What We Can Learn From Kanye West’s MacBook Pro

Kanye West’s return to Twitter continues to be a roller coaster, filled with dizzying highs (a new album! TWO new albums!) and ever-new lows.

Over the weekend, some Kanye fans were disappointed that he tweeted support of conservative pundit Candace Owens, who has been critical of the Black Lives Matter movement. Monday, Kanye tweeted about how much he loves his Tesla, then went on a tweet storm in which he posted many videos of him watching a 21-minute Periscope video of Dilbert creator Scott Adams explaining “how Kanye showed the way to The Golden Age.”

Adams, if you’ll remember, has spent much of the last 18 months exalting President Trump and delving into full far-right conspiracy theory territory. That Kanye is politically all over the place is no real surprise, but his short videos do give us a chance to ENHANCE Kanye’s video and go deep on the enigmatic artist’s tech choices.

The Computer: A 2017 MacBook Pro with Touch Bar. Lots of people don’t like the Touch Bar, or this computer, because its keyboard breaks often.

The Other Tab: Kanye uses Safari, and his other tab is futurist thinker Ray Kurzweil’s TED Talk about “How Technology Will Transform Us.” Kurzweil is best-known for proposing the idea of a technological “singularity” in which artificial intelligence will surpass the intelligence of humans. How long until Kanye goes full transhumanist?

The Webcam: Is covered. Nice opsec, Kanye.

The Emails: Kanye uses Apple’s default mail app, and has 126 unread messages. This is many fewer than I would have guessed!

Photoshop: Is not open, but is installed.

iTunes: Is not open and hasn’t been removed from the dock. There’s no indication that he actually uses it.

The App Store: He needs four updates.

The last App: Has a DS logo. I don’t know what this app is. Do you? Let me know @jason_koebler

Correction: An earlier version of this article said Kanye was using a "gold" MacBook Pro. Apple does not sell a gold MacBook Pro, and so it's either an exclusive Kanye version or the lighting in the video is off, giving a MacBook Pro of another color a goldish hue.