Changing habitual memory is a tricky thing. Up until recently, all of my podcast editing was done in GarageBand, but I’ve recently made the jump to Logic Pro X and it’s been an interesting experience. Honestly, however, the transition has been far less fraught than I’d feared.
A large part of that is because of Apple’s move over the last couple years to share more code between GarageBand and Logic Pro. Rightfully, the current version of GarageBand should be called “Logic Basic,” or something similar; Logic Pro looks simply like a slightly more complex and cluttered version of GarageBand. Not to mention that Audio Unit plug-ins you’ve installed for GarageBand are totally compatible with Logic Pro as well. All of that is good for someone like me, who—though a big chunk of my work involves podcasts—is not an audio engineer. I know exactly what I need to do to take raw audio files and turn them into a produced episode and Logic Pro mainly lets me do that without having to spend a ton of time re-learning tools. (With the exception of actually mixing that multitrack project down into a single file—I admit, I had to consult the manual for that one.)
The even more significant impact is that rather than re-learning all my basic skills as I might have had to do had I gone to a totally different application, like Adobe Audition, I can instead spend my mental energy on enhancing my current podcast production workflow. I can focus on the new tools and capabilities that Logic Pro brings to bear to smooth out the most time-consuming parts of my life in GarageBand. So, for example, Logic’s tools for stripping silence or selecting all the audio regions forward in a project (or on a single track), or the ease of inserting chapter markers that can then be read by Forecast. I can even spend a little more time on things that make my life a little easier, like color-coding tracks so I can tell at a glance whose audio I’m looking at.
None of this is super envelope-pushing stuff, to be sure, but all of it contributes to making my life a bit easier. And no, I still don’t use a fraction of the full power of Logic Pro, not least of which is because so much of it is still aimed at editing music. (Skimming through Brett Terpestra’s excellent list of Logic features for podcasters, I only use even a few of those!) In truth, I could likely get by with a Logic Basic or a GarageBand Pro, an app that’s somewhere between the two that are available now. If you’ve never used Logic before, the app does try to ease you in by hiding away a bunch of the more advanced features upon your first use, but many of the features I was there to use were squirreled away in that case, so I had to jump into the deep end.
I understand it’s not necessarily feasible for Apple to invest its time in developing a third audio-editing program to fit between GarageBand and Logic, but it would be cool if the company created “packs” of features that could be accessed via in-app purchase, à la Ferrite on iOS. I’d gladly pay a solid chunk of money for a “Podcast Pack” set of features for GarageBand that would add in some of those useful missing tools, along with perhaps some built-in export options for popular podcasting-hosting services. Maybe that would mean more lost sales for Logic, but it’s hardly a program that has wide consumer appeal as it is. As it is, a part of me yearns for the uncluttered elegance of GarageBand (and no, that’s not a phrase I ever thought I’d be saying).
Then again, perhaps a year from now after I’ve fully adjusted to Logic, I’ll never want to go back to anything else—I mean, if it’s good enough for Spock, it’s good enough for me.
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]
When Apple announced the iMac Pro back at WWDC, I thought it’d be my next desktop. I love my Late 2015 iMac with 5K display, and the iMac Pro promised to take everything about it and make it better.
Like Jason, much of my work would benefit from being able to max out more cores. I do a ton of audio processing and editing, in addition to a fair amount of 4K video editing in Final Cut Pro X.
Before I saw the iMac Pro’s pricing, I had thought I’d opt for the 10-core machine, which seems to be the sweet spot between clock speed and core count. When I saw that the final pricing, I knew the only machine I could afford (and justify) would be the base model that Jason ordered.
I settled into that but had a problem. Instead of tapping the purchase button as quickly as I could, I found myself unsure about my decision. Even the 8-core machine would be a huge update to the 4-core i5 in my iMac, not to mention the superior RAM, SSD and GPU, but the $5,000 was still a huge chunk of change.
I set out to compare the regular iMac to its new Space Gray cousin. I think it’s easy to overlook the 27-inch iMac in the shadow of the iMac Pro, but it’s still noticeably faster than what I am sitting in front of now. Apple gave this iMac a much better GPU that what mine shipped with, and I could order one with i7, which I skipped last time when buying refurbished. Geekbench scores showed I could expect a nice speed bump, and by going to the i7 model, I’d have a hyper-threading CPU, giving me 4 additional virtual cores.
Then there was the budget. A 27-inch iMac with a 4.2 GHz Core i7, 1 TB SSD and 8 GB of RAM is just $3,099.00. A 32 GB RAM kit from MacSales runs $334, and bumps the machine to 40 GB of memory. Even at $648, their 64 GB RAM kit is less than half the price of Apple’s upgrade.
