The Online Photographer

Print Sale Update / Ctein's Thoughts on Mac Studio

I'm still working on the Baker's Dozen, I haven't forgotten. Very wrapped up in this piece I'm trying to put together for that other outlet. I might submit it tomorrow, so that'll be that one done.

Ctein wrote to say that all the infrared prints from the sale have shipped. If you haven't gotten either your print(s) or a notification from USPS that it's on the way, please contact Ctein at ctein@pobox.com.

I invited him to write a column giving us his thoughts about the new Mac Studio, and below is what he replied—written as a casual email, mind you. I have his permission to share.

Ctein: "I wouldn't mind writing something about the Mac Studio, but at this point I have nothing coherent nor useful to say. My thoughts are too muddled. I need to straighten them out before I'll have anything worth adding to the chatter.

"The two things that are most messing with my head (there are others) is that, first, I have little interest in the M[x] chips. The switchover, in fact, will cause me problems when I'm forced into it. Which is, hopefully, not going to happen any time soon.

"The second is that I am unreasonably fond of the 27" 5K iMac. And I do think it's unreasonable. My last-year's 16" MacBook Pro runs rings around my now-ancient (2014) iMac, along with providing me with a dual monitor setup (I have the LG 5K 27" monitor), which has better color and a larger gamut. Plus having twice as much RAM as my maxed-out iMac. There is no sensible reason why I should prefer working on the iMac. Well, I'm allowed to have my idiosyncrasies, but I don't understand this one and it makes it hard to write usefully about the New Apple Order.

"The likely reality is that if my iMac were to give up the ghost tomorrow, I'd go out and buy the final-generation 27" iMac, either refurbished from Apple or used from one of the reputable dealers, in the minimum RAM configuration, populate it with RAM from Other World Computing, and I'd be spending half as much as a Mac Studio would cost me. And that would likely carry me for another 6–8 years... or until Apple decides to stop supporting the Intel chips entirely."

Note that Ctein does professional printing and restoration, so he falls into the pro user category. I believe he paid top dollar for his 5K 27" iMac when it was the very latest thing, so it's nice to hear that he got his money's worth out of it, both in terms of years of use and his positive feelings for it.

By the way, I'm far from an expert on computers—actually more the opposite—but I read enough of Daring Fireball yesterday to find out that it's pretty well accepted that the 27" iMac is now dead. I had two of them, the second being a 2011 that's still sitting here looking for a home. The only reason I went to a separate CPU and monitor was that I work on a porch, surrounded on three sides by windows, and I needed a monitor that could cope with glare better. I still can't do critical work on photos in the daytime. But my NEC MultiSync PA272W solved the glare problem—it has a non-glare surface and a hood.

And in local news...
It's like mid-Winter here today—five or six inches of fresh snow and 17°F (–8°C). The difference is that we're due for a warm-up tomorrow. The anti-icing wires on the pool table shed are working nicely, so no ice dams! Personally, I count today as the first day of Spring, despite the weather. With Daylight Savings Time newly returned, it should be light till 7:00 or even a little later, and don't think I'm not grateful. Those dark Winter evenings can feel awfully lonely. The seven Temperate Months (capitalized out of reverence), roughly April through October, are the reason to live in the Finger Lakes. Bring it on!

27-inch 5K iMac new at B&H Photo: i5, 8 GB RAM, 256GB SSD, $1,799; i9, 32 GB RAM, 2TB SSD, $3,699 (that's the low end and high end; there are other configurations in the middle).

Mike
(Thanks to Ctein)

Book of Interest this Week

Gregory Crewdson: Alone Street. "Filmic" seems the best single adjective to describe Gregory Crewdson's work; his directed and carefully managed tableau are the still photography version of scenes in movies. As such they are hyper-real; more beautiful than life and more poetic, and more concerted. They're also very easy to enjoy and a pleasure to look at.

This book link is a portal to Amazon.

Today at B&H Photo

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Thom Hogan: "I'm with Ctein for the most part. A recent 27" iMac 5K Retina configured properly is an excellent tool that should be long-lived (though Apple's yearly macOS updates have many of us living behind the times intentionally).

"Thing is, the 24" M1 iMac fills the need for those who want a lithe all-in-one, and as Mike has noted with his need for a separate monitor to get glare/positioning benefits, a Mac mini or lower Mac Studio model with the proper 4K/5K monitor is probably a perfect replacement for the 27" iMac.

"Those of us with iMac 5K's almost certainly have a small farm of peripherals hanging out on the desk (mine are about 3x the area of a Mac Studio), so the notion of a separate box really isn't an issue. Macsales.com has some very nice boxes that would stack under a Mac Studio and actually take up less space than my current drive boxes when all is said and done.

"As far as I'm concerned, Apple has done a good job of rationalizing the M1 Macs. Portables in 13, 14, 16" sizes, mini, Studio, iMac 24", and later this year a Pro. This is the best set of choices we've had in a long time. I'm not sure that a 27" iMac M1 adds much to the lineup. Indeed, if Apple were to provide one, I'm pretty sure that it would have to be Max/Ultra and the 24" would have to remain plain M1, which is what the mini/Studio distinction is right now."

John Krumm: "My Sierra Juniper just arrived and it looks fantastic. Off to the frame shop."

Bill Beebe: "I certainly understand a strong attachment to any technology or tool, especially if that tool has served you well and allowed you to make a living in your chosen profession. I have experienced the same, but from a pure engineering viewpoint. (I use a camera, and my output can be charitably described as hobbyist).

"What Ctein might be reacting to is the cost of the new M1 variant Mac minis. Let me speak to cost from my perspective.

"I'm fortunate enough that I have a 2019 16" MBP fully equipped with an i9, max memory, and 4TB SSD. That cost $6K. It's a workhorse given to me in 2020 to help complete a contract, and believe me I put it to very good use. Later, I was able to pick up a 2020 13" MPB with the basic M1 (i.e. just 8 cores), on sale for $1.5K. That became my field computer because the idea of carrying $6K of computer out of the house became untenable.

"I can say, without exaggeration, that the 13" will keep up with the 16" with 1/4 the memory, even if the 13" has to hit swap. There are use cases for which the 16" has to be used due to its 64GB memory. But for a lot of other basic use cases, I can't tell the difference in performance.

"But I can certainly tell the difference in battery life. What makes the 13" such a keeper is the speed combined with its very long battery life while out testing in the field. I can run at least eight hours of solid work before I even have to think of hitting the charger. The 16" by comparison sucks down a battery like it's going out of style.

"I understand and appreciate why Ctein uses what he uses, but I hope in the future he'll see that the Apple Silicon based Macs will benefit him even more than Intel based Macs, especially when mobile."

The Biggest News from Apple in Years

The all-new Apple Mac Studio computer

I can hardly believe my senses, but Apple yesterday appears to have introduced an all-new computer designed and aimed exactly at us—PHOTOGRAPHERS. Excuse the shouting.

The all-new Apple Mac Studio looks like a bulked-up and pumped-up musclebound Mini with two supercharged versions of the high-performance M1 chip—M1 Max ($2,000) for still photographers, M1 Ultra ($4,000) for videographers. With industrial-size fans. The M1 Ultra chip being basically two M1 Max chips joined at the hip, thus requiring less power than two separate M1 Max chips. 

Its shape is kinda reminiscent of the Power Mac G4 Cube that appealed to me so much back in 2000. Neat, clean, contained, smallish and easy to site on a desk. John Gruber wrote of the Cube in July 2020: "The Cube was a worthy failure, deserving of our utmost praise in hindsight. Powerful computers needed to get smaller, quieter, and more attractive. The Cube pushed the state of the art forward." Apple could have called the Studio the Cube II—except that the Cube, which was before its time, was a commercial failure.

There's a matching monitor, the 27-inch 5K voice-and-video-ready Studio Display that has its own A13 Bionic chip onboard. It has a nanotexture glass option to cut glare and an adjustable-height stand as an option. Suitable for graphic arts professionals who use their monitors all day.

The Mac Studio's memory is "unified," (i.e., not user upgradeable), but you can choose 32GB or 64GB for the M1 Max version and those options plus 128GB on the M1 Ultra version. 512GB SSD storage is standard with options available from 1 to  8 terabytes. According to Apple, the new Mac Studios are significantly faster than the 27" iMac and the existing Mac Pro, from 50% to 3.8X.

Both the Mac Studio and Studio Display will start shipping March 18th.

Yay, I say. Although I can't afford one myself.

Pet peeve no more
And—OMG, be still, my beating heart—not only is there a built-in SD card slot on the Mac Studio, but it's on the front.

I couldn't believe my eyes—sat there blinking stupidly—but then I remembered, oh yeah, Jony retired. Apple has always wanted everything to be designy and clean even at the expense of usability, so it insisted the ports be on the back, out of sight. Bugged me for years, but then, the world is the world. The card slot on the front won't mean much to most people, but to me it's a flag that proclaims changed intentions for this product and renewed respect for the needs of photographers. Oh, okay, "creatives." (Man I hate that word.)

Because not only is an Mac Studio an all-new computer, for today's Apple it's an all-new computer category. For years you have been dutifully enduring my griping:

• Apple didn't make a good midrange desktop for a separate monitor, so we could upgrade separately and/or use third-party graphics arts monitors such as my NEC. Apple's choices were too much (the Pro) or too little (the Mini). High end or low end, nothing in the middle.
• Apple's focus was on lifestyle and the high end, and what photographers needed was a good solid middle-range workhorse, affordable but capable.
• Apple had forgotten the graphics arts market that had once been its most loyal constituency.
• Apple always put the bleeping card slot on the side, and then on the back, so we could get irritated just a wee bit every single time we had to get up and lean over and crane our necks to put a card in or pull a card out. Which was often.
• Well, then it solved that problem by eliminating the card slot altogether. Of course, we all still use cards on a nearly daily basis. So they cleaned up the sleekness of the computer just a tiny bit...at the cost of the outboard docks that now sit on our desks. Thanks for that.
• Couldn't we please get one or two ports on the front, where they'd be accessible, for frequently swapped peripherals? We already have cords all over our desks, we really don't mind one or two more. Ours are working offices.
• Apple's Mini, post-2014, was designed for switchers (from PC) and thus could be crippled. Didn't need the latest or best chips, didn't need upgradeable RAM. The fan could be an afterthought and too small, because grampas and soccer moms and humanities majors were only going to use the thing for email and YouTube—and now Zoom—anyhow.
• In short, Apple didn't deign to make a computer for us...or so I b*tched, when of course the iMacs worked well enough and I shoulda stopped my kvetching and gone along with that program like a good sheep customer. (I do have an iMac, upstairs.)

Happy day, Apple has just shut me up entirely. By addressing all those criticisms. In one fell swoop.

A win for photographers and we might as well shout it
The Studio is ours. It's for us. Finally, that midrange workhorse utilitarian monitor-less high-connectivity accessible affordable PHOTO-CENTRIC computer I always thought Apple should make for photographers. And for videographers. (It's for musicians, too.)

I'm getting carried away, so I'll just say thank you, Santa Apple, and go calm down.

But oh, happy day. This one's for us.

Mike

P.S. I have no connection to Apple except as a customer, and was privy to no prior notification or information about any of the products introduced yesterday.

UPDATE: Thom Hogan has weighed in on the Mac Studio. One thing he points out that I should pass along is that the previous photographers' workhorse, the Intel 27" iMac with Retina 5K display, has been discontinued by Apple and is a bargain from resellers who still have stock (I believe it's what Ctein uses). Check out Thom's article. (Thanks to Richard Nugent for pointing this out—I hadn't caught up with it before he did.)

Book of Interest this Week

Gregory Crewdson: Alone Street. "Filmic" seems the best single adjective to describe Gregory Crewdson's work; his directed and carefully managed tableau are the still photography version of scenes in movies. As such they are hyper-real; more beautiful than life and more poetic, and more concerted. They're also very easy to enjoy and a pleasure to look at.

This book link is a portal to Amazon.

Today at B&H Photo

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Richard Parkin: "I solve the problem of the connections at the back by simply having the back at the front so all the ports are accessible."

Mike replies: Ha! I did the same thing with my subwoofer for my desk system...it's downward-firing, so I simply turned the front to the wall so I could access all the controls and connections.

Yuan: "Although it's drool-worthy, I'd rather call the Mac Studio video-centric. For the majority of still photographers, even the $2k version is over-kill. Nowadays you simply don't need to spend $2k to get a perfectly fine still photo computer."

James: "It's $2,000 before a screen. Five of those and you can have a pool shed."

Mike replies: True, but the Pro is $6k and up, and a Fuji X-Pro3, Panasonic S5, or Sony A7III are all the same price, and you could also spend the same on a Sony FE 50mm ƒ/1.2 GM or a Fuji XF 8–16mm ƒ/2.8. And some people already have monitors. But sure, it's not for everyone.

Michael Fewster: "SD card slot at the front! Loud cheers. Let's hope that the cheers are heard by laptop makers. In recent years SD card readers have almost completely disappeared from the laptops we photographers like to take when we travel. A MicroSD card reader doesn't do it."

Steve W: "This is good news. I have a 2018 Mac Mini, and I'm getting close to wanting to upgrade. The current Mac Mini has even fewer ports: it's been reduced from four Thunderbolt/USB-C ports to only two. That's not going to cut it. The Mac Studio is configured almost perfectly, and the SD card slot is frosting on the cake. The price seems about right given that a 14" MacBook Pro costs $1,999 as well."

Rob de Loe: "I used to teach in a lab full of Macs. Someone who wanted a nearly endless bounty of free SD cards could be happy in that room. There they were in the back of the monitor, forgotten by the previous user, waiting to be collected. There probably was someone coming around harvesting them each day, like the people you'd see running from pay phone to pay phone checking for uncollected change."

Mark replies to Rob: "What's a pay phone?"

Danielsroka: "I am just as excited as you are. My beloved 'trashcan' Mac Pro has been a workhorse, and served me well. But it is now eight years old now, and I've been waiting for a solid professional desktop Mac to come along to replace it. It feels like this machine was designed with the professional photographer in mind. Fast, efficient, and bang-on with the price. I calculated that $3–4,000 will get me a fast (but not outrageous) setup, which is the same price range I've paid for my high-end Macs in the past. And these new M1 Max chips are proving to be groundbreaking in speed and energy efficiency, a significant upgrade from the old Intel framework. Can't wait!"

