
The Setup: William Gibson - Umalu
http://william.gibson.usesthis.com/
======
0x12
Technology is a means to an end. Once you can reach the end with the tech that
you have there is no need to upgrade any further.

Upgrading is an investment in both time and funds, both can be spent better if
you are already able to do what you want to do.

Most of us could get through the day just fine on a 486/33 if we had to. In
fact, we'd probably write better software if we did.

~~~
cstross
Comments like this make me wish I could occasionally grant more than a +1
upvote ...

It's so true. Sometimes we need more power to make a given job possible, but
as often as not we could accomplish it with far less and all that throwing
extra hardware at a software problem achieves is to allow sloppy coding to
proliferate.

~~~
adrianN
Generally it's a pretty good deal to trade hardware requirements for
programmer productivity.

------
lylejohnson
"I haven’t bought an app for about a year. Neither hardware nor software
excite me very much, after whatever brief (and usually painful) novelty has
worn off."

It's probably because I'm so immersed in tech stuff at work, but it's hard for
me to understand how such an imaginative science fiction author can be so...
_indifferent_ about the technology he uses.

~~~
cstross
If you're a novelist your career doesn't usually start rolling until you're in
your mid-thirties. (You need life experience before you can depict characters
folks want to read about.) Neophilia for its own sake usually wears off some
time in the forties, even among many geeks. Moreover, if your job involves
spinning text, just about _any_ computer built in the past two decades will do
the job.

(I know one award-winning SF novelist who uses an obscure British word
processor, originally for CP/M and MS-DOS, now supported as a hobby project by
one of the former developers -- the company is long since bust. Their SO has a
hell of a job keeping them supplied with either 20 year old Compaq 386
lunchboxen _or_ Linux boxes tailored to run DOSBox full-screen on the console
without pestering them to do annoying GUI things every few days. This novelist
is younger than I am.)

Gibson has repeatedly displayed a fascination with _style_ and _fashion_ and
design language, rather than with random agglomerative collections of features
bolted together into a Frankensteinian morass by a bored marketing committee.
Given how Apple is oriented around design and the humanities, I find it very
unsurprising that he'd be working on a Macbook Pro ...

~~~
dy
Would love to have you do a usesthis as well - the more obscure stuff is
especially fascinating as it usually carries a much better story than just
"I'm using the newest Macbook Pro and I got 8GB of RAM."

~~~
cstross
Well, I am a gadgetoholic-in-recovery.

Let's skip lightly past the colo server running Debian that I keep the blog
on. I'm mostly a Mac shop. On my desk right now is an older 23" Apple Cinema
display, being driven by an October 2010 13" Macbook Air (4Gb/250Gb SSD, OS:
10.7.2). Next to me is an iPad 2/64Gb and a 3 mifi, with a ZaggMate
cover/keyboard. And there's an iPhone 4 that ain't going to be upgraded until
it's at least 24 months old (next summer).

Pretty dull, huh?

(There are also hordes of eccentric items around here, such as the Viliv N5
palmtop -- currently running Win7 as I don't have the energy to battle a
GMA500 chipset into cooperating with Linux right now -- but let's not get into
lesser-used territory.)

Core software:

\- Firefox 7.blah (with noscript, adblock pro, ghostery, beef taco,
instaright, https-everywhere, and tab mix plus)

\- Thunderbird (mostly using gmail as an IMAP/SMTP/SSL server)

\- BBedit (what can I say -- it's prettier to stare at than MacVim, and seems
to support MultiMarkDown better)

\- Apple Pages (I _loath_ MS Office 2010's ribbon with a cold and fiery
passion because it eats vertical screen real estate; Pages is "good enough"
for layout and final markup)

\- Scrivener (because when I write myself into a corner and need to refactor
the deep structure of a book, Scrivener makes life a lot easier)

\- NeoOffice/OpenOffice/LibreOffice (because sometimes I need something that
can handle MS Office documents better than Pages)

\- Calibre (ebook management software)

\- NetNewsWire (this may change soon)

\- SplashID (because we all need unique passwords for each website, right?)

\- MacPorts

\- iTerm (and Go2Shell)

...

I think that about covers it. I really _don't_ game much, if at all (it
interferes with work to have attractive nuisances on my computers).

Dream rig:

(This is going to strike you as deeply sad)

Start with a build-to-order Macbook Air 11", 4Gb RAM/128Gb SSD. Add the 1.8GHz
i7 CPU bump. Don't bother with the 256Gb SSD from Apple because we are going
to replace the stock SSD with a 3G OWC Mercury Aura Pro Express sized in
480Gb. Finally add a 27" Apple Thunderbolt Display for when it's sitting on my
desk.

Underpowered? Sure. But it's tremendously portable, and I'm on the road for
8-12 weeks of the year. Two wires to connect, and I have a decent desktop
system. Unconnect, and I have a nice 1Kg notebook.

The reason I don't have this dream rig right now is that I have the last
generation, and I'm not quite enough of a sucker to upgrade _every_ time Apple
crack the whip, thanks. Maybe next year.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
I don't think you can upgrade the SSD on an Air. My understanding is they are
pulled apart and soldered to the MB in order to give the Air its awesome form
factor.

Somebody, please correct me if I am wrong, because that is one of the primary
things keeping me from an Air instead of a MacBook Pro.

