The Newsprint
Written by Josh Ginter.

The Pro Default

Wednesday, Oct 20, 2021

It's time to whip out the good old fashioned linkblog back-and-forth commentary made famous a decade ago. Here's Greg Morris yesterday on his fun blog:

These Pros are for those that need serious power on the go, yet I have a feeling I will see these all over the place in a few weeks. Apple devices have always been a status thing for some. Like designer clothing the enjoyment comes from brandishing something just for the cost – or so I am told. I can’t wait to be able to pick those notched screens out with not too much trouble and have a look at what tasks are being done on a machine that is at least a thousand pound more expensive than required.

I wear designer clothing quite regularly. I’m wearing a new swacket this morning, in fact. There is a very distinct line between enjoyment due to cost and enjoyment due to quality of materials. In fact, I think enjoyment greatly diminishes after a certain price. At this particular price, you know you can buy equal-quality garments but for less money.

Matt Birchler wrote up a bit of a response as well:

What's great is that the M1 processor is so impressive that it makes the consumer-grade devices some of the best money can buy period. If you buy a MacBook Air today, you're getting one of the fastest laptops on the market, and you're getting it in a thin, fan-less body. You're not getting some throwaway, slow machine, you're getting something awesome. Do you need the extra-awesome new Pros? Maybe, but I think the non-Pro Apple lineup will make more people very happy than ever before.

I think comparing the M1 MacBook Air to the incoming M1 Pro and M1 Max MacBook Pro works very well in the MacBook Air’s favour. The MacBook Air may be the highest value notebook Apple has produced ever. It outpaces my 2019 six-core Intel iMac in every Geekbench test at less than half the purchase price. Checkmark in the MacBook Air box, to be sure.

But the M1 MacBook Pro is an entirely different story, if you ask me. There’s an $800 CAD difference between the M1 MacBook Pro and the baseline M1 Pro MacBook Pro. For that $800, here’s what you’re buying:

  • An inch of extra screen real estate
  • Liquid Retina XDR display
  • Six more GPU cores
  • An extra 8GB RAM
  • Faster RAM
  • An extra 256GB SSD storage
  • Faster SSD storage
  • ProMotion
  • A better 1080p camera
  • An improved sound system
  • A better headphone jack
  • Expanded I/O including an SD card slot
  • No Touch Bar

Really, the only thing you gain with the M1 MacBook Pro is the better battery life. The M1 MacBook Pro boasts up to 20 hours of battery life to the M1 Pro MacBook Pro’s boasting of 17 hours of battery life.

I think this might be some of the most consequential $800 you can spend on Apple’s entire store right now.

Of course, Morris’s original point is always going to be correct — you probably don’t need one of the shiny new MacBook Pros. The best value Apple laptop in the last decade is the M1 MacBook Air after all. Despite being a year old, I’d still recommend this laptop to any consumer looking for a laptop.

But the other question I think needs to be asked is whether it’s worth buying the shiny new MacBook Pro. If you’re earning dollars with your computer, then the extra investment is 30% cheaper because you can deduct the amount on your tax return and it buys you more of Apple’s best features than ever before.

So, no, if you aren’t a demanding user, you probably shouldn’t be looking at the M1 Pro MacBook Pro. This recommendation should continue to be the M1 MacBook Air.

If you’re a user who has eyed the M1 MacBook Pro for the last year though, you really should consider what that extra $800 is going to buy you.

In my mind, there should be just about nobody buying an M1 MacBook Pro at this point. Unless you absolutely, undoubtedly, unabashedly need an extra 3 hours of battery life beyond the 17-hour mark.

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I Got What I Wanted at Apple’s Unleashed Event

Tuesday, Oct 19, 2021

As a quick reminder, here’s what I stated late last week regarding my hopes for yesterday’s “Unleashed” Apple keynote:

My ideal setup would be a 13-inch MacBook Pro that is capable of running two 27-inch displays. There’s an Intel-based 13-inch MacBook Pro capable of this right now, but I’m hesitant to double-down on an Intel-based Mac given the inevitable Apple M-chip future. I’d like a laptop so I could work from home in the evenings during tax season rather than beaming in via Screens from my home office M1 MacBook Air.

And then:

Assuming Gurman and all the Apple journalistic community is correct, we’re getting 14-inch and 16-inch high-powered MacBook Pros on Monday. There is no way these MacBook Pros debut without 32GB RAM options. I’d also be utterly stunned if they only supported a single external display.
I wouldn’t be surprised if I came away from next Monday’s keynote with pure excitement. I think the odds are high Apple debuts the computer I have hoped for since I converted my iMac to office use.

Hindsight is 20/20, of course — some sophisticated keyboard warrior is bound to say “Well duh Josh, it was so obvious they were going to debut a high-powered MacBook Pro.”

