Friday, April 20th, 2018

	Long time, no see
	~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Hello, gopherspace! It's been  a while, let me apologize  and explain:
I was ill in last two weeks of march and since then I'm just trying to
catch up the movement the world made during  my suffering in bed. I've
got flu and airways infection, so viral and bacterial at the same time
and it was hell of a ride - I didn't have temperatures around 40 deg.C
since I was kid. Not very pleasant, I'm glad it's over.

In almost the same time we made some tough family decisions - the most
significant one is to sell our flat in small town near Prague and move
back  to the big city. At first it was OK here, but almost  all roads,
highways  and railroads  in our direction  are going through long-time
reconstruction  and  my daily commuting takes almost three hours, even
though it's just 38 km (or ~24 miles,  if you prefer the crazy units).
That's not how I plan to spend my time on Earth.

And I made another decision, this time computer related:  I'm going to
remove  Apple devices from my personal workflow. I used  2004 PowerMac
G5 for all my home computing since 2009 to the very beginning  of this
year and Apple computers as a platform since 2003. Sadly at this point
it would require to replace all rotating parts  in my G5 to use it any
without noise canceling  headphones any further, so I finally accepted
Apple's transition to Intel and decided to buy a MacBook Air.

I  could go and buy it any  time, but I  wanted to get the  money from
selling  surpluses from my so called  computer  collection. I  hoarded
many not so  interesting  things (for me) and  just  never had time to
sort them out. My storage is however limited and I would have to do it
sooner or later anyway, so why not do it this way?

Cheapest MBAir is around  1200 USD here. After two months  of sorting,
testing,  shooting photos and selling on local eBay equivalent, I made
it to almost 70 % of the amount. Then Bloomberg  published, that Apple
may switch to in-house ARM  CPUs after 2020 and that was a showstopper
for me. Otherwise I'd prefer ARM over Intel any time, but I don't like
the way Apple  treats people and  I don't like even more,  that people
are happy with that. I am not.

The main reason, I still used their computers, was the iPhoto. All  my
photos from this century in  it. It's not supported anymore, but still
runs on current system. I never used any of  Apple's  online services,
I never used  anything after MacOS X 10.7, I never liked how macOS  is
pushed to be more and more  iOS-like and I even never liked the MBAir,
it was just the least bad option in Apple current product portfolio.

That being said, I was  still willing to buy a Mac  to have the iPhoto
continuity,  but obviously Mac is not a solution anymore. Even if  the
rumors  were incorrect, Apple could do this  any day. They already did
it more than once and every such change only pushes people  into their
on-line ("cloud") services, which means more profit for the company.

I know how it is to be on Apple's "previous" CPU,  I was there last 12
years and I'm not going to do something  like that again, not even for
iPhoto, which on the  other hand  won't run  natively on those new ARM
Macs.So it's time for me to leave the train and I already did it.

I ordered a refurbished HP EliteBook 840 G1. It cost  1/3 the price of
of new MacBook Air and has the same CPU power. With some Linux  distro
it will serve me maybe better than  MBAir. I will  virtualize Mac OS X
to have my old  iPhoto library available and learn  to process  my new
photos in something else.

Sometimes it's harder to upgrade the hardware, than go through illness
or move with the family to another city. But such's life.

.