To an untrained eye Huawei’s HarmonyOS looks like the Android phone operating system. Officially the company says it is not a copy of Android. But that’s not what your eyes will tell you if you give it try.
HarmonyOS is the company’s response to changed market conditions. Huawei aims to establish it as a third phone OS alongside iOS and Android. It hopes HarmonyOS will reach beyond phones to tablets, watches and smart speakers.
Soon owners of recent Huawei phones including the Mate 40, P40 and Mate 30 models will be able to upgrade to HarmonyOS. The word upgrade needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. Few users will see much of an improvement.
Why is this happening?
It took 18 months for Huawei to go from the top rank of phone makers to become a distant runner up.
Two years ago the US government put sanctions on Huawei. It is no longer allowed to licence or otherwise use US technology. Most of all, it can’t use Google Mobile Services.
This is the glue that makes an Android phone useful. Among other things it gives users access to Google’s cloud, to the Play Store and to Gmail. Google Maps and YouTube are off limits. Users can’t buy things with Google Pay.
Between them, Apple and Samsung account for 17 phones in 20. The rest are rats and mice.
At its peak Huawei was close to a quarter of the New Zealand phone market.
In 2019, Huawei was in third place both in New Zealand and worldwide. There were quarters when it shipped more units than Apple. Mind you, a lot of those units were low-end devices.
Huawei pivots
In recent months Huawei’s New Zealand business has turned to selling solar power technology and headphones where it once sold premium phones and mobile network hardware.
At Ars Technica, Ron Amado takes an in-depth look at HarmonyOS. He had to jump through ridiculous hoops to get a copy of the software.
His conclusion is that it is an Android fork. Or to be more accurate, he says: “It’s Android but slower”.
There’s a lot of technical material in the story. It’s something of a treat for a certain kind of Android fan. Amado concludes by saying HarmonyOS is potentially China’s version of Android.
Truly Ergonomic’s marketing claims the Cleave is the most comfortable keyboard on the planet and will improve your productivity. The claim is far from ridiculous, but there should be a few qualifiers in there. You may see a benefit, but don’t bank on it.
Truly Ergonomic Cleave keyboard at a glance
| | |
|—|—|
| FOR | Well built, solid key action with feedback, can stop you from getting a painful injury |
| AGAINST | Does not include number pad, expensive. It’s not easily portable. |
| MAYBE | Could be hard to learn but worth the effort if you persist. No wireless connection. |
| VERDICT | If you find typing painful, you need to consider the Cleave keyboard. |
| RATING | 4 out of 5 |
| PRICE | US$330 – with cheaper options – see below. |
| WEB | Truly Ergonomic |
The Truly Ergonomic Cleave Keyboard looks like no other computer keyboard. It is narrower and deeper. The keys rise higher out of the backplate and, unlike traditional typewriter styles keyboards there’s no offset between the rows.
This, says, Truly Ergonomic is all deliberate. The design will reduce your risk of carpal tunnel syndrome.
Carpel tunnel syndrome
Carpel tunnel syndrome is as nasty as a it sounds. You can get it from spending hours typing with a poorly designed keyboard. It is a painful infliction and hard to treat.
If you get it, you may not be able to type again for weeks or months. For many people it can mean looking for a new job away from computers and keyboards.
Anything that stops carpel tunnel syndrome is welcome.
Sturdy design
The keyboard is sturdy and heavy by modern standards. You can carry it with a laptop in a backpack, but it’s not for mobile computing as we know it.
It has a solid aluminium backplate. At the front there are padded, but firm, wrist rests on both sides. While the keyboard is smaller than many Windows computer keyboards, it is massive next to the Apple Magic Keyboard.
Compared to a standard desktop keyboard it is narrow. There are no number keys. Truly Ergonomic says a narrow keyboard means less reaching for the mouse, which is, bad for your hands and wrist.
Key layout
Keys are laid out symmetrically with a small split down the centre. Letter keys are arranged in the familiar Qwerty pattern. in rows and columns.
Back in the first paragraph of this review it says: …”there’s no offset between the rows”. This needs an explanation.
Traditional mechanical typewriter keyboards were designed to stop keys jamming. Part of that meant the keys in each row are offset by a few millimetres from the keys in the row above. The A key is the first key on the second row. It sits below and slightly to the right of the Q key which is the first key on the top row.
The Cleave keyboard doesn’t have this offset. Each key sits directly below the key in the row above. This means a grid-like pattern of columns and rows.
The photo should make this clear.
The remaining keys
Truly Ergonomic has moved certain other keys from where you might expect to find them.
A row of function keys sits across the top in the usual manner. There are left and right return keys and two space keys instead of a bar. There is also a set of arrow keys on both halves of the keyboard.
The backspace key sits near the centre, again there are left and right versions. The function key is here too.
This arrangement says Truly Ergonomic keeps your wrists straight. And that is how you can avoid carpal tunnel syndrome.
In practice it takes a lot of time to adjust to the alternative key positions.
Construction
The keyboard construction is solid, bordering on rugged. It’s heavier than many of the cheaper ergonomic keyboards, but that’s down to the robustness. You’ll get more years out of this keyboard than a cheaper ergonomic alternative.
It’s not a pretty keyboard. Although ergonomic keyboards never are. You can have comfort and health or looks. Pick one.
Truly Ergonomic doesn’t use Bluetooth. You’ll have to connect it to a computer using an old style USB 2.0 port with a metre long cable. That can be a problem with, say, a modern laptop where there is a limited selection of USB C ports. In that case you’ll need to buy an adaptor.
A smart move would be for Truly Ergonomic to switch to using USB-C like the rest of the world and include an adaptor in the box for people who need an older connector.
Clicky
The review keyboard came with the “clicky” key option. It gives a satisfying noise when you hit a key along with tactile feedback. It’s a welcome reminder of when all keyboards were made this way. There are options for a silent keyboard without the tactile feedback and silent with the feedback.
Truly Ergonomic says the keys are waterproof and dust proof. It wasn’t practical to test this during the review, but the opened out design does make it easy to clean up crumbs if you get them between the keys.
One important upgrade from the earlier Truly Ergonomic keyboard is backlighting.
How does the keyboard work in practice? The simple answer is that it can mean a significant adjustment on your part. Retraining those mental and physical muscles is far from trivial.
Hard work for a touch typist
It is 40 years since I learnt to touch type on a manual typewriter. If my fingers can find the home keys on a keyboard I can type without looking at what my hands are doing. There are fumbles, but it works. My speeds aren’t great but they are good.
What’s more, I now “think with my fingers”. By that I mean there’s no barrier between my thoughts and seeing words appear on the screen. My typing is unconscious.
That was not the case when I tested the Cleave. My typing speed slowed right down. I needed to look at the keyboard all the time and returned to two finger typing. My fingers could no longer automatically find the keys. The result was my flow was ruined. I can’t use this keyboard.
Hunt and peck typing is different
It’s not all about me. You may not have years of touch typing drilled into your brain.
The Cleave could be a perfect fit for you, but what I can’t tell you is that it improved anything for me. I couldn’t use it long enough to be sure. After a couple of days of not being productive, I gave up.
The words you are reading here were not typed on the Cleave. I’ve gone back to my old, standard not even remotely ergonomic Apple keyboard.
Same product, range of prices
The Cleave’s official list price is US$330 and, frankly, the price structure is odd. There is an option of paying US$249. The cheaper price means a two year guarantee and a 60 day trial instead of three years and 90 days.
At the time of writing there is a limited time offer of US$199 with a one year guarantee and a 30 day trial period. With each option you get exactly the same keyboard.
While the price is expensive by everyday keyboard standards, the amount Truly Ergonomic asks for is reasonable if it delivers a clear benefit. US$330 is a bargain if it keeps you out of surgery. And anyway, the price is in line with other upmarket ergonomic keyboards with mechanical switches.
Verdict: Truly Ergonomic Cleave keyboard
If you find typing painful, the Cleave has to be on your list.
As the experience outlined above shows, Cleave doesn’t work for everyone. Yet it could be the answer for you.
The biggest barrier to buying the keyboard, is that you won’t know if it is right until you’ve used it for a while. Truly Ergonomic offers options with a trial period, which makes a lot of sense to customers in North America. It may be harder to manage those trial options if you live elsewhere in the world.
There are alternative keyboards, the best known is the cheaper Microsoft Ergonomic keyboard which is widely available in retail stores and costs about half the price of the Cleave. The Microsoft keyboard can help, but the Cleave is much better for people with serious carpel tunnel symptoms. If you’ve tried the Microsoft keyboard and not seen an effect, then you should consider the Cleave.
Typora is a great Markdown editor that brings distraction-free writing to Windows and Linux.
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There’s a full smorgasbord of Markdown editors for Apple users. Windows and Linux users who want to simplify writing have fewer options. Typora changes that.
It’s possible to run Typora on a Chromebook. While there are no versions for Android or iOS, that may change.
Markdown editors are stripped-back distraction-free writing apps. If you want to focus on getting your words onto the virtual page and nothing else, they are your best option.
With Markdown editors you can enter formatting codes directly into your text. A pair of * symbols tells Markdown the next few characters are in bold type and so on.
Keep it out of sight
Other Markdown editors tend to keep these codes in sight. You type onto a blank pages and can see your markup codes. You can then switch to a second screen to see how they look after formatting.
Typora doesn’t do that. In normal use, it styles the text as you type. This takes us back to an acronym that we don’t hear much these days: wysiwyg – what you see is what you get.
