Weeknote: Sunday 2nd August 2020
I try not to grumble too much when I’m writing these notes. However, 36 degree heat isn’t really the kind of thing that I enjoy, and it’s not the kind of thing that British homes are built for.
Autumn is my season. I have always thought that the reason I love autumn is that I spent a long time in education – seven years including my degree and post-graduate studying – and autumn still feels like the start of the year. I’m not an academic, but I still feel the rhythms of the academic calendar in my blood.
Most of what I’ve been working falls firmly into the bucket marked “business confidential” so I can’t really talk about it much. Meanwhile the garden is dry and needs more watering, every time I look at the lawn at the back I’m reminded that it’s actually mostly composed of moss, and the roses have got too high and really need pruning right back. When your roses are higher than your bird feeders, something has gone a bit wrong.
Meanwhile, in tech world…
Google got accused of retaliation against Blix for the company’s cooperation with antitrust investigations. Of course, this is only part of the story, but imagine for one second that this was Apple booting someone out of their App Store – how much coverage would you have seen in the tech sites, compared to how much coverage this got?
(A small break, while I decamp to the shade of the living room – the iPad Pro can deal with quite a bit of heat, but not as much is the Sun is giving it right now…)
Steven Soderbergh’s version of 2001: A Space Odyssey? Yes please.
The dreary hand of politics
The de-skilling and reduction in competitiveness caused by Brexit and the Tories lack of understanding of modern management will continue to the point where Britain falls out of the G8. A lot of this is down to the Tories perverse misunderstanding of the outside world: the idea that “high cost labour” and “rules” are “holding Britain back” rather than poor management, low training, and lack of technical investment. They look at Singapore as a role model and learn the wrong lessons.
Their ideology means they can’t look at Germany (say) abs ask “what can we learn from high German productivity?” because their Brexit thinking is that Germany is rich because it’s been ripping off Britain via the EU.
Because the EU is seen through the lens of empires, it contains two kinds of state: dominant, and subjects. In their heads it’s a Franco/German empire, and so the reason Germany does well is because it exploits Britain.
All this, of course, is nonsense. But it’s their ideology.
Myths of decline is an interesting look at how the “two cultures” approach, coupled to a view that British science is second-rate thanks to the dominance of liberal arts in universities, isn’t really true. There is so much to unpick here: the British view that technical education should happen at school and university, delivering a pipeline of skills that companies want, for one thing.
This idea is nonsense for a lot of reasons, but perhaps the biggest error is that it attempts to absolve business from the hard work (and expense) of training. Ironically, in the polytechnics we had a great collaborative system: polytechnics often specialised in degree-level technical education focusing on the needs of local business. That’s why, for example, Hatfield Polytechnic had brilliant aeronautical engineering degrees, as BAE was a big local employer.
There’s some great points in this piece on ”8 Lessons from the Best Remote Companies in the World”. So many companies struggling to catch up on this, especially in the UK where the culture of “presenteeism” has been historically strong (and clearly believed-in by the government, who are desperate to reopen offices rather than support remote working).
Weeknotes: Sunday July 26th 2020
I started writing a post this week about the two major trends in computing devices at the moment: pervasive computing (voice activated wherever you are); and multi-posture (devices which enable different modes of work by physically changing).
There’s a lot of interesting stuff in this (much of which I’ll save for the actual post) but one is that companies are tending to be good at either one or the other, but not both. Apple and Microsoft have both produced high-quality multi-posture devices in the form of Surface Pro X and iPad Pro; Google has produced great pervasive hardware in the form of the Hub stuff. But when Apple or Microsoft has tried pervasive, it’s been second-rate (Siri, Cortana, HomePod). Likewise, when Google has tried its hard at multi-posture, it’s been terrible (Pixel Slate).
I’m very curious about why this should be. What is it, attitudinally, which pushes companies into one camp or the other?
Related to this, apparently the Surface Duo is edging towards a release. The Duo is interesting because it’s all about that approach of multi-posture hardware which can be one thing or another – in this case, a “book”, or a simple single flat screen.
How is that different to a folding single screen? A folding single screen is only ever one thing: its small screen is simply a smaller version of the whole thing unfolded. Two screens on the other hand have to be true to what they are – they can’t really pretend to be a single spread with a huge bar in the middle. Folding the device makes it into a different thing.
Danny wrote a terrific thing about the fundamental unit of news being the story, not the article, to which I say a resounding YES. Hub pages, which encapsulate the story of the story, as it were, are a truly web-native way of doing news (and Google likes it too).
Om found his first post about Twitter, or Twttr as it was at the time. Two things:
- You can understand every single problem Twitter has by its origins as a presence notification function. It was never designed to be a social network where strangers followed you, reply to you, etc. It was just designed to tell other people what you were up to.
- I’m pretty jealous that Om still has all his ancient blog posts.
Tim Bray does not like the way Safari organises lots of tabs.I don’t know, maybe, just maybe, having 20-30 tabs open is stupid…
To put that in a way that’s a little less facetious, I’ve always struggled to understand the use case for having 20-30 tabs open at the same time. You can’t actually work on that many tabs. You probably shouldn’t be context-switching between that many applications at the same time (the more you context-switch, the less focus you have on the task at hand). And if you’re just saving something to come back to later… use a reading list app?
(Related: people who talk about “how they multitask” set my teeth on edge. You can’t multitask: it’s just called “making it harder to focus” and it’s one of the reasons I love working on the iPad)
Weeknote: Sunday 19 July 2020
I’ve been on holiday this week. Of course that means I spent the first few days being anxious about work, something that’s a pattern I’ve had throughout my working life. At the back of my head there’s always the feeling that something is going wrong, that there are things left open that I absolutely must deal with. It fades after a few days, but on a one-week holiday by the time that feeling has declined I am almost at the point where I want to start working again.
I have a terrible relationship with work and relaxation, but that’s an improvement over what it used to be, which was basically catastrophic. Back in the late 90s/early 00s I would end up with four weeks holiday left to take in December, which both made my managers want to strangle me and also meant I was constantly on the edge.
But eventually, I switch off, usually just in time to go back to work. This time round it will be a bit strange, of course, as I won’t physically be going anywhere. While the government is urging companies to open up, sensible ones are promoting working from home for everyone that can feasibly do it. It is great we’re getting re-evaluate work and office spaces. It’s worrying that not every company has the leadership to carry it off.
The very real ways that agility can just mean “work more”
I’m fortunate to work for a business which takes management training seriously, and I’m keenly aware this isn’t the same for every company.
There’s a language around internet-era working which is all about wanting employees to be engaged with their work, to work it out for themselves, to be flexible and agile and work at internet speed. Often, that comes from managers who operate that way themselves: who send emails outside of hours because they work outside of hours, who work all the way through weekends and simply don’t understand if people aren’t as “engaged” with work as they are.
