Traditional laptop for mobile professionals

We don’t often hear the term ‘power users’ any more, but this is the market HP has in its sights with the thin and light OmniBook 7 Laptop AI. It’s a beautiful, highly portable machine, but its focus on everyday office productivity means demanding creative users may be better served by alternatives.

Looks the part

You won’t find a better-looking traditional clamshell Windows laptop than the HP OmniBook 7 Laptop AI. The aluminium case is smoothly finished and looks capable of stopping bullets. HP’s marketing says it is ‘military grade’. This gives the OmniBook 7 all the protection it needs to navigate airport terminals or the challenges of daily public transport commuting.

If the OmniBook 7 oozes style before you turn it on, then it goes one better when the gorgeous OLED touchscreen display lights up.

HP’s OLED display is the OmniBook 7’s standout feature. It is one of the best we’ve seen to date. Colours are vibrant and accurate. Blacks are solid and dark.

This makes it a great laptop for sustained reading text or writing without eye strain.

While the screen is excellent for photo-editing, the processor is not ideal for heavy-duty photoshopping.

The touchscreen and haptic touchpad are both first class. Keyboards are often a matter of taste. This one is excellent although there is less travel than you might find elsewhere. It would pay to test the keyboard before buying in case this low-profile approach is not for you. In testing, it felt ideal for fast typists and those, like me, who learned to touch-type.

There are four ports plus power and a retro audio jack for those who don’t do Bluetooth. There are two legacy USB-A ports, two USB-C ports. You’ll use one of these for power. There is also a full-sized HDMI 2.1 port for connecting to an office display or your home TV.

Performance: A mixed bag

Everything about the HP OmniBook 7 Laptop AI says premium laptop except the performance. It’s good, but not workstation class.

The Intel Core Ultra 5 and the 32GB of Ram can power through massive spreadsheet models or tons of open browser tabs with aplomb. If you multitask productivity apps you’ll be more than satisfied.

We’ve already said the OmniBook 7 can handle some photo-editing. Its integrated Arc GPU is built for light creative tasks. You would not buy this machine to handle video rendering or 3D modelling.

Price and options

The review laptop came with an Intel Core Ultra 5 and a 512GB solid state drive. At the time of writing this version is no longer listed on HP’s New Zealand website. Prices for models with the Intel Core Ultra 7 start at $2100, which is a bargain.

Confusingly a Core Ultra 7 can be slower than the Ultra 5 in terms of raw processing. That said, it uses considerably less power giving you longer battery life.

The Core Ultra 7 model includes a more powerful Intel Arc 140V graphics processor which makes the laptop more appropriate for creative work and is around 20 percent faster when playing games. The review configuration is not great for gamers or creatives: the Ultra 7 version is much better.

The box label says “HP OmniBook 7 Laptop Al”. That’s not untrue. You can run AI jobs on the laptop and you’ll see the benefit of the Neural Processor Unit at times with Windows Studio camera effects. Yet those two letters appear to be more about marketing than delivering AI capabilities. Much the same applies to the Copilot button on the keyboard.

Battery life

Intel’s Core Ultra 5 225H does great work matching power consumption with use. You’ll easily get all-day battery life even if you work long hours. When the battery needs charging, HP’s FastCharge can get the power back to 50 percent in around half an hour.

HP is the dominant laptop brand in New Zealand. It is especially strong in the corporate world, so if your workplace buys your hardware, there is a good chance one of these will land on your desk.

If you are comfortable with Windows you won’t be unhappy with the hardware. The software is another story. HP can’t resist loading annoying bloatware on its laptops. That cheapens an otherwise impressive early experience.

The OmniBook’s likely competitors would be Lenovo’s ThinkPad X1 Carbon and Apple’s MacBook Air. The ThinkPad has a better keyboard with more travel and, if you like it, a more striking look. HP offers a far better screen than you’d find in a similarly priced Lenovo.

Comparisons with MacBooks are less head-to-head. Apple’s MacBook Air has no fan. It is completely silent and beats the OmniBook 7 on video editing. To fully match HP’s display and 32GB Ram you’d need to move up to a more expensive MacBook Pro.

Verdict

If you work for an employer who supplies laptops, there is a good chance you’ll see one of these models. HP is New Zealand’s dominant personal computer brand. In 2024, the last year figures are available for, the company accounted for around one third of the total market and half the business PC market.

The HP OmniBook 7 Laptop AI gets most of the important things right for business users.

It is slim, light and easy to carry. The OLED display is excellent. Battery life is strong enough for a full work day and the 32GB memory configuration makes multitasking painless.

Its weakness is comparative value at the premium end of the market. Buyers spending close to MacBook Air or ThinkPad X1 money may expect more outright performance. The base model with a Core Ultra 7 processor at $2100 is exceptional value.

If your priority is a highly portable Windows laptop for writing, research, presentations, web applications and day-to-day office work, the OmniBook 7 is easy to like.

HP OmniBook 7 Laptop AI at a glance

A short guide for curious non-technical readers who come across the term Open Source.

Open source software is free.

Anyone can download open source programs, run them, copy them and pass them on to friends and colleagues without paying a licence fee and without breaking any laws.

That’s a big deal and yet the cost, or lack of cost, is not the most important point. Open source advocates say the word free should be regarded in the same context as ‘free speech’ rather than ‘no payment’.

Open source is freedom

This freedom means that users can change the program to suit their own needs – something that is illegal with most other forms of software. The only stipulation is that the same set of freedoms must be passed on.

Altered open source programs must be made available to everyone. The logic of this approach is that control is decentralised – that way the software is continually improved.

At the same time, having large numbers of people looking at and improving on programs means that bugs are quickly eliminated – this is a powerful form of quality control.

Independence

Another aspect of open source is that it frees users from the clutches of the tech giants. In general they can’t control what happens, they can’t easily use open source software to feed their surveillance or AI engines. Open source users are generally independent of tech giants.

There are open source applications, games, operating systems and utilities. Any form of software can be open source.

You’ll find open source software embedded in proprietary software. Parts of Apple’s MacOS are open source. While the Android phone operating system is based on open source, the relationship between the version of Android on a phone and its open source roots is complicated.

There are different definitions and conflicting views on many of the nuances around open source. And, confusingly, there are hundreds of different open source licences to navigate, but, in general, if the software is free, if you can see and modify the code, it is open source.

There’s a lot more to open source than mentioned here. This is a simple guide for non-technical readers..

Originally posted August 2016

“You like the iPad because it’s simple. But if you’re using the iPad as your primary computer, you may just like it because it’s a challenge.”

Watts Martin hits a nerve writing iPad-only is the new desktop Linux.

Martin says people who use only iPads for their computing do it because it’s a challenge.

He says: “Figuring things out is part of the allure”. This, he says, is just like things were, maybe they still are, with desktop Linux.

When desktop Linux roared

Remember desktop Linux? Kids ask your parents. It was huge in the late 1990s and peaked around the year 2000.

At the time many thought Linux would replace Microsoft Windows for day-to-day desktop computing. Although a handful of organizations imposed it on their workers, it never got beyond being a fringe option. Yet it shook Microsoft and had a widespread effect on commercial PC software.

Desktop Linux was hard work.

There were practical reasons to use it. Linux needed fewer computing resources, it would work well on older, cheaper computers. Eventually Microsoft responded by trimming the fat on its software.

Free and open

Linux fans would find political or philosophical justifications for choosing a more difficult personal computing path. They’d talk about it being free, about how it was open source and so on.

One common idea at the time was that Linux forced users to get down and dirty with how computers worked at a basic level. This, the theory says, increases people’s understanding of computing. The knowledge would, in turn, make them safer and more productive.

This idea sounds great until you realise it takes a day to recompile an obscure but necessary piece of code that everything depends on.

Freedom has a price

While the freedom to tinker aspect of Linux could be useful. More often it was a terrible time sink. You could spend hours or days down software rabbit holes.

Desktop Linux was more difficult than Windows or Apple’s operating system. Maybe it didn’t challenge developers so much. They spend all day using esoteric commands and compiling code.

But for those of us with little coding experience, desktop Linux was challenging. At times it was an ordeal.

Martin writes:

Don’t deny it, folks who prefer the iPad to the Mac or PC: you like the challenge. It was awesome to check out and edit files in my company’s Github repo and make a pull request, all from the iPad.

Myke Hurley made an observation on his Analog(ue) podcast that even if you could prove that a given task was easier on the Mac, he’d still rather do it on his iPad because it’s just more fun. I absolutely get that.

Pioneering

Now, this is fine. There’s nothing wrong with people choosing difficult paths. They are pioneers, they find ways through the thickets for the rest of us to follow.

One of the reason that OS X is so good today is Apple built it on FreeBSD. OS X stands on the shoulders of open source giants.

FreeBSD isn’t Linux, but the two have a lot in common. Both are Unix-based and both are open source. Many commands are similar. Hacking around in the OS X terminal is a piece of cake for anyone who mastered Linux.

Tweakers of the world unite

Moreover, open source pioneers wrote and tweaked a lot of code powering modern desktops. Some of today’s iPad-only pioneers may be developers who fix code. It’s unlikely they’ll fix or improve iOS because it is a proprietary operating system.

Even so, they will be helping to find ways through technical thickets for the rest of us to follow later. They’ll figure out how to cope with, say, the iPad’s lack of a formal file system. They’re more likely to be writing useful new apps than parts of the underlying system.

What’s more, they’ll won’t all be passive consumers of technology. Many will submit bug reports and feature requests to Apple’s developers. We’ll get better tablets and tablet software thanks to them.

So while Martin is right about iPad-only pioneers doing it for the challenge, their curiosity and exploration isn’t a waste of time. iPads and other tablets are the future of personal computing, it may take years until they are the mainstream, but the pioneers will help us get there sooner.

📢 If you plan to use an iPad as your main computer, take a look at: A practical guide to writing on the iPad.

The 2025 MacBook Air M4 handles Logic Pro and other demanding apps with ease, making it a surprisingly capable choice at NZ$2400. This was originally posted in May 2025.

Basics

Apple sent a review model 13-inch MacBook Air with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. This configuration sells in New Zealand for $2400.

I used it as my daily work computer for four weeks. The biggest change isn’t raw performance, but how quietly and consistently it handles everyday work.

From the outside, it’s indistinguishable from the 2023 or 2024 models apart from the pale metallic finish. Apple calls this colour “sky blue”, replacing space grey.

Otherwise, nothing has changed. It’s thin, light and solidly built. The ports, screen, keyboard and trackpad are all carried over. There was nothing to fix.

Apple doesn’t mess with a formula that works.

Screen nit-picking

The 13-inch Liquid Retina display is excellent. At 2560 × 1664 pixels, text is crisp and colours are vivid. Photos and video both look great.

Apple sticks with a 60Hz refresh rate. MacBook Pro models offer 120Hz, which is smoother, but for most users it’s a nice-to-have rather than essential.

If you’re gaming at high frame rates or scrubbing video timelines all day, the Pro still makes more sense.

Fewer pixels than the MacBook Pro

The Air has fewer pixels than the MacBook Pro’s 3024 × 1964 display, and it’s slightly smaller at 13.6 inches versus 14.2 inches.

Brightness is also lower: 500 nits compared to the Pro’s 1000 nits sustained (1600 peak). On paper that sounds significant, but in practice the Air is bright enough for almost any job.

During testing I had cataract surgery. Beforehand I needed higher brightness, which hit battery life. Afterwards, I could turn it down. That’s not a typical benchmark, but it did underline how usable the display is across conditions.

If one screen isn’t enough, the M4 Air now supports two external displays while the lid remains open.

Keyboard, trackpad and ports

You’ll struggle to find a better laptop keyboard. As someone who types all day, I find the MacBook Air the best laptop for writing.

At the top right, the power button doubles as a Touch ID sensor. It’s fast, reliable and works for logins, passwords and payments.

Competitors come close on keyboards, but Apple’s trackpad remains unmatched. It’s precise, fluid and natural.

Ports are unchanged: MagSafe for charging, two USB-C ports and a headphone jack. Some complain about the lack of HDMI or Ethernet, but USB-C covers almost everything now.

Webcam and video calls

The upgraded 12MP webcam is a big improvement. Apple’s Center Stage keeps you framed and in focus during calls.

It works automatically. You don’t think about it, and that’s the point.

Apps like Zoom, Teams and FaceTime now feel like first-class experiences rather than compromises.

More computing power

If you’re upgrading from last year’s model, the performance bump is noticeable mainly in demanding apps.

Apple has doubled base memory to 16GB. Last year, that upgrade cost extra. Now it’s standard.

That matters. With 16GB you can comfortably run multiple apps at once. It’s the practical minimum for anything beyond basic office work.

Performance without noise

The M4 chip delivers strong performance without fan noise. The Air stays cool under normal use and only gets warm under sustained load.

I ran a demanding game in the background to stress the system. It became warm, not hot. For everyday work, it stays cool.

It won’t make you type faster, but it will render video, process images and handle 4K workloads without hesitation.

I tested it with Logic Pro and FL Studio. Even pushing towards the limits, there was still headroom.

Productivity: external displays

The ability to run two external monitors with the lid open is a meaningful upgrade.

With multiple screens, it’s easier to spread out research, documents and apps. It’s a genuine productivity boost, especially for writing or editing work.

Earlier Apple silicon Air models had limitations here. The M4 removes them.

Battery life

Apple claims up to 18 hours. In practice, I saw around 13 hours.

Higher screen brightness and external drives both reduce battery life. Even so, it’s enough for a full working day.

Long battery life has been a MacBook strength since Apple moved away from Intel.

Windows laptops have caught up in endurance, but often by trading performance. The M4 Air delivers both.

Running Logic Pro and other demanding apps

At $2000, this is Apple’s cheapest laptop. Yet it handles workloads that once required a MacBook Pro.

Logic Pro runs smoothly, even with large projects, multiple instruments and real-time effects. There’s no stuttering.

That’s a big change from Intel-era MacBook Air models, which struggled with even modest sessions.

The M4 handles advanced features, including AI tools, without breaking a sweat. I only found limits by deliberately overloading it.

FL Studio shows a similar story. Where older Air models hit limits quickly, the M4 runs cleanly and reliably.

Memory and storage options

The M4 MacBook Air supports up to 32GB of unified memory. That’s important for demanding workloads.

While 16GB is enough for most users, serious music or video work benefits from 32GB. It’s expensive, but it adds long-term headroom.

Storage is another constraint. The base model fills quickly if you work with media. Realistically, 1TB is a better starting point, with 2TB worth considering if budget allows.

A fully loaded 13-inch model reaches NZ$4400. The 15-inch version goes higher.

Verdict

You won’t find a better mix of performance, features and usability at this price.

It’s faster, more capable and now slightly cheaper than before. That’s rare.

The keyboard, trackpad and speakers remain best-in-class. Battery life is strong. Performance is more than enough for almost any task.

Upgrades are still expensive, but worthwhile if you need them.

Last year’s M3 MacBook Air was arguably the best all-round laptop available. The M4 version takes that title and strengthens it.

Frequently asked questions

Q: Does the MacBook Air M4 support two monitors? A: Yes, unlike previous models, the M4 Air supports two external displays while the laptop lid is open.

Q: Is the M4 MacBook Air good for music production? A: Yes. In my month of testing, it handled Logic Pro and FL Studio sessions that would have made older Intel models stutter.

Q: Is 16GB of Ram actually enough for professional audio in Logic Pro? A: Surprisingly, yes. While the 32GB upgrade offers more “future-proofing,” the new 16GB base configuration handles serious Logic Pro and FL Studio sessions with dozens of tracks and multiple real-time effects without stuttering. Because the M4’s unified memory is so fast, the “memory pressure” stays in the green for most home studio and mid-level professional projects. Only those working with massive orchestral sample libraries or high-end 4K video editing should feel the need to spend the extra $800 on the 32GB model.

HP’s OmniBook 5 14-inch promises next-generation AI performance. In practice, its strengths are battery life, portability and value. It is a smart, efficient machine, as long as you don’t expect the AI branding to change your workflow. Review oringally posted in October 2025.

You can buy the HP OmniBook 5 14 for a shade under NZ$1500. It suits anyone who values portability and battery life over raw performance. Think senior school students, undergraduates or office workers.

It is also a good fit for journalists.

Performance is fine for web apps, office software, media streaming and light creative work. You will need to spend more for video editing or 3D rendering.

Despite the AI branding, battery life is the key feature. This is not a laptop for GPU-heavy tasks or demanding games.

Build quality

Build quality is serviceable rather than premium. It should cope with normal home or office use, but not rough handling.

It is less robust than Microsoft’s laptops and not as solid as an Apple MacBook.

Commuting is fine. A building site or farm may be a step too far. It is not ideal for users who are hard on their gear.

Even so, it represents good value. This is a well-balanced mid-range Windows laptop with strong battery life, a decent screen and a good keyboard.

You may find more powerful processors at this price if you shop around. Even so, this model deserves a place on a mid-range shortlist.

Snapdragon X Plus processor

HP uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus chip. The review unit has the base X1-26-100 model: an 8-core processor built on a 4nm process with a 45 TOPS NPU. It is tuned for efficiency rather than speed.

HP claims up to 34 hours of battery life. I could not verify that, but saw consistent results of more than 24 hours between charges.

That is still excellent for a Windows laptop.

The review unit has 16GB of Ram, which is at the low end for 2025. It will handle multiple apps, but heavy multitasking will slow things down. The 512GB storage is typical at this price and limits large media libraries.

Keyboard, trackpad, display

The keyboard is spacious and comfortable. Keys are close to full size and typing feels natural. This is as good as you will find at this level.

The trackpad works well, but does not match the smooth feel of a MacBook.

HP describes the display as “2K”, which is generous. In practice, it is a 1920×1200 OLED panel with a 60Hz refresh rate.

The screen is good for the price. Text is sharp, colours are strong and contrast is excellent. It is bright enough indoors, but struggles in direct sunlight.

Verdict: HP OmniBook 5 14

You get a lot for less than NZ$1500. Battery life is excellent, the keyboard is strong and the overall package is well judged.

What you do not get is high-end performance. That may matter if you are buying into the AI message in HP’s marketing.

Otherwise, this is a balanced, practical laptop for everyday use.

Worth knowing: do you need an AI laptop?

Most mid-range and premium laptops now come with some form of AI branding.

In practice, you may not notice much difference in day-to-day use.

Even so, this is the direction the market has taken. Unless you buy at the low end, your next laptop will almost certainly be sold as an AI device.

That is not necessarily a bad thing. These machines can offer good value. It does mean you should treat some of the marketing claims with caution.

Tiny, powerful and pricey, the Oura Ring 4 tracks sleep, fitness and stress without a bulky watch. For some people, skin reactions could be a real risk. This post was written in October 2025..

Review: Oura Ring 4

The Oura Ring 4 is the latest version of a popular smart ring that tracks fitness, sleep and stress. This is not a full review. Testing finished early because of an adverse skin reation. Think of it as a snapshot.

Many readers will like the idea. I could not live with the reality. In testing, it did not last 24 hours on my finger.

I’ll explain in more depth why this happened later. First, some background.

The ring is a neat piece of engineering. It weighs five or six grams and sits quietly on your finger while monitoring vital signs.

There are limits. Small devices can only hold so many sensors. Physics and thickness still matter.

The Oura phone app

There is no display on the ring, so you use a phone app to view data. The ring connects over Bluetooth.

The app is well organised and easy to navigate. Some details take a little digging, but it works well.

You can see heart rate in real time. A sleep score appears soon after you wake.

Other insights take longer. You need to build up a body of data before recommendations appear.

Sizing kit before you buy

The ring is about the size of a large wedding ring. Before shipping, Oura sends a sizing kit. There are 12 sizes.

There are multiple colours and finishes. Buying direct, prices start at US$350 for silver. Most models cost about US$500. At the time of writing that’s roughly NZ$850 to NZ$900, plus GST. New Zealand pricing is exchange-rate dependent and may date quickly.

You can also buy from retailers such as JB Hi-Fi. At the time of writing, a gold model sells for NZ$979.

This is not a product you should buy blind. Fit matters.

Oura is expensive for a smart ring. It costs more than rivals from Samsung. At this price, you could also consider an Apple Watch.

Even basic functionality requires a subscription

There is a controversial catch. The ring is of limited use without a subscription.

When you register, you are asked to complete account setup. That includes payment details.

The fee is US$6 a month or US$70 a year. It is not huge, but it feels steep after the upfront cost.

By comparison, Samsung does not charge for its ring app. Apple does not charge for core Apple Watch health features, although that could change.

There is a wider trend here. Hardware makers are looking for ongoing revenue from connected devices. Not everyone will like that.

Without a subscription, you see only basic scores for readiness, sleep and activity, along with battery alerts.

Battery life

The lack of a display helps battery life. Oura claims up to eight days on a charge.

That sounds plausible. I could not test it. My experience did not last long enough.

Why I had to send the ring back

I found the ring less comfortable than a smartwatch.

It is light, but noticeable. If you are not used to wearing rings, you may feel strange.

In my case, things got worse. Ten years ago I had a serious skin reaction to an early Apple Watch.

I kept that in mind during testing. At first, the ring felt fine, if slightly irritating. Later, my finger became itchy, then faintly red.

At around 1:30am I woke in pain. My finger was swollen and throbbing. It was hard to remove the ring. Another hour or two and it might not have come off.

By morning, the swelling remained. I did not wear the ring again.

Oura acknowledges this risk. Its safety advice says you should remove the ring if irritation occurs and seek medical advice if symptoms persist.

Verdict: Oura Ring 4

It is unusual to deliver a verdict after limited use. Even so, the idea is sound.

Oura has built a device that can track health data without getting in the way. For most people, it will be unobtrusive.

It may even flag health issues early. That alone could justify the cost.

For a minority, comfort and skin reactions will be a barrier.

First posted February 2025: HP’s OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 is a thin, light and flexible 2-in-1 Windows laptop. Battery life is impressive for an Intel machine and the hardware rarely puts a foot wrong. Yet it falls short of HP’s promise of delivering “the ultimate AI experience”.

OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 at a glance

For: Long battery life, solid build quality, practical 2-in-1 design.
Against: Expensive for a consumer laptop, similar money buys more powerful hardware, underwhelming AI features.
Maybe: Odd port placement, Intel still comes with trade-offs.
Verdict: A strong choice if you want a thin, light Windows laptop with good battery life and full Intel compatibility.
Price: Officially NZ$3700, although retail pricing can dip closer to NZ$3000.

Familiar design, well executed

At first glance, the OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 looks like a business-class hybrid. In reality, it sits in HP’s consumer range.

The plastic chassis is a surprise at this price, but it works. Where some plastic laptops feel flimsy, this one is sturdy and well put together. It feels capable of handling the knocks that come with everyday travel.

The hinge is another potential weak point on 2-in-1 devices. During a month of testing, it proved reliable and smooth in operation.

As a hybrid, the device can be used as a standard laptop, folded flat into a tablet or propped up in a tent configuration. The latter may appeal for presentations, although it is not something everyone will use.

Display and everyday use

The 14-inch OLED touchscreen has a 2880 by 1800 resolution and supports refresh rates up to 120Hz.

Indoors, the display performs well. Colours are rich and the higher refresh rate helps with smooth scrolling and general responsiveness. Outdoors, it is usable in shade or overcast conditions, but struggles in direct sunlight.

Speakers are adequate for calls and general office work, although they sound thin when playing music. This is typical for laptops of this type.

The keyboard spans the full width of the device and is comfortable for extended typing sessions. The trackpad is responsive and accurate.

Price and positioning

With a list price of NZ$3700, the OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 sits in a competitive bracket.

At this level, buyers could opt for a well-specified MacBook Pro or a fully loaded MacBook Air. Windows alternatives include premium models from HP, Lenovo and Microsoft, some offering more raw performance.

The key distinction is the processor. While many rivals are moving to ARM-based chips, this model sticks with Intel. That means fewer compatibility concerns, even if it comes at the cost of peak efficiency.

Retail discounts make a difference. At closer to NZ$3000, the OmniBook Ultra Flip becomes easier to justify.

Performance and battery life

In everyday use, the OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 is quick and responsive. It handles typical workloads with ease and should remain capable for years.

Battery life is the standout. For an Intel-powered laptop, it lasts far longer than expected and comes close to what you might see from ARM-based machines.

For many users, this combination of performance and endurance will be more than enough. Those needing sustained high performance may still be better served by a business-class machine.

Windows 11 holds it back

The weakest link here is not the hardware, but the software.

Windows 11 continues to feel inconsistent. During testing, there were occasional crashes, including while the machine was asleep, along with driver issues that appeared without warning.

Even when stable, the experience lacks the polish found elsewhere. For users coming from macOS, the difference is noticeable.

AI: more promise than delivery

HP leans heavily on AI as a selling point, particularly through its integration with Microsoft Copilot.

In practice, this is not a compelling reason to buy the laptop. The AI features feel underdeveloped and add little to the day-to-day experience.

HP’s own AI tools are still in beta, which shows. Some features, such as performance optimisation, are difficult to assess and did not make a clear impact during testing.

For a device at this price, buyers could reasonably expect more mature software.

Verdict

The HP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 is a well-built, thoughtfully designed hybrid with strong battery life and dependable performance.

It does not redefine what a Windows laptop can do, and its AI ambitions are not yet realised. Even so, the hardware is solid and the overall package is easy to recommend for those who want flexibility and full compatibility.

If you are committed to Windows and want a premium 2-in-1 with long battery life, the OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 is worth considering.```

HP’s EliteBook Ultra G1 is a business-class Windows laptop with a solid build, strong security and a heavy emphasis on corporate features. It costs far more than a typical consumer notebook. That makes it attractive if your employer is paying, but a harder sell if you are spending your own money.

Smart, corporate design

From the outside, the EliteBook Ultra G1 looks exactly as a corporate laptop should. The matte magnesium case, rounded corners and clean lines give it a restrained, professional appearance.

At 1.2kg and around 18mm thick, it is light and portable without feeling fragile. There is a clear sense this is a premium device designed for executives who travel.

