Apple, macOS, and the laptops that run it.

One of the things that's kind of convenient about my work is that I have access off and on to a bunch of different hardware to play with from time to time. 

One of the things that I've been playing with recently is a M2 MacBook Air. 

I did wind up purchasing one of these and returning it a long while back, it was an impulse purchase and at the time it didn't scratch the right itch for me. However I'm going to be needing something that I can haul around and use for personal computing over the next few months and I don't like mixing personal and work data on the same device. 

Given recent problems with Intel CPU's and the fuzzy situation with Windows and where they are going from a privacy standpoint I'm thinking more and more that macOS may be the way to go this time around. 

Given that I have a device I can play with I've been playing around with the base unit and I think that at this point there's a couple of things that I'll have to consider if I'm going to swap over to macOS as a personal device.

1. The AIR would work for a lot of what I do, but if I want to keep playing around with some of the large language models and things of that nature the faster CPU in the MacBook Pro's would be a huge advantage.
2. I would really prefer a high refresh rate display. That's only something that can be had on the Pro models. 

The big down side of this is that the pricing on the pro devices is much higher than the Air, enough that I'm seriously having to think if this is something that I should be picking up. While it's not like I'm going to be replacing the thing in a year it's still a lot of money to put down on a single device. 

I can pickup hardware that will run Windows much cheaper, but unless you are looking at something as expensive end most of the hardware out there isn't  as well put together as a Apple laptop is. Apple's had the design nailed for years and each generation generally just improves on things in small ways (with the exception of that butterfly keyboard from a few years back). 

So is a 120hz panel and the faster CPU worth the extra? To be honest I'm not 100% sure yet.

Lenovo Thinkpad Z13 - It's not really a Thinkpad as you expect.

So, previously I posted about a X13 that I ran for a couple of years. After fighting problems with the specific unit that I was shipped Lenovo did wind up swapping that out with a Thinkpad X13. 

And after having used it for a year I think that it's a pretty decent device for a ultraportable device,  but it's not really the Thinkpad that you would expect if you are used to the older Thinkpad models. And that's not really a huge issue since it is good for what it is. 

The first thing that's different is the keyboard, it's not like a traditional Thinkpad keyboard, it's more like what you find on the current models of MacBook's. Depending on what you like as far as keyboards go that could be either a good thing or a bad one. Personally I'm ok with either type of keyboard - generally my preference leans towards a proper mechanical keyboard, but as far as laptop keyboards go either a Thinkpad or MacBook keyboard works well enough for me.

The other thing that was different at the time was the little knobby bit at the top of the laptop. Instead of cutting down into the screen with a notch Lenovo kicked the entire lid of the thing up into a little handle that houses the web camera. It's a bit odd at first but it makes opening the device simpler since you have a handle to pull up on. It's also something they have started putting into other Thinkpad's in the line up. 

The body is also more like an Apple device, lots of aluminum, solid construction, and nice and light. 

So physically it's all good. However, there's still some strangeness when docking and undocking the laptop. It's better than the x13, but I still do get occasional crashes if I'm using a Thunderbolt 4 dock. A USB C dock however works like a charm. So while there's obviously been some improvement there's still a ways to go.

The other annoying thing that can happen when the Thunderbolt dock crashes the device is that it seems to get into a state where it's just running the CPU doing nothing but dumping out heat. I caught it a couple of times where the device crashes and won't turn off. Tossing it into a bag would probably result in the thing cooking the CPU. That's in fact one of the things that may have toasted the X13 that I had back previously since it was much more prone to those crashes. 

Overall the Z13 is a good device and I will probably be able to squeeze some more life out of it. At least until the current issues with the Intel 13th and 14th generation processors are sorted out or the stuff from Qualcomm is working properly. 

Windows Recall and why you should be concerned.

I'm a touch late on this one, but a few months back Microsoft kicked out a feature called Windows Recall that would be coming in future releases of the operating system. The idea behind this would be that all your activity on the device would be tracked and logged to allow you to roll back and quickly find what you were doing and go back to things that you may have lost track of. All using the power of "AI" to help you navigate that data. 

On the surface that sounds like a great idea. 

However, to do what they are talking about the computer will have to be recording all your activities, what sites you visit, programs that you run, possibly even the keystrokes that you are entering into the system. And that data is going to have to live someplace, and if they are going to be using AI to process that information where is that process going to take place, and what else will they be doing with that information once they have it?

