I’ve had my M4 Pro Mac mini for almost 1.5 yrs and it’s been great. But I have been pushing its limits lately (heavily modded Skyrim SE in particular—there’s always a neat new mod that taxes performance a bit more) so I took a look at potential upgrades.

Apple offered to take my mini as a trade-in for only $150 less than I paid for it if I got a new M5 Max Studio. How’s that for holding its value? You really need to take that into account when getting Apple sticker shock…

Windows gaming alternatives to the base M5 Max Studio ($2500), spec and performance wise, are ~$500 more whether desktop or laptop (RTX 5070/5080-ish, 32GB RAM). At MSRP anyway. So we’re not talking a huge difference and after trading in the Mac mini it’s half the price of a Windows equivalent. About $1500 spread over 12 months, interest-free,…

Noooooooooooo! OMG. Nooooooooooo! Apple scrapped a shorter Apple Pencil for the Apple Duo, report says

What were those sites that had corporate/business refurb & open box Surfaces? I'm looking at getting either the SP10 or SP11 Intel(not the SD) variant. I remember CDW, but forget what the other sites were.

It's been a moment since I've been here. Surface Pro 7+ has been doing well after 5 years(well technically 3 years as this is a warranty replacement). Today I the camera drivers caused the device to crash. That usually happens like twice a month. Then later today I noticed a diagonal hairline crack on the display, only noticeable at certain angles. I think these are signs it's time to upgrade.

I like the 12" size. Besides the Framework 12 & Surface Pro 12" what are the other pen enabled options in the under 13" size? FW 12 looks very good, but the upgraded display probably wont be out until another year. The 12" should offered the Snapdragon X Pro cpu over the plus & user swappable SSD(like my 7+). Would rather do X Pro cpu if I am going to try another ARM Windows device. Yoga 11 ARM flashbacks(no pen…

Pot Committed...just saw Gurman's final rumor mongering on the iPhone Fold/Ultra - it will be named iPhone Duo (sorry Microsoft, you blew it AGAIN). But more importantly, it will support Apple Pencil. So now I have about 30 days (not showing up until October, and waiting list likely to go to Christmas) to get the kidney sold - starts at $1999 (actually better than I thought - see how "raitonalization" works), but my guess is 512gb storage is a minimum of $2400. Just checked my 3 year old iPhone 15 Pro Max and it is only using 107gb of its 512gb...hmmmmm

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…