Yet another great piece by Riccardo Mori. A fascinating read, and one that has somewhat echoed feelings I have in regard to what Apple are doing with their software.

Random thought: Whenever I think about the best days of my life so far, or just days where I thought it was "pretty good", they very rarely involve technology.

As someone that has been interested in technology to a certain degree for most of my life. It's weird to think that most of the time, I prefer life without it. A day where I don't use my phone at all is usually a pretty good day.

A thought popped into my head the other day, about the apps I use on my iPhone. So I gave it some thought, and I didn't think the list was that long. I know I have a ton of apps installed on my phone (I checked, it's 208), but as for day to day use, I barely touch most of them.

I seemed to pique my own interest, so I went through the list of apps I have installed on my phone, and took a note of each app that I have used in the last week or two. Even when I was being a bit generous, I could only find 27 apps that I've used.

The majority of them are core phone apps like Camera, Mail, Photos, etc, then the rest are mainly entertainment, social, and football related.

Full list of the apps I've used:

Core Phone Apps

• Camera
• Clock
• FaceTime
• Mail
• Maps
• Messages
• Phone
• Photos
• Safari
• Weather

Shopping

• Amazon
• App Store
• Deliveroo (Food delivery)

Entertainment

• Cracking the Cryptic (Sudoku game)
• Reeder
• Spotify
• YouTube

Social

• Instagram
• Linky (I use the Share extension to share links to Twitter)
• Telegram (I use this literally for one person)
• Tweetbot
• Twitter
• WhatsApp

Sports

• OneFootball (Football scores)
• Premier League (Fantasy Football and stats)
• Sky Sports (Football news)

Other

• Monzo (Bank)
• Zero (Fasting)

That may seem like a relatively long list, but for most of them, I use them for a maximum of a few minutes at a time, and only a few times a week. I just went through them again, and I could probably drop 10 of them, and barely notice it.

This doesn't mean that I can now delete the other 181 apps that I haven't used this past week. (Although I should probably go through and clean some up.) Because there's a certain type of app that will only ever be used sporadically, like apps for flights or restaurants. So I'm not going full minimalist of anyone. But I did just look at my home screen, and of the 22 apps that are there, I haven't used 6 of them in ages.

I'm not writing this to say to everyone "hey, everyone, look at me, I use less apps than you". I just wanted to share something I noticed in my own behaviour, and maybe put a little thought into the possible reasons behind it.

One thought that entered my mind, was that maybe this is just how normal people use their phone? Maybe before, I was an iPhone "power user" but now I'm not? That does seem to match up with my current feelings about technology, and tech products in general.

In general, my interest in computing has dropped slightly, although to be honest, the biggest drop is my interest in Apple. And maybe this is because I've reached 30, but I just want things to work now. Sure, I can sit inside a command line for hours, and play around with silly customisations and tools, but when I'm doing a task like programming or writing, I don't care about the frills anymore.

Now I think about it more, that does seem to match up with a few more things I've noticed recently:

• I'm really enjoying using my minimal Arch installation on my ThinkPad.
• The iPad is starting to feel clunky and restrictive.
• I haven't been too interested in updating my iOS apps.
• I'm not interested in the latest and greatest technology anymore.

Even when I'm using my Mac, for both work and personal use, I rarely use anything other than a browser, text editor, terminal, chat app (for work), or email client.

It's fascinating to me to see how much my interests and feelings have seemingly changed so much recently. For quite some time, I was the "Apple guy" to my friends and family. Anything Apple did, I liked, anything Apple sold, I purchased. Maybe this is part of becoming older? If so, hopefully, that means I'm getting wiser.

Fortunately, I didn't build this blog around a niche, so I guess as I work out my new feelings on technology, and possibly my new interests, I'll keep on writing here.

Matt Birchler has written a great piece on the current state of the iPad, and how it might not be the best device for real work. Not because of the hardware, but because of iPadOS. And maybe what should exist, is an iPad-type device that runs macOS.

I haven't used my iPad for anything serious in a while, and I think the main reason is something Matt also brings up:

I've spent the last year using an M1 Pro MacBook Pro, and it's been glorious. Apple made all the right decisions with this machine, and it's an absolute dream for me.

I totally agree. I too have a M1 Pro MacBook Pro, and it's my favourite Apple device. I still enjoy using a Linux laptop, but that's besides the point for now. If you're comparing iPadOS and macOS, macOS has to be the operating system where I feel comfortable and capable to get work done.

The iPad for me has always been an enjoyable device to use when you're doing light tasks, simple automations, and, of course, media consumption. But at the same time, there's always been friction when you want to do something that isn't quite supported. Or at least a task that iPadOS hasn't been specifically designed to accomplish.

Rather than simply being a computer that can do computer things, it seems to me that the iPad does iPad things. That's not necessarily a negative thing. But it sure would be great if there was a compromise. If you could run a "desktop-class" OS such as macOS on a flexible (and quite capable) device such as the iPad.

58 bytes of CSS to look great nearly everywhere

I've always found it amazing how you don't actually need tons of CSS to make your website look good. Maybe my website needs a "lite" mode?

Spotify aquired Heardle recently, and when I commented on the news, I was relatively positive in that it seemed like a deal that made sense, at least for Spotify.

