Apple

The iPhone 6 Plus has been a revelation and I am a huge fan. For me, it has become the only device I carry around every day. No longer do I feel the need for an iPad mini to supplement the phone. It is truly a one-stop shop. There is just one major aspect of the design that niggles—the placing of the lock (or on/off) button on the right of the handset, directly opposite the volume controls. Many times I have inadvertently locked the phone just by picking it up or when attempting to alter the volume. The top-placed button on the iPhone 5 was much more sensible in my view. 

Twice in the past few months I’ve written about Apple Notes. First, I recounted how I had successful transferred all my Evernote files over to Notes and that all had gone well. Well, it went downhill from there. First I noticed some slowness in Notes. Then I realised that every time I opened the application on the iPhone there would be a delay of over a minute before I could start a new note or search for an existing item.

Way back on the day in the early 1970’s when Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, two young longhaired more-or-less hippies, created their Blue Box (a device intended to enable them to hack into AT&T’s network in order to make free telephone calls), and in passing, probably without realizing it, laying the foundations for the first practical PC, a major revolution took place, but quietly, obviously, as they were attempting – and succeeding – in being thieves in an electronic manner.

This was the start of Apple, as a computer maker.   A curious start when one looks at the monolithic and respectable company that it has now become.

Originally the ideals and thrust of their work, well, actually it was mostly Wozniaks work, was to create a PC that was completely accessible to its users.   As with most PC’s in the early days, users were actively encouraged to open up the box and tinker with everything inside it.  I remember those days with affection, as I was an Amiga owner in the mid 80’s and spent as much time with a soldering iron inside my computers as actually working with them.  This was completely normal in those days.   Everything was open and accessible, both hardware and software.

For Wozniak, this was more than simply a matter of practicality; it was almost a religion for him.   He believed strongly that computer users should be free to add software, written by whoever, hardware, bought or self-made or do anything they wished with their computers.   To this end, he ensured that its OS was accessible to us, and that the computers themselves came with a whole range of expansion slots, I/O sockets and enough power to drive anything we cared to bung into the PC.

Unlike Jobs, he wasn’t too concerned about how it all looked; function and freedom were his watch words. He was simply one of the first computer nerds in fact.

Hindsight, as we all know, is a wondrous thing. Looking at this introduction of the Macintosh Portable in 1989 makes it very clear that we are living in a different century.

Back to the old dilemma: A desktop computer and portable laptop or one do-it-all solution: The new MacBook Pro with a Touch Bar..... 

Can you exist without cash? Electronic payments for trifling amounts are now commonplace, thanks largely to the total acceptance of swipe cards and smart devices such as the Apple Watch. We are moving inexorably to a point where cash will be an curiosity, a payment method of last resort…..