Applepeels

New Macs in the House

I have struggled to justify purchasing Macs over the years since I left Apple in 2004.  Yet there were times when Apple could do almost no wrong with hardware like the white plastic Intel MacBook laptop that I bought in 2006.  It nearly erased the memory of the Aluminum Powerbook G4 that I bought in 2004 which effectively died about a month after the warranty expired.

It was almost like that I was cursed as an ex-Apple employee. While I was at Apple, I seemed to always have the latest and greatest hardware but everyone knows that Apple hardware is not inexpensive. For years I just couldn't justify the prices that Apple demanded. Then in the summer of 2020, I bought a new I5 MacBook Pro because after nine years at a company that uses Macs, my 2010 iMac and 2012 MacMini could no longer handle the tasks.

Still it would likely be a surprise to friends still at Apple that I bought a MacStudio in December and just took delivery of a MacBook Air for my wife.

Using Macs for 39 years has not been a smooth ride by any stretch of the imagination. I have probably recycled a truck load of dongles and proprietary hardware.  Even with twenty years at Apple, I could not protect myself and my photos from Apple’s Cloud missteps.  However, all my photos now reside in places besides Apple’s Cloud.  As I have often said your data needs to be divorced from the hardware not hooked to it. I have achieved that without Apple's interference.

I went with a Mac Studio because my work had become even more demanding and the 16GB of RAM in my Powerbook just was not enough. I did not switch my wife back to a Mac because Apple miraculously figured out how to do cloud photos.  They didn’t as far as I can tell and photos don't matter to her.  I brought her back to the Mac because I believe that Apple has a better security foundation and does a better job handling and protecting passwords without going to a third party password manager.

I have used a variety of password managers including Last Pass (no snarky comments needed) and most recently Keeper which I continue to use.  Apple’s system activated by their touch finger print reader or password on the Mac or by Face ID on the iPad is just simpler and it works. So far there have been no breaches.

Now I don’t just use Macs, I have a Linux machine, a couple of Windows laptops, a Chromebook, and a Google Pixel 6 Pro phone. The Macs include my I5 based MacBook Pro, an M1 based Mac Mini, a 2010 I5 iMac, an older 2012 Mini and the new Mac Studio. 

You don't have to be someone with over four decade of Apple experience (I got my Apple II+ in 1982) to read the handwriting on the wall. If you are going to continue using Macs, you need to be on Apple silicon.  I have been with Apple through all its processor migrations so I am confident that the company will do that correctly and those that don’t get on the train will be left behind. If we are lucky most of the important and needed applications will follow.

So here maybe four months after writing a post that Apple no longer just works, I decided that my problem was that I had made the mistake of buying first generation Apple hardware when I should have known better.  I accept responsibility.  I knew better and thought this time might be different. It wasn't.

My Mac Studio with 32 GB of RAM arrived December.  While it was a little shaky at first, the most recent operating system update seems to have made it rock solid.  Since January I have written over 350 pages of reports using Pages. The reports are backed by multiple spreadsheets, both Excel and Numbers. I have also done several presentations with Keynote.  I use GoToMeeting, Zoom, and Teams regularly. I have had no problems. I was impressed enough that I started thinking about updating my wife’s aging Windows machine with a MacBook Air.  It didn't take long to make that decision.

Thirteen years ago she became a reluctant Windows user.  I got my wife the Mac Book Air because I felt like that once she got over losing a touch screen, she would have a good safe computer to do all our banking and accounting needs. She has a Google Pixelbook Go for browsing and social media.  She likes to separate business and play computing so I am fine with that.  Losing the touch screen has been more painful than I imagined but she will get through it.

Part of the reason I did not buy her a new Windows machine is that Windows 11 has become very irritating or maybe pushy is the word.  I have a very capable Yoga 9i but it seems like Windows is always trying to sell me something or get me to do something that I don’t want to do. I don’t really care that Windows 11 is built for gaming because I don’t do gaming.

For many years I was an iPhoto fan, then a Picasa fan, and eventually a Lightroom user because I had run out of choices. Recently I have had a lot of trouble with Lightroom on my two screen setups with the menus not displaying properly on Windows and then there is that Lightroom licensing nightmare. I have two separate licenses but it seems I am always having to deauthorize something. 

It also appears that Apple is taking Photos a little more seriously than it has in the past. While it doesn’t have everything that I need, it is a lot closer than it was in the last few years.

In 2023, I think Apple is a better choice, maybe not for everyone but for us it is.  Likely I will spend more on Macs but they do have some trade-in value and we likely won’t need too many more computers at our age.

