Mac Neo vs Mac Air vs Mac Pro - It's The Storage

My trusty Intel Air is the early 2015 version, so it is at least eleven years old and with 4GB of RAM is not suitable for upgrading from OS X Catalina. Software upgrades are a thing of the past as almost everything requires at least OS X 12 or later. What I have still works, but when the Apple website won't run on the Safari version Catalina supports, it's time to upgrade.

What do I need it for? Running the latest browser versions; light editing of small numbers of photographs; writing in Notes and TeXShop; opening and light editing of spreadsheets from National Statistics; running utilities like HX Edit and Focusrite Control; and Apple Music, Sonos and Qobuz. Those utilities run just fine on my old Air. I am never going to do AI, gaming, video editing, RAW processing, music production or anything that needs serious machinery, and if I do, there will be a solid business reason behind it that will probably justify buying a suitable laptop.

The nice man in the Covent Garden Apple Store said that a) if I did need a Macbook Pro (starting at £1,999), I would already know I did; b) if I promised to stay in my low-compute mode, the Neo (£799 for 512GB) would be just fine, c) but the moment I stepped into higher-Compute mode, I would curse myself for not getting the Air (starting at £1,299).

He's right about the Pro. 14" screen, 16GB RAM, 1TB storage, three Thunderbolt 4 ports, MagSafe, headphone jack, HDMI port and SDXC card slot, latest Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, for £1,999. The Pro has fans for cooling and other such touches. That matters, because modern chips are designed to slow down when they get hot, and if your laptop is how you make money, you don't want it doing that. You're not paying for the specifications, you're paying for productivity. That's not me. Unless I just want to treat myself.

The base-model M5 Air is a full-featured laptop. Sky-blue for preference. 512GB storage, 13" screen, 16GB RAM, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, MagSafe, headphone jack and the latest Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, for £1,299. It's way more than I need, but that's not a reason for not getting one.

The Neo is. It is a considerable upgrade over my Intel Air, which is what I am looking for. A nice Indigo Neo with 8GB RAM, 512GB storage, A18 Pro chip, 1 USB-C 3.2 and 1 USB-C 2 port, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and 512GB storage. It lacks some of the refinements of the Air, but none that I will ever use or miss.

The use-issue is not performance, but storage. How much, and how reliable is it?

Let's do "how much" first. My usage is roughly: Photos Library: 17GB; CD rips and downloads: 33GB; iCloud: 1.1GB on drive; Other: 1 GB. Apps, Mac OS, OS 'Other' and my ~/Library come to about 35GB. An OS update can need 3-4GB plus working space while it is running. Apps bloat over time; and some apps give themselves as much cache as they can get, often without asking, because it reduces their streaming costs. AI will want lots of RAM and memory-swap if you don't give it enough, so allow 8GB for that; while the EU and UK Government will be installing client-side snooping and heaven knows what-all else in the near future. Say 15GB free at all times just for the system to work properly, and another 5GB for app cacheing. That comes to 107GB, 55GB of which is for operations.

I will not be ripping or downloading any more CDs, and text takes minimal amounts of storage. The future space-hog is Photos. I shoot JPEG when I get out at all. That 14GB Library is about 1,000 pictures taken and kept over the course of 17 years (! I said I don't get out much). My shooting ratio is about 12:1, so in a regular year I will take about 750 pictures occupying 15GB at current average size. Over a 5-year period, that's 75GB and easily held on a 512GB drive. Even if I went out twice as much, it would not cause a problem.

So the 512GB Neo it is.

I get away with this because I do not take lots of pictures of my family, cats, sailing boat, holidays and the like, and I don't take hundreds of RAW files, let alone 4K video, nor do I want to run lots of AI tweaks, and I have given up any ideas of producing music tracks. If wanted to do any of that, I would get the M5 Air, and look at external SSD drives vs internal storage upgrades.

To no-one's surprise I have been thinking about this for a while. The answer kept coming out as the M5 Air, whereas my intuition said the Neo was fine. It wasn't until I realised that I was looking to upgrade an 11-year old laptop, not a more recent one, that the arguments changed. When I looked at how much storage the photos would take that I realised what my intuition had grasped that maybe I didn't want to recognise: photography is not even a once-a-week hobby for me. Especially when it gets too damn hot.

Even New PRS Guitars Need Attention From A Tech

Contrary to Paul Reed Smith's claim in numerous interviews, you cannot walk into any guitar shop, pick up any PRS SE and play it on stage that night. It will need a going-over by a tech. Maybe the American guitars are that good, but the SE's are not. The same is true of Fender, Gibson, Epiphone, Squier, or any other guitar costing less than £1,000. You may be lucky, but it would be easier to take it straight to a good guitar tech to look over and sort out the obvious issues.

Over the last not quite four years (seems much longer) I have bought five guitars - traded one - one cheap electronic amp (the Boss Katana) and one not-so-cheap valve amp (the Fender Princeton Reverb 65 Reissue). Here's the schedule of repairs.

The Boss Katana (from GuitarGuitar, Epsom) didn't need any work. It's a PCB and electronic (aside from the final power amp stage), and so can be made to high standards out of the box, and quality control can be digital, and hence cheap.

The Fender Princeton '65 (from GuitarGuitar, Epsom) needed the pre-amp valves replacing- after only eight months. They got it back to me in a week, and I think it sounds better than it did when I bought it.

