June, 2017 Edition

by Ms. Duh
Contributing Columnist

Yeah, I’m a week late.

Good thing, this is only a bloggy thing.

And to get this out of the way, if you (pointing at Trump supporters) are STILL a sincere Trump supporter… after ALL that has HAPPENED???!!!! You need serious help. But, if you are a sane individual and a proud member of the resistance, here are two things that I will warm the cockles of your outraged heart:

http://wellredpodcast.libsyn.com
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTHsQd-vRXK1bp4vpifl6yA

A redneck liberal. You got it. All the Boomhauer you can stand, dipped in Rachel Maddow and rolled around in cracklins. I can’t take a LOT of this, just because of the accent makes me want to kill myself, but it is THOROUGHLY ENJOYABLE.

and

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9VZTrtRhN0&list=PL0hKMB1-xkc-XWNf9VL-LxVYysdHpjyMF

A nice bit of liberal goop to dollop on your Ben and Jerry’s.

On to other things.

So, if you are/were a rabid mac-mac such as myself, you would wait for your main event every year. You’d pensively await the announcements that would make you swoon with lust, or scream with outrage. Apple peppered the year with announcements or surprises, but the main rodeo was at Macworld. It was the one time of the year that validated my reason for being on the computer. The machine that kept me from just getting some biology degree and taking up stand-up.

I miss those days.

Now, in 2017, besides awaiting the inevitable tweet from Trump that will plunge us all into a ball of nuclear fire and make ever apocalyptic vision of a wasteland dystopian society where we are either the hunters or the lunch, I do count the days until WWDC - the World Wide Developer’s Conference. It’s the gathering of around 5,000 nerds that make the nerd stuff, specifically Apple and Apple related nerd stuff. It was the ignored little sister of Macworld until the big sister bit the big one and now is the event that you can indulge a little of that reality distortion excitement that once flowed in abundance from our little fruit company.

Let’s see what Apple has in store for us, shall we?

HomePod - the first brand new hardware thing to come out of Apple since the Apple Watch. This HomePod, or as I like to call it, the start of Orwell’s 1984 vision of the future, only its dipped in the goo of commerce. It wasn’t the government that was going to be an invasive and controlling force eyeballing your every move, thought and desire, it was COMMERCE. I have a fear and loathing of these things because they are the earhole into your life that you don’t really have control over. You THINK you do, but you really don’t. Something listening to you all the time. Something that is dedicated to bring you your every desire, ease the burden of life upon you, and offer up things to mollify your every anxiety. In short, its the androids that are built to serve and control humans in the Star Trek episode, “I, Mudd” only without the laughs provided by a drunken, lecherous Harry Mudd. It’s the beginning of the end. Mark my words. Destroy these things. They are the things that will bring down humanity and reduce us to corralled fat people who move around in our balloon chairs, just like in “Wall-E”….

iMac Pro - HOLY GREAT PURPLE JEEBUS, I am your slave Apple, if only you’d send me one of these…. You GOT TO BE POOPING PEANUTS? I was perfectly happy with my 2011 iMac with SSD and 32 gigs of Ram and you present me with grey, sleek iMacs the come with processors up to 22 teraflops, memory up to 128 gigs, and as much as 4 terabytes of storage. New iMacs will be able to handle double the RAM of last year’s models, and the Fusion drive is standard on the 27-inch model, with storage up to 2TB. The freaking thing gets a price drop to $1,299.You know, I HAD some money I was going to put a down payment on for a house, but screw that…

High Sierra macOS - Really? Well. Okay. Safari is 80% faster? Well. Okay. Autoplay blocking. Well. Okay. All the other stuff is… well, okay. I just want colored folders to come back. For about 15 years now, I’ve been wanting colored folders/files to come back. Tags suck donkeys.

Amazon Comes to Apple TV - Apple TVs been around for a while, and even though we’ve at the old Duh-compound have switched to wireless TV, I still don’t really know how all that works. I still got an old laptop hooked up to my internet capable, 4k Ultra TV, to play stuff.

Apple Watch Brings AI to Your Wrist - I’m still waiting for the Apple Watch to crash, burn, Newton-Out and disappear. But now, its awash in Siri magic so you can do a bunch of stuff that I don’t care about. Plus, it smacks suspiciously of being another cog in the machine that is going to enslave mankind - see above.

iOS 11 - Yawn, except for this “totally redesign App Store”. That makes my butt twitch. Anytime Apple redesigns anything, especially anything I use like iTunes, my old person cranky gets ratcheted up to 11 and I consider seriously finishing that manifesto that I left in the old VW microbus parked in the backyard.

AR on Your iPhone - Yeah. Don’t care.

Siri Intelligence - THERE GOING TO ADD INTELLIGENCE TO SIRI? So when I want Siri to text somebody and then it won’t and I try about 5 times, cumulating in a pissed off “SEND MY MESSAGE, YOU PIECE OF SHIT”, and then it finally sends the message “YOU PIECE OF SHIT” and then I have to explain to some loved one that, no they really aren’t a PIECE OF SHIT? That won’t happen anymore?

iPad Pro 10.5-inch - Okay, I can get behind this. Even though its $700 and I have no reason to have one, if you gave me one, I would say, “Yeah, this is cool” before I’d play with it a couple of hours and put it on the shelf. Now, if it acted like a display/storage deal to where when I’m shooting photos out in the world, I could download all of them on the iPad, view them and email them to people, I’d support that. And you probably can do that, I, just because I’m an old fogey, haven’t learned, doesn’t mean you couldn’t. I still wouldn’t buy one with my own money, though. Maybe shoplift one…

All in all, some stuff I liked, one thing I really dug, and the rest was firmly in the “meh” category.

But, as it is, some of them are perfectly acceptable to get me for my birthday in T-minus 9 days.

.






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