There is an option to choose a view with pure Markdown codes. Yet, for the most part, Typora keeps this out of sight.
I’m not convinced this is an improvement, but you may feel otherwise.
Themes
The other departure from standard Markdown editors is that Typora offers a series of themes. Many allow you to switch from dark text on a light background to light on dark, or perhaps, format the output in different ways.
Typora takes themes further than that. There is a theme gallery, you can download more themes If you are handy with CSS, you can create your own custom themes.
While this is neat, it is a form of distraction. Instead of procrastinating over font choices and layout options when using Microsoft Word, you can now waste valuable writing time looking at these themes.
Document format
There are Markdown editors that store files in a proprietary format. Thankfully, Typora does not do this. Proprietary formats are a backward step.
The files store as .md documents that you can open with other Markdown editors and applications or services that accept Markdown input. This can be handy if, say, you have a WordPress blog.
You can save direct to Word format if you need to stay compatible with colleagues. Typora has HTML and PDF output too.
Typora verdict
If you already use a Markdown editor, Typora can make sense if being able to see formatted text as you type appeals. I find it doesn’t help, but it doesn’t do any harm.
Typora is the best Markdown editor I’ve seen for Windows and Linux systems. If you want to simplify your writing and you use one of these, it is the smartest option.
If you are a Mac user, take advantage of the free trial period to see if Typora suits better than the other Markdown options.
Typora costs a one-off US$15. There is no cheeky annual subscription to worry about. I couldn’t find it in app stores, you can buy direct from the Typora site.
It’s easy to sceptical about the current wave of AI euphoria. There is a lot of hype to navigate. Every tech company has an AI story to tell: worthwhile or not. Failure to tick the AI box makes it hard for start-ups to raise money.
Yet unlike, say, crypto, there is substance behind AI. True, it enables plagiarism on an industrial scale. But it is capable of turning in impressive results.
This is especially true in a sector like medicine. We’re seeing results that underline how important and radical AI can be.
The AI helped narrow down thousands of potential chemicals to a handful that could be tested in the laboratory.
The result was a potent, experimental antibiotic called abaucin, which will need further tests before being used.
The researchers in Canada and the US say AI has the power to massively accelerate the discovery of new drugs.
It is the latest example of how the tools of artificial intelligence can be a revolutionary force in science and medicine.
An example from closer to home could prove as important.
Auckland ophthalmologist Dr David Squirrell has used AI to help screen patients for diabetic retinopathy - a complication of the diabetes epidemic which is a huge problem for New Zealand’s Pasifika communities. Without screening people can have serious visual problems and, in cases, irreversible damage.
Sifting through data to spot patients who need further treatment is slow, difficult work. Using AI speeds up testing, making it more accessible to a demographic that can struggle to get the right medical treatment. More importantly, Squirrell found the AI approach is more accurate than the manual process. It picks up things a human might miss.
Two years ago Toku Eyes, a start-up established to develop the software raised $3.6 million to develop the software. Earlier this year it raised a further $13 million in the US.
Eventually it will be able to install cameras in accessible places like shopping malls and test eyes early enough to catch problems and deal with a preventable, but devastating condition.
Charles Handy spent his early working life as a Shell International executive.
He had a philosophical bent, but much of the material in his book, The Age of Unreason, is practical.
Handy looked forward to a world where telecommuting was an everyday reality. One where people no longer regard marriage – or any other aspect of their lives – as being forever. He predicted organisations would no longer hire vast numbers of full-time workers, they are either employed on a temporary basis or hired as consultants.
The Age of Unreason predicted the gig economy
Handy anticipated today’s job market: The gig economy.
While Handy suggests answers, he asks readers to think in new and radical ways about a changing world.
Handy explores the contradiction that employers want to hire staff who have both knowledge and experience even though it is impossible to gain experience without first getting a job.
He says there are professions where young people move through the ranks to the point where they can switch careers. Journalism is an example. Young journalists have huge amounts of responsibility early in their careers.
Another idea is people now have shorter careers in the past, but that they work harder so over the length of their working life they work as many hours as earlier generations.
Handy says people spend longer in education so they start working later. Yet employers encourage them to leave work at an earlier age.
So a career in, say, international banking might last from the age of 25 to 50; that’s 25 years. In earlier generations, the same career might have lasted almost 50 years from 18 to 68.
Handy missed one twist on this, today’s employees work longer hours.
An earlier version of this post was originally written in 2016..
Originally a digital meeting place for professionals and a handy contact book for journalists, LinkedIn’s value proposition has shifted significantly since its 2016 acquisition by Microsoft. What began as an efficient tool for maintaining work networks has evolved into a site defined by aggressive data harvesting and heightened security concerns.
Linkedin’s declining usefulness
In its early years, LinkedIn was a high-functioning, self-updating contact book. For industries with high turnover, such as technology and telecommunications, it automated the task of tracking people’s movements. Features like Microsoft Outlook synchronisation and the business-card-to-digital-contact app CardMunch positioned it as a helpful, though still often annoying, tool.
For journalists, it was a fact-checking database. It provided up to date job title information and made it easier to find subject-matter experts. However, this usefulness eroded as users became slower at updating profiles, the information was hidden deeper in profiles and Linkedin prioritised internal “walled garden” communication over direct contact.
Friction as a business model
LinkedIn’s shift toward a “pay-to-play” model turned a once-open network into a brokered marketplace. Direct contact information—once readily available—is now largely hidden, in part to prevent scraping by spammers. In its place is an internal messaging system where response rates are notoriously low, often dismissed by recipients as noise. None of this worked at the speed of news deadlines.
With premium subscriptions starting at US$60 per month, the cost of breaking through these barriers is steep. This has led to a landscape where users are frequently bombarded with intrusive, irrelevant connection requests from industries like real estate and vehicle sales, further diluting the platform’s professional rigour.
You are the product
The core of LinkedIn’s business model relies on a massive, user-generated database. Every field a user completes increases the profile’s market value. When Microsoft acquired LinkedIn for roughly US$26.2 billion, it effectively paid US$60 per user profile.
Critics argue that Linkedin’s “social contract” is unbalanced. While the site makes a fortune selling data to recruiters and advertisers, the average user receives diminishing returns. In many regions, the platform maintains a job-market monopoly, forcing professionals to maintain “well-crafted” profiles even if the site provides no tangible daily value.
Integration or intrusion?
The Microsoft acquisition raised concerns regarding market dominance and user experience. CEO Satya Nadella’s vision of “delightful” integrations—such as Microsoft Word suggesting LinkedIn experts to contact while writing—was met with skepticism. To many, these features represent an unwelcome intrusion into the workflow rather than a productivity boost.
Security worries
Linkedin’s handling of security has also faced scrutiny. A 2012 breach, which compromised approximately 100 million emails and passwords, was not fully acknowledged by the company until 2016. For many, this delay highlighted a lack of transparency regarding user welfare.
When balanced against the risks of data exposure and the annoyance of persistent notifications, the “ROI” of a LinkedIn profile is increasingly difficult to justify. For those not actively seeking work through its specific channels, the platform often functions as little more than a security risk and a source of digital clutter.
Why I left and, reluctantly rejoined
By 2016, Linkedin had no value for a New Zealand journalist beyond fact-checking up-to-date job titles and, at the time, that could be done using Google without ever opening the Linkedin site. It made sense to cut through the noise and leave. Much of the other useful functionality, the status updates and so on could be found on Twitter, now X, where responses were many times faster. I closed my Linkedin account and for the next five or six years did not look back.
However, soon after Elon Musk acquired Twitter at the end of 2022 and tinkered with its algorithms, it became harder to curate the service in ways that help journalists stay in touch with contacts. At this point, despite being flawed and even more annoying than before, Linkedin was once again the best place to stay in touch with industry players.
IA Writer is a text editor. A stripped back, race-tuned greyhound of a writing app. There’s nothing fancy or complicated. That is its attraction.
You can start putting words together within minutes of installing the software.
It is the most productive writing tool I’ve used since learning to type on manual typewriters. Like those old machines, iA Writer lets you focus on words without distractions—though as Robin Williams taught Mac users decades ago, computers aren’t typewriters and follow different typography rules. iA Writer could be the software you are looking for.
You can keep your fancy, feature-rich word processors. They have their place, but they are not always the most productive tools.
I keep a copy of Microsoft Word on my Mac to stay compatible with clients and co-workers. That way there’s no chance of anything slipping between the cracks in a complex editing job.
iA Writer first
Yet when it comes to writing a newspaper feature, a blog post or commercial copy, Writer is my first choice. Every time.
That’s because iA Writer’s minimalist approach gets out of the way. There’s no temptation to mess around choosing the right font for this communication. You won’t wonder if the crosshead typeface you’ve chosen is a good fit with the body.
You don’t have choices. There’s nothing to tinker with. Or, at least, not much.
Instead you can focus on your words.
Over the years the software has evolved. It does more today than it did when I started using it about five years ago. Yet you couldn’t accuse it of feature bloat. It remains simple.
Works everywhere you do
One advantage of keeping the software simple is that you get a near-identical experience whether you are writing on a large screen desktop Mac, an iPad or an iPhone.
For years iA Writer was an Apple experience. Today you can get versions for Windows or Android. The cross platform experience is almost as smooth as staying in Apple’s walled garden. This makes it an excellent choice for people moving between Apple, Microsoft and Android.
Text editors in general tend to be a form of lowest common denominator. IA Writer has this to a T.
iA Writer 5.4
Earlier this year iA Writer moved to version 5.4. That added features such as local storage, new export options and context menus.
