Sometime in the next month or so, I will start my winter reading program (WRP).
Closing out the SRP - 2023:
The books:
The Art in Painting, Albert C. Barnes, c. 1925, c. 1965.
The Art of Renoir, Albert C. Barnes and Violette de Mazia, c. 1935.
Radical by Nature: The Revolutionary Life of Alfred Russel Wallace, James T. Costa, March 21, 2023;
The Wok: Recipes and Techniques, J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, March 8, 2022;
Before the Big Bang: The Origin Of The Universe and What Lies Beyond, Laura Mersini-Houghton, July 4, 2023;
The Maniac (John von Neumann), BenjamÃn Labatut, c. 2023.
Why Tammy Wynette Matters, Steacy Easton, c. 2023. A series of books on musicians.
Grant: Memoirs, In Two Volumes, and Selected Letters, 1839 - 1865, The Library of Congress, c. 1990 by Literary Classics of the United States.
A History of the Jews In America, Howard M. Sachar, c. 1992. Softcover, $7.00 at a used book shop in Nashville, TX, Rhino Booksellers.
************************ Veterans Day
Enjoying a free lunch with my wife at The Thirsty Lion around the corner from where we live, and our favorite watering hole. I'm wearing my USAF leather flight jacket. Those flight jackets were issued back in 1993, or thereabouts. At the time, we were stationed at Incirlik Air Base, Turkey, just north of Syria.
*************************** What A Bookstore Can Tell US
Barnes and Nobel has three huge two-sided magazine racks at the front of the store.
This is the front side of the first rack one sees upon entering the store.
The three rows of the technology section: camera and photo magazines; computers, software; and, at the bottom, gaming.
Top two rows:
Bottom row:
With all the focus on gaming, one would think gaming would be at the top.
With all the smart phone cameras most of us would have thought 35-mm cameras were dead. But not dead, and, in fact, by the number of different magazines, and the prominence of the magazines, it is obvious that the 35-mm single reflex high-end digital cameras are thriving.
And, finally, computer and software magazines. Years ago you wouldn't have an Apple cover but now it's hard to not see an Apple cover.
************************** Cameras
It's counterintuitive, but one wonders if the Apple iPhone might not be responsible for the resurgence of the high-end digital camera?
And, oh, by the way, comparing an "old" iPhone camera -- the iPhone 14 -- with a high-end Sony camera tells you how far the iPhone cameras have come.
Apple earnings: analysis. This is probably the best analysis I’ve seen. To whet your appetite:
Services reached a new all-time revenue record of $22.3 billion, +16% Y/Y, accelerating from +8% Y/Y in the previous quarter. Apple set new records in every Services category. The growth was attributed to double-digit growth in transacting and paid accounts.
Apple now has “well over 1 billion paid subscriptions.”
How big are Services? To put the $22.3 billion revenue into perspective — it was more than the combined revenues of Netflix, Mastercard, Spotify, Electronic Arts, Dropbox, and Peloton in the same quarter.
Disney subscribers: 150 million. Netflix: 250 million. Warner Bros Discovery (MAX, HBO): 95 million and falling.
How “big” is Apple? Almost 50% of Buffet’s entire equity portfolio is one stock: AAPL. Let that sink in.
Apple product review: Pro M3. To whet your appetite:
Hello again. It’s only been about 10 months since the M2 Pro and Max chips arrived on the MacBook Pros, but that’s already old news. Here I am with the MacBook Pro 16 with the M3 Max chip — and hoo boy, this is one big, beefy hunk of Pro laptop.
It’s priced like one, too.
If this bad boy and its benchmarks came out in 2021, we’d all be picking our jaws up off the floor. But it’s 2023, and we’ve already seen what Apple Silicon can do.
Spec bumps just aren’t as tantalizing as whole transitions. And while this computer is powerful, it starts at $3,499. That’s for the “base” M3 Max configuration with a 14-core CPU, 30-core GPU, 36GB of RAM, and 1TB of storage. That’s about as much as my current rent is for a two-bedroom New York City apartment.