Screen and media

The 14-inch OLED touchscreen has a 2880 by 1800 resolution and a variable refresh rate.

At 400 nits, brightness is adequate for most environments. It is not the brightest display in its class. Users accustomed to more luminous screens may find themselves wanting more headroom.

The screen can fold flat, allowing the laptop to double as a makeshift desktop tablet. In practice, this is useful in limited scenarios rather than everyday use.

Audio is a highlight. The quad-speaker system performs well for a device this thin. Calls are clear and voice-based applications sound excellent. Music playback is respectable, although still constrained by the form factor.

Keyboard, touchpad and ports

HP gets the fundamentals right. The keyboard is responsive and comfortable for long typing sessions. The haptic touchpad is equally well executed and adds a sense of precision.

Port selection is generous for a modern laptop. On the left, there is an audio jack, a USB-A port hidden behind a pull-down cover and a USB-C port with a charging indicator. On the right, you will find two more USB-C ports, another charging light and a lock slot.

Like Apple, HP has dropped the microSD slot.

Connectivity

The EliteBook Ultra G1 supports WiFi 7, putting it at the leading edge of wireless connectivity. While many users will still be on earlier standards, this ensures the laptop is ready for faster networks as they become more common.

Performance and battery life

On paper, the combination of an Intel Lunar Lake processor and 32GB of Ram suggests strong performance.

In practice, it is less impressive. Everyday tasks run smoothly, but at this price you might expect more headroom. Comparable MacBook Air models, costing significantly less, can outperform it in a range of applications.

One notable detail is how quiet the system remains. Even under load, the fan rarely makes itself known.

Battery life is solid. Around 14 hours of video streaming is realistic, which is enough for long-haul travel. It is not class-leading, but it is more than adequate for business use.

AI: not the main event

HP positions the EliteBook Ultra G1 as an AI laptop, but the reality is more modest.

The machine lacks a dedicated GPU and the Intel processor is not heavily optimised for AI workloads. As a result, it feels more like a traditional business laptop with a few AI extras.

HP’s AI Companion is essentially a branded interface for GPT-4. It requires an internet connection and offers little beyond what you can already access through standard tools, aside from some system-specific functions.

There is also a dedicated Copilot button for Microsoft’s AI assistant. It is convenient, but not a compelling reason to choose this laptop.

Security sets it apart

Where the EliteBook Ultra G1 distinguishes itself is security.

HP Wolf Security for Business adds multiple layers of protection beyond standard Windows tools. This includes anti-phishing measures, BIOS tamper protection and system hardening features.

The trade-off is usability. Security prompts can interrupt workflows, particularly when installing software that is not on an approved list. Unlike some systems, there is limited scope to override these restrictions.

For individual users, this may feel intrusive. For corporate IT departments, it is a significant advantage. The ability to manage and secure fleets of devices will appeal to organisations concerned about risk.

Verdict

The HP EliteBook Ultra G1 is a premium business laptop aimed squarely at corporate buyers.

It excels in build quality, security and manageability. Performance is competent rather than exceptional, and the AI features do little to justify the marketing emphasis.

For individuals, there are better-value options with more power. For organisations that prioritise security and control, the EliteBook Ultra G1 makes a strong case, even at a high price.

Apple iPad Pro 12.9-inch (2020) brings a modest speed bump, a revamped camera system and full mouse and trackpad support.

Apple’s 2020 iPad Pro 12.9-inch is a refinement, not a revolution. The big leap came in 2018 when Apple rebooted the Pro line. That model pushed the iPad closer to being a genuine laptop replacement while keeping the strengths of a tablet.

For everyday tasks like browsing or writing, there’s little difference.

The 2020 update builds on that solid base. Most hardware changes are incremental, but iPadOS has matured into a more capable platform for mobile computing.

Everything that made the 2018 model great remains. The design is still one of Apple’s best, with minimal bezels, squared edges and rounded corners. It feels so right that it’s hard to imagine a better approach.

Performance

Bionic chip

The new iPad Pro uses Apple’s A12Z Bionic processor. On paper it improves on the earlier A12X, but in practice the gains are modest. There are still eight cores, split between performance and efficiency.

For browsing, writing or streaming, there’s little noticeable change.

Push it harder and the difference shows. Graphics-heavy tasks like photo editing run faster, audio apps feel smoother and demanding workloads are more responsive. Even so, the improvement is incremental.

By today’s standards it remains fast. It can outperform a 2019 MacBook Air (2019) with an Intel Core i3, although it doesn’t challenge Apple’s high-end laptops.

Battery life

Battery life is slightly down on the 2018 model, which could stretch to 10–12 hours depending on workload. The 2020 version manages a little over nine hours in regular use.

That’s still enough for a full working day, though no longer exceptional. Heavy apps can drain the battery in around six hours, while lighter use will comfortably last longer.

Cameras

Apple has focused more on cameras than raw performance this time. The rear now includes two lenses and a LiDAR sensor, following the same direction as recent phone upgrades.

The main 12-megapixel wide camera is unchanged. It’s good for a tablet, though not on the level of the iPhone 11. The new 10-megapixel ultra-wide lens is a first for iPad and proves useful, especially in tighter spaces or low light. It often works alongside the main camera to improve results.

Using a 12.9-inch tablet as a camera still feels awkward. Holding a device this size for photography is unnatural, and the controls are less intuitive than on a phone. For consistent quality, dedicated cameras remain the better option. For quick snaps or document scanning, the iPad does the job well.

Front camera

The front-facing 7-megapixel camera is designed for selfies and video calls. This is where the iPad Pro excels. Video quality is far better than on most laptops I’ve used, whether Mac or Windows. For remote work, it makes a noticeable difference.

Placement is less ideal. In portrait mode the camera sits at the top, but with a keyboard attached in landscape it shifts to the side. Software compensates, yet eye contact can feel off. To appear engaged, you need to look towards the edge of the screen.

LiDAR sensor

The standout addition is the LiDAR sensor. While it may eventually improve photography, its main purpose is augmented reality.

LiDAR, used in autonomous vehicles, measures distance by mapping the surrounding environment. On the iPad it can scan rooms with surprising accuracy. Apple’s measuring app works up to around five metres, which is ideal indoors but less useful outside.

It also opens the door for AR apps and games, letting you place virtual objects convincingly in real spaces. For now it feels like a bonus feature, but that could change as developers explore its potential.

Verdict: 2020 12.9-inch iPad Pro

The 2020 iPad Pro 12.9-inch is an incremental update to an already excellent device. The design remains outstanding, performance is strong and iPadOS continues to improve.

New cameras and LiDAR add interest, but they are not compelling reasons to upgrade from the 2018 model. Battery life is slightly weaker, though still solid.

If you’re coming from an older iPad or want a tablet that can double as a serious work machine, this is an easy recommendation. If you already own the 2018 version, you can afford to wait.

From September 2020: Apple's Scribble works better than you might dare to expect, it's fast and feels natural although it can get tiring over the long haul.

The first few paragraphs of this review were handwritten on an iPad Pro running iPadOS 14. Apple included a new feature in the operating system called Scribble.

It allows you handwrite in any iPad text field. Scribble then converts your handwriting into text.

Scribble works with the Apple Pencil. If you don’t own one, this a reason to buy the Pencil.

It doesn’t have to be the Apple Pencil, any powered iPad stylus will work. Scribble doesn’t work with fingertips or with passive styluses.

If you’re old enough and spent a lot of time with Apple hardware you may remember something similar was possible with the Newton MessagePad.

Impressive performance

Scribble works better than you might dare to expect.

It is fast enough to covert handwriting on the fly. Using it feels natural enough over the short haul. After a while writing with the Pencil can get more tiring than typing, although that may be unfamiliarity.

That could also be because I am a touch typist and have never been great at handwriting. In my case Scribble is an accurate description.

Either way, I gave up trying to write this entire post using Scribble at the sentence you are reading now. In other words, it’s good for a couple of hundred words.

Don’t plan on using it to write your magnum opus.

Scribble quick notes

To date I’ve found Scribble is excellent for making quick notes, filling in forms, compiling lists and the like. It excels if you need to pen a fast reply to an email.

While you can use Scribble in any text field, certain iPadOS apps have full support. The first paragraphs of this post were written directly into the Apple Pages word processor. If you own an iPad, Pages is free.

When you touch the screen with your Pencil while in a Pages document, the draw palette shows up. To choose scribble, you have to pick the leftmost pen tool, it has an A on it to make things clearer.

Reading my handwriting can be challenging at the best of times. Scribble got almost everything right for the first paragraphs. We’ll discusss the word almost in a moment. Where it doesn’t recognise your writing, you can quickly fix the text using one of four simple pen gestures. Newton owners might find them familiar.

Gestures

To delete a written word, you scribble over it. That’s straightforward enough and needs no training. You can select a word by drawing a line through it or by circling it. In practice the circles are easier and more accurate, although you may find otherwise. Inserting text works when you tap and hold the pen tip at the insertion point. A gap opens in the text and you can write in your extra text. Drawing a vertical line between text characters will either add a space to separate two connected words or open a space when two words are closed up.

It doesn’t take long to pick up these gestures, I was doing them all without a second thought before I stopped scribbling this post. There is one glaring omission. You can’t go to a word and, say, capitalise it. With the Newton you can turn a lower case character into a capital with an upward swipe. With Scribble you have to delete and write the word again remembering to use a capital initial letter.

You can’t Scribble everywhere yet

Scribble doesn’t work with all iPadOS apps. The software has to be enabled by the app developer. It doesn’t work with Microsoft Word or Google Docs. If history is anything to go by, third party app developers will embrace it over time. Other Apple iWorks apps can use it. I was pleased to find it works with iA Writer. And, as mentioned earlier, it does great service with the iPadOS Mail app.

Scribble is one of those features that you can overlook. Yet it has the potential to upend the way you work with an iPad. My favourite aspect of this is that Scribble makes it much easier to write on an iPad when you are standing. As a journalist this is something I need to do when on reporting jobs.

This review was written in May 2018.

Apple’s sixth generation 2018 iPad is a bargain. In New Zealand it costs NZ$540. For many people it is all the computer they will ever need.

Sure, there will be people who consider it dull next to the swept-up iPad Pro. It doesn’t have as many features. Yet it does one important thing that, until now, only the Pro model iPad could handle. The 2018 iPad works with Apple Pencil.

That’s great if you want to use an iPad to create art or jot quick notes without adding a keyboard or dealing with the device’s glass keyboard. This, coupled with the price should open up the iPad to new audience.

It’s a solid, reliable alternative to buying a low-cost computer. Some geeks will hate me writing that.

With this iPad, Apple is doubling down on the strategy that made the recent iPhone SE so compelling; by pairing a powerful, current-generation processor with a tried-and-true physical design, Apple created a entry point into its world that doesn’t break the bank. It will pull new customers to the iPad.

Half the price of an iPad Pro

While the 2018 iPad doesn’t have all the features you’d find in an iPad Pro, it’s close to half the price of the cheapest Pro. The basic model $540 2018 iPad Pro comes with 32GB of storage. In contrast, the cheapest iPad Pro model costs NZ$1100 and has 64GB of storage.

There’s a NZ$700 version of the 2018 iPad with 128GB. If you can find the extra $160 it’s worth it. If you have a large library of music, videos or photographs you’ll soon bump up against the limits of 32GB. With a 128GB you won’t need to continually swap out files to a back-up device or the cloud.

What you get with both models is the classic 9.7-inch iPad Retina display. There are not as many pixels as you’ll find on the 10.5-inch iPad Pro, but the resolution is much the same. It has 2048 by 1536 pixels compared with the Pro’s 2224 by 1668. The 2018 iPad weighs exactly the same amount as the 10.5-inch iPad Pro; around 480 grams.

At 7.5mm, the 2018 iPad is a sliver thicker than the Pro which is just 6.1mm. That’s enough to notice, but not much of a compromise. It’s about 10mm shorter and 5mm less wide. This means you can’t swap covers or keyboards between the two devices. Not that many people will be doing that.

Adding a keyboard

And anyway, the 2018 iPad doesn’t have the Smart Connectors found on iPad Pro models. These make it easier to use a keyboard without resorting to Bluetooth. If you want to run a keyboard with the 2018 iPad there are dozens of options, many are excellent.

It’s a fine tablet for writing on.

The speakers are not as loud or as clear as you’ll find on an iPad Pro.

Another difference between the Pro and the 2018 iPad is that you only get a first generation Touch ID button. It’s a little slower than the newer version and more prone to stumble when you use a fingerprint to sign-in. This is noticeable in practice if you’re stepping down from a newer iPad Pro or have an iPhone 7 or 8.

There’s a software difference too. The 2018 iPad only allows two apps to appear on screen at any time. While the Pro models allow three, this is something I never use on my tablet. I doubt many others will miss it.

The 2018 iPad uses Apple’s A10 Fusion chip, it’s similar, but not as powerful as the A10x Fusion chip in the Pro model. In theory it doesn’t run as fast, you could probably prove this by running benchmarks. In practice, you won’t notice. I didn’t find any lag on the 2018 model, it doesn’t feel slower. In fact, when it comes to speed, it feels almost exactly the same as my first generation 9.7-inch iPad Pro.

Where the 2018 iPad fits

Apple launched the 2018 iPad with an emphasis on education. It’s a great choice for students. Apple critics will tell you the iOS operating system is a walled garden and restrictive. Although there is some truth in this, in practice iOS is as open to the rest of the computing world as all the alternatives. Chromebook, Android and Windows are all as flawed in their own ways – possibly more flawed given their business models.

I’ve spent much of the last year using a 12.9-inch iPad Pro as my main mobile computer. It doesn’t do everything I need, but for most purposes it is more than enough computer. It has travelled overseas and out-of-town with me several times. For the most part the limitations of the 2018 iPad would be the same. If you’re on a tight budget and don’t need a lot of fancy features it could be all the computer you need. It’s a great device for creativity, just don’t expect to edit movies on its 9.7-inch screen.

The key to the 2018 iPad is that you get a lot of computer for not much money. You can buy cheaper Chromebooks, Android tablets and, at a pinch, Windows PCs. Unless you’re looking for an app that doesn’t appear in Apple’s store, this beats all those devices for most people who have light computing needs.

Posted in May 2024. From the outside, Apple’s latest MacBook Air appears identical to its 2022 counterpart. It has the same ports, a great screen, terrific keyboard and the best trackpad you’ll find on any laptop. It is still thin and light.

From the outside, Apple’s latest MacBook Air appears identical to its 2022 counterpart. It has the same ports, a great screen, terrific keyboard and the best trackpad you’ll find on any laptop. It is still thin and light.

Despite two years of hefty inflation, the M3 MacBook Air’s NZ$2050 starting price is unchanged. You could view that as a de facto price cut. Apple still offers the 2022 model with prices starting at NZ$1800.

The main change is the switch from the M2 to M3 chip. This brings a significant bump in power, depending on the application the laptop is anywhere from 15 to 20 per cent faster than its immediate ancestor. It’s a huge leap up from the M1 or Intel MacBooks.

Better WiFI

Other changes include a welcome upgrade to WiFi 6E. If your router supports WiFi 6E you’ll notice a huge jump in data speeds. My gigabit connection gives me more than 600 mbps direct to my home office.

Apple has also reconfigured the external monitor hardware so you can run two external screens from the M3 MacBook Air.

Beefing up the processor does not take a toll on the computer’s battery life, you can still get more than 16 hours use before needing a recharge.

You can be forgiven for thinking that a 15 to 20 per cent increase in power does not amount to much. Nothing could be further from the truth. For many years now Intel-based laptops have only managed low single digit increases in computing power between generations. Apple continues to squeeze performance from its chips.

The performance jump is immediately noticeable when moving between MacBook Air models. It is even more noticeable when moving from an Intel Windows laptop to the Air.

M3 MacBook Air closes gap with MacBook Pro

In practice it means the new MacBook Air can run apps that might previously have required a MacBook Pro. In the meantime the MacBook Pro has moved up to the point where it outperforms many “workstation class” Windows laptops.

For the past month the 13-inch M3 MacBook Air has been my main computer. During that time, I haven’t heard the fan switch on once. Indeed, I had to check to see if there is a fan in the case.

Apple says you can get 18 hours from a single battery charge. That may be true, but I need to have a brighter screen and find I can work for around 16 hours without needing to use the MagSafe cable. On a recent two-day trip away from home I took the wrong power cable and power anxiety only kicked in late on the second day.

Price

Prices for the M3 MacBook Air start at NZ$2050. That buys a computer with 8GB of memory and 256GB of storage. It’s adequate if you never run lots of apps at the same time and mainly use your laptop for the web, basic office applications and video calls.

Otherwise you’d need to look higher up the range. More demanding applications and practical multitasking require 16GB of memory. That takes the price to $2400. There’s also a 24GB option. You need to make the right call when you buy as the memory is not upgradable.

Storage

The base model’s 256GB storage is modest by 2024 standards. You could live with this if you don’t store many media files your computer. More likely you will need to buy more storage at the time of purchase. Like memory, this is not upgradable.

There are options with external drives, network drives and cloud services but these are clumsy compared with getting a bigger drive in the first place. I find 512GB is essential.

Adding 16GB memory and 512GB storage to an M3 MacBook Air lifts the price to NZ$2750. Apple sent a review model with 16 GB of memory and a terabyte of storage. This configuration costs NZ$3100.

There is a 15-inch model with prices starting at NZ$2500.

Premium laptop

These prices place the M3 MacBook Air firmly in the premium laptop bracket. That’s fine, it is more than competitive with rival premium laptops from the likes of HP or Dell.

People tend to think of Microsoft’s Surface Laptop as a direct competitor to the MacBook Air. Prices are similar. The base model Microsoft Surface Laptop 5 is NZ$2000 for a model with 8GB of memory and 256GB of storage. The M3 MacBook Air is considerably more powerful than the Surface Laptop 5 which feels like it is at least a generation behind Apple’s laptop.

M3 MacBook Air verdict

For now Apple’s M3 MacBook Air is the best all-round laptop in the world and certainly the best option in its price range. You won’t find a better blend of features, functionality and performance anywhere else. You’ll power through your daily work with ease.

Unless you work for an employer who insists on Windows, this would be a good time to think about jumping ship to MacOS. Apple either beats or equals every rival when it comes to the laptop’s keyboard, trackpad and the physical case. You won’t find a better screen or better speakers and its webcam is top class.

They don’t get much attention but Apple’s Touch ID and the WiFi 6E modem are also huge plus points. There is an attention to detail that rival laptop makers rarely match.

That said, it’s not cheap and it might be overkill for some readers. If your needs are not demanding and want to spend less, the M2 version costs NZ$250 less and has almost everything.

In 2021 Apple moved ahead of the laptop pack with its M1-powered MacBook Pro. That model set new standards for processing power and battery life. This report from 2023 looks at how the M2 MacBook Pro takes performance and battery life further. It's not cheap, but the most demanding users will see it as a wise investment.

16-inch MacBook Pro at a glance

At first sight Apple’s 2023 MacBook Pro looks identical to the 2021 model. Externally, little has changed and that’s no bad thing.

The 16-inch model has a full-size backlit keyboard (280mm by 115mm). It’s the best I’ve used on a laptop, with a precise, comfortable feel. A Touch ID key handles security, making logins and payments quick and painless.

The trackpad is large (160 × 100mm) and superbly responsive—again, the best I’ve seen on any laptop.

Apple’s Liquid Retina XDR display is stunning. It refreshes at up to 120Hz, with sharp text, vivid images and, if needed, searing brightness. Apple quotes a 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio. On the review unit the 16.2-inch screen delivers 254 pixels per inch.

There’s also an SDXC card slot. In testing, file transfers from an older camera card were effectively instantaneous.

Raw computing power

The review unit has a 12-core M2 CPU: eight performance cores and four efficiency cores. The 2021 model’s M1 Pro had 10 cores, so the newer chip adds two efficiency cores.

In practice, this MacBook Pro is about 20 percent faster than its predecessor. That’s noticeable, though probably not enough to tempt 2021 owners to upgrade. Anyone coming from an Intel MacBook will see a huge leap.

Benchmarks only tell part of the story, so I focused on real-world tasks. Using HandBrake to encode a library of DVDs for Apple TV, the MacBook Pro completed the job in less than a quarter of the time taken by my 2020 Intel MacBook Air.

It’s not a gaming laptop, but it handles demanding graphics work with ease. Rendering lossless audio from a digital audio workstation took a fraction of the time compared with the MacBook Air.

Beyond that, I struggled to find anything in my workflow that could push the M2 to its limits.

Outstanding battery life

The 100Wh battery combined with Apple Silicon’s efficiency delivers extraordinary endurance.

Apple claims up to 22 hours of video playback. In a controlled test, with WiFi and Bluetooth off, moderate brightness, video looping, the MacBook Pro ran for 27 hours, comfortably exceeding that figure.

In everyday use, writing, browsing, light photo work and background encoding, I saw around 16 hours. That’s roughly two full working days on a single charge.

Long battery life changes how you use a laptop. You stop thinking about chargers, power points or rationing screen time. It feels closer to using a phone.

It’s also enough to cover most of a New Zealand–Europe flight, assuming you sleep part of the way.

Fast charging

Apple’s 140W power adapter delivers a 50 percent charge in about 30 minutes, with a full charge taking roughly 90 minutes.

MagSafe has returned, which means a stray foot won’t send your laptop crashing to the floor. You can still charge via USB-C if needed.

Video camera

Laptop webcams are often poor, but not here. The MacBook Pro has a 1080p camera with a four-element lens. In video calls, others consistently reported clearer images.

That clarity can cut both ways: during one call, someone spotted a competitor’s product on a distant desk.

Like modern phone cameras, it uses computational video powered by the M2’s neural engine to improve exposure, colour and noise. You can’t easily judge that from your own feed, but the results are obvious to others.

macOS Ventura also lets you use an iPhone as a webcam. On this machine, the built-in camera is good enough that the feature feels redundant.

Speakerbox

Laptop audio is usually an afterthought. Here, it’s a highlight.

While testing FL Studio, I accidentally switched from headphones to the built-in speakers. The difference was striking: full, balanced sound with real bass, that’s something laptop speakers rarely deliver.

The six-speaker system (four woofers, two tweeters) handles music and video calls with clarity and volume, with little distortion even at higher levels.

Apple also supports spatial audio. With compatible content, the effect is impressive. It won’t replace a hi-fi, but it’s ahead of any laptop I’ve used.

WiFi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3

WiFi performance is strong. With WiFi 6E support, you can use the less congested 6GHz band, assuming you have a compatible router.

In testing, downloads peaked at over 920 Mbps on a gigabit fibre connection, matching wired Ethernet speeds.

Weaknesses?

There’s a good selection of ports, but no built-in Ethernet. That’s usually fine, but I still needed a dongle to connect directly to a network drive.

Memory and storage aren’t user-upgradable. While repairs are possible, unofficial upgrades may run into restrictions.

Running Microsoft Windows

Apple Silicon Macs can’t use Boot Camp. Instead, I used Parallels Desktop to run Windows. It works well, but it’s expensive and comes with licensing complexity.

VirtualBox is a free alternative, but the Apple Silicon version remains unstable at the time of writing.

Talking points

• You can spend far more on a laptop. Workstation-class machines like HP’s ZBook Studio cost considerably more in some configurations, yet the MacBook Pro often outperforms them.

• Apple says a third of the machine uses recycled materials. Its environmental report is worth reading if sustainability matters.

• macOS Ventura is close enough to Windows to feel familiar, while offering useful extras like using an iPad as a second display.

• The display notch is easy to ignore, though not everyone will like it.

• Even under sustained heavy workloads, the MacBook Pro stays cool and quiet.

• There’s no Face ID. An odd omission given how well Face ID works on iPhone and iPad. Apple sticks with Touch ID.

• Despite its size, the 16-inch model remains portable and well balanced—never clumsy.

• Apple’s annual update cycle is also a marked improvement on the long gaps seen in the Intel era.

Verdict: 16-inch MacBook Pro

Apple’s 2023 16-inch MacBook Pro is an outstanding high-end laptop. It delivers immense performance and class-leading battery life, with few meaningful weaknesses.

It’s expensive. Prices start at NZ$4600 for a model with 16GB memory and 512GB storage. The reviewed configuration (32GB, 2TB) costs NZ$6350, while fully loaded versions climb far higher.

Even so, pricing is competitive with workstation-class PCs. If anything, Apple has the edge in performance per dollar.

This unconventional review of the M1 MacBook Air, written February 2021, is about the experience. Think of it as a glimpse into a possible mobile computing future

At first sight there’s little to tell the new M1 MacBook Air from the most recent MacBook Air model. From the outside they are peas in a pod.

The only physical difference are the small icons printed on the F4, F5 and F6 function keys. You have to look to notice. They show controls for MacOS’s Spotlight search, dictation and Siri features. A globe printed on the function key at the bottom left of the keyboard tells you this can open an emoji picker.

Clues There are a few more clues to help distinguish the two MacBooks. The M1 model is much faster. We’ll come to that in a moment. The battery goes for hours longer between charges. We’ll look at that in more depth later.

Apple’s M1 MacBook Air is cooler and quieter. There is no cooling fan. It doesn’t need one. Mind you, the fan on the older MacBook Air doesn’t kick in until you push the hardware. With my writing work, that’s not common. I’m a journalist. I spend the bulk of my MacBook time writing. I prefer lightweight writing apps over the big, sprawling word processors. Yet there are jobs where I have to use Microsoft Word. In normal use none of the writing apps in my toolbox draw on enough resources for the cooling fan to kick in.

Goodbye humming fan To get the fan humming I’d need to run a media creation app or do a demanding spreadsheet or database task. It also hums when playing games.

That said, the old MacBook Air can still warm up during a lengthy work session. After two months with the M1 model, I’ve yet to detect the merest hint of processor heat. Given that I spend the bulk of my MacBook time writing, I didn’t expect to get much of a performance kick from the M1. After all, it doesn’t help me type faster.

