While migrating saved blog posts in 2020, I came across this one; it is not currently on my old Blogger blog and I’m not sure if it ever was.
Regarding Apple’s problems, I’m just going to throw out some ideas. This is from a music producer/home studio perspective.
I would really, really like to buy a Mac Mini with an SSD. I’ve wanted one for years, for recording, because they are already very quiet, and without a spinning drive they would be even quieter. You can’t order one. Now, I have taken apart Mac Mini boxes and done substantial modifications and upgrades, but they are tricky and delicate to open up, more like laptops than desktops, so that kind of upgrade is something I would prefer to leave to Apple… but they won’t do it.
The basic Mac Mini ships with 4GB of RAM. In 2016.
I’d consider a MacBook, but they are much more expensive and they have only that one USB-C port, which means I would need some awkward outboard gear just to plug it in to both power and an audio interface.
There’s the MacBook Pro line, but I’m not really a fan of the freaky new “force click” TrackPad. It seems like a Jedi mind trick. And of course with the Pro line, we’re starting to get into serious money.
I’d like to say I’ll just buy a ThinkPad or a Linux laptop, but I’ve used a lot of the recent ones and, compared to the older ones, the recent ones just have terrible hardware quality. Really terrible. So I guess I’m back to building a PC from components.
It is almost impossible to find iPods on the Apple home page. One might conclude they no longer make iPods. If you go to “Music” it is a big thing primarily about their music service. 90% of the way down the screen there’s a thing about the iPod.
The nano tops off at 16 GB. The shuffle tops out at 2 GB. In 2016. What do flash drives go for, these days?
In other words, “HEY! I just found out that Apple is still selling an iPod that holds 2 gigs. HAHAHA!”
The Touch costs $400 for 128 GB of storage and those things are awkward; it’s kind of neat that they have Wi-Fi, but the screen is an awkward form factor and they get terrible battery life.
Let’s say I just wanted to put as much of my music collection as possible on a handheld device with a long battery life. The best choice is actually to buy a refurbished iPod Classic on eBay. In fact, the highest-capacity iPods Apple ever made, the classic 6Th gen, maxed out at 160 GB in 2007 and were discontinued in 2014.
Maybe I should find a Zune. Is the Zune still a thing?
Well, thank goodness the Apple Watch is front and center on the Apple home page! Yeah… I’ve got a sense that they aren’t actually doing anything to appeal to me as a customer and haven’t been for some time. It makes some sense when you consider how much of their revenue comes from iPhone sales. But it seems like, I dunno, computers would be a nice thing to be able to buy from a computer company.