Working from home at 25MHz: You could do worse than a Quadra 700 (even in 2020) | Ars Technica:

The '040 was a substantial upgrade over the '030 that had previously been used by Apple. It featured 1.2 million transistors, over four times as many as its predecessor. This processor increased the L1 cache size by a factor of eight to 4096 bytes, and it was the first 68k processor to have an on-board floating-point unit (FPU). While not without its drawbacks, the '040 processor was an obvious candidate for Apple's next line of premium workstations at the time. And this line would become known as “Quadra,” starting with the Quadra 700 and 900 models in late 1991.

In 1990-1991, I was working for an Apple authorized dealer. I remember the Quadra line, in particular, the 700. It was the most popular machine among desktop publisher. It was fast. I liked its vertical and boxy look. It was different. What is interesting is the description of the Motorola 68040 processor. Compare this to the Apple Silicon, it’s simply unbelievable. The M1 chip comes from an alien world.

Recently I spent more time than usual on YouTube for different reasons: to look at AirPods Max first impressions, to learn more about Synology DSM 7.0 beta, etc. After a while, it’s easy to see a trend that bugs me: design uniformity across the board. See the previous image gathers a few popular YouTubers channel content pages. They all look about the same or at least designed by the same designer. On top of that, there seems to be a trend where the weider you look, the better. When did that trend start?

During my digital assets cleanup this weekend as I’m preparing a move to Synology, I came across this screenshot of my iPad running iOS 6. Looking carefully to this image, it’s fascinating to see all the things we lost since then. First, many of those apps no longer exist. Second, design.

Enjoy in all its glory.

I use to keep a time of all the news and announcements emanating from Apple, Cupertino. It was fun but time-consuming. I failed to find a good use of it, so I stopped updating it. Maybe I should have continued, as a blogger, it could have been really useful.

At long last, Apple’s detailed maps is now available for Canada! Not only we get more details in maps and better driving directions, we also get guides and the look around which is, in my opinion, way better designed than Google’s street view. I wasn’t expected them but they are certainly nice bonuses! Detailed maps were first introduced in iOS 13, more than a year ago.

Now, if only we can get rid of COVID-19, I may start to use Maps more frequently. 😔

Ernie Smith writing on Tedium about the hackintosh necessity in a world with the M1 chip for the Mac:

”I hope, now that Apple has a chip architecture that doesn’t get in the way, it ramps up its industrial design … and more importantly, it reads the reviews and iterates more thoughtfully and consistently.”

That’s exactly what I’m hoping too. The iMac and the MacBook design in general were highly influenced by the thermal pressure the Intel chip was imposing. The next iMac design revision will certainly take advantage of the Apple Silicon low thermal dissipation and put Apple in a more creative mode when it comes to imagining what a desktop computer should be.

Now it’s official, Apple is no longer accepting blogs on their news platform, Apple News. I got my rejection mail today (read about my original submission). I understand Apple News as being a… news platform, yet I think Apple is missing an opportunity here. Why? One word: Substack. Another word: Medium. Apple could have done to the written space what they did for the audio world with podcasts. Apple could have created a special place on Apple News for individual writers, not only bloggers per se. This would have been a message of inclusion, diversity and openess. Instead, Apple is again sending a message about begin a walled garden, exclusion, elitism. Too bad.

Fridays are always slow, it seems. Are people simply taking time off social networks, blogs, etc.? Maybe. In any case, I want to send a “have a nice week-end” to my dear readers and followers. 👈🏻 I do have a lot on my plate for this week-end: writing, writing, writing. And some time off too.

Photo credit: Jonas Jacobsson / Unsplash.

I use Apple’s Notes app to jot some ideas, all the time. When the concept is clear in my head, I go ahead and select my tool for the next phase. In this case, it was Apple’s Keynote which proves to provide a quite capable environment for diagramming. The subject: how I process information that eventually will enable me to write blog posts. More details here.

Wanted to give a try to Lightroom CC on my new and still pure Mac mini (no Rosetta installed). Guess what? The creative cloud installer needs Rosetta as it is not yet native. I know, it’s no big deal, it will be fine. If that wasn’t enough, Adobe installers put a lot of things on your system that I don’t like. Then, I remembered about “Suspicious Package” utility which inspect an installer and show what it is actually doing. But, again, this software has yet to come in a universal binary. It will be hard to resist longer.