I know most will not agree with me, but I found this segment of today’s Apple presentation to be the most compelling, and the most important.
There’s a lot of snark online about Apple and their devices and their features and all of that. I know, your flip phone could do everything plus bake a loaf of bread back in 1972. Your “blarrrrgggggghhh” tweets/Xcrements from your Android phone could wipe the floor with anyone and everyone that works at Apple. I know, I know, you need your superiority.
You know what’s superior? Taking care of the planet. Listening to Mother Nature. And Apple gets it right. And it shows, right here.
This was the most important message of today’s presentation. Let’s do everything we can to be carbon neutral, as fast as we can.
And let’s face it, Octavia Spencer is one fine Mother Nature.
There has been something I’ve been wanting to get off my chest for a while, and after several weeks of pondering on this, I have decided to go for it and make this bold announcement right here on my blog. That’s right, you’re hearing it here first.
I bought the official Apple Polishing Cloth.
There it is in glorious color, positioned at a jaunty angle atop the original packaging.
I mentioned this fact a few weeks ago on an Apple centric Reddit channel and was promptly chastised and mocked for having made such a purchase from an extravagant $19.00. Apparently I can go to the dollar store and buy some knock off wipes called Sham-Mee or Sham-Wow or something and accomplish the same exact task, the desire to clean finger prints from my M2 MacBook Air in Midnight, with the same ease instead of buying into Apple’s rapid and vapid commercialism and capitalism and paying a whopping $19.00 for a polishing cloth.
After all, in this era of buying $9 coffees (Mocha-Chocha-Woo-Woo-Zaire-Lite, no whip please) with more calories that an African nation, how dare I spend money that will make Tim Apple a billionaire.
I like my polishing cloth. It feels good on my hands, it completes its task quite well, and I’m so delighted I’ll probably buy another one to whip out at Starbucks.
So I’m typing this blog entry on my iPad Pro, but I’m using the case designed for my old 2018 iPad Pro. The camera hole doesn’t fit right, but that doesn’t prevent the keyboard from working as intended, I just can’t use this old keyboard setup as a carrying case.
I’m good with that.
I’m strongly considering asking Chris and Mike to use the laser cutter to make the camera hole bigger in as clean a fashion as possible. That would make things fit like it’s suppose to and would revive this case that’s been gathering dust in the back of my “tech drawer”.
I have owned MacBooks of some vintage and designation for the past 20 years. My latest computer is a 2022 M2 MacBook Air, and I just love this computer. It’s fast, it’s light, and it does everything I want it to do. It’s become my daily driver and while I jump to my older ThinkPad T460s with Linux for dabbling from time to time, the main focus of my computing experience is my MacBook Air. I have the “Midnight” variant.
And fingerprints and smudges love the midnight finish.
My previous MacBook Pro had stickers proudly proclaiming my various interests. I have the same on the aforementioned Lenovo ThinkPad as well as the case of my iPad Pro. I’ve been toying with the idea of putting stickers on this MacBook Air, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it, not yet.
The lightness of this computer makes it a little more easier to drop, or I’m getting clumsy as I get older. So, for the first time in my computing life, I ordered a protective case for my laptop.
I found a case that fits the bill; I saw it used in an Army article on the U.S. Army’s Cyber Security website and discovered it was rather inexpensive on Amazon. The case is from SUPCASE and it snapped right into place with little muss nor fuss.
I really like the way it looks and I like the slight heft it has added to the MacBook Air experience. I didn’t realize the case would be so shiny; notice the wall receptacle in the shot below.
Overall I am quite pleased and I’ve had the case for just over an hour. I hope to never test the survival of a drop metrics, but knowing I have a case on my computer in case I do get a case of clumsiness is quite reassuring.
We are at the Apple Store with our friend Marshall. He is trading in his iPhone 12 for and iPhone 14 Pro Max. I like the vibe of this store here in Tucson.
It’s been a long time since we did an in store selfie. Today we used a MacBook Air identical to my personal MacBook Air. It’s fun to do Apple Store selfies again.
There’s a “Today At Apple” basic training class going on at the next table. I enjoy the age range of the attendees. Good for them.
I’m always on the search for better wallpaper for my devices. I need my backgrounds to be non intrusive, muted by colorful, inspiring, and very high quality. I don’t want to see the pixels, just the theme.
This is my current selection.
Orange is the color of inspiration. Blue is calming. This makes me happy.
