Cheap options at a high price

October 15, 2015
by Riccardo Mori
Tech Life

Just a few days ago, I was musing about which path to follow for my next (Apple) hardware upgrade:

All things taken into account, the rational decision is to consider two Macs as possible candidates:

  • The (hopefully forthcoming) smaller iMac with retina display.
  • The 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro, the mid-tier model with 256 GB flash storage ($1499/€1649).

A 21.5‑inch iMac with retina display wouldn’t be a bad desktop choice. I could attach to it the current 23-inch external monitor I use with the MacBook Pro. It wouldn’t have the same resolution and density of the iMac’s screen, of course, but I could use it as a secondary screen for applications and information I only need to glance at every now and then, or for palettes and toolbars when using graphics applications. I expect the price to be slightly higher than the current non-retina 21.5 iMac, so maybe something around $1400/€1600 — which would be in the same league as the 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro above.

Now the 21.5‑inch 4K retina iMac has shipped (all the iMac line has been refreshed, by the way), and apart from the obviously gorgeous retina display, there are aspects of this new iMac I find underwhelming. Mostly two, and it’s difficult to talk about them sequentially, for they are rather interconnected from my point of view. The best summary is perhaps the title I chose for this article: Cheap options at a high price.

I will primarily focus on the base model of the retina 21.5‑inch iMac. For $1,499, you get:

  • CPU: 3.1GHz quad-core Intel Core i5 (Turbo Boost up to 3.6GHz)
  • RAM: 8 GB
  • Storage: 1 TB 5400rpm hard drive

You can read the rest of the technical specifications on Apple’s site. Let’s assume I’m interested in this Mac as a possible candidate for upgrading my current workstation, a mid-2009 15-inch MacBook Pro. The CPU, despite not being the latest Intel generation of processors, is definitely enough for my somewhat modest needs, and future-proof enough that such an iMac should last me several years. The amount of RAM is adequate, but I’d certainly take the option to upgrade it to 16 GB sooner rather than later. A quick check on the Web, and thanks to iMore I learn that Unfortunately, you can’t change that post-purchase, so make sure you configure your maximum RAM during purchase.

Bummer. No, wait. The true bummer is that 5400rpm hard drive. Seriously, in late 2015, you introduce a new computer with an internal component that is essentially the same technology you could have in a PowerBook G4 more than ten years ago (to my knowledge, the DVI Titanium PowerBook G4, introduced in April 2002, was the first with the option for a 5400rpm hard drive — of a much smaller capacity, sure, but a 5400rpm hard drive nonetheless.)

That’s sufficiently bothersome as it is, but what makes it particularly annoying is the fact that, outside the U.S., the same base model of the new 21.5‑inch retina iMac is much more expensive. Here’s the pricing in some European countries, with the dollar equivalent in parentheses (exchange rates updated October 13):

  • Ireland, Portugal: €1,749 ($1,991)
  • Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Belgium: €1,729 ($1,968)
  • France, Germany: €1,699 ($1,935)
  • United Kingdom: £1,199 ($1,823)
  • Sweden: 16,495 SEK ($2,025)
  • Czech Republic: 46,990 CZK ($1,972)
  • Denmark: 12,999 DKK ($1,983)

I know there are tax-related reasons behind the different pricing, but the end result is that the same exact machine acquires a price that makes it jump to a higher tier and gives it a value that feels quite different than a $1,499 machine, if you know what I mean. If you look at the list above, you’ll see that in Europe, a base model 21.5‑inch 4K iMac essentially ends up costing much like the mid-level 27-inch 5K iMac ($1,999). Taxes or not, I think it’s rather unfair. And frankly, a base model 21.5‑inch 4K iMac at that price, with an outdated 5400rpm hard drive as default option, stings even more — it almost feel disrespectful towards the customer.

And what about that 1 TB Fusion Drive option? Certainly better than a lousy hard drive, but it turns out it’s another ‘cheap trick.’ From the Ars Technica review:

The good news is that entry-level 1TB Fusion Drives are now a $100 add-on, though that comes with caveats. 1TB Fusion Drives now pair just 24GB of flash storage with a 1TB hard drive, not 128GB as in previous generations. This is going to be enough to speed up boot times as well as launch times for built-in apps and some frequently-loaded apps and files, though you may notice the system hitting the hard drive more often than it would with a 128GB SSD.

