Tag: apple

#REVIEW: Macbook Neo (2026)

On By Luther M. SilerIn ReviewsLeave a comment

I’m not going to pretend to have super unique insights here, but I figure if anyone is in the market for a new laptop, hearing from an actual person and not a tech website might come in handy. Honestly, the biggest question for me is what color the Citrus version of the MacBook Neo actually is. I’ve been thinking of it as green, but I’ve heard people call it yellow? So naturally my picture of it is directly underneath a red monitor which is throwing the color balance all off. One way or another, the Citrus color is really pretty and it’s not picking up fingerprints or anything annoying like that.

At any rate: I went with the slightly more expensive version of the laptop, with twice the storage space and a touchID button for an extra $100. I mostly need the extra storage space for my music collection, which mostly lives in the cloud right now anyway, but $100 for an extra 256 GB isn’t bad one way or another. I’d say unless you have a reason to upgrade you probably don’t need to, but either way you’re getting a deal.

Here’s what I use a laptop for: web surfing, watching videos, writing, lesson planning, listening to music. Any video editing is going to be done on my (much more powerful) desktop, and the main reason I went back to a laptop is that the iPad I bought a while ago actually proved to be too big for, well, lap use. At 13″ this is the perfect size to balance on one knee in one of my comfortable chairs while I write, which I couldn’t do with an iPad even with a more laptop-style case on it.

And here’s the verdict: buy one if you think you want one. There are a couple of shortcuts taken to get this thing down to $600 or $700 for the higher capacity version: the touchpad is physical, so you will actually be clicking on things rather than Haptic Touch feedback, and it charges via USB-C and not MagSafe. It comes with a nice, braided USB-C cable– at some point, I’m not sure exactly when, Apple decided to upgrade their cables so they aren’t breaking off at the plug-in point any longer, which is awesome. I don’t love the touchpad but it’s fine, and the Neo battery lasts long enough that I can’t really pretend that the port to charge it is a big deal. I’m recharging it right now for, like, the second time since I’ve bought it. The keyboard is snappy and responsive– I type fast, so keyboards are important to me, and this one passes all of my tests– and the monitor is bright and clear.

It’s not the fastest laptop in the world, of course; it takes a little longer to start up than my desktop, but once it’s running, again, my computing needs aren’t currently anything that are going to challenge it so it’s fine. If you’re doing something complicated with your computer– or, if, in other words, you need to worry about how fast it runs– it might not be the best one for you. It’s not slow, by any means, it’s just not touching the Speed Force like some of my other devices. But the fact of the matter is I interact with my computing devices mostly as a writer and not as, say, a programmer or a gamer or a multimedia person. Lesson planning doesn’t exactly tax the CPU either, y’know?

It goes without saying that the build quality is solid as hell; it may be a budget Mac item but it’s still from Apple. It does not in any way feel cheap.

So, yeah: if you think you’re the target audience for a $600 MacBook? Go forth without fear. I’m happy I picked this little computer up, and I’ll likely be using it for quite a while.

So anyway

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek3 Comments

I was going to start yesterday’s aborted post by making fun of these horrifying things. After that I had a whole gross story about getting sick at work and hell if I remember what was coming after that.

So, yeah, I got sick at work, and then made it through the rest of the day and I’m fine now. Meanwhile, I haven’t technically fixed the deeply weird issue the new laptop is having– I think something about the OS isn’t playing fair with Gutenberg at WordPress, because nothing else makes sense– but I’ve found a sufficient workaround for now. I’m going to spend some more time tomorrow or Sunday fiddling with it; until then, all good.

Anyway, I’ll do a review of the laptop once I’ve had it for a week or so and put it through its paces. I’m pretty sure this particular issue (did I ever say what it was? Click on “new post” in WordPress, get a white screen. In every browser. No matter what. Every other device I have is fine.) is not the laptop’s fault. We’ll see if anything else stupid crops up.