Processor intensive Yet, in practice there are dozens of small processor intensive tasks that now work faster. I rarely used dictation on my Mac. It wasn’t great. It is now. The new MacBook Air shows how much processor speed changes that experience.

Likewise Siri. Because I’ve been a touch typist for years I tend to use keyboard commands others might prefer speech. Movies load faster. Complex web pages perform better. On the odd occasion where I need to edit a photo, clip audio files or chew through a lot of data it all happens at speed. I’ve never had a problem waiting for a MacBook Air to wake-up when I open the lid. It happens in a few seconds. With the M1 model, it happens in fewer seconds. That’s not a big deal, but I like it.

Pushing Safari The other effect is more subtle than that. I’ve learned not to have more than a handful of apps open at any given moment and to not push Safari by opening lots of tabs. That could test my old MacBook Air. These restrictions have gone. when. testing this, I got bored opening new apps and tabs long before the new Air began to struggle with the workload.

You can benchmark the new Macs to get interesting looking figures. These numbers may mean something to certain people. Yet I’d argue everyday use matters more: The new Macs offer a much improved experience. It feels more fluid, more natural, there’s less of a gap between what you might want from a computer and what you get. One aspect of the M1 Macs that worried users was the 16GB limit for system Ram. The MacBook Air never had more Ram, but MacBook Pro models could have 32GB. Desktop Macs could have 64GB. In the event, it’s not an issue. M1 Macs have a design that does more with less Ram. To my surprise I found I ended up more excited and enthusiastic about the new M1 MacBook Air than expected.

The new normal The problem with performance boosts is that higher speeds soon become normal. As an acid test, I fired up the old MacBook Air. I wanted to know different the new experience was. The test confirmed it, the M1 MacBook is much better.

There’s a link between a fast processor like the M1 in the new MacBook Air and gigabit fibre or Fibre Max as the Commerce Commission prefers us to call it. Few, if any, everyday applications that push a gigabit fibre connection to the limit. Yet having plenty of headroom means you’re never going hit a speed barrier. Likewise, even if you have modest computer needs, there are times when headroom is useful. Say you’ve spent months working from home on gigabit fibre. Then, say, you return to the office and a more modest connection speed. That connection now feels laggy and flat, even though it may be fast by accepted standards. That’s how the M1 MacBook Air feels after using the Intel model.

Battery One reason I switched from Windows to a MacBook Air seven years ago was the improved battery life. I could get more than ten hours from the MacBook. The Windows machine it replaced struggled to do three hours.

At that time I had a job working part-time in an office. I’d take my MacBook on the bus and work a full nine-hour day without hunting for a power outlet. Two years later the MacBook could still last the entire working day. It changed how I worked. The Air had enough battery life for a long-haul flight. Enough to work in the Koru lounge and for the trip to, say, Singapore with a few hours of down time for naps or meals. Apple’s M1 MacBook Air almost doubles that time. I won’t be taking any long-haul flights soon, but, if I did, it would get me to Barcelona or Paris. Working from home, I can go a couple of days without charging.

This is the start It’s interesting to realise that Apple used its new processors first in low-end models. There are M1 models of the MacBook Air, the entry-level 13-inch MacBook Pro and the Mac Mini. The message isn’t that subtle. If Apple’s low-cost laptops are this fast, what can we expect from more expensive models?

Which leaves us with another question. How is this going to affect the Windows laptop and PC market? At the time of writing, Apple’s low-end Macs are at least a generation ahead of Windows computers. When Apple releases its Pro model computers that gap could be wider. Let’s stop and qualify that last paragraph. The NZ$2200 eight core M1 MacBook outperforms almost every Intel-based laptop. This includes models costing twice as much. There may be faster Windows laptops out there. Good luck finding one.

Fanless Intel can’t build a fast fanless Windows laptop. The Air is silent. If that matters to you, that’s an Apple advantage its rivals can’t match.

When I first switched back to Macs from Windows, I configured my MacBook to dual boot Windows and MacOS. I stopped doing that years ago. If there’s a spare Windows licence in my home, I can no longer find it. Reports suggest a MacBook Air runs Windows faster than native Windows laptops. That has to rattle Intel. Last week Intel responded with its own set of cherry-picked benchmarks in an attempt to prove… well, it’s not clear what that goal was other than to muddy the waters. From a user point of view, you now need a powerful reason to choose a Windows laptop over a MacBook.

This post is from May 2022.

If you use a Mac or an iPad, Apple’s Pages 12 could be the only word processor you need. It’s free, easy to master and, unless you are a lawyer or an academic it includes everything you are likely to need.

Pages 12 at a glance

You may already have Pages 12. Apple installs the software on new Mac computers. It doesn’t come preinstalled on new iPads or iPhones, but you can download it for free from the App Store.

There is a web version of Pages on iCloud that anyone can use, you don’t have to be an Apple customer. The web version works fine with Windows, ChromeOS or Android. You will need to sign up for a free iCloud account that comes with 5GB of storage.

Where iWork fits in the bigger picture

Pages 12 is part of iWork, Apple’s office productivity suite. It sits alongside Numbers, a spreadsheet and Keynote, a presentation app. The three are made to be used with each other and share many common ideas and controls. Learn to use one and you have learned them all.

For many Apple users Pages will be the only word processor you ever need. It integrates brilliantly across the various Apple devices and to iCloud. You can move from device to device and get the same user experience, Pages works much the same way everywhere.

The main alternatives to Pages are Microsoft Word, which is part of Microsoft Office and Google Docs which is part of GSuite.

Office and GSuite are not free, although there are free options. You may not find these free options enough for serious work. If you prefer free software there is LibreOffice.

Microsoft Office and LibreOffice offer more features, but many of these are not essential for everyday word-processing.

Is Pages as good as Microsoft Word?

The simple answer to this question is that it depends on what you want to do and who you work with.

Pages, Word and Google Docs each have a different central focus. Pages is all about putting words and pictures onto a printed or online page.

Its strength lies in layout.

You could produce an advertisement, a newsletter or a pamphlet faster with Pages than with, say, Microsoft Word and a layout app.

You might choose Pages as a low cost alternative to a professional design application like Adobe Indesign.

Compare Pages with Word

In comparison, Word has every conceivable word processor feature including many that you may never use. This makes it popular with large companies and professional users, such as lawyers.

It is a sprawling, complex comprehensive application. That makes it versatile, but it takes a long time to learn how to get the best from it. In comparison Pages is lighter and quicker to master.

Apple built Pages to work with its computers, tablets and phones. If you are familiar with these products, Pages will feel familiar. Microsoft developed Word for Windows computers. These days the Mac versions are far better than in the past, but there are times when that Windows heritage can confuse Mac users.

Is Pages better than Google Docs

Again, it depends what you want to do and who you work with.

Google Docs’s strength is in collaboration. Pages is great for collaboration if you only work with colleagues who use Macs. Otherwise it is not as good as Google Docs. Nor is Microsoft Word.

While Google Docs is good on a desktop or on a ChromeOS device, it is far from the best choice on a tablet or a phone. Google’s mobile apps are inferior to Pages or Microsoft Word. Pages works far better on Apple tablets and phones.

Likewise Pages is a long way ahead of Google Docs for layout and complex documents. In terms of features it sits between Google Docs and Word.

Using Pages 12

You can use Pages on multiple levels. Need to knock up a document fast? Pages can do this, it will guide you through adding typography and inserting images. You can power through the tasks in no time.

There are templates to help you get started. Pages has the best range of templates of any popular word processor and there are many more you can download from Apple and third parties.

When you first open Pages you’ll see a main window and a right-hand sidebar. This sidebar shows formatting and layout controls. If you want to focus on words, it is easy to hide the side-bar.

A second, optional left-hand sidebar can show comments and features like a table on contents.

Unlike other word processors, there isn’t a draft view. This can be annoying at first because, as the name suggests, Pages is organised around pages. And like every other word processor, that means it sees the world from a printed document perspective. No matter what you are working on, there can be headers and footers to navigate, even if you plan to build a single online-only document.

Working with others

Pages can opening and write documents for other word processor formats but has its own native format. Some features, largely to do with layout, don’t necessarily make it when converting to other document formats. And nothing else reads native format Pages documents.

This isn’t a problem in practice as long as you remember which features don’t translate. You can’t send a native Pages document to a colleague using Microsoft Windows and expect them to open it. There is a workaround, but it involves them signing up for an iCloud account and opening the document in the online version of Pages.

Life is far easier if you remember to save your Pages document in Word before sending. You can choose to send as PDF, text or RTF. Don’t expect your formatting to stay unchanged if you make a round trip where a colleague edits and returns the document.

The software picks up almost everything from other formats. You could, say, open a Microsoft Word document that has review comments and mark-up, then work through these in Pages.

Pages collaboration works fine if you work on the same document as a colleague using either Pages or the web app.

Pages for Mac, iPhone, iPad

Pages for Mac works really well. Yet Pages can shine on an iPhone or iPad, especially if you use one of them with a Mac. You’ll see a simplified view of the app, but all the desktop features are there. You may have to dig around to find them.

On the iPhone you can use a screen view designed to make editing easier. It hides the images and fancy features allowing you to focus on the text.

Apple has a feature on its operating systems called Continuity. It means that if you have Bluetooth switched on and both devices are on the same Wi-Fi network, you can move seamlessly from editing a Pages document on one device to another. Another feature called Handoff means you can pick up on another device where you left off.

It feels like magic to work on a desktop document at home and continue to edit the same document on your iPhone while riding on a train or bus to work.

If Pages 12 has a weakness it is dealing with long documents. It’s fine if you are writing anything up to a few thousand words, say a long essay, magazine feature or book chapter. Things break down when documents get bigger than this.

Reviewer’s notes

The iPhone and iPad versions of Pages have a useful Presenter Mode which can turn your device into a teleprompter or autocue. Words appear in big text without any images or distractions and you can make it automatically scroll down.

A recent update adds support for Apple’s Shortcuts automation tool.

Pages has support for language translation on the fly.

You can use Apple’s Scribble software with Pages on an iPad. It works with the Apple Pencil to turn handwritten notes into typed text. This feature is powerful if you want to add text to a document while you are standing up.

Pages is a good option if you plan to produce Apple Books.

Pages 12 verdict

If you live and work exclusively with Apple devices Pages 12 is potentially the best word processor for your needs. There are simpler alternatives, Markdown editors are a good choice if you crave simplicity and minimalism. And there are more complex alternatives, Word had more features. Yet for many users Pages 12 is a solid choice and it is free.

Apple Pages 5 review

_This is an excerpt from an Apple Pages 5 review that was published July 8, 2014. _

Many long-term Pages users were not impressed when Apple updated its iWork word processor from Pages ’09 to Pages 5 in late 2013.

People who invested time and effort learning and mastering the earlier Pages ’09 version of the software found key features were missing. If they had written scripts, many stopped working.

In time the features returned. Apple drip-fed updates restoring much of what was missing in the first version of Pages 5. Pages: the name tells the story

Pages is not a standard word processor. The name is a giveaway. It is a page design tool first and a word processor second. It was first built to make works look pretty on the printed page. Later the focus shifted to creating good looking online documents.

It does this well. Pages is a low cost alternative to Adobe Indesign for people who need to make words and pictures look good, but who don’t need professional tools and don’t want to pay a lot for them.

It can deliver great looking designs. You don’t need to be an expert to get results.

As a word processor?

Apple talks about Pages as a word-processor. It is part of iWork along with the Numbers spreadsheet and the Keynote presentation manager.

Like it or not that puts it up against Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint or Google Docs, Sheets and Slides.

Pages 5 does not feature collaboration tools like Google Docs. Nor does it have the heavy duty tools you’ll find in Microsoft Word. It’s more basic in these departments.

Writing space

You get a clean writing space and easy access to the controls needed for adding styles. It’s productive and trouble free.

You can work with documents that come from Word or Google Docs and you can send Pages documents back to these apps. You’ll even see many of the review marks from the other applications – although not all. There are few, if any, problems converting between document formats.

Tracking changes

It’s not the best tool for jobs where you need to track changes with clients, but it can cope.

Pages 5 is the best tool if you want to share and edit documents across a Mac, an iPhone and an iPad. There are apps for all three devices and they work much the same in each.

The big change in the move from Pages ’09 to Pages 5 is iCloud. You can choose to store documents on your Mac’s hard drive or to iCloud. This means you could start writing a document on an iPad at home. Pick up the document from iCloud on your phone while riding the train to work, then finish it off on your desktop Mac in your office.

Pages 5 verdict

Apple Pages 5 is free for Apple users. You can’t argue with the value. It is more than good enough for everyday writing jobs, can handle many, but not all, more difficult tasks and massively outperforms Word or Google Docs if you need to create a good looking layout.

If you are committed to Microsoft Word or Google Docs you may not want to switch, but the option is there should you need it.

This post is from December 2015.

A few days after first wearing the Apple Watch I found myself scratching my irritated wrist. I took a break from wearing it and my wrist got better.

For a while I fell into a pattern of only wearing the watch when I worked away from home. At home, I’d leave it off. This runs counter to the idea of wearable devices, but it worked for me.

At least I thought it did. I was getting a mild rash and would find myself scratching my wrist and the area around it. But things seemed under control.

It turns out they weren’t.

Discomfort

There was still some discomfort. I took to loosening the band in case the problem was to do with it being too tight. My skin didn’t improve. In fact the problem got worse. I found the area where my thumb meets my hand was red and itchy.

At home, Johanna says she noticed swelling around my wrist, across the lower part of my hand and thumb. We compared my right and left hands. I wear the watch on the left hand, but am right-handed for most things. The left hand is clearly swollen in comparison with the right.

My instinct was to wear the Watch even less and keep an eye open for more symptoms.

Warning Will Robinson

Ten days ago I visited a medical specialist needing treatment for another medical problem. Like a lot of people he noticed my Apple Watch. I thought he was interested in the technology. He wasn’t. Instead he took a closer look at my rash and told me to take the watch off.

He told me I had an allergic reaction to the material. It could be the strap — my Watch has a black Sports Band. Or it could be the watch itself.

The medical specialist asked if my reaction had worsened over the weeks I’ve been wearing the watch. I couldn’t be certain, there’s a boiling frog aspect, you don’t notice a slowly worsening skin reaction creeping up on you.

After some thought, I realised it was getting worse.

Potentially serious

He said this could be serious. It turns out some allergic skin reactions have a cumulative effect. They can go on getting worse and reach a point where it is hard to recover. In extreme cases it can lead to anaphylactic shock.

Now, this was the doctor’s reaction after seeing the rash. I wasn’t there for this condition and we didn’t take things further. It wasn’t a formal diagnosis, just some friendly, informed advice.

Apple acknowledges some people may have a reaction to the Watch materials. It says it went to great lengths to test and check materials first. The Apple Watch support website offers some advice on possible allergic reactions.

Material care

It says: “A great deal of care and research go into choosing materials for all our devices. A small number of people will experience reactions to certain materials.

“This can be due to allergies, environmental factors, extended exposure to irritants like soap or sweat, and other causes. “If you know you have allergies or other sensitivities, be aware that Apple Watch and some of its bands contain nickel and methacrylate.’

Apple suggests people who have problems should talk to a doctor before wearing or returning to wearing the Watch. I’ve done that and for me, the long-term review is over.

The best thing about the Apple Watch is that has made me more aware of my health. Some irony there.

This post was written in April 2015.

Apple’s newest lightweight laptop isn’t a MacBook Air. It’s simply called MacBook — a pared-down name for a pared-down computer.

It draws on ideas Apple developed for the iPhone and iPad. The result is a mobile computer as elegant, compact and polished as anything you can buy in 2015.

The new MacBook is thinner, smaller and lighter than any other laptop.

Not laptop, nor tablet, nor hybrid

In some ways it isn’t a laptop, at least not a traditional one. Nor is it a replacement for the MacBook Air.

It sits between the Air and an iPad with a Bluetooth keyboard running OS X. It’s laptop-like and tablet-like, but not a hybrid. Think of it as a new class of device for people who need more than an iPad and less than a full-blown laptop.

Built for mobile work

This isn’t a computer for everyone. The MacBook comes with compromises many won’t accept.

But it suits anyone who needs reasonable power on the move, say, a journalist working away from home. I took one to Wellington earlier this month to cover a conference.

Journalists were among the first laptop users. If you’ve ever carried a portable typewriter on a plane, you’ll understand why. On the road we value three things above all: portability, a good keyboard and enough power to run essential apps.

The MacBook ticks all three.

Portable

Apple designed the MacBook for portability above all else. Some reviewers worry about the keyboard. I’m fussy, yet had no trouble with it.

If there’s a weak point, it’s the processor. It’s fine for my work, but may not suit yours.

Small and light

It never occurred to me I’d want a laptop smaller or lighter than a MacBook Air. Then I met the MacBook.

My 2013 13-inch MacBook Air has travelled everywhere with me. It never felt heavy or burdensome. The MacBook doesn’t either — but it is lighter.

At 900g, it’s about a third lighter than the Air’s 1.35kg. On paper that’s significant. In a travel bag, less so.

You notice the difference more when carrying a backpack all day or using a briefcase. There the reduced weight means less strain — and, more than once, I found myself checking the bag to make sure the MacBook was still there. It really is that light.

You notice it immediately when holding the machine. The Air can be held one-handed, but not for long. The MacBook is easier to carry that way.

It’s also remarkably small. Despite the 12-inch screen, it has a smaller footprint than the 11-inch Air and is only a little larger than an iPad. At 13mm thick, Apple has effectively built a full laptop in something close to tablet size.

Built to travel

There’s more to portability than size and weight. The MacBook is beautifully made, with Apple’s usual attention to detail.

The anodised aluminium unibody feels solid and durable — important for a machine that spends its life on the move. It inspires confidence.

Battery life

Battery life is part of portability. My MacBook Air once ran all day — 12 or 13 hours — on a charge.

The MacBook doesn’t quite match that, but it gets close. On my Wellington trip it handled around 10 hours of solid work with charge to spare, including some time using cellular data after the venue WiFi timed out.

That’s good enough.

Keyboard

Typing is my trade. I write thousands of words a day and have done so since the days of manual typewriters.

So I pay attention to keyboards.

Despite criticism elsewhere, I had no problems with the MacBook keyboard after two weeks and around 10,000 words.

Apple says it designed the keyboard first and built the computer around it. That feels right.

The keys are larger, flatter and backlit individually. They travel less than traditional keys, which some dislike. I didn’t notice the difference.

There’s a short adjustment period — muscle memory takes time — but that’s true of any new keyboard. My typing speed didn’t suffer. If anything, it may have improved.

Trackpad

Until now, the MacBook Air had the best trackpad around. The MacBook’s Force Touch trackpad is better.

It responds to pressure as well as movement. A light press selects; a deeper press triggers extra functions like dictionary lookups.

It takes a day to learn, then becomes second nature.

Retina display

I’d seen Apple’s Retina displays before, but not used one for everyday work.

What surprised me wasn’t the sharpness, but how it changed the way I work. On the Air I tend to use full-screen apps. On the MacBook, the higher resolution makes it easier to juggle multiple windows on a small screen.

USB-C

The most controversial feature is the single USB-C port, which also handles charging.

It’s more versatile than older ports, but there’s only one. Apple expects you to rely on wireless connections and use adapters when needed.

So far, that works for me. My storage is mostly wireless. The only awkward moments come when connecting an iPhone or iPad — something I’ll deal with when necessary.

I do miss MagSafe. It was reassuring to know a power cable trip wouldn’t send the laptop crashing to the floor.

Reasons not to buy

This is not a mainstream laptop.

If you need power, look elsewhere. It will struggle with heavy tasks like video editing or large-scale image work.

If you rely on ports, the single USB-C connection may frustrate you.

And it isn’t cheap. At around NZ$2000, it carries a premium.

But “better specs” depend on what you value. If portability matters most, the MacBook delivers.

Should you buy one?

Maybe. It depends on your needs.

If you travel often, don’t need much processing power and can live without plugging in devices, it makes sense. Few laptops are this mobile.

If you were thinking of replacing a laptop with a tablet and keyboard, the MacBook is a compelling alternative.

Otherwise, stick with the MacBook Air or Pro.

For my work, the Air remains the better fit — but if I spent more time on the move, I’d choose the MacBook.

This story was written in July 2014.

Last June I switched from a Windows 8 desktop, without a touch screen, to an Apple MacBook Air.

Four reasons prompted the move:

• I needed portability and my older Windows laptop was too long in the tooth, not portable enough.
• After looking at and test-driving Windows UltraBooks I saw Apple’s 2013 MacBook Air cost the same as a comparable Windows 8 PC. In the event I picked up a 13-inch Apple MacBook Air with a 256 GB solid state drive for NZ$1700.
• I’d been using an Apple iPad for a year and an iPhone for a few months. It was clear Apple’s technology stack suits the way I work.
• The MacBook Air’s thin, light design was important but more than anything I couldn’t go past its claimed 12-hour battery life

How did it work out?

Portability

Although I didn’t work away from home as often as expected, when I did, the MacBook Air’s thin, light design was everything I hoped for. It did service at four or five away from home conferences and many client offices around Auckland. I also used it on planes and in cafes.

Because I’m a journalist, I need a decent keyboard and a good, readable screen. While on paper Windows UltraBooks offer similar hardware, to date no-one has improved on the six-year-old MacBook Air format.

MacBook Air all-day battery

Battery life isn’t what it was. A year ago I could work more than ten hours on a single charge. Today there’s still enough juice to last a whole day away from home. I get about eight hours out of the MacBook Air now.

I rarely feel the need to pack a power supply when I’m working in someone’s office which means I can slip the computer into a neat leather case.

In part the shorter time is because battery life declines over time. However, I’ve changed the settings and now crank up the screen brightness which drains power faster. I also tend to leave Bluetooth and Wi-Fi on even when I’m not using them.

Even so, I’d say Apple more than delivered on its battery life promise.

Keyboard, screen

I worried about ergonomic problems when I moved from a Windows desktop with full keyboard to the MacBook Air. There were none. Even when I ran into serious eye problems earlier this year, the MacBook and its ability to zoom was just fine.

Some complain the MacBook Air doesn’t have the high-resolution Retina display found on the iPad Air or the MacBook Pro. Presumably a big increase in pixels would push the battery harder — I prefer to stick with the existing display.

One other point, the MacBook Air’s 3:4 format screen is better for writing than the thinner postbox-shaped displays found elsewhere.

OS X, applications

Moving from Windows to OS X didn’t present any serious problems. A year on I still have to look up how to do obscure, rarely performed tasks on the Macintosh operating system. But I didn’t experience any hiccups. OS X is stable, I can go a long time between reboots and I’m not always sure they are necessary anyway.

Microsoft makes it easy to switch from Windows to OS X. My Office 365 subscription means I have to put up with out-of-date Office apps.

When I wrote Two months with the MacBook Air I said:

The 2011 Mac version of Microsoft Office is a disappointment after the 2013 Windows version. I find myself using it less and less preferring other tools. Unless Microsoft fixes this, I won’t renew my Office 365 subscription when it lapses early next year.

That didn’t happen because my Office 365 licence is shared with the other computers at home and my iPad, iPhone and Windows Phone. Damn it, Office 365 is too good a deal. And anyway Microsoft says a refresh is due soon. Maybe. In the meantime, I’ve been using Apple’s iWorks software.

What happened since buying the MacBook Air?

Microsoft’s first generation Surface devices were on sale when I bought my MacBook Air. I passed over these because the original RT Surface was underpowered and the first generation Surface Pro was both a touch underpowered and overpriced.

Although Chromebooks are not ideal tools for journalists and professional writers, their throwaway price and ridiculously low management overheads make them worth thinking about. OK. I’ve stopped thinking about them. The keyboards, screens and writing software are not up to the job. Let’s move on.

To me the Surface sits somewhere between the MacBook Air and the iPad. It’s a tablet, but the letter box-shaped Window means it’s not so comfortable switching between portrait and landscape modes. It’s a tablet, but I bet few Surface owners choose not to buy the optional keyboard.

Microsoft Surface

In practice Surface feels more like a touch screen laptop. I’ve nothing against touch screens. They have their place, but when you bang out words for a living, you don’t want to move your fingers too often from the keyboard to the screen. When I spent time with a Surface I ended up with horrible wrist pains from that action.

Despite all that, second generation Surface devices — and more recently the Surface Pro 3 — are fine alternatives to the MacBook Air. Surface would be my second choice behind a new MacBook Air.

Three things give the MacBook Air an edge:

A better, squarer display is important for writing. I need to see more lines of text and not a greater width of text. Incidentally, it’s harder to proofread across a wide measure. And the 13-inch screen makes for better writing productivity.

Microsoft’s newer Type Cover 2 keyboards are better than most tablet add-ons, but they are not as good for my kind of bashing out words typing style as the MacBook’s keyboard. Also, having the keyboard as an add-on means there’s something that conceivably could get left behind. I can’t risk that.

Microsoft’s Surface makes the MacBook Air look inexpensive. A 2014 MacBook Air with 13-inch screen and 256GB storage costs NZ$1650. A Surface Pro 3 with the same storage and a typewriter style keyboard is 25 percent more expensive at NZ$2077.

One year on

So far I’ve not mentioned what is perhaps the most important aspect of owning any work computer: productivity.

Life with the MacBook Air is more straightforward than my time with Windows. I doubt I’ve spent more than an hour or two doing anything resembling maintenance since I got the computer. In contrast I spent a couple of hours last week fixing a minor problem on my daughter’s Windows laptop.

The hours I’ve regained are more than worth the price of the computer. At the same time, OS X does better at getting out-of-the-way than Windows. There’s a better focus on the user interface and that leads to greater productivity. On the flip side, there’s less flexibility, but that’s not what I look for in a work tool.

After one year I’m still convinced I made the right decision with the MacBook Air. I’d certainly buy another, perhaps after the next refresh or the one after that.

First posted March 2023.

If you need to charge a handful of devices at the same time and in a hurry, Satechi has the answer.

The product’s name, Satechi 165W USB-C 4-Port PD GaN Charger, spells out what it does and how.

