If you ask anyone who knows me, I’m probably the biggest Apple fan they know. Ask for a suggestion of what computer to get, and I’ll almost certainly either tell you the MacBook Pro, or to wait, because Apple is about to update its hardware finally.

Update: since this post was published I’ve tested a number of Windows laptops as alternatives to MacBooks. Find results at the end!

But recently, I realized I’d gotten tired of Apple’s attitude toward the desktop. The progress in macOS land has basically been dead since Yosemite, two years ago, and Apple’s updates to the platform have been incredibly small. I’m a developer, and it seems to me Apple doesn’t pay any attention to its software or care about the hundreds of thousands of developers that have embraced the Mac as their go-to platform.

Take a look at Sierra: the only feature of note is Siri, which is half-baked as it is, and the things that did get ported over from iOS are half-done too. On the developer side? Nothing, unless you use XCode — the same story it’s been for years.

The only reason it’s still even viable as a platform for web developers at all is because of the incredible work the open source community does on the Mac toolchain (take a look at how easy it is to use Node, npm, Yarn or any of the other relatively new tools out there).

Bloomberg reported in late 2016 that Apple had dismantled the Mac team, rolling it into the iOS team, and it shows. The new MacBook Pros, released in late 2016, where interesting, but something of a half-hearted shrug in the direction of users: they’re okaymachines, but they sure aren’t interesting at all. Their hardware is underpowered, focusing on thinness and a gimmicky touch bar rather than power or functionality, the previous tentpoles of the Mac.

“In another sign that the company has prioritized the iPhone, Apple re-organized its software engineering department so there’s no longer a dedicated Mac operating system team…” –Bloomberg

To tell the truth, I’m a life-long Windows user that grew to be disillusioned by Microsoft after Windows Vista. It was obvious the company had no strategy or vision, and while Windows 7 smoothed things over a little, Apple’s side had something I wanted: everything worked together nicely.

You could send iMessages from your computer or phone, answer calls wherever you were, and throw files to other devices with ease — and so I was tempted away in early 2013 when Apple released its second-generation 15" Retina MacBook Pro.

That machine was my first real taste of Apple’s world, and I loved it. Everything was designed nicely, and worked well together. Apple’s deep roots in Unix meant I actually finally picked up web development for the first time, learnt how to use the terminal deeply, and even gave back to some open-source projects.

But, about the time I joined Apple’s world, the company’s attention pivoted. The Mac was no longer important, as the iPhone, iPad and then the iPad Pro became the focus of the company. The message was simple: why do you even need a computer when a tablet and phone can do it all anyway?

As a result, Apple’s focus on the Mac waned: the hardware didn’t receive an update for over four years, and then OS X, once regularly updated with interesting features, now only receives the scraps from iOS. If you want to see this in action, check out iMessage on Mac: the flagship feature of iOS, iMessage stickers, barely works on Mac.

You started seeing this in almost everything: Airdrop, Apple’s much-touted feature that lets you easily beam files between computer and phone was my first taste of the company’s “just works” mentality — about 30% of the time it worked every time, and the rest of the time you couldn’t connect at all. Then there was handoff, the heralded feature that let you work on one device, then seamlessly move to another. I don’t know if I ever got it to work with any sense of reliability.

DHH on Twitter

I'm out of apologia juice for defending Apple going with 4 USB-C ports on the new MacBook over a useful mix and keeping the MagSafe. 🍎👎

Meanwhile, Microsoft had licked its wounds inflicted by Windows 8, found a passionate new CEO in Satya Nadella, and started doing something interesting with Windows 10: it actually started listening, and implementing, features people wanted.

I mostly ignored the Windows world until late last year when Microsoft introduced the Windows Linux Subsystem — basically a way to use a Linux terminal natively in Windows — which made me realize that development on Windows might actually be pleasant eventually. I wrote back then that even this was enough to tempt me back to Windows, and it was a game changer:

“At its core, Bash support on Windows is both exciting and an incredible feat of engineering. As a front-end developer, I’d now consider buying a Windows machine to replace my Macbook, where I wouldn’t have in the past.”
(Me, a year ago before I even considered switching)

After waiting eagerly for the MacBook Pro refresh, then being utterly disappointed by what Apple actually shipped — a high-end priced laptop with poor performance — I started wondering if I could go back to Windows. Gaming on Mac, which initially showed promising signs of life had started dying in 2015, since Apple hadn’t shipped any meaningful hardware bumps in years, and I was increasingly interested in Virtual Reality… but Oculus dropped support for the Mac in 2016 for the same reasons.

Then, in October 2016, Microsoft unveiled the next version of Windows: Creators Update out of nowhere. It brings dedicated gaming features, full OS-level VR support, color customization, a people bar for quick chat and a lot more in a free update.

I watched the event with my mouth open (it was the first time I’d tuned in to any Microsoft event in years), wondering how Microsoft was suddenly shipping awesome features out of nowhere.

This, and seeing all the progress Microsoft was making with the Linux subsystem, as well as Apple’s lack of any meaningful progress, made me decide to make the jump back. I’m not a hater, I’m just tired of not being able to get a machine worth using.

“Those complaining about Apple’s current Mac lineup are not haters, they’re lovers. They’ve spent 10+ years and 5+ figures on Macs.”

