A Pre-Spring Update

It’s already March 2025, though that doesn’t come as much of a shock, now I have the gregorian calendar understood for the most part. Weeks tick by, months pass, but what can erally catch you out are the years. I notice this most when powering up some old electronics (of which I have many), and I’ll set the time, day, month, and then… oh… I have to cycle through 20+ ticks to get to 2025. This most recently happened when I resurrected my original iPod (cleverly named miPod) and scrolled from 2000 to 2025. The PSP was a similar affair. Funnier still, is when writing the date I am reminded of my time in school, where all throughout the first two weeks of January I’d had to continually correct myself or rub-out the year. I write much less frequently now than I did in school, of course, so there’s a bit of lag.

What’s new? Well, Apple have released the MacBook Air with M4 chip, which looks mighty tempting. I have the M4 iPad Pro 13” which is a great device in many ways—it’s very well made, has fantastic battery life, very good pen-support with the latest Apple Pencil, and is powerful enough to edit my 64 MP photos from the Sony A7CR with ease. With the Magic Keyboard attached, it gives some “laptop vibes”. But, as many online will tell you, it truly is limited by iPadOS. Stage manager gives a bit of the feeling of a proper OS, and the Files app is far better than 10 years ago (did it even exist then?), but the experience is still lacking, and limiting. One thing that does make it feel like a laptop is its weight—coming in at over 1 kg with the Magic Keyboard attached makes this something of a limiting factor when travelling. You find you don’t really want to take it with you at all. Without the keyboard it’s far lighter (the keyboard is very nice and much better than the one I am using right now), but then it’s just a giant tablet, and how do I use that? One reason was for photo editng, which I do, but in truth I can use a laptop for this just fine, and then I wouldn’t need to bugger about with Adobe’s weird cloud syncing approach to Lightroom.

I write this post on a very underpowered and nearly-decade old laptop, the MacBook Retina 12”. You know its screen size from its name, and it weighs under a kilo. It has MacOS Ventura (13.7.4), 8GB RAM, i5 Processor, and a 256 GB SSD. This little beasty is such a nice little computer, but it’s basically a netbook (remember them?). The new MacBook Air M4 is heavier (so I guess the 12” MacBook is Helium) at 1.24 KG which is not insignificant. This is actally the same as my 13” iPad Pro M4 with magic keyboard. The keyboard however is fantastic, and backlit. It’s a joy to write on. But this heavy weight — therein lies the conundrum. It’s the same weight as a laptop.

You do have still have to think. AI will not think for you. ChatGPT gets things wrong all the time.

So which is better? Depends what you want to do, I suppose. There are a million reviews on YouTube and online, but the short story is that iPadOS is full of frustrations, and MacOS (or rather the hardware) only lacks eSIM support and touchscreen or pen input. How important are they? Not very. The only time that you want to use the pencil is for notes, which is fun. I was thinking to get a paper-like screen for the iPad to improve the writing feel, but I’ve not done it yet. I want to continue my German studies and Japanese studies, but I’m not yet feeling it on the iPad for some reason. It’s good for Lightroom, where I have a few months of subscription left, so I will keep editing photos on there for sure.

But at the time of writing, I think a MacBook Air M4 will become my primary machine, and I’ll do away with the Lightroom subscription. I would also then probably prefer either the 11” iPad or try something new with an iPad mini (which I’ve never had). Something of a bigger pain in the arse is that I went to the effort of writing a Apple Shortcut to allow me to use the “Bear” app to write blog posts on the iPad with in-line Lightroom images to streamline the blog flow, but in the end I am not sure what it gives me over just using a Mac for all this and stop trying to make other devices do other things.

Until soon.