I don’t mean old as in tired and passe–though others might make that argument, with some justification–but rather, it’s actually been around a good long while now.
I recall articles in computer magazines (almost as quaint now as the pre-internet days) in 1994 were touting two major developments in the tech world: the forthcoming release of Windows 95 (originally known only as “Windows 4”) and the rise of this new form of online communication known as the Internet.
I was already a regular participant on some BBSes (my roommate in the late 80s had a BBS running off four Commodore 64s) and participated in early forums that were part of FidoNet. Looking back it seems hilariously primitive. You connected to the host, downloaded all of the new messages on the forum, made your replies, then uploaded them and…waited. The conversations were not only not real-time, they weren’t even same-day. It would typically take two to three days for the turnaround. It didn’t prevent people from hurling insults and contributing little, of course, but it helped.
By comparison, my first cable modem and the actual internet–first introduced to me as a separate “premium” service by my ISP–was like stepping into the future. Your connection was always on (!) and you could visit multiple sites at the same time. There were multiple sites!
A big part of the early days for me revolved around gaming and one of the first games I got into online was Tribes, released in December 1998 (I bought it a month later). It got me into a gaming group and I still regularly converse with members of that group twenty years later. Back then I had the reflexes of a thirty-something, so I was already behind the curve, but I held my own. I read a bunch of gaming sites, many of which are either gone now after living on in a zombie state for awhile, like Voodoo Extreme, or have been abandoned after the parent company vanished, like PlanetQuake, which is still up, but hasn’t been updated since 2012 (its parent company, GameSpy, was shuttered the next year).
And then you have something like Blue’s News. Not only is the site still being updated regularly (by the same person, no less), but visually it is unchanged. Yes, the site looks pretty much exactly like it did 20 years ago. It was my home page for a long time, but I haven’t regularly visited any dedicated gaming site since consoles entrenched themselves as the primary way to game. There’s something both admirable and awful about not changing your website design for 20 years (for the record, I find the look today to be pretty ugly. Dense, small text on a dark background is not my idea of readability. On the plus side, the layout is about as straightforward as you can get).
The internet is an inescapable part of our lives now, and much of it is a terrible place. Facebook and Twitter serve as staging platforms for hate, enabling the spread of misery, violence and death. The wealth of information is vast and impossible for any single person to even begin to sift through. You choose your interests, put your faith in Google (or Bing, or DuckDuckGo if you really want to go full rebel) and hope for the best. Sure, you can find stuff through the recommendations of friends, but most of those will come via Facebook, anyway. And there’s always the echo chamber effect, too.
In the olden days the array of content was exponentially smaller. Sites themselves were smaller and updated less frequently. Messages downloaded as pure text at a rate slow enough to read as it downloaded. It wasn’t better, per se, but it was simpler. And in a way, that made it better. Or it created the illusion.
Fun Fact: this site turns 14 years old (!) on February 4th. In my first post I ranted about sites using white backgrounds. How things change.
I got a new computer desk from IKEA. It is fairly simple–just a big plank of wood with four legs. It replaces an L-shaped desk that fit the nook I have the computer in, but it was kind of awkward, otherwise. It was too shallow, too narrow and too faux executive office-looking, with a fake dark wood surface.
The new desk comes with a fake light wood surface, which is brighter, happier and will inspire me to previously unforeseen levels of stuff and junk.
What you can’t see in the mediocre shot below is the printer has moved from the left side of the desk to a pseudo-printer stand to the left. I say pseudo because it’s really the old end table from the living room temporarily repurposed to hold the printer. It has two shelves which handily hold all the junk I had scattered across the old desk but did not need quick access to.
Also helping to inspire me is Edvard Munch’s The Scream, as seen on the all behind the desk.
The gear, from top-left, clockwise: Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon, Blue Yeti microphone (hidden partly by the monitor), Asus P248 24″ monitor (on the monitor stand are Tic Tacs and a WASD 6-key Cherry switch tester), two escapees from a Robax commercial, a Seagate 4TB backup drive, my gateway/router, Logitech G703 wireless gaming mouse, CTRL mechanical keyboard (Halo Clear switches), Sony MDR-7506 headphones with absurdly long cable, and iPad mini 4, which has a battery life similar to whatever bug dies after about four days.