It took me months to convince myself to do it, but I spent weeks poring over forum posts about computer specs and new hardware before realizing how far ahead the PC really is now: the NVIDIA GTX 1080 graphics card is an insane work-horse that can play any game — VR or otherwise — you can throw at it without breaking a sweat.

I realized I’m so damn tired of Apple’s sheer mediocrity in both laptops and desktops, and started actually considering trying Windows again.

So, in February 2017, I found myself building a computer from scratch. I sold my 15" MacBook Pro (I now use a 12" MacBook for on-the-go productivity), and invested in building a desktop workhorse that would fit my needs and last for a long time.

I’ll spare you too much detail, but if you’re interested in my build you can see what parts I ordered here — the machine is a bit of overkill, but given I want to learn how to develop for VR, it seemed to be a good balance of power and price for the long haul.

Now I’ve been on Windows for about six weeks, and while I was expecting to hate it, I’ve found myself impressed. It’s not perfect, but it’s clear Microsoft is sweating the details for the first time in recent memory.

I’ve got my development environment set up just the way I liked it on Mac, thanks to the Linux subsystem — everything from Jekyll to Gulp works exactly how I’d expect.

I’d been worried about Microsoft’s high-density display support, since it was unusable in Windows 8 and even the original release of Windows 10, but Creator’s Update seems to be able to finally handle 4K displays without things just getting weird.

On top of that? I can play recent games without the PC breaking a sweat, and I’ve started experimenting with VR. The HTC Vive is an incredible device, and I’m just at the start of figuring out Unity so I can actually create my own things for it.

The experience hasn’t been all roses — I had forgotten drivers were a thing, and the quality of apps on Windows, while far better than I remember, is sorely lacking. This seems to be getting addressed quickly thanks to Electron apps: Slack, Nylas, Hyper and Visual Studio Code are awesome, and stand out in the Windows world for being fantastic.

I don’t say this lightly, but Windows is back, and Microsoft is doing a great job. Microsoft is getting better, faster at making Windows good than Apple is getting better at doing anything to OS X.

There’s a few things I sorely miss: Sketch, which I use a lot for quick design work, iMessage so I don’t need to keep pulling out my phone and a handful of other things… but it’s easy enough to live without them.

It’s clear to me from Apple’s language and sheer focus — cough killing the Airport cough — that all Apple cares about is iOS, and the iPhone. Maybe they’ll ship something awesome out of nowhere that really brings back its “productivity” play, but the company is busy trying to convince people that its ham-fisted iPad Pro is good for work.

Over the coming weeks I plan to write about the great parts of Windows, how I got my development environment set up, the apps I use, and, of course, the bad parts. I’ll be honest, I can’t bring myself to leave Mac at work yet, because I’m not convinced there’s a good enough Windows laptop yet… but maybe that will change over time.

If you’re a Mac user sitting, waiting for Apple to maybe release a real workhorse computer so you can actually do your work, stop what you’re doing and take another look at Windows. It’s awesome, and now you’ll be able to get something with incredible power for a great price that’s actually worth using.

For more from the switching away from Mac series, published since this post went live:

I'm switching to Windows from Mac, and looking for a laptop

Building the perfect modern developer environment on Windows

Essential apps for Mac users switching to Windows

Razer Blade: a great, hardcore alternative to the MacBook Pro

Eve V: a first-time laptop maker hits a home run

I’ve found a perfect Windows laptop in an unlikely place

This post originally appeared on Charged, but was brought to Medium for your reading pleasure ❤.

Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up was originally published in Charged Tech on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Snapchat is the darling of technology: for years, we’ve fawned over the company for being innovative, using daring interfaces and out of the ordinary tactics to get people to pay it.

Despite the fact that the app was always what some would consider “hostile” to new users, full of design anti-patterns, it managed to gain a fledgling user base of 180 million monthly active users. It’s an impressive feat, and one that the company is about to IPO for $20 billion over, but I think the company’s reign is coming to an end.

Snapchat started as something completely foreign to us all: it was a camera that didn’t save anything — if you took a photo, and it was opened by someone else, it was gone forever. At the time, that was alien, but eventually, as we all grew weary of social media and burnt out on over-sharing, it caught on.

Ephemeral messaging, the kind of disappearing messages invented by Snapchat, were a new world: you could share anything — a dumb thought, a nude photo, or a photo of a sunset — all in the same place with little fear that it’d escape once your recipient saw it.

Stories, however, were Snapchat’s genius moment. Being able to drop a continuous stream of interesting, or banal, photos into one continuous loop was fascinating at the time that the company released it.

The addictiveness and popularity of Snapchat’s Stories feature continue to this day, but the company finds itself at something of a crossroads: Facebook’s cloned the entire thing, and it’s doing it better than Snapchat ever could, and innovating at a faster clip.

When Instagram Stories launched well over a year ago, I thought it was cute, but couldn’t understand why I’d ever jump from Snapchat. Simply put, like you, I was hooked on snapping everything as it was. I loved sharing photos into my story, and rarely send pictures directly to others, because it’s a fun way to passively share what I’ve been up to over the course of the day.

“If Instagram is built around highlights, we’re filling in the space in between — and becoming more about visual expression in general,” he said. “We’re capturing all the world’s moments, not just the best ones.”

