While the Mac Pro desperately needs an update, all of the rest of Apple’s computers can be recommended.
When you've been used to an 11-inch screen for so long, the necessary leap to 13 inches is jarring.
Sometimes, I find myself leaving two inches of space around the edges and keeping my browser window at the old 11-inch mark.
It's creepy how habit can storm your life and dictate its every move.
For instance, you could set a routine up so that, when you say "Alexa, good morning," your lights would turn on and that morning-motivation playlist would start blaring from the speakers. Or an iPhone use might say "Siri, I'm going home" to trigger a shortcut that sends an update to a family member in a text message, pulls up navigation directions on Apple Maps, and tells the smart thermostat to start heating up.
The real beauty of routines lies in the way you can customize them to suit your own needs and schedule. In this guide, we'll show you how to start building your own shortcuts for Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri.
Having formed a (somewhat) unified engineering team, it’s time to get down to business. May, 1985: Apple ][ sales are falling; the Mac has yet to take off. We need to make some changes, pronto, that will attract new customers and keep the old ones coming back.
One day in March of 2000, six of Google’s best engineers gathered in a makeshift war room. The company was in the midst of an unprecedented emergency. In October, its core systems, which crawled the Web to build an “index” of it, had stopped working. Although users could still type in queries at google.com, the results they received were five months out of date. More was at stake than the engineers realized. Google’s co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were negotiating a deal to power a search engine for Yahoo, and they’d promised to deliver an index ten times bigger than the one they had at the time—one capable of keeping up with the World Wide Web, which had doubled in size the previous year. If they failed, google.com would remain a time capsule, the Yahoo deal would likely collapse, and the company would risk burning through its funding into oblivion.
In a conference room by a set of stairs, the engineers laid doors across sawhorses and set up their computers. Craig Silverstein, a twenty-seven-year-old with a small frame and a high voice, sat by the far wall. Silverstein was Google’s first employee: he’d joined the company when its offices were in Brin’s living room and had rewritten much of its code himself. After four days and nights, he and a Romanian systems engineer named Bogdan Cocosel had got nowhere. “None of the analysis we were doing made any sense,” Silverstein recalled. “Everything was broken, and we didn’t know why.”
Silverstein had barely registered the presence, over his left shoulder, of Sanjay Ghemawat, a quiet thirty-three-year-old M.I.T. graduate with thick eyebrows and black hair graying at the temples. Sanjay had joined the company only a few months earlier, in December. He’d followed a colleague of his—a rangy, energetic thirty-one-year-old named Jeff Dean—from Digital Equipment Corporation. Jeff had left D.E.C. ten months before Sanjay. They were unusually close, and preferred to write code jointly. In the war room, Jeff rolled his chair over to Sanjay’s desk, leaving his own empty. Sanjay worked the keyboard while Jeff reclined beside him, correcting and cajoling like a producer in a news anchor’s ear.
Jeff and Sanjay began poring over the stalled index. They discovered that some words were missing—they’d search for “mailbox” and get no results—and that others were listed out of order. For days, they looked for flaws in the code, immersing themselves in its logic. Section by section, everything checked out. They couldn’t find the bug.
Personally, I think a Mac Mini and iPad combo is pretty sweet. Especially if someone can create a good keybaord that can be shared between the two devices. Bonus points if the keyboard works via Bluetooth and the smart connector. And maybe with a trackpad that can move cursors in both macOS and iOS.
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Thanks for reading.