HiWire

Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan (for really obvious reasons)... I've been meaning to read it for years.

Getting rid of all the ports might allow them to make a waterproof iPhone/iPad (IP68). It's going to be a pain point with A/V gear for a while, though... I can foresee a booming business in XLR to Bluetooth dongles, low-latency wi-fi hubs for mixing equipment, effects, etc... maybe in ten years. Not sure if fiber optics will get a shot before cables disappear.

Keeping it on an i5 and 8GB is basically the best way to keep the price down. You can configure a new one with a 256GB SSD for only $50 more.

What are you using it for? I'd go for the 2TB Fusion drive because it has a larger SSD cache of 128GB... the 1TB Fusion drive might have a 24GB or 32GB cache: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7975498 I'd also go for 16GB of RAM and an i7, but that's just to mitigate the fact that it's a product from 2014. Graphic power is a weak point, but it's good enough to run 1080 resolution. A bit hard to justify at the prices Apple is charging, even refurbished. The strong points are that it has Thunderbolt 2 and you won't have to buy a dongle for Gigabit Ethernet or HDMI. It's probably a good idea to use an old keyboard and mouse... Apple increased the price of the new wireless keyboards and mice.

Bryan Ferry – Bête Noire

I hope the cables are labelled nicely behind all the gear... what a dream studio.

Bojack Horseman... better than a sitcom!

Great article... I think I'm at the opposite end of the writer's spectrum, though, despite the amount of time I spend listening to music. Since I buy music in CD/SACD form, my library is strongly constrained by budget, so I don't listen to as much new music as I should (my collection is also strongly-weighted toward audiophile recordings, which generally means that it is extraordinarily conservative). Instinctively, I know this is wrong because many of my favorite albums have been somewhat random, rather than planned purchases. Still, that Mobile Fidelity SACD of Santana III has my name on it. Even with those caveats, I have no excuses with access to free Spotify, internet radio, YouTube, etc. We are living in an unprecedented age of musical accessibility, and I am not one to complain.

Suzy Wilde https://soundcloud.com/suzy-wilde

I'm loving it so far. They appear to have consciously avoided repeating themselves and some of the stuff has been crazy, beautiful, scary, and unforgettable. It's bittersweet, too, to see everyone getting old and knowing some of the actors aren't around any more (RIP, Miguel Ferrer). I'm going to try and pace myself with an episode a week. This show deserves my time and it shouldn't be binge watched.

I finally got the Blu-ray set for this show (just watched the first 4 episodes). The sound design is by David Lynch... I'm not sure if people with TV speakers are getting everything out of the show. Has anyone else watched it yet? I'm surprised by how many actors Lynch was able to get back. There are some big-name stars, too, but I don't want to put too many spoilers in here.

Patti Smith – Horses

Annie – Two of Hearts

I wonder how long it will take for a hardware fix in new Intel processors? This messes up my purchasing budget for the next few months at least...

Happy Birthday!

Community I skipped the 4th season, though... this just reminded me to get the 6th season!

Happy holidays! May your days be full of joy.

MOJO presents... beloved

Perfecting Sound Forever by Greg Milner One of the best books I've read recently. Milner strikes an excellent balance between tech-geekery and storytelling as he discusses the history of music recording.

Sometimes I miss the 90s:

2018/2019 should be good years to buy. Intel has started laying out the power with the Kaby Lake R chips this fall to compete with a revived AMD, so we can expect to see more cores in even the mainstream products. Weirdly, Intel and AMD have agreed to collaborate on graphics together, while AMD's former graphics chief is joining Intel. May you live in interesting times... Intel's Optane drives have started to ship – I'm hoping to see those in next year's Macs as well as 10 Gigabit Ethernet, PCIe 4.0, etc., which will provide a large jump in performance rather than the incremental improvements we've seen for the last ten years. One big question mark: where does Nvidia fit in Apple's roadmap? Apple hasn't shipped a Mac with an Nvidia GPU since 2013, but there are enough CUDA apps on macOS (and Windows) that you have to wonder if Apple is sticking with AMD and OpenCL despite overwhelming evidence that Nvidia's current lineup is more powerful and more efficient than AMD's comparable Polaris/Vega products: http://barefeats.com/nv_egpu_hic.html It's possible that Nvidia will cave and include more OpenCL and Metal support in their new products (they continue to release updated macOS drivers), but I'm not sure if Apple is a big enough customer for them to care, especially if they are locked out of Apple's OEM supplier group. Another question: will Apple allow a 3.5" hard drive into any future Mac? Part of being a pro, in my opinion, is having access to fast, local storage – they blundered with the 2013 Mac Pro by limiting it to 1TB of flash storage while hard drives are reaching 14TB with the latest helium models. It would be nice to have a case that can hold at least two 3.5" hard drives for 28TB RAID 0/1 rather than relying on an external drive for mass storage.

Turns out the RAM is not upgradeable: https://www.macworld.com/article/3242187/macs/imac-pro-shipping-december-14-ram.html Cash is king...

So the iMac Pro is supposed to be available to order on Thursday... anybody going to get one? https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/12/12/16766358/imac-pro-release-days-away-apple-phil-schiller At those prices, I'm not sure if there is going to be much demand, but I'm probably wrong. I'm curious if they have some kind of exotic cooling hardware (water cooling?) to handle the thermal output from the Xeon CPUs and the Vega GPUs. Both are pretty hot and there has been a lot of online discussion about de-lidding the Xeons for better cooling. Perhaps they'll decrease the clock speeds on the Vega chips and video memory as well.

Reviews of the DVD sets seem to agree with this, too. I'll finish the first season and see how I feel about committing to the rest later.

I'm obviously late to the show, but the first episodes have been fantastic so far. I'm disappointed that they only released the first season in Blu-ray... if I like it enough, I'll have to settle for DVDs of seasons two to five. The retro '80s soundtrack is great and they've done a good job with historical detail so far. The plot has some gigantic plausibility holes, but it holds together from a dramatic standpoint (i.e., a "realistic" espionage show would be incredibly slow, boring, and basically unwatchable).