If this was an ordinary product review, at this point I’d run through how these feature work in practice. But I won’t because I find I never use them all. My understanding of them is abstract. I’ve tested them and seen they work as advertised, but they don’t get a second glance in the heat of battle.
You can do something complex with blocks of copy, which you can insert as content blocksin your document. Again, I’ve tested, but never needed this. It may be the feature you’ve been looking for.
Writing experience made for cloud
The new feature that I do use is the ability to make local copies. In normal use Writer stores documents in your iCloud account. Because each document is tiny, files are tiny. You won’t chew through iCloud storage the way you might with word processor documents.
For a while iCloud integration was buggy. At times you couldn’t be sure they document was where it should be. Having local backups meant you never faced losing an afternoon’s writing brilliance.
In May iA Writer moved to version 5.5. In part the upgrade brought the software in line with the new features in iPadOS. You can now use a trackpad or mouse with the software on an iPad. Not that I’d want to do that.
Markdown
We’re 600 words into this post and there has not yet been any mention of Markdown. This is a simple markup language that lets you format your text. Type a * symbol either side of a word and it will show up in italics. Put two * around a word and it is in bold.
There are a handful of Markdown commands to memorise. It doesn’t take long and it means you can keep your hands on the keys without reaching for the mouse or trackpad.
That way you can type faster. It’s more efficient. As a bonus, you are less likely to get a repetitive strain injury. The commands soon become hardwired in your fingertips. Yet I must confess there are times I have to look up the more obscure ones.
In version 5.5, there’s a new Markdown code. Two equals signs around a word will highlight it. That’s like the yellow marker you find in word processors. It’s hard to miss.
You’re either going to love Markdown or hate it. It works for me. I recommend giving it a try before deciding. There are free trial versions of iA Writer 5.6.
PDF viewer
The other 5.5 upgrade was the addition of a PDF viewer. When I write for my website I can publish text direct to WordPress. All the formatting comes with the words. If I work for a client who needs a Word document, yes that is almost every client, I can save my iA Writer document in a docx format.
Adding the ability to save in PDF format takes this further. Yet, like many new features, I don’t use it. Or, more accurately, I haven’t used it yet.
That’s not the point. Each feature upgrade expands the software’s reach to users who need more than basic text editing but not as much as a word processor. IA Writer rolls out a few new features every year, but you couldn’t say the software is bloated or even on the road to bloated.
iA Writer 5.6
We’re now at iA Writer 5.6. It’s been around now for a month. The latest version adds a style checker. It could help improve your writing. The checker looks for cliches, fillers and redundancies. When they appear in your text, they are grey.
You can choose to edit them if you wish.
I don’t always agree with the software style decisions. Journalism relies on short simple language. While that can get hackneyed, it’s a way of getting a message over fast.
And there are words iA Writer 5.6 doesn’t approve of, like also or too, that are useful for journalism.
Good housekeeping
The remaining updates in 5.6 are all background housekeeping changes that developers make and casual users may not notice. Files now open faster, but that was never an issue for me. The noticeable background update is that huge files don’t slow down.
IA Writer’s price has climbed over the years. When I first bought the software I paid NZ$3. It was a promotional price. Today the software costs US$30 for the Mac and $9 for the iPad or iPhone. You can get it from the relevant app store. There are free trial versions.
You have to buy both if you plan to use the software on a Mac and an iOS device. I don’t begrudge it.
Compared with the alternatives it’s a bargain. You have to pay roughly four times that amount every year to use Microsoft Word.
Other word processors can cost more. This is important. Journalists and others who write for a living get paid in ways that make it hard to budget for a regular subscription. A flat one-off fee is better. You know where you are and you know for certain there will never be a month where you face not paying the software subscription or skipping a meal.
Critics
You’ll see critics complain that iA Writer doesn’t have collaboration tools. In part that’s because the idea of collaboration doesn’t sit well with distraction-free writing. Nothing is more distracting than someone jumping it with an annoying, pedantic edit while you are crafting your next perfect piece of prose.
Collaboration is important. It is not the be all and end all of working with others.
The upside is that it’s easy for iA Writer to work in with collaboration tools. At times when I’m asked to work with, say, Google Docs, I will write first in iA Writer, then load the text into a shared Doc for the editing party to begin. I’ve been known to pull paragraphs or sections from the shared document, paste them into iA Writer, make my edits and return the text.
IA Writer isn’t for everyone. Many people feel they need the handholding they get from a product like Word. Or they feel comfortable using the same thing as everyone else. There are companies, clients and individual managers who will insist you use Word.
When I was thinking about this idea earlier, it occurred to me there is an analogy with music. IA Writer is to a word processor what, say, a fretless string instrument is to a guitar or keyboard. If you are on top of your writing game and confident, you can get better results without the guiding baggage. If that’s not you, then fine. You have alternatives.
Left to my own devices I prefer to use iA Writer over any other writing tool. It’s been my main word processor for the past seven years.
This might sound odd because iA Writer isn’t a word processor. It is a simple text editor app that runs on both iOS and MacOS. I have installed it on my MacBook, iPad and iPhone.
Late last year the software was updated to version 5.2. While iA Writer was already my favourite writing tool, the newest version makes for a better experience.
That’s because the update addresses the one aspect of the software I wasn’t comfortable with.
Stripped down
Unlike word processors and other fancy writing tools, iA Writer has a stripped down interface. I’m using it now to write this post on my Mac.
All I can see on the display is the Mac’s built-in menu bar across the top. A blank screen that I’m filling with my words and a small status bar at the bottom of the display. It’s the nearest digital equivalent to writing with a manual typewriter on a blank sheet of paper.
If that’s too much, you can enter a full screen mode and the menu bar disappears from sight. There’s also a focus mode that can hide everything except the paragraph or sentence you are working on.
No fiddling with iA Writer
This simplicity allows me to focus on writing. There’s a wonderful passage of text written by The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams where he describes the creative ways he prevaricates with his work. It involves tinkering with fonts, type sizes, widths and so on.
The mere presence of all those options can be a distraction. iA Writer does away with it. As every long-term Apple user understands, restricting your options can boost productivity.
While, on one level, this iA Writer approach has always worked well for me, it has, at times been a problem. In the earlier versions of the software those choices were too restrictive. The text size was fixed and there was a strict monospace Courier-like typewriter typeface.
Legibility
Good in theory, but in practice we reached a point where I was struggling to read my text on the screen.
I have an eye problem and every so often have restricted vision, to get around it I need larger, clearer typefaces. When that wasn’t an option with iA Writer I found myself using different writing tools. The, now apparently defunct or neglected Byword was a solid alternative with variable fonts and text sizes.
iA Writer addressed these issues with the last two releases of the software. Version 5.2 builds on version 5. There are now three typeface choices: Mono, Duo and Quattro. As the names suggest the first is monospaced, the second uses up to two spaces and the third can use as many as four.
There’s a lot of nerdy material on the iA Writer website about fonts. It all boils down to the newer options making it much easier to read your words on the screen.
Uno, Duo… Quattro
The most recent typeface, Quattro combines the benefits of fixed and proportional spaced fonts. It is particularly easy on my eyes. Better still, it is legible if I need to read or write on a smaller screen, say an iPhone.
iA Writer has always done a good job of exporting to Microsoft Word. The latest version improves this. If you want you can write documents with footnotes, tables or even inline images and convert them to Word .docx format. This is essential for my work as almost every client expects to see a Word document.
The software also integrates with other services. The only one I use all the time is the post to WordPress option. This was sometimes a little tricky with earlier versions of iA Writer but has been good since version four.
Sharing an iA Writer strength
You can also save documents as HTML, which is powerful when fixing web copy.
As you might expect with a made-for-Apple app, iA Writer deals brilliantly with the internal Apple sharing functionality. This work well with the iOS Files app and on both operating systems with iCloud. One neat aspect of this is that I can draft a post on my Mac and then edit on an iPad or iPhone later. You can also link them both to Dropbox.
When I first purchased iA Writer for iOS, the price was, from memory, US$3. That was an introductory deal. It later moved to $5. Today it is US$9. The MacOS version has increased more in price, today it is US$29. Get it from the app store. You have to buy the app again when there’s a major upgrade, but the price is low enough for this to not be a deal breaker.
There is a US$20 Windows app and a free one for Android. There are trial versions at the iA Writer web site.
One last thing. iA Writer stores documents as plain text, but it uses Markdown formatting. This is a simple way of adding headers, bold, italics, hyperlinks and so on to you text. These show up in the text editor as punctuation marks. You can then create a preview to show how the document looks after converting it to HTML, Word format or whatever. It might sound off-putting, but in practice it’s easy to use.
Is iA Writer 5 a text editor? Or is it a minimal word processor? The software is both and neither at the same time. It’s an elegant stripped down writing tool that’s perfect for 2018.
iA Writer starts from the premise that some writers focus on their words, not how they look on a page.
There are no distractions. The software has almost no moving parts. Words on a screen, that’s it. iA Writer feels the nearest thing to using paper in a typewriter and yet it is as modern as the iPhone X.
If you like your writing software flashy and complex go elsewhere. If you need to do tricky typographic work or lay out pages, this is not for you. It is a writer’s tool, pure and simple.
MacOS and iOS
There are versions of iA Writer for iOS, MacOS and Android. It works best with Apple kit. If you don’t use Apple hardware, the software is a good reason to change. If you have an iPad Pro, this would be a good time to invest in a keyboard, although iA Writer is fine if you write on a glass keyboard.
