Category: Apple

iPhone XR day four

I didn’t talk about my new iPhone XR in my New Year’s Day post, since I knew it would set me off on a tangent and add another 2000 words to the post, so here’s a separate follow up to my previous iPhone XR post.

I’m still struggling with the headphone jack thing. I bought these urBeats3 Earphones at the Apple Store the day after I bought my iPhone, then returned them today. They plug into the Lightning port, just like the Apple earbuds, so I thought that would simplify things. My thought was to use them as my main headphones at work. These were the first in-ear earphones I ever tried though, and it turns out they don’t work well for me. They include tips in four different sizes, but none of them fit my ears well. And microphonics turned out to be a big problem for me. I tried the trick of looping the cord behind my ear, and that helped, but also made the tips even more likely to fall out. I also thought about trying some Comply tips, but I don’t know if those would actually help, and I didn’t want to spend another $20 just to make a pair of already-overpriced $60 earphones work better. So, in a nutshell, I think I need to avoid in-ear earphones.

I picked up a second $9 Lightning headphone jack adapter when I returned the Beats. So my plan for now is:

  • Keep the Belkin Rockstar adapter in the car, so I can charge and connect to the car stereo at the same time.
  • Keep one headphone jack adapter at work, and keep using my good old comfortable Sony earbuds. (I won’t be able to charge and listen at the same time, but that’s probably fine.)
  • Keep the other headphone jack adapter at home, and use it with my Sennheiser headphones, when I want to listen to something at home, and don’t want to pipe it through my Sonos speaker.
  • Try to remember to toss that second adapter in my backpack when I travel, so i can use it with the Urbanears headphones that I keep in my backpack.
  • Consider giving AirPods a try at some point in 2019.

So that’s more complicated than it needs to be, but is probably workable.

I do still have a couple of minor annoyances with Face ID. Sleep Cycle works a bit differently with this phone than it did on the old phone, and I’m finding that I need to unlock the phone to stop the alarm every morning. And Face ID isn’t working for me first thing in the morning, so I have to type in my passcode. So that’s a bit irksome. In theory, Face ID should work in the dark, but, well, it’s not working for me. It’s probably that I’m not picking up the phone at the right angle for it to work. But it’s 6am, and I just want to shut the alarm off, and I’m not thinking about lining up my phone with my face properly. Maybe I’ll get that figured out over the next week or so. Overall, Face ID is working fine for me, but honestly it’s at least slightly less convenient than Touch ID.

I’m still finding the phone to be a bit unwieldy. I might pick up a silicone case at some point to make it a bit harder to fumble.

That’s about all for now. I briefly thought about returning the phone, and getting an iPhone 8 instead, so I could at least go back to Touch ID and a slightly smaller form factor. But that would be a lot of hassle, and probably a bad decision long-term. I think I’ll get used to the XR, and will probably start liking it more over time, as I get used to it.

iPhone XR day two

Today is day two with my new iPhone XR and Apple Watch Series 3, so I thought I’d post a few more thoughts on the phone. I’ve got all the basic setup done now, and things are working smoothly.

First, let me talk about the size of the phone. For some apps, it’s really nice to have the larger screen. For others, it doesn’t make much difference. For general usability, I’m still finding it a bit unwieldy. It’s harder to hold in one hand than the SE, and I’m finding that the back is a little more slippery. I’ve dropped it a couple of times already. I could make it a lot easier to hold if I stuck a PopSocket on the back, but I’m not sure I want to do that. I don’t really like the idea of sticking something directly to the phone. So I could buy a case and stick the PopSocket to the case, but that adds even more bulk to a phone that’s already too big. So I’m not sure if I’m going to keep using the phone as-is, or do something with it. I did order a sleeve for the phone, so at least I’ll have something to put it in to keep it from getting scratched up while it’s in my pocket, but that only solves one (potential) problem, and doesn’t make it any easier to use.

I’m still at loose ends with the headphone jack thing. My general attitude about it is still pretty similar to this guy’s (I want it back). But I’m trying to work my way over to this guy’s attitude (it’s time to move on). I tried the Lightning earbuds that came with the phone, and they’re not great. I might decide to bring them into work and use them as my “work headphones”, but I’m not sure they’re good enough or comfortable enough. I have a pair of low-end Sony earbuds at my desk that are a good fit and sound (I think) better than Apple’s earbuds, so I’ll probably stick with them for now, using the $9 adapter. If I keep the adapter at work, though, then I don’t have one for home or travel.