If you are considering a Mac and have an iPhone, we will likely be very happy with a Mac. If you are a Windows users who is tired of the pushy Windows 11, a MacBook Air is a solid computer. I don't think there is an equivalent Windows machine to the Mac Studio. The Mac Studio is the product that many of us have been requesting for years. It does not disappoint. If you are a power user and the Mac has software that works for you, I can also guarantee that you will love it. I do not miss the jumble or cables and stuff on my MacMini.

I can highly recommend a few programs but I doubt that anyone has the same needs so I will just list them. If you want to ask about a specific product, contact me.  One of my favorites is Bear because it lets me write on multiple Macs and my iPad without worrying about files. I also use Coda2, RapidWeaver, BBEdit, Fetch, Squash, Nisus Writer Pro, Numi, Yojimbo, Greenshot, Snagit, CleanMyMac, Kiwi Mail for Gmail, Spark Desktop and Marked 2 along with the full Microsoft suite including Outlook.

The one thing I do a little different is that I have a LaCie 1GB SSD drive.  It comes with a program that creates a folder on your Mac called Mirror. All my work files are in that folder. It is automatically backed up to the LaCie drive regularly.  At lunch and at the end of the day, I do a manual back up from the Mirror folder to both the NAS in my office and the appropriate folders on our cloud-based Box drive.

At this moment in my life I am a happy, somewhat contented computer user. My Windows computers won’t disappear because I can only run ExpertGPS Pro on Windows.  I do like the way that Windows will show you all the images in a folder. The Mac doesn’t do it as well.  The Mac is also terrible at searching my NAS but Windows does a good job. A Windows touch screen is also something that I miss greatly when navigating my screen real estate. Apple isn't quiet the Open Standards company that I believed it would become but OS X is still Unix. On balance, prefer to work on a Mac because it is less intrusive. It does try to make me use something like teams when I don't want to. Our company's email which is hosted with Microsoft used to work on a bunch of clients but they keep tweaking things and that is no longer the case. At least Apple understands that IMAP is IMAP.

There is only one caution when buying a Mac. If you are new to a Mac it helps to have a friend who is a Mac user if you aren't close to an Apple store where you can find experts. Google search isn't nearly as useful for solving Mac problems as it is for solving Windows problem.

I have been writing about Apple computers for a long time.  Here is one of my early article, Computer Battles.

 

Apple No Longer Just Works

I am actually a patient person when it comes to technology. It took me two years before I labelled my 2010 iMac, my first iLemon.  Even then I gave Apple’s executive relations team a chance to make it better. When they failed, my son, who passed his Apple service certification before he graduated from college, helped me fix it by installing a SSD drive.

As I said back in 2012, just over ten years ago,

To many people Apple is a premium product on par with the best computers that are out there. Certainly with few exceptions, you end up paying more for an Apple product than you might for a product from another manufacturer. If like many Americans you live in a metro area, your Apple purchase gives you access to an Apple store and what can be for many people a very satisfying support infrastructure.

Apple products are even more premium now than they were ten years ago. We still use Macs in our company, WideOpen Networks, where I am vice president of sales. Even though I am in much more of a metro area than when I made the comment ten years ago, an Apple Store is still almost an hour away from us. Still that drive is an hour and an half shorter than the nearest one to our corporate office.

I could easily have given up on Apple products when they showed me the door eighteen years ago when my team had just finished another unbelievable year selling Apple products to the largest enterprise customer in the world with perhaps the smallest sales force ever to tackle the US government. I was director of federal sales and my team of just over twenty people tripled sales there year and year.

However, I am a committed Apple user since I started on an Apple II+ and began my technology career selling Apple products over forty years ago. I still appreciate how Apple has changed computing for all of us, but they are not perfect and they seem to be reluctant to use their mountain of cash to give us better products, warranties or services. The components in Apple's  computers sometimes are no better than what we get in other products and  to make you feel good about that Apple has one of the most expensive extended warranties in the business.

Even so when we moved from North Carolina’s Crystal Coast, I took the step of upgrading the Macs that I was using. We were getting fiber to the house and I felt like I needed a backup machine for my I5 MacBook Pro. I went with the new-at-the-time MacMini with the M1 processor and 16GBs of RAM.

I am glad that I kept the I5 MacBook Pro as my main work machine. The M1 MacMini is fond of locking up. I keep hoping that one of the software upgrades will fix things. I am beginning to think the real problem is Apple just not caring. I know that conventional wisdom says to never upgrade to the first release of Apple’s operating system software, but I was having enough problems that I thought it was worth a shot. After all I am never shy about upgrading my Windows and Linux machines as soon as I can.

