789: Back to the Mac, with Matt Gemmell
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Welcome back to the Mac Power Users. I'm David Sparks, and as always, joined by Stephen Hackett. Hey, Stephen, how are you today? I'm good, David. How are you? I am very excited because we've got a guest that hasn't been on the show for a long time. Welcome back to the Mac Power Users, Matt Gemmel. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here, gentlemen. Yeah. Matt, for folks who don't know, is a... Well, I guess you started as a computer scientist, but then you turned into a thriller and a horror author, right? Yeah.

That's true. Yeah, as unlikely as it sounds. You know what? I think that there's a lot of relationship there. It takes a lot of creativity to write code. And I can see people who have that bent deciding to go off on a little bit of a tangent.

I've always felt there was more in common with those two disciplines than most people might think, absolutely. Yeah, exactly. And you probably, when we had you on the show years ago, you were able to share how some of your computer savvy helps you write better and faster, you know, taking advantage of the tools. For folks who haven't figured it out yet,

Matt hails from Edinburgh. Is that how I say it, Matt? Edinburgh? That's how you say Edinburgh, yeah. I'm not actually from here. I'm from over in Glasgow. I thought you were. I do live in Edinburgh, and we're always very careful to make that distinction here.

Okay. Yeah. I, you know, I was there last year. It is a beautiful town. I want to just take a moment to tell anybody who's thought about going to Scotland. They should. It's just amazing. I had so much fun there. I was there for fringe fest last year. My daughter had a play in fringe and man, it's a great city, but everybody from Glasgow told me that I should go to Edinburgh. In fact, James Thompson told me we built that city for the tourists. So there you go.

Absolutely. We all get a bit of a sort of staycation in our own homes when the fringe is on because we try not to venture into town because of the sheer number of tourists. I completely believe it because they take over. The other thing really quick, I promise we'll get to Mac stuff. I always thought Joe Rawling made up.

that Harry Potter universe. But in reality, it's just Edinburgh, right? I mean, there's crooked buildings and it just looks like Harry Potter to me. I don't know. I'm sure people have told you that before. But anyway, so Matt is in Edinburgh from Glasgow and writes thriller, horror, and suspense novels. We're going to put links in the notes to some of his books. They're excellent books.

but Mac is also very connected to Apple gear and his technology. And he's always got fun stuff to talk about. So Matt, what is your current Apple gear? What have I got right now? I've had a bit of an upgrade recently having moved away from the iPad pro. My last one of those was the M4 13 inch. But of course, as we're talking about today, I switched to Mac and I thought that,

I would probably need to upgrade from my... It was an M2 MacBook Air that we had as a sort of family emergency computer, but I have since got myself a computer for the next few years. So I got the 16-inch MacBook Pro, the M4 Max, 16-core CPU, 40-core GPU, 128 gigs of RAM. Yeah.

You're good now. Various accoutrements. The accessories obviously had to upgrade to a Thunderbolt 5 hub because why wouldn't you? Speakers, monitor, blah, blah, blah. Okay, so I got some follow-up questions to that, but let's start with the Thunderbolt 5. So that's the big announcement with the M4 generation. MacBook Pro, Mac Studio. Does the Mac Mini, I think Mac Mini does have Thunderbolt 5 too? I think the Pro does.

Yeah, so Apple has upgraded the Thunderbolt port, but there really aren't many Thunderbolt 5 accessories yet available. Which one did you get?

I always used the CalDigit Element Thunderbolt 4 hub, even with the iPad Pro, and absolutely loved it. The only issues were that the power supply is absolutely gigantic. It was about three times the size of the hub itself. And of course, it was a bit heavy on USB-A ports instead of...

So they have recently upgraded the Element 5 where it's got a couple of USB-C datas on the front, a couple of USB-As.

and a single USB in the back with three Thunderbolt 5s and a much smaller power supply and I just managed to get one by pestering their UK sales team almost daily until they finally sent one to me so I guess I'm now waiting for a Thunderbolt 5 enclosure to put some SSDs in for you know backing up video files and things

And there aren't many Thunderbolt 5 enclosures yet, but there will be. And that's really nice because Apple charges you so much money for storage. Thunderbolt 5 is going to be very fast external storage. And my guess is a lot less expensive than what Apple would charge you. How big is the drive in your new M4?

I only upgraded to the 2TB because just the cost of it, particularly as you say with Thunderbolt 5, the cost of upgrading the capacity as a pre-built option was insane compared to buying more than the same capacity as an SSD and even getting a Thunderbolt 4 enclosure with negligible difference in speed for most things as well. I think it was going to be...

I don't know, 1,500 pounds or something to go from two to, I think eight is the maximum you can spec it to at the moment. Whereas I got a Thunderbolt 4 enclosure and a WD Black 8 terabyte for like a couple of hundred pounds or something. It was just a crazy difference. Yeah, it's nuts. I mean, I keep thinking that the next generation is where Apple will finally get reasonable about their storage pricing, but...

I guess not. I don't know. And then one of the options with the MacBook Pro you get now is the matte screen. Did you try that or did you just get the glossy? That's the only other upgrade I chose not to get. I looked at both of them side by side in the store. And I mean, it's fantastic, but it just isn't really for me. I prefer the

and I'm using it primarily on my desk in a controlled lighting environment and I prefer the sharpness. There was a certain element of, I don't want to say graininess because that's overstating it, but there was just a certain quality to the matte screen that wasn't for me, but I certainly understand why people do buy it because it's a wonderful technology.

Now, the 16-inch is a pretty big laptop. Are you using it just as a notebook, or are you an external display and keyboard and mouse kind of person? I use it as a notebook when I take it downstairs in the evenings or something like that, but primarily, yeah, it's hooked up to an external display. I've got a 27-inch 4K Dell here, so it's a USB-C monitor, which is really convenient. It's just plugged through the hub and the...

My MacBook Pro just charges in that way. I've got some external speakers and I'm one of these mechanical keyboard folks. So I've got a split keyboard and a Kensington trackball and so on. Guys, I know this is a guest show, but can I do have a little bit of an intervention from the two of you? Oh, boy. Because I have a crisis. All right.

