inphiltrate nonfiction

No matter where you stand on iOS versus Android or MacOS versus Windows or really Apple versus any other ecosystem, there is a universal truth that we can pretty much all get behind:

Siri sucks.

Techpinions recently posted an article on iPhone X customer satisfaction, and the graph details this truth pretty brutally – consumers are super happy with the iPhone X in every aspect except for Siri.  This has prompted a lot of extra opining on the subject lately by tech journalists, so naturally I couldn’t resist jumping into the fray myself.

I’ve mentioned before that I don’t feel like tech journalists understand the plight of regular people, since most of them exist in a bubble in which they live and breathe any and all tech, which divorces them from reality at times.  This is another of those cases, because over and over again, when I hear tech journalists complain about Siri, it’s always something along the lines of, “Siri sucks because it doesn’t have enough access to your data.”  I have no idea where they are drawing this conclusion from, but it always drives the conversation to what Apple can give Siri access to in order to make it better, which is a terrible assertion and the wrong direction for the conversation to go in entirely.

Siri doesn’t need additional access to be better; Siri just needs to work, period.  The only thing Siri is okay at right now is setting reminders/timers, sending text messages, and controlling HomeKit accessories.  And while Siri is good at those things, even some simple commands throw it for a loop.  As I understand it, commands given to Siri get send to one of multiple Siri processing servers at Apple, and then a result is returned.  Sometimes, it feels like the fate of your command is dependent on which server it hits, because 9 out of 10 times, your command will process and work properly, but the 10th time, it won’t.

One wacky personal example of this was when my wife and I were headed on a weekend getaway to the mountains.  I activated Siri and said, “Give me directions to Lake Lure, North Carolina,” and consistently, multiple times in a row, it returned directions to a completely unrelated town in a totally different state.  There was no rhyme or reason to this.  This town didn’t sound anything like my command, Siri just straight up failed to get anything about my request correct other than that I wanted directions to a place.  Siri has navigated me to Lake Lure multiple times with no issue, but in this instance, it gave a completely bizarre response.

And it’s not just stupid failures of the server that make Siri dumb; she’s literally unable to do requests that feel totally obvious.

“Hey Siri, turn on the flashlight.”

“Sorry, I’m unable to do that.”

“Hey Siri, take a selfie.”

*opens the front facing camera, doesn’t take a picture*

These are both on-device commands which pose little to no privacy concerns.

Then, there’s one of the biggest complaints about Siri – general knowledge questions.  I’m not talking personal data, I’m talking, “What is the name of those gates in Japan?”  For this type of question, Siri will just do a Google search and display the top results.  The correct result is at the top, but this is entirely not useful if I’m driving or if I ask a HomePod or if I’m across the room.  Google Assistant, on the other hand, responds verbally with the correct answer and some information from Wikipedia, correctly identifying the answer to my question as “torii.”

Take note again, that question was not context based, nor did it require any sort of permissions to my personal data.  It was simply a request to find some basic data on the web.  Sure, I can ask Siri how tall Natalie Portman is, and she’ll answer, but that’s just par for the course.  If I can ask that, I should be able to ask other general knowledge questions like I can with Google Assistant, and the fact that Siri only sometimes knows the answer to my questions makes me less likely to try it for new things.

Why waste my time attempting to see if Siri will tell me what the fastest production car in the world is when it’s so inconsistent with literally everything else?  It will (surprisingly) answer that question, by the way, which is the saddest part of this situation.  Siri can do a lot of things that people don’t know about, but none of us are willing to waste our time with trying because of how often it ends up being a waste of time.

Quite frankly, I don’t care if Siri can’t tell me information about flights I booked or if it can’t give me contextual information based on the website I’m currently looking at.  Lacking the ability to do both of those things, which Google Assistant can do, is not why Siri sucks.  The fact that Siri keeps more data on device is great for users that care deeply about privacy, and I don’t think that’s something needs to change.

Making Siri better is not a matter of privacy versus convenience; it’s a matter of getting consistent performance, being able to do the things that you’d expect of a smart assistant (within the focused space of on-device privacy), and becoming better at answering general knowledge questions.