~~~
cstross
You can most _certainly_ upgrade the SSD in an Air, as my first-generation 11"
Airbook with the 256Gb SSD (that I installed in it myself) can attest.

It's the RAM on the mobo that's non-upgradable.

------
mortenjorck
Gibson just tweeted a perfect postscript to this interview:

 _Gizmos bore me. People doing the weird unexpected things they do with gizmos
fascinates me._

[https://mobile.twitter.com/#!/greatdismal/status/12615524172...](https://mobile.twitter.com/#!/greatdismal/status/126155241723928576)

------
jberryman
Gibson fetishizes technology (apple products in particular) so much in his
books that I'm surprised he's so blasé about the shiny new in real life.
Weird.

------
rdl
I really hope someone has set him up with an offsite automatic backup system,
plus maybe some versioned local storage.

------
aaronbrethorst
I am somewhat disappointed that he didn't say he'd goosed his Mac's
performance with "3MB of hot RAM." Oh well.

------
jc4p

        I just want to write, or do whatever else I’m doing, and not have to think about whatever I’m doing it on.
    

I'd love to know what he would think of <http://www.iawriter.com/>

------
baddox
I'm pretty sure a four year old Macbook Pro would weigh more than two pounds.

------
huhtenberg
His _retweet_ feed is really entertaining, very diverse and unboring, highly
recommended - <http://twitter.com/greatdismal>

------
ableal
> It’s the WiFi, no cellular to worry about

A palpable hit. Gibson was talking about the tablet, but I suspect there may
be quite a few (Wi-Fi enabled) phones out there without data plans.

------
dshep
Wow these are getting pretty boring...

~~~
generalk
Would it have been less boring if Gibson waxed for pages about weighing the
new Lenovo laptops vs. the MacBook, or the merits of one word processor over
another?

I think it's fairly fascinating to discover that the author of one of the most
notable cyberpunk novels doesn't really _care_ about technology. (In fact,
that's kind of the feeling you get from Neuromancer. There's loads of amazing
technology but nobody's really fawning over it. It's just there, and it's just
_used_.)

~~~
uriel
Also, most modern software/hardware is not particularly exciting from a
usefulness point of view. It is mostly the same stuff that has been around for
ages in a slightly smaller package with a new coat of paint.

~~~
qx24b
It really depends on the person and how they use that technology. People like
I assume Gibson use tech as a means to an end, he hasn't bought a new app
because he is comfortable with what he has and sees no need to try new things.

This is the same reason my mother had a hard time when she bought a new laptop
with windows 7 on it, though surprisingly she really likes google chrome and
tells everyone on a computer using internet explorer they should use chrome
instead.

I guess the gist of what I am saying is that sometimes change can be to much
for those who aren't the power user. I loved windows 7 on the RC and all the
little improvements, the same with word and office 2007. I get excited about
new OS releases and new programs and updates because I find them useful and it
doesn't take me hours or weeks or months to become more productive because I
live tech but others just don't have the time or desire to understand it.

