* * * * *

   Congratulations Apple! You made a laptop as annoying to use as Microsoft
                                   Windows

The new Mac laptop [1] arrived today. I will say that Apple packaging is top
notch and beautiful in a Zen-simplistic way. Just beautiful. The laptop
itself? Eh … it's physically smaller than my previous laptop, and it has that
insipid touch bar across the top of the keyboard. And the less said about
that keyboard, the better. Upon turning the laptop on, I was beset with
pleading messages to update software from Apple, the Apple Store and from …
Microsoft?

Sigh.

Thing is only thirty minutes old, so of course it's ancient and not worth the
brushed aluminium it's made from. Burn it to the ground, salt the earth, and
start over again.

Damn this upgrade treadmill.

If that wasn't bad enough, Apple is now copying Microsoft's playbook and made
a ton of gratuitous changes to the various system configuaration windows,
making it all the more difficult to adapt the settings to how I like them.
For a period of time, it looked as if my entire work flow just wouldn't be
possible (mainly, I log into my work Mac laptop via ssh and do all my
development via the command line with a Real Keyboard [2]™ and not the utter
XXXX that is passed off as keyboards on laptops of any make these days), but
I did find the tweakable option to enable ssh access. Of course, twenty
seconds of not using the physical laptop will cause it to sleep, thus making
it unresponsivle via ssh and none of the settings I've tweaked has stopped it
from doing that.

XXXX!

So while I have a ton of corporate crap like Microsoft Word, Excel,
PowerPoint and big brother-esque spyware to prevent me from “infecting” the
computer, it did not come with any development software on it. Of course it
didn't! Who uses computers for development these days? Granted, if I
purchased said laptop, I would expect to have to install the development
software, but for a corporate pre-installed laptop for my job? That involves
writing software? I have no words.

So yeah, I no longer have to use Satan, the useless Windows Laptop [3]. Now I
have to use Belial, the annoying Mac Laptop. I suppose I could try asking for
a Linux laptop … yeah, who am I kidding? That will never happen.

[1] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2022/02/11.3
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_M_keyboard
[3] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2019/08/22.1

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