Well turns out the data is going to be saved locally, not in the cloud, and while that's a good thing there have been a couple of posts showing that the data saved on the machine can be pulled from the system and quickly accessed without a lot of fanfare. While the data is on your machine, and arguably a bit more private than something in the cloud, anybody who's able to access your computer could pull the data from your system.

How many people have watched the videos about scammers getting access to systems and pulling data from them? How many of us know people who have had this happen to them? 

If suddenly there's a complete record of everything that you have done on your system, including your banking details and personally identifying information that's going to be gold for people trying to cause you grief, and suddenly Microsoft is collecting that information and putting it in a box for someone to just come grab. 

Personally I don't want the operating system on my computer to be tracking my activities like this. 

I understand that things like Facebook, X, and other social media services track everything that I do, but that's kind of the trade that you make. You get access to a platform and communication services in exchange for the information they can harvest to turn you into a product. 

What I expect from the operating system on my device is to boot the computer and run the programs that I tell it to, and to process data in ways that I expect.

The big issue with this type of functionality being baked into the operating system is that we are trusting that Microsoft is not going to change their mind and start pushing that information to some cloud service for processing, training AI models, or some other activity that we can't control. 

There's always that argument that if you aren't doing anything wrong you won't have anything to hide, but that doesn't mean that you should have to worry about having your entire personal life laid out in front of someone else. You may not be doing anything wrong, but it may not be something that you want posted on the internet for all to see. 

The only way that things like this stop is for us, as consumers, to reject this type of change. For computers this may require that we look at moving to something other than Windows as an operating system. Linux, macOS, something else? Who knows. 

Right now for gaming Windows is kind of the only option for a lot of people, but if there's a huge shift in the market the game Developers will move. Worst case I'll be keeping two systems sitting around and just using the Windows machine for running some games on. 

Lenovo X13 Gen1 - Post mortem.

 Ok, let's be clear here. This is not a review. The laptop in question is dead and gone, this is more a review of what happened with the device and my experience with the device over the two years that I was working with it. 

So, back three years ago I wound up getting a new device for work, this time around I picked up an AMD based Thinkpad X13 from Lenovo. The device had pretty much every option, and was a significant upgrade from the T480 that I was using previously.

And for the first couple of months it wasn't bad, I did have some oddities with putting the laptop to sleep and docking it, the biggest one was that anytime that you pulled it off a thunderbolt dock the device basically bricked itself and would require a hard reboot to come back, but I wasn't docking and undocking a lot during the day so while inconvenient it was not the end of the world. 

However about four months into the things the screen started developing bight spots that were distracting as hell. No worries since we did have a 3yr support contract on the device that included on site support. A quick phone call and a replacement screen was on the way and things were once again in order.

However about a month later a BIOS update bricked the motherboard. 

You can argue about why I bothered updating the BIOS but it was supposed to help some of the issues I was seeing with docking the device, and so that was motherboard one down the drain. At this point the display had started dying again, so another call, and motherboard and screen were swapped out again.

All in over the two years that I used the device it had three dead motherboards, four dead screens, and a dead set of speakers in two years.

To Lenovo's credit after the third motherboard died I asked for a replacement device and they swapped it out with completely new device without any real fight. 

And the frustrating thing is that this isn't something specific to the model, there are other units that I have sitting around that are exactly the same that work without issue even to this day. That being said, physically it was all you would expect from a Thinkpad, just a bit twitchy about what it was willing to do. I'd still look at another one in the series if I was looking for another work machine, or I didn't need to worry about it being docked. 

The one thing I will say, unless you have a requirement for it I would avoid the "privacy" displays that Lenovo and other vendors ship with these things. They sacrifice a lot of brightness for that privacy filter and honestly the trade-off isn't worth it. That would be the only thing that I would have changed if I was going to re-order the device. 

I've been around computers long enough to remember a time when you had multiple different platforms that all didn't talk to each other or interoperate easily. Try moving a file from a machine running macOS to a DOS/Windows 3.1 machine back in the day and it was a huge hassle even just to get that document off of one system and into another. 

And unfortunately I'm starting to worry about this happening again.

Right now Microsoft is pushing the new Copilot PC's running on the Qualcomm Snapdragon processors. They are touting them as being hugely power efficient and having great performance per-watt compared to stuff on the Intel and AMD side of things. And for most people that may be true, but there's also a pile of software that has problems with running on these systems.

The obvious ones are games, specifically those that include anti-cheat software, and unfortunately that's something that I do like to occasionally use my computer for. 

