Star Wars has been on a little hiatus since You-Know-Who had his hallway scene about a year ago. Naturally then, Star Wars has fallen out of conversations a little.
Since that hallway scene, we’ve had Bad Batch and Visions, the latter of which I haven’t actually watched yet. We’ll chalk it up to a lack of time — it’s 100% on my must-watch list. Bad Batch was a little slow at times, though it began and ended very, very well.
I had a chance to talk Star Wars in-person with two younger gentlemen the other day who I would have never guessed were Star Wars people. One talked about how he read all the Qui-Gon/Obi-Wan Jedi Apprentice books from the late ‘90s and the other talked about the follow-up Jedi Quest saga with Anakin being trained by Obi-Wan. This particular young man even recognized Yaddle and the sacrifice Yaddle made to save a young Anakin between Episodes I and II.
It’s not every day that I can share a Yaddle experience with someone younger than me.
I read every word of those Jedi Apprentice and Jedi Quest books two times over. I was always first in line at the school library for when a new book debuted.
Star Wars has just been my thing. For so long. And it was so much fun to talk about a young Obi-Wan leaving the Jedi Order with someone 10 years younger than me. It was like being a kid again.
I get a little hairy on the Star Wars lore post-Episode VI and pre-Disney — I don’t know much about the stories of Mara Jade Skywalker, Thrawn, or Jacen and Jaina Solo. These types of stories were more my Dad’s teenage years.
But Yaddle? Xanatos? Bruck Chun? Darth Maul — the truly greatest Star Wars villain ever created? Or Ahsoka?
These are the Star Wars characters I remember. These are the characters I can’t get enough of. The Ahsoka series can’t come soon enough.
This header image in Disney Plus recently gave me the shivers.
Something about this jump to hyperspace threw me back into a much younger Josh with a much more vivid imagination.
It reminded me of that old Star Wars I grew up with. It gave a glimpse at the new Star Wars we have today. I could have scrolled to the right to reveal Clone Wars Season 7, with four of the greatest pieces of Star Wars storytelling you’ve ever seen.
The Book of Boba Fest debuts in a few weeks. Obi-Wan debuts in 2022. Ahsoka is destined for screens at some point thereafter.
With Filoni at the helm, this is the greatest time ever to be a Star Wars fan.
I’m so glad the sequel saga didn’t rob me of those childish Yaddle memories.
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I talked about Apple’s gamble on Wednesday and how they get a free pass for their failed gamble on Thunderbolt 3 in the 2016 MacBook Pro. So it’s only fair to update everyone on a gamble I’ve made, which has an unknown outcome at this point.
I’ve committed pretty heavily to this 14-inch MacBook Pro. I’ve officially sold all other Macs — this MacBook Pro is all I have left.
I need to run two pieces of Windows software each day with the rest of my daily-doings happening on a Mac. The end result: I have become a fairly heavy Parallels user.
The Parallels experience on an M1 Mac has been pretty smooth — the installation process is very fast and the virtual machine integrations are handy. Especially in Coherence Mode, it really does feel like Windows apps live side-by-side with the rest of the Mac.
It all depends on the build you’re running though. Herein lies the caveat — Windows 11 on ARM is the only version of Windows 11 that can operate on an M1 Mac, and Windows 11 on ARM is licensed exclusively with Qualcomm right now. Until that exclusivity deal expires, there’s no truly supported way to run Windows 11 on an M1 MacBook Pro. You have to download Windows Insider Preview beta software to run Windows 11 on an M1 MacBook Pro. Builds are released a few times a week.
Recent builds have been anything but stable. I can’t export certain Excel reports, I can’t install certain types of plug-ins to enable printing from an age-old piece of software, and apps just kind of get hung up after awhile. Worst, the Settings app and Windows Update itself don’t run (it doesn’t even look like Settings or Windows Update exist in these recent builds), so you can’t update to the latest Insider Preview builds.
So there’s my gamble: I’ve committed my entire computing lifestyle to an unsupported process on almost bleeding edge hardware. Perhaps not the smartest gamble. (I’m risk-averse, to be sure, so there are multiple contingency plans in place in case something happens. It’s not an entirely crazy gamble.)
This how-to help guide in the Parallels Knowledge Base has been my saving grace. The guide provides two ways to work around the Settings launch issue. If neither of the options work for you (neither worked for me), you can download the actual publicly released Build 22000 right from the bottom of the guide. Build 22000 is more stable, everything seems to work (though I still can’t export certain things; I think this may be an x86/ARM issue), and apps aren’t crashing left and right.
