Random Thoughts

I’m still waiting to see what Apple does with desktop Macs this year, but I knew I also wanted a 5k display, so I ordered the new Ultrafine 5k without a Mac to go with it. I wanted to get the display under the promotional pricing, but ordered it before I noticed Apple extended the promotional pricing until March. The reason I kept the order instead of cancelling it is this support document, which states that the...

I’ve been recently looking to replace my 2008 Mac Pro, but it’s hard to find an Apple product that’s right for me. The new Macbook Pro has far less horsepower than my existing tower, and the 2013 Mac Pro isn’t a clear replacement either. The Mac Pro’s GPU is not really an improvement over the GeForce 680 in my Mac Pro, and it doesn’t support the new LG 5k wide gamut display, which is a must for...

I wanted to write a bit more about the future of “pros” on the Mac, but about the Mac Pro. Pros are the most easily spooked, jittery segment of the computer market, and they have reason to be. When they buy equipment from a vendor, whether that is Apple or HP or Dell or whoever, they are spending a substantial amount of money, and are risking their business on a platform. Buying the wrong equipment or buying into the...

One of the counter points to criticism of the Macbook Pro event is that expectations are too high. Users are expecting that a laptop should be just as powerful as a desktop, and that’s unreasonable. Generally, I agree. The Macbook Pro has not really been a good desktop replacement since almost the Powerbook G3. But the problem is Apple themselves is marketing the Macbook Pro as a desktop replacement. I mentioned in the previous post that...

I’m very supportive of going all in on Thunderbolt 3. Thunderbolt 3 is a huge advance, and I think it’s worth ditching all the legacy connectors. It will be a bumpy transition at first, but once it’s done having one universal connection will be worth it (although I’m not holding my breath for corporate projectors to start adopting USB-C or Thunderbolt 3.) AMD and Nvidia have been working hard on shrinking the size of their chips, and...

I’ve been working on an app intended for use with the Apple Pencil, so I went to the store and picked up an iPad Pro this morning. (Sadly no Apple Pencil or Keyboard, both are deeply backlogged it seems.) At my desk I have a Mac Pro, I carry a Macbook Pro for working on the go, and I have an iPhone 6 Plus and iPad Air 2, so I’ve been thinking a lot about how...

I’m just finishing up my first app store bound project that was written in Swift. It’s nothing hugely exciting, just a giant calculator sort of application. Why I chose Swift is that Swift’s static typing really made me think about the data layer, and how data flows through the application. What I missed terribly was KVO/KVC, and I’m not alone. Brent Simmons has also mentioned this, but as someone who’s used a lot of KVO and...

My initial takes on WWDC announcements…

At work, we support a lot of platforms. We support iOS and Android, Windows, Linux, supermarket checkout scanners, Raspberry Pis, old Windows CE devices, and more. And all the devices run our same (large) core code, and all that code is written in C++. I’m not the biggest fan of C++. But there’s no doubt when we need to write something that works across a range of platforms, it’s a rich, commonly understood tool. It’s also...