However, I must say, since the aquisition, the music choices has been terrible. I know there's going to be days when I can't work out the song, but it's just been absolute nonsense. It's certainly made it a lot less fun.

I commented earlier on a few apps that I currently subscribe to. But I've now gone through the entire list of my app subscriptions, and I've actually cancelled all but 2 of them.

A few of them were on yearly renewals, so they won't all end immediately. But I've decided that, at least for now, the value they provide me isn't enough to warrant any extra money.

Here is my previous list of subscriptions:

• Apple One
• Castro
• Glass
• Halide Mark II
• Tweetbot
• VSCO
• Ulysses

I have to note that VSCO was already expiring. I used to use this for photo editing, but I've since moved away.

As of right now, the only subscriptions that aren't expiring are:

• Apple Music
• Ulysses

I don't use Apple TV or Arcade, and I already pay for 2TB storage, so Apple One was useless to me. That's been reduced to Apple Music.

And to be honest, I'm also thinking of unsubscribing from Ulysses. I guess I write a fair bit compared to most people. But I don't do anything complex. I write relatively small markdown files, and upload them to my Ghost blog. And £5.99 a month might be a bit too much for my use case.

Forgetting VSCO, a year of my previous subscriptions would have looked like this:

• Apple One - £239.40 (19.95 monthly)
• Castro - £33.48 (£2.79 monthly)
• Glass - £25.99
• Halide Mark II - £9.99
• Tweetbot - £5.99
• Ulysses - £71.88 (£5.99 monthly)

That's £386.73 in a single year. Admittedly a bit portion of that was going towards Apple One. But even the smaller prices can add up after a while.

And after my adjustments, it sits at just £191.76 yearly:

• Apple Music - £119.88 (9.99 monthly)
• Ulysses - £71.88 (£5.99 monthly)

A big jump, and like I said earlier, it may be slimmed down even further if I decide to move away from Ulysses.

I don't mean to single out these apps as being objectively bad apps. But for me, they just didn't provide enough value to warrant a subscription fee. £5.99 to use a good Twitter app for an entire year doesn't sound particularly bad. But when the app hasn't received an update in 6 months, and there's free options available, you may start to question it.

Maybe other people feel differently. But as much as I think people should be paid fairly for what they produce. It's got to actually provide value to me. So, as much as I appreciate Glass as a platform, if I don't find myself using the app, I'm just wasting money.

I guess that means I'll have to be a bit more cautious when subscribing to new apps and services, and maybe not jump into a yearly fee so soon.

I'll have to analyse and evaluate my other subscriptions at some point, such as Netflix, YouTube, etc. But for now, I can at least say that my outgoings have been slightly decreased.

In a recent post, Lee Peterson talked about cutting down on subscriptions, focussing on both Tweetbot and Glass.

I subscribe to both of these, and to be honest, I've jumped in and out of Glass a few times already. I'm not quite sure how much Glass has to me, but at the same time I appreciate the platform itself, so it can always find a way to attract me back.

But as he mentions in his post, Tweetbot hasn't been updated in over 6 months. I just checked my subscriptions, and it appears that mine is a year long subscription that has recently been renewed. So I guess I'll just have to deal with it. But I can imagine, that if you started paying a monthly sub for Tweetbot just 6 months ago, with the concept of this supporting developers to release regular updates, you'd be a bit miffed.

I was planning on writing in detail my thoughts on the Apple event, and the products that were announced. However, after I started writing an outline, I noticed a trend. These products aren’t for me, I’m not in the market for them, and they don’t provide enough additional value for me to replace what I currently have.

I didn’t want to create a big negative post about the event, simply because it didn’t cause me to spend my money, but I'll offer a few short opinions on what was announced.

Watch

I’d say this was the biggest part of the event (I don’t know the actual numbers, but it felt that way), and I guess it appears that the Watch has started to mature, and updates to the main watch are iterative at this point. However, the Ultra seems interesting, specifically for more outdoors people that maybe hike or scuba dive. This seems like a niche product to me, so that will be an interesting thing to watch.

AirPods

I can’t say much about the AirPods, except that I’d probably start to at least show an interest if there was a non-in-ear option.

iPhone 14

Similar to the Watch, this is another iterative update. However, I do like a few of the additions.

Firstly, I have to mention the Dynamic Island, it’s a clear improvement, and it’s great to see how the OS handles and actually builds upon the cutout. However, I can’t get over that name.

As for the always-on display, I definitely think there’s some value in that, although I’d only ever know after using it for a while. I have it on my Pixel 6, and it’s been mildly useful to have the time and a few notification icons available, but it looks like the iOS implementation takes it just that bit further.

Final Thoughts

In general, this wasn’t an event for me. Apple’s products seem to all be maturing, and there hasn’t been anything spectacular for a while in my opinion.

But I can’t say that every event Apple do has to be spectacular. The world is built on small, iterative updates. The real problem may be the constant desire for bigger and better.

And to be honest, I don’t even know what I’m looking for in regard to innovation at the moment. Brighter colours? Maybe a different form-factor? I guess I just want something different from the same slab of glass Apple have been selling for quite a few years. Maybe that’s why Android is starting to pique my interest.

London Bridge is Down.

May Her Majesty rest in peace.