Hardware

I’ve always had great respect for Steve Wozniak, the tubby nerd who, in the eyes of those in the industry, has always been considered one step behind (if not more) his friend and Apple Computer co-founder, Steve Jobs. Without Steve Jobs’ commercial genius, Apple would never have become the giant it is today. Instead, it would have remained just another company selling personal computers of various shapes and functions in the 1980s, alongside the likes of Tandy, Sinclair, Commodore, Osborne, Atari, Compaq and many others.

It all started with Severance, the cult TV series that almost everyone liked. To promote the final episode of the second season, Apple launched a webpage showcasing the Lumon Terminal Pro, the computer used by Lumon Industries employees – a replica of a vintage Data General terminal (more images available here and here). This sparked a race among fans to own a keyboard inspired by that terminal.

– Source: Viktor Forgacs on Unsplash. The transition is complete: since a few days, all the computers I use for work are running on Apple Silicon ARM processors. This includes a Mac Studio M2 Ultra, which I’ve already talked about extensively and which sits on my office desk; a Mac Mini M1 with 16 GB RAM and 1 TB SSD – previously neglected on a shelf for reasons I won’t go into here – now in my home office; and a very basic MacBook Air M1 (just 8 GB RAM and 256 GB SSD, half the specs of my wife’s) for light use and when I’m on the go.

And here it is, the Mac Studio. I had to go through a long bureaucratic process to get it, but I finally managed, and now it’s right here in front of me. The first thing you notice is that the box is heavy, very heavy. The specs state that the Mac Studio is large and weighs about as much as three Mac Minis stacked on top of each other (19.7 x 19.7 x 9.5 cm^3 and 3.6 kg for the Mac Studio versus 19.7 x 19.7 x 3.6 cm^3 and 1.2 kg for the Mac Mini). I’ve never held three Mac Minis together, but the box gives a strong impression of solidity, which is definitely a positive for such an expensive device.

– Source: The London Standard. Jonathan “Jony” Ive, after thirty years, is leaving Apple to start his own company, LoveFrom, which will have Apple as its first client. The news has filled tech (and non-tech) headlines worldwide for days (as you can read here, here, and here). Almost everyone, after overcoming the surprise of the announcement, expressed hope that the collaboration between the English knight1 and the California-based company could continue just as before.