Larry Angier: "Faster, cheaper, better continues! In 1984 my original Mac 128 with external floppy and ImageWriter printer cost (then) about $2,500 and it had a nine-inch monitor, 128 KB ram and 400 KB floppies.... Things keep getting better and better for us!"

Apple Point-Counterpoint

John Camp: "I'm typing this on a 2015 MacBook Pro, which will be my last Apple product, other than cellphones, and I'm taking a hard look at those. Most (maybe all) of what Studio will do can be replicated much more cheaply on Windows machines, although the Mac OS still seems easier and more intuitive that even the latest Windows 11. My problem is, if you interface (cliché) with the business world, the business world uses Windows, and even identically-branded software is not the same between the two worlds. I could no longer put up with the problems created by using Word for Mac when sending a manuscript to a publisher who is totally on Windows. Microsoft frequently updates Word, but not so frequently Word for Mac, which means there are always incompatibilities, and some of them can drive you crazy. So I'm forced to change.

"The Studio, it seems to me, is for professional videographers and perhaps professional still photographers, because Apple systems are widely used by 'creatives' (another cliché.) For artists and enthusiasts, who may only be dealing with couple of dozen photos a week, an expensive computer makes little sense. For somebody like Kirk Tuck, who may take several hundred photos at a single public event, with an ad agency demanding instant returns, the Studio may be something to seriously consider. IMHO.

"I will concede that changing operating systems is a pain in the ass, and I'm currently experiencing that. There is certainly a solid value in staying within a familiar, comfortable system, which is why I still shoot Nikons along with my Micro 4/3 stuff. But for me, from here on, it's Windows."

Alex Mercado: "I'm a staff photographer and certainly welcome the Mac Studio.

"My department is currently making use of a small fleet of Mac Minis from 2018 and, while the Mini I use exhibits no significant performance issues—as I have the luxury of only running Capture One—my colleagues in production have been feeling the limitations of theirs for some time. The suite of applications they need to run simultaneously on any given day visibly taxes the hardware of their 6-core Mac mini. And we even ponied up for them to have the maximum of 64BG of RAM from the start.

"If it were possible to cram even more RAM into the Mac Mini to help things run more efficiently, the dated CPU would still have trouble juggling the multiple threads of all the updated, and increasingly processor-intensive, applications. If the CPU could be upgraded, then every other part of the motherboard would likely become a bottleneck. The notion of long-term upgradability for an affordable computer is not terribly realistic; there will always be a component, either hardware or software, that will fail to deliver to the peak performance of the computer as a whole.

"This lack of upgradability for most of Apple’s current computers is a non-issue in our 'corporate' setting by the simple virtue of having to work within the recommendations of the IT department. Ours require us to update the OS and software regularly to keep up with security updates and network compatibility; meaning we eventually need to replace the computer to keep up with the times. Today’s Adobe Creative Cloud applications running on Monterey isn’t nearly as speedy on our Mac mini as the 2018 suite was on Mojave.

"Our replacement options before the Mac Studio were: The 2020 Mac mini. For $1,300, it has two additional CPU cores, but the RAM tops out at 16GB. It will logically struggle to keep up with demands rather quickly.

"We use Eizo displays so considering any iMac is basically pointless.

"Lastly, the 'base mode' 8-core Intel Xeon-based Mac Pro with 48GB of RAM will cost $6,500 (the next step up is 96GB for $7,200!) and is just overkill in more ways than one. Also, how long is Apple really going to keep supporting x86?

"Now, $2,600 for a Mac Studio with its 10-core M1 Max and standard 64BG of RAM is the Goldilocks Mac we’ve been waiting for. And I suspect it will remain usable for more than the four years we've managed to squeeze out of the Mac Mini."

Ed Hawco replies to John: "Another counterpoint to John Camp's point that 'if you interface (cliché) with the business world, the business world uses Windows, and even identically-branded software is not the same between the two worlds.'

"John says he wrote that on a 2015 Macbook Pro, and I think his thesis is also from 2015, if not earlier. I work in the business world, and have done so happily for over a decade on Macs. At my employer we're pretty much evenly split between Macs and Windows machines, and it is exceptionally rare to find any issues crossing platforms. My macOS MS Office interfaces flawlessly with MS Office files from Windows users. Ditto other applications we use.

"The only exception I'm aware of is the screenshot application called Snagit from Techsoft; the native image format on macOS is '.snagproj' and on Windows it's '.snag,' and they are not compatible. This is a very weird thing in 2022. Six or seven years ago I asked one of their product managers why they don't make the formats compatible across OSs, and the reply (which I don't remember verbatim) left me a bit stunned, as it implied the person did not understand what the 'use case' was for having cross-OS compatible files. Whaaaaaaa?"

Thom Hogan replies to John: "Message to John Camp: stop using Word on the Mac. The best, most compatible word processor on the Mac is Nisuswriter Pro. Has been for years as Microsoft slowly let their Mac software slide. But that should tell you something about reliance on Microsoft software in the first place. Office is a lowest common denominator product now, and as such is going to have problems long-term even for an all-Windows user."

Eric Brody (partial comment): "Like Larry Angier, my first Mac was purchased for US$2,500. I got it on April 18, 1984! 400K single-sided disks, no externals. My first external drive was a 20 megabyte, not terabyte, drive that cost hundreds! It always seemed to me that one spent the same $2,500 every few years, but got a lot more computer power."

Mike replies: My first computer was the 512K Macintosh, 1984–86, which I got for a graduation present from art school in May of '85. It was called the "Fat Mac" because it had, woo-hoo, 0.000512 GB of memory, which was a lot. Like you guys, my Macintosh and an Imagewriter daisy-wheel printer cost about $2,600. For the same dollars you can get a Mac Studio with a 2TB SSD, which can do even more than my old Fat Mac could. (I kid, don't yell at me.)

The World's Richest Man

[Comments have been added.]

Roald Dahl earned half a billion dollars in 2021,
despite being fairly severely incapacitated (he's deceased).

You've probably heard by now that Elon Musk has taken the title of richest rich guy, showing up those washed-up poor-ass no-money-having former holders of the championship belt such as Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffet. Losers!

Ahem. Excuse me. Mustn't get carried away. I don't really have an opinion on Elon Musk. I'm not really entirely sure who he is. Something about space?

More recent news is that Apple, the little startup founded in a garage (or a basement, I'm not really up on the origin story), recently poked its nose past the landmark of three trillion dollars in market capitalization. Market cap, as you might know, means the dollar value of all of its shares. It's not a made-up number, but it's sort of a theoretical one. Nobody actually has the three trillion dollars. Anyway, it's doing well.

Meanwhile, back down here in the land of guys who never balanced their checkbooks, it seems to me that what I'm hearing and reading is that the Apple M1 iMacs work nicely for photography.

On the button
For photographers, it makes little actual sense to pursue ultimates and extremes. With enough money it's possible to buy the best, of course, but even if you do, "the best" is a very time-bound concept; soon enough it will be yesterday's news. Bragging rights have an expiration date. Does anyone really care, now, if you're using a computer that was the best money could buy in 2016, 2010, or 2004?

So it might be optimal (I almost slipped and wrote best) to use stuff that's merely very good but still practical. Sort of the upper-middle-tier class of product. The M1 iMacs seem to hit that goal on the button. We photographers don't really need cutting-edge capabilities in our computers, but it's nice not to have to sit around and wait for processor-intensive tasks to run.

As for the screen size—currently there are only 24-inch M1 iMacs—I have both a 27-inch monitor and a 24-inch one. I like to believe that I could be happy with just a 24-inch screen, but I also admit that it would probably feel like a step back to give up the larger one. You'll have to decide for yourself on that question. It's why I switched to a Mac Mini and an NEC monitor a while back...the idea is to keep the monitor through several lifecycles of computer. (The kind of plan I usually don't have the discipline to carry out.)

All things considered, though, the M1 iMac feels like it might be the ideal middle-of-the-pack sensible solution for Apple-using photographers, a fully matured embodiment of the graphics workstation. At least for people who are happy with compact APS-C or Micro 4/3 cameras, which are positioned similarly in the great scheme of things—"very good but still practical."

Doing well but not here
And by the way, one other thing Apple's three trillion market cap means is that actually, Steve Jobs is the world's richest person. Well, except for two inconvenient little details. First, he sold all his Apple stock (except for one share, which allowed him to access Apple investor reports) in 1985 when he got ousted as head honcho. And, he passed away. So he's no longer, you know, a flesh-and-blood person. Details, details.

It has hardly impacted his success or fame; Bing Crosby, Arnold Palmer, and Elvis Presley go on racking up profits and adding to their wealth year after year, and they are also—there's no polite way to put it—dead. Roald Dahl (Roald Dahl?!), the author of James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, whose stock seems to keep rising and rising in the world, earned $510 million in 2021 (Netflix splurged on the rights to all his work). Michael Jackson had the best earnings year of any celebrity in all of history in 2016, which was fantastic for him except that...oh yeah, right. He was pushing daisies, then and still. Bereft of life. Bought the farm. Bucket kicked. My point is that in a world where dead people go right on making money and being admired for it, it seems a smaller leap to pretend that Steve had kept his Apple stock and to admire him for how rich he would have been if he had.

He managed to get by anyway—I'm not saying he wasn't rich. Did you know Forbes publishes an annual list of the most successful dead people? Bizarre but true. I can't quite wrap my head around the concept. But then, I don't understand Bitcoin either.

So how does Mr. Jobs feel about all his recent theoretical success? The amazing on-paper value of all the shares he wouldn't own any more if he wasn't dead? I for one would love to know. However, he can't be reached for comment.

Mike

Book o' the Week

American Geography by Matt Black, a great name for a photographer but a terrible internet name, impossible to search. Stan Banos calls American Geography a "handsome, well thought out and put together book." Matt's work is outstanding.

The link is a portal to Amazon. Thank you kindly for helping support The Online Photographer!

The following logo is also a link if you click on it:

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

hugh crawford: "Well, compare to Ronald Wayne who sold his 10% of Apple for $2,300. If that wasn’t enough, to quote Wikipedia, 'In the early 1990s, Wayne sold the original Apple partnership contract paper, signed in 1976 by Jobs, Wozniak, and himself, for US$500. In 2011, the contract was sold at auction for $1.6 million. Wayne has stated that he regrets that sale. Wayne retired to a mobile home park in Pahrump, Nevada, where he sells stamps and rare coins, and plays penny slots at a casino. Wayne never owned an Apple product until 2011, when he was given an iPad 2 at the Update Conference in Brighton, England. He holds a dozen patents.' Also, Jobs’ real fortune was from being the largest shareholder of Disney stock which he got for Pixar. He sold all but one share of Apple when he got fired and never again had that big a stake in the company."

Mike replies: Ronald Wayne, Pete Best, and the '62 Mets are among history's biggest losers. Fortunately the Cubs are finally off the list.

Ilkka replies: "If I buy shares at $10 a piece and sell them at $30, I made $20 per share. So I won (?). If that share price then goes on up to $200, what did I lose? I still made a $20 profit. How is that losing? If I take part in a marathon run and do not win, does it mean that I lost? I don’t think so. Football game and boxing match has two sides, one wins and the other one loses, unless it’s a draw. In most other things in life there are no losers even when you don’t 'win.'"

Mike replies: Ronald Wayne sold an asset for $2,300 that is now worth ~$300,000,000. And is living in a mobile home park in Parhump. How would you feel? I really doubt he looks back on that and thinks "no loss."

Ken Brayton replies: "An engineer I used to work with quit and got a job at a new startup. Not much of a pay raise, but very nice stock options. He loved flying planes, so when the company went public and he became quite rich he bought his own plane. Flew down to Vegas and ended up landing nose first into the desert. His startup was Apple. I would much rather he was retired in a mobile home in Parhump."

Paul White: The Jobs Trust controlled 38.5 million shares of Apple after his death. It also owns 12.5% of Disney. Jobs was granted shares after he came back to run Apple in 1997.

Mike replies: I haven't been able to determine what percentage of Apple those shares represented, but most sources seem to agree that it was nothing close to 11%, the stake Jobs sold off in 1985.

Phil Stiles: "The classic comment on Elvis' demise was that 'it was a good career move.'"

Mike replies: Yes, and although I appreciate it as a joke, I still kind of can't quite get my mind around the concept. It implies that the important thing about such celebrities is the enduring persona rather than the personhood of the actual person. It sounds like the basis of a Monty Python skit. And probably was. Didn't the family in The World According to Garp have a stuffed dog, Sorrow? And I recall that the original "Saturday Night Live," long ago, had a recurring joke on the "Weekend Update" fake news segment, repeatedly announcing that Generalissimo Francisco Franco was still dead.

Robert Pillow replies: "Sorrow was the family pet in The Hotel New Hampshire whose remains were stuffed following his euthanasia, which I believe was implemented because of his blindness and constant flatulence. Of course, it's been a while since I read the book."

Richard Tugwell: "I have an M1 Mini, which I use exclusively for photo processing, paired with a nice, mid-price monitor. Very, very pleased with performance. So I guess the M1 iMacs will be similarly suitable."

Mike replies: Finally, a comment about the M1 Macs! My purpose in this post was to elicit opinions about them, but apparently I so thoroughly buried the lede that that purpose was lost. Maybe I should try again....

Stephen Cowdery: "I got an M1 iMac as soon as it was released. It is wonderful, especially for image processing. Use your old monitor for displaying files and folders and the Photoshop windows."

Bill Tyler: "I'm reminded of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in which Hotblack Desiato, an incredibly rich musician, spent a year dead for tax purposes."

Phil Stiles: "A year ago, I upgraded my Mac Mini to an M1 model. The difference is profound, especially in how fast Photoshop and Lightroom load and perform. I use solid state drives for storage. My monitor is an aging 30" Cinema Display, but it still works for me. The Mini is the most cost effective way to upgrade. I also recommend an additional OWC Thunderbolt Dock for a plethora of ports."

Steve Rosenblum: "I sold my maxed-out Intel i7 Mac Mini and my 2018 Macbook Pro and bought an M1 Max Macbook Pro to use as my only computer. When photo editing I connect it to my existing NEC 27-inch MultiSync monitor. It's a major leap forward for photo editing compared to my previous computers which were pretty good."

Richard Tugwell: "I have an M1 Mac Mini, which I use exclusively for photo processing, paired with a nice, mid-price monitor. Very, very pleased with performance. So I guess the M1 iMacs will be similarly suitable."