— Kevin Systrom

Throughout each day, friends browse my story and fire back a chat message if they like it, and I do the same. Before I switched, I was probably checking Snapchat once an hour to see if anything new had happened. Like you, I was addicted to the service — more than a disturbing amount.

But I’ve noticed over recent months a shift: less people are using Snapchat around me, and I’ve stopped entirely. Photos in my stories that regularly got over 5,000 views a day, now get less than half of that — and only a handful of the people I actively followed along with are even sharing anymore.

We’ve all moved to Instagram Stories. I never thought I’d do it, but eventually, as I used it more, I found Instagram’s rip-off of Snapchat to be more authentic. Suddenly, instead of checking one app for beautifully manicured photos, and the other for raw feeds, I could get everything in one place… and it actually worked better.

Snapchat’s story feed was fun at first, but the company has tweaked it to the point that it’s not as good anymore.

Now you’re forced to pick which stories to watch end-to-end before even starting, and it’s filled with either advertisements between each one, or shitty clickbait from the likes of the Daily Mail trying to get you to click on Kim Kardashian’s boobs again.

Instagram, somehow, has innovated on Snapchat’s core ideas at an incredible clip: instead of making you see a story sequentially, you can tap either side of the screen to skip forward or back. You can swipe to get between stories, creating what amounts to an endless loop of content, or you can tap and hold to freeze-frame it on what you’re seeing.

Not only that, but Instagram’s added other content types already: live streaming, boomerang, hands-free and a bunch more. It cloned stickers, added filters and assumably, will soon launch face masks with that handy acquisition it made a few years ago. You can tag your friends directly in a picture, and even link out to external websites. Frankly, Instagram has made Snapchat better faster than Snapchat could make Snapchat better.

These thoughtful user-experience innovations probably come right from the core of Facebook: the company’s been thinking about this for years. Meanwhile, Snapchat’s experience is an exercise in a maze that looks something like this:

What really takes the cake, however, isn’t thanks to Snapchat’s terrible execution, but Instagram’s biggest strength: it’s already got a strong network underneath, full of people that I’m extremely interested in following.

If it’s not a friend’s stream I’m browsing through, it’s an incredible photographer’s, or a film maker in North Korea showing what life is like there.

Snapchat might have some of these users, but Instagram has the sheer majority because they’re just sharing there anyway — and what’s surprising to me, is these influencers seem to be shifting at a high click.

Half of the stories I drop into on Snapchat these days are these people asking me to follow on Instagram too, and if they’re not shifted entirely already, they’re definitely loading the same pictures into both platforms already.

I think this, at its core, has always been Snapchat’s problem. When you added a friend on Snap, it felt like you were performing an intimate ritual — it’s almost like letting someone into your underwear drawer — and feels like a big deal.

Hend Janahi on Twitter

Snapchat is very personal to me, I don't walk around adding random people unless you're family or a close friend & I asked you for it.

Be it scanning each other’s codes, typing out your username, or using the ‘nearby’ feature, adding someone on Snapchat is a big deal, and feels akin to a huge step in your friendship (it can also easily be misinterpreted as an attempt to flirt).

Instagram on the other hand feels just as free as following someone on Twitter, or adding a friend on Facebook: it’s non-committal, and isn’t a big deal. You don’t mind doing it with strangers, and it doesn’t feel strange. The service’s ease of discovery is miles ahead too, and encourages you to follow interesting stories from people every day, tucked away in the explore tab.

Snapchat’s discoverability looks more like this:

I think, after years of being an active Snapchat user and fan, I’ve decided to move on. The service was fun, but I’ve realized recently that it doesn’t offer anything unique, and even if Facebook was copying the company in the first place, it’s done a better job than Snapchat ever could.

The majority of my friends have moved across, and those who initially relented seem to have started getting their feet wet with Instagram too. Facebook, be it accidentally or on purpose, has created an Instagram renaissance that has us more addicted than ever before because we get to see beautiful photos in the feed, then the raw, real life stuff in stories.

Yes, that’s anecdotal at best, but I believe that’s what’s happening on a larger scale too: how else did Facebook get 150 million daily active users so quickly?

Snapchat’s S1 filing, which it’ll use to go public in the next few weeks, painted an interesting picture of the company: it’s either at the crux of something big, or a massive decline in users.

And I don’t think that scales to a billion people — or even that many more than the service might already have. Snapchat’s end game, of course, could be entirely different. It’s said repeatedly that it’s a camera company, not an app, and perhaps that’s true: maybe Spectacles are really the big thing™ and everything else is merely a distraction.

But my biggest question is, with thousands of employees and a years-long lead over everyone else, why has Snapchat floundered when its first real competitor has emerged? Facebook is pouring resources into what’s become an all-out war, and it could escalate even further if the 1.83 billion users of the core app are given a way to sync stories across Facebook, Messenger and Instagram in one tap.

I don’t think that it’ll ever go away, but I do think we’re watching another Twitter being hatched: it simply has limited appeal after a while, and eventually comes to feel like yet another service you need to keep topped up.

Snapchat, as it stands, isn’t going to survive. Maybe it evolves into a media platform instead, or something bigger, but in its current I don’t think it’ll be able to hold out.