From the top: There’s 165 Watts of power. That’s a lot. In comparison the 2023 16-inch MacBook Pro includes a 140W charger which is considered a lot by modern laptop standards.

More power means faster charging or charging more things at once. We’ll get back to that in a moment.

USB-C means it works with almost every modern device. Today’s laptops, tablets and Android phones use USB-C. Apple’s' iPhone is one notable exception although reports suggest it will switch with the next generation.

Not that it matters in this case, because the iPhone’s current Lightning connector cable has a USB-C port at the end that plugs into a charger. My Apple Watch is harder to accommodate. It has a USB 3.0 plug. There are compatible USB-C cables, but in my case I used a USB 3.0 to USB-C adaptor.

The review Satechi charger has four ports which means you can charge your laptop, tablet, phone and smart watch at the same time. It automatically configures the power output depending on what is connected and can use one of these schemes: 100W, 100W/60W, 60W/60W/45W or 100W/30W/30W, 60W/45W/30W/30W, up to a total of 165W.

Satechi uses Gallium Nitride (GaN) technology which replaces silicon-based semiconductors. This is used to make blue LEDs, there’s one on the case to drive this point home.

Gallium Nitride can work at higher temperatures and higher voltages than traditional power semiconductors. In practice the charger doesn’t tend to heat up as much as conventional chargers, even when it is working at full capacity.

Satechi’s marketing is understandably geared towards selling the 165W charger on the back of its fast charging and power efficiency. As we’ve seen, it delivers in both departments.

There’s another less obvious benefit. Peek under the desk in many home offices and there will be a rats' nest of cables, charging plugs and distribution boards. They can be the worst places for collecting dust and quickly become unsightly and unhealthy.

The Satechi four port charging hub can replace more than four traditional cables. You can rationalise your cables and chargers, sweep away the distribution boards and simplify the home office.

Talking points:

• Apple and a handful of other manufacturers no longer include chargers with phones, which means a third-party charger capable of doing more can be a smart purchase.
• It takes about 90 minutes to charge a 16-inch MacBook Pro from zero to full using the Satechi charger. That’s roughly the same time as Apple’s charger. I found an iPhone charges much faster than with the official charger. (The next two times it gets to empty I’ll benchmark that).
• It is handy to take when travelling as hotels, motels or Air BnBs rarely have multiple spare sockets for charging devices.
• If you go overseas it can automatically adapt to voltages between 100 and 240V.
• The list price is NZ$185, but while writing this review I noticed local retailers selling it for $150.

Originally posted in April 2023, the Sony WH-CH520 are a pair of decent sounding headphones from a known brand at a low price. While there are few features, you won’t find better headphones for under NZ$100.

If you are on a tight budget and looking for decent Bluetooth sounds, the NZ$89 Sony WH-CH520 headphones are hard to walk past.

That money won’t get you active noise cancelling or fancy features. It does buy up to 50 hours of battery life, Sony’s Digital Sound Enhancement Engine1 and Bluetooth Multipoint which eases the handover as you move between devices.

There is voice control and the WH-CH520 will work with Sony’s Headphones Connect app.

You can buy the WH-CH520 headphones in four colours. There’s black, white and beige. Sony sent a blue pair for testing.

Surprisingly good sound

The sound is surprisingly good. You’d need to spend three or four times as much as you pay for the WH-CH520 to get a noticeably better sound.

You’ll be more than satisfied using the headphones to listen to voice calls or Zoom calls. The built-in microphone is average. You may be better off using your phone, tablet or laptop mic.

Headphone and earbud makers have a habit of boosting the bass and treble, occasionally pushing headphone speakers beyond their natural range and introducing distortion. Sony hasn’t fallen into this trap.

Balanced

Instead you’ll hear a pleasing well balanced sound. It’s not as natural as you might get from more expensive headphones and there’s a lot of audible compression, but you’d expect that in this price range.

You’ll be happiest if you listen to pop music or the less bass-heavy EDM. Mainstream rock works well, although prog rock fans might hit against the headphones’ limits if the music ventures into classical territory.

Classical music is less satisfying. If you are a fan then you would be better off spending more on headphones. Likewise, if you want lossless digital music or spatial audio, you should shop elsewhere.

Sony’s DSEE is optional. You can select it from the headphones app. Sony says it puts back the detail that is lost when music is compressed. In testing this was, at best, marginal.

This could be down to the specific tracks tested, despite running through a range of styles. What you do get from DSEE is a fraction more warmth. It’s nicer with DSEE than without, but the feature doesn’t take the headphones up a class.

DSEE Engine, is a Sony technology that improves the sound quality of compressed audio files. It restores the high-range sounds removed by compression.

Sony WH-CH520 headphones look good

The WH-CH520 headphones may be cheap, but they don’t look it. At least not at first. They may get scruffy with use, but from new they look classier than $89 suggests.

At the same time they are more comfortable than alternatives in this price range. They have decent cushioning and fit well on a standard head. If you have previously used more expensive headphones you’ll notice a difference. If you are new to Bluetooth over ear headphones it won’t bother you. Once again, you’d need to spend a fair bit more to get a better feel.

One area where the cheapness shows is the on-off and volume controls. There are trickier to use than those on more expensive headphones, at times you can press the buttons and nothing happens. Other times you can overcompensate and blast your ears with sound.

Verdict: Sony WH-CH520

These are decent sounding headphones from a known brand at a low price. While there aren’t many features, you won’t find better headphones for under NZ$100. A safe, affordable choice.

More on consumer audio and wearables:

• Technics EAH-A800 noise cancelling headphones – Context from 2022 on the high-end audio engineering that set the bar for the current generation of personal listening.

• Review: Sony WH-1000XM4 – A retrospective on the device that many consider the benchmark for modern noise-cancelling technology.

• Why I had to stop wearing the Apple Watch — The first generation Apple Watch triggered a dangerous allergic reaction.

• You’ll have to pry my Airpods Pro from my cold, dead hands — Apple’s noise cancelling ear buds are remarkable.

Last month The Document Foundation released LibreOffice version 7.0.1.

Taken at face value it is a free, open source office suite. It is interesting on many levels. You should consider downloading and investigating the software, it won’t cost you anything.

LibreOffice is not right for everyone. Yet it is an important alternative to Microsoft Office, Apple iWork and Google G suite. There are versions of LibreOffice for Windows, MacOS, ChromeOS and Linux. Android and iOS uses can get versions from Collabora. This is also a paid Enterprise edition.

Free as a starting point

LibreOffice is free. There was a time when free was its main attraction.

The world needed a free alternative to Office because people found Microsoft expensive. Many still do.

The Document Foundation, the not-for-profit organisation behind LibreOffice, asks people to donate to help pay its bills. That’s fair enough, especially if you use LibreOffice in business.

Open source

These days open source is often more important than free.

The importance of this control was recognised early—back in 2000, Bob Bishop predicted that countries like Russia and China would embrace Linux specifically because being “open” mattered more than being free.

Open source means you can get the code and tinker with it if you wish. You may be able to improve it, add features or otherwise tweak it to do things the original developers did not.

Being open has broader advantages than being able to rewrite code. As Dave Koelmeyer pointed out after I looked at LibreOffice 5.2, it uses open standards throughout. You get full document interoperability.

LibreOffice won’t lock you out because of proprietary traps. Microsoft Office and other proprietary suites don’t trap you as much as in the past, but risks remain.

There is a security angle: Governments and many large companies can be wary of proprietary software. This is even more the case now that cloud computing plays a large role. They fear their data might find its way into a remote data silo and be vulnerable. Microsoft has talked about Office being able to connect to Linkedin. Google can sift through data looking for advertising sales leads and so on.

With LibreOffice, open means everything is transparent.

When you don’t want clouds

Microsoft and Google want you to move everything to the cloud. That’s where they see the future. Google has never favoured the desktop. Microsoft now sees desktop versions of Office as a last resort.

There are cloud options for LibreOffice, but it is the last remaining cross platform old-style office suite that lives on your computer. No other office suite leaves you this much in control of your destiny.

More compatible than ever

Speaking of Microsoft Office, LibreOffice has boosted its compatibility with the popular commercial suite. The Document Foundation says it has better compatibility with docx, xlsx and pptx files.

Earlier versions of LibreOffice didn’t lag when it came to Microsoft compatibility.

The main difference this time is that you can save docx in native 2013, 2016 or 2019 formats. In the past the best option was the 2007 format.

Open Document Format

LibreOffice 7 now supports the 2019 Open Document Format. It uses this as its standard document format. You can add digital signatures and use document encryption.

Graphics are better supported in LibreOffice 7. There is Skia, an open source graphics library you can use to draw shapes. Vulkan is an addition to add graphics acceleration.

Although LibreOffice 7 has been around for a while, it is not the right version for everyone. Version 7, or even the version 7.0.1 that I downloaded last week, is somewhere between a beta and the finished product.

The Document Foundation says it is for the “technology enthusiast, early adopter or power user”. On the download page it recommends everyone else, including business users stick with LibreOffice 6.4.6 for now. The time for others to move will be when 7.1 arrives.

Historic criticism

In the past I’ve written about two aspect of LibreOffice that I don’t like. There has been a lack of polish and the software has felt cluttered and over complex.

Readers disagreed with both these criticism. The first is no longer the case. The software looks and feels as polished as anything in the proprietary world. The font support needs work, some typefaces don’t look as crisp as they should. But that’s a minor niggle. As for the clutter: If you don’t want clutter and complexity you shouldn’t be looking at an office suite. This software category is all about complexity.

That’s why I don’t use an office suite for my writing. That said, I have to work with Word or Google Docs when collaborating with clients. For now, there’s an online LibreOffice for collaboration. It is not as developed as the proprietary alternatives. It’s no accident that Office has become far cheaper since LibreOffice has been a viable alternative.

This story was originally posted in June 2021.

At a glance

Sony’s WF-1000XM4 noise cancelling ear buds are a revelation. There may be ear buds with better sound quality and noise cancellation. But I have yet to hear them.

Sound quality and excellent noise cancellation comes at a price. At NZ$500, they are expensive. That is NZ$50 more than the price of Apple’s AirPod Pro. It could be more than you’d pay for a phone. What do you get for $500?

Size, design

Sony’s ear buds are bigger than AirPod Pros and heavier. In use they feel bigger and heavier. This makes them less comfortable, but not to the point that becomes an issue.

The WF-1000XM4 weigh 7.3g. With the charging case the total is around 41g. This compares to the AirPod Pro at 5.4g for the ear buds and 46g for the case.

Sound quality

That extra bulk is put to good use. Inside the ear bud are 6mm drivers that handle a wide frequency range. Sony has coupled these with its integrated V1 processor, it handles the music in real time.

The result is outstanding sound quality. You’ll get plenty of detailed sound. It’s hard to fault the quality. But if you don’t like what you hear first time, you can adjust the sound to better fit your tastes.

On my first try, I tested the WF-1000XM4 on factory settings against a set of corded studio monitor headphones. These have a flat response. I was listening to melodic house music and indie rock on Apple Music.

Sound Colour

It sounded great, but I could tell the ear buds added a few dB at the bottom and the top of the range. This makes them good for listing to modern music. Your taste may differ, but it felt like there is too much colour for softer classical music or jazz.

To fix this I turned to Sony’s Headphone Connect app. You would need to download this from the Apple or Google Play App Store. Here you will find a ‘sound’ tab. This takes you to an equaliser.

There are a series of presets which cover various types of music and two slots for you to customise the sound. This can all get fussy and tricky. Yet the software does a fine job of learning your tastes and needs and adjusting things.

Loudness

With other headphones and ear buds you often need to push phone, tablet or computer sound output towards the higher volumes to get the best quality.

In practice the WF-1000XM4 work best at around two-thirds to three quarters on the dial. Go higher and you may run into distortion. Likewise, the sound leaks at high volumes.

Noise cancelling

To make the most of noise cancelling, you need the ear buds to have a tight fit. Sony provides three sizes of tips and an app to help you get the best fit. I didn’t fly anywhere during the testing period. If I do, I’ll write an addendum to this post.

Instead I travelled around Auckland on a series of buses to give the noise cancelling a workout. For extra testing I worked for an hour in a noisy downtown coffee shop. There I barely heard a whisper as the barista hissed the espresso machine and called out orders. There was nothing to fault.

They do a fine job. When I read the marketing blurb, I suspected Sony might be talking up its noise cancellation. In use, the ear buds live up to the promise.

AirPods Pro comparison

If you are a committed Apple user, you might not choose the WF-1000XM4 in preference to the AirPod Pros. There are far too many Apple ecosystem advantages from staying with the brand.

AirPods are lighter, more comfortable and have terrific noise cancelling. That said, there’s no question the newer WF-1000XM4 beat Apple’s 18-month-old AirPods Pro on sound quality. They could be a smidgeon ahead on noise cancelling.

AirPods handle transparency and, so long as you have an iPhone, do phone calls better. The technology is improving fast. It will be interesting to see what Apple can do if it updates the Pods.

Minor niggles

The WF-1000XM4 ear buds arrived in a box that is 350 x 120 x 70mm. That’s a lot of packaging for ear buds. This compares with 100 x 100 x 50mm for Apple’s AirPods Pro. This may be special review packaging with consumers getting a smaller box.

If there’s an area of weakness it is the microphone. Sure, it isn’t important to talk in high definition sound in a phone call, but Sony is a distance behind Apple in this department.

The technology does a good job of capturing your voice among all the background hubbub, but it can make you sound robotic. It could be too much compression. Whatever the reason, it’s a minor negative.

Unless you plan to use your ear buds to make live radio crosses back to the studio, you can dismiss this as a problem. WF-1000XM4 comes in a white version and a black version with copper coloured highlights. No-one would mistake either for AirPods. Verdict – Sony WF-1000XM4

If you don’t live in Apple’s world and you’ve got the budget the WF-1000XM4 ear buds would have to top your list. They tick the important boxes: sound quality, noise cancelling and enough battery life for a flight from New Zealand to Europe.

Originally posted August 2018.

At a glance

Dragon Anywhere is a speech-to-text dictation app for iOS that can transform how you work. It’s a version of Nuance’s Dragon speech recognition software.

It needs to deliver: an annual subscription costs a NZ$240.

At that price, Dragon Anywhere is not a buy, try, forget app store experiment. It’s a significant investment. It needs to earn its keep.

Worth the money?

For some people, Dragon Anywhere will be worth every penny. Accurate speech-to-text software can unpack new levels of productivity. Yet not everyone will see a return on the investment.

If you already use desktop dictation software, you’ll have an idea of what Dragon Anywhere can do.

Being able to dictate text to an iPhone is a bigger deal than it might sound at first hearing.

The designers made the iPhone for dictation. Writing on a tiny glass keyboard is a challenge if you want to do anything more than send a text or a tweet.

I’ve written 1000 word stories on the iPhone. It’s not fun, nor is it productive. The alternative to dictation is carrying a Bluetooth keyboard. That can be a pain.

It also means you can replace desktop dictation with your iPhone. Given that your phone goes everywhere you do, it means you can produce text almost anywhere. This explains the product name.

You could, for example, write while in the back of a car or lounging in bed. In practice using the iPhone for dictation feels more natural than using a desktop or laptop Mac.

Anywhere

Mobility is important, because ideas do not work nine-to-five in an office. Your writing muse can turn up unannounced at any time. With Dragon Anywhere you can jot down your ideas as they appear. There’s no need to hunt around for a computer or a pen and paper.

Your phone is already your most important computer. Dragon Anywhere takes that further. Depending on how you work, you may be able to ditch the desktop altogether. Although if you don’t want to, Anywhere integrates with Nuance’s desktop dictation applications.

If Dragon Anywhere save you buying a new computer, the subscription starts to look like a bargain. Even if you don’t go that far, your typewriter keyboard may gather dust.

Dragon Anywhere works where there’s a connection

The software doesn’t quite work anywhere. Dragon Anywhere calls on Nuance’s cloud resourced to work its magic. That means you can only use it when you have a live internet connection.

It sips data. You might run through a megabyte or so dictating thousands of words. After an hour’s use, my data consumption was still measured in hundreds of kilobytes.

The phone to cloud round trip is fast. Speak a sentence or two, pause and the text is there on screen. It takes seconds. I found I couldn’t dictate fast enough to get ahead of the cloud connection.

In other words, you can use Dragon Anywhere while you’re on the move. If you have anything but a minimal data plan you can use it without counting the bytes or hunting for WiFi.

Nuance says it encryopts connections, so criminals can’t listen in on your dictations.

How well does Dragon Anywhere perform?

The performance is impressive. I used it to write a first draft of this review. From the first words I uttered it was catching almost everything without error.

The software stumbled over the word iOS in the first sentence. To be fair, it’s a specialist word. If you think of how you say the name: eye-oh-ess, not picking it up it understandable.

User error

It wasn’t the software that stumbled in the second paragraph. I can take the blame for not figuring out how to say NZ$240 in a way that made my meaning clear. Put this down to user error.

The third sentence was perfect.

Out of the first hundred words, Dragon Anywhere got everything except iOS right. That’s impressive. Remember this was my first try of the software. The software had not encountered my voice or accent before.

In practice it learns as it goes along. To see how this worked I read the words again and this time Dragon Anywhere scored a perfect 100 percent. It understood iOS. The software understood my speech far better than Apple’s Siri.

If you make an error, fixing your text is easy. The only barrier is that you have to memorise instructions. In most cases the words are obvious, you don’t need to guess them. Some take a little practice.

I ran into a problem with some New Zealand place names. That’s understandable. Dragon Anywhere allows you to add custom words to the system which gets around the problem after some training.

The productivity question

If you notice, I hedged my words when I said the software could be worth the money. Likewise when I said it may transform how you work or make you more productive.

That’s because, good as it is, speech recognition is not for everyone. In my experience it takes longer to dictate stories than to type them. I also find I struggle to compose while speaking. This could be down to 40 years of touch typing. With practice my dictation speed might improve.

There are also times where I need to write and dictation isn’t the best tool. Writing on a train, an airplane or somewhere public would be too much for everyone else.

If you find typing is difficult or run into overuse problems, then it’s a godsend. If you think by speaking, you’ll love it.

Battery Monitor was previously called Battery Diag. There was a review of the app on my main site that was posted in May 2014. This is an updated version. The photo shows the 2014 version of the app. It has barely changed its look in the past 11 years and most of the changes since 2014 are either bug fixes or necessary updates to keep up with operating system changes. Here’s an updated look at the software.

Still useful in the age of all-day batteries

Ironically, because the modern Apple MacBook Air has a longer battery life than earlier laptops, there’s a greater need to know how much juice is still in the tank.

That may not make sense at first until you realise that in the old days you were always at the point where there was no much power left. You were never that many minutes away from needing a top-up. Range anxiety was permanent.

When the original version of this review was posted in 2014, a MacBook Air battery gave about ten hours of use. That was a huge leap, previously you might have managed four or five hours. Today, an M4 MacBook Air can go all day on a single charge.

With so many hours of computing from a single charge, it’s easier to lose track of how much is left.

Compact and lightweight

Battery Monitor from the Mac App Store is free and visually attractive. It has a design that echoes earlier versions of the iOS design found on iPads, iPhones and, surprisingly, Westpac bank’s web site in the years around 2014. That said, it still looks modern and not remotely out of place on a 2025 MacBook.

The app runs in the menu bar, so you can get at it quickly, it sips resources and stays out-of-the-way until needed.

Having Battery Monitor and the MacOS Battery icon on the menu bar at the same time is odd. You can turn the official Apple icon off from System Settings.

Readouts and reporting

Click on the menu bar icon to get a report on the amount of power left both as a percentage and as a time estimate. There’s also an indicator showing the state of battery health and number of charge cycles. Further information, including battery temperature and power usage is hidden behind an I icon.

The time remaining estimate can be misleading. The number is based on your recent use and current environmental conditions. If you change what you are doing, the actual amount of time left can change significantly. Think of it as a suggestion, not a hard and fast limit.

The clever bit is that if you’re running out of juice, you can tinker with your open apps and usage to trim the power drain and extend the time remaining.

Recommended.

Originally posted January 2023.

This simple iPhone mount gives your MacBook a far better webcam.

Belkin’s NZ$50 iPhone Mount with MagSafe for Mac Notebooks isn’t much to look at. One side has a hinged clip that attaches to the top of a MacBook. On the other side there is a magnet that clamps to the back of an iPhone.

Apart from the hinged ring grip on the same side as the clip, that’s it.

Apple’s recent MacOS Ventura and iOS 16 operating systems include a feature called Continuity Camera. This lets you use the high resolution camera on your iPhone instead of the MacBook’s webcam.

The software works beautifully. The Mac automatically detects your iPhone and adjusts. You have an option to move your image centre stage, to transmit a portrait-only image and there is Studio Light to brighten your face.

Continuity Camera is one of those Apple features that can feel like magic the first time you see it.

Belkin’s mount marries the MacBook and iPhone in an elegant, easy-to-use way. It takes seconds to set up - you can do it even if you take an incoming call at short notice.

You can rotate the mount, which means you can use the iPhone camera in portrait or landscape mode.

iPhone Mount with MagSafe for Mac Notebooks close up.

Why bother? Almost every laptop on the market comes with a low resolution built-in webcam. Laptop webcams are rarely good. MacBooks are better than many rivals, but still well off the pace.

When you take part in a Zoom, FaceTime or any other video call with a normal webcam, the people you talk to will see a poor quality image. This wasn’t an issue when we had low bandwidth connections, in 2023 it isn’t necessary. You might have reasons to prefer to send a low-resolution video image.

I tested the mount with a 2021 M1 MacBook Air and an iPhone 12. In practice the mount works best when you are seated at a table or desk. The arrangement is stable, but it quickly becomes unstable if you want to work with your MacBook on your lap.

You can use the grip ring on the clip side of the mount to hold onto your phone, it doubles as a kickstand for the phone. No-one is going to buy the mount for this reason, but it is a handy bonus.

Belkin makes a similar mount for desktop Macs and displays.

This post was written in 2018.

Many recent phone launch presentations have been all about the camera. Most of the rest spend more time talking about their phone cameras than anything else. I can’t think of a single phone presentation I’ve seen in the last three years where the camera was relegated to a footnote.

Apple, Samsung and Huawei all want you to know their phone cameras are better than before. It is always true.

They’d also like you to think their cameras are better than their rivals. That’s a losing game. They are all excellent. But each excels in different ways.

You wouldn’t be disappointed with the camera in any premium phone. You might find one phone misses a camera feature you’d like, or is a touch weaker in some department. You might find one suits your style, works the same way you do or has a user interface that’s easier to understand. Either way, they are all good.

Phone cameras good, getting better

Indeed, phone cameras are now exceptionally good. So good that the stand alone camera market looks doomed for everyone except professionals and serious amateurs willing to part with lots of money.

Forget whinging about a NZ$2800 phone, the starting price for a full frame mirrorless camera from Sony, Nikon or Canon is about twice that. And then you buy extra lenses.

The low-end camera market is already dead. The mid-range is struggling. There is almost no casual stand-alone camera market these days.

It’s still worth buying a standalone camera if you want consistent great pictures

There are good reasons to buy a high-quality standalone camera if you want to take great pictures.

The physics of camera optics means that, in general, you get better images with a bigger and better lens along with a big sensor array. You also need some distance between the lens and the focal plane where light hits photosensors.

None of this is possible in a phone which is often less than 10mm thick. Phone cameras have small lenses. There is almost no distance between the lens and the sensor array. Sensor arrays are also small, usually smaller than a fingernail while a more traditional digital camera might have an array the size of a matchbox.

Phones have plastic lenses, which, on the whole, are not as good as the glass lenses in cameras. Plastic can distort images. Phone makers spend millions developing better materials and techniques to reduce this, but glass still beats plastic.

Phone cameras get around physical shortcoming with heavy duty computer processing. Upmarket phones have two or even three lenses. They combine their images to create better pictures. Most of the time this gets around the distortion.

Software does the heavy lifting

They do a hell of a lot of this in software. Which brings up an interesting philosophical point: Are they capturing reality or are they making it up?

You may wonder why phone makers keep putting faster and faster processors in their phones. After all, none of the last three or four generations of flagship phones have been slouches when it comes to handling most computing tasks.

The main reason for the extra grunt is to handle image processing. It’s a data-intensive task and phones have to do it in microseconds.

Phone makers love to tell you their models use artificial intelligence. Most of the time phones use the results of earlier AI work to inform their brute-force image processing. They don’t do on-the-fly artificial intelligence to process your pictures.

The results are impressive. When Apple gave me a demonstration of the iPhone XS Max, I was struck by how much like a digital SLR the results can be, in the right hands.

As much as I try, my iPhone or Huawei shots are never as good. I still get far better results from my ageing but trusty digital SLR. The pictures are often good enough to use in print.

Mirrorless

If I was to buy a new camera, I’d go for a modern mirrorless design. Until recently this would have meant a Sony Alpha, but Nikon and Canon now have tempting alternatives. I can’t put my finger on it, but to my eyes Canon images look better, so the Canon EOS R would be my probable choice.

Mirrorless means the camera doesn’t have a traditional optical viewfinder like an SLR or digital SLR. Instead you see the same image that the sensors see. This makes the cameras simpler, smaller and lighter.

For consumers stand alone cameras are on a path to becoming a retro-tech thing like vinyl records or analogue music synthesisers. Professionals will go on using standalone cameras. But the market is slowing.

I still take a camera along when I travel overseas or cover a conference as a journalist. The more traditional controls easier to use, even if I spend most of the time on automatic setttings. When I need to fiddle, it’s easy to tweak dials and press buttons than hunt for controls on a phone screen.

Having said that, often I find myself on a reporting job where the only camera to hand is my phone. If I take a little time, I can get good pictures with that too. I’ve already noticed I’m less likely to pack the standalone camera when heading out to cover a story. I no longer keep it handy, charged and ready to go. That’s not the case with my phone.

You don’t need to be told there is something different about the BlackBerry Passport.

For a start there’s a retro qwerty keyboard. Then there’s the shape. It’s different to any other phone. It is also big — as big as an Apple iPhone 6 Plus.