In short, a 2017 iMac wouldn’t be as big of an update for me as an iMac Pro would be, but I could do it spending considerably less money.
So that’s what I did.
My new non-Pro iMac got here right after Christmas, and I couldn’t be more excited to have a faster and more capable workstation. It should greatly decrease the frustration I feel when editing video.
Some Mac users warn against buying the first generation of any Apple product. I’m usually not in that camp (but do suggest AppleCare!) but with the iMac Pro, I couldn’t shake that thought. There’s a lot of new stuff in that chassis, with an all-new cooling system. I am extremely curious to read reviews by people I know and trust, but I’m even more interested in seeing how these machines hold up over the next couple of years.
It also lets me buy time. If this machine doesn’t meet my needs, I can still move to the iMac Pro once the dust settles, while it still retains most of its value on the second-hand market. It gives me enough breathing room to even see what the next-generation Mac Pro will be like, or even upcoming iMac models that could feature the 6-core/12-thread Coffee Lake chips from Intel.
If the 2017 iMac ends up being a bridge to the future, that’s fine. It’ll be better than my 2015, and in the worst case scenario, lets me save some cash for an upgrade down the road.
I am bummed I won’t be getting any cool Space Gray input devices, though.
[Stephen Hackett is the author of 512 Pixels and co-founder of Relay FM.]
Last month I wrote an entire article in this newsletter about my hemming and hawing about buying the iMac Pro. I mentioned that my opinion varied day to day. Well, it turns out that the iMac Pro went on sale on one of those days where I was leaning toward buying one, because I’m typing this to you while staring at a brand-new iMac Pro that’s sitting right in front of me.
Some of my peers ended up leaning the other way. See Stephen Hackett’s column, below, for why he didn’t end up with the iMac Pro. I admit to having a bunch of the same feelings as Stephen, but decided that I’m not interested in waiting for the Mac Pro and that the base-model iMac Pro would be a sufficient step up from my 2014 5K iMac to make it worth the expensive price tag.
In my quick initial tests I’m finding that on processor-intensive tasks, this iMac Pro is nearly twice as fast as my top-of-the-line 2014 5K iMac. The storage is faster, too—Apple upgraded SSD speeds in the 2015 5K iMacs, but I missed that out by jumping on the 2014 model. I’m writing a full review of the iMac Pro for Macworld, due out in the next week or two, so look to the web site for links to that article when it arrives.
Paying all this money for a computer definitely gave me a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach at several points, I’ll admit. It’s been a very long time since I bought a remotely pro-level computer—it was probably the Graphite Power Mac G4 I bought in 1999. And in those days, pro Mac desktops were designed for much broader appeal than they are today.
But what this purchase really reminded me of was the computer I convinced my parents to buy for me during the summer of 1984. They dipped into my college savings account—I marvel at that now!—to accede to my begging for a computer. As Luke Skywalker might say, this story isn’t going to go the way you think. That computer, fresh and new and sparkling with promise in 1984, was… an Apple IIe.
Seems like a terrible purchase now. The Mac… the Mac was right there! Well, let me explain. First off, the Apple IIe cost about $1400, while the Mac cost $2500. The Mac was new and weird and I had literally seen one a single time, at the West Coast Computer Faire in 1984. My reaction was that the graphics were amazing, but I was shocked at the lack of color.
The people I know all had Apple II’s of various kinds, so we were able to share software and write programs. The computer lab at my high school was full of Apple II’s. Today we think of the Mac era as starting with a bang in 1984, but it’s just not true: The Apple II was huge back then, and took years to trail off. When I interned at MacUser during the summer of 1993, there was still an Apple II magazine.
When we got home with the Apple IIe I remember setting it up, playing with it for a few minutes, and then feeling a colossal letdown. That’s where I first experienced something that I discovered was a rather common feeling called “buyer’s remorse.” I think of that feeling often, because it was intense and completely misguided. That Apple IIe was one of the best investments in my future my parents could have made.
I wore that thing out. I used it to write school essays and short stories, to run a bulletin board service for a little while, to write massive amounts of BASIC code, to play games (Lode Runner and SSI Computer Baseball were favorites)… I met my first girlfriend via that thing. And yes, I took the whole kit and caboodle to San Diego for college, and used it to write all my papers the first two years I was there. (Though that second year my enthusiasm for the device was rapidly diminishing, because I discovered the Mac. I would write papers on my Apple IIe, save them to a 3.5-inch floppy disk, and take them to a Mac on campus to print them out on a LaserWriter.)