I had an old lawyer friend who for a variety of reasons needs a large Mac. And I happen to have an eight terabyte drive on my M two Mac studio. So he calls me up last week and says, Hey, I'll give you a very generous offer for that thing. Because for us to buy a new one with an eight terabyte drive is going to cost an arm and a leg and your resale value on your two year old is not going to be very good. So he gave, he made me a very good offer. And he,

So I thought, okay, well, I'll be like Steven and I'll sell this and get like an M4 MacBook Pro and then I'll have a mobile computer. So I did. I ordered it. I told the guy, yeah, and then I canceled it because I got like –

I have this paralysis. I can't make up my mind. Do I get a MacBook Pro? Because I almost always am in my studio. I don't have much cause to do production work outside of this room. So then I cancel it and I ordered a new M4 Mac Studio with a smaller drive.

And then I canceled that because I'm thinking, well, I have an M2. That's fine as an eight terabyte drive. I have gone through this. If you look at my Apple, like I have purchased and canceled four computers in a week. And currently I have not purchased anything because I'm just like, what am I doing? This is nuts. Tell me what to do, guys. Tell me what to do. What do you think I should do, Matt?

Well, I mean, the reason I wanted a portal, I suppose partly having come from the iPad for so long, I have a degree of anxiety about being completely tied to a desk. But I do also like to have a bit of a change of scenery. The 16-inch M4 MacBook Pro is a fantastic machine. The only thing I would say is if you're doing something

super heavy weight on it, the fans are going to kick in and it's going to make a fair bit of noise but that's if you're doing something pretty extreme, video editing and so on. It's also not a light thing

To cart around, it's sizable, as Stephen said. I suppose it depends where the source of your anxiety that feeds this paralysis is coming from. Yeah, I don't know. I guess I have some... I need a computer therapist or something. I don't know. It's weird. Because I'm usually not that indecisive. But I am on this decision for some reason. But I think if I had to pick one right now, I think I would...

either just keep my existing one or upgrade and stay Mac Studio because I have a room that I work in and I just don't have that much need. And I have a MacBook Air when I go on the road and MacBook Airs are very good now. So it's not like I couldn't do a little production work if I needed. But man, I am almost embarrassed to admit this, how difficult this decision has been for me. It's like most things in life, I'm fine. But for some reason, this upgrade cycle is really hard on me.

The way I thought about it was that if I was making a big desk setup, then the MacBook Pro is also kind of a three-second display. I've got it sitting on a riser beside my big monitor, so I suppose that's another factor to consider. Yeah. And we should mention that Matt has an excellent YouTube channel. I've been watching it all week, and you've got some great content up there. And you just recently did the What's on My Desk video, which is always fun to watch.

And I know exactly where it is. It's to the left of your monitor. It looks great.

And I have to say, I've just now completely obviated that by getting a brand new desk that I've been building for the past day. But the setup is substantially the same. All right. Stephen, give me some advice on this and then we can move on. I honestly don't know what to do with this. Because he's offering me a good sum. I'm never going to get that resale on this unless I sell it to him. But I can't honestly make up my mind between just keeping it with the big drive

upgrading the studio or going to a laptop. I go up and down on the whole thing. I mean, my sort of initial thought is that the Mac studio is owned by your business, I would assume. And like you said, you're never going to get the money out of it that he's offering. And if that's true...

then I would be, I would be tempted to do it. I know I have a bit of reputation for like swapping computers around pretty often, but you know, I've been on this 14 inch MacBook pro plus studio display set up for years now. And, uh, I've been very happy with it. And I think that, uh,

Yeah, the performance uplift going from your M2 studio to an M4 Pro or Max, probably not going to be huge or even maybe even noticeable, but there's something to the bit about like, am I going to ever see this much money for this again?

Yeah, that's for sure. But, and then the flip side is, yeah, but I'm having all my storage in one place is really nice too. But yeah, I don't know, gang, I guess maybe next show I'll tell you what I did, but yeah,

I, uh, it's, it's a strange question and I'm sorry to interrupt the show with this, but talking about Matt's computer just raises the question in my head once again, because Matt didn't question it. He just ordered himself the top of the line MacBook pro and moved on. And that's what I need to do. I need to just make a decision and move on. Yeah. I mean, in a way I'm a bad guy to ask because I have, I mean, I do some video editing stuff and some music production as well. And there's this, uh,

term having gas standing for gear acquisition syndrome and eternal lust for new technology that is very prevalent in all of those fields so I'm one of these people that when a substantially new thing is released and I've got the previous generation I just momentarily can't even look at my existing gear because I so desperately need to get the new thing

Yeah. Well, I think that not only are you two enablers, everybody listening to this show is, so that's the problem, right? If I like talk about this in the Max Barkey labs, they will all tell me to buy the most expensive thing, you know? And, and, and it's even really not the money so much as just like, you know, do I want to like switch? And, and honestly, I,

I have not really missed having a mobile production laptop. Matt, I built out a room on my house for my work, so it's very stable. And the MacBook Air is very impressive. So I go through this decision cycle. I think I just need to take a few days away from it and then come back to it. It's silly, but I struggle.

I do want to circle back to the CalDigit hub. You know, we talked to a lot of people who do use a laptop as a desktop, Matt, like you're doing, like I do. A lot of people do this. And I think to a person, anyone we've talked to over the years with a CalDigit dock, whether it's the Elements hub or like the full blown, like the TS4, which is the current big one.

have been really happy with it. And I wanted to highlight that because we just got an email recently about somebody who was looking at them like, yeah, they're kind of expensive. You know, I could just get like a USB breakout thing on Amazon for a lot less. And for some people that may work, but if you really are turning your notebook into a desktop and you want one cable or two cables going to your laptop and that's it,

The Caldige's stuff really is, I think, best in class. And it sounds like, Matt, your experience has been really positive with them. Oh, I completely agree. I would recommend these things to absolutely anyone. I was one of those people who was on the fence because of the cost of Thunderbolt, and I had any number of USB-C dongle things. And especially in iPadOS, there are just so many weird issues like

One time it will say it's drawing too much power and then you have to reconnect a device and so on and so forth. But the powered Thunderbolt hubs, they're absolutely rock solid and it just feels like they finally fixed this issue of wanting to have a whole desktop you plug into like those...

