The Correct Resolution of Paper

I’m not one for New Year’s Resolutions, typically; I prefer CGPGrey’s idea of having themes. However, in 2025, almost as an afterthought, I vowed to go paperless for the year. This was partly spurred by having gotten some Mobiscribe e-ink tablets, one to use at work instead of notepads or composition books and one at home for reading (and a color one because it was a good deal and I was curious about the tech). I was planning on using them for Inktober, but decided against it as getting notes and drawings off of the devices is more than a little tedious for something I’m supposed to do daily 31 times in a row. In the end, with only about a half-dozen Post-It notes at work as the exception, I stuck to the resolution well beyond the 365 days. 

Reflecting on this, I had another thought of something I could do as a resolution for the year 2026. It occurred to me while playing a typing game called Glyphica. In the game, you occupy a central turret and fire at invaders coming at you from all sides. You select your target by typing the word that appears above them. The game is a lot of fun; reminds me of the quality time I spent with Typing of the Dead on Dreamcast, an  edutainment title that doubled my typing speed in the course of a few weeks. Though the games are very different in terms of presentation, the biggest difference is one of quality of life. In the decades between the two titles, we’ve gone from spellcheck being a luxury to the software going the extra step of not only correcting your errors without you asking, but even predicting what it is you’re trying to say in the first place. If I start typing a word like constitution, I only need to get about as far as “const” before the autocomplete shows me the rest of the word, at which point I need only press the tab key to finish what I started and move on to the next word. A hundred keystrokes can drop down to as low as sixty-five in this way. So, what, you may ask, is the problem? 

Between Glphyica and an online typing speed test called Monkeytype, it's occurred to me that I've amassed a sizable number of bad typing habits because autocorrect swoops in and fixes them, sometimes before I even notice. Don’t get me wrong, it’s convenient when it’s not trying to forcefully make me say an incorrect word, but I feel like this is offloading vital aspects of a skill I happen to be very proud of. Between that and autocomplete, the software is doing too much heavy lifting for my liking. 

My worst habit is something I like to call chording. It happens with especially short words such as "the", "to", and... well, "and." The problem is I hit all the keys at once and I end up with "teh", "ot", and "adn." I can't help but wonder if stenographers have this problem outside of the courtroom. Although chording has technically been with me since I first learned to type, autocorrect and autocomplete have made it substantially worse. Rather than typewriter keys jamming or the timing of my keystrokes being measured in imperceptible milliseconds, the software is able to work out that I'm writing "the" and not "teh" as "teh" isn't a word as far as I know, at least not one in English. 

If you've ever seen that brain teaser where the words in a paragraph all have their respective letters out of order (yet it's still readable because your brain unscrambles it from context clues), that's more or less what my typing feels like to me at this point. It's like I know words as clusters of letters rather than sequences of them. My muscle memory has contracted to the point where it's folded in on itself. My speed has been relatively consistent, but my accuracy has taken a massive hit, and that's no good to anybody ecepxt vrey wreid poelpe who lkie tshoe arfoneemtoiend barin tseaers. 

This has led me to the decision to disable autocorrect and autocomplete on my Mac. Spellcheck gets to stay, inadvertent brain teaser construction be damned. A red line appearing under a word I just typed doesn't bother me. That's instant feedback on a mistake I made and it's on me to fix it. It's gently saving me time, not doing the work for me. It's what The Oatmeal would call an administrative task and not a creative one. When I give what I've written a once-over, it's highlighted the areas that need my attention first. It's working ex post facto rather than trying to get ahead of me like far too many "smart features." Those assume what you're going to do next. Sometimes they're right, but other times I want to write construction or constriction or consternation or even constituent rather than constitution. 

As for my iPhone, predictive text (which is essentially autocomplete) remains enabled on my keyboard of choice, Microslop's SwiftKey, the only Microslop product I use willingly and with any consistency. The reason for keeping this feature enabled is simple. It's a small and cramped keyboard and I need all the help I can get. It's like Lewis Carroll's Nyctograph, a specific tool for a specific job. In his case, it was writing in the dark and without getting out of bed. In my case, it's when I need to write something and either can't get to one of my full-sized mechanical keyboards when I want to or, like Mr. Carroll, I can't be bothered to get out of bed or off the couch at the moment. 

The jury had been out on the iPad since it's a notable difference in screen real estate, but I don't always have one of my Bluetooth keyboards along with me and the on-screen keyboard still has all the same problems as the iPhone. 

As for the paper resolution, that has stuck around as far as taking notes at work goes, though Post-It notes will no longer give me pangs of guilt on the rare occasions I have to use them. For everything else, I do want to start doing more traditional art instead of my usual vector works. I'm even going to try using a fountain pen after either losing or breaking the first one I tried. I don't remember which fate befell it, which is why I'm happy to have discovered that disposable fountain pens exist. In fact, some artists recommend them over their more expensive brethren. 

Welcome to 2026, everybody. 

The Great UnGoogling: First Steps

Google pays Apple around 18 Billion every year for their search engine to be the default in the Safari browser. For perspective, that’s roughly NASA’s annual budget. Bear in mind, this isn’t some exclusivity deal. You can change the default search engine in Safari with just a little spelunking into the menu system. Like most things with Apple, the solution is simple, just not obvious.

If you’re on an iPhone:
Go to Settings. 

Scroll down to Apps.
Find Safari.
You’ll see an option for Search Engine.
Tapping on it reveals a list of options with Google at the top.
Take your pick.
You’re all clear, Kid. Now let’s blow this thing and go home.

The desktop environment has fewer steps, but works much the same way; it’s neatly tucked away in settings, far from hidden, but not calling attention to itself. Like I said, simple, not obvious. As for that list of options, it may seem like slim pickings, and it kind of is. Once upon a time, it was kind of the Wild West. There was Yahoo! and Google, of course, but there was also the likes of Excite and Lycos. Those two are still technically around, but they’re very much shadows of their former selves and not selectable on Safari’s shortlist. In fact, the only search engine I know of that came on the scene with a lot of hype and died almost as quickly was Cuil (pronounced “cool”), lasting only from 2008 to 2010. As to how we came to have one big slice with many rail-thin slices that would blow away in a gentle breeze if you tried to serve them on a plate, that’s a discussion people have earned degrees investigating. So, let’s just call it (Un)Natural Selection Meets The Law of Averages and carry on.

Touching back on those thin slices, they all stand a very good chance of becoming bigger pieces of the pie with the recent backlash Google has gotten for failing to uphold their founding mantra of “don’t be evil”. There’s been too many issues to cover in great detail here, from exploiting behavioral economics to legal troubles to policy changes contrary to earlier promises. Speaking only for myself, I’ve been making moves since the start of the year to slowly but surely de-Google my life, a kind of unintentional New Year’s Resolution. I don’t plan on quitting Google entirely, mostly because of my blog here as well as my YouTube channel, Gmail, and maybe Google Drive (which I'm considering moving to an external drive). My first real step in this direction was eliminating instances wherein I use my Google account to log in to a service. That took a very long time, but was ultimately painless and now I log in to those services through other means.

My next step was choosing a new default search engine, which brings us to that list of options. Yahoo! was an outright no from me. I closed my email account there some time ago and the only real attachment I have to them is Flickr, which I almost never use, at best serving as a plan B if I decide to give up on Instagram. Bing is okay; it’s by Microsoft, a company I have very mixed feelings about, but overall it’s a perfectly competent search engine. I don’t know a lot about Ecosia, except that it’s some kind of nonprofit that plants trees. I simply don’t see a gimmick like that being sustainable, which makes me sad as it’s a very noble cause.

In the end, I chose DuckDuckGo, and I’ve been using it for a few weeks now. It is partly built on Bing and primarily emphasizes privacy. What this means is that when you search something, DuckDuckGo doesn’t keep track of where you’ve been and what you’ve searched for, and does not use this data to target ads to you or otherwise tailor your search results to consider your browsing habits. I’ve never used Google without logging in to my Google account, so I don’t know what the search experience is like for everyone else. The consensus of late is that the search results feel fundamentally broken as they push AI features that are hit or miss at best as well as giving special favor to companies that buy advertising space on the platform rather than emphasizing relevance. Few things in this world irk me more than someone saying, “Just Google it!” as it exposes their ignorance to just how Google works. Put simply, my search results are not going to look like yours because of our different browsing habits. Google tracks what you look for and tries to find results that fit, often creating a kind of echo chamber.