Today, I am running Ventura 13.0 on an eighteen-month-old MacMini with 16GBs of RAM. It is hooked to my internal network and a rock solid NAS with what I would call a bullet proof 2GB fiber connection where the speed at any of my desktops rarely drops below 940 Mbps/940 Mbps. There is nothing but Category 6 Ethernet cabling from the Calix Gigaspire router all through my home and  office. I have five other computers in the office including that resurrected iMac from 2010 and a Lenovo Yoga from this summer running Windows 11 and a much older Lenovo I5 running Ubuntu Linux.

This morning I tried adding a simple contract to my Highrise CRM using Safari. When I went to add the picture from a network mounted volume, it froze three different times under different scenarios. Finally, I brought up Chrome and everything worked fine.

So the question is- how can Google make a better browser for the Mac than Apple’s own Safari? Google makes Chrome for all sorts of platforms and it generally works. You would think that when you release a major operating system update like Ventura that you would make sure your browser works.

Apparently Apple just doesn’t care any more.

I haven’t been brave enough to open any of the newly updated apps like Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. I am not expecting a good ride.

Apple should appreciate that more customers than me have been using their products for over forty years. We deserve better and because we have been around so long, we have seen better from Apple. Even when it was worse, Apple appeared to be taking the problems seriously.

Just to show that I am not conjuring this up out of an old Dual G5 case,  I ran additional tests to prove that this is a problem on the M1 with Ventura and the most recent Safari.

I used the same test of opening Highrise CRM in a browser, creating a new contact, and adding a picture from a mounted NAS volume. The results aren't much of a surprise. It worked on everything else but the M1 Ventura MacMini.

My test worked flawlessly on the following systems:
2020 MacBook Pro I5 16GB RAM running macOS Monterey 12.4 and Safari 15.5
Late 2012 15 MacMini 16GB RAM running MacOS Catalina version 10.15.7 and Safari 15.6.1
Mid 2010 I5 27” iMac (iLemon) 16GB RAM running High Sierra 10.13.6 and Safari 13.1.2
2022 Yoga 9 14” 16GB RAM running Windows 11 Home 22H2, successful using both Edge and Chrome
2010 or perhaps early I5 Lenovo desktop with 16 GB RAM running Ubuntu Jammy Jellyfish and the latest version of Firefox.

I chose not to add insult to injury by running the test on a Chromebook or an iPad.  It would probably work on my dead Dual G5 if I just get it to boot.

Apple, it is time to do better by your customers.

Should I Buy a New MacBook with Apple Silicon on the Horizon?

I bought a 13-inch MacBook Pro in early July of 2020. It is actually the first Apple laptop that I have purchased in the fourteen years since I bought a white plastic MacBook with one of Apple's first Intel processors. It replaced my broken 15" Aluminum Powerbook G4. This time I am buying what might be the last of a line of laptops with an Intel processor. The last time I was buying what was one of the first systems with Intel processors. This decision to buy has been a couple of years in the works.

For those that need a short answer to should I buy? The 13" MacBook Pro is a very good Mac. I hope it will last me for six or eight years. It is much faster than either my 2012 Mac Mini or my 2010 iMac, both of which have I5s, SSDs, and 16GBs of RAM.

The new system has been a pleasure to use. I have only had the system a month so this will not be my last post about the 13" MacBook Pro. If you need a Mac, and you can find any type of a deal, I would recommend you buying this Mac as opposed to waiting for a laptop with Apple silicon.

Unfortunately, if you do order the MacBook Pro 13" on Amazon, it will only have 8GBs of RAM and 256GBs of SSD storage.  The only way to get 16GBs of RAM on Amazon is to order the 16" MacBook Pro which is very expensive at just under $2,100. For my work, 16GBs of RAM is essential. You can, however, get a custom system from the Apple store with 16GBs of RAM. You can no longer add RAM to most of Apple's systems after ordering.

If you are new to the Mac world, and just want a Mac, it probably makes sense to wait for the first of the new line of Apple silicon-based laptops.

For anyone that wants a longer answer read on as I do not come to this question without some biases.

I worked for Apple for nearly twenty years and Apple has not really been price competitive in the laptop world since I bought my white plastic MacBook.  The MacBook Air has been as good as it got but it was never enough horsepower for me. However, I have worked for a company that uses Macs as its primary machine for the last seven years. I spend more time than I would like writing large proposals with Pages which by times drives me up the wall for different reasons than MS Word makes me nuts.