The only thing I regret about my entire Apple IIe purchase was that I sold it when I was done with it. It was the right thing to do at the time—I had just bought a Mac SE at my college bookstore and even on sale (the Mac Classic was coming soon) and with the educational discount it was not a cheap device. I kept many of my Apple II disks, and have no idea if anything remains readable 20 years later. I bought an Apple IIc on eBay a few years back and in the next few weeks I’m going to attempt to salvage anything I can from them.
But even if the disks end up being empty, it has been a nostalgia trip to turn on an Apple II and press control-open Apple-reset. To hear the churn of that floppy disk. It was a big purchase, worthy of a case of buyer’s remorse, but that Apple II provided me six years of use during a vital part of my development. If I can get a fraction of that value out of this iMac Pro, I’ll be doing all right.
Thanks for supporting Six Colors. Without you, Dan and I would have a considerably harder time making it as independent writers and podcasters. We appreciate your support. Happy New Year!
With 2017 pretty much in the books, it’s time to cast our eyes forward to the year ahead. Apple’s already laid a lot of groundwork for what we can expect to see next year, but there are a lot of blanks still to be filled in. As ever, some of it can be gleaned from the tea leaves of what Apple’s already talked about, though, admittedly, there’s always an element of wishful thinking that plays into it as well.
Based on that heady combination, here are three technologies that I’m looking forward to hearing more from Apple about in 2018.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
On Thursday Apple apologized to iPhone customers for its lack of communication about throttling iPhones with aging batteries and explained in greater detail what it’s actually doing—and what it plans to change in the future.
The company also posted a detailed knowledge base article about the issue, and has committed to making additional details about battery status available to users via an iOS update early in 2018. After the update, the Settings app will inform users if they have a battery that’s degraded to the point where it’s eligible for a replacement. (Currently, Settings only calls out extremely degraded batteries.)
Speaking of replacements, Apple’s dramatically cutting the iPhone battery replacement cost for 2018 (for iPhone 6 or later models), discounting a replacement from $79 to $29.
These are good moves. Making it cheaper to replace an old battery is a big deal for iPhone users, who can get more life out of older models for a lot less money.
Its unfortunate that Apple wasn’t more upfront about its approach to dealing with battery issues on older phones. Their decision to keep silent plays into conspiracy theories about Apple sabotaging older devices to force upgrades. A lack of information and understanding led iPhone users to be frustrated by inexplicable device slowdowns—when there was a perfectly good explanation sitting right there.
This situation could have been avoided, or at least mitigated, but at least it has prompted Apple to communicate better and make battery upgrades much more affordable.
There are a lot of arguments against putting LTE in Macs that are distractions—Qualcomm’s royalty, for instance—because you need only look at the iPad to see how Apple would approach LTE Macs. They’d be an alternate version for an additional $130 or thereabouts, which would presumably cover the hardware, royalties, and a nice margin.
For those who think it’s silly to have an LTE Mac because why not just tether your iPhone, I once again point you to the existence of the LTE iPad. If Apple thought tethering your phone was just fine for all cases, why would a cellular iPad exist?
No, the real reason LTE Macs don’t exist is because the Mac basically has no built-in way to regulate how apps connect to the Internet. iOS was built from the ground up to differentiate between Wi-Fi and cellular data, which allows users on metered cellular plans to regulate how much data their devices use. Apps behave differently on Wi-Fi than on cellular.
This concept doesn’t really exist on macOS. (I use TripMode, an excellent utility, to manually control how my Mac apps use the Internet when I’m tethered or on a very slow connection.) Apple could absolutely add it, but that requires some (presumably hairy) work on macOS, as well as cooperation from third-party developers.
If Apple had the will to prioritize this, I think we could’ve seen cellular MacBooks years ago. Once again, the cellular iPad colors my thinking here. Its existence suggests that Apple isn’t philosophically opposed to building LTE into every mobile device it makes. It’s just too much trouble to build it into the Mac. (And if you put LTE into a Mac without tools to regulate cellular data, people would destroy their data plans and get very angry, very fast. This happens today on tethered Macs, hence TripMode.)
The pessimist in me says that there are no cellular MacBooks because Apple is putting what limited resources it’s allocating to macOS to other features, and because iOS (or whatever comes after iOS) is the future. The optimist in me figures that if the Mac does indeed keep going forever, at some point Apple’s going to need to make the effort to transform it into a better cellular citizen.
2017 was a pretty good year for the Mac, if you consider how 2016 went. We got new iMacs and an iMac Pro, timely revisions to the MacBook Pro and MacBook, and a promise of a new Mac Pro in the future. I got more of what I wished for than I’d expected.