One of the criticisms of DuckDuckGo and to a similar extent Bing is that the search results aren’t as “good” as Google. What is meant by this is that the results are less tailored and require a little more heavy lifting on your part. This isn’t the best example, but you’ll get the idea: when I put “flip a coin” into Google, it loads an applet that flips a virtual coin. When I put “flip a coin” into DuckDuckGo, I don’t get an applet. Instead, I get a list of websites that offer random number generators with coin-flipping options, along with articles detailing the history of the coin flip as well as the mathematical probabilities of using different currencies in the flipping. In other words, it’s not flipping the coin for me, it’s directing me to where I can get help with flipping a coin as I don’t have one on me and need to decide where I’m going to go for lunch. DuckDuckGo isn’t trying to be the answer. It knows it’s a directory. Google is trying to be the answer, at least for simple things like flipping coins or telling me the current temperature in Madagascar or the results of an election. At least, they started with simple things. Now, they’re trying to get AI to deliver more concise answers to more complex questions. I once asked Google which finger types the 6 on a keyboard. The first result was an AI summary that insisted it was the ring finger on the right hand. Needless to say, this is very wrong*. I tried again with different wording, thinking maybe I confused it. The result was the same. Sometime later, when I asked the same question, it did away with the AI summary and gave me a list of websites about learning to type.

To be fair, DuckDuckGo does have some AI features and will occasionally feature a summary at the top, but this is actually a pretty rare occurrence, even when I ask a direct question rather than inputting a string of keywords. Sometimes, the AI summary will only show a blank bar with an option for me to generate the summary. Other times, it’s placed far down the list, sometime after the 5th or 6th result. The point is that DuckDuckGo isn’t trying to force it on me, and I appreciate that. It’s still interested in the technology and wants it to be better, but it knows to make it more or less “opt-in” compared to Google. 

DuckDuckGo also offers itself as a full-fledged web browser. I have it on my phone, but I don't really use it for anything. It doesn't even have a Reader View like Safari, so it's not very practical right now and I don't expect new features to roll out any time soon. It's a small company with few employees that operates under a very utilitarian and minimalist philosophy. Much as I think a Reader View would be a given for a utilitarian and minimalist philosophy, I can still respect their barebones approach to what the browser offers. They also offer this subscription service that includes a VPN, identity theft protection, and a personal data removal service**. It’s about 100 a year, and while I don’t have any real need at the moment for what’s on offer, I am considering it as a way to support the cause. I like what DuckDuckGo is doing and I hope they become a substantially bigger slice of the pie. 

I’ll have further entries on my UnGoogling progress, but I wanted to start it off light and simple, something that most people can do without having to make any serious commitments or disrupt any routines.

* On reflection, I think the problem was that Google was assuming I wanted to use the number pad to the right of the keyboard rather than the number row along the top. After all, if you rest your right hand on the number pad, your middle finger falls on the five, putting the 6 right under your ring finger.

** Basically, they put in requests to data brokers to remove your personal information from their records, kind of like a digital "do not call list". I'd previously tried a service called Incogni to see if it would cut down on the damned robocalls. The results have been mixed, but given the majority of these robocalls are from scam artists, I don't expect them to play nice and uphold their part of the Geneva Convention. Needless to say, if I ever find any of these scum piles in the wild or locate their call centers, I will not abide by the Convention, either. 

Amp Up Your Dental Game

I got a new toothbrush, and I really like it, but it has a design choice I feel very conflicted about. It’s rechargeable, which is a step up from my previous one that used a AAA battery (though you easily got more than 6 months of life out of it), but it charges through USB. Not only that, they didn’t bother including a wall adapter.

Here’s what you need to understand about USB: the only consistent standard across all USB ports is that they deliver 5 volts of power. If you know anything about electricity, you know that’s only a third of the equation. Amperage is another third and arguably the most important. You’ll see it on your wall adapters, in that really small print that’s only one shade lighter or darker than the rest of the housing. How they list it may be a little hard to decipher, but you’ll generally see something along the lines of “5V/1.0A.”

Before we move on to explain amperage, let me give you a more real world scenario involving batteries. You’ve probably only had to replace the batteries in your TV remote every few years, and chances are you’re using something like Rayovac, a brand that’s not exactly known for high use applications compared to the Coke and Pepsi of the battery world, Energizer and Duracell. If you’re old enough to remember portable CD players, you know those things went through AA batteries before the end of the week. Obviously, a portable CD player is a very different device than a TV remote, which is practically an overengineered flashlight. It’s not constantly running while you’re watching TV. Both devices can run on a pair of AA batteries, but the CD player uses more amps than the remote.

Needless to say, an electric toothbrush is not a portable CD player. It’s not power hungry, hence a AAA battery lasting several months in my old toothbrush. Even the rechargeable cell in the new one isn’t exactly a hog. In the case of rechargeables, amperage is an indicator of how quickly something can be charged. You might be thinking, “What’s the big deal? It charges faster, so get a wall adapter with a higher amperage.” However, as an old fable once told us, slow and steady wins the race. The race, in this case, is the overall life and longevity of the battery. Without getting into the chemistry of Lithium-Ion celled batteries like those in your smartphone, the first 80% or so of your battery being charged seems to happen pretty fast, even with a fairly slow charger like one rated to 1A. That last 20% though is often going to be a bit slow by comparison and that’s also when you’re probably going to notice your phone getting a little hot. When you pour water out into an empty glass, you slow down and ease off the pour as you get near the top of the glass in order to avoid spilling. That’s more or less what’s happening in that battery when it’s charging.

Now, here’s the problem, the faster you charge your battery, the more strain you put on the whole system because you’re more likely to “spill”. For a time, I was using a wireless charging pad for my iPhone 12 mini. Wireless charging pads, in my view and with the benefit of hindsight, are terrible devices that nobody should ever use ever and you’re an awful person for insisting otherwise. It takes a lot of energy to transmit the electricity wirelessly than through a simple cable, and a lot of that energy is wasted in the process. Despite this inefficiency, this particular wireless charging pad was charging my phone really quickly. Between this and an issue with an app running in the background when it wasn’t supposed to, my battery’s health began declining and my phone wasn’t lasting through the day. It would literally drain in about 4-5 hours of moderate use. Even setting it down on a table overnight would leave it dead by morning. I hadn’t had the phone for very long, so upgrading through my cell carrier was out of the question. I was outside my warranty window as well, so I couldn’t rely on that. I had to pay out of pocket and take my phone to an Apple Store (because mailing it in would have taken weeks) to have the battery replaced. Really, taking it there was the bigger hassle than the 40 dollar cost for the procedure. Since then, the battery health is declining again from routine use, and all despite charging it the old fashioned way with a 5V/1A charger, the little white cube that came with one of my older iPhones. Apple doesn’t make this little cube anymore, and now all of their chargers list the wattage, leaving you to figure out the amperage. To be fair, newer iPhones have more sophisticated charging circuitry in them and can handle faster charging operations if one so desires.

Put simply, if you’re the sort of power user who upgrades their phones every 18 months or whatever your carrier offers, the life and longevity of your battery probably isn’t going to crop up until you’re in the market for a new one anyway. So, for these people, faster charging methods may be more practical. If, however, you’re a moderate user and/or the kind who likes to hold onto their phones until the duct tape holding the glass back together rots away, the two most important numbers you need to know are 5 and 1, which are voltage and amperage, respectively.

So, back to my toothbrush*. It’s using the slowest charger I have, which is going to be fine for it. As for my iPhone 12 mini, I’m just going to start charging it by plugging it into my Mac.

*I should mention in the interest of full disclosure that this toothbrush utilizes wireless charging. That is to say, wireless charging isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but coupling it with fast charging is an utter waste of energy on a phone or comparable device. It’s certainly a waste on an electric toothbrush, hence going the slow and steady route.

Keeping Watch in the Walled Garden

Full disclosure: I'm writing this on a Mac mini while my iPhone 12 mini charges and before I do a little drawing on my iPad Pro later. 

