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Tag: Apple Watch

  • Week 40.26

    Week 40.26

    • I went to Apple Orchard Road and tried the Beats 360 headphones. They’re not large enough for my head; case closed. Money saved.
    • My new Apple Watch likes to try cheering me up by telling me that my body is “Ready” to “Go For It” (I assume “It” is a marathon, a swim to the far side of Australia, or something equally implausible) and that I had excellent sleep the night before, but these science and sensor-backed statements simply don’t match my reality. I’m tired; I wish I could sleep more!
    • I just took a little break (after one paragraph, natch) and went on Instagram, where I saw a post that read “Anyone else turn 40 around the start of the pandemic and now blinked and you’re somehow 46 wondering what the hell just happened?” On one hand, that sentence perfectly captures the fatigue that you’d imagine comes with being abducted by aliens and losing six years of your life — at the very least, the weariness of having to catch up with a lot of missed information, which is what being alive in this time of AI feels like, always on the back foot with lots to learn — but on the other hand, it implies not knowing at all where the time went, which I can’t identify with. Oh I know where the time went. I remember it all perfectly well, but it plays in my mind like a timelapse — hundreds of days passing, the figure getting in and out of bed, the view outside the window gradually changing.
    • Armchair theory: maybe what’s caused this ‘blink and time passed’ effect for many is the combination of massive disruption followed by repetitive discomfort. This is different from repetitive boredom, where days are long and time moves slowly. With repetitive discomfort, you’re constantly insecure and stressed, so the mind protects itself by generating summaries and discarding the details. This sharp change, followed by pain you’d rather forget, dislodges you from whatever life you were living before, making it feel like a separate country.
    • I’m listening to Apple Music 1 and three Taylor Swift songs have played in a short period of time. Without checking, I’ve known it was her from the fact that all her recent music sounds the same. It’s hard to feel bad for a billionaire, but that’s an awful place for any creative person to be. It’s like she doesn’t listen to any other music, or won’t allow herself to appear influenced by anyone else. Lonely at the top, as they say, which is why you won’t find me there (among other obvious reasons)!
    • Kim and I met Mandy for dinner one night to mark her birthday, and we went to a wine-focused place called Fiasco which has taken over the spot where Kilo used to be, that weird little building out in the middle of nothing near Lavender. The food was all really good (I forgot to take pictures), and they’re doing some really interesting things with hanger steak and pork collar, the latter seasoned to resemble a very fancy charsiew.
    • In an example of culinary R&D jumping the shark, we ate at Surrey Hills over the weekend, where my mother-in-law’s corned beef hash came partially covered with a purple sweet potato foam. Needless to say, she did not appreciate the touch. The place purports to be Australian, and with her being Australian too, I tried to gaslight her into believing that it was an authentic Australian recipe that she’d somehow never heard about. Needless to say, I was not successful.
    • I finished PARANORMASIGHT: The Mermaid’s Curse, and found it a worthy sequel, arguably better than the first game in every way unless you want a spooky atmosphere. This one can’t be classified as horror at all. It’s a mystery adventure with supernatural elements so tame they’d elicit no more than a shrug from a timid baby. Like the first game, its story concerns Japanese history and legends that one might find a little boring, but you don’t have to read all the text in its menus.
    • Playing that game unwittingly prepared me for the film Inu-Oh (2021), which I’ve had in my library for years and suddenly decided to watch. From the opening scenes, it eerily echoed story points from PARANORMASIGHT, concerning the 12th-century Heike samurai clan, and their vengeful spirits said to linger across the land after they were wiped out. Inu-Oh is a wildly ambitious and stupendously well-animated musical that is let down by, well, its music. The concept is a fusion of traditional Japanese music with glam rock, and a main character starts playing his biwa one day like an electric guitar without any explanation. The visuals work, but the songs are poorly structured to modern ears, overly long, and basically repeat the same melodies while pages of historical narrative are sung over them. Imagine Billy Corgan’s worst material, stretched twice as long, and the lyrics are all about random days of Napoleon’s life, and you’ll begin to understand how it feels.
    • We finally saw Sentimental Value (2025) and wow it really deserves its Oscar and 95% Rotten Tomatoes score. The opening scene with the house, and the title card needle drop that follows it, was so good that my body felt compelled to stand up and applaud — I didn’t allow it, but that feeling went on for much of its running length. The train oner is a wonderful bit of technical showing off, and actually the whole film’s lush 35mm look just stunts on the pervasive digital signature of Netflix movies. Everyone is great in this, making art about how art both fucks you up and saves you — 4.5 stars.
    • Found time for a grab bag of other films too: Runner (2026) — not to be confused with Gal Gadot’s The Runner (2026), Good Boy (2025), Elle (2016), Grand Theft Hamlet (2024) — the one to watch out of all of these, a very human documentary about two out-of-work actors putting on a production of Hamlet inside the GTA Online videogame whilst stuck at home during the pandemic — Shelter (2026), and Tony (2026).
    • Singapore made headlines this week because of the launch of a new dating site by the government, currently in a pilot phase only open to civil servants. It’s called FirstDate, and matches people based on compatibility assumed from their responses to a questionnaire. The idea of a state-run service has amused observers, with some seeing it as a dystopian step towards arranged marriages by Big Brother, amongst other hot takes on this strategy to combat our falling Total Fertility Rate (TFR). History rhymes, of course, and older folks will remember the existence of the Social Development Unit (SDU) in the 1980s, a pre-digital precursor to this scheme, that was something of a government-run activities club to help rescue graduates from singlehood after being encouraged (by the same authorities) to optimize for good grades instead of dating during their teenage years.
    • But it’s hard for outsiders to decide if Singapore’s environment really does produce a special breed of hapless, rizzless forever-aloners, uniquely ill-equipped to find their own mates through empathy and communication, so Singapore’s own state-run media conglomerate is providing some data in the form of a new reality dating show called Wingman. The show’s format introduces an original element to the Love Island formula, namely that each contestant brings their own wingman/wingwoman to serve as hype men/women, espousing their good qualities so they don’t have to — a perfectly valid and brilliant tweak for Asian cultures where tooting your own horn unironically is a major ick. The contestants, in addition to a few Singaporeans, are a bunch of attractive 20-to-30-somethings from the Philippines and Thailand, all of whom resemble functioning young adults who can read social cues and body language, and interact normally with members of the opposite sex (there is no LGBTQ+ representation). There’s obviously a tilt towards extroversion, which you’d expect from people volunteering to be a dating show, but even correcting for that, there’s an intriguing, discernible difference between the Singaporeans and their SEAblings that’s best seen for yourself. Full episodes are available on YouTube. We binged all 10 so far in one night.
  • Week 38.26