You know those dockable power books way, way, way back in the day where everything was hooked up to you and you just plug your computer in and you've got everything? And the CalDigits, the Element Thunderbolt 4 and the Element 5 now, they have been absolutely 100% without any problems, without any overheating, without any connection issues. And they're so incredibly compact. They're reversible. They're stackable. They're daisy-chainable.

It's a magnificent thing. And the cost of it, I think it was £250 to get the Element 5 and whatever the equivalent is in US dollars, it's well in proportion with the degree of hassle that it saves you and the amount of convenience that it brings. I would not hesitate for an instant to suggest people get one. Yeah. In fact, you can, Daisy Ching, because you have the four.

and you're getting the 5, so you could probably put the 4 on the back end of your 5, right? You can do, yeah. They said so in the video. I've got the 4 sitting over behind me and the 5 plugged in right now. I haven't got around to daisy-chaining them, but if I need to, it's nice to know I've got the opportunity. And of course, they're stackable because they give you these little rubber bumper things that you can mount on either the top or the bottom to even allow a wee bit of airflow. Yeah.

And then the other one that CalDigit that people like is the TS4, which is slightly more, I think it's about $100 more. And that gives you like the garden variety of input, output, you know, Ethernet, SD card, all the other stuff too. So if you want to have like a one stop for all your IO on your laptop, that's the one.

Yeah, I know a lot of people with the TS4 and they absolutely love it as well. I just didn't need the ports, but otherwise, I mean, I will be paying attention to possible announcements of hopefully a TS5 in the future. Yeah, that seems natural, right? That that'll be the next thing they have is a TS5.

Well, you guys haven't really helped me that much, but I'm just telling you, it's an internal thing I'm dealing with. It's just kind of funny. I thought I'd share it with the audience. But yeah, it's like sometimes you get opportunities and you get paralyzed by them. And most things in life, I don't have a problem with it. Apparently, upgrading my hardware is one of them. Honestly, I admire your forbearance. It almost sounds like you're the one that ought to be staging an intervention for us instead. Yeah.

Yeah, I guess. I mean, I don't know, but you know, I, that really, honestly, a solution would be to tell them no, because I have an eight terabyte drive on this M two max studio, which is an amazing computer and will continue to serve me probably for another two or four years if I let it. Right.

And all my backup, everything is done. Like if I decide to go laptop, then I got to like figure out, am I going to buy an element hub or a TS4? Like the whole situation changes, you know? And part of me is like, I don't know, am I going to get enough bang out of this to make it worth the hassle? But anyway, enough about me. Let's get Matt back to the Mac.

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The funny thing, Matt, is I had you on the list for a long time to get on the show because I felt like you were one of the best advocates of the iPad. For folks who don't know, Matt used the iPad as his sole computer

for eight and a half years. And I missed my window, right? Because I was going to have you on to talk about, well, how do you get all your work done on iPad? You know, what are the things you're doing? I look at my RSS and I see a month or two ago, Matt announces that he's back on the Mac.

So we got a great link to your article, really explaining the whole thought process behind it. I like the way you wrote it. Of course, you write very well, Matt. But just kind of explaining, it wasn't like you were angry with the iPad, but just the Mac started. You realized that the Mac was probably the better platform, what you're doing. But let's just start with the iPad journey a bit. What was it that drew you to the iPad to use it that long?

I think I've always wanted a piece of technology that was

It had a chameleonic quality that it could be not just a computer that you sit at and type on, but could give those more both futuristic and personal interactions. And I vividly remember the various abortive sort of tablet PCs way back in the day, long before iPhones and such. And the iPad, I think for everyone, it seemed like quite a natural extension of the

iPhone when the iPad was first announced, but it also sort of lacked an identity of its own. I think that still drew to some extent, but it did start to gain features and particularly the stylus input when that came along. And when I started seeing the application developers were taking the platform seriously, in some cases in areas where you would perhaps expect Apple to have done so,

I thought, I wonder if I, given that I've changed from a job that requires, you know, compilers and IDEs and simulators and all this stuff to writing, this seems something that I could readily do, along with all the ancillary bits and bobs, graphic design, accessing servers, web work, whatever else you need to do. And I just decided that I was...

So I'm going to go with that sort of figuratively minimalist kind of approach as a means towards obtaining the kind of focus that I need in my work and that I enjoy in my work. And in fairness, by the time I did that, even eight and a half years ago, there was remarkably little friction there.

A lot of the potential friction or blocks, I have to say, were addressed by third-party applications rather than iPadOS and its native first-party applications, but that was neither here nor there. And I have to say that with the very, very odd exception, I really didn't have recourse to go back to a Mac at all. Indeed, for the past several years...

I think I only ever used our sort of shared family emergency MacBook Air to do things like updating firmwares on devices because the iPad doesn't provide that level of hardware access, I think, even today, although that is starting to change. And I just worked on the thing full time. And I absolutely love that it could become a drawing tablet and a journal and...

a music production machine and a video editing terminal. It could become a terminal in the shell sense, accessing servers, but also, of course, a fantastic writing environment and even a design slate and whatever else it could be.

And I became so used to adapting myself to what the iPad offered and seeing that as the totality of what was possible. I mean, that had been my whole philosophy going in. I was going to use the iPad full-time come what may. I think at some point along the way, I stopped paying attention to the compromises that I was making.

I never installed betas of iPadOS. Once that became a thing that we were able to do, I would barely even pay attention to WWDC announcements of new features because I just had gotten into this mindset of

you know, what you don't know you can't be envious of sort of thing. Yeah, kind of put your head in the sand a bit. Yeah, sort of willfully to put my head in the sand. And that is helpful when you're on a platform where you invariably have to find novel ways of doing things that would have a very obvious defined way of doing them on a desktop operating system.

But I mean, the hardware was a massive attraction and the sense of fluidity and of the changeability of the device, that whole thing, it becomes whatever app you are in or whatever task you are doing. It really did appeal to me.

And I was extremely happy and I did not feel hampered. I really didn't feel artificially constrained. I was conscious of things like reduced feature sets and obviously certain things you couldn't do, hardware support, blah, blah, blah. But I just sort of decided that I would live with that for the future.

I guess the conceptual simplicity and minimalism of it. And it's a huge testament to iPadOS such as it is that I was able to do that quite comfortably for all of those years. And I do want to make it very, very clear, given the subject that we're talking about, that

As I say in the article, this is not a case of feeling that the Mac won or that I have come to my senses or that one is superior to the other by no means. It's simply that I have changed and my needs have changed and I've been forced to sort of reassess my computing environment in light of that.