Will: "For one, Roald Dahl’s children’s books are essential read-tos for a certain type of kid. My son was captivated by many of those books, and I expect my daughter to be as well.

"For two, your surprise at his work being well-regarded suggests you’re unfamiliar with his adult work. His short stories are brilliant. And if you’re familiar with any individual episodes of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents," it is extremely likely they were Dahl adaptations. Many rely on a sort of characteristic 'dark twist,' like the probably best-known 'A Lamb to the Slaughter,' which sees a housewife murder her husband with a frozen leg of lamb, then serve the evidence to the investigating officers. Many follow this pattern, but the 'dark twist' in 'Genesis and Catastrophe' is more subversive.

"Regardless, it is worth grabbing a Roald Dahl adult short story collection. Loads of good stuff."

Mike asks: Like this one?

 

iPhone: The Real-World Upshot

Well, this is pretty funny. It turns out I actually waited too long to get rid of my phone. Far from being sensible, I missed the boat.

I dropped into the local Verizon store yesterday and here's the upshot: They'll give me a trade-in on my old phone—the guy said six to eight hundred dollars. Great. Then I asked about the iPhone 11 and 12. They no longer have 11's, and the 12 Pro Max is exactly the same price as the 13 Pro Max. But, they don't give any trade-in allowance on the 12; only on the 13.

So that makes the 13 the no-brainer choice...which I'm sure is how Apple and/or Verizon wants it.

Then he looked up my trade-in, and...uh-oh. Guess what? The 7 Plus is too old now. Apple no longer sells them as refurbs, so the trade-in value takes a nosedive. I could have gotten $600 to $800 credit if I had traded it in on a 12 or an 11 when those were new, but I waited too long. Now it's only worth $200 in trade.

You know what they say: Oh well.

So the iPhone 13 Pro Max would cost me $910 in cash or on payments. That's actually less than Apple sells a loaded 11 Pro Max for as a refurb ($1,019).

So I missed my window. Kept the 7 Plus too long, such that now I pretty much have to pay full boat to get a new phone. It's no tragedy; I could buy one if I wanted to. But I'm leaning toward just getting a new battery for the old 7 Plus. It's kinda like a car after it's paid for: you get this golden sunset "no payments" period when the thing is paid off but still working smoothly. Besides, I'm waiting for the A6600 to go on sale again and I'd rather blow the $$ on that.

I'm sure another year or two with the old phone won't hurt me. And who knows what the 2H22 rumors will yield? I'll try to be ready for that, if and when it happens.

The moral of the story: If you want keep current with developments in phone cameras, don't hang on to your phone too long.

Mike

Product o' the Week:

The brand new 2021 Apple 10.2-inch iPad (Wi-Fi, 64GB) in Space Gray. My iPad is my least necessary but most-loved Apple device. I could get by with my phone and a desktop computer, but I use this constantly and I like it best. Check out that price.

The above is a link to Amazon from TOP—anything you buy while you're there benefits TOP. B&H Photo is closed for the rest of September for Succos.

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Niela: "Sorry Mike. I have no idea what you are talking about. I just buy my iPhone directly from Apple and sell my old one to whoever wants to pay the most. Picking and changing my carrier whenever services or pricing is convenient just makes so much more sense."

Dan: "I shall upgrade my iPhone SE when it can no longer do what I use it for…reading The Online Photographer and Jalopnik. Should be quite a while."

Dave Pawson: "Excellent (sensible) decision. I look forward to the A6600 review!"

iPhone 13?

Asking the experts: So do I need an iPhone 13?

My iPhone 7 Plus, released five years ago this very month, is getting out of date, but it still works perfectly. I have no complaints with it other than that the battery is getting a little weak. I have to remember to charge it every day, and I do run short of power every now and then because I get caught out. I take a lot of pictures with it, though. I'm guessing the newer ones are better at that.

What would you do if you were me?*

Mike

*You can say you'd switch to Android but not me. Apple loyalist since 1984, for better and worse, through thick and thin.

Product o' the Week:

The brand new 2021 Apple 10.2-inch iPad (Wi-Fi, 64GB) in Space Gray. My iPad is my least necessary but most-loved Apple device. I could get by with my phone and a desktop computer, but I use this constantly and I like it best. Check out that price.

The above is a link to Amazon from TOP—anything you buy while you're there benefits TOP. B&H Photo is closed for the rest of September for Succos.

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Jean: "I would imagine that you would be very pleased with the new iPhone. I use the regular iPhone 7 and the 12 Pro. The old one is the perfect size and weight in my pocket. The new one is a superior photographic tool. It doesn’t replace my Fujifilm X-Pro2 and X-T2, but the low light is performance is unreal with a fast lens, image stabilizer and up to 30 seconds exposure time. Apple’s special ProRAW is also a favorite for me. You can have 30 MB files with multiple images combined (tone mapping), data available for adjusting your white balance to your preference, and lower noise than JPEGs. You can lock the exposure of your sky to protect the highlights and bring up the shadows before you trip the shutter. If you still want to edit, the data is in the files. Great for landscapes. Shoot your house in the middle of the night and get the stars as well. The super-wide-angle lens is the so-useful and often used 13mm-e. On the iPhone 13 Pro, a new faster super-wide-angle lens and improved autofocus makes it even more useful. The portrait mode lets you adjust the depth of field after the fact.

"Every feature I have described here is available in the standard camera app. The convenience is great and video is quite stable and useful. Battery capacity is improved and great."

Clyde: "I went from an 8 to a 12 Pro last year and the image quality improvement was stunning! So yeah, it's worth upgrading."

Richard T: "My suggestions:

"1.) If you want or need to minimize costs in the short run, Apple can replace the battery for you (which I think costs $49 in the US). You can do this in an official Apple store or authorized service centre, or can mail out your phone if you can live without it for a few days. The iPhone 7 generation is still supported by the upcoming newest iOS (version 15 launching soon). It is unclear though if the 7 generation will still be supported by September '22, though likely that iOS version would still get security updates, so if you go for a battery replacement you'd have at least one year, probably two, and potentially more years of use out of this. By the way, in the settings menu you can find the current battery health.

"2.) You are very right that an upgrade would also get you a better camera—though perhaps slightly less so than you may think. The 7+ was the very first model with two cameras (~26mm/52mm equivalent), and if you get the iPhone 13 (non-pro version) you will still only have two cameras (except 13mm/26mm, so lacking the 52mm). Based on your love of 35–40mm equivalent lenses, that would be a significant omission. So in your case I'd go for an iPhone that also includes that 52mm lens (which Apple calls 'tele'). But note that in the iPhone 13 Pro generation they went to 3X, which equates to 78mm equivalent, i.e. a little tighter than I think you'd prefer (Apple uses 26mm as 1x, which it calls wide, and 0.5x for the 13mm, which it calls ultra-wide). The iPhone 12 Pro Max has a 2.5x tele lens, so it's 64mm equivalent. This 2.5x is only for the 'Max' version, i.e. the bigger one which is roughly the size of your Plus model. The iPhone 12 Pro (non-max) has the same 2X (52mm equivalent) lens.

"3). Possibly a nice compromise for you might be the iPhone 11 Pro Max, which has the 0.5/1x/2x lenses and gets you a similar sized phone as the 7+. You might be able to get a refurbished directly from Apple—and you can use https://refurb-tracker.com/ to keep track of stock. There's also eBay of course, though battery quality varies—I'd ask sellers to check battery health if you take the eBay route. When I upgrade I usually go for the t–1 model [i.e., last generation —Ed.] since there is about a 50% depreciation after the first year (not unlike a new car!)."

David Place: "I once had an iPhone 6 and kept it through the XR (10) but shouldn't brag...since then I've fallen for the camera upgrade every year. I pass on my current model to my other half and trade in the two-year-old iPhone. So the 11 is traded in / the 12 is passed on / the blue 1TB 13 Pro Max will be here Friday (I also tend to get the new color each year). The iPhone is now my main camera (that's my only excuse). Suggestion? Move on to the 13."

Kirk: "I would rush to pre-order the iPhone 13 Pro. You can go to the Apple website and see everything they've improved on. It's now an amazing camera in addition to being a phone...and a computer...and a health resource...and an entertainment center.... I'll be buying one for the video capability alone but I'll end up using it for everything I photograph that couldn't be better photographed with a full frame, higher resolution camera (and attendant lenses...).

"The perfect moment for a tech straggler to leapfrog into the cutting edge."

Soeren Engelbrecht (partial comment): "The new phones are a bit like buying into a new camera system without the ability to choose your own set of lenses.  :-)  ."

Aakin Patel (partial comment): "I think it's worth upgrading. [...] The iPhones usually get security/software updates for five years. Yours is hitting that limit, and in today's world where phones are big targets for cybersecurity attacks, it's pretty worthwhile to stay on top of that. Having a new phone that gets the updates is pretty important, and worth upgrading if you can swing it."

Øyvind: "I would go with the 13 Pro. The camera system is just more complete, and is given the biggest camera bump ever this year. The wide/ultrawide combination of the standard model just never appealed to me as someone who uses normal to short tele quite a bit. If you're coming from an iPhone 7 the new models should be a massive leap (as Apple likes to say for every model increment). That goes for battery life, operational smoothness and convenience, display quality and sheer computing power. And the cameras are just way better.

"Still I respect you holding on to your phone for its useful life."

Robin: "No-one needs an iPhone. Some people might want one. Big difference. It's clear to see that Apple is the most hyper-capitalist, resource-extracting company in the world. Even on my doorstep here in Ireland, I see the damage...as they avoid paying any tax while keeping desperate employees in dead-end jobs. I would never support this company. No matter what pretty things they dangle. The world is on fire. We are in the Sixth Great Extinction. Time to take a more moral stance. Even in an array of bad choices, some are better than others."

Fred Haynes: "I’m the last person to give advice, since I don’t own a cellphone! I am a dinosaur! But considering the ‘business’ you're in, I think it would be a good idea to have the best, assuming this latest model is the best. Regarding your thoughts about the iPad, I’m one hundred percent with you on that! I could not be without mine, I’d go nuts!"

els: "Absolutely buy the iPhone13 Pro. If you already take a lot of pictures with your iPhone 7, you will be so happy with the iPhone 13. Let's face it, it is the only camera we all use every day. So why not have the best one available?"

Wonders Awaiting

I descended the stairs this morning to find poop all over my office, which is part of caring for the older doggie. Poop happens. In my spiritual program we learn acceptance along with patience and tolerance. Crucial to happiness and contentment. I work on acceptance every day. And I need to, apparently.

The poop is all cleaned up now. All has been sanitized and sanity is restored. Welcome, bright new day.

On firing up ye wheezy computer I was presented with a come-on to pay $5 a month for something called Mozilla VPN. It has something to do with my browser as Mozilla is the entity that makes Firefox, which I've used for years...without having any idea whether that is a good idea. I can't remember why I started using Firefox. Just one of those things that I do. (After a while, trudging the road of happy destiny, lots of things silently and inevitably morph into just something one does.)

These days, you have to be careful. Some people are trying to offer you something useful and helpful; others are trying to work their grimy fingers into your wallet, not to mention sometimes your soul.

So I'm hoping some expert out there on computery things (internetty subset) will share and school: what be a VPN? Do I need such? Is Mozilla's the one I should get? Is it worth yet another poxy $60 leak per annum? (My bank account is now riddled with such tiny leaks. Drip drip.)

Don't ask
And by the way, this has been a pretty consistent issue in blogging over the years. When you have access to a crowd, especially a crowd of such exceptionally wise heads, it's always a temptation to ask about anything that is outside of one's own sphere. Legal questions, medical questions, questions put to pilots or investors or spelunkers or gardeners or what-have-you, or just things I'm curious about. Because when you open that magic window, you never know what is going to happen. For example, long ago I mentioned an obscure Australian photographer, and, months later, a rare volume of his work arrived in the mail from an Australian reader who was moved to seek it for himself and happened to find two copies instead of one. Or, once I mentioned A&E's show "Deadliest Catch" about crab fisherman in the Bering Sea, and what did we get but a comment from a reader who is a crab fisherman in the Bering Sea who loves TOP but can only catch up with his reading when his ship is within internet range of Dutch Harbor. Or the time we were talking about Irving Penn's platinum/palladium prints and we got a comment from Irving Penn's former platinum/palladium printmaking assistant.

Gold. You just never know what wonders await. Ask and ye shall receive.

Anyway I have a guideline for myself...try not to ask readers-plural for help with stuff that doesn't have to do with photography. That filters out about 80% of these impulses. Some off-topic "asks" sneak through however. I allow computer questions to wiggle their way in as being sorta-kinda related, although that's questionable.

Anyway, if anyone could help educate me in re VPNs off the top of their heads it would save me some time, time that could be better spent writing, which is the thing I do.

Mike

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Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Upcoming! (Update)

Upcoming: Apple iMac Pro 32" with M2 chip, with an adequate number of ports and an Apple logo on the business side. Available in silver and space gray only.

(Photographers who do heavy Photoshop lifting might be better off waiting for that one.)

I've always had this ability to see the future. It's a curse as well as a blessing.... 

Mike 

Books o' the Week

Nikon fan are ya? Nikon: A Celebration by British automotive writer and Nikon collector Brian Long covers the history of the company from its beginnings to the end of the film era. A U.S. parallel with more concentration on opinions about the equipment is B. Moose Peterson's Nikon System Handbook. The 6th Edition covered film equipment up to 2000. <—These are portals to Amazon.com thru TOP; you can also search for Nikon books from The Book Depository, which offers free shipping worldwide.

Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

MarkB: "Har har. Today's iMac announcement is, for serious digital photographers, the equivalent of 'nothing to see here.' I'm rather relieved, as they retained the 27" Intel models for a little longer...whew!"

Margaret: "Completely underwhelmed by new M1 iMac. 24", no SD slot, only 'up to' 16Gb memory and 2TB storage. I'm currently on 27", SD slot, 32GB and 3TB, so why on Earth would I downgrade to this? And with everything one one chip, no possibility of upgrading anything. But wait!! It comes in 'seven vibrant new colours'!! Oh well. Obviously I'll be buying one then (massive eye roll). Another triumph of style over substance."

Mike replies: Exactly. That why I think this is the rollout of just the "lower tier," the computer for people to put in their family rooms so they can keep a watchful eye on the kids at school and doing homework, the computer for people who don't use the computer much, and for people who care about things like color-matching computer and peripherals (the new 24" iMac comes with color-matching mouses, did you see?) in Easterish pastels.  Not the things that are enticing for the likes of us.

