As Apple introduces new models of its Watch, it adds new features. If one or more of the new features are especially important to you, that’s OK. Ditto if your goal is to impress your friends. On the other hand, those features take some time to learn. Do you really need a blood-oxygen sensor? But its compactness was important during President Trump’s impeachment trial.
Microsoft dominates the market for productivity software, with its suite that includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. We have been using these tools for many years, and have found them to be well-crafted and free from errors … except Outlook. The following three examples have caused us considerable pain.
First is the matter of duplicate emails. We frequently receive two identical emails, sent a few minutes apart. This is better than receiving none at all, but it wastes our time, and makes a mockery of its putative “productivity” positioning.
Second is its “Quick Print” feature, which simply doesn’t work. Again, it is not the end of the world, but is inexcusable from a company with massive resources and hundreds of software engineers.
Third is its unilaterally creating of new-and-unwanted mailboxes. This caused us considerable pain, because an incoming email from an important new client was incorrectly stuck in this new mailbox that was out of sight because it was below the normal viewing range.
In our earlier days we wrote the software. We, or one or more colleagues, tested it in a variety of ways to make sure that it did what we thought it should do. As time passed the software became more complicated, and the penalties of mistakes increased, so the testing had to become more complicated. In addition, an increasing number of malevolent hackers emerged, necessitating increasingly draconian measures to key them at bay. Even then, the size and complexity of code these days make it very difficult to cover all the possibilities. Fortunately there is a government body, the US National Security Agency, that was doing its mission appropriately.
The Apple Watch is very popular, and we were excited to receive one for Christmas 2018. But trying to use it is UN-exciting. For starters, Apple provided nothing but 2-point text of nonsensical legalese. If we had instead received a Casio we would been at least able to use the watch to tell the time. And we would not need the iPhone, like we do when we have the Apple Watch.
Apple’s philosophy was shaped by Millennials, who apparently had plenty of free time to play hide-and-seek with their latest gadgets. People who have to earn their daily bread don’t have so much free time, and want both documentation and elegant-in-their-design features. Surfing the web was a lot more productive, and we learned how to do some of the things we wanted.
Unfortunately, we found out some things we DIDN’T want to do. One of those was to be annoyed frequently and promised that the watch’s iOS would be updated overnight, and it never seemed to happen. Another is to be annoyed by incoming phone calls because it is unclear how to silence them. Another is for the watch “cleverly” guessing that we are walking or running after we have been doing it already for 15 or 20 minutes.
Worst of all, the iWatch behaves randomly. Sometimes after one finds out how to do some favorite tasks, it changes its mind and the tasks have disappeared.
We have a weekly meeting in Mountain View, CA and every week we see at least one Waymo car (with one or two people inside) driving along the streets. (Since the company’s headquarters are in Mountain View, this is not surprising.) But Mountain View’s streets are easy to navigate compared with the myriad driving environments that self-driving cars face. In March 2018 a driver of a Tesla X was killed when its navigation system failed to recognize a fork in a freeway and crashed the car into a traffic barrier. And this situation still is a lot easier than many others: bad pavements, hard-to-see fences or barriers, etc. While we and millions of other people continue to be excited by the notion of self-driving cars, we believe that it will take a long time for manufacturers to build the needed database of conditions these vehicles face.
A tried and true scam is to give away a gadget and charge for its consumables. One that comes to mind immediately is razor blades. And to add insult to injury, the messages from the printers are either incomplete or inconsistent or both.
We recently purchased two Samsung color computer printers from Fry’s in Palo Alto, CA. The first one (call it #1) was motivated by (1) the high price of toner for our aging printer, and (2) a super-low price advertised by Fry’s. The second one (call it #2) was motivated by the limited space available for it. Strangely, when one or more colors of toner in printer #1 got low, it warned on the PC #1 “Toner Low”, but it didn’t tell WHICH color or colors were low. But on printer #2 it DID tell which color was low on PC #2. Interestingly, we found that yellow runs out first. And we weren’t the only ones who noticed this.
The famous quote from Lord Acton—“Absolute power corrupts absolutely”—is a good guide to compiling a list of the companies that are likely to need policing. The list is pretty short—Amazon, Facebook, Google (including YouTube), Twitter, and Uber (perhaps). And the effect on humankind (especially children) is pretty severe. Amazon is now so large and powerful that it is in danger of being prosecuted under the antitrust laws.
And Facebook and Google make bags of money from advertisers, and have a continuing series of privacy violations.
Fortunately, a handful of Silicon Valley notables have become activist vigilantes. And they are aiming at kids to use their smartphones for healthy purposes rather than wasting time on useless social apps.
Click on the TAKE ACTION box if you received this message from Google, as likely all gmail users did, and you will be eternally annoyed by a repeating string of useless messages saying that someone (likely you yourself) tried to violate your security.
Every major new technology brings with it not only fascinating new capabilities, and in the case of electronic technologies also some potentially-dangerous new challenges. So many auto accidents have been caused because drivers were distracted by their gadgets that it has been proposed that those drivers be punished as if they were driving under the influence of alcohol (or other substances). And it isn’t only driving. Focusing on the small screen while walking not only puts one in harm’s way but in cities like Montclair, CA crossing a street while distracted can result in a sizable fine.
Some help is on its way. At its most recent developers conference Apple introduced a feature called Screen Time (to be available in September) that lets users monitor and limit their app use on their iPhones and iPads.
A couple has dedicated themselves to the cause, creating an app called Moment and living in their RV as they travel the USA.
And at the Hearth in Manhattan, diners are encouraged to put their cellphones in picturesque boxes provided at each table.
But isn’t the real villain the pressure to keep users connected so advertisers can continue to shovel advertisements into the users’ brains?
We have twice before posted strong pleas for the giant tech companies—especially Alphabet/Google/YouTube, Apple, and Facebook—to stop expanding their Silicon Valley facilities rather than creating/expanding sizable operations in other cities. They’re mostly software companies, which could be located anyplace with high-speed data transmission capabilities!!! Are these companies afflicted by cases of hubris?
We wonder why all those cities who were campaigning for the Amazon HQ2 aren’t similarly campaigning for expansions of other tech giants.
We also wonder why Silicon Valley communities have not been able to either (1) extract enough money from these companies to compensate the many victims (long commutes, wasted time in traffic jams, inability to find housing, homelessness, etc., or (2) tax the companies so much that it makes it uneconomic to expand there.
Other organizations that are keeping up the good fight include the San Francisco Peninsula Resident Association.