They’re adopting the tropes of modern management, without recognising that people have different needs and desires and this kind of working just doesn’t work for everyone. It’s not agile, it’s abusive. And weirdly, I often see this pattern in the most liberal (with a small l) people, who are horrified if they’re challenged about it.
I’ve seen a similar pattern in others, who start off wanting to remake the establishment, then they become the establishment. In every new role, they hire the same faces, so they can “get things done quickly”, and don’t realise that what they are doing is outdated now — and of course also means they’re operating a new kind of the old school tie. The New Slogan T-Shirt maybe?
Keep on moving
I sometimes think I’ve been incredibly lucky, in that I’ve been able to constantly move and accept challenges to the way I do things. I wish I knew back in the early 00s what I know now about leading people, and I’m glad I’ve learned, both formally and informally, along the way. It’s glorious that I’m able to understand that whatever I know, there’s more to learn.
One of the things I’ve said for years is that doing what I do you have to relearn new stuff every few months because things move all the time. I thought that applied mostly to web publishing, but now I realise that it’s the same for people management too.
Stuff I’ve found this week
Ulysses 20 for macOS is out and includes two brilliant new features: a dashboard which shows you data about the sheet you’re working on; and a revision mode which highlights suggestions for improving the grammar, punctuation and language of your document.
The dashboard also shows you the document’s structure with a nested list of headings, and all the links you have included in it. Clicking on a heading or link takes you directly to that point of the document, which is very handy.
More good news: there is a new version of Ulysses for iPadOS out which not only includes the dashboard feature, but also doesn't crash on IPadOS 14. Hurrah!
At last, the Pixel Buds
Google’s Pixel Buds arrived in the UK finally this week — hurray! — and I had them on pre-order since they were first announced almost nine months ago. First impressions are very positive. They’re really nice and light, easy to wear, and having the Google Assistant there on demand is nice. Bluetooth's performance is adequate. The range is great — I can basically leave my Pixel 4 XL in the living room and wander round the whole house without drop-outs — but there’s an occasional crackle and drop out and back in again, which many people have complained about.
How do they compare to the AirPods Pro? I think the Pixel Buds are a little more comfortable to wear, but they’re not as comfortable as the Surface Earbuds, which I can happily wear all day (and thanks to their larger size and bigger battery, I really can wear them all day).
One thing that really stands out is the material design. Google is so good at this. The case, which has a beautiful weight and delicious snap to its opening mechanism, feels the kind of slightly matte smoothness of an egg or a stone that’s been in the river for a few years. It’s genuinely lovely. I wish that Apple would start to design its products with this level of attention to material, and less of the “yes we overdosed on Dieter Rams at design school” aesthetic.
Google’s ATAP lab
Harry McCracken has got a look inside Google’s secretive ATAP research lab. While putting radar into a phone doesn’t sound like the most obvious or user-focused development, it’s worth remembering that most of a phone’s actual value now comes from the sensors in it: camera, GPS, Bluetooth, UWB (in Apple’s case), motion, tilt. In a sense, what defines mobile technology is its sensors.
German court bans Tesla ad statements related to autonomous driving
How Tesla has got away with actually selling this as a feature that’s coming “really soon now” for years is beyond me.
Labour suspends Brighton councillor over alleged antisemitism
What gets me most about this is the sheer inability to see that this was a racist trope even back then.
How come New Zealand got the pandemic so right?
New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, got profiled a while ago in Vogue and it’s no wonder she ended up dealing with the pandemic so well.
Ambitions
When I left school in 1983 my ambitions boiled down to owning a van and being in a band. The two things were not unconnected: I was a terrible keyboard player (punk, yo) but if I owned a van the band would still need me to cart the equipment around from gig to gig, free festival to free festival.
I never bought a van – in fact, I never learned to drive – but neither did I replace that ambition with another. Leaving school at the age of 16, with four CSEs at the height of Thatcher’s era of mass unemployment basically meant I had no expectation of ever even working. And if I did, it would be a shitty job, probably in a shitty shop. When a local Wickes store opened, I applied and didn’t even get a reply, let alone an interview.
The trajectory of my escape from that world is long and complex and deserves its own piece of writing, but the important point is this: I had no ambitions. Ambitions were something that other people had, but not working class kids from Derby. I had dreams, sure. But there was no possible path from here to there.
Since then, though, ambitions have become the playground of the young, and there’s been an expectation actually rooted in reality that a young person’s ambitions can be fulfilled. You could travel and work in Europe. You could go to university. You could get a job, buy a house, something that so so few of your parents were able to do. Some of these simple things moved from ambitious dreams to expectations.
The past ten years have chipped away at this. A house has become something no one can afford unless they can rely on the bank of mum and dad, while the media bombards you with messages about how it’s your own fault you can’t save a hundred thousand pounds. Jobs which offer long-term careers and progression have been eroded, to the point of destruction. There is no such thing as job security if you are young.
Brexit and COVID, though, have been the twin hammer blows which have destroyed the opportunities of the young. Brexit’s retreat to cosy little Englander fantasies of an idealised 1950s Britain mean putting up borders and robbing the young of a core part of their identity, while reducing the ability of the poorest to up sticks and work wherever they can across the continent. Looking abroad for work was one of the few routes out of Thatcher’s newly-impoverished Britain when I left school, and that option just won’t exist the young poor in a few months time.
But it is probably COVID which will have a longer term impact, and which will break the back of ambition, particularly for those reaching maturity now. In a long and brilliant Twitter thread, David Hayward wrote that “a pandemic is a killer of the dreams of the young” and nothing could be closer to the truth. I have been lucky to live for 53 years in a bubble of safety, with the freedom to roam and to dream. Until we find a vaccine, that freedom is basically gone. Who can have ambitions, who can have dreams, when the next person you meet might be the one that passes on a deadly virus rather than the person who changes your life for the better?
Weeknotes- Sunday 12 July 2020
I have a week on holiday! Because I am an idiot this is the first time off that I’ve had this year, not counting being sick with COVID (and that wasn’t really a holiday). I have no idea what to do with the time off though, particularly as Kim is actually doing some work.
Expect next week’s post to be either a celebration of my enlightenment after a week of doing little, or the most dull post I’ve ever written.
Onward…
Ulysses in iPadOS 14 and a bit about the workflow I use for these posts
Obviously I’m using iPadOS 14, and obviously there’s bugs which affect applications. One of these is in Ulysses, which I use to do most of my writing, and which crashes under the current developer beta.
I should add at this point that it’s not their fault, and it’s almost certainly a bug in this developer beta which is nothing to do with Ulysses. It worked fine with the previous version, it crashes now. It happens.