The colors simply radiate unseriousness. Surely Apple means to telegraph that this is not the computer for power users.

I'm probably three years away from a new computer, unfortunately (I'm out of sync with Apple), and I hope my new computer will have 32GB RAM and a 4TB hard drive and enough ports that it doesn't automatically require a dock that automatically clutters up the desktop—the real top of my desk, I mean. I absolutely would have to use a dock/cardreader with this just-introduced model. Just as I do with my Mini.

Although I have to say, 24" strikes me as perfect. I currently have a 21.5" iMac and a 27" NEC monitor on my Mini, and while the latter is fine there's something nice about my little iMac. But I don't do photo editing on it, and for that it's just a bit small. About the only thing I don't need is a screen larger than my NEC...it will just be harder to wrangle and ship, and I personally don't need the screen real estate. And who really does? If you want room for your image and your palettes, don't you just get two screens? I know people who use three screens.

It mystifies me that Apple insists on sleek, uncluttered design, as if your office is a showplace, and then at the same time limits the number of ports it affords you and removes features like the SD card slot and DVD drive. Doesn't Apple understand that having more ports and built-in features would mean less clutter?

But then, I value practicality over style. And I notice that my whole (real) desktop has migrated slowly away from Apple for everything save the computer itself—my display, keyboard(s), mouse, speakers, dock/cardreader, and outboard drives are all non-Apple items now.

robert quiet photographer: "Am I the only Apple user who would like a desktop in between the Mac Mini and the Mac Pro? I'm still on my Mac Pro (2013) trash bin...with too many cables around it...."

Mike replies: I wrote a rant to that effect once. It doesn't appear to have changed Apple's mind.... :-)

Apple News

Is this OT or not? I guess it depends on you.

It's possible the Apple M1 iMacs could be announced tomorrow. The event is at 10 a.m. U.S. Pacific Time, 1 p.m. here in the East.

The iMac has been Apple's mainstream desktop computer product since it stopped seeing its major prestige market as being graphic designers and video and photo editors. Current iMacs range from a little over $1k to a little over $5k, which is a broad segment. If we do get new iMacs, it'll be interesting to see where in that range it targets Apple Silicon. The first iMac cost $1,299 in 1998, which would be $2,111 now.

Watchers expect a redesign, too. Other options: the iMac could be redesigned for the first time in years but retain Intel chips; or they could get Apple Silicon but no redesign.

One of the touted benefits of the M1 chip is battery life, which obviously won't be relevant in an iMac. So the focus will have to shift to other performance parameters. What those are going to be, and how much they might matter, is the question.

Could be an interesting day; or not.

I've been using all-in-one Macs, including the first Macintosh and the first iMac, since 1984. I'll be watching. Or, more accurately, waiting for the relevant news to filter through from someone who can 'splain it to me. But maybe actually watching too. 

Meanwhile, provoked by a bug in Word for Mac, a friend switched from Apple to PC and was impressed by the feature-richness of the mid-level PC he bought.

Spring
I've got my windows open and I'm starting Spring Cleaning out here on the porch where I work. (One of my ambitions for this year is to move my office to the back of the house.) I gave the lawn its first haircut yesterday, strategically shoehorning the task in between rain showers. The daffodils are up and the robins are mating—two robin couples were actually making such a racket in a bush this morning that Butters charged the bush barking! Rude interruption, that.

Go Spring.

Mike 

Books o' the Week

Nikon fan are ya? Nikon: A Celebration by British automotive writer and Nikon collector Brian Long covers the history of the company from its beginnings to the end of the film era. A U.S. parallel with more concentration on opinions about the equipment is B. Moose Peterson's Nikon System Handbook. The 6th Edition covered film equipment up to 2000. <—These are portals to Amazon.com thru TOP; you can also search for Nikon books from The Book Depository, which offers free shipping worldwide.

Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Joseph Vavak: "I bought a MacBook Air with the M1 earlier this year and have been very impressed with just how quick and responsive it is to use. I expected some slowness and hiccups with applications that hadn't been optimized for the M1, but it's hardly noticeable, if at all. The Air feels faster in day-to-day usage than the Lenovo Ryzen 5 powered-desktop I bought at the start of the pandemic for work purposes and upgraded to 16GB of RAM and a 1TB NVME drive. I expected the battery life and the lack of heat generated, but I am honestly surprised how well it works for a 1st generation product that doesn't even have a fan."

Richard T: "Re whether this is OT, computing is another main interest of mine so from my side, the more you write/opine/reflect on Apple or related issues the better.  :-)  "

John Camp: "I'm Mike's friend who is experimenting with a PC. (Lenovo A940 with the i9 processor.) In addition to the new Lenovo, my wife and I between us have five active Apple machines, three 27-inch iMacs and two laptops for travel. (We're professional writers. [Here's John's latest —Ed.]) Our problem is, Microsoft Word is the publishing standard, and Word for Mac and MS Word have become increasingly incompatible—not in any large way, but in small ways that drive you absolutely crazy. For example, if you create in Word for Mac (or worse, in the supposedly compatible Pages) and the manuscript is opened in MS Word (the standard), one bug may separate a possessive apostrophe from its intended place, and attach it to the following word. (As in: The Smiths 'car.) Try finding all of those in a 110,000-word manuscript. There are also bugs that mess with spacing. I finally couldn't deal with it anymore, and I'm trying a PC with MS Word. (I'm a Word subscriber for both machines.)

"I don't know why the bugs appeared, but I suspect that Microsoft isn't interested in writing new Word software every time Apple updates its OS, which is now annually. And honestly, some of the incompatibilities are really hard to see until they get you by the throat.

"What I'm finding so far: the Lenovo, also an all-in-one, has far surpassed the iMac in function, although it is clunkier. The screen is the same size (27") and UHD, but it is a touch screen. I won't get into all the specs, they're easily researched on the 'net, but I'll mention a few things: the underside of the screen has a row of dimmable LED lights (that may also be turned off) that shine down on a manuscript that you may be editing. To the right side of the screen is a small platform that is a wireless iPhone charger. The machine comes with an electronic 'pencil' for writing on the touch screen which is great for apps like Photoshop. The 940 is faster than the iMac and has more RAM and storage. It has excellent Dolby Atmos speakers built into the base. It cost $2,449.99.

"The downside is Windows 10, which is not as good as the Mac OS (I'm using Big Sur.) Still too complicated, but much better than it used to be. After a few days use, I'm getting into it, and though I'm getting into it, it's not as slick as the Mac. Though, really, it is fairly slick.

"Going forward, I suspect the Lenovo will become my main machine, and my Apples, as they become increasingly obsolete, will go away. But I'm not sure of that. I've been using Apples since the '90s. I do think that Apple's tendency toward fashion and sleekness at the price of less function will eventually bite it in the ass."

Thomas Mc Cann: "A post on TOP some years back coupled with a recommendation from Ctein led me to buy the latest Mac with the latest screen and an Epson SureColor P600. All touted as the ne plus ultra. A longtime PC user, I struggled with the Mac. Eventually I gave up in frustration and switched back to a Dell and Windows 10. I was probably too steeped in the Windows environment. Only good thing was I got a good price for the Mac when I sold it."

Is It Okay to Shoot Down a Drone?

There's a great article in the latest New Yorker about ownership. It starts off by relating the case of one William Merideth, who shot down a drone that hovered over his property while his daughter was sunbathing. It discusses all forms of ownership, starting with the idea that property owners also own the air above their property out to where the stars begin and down to the center of the Earth, an ancient legal principle called Cuius est solum, eius est usque ad coelum et ad inferos. Eventually the discussion segues to the online world, where the article makes the case that we're all fast becoming "e-peons." We used the word peon as a put-down in high-school, so I'm familiar with it. It might also be familiar to you if you're a rapper—according to dailyrapfacts, "The slang term 'Peon' or 'Peons' are nouns and adjectives...used by rappers and in the music industry to reference a lame, low class or low status person (someone who is at the bottom of the food chain)."

"The digital and smart devices that surround us are legion, but we do not truly own or control them," writes Joshua A.T. Fairfield, in the book Owned: Property, Privacy, and the New Digital Serfdom. Having just spent a week wrangling with "my" computer, or rather Apple's computer that's in my house, and pondering again the headache of 3-2-1 backups, I really do wonder how much of what's on "my" computer and how it works is really under my control. Not as much as I like to think, I suspect. A number of years ago Apple sold the writing program I used, and the new owners (after several ownership changes) discontinued it, and before you knew it all those files that I had worked so hard on were un-openable. My work was lost. How that's conceptually different from someone breaking into my house and stealing stacks of paper on which I had written with india ink and a quill pen, I don't know.

I've always been against the idea of self-driving cars, because all I see is a future in which everyone will have to pay a monthly fee to participate in the program of whoever is supplying the guidance and coordinating system. I don't want to pay a monthly fee to drive. "If we do not take back our ownership rights," Fairfield writes in his newest book, Runaway Technology, we will only be able to use "our smart devices, our homes, our cars, and even our own software-enabled medical implants purely at the whim of others."

Are "my" digital pictures really mine? To what extent and to what degree can someone other than me control or limit my access to them? I don't know.

I also have a feeling I don't want to know....

Anyway, good reading. Check it out.

Mike

Book o' the Week:

ArtCurious: Stories of the Unexpected, Slightly Odd, and Strangely Wonderful in Art History by Jennifer Dasal (Penguin, 2020. Adapted from the popular podcast.)

This link is a portal to Amazon, through which most anything you purchase will be credited to TOP. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Also, TOP is sponsored by:

Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Rob L (partial comment): "I haven't shot down a drone, but I may have practiced casting and hooked the drone hovering over my backyard trying to video the pool next door. Darn accidents, what can I say?(drone rotors and fishing line are not friends....)"

Christopher Crawford: "A peon is a person enslaved by debt. The term originated in Spain's colonies in the 1500s when the King, under pressure from the church, outlawed the enslavement of the natives in Mexico. Peonage replaced slavery. Technically the peon was not a slave, but they depended on a nobleman who rented farmland to them at prices higher than they could pay, forcing them to pay off the debt (which always got larger) with free labor. This system was called Peonage, and a Peon was a person enslaved by it. In some Spanish colonies, African slaves were imported; peonage was less common in those places than it was in places like Mexico where few black slaves were brought in."

Geoff Wittig: "I intermittently try to remember to save a copy of my favorite image files as a TIFF in hopes that I'll be able to open them down the road even if Adobe disappears and Photoshop is dead. Which might strike people as a ludicrous concern, until you think about what happened to Lotus. Back in the day they wrote the spreadsheet software the entire business world used, but then they were crushed by Microsoft and disappeared almost overnight. I suspect (don't know because I'm a spreadsheet illiterate) that countless businesses and financial people lost painstakingly written macros and custom spreadsheets when that happened. So it bothers me to think that I don't really 'own' my own multi-layered Photoshop image files because Adobe might some day just stop supporting them. Kinda like having thousands of slides and having the last bulb for the last slide projector burn out."

mike rosenlof: " I suspect you may get other comments like this, but I don't think it's a good analogy to compare writings lost inside no-longer-supported files formats to theft of paper from your house. I think it's a better comparison would be if you stored your files on eight-inch floppies and now you can't find a reader. For that matter, any floppies, SCSI disks, etc. Technology marches on and doesn't necessarily pull the old baggage with it. You have written about how to make sure one's photos survive. Option no. 1, 'Be famous' if I recall correctly. This is a recurring issue for any creations in the digital realm. Digitally stored material requires active maintenance to ensure the work makes it across generations of technology.

"I readily admit that I don't practice what I preach. I print many photos, but I have a lot of stuff I've written that exists only in digital form. I have good backups, but they're all on SATA spinning disk drives.... P.S. checkout Open Office Writer; it opens several file formats that are no longer current."

James Bullard: "Re The drone question: No, you may not shoot down drones and you don't own the airspace above your property all the way out to the stars. You are however entitled to a certain degree of privacy and drones should not be flown over private property for the purpose of invading your privacy. Legally, in the U.S., all the airspace is controlled by the FAA and drone pilots are obliged to follow FAA rules for flying drones."

Rip Smith: "The problem of technical obsolescence of data is a great argument for printing the best of your photographs and even written pieces."

Dave Sailer: "Not there yet, but some are working on it, like these three, in laptop space. MNT Reform: ...take a look under the hood, customize the documented electronics, and even repair it yourself if you like. The Reform laptop has no built-in surveillance technologies, cameras, or microphones.... Librem 14: The first 14" laptop designed to protect your digital life. Ultra-portable workstation laptop that was designed chip-by-chip, line-by-line, to respect your rights to privacy, security, and freedom. PINEBOOK: Pinebook is a lightweight, low-cost notebook designed and manufactured by the company Pine64...its appearance resembles the MacBook Air...The Pinebook is sold at-cost by pine64 as a community service."

Slick, Cool, and Pretty

Well, my main computer is dead in the water as of yesterday...won't boot up. This is, if porous memory serves, the second time I've experienced this with a Mac in the past 37 years.

The very first Macintosh I used was the very first Macintosh...the original 128k Mac of 1984, which I used in art school. A gallerist named David Adamson was convinced that computers would play a significant role in the art of the future, so he bought six Macs, donated them to the Corcoran School, and then donated several hours of his time every week to teach a couple of courses. I was the only student who used MacWrite rather than MacPaint.  :-)  Those were the only two programs for the new computer at the time it came out, I think.

The first computer I owned—a graduation present from Mom—was the second Macintosh, the 512k "Fat Mac" of 1985. Since then I've owned another 15 or 16 Macs, for an average of about one every two years. That counts three that belonged to employers rather than to me. I think the only other time I had a failure to boot was, ironically, with the most trouble-free Mac I ever used, the Quadra 605 of 1993, provided to me by an employer. One day it failed to start. Dead. Nothing was broken or amiss; it turned out that there was a little battery on the motherboard that was used to kickstart the monitor, and it was depleted. A new battery was inserted and all was good again. 

I've liked every Mac I've owned except the Mac Classic, which was basically outdated when it was introduced, and a fractious, clunky desktop model from Apple's nadir, the John Scully years. My favorites were the Quadra 605, an early Powerbook called the 160, and my first 27" iMac. One of the worst problems I ever had was with the original Bondi Blue iMac, Steve Jobs' initial product on his triumphal return to Apple, which I also owned. A CD got stuck in the CD bay, and of course the entire computer was hermetically sealed with no user access. After days of hassle I basically broke into the box and pulled the offending CD out by force, using about the same level of sophistication that a burglar uses getting into an unoccupied house. Except I made more noise.