Maybe I’ll keep the Lightning earbuds at home; if I really want high-quality sound at home, I use my stereo and not my phone anyway. I can just use them for podcast listening at home. And maybe I’ll throw them in my backpack when I’m taking the train to NYC, rather than using the Urbanears headphones that I keep in there now, though I don’t really like that idea. Or maybe I just need to buy a few more $9 adapters (sigh).

For the car, I have the Belkin Rockstar thing to let me plug into my aux jack and charge at the same time, so that’s taken care of, though it’s going to be a little messy. And I think I’ll just keep that in the car.

I’m curious about AirPods. If not for the rumors of a new version coming early in 2019, I probably would have ordered a pair with the new phone. (Of course, if I did, I wouldn’t have them yet anyway, since they’re still not keeping up with orders on those.) Meanwhile, I’m thinking about buying a different set of Bluetooth headphones, but I don’t want to spend too much on them, if I’m just going to switch to AirPods next year anyway. But I don’t want to get really cheap ones either. So, in summary… yeah, I’m still at loose ends.

Aside from the size and the headphone jack stuff, it’s a fine phone. (I haven’t made a phone call on it yet, actually, but I assume it can do that.) It works fine for most of the usual stuff I do, but not noticeably better than the old SE. I haven’t checked out the camera much yet, so that’s another thing to play around with. It should, theoretically, be better than the SE camera (but not as good as the XS camera).

Given how much it cost, I’m hoping I can get three years of use out of it, but I know that’s a stretch. (The SE was about 2 years and 9 months old when I retired it yesterday.)

new Apple gear

I’ve been thinking about buying some new Apple gear lately. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about replacing my iPhone, iPad, and Watch.

My old iPhone SE is almost (but not quite) three years old. The battery life on it has been pretty bad lately. If I go through a whole day without getting a chance to recharge, it’s usually at about 20% by the end of the day. And if I use anything that drains the battery, like Uber, Lyft, or Apple Maps, it can drain down enough that it shuts itself down. (I had this problem one day during NYCC this year, where the phone was dead by early afternoon, largely because I’d used Uber to get to the con.) And it’s been getting noticeably slow lately too, in some apps.

The iPad I’m using now is an iPad Air that I bought via eBay in 2014. The battery life isn’t good, and it’s acting a little funny sometimes, but overall it’s still OK. I’d like to replace it, but it’s not top priority.

And my Apple Watch is a “Series 0” that I bought not long after I bought the iPhone SE. There’s really nothing wrong with it, but it won’t run watchOS 5.

I’ve been looking at the iPhone XR, but I haven’t been really enthusiastic about any of the current crop of iPhones. They’re all too expensive, too big, and none of them have headphone jacks. But, well, I decided to give in and buy an iPhone XR today. I ordered it via the Apple Store app on my old phone, for pickup at my local Apple Store. I got the “(Product)Red” 128GB version. We’ll see if I can get used to the size and the lack of a headphone jack. The total price, including AppleCare, the $9 headphone adapter, and a Belkin Rockstar adapter (so I can use headphones and charge it at the same time), came to just under $1000. Which seems like a crazy amount of money to pay for a phone. But oh well. I’m too old and set in my ways to switch from iOS to Android, so I have to pay that Apple premium.

And a friend dropped by today with a Christmas present for me: a new Series 3 Apple Watch! So now I have that taken care of too. The Series 3, physically, is pretty much identical to the Series 0. I haven’t done enough with it yet to tell whether or not it’s any better than the Series 0, in any noticeable ways, but I’m happy to have it, and to now be running watchOS 5.

Setup on the iPhone XR was a little painful, but could have been worse. It took several tries to activate it with Verizon. And, since it was running a slightly older version of iOS than my SE, I had to set it up as new, update iOS, then restore from backup. Setup for the Watch was comparatively easy. It paired with the new iPhone easily, and restored from the previous Apple Watch backup pretty quickly.

