Richard Rutter shared an idea for limiting typographic widows with CSS. I love the simplicity of his proposal and would be thrilled if something like this were implemented as part of the core spec.

Twelve years ago felt like a golden age for indie bloggers. Shawn Blanc had just gone full-time independent and was writing up a storm. Austin Kleon posted the slides that ended up becoming *Steal Like an Artist*. The Great Discontentposted their first interview (with Dan Rubin). The Verge was still called This is My Next. John Siracusa was still writing 50,000 word macOS reviews.

The community was growing behind the web, too. Frank Chimero wrote a lot more then, and eventually a lot of what he wrote became The Shape of Design in 2012. Also in 2012, Kai Brach crowdfunded the first issue of Offscreen Magazine.

Maybe this is nostalgia. In 2011, I started freelancing and was actively seeking my tribe. For me, it was a magical time to be online. TGD was how I heard of all the designers I count now as inspiration. It gave me the confidence to explore my path. And Shawn Blanc quitting his job to blog full-time was an aha moment for me. Austin Kleon shone a light on how to do your best creative work (and continues to do so; he’s the best). Frank and Kai proved that there was still space and interest in sharing something deeper and more philosophical online.

Is there a community of people like this in 2023? Who is today’s Shawn Blanc? Who else is shining a light like Austin Kleon?

The newest additions to my list of must-read bloggers are Matt Birchler and Nick Heer. But I’m still looking for the next generation of creative pros and artists who remind us why we get up every morning and make stuff.

Who’s making food for the creative soul?

Before the Apple Silicon transition, it was always the case the biggest MacBook Pro was the most powerful. That’s no longer the case. These days, 14″ MacBook Pro can be specced out to be just as powerful as its bigger sibling. 

Without considering the implications of this, I purchased the 16″ MacBook Pro last year — the biggest one available — out of sheer habit.

Next time, I’m getting the 14″. I want as much power as I can get, but when I’m portable, I want as much portability as possible.

When in doubt, the answer is simple: reduce, reduce, reduce.

Didn’t Dieter say the best design is as little design as possible?

Probably still true. Probably true of words too.

(Edited for brevity.)

I’ve been thinking a lot about writing more often — doing something like what Austin Kleon does, or what he used to do: frequent updates about what I’m working on and thinking about, giving away whatever knowledge I have for free, and linking it all together with some sort of meta-textual awareness.

Post-Twitter, it seems like the best sort of thing to do with a personal website: write personal thoughts, sometimes using more than 280 characters, and link them together. Sometimes add links to things outside of this site too. Share it all for free, in the tradition of the open web (none of this paid newsletter stuff, lest suddenly I do this as a job and begin to despise it).

Of course, as soon as I thought about it, I started thinking about the forever-unfinished state of this redesign. Despite starting work on it during the early days of the pandemic, I never found time or motivation to finish it. It felt too much like work, and I was already up to my ears in work. I assumed that it would slow down at some point, but it never did. (An amazing predicament to be in as a freelancer.)

And so the site sits unfinished, and I feel unable to participate in my own work as I once did.

I don’t like Wordpress. It’s open source, but it also lacks direction, and I disagree with almost every direction it’s taken in the past half a decade. I’d prefer something Markdown based, so I can write on my computer, run a quick script from the command line, and be up and running. But I also want the flexibility to create complex structure if I need it. (I keep thinking I may one day want to share my photography work on the site, and that would require its own design and post type, so I do want to some flexibility.)

Some options:

• Grav
• Statamic
• Craft CMS (I think Craft is the best CMS in the world right now, but I wouldn’t be able to use flat files at all if I took this approach)
• Kirby
• Ghost

Leaning towards Craft or Kirby at the moment, but neither of them really match what I’m looking for. Obviously I could use Jekyll or any of its descendants, but something about that approach holds me back. I think it’s great they support plain text so well, but my site may end up being more rich than mere static text would allow.

In the meantime, I’d like to keep writing here. The work of the site is the text itself, not the container surrounding it. As much as the web designer in me hates to admit it, carrier pigeons have delivered more important words on paper with much less ​“design.”

I was saddened to hear about layoffs at Sketch. No company deserves to suffer layoffs, and certainly not a company that has done so much for its industry as Sketch. If you’re hiring, it sounds like the 80 people they’re letting go would be great for your team.

After Adobe bought Figma, I suggested to a couple different teams I freelance with that we could try Sketch again for our workflows. I’ve been impressed with their marketing efforts since the Figma acquisition (sadly it sounds like the marketing team is who they’re letting go of), and I miss using a Mac-native design app. 

Sadly, I think this ship has sailed. None of these developers are in love with Figma, and all of them hate Adobe, but Sketch being Mac-first immediately ruled them out for the teams I’m on. I wish Sketch took the Affinity route: build an amazing Mac app, and then build out native Windows and iPad versions. That could have made Sketch an unbeatable proposition in an increasingly tool-agnostic world.

It’s Figma’s world now. And in Figma’s world, it’s hard to beat ubiquity.

Over two years ago, I wrote about how I was going to redesign my personal blog. I did not intend for it to take two years. I thought it would be a minor thing I worked on in my spare time during COVID lockdowns.

