I made pretty good quesadillas for lunch, but the crema purée was both tasty and oddly hypnotic in the blending.
The DSC-QX10 once again fills in for the missing 10X zoom lens on an iPhone, this time catching a bluebird at the feeder. How much longer before Apple has a flagship device that matches the competition? I mean, the DSC-QX10 is a decade old, not sure how many years it has left.
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:
- No more than three beans at a time.
- No more than three bean times a day.
- 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.
Windows Phone Redux
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.