I not infrequently fall down the rabbit hole when I sit at the computer. What happens is I’ll read something (The original iPod Shuffle came out 14 years ago), then see something specific to latch onto (a mention of a SanDisk MP3 player, of which I bought one some years back when I first started running), which further prompts me to investigate further (looking at current SanDisk offerings, then what Sony and other companies are offering for MP3 players) and in the course of this, moving onto other things that pop into my head and checking them out.
Hours pass and I look back and I don’t regret the time spent, per se, but it does seem a bit of a waste in that I’ve not accomplished anything other than scratching a faint nostalgic urge (I never had a Shuffle, though I still have two iPod nanos) and confirming things I already knew (the current MP3 player market is pretty bad, filled with brands you’ve never heard of selling products that look suspiciously like Apple’s discontinued designs).
Somehow tonight I ended up on the Wacom site, looking at their Intuos tablets (I have one). And I was thinking, I should draw more. I could draw here at the computer using the Intuos, but I’d have to dig it out of a drawer, plug it in and neither requires any great or special effort, but I just can’t be bothered. So I see on their site that there is a model that uses Bluetooth, so you don’t need to plug it in. That takes away a step, making it 50% easier to use! Is it enough for me to go for it? I think and honestly, it would probably make no difference. I don’t need more convenience, I need more discipline.
Which gets me back to the rabbit hole. I am distracted and allow myself to get pulled into these little online expeditions too easily. I don’t think I have ADHD, though my brain does perhaps spin a little faster than I’d like (this is where learning meditation might be handy), but maybe I have some low-grade variety of it, where I don’t flit from one thing to another, I just flit from something and in the end have little to show for the time spent having flitted.
Anyway, that’s enough pop pysch self-analysis for tonight. But hey, I wrote again.
If I thought I wouldn’t game at all, I’m pretty sure my next PC would be a NUC, simply because they are so small and adorable. And you can get a full PC without any real compromises–you can have fast storage, lots of memory, a good port selection. And it can sit silently and adorably on the desk, where those ports are easy to get to.
I will likely build a new, bigger PC with a full-size video card in the near-future to replace my current, aging machine. But I might go ahead and then build a NUC as a secondary/experimental PC. I might even try a zany Hackintosh build, so I can have that Mac experience, but with a good keyboard.
It started a few days ago when I went online to check how my monthly internet/TV bill was divided between the internet and TV parts, as I am looking into the possibility of cutting the proverbial cord. As it turns out, the TV part is about $60 per month. I then drifted over to looking at the various internet plans to compare to what I have now, and discovered my current plan no longer existed, but a new plan that was both faster and cheaper, was available.
My ISP had not notified me of this. IMAGINE THAT.
I called and a tech came out today for her last appointment before heading off to spend Christmas with the family or whatnot.
Here are the results of the initial internet connection in 2011 and the results of the speed test today, post-upgrade.
2011:
2018:
Sadly, Telus’s star rating has not similarly improved over the last seven years. But now I can reap the benefits of getting exposed to horrible social media even faster than before. Onward to the future, what little we have. Hooray!
One day I’ll write up a proper review of the CTRL keyboard I got through Massdrop. I actually quite like it. But it also prompted me to make my first YouTube video. Or at least the first one I can remember.
When Windows reboots, the keyboard shuts off, then when it comes back on, it goes into its default backlight mode. It looks like this. The effect is so pronounced you don’t even need to actually watch the video, just look at the still image from it. But go ahead and watch it, it’s only two seconds long and it’s magical.
Now, you might be thinking, “Who would consider a strobing rainbow pattern to be a good choice for a default backlighting scheme on a keyboard?” and then answer quite sensibly, “Absolutely no one.” And yet we know at least one person would, given the video evidence above.