The next step in this awful downward spiral of price differences, has been simulating a purchase of the base model 21.5‑inch retina iMac by adding the options I would prefer so as to have a speedier, more future-proof Mac. Starting at a base price of €1,729 and simply choosing:

  • 16 GB of RAM (+ €240)
  • 256 GB of Flash storage (+ €240)

The result is €2,209, which is slightly more than $2,500. Doing the same in the U.S. online Apple Store, I’d spend $1,899. The most striking difference in the customisation options during purchase, price-wise, is the 512 GB Flash storage: $300 versus €600. (As Peter Emery suggested on App.net, at this point it’s cheaper to buy an external Thunderbolt SSD and run the iMac from there.)

Such price differences are simply unjustifiable. Offering a plain old 5400rpm hard drive in such a Mac is inexcusable. You’re just driving customers towards pricier choices rather blatantly. My friend Fabrizio Rinaldi said on Twitter that it’s the equivalent of the 16 GB iPhone option. I’m inclined to think it’s even worse than that. It’s like not equipping the older iPhone 6 Plus with enough RAM. 

Putting a hard drive in an otherwise fast Mac is like driving around in a sports car with the handbrake on. It’s a performance dampener. My MacBook Pro, which has a 5400rpm hard drive, takes about four minutes to boot up. Current MacBook Pros with SSD drives or Flash storage, boot up in 30 seconds or less. That’s a very telling, real-world benchmark. 

Quoting again Andrew Cunningham from Ars Technica:

The 2010 MacBook Air made SSDs the default storage option five (!) years ago, but all of the iMacs still ship with 5400RPM rotating hard drives by default. I’ve been using the base model iMac as my primary desktop for a few days now. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve gotten used to my 2012 iMac’s Fusion Drive over the last three years or if El Capitan is just better optimized for SSDs than HDDs, but it. Is. Excruciating.

Buying a Fusion Drive or SSD for a new iMac in 2015 should not be considered an optional upgrade, especially since it’s so difficult to add your own after the fact. Not everyone will notice the move from a dual-core to quad-core CPU. Not everyone will notice the move from 8GB to 16GB of RAM. But everyone, no matter how they use their computer, will benefit from having some solid-state storage in their computers.

I’ll reiterate: in a ‘base model’ iMac that costs €1,729 without any add-on, I’d expect at least the low-price 1 TB Fusion Drive option as the default, not old hard drive technology.

Menu calendar apps I've used over the years

October 13, 2015
by Riccardo Mori
Software

I dislike cluttering my Mac’s menubar with too many menu extra, i.e. first- and third-party applications that put a permanent icon on the menubar for quick access (or sometimes sole access) to the application’s options. But one particular kind of application I have always found quite handy is the calendar. The icon allows me to check the date with a glance, and by clicking it I can see right away the calendar’s month view.

It’s also the kind of application that is soon taken for granted, so I wanted to quickly enumerate the menu calendar utilities I’ve been using since the first versions of Mac OS X.

  1. MenuCalendarClock for iCal [$19.95; See also: MacUpdate link] — I’ve had this on my menubar from the days of Mac OS X 10.3 Panther to Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, but actually I used it until mid-2009, when my 12-inch PowerBook G4 went from primary to secondary machine. I still have MenuCalendarClock on my Titanium G4 PowerBooks. I loved its compactness. Not that the most recent menu calendar apps are less compact, but back then, on a clamshell iBook G3 with an 800×600 screen resolution, every pixel did count. Judging from the webpage, it appears that this app was no longer updated/developed after Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. 
  2. MagiCal [Free] — I’ve used this app for a long time as well, from 2009 to early 2014, and it’s still the menu calendar app on my aluminium G4 PowerBooks running Mac OS X 10.5.8. It’s available as a PowerPC-only, Intel-only, or Universal Binary. It’s still a personal favourite: of all the calendar apps I’ve used, MagiCal is the one with the most customisable appearance. For example, the menu icon can be of different styles and colours, it can show just the date, or date and month, or date and day. The app seems to work fine also under recent OS X versions (Mavericks, Yosemite, El Capitan). Last year I decided to look for an alternative after noticing that every now and then the related background process would hang and the date would not refresh. But it may be an issue related to my specific Mac configuration, not necessarily a fault of MagiCal. Your mileage may vary. (But if you still use G3/G4/G5 PowerPC Macs running Tiger or Leopard, I definitely recommend it.)
  3. Day‑O [Free] — I’ve used Shaun Inman’s nifty calendar app from early 2014, when I was on Mavericks, up to ten days ago, when I upgraded to El Capitan (without passing through Yosemite). Simple, lightweight, well designed. It’s not that it has stopped working, but Inman hasn’t updated it for Yosemite, and it doesn’t play well with OS X 10.10 and 10.11 Dark Mode for the menubar and Dock. If you’re not using Dark Mode, Day‑O still works fine under these most recent OS X versions.
  4. Itsycal [Free] — I found Itsycal a few months ago when I was checking whether the developer was still working on Itsy, one of my favourite Twitter clients for Mac. I couldn’t try it, though, because I was still under Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks and the minimum requirement was 10.10 Yosemite, but I bookmarked the link so that I could check again if and when I upgraded to Yosemite. It turns out that I upgraded directly to OS X 10.11 El Capitan, and when it came to finding an alternative to Day‑O, I switched to Itsycal at once. Not as customisable as MagiCal, but definitely well-designed and a pleasure to use. Under El Capitan, as the developer notes on the app’s webpage, you can’t change Itsycal’s position in the menubar as you could under Yosemite. Apart from that, it works flawlessly.

