Guess I should turn my phone on soon…
I spend each and every day wrangling technology. Either I’m working through some broken or malfunctioning bit of client technology or I battling with what has to be one of the most kludged systems I’ve ever seen, in an attempt to find, document, or send a replacement to fix a customer’s problem.
I just couldn’t take it anymore and shut everything off. I’ve been working through a problem with my automated backup routine and had finally narrowed it down to the antivirus software I’ve been running for years. Turns out the company updated their software and appears to have a bug in excluding files or folders from on-access scanning. The practical upshot of this is, every single byte of a backup is scanned. Meaning that an incremental backup of a couple of megabytes that should take 5 minutes now takes five hours.
Well, at least I know what’s causing the problem. On the down side, that’s many hours of my life spent troubleshooting that I’ll never get back.
Which probably explains why I decided to take a break from technology for a day.
To ease back into turning technology on;
I watched the Apple event on the Apple website, this morning. I wasn’t interested in watching it live because streaming the event is often a problem because a billion other people are trying to stream the same event. It’s a lot more convenient for me to wait until its up on the Apple website then I can watch it un-interrupted without the image freezing.
This is the annual iPhone event. On that note…
iPhone 7… Meh. I like the Jet Black color, I like the water resistance, I like that the home button is solid state, and I like that the machine has a brighter display. But these things aren’t enough to make me salivate for the new model.
I’ve got an iPhone 6s and from what I could tell my current phone will run IOS10 just fine.
I did think that their use of power management inside the CPU was clever. After all, why fire up the whole CPU for simple tasks that could be served by a less power hungry subsystem?
I’ll be looking at the iPhone 7s next year of course, but unless there is some compelling reason to replace my phone, I could potentially see myself holding off until the 8s.
I’m like ApplePay, in those places that I’ve been able to use it but it’s not ubiquitous just yet. The iPhone 7 doesn’t do anything to advance that over what my iPhone 6s does now.
I don’t play games on my phone, and so generally battery life isn’t an issue for me during the day. Which that brings me back to keeping my current model since the display, and processing speed aren’t something I generally have issues with. I suspect that a lot of folks are thinking along similar lines.
The Apple watch series 2 could be in my future. One of my concerns about the 1st generation was the water resistance issue. I tend to forget about water being a problem for a watch, primarily since I’ve worn diving class watches for years. I have the very bad habit of expecting my watch to go wherever I do and most of the time completely forget I’m wearing one. Not a problem for a dive watch, BIG problem for a little bit of high technology.
Where I live and work isn’t exactly the best place to be wearing a Rolex, Tissot, Ball, TAG or even a higher end Fossil. So for the past several months I haven’t been wearing a watch.
I like having a time piece on my wrist though. Having someone mug me for a $400 Apple watch is a lot more palatable than a several thousand dollar swiss work of art.
The new Apple watch has a GPS built in and that plus some of it’s fitness features could be useful. Given the building I’m working in it might also be nice to find the sweetspot at my desk where my phone can actually “hear” the cell tower and then allow the watch to notify me of text messages phone calls. (Working in a “DeadZone” is a whole other story) I also can see the usefulness of having the ability to initiate a 911 call and send emergency text messages to selected individuals, directly from the watch.
Particularly, since there are people in my life now that are more prone to having medical events that would require 911 interventions.
I liked the AirPods. a little on the pricy side but neat. If Apple wanted to make a splash they could have asked Nichelle Nichols, or Zoe Saldana to introduce them. As the Apple event unfolded, showing off the new AirPods I couldn’t help but see Lt Uhura. Perhaps it was just me.