It takes a few keystrokes to set the backlighting to what I prefer (white, no strobing), but this is a textbook example of just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should (technology edition).
(Also, the video was made from the two-second live video clip from my iPhone. It’s like video-making for lazy people with no attention spans. Perfect for me!)
Apple has been raising prices across all of its product lines, most famously with the iPhone X last year, the first smartphone to sell for $999 ($1349 Canadian). This year’s “budget” phone, the iPhone Xr sells for $749 ($999 Canadian).
Other products that have seen significant price increases since 2016:
MacBook Pro
MacBook Air
Mac mini
Apple Watch
Apple TV
iPad Pro
The only product to see a substantial price drop is the base model iPad, which went from $499 to $329 after Apple reverted a lot of the improvements found in the iPad Air 2 to better differentiate the iPad from the iPad Pro. Technically the Mac Pro (see below) has also seen a price drop, but it is dead hardware.
If you look at the above list, you may be wondering what is missing? Here’s the short list:
MacBook
Mac Pro
iMac Pro
The MacBook has not seen any upgrades other than minor processor updates since it debuted in 2015. It has not been updated in over a year.
The Mac Pro was released in 2013 and in 2017 Apple admitted its design was “thermally constrained” (it overheated) and promised a new model…in 2019.
The iMac Pro was introduced a year ago and has seen no updates since then.
Older iPhone models also get discounted, but these are, well, old phones. Apple can’t sell them at the same price as current models, so their hand is forced here.
The argument can be made that Apple is justified in that many of these products have seen more than just incremental updates. The iPad Pro, for example, has smaller bezels and Face ID. The MacBook Air now has a high resolution display. And so on.
But other companies regularly improve products without significantly increasing prices. And a lot of these upgrades are simply Apple catching up to the current market.
The Mac mini, left untouched (including its price) for more than four years was upgrade this year, with the base model sporting an unimpressive Core i3 CPU, a measly 128 GB SDD and at least, mercifully, 8 GB of ram. But these specs rank it is as merely average for a desktop PC, even slightly below (most desktop PCs start with Core i5 CPUs, unless they are specifically budget models, which the Mac mini is absolutely not). Where the base price of the mini was once $499 it has skyrocketed to $799 ($999 Canadian). It’s not a bad system, but it’s a terrible value. Unless you are absolutely wedded to macOS, it makes little sense to buy it.
The Apple watch this year got a 30% larger display…and a 20% increase in price. What was once $519 Canadian is now $649 Canadian.
The so-called Apple Tax has been around nearly as long as the company itself, the idea that you pay a premium price for premium products. Given Apple’s record revenue and profits, it would seem people are happy to pay these premiums. But Apple is now pushing pricing to ever-higher levels, often with little to no justification. The new MacBook Air finally has a high definition display, catching it up to…the entire rest of the laptop market. And for this Apple now charges $200 more ($350 more Canadian). Some people will keep paying, no matter the price increase, because they value Apple’s devices so highly.
But the last year has seen sales of Apple devices either go flat (iPhone), decline (iPad) or decline sharply (Mac). When this happens to a company that wants to keep its revenue steady, they generally do one of two things:
cut prices, hoping to boost sales sufficiently to make up for lower revenue-per-unit
raise prices, hoping to boost revenue-per-unit enough to offset the lower sales
The first is basically hoping to turn around flat or declining sales, the latter is accepting the declines and trying to make more money from your remaining customers. Apple is taking the second approach, and this is one of the few times I think people saying “Steve Jobs would never have done this!” are actually right. He would not have raised prices to simply maintain revenue. He would have pursued new products and product lines. Apple is doing this, to an extent–rumors persist that an Apple car is still in development, for example, but the company seems to be moving away from things to services and counting on them to help keep revenue up. The services range from iCloud storage to Apple Music and the iTunes store. And this part of Apple is growing.
So maybe Apple is content to squeeze as much as they can from their hardware sales, knowing that the established base of devices (100 million Macs, over a billion iOS devices) is sufficient to keep services growing for a very long time.