Tomorrow we’re going to get some more shit done in the bedroom. The goal is to get work done in the house without inhaling enough drywall dust to give me cancer. Not the highest of bars. We’ll see if we can pull it off.

First world problems

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, idiocy9 Comments

My current phone is an iPhone 14 Pro Max. Apple is a few days away from announcing the iPhone 17, and my phone has reached the point where on most days I have to charge it for a bit while I’m at my desk or doing something else; the battery isn’t getting through a full day reliably any longer. I used to replace my phone almost every year more or less whether I “needed” to or not; I’ve gotten out of that habit with the last few phones as they’ve gotten steadily more expensive.

So here’s my dumb problem: I don’t really want an iPhone 17 of any particular stripe, although it’d be highly unlikely that I would order anything other than another Pro Max. Not because I’m thinking of switching back to Android– I am Apple’s bitch now and forever, and am too thoroughly tied into their ecosystem to even seriously consider switching– but because their foldable phone is rumored to be coming out in 2026.

Rumors for the price of the foldable iPhone have ranged between two thousand and two thousand five hundred dollars, and that’s before whatever tariff fuckery might happen between now and next September.

That’s … a hell of a lot of money. And it’s even more money if I spend the $1200 or whatever I’m going to pay for a 17 in between now and then. And it’s also money that would be spent on a first-generation Apple product in a category that, so far, phone manufacturers have not exactly been covering themselves in glory with. Foldable phones are tricky as hell, and from what I’ve seen so far no one has really nailed the tech yet.

Now, for a sensible person who doesn’t have a spending problem, this isn’t actually a hard decision. I hold onto my current phone until it’s genuinely untenable to keep using it; if that’s before the Fold is released, well, that sucks, but it happened, and if the Fold comes out and I don’t like the price or something else about it (or they delay it, or the rumors are wrong, or or or … ) I just buy whatever the equivalent of my current phone is at that time.

That’s the sensible approach. But the sensible approach ignores the fact that I’ve been fighting off the newshiny for three years already, and I am maybe more sensitive than I should be to being annoyed by my phone– part of the reason I have a Pro Max is that I don’t like having to think about battery charge pretty much ever– and, like, September is the month you buy new phones. I recognize that all of this is stupid; that’s why I titled the post the way I did.

I could, in theory, try a smaller phone for a year, instead of buying the most expensive phone in their lineup. What would that be like? I don’t even know. But it would cut the pain a little bit if I decide to upgrade a year later.

Anyway. I have no common sense, but that’s why I have readers, who I assume are smarter people than me. What say you? Put up with bullshit for another year assuming I’ll want to trade up in 2026, upgrade but with a less expensive model so that it’s not as big of a hit in a year (worth pointing out: the trade-in will get me money back) or assume that I’ll manage to talk myself out of spending laptop money on a phone a year from now and just get the phone I’d be getting if I didn’t know anything about the Fold?

Public Service Announcement

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

Just in case you haven’t heard, even by 2025’s standards there was a pretty massive fuck-up by somebody this week, with billions-with-a-b of passwords leaked.(*) And it’s looking like a lot of them were from Apple and Google and Facebook, and places like that where you really want to make sure your password is secure. I changed about twenty passwords today– all of my email addresses except for work, anything connected with money, and this site– and while it was a pretty big pain in the ass, it really needed to be done.

You’re using a password manager, by the way, right? You should be using a password manager. Make your password for that a four-or five-word phrase that you’ll remember, substituting a couple of numbers for letters or maybe doing some strategic misspelling, and let the app worry about everything else.

Anyway, point is, go do that.

Dammit, I had something else for this. Uh … shit, getting old sucks; I’m watching a video on another monitor while I’m writing this and I’ve lost the ability to pay attention to more than one thing at once. Expect a quick post tomorrow; we’re going to my brother’s to celebrate both of his kids’ birthdays; we’ve had to reschedule this a couple of times now because one or both of them keep getting sick, so hopefully nothing other than the heat will be getting in our way tomorrow.