Over the next few days, I’ll have to see if I can get used to carrying and using a larger phone. The XR is significantly bigger than the SE. While the larger screen is nice, it’s a bit harder to hold than the SE, and it’s noticeably heavier. I haven’t put it in a case yet, and I’m not sure if I’m going to; it looks nice as-is, and I don’t know if I want to add to the weight. (I’ll probably write a cranky follow-up post about the phone in a few days…)

Black Friday

There was no repeat of the Christmas music incident last night, so I got a good night’s sleep (or at least as good as I can manage these days). So I may actually be in shape to do a few of the things that I was too frazzled to do yesterday. However, it’s still very cold out: 12° this morning. And Raritan Valley trains are running about 30 minutes behind schedule right now. So, combining those two factors, going into NYC today might be a bad idea. I’m not going to completely rule it out, but I’m definitely not heading out to the train station right now to stand outside in the cold for a half-hour, hoping the train eventually shows up. If I see the trains get back to normal, and if it gets up into the twenties, maybe I’ll go in later.

I started my online Black Friday shopping yesterday, and I think it might be amusing to list out some of the stuff I bought, yesterday and today.

  • I picked up some random comics on Comixology, from DC’s big Black Friday sale. I got Batman: White Knight, which I’ve heard a lot of good things about. And Tales of the Batman: Gene Colan Vol. 2. I really liked Colan’s run on Batman, back in the 80s, after he left Marvel for DC. And I got Grant Morrison’s Wonder Woman: Earth One Vol. 1 and Vol. 2. I generally like anything Morrison does, so I’m pretty sure I’ll like these. (These were $5 each.)
  • I bought Blade Runner 2049 and Isle of Dogs from Vudu. I hadn’t previously bought any digital movies from Vudu, but with the whole Movies Anywhere thing, I can buy from Apple, Amazon, or Vudu and the movies show up in all three libraries, so it makes sense to buy from whichever service is cheapest. (I was originally thinking about going out to see a movie today, but I think that, instead, I’ll likely stay in and watch one or both of those.)
  • I picked up Fantastical 2 for iPad for $3. (It’s regularly $10.) I’ve been using the iPhone version for years, but never got around to picking up the iPad version.
  • I bought a $100 iTunes gift card for $80 from Costco. It seemed like a good deal.
  • This morning, when I went into Lose It to log my breakfast, I got a popup offering a deal on a lifetime subscription. I’m always a bit leery of lifetime subscription deals, but I’ve been using Lose It for five years, and renewing my premium subscription every year, so I went ahead and paid $75 for a lifetime sub. Since I did that in-app, that came out of my iTunes account, nicely using up most of that gift card I bought last night. (Maybe I’ll pick up another $100 card today.)

And here are some things I’m looking at today:

  • Pluralsight has their usual Black Friday sale going on, where you can renew your subscription for $200 instead of $300. I’ll probably do that again this year. I don’t get a ton of use out of Pluralsight, but I guess I get enough that it’s worth the $200.
  • Jetpack has a 30% discount off all plans for Black Friday. I’m currently only using the free Jetpack services on this blog, but I could step up to their “personal” plan. About all that really gets me, beyond what’s in the free plan, is site backups, but that could be useful.
  • Apple’s Black Friday weekend event has started. As usual with Apple, it’s not that compelling. But it might be worthwhile for me, since I was looking at getting some new Apple stuff anyway. On the iPhone front, they only have deals on iPhone 7 & 8, and I was thinking about the XR, so I’ll probably skip those. Their Apple Watch deal is for a $50 Apple Store Gift Card when you buy a Series 3. That’s not much, but might be a good deal for me. My current watch is a “Series 0,” so a Series 3 would be a good step up. I can use the $50 towards my eventual iPhone purchase.
  • I’m thinking about picking up a second Sonos One speaker, either from Sonos directly, or from Amazon or Costco. I get a fair bit of use out of the one I bought earlier this year, and it would nice to have two, for stereo. I don’t know if I really need that, though.
  • It’s not exactly a Black Friday thing, but a friend of mine has a story in this anthology about… cannibalism. On the one hand, I’d like to support him, on the other hand, I don’t much like reading about cannibalism. But hey, it’s only $4 for Kindle.

Since I started writing this blog post, I see that the NJ Transit delays are now at almost an hour, so things on that front are definitely going in the wrong direction. And the temperature is up to 22°, so that’s going in the right direction, but maybe not far enough to motivate me to spend much time outdoors today.

Lazy Sunday

I had tentative plans to go in to NYC for the Frankenstein exhibit at the Morgan today, but it turned into one of those mornings where I couldn’t quite talk myself into getting all my stuff together and heading for the train station. Instead, I finished reading a big Avengers hardcover, then spent way too much time writing a review of it on Goodreads. I’m kind of in a mood to read some more Marvel stuff now, so I might spend the afternoon reading Avengers vs. X-Men, which I have in Comixology.