P.S — As I was finishing writing this, Facebook added Stories to WhatsApp too!

Like this? You can get the best of technology in your inbox every weekend, for free — sign up here.

Or, follow me on… Instagram Stories Also, we talk about the future of Snapchat, and other companies on my podcast every week:

Why I’m leaving Snapchat and so are all your friends was originally published in Charged Tech on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For years Bluetooth has been a hostile mess of pairing issues, connection drops and inconsistent quality. Whenever I think of Bluetooth audio, I associate it with sitting for a few minutes every time I want to actually just listen to music, poking around at the phone figuring out why they’re not pairing.

The beauty of AirPods is that they promise to fix all that, even across devices like your MacBook and Watch — so I decided to roll the dice and try a pair, since it feels like I’m constantly untangling the damn things.

AirPods are actually one of the few Apple inventions in recent memory that ‘just work’ like the company is famous for. From the moment you take them out of the box and flick the charging case open, they’re paired with your phone and automatically pop up on the screen, which actually shocks you for a second — you mean that’s it? It is.

This is what I had come for — the ability to sit in front of my computer and have them automatically pair, then jump on my bike and have it work with my phone automatically.

That part of the promise worked, and I was surprised that despite all the hand wringing in reviews of the headphones it’s pretty hard to get them to fall out.

The sound quality is noticeably better than that of those in the box, presumably because they have a small battery onboard that can drive them, and smaller touches like battery glances when you flick open the case shows just how much attention to detail Apple pays to the experience.

What reviewers seem to have ignored, and even discounted, is that beyond the fancy pairing process, the AirPods are actually pretty junk to use in the real world. There are annoying oversights that don’t make any sense, and Apple has leant on Siri incredibly hard to make the AirPods useful that they end up being more frustrating to use than the free ones with a cable.

Within just a few minutes I was annoyed that something as simple as changing the volume required me to speak out loud — and I’m all for voice assistants, but Siri is an utter shit-show.

When asking to change the volume, or skip a song not only would it rarely recognize me awkwardly tapping on the side over and over, it’d often do the opposite of what I asked, or even just randomly call someone. On top of that it’s incredibly slow, so by the time you’ve managed to do what you started out trying to do, it’d have been faster to pull out your phone, unlock it, do it and put it back again.

We all know Siri is crap on the iPhone, but putting it in your ears doesn’t make it any more convenient, instead, it made me resent how bad it really is. AirPods do, strangely, let you tap on the side to either invoke Siri or pause music, but not anything else. Perhaps this will change in the future, but it’s an oversight only Apple could manage to pull off.

Last November I picked up a Google Home, and the beauty of that device is it’s able to pick you up virtually anywhere with surprising accuracy — and it provides a response in a second or less. Home is legitimately useful because it’s charming, responsive and generally reliable, where Siri is the opposite: slow, robotic and incredibly patchy.

When you put the AirPods in your ears and start listening to music, it’s not a bad experience. The ability to pause music as you take one out of your ear is cute, as is having incoming calls announced to you. Unfortunately, when you want to skip music, hang up a call, turn down the volume or do anything at all, it falls apart.

I quickly realized that the free headphones in the box could do more, simply because they have a bunch of buttons on them. With AirPods, you’re stuck saying actions out loud over and over before giving up and ripping your phone out of your pocket.

And that’s the point Apple’s missed: AirPods are pretty amazing hardware, but because they’re so intimate and Siri is right inside your ear where you need it to work reliably constantly… it just becomes frustrating quickly. Apple’s offloaded the most basic of tasks to a voice assistant where it isn’t even capable of performing them reliably, and it shows.

Home and Alexa, on the other hand, reveal Apple’s weakness: they have a place in your life that’s permanent throughout your day, and while those assistants still need work too, it’s much easier to forgive them since they’re sitting on your countertop rather than in your ears, and what you’re probably asking them to do is convert a recipe measure rather than hang up a call.

Both Amazon and Google have worked to make their assistants charming and even sometimes lovable, so when something goes wrong you’re more likely to just try again. But ultimately the strategy is a good one: slowly get people accustomed to interacting with a voice assistant in the real world daily, in the privacy of their own home.

Apple, boldly, went straight for the obvious: why not integrate a voice assistant into your daily life by wearing it somehow? Unfortunately, both the timing and technology simply isn’t there. Siri isn’t up to the task at all, tends to be cold and clinical, and talking out loud to your voice assistant nobody else can hear in public is actually pretty weird.

Siri has been a constant complaint for years while other assistants have raced ahead. Google’s version, for example, understands the context of what you’re asking and can reference other queries earlier in the conversation. Siri, on the other hand, can still be stumped if you just ask the question in a slightly strange way.

Ryan Hoover ✌️😸 on Twitter

So much potential in AirPods, but they're crippled by slow and inconsistent Siri. 😐

I love the idea of AirPods, but ultimately they’re more frustrating than anything else. The wireless technology really ‘just works’ like Apple always promises, going above and beyond any other wireless earbuds I’ve ever tried. But, the last 5 percent is infuriating and AirPods’ heavy reliance on Siri made me long for wired headphones again — so I took them back after just a few days.

