Balancing Power and Portability: The journey of a technophile

When I attended All Things Open a year ago, I carried a Hewlett-Packard DevOne, which I had purchased the year before. Two years ago, I was anxious to try the DevOne because I wanted to try an AMD Ryzen 7 with Linux. It was a platform I had never used. I have been a solid Intel user for Windows, MacOS, and Linux. I liked the size and feel of the computer, but in an all-day conference where I attended all the keynotes and other sessions using the computer for note-taking, tweeting, and tooting, I was disappointed in the battery life.

I came home, put the laptop for sale on E-bay, and decided I was going to buy one of the newer 15-inch M2 MacBook Air computers. I have enjoyed using the MacBook to experiment with Stable Diffusion, DiffusionBee, Llamafile, Ollama, and other applications. I took the MacBook to a half-day conference in mid-April and have used it sparingly since then, but I was determined to give an actual test at All Things Open earlier this week. It surpassed all my expectations for its exceptional battery life. I attended all the keynotes and many sessions where I took notes and live-tooted what I was seeing and hearing, and at the end of the day, each day, I had around seventy percent of battery life. That is simply amazing.

I’m not ready to ditch Linux. I’m writing this article on my main desktop, which runs Linux Mint Cinnamon, but I am impressed with the battery life of the M2 MacBook Air. I have found the M2 chip equal to almost everything I have used it for. Apple has introduced the new MacBook Pro with an M4, sixteen gigabytes of RAM, and 512 GB drive with three Thunderbolt ports and HDMI. I came close to buying one today. I learned while I was at All Things Open that it might make sense for me to get a MacBook with a bit more RAM to continue experimenting with locally hosted large language models.

Being a technophile has its rewards and challenges, and I am presented with another one now. Apple will give me a five hundred eighty dollar trade-in on the M2 MacBook Air. The new MacBook Pro has a fourteen-inch display, and the MacBook Air has a fifteen-inch display. I like the larger display, but there is no doubt that there are compelling reasons to go with the newer, more powerful MacBook Pro with lots of expansion. Should I pay another two hundred dollars for a terabyte of storage, or should I stay with the stock of five hundred twelve gigabyte drives? Lots of decisions.

When the teacher is ready

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There’s an old axiom that when the teacher is ready the pupil or pupils will present themselves. Today at work I sat down in our high school library to install software on a new MacBook. A student next to me had an older Dell Inspiron 1100 and I asked him if it was his and how much he’d paid for it. He said he traded an XBox 360 for it. He was running Windows 2000 and was using Microsoft Write to do some word processing. I told him about Software for Starving Students and how I could give him a CD-ROM that had 57 open source programs on it that would help him use a better word processor like Open Office. He seemed somewhat indifferent. Just then some other young boys began to congregate around me and ask questions about the MacBook. Continue reading “When the teacher is ready”