However, this does give me a chance to experiment with other workflows, so I’m using a combination of Drafts and IA Writer as a bit of an experiment.
The workflow I usually use is pretty simple: through the week, I jot down little notes in Ulysses, which go into a “Weeknotes” project. These then get shifted around and edited, and I write an introduction at the start. Once done, it gets grouped together and exported into Wordpress, then the whole post is archived.
With no Ulysses, I’m using IA Writer instead. However, annoyingly IA Writer doesn’t have a Share extension, so there’s no easy way to capture something, which means I need to use something else: in this case, Drafts is the best option.
The workflow looks like this:
- Capture a though, or a URL and some text in Drafts, tagged with “weeknotes”
- When I’m collating the post, use the “Send Multiple to IA Writer” action to copy everything into iA Writer
- Write my intro, then use the Content Blocks feature in iA Writer to add in the other pieces of content
- Send everything to appropriate archives
It’s obviously not as elegant as just using Ulysses, although in theory it allows me to do some automation to archive everything once I’ve done my post. But it’s fun to tinker.
Why is Apple exposing tracking apps and websites?
Interesting point from Dieter Bohn on The Verge podcast. Dieter says that things like exposing tracking done by apps nudges developers towards the business model that Apple favours – paid, not ad supported – which happens to dovetail with giving Apple a cut of the money.
Another way to look at it: Apple has consistently prevented developers from using methods of monetisation that are user-hostile, and is exposing the tracking that developers do which everyone – including the developers – would rather hide from users. And the reason that prefer it hidden from users is they know users wouldn’t like it and would regard it as an unacceptable invasion of their privacy.
Things I’ve been reading this week
Apple began work on the Watch’s handwashing feature years before COVID–19 | TechCrunch
I’ve turned this on and – surprise surprise – I don’t wash my hands for long. It’s surprisingly accurate in terms of spotting when you’re washing your hands, although it does seem to get triggered sometimes by washing dishes…
How the Apple Watch tracks sleep – and why - CNET
“You can’t really coach yourself to have more or less REM stages,” he says. “We felt like that wasn’t the best way Apple could add value here on sleep. We focused on the transition to the bed, which we think is way more actionable, and will result in people getting a better night’s sleep, which then has secondary effects of perhaps your REM stages sorting themselves.”
Absolutely: when it comes to sleep, duration is the only thing you can really impact. It’s not the only thing worth measuring but it’s the thing you can personally change
Some really good points about the implications of Apple’s current direction with macOS and iPadOS on pricing models for software.
What’s really behind “tech” versus “journalism” | Revue
But what if you take the whole discussion of “tech versus journalism” and reframe it as “managers versus employees”? Then, I think, you get closer to the truth of what’s going on.
What it comes down to is simple: powerful people do not like scrutiny, they do not like criticism, and they do not like being exposed for their terrible opinions and practices.
Francois: ‘If called upon I will form a military junta’ – The Daily Blether
Your weekly reminder that the Brexiteers are a bunch of liars and hypocrites. In this case, Mark Francois, a former TA officer who seems to regard himself as the best of the best of the best, claiming that if Brexit didn’t happen last October he would form a military junta. Reader, Brexit did not happen on 31 October, and mark did not man the barricades.
How Prosperity Transformed the Falklands | The New Yorker
The Falkland Islands were now among the richest places on earth—with an income, per capita, comparable to those of Norway and Qatar. Despite its spending, the government had also put aside several years’ income for a rainy day: it had no debt at all.
The story of the Falkland Islands is utterly fascinating. From a sheep farming station to a level of prosperity it hasn’t seen before.
Gender Spectrum: A Scientist Explains Gender Isn’t Binary
For all too long, the government, the medical system, and even our parents have assumed that sex (and gender) are binary. Based on science, this is not biologically or medically accurate. What is true is that sex characteristics tend to be bimodal, meaning there are clusters of characteristics that tend to be associated with people that we call “female” or “male.”
Weeknote: Sunday 5th July 2020
We’re starting to emerge from lockdown (too early, maybe) but the world still feels very weird. Boris Johnson is still the most useless prime minister in history and I fully expect the Tories to dump him before the next election unless they fail to learn the lessons that Trump is teaching Republicans about what happens to parties who put their full loyalty behind a leader who is massively out of his depth.
Closer to home, I want to start venturing out more, before I go weird.
Interesting note in my journal this morning: Five years ago, I bought Julian Barnes’ book “A History of the World in 10 and a half chapters” and noted that I had never finished a Julian Barnes book.
I still haven’t finished a Julian Barnes book.
Currently reading...
Make Time, by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky. People have been raving about this book, but I’m not that massively impressed so far. It’s basically a set of three principles and some useful tips. They’re good principles, and good tips, but I suspect this book will only be life changing if you’ve never read another productivity book in your life. If that’s you, though, this will probably help!
Stuff I’ve been trying this week
I've been trying out Hey email. It's interesting, but it should be an app, and I would expect its features to be rapidly copied by other email apps. It doesn’t seem to do much more than Sanebox does, at lower cost, without the faff of having to redirect emails and/or change your email address.
Of course, what Sanebox doesn’t do is give you a fashionable new email address and mark you out as a silicon valley hipster, so… 🤷🏻♀️
IPad OS 14, iOS 14 and macOS Big Sur are now installed on all my daily use devices. Don’t underestimate the impact of these updates: although the feature lists are relatively short, they all offer interfaces that it’s OK to fall in love with again. So far, Big Sur is the buggiest, and please Apple tone down that translucency on the menu bar, but also the one that has the most changes so that’s to be expected.
And I now have a single home screen on my iPhone, with very few apps on. I suspect my home screen will end up being mostly widgets.
I’ve also been trying out GoodLinks as my place for saving links to read later. This one is leaving me a little cold. It’s a simple and clean interface, but it’s not cross-platform so I don’t really see what makes it better than just using Safari’s built-in Reading List feature, unless you want to organise your links with tags and stars and all that jazz.
Things I’ve read this week
Perhaps understandably, I’m fascinated by the long term effects of coronavirus. This article looks at some of the experiences of those “long-termers”. I think this is going to be a persistent theme over the next thirty years.
Worth noting: my father died of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a degenerative and fatal lung disease. Were COVID-19 to produce a spike in long term IPF, we are going to see a lot of people who have had few/mild symptoms die over the next few years.
A little more cheery, it looks like we might be on the trail of that illusive ninth planet again. Poor Pluto.
Just what we need: Pizzagate has been given a boost by TikTok. When will we learn that social networks have more cons than pros?
There is an appetite for change amongst the public, with only 6% of people wanting a return to the pre-pandemic economy. I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the context of the fall in GDP: how many people actually feel a lot better off now than 2002, when GDP was the same size? How much of that growth went straight into the pockets of the most well-off, rather than the poor?
