The Online Photographer

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.

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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."

Write On (Blog Notes)

I finally broke down, bit the bullet, unclenched the fist clinging to the wallet like grim death, and bought a new computer. I had the kind help of Ben Rosengart and Steve Rosenblum. I bought an Apple 3.0GHz i7 six-core Mac Mini with 16 GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD. It's not here yet.

I have a stack of envelopes sitting on my desk from readers who mailed donations recently, which is what paid for most of the new computer. The return addresses include J. Reid, Nicholas Hartmann, Robert J. Sliclen, R. Teasley, G. Andros, Andrew Morang, Mark Gregg, J.F. Van Domelan, Jim Henry, Andrew D. Kirk, and Alan Currie—and there were at least three more whose names I despicably neglected to scribble down before depositing the checks. I apologize for that. I am not organized.  :-( 

Big thanks to them and everyone who donates to the site in any way. Donations now make up for the decline of the camera market and the incursion of YouTube reviewing channels, which dwarf the old TOP in terms of viewers. The Internet is changing!

You what?
I remember talking to a business-book writer in the early days of the Internet. He told me I should write about asbestos illness, because attorneys paid top dollar for leads to clients. When I told him what I did write about, he highly approved, saying that camera sites were known to be among the most lucrative to "monetize." He said the only problem with them was procuring content, which was a PITA (pain in the you-know-where), and he asked me what my sources for content were. I allowed as how I wrote most of my own content, and that, in fact, the content was my principal interest and the monetization of the site was a distant second. He stared at me as if I had just told him that my preferred sexual partners had hooves and grew wool. Apparently such a peculiar motive toward business was a little outside of his wheelhouse.

The Internet is changing; I write on.

Mike
(Thanks to all)

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Thomas Mc Cann: "Occasionally I get a twinge of conscience and would like to make a contribution, but dislike Patreon. Is there another route to make an ocasional contribution?"

Mike replies: A small group of diehards sends the occasional much-appreciated old-fashioned check. The mailing address is me, 740 East Lake Rd, Penn Yan NY 14527. Thanks for asking!

Calibrate That Monitor!

I used to love these...great way to calibrate that monitor. I don't need them any more because my NEC came with its own colorimeter, but the Datacolor Spyder5PRO is on sale as part of B&H's Mega Deal Zone, which has been extended until Midnight Saturday. The sale price is only $89.99. (Current price at Amazon, where it's an "Amazon's Choice," is $134.36.)

Do note that your remaining window to get the sale price is very limited—it's Saturday evening Eastern U.S. Time between 6:00 p.m. (when B&H reopens from Shabbat) until 11:59 p.m. (when the Mega Deal Zone ends).

They're easy to use.

Mike

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Photo[shop]-Specific Computers

I'm far from a computer expert, so take this with the appropriate chunk of salt. I'm just reading and reporting back.

A friend sent me this interesting short article about picking a computer for Photoshop and Lightroom. It's a product description page for a photo-specific computer built by a PC fabricator. It's on Punch and it's called "What kind of processor do I need for Adobe Photoshop CC and Lightroom CC in 2018?"

It starts with a brief description of cores and threads, then moves on to clock speed. Turns out multi-core CPUs aren't really that significant with photo processing: "...we have undertaken testing using a range of processors from dual core right through to the huge 18-core variants. We were quickly able to conclude that both Photoshop and Lightroom are not able to take advantage of a great number of processor cores." Two- and quad-core machines are fine, the authors say, with maybe an extra two cores for running background tasks at the same time.

The situation is the opposite with processor speed. Their conclusion is pretty stark: "Photoshop performance scales directly with processor clock speed."

This would seem to emphasize the importance of turbo boost, but the authors explain that turbo boost requires CPU cooling to avoid overheating the CPU and operate at good efficiency. It's good news that the new Mini has a redesigned fan—sorely needed, in my experience—but how does that relate to what they're talking about? Beats me.

I'm not sure all this helps me choose a Mac Mini model. But then, I don't really do massive Photoshop projects—I process relatively straight, don't do a lot of processor-intensive functions like panoramic photomerges, and print small. I should probably just make do with the most basic base Mini if I go that route.

Oops
But I did some configuring, and it turns out you can slam the budget pretty easily configuring a Mini. The Mini is not mini any more in terms of $. I guess you're getting a lot of computer, but you're certainly paying luxury prices. (And before the Apple-haters chime in, I'm in the Apple ecosystem and I'm not getting out. It's not a question of just one device—it's how all of them work together.) I suppose my next work computer will be a 21.5" iMac, which is what lordly Apple decrees customers like me shall buy. Who am I to argue with a trillion-dollar behemoth?