DC was really pushing their new DC Universe service at NYCC last weekend; every DC-related panel started with the DC Universe trailer, and the service got mentioned a lot in some of those panels. I’ve alternately been talking myself into and out of signing up for the service. On the one hand, I’m a long-time DC fanboy, so there’s probably lots of stuff there I’d like. On the other hand, I still have a huge pile of unread comics and graphic novels that I haven’t read yet, and DVDs and Blu-rays that I haven’t watched. And I haven’t watched the most recent season of any of the Marvel shows on Netflix. So I already have a lot of superhero content to consume, that I’ve already paid for. But at $75/year for the service, that comes out to $1.44 per week, which is less than the price of a single comic book. So… maybe.

I’ve been curious about the game Stardew Valley since I heard it discussed on an NPR podcast a couple of months ago. (Here’s the article that they mentioned on the podcast. And here’s another NPR article that makes me wonder what kind of Stardew player I’d be…) I was kind of hoping that the game would have been available for the Apple TV, since I have a game controller for my Apple TV that I never get to use for anything. But no. It’s available for most other platforms, including Mac, PC, PS 4, Switch, and XBox One. The only game console I currently own is a PS 3, so I’m out of luck there. I could buy it for Mac or PC, but I was looking for something I could play on the TV. I saw an article a few days ago announcing that it was coming out for iOS, so I had some hope that would include Apple TV. Still no; just iPhone and iPad. And I saw that Minecraft for Apple TV has been discontinued for lack of players. So if Apple TV can’t support something as popular as Minecraft, it probably can’t support any big, interesting, game. Oh well. Maybe I should buy one of the current-generation video game consoles, but I just don’t think I would use it enough to justify the price. (I was really hoping Apple TV gaming would take off at some point.)

I didn’t make it to the big Doctor Who panel at NYCC last weekend. I’m sure it would have been fun, but it sounded like it was going to be very crowded and I was too tired to deal with that. The full panel is up on YouTube now, on the official Doctor Who channel, so I’ll have to watch that later. I watched the first episode last week, and liked it enough that I’m looking forward to this week’s episode. I don’t get BBC America, so I get the episodes through iTunes, which means I don’t get it until tomorrow. I’m not liking this new Sunday night schedule for the show. When it was on a Saturday night schedule, I could watch the new episodes on Sunday afternoon. Now I have to wait until Monday after work. Well, at least it gives me something to look forward to after work on Monday.

OK, so this turned into a long rambling post, it’s almost noon, and I’ve killed my entire Sunday morning reading comics, listening to music, and writing pointless reviews and blog posts. Eh, there’s worse ways I could have spent the morning. Time for lunch.

WWDC round-up

Here’s a quick follow-up to yesterday’s post, based on what I picked up from the WWDC keynote today:

  1. No new hardware announcements. So I don’t feel like an idiot for buying a MacBook Air right before WWDC.
  2. iOS 12 will run on everything that runs iOS 11, so my iPhone SE should be able to run it, as well as my iPad Air. (Mind you, there’s not much in iOS 12 that I’m terribly excited about.)
  3. macOS Mojave will run on my new MacBook Air (of course) and would likely have run on my old MacBook, though I think it was the oldest supported model, if I read the compatibility note correctly. It looks like there will be a few nifty things in Mojave, but nothing earth-shattering.
  4. watchOS 5 is not compatible with my “Series 0” watch. So if I really want to keep current with watchOS, I’ll have to get a new watch. I’ve been thinking about doing that anyway, even though I’m not actually having any problems with my Series 0 watch.

I’ve been getting interested in doing more automation stuff on my Mac (and maybe on iOS too). I started reading Joe Kissel’s Take Control of Automating Your Mac today, and I’m hoping to get some ideas from that. This article on Sal Soghoian from Wired is pretty interesting. He’s the guy who used to be in charge of automation at Apple, until his position was eliminated a while back. They didn’t talk much about automation at the WWDC keynote, though the new Siri Shortcuts feature is somewhat promising. I guess it’s what they’ve had the Workflow team working on since they acquired Workflow. Meanwhile, on the Mac, they’re still supporting Automator and AppleScript, as far as I can tell, though they don’t talk about them much.

