Molten Macbook

But it’s my pride and joy, my essence of being. It performs every duty I desire with infallible dedication. I cannot dispense with a tool that has grown closer to my heart, figuratively, than my grandfather’s century old hand-drill or the flagship Swiss army knife my mother bought me as a consolation gift when we discovered I wasn’t tall enough to ride the Vorpal Viper roller-coaster at “Havoc’s Cove” Theme Park (now closed) or this rather ornate bottle opener I obtained from a Christmas cracker in 1997 and subsequently used to liberate a baby hedgehog trapped inside my neighbours drainpipe.

This beloved contraption I write of has rendered over 500 Vlogs with not a single scrambled frame nor a syllable out of sync. Upon it’s platters and within its cells is stored a literary stream of lucid consciousness that somehow stemmed from my brain but which my brain could never retain by virtue of life’s recurring banalities perpetually displacing profound and meaningful rhetoric.

Articles, essays, accounts, dissertations, the first third of three novels, fragments of emails, forum posts and critiques I was never reckless enough to dispatch or publish but preserved on account of future disputes that might merit instant and ruthless responses.

It has been my portal to countless hours of cyber socialising and gaming across nations with acquaintances I never thought possible.  To be sure, some of them were arse-heads, but a single click would consign them to the proverbial “ether”, where they could hunt out another whose notion of “fun” was better aligned with their own.

Now, just because it fails to trade frame-rates with “superior” successors, or rejects updates, patches and fixes that “experts” whom I’ve never met insist are essential to expel threats and enhance my experience, I’m expected to forsake it, consign it to binary oblivion?  It might not be the swiftest nor the smartest but its stability remains beyond all sane criticism.  I could count last year’s crashes on one hand and have met every deadline with time left to lead a healthy life, unlike so many who seek style over substance and pay a heavy price of stress when extravagant gimmicks don’t work as intended/advised for longer than it takes give them a glowing review, or decline a prohibitive extended warranty.

You’ve probably deduced by now that the above is a noble and heartfelt eulogy to an ageing computer, whose owner has come to depend on it as one would a tried and trusted business partner.  When things really do work out as advertised, the relationship between mortal master and synthetic slave can frequently be firmer, longer and more rewarding than provided by a traditional marriage, indeed, it has caused many to implode.  And whilst the bulk of society might baulk at the “painful” truth that a box populated with silicon, solder and circuitry can command such a significant and potentially devastating influence, this shouldn’t deter designers, manufacturer’s or consumers from maintaining high standards and expectations.

Regrettably, as the 21st century gathered steam, the only long term solutions that the richest corporations coveted were those that ensured their customers’ sustained and unconditional loyalty.  Where there had existed a prevailing need for established PC vendors to duly construct and configure systems in accordance with the buyer’s demands and moreover, leave ample scope for upgrades to maximise their longevity, there was now an increasing market for laptops, tablets and even phones that could fulfil every “useful task” an “average user” could conceive. By “average user” we mean”the easiest to satisfy” while the term “useful task” translates as “the easiest to execute”.

Pictures of pets, pies or ex-partners, the odd comment on a forum, selfies featuring famous social media icons or Vlogs trolling disgraced social media icons.  Even the era’s foremost tech journalists struggled to scratch the potential of “revolutionary” hardware, consistently accomplishing little more than one could have with a 19th century Smith Corona! Such a dearth of culture, coupled with grotesque profligacy in pursuit of fashionable and disposable trends afforded the likes of Apple, Google, Microsoft and others to formulate fiendish methods of charging us all more and more to create less and less.

Flimsy, consumer grade designs with limited or negligible upgrade paths whose increasingly limited functionality was entirely at the mercy of forced OS updates became all the range.  Worse still, we paid “professional” prices for the privilege.

Here, by many accounts was one of the worst offenders.

The Macbook Pro I9

This infernal contraption, the flagship of a trio, was the subject of abundant and sizzling debate during the sweltering Summer of 2018.  For the purposes of clarity and sanity, we shall refer to this close-knit family as Big Mac, Middle Mac and Little Mac, Daddy, Mommy and Baby would never do you understand, because all were born on the same day.  Besides, these three had only one direct ancestor “Old Mac”, who had emerged one year earlier.  The saga took wing when a prominent tech Vlogger bearing the same surname as a 1970s hammer horror icon, discovered that his latest and most lavish investment “Big Mac”,  was failing to eclipse the performance of his associate’s lesser-endowed elder “Old Mac”, especially when assigned tasks that it was supposedly optimised to carry out, such as rendering a video of its own review.

Furthermore, Intel’s lauded i9-8950HK, the machine’s crown jewel, was exhibiting scorching temperatures and severe “throttling” under workloads that, whilst intensive, were hardly beyond reason for a professional product of such illustrious origins.

