“One look at the screen was enough to wipe away all thoughts of the cost”
Readers with a sensitive credit card disposition should avert their eyes, as Jon unpacks his 16in MacBook Pro for the first time
Well, my 16in MacBook Pro finally arrived. It was with trepidation that I unpacked it and got it ready to boot. Then I opened the lid and fell in love. The only word to use is “wow”. I accept that I ticked most of the boxes when it came to this purchase, going for the M1 Max processor, 64GB of RAM and 2TB of storage. That came in at around four grand, only for me to realise that I hadn’t paid for AppleCare (which I have on all my daily-use devices), so that upped the price even further.
But one look at the screen was enough to wipe away all thoughts of that cost. It has blacks that are blacker than black. The peak white brightness on HDR content is eye popping. The keyboard is a significant improvement, although I might be the only person in the world that rues the loss of the Touch Bar.
After a quick install, I decided to download some apps. On went Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro from Apple, and DaVinci Resolve from Blackmagic. I loaded up some complicated video and audio test projects, and then started giggling. It’s so quick it’s positively stupid. 4K HDR video? Pah, it doesn’t care. Even higher resolution? No problem. A hugely complicated music mix with a three-figure number of tracks? It didn’t blink. Photo editing? It laughs at it.
Then I actually cackled. There was no loud whirring of the fans that I get on the 2019 Core i9 MacBook Pro. Just silence. The i9 device spins up its jet-like fans at the merest provocation. With the M1 Max chip, it couldn’t be bothered, irrespective of the workload that I threw at it.
After some hours of playing around, the power meter had barely moved. Like a few percentage points. My Core i9 MacBook Pro would barely last four hours when faced with this sort of workload. With the M1 Max, it was clear that battery life would be at least into the mid-teens of hours. I’m yet to push it below 50% , and that’s with a long day of use.
So this is the ultimate laptop, then? The one to have? Well, there’s more to enjoy. If my wallet would stretch to it, I could plug in not one, not two but three of the eye-popping Apple 6K monitors. And a 4K projector on the HDMI port, too. This is a high-end workstation in laptop form.
Clearly, you should buy it. Why wouldn’t you want all that capability? Well, here’s the conundrum. It’s absolutely worth every penny for the quite ridiculous performance and the screen if, and only if, your workload can take advantage of it. Video editing, colour correction, video post-production, audio production and 3D graphics are all entirely justifiable uses for the M1 Max.
Web browsing for your weekly shopping, some Excel work and a smattering of emails is an almost criminal misuse of the capabilities. A bit like taking a Lamborghini to the local supermarket. For those more normal day-to-day operations, a standard M1 MacBook Air is a far better proposition if you can forgo the 16in screen size. But if you have the need, this is one heck of a device.
Looking for a keyboard stuffer
I have been landed with an interesting if somewhat infuriating problem. A family member has to use an iPad for some work purposes because there’s a custom app that’s core to the work process. She likes to use the textexpansion capabilities of iOS to type pre-cooked responses into the app. And it appears that much of this within iOS has been broken by iOS 15.
So she asked if there was a way of making this work independently of the iPad. Well, you can connect a standard keyboard to an iPad then type on it, so I started looking at custom keyboards that could store phrases and chunks of text. These took me into the murky world of point-of-sale till systems, and the custom keyboards that such tills can use. I quickly backed away: the pricing wasn’t too bad, but the software support seemed to be from around 2003. You could have felt my shudder from the comfort of your sofa.
Then an interesting suggestion came up: how about using a Raspberry Pi to be a keyboard emulator? It could then squirt the necessary key codes up the USB
cable into the iPad, which would be completely oblivious to what was going on. Ideally, I could then connect a physical keyboard to the Raspberry Pi to fire off the keystrokes.
I’m still in the searching phase, but it seems it’s possible to do this. I haven’t found an off-the-shelf app for the Pi that meets my needs, so some coding might be required. I did find a cute inline USB adapter that would do the keycode injections, but that requires you to blow the definitions into the firmware of the device. Powerful, but difficult to edit out in the field. I’ve even looked at using KVM devices to see if they’d work. My research esearch continues, but if I get something to work, I’ll share it here.
