2025-12-30 08:28:49
It was time to do a quick check-up of my vintage calculators, because the last time I did it was before moving and I didn’t remember whether I left batteries inside these or not.
From left to right:
The ‘Wondertopia’ was a regular calculator, but it featured 3 little games: Physical & Mental Reflexes Test, Dice Roll, and Coin Flip.
You could use Dice Roll to roll two virtual dice, which at the time it was very useful since my family lost the two dice we needed to play Monopoly (heh heh). Coin Flip displayed a little ‘coin toss’ animation and then returned heads (○) or tails (●). The reflexes game displayed a series of fast-moving characters/numbers and you had to try and stop them in order to obtain the highest possible number of matches (e.g. 4–4‑4–4 or A‑A-A‑A). Other combinations were rewarded, such as two pairs (e.g. 2–2‑6–6 or 3–7‑7–3), or three of a kind. And there was even an easter egg: by getting the combination E‑L-5–1 (ELSI), the calculator returned: “HAPPY”.
It was basic entertainment, sure, but these were the 1980s!
The three calculators seem fine. The Casio unfortunately had two batteries inside and one leaked, but after a quick scrub with a q‑tip soaked in WD40 everything looks very clean. The Sharp WN-100 didn’t have batteries. I put two LR44 cells I had lying around and it came to life. The EL-540, being solar-powered, turned on as soon as it got enough light.
Not bad for three devices that are 42–45 years old!
By the way, I love the keys on the Casio. Unlike the other two Sharp calculators, they’re not made of rubber, but hard plastic. Much easier to clean and they’ve also stood the test of time rather well.
2025-12-28 22:13:10
An Elephant Memory Systems 5¼″ floppy disk from my archives
Last week I was looking through my archive of 5¼″ floppies and stumbled on a bunch of disks made by this brand, Elephant Memory Systems. These were the first blank floppies I purchased back in the 1980s to use with my Commodore 64. When I last checked their contents in 2018, they were all still accessible. (That tagline, “Never forgets”, may be on to something).
This gave me an idea… for this blog.
Some blogs (like mine) only feature long-form articles. Others have link posts (frequent) interspersed with articles (less frequent). Others mix everything up: articles, links, and all social media status (micro blog). The latter is the kind I like less; they’re too chaotic, at times hard to navigate given the sheer amount of status updates, a mess to follow via RSS.
Some of my articles have been expansions of notes and observations I first shared on Mastodon. But, looking back, I remember some interesting impromptu threads that lasted a few posts, got insightful replies, and then nothing came out of it.
So my idea is this: from now on, any worthwhile thread I write on Mastodon that doesn’t get expanded into a full article on this blog will nonetheless be preserved here as a short-form Elephant Memory Systems entry — EMS for short. (Note the obvious connection Mastodon → Elephant). Where relevant, I will also include the most interesting replies I received in the original Mastodon thread. If they come from private accounts and I think they’re worth sharing, I will ask permission to do so.
In my opinion, this would add a bit of variety to the blog, and slightly increase the frequency I update it, without the mess of having my blog turned into a micro-blog with all my status updates mirrored here.
Those who closely follow me on Mastodon wouldn’t find nothing really new in these updates, but it could be useful to me, for future reference, and to readers of this blog that don’t follow me on social media.
This post is itself the result of a thread I posted on Mastodon a week ago.
While the context should make this obvious enough, I’ll nonetheless state that the reference to the name “Elephant Memory Systems” simply originates from happenstance and nostalgia. It’s merely a label I decided to use to indicate a type of short-form post whose idea started as a Mastodon thread.
2025-11-27 04:24:39
For the past two months I’ve been busy in ways that, as it sometimes happened in the past, have left me sort of looking at the tech world from outside. It’s no mystery for those who have been reading this blog or have been following me on social media for a long time, that my enthusiasm for technology has been dwindling for a while — I’d say for at least two years, maybe more — with occasional sparks that have brought me back from a general state of tech ennui.
The terms associated with that word, ennui, like listlessness or dissatisfaction or even apathy make the feeling sound almost as if it mysteriously originated from within and your worldview is impacted as a consequence of that. But that’s not the case. At least, it’s not the case here. As I wrote on Mastodon the other day, I feel that my current tech headspace is a sort of limbo made of distrust and uncaring-ness. These feelings are pretty much reactive and defensive. They are a response to what tech has become and is becoming nowadays.
I was chatting with two of my best friends last week, and among the various personal updates, we touched on this for a bit, as they, too, have been feeling a sort of tech burnout as of late. And the image I’ve used to sum up my feelings on the matter was this — I told them, It’s like I’ve been playing this game called Tech for the past 30+ years of my life and I just don’t feel engaged anymore, but not because I got bored of the game — like it happens with many regular games. It’s not boredom or fatigue. It’s more because the game has gone through a series of updates that have ultimately made it so much worse.
Technology has been a significant part of my life since I was a young boy. First it was my fascination with digital watches and calculators, then the avalanche of the 8‑bit home computer era — Commodore computers, Sinclair computers, Atari consoles, the Apple ][ at a friend’s place, where he used to show me all the cool programs his engineer uncle was making for him and his younger brother. All this pushed me towards… more of this. I learnt BASIC and even some rudiments of Assembly code; with two other friends we made a couple of simple games for the Commodore 64; I felt drawn to this world and told my parents I wanted to pursue a career in technology, become an engineer and whatnot. Too bad that in high school I discovered I completely sucked at maths and that I was much more interested in literature, art, languages, and writing.