Where Home and Alexa are delightful because they enhance your life with voice technology and aren’t pivotal to going about your day, AirPods will leave you frustrated more than anything else. For some, it might work better, but I’m not convinced it’s worth it right now.

I’m sure that Siri and AirPods will get better over time, but it certainly seems like Apple has skipped the step where it makes the software better and released AirPods into the world without considering the implications of how hardware that’s heavily reliant on a voice assistant can make you feel about that assistant after consistently trying and failing to get it to work.

Siri is still not much more than a toy, and while everyone else seems to be forging the way with speakers in your home that can learn and slowly reveal to you how useful the future could be, Apple went straight for the jugular and only shone a light on how behind it is with Siri.

Over time, AirPods and Siri will make sense, but right now it feels like paying for the privilege to be a beta tester of a product that may or not improve over time. They might get better tomorrow, or it might take five years.

For now, it’s back to wired for me.

Apple’s AirPods are junk, and it’s all Siri’s fault was originally published in Charged Tech on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For decades the technology industry has been chasing the holy grail of computing: natural language conversation. Humans have always wanted to talk with computers like a real person, but for a long time, it’s felt like a pipe dream.

Research has stretched decades. IBM had a computer that could understand spoken words as early as the 1970s, but it took more than an hour to crunch a single sentence. Dragon Dictate, the first consumer voice product, launched in 1990 for more than $9,000 per license. Now, just two decades later, you have a voice assistant in your pocket that can understand you pretty damn well for essentially no cost.

It’s incredible to think about, but shackling these incredible voice assistants to phones meant while they had come leaps and bounds into the future, have mostly been restricted to doing menial tasks and being used for stupid jokes.

When Google announced its Siri competitor, Google Assistant, last month I wrote that it looked more promising than Apple’s version ever had, but it’s further ahead than I thought. I picked up a Google Home while I was in New York last month and it’s changed the entire way I think about voice, and how computers can actually help us in a natural way.

I always thought Siri was cute, but mostly dumb. It’s easy to stump it by simply asking it a vague question, or following up a query like “what movie is Jennifer Lawrence in” with “how old is she?” The illusion quickly falls apart, and as far as I’ve seen, Siri isn’t much use outside of being an egg timer.

Naturally, given this I was skeptical — but having watched the Google Home launch video and seen all the hype about Amazon Echo, I decided to give it a go and see if it’s as magic as promised.

Google Home is… well, a fairly simple device if you start looking closely. It’s a speaker with two far-field microphones that essentially services as a place in the physical world for Google Assistant to live — that’s pretty much it.

You can speak from anywhere in a room and ask a question or perform an action, play a game or even control your home. As far as I can tell, the moment you say “OK Google” it starts streaming your voice to the cloud for processing, and stops the moment you’re done — almost no processing is done on-device, and otherwise it’s mostly a glorified Chromecast.

Interacting with Google Home is awesome however. It’s super quick, and entirely conversational. Once you ask a query like “OK Google, how do I say let’s play video games and hang out in Japanese” it’ll reply, out loud within milliseconds “ビデオゲームをプレイしてみましょう.”

The beauty of the device is really in how it’s able to understand both context and the seemingly bizarre, however. If you say “OK Google, who’s that guy who plays God in lots of movies” it’ll say “Morgan Freeman.” From then, if you ask “what else is he known for” it’ll pick up that you’re still referring to Morgan Freeman, and tell you a bunch of stuff from his biography.

My favorite command is a simple one: “how’s my day looking?” Home spouts off the things in my calendar, the weather in Amsterdam, how long my cycle to the office will take and then jumps into a two-minute world news briefing. It’s simple, but actually really addictive.

Home really comes into its own if you buy a whole bunch of smart devices, too. I reluctantly picked up a set of Philips Hue smart light bulbs, and wired up my smart thermostat to the device with IFTTT. Now when it’s cold, I can just say “OK Google, turn up the heat” and it does adjusts up a few notches.

Even better, “OK Google, goodnight” turns off all the lights, stops the music, turns off the TV and lowers the heat automatically. If you have a few Chromecast devices it’s nifty too — then you can just say “Play Carly Rae Jepsen in the Living Room” and it works.

It’s quite amazing how powerful the microphones are, and you really feel like you’re talking to a human. The magic of that seamlessness is quite powerful. So much so, in fact, that it’s actually a little creepy interacting with Home on its own the first few times — it’s fast enough that your brain really thinks it’s just talking to a person.

That’s the magic that Google’s pulled off here, and it’s really compelling. Home has a lot of personality, and if you ask a particular question that deserves a different tone of voice, to emulate enthusiasm or being reserved, it actually reacts how you’d expect.

Ask to play a game, and Google Home says in a higher-pitched, faster-paced voice “Oh boy, this is gonna be so much fun!” The Wall Street Journal reported that Google has hired Pixar writers to give the device more personality, and it constantly shines through.

Owen 💁 on Twitter

also it gets super cutesy if you ask to play a game https://t.co/MouOPqc541

There are some obvious gaping holes for improvement: Home, ridiculously, doesn’t work properly with Google Apps accounts, so I can’t get my work calendar with it. It also can’t connect with multiple people’s calendars, so my partner doesn’t have her own information in it.

