posts

The Spiritual MacBook Air⇢

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Jason Snell:

If Gurman’s reports are accurate, this new model pulls the MacBook Air line away from the MacBook Pro. In fact, it returns the MacBook Air to its roots—as a product full of choices that we consider crazy at first, because they’re out of step with conventional computer design, but that will appeal to a target audience that doesn’t actually care about those de rigueur features.

We talked about this machine at length on yesterday’s show, but Jason’s article sums up my thoughts pretty squarely.

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Connected 21: 50% my Duty⇢

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Connected is old enough to drink legally in the United States:

To ring in 2015, the boys spend some time with weird old browsers, Hackintoshes, the rumored 12-inch MacBook Air and Federico’s attempts to reinvent his nerd life.

It was made possible by these awesome sponsors:

  • Hover: Simplified Domain Management. Use code ‘RECONNECTED’ for 10% off your first purchase.
  • Loot Crate: a monthly subscription box service for epic geek and gamer items and pop culture gear. Use code VIRTUAL for 10% off.

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Ten years of Mac mini⇢

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Brian Stucki:

This weekend marks the ten year anniversary of the first Mac mini. I feel confident in saying that no one has watched this little machine grow more intently than I have watched it. It’s the center of everything I do here at Macminicolo.

To celebrate a decade of working with the Mac mini, I’ve put together a timeline of hightlights from the last ten years.

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How to reset iTunes Match

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I’ve used iTunes Match for quite a while now because my music setup is fiddly.

My iTunes library is quite large, so until a couple of weeks ago, the files reside on a RAID connected to my home Mac mini.

My main computer isn’t the Mac mini, however, but a 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display. Even though it sports a 512 GB SSD, I don’t want to sacrifice disk space to music I’m not going to listen to, so I use iTunes Match to keep the two libraries connected. I can download what I want to my laptop, or delete something I don’t, all without affecting the home library directly.

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Panic, on leaving the Mac App Store⇢

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Cabel Sasser:

Coda was removed from the Mac App Store in mid-October, at the same time version 2.5 was released. Since new releases always generate a short-term sales spike and we wanted the numbers to be fairly representative of “typical sales”, we looked at one month on either side — September and November.

The results were interesting. We sold a couple hundred fewer units of Coda post-App Store removal, but revenue from it went up by about 44%.

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Skepticism and trepidation⇢

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I don’t often want to shout “Amen!” after reading a blog post, but I don’t disagree with a single syllable of this. These paragraphs really hit home:

Apple has always been a marketing-driven company, but there’s a balance to be struck. Marketing plays a vital role, but marketing priorities cannot come at significant expense to quality.

I suspect the rapid decline of Apple’s software is a sign that marketing is too high a priority at Apple today: having major new releases every year is clearly impossible for the engineering teams to keep up with while maintaining quality. Maybe it’s an engineering problem, but I suspect not — I doubt that any cohesive engineering team could keep up with these demands and maintain significantly higher quality.

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