I'm afraid I might have turned into a world-class geek and technology snob. My desire for the latest in computer hardware never seems to be quenched. I spend quite an amount of time in front of the screen and have begun to demand that the hardware and software I use be adequate to make the best use of my time. My problem is that rarely have I been unable to find a computer manufacturer capable of making a system that best meets my needs. I can't decide if I am not mainstream enough or if I am just too much of anomaly for any computer firm to identify my demographic.

I didn't think my needs were that out of the ordinary. I am basically looking for a system that will allow me to do development, graphic design, desktop video, studio quality audio, DVD playback, encoding high definition formats, stream music, and run a few automation tasks for my home. Oddly enough no one puts these things together into a readily made system. The result in the past has been that I've been forced to build them myself.

My struggle is the fact that my creative side loves the Macintosh operating system and their industrial design.  My analytic side is interested in the most horsepower and cutting edge technologies.  For quite some time these seem to be diametrically opposed design criteria forcing me to manage two environments to meet my needs.

As Apple announced a move away from Intel processors to their own Apple silicon I was skeptical and wondered whether their machines would ever recover from such a decision. Like many in the industry I questioned why Apple would enter into the competitive market of processor design and manufacturing. I should have thought through that skepticism.

When Steve Jobs announced Apple would build their own cellphone, nearly everyone thought that a mistake that would cost the company and make their stock price plummet. Instead the iPhone because the best selling phone on the planet and has created an entire ecosystem through the introduction of the Apple App Store and the ability for developers to create customized software for the mobile environment.

Likewise, when Apple announced the Apple Watch, people questioned why they would spend their R&D on a watch especially when fewer people were wearing a time piece on their wrist. The watch had been replaced by the cellphone (in a big part due to Apple and the iPhone). Shortly after the launch of the Apple Watch product line it became the best selling watch in the world. Suddenly everyone is wearing a watch again. But this is not your father's Timex, this is a wrist-based computer capable of monitoring the health of the wearer and alerting them in case of abnormal issues.

Apple Silicon was introduced with their first chip focused on computers, the M1. Not only was it quite different in the way it managing processing but it ran substantially cooler and using less power making it perfect for laptop and mobile computing. Even the way the chip managed memory was different an as a result more efficient allowing the device to do much greater processing with less memory.

I purchased one of the first MacBook Air M1 computers when it came out and I was impressed on its capabilities. I was able to utilize it to do much of my development work that I had been using an iMac Pro to do. My iMac Pro has a 3 GHz 20-core Intel Xeon with 128 GB of DDR4 RAM. The MacBook Air with 16GB of memory was able to render and compile in half the time on a machine that cost a fraction of what I paid for the iMac Pro.

I've learned a valuable lesson to remind myself to not question Apple when they do something completely different than other in the market place. The great part about this is that with Apple now building state-of-the-art computers with cutting edge processors, it will force Intel to step up their game and hopefully they too will come out with amazing technology making the consumer the ultimate winner.

Hardware	Software	Development	Languages

This section is not just about building hardware. It is really about how my interest in computer systems - hardware, software, and development - continue to evolve and what that means. I doubt I am alone in what I require from computers. My goal through this is to provide a clearing house of information so that I can make better informed decisions about the computer systems, software, and development tools that I use to reach my full potential no matter what that may be. Of course having hot software and hardware is always cool too.

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