With my 2017 calendar looking awfully thin, it’s time to turn to 2018. Here’s a collection of my hopes, dreams, and wild ideas for what I’d like to see from the Mac in the next year.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
Even the screen protector is darker.
On Boxing Day I took delivery of the new iMac Pro. This is the $4999 base model (8 core Xeon, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD), and I bought it myself with my own money because after three years with my original 2014 5K iMac (core i7 model), I was ready to upgrade to something faster.
I’m working on a full review for next week or the week after, but I’ve done some initial comparisons between my old 5K iMac and the iMac Pro and you will not be surprised to discover that it’s a lot faster. Yep. Stop the presses.
A sound improvement
Let’s be honest, the writing work I do could be performed on a PowerBook 160 running WriteNow. Putting one letter after another isn’t particularly demanding work in terms of processing power. But these days I am recording and producing numerous podcasts, and sometimes generating large video files, and these are the tasks that drove me to purchasing the iMac Pro.
One of my most common audio workflows involves grabbing audio files from panelists, converting them to WAV format via the ffmpeg command line tool, removing background noise via iZotope RX 6’s Spectral Denoise filter, writing that file back to disk, and using the private-beta tool sidetrack to sync the panelist’s file up with a reference track. There’s a lot of processor-intense stuff in there, as well as some disk access.
It took my 2014 5K iMac 160 seconds to perform all of those tasks; it took the iMac Pro 96 seconds, meaning that the iMac Pro was able to do the job in 60 percent of the time. Isolate just the processor-intensive task of denoising three hours of audio, and the 5K iMac took 94 seconds, versus 49 seconds for the iMac Pro—a little more than half the time.
I frequently take large 1080p videos export from editing apps and slim them down into versions I can upload to YouTube or post for a video podcast via the HandBrake video-encoding app. I performed one of these encodes on both the 2014 5K iMac and the iMac Pro; the 5K iMac encoded the video in 21 minutes and 16 seconds, while the iMac Pro took 11 minutes and 14 seconds. Once again, that’s a little more than half the time. It’s enough for me to declare that for jobs optimized for multiple processor cores, this base model iMac Pro is nearly twice as fast as the top-of-the-line 5K iMac from 2014.
When running HandBrake, the fan on my 5K iMac would always crank up and was quite audible when it did so. So far as I can tell, the iMac Pro’s fan may always be running, but it’s amazingly quiet. In my normal office environment, I can’t hear it—only when I spun the iMac Pro around and listened with all other devices off could I hear it, faintly blowing. When HandBrake was running at full speed, the iMac Pro sounded pretty much the same—but the air coming out of the vents on the back was definitely warmer!
None more black
Nothing like buying a computer for five grand only to have everyone ask you about the accessories instead. Yes, there’s a space gray trackpad (I’m keeping it) and a space gray keyboard (I’ll sell it to a friend) and a space gray mouse (I didn’t bother ordering it). I hope Apple makes these color variations available to everyone eventually, given how excited people are about them. I like the dark trackpad, which is a better match for my black keyboard and black keyboard tray. The dark keyboard with dark keys looks fantastic, but I’ve got no interest in any keyboard with a number pad attached. It’ll find a good home.
Like the Mac Pro, the iMac Pro’s little packet of Apple goodies includes a pair of black Apple-logo stickers. It’s like Spinal Tap packed this computer.
My 5k iMac was the VESA version—it had no base, but instead had a VESA mounting block on the back, and it’s hung on a mounting arm suspended above my desk for the last three years. The iMac Pro, like iMacs of previous generations (but not the most recent), isn’t offered in separate versions. Instead, the base of the iMac is removable, and Apple sells a VESA adapter. Unfortunately, that adapter isn’t arriving until next week, so for now my iMac Pro sits on my desk on its Space Gray base. Every time I reach for something on my desk, I’m reminded why I prefer to have my iMac on a mounting arm. At least iMac Pro buyers don’t have to choose the fate of their computer at the moment of purchase.
Beyond that? It’s a 5K iMac, albeit in a slightly darker shade. I made my transfer of data using Migration Assistant via Thunderbolt, which meant I needed to dig up a Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 adapter. (Turns out I had one of those!) I look forward to compressing more video and denoising more audio. This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
I spoke to Chuck Joiner a couple of weeks ago about the new edition of my Photos book, Apple’s strategy for Photos in general, and the future of computer-processed imagery. If you wanted to hear me talk about what Apple’s doing with Photos and where it’s going in the future, this is a good overview. (The YouTube video is embedded below; here’s an Overcast link.)
Rene Ritchie invited me on his new Vector podcast to talk with the developer of one of my favorite iOS apps, Ferrite Recording Studio. It was a fun conversation that you might like if you’re interested in iOS apps and podcast editing! (Here’s an Overcast link.)
