jadespace

Like most teenagers, this red-bellied woodpecker is too young to know better or doesn’t care, hopping onto the feeder after I filled it but while I was standing right there.

I don’t tell the woods in back how much I appreciate them often enough.

Other World Computing should call it the Envy Pro FX because it will create that in others. It’s fast, not sure how fast, though. I moved 10GB off my iPad Pro before my water heated in the microwave, 100GB Time Machine backup before I’d finished my tea.

Like any addict, be they opioid user, Love Island viewer, or Trump voter, I make up reaons to justify my habit, rules to control my habit. It’s the Rule of Three for Trader Joe’s Coffee Lover’s Expresso Beans, not that it matters because the cycle always ends in shame and self-loathing.

The reason is fatigue, maybe with a touch of ennuii or long COVID, because sleep is sufficient and exercise daily, so that tired feeling shouldn’t be, but there it is. A cup of coffee, even half, would dispel it as caffeine sunshine through Adenosine brain fog, but my stomach lining would disagree, so a compromise is reached. A few magic chocolate-covered expresso beans for a little cognitive clarity, but magic always has a price, hence the rules:

1. No more than three beans at a time.
2. No more than three bean times a day.
3. No beans after 3:00 PM.

I don’t know how long a 99 cent bag of beans lasts because I’ve never made to the end of one following the rules, instead gobbling what’s left in the jar because reasons. That’s followed by a beans embargo that lasts longer, days for sure, a week or two, but then….

I have to go to Trader Joe’s today.

Starlight at rest.

Microsoft just reported earnings for the 2022 fiscal year, generating more revenue than approximately three-quarters of the countries in the world, the vast majority from: cloud, software, services, gaming. And then there is Surface, the last vestige of corporate Apple envy.

Surface division started out failing to make an iPad competitor, transitioned to another reason to fire Steve Ballmer, and most recently was reorganized as a trojan horse for the “digital moleskin” fever dream of Panos Panay. The Surface brand now includes the following exhausting list of products, almost none of which matter.

• Surface
• Surface Pro
• Surface Duo
• Surface Laptop SE
• Surface Laptop Go
• Surface Laptop
• Surface Laptop Studio
• Surface Studio
• Surface Hub
• Surface Headphones
• Surface Earbuds

Of the $6.68 billion in revenue earned for FY22, and $1.49 billion for Q4, almost all of it was spent on Surface Pro tablets and Surface Laptops. Scrape $680 million for products no one buys, and figure an ASP of $1,000 split evenly between tablets and laptops and you get 3 million of each. In comparison, Apple sells around 65 million tablets and 25 million laptops. You could goose the numbers by adding more low-end tablets and laptops at an ASP of $500, so maybe 4 million each, but it’s still just pretty sad for supposed flagship devices. We’ve seen this mediocre story this before.

Like Windows Phone, Microsoft is either unwilling or unable to devote the resources to make Surface a measurable success in terms of volume or profits. Surface exists on sufferance of Nadella and interest of Panay, and either changing means doom.

My wife says there are now two Swallowtails visiting our yard daily. No kaleidoscope of butterflies this year.

Seeing this infrequently, looks like iPadPro has vertigo or possibly its orientation is fluid. I’m hoping it’s iPadOS and not the gyroscope. Perhaps the iPadOS 16 beta might help, or at least break different things.

This Rabbit hanging in the yard evenings spooks if I step onto the stoop, but is content to be watched through the glass storm door. It’s about 12 feet, or 10 feet two far for an iPhone 13 mini, but not the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-QX10. Ten years later, still getting the shot.

The packaging is minimalist: white box, product photo, typography seemingly chosen for a city Apple demographic types are fleeing over quality of life issues. Looking just at the box you might think Apple designed the Max Stand, that is until you pick it up and hear rattling. Not an Appley experience at all, but then you open the box and find the rattling is actually a very Appley experience: dongles.

Besides two dongles (Lightning port plugs), you get a dongle-to-USB-C cable and a generic USB-C cable. The stand itself is space gray, other color choices being silver, sky blue, pink, and green. The shape is a gently sloping, rounded square, 3.54 inches (90mm) on a side, just under an inch (~25mm) tall at its peak. Material components are plastic (stand), steel (base), and rubber (pad). The plastic of the stand is the first point of contention for the Max Stand.