I mean, the word I like to use with respect to the iPad is delight. I feel like it's delightful sometimes to sit and work on an iPad. It feels like you're living in the future. But you're right. There are sharp edges you will find that are sometimes a real pain to get around.

That's true. I think 'delight' is an excellent word. There's something about a device that responds to touch and it's held in the hand and that is portable and thus more often with you. There's an emotional colour to it and

I think that the marketing is really clear on that. And I think when someone first uses a tablet device, particularly an iPad, I think that is also something that is immediately understood. And that has enormous value. I just did come laterally to feel that perhaps I was spending a little too much time being delighted and perhaps not quite enough time being facilitated.

Yeah, no, absolutely. Thinking about eight and a half years, that's quite a long time. And the iPad saw some really interesting changes over that timeframe. You had it going from literally from iOS to iPadOS. And you saw more multitasking and stage manager and stuff.

But also a lot of changes in the hardware, right? Things like the Magic Keyboard. That was, I think, about five years ago. The Apple Pencil, the iPad Pro, you know, the iPad getting bigger. What were some of the meaningful changes you saw on the iPad over that time that you felt moved the platform forward?

I was very grateful to get the Apple Pencil because I always felt so uncomfortable with that whole projection of the, you know, if you see a stylist, they blew it thing with the iPhone onto the iPad because...

it was the wrong message to carry over and I'm not saying that Apple ever did but it seemed to be this sort of tacit assumption on the part of the market and the potential user base. To me it was always extremely apparent that a large touch device was perfect for artistic tools of that kind so I was very happy to see that. The Magic Keyboard, absolutely. I obviously always had to use a keyboard and whilst

there were always, you know, keyboards you could use via Bluetooth and third-party cases and so on. There is something to be said for the, you know, the extreme fantastic build quality and the, you know, magnetic latching and blah, blah, blah, even the power pass-through of the Magic Keyboard. So I'm certainly glad to see that. But the things I most appreciated were on the software side.

I wouldn't include multitasking because firstly, I always sort of

I suppose I privately felt a wee bit disdainful when people were kept coming back to that word as the be-all and end-all of the validation of a computing device. Because my experience was that the greatest strength of iPadOS is its focus. And the fact that you are immersed in a task, that was always what was most valuable to me.

And I felt that the concessions that were increasingly made to quote-unquote multitasking with split screen and slide over, et cetera, ultimately stage manager, I just, whilst acknowledging their periodic utility, I wondered if they weren't just a sort of an appeasement in a way of sometimes voices who weren't clear why they were asking for something. It was perhaps just from

losing something that was familiar rather than being willing to reconsider how they were working, which I always felt was one of the things that the iPad was primarily about.

Because the iPad started life right as a the app takes over the whole device, right? The sort of the magical piece of glass idea was this becomes whatever you're doing. So this becomes your document. This becomes your musical instrument. This becomes your sheet music. This becomes your video.

And I hadn't really thought about it the way that you mentioned. It really caught my attention about multitasking, multiple apps at a time being the benchmark that people use to define, like, is a computer good or useful? It sounds like what you're saying is there's benefit in that what originally was a limitation but now is an option on the iPad of, like, I am doing one thing at once. It takes up the whole screen. It takes up my whole...

Absolutely. I mean, I always have done, and I'm not claiming that the omission of multiple simultaneous apps visible in earlier versions of the iPad operating system was...

anything but an attempt to guarantee performance and those things hadn't been developed yet for that type of user experience. But when those features became available with split screen first, although I don't recall the exact order of the various things being given to us,

I never found myself using it and when I did, I had this uncomfortable feeling of, you know, a memory of the desktop operating system, multi-monitor setups I always had to use in the past with any number of windows and widgets and apps running in the background and so forth and the fragmented attention.

that comes with it. And the thing that I relished most about the iPad was that sense of focus that the black borders just disappeared into the background. And I always found I did my best work when I wasn't

managing Windows and interacting with the sort of artefacts and artifice of a computing device and instead was doing my work. Now that sounds pompous and I apologise for that and I by no means want to denigrate those who have absolutely valid workflows that require many apps and Windows simultaneously. There absolutely are those and I acknowledge that I was in a state

of extreme privilege as a writer who invariably does focus on a huge big chunk of text full screen for a very long time. I'm aware that that doesn't generalize to a great many people, perhaps even to most people. And so you have to take that view with a pinch of salt. But I did very much feel that

multitasking in the sense of using multiple apps at the same time, you know, visually simultaneously present was held up as this

It was almost as a... What would I say? Like a litmus test of success. Yeah, it was used as this sort of shorthand representation of what people felt they were lacking in the iPad. You know, it became this thing emblematic of proper computers or real computers or computers for productivity versus consumption and so on. And I think that we were...

too ready to leap onto that and I think there was a sacrifice involved in doing so because it pushed the iPad in a direction which was not along the path it was defining for itself. It was

More to a style of computing that had been long established. I don't want to say from the past because obviously desktop operating systems are very much contemporary as well and will be for a very long time. But I think that it was a compromise in the direction of voices who perhaps hadn't considered that maybe the point of these new interaction styles and new devices was to find different ways to do things.

Yeah, I have to say that for that reason, back to your question, Stephen, whilst I was conscious of many of these changes and improvements or whatever you would call them in the operating system,

over all of these years, I really was not a heavy user of things like multitasking. And it was only in the past year or so, perhaps less, before I switched back to the Mac just recently, that I was even using any form of multitasking. I didn't use the split screen or slide over and certainly not stage manager. So

That was something that came very late in my iPad journey because I attempted whenever possible to preserve the purity and particularly the focus of that single app interface. Yeah. Another thing you said that really resonates with me is the idea of the iPad only as consumption, not a creation device. I know that's the case for a lot of people.

But that doesn't make it the only case. I think a lot of people create a lot of stuff with the iPad. It is not just a consumption device. I always push back on that a little bit because it's okay if you've got an iPad and realize you just really like it for watching movies and reading the web because it's great for those things. But you can also write on it and you can also create on it and make music and do all sorts of stuff.