But then the years 2015-2017 happened and it feels as though we’re sort of accustomed to Apple falling short in the Mac delivery department. Here’s Matt Birchler in a tweet thread last night:

I feel like Apple has been absolutely on fire in recent years when it comes to hardware. 2015-17 seems like slow point with aging iPhone designs, a terrible MBP refresh, an awkward Apple Watch launch…
But 2018-2021 has been almost exclusively home runs on the hardware front.
2018 iPad Pro still slaps, the iPhones 11, 12, & 13 all winners, M1 revitalized the Mac as a category instantly, 2021 iPad Mini, AirPods (all of them), Apple Watches, they all absolutely kill.
The 2021 Apple TV is the only exception I can really think of, but it was still solid.

I’m still getting used to this Apple which overtly listens to its customer base. It's almost like they fixed every single mistake they made on the MacBook Pro from 2015 t0 2020.

Now that’s an anecdotal tangent. Here are the specs of the MacBook Pro I ordered yesterday afternoon:

  • 14-inch M1 Pro MacBook Pro — Silver
  • 10-core CPU, 14-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine
  • 32GB RAM
  • 512GB SSD

There’s no world where my personal computing workflows and Sweet Setup contribution workflows would call for a MacBook of this magnitude. Instead, I’ve been on this experimental path to convert my entire Windows-based accounting workflow to a Mac. This is hardly the “professional user” Apple has in mind when they discuss the MacBook Pro’s potential, but I’ll kindly ask to be a part of this group.

The Windows-only part of my job seems to be a hardware pig. Tax software eats RAM for breakfast, accounting program files and backups can take up ridiculous amounts of storage space, and bloated Microsoft Excel workbooks can require heavier lifting than some may think. I received a general ledger in the last few weeks that was 35,000 lines long, 400 columns wide, and formatted top to bottom. Searching for “Repairs & Maintenance” resulted in a 45-second process to find a single result. I typed "Repairs and Maintenance" the first time only to be met with an empty search result.

Guess what I never do in that general ledger anymore? Search for specific terms. It’s legitimately faster to ask the client where to look than to go down the path of searching in Microsoft Excel.

Which is to say, I want to be part of the “Needs a powerful MacBook Pro” group. Running two OSes side by side with archaic hardware-hungry software takes some power under-the-hood.

This MacBook Pro appears to deliver in spades. I’m excited to see how the one-MacBook-for-all-the-jobs idea works out in practice.

iPhone 13 Pro First Impressions: Cinematic Mode

Monday, Oct 18, 2021

Last week, I touched on how impressed I am with ProRAW on the new iPhone 13 Pro. ProRAW debuted in last year’s iPhone 12 Pro, so I was about a year late to the ProRAW party after my iPhone 12 mini debacle.

Not so this year with Cinematic Mode. Instead, I’m just a few weeks late.

And really, this isn’t enough time either. I haven’t fully explored Cinematic Mode on the iPhone 13 Pro. Nor will I ever fully understand how the feature works or how to best implement it.

I’m no videographer. I don’t understand video. I have zero vision when creating a video. I don’t understand the required techniques or what makes a good video. Video is a massive, massive arena right now and photography’s smaller goalposts make it feel more approachable to me.

But Cinematic Mode does something to my unspectacular home videos which I never thought possible.

Cinematic Mode instantly turned crummy-quality videos of my girls dancing at home into videos of my girls dancing at home that I want to show off to the world.

And I mean “instantly” — the very first Cinematic Mode video I shot resulted in two “Oh my goshes” from me and another “Wow, that’s awesome!” from my wife.

Sure, you can see odd blurring around someone’s head. Sure, the iPhone isn’t perfect at choosing which area to put focus on (you can change the focus point in post-processing, so this is less of a concern). Sure, the video looks sort of artificial.

My untrained eyes have a heck of a time seeing those issues though. The only issue I see is the incredibly large video file I have to send when sharing with family and friends.

The videos shown in this post are super simple. Straight out of camera. Not a stitch of video editing. They may not even showcase the very best Cinematic Mode has to offer. But they are the first two videos I've ever shot where I feel a sense of "Wow!". Especially this second one with the sun flare.

Put it this way:

My oldest daughter took the training wheels off her bike last night and rode up and down Grandma and Grandpa’s driveway for an hour, all on her own. For the first time. I had kept my hand behind her seat and followed her along a few times before she looked back and said “Dad, by myself.”

Yeah, I cried. So did my wife.

Somewhere in the middle there, I pulled out the iPhone 13 Pro, flipped into Cinematic Mode and shot videos of her biking up and down the driveway. When she was further off in the distance, no, there was no artificial blur. But when I got closer and the iPhone could pick her face out of the background, the background turned to mush, her face took priority front and centre, and my video skills went from zero to hero in an instant.

I will forever be able to show my daughter the first time she rode a bike. When she looks back on the video, she may even think I knew what I was doing with a video camera in my hand.

At which point, of course, I’ll remind her it was all the iPhone and the only person with any skill that day was her riding a bike all by herself.

The iPhone 13 Pro camera system is making memories in my home right now. ProRAW has put a new level of photo editing quality into my pocket. And Cinematic Mode has a smoke and mirrors effect — I may be able to trick people into thinking I know how to shoot a video.

My home videos will see the biggest improvement in quality in the history of iPhone. There’s a chance Cinematic Mode is the most consequential camera upgrade to my iPhone ever.