Passport is BlackBerry’s business class phone. BlackBerry built the Passport with productivity in mind. Although BlackBerry tailored the Passport for enterprise customers, it can work for smaller organisations operating in the corporate world.

The Passport is an impressive piece of engineering, but it arrives in a market that has fundamentally shifted. It is the literal embodiment of why enterprise hardware has become such a tough sell; business users now prioritise the flexibility and price of consumer products over specialised corporate tools.

Like the iPhone 6 Plus, the Passport is as much tablet as phone. Phablet is an ugly term, but it applies to the BlackBerry Passport more than any other device. You can work in ways that would seem strange on other phones.

When square is cool

The Passport’s 4.5 inch square screen — 80mm by 80mm — lends itself to applications that don’t work well on conventional phones.

If the Passport fails and BlackBerry exits the phone market some observers may blame the square screen. That would be a pity, because it’s a great idea.

Reading .PDFs is easier on the Passport than on an iPhone 6 Plus. It works well with eBooks and is terrific for maps. The screen is a plus point. Although you can turn a normal phone on its side to read documents, the Passport format feels better. Spreadsheets are us

Passport does spreadsheets better than any other phone. The wide-screen helps when composing written documents if you need to check the way readers will see the finished product.

The screen is not the only difference when it comes to writing on the Passport.

Qwerty keyboards were BlackBerry’s phone signature before anyone saw an iPhone. Using the physical keyboard on the Passport feels almost nostalgic. Those of you who miss those days will feel instantly at home.

BlackBerry Passport keyboard, touchpad

BlackBerry has updated the keyboard. It now doubles as a touch pad, you control the cursor and screen by sweeping up and down or across the keys. This is hard work at first, yet it quickly becomes a natural action.

The BlackBerry 10 operating system learns how you type, so over time it anticipates where you are heading. This improves accuracy and increases your typing efficiency.

In practice the Passport keyboard is not great. It is only slightly larger than a smartphone on-screen keyboard. Like an on-screen keyboard it seems to cope with pudgy fingers almost by magic. Make that thumbs. I found myself hitting the keys with just my thumbs.

Thumbing it

The Passport has tiny, sculpted keys. The ones on the left lean one way. Those on the right lean in the other direction. They have a positive action, you know when you’ve pushed one down enough.

You need to reach your thumb up to the screen to type numbers. There’s nothing unusual about this, it feels as natural as typing ever does. Reaching up to the screen space to find the capitals key feels strange. Often the software guesses when you want to type a capital and does this for you.

When the operating system thinks it knows what you’re attempting to type, it offers the word as a guess for you to flick up in the text screen. I never mastered that.

We can put my failure down to practice — reviewers only get these devices for a short time. I’m sure with time I could speed up.

Docs to Go

BlackBerry now owns Docs to Go — the app has been around since the Palm Pilot. Docs to Go is a mobile office suite with a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation manager.

Docs to Go is compatible with Microsoft Office so you can move documents easily between the Passport and a personal computer. It works with cloud services to make that easier.

I attempted to write this review on the Passport using Docs to Go. After a short time I gave up, returning to a full-size keyboard. To be fair to BlackBerry, that’s partly because I’m a touch typist — my fingers do the thinking on a full size keyboard in ways they don’t on a phone.

Writing on a Passport

Writing on the Passport was slow, but not painfully slow. Nor was it hard work. It is roughly comparable with writing on any phone, although I suspect with time and practice, I could speed up.

BlackBerry is weak when it comes to apps. Things have improved since a deal to put Amazon’s Android apps store on BlackBerry 10 devices, but it is far from perfect.

The Passport comes with 38 apps as standard including Docs to Go and BlackBerry’s own BBM. Most of the standard fare is included. The quality of BlackBerry’s own apps is solid, you won’t find a better set of communications tools and the BlackBerry Hub pulls it all together.

Standard apps There’s a great Maps app, Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin are all there from the moment you start the phone. The list also includes a YouTube app, Adobe Reader, Evernote and links to Box and Dropbox.

Life gets messy beyond the built-in apps. Amazon’s Android apps run in an emulator. The Passport’s processor is fast enough to do the grunt work, but emulators are rarely as smooth as native apps.

And Amazon’s Android app store is not as complete as Google Play or iTunes. You won’t find everything here. Nor will you find the best experience when it comes to Google’s apps.

Verdict

So where does that leave the Passport? Blackberry could make the best phone in history and most of the world would take no notice. You probably won’t pick up many geek credibility or hipster points if you whip one of these out in your local craft beer outlet.

There’s more to technology than fashion. Blackberry deserves kudos for, er, thinking outside the square.

I like the BlackBerry Passport more than I expected. It’s a good choice for companies that need BlackBerry’s security and can use the great communications apps. It works well as a writing tool — the square screen is anything but a gimmick and the keyboard is better in use than most on-screen alternatives.

The main market for the Passport will be people who already live in BlackBerry’s world. It should be enough to stop some of them exiting for Android-land or Apple-ville.

I suspect many Passport users will carry other phones. Maybe they’ll use the BlackBerry for work and an alternative for personal use. That’s not a bad idea, the Passport is clearly there for serious business, not fun. Think of it as a phone for people working in places where the men still wear ties.

Showing the BlackBerry Passport on TV3 Firstline.

Even though the segment is short, TV is a great way of quickly letting people see what’s different about a phone like this. The BlackBerry Passport is big, but as you can see from the clip it fits comfortably in a jacket pocket. I get to show the size of the phone alongside the better known Apple iPhone 6 — the size comparison is useful. And I get to show how you can thumb type on the QWERTY keyboard.

This post was written in 2021.

Acronis True Image 2021 promises to keep your data safe for around A$100 a year. It protects PCs and Macs from disasters, accidents, criminal attacks and ransomware.

What is True Image?

True Image started life as a back-up application. The name refers to the way it creates a copy or an image of your computer data on an external hard drive or cloud server.

Two years ago Acronis added security features adding ransomware protection to back-up. The most expensive version of the software included blockchain certification. I’m not convinced that is necessary. Yet there are those who find it useful.

The 2021 version of the software adds more protection. Acronis says it deals with malware, malicious websites and code injection. There’s a new antivirus scan.

All this means the security software has to work in real-time.

There’s the timely addition of protection from videoconferencing interference. This is a threat that emerged during the Covid-19 lockdown. The feature is not included in the MacOS version.

In effect, Acronis repackaged its enterprise security technology for individuals and small businesses.

One user interface

Having back-up and security controlled by a single user interface simplifies the two processes. That’s important. Many small business buy back up and security then fail to make the most of them because it’s difficult.

True Image 2021 has a clean, straightforward interface. This hasn’t changed since the True Image 2019 review written more than two years ago.

It’s not immediately obvious how everything works, but it is easy to learn. The trick is to mouse your way around the user interface and try all the options.

Once you’re done, you can leave True Image to work without day-to-day intervention, although it is likely you will need to revisit the app.

Testing True Image

I tested it on an iMac. Here it adds an icon to the menu bar. Unlike other MacOS apps, this is not a menu, instead it shows notifications. There is an option to open the app’s main screen from here.

Back-up remains the focus. You can create images of entire drives, partitions, folders or even individual files. True Image can back-up your network drives and add back-ups for your mobile phone or tablet.

There are options to do a full back-up, this can take a long time, or to do a differential back-up. This means backing up everything that changed since the last back-up.

Back-up options

You control the back-up frequency. Options range from monthly, which I’d regard as “why bother”? all the way to hourly. The default is daily. There’s a twice daily option which I’ve set to back-up about half way through my working day and then late at night. That way I’m never going to lose more than a few hours work.

More frequent back-ups are possible, but this can tie up resources.

There are options to remove older back-ups when you are running out of space on your target disc. You can do this manually or leave it to the software. You can also set up validations.

Pricing

There’s a basic A$70 subscription that doesn’t include cloud back-up. You’ll need a local or network drive. Acronis does not appear to allow you to use alternative cloud storage.

The A$98 Advanced plan includes 500GB of cloud back-up storage. There is a A$140 plan with a terabyte of storage. These prices are for one computer.

Acronis’ per computer price drops if you add more, but you don’t get more cloud storage.

This complex price structure is strange given that everything else about True Image 2021 works to hide complexity. I’m concerned that buyers can end up buying more than they need, or not enough.

Back-up updates

There are updates to the way True Image handles back-ups. It no longer duplicates data if a back-up is interrupted, say if you lose your connection. Instead of restarting and doing the whole back-up again, it picks up from where it left off.

While testing I ran into a couple of interesting observations. First, there may be times when you want to turn off protection. I did this when bittorrenting a copy of LibreOffice 7 for review.

True Image’s security stopped my bit torrent client from working. Fair enough. To allow it through I paused the software, then forgot to restart. The next morning an email arrived telling me the scheduled back-up failed.

This is excellent. It’s easy to forget to switch back on and leave yourself without back-ups or protection. Getting a non-intrusive reminder is the best way of fixing this.

Safe replication

Likewise, after first installing the application, I chose to make a replica of my Mac hard drive using the Acronis Cloud. All good. Then I swapped out my home WiFi router for a D-Link WiFi 6 router.

The router remained installed. When I went to update the drive replica, True Image responded with a message saying replication would restart after I connected to an approved Wi-fi network.

This protection would stop True Image from automatic drive replication when, say, a laptop connects to public WiFi. It takes a couple of clicks to resume replication with a new router.

True Image’s replication will wait until the everyday back-up is complete. It handles tasks one-by-one, not in parallel. This is useful on slower connection.

Fast, if your network is fast

Cloud back-ups are fast. I have a gigabit fibre connection, my WiFi 6 router is the bottleneck. It can clock speeds of over 500mbps. On my set-up, when True Image connects to the Acronis Cloud the reported speed fluctuates from around 100 mbps up to over 200 mbps.

Back-up times vary. The time indicator on the user interface gives a rough guide, but don’t take it seriously. It warned me a full drive back-up of 340 GB would take 52 minutes. I left it running and checked 30 minutes after starting to find it had finished.

Incremental back-ups of around 200 MB take a couple of minutes. Again, the times reported on the user interface can be misleading. The ‘less than one minute’ turned out to be a few seconds over two minutes.

Early back-up software, including earlier versions of True Image, could hurt system and network performance. I found this year’s edition of Norton LifeLock ties up all system resources when in full flight and then some. That is another story for another time.

True Image 2021 has no noticeable impact on performance. Automated back-ups can happen while I’m on a Zoom call and I’d never know. I haven’t seen a spinning Mac beachball while using True Image. This is in part down to plenty of headroom on a fibre connection and WiFi 6 local network, but, as mentioned, Norton struggles with the same resources.

Acronis True Image 2021 verdict

I can’t think of any other application that combines back-up and security in the way True Image does. The price is on a par with buying separate applications to do the two jobs.

You won’t need to pay for Acronis back-up and a separate security suite. You won’t need to learn two user interfaces. This is important if you don’t have full time IT professionals to call on for help.

Getting both back-up and security in a single integrated package from one source simplifies both.

Today, True Image is comprehensive to the point of providing more protection than everyday users or small businesses need.

It could be overkill for your needs.

If your data is precious or your work makes you a security target you should consider True Image.

If you handle other people’s data it could be essential. It makes sense if you work for a company or agency that requires high levels of security. Choose it if losing your data for more than a few minutes will cost you money.

Editor’s Note: This review was originally published in April 2022 on billbennett.co.nz. While the hardware remains in use by many, the software, particularly Windows 11 and its AI integration, has evolved significantly since this was written. This post has been moved here as part of a site archive.

Closed, the Surface Laptop Studio resembles other Surface devices. It’s larger, but otherwise familiar.

Microsoft etched its shiny four squares logo on the brushed metallic top of the laptop. That way everyone watching knows you are using a Surface.

A hinge across the top looks similar to the kickstand you’ll find on Surface Pro tablets.

Elegant, minimal

Open the lid and the keyboard and touchpad will remind Apple users of an old school MacBook Pro. It is all about elegance and minimalism. There are no annoying, embarrassing stickers boasting about what is inside.

The LCD touch screen looks great from the moment it lights up. At 14.1 inches with a few mm of bezels, it is a generous size for working or playing on the move. A high 120Hz refresh rate adds to the classy look and feel.

It’s hard to find a bad display on any device that aspires to be more than a basic bargain basement workhorse. Yet, this is good. You may not always be conscious of the high refresh rate, but you’ll notice it immediately if you look at a similar size screen with a slower rate.

Transformer

Fiddle around with the open laptop for a moment and you will find that the screen swings away from the laptop lid along that hinge line we mentioned earlier.

This hinge may be a simple innovation, but it is what puts the Surface Laptop Studio in a class of its own. It turns the Laptop Studio into a more modern, upmarket take on the hybrid device idea.

Magnets in the lid and elsewhere on the case help you position the screen in a range of positions. That way, the laptop transforms into other Windows 11 devices.

Stage mode

There’s what Microsoft calls the stage mode. You could use this to watch videos. It works well for Zoom or Teams calls. There’s a reverse position which has the screen pointing away from you. This may be useful for giving presentations to a small audience

You can fold the screen all the way down. This, in effect, reverses the lid position and turns the laptop into a thick and heavy large screen Windows tablet.

At 1.8 kg and 20mm deep, the Surface Laptop Studio makes a hefty, thick tablet. Your arms will tire if you hold this for a long time. Mind you, the 14 inch screen is larger than you’ll find on other tablets. This makes direct comparison with, say, a ten-inch iPad, meaningless.

Studio

There’s a variation on this known as studio mode. You might use studio mode to sketch or write on the screen with Microsoft’s optional Slim Pen 2 stylus. In effect it turns the computer into a giant drawing tablet.

Artists and designers will find this handy. Whether you find these screen positions useful is another matter.

At first it takes a conscious effort to use them, we have become conditioned to using laptops in certain ways. During the short review period it never felt natural using these modes, that might change over time.

And that’s the nub of the Surface Laptop Studio. Its signature feature is not for everyone.

Fan base

The extra thickness is, in part, down to the curious design of the base. It is smaller than the size of the rest of the case. It is where the CPU and the graphics processor live and there are fan vents at both ends.

When you push the computer hard, the fan will kick in. You can hear it working, it’s not silent, but nor is it noisy. You won’t be distracted and the sound should not interfere with video calls.

The fact that the Laptop Studio needs a fan underlines how much Microsoft’s rival, Apple, has moved ahead of Intel processors.

CPU power

Microsoft uses an 11th generation Intel Core i7 in the review device. This is as good as it gets in the Intel world. There is a cheaper model with a Core i5 processor.

Intel’s i7 is more than powerful enough for everyday users. Even the majority of power users will be satisfied. Unless you run the most demanding applications you will not want for computer power.

Yet it is no match for the processors in Apple’s current laptops and high-end tablets.

Graphics processor

Microsoft includes the NVIDIA GoForce RTX 3050 Ti graphics processor in the review model. The cheaper version of the Laptop Studio uses Intel Iris X.

The graphics processor and CPU quickly get hot if you push the hardware. That’s not going to happen if you use the device for business applications, mail, web surfing and Zoom calls.

If you play games it is another story. It was noticeable during the device set up that Microsoft encourages users to sample its game playing services.

Maybe Microsoft does that with every device it sells, yet this would be the Surface device that delivers the best gaming experience. Powering through tasks

In testing, the i7 version of the Surface Laptop Studio was more than the equal of any conventional business application. It handled photo editing tasks with ease.

Although Microsoft’s marketing describes the Laptop Studio as ‘workstation class’, that’s pushing it.

Running high end workstation apps is beyond the scope of this review, but looking at the specification, the device might struggle with heavy duty video work.

You’ll find workstation class laptops from rival brands that sell for a similar price to the Surface Laptop Studio, but offer more raw power.

Battery hog

It was noticeable that high-end work is greedy for battery power. Use the Surface Laptop Studio for everyday work and you might get ten hours on a single charge. There would be fuel left in the tank after a normal day’s work.

This is a long way behind the latest Apple MacBook Pro models that sip battery power and can run for 14 hours on a charge. Things get worse fast if you perform tasks where the fan kicks in. When you can hear its gentle hum you know you’ll be lucky to get four hours before hunting for a power socket.

Speakers, keyboard, touch pad

Two other hardware features are worth mentioning. The speakers are surprisingly good considering the engineers had little room to work with. You’d need external speakers for serious audio editing work and fussy listeners might prefer to hear music delivered that way. Otherwise, your ears will be happy.

Microsoft has included a first rate keyboard. This is one area that laptop buyers can overlook. Once you’ve got past the novelty of a new computer and its power or features, you can often end up feeling frustrated by a less than perfect keyboard. This can be even more the case if you buy a tablet with a keyboard like, say, the Surface Pro.

The haptic touchpad is equally excellent. It is as good as anything you’ll see from Apple. This has not been the case with Surface devices in the past.

Microsoft missed a trick not including an SD card slot. That would be helpful for the creative market the laptop aims to serve. Windows 11

As you’d expect, the review Laptop Studio was delivered with Windows 11.

Thankfully Microsoft avoids the bloatware that Windows rivals unhelpfully pack with their hardware. The only preloaded software is a trial version of Microsoft Office. This is hardly an imposition. Almost every Surface Laptop Studio buyer will want Office.

Microsoft’s Hello face recognition works as before. It’s a better way of logging in. While the hardware impresses, Windows 11 itself remains questionable as an upgrade for most users.

Firing up Windows 11 for the first time took the review computer into Microsoft’s tiresome, but essential software update process. It was a full 20 minutes before the computer was ready to work and that is on a gigabit internet connection. If you have a slower link, don’t expect to open the box and get started straight away.

Handwriting recognition

It took a while to realise that Windows 11 has improved handwriting recognition compared with earlier versions of Windows. This makes the various modes more useful than they might otherwise be if you buy the optional NZ$200 Surface Slim Pen.

Like the Touchpad, the Slim Pen has haptic feedback which makes writing on screen feel like a pen on paper. It’s impressive, but not essential for productivity.

Bold move

Surface Laptop Studio is another bold, you might even say brave, hardware move from Microsoft. The software and cloud company shows it remains determined to push the device design envelope.

This strategy doesn’t always work. Surface Duo was ridiculous and the early Windows RT tablets flopped.

Yet, in a sense, that’s the whole point of Surface. Microsoft got into the device business ten years ago because it wanted to push its Windows hardware partners into more innovation, more risk taking.

Sans Microsoft

In passing it is worth mentioning that Microsoft no longer brands its hardware as “Microsoft Surface”. It is letting the name stand on its own. There’s more distance than in the past. While this would make it easier to sell the division in future, it looks as if the idea is more about giving the brand more meaning.

Surface devices don’t sell in huge numbers compared with hardware from HP, Lenovo, or that elephant in the room: Apple. In round numbers Surface accounts for about four percent of US device sales and a lower share of worldwide sales.

Where Surface fits

The range does make money for Microsoft, but is dwarfed by the company’s cloud, enterprise software and personal software business. This could change if Surface stumbles over a hit product.

Surface’s more important role is laying down important markers and staking out turf. Microsoft doesn’t say as much, but it’s clear it wants to show it can go head to head with Apple with innovation. Or at least prove it in the same league.

Surface Laptop Studio verdict

Despite the versatility, Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Studio is not hard to use or understand. Its ability to shapeshift may be essential for a niche creative audience, but it will have broader appeal, for novelty value if nothing else.

There’s no question the Laptop Studio is expensive. Prices start at NZ$2700, you can pay NZ$5350 for a fully-loaded model with 2TB of solid state storage, 32GB of Ram and the top-of-the-line CPU and graphics.

Microsoft wants a further NZ$200 for the Slim Pen. That’s outrageous. At these prices the pen should be bundled. That said, at least you don’t have to dig deeper to buy a keyboard. That’s annoying when you buy a Surface Pro.

The problem potential creative buyers face is the money you’d pay for a Surface Laptop Studio can buy a more powerful workstation class system. Go that route and you won’t get the portability or the versatility, you will power through your work faster.

This story was originally posted in September 2020.

Huawei’s MateBook line sets out to challenge premium laptops, taking aim at Apple’s MacBook Air and Microsoft’s Surface while targeting business users with a lower-cost, high-style alternative..

Richard Yu, chief executive of Huawei’s consumer division, at launch of Huawei Matebook in Barcelona.

Huawei pitched its 2020 Matebook 13 as an Apple MacBook Air alternative. That’s not my words, it is a direct quote from Huawei consumer chief executive Richard Yu, who made the comparison at the product launch at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Comparisons with Apple are a big deal at Huawei. The company wants to be China’s Apple.

While there are similarities between the Matebook and the MacBook Air, it’s not a direct comparison. Few people would choose directly between the two. Apart from anything else, Huawei runs Windows 10, while the MacBook Air runs macOS.

Switching between operating systems is not something you’d want to do every upgrade. Individuals choose to buy Apples. Huawei’s strategy is to target enterprise buyers.

A more direct comparison is between the Matebook and Microsoft’s Surface line of computers and tablets. We’ll look at that later.

First, how does Huawei’s 2020 Matebook 13 compare with the Apple MacBook Air?

Matebook 13 versus MacBook Air

Huawei’s MateBook offers the most MacBook Air-like experience in a Windows laptop.

The Matebook 13 sells for NZ$2200. It has an Intel i7 processor. There are an Nvidia MX250 graphics processor, 16GB of Ram and 512GB of storage.

The nearest equivalent MacBook Air costs NZ$2350. It has the same 512GB of storage. You get 8GB of Ram and an i5 processor.

Given the specifications, it is no surprise the Matebook handles processor intensive work better than the MacBook Air. To be fair, Apple doesn’t pitch the Air as a computer for intensive work, the company points power hungry users at the MacBook Pro models.

In testing, the Matebook beat the Apple for video editing. Otherwise there was less difference that you might expect give the different processors and amounts of Ram.

Simple or complex?

If you use a laptop for simple tasks like, writing or answering emails, then the performance gap between the two is academic. You won’t notice which is faster. That changes as you throw more work at the computers. The more powerful Matebook 13 does a better job with, say, manipulating large Excel spreadsheets or complex calculations.

The MacBook hard drive is much faster than the Matebook 13’s drive. The MacBook Air stores files in about half the time it takes on the Matebook 13.

When it comes to graphics, the MacBook Air beats the Matebook 13. The 13.3 inch screen has 2560 by 1600 pixel resolution. The Matebook screen is a fraction smaller at 13 inches and has a 2160 by 1440 resolution. If you compare the two side by side, Apple’s display is far more impressive.

Apple wins by a long margin on battery life. You can work on a MacBook Air for ten hours between charges. In testing the Matebook 13 ran out of juice a few minutes before the six hour mark.

Portability

One strange point of comparison is with weight. Huawei’s specification sheet says 1.3kg. That’s as near as it can be to the MacBook Air which Apple’s tech sheet says weights 1.29kg.

When I picked the two computers up, the Matebook 13 felt heavier than the MacBook Air despite these specifications. I weighted them on kitchen scales. The MacBook Air was 1.3kg and the Matebook 13 was 1.4kg.

That goes part way to explaining the practical difference, but not the whole way. The Matebook 13 is smaller than the MacBook Air. It measures 286 by 211 by 14.9 mm. The Air is 304 by 212 by 16 mm. Which means the Huawei computer feels heavier because it is denser.

This could be nitpicking, until you put the two computers in bags and carry them around all day. Both are light and easy to carry. Yet you’ll notice the Matebook 13 a fraction more than you’ll notice the MacBook Air.

Small and neatly formed

Both Apple and Huawei take a pride in build quality. The Matebook 13 almost hits the MacBook Air standard.

There are two places where it fails. First, the power button which doubles as a fingerprint reader.

Apple’s square Touch ID sensor sits at the top right of the keyboard. It feels like any other key. Huawei’s round button sits north of the top right of the keyboard and doesn’t have the same solidity as Apple’s key. There’s a small amount of wobble. You can live with it, but it shows Huawei doesn’t achieve Apple levels of attention to detail.

A more obvious annoyance is the Huawei Share sticker on the keyboard’s bottom right. This is next to the as disfiguring and tacky Intel advertising sticker.

It’s amazing, computer makers go to extreme lengths to design sleek, beautiful hardware and then spoil the effect with stickers. Many are needless aesthetic wreckers, the Huawei Share sticker is not. It has a function.

Integration

Huawei Share lets you connect your Matebook 13 to a Huawei phone. The idea is loosely similar to the features that let Mac owners swap files and photos with iPhones or iPads. When you’re working with a Matebook, these Apple-Huawei comparisons are never far away.

Unlike Apple’s phone-computer integration, Huawei Share mirrors your phone’s screen on the laptop screen. I can’t think of why this might be useful, but you might find a purpose for it.

It has to be a Huawei phone. That’s an oddity right there. Huawei may be New Zealand’s third favourite phone brand, but it enjoys, at best, a ten percent market share. If you draw a Venn diagram of the New Zealanders who have both a Huawei laptop and phone, it’s unlikely the overlap would be more than a couple of hundred.

A few last comparisons that don’t fit elsewhere. On paper both the Matebook 13 and the MacBook Air have the same WiFi specifications. In practice, the MacBook’s WiF works better over longer distances. I connected both to remote servers via home WiFi and saw better speeds on the MacBook Air. I can speculate on why this is, but a proper answer is beyond the scope of this story.

Like Apple, maybe because of Apple, Huawei has gone for port minimalism. There are two USB-C ports and a 3.5mm headphone jack. You can only charge the computer using the left-hand USB-C port.

Huawei Matebook 13.

Matebook 13 versus MacBook Air verdict

You get more computer for less money with the Huawei MateBook 13. You’ll be hard-pressed to tell the performance apart despite the specifications. That is unless you run demanding apps. If that’s you, then you’ll appreciate the more powerful Matebook.

Apple’s MacBook looks and feels nicer; it has a better screen and way more battery life. Which means if you don’t need more processing grunt, it could be a smarter buy.

And yet few would choose between a Matebook 13 and a MacBook Air on these criteria. If you prefer Windows 10 or have to use it for work, the Matebook 13 gives you the most MacBook Air-like Windows laptop experience.