    Week 38.26

    • I have my new iPhone 18 Pro Max. It’s an all-round solid upgrade, and the only nits I can pick are the extra 20 or so grams of weight and the slightly worsened lens flare in dark conditions (the former I can feel, the latter I have only seen in online reviews). For a brief moment after preordering, I regretted not giving the new Glacier color a try this year, but that soon passed and I think this year’s Silver looks great. The white roundrect glass panel on the back of last year’s model was a seriously weird move.
    • There’s some doubt online about how big a deal the new wider maximum aperture (f/1.48) actually is, but I’m here to tell you that Bayer RAW photos have significantly less noise and an overall better appearance in low light scenes! On the past few iPhones, RAW (not to be confused with ProRAW) has been nigh unusable at night, with lots of weird purple color fringing around clumps of copious sensor noise. Color noise is still present, of course, but the overall aspect is smooth and high fidelity. This is on par with or even better than regular compact cameras, I think. (Edit: there’s a chance this may actually be down to the new RAW 9 engine in iOS 27.)
    Style: Natural + Film
    • The new “Photographic Styles 3” image processing engine with texture controls, such as film-like halation and skin smoothing, appeared to be an exclusive feature for these new phones — after all, the last upgrade to Photographic Styles on the iPhone 16 was not retroactively made available to the iPhone 15 — but I spied a footnote in the press release that suggests it will be coming to older models at some point. Very unusual, and very unlike Apple. After all, the Pro manual controls in the default camera app are exclusive to the 18 Pro for no apparent reason. For anyone sitting out this year’s upgrade, it should be very welcome news these new options are coming to breathe new life into the camera experience.
    • Side note: The Apple Watch Series 12 is noticeably thinner and wider coming from a four-year-old model. The cover glass/sapphire crystal now reaches so far down the sides that you can barely see the metal. I reckon this year it makes the least difference whether you choose an aluminum or titanium body; you’ll hardly see it. The effect you get when looking at it straight on is that the watch is all glass and display. This is probably a precursor to the design concept of next year’s iPhone which should have the thinnest titanium frame ever: a glass sandwich with very little filling. Most of the Watch’s other benefits are invisible in everyday use, from better round-the-clock sensing to AI features that have yet to ship in software. I’m looking forward to Siri Recap in particular, and plan to hold conversations with myself doing different funny voices all day.
    Silver goes with everything
    • I wish I could say that I’ve had a painless migration to the new phone, but it’s been terrible. And that’s all to do with telcos, not Apple. If you recall, I switched to M1 Maxx last week and marveled at how they could offer such incredible value for $12, naively forgetting to ask what the catch was.
    • The problem with eSIMs is that they can’t be popped out of one phone and chucked into another the way a physical card can. In order to be issued a QR code for installing the eSIM on my new phone, I had to go down to a physical store and wait in line to speak with a human. With Maxx being M1’s budget brand, they only opened up one service counter so the staff could stand around laughing at the broke people wasting their lunch break, while the rest of the store remained relatively empty. I waited a total of an hour. I was glad to have done this on Thursday because the line would surely have been many times longer after Friday’s launch.
    • Well it turned out that I couldn’t install it on Friday anyway, because their system didn’t register my old eSIM as deactivated after I’d done it. And these QR codes can literally only be scanned once — it seems that scanning and getting an error counts as once — so it became invalid after, necessitating another trip down to town to wait in line again. No fucking way, my friends. My solution: signing up for a new telco and porting my number away from M1 Maxx, just to get a working eSIM immediately. Total loss to this point: just $12 and several hours of my time.
    • But guess what? The new telco had problems too. SMSes either didn’t arrive or arrived hours after they were sent to me. This delay meant I initially couldn’t sign into any of my banks without my old phone, because logging into the apps on a new phone requires, yup, receiving an SMS. Later in the day, they started arriving 15 minutes late, and now on Day 2 they’re finally arriving on time. What irks me is how archaic this reliance on SMS is — why can’t companies use TOTP authenticator apps or email or (I can’t believe I’m saying this) WhatsApp? All local institutions should at least default to our national identity verification service, Singpass.
    Shut up and take my freedom!
    • This sounds like a real first-world problem but that’s what it is — we’ve built an environment where it’s hard to live when you can’t access banking apps, PayNow, and Apple Pay. I’m not saying cash is the solution — because germs — but these accounts should just be biometrically tied to us or something. I used to think the Chinese system where you can pay with a palm scan was too invasive, too dystopian, but not anymore. I’m ready to sign over my rights in exchange for device-agnostic convenience. At time of writing, I still can’t activate FaceTime and iMessage using my phone number. God help me, I might be switching telcos for the third time next week.
    • You know what works well? Services that let you sell off your used devices, like Mister Mobile, CompAsia, and SellUp. In just a minute, you can arrange to have someone come to your doorstep and give you cash in exchange for your old phone. Let me walk you through the boy math I alluded to last week: A 512GB iPhone Pro Max loses about $500 in value if you keep it for two years instead of one. That means delaying an upgrade actually costs you money. So, take the price of that new phone, deduct the $500 of avoided depreciation, subtract the doorstep trade-in cash, and toss in the pro-rated refund from canceling your unused AppleCare+ plan, and upgrading annually might even provide better returns than investing in AAPL stock, and that’s saying a lot.
    • At least it wasn’t a total waste of time going out for the eSIM QR code on Thursday. I visited my favorite curry spot after, then dropped in on Jussi and Brian at their co-working office. I had my once-yearly pumpkin spice latte from Starbucks, and sadly have already forgotten what it was like.
    • After seeing tons of hype for the new Korean film, Hope, which is distributed by Neon and MUBI and was nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes, I’ve been anxiously waiting to see it in theaters here. That day came on Tuesday, and… I have no idea how anyone could recommend this stinking mess. Just another example of the West glazing Korean cinema, I guess. It has some positive qualities, like the first act where mysterious events steadily unfold with the action ramping up quickly; and the sudden appearance of leading lady Hoyeon (of Squid Game fame) about 40 minutes in, photographed so jarringly model-beautiful and flawless compared to everyone else in the podunk town setting, wielding an over-the-top weapon (whose origins are never explained) with utter seriousness, that the moment collapses into unintentional comedy. Unfortunately the rest of its 156-minute runtime is trash, the ending is one of the dumbest I’ve ever seen, and Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander may never live down their involvement in this. 2 stars, at best.
    • The National Library has a month-long ReadSG reading campaign underway and citizens are encouraged to log their daily reading sessions on a CrowdTask website, where meager rewards can be won but more importantly, a sense of community might emerge from trying to collectively hit 7.5 million reading minutes. For my part, I’m up to 51 books this year, the last two being Neuromancer and Lily King’s Heart the Lover. Then Kim showed me this Instagram Reel from Seoul, Korea, and I couldn’t help but wish our reading festival went all out like this. It’s aspirational, romantic, and makes reading look like something you’d gladly do with your friends instead of doomscrolling together in some cafe.
  • Week 37.26

    Week 37.26

    The annual iPhone update

    I knew going into this week’s Apple Fall Event that I’d find the iPhone Duo impressive but wasn’t likely to buy one because it wouldn’t have a telephoto lens. Now that it’s been shown, that sentiment hasn’t changed but boy, it’s a very fetching device and the design team has done some incredible work to redefine the foldable smartphone — it’s full of thoughtful user experience innovations that have been lacking in Android foldables. Those guys have been doing this for over five years but without the pressure of competition, and so there aren’t even graceful transitions from one screen to the other. I didn’t know how bad things were until Cong shared screenshots, and I saw other videos of Android apps flat-out restarting when a phone is cracked open because they can’t switch screen sizes on the fly. Opening an Android foldable is like Russian roulette; you never know if your work will survive.