Two alternatives to MenuMeters

October 9, 2015
by Riccardo Mori
Software

MenuMeters is a set of CPU, memory, disk, and network monitoring tools for Mac OS X. It has been around since Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, and it’s always been my preferred software in its category. Every time a major Mac OS X release came out, one of the first things I used to do after upgrading was checking whether MenuMeters would work. I like it for its unobtrusiveness, level of customisation and general lightness. I hate cluttering the menubar with icons, so it’s important that a monitoring tool let me hide everything I don’t need to see. In my case, I’ve always been interested in one thing — checking network activity, and MenuMeters can simply show the network throughput as bytes per second (or even just arrows, if you really want the simplest, most minimalistic option). I still use MenuMeters on all my PowerPC Macs.

But after upgrading to Mac OS X 10.11, I discovered that MenuMeters is not compatible with the latest version of the operating system. At the time of writing, developer Alex Harper has put a warning on the MenuMeters website that reads as follows:

Due to new Apple-enforced code signature restrictions, MenuMeters is not compatible with the OS X 10.11 “El Capitan” public beta. Although the restriction is similar, this is not directly related to 10.11’s “System Integrity Protection” (SIP, aka “rootless”) feature and disabling SIP has no effect on MenuMeters.

Unless Apple makes the signature restriction optional, it is not clear that MenuMeters in its present form can ever be made compatible with OS X 10.11.

In the meantime I can only suggest that you do not install 10.11 if you wish to use MenuMeters.

So I started looking for alternatives, and after asking for advice on App.net, I received two great suggestions. One for a software I didn’t know, the other for a software I should have remembered (since I used to have it installed as a Dashboard widget). Neither alternatives are free, but they’re not very expensive either, and both are worth your consideration.

The first alternative that was suggested — thanks Peter! — is Colossus by Sparkfield, available on the Mac App Store for $3.99. System requirements are Mac OS X 10.6.6 or later. An interesting feature is a built-in memory cleaner. I haven’t tried this app myself, but Peter is another long-time, expert Mac user, and he has purchased it. I trust his judgment on this.

The second alternative — as Shawn kindly reminded me — is iStat Menus 5 by Bjango. A single licence is $18, and if you’re upgrading from version 3 or 4, you’ll only pay $9.99. System requirements for version 5 are Mac OS X 10.8 or later, and it’s guaranteed to be compatible with OS X 10.11. It costs more than Colossus, but it also has more features and a higher level of customisation. 

I ended up choosing iStat Menus mostly because I’m more familiar with Bjango’s products, but this shouldn’t influence your choice at all. Everyone has different needs and preferences, and I’m sure there are other similar monitoring tools out there that cost less or are even free. I think Colossus and iStat Menus are two well-made applications that are worth considering before looking for other cheaper alternatives.

Update — Meanwhile, another alternative that has been suggested to me is Monity ($4.99) by Lukasz Kulis.

iPad, text editors, workflow fragmentation. Again.

October 6, 2015
by Riccardo Mori
Tech Life

I have already written about this, at length, in an article I published eight months ago: iPad, text editors, workflows, and a frustrated digression on simplicity, but earlier today a similar episode as the one I talked about in that piece made all that frustration return.

