MacBook time
So, I finally bit the bullet. I bought myself an M5 MacBook Air. Friends will be unsurprised, it’s been on the mind for a while. This is also my first proper Mac that I’ll be owning too – before this I relied a lot on Hackintosh since the early 2010s which for modern use was found dead in a ditch sometime last year or this year following the announcement that Tahoe was the last version to support Intel.
My main blocker was, what the hell would I do with it? I had some tasks I wanted to do that I could only do on a Mac due to the apps available there, such as video editing with Final Cut. However, I was able to internalise it that it wasn’t wrong to just want one, so I went for the base model (but with the bigger screen), and the reasons started coming up soon after I placed my order, as if it unlocked a bunch of memories, namely:
- The Mac ecosystem having a lot of great apps – both free and paid – and some of my apps are cross-platform in the Apple ecosystem and support Mac, such as Mona (a Mastodon client) and Things (a to-do list app), not to mention actually cross-platform apps like Obsidian and Mac Catalyst enabling iPad apps to work on Mac.
- As stated in my post about my Apple journey I feel like the window management in macOS will suit me more than on Windows, where I’ve been stacking windows on one desktop and not making as much use of virtual desktops as I’d liked. On Mac, I can just have one or two windows in a full-screen and be anchored and therefore focused on a specific task. It’s similar to Niri, except here I have none of the jankiness and aggro that desktop Linux gave me.
There are other benefits too. I want to give the iWork applications a go, it’s nice that Apple gives you a pretty damn cromulent office suite right from the get-go. I want to see how Numbers fares for my spreadsheet autism compared to Excel, given my less than stellar experiences with the open-source offerings and willingness to avoid the drama that happens in that area. Apple now has a creative suite that is subscription-based and doesn’t seem to have any of the bullshit Adobe pulls, which includes Final Cut.
Initially I was going to go for 24GB RAM, as I wanted to use a Windows virtual machine on it. Searching on Google gave me Redditors stating I should go 24 gigs because of AI models, too. However, the price was too much, ironically thanks to AI, and given that this would be my first proper Mac and after a bit of talk from a close friend and his friend who works at Apple (this post is not paid lmao), I decided to go down to 16GB. This isn’t a gaming laptop, I already have a tower for VR gaming, a Nintendo Switch, a PlayStation 5, and a Steam Deck, not to mention the retro consoles I have (Wii U [for Wii games], older PlayStations…). I don’t need any more computers for gaming. Mac is also really good at memory management, too, and if 8GB is good enough for a MacBook Neo, 16GB is just as cromulent on a MacBook Air for someone finally dipping their toe properly into the Mac world. With regards to AI models, I simply don’t care. I know Apple can work the memory thing out themselves, and if not, there’s plenty of online LLM services I can throw money at, whether they host it or I do the hosting myself. I’m not anti-AI, but I’m also not an AI-maxxer that I need a local model running on my laptop.
All in all, even if the novelty fades and the MacBook becomes more work than “play”, a curiosity for computing has finally returned for me in a way. As much as I miss Linux (or rather, KDE), I can’t really justify going back to it given the jankiness and problems I encountered, and as much as Windows Just Works, I’ve come to notice the environment doesn’t suit me at the moment. Mac is sorta-chartered territory for me, but only by running it on something it was never ever supposed to run on, so I’m pretty psyched to be giving it a go.
Writing style problems
How I feel microblogging ruined my writing style
I’ve been going back to my old posts, rephrasing things and reorganising the paragraphs to improve its flow, but I definitely feel like microblogging (in the Bluesky/Mastodon sense) has ruined my writing, much similar to how some people using AI chatbots feel those bots have changed how they write. On these platforms, short, bite-sized posts with little to no nuance are very much the norm due to how these sites are built, and I notice that I write a bit like I’m stringing several Bluesky skeets together, and it annoys the hell out of me. Doubly so given that I feel like I go off on a tangent in the middle of things much like on my microblogging posts.
Grammar checking
Spell-check is, whatever, but I find myself reliant on grammar checking tools. Right now it’s Harper and it’s alright, but now I’ve been using WordPress and sinking my teeth properly into it, I do feel a bit underwhelmed by it. While I’ve learned to adopt some grammatical things like the Oxford comma, sometimes it will get something blatantly wrong when I know for a fact it’s right. An example is when writing “no thanks to…” to denote something that was a success despite or without the presence of someone or something. It thinks I should write “no, thanks”, which isn’t what you do here. I presume it’s because there’s no machine learning involved in this, which is a bit ironic given it’s Automattic and people hate that company for the AI shit they forced into WordPress via the Jetpack add-on.
Maybe I’ll stick to Harper – they are willing to improve things especially as LanguageTool and Grammarly “enshittify” even with the concern of Automattic’s ownership, or push comes to shove I will probably have to start using either one of those services or an AI chatbot to check my writing. I’m reluctant to do the latter as because people have had their writing has changed thanks to those chatbots and . Or, maybe I’m being too much of a perfectionist and overthinking about things again – Harper was part of the reason I hopped onto WordPress over a static site generator after all. Even if I end up not using it, I’ll still keep tabs on it, a free and open-source grammar checker that’s nice and light is good no matter how you slice it.
As a bit of a post-ending comment to this post, something a bit amusing that wraps this up is that Harper actually has a Mac app that enables it on every text field. Don’t know how they do it and if Apple allows it, but nonetheless, it’s nice to see.