These apples cost too much
For me, though, everything is just too damn expensive now. I was originally thinking about upgrading my Series 2 Watch to the Series 4, or getting one of the flagship phones. But the prices are just too high. I’ll keep and continue to use the devices I have, but when it’s time to replace what I have, I think it will be easier than expected to extract myself from the hallowed Apple ecosystem.
Here’s a current-gen list of replacements. The ones in bold I already have:
Apple device
Non-Apple replacement
iPhone 8
Google Pixel 3
Apple Watch Series 2
Garmin Forerunner 645
MacBook Pro without touch bar
Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon
Apple TV 4K
Xbox One
iPad Pro 10.5″
No replacement
Apple Music
Spotify
iCloud storage/Photos
OneDrive
In most cases the replacement either costs less (eg. Pixel 3) or does more (eg. Xbox One). Without even trying, I am already partly ready to make the jump.
Why do I have no replacement for the iPad Pro? Android tablets have never really established themselves (a lot of this can be blamed on Google not pushing the form factor more or doing more to get developers to make tablet-specific apps) and the market has largely been ceded to the iPad. When my iPad Pro is ready for replacement, I’d consider buying a refurb, used or waiting for a sale (not from Apple itself, of course). But everything else is ready for the switch and in a way I’d look forward to it, not just because Apple’s stuff is so expensive now, but because I’m growing increasingly weary of the limitations Apple imposes as it insists it knows better than its users. iOS is particularly bad for this, letting you do things like use different browsers, then having all web links open in Safari, anyway. I’m tired of getting a second-rate experience because Apple wants so much control over my experience. All they do now is largely get in the way.
And the iPad Pro is wonderfully adept hardware, shackled to what is still essentially a phone OS. They added a USB-C port to the newest models, but plug in an external drive to copy files and nothing happens. Apple doesn’t support that, unlike any other tablet out there. It’s silly. And for this they want you to pay ultrabook laptop prices.
Is the future pear-shaped?
It will be interesting to see where Apple is in a year. During its last quarterly report the company announced it would no longer report unit sales. The tech market, already going bear, did not react well, and Apple’s stock has shed much of its value and has yet to recover.
Some dismiss the decision to not report unit numbers, as Apple is again expecting record revenue in the next quarter, but really, there is only one reason to start hiding the numbers–it’s because they expect them to go down. And they will. I am curious to see where the declining sales and higher prices intersect, and how Apple will react if and when they get to that point. It’s hard to imagine them cutting prices, but it’s happened before. It’s entirely possible Apple will ride out their flat or declining sales with ni major impact to the company’s bottom line. I don’t think that will be the case, though.
You may accuse me of being cynical, to which I would offer:
The pricing of the MacBook introduced in 2015
The pricing of the redesigned MacBook Pro in 2016
The pricing of the iPhone X in 2017
The pricing of the iPhone XS Max in 2018 (also candidate for Worst Smartphone Name 2018)
All of these products saw hefty price increases or were introduced at high prices.
You might counter with a few examples, like:
2017 iPad dropping from $499 to $329 vs. previous gen iPad Air 2
AirPods at $159 being priced competitively with other true wireless ear buds
Apple Music for $9.99 a month
Mac Pro got improved specs at the same price in 2017
To which I would counter:
The iPad was cost-reduced to create an artificial distinction between it and the “Pro” line of iPads, with several features made worse than the previous $499 iPad Air 2, notably the 2017 model being heavier, thicker and with an inferior display. The base line iPad may cost less now, but it’s also worse than what Apple offered as the base line previously.
AirPods is valid. I think Apple really wanted to carve out market share here. They will offer upgraded AirPods in 2019, with an upgraded price. The original model for $159 will go away.
Prediction: In two years Apple Music will be $11.99 per month, eventually rising to $14.99 in five years. Every other streaming service will match Apple’s prices.
