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I fully admit that this is not an earth shattering problem, but the sheer amount of people asking me to elaborate have caused me to pen this post.

As those of you who follow me on Twitter know, I was rather upset by the ordering process for iPhones this year.

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For years the Apple mantra was always “just works” and as Apple became more entrenched with their just cause of protecting user privacy — Google went the opposite way. Deep machine learning pushed Android to be preemptive and understanding — Google Now being the primary focus, but certainly not the only place this happens. Back on iOS we have always been siloed where one hand doesn’t know what the other is doing, unless you explicitly tell each hand what the hell is going on. A task as tedious as it is to read about.

And while I typically don’t write iOS reviews, iOS 10 is Apple’s first step into the future of software which customizes itself to the user — and they figured out how to do this without compromising your privacy. People have been hesitant to embrace iOS as their only platform, but iOS 10 is what is going to push a great many people over the edge.

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Over the weekend a few others have expressed similar thoughts, but let’s face the fact that this stuff is likely bigger than most of us realized when Apple made its announcements.

Here’s Will Oremus on the matter:

The AirPods can’t store files or access the internet on their own, of course. They need your other Apple devices for that. But as processors continue to shrink, they’re likely to grow more independent with time, as the Apple Watch is beginning to do.

Exactly.

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I started a new experiment the other day, born out of a few comments from readers. They all remarked how much better it is to edit writing with the software keyboard, over a physical one on the iPad. Which is funny because I was actually thinking about working on setting up a mechanical keyboard again, but realized I packed them away (getting ready to hopefully move).

So I tore off my Smart Keyboards and stowed them in a drawer and committed to using the software keyboard for a week. I expected long fits of rage, but what I’ve found is that I quite like it.

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There is a very frustrating notion circling — the idea that managing files, or sharing files between apps, is hard on iOS. I’ve read three posts of late about them, each I will omit for varying reasons. The fact of the matter is that managing files on iOS is not hard — it is tricky and requires a modicum of brain power at times — but hard it is not.

In general the complaints are two fold:

1. Sharing files between apps is difficult.
2. Opening certain types of files is so cumbersome that many users will think it is not possible.

I’ve been using iOS full time for long enough now, I actually wondered if it is me who is out of touch with the level of difficulty, so I took this as a problem to investigate.

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When I started this site, my email was hosted on Google Apps, then I moved to Media Temple, and from there my @brooksreview.net emails have been hosted on whatever server my website was hosted on. This was never an issue for me, and I always wondered why people hated hosting email themselves, because it’s taken me 6 years to come to a breaking point. I was pumped to finally move to a Mac mini server so I could host all my email on a Mac using Mac tools. That was quite some time ago, and it’s been chugging along ever since. Sure, it goes down when I screw up the server, but thats part of the fun.

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Editor’s note: these shirts were sent to me at no cost for the purposes of reviewing.

It’s been a while since I reviewed undershirts — the regular ones, not fancy merino undershirts — but I received some NVSBL undershirts to test and then I took my damn sweet time testing them. There’s two types of people who wear undershirts: those who want their undershirt to be seen and those who don’t want it to be seen. I don’t understand the former group — but the latter group is doing it right.

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