It's a magnificent entertainment device if you want it to be. And of course I used it that way every day, but it's foolish to say that something isn't for productivity. When, you know, we're as a species, a napkin and a biro are for productivity. Great novels have been written loose leaf and song lyrics have been jotted down and, and,

You know, music has been made as an acoustic instrument sitting under a tree and it's foolish. I mean, creativity and productivity and creation are a function of the individual and how they apply themselves. There are certainly no preset limits on a device as sophisticated as the iPad.

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So you spent eight and a half years on the iPad, but you have switched back to the Mac and we'll have your blog post in the in the show notes and everyone should go read it, as David said. But what was the impetus here?

It sort of snuck up on me to be honest. It was organic and it was by stealth. My wife has a home office here as I do and she was in need of an external monitor for her work machine which is a Macbook Pro and I shopped around for one in order to make a credible recommendation. She got it and

Every time I walked past her office, I just loved the look of the thing. And it's the same one that I ended up getting, this 27-inch USB-C Dell 4K monitor. And one day when she was out, it occurred to me to wonder just how iPadOS had evolved in terms of dealing with multiple screens and the stage manager experience and so on.

So I plugged it in. USB-C obviously made that extremely easy. Not quite a Thunderbolt dock, but one cable and away I went. And it really wasn't too bad. And I could see the utility of it. I tried a few apps that were the usual weird limitations. Logic works great on an external screen. Final Cut Pro doesn't. Those are just Apple applications that are obviously...

with the limitations of iPadOS with regard to customization of where widgets can and cannot go, etc. But it was a nice experience and it was running about in my head and I thought, I'm just going to get one of these. So I got the same monitor, plugged it in, and I think it was a matter of about a week later that I thought, well, I've got this Thunderbolt dock. I think there was something that I was needing to do that wasn't...

quite working out for me on the iPad. And as I say, they had this sort of household emergency use for weird websites only or firmware updates or whatever it is, microgear in the cupboards. And I thought I can literally just swap the Thunderbolt cable one machine to the next. Plugged it in and it was so instantly familiar that

And also strange, and it had changed and it had not changed. And it was less attractive and more attractive in all the ways that two different things are both better and worse than each other subjectively in the moment. And I just found that I was confronted just in the moment of it, within 10 minutes or so, with the...

sort of silently accumulated huge list of compromises and adaptions and alterings of workflows that had of course become muscle memory over decades of using desktop Macs in the past and

Particularly since my needs have changed substantially and I do a lot of video editing and music production and so forth. I thought, this is no longer the right machine for me. The iPad, I mean, as wonderful as it is. And, you know, in that context, why am I doing this to myself? And I just never plugged the iPad Pro back into the Thunderbolt dock. Was that fast? Really? Yeah.

Well, it was 15 minutes, I would say, between plugging the air into the dock to try it out with the whole setup, with my mechanical keyboard, with my pointing device, with the external monitor, until I thought, yeah, I've switched back to the mic now. It either took you 15 minutes or eight and a half years, depending on how you look at it. Exactly. Yeah.

They were 15 minutes that came at the end of a particular eight and a half years. So, I mean, things don't actually happen in the moment. They happen as a consequence of a cumulative experience. But it makes a much better anecdote if I say it was the span of 15 minutes. Yeah. So your wife came home and you said, hey, guess what? Yeah.

Thankfully, my wife, for things like that, she'll just sort of nod and say, that's nice, honey. She works in technology and she likes technology as a tool, but I suppose she quite correctly anticipated my pontificating on the subject and maybe short-circuited that by saying, oh, that's great, that's fine. Yeah. Yeah.

What were some of the friction points going back to the Mac, or were there any? Well, I have to be fair and say that going back to a Mac after a long time not using one, you're inevitably front-loading an awful lot of frustrations because you're doing a lot of installation and the old utilities you like, everything from Moom to Alfred to all the stuff.

And these days, of course, that involves a thousand prompts for, are you sure you want to allow this app to control accessibility features? And are you sure you want to open this app? It's not been signed. And this app can run in the background now. You can go to this...

system preferences to learn more about that and check it on checker checkbox and the constant touch ID the fact of touch ID I was not consciously aware that Macs don't have face ID I thought my god this is like going back to

much more primitive technology, having to use my thumb or my fingerprint or whatever. But I have since adapted to that. But that has changed since you left. Everything needs seven approvals and a system setting checkbox anymore to get installed. And that must have surprised you, right? It felt like it needed a lot of nursing. And it was an avalanche of these things. But I did do it to myself. And of course, it has settled down to some extent.

although it is more requiring of approval, requiring a pat on the head every so often than I recall it being eight and a half years ago. But that's just an artifact of the change, the security situation and just the way the world is and the fact that the ecosystem that the Mac exists in is constantly evolving, constantly in flux. I acknowledge that. It's not a failing of the operating system per se,

It was just something that was very noticeable because I was suddenly crashing back onto a platform I'd been away from for so long. The other things are that the Mac looks very different. The interface is much smaller text. There's so many more things to pick away at. Buttons and contextual menus and submenus and all of that stuff because everything is at pointer level.

scale rather than finger scale. So there's both a density and a sort of odd sparsity. I mean, the menu bar sitting at the top left of a 27-inch monitor and then this vast expanse of emptiness before you get over to control center, it just looks slightly strange to my eye occasionally. But it more than makes up for that by the degree of customization and the fact that everything is supported, be it hardware or software,

and that even you can route audio to multiple places at once and have the temerity to choose the input and output device and upgrade firmware on mechanical keyboards and so on and so on. But I had to... I found I was...

not spotlighting, alfreding, if we can make that a verb, for apps that only exist on iPadOS for a week or two before remembering which app I used for that corresponding activity on a Mac instead. But no, I suppose it's like you drive an automatic for a number of years and then you get a rental that's a manual and you find that you're automatically using the app

the clutch sorry subconsciously you know you correctly use the the clutch to change gear because you just got that memory of it from so long so that all the keyboard shortcuts immediately came back and of course helped that with a heavy keyboard user on the iPad as well I tried never to point if I could help it but yeah the one thing that trips me up to this day is

that photos, if you're, you know, uploading a photo to social media or whatever, that you get a file browser like the Finder and there's a photos entry down on the side of that rather than immediately jumping to the photos library. I honestly thought that some of the apps were just broken or there was an issue with my photos permissions or something. It just seemed so bizarre that you would have photos as an entry in the sidebar of a file picker.

in order to choose a photo to upload, but I've accepted that. You know, that's the way it is. I'm the one who's been away. It's the Max house, it's not mine, so I have to obey the rules and the customs of this strange country to which I've returned.