Wendel at Level1Techs has a great video about this here;

https://youtu.be/qKRmYW1D0S0?si=Ru8VciH7rKkCwl9_

So, as much as I like the feel and design of the new Surface Laptops I'm turned off by the compatibility issues that exist. As a consumer if I am running Windows I shouldn't have to worry about what processor is installed in the dammed thing - the software should just run. 

Personally I would love to see a new entrant into the field for processors. Intel's problems with the 13th and 14th generation processors isn't really inspiring confidence in those systems, and my experience with the AMD laptop I have for work doesn't have me jumping at that platform eagerly, so another platform would be appreciated if it just worked. 

If Microsoft was managing this as well as Apple handled their platform changes I think I would be more interested in purchasing into the platform moving forward, but since that's not the case I think that I may have to look in other directions. 

Decisions, decisions, decisions.

So I've been looking into a new laptop for personal use. 

Actually, it's better to say I'm looking to purchase my first laptop for personal use in well over twenty years. 

That's not to say that I don't have laptops around, work has plenty sitting about that I can grab, play with, and could potentially make use of. I just don't like the idea of mixing work and personal data on the same device and try to avoid doing so as much as humanly possible. So over the last couple of months I've been going over options and I'm sitting here unable to decide on what to do.

Looking into what I want on a laptop I really want something smaller, lightweight, and with a very good battery life. 

I would also prefer not to have the device being a slow piece of crap or built like a flimsy piece of crap. I can't stand laptops where the entire device seems to twist and flex when you open the screen or type on the keyboard. 

One option that I've been looking at is the current crop of Apple's Macbook laptops. 

While I have a general preference for Windows, since that's been my primary OS for many decades, the recent things that Microsoft has been doing with Windows has me less and less impressed and willing to consider what Apple has on offer. For most of what I do the "work" is done either in a browser, a terminal session, or some other type of remote session. This means that a lot of what I do is rather platform agnostic and being on Windows vs. MacOS or even a Linux system doesn't make a hell of a lot of difference. 

On the Windows side the new Quallacom based devices are a interesting option, however I remember the first time that Microsoft attempted to move into running on a ARM derived CPU with Windows RT and that was a huge flop. Even the more recent Surface Pro X hasn't really made a lot of waves from what I've been seeing. While these new Snapdragon processors sound promising software vendors still have a lot of stuff to catch up on to get everything working. Given that nobody seemed to bother with it the first time around and how Microsoft managed things the last time they tried to make ARM cpu's a thing for Windows I'm thinking that I might pass.

And with the news about the latest problems on the 14th and 13th generation Intel stuff hitting the fan right now I'm kind of gun shy about getting in on anything running Intel's latest stuff. 

AMD is an option, and I've been running Ryzen processors in my desktop machine and on my work laptop for years now and I have been quite happy with them overall. However the laptop side of things has had enough quirks that I'm not just ready to jump right in again. From a performance standpoint the AMD stuff is great, but the battery life leaves a lot to be desired if I'm going to be running around with the laptop in my bag over the course of a day. Having a highly portable system kind of becomes moot if you have to plug in for anything more than a hour or so.

I think I'm getting close to a decision, but I'm probably going to sit on this for a bit more and make sure that I've let things bake in my mind to make sure that everything is good. 

TWSBI Eco

 So a few weeks back I picked up a TWSBI Echo from my local pen shop just to try something new.

I've been collecting pens for a while but for the most part I've been picking up two specific types of pens that are released in different color each year. While it makes for a nice looking display it's also something that doesn't really give a lot of verity in the way that those pens write. I've been thinking of picking up some different pends from other companies and the Eco is one of the first that I've grabbed aside from really inexpensive ones that I have played with.

The pen itself is a piston filled deal, so no ink cartridges to have to track, but you then are having to look into keeping bottles of ink around so that you can fill the thing up. The pen itself isn't that much bigger than the Safari that I usually have inked, but it is a little wider and thicker all the way around - not taller though. 

Writing was smooth, and after writing with it for a day I actually liked the feel of the pen enough to go pick up a second one so that I have a matched set for use in my bag, there is a bit of variance with the way each one writes - the orange pen is a touch dryer than the blue. That may come down to differences in how the specific inks flow in those specific pens or just the variance in the manufacturing of the pens. 

Either way, I'm quite happy with these for now, but I'll be keeping eyes out for other pens that might be worth adding into the collection.