Unfortunately, I have had no spare time. In those past two years, my work has exploded, my wife and I bought our first house, and we had some health concerns that required our attention. (We’re fine, don’t worry.)

So I’ve spent a grand total of 15 hours working on the redesign in two years, which is a paltry amount of focused efforts divided into a hopeless amount of working days. I’ve not been very successful.

What I want to share today are some failed designs. I think sharing the failure is as important as sharing the successes. Rather than share dozens of art boards, I’m cropping many of them to be around the same aspect ratio as most laptop displays.

In over two years, I haven’t gotten past some basic wireframes for this site. I’d be ashamed of my progress if I hadn’t worked on so many other projects in that time (I have yet to update my portfolio with any of the work due to a lack of time).

But what I have is terrible. These designs have too much white space, or too little white space. They lack any sense of coherency or purpose. What is the point?

I overthought everything to such an extent that my website started to look more like a portfolio than it did a simple blog. I already have a portfolio. A few months ago, I asked my wife what her thoughts were, and she told me what I already knew: I’d entirely overthought my goals here. Somehow, I’d stopped making a blog and started making a résumé.

What I want to make remains simple: I want a place where I can share blog posts or title-less, tweet-length updates. I want a place I can share some personal images (not client work). Maybe one day I’ll share my film reviews too.

In short, I want to lessen my dependence on third-party social media and make a small home for myself on the web. I do not care if this home houses my work. That’s what my portfolio is for.

When The Verge rolled out their new redesign, I realized they’d already done what I want to do: they have mixed status updates and lengthy blog posts in one feed. Their new site’s design is not entirely to my taste, but its function is closer to what I wanted to do two years ago.

Sometimes, when you’re working on a project, you drift away from your intended purpose. You become so enamoured with all the possibilities that you forget why you started in the first place. One must say no to all these ideas if they are ever to accomplish their purpose. Assuming the stated purpose is good, and assuming the intent is there, then the designer’s goal is to remove distractions. The designer must say no to a thousand new ideas that distract from the statement of the original.¹

That doesn’t mean some ideas don’t have merit. I have become fascinated with indented margins and side notes. Hanging margins are nice because they allow for left-aligned metadata that can float to the left of the article. Side notes are nice because it’s easier to find footnotes in place while reading an article. (Klim’s blog posts are the first place I can recall seeing this online, although side notes have existed in the marginalia of books for longer than anybody’s living memory). I plan on using side notes on my portfolio blog, where I already incorporate indented margins. Every idea has its place.

In the meantime, I’m throwing all my designs for my personal website out the window, and I plan on making something radically simpler. I know what it needs to look like. Now all I need is some free time.

Well, here we are. The inevitable future of our draconian Adobe overlords is here: Adobe has bought Figma for $20 billion.

For some reason, this caught me off guard. I really like Figma, and I work in it every day. It’s a great tool. I also have a Creative Cloud subscription for Lightroom, Photoshop, some XD usage (for some clients), Illustrator, etc.

The Bloomberg report claims that ​“Figma will continue to exist as a standalone product,” which is a puzzling statement because it implies Adobe doesn’t want to bring Figma into Creative Cloud.

So with that, I have a number of questions about this deal. I asked some of these questions on Twitter, but there are some new additions as well:

1. At some point, is Adobe going to make Figma part of Creative Cloud?
2. If they do, does that mean that Adobe will build a native Figma app for Mac and PC? Because that could actually be a plus side of this announcement. It would be great if Figma supported local saves, along with my local backups, my local typefaces, etc.
3. If Adobe brings Figma into CC, how do they plan on integrating it into the rest of their CC tools?
4. If Adobe brings Figma into CC, will they kill off XD? Or do they simply integrate the two tools? I can’t see both co-existing in CC. (This might be the reason Figma exists as a separate tool.)

If the report is accurate, the solution to all these questions might be simple: Figma stays how it is and is allowed to function as a profit centre for Adobe. Adobe does not integrate it into CC, and maintains XD in parallel.

XD has a lot of neat features, and it would be a shame to lose them. But you’d have to pry Figma from my cold, dead hands at this point, so I hope they don’t cancel it altogether. That would make me very sad.

There are some potentially good things that could come out of this, though:

1. People who use CC may not need to pay for a separate Figma subscription. I wouldn’t complain if this happened!
2. Figma’s collaboration tools are so much nicer to use than Adobe’s. There’s no comparison. If Adobe embraced some of their tooling, that could make Adobe’s crummy collaboration tools a lot better, and I’d appreciate that.
3. I’ll once again mention my desire for a native, offline Figma app with full support for my local font library. If Adobe wants to integrate Adobe Fonts support into Figma, that would also make my life easier.

For those among us who are philosophically aligned against Adobe, I guess Sketch is probably the only big option left — but it’s only an option if you’re a Mac user. Sour grapes to Windows folks who don’t want to support Adobe.

Personally, I’m saddened by this, excited by this, optimistic about this, and extremely pessimistic about this too. I’m a whirlwind of emotions. This whole thing feels like somebody punched you in the gut, and then hinted they might change their ways. (This is always how it feels to be an Adobe customer, though, so not much has changed

The last time I wrote about Apple’s laptops, in May 2020, I said the following:

Apple’s laptop lineup, in all honesty, hasn’t looked this good in almost a decade. Now that they’ve replaced the butterfly keyboard with the Magic Keyboard, it’s easy to recommend almost any of their laptops.