That’s because cloud is central to the software. You can store documents locally on a Mac, iPhone or iPad, but why would you when you can save them the cloud and have them sync between devices.
This works so well that you can type away on, say, a MacBook, race out the door and pick up from where you left off on an iPhone.
The app-OS-hardware integration has only improved with Apple’s recent move to iOS 11.
iA Writer a breeze compared to Word, Pages
Of course you can do much the same with, say, Microsoft Word or Apple Pages. Up to a point.
Word is a hefty MacOS app. It rarely starts without checking to see if there is a software update — usually once a week. Often you’ll need to wait 15 minutes or so before working while Microsoft handles the latest updates to all the Office apps.
Even when there are no updates Word is not instant on. iA Writer is ready immediately. Often a Word work session starts with something other than jumping straight into writing. Maybe you need to find the right fonts or styles. There are always things to fuss over.
With iA Writer you are ready to go almost from the moment you click the app’s icon. There is nothing to fuss over. Almost no possible choices to make.
Focus
The idea behind iA Writer isn’t new. A decade ago there were minimalist word processors and writing tools for Macs and PCs. You may recall WriteRoom or Q10.
There were others. And if you didn’t want a special app, there were the basic text editors shipped with operating systems and tools derived from the Linux or Unix text editors. Even the MS-Dos versions of Word Perfect were minimal in this way. So were older programs like WordStar.
All of them attempted to keep out of your way. In place of a fancy user interface and menus full of esoteric commands, they relied on the user learning a few standard codes. These were embedded among the words to handle things like bold text, heads and so on.
There is a WordPress OSX app that aims to simplify writing blog posts on a Mac. In practice I’ve found sticking with iA writer and integrating with WordPress is much more efficient.
Markdown
iA Writer uses Markdown to do this. Markdown is simple and keeps out of the way. Type a single hash # character at the start of the line for a top level head, two hashes means second level head and so on. It takes seconds to learn, days to master.
One key difference between iA Writer and earlier simple writing tools is the beautiful integration with the hardware, software and cloud services.
It’s as if the the software developers digested the entire Apple less-is-more credo and spat it out as a perfect writing application. Perfect is not too strong a word here. Although this style of perfection may not be to your taste.
iA Writer 5 rival
Only one other application comes close to iA Writer’s elegance and simplicity. The excellent Byword has its own minimalist aesthetic. It too is lightweight, simple and stays out of the way.
Unlike iA Writer which offers next to zero choices, Byword gives you some options. You can change a few things.
This may sound like a cop-out. It isn’t. I have a medical condition which means my eyes sometimes don’t work well. When I’m having bad eyesight days, I can’t adjust the iA Writer type to a bigger size, I can’t alter the font or screen colour to make reading easier. With Byword you can make these changes.
Subtle difference
The result is the two similar minimal writing tools have distinct personalities. They work for different types of use. iA Writer is all about the writing and precious little else. You can use it for complex writing jobs, but it works best for blog posts, putting down thoughts and things like journalism.
Byword is a touch more sophisticated. You can write a book or a 3000 long-form feature in either app. If you want something more, Byword is the first stop on the road from iA Writer to more complex tools like Apple Pages or Microsoft Word.
Efficient
There’s something else important about iA Writer and Byword. The two apps have an impact on the way you write. I find I can sit at a Mac or iPad and zip through a thousand words or so in quick time. This blog post will take less than an hour to write.
Between the minimal software and the Markdown editing language there is almost no reason to move your hands from the keyboard. That’s when you have one on a Mac or say with your iOS device.
With, say, Word, the composition part of the writing process takes longer. There’s more scrolling up and down the page. More distraction. Sure, you can make the words look pretty as you go, but that’s a barrier to getting the right words written efficiently.
iA Writer 5
In November iA Writer reached version 5. It was a free upgrade to those who had earlier versions. There are changes. First the iOS version now works with the new iOS file system.
There are other changes which added functionality without adding complexity. One is that it is now easier to create tables in text.
iA Writer’s other big change is there is a new duospace font. Since the software first arrived there has been no choice other than a standard monospace, typewriter-style font. Now you can choose monospace or duospace.
This sounds like a big deal. In many ways it is. And yet, you’d hardly notice it. I knew I had set the new font in my preferences after downloading the update, but had to go back a moment ago to check I was using it. That’s how subtle it is.
Indeed, while typing away you hardly notice any of the improvements in the last seven years and five versions of iA Writer. That’s the whole point of a minimalist application.
Editor’s note: This 2014 questioning of the Productivity Commission’s push for offshore cloud remains relevant today even though the Productivity Commission has gone. If anything the debate over cloud sovereignty, data residency and supporting local tech providers has intensified since then—particularly after global supply chain disruptions and increased focus on digital sovereignty.
The government should lead the way to cheaper cloud computing services by using offshore providers rather than just New Zealand firms, the Productivity Commission says in its final report on improving productivity in the services industries.
The report goes on to say:
By favouring domestic cloud services, which are significantly more expensive than similar overseas services, the government has missed opportunities for cost savings and technology demonstrations.
More expensive
Offshore cloud providers certainly economies of scale not possible in New Zealand.
This can mean lower prices. In some cases much lower prices. One cloud customer told me a local supplier charges 11 times as much for storage as Amazon Web Services.
It’s not that simple. The company has to buy reserved international bandwidth to access overseas data centres. That changes the price equation.
Even taking that into account, local cloud services can cost more than using overseas suppliers.
Cloud storage and processing costs are often only a fraction of the cost of a computing project. Often they can be tiny compared to other costs.
Paying less for storage may not change the total cost by much. It won’t help much if the human costs of dealing with remote service providers are high.
And there is risk.
At the time of writing a single submarine cable company links New Zealand to the rest of the world. It has two connections. The risk of both legs of the Southern Cross Cable Network failing at once is small. It is not zero. Hopefully this will change.
Technology cultural cringe
The Productivity Commission report reads like an overseas cloud services provider wrote it. That’s not entirely surprising.
Multinationals like Google and Microsoft pay government affairs professionals in Wellington to lobby politicians and get the company’s position in front of organisations like the Productivity Commission.
They spend millions on lobbying. Local cloud companies have nothing like their budgets. It sounds as if the Productivity Commission hasn’t listened to the locals.
The problem here could be ‘The wise men from the east” syndrome. Government employees and organisations like the Productivity Commission think when it comes to technology, people who speak with American accents know more than those who speak with New Zealand accents.
Google’s Chromebook Pixel broke new ground when it launched in 2013. It featured a 12.85-inch, 2560×1700 touchscreen, an Intel Core i5 processor, 4 GB of RAM and a 32 GB solid-state drive. The premium build quality and high-resolution display were well ahead of most Chromebooks at the time.
Much of the Pixel’s extra cost went into that display, which rivalled the Retina screens appearing on Apple’s laptops. Yet the machine still ran Chrome OS, a browser-centric system that relied heavily on cloud applications and had limited support for offline work.
Pretty, pricey and polarising
While the Pixel was praised for its technical ambition, reviews were divided on its value. Lifehacker Australia described it as “pretty, pretty pricey, pretty pointless”, arguing that only people working for Google or reselling its products might find a real use for it.
The review noted that laptops with similar performance running the same operating system were available for less than 20 percent of the Pixel’s price. To many observers it was more adornment than a tool.
A New Zealand technology executive once described Compaq computers as “just high-tech jewellery”—expensive products that existed mainly to make their owners look good. The same description fits the Chromebook Pixel.
Despite the criticisms, the Chromebook Pixel served a purpose for Google. It demonstrated that Chromebooks could be more than bargain-basement machines and helped lift the profile of Chrome OS. In that sense it worked as a halo product, even if sales were limited.
A boundary-pushing but impractical device
The Pixel pushed the Chromebook concept into premium territory, showcasing what the hardware could do and setting a design benchmark. But for most buyers it was less a practical work machine and more a statement piece—an example of high-tech jewellery in laptop form.
Updated and edited February 2026 to put the 2013 story into historic context.
“Large multinationals arrive in the country, contribute nothing in the way of paying local taxes, and exfiltrate value and data (“the new oil” as it was unironically christened by The Economist). It is essentially digital colonialism.”
The ugly face of what Christie calls digital colonialism was on show at a recent industry event. A handful of companies had speaking slots.
Long-term focus
Local firms spoke about serving small business, building skills and capability. Their focus was longer-term.
Meanwhile two of the multinationals that got to speak made short term sales pitches. One even used the occasion to push its latest promotion.
“…there are other approaches. Ones that involve paying taxes that provide for schools and hospitals, keeping data onshore and respecting te ao Māori, acknowledging the value of New Zealanders’ privacy, and building a resilient digital sector that will provide fulfilling, high-value jobs for Kiwis for decades to come.”
Taxes
Paying local taxes for digital products is a sore point. Yet it is not unusual for countries to tax foreign resources firms like miners and oil explorers.
On that basis, it makes sense to treat the ‘new oil’ the same way.
Tax on digital profits is being addressed at the international level. The process will be slow and could be unsatisfactory. Yet a small country like New Zealand would do better to fall into line with other like-minded nations and not go it alone.
Jobs
Jobs are critical. We have low unemployment today. Indeed, a halt to immigration means we are desperately short of skilled workers.
Yet we may be a lockdown away from widespread company failure and layoffs.
While multinationals use locals, and in cases pay well, much of the work is in sales or administration. The high value-add work tends to take place close to corporate headquarters.
