We Live in an Age of Wonders

The new M4 Mac mini is extraordinarily impressive as a piece of design, squeezing the current state of the art for Mac computers into an incredibly compact size. I admit that I spent a good amount of time trying desperately to justify getting one, even though I have absolutely no need for it.

I recently saw a video on YouTube (which I won’t link to, because I’m being kind of harsh on it) where a guy outlined his project to turn the Mac mini from a desktop computer into a portable one. He 3D-printed an enclosure that would hold the mini and a bluetooth keyboard, with a hinge attachment to hold a compact widescreen monitor. At the end, he proudly showed off his achievement, prompting me to ask, “What the hell is the point of all that?”

It seemed pointless because for over a year, I’ve been using a 14″ M3 MacBook Pro as my main computer. And it’s been flawless. Not that I’m a super-user or anything, but I’ve never once had it be anything other than fast, efficient, and capable of doing everything I want it to do.1

It’s so capable, in fact, that I almost never think about it. I’m even a little bit disappointed that I treat it like a desktop machine and rarely need to remove it from its dock, because it is so light and powerful and portable and, if you’re a weird gadget nerd like I am, just a pleasure to hold and carry around.

Since we spend most of the time seeing technology making incremental improvements2, it’s easy to lose sight of just how remarkable the current state of consumer technology is. Especially when the bulk of the news is about how tech companies are making everything worse. (And even the most fervent Apple fan (e.g., me) would be foolish to suggest that Apple isn’t a significant part of that).

It seems like a good idea to stop every once in a while, take a look around, and just appreciate that some things are just neat.

The aforementioned video, for instance, has the guy not only using a home 3D printer to make his needless creation. That would’ve been unfeasibly expensive until fairly recently, and not possible at that level of print quality until very recently. Plus, the video is full of YouTube-influencer gimmickry, like floating text and motion graphics and other AfterEffects, and lots of scenes where the host is talking to himself using video compositing. He uses a professional CAD package that would’ve been unattainable for most of the past 20 years, but is now free to use for personal projects. It’s all set to a generic synth soundtrack, probably made with software that came for free with his Mac. There’s even a shot where he has a light bulb come on in the background, made possible with ubiquitous home automation and probably controlled via a smart phone.

I say with no trace of irony that it’s amazing how so much of this stuff has become so ubiquitous, accessible, and affordable that it can become such a gimmick that we no longer notice how remarkable it is.

And I don’t like it, but part of this was prompted by hearing so many accounts of people online talking about how difficult it is to be viable as an independent game developer these days. My immediate response is to think, “For most of my lifetime, it wasn’t even possible, much less viable!” I don’t love it because it sounds so similar to the type of asshole who balks at student loan forgiveness; “if it was hard for me, it should be hard for everyone!” But there’s a nicer idea at its core, which is to marvel at how development is easier and more accessible now than it’s ever been.

It seems easy to forget that for much of my life, it was unreasonably expensive to get a compiler, much less a functional game engine. (There almost certainly was a free version of gcc or something out there, but I was ignorant of it or how to get it). Now, IDEs are freely available, there are multiple options for development languages for the web and otherwise, and Xcode is available for free to anyone with a Mac and a network connection. I’d definitely prefer it if the Mac still came with an easier kit for rapid application development like HyperCard, but as someone who had no access to a C++ compiler until I got a job that paid for my license, it’s remarkable to think of how accessible it is now.

Game engines — except for Godot, of course — have all kinds of very real licensing issues associated with them, but have unprecedented accessibility if you previously had zero options unless you had the skills to write your own engine. Not to mention developers making Blender freely available, when we’ve spent most of our lives not being able to afford tools like Maya and 3DS Max. And Nomad Sculpt makes it possible for an amateur like me to make 3D models I’m actually kind of happy with; the accessibility isn’t just in terms of price, but in actual ease of use.

I don’t want to be too much of a Pollyanna, since it does undoubtedly feel like things are slipping backwards for the first time, after decades of tech and development getting more and more democratic and accessible. Web sites suck now, useful information is getting drowned out by LLMs, and there’s increasingly a premium around what should be freely accessible information. There will always be a gold rush mentality around technology, so we have to hope that people will be able to pick up after all the damage caused by the AI bubble when it inevitably bursts.

But I genuinely do think that it’s important not to be so caught up in the negatives that it becomes impossible to pause every now and then to appreciate how much potential we have now. It’s never been more possible to make cool things. An environment where it’s difficult to get exposure for your work also means that we’re living in a glut of wonderful stuff. Maybe instead of being dispirited, we can use it as inspiration.

1
Except play games, of course.

2
Although the introduction of the M1 was genuinely revolutionary, I think

1 Except play games, of course.

2 Although the introduction of the M1 was genuinely revolutionary, I think