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.

So Richard Branson went to space. Next, Jeff Bezos. And then, what? Is there any scientific purposes in these flights to space? Nope, not directly at least. Is this a publicity stunt? Yes and no. I’m not at ease seeing billionnaires spending their pretty money on something that don’t bring value to a community except for themselve. Oh, they want to start a new commercial flight in space business apparently, for billionaires:

Branson’s flight — which came just nine days before Amazon bilionaire Jeff Bezos is slated to rocket into suborbital space aboard his own company’s spacecraft — is a landmark moment for the commercial space industry. The up-and-coming sector has for years been seeking to make suborbital space tourism (a relatively simple straight-up-and-down flight, as opposed to orbiting the Earth for longer periods) a viable business with the aim of allowing thousands of people to experience the adrenaline rush and sweeping views of our home planet that such flights can offer.

Is there a better way to spend our resources to see the burning planet from space? Gosh.

What if nobody at Google knows exactly what their data hungry engine is all about? I mean, what if nobody has a global picture, so nobody can say “oh my god, it’s terrible, we must stop it!”. This makes me think of the nazis in second world war: very few had a global picture of what was really going on. It was devised this way so it was easier to “manage” and keep the machine humming.

While reading a recent article from Basic Apple Guy about News+, there is this illustration that shows how far Apple News icon has come since its beginnings. I have included the illustration here. It shows how bad design has become in the last five to ten years. That is really depressing to see. As much as things like AR and LiDAR technology help bring real world and virtual world closer together, UI design seems to go the opposite direction. Why is that? When will that trend stop and maybe revert a bit? Why can’t we get visually joyful icons anymore? Is it a matter of design costs being too high?

I always thought that politicians and their aides don’t really have clues about technology in general. If you want to fuck up something in tech, ask the politicians. This is exactly what could happen if these antitrust legislation proposal become laws.

Imagine that: you take out your brand new iPhone out of its box, turn it on only to be welcomed with an empty screen, no builtin apps, just a simple “Hello”. In the name of what: competition. Developers like the one behind Basecamp and HEY would be so happy, because in this hypothetic world they would feel in better position to compete against Apple. What a bunch of retards.

I just wish this type of legislation would be in effect in the US, so that here in Canada, we would continue to get the standard iPhone experience.

I never bought so many applications and utilities or subscribed to so many services since the beginning of the pandemic. For the latter, I had to use Apple’s Number just to keep track of all of them😳🤪. Because I’m working from home since March 2020, my work-related expanses are close to zero. I don’t go buy a coffee or snacks in the middle of the workday as I used to. I don’t buy transportation titles anymore. I no longer commute. Furthermore, I no longer travel. My home office setup upgrade is complete. This mean that I have more to spend on something else. I’m more inclined to buy digital goods. Some are impulse buys. That’s why I invested in many macOS applications and utilities which gave me the idea of writing this article “Tips & Tricks & Utilities for Boosting Your Productivity with Apple’s macOS Big Sur”.

I don’t know if a return to normal will push me to cancel any of my applications or utilities subscriptions. I don’t think so as I think they are needed and useful to my blogger workflow. I return to this commuting world as I’ll keep working from home forever. I’m not alone and this makes me wonder how profound changes caused by this pandemic could be on so many economic levels.