Pondering

In a week, I’ll be preparing to fly to Croatia for a three-week vacation with my wife. I’m still considering several aspects of the trip. How much blogging should I do during this time? Should I stay quiet and focus entirely on my vacation and photography? What camera equipment should I bring? Should I bring my MacBook Air in addition to my iPad Pro?

I need to decide the right balance between being present in the moment and documenting the journey through my blog. While I enjoy sharing my experiences, I also want to fully immerse myself in the trip without the constant pressure of content creation. As for the camera gear, I’ll need to carefully assess what I’ll actually use versus what I might pack just in case. The MacBook Air could be helpful for editing photos on the go, but the iPad Pro is a more compact and convenient option. Ultimately, I want to travel light and focus on making the most of this vacation with my wife.

I still have a week to figure this out.

Pondering.

In a week, I’ll be preparing to fly to Croatia for a three-week vacation with my wife.

I’m still considering several aspects of the trip.

How much blogging should I do during this time?

Should I stay quiet and focus entirely on my vacation and photography?

What camera equipment should I bring?

Should I bring my MacBook Air in addition to my iPad Pro?

I need to decide the right balance between being present in the moment and documenting the journey through my blog.

While I enjoy sharing my experiences, I also want to fully immerse myself in the trip without the constant pressure of content creation.

As for the camera gear, I’ll need to carefully assess what I’ll actually use versus what I might pack just in case.

The MacBook Air could be helpful for editing photos on the go, but the iPad Pro is the more compact and convenient option.

Ultimately, I want to travel light and focus on making the most of this vacation with my wife.

I still have a week to figure this out.

Apple Private Cloud Compute Curiosities

Apple announced a significant development at this year’s WWDC: the creation of its own cloud infrastructure named “Private Cloud Compute” for securely handling certain Apple Intelligence requests. As an IT professional working in data center technologies, I have a few questions that remain unanswered even after watching John Gruber’s The Talk Show Live:

  1. What CPU is used in each server? I wonder if Apple is utilizing high-end versions of its Apple Silicon chips. It’s worth noting that there was no update to the Mac Studio this year. Is Apple diverting M3 Max or M3 Ultra production to build its Private Cloud Compute data centers (which currently feature 32 Neural Engine cores in the M2 Ultra)?

  2. What type of case design is Apple using for the servers? Are they modified versions of the Mac mini, or are they using a rack-mount variant of the Mac Studio?

  3. Is Apple deploying data centers only in the United States or across multiple continents? I suspect the latter, for the sake of redundancy and capacity.

I expect that sometime in the future, perhaps at WWDC 2025, Apple may reveal details about the first year of Apple Intelligence in a short video. We’ll have to wait and see.

Two Highly Different Approaches

Microsoft is recalling “Recall” after all, and this makes them look rather bad. This happens on the same week of Apple revealing Apple Intelligence which received a more positive set of reactions.

We are witnessing two different approaches to the challenge of intelligently integrating generative AI prowess to the base operating system. These two events couldn’t be more evocative of how different Apple and Microsoft strategy and culture are. Guess which approach I prefer? I’m excited for Apple Intelligence, but I appreciate the time it will take to make it right.

Referring to this post from MacStories’ Viticci, I might be living or coming from a different planet, but I do not want to block any of my sites from AI bot crawlers, none of them, even if it is from Google, OpenAI, Apple or even Meta. I want to embrace this new era while being critical to what is happening. More to come soon.

Two of my preferred visual things in iOS 181 is the colorful visual effect of Siri and the default wallpaper, which is also very nice. Siri animation is so relaxing and less intrusive than the big colorful ball. These are small changes but welcomed changes nonetheless.

  1. I’m not using iOS 18 yet. Should be later in the summer, late in August, I guess. ↩︎