Category: gadgets (Page 1 of 4)

40 years of the Mac

January 22, 2024 /

Macintosh computers and Mac OS turn 40 this year, and the media tributes are starting already. The Upgrade podcast linked here asked a few Mac-media luminaries for their picks in a personal Mac retrospective. I did something like this when Steve Jobs died, but that was more than a decade ago, so I figure I’ll play along with their topics:

First Mac owned: the Mac LC, when I went to college, seduced by the color monitor. In retrospect I should have gone with the Classic. I got an Apple //c in sixth grade, so it was logical and comfortable to move into a Mac.

Favorite/best Mac: without a doubt, the Mac SE/30 that I used in the college newspaper office. Quoting my 2011 blog post: “I had on it Eudora, Microsoft Word 5.1a, and a Klondike solitaire app, and it was just about perfect.” Many machines have done many more impressive things in the decades since, but no other computer I’ve used achieved the purity of purpose and sheer enjoyment of use. The classic iPods reached a similar level of perfection.

It’s a bit unfair and crotchety to miss a 30-year-old computer from when I was on a college campus, so I will note that my PowerBook G3 and M-chip MacBooks have also been delightful devices.

Favorite/best Mac software ever: I began using Eudora way back in 1991, and I’ve been chasing the Eudora email experience ever since it went end of life. Even now I have my Outlook UI on my work computer set up to resemble it. Other software I’ve used and loved: BBEdit, Fetch, Netscape Navigator, Photoshop, Napster, Talking Moose (you scuzzball! IYKYK).

Favorite/best Mac accessory or hardware: eh, I’ve never been a peripherals guy, despite having my share of keyboards and mice and external hard drives. I do enjoy and appreciate a good ergonomic keyboard; Microsoft’s have served me well for years. And I once had a super cool desk that fit a computer tower and all its peripherals in an 18″ square footprint by putting a printer stand 5′ high, above the desktop.

Hall of Shame: worst accessory, Mac, or moment: that Mac LC, because, again quoting past me: “I installed AutoDoubler to find hard drive space and my processor slowed to a crawl.” That was probably as bad as it got. I learned some lessons about compacting hard drive storage that spring. And, sadly, I’ve been short on HD space ever since.

The last phone-sized phone

October 3, 2023 /

My last-out-the-door iPhone 13 mini arrives today.

I’ve been using an iPhone 12 mini since spring 2021. With the exception of battery life it’s been great. For me, the most important thing is that the size is reasonable: I want to be able to hold it in one hand; I want to throw it in my jeans pocket without protrusion. Modern iPhones don’t meet those criteria.

I have been advocating for reasonable phone form factors for quite some time. Back in 2016 I skipped technology upgrade cycles and bought older hardware in order to own a right-sized iPhone SE that fit in my hand.

My hands aren’t getting any larger, but the iPhone is. So I made it a point to buy the 13 mini the day before this year’s September iPhone keynote. I was actually holding out hope that we’d get a surprise small phone and I could cancel the order, but the opposite occurred. Apple discontinued the mini the next morning.

There’s an interesting case study to be made on smartphone usability optimization, and how “I want a big screen” consistently trumps “I want it to fit in one hand.” I’m not alone in my desires, but I’m certainly in a minority segment.

Here’s to hoping my new phone lasts until Apple tries a return to smaller form factors.

My all-time favorite video games

April 18, 2023 /

In chronological order, with honorable mentions for the same platform noted in parentheses.

