We started seriously shopping for a replacement cooktop today – ours is probably still fixable, but if one switch failed for no particular reason, can the other three be far behind?

We’d taken a look at Best Buy and Home Depot over the weekend and were under-impressed with their selection. Two friends recommended University Electric so we went there this morning. You could look around on your own or request help – we were serious enough to ask for help, and our salesperson quickly took us to the right section of the store. Consumer Reports strongly recommends the Bosch induction cooktop, so that’s what we looked at. We got a good price quote ($50 lower than anything we found online), but availability is a question (of course). More to come….

After shopping, we took a walk on the San Tomas Aquino Creek trail, which we’d never been on before; it goes right through Santa Clara’s semiconductor heartland (we passed AMD, Nvidia, and Intel), but we did see a little wildlife while we were walking.

We had planned to go food shopping next, but we were too hungry to be trusted in a supermarket, so we went to Athena Grill for some tasty Greek food; the deep-fried pita bread was almost worth the trip by itself!

My main computer at home was a 15-inch MacBook Pro from 2010 until last year. Actually, I had two 15-inch MacBook Pros for most of that time – but I replaced them both last year, one with an M1 Mac mini and the other with a 13-inch MacBook Air.

I’m very happy with the Mini, but the Air is a bit underpowered, and the 13-inch screen is small. So I was looking forward to today’s Apple announcements.

As rumored, they came out with a 14-inch and a 16-inch MacBook Pro; the 14-inch is the same size as the Air but has a bigger screen; the 16-inch is the same size as my old 15-inch, but with a bigger screen. And even the base model of either of them is much much faster than this Air.

But I’m not sure the new machines are really what I need. The bigger screens are very attractive – but the new computers are heavier than this one (¾ pound for the 14-inch and nearly 2 pounds for the 16-inch). And, if I’m being honest, I rarely need more computing power than this Air gives me – and if I did, an M1 Air is the same weight as this one and quite a bit less expensive than the new Pros.

I may change my mind when I actually see one of the new machines in person – but so far, my wallet is safe.