I can't has cheezburger

Earlier this year I was on Mastodon, opining casually on Apple being so tight-lipped about their strategy with their highest-end pro Macs, and suggesting that Apple just speak openly about the long term plans because there isn’t really much of an Osbourne effect to be concerned with, and it will help pros trying to make a long term home on the Mac.

I had mentioned John Gruber in the toot because it was discussing an interview he did with John Ternus, so he replied to me and said “Easy. Because Apple does not talk about future products.”

Which was a really funny response to get from John Gruber because he literally participated in a roundtable discussion hosted by Apple where they specifically talked about future products, specifically pro Macs.

But this is less about me dunking on John Gruber and more about this kind of thought pattern I see a lot now from prominent bloggers and podcasters who cover Apple. You criticize something about Apple and their response is that that’s just how Apple does things.

The most recent such thing to make the rounds has been surrounding criticism of Apple for releasing a new MacBook Pro in late 2023 that still has 8 gigs of memory in its base configuration.

Pundits are taking to macsplaining that this criticism is just futile because this is just how Apple does things. Apple specs these base model Macs to hit a price point that sounds good, but they will be stingy in how it’s configured so that you need to make a hundreds of dollars upgrade to get something good.

Of course, my issue here wasn’t that I didn’t understand Apple’s strategy here (and neither is anyone else who is calling Apple out for this). I know this is their strategy, and I’m saying it sucks. A computer with the “Pro” moniker should be pro-level without qualifiers. People buying a pro Mac shouldn’t be buying one with just 8 gigabytes of memory in 2023, because even if that suits their needs now, needs grow, and a MacBook Pro with 8 gigs of RAM will, on average, have a shorter useful life than a MacBook Pro with 16 gigs (since you can’t upgrade down the road).

It’s not a pundit’s job to defend a position Apple takes that’s so indefensible their own PR teams don’t even try to defend it out loud.

Apple’s products have historically had their differences that have been misunderstood, sure, and it’s not unreasonable to explain that (and I continue to appreciate that macOS has a distinction between an app being quit and an app being open with no open windows).

But to just plain defend Apple’s right to be shitty capitalists extracting every last basis point of profit margin just for its own sake? When that very same Apple was talking a big game in September about their ambitious environmental goals? I just don’t get why you’d want to waste paragraphs or air on it.

It’s true that this strategy of under-specced products at the low end has been a cornerstone of Apple product strategy under Tim Cook, and it’s fine to explain that historical context to your audience. And you can tell me that I shouldn’t be surprised at behavior like this because it’s consistent with years of their behavior. But you do not get to tell me I just need to accept that. These practices are worse for Apple customers, and if your primary audience is Apple customers, what good are you doing your readers and listeners telling them there’s no more in expecting more from Apple? What good is your loud voice if all you want to use it for is to help a $2.8 trillion company work their way to $3 trillion and beyond?

icanthascheezburger isn’t here to shill for Apple; I am here to understand Apple and to call them out on customer hostility. If Apple wants to make record-setting revenues they can do so by earning the revenue by making great products, not extracting it through nickel and diming on entry level configurations.

2023 was a relatively quiet year for icanthascheezburger.

It wasn’t a quiet year for me, though. I spent much of the year adjusting to the new reality that the most important person in my life decided to pursue another relationship and moved out. I had experienced a previous loss in momentum back in 2021 when I set the ambitious goal to publish 100 posts, and it was related issues that was taking the wind out of my sails.

The details and aftermath are mundane and not likely to be that meaningful to anyone but me. If you’ve experienced the same, you probably know what it’s like. In retrospect, I’m impressed I stayed as on top of things as I did. I was close to being a functioning adult as one could reasonably expect, but I was a depressed functioning adult.

The theme of 2023 for me has been “radical self-care.” Sometimes just continuing to exist from day to day was all I could handle. There were a lot of evenings where I remember just sitting in the hammock chair in my office, doomscrolling on TikTok and generally feeling numb, save for the comfort of being cocooned in the chair and having some cats curled up with me.

But I also did a lot of activities this year. I biked something like 150 miles this year which probably isn’t that much to a biking enthusiast but it’s more than I’ve ever biked in a year. I kept up with a commitment to regularly play retro games with one of my friends and we have completed a ton of games this year (more on that in a later post). I landed four different fixes into Ruby on Rails and even experimented with making a code change to Ruby itself (the PR didn’t land but I’m not mad; I got to learn how to play around with the Ruby C code).

I went to therapy. I relaxed in soaking tubs. I floated in sensory deprivation tanks. I even did some mushroom trips. I met new people and made some friends along the way (some people things didn’t work out with, but that’s okay). I went on dates.

And in the last couple months especially, I felt myself starting to turn a corner. And I found I had more I wanted to post on here, and so I just started posting more stuff.

Writing on icanthascheezburger is a virtuous cycle; it makes me feel good to post a lot of stuff on here, but I need to feel adequately good in the first place to be able to have ideas on what to write, and to write stuff that I like enough to post. And it was hard for me to do that in the last couple years while I watched the most important relationship in my life steadily decline from being really healthy and a solid foundation I could count on I knew was always going to be there, to becoming uncertain, to eventually not being there at all. When my employer announced in February (the week my ex left, actually), I joked to my manager that I could handle it just fine because I was accustomed to spending months uncertain if a relationship (work or otherwise) has a future.

icanthascheezburger’s direction

I still don’t think that icanthascheezburger has any particular major theme aside from “stuff Aaron’s interested in talking about.” I plan to overall keep doing that, but hopefully with more regularity. One of the biggest lessons I learned this year is that home is what you keep showing up to, and I want to make icanthascheezburger feel like a home to me.

I kind of look at John Gruber’s legendary Daring Fireball blog as aspirational. That’s not to say I want to make a DF clone. But as I look at the Apple bloggers and podcasters I’ve looked up to, I see this generation of now middle-aged straight white dudes whose values aren’t quite lined up with mine. I still respect their work, but I realize now that it’s okay for new voices to sprout up. It’s not like the internet has a limited number of column inches.

In particular, my adulthood has seen Apple ascend from being a relative underdog to being an incredibly powerful force, and though I know Apple’s history and humble roots too, I want to be louder about the stuff I think we should be worried about more, both Apple related and otherwise. The generation of Apple literati I’ve grown up reading and listening to were shaped by a different era of Apple’s history, one where you could unironically refer to Apple as beleaguered and in need of people to champion them.

So I plan to write about that more. I want to talk about major issues facing the world and the tech world. I’ll talk about topical stuff without feeling an urge to weigh in on every single event. I will be buying a Vision Pro and I expect I’ll be talking about it a lot. I may not have a post for everything, but I’ll post when I feel I have something worth saying.

I don’t expect to ever amass a following of tens of thousands or even thousands (if I can pull off three figures I’d be delighted, to be honest), but I’d love to put out some good writing and get people thinking more about stuff. But icanthascheezburger doesn’t have to become big. If it got big enough that I could make a living off of it, that would be wild. But I’m happy to keep it a hobby, sharing thoughts with my dozens of readers (even “dozens” is probably a stretch).

And barring that, this is a journal where I am sharing my body of writing work with the world, and people can watch me work on my writing craft.

Expect an uptick in posts as 2023 nears an end and I am getting more relaxation in, and let’s see if I can’t really hit that 100-post mark in 2024.

Finally, if you are reading this, thank you. It’s humbling to get to spend a little time in your brain.