Keith Phipps (be warned, there are spoilers in the linked article):

Part of the genius of the original Star Wars trilogy came from George Lucas’s decision to offer glimpses of a larger world and suggestions of who might live in it without providing much detail. Bizarre aliens and strange technology get only a few moments of screen time but have fueled the imaginations of viewers for decades. The Empire Strikes Back, for instance, features a gathering of bounty hunters, all of whom look like they’ve accumulated a lifetime of stories living hard in some of the nastiest parts of the galaxy, stories the film leaves tantalizingly untold. Successful franchises abhor a vacuum, however, and that same quality has helped inspire a whole industry of spin-off novels, comics, games, and animated series to fill in all those intriguing blanks. There’s something lost in that process, but when the spin-offs work, there’s also something to be gained.

I was super excited for the debut of The Mandalorian yesterday and wanted to pull off some sort of tongue-in-cheek tweet to deter folks from spoiling the first episode. I ventured into the archives to find all of Boba Fett’s lines in Star Wars, hoping to find something worthy of a funny tweet.

Boba Fett has four lines in all of Star Wars. Fett is one of the most intriguing and feared characters in the original trilogy and he only has four lines.

Fett isn’t the only bounty hunter with such a minimal role — Bossk is one of the main villains in EA’s Star Wars Battlefront 2 video game and he doesn’t really have a line in the official Star Wars films.

Every character George Lucas created has a deep back story, and it’s these spinoff shows and films which really build out the Star Wars lore.

I absolutely loved the first episode of The Mandalorian. From the feeling of a true Star Wars film to the revelation at the end of the first episode, everything about this first episode has me giddy for Friday at midnight.

Like big fans of the Marvel universe watching everything come together in End Game, I love watching how Disney has consolidated and improved the consistency of Star Wars shows. You need only look at the costumes of the various alien races in this first episode of The Mandalorian. There are Weequay, Ugnaughts, Rodians, and of course the species-that-must-not-be-named at the end. The weapons used in the first episode are no different — the little CR-2 repeater held by one of the four Stormtroopers is consistent with other Star Wars shows and video games, and the powerful rifle used by IG-11 is the same rifle used by Iden Versio in Battlefront 2. The consistencies from video game to TV show are so cool to see.

It’s this consistency and overall cohesive direction that make me most excited for The Mandalorian and other spin-off TV shows. I imagine this is just a taste of what’s to come — Ewan McGregor confirming a reprising role of Obi-Wan Kenobi after Episode III sounds pretty awesome right about now.

There has been a ton of fanfare and coverage of today’s relatively minor upgrade — at least in terms of “major upgrades” — for the MacBook Pro. There’s a slightly larger screen, some impressively improved speakers and microphones, some new and high-powered build-to-order options, and, of course, a new keyboard. Ignore the keyboard and this really isn’t that big of an upgrade.

I’m not the first to point out that it didn’t have to be this way — Apple didn’t have to go down the path of the terrible butterfly keyboard in 2015.

That butterfly keyboard first debuted in the 12-inch MacBook. I drove an hour and a half into Winnipeg to be the first to buy and test that 12-inch MacBook, and I spent all of 35 minutes in a nearby Starbucks before the keyboard jammed the first time.

I kid you not.

I actually drove back to the Apple Store and returned the MacBook for a new one. By the time I had finished my two-week return period, that MacBook’s keyboard jammed as well.

Good riddance.

I ordered today’s MacBook Pro to test it out and to simply see if that keyboard can hold up to a relatively rigorous writing workflow. It just so happens to debut in the middle of NaNoWri…err… NaNoBlogMo, so there’s no better time to put that new scissor keyboard to the test.

As always, there are a range of great first impressions pieces floating around the internet:

• John Gruber’s first impressions piece at Daring Fireball.
• Jason Snell’s first impressions post at Six Colors.
• Dieter Bohn’s first impressions post and video at The Verge.
• Side note: The Verge is back to its old-fashioned photography ways recently. That photography team killed it in their review of the Microsoft Surface Pro X.
• Marques Brownlee’s video review.
• Judner Aura’s (UrAvgConsumer) unboxing and hands-on.