I spoke too soon. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s clear the lineup was about to get way better. The transition to Apple Silicon has been a boon for Mac users.

I’m writing this on a 2021 MacBook Pro with an M1 Max chip. That chip has 10 CPU cores, 32 GPU cores (!!!), and 64gb of RAM.¹ It’s also got an SD card slot! It’s a miracle of a machine. I won’t oversell it: it’s the best laptop I’ve ever owned. Honestly, it might be the best computer I’ve ever owned.

This machine is faster than the Intel Xeon-powered iMac Pro desktop workstation it replaced, and not by a little. Once in a while, I run a command in Terminal that used to take some time on the iMac. When I run the same command on the MacBook Pro, I blink, and it’s over.

It blows my mind, honestly, how much faster these machines are in day-to-day use than their desktop counterparts were a couple short years ago.

We also have an M1 MacBook Air, which was my laptop before I got the new MacBook Pro, and is now my wife’s primary non-work machine. That MacBook Air is as fast as my old iMac Pro. Let me repeat that: the little laptop with no fan and Apple’s most barebones Mac CPU is faster than my old, 240w desktop workstation machine with Intel Xeon processors. How is this possible?

Oh, and apart from one machine, the Touch Bar is gone. We now have this glorious scissor keyboard with full-height function keys and a much-improved Touch ID button. I can’t praise it enough. It just works. I haven’t thought about keyboards in a while.

The ecosystem around these laptops has also improved tremendously. In April of 2021, I wrote the following:

Apple’s external display situation remains a hot mess. They offer a mismatched 24″ LG screen, an ugly 27″ LG screen with inconsistent build quality and no glass above the LCD panel, and a $6,300 (CAD) 32″ ​“pro display” with an ​“optional” $1,300 stand. To make matters worse, this $7,600 setup was outshone this week by the new 13″ iPad Pro, which offers a much better backlighting system with 2,596 local dimming zones. The pro display offers 576.

If none of that meant anything to you, let me be frank: Apple’s pro display for their Mac is outshone by their tablet range. As a friend of mine said the other day, you’d be better off taping four iPad Pros together and treating them as one extended display for your Mac than you would buying Apple’s Pro Display XDR.

In my desperation, I summed it up with this:

Whatever comes next, will Apple please, for the love of everything good in this world, rip the computer out of the iMac and just sell me the display.

With that sentence alone, I feel like I willed the Studio Display into being. True, the Studio Display lacks HDR support, but now that I’ve had one for a couple months, I’m happy to say it’s a great monitor. The camera sucks, and there’s no HDR, but guess what? It’s an iMac display without a Mac attached to it. Webcam aside, it’s probably exactly what Apple needed to make.

Apple’s new chips also enabled the Magic Keyboard with Touch ID – a wireless keyboard with Touch ID built in. When I’m working at my desk, I often have to enter my password. This keyboard has saved me so much time every day. It doesn’t hurt that it looks great. While Face ID would be fine, I’m happy with Touch ID. Face ID is more convenient, but somehow, touching a key to authenticate feels more secure than having it happen automatically. (The Face ID-equipped iPhones and iPads operate this way too: any user authentication requires double-clicking the lock button.)

Overall, I am giddy about the state of Apple’s laptop lineup.

But like anything else, there’s room for improvement. I was excited to see the new M2 MacBook Air debut last week, but the continued existence of the 13″ M2 MacBook Pro stymies me. That laptop still ships with a Touch Bar, the old Touch ID button, and the old chassis. It doesn’t have the extended display with the notch (which I like), and it doesn’t have MagSafe. It’s missing the SD card slot and the HDMI slot. It’s a MacBook Air with a fan and a worse chassis. Why does it exist?

Any time that somebody asks what laptop they should get, it’s a shame when there’s a model you have to warn them against. That’s the 13″ MacBook Pro.

I think it exists because people buy it, and Apple is putting in the minimum effort required to keep selling it. There are rumours on the horizon of a 15″ MacBook Air and a 12″ MacBook Pro, which could theoretically straddle the price difference between the 13″ MacBook Air and the 14″ MacBook Pro better than the existing 13″ MacBook Pro could.

(Read that paragraph again: that word salad means Apple has a problem in the lineup. This isn’t rocket science. Please forgive the word salad; it’s not my fault the lineup is hard to understand.)

In addition, there’s a major feature missing from these laptops: cellular radios. The iPad can do it — why can’t the MacBooks? I think Apple needs to do a lot of work on macOS to prevent the system from downloading too much data over cellular networks (Macs are data-hungry on wifi!), but this has to be a product on their radar. If they ever add it to a machine, I would consider upgrading for that feature alone.

And if they want to give me more USB ports on the laptops, I won’t complain. (They could at least add a couple more to the Studio Display, while I’m thinking about it.) You could also add my voice to the choir of people asking why they don’t ship better webcams on these machines, but the 1080p webcam on the MacBook Pro is also fine.

