a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment
kleinbl00  ·  2576 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Mac Pro is dead. Long live the Mac Pro.

I was on my fifth Windows phone by the time the iPhone came out. And it was a thing of jealousy, no doubt. Only - no keys. No FTP. No... copy and paste. No APP STORE. it was definitely form over function but the form was spectacular. King of the hill at the time was this guy:

But yeah. Once the iPad was out it was game over. I had a white Macbook at the time and you could take 'em apart if you were brave. Memory? No prob. Battery? Went through three. Hard drive? Two of 'em. Now? Now I'm on a 6-year-old Air because I front-loaded it with all the whizbangs and it's still fast enough for what I do on it, which is nothing.

I have a new Mac Mini. Hard drive died on it. Can you replace the hard drive? No. Even though it's spinny platters. Why? Because Apple uses proprietary firmware on their drives now. Why? Because fuck you, that's why. So the stupid thing has a thunderbolt SSD dangling off of it with the OS on. Because that's the world now.

There was a time the Mac Mini was a form factor all its own. Now? Now you can get a Windows PC the size of your finger. Stab it into an HDMI port and connect to it over bluetooth and wifi. Woot has a Mini form-factor Windows box every second Wednesday. I've even got a spare slot in the KVM; I could buy one, install Linux on it and spend less than $300.

We grabbed a Surface for the office. Microsoft often discounts them steeply; we got the hot one with a free keyboard cover for $700, I think. It's a great little rig, even if it's awkward to type with in your lap.

    What really put the nail in the coffin in my mind was having the "courage" to remove the headphone jack from the iPhone and leave Lightning, then roll out a MBP with USB-C and a headphone jack.

God I fucking forgot about that.