To be fair, the scratches in the photo are not something I notice in daily usage. Still, a more robust material like aluminum might arguably have been better, but floating pixels asserts the plastic “is considerably softer than the aluminum of the ear cups, making scratching of the ear cups unlikely.” Is that reasonable? I mean, sure, everybody wants superlubricity, but outside of theoretical physics journals or a tube of KY–not happening. The lightweight plastic of the stand is balanced by the stainless steel base, giving the Max Stand heft. Weighing in at around half a pound (~250g), it is definitely heavy enough to throw through a glass window or, if you have good aim, kill a squirrel at 10 paces, though neither of those are intended use cases. The use case is to easily and efficiently charge the AirPods Max and to look good doing it.

The included USB-C cable attaches to a port on the rear of the Max Stand, and then to a not included power adapter. A dongle (magnetic connector plug) is inserted into the AirPods Max Lightning port. That connecter then attaches magnetically to the matched receptacle on the Max Stand when the AirPods Max are placed on it. There is some real engineering precision here that deserves praise, as effortless and invisible as it is. Too weak an attraction and either the connector comes out of the headphones or the headphones don’t connect to the stand properly. Too strong an attraction and the headphones don’t detach cleanly from the base, resulting in the stand dragging or dropping off. After weeks of constantly placing and removing my AirPods Max I’ve never dragged or dropped them. Getting the headphones to connect properly did require a small learning curve, a couple of days usage for me.

Unfortunately, the compromise to that excellent functionality is arguably poor form, a visible and not easily removed dongle dangling from the AirPods Max. You can remove the connector with a pair of needle-nose pliers, or your fingernails, if you have really strong fingernails, like Nosferatu the vampire strong, but you are better off not bothering. The magnetic connector is small, like micro SIM card small, and you WILL lose them if you are constantly inserting and removing them when you get out of your crypt at sunset. Nonetheless, two connectors are included with the Max Stand with replacements available.

While no one wants a dongle sticking out of their AirPods Max, save some of that disdain for Apple on their design choices. Like the Magic Mouse with a charging port underneath, the AirPods Max charging port is hidden on the bottom of the ear cup. This requires insertion of a tiny rectangle of a connector into a slot on a curved surface It’s awkward, and more than once I have felt the unpleasant scraping of a Lightning connector across the surface of my pristine AirPods Max. That’s a solved problem with the Max Stand, as is charging while traveling. The included magnetic connector-to-USB-C cable is for use when the AirPods Max are stored in Apple’s just awful–like an AI construct might design if given examples of all Jony Ives' product designs and Donald Trump’s home interiors–Smart Case.

As for the charging process itself, “set it and forget it” is more appropriate than “it just works” because it’s not obvious that it is working. There is no indicator light on the Max Stand because “you can feel how the headphones make the connection when putting them on the stand.” True, but it is a very subtle feeling, much less reassuring than an indicator light, absent that check a widget or just forget it. Headphones going off and on the Max Stand multiple times daily are effectively always charging. Regarding overcharging, I leave it to Apple to regulate that, or participation in the inevitable class action lawsuit if they don’t. If you’re wondering how long the Max Stand takes to charge the AirPods Max, you’ve missed the point or are being obtuse. Nonetheless, my AirPods Max go from 20 to 90 percent in about two hours connected to a 7.5W port, under an hour with an 18.5W USB-C PD port. Good enough. The Max Stand effectively charges the AirPods Max while providing stylish and easy access to them. But the Max Stand does one more thing, at least for me.

This is my space. There are many like it–Rupert Murdoch set fire to $680 billion for his–but this one is mine. I do my household business here, and charging devices is part of household business. The Nomad Base Station inductively charges my iPhone mini, Apple Watch, and AirPods Pro, and also provides a USB-A and USB-C port. The USB-C port charges my iPad Pro because an inductive charging iPad does not exist. Yet. But now, instead of monitoring battery life and fumbling with a cable to charge my AirPods Max, I just set the headphones down on the Max Stand. It’s another step towards a cordless–or at least a less corded–future, and that alone is worth ~$80 USD, at least to me.