It has been my attention to take a “modern” approach to my personal computing needs. I have an M1 Mac mini from 2020 for my desktop setup, and I’d do everything on my 12.9 inch M1 iPad Pro. Apple encourages users to try this approach and I was willing to give it a whirl. I tried this before with my old iPad Pro and I find the experience a little limiting when traveling.
I had my iPad Pro as my primary computer on my last trip back East and even though Apple insists the iPadOS can do everything I need to do, there were limitations. I’d go to a website to take care of some medical paperwork for my mother and it wouldn’t work. Multitasking is never easy, even with the latest updates to iPadOS. The setup worked 80% of the time and as we start traveling more, I need a setup that works 100% of time.
I finally convinced my husband I needed a laptop. I’ve been playing around with the idea of going to a non-Apple device again and focusing on a Linux setup. Even though there has been huge progress with Linux on the desktop over the years, again, I’d find myself becoming dissatisfied with that setup and knew I’d still be wanting a proper Mac laptop. After all, MacOS gives me the full UNIX experience I’m looking for with the terminal always being available.
Enter my new M2 MacBook Air.
For the first time in my Apple existence, I stepped away from the standard “Space Gray” and decided to go with their Midnight model. I also went up a notch from their base offering in the space and went with the 10 core GPU and 512GB SSD version.
I’m absolutely amazed at how fast this machine is. And it is gorgeous, oh so gorgeous.
Some unboxing photos.
I never owned a Mac that had the “butterfly” keyboard. My last MacBook Pro was the very last 2015 model they offered before switching to the butterfly keyboard. I set that loose a couple of years ago when it looked like it wouldn’t be easily supported by the latest versions of MacOS. My husband had a butterfly keyboard on his first MacBook Pro with Touch Bar (I don’t remember the year). His current machine, a 13-inch M1 MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, was purchased a year ago for his birthday and is still blazing fast.
The “M” series of Apple’s processors are absolutely amazing. I have always been impressed with the performance of my M1 Mac mini. Anything I threw at it was not a problem. When I used the machine for work during COVID, with video calls and multiple applications, and compiling software, and everything else, the computer didn’t break a sweat. It’s going to be repurposed for Jamie to use in his music studio, replacing a 2014 iMac he’s been using for a very long time.
This new M2 MacBook Air leaves that M1 Mac mini in the dust. I did not expect to see such a speed increase. This computer has been an absolute delight for the past 24 hours.
The setup was not as straightforward as I would expect from Apple. A few months ago Apple offered “Advanced Data Protection” for iCloud. This added an extra layer of encryption so that absolutely no one could access my data while in iCloud. The new feature requires the latest version of the relevant operating systems. As you can see in the last screenshot, the first thing I needed to do was upgrade my brand new computer from macOS Monterey to MacOS Ventura. Ventura made its debut last fall: five or six months ago.
Because of Advanced Data Protection I was unable to add my iCloud account to this new computer. That left me with two choices: add a temporary account so I could update the machine and then jimmy around in the users’ panel to add the “real” account or turn off Advanced Data Protection on iCloud (lowering security) so I could add the computer, update the computer, and then turn on Advanced Data Protection.
I tried the former, but ended up getting into a dead-end when it came to user management. This resulted in some fast searching to bring my computer back to factory settings and then I opted to go with option two. As a computing security zealot that is probably more paranoid than necessary, I found this approach unsettling but I went ahead and did it anyway.
The second solution worked and once that was done, I had everything up and running as I wanted within a couple of hours.
Aside from that hiccup, this computer has continued to amaze me with its performance. One thing I love about MacOS is that I can get to the terminal prompt and do all the UNIX (Linux-type) things I want to do but still have the MacOS experience riding on top of everything.
Overall I’m very pleased with the new computer. Aside from the few hiccups that seem to common around Apple these days, things are quite good and I’m a happy camper.
I really don’t know what’s going on with you lately. Your road show Sybil, Siri, is doing wonders with messing up my HomeKit experience on a daily basis, but now we have a new game.
It’s called “let’s change the clock”.
You see, I like my time display on my iPhone to be shown on a 24-hour clock. As I type this shortly before bed, the clock says 21:52. I’m smart enough to know that means 9:52 PM. But I prefer to have my time displayed in military time. It’s just how my brain is wired.