Did you find anything was better on the Mac than it was as you recall it being, you know, coming back? Did you find like, for instance, we had the Apple Silicon switch while you were gone. You know, did you find some some points of delight on the Mac coming back?

The main thing that delights me about the Mac is the stability. And I don't mean in the sense of apps not crashing. I don't mean that kind of stability. I mean that when you set something up,

to some value or put something somewhere, some window or whatever it is, it stays there and you come back and it's there again. You can leave apps running in the background and they don't have to relaunch and flash the launch screen again when you come back to them 20 minutes later when you've been using something else. It's just there's this wonderful quiet, steady reliability to the user experience.

And believe me, that is not to be underestimated because iPadOS is not like that. Apps will have relaunched themselves or need to relaunch themselves when you go back to them or...

so that you won't have preserved the last setting from files in the file browsing interface on iPadOS and just things that you got used to having to redo and reconfigure each time such that you got to the point where you wouldn't configure anything because you knew it would be ephemeral anyway. On the Mac, everything just sticks and the wallpaper sticks and if I've got

Two wallpapers set on the MacBook Pro and the external monitor, and then I unplug the MacBook Pro and set a different wallpaper for when it is solo without an external monitor. It remembers these things. It remembers the widget placement for the different connection modes and the different monitors set up. It remembers the positional relationship between the screens. It just remembers everything. And I have learned not to take that for granted. Where does the iPad fit in your life now? I mean, do you use it at all?

Well, it fits nicely in my cupboard. But if you'll allow me a less flippant answer, the thing about the iPad is that it is a fabulous tool for, you know, kind of satellite working. It's incredibly portable, even with the magic keyboard attached to it. And if you're doing a whole series of different types of focus work, writing most definitely included,

It's just a much more pleasant thing to use than certainly a bigger, heavier laptop like the MacBook Pro. Even the MacBook Air, which is a fantastic, gorgeous, light, portable device, there is something about the iPad where you can just pluck the screen out

off and then turn it into a drawing pad for my four-year-old son or watch something on it, the way it can transform. So I mean, I'm not getting rid of the iPad, although I do have to say at this stage, it's been weeks since I've had recourse to it. And I wonder if it might not be inherited by the aforementioned son sooner than later.

I anticipated. It is a delightful machine for the right circumstance, but I have to wonder if the amount of times that I encounter those circumstances in my life now justifies keeping a whole separate and pretty expensive tablet computer around for. Yeah, I was curious because, you know, talking about the idea of it being a great unit tasking

delightful platform. Do you write on it still? But it sounds like everything's getting done on the Mac now. It can, but if I was going to a coffee shop or going away for a couple of days and I knew that I wasn't going to need to do

anything work-wise other than focused planning, writing, that sort of thing, I'd much prefer to take the iPad along. And that's great if you already have one, but in my present situation, I don't think if I didn't have one that I would purchase one purely for that reason, because that seems a little excessive. I want to talk a little bit about some of the tools you're using for your writing. What's...

either on the iPad or especially now on the Mac, when it's time to sit down and work, where are you typing? What are you typing into? Well, I'm fortunate because Ulysses, my tool of choice, is completely cross-platform there. And indeed, I very commonly, previously I would be writing on the iPad, now on the Mac, of course, but I quite often sit and proof on the iPhone,

And of course you can edit there as well, not that I particularly like that, but the user experience is virtually identical and it's virtually at feature parity as well. So Ulysses is the main thing I use, it's where I spend the majority of my time. If I'm doing things like

graphic work and that might be anything from book cover, wraparound masters to graphics for the web, whatever it might be. Again, the Affinity Suite is on both or at least Photo and Design are, I don't think, or is Publisher on the iPad now as well. I think it actually is. So I've got that. In terms of planning and thinking,

I did previously use outliners. I was on the outliner back in the day. I shifted over to the outlining tool in MindNode, which is predominantly a mind mapping application, but it has an outliner interface to the same data and you can switch back and forth, which is fascinating. But lately I've found that

For sort of planning and thinking, I don't like to be too structured. So I tend to do them on paper, quote unquote, on my e-ink tablet devices and then just sort of save the computer for the focused work or for anything that obviously needs a sophisticated machine like video work and music production and so on. It's not really a software question, but I'm just curious. I'm always interested in people who write for a living. Are you a big outliner person?

And planner, or are you sitting down at the page and letting it flow? And what does that look like?

Yeah, the perennial question of being a plotter versus a pantser, as we call it in that area. You know, I've changed, Stephen, to be honest, in much the same way as my computing needs have changed, whereas previously, absolutely, I was a planner and everything would need to be drawn out in detail, often in the form of a multiple levels, deep thousands and thousands of words long outline. But...

I've written well over 200 weekly short stories at this point, four novels, another one on the way.

I just think that I've, I don't want to sound arrogant, of course, but I think that I've gotten enough of a facility with it and enough of a familiarity with it that I don't need that degree of preparation and that I feel a bit more able to give myself permission to pounce it a bit more. I'm always doing it in the context of

knowing where the story is going and understanding story structure and having the experience under my belt. So I think that's a sort of transition that I've made at this point where I'm much more willing to

just let it flow. But that wouldn't be the same thing as saying that I was coming completely fresh, never having written a novel before and was just going to let it pour out. It's obviously a bit of a different thing when you've done it a few times already. Yeah, you're building on it and using your experience to...

be able to do that. I mean, I think a lot of people, especially when they're starting, right? I think it's the reason like, you know, in school, like, you know, I took a bunch of writing classes, like they talk about that preparation and the outlining and maybe that's more important when you're starting out than, than later on. And some people it's vitally important the whole time. I think people just kind of land in different places.

Absolutely. It's a personal difference and neither, you know, as with the iPad and the Mac, neither is wrong, neither is worse. It just suits the individual and as I've discovered the sort of stage of life as well. Yeah, I have a friend who's a novelist and she says at this point her characters surprise her. Like she doesn't know sometimes where it's going, but the characters figure it out. And I thought that was a very interesting way to think about it.

