Like me, Casey Newton still relies on syncing to iTunes to put music on his iPhone. And like me, he’s finding that more and more complicated:

For my system to work, iTunes has to sync. But with each passing year, the act of syncing seems to take longer than the year before. Hours pass by as my phone is “backing up,” even if I fully backed up the phone minutes before. And increasingly, sync doesn’t work at all. Sometimes I plug in my phone and iTunes doesn’t recognize it as a device. Sometimes the dreaded “unknown error” occurs. Most frequently, I get this: “iTunes cannot sync photos to the iPhone … because your Photos Library is not yet available. Please try again later.” (I am just learning that there is apparently a fix for this one.)

By themselves, each of these problems is undoubtedly fixable. Taken together, they convey the strong impression that sync is not a high priority at Apple. Even when syncing works, it often takes an unbelievable amount of time. And little wonder: there’s no profit in the perfect sync. Apple would undoubtedly prefer that I back up my entire library to the cloud and subscribe to Apple Music for $10 a month and watch all of my problems evaporate.

Yup.

The biggest news out of today’s press releases from Apple is probably the new 9.7-inch iPad.

Tech wise, it’s more or less an upgraded iPad Air 2. It comes with a A9 processor, 8 MP cameras and 10-hour battery life. None of Apple’s Pro features are here. It doesn’t support the Smart Keyboard, Apple Pencil or include that fancy four-speaker sound system.

The price is decidedly un-Pro, as well. At $329, the 32 GB model a full $270 cheaper than the 9.7″ iPad Pro with the same storage space, and that’s before the extra $248 the Smart Keyboard and Pencil will set you back.

In short, this is a cheap full-sized iPad, and I think that’s the point. Schools (who will undoubtedly pay less than retail price) are going to like this. Parents looking for a tablet for their kids are going to like this, especially now that the only iPad mini for sale runs $399.

This goes beyond schools and families, though. Just look at how Apple is pitching this device on its website:

Flat-out fun.

Learn, play, surf, create. iPad gives you the incredible display, performance, and apps to do what you love to do. Anywhere. Easily. Magically.

Compare that language with this, from the iPad Pro webpage:

Super. Computer. In two sizes.

iPad Pro is more than the next generation of iPad — it’s an uncompromising vision of personal computing for the modern world. It puts incredible power that leaps past most portable PCs at your fingertips. It makes even complex work as natural as touching, swiping, or writing with a pencil. And whether you choose the 12.9-inch model or the 9.7-inch model, iPad Pro is more capable, versatile, and portable than anything that’s come before. In a word, super.

This is the iPad for the large group of consumers not interested in turning their iPads into their work machines. These people don’t care about Workflow or advanced multitasking or Swift Playgrounds. For the masses who are still streaming Netflix and checking Facebook on iPad 2s and 3s, this new price may finally be enough to lure them back into the Apple Store.

For the first time, getting a cheap iPad doesn’t mean buying one that’s been on sale for a couple of years already.

The decision is pretty clear now. Want something for games and for light tasks? Buy an iPad.

Need a keyboard or Pencil with as much power as you can stuff into a tablet? Buy the iPad Pro.

Apple’s tinkered with their business philosophy surrounding the iPad for years now. I think this one may finally stick.

I really like my iMac, but every once in a while I do wish Apple was shipping a cheese-grater Mac Pro with modern internals. I’d love to shove some of my external drives into a tower that could keep my desk nice and tidy, not to mention having more horsepower for audio and video editing.

In the current vacuum of updated Pro hardware from Apple, some are turning to Hackintoshes. These custom-built PCs are designed to run macOS, giving users great flexibility to build their own setups for running Mac software.

A couple of days ago, RealMac’s Dan Counsell shared a bit about his new desktop:

I spent a week or so researching how to build a Hackintosh, I watched plenty of YouTube videos, read articles, and spent a lot of time on the tonymacx86 website. As many others have pointed out, this is time well spent, and probably the best way to learn how to do it. There are basically three parts to building a Hackintosh; picking the right components, actually building the thing, and finally getting macOS installed and running. As long as you take your time, and research each part properly you’ll be fine.

I wanted to build a machine that was faster than my current Macbook Pro and would be able to replace my gaming PC. This basically boiled down to picking the fastest CPU and GPU that macOS supports without resorting to any hacks.

Dan’s machine isn’t quite as fast as the 2013 Mac Pro in multi-core scoring, but beats both it and the MacBook Pro in single-core tasks. While he didn’t include it on his charts, it also appears to beat the current iMac at the Geekbench 4 benchmark test.

tonymacx86 publishes monthly guides that make picking compatible hardware easy. Dan spent less than $2,000, and you could spend far less than that if you didn’t want an all-SSD system.

I’m not feeling particularly itchy about building my own macOS-compatible computer. My iMac is great, and even though keeping macOS happy on these computers is easier than ever, I am hesitant to run my business on unsupported Mac hardware. However, I find the project and community around in really interesting. These users are passionate about what they are doing, and I think that is really exciting.