Let’s get back to one of the points I made then:

When I’m writing fiction, my preferred tool is TextEdit, I write in rich text format, all my files are RTF. Nothing fancy, but I need to see the formatting. I need to see the parts in italics, bold, in smaller font size, that sort of thing. I can’t write fiction in Markdown or HTML like I do when I’m writing articles to be published online or on my Vantage Point magazine.

[…] [T]hese days I’m practically forced to continue my work somewhere else. […] I want to travel light, so I take a small backpack, put the iPad 3 and the Incase Origami Workstation inside, then a few pens and notebooks, and I’m off to the library. Of course, I’ve saved my work in a dedicated Dropbox folder, so I’ll be able to easily resume writing from the iPad.

Once arrived, I set up the Origami Workstation, wake the iPad, and from there — at least theoretically — it’s just a matter of picking a text editor among the few I’ve purchased and— oh wait… None of them will handle my RTF files saved with TextEdit. Not Phraseology, not iA Writer, not Daedalus Touch (my favourite of the bunch), not WriteRight… Then there are apps like UX Write and GoodReader which at least let me read the RTF files I need, but to actually continue my work right where I left it, I have to copy what I wrote, paste it into a new text document (say, in Daedalus Touch) in the same Dropbox folder, and take it from there. And write in plain text, or Markdown, which may be fine with you, but it’s hugely annoying for me.

Sure, if I had to work on the iPad only, or if my setup were iPad-first, Mac as a secondary device, instead of the other way round, my approach would probably be different, and I would perhaps choose my tools more carefully. Still, I would need to use a pleasant application that lets me write in rich text format directly (no, I don’t want to write in Markdown and check the preview all the time). When I publicly expressed my frustration, some suggested I use Microsoft Word for the iPad, or Apple’s Pages both on the Mac and the iPad. These solutions, however, strike me as a bit overkill for my needs, and frankly it’s also a bit silly that I have to compromise and resort to tools I don’t like using just because they do the job (I also don’t want to use iCloud for syncing — it’s a long story that I’ll leave for another article, maybe). I did that back in the 1990s and I hated it.

These past months, when I’ve had to work on texts from my iPad, I resorted to a few tricks and workarounds to mitigate this kind of friction. For example, knowing that I’d continue working on a few text files on the iPad, I would convert them on the Mac beforehand, and upload them ‘iPad-ready’ on a different Dropbox folder. But today I had to perform a slightly different task, I didn’t have time for preparations, and I found myself dealing with the most stupidly fragmented workflow to accomplish a relatively simple goal. It was maddening.

I had a folder with six old RTF documents, written in Italian about twenty years ago, which I needed to edit and then translate into English. The idea was to simply open them and edit them right away in an app, then open a second app where I would create a new document and begin the translation. I don’t have Split View on my old iPad, so I would have to endure a bit of back-and-forth, but nothing overly dramatic. The problem is that I’d forgotten that none of the text-handling apps I have on my iPad (a dozen, more or less) can edit RTF files. So here’s what I did:

  1. Opened the first RTF document in UX Write, an app that can display RTF files but not edit them.
  2. Created a small workflow in Workflow that would convert the RTF text into HTML and copy the converted text to the Clipboard.
  3. Created a new document in Daedalus Touch, pasted the HTML text in there, and tried to get rid of all the useless, superfluous markup by using Find and Replace.
  4. Realised that Daedalus Touch has a Find feature, but apparently not a Replace feature.
  5. Opened WriteRight, pasted the HTML again, and proceeded to remove all unnecessary HTML code via Find and Replace (a feature WriteRight has, thankfully).
  6. Saved the result as a new document in WriteRight.

The time I lost, from Step 0 (becoming aware of the issue) to Step 6, was more than half an hour. If I had had a Mac with me, I would have opened the document in TextEdit, created a new document, stacked the two windows, to then begin working on the translation right away.

Again, perhaps the mistake on my part was in the choice of text editors I bought for the iPad. But see, I like to choose pleasant tools to write with. And there are apps, like Daedalus Touch, iA Writer and WriteRight, that have interesting features, are well-designed, and are generally a pleasure to use. Resorting to Pages or Microsoft Word for iOS is truly overkill when what I would simply like to do is editing an RTF file. It’s as if you needed to crop a picture and slightly retouch a small spot, and someone suggested you use Photoshop.

Most of the text-handling apps that exist for iOS — and there are a lot of them — seem to forget that there are other text formats out there beyond plain text and markdown. Some are great in offering a pleasant environment to write in, but when it comes to importing and editing documents created elsewhere with other software, things begin to quickly fall apart. Sure, I could get yet another app, but isn’t it a bit ridiculous to have 15 different iOS apps to do a job that on the Mac could be easily carried out by just one simple app like TextEdit?