But tech changed in a way that I was still able to reconcile these different directions: when DTP, Desktop Publishing, was suddenly all the rage thanks to the Macintosh platform in the mid-1980s, I was right there, like a surfer riding this massive wave. I was lucky enough to be doing a bit of apprenticeship at an advertising agency, and for 3–4 hours a day I could have a little workstation (a Macintosh SE connected to one of the first LaserWriter printers) all to myself. And there I was, learning QuarkXPress, playing with text and words, getting passionate about user interfaces and the Macintosh in general. It felt like being immersed in an environment that had such an incredible potential. I was thinking of all the possible applications and contexts where machines like that little Macintosh I was using could be utilised to make a difference.
I went on writing but also designing books during my university years, using more powerful Macintosh computers and trying different software solutions. The World Wide Web was coming, and I realised at least part of its future impact already in the early stages, thanks to a chat with the father of a high school mate; he was an engineer working at CERN when Tim Berners-Lee was developing his idea to put hypertext and the Internet together. It was an unforgettable chat that helped me understand what was coming and how big of a deal it would be. And though some of this engineer’s specific predictions didn’t really materialise, there was this moment in our conversation where he would get quiet and with this air of ‘I’m going to say this carefully because it’s a really wild guess so don’t quote me on that’, he said to me: It [the Web] is probably going to be so effective and so ubiquitous it will ruin people’s lives. Well, Mr [REDACTED], here I am, 34 years later, actually quoting you.
The 1990s, my 1990s, were exciting — the Web, the CD-ROM, the multimedia projects, my first mobile phone, my first email address, my first engaging online with people across the world (my parents found my enthusiasm for that somewhat amusing, and reminded me that when I was in secondary school I hated the ‘pen pal initiative’, that involved an exchange of letters with other young students from abroad, and didn’t want anything to do with it). A dear friend of mine suggested I could mix my interest for literature, technology, and my fluency in a second language to do translations as a side job to have more financial independence as I was finishing my studies. Shortly after, it became my main occupation as a freelancer. I translated books, manuals, a lot of assorted tech documentation. I learnt a lot and absorbed a lot. While I still didn’t have a direct involvement in tech like, say, a software developer or a hardware engineer or a computer scientist, my relationship with tech was still pretty much symbiotic. And it felt good. Technology felt like a force for good, an ally that could really improve people’s lives. The huge impact it had on mine certainly felt positive. My job wasn’t making me rich, but it was giving me independence from the corporate world, a world I had experienced for just about 3 years, enough to realise we were tragically incompatible.
In the late 1990s I was an Apple evangelist, just as the company was nearing the abyss and was truly ‘doomed’. But then Steve Jobs saved it, and I found myself riding Apple’s comeback just like a surfer riding this massive wave. Tech-wise, the 2000–2011 years to me probably felt like the Swinging Sixties for the previous generation. The Apple ecosystem was getting stronger, the products were exceptional and fun. Around 2001–2005, my studio was littered with Apple products: an iMac G3, an iBook G3, a 12-inch PowerBook G4, older compact Macs and PowerBooks and peripherals; and when I was on the go I didn’t leave home without my iPod and my Newton MessagePad. I was full-in with Jobs’s vision of ‘the Digital Hub’. During those years, every thing Apple introduced, every direction Apple was taking, felt like genuine progress.
I had to wait one year and a half, and the next iteration of the product, before getting my hands on an iPhone, as the first-generation iPhone that was introduced in 2007 wasn’t available in my country and I didn’t feel like importing one from the US and jailbreaking it. So I had a lot of time to mull over it as I was stuck with a Sony dumbphone and my impatience was growing. As the media was talking about the iPhone success and impact, I couldn’t help but go back to that conversation with my schoolfriend’s dad about the World Wide Web back in late 1991. I couldn’t help thinking of what he had said: It is probably going to be so effective and so ubiquitous it will ruin people’s lives.
Of course it’s not that black-and-white. Of course the argument is nuanced. Of course a third-party iOS developer can chime in and tell me that actually it’s thanks to the iPhone that they’re putting bread on the table, and so forth. But something happened with the introduction of the iPhone. Something was put in motion. A snowball effect. Some kind of Pandora’s Box got opened. The App Store changed software and its value. Whether it’s for the worse or the better depends on where you stand. As a tech-savvy customer, I’m firmly on the for the worse side. The general devaluation of software brought on by the App Store market created the race to the bottom of unsustainable free or $0.99 apps, which in turn created the subsequent whiplash where everything was transformed into a subscription-based service. Whether that turned out to be sustainable depends on where you stand. As a tech-savvy customer, I’m firmly on the unsustainable side.
But these forces that have little to do with technology and technological progress have created two of the worst trends I’ve seen in a while, fused in one single strategy: monetise and weaponise. Putting the absolute pursuit of money and the general product weaponisation before everything else is, from where I stand, the primary cause of the disconnect I’m feeling towards tech today. At least towards most of the mainstream tech.
To be clear, I’m not that naïve and idealistic as to think that money shouldn’t be involved in this business. It always was and it always will be. But the problem today is the way money is involved. It’s all about this quest for infinite growth that has become an obsession in Silicon Valley and environs. It’s a model where a product isn’t created with the goal of being an excellent product people will buy because of its apparent merits and because it clearly has been designed to improve their lives. It’s a model where a product becomes a pretext, becomes bait to lock people in an ecosystem made of other products and of habits that are engineered to keep people hooked. And bait only has to be good enough to do its job.
