hi, I'm a dev who was working in journalism around thirty years ago and still has some connections.
The entire industry is run by actual journalists, it's one of the few industries where people who know how to do the job still rise to the top. Unlike most other industries, where the top brass are MBAs who don't actually know how to do things like build airplanes or write software or what have you. Which is honestly great except when it's not.
The web has never found a way to make journalism as profitable as it was back in the print days, so they mostly see technologists as people who get in their way, as disposable or replaceable.
So imagine the state of their tech stack — CMS's integrated with the front end, if not Wordpress then something like that, nothing headless. “Hey you should remove this plugin" what's a plugin? "look… this Bonzai Buddy, who installed it?" Some guy who left twenty years ago. And it's not in a template, it's in the articles and executed by an eval().
They have no motivation to fix any of it, because again, web sites for newspapers aren't profitable. Subscriptions are profitable. I think the real reason why Substack is successful is not that email is a good format for journalism — in fact it’s terrible — but because you generally cannot inject javascript into it. Which comes back to Gruber’s point — javascript was a disaster for the web as a document standard.
(personally, I haven't read news on the web in something like twenty years — RSS ftw)
Funny how 20 years ago Logitech's software sucked enough for me to pay for an alternative, and two decades later Logitech's software still sucks enough for people to pay for an alternative.
It's sort of ironic that at the time, there were many complaints that Apple made its devices thin at the expense of more important features. Now that M series MacBooks are thicker again, there are complaints that they are too thick.
I owned an i9 MBP with a discrete GPU. It absolutely was too thin. The CPU and GPU ran hot, it throttled like crazy. It would drain battery while USB-C docked while idling. Worst laptop I've ever owned.
The M1 Max I replaced it with was the opposite. I don't think I heard the fans for the first month. But it was much larger.
Based on the fanless Air, I strongly suspect an M1 Max in the old chassis would have been totally fine for non synthetic workloads and an M1 Pro would probably have been fine in all scenarios.
But I think they over corrected on the chassis design when they were shipping borderline faulty products and haven't walked it back yet.
I speculate they gave themselves a lot of thermal engineering margin to bump up TDP with the M-series MBP design (or perhaps they underestimated how good the M-series chips were going to be) The battery being at the TSA limit of 100Wh is quite nice as well. Another benefit is that it now differentiates the "Pro" line from the rest of the laptop lineup quite significantly. For most people the Air has enough power now and its plenty thin and light. The pro line is for "true" pros with actually intense workflows.
I'm a dev and the MBP line is definitely overkill for me. The 15" MBA handles everything I can throw at it.
By dimensions, assuming the 2015 ("eleven year old") version, the 13" M4 MBA is 0.17" wider, 0.9" deeper, and 0.32 lbs heavier. Where it's harder to compare is thickness. The M4 is 0.44" thick where the Intel one was tapered (0.11"-0.68").
Kind of hard to see that as "HUGE" in comparison. Bigger? Yes, but not really huge.
I feel like if they can profitably sell a Mini-LED in a $1400 14" Macbook Pro, they can find a way to sell a larger one in a 27" display for under $3300…
I have the last-gen Studio Display, pretty great during the day (the nano-texture is astonishing), but just looks like trash at night when the backlight overwhelms the blacks.
My guess was that the “Studio Display 2” would introduce Mini-LED, and then a “Pro Display 2” would have the high-refresh and maybe 32". Wake me up in five years, I guess.
Looks cool, but burns a bit of credibility by ripping off Apple's icon designs.
There has to be some fresh-out-of-college graphic designer in Berlin ready to make their name by designing a custom icon library for a project like this, ask around.
The entire industry is run by actual journalists, it's one of the few industries where people who know how to do the job still rise to the top. Unlike most other industries, where the top brass are MBAs who don't actually know how to do things like build airplanes or write software or what have you. Which is honestly great except when it's not.
The web has never found a way to make journalism as profitable as it was back in the print days, so they mostly see technologists as people who get in their way, as disposable or replaceable.
So imagine the state of their tech stack — CMS's integrated with the front end, if not Wordpress then something like that, nothing headless. “Hey you should remove this plugin" what's a plugin? "look… this Bonzai Buddy, who installed it?" Some guy who left twenty years ago. And it's not in a template, it's in the articles and executed by an eval().
They have no motivation to fix any of it, because again, web sites for newspapers aren't profitable. Subscriptions are profitable. I think the real reason why Substack is successful is not that email is a good format for journalism — in fact it’s terrible — but because you generally cannot inject javascript into it. Which comes back to Gruber’s point — javascript was a disaster for the web as a document standard.
(personally, I haven't read news on the web in something like twenty years — RSS ftw)
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