Matebook 13 compared with the Surface Pro

Microsoft’s Surface Pro has been the best Windows computer money can buy. Now it faces direct competition from Huawei.

Like the Surface, Huawei’s MateBook is a similar thin, light hybrid with a 12-inch display. It follows the same basic format as the Surface: A tablet with a theoretically separate keyboard that everyone is going to buy anyway.

Matebook comes with a similar range of processors and memory configurations. Like the Surface Pro, there’s a stylus, although Huawei’s also includes a laser pointer.

The Matebook even resembles a Surface although there is also a nod of the head to Apple’s iPad Pro design. One nice touch is the fake leather keyboard case.

Perhaps the most important feature is that the Matebook is priced at about 75 percent of Microsoft’s prices. That’s enough to make a difference.

This isn’t a direct comparison between the two, Microsoft’s Surface Pro has a 2736 x 1824 pixel screen. The Matebook has a lower resolution at 2160 x 1440 pixels, but it also has the same fingerprint sensor technology used on Huawei’s phones. Huawei says its Core m model runs faster than Microsoft’s Core m Surface Pro.

Huawei has followed Microsoft’s practice of charging extra for a keyboard, stylus and dock. A Huawei New Zealand representative told me that when it reaches the country the Matebook will probably be sold bundled with a keyboard.

Typora is a great Markdown editor that brings distraction-free writing to Windows and Linux.

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.

Many writers swear Markdown improves productivity.

Typora offers a different Markdown take

Markdown editors have a limited range of type and formatting options compared to traditional word processors like Microsoft Word.

Even Google Docs offers a wider range of choices.

That’s deliberate, it keeps things simple.

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.

This story was first posted in November 2017.

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.

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.

Writing at Newsroom, Catalyst co-founder Don Christie says technological sovereignty could be a defining issue of the decade.

“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.

Christie expressed a similar sentiment four years at Net Hui 2017 where he talked about the global tech giant’s behaviour in New Zealand being a disincentive for locals considering investing in technology.

This post was originally written July 2021.

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.

This post was originally written in August 2020.

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.

_You can hear me talking about this on RNZ Nine-to-Noon with Kathryn Ryan: Exam algo bias, fighting back against the boss snooping on you | RNZ_

This post was written in June 2015.

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.

Glory days. Randal Jackson, I’ll miss you mate.

This story was originally posted in 2021.

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.

**This story was first posted in 2019. **

Science fiction doesn’t do a great job of predicting the future. When it comes to telecommunications, it does worse.

At the time of writing, Netflix is streaming Blade Runner, a classic science fiction movie from 1982.

Blade Runner is interesting because the action is set in 2019. In other words, it is a view from almost 40 years ago of how we live today.

What did it get right and what did it get wrong? Some things are way off target. Early on, the hero, Rick Deckard, meets a policeman driving a flying car. We’re not even remotely near driving flying cars in 2019.

That’s a huge miss.

Bladerunner’s flying advertisements

Also early on, an advertisement floats overhead. Again, flying adverts are not an everyday feature of our lives. The nearest we get are banners floating behind light aircraft.

However, the advertising hoardings are giant screens. That is on the money. Large advertising screens are now a familiar sight in cities, although, thankfully, unlike in the film, they don’t project sound with their images.

Thanks to climate change, Los Angeles, the film’s setting, suffers constant rain. The writers were correct in predicting climate change, but we have heatwaves and storms, not constant downpours.

Travelling to the stars?

One flying advertisement encourages people to emigrate ‘off-world’. Travelling to the stars seems a tempting offer looking at the movie’s depiction of 2019 life.

But really? We still shoot rockets into the sky, but no-one has been back to the moon since 1972, let alone travelled the solar system or deeper into space.

And we know Blade Runner’s people travel beyond the solar system because later in the film one of the characters talks about seeing “attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion”.

Then we get to the main theme of the movie: bio-engineered replicants. These aren’t robots in the usual sense, but artificial humans. We are nowhere near this kind of technology in 2019.

As an aside, the film is based on a 1968 book called Do androids dream of electric sheep? Androids play a large part in life today, but they’re not human-like, they are mobile phones.

Where are the mobile phones?

This brings us to telecommunications. Where are the mobile phones that dominate 2019 life? Almost everybody in the real world has one.

It’s not as if mobile phones weren’t around in 1982. The first, albeit heavy and unwieldy models, were introduced in 1949. Motorola had practical commercial handsets in 1973.

And where is broadband or any other kind of digital service? In 1982, some homes had tele-text machines. And email started in the 1970s. I had a work email account in 1982. Sure, it was dial-up and extremely slow, but no-one in the film has anything remotely like internet access.

Blade Runner is entertaining and thought provoking, but as a foretaste of 2019 it doesn’t come close. Technology journalists aren’t much better at prediction the future.

Originally published November 2014. Updated January 2026 with a decade of further decline, consolidation and the rise of independent journalism sites.

A decade on there are even fewer voices

When this was first written in 2014, New Zealand technology journalism was in its “twilight years.” By 2026, it would be generous to call it even that. The situation has deteriorated further:

IDG’s titles: Computerworld NZ and **Reseller News **are now run from Australia. There is local input, Reseller News has a New Zealand editor, but both titles include much Australian content. TechDay continues but with reduced scope and it is still primarily a marketing operation, not journalism in the sense we grew up with.

Many of the journalists named in 2014 have moved on to other roles or overseas publications. The mainstream newspapers have cut back even further.

What technology coverage exists is often outsourced, aggregated or, in the worst cases, AI-generated filler.

There is bright spot with independent journalists using platforms like Substack, Ghost and personal websites to partially fill the void. But these voices serve niche audiences rather than providing the broad industry coverage New Zealand once had. And none of them other than this site are technology focused.

The core problem from 2014 remains: No one wants to pay for local technology journalism, yet the need for it has never been greater.

Vibrant and flourishing?

New Zealand has a vibrant and flourishing technology sector. Nobody would use those words to describe New Zealand technology journalism.

Like a retirement village, there are still pockets of life, but things are winding down. Publishers missed critical opportunities to build sustainable models when they had the chance. There’s less coverage of local technology stories.

You can count the number of full-time technology journalists writing for New Zealand audiences on your fingers. Experienced local journalists are as likely to turn up on overseas publications as on local titles.

Readers are more familiar with international technology media; even if it doesn’t always serve our needs.

It means we no longer tell the best stories about local technology companies. We don’t report the ways New Zealanders deal with technology. A lot gets missed.

We’ve stopped telling our stories because no-one wants to pay for that kind of writing.

Specialist tech publishers

Three specialist publishers dominate:

• Techday publishes two monthly print magazines: IT Brief and The Channel. It operates as an umbrella website featuring eight virtual publication brands covering subject niches.

You couldn’t accuse Techday of being mean to technology companies.

Techday lists three staff journalists are listed on its website. The last time I asked none of them worked full-time. This may have changed. Update: Techday Publisher Sean Mitchell tells me his journalists are all employed full-time.

IDG is US-owned and Australian managed. It publishes a print edition of CIO magazine three times a year. If you want a subscription you have to apply to Australia. That speaks volumes. IDG also operates Computerworld, NZ Reseller News and PC World as online-only publications.

IDG employs two full-time journalists. James Henderson is the editor of Computerworld NZ while Divina Paredes is CIO editor. Randal Jackson writes stories as the group’s Wellington-based freelance. Reseller News and PC World don’t have local editorial staff. Update: James Henderson is the editor of both Computerworld NZ and Reseller News.

**iStart **publishes a print and electronic magazine three times a year. The business is Auckland based with New Zealand and Australian print editions and websites. Auckland-based Clare Coulson is the editor.

Part-time technology journalism

Between them the three specialist publishers employ three full-time and four part-time journalists. Update: six full-time and one part-time. That’s still fewer than one journalist per masthead. They rarely break hard news stories. News pages are mostly filled with rewritten press releases and PR-fed material.

That sounds like criticism. On one level it is, but it also reflects commercial reality. There’s little advertising revenue, and ad-blocking has made the situation worse. What advertisers the publishers can scrape up are looking for a shortcut to sales leads, not hard-hitting exposés.

You will find longer features in most titles. Sometimes there’s even analysis although there’s little of the deeper material that characterised the technology press in the past.

Again that’s commercial reality: journalists are under pressure to pump out a lot of content fast. There’s not much time for reflection.

This also explains why the IDG sites are full of overseas filler material. It keeps the pipeline full at no extra cost to the publisher. The stories seem to be picked at random. No thought is given to whether a story serves readers.

This can get extreme. Last week Ian Apperley noted there wasn’t a single local story among the 100 most recent news items on the Computerworld NZ feed.

Technology journalism in mainstream media

The same pressure to pump out volume applies to tech journalists working in New Zealand’s mainstream media. Both Stuff and the NZ Herald fill their online pipelines with low-cost, low-value overseas filler material.

In the past the newspapers did great work keeping industry insiders, users and the public informed about events and trends. Now they publish shorter, less analytical news although there are some notable exceptions, particularly when covering telecommunications.

One reason you don’t see as much local technology news is there are no longer any full-time technology journalists working on mainstream newspapers and magazines.

Chris Keall who at one time edited NZ PC World is the most notable specialist journalist in terms of output. He is NBR technology editor. Keall is also the paper’s head of digital, so he spends less time at the tech coal face. Keall manages to write roughly a story a day and at times gets behind more complex issues.

At the Dominion Post Tom Pullar-Strecker was a technology specialist but now has a general business journalism role. Being based in Wellington he sometimes gets insight into issues such as telecommunications policy. These days he writes roughly one tech story a week.

NZ Herald

The NZ Herald gives technology assignments to a number of journalists. The best know is Chris Barton, who writes features and commentary covering technology and telecommunications topics. Barton goes deep, but his work only appears occasionally.

The Herald also runs a weekly blog by tech veteran Juha Saarinen. Saarinen is one of the locally based technology journalists who appears to earn most of his income from working for overseas publishers. Unlike most of us, he has a firmer technology background. He mainly writes for IT News, an Australian online publication.

Rob O’Neill is another virtual ex-pat New Zealand journalist. He writes for ZDNet and is listed as part of the ZDNet Australia team. O’Neill writes local and international stories, maybe two local items a week.

Wellington-based Owen Williams has only recently moved to working full-time as a journalist. He is now on the team for US-based The Next Web.

On a personal note

This round-up wouldn’t be complete without mentioning my work.

I’m a freelance journalist. I write a regular technology column for NZ Business magazine — it mainly appears in print. In the last year have also written features for iStart, NBR and for Management magazine, which is now part of NZ Business. I also turn up on TV3 Firstline and the NZ Tech Podcast talking about technology.

My highest profile freelance work would be on the business feature pull-outs that appear in the NZ Herald about ten times a year. Although I get to write about tech from a business point of view, the stories range across most business areas.

There are also overseas jobs. In the last year I have written for ZDNet’s PC Magazine and for Computer Weekly out of the UK. Both publishers commissioned stories that are specifically about New Zealand themes.

Local technology journalism is undergunned

Most experienced New Zealand technology writers, myself included, are not writing full-time for New Zealand audiences about local themes. Some are writing for overseas publishers, others split writing duties with other editorial responsibilities.

Those who are writing full-time spend their lives in a haze churning out short items dictated largely by the flow of press releases and PR-initiated pitches.

Too often an exclusive is nothing more than first dibs on a press release. You’re not doing your job when you post 20 smartphone shots of someone’s new data centre or are the first New Zealand site to publish alleged leaked photos of a yet to be launched product.

Getting eyeballs is everything. Local publishers fight with Google over the slim pickings available from online advertisements. They also compete internationally. New Zealanders probably read more overseas written tech news than locally written stories.

I’m not judgemental about the problems they face or the way local publishers tackle the problems, I’m on the receiving end of the same economic forces.

I’m not judgemental about the problems they face or the way local publishers tackle the problems, I’m on the receiving end of the same economic forces. The subscription economy hasn’t solved the problem and paywalls remain controversial.

Who pays the piper?

The market doesn’t serve the readers. It doesn’t serve the local tech industry. Leaders of New Zealand tech companies need to be aware of what is going on in their industry, not what someone’s promotional output says. They need intelligence, not propaganda.

The current approach doesn’t serve the public good.

There’s also a problem when a big news story breaks that has technology woven into its fabric. Remember the fuss in the run-up to the 2014 election over stolen emails? Perhaps the planned $1.5 billion reboot of the IRD computer system. How about the business of the Edward Snowden leaks?

In some cases journalists who don’t have tech expertise or the contacts needed to make sense of what is happening are sent to deal with these stories.

That’s a pity. There’s a bigger pity. Hundreds of real, hard news stories, things that the public needs to know about go unreported because they are not part of a public relations campaign. Or worse, public relations managers block the news from getting out.

And much of what passes as news is actually PR campaigns dressed up as research.

Oxygen

Let’s put aside the worthy goal of keeping the public informed and get to a different commercial reality. New Zealand’s homegrown technology sector doesn’t get the media oxygen it needs to breathe. Individual journalists have learned they must build their own platforms and audiences, but this creates a fragmented landscape rather than comprehensive industry coverage.

Because overseas news feeds dominate the agenda in New Zealand, people buying here are more likely to hear about an overseas supplier than a local one. Investors will put their money overseas, skilled workers will look for jobs overseas. This is already causing problems.

The lack of balanced, impartial and thoughtful New Zealand technology journalism creates the impression there’s not much going on here.

Blogs take up some of the slack. So does Mauricio Freitas’ Geekzone website and projects like the New Zealand Tech Podcast.

Technology needs a local voice. It has to be an honest voice. That means turning over rocks some people would prefer stayed untouched.

What comes next?

Technology journalism won’t disappear entirely, but it has fundamentally changed. The model of specialised technology publications employing teams of journalists to cover a local market comprehensively is dead—at least in a market the size of New Zealand.

What survives are:

• **Independent voices: **Journalists like myself who maintain their own platforms and patch together income from multiple sources.
• Niche coverage: Specialist reporters focusing on telecommunications, cybersecurity or other specific sectors.
• Occasional depth: Mainstream journalists who dive into technology topics when major stories break
• Community efforts: Podcasts, newsletters and news services like Geekzone that are built by enthusiasts.

The question isn’t whether this is better or worse than 2014—it’s simply what exists. The business model challenges that drove the decline haven’t been solved; they’ve forced adaptation.

For New Zealand’s technology sector, this means companies must work harder to tell their stories. For readers, it means seeking out multiple sources rather than relying on a single comprehensive publication. For journalists, it means building direct relationships with audiences rather than depending on institutional employers.

**More on journalism and media: ** _This post is part of ongoing coverage about journalism business models, digital adaptation and the state of technology journalism: _

• Apple’s iPad won’t save newspapers.
• Online paywalls vs print: Why readers resist.
• Online subscriptions: the second digital divide.
• Why I’m a technology and business writer, not a geek.
• Old school journalism writing habits are powerful tools.
• Does online media fill the gap left by newspapers?

Rupert Murdoch once called the iPad a saviour of newspapers. The reality was smaller savings, fewer readers and little relief for publishers.

This post was originally published in April 2010, days after the first iPad launched. Updated January 2026 with fifteen years of hindsight on how the tablet revolution reshaped—but didn’t save—news media.

Rupert Murdoch described Apple’s iPad as a “potential saviour of newspapers” not long after the tablet computer first appeared. At the time, his optimism was misplaced. Both the numbers and the economics showed otherwise.

Small savings, big costs remain

Moving to the iPad saves publishers money on paper, printing, wrapping and distribution. Yet Apple’s 30 percent cut of subscription revenue is roughly the same as the margin taken by newsagents and other retailers. Editorial costs don’t go away, so the overall savings are relatively small.

More importantly, fewer readers are willing to pay for digital subscriptions than for printed copies. Evidence in 2010 suggested only five percent of readers would pay. Even if that number had climbed to 25 percent, copy sales revenue would still fall.

Fewer readers means less advertising

Print newspapers also enjoy a secondary audience. A copy bought in a shop is often passed from reader to reader. Digital editions make sharing harder because of copy protection. That reduces the number of readers per subscription and in turn makes advertising less valuable.

True, digital readers are more identifiable, which improves targeting. But advertisers ultimately want reach: fewer readers meant less ad revenue overall.

Analysts warn of limits

Ovum, a technology analyst firm, reached the same conclusion. In a May 2010 report, principal analyst Adrian Drury wrote: “Apple’s much-hyped tablet device alone will fail to secure the future of news and magazine publishing.”

He argued that while the iPad offered publishers new distribution channels, it was still just one device. Sales volumes would take time to build, while the challenge of finding a sustainable business model for publishing was immediate. Ovum also predicted the iPad media market would quickly become congested.

A turning point, not a saviour

Apple forecast it would sell 13.2 million iPads by the end of 2011. That compares with 25 million iPhones shipped in 2009 alone. While the iPad and later tablets reshaped media, they were never the cure for declining newspaper fortunes Murdoch and others hoped for.

Fifteen years later: What actually happened

The prediction proved accurate. The iPad didn’t save newspapers, though tablets have reshaped how people consume news.

By 2026, newspaper print circulation has collapsed to a fraction of 2010 levels. The iPad’s failure wasn’t about the device—it was about the business model. Publishers eventually learned that how they frame digital subscriptions matters more than the delivery mechanism.

What actually saved some news organisations wasn’t a technology but direct reader relationships. Email newsletters, podcasts and reader-supported journalism have all succeeded where app-based distribution failed. Journalists who learned to use their core skills in new ways thrived, even as their erstwhile employers struggled.

The iPad became ubiquitous—Apple sold over 500 million iPads in the fifteen years since Murdoch’s prediction. But news apps didn’t become the dominant way people consume journalism. Instead, social media, web browsers and direct subscriptions won out.

Meanwhile, the cost-cutting that seemed attractive about digital distribution—no printing, paper or physical distribution costs—accelerated newsroom layoffs. The savings went to shareholders, not journalism. As predicted, newspapers missed crucial opportunities to adapt their business models when they had the chance.

**More on journalism and media: ** This post is part of ongoing coverage about journalism business models, digital adaptation and modern reporting:

• Journalists too mean to tech companies.
• Lack of local technology news damages industry.
• Dealing with the pay wall economy.
• Online paywalls vs print: Why readers resist.

On the fifth anniversary of Windows 10, we look back at what it was supposed to be and what it ultimately became. Almost nothing turned out as planned, and that’s OK.

Ed Bott brings the state of Windows 10 up to date at ZDNet with: Windows 10 turns five: Don’t get too comfortable, the rules will change again.

He writes:

I celebrated the occasion by upgrading a small data centre’s worth of Windows 10 devices to the new build and monitoring for glitches. This year, the process was refreshingly uneventful and almost shockingly fast. On newer PCs, almost everything happened in the background, and the wait after the final reboot was typically five minutes or less.

Five minutes seems incredible. There were early iterations of Windows 10 where you might need to set aside the best part of the day for an upgrade.

That was for the essential pre-upgrade back-up along with an hour or so for the upgrade itself. On top of that was time needed to familiarise yourself with the new reality.

Often things would go missing. In some cases key features would be dropped or change beyond recognition.

One lesson at that time was to never automate or customise Windows 10 because you’d never know if an update would break everything.

There were also times when an automatic upgrade might happen without warning and you’d wake up in unfamiliar territory.

It’s not clear to me how long it took Microsoft to get Windows 10 to the point where upgrading stopped being a risky venture.

Microsoft’s cunning plan

Ed Bott:

Back in 2015, Microsoft’s vision for Windows 10 was expansive. It would run on a dizzying assortment of devices: smartphones running Windows Mobile, small tablets like the 8-inch Dell Venue 8 Pro 5000 series, PCs in traditional and shape-shifting configurations, Xbox consoles, the gargantuan conference-room-sized Surface Hub, and the HoloLens virtual reality headset.

In 2020, that vision has been scaled back. Windows 10 Mobile is officially defunct, and small Windows 10 tablets have completely disappeared from the market. Of all those chips scattered across the craps table, only the 2-in-1 Windows device category appears to have paid off.

There was a time when Windows Mobile, or Windows Phone as it was called, beat the pants off Android and gave iOS a run for its money. Windows Phone 7 was great. It integrated neatly with everything else Windows and Office. For a while the Windows desktop and mobile combination was the most productive option.

Microsoft, being Microsoft, couldn’t resist tinkering with great, making life more complicated. Let’s face it, too complicated.

Windows Phone 8 may have had better features, but it was already on the path to clumsy and cluttered. From that point things kept getting worse.

Of course the real killer was that mighty Microsoft, once the world’s largest company and still among the biggest, couldn’t assemble a credible suite of phone apps.

Microsoft would have done better spending more of its capital seeding phone app developers than on other failed investments. Or maybe it was always a lost cause. It doesn’t matter because a reinvented Microsoft went on to greater things with Azure and enterprise products and services. There are times when 2-in-1 Windows devices sparkle and shine, but for the most part non-Surface Windows PC hardware feels almost held back by Microsoft.

HP, Dell and others give every appearance of being capable of making great hardware. Yet they never quite reach the lofty heights. Ever so often something special appears, but you have to move fast and buy it at the time because the good stuff never gains traction.

Likewise Microsoft’s own-brand Surface products don’t always hit the target. There have been missed. Yet on the whole the Surface experience is fine even if product reliability isn’t up to scratch. And if you want to spend that much money, Apple can look relatively inexpensive by comparison.

On conspiracy theories

More Bott:

And then there were the dark scenarios that Microsoft skeptics spun out around the time of Windows 10’s debut.

The free upgrade offer was a trap, they insisted. After Microsoft had lured in a few hundred million suckers with that offer, they were going to start charging for subscriptions. Five years later, that still hasn’t happened. If Microsoft is running some sort of hustle here, it’s a very long con.

There’s more conspiracy coverage in the original story. As Bott says, it is all nonsense. The conspiracy theories looked daft at the time. They showed a lack of understanding about Microsoft’s direction and where Windows 10 fits in the big picture.

Windows 10 did the job it needed to do

As Bott puts it:

Despite the occasional twists and turns that Windows 10 has taken in the past five years, it has accomplished its two overarching goals.

First, it erased the memory of Windows 8 and its confusing interface. For the overwhelming majority of Microsoft’s customers who decided to skip Windows 8 and stick with Windows 7, the transition was reasonably smooth. Even the naming decision, to skip Windows 9 and go straight to 10 was, in hindsight, pretty smart.

Second, it offered an upgrade path to customers who were still deploying Windows 7 in businesses. That alternative became extremely important when we zoomed past the official end-of-support date for Windows 7 in January 2020.

It’s taken Microsoft eight years to recover from Windows 8. In some ways it still hasn’t fully recovered. It may never recover. Windows 8 was the point where Microsoft no longer dominated.

Yes, things happened elsewhere. There was a switch from PCs to phones. But the key point is that when Microsoft faced the first serious competition to its dominance, it released a terrible operating system. Or at least the wrong operating system to meet the challenge.

Windows 10 didn’t halt Microsoft’s OS decline

If anything Windows 8 accelerated Microsoft’s OS decline.

Stockholm syndrome means that many Windows fans couldn’t see how awful Windows 8 was. Switching from 7 to 8 was a horrible experience. People who could put off those upgrades and stayed with 7. Today about 20 percent of all OS users still have Windows 7, an operating system that is well past its sell by date. Microsoft no longer supports 7.

Other users switched to Apple, Linux or even ChromeOS. And there was a huge switch away from computers to phones.

Before Windows 8 Microsoft’s OS market share was around 90 percent. Today it is about 35 percent and comes in behind Android. Apple is about 8.5 percent.

Windows 10 offers a credible path for Windows 7 users. The fact that so many users, especially enterprise users, have stuck with 7 tells you how bad things were for Microsoft.

To a degree Microsoft has lost interest in Windows. It no longer makes rivers of gold from the operating system. At least not directly. It remains important as a gateway for business users to move to the company’s Azure cloud services. But the days when Windows called the shots are over.

In our coronavirus-tainted world, we’re realising that we depend a lot on our laptop webcams… and they’re not good. WSJ’s

At the Wall Street Journal Joanna Stern takes a critical look at laptop webcams: Laptop Webcam Showdown: MacBook Air? Dell XPS? They’re Pretty Bad.

Part of the problem comes down to laptops having thin lids, too thin to include great webcams. Mind you, thin hasn’t stopped phone makers from putting a lot of time and energy into making better cameras.

To a degree none of this would have been much of an issue before half the world started working from home on their laptops. For most people video conferencing was something of a nice-to-have after thought until now.

Suddenly we all notice the poor picture quality. What makes this worse is we now have much more bandwidth, so the internet connection is no longer the limiting factor. We also tend to have much higher resolution screens, so camera flaws are more noticeable.

Opportunity for better webcams

There is a huge opportunity for the first laptop maker to get this right. Apple is the most likely candidate here. It’s noticeable how much better the front facing camera is on a iPad Pro when compared with, say, the MacBook Air.

The 2020 12.9-inch iPad Pro has a seven megapixel front facing camera with all the trimmings. It handles 1080p video at up to 60 frames per second. In contrast, the 2020 MacBook Air camera is only 720p.

No doubt there is room for improvement now the laptop camera specification matters in ways it didn’t. The most curious thing about Stern’s video story is that Apple put a better camera on MacBooks ten years ago. Of course they weren’t as thin then.

Of course there is a trade off between thin and camera performance. Laptop lids are thinner than phones or iPads. Apple’s obsession with thin meant laptop keyboard problems until recently. Now it has to rethink where cameras fit in this.

During the lockdown sales of devices like large screens and printers took off, but there was little interest in standalone webcams. People assume the laptop ones are going to do the job.

This post from 2020 looks at criticism of the iPad. It took another four years for the noise to subside and it still hasn’t entirely gone away.

Last week was the iPad’s tenth birthday. An elite group of Apple fans celebrated the date with a barrage of criticisms centred on the iPadOS operating system.

For many people and some tasks Apple’s tablet is the best computer ever made. It is more mobile than any laptop and, despite the high-powered whinging, for the most part is easy to use.

