A little over two years ago, I first started experiencing weird happenings. I would grab my laptop, sit on the couch or at my desk ready to write a blog post, and a little while later, I would catch myself answering work emails or updating things on our website. Without realising it, I had stopped writing, if I even started at all, and had begun working full-on when I should have been switched off. At that time, I tried to split things up; it never worked, and I am back to feeling frustrated.
I have one computer for everything. At this point, it’s a 16" M3 MacBook Pro, provided by my company, and for work things, I wouldn’t have it any other way. My hybrid setup means I can work at home from my desk and monitor, I can take it with me to my office, or be just as happy working in a coffee shop. The issues only arise when I want to do some personal things, and my work things are always right in front of my face.
The internal debate on using an iPad for my ‘creative’ work was sparked last time by Josh Ginter, but if I am honest, I don’t want to open that can of worms again. I do have an 11" iPad that very rarely sees any use, and a few iPadOS updates later, it sits in exactly the same place it always has. However, I noted Matt Birchler missing his iPad a few days ago, and he has an important point to consider.
I think the iPad Pro might subconsciously give me unrealistic expectations for how much I need to get out of the iPad.
When you spend as much as a laptop on an iPad Pro with a keyboard and pencil like Apple tells you to, it gives you a lot of false expectations. As a user, you now have to justify all that expense by seeing a return, and the iPad just isn’t up to the job. I can do all the things I need to do with writing and photography on an iPad, but I have to spend my time hacking my way there. Which is fine until Apple breaks something, and I’m back to square one.
Which leads me on to my second point, really. In many ways, my iPhone is my ‘creative computer.’ I write a lot of my blog posts on it, nearly always edit photos on it, and Apple seems to take more care with the OS, so things rarely break. You may consider iPadOS and iOS one and the same; however, there have been many instances where the shortcuts my business relies on have broken on an iPad yet continue to work on iOS.
This feeling of relying on my phone doesn’t fill me with confidence. If you’ve read more than one of my posts, you will know I yearn for a smartphone-free life. Yet, I feel content in the fact that it fulfils an important role in my life—it costs about as much as an iPad Pro, so it should! This post didn’t start off as a way to justify my iPhone. I’ve tried to do that before, but more of an appreciation of the work it does for me. It’s easy to be down on using your smartphone, and you should be aware of it, but users aren’t always scrolling through social media. They just might be doing their work.
When I read philosophy, it nearly always gets me thinking about technology. Not because I am obsessed with it, or that it occupies all of my thoughts, but because I don’t really have any other vices to solve. I mean, I probably do, but my usage of technology is one of the only things I seek a solution for. Which usually means I moan about it on my blog, or I shut myself off from it. Which is completely the wrong approach.
Show us these things, so we can see that you truly have learned from the philosophers ~ Epictetus, Discourses 3.21.5-6
When Epictetus writes ‘show us these things,’ he means the rest of your life. He refers to eating, drinking, suffering abuse, having children, all of the things that you expect to fill your life with. Only amongst all of these ‘normal’ things will you really show your true values and morals. You, and those around you, will be able to judge if your values are true only with, and against, action.
It is easy to be a virtuous man if you shut yourself off from the world. Never having temptation nor the opportunity to test yourself. The Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, came from the riches of royal parents and was content with nothing. Jesus walked with sinners, thieves, and prostitutes, yet knew himself. The list of people that became great whilst living in the world is endless, yet the temptation to shut out everything is a powerful one. The problem becomes when your outlook on the world is never tested, they are never hardened or broken by the world.
How does this relate to technology, you might be wondering? Well, this all boils down to my constant desire to remove it from my life. I don’t want a smartphone, yet I need one. I don’t want to use social media much, yet it brings me much needed interaction. I am still walking the path to self-discovery and, as I have written about before, the knee-jerk reaction is to remove all of the things that I use, get a smaller phone, or a dumb phone and wait for the changes to happen.
Yet they never do. Because the fix is not removing the desire; it is ensuring you no longer desire it. I can happily sit in a pub surrounded by drunk people, and a drop will not pass my lips - because the desire has been removed from my life. I could take an entire busload of people to McDonald’s and not order a thing, but take me to a shop selling technology and my cup may very well overflow. When I can sit and watch an Apple keynote and not order a thing, that will be peace, my friends.
Mr Mobile review of a product I had my eye on for meeting notes, the Plaud Note:
Finally, there’s the question you really have to ask with any product like this. What company am I entrusting with these potentially sensitive recordings? Well, answering that led me down a fascinating rabbit hole into the world of so called registered agents, which are essentially companies that allow certain types of businesses to operate by giving them a physical address for legal purposes…in Wyoming, registered agents don’t seem to need to do any kind of vetting of the companies they represent.
This was not the way I expected the review to end, but it raised an interesting point. There is no claim of anything fishy going on with Plaid, but things like this are why I really love Michael’s reviews. He thinks deeper than most people would about a product that receives masses of our own, and other people’s, data.
Of course, he also raises this about the dozens of phones we do the same with, but this company in question is a bit of an enigma. Of course, if you want to achieve the same result, the alternative is to hand this data to Google or (Not so) OpenAI; however, I think I trust them more.
The type of data I would hand over using the Plaud Note would be personally and business sensitive, and I don’t think anyone should be doing this without knowing exactly who is processing it. With an endless sea of data brokers, that might not be 100% possible, but not knowing who the OEM is in the first place, hard pass from me.
Matt Birchler, writing about the technology used in wristbands at concerts:
Whenever a company says, “We’re using AI to enhance our product,” ask them for specifics. Often, it’s either complete nonsense or something so minor that it’s essentially doing nothing. It’s not always the case, but I think you’d be surprised how much “AI” is mentioned in product marketing as nothing more than a marketing tool to look modern.
The piece linked by Matt is incredibly interesting, but this is the part that resonated with me and confirmed what I’ve suspected for a while. Now that everything is marketed as having AI, I am more convinced than ever that hardly anything actually utilises any type of AI. I’ve seen companies make claims about their products that amount to nothing more than a bunch of IF statements in their code.
I mean, sure, that’s essentially what generative AI is if you zoom out enough and reduce it to its simplest structure, but a significant portion of these products marketed as using AI absolutely do not use AI in the generally accepted sense.
There’s also a deeper, more fascinating shift in our collective psychology occurring. The assumption that even fairly simple gadgets are advanced electronics is a downstream result of all the marketing hype. I am often amazed by what people attribute to the extraordinary, which could be explained quite simply. The wizardry and witchcraft that once filled the gaps in our understanding are now labeled as AI, when in reality, hardly any intelligence is involved at all.