I’m on my way back home from a weekend in the Niagara Falls region. I put my iPhone 13 Pro to the test. I’m quite happy with my experience. Most of my photos are in ProRAW format. I’m not sure how I’ll process them: with Pixelmator? Lightroom CC? If the latter, the import process is putting me on the break instead of a more integrated experience with Pixelmator.
This podcast episode from MacStories featuring Viticci triggered quite a few reactions. Why? Because of these two sentences in the first moments of the episode talking about the iPad mini:
“You wouldn’t want to read/or watch a review by someone who is not a professional reviewer. It wouldn’t be enjoyable.”
Yep. Viticci said that. In “The value of a non-reviewer’s perspective” from Mere Civilian:
”I agree, a review from a person who does not write for a living may not be enjoyable. However, I strongly disagree with the first sentence. “
What? Really? Then, I read this reaction from Lee Peterson on his blog:
”MacStories posts some great stuff but not everyone wants to read long articles, some like smaller easy to digest articles from independent writers, I like to think I do that here. I get to the point and try to respect my audiences time, does that make my opinion invalid or not enjoyable?”
And here is my response. Viticci comments make him look full of himself. Period. I’m happy for him if he can live from writing reviews. I would rather read review from real end-users because the point is to get comments and observations from real use case scenarios. Sure, I like reviews from Marques Brownlee because he has well-balanced and critical point of views on a lot of stuff. It also touches the subject of what makes someone a blogger or a writer. If you write constantly, then you are a writer. Are you Shakespeare? Probably not. There is a starting point for everyone. Some will fall along the road, others will thrive. I tend to think of reviews by professionnel reviewers as synthetic reviews, where there is a lot of speed and feed talk. At some point, we want to go beyond that and have comments coming from experience. So, sure, I’d like to read comments from pilots about the real usefulness of the iPad mini. They are the one who can make a judgment on the subject.
Last year I wrote “I’m not an audiophile, but here are my thoughts on Apple’s AirPods Max” which is not of “review” but a collection of observations. I concluded with this:
”So, do I like the sound quality of my AirPods Max? Yes. Do they sound better than my Bose QC25? Yes. By a wide margin compared with the price difference with my Bose Q25? No. But, hey, they are wireless, convenient, comfier, have transparency mode, spatial audio and they fit within Apple’s walled garden.”
Is there any value in this? I think so. Should Viticci care? Certainly not. I do have genuine thoughts and opinions, and this is my ultimate right to share them with the world for exactly what they are: thoughts and observations. Nothing more, nothing less.
Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash
John Gruber on Apple’s lack of courage regarding vaccination of their employees:
So where’s Apple on this? Why isn’t Apple requiring proof of vaccination for employees, including for retail employees and customers? Why reserve courageous decisions only for removing headphone jacks?
Boom.
Photo by Marisol Benitez on Unsplash
I was at the office. A normal day. It was a perfect sunny and more than usual mild September day. Blue sky. Then the news struck. At first, I didn’t understand what was actually happening. The internet went slow, to the point of becoming unusable. My colleagues started to leave their desks. We all turned to the TV set in the employees cafeteria. It was such a unique accident, we all thought. Then, the second plane, which marked a turning point in our history of modern barbarism. We are still trying to recover from it. I think of this day so often, each time with deception and bitterness because we didn’t learned the right lessons.
Side note: I find the American society fascinating. They seems to treat those who died on 9-11 differently then those who die each year from guns. The latter are more than three times those who died on 9-11. Each year. The US spent close to 6 000 billions dollars on war since 2001. It didn’t fix anything. How much do they spend on guns to try to fix this problem? Fascinating indeed.
Photo by Magnus Olsson on Unsplash
There is so much to think or write about a simple “Store” tab. Something so “obvious” can lead to weird design decisions, even for Apple. I love this (rare) blog post from Ken Segall.
Sarcasm ON: “I’m feeling inspired by Apple’s new way of thinking. It’s liberating. Who needs “Apple” when you have “Store”? Generic is just so much easier, don’t you think?” - Ken Segall
To be honest, I don’t remember when there was a dedicated Store section on the Apple.com website. Apple brought it back, leaving “Buy” buttons scattered around every single product pages. It is now so much easier to buy something from Apple these days.
Sarcasm OFF
Again, Matt Birchler:
technology and improved general productivity always had the promise of letting us work less, and yet today we work more than ever and have less than before Source: A Four Day Work Week? Yes, Please!
I sure wish we had this four days work week. I cannot see the day it will become reality. The problem in IT where I work, there is a worsening trend of a lack of qualified people for many IT fields. This trend puts pressure on those who are qualified to do more working hours.
Matt Birchler writing about Apple ecosystem stickiness:
“As I buy more and more Apple products, all of those Apple products get better. My iPhone is more valuable because of the HomePod Mini I AirPlay my podcast to while I’m working. My iPad gets more valuable because it has seamless file sync with my Mac. Reminders is better because it works with Siri in a way no other app is allowed. The list goes on. But this is of course also a bit of a trap. I can’t really get an Android phone, even if I think I would enjoy it more than my iPhone, because then my HomePods become worse, my Mac gets worse, my iPad gets worse, and my Apple services get worse. Because each additional Apple product makes all my other Apple products better, likewise removing something from that mix brings down everything else.”
You cannot use an Apple Watch with an Android smartphone. In Apple’s garden, every product has an extension that takes the form of a service or another physical product from Apple. Did we forget that once upon a time we made a switch from platforms like Windows or OS/2? When a new offering is really making a difference, we tend to switch. Back in the days, a Windows PC was an island, leaving it for the Mac meant that you had to re-buy new software, a few accessories. All things equal, the switch wasn’t necessarily funny. Today’s digital world is quite different, for sure, but pose a similar kind of challenge when switching.
Photo by Miguel Tomás on Unsplash
I’ll be getting a old 2013 MacBook Air for one of my son to replace an aging Chromebook that I bought about two years ago. Think about it. This eight years old MacBook Air is faster, much better design, much better screen quality, more memory and will be able to run macOS Big Sur and all other apps like iWorks et al. I find this incredible that we can read and hear people saying Apple gear is expansive and that is under Apple’s obsolescence progamming. I call this bullshit.
We are in the dark age (not dark mode!) of user interface design for sure. We get excited for new animated UI elements (example here), but overall, delight has been lost in translation a long time ago. As Mike Rockwell is a link post say:
“I can’t really identify anything that I’ll be nostalgic for in ten or twenty years.”
I wouldn’t go back to pre-iOS 7 days but there has to be some delightful in-between degree of crafted user interface that had some real joyful elements in them. Apple is not the only one at fault here. It looks like it is a design trend spanning many mediums (print, TV, web, etc.).
Has the industry decided that our devices have reached a level of maturity that warrants making everything minimal, sterile, and utilitarian to help “do work” and “get stuff done”?
Excellent question, Tyler Hall.
The next step for Apple is to design for repairability which goes beyond recycling. AirPods are the worst example of this. When the battery life on these is reached, there is no practical way to replace them without throwing it to the trash and buying a new one. So for me, the right to repair goes way beyond having a choice of where I’m going to take a device for repair. It is about buying a device that was designed for and built to use recycled materials, but also it is about buying a device that can be repaired for basic things like battery replacement.