The first Mac I did my work on, Spring 1984.
Ten pages of text per floppy.  :-)

Still, interesting article. (I love primers.) I'll be interested to hear what some of you think who know much more about the subject than I do.

Mike
(Thanks to Steve Rosenblum)

P.S. And here's an interesting thought. It's finally at least conceivable that I could go with a highly configured iPad Pro and an iPhone, and dispense with everything else. No more desktop, no more laptop? Radical.

Original contents copyright 2018 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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Thom Hogan: "As I outline in an article on my site: memory first, dedicated GPU second (if you can get one), CPU clock speed third. In broad strokes, that's where performance in Photoshop comes from. The thing you absolutely want to avoid is virtual memory or scratch disk spills out to a slow drive.

"To answer your question on the new Mini, it's unknown yet just how much heat dissipation the fan on it can manage long term. If it's efficient, then yes, the turbo boost speed is very important. If not, the base clock speed is probably more important."

[Here's that link —Ed.]

Vince: "If you’re going to get an iMac, you’ll be much happier with a 27". Especially since that’s the size screen you already have. But I don’t know why you would. A Mini with an i7 and 512GB SSD is $1,500. If you want 16GB of memory, give Apple $200 to upgrade it. (The memory is replacing the built-in, and 16GB is $170 from OWC; it’s worth the $30 not to mess with it.) If you want 32GB, give OWC $330 to upgrade it. Around $1,700–1,800 total. A comparably equipped iMac 27" is $2,500–2,600, and only has four cores instead of six. Why spend the $800–900 when you don’t have to? (Unless you also want a 5K monitor, in which case definitely get the iMac.) (Note: I own and love the iMac. But you have a Mini and a good monitor. It seems to make more sense to stay with the Mini.)

"Also, what that article really says is that Adobe apps are bloated and horribly performing. If you really want to improve the performance of your editing, get new software instead of beefing up your hardware to ridiculous heights."

Moose: "Likely not much factor for your use, but GPU is a significant factor for many Photoshop users. Your link mentions two reasons: 'The downside of utilising a processor with integrated graphics solution is that both the processor and GPU share the computers main system memory. Not only does this consume valuable memory for graphics use but it eats up memory performance bandwidth too.' A more powerful GPU also speeds up some display functions."

Joe Holmes: "After eight years with my elderly Mac Pro desktop machine I finally upgraded last year to the 27" iMac Retina 5K, with every available upgrade and 40GB of RAM. What an enormous difference, a huge amount due to moving a lot of my software to a superfast SSD. Everything is now just snappy. One thing I've long depended on for photo processing is two monitors—it's great having a full-screen image on one and all my Photoshop palettes and tools on the other. I know you love your existing monitor, but you might consider keeping it and using the iMac's (gorgeous) 27" Retina screen as a second monitor. All it takes is the right cable. Of course the iMac is much pricier than a Mac Mini, but if you, like me, expect to keep the machine for at least six or eight years, it's a very worthwhile investment."

Thomas Tveit Rosenlund: "That is not a photo specific computer. That is actually an Adobe specific computer. Because of Adobe's software architecture the applications can't utilize a lot of cores in an optimal way (only for some tasks like batch output/input). It is the same story with GPU. There exists other software solutions for photo processing and cataloging that actually manages to utilize the resources of a multi-core setup as well as the GPU capabilities in a much better way. Capture One is one, I am sure there are others as well (Capture One is reportedly better developing Fujifilm X-trans files also, so the switch should really be a no-brainer for the author of this site).

"What you really need is a Microsoft Surface pro and an upgrade to Capture One for Fuji.  :-)  "

Mike replies: I've been trying to make friends with Capture One for Fuji. The plugin I really want to keep is Nik Silver Efex Pro 2, and it looks like I should be able to learn how to integrate that. I just think I'm going to miss ACR. I've spent time and effort learning ACR and I'm attached to what I know how to do in ACR....

david stock: After decades of Mac use, I'm feeling stuck. With Apple's lack of desktop choices, iMacs are what many photographers seem to turn to. But I dislike the screens. They are pretty for viewing, and for web content. But for someone who prints photographs regularly, they are suboptimal. They are extremely bright and saturated (and too reflective). Because they are optimized for web and movie viewing impact, they are hard to profile accurately for printing. They have a history of problems with uneven illumination. And they are actually too high in resolution to allow conveniently judging critical sharpness (as Lloyd Chambers and others have pointed out). I had high hopes for the new Mini. It's powerful, with lots of good ports. Its only drawback for me is the lack of a dedicated graphics card; I can't wrap my mind around paying $700 for an external GPU box. Apple promises a new Mac Pro next year. But I'm sure it will be incredibly expensive...."