PCalc was my first ever application. I started writing in the summer of 1992 and it took me around six months to get it into a state where I was happy to show it to the world. Some of that code still runs today, deep at the heart of the machine.
That is both amazing and terrifying.
In 1992 I had finished college and while James was writing PCalc I was a reporting intern for my hometown’s daily newspaper. By the time it was released, I was finishing my first semester of grad school and had just bought a PowerBook 160, my first laptop.
I didn’t get to know James for a few more years. When I was a junior editor at MacUser I reviewed DragThing for MacUser’s shareware library and gave it the coveted five-mouse award, and deservedly so. This means I haven’t known James for quite a quarter of a century, but it’s getting awfully close.
Isn’t it cool to know that sometimes your favorite apps can grow and change and still survive across a quarter of a century? PCalc started on the classic Mac OS and has since gone to OS X, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, and Apple Watch. Most remarkably, it has allowed James to make his living as an independent software developer.
Congratulations to James on this amazing milestone.
2017: a heck of a year. Normally, I spend most of my time thinking about what Apple might do in the future, but as 2017 draws to a close, I thought it might be worth it to revisit some of the biggest moves that Apple has made in the last twelve months, and where it might leave us positioned for the year to come.
We haven’t tried the iMac Pro yet, but others have: https://daringfireball.net/2017/12/imac_pro_first_impressions
The Caava will ship in February: https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/19/16794280/caavo-universal-remote-price-release-date
It’s too late to get AirPods before the end of the year: https://www.macrumors.com/2017/12/17/airpods-sold-out-until-january/
Moltz recommends Inside: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/playdeads-inside/id1201642309?mt=8
Lex still likes HQ. Its founders, though: https://www.recode.net/2017/12/18/16752796/hq-trivia-founders-fundraising-bad-reputation-creepy-behavior-twitter-vine
Our thanks as well to Hello Fresh (http://HelloFresh.com) making cooking more fun with farm-to-box recipes and ingredients delivered to your door. Go to HelloFresh.com and enter the code “REBOUND30” to get $30 off your first week of deliveries!
January is the month for optimism, looking forward, and dreaming about what the new year might bring. But in the cold, dim light of December, it’s time to admit that the hourglass has just about run out on our hopes and dreams for the current year. Last year I wrote about my hopes for the Mac, the iPhone, and the iPad Pro in the shiny new year 2017.
While I am hard at work on building my wish list for 2018—hope springs eternal—it’s worth looking back and finding out just how many of my dreams were fulfilled this year, and how many simply didn’t happen. (Yes, this is the More Color column where I check my work.)
Starting as early as next year, software developers will be able to design a single application that works with a touchscreen or mouse and trackpad depending on whether it’s running on the iPhone and iPad operating system or on Mac hardware, according to people familiar with the matter.
Apps written for macOS and iOS already share a lot of common elements, including relying on many of the same underlying frameworks; this story seems to suggest that those ties will get even closer. Essentially, you’d have a single app package that would be able to load the correct UI for the devices that it’s running on.
One major advantage of this, as Gurman says, is that it would potentially help breathe new life into the Mac App Store, which has never seen quite the same level of success as its iOS counterpart. Developers would still have to deploy a custom Mac UI optimized for trackpad and keyboard rather than iOS’s direct touch interaction, but much of the code could then be written once for both iOS and Mac apps.
Of course—and here I’m diverging into my own speculation—if Apple decided it wanted to create a direct-touch interface on the Mac, this would help that along as well. If apps already contain UIs that are optimized for touch, that could make it easier to bring touch capabilities to the rest of the Mac. It would still require some pretty large shakeups to adapt the rest of the macOS to a touch interface, but it could point the way towards a future unified platform.
It also raises questions about the much-discussed potential of a Mac running on an ARM-based processor. An app that runs on both iOS and macOS would need to contain binaries to run on both x86 and ARM hardware, which would by default make all of those apps compatible with a putative ARM-based Mac.
If this unified app platform does come to pass—and Gurman hedges to say the plan could still be pushed back or canceled—then it’s the first step towards a future where Apple doesn’t have to maintain two major platforms. And, from the Apple perspective, this is a sensible way to move in that direction: by making a smaller adjustment upfront that could potentially save a lot of headache later.
What’s clear is that with iOS hitting the ten-year mark and the current incarnation of macOS approaching its 17th birthday, Apple is likely looking forward to the future of both of its platforms—and it makes a sense that it would want that future to be a closely intertwined one.
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
Dan and Jason read a lot. And both of them keep running into people who say they hear us praising books, and then they go and read them! This is a great responsibility, and not one we take lightly. Here are the books we loved this year. (Not all of them were published in 2017. But this is the year we read them!)
