November 2023 – South Texas Macintosh User Group

by Jeff McKamey

Apple had a scary fast apple event announcing some new products:

https://www.apple.com/apple-events/

Basically, there is now M3 Macbook pro 14” and 16”

They got rid of the 13” cheaper macbook and made a 14” with the base chip and one less port in the side.

They also skipped a generation for the imac and went from a M1 to an M3. Still only a 24” screen, there is a rumor they are working on a 32” model.

The big news is of course the performance improvement from an M1 chip to an M3. It is anywhere from 20% to twice as fast depending on which chips you are comparing and what it’s doing. The M3 is 11 times faster than the fastest intel chip they ever put in a mac book (which was a while ago, but still!)

The GPU is probably the most improved from the last generation.

And they claim a 22 hour battery life on the Laptops, which is amazing…

They now have a ‘Space Black’ finish which will be interesting to see.

Apple also has refreshed some of their rechargeable devices to use USB-C instead of lightning to match the new phones.

The apple Pencil 3 is one of them. It is basically a cheaper version of the Apple Pencil 2 that recharges with a USB-C connector..

https://www.creativebloq.com/news/apple-pencil-3-ipad

There are a bunch of alternatives to the apple pencil with a different twist on drawing on a tablet:

https://www.creativebloq.com/buying-guides/best-apple-pencil-alternatives

I liked this video showing that they would use Iphones to film the event:

https://www.macrumors.com/2023/10/31/apple-video-scary-fast-event-shot-iphone-15-pro/

This is only possible because the new phones can be plugged into an external storage. At the max settings it is eating up 2 GIGABYTES per minute.

This is an article on some of the changes on the cheaper macbook pro

https://www.macrumors.com/2023/10/31/m3-macbook-pro-two-tb3-ports-not-tb4/

The big savings will be the M2 chip computers should be selling at deeper discounts than before. For Imacs, the M1’s will be on sale.

Here is an article on the M3

https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/10/31/new-apple-silicon-has-arrived-with-m3-m3-pro-and-m3-max-chips

This one just shows the slides from the event:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/21116/apple-announces-m3-soc-family-m3-m3-pro-and-m3-max-make-their-marks

CPU monkey took some wild guesses of what the performance will be:

https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu-apple_m3

This is a recap of the event

https://www.macrumors.com/2023/10/30/everything-apple-announced-october-2023-event/

I really like this picture, It shows a guy in the 80’s with all the tech of the day!

Everything in this picture is now in your pocket.
byu/contrarian_outlier_2 in90s

It is amazing how big all the stuff was to do what a phone did.

Ironically enough, there is no rotary phone in the picture…..

I really like what they can do merging databases with maps, this one show how many horror films were filmed in each town…!

https://digg.com/data-viz/link/most-popular-horror-film-locations-america-ranked-Mfv1cJ1FsZ

If you zoom in and click, Corpus Christi has an unbelievable 25 films…

But Victoria has 59????

The other map I like is from this guy,

https://eric-yim.github.io/demos/all_states.html

He has an interactive map on how good or bad schools are from databases that are really hard to read.

More AI

The writers strike is over, but no the actors strike,

Here is Johnny Cash singing blank space:

https://www.tiktok.com/@thereiruinedit/video/7295907731372772651

This has a bunch, but the second one with Snoop and Tyson is worth watching..

And of course my favorite, Arnold singing Dance With Somebody:

Cheap cloud accounting software:

There is a web based application called Wave that is much cheaper than Quickbooks or sage:

https://www.waveapps.com/pricing

It lets you do basic things for free, and if you need payroll or advanced features, they have charges for everything added on!

Air BNB has been banned in NYC (unless you register….)!

So people are of course not paying the fee and finding solutions, like putting the rentals on craigslist, facebook, or this new service called Houfy!:

https://www.houfy.com/vacation-rentals/New-York–NY–United-States

Compare that with airbnb…

https://www.airbnb.com/s/new-york-city/homes?query=new+york+city

Fredricksberg has banned new AirBNB’s but grandfathered old ones, so new ones are showing up on Houfy,

https://www.houfy.com/vacation-rentals/Fredericksburg–Texas–United-States

But the grandfathered ones are still there:

https://www.airbnb.com/s/fredricksberg/homes?query=fredricksberg