Gaaaah. If I remember the other thing I’ll either throw up another post or just edit this. There was definitely something but it’s gone right now. Sigh.

(*) I’m not actually certain of any of the details of the leak, which looks like it had to have been multiple simultaneous leaks, somehow? I just know I pay attention whenever Apple or Google gets hit by one of these things because those are the accounts I really don’t need compromised.

EDIT: Oh! I remembered! I woke up this morning to discover that I had a couple hundred page views already, which is not normal– usually there will be no more than a couple dozen overnight. The other weird thing? They were all from Hong Kong, and the specific posts that were seeing a bunch of views were all older posts with no clear relationship to one another. We’ll see if it happens tonight. Those couple hundred page views were also spread out over a hundred or so individual visitors, so it’s not like one person went through a big chunk of the site or something. So … yeah, Hong Kong folks, if you come back, can you tell me why? 🙂

In which I cave

On By Luther M. SilerIn GeekLeave a comment

Dammit.

You might remember a few months ago where I went back and forth endlessly for a little while about watches. My existing Apple Watch was starting to have battery issues and I was getting tired of constantly having to pay attention to my wrist. So I ordered a nice analog watch and committed to a less connected life. Or at least I tried to.

So, yeah, I went and bought a new Apple Watch today. I’m not, like, throwing the old watch away, or anything like that, and I think I’ll continue to wear it on days where I need to dress up a little bit, but I’m going back to the Apple Watch for daily wear.

Why? Turns out the Apple Watch was useful for way more than just notifications, and part of it is definitely my fault for picking the wrong watch if I was going to walk away from a smartwatch. For example, I went super minimalistic on the new one– no visible numbers, no date, no complications at all.

I don’t think I realized, at the time, just how many times I look at my watch in a typical day, and just how often I am capable of forgetting the date in any given day. I am, as it turns out, not very bright! And I also write, with no fear of exaggeration, somewhere in the neighborhood of 20-30 hall passes each and every day, all of which must have the current time and the date on them. And that means that 20-30 times a day I’m forgetting the date and needing to look at my wall clock.

And I probably should be embarrassed about this part, but with no numbers at all it takes a second or two to parse the exact correct time on an analog watch. I’m not sure if “a second or two” makes me slow or not, but when it happens over and over again over the course of every single day it makes me regret at least not buying a watch with numbers around the outside. I didn’t think it would make a difference at the time– I can tell time on a clock– but if I’m writing a pass I want to be done writing the pass immediately because I have more important shit to be doing. Even just a couple of seconds each time adds up.

The analog watch had no light on it, and it turns out that I frequently want to look at my watch in the dark.

(I am not buying a digital watch that isn’t a smartwatch, by the way. I realize that a number of those issues could have been solved with the same kind of digital watches that have been available since I was in fourth or fifth grade. I just don’t want one of them.)

I use a data-heavy watch face, too, and it turns out that I frequently want to know what the temperature outside is. That image to the right there is my current watch face, and I genuinely after four months was unable to check my urge to look at my wrist every time I wondered what the temperature was. The Spotify song-identification app comes in handy a hell of a lot, and that’s my calendar in the top left. I feel like I had one more piece of information on the old Apple watch– my activity circles, maybe– and I might go back to that after a while, maybe instead of the Messages icon, since I’m supposed to get notifications anyway. I don’t need that on there all the time.

Driving and using a map app with the watch on is significantly easier and safer than using the phone, and my car isn’t new enough for CarPlay or something similar.

But yeah. I feel like four months with an analog watch should have been enough to cure me of my bad habits, and it wasn’t, and on top of that I was constantly missing notifications that I wanted to get– like texts from my wife to come help her with something, for example. I kept my phone muted because I can’t stand getting a beep or a chime all the Goddamn time, and the vibrate on the actual phone itself wasn’t strong enough (and hasn’t been on any phone I’ve owned for probably a decade or more) to consistently make me notice it if it was anywhere other than on a hard surface or in the pocket of a pair of jeans. I’ve had comfy pants on for most of the last several days. I haven’t noticed a single damn notification through the pockets of those pants.

