Category Archives: Hardware

Stuff

Butt ugly. $60k+.

Mac Pro

Had to get the wheels, too.

For an index of all my Mac Pro articles, click here.

There’s a new American Express card out named the AMEX Plutonium, and of course they sent me one. It’s a sweet deal and there’s no charge for the radioactivity, which decays quickly. There’s no credit limit and if you spend $1mm a year they waive the annual $50k fee. And the interest rate is only 10% a month, which beats the local Mob’s.

Well, says, I, better get with the action and earn that freebie, so I decided to splash out on the new Mac Pro. Yup, it’s butt ugly, but I have a mechanic who will gut one of my spare regular Mac Pros and install the hardware inside that elegant box. And he’s only charging $5k to do the work! Too bad he doesn’t take AMEX.

Anyway, to jolly things along I decided to max out the new MP’s specs, so here’s what I ended up with:


Had to get the Apple monitor – it’s only twice the price of the identical Dell. Loaded her up with 768GB of memory at only 3x the market rate, a snip at $10k.


The stand is only $1,000 more. Had to have it.


Ugly as sin, so I’m having it rehoused.


Forget the stock legs. I’m going with the rollers for a mere $400 more.

I hope it arrives soon as it should allow me to email and play Pong much faster. I also charged a new Rolls and a Bentley on the Plutonium – a man needs variety – so now I am well on the way to the free annual fee. I’m going to show the new Roller at local shows with the new Mac Pro in the passenger seat.

Looking to the future

iPhone, Photography

Small sensors rule.


Apple’s latest acquisition.

Let’s face it, the photography world needs yet another 35 mm f/1.4 or 24-70 mm f/2.8 lens for full frame as much as it needs a hole in the head.

The future is not with more optics but with better computational photography and Apple knows this better than anyone, with the dramatic improvements in quality visible in the output of the iPhone 11 Pro. Yes, those Sony optics and sensors in the iPhone 11 Pro are tremendous but the secret sauce is in the code. Any phone maker can buy the optics from Sony. Only Apple has the code and the fabulous A13 CPU to drive all those instructions. So Apple’s latest acquisition makes eminent sense while the competition at the major SLR manufacturers continues to make optics no one needs. Like the Pentagon, these camera makers are fighting the previous war.

It’s the likes of Sony and Nikon who should be buying these businesses with their smarts, not Apple, if they are to have any chance of survival. I think those chances fall daily. These companies are like Kodak whose board of directors believed film would never die.

Apple has already shown with its latest cell phones that the need for bulky digital gear falls daily. To all those skeptics who say that small sensors will never equal the output from big gear, I would remind them of what Oscar Barnack accomplished with the Leica a century ago. “Small camera, big picture“ applies as much today as it did when Oscar was a lad.

The photography future is with small, leaving just a few masochists to hump around heavy equipment bags and tripods. Increasingly, their results are indistinguishable from those produced by cell phones in capable hands.

Desperation at Nikon

Nikon bodies

Shameless revenue grab.

Time to hire the investment bankers at Nikon and sell the parts while they have some value left:


Gimme the money. Click the image for the story.

There is no comparison with like action by Apple. An iPhone with its intricate weather sealing and complex internals is not something for the local butcher to fix and, last I checked, Apple was not going out of business. Also, unlike Nikon, their 80 million iPhones sold annually do not arrive faulty or with serious design flaws. Quick, how many iPhone recalls do you remember?

Nikon is failing owing to Apple’s superb iPhone cameras, made by Sony, with Cupertino brains. That’s why they are making this pathetic revenue grab. Amusingly, the picture in the linked article testifies to Nikon’s incompetence – the stripped camera is being handled with bare, greasy fingers.

It has long been Nikon’s policy to refuse repair at the factory places for ‘grey’ market imports – the sort of thing companies like B&H was offloading in boatloads when they were not allegedly cheating on sales taxes. Now you will not be able to get your Nikon fixed anywhere but at Nikon. So when your $5,000 D6 ‘professional’ behemoth fails, get in line or do as Jaguar owners of yore did. Buy two. One for use, the other in the repair shop.

Upcoming deaths

iPhone, Photography

All change.

Here are some of the activities and businesses which will die with the oncoming tsunami of change powered by computational photography:

  • Professional wedding photographers – anyone can take a good wedding snap, and it only has a shelf life through the divorce date
  • Micro Four-Thirds cameras and lenses – they add nothing to iPhone 11 Pro quality at 4x the bulk and weight
  • Olympus – all their eggs in one basket …. and a handful of microscope sales and accounting fraud
  • Nikon – no diversification
  • Canon’s big gear division
  • Panasonic’s camera division – they managed to deliver a great FF body just as the format died. They should stick to TVs and washing machines
  • Pentax – no distinguishing product
  • APS-C – a ridiculous format which delivers the quality of MFT in the bulk of FF
  • All those silly-priced Zeiss lenses for full frame
  • The third rate garbage that goes by the moniker ‘Sigma lens’, an oxymoron if there ever was one
  • Most large format digital – silly priced, no quality advantage over big sensor digital bodies
  • Sony’s camera division. On the other hand their cell phone lens and sensor division will bloom
  • The last handful of reportage pros – everyone has a camera and the pro will never be in the right place at the right time
  • The mystique associated with ‘pro’ gear. It’s inferior in most practical aspects to the best cell phone cameras
  • DP Review – how many cell phone reviews can you do in a year?
  • All the other hardware sites for pixel peekers

Leica, however, will survive as there are always antiquarians with china cabinets to fill.

And it’s all because of this little part with 8.5 billion transistors in the area of two postage stamps, plus a team of very smart programmers:

And by the time Samsung has managed to steal all this proprietary technology, Apple will be on the A20. I provided an early peek inside Samsung’s design lab almost a decade ago.


iPhone 11 Pro fully loaded with case, credit card, DL, health insurance card and ATM card. Nikon? Not so much.

For the yearbook

iPhone, Photographs

Studio lighting mode.

After the test run the other day my son opted for the Studio Light portrait mode in the iPhone 11 Pro, donned a favorite shirt, combed his hair and voila! The shade of the orange tree makes for soft, diffuse lighting on what was a very sunny day. We only get 350 of those a year in Scottsdale.

iPhone 11 Pro snap, SOOC. The Portrait mode automatically blurs the background and the degree of blur can be changed in post processing.