Microsoft is shutting down its retail store. While I enjoy visiting the London one, this is possibly the least surprising thing of the week.
Surprise surprise, Facebook is a horrible, lying, cheating company. Who knew?
Weeknote 27 June 2020: WWDC, social media, and a whole lot of linking
I think you basically have to not be looking at the state of the country to not be anxious about the state of the country. I keep trying to remind myself that I’ve lived through worse – when I left school aged 16, it was with the absolute certain knowledge that there were no jobs and would never be any jobs. Oh, and nuclear war would probably happen well before I ever had chance to do much anyway.
But if the combination of a madman in the White House, a man-baby in Number 10, Brexit and a global pandemic that the British people have unilaterally decided isn’t worth worrying about isn’t making you anxious then probably nothing will.
Of course the difference between 16 year old me and 53 year old me is that I have more to lose. Sure, back then I had my whole future to lose: but my generation was raised on their being no future. I sometimes think that the strangeness of my generation is down to us being perpetually surprised that we’re still here at all.
This is also the fiftieth anniversary of the first Glastonbury, which I attended religiously in the 1990s and completely stopped going to after that. I had to think very hard about which Glastos I went to – if you can remember them all, you were doing it wrong – but I think it was five. I don’t remember seeing many bands, but I remember very well the feeling of potential, of space to be yourself – or, if you preferred, someone else.
MacOS Big Sur
It’s officially macOS 11, which ends an era which, for me, began on a Eurostar train coming back from Apple Expo Paris. Myself and MacUser technical editor Keith Martin spent the journey back installing the prized CD-ROM copy of the beta version of Mac OS X on a translucent blue iBook G3, and cooing at the “lickable” interface.
I think the new interface is lovely. It looks like “iPadOS Pro”, with a dock that’s rounded and raised from the bottom of the screen, just like the iPad’s. The design language is the same as iPadOS 14, including iconography, translucency and colour schemes.
To me, that’s a good thing. I love the look of iPadOS and I’m really pleased that my Mac will look as sleek and modern. Some long-term Mac users might baulk at first, but I’m willing to bet they will love it after a while. And it once again raises the bar, making Windows 10 and ChromeOS look like they really need a refresh.
I really like it.
Social media is a kind of hell
We are all in a collect space of political angst which we are communicating every day by social media. With social, you find what you’re looking for: if you sign into Twitter looking for a fight, looking for some negativity, you’ll find it. If you look for good, you’ll find that too. But that anxiety means we look, actively, for the bad.
Some stuff I’ve been reading
“I feel like I’ve been dragged into being a poster child for something I don’t believe in.” Fascinating interview with Gary Vanerchuk, who is a much more nuanced person than his fans might expect.
One of those quotes about business that really makes me stop and think: “Don’t ship the org chart”. And, related to that, any business which puts together these three things has a decent chance of success.
TikTok is awesome, but jeez it’s also a massive piece of spyware.
The use of Google Docs as a kind of surrogate for web publishing is fascinating. I’ve been meaning to do something interesting with it for a while – but I haven’t worked out what. Could you write a semi-collaborative blog just with Google Docs? I bet someone’s already doing it.
Is it really a year of Boris Johnson?
I don’t think that Skylake’s abysmal QA was really the reason for Apple to transition to its own processors – I think that was always going to happen at some point – but it probably tipped things along.
Weeknote, June 21st: a big ol’ week of very little
In technology it’s the calm before the storm: Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC to most, dub-dub inside Apple) is kicking of tomorrow in its new virtual guise. I don’t think I’ve missed a single WWDC keynote in a decade and this will not be the exception.
I’m really keen to see how Apple plans to improve iPadOS. If they announce support for multiple apps running across monitors without those hideous black bars at the side I’ll be racing to download the preview version as fast as my oh-so-shoddy broadband can carry me.
Currently reading
The Bullet Journal Method, by Ryder Carroll. I read this every few months to remind myself that productivity is fundamentally about mindfulness, rather than some kind of uber-style pumped up hyper masculinity. All productivity starts with awareness: what do I want to achieve, what do I want to do, how do I get there, and – arguably most important of all – who do I want to be?
If your experience of Bullet Journaling extends only to those hyper-hashtag-aesthetic books that you see on YouTube, I’d really recommend you read this book. Lovely as those are, a lot of them bare only a tangential relationship to Bullet Journaling proper. Bullet Journaling at its core is minimal; a single set of three “bullets”, an index and spreads for a month, and rolling simple daily notes. I’m happy for people who find the aesthetic stuff helpful, but that’s really not what it’s about.
Stuff I’ve been reading this week
It’s been a while since Google launched a thing, and Keen is a classic GoogleThing: no discernible reason for it to exist from a customer perspective.
Come on guys, Alien is over.
Weeknote: Sunday 14th June 2020
One of the things they don’t tell you about COVID: you’ll still be feeling it weeks later. It’s now 15 weeks since I felt ill, and my symptoms back then were very mild. However, I’m still getting very occasional chest tightness (imagine you’ve eaten something that gives you mild heartburn, but it’s not where it’s supposed to be) and occasional days when, by about 3pm, I’m done.
This week was a little like that on a couple of days. I’m lucky enough to be doing an MSc in Senior Leadership (thank you, wonderful employer) and of course at the moment all the classes are virtual. Sensibly, the two full days we do on each module is now split into four half days, spread over two weeks – but three to four hours on a Teams call definitely takes it out of you.
The current module is on business resilience – couldn’t really have come at a better time, given Our COVID Lives…
Links for this week
Thundering comment from The Observer. The COVID-19 crisis in the UK, which has the second highest death toll in the world, is the result of a combination of 10 years of austerity gutting our ability to cope with crises, and unfashionably bad management by this government.
I like my first generation Surface Go a lot, but trick the new version out and you’re basically at close to £1000. You can get an awful lot of iPad for that money – or a very good Windows laptop.
Microsoft Surface Go 2 Review - Thurrott.com
A lovely collection of links from Rachel on digital civil society.
31 May 2020 Weeknote
Habits, as I’ve learned over the past few months, are a good thing. They’re also something I resisted like the plague in the past owing to a misplaced idea that creativity and all things good came out of spontaneity not repetition.
I’m not sure I even believed that myself at the time, so it’s good to get it out there and over with.
One habit that I’ve been meaning to get into for about fifteen years is the habit of blogging regularly, something that I really haven’t done for a good ten years, possibly more. Prompted by the appearance in my feeds of this post from the redoubtable Ben Hammersley (were you twiddling with your feeds, Ben?) I’ve decided that a regular weeknote of my own will be in order.