Combat for Atari 2600 (plus Breakout, football)

Friendlyware for MS-DOS

Pinball Construction Set for Apple ][

Pole Position arcade console (plus Offroad)

Marble Madness arcade console

Bard’s Tale III: The Thief of Fate for Apple ][

SimCity for Apple ][

Nintendo Golf for GameBoy

Klondike Solitaire for Mac OS 7

Triple Yahtzee for Mac OS 7

Risk for Mac OS 7

PGA Golf III for Sega Genesis

Mario Kart 64

Snake for Nokia mobile phones

Mario Kart Wii

Sparkle for iOS

Wii Sports and Wii Sports U (particularly golf and disc golf)

Klondike Solitaire for iOS (Mobilityware version)

Taberinos for Flash

Bounzy! for iOS (plus Holedown, Physics Balls)

Townscaper for iOS

What I find most interesting about this list is how many of these games I still play and can play, even though the top game on this list dates to 1980. The bottom four are all in regular rotation—I play Taberinos in a legacy desktop Flash player—and many of the others I’ve played in the past couple of years, thanks to still-working consoles and MacMAME. Last spring I played Wii Sports disc golf as a nightcap for almost two months straight.

Also, I need some new games.

Drafted 2023/01/02 at 1:08 pm. Published with clarifying edits and epilogue.

iPhone cases and me

April 4, 2023 /

John Gruber posted a nice write-up of iPhone cases (or not) and personal preference. I can tell you mine: case, always, and rarely Apple’s. Everyone is unique, but in the interest of sharing, here’s why I do as I do.

I use a case because I dropped my first-gen iPhone the first weekend I owned it. Just a scuff, but a lesson learned: iPhones are slippery, shaped inorganically, and in cadet-sized hands also dealing with children and pets, they can and do go flying. And, frankly, cases work: in all the years I’ve owned an iPhone, I’ve only broken the glass once—when my phone fell out of a broken case that I was preparing to replace.

I’ve generally bought third-party cases because they’re slimmer than Apple’s. As long as they have a lip around the front edge, to protect the screen, they’ve done me well. There are downsides, though: the fit can be off, and they tend to break down more rapidly. I go through a plastic Case-Mate Barely There every six months or so on my current 12 mini. Meanwhile, the Apple-issued case I have on my 2017 iPhone 7 (which I still use for audio and games) is still hanging in there.

For my new, plus-size work phone, I got Apple’s case, and it’s really nice. I love its tactile qualities. It doesn’t seem much larger than my Case-Mate, either. I may get a second Apple case when I upgrade my mini. (I’m also eyeing some of the makers Gruber links to.) Whatever I buy, though, I’ll have a case on it promptly.

My iPhone SE

May 6, 2016 /

This Sunday I activated my latest iPhone, a space-gray 64GB iPhone SE.

I’ve actually been hanging onto my old phone for an uncommonly long time. It was an iPhone 5, with scratches on the glass and a connector that was losing its ability to connect, making every night’s charging a dicey proposition. But I’d held out for one important, fundamental reason: size.

I’ll admit what Donald Trump won’t—I have fairly small hands. Specifically, I have a wider hand with compact digits, what the golf glove industry calls “cadet” dimensions (which always makes me feel like I’m 14 when I buy a new glove, but oh well).

You can guess what someone with hands like the one on the right might feel about an oversized smartphone. I didn’t even like it when the iPhone graduated to 4″ from 3.5″, because it became somewhat hard for my thumbs to reach the top row of icons. I regularly use my device one-handed, so the iPhone 6 and 6S were not what I wanted.

The SE, on the other, um, hand, is exactly what I wanted. Updated hardware, updated features, and still the compact size that I could palm with ease. The design may not be as slim as the 6, and its longevity makes it feel a little bit dated, but it’s also a near-perfect design execution, and not at all something I mind re-upping.

And, of course, the SE delivers: fast, easy, familiar performance that embodies a good upgrade. The battery life is phenomenal, too—I’m on an every-other-day charge cycle so far, which I haven’t achieved since, I think, my iPhone 3GS. Hanging onto my phone far past the standard replacement cycle makes me appreciate it that much more.

It’s been a great buy for me, and I’m glad Apple saw fit to release it.