Yet a surprising number of high-profile Apple fans took to their blogs and news outlets to criticise the iPad.

In The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10 at Daring Fireball, John Gruber writes of his disappointment:

“…Ten years later, though, I don’t think the iPad has come close to living up to its potential.”

Gruber has a lot to say on the subject. His blog post runs to 1100 words.

He isn’t the only high profile Apple commentator to criticise the iPad. His piece is here because it was the trigger for others to join the pile-on. If anything Ben Thompson’s Stratechery post is more critical.

Apple geeks dislike iPadOS

The nub of Gruber’s point is the iPad’s operating system. He explains here:

“Software is where the iPad has gotten lost. iPadOS’s multitasking model is far more capable than the iPhone’s, yes, but somehow Apple has painted it into a corner in which it is far less consistent and coherent than the Mac’s, while also being far less capable. iPad multitasking: more complex, less powerful. That’s quite a combination.”

The words, especially the last two sentences, are damning. Gruber may have focused on multitasking because his blog’s audience tends towards geeks and computing professional. For them multitasking is a big deal.

Of course iPads are not computers for the geek elite.

Until the last couple of years they were simple, lightweight, handy devices best suited to media consumption and basic tasks like dealing with email or writing.

That’s changed with the iPad Pro, they are now far better tools for media creation. In many cases they are now the best tool for media creation.

Multitasking

Multitasking is a nice thing to have on an iPad. It is not essential. It’s unlikely even half the people who own iPads ever use multitasking.

Moreover, iPads enjoyed their best sales in their early days long before anyone gave much thought to multitasking. It is something Apple has bolted on in recent times.

And that brings us to an oddity. It was the geeky, elite iPad users who constantly complained the iPad couldn’t do multitasking. When Apple delivered, they decided this was not the multitasking they had been calling for.

Few everyday users would choose or not choose an iPad because of multitasking. For that matter, few everyday users go for full multitasking on their laptops and desktops. It’ i a subject that matters most to a small segment of users who might be better off with other devices anyway.

Doing more than one thing at a time

That said, iPad multitasking is handy.

iPad multitasking is still relatively new. Apple added a basic form of multitasking in 2017. Then last year multitasking was bumped up to become more powerful and usable. This 2019 multitasking is what upset Gruber and the other Apple commentators.

That was in September. We’ve barely had time to come to terms with the new features. If, like many iPad users, you often switch between a more conventional computer and Apple’s tablet, four months is not a lot of time to learn all the nuances of a major operating system update. It’s only a couple of days since I found a hitherto undiscovered multitasking feature. That is already paying off in terms of increased productivity.

There are some complexities to the multitasking user interface in some circumstances. But there are simpler ways to work with the functionality.

Where iPadOS scores

Some computing tasks still work better on a laptop or desktop computer. Few of them affect me in my daily work as a journalist. Many, many other iPad users have similar usage patterns. In my experience, I get through most of my work faster and with fewer roadblocks on an iPad compared to any laptop or desktop computer.

There is a clear productivity advantage.

The list of tasks iPad does not do well has now dwindled to the point where I could keep my MacBook in the cupboard and do most of my writing, website managing and other tasks with my iPad Pro.

For my needs, the iPad Pro is the productive choice.

Shortfalls

Where there are shortfalls, it is often because of poorly designed apps that have yet to adapt to the hardware. This is also true for touch-screen Microsoft Windows. There are iPadOS apps that are not as complete as their desktop equivalents, but a lot of desktop applications are bloated, over-featured and unnecessarily complex.

Gruber’s criticism is damning, but it’s not all negative. He finishes writing: “> I like my iPad very much, and use it almost every day. But if I could go back to the pre-split-screen, pre-drag-and-drop interface I would. Which is to say, now that iPadOS has its own name, I wish I could install the iPhone’s one-app-on-screen-at-a-time, no-drag-and-drop iOS on my iPad Pro. I’d do it in a heartbeat and be much happier for it.

“The iPad at 10 is, to me, a grave disappointment. Not because it’s “bad”, because it’s not bad — it’s great even — but because great though it is in so many ways, overall it has fallen so far short of the grand potential it showed on day one.

“> To reach that potential, Apple needs to recognise they have made profound conceptual mistakes in the iPad user interface, mistakes that need to be scrapped and replaced, not polished and refined. I worry that iPadOS 13 suggests the opposite — that Apple is steering the iPad full speed ahead down a blind alley.”

In simple terms Gruber’s criticism boils down to the iPad not being a Mac. He takes us back to the computers versus tablet debate that went underground for a few years before coming back. In the Windows world this is answered by laptops that are also tablets.

Apple’s iPad is great. It is not perfect. There are questions to ask. After an initial burst of enthusiasm, sales have dropped away. Something needs fixing for sales to recover. It is unlikely that something is the “profound conceptual mistakes in the iPad user interface”. After all, that update only happened four months ago, long after the sales decline started.

This post from 2017 looks at moving between Macs and Windows PCs. Things have changed since this was written, but the basic questions remain the same.

At the Guardian, Alex Hern asks: Is it time to swap your Mac for a Windows laptop?

You don’t have to look hard to find similar stories elsewhere. A number appeared after Apple launched the MacBook Pro in late October.

Other Apple users used social media to wonder out loud about jumping to Windows or to announce an actual move.

And Windows users are thinking of moving to Mac.

On one level moving is easy

This level of fluidity is unprecedented. In many respects it has never been easier to move from Mac to Windows or Windows to Mac. Y et switching from one to the other or for that matter to Linux or a Chromebook can be trouble. It can be so much trouble that you need powerful reasons to move.

A missing HDMI port is not enough reason.2 At least not on its own.

If you’re a disgruntled MacBook Pro user you’d have to be crazy to spend up to NZ$6000 on a Surface Book because of a missing port. In comparison dongle costs are nothing.

Wrenching…

Wrench number one is that most long-term computer users have invested in one or more expensive apps that don’t necessarily make a good journey to the alternative operating system.

This is less of a problem now that many apps are cloud-based or purchased as a subscription. It’s not going to worry anyone who uses, say, Xero.

If, say, you move from a Mac to a Windows machine, and use Microsoft Office then you can kill the MacOS account and download the applications to your new Windows computer in a matter of minutes.

Cloud

You can keep your iCloud account active long after moving to Windows. Likewise, Microsoft OneDrive works well on Macs.

More specialist applications and games can be more troublesome.

There aren’t many third-party hardware devices still limited to only Apple or Windows. Printers, back-up drives, routers and so on can make the switch in minutes.

If you like a big screen or typing on a mechanical keyboard your old devices will all work with your new computer. Although you may need to buy a dongle to connect them to the ports on the new machine.

Phones

You may run into unforeseen compatibility problems between devices like phones or tablets.

iPhones and iPads play nice with Windows PCs and Macs, but the experience is much better when you are all Apple.

Likewise, the flow between your Android phone and your Windows laptop will be different if you switch to a Mac. Maybe not worse; different.

There will be minor niggles.

Standardisation and convergence mean from a hardware and software point of view moving from

Windows to Mac or Mac to Windows isn’t a big deal.

Brain

However, moving your brain from one way of thinking to another is harder.

This isn’t so much of a problem for casual users who don’t dive too deep into their operating system. There will be frustrating mysteries in their new system, but there already are in the old one.

More sophisticated users can struggle. All of us who work many hours each day with computers develop habits, learn shortcuts and productivity hacks to get more done in less time. These rarely translate from one operating system to another.

You’d be surprised how many you have accumulated over the years.

Peak productivity

It can take hours to get used to the basics of a new operating system, it can take months to get to peak productivity.

This is why moving can be trouble.

Within hours of firing up a new computer with a different OS you’ll take delight in features that were missing from your old one.

Not long after you’ll start to wonder why simple things that were so easy with your old computer are suddenly hard — or even seem impossible.

You have to build this learning curve into your planning before moving.

If you are unhappy with what you have, if your frustrations have reached boiling point or if you like the look of that fancy new computer then by all means move to another operating system.

While changing may be rewarding in the long-term, in the short-term it could be harder than you expect.

Apple introduced its butterfly laptop keyboard design for the 2015 12-inch MacBook. It is shallower than previous keyboards. The 2016 Apple MacBook Pro keyboard uses the same design.

The key action is less positive than on older Apple laptops like the MacBook Air or earlier MacBook Pros.

Put aside for one moment the Touch Bar that appears on most 2016 MacBook Pro models. What remains of the keyboard looks like those on Apple’s recent MacBooks.

The Force Touch trackpad on the 15-inch MacBook Pro is huge. Because of its size, the MacBook Pro keyboard sits further up the body, closer to the screen. This doesn’t make any difference to typing in practice.

Flush versus recessed keys

Although it has the same underlying design, it is not identical. On the 12-inch MacBook the keys are flush with the body. The new MacBook Pros have keys recessed a millimetre or so below the body.

Apple has improved the butterfly key action. There is more click and greater travel when you hit a key. You hit them harder.

The keys sound louder when you type. This audio feedback helps but I can’t articulate or measure how that works. In practice I found it all adds up to make typing and touch typing easier than on the 12-inch MacBooks.

MacBook Pro keyboard for touch typists

When I first used the 12-inch MacBook keyboard it took a while to adjust my touch typing technique. That’s not unusual, this happens every time I use a different machine or keyboard.

After a few hours I was typing with ease. I made a few more errors than before, but there was no performance hit. At that stage I decided the butterfly keyboard was an acceptable change.

Then I returned to the old MacBook Air keyboard. It was like swapping smart new shoes for comfortable slippers.

Although I didn’t get through my work faster, it felt right. There’s a more pleasing bounce to the keys that feels right or maybe it’s a matter of familiarity.

Comfy

There is less of a comfy slippers effect moving back and forth between the 2016 MacBook Pro and the Air. It could be down to what some describe as muscle memory.

My error rate is still higher on the new keyboard, but not as high as it was on the 12-inch MacBooks. Unlike then, this time I’m certain that it will soon be back to normal.

The new keyboard is not without flaws. The up and down arrow keys are too small and close-packed. They are hard to use. There’s a good chance you’ll hit the wrong one by accident. Yet with the trackpad, there is less need for arrow keys.

Flat, less travel keyboards seem to be a feature of 2016 premium laptops.

Surface Book comparison

Microsoft echoes some aspects of the butterfly keyboard in its Surface Book. The MacBook Pro and Surface Book have a different fundamental design. They come from different philosophies of what modern laptops should be. Yet in many ways they are head to head rivals.

Both are flat, both keyboards have a hard feel. If anything the Surface Book keyboard has a better layout and spacing. In practice the typing experience is similar.

Some other reviewers are unhappy about the missing esc key. It always turns up on the Touch Bar when you need it, but having a conventional esc key would be better.

You might argue that a MacBook Pro is not the device for someone who spends a lot of time typing so all this is academic. That view is nonsense. A keyboard is why you buy a computer instead of a tablet. It is not an essential component it is the essential component.

There is always a payoff between portability and function with laptop keyboards. Apple has balanced the two well here. You may find better keyboard experiences elsewhere. Yet the MacBook Pro keyboard goes well beyond being an acceptable compromise given the size and weight. It’s a worthy keyboard for a Pro laptop.

The MacBook Pro and Surface Book have a different fundamental design. They come from different philosophies of what modern laptops should be. Yet in many ways they are head to head rivals. I’ll explore this idea in more depth elsewhere.

Stick the words computer-, net-, web-, online- or digital- directly in front of other words when describing something and you won’t scare the population half to death:

• Computer-gaming
• Net-gaming
• Web-gaming
• Online-gaming
• Digital-gaming.

None of these are remotely frightening. They barely raise an eyebrow.

This is just as true when whatever being discussed has negative, or less than positive implications. You know these things aren’t necessarily good. They can be scary, but they’re not going to terrify anyone:

• Computer-surveillance
• Net-neutrality
• Web-porn
• Online-privacy
• Digital-disruption

But when cyber is used as a prefix it is almost always viewed as something bad:

• Cyber-bullying`
• Cyber-crime
• Cyber-sex
• Cyber-war
• Cyber-terrorism

Although it was big in the 1990s, the term cyberpunk is out of fashion. There may be pockets of geekdom where it is still celebrated, but as far as everyone else is concerned, it is faintly threatening.

Take me to cyber space

Even the innocent and increasingly anachronistic, cyberspace now sometimes carries faintly negative connotations. At least in some circles.

This is because we’ve become used to newspapers and TV reports using cyber as their favoured technology-bogeyman word.

That’s not always a bad thing. It’s a form of shorthand that flags what’s coming next.

Getting the attention of the great unwashed then warning them to take appropriate care with passwords, privacy and security can often be difficult.

Danger Will Robinson

So telling them in advance the story is scary at least gets a warning message across.

Likewise, those dreary, cliched clip art images of burglars in striped shirts and balaclavas sitting at computer terminals is another useful form of shorthand.

Sure it is crass and unimaginative. Yet people get the message that something’s afoot even if they switch off to the main story being told. And who can blame them for switching off? Often the stories are dull or incomprehensible to everyday folk.

David Sparks writes about writing with iPad screen keyboards after years of touch typing. Much of what he says resonates:

“It started with the iPad Air. On that machine I got quite good at thumb typing in portrait mode. It’s nothing like touch typing but still pretty great to sit on an airplane and thumb my way through an outline or a pile of email.”

Like Sparks, I started with light thumb-typing on my iPad 2. Nothing more than tweets and simple return email one-liners. When the lighter, slightly smaller iPad Air arrived I graduated to thumb-typing for longer stretches.

Using a real keyboard with an iPad

For anything more than a paragraph, I needed a physical keyboard. At least I thought so. Either I’d attach one of the many sample keyboards people had sent me to the iPad Air or I’d use the MacBook keyboard.

Sparks goes on:

“Speaking of airplanes, I recently took a flight where I was seated right between the window and a big guy that made pulling down the tray and using my iPad Pro’s Smart Keyboard cover impossible.

“I had four hours on that plane and was determined not to thrown in the towel. So I placed the iPad on my lap and started typing. I then went into one of those hypnotic work-states that I often feel on airplanes and before I knew it the pilot announced we were about to land.”

This echoes my first serious glass typing session. I was on a plane. While crammed in economy I tapped out an entire feature on the iPad Air screen keyboard. Like Sparks I hit the writing zone and tapped into a familiar well of productivity but in an unfamiliar setting.

Phoning it in

Something similar happened with an iPhone 6 Plus. Although it worked at a pinch, the iPad is a far better writing device, even in a cramped space.

Unlike Sparks who found himself writing on screen with the larger iPad Pro, my typing-on-glass-while-flying epiphany was thumb-typing on an iPad Air held in the portrait position.

I’ve used the 12.9-inch iPad Pro in the way Sparks describes. It works for me. At a pinch I can also do the same on the 9.7-inch iPad if I lay it flat in the landscape orientation and use the larger size keyboard.

Trains and boats and planes

Yet, I’ve become so adept at portrait orientation thumb-typing, it’s now my preferred way of working on an iPad. I find it is perfect for planes. I’ve done the same on railway journeys, the Birkenhead-to-Auckland ferry and, less successful, while riding in an airport bus.

It works for me in airport lounges, cafes and even when I’m sitting in an office reception before a meeting or in a quiet room at a conference. Sometimes I’ll write this way sitting at home on the sofa. 

When I was recently in bed with ’flu, I managed to type a long-form newspaper feature this way.

I wouldn’t say it trumps writing on the MacBook Air using a full typewriter keyboard, but it isn’t far behind. By the way, I’m writing this blog post using the thumb and portrait mode technique on my 9.7-inch iPad Pro. The iPad keyboards are gathering dust.

Natural born killer technique

Writing this way on the iPad or iPad Pro now feels natural. At first thumb-typing was slow. Now I’m almost as fast as on a real keyboard. I’m a long-time touch typist, so my speeds there are good. 

Achieving something close on a glass keyboard surprised me.

Typing on the iPad screen is more, not less, accurate. The iPad’s built-in spell checker almost never comes into play. I’ve no idea why I mistype less characters on the glass screen, but it’s real.

Another observation. As a touch typist, I don’t look at the typewriter keys when writing. My focus is on the screen. When thumb typing on glass, I do look at the keyboard. The distance from the on-screen keyboard to the text is only a few millimetres, so I can check my output as I go.

Application independent

iPad thumb-typing works well with all writing apps. I wrote this blog post using Byword, currently my favourite writing tool. I could equally have chosen Microsoft Word. Pages or iA Writer. They all work just fine.

In his post, Sparks says he still has pain points:

“Text selection is still far easier for me using a keyboard. Also, typing on glass at least once a day my finger accidentally hits the keyboard switch button which brings my work to a screeching halt. On that note if I were in charge, I’d make the keyboard selection button something where you had to press and hold to switch between keyboards.”

From manual typewriter to glass keyboard

I don’t have either of Sparks’ problems. I almost never use text selection during writing. I learnt to type on manual, paper-based typewriters. That means I’m disciplined about not constantly moving blocks of text.

My technique is to write, almost as a stream of consciousness. Years of experience mean I can structure a story in my head before starting. I write, then walk away for a breather before returning to edit the words. This, by the way, is a good technique. Unless you are pressed for time, do something else before self-editing.

I’ve not had Sparks’ problems hitting the wrong keys on the iPad screen keyboard. This surprises me, the individual keys on a 9.7-inch iPad screen in portrait mode are tiny, just a few millimeters square. And yet I rarely mistype.

There are no pain points for me. I’m more than ready to give up attaching a keyboard to the smaller iPad Pro. It’s reached the point where I can now attend a press conference or interview armed with nothing but an iPad and come away with clean copy.

For me, the iPad screen keyboard is a productivity boost. The story you’re reading now is around a thousand words long. I wrote the first draft on my iPad in relative comfort in about 45 minutes. I doubt I could do better on the MacBook with a full keyboard.

People selling technology love using words like platform, ecosystem or environment.

Almost everything in the tech world is one of the three.

Some are all three. Hence: the Windows platform; Windows ecosystem and Windows environment. Are they the same thing are are they each different? 

Likewise Apple, Android, AWS and so on.

The words are a problem for trained journalists because they are non-specific, even ambiguous. They rarely help good communication. We prefer to nail things down with greater precision where possible.

Often you can replace one of these words with thing and the meaning doesn’t change.

Platform: redundant, used badly

Or you can remove the word altogether. Usually Windows, Apple and Android are good enough descriptions in their own right for most conversations.

The other problem is that the words are used interchangeably. People often talk about the Windows platform when they mean the ecosystem.

There are times when you can’t avoid using platform or ecosystem. That’s not true with environment, the word is always vague or unnecessary.

Ben Thompson offers great definitions of platform and ecosystem in The Funnel Framework:

A platform is something that can be built upon.

In the case of Windows, the operating system had (has) an API that allowed 3rd-party programs to run on it. The primary benefit that this provided to Microsoft was a powerful two-sided network: developers built on Windows, which attracted users (primarily businesses) to the platform, which in turn drew still more developers.

Over time this network effect resulted in a powerful lock-in: both developers and users were invested in the various programs that ran their businesses, which meant Microsoft could effectively charge rent on every computer sold in the world.

Ecosystem:

An ecosystem is a web of mutually beneficial relationships that improves the value of all of the participants.

This is a more under-appreciated aspect of Microsoft’s dominance: there were massive sectors of the industry built up specifically to support Windows, including value-added resellers, large consultancies and internal IT departments.

In fact, IDC has previously claimed that for every $1 Microsoft made in sales, partner companies made $8.70. Indeed, ecosystem lock-in is arguably even more powerful than platform lock-in: not only is there a sunk-cost aspect, but also a whole lot more money and people pushing to keep things exactly the way they are.

Thompson then goes on to discuss why platforms and ecosystems are no longer as important as they were in the Windows era. His point is that in the past owning the platform and ecosystem was the key to sales success, today being the best product or service for a consumer’s needs is more important.

Originally published in May 2023, this looks back at the immediate six-month aftermath of Twitter’s ownership change. Back then it was still living under its old name and facing a wave of user departures. This post surveys the emerging alternatives and what a fractured social landscape might mean. One of the alternatives, T2, didn’t make it.

When the company changed hands there were high profile predictions that it was days away from operational meltdown. Those predictions kept coming as the company laid off key workers and shut cloud services.

Twitter continues to function. There have been hiccups and outages. It may not be the smooth experience it once was. Service quality has degraded. But no sign of a meltdown. It is not pretty. Twitter isn’t as much fun as it was. Many follow-worthy accounts have left. There is a noticeable increase in far right extremism, hate speech and unpleasant behaviour. Outright nastiness is commonplace. There’s less Twitter journalism.

Poor signal to noise ratio

In engineering terms, Twitter’s signal to noise ratio was always bad. Now it is noticeably worse. There’s evidence Twitter’s advertising revenue has fallen off a cliff. The social media site wants to fix this by converting free users into paying customers. This does not appear to be working. The blue tick which tells other users you are a paying customer has become a badge of shame. High profile users who got a free blue tick under the new regime complain they look bad to their followers.

Yet Twitter stumbles on.

Likewise, the early predictions of mass flight and rapidly falling numbers were overstated. There has been flight, but not on a huge scale. Estimates range from one or two per cent up to five or six per cent. It’s tangible, but not significant. At least not yet.

Mastodon

To date, Mastodon has been the most popular alternative for disgruntled Twitter users. In the run-up to Twitter’s sale, Mastodon had around 300k active users. Soon after the sale it hit a million active users. By the end of 2022 it was north of 2.5 million active users.

At the time of writing, May 1 2023, it is back down at about half that level: around 1.2 million active users. Mastodon monthly active users since Twitter was sold. Incidentally, these Mastodon user number stats come from this source. They are based on data collected by the Mastodon API. Another estimate says there are 1.4 million active users, the source for this number is @mastodonusers@mastodon.social, an automated counter.

Stats from Mastodon servers.

Rise and fall

The sharp rise and fall of Mastodon active user numbers is no surprise. Twitter users spot a degradation or witness an outrage, decide to bail, try something else, some decide that alternative doesn’t meet their expectations. What’s important here for Mastodon is that today’s user numbers are about four times what they were six months ago. That’s impressive growth by any standard. Impressive in Mastodon terms, but looking at Twitter numbers provides a useful reality check.

Mastodon in perspective

Mastodon’s user numbers would be a rounding error in Twitter’s user numbers. At the time of the takeover Twitter had around 450 million active users. That means, if we are generous, that Mastodon is about half a per cent of Twitter. You can’t make a coherent argument that Mastodon is a threat to Twitter on that basis. Even if you look at the 11.5 million or so people who have signed up for Mastodon, it is around 2.5 per cent the size of Twitter.

Potential

Mastodon has its merits and it has potential. The idea of a Fediverse is interesting. We’ll look at that in another post. It is thriving and lively, in that sense it is, for now, the nearest thing to a viable Twitter replacement for many users. It can work in a browser and there are plenty of apps for Mastodon users. There are compatible services that use the underlying open ActivityPub protocol that can work well with Mastodon. Micro.blog is one example. Another is Bluesky, a Twitter-like alternative funded by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. That means it has a lot of attention. Possibly more attention than it deserves.

For now you need an invite to join Bluesky. It is decentralised, or soon will be, but not in the same way as Mastodon.

T2 is a Twitter reboot

A third alternative is T2, which was founded by ex-Twitter employees. It looks and feels a lot like early Twitter. That is the vibe the founders say they are aiming for. They want to focus more on community and less on building a viral, algorithmic monster that messes with users’ heads. The interface is cleaner and there are, for now, few features. If you want to leave but enjoyed the pre-sale Twitter experience, this might be your best new online home. T2 is young… the founders left Twitter in November. What you see today is not its finished form. Hell, the company doesn’t even have its official name yet. At the time of writing there is no app. The T2 moniker is a marker that hints at Twitter 2.0.

These things take time

Six months may feel like a long time when you’re moving at the internet’s pace, but it’s nothing when it comes to establishing a new social media service or running down an old one. That takes years. For this reason, it is far too early to say what the post-Twitter landscape will look like. And realistically, unless Twitter collapses in a messy heap under the pressure of one too many bad leadership decisions, that service will likely continue in one form or another. To put things in perspective, did you realise MySpace continues to operate? Likewise Yahoo. Both Mastodon and T2 look promising, if unfinished. Other alternatives are on the way. With luck we will see alternative ideas and approaches competing to be your next online home. That’s positive. The social media scene was, in that sense at least, stagnating before the Twitter sale.

Originally published in June 2014, this post looks at how Apple’s Continuity strategy — seamless hand-off of tasks and services across devices — contrasted with Microsoft’s convergence vision at the time and what it said about each company’s approach to personal computing. It remains an historic snapshot of competing philosophies, back when Microsoft still had a phone operating system.

Apple mapped the direction its technology will take at last week’s World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC).

In Apple’s world, PCs are distinct from phones and both are different from tablets.

Apple offers different devices for different parts of your life. iPhone when on the run, tablet when on the sofa, PC when at a desk or whatever else you choose.

With Apple each device class plays its own role. Hardware, software and user interfaces are optimised to take advantage of the differences.

Apple aims for integration

Apple calls this Continuity. While each device offers a different experience and there are different user interfaces, you can move smoothly between them.

This already works to a degree with Apple kit. However, Apple upped the ante at WWDC announcing changes to make for even smoother handoff as you move from one device to another.

One other thing is clear. Apple sees mobile phones as central, tablets and PCs are, in effect, secondary. This means you’re going to need an iPhone to get all the benefits of owning other Apple device.

Software features like Continuity are designed to keep users locked into Apple’s hardware cycle. It adds a new layer of utility to highly portable machines like the MacBook Air, as noted last year, had already mastered the physical requirements of ‘go-anywhere’ computing

Microsoft puts PC centre stage

Microsoft’s technology centres on the personal computer. Or, perhaps, whatever the PC becomes next.

What that means in practice is Microsoft tablets and phones are extensions of the Windows PC. The Windows you see on a desktop PC is the same, or almost the same, on a Microsoft tablet or a Windows Phone.

