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. 

When To Hold 'Em, When to Fold 'Em

So, we've had two major developments in consumer technology, both having to do with flexible displays. The first of these is the delay of the Samsung Galaxy Fold phones, following a number of review units breaking. Some of these incidents were due to user error, namely the removal of what appeared to be a screen protector from the display. Others seemed to be simple wear-and-tear in a relatively short amount of time. First iteration gremlins aside, the device does not seem to be offering what users expected in terms of form and function. Marques Brownlee in particular noted the clumsiness of the hinge and how more often than not it simply felt like he had two small phones in his pocket rather than one large one. He did give the device a little credit when he addressed viewer concerns of the "crease" in the middle of the display only being noticeable in certain lighting conditions and/or whenever users are actively looking for it. 

The hype over the folding phones, the various proof-of-concepts teased last year and a few prototypes for hands-on demos from the likes of Huawei, is completely underwhelming to me. I have absolutely zero use for a folding display. I'm hard-pressed to think of an instance in which the thought occurred, "If only I could fold up this display and tuck it away." That's not entirely fair, though. If one of my Moleskines could bend and give like a softcover when I don't need it and lay flat as a hardcover when I do, that would be pretty cool. Trouble is, that's not what the Fold, nor any other folding display phone, is offering. What it's offering is to open and close like a book, but display as a single page. Contrast this with two devices, the Nintendo DS and the Sony Tablet P, and suddenly the Galaxy Fold becomes a solution looking for a problem, a step down from a novelty. The DS had more than a few titles that had the user hold the DS on its side, with the left and right screens displaying pages like a book. The Tablet P never quite made the most of its dual displays, but that was more of a software issue (Android) than a hardware problem. 

Still, I'm not being fair. As I said, I have no use for a folding display. I'm clearly not the target audience for a device like this. It all speaks to a fundamental disconnect between how I see tablets, and how the general public sees them. I think my brother put it best when we were talking about the original iPad back in the day. I was expecting a productivity machine, a touchscreen Macbook, not an oversized iPhone. From this perspective, the iPad is terrible, a step back, borderline insulting to the creative spirit of Apple users. However, as a consumption device, a means for appreciating various media, it's a Victorinox-style music player, television, and e-book reader. Time has blurred this line, with no shortage of productivity apps along with all the fun stuff. The iPad is still far from being the laptop replacement Apple wants us to believe it is, but it can certainly hold its own against a Chromebook. It's still my choice platform for making digital art. From that perspective, the Galaxy Fold is terrible. I can just see it folding up in my hand as I push down with my stylus just a little too hard, or my lines across the middle not being nearly as straight as they could be, little hiccups interrupting smooth pen strokes. 

I haven't yet found a single Fold review in which anyone attempts to use Autodesk Sketchbook or Medibang. Between that and Samsung not enabling the S-Pen for it, I'm thinking it's either so extraordinarily unremarkable it's irrelevant, or my visions are prophetic. The simple fact is that carrying around an iPad Pro just about everywhere is something I resigned myself to. It's no more of a hassle or headache or added bit of bulk than when I carried around an 8 x 5 sketchbook everywhere. 

Speaking of carrying something around everywhere with little to no hassle, the second recent development may have its own share of issues, but I'm far more optimistic about it than the Fold. The Nubia Alpha is easily the smartest use of a flexible display I've seen thus far, its focus being less on folding and more on wrapping. It's not trying to put a bigger thing in a smaller package. It's doing something entirely different. It's invented a new form of screen real estate, expanding the clock face onto the rest of the band. It rather reminds me of Sony's little-known "smart wristband" the Wena, which lets you keep your existing watch while delegating the smart features to a tiny display in the band. 



Remember what I said about wanting to be able to roll and bend a Moleskine softcover yet have it lay flat when I needed to draw or write in it? Well, the Alpha isn't trying to be that for me. It doesn't have to, and I would never ask that of it. It's not exactly on any wishlists of mine right now (I'm no early adopter and my FitBit works just fine), but I'm watching this far more closely than any other flexible display out there.