Mike replies: FWIW, I've felt that frustration. I invested in the NEC PA272W last year to have a more configurable, lower-glare display, but Apple's options of low end (Mini) and high end (Pro) desktops were both too extreme for me—no Goldilocks solution. I needed a box right in the middle. The new Minis are likely going to do the job when I upgrade next Spring, assuming I can afford to. 

But maybe the real problem is Photoshop. I just looked at Capture One's system requirements. It's a pretty basic, casual page, but they say minimum is 2 cores, 8 GB RAM, and 10 GB free hard drive space, and optimum is 4 cores "or better," 16 GB RAM "or more," 100 GB free hard drive space, and an SSD drive. Seems like the Core i3 Mini with extra RAM would serve. I just don't know about what you mentioned, which is how the lack of a dedicated GPU might affect anything. I just switched from coffee to tea; switching from ACR/Photoshop to Capture One should be easy, right?

But hey, I learned a lot today. I guess I'll just keep my ears open and read the real reviews when they start appearing, and just keep learning till I know enough.

Hallelujah

Oh, joy.

New Mac Mini.

This will not excite some of you, but I've been waiting for this day for quite a while. The Mac Mini is exactly what I need (I prefer the form-factor because I can use my third-party monitor of choice and secure the computer when I'm away), and my 2012 is in need of updating. I'm on my computer 6–10 hours a day so little differences add up.

Photoshop CC speed performance compared with current 2014 model:

Here are the rest of the details. Available November 7th.

As my friend Steve texted when he heard: "Yay!"

iHappy.

Mike
(Thanks to Steve Rosenblum)

Original contents copyright 2018 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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Jim Kofron: "i2."

David: "New Mac mini, Yay! No SD slot, Boo!"

Kodachromeguy: "Wow, good news, I hope. I, too, am using one of the 2012 Mac Minis and have been waiting for the next version. Let's wait a few months for the first users to provide some feedback. Let them do the troubleshooting."

Keith: "Based on the extended delay between the D300 and D500...uh, wait, wrong product. Between the previous Mac Mini and this current one, you may want to buy on the high end of the spec. Might be anchored to it for awhile."

Gordon Lewis: "The reasons that same may feel motivated to curb their enthusiasm over the new Mac Mini is that, in classic Apple fashion, the cost mounts steeply with every option you add to the base configuration. For example, the lowest priced model is $799. The next one up is $1099. Want an extra 8GB of RAM? That's $200 extra. Want to double the base SSD drive capacity? That's another $200. Want a faster processor? Yet another $200. And because Apple makes it difficult if not impossible to retrofit any of these components, including RAM, you can't upgrade components over time. Instead, you have to anticipate future needs and buy everything at all once. I mention all of this as a generally satisfied Apple customer, not a 'Windows fanboy,' but I call 'em like I sees 'em. The Apple ecosystem has its benefits, but economy is not necessarily one of them."

New MacBook Pro

Apple has updated its MacBook Pro with Touch Bar models to incorporate 8th Gen Intel Core processors, True Tone technology, and the Apple T2 chip.

The 15.4" models now feature 8th Gen Intel Core i7 six-core processors, which are up to 70 percent faster than 2017 predecessors, while the 13.3" models now feature 8th Gen Intel Core i5 quad-core processors, which are up to twice as fast as the previous models. The 15.4" models now utilize DDR4 onboard RAM and can be configured up to 32GB for optimal multitasking. These models feature a dedicated AMD Radeon Pro 555X or 560X graphics card with 4GB of GDDR5 VRAM. The 13.3" models utilize integrated Intel Iris Plus Graphics 640 or 655. [Text from B&H Photo.]

They seem expensive to me, but then I guess they are, for most people, arguably (and I use that word advisedly!) the best all-around computers money can buy. I probably should have bought a new MacBook Pro of the generation just prior to the Touch Bar models (which I can see myself being frustrated with—any control panel that changes itself would not get along well with my brain, or rather the other way around) to run my NEC monitor at home and detach to take on the road with me. But I went another direction, so it's too late now, until I need to update next time. Sigh.

