I am in a similar boat. With no real hardware announcements it isn’t appointment viewing for me.
Apple News, eh? Lots of mentions in the context of Google Reader. However, if Google Reader were still around today it would have one ENORMOUS advantage. It would be available in about 191 more countries than Apple News.
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Me, old age and turning into a curmudgeon are certainly possibilities. I’m so much less excited by new tech stuff than I was last century. One reason is that the hype just doesn’t count; you have to see how new stuff actually works out. Vision Pro, a flop; M1 chips, terrific. Apple watch -took me a long time to try it, but I finally came around. But for the most part it seems like very incremental improvements are way overhyped. I’ve never been able to get excited about emojis (old age again). WiFi and streaming are great, but we now take them for granted. Probably the best thing about Apple is that it comes closest to “just works,” and we can take that for granted, and that’s not bad.
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This is a bit OT, but in the last few years I’ve gotten more pessimistic about tech outside the power user / techie circles.
On reflection, I see non-tech family and friends being less organized and less productive now that they have all kinds of tech devices.
Some examples:
I remember how my Mother carefully kept a small, pocket sized, written address book up to date keeping track of family, relatives, and important contacts.
Sure there were lots of updates with crossed out ink and scribbled changes, but she had all the info she needed at her finger tips.
Now I see friends/family/relatives struggling with simple queries like “What is Nancy’s new address since she moved to Utah” and “What is cousin Joe’s phone number?”
A little prodding on my part and I found:
Surprisingly low ability (either skills or lack of motivation) to use the built-in contact/address book in Android or IPhones.
The majority of contact information is kept organically by never erasing the “recent call list” and text chains that have been saved for years. Neither organized in any useful way and brute search failing as often as helping.
Family members desperately searching for photos of people or events from several years ago and when finally found, they take a screenshot of it so a copy now is at the top of their recent photos list, for a short time, in their huge unsorted photo stream library.
I could on about never keeping copies of receipes and every time they want to make a new batch of their favorite cookies using Google search and desperately doom scrolling through the search results looking for one that is vaguely familiar.
Tech is failing - doesn’t matter whether why, making excuses is missing the point. I almost think that Apple’s utopian dream of how personalized on-device AI should work, might actually be a viable solution, if/when it does work?
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I believe you might be onto something here, but I want to mull over this for a while before responding. Thank you for your post.
IMO, tech isn’t failing. Apple misjudged where “the puck is going” and let the competition get three or more years ahead of them in on-device, consumer AI.
But Apple’s hardware and reputation should keep android from capturing any significant market share while they catch up. If the economic tsunami that just hit the world doesn’t hurt them too much.
I think he means in that Big Tech causes more problems then they solve. Which I would have to agree.
I guess that depends on what you think is important.
I regret including AI in my post. The main issue I issue, well before the AI hype, is that normal people seem to have less basic organizational skills are using tech as a crutch to achieve a level of literacy/usability that is less than what most people had in the analog/pre-tech days.
The example of fast food workers that can’t make change unless the register tells them how much to hand back, etc.
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That is absolutely true. I know because I don’t have the skills I had when I was in school.
I may have told this story before but I worked in a grocery store from age 16 until I graduated college. Cashiers had to calculate tax in their head and make change manually. And after doing that for six hours straight, and handling thousands of dollars, all of us were almost always accurate to within $1 or less. I was once written up for being $19.99 short. I had handed someone an extra 20 dollar bill.
Today the calculator is one of my most used apps.
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I am satisfied with the hardware side of the equation. The M series line up is excellent. My enthusiasm for tech wanes as I get older though. I am more focussed on - what can this tech, app or process do to help me with my work or organize my thoughts/writing. With the rise of subscriptions and every other crazy thing in the world, I have to be careful with what I decide to purchase/try.
Tech is just another tool to manage these things, there’s no reason that some couldn’t continue to keep a manual address book, people choose not to. It’s important people choose their own way.
Beyond that there are two sides to this coin. If I suggest that the internet and smartphones became fairly ubiquitous from 2010 (3 years after the iphone debuted) stereotypically there is a divide between those who quickly truly adopted this technology/grew up with it, and those who use the technology, never adopted it, but were dragged into it.
Both suffer from it in different ways when they let it happen to them rather than truly adopting it.