But that’s it. This short list reflects how happy I am with the laptops in our household. I have a litany of complaints about macOS at this point. I much prefer it to Windows, but the quality of the OS is degraded by a myriad of little bugs that affect my quality of life every day. That being said, the laptops are the best they’ve ever been. That hasn’t been true since 2015. For the first time in seven years, it feels like the Mac laptop lineup is in a great place.

Over the past four or five years, I’ve gone back and forth between Lightroom and Capture One many times with my photography work. I find C1 takes me a little longer to work with, but I often prefer the results I can get with it — especially with regards to colour accuracy.

That’s why I was curious about their recent Capture One for iPad preview. I’m impressed with the work they’ve done on the UI. It’s clearly early days — this is still a preview — but I’m more interested in editing with this on iPad than I am in editing with Lightroom CC.

What that preview video confirmed for me is that I just don’t like working on iPads. I watched as David danced around the iPad UI and couldn’t stop thinking about how much faster all these edits would be on my Macs.

So Capture One for iPad looks very impressive. I have a lot of questions still: how are photos synced? Where are they stored? How can I manage the synced photos and edits between machines? Does this work well for catalogs, or is it meant for sessions? Etc. It’s exciting progress, though. My congratulations to the Capture One team for thinking out of the box and designing a UI that is specifically tailored for a touch interface. 

But now I have a different question, unrelated to Capture One, but very much related to the iPad: For years, my assumption was that the software was holding back the iPad. But with software like this, the software won’t be the problem. The problem is just that my human fingers are not as precise or fast as a dialled-in mouse or trackpad.

If Apple announced a new version of iPadOS that somehow fixed all the issues I have with file management, window management, and other productivity features on an iPad, would I want to use an iPad? 

I’m starting to think I will always prefer the mouse-and-keyboard paradigm.

For years — literally years — I have been complaining about the monitor situation for Mac users. Here’s what I said the last time I wrote about this:

Apple’s external display situation remains a hot mess. They offer a mismatched 24″ LG screen, an ugly 27″ LG screen with inconsistent build quality and no glass above the LCD panel, and a $6,300 (CAD) 32″ ​“pro display” with an ​“optional” $1,300 stand. To make matters worse, this $7,600 setup was outshone this week by the new 13″ iPad Pro, which offers a much better backlighting system with 2,596 local dimming zones. The pro display offers 576.

I followed that up with:

I’ve been complaining about this display problem since 2019, and I don’t want to complain about it for much longer. If somebody who works at Apple somehow ends up reading this, here’s a note for you: it would be easy for you to fix this. Tear the computer out of the iMac and sell me just the screen. I (and I am sure many others) will give you up to $2,000 for this product. This is easy money for you. Please take it.

Finally, in the year of our Lord 2022, Apple sells a 5K, 27″, first-party display with 218PPI and a factory-calibrated P3 colour gamut. In Canada, it starts at $2,000. (Did somebody at Apple read my blog post?)

I’ve seen a lot of reviews that compare the Studio Display to other monitors. ​“There are lots of cheaper options that are just as good,” is the common thought.

There are not.

If your priority is 5K resolution at 27″, with a PPI of over 200 pixels, you really only have one other option: the LG Ultrafine. It’s the option Apple previously sent Mac users to. I owned one, and it’s definitely not great.

The stand is wobbly. Sometimes the monitor doesn’t turn on, or flickers on and off until you unplug the laptop and plug it back in. It creaks when you adjust the height, and it wobbles and vibrates every time I hit a key on the keyboard (I’m a loud typist).

The LG Ultrafine is $1300 USD ($1,750 CAD), and one thing not included in that price is reliability. (It shares that theme with the butterfly keyboard.)

In fact, that monitor/​laptop combination was so bad that I sold both and bought an iMac Pro instead, relegating myself to primarily work at a desk for the past few years. I have a MacBook Air — a machine that love — but I use it exclusively when I’m away from my desk. Before I work on it, I have to spend a lot of time syncing git repos, server databases, raw photos in Capture One or Lightroom, and creative assets like font files before I can get to work. I really miss having a single computer with all my stuff on it, all the time.

So I ordered a Studio Display the minute they were available, along with a 16″ MacBook Pro with M1 Max. My display should be coming sometime in the next couple weeks, and the laptop arrived a week ago.

I’ll have more thoughts to share on both products later, but for now I just wanted to say I put my money where my mouth is. Dear Apple: thanks for listening.

You know when you’re reading an article online, and for some reason, there’s a video ad on the bottom right of the screen that has nothing to do with the website or the article?

The video ad I saw recently was a perfectly-targeted ad. I don’t know how they did this. But it was an ad for the new Horizon game. And it was like it knew me.

The big feature the ad showed off was the new machines in the game. And the ending of the ad was, get this, Aloy riding a velociraptor.

So somehow this ad perfectly targeted me:

• It knew I owned a PS5
• It knew I played the previous Horizon game
• It knew I love velociraptors

Now, here’s the thing: I wasn’t planning on playing the new Horizon game. I’m knee deep into Elden Ring on my Playstation, and I’ve got a bunch of more casual games cooking on my Xbox (related: Game Pass rocks), so Horizon was going to get a pass from me. 