Most of all, I don’t like saying “OK Google” constantly, and I wish the company would let me name it — but I suspect it’s set this way so it can consistently learn millions of times what it’s hearing to get a big data set.

One other weird thing is occasionally you just stump it entirely with searches that work in other Google products. Ask “what movies are on near me” and it’ll get confused: “sorry, I really didn’t understand what you meant by that.”

I’m sure it’ll get better over time, but even small improvements in these areas will help a lot. It seems like a massive oversight that Home can’t handle multiple people in a house… since that’s one of the most obvious use cases — bizarre.

I thought Home would be a gimmick, but a few weeks after launch and we’re using it all day at home for music, news and lots of other stuff. It feels like a glimpse of the future, and for the first time I’m really convinced voice assistants could take off. Google Home truly makes Siri look like a toy.

Home is one of my favorite purchases of the year — you won’t regret it if you’re interested in dipping your toes in the smart home world, and it’s of such a high standard that it feels like Google is playing in Apple’s league for the first time.

Everything ‘just works’ and you feel like you’ve got a Star Trek-style communicator everywhere in your home. If it keeps getting better, I can say for sure that I want one of these in every room of my home — we’re really living in the future.

P.S — a note on “Google being Evil”

Google Home changed the way I think about voice assistants was originally published in Charged Tech on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Last night’s Apple event was bizarre — I had been anticipating this show for a while, mostly looking forward to being able to stop telling people not to buy a Mac, because everything was so outdated. But, even though what I saw was interesting, it really feels like Apple has lost its way.

It’s strange — there’s nothing actually wrong with what Apple announced: USB-C on the Mac is great, a thinner, more powerful machine is intriguing and, while it’s too early to say, the Touch Bar could possibly be a gimmick, but it could be useful for helping people discover what shortcuts exist as they use the computer.

The thing is, I can’t figure out who this is for other than those who are on really old machines. Myself, and everyone else, seems to be wondering what, exactly, is the selling point of this upgrade. I have a MacBook Pro 15" from 2013 and it’s still going strong and the majority of the time it’s plugged into a large display for creative work, coding or whatever.

Touch Bar is a great example of this. First, it feels like an excuse to not just add touch to the Mac in the first place. While Microsoft is busy letting you touch the entire display, Apple’s making you look down at your keyboard to interact instead — bizarre.

But the “Pro” in Apple’s devices isn’t even accurate anymore. It used to be the best notebook on the market for creatives, developers and people with big requirements. One look at this slide shows Apple has no idea exactly where its demographic lies:

The MacBook Air is dead, which is great news, but why are there two MacBook Pro 13" now? The only difference is one doesn’t have the touch strip, but why not just… call it the new MacBook air to alleviate confusion?

Adding an additional option, without the touch bar was a smart move. I was speaking with a number of friends on Slack during the event, who all said they’d buy the new Mac if you could get it with a normal function row. Then, Apple dropped this and they were interested. But as a final “fuck you” for those that get this, it has two less ports, slower memory and a worse GPU– and to add them back it’s basically the same price.

“The fact that Apple itself considered the MacBook Pro as a competitor to the MacBook Air shows it’s not really a Pro.”
-@lapcatsoftware

What video editors are going to do edits on a tiny touch bar below the screen? What DJ — like Apple demonstrated — wants to use a tiny touch bar to mix their music when the action is… on their screen?

The event also left Apple with a ton of bizarre loose ends. At the iPhone event in September, Apple told the world that headphone jacks were dead because wireless headphones are superior — so why is there a headphone jack on the Mac? Even worse, Apple has delayed its wireless headphones which were supposed to change the world.

From there, the questions just get even more ridiculous:

Why can’t you plug the Lightning headphones that come in the iPhone box into the new Mac? Why doesn’t the iPhone come with the right cable for the new MacBook Pro? Why doesn’t Apple make a screen that properly works with its own devices? Why did Apple highlight how great the Touch Bar is for Messaging, but didn’t even port most of the new iMessage features to macOS properly? Do I have to carry two pairs of headphones now? How do I charge my Lightning cable mouse? Why remove the HDMI port, a standard that’s still incredibly popular for plugging into TVs? Why remove the SD card, a popular slot for… creatives using cameras?

“Watching someone DJ with the top of a keyboard was just embarrassing, doubly so from the company that makes the iPad and as recently as this year’s WWDC showed off its ability to be used by blind people.”

Even worse, what took so long to get to this point? Many people have been waiting a year or more for a refresh, and this itself wasn’t even that notable.

The new MacBook Pro has a Skylake chip, not the Kaby Lake one that’s recently landed– if you look at benchmarks at the top-end it’s pretty clear something is wrong: the CPU in this MacBook Pro actually appears to perform worse than the older one.

CNET spoke to Apple’s marketing head, Phil Schiller, who said:

Marketing chief Phil Schiller, software engineering lead Craig Federighi and top designer Jony Ive explained, in exclusive interviews earlier this week, why the Mac matters. Since they say it’s so important to Apple, we asked them why it took four years, four months and 16 days to deliver what they call a “milestone” and a “big step forward” for its top-of-the-line laptops.