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Apple held an education event on March 27th, which is probably not a surprise to anyone reading this, nor is it any sort of breaking news that the biggest thing to come out of the event was a new 6th generation iPad with Apple Pencil support aimed at the education market.  This iPad is very similar to the low-cost, $329 iPad that was introduced last year, with a bump from an A8 to an A10 (not A10X) processor in addition to the aforementioned pencil support.  This new iPad still has a non-laminated display (which means there’s a small air gap), lacks ProMotion (Apple’s adaptive refresh rate technology that goes up to 120Hz), and doesn’t have the smart connector to snap a keyboard on, but for half the price of an iPad Pro, I do think it’s quite a bit more than half of the iPad Pro.

I don’t think a review of this iPad is super necessary, because anyone that buys one knows exactly what they’re getting – a really good iPad at a much easier to digest price point.  Again, it’s not the best iPad experience, just a really good one.  But this event wasn’t targeted to consumers, it was targeted to education, the market in which Apple (and Microsoft) are losing serious ground to Google on thanks to low-cost, easy to manage Chromebooks and Google Education offerings.

Apple’s sell on this new iPad was to this specific market.  For educators, the new iPad is discounted to $299 and the Apple Pencil to $89 (because of course, it’s not included).  There was a host of updates to iWork, including some fancy new annotations with the Pencil, announcements of 200GB of iCloud storage per student account, and a few other creative-type things relating to AR and eBooks, but the main takeaway here is that Apple wants to make their offering clear to the education market.

This is an opportunity to not only sell iPads, but to get kids in front of iPads that may otherwise not have been exposed to them, which could create a positive brand association down the line, ensuring future sales.  If that sounds dumb, my elementary school had Apple II’s and old Macintosh desktops, and when my parents bought my first computer (a Packard Bell running Windows 3.11), I was a little upset that it wasn’t one of the ones we had at school.  Granted, many kids today grow up with tablets, whereas kids from my generation probably didn’t have a computer at home until the late 90’s.

From a school’s perspective, there’s very little doubt that Chromebooks are still a cheaper option.  For the price of an iPad alone, you can get a pretty decent Chromebook with money to spare.  It may or may not have a touchscreen, but what it will have is a keyboard, and it won’t be nearly as fragile, which means it’s ready to go.  Apple’s big sell was pretty heavily reliant on the Pencil (or the $49, education-only Logitech “Crayon” that will be launching soon), and that still doesn’t include a Bluetooth keyboard to type on (since this iPad lacks a smart connector) or a protective case.

Speaking on terms of price alone, the Chromebook clearly wins, but Apple’s vision for the product goes quite a bit beyond the traditional idea of a computer in the classroom (and of course, Apple simply doesn’t compete on price).  I’m quite sure there are some really cool merits to giving kids the ability to create eBooks in their classroom, introduce them to coding with Swift Playgrounds, and maybe give them the ability to create music with GarageBand.  I would never downplay the importance of these tools, and if the iPad came with a keyboard, this entire blog post could basically be deleted from existence.

However, that’s a major issue from my perspective – this new iPad targeted to education does not come with a keyboard.  If we could somehow pretend that keyboards aren’t important anymore and that kids won’t break an iPad without a case, that would knock $99 off the total cost of these devices.  See, besides the $49 Logitech Crayon I mentioned earlier, Apple also announced a $99 Logitech-created rugged keyboard case, which brings the total up to $447 minimum to give students an iPad with a stylus and keyboard/protective case.  That’s more than double the price of many Chromebooks.  Education is a very price-sensitive market, and Apple’s offering is not just double the price, but double the price at education scale.  We’re talking $447 times hundreds of students instead of $200-250 times hundreds of students.  For a school of 500 kids at $250 a pop, that’s a difference of nearly $100k, and there are cheaper Chromebook options to make that rift even larger.

Keyboards are important.  Yes, touch is incredible, and it’s captured and redefined the world via mobile, but most kids will get jobs doing work that is still done with keyboards.  Really, the only job I can think of offhand that you can do entirely with a touchscreen is cashiering at a fast food place.

The eBooks Apple wants to help kids create, the coding they’re hoping to inspire kids to learn about – just try doing either of those things on an iPad without a keyboard.  You will drive yourself crazy.  Kids need to be taught how to type because content creation is severely restricted without a physical keyboard.  I like to think I’m a pretty forward-thinking person, and I can’t imagine a 12 year old kid today getting an office job in 10 years that doesn’t require them to create reports, type up long emails, work with spreadsheets, or a whole host of other things that are just incredibly difficult on a touchscreen and oftentimes impossible (read: unavailable) on iPads.

