Another lovely, clear day. The morning temperature was 6°, but my joints were stiff and the spring pollen count is high; breathing and limberness were suboptimal, and my time was sadly (but not surprisingly, as I felt sluggish while I was running) a laggardly 10:13.
Yesterday I noticed that my MacBook Pro from 2015 was signalling that I should service the battery. This struck me as a bit odd, since the MBP is usually kept plugged in; I don’t cycle the battery much at all. But five years is five years, I suppose, and the battery hasn’t given me any trouble. I just checked it, and it does seem to run down rapidly. The malign twin prospects of sending the laptop in for service (on one hand) or its breaking down (on the other) give pause. I looked at the current status of Apple laptops, and was struck to observe that they seem not to have evolved as markedly as has been my experience in the past. My 13″ MBP cost somewhere between £1500 and £2000 when we bought it years ago (education pricing); its dual-core processor runs at 2.9 GHz, and I paid extra for 16GB of RAM and 500GB of storage. A current-model MBP will have a much more powerful processor, but would cost £1700 for the same RAM and storage. I wasn’t having speed problems, and I’d rather not step down my RAM, and storage always only needs to grow, so to step up to 1TB would cost another £180. I have no interest whatever in the Touch Bar. I could slide down to the MB Air, I suppose…. But probably, it’s just time to [shudder] send it back to Apple for a once-over.
For the day, mostly reading Newman, though I had a good talk with Pippa in the afternoon. Pip and Christian both like my grown-out beard, and Mel commented on it as well when she came past the other day, so I may be more inclined to keep it after the plague subsides. Mel made chick pea patties for our dinner which we ate with relish, and we watched Spooks before bed. It’s getting formulaic; we have to watch to the end, of course, but I won’t be sad when we reach the end of series 10.