The last time I used a laptop as my main computer, it looked like this:

...And sounded like this. (You would need to listen to the entire three minutes and 25 seconds to get the full experience, but please spare yourself.) Talk about the bad old days!

And yet it was one of my favorite computers ever, if I'm honest. I probably have readers who were "tweens" when that computer was current. And they think I'm old, only because they have no idea yet that their own lives are going to zoom by with the speed of an 8th Gen Intel Core i7 six-core processor.

:-)

But I digress. From the digression. Here again is the latest and greatest.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2018 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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louis mciver: "Yes, the physical interfaces of the Macbook Pro continue to deteriorate, with the Touch Bar taking the cake. It is a significant visual distraction and also very prone to triggering something or other when one of your fingers accidentally rests on it, which is a very natural and ergonomic thing for your fingers to want to do. Fortunately there is nice piece of free software called 'Touchbardisabler' that completely turns off the touch bar. Screen brightness and volume keys are automatically remapped and you can also remap the escape key to another key such as the caps lock key."

Peter Wright: "I am very glad to see at last a four-core MacBook Pro 13 inch, and I expect I will buy one in a few weeks to replace my old MacBook Air. I think the Thunderbolt 3 interfaces that get so much criticism are really another reason to make the purchase: At last I can expand/update the machine externally using fast SSD storage or GPUs. I’ll take high-end interfaces any day over the clutter of different low-speed interfaces we have seen up to now. All I wanted in addition was more horsepower under the hood."

How To Use a Standing (or Sit-Stand) Desk

My messy desk in the sitting and the standing position

It's well known by now that sitting at a desk all day isn't good for you, and standing desks—also called sit-stand desks—have exploded in popularity. To the point that it might be considered a fad.

But I love mine.

There are a lot of options. You can get just the leg set, and then you can have a local cabinetmaker craft a custom top in whatever size and whatever kind of wood you prefer (in our area we have loads of Mennonite woodshops that will provide reasonably-priced, very well made solid wood furniture of any specification or design on demand). You can buy inexpensive hand-crank models. Or you can just buy a complete desk that comes with a tabletop, like I did four years ago. (Word to the wise: do opt for the "expert assembly" if it's available in your area.) If you really want to go all-out there's even a beautiful, deluxe new type with four separate legs that comes in several colors and sizes. (This is the killer app among current options, and it's apparently considerably easier to assemble yourself—assembling the older two-legged ones like I have is a challenge. The "expert assembly" guys who came to my house worked for two hours. Two guys. Two hours. Glad that wasn't li'l ol' me.)

What you might not know is that standing all day might not be all that good for you either. The trick is to change your state a lot—get into the habit of changing position. Sit for a while, stand for a while, sit for a while. If you can mix in "microwalks" it's a very good idea, too. Take a two-minute walk to the water-cooler every hour or so. Just make sure those walks aren't to the soda machine (at work) or the kitchen (at home)! A slightly longer brisk walk (5–15 minutes) at midday is a smart idea too.

I have these microwalks built into my day because of the dogs. They're also my built-in exercise timer (theirs, but also mine.) I also touch my toes for thirty seconds once or twice a day. (This takes longer than you'd think because it takes a while to stretch all the way down there.)

Here's the right way to use a standing desk: every hour or two, raise the desk to standing height. Take a standing position with your feet comfortably (about should-width) apart and deliberately put equal weight on both feet.

When you catch yourself shifting your weight, sit down again.

That's it. Doesn't have to be any amount of time. Two minutes, six minutes, twelve minutes, doesn't matter. As soon as you shift your weight it's a sign of discomfort and you've been standing long enough. Take a load off. Sit.

It's the intermittent change of position that does you good.

And don't forget those little walks.

Mike

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Speed: "The power of photography—I am now going to clean my desk."

Wednesday Open Mike: Remember Moms

Great gift idea for Mother's Day: B&H has the Apple 9.7" iPad (2017, 32GB, wi-fi only, gold) on sale for only $269. Your Mom is worth it.

I love my iPad.

I have five Apple devices. Of those, by far the worst is the one I have to use most of the day every single day, the 2012 Mac Mini that I use as my work computer. It overheats and crashes frequently and it's not all that powerful when I'm doing things in Photoshop. Why Apple can't make me a competent basic computer in a smallish (but not overly small) box, that doesn't @!#%#$ overheat, is one of those problems that's annoying chiefly because it shouldn't be a problem at all.

The phone (mine's an iPhone 7+) is my favorite "thing" ever, large or small, tech or mechanical or art-object—favorite all-time. Well, actually I liked the 6+ a little better because the button was real, but "same difference" as we said when I was a kid.