I know how slow corporate adoption can be, and even for the organizations that upgrade quickly, many are bound by the vendors that make the software.  Specialized software for niche markets is notoriously bad at updating, which is why so many machines out there still run Windows 7 and even Windows XP.

By not providing kids with keyboards, we’d be setting them up for failure, so these $299 iPads don’t cost $299, they cost $398, which at that point is already double the price of a Chromebook before you tack on the Crayon or Pencil.  Yes, Apple doesn’t compete on price, but this is not a market than can absorb Apple’s strategy for competition, save for some of the wealthier private schools (it should be noted that Apple held this event at a public school in Chicago).

Quite frankly, I have some concerns about Chromebooks for a similar reason – that kids aren’t getting exposed to the actual operating system they’ll be using once they get a job (most likely Windows, sometimes MacOS).  Hopefully this is an unfounded concern, or I’m underestimating the ability today’s kids will have to adapt from ChromeOS to a similar-but-very-different system, but this same adaptation simply doesn’t apply to my concern about using a real keyboard.

I suppose you can argue that there are plenty of successful people who employ the hunt-and-peck method of typing, but at least this method was honed on a physical keyboard.  Maybe they type one third or even half as fast the average WPM of a person that knows how to type properly, but the reality of that situation is still that they are not as prepared or equipped for the real world.  Heck, I even shudder to think of trying to take notes in college without the ability to type.  I suppose you can handwrite notes with an iPad and a Crayon/Pencil, but personally, I type about three times as fast as a I write.

This isn’t to say that Apple’s education strategy will be a failure for their business, but rather that I hope it’s not a failure for kids or schools.  Only time will tell in that aspect, but I guess on the bright side, the new iPad does seem like a solid purchase for consumers.

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The progression of advanced technology has rapidly changed our lives, most relatably in recent years with the advent of mobile technologies so advanced that PC purchases have been in decline year-over-year for some time now.  Yes, there are far more positive impacts than negative, but that doesn’t mean the negative should be completely downplayed.  While there are plenty of debates over what tiny screens in our pockets have done to us socially as a species, there are also many far-less controversial consequences, like distracted driving.

Today, however, I’d like to talk about one of those controversial impacts, and that is the issue of privacy.  The world has become very data-driven, for example, by services like Instagram, which is a simple photo-sharing app at face value, but is a huge sales and marketing tool for influencers.  We can now buy $50 devices that sit in our homes and react to commands to buy things and turn our lights on, and cameras on our phones are so good that owning a point-and-shoot digital camera these days is practically…well, pointless (pun intended).

But these things come with tradeoffs, and as we move further and further into this data-driven ecosystem, people are starting to become concerned about how much is too much.  Is it okay to put an Amazon Echo, Google Home, or Apple HomePod in your home, knowing full well that those devices listen to you and have the potential to accidentally record and store much more data than intended?

We know, almost certainly, that the Amazon Echo is not recording everything that a person says.  The way these devices work is by waiting to hear a specific waveform – that of your trigger word (“Alexa,” “Okay Google,” “Hey Siri,” etc) – at which point it records the sound that follows, sends it home for analysis to Amazon, Google, or Apple, then returns a result (this is also how assistants work on your phone).  They don’t record all the time (except when an error caused the Google Home Mini to do exactly that), or we’d know by sniffing the network traffic.

The reason I used the phrase “almost certainly” above is that there is always the possibility of the government forcing Amazon (or any of these companies) to record and store all listening data for a single user, but the instant a savvy user noticed increased network traffic and tracked it back to their voice assistant, it would be the biggest news story of the week.

People worry about these devices, and have every right to, because as consumers, we don’t completely understand them.  However, because of that very concern, worry is often misappropriated.  Take, for example, those that refuse to have a Google Home in their living room, but carry a Pixel 2 on their person at all times, so far as even keeping it on a night stand 3 feet away from their head while asleep.  This same concept applies to those that tape over the cameras on their laptops but would never do the same thing on their Galaxy S9.