Unlike many weeknotes, there won’t be much about work in these. There’s a couple of reasons for that: first, much of what I do these days is connected to people management, or in some way sensitive to the business. I can’t really write much about that, although I might write more generally about digital publishing every now and then (I have, as you can guess, opinions.)
So the focus is going to be a bit more personal. I hope that’s OK.
Covid exhaustion
In common with a surprisingly small percentage of the population I’ve had the coronavirus in my system. For me the symptoms at the time I got it were minor: a raised temperature for a whole day, a very intermittent cough for a couple of days, a couple of other things. The biggest impact was tiredness, which was like nothing I’ve ever encountered before. I felt ill first thing in the morning, so I started writing an email to my manager – and something which should have taken me five minutes to compose took nearly half an hour. I couldn’t concentrate, and my eyes just started closing.
I promptly slept from 9am till 9pm, when I woke up and soon enough fell asleep again.
Since then tiredness has been an ever-present factor in my life, and I’ve learned to manage it so I get the most important things done in the morning. This week, that feeling has been back with a vengeance. I don’t know if this is the start of some kind of post-illness fatigue syndrome or what, but at one point in the early evening I was lying on the small sofa and was so tired that I literally felt my arms slump to my side as I passed out.
I’m hoping this will pass, but if not, I’ll embrace it and just get up earlier. You can only do what you can do.
Big-picture productivity
A few weeks ago I signed up to Pater Akkies’ “Big Picture Productivity” course, and I’ve just completed the second module. I discovered Peter through YouTube – where I discover 90% of people these days – where he’s put a series of really nice videos on setting up Things, OmniFocus and some other tools.
The course is really good, and I’d recommend it to most people. The modules released so far have been on the basic productivity strategies of thinking about your values and roles then working through what your goals are. Once you’ve done that it’s time to work out what the actionable projects are which lead to your goals.
I like Peter’s avoidance of the SMARTER framework which everyone uses for goals. One thing that I’ve come to understand is that some goals don’t have an end: for example, a goal of reducing your carbon emissions isn’t ever going to end, but it’s still a goal. The projects you put together to achieve that should have something closer to a smarter framework, but the goal itself can be ongoing.
Peter has also finallygot me using Notion, which I’ve resisted for a long time. A notes app that is really a database sounds too much like the kind of thing that I would spend about a year tinkering with to get it just so while never actually using. But Peter’s course shows you how you can use it to track goals and projects in a way that I really like. I’ll still use my Bullet Journal for my day-to-day note taking, but when I need something more serious I can see how Notion fits in.
Tot
The other big discovery of the week is Tot, which I’ve written about extensively already so I won’t dwell on it too much. However, it’s a great example of an application which uses a limitation as a fundamental feature to nudge someone towards a better behaviour. We need more of that.
Music
For some reason I ended up listening to “I’m a tree” by Imani Coppola AKA the single that almost sank her career. After having a big hit with her first song, top 20 worldwide and all that kind of thing, this one was released and promptly charted… absolutely nowhere. Well, it scraped the top 200 in Australia.
Culture
Grayson’s Art Club is of course fantastic. There’s a long-running battle in our house over which of is Grayson and which is Philippa. I’m also really enthused by the amount of talks that museums and art galleries are making available virtually while we’re all stuck at home, plus the new range of plays and ballets available on YouTube. At least, the internet is enabling democratic culture.
As well, of course, as resurgent nationalism, but we will talk no more of that.
Tot
I hadn’t heard of Tot before I read MacStories’ article about its new share extension in iOS, but when I did I was intrigued. And when I used the Mac version I knew it was something I really wanted on my Mac.
At its heart, Tot is a scratch pad. It's just a place to jot down little snippets of text, often that you will use elsewhere.
There’s only seven documents, called dots, represented by – you guessed it – a series of dots along the top of the window. If a dot has text in it, it has a colour fill (you can change this for accessibility purposes – a nice touch).
This conceit of seven and only seven possible “documents” is what makes Tot so good. It places a limitation on what the user can do which nudges you towards a particular kind of behaviour. Applications like Drafts or Apple Notes allow you to keep on making more and more new documents and that encourages you to never actually look back on what you’re written.
The seven-dot limitation of Tot means you can’t do that: if you keep taking notes, as soon as you hit that seven dot limit you’re going to have to go back through what you’re written and either delete something or, if it’s still valuable, move it elsewhere.
There are some other cute little interface touches, all of which remind me quite why I love the Iconfactory’s software. You can have Tot set up either as a menu bar icon or a dock icon. If you have it in the dock, the icon changes to match the colour of the front-most dot.
You can set a keystroke to invoke it on the Mac and there’s a smart set of keyboard shortcuts which let you move forward and back through dots without taking your hands off the keys. You’d be surprised how many text applications don’t have proper navigation like this. There’s also, I’m pleased to say, Touch Bar support.
The Mac version is free: the iOS version is $20. That sounds like a lot for an iOS app, but in the great history of what you can charge for software it’s peanuts. I paid more than that for ridiculous shareware games in the past. And as Mike Schmitt on Sweet Setup points out, for an app this simple a subscription model just doesn’t make any sense.
And the iOS version is excellent, working exactly how you would expect it. If you’re using an iPad with a keyboard then you will find all the keyboard short cuts you have on the Mac version. To switch between dots, you can just swipe across the screen with a single finger. Again, it’s simple, but you can see and touch (literally) the thought that has gone into making it easy.
The iPadOS version really comes into its own when used in a Slide Over window. It’s ideal in this kind of scenario. Of course you can use it full screen, or split view, but when you have it in Slide Over you can see the screen and take notes easily from what you’re working on, or just drag and drop text or links from your “main” view.
The key question with any new software, though, is “what can you actually use it for?” For me, it’s all about jotting down random thoughts and ideas that I’ll take and do something with later – this blog post started life as a set of jottings in a single dot, and then moved to Ulysses once I thought I had enough to start writing a full blog post on it. And the nice thing is that when I exported to Ulysses, all my links and formatting just dropped right in.
COVID 19 is tailor made for our culture
I should start with this: I’m not an expert. You should listen to those that are.
COVID is an almost perfect virus. It rarely kills its host. Unlike its distant relative MERS, which makes people ill fast and kills them before they get chance to infect many others, it creeps up on you.
In fact, for the majority of sufferers, they will remain ambulatory. They may have outward signs, like a cough, but they may not - and our culture has trained us to keep going if we feel under the weather, to ignore symptoms.
It hits us when economically we're weak to it. Zero hours contracts mean there is a pool of people who have no choice but to keep working, and a set of businesses that are built around the idea that you don't have to keep people on staff. If you're under 50, you've never really experienced a dangerous infectious disease that spreads like this. Yes, there was HIV, but that could mostly be avoided. COVID can't.
But it also hits us when we’re mentally unprepared.