The Mac Pro is still overpriced and outdated
The rumored improvements to the iPad Pro seem to be extremely thin bezels and Face ID. I don’t find the bezels overly big now on my iPad Pro 10.5″, but sure, make them a littler slimmer if you insist, as it makes the display larger without bumping up the physical size of the unit. They’re also said to be adding Face ID. This also seems like a step backward. On the iPhone I rarely unlock it without also holding it up. I often unlock my iPad when it is laying flat on a desk, a situation that will not work with Face ID.
And that really seems to be about it. Neither of these will dramatically change what an iPad Pro (or any iPad) can do. It’ll still have the same OS, the same limited multitasking, the same everything else, just a little faster and shinier than before. And I fully expect this to cost at least $100-$150 more U.S. I would be willing to bet the iPad 10.5″, rumored to be morphing into an 11″ device with the slimmer bezels, will go from a base price of $869 Canadian to a starting price of $1099. Maybe more, especially if they dump the 64GB model and start at 256GB.
As the total sales volume of iPhone and iPad have flattened (or in the case on the Mac, declined significantly), Apple is shoring up its revenue by raising prices across the board, offering lower prices only where they are deliberately seeking to gain market share or to further justify price differentials between lines, as is the case with the iPad and iPad Pro (the iPad pricing can also be seen as Apple trying to make inroads to the education market and an attempt to shore up a shrinking iPad market). As I mentioned when the iPad Pro was first introduced, this is not sustainable, as Apple will reach a point where people will not buy. The danger there is if they go too far–even by just a little–they risk having sales plummet as people look elsewhere and begin removing themselves from the Apple ecosystem. This wouldn’t happen quickly, of course, but it has the potential to upend the company.
Mostly I don’t mind paying a premium price for a premium product, but I think Apple is starting to trade a little too much on the supposed Apple tax. They don’t need to make that much money. Some would say “let them charge what the market will bear” but the problem with that is a lot of people fundamentally lack common sense. Yes, that is cynical, but the evidence is abundant. I wish it weren’t.
If Apple raises the price of the iPad Pro 10.5/11 inch model by “only” $100 Canadian I will make a new post loudly proclaiming I AM WRONG AND ALSO A BAD PERSON.
I recently updated my Apple Watch to the latest version of watchOS. It includes a feature where it will detect if you are starting a workout activity and ask if you want to start recording the workout.
Tonight it asked if I wanted to start recording an indoor run.
I was playing air guitar at the time. While sitting in a chair.
May need a little tweaking.
(Either the watch software or my air guitar technique. I’m not sure which.)
This is the current feature story on engadget. (Yes, I’m picking on engadget yet again, but it’s almost unavoidable now. I swear!)
Speculation: The “Android table” is furniture that connects to the internet so you can shop/surf/post while having dinner. Good on Samsung innovating in ways that Apple never would!
I decided to give voice dictation/speech recognition a serious try for my writing, to see if it actually works as well as its advocates suggest.
I didn’t want to use my gaming headset because I didn’t really want to wear a headset at all, if possible, so I looked into desktop mics.
I picked up a Blue Yeti USB microphone during Amazon’s Prime sale, both due to its sale price and its generally stellar reputation. I can use it for dictation, podcasts (if I had anything to talk about) and karaoke (if I want to annoy others and embarrass myself, or perhaps become the next Justin Bieber, except older, with better legs and fewer run-ins with the law).
This thing is gigantic. And it’s heavy enough to use as a weapon. A lethal weapon. But set up is dead (ho ho) simple and initial testing confirms it’s working just dandy. If I get some quality alone time this weekend (voice dictation is not something you want to do with others around, because it’s likely to bug them and make you look a little weird, to boot) I intend to give this thing a shot, probably starting off with Google Docs, as it has integrated speech. If I am convinced of its worth, I may move onto getting some flavor of Dragon Naturally Speaking (and how naturally does a dragon speak, anyway?)
From there I would also consider an app for the phone to record when I am out and aboot, or even get a digital voice recorder, which could later be played back into the appropriate software in order to transcribe my recordings.
It’s kind of exciting because it’s an approach I’ve never done before, but it could always be one of those crazy things that just doesn’t work for me, like touch typing, swimming or programming. I’ll find out soon.