But I’m now eager to play it, because I have a basic human desire to ride a velociraptor.

My wife suggested the Venn diagram of PS5 owners, Horizon players, and velociraptor fans must have a lot of intersections. But I disagree. If there were that many people like me, they would have done a better job marketing this feature of the game. I visit Polygon and Kotaku every day, and I had no idea I could ride velociraptors.

First of all, if there were a lot of people like me, the front cover of the new game would just be Aloy riding velociraptors. Instead of Forbidden West, it’d be called Horizon: Ride Velociraptors. And every possible ad for it would just be Aloy riding velociraptors. 

If these conditions were met, I would have pre-ordered without even thinking.

Because here’s something I earnestly believe after playing Breath of the Wild and Halo Infinite: every game should have a hang glider and a grappling hook. The new Horizon apparently has both these features, and it also has velociraptor riding.

So let me revise my opinion: every game should have a hang glider, a grappling hook, and velociraptors to ride. I don’t think I’m asking for too much.

As much as Sony is the dominant leader in the video game market right now, they also have a marketing problem: I am basically the target market for this game, but they failed to reach me with this pivotal information before the game came out. And when they finally did reach me, they did so with an automatically-playing web ad, which is the worst possible way to reach me.

Somebody in the marketing department is messing up.

(Also, I don’t know who’s in charge of Horizon release dates, but the first one was released a week before Breath of the Wild and this one is released a week before Elden Ring. The person in charge of sorting out release dates for Sony needs to take a good, hard look in the mirror and sort out their life.)

Update:

Upon further research, it turns out you can also ride giant pterodactyls in the sequel, and they didn’t advertise this. In fact, people are mad at critics who have ​“spoiled” this for them.

But this shouldn’t be a spoiler! LEAN INTO THE DINOSAUR RIDING. That’s at least half the appeal of this game. Riding velociraptors and pterodactyls is a feature, not a spoiler!

Imagine if the people in charge of marketing Halo Infinite said, ​“You know what? Nobody needs to know about the grappling hook.” 

That grappling hook changed my life. Infinite is the best Halo game solely because of that feature. (I’ll die on this hill.) If Master Chief also had a hang glider, and he could ride velociraptors, it would easily be among the best games ever made. 

In conclusion: if you’re making a video game, and you want it to be great, make sure you include the following:

• a grappling hook
• a hang glider
• velociraptors I can ride

If you were to market each of those features, you are guaranteed to make a best-selling, critically-acclaimed masterpiece. 

Horizon: Forbidden West just skyrocketed up my wish list.

First things first: the new, M1-power iMacs are visually incredible. The colours are bold. I like it a lot. I want the yellow one (above) — look at it. It’s great.

I’ve seen a lot of people say they don’t like the front of these machines. They say the white bezels are distracting and the chins are ugly. Whether or not the chins are ugly, as far as Apple is concerned, they are an iconic part of the brand.

I have an iMac Pro, which I stare at every day. I have never been bothered by the chin. I’ve also never been bothered by the size of the bezels.

My television (an old 1080p Sony Bravia) has a silver bezel on the bottom. It is ugly as sin, and serves no purpose. But I have never noticed it while watching television.

In short, I don’t think the bezels or chin are as important as everybody else. I do think the bezels and chin on this new iMac look cool, but I will not be ordering one myself.

Secondly, the new 24″ screen is a 4.5k screen. This is interesting because the 24″ LG monitor Apple sells in their stores is only 4k. At 24″, LG’s 4k monitor is too low-DPI to meet Apple’s qualifications for Retina.

The differences in resolution mean that buyer’s of Apple’s 24″ iMac do not have a matching second screen they could purchase, should they want one. I doubt this matters to most people in the market for the entry-level iMac, but it’s curious.

Apple’s external display situation remains a hot mess. They offer a mismatched 24″ LG screen, an ugly 27″ LG screenwith inconsistent build quality and no glass above the LCD panel, and a $6,300 (CAD) 32″ ​“pro display” with an ​“optional” $1,300 stand. To make matters worse, this $7,600 setup was outshone this week by the new 13″ iPad Pro, which offers a much better backlighting system with 2,596 local dimming zones. The pro display offers 576.

If none of that meant anything to you, let me be frank: Apple’s pro display for their Mac is outshone by their tablet range. As a friend of mine said the other day, you’d be better off taping four iPad Pros together and treating them as one extended display for your Mac than you would buying Apple’s Pro Display XDR.

I’ve been complaining about this display problem since 2019, and I don’t want to complain about it for much longer. If somebody who works at Apple somehow ends up reading this, here’s a note for you: it would be easy for you to fix this. Tear the computer out of the iMac and sell me just the screen. I (and I am sure many others) will give you up to $2,000 for this product. This is easy money for you. Please take it.

Thirdly: it looks like the M1’s story is mostly complete. Apple has released an M1-powered iPad Pro, MacBook Air, Mac mini, 24″ iMac, and 13″ MacBook Pro. We have never seen a computer chip across this large a range of products.That alone is revolutionary. But whatever chip powers the high-end laptops and desktops will not be the same as this M1. Undoubtedly, it will offer more computer power and better graphics.