I’m not complaining because on iOS there are too many apps to choose from, mind you! Such variety, such abundance, aren’t bad things at all. What I find a bit exhausting, however, is this silly trend of single-purpose apps or simplistic, minimalistic apps that are very pretty and very fashionable but sorely lack in features apart from some of the most basic stuff. 

There’s a long debate going on about the iPad — that it could benefit from more ‘pro’ apps. That way, it could properly transform into a more professional tool, and a device like the iPad Pro would really be expressing all of its potential. Why don’t we start by offering some more ‘pro’ features in apps that are already out there? There must be a decent middle point between something like [insert minimalistic text editor here] and Microsoft Word for iOS, feature-wise. Adapting one’s needs and workflows to one or more apps can be a temporary solution, but in my opinion it’s not the ideal approach. These are tools, and tools should work for us, not the other way round.

Upgrade paths

October 4, 2015
by Riccardo Mori
Tech Life

I don’t upgrade hardware frequently. Having a constantly tight budget is the main reason, but it’s also a matter of mindset. I don’t like to waste resources. I have been taught to make the most of things and keep using them until they’re not efficient anymore. Thankfully, Macs are still long-lasting machines. And thankfully my job doesn’t involve the use of demanding software that requires constant upgrades to the latest and fastest Mac. The most telling detail in this regard is that the 12-inch PowerBook G4 has been my primary machine from 2004 to 2009. Considering that the transition from PowerPC to Intel architecture happened in 2006, I was able to keep going with a PowerPC Mac for three years and a half. When I finally decided it was time for a faster, Intel-based machine, it was mainly because that poor PowerBook couldn’t handle my primary workload very well (the 1.25 GB of maximum RAM didn’t help), but also because by 2009 I couldn’t reasonably expect support of the PowerPC architecture to last much longer; in August 2009, Apple would introduce Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, and the upgrade was available only for Intel Macs. It was time for a change.

Historically, my primary Mac has lasted me at least five years. That has usually been my upgrade cycle. When purchasing a new Mac, the strategy has generally been to invest a bit more money for a better-specc’d machine — at least one tier above whatever my current needs were — so that it could hopefully keep up with the increasing software updates and demands for as long as possible. I’ve also been favouring the laptop over the desktop for its versatility: at home I’d use it in desktop configuration, attached to a big external monitor, to an external keyboard and mouse; and when I needed to work while out and about, I could unplug everything and put the laptop in my backpack. 

Now, my current Mac is a true workhorse, and I can’t stress enough how satisfied I am with it. It’s a mid-2009 15-inch MacBook Pro, with a 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 8 GB of RAM (updated from the original 4 GB), and a 500 GB hard drive (updated from the original 320 GB hard drive). To date, it’s the primary Mac that has lasted so much, further extending my upgrade cycle. It has seen 6 different version of Mac OS X, from 10.5 Leopard to 10.11 El Capitan — which would be seven, but since I’ve skipped 10.10 Yosemite entirely, I’m not counting it — and it’s still going strong, at least for my needs. 

I have however been feeling that it’s time for an upgrade for a while now. Not because I’m noticing that this MacBook Pro is on its last legs, like it happened with the PowerBook G4 in 2009 and the clamshell iBook G3/466 in 2004. I simply think the time has come for a more future-proof Mac. A machine with a better display, which would literally be a sight for sore eyes. A machine with more up-to-date technology inside (advanced Bluetooth for OS X’s Continuity features, faster Wi-Fi, faster connections, better graphics card, etc.). And, in case of a laptop, a machine with a much longer lasting battery. I’m still amazed that my 6‑years-old MacBook Pro can still last about three hours on a full charge, but it’s nothing compared to the performance of the 12-inch MacBook (9 hours) or the 13-inch MacBook Air (12 hours).

So, which Mac?