In a sense, part of technology today has lost its ‘altruistic’ roots I felt it had in decades past. Products increasingly feel like they’re meant not to make your life better, but meant to make Big Tech people’s life better. Not to empower you, but to empower someone else. I miss the days where a new piece of software, or hardware, or even a service felt like a groundbreaking moment and something that could be so useful as to become indispensable and to constitute actual progress. Now I mostly feel distrust. Now I just see shallow hype and find myself routinely asking, What’s the catch? — and if it’s free, what am I actually giving you in return? (Spoiler: personal data, digital profiling).
And as someone who genuinely cares about technological progress, actual progress, it’s disheartening to see the effects of this growth-driven change in tech companies. For not only do a lot of products today feel like customer bait and little else, tech companies are also prioritising their profits over actual tech progress. ‘The future’ has become a trite narrative where technological advancements are little more than hyped concepts or half-baked ideas tech companies want you to believe are the Next Big Thing. Like ‘artificial intelligence’. Steve Jobs famously said that Apple was at its worst when business and marketing guys were at the helm. Well, now marketing people are leading the whole tech industry.
A tech industry that is gasping for air. Since naturally groundbreaking products are nowhere to be seen, the industry is doing its utmost to conjure up some. And big companies are using their legacy and reputation to make people believe that this new snake oil is really miraculous and is really ‘the future’.
I understand that we can’t always live in times of constant innovation. The curve that has been climbing for the past thirty years is flattening a bit, and we’re definitely experiencing a lull, a stabilisation phase after what’s probably been a saturation point. In an ideal world, in a sane market, tech companies would use this somewhat stagnant interval to improve their products, the quality of their software, the quality of their designs, focusing less on quantity and slowing down this mad technological pace they feel they have to maintain. Better quality and more reliability in products would certainly reinforce user loyalty and would unquestionably benefit the relationship with customers as it would help slow down this progressive erosion of trust we’re currently witnessing in various degrees.
This of course would happen if tech companies were to do what they used to do up until the 2010s — prioritise end users, customers, developers and, ultimately, prioritise technology as a means towards a better world for everyone.
What is happening with the monetise & weaponise strategy, instead, is this progressive fracture and disconnect between tech companies and regular people. A disconnect where people at various levels of tech-savvy feel equally at odds with the behaviour of many tech companies. I certainly don’t view tech as an ally or as something that should benefit me or improve my life anymore. More like a user of technology, I increasingly feel used and lied to by it; I feel like a mere instrument that exists to guarantee its survival — a battery, like humans are to machines in The Matrix universe.
And what’s worse is that other industries are getting increasingly comfortable with that monetise & weaponise strategy I was mentioning above. The mainstream gaming industry, which has weaponised fun and entertainment and monetised the hell out of it with online services, microtransactions, and gambling-like tactics that have turned players into ludopaths. The car industry, which has transformed cars into smartphones or tablets on wheels, and showered them with tech gadgets while almost forgetting basic stuff like offering vehicles that are pleasant to drive simply for the sake of driving and that can help people disconnect from a daily routine already drowning in tech and bad habits. Or basic stuff like providing a driving experience that is more focused on security than infotainment systems that distract drivers and passengers, and ‘smart solutions’ that dangerously lull drivers into a false sense of security (hi, Tesla!)
And the advertising industry, of course. Which probably deserves a 3,000-word piece all by itself. An industry that was full of creativity and proper visual art when I first got into it so many years ago, and which has gradually turned into an ever-spreading, intrusive, data-sucking cancer.
All this money-making tactics focused on growth at all costs are making these industries more and more self-absorbed, and are also draining the creative and innovative forces I used to witness in past decades. I see car companies like Renault being praised for introducing cars like the new Renault 4 and Renault 5, whose designs are essentially inspired… by past successful designs. Same with Fiat and Volkswagen. So many industries are weaponising and monetising nostalgia in a desperate search of ‘what used to work to win people over’, instead of trying truly new and fresh approaches. Same with films and TV shows and this ubiquitous insistence on remakes, reboots, prequels, sequels, franchises, and methods of consumption that are entirely focused on hooking the viewers — who cares if a story is original, or if the script is actually well-written and doesn’t insult people’s intelligence.
You may argue that these tactics are mostly working, because the public buys into them and regular people don’t seem really all that bothered with what the tech industry and these other industries are throwing at them today. Well, in part it’s because people really don’t have much choice, and many tend to choose the path of least friction when making tech-based choices — something tech companies are well aware of, given that they have worked relentlessly at eliminating friction for the past 15 years at least. In part the lack of viable choices comes from what I call ‘legacy loyalty’ and ‘legacy lock-in’, like when you hear people say something like, I know Apple is not as good an actor as it used to be, and I don’t like the direction it is going, but I’ve been using Apple products for so many years, I can’t just switch to another platform overnight, or I wish I could get rid of everything Microsoft, but I have to use their stuff at work, and so forth. It’s another thing tech companies have worked a lot to achieve: giving people the idea that changing platforms (and therefore habits) is much more daunting a task than it actually is.
In all this personal limbo made of distrust and uncaring-ness towards tech, I’m trying to find and trying to focus on whatever entity behaves like an exception to the mainstream. I’m trying to focus on products and software applications that are made by people who still care and even feel the same as I do about technology today. Valve’s recently-announced new products (the Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and Steam Frame) look cool and interesting. But what I find most exciting is that they all seem very focused. As in, designed with a specific purpose in mind, and in service of that purpose. Which, frankly, today is an increasingly rare sight in tech. Product design before profit design. No-nonsense offerings instead of hyped solutions. The Steam Frame doesn’t want to ‘revolutionise computing’ or be the perfect vessel for ‘spatial computing’. You can use it to play games from your Steam Library, or for specific VR stuff. That’s it. And it makes me more interested in getting one than the vague and pretentious Vision Pro.