The two machines that have kept me functioning are more than a little long in the tooth, a 2010 iMac and a 2012 Mac Mini. Both have received transplants of SSDs to keep them functional but the challenges of using machines that old in an environment with hard deadlines outweighed the advantages of not spending any money. Since I am ex-Apple, I managed to use my contacts to get a good deal. Even at that, I spent considerably more money than I would have on a similarly configured Lenovo and the Lenovo would have had a touchscreen and a larger SSD.

A computer that comes into my office comes into a sophisticated environment with multiple operating systems. I like it that way. If I need to use Windows, I just turn my chair. While I am tied to the Mac because of my job, much of my other work can be done on my Windows computer, Linux, or even my Pixelbook. I have a history of wanting to spend $1,100 or less on my laptops. I broke the rule for this MacBook. My HP Envy has 16GB RAM, 500GB SSD, 8th generation I7 with a touch screen, GeForce graphics and it came in at less than $1,100. The Pixelbook with an I5, 8GB RAM, and 128GB SSD cost $699. My previous Lenovo Yoga with one of the first 64GB SSDs came in at $999 in the fall of 2012. It is still running.

My new computer is my first experience with macOS Catalina. I have been stuck on macOS Mojave. When I went to work at Apple in 1984, I gave up MS/DOS and did not spend any serious time with Windows until I left Apple in 2004. Even after all those years away from Apple and many of them using Windows almost exclusively, my system of choice is the Mac. I even have a 2004 Dual G5 Mac and a Titanium Mac laptop that both still work.

Having explained all of that, the biggest reason to buy the current Intel-based MacBook Pro 13" is the non-Apple software that I am using on my current systems. I have been through Apple's transition from the Apple IIe's 6502 to the Mac and Motorola's 68000, from Motorola chips to the PowerPC and from the PowerPC to Intel chips. It hasn't always been pretty. You can count on Apple's core software suite, Pages, Numbers, and Keynote to work well on Apple's on silicon. No matter what Apple promises the software from third-party vendors will come when they get around to it. If you depend on a specific piece of software, you might end up waiting for it.

This is not just a silicon thing either. My Mac Mini is still on my desk. I have a nice Epson scanner and an HP Color Laser Printer that I have been unable to get to work with Catalina. Apple does not focus on making things work like they used to back when they were desperate for computer revenue. Even then Apple has had some bumpy transitions and left some users of their own software hanging out to dry. Want to open a ClarisWorks or an AppleWorks document with Pages? Good luck. Fortunately, my Titanium PowerBook will still run OS9 and Appleworks.

Mostly the MacBook Pro 13" works as advertised. The Touch Bar above the number keys is a waste as far as I am concerned. I have yet to find a use for it. The biggest delay that I had in buying the MacBook Pro 13" aside from cost was the keyboard. When I found out that the infamous butterfly keyboard had been replaced by the new Magic keyboard, I went ahead with my purchase. I like the keyboard so much that I have not replaced it with a desktop one.

I also particularly like the way the MacBook works with my attached large Dell monitor. Things wake up the way that I left them which is sometimes not the case in the Windows world. The touch ID seems infallible so far and it is a good addition to the system.

When I brought up my new MacBook, I made the decision to do clean installs of all my software and not drag over everything that had found its way onto my Mac Mini in the last eight years. Besides Apple's suite of software, I use Slack, Excel, and Word in MS Office's suite, Powermail, Pixelmator, Fetch, Adobe's suite of Lightroom, Photoshop, and Acrobat, along with RapidWeaver 8 and Nisus Writer Pro. I have a Canon Pixma TS-9100 inkjet and a Brother HL-2360D laser printer on my network. Both work fine. I haven't given up on my color HP Laser printer but it isn't a priority right now and neither is my Epson scanner. Like everyone, much of my work is done in the cloud with browsers. I have chosen to go with Firefox and Safari on the new Mac. I have encountered no problems. Box, Drop, and Google photos all work like they are supposed to work. I have not installed desktop clients for OneDrive, Box, or Drive.

The only hitch that I have had with the MacBook is network related. Sometimes it seems to drop the connection to my NAS. I just have to reconnect but it is a problem that I have not experienced on the High Sierra iMac or the Mojave Mac Mini. It is not a huge issue and might have something to do with my unfamiliarity with Catalina.

In closing, if you are already in the Mac world and have a significant investment in software and hardware that you plan to continue using, the MacBook Pro 13" with the new magic keyboard is likely a good, but somewhat expensive investment.

If you are thinking about jumping to the Mac world, I would wait for Apple's new silicon. You will likely have everything you need to be functional very quickly after the introduction. With no legacy applications or hardware, compatibility should not be an issue.