Officially, I identify as platform agnostic. I don't care what operating system I have to use; I will make it work. I grew up on classic MacOS, I switched over to Windows XP shortly after college, I was a Linux user for a while, and my phone choices have been equally all over the map. I'm far from an early adopter, but you name it, I've probably tried it. Ever heard of Maemo? Symbian? 

For my money, Apple makes exactly two good products, the Mac mini and the iPad Pro. I often joke to people, "I don't have an iPhone. I have an iPad... Oh, by the way, did you know Apple makes a camera? It takes calls too for some reason." Also in the interest of full disclosure, I have a smartwatch from Fossil that works well enough with my iPhone. I have no desire to buy an Apple Watch. For perspective, my favorite feature about my Fossil is that it doesn't have a screen. It's got a plain, ordinary watch face (which I think is called a complication if you're in the know) and the hands occasionally move to different positions based on what notifications I've set it to. In recent months, however, this has stopped working. It's a little irritating, but I don't miss it. It certainly doesn't make me want to buy an Apple Watch. Those could well be famous last words, but on the whole, the only Watch feature that had my attention was using it as a painter's palette for Procreate, and I don't even think that feature is supported anymore. As for my Fossil, I've actually stopped wearing it altogether. I simply don't need a watch that much, and its use as a pedometer and sleep tracker are simply no longer part of my daily habit. 

As of this writing, the Department of Justice has taken Apple to court over its monopolistic practices, particularly in the smartphone market. Among its talking points was the fact the Apple Watch currently only works with iPhones. Android users are simply out of luck and have to settle for a Garmin, a Fossil, a Fitbit.... 

I'm not saying the DOJ doesn't have some kind of a case against Apple. What I am saying is that their angle of attack speaks more to their lack of knowledge not only of the technology, but of the market itself. This isn't like 20 years ago when Microsoft was under the microscope for their own monopolistic practices, but this is far from apples to apples (no pun intended). That's why I brought up all the other smartwatch brands, smartwatch brands that work with both Apple and Android devices. Moreover, I'm a little confused by this talking point. The DOJ is saying Apple has too much of the smartwatch marketshare with their watch which is exclusive to Apple products. So, what happens if they add Android support? Wouldn't that give them a bigger piece of the pie they allegedly already have too much of? Won't that just land them back in court for the exact same offense but now with slightly different wording? Wouldn't that make any ruling on the matter tantamount to self-incrimination? 

Personally, I don't know anyone who wants an Apple Watch so badly they're willing to give up their Android phone to get one. That's simply not the market we live in. Once upon a time, I worked for a cell carrier that did not earn the iPhone's exclusivity contract with AT&T. Needless to say, this led to a deluge of calls about when the iPhone was coming to our neck of the woods and what hoops would have to be jumped through to make it happen. A workaround did emerge at one point. The iPhone's exclusivity was limited to the United States, so it was possible to use the phone on our network... in Germany. That means you'd have to import a German iPhone, and use a German SIM card, which meant all of your calls would be international ones. Would you believe someone I spoke with still wanted one after all that was explained to them, that it would literally cost them more to use the phone in a month than to buy the thing outright because all of their calls would be for a German number on a North American network? I have no idea if this person went through with their plan, though I like to think he got as far as putting in a bid on an eBay listing before losing it and taking it as a sign to simply wait for the iPhone to be available on other networks. He didn't have to wait long and, frankly, those early iterations of the iPhone are among the many reasons I'm not an early adopter. My first iPhone was a 5c, which was only supposed to be a temporary device while my Sony Xperia phone was getting its battery replaced. None of my iPhones have been the newest model. 

There was likely a certain time in my life when I suffered from the dreaded Fear of Missing Out, but I was a kid, and like all kids, I grew up. So, when I see people lining up to buy a phone or a game console on launch day, I don't envy them. In fact, I only sort of feel bad for them. Do you know who was the first person in North America to own a Nintendo 64? Neither do I. I don't think anyone knows. Even with social media, I don't think we could ever know for certain the name and face of the first person to own a Playstation 5. I'm sure it was a big deal to them, whoever they are, but let's not pretend that this FOMO business is anything to give in to or follow like a cartoon character floating toward a pie cooling on a windowsill. 

I think the DOJ is misunderstanding FOMO, treating it like some perfectly rational mindset in a consumer-driven economy regulated (loosely) by a democratic republic. Someone really wanting an Apple Watch does not make the niche Apple has carved out for itself a monopoly, even if that niche is worth several billion dollars. 

"What do you mean this person has to get a new phone for their watch to work!? This is an injustice!" 

Seriously, where is this attitude when it comes to big Pharma or the oil companies? 

That'$ only a $lightly rhetorical que$tion. 

My point is that the monopoly Apple has allegedly made for itself is nothing like the one that Microsoft got called out on 20-some years ago or the one AT&T was broken up over however long before that. I can't run MacOS on a Microsoft Surface tablet. I can't play Nintendo Switch games on my iPhone. I can't use a BMW part in my Honda. The list goes on. If Apple wants to paint themselves into a corner by playing their cards close to the chest, let them and most importantly let the market decide whether that's playing fair in the game of capitalism. 

A Prime Example

In the interest of full disclosure, I am an Amazon slave. I've been a Prime Member for years, I have several Alexa smart speakers, I use Subscribe & Save, I use Kindle and Audible, and I even watch Prime Video (mostly for the Grand Tour or anything the old Top Gear crew is attached to). I know the company is evil, they treat their workers (especially their drivers) like garbage, their returns are a joke, and Jeff Bezos is dumping tons of methane into the atmosphere with his phallus rockets, to say nothing of that stupid yacht he tried to have a bridge disassembled over. 

Yet... I'm still paying. I can only offer so much in my defense. There's still plenty of small and local businesses I support, and there's certain items that I simply will not buy from Amazon if I can avoid it. If I can get it straight from the manufacturer, I'll go that route (especially if they let me check out with PayPal because that's just as convenient as Amazon). To me, Amazon offers a way to eliminate tedium. I don't have to haul bags of cat food, kitty litter, and sparkling water around in a cart, into my car, out of my car, and into my house. Now, all but that last step has been eliminated. It's one less thing I have to deal with. It's cruise control, not fully autonomous driving, if you follow. The point is if it all went away tomorrow, I'd be only a little bit bummed... for about five minutes, and then I'd move on to something else. 

Is it really an addiction if you're in control of it? 

Anyway, there's still the dilemma of supporting a terrible company, but the awful truth to that matter is that voting with your wallet is kind of a hollow promise. After all, there's no "vote against" just voting for something, and not voting at all. Moreover, if you know anything about how the company is structured, their main money maker is not their retail branch. It's all their web hosting. That's where this gets really scary. I heard once that all of Netflix's servers are owned by Amazon. That may seem like a massive conflict of interest, but it's actually good business. There's a similar sort of relationship between Apple and Samsung. Yes, they're rivals in the smartphone space, but if you were to open up your iPhone, you'd find Samsung's name on more than a few components. In fact, the iPhone camera is actually a Sony component. I find that funny because the camera on my old Xperia phone wasn't all that great, but the little iPhone 5c I got to replace it took damn fine pictures right out of the box. 

I decided to write this entry after receiving an email from Amazon that some of you may have read yourselves or at least heard about on social media. Ads are coming to Prime Video. Although they insist there will be overall fewer ads than television, it's more than a little disheartening that this is what they resorted to in terms of expanding their market share in the streaming space. 

Rather than create a new, lower-priced, ad-supported tier and bring in new customers, they'd rather punish loyal customers who have been paying for Prime for years (seriously, whatever happened to grandfathering?). Instead, they now offer an ad-free version of Prime for an additional fee. Obviously, this is about Amazon making more money. They chose this strategy because simply raising the rates would have deterred many from renewing, so they decide to raise the proverbial temperature of the pot of water instead of dunking us in straight away. As I said, I think they could have done more to draw in new customers than try to tiptoe around existing ones. 

As for what I'm going to do about it... very little. Ironically, most of what I've been watching on Prime Video of late has been through their subsidiary FreeVee, which is ad-supported anyway. There's also that practice of advertising their other shows before the ones I'm already watching. It's frustrating that this is happening, but I'm more mad at myself for not being more bothered. I feel like I should be cancelling my Prime membership as a statement, but I know it's not going to change anything and despite what I said about what I'd do if this all went away, I don't want to be the one to pull the plug. Given the scale, it would be cutting off my nose to spite my face. Then again, we're also living in a time when a comedy about Wile E. Coyote suing Acme was brought back from a fate worse than death for media. 