More high value jobs means building more capability. It would give young New Zealanders better career paths. And that would seed interest in tech related subjects in schools and tertiary institutions.
If we get this right, there will be more corporate headquarters in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. This would be better for the wider economy.
“…Rebuilding New Zealand’s economy in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, and under the shadow of climate change, is a challenge that we have not seen since the end of World War II. The decisions we collectively make now have the potential to impact, positively or negatively, generations of Kiwis to come.”
Priority
There are ministers and opposition politicians who get this. Building digital capability is low down the priority list at the moment. If more prominent industry personalities speak out, we can push it higher up the agenda.
“We should be planning for our own data management, cyber security and artificial intelligence applications, and how these can be implemented across all of our sectors: agriculture, education, finance and others.
“Building and delivering value for the current and future generations, now that technology is interwoven into every aspect of our communities and our economy.”
It’s hard to disagree with any of this. A good place to start would be with government. Even now, government buyers appear to have a built-in reluctance to choose local technology. Fixing that would be the best place to start.
Unlike other search engines, Duck Duck Go doesn’t track your searches. You’ll see advertising based on your search terms, but they don’t relate back to earlier searches.
Nor are they based on your recent web activity elsewhere.
This is a different business model to Google which attempts to build profiles based on your activity. Google doesn’t just track your searches; its tentacles are everywhere. By some estimates three-quarters of all websites report your habits back to Google.
Stalker
This explains why some advertisements stalk you as you navigate the web. It can be surreal.
While a lot of people don’t care about privacy in this way, others are concerned.
The vast amounts of data Google collects are enough to identify an individual. Thanks to the ability to read most emails, Google knows where you live, what you do and can make assumptions about how much money you earn, what you spend and who you vote for.
Google reckons
Away from privacy, this approach has another advantage. Because Google thinks it knows about you and what you want, it uses your profile to send customised search results your way.
T
his can be useful. It can also be a problem. It means Google searches are not neutral. If two people search for a certain term, the may not both get the same answers.
This isn’t always helpful. You might want the best quality information, not what Google think’s you’d like to see. There’s no way of knowing that Google’s filters give you the best. With Duck Duck Go everyone would see the same result.
Duck Duck Go tricks
The search engine has a couple of help tricks up its sleeve. Let’s say you want to know more about someone you meet on Twitter. Type their address into the search bar and you get their profile.
If there is a weakness, sometimes there is not enough depth of coverage. In particular, it doesn’t do a great job of finding New Zealand-specific material.
This hasn’t changed, or if it has changed, it hasn’t changed enough. It can still be frustrating to use at times. You may need to switch back to Google to handle a specific search.
Away from New Zealand searches, Duck Duck Go does well enough. It is better than before.
Google often seems to be more interested in delivering users to sales outlets than information. Duck Duck Go doesn’t have a news filter, so a search can mean wading through lots of sales sites to find more independent information. It would be great if a news search was an option.
Bang Bing
What the search engine does have is something called bangs. This is a shorthand way of restricting a search to a single site or organisation. So, to look on Bloomberg for information about SDNs, type:
!blmb software defined networks
This doesn’t always work. The search above drew a blank. Trying the same search using The Economist bang, the browser couldn’t open anything, not even a 404 page.
Duck Duck Go still isn’t the best choice for most searches, but it is a more private choice.
Traditional laptops, that generally means the low cost models sold to families with school age children, look and feel dated next to modern MacBooks and Surfaces.
This observation hints at something deeper going on behind the scenes.
Premium mobile computers typically include technology that was originally designed to be used in mobile phones. The M1 processor used in today’s MacBooks derives from an ARM chip Apple developed for the iPhone.
Microsoft uses another type of phone derived ARM processor in its latest Surface Pro models.
Power-efficient ARM processors
Compared with the Intel processors used in more traditional laptops, ARM sips power. Computers made with ARM can go the best part of a day between charges. The M1 MacBook Air battery gets close to 24 hours.
Huawei’s MateBook also incorporates phone-derived tech in a sleek laptop form. It’s no accident that Huawei is a phone maker bringing its expertise to the laptop market.
There are a 2-in-1 and similar devices from HP and Lenovo. While they might not derive directly from phones and may include Intel processors, they mange to have many phone-like characteristics.
Legacy laptop design
In contrast, Dynabook and the other more traditional computer designs trace their ancestry direct from flip-lid laptops. It’s a format that has been around since the mid-1980s.
Yes, the Dynabook is slimmer than those models. It is way more powerful and its batteries last longer. It is better. But its pedigree comes from the old breed. Not from the new phone lineage.
Where phones become PCs
Phones and PCs have been converging for more than two decades—especially as PC sales waned and smartphones soared. Lockdown-driven work-from-home trends further blurred the lines.
Today, there are far more phones in use than PCs, and for many—even those who own both—the phone has become the primary computer.
Creative tasks still favour PCs
For creative work, like editing a movie or drafting a novel, computers still pull ahead. Sure, you could do it on a phone, but a big screen and keyboard make a world of difference.
Meanwhile, devices like tablets increasingly mimic phones—often with SIM slots—making them feel more like oversized smartphones.
While tablets are not designed for voice calls, that’s no longer a phone’s primary function.
Always-on, everywhere connectivity
In an era of ubiquitous 5G and abundant wireless bandwidth, it’s hard to remember life without constant internet access.
Apple blurs device boundaries by using ARM across iPhones, iPads and MacBooks—making their tech stack remarkably uniform.
Microsoft has struggled with ARM compatibility for Windows apps, since many haven’t been rewritten to suit the architecture.
Future Windows releases may improve this, but Windows 11 already supports running Android apps (i.e. phone-made apps).
Apple’s new Macs do the same, running iPhone apps natively. The convergence is well underway.
ARM chips leap ahead
Arm processors are at least a generation ahead of anything Intel has. The traditional chip maker is in a tailspin and does not have a plausible roadmap.
At the high end, MacBooks and Surface devices dominate. At the other end, Chromebooks—essentially cloud-driven laptops—offer simplicity in a modern form.
Chromebooks may be simple, but in their own way they are every bit as modern as MacBooks and Surfaces.
The internet-dependent Chromebook
There’s not much phone hardware in a Chromebook. Yet they share one important characteristic with phones. Both sets of devices need a constant internet connection to be any use. Most Chromebooks are budget devices, yet Google’s Chromebook Pixel attempted to bring premium build quality to the category.
You could work with a laptop on an internet-free desert island. A Chromebook is pointless without a connection.
Chromebooks, MacBooks, Surfaces and modern tablets embody progress in a way that legacy Windows laptops no longer can. We’ve crossed a threshold—in a few years, the shift will be clear in hindsight.
There’s a nasty example of the algorithm bias can do from the UK.
New Zealand has an algorithm charter which could protect us from similar problems. Although that’s not certain, read on.
Thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, schools in England and Wales were closed during this year’s exam season. The British school year ends in July and the main exams are held in June.
Students couldn’t sit exams the normal way. Instead the exam authorities set up an assessment system. Like other things these days, this meant going digital and using an algorithm.
The tyranny of a normal statistical spread
The exam regulators made a point of using a system that would give a normal statistical spread of grades. That way they could avoid grade inflation.
It’s important for another reason. In the UK there is stiff competition for the best university places. They go to the students with the best exam results. The entry conditions for certain courses can be strict and tough.
T
o get exam results, the regulators used an algorithm that combined grades given by teachers with a student’s past performance and the past performance of their school as a whole.
I
n many cases, as many as 40 percent of the total, the qualifications authorities marked students down, below the grades recommended by teachers.
Take from the poor, give to the rich
There was one huge problem with the exercise. It was skewed towards giving students from the ‘better’ schools a shift up and those from the underperforming schools a penalty.
In the UK the best schools are all in the richer areas. People pay a huge premium to buy a house in a better school zone. Which means the exam results rewarded students from better off families.
The bias was huge. The Guardian newspaper described the algorithms used as “a sociological sorting process which entrenches class divides in the state system”.
’…by building in a criterion of past school performance to this year’s A-level and GCSE results, Ofqual has tied the fortunes of individual students to pre-existing inequalities of outcome.”
Algorithm bias means talent misses out
At first, many less well-off students who expected places at Oxford or Cambridge or, say, medical school missed out.
A-levels are important in the UK, to a degree they determine the next decade of a students’ life. They are more important than New Zealand’s NCEA exams in that sense.
This week the authorities backed down and went back to grading students based on teacher assessments. Which may fix matters, but after a huge amount of stress and upset plans.
New Zealand’s algorithm charter might not stop a similar abuse here but it could help. That’s because it makes algorithm decisions and the logic behind them transparent. The problem with the UK algorithm was less a lack of transparency and more a set of assumptions that are neither fair nor just.
This year a lot of people will pay NZ$2000 or more for a phone.
Apple set the tone at the end of last year with an NZ$2100 iPhone X. Now Samsung has joined the party with an NZ$2000 Galaxy Note 9.
One way to make sense of these prices is to calculate how many days you’d need to work to afford one—this puts the cost in more tangible terms than raw dollar amounts.
You can pay less. A basic iPhone X with 64GB of storage costs NZ$1800. The more expensive model has 256GB.
Samsung has an NZ$1700 Galaxy Note 9 with 128GB of storage. The NZ$2000 model comes with 512GB.
Whether you need that much storage when cloud storage is plentiful and mobile data is cheaper is beside the point.
Inflationary
These are two examples of how New Zealand’s Consumer Price Index or CPI is the nearest thing to an official measure of inflation.