Finally, I’m also trying to educate other people to look past all the vacuous hype tech companies and (some) tech influencers are putting before our noses. I feel I’m in a sort of ‘survival mode’ at present, a luddite who is not against technology, change, and technological progress — despite what some hate-mail writers may think. Rather, my idea of being a luddite is more like someone who keeps advocating that technology should be in our service, and not vice-versa. Technology seems to be on a path of eroding people’s agency, whereas I want people to have more agency and to be less ‘personal data fodder’.
2025-09-16 02:35:06
A first version of this piece was almost ready to be published two days ago, but after writing more than 2,000 words, I grew increasingly angry and exasperated, and that made the article become too meandering and rant-like, so I deleted everything, and started afresh several hours later.
This, of course, is about Awe-dropping, Apple’s September 9 event, where they presented the new iPhone lineup, the new AirPods Pro, and the new Apple Watches. And the honest truth here is that I’m becoming less and less inclined to talk about Apple, because it’s a company that I feel has lost its alignment with me and other long-time Apple users and customers.
The more Apple talks and moves like other big tech companies, the less special it gets; the less special and distinctive it gets, the less I’m interested in finding ways to talk about it. Yes, I have admitted that Apple makes me mad lately, so they still elicit a response that isn’t utter indifference on my part. And yes, you could argue that if Apple makes me mad, it means that in the end I still care.
But things aren’t this clear-cut. I currently don’t really care about Apple — I care that their bad software design decisions and their constant user-interface dumbing down may become trends and get picked up by other tech companies. So, what I still care about that’s related to Apple is essentially the consequences of their actions.
The event kicked off with the famous Steve Jobs quote,
Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
and I immediately felt the whiplash.
Why that quote? Why now, after months of criticism towards the new design æsthetic of Liquid Glass? I gave this choice three possible interpretations — I still may be missing something here; I’m sure my readers will let me know.
I can’t know for sure which of these might be the correct interpretation. I think it heavily depends on whose Apple executive came up with the idea. Whatever the case may be, the effect was the same — it felt really jarring and tone-deaf.
If you’re not new here, you’ll know that these are the Apple products I care the least, together with HomePods and Apple TV. I always tune out when Apple presents these, so browse Apple’s website or go read the technical breakdown elsewhere. Personally, I’m too much into traditional horology and therefore the design of the Apple Watch has always felt unimaginative at best, and plain ugly at worst.
From a UI standpoint, the Apple Watch continues to feel too complicated to use, and too overburdened with features. I wouldn’t say it’s design by committee, but more like designed to appeal to a whole committee. Apple wants the watch to appeal to a wide range of customers, therefore this little device comes stuffed with all kinds of bells and whistles. As I said more than once, the real feature I would love to see implemented is the ability to just turn off entire feature sets, so that if you only want to use it as a step counter and heart rate monitor, you can tell the watch to be just that; this would be more than just having a watchface that shows you time, steps, heart rate — it would be like having a watch that does only that. With all the features you deem unnecessary effectively disabled, imagine how simpler interacting with it would be, and imagine how longer its battery life would be.
What really got on my nerves during the Apple Watch segment of the event, though, is this: Apple always, always inserts a montage of sob stories about how the Apple Watch has saved lives, and what an indispensable life-saving device it is. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad those lives were saved. But this kind of ‘showcase’ every year is made in such poor taste. It’s clear to me that it’s all marketing above everything else, that they just want to sell the product, and these people’s stories end up being used as a marketing tactic. It’s depressing.
As for the AirPods, and true wireless earbuds in general, I find this product category to be the most wasteful. Unless someone comes up with a type of earbuds that have easily replaceable batteries, I’m not interested in buying something that’s bound to become e‑waste in a relatively short period of time.
Don’t buy them. Don’t waste your money, unless you have money to waste and don’t care about a company with this kind of leadership. Read How Tim Cook sold out Steve Jobs by Anil Dash to understand how I feel. I couldn’t have said it better myself.
I’d wrap up my article here, but then I’d receive a lot of emails asking me why I didn’t talk about the iPhones, so here are a few stray observations:
One, maybe involuntary, user-friendly move Apple did with this new iPhone lineup is that now we have three very distinct iPhone models, whose nature and price should really help people decide which to purchase.
The regular iPhone 17 is the safe, iterative solution. It looks like an iPhone 16, it works like an iPhone 16 that has now better features. It’s the ideal phone for the average user (tech-savvy or not). It’s the safe choice and the best value iPhone overall.
The iPhone 17 Pro is possibly the most Pro iPhone to date. During its presentation, I felt like Apple wants you to consider this more like a pro camera for videographers and filmmakers rather than just a smartphone with a good camera array. People who have no use for all these pro video recording features shouldn’t waste their money on it. Unless they want a big chunky iPhone with the best camera array and/or have money to burn. In my country (Spain), the 6.3‑inch iPhone 17 Pro starts at €1,319 with 256GB of storage, and goes up to €1,819 with 1TB of storage. For the bigger iPhone 17 Pro, those prices become €1,469 and €1,969 respectively, and if you want the iPhone 17 Pro Max with 2TB of storage, it’ll cost you €2,469. You do you, but I think these are insane prices for phones (and SSDs).
The iPhone Air is just… odd. I was curious to know about other techies’ reactions, and of all the major tech YouTubers, I think the one I’m agreeing the most on their first impressions of the iPhone Air is Marques Brownlee. At this point in his video, he says:
I really think this phone is gonna be a hard sell, because if you subtract emotions from it, it’s just… the worst one. This is gonna jump in the lineup at $999 — it replaces essentially the Plus phones in the lineup — and it is surrounded by other iPhones that are better than it in basically every way, other than being super thin and light. So it’s a fascinating gamble.
