Linked List: November 19, 2018

Monday, 19 November 2018

Marco Arment on the 2018 Mac Mini 

Marco Arment:

The 2018 Mac Mini is real, and it’s spectacular. It makes almost nothing worse and almost everything better, finally bringing the Mac Mini into the modern age.

Jason Snell on the New iPad Pros: ‘A Computer, Not a PC’ 

Jason Snell, writing last week at Six Colors:

With the iPad Pro and improvements to iOS and various iOS apps, I reached a point where I could do most or all of my required work on the road without bringing a Mac along. (I’ll get into some of the limitations below, because they still remain — and are frustrating reminders of how young this product still is.) I wasn’t going to leave the iPad behind, but I no longer needed to bring the Mac. My bag got lighter.

So when I review the new iPad Pro, it’s as someone who has chosen this platform as a tool to get work done around the house and on the road, in addition to all the other things the iPad excels at, like letting me read the news in the morning in bed while sipping my tea.

I simply love this review, and Snell’s perspective on the iPad in general, because Snell and I share a similar history, affinity, and expertise with the Mac. But he’s leaving me behind. I do travel with both an iPad and MacBook — but if I had to take only one it would be the MacBook, zero hesitation. I’m open to the notion that this is less about the iPad and more about me, personally.

But, I will object to one thing: the iPad feels like a young platform, yes, but it’s not young. It’s over 8 years old. Steve Jobs was still around to introduce it. When the Mac was 8 years old in 1992, System 7 had been launched and it was a very advanced platform, suitable for work of any kind. The new iPad Pro hardware might be the best consumer computer hardware ever made — the only rivals are the iPhone XS and XR. But software-wise, the iPad platform is nowhere near as far along after 8 years as the Mac was a generation ago. The iPhone is. But the iPad is not, and I don’t see how anyone can deny that.

CPU Options in Future Macs 

Jason Snell, writing at Macworld:

The new $1,199 base-model MacBook Air comes with a 1.6GHz dual-core Core i5 processor with Turbo Boost up to 3.6GHz. If you max out all of its specs, on the other hand, you’ll walk away with a $2,600 computer… with the very same 1.6GHz processor. Apple will let you expand storage (to 1.5TB) and memory (to 16GB), but the processor you get is the processor you get. […]

And it got me thinking: This feels like the future of the Mac, certainly on the consumer end of the product line. With the new MacBook Air, Apple has picked a processor and stuck with it. Would any of us be surprised if it did the same with a future update to the MacBook? Or low-end iMacs?

I am convinced this is the future of the Mac. The thing to keep in mind is that Apple’s A-series chips — like the A12 and A12X — aren’t just CPUs. They each put an entire system on a chip. They are integrated wholes that include not just CPUs, but also GPUs and now machine learning neural engines, and all the IO communication lines between these components. It just doesn’t make sense to offer configurable CPU and GPU upgrades in an SoC context. Instead, you make a great SoC and offer configurable storage and RAM.

One reason the new MacBook Airs all share the same CPU is that it’s the only CPU from Intel right now that meets the MacBook Air’s power requirements. But count me in with Snell — I think configurable CPU options are going the way of removable batteries and optical drives. And I welcome it. I hate CPU options. I never know what to buy; how best to balance performance and power consumption. I want Apple’s system architects to do all the work to make the decision for me — to find the perfect balance.

Apple’s Newest Macs Include Better Built-in Audio Devices 

Paul Kafasis, writing at the Rogue Amoeba blog:

On older Macs, the headphone jack and the internal speakers are essentially separate ports on a single output device, and only one of these ports is allowed to be active at a time. Because of this, audio can be sent to either the built-in speakers, or the headphone jack, but not to both. As well, if anything is connected to the headphone jack, the OS shuts off the built-in speaker completely.

With these new Macs, there are actually two distinct output devices. The headphone jack and the internal speakers are separate devices, completely independent from one another.

Nice.

Are Pop Lyrics Getting More Repetitive? 

Colin Morris, writing for The Pudding:

In 1977, the great computer scientist Donald Knuth published a paper called The Complexity of Songs, which is basically one long joke about the repetitive lyrics of newfangled music (example quote: “the advent of modern drugs has led to demands for still less memory, and the ultimate improvement of Theorem 1 has consequently just been announced”).

I’m going to try to test this hypothesis with data. I’ll be analyzing the repetitiveness of a dataset of 15,000 songs that charted on the Billboard Hot 100 between 1958 and 2017.

Clever technique.