There wasn’t a whole lot of excitement at our house this weekend as both kids were at their respective other parent’s houses and, really, there isn’t a whole lot worth noting in tech news unless you’d like to read another unexciting rundown of all of the pre-Black Friday deals in hopes of getting you to click through an affiliate link. Blah blah blah.
There were a couple things that did spring to mind when I thought about making a whiskey fueled Sunday night post though. The major one is my experience with the newest macOS (I feel like an idiot each and every time I type that) release. Right now I’m typing this up on a 13″ MacBook Pro running Big Sur and despite being on a less than stellar hardware version (quad core i7 with 16G of RAM) it feels pretty snappy but that’s also because it isn’t doing very much of anything other than running Chrome with way too many open tabs and Mars Edit which is the application I’m writing this entry in right now. I’m also in bed with just the laptop on my lap (this is not typical computer usage for me) and all is well.
On my other MacBook Pro with an i9 processor and 32G of RAM everything is a complete shit show. I also run two large monitors on my desk (36″ and 32″), a mechanical keyboard, and always always a Logitech MX Ergo trackball mouse that keeps my shoulder from attempting to kill me. I also do crazy things like take advantage of my gigabit internet by using a wired connection. This crazy, wild collection of hardware that none of my Linux machines has the slightest bit of trouble running harmoniously is giving the other machine continous breakdowns. I’ve switched out both the USB-C hubs and even switched over to a wired mouse without a trackball to try to isolate what the fuck is causing $2.5K of vastly overpriced hardware to completely lose its marbles. What I’ve found is that it’s entirely due to the fact that I expect my mouse to track quickly over two spacious monitors. My mouse stutters, freezes, and sometimes just locks up until I move it with the trackpad and others leave it paralyzed until I log out and back in again or reboot. It’s frustrating to a point where I don’t even want to use that machine at all anymore. Apparently this is somehow related to polling frequency of the mouse being too high with the fanboys recommending switching to a win modem Magic Mouse which doesn’t in any way work for me since I’m not 23 years old and need to preserve what little connective tissue is left in my wrists and shoulder. I’m feeling pretty over the whole free beta tester role and have just set aside the recent MBP and am running the commodity Dell laptop running Arch which handles everything magnificently. It’s frustrating and I wish it were easier to downgrade the OS version without having a Time Machine backup to lean on. Guess my brief resurgence in Apple stuff is over. Not a huge surprise.