This phone has the same A19 Pro chip in it as the Pro phones, minus one GPU core. Interesting choice: apparently it’s a bit more efficient than the base A19, so that’s good for battery life. But we also just heard a whole long list of choices Apple made with the Pro phones to make them more thermally efficient to not overheat — switching from titanium to aluminium, and adding a vapour chamber to the back. But this phone is still titanium, and absolutely does not have room for an advanced thermal solution or any sort of vapour chamber, so it sounds like this phone could get much hotter and throttle performance much quicker. It’s a red flag.
Now we also know that ultra-thin phones have a tendency to be a little bit less durable. They’ve bent over the years. And I’m not gonna be the first one to point this out. […] And Apple of course has thought about this. They’ve for sure tested this, and they’re telling us it’s the most durable iPhone ever. But, I mean, I’m looking at the phone and I think it qualifies also as a red flag. And then we already know there is just no way battery life can be good on this phone, right? There’s just no way. I’ve been reviewing phones for more than a decade, and all signs point to it being trash.
There was a slide in the keynote today about how they were still proud to achieve ‘all-day battery life’. But, like, come on. Really? I mean they still do the thing where they rearranged the components up into the little plateau at the top to make room for more battery at the bottom. But there’s just absolutely not enough room in this phone for a large battery. And it doesn’t appear to be silicon-carbon, or any sort of a special ultra-high density battery.
And Apple also announced it alongside a special dedicated MagSafe battery accessory, just for this phone, that adds 3,149 mAh, and just barely, combined, will match the 17 Pro in terms of quoted video playback. So if that doesn’t scream red flag, I don’t know what to tell you.
It is also e‑SIM-only, globally, ’cause there’s no room in any version of this phone for a plastic SIM card. There’s also no millimeter-wave 5G. And like I said, it’s coming in at $1,000, which is more expensive than the base iPhone, which will have a better camera system, and better battery life, and may overheat less.
So look, I think there’s two ways to look at this phone. This is either Apple just throwing something new at the wall and seeing if it sticks. […] Or you can see this as a visionary, long-time-in-the-making preview at the future of all phones. Like, maybe someday in the future every phone will be this thin. And Apple is just now, today, getting the tech together with the battery and display and modem and Apple Silicon to make this phone possible. Maybe kind of like how the first MacBook Air sucked, and was underpowered, but then eventually all laptops became that thin. Maybe that’s also what’s gonna happen to smartphones. And maybe the same way Samsung made the ultra-thin S25 Edge, and then a few months later they came out with their super-thin foldable, the Z Fold7, and I felt like the Edge phone was one half of that foldable. Maybe that’s also what Apple’s doing. Maybe we’re gonna see an ultra-thin foldable iPhone next year. Maybe.
Yeah, I’m firmly in the “Apple throwing something new at the wall and seeing if it sticks” camp. Because what’s that innovative in having thin smartphones? What’s the usefulness when the other two dimensions keep increasing? Making a thin and light and relatively compact MacBook and calling it ‘Air’ made sense back when virtually no other laptop was that thin and light. It was, and is, a great solution for when you’re out and about or travelling, and space is at a premium; and you also don’t want a bulky computer to lug around.
Then Apple applied the ‘Air’ moniker to the iPad, and that started to make less sense. It’s not that a regular or Pro iPad were and are that cumbersome to begin with. And then Apple felt the need to have MacBook Airs that are 13- and 15-inch in size, instead of 11- and 13-inch. A 15-inch MacBook Air makes little sense, too, as an ‘Air’ laptop. It may be somewhat thin, somewhat light, but it’s not exactly compact.
And now we have the iPhone Air — which is just thin for thinness’ sake. It’s still a big 6.5‑inch phone that’s hardly pocketable. I still happen to handle and use a few older iPhones in the household, and the dimensions of the iPhone 5/5S/SE make this iPhone more ‘Air’ than the iPhone Air. If you want a slightly more recent example, the iPhone 12 mini and 13 mini have the real lightness that could make sense in a phone. Perhaps you’ll once again remind me that the iPhone 12 mini and 13 mini weren’t a success, but I keep finding people telling me they would favour a more compact phone than a big-but-thin phone. I’ll be truly surprised if the iPhone Air turns out to be a bigger success than the ‘mini’ iPhones. It is a striking device in person, no doubt, but once this first impact is gone and you start thinking it over and making your decision, what Marques Brownlee said above is kind of hard to deny.
Also, I find the whole MagSafe battery accessory affair particularly hilarious. Apple creates a super-thin, super-light phone, proudly showcases its striking design, and immediately neutralises this bold move and thin design by offering an accessory 1) that you’ll clearly need if you want to have a decently-lasting battery (thus admitting that that thinness certainly came with an important compromise); and 2) that instantly defeats the purpose of a thin design by returning the bulk that was shaved away in making the phone.
I found a lot of reactions to these products to be weirdly optimistic. Either I’m becoming more cynical with age and general tech fatigue, or certain people are easily impressed. What usually impresses me is some technological breakthrough I didn’t see coming, or a clever new device, or some clever system software features and applications that give new purposes to a device I’ve known well for a while. This event, and what was presented, didn’t show any of this.
Didn’t you expect Apple to be able to produce yet another iteration of Apple Watches and AirPods that were better than the previous one? Didn’t you expect Apple to be able to make a unibody iPhone after years of making unibody computers? Didn’t you expect Apple to be able to have iPhones with better cameras and recording capabilities than last year’s iPhones? Didn’t you expect Apple to be able to make a thinner iPhone? To come up with better chips? Or a vapour chamber to prevent overheating? Or a ‘centre stage’ feature for the selfie camera? Are these things I should be in awe of?
