RANT INCOMING WARNING!

I just saw a headline this morning that the nearly new MacBook Neo is now available in the Apple Refurb Store for - get this - the SAME price it was released at BEFORE the recent $100 (17%) price INCREASES. What a deal - it's like the good old days of retail groceries where the store either raised the price or decreased product (remember 5lb bags of sugar suddenly becaome 4lb bags) then "put it on sale" for the same old price?

And it is far from Apple though - M$ raised their prices an astronomical amount in June, but third party retailers a month to 6 weeks later have "sales" just above the previous prices.

I understand that data centers are devouring high end ram and vendors are switching production to that profitable market (data centers are announced weekly in Texas), but this has all the…

Samsung has officially announced that it will launch the next generation of Galaxy Tab before the end of the year.

www.notebookcheck.net

An upcoming Samsung tablet with the model number "SM-X848U" has appeared in the FCC database, pointing to a cellular variant of the Galaxy Tab S12+ for the US market. The certification reveals connectivity features of the upcoming device.

While there are plenty of rumours regarding performance upgrades for the new Tab S12 series, I haven't found any mention of the stylus. We haven't seen a significant evolution of the S Pen across multiple Galaxy Tab generations. Even though the Tab S11 version brought a marginal improvement to pen tilt by redesigning the nib, the underlying technology remains identical. 

Do you think there is any chance that Samsung will launch a new stylus in the short or medium term to compete on par with the Wacom Movink or Cintiq Pro?

Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold 8 still skips the S Pen, and that's getting harder to ignore | Android Central

I can't tell you how many speculative articles last Spring were sure that the SPen was coming back. No chance. Nobody seems to miss it. For me, it's keeping me on my Fold 6. I use it all the time. Haven't had a chance to look at the Motorola in person. Too damn busy.

On another front, I had a demonstration of Claude the other day that really impressed me. Not that it was correct in its attempts at analysis but in the ability to dig details out of a stack of documents that were relevent. It set me back on my heels a bit and might have muted my criticism of AI generally by quite a bit. If I was a young lawyer, I'd be paying attention to this.

I guess I signed up for a raffle that determines whether or not I have a chance to buy it. Went with the 512 GB because if I get this, I can take the extra 2 TB NVMe SSD out of my laptop and use it. It has Linux on it, which I won’t be using if I have a Steam Machine.

Edit: it’s pretty unimpressive in the reviews… darn it. I will probably cancel before the raffle. My M4 Pro Mac mini plays Windows games better via CrossOver, though it doesn’t have all the compatibility I would have with Steam Proton. And if I really want to play a game that doesn’t work on my Mac mini I still have my RTX 4060 gaming laptop with stripped-down Windows 11.

Edit 2: Cancelled. Regardless of pros and cons it doesn’t make any sense in my current situation. The money…

I didn’t notice when it was announced a week ago, but Microsoft and Nvidia are partnering in the use of the new RTX Spark silicon in the next gen of Windows PCs. QUALCOMM’s Windows on ARM deal has expired. Is Microsoft dumping them?

https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/cpus/nvidia-rtx-spark-is-here-and-no-its-not-called-n1x-everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-super-chip-thats-about-to-change-laptops-forever

I've been rather busy recently, so I haven't had the time to get on here.

Firstly, who of us are still around? It's good to see a number of us still around, although Kuma seems to be AWOL; we're missing the innuendoes!

Blog post

ZenBook Duo

The ASUS ZenBook Duo (2025) has been serving me well. The battery life isn't great and I'd even say bad when using two displays (no surprise). The keyboard occasionally has a spaz out, but can be quickly fixed. The docks I have to use are temperamental with it and really don't like the dual displays.

The MPP is atrocious. I can barely use it even with stroke smoothing. I draw on other devices and transfer it over it's so unusable. Not to mention the included stylus just straight up died.

So I wandered over to Woot today. This was partially motivated by a video of someone trying to daily drive a pixel fold with GrapheneOS, so I went looking to see if they still had that fold deal going, and they do!

Original Pixel Fold - $449

http://electronics.woot.com/offers/new-google-pixel-fold-5g-smartphone-256gb-1

Remarkable bundle deals:

https://computers.woot.com/plus/remarkable-paper-pro-bundle-2

And for funsies, the Surface Go 2 with LTE that I've been enjoying so much:

Just when I thought that pens and folding phones were done with each other, along comes the Razr. The 6200nit Motorola Fold has an option for a pen that has its own charging case and is roughly the size of the Samsung Fold 7. It has interesting possibilities. Hopefully, it will prompt Samsung to think about bringing back the pen. I'm hoping that the Fold 8 Wide comes with an S pen option but I'm not holding my breath. Here is link to the first Razr Fold review I have seen. Motorola Razr Fold

I realize it's been nearly 3 decades when "pocket PCs" were on my radar with Palm and iPaqs. I had this notion that perhaps I could do all my computing on a portable device that could fit in my pocket.

I guess the modern smartphone has advanced quite a bit, but it still doesn't handle all my computing needs.

Now, upon reflection, I've strayed far from the idea of having a singular computing device.

Currently I regularly use:

-Windows gaming laptop, specifically with a discrete GPU to handle video and 3D rendering work

-Macbook Air specifically just to deploy stuff via XCode