MacBook Air and WWDC

Here’s one more post on my new MacBook Air and other Apple-related thoughts.

When the old MacBook went south, I was initially considering dropping macOS entirely, just getting a new Windows laptop, and simplifying my life a bit. I opted not to do that for a few reasons, including my realization of how hard it would be to switch away from macOS without a working macOS computer. I would have wanted to copy some files from the old MacBook to my Windows machine. I had an external Time Machine backup, and an SSD in the old MacBook that might or might not have been damaged. The external drive was probably formatted with HFS+, while the internal drive would have been APFS, encrypted.

There are Windows tools that let you read HFS+ drives, like Paragon’s HFS+ for Windows and Mediafour’s MacDrive. Both of those tools are adding APFS support, but it looks like they’re both in preview/beta right now. And it looks like neither would be able to read a FileVault encrypted drive. As for Time Machine, Paragon doesn’t support it, but MacDrive says it does. So, overall, I think that getting files off the Time Machine backup and/or the internal SSD might have been a little dicey, if it was even possible.

And if I was giving up on macOS, I’d really need to give up on Day One, since there’s no Windows client for that, and it wouldn’t be worth it to me if I could only use it on iOS. If I did that, I’d want to migrate my old journal entries into Evernote, but it would be hard to do that without a Mac.

Likewise, migrating my contacts and calendar data to a new solution without a Mac would probably have been possible but annoying. So I guess the lesson here is that, if I decide to give up on macOS, I should do it while I have a working Mac and not when I don’t.

On a related topic, WWDC is next week. A number of people have chided me for buying a new MacBook Air when there’s probably new hardware announcements coming at WWDC. My response has generally been that (1) I’m not sure that’s true, (2) even if there is new hardware, it probably won’t be available until fall, and I can’t wait that long, and (3) given the direction Apple has been going in, I’m probably better off with the older MacBook Air than any newer hardware.

This article from Ars Technica indicates that there probably won’t be any big MacBook-related hardware announcements next week. And this article from The Verge questions whether or not Apple might address their MacBook keyboard issues at WWDC. (Answer: probably not.) So I think I’m still better off with this old-style MacBook Air, with it’s familiar and usable keyboard, it’s two USB ports, one SDXC port, and good old MagSafe power connector. (And a Thunderbolt 2 port, but I probably won’t have much use for that.)

sorting photos with Python

As part of my MacBook replacement project, I wanted to get a good new backup of my photo library. Photos.app stores photos in a database, not individual files, so if you want a “plain old JPEG” backup of your library, you need to export the photos from Photos.app. There are various ways to do this, but the way I chose left me with a folder full of subfolders organized by “moment name,” so a typical subfolder would be named “Somerville, NJ, May 27, 2018” for instance. That’s kind of a mess, since the folder names sort alphabetically. (And the folder dates are all set to today. Setting the folder dates to the date the photos were taken would solve some problems, but let’s ignore that for now.)

To impose some rudimentary organization on this, I wanted to make a top-level folder for each year, and move all the subfolders for that year into that folder. Not perfect, but at least it gets me from having one folder with 2000 subfolders to 10 folders with 200 subfolders each (approximately), which is a bit more manageable.

I looked around at various ways to do this, and settled on writing a quick Python script, which is shown below. I haven’t written a Python program in years, so this probably isn’t elegant Python. But it works. I’m posting it here in case it’s useful for anyone else. (I first learned Python back in 2003, and have used it on and off since, but never regularly.)

I had also looked for third-party utility programs that would allow me to export from Photos with more options than Photos itself allows. I found an old MacStories article from 2012 that talked about exporting from iPhoto to Dropbox using a tool called Phoshare. I had hoped that maybe Phoshare had been kept up to date, and worked with Photos, but nope. It was last updated in 2012.

I feel like there’s probably some interesting stuff I could do with Hazel too, and/or ExifTool, but I didn’t want to over-complicate things. And I also feel like there’s probably a third-party app out there that would make this much easier, but I didn’t find one that did exactly what I was looking for.