Coping with brownouts
I’m sure it’s just coincidence, but we appear to be having more electrical brownouts and blackouts than before. The length of the downtime is usually quite short – a few seconds – but it’s enough to make most computer equipment shut down and reboot. Obvious exceptions are laptops, tablets and mobile phones, but they either rely on Wi-Fi (which is now rebooting) or switch to a GSM connection if available. I can understand why the house alarm system throws a wobbly, insisting that I go through a set/unset cycle to tell me that the power failed (as if I didn’t know). But there’s much to be said for protecting devices against such outage.
Now, if I can stroke my proverbial white beard (not that I have one yet), things were much harder in times gone by. I can recall early versions of Windows that managed to lunch their entire hard disk on a power outage. This was probably caused by firmware faults in the disk controller rather than something fundamentally wrong with Windows – after all, NTFS has always had grown-up capabilities for handling disk outages, although many of us will remember the delight of the Dell PERC RAID controller that, on replacing a failed disk in an array, decided to lunch the rest of the array rather than rebuilding it onto the new disk. Oh, how we laughed.
So getting in some small uninterruptable power supply (UPS) units are useful. They’re no panacea, though, as a UPS can fail too. That’s why serious servers have multiple power suppliers, and you feed each of them with their own UPS (or power rail in a data centre). Nevertheless, a single UPS feeding a NAS such as a Synology or QNAP is a useful upgrade, and might even die in sacrificial fashion if there’s a particularly nasty spike, protecting the downstream NAS.
My go-to brand has always been APC. I’m not particularly sure why, to be honest. Around 20 years ago, I had a big APC 2200 that was rack-mounted and needed a 30A feed. It was driving a bunch of servers, including a Compaq 8500 data centre server, so the load was big.
More recently, I have used smaller standalone and rackmount UPS devices, and I have stuck with APC. They need to have the batteries replaced every so often, but this is reasonably painless. Maybe I should investigate other brands, so would welcome suggestions if you know of one.
Nevertheless, if you have a UPS and a NAS such as a Synology, it’s important to ensure that you cable the two together so that the UPS can signal to the NAS that the power has failed. That way, the NAS can start to initiate a clean shutdown when the battery signalling from the UPS indicates that the battery is getting low.
I have UPS devices on all of my main infrastructure. Of course, you have to remember that while it’s useful to have these on NAS and so forth, you must make sure that the power keeps flowing to all the other parts of the network, too. Don’t forget to put them onto your network switches, Wi-Fi access points and the internet router. This is where feeding power-over-Ethernet (PoE) to remote switches can be a useful trick. Then you need to do the ultimate test: throw the main power switch to your house or office, and see what keeps working. Can you still connect to the internet from your laptop? Has the phone system gone down? This sort of testing is brutal but utterly essential.
“We appear to be having more electrical brownouts and blackouts than before”
SMS for validation
I’m getting somewhat worried about the number of online services that are using SMS for user validation. I can just about handle using a known email address for a password reset, but SMS is too open to abuse and misconfiguration. While it can be argued that an SMS token is better than nothing at all, surely it should be possible to get some proper 2FA into place?
The unfortunate reality, however, is that 2FA is just too nerdy for the normal tech-disinterested user. I use Authy, and while
it works very well, it’s still too difficult for many. Generate a QR code, point your phone at the screen to capture and so forth. At this point, most users have switched off and their eyes have glazed over.
There have been alternatives – authorising via fingerprint or facial recognition are the obvious ones that come from the phone world.
But we really should have a better way of authenticating.
Maybe it would be possible to have phone support for authentication built into the operating system, but since Microsoft has little or no traction in the phone space any more, it’s unclear how this would work. Apple does a pretty good job with cross-device authentication, but this doesn’t help if you’re trying to log into a website or reset a forgotten password.
It’s almost as if we need to really raise the bar on websites, to ensure that they offer a range of authenticators, all the way up to hardware keys such as the YubiKey. Maybe we should be making our voices heard on the social media platforms like Twitter, though I am somewhat sceptical that anyone will be listening.
Amex and QuickBooks
Some months ago, I discussed a problem I was having with QuickBooks Online and my Amex card. One of the beauties of modern accountancy programs is the integration of all your banking feeds into one package, as well as the ability to generate and automatically post invoices. In more comprehensive packages, you can even do stock control management.