I will probably be genuinely amazed when Apple is finally able to come up with a solution that entirely removes the dynamic island from the front of the iPhone while still having a front-facing camera up there.
I’ll be similarly amazed when Apple finally gets rid of people who have shown to know very little about software design and user interfaces, and comes up with operating systems that are, once again, intuitive, discoverable, easy to use, and that both look and work well. Because the iOS, iPadOS, and Mac OS 26 releases are not it — and these new iPhones might be awe-inspiring all you want, but you’ll still have to deal with iOS 26 on them. These new iPhones may have a fantastic hardware and all, but what makes any hardware tick is the software. You’ve probably heard that famous quote by Alan Kay, People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware. Steve Jobs himself quoted it, adding that “this is how we feel about it” at his Apple. Today’s Apple needs to hear a revised version of that quote, something like, People who are this serious about their hardware should make better software for it.
The level of good-enough-ism Apple has reached today in software is downright baffling. This widening gap between their hardware and software competence is going to be really damaging if the course isn’t corrected. The tight integration between hardware and software has always been what made Apple platforms stand out. This integration is going to get lost if Apple keeps having wizards for hardware engineers on one side, and software and UI people producing amateurish results on the other side. Relying on legacy and unquestioning fanpeople, for whom everything Apple does is good and awesome and there’s nothing wrong with it, can only go so far. Steve Jobs always knew that software is comparatively more important than the hardware. In a 1994 interview with Jeff Goodell, published by Rolling Stone in 2010 (archived link), Jobs said:
The problem is, in hardware you can’t build a computer that’s twice as good as anyone else’s anymore. Too many people know how to do it. You’re lucky if you can do one that’s one and a third times better or one and a half times better. And then it’s only six months before everybody else catches up. But you can do it in software.
But not if you keep crippling it because you want to bring all your major platforms to the lowest common denominator.
2025-08-27 06:53:26
Ever since publishing my three articles criticising Apple’s Liquid Glass redesign, I’ve been getting a lot of reaction and feedback emails. A lot. More than when I published my four-part series of articles criticising Mac OS 10.15 Catalina back in 2019–2020. In one of the most recent emails I’ve received, the sender wrote this about me: You’re the Rust Cohle of tech commentary. If you haven’t watched the first season of True Detective, you probably won’t get the reference. Reading the complete background on Rust Cohle in the dedicated Wikipedia entry, one would think that this comparison isn’t one of the most flattering. But I guess one doesn’t have to dig too deep. I assume the sender of that email wants to reference the character’s cynicism and the charismatic way he delivers his views. I take it as a compliment. I don’t have a tragic past and am not an alcoholic. I used to smoke. Now it’s just some occasional pipe smoking.
Time for a break. A break that breaks my one-month silence here, but still a break. Like when at work there’s mostly a somber and awkwardly quiet atmosphere, then someone says, Let’s talk outside.
But about what?
August, which in my corner of the world is usually considered the summer holidays month, has been mostly spent listlessly surviving being stewed either by the excess heat or, sometimes, excess humidity. I’ve worked but also had time to do a quick check-up of most of my vintage computers — at least those I still manage to routinely use. And most still work. The one glaring fatality was promptly replaced after a surgical strike on eBay. As it often happens, the replacement turned out to be twice better in specs, and almost half the investment compared to the replaced machine.
Ah, tech. What’s there to talk about now?
Not much, to be honest. One day, nothing feels wrong. The day after, nothing feels right. It’s a pendulum. There’s a growing disconnect between the games big tech and billionaires are playing in their Mount Olympus, and the street-level, home-level, studio-level everyday tech made of our little tools, our rants-in-a-box on social media, our debates and defence of such tools or ecosystems, whether it’s against a fanboy, or someone who isn’t enough of a fanboy, or even a company’s attempt at reshaping those tools in ways that fit more the company’s grand strategy than the end user’s needs.
In those days where nothing feels wrong, you’re just doing your things at your desk in front of your computer and you think about big tech and the billionaires and their games and you’re like, Just play your stupid games and leave me alone, I have real work to do. You’re feeling equally unfazed by all the ‘AI’ hype. Let them believe that an LLM ‘reasons’ and that ChatGPT ‘thinks’ and it’s a great companion that understands you. Let them allow their delusions to drive their cars until they inevitably crash and burn. You can’t do much against the overwhelming stupidity. You have just enough energy to carry on with your stuff, so if today stupidity loses a bit with an own goal, well, you can’t complain too much.
When nothing feels right, you feel friction — the bad friction — everywhere. At the personal level, you realise for instance that you can’t trust Apple anymore to keep providing the same quality software environment you’ve depended on for years, because the people who cared about providing that kind of software are gone, and the people who are present now simply throw their sandbox visual experiments at your face, and while they consider their work done, they don’t give a shit about your work. The user interface and user interaction experts are nowhere to be found — these are aspiring interior designers, and their idea of user interface is the back cover blurb of a book on feng shui.
So, no, you look at this Mac OS abomination and you sigh, realising that no, you can’t upgrade to it. You just can’t. The cost-benefit analysis is quickly over, you don’t even need pen and napkin. The cost is unnecessarily high, the benefits are non-existent. Where are the It’s just a beta! people? Time’s running out. This beta doesn’t look that much different from the first beta. The die is cast. You get back to your internal monologue. You think, This is another Yosemite moment, I can wait it out and hope history repeats itself and in late 2026 we get another El Capitan.
