We hiked up our local hill yesterday after the summer heat had cleared, and we got some nice sunset colours.

Most pictures ended up being the typical sunset shots, because that stuff seems to be irresistible, but I got some that are different; sunset merely illuminating the things and giving them a 3d glow. I ended up liking those the most.

Trump, being himself, let it slip that the West has for the most part no more than 4 weeks of oil reserves, which is unsurprising since they’ve been using them up foolishly in order to prevent the oil prices from going up too much, which would reflect poorly on the popularity of the politicians and their foolish wars. Since the current “agreement” between Iran and the USA is of such flimsy nature that the sides can’t even agree enough to publish the same version of what’s supposedly being agreed upon, there’s not much chance of any peace there taking root, at least until Israel gets its way, nukes Iran and gets wiped off the map in return.

I noticed one thing changing in my attitude towards the Apple ecosystem, and Apple Silicon in particular. I no longer see them as an experiment, a thing I’m testing to see if it’s long term viable, while maintaining a backup Intel based system that could take over in case it all fizzles out. It became my primary system, while everything else is essentially obsolete. I know exactly how that came to be. When I was writing the last book, and especially when I was proofreading it, I pretty much exhausted myself to the point of almost passing out, and I noticed that I removed that margin that I always maintain – if the computer breaks, dies, crashes or fubars the data, I am usually always ready to do something. This time, I was so tired that I relied on the computers – the 15″ M4 Air, and the Studio M2 Max – to do everything perfectly because I was simply too tired to do anything about it. And they did – they were both incredibly fast, reliable and good, and nothing went wrong in any way. One would think that after all the decades of IT progress that would be expected and unsurprising, but it isn’t. My Windows desktop, the Ryzen machine, is unreliable to the point of randomly bluescreening whenever I really push it. It probably means that the CPU is damaged and can’t handle the thermal load, or something; but since a machine bluescreening under load means loss of data, I simply stopped using it for anything other than games. I had to push the machines when I was finishing the book – not care how many things I left open, not care how big images I imported into Photoshop for the covers, not care how many layers I had; I just needed to get the job done, and I did the covers after proofreading for multiple days in a row, and had the machine crashed during that, I’d probably throw it out the window and make it a lawn ornament. But it didn’t crash. It didn’t slow down, it didn’t glitch, didn’t do any of the stupid shit I came to expect from both Windows and Linux, and I could rely on both the OS and the hardware to pull me through when I was half-conscious from work. As a result, something changed in my attitude; I now treat Apple Silicon machines as serious stuff I rely on, and I treat everything else as toys. I bought another laptop, the 13″ M5 Air, the 16/512GB model. It’s not that the 15″ did anything wrong; to the contrary, it’s the best laptop I ever had. I wrote almost the entire book on it, and it did everything flawlessly. It’s just that I like having 13″ laptops for some things, and all my other 13″ machines are either old and expected to fail sooner rather than later, or they are much, much worse than Apple Silicon in almost every way. For some things, such as making the covers or editing photos, I use the Studio with a 43″ screen. For some things I use the 15″ laptop, and for some things I use the small one. I think it’s similar to how guitar players have multiple guitars they use for playing different things.

Over the years, I experimented with different kinds of laptops, and I discovered that a very powerful desktop replacement machine is the least useful for me, because I rarely need that kind of power on a laptop. I need it where I need the big screen for editing pictures, and that’s a desktop. I need a laptop to have an excellent keyboard, touchpad, screen and battery, and to be fast enough for all the things I run on a laptop. This ends up being everything other than photo editing, so basically I have photo editing machines and “everything else” machines. This explains why I prefer the Macbook Air to the Pro – the pro models have active cooling and more power, but they are thicker, heavier and more expensive for the virtue of being great for the things I don’t actually use the laptop for. As a result, I managed to “cook” the 15″ Air only twice, and both cases took place in a hotel when I was importing a batch of 350 or so 61MP raw files into Lightroom. To its credit, it actually managed to hold its own and be as fast as my Studio for the first 100 or so pictures, but then it throttled itself to less than half its nominal speed and it was pegged at 100°C. Also to its credit, it managed to actually import everything just fine, and I proceeded to edit everything on the hot laptop and functionally speaking, I got the job done. Would I like doing it regularly, no. But also, would I like buying a 5000 EUR machine that is better at something I do twice a year, while also being so much bulkier and less practical for everything else I actually use it for? Hard pass.

On the other hand, the Studio is a complete opposite. The Air has incredible speed and power, until it hits the thermal limit. The Studio M2 Max is actually somewhat weaker in that range. However, it never hits the thermal limit. It can keep going at 100% load, for hours, days, weeks or years, and it will never give a single fuck. The machine is under-specced for my new 61MP cameras because I bought it for processing 24MP files, so things that used to run instantaneously now take time. The thing is, I don’t necessarily care. I have it import the files while I take a shower, it gets stuff done, and I never have to think about overheating it, stressing it by having it work for too long on 100%, or anything like that. It’s like a rock crushing machine that just crushes rocks for years and doesn’t give a fuck. Also, unlike other powerful machines, it is always completely silent. And unlike my equally powerful Ryzen machine, it never bluescreens.

No wonder Apple ate everybody’s lunch. It’s the thing you need when you’re done with everybody else’s shit and you just need to rely on things to do their job because it’s important, and you don’t have the patience for drivers acting up or the OS update locking up the machine just when you need it, or something crashing and taking your files with it. When you need a rock crusher that works 24/7, and you really depend on it doing the job, maybe it’s not the time for solutions that require you to reserve a part of your mental capacity for fixing the mess after the machine inevitably shits itself.

So yeah.

Do I actually need a zillion computers? Does Mike Oldfield actually need a zillion guitars? Yes, in fact. It’s weird how that works, but this is no place for minimalism.