Back in issue 317, so exactly a year ago, I covered how all banking feeds had to move to the “new” open banking standard. Among other useful things, it requires that feeds are re-authorised every three months by the user, to ensure that they still want to allow the data download on their behalf.
When the move to open banking happened, the direct feed from Amex stopped working. At this point, I had to resort to downloading the data manually and then importing it into QuickBooks. This was made even more tedious by the fact that the
Amex import was the wrong sign. In other words, a debit appeared as a credit, and vice versa. To fix this, I had to fire up Excel, load the CSV file downloaded from Amex, do an =-1* (the cell to the left), copy and paste the values, delete the original data and formula, save out the new CSV file, and then import that into QuickBooks. It would have made things much easier if the QuickBooks importer had a “please invert the values” tickbox that would do this for me.
I should have realised that this was a sign of problems to come. In the spring of 2021, to much fanfare by QuickBooks, the open banking feed was reinstated. I dutifully set this up, only to discover that the balances were all the wrong way up. What should have been a value of, say, £5,000 on my Amex balance, indicating that I owed five grand to Amex, appeared as £-5,000, completely at odds to my Barclaycard feed. I raised a support ticket. We had online and phone chats. I started receiving a monthly email telling me my problem was being investigated by the developers and that there would be an update soon. Next month, the same thing happened.
Then on 2 November, QuickBooks emailed with me an update. Hurrah, I thought, it’s fixed it! Then I read the email:
“They have advised me that Amex is sending us the credit card balance the opposite way to all the other credit card providers that we connect with which is causing the balance to be the opposite to the actual balance in real life (-£1000 rather than £1000 for example).
“As the engineers are unable to edit the way credit card balances show on the Transactions > Banking tab for a single credit card provider without affecting all the others there is no way for them to correct this currently.”
In other words, it’s broken. QuickBooks blames Amex, and no it can’t put a flag on the Amex feed to ensure it imports correctly. The case was closed.
Frankly, this is crap. I don’t care if Amex is the wrong way up – it’s what it does. It is for QuickBooks to ensure that it can handle that feed correctly. I don’t care if all transactions from Amex are measured by kilotons of bananas, it’s the job of my accountancy package to sort this out.
But no. It can’t be done, apparently. You might recall earlier in the year how my Barclays Euro open banking account was wrong by a factor of 100,
“We need to raise the bar on websites, to ensure they offer a range of authenticators”
so that €1,000.00 appeared as €10.00 in my QuickBooks accounts. That got fixed, probably because they were sufficiently embarrassed.
Actually, I suspect it’s perfectly possible to fix this Amex problem, but QuickBooks simply can’t be bothered. The Amex open banking feed has been wobbly at best, missing transactions every month that I find when I do a reconciliation. I would be better off just going back to manually importing everything and fixing up the sign error within Excel.
Of course, I have choices. I could stop using this credit card, which has served me well. I could change accountancy packages to one that handles Amex on open banking correctly. But changing an accounts package is a major ball-ache for a business, and an investment in time that simply isn’t justified. You can probably tell from my language, dear reader, that I’m not pleased. And yet another part of our financial lives (banking, accounts, tax) appears to be held together by gaffer tape and some sticking plasters.
Lightning strikes
I’ve just come across a cabling oddity. My hatred for all things USB is almost visceral, as I have discussed many times before, but one of the beauties of Apple’s Lightning cable solution is that it Just Works. Right up to the point where it doesn’t. I wanted to plug a device in that has a USB-C port and is supported on the iPhone. I have an official Apple Lightning to USB-C cable and plugged in both ends, so expected it to work. It didn’t. I tried an identical-looking cable that came with the product, and it worked fine.
Turns out that Apple has recently implemented the Lightning Accessory Cable platform. In the past, you had to use the Apple Camera Connection Kit to get to a standard USB socket, and then out to a third-party device. Now this functionality can be incorporated into the cable itself, from Lightning to USB-C, with a tiny embedded chip that provides this handshaking.
So, now we have cables that work. And cables that don’t. And you can’t tell them apart from the outside. I think that deserves a slow handclap and a hard stare.