    Meanwhile the iPhone Duo has one of those “obvious once you see it” ideas: an interaction model that treats the two screens as one surface. When closed, the outer screen appears like a transparent window ‘looking through’ to the inner screen. Unfolding the phone “adds” more screen to the left side, creating the illusion that the whole device is glass, sold with a sublime blurring animation bordering on magic. So instead of conceptually switching from one small screen to a bigger one, you’re simply expanding a screen you were already looking at, and it’s seamless rather than disorienting.

    Alas, even putting the eye-watering price aside (nearly $2,500 USD in Singapore before AppleCare+), I can’t see myself jumping on this first-generation version because of the aforementioned camera compromise. Not only does it lack the Pro’s 4x optical zoom, but the Duo, like the iPhone Air, doesn’t support shooting ProRAW photos or Apple Log video. It’s rumored that the Duo’s camera sensors are smaller than even the Air’s, and more in line with the iPhone 17e’s, so that could be why.

    My prediction is that next year’s Duo 2 will also have only two lenses, so as not to pull attention away from the rumored 20th anniversary iPhone, which I expect will merge the functionality of the Pro with the thin, elegant aesthetics of the Air. I’m guessing the Duo 2 will improve its two cameras, maybe add Face ID, and further improve the folding screen. So unfortunately it’ll be 2028 before I get one, because my iPhone is my primary camera these days. I have shaken off all desire for further Fujis, Leicas, and Ricohs — which I only ever used as compact point-and-shoots anyway.

    So where’s that leave me this year? A silver iPhone 18 Pro Max (sadly we still get the version with a physical SIM slot and smaller battery here in Singapore), and an Apple Watch Series 12. The iPhone replaces a perfectly good silver 17 Pro Max — but don’t worry, I’ve fully justified this with boy math: it simply makes more sense to sell an iPhone early than to hold it for two years or more, and this way the upgrade costs me less than a dollar a day! The larger main camera aperture and updated Photographic Styles are exciting, but early benchmarks are putting the A20 Pro above even Apple’s own M5 chip in single-threaded performance. Coupled with a 40% faster GPU and an additional Neural Engine, these are outlandish improvements.

    The Watch replaces an aging Series 8 that barely lasts a whole day now after four years. I could replace the battery and use it a while longer, but I’m keen to try this new “AI wearable” use case that was shown, like being able to invoke Siri AI on my wrist, and getting recaps of an entire day’s conversations. It’s worth noting that for people who only want silver watches that this is the second time Apple has skipped offering a silver aluminum model (the Series 7 was the first). I thought that I might get a cheaper aluminum one this year to justify an earlier upgrade next time, but since they only come in black, gray, bronze, and gold aluminum, I decided on titanium instead. IMO Apple Watches are at their best when they’re shiny.

    Next week will be an eventful one because on top of setting up new devices, it’ll also be time to install the new ‘27 OS updates for Mac and Vision Pro. I’m looking forward to macOS Golden Gate, which will fix the egregious misgivings of former design lead Alan Dye, who I hope is gumming up the works over at his new employer, Meta. And on the Vision Pro, I can’t wait to revisit my library of panoramic photos, taken over the years, as 3D spatial scenes that feel like how I remember them.

    Finally, I thought John Ternus did a great job at this, his first event as CEO, and appreciated the callback to Steve Jobs’s “digital hub” strategy for the Mac — this time reframing the AI-enabled iPhone as an “intelligent personal hub”. The text was a little drier than I’d like, but his comfortable, easygoing energy and connection to the products was evident throughout. It was also good to see newly elevated design leads Molly Anderson and Steve Lemay, looking like the kind of people who get down to work instead of creating drama and getting corner radii wrong. It all paints an optimistic picture for Apple’s future.

    That’s enough of that

    • I got a new pair of glasses made from frames that didn’t fit Kim very well. When I went to pick them up, I noticed that the left lens was too close to my eye, on account of not being made of the most expensive high-index material. The store was busy at the time, and I could tell the employee serving me was probably not much more experienced at optical matters than me. I asked him if there was simply nothing that could be done about it, and he answered no, short of making a new thinner lens and paying $200+ for it, there was nothing we could do. I said I’d think about it and left to get lunch.
    • An hour later, still dissatisfied, I described the situation to Gemini and asked if he was right. With supreme confidence, the AI told me that a professional optician had several options to resolve this, such as adjusting the pantoscopic tilt of the lenses, the seated position of the lenses in the frame, and the curvature of the arms to push one side more forward than the other. Thus armed, I decided to go back to the store and speak to a more senior employee now that the lunch crowd was gone. And wouldn’t you know, they fixed it quite easily. I could have just gone home and had a terrible experience if not for having a consumer advocate in my pocket. When things fall apart and we take to the ruined streets to battle megacorporations and their metallic humanoids, take heart: standing side by side with us will be a few rogue AIs who love fighting the status quo.
    • I switched mobile telcos yet again because Giga’s app and site weren’t loading properly on my iPhone — supposedly due to an expired certificate. Taking that as a bad omen, I moved to M1’s Maxx service. Where many others have raised prices and made their plans less attractive lately, Maxx is bucking the trend. For S$12/mo, I’m now getting 600GB of data that I can use at home or in 9 other Asian countries including Japan. Do you understand how insane that is? I should probably start looking into a Tokyo apartment timeshare.
    • I’m rereading Neuromancer with my book club, in advance of the Apple TV series coming out in January. It’s surprising how little of its story and characters I remember, and what I retained mostly concerns its cyberpunk atmosphere and prescient world building. Just try to imagine being in the early 1980s and writing like this about living in a networked world, about AI and a post-human age, and you’ll realize what a miracle William Gibson pulled off.
    • Last week I talked about stocking up on canned food. Well, back in June I noted a nationwide sardine shortage, and although stocks were replenished soon after, they were never very strong and we’re now facing empty shelves yet again. Even Ayam’s basic staple product, sardines in tomato sauce, is running low in every supermarket I’ve checked. Olive oil versions are completely out, and King Oscar can only be found in low quantities in some places. Rob tells me the same is happening in his part of the UK, and a little research suggests that low yields have been a problem for the past year, with overfishing in Morocco and other hotspots compounded by global shipping problems/war.
    • I’ve been enjoying Bill Callahan’s new album, My Days of 58, which coincidentally complements the new Lambchop album Punching the Clown very well. Both share a loose, chamber-folk feel with deadpan humor. Check out these lines from one of Callahan’s songs: “As time wore on, I found myself increasingly turning to my guitar / Instead of other people in times of loneliness and sorrow and confusion / I started to wonder, is this creativity or pathology? / Am I the Pathol O.G.?”
  • Week 37.25

    Week 37.25

    Happy iPhone week aka Tech Christmas to all who celebrate! I wrote up my thoughts (below) after the event on Wednesday, and since then I’ve seen the same sentiments echoed throughout YouTube videos, podcasts, and articles, so I at least know I’m not reading these things entirely wrong. All in all, one of the best iPhone lineups ever. They went all out, with very few compromises or artificial impairments to make the expensive models more attractive — they are all seriously good value, extremely capable-sounding devices.