I also picked up a Ringke Snug-Fit case for the SE. I need a case—my kids are clumsy, and so am I—but as a pocket-carrying user, I need a slim one. The Ringke is nearly identical to my previous Case-Mate Barely There, but it’s actually a little smaller (albeit lacking the shock absorption that the Case-Mate includes). By making my new phone just a touch thinner, my phone feels that much newer, and for all of $9.99. So make that two happy purchases, not one.

An Apple Watch update

July 21, 2015 /

You haven’t mentioned your Apple Watch much since your tweetstorm on June 1.

Update: I’ve been wearing my stainless steel 42mm Apple Watch for seven weeks now.

Do you like it?

Yes, I do, very much.

How’s the battery life?

Better than my iPhone 5. I have a fairly sane amount of notifications coming into my watch: texts (via iMessage, Facebook and Twitter), calendar alerts, reminders from Due, and not much else. No email, news, stock quotes, or extraneous things that would interfere with my day.

As a result, I rarely use more than 40% of the battery in a day, and I routinely charge the watch every other night, not nightly. I’ve only had one day in this routine where I had to switch to reserve power. Of course, I did have one experience where something drained my mostly-full battery overnight, and I spent most of a work day without a watch, which felt kind of ridiculous. But then, it’s not unlike a quartz watch’s battery dying and your not noticing until after you’ve left the house wearing a watch stuck on 3:19.

What do you use it for?

A whole bunch of stuff, actually. Text messaging has been great, from the one-tap canned replies to the occasional voice recognition reply. I’m getting meeting alerts without having to dig into my watch or look at my laptop, and I enjoy checking (and dismissing) incoming messages by glancing at my wrist. I love how the Due app is set for the Watch; it reminds me of to-do list items daily. It’s just Bluetooth on a minimized screen, but each of these apps has worked beautifully. I’ve asked Siri a bunch of questions, although those are disappointing, because Siri usually prompts me to switch to my iPhone for the answer.

Not actually me. I also make the occasional call on it, which has worked well every single time, whether freeing my hands around the house or allowing me to answer the phone with minimal distraction while driving. The speaker is quiet but serviceable; the microphone has yet to prompt someone to ask me if I’m on my watch and not my phone. The Dick Tracy gimmick has proved to be useful, nerdy and delightful all at once.

And, a bit surprisingly, I’ve embraced the fitness tracking. I get annoyed at myself if I don’t meet my activity goals most days, which is a nice way to keep me on my feet and moving. (I also get annoyed at the stand-up reminders, which I may turn off.)

So you’re happy owning an Apple Watch?

Very much so. I was a bit ambivalent going in, as previously noted in this space; I didn’t quite see the point. Indeed, I got the watch in part to find that out.

What I wound up with is a great little gadget. It’s part fashion piece, part conversation topic, part functional tool, part toy. It has reduced the number of times I grab my phone over the course of a day, which is a victory. Frankly, I get a kick out of it.

So should I get one?

If you think it’ll be fun, then yes, particularly if you’re tired of peering at your iPhone all the time. Do you need one? Not yet, no. It’s not doing anything your phone (and, to be precise, your bluetooth headset and your FitBit) isn’t doing already. But it’s definitely an entertaining, high-quality product, and an amazing piece of human ingenuity.

Day 1 with an Apple Watch

June 4, 2015 /

I’m on Day Four wearing my Apple Watch, and I like it very much. I’m finding it useful, attractive, comfortable, interesting and fun.

Of course, my first day wearing it was something else entirely. And while reviewers intentionally give new products some breathing room, I thought I’d take a stab at quantifying the first impressions of a Watch wearer. This is a product with a learning curve—does it create impediments? Frustrated expectations? Or would it all be part of the fun?

So I live-tweeted my day getting used to the watch (to the chagrin of my friends on Facebook, where my tweets cross-post). I’m a few days removed from the experience, so they are presented below as-is. All in all, it was a very good first day.