In the most recent year, it was 1.5 percent. That means consumers paid 1.5 percent more for a typical basket of goods and services in the year to June 2018 than a year earlier. This contrasts sharply with the broader telecommunications sector, where the real cost of telecoms services fell 6.3% in 2017, driven by steep drops in fibre broadband pricing.
Expensive
At NZ$1700, the Samsung Galaxy Note 9 is $100 more than last year’s Note 8. That’s 6.25 percent higher: more than four times the CPI increase.
Apple’s iPhone X doesn’t have a year earlier model to compare.
Instead, we’ll look at the iPhone 7 and iPhone 8. When it launched the iPhone 7 was NZ$1200. A year later the iPhone 8 went on sale at $1250.
That’s a four percent increase. Apple’s markup is smaller than Samsung’s, but still well ahead of the CPI.
Everyone is at it
It’s not only Samsung and Apple. The prices of Huawei phone models climbed over the years.
Even Oppo, where the phone’s low price is the most important feature, has increased prices.
If anything, Huawei and Oppo’s price increases have been steeper than Samsung and Apple’s because they come off a lower base price.
But don’t phones get better
You might argue that the newer phones are better so phone makers can expect to sell them for more money. There’s something in this, see below.
Phone prices were stable during for years while annual upgrades meant huge leaps in functionality. Today’s upgrades are incremental while prices leap.
Apple shows the way
Apple has always lead the way on phone prices. It’s no accident it is the world’s biggest company and enjoys large profit margins. That trillion dollar valuation didn’t come by chance.
When it launched the iPhone X last year, Apple showed it could push phone prices above the NZ$2000 mark without denting sales. That opened the door for its rivals to charge more. They won’t admit it in public, but the iPhone acts as their benchmark.
Apple sells fewer phones than Samsung or Huawei.
The iPhone makes up around 20 percent of the handset market worldwide. It accounts for around 80 percent of profits from phone sales. Almost all the remaining profit from phone sales goes to Samsung.
Profits
It’s not clear how profitable the other main phone brands are. It’s not even clear if they are profitable. The companies don’t break out figures in the way that Apple and Samsung do. Yet it’s clear they are not making big margins.
Until a couple of years ago the Android phone market taken as a whole ran at a loss.
Things have changed. In part that’s because phone makers have pushed up handset prices ahead of inflation. It helps that some of the big names have either gone to the wall or wound down their operations.
Price rises have two sides
Inside the phone business, people talk about the average selling price or ASP.
According to IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker:
…”climbing ASPs continue to dampen the growth of the overall market”
…”Consumers remain willing to pay more for premium offerings in numerous markets and they now expect their device to outlast and outperform previous generations of that device which cost considerably less a few years ago.
IDC says worldwide phone ASPs are up 10 percent in the last year.
Sharper prices lower down the market
Phone makers love to tell investors they have managed to increase the average selling price of their phones.
In some cases, they have done this by bumping up prices on their flagship models while fighting tooth and nail further down the market.
You can still get bargains. Spend NZ$500 to NZ$600 and you can end up with something great. It won’t have the latest camera or tonnes of storage, but not everyone needs those features.
High prices could be here to stay
New flagship phones are expensive to make, but the cost of building a phone is a fraction of the selling price.
Putting more lenses and more camera sensors may cost a phone maker a dozen or so dollars. OLED displays, curved glass add to costs. Perhaps the biggest extra cost is the memory chips needed to boost a phone’s storage, there is a trend towards higher storage in phones.
Higher phone prices are unlikely to go away soon. The glory days of fast rising phone sales are over.
People are now holding on to phones for longer, squeezing more value from the money they have already spent. So it becomes important for each sold phone to contribute a little more profit.
This post was originally written in November 2024.
WordPress was great until about a decade ago.
It was open source, which meant it could be free. It was simple and straightforward to use. It was customisable to the point where even non-technical users could build websites that didn’t look like WordPress sites.
WordPress’s stated philosophy was about democratising online publishing. Anyone could do it. You didn’t need skills or deep pockets. You could fire it up, get online and blog.
Unwelcome change
Then around a decade ago, the team behind WordPress began tinkering with it. It became bloated and complicated. It did what software companies often do: It added features that many users neither asked for or wanted.
This meant WordPress sites became cumbersome. There were ways of taming this process, but only up to a point.
WordPress site owners found they were being penalised by Google in search listings as their sites became slower. This was a warning of what was to come.
Gutenberg
Gutenberg was the first clear sign that WordPress was heading in the wrong direction.
For years WordPress was the best way to build a blog or a basic editorial web site.
It was straightforward. Although it needed some technical know-how, early WordPress was accessible. There was a great community of users willing to share information and help newcomers.
Online tutorials, user meetups and WordCamps filled in the gaps.
For a while it felt as if Wordpress really was democratising publishing.
The beauty of simplicity
You didn’t need programming skills to dig into early WordPress. But if you wanted to do more than the basics, there were easy-to-install plug-ins to add functionality.
Likewise there were many themes that let you change the look and feel of your site. Even non-developers could take things further by digging in to the CSS or tweaking lines of PHP code.
This simplicity meant it was easy to get information in and out of WordPress. In particular, I could take a blog post, find the underlying HTML code, then cut and paste it into another CMS for instant syndication.
Before and after Gutenberg
Gutenberg changed everything. Before Gutenberg you would write posts in an editor that resembled a text editor like IA Writer. Gutenberg replaced this with an editor that treats every element, text, images and so on, as a block.
Some people, maybe many people, find this approach more useful. It certainly works well for building more sophisticated sites, but this comes at the cost of making WordPress more complex.
It is harder to learn Gutenberg than the TinyMCE editor it replaces.
Page design
If pre-Gutenberg WordPress was like using a text editor, the current edition is more like Adobe’s InDesign. You need to take a training course to learn InDesign; mastery takes years.
Before Gutenberg, WordPress focused on creating great blog posts. Writers could concentrate on words and finding pictures to tell better stories.
Gutenberg is more concerned with layout, how things look on a web page. This can be distracting. It is an invitation to prevarication. There’s a risk it gets in the way of productivity. It certainly gets in the way of writing editorial.
Gutenberg’s gifts
Gutenberg is great for professional website builders. It gives them flexibility.
That extra layer of complexity that leaves casual WordPress users bewildered or in the cold means they can do more. It gives them ways to charge more and it creates a usability barrier which is, in itself, a commercial opportunity.
Professionals can use Gutenberg to design bigger, better sites with more features and functionality.
They can also sell custom blocks.
At the time it looked as if Wordpress was pushing Gutenberg in order to compete with companies like Wix and Squarespace which were proprietary alternatives for companies building commercially focused websites.
The newcomers were eating WordPress’s lunch in these key markets.
While the change may have made commercial sense, it sent WordPress further away from its roots as, essentially a blogging or editorial content management system.
It was no longer about publishing.
WordPress.com
About the same time WordPress.com, the commercial, hosted version of the software found more and more ways of charging users. Running a WordPress.com site went from pocket money pricing to we-could-take-the-entire-family-out-for-dinner pricing. To be fair this would depend on which options you chose to buy.
WordPress also dragged out the huge, sprawling Jetpack plug-in which was a way of getting people with open source, self-hosted Wordpress sites to pay subscriptions. A handful of important features were wrapped into Jetpack making the subscription essentially compulsory for any but the most casual, disengaged user.
This was the second sign that Wordpress was no longer the idealist democratic publishing service it once was. It was clear it was out to maximise income.
It’s hard to complain about that. We live in a commercial world. But we don’t have to like it or accept it.
I didn’t sign up for a full CMS
I didn’t want an all-singing, all-dancing content management system. For a few years I tinkered with WordPress themes and plug-ins that stripped the complexity, bloat and sluggishness from the software. Until I realised this was a losing battle.
My first website was a hand-coded, flat affair written in HTML and CSS with no database. I considered returning to this, although with 1500 posts that was a daunting prospect.
Since then I settled for Ghost and Micro.blog. The two options offer different approaches, different features. Ghost is clearly aimed at journalists, bloggers and online publishers. It is closer to the Wordpress goal of democratising publishing. Micro.blog can be used that way, but it also functions as an alternative to social media.
I didn’t see the recent WordPress controversy coming a decade ago, but by three years ago when I switched away from WordPress it was clear something like this was on the way.
As it says earlier in this post, I didn’t leave WordPress, WordPress left me.
_This post was originally published in October 2024. _
Whatever the outcome of Matt Mullenweg’s fight with WP Engine, WordPress will never be the same again.
There are two parts to WordPress. There’s the open source WordPress.org project and a commercial business called WordPress.Com which is part of Automattic.
Matt Mullenweg was the co-founder of WordPress and is the sole founder of Automattic.
Last month Mullenweg started a verbal fight with a company called WP Engine. The spat has now gone well beyond words. It has already changed the way many see WordPress and it looks set to alter the course of the web publishing software’s future.
Not necessarily for the better.
WordPress is important
WordPress is important because it is the technology behind about 40 percent of all websites on the open web. One estimate says there are a total of 65 million WordPress sites.
On the surface the fight started because Mullenweg was angry that WP Engine profits off WordPress without contributing anything.
This needs explanation.
WordPress is open source software. Open source means anyone can use the software, they can also update the code or even take the code and incorporate it into new projects. There are restrictions, but not many.
Open source and control
One point of open source software is that the initial developers can’t stop others from using it. This philosophy has deep roots—as far back as 2000, open source was seen as a way to escape vendor lock-in, particularly for countries wanting to avoid dependence on proprietary software from dominant powers.