That truly is the question. The strategy I was considering is as follows. My current MacBook Pro becomes the secondary machine, and this opens up different options:

  1. I could wait until the smaller iMac with retina display is introduced. I would go back to having the more powerful machine on my desktop, and a still capable MacBook Pro for when I’m on the move. Flip side: limited battery life of the aging MacBook Pro.
  2. I could opt for another, smaller laptop but with a retina display, and keep this more powerful machine in laptop configuration, while keeping the older MacBook Pro connected to the non-retina external monitor as it is now, since it’d make little sense to have a retina laptop connect to a non-retina monitor. Flip side: I work better on a bigger screen, and to keep using the older Mac in desktop configuration, while the newer Mac sits on another desk isn’t a very bright strategy — the newer Mac is supposed to be the primary machine!
  3. I could purchase a Mac mini. I would attach it to the peripherals I already have (Apple Keyboard, Magic Mouse, external monitor) and keep the MacBook Pro as my secondary Mac for when I’m out and about. This looks like the best option for someone on a limited budget. Flip side: Same as option 1, and I wouldn’t even have a retina display on the desktop.

These are just three examples, but the possible combinations and related dilemmas are numerous. Up until a few months ago, a machine I was really liking for an upgrade was the 13-inch MacBook Air, but the lack of a retina display in the whole Air family makes it a bit less ‘future-proof’ than I’d like. When the 12-inch retina MacBook was introduced, I really thought it was the best candidate as my next Mac. It’s the youngest of the line, it’s powerful enough for my needs, it’s thin and light, it has a retina display. Unfortunately it also has a terrible keyboard that makes it unsuitable for the amount of typing I do daily. The iMac Retina 5K Display is beautiful, and it would probably last me even more than my current 6‑years-old MacBook Pro, but it’s way, way beyond my budget. Another machine I’d like, but is equally unattainable, is the 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro. Lovely Mac, and just the sweet screen size for me, but the entry model is €2249 and the high-end model is €2799. It’s simply too much.

All things taken into account, the rational decision is to consider two Macs as possible candidates:

  • The (hopefully forthcoming) smaller iMac with retina display.
  • The 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro, the mid-tier model with 256 GB flash storage ($1499/€1649).[1]

A 21.5‑inch iMac with retina display wouldn’t be a bad desktop choice. I could attach to it the current 23-inch external monitor I use with the MacBook Pro. It wouldn’t have the same resolution and density of the iMac’s screen, of course, but I could use it as a secondary screen for applications and information I only need to glance at every now and then, or for palettes and toolbars when using graphics applications. I expect the price to be slightly higher than the current non-retina 21.5 iMac, so maybe something around $1400/€1600 — which would be in the same league as the 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro above.

The 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro is very interesting. It has been improved, now featuring the same Force Touch trackpad introduced with the 12-inch MacBook, a longer battery life, and faster flash storage. It has retained the ‘good’ keyboard I know and love (okay, maybe not love, but at least it’s way more comfortable for me to type on). 256 GB of main storage isn’t a lot of space, but I can certainly optimise it and keep the majority of media archives on external volumes. I could wait a bit more and go for the 16 GB RAM upgrade straight away, too. Yes, it feels like the most likely candidate.

The crazy alternative

And then Apple introduces the iPad Pro, and it gets me thinking.

With the new productivity-friendly features introduced in iOS 9, I could revise my main workflow to make it more iPad-oriented. I could connect my Apple Wireless Keyboard to it (I’m not a fan of the Smart Keyboard for the iPad Pro), and still use my Incase Origami Workstation to prop up the iPad. With the right combination of apps and Split View, and a bit of training, the iPad Pro could become an interesting alternative. Not exactly my main machine, but certainly a workspace I’d spend a lot of time in, reserving the MacBook Pro for those specific tasks that require certain desktop applications and tools, or a bigger screen real estate, or the kind of versatile multitasking the Mac OS X environment can afford. I could even extend the MacBook Pro’s already long lifespan by removing the optical drive and getting an SSD, and eventually getting also a new battery. 

I know, it sounds crazy, perhaps even counter-intuitive given all my ramblings about choosing the right Mac for the next upgrade. But the iPad Pro, I admit, has truly fascinated me. So far, I’ve been perfectly happy with my old iPad 3 and have never felt the urge to get a newer and faster iPad. I have older devices, and upgrading more than one at a time is something I cannot afford. So of course the Mac has precedence and is the rational, safe route given my long-time Mac user mindset. But the challenge of getting an iPad Pro and the Apple Pencil, and making this my new productivity environment is quite tempting. I can’t wait to see new iOS apps specifically designed to take advantage of the iPad Pro’s form factor and bigger screen. Again, the right software could definitely tip the scales in favour of a ‘disruptive’ iPad-oriented upgrade path for me. Interesting times ahead, indeed.

 

  • 1. Please note the stupid dollar/euro difference, something I complained about when discussing the retina MacBook pricing. ↩