Maybe we're reaching a point where it's more than just the bottom line that a business can pay attention to. Yes, Coyote Vs. Acme got a big boost from a number of meetings being canceled, as well as the potential threat of Capitol Hill getting involved (one congressman compared the move to committing arson and insurance fraud), but it's still notable how much of a public outcry got heard. Hell, remember when the first Sonic the Hedgehog movie got delayed because of backlash against the early trailer? No calls for boycotts there, just plain, "Dear God, what is that thing!?" from a few thousand voices on Twitter. Yes, there was still a bottom line ultimately being threatened, but we didn't have to wait until opening weekend for the change to occur. 

(Un)Lucky Number 7

 I woke up this morning to find my iPhone 7 had not actually charged in the night like it was supposed to. Thinking the cable and become dislodged from the outlet, I checked both ends and found everything was where it should be. Upon unplugging the lightning connector from my phone and plugging it back in, I got greeted with the dreaded "accessory may not be supported" message, that lightning bolt icon flashing over the battery ever so fleetingly. Restarting the phone did nothing for it. I thought maybe I'd tripped over the cable at some point in the night and finally caused some internal fault in its braided beauty. That didn't seem to be the problem, however as I plugged in my iPad and didn't even get the "not charging" message I used to get when I plugged it into anything less than 2 amps. To further add to the confusion, I took the iPhone into my office where my iPad's charger is and plugged it in. Charged like it should. 

Here's the results of my ensuing mix-and-match experiment. There's probably a better way to organize these data, but I can't think of one right now, especially since there turned out to be a time factor involved (that is, what would once work suddenly wouldn't). 

Not noted here is the turnover. One of my favorite features about the lightning connector is being reversible. However, when I plugged Cable 1 into the iPhone charger, it first showed as working with the iPad. Then, I turned it around and that got me the "not supported" message. Turning it back around to the "working" side now suddenly didn't work at all, "not supported" message and all. So, I guess it's just an intermittent cable that finally bit it. 

For further background, both Cable 1 and Cable 2 are third party. Cable 2 is a shorter cable that was provided by my cell carrier. Cable 1 came in a 3-pack from Amazon. Both are also braided, which isn't always a mark of higher quality, but certainly helps on the durability front, which often leads to cables failing. 

Hold Your Tongue While Saying Apple (an apology)

I haven’t owned an Apple-based desktop since at least 2005 when I abandoned the Bondi Blue iMac my parents bought in 1999 and went with me to college, shifting gears to a Compaq Presario as it was all I could afford. I knew of OSX and was thoroughly impressed by it, using it on occasion for some classes, but I felt that Windows XP had offered me the best of both worlds, a wider library of software (Windows) coupled with a streamlined and no-nonsense user interface (OSX). This was my standard for a few years until for reasons I don’t quite recall the full details of, I wanted to give Linux a try, namely Linux Mint. While impractical in practice and certainly a bad decision in the moment, the passage of time has healed those wounds and left me overall appreciative of the experience, scars and all. 

I briefly returned to Windows XP with a Toshiba laptop which got a fair bit of use out of before handing it off to a friend no stranger to computer troubles as a backup device. I didn’t miss it as Sony’s Xperia Z Ultra found its way into my heart as my daily driver. Its large, high resolution screen made for a thoroughly satisfying drawing experience, migrating me fully from traditional to digital art far more effectively than many previous gateways I gave a fair shot in the past. My favorite drawing app was Zenbrush, and when its major upgrade was going to become an iPad exclusive, I knew I was going to have to go back to Apple. While my impressions of the early iPads was far from positive, I’m happy to say I was proven wrong on most counts as it became a choice tool among a number of digital artists for its convenience and relatively affordable price point. As such, I’ve been drawing on iPads (a mini and a Pro) for some 4-5 years and I have practically no desire to draw on anything else. 

For the most part, this has worked out beautifully. Then, I tried my hand at vector artwork, and as I learned from Ash Vickers of Megacynics fame, vector art is done with a mouse. I also started doing more CAD and 3D work as part of my job and it began to creep over into my non-work workflow. This is another art form that benefits from a mouse rather than a stylus and touch gestures, though some prefer it to the bar of soap. 

A few of my art friends were in love with all things Microsoft Surface and I nearly joined in, seeing it as once again the best of both worlds, a touch screen drawing interface (iPad) with a full desktop environment to run a host of apps (Microsoft). In the end, I decided that it was the latter half of that equation I needed most of all, and therefore finally settled on a new Mac Mini. I’d wanted one for years and now presented itself as the best time to invest. 

It arrived within the week and within an hour, I was regretting my purchase, to the point of attempting to get a return going. Unfortunately, B&H’s normally very generous return policy stops at computers, which they only seem to sell through grit teeth and clenched fists given their primary business is photography, with all these “digital” stuff par for the course in keeping up with the almighty Amazon. The source of my frustration was with the performance of the two applications I’d intended to use most, Sketchup and Inkscape. The performance of Sketchup (particularly Sketchup Viewer) wasn’t that big of a deal as the CAD program proper worked just fine and as well as my desktop at work (which has largely similar specifications to my Mac Mini). It was still perfectly usable, simply not ideal. As for Inkscape, I was dumbfounded at how poorly it ran for such a lightweight drawing program. Whatever shape I wanted to draw was so far behind where my cursor was I could count a full Mississippi, and for something that’s not running “by wire” so to speak in a browser, that’s simply unacceptable. I was furious. I refused to believe this was as good as the machine worked given what I’d seen others use them for, including editing 4K video in Final Cut Pro. 

But that’s the rub. Final Cut Pro is made in-house by Apple. It’s developed from the ground up to work on their machines and their machines alone. For as demanding as it is in terms of hardware, it’s equally optimized to make the most of it. Inkscape is multi-platform and open source, giving its users the resources necessary to compile their own version for their particular favorite flavor of Linux. The team behind it is essentially working on the program out of the goodness of their hearts (and maybe to stick it to Adobe’s domination of the market with their Illustrator package). The point is just because a program is a lightweight in the system requirements market doesn’t mean it’s suited to the platform it’s ported to. I’d made an Instagram post showing Inkscape in relative inaction and intended to put this all in a blog entry to serve as an open letter to Apple in hopes they could give me some advice or offer some options to make the most out of my mistake. I slept on it and tried the next day to see if Inkscape was an inkling of what was in store for trying other apps. While I had no plans to use it, I downloaded Autodesk Sketchbook and performed the same basic test I did with Inkscape. 

The results were astonishing. 

Needless to say, I felt very silly. I had completely dismissed a perfectly capable of machine as near-useless on the power of testing two apps, one of which was simply not coded well in the first place. At the same time, I’m obviously relieved this computer is going to work out, albeit with a few different software options to make up for Inkscape running like molasses having an existential crisis in winter. Still, there was all the work I’d put into my write-up up until this point. I didn’t want that to simply end up in a bin, especially since most of what I had to say about the overall user experience is still valid. I definitely feel that OSX has fallen behind the times and is a branch of the Apple tree the kitchen of Cook would just as soon see wither away as their phone and tablet sales have been far more lucrative to them. For my money, there’s still plenty of gas in the tank until we swap out the old fossil fuel system for something more solar in nature. If you ask most Apple users their favorite part about being part of the full Jobs, Wozniak, Ive, & Cook experience is the ecosystem, the synergy shared across the range of devices. Microsoft tried to have this with their own mobile phone system before letting that dream fly out the window, and Google has made a good effort of it between their Chromebooks, Pixels, and dealings with Samsung’s Galaxy lineup. While I don’t think Apple’s approach to all-inclusivity is a paragon of perfection, it’s still leagues above its kin. The Surface line is catching up with their upcoming offers of a dual-screen phone, but I’m happy in camp Cook for the time being. 

Until then, maybe there’s an off-chance someone at Apple can look upon this long-winded journal of a former Mac user who came back to the fold having only spent serious quality time with OS 9 some 15 years ago. It’s not a typical blog entry, but a dedicated page that can only be accessed with the following link. 

Here it is, in all its mostly finished glory.