Throttling in the current context has nothing to do with the Boston Strangler, it was a phenomenon formulated by Intel to protect his precious forgings from self-immolation. On occasions when temperatures rose to levels that were deemed unsustainable, the frequency of the CPU’s cores would be incrementally reduced until things had cooled off.

In the case of Big Mac, speed would frequently drop beneath the I9’s “guaranteed” minimum of 2.9ghz.  Moreover, the fluctuations were so regular and acute that it led numerous astute technicians to conclude the processor was not at fault but rather, its surrounding voltage regulators, which appeared incapable of meeting their master’s needs under extreme circumstances.

To determine whether or not heat was at the heart of the matter,  the vlogger in question, a Mr Dave Lee, took drastic action by using Adobe Premier Premier Pro, a class leading Video editing application,  to transcode the same sequence of high resolution footage, first under normal conditions and then with his acquisition placed inside a freezer.  The results appeared decisive, for when working in a winter wonderland, Big Mac completed his chore over 10 minutes faster, placing it ahead of “Old Mac” and closer to the projected improvements.  After broadcasting his findings to legions of devoted fans, there followed a tsunami of gleeful outrage, mostly ridiculing Appoyltes for further enforcing their Demagogue’s supremacy in return for a product more likely to malfunction than a Papier-mâché pizza oven.

Enter a second established “influencer” of lavish technology, Johnathan Morrison.  Fortuitously, this gentlemen also had a pair of Macbooks at his disposal, though in contrast to his contemporary, both were from the latest generation.  Big Mac and Little Mac.  At pains to express respect for a “great friend”, he was nonetheless critical that Mr. Lee’s conclusions were founded on an improbably taxing scenario, after-all, who could possibly wish to use a state of the art four thousand dollar device deemed to excel in cutting edge a/v production to produce premium quality content?

Peevishness aside, Mr. Morrison also asserted that Premier Pro, whilst universally popular, was a poorly optimised solution compared to similar applications on the Mac platform, most notably Final Cut Pro.  Thus, his methodology was more comprehensive, comprising 13 tests in total, all conducted at room temperature and conversely, showing Big Mac outperforming Little Mac on every occasion and by an overall margin of 16 percent.  At this juncture I’d normally insert a chart to break down the statistics and enchant readers with pretty colours, but I ran out of patience.

Cue hoards of rejuvenated Applolgists expressing their glowing gratitude to Mr. Morrison for “an impartial and detailed comparison” and for exposing the insidious prejudice of Mr. Lee along with other reprehensible betrayers of the New World Orchard.   Even more , When officially released, the price discrepancy between Big Mac and Little Mac in their most basic configurations was $400, meaning that the former’s superior performance was commensurate with its higher price tag to within half a percent, leaving no scope for trolls to complain of diminishing returns.  End of debate?  Not by a long pip.

Amidst this furore, Mr.Lee’s original viral video had garnered a sliver of Apple’s attention and in a showing of rare humility, they solicited its proactive author to discuss his findings and establish a permanent resolution.

Within days it had materialised in the form of an update to the Mac’s present operating system, High Sierra, though when pressed to expound on the fix Apple’s repose was fleeting and cryptic, referring to a “missing digital key”which “impacted thermal management”.

The question was, had matters improved? By now, every tech vlogger worth their weight in fame had performed and documented multiple benchmarks comparing Old, Little, Middle and Big mac in various combinations.  Some had already returned their purchases either because it was the perfect excuse to publish a follow-up video entitled “why I returned my Mac Book Pro i9” or they’d simply requested a refund within the “cool-off” period due to the initial uncertainty regarding a remedy.

For those who’d held out and felt obliged to indulge their spellbound viewers with another feast of figures, opinion remained divided over the value of this volatile “portable workstation”.  The Godfather of tech podcasts Leo Laporte, who’d splashed out on every Apple product since Adam and Eve swapped selfies, demonstrated through several  that even though Big Mac continued to dial down his frequency under maximum duress, it was no longer dipping below Intel’s assured minimum.  For him, this was satisfactory.

However, a certain Max Yuryev, the first techno-extrovert to compare all three Macbooks side by side concluded that, in spite of the patch’s success, thermal concerns and the minuscule advantage that Big Mac held over the Mac in the Middle, meant that the latter should be a first choice for anybody who wished to save $300 dollars….and then spend it on Apple’s care plan.

As much as Apple would have their loyalists believe that the hardware driving its “definitive” OS was every bit as exclusive, many critical elements were forged by prominent third parties.  Most significant amongst these were the fabrications of Baron Von Intel, which had formed the foundation of Apple’s creations since 2006. The i7 and i9 packages that propelled the brothers Mac had already been adopted by such rival vendors as Asus, Dell, Acer and Gigabyte all of whom had served up enticing alternatives with ample accommodation for these hot-rods to flex their cores.