I'm writing my book on a 21" iMac that I like a lot (it's not connected to the Cloud and has almost nothing on it), and then I have an older MacBook Air laptop that I don't use except when I'm traveling. Which means, I hardly ever use it.

The device that I need the least is the one I'm most attached to: my iPad.

When I first got it, I couldn't figure out what to do with it. Now it's like Linus's blanket: I take it to bed with me every night, and it's what's in front of me when I eat alone. I use it mainly to watch videos, movies, and snooker (snooker's my no. 1 spectator sport), and I read books on it. It migrates around the house.

It's fantastic to look at pictures on. It's just the right size to hold in your hands, and the Retina screen shows off digital images nearly ideally. I like looking at pictures on it.

You've probably already gotten your Mom a present. Just thought I'd add a suggestion.

Alternately, try flowers!

Mike

Original contents copyright 2018 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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Ernie Van Veen: "The boys and I bought an iPad mini for my wife got Mother's Day five years ago. She's never been a fangirl of tech stuff, but she was, as we say in Australia, 'chuffed' when she got it. She uses it every day for everything from Facebook, to news, blogs, email, and reading, and she takes it in her handbag everywhere we go because it's her first choice for photography. Lately she's been complaining about the limited storage space...I think it may be time for a new one."

Eolake: "I couldn’t agree more about the iPad. Love of my life since the first one. Tip: make a search on Amazon for Tablet Grip. There are many different kinds, and when you hold a tablet in your hand, it makes a big difference. (There are some for phones too.)"

james wilson: "I keep my mini cool with Macs Fan Control. It is a great little app that increases the fan speed in response to processor. I batch process hundreds of images at a time and the fan goes faster and faster to maintain a normal temp. I love my little Mini, no problems."

Mike replies: Thanks. This seems to be working well. It's not clear what the best settings are or what the target temperatures should be, but I was able to get the case cooled down quite a bit and the CPU temps down from 210°F to about 180°F. Hopefully that will help with the crashes, but of course it could be something entirely different causing those.

A Brief Plea to Apple

Boy, does this feel like a grain of sand in the Sahara. It doesn't even amount to a hill of beans. Maybe one bean, at best.

However, we have several readers who work for Apple, so maybe one of them can get this to the right department. A seemingly minor thing, but I'm in dire need of a timed Do-Not-Disturb mode for my phone. I go to meetings of my fellowship most nights, put the phone on Do-Not-Disturb mode when the chairperson prompts me to do so...and then forget to turn Do-Not-Disturb back off again until sometime the next day—when I discover that I've missed one to five calls. Calls can be critical, because one might come from a friend in trouble.

Using the Scheduled mode in Settings kinda works, but kinda not, because the meetings are all at different times. And I still forget to reset it.

Either that, or maybe Apple could provide me with a younger and less absent-minded brain—but maybe even mighty Apple can't afford that.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2018 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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Ray Hunter: "Perhaps you could ask the chairperson to state a reminder regarding the silenced phones at the close of the meeting, a mirror to that at the beginning of the meeting. I know it isn't a solution to a functional memory, but it's a Band-Aid."

Mike replies: Paul Butzi suggested the same idea privately. I spoke at the meeting last night, and I brought up the phone issue. We did end the meeting with a reminder to people to turn their phones back on. We'll see whether that sticks, but I'm going to try to remember to announce it at the end of meetings.

Michael: "The alarm clock function in your phone can be a big help. I have number of different pills which have to be taken daily, some at specific intervals, some two hours after eating—with nothing ingested for an hour after taking—plus eyedrops on another schedule and such stuff. The entire schedule set as a series of alarms on my phone does more than just remind me to take this or do that. If something interferes to throw me off the clock, I can quickly reset the rest of the day to accommodate the change. If the dislocation is a big one, I can incrementally time-shift my way back to the normal schedule over the next few days. This may seem to have nothing to do with your problem but give it a try. Set an alarm for shortly before meeting time and another for a reasonable interval after it’s over. Turn the phone function off when the first one sounds. When the after-meeting alarm sounds, turn the phone back on. Low tech? Yes, but it works."

John: "You've become too reliant on technology. Leave your phone at home or in the car when you go to meetings."

Mike replies: That presupposes that I can remember to do that, which would functionally never happen, given that I've been trying for about twelve years now, unsuccessfully, to remember to take the canvas shopping bags from the trunk into the store when I go to the grocery.