Borderline
Mishell Baker’s Borderline is what I’d call “fairy noir”. It’s got a lot of the features of noir detective stories—a hard-bitten investigator with a load of personal baggage who has to navigate a corrupt system and a bunch of deceitful suspects in order to do the job. That it’s set in L.A. and is about the rich and famous in Hollywood is an extra noir bonus. The protagonist, Millie, has Borderline Personality Disorder and is still reeling from the suicide attempt that left one leg amputated above the knee and the other just below. To top it all off, she’s just discovered that everything she thinks she knows about how the world works is wrong: Earth and a magical realm are joined by a series of portals, and magical creatures we might call fairies have been the source of human creativity and inspiration for centuries.
I’m not a big fantasy fan, but this mash-up of genres really works. And its beating heart is Millie, damaged and unhappy but trying to pick up the pieces of her life and make something of it. If only she can find her missing person and avoid being killed as she uncovers a worlds-spanning conspiracy. It’s the best book I read in 2017.-J.S.
The Pigeon Tunnel
I know you’ll all be shocked to hear that I’m a fan of espionage fiction. And though The Pigeon Tunnel is neither fiction nor wholly about espionage, that fact that it’s by legendary spy writer John Le Carré still explains why I picked it up. This assemblage of stories from Le Carré’s life is a delightful collection, including everything from his rubbing shoulders with Russian mafia members to Le Carré’s own meager time in the secret intelligence services to a chance encounter that involved him dancing with Yasser Arafat. It’s a quick but fascinating read and well worth it for Le Carré fans or those who enjoy tales of an interesting life well lived. —D.M.
Persepolis Rising
It’s hard to recommend the seventh book in a book series, but here I am recommending Persepolis Rising by James S.A. Corey, the latest in the Expanse sci-fi series. If you’re new to the series, start with Leviathan Wakes and go from there. The latest installment jumps forward in time, allowing the ramifications of the first six books to bake into the setting and cause some really interesting twists to fall back out. This book’s a bit dark—it’s definitely the “Empire Strikes Back” of the series—but I simply couldn’t put it down. That’s the sign of a good book.
After seven books and that time jump, the Expanse’s characters are lived in and familiar, but that only intensifies the changes to the world around them and the decisions they need to make. There’s large-scale war with spaceships, small-scale politics, freedom-fighter strategy, and a whole lot more. So if you’re reading the Expanse books, this one is good. If you’re not, and you like books about spaceships and the people who live inside them, why are you waiting? (You should also watch the TV series, which is excellent—and has only managed to get through about a book and a half of plot in two seasons.)-J.S.
City of Miracles
With each succeeding installment, Robert Jackson Bennett’s Divine Cities trilogy got better and better, and the finale, City of Miracles, is the capper. Set quite a bit of time past the previous book, City of Swords, this novel stars the bruising berserker Sigrud je Harkvaldsson, a supporting character in both previous entries in the series, trying to track down the people who murdered his longtime friend. Bennett’s series and his world have evolved considerably since it began in City of Stairs, gaining more depth as they go along, and he delivers an ending that is satisfying while still leaving you wanting more.—D.M.
Tool of War
Another book in a series, but a great series. Paolo Bacigalupi’s two previous books set in this world—Ship Breaker and The Drowned Cities—are set in the near future after an environmental apocalypse has led to a dramatic reshuffling of the world order. Those two excellent books (suitable for teens and pre-teens, as they’re firmly in the Young Adult genre) can stand alone and be read in any order, though they share one supporting character in common.
That character is the genetically-engineered monster-who’s-also-a-mentor, Tool. And in Tool of War he takes center stage at last. This book’s about how Tool came to be, the purpose for which he was created, and how he feels about that. It’s sort of like reading Frankenstein from the perspective of the monster. Also, this book gave me my biggest reading surprise of the year, because it serves as a sequel to both Ship Breaker and Drowned Cities. Read those first, then read Tool of War. And if you want more from Bacigalupi, consider his adult novels The Windup Girl (my favorite book of 2010) and The Water Knife.-J.S.
A Conjuring of Light
Another trilogy ender, V.E. Schwab’s A Conjuring of Light brings to a close the story of multiple Londons first begun in A Darker Shade of Magic and continued in A Gathering of Shadows. Court magician Kell and thief-turned-pirate-turned-magician Delilah Bard try to save Red London from a monstrous evil that has already destroyed one world and now hungers for another. There’s magic, there’s romance, and plenty of action.—D.M.