Gigabyte’s Aero 15X, equipped with the same CPU as “Little Mac”, was able to render identical tasks in less than half the time by virtue of a burlier cooling system, which consistently expelled enough heat for the processor’s six cores to operate above their default or “base” frequency.

Even when taxed with applications designed to simulate workloads more intensive than the most demanding user might encounter when carrying out day to day duties, this exact same CPU remained between 15 and 20 degrees cooler than when stifled by the Macbook’s meagre dimensions.

“But they sound like a wind turbine and weigh as much as a breeze block, retorted the Apple-achians, plus who would pick Premier Pro over Final Cut? The latter is invariably faster when manipulating and previewing a multitude of compressed and Raw formats, which more than compensates for the Processor’s thermal handicap!”

“Wow, how standards have slipped.” Came another response.  “So in the realm of Apple the most we can expect from a three thousand dollar laptop is a processor that exceeds 85 degrees under nominal workloads and can only provide a few minutes above its base speed with every core fully occupied?”

“It’s quick enough for me!” Yelled another, “AND I ENJOY HEARING MYSELF THINK!”

“Let’s find out how fast it is after a year of teetering on the verge boiling point.”  Voiced a disapproving chorus.  “Let’s see it keep a cool head with clumps of dust obstructing what pathetic ventilation it has, and  I wonder just how many of those VREGs will go bang the night before game changing deadlines or how easy and cheap it will to get replacements when Apple’s certified Geniuses can’t source parts that cost twice the price of a whole new machine and refuse to allow any freelance engineers the right to repair.”

“If Intel hadn’t fluffed their lithography, it would run cool enough without any ventilation.” Protested users who now relied entirely on iPad Pros for their assignments and amusements.

“Besides” Followed one long time Mac loyalist. “Dust is busted with a screwdriver and compressed air every few months.  For any catastrophe, which is rare, Apple care has never failed me.  You’ve all been deluded by those tawdry “smear studies” where stupidly wealthy technophiles tarnish Apple’s profile by “orchestrating” disasters on newly released products just to grab a ton of hits and imply Apple isn’t willing or competent to honour its customers.  To them its highly profitable propaganda.”

“Ha!” Exclaimed a staunch Windows activist.  “Your high and mighty has made cutting corners into a fine art, and all under the pretence of innovation.  Take that “Butterfly” keyboard.  Another shortfall that a modicum of practical testing would have exposed.  It’s 2018 but apparently still not possible to produce a typewriter as reliable as a 19th century Smith Corona.  And even when complaints implied that the fault was inherent, there were the likes of you to protect and preach.

“Oh no, it’s not Apple’s fault, nothing to do with the hardware, they simply decided in their infinite wisdom and kindness to nullify the incendiary publicity spitefully created by a handful of vitriolic customers by magnanimously agreeing to offer a free service & repair program to alleviate defects that are absolutely within the requisite boundaries of tolerance for a manufacturer of such principled, accomplished and universally acclaimed calibre!!”

“Agreed.” Chimed in an betrayed ex-Appolyte.  “The only time that Apple wants to see one of its machines after its left the factory is at an Apple recycling plant. The need to implement any form of “repair” process is a major inconvenience since it requires “needless” expenditure on human resources. Apple craves nothing more than to “push the button and bank the profit”.

Once the mud slinging had subsided, there remained the controversial theory that Apple had deliberately chosen to chuck money at a product that would charm in the short term, but choke in the long.

Adopters were those with enough finances to use it as a mobile accompaniment to their $8000 iMac pro, which handled “all the really important stuff” likely to require a processor to perform to its capacity for longer than half an hour.  Like 8K videos of themselves discussing next year’s Macbook, which they also intended buy;

“Even though it’ll be a thousand dollars dearer and this one I got last Summer was returned the Apple store several times because capacitors near the CPU had melted…but that wasn’t Apple’s fault.”

Of course not, one could hardly condemn a trillion dollar cult for producing a clumsy concoction of reckless extravagance harbouring design flaws that a potted Science undergrad could have exposed.  Let’s not even consider the notion that Apple elected to self-sabotage in a calculated attempt to test the tolerance of their eternally forgiving clients and more crucially, justify terminating their reliance on Intel, who were “cramping their inimitable style” by failing to forge a processor that could function at full throttle inside a chassis equipped with as much ventilation as a shrink-wrapped safe.

No, far better to err on the side of blind faith and heed our leader’s prophecy.

“Worry not, for our true salvation is within “ARM’s reach”, the next one will be so much better….