Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

Tag: apple

  • Ode to a 2020 MacBook Pro

    Time for another one of these posts. This upgrade is not as catastrophic as a battery explosion like last time. It does have a slightly dumb story to it, though. So yesterday, I was supposed to fly to New Orleans. If you’ve known me for a few years, you know Louisiana is one of the…

  • Book layouts in Apple Pages

    I do my book layouts in Apple Pages. Yes, I should be using InDesign. No, I don’t want to pay $35/month for something I use once a year. Apple Pages worked okay for layouts until version 5.0 came out in 2013, when they tried making the OSX and iOS versions have parity with each other,…

  • Day 167

    I don’t really know how many days into the lockdown we are. I suppose I could figure it out. I also suppose I could update more here, instead of just when something breaks. But there’s not a lot otherwise going on. So remember last year when my iPhone 8 blew up? Almost exactly a year…

  • Ode to a 2017 MacBook Pro

    So I was in a meeting yesterday, looking over at my Mac, and the lid didn’t seem to be closed all the way. My only thought was the usual “Apple doesn’t make them like they used to” and I ignored it. A few hours later, at the end of my work day, I went to…

  • iPhone grenade; Sundays; the life and death of long reads, etc

    This week’s excitement was that my iPhone 8 blew up after about a year and a half of service. I’d noticed a bit ago that the 3D touch feature wasn’t consistently working, especially on the left side of the screen, but chalked it off to the fact that iOS has far too many tricky gestures…

  • Ode to a 2014 Retina MacBook Pro

    Well, it was time. The Retina MacBook Pro I bought in 2014 reached its retirement, and I got a new one. This one did not have a spectacular death or great failure, but it was getting up there, so I decided to swap it out now, while I could afford it. Two computers ago, the…

  • WordPerfect for Mac

    A stupid memory… I was thinking about how I used to love WordPerfect on the Classic Mac OS. It wasn’t a port of DOS WP 5.1; a different dev team wrote their own program, and the company called it WordPerfect, so it worked much faster. I always found it better than Word on the old…

  • New iPad

    Thanks to a generous gift card from Sarah for my birthday, I ended up at the Apple Store, upgrading my iPad again. I was really on the fence about upgrading at all, because there’s a rumor they will be updating in March, but there’s another rumor that there’s a massive 10nm chip shortage that’s going…

  • The iCloud Music Library Different Version of a Song Thing

    I’ve been having some odd problems with iCloud Music LIbrary and Apple Music. Here’s a description and walkthrough of the issue, partly so I won’t forget it in six months when something completely different doesn’t go sideways, and partly so there’s a record of it somewhere on google, because googling on stuff like “iTunes different…

  • The Latest S

    Another two years have passed. My iPhone wouldn’t hold a charge more than half a day anymore, and I got annoyed at carrying an external battery charger everywhere. So this week, it was off to the Apple Store to trade in the old 5s for the new 6s. First things first: I do not understand…