It’s not a completely black and white issue, but if you are truly concerned about privacy, it would be foolish to take precautions like taping over your laptop camera and depriving yourself of modern home assistant technology, but not also take some kind of precaution with your phone – the most personal device currently imaginable (which, by the way, probably has at least 2 microphones and 2 cameras, minimum).

Consumers are almost always willing to trade a little privacy for convenience, which is why Google’s entire business model of knowing everything about you is working so well for them.  Conversely, there are still those that are concerned about these types of things going too far, and Apple has a model that is more friendly to those consumers.  Yet, either way, some privacy is sacrificed, or at least, the possibility of complete privacy is given up.  Even with a privacy-focused company like Apple, if you backup your phone data to iCloud, the government can subpoena that data from Apple, and they will provide it.  But does that mean you should never use a phone?

We should always be wary of what information we give to companies, because whether or not that info improves your experience with a product or service, it is almost certainly also being used to feed complex algorithms with ways to make more money from you.  On a personal level, I don’t particularly care if Google knows the area I work in so it can advertise relevant local eateries around noon, but some people take offense with this, even if the company is upfront about it.

Privacy is a difficult and delicate issue, but there is no blanket statement that those of us that understand the intricate details can provide to make the less tech-savvy make better decisions.  Unfortunately, I’d guess the lack of brevity tends to make people disinterested.  What we need to remember is that we shouldn’t oversell convenience without taking into account what our data is worth, but we also shouldn’t oversell the value of certain data that we can exchange for a greater amount of convenience.

If you’re looking for a takeaway, I’ll say this: being concerned about putting a Google Home in your bedroom is absolutely, completely valid.  Do your research, understand how it listens and responds, then make that choice, but also remember that your phone follows you around and your Google Home does not.  Mentally separating the two because your phone is more familiar is cognitive dissonance if you truly want to sacrifice convenience for security.

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The original reveal of the Apple Watch is a pretty disappointing memory for me.  At the time, I don’t think anyone really knew what they wanted out of wearables, so I was okay with much of the functionality (barring some of the stupid things Apple expected people to do with their tiny wrist computer, but more on that later).  What really bothered me was the design and the price.

Apple is undeniably great at designing technology, but a watch is a fashion accessory.  They created and pushed a narrative that portrayed the watch as being stylish and hip by inviting not just tech journalists, but fashion journalists to the reveal, and this has been consistent ever since.

Honestly, the most fashionable thing about the Apple Watch is that it’s not as bulky as other smart watches.  Bigger watches go in and out of style, but some of the Android Wear watches out there are comically big.  However, there are round ones, whereas the Apple Watch is designed to look like a small iPhone.  Generally, watches (as a fashion item) should be round, according to fashion communities and publications like GQ.  While there are exceptions, I don’t feel like the Apple Watch, stylistically, is one of them.  It’s a pretty piece of technology, but it’s an ugly watch.  And yes, I know the utilitarians out there will go on and on about how round displays are inefficient for displaying content, but all of those arguments are predicated on the ideas of familiar design.  Personally, I think it’s very absurd to suggest that Apple couldn’t engineer content for a round display.  Heck, most of the content that’s already there works if you just cut off the corners.  You’d lose practically nothing of value in most cases.

But anyway, that’s a blog post for April 2015.  This is a post for December 2017, where we’re on Apple Watch iteration number four, I guess (do we count Series 1 as a separate watch?  I guess so).  We’ve now had two and a half years with these wrist computers, and Apple has had that same amount of time to refine the experience.

The original premise of the Apple Watch was that it was a small iPhone.  Apple demoed writing notes, watching Instagram videos, making calls, and sending texts.  Only the latter two have held up.  Legitimately, I don’t know if you can even still send heartbeats or digital taps/drawing.  My guess is that you can, but I don’t know how, as that menu has been completely taken over by the dock.

Clearly, the Watch isn’t a small iPhone, despite it looking like one.  It holds certain use cases – mostly revolving around convenience and fitness – but it doesn’t replace your phone except in extremely specific situations.  It took Apple over a year, but they finally started honing in on those use cases and have been perfecting the Watch for those uses ever since.

I guess I should mention here that the Apple Watch has been a pretty successful product, despite some of the doom and gloom we sometimes hear from tech journalists.  I know at least one person that abandoned the product somewhat quickly, but I know more that have kept and still use theirs.  I bought the original version in 2015 a couple months after launch, and only recently (finally) upgraded to a newer version, the Series 3 aluminum model.