But this time nothing feels right. You look at those stupid transparency effects, at the thoughtless UI decisions and you wonder, What if they haven’t reached the bottom of the barrel yet? What if the spiral still moves downward for a while? What if they keep removing all the meat from Mac OS until there’s just bone? Meanwhile, people working with this operating system have to accept the spoon-feeding, otherwise sooner or later they’re going to be cut off via planned software obsolescence.
When nothing feels right, you remember that quote from the WarGames film — “The only winning move is not to play” — and actually you feel like you’re damned if you play, damned if you don’t.
And all this thinking about cost and benefits reminds you of the ‘artificial intelligence’ problem. Of the ‘AI’ tech industry games, of people like Sam Altman who wants to (and likely will) raise billions of dollars to develop some NothingBurger AI that will be marginally more capable of writing up a stupid summary for you while its data centres consume millions of litres of fresh water and gigawatts of electricity. All while the utter morons who endorse and spread the ‘AI’ credo keep spewing utter nonsense about ‘AI’ being the solution to problems that could be resolved with 1/100th of the resources burnt to maintain chatbots, and 100 times the common sense. People so invested in this shit that they truly believe in the ‘intelligence’ part of ‘artificial intelligence’ — and that’s because to a complete idiot, everything seems intelligent.
Will real intelligence prevail? It’s another good day, you still feel some hope for humanity. You’re a humanist after all. You’re back to work, you’re back to your plans for the rest of the week, you skim through your RSS feeds with the confidence of someone who has learnt the art of not giving a shit; in a good way, though — it isn’t ‘not caring’, it’s more like ‘letting this rain roll down my raincoat’; you like the rain but don’t like getting soaked, especially when the things you read online are acid rain and you don’t want it to dissolve your mental health.
(It’s a smoke break, bear with the mixed metaphors).
You feel again in control for a while. You understand that you have to find your particular thrill if you care about tech. You have to find it, not let a company tell you what it is and where to find it. You understand that the only entity having your interests at heart out there is yourself. And maybe a scrappy band of software developers and small tech companies. You understand that the best ecosystem is the one you take care of yourself. You see past all the convenience tech throws at you, and you feel that, at the end of the day, you’re not that busy to delegate everything to some tool or tools. You feel you prefer finding yourself, not losing yourself in all this. You look at the physical and digital stuff surrounding you in your home office and start mentally putting labels on everything — labels like I did choose this and This was a mistake and That was the result of peer pressure and I was fooled into believing I needed this and— you know.
– What did you want to talk about?
– Will we survive these dystopian times?
– As long as we keep this “I won’t act on [issue] until it affects me directly” mindset — at any level — nothing will change. The rich will keep getting away with it. The powerful will keep getting away with it while pushing their agendas. Individualism can be useful when growing up. You have to learn to be self-sufficient in many situations. But the sense of community, society, common good is an equally important value in our toolkit. We have to preserve it at all costs. We have to keep caring.
– Thanks for the chat.
– Anytime.
New email notification.
Hi Rick. Just a quick message to tell you I’ve read your pieces on Liquid Glass and it was an illuminating read. I didn’t agree on everything, but many points you made had me stop and ponder these matters more seriously…
Back to communicating. (Look up the etymology of communicate).
2025-07-20 00:34:38
Ever since Manuel Moreale contacted me and asked me for an interview for his People & Blogs series (it’s here, if you want to read it), I’ve followed his blog with interest and pleasure. From what I’ve read so far, we share similar views on technology and related matters, and reading his posts has me nodding along most of the time.
One of his recent pieces, On using Apple products, hit differently. It’s not that I disagree with him, but I feel it’s worth building on it and looking at it from a broader perspective. I very much sympathise with the general sentiment when — after explaining that he is an Apple customer and uses Apple products — he writes:
Because all these I listed are tools, tools that I replace if and when I have to upgrade, either because they break down or because they no longer do what I need them to do. I don’t give a shit about Apple the company, the same way I don’t give a shit about any other company. Most of my time in front of this screen is spent using software not built by Apple, often by independent developers and small studios. I care about them. But Apple? Nah.
I also agree with this, which he writes in the next paragraph:
Tools are tools; they either do the job you need them to do or they don’t.
In fact, I’d say this is the central point of the post. We choose and use the tools that are most suitable for us and for what we have to do (work) and what we like to do (leisure and personal projects) — it doesn’t mean we have to care about the companies that make them, right? Manuel says so himself immediately after:
And the sad reality of this world we live in is that most big companies out there are awful. If you spend some time digging, you’ll find despicable things done by probably 99% of CEOs of big companies.
If I find out that the Volvo CEO is eating babies in their spare time, what should I do? Sell my car? Do I need to check if the Suunto CEO is a piece of shit to make sure I can wear this watch on my wrist and still feel at peace with myself? Frankly, I think it’s an exhausting way to live a life, and I’d be better off focusing all those energies somewhere else, trying to make something good, something that has a positive impact on the people around me.
I’ve joked about this kind of frustration myself on Mastodon, even before Manuel published his piece:
“Don’t use this company’s services, the company gives money to right-wing morons.”
“Don’t use that company’s product, the company doesn’t support clean energy.”
“Don’t subscribe to that! It’s a centralised solution and who knows what’s gonna happen to your data!”
“Don’t download that app! The company’s CEO is an AI worshipper and backed a memecoin!”
“Don’t—”
Me: “You know what? I’ll just switch back to this:”
[Picture of an old Nokia 3310 dumbphone]
“Digital minimalism is not the answer!”
Me: I’m tired.