“The calendar isn’t what drives any of the decisions,” Schiller says in a 90-minute briefing at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California. “We challenge the teams to do great work and sometimes that great work can be done in one year, sometimes it takes three years… What we really care about is creating new innovations in the Mac and continuing the story that has really defined Apple for so many years.”

What does that even mean? It took four years to add a touch bar to the keyboard, which delayed any meaningful progress in the meantime? Apple’s customers are those that need powerful machines, but it delayed them infinitely for what amounts to a vanity project that the core demographic of Apple’s customers probably won’t even use.

This does, indeed, speak to the longevity of the machines that Apple sells: you can use a MacBook from 2012 right now and probably can’t tell the difference. But therein lies the problem — the company waited four years, then didn’t really deliver any real future-value other than it’s “new.”

The other perplexing component of the event was the sheer lack of anything interesting for existing Mac owners. No new accessories — how cool would a Bluetooth version of the Touch Bar be — and no desktop computers.

Now you’ve got an aging iMac with old ports, a very out of date Mac Pro and a bunch of weird old accessories that haven’t been touched in years — oh and about a million dongles anytime you want to plug something in.

“I think if you’re looking at a PC, why would you buy a PC anymore? No really, why would you buy one?”
– Tim Cook, talking about the iPad Pro

The good news is there’s finally a modern Mac available, even if there are some small compromises, I just hope that Apple keeps up the pace from here on out. For the last 12–24 months it’s been painful explaining to someone that Apple will surely update its machines soon.

To be clear, USB-C is a good thing. Someone has to do it, and jump in the deep end — but the way Apple has done it by forcing you into a corner to deal with it yourself rather than making it an easy transition… and you don’t even get the full power cable in the box anymore.

For a company that prides itself on ecosystem, and thinking of the ‘end to end’ experience, Apple has utterly lost its way.

Yesterday, the world got an iteration on something the company’s been doing all along, rather than something that’s a vision for the future.

Apple spent the entire event comparing itself to its own past, rather than showing us the future, and even then painted a very clear picture: it has no idea who the Mac is for.

Peter Kirn wrote last night that it was hard to watch the Apple event:

Apple’s obsessive naval gazing in the Mac event today speaks volumes. This is a company with no real vision for what its most creative users actually do with their most advanced machines. So, instead, they look into the past.

The Mac made its name because it embraced the creative industry where Microsoft missed the boat, but in 2016, it seems like it’s going to miss out on the next wave entirely: the updated Mac isn’t suitable for the heavy graphics, virtual reality or 3D work it’s so famous for being good at.

Is the new MacBook a mildly-interesting upgrade to the old one? Yes! Would I get it if I was in the market? Probably. But, to be frank, there’s simply no reason to right now if you already own a Mac that works well, and for the first time I’d at least consider looking somewhere else before buying it.

Apple, it seems, is angling for the ‘amateur creative’ and isn’t interested in anything else anymore. It wants the market that sits in coffee shops with its brand and only buys Apple, but doesn’t mind so much if the core demographic disappears. Maybe that’s OK — there’s probably good money in it — but it’s a real shame.

When the 12" MacBook was released, I thought it was pretty forward-looking. Apple had produced a machine that was both impossibly small, had a number of interesting new concepts — and even took the “courage” to drop all ports for a single USB-C port: a bold move. It’s not a perfect machine, but it’s a look at a world where you can have a whole computer in your bag and not even notice it.

To me, the event last night was Apple trying to remind the world it cares about the Mac, but more than anything else the undertone was this: Apple only cares about the Mac when it’s convenient, but even then, it’s obviously not thinking that hard about the impact is has.

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Apple just told the world it has no idea who the Mac is for was originally published in Charged Tech on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

With almost every new technology product comes a hype wave. Everyone will exclaim hyperbole about how great it is, then around 12–18 months later criticism creeps in.

It’s part of the natural technology news cycle: get clicks for the shiny new thing, then get even more clicks for shitting all over it later.

Apple’s products are some of the easiest targets for this, and Apple Watch seems to be going through it right now having just hit its one year anniversary.

Here’s a selection of the latest headlines about the company’s year-old wearable:

• My God-Awful Year With The Apple Watch
• A year after its launch, it’s now clear that pretty much no one needs an Apple Watch
• The Apple Watch, one year later: Did we expect too much?
• The Apple Watch one year on: Why we’re frustrated by what could have been

Reading these headlines you’d think Apple Watch was a piece of trash that basically everyone regrets buying — but I think it couldn’t be further from the truth for people actually wearing it.

For some, it’s changed their lives for the better, and I’m one of those people. I’ve been wearing mine for the better part of 10 months and still wear it daily, because it made subtle changes to the way I think that modified my lifestyle.

When I got my Apple Watch I was pretty sedentary, having just moved across the world to Amsterdam, I found myself having fallen out of an exercise routine, so I had no reason to move much.

The first few weeks of wearing the watch were uneventful. Sure, notifications on my wrist are handy and the Dutch rain alerts so I would know when to head home to avoid getting wet were awesome, but what else was compelling here?

As I grew accustomed to Apple Watch’s fitness nags, which constantly bother you to stand up or try for your goals, my attitude changed: I wanted to beat it.

It became something of a personal obsession to beat those three exercise rings. I started going out of my way to achieve them every day — a little further on the bike home, or a quick walk around the block to get that last tiny chunk of calories into the red ring.