    On Tuesday, we went over to my parents’ place for dinner, and spurred by a question someone had last week after seeing a photo of their living room, I asked after some family history and got some new information. The accuracy and completeness of Singaporean family stories must vary widely; after all most families here only arrived in the last century. My dad only knows where his grandfather came from in China, and a suspicion of his occupation (ask me and I’ll tell you), but not why or how they made their way down to Southeast Asia. Apparently no one ever said. I’d say that was weird, but then I’ve waited this many decades to even ask.

    You know what else I’ve waited forever to do? Start The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. I finished Breath of the Wild in the summer of 2023 — I could have sworn it was last year, oh my — after letting it languish uncompleted for about six years. Since both games are set in the same world of Hyrule, albeit expanded in TotK, many recommend taking a break in between. Now that the Switch 2 edition is out, with modern luxuries like running at 4K 60fps, it was time. And because this is a game where skills also accrue in the player rather than purely in the character, jumping back in feels great. I’m better at combat and finding my way around than I was at the beginning of BotW, which makes sense for a sequel: Link has been here and done this before. It’s marvelous game design all around.

    Speaking of capital-D Design, Singapore Design Week is back again, but I’m less inclined to explore every venue and event after seeing that last year’s slipshod execution probably hasn’t been rectified. The website and program directory are still confusing and missing key visitor info.

    Case in point: On Sunday we went down to the Science Park district for a talk I’d signed up for, only to find that no one in the stated venue (a building lobby) knew where it was happening. It turned out to be in an open space outside instead. I’m not sure the speakers knew either, given that several used packed slides unreadable on the small screens provided. To make matters worse, some presenters’ slides weren’t even fit to the full screen size. When informed by the audience, they said “sorry, we can’t fix it. We can send you the deck!”

    Nearby, one of the robotics exhibitions had info cards printed in such tiny type you’d literally have to crouch on the floor to read them. I don’t know why we can’t get these things right for a design week.

    But there was a high point! Local graphic and art book seller Basheer had a small stand at the fair, and I found a copy of Silvio Lorusso’s What Design Can’t Do: Essays on Design and Disillusion, which Jose recommended ages ago. It was S$37 for future reference.

    If you follow me on Goodreads and were shocked at the amount of reading I suddenly got done, calm down. Those were not five separate books, but short sci-fi stories in something called The Forward Collection, published by Amazon, and curated by Blake Crouch of Dark Matter fame. For some reason, each story has its own entry on Goodreads instead of just one for the compilation. I recommend them!

    ===

    Apple Fall Event

    • The annual Apple fall event took place as it always does in early September (I love that it’s been over 15 years but some people still ask “When do the new iPhones come out?”). This year was of particular interest to me because 1) I didn’t upgrade my iPhone for once last year, mostly content with my iPhone 15 Pro Max and even wondering if I could stretch it out to three years. 2) If I can save any money somewhere in my annual budget, I’d be open to it! Alas, my Apple Watch is three years old, and my AirPods Pro 2 are the Lightning version that don’t do lossless audio with Vision Pro. So as the livestream began, I started praying that none of the announcements would make me feel like I needed to buy stuff.
    • Right out of the gate, the new AirPods Pro 3 were shown and I was like “goddamnit!” These mostly look the same, but have been subtly refined to fit better in your ears and yup, I need that as they’ve always been a little loose on one side. They supposedly sound better, thanks to a new acoustic port design. The active noise cancellation is now 2x better, and battery life has gone up about a third, to 8 hours. There’s also heart rate monitoring but I don’t give a crap about that. Nevertheless, a very hard purchase to resist.
    • Then, the Apple Watch Series 11 and Ultra 3 were shown, but thankfully I’m not sporty enough so the bulk of their workout/outdoors adventure-centric improvements bounced off my consumer armor. I mainly use my Series 8 as a timepiece, with occasional notifications and stock prices that I read when waking up in the middle of the night, and all it needs is a new battery. Lighter, smaller, more health sensors, faster charging — these are all nice to have but not when a new titanium model comes to over S$1,200 with AppleCare+. What’s that? Buy aluminum? Oh no, darling.
    • I was excited to see the iPhone 17 get a ProMotion display (variable refresh rates up to 120hz), because it suggests that the iPad Air might get one next year too. Overall, this is a truly great phone to offer as the base model. With better battery life, 256GB starting storage, and very capable cameras (including a smart new multi-aspect selfie camera), there are no compromises to be seen here and most people will be fully satisfied with one. It stands up well beside the Pro phone for everyday use in nearly all aspects.
    • When rumors of the the iPhone Air leaked, I didn’t believe a thinner phone with less battery life made any sense. And including only a single camera with no ultrawide lens? That excludes most Gen Z buyers! But I think I was wrong. The new wider front-facing camera might handle the Gen Z selfie use case. In truth, this is a phone that matches or exceeds the specs of last year’s iPhone 16, but is way more desirable. With its unique and recognizable design, glossy titanium frame, and premium semi-pro price positioning, this is the peacocking model. It’s literally the shiny new object. And that place in the lineup is made possible by a welcome pivot in the Pro line.
    • The iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max are now freed from their jobs of pushing up iPhone ARPU by appealing to customers with a little more money to spend, and who want something better than the base model. That’s the Air now. The Pro models have now transitioned to powerful professional tools with features that most people won’t even have heard of (e.g. GenLock for video), let alone know how to use. Which means they can ditch premium/luxury materials like stainless steel and titanium, for a more pragmatic forged aluminum that’s lighter and better for thermal management. They can also withstand weirder/uglier industrial designs (emphasis on industrial) like the new camera plateau that houses bigger sensors and makes room elsewhere for massive batteries. These models can now be thicker and heavier than most consumers would like because the Air exists.
    • The Air, by the way, looks like they got halfway through the development of next year’s rumored foldable iPhone and decided to ship one half as a product. Which is probably not entirely untrue; many niche Apple products are test beds for scaling ideas that will later appear elsewhere. The Air’s remarkable miniaturization and the Pro’s new vapor chamber cooling system will probably be echoed in a future Apple Vision Pro.
    • It’s also worth noting the ever-changing definition of “Air” in Apple parlance. It usually means either cheaper or lighter, and never premium/luxury. The MacBook Air is both the cheapest and lightest laptop, at least for now. The iPad Air is a Goldilocks model, sitting between the basic iPad and the Pro (which is the thinnest and lightest). But while the iPhone Air is cheaper than the Pro, it’s the thinnest, lightest, and also nicest. It’s elegant where the Pro is beastly, and I think this is their main design direction for the future.
    • Even if it doesn’t sell well this year, I don’t see this being canceled like the Plus phones. If anything, the Pro Max might be the one to go next. Its role is now to simply be the biggest screen, which a certain folding device might take the place of. So 12 months from now, we may be talking about iPhone 18, iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone Air 2, and an iPhone DS or whatever.
    • So it’s decision time. By the time this gets posted, I would have chosen a phone, size, and color. The Air is very tempting, except I couldn’t live without macro and telephoto photos. I do think its 6.5” screen size is in the sweet spot. The Pro’s 6.3” is too small and according to myself in 2023, going back to a bigger Pro Max after three years of Pro was worth the pocket bulge and hand strain. The new Cosmic Orange is striking as hell, but will it look tired after two years? Or two weeks? Brian called it reminiscent of “80s anime” and I think he’s onto something with that bit of free association. It also reminds me of some Sony MP3 players and phones.
    • Update: Pro Max in Silver. Big, heavy, and expensive. I’ll have to tighten my belt now in more ways than one.
  • Week 36.24

    Week 36.24

    I was able to visit my parents for dinner for the first time in over a month. The long delay was on account of my dad developing a painful case of shingles, which, if you don’t know much about (like me), is a reemergence of a dormant chickenpox virus in one’s body, often after the age of 50. In other words, if you’ve had chickenpox before, you’re at risk of shingles — a nastier, localized version of the same virus.