A review of the watch-ness of the Apple Watch, by a longtime watch-wearer and Apple product user who got to play with the Watch for 10 minutes at an Apple Store today

April 10, 2015 /

I went to the Apple Store in Soho today mostly to check out the Watch from the perspective of a watch-wearer.

I’ve been buying first-generation Apple products since the 1990s, so buying the Watch is sort of a fait accompli for me. The product is apparently a personal one with a learning curve, so outside of toying with it for a minute, I didn’t try too hard to use it.

But that’s because this is a different kind of purchase—it’s fashion, it’s luxury, it’s apparel and accessories, it’s 30 different default combinations of Watch and Watch Sport sizes, colors and finishes. From that angle, it’s a far more complicated product to order than just picking the amount of memory for your iPhone, and choosing white, black or gold on the back.

Which is why I shouldn’t have been surprised when I was asked to make an appointment to view the Watch with a specialist. The front of the Apple Store now resembles a Tourneau: lots of product quietly tucked away, available for sampling only when handled in a 1:1 customer interaction. There are plenty of watches on display for tinkering with the UI, but to try one on, one gets personal assistance—and security oversight.

It took Apple all of two minutes to get me to a specialist, who had gotten to the store at 4 a.m. and was understandably not in a real salesy mode. She let me play with every style of watch, though, and helpfully showed me how certain physical components worked. My impressions:

For anyone who thinks about fashion, it will be hard to buy the Sport over the Watch. The stainless steel looks, well, like stainless steel, polished to perfection and with the right heft for a watch of importance. The Sport is fine for casual and sport usage; it looks plenty nice on its own. But it’s a matter of context. The Sport won’t look quite right under a suit-sleeve or French cuff. I have long worn a watch for fashion purposes, and I’m going to be hard-pressed not to pay the extra $200 for the stainless.
There’s a substantial difference in the screen real estate, and thus areas for interaction, between the 38mm and 42mm models. As someone whose thumbs often miss the letter targets on the iPhone keyboard, I’m glad I can buy the larger one and have it fit my wrist.
I really love the basic sport band. The material looks and feels terrific. It’s soft and comfortable on the wrist, although clasping it will take some getting used to. I thought it looked nice enough to carry the watch face in style.
The leather bands didn’t do much for me. Mind you, I’m not really a leather-watch-strap guy, historically, so I didn’t expect them to.
The metal bands were really disappointing to me. The Milanese band, which I’ve long admired on Skagens, was thin and narrow, and I could almost see my wrist through the gaps in the mesh. The link bracelet, meanwhile, reminded me more of a $30 Casio than my Breitling, which is not the impression a thousand-dollar watch should give.

This last point is where Apple’s pivot is going to really have to accelerate in the coming year or two. The craftsmanship behind these accessories is obvious. However, it’s a technical attention to detail at work, and not yet an emotional one. I’d love to have a handsome link watch from Apple; perhaps I will wind up with one through a third-party watch band seller. In the process, though, I came away a little disappointed with the fashion side of the Apple Watch.

That said, the product is an exciting one; the screen is gorgeous, the tapping mechanism borders on cute, and the innovations to come in the next couple of years is too great to ignore. Check this space again come summer when I can report on what it’s like to own one.

Update: “Trying on the Apple Watch” mirrors my in-store experience pretty well and captures some of what I tweeted in the moment but missed in my write-up. Apple doesn’t know how to do personal, wearable luxury yet, and it’s going to be a little while before they get the rhythms just right. In the meantime, we’re stuck with non-functional watches and salespeople that lean toward geeky technical expertise rather than the emotional, tangible experience in which a watch purchase traditionally relies.

What the watch industry is missing

September 16, 2014 /

I’ve been following the Watch reaction since its unveiling last week, and I keep coming back to the short-sightedness of the luxury watchmakers’ reaction.

