The Northern Spy
January 2025
Toll the Bell for the Old and the New
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Expect Apple to
have a big hardware year in 2025, with new phones, tablets, Apple TV and a new MacPro. The latter has become somewhat of a niche product of late, as busy professionals can now use a laptop as a heavy duty machine with suitable accessories such as multiple external monitors and bulk storage without sacrificing much by way of workflow capability. Still, for people doing video editing and/or running multiple high-demand applications at once, the big bulky desktop beast does have unmatchable capabilities.
Besides, even the M-series laptops have their limitations, as the Spy is discovering. His M2 Max machine, though bulked out with 64G of memory a 4T drive, and three external monitors, does have its issues. Moving it between the work office and home office, whose monitors have a slightly different configuration and whose external environments are very different, confuses the machine if it is not shut down at the one location and re-booted at the other. Symptom: external devices (keyboard, monitors) do not properly attach, and/or outside connectivity is limited to Wi-Fi, with the wired connection billed as live, but in fact not being used. Moreover, using it long enough at one location eventually confuses the memory manager. Likely symptom: when working with Thunderbird (preferred email client) the Owl add-on loses connectivity with IMAP clients, and this cascades into the program being unable to connect with any mail server. Restarting Thunderbird may fail to solve the problem; and the machine have to be re-booted.
On the software side of things, expect to see the somewhat clumsy integrations of Apple's assorted devices to mature significantly. Right now the phone-Mac cooperation is primitive at best and seems sketchy in execution. Neither does the Spy use many of Apple's apps. He has no workflow incorporating Cupertino's Mail, Pages, or Numbers, for instance. None of the three seem polished professional tools, but more geared to the casual user with modest demands.
His go to applications (as opposed to "apps") are:
- For mail: Thunderbird, with the Owl extension for IMAP the MS way;
- for Book writing: the incomparable Scrivener;
- for everyday routine documents and final publication assembly: NisusWriter Pro, which saves .rtf files correctly, unlike Word (which he never uses and would not recommend for anyone);
- when equations and other fancy document decorations are needed: LaTeXIT (Interestingly, Moodle can render almost anything you write there and include in student materials, despite its own Latex editor being extremely primitive;
- for code: the venerable BBEdit, and occasionally Alpha or the Swift environment;
- for Church, work, and personal bookkeeping: Excel, despite its bugs, the truly wretched VBA, and the fact that the Mac and Windows versions are different programs (imagine having to write macros that detect the OS environment and use different branches of the code depending on what it finds, plus having to re-write same when the rules change with some minor update of the program). He is also no fan of the macro addin suite called VENA that TWU uses. It's also a pity that there really is no appropriate software for charity bookkeeping;
- for browsing: Safari, which seems the best of a deteriorating lot, and despite its claimed (and sometimes verified) incompatibilities with many sites;
- for Bible study: the Olive Tree Bible Study app for routine work, and Logos when heavy lifting and more resources are needed (GoTo translation: the interlinear Greek/Hebrew ESV, which strikes just the right balance between fidelity to the original language and English clarity, with the NASB coming in second by sacrificing some of the latter to better render the former);
- to monitor the queues of multiple printers: Print Center (though seeing centre spelled thus is annoying);
- for graphics manipulation: the absolutely essential Graphics Converter 12;
- for disk health: TechTool (Apple's tools offer nothing for power users);
- for preparing slides: Keynote, a great exception to Apple's otherwise mostly pedestrian offerings (caveat: the Spy is no fan of using textbook publishers' slides in a classroom as they add little value to the text);
- for his web hosting business: a LAMP machine outfitted with CPanel's WHM;
- for communicating with and updating his web sites: Cyberduck, which has a new update every time he fires it up. Yes, he could do this from within BBEdit, but he likes the 'duck's versatility.
On the other hand
His new publisher Wipf and Stock, who have just officially launched the now fifth edition of his textbook on ethical and social issues in technology adoption, required the use of Adobe Acrobat for the final proof and copy editing. His verdict: No wonder Apple distanced itself from Adobe by no longer distributing or recommending this product. The Spy suspected it wasn't very good, but this piece of junk is his new contender for second place in the race to the bottom for the prize of worst all time commercial software. Talk about inconsistent, non-intuitive, buggy, and hard to use. Yikes. Sheer agony.
Does that comment whet your appetite for knowing the old bottom two? Well, the previous second worst was a 3-way tie between MS Access, the early versions of MS Word on the Mac (over 1200 documented bugs and only order of magnitude statistical estimates of how many in total) and the unlamented Lotus 1-2-3, which worked, but was so badly written it could not be updated in a timely way and fell by the wayside when Excel came out. The incomparably worst, whose worstness the Spy doubts can ever be bested (how's that for a zinger?) and whose very name was oxymoronic: Word Perfect on the Mac. But for most abysmally bad current product, Acrobat has a big lead among all software packages the Spy has had to endure. (He has never, BTW, endured Access.)