Make of its meanderings what you may. 

iSE What You Did There

My first iPhone was an iPhone 5C. I had to send in my Xperia Z Ultra to get fixed, and this was likely going to take a few weeks, so I needed a backup. For as few calls as I get and for as many things as I could have done on my tablet, I knew the moment I physically couldn't get to my phone for any length of time is likely to have become the peak of my popularity. 

I could probably spend a week telling you why I never bothered with iPhones up until this point, suffice to say it's mostly circumstances. I went with the 5C as it was the inexpensive one, and I found it interesting that Apple had designed it that way, with slightly cheaper materials than its 5 and 5S siblings. I have to say my first impression was not positive, and not simply from going to a 4-inch screen from a 6+-inch "phablet" but from a fairly versatile and accommodating operating system like Android to something that frankly felt like a toy. I warmed up to it well enough, and the camera was certainly an improvement over the Xperia's, which always felt a little off. Pictures simply never looked as good as they could have, no matter how much I tweaked the settings. Maybe I just wasn't as adept at photography as years of 35mm had led me to believe. Maybe Sony was trying to upsell me on their add-on camera accessory (which I nearly sprang for). Maybe it was simply out of date compared to the 5C. 
In any case, I switched back to the Xperia upon its return but kept the 5C as a camera. A few months later, I was going on a trip and didn't want to pack two different chargers (the other being my iPad), so I swapped SIM cards and never looked back. The Ultra was certainly worth it up until its internal battery finally bit it and Sony stopped supporting it; the larger screen made it a good gateway drug into digital art, but when Zenbrush's next iteration was going iPad exclusive, I decided to see what all the fuss was about. Anyway, the 5C served me well until I was eligible for an upgrade, and that was when Apple delivered what is easily to date my favorite iPhone, the SE. 
The SE was marketed almost as a kind of apology from Apple for the 6 and upcoming 7, as if to say, "Yeah, these are kinda chintzy and gimmicky, here's a not-Jitterbug model. KTHXBYE!" It reminded me of when I was a Linux user. Mint would release a new OS every year, with support typically overlapping by a few months or sometimes up to another year. If it seems laborious to reinstall an operating system on your PC every year, it is. You have to bear in mind Linux is generally targeted at people who probably spend more time with the access panels OFF their computers than ON. That said, there were plenty of more casual users who just wanted an OS that wasn't Windows or Mac. For these types, they offered "LTS" or long-term support versions of the OS. These were typically a previous year's version, usually one that was well-received, that offered support for 5 years instead of the typical 1-2ish.  
This was more or less Apple's promise with the SE, that it was outside of the typical naming/numbering convention of the iPhones and therefore was meant to have a longer "shelf life" than the other models. It's easy to forget that Apple is rather supportive of their older hardware, to the point that properly "retiring" a device is practically headline material. As for what was being supported, the nuts and bolts of the SE were the guts (processor, memory, etc.) of a 6S in the shell of a 5S. For my money, this was genius. As I said, I loved the 5C. I still think the 5's were the best iPhones ever got. Now, those wanting to upgrade could get a little better performance while keeping all those accessories they'd built up over the years. Also, manufacturers of those accessories weren't going to have to liquidate their stuff. You had a legitimately stable platform. Granted, said platform only ended up lasting about 2 years, but September 2018 was only when it was discontinued. Support carried on for some time later, and as I said, you had a backlog of accessories and add-ons that would still work for it. 

Rumors of an "SE2" abounded for years. Most of them were wishlists, along with some very detailed renders, but nearly all of them worked under the premise that Apple would start from scratch, designing from the ground up. It made sense, building on what already worked while fine-tuning certain shortcomings. It seemed as though people were missing the point of the SE, that it's not for following trends, that those hot, must-have gimmi--er, features are not for everyone. When it came time for Apple to unveil their next big lineup of flagship phones, the XR seemed to quash the majority of SE2 rumors. The XR seemed to fit the bill. It had the FaceID in lieu of a home button. It lacked the edge-to-edge display due to having a different type display than the others, but still made good use of the real estate. The camera was good, but kept the features list short enough to appease most casual photographers. Above all, it looked, for lack of a better term, like a toy. It looked, to the XS/Pro/Max, precisely what the 5C looked like to the 5 and 5S. 

Fast-forward to 15 April 2020:


Before getting a better look at it, my first thought was that this new, proper SE would be a rebadge of an original X, maybe with a few hardware tweaks to bring the phone up to speed with something like the XR. What we got instead was an iPhone 8 with the internals of an 11. I wasn't too far off; the original 8 had the same internals as the X.The 8 also shares a similar form factor to the 7, with many accessories being cross-compatible. So, there you have it; we've hit all the hallmarks of the original SE. 

• Not everyone likes "edge-to-edge" displays. 
• Some people like the home button. 
• FaceID isn't exactly reliable. 
• Not everyone needs a bigger screen. 
• Some people simply want a phone. 

Sadly, there's no rose gold option, but there's a Product (red) edition, and that suits me just fine. My Mophie battery case is certainly going to be a happy camper. 

Batting for Apples

I have a Playstation Vita and I swear that after one particular upgrade to its firmware, my battery life got cut in half. I thought it was just my imagination or finally taking notice of how long I'd had the thing. However, I found a few other users on forums reporting the same issue, with one offering the possibility that the firmware has a new protocol for the Wi-Fi antenna. I don't have the exact post, but it was something about refreshing more often or using more power. If this sounds familiar, you've likely been following the news of Apple slowing down performance of older phones for the sake of preserving battery life (or not, depending on how you read the nuance of various conflicting statements). 

So, as an iPad user who uses an iPhone as a backup for my Android daily driver, here are my thoughts on Apple's whole battery "fiasco".

I don't care. 

I'm not going to go so far as to say #appledidnothingwrong because that's fueling a fire that nobody asked to have started. As far as big corporate deceptions go, this is small potatoes. When I was at T-Mobile, HTC had this "hybrid" style of smartphone (bit of a last hurrah before Android) with battery life so atrociously below specifications that they offered trade-ins for bigger battery packs. 

From my perspective, as someone who got to see the Google G1 phone in person months before any consumers got their hands on it, Apple's exclusivity deal with AT&T was a massive blunder on their part, but also the very definition of serendipity. I have no doubt we'd have gotten Android phones anyway, but that "power vacuum" created by Big Mama Bell had an undeniably immeasurable impact on the smartphone landscape. Smartphones were now for everyone, and everyone deserves as many options as possible for the consumer-based economy to work best. Some people like to tinker with what they buy, while others just want the damn thing to work as advertised. 

My point is, if you're just joining us, welcome to the wonderful world of how upgrades work for Apple fans. You trade customization for stability, and that stability means every few years you get a whole new machine. That sounds cynical, and even condescending, but it's really what Apple users have expected, asked for, and gotten in spades since the beginning. They want their creative productivity machines to be super easy to use and ready to roll right out of the box. In short, Best Buy's Geek Squad is an aftermarket version of Apple's entire business model. If you own a Mac, chances are the most work "under the hood/bonnet" work you've ever had to do with it is upgrade your RAM. Now, by a show of hands, who knows what RAM stands for? Don't be embarrassed if you don't know. As far as adventures in technology goes, RAM upgrades are like changing a diaper or your car's oil. It may not be intuitive or obvious, and can certainly seem daunting, but you can be walked through the whole process in about 2 or 3 steps. 

If you're an iPhone user, you're only holding onto your phone because A) it's still working fine for what you need and you probably don't use it enough to even notice the battery's gradual diminishing, B) you've upgraded and it's now a backup in case something goes wrong with your new one, or C) it's good enough as a hand-me-down or something to occupy a kid or other family member who only needs it for something specific. Speaking of specific needs for family members, check out Music and Memory if you've got a few old iPhones, iPods, or even iPads resting in drawers. 

In my admittedly limited experience with Apple's iPhone line, they're sort of like the original Star Trek or Batman films in that every other iteration seems to get things right. For example, the iPhone 2 was panned by critics for having a lackluster camera despite a high price tag (their Macbook Air had the same problem). Later, the iPhone 4 became a laughingstock because you literally couldn't hold it in your hands without interfering with its reception. The iPhone 6 gave us #bendgate, enough said. More recently, the iPhone 8... well, admittedly those swollen batteries were a rare occurrence possibly blown out of proportion, but they didn't address complaints about the headphone jack from the iPhone 7, so we'll count that as a missed opportunity. Jury's out on the X, though that facial recognition feature causes more problems than it ever solved. Not only can it be fooled by an embarrassingly crude mockup, but if you're under arrest, a cop can unlock your phone just by pointing it at you. It's a scary prospect. 

