Tag: Marco Arment

The best laptop ever made

The best laptop ever made – Marco.org (marco.org)

Apple has made many great laptops, but the 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro (2012–2015) is the epitome of usefulness, elegance, practicality, and power for an overall package that still hasn’t been (and may never be) surpassed.

I think this reads like a requiem to a lost loved one.

I recently returned to the 2015 15-inch MacBook Pro after a year away.

Apple still sells this model, brand new, just limited to the integrated-only GPU option (which I prefer as a non-gamer for its battery, heat, and longevity advantages), but I got mine lightly used for over $1000 less.

I thought it would feel like a downgrade, or like going back in time. I feared that it would feel thick, heavy, and cumbersome. I expected it to just look impossibly old.

It didn’t.

It feels as delightful as when I first got one in 2012. It’s fast, capable, and reliable. It gracefully does what I need it to do. It’s barely heavier or thicker, and I got to remove so many accessories from my travel bag that I think I’m actually coming out ahead.

It feels like a professional tool, made by people who love and need computers, at the top of their game.

It’s designed for us, rather than asking us to adapt ourselves to it.

It helps us perform our work, rather than adding to our workload.

This is the peak. This is the best laptop that has ever existed.

I hope it’s not the best laptop that will ever exist.

I'm not a big laptop user. I prefer my Mac to have the largest screen possible; 13" and 15" feels cramped. But if I were a laptop person, Marco has just sold me on the 2015 Retina MacBook Pro. Click the link above to read Marco's post. Photo by Thomas Wong on Unsplash

The Developer's Dystopian Future

The Developer's Dystopian Future by Ed FinklerEd Finkler

I think about how I used to fill my time with coding. So much coding. I was willing to dive so deep into a library or framework or technology to learn it.

My tolerance for learning curves grows smaller every day. New technologies, once exciting for the sake of newness, now seem like hassles. I’m less and less tolerant of hokey marketing filled with superlatives. I value stability and clarity.

.....

I’m scared that either the job “web developer” is outpacing me, or my skills are atrophying.

Marco Arment links to developer Ed Finkler who is ageing and finding that keeping up with every flashy shiny new language and development framework is just exhausting and no longer interesting.

I’m almost 48 — Marco and Ed are most likely much younger — and as a former1 web developer I’m already living into my own dystopian future. I haven’t a clue about Ruby on Rails or Scala.  I dislike the formatting cage of Python and I barely know (or used) Objective C and Java.  I absolutely hate C.

But.   I’m going to try to learn the Swift language and the Node.js framework. I’m going to leverage my other language skills in Perl, PHP and JavaScript.

Then I’m going to learn how to break code.

Because the application layer is where the black hackers and criminals have gone.   The future will be filled with (more) data piracy and breaches, and cyber attacks.  So I’m learning how to break the code and start a new future.

I still call myself a web developer but the technologies have rapidly outpaced my motivation. But I have a plan.

Posted via Desktop Publishing Machine

  1. I still code.  I just don’t get paid to do it. ↩

Google Blindness

I object to a huge, creepy advertising company having that much access to me and my data, I think it’s unwise to use many proprietary, hard-to-replace services in such important roles, and I think it’s downright foolish to tie that much of your data and functionality into proprietary services run by one company in one account that sometimes gets disabled permanently with no warning, no recourse, and no support.Marco Arment