They also can’t stop others from profiting from it, so long as they obey basic rules. There are moral obligations, but, in theory anyway, developers can’t force users to contribute money or time.
Which means demanding or expecting a contribution is just not how open source usually works. That said, there are many complications and variations on the open source theme where these things might happen.
Businesses that profit from open source project typically do contribute towards it. They might donate money or, perhaps more important, they might lend programmers or developers to work on the software.
Apparently WP Engine does not do enough of that.
Maker versus taker
This is sometimes described as a maker versus taker problem and it’s a version of something known as the Tragedy Of The Commons.
Either way, when there is an imbalance between major contributors and those who contribute minimally it harms everyone in that community. When one or more parties makes a killing off the work of others who see little reward, there are potential conflicts.
Maker-versus-taker stops some would be idealistic entrepreneurs from starting open source projects. This is sad because everyone gains from open source. It is a far better way of building applications, but it can be a better way of running things too.
Blurred lines
The difference between makers and takers is not always clearcut. But in general makers invest directly in the open source project as they grow their businesses. Meanwhile, takers are all about extracting money from the project.
Not contributing gives takers an advantage over makers.
This can discourage makers. If they see others getting rich from their work, they might take their foot off the pedal. It’s harder to be motivated when all you do is make others rich.
If takers go too far, it can give makers an incentive to flip their identity and become takers.
This isn’t quite what is happening with WordPress and WP Engine, but it sets up the background to the dispute.
Show me the money
WP Engine is owned by Silver Lake, a powerful private equity firm and it makes a lot of money. Mullenweg effectively argues it is a taker.
This is where it gets complicated. WP Engine’s biggest rival is a hosted version of WordPress called WordPress.com, which is owned by Matt Mullenweg.
In other words, Mullenweg’s fight is not just about abstract ideas of fairness, it is about market competition.
WP Engine responded to Mullenweg’s criticism by showing its contributions to the WordPress open source project. And then, for good measure, it opened legal proceedings against Automattic.
Blocked
Next Wordpress blocked WP Engine from accessing its servers. This is serious for WP Engine’s customers who need to continually update their software to keep their websites secure.
It turns out that before the fight was public, Automattic proposed a deal where WP Engine would commit to handing over 8 percent of revenue to licence the WordPress trademark. It could chose to pay money or use the money to fund its own employees working on WordPress projects.
Until now Automattic, WordPress.org and the nonprofit foundation that owns the WordPress trademark presented themselves to the world as three independent organisations. Ultimately they are all owned by Mullenweg and the distinctions between them have blurred.
His complaints about WP Engine have expanded. He accused the company of hacking Woo-Commerce, which is also owned by Automattic, as a way of collecting commissions that would have gone to Automattic. He also says WP Engine is infringing on the WordPress trademark.
Unless there is a sudden rapprochement this is going to be a long drawn out legal battle between billionaire Mullenweg and Silver Lake which has more than US$100 billion in assets.
That will be a bruising fight, but Mullenweg has more to lose than Silver Lake. Of course there is the money, but there is reputation and the moral high ground.
Who are the good guys?
For years Mullenweg has enjoyed a reputation as a leading open source entrepreneur. In the eyes of many, open source is synonymous with ‘the good guys’.
Even though he is fighting the kind of organisation most in the open source community would think of as ‘the bad guys’, Mullenweg has burnt through most of his social capital and lost the community’s kudos and respect.
No doubt the 40 percent of the web running on WordPress will carry on regardless, but it’s unlikely much good will come from this dispute.
There is a bigger concern here, the dispute has huge implications for the entire open source world. Automattic versus WP Engine could shape the future of many other projects. It would be a tragedy if all that expertise and idealism was lost as a result.
A directory of New Zealand journalists, publishers and media outlets with a Mastodon account.
This was originally posted in January 2023, so it will almost certainly be out of date, please get in touch with me if you know of any additions or changes.
Update, July 2025: The data explosion has only accelerated since this post first ran in 2007. IDC now estimates global data creation surpassed 180 zettabytes in 2025 — more than four times the 2020 total. The growth is exponential, driven by AI, surveillance, IoT and cloud services.
While cloud storage costs have fallen, so has the value of what we store. IDC estimates less than 10 percent of data is ever analysed. The rest sits in cold storage, largely forgotten.
Today, AI makes the storage problem worse. Models churn out draft documents, fake images, test runs and logs — most of which no human will ever read. It’s more data we (or our bots) save “just in case”.
An exabyte is a billion gigabytes. Which means in a year we added 800MB of data for each of the world’s 6 billion people. As much data as a 30 metre high stack of books.
It’s a lot of information.
Or maybe not. Storage experts believe that anywhere from 80 to 90 percent of stored data is anything but valuable.
Worthless storage, junk information
In 2002 I spoke to Rob Nieboer, who at the time was StorageTek’s Australian and New Zealand storage strategist. He revealed the vast bulk of data stored on company systems is worthless.
He says, “I haven’t met one person in the last three years who routinely deletes data. However, as much of 90 percent of their stored data hasn’t been accessed in months or years. According to Strategic Research, when data isn’t accessed in the 30 days after it is first stored there’s only a two percent chance it will get used later.”
At the same time companies often store many data files repeatedly in the same file system. Nieboer says it’s not unusual for a single system to hold as many as 15 separate copies of the same file.
Data storage Parkinson’s Law
According to Rosemary Stark (also interviewed in 2002 when she was Dimension Data’s national business manager for data centre solutions), storage obeys a version of Parkinson’s Law.
She said, “It’s a case of if you build it, they will come. Put together a system with 2GB of storage and pretty quickly it will fill up with data. Buy a system with 200GB of storage and that will also fill up before too long.”
Like Nieboer, Stark said there’s a huge problem with multiple copies of the same information but she estimates the volume of unused archive material to be closer to 80 percent. But she said 80 percent isn’t all junk: “It’s like the paper you keep on your desk. You don’t want it all, there may be a lot you can safely throw away but sometimes there are things you need to keep just in case you need them again later.”
Needles and haystacks
Although many companies focus on the economic cost of storing vast amounts of junk information, there’s a tendency to overlook the performance overhead imposed by unnecessary data. In simple terms, computer systems burn resources ploughing through haystacks of trash to find valuable needles of real information.
There are other inefficiencies. Stark said she has seen applications, for example databases, that use, say, 300 Terabytes of storage even though the actual data might only be 50 Terabytes. This happens when systems managers set aside capacity for anticipated needs. The situation is a little like a child’s mother buying outsize clothes on the grounds that the youngster will eventually grow into them.
Nieboer said there are inherent inefficiencies in various systems.
Mainframe disks are typically only 50 percent full. With Unix systems disks might only be 40 percent full, with Windows this falls to 30 percent.
It is a strange paradox of the modern age: we are drowning in redundant data, yet we are still struggling with the fact that vital information pages frequently disappear because we haven’t prioritised the preservation of the ‘living’ web over the storage of digital waste.
Last night I joined old friends and colleagues in raising a glass to the late Randal Jackson. It was the an appropriate send-off, something Randal would have enjoyed himself.
Over the years Randal was a rival, a colleague and a mate. Sometimes all three at once.
In the early 1990s I was working a freelance technology journalist in Wellington. There were others in town, but Randal was the most likely to turn up at the same jobs and events as me.
Often we’d be the only two journalists in the room. Depending on the time of day, we’d would repair to a bar afterwards to talk over whatever story was on offer and others besides.
It didn’t always depend on the time of day. Randal was happy to visit the bar any time.
The Randal Jackson breakfast show
At one alleged breakfast event I sat down next to Randal at 7am in a private meeting room at what was then called the Wellington ParkRoyal.
Two earnest American IT executives were there to talk about whatever overpriced product their company was trying to foist on New Zealand at the time.
About ten minutes in to the session it was clear they weren’t planning to give us breakfast. The mean swine hadn’t even organised coffee.
Randal wasn’t happy. He told them to stop. He said that in New Zealand an invitation to breakfast usually meant some kind of food and certainly meant hot coffee.
Fair enough. Apart from anything else we could smell the food and coffee in neighbouring rooms.
He turned to me, winked, then said: “I bet you didn’t have time to eat before coming in Bill?”.
It was a question. I told him he was right and that I was hungry.
Randal then said how he was also hungry, too hungry to think about difficult topics like enterprise computing on an empty stomach.
The strait-laced Americans were mortified. They looked confused and worried. Nevertheless they decided to bat on regardless.
Randal put his pen on his pocket, picked up his notebook, winked again and said: “Come on Bill let’s go and find some breakfast”.
We got up to leave.
“Now just wait”
The senior executive said something like “now just wait” then gave instructions to his junior. The younger executive left the room.
Five minutes later waiters entered with a coffee pot, a tea pot and croissants. This was more like it. The session resumed.
After another five or ten minutes a huge trolley rumbled in piled high with fresh fruit, eggs, bacon, sausages, the works. There was easily enough food for ten people.
We tucked in and listened, questioning the execs for another ten minutes before they took off for meetings. We demolished piles of food. They ate nothing. I guess they had their power breakfast before our session.
When, not long after, they stood to leave , the senior executive said if there was anything else we wanted we could just order and he would pick up the bill.
That was a bad move.
After they had gone I turned to Randal and asked: “Champagne?”. In those day fancy breakfast functions often included sparkling wine or Buck’s Fizz.
Randal said no, and ordered cognac instead. And coffee. And more of those little Danish pastries.