When some new bug resulted in the blurred out mess you see in the screenshot above, I had no choice but to hard power cycle my iPhone. Yes, that’s my home screen, after I tried swiping and moving and turning the screen on and off for five minutes but no, you wanted everything to be just a big blur. Because, after all, It Just Works. Except, you took that reset to move my time display choice back to a 12-hour clock. This morning my temperature displays were in Celsius, even though they’re set for Fahrenheit, and my time display was showing a 12-hour clock even though it was set for a 24-hour clock. And all my HomePods were suddenly reporting the weather report in Celsius. Which I specifically have turned off because it confuses the rest of the house.
I really don’t know what’s going on.
I tried getting rid of that big blurred out mess you see above and I was able to get to this before I had to do that whole hard power reset thing.
I don’t know. Maybe it’s me. Maybe I just expect to much, like fairly expensive technology to work properly. I know that my next laptop will probably not be an Apple product because I just can’t trust your quality control anymore. And if I’m going to have a mediocre experience I’m not going to pay a premium price for that experience.
When the latest round of updates were announced earlier this month I was really hopeful that some of the bugs I’ve been seeing on my Apple devices would be squashed and all would be right in It Just Works land.
Apparently I was very, very wrong on holding out hope.
HomeKit continues to be awful and unfortunately progress on that front is headed in the wrong direction. I finally realized that you made some subtle changes to Siri. Before the latest update I could say, “Hey Siri, get ready for bed” and she would run the automation I created two years ago called “Get Ready For Bed”. Since the latest update she can no longer do that and now I must say, “Hey Sir, turn on Get Ready For Bed”. Because Siri apparently has a considerably different grasp of “natural language” interfaces when it comes to English. When I do this new song and dance she’ll try to turn on “Get Ready For Bed” but will tell me that she can’t talk to some of my devices while turning the same lights at a brightness of 5%. (The automation sets the brightness at 30%).
Then we move to iOS and iPadOS, where I’m apparently being punished on a daily basis for having the audacity to use my personal email server instead of relying on iCloud email. I realize the IMAP protocol used by email servers has only been around since 1990, so it’s hard to plan on what’s going to endure, but the built in Mail client is REALLY struggling with IMAP now. All my non-Apple devices (GASP, but I must to maintain sanity) have absolutely zero, nada, zip issues with accessing the exact same account but Mail.app tells me there’s email when there isn’t, there isn’t email when there is, hangs on prompts with “Connecting…” for an inordinate amount of time and now has the trick of leaving the body of my email in the window after I’ve deleted it, so anyone that might steal my iDevice can see the contents of the email I deleted because I had the audacity to think that delete would delete.
That’s a run on sentence up there that makes the writer seem out of breath because that’s exactly how I feel when it comes to iDevices. Exasperated.
I have a very functional M1 Mac mini for personal use. The latest version of MacOS is so riddled with bugs and questionable UI design choices, I’m finding myself using my non-iDevices more than ever. And what’s up with Stage Manager? What is it really suppose to do? And why did you enshittify the settings panel in MacOS?
I’ve always been a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to life. It’s just the way my brain is wired. Much of the reason I pay the Apple Tax for your devices is because you were headed in that direction back in the day, but on top of the “same old, same old” approach you’re taking on everything you release (hardware, software, services) and telling us that it’s brand new, these bugs are really detracting from the Apple experience. I’m going to be looking for a new laptop in the not-so-distant future. If things continue as they are right now, there are plenty of non-iDevice options out there that will fit the bill just fine for me.
And as for your HomeKit travesty, I’m going to end up just building my own private ecosystem with plenty of free and open-source alternatives out there. I simply can’t trust you to do the home automation thing with any sort of reliability or consistency anymore.
What are you doing with HomeKit? Do you know? Does anyone on your team know? Because Siri doesn’t know. After the latest update (to 16.3?) things will work in the morning but absolutely not in the evening. Or vice versa. Or my HomePods will no longer recognize my voice. Enter password. Enter your password. Enter your password on every HomePod you own. Enter again.
Apple could have knocked it out of the park with HomeKit and the associated HomePod line of hardware. But no, it’s taken a back seat and no one knows why. Promises of things getting better and easier to navigate and more reliable fall by the wayside.
We need more love for HomeKit. Full stop. I want my home automation to live in the better security of iCloud but more importantly I want it to be reliable.
Just a guy with a husband. We’ve been together 28 years and he still makes me see fireworks on a daily basis. Hiker. Storm Chaser. Private Pilot. Tech Guy. Hackerish.
