It’s MacBook Pro announcement day, which immediately (for me) became MacBook Pro order day and Monterey/Xcode download day.
On the event itself
It felt tighter, with less filler and fewer overdone transitions, than the iPhone event. But this is a matter of personal taste, of course, and I suppose that I was more interested in this one’s subject matter.
On Monterey and Xcode and TimeStory
We now have a release date for Monterey and release candidates for both it and Xcode. I can finally prepare and submit V2.7 of TimeStory, which has been roughly feature-complete for some time now. This is the first time I’ve ever tried to tie a feature release to Apple’s roadmap (namely, Shortcuts support), and although I mistimed things a bit so that I ended up in a long holding pattern after 2.6 (notice that the last release was “2.6.5”), I’ll be able to hit day one as planned!
On the new Macs
- I’m excited about their expected performance and low power draw. I’m noticing how hard my 2018 i7 is blasting its fan while compiling as I type this on my iPad.
- Why can’t I have color, Apple? Grey and silver are the beige of the 21st century. If you refuse to let us have real iMac-style colors, just pick an iPhone Pro color (midnight or Pacific blue or whatever). You even teased me today by giving us color HomePods!
- “M1 Pro” is a much better name than the rumored “M1X”. No comment on “M1 Max”.
- Full-size Escape and function keys are coming! I thought the Touch Bar was a worthy experiment overall, although I’ve always disliked the loss of the Escape key. But several years in, I still never use it for anything that couldn’t be a keyboard shortcut, and I still bump it accidentally all the time. So now I get to close out my Touch Bar to-do for TimeStory, having never even read an API document. Nice.
- I like the new rounded case design. I don’t like the sharp edges on my current 2018 MBP, and I think they’re to blame for some damage at the bottom of some of my T-shirts from coding on my lap.
- The notch rumors bothered me at first. But seeing it in action, I think I’m happy with the screen-size tradeoff. I do run some apps with enough top-level menus that I suspect there will be a collision there (Xcode, for one), and I have a lot of menu-bar apps. (And I use Bartender; I wonder how big an impact this will be on that app?)
- MagSafe is back, and best of all, it’s just a USB-C-to-MagSafe cable, so I can still use other power bricks.
- The SD card slot makes me happy. I rarely use my Fuji camera, and it’s been some time since I’ve prepared a microSD boot image for an embedded board, but I like knowing I can easily do both again.