Category: Articles

There’s a real problem occurring right now with the royal us not coping well with interconnectedness, and how fast and easy information can and does pour in. Some point to smart phones as the culprit, others to high speed internet, or rather the internet’s underpinnings itself. The issue is all of the above and us.

And this was never more evident than my recent internal debates about whether or not I should get an Apple Watch series 4 to try out — and no I won’t be getting one. Because the more you think about the Apple Watch, the more you realize that it exacerbates the problem — you have to choose: do you want to relax, or do you want to be more connected? If you want to relax, or have any hope in doing so, you need to get rid of your phone and Apple Watch as best as you can.

Apple watches are at their core, a way for your iPhone to reach out and tap you on the arm to bother you better, in hopes of solving a user *want* to use an iPhone less. Or put another way: people wanted to ditch their phones, so Apple Watch was made to allow people to ditch their phones without ditching the addiction. It’s like stopping smoking to only become addicted to nicotine patches or vapes. You really solved nothing, you just substituted one thing for another.

And, ok, let’s argue that people use the Apple Watch wrong and first and foremost it should be a device to promote good health. I call bullshit on this. It’s not, if it was, it’d be great and I would own one. But it’s not a health device firs and foremost, here’s why:

1. If the Apple Watch really wanted you to get out and be healthy, they would not advertise that you can go catch some waves on a surf board while also not missing that important conference call. “Get fit, be healthy, but don’t ditch your device — that’d be nuts.”
2. If Apple Watch wants to help you be more mindful and relaxed, then “breathe” is not the best avenue — having *no* notifications is. And, actually, that’s technically easier to accomplish than the Breathe complication, so that tells you the lengths being gone through. I got 95 notifications on my iPhone during Friday — and I have almost all notifications turned off. That would be 95 times the Apple Watch tapped my wrist — there’s nothing at all relaxing about that.
3. Standing up, as much as you think it does something, doesn’t do jack shit for extending your life. But congrats on hitting those rings and goals. What would be better: using your computer or device less, but yeah that really is not good for sales, right?
4. The rings, yeah sure they are probably accurate, but let’s not forget that your diet is far more important than your exercise — it’s just that we don’t like to accept that because it’s harder to change the way we eat, than it is to full those rings. I am glad they get people out and doing stuff, that’s good, but knowing how hard you’ve worked out is not in itself important. Actually, another issue here is that it does tend to make people skip workouts they would have otherwise done when they see they have almost already filled their ‘rings’ for the day.

That’s the thing about the Apple Watch: for everything it purports to do for the good of the person, all it does is seek to make them more addicted to the tech itself. And it’s not just me, and it’s not just Apple Watch, here’s [Matt Honan on the Google Pixel 3](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/mathonan/google-pixel-3-review-android):

> I don’t recall exactly when my phone became such a festival of stress and psychological trauma, but here we are.

Replace phone with watch and it still fits. That’s certainly how I felt and how I feel every time I wear an Apple Watch. Luckily, I was able to quit, but it wasn’t easy. And don’t even mention Screen Time — all that does is calm down Wall Street, while giving us more in-actionable and meaningless data. If Apple really wanted Screen Time to mean something, they wouldn’t allow it to be so easily bypassed — but in doing that we might miss something and surely the world would end, or so I assume, I dare not test out that theory for fear I miss something myself.

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This is a shorter post this week, but I wanted to share a few thoughts about cloud infrastructures and the transformation with all of them.

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This week is all about Siri Shortcuts, and the new Shortcuts app. I don’t think people quite realize how powerful these new features are, and how easy they are to get to work on. One such shortcut made the news rounds as a shortcut to use when you are pulled over, it does a series of actions which culminate to letting someone know where you are and what is happening and silently recording the event. It’s neat (and sad it is needed), and really only scratching the surface of what is possible.

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Facebook recently saw themselves hacked, again, but that’s not what I am here to talk about today — because that’s going to be par for the course with any big tech company now. Instead, we need to talk about something else which seems like a ‘so what’ but is really much more nefarious than it first seems.

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During the summer, while I had iOS 12 betas on my devices, I never downloaded the beta of Shortcuts, Apple’s revamp of Workflow. I also rarely use Siri unless I am driving in general. But last week I was playing around with Shortcuts and with Siri settings for Shortcuts and found that I wanted to record some voice triggers.

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Picture for a moment the three leading tablets on a desk. On the left you have an iPad Pro with Smart Keyboard and a Pencil beside it, next you have a Surface Go, or Pro doesn’t matter, with a Type Cover and Pen, then at the right a Samsung Galaxy Tab S4 with the SPen and associated keyboard cover. They represent the state of the art of tablets made to replace laptops, or more generally “the future of computers”.

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Last week I chatted with Tim Bradshaw of the Financial Times about the iPad, and more specifically how I use it as my only device and a bit of prognosticating about why more don’t use it. The article, if you can’t read it, gives a good overview of where things are. Of course, reading it, I have many more thoughts I’d like to expand on, so here we are.

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A couple of weeks ago I talked about a shift in the way I am working on my productivity tools. For those who missed it, the crux was that I no longer felt like my systems were helping me to get things done. I love Things, but some how it had become a database of stress, instead of the normal tool it had been for keeping stress at bay.

I turned to my buddy Shawn Blanc, and asked him explain his digital-analog system to me. After talking to him I bought a large Baron Fig Confidant, a little ruler from them (why not?) and set out to give this system a go. I also decided that I need to go back to a standard wake up time.

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I talk to a lot of people who often say a couple of things to me with regards to their smartphone/computer usage:

1. I probably use it way too much.
2. I really don’t think I am not that bad, so I don’t really need to curb my usage.

Most people say both, roughly in that order. I’m guilty too. It seems that in society today, people with data plans and smartphones recognize that they likely use these devices far too much. But by the same token, the usage they deem to be too much is excused away by saying it is necessary for any number of reasons. Thus, at the end of the day, no one actually thinks they should curb their usage of devices because, well, they have really gotten rid of everything nasty in their own usage.

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