The first guitar was the Epiphone Les Paul (from GuitarGuitar, Epsom). It needed something doing to the electrics, probably the jack socket, and the tech lowered the action and polished the frets while he was at it.

The second is the PRS McCarty 594 SE (from GuitarGuitar, Epsom). That needed a dry solder joint on one of the tone pots fixing, and later on a decent jack socket, a little neck relief and some work on the nut to correct the playability and intonation of the G string.

The third is the Squier Paranormal Telecaster (from Regent Sounds, Denmark St). That needed a decent jack socket and a better selector switch. Upgrading the pick-ups was my little indulgence.

The fourth is the Fender Vintera Mustang (from Sell Us Your Guitar via Reverb). That came with the tremolo system so badly set-up, the bridge was at an angle to the body and the adjustment screws were cross-threaded. My tech sorted all that out, polished the frets, relieved the neck and oiled a dry fretboard.

The last is the PRS Silver Sky SE(*) (from Wildwire Guitars via Reverb). As delivered the tremolo was locked down and there was some string buzz towards the upper frets. My tech unlocked and adjusted the trem, watered and fed the fretboard, polished the frets, adjusted the nut, and replaced the penny-pinching jacket socket with a proper Switchgear one.

This reminds me of what cars used to be in the 1960's and 70's - there would always be something that needed fixing and usually something that rattled. Automakers spent millions upon millions on robot automation assembly to get rid of those problems. Ordinary cars today are built to standards that were engineers' pipe dreams in the 1960's. Today's guitars are built to the same standards as yesterday's cars. The bodies are cut by CNC routers, and the pickups are wound by CNC winders, all the other parts are made in the same way they would have been back in 1960, and all are assembled by hand. A lot of guitars get sold each year, but not enough to justify the kind of investment that would be needed to make a robot assembler and installer for the wiring loom. If that was even possible.

A basic set-up from a tech costs around £50 - £100 depending on what needed doing. It's worth the money.

Everything you have heard about the Silver Sky SE is true. It sounds like you dreamed a Strat should sound like, plays like a dream (now) and Wildwire had one that weighed just over 7lbs. The Mustang could easily become my default guitar: the Mustang neck pickup should be right up there with the Telecaster neck pickup as something legendary. And it weighs 7lbs. Whereas the Paranormal weighs 8.5lbs, but sounds and plays like it should. The 594SE also weighs 7lbs, plays really well and has a lovely round, thick jazzy neck sound, and a snarly bridge tone - at least that's how I have it dialled in.

Props to Andy at Richmond Guitar Workshop for sorting all these things out. Support your local tech.

(*) Yes, I know I said recently that Strats were not cool and I couldn't see myself playing one. But you see, Silver Skys are not Strats. It's the headstock. Makes all the difference. Also it has three single-coil pickups and a five-way switch, whereas Strats have a five-way switch and three single-coil pickups, which is entirely different. And Guitar Tube says that Silver Skys are not Strats, so it must be true.

RAF Museum, Colidale - Part One

I will have a longer post about taking photographs at the RAF Museum, Colindale, illustrated by shots that didn't work out so well. When the weather allows my brain to run at more than 70% capacity: I have a mid-1950's brain that did not come with enough cooling for these tropical temperatures. Anyway, here are some that I think work okay.

Top down: Messerschmidt 109; Gloucester Meteor; Jet Provost; Provost, Meteor, AN Other; Fokker D VII. 
 

Centrepoint Close-Up

 

It's Centrepoint of course, and therefore at the junction of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street, and throughly iconic. But in this picture, you have to know the building to know that. Otherwise it's some random 1960's concrete office block with some random glass geometric gadget in front of it. It's a neat picture, but I'm not trying to exploit the iconicity? iconicness? of Centre Point. In fact, I'm hiding it. A lot of my photos do that: I don't take pictures of iconic things, partly because "everyone does" and partly because the Iconic Thing distracts from the composition and the picture. If that makes sense. 

Saffron Hill

Oh darn tootin' amma blame the weather. It's to do with Europe being off the English coast or something like that, I blame the bureaucrats in Brussels. Or the CCP. Or The Russians. Or the Democratic Party. Or maybe all of them, since they all meet secretly in Mae's Cafe, Brighton, every other month on the third Saturday for a full English and to hatch a new round of conspiracies. They speak in Really Bad International English, which Mae speaks fluently, and she passes on what she can make out of their chatter to me and the editor of the Financial Times, who ignores it and then wonders why he has the feeling he's already heard about whatever it is when it happens. She used to tell the editor of The Economist, but they wrote about what the leaders should be doing. Because The Economist can run the world so much better than anyone else except the BBC. Mae never tells the BBC because she knows the BBC is the propaganda branch of the Security Services when it isn't being the media wing of Right-Thinking-People, or perhaps Left-Thinking-People, or maybe People-With-Their-Heads-Up-Their....

Moving along...

This is looking down Saffron Hill, near Farringdon, and it took me a while to see that it's actually a good picture.

The Ironmonger Est 1835

I do like a photograph of a shop sign. Other people may like snapping celebrities, or pigeons, or cats, or passers-by scratching their ears, or other such cutsie things, but I like a shop sign. So here is one.

Central London from Parliament Hill

This year's photography condition is that I have to use the 90mm (135mm equivalent) prime lens that I splurged for second-hand in spring. It takes shots like this, and there is almost no zooming-by-cropping. I like shots of Distant Things (as opposed to things-in-the-distance) and that lens does it about the way I see the scene. So score one with this...