The Cooperstown Casebook and Smart Baseball
I like baseball. I like books. If you like baseball and books, you might like books about baseball! And these are the two I read this year that I’d recommend.
Jay Jaffe is the single writer who has done the most work on the Baseball Hall of Fame in the last decade. He invented a new statistical standard for the Hall, JAWS, that helps understand who is enshrined and where the possible new inductees fit in. His book, The Cooperstown Casebook, features numerous smart essays about the Hall, what it has been, what it is today, and where it’s going. By position, he ranks existing Hall of Famers into the inner circle, the standard inductees, and the… er… questionable choices. Then he judges the current crop of players. It’s opinionated but smart, and Jaffe has plenty of data to back up his opinions. When I was younger I tore through Bill James’s Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame, and this is a fitting modern follow-up.
Keith Law’s Smart Baseball is a great modern update to baseball’s statistical revolution. Keith’s a longtime baseball writer and sometime baseball executive, and in this book he skewers the lousy statistics that still hang around baseball because they’re traditional, even though they don’t really inform us about how good a player is or whether a manager’s particular strategy is smart or stupid. And of course there are new statistics to replace them that are much better. If you loved Moneyball and want to know what the current state of affairs is in terms of understanding baseball, this is a great read. (For another great take on modern ways of viewing baseball, check out last year’s pick, Ahead of the Curve by Brian Kenny.)-J.S.
The Core
In The Core, Peter V. Brett’s sprawling Demon Cycle comes to an end after five volumes. Those who have followed hero Arlen Bales since The Warded Man will find this a fitting conclusion to the epic, as humanity prepares itself for the final fight against the demons that rise at night. There’s plenty of political intrigue and machinations, a few twists and turns, and a last act that is going to keep you turning pages until late in the night. Which is good, because at 800 pages, it’s going to take a while.—D.M.
Space Race: Battle to Rule the Heavens
As an American, what I learned about the Space Race is that the Soviets launched Sputnik and put the first man in space and then the Americans responded by catching up and passing them and going to the moon with the Apollo program.
So, how did that happen? Why were the Soviets out in front? How did the Americans catch up? What happened to the Soviet space program? Turns out, the USSR wasn’t really forthcoming with a lot of this historical information, but in the past few decades we’ve gained a lot more insight into that history. Deborah Cadbury’s Space Race: Battle to Rule the Heavens is essentially a joint biography of two of the biggest names in the early days of rocketry: Werner von Braun, the ex-Nazi designer of the V-2 rockets that bombed the UK, who was spirited out of a defeated Germany by the American military and put to work building the rockets that would ultimately get Americans to the moon; and Sergei Korolev, the man who went from starving to death in a Siberian gulag to becoming the “master architect” of the Soviet space program.
This is a history that doesn’t get told often enough. It’s a great read.-J.S.
The Stone Sky
Seems like it’s a year for series enders. I waited until the last volume of N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth series came out before I embarked on reading the whole thing, beginning with The Fifth Season, and I’m glad I did, as it reads more like one long unbroken story. The Stone Sky is an emotional conclusion to the long story of Essun, Nassun, and Schaffa, and sheds a lot more light on the history of this fantastical world. At this point, you’ve probably run out of excuses to read it, so just start at the beginning. Or, heck, wait for the TV show.—D.M.
Death’s End
Death’s End, written by Cixin Liu and translated into English by Ken Liu, is the third book in a series that started with The Three-Body Problem, the first foreign-language translation to win a Hugo Award for the best science fiction novel of the year.
These books are bananas. The first book made ridiculously audacious moves early on that I was positive that it couldn’t deliver on—and then it did. In spades. The scope and difficulty level of that book suggested a writer simply brimming with ideas, so many ideas that he could toss a dozen of them into a book, pulse the blender, and create one of the most inventive science-fiction books of the year. (In addition to giving me a very different perspective than what I usually get from English-language writers.)-J.S.
I had no idea. Death’s End is more audacious and more inventive than Three-Body Problem. Almost every chapter features ideas that would be mined for entire novel series by other writers. The scope of the story is the widest possibly imaginable. Yes, the characters in these books aren’t incredibly well defined—it definitely reminded me of old-school Asimovian SF at several points—but the ideas override all. I have never had as wild a reading experience as I had while reading Death’s End. It’s long and complicated and weird, a book written by someone who has read all the Science Fiction and decided he’s going to top it all, at once, in a single book.-J.S.
A Closed and Common Orbit
I enjoyed Becky Chambers’s The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, though I found it a bit more like a series of vignettes than one whole story. No such comment about the followup, A Closed and Common Orbit, which narrows the scope by focusing on two specific side characters from the first book. Chambers intertwines these two characters’ stories in the past and present and in doing so delivers a tightly plotted and emotionally affecting story of self-discovery. You don’t need to have read the first book to enjoy this one, so feel free to jump on in; a third book in the same universe is on the way next year. —D.M.