The Series 3, compared the Series 0/original Apple Watch has three main advantages: 1) it’s more water-resistant (you can swim with it), 2) it’s so much faster that it makes the Series 0 feel absolutely ancient and 3) the battery life is like 300% better.  They still market it as having “all day battery” but the reality is if you don’t keep the GPS on all the time or use/have LTE on it, you could go two days without charging, maybe almost a full three.  I used to end the day with around 25-30% battery.  I now end the day with around 70-75%.

Personally, I think the LTE model is a joke.  After carrier costs and fees/taxes, the watch will run you anywhere between $10 and $15 a month to add to your data plan, most likely, and I could count on one hand the amount of times my phone wasn’t within Bluetooth range of my watch and that I also needed to use it for some data-related purpose.  Again, there are very specific cases where the LTE model is probably not only useful, but a God-send; however, I’d imagine that for 97% of people, just the regular watch is fine.

I think within the 3% that will find use with the LTE model, some sort of outdoors or sports-related activity will be a key in defining that usefulness.  Apple has really been honing in on that market, and more recently, other health-related things that aren’t necessarily fitness, like their heart study program (to detect AFib/arrhythmia).  These things combined with the convenience of notifications on your wrist are the real selling points to most people, I’d say.

Personally, while I do enjoy the convenience of notifications, I’ve found that having the weather on my wrist at all times has been a game changer for me.  My expectation of basic data that a watch face provides has shifted from “time and date” to “time and date and weather.”  Yes, it’s nifty to know how many steps I’ve taken, how active I’ve been, but paradigm shifts like the former are more interesting to me.

That said, I can’t overlook that having Siri on my wrist has been important as well, but that’s almost 90% for setting reminders in my case.  There are times when my phone is across the room, so the ability to pause/play/skip ahead in music/podcasts, take calls, send messages, use Authy, or pause my Apple TV has been very useful.  While I rarely do use other apps, the occasions do still exist when I start my car from my watch, or even more rarely, check an email.

When I use Apple Pay, it’s almost exclusively with my watch, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that I have found the ability to remotely control the camera on my phone extremely useful, even if only on a handful of occasions.

All in all, I’d say the Apple Watch, while still catering to certain niches with more specific functionality, has broken out of being a niche product as a whole.  I see them all the time now, and of course, wear mine daily.  I don’t think it’s worth upgrading yearly, and I don’t think it’s worth paying more than the base model costs, but it’s a product that I truly like – not because of how it looks, as Apple may market – but rather, in spite of how it looks.

A little while back, Google released their new earbuds, the Pixel Buds, no doubt in answer to Apple’s AirPods that were released late last year.  The marketing for this product is clear, as Google states on their storefront:

Loud, proud, ‘wireless.’  Well, the Pixel doesn’t have a headphone jack (no surprise there, it’s 2017 after all), so Google needed to release a product for Pixel buyers to use that would provide a quality experience after the port deletion, just like Apple did.  However, there’s one weird thing about the Pixel Buds, and that’s, well…

…the wire.  Yes, the Pixel Buds are wireless in that they don’t require a wire to go from the phone to your ear, but they do require a wire between each earbud.  This is very much in contrast to the way that Apple solved the “quality experience without a headphone jack” problem, which was to release a truly wireless pair of earbuds.

I found this rather odd, but Google isn’t alone, of course.  Apple’s own Beats X earbuds are “wireless” earbuds that have a wire, as are any headphones that claim to be wireless.  In fact, there are only a handful of truly wireless earbuds on the market, and I think it’s a shame that Google chose to go “wireless” rather than truly wireless.  I’m sure if you get the PixelBuds, they’ll be fine (or maybe not, TWiT owner Leo Laporte seems to think they’re disappointing), but I think that experience really could’ve been better.

I want to see more really wireless earbuds.

For the record, prior to the iPhone X, I would’ve said the the Apple AirPods are the best product Apple launched since the iPhone 4 or perhaps 5.  They are incredibly good, and the first product Apple has released in quite a while that captured some of that undeniably cool Apple magic that people used to rave about so much before it became cool to hate Apple