David Pierce on the iPad at 10

David Pierce writing at The Verge:

I’ve been using the latest Pro as my go-to laptop for a few weeks now, just to see what all this change adds up to, and I’m shocked at how close this thing is to a truly all-purpose computer. There are the obvious things, like built-in cellular connectivity and the Apple Pencil, that give the Pro powers the Mac doesn’t have. The mix of touch and trackpad is genuinely great, too; I’m constantly back and forth to the screen, scrolling or swiping with the trackpad but doing finer and more complex things with my hands. And there’s just no replacing the fact that you can turn on a movie, pick up the screen, and flop back on the couch. Add in the solid speakers, good camera, and great battery life, and there’s a lot I like about life with the iPad. If you do creative work of any kind — and more and more people do — it’s a uniquely useful device.

Which makes it all the more annoying every time you run into some totally unnecessary system limitation. There are still a lot of those. Apple’s laptops are allowed to run any app, not just the ones in the App Store. They can interact with more accessories. They can access virtually everything about the system through the Terminal. They can run better browsers. Utility apps I rely on to make my computing life easier, like Raycast and Better Touch Tool, just don’t exist the same way on the iPad. There’s almost nothing the Mac straight-up won’t let you do, but the iPad is full of limitations. They’ve been there for so long, and are so glaring, that we’ve been mad about them in reviews since at least 2018. Apple saw them as a feature, not a bug.

Even with iPadOS 26, I still find multitasking with the iPad hugely cumbersome, and I just think to myself “ugh, I should just grab my Mac.” I have a iPad Air with the A14 SoC, the last iPad Air before the transition to M-series chips. 5+ years later, it’s fine. It does the multi-tasking things in iPad OS 26. However, in the last 6 months, I’ve found myself reliably just using my M1 Pro MacBook Pro. Perhaps it’s for the larger real estate; perhaps it’s that the M1 Pro has held up better than the A14 over time. In any case, the I just consistently feel that I’m hitting walls on that iPad.

Opinion: Let Oregon kids ride Class 1 e-bikes – BikePortland

As a resident and regular biker of and within Portland, I am a regular reader of BikePortland. Jonathan recently published this piece regarding Oregons restrictions on minors using e-bikes. Oregon, and likely the country, needs to make some common-sense guidelines for this sort of micro-transit. Regulating bikes by class, setting laws, and holding parents responsible is likely the best way forward.

Boring Is What We Wanted – 512 Pixels

Stephen Hackett, writing at 512 Pixels, with a wonderful retort to the conventional wisdom that the M5 Macs released last week were “boring”. Good! The Mac regularly getting attention and regularly building ~10-15% improvements year over year means that any time you need to upgrade a Mac (whether by choice or not), you’re going to get something better than you last had.

Unsaid in his post is how impressive this collaboration between Apple and TMSC is. It’s not *just* Apple that are squeezing regular YoY upgrades. TMSC is similarly executing.

“Apocryphal Inventions,” an exploration of Generative AI — Jonathan Hoefler

Theres a lot to be said about how generative AI will affect art and artists, but this is a really neat project.

 

The objects in the Apocryphal Inventions series are technical chimeras, intentional misdirections coaxed from the generative AI platform Midjourney. Instead of iterating on the system’s early drafts to create ever more accurate renderings of real-world objects, creator Jonathan Hoefler subverted the system to refine and intensify its most intriguing misunderstandings, pushing the software to create beguiling, aestheticized nonsense. Some images have been retouched to make them more plausible; others have been left intact, appearing exactly as generated by the software. The accompanying descriptions, written by the author, offer fictitious backstories rooted in historical fact, which suggest how each of these inventions might have come to be.

These images represent some of AI’s most intriguing answers to confounding questions — an inversion of the more urgent debate, in which it is humanity that must confront the difficult and existential questions posed by artificial intelligence.

 

My New-To-Me Mac Mini

Buy Mac mini - Apple

I had been kicking around the idea of a “Family” Mac for a few reasons:

( 1 ) I’ve wanted some central Mac that could house my entire photo library and back it up to my NAS

( 2 ) A family member has a Windows laptop is that is nearly dead, and is Mac-curious. There is a high likelihood that I will be the tech support for their new laptop, so I have a vested interested in ensuring they move to a Mac

(3) My wife really loves her M4 iPad Pro, so much so that she hardly uses her MacBook anymore. She does need a Mac from time to time, but it is very infrequent.

This provided an interesting opportunity: give my wife’s MacBook Pro to the Mac-curious family member, and buy us a Mac mini for the family. This way, I could set up my wife’s iPad to access the Mac mini, so that she would have access to a Mac when she needs it. I would also have a desktop Mac I could use when at my desk, or for any automations, and still have my M1 Pro MacBook Pro for while I’m around the house or on the go.

The introductory model for the Mac mini has 256 GB storage, 16 GB RAM, and an M4, and while it’s a bargain for its $599 price, it is insufficient for my needs:

( 1 ) I wanted a new Mac that was clearly an upgrade relative to my existing M1 pro MacBook Pro (otherwise, why would I use it?)

( 2 ) I needed enough internal storage to house all my data and photos.

( 3 ) I wanted enough RAM that I wouldn’t ever push the device into using swap memory.

Processor

The Mac mini can be configured with either an M4 or an M4 Pro chip. To decide between the two, I compared GeekBench 6 scores back to my M1 Pro MacBook Pro:

CleanShot 2025-11-11 at 14.30.21.

M4 Pro it would be.

Storage:

I have about 1.1 TB of data in iCloud between my documents, back-ups, and photos. Upgrading to a 2 TB internal drive was a no-brainer, especially when the price gap between 2 TB and 4 TB is an additional $600.

RAM:

This is where I splurged. I was, and am, tired of being RAM limited on my laptop. I usually only hit a clear slow-down when I’m editing photos on my MacBook Pro, but I regularly see it using swap. With an M4 Pro, you have choices between 24, 48, and 64 GBs of RAM. I wanted to at least double the RAM on my laptop, but ideally this machine will last us 5+ years and not start moving to swap memory. 64 GB – no regrets.

Accessories:

I wanted a new monitor to go with the new desktop. At work, I have three monitors: one positioned centrally in landscape, flanked by two portrait monitors on either side. I already had two 27” HP Z27n monitors, and woot.com had a great sale on a Samsung M80 32” monitor. I’ve just re-created my set-up at work at home. This monitor technically falls into “The Bad Zone” for Mac monitors, but it’s fine.

Lastly, I set up Screens Connect and bought a subscription to Screens 5 for the family. This way both my wife and I can access the Mac mini remotely from our preferred devices.

I did hunt for a refurbished model on Apples site for the better part of a month, and I bought the configuration described above: M4 Pro, 2 TB SSD, 64 GB of RAM. The thing is so fast. I’ve seldom seen my memory usage above 20% so far, with the lone exception being when I selected every application in my application folder and hit enter.