Yeah, I think probably at the beginning you start off with the familiar and that little sort of circle of light that you know and you invariably are writing about yourself and you hear your own voice and you see your own face.

And as you get more comfortable and you stretch yourself a bit and you maybe get a wee bit better at it, you find that you're more willing to improvise and to experiment and to take the risks. And I think that's when you're really sort of developing your own craft. So I'm not surprised to hear that. This episode of MPU is brought to you by Devonthink.

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Our thanks to Dev and Think for the support of the show and all of Relay. Matt, one of the things you've been covering on your YouTube channel is the SuperNote, which is an e-ink tablet. I guess you wouldn't, well, tell us what the SuperNote is.

Well, as you say, it's an e-ink tablet. So for people who are completely new to these things, it's just like a Kindle sort of device in terms of the screen technology, but you have a stylus to write upon it using the Wacom system. In fact, all of these things are digitizers from Wacom and they're all set up primarily as notebooks,

rather than reading devices, although they all can do that as well. And the idea is that it's a sort of digital analogue, if you'll permit me to say that, of a large notebook for taking notes and organising your thoughts and so on. There are any number of manufacturers and a great many of them are essentially making Android tablets with the same sort of home screen type interface,

which just happened to have an E-Ink display and some tweaks to the UI to make it more friendly to E-Ink for high contrast and better pen latency and that kind of thing. But there are some manufacturers who have taken that Apple sort of approach where they have given themselves permission to really think about the problem they're trying to solve right from the ground up.

And I think the main two in that context would be Remarkable and Rata. And Rata is the company that makes the SuperNote devices.

The thing that really attracted me to the SuperNote in particular is, of course, its user experience and the very considered way that you interact with the device with a combination of gestures and that original iPad type absolute focus where you're always in

you know a notebook in this case and any and so every UI is temporary and transient there's no home screen for example and I just find these things hugely conducive to creativity and to productive thought and to everything from journaling to novel planning outlining that we talked about before

And even also is that scrap of paper or that stack of paper you keep on your desk for things that occur to you during the day or you want to work something out or draw a little sketch or take notes during a phone call or whatever it might be. And there is something just so special about e-ink. I don't know whether it's the very high contrast, the high resolution,

lack of emitted light of course how wonderful an experience it is when you're outdoors but it just feels like the most perfect use of the technology better even than as a reading device believe it or not it just feels so absolutely natural and when I used my first one of these devices I realized that

That in fact was what I had wanted the iPad to be in the context of using the Apple pencil for jotting things down or for drawing sketches and figuring out scenes and all that sort of thing. And of course the batteries last for weeks and weeks and weeks.

And they're just wonderful, wonderful devices as a second surface for work and for thought. And a lot of the time that I go somewhere else to do a bit of work, I don't take the iPad, I don't take the MacBook Pro, I just take an E-Ink device and work things out on paper.

And there really is something, there's something, it's an eerie magic. Perhaps it's specific to people who come from a generation where paper was much more ubiquitous, but I honestly would not be without these devices now.

And the SuperNote, one of the distinguishing factors of it is it has a ceramic nib, which is very small. So I've written on one. And when you write on this thing, it feels the most like a paper kind of experience, way more so than an iPad. And I'm guessing that's part of the attraction.

Yeah, obviously the screen feel of an iPad, it's writing on slippery glass. There are numerous screen protectors and so on you can attach in order to try and create that degree of friction. But the e-ink tablet makers have, I mean, this is their own backyard, you know, they've been doing this for years.

And it's a combination of the tips of the styluses, all of which are interchangeable between any manufacturer's E-Ink tablet device because it's all based on the Wacom EMR system. And also the film, the layer that's put on top of the device. And for my money, in terms of getting that fountain pen kind of feel,

there really is nothing better than a SuperNote with a ceramic-tipped stylus. And the reason you have the ceramic tip is because being ceramic, of course, it's got an extremely high hardness and it doesn't wear down like the sort of plastic-based tips on the majority of Wacom system stylus devices. You do have to replace the tips. And you'll find this if you have a Kindle Scribe or whatever, you'll get this little...

ring-shaped tool to pluck out the tip once it's been worn down, which can happen in a matter of weeks if you have quite a firm writing action. But the ceramic tips on the Supernote styluses, of course, they do not wear down. And the Film, I think they call it Feel Right 2 or something, I believe it's another technology license from Wacom,

which has a sort of self-healing surface, and it just provides this absolutely delightful friction. And even the sound, almost, of writing in paper, that sort of rustly, and the sense of it against your hand, it's a wonderful tactile experience. And you're right, it's absolutely something that hugely contributes to the overall feel of using these devices.

And it's interesting because price-wise, they're in the neighborhood of an iPad, the cost of an iPad. If you look at their processor...

They're way underpowered compared to an iPad, but they are a very different experience. I mean, we have listeners that absolutely love their remarkable and I hadn't heard of super note. So, so we had you coming on, but I feel like super note almost gets it better than remarkable in terms of like being unabashedly a, a digital writing pad.

I do feel that super notes, there are a lot of things that attract me to the devices and to the

company. I think that their user interface and their workflow for writing is genuinely second to none. I also like that the devices are modular or repairable. You can swap out the motherboard, you can swap out the screen component, you can swap out the battery. The internal storage is expandable.

it's presumably part of getting ahead of the whole European repairability and e-waste and so forth stuff but they also don't do this yearly upgrade cycle death march thing that is the curse of the technology industry. It's years between flagship devices in each of the two sizes that they make them and

And even previous generation devices are still going strong. So, I mean, that's wonderful. But yeah, just the way they've designed the thing to be so, so, so easy to use and to give what at first seems like a very minimalist interface, but has a depth to it, but only in the service of the core task of, you know, writing and drawing and thinking.

Whereas so many of the Android tablet type e-ink manufacturers, which are the majority, they are just these, you know, I mean, you know what Android is like. It's wonderful. It has many strengths, of course, but it is an agglomeration of lots and lots of things and options and tweakable bits and heterogeneous experiences and so on. And that sort of does infect even the e-ink variants, right?

of Android devices. They do all run Android in one flavor or another, including SuperNote, various forked versions of the operating system. But for my money, if you're looking for something that really is a digital notebook in the writing sense without equal, SuperNote is absolutely where I would advise you to look. But as you rightly point out, market forces are in place and this is a niche

area with fanatical people who are interested in it, but without gigantic markets where the costs are very high. So do you move your SuperNote data over to your Mac at any point, or do you just keep it all on SuperNote?

