Tag: tech reviews

#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.

#REVIEW: Kindle Paperwhite, Signature Edition

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews2 Comments

Having read an entire big-ass book on this thing (TEOTBB is 260,000 words) I can get to the meat of a review of my newest tech toy in a single sentence:

Reading a book on this thing feels like reading.

If you don’t know what I mean by that … I’m not sure how well I can explain it, to be honest. I have an earlier version of the Paperwhite– about ten years old now, so probably pretty close to the first generation– and on that device and every other Kindle I’ve ever touched, I was never able to forget I was holding a tech object with a screen and not a book. I couldn’t get into stories the same way I could with a book. I had trouble remembering details, or even keeping my place on a page. Reading short stories on the Kindle wasn’t bad, but entire books? Forget about it.

At some point in the last ten or so generations of this thing, they fixed that problem, and I’m not sure exactly what the difference is. I can say it’s tremendously faster than my old Paperwhite, which is no surprise, and since ebooks themselves haven’t really evolved all that much in that time you can really feel the speed difference in a way you might not be able to with a phone upgrade or a new laptop or something. It’s got a pleasing heft in the hand and while I wasn’t terribly happy with spending nearly $40 for a case at first, now that I have it I really like it. I got the fabric cover, and the texture is marvelous, both on the inside and the outside of the case, and the automatic wake-up/shut-off when you open and close the cover is a nice feature.

(Why did I spend $36 when I could have gotten a case much cheaper? It says “Kindle” on the cover and not some other random brand. If I’m going to put my device in a case, the case needs to be either featureless or branded for the device and not for whatever random company makes the case. Yes, I know that’s dumb. It’s how my brain works. That’s my original Paperwhite case under the new one up there, and you’ll notice there are no words on it.)

Battery life is going to be excellent– I’m not sure how long I spent reading that book, but it only ran the battery down to 81%. It says that “typical reading time” is just under 14 hours, but I don’t know if that’s how long I took in my one read or what. I was annoyed by the Kindle displaying when certain passages had been annotated by a ton of other people, but I was able to turn that off.

I spent a pleasant half-hour today rearranging my wish list on Amazon, moving fiction books by new authors into a new “Kindle Wish List” section, keeping books I know I want in print and nonfiction on my original wish list. I’m going to need to get into the habit of deciding I Shall Read A Kindle Book Now and buying the book right then from my wish list, because I still don’t like how this thing displays your library and anything I download and don’t read immediately is going to get lost. That will require a bit of an adjustment, but at least I know the reading part is going to work, and that’s good.

(Two more quick things: I just started Ron Chernow’s Mark Twain today, and it’s 1200 pages, and after holding it for a while I damn near shelled out another $17 to get a digital version that wasn’t going to torture my hands as much. I may still cave, we’ll see. Also, Bedlam Bride is unfairly fucking good; it’s the best book of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series so far, and as I’ve said repeatedly DCC already didn’t have any right to be as good as it is. I only have one book from the series left and then I have to wait for the rest of them to come out. I’m not happy about it.)