We didn’t get out of the ParkRoyal until lunch time, and only then because there was a horse running that afternoon and Randal needed to find a TAB.
An organisation I co-chair, NZRise, has been looking at the problem. We represent New Zealand owned digital companies who generate jobs and good incomes for tens of thousands of Kiwis. Our research shows Facebook, Google, Amazon and many other global digital companies are engaged in similar tax avoidance schemes to Apple.
Most revenues that accrue to those companies from New Zealand simply don’t get reported. They are the result of an online transaction and the money flies out of the country in the blink of an eye. No tax. No multiplier effect. No 41 per cent investment into our society.From a business owner’s perspective it also represents a huge disincentive to invest in R&D, which is already at shockingly low levels by international standards. We find ourselves at a disadvantage to our multinational competitors.Why create software and technical services in New Zealand when we will always be facing uneven tax playing field?
New Zealand has had a problem with multinational companies and transfer pricing for decades.
Yet the problem Christie writes about is on a different scale.
While the old multinational would shuffle money to minimise liabilities in New Zealand, they still paid some tax. They employed people, trained people and contributed to the economy in other ways. They funded university chairs, sports clubs and other worthy causes.
If the new breed does any of that, it’s invisible.
Little contribution
The new multinationals pay next to no New Zealand tax. They employ next to no New Zealanders. They contribute little to the economy.
Sure, you can argue that Apple products make New Zealanders more productive and that’s a positive economic contribution. The net positive economic contribution may even be greater than Apple fails to contribute in more direct ways.
That is an argument against banning or boycotting Apple products. No-one is suggesting that.
It is not an argument against taxing Apple.
After all, our roads carry Apple products to market. Our schools give people the skills people need to use Apple products. Our health system keeps Apple’s customers alive and healthy. In some cases our tax dollars buy Apple products.
Google this!
You could argue something similar about Google. Some believe Google software makes workers more productive than they would be with other software. Maybe.
Some think that Google’s activities in the advertising sector has an economic benefit. Try saying that to a New Zealand journalist or someone who works in the media.
Again, these are not arguments against taxing Google.
Google is quite happy to sell its products and services to New Zealand government departments that it doesn’t help fund.
It’s harder to argue Facebook offers any economic benefits to New Zealand. If anything it undermines productivity. It is the digital equivalent of an all-sugar diet.
Christie has a good point
There’s little chance Apple, Facebook and Google will stop selling if we force them to pull their economic weight.
Until recently the problem was limited. Most of the non-contributors were technology companies. That’s changing with services like Uber muscling in on our markets. If things continue, the giants will hollow out our economy. Let’s not allow that to happen.
It’s been said that what the companies do is legal. That’s true. It doesn’t make it right. We have the power to change that. We have left this problem in the too hard basket for too long.
While Christie’s argument is focused on tax avoidance and economic contribution, there’s a wider conversation about market dominance. We saw this in 2024 with the US Department of Justice’s major antitrust case against Apple, which specifically targeted the ‘blue bubble’ messaging lock-in as a means of unfairly suppressing phone competition.
Elon Musk paid $44 billion to take control of X-Twitter at the end of October 2022.
It’s been a ride ever since with story after story about the stupid, evil or inexplicable things that have happened. There are far too many to mention here.
Soon after the takeover there were many posts from disgruntled ex-employees and high profile internet personalities predicting imminent disaster.
Down, but far from out
Some said the site would fall over. It has done. The last year has seen several widespread outages. But there hasn’t been the persistent meltdown that was talked about.
Likewise, there were claims Twitter user numbers would plummet. As we shall see in a moment, they are down, but it’s a steady decline, not a rapid dive.
It appears that the technology and the site’s user stickiness both had more momentum than critics expected. That is about the only positive angle to this story.
Last month both Elon Musk and CEO Linda Yaccarino made public statements about Twitter usage, user numbers and everything else reaching an all-time high.
Decline and fool
A look at the figures shows something different. Twitter is declining in almost every way.
It’s relatively easy for researchers to get external data traffic data for a site like Twitter.
Highlights include an estimate that global web traffic to twitter.com was down 14 per cent year-over-year in September. It was worse for traffic to the ads.twitter.com portal for advertisers which was down 16.5 per cent.
Traffic was down 20 per cent in the US and 17.5 per cent in Australia.
Vanity press
It’s not all bad news for Musk. Traffic to his Twitter profile and posts was up 96 per cent.
Twitter is not the only social media site facing a drop off in interest. Similarweb found traffic to the top 100 social networks and online communities was down 3.7 percent. Yet TikTok was up almost 23 per cent over the same period.
Follow the money
Raw user numbers are one thing, what about the metric that matters the most: revenue?
Every month since Musk took over the year-on-year revenue has dropped. The best month was last October (2022). Twitter’s revenue was down 12 per cent that month. In December it posted a 78 per cent year on year revenue drop. The falls appear to be slowing, but the direction has not.
A conga line of startups and pre-existing alternatives hopes to profit as Twitter declines. The list includes: Bluesky, Post, Pebble, Spill, Mastodon and Threads. There are others, but these are the most direct competitors.
Bluesky mining a vein
Of these, Bluesky is the most Twitter-like. A site called twexit.nl publishes a running tally of subscriptions to Bluesky. It is the closest thing to a direct Twitter competitor.
On Monday Twexit showed Bluesky had 1,706,954 subscribers. That’s tiny compared to Musk’s claim of 500 million plus Twitter users, although few people believe his estimate.
You can see the Bluesky numbers jump every time Musk makes a move. In September the service saw a five per cent jump in sign-ups when Musk said he plans to charge all Twitter users.
It’s early days for Bluesky, potential new users need a sign-up invitation to join, although these are easy to get. The other obvious Twitter-like services, Post, Pebble and Spill have fewer members. Collectively they may add up to five million. That’s not much compared to Twitter’s numbers, even after discounting any Musk exaggeration factor.
Threads
Threads is more of a threat. It is Facebook’s Twitter alternative. Strictly speaking it is a Meta business, but the link to Facebook is strong with Threads posts now showing up on Facebook feeds.
Earlier this year Threads went from zero to more than 100 million users in less than a week. Accounts vary but most agree it does not yet have the impact you might expect from a social media site with 100 million users.
Mastodon remains interesting. It’s not a single site, there is no-one to call if you want to speak to Mastodon. It is made up of many sites or “instances”, often run by enthusiasts, bound together in a “federation”. Mastodon is an acquired taste, it is popular with certain communities and has a higher geek to non-geek ratio than other social media.
At the time of writing Mastodon’s records show it has 8.1 million users. That makes it, for now, the biggest of the smaller alternatives. Like the others, it often gets a boost in user numbers when Musk says something silly.
Here, highly exposed means between a quarter and a half of the tasks in a role can be automated using today’s AI.
Disrupted
A separate study based on LinkedIn’s Economic Graph, which identifies trends across its one billion members, found that 36 per cent of women will have their jobs disrupted by AI, compared with 26 per cent of men.
“Women tend to be over-represented in roles more susceptible to disruption by generative AI, such as medical administrative assistant and legal assistant, whereas men are over-represented in roles potentially augmented by generative AI, such as electrical and mechanical engineer”.
Recent research in Australia and reported in The Australian (not linked here because of the paywall) found:
“… 7.2 million employees – about half Australia’s total workforce – will need to re-skill and adapt to generative AI, with 3.3 million having their roles augmented by the technology while 3.9 million will face disruption. The remaining half of the workforce is expected to be largely unaffected by AI.”
You can read ‘disruption’ as meaning ‘likely to lose their jobs”.
Like the other research it found that clerical workers are in the front line, but away from rich countries that has other implications.
Historically as poorer countries develop economically, women enter the formal workforce by taking on clerical roles.
The ILO warns that one potential result of AI could be those clerical jobs that lift women out of poverty may now never emerge in lower-income countries.
Which not only makes it harder for women in those countries to enter the workforce, but it will have a huge impact on families.
It’s not entirely negative for women.
The Australian report goes on to say that more women than men have what it calls ‘soft skills’ which include communication, teamwork and adaptability.
These are skills where demand is expected to rise as more companies look to combine “people skills” with AI literacy.
Which means women are most likely to be displaced, but, on the whole those who are displaced are likely to do better than men at finding alternative jobs.
Last year the world created or replicated 64.2 zettabytes of data. The number comes from IDC, a market research firm (but the original document is no longer online).
The figure is remarkable considering three years earlier IDC was forecasting the 2020 number would be 44 zettabytes.
A zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes.
In part IDC puts the faster growth down to the Covid-19 pandemic: a “…dramatic increase in the number of people working, learning, and entertaining themselves from home.”
Ephemeral data
IDC says: “…less than 2 per cent of this new data was saved and retained into 2021 – the rest was either ephemeral (created or replicated primarily for the purpose of consumption) or temporarily cached and subsequently overwritten with newer data.”
Between now and 2025 the amount of data is set to grow at a compound annual rate of 23 percent.
The fastest growing source of data is the Internet of Things, not including surveillance video cameras. Social media is the second fastest growing source.
Growing faster than we can cope with
IDC says the amount of data generated is growing faster than our capacity to store data. The world had around 6.7 ZB of storage and that is growing at 19.2 per cent year on year.
Which means we save less and less of the generated data.
This is less of a problem than it might appear because a large fraction of data is useless. A decade ago experts found as much as 90 per cent of stored data was rubbish. It can include empty files, duplicates… or many multiple copies of identical files and temporary files that were never deleted.