If you’re wanting to use Windows 11 on your new M1 Pro/Max MacBook Pro, Build 22000 will save you a headache or two.
We all make gambles on the future. We go to university with the thought of using gained skills in a future world where those skills are valued. We ask to go on a date with a stranger with the hope that person may be a future spouse. We invest money in the stock market with the hopes the stock market grows in value in the future.
It’s pretty rare to find someone who openly admits to a failed gamble. Admitting to a failed gamble means admitting you were wrong. It means admitting you can’t predict the future.
You could argue Apple has far more control over the I/O market than an individual investor has over the stock market. Apple could stack the deck and increase the odds of their gamble paying off.
Apple’s I/O gamble did not pay off. The move to USB-C and Thunderbolt 3 in 2016 was not met with unanimous ubiquity across the market.
But just like you wouldn’t expect your colleague to admit a miss to your boss (you may want them to admit the fault, but you certainly wouldn’t expect it), you shouldn’t expect a trillion-dollar-company to admit a miss.
So, in my book, Apple gets off lucky for its 2016 USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 gamble. At best, it prepared a large swath of the market to have ample I/O coverage by way of overpriced adapters. At worst, it stole an additional few dollars from those just wanting to plug in a USB thumb drive. Either way, they created an audience hungry for plentiful I/O.
The 2021 MacBook Pro comes with a new and improved MagSafe connector, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, and a high impedance headphone jack on the left side of the notebook.
I wouldn’t say the 2021 MacBook Pro comes with “plentiful I/O” on its face — one HDMI port, an SD card slot, and three Thunderbolt 4 ports hardly constitute “plentiful”. Especially when the HDMI port and SD card slot are limited to a single Thunderbolt 4 channel.
It’s that dongle world come full circle, though. Where those dongles tarnished a desk setup before, they now offer potentially the most flexible I/O experience a MacBook Pro has ever seen.
Want wired ethernet? The MacBook Pro doesn’t ship with an onboard ethernet port (though I’d argue there’s probably enough thickness in this chassis to accommodate one), but you likely have a dock or adapter in your arsenal that handles a wired ethernet cable.
Want an ExpressCard slot? If you shoot with these cards, you needed an adapter before and you can use that adapter now.
The 2021 MacBook Pro comes with an additional Thunderbolt 4 port on the right side, along with an SD card slot and an HDMI port.
Or if you’re lucky enough to have a display capable of powering the MacBook Pro via Thunderbolt 3 or Thunderbolt 4, you’ll be met with a world of possibilities. I have two displays, an ethernet connection, a scanner, and a phone charger all attached to my M1 Pro MacBook Pro by way of a single Thunderbolt 4 connector. It’s single-cable-I/O heaven if you ask me.
Indeed, it’s such a treat to simply slide an SD card right into the slot without needing an adapter though. It’s so, so nice. It’s probably the simplest pleasure this MacBook Pro has to offer.
Or the ability to watch a TV show on a beautiful 4K TV without having to AirPlay to an Apple TV. I spent a couple years running my entire TV setup through my iPhone and a Lightning-to-HDMI adapter. It worked really. The MacBook Pro’s HDMI port works much better.
Perhaps the epitome of the flexibility of the I/O on this new 2021 MacBook Pro is how it charges. This computer can charge through four different ports. You can fast charge through all of them, too, if you have the right power adapter.
It’s so flexible that I don’t tend to use the included MagSafe cable. This is a bummer to me — the MacBook Pro’s battery life is good enough to get me through an evening of work on battery and the LG UltraFine’s Thunderbolt 3 ports charge the MacBook the next day. My MagSafe cable has been relegated to a pocket in my bag and the occasional weekend charge. It’s a wonderfully old technology — don’t get me wrong. And the braided cable is particularly fantastic. It’s just too easy to charge via one of the included Thunderbolt 4 ports.
So, will most users find the 2021 MacBook Pro’s I/O options to be satisfactory? I suspect so, though maybe not on the face of it. It’s likely most folks will need an adapter of some sort still — there are no USB-A ports onboard, after all — but it’s also likely that anyone opting for this computer will have an adapter kicking around anyway.
It’s an old time treasure, simply grabbing an SD card and not needing an adapter. It’s like Pavlov’s dog: Click that SD card out of the camera and your ears perk up for that adapter. To be rid of that conditioning is beautiful.
And what of the return of MagSafe? Honestly, I don’t think Apple needed to admit this mistake. MagSafe was phenomenal — is phenomenal — and I’m glad I have it. But I truly don’t need it. If could trade the MagSafe port for a USB-A port, I wouldn’t even blink.