Around this time I started getting more attentive to my health — because I had become aware of it on a daily basis — and began considering running, so decided to try starting consistently in January.

Thanks to a combination of the Apple Watch running feature, and Runkeeper, it became another obsession to beat my own personal bests. I’m still trying to form better habits, but I’ve found myself running 10+ times a month — and just ran more than 8KM for the first time.

As a result, I’ve lost more than 10KG in about six months, after really getting stuck into the routine.

For me, that’s a huge achievement, as I’d been trying and failing to stick with any plan to do that for years. The Apple Watch gave me a reason to fight, reminding me at every step of the way where I was at.

I’m more bullish on the Apple Watch than any of the company’s other products because it can have a material impact on the way I live my life. I’ve tried Fitbit, Android Wear and all the other ones I can think of, and they just don’t compare to how well Apple has tuned the balance of useful information and alerts to get you moving.

Most of the Apple Watch reviews have addressed problems the device has, like slow apps or that it supposedly doesn’t have a killer use case yet, but I’m living proof that the Apple Watch has a day one killer app:

It can change your life in material ways, just by helping you make tiny behavior tweaks. All I needed was a push to get moving, and it delivered it — it might be all you need too.

Be it through notifications making me more aware of my actual surroundings because I don’t have to pull out my phone, that I stand up whenever the thing nags me to, or that it actually makes me want to go for a run, my Apple Watch quickly became a life-aid I can’t take off anymore during the day.

Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of things that a second-gen Apple Watch can improve on — I recommend most people wait until the next one now because it looks like an upgrade is on the horizon — but long-term I’ll be putting it on every single day, because it’s more than enough right now.

For all the complaints in the media about Apple Watch, there are hundreds of people who’s lives are changing in meaningful ways that you aren’t hearing about.

I’m one of them, and I’m glad to have worn this fancy wrist computer so far, because it’s one of the few gadgets that intimately changed my life rather than just get in the way of it all the time.

Everyone’s wrong about Apple Watch. Here’s why. was originally published in Charged Tech on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference is a rare chance to get a glimpse into how the company’s long-term thinking could reshape the app industry, as well as the web.

Although it’s probably said every year, it felt like this year’s WWDC was significant, even if a lot of people don’t realize it quite yet. To me, it signaled the beginning of the end of the way we use apps.

I’ve been playing with iOS 10 since the announcement, and in that short time it’s finally become clear how Apple plans to move its mobile platform into the future: by changing what it means to interact with apps.

With iOS 10, Apple wants to stop you from jumping in and out of apps all the time, instead encouraging quick dips into different services, without ever opening them entirely.

Rich notifications, which are part of iOS 10, let developers extend what a notification actually is in complex ways so you don’t actually need to open an app to reply, see a picture or get the latest news — a 3D touch on the notification reveals more information without leaving whatever you’re already doing. Tapping the home button takes you back to where you were.

Here’s a great example: I’m browsing Twitter, catching up on what my friends are talking about. I get a text from Femke, asking me if I want to go out for dinner.

In iOS 9, I could have pulled down on the notification to reply, without the context of our previous messages, or I could have tapped on it to jump into the full Messages app and read the thread.

In iOS 10, you can 3D Touch a notification to open a popover window with full context, then reply instantly and go back to what you’re doing without ever breaking the flow of your previous task.

There’s far less cognitive overhead because you’re not completely removing yourself from what you were doing before, so you’ll probably carry on once you’re finished replying rather than doing something else.

Developers are able to do this with a huge range of different app types, giving you as a user new ways of accessing apps without ever really needing to open them.

In the same vein, widgets have been liberated from the notification center and appear front and center across iOS 10.

Now they’re on your lock screen, to the left of the home screen and in the 3D Touch menu of an app’s icon — giving you one less reason to actually open that app to get information.

Check out this glimpse of an upcoming Ring smart doorbell widget, which lets you see live video and open the door instantly: no need to open the app, mess around with where to go and what to do: the options and information you need is right there.

Need the weather? Swipe left on your lock screen.
Want to check your calendar? Just force touch on the app.
Keeping up with the game? Slide on over to Siri.

What’s most impressive about these changes is they’re also validation of a feature that felt a little lackluster before: 3D Touch — the hardware feature in the iPhone 6s which lets you push a little harder on the screen to view more.

Now, 3D Touch is the ALT button like on your Mac. It lets you peek a little deeper inside apps and find out something interesting, rather than just right click them to get a menu.

iOS 10 is going to change the way we think about apps, because you won’t even need to open them most of the time.

Apps are suddenly less about performing tasks, and more about consuming, since whatever else that needs your attention can be done immediately without switching context to something else.

Over the last year we’ve seen Facebook fighting to deeply integrate every app it possibly can into Messenger, like Uber, so you can order a ride without leaving a conversation. But what if that dead-simple idea of embedding services to be used where you are already could be extended to an entire phone? That’s what Apple just did.

Soon, you’ll be able to watch a YouTube video, while replying to your boss on Slack and iMessaging your friends — and it’s going to be a fundamental change to how all of us use the iPhone.

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iOS 10: the beginning of the end for apps as you know them was originally published in Charged Tech on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.