David ArtissThe amazing new MacBook Pro’s are here and for reasons that I find bizarre, the notch at the top seems to be attracted all the attention.
Not the blistering performance. Not the amazing new screen quality. Or the return of a MagSafe power connector and numerous useful ports.
But a notch.
At Automattic, you get to change your work laptop after 18 months. The old one can be bought by yourself or your family or friends, or you send it for resell. You then spec your own replacement and get it ordered. It’s an Apple, unless you have a good reason for choosing differently.
At my previous employer, they had a policy of doing it every 5 years. It was usually 7. Even by 5 years, it’s slow and buggy and really impacted your work capability.
Anyway, once you’ve been at the company for 4 years, you get a special “anniversary” laptop (assuming you order a laptop) – this goes away to a third party company to have one of the company logos (you choose which one) etched into the lid, with a backlight put behind it, much like the old Apple Mac lids of yore. When it’s due for replacement 18 months later, it’s yours to keep.
I had the fortune to be asked yesterday to take part in this week’s live recording of the PC Pro podcast, during which I reviewed the iPhone 13 Pro.
The conclusion – it’s a hot phone with relatively iterative updates, a lot of which I’m not bothered about. Essentially, if you have a recent iPhone, it’s probably not worth upgrading for most people.
It was during this that Jon Honeyball argued that these features aren’t meant for the masses, as that’s why this is a “Pro” phone – if those professional features aren’t something I need, why not buy the standard iPhone model?
And that got me thinking.
The new iPhone 13 became available yesterday and, for the first time, I was in the queue to get one. I’m on the iPhone Upgrade Programme, which means I get a sparkly new one each year (technically, every 11 months). This year’s iPhone launched early so I was due for a new phone on… Thursday. Great timing.
I was excited for Safari implementing tab groups in MacOS. Other browsers have add-ons for easy ways to group and save tabs but I couldn’t find anything suitable for Apple’s browser.
Instead, I have such groups saved in bookmark folders – Safari then gives you an option to open all links within a folder, which works as an equivalent, albeit clumsy.
But, yeah, the execution.
