Category: Computing

Just this title will get some peoples blood boiling, the answer is no of course not – but its the wrong question, what is it you want to do?

I am currently typing this on the iPad Pro 9.7 with its Apple keyboard (Apple look at Logitech there’s is better).   I have done a number of blog posts on my iPad during this year, sometimes I only got so far and had to wait till I got home to fire up my desktop to access a picture from my master Adobe Lightroom catalogue (not the iPad’s fault).

Another time I had the image in my camera roll on the iPad but it was too large to load onto the website and I could not find a way on the iPad to resize it.

As the last seven months have past, I have continued to alternate between my old eight year old laptop and the iPad, each time as features progress and improve I have been able to do more and more.  Recently I managed a complete blog post just using Adobe Lightroom Mobile and the Web front end, it helped that the images I needed were in my sync’ed images but if they had not been reaching for the laptop would not have helped.

Lightroom Mobile is fairly usable it’s missing keywords and presets but is getting there.  Its a bit of a cheat but I sometimes use remote control tools to remote my Mac and use Lightroom and Photoshop with the Apple Pencil, its nice to work in the living room and be social and not be locked away working in my office.  Interestingly this works better then trying to remote my desktop Mac from my laptop.

 

Tonight here in the UK we had the Apple Press conference streamed.  I was expecting Thunderbolt 3 and was not surprised to see four TB3 ports on the mid and high end models and two on the low end.  I was also pleased to see the headphone socket retained.  What I was sad to see was the loss of the MagSafe port for charging and also the lack of HDMI and USB3 or Ethernet.  Now we need to carry more dongles until the rest of the industry catches up.

Its also given Apple a bit of a problem with consistency, the iPhone headphones are now Lighting port but we have no Lighting port on the MacBook Pro, so you cannot use the new headphones.  If you just bought a iPhone 7 you cannot even plug it in to your shiny new Mac to charge or sync with iTunes but are limited to syncing over Bluetooth.

I had a quick look on the WEX Photographic website for CF and SD card readers for TB3 or USB-C (its the same port), they had USB 2, 3.0 and TB2; so more dongles to carry.

I have to admit there nice machines but for me i’ll keep using my old laptop for a while longer until TB3 and USB-C get more common and Apple sort out their inconsistencies with the iPhone.

If I did need a laptop for light work I would buy the bottom of the range 13 inch MacBook Pro, while it just has the two TB3 ports it would work ok for light work.

Last week Apple released the latest version of OS X, now renamed to MacOS.  My old laptop is now too old, there are ways of forcing it on, and I may try that but without Bluetooth v4 and Wireless AC you miss out on a lot of the cool features.

Luckily my desktop does support the OS and the cool new features.

Being a photographer I have too many devices that need testing to just jump ahead with the upgrade so I have been doing a little research first.

As far as I could find everything should work, the only worry was my i1 screen calibrator and my printer, while Epson listed my scanner compatible with MacOS the printer only had the previous version of OS listed.

With that being the case I downloaded the new OS and installed it on a spare external hard drive and booted my MacPro desktop from that.  First I did a clean install and downloaded the Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom to test, then my Wacom tablet.  That all worked fine.

I then tested Apple’s migration assistant and pulled over all my data and applications and settings from my Time Machine backup disk.

I tested Photoshop and Lightroom again and the tablet.  Then I tested my scanner and finally I tried some prints from Lightroom to my printer.

I am pleased to report that everything works, so once MacOS 10.12.1 is released I’ll risk upgrading.

 

Here in the UK iOS 10 was released at 18:00 on Tuesday night.  I was looking forward to this more then the new iPhone, my iPhone 6 Plus is still going strong with no issues, I skipped the 6S and will skip the new 7.

I was not at home when it was released but had my laptop, iPad and iPhone with me and internet access.  I had made sure that my iDevices were backed up, but also before updating I checked out the forums to see what issues people were having.  Lucky I did as the OTA (over the air) update was corrupt so many users ending up having to restore their phones.  Apple quickly resolved that and once the reports looked good I upgraded my phone.  When I was happy with that I then updated the iPad.

Once again iOS10 is more polish and has changed a few things including getting rid of the iconic swipe to open.  Overall I like the changes.