So yeah. Back to being tethered to technology, I suppose. If I get annoyed with my wrist buzzing at me all the goddamn time I’ll figure out what apps don’t need to ping the phone and go with that. But the analog watch experiment is done, unfortunately.

New Hotness, Same as the Old Hotness

On By Luther M. SilerIn GeekLeave a comment

I mean, not really. And I need to figure out where to stash the actual computer, which is the silver rectangle there. And clean up some cables, and rearrange the monitors, and hook the old computer up somewhere so I can make sure everything’s transferred properly, but I have my music and I have WordPress and I have my password manager so everything else can wait, right?

I need to turn the YouTube channel back on for a while, if only to find a way to put this thing through its paces a little bit.

Typed in between crashes

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, idiocyLeave a comment

The computer is getting worse, not better, and I still have no idea what exactly is wrong, but the arrival date on the replacement keeps getting moved up, which is good. Currently it’s supposed to be here on Wednesday, which would mean that it took two days to get to Memphis, TN from China but then took five days to get from Tennessee to northern Indiana. Which, okay, intellectually I get why that might be the case, but it still strikes me as kind of ridiculous.

At any rate, the computer could decide to shit the bed on me at any time, so expect short updates for the next several days and then probably a New Hotness post. Hooray?

On details

On By Luther M. SilerIn GeekLeave a comment

Spent the last couple of days putting this little thing together:

I took the picture from a couple of different angles and then realized if I was going to give you a picture of the Tantive IV, it really ought to let you see the engines, which are the most iconic part of the ship. And once again, while putting a Lego set together, I found myself musing on why the designers make the decisions they do on certain things, and just how dedicated these crazy bastards are to including Easter eggs. To wit, an earlier, in-progress photo of the front of the ship:

What you don’t see there is a third two-stud stack behind the white and blue one. That one has a white base and a brown top, to go with the one that is gold-on-gold and the one that is blue-on-white. Note where this is in the picture above; it’s completely invisible and covered up by the pieces that attach to those clamps on the side.

Why are those there?

Well, it’s C-3PO, R2-D2 and Princess Leia, of course. Each rendered as two single studs in the right color. And it’s just there to put a little smile on your face as you’re putting the set together, and as a little secret that you know about once the build is finished. The Tantive IV, of course, is the ship that Leia is trying to escape Darth Vader in during the opening moments of A New Hope, and so of course she has to pass the Death Star plans on to the droids.

In other news, as of last night I thought I’d fixed my computer again, only to spend forty fucking minutes trying to get the damn thing to launch Chrome this afternoon so that I could work on writing practice finals for my classes this week. The following all happened:

  • Apple Music crashed, repeatedly;
  • Chrome crashed, repeatedly;
  • One hard restart;
  • After the restart, my desktop images on my extra monitors were on the wrong monitors (?!?)
  • My touchpad lost connectivity three times, and had to be turned off and turned back on again;
  • Audio was coming through the wrong monitor at one point;
  • Every so often I could move the mouse around but couldn’t click and the haptics on my touchpad were disabled, and every so often I could click on things but not move the mouse;
  • Attempting to open the systems settings crashed every other open app, then the system settings opened as if nothing had gone wrong;
  • Probably a few other things.

At this point, I have officially caved and ordered a new screaming fucking beast of a computer that is so much more computer than I need that it’s actually kind of sad. Like, I’ll need to develop a new hobby or go back to gaming on YouTube or something to justify this purchase. Naturally, after dinner, the computer had mysteriously reverted to working just fine, and I’ve been sitting here for just over an hour, writing the two initial practice exams and this blog post with no issues of any kind. I have no idea what the hell is going on, but I’ve had enough of dealing with it.