I'm 53, and as a child I was vaccinated against two things: smallpox (one of the last wave of children to get the smallpox vaccine); and polio. I got my immunity (such as it is) to measles, mumps, scarlet fever and German measles the hard way, by contracting the disease. And I remember the steps my parents had to take to keep me isolated (no playing outside, stuck in my bedroom, no friends visiting, EXTRA COMICS) because some of those diseases could kill other children. And, of course, could have killed me, although their undoubted worry didn’t register at the time.
If you’re younger than me, you’ve grown up in a world where most of the major childhood infectious diseases didn’t exist: you’re used to infection being something that either you didn’t have to worry about (colds, seasonal flu) or affected someone else, somewhere else.
And if you’re older than me (OK, boomer)... well, you should know better.
The generations currently alive are probably the first in history not to have anyone who remembers the last global pandemic in them. The influenza of 1918 was a distant memory to my grandmother, born in 1910, but for anyone of my mother’s age or younger – everyone currently alive – the danger of pandemic has faded from the collective memory.
Having lost the folk memory, all we have to keep us cautious and keep us alive is the knowledge of experts, and yet we also live at a time when major Western countries have turned away from an understanding of the important of expertise. Brexit, the pride in ignorance that characterises Trumpism, all show us that the respect for expertise which built post-war prosperity has vanished. Even amongst my generation, the notion of the “wisdom of crowds” tell us that while everyone can’t be an Einstein, if we all click our heels and wish three times, a hundred of us can add up to one.
No one is going to crowdsource a new treatment for COVID. Wikipedia isn’t going to discover a vaccine.
Social media allows accurate information to pass faster than before, which would be a ray of hope were it not for the fact that rumour, speculation and outright lies spread faster. The old, early internet idea that “good information drives out bad” is probably still being touted by the Digerati somewhere, but it’s really now pretty laughable.
And of course the news that your local supermarket is running out of bread can spread faster than ever, letting the well-off drive down in their cars and buy up the last remaining stocks to put in their chest freezers, while the poorer wait for a bus and find shelves empty. We have even forgotten that “panic buying” doesn’t mean everyone gets a fair share, it means that the poorest and weakest will go hungry.
Never has a culture been less prepared for a pandemic, and never has a virus had a better chance to become endemic in a population. COVID almost seems tailor made to capitalise on every single weakness in our culture, from expert denial and anti-vaccine madness to our lack of experience of pandemic to the way our economy is structured. I said earlier it was almost perfect. I was underplaying it. I think it actually is the perfect virus for our times.
But it’s not hopeless, and life will go on. These are obstacles, and it is down to each of us as individuals to use them as ways to improve ourselves, to do what we can for others, to make ourselves better people for the experience. “Amor Fati”, as the Stoics said.
Scamware, malware, viruses. Who cares?
Computer viruses are called viruses because like biological viruses, they spread by themselves. What Malwarebytes is talking about are scam apps — things that trick or otherwise convince the user to install voluntarily. Dan Goodin had a piece at Ars Technica last month about the scourge of fake Adobe Flash installers — which work because unsophisticated Mac users had been truthfully told they needed to upgrade their version of Flash for a decade. It’s a real problem — but third-party antivirus software is not the answer. As usual, Tsai has a wonderful compilation of links to commentary on the matter.
Sigh. I can't believe John is still making this distinction as if it matters. The vast majority of malware on Windows and pretty much any platform is scamware, not viruses. This has been true on Windows for probably a decade, maybe longer.
What matters is, as I argued 12 years ago, that the Mac is now a large enough target to bother creating malware for. There's money to be made out of those Mac users, particularly the ones who bought the line that the Mac is immune from malware.
Thinner, lighter, faster
John Gruber, on the "thinner, lighter faster" Galaxy Book S compared to the MacBook Air:
Well, there’s the small notion of, you know, the operating system. And let’s see if it really does get 25 hours of video playback. But the point stands. A lot of people using MacBooks today aren’t devoted to the MacOS experience, and might switch, based on hardware alone. The ARM revolution for notebook PCs is coming, whether Apple is ready or not.
John's right that a large chunk of people using MacBooks today aren't devoted to macOS. But... macOS also just isn't as good as it used to be. That's not about software quality, something that bothers technical users more than ordinary ones. It's just that Windows 10 has got better, to such a degree that unless you're bought into the whole Apple eco-system there's not much point in going for a Mac.
The Mac is now Apple's weakest link.
ChromeOS
I was an early user of ChromeOS. Not as early as David Ruddock, who has written a post on how Google’s flagship desktop operating system has stalled, but as soon as the first commercially available Chromebook was out. I was in. Since then I’ve always had a Chromebook in my life, and usually it’s been a pretty high-end one. Sometimes, as was the case with the Pixelbook, they have spent quite a chunk of time as my main or even only laptop.
I’m pretty sure that I made a similar argument to David’s a few years ago. When rumours that ChromeOS and Android were going to merge, or that Android apps would come to ChromeOS, I was not only sceptical, but actually antagonistic towards the idea. Android apps would mean less focus on web apps, and that means less focus on what ChromeOS is really, really good at: the web.
I think, though, that David’s piece doesn’t really focus on what Google was trying to achieve with ChromeOS and so he misses the mark. To understand that, you need to look at what people actually use computers for now.
First of all, it’s important to split how people use laptops between work and home. David says:
“I say this even as one of the few people who can do 95% of my job on a Chromebook: that 5%, when you really, really need it, is more than enough reason to avoid a platform entirely. And for many others, it’s much more than 5%: it’s their entire workflow.”
Actually, probably 90% of workers who use a laptop can do their jobs on a Chromebook. If your life revolves around office applications – and that’s most people who use a computer for work – then web apps are not only fine, in many cases they are the only option on a laptop. The Microsoft Office suite is a first-class citizen on the web, and some of Microsoft’s PWA’s are excellent. I’ve known Office 365 deployments where people don’t even bother to have the desktop apps installed. Salesforce… does it even have a Windows or Mac desktop version? It’s all about the web.
In that environment, ChromeOS is fine – and it has been for years.
Of course, there are plenty of people, typically in the creative industries, who require applications that either don’t exist on the web or where the web apps just aren’t good enough. Because journalists work in this area they often think everyone does.
But as Benedict Evans has repeatedly pointed out, there are seven million Adobe Creative Cloud subscribers out of the 1.5bn PCs in the world. That’s less than 0.5% of all computer users. Adobe isn’t the be-all and end-all of creative software or of software you can’t do with web apps, but even being generous it’s hard to make the case that the total number of PC users who can’t live in a world of web apps gets to more than between 2-5% of users.
