvs) on Disney+, an audio stream of Vaporwaves on SomaFM, a family Zoom session, an online Crashplan backup, an install of Microsoft Teams, reading a Slack channel…and it was just fine. It did balk for a moment when it finished the Teams install, but I wouldn’t grade any product by how it handles Microsoft products. All in all, it was an impressive performance. And that was running under the restrictions of CIS Level 1 security settings and accompanying device control and DLP software, not to mention Crowdstrike.

And all of this, as Rands pointed out on his blog, with a machine that is basically recycled leftovers. A 100% recycled aluminum shell around a binned iPhone 16 Pro SoC – arguably inferior to the processor set in my phone, one less GPU core – Apple is selling their e-waste for $600 a pop. And their e-waste runs rings around every other computer you can buy at that price point. And it’s not close. 

This is the 50th Anniversary Macintosh. This is the Apple vision, fifty years later. The least expensive complete Macintosh system of all time, for fewer dollars than the original Apple I. And it does everything I need, frankly – the Apple application suite, plus MarsEdit and Signal, is enough to cover me and still leave more than half of the 256 GB model free (and almost 400 GB free on the higher end model).

The only topics of real concern are 1) I don’t know how long it will run Kentucky Route Zero, given the forthcoming end to Intel emulation support, although there’s supposed to be a game layer coming to keep those viable so who knows. 2) I don’t know how long it will run. Single-core performance is on a par with the M3, but multicore is closer to the M1, and that suggests it kind of comes pre-aged two years. Is it going to stay viable long enough to make the cost per year less than a 13” MacBook Air equivalent? Jury’s out. 

And most of all, 3) the Great Mentioner says that it will be updated to binned iPhone 17 Pro SoCs next year, but the wild demand may be even higher than Apple anticipated and they may soon have a choice between either running out or changing early to the newer, more efficient, cooler-running, 50%-more-RAM-having A19 Pro. And if I can hold out and wait for that, I absolutely would, the cost of everything notwithstanding. Hopefully using binned A19 Pros would not be any more expensive – kind of a sunk cost, honestly – and I would love an identical form factor and cost (and there’s no reason to think it would be anything but a SoC replacement). Farming out the authentication to the Apple Watch on the low end model, or the fancy camera to the iPhone you probably already own via the use of Continuity Camera, makes it easier to build a cheap and cheerful laptop that’s everything you need and nothing you don’t.

I officially want it. But I’m going to wait. And wipe it and set it up for a few days of personal use just to prove it.

Somehow in the last couple years, I accumulated four short-sleeve henley shirts from American Giant, purveyors of almost everything that goes on the upper half of my body for the last decade or so. And in sorting through the closet, it occurs to me that the last time I had even one of those was thirty years ago.

It was a different worls altogether. One where “mobile internet” meant you had a laptop with a PCMCIA modem card in it capable of 14.4Kbps dialup and a provider you could connect with, and “mobile phone” meant something that if you were lucky could fit in a coat pocket and wasn’t that much larger than a checkbook. And more than that, it was an era where my friends were still the ones I knew in person, such as they were, because I hadn’t yet subscribed to that email list. I knew it existed, but that’s about all, and I was circling it slowly like a porch cat before taking the plunge. 

“Such as they were” is a load-bearing term. My few high-school friends were scattered to the winds, from Charlotte to New Orleans, and my college friends…well, there weren’t any, really, save for the problem girlfriend I was still too weak and scared to cut loose. And she was slowly poisoning my career, my ability to connect with other people, and ultimately doing me a favor, I suppose – steadily tearing down the old world  so that when the time came to step into the new one, there wouldn’t be anything for me to cling to. 

Thirty years ago, More than half a life. It’s a lot to wrap my head around, especially with the world so completely transformed. Even the stuff I carried in my pockets when I left DC is reduced by more than half thanks to the iPhone (okay, and no longer smoking a pipe routinely) and I could arguably go to the pub with nothing but my watch and a house key under the right circumstances. Which is pretty close to what I would walk to the Overcup with in days gone by.

It was a smaller world, a simpler world, a world at a more human scale. I miss that. It’s something I look forward to in retirement, something I enjoyed in my brief spell of pre-tirement. I hope the world lasts long enough to give it another chance.

I wish I could remember the first time my dad brought an Apple II from his school home for the Christmas break. But for years, the Apple II was what a computer was. Then my local frenemy got a Macintosh, and that was interesting, to say the least. And then there was a whole lot of nothing until my senior year, when someone I knew at college had a Mac and said that the Power Macintosh was coming, and by that time I was looking at PowerBook flyers from every serious college bokstore I could get into. And then, when I got my fellowship, I went to the Vanderbilt computing store and bought a Power Macintosh 6100/60 AV, and that was the beginning of one of the longest relatioships of my life.

That’s the amazing thing about the Mac – it was possible for me to start almost completely cold in the summer of 1994 and three years later, I had taught myself to manage the thing to the point that I wheedled myself into a job. And ever since September of 1997, every dollar I’ve ever earned has been connected to the products of Apple, inc of Cupertino, California. Including a stretch of three years when those dollars came directly from Apple itself, in which I had the assorted privileges of being gifted the first edition iPhone, getting a group email to remind us of the Apple alcohol policy, and talking shit about hockey to Phil Schiller before I realized I was chopping it up with my great-great-great-great-grandboss.

The thing about Apple’s products is – they’ve always been good at getting out of the way of what I want to do. None of the learned helplessness of Windows, the expectation that it will only kind of sort of work and might fail for no reason, and none of the DIY satisficing that goes along with Linux. Not that I’ve put much money into the Mac myself in those years. In all that time, I’ve only ever bought four desktop Macs and three laptops (one for my wife, on which I’m writing this). Most of the time it’s been work’s Macs. Now as for other things…three Apple Watches, half a dozen iPhones of my own, couple pair of AirPods Pro, couple of iPads. Because Apple launched another personal computing revolution from 2007 to 2010, for better or worse, and gave us truly personal computing. What’s on your iPhone is you. It’s your familiar, it’s your cyberspace interface viewer, it’s an extension of your hand and an extension of your brain.

A dent in the universe. Over and over. It’s been something to see.