Apex
Ramez Naam’s Apex is the final book in a series that began with the excellent Nexus. These are books about what might happen to the world if nanotechnology allows us to connect human brains directly to software—and one another. Oh, and also there’s an emergently intelligent artificial intelligence trying to break out of a computer center in China. There are augmented-human fight scenes, military maneuvers, and behind it all, a fascinating theme of what it means to be human when the edges between human beings and the technology that surrounds us are entirely eroded.-J.S.
The Hanging Tree
One of my favorite ongoing series is Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London novels, following the escapades of apprentice wizard and police constable Peter Grant. The latest installment, The Hanging Tree takes Peter into the world of the wealthy as he does a favor for Lady Ty, the goddess of the River Tyburn. As always, Aaronovitch’s book is eminently readable, replete with good humor and pop culture references. It also expands upon the books’ ongoing story arc of the Faceless Man and brings it around to some particularly timely, if uncomfortable, themes. —D.M.
Ganymede
I’m not a big Steampunk fan, but I can’t get enough of Cherie Priest’s Clockwork Century series, set in a late 19th century where the Civil War rages on, airships fill the skies, and the city of Seattle has been taken over by zombies. It’s one of those genre-melting series that really does it for me. You should probably start the series with Boneshaker, but this year I finally read Ganymede, in which an airship pirate is recruited by the women of a New Orleans brothel (who are secretly spies) to raise an experimental Confederate steam submarine from a lake and navigate it down the Mississippi River into the Gulf of Mexico, all while the Confederates have the city on lockdown. Oh, and there are Seattle-style zombies in the swamps.-J.S.
Lois McMaster Bujold’s Penric novellas
I don’t tend to read a lot of shorter fiction, but I’ll certainly make an exception for the work of my favorite writer, Lois McMaster Bujold. Fans of her World of Five Gods (previous entries include The Curse of Chalion, Paladin of Souls, and The Hallowed Hunt) will enjoy this series of novellas about the adventures of young Lord Penric, who accidentally becomes host to the demon Desdemona and, eventually, a temple sorcerer and learned divine of the Bastard’s Order. Most of the (currently) six e-book-only stories that make up this series are short, though Penric’s Mission is long enough to qualify as a novel in its own right. Start with Penric’s Demon and continue from there!—D.M.
Apple does not provide the encryption keys for iMessage, thus there is no current legal obligation for Apple to redesign the system to provide law enforcement access. In fact, it’s exactly these explicit limitations of CALEA that apparently have been driving law enforcement to push for new legislation (which has in the past been referred to as “CALEA II”). That effort has not yet born fruit, despite a number of high-profile speeches.
Most interesting here is Green’s contention that Apple doesn’t go far enough to secure its communications, leaving open the technical possibility for man-in-the-middle wiretapping. That’s a hole that should be closed, and Apple should expand its efforts to bring secure communications to other avenues—email, for example—as well.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
For more than a year I’ve been trying to give myself the maximum amount of travel flexibility by finding ways to record and edit podcasts on iOS, so I don’t need to bring a laptop with me just to make podcasts. Ferrite has solved my editing needs, and I’ve found a few ways to record audio locally while using iOS.
The big challenge has been iOS’s sad and continued lack of support for external storage devices. When I’m traveling with only my iPhone and iPad, I can record audio on an external device—an SD-card recorder from Zoom, usually—but how do I get those files onto my iOS device? iOS can’t see the contents of a standard SD card.
A year ago I extolled the virtues of using a Wi-Fi enabled SD card to transfer files. And while that works, the problem is that the kind of Wi-Fi that’s embeddable in a tiny SD card is slow. Painfully slow. Especially when transferring large audio files.
This year, though, I found a new device that solved my problems. It’s the Kingston MobileLite G3, a peculiar little multi-tool of a product that can charge iOS devices, act as a mobile router to convert hotel Ethernet into Wi-Fi, and more. But there’s only one feature that I really use: its onboard SD card slot.
Like the Wi-Fi-enabled SD card I previously used, you have to download a custom app in order to view the contents of the SD card and transfer it over to your iPad or iPhone. The difference is speed. The MobileLite’s Wi-Fi transfer speeds are vastly better than those from the tiny SD card.
It’s still a little bit silly that, now that iOS has a file-management app, you still can’t plug in a mass storage device via a USB adapter and copy files off of it directly. But until Apple relents—or if it never does—the MobileLite G3 gives me a fast way to transfer audio files on the road.