As for the odd-numbered lot, I can only really speak for the iPhone 5, which is damn near perfect. The most important feature was the variety of 5 models available. There was the standard 5 and the slightly nicer 5s, but then there was the 5c. Intended as an economy/budget-level device, I had a 5c and while it definitely felt like its price tag, it still felt way more solid than any similarly-priced Android phones, and the display alone ran circles around the competition. Later, after I'd finished having my laugh over the 6, I admit to getting genuinely excited for the iPhone 7. Sure, the headphone jack was nowhere to be seen, but they'd given us an awesome camera and finally, finally made it at least splash resistant. For comparison, my Xperia Z Ultra is about 3 years old and nearly every review you'll see from its launch has it getting dunked in a fish tank. It's a small gesture, but I'll take it. 

Building on the success of the 5, Apple made another smart move that may not quite fit the odd-numbered pattern, the SE. The phone has almost identical dimensions to the 5s, but with upgraded guts from the bendy 6. In terms of price, it's filling the same position as the 5c. Sadly, this is a model that's been listed as afflicted by the battery throttling. That said, I've had mine for a few months, and I haven't noticed it. Then again, I only have it as a backup for my Xperia, the same as my old 5c, which I'll be carting off to Music and Memory along with my old iPad Mini 3. I'm sure whoever gets them won't mind some less-than-stellar battery performance. 

iOS 10 Impressions

I miss Slide-to-Unlock.
Yes, I'll get used to it, but did they have to cripple touchID along with it? For that matter, my iPhone doesn't have touchID, so I have to click the home button to wake it up. Part of the convenience of touchscreens is that we don't have to rely on buttons. At least, we don't have to rely on them for mundane tasks. Software can't solve simple physics problems like, "the more times you push a button, the more likely it is to break." 

I did have a pretty serious spot of grief when one of my drawing apps crashed while trying to save a sketch. The worst part is not only did it not save the sketch (which was expected), but every single piece I'd saved to my gallery up until that point was gone, including some unfinished works. Needless to say, I was furious. I was all over Twitter asking Autodesk and Apple what gives. Autodesk responded first and, to their eternal credit, they could not have been nicer about it. There wasn't anything they could really do and their advice pretty much amounted to "Shoulda done backed 'em up, son" but given the circumstances of this happening at the dawn of the iOS 10 debut, they wanted to know everything that happened. On top of that, they walked me through all the different ways to backup my gallery, from Google Drive to iCloud. 
It's a little baffling that for all of Autodesk's resources, backing up to something like A360 isn't a default. It's barely opt-in. As for Apple, they just asked me for the exact model number of my iPad. 

Fortunately, I had my iPad backed up via iTunes that very morning, so I could restore the pre iOS 10 version and back up my PSD files. Procreate is a little bit trickier somehow; it exports PSD files like Autodesk, but somehow iCloud thinks they're written in some alien language. 

Apple Reveal Thoughts

Let me start by saying I think it's honestly clever of Apple to close down their site and store in the time leading up to their keynotes. I'm not being sarcastic, I think it's a good way to curb people cancelling orders in light of newer products. It's certainly a good way to draw attention, though I wish their "come back later" wasn't so vague and wasn't so easily mistakable for a typical 404-like error. 

Apple made at least three major announcements regarding their lineup: The iPhone 7, iOS 10, and the Airpod wireless earbuds. There's also the second series of the Apple watch, but for my money, I can't tell the difference. I haven't worn a watch in years, and this hasn't made me want to start again. 

I was rather surprised, though somewhat relieved, that they made no announcements on the iPad front of things. Then again, the iPad pro was only recently announced, so they'd do well to hold off on any major upgrades until more users get back from their honeymoons. There's been some talk of Apple phasing out one of its major lines, possibly the Air, though a few tech sites have speculated the mini to be on the chopping block. As an iPad mini 3 owner, I certainly hope the mini doesn't go anywhere. 

First, let's talk iOS10, easily the least interesting announcement. I'm glad so many iPhone and iPad models are represented so no one feels left out or like they backed the wrong horse. Speaking for myself, it often feels like when I got my 5c, I was getting the "kiddy" edition, with its limited memory options, fruity-flavored color selection (though my "pink" is more salmon than grapefruit), and less-than-stellar build quality. It remains to be seen how well 10 will handle the hardware, but I certainly don't suspect any "planned obsolescence" agenda on Apple's part.  

iPhone 7. I must have a skewed view of time when it comes to Apple products, but the 6 doesn't seem long ago enough for a successor to be rolled out. Maybe it's got something to do with "Bendgate" as much as that was blown out of proportion, certainly far less egregious than that antennae fiasco with the 4. As for the 7, I find the specs overall less than exciting, more a 6.5 than a full iteration, which may be all most Apple users want as opposed to the extended betas many of their products feel like. There was one feature that got my attention, however, in the most unlikely place. The camera is dual-lens, but not for 3D purposes. Instead, they seem to be building on an old Kodak digital design from years ago, with one lens being wide-angle and the other telephoto. What's more, instead of simply switching between the lenses to suit the application, they can be used in conjunction to create depth-of-field effects. This is legitimately intriguing and I can't wait to see some results. 

Airpods. These things look stupid. There, that's your in-depth, thorough analysis of this product. I've never liked bluetooth earpieces, I can't stand earbuds, and now they've come together in an over-engineered mess. There's clearly a lot of good tech behind it and many useful features, but the design is lazy, they look way too easy to lose, and the only people I can think of who would have a legitimate use for it are vloggers tired of having those obnoxious white wires swinging every which way while they "um" and "uh" their way through an attempt at a movie review minutes after getting out of the theater. 

Double Down on DS

NOTE: This op-ed is based on very loose hearsay, speculation, and partial evidence. The very nature of the Nintendo NX is subject to change between the time of this writing and its eventual release. 

The console market is in a place of uncertainty for the first time since the early 1980s. Sure, the uncertainty principle has followed consoles from day one, but if we look at the facts, the years have seen a dwindling number of advantages consoles have held for consumers over PCs in the last fifteen years. The Dreamcast introduced a built-in modem in 1999, whereas previous attempts at internet support have been aftermarket accessories like the Satellaview or the Sega Channel. Despite this, the idea of distributing games over data lines was years away from viability, with the 64DD, PS2 Hard Drive, and Phantom Console's graves as trail markers. Now, hard drives and internet connections are standard, along with digital storefronts and infrastructure for downloads and even streaming. Put simply, the line between consoles and PCs has been completely blurred, the only true differences having more to do with politics than hardware. PCs are still fundamentally the wild west while consoles are gated communities. Literally anyone can develop a PC game, and even get it released through a proper online store like Steam or Humble Bundle. Console developers have to offer their firstborn just to be put on a waiting list for a development kit. Granted, that line is blurring, but there's very little point in waiting for the treaty to be signed if the arms race is already over by way of stalemate. 

Between Miitomo and the runaway hit Pokemon GO, Nintendo has shown they're not above going to third parties for hardware, the taste of Philips out of their mouth at long last. Still, what we've always loved about Nintendo is how they go their own way, for better or for worse. Though they may have tread lightly in bringing the NES to America, compromises have been few and far between, much to the chagrin of developers, publishers, and even gamers. The Super Nintendo sold well enough, but if not for the Mortal Kombat blood controversy and Sega looking the other way to EA bypassing normal publishing channels to bring Madden to the Genesis, the SNES could have buried the competition as the NES had done to the likes of the Master System and Atari 7800. The N64's use of cartridges (in)famously drove away powerhouses like Square to Sony's bed, alienating those RPG fans who had cut their teeth on the SNES. Again, it sold well enough, but we have to ask what could have been. Similarly, the GameCube was a reasonable success, but now stands as Nintendo's second worst-selling home console, after the Wii U (we won't count the 1973 Color TV-Game since it's a Pong console), owed again to a proprietary format and a reluctance to play ball with third parties. 

