good lord, the tinny little speaker! I had taken for granted the small but (by comparison) robust stereo speakers in my now-retired iMacs, but this big ol’ tower delivers the kind of sound I associate with the “transistor radios” (handheld devices about twice the size of a smartphone and powered by a 9-volt battery, for the benefit of our younger readers) of my childhood. I have ordered corrective hardware.

chord-ially,

I’ve become a little gun-shy about Mac OS upgrades over the years (times past, when Apple charged for them, I would pay and pre-order) because older machines and older software sometimes don’t play well with the latest and greatest. I have, in addition to my boot SSD, two other internal SSDs (one of them a bootable clone of SSD #1), the original 2TB HD (bootable), and an external SSD that’s also a bootable clone of #1. I might install High Sierra on one of the clones and put it through its paces. I rather like the idea of disabling autoplay audio in Safari, which is apparently one of the new bells and whistles (or mutes, rather).

At this point I’m still engaged in rebuilding the functionality of my old setup, so I’ll likely wait until much of this has been restored, make new clones, wait for some of the High Sierra bugs to crawl out from under the furniture, and test-drive it then.

The new soundbar fits nicely beneath the “Cinema Display,” and its audio quality is at least as good as I was accustomed to from the iMac. For the rest, I’m feeling good about this brute of a machine, and venture to hope that we’ll have a few good years together before the inevitable accretion of system cruft takes the bloom off the romance.

(The machine came preloaded with a raft of high-end software of the sort that these days is available by subscription only if you know what I mean, and I think you do. Thus far, it appears to perform without asking me to check in with the mothership. I am, as I may have mentioned times past, vehemently opposed to the subscription model. A technically savvy acquaintance maintains that there are extant copies of this class of products—let’s call it a “suite,” or a “cloud”—that have been unshackled from the extortion protocol. We’ll see. It may be that within thirty days after first launching one of the apps, Mother will tug the apron strings. If that happens, I will refresh the boot drive with the latest version of the clone, and perhaps extend the “trial” period indefinitely. This will not gnaw at the vitals of my conscience.)

cordially,

“High Sierra” appears to have broken Final Cut Pro, which lived on the machine when I bought it, and it may have killed my Firewire 400 card—at any rate, my external “iSight” camera, which connects via that venerable standard, is not recognized (further investigation pending, but much of my gear remains to be uncrated). I did not expect to get through this without any collateral damage, and these incidents fall within the acceptable range.

cordially,

I would have expected Mudbrick Technologies to have yanked my chain by now, demanding I start paying them monthly for access to their “Fanciful Fog” collection of graphic apps, but after six weeks it still hasn’t happened. Since my Apple “iWorks” apps don’t update because these are registered, apparently, to the machine’s former owner, I wonder whether I might be coasting on his Mudbrick subscription as the permitted second CPU (not everyone routinely uses two or more computers). Who knows?

bemusedly,