Those who grew with it or embraced it often trust the tech, but sometimes too much. They allow Facebook to be their conduit to their “friends” and family so that they don’t retain phone numbers or addresses. “It’ll always be there” When they need something they google for it. But persistent storage isn’t a thing. TV, music and film are streamed,
Those who are dragged into it try and keep up, but things change so quikly for them they they sometimes give up and hunt and peck.
There are a relatively small minority (like MPUs) who use these things like tools, but it’s relatively rare.
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I have no desire to insist or force anyone to use tech instead of other methods.
My dismay is that the majority of standard folk, not techies, seem to choose to not use tech and not use analog methods at all.
I.E. family members that never add any contact to their phone or computer address book also dont have any organized offline contact book; close family member that has to Google for the same recipe over and over will not write or clip recipes in any form - let alone the classic index card recipe file box of prior generations, etc.
Older generations (my parents to some extent, grandparents) did not embrace tech or only slightly, but they didn’t abandon tried-and-true analog methods of organization.
My disappointment is not better adoption of digital tools, or the choice of keeping analog tools instead of moving to digital, it is the lack of adoption of any tools for a lot of common tasks.
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I would suggest there are at least two things in play.
The first is that digital isn’t nearly as convenient as it’s frequently billed as being. Typing into a phone is slower than scribbling things down on paper. Scanning somebody’s QR code and having them just get dumped into my contacts isn’t any faster than taking their business card, and it gives me a contact without obvious context. Increasing friction and decreasing curation negatively impacts adoption and usage.
The second is that there’s an actual social stigma - at least in the corporate world - around analog. I reference this article frequently, because it sums up the argument very well - https://hbr.org/2013/01/dear-colleague-put-the-noteboo. In that context, “getting organized” means “going digital.” If digital doesn’t work well for them (frequently for good and valid reasons), they’re not going to turn to the option that carries the stigma.
We don’t just need to teach people that digital options exist. We need to teach them how to effectively manage the flood of information they’re getting, and how to do so in whatever tool(s) work the best for them.
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I will be watching to see if they mention the tariff issue. (Of course right now we have little idea where we will be in June)
I’m really enjoying the recent direction of this thread. I see much of what you’re describing in my own family, especially the elders. Some still cling to paper but many allowed themselves to gradually adopt and adapt to electronic devices. And it’s interesting to see how they adapt by coming up with their own methods as some point out here like screenshots. not using Contacts is a good example as is the recipes. Another would be how people manage and connect to photos. So much has changed, especially with iCloud photos. Apple made it so easy to take photos, store them in iCloud, share them. And yet for all the power of the Photos app it still confuses people and I find my older relatives especially confused by it. And so they seem to just adapt as best they can.
Add in the thus far unreliable/inconsistent addition of AI and it seems like further dependency on blackbox technology. We are encouraged to trust the systems being put in place. AI powered search to find things we’ve lost track of being just the next thing that leads us to a dependency on something outside of our control.
After years of trusting Apple and the trajectory it sets too much, I’ve taken a U-turn in my approach. I’ve brought all my data and computing back to a pre-cloud process with no subscription. Yes, it’s been a bit of work and effort but I had it mostly taken care of in 4 weeks and have fined tuned it further. Going forward I’m also being more proactive with extended family in offering to help them do the same if they are interested.
With the general state of things right now it feels pretty good and I feel more secure having returned to having it all under my roof.
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I usually have about 750 contacts in my work and personal address books. It takes a lot of attention to input everything the first time correctly. After that, it’s just attention to putting in more correct information if it changes and asking questions of my contacts. I’m super picky about getting names perfect, including diacritical marks.
Most people’s phones that I have worked on to help them are absolutely chaotic. They put in the bare minimum of information and they don’t usually put in last names and they’re never in the right fields.
I tell people the more accurately you input information into the contact book the better your phone is going to work. “Computers are stupid. People are smart.” They look at me like I’m crazy and they absolutely do not understand a word I’m saying.
I don’t think /anybody/ really wants to spend the time to do this. I’ve also seen people use their contact books as note applications.
Although I don’t exactly like AI, this would be one place it would really help.
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This has a name. It’s called respect. I honestly think a lot less of someone if they reply to an email, using my name, and they spell it wrong, even though it’s not only there in my email but also in my email address. There is simply no excuse for not respecting others.
It’s the same in person, too. You don’t have to automatically know how to say someone’s name, but it never hurts to ask!
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+1
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and then remember how they pronounced it.
I have 2 problems
- Remembering someone’s name
- remembering how they pronounced it.
For some reason I need to meet someone 3 or 4 times for names to stick.
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