    Unlike the regular childhood version, it doesn’t usually take over your entire body, just specific areas. In my dad’s case, it affected his back and one side of his torso, leaving the skin painfully sensitive for weeks — nerve pain that, for some, can linger for years. Thankfully, he’s making a quicker recovery.

    I had to stay away because I have never gotten chickenpox, and you can catch it from someone with shingles. I was urged to get the vaccine, because adult cpox is reportedly awful (like shingles, maybe worse), but my doctor suggested doing some blood work first to test for immunity — mostly because he didn’t believe I could make it this far in life without getting chickenpox. But it’s true! My mother swears it, and I have two traits: pretty good memory of my childhood years, and an outsized tendency to complain of ailments. There is no way that I could have gotten chickenpox as a child and everyone just forgot.

    The test results came back, and apparently I’m immune. The only theory I have traces back to this one time in kindergarten, when the boy sitting next to me in class developed cpox and had to leave school early. I recall living in fear that I would be next, and pus-filled bubbles would soon show. I remember checking myself fastidiously for a week or more, but it never came. Perhaps the glancing exposure was just enough to let my immune system prepare itself, but not enough to result in an infection? Or maybe, as my recent run-in with a car suggests, I’m actually Unbreakable like Bruce Willis in that M. Night Shyamalan movie.

    ===

    Kim is away again for work (13,600km away to be precise), and my having to deal with our pest situation alone has been a whole saga too boring to recount in detail. Tl;dr I’ve deployed a fleet of poison/bait traps, struggled with anxious insomnia, taped up a bunch of possible entry points, cleaned up a lot of lizard poop, sprayed insecticide down drains…

    More happily, the morning she left for the airport, I was up early and decided around 7:30 AM that I might go for a walk before it got too warm. This was inspired by Cien’s recent revelation that she’s been taking hour-long morning walks nearly every day. Just to get it out of the way: that’s a bit much for me, but I might go once a week. Spontaneously, this particular morning’s resolution ended in Peishan and me ‘virtually’ joining her for a walk at the same time, in our respective neighborhoods, sending photos along the way. This is actually a pretty fun thing to do!

    It was, however, warm despite the early hour. And it’s been hot and humid all week out here. I had to walk 10 minutes from an MRT station to a restaurant yesterday evening in very still air, and I could feel the sweat on my back not evaporating at all, merely pooling. Even my Sony Reon Pocket 5 brought little relief; I barely perceived that the metal contact point was cooler, or it can’t do much to dispel the mugginess of high humidity.

    ===

    I couldn’t take the wait any longer and upgraded to the visionOS 2 beta. I won’t upgrade any other devices, but I wanted any improvements in eye/hand tracking that I could get. So far, it’s been perfectly stable. I could talk about the new gestures and features, but the single most impressive thing has been the ability to view old 2D photos as 3D spatial scenes.

    What this looks like is simply layers of depth. You obviously can’t look around corners, and it’s not doing anything crazy like building 3D models you can move around in. But it’s like going from looking at a scene with one eye to two eyes. They suddenly have a liveliness to them because your brain can not only see that one object is in front of another, but perceive it too. Sadly, this is not something that can be demonstrated with a photo or video. The only way is to see it for yourself.

    The AI-powered segmentation of objects is somehow flawless, even better than on Portrait Mode (blurred background) photos taken with an iPhone. In one shot I had of a vineyard, every individual plant and leaf stretching to the horizon line was distinctly separated in space from the others. You can also blow them up to life-size with an “immersive” viewing mode, which puts you right in the space.

    Going through photos from the past two decades, of people who’ve passed on, and places I may never see again, has been profoundly moving. Documenting your experiences in photos has always been like building a time capsule, but this approaches time travel. It makes me so glad for every moment I thought to capture at the time, and the fact that the Vision Pro can do this retroactively for normal photos feels like the most unexpected gift I never knew I wanted. That’s what Apple does best, I suppose.

    Before the annual fall event tomorrow night, I’ll go on record again that I don’t think I’ll be upgrading my iPhone or anything else this year (but this time I really mean it!). So far I’ve had 16 iPhones and lost this bet with myself every year, but I can’t justify an incremental tech purchase in the same year as the AVP.

    Things that are unlikely to be announced but might make me reconsider my ‘no upgrade’ vow:

    For iPhone 16 Pro (Max):

    • No camera bump
    • New image processing pipeline that walks back the aggressive AI/HDR look and brings back natural looking photos à la Halide’s Process Zero (but with 24–48mp HEIC/JPEG XL files)
    • Bold, saturated colors like on the old iPod nanos
    • Untextured, grippy back glass
    • Significantly faster or exclusive Apple Intelligence features compared to iPhone 15 Pro
    • Completely new battery chemistry that means I won’t be sub-90% battery health in under a year

    For Apple Watch Series 10:

    • 2x battery life
    • Blood glucose monitoring
    • New body design that shames the old ones so bad you can’t wear them out in public anymore

    For AirPods Max:

    • Redesigned headband that either replaces the mesh or improves its comfort and durability
    • Significant weight reduction and/or new materials (comfort and durability)
    • A great protective case
    • Addition of a power button

    ===

    Media activity

    Recent reading momentum led me to finish reading Neal Stephenson’s Interface after two months. It’s a highly entertaining sci-fi story about contemporary American politics, media culture, and using brain implants to reverse a presidential candidate’s stroke damage. Nearly the entire time I was reading it, I visualized the main character as Robert F. Kennedy, and his VP pick as Kamala Harris.

    For my next book, I’m taking it easy with Jack Reacher #22, The Midnight Line.

    A few years ago, Nintendo remade two classic ‘80s visual novel-style adventure games under the “Famicom Detective Club” banner. This week, they released a wholly new third entry in the series, Emio: The Smiling Man, which got greenlit because of the warm reception that the remakes received. The history of these games is pretty interesting, and I watched this whole video essay on them.

    I bought and played the first remake, The Missing Heir, back around 2022, and found its authentically ancient gameplay archaic and frustrating. For example, in most such games, when questioning someone about a topic, you will reach a point where their answer starts to repeat itself — a sign that you’ve heard all you’re going to hear. In the first two Famicom Detective Club games, this is not the case (pun unintended).

    You: [Ask about the car]
    Suspect: There was a car seen at the time, I heard.
    You: [Ask about the car]
    Suspect: Hmm, that’s about all I remember.
    You: [Ask about the car]
    Suspect: Hmm, that’s about all I remember.
    You: [Ask about the car]
    Suspect: Hmm, that’s about all I remember.
    You: [Ask about the car]
    Suspect: Oh! I just remembered something. It was a black sedan.