The M1 is an incredible chip. The new MacBook Air, which I’m writing this post on now, feels as fast to me in use as the iMac Pro on my desk — yet it’s the low-powered chip. How much headroom is there above this? How far can Apple push their architecture? Will Apple have in-house GPUs that can rival what they typically purchase from AMD? How much RAM will these new machines have? How much will these machines cost?

But most importantly: Whatever comes next, will Apple please, for the love of everything good in this world, rip the computer out of the iMac and just sell me the display.

I was surprised and excited earlier this week to see the announcement of Canon’s new EOS R3 camera. I was expecting them to announce their flagship R1 camera (which would sit alongside their 1D series), but instead, Canon has surprised me with a ​“new” product line.

The 3‑series moniker has been used by Canon before, but not since 1998. (In fact, they never made a digital 3‑series camera.) The R3 incorporates the EOS-3’s headlining feature: Eye Control AF. Eye Control AF essentially uses the position of the photographer’s eye in the viewfinder to dictate autofocus placement. If it works well (the 1998 implementation was not always well-received, but it’s been more than 20 years since), I think this could be a game changer.

Not only that, but this looks like a 1D-series camera: it has an integrated battery grip. On the Sony camera I used to own, I bought their battery grip separately to make the camera more comfortable for me to hold. Canon’s cameras fit my hands much more naturally, but I’d still be very interested in something a little bigger.

But I’m way more excited about two other features in this camera: 30 FPS shooting and the Stacked CMOS sensor.

30 FPS shooting means that this camera should compete directly with Sony’s technologically-breathtaking A1 on at least some level. The A1 is Sony’s flagship, though, and the R3 will not be Canon’s flagship. I’m taking 30 FPS on the R3 as a statement that Canon can outdo the A1 whenever they release their R1 flagship camera (next year, perhaps).

The Stacked CMOS sensor is even more interesting. For years, Canon has been behind in sensor tech. Stacked CMOS leaps over the BSI technology Sony used for years and skips an entire sensor generation. More importantly, Canon designed and will manufacture the chip themselves. Unlike Nikon’s sensors, this won’t be a Sony gizmo.

This will be the first Canon sensor with backside illumination, which will help dramatically with low light shooting (an area where Sony still edges out, in my opinion). But it’s also going to be a boon for overall sensor speed. That Stacked CMOS sensor is undoubtedly how Canon is getting to 30 FPS.

There are some obvious questions that remain from this announcement:

1. What is the megapixel count? (I don’t need more than 20 – 30mp, but I’m curious who the intended market is for the R3.)
2. Does it record video? Of what quality, and with what limitations?
3. Does it have a flip-out screen?
4. When can we get one?
5. What’s it cost?

That being said, there are some less obvious questions that are more interesting to me:

1. The R3 already looks an awful lot like what I expected the R1 to be. In fact, my mirrorless R6 performs quite similarly to Canon’s flagship 1D Mark III dSLR. Canon’s new bodies are exceptional, but clearly they think they can make them even better. How much space is left above the R3 for an even better camera?
2. If the R3 competes with Sony’s A1, does the R1 sit in a new class of its own?
3. If Canon can surprise us with an in-house Stacked CMOS sensor, does that make the rumours about their global shutter more likely to be accurate? (That would be incredible.)
4. How does a Stacked CMOS sensor change the familiar attributes of Canon’s cameras? For me, Canon’s approach to colour and exposure is more intuitive than Sony’s. How much of that is because of their (admittedly outdated) sensor tech? Will any of these positive attributes get worse?

The past couple years have been the most interesting years for camera bodies in two decades. I’m extremely excited about the R3, but largely because it represents an even bigger change in the lineup. It means that Canon isn’t resting on their laurels — likely because of Sony’s aggressive market reach and increasing dominance in the mirrorless sensor. As a fan of both companies and an owner of Canon’s system, nothing could excite me more.

I never wanted to buy a Canon camera. 

Years ago, when I moved from Nikon to Sony, I never considered a Canon. I had heard too much about the Canon ​“cripple hammer,” as conspiracy theorists call it, and had decided in advance that they weren’t for me. 

Two years later, here I am. Let me definitively say this: I was wrong. Canon’s new EOS R6 is my favourite camera that I’ve ever shot with. Period. Full stop. Bar none. (If you’re curious about why I moved away from Sony, I wrote about that as well.) Here’s my review after one month of shooting — and a generous smattering of photos I’ve taken with the camera as well.

The R6: A Mini 1D X III

A lot of people have already noted that the R6 shares its sensor with the 1D X Mark III, which is an incredible camera priced at $9,000 CAD. But outside the sensor, these cameras are markedly different. For one thing, the R6 is mirrorless, but it’s also much smaller and lighter. 

The R6 has also been compared to the 6D series’ build quality and weather sealing. I don’t know where folks are getting their information from, but for what it’s worth, Canon have also told some reviewers that the R6 has the same weather sealing as the 5D. (I’m inclined to think this is true, since the R5’s sealing goes far beyond what the 5D offered.)

All this has created some confusion: is the R6 a replacement for the 6D or the 5D DSLR series?