Here’s where things gets complicated for me. A lot of people share Manuel’s sentiments and attitude. Myself included — to an extent. And the problem is that if we want things to change in technology, it’s necessary to start reflecting on our attitude and considering whether perhaps we should care a bit more about the companies that make the products we use.
That’s why I always chuckle bitterly when I hear people say We should vote with our wallet, meaning we can sort of change the course of a company’s success by refusing to buy whatever said company shoves in our faces. It’s not going to happen. Because, deep down, we don’t care. When we take the stance of I only care about what are the best tools for me, I don’t care about the companies that make them, it’s this not caring and this selfishness what makes these companies ‘win’, and what makes these companies too big to fail. And ultimately what makes the status quo so hard to change.
Even our selfishness as users and customers — what makes us feel better about the choices we make or the choices we don’t make — is turned against us, in a sense.
Changing things is hard, requires time and energy to do our homework before purchasing a product or subscribing to a service, and often requires introducing friction in our lives — because we have to learn to use a different tool, a different operating system; we have to create new habits and different workflows, even. And tech companies know people hate friction. Everything I’ve seen in tech for the past 25 years or so has been aimed at eliminating friction in a way or another. The more convenience you give people, the more change-averse you make them.
Before saying that Tools are tools; they either do the job you need them to do or they don’t, Manuel writes:
Could I switch away from Apple? Sure, I could ditch my iPhone and buy another phone, and I could ditch my Mac and buy a laptop with Linux, I guess. But the only thing I’d be accomplishing is to make life easier for myself, and I’d also stop using software developed by those developers I care about. And also, nobody would care. Because nobody should.
When it’s virtue-signalling, I agree, nobody should care. But the more time passes, the more I’m convinced that people should start caring more about this stuff. Especially those who routinely moan and complain about Big Tech while also continuing to use Big Tech products because [insert reasons/excuses here].
If you think I’m taking the high moral ground here, I’m not. I’ve been gradually disappointed and dissatisfied with technology in general, and Apple in particular, for the past decade or so. I’ve been more and more critical about Apple’s design choices and general direction. Cook’s $1M donation to Donald Trump angered me immensely, and I decided right then and there to stop giving my money to this company for the foreseeable future unless something radically changes at Apple’s executive level (I doubt it).
At the same time, I’m not in a position to exit the Apple ecosystem on a whim. Most of my work consists of localising Mac OS and iOS/iPadOS apps. Often, after an app has been localised in the target language, I’m asked to test the app to see if the translated interface is fine or if some strings need adjusting. This requires having around at least one Mac and one iOS device that are reasonably updated. On a personal level, I’ve been using Macs for decades. I have different projects and materials scattered across a variety of Macs. Fortunately I can still work on those projects using older Macs and older versions of Mac OS I actually enjoy using.
But I’m trying to change my attitude towards this stuff, even if it means introducing more friction in my workflows. I’m trying to focus on companies that seem genuinely interested in going against the big players and in providing users with alternatives that are more environmentally conscious and more on the customer’s side when it comes to warranties, sustainability and repairability. In this regard, companies like Framework and Fairphone look like very good candidates to me. It’s in this direction I would like to move in my future tech purchases, and if I must buy an upgraded Mac or iOS device for work, it’s going to be a second-hand machine. Less e‑waste, and one fewer unit sold by Apple.
And the sad reality of this world we live in is that most big companies out there are awful.
The sad reality is that these companies will keep being relevant and awful as long as people maintain this shrugging Watcha gonna do? attitude. It’s an extremely hard battle — the good, uncorrupted alternatives are few and may look a bit arcane or abstruse. Choosing Linux, for example, looks daunting to a lot of people, especially those who are not tech-savvy. And even those who are tech-savvy aren’t thrilled to start anew with a different operating system; they don’t particularly like to be novices again. This is the friction. Hopefully, however, it’s friction that hits the hardest only at the beginning of the journey. I didn’t think I could switch to an Android phone as primary phone, but the discomfort only lasted so much. I didn’t think I could ‘get’ Linux, now I think I ‘get’ it more than five years ago. (My Linux journey is still in the first stages, mind you, but it has begun).
Just like Manuel doesn’t judge those who do differently than he does, I’m not really passing judgment here either. I’m not criticising Manuel specifically. I’m simply observing that, at the individual level, this kind of selfish pragmatism (I care for the tools and focus on them, I don’t care for Apple or Microsoft or Google or Meta, etc.) is undoubtedly understandable. And for some people it isn’t even a matter of being selfish, as they may not have the luxury of cherry-picking the software or the hardware manufacturer of the tools they use or have to use.
At the same time, though, whether people care or not about tech companies, they end up purchasing their products, and perpetuate a vicious circle at the macro level: these companies remain in business, thrive, and grow. And keep being bad actors. That’s why I’m always glad when there’s governmental regulation aimed at protecting the citizens and customers. But that’s not enough.
I’m perfectly aware that today it feels that our choices — especially the ‘good’ ones, the responsible ones — don’t seem to matter. I understand my friend who tells me, Oh, I’d love to ditch WhatsApp and switch to Signal, or get a Linux laptop, but in the grand scheme of things, what difference does it make? But then don’t be surprised if, say, Apple keeps making billions of dollars despite their design blunders or mediocre software. Or don’t be angry that 90% of technology today is shaped and controlled by a handful of stupidly rich and powerful companies. Change — if that’s what you want — isn’t coming from the top. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, are not going to fail on their own. It’s a matter of tough personal decisions and it’s a matter of evangelising such decisions — constantly. All while these companies count on our natural selfishness and love of convenience as their life support.