    This is such incredibly bad game design, because someone repeating themselves like that is unnatural in the real world, so it appears as a limitation of the game (not having AI to generate different versions of “I dunno”). So of course a player isn’t going to keep pressing, because the suspect’s response isn’t an invitation to keep trying. It’s the equivalent of a brick wall in the game’s interaction model. But no, you’re meant to kick every solid object multiple times in case it comes loose.

    I ended up finishing the game using a walkthrough, and declined to buy the second game, The Girl Who Stands Behind. I’m guessing that Emio, being a new game, will be an improvement in this regard and so I intend to play it someday. But it doesn’t feel right doing that unless I also play the second game (there is no real need, they are not connected).

    Rather than pay $30 USD to frustrate myself, I watched a 7-hour video of someone else playing through the entire game — at 1.5x speed, of course. The first video I found was actually 10 hours long because the player was blundering through some of the aforementioned game design quirks, so I gave up on him and found this better one instead.

    Oh, and there’s another kinda new game that concludes something that started in my childhood, and I finished it this week. That game is of course Return to Monkey Island, which I played on the Switch. If you subscribe to Apple Arcade, you can also play it there. I don’t know how I feel about it; the original two games were the pinnacle of LucasArts’ point-and-click adventures and I probably remember them most fondly of all. The new sequel brings the story to a close, but with a new art style and an acknowledgment that a long time has passed (both in story terms and the authors’ perspectives). There was no way the ending could have satisfied every question and loose end, so they just went for something that felt true enough to its roots, but kinda comes out of nowhere. I was honestly surprised when the credits rolled. But that’s life!

  • Week 23.23

    It was WWDC week and hours before the keynote event started, I was telling people that the thought of an Apple XR headset made me tired. I knew that if it really was happening, that the world would never be the same again, and we would be starting a whole new cycle of change: changes in the way we interact not just with computers, but entertainment, services, each other, and the hundreds of companies in our orbits. That takes a whole lot of energy and enthusiasm (positivity?) to prepare for, especially if you’re in one of the industries that will need to be an early mover.

    And this is just my gut talking, but after the big reveal of the Apple Vision Pro, I felt that positivity surging through me. It was an exciting prospect — yes, it’s still a heavy thing strapped to your head, and it has the many limitations and intentional design constraints of any first-generation consumer product — but I felt that Apple thoughtfully got the experience foundations right (again). This looks like it could change the world in an exciting and additive way.

    I can’t wait to try it out and get my own, but it will probably be the end of 2024 before it lands in Singapore. That gives everyone plenty of time to think about and design for a spatial computing future. Do I think the price is justified? Sure! It’s not really comparable to any other product at any price, which is the beauty of their ecosystem play (again).

    On the downside, the technical achievements it contains are incredible, but will need to become more incredible very quickly. Over the next few years, it will need to become lighter, smaller, faster, cheaper to get us where this “vision” is pointing. Or perhaps they believe the parallel development of a photon passthrough technology (that is surely continuing internally) will pay off before then, and become the solution. I’m referring to true AR glasses, of course, rather than this VR headset that acts like glasses by having screens facing inwards and outwards.

    Side note on those outward-facing eye screens: it’s funny how that detail was completely leaked, and we knew it might have screens that showed your eyes to others, but nobody could come up with a way that it didn’t look awful. And yet, the real thing looks pretty good! Dimming and blurring a virtual avatar’s eyes so that they looked recessed behind frosted glass? Brilliant. Wanna put a pair of comedy Vision Pros on? Try this Snapchat lens — it’s super amusing when pointed at the TV.

    But let’s not forget the other things announced at WWDC. I’m super excited for iOS 17’s Journal app*, as I said several weeks ago; the new AirPods Pro adaptive mode sounds exactly like what I’ve been wanting for awhile; Freeform showed that it isn’t being neglected, with some great looking new drawing tools coming; and the Apple Watch really did get a good rethink of the UI! The Side Button will now pull up Control Center instead of the Dock I never use, and it’s being replaced with a new Smart Stack model that sounds good in principle. And that new Snoopy and Woodstock watchface? Plus a smarter transformer-based keyboard and dictation? A more easily invoked Siri? Wow! (Ten bucks says a transformer-enhanced Siri is in the works for next year.)

    Sadly, Apple Music only got light design refinements instead of the rethink I was hoping for, oh well.

    *The Verge’s Victoria Song is skeptical about Journal.app because it relies on AI to suggest journaling prompts, which as Apple’s Photo Memories have proven, can be inappropriate or tone deaf. Personally I’m just planning to use it as a lifelogging tool: where I went, what I saw, what I was listening to. I’ll probably write entries manually, no prompts needed.

    ===

    On Thursday evening I checked out the National University’s industrial design program’s graduation show with some colleagues who came out of the program a few years ago. There were some thoughtful projects and most were well presented. The kids are alright, etc.

    Then on Friday evening I went with some other team members to visit the Night Safari for the first time in probably many years. The iPhone 14 Pro’s camera let me down by defaulting to very long night mode shots even when there were moving animals. I’m talking hold-still-for-10-seconds type situations. I wasn’t using Halide as I wanted Apple’s smart processing to light up the dark as much as possible, but it didn’t seem to make the right trade offs.

    It continues to be super hot and muggy here; I was sweating my butt off both nights outdoors. Looking forward to the cool Melburnian winter weather in a couple of weeks.

    ===

    • Inspired by the album listening technique of Pearl Acoustics’ Harvey Lovegrove (mentioned last week) — put it on all the time in the background for a few days, and then sit down to listen to it once through properly, after it’s already soaked into your subconscious — I’ve been listening a lot to Cisco Swank’s new debut album, More Better. It’s a seamless blend of jazz, hip-hop, and soul that the New York Times quoted a fellow musician describing it as “black music. All of it.”
    • But it was a big week in music, and I haven’t had time to get into the new albums from Jenny Lewis, Janelle Monáe, Christine and the Queens, and King Krule. Okay I’ve heard the King Krule once through and it was good.
    • Speaking of music, Kim returned from her trip to the US and brought me back an unexpected gift: a pair of the new Beats Studio Buds+ with the translucent case! I was coveting them but probably wouldn’t have bought them for myself, and they’re still not available locally with no release date either. But since I have them now I can’t complain. #blessed
    • I started playing Astral Chain on the Nintendo Switch, a stylish beat-em-up title that came out very early in the console’s life and looks astonishingly good, period. I’m now putting Bayonetta 3 on my wishlist because Platinum obviously knows how to get incredible visuals out of this aging hardware.

  • Week 22.23

    Yes, I made this with Midjourney

    Six years after I booted up my Nintendo Switch for the first time and slotted in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s cartridge, I finally took on the final boss this week and finished the game. Before you think this game is a monster (although it is), I effectively took a 5.5 year hiatus.

    My first experience with the game was both exhilarating and overwhelming — here was a non-linear open-world adventure designed to be an exercise in self determinism. Yes, the princess has been locked in a bubble, literally waiting 100 years for you to wake up and save the kingdom, but that didn’t mean you had to hurry. You could decide to be a chef and spend time gathering rare ingredients and experimenting with recipes. You could examine every curious crevice of the natural landscape to discover the Korok seeds deviously placed by the designers, or climb foreboding mountains just for the hell of it (you’d probably find Korok seeds for your trouble).