Meanwhile, in the portable and handheld market, Nintendo's only true blunder to this day is the Virtual Boy. Otherwise, even the weakest link in the Game Boy/GBA/DS chain has been a license to print money. It's almost hilarious how people would forgive serious flaws like a blurry, spinach-green display on the original or a dim-as-moonless-midnight screen on the Advance and still send the things flying off the shelf. It took Sony pouring buckets of money and marketing into the PSP to even make a dent in that wall (Rest In Peace, Neo Geo Pocket Color). It finally took the iPhone to make Nintendo sit up and notice they weren't alone in their dominance of the handheld market. As much as I laughed at the prospect of iPhone/Android games and still hesitate to call it a serious platform, just like consoles, the line is blurring and it's all getting better. I still love my Vita, and I still have my original PSP, and if I could only have one, I'd take either of those over the best iPhone or iPad any day. The problem, the final hurdle for mobile phones and tablets to overcome, is the interface. Touch controls and gyroscopes do not give the same satisfying, tactile feedback as buttons or even knobs. Nintendo seems to understand this. That's why I think they're making a legitimately smart move in presenting the NX as a souped-up gaming tablet, following patterns laid down by the likes of the NVidia Shield or the Wikipad or some of Sony's Xperia devices. Some may be scratching their heads, but I think this move is the best decision they've made in years. They're still going their own way as they always have, it's just down a trail they blazed years ago. 

V12 Turbo Beetle

Imagine Volkswagen offers a new version of the Beetle, one with a turbo-charged V12 from Lamborghini, and for the exact same five-figure price (in €, let's say) as a fully equipped Beetle. The catch, as there would have to be for this kind of offer, is that the fuel tank is only a single gallon, putting this monster's range at around 20, if you adjust your settings to only use so many of those cylinders, at the expense of top speed and optimal acceleration. With that scenario in mind, let's talk about Apple.
I haven't owned a proper Apple product since 2005, that little gem being my Bondi Blue iMac, bought in 2000 and running OS 9. It had a 10GB hard drive. One day, around 2003, the drive took a dive and I had to scramble to save every last bit of it by way of about two dozen Zip Disks. When I took it in to get repaired, I was warned they wouldn't be able to replace the drive with the same size. I took a deep breath and asked how badly I'd be downgraded.
Luckily for my dignity, the gentleman behind the counter did not laugh, as so many lesser places might have. He politely explained that the smallest hard drive they offered was 30GB. Obviously, it was an aftermarket drive, one not directly endorsed by Apple, but compatible nonetheless. I chalked this up to having an older machine in a fast moving world.
Fast forward to a few weeks ago, and we've got commercials for storage expansion devices for the MacBook Air, a tiny and inconspicuous drive capable of doubling the Air's 256GB drive. There are similar options for the iPad and iPhone, but none of them are what would be called terribly practical, certainly not as seamless as the geekily-named Tardisk. They typically involve lugging around an external drive with some sort of wireless option that doesn't so much work in sync or tandem with the onboard storage as much as trailing it.
Recently, the iPad Pro was released, an admittedly impressive piece of machinery that makes me seriously consider it plus Pinnacle over a Mac Mini running Final Cut as an option for producing video content on a semi-regular basis. I mean, I'd get a decent video editing console and a tablet for drawing and painting in one singular package. It's practically perfect... Except a closer look at the specs reveal it as perfectly impractical.
Between the iPad Mini 3 (which I have currently) and the Pro, the difference in processing power is a mere factor of 2. Also, why is the 12-inch version only capable of 1080p video recording while the 9-inch one can pull 4K? Granted, video recording is a completely pointless feature on a tablet compared to a phone, but that's the rub, isn't it? All of these little compromises in areas that really aren't selling points in and of themselves add up to a goofy mess of a product line from a company we once lauded for taking bold and unusual risks. Now, they're just kind of dumb, shortsighted, and even naive. Of all the features to hold hostage behind the higher price tags, storage space should not be one of them. I could almost understand having an SD card slot on the upper tiers, not unlike microphone inputs on camcorders; it's not quite a prosumer feature, but versatility is often the first casualty of accessibility. However, there's still only built-in storage on the most tricked and pimped Pro. This strategy makes no sense because you're not really being rewarded for your larger investment. Apple, as a rule, has never done anything conventionally, and I doubt I'm alone in loving them for that (Cheap desktop computer? Fine, but we'll make it really small and adorable... Mac Mini). However, there's innovation, and then there's mud-flavored candy.

Not Every Jolicloud Has A Silver Lining

Platform Agnostic is what's written on the "Operating System of Choice" line of my DeviantART profile as well as any other profile or bio that asks. It means that, officially, I couldn't care less what OS something has installed on it because, apart from a few and fairly reasonable strength/weakness debates, they're all alike. The only factor that truly differentiates Microsoft from Apple from Linux is market share; Windows is the 500-pound "Any color, as long as it's black" Gorilla, Mac is the Cocky "Well, you win some, you lose some" Upstart, and Linux is the Grassroots "None of the above" Rebel. I grew up in a Mac household up until OSX, became a Windows convert of sorts with XP after college, and dabbled in Linux (specifically, Ubuntu and Mint) the last two years. I've seen the best each has to offer, and I've witnessed their stumbles. Most recently, I gave a little OS called Jolicloud a try, after hearing it briefly mentioned on a podcast called Dumpstertech. I thanked them for letting me know about it via Twitter:

Matsugawa: I'm about to try out that #Jolicloud OS that I heard about on @dumpstertech some time back. We'll see how it stacks up in Linux terms...

This leads me to what is probably my favorite part of Jolicloud's design, the installation and demo design. Normally, if you want to install a Linux operating system on your PC, you have to download the .iso file to create an install disc with a CD or DVD burner. ISO files are between 650MB and 1.5GB in size, so this requires a relatively substantial internet connection, not to mention a modest degree of patience. In short, it's more of an investment than an impulse. Jolicloud, however, seems to understand the weariness many of its potential users may feel toward trying a new and substantially-simplified operating system, so they came up with a solution in the form of Express, something that could only be described as a demo of the full version of the OS. Demos are usually reserved for applications, namely games, and consist of a pared-down version of the full program intended to take up less room on one's hard drive and be relatively easy to install and, if necessary or desired, removed or upgraded to its full capabilities. While Jolicloud Express cannot be upgraded-to-full per se, it does not require an install disc to be made, and is instead simply downloaded and installed like any other application.
Jolicloud is designed for netbooks and favors touchscreens, giving it more than a passing resemblance to the iPad operating system. While it has folders for user-created documents such as text files, photos, and videos, applications are hidden except for desktop shortcuts, which are large icons arranged in a grid on the main screen. When there are more apps than there is room to display, or you want to organize your apps according to their function or something, a small row of white dots appears along the bottom of the screen, each representing a new "page" of applications.
While this setup would only prove slightly problematic as my test drive proceeded, there was something of a false start that nearly put the whole trial on indefinite hold. When an operating system is installed on a computer as a partition (that is, keeping the original OS with the new one installed alongside it), the option is presented upon boot-up which one is to be used until the next shutdown or restart. Unfortunately, after installing Express and restarting, no such option appeared. I found out Jolicloud's support department had a Twitter page:

Matsugawa: @Jolisupport I used the Express version, but it won't let me choose between it and XP on boot, only #Jolicloud. What gives?