Home users are a little different. Yes, there are home users who fall into that nebulous category of “prosumer” – the kind of people who do “proper” photography or video editing, and want/need Photoshop or Premiere/Final Cut to do that. But again, they’re rare. The majority of the world’s photographs and videos are created, edited, published and viewed on smartphones, never touching a PC at all.
The one thing that lots of home users do with laptops which Chromebooks struggle with is games, and even here the majority of casual gaming is phone based. This is where having Android app support for ChromeOS makes sense: being able to play the huge range of casual and less casual mobile games on a ChromeOS laptop would be awesome. Sadly though – and this is where David’s piece is correct – to do it properly you need the developers to have optimised for larger screens, and to put it bluntly most simply haven’t bothered.
Remember I said that for web apps, “ChromeOS is fine – and has been for years”. That’s actually Google’s biggest challenge. In the space of nine years, ChromeOS has run slap into the same challenge that it took Windows and MacOS three decades to get to: there really aren’t a lot of improvements to make. Of course, ChromeOS needs to keep pace with web APIs and – in true Google style – push them forward. And there are definitely areas for improvement, like biometric support (as David highlights). You can improve the interface, as all OS’ should.
But what else do you want ChromeOS to do, other than be the best platform for running the web apps which 90% of users care about?
This post was written and posted on an iPad Pro, another device where you can’t do any creative work and that isn’t really suitable for professionals.
Goals
January 2nd, or “the death of goals day”. You spend the first day of the year thinking about all the things you want to achieve and by this day you’ve broken your promises to yourself, forgotten about the things you want to get done, and wondered at what point in your life one day hangovers turned into two day hangovers.
Don’t worry. We have all done this.
I have an ambivalent relationship with goals. On the one hand, goals add value and, if chosen well, meaning to your life. On the other hand, goals can be stifling, endless wells of disappointment and failure.
If you’ve ever done any kind of personal development course you’ve probably been told to make goals SMARTER (the personal development industry loves an acronym). And for some things, SMARTER really is better. If you want to pay off your credit card debt then being specific about when you’re going to do it and making sure it’s an achievable thing is good idea.
But not everything you want to do in life is SMARTER. And the peril with trying to apply the same framework to everything you want to do is that you end up feeling bad when you start something only to find out you don’t care enough about it to actually keep going.
Sometimes, you need to start small and just find out if something is right or possible for you. For example, I’m interested in photography, and – as I don’t have any hobbies and know I need something other than work in my life – I want to see if it’s something I enjoy. I could set myself a SMARTER goal on this: “By the end of January I will have found and enrolled in a photography course”, say. But suppose I look around, read some course descriptions, and find that actually it all sounds dreadful and I can’t get excited about it? Have I FAILED in my goal?
The best advice I’ve seen about goals is Ryder Carroll’s in The Bullet Journal Method, where he talks about splitting goals into sprints, little two week chunks which achieve something in themselves – each sprint is complete in that sense – but achieve something within that overall goal. And importantly, if after a sprint you find you want to head off in a different direction from where your goal was leading, that’s fine.
Sometimes, all a goal is is an opportunity to learn about something and maybe take it further. So start small, and be forgiving. Never forget that it’s fine to decide that something which looked important to you before you started is not something you want to pursue.
Everything you do is a chance to learn. The only time you learn nothing is if you do nothing.
Happiness
How often do you think about what makes you happy? Not “how often are you happy?” but how often do you reflect on the things which make you happy and try and learn something from that?
If you’re anything like me, which you probably are, then the answer is “almost never”.
Yet it’s only by doing this kind of reflection that we can understand happiness and try and make our lives better.
One of the most limiting parts of our culture is that we learn what happiness looks like not through self-reflection but through watching other people. Whether that’s watching Love Island and imagining ourselves looking like or being like the people on it, or it’s watching YouTube vidoes about some guy in LA with the most uber-minimal life you’ve ever seen, it’s the same: “This person does this stuff and is happy. If I did that stuff I’d be happy too”.
We’re all guilty of this. It is at the crux of our mediated lives.
So take some time to think about the things that make you happy. Think more on what it is about those things that you love, that (to steal a Marie Kondo-ism) sparks joy in you. They can be big or small: one of mine is simply watching the birds on the bird feeders outside our living room window. Why does this make me happy? Because I love nature and the natural world, so I want to get into it more.
Today’s a good day to think about this.
So I got a Surface Pro X
Earlier this year I bought myself a shiny new Mac. This was the first Mac I’d bought since 2015, when I bought the 12in MacBook, a machine which lasted me four years but which was starting to struggle a little with battery life and a few other things.
The Mac I chose was one of the new retina MacBook Airs, the base model. As you can guess from the fact that a Core m3 MacBook was capable being my main machine for four years, I’m not a particularly demanding power user. I’m not running Photoshop, I don’t have to compile code. Mostly, I write, I do spreadsheets, and I browse the web. Mostly spreadsheets.
The Air is nice. Having TouchID built in is great, the keyboard is adequate, it’s fast enough and although it only has 128GB of storage, in the age of cloud applications and sync engines that are smart enough to work out what to sync and what you don’t ever use, that’s actually not as much of an issue for most people as you’d think.
But I don’t love it. Unlike the MacBook, which for at least two of the years I used it was an absolute darling of a machine, the MacBook Air has just always felt a little half hearted. There’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s probably the first Mac I’ve ever owned that I just don’t love.
Meanwhile on the other side of the Mac/Windows divide, Microsoft has released the Surface Pro X, and it’s as if they basically created a computer purpose-built to press all of my technology lust buttons. It’s light and portable – I love light and portable – and at the cutting edge thanks to its ARM processor. It’s got LTE built in, something I’ve been desperate for on a Mac for years, and something that made me use my iPad a lot. Oh and it’s a tablet too, and I absolutely adore tablets.
I don’t think I’ve prevaricated about buying a computer more than over the Surface Pro X. On the day it was announced, I added it to my basket on the Microsoft store. On the next day, I took it out. Repeat that three times and you’ll have an idea of how much I agonised over whether to buy one or not.
The reviews, when they came out a week or so before release, should have made up my mind that this was not a device for me. And yet… Reader, I bought one. And not just the lowest end one: I went for the fully tricked out 16GB of RAM and 512GB of SSD version, because if this thing is going to be my main computing device for a few years, I want some future proofing.
Pricey. No, REALLY pricey
You are of course paying through the nose for all this. Even for the base model, you’ll barely get change out of £1200 once you’ve bought the keyboard (yes, you need this) and pen. Even if you’re lucky enough to get an education discount, you’re still looking at a machine that starts expensive and moves quickly to the level of pricing that will make trigger automatic offers by your credit card company to raise your limit. If you want the fully-loaded 16Gb of RAM and 512GB storage version, you’re going to pay the best part of £2,000.