In my opinion, it isn’t a replacement for either of them. Canon have a different product strategy for their mirrorless lineup. That strategy is simple: give you 1 DX levels of performance in a compact, comfortable, and reliable body at one third of the price. 

It’s that simple. 

Shooting with it

Of course, none of that matters if it’s not fun and easy to shoot with. After all, that’s the bug I had up my butt about my Sony gear: shooting with it was tedious and joyless. I am happy to report that’s not the case with the R6.

The R6 has a fantastic, generously-sized grip — exactly what you would expect from Canon. It feels like a DSLR, but it’s not quite as large as one. It’s very easy to carry the camera without a strap, even with a heavy zoom lens. I have done this for hours at a time. The camera is heavier than the a7 III, but because the R6’s weight distribution is so much better, it somehow feels lighter in the hand.

The buttons feel great, too. All the port coverings are labelled (unlike the Sony), and even the dual SD card slots have a very nice card eject mechanism. These are little niceties, but they make a difference. It’s like the old magnetic charger for MacBooks: these are tiny improvements that, once you’re used to them, are difficult to go without.

Another thing that I much prefer about the Canon: it’s so much easier to change lenses. The shutter closes by default when you turn the camera off, which helps swap lenses without getting dust on the sensor. The lenses are also clearly marked, and it’s easy to identify where they mount by feel if you’re in the dark. This is a killer feature.

I also love the flip-out screen. This is new to professional-level Canons; the 5D IV didn’t have one. I have used it almost every day; it’s one of my favourite features. The touch screen on the R6 is almost as responsive as my iPhone, which is high praise. While you’re shooting, nearly all the most important camera functionality is always available from the touch screen.

Here’s something that surprised me: I don’t think the menus are that great. Sure, they’re better than Sony’s, but that’s a low bar. As these cameras become more and more feature-packed, the menus are bound to get more cumbersome. So it comes down to the devil you know. 

But still, some of the menu choices are downright bizarre. As an example, if you want to film at 120p, that’s in a different menu than all the other frame rates and movie modes. And once, I spent ten minutes trying to find an option in the menus that used an unnecessary short form (Exp. instead of Exposure). If there’s space on the screen to display the whole word, these companies should do that. Both Sony and Canon are making the same menu mistakes. 

But overall, I much prefer shooting on the Canon to shooting on the Sony. In actual usage, it’s not even a contest. The Canon is much more comfortable and way more fun. Over the past five weeks, I’ve eagerly shot with it almost every single day. I love it the way I love my iMac: it just works. Exactly as a tool should be.

Image quality

How do the photos look off this thing, though? In a word: exceptional. I was a little nervous about losing dynamic range I could capture with the a7 III, but I’ve had nothing to worry about. Sony might claim more dynamic range on paper, but in practice, they’re basically identical.

That being said, I haven’t had the chance to try the R6 in a low-light event space yet (you know, because COVID). I have no idea how it will perform at ISO 3200 indoors because I haven’t needed to push it that high. But given how it performs at ISO 1200, I’m not worried.

The R6 also seems to be less reliant on ISO than my Sony. I frequently found that my Sony needed to be pushed to ISO 800 or higher, and the Canon rarely needs to get pushed as far. (It’s important to note that ISO isn’t really a universal standard, so this isn’t surprising — it’s just indicative of how hard it is to talk about and compare different camera systems.)

While I’m talking about ISO, this seems like a good time to mention Canon’s IBIS system. For stills, the IBIS is sensational. I can pretty easily get a one second or two second exposure handheld, even at telephoto distances. With a wide angle lens, I can take a four second handheld exposure. It doesn’t completely obviate the need for tripods, but it helps.

The R6 has a 20mp sensor, which is low compared to the competition. That being said, the files are incredibly sharp and surprisingly detailed. They appear sharper than the files I would get out of the a7 III’s 24mp sensor. It’s hard to say if that’s a result of the camera or the lenses, but I’d assume it’s a bit of both. In all honesty, while 20mp and 24mp sound different on paper, megapixel resolution doesn’t scale exponentially, so the difference is fairly minor — just a couple hundred pixels on either side.

The files are so sharp from the Canon, though, that I am often turning down sharpness. In Lightroom, I’ll put the Clarity and Texture tools at negative numbers on occasion — the photos are that sharp. 

Autofocus has been excellent, at least on par with my Sony, if not better. The only time I ever had an issue was when I was using the Canon mobile app to shoot remotely. I assume that’s a bug that will get patched soon; this camera is still brand new, after all. (I also missed focus occasionally because of user error. Even this camera can’t fix my stupidity.)

Finally, I want to briefly touch on Canon colours. I don’t want to say they’re ​“better” than Sony’s, because colour science is often misunderstood. What I will say is that the colours are much more predictable in post. I can look at a jpeg preview in-camera and know how I’ll tweak the colours later. As you might predict, this has made my editing workflow much smoother. I’m probably saving anywhere from 20%-50% of the time I spend on photo editing now, and I can get much more consistent results. 

So, in short: great image quality. Dynamic range is more than you’ll probably ever actually need, the colours look great and are easy to work with in post, and the autofocus nails it. 

Is the image quality better than the Sony? It’s certainly not worse. It’s just different. I prefer it, but this is subjective. Your mileage may vary.