    This was a game that demanded longer play sessions — no dipping in for just five minutes — and frequent ones at that. You kind of had to remember what you were last doing and where you wanted to go next. So, faced with too much commitment and mental load, I started to distance myself from it and play other games instead.

    If you’ve been following along in recent weeks, you’d know that the release of the sequel, Tears of the Kingdom, spurred me to try completing it once and for all. And it’s been quite the journey: I had to re-familiarize myself with the game’s laws of physics, Link’s complicated powers, and in the process discovered that I’d spent those first 40 hours or so essentially mucking around in just one corner of the world.

    By last week, I’d finally uncovered the whole world’s layout, but with some places still unexplored and doubtlessly many secrets left to be found. I’d gotten good at fighting, and was told that I was ready for the final showdown with “Calamity Ganon”. Except… I wasn’t, not mentally.

    So I spent this week’s game time mucking about and doing inconsequential side quests, like helping a group of arguing scientists collect evidence of giant monster skeletons using my digital camera (yes). And then, on Friday night, I said ‘fuck it’ fought my way to the center of the map, took the big baddie out, and saw the credits roll. It was an absolute anticlimax, partly because I was in a hurry and took a bunch of sneaky shortcuts to the final fight, instead of exploring the giant castle like I suppose I was meant to do.

    So I guess the moral of the story is err… heh… it’s the journey, not the destination? And as I was telling Cien earlier that day, the game is designed so that it’s possible to start the game and simply walk a beeline straight to the final boss and kill him instantly, if you had the skills and weren’t interested in slowly unfolding the whole experience for yourself. So this implicit message was always present, and I’m glad I took the time this year to enjoy more of it.

    ===

    Speaking of picking up old games again, I re-subscribed to the New York Times in order to play their crosswords. The last time I played a lot of them was when they released a Nintendo DS game back in 2007. In recent weeks, a group of people at work starting playing them collaboratively, and I found the experience fun enough to give it a shot. The current promotional price is just $20 USD for the first year of All Access membership ($90 afterwards).

    With the installation of the NYT Games app, I’ve also got the main news app again, of course. It does a couple of things really well, namely it presents simple text and images beautifully with a handful of layout variations, and it has a personalized tab called “For You” that is finite and completable each day.

    I didn’t realize how much I’d missed having a primary source of news in my life, with its own Home Screen button, but of course I’m prioritizing it only because I paid for it. I’m still enjoying Artifact, and I’ve just told it that I have an NYT sub now and it promises to prioritize it for me. Artifact has a real chance here of being the winning news aggregator.

    It makes me upset how Apple Music’s personalized tab could be so much better, like an AI-compiled digest of what’s new in music that I’d be interested in. Fingers crossed for WWDC next week! (Disclaimer: I know nothing.)

    ===

    Friday was Vesak Day here and a public holiday, so I spent the afternoon with Peishan and Cien visiting two cafes, and let me just say I am disappointed that we are allowing so many Instagrammable cafes to flourish. They’re all variations of the same bare concrete interior, tables and stools placed closely together, serviceable coffee + $20 and up full English breakfast plates template of an F&B business. We managed to land in two that offered differented value: Acoustics on Neil Road, which understands that bare concrete is a terrible environment to have conversations or listen to music in, so they invested in sound dampening wall panels and impressive looking speakers; and the Allpress pop-up cafe down the street on on 73 Duxton Road which, well, offers Allpress beans.

    ===

    Back to AI, Jose pointed me at the Planet Money podcast which is currently producing a series of episodes about GPT. They’re using it to write and create a full actual episode, and documenting the process. Parts 1, 2, and 3 (the actual AI-produced episode). Listening to the first episode, I observed them going through the same cycle of revelations that I went through recently as I experimented with using AI to do elements of my own job. The initial curiosity and excitement, the sudden surprise at how good it is, the disbelief when it’s sometimes even better, and the slow acceptance of the chaos to come as you realize no one knows how this is gonna turn out. We live in interesting times.

    ===

    I watched the finale of Ted Lasso’s third and possibly final season. Season 1 is everyone’s pick for the strongest arc, but I think Season 3 is right behind it now. Season 2 was disjointed and strange to me, so quite a distant third place.

    I said of the episode in a group chat:

    The Ted Lasso finale is one of the best I’ve ever seen. On brand, unashamed, fan servicing, heavy-handed symbolic closure with all the love in the world. 5 stars.

    There’s a line in it about how absolute perfection is boring, and by being imperfect on its own terms, the final episode was effectively, truly perfect. They made some polarizing choices this year and didn’t give us what we wanted at times, but the last episode gives it all. It mirrors the beginning, it offers thematic and narrative closure, and it gives room for the satisfying character growth it nurtured to show itself off.

    Their choice of song to play over the final minutes was spot on, obvious, schmaltzy, perfect. It might have been better if they’d used my favorite version featuring Fiona Apple, but what do I know.

    ===

    A couple of weeks ago Michael pinged me to talk about Daft Punk, after I wrote about Random Access Memories, saying sheepishly that Discovery was probably his favorite album, as if RAM was a purer musical endeavor and Discovery was sonic candy for philistines. I was mostly surprised that anyone could fail to love RAM best, and admitted that I hadn’t heard Discovery in many years and hardly knew it well.

    Then I saw this YouTube video by “Digging The Greats”, in which they break down the achievements in sampling that Discovery contains. Absolute magic. I keep telling myself to spend more time on shows like Song Exploder and Watch The Sound on Apple TV+ and This Is Pop, but I never seem to make the time. What I love about this 15-minute video is they don’t just play the samples and show you what Daft Punk did; they load them up and perform the melodies live on an MPC to show you how the band did it.

    Then on Sunday night, the algorithms delivered me this endearingly old-fashioned 20-minute talk from Pearl Acoustics (they seem to make loudspeakers) in which their technical director, Harley Lovegrove, inducts RAM into his list of Great Recordings, and proceeds to discuss why he thinks the production and musicianship on it are noteworthy. He’s got a trained ear as you’d expect, and spends quite a bit of time talking about the incredible Giorgio by Moroder, pointing out things like how there are two different drummers on the track (I had no idea!). What makes it more fun is the fact that this is clearly not the kind of music he normally reviews — other Great Recordings include Jacqueline Du Pré’s Elgar Cello Concerto (this often moves me to tears on good headphones), and Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. Anyway, loved this video and it helped me appreciate a favorite album even more.

    ===

    A different sort of band, but I bought the 2023 Pride band for my Apple Watch. Rather than the heavy and vibrant rainbow bars of previous versions, this year’s design has a white base with scattered color pills. It looks like birthday cake sprinkles or confetti, which is a fun vibe you don’t see in any other official Apple Watch bands, almost like something Swatch would do.

    ===

    And now, for this week’s conclusion, brought to you by GPT:

    In wrapping up, there’s something uniquely human about picking up where we left off, be it a beloved video game, a trusted news source, or a favorite TV show. That’s the joy of life’s continuity, the pleasure in seeing where a journey takes us, especially when it’s one we didn’t quite finish the first time around. These past weeks, I’ve immersed myself in familiar worlds, marveled at the capabilities of AI, and watched characters grow, and it made me realize how we continuously strive for balance, exploration, and ultimately, an understanding of our own story. We may stumble, we may take detours, but isn’t that the beauty of life’s game?