There's a cloud from Supernod. Indeed, you can choose where your data is stored in terms of what jurisdiction and the laws that apply to it. You can also sync via a variety of third-party services, including Dropbox and so on.

I do do that, but for the most part, I just find myself referring to stuff in the way that you would if you had a paper notebook beside your computer. And when I do need to look at things side to side, you can obviously do the handwriting, recognition, transcription, exporting that text. But what I find myself doing most often is I just open a browser window and...

screencast the supernote straight to it and it becomes a sort of presentation tool and you get the whole interface and all of the data there to refer to because i most often need to look at and read through and refer to the information rather than have copies of the information if you know what i mean yeah and and then one last question do you think that the supernote played a role in your switch back to the mac i mean you said that this scratches an itch for you that the ipad didn't um

Did this play a role? I think it's an insightful question. I'd have to say yes, because as I mentioned, one of the things that I always have loved so much about the iPad is the transforming nature of the device and having the option to...

do things like plan out my day in a sort of paper type planner and Notability or GoodNotes or the other apps that I used to use. But all of that was instantly offloaded to the E-Ink devices as soon as I started using those devices. So I suppose that in a way it did take away one of the sort of key things that had always been

I suppose emotionally bound me to the iPad form fighter. Matt, we always like to end up these interviews asking folks about some of their favorite apps and services. What are some of the apps and services that are bringing you joy and delight these days? Well, joy and delight are large words. Yeah, I know. I'm asking for those, though. Those are the ones we want to hear about.

I have to say that one of the old friends I was happiest to see upon switching back to the Mac was my absolutely beloved BB Edit that I've been using since I was, God, a teenager probably. It was jarring to not have BB Edit on the iPad. And yes, it's a text editor and code editor and all that sort of thing, so it's maybe a bit on the...

The techier side, but I feel such love. Do you write in BBEdit too? I sometimes edit things in BBEdit and use it as a sort of transitional place in the way that I would use drafts on the iPad. Of course, draft is on the Mac now as well. But for code type stuff or processing lots of text files with regular expressions or editing files on a server, BBEdit is just...

Oh, like an old love glimpsed once again and you discover your feelings have not in fact changed over the decades. So...

No, no, I'm so happy to have that in my dock. And I don't launch apps from my dock. I just file them up from Alfred or whatever. I never mouse down to the dock, but I keep BBEdit there in the same way as... The same reason I keep a photo of my son in a wee frame on my desk, you know? It's also lovely to have the full version of Logic Pro and, of course, DaVinci Resolve for video editing. Other than that...

I'm just loving the customization that's available. You know, I've got my dual screen wallpapers that are actually two halves of a big image and I've got my widgets for things that I don't have or can't have on the iPad Pro. But, oh, actually, you know what? Now that occurs to me and the reason it didn't pop into my head is because I mentioned it previously, it's the little system customization utilities.

Alfred, having Alfred again, having Moom to, you know, it's a window manipulation utility. You can use keyboard controls to move your windows around and automatically resize them and grow them and shrink them and center them and all that stuff. I am fastidious about that. And I love being able to juggle windows just via these keyboard shortcuts. Yeah.

Yeah, and Moom got a recent update, and it's like even better. Yeah, several of them. There was a new version of Alfred since I'd been away, at least one major version. So I'm now on the latest versions of all of those. And of course, gosh, SteerMouse from way back in the day. It lives still as well, and that's what I've got running my Kensington...

trackball so the joy of not that you need this on an iPad but the joy of automatically jumping the cursor to the default button in any dialogue that pops up so I don't need to actually roll around I can just click

These are wonderful things and it does make me feel sort of nostalgic for these interactions that are from way in the past. But top of the list would absolutely have to be BB Edit and you can tell Rich Siegel, whom I have met a number of times and whom I have drank whiskey with and so forth, you can tell him I said so.

Well, you know what? We're glad to have you back on the Mac because then we can get you back here and share additional workflows in the future. And I find your story about the iPad compelling. I mean, I think a lot of the things you say are still true. I mean, it's still a great unit asking device gang. Don't let people tell you that it's only for watching movies. You can do a lot of work on it. So I hope that.

that encourages you to use your iPad as well. I also hope that Apple does look at some point at some of those friction points that you saw. I mean, I do feel like, you know, the iPad does need love. In fact, here's a question for you. A final question. If Tim Cook called you and said, Matt, we're going to put you in charge of the iPad platform, what would be the first few things you would do?

I think I would, if I was being responsible, then I think I would resist doing anything immediately and I would want to sit down

with senior people and have a very serious and probably months-long discussion about what the iPad is actually for in terms of product vision, because I think that so much of it has been reacting to things and reacting to its popularity and reacting to criticism and user clamoring and requests and so forth. And I think that it has been pulled in so many different directions. And I think for a device of...

such beauty and of such flexibility and of such potential I think the main thing that the iPad lacks is a clear identity for the future and I would want to find an answer to that but my real answer would be no thanks that sounds terribly difficult and stressful I'm quite happy with Scotland of course

Well, that was a great answer. We are the MacPower users. You can find us over at relay.fm.com. Matt, where should people go to find you? I am on the web at mattgemell.scot, since I am Scottish. That's M-A-T-T-G-E-M-M-E-L-L.scot. And if you are interested in reading some of my books, you will find them at Amazon. And of course, your local physical bookstores can happily order them for you as well.

Yeah. And I will also add a plug for Matt's YouTube channel, which I think is really well done and interesting. If you are curious about a super note, he's got a bunch of videos about how he uses it there, but also just a lot of great tech stuff. So go check out Matt's YouTube. We'll put that in the show notes as well.

If you want to become a Mac Power Users, more Power Users member, go to relay.fm slash MPU. That gets you the ad-free extended version of the show. We'd love to have you. Today we'll be talking to Matt about a writer's perspective on AI. And thank you to our sponsors, 1Password, Ecamm, and Devon Technologies. We'll see you next time.