Tech:

Vlad Savov (The Verge) on the “Apple Bias”

The funny thing is that everyone’s right. Readers are right to claim that the iPhone is treated differently from other smartphones, and reviewers are correct in doing so. Apple makes more in quarterly profit than many of its mobile competitors are worth, and the success and failure of its smartphone plays a large role in shaping the fate of multiple related industries. The iPhone is reviewed like a transcendental entity that’s more than just the sum of its metal, plastic, and silicon parts, because that’s what it is.

Interesting read from somebody who’s on the reviewer side of technology.

Dan Moren (Six Colors) on His Apple Watch Usage 5 Months In

In practice, I use almost none of them. Sending sketches fell by the wayside a couple weeks in. I take the occasional phone call, but doing so on the Watch is almost never the best experience. Siri generally takes a couple tries to respond, so I end up using my iPhone, or, well, Alexa. Most of the apps are too slow and too limited to be of significant benefit to me. I vastly slimmed down my number of Glances, both because having a huge number of them was practically unusable and because most of them took too long to be useful. (I may have to revisit both apps and Glances under watchOS 2 to see if they deliver on promised performance improvements.)

Dan’s experience with the Apple Watch staggeringly matches mine, almost line for line.  Dan specifically mentions that this piece isn’t meant to be disparaging, and I agree.  It’s just the reality of a very new platform and a very new product category.   I love my Watch, and I wear it every day from the time I get up to the time I go to sleep.   The only specific difference between Dan’s experience and mine is that I LOVE everything about the fitness including the lack of social features.  As a person who’s been severely out of shape for my entire life, having a device like the Watch constantly tracking my activity without any social pressure at all has made a gigantic difference in my health and by extension, my life.

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