Mostly, the watch industry has been complimentary, in its way, of the Apple Watch. They are right to compartmentalize it as fundamentally different from their products, and to appreciate it on its own level. Sample quote: “I do not believe it poses any threat to haute horology manufactures, I do think the Apple Watch will be a big problem for low-priced quartz watches, and even some entry-level mechanical watches.” (Monday Note has a good roundup.)

But here’s the thing: anyone who buys an Apple Watch is going to stop buying other watches, regardless of price point.

I keep thinking about my own use case. I’ve been a daily watch wearer since elementary school. I wear a watch with a great degree of pride, as the accessory I rely on. My watches are carefully chosen, and whether an inexpensive Swatch, an oversized Nixon or a finely crafted Breitling, they are a fixture in my life.

Of course, I’m also a daily Apple user, and an early adopter of their products. I own the first-generation iPod, the first iPhone, the first iPad. I undoubtedly will buy the Watch, even though I’m not a rabid message-sender, even though I’m not a jogger, even though I’m not yet 100% certain where the new device journey will lead me. It’s a new Apple gadget and it’s a watch—I’m powerless to resist.

And once I have the Watch, I’m going to wear it regularly. I will tinker with it, find its ideal use cases, answer a thousand questions about it, be proud of it as I was my other first-gen Apple products and every one of my watches. As with the iPhone, I expect it to become part of my daily routine.

And once I’m doing that, well, my other watches don’t stand a chance. Because as the Watch assimilates itself to my life’s rhythms (or, perhaps, vice versa), not wearing the Apple Watch will feel like something’s missing. The vibrations and alerts and shortcuts that aren’t offered by my quartz Zodiac will be glaring omissions. Before long, I’ll be strapping on the Watch every day, just as I put my iPhone in my pocket.

If the Watch works for me, my workaday watches will slowly get relegated to my nightstand drawer, and future watch purchases will shift from investing in the next object of beauty and personal expression to saving a few bucks for Watch 2. And Apple will then own a thirty-year habit of mine, just like they came to own my music and phone habits, too.

Frankly, I’m not even sure I’m happy about this. But I’m going for it. I expect millions of folks like me will, too, and when they do, the disruption to the watch industry will not be pretty.

Obsolete vs. useless

January 8, 2014 /

Quartz and Wired is making a big deal today out of a new survey that shows 58% of American households still have a VCR.

“It shows,” writes Christopher Mims*, “that a majority of Americans are holding onto a device designed to play a media format that isn’t even available anymore.”

But there’s a reason for this “lingering on past their expiration date,” as Mims nicely puts it: old VHS tapes.

While millions of Americans have moved on from tape formats, decades of media were created and stored on them before discs, drives and cloud storage appeared. And while it’s easy to replace that videotape of “Dirty Dancing” with Blu-Ray or a stream, doing so with home movies and one-offs taped from live TV is much harder. Many families have paid for a service to migrate their essentials; mine has dubbed its childhood videos from Super-8 to VHS to DVD over the past 15 years. But many others have not. And until they do, they’re not ditching their VCRs.

I still have roughly 800 cassettes in my possession (well, technically, they’re in my parents’ basement, to my mother’s ongoing chagrin, but still), including a number of bootlegs, one-offs, hard-to-find albums, and irreplaceable moments, from a Taj Mahal concert at summer camp in 1989 to my college radio shows. It’d be great to digitize them for posterity. But seeing how hard it is even to move all my CDs to MP3, the digitizing of my tapes won’t come for awhile. And while I wait for myself, I’m glad to have a working cassette deck, still gorgeous in its anachronistic 1988 glory.

So color me unsurprised at the persistence of the VCR. It remains peripherally useful for many, even in the rarest of moments. And so it remains, unbothered in many homes’ wall units, biding its time, and probably blinking ––:–– as usual.

* Of course, Mims is the author behind the recently infamous “2013 was a lost year for tech,” which suggests he’s in the dot-com-needling-provocateur game right now, much like Farhad Manjoo a couple of a years ago.