The RF system

Can I talk to you about lenses now? As far as I’m concerned, the RF glass is the best reason to switch to Canon right now. 

The RF glass I own is simply sensational. I bought the trinity: the 15 – 35 2.8, the 24 – 70 2.8, and the 70 – 200 2.8.

The 24 – 70 is far and away the best I’ve used in its category. I don’t typically like this zoom range much, but this has become one of my favourite lenses. It renders sensationally. Canon also makes a 28 – 70 f2, which sounds amazing. I’ve been told the images it records make my 24 – 70 look like a child’s plaything, which I find hard to believe — but also, I want one. 

The new 70 – 200 is also awesome. Unlike my Sony, it is sharp all the way through, from 70mm to 200mm. And it’s so small and chunky! I love it. I can stand it upright in my backpack (so long as I’m not also carrying a laptop), which saves me a ton of space. (I’ve heard Canon is working on a 70 – 135 f2 lens, which… drool.)

The 15 – 35 is interesting. In all honesty, I think I preferred Sony’s 16 – 35GM, which was a truly sensational wide angle performer. The Canon lens has an even stronger vignette in the corner, which makes the lens difficult to use for portraiture. (I once shot an engagement session entirely at 24mm on the Sony, and people love how it turned out. I don’t know if I would do that with this lens. I would absolutely use the 24 – 70 for this purpose, but maybe not the 15 – 35.) That being said, Canon’s take on this lens includes built-in lens stabilization, which is a nice addition for landscape, real estate, and architecture work (four second handheld exposures!).

While the difference between the two wide angle lenses is subtle, I much prefer Canon’s 24 – 70 and 70 – 200 lenses over the Sony equivalents. It’s night and day; the glass is substantially better. This isn’t even Canon’s best work; if you want to see what the system is truly capable of, the 50mm f1.2, 28 – 70 f2, and 85mm f1.2 are expensive, but supposedly unbelievable. Not only that, but the EF to RF mount adapters make it easy to use EF lenses with the new Canon cameras — and there are some classic lenses in their lineup.

Comparing the Canon R6 to the Sony a7 III

In my exit review of the Sony a7 III, I listed a few things that I didn’t like about Sony’s cameras. I thought I’d list out some of those issues, and directly compare the Sony and Canon on those fronts.

• Ergonomics: Every Sony I’ve ever is uncomfortable in my hand. For what it’s worth, my hands are probably the average size for my height (six feet exact), so it’s not that I have ​“huge hands” and can’t hold Sony’s gear. It’s literally that Sony’s gear is too small. Canon’s mirrorless offerings are night and day better; it’s not a contest, and I doubt you’re surprised. Sony’s recent announcement of the super-small a7C belies the fact that Sony doesn’t believe this is an issue. It is. There’s a place for small cameras, but it is so important that we make tools that are ergonomically sound.
• Changing lenses: Changing lenses is so irksome with the Sony that I listed it as a bug in their system. This is a non-issue with the Canon. Overall, the system I found it easiest to change lenses with is Nikon (back when I shot Nikon), but why would anyone shoot Nikon these days? (Please don’t send me hate mail about this.)
• Editing workflow: it’s so much easier to work with the Canon files. This is true in every app I’ve tried editing the files in. My editing time has shrunk exponentially, which means I’m shooting more.
• Shooting quirks: The R6 doesn’t need to be underexposed like my Sony. I can half-press the shutter button and continue to adjust my exposure settings without releasing the shutter button. I have not experienced a single bug or glitch yet (though that does not mean they don’t exist). Unlike my Sony gear, there has never been a situation where the Canon silently failed to record images to a memory card, or recorded everything to the card with a green overlay, or failed to recognize its own batteries.
• Flip-out screen: The R6 has one, and the a7 III does not. The only Sony cameras with flip-out screens are the new a7C and the a7S III. I am confident more flip-out screens are coming to their lineup, but shocked it took this long. Flip-out screens aren’t just for vloggers; they’re important accessibility features for people who are physically handicapped as well.

At the end of the day, almost all of my problems were about usability and workflow issues. These are things that you don’t read about on a spec list, but you do experience them over time. The a7S III’s marketing page includes a section about improvements for ​“workflow efficiency.” This is something Canon doesn’t typically need to advertise; outside of the Multi-function Touch Bar on the EOS R, their ergonomic blunders have been few and far between.

Canon’s image quality has been tested and proven time and time again. Sony’s image quality is also very nice, but until recently, they hadn’t been focused on usability and workflow at all. While I’m glad to see Sony is working on it, it’s an iterative process. It will take years for Sony to sort this out. I got tired of waiting.

For me, this has been like switching from Windows to a Mac, or an Android phone to iPhone. It’s been an instant improvement. The R6 mostly works the way my brain works, which helps the camera become a physical extension of my body. It lets me focus on the photo, and not the device I’m making the photo with. I couldn’t be happier with the move.

I never wanted to buy a Canon camera, but I guess I’m one of those Canon people now. It’s like being an Apple devotee (I’m also in this club), a BMW driver (who else drives like that?), or a New England Patriots fan (the most unfortunate). Never say never… but I don’t plan on going back.