It annoyed me that it was a problem that didn't have to happen at all—most CD drives had drawers at the time. Jobs apparently liked the self-loading slot because it was more elegant. Harbinger of the future, as it turned out—Apple now has a long history of making things less functional so they can be slick, cool, or pretty. Bah, humbug, is my official position...and yet I kinda like the styleyness of Apple stuff too. My favorite Apple device of all is the iPad, which is also the least necessary computer-related thing I've ever owned.

The bad thing about living at TOP Rural Headquarters is: everything's a drive, and anything specialized is a long drive. So I'm in for two and a half hours in the car later this afternoon to drive the computer (a Mac Mini) to the Apple store. If they can't fix it, I have an appointment at a Mac specialist in Rochester for Monday.

I'm writing this on my second Mac, a 21.5" iMac I keep upstairs that I use for Zoom meetings. This one is the opposite of the downstairs one—stripped down and leaned out about as far as possible. The downstairs computer carries the freight of decades of crap carried over from the last Mac to the next Mac, and it's an impressive amount of clutter. If it were a house and everything on it were a physical object, I'd be on "Hoarders."

My next Apple purchase will probably be a phone. Do you think, when the iPhone 13 comes out, that I can justify upgrading from the iPhone 7 Plus? The latter is not even very old, but they say the cameras are better on the newer ones....

I imagine my next Mac will be the M1 version of this, with the best screen I can get. The 21.5" iMac is really all I need in a desktop, if I'm honest. It's not fancy and not advanced, but it's the perfect embodiment of the Apple ethos which has been a part of my life for so long. 

Mike

Gear o' The Week:

I'm going to get a review unit of the Fuji GFX 50R as soon as the weather gets nice. Believe it or not what really appeals to me about it are the simplified controls. It has all the features I like and not many I don't like.

The above link is a portal to take you from TOP to Amazon. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Here's a handy portal to B&H Photo, which also sells the GFX 50R:

Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Dan Khong: "Mike, Macs are like family in your life. The next one deserves to be named Mac Johnston. Just sayin'."

Timothy Auger: "Moving from an iPhone 6s to a 12 Mini, I would say the new camera does astonishing things for its size, and amazing things in the dark. Massive step forward. But are the files as good as (say) my 12-MP Fuji X30? In terms of pure resolution, they're better. But otherwise, on close inspection, not. Noise reduction and sharpening applied with a spade. Depends what you want it for. Terrific for casual use, or smallish display or print sizes. Worth getting? Yes."

Stephen Scharf: "The new cameras on the new iPhones are pretty impressive. Check this out; an interior real estate ambient light grab shot taken with my iPhone 12 Mini. A beautiful Oakland hills mansion taken Tuesday evening while walking by the living room to the back terrace to shoot twilights for the listing agent. Single frame, single exposure JPEG with some small tweaks in PS.

"And...the sensor on the iPhone 12 Pro Max is larger."

rob l: A leap from 7 to 13 will be a very nice jump - not only to you get a much improved camera, faster everything, and a better screen, the form factor hopefully will be similar to the 12's return to the iPhone 5 ethos, with makes camera use easier with a defined side to the phone.

"Trayless CD players rock—the offense was not exposing the manual eject hole to the world, which used a familiar paper clip a la the old floppy drives to pop out the offending media. But the trays we frequently broken by students and other careless folks, so there was more than simple aesthetics driving that change."

Oskar Ojala: "When the iPhone 11 came out, I upgraded from the 7 plus to the 11 Pro Max. In theory the cameras are supposed to be better. In practice the Apple camera software does such heavy-handed processing that my images look garish; there's too much sharpening and local contrast and images tend to be a bit dark. The magic is gone. I Googled and other people have encountered this problem, but there's no way to fix it. So I'm resigned to using a third party program to shoot raw, but it takes away the convenience and I don't bother so much anymore. In other words, if your 7 plus works, don't fix it! Save the money for something else."

Ben Rosengart replies to Oskar: "With regard to shooting raw on iPhone, I believe some of the newer phones support it in the first-party Camera app. Yeah, here we go. Full disclosure: I work for Apple.

BWJones: "You will love the new iPhone from the camera perspective alone. The computational work that is going into creating routine images makes me surprised that the traditional camera companies have not been engaging in this same sort of thing."

Mouse and Keyboard

It was certainly interesting to read everyone's thoughtful discussions of camera viewfinders. Thanks for that. The viewfinder is perhaps the most important feature of most cameras for most users, and yet one of the least discussed. A great viewfinder is worth buying a camera to get.

I wanted to follow up briefly about my mouse and keyboard problems, which I wrote about on February 3rd. I'm not an expert on either product type. I had been having persistent problems with my Apple Magic Mouse 2. And my Microsoft 4000 Ergonomic keyboard had evidently been discontinued, which was causing me some consternation. I've bought a new one of those every year or two for probably the past fifteen years, since I first started having some signs of repetitive stress hand problems.

Thanks first of all to the other Mike who wrote the Featured Comment on that Feb. 3rd post. He says he worked for Apple Support for years, and suggested turning off other Bluetooth mouses (or mice, if you wish—both usages are correct) nearby. Since my upstairs computer is only one floor and a few lateral feet away from my downstairs one, they were indeed interfering with each other, and turning off the mouse on the computer I wasn't using did help.

But I've never really been happy with the Magic Mouse 2, which got off on the wrong foot with me from the start because it has its charging port on the bottom, which means you can't use it while you're charging it. That's absolutely "form over function" and it's an asinine arrangement if you ask me. Apple's Achilles heel is that for a long time now it has prioritized style over function. I've never totally disapproved, but I've never totally approved either.

I ended up buying two mouses, a bluetooth Logitech M510 which went on sale right after I bought it, and a wired Macally XMOUSE (about $15) as a backup. (I might use the MacAlly permanently on the upstairs computer so I never have bluetooth issues without having to remember to turn the mouse off. I'm absentminded, and I try not to set things up such that I have to remember to do something. Inevitably I will occasionally forget.) Both are the first-ever non-Apple mouses I've ever owned.

The Macally is cheap, too light, and not great to hold, but it's very responsive and has a large scroll wheel which seems like it will be reliable and won't gum up too easily.

I bought the Logitech M510 (about $25) by mistake! I had multiple windows open and different mouses in my Amazon carts on different screens, and just hit the go button in the wrong window. Oops. I meant to buy the wired Logitech G203 gaming mouse ($40 or less), and didn't realize my mistake until the package arrived.

Logitech (AKA "Logi") is confusing if you don't know your way around—the company has separate websites for its regular product lines and gaming equipment lines. Logitech.com is for its regular products and logitechg.com is for gaming products.

The wireless Logitech M510 and its small USB receiver

The M510 is a step up from what I was used to. It's more customizable, although Logi doesn't make left-handed mouses so the thumb buttons are on the wrong side for me. But I like the weight, I like the indented finger grips, and I have enough buttons to customize the functions I use most. The scroll wheel is very "bumply" rather than smooth in its action, which I didn't initially like but am getting used to.

I've still had bluetooth connectivity issues. The M510 has a small receiver you have to plug into a USB port, which defeats the advantage of a wireless mouse for me since ports are my issue. Also, the M510 requires that it be in an immediate sightline with the receiver unit to work properly, which is less than ideal. As for the buttons being on the wrong side, I can get used to that. The things they control—moving between desktops—is not something I do very often.

Mouses are cheap enough that I've decided to keep the two I bought even though I might replace the Logi at some point with a wired mouse. They just seem to work better for me. But as I adapt to the M510 I'm beginning to be fond of it. Wish I had gotten the red one, however! Mine is black.

True to type
As for the keyboard, the situation wasn't so dire.

Note that I cannot review keyboards. I made a fateful decision when I was 14—I received a typewriter for my 14th birthday from my grandmother. It was a beautiful German Adler Satellite 2001 electric portable (very futuristic in 1971!) that I loved. I was told the basics of touch-typing, but I decided hunt-and-peck typing was faster and easier so I just decided not to learn to touch-type. I remember the day I made the decision. Big, big mistake. I've typed how many millions of words since then? More than ten, easily. If I had just stuck with touch-typing a little longer I'd have been adept at it in no time. As it is, to this day I type clumsily with four fingers, just as I did in the week following my fourteenth birthday. On a good day I can type without looking at the keyboard, but my finger patterns are so daft and awkward that I'm not very accurate and certainly not fast at all. Also, I'm getting less coordinated as I age, and my mistake rate has gone steadily up. Frowny face. At any rate, one would need to be a touch-typist to responsibly review a keyboard.

So it turns out that Microsoft merely revised its keyboard. Old dies and molds wear out; the 4000 had been manufactured for a long time, and the time probably arrived when the fabricator had to re-make the tooling one way or the other to continue producing the product, so Microsoft took the opportunity to update and refine the design. The new Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard is very similar to the old one and didn't require much in the way of adaptation of my old, long-entrenched habits.

The new keyboard is all black and much cleaner in design. My only comment is that it doesn't quite sit flat. It does, until you put the weight of your right hand on the pad where it naturally belongs, at which point the back left corner raises up slightly. So the whole thing is just a little too flimsy. But it's not bad in that respect, and that flaw isn't major. I can't comment on the common failure mode of the 4000, which is that the letters wore off the keys. But now, thanks to you, I know what to do about that—I'll just add stick-on letters like these.

How is typing taught these days? I have no idea. But if you're the parent of a young person, urge them to learn proper touch-typing from the start. Life will be much easier that way. Even if they don't grow up to be writers.

Mike

Book Product o' This Week:

Is it too late for this? 2021 is still young. There are two reasons to value these Michael Kenna calendars from Nazraeli Press: one is that his originals are 8x8", so these pictures are meant to work at wall-calendar sizes. The other is that Michael's calendars can actually increase in value! Dan Smith suggested this, and he reports that some older ones sell in the hundreds of dollars. "The printing is excellent," Dan wrote, "and the calendar is beautiful."

The above link takes you from TOP to Amazon. This week's pick is not available at Amazon Canada, but 2019 is. Hey, the pictures are still good. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

 

Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Roger Bartlett: "Re 'How is typing taught these days? I have no idea.' There are gaming apps that teach touch typing; kids learn while gaming and don't notice the drill and practice. 'Gamification' is a thing. I am the same age as you and made a similar decision at about the same age in my life. Also regretted it ever since."

John McMillin: "Apple frustrates me by offering no lighted keyboard option for its desktops. Sounds like I type at your level, where I'm looking at the keyboard. After dark, my office becomes a shady lair, like I like it, so the clutter disappears. The latest Apple keyboards are labeled in a subtle gray, suggesting that they think we all ought to be good typists by now. Finally it occurred to me to buy a non-Apple keyboard. I'm using a Logitech now."

Lawrence Plummer: "Funny you should mention keyboards. My prized Omni Key Ultra by Northgate Computer Systems is still going strong after 30+ years of use! I learned typing in the seventh grade, in the mid/late '60s, and have typed on untold numbers of different keyboards in my life as a software engineer. Everything from IBM keypunch machines and French keyboards to the original keyboards used on the US AWACS aircraft."

Dillan: "I took typing in high school as an elective. My buddy and I, the only two boys in the class, thought it would be an easy class. Ha! I barely passed! Despite my poor performance, it proved to be one of the most useful skills that I've ever taken the time to learn. I'm grateful for the experience."

David Dyer-Bennet: "I exactly reversed your typing decision. In fifth grade I needed to put my script for an adaptation of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea as a puppet play onto ditto masters (we only needed about six copies...but that was before there was any real access to photocopiers for ordinary people).

"I got out my father's old Smith Corona portable (manual)...and found the finger placement chart for touch typing on top of the carriage inside the case.

"I knew I had a huge amount of typing ahead of me, and that it was going to be slow, laborious, and generally a pain. But, I thought that starting to do it 'right' wasn't going to be any slower or really less pleasant than doing it hunt-and-peck (as my father did).

"So I started typing with the 'right' fingers (looking at the chart for every letter). Quite soon, of course, I was no longer looking at the chart for most letters, and was in fact typing much faster than when I started (hunt-and-peck would also have sped up from where I was starting). And by the end of the however many dozen pages it was, I was fairly comfortable with it.

"Three years later I started keypunching my own Fortran programs onto computer cards, so I started really benefiting from the new skill. Also my high school (and college) teachers benefited from not having to try to read my hand-writing for papers.

"I guess I trusted the people who decided touch typing was the 'right' way to do it. Of course I'd seen it in movies and on TV, and I'm sure in offices sometimes as well, though not at home. And I maybe wasn't cynical enough about what I saw on TV back then :-) . So I just decided to do it 'right.'"

Mike replies: Cool. I wish I'd had your good sense!

Frank Gorga: "As far as touch typing or not goes... I am a two finger typist. However, since I began composing at the keyboard decades ago, I have not found this to be a problem. My thought process is the rate-limiting step, not my two finger typing."

Mike replies: Maybe that's why I was never motivated to rectify my deficiency! Thanks for giving me another way of thinking about it.

Kirk Tuck: "People ask how I can churn out so much blog stuff in so little time. Two secrets: Never re-write. Never. Learn to touch type, and practice until you can do 90 words a minute, even in a stupor. Now, this in no way says anything about the quality of the content; just the efficiency. No claims for quality—just bragging about quantity."

Moose (partial comment): "Slight tech misunderstanding. This mouse, and the majority of wireless mice, those that use a tiny USB receiver, are NOT Bluetooth. They use proprietary coms in the 2.4 Mz band. If it doesn't say Bluetooth or BT, it isn't. So...these mice, and keyboards, don't interfere with BT mice and keyboards. I have one of each next to each other on my pad, one for desktop, one for portable when I'm home. They are usually both on at the same time. I've never had any trouble at all. A guess? Neither of your old mice that were interfering with each other is actually BT."

Mike replies: Sorry, I was using "Bluetooth" to mean any short distance radio-frequency wireless connectivity, which you say isn't correct. I've now taken the term out of the post where it doesn't belong, and thank you. However, the interfering devices I was referring to in the post were both identical Apple Magic Mouse 2's, one upstairs, one downstairs. I subsequently replaced one of them with the Logitech, which had connection problems until I located its receiver essentially right next to it. All things considered I'd rather have a wired mouse rather than the "convenience" of balky, unreliable wireless.