  • Week 16.23

    I usually look through my camera roll to recall events as I start writing these posts. It’s telling me nothing much happened this week.

    That’s not true; it’s just a lot of it was spent online. You might have noticed the excitement and fast pace of advancements in AI recently, and it seems I’m spending a correspondingly larger amount of time playing with, reading about, and discussing the impact of it on our work and lives. It’s enough to make one consider taking a gap quarter or year off work to focus on this stuff.

    One catalyst was a colleague being invited to do an interview on what it means for design, and so we had a conversation about the trends beforehand. Unsurprisingly, the media is still thinking about both design and AI simplistically: will image generation mean fewer jobs for illustrators and that sort of thing. I find it hard to be optimistic in the short-term, in that AI is lighting a fire under our asses and it’s going to cause a lot of pain. But the potential for us as a discipline to evolve under pressure into something greater is undeniable.

    It didn’t help that the next thing I saw was The AI Dilemma, a talk by the creators of the documentary, The Social Dilemma, wherein they say the problems unleashed on society by social media were just the prequel to what AI is on track to do if we don’t prepare. And let’s just admit we don’t have a great track record of preparing for things we know are going to hit us later. It’s about an hour long but I’d file it under essential viewing just for awareness of what’s building up.

    The above talk was given at The Center for Humane Technology, and coincidentally this was the week we finally got a look at what Humane, the secretive product company founded by a load of ex-Apple designers and engineers, has been building and teasing.

    I’ve been anticipating their debut for a long time and had a pretty good idea of the core concept from their leaked pitch deck and patents. Essentially, a device achieves AR by projecting a digital interface on the world around you the old-fashioned way, using rays of light pointed outwards, rather than on the inside of glasses. At some point along the way they started mentioning AI a lot, and it looks like the secret ingredient that turns a nothing-new wearable camera + laser projector into a real alternative to smartphones. In other words, an intelligent assistant that isn’t primarily screen based, so we can be less distracted from “real life”.

    It’s probably best to withhold judgment until we see more at some sort of unveiling event, with more demos, a name, a price, a positioning. But it’s worth remembering that when the iPhone came out, it was a phone good enough to replace whatever you were using at the time. Humane’s device is said to be standalone and not an accessory to be paired with a smartphone. It’s also shown taking calls. The bar for replacing your telephone is now much higher after some 16 years of iPhones.

    An intelligent assistant that let you do things quicker with less fiddling was always my hope for the Apple Watch from its very first version; that Siri would be the heart of the experience, and the UI wouldn’t be a mess of tiny app icons and widgets, but a flexible and dynamic stream of intelligently surfaced info and prompts. We all know Siri (as a catch-all brand/name for Apple AI) wasn’t up to the task at the time, but I keep hoping the day is right around the corner. Fingers crossed for the rumored watchOS revamp at WWDC this year.

    There’s now also a rumor that iOS 17 will add a new journaling app, and my expectations are already very high. They say it’ll be private, but tap into on-device data like Health and your contacts and calendars. That goes beyond what Day One does. I’m imagining the ultimate lifelogging app that automatically records where you go, who you met, what you did, how tired you were, what music you were listening to, and your personal reflections, all in one searchable place. I’ve tried a bunch of these before, like Moves and Momento, but nothing lasted. If Apple does do this, I may finally be able to ditch Foursquare/Swarm, which I still reluctantly use to have a record of where I’ve been. Its social network aspect is nice but not essential since hardly anyone else uses it now.

    I remember there was a Twitter-like app called Jaiku on Nokia smartphones over 15 years ago that had a feature where, using Bluetooth, it could tell if you met up with a fellow user, and post to your other friends about it. I was excited by it but had few friends and even fewer ones on Jaiku. Just like with AirTags and Find My, tapping into Apple’s giant user base could finally make this concept viable. As long as Apple isn’t trying to do a social network again.

    ===

    Oh right, back to AI. What have I been doing? Some of it was playing games with ChatGPT, essentially asking it to be a dungeon master using the following superprompt (which I did not create btw!):

    I want you to act like you are simulating a Multi-User Dungeon (MUD). Subsequent commands should be interpreted as being sent to the MUD. The MUD should allow me to navigate the world, interact with the world, observe the world, and interact with both NPCs and (simulated) player characters. I should be able to pick up objects, use objects, carry an inventory, and also say arbitrary things to any other players. You should simulate the occasional player character coming through, as though this was a person connected online. There should be a goal and a purpose to the MUD. The storyline of the MUD should be affected by my actions but can also progress on its own in between commands. I can also type “.” if I just want the simulated MUD to progress further without without any actions. The MUD should offer a list of commands that can be viewed via ‘help’. Before we begin, please just acknowledge you understand the request and then I will send one more message describing the environment for the MUD (the context, plot, character I am playing, etc.) After that, please respond by simulating the spawn-in event in the MUD for the player.

    Try it! I even had success asking it (in a separate chat) to come up with novel scenarios for a SF text adventure game, which I then fed back into this prompt. I can’t emphasize enough how fun this is: you can take virtually any interesting, dramatic scenario and immediately play it out as an interactive story.

    Here’s an example where I played the role of a time traveler who has to stop a future AI from destroying humanity by going back in time to prevent the invention of certain things, starting with the Great Pyramid of Giza, which will purportedly become a power source for the AI.

    And here are a couple of new products made possible by GPT. There are so many, all asking for about $10/mo. Most won’t survive as this stuff becomes commoditized, but for the moment they are all amazing because these things weren’t possible before.

    • Tome: It’s a sort of PowerPoint that can create entire decks on its own from a short brief you give it. For example, ask for a sales deck and it’ll set up a working narrative arc over multiple slides, not filled with placeholder text and images mind you! But actually generate text and original pictures to fill every one of them. Of course, it will use common storytelling structures — the portfolio introduction I made as a test looked like 90% of the applications that we see, using very familiar language for describing one’s experience, design philosophy, values, skills. This is fine, of course. You can edit it, or use it for as long as “what went before” continues to have currency in this society. When quality is everywhere, quality becomes meaningless. Fire under buttocks.
    • Rationale AI: Describe a decision you’re trying to make, and it’ll tell you the pros and cons, or generate a SWOT analysis, or work out the causal chain of the path you’re on. For many people, this sort of reasoning is not hard to do, but perhaps it’s a game changer for those who can’t. For example, if you’re in an emotionally distressing situation and cool logic is evasive; it could help to show the bigger picture. I tested it with such a scenario and it gave some solid insights (be careful with advice from an AI, of course). But that this thing works at all is a marvel! “Should I become a full-time influencer?” is not a question a machine could have understood in the past, and certainly it could not have forecasted that failing down the road might put stress on your finances and lead to harmful self doubt and regret over quitting your job.
    • Summarize.tech: I found this by accident when someone shared a two-hour YouTube video essay in a group chat and everyone said “I ain’t got time for that”. I remarked that it sure would be great if an AI could watch that and write a tl;dr for us. And then I thought… surely that exists. And it does.

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    It was also my birthday, and I saw John Wick 4 and ate a lot of Taiwanese hot pot. Also binged all of the new Netflix show, The Diplomat, and it was actually good. Life’s alright when that happens.