# sort_photo_bu.py
# ajh 2018-05-27
# sort Photos app export into folders by year.
# Export from Photos with subfolder format "moment name". 
# We assume the moment name always ends with the year.
# (Note that this may throw a "destination path already exists" error at some point, but that's probably fine.)

import os, shutil, sys

bupath = "/Users/andrew/Pictures/backup20180527"
for (root, dirs, files) in os.walk(bupath):
    for dirname in dirs:
        if len(dirname) > 4:
            year = dirname[-4:]
            yearpath = bupath + "/" + year
            if not os.path.isdir(yearpath):
                print "Making folder for " + year + "..."
                os.mkdir(yearpath)
            origpath = bupath + "/" + dirname
            #print "moving %s to %s..." % (origpath, yearpath)
            shutil.move(origpath, yearpath)
            #sys.exit()
print "All done."

MacBook Air migration

I’m just about done setting up my new MacBook Air. I hit a few bumps, but I think everything has worked out in the end. My initial plan was to restore from my most recent Time Machine backup with Migration Assistant. But that didn’t work out, for a variety of reasons. So instead I just dragged and dropped the files I needed from Time Machine to the new Mac. That took a while, but went smoothly enough.

Buying this MacBook Air was a bit of a compromise. For the most part, it’s at least as good as my old MacBook Pro (and better in some ways), but it only has a 256 GB drive. (The Pro had 512 GB.) I could have gone with a 512 GB drive on the Air, but it would have added about $300 to the cost, which I couldn’t really justify.

After getting rid of all the movies and TV shows I had on the old laptop, I’ve managed to fit everything else from the old drive onto the new one, with about 40 GB free. I have some other old files I can get rid of too, so I should be fine for the time being.

I’m trying to avoid the option in macOS to store documents in iCloud Drive. First, I don’t want to pay for iCloud Drive storage. And second, I don’t really trust it. There are other things you can do to free up space on a Mac, and I’ve reviewed those.

I’m currently syncing my entire OneDrive account to the Mac. That’s about 40 GB. I could probably turn off a few folders there to save some space.

I’m also toying with the idea of throwing a 256 GB SDXC card into the card slot, for additional storage. Those can be had for about $100. I really don’t need one yet, but it’s something I’m considering.

I’m a little annoyed that I don’t have a CD/DVD drive on this thing. I wasn’t really using the drive on the old MacBook that often, but I did get some use out of it. I’m going to have to do all my disc burning on my desktop PC from now on.

There’s one cool feature that works on the Air but never worked on the old Pro: unlocking it with my Apple Watch. (I was never sure if it was supposed to work on the Pro, but it definitely didn’t.) It’s a pretty minor thing, but it’s nice.

I still have a few minor things on my setup checklist, but the machine is functional now. I want to make a full backup with Carbon Copy Cloner soon, then set up a new Time Machine backup. And I need to pull the SSD from the old MacBook, recycle the machine, and repurpose the SSD, assuming it’s still good. (I may actually use it as a new boot drive for my desktop PC, since I only have an old-fashioned hard drive in there. That’s a project for another day.)

new MacBook Air

I have now officially given up on my old MacBook Pro and bought a MacBook Air. I’m not entirely happy about this, but it seemed like the path of least resistance. Giving up on macOS altogether was somewhat tempting, but the more I thought about all the stuff I’d have to do to accomplish that, the less enthusiastic I was. And replacing the MacBook with a Mac Mini was also somewhat tempting, and would have been cheaper than the Air, but then I started looking at KVMs and thinking about other factors, and decided against that too.

When I saw that B&H had the MacBook Air marked down to $999 ($200 off), I decided to go with that. It’s an imperfect solution, since it’s only got a 250 GB drive (vs 500 GB in the old MacBook), but it’s better (for my needs) than the current crop of MacBooks and MacBook Pros. The keyboard is the old-style one (same as my old MacBook) and it has a few useful ports (unlike the newer MacBooks). Here’s the specific model that I bought. (One improvement over my old machine is that it has 8 GB of RAM vs. 4 GB on the old one, so that’s good.)

I’m currently setting it up, which is going to be a slow process, I think. I want to restore it from Time Machine, using Migration Assistant. But it won’t let me do that until I’ve updated it to the latest version of macOS. Which is apparently won’t let me do until I install some other updates first. So that’s going to take a while. The Time Machine backup is from May 9, which is probably ok. Most of the data on the Mac that changes frequently is in OneDrive, so that will get pulled down from there.

Once that’s done, it should be smooth sailing, I hope. (And if Apple announces new MacBook models at WWDC in June, I’m going to be really annoyed. Unless they’re new models that I wouldn’t be interested in anyway.)