RubyT: "I took typing as a filler in 10th grade in the early '80s. This turned out to be the most valuable class I took in high school.

"I know I'm late to the party, but I literally plugged that red mouse you pictured into my computer this morning. I've been using that basic mouse for years, on the recommendation of my son. It's predecessor had worn out. A couple of years ago he had me get a mechanical keyboard. The keys are backlit and the sound and feel is very satisfying. He was several hundred miles away, but I was able to describe what I like in the feel of the keys and he went to the store, tested several, and then told me which one to order. You've reminded me to appreciate my luck in having his experience and advice in this area."

M1

There are times I miss Ctein, and this is one.

My first Mac was...well, the first Mac, the 128k Macintosh (as it was called then) of 1984, that Orwellian year. I also had an original ImageWriter, Apple's first dot-matrix printer for the Macintosh. I bailed early on the Macintosh Classic, which was a pricing breakthrough but just too limited for its time. I replaced it with an early Ur-laptop, then called a "portable," the PowerBook 160 of 1992. I loved that thing, and clung to it for too long. Still have it, actually. I worked for years putting magazines together on a super-reliable Quadra 605 (with a black-and-white monitor, no joke). I jumped on board with the original "Blueberry" iMac (a Bondi Blue G3), Steve Jobs' first consumer product after his (Messianic? MacArthurian?) return to Apple in '97. That one ate a CD and wouldn't give it up. I practically had to take a crowbar to it. And so on. All in all, between school, work, and home, I think I've owned or been assigned to work on a total of about 17 Macs over the years. Maybe 18. I've kinda lost count, if I'm honest.

But I'm not a computerphile. Never got into it. Never subscribed to all those Mac magazines back in the '80s and '90s, Macworld, MacUser. Never been an enthusiast. I used computers for creative work but just as tools. Never knew much about it, although I probably know more than I think I do after all these years. In other words, I was pretty much "that guy" the Macintosh was aimed at in the first place.

So I hope the real Mac geeks amongst ye will pitch in and help me out here. I don't have the deep chops to put the new Apple Silicon M1 chip into perspective. I watched the whole Event this time, and some impressive claims are being made—

Packed with an astonishing 16 billion transistors, the new M1 chip integrates the CPU, GPU, Neural Engine, I/O, and so much more onto a single tiny chip. Combined with the new macOS Big Sur, M1 delivers category-smashing speed, mind-bending graphics, and power efficiency and battery life that defy belief.

—But where on the spectrum between truth and marketing hyperbole do those claims fall? I wouldn't know.

Ctein is probably all over it.

Anyway, here are some pre-order links to the new products with the M1 chip:

Late 2020 13.3" MacBook Pro with Retina Display

Late 2020 13.3" MacBook Air with Retina Display

Late 2020 Mac Mini

And here's B&H's Explora Page for the new M1 products if you want to read what they have to say.

Looking into my crystal ball, some future M1 iMac will probably be my next computer. What can I say? At this point it's just tradition.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Eolake Stobblehouse: "I find that the most sober, precise, and readable assessments are found on TidBITS.com."

Mike replies: TidBITS suggests that the one to choose might be the M1 MacBook Air, because of the fact that it has no fan and that the two M1 MacBook Pro's might not offer enough of a performance premium. (The two higher-level MacBook Pro's retain their Intel chips, presumably because the M1 chip is limited to 16 GB of RAM, and perhaps because power users are less likely to want to be forced into macOS 11 right away.) Personally I like the fact that the Air finally dumps the unsatisfying butterfly keyboard—never liked that—and brings back the traditional Apple startup chime. Always liked that chime.  :-)

Kenneth Tanaka: "I'm a long-time devoted Mac user, although I don't consider myself a 'geek.' But I don't think you really need to be a techie to understand this move. It's all about power and control.

"Yes, I'm certain that Apple's new processor brings advancements to the party. Power management, for example, has been one of the big issues since computers became predominantly batter-powered. The M1 claims to offer benefits here. And since gaming has also become a big priority for customers 3-D graphics processing has also taken a front seat with the new M1 processor.

"But ever since Apple left the PowerPC platform for Intel's platform 10+ years ago the writing seemed engraved on the wall; it would be just a matter of time before Apple would want to completely control (i.e. manufacture) its own CPUs and associated chip sets. To use a weak theoretical automotive analogy, how long would General Motors buy all their engines from Toyota? Since the time of that Intel partnership Apple's value has increased exponentially. They are now the wealthiest and most influential company in human history. So the move into the 'M1' was inevitable, even if it delivered no measurable performance advancements (which is possible).

"From a practical consumer perspective look for some relative bargains in Apple's Intel-based computers early next year as retailers try to clear inventories."

Richard T: "Jason Snell is the former editor of Macworld magazine and for several years now runs his own website at Sixcolors.com—excellent coverage that's also quite accessible. For old-school Mac users like Mike (or those wanting to learn more about Apple history!), Jason has started a great YouTube/article/podcast series called '20 Macs for 2020.' Includes wonderful articles/videos/podcasts. See here for the current list."

"...And to address the original question: yes, these chips appear to be extremely impressive. But note that Apple has announced a two-year transition window, so, as usual for tech products, it pays to wait if you have no pressing need to upgrade. The current M1-series-based lineup is very traditional (essentially identical hardware compared to the Intel equivalents) and future products (e.g. iMacs) may also provide hardware innovations."

Alex Mercado: "It boils down to latency and security—or in more pragmatic words, speed and control.

"The M1 is an integrated circuit (a system on a chip, or SoC) that incorporates much of the necessary components of the computer. Since it is integrated, the data transfer speeds amongst those components are significantly faster than on a traditional motherboard. As an analogy, think of SoC as a Costco, while a motherboard is akin to a shopping mall. You can find almost everything in the Costco rather quickly compared to roving a mall.

"As for security, Apple now controls the microcode the transistors on the SoC use to perform. Apple had to wait for Intel to create patches to address the Meltdown and Spectre threats that affected the CPUs a few years back, which, arguably, left Apple and their users susceptible to security threats.

"The M1 is completely managed by Apple, which significantly limits access to third parties. For comparison, iPod touch, iPhone, and iPad already work this way because Apple controls the A-series SoC in those devices.

"Yes an iDevice can be jailbroken, but its reliability and security are less than optimal for the average non-enthusiast. [Ed. does not understand this sentence. —Ed.]

"The marketing hyperbole for the M-series has much truth to it."

Robert Hudyma: "Be aware that Apple has been moving to control its entire Ecosystem slowly but surely. Saying good-bye to Intel and hello to ARM is part of that strategy.

"Current products are not upgradable or repairable by end-users or independent repair facilities.

"If your current MacBook Pro or Air has a failure, your data on the SSD is essentially not recoverable since it is soldered on the logic board.

"Also, the new macOS Big Sur is not supported on most Apple products older than eight years old so you can no longer keep your Operating System current.

"Another example is the new iPhone 12: individual modules such as the camera or battery are not end-user replaceable since they are serialized to each device and only Apple has the magic wand to make it work again.

"I think the right to repair is important and I am not purchasing any technology that cannot be repaired by me or a qualified technician. Louis Rossman has a popular YouTube channel that focuses on Apple product repairs. He is informative, outspoken and knowledgeable. He is worth a watch."

Mike asks: Cameras and cars too, and etc.? Because 'right to repair' as you call it is getting a lot more rare everywhere in products of all sorts, right? I learned last year that I don't have RtR for my five-year-old clothes washing machine, for example. A broken on-off switch(!) will total the motherboard which will total the whole machine.

Steve C: "Mike—I think, given how close the specs are, the most notable difference between the Air and Pro laptops is that the Air will probably have very similar peak performance to the Pro, but won't be able to sustain it for anywhere near as long without fans.

"@Robert Hudyma—right [to] repair is a concept I haven't thought much about but is really interesting. The usual thinking on the business side is the trade-off between modularity and integration. Integrated product/systems tend toward higher performance (and higher price), modular ones towards low cost. Alongside that, modular designs are inherently more repairable.

"It's the integration between components, their housings, the hardware and software (and now services) that makes Apple products unique. Ecosystem control is a benefit to both the company, and to users who don't value repairability as much as they do convenience and performance.

"The services approach to software, where everything is being updated all the time, that so many people hate is also what allows the company to stay ahead of the field. It prevents them from becoming weighted down by an ever-accumulating legacy of old versions, software interfaces, methods, system quirks, and security issues.

"The down side is that one day your otherwise perfectly fine device / software is no longer supported, and that sucks. The up side is that the company gets to keep pressing forward at speed. They could choose not to (which I expect many people here would love—myself included many days), but the press itself is relentless. Another company will simply take up the torch.

"Microsoft suffered badly under the weight of backward compatibility (between Windows and its many associated applications, drivers, systems) for many, many years. It's not a mistake, but it's a choice that has clear consequences.

"In slower-moving industries / technologies / products (hello white-goods!), integration around key parts is probably very deliberately about creating new purchases through planned failure and obsolescence. But Apple's desire to differentiate their whole multi-product, multi-service user experience such that each product makes the others better, kinda requires integration. I doubt they could wring such high size / performance from their camera system without it."

Steve C: "For anyone who's interested and moderately technically-minded, this piece on Apple's M1 and the A-series chips that lead to it is really impressive. The desire, vision, strategy, organisational focus and multi-year execution needed to run down a goal and outcome like this, in this space, is hard to over-estimate. To give you an idea of scale, the R&D investment that preceded the A-series semiconductor fabrication was in the order of building an aircraft carrier, or a New York City block every quarter."

Steve C: "One final comment on this—I promise—about the limited RAM. I've read in several places now, speculation that the combination of massive advances in the system-on-a-chip latency, and the integrated high-end SSDs make RAM much less of a bottleneck. Modern SSD memory is faster than RAM from only a few years ago. Storage and 'memory' are converging."

Andrew: "Shout out also to Google's Pixel line which has been blazing the computational photography route as well—what those phones achieve with relatively humdrum lenses and sensors shows, as Richard T commented, how much of the heavy-lifting can be done by the software these days. (And this isn't to invoke a Google/Apple, Android/iOS flame war—the best from both is seriously impressive.)

"Personally I loved the brief period just before the software took over from the hardware—fantastically-engineered phones like the 41MP Nokia 1020 and 1-inch-sensored Panasonic CM-1 have (mostly) been outclassed now, but how they went about their imaging business was a lot more on show than today."

Thom Hogan (partial comment): "As I wrote on my site: these are low-end Macs, and they're faster than a lot of high-end Macs. We're all waiting to see just what happens when Apple goes upscale with their chips, because what just happened to the MacBook Air and low-end Mini is pretty spectacular."

[For the full text of Partial Comments, see the full Comments section. —Ed.]

Portfolio App for the iPad?

Carl asked me what I use as a portfolio app for picture presentations on the iPad and it's one of the (many) things I just don't think I know enough about to speak of. Anyone have any favorite ways of presenting pictures on the iPad they'd like to share?

Mike

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kirk tuck: "I second the use of Portfolio but I wanted to step in here for just a second and bring up one little thing: Everyone keeps mentioning 'slide shows' and when I hear that I presume that the slideshow plays through the images at a fixed pace. But that's not at all the way ad agency people want to see images; either on a screen based portfolio or in real life. The don't want an automated slide show. They want to be able to spend as much or as little time as they please on each image. They want to control the pace. Always. Slideshows are great for unmanned presentations but are not what people should be looking for in a portfolio app for an iPad."

Mike adds: I concur completely. The user needs to be able to control the pace through the presentation, preferably by swiping or with a fixed, non-moving arrow. (It always annoys me when I'm clicking through images and the arrow moves under my cursor and I have to reposition the cursor.)

New Toy!

I've owned many Apple devices since I began writing on the original 128k Macintosh in 1984. The one that's least necessary is also the one I like the best: the iPad.

I bought my iPad Air, the original one, in 2013 (which does seem like a long time ago) because I thought they were cool and I was feeling flush back then. At first I couldn't figure out what to do with it and I barely even touched it for the first six months I had it. Within a few years it became my favorite Apple product and the one I'm closest to in everyday life. I watch movies and videos on it, read email on it, even answer the phone on it (although it's Wi-Fi only, it links to the iPhone when a call comes in). I take it to bed with me, where I read books on it before falling asleep. It's my alarm clock. When I get up in the morning I check the time on it and read the AA Daily Reflection. I read on it while I eat breakfast. In fact I do almost all of my newspaper and book reading on the iPad—it's been so long since I used my actual Kindle device that I don't even know where it is any more. (It took me a while to get accustomed to reading on the iPad screen, but I've adapted. Now if I have a paper book I really want to read, I'll buy the Kindle version too so I can actually read it. On the iPad, every book is a large print book.) If I'm eating alone at a restaurant and only have my phone, the book I'm reading is also on that, and the devices keep track of where I am in the book.

And by the way, it's the best way to look at portfolios. You can pass it around like an album and let people swipe from one picture to the next at their own pace. Pictures are an ideal size for reading distances, and have all the resolution the screen size calls for.

To this day there's nothing at all wrong with my old iPad and I'm not dissatisfied with it at all. It works perfectly well and it's all I need. Unfortunately, however, it's a 16GB model and that's its downfall...I've been getting "storage full" warnings for a long time and I have nothing left to throw away to make room. I don't think I've done an IOS update in quite a while, because I don't have room. A few days ago I found myself deleting apps I would really rather keep, and thought, okay, enough.

The one thing I hope the new toy does better is pick up the Wi-Fi signal in the back room...the old one doesn't do that very well, even with my fancy alleged range extender.

At least I've gotten my money's worth out of the 2013 iPad. I've paid about a hundred dollars a year for it. A bargain, considering how much I use it. And how much I like it.

Gift cards seem like free cash
Every year B&H Photo gives me a gift certificate to thank me for being an affiliate, and I had several of those piled up. So I used them, plus some cash, to buy a new (early 2019) iPad Air. I splurged (gift cards seems like free cash) and bought the one with 256GB of storage for about $160 more.

Do I really need 16X more storage? Well, I don't know, but over the years I've owned a great many Apple products, and the thing that often seems to push me to upgrade or update is a shortage of storage space. I suppose sooner or later I would have upgraded all those old things anyway, but I think I would have saved money over the years and kept most of my devices for longer if I'd had the foresight to max out on storage as a matter of course. I know I'd keep my current iPad with no complaint if it weren't for the storage problem. Probably a fool's economy to scrimp on storage.

