I just got a new Mac Mini with the M1 Apple silicon.
The experience so far is stunning performance compared to my previous 16” MacBook Pro. I was using an i9 with 16GB RAM, and this Mini blows it out of the water on responsiveness (and every other category).
A little reading on user experiences with the M1 had me interested in upgrading to any machine with the latest SoC. One of my main drivers was the noise and heat generated by the MBP, which is just in constant turbo mode with...
A great annotated Twitter thread from Steven Sinofsky, who was leading the launch of Windows 7 coincident with when the iPad was announced.
19/ The iPad and iPhone were soundly existential threats to Microsoft’s core platform business. Without a platform Microsoft controlled that developers sought out, the soul of the company was “missing.”
20/ The PC had been overrun by browsers, a change 10 years in the making. PC OEMs were deeply concerned about a rise of Android and loved the Android model (no PC maker would ultimately be a major Android OEM, however). Even Windows Server was eclipsed...
A fun story from Jimmy Maher about the 1991 partnership with IBM that moved Apple from the Motorola 88000 chips to PowerPC. It was a savvy deal that kept the Macintosh (and Apple) alive and kicking long enough to bridge into their transition back to Steve Jobs’s leadership, and the eventual transition of the Mac lineup to Intel in 2006.
While the journalists reported and the pundits pontificated, it was up to the technical staff at Apple, IBM, and Motorola to make PowerPC computers a reality. Like their colleagues who had negotiated the deal, they all got along surprisingly...
We’ve been doing some thinking on our team about how to systematically address (and repay) technical debt. With the web of interconnected dependencies and micro packages that exists now through tools like npm and yarn, no single person can track all the versions and relationships between modules. This post proposes a “Dependency Drift” metric to quantify how far out of date a codebase is on the latest updates to its dependencies:
I just got the latest version of the iPad Pro, opting for the 11” model instead of the previous generation 12.9” one that I’ve been using for 2 years. Some brief thoughts so far on a week’s worth of usage:
The iPad
So far the smaller form factor takes a little bit of getting used to, but the weight and size is a huge improvement in portability. When this iPad is the only thing in my bag, it almost feels empty it’s so light. I also love the ability to one-hand the device without feeling like I’m about to...
I recently learned that you can pair your AirPods with the Apple TV, which I’ve been using for the last couple of weeks. With two kids sleeping nearby plus noise from the nearby kitchen, it’s impossible to get the volume loud enough to make out dialog in most shows. Because of this we always have the captions on for everything. But this new discovery solves this problem, plus it makes it easy to get up and walk away for a minute without having to pause anything.
I saw this Nightline interview clip with Steve Jobs from a recent Steven Sinofsky post.
In this clip is his famous “bicycle for the mind” quote about the personal computer.
This is a 21st century bicycle that amplifies a certain intellectual ability that man has. And I think that after this process has come to maturity, the effects that it’s going to have on society are going to far outstrip even those of the petrochemical revolution has had.
I normally avoid early upgrades to iOS betas, having been burned too many times in the past. But this time, the release of iPadOS is too exciting for me to avoid. Now that the public beta is available, I set it up and am already enjoying the changes. So far, the home screen app density and Today view up front is already a huge improvement for using the iPad for productivity, as expected. The Share Sheet changes are also pretty slick. Once I spend more time with it I’ll probably post some more thoughts, but it’s looking good for further...
At the recent WWDC, Apple announced an overhaul to their Maps product, including millions of miles of fresh data from their vehicle fleet, along with a new Street View-like feature called “Look Around”. Even though it’s exciting to see them invest in mapping, it seems like a bridge too far to ever catch the quality of Google Maps. Om Malik compares the relative positions between the two to that of Bing to Google in search. Apple is approaching Maps as an application first, when really maps are about data:
Why do I think Google Maps will continue to trump...
Paul Ramsey considers who might be in the best position to challenge Google as the next mapping company:
Someone is going to take another run at Google, they have to. My prediction is that it will be AWS, either through acquisition (Esri? Mapbox?) or just building from scratch. There is no doubt Amazon already has some spatial smarts, since they have to solve huge logistical problems in moving goods around for the retail side, problems that require spatial quality data...
I’ve written here before about my enjoyment of working on the iPad Pro. Even with the excitement around Apple’s launch of the new Mac Pro this week, my favorite announcement was their “specialization” of iOS in the new iPadOS.
Running down the best features:
Denser screen real estate — Anyone that uses an iPad for work lots of different apps is familiar with this gripe. The giant screen with a sparse scattering of tiny icons looks sort of ridiculous. That plus the addition of the anchorable Today Widget view on the left will both...
Love to see the Rays getting some deserved attention in the mainstream sports media. They’ve put together a great, diverse lineup of consistent hitters that have performed well all season:
The Rays emphasize power now, but in a different way: Through Monday, their hitters had the highest exit velocity in the majors, at 90.1 miles per hour, and their pitchers — who specialize in curveballs and high fastballs — allowed the lowest, at 86.3. Hard-contact rates enticed them to trade for Pham from St....
The NSF StEER program has been using Fulcrum Community for a couple of years now, ever since Hurricane Harvey landed on the Texas coast, followed by Irma and Maria later that fall. They’ve built a neat program on top of our platform that lets them respond quickly with volunteers on the ground conducting structure assessments post-disaster:
The large, geographically distributed effort required the development of unified data standards and digital workflows to enable the swift collection...
Anyone that works in a successful company with a large distributed staff can attest to remote-first being the future for knowledge work organizations. The more we expand our remote team at our company, the better we all get at realizing all of its benefits. It seems like an inevitability to me that there’ll be a tipping point where all new tech companies begin as remote-centric groups. Naval, the founder of AngelList (which is a key...
I swung through an Apple Store a couple of weeks ago to check out the new hardware. The Smart Keyboard Folio has been hard to imagine the experience with in reviews without handling one. Same with the Pencil. I was particularly impressed with the magnetic hold of the Pencil on the side of the device — it’s darn strong. The current Smart Keyboard has some deficiencies, as pointed out in this article. No instant access to Siri or at least Siri Dictation, no system shortcut keys...
Interesting work by Ford’s self-driving team on how robotic vehicles could signal intent to pedestrians. You normally think Waymo, Tesla, and Uber with AV tech. But Ford’s investment in Argo and GM with Cruise demonstrates they’re serious.
The cascading effect of a world with no human drivers is my favorite “what if” to consider with the boom of electric, autonomous car development. Benedict Evans has a great analysis postulating several tangential effects:
However, it’s also useful, and perhaps more challenging, to think about the second and third order consequences of these two technology changes. Moving to electric means much more than replacing the gas tank with a battery, and moving to autonomy means much more than ending accidents. Quite what those consequences would be is much harder to...
Trying out a new thing here to document 3 links that caught my interest over the past week. Sometimes they might be related, sometimes not. It’ll be an experiment to journal the things I was reading at the time, for posterity.
Good piece from Ben Thompson comparing the current developmental stage of machine learning and AI with the formative years of Claude Shannon and Alan Turing’s initial discoveries of information theory. They figured out how to take mathematical logic concepts (Boolean logic) and merge them with physical circuits — the birth of...
I’ve talked before about the concept of “ubiquitous capture” and how achieving a system where you never lose an item is an ideal for a seamless GTD setup. No matter what task management tool you use of the hundreds of options, both automatic or analog, there are still moments when a fleeting piece of info we want to remember — either something new to do or an idea or breakthrough on an existing project task — slips through the cracks. The best system for managing all of your collective “stuff” is any that you trust to be the go-to...
