Charlie Stross
While I applaud Apple's 2022 refresh of the Macbook Air, what I REALLY want is a new 12" Retina Macbook (like the 2016 model), only with an M-series processor and a battery life of > 8 hours (rather than the gutless 1.3GHz intel cpus and pathetic 3-4h the original Macbook got).
Basically a Mac of the same size and weight as an 11" iPad Pro plus Magic Folio. macOS rather than iPadOS.
I had a 12" Retina Macbook. Loved it to death as a portable writing tool, but it was just too slow in the end.
pettter
@cstross @dymaxion I understand that @pluralistic is swearing by the Frame.work laptops nowadays, but they're also slightly larger (13.5" I think).
Charlie Stross
@dymaxion Strong rec: some Chinese vendors are carving out a really neat mini-ultrabook niche: eg. the One Netbook One Mix 4 or the (chonkier, because it has game controllers built-in, but also 4G/LTE and upgradeable SSD and faster CPU/more memory options) GPD Win Max 2. (Both companies are well-established and these machines do the job, albeit battery life is no better than the 2016-vintage 12" Macbook, because Intel/AMD. Much faster, though.)
Eleanor Saitta
@cstross
Yeah, I assumed, as much as it's amusing to think of your sheer typing speed bogging the machine down. I'm very curious to see if there's going to be an answer on the wintel side — I've been in the ecosystem for ages for $/perf and service network reasons, but I'm starting to look across the aisle.
Charlie Stross
@dymaxion Seriously, I was writing a trilogy using Scrivener and it took *ages* (well, noticeable time) saving or compiling output documents. Also the single USB-C port and short battery life made using an external time machine drive problematic (even with SSD speeds and only a 512Gb internal SSD the first complete backup run often failed due to lack of battery capacity).
It was a great form factor. The 13" M2 Air feels just that little bit too big for a no-compromise go-everywhere machine.
Eleanor Saitta
@cstross
I know you write fast, but really?!
(Kidding, obviously)
pettter
@dymaxion @cstross Fully understandable, though n.b. that framework laptops actually do come with a windows installation, as far as I can tell. Not sure about worldwide next-day support options, though. @pluralistic
Eleanor Saitta
@cstross
Yeah, same reason for me sticking to windows. It's not great, bit I had to use it for work for a decade and now I've got 20 years of infrastructure built on it.
@pettter @pluralistic
Charlie Stross
@pettter @dymaxion @pluralistic I would love a Frame.work Hackintosh. But for now I'm sticking with Mac because I have a workflow that has evolved over 15-20 years bedded in and I rely on some apps that are unavailable or hard to get working on Linux.
pettter
@daveirving I've been a Linux user for the last 20 years and have no interest in going back, either. For me, things have worked "properly" more or less that entire time. At least as well as any of the times I've used other OSes.
Dave Irving
@cstross @pettter @dymaxion @pluralistic To be fair, very few things work properly on Linux. I acquired an iMac nearly
20 years ago, and have never looked back.
pettter
@daveirving Mm, well that's not a problem I've had for a long time. Mostly things Just Work.
Dave Irving
@pettter Yeah, I just got sick of the multiple headfucks when some vital library, of the correct microversion, for some software I wanted to install couldn't be found, either bundled with the particular Linux package I was currently dicking around with, or anywhere else on the intertubes.. That is not a problem on the Mac, despite its other limitations. (I spent most of the 1990s and a few years this millenium dealing with that shit.)
It made Microsoft's DLL Hell look (comparatively) like heaven.
GNU social JP is a social network, courtesy of GNU social JP管理人. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.2-dev, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.