The 2025 market and other futures
are primed for (but may or may not see):
- a reconciliation between Excel versions;
- even more functionality for Scrivener (and, please, do not sell out to one of the giants);
- tighter integration among Apple devices and their respective software;
- Apple to become a major player in the health sector with both in-house-developed and taken over products;
- the relative decline in popularity of EVs, which are overpriced, not selling well, are minus a robust support environment of charging stations, employ primitive and ridiculously large and expensive battery systems that might not be replaceable when they fail, and cannot become ubiquitous without massive upgrades to the electrical power generation and distribution grid, the scale and cost of which their fans in both government and industry seems unable to contemplate, much less grasp;
- more hype, very modest growth, but declines in expectations for AI, as its limitations become more evident;
- a huge proliferation of Matter-enabled home automation products that can talk over either or both of 2.4G Wi-Fi or Thread, thus eliminating the proliferation of discrete hubs for each and very manufacturer's products;
- many new Wi-Fi 7 router and access point products, and serious work on Wi-Fi 8 toward a (currently) 2028 release date;
- much new research into novel battery technology;
...and on the larger scene
- the big tech companies will become bigger yet in North America, but face increasing scrutiny, more regulation, and larger fines for monopolistic behaviour in Europe, Australia, and New Zealand;
- given the new government of the dU.S., the removal of most or all consumer safeguards, carte blanche for corporate takeovers, mergers and monopolistic behaviour, plus lower taxes for both them and their wealthiest shareholders;
- moreover, a tariff war that raises prices dramatically, and if not recanted, leads to a second great economic depression;
- plus an avalanche of pro gun legislation and repeals of restrictions on same, combined with a significant increase in mass killings;
- given the predilection of the killers to target schools, the increase in political indoctrination by whoever happens to be in power, the complete lack of respect for and support of teachers in many jurisdictions, mass resignations from an increasingly impossible to practice profession;
- similar outcomes with somewhat lower percentages will eventuate in health care and the justice system;
- more authoritarian regimes will come to power in various parts of the world;
- more politically-inspired violence;
- a proliferation of hate crimes against various ethnicities and nationalities, people of colour, and women;
- a worsening of the drug crisis, and its associated mental health and homelessness;
- a further squeezing out of the middle class in Western countries as its traditional jobs vanish, and the inflation, housing, health care, and educational crises destroy its viability;
- the essential bankruptcy of several nations that have for decades engaged in reckless spending (there comes a tomorrow when the piper must be paid). Note: Canadians were outraged last month to discover that the current federal deficit projection is a whopping $69 CDN Billion (72.5% higher than promised), but the dU.S. one is $1.9 Trillion--approximately four times as much per capita. Also on a per capita basis, the corresponding total Federal debt ratio for the two is even higher at 4.5. This is unsustainable. Note that these figures do not include Provincial/State or local government debt.
- Russia's war of annihilation against Ukraine appears likely to end badly; Putin will turn his rapacious eye on other neighbours such as Muldova, Romania, Poland, and the Baltic States. Meanwhile, Xi will escalate against Taiwan.
...and the Spy is considered an optimist. He was, but...
--The Northern Spy
Opinions expressed here are entirely the author's own, and no endorsement is implied by any community or organization to which he may be attached. Rick Sutcliffe, (a.k.a. The Northern Spy) is Professor of Computing Science and Mathematics and Assistant Dean of Science at Canada's Trinity Western University. He completed his fifty-fourth year as a high school and university teacher in 2024. He has been involved as a member of or consultant with the boards of several organizations and participated in developing industry standards both nationally and internationally. He is a long-time technology author and has written two textbooks and ten alternate history SF novels, one named best ePublished SF novel for 2003. His various columns have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers (both dead tree and online formats) since the early 1980s, and he's been a regular participant and speaker at churches, schools, and academic meetings and conferences. He and his wife Joyce celebrated their fiftieth anniversary in 2019 and lived in the Langley/Aldergrove/Bradner area of B.C. from 1969 to 2021 and cancer happened, so he latterly continues alone, depending heavily on family and friends to manage.
URL s for Rick Sutcliffe's Arjay Enterprises:
The Northern Spy Home Page: https://www.TheNorthernSpy.com
opundo : https://opundo.com
Sheaves Christian Resources : https://sheaves.org
WebNameHost : https://www.WebNameHost.net
WebNameSource : https://www.WebNameSource.net
nameman : https://nameman.net
General URLs for Rick Sutcliffe's Books:
Author Site: https://www.arjay.ca
TechEthics Site (Fourth edition of text; the fifth has been released; site to be re-ded=signed real soon now) : https://www.arjaybooks.com/EthTech/index.htm
Publisher's Site: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Richard-Sutcliffe.html
URL s for one product mentioned this month:
Wipf&Stock site for the 4Civ book Volume One: https://wipfandstock.com/9798385226818/the-fourth-civilization-volume-one/
Wipf&Stock site for the 4Civ book Volume Two: https://wipfandstock.com/9798385232932/the-fourth-civilization-volume-two/
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