Expecting an automated "please visit our full site" response, I was rather relieved to get a real response from a real person with whom I could have an actual (if somewhat limited) dialogue:

Zak Kaufmar: @matsugawa Did the installation complete correctly? Maybe try reinstalling. ^ZK

Looking back over JoliSupport's other messages to users, this was the catch-all solution offered at least once during the conversation, regardless of the situation. To be fair, back when I worked in customer service for a cellular provider, whenever a customer was having a technical issue with their phone, our first step was always to have them turn the phone off and back on again and, surprisingly, that solved the issue nine times out of ten, at least. At worst, the issue would recur and do so frequently to the point of no longer being simply a glitch, but this was rather rare. The point is, this solution was not by any means inappropriate, but its preceding question assumes that a first-time user would know the difference between a successful install and one that was otherwise.
Furthermore, the problem was that I couldn't actually reinstall if I wanted to, because I would have to go back into the Windows XP environment to remove Jolicloud, but I couldn't get there to do so. The only thing that kept my next message from being one of complete verbal abuse was a great sense of smug satisfaction that I'd listened to my prior instinct and backed up all my files onto an external disk before installing Jolicloud. Past experiences with computers have included some close calls in terms of data loss, but while I've made archiving a habit, it begs pondering how many otherwise-lucky people trying Jolicloud will fill Jolisupport's inbox with pure textual hatred.
On a whim, I went to Jolicloud's official page and clicked on their support link, arriving at their community forums named "Get Satisfaction" (which always makes me think of Barry Lyndon, for better or for worse). It seemed more than likely my problem wasn't unique, so I typed in a brief description of the issue, something along the lines of "Jolicloud dual boot XP issue," and got about a half-dozen forum threads whose respective headers noted that at least two or three people each had this exact same problem. It turned out, luckily, that XP had not been supplanted so much as upstaged by Jolicloud. To fix this issue, all I had to do was find a file called boot.ini and open it in a text editor. To Jolicloud's credit, a user can access all their original Windows files (like documents, photos, and the like) while in the Jolicloud environment, and this was where I found the mystical INI file. The document, a script less than 20 lines in length that effectively told the computer how long to leave the dual-boot option visible for, with the "timer" set to zero. All one had to do was change that value to something like 10 or 30, click on save, and restart. Sure enough, there was the dual-boot screen. It sounds weird to speak of how the sight of some white text on a black background can invoke such a warm feeling of relief. Still, I wondered how many other users would be as patient and, more importantly, persistent as I in finding this solution, and concluded that just because a problem has a simple solution is no reason for it to not have preventative measures taken against it. I told as much to Jolisupport:

M: @Jolisupport found a solved thread regarding XP bootup issue. Thanks, just wish boot.ini's timeout defaulted to 30 instead of 0.

Of course, had this been a full install, there would have been no XP, Vista, or 7 to choose, so there would have been no reason for the INI script to be set to a value higher than zero. Similarly, if this had been a partition installed, the ability to still access Windows files might well have, for most users, made the whole dual-boot option borderline redundant. The problem is, though, this was neither a full install nor a partition, this was a demo, essentially an application running in Windows. In other words, it's a completely different entity from its more "permanent" kin, so why not have the default dual-boot timer set to 30 or 15? From what I came to understand, this issue is somehow exclusive to XP users, so it might have more to do with Windows than Jolicloud, but it still just strikes me as this glaring flaw that will ultimately break more deals than make them.
With that rough start out of the way, my second session with Jolicloud resulted in what could best be described as the OS having a nervous breakdown. After installing a few apps (namely Opera, as I didn't care for the default browser, Chromium), I tried to rearrange them into something a little more intuitive and streamlined. I found it a bit frustrating that I was limited to two horizontal rows of icons, thereafter I had to go to the little white dots underlining the screen to see the rest; my monitor was tall enough, and there was a tantalizing gray space between the second row and the white dots. This ended up not being the worst of it, as suddenly I found I could no longer rearrange the icons and the white dots at the bottom of the screen did not respond to being clicked on, limiting my view to one screen and with only a fraction of my apps accessible. The most troubling part of all was that, every time I clicked on an icon or tried to drag and drop it to elsewhere on the screen, a white dot would appear on the bottom of the screen; where once were two, now came to be three and counting. Every failed attempt at moving an icon made for a dot, until they numbered at least twelve. Jolicloud had crashed, but it was completely oblivious to it. I tried the old standby countermeasure Ctrl+Alt+Del only to find that Jolicloud didn't work that way. I used my phone to bug Jolisupport on Twitter again:

M: @Jolisupport cannot rearrange apps, white dots at bottom of screen multiply if I try to move an app, and stuck on one screen. What now?

Z: @matsugawa You're dragging and dropping? Can you maybe provide a screen shot? ^ZK

M: @jolisupport yes, I drag and drop the icon only to have it stay and a dot appears at the bottom of the screen, as if it's been moved

Impatient for a reply, I used the next oldest remedy and physically restarted the PC. It regained its senses; I could rearrange the icons, but they now left lingering transparencies of themselves where they once stood, overlapping with whatever application would fall into its place.

Z: @matsugawa Have you tried reloading the launcher with F5? ^ZK

M: @jolisupport actually, I'd tried restarting altogether, which fixed the issue, but F5 has helped a new issue of icons overlapping.

So, with that second ordeal sorted, there was now a chance to do some tweaking of the system's general settings. In particular, I wanted to change the desktop background to a customized image. As this can be done with any and many a number of devices, including cellular phones and even my PSP, it didn't seem like it would be utterly out of the question to do this with a netbook OS. Sure enough, there was a way to customize the desktop's appearance, but it was rather unorthodox to the point of enigmatic. On Windows and OSX, these features are managed using the Control Panel. On Jolicloud, however, there's a button on the upper-left corner of the screen (resembling a gear) that takes one to a sort of profile page, which displays the user's profile information and a device manager. Here, there's a tab labeled "Legacy Apps" containing a set of App icons which cannot be removed, rearranged, or placed on the desktop proper, the first of which is "Local Settings." This is the control panel where the desktop's appearance is managed, including desktop wallpapers. In any other operating system, the Control Panel for customization is an integrated part of the OS, so having it as an application (not to mention, one that is held in place compared to its more mobile counterparts) made the option seem like an afterthought of the design process. To deepen the mystery, the entire application seemed ineffectual as I could not actually see any image I picked as the desktop wallpaper. It was only visible for a brief second during startup and shutdown.

M: @Jolicloud why is Local Settings a Legacy App instead of a more integrated part of the system?

Z: @matsugawa Because it's part of the legacy system of Ubuntu/Gnome, I believe. ^ZK

Fair enough, I suppose, though I don't remember any such setup in Ubuntu or Mint. A return visit to Get Satisfaction revealed that the inability for the custom desktop image to appear was, in fact, not a bug, not a feature (the oldest spin in the history of technology), but rather a solution to a bug. Affecting only dual-boot installs, switching between the two operating systems creates conflicts in the graphics cards of most netbooks, so the option to make the desktop transparent to show the customized background image was simply left out.
So, the rough start was simply a growing pain, the nervous breakdown was a temporary insanity solvable by a simple keystroke, and the lack of customization was limited to the trial version. All these things could be forgiven, but when everything else had been solved, one problem remained: there was no sound. I went back to the forums, found a few relevant threads, and followed all steps to no avail. This, for me, was the deal-breaker. The next day, I turned on the computer with the intent of starting up Jolicloud to try a few new apps, only to select Windows by reflex and take that as a sign that this was not going to work out.

M: I think I'm officially done with #Jolicloud ; I switched back to XP and don't miss it. Write-up to follow soon.

Z: @matsugawa Did you have any trouble with it? ^ZK

Yes, lots of trouble, more than 140 characters in a tweet can express, hence this write-up. To Jolicloud's credit, I probably wasn't the target audience, given my relative expertise with most operating systems and the fact that my computer needs tend more toward the productivity side of things than basic browsing or networking options. Also, the computer this was installed on was my Compaq Presario, bought on a tax-free day in 2005 and, except for a graphics card and additional disc drive, left virtually untouched in terms of its specifications. Needless to say, there have been many changes in the market since then, so compatibility issues are practically unavoidable and not technically anyone's fault. This was intended for newer netbooks, and I used it on an older desktop, so, from the start, Tech Support went above and beyond the call of duty to make sure I was happy with their product.

In the end, I can't truly recommend Jolicloud, but take that condemnation with a grain of salt and consider my experience an example of the worst possible scenario, which consisted of a brief scare followed by a few petty annoyances. I highly doubt you'll have a worse experience than what I just detailed.

To end on a positive note, one thing that intrigues me above all else about Jolicloud as a company is a note at the bottom of their main page. It promises that if you purchase a computer and perform a full install of Jolicloud, you can have the cost of Windows refunded to you. Between OEM versions of Windows ranging in cost from 90 to 150USD, depending on the version, and netbooks costing as little as 250USD, that sounds like a damn good price to pay for an iPad clone. This is exactly the sort of step Linux needs to take in order to be taken seriously as an alternative to Microsoft and Apple. This offer is not without conditions, of course, but they're unspecified beyond "Applies in certain countries." Still, I'm going to e-mail them through their media inquiry channels for more details and write a follow-up of it with their reply.