What you get for that money is basically what all computers should be like in 2019. Silent, always connected, light, with a great typing experience and an amazing screen. Usable in a variety of modes, and equally adept in all of them. It’s a computer that makes you feel productive.
I’ve always believed that Apple makes the best hardware in the business, and in some areas this is true (the new iPhone 11 is shockingly good). But when it comes to computers, Microsoft now beats it, pretty easily. It’s arguably better than the design of the iPad Pro, and I love that device.
Hardware without software is a paperweight
As an iPad user allow me a moment of schadenfreude: One of the biggest criticisms of the iPad from the Windows community has been its failure to run “real” desktop apps “like Photoshop”. Now, the leading edge of Microsoft devices is something which also can’t run Photoshop.
The good news is that the vast majority of applications that I use on a day-to-day basis are already ported to 64-bit ARM, which means I get good performance out of them. Using ARM applications also improves the battery life: whatever emulation system Microsoft is using to run Win32, it pushes the processor hard enough to significantly decrease how long you’ll be using the Surface Pro X without plugging it in. It’s still not bad – but you’ll definitely get a better experience if you can go ARM-only or ARM-mostly.
By and large, if you’re using ARM applications you’re going to find the experience of using the Surface Pro X really positive. That means most of Microsoft’s own apps, including – of course – Office (but weirdly not Teams), plus some staples like Spotify and WhatsApp Desktop.
The Surface Pro X can also run 32-bit Intel apps… but “run” is sometimes a generous way of putting it. It’s hit and miss whether an app will run properly, and if it does run at all, it can be prone to random freezes and crashes.
iTunes is a good example of this. It’s a Microsoft Store app, and it’s Win32, so it should work fine. But whenever I used it, it would randomly lock up while trying to do innocuous things like switching to a playlist. 1Password works, but the desktop client is slow and painful to use.
However, there’s now an ARM version of the new Edge browser, and Edge lets you run pretty much any web site as an application that appears in your task bar, you can run apps like Apple Music and Slack as web apps rather than their native equivalents. Because Microsoft has got into Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) in a big way, this is actually a good experience. And 1Password has a Chrome extension version – 1Password X – which is almost as fully-featured as the client, which means you can run it as part of the browser since Chrome extensions work well with the new Edge.
The right device for me… but maybe not for you
If you’re the kind of person who lives in Office 365 and browser-based applications, you’re going to find performance on the Surface Pro X is good, battery life is excellent, and built in LTE is wonderful. Microsoft has built the best device for experiencing its own software, and if you live a Microsoft life you’re going to love it.
This describes my computing world at the moment, so unsurprisingly I love this device. Ironically, it was my experience with the iPad Pro that helped me understand the Surface Pro X could work for me. I’ve never had a problem using the iPad Pro for almost all my work and a sizeable bit of play. I’m mostly deep into the Office 365 ecosystem, and the iPad Office apps are good. And I also knew from the iPad that ARM is capable of more than enough performance to support everything I want to do.
And remember too that for three years a MacBook was my everyday carry work machine. I’ve lived the life of USB C-only for a while. I know that performance is less important to me than lightness. The iPad taught me that integrated LTE and an all-day battery was also very high on my list of requirements.
All computers are inherently a compromise between size, design, performance, mobility and ease of use. You can buy a beast of a gaming “laptop” that weighs a tonne but absolutely screams at
So does anyone want to buy a barely-used MacBook Air?
The Pixel Slate and why I still really love it
The Pixel Slate has had a rough ride. When it was initially revealed, there was a level of excitement around it which built a big bubble of hype. When it was finally released that bubble burst, spectacularly.
The Slate had a lot of problems. There were performance issues in tablet mode, which meant doing something as simple as having two windows snap side by side was a laggy experience. There was the design of the Keyboard Cover, which made the device almost impossible to use in your lap unless you had the kind of length of thigh bone that would place you into NBA levels of height (or extremely weirdly shaped legs).
But the biggest and most damaging question was one that should have been obvious to Google prior to launch: why should you buy the Pixel Slate when the Pixelbook still exists, and even though it has an older processor and bezels as wide as the Grand Canyon it actually did everything that anyone would want from a Chromebook, in a more familiar form?
I have both a Pixelbook and a Pixel Slate. I had expected the Pixel Slate to effectively replace the Pixelbook. All the things the critics said are true about the Slate, and that’s why I never sold the Slate -- but despite the Pixelbook being, in many ways, a superior device I still love using the Slate, and just when I think I’ve put it down for good it finds a way to sneak back into my life.
Why? The first reason is the screen -- and no, I’m not talking about the bezels. I can live with the bezels on the Pixelbook, and the reality is that those on the Slate are not that much smaller. But the screen itself is genuinely joyful to look at over a long period of time. The only screen that I’ve ever used that rivals it is the iPad Pro, which is the best screen on the planet for ordinary use at the moment.
Images on the screen are soft without lacking sharpness or clarity. Colours are absolutely perfect. I can look at this screen for a long, long time without wanting a break (note: I do take breaks anyway, and you should too!)
The second reason the Pixel Slate keeps luring me back is the keyboard. Yes, I know: you can’t use it in your lap, and it has to lie flat on a table because there are no clever magnets to keep it angled up like there are on the Surface Pro keyboards.
But the keys themselves are brilliant to type on. Round keys take a little while to get used to, but Google’s user testing was right. I find myself making less typing errors on it, and when you type all day that adds up to a lot of time spent not doing corrections.
Also, one for Apple: find a way to steal the bit from this keyboard that lets you put it at any angle. The two angles on the iPad Pro keyboard are a big improvement, but they just don’t cut it when you’re used to being able to work at any angle, as you can on the Pixel Slate.
I can’t speak for the lower end versions but the Core i5 that I have in my Slate performs perfectly well now, in laptop or tablet mode. Everything feels as snappy as you would expect. And battery life is fine: you can never have enough battery life, but the Slate will get me through a full typical working day.
I think the biggest problem the Slate faced was that Google never really answered a simple question for themselves: Why make a tablet at all? What role is this device going to play in someone’s life? If it’s going to replace a laptop (or even “replace a laptop 80-90% of the time”) then it needs to be better than a laptop at a wide range of tasks. The iPad is the best example of this: it’s got a better screen, it’s easier to use, the battery lasts and lasts, it’s more powerful given the price, it has really good software, it integrates brilliantly if you have an iPhone, it’s hugely better for consuming content, and thanks to that processor power and easy to use software it’s often better for consumer-level content creation.
And yet… I doubt I’ll ever regret buying the Slate. It’s a big barrel of contradictions and half thought out ideas, but it’s also just one of the most pleasant and compelling devices I own. Even when it’s frustrating you over some little thing, it’s a joyful piece of design that misses the mark in places but delivers in others.