Microsoft talks about being consistent.

When you use Microsoft kit you can move smoothly between devices because they all look and run in much the same way. You only need to learn how to use one user interface. Up to a point, all the skill gained with one Windows device is instantly transferable to other Windows devices.

Apple, Microsoft roots

The contrasting philosophies stem from each company’s history.

Apple’s success came after realising a phone could do 90 percent of what PCs can do. It may not sell as many iOS phones as the massed ranks of Androids, but it dominates smartphones in other ways.

It also dominates the tablet market. Putting its most successful product at the core of its strategy is understandable.

Likewise, Microsoft dominates PCs. While personal computers are not growing, they are not heading for immediate extinction. Microsoft aims to have them evolve into something new.

It makes sense for Microsoft to come at 2014 technology from a PC-centric point of view.

There is no clear right or wrong here. Apple and Microsoft offer two distinct visions. They could end up at the same destination while travelling on different paths.

Triangulating Google

Apple and Microsoft have been strong in hardware and software. Services sit at the third corner of the modern personal technology triangle. That’s where Google comes from, Apple and Microsoft are only now picking up momentum in services.

Google beats both with its services. Google search, mail, online collaboration and so on are central to the company’s offering. It is a relatively late entrant into hardware and software.

For now, Google is the dominant name in personal cloud services. Because all the hard work is done remotely on massive server farms, Google sees hardware and client software as secondary. It leaves most of the hardware part of its world to partners.

The move toward a seamless experience across phone and desktop further erodes the traditional interaction model. It’s the next step in a transition in favour of more fluid, touch-based alternatives.

Choice

It would be wrong to see any one of these three strategies as better. They represent choice and your choices are clearer today than they were even six months ago.

It’s possible the three companies will diverge. It’s just as possible they’ll converge.

It sounds contradictory, but I expect a little of both. By that, I mean if one company gets a clear upper hand in any area, the other two will move to counter the threat.

Alternatively a fourth player could come along and upset the balance of power.

Either way the market is dynamic. This analysis is just a snapshot in time. It’s unlikely things will look the same 18 months from now let alone five years.

Revisiting a post first written in 2008.

In 2008 the world was waiting for a digital device that would do for newspapers what the iPod did for music. At the time there were no obvious candidates but a few promising developments.

There were hopes that a dedicated ePaper device might fill the gap. This would be like the Kindle, but better suited for frequently updated news reports. The Kindle’s physical format was promising and its ability to display crisp, easy-to-read text. It would help if the news device could display editorial photographs.

A story in ComputerWorld looked the future of ePaper, which the author said was “just around the corner”.

ePaper looked a plausible candidate

ePaper clearly had potential. It could disrupt publishing business models which were already under attack from the internet. Yet, at the time, ePaper is “just around the corner” was questionable. Claims like that can never be taken seriously until practical products hit the market.

I’ve been writing about technology since 1980. In that year I saw my first voice recognition system and the first example of what we now call electronic books or eBooks. The proud makers of the 1981 voice recognition device said their hardware would be “ready for prime time” within two years and keyboards would quickly be a thing of the past.

In 2008 voice recognition technology is still around two years away from prime time.

eBooks didn’t hit take-off

Likewise, in 1981 electronic book makers were confidently predicting we’d soon be cuddling up at night with their hardware. By 2008 there still wasn’t been anything as impressive or as easy to read as ink stamped or squirted on crushed, dead trees. Old fashioned books refused to die. Printed newspapers, on the other hand, appeared to be on the way out.

Another possibility at the time was the iPod-derived iPhone, which was still new in 2008. It has a tiny screen and people were skeptical about its ability to become the iPod for news.

In the meantime, the internet continued to build momentum delivering news and other information to desktops, laptops and handheld devices like Apple’s iPhone. Although none of these were anything like as satisfactory an as paper, people could use them to read news. Many had already switched to getting news that way.

The view from 2025

Looking back, the phone handset won by default due to ubiquity, not superior reading experience. Today the majority of news readers get their fix through their iPhone or Android phone.

The iPad and other tablets became a supplementary news reading device. They are ideal for immersive reading but lacking the necessary ubiquity to be the sole news reader.

It turns out all the fretting about screen quality and creating a better reading experience was focusing on the wrong problems. Yes, there are better devices for consuming text-based material, but the device in everyone’s pocket is always going to win any competition.

What was not apparent in 2008 is that publishers would adapt to the preferred format. In time the dominance of the mobile-first design model, where speed and scrolling trump the print-like page fidelity promised by ePaper.

In many cases news publishers build dedicated apps for phones and tablets. This has the added advantage of deepening their relationship with readers and increasing their ability to learn more about those readers so they can better target advertising. New models changing: Paywalls and the creator economy

Before anyone had heard of the internet, newspapers made fortunes from physical copy sales. In the UK, the big newspapers would sell millions of copies each day. the revenue from print sales was so large that advertising barely featured in the most popular British papers.

In most of the rest of the world, newspapers were financed by advertising sales.

The transition from physical sales to digital revenue models has been hard. Up to a point it is still a work in progress. At one point the iPad model looked promising. This involved iTunes-enabled micro-transactions. Some titles still sell subscriptions this way. 

Meanwhile the websites use paywalls and subscriptions as a way of charging for content. Other, smaller news operations use alternative subscription models.

Early attempts at paywalls failed. While they worked for publishers with exclusive coverage of lucrative niche markets, most obviously in business journalism, more general news publishers struggled. Major players like the New York Times and The Guardian relied on massive scale delivering readers to advertisers with high-quality, high-cost journalism.

Advertising Failure

In practice, tech giants Google and Meta (Facebook) captured nearly all the digital advertising revenue, forcing newspapers to go subscription-only to survive. The Guardian continues a free model, but carpet-bombs readers with needy promotions begging for ‘donations,’ degrading the reading experience for those unable or unwilling to pay.

Most surviving news publishers rely on traditional paywalls and subscriptions. The irony is that insisting on subscriptions gives publishers greater visibility of exactly who is reading. This information is valuable when it comes to selling better-targeted advertising.

Beyond the institutional paywall is the rise of Substack and other newsletter models. This site runs on Ghost Pro, which offers an alternative approach to online publishing and newsletters. There’s no charge here, but adding one would be relatively easy.

The rise of the independent journalist blogger

Substack and newsletters represent the true decentralised evolution of the “journalist blogger” first discussed on this site in 2008. 

With it journalists can cut out the publisher and take the vast majority of the revenue. It’s long been known that the two ways to make money off any media in the digital age are aggregation (putting things together, e.g., major news sites) and disaggregation (pulling them apart, e.g., individual newsletters).

If a journalist focuses on a high-value niche—most likely business, finance or specific areas of politics—there’s a ready market for their expertise. This is the long tail of journalism. You don’t need millions of readers to make a specialist niche pay, a thousand subscribers paying a modest sum is enough for a reasonable income.

News and journalism are not like music

Let’s go back to the start of this post, the point about “a digital device that would do for newspapers what the iPod did for music.” In some ways, the analogy is unrealistic. Today, the iPod functionality is wrapped into every iPhone. Android phones act the same way.

Music fans can buy all-you-can-eat streaming music from Spotify or Apple Music. They can also buy single tracks and albums. These models never worked for news. Instead, we have paywalls or the Patreon-Substack direct creator support model. And that brings us to the key point: The real disruption was not about the device, but the revenue model.

In 2008, one UK journalist predicted the future of news would be a “small hub of professional journalists” with citizen journalists on the periphery. He was wrong.

The distinction between the “professional journalist” and the “citizen journalist” is now obsolete. The device (the phone) was merely the delivery mechanism; the real iPod-like disruption was the technology that allowed the writer to get paid directly. The new professional journalist is simply one who can:

• Own their audience: Control the email list (Substack/Ghost).
• Command a niche: Offer expertise valuable enough to justify a subscription.

The modern news landscape is not a single hub, but a decentralised network of powerful, independent creators competing with large institutions. In 2025, the writer’s brand is often stronger than the publisher’s brand. That’s a concept that was almost unthinkable when this article was first written.

**2026 update: **This post was first published in 2009, when Twitter was a relatively new and exciting social media service. Twitter has since been renamed X and the media landscape has changed significantly. The argument below reflects the context of that time.

Australian tech journalist Renai LeMay says Twitter is journalism. (The original site is dead, so no link, sorry). He is right but only up to a point.

LeMay writes:

Journalists are not simply using Twitter to promote their own work and get news tips. This is nowhere near to being the whole truth. In fact, audiences are using Twitter as a powerful tool to engage with journalists directly and force a renewal of journalism and media along lines that audiences have long demanded.

Well, some are.

I follow about 25 Australian and New Zealand journalists on Twitter. On top of that, I follow about the same number of public relations people and a handful of both from elsewhere in the world.

As an unscientific rule of thumb, I’d say only 40 per cent of journalists use the service in the way LeMay suggests.

About the same number simply use it as a way of promoting their online stories without any meaningful engagement.

Twitter journalism should not be broadcasting

In other words, they aren’t joining the conversation. Instead, they simply using Twitter as a broadcast medium.

This can be down to dumb managerial restrictions on their use of the technology. Journalists might understand social media, but their bosses don’t. Some bosses are frightened of it. Some bosses see Twitter as a competitor to their newspapers, websites, TV or radio stations.

A small percentage of journalists dabble in Twitter engagement, going on and offline depending on their workload. I understand. I’m sometimes guilty of switching off Twitter when there is a looming deadline and a huge number of words to write. It can be a distraction.

Some of the remainder are still in the dull “morning tweeps” and “I had muesli for breakfast” or the more disturbing narcissistic school of Twittering. Their social media use and their journalism don’t connect.

I can read a printed book for hours without stopping, but struggle to last even 30 minutes with an ebook. Eye strain, poor sleep and lost focus make sustained screen reading far harder than turning real paper pages.

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On Saturday I picked up a printed hardback novel I ordered from my local public library. When I got home I sat down to read. And read.

I read for five hours straight. On Sunday I woke early and read for another three hours without disturbing my sleeping wife.

Which is more than I can do with an ebook

Neither would have been possible with an ebook. I know, I’ve tried three specialist ebooks, Apple’s iPad 2 and an Android phone.

None work for me when it comes to a serious reading session.

I’ve found I can’t read an ebook for one whole hour, let alone five. There are three problems, two are physical, the third may be a personal failing.

Blurry vision and headaches

First, my eyes go blurry after about forty minutes. They weep. I don’t mean I’m crying, I mean water fills my eyes and runs down my cheeks. On some occasions the ebook experience also gives me headaches.

When this happens my eyes stay blurry for some time after I stop reading. At least an hour, maybe more. I can’t drive or do much that requires good vision.

This doesn’t happen with printed books.

Sleep problems from screen reading

If I read a printed book last thing before switching out the light, I can usually fall asleep minutes after hitting the pillow. If I read using a screen I struggle to sleep at all. I suspect the colour and brightness of the display has something to do with this. You may have another idea. Please share it if you do.

Losing focus with ebooks

My third problem with sustained eBook reading is I get distracted. This may be a failing on my part or it may be related to the discomfort described above. Either way, I find it hard to concentrate on an ebook. This isn’t a problem reading novels, it is a problem when I’m reading non-fiction.

I’m in a race to see whether I lose my concentration or my vision first. It turns out I’m not alone.

One often-overlooked consideration: studies show digital reading may reduce comprehension compared to print.

Backlighting blues

When I read a printed book in bed early in the morning, it doesn’t disturb my wife. When I tried reading an ebook early one morning, it woke her.

I should confess I haven’t tried a specialist ebook device in months. The technology may have improved. Perhaps I should try again. In recent weeks I’ve read books on an iPad – I took one loaded with a library on a recent trip. Yet ended up opening a printed book and sticking with it until I returned home.

This old post was written in 2011 about early e-readers and tablets. While e-ink technology and blue light filters have improved significantly, many readers still experience these issues with backlit screens. The debate between digital and print reading continues.

This story was originally posted June 2009. It remains relevant today.

People spend less time reading online news than reading printed newspapers because reading a screen is more mentally and physically taxing. For a closely related take on this see E-books harder to read, hard to comprehend.

This has consequences.

In Newspapers online – the real dilemma, Australian online media expert Ben Shepherd examined why online newspapers earn proportionately less money than print newspapers. He says it comes down to engagement. A typical online consumer of Rupert Murdoch’s products spends just 12.6 minutes a month reading News Corporation web sites. In comparison the average newspaper reader spends 2.8 hours a week with their printed copy.

Print still better in some ways

There are other factors. But I’d argue, the technology behind online reading is part of the problem:

• Newspapers and magazines are typically printed at 600 dots per inch or higher resolution.
• Computer screens typically display text and pictures at 72 pixels per inch. Some display at 96 dots per inch. This was the case in 2009 when the story was orignally written today’s phones typically have 300 to 500 dots per inch. Tablets are around the 200 to 300 DPI range. Laptops are 150 to 250 DPI. Desktop displays vary from 90 to 160 DPI.
• Contrast is usually far better on paper than on screen.
• Screens often include distracting elements. This can be particularly bad where online news sites have video or audio advertising on the same page as news stories.

Lower resolution means it takes more effort for a human brain to convert text into meaningful information. Screens are fine for relatively small amounts of text, but over the long haul your eyes and your brain will get tired faster even when there are no distractions. You’ll find it harder to concentrate and your comprehension will suffer.

Print readers can stay up all night with a decent book, but many find it hard to stick with most eBook readers for long periods.

Also, sub-editors and proofreaders generally find more errors on a printed page than on a screen.

At Wired David Pierce writes:

Kill your notifications. Yes, really. Turn them all off. (You can leave on phone calls and text messages, if you must, but nothing else.) You’ll discover that you don’t miss the stream of cards filling your lockscreen, because they never existed for your benefit. They’re for brands and developers, methods by which thirsty growth hackers can grab your attention anytime they want.

Allowing an app to send you push notifications is like allowing a store clerk to grab you by the ear and drag you into their store. You’re letting someone insert a commercial into your life anytime they want. Time to turn it off.

Source: Turn Off Your Push Notifications. All of Them | WIRED

This has bothered me for some time. Not least because the mental space needed to write anything more than a paragraph means turning off all notifications. I used to take this even further.

Push notifications sin-binned

It’s impossible to focus when there’s a constant barrage of calls on your attention. I go further than Pierce. For much of the time I have my phone set on silent, all computer notifications are permanently off. Everything, except system warnings to warn of a flat battery or similar.

Touch Voicemail catches messages from callers should they bother to leave one.

There are two exceptions to the clampdown. I allow text messages and voice calls from immediate family members and my clients or the people who work for them. The other exception is I allow calendar notifications to remind me if, say, I know I have to leave later for a meeting.

The downside of this is that some things get missed. It’s rare, but I have missed out on stories by putting myself in electronic purdah.

Yet on the whole, it works well. There’s always the list of missed calls, messages and so on. I can go to the notification centre scan the long, long list of missed items and realised that nothing important slipped through to the keeper.

The problem of messaging overload has only become worse since 2014, with WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Discord, Slack and Teams all fragmenting our communications.

Tech product reviews take many forms.

Some are scientific. Others are anecdotal.

Scientific reviews involve research, prising the back from things, taking them apart and dropping them on hard surfaces. Listening to noises. Measuring everything. Running battery life tests.

You come away from these tests with numbers. Often many numbers. Maybe you’ve heard of data journalism. This is similar, you need maths and statistics to make sense of the numbers. Scientific reviews take time. And money. You need deep pockets to test things to breaking point.

Benchmarks

Benchmarks are one reason scientific reviews take so much time. You do them again and again to make sure. You draw up meaningful, measured comparisons with rival products. Then put everything into context.

We used the scientific approach when I ran the Australian and New Zealand editions of PC Magazine.

This was in the 1990s. ACP, the publishing company I worked for, invested in a testing laboratory. We had expensive test equipment and a range of benchmarking software and tools. Specialist technicians managed the laboratory. They researched new ways to make in-depth comparisons, like the rest of us working there, they were experienced technology journalists.

The scientific approach to product reviews

My PC Magazine colleague Darren Yates was a master at the scientific approach. He tackled the job as if it were an engineering problem. He was methodical and diligent.

You can’t do that in a hurry.

There were times when the rest of my editorial team pulled their hair out waiting for the last tests to complete on a print deadline. We may have cursed but the effort was worth it.

Our test results were comprehensive. We knew to the microsecond, cent, bit, byte or milliamp what PCs and other tech products delivered.

There are still publications working along similar lines. Although taking as much time as we did then is rare today.

Publishing industry pressure

It’s not only the cost of operating a laboratory. Today’s publishers expect journalists to churn out many more words for each paid hour than in the past. That leaves less time for in-depth analysis. Less time to weigh up the evidence, to go back over numbers and check them once again.

At the other end of the scale to scientific reviews are once-over-lightly descriptions of products. These are little more than lists of product highlights with a few gushing words tacked on. The most extreme examples are where reviewers write without turning the device on — or loading the software.

Some reviews are little more than rehashed public relations or marketing material.

The dreaded reviewers’ guide

Some tech companies send reviewers’ guides. Think of them as a preferred template for write ups. I’ve seen published product reviews regurgitate this information, adding little original or critical. T hat’s cheating readers.

Somewhere between the extremes are exhaustive, in-depth descriptions. These can run to many thousands of words and include dozens of photographs. They are ridiculously nit-picking at times. A certain type of reader loves this approach.

Much of what you read today is closer to the once-over-lightly end of the spectrum than the scientific or exhaustive approach.

Need to know

One area that is often not well addressed is focusing on what readers need to know.

The problem is need-to-know differs from one audience to another. Many Geekzone readers want in-depth technical details. If I write about a device they want to know the processor, clock speed, Ram and so on.

When writing for NZ Business I often ignore or downplay technical specifications.

Readers there are more interested to know what something does and if it delivers on promises. Does it work? Does it make life easier? Is it worth the asking price?

Most of the time when I write here, my focus is on how things work in practice and how they compare with similar products. I care about whether they aid productivity more than how they get there. I like the ‘one week with this tablet ‘approach.

Beyond benchmarks

Benchmarks were important when applications always ran on PCs, not in the cloud. How software, processor, graphics and storage interact is an important part of the user experience.

While speeds and processor throughput numbers matter for specialists, most of the time they are irrelevant.

How could you, say, make a meaningful benchmark of a device accessing Xero accounts?

Ten times the processor speed doesn’t make much difference to Xero, or to a writer typing test into Microsoft Word. It is important if you plough through huge volumes of local data.

I still mention device speed if it is noticeable. For most audiences benchmarks are not useful. But this does depend on context.

Context is an important word when it comes to technology product reviews.

Fast enough

Today’s devices are usually fast enough for most apps. Much heavy-lifting now takes place in the cloud, so line speed is often as big an issue as processor performance. That will differ from user to user and even from time to time. If, say, you run Xero, your experience depends more on the connection speed than on your computer.

Gamers and design professionals may worry about performance, but beyond their needs, there is little value in measuring raw speed these days.

Instead, I prefer exploring if devices are fit for the task. Then I write about how they fit with my work. I call this the anecdotal approach to reviewing. There has been the occasional mistake, my Computers Lynx review from 40 years ago was a learning experience.

Taking a personal approach this way is a good starting point for others to relate to their own needs.  My experience and use patterns almost certainly won’t match yours, but you can often project my experience onto your needs. I’m happy to take questions in comments if people need more information.

Review product ratings

I’ve toyed with giving products ratings in my reviews. It was standard practice to do this in print magazines. We were careful about this at PC Magazine.

A lot of ratings elsewhere were meaningless. There was a heavy skew to the top of the scale.  Depending on the scale used, more products got the top or second top ranking than any other. Few rated lower than two-thirds of the way up the scale.

So much for the Bell Curve.

If a magazine review scale ran from, say, one to five stars, you’d rarely see any product score less than three. And even a score of three would be rare. I’ve known companies to launch legal action against publications awarding three or four stars. Better than average is hardly grounds for offence, let alone litigation.

As for all those five-star reviews. Were reviewers saying a large proportion of products were perfect or near perfect? That’s unlikely. For any rating system to be meaningful you’d expect to see a lot of one or two-star ratings.

That doesn’t happen.

Loss aversion

Once I heard an advertising sales exec (not working on my publication) tell a magazine advertiser: “we only review the good stuff”.

That’s awful.

Readers need to know what to avoid as much as what to buy. Indeed, basic human nature says losses are twice as painful as gains.

Where possible, I like to warn against poor products. Companies that make poor products usually know better than to send them out for review, so you’ll see less of them, but it can happen.

My approach to reviewing products isn’t perfect. I’d like to do more scientific testing, but don’t have the time or resources. Often The review loan is only for a few days, so extensive testing isn’t possible. Reviews here are unpaid. This means reviewing has to take second place behind paying jobs.

More on media process:

• SEO vs. quality – Why authority matters more than algorithms in the AI age.
• When the internet disappears – Why digital preservation and archives matter for the future of news.

This story was first posted in 2011 and needs a refresh, but the key points remain as relevant as ever.

Text editors are a lowest common denominator for dealing with documents. That is their appeal.

Plain text always travels smoothly between applications, operating systems and devices. The same can’t be said for Word documents or anything else that uses a proprietary format.

Text is compact and efficient. It is quicker to search and easier to manage than word processor documents.

Geeks already spend large parts of their working life dealing with plain text. Text is widely used for settings and configuration files. Geeks write small programs to merge, sort and otherwise process text files.

Plain text simpler than word processors

Text editors are simpler than word processors. Many have been around for more than 40 years and have roots in pre-graphical-user-interface computing.

They use keyboard commands — writing memos and other notes this way may look scary to non-technical types, but it isn’t much of a stretch if you’ve used the same tools to handle your everyday technical tasks for a decade or more.

There’s an added bonus to text editing; the applications can bypass the computer mouse. Given mouse movements are one of the most troublesome sources of strain injury, switching to keyboard-oriented writing tools makes sense for technical types who spend hours hunched over their machines.

Ergonomics

Similar ergonomic concerns explain why some professional writers turn their backs on conventional word processors. This group has another problem: modern word processors are busy-looking. It is hard to concentrate on writing when there are so many distractions.

It is tricky, but the old Dos favourite WordPerfect 5.1 could be shoehorned into working with Windows XP. Making it work with Windows Vista is more of a challenge. A small but vibrant user community at WP Universe provides tips and even drivers to make the software work with modern operating systems and hardware.

You’d need to buy WordPerfect. Two recently developed applications channel its spirit for free. Darkroom and Q10 are both stripped down text editors designed to offer distraction-free writing.

Darkroom fussily requires Microsoft .Net 2.0, a deal breaker for some, while Q10 mainly gets on with the job, but there is some beta-software strangeness with both programs. Perhaps for now, these text-editors-Word-replacements are a trend to watch and not follow.

In the meantime, find a basic, old-fashioned text editor. If you can adapt, it could be your biggest productivity boost of the year.

Geoffrey Moore wrote Crossing the Chasm in 1991. The book is still an important sales reference for technology companies.

Moore says you can rank customers on a technology adoption scale. These customers can be companies, organisations or individuals.

There are five ranks. Moore divides the five into two clear groups and the gap between these groups is large. Or in his words, a chasm.

##Early Adopters Moore’s first group are early adopters. They feel they must have the latest technology. This can be about prestige or perceived competitive advantage. They are willing to pay a high price to get hold of technology early.

This high price is important. Technology companies get a big margin which funds further development or marketing. The companies love early adopters.

Chasm between visionary and mainstream

The next group are visionary customers. They need a product to gain competitive advantage or control costs. They accept immature support and absorb any technology risk.

They’ll pay a premium, often less than the early adopter premium. This allows companies to develop marketing channels and support infrastructures. These are important in the next phase.

Moore’s third phase is the bulk of the market. Moore calls them early majority or pragmatic customers. They look for clear pay-offs from a technology investment. They deliver the profits and locks a technology into the mainstream.

The fourth group are reluctant adopters. They buy mature, proven technologies if there is a sensible business case. They look for commodity products.

The last group are those who may never adopt a technology. There are companies that still don’t use email, mobile phones or computerised book-keeping.

Crossing the chasm

Moore says for any technology to succeed it must cross the chasm from the first two phases and enter the third. It’s an Evil Knievel leap, many technologies can’t make it.

The bridge across the chasm might be technical. It can be about channel organisation or support infrastructure. There are political matters such as establishing a standard or it might come down to old-fashioned marketing.

To pick winners, focus on the product or technology’s ability to cross the chasm between visionary and pragmatic customers. Besides Moore’s chasm, there are common sense ideas of price and utility.

A product which meets certain key standards can sell. The number sold depends on price and function. A lower price or more functionality means higher sales. If the first two phases allow a maker to build in enough functionality or reduce price through economies of scale then it’s easier to cross the chasm.

Standards are successful

Standards are a further good indicator of likely success. Yet you need to read the signs.

Many so-called standards are anything but open. Accepted standards aren’t always the ones which prevail. Think of market dominating companies like Intel or Microsoft.

The standards used in a particular product or technology are not always fixed. For example, developers can change a non-standard communications protocol with a software upgrade.

Work, rest and play

Moore started out looking at business technology. The principles also apply to consumer products such as smartphones. The rules don’t change much between the suits and the open-neck shirts but their interpretation does.

Building up a head of steam to cross the chasm is harder for makers of consumer hardware. Consumers rarely look for a return on their investment in the business sense. They are less willing to pay top dollar for new products.

Complicating matters further is the way many products now straddle both markets. In some areas the consumer market influences business purchasing strategies. For example, the first customers to adopt the iPhone were consumers.

There’s a clear connection between Moore’s chasm and Gartner’s Hype Cycle. While the two look at adoption from different points of view, both recognise there is a hump to get over before a product or technology can succeed.

This post was written in 2011 when Microsoft killed its Reader software: 15 years later, the warning about proprietary formats remains more relevant than ever—and Microsoft Reader is still dead.

Microsoft’s decision to kill its Reader eBook software is no surprise.

When it launched in 2000, Microsoft Reader wasn’t