But then I might not even need an iPad at all. I could probably get along fine with just my iPhone 7 Plus and my Mac Mini. The iPad is arguably the device I need the least. And yet, as I said, it's the one I like the most.

And now Xander gets the old one for free! I'm looking forward to when the new toy gets here, but there should be more life left in the old toy yet.

Mike

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We've Come a Long Way, Dudes and Dudettes

Does it ever occur to you to be grateful for the (good!) changes you've been able to witness, and the cool technology you've experienced the introduction of? It's something I appreciate. I've very glad my lifespan straddled traditional film and early digital, for instance. I wouldn't give up experiencing either one if I had my choice.

I mentioned recently that my first computer was an Apple 512k Macintosh, in 1985. (It was also author Michael Crichton's first Mac, and his experience was similar to mine—amazed and pleased, never looked back.) 

The very first Apple hard drive was made for our computer, although I didn't buy one. Too pricey. I'll bet Michael Crichton had one. This is it, the HD20.

A couple of days ago I broke down and bought this as my media drive. Loaded it up yesterday and overnight. Unfortunately it's almost full.

HD20: $1,495, 20MB, about the size of a large telephone book. That's a dated reference, by the way.

Samsung T5: $329 on sale, 2TB, and tiny and light. Its capacity is 100,000 times that of the 1985 drive.

And this is fun: at the Apple HD20's price of roughly $75 per megabyte, the T5 would have cost $150 million. But that's in 1985 dollars—adjusted for inflation, it would be $372,090,000. I wish Moore's Law applied to printer ink.

The 500GB model is still available at the sale price of less than $100. If you have any use for such a small drive.  :-)

Mike
(Thanks to Charlie. Top illustration courtesy
Museums Victoria.)

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(Not) everything must fade away

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David Brown: "My company designed and manufactured all those early hard drives for the Apple Computers. My have times changed. All my storage is SSD now."

Jamie Pillars: "Regarding the Samsung T5, these things have gotten just too small! I can picture it now...I load it up with my entire photo archive and then lose it in the couch cushions!"

A Non-Review of the 2018 Mac Mini

This absolutely doesn't rise to the standard of a review—I'm not remotely competent to write one. On the other hand, I've used Macs since 1984, pretty much from the day they were introduced. I've lost track now, but I believe I've owned or regularly used 17 of them since that first one, either at school, at the office, or at home.

But I did want to mention that my new (2018) Mac Mini has had an almost transformative effect on my workdays, and I'm delighted with it.

The specs on mine are:

• 3.0 GHz Core i5 (six core)/ Gigabit ethernet
• 16GB RAM
• 512GB SSD drive

I had Apple install the extra RAM, even though we know they overcharge for it. List price on my Mini is $1,499.

The decision was really between the 3.6 GHz quad-core i3 and the 3.0 GHz six-core i5. I don't really have any way of knowing the practical differences the choice would make for me, but since I seem to always have a lot going on on the desktop, I went with the six cores over the higher clock speed. And it seems to have worked out.

Nothing in the middle
A while back, I was grousing about the lack of a mid-range model in the Apple lineup, a non-iMac, display-less model between the cheap intro-level Mini for "switchers" and the graphic-arts-studio-level (but now seriously outdated and kind of a bollix from the start) Mac Pro.

[Aside for non-Apple people: Apple really expects desktop buyers to buy iMacs, which are the proper heirs of the original all-in-one Macintoshes. And they're lovely machines—I've owned them right from the first "Blueberry" iMac of early 1999 to my current upstairs computer that I use for book writing, a lovely 21.5-inch Retina iMac with an SSD. Mine is a 2017 I bought as a factory refurb.]

Well, here's my point: the 2018 Mac Mini is that Goldilocks computer I wanted. It just happens to be in the old Mini box, is all.

I'm astonished by what a difference it makes. Everything is zippier, even the work I do online in the TypePad compositor where I spend most of every day. It never makes noise, never gets hot, never crashes or hangs, and is highly responsive to everything I want to do with it.

I suspect that my previous Mini—a 2012 model I picked up because it was higher spec'd than the pre-2018 Mini—got worked hard and put away wet by its previous owner(s). It might be the second-worst Mac I've ever owned, after a klunky John Scully era desktop that coincided with the nadir of Apple in the mid-to-late '90s. The 2012 Mini is the only Mac I've ever had that crashed (my '93 Quadra 605 of sainted memory crashed once in six years, when the little battery on the motherboard that kickstarted the display ran out of juice). Before I sell the 2012 Mini I'm going to get it cleaned, get a new fan for it (the old one is broken now), take out the second hard drive (I suspect it makes it harder to cool) and maybe even get a new main drive put in if it's not too expensive.

Whee!
Given that I input hundreds or most likely thousands of little commands a day, from scrolling a folder to resizing an image for the Web to flicking between windows in Firefox, the aggregate improvement in the speed I can work is, as I said, transforming. It saves me loads of time over the course of a day and imparts a sense of ease and freedom I had been missing. I didn't even realize how much my creaky old 2012 was slowing me down and frustrating me, until all that slowness and frustration vanished.

Downsides? Just one—the disappearance of the card slot. Yeah, yeah, I know all the arguments, but I've always appreciated the elegance of the built-in SD card slot and I'm sorry to see it go. The current killer Thunderbolt3 hubs are the $299 OWC Dock and, even better because it reads UHS-II cards natively, the hugely flexible American-made $310 CalDigit TS3 Plus. I'd love one of those, but I'm a beer budget guy. I use a Lention USB-C 3-port hub I bought for $20 on eBay.

Conclusion
Would I recommend the 2018 Mini? Heartily, if it happens to be what you need. Me, I like to be able to unhook the computer and stash it in a safe location when I'm away, and I like to be able to use my 27" NEC monitor.

But really, if you're currently not locked in by past choices and just need a super-slick, beautiful computer and want to be able to do anything on it, including working with photos, my first recommendation would be one of the still-new 2019 21.5" Retina iMacs. They're light and easy to move around, very pretty, and right-sized. The display is lovely (and you don't stop thinking so—I still appreciate mine whenever I use it) and let's face it, they'll do most anything most of us ever want to do. There are 27" models too of course. I've owned three 27" iMacs and I work on a 27-inch monitor right now, but I could live with the 21.5" size. Those start at $1,249, which means you're paying no "Apple tax" in any sense. They're just plain worth that.

...In my opinion. Your biases may vary.  :-)

So all is well in TOP-land. I imagine I'll be writing about Mac no. 18 at some point on down the line.

Mike

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Everything must fade away

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Mark Cotter: "'Non-reviews' are often the most helpful. I think of myself as knowledgeable enough about specs to decide what could suit me, real world reviews are the most useful. And this is especially useful as I am thinking of replacing my seven year old 27" iMac (the last with a DVD drive built in), and a Mini similar to your configuration is on my list."

The Very Very Very Best Backup...

...Is still a box of prints! (Or a "few-of-a-kind" custom book like a Blurb book.)

Okay, maybe not the best backup but the best archive.

I had planned to make this point again two days ago (bringing us around full circle in recent discussions here on TOP), when this comment came in from David L. night before last:

"My engineering career was as a hard drive engineer and in server storage. My advice—make prints."

(That's his whole comment.) 

Ending up with prints is still a good idea, even though I know most people don't do it.

It's always been a good idea to think of a photograph in digital form as a transitory state—a state between the taking of the picture and the final object—a print, or printed book, or whatever the final creation might be.

Of course we do want to have a working archive—our shooting in mass unprocessed form—so that we can go back and print old files, reconsider our editing choices, or bring together different groups or pairings or whatever. It's the raw material for our ongoing creative activities as photographers.

A well-made print (pigment inks on stable paper) is a write-once, set-and-forget medium. It has to be physically protected, sure, but that's a different problem, and one I've written about elsewhere.

Ultimately nothing is permanent—but it's a good idea to remind ourselves every now and then that "backup" of the material we work from is just a fluid working state, and not, in itself, a final achievement.

(See what I do for you? I just said with 264 words what David L. said better with 17. Heh!)

Mike
(Thanks to all of you who helped me with my backup strategy)

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Everything must fade away

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Tim Smith: "In my 20s I worked in a print darkroom for several years. We entered into a contract with Yale to make contact prints of their extensive collection of glass negatives. Aside from the fact that they were stunning and technically amazing, it strikes me that as long as they haven't been smashed or destroyed, you could do the very same thing today. I fear that the evolution of digital may someday make even the best drives obsolete or at least very difficult to recover. I can't even remember all the storage devices/methods that have come and gone, like: SCSI tape drives, ZIP drives, CD-RW, etc.

"So yeah, prints."

Deal of the Day: Samsung SSD (Solid State Drive)

On topic for World Backup Day, Amazon's "Deal of the Day" today is Samsung SSD portable solid-state hard drives for anywhere from 25 to 31% off list.

The larger sizes are still pretty expensive, but they're more reliable than spinning portable drives and great as scratch disks among other things. The 1-terabyte size is only $178, marked down from $250 (Newegg's best price is $218). The 500GB size is only $98. The ones on sale are USB 3.1. By the way, this is a top recommended brand of external SSDs according to several review websites.

Deal ends in 15 hours as I post this, but these deals often end early because Amazon runs through the sale stock. Get 'em while they last.

Mike

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Geoff Wittig (partial comment): "I love this drive, and just bought my third 2TB unit. They're tiny, they're much, much faster than traditional hard drives, and in principle they're much more reliable because they have no moving parts. Every photograph I've taken and saved for more than 25 years fits on one of these units with room to spare. My circa 1.3TB archive can be transferred from one of these drives to another in less than two hours. So it's easy for me to have a complete copy of all my photos off-site at my office, another copy in reserve at home, and a third I use as my working drive with Photoshop."

New Backup Plan (?)

Dateline, Sunday March 31st — Today is World Backup Day, in case you haven't already guessed the reason for the recent topics. (Also because I got a stonkin' new Mac Mini which is awesome, brilliant, slick and fast.) I'd link to WorldBackupDay.com, but they're probably getting slammed, because the site has not been responding for a while. Maybe they took World Bandwidth Day off to go to the beach. —Mike

So here's the backup solution I've decided on...as of, um, this minute. See if you approve. I'm not too slick on this stuff. (Warning: I do not think this is a very interesting post. You might want to treat World Backup Day as a holiday.)

This is the second time I've tried to get serious about backup. The last time I was helped by a well-timed boot in the rear from Bill Tyler. That was back in February of '18, which, as Peggy C. noted, was the last time we talked about this subject. Back then, Bill challenged me to sign up for Backblaze before sundown, and I did.

Here's the latest plan. See if ya folla.

1. My Mac Mini has a 512k SSD. That drive holds everything except photos and music.
2. The Mini's SSD drive will be backed up to my Time Capsule router as usual, via Time Machine. (Time Machine is the name of the automatic backup software that comes with every Mac. The AirPort Time Capsule, which Apple no longer makes, is a wireless router that includes a hard drive or hard drives for...well, for backups via Time Machine.)
3. Next, I'll return the two new WD My Passport portable drives I got yesterday. No longer part o' the plan.
4. For the photos and music, I think I'll continue using my existing 2TB WD My Passport portable drive (which is named "Passport One"). I've already had one fail and I know they're not terrifically robust, but if one fails I'll just rotate another one in. I currently have two of the little portable drives, and new ones are cheap enough. (They're bus-powered and about the size of a pack of cards.)
5. A reader who wishes to remain anonymous donated (nice word for "gave me as a present") an AKiTiO Thunder2 Quad 4-bay storage enclosure he was no longer using. (Pretty nice.) His insight was that vibration reduction and proper cooling help hard drives live longer—the AKiTiO is solid and has a big low-speed fan in the back. He told me he had persistent problems with his hard drives until he stripped them out of their single enclosures and put them in the AKiTiO, at which point his problems stopped.
6. For the enclosure I got two slow (5400 RPM) 3.5" 4TB hard drives. I researched madly till late at night and ended up buying two of these from B&H Photo*. They were on sale for $84.99 each when I bought them.
7. With the two 3.5" drives, I've decided not to go with RAID 1, based on the advice I got here yesterday. Instead I'll take Rodolfo Canet and Trevor Johnson's advice and use Carbon Copy Cloner 5 (MacOS only. But it's on sale for World Backup Day! Twenty percent off) to back up the Passport One drive to each of the two drives in the AKiTiO every time I download a card. That way new shooting will exist in three places before I even remove the card from the slot.
8. The Mini and Passport One will both continue to be backed up to Backblaze as before.

So here's the upshot:

• Mac Mini: backed up on Time Capsule (kept on a shelf halfway down the basement stairs) and with Backblaze offsite backup.

• Passport One drive with all my photos and music on it: backed up on the two identical 3.5" drives in the AKiTiO and also on Backblaze.

So I'll have:

• Three copies of the boot drive disk—the original in the Mini plus one backup in the house and one in the Cloud.

• Four copies of the photos/music external drive—the one attached to the computer for everyday use, the two identical clones in the AKiTiO, and one in the Cloud.

So what say ye? Approve?

I know that some of you are probably going to say I need one more offsite disk, solemnly rotated in and out of a safety deposit box at the bank, but really, my photos aren't that great.  :-)

Mike

*By the way, best not to buy hard drives from Amazon. As you probably know they tend to stick things loose in a roomy box with a couple of symbolic air pillows thrown in. Not smart with hard drives not to use careful packing.

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Neil Swanson: "So I wonder, how long does it take to upload a 2TB drive to Backblaze or a similar service? It would take seemingly ages to go from drive to drive but to a 'Cloud'?"

Mike replies: Per Backblaze: "Ideally, Backblaze should be able to complete your initial backup within 30 days, and that’s OK. Be patient, especially if you have a lot of data. Backblaze will complete your initial backup as soon as possible." I think mine took about 10 days or two weeks, something in there. But it happens in the background, so it's not any hassle.

Bruce McL: "Nice backup plan. As a retired Mac IT guy I approve, with one addition. Buy one more drive for your enclosure. Have Carbon Copy Cloner make a clone of your system SSD to the new drive once a week, or have it update the clone every night if you want. Get a small capacity, fast, spinning 3.5" drive—1TB 7200rpm HDDs are cheap, under $50.00. I don't quite trust Time Machine to recover everything after a catastrophic failure of a system drive. It can work, but it's a messy process. With a CCC cloned drive it's easy. Plug the backup drive into any Mac. Go to System Preferences: Startup Disk and select the backup HD. After a restart, everything from the system drive will be there and will be functional. If your SSD suddenly died, you could be back at work in minutes."

Mike replies: Bruce, is there any risk of having all my local drives in one non-RAID enclosure? I thought last night that maybe I'll just streamline things and put the media on a separate drive in the enclosure, instead of on the 2TB My Passport portable. So I'd have four drives in the enclosure—one fast 2–4TB drive for media, the two slow 4TB drives for media backup, and the one you suggest, a 1TB fast drive with the backup of the System on it. 

William Whitaker: "So, today I have to drive everywhere in reverse?"

Mike replies: Don't get your back up.

Michael T.: "Whatever you end up doing it is important to test it from time to time. For example, see if you can boot your Mini from the two external backups. If not you need to understand why and remedy. Same with backups of your photos and music. It is also a good idea to occasionally run the repair function in disk utility on your backup drives. I run carbon copy and find it to be easy to use and quite robust. Good luck!"

Mike replies: CCC recommends that you restore several random files every now and then just to make sure everything's working smoothly. I'll also try to remember to learn how to boot from the backup once everything's set up.

Kev: "This has been a very useful topic, thanks Mike. I'm moving from a mini to the new MacBook Pro, and it’s changed things a bit in terms of storage and back up, so your thoughts are very timely. Also the commment made re. Time machine as a backup tool - I’ve always been a CCC guy, only had to use it once to recover from a borked main disk, and it was faultless and easy. Recent change of machine made me give time machine a go, and it has proved useful when I accidentaly wrote over a crucial file, but I think I'll follow advice and also ensure I have a weekly clone with CCC. Excellent stuff, and you explained it better then I could, as currently I have the plan sketched out on a piece of A4 paper as it was getting so complicated!"

Bill Poole: "Passport-style drives are not really adequate for continuous use. The drive gets too hot when run continuously. Heat shortens drive life and these drives are not specified for long life to begin with. They are good for clones that are off most of the time, and for data transfer. One option is to get a drive in a better case such as sold by OWC (available on Amazon). The better option these days for any external drive that will run continuously is the Samsung T5 line you mention in your subsequent post. The two clones should really be staggered in time, perhaps by a week. Otherwise you may find both clones and the cloned drive all have the same problem, perhaps something like ransomware. One of the clones should be offline, in a small Pelican box, in an ESD safe bag, with a desiccant. And it goes without saying that everything runs off a UPS."

Timo (partial comment): "As long as the system makes sense to you—and is something you do regularly—it seems fine. It mirrors my understanding of contemporary computer set ups: that is, one has a small, fast boot disk with the OS and programs, connected to larger but slower data storage, in our case photos, that use conventional Winchester drives. So each side of that Thunderbolt connection needs a back up strategy. But a few notes/tweaks:

1. On the boot side of things:

• I agree with others who think you should have a bootable clone of your Mini's internal drive. Carbon Copy Cloner (essentially a nice GUI wrapper for the UNIX 'rsync' command, but with customizations) is terrific for this. So one 'task' the left-hand pane would be a clone of your boot drive. I might suggest you spring for one of those Samsung SSDs on sale today. Plug it in, and schedule the task to run every night at 2 a.m. or so. Now you're really covered if the Mini's internal fails, and if you bought the SSD, the boot from the clone is fairly speedy (whereas a boot from a 5400 rpm external drive is painfully slow). Best of all, it's set and forget
• The first CCC clone takes awhile, but subsequent clones compare what files have changed and only copy the newer stuff, cutting back up times dramatically
• Keep using the Time Capsule and Time Machine, but think of this more as a system for recovering files accidentally deleted or corrupted. In back-up jargon this is 'versioning,' and it's nice to be able to 'go back' and fetch something from before a user-error. However, whole system restores from Time Capsule back ups are flakey and/or time-consuming enough to not be worth it, except as a fallback, in my opinion

2. On the data side of things:

• I think you'll need a TB3 —> TB2 dongle to hook up that AKiTiO to your new Mini
• you will probably need to 'exclude' your new drives in the AKiTiO from your Time Capsule, or it will fill up prematurely (depending on how much data you have, of course)
• the Thunderbolt 'pipe' between your new 5400 drives and the Mini is really fast, such that the drive platter speed in your new drives will be the limiting factor in terms of speed
• I personally find the copy-to-two-drives a bit of overkill for one problem (drive failure) but less-than-ideal with regards to human error. I might change the copying such that one of your new WDs is a copy of the passport photo/music drive, and the other WD is a trailing copy—something only done weekly. (And one can use CCC to schedule this weekly copy.) So, if you muck up something on your music/photo drive, and inadvertently (or automatically) copy that muck-up to one AKiTiO back up, you still have an older version to recover a file or three from.
• I learned from kind of crazy Reddit threads about 'shucking'—essentially buying cheapish Best-Buy-branded external hard drives, and 'shucking' them out of their enclosures in order to use the drive inside in your own enclosure. The advantage is cost, and, as your benefactor who put drives in his AKiTiO noted, it's also good not to have to rely on the commodity-price drive controller bundled with the external drives on sale. At any rate these drives in external enclosures often go on sale for prices one-half or less of bare drives (but also with less warranty)."

DavidB: "Take Control of Backing Up Your Mac, Third Edition.

"It examines a variety of strategies, programs, and hardware for cloning and archival. Worth the $15 price."

Mike replies: I just read the sample—I especially like that he "took control" of his Take Control books from the original publisher, as recounted in the "Read Me First" section.  :-)

John Camp: "I've often wondered why people need such huge-capacity drives. I know there must be a reason, I just don't know what it is. A 1TB drive like the one you illustrated could hold (I think, I may be wrong, I'm not a numbers savant) up to something like 13,000 uncompressed raw photos from my GX8's. Yet Geoff needs a 2TB drive! To me, that's inconceivable. On a full 2TB drive, If I looked at each of my GX8 photos for ten seconds each (and if I had that many) it'd take me virtually two entire work weeks just to page through them. That's a lot of #@$%! photos."

Ken Tanaka: "In answer to John Camp’s puzzlement over why hard drives have reached, and exceeded, such enormous capacities the answer is simple: VIDEO. The incorporation of cinema-class 4K video facilities into still cameras has mandated lightning-speed cavernous memory cards and these ginormous tiny portable drives. Certainly, larger still image file sizes also contributed to this trend but not with the force that video-in-still-cameras did. Video is also responsible for increasing the complexity of camera menu systems, a recent complaint campaign here."

Mike replies: I also think that 2TB isn't all that much. Take John's figure of 13,000 photos per terabyte, Geoff's 2TB drive, and Geoff's statement that he has 25 years' worth of digital images archived on one drive. As I do the arithmetic (never my strong suit, n.b.), 26,000 photos over 25 years is close enough to 1,000 photos a year, and with two weeks for giving it a rest (and making the arithmetic simpler) that's only 20 photos a week. I'm a light shooter but I don't think I've ever shot less than 20 exposures when I go out to photograph with a digital camera in my hand. I'll do that much just to warm up.

I have about 80,000 Plus-X, Tri-X, and P3200 35mm negatives from my younger days. Granted, I keep everything, even the rankest junk, because of the way negatives are filed and stored. But that was all done between 1980 and 2000. So that's 1,040 weeks, meaning I shot an average of just under 77 pictures a week during those decades, which is, in turn, just over two rolls of film per week. That's not very much at all.

RAID!!!

[UPDATE Sunday March 31: Readers in the comments talked me out of my brief infatuation with RAID. I'll leave this post alone, but my backup plans no longer include RAID. Please see the next post for my backup plans as they developed from the collective advice I got from readers. Thanks! —Ed.]

-

Because I am an unwilling slave to authoritarian Big Brother corporations and my mind has been taken over, I can't help thinking of the old Raid bug spray commercials that featured insects happily destroying human property until the can of Raid comes out, at which point they all shriek "RAID!!!" and flee.

But what we're talking about here is not that, but computer storage. In the computing world, RAID stands for "Redundant Array of Inferior Disks." It's an umbrella name for several strategies for ganging physically separate hard drives together in various ways to make them work less poorly.

There are several types. The first is RAID 0 (zero), so called because it offers zero protection from failure. Photographers don't need to mess with this type; all RAID 0 indicates for us is that we must momentarily become sad and feel sorry for videographers.

Then there's RAID 1, which is the important one for us. In RAID 1, two identical drives are linked together in the same volume, which are often placed in the same enclosure. The capacity of the array is the same as the capacity of a single hard drive, so you are getting one for the price of two plus the price of the enclosure (such a deal!). But the salient point is that any file you copy to the first disk is automatically copied exactly on the second one. So, if when one drive fails, you can keep on working. If you remove the bad drive and insert a fresh one that's still good, RAID 1 will immediately begin rebuilding the new drive from the surviving old one.

There are many other types of RAID, including RAID 5, RAID 10, RAID Track 9 1/2, RAID 42, and RAID TTPoP (to the power of Pi). All of these types and many others not listed may be ignored with a devil-may-care attitude and a dismissive wave of the hand on account of us not being smart enough to be IT persons.

You might think that RAID 1 means you are also automatically backed up, but oh no, bug-spray-breath. Because good backup hygiene demands that you still be backed up even during a failure. When one of the drives fails in a RAID 1 setup, you would then temporarily have all your data on one physical drive, and that is not enuff. (Isn't it annoying when people try to be cutesy by spelling "enough" like that?) So a RAID 1 box is highly reliable, much more so than a single external drive, but you still need to back it up somewhere else. How you do this is the same problem you had in the first place, but never mind.

Note that stated RAID 1 capacities must be cut in half. For instance, a 4TB RAID 1 box has two 2TB drives inside and offers 2TB of storage. I hope I don't need to say out loud that if hard drives actually were reliable, we wouldn't need RAID setups in the first place.

You might already have one
What some people don't realize is that you can set up a RAID 1 in MacOS Mojave using regular old external hard drives. I do not know if this is better than or worse than or the same as the bespoke solutions.

Start with two identical hard drives. If not new, make sure there's nothing on 'em you want to save. If new, make sure they are formatted for Mac—"Mac OS Extended (Journaled)." Do a Spotlight Search to find Disk Utility if you don't already know how to find it. Under the File pulldown menu in Disk Utility, there's an option called "RAID Assistant." You can use RAID Assistant to set up Striped (RAID 0), Mirrored (RAID 1), or something very charmingly called "Concatenated (JBOD)." This last is pronounced "jay-bod," and, this is true, it stands for "just a bunch of disks." I'd use JBOD just for the name alone if I could think of any reason to do so. A JBOD is a volume that just lumps one disk with another resulting in a larger drive.

The best Thunderbolt 3 dock

So while I wanted a super-duper hardware RAID 1 in its own fancy enclosure, they're all expensive, and I ended up just buying two 4TB Western Digital My Passport portable drives which I plan to set up as a RAID 1 in Mojave. Offsite backup courtesy of BackBlaze. Good enuff (?).

If you really want to go the Ferrari route, try a RAID5 setup with the awesome made-in-the-USA CalDigit T4. Way above my pay grade, so you're on your own with that. CalDigit, by the way, is the company that makes the best Thunderbolt 3 dock for photographers, the famous TS3 Plus, the one that has a UHS-II card slot in it and that can charge your laptop at full speed and run your monitors and has umpteen ports and on and on. There are glowing reviews all over the Web.

Enuff! (Er....) And now, many readers will write comments that I am not smart enough to comprehend, but which I am hopeful of learning something from anyway.

Mike

P.S. It's actually Redundant Array of Independent Disks. Originally inexpensive, says Wikipedia.

But you knew that.

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

Speed: "Many years ago I worked in a bank. Every Friday afternoon a professor from the music department at the local University brought in some sort of computer storage media, put it into his safety deposit box, removed last week's media, said 'have a nice weekend' and left. He was a man of few words. And fewer worries about backups."

Jim Richardson: "I must say that after a while MEGO when it comes to RAID. And since what I really wanted was data security, not data availability (as 01af so nicely pointed out) I have run my business on JBOD. To me the giveaway is that RAID users always have stories to tell. I don't want stories to tell. I want to know where the files are."

["MEGO" means "my eyes glaze over." —Yr. Hmbl. Ed., working so you don't have to.]

Bob Johnston [no (immediate) relation to the ed. —Ed.]: "Beware the RAID 1! I am retired now but used to work for a computer company. If I had a pound for every unrecoverable failure of a RAID 1 array I would be a rich man. I won't bore you with the details but there are several failure modes that can render a RAID 1 unrecoverable. The simple kind of RAID is intended to keep you working seamlessly, so for Mike there is a value. If his disk fails while he is writing his blog he won't be interrupted. But it does not negate the need for a backup. Therefore, in my opinion, unless you can afford RAID 6, RAIDs are of little value to anyone who can wait a while whilst their data is rebuilt."

Bill Tyler: "Several years ago, I was working at a very large software company on very large storage systems. We had thousands of servers, each with lots of disks attached to RAID controllers. At that time, a petabyte was a lot of storage, and we had lots of petabytes. Anyhow, the official line was that we had nice redundancy because each RAID array could withstand the loss of a disk. Fortunately, each byte of data was also stored on a different RAID array on a different server. I say fortunately, because the bit that wasn't considered in the official line was the RAID controller—the thing that all the disks attached to—as a point of failure. If that goes, the whole RAID array is toast. The point was driven home forcefully when we discovered that a batch of those RAID controllers were subtly defective.

"Whatever you're using to create and maintain a RAID array, whether hardware or software, is a single point of failure. Be warned, and use RAID judiciously."

Rodolfo Canet: "RAID 1 doesn't protect you from accidental deletions. Use one of your two new drives for data and tell Carbon Copy Cloner [MacOS only, 30-day trial available —Ed.] to back it up to the second one at regular intervals. Easy and cheap, and you can work directly from the second in the case the first dies and you don't have the time to buy a new one (that's the problem of relying totally on Time Machine)."

Edward Taylor: "If you want to be wealthy, design a permanent storage solution. There is no practical permanent solution at this time. Back up once, store in a drawer forever, no worries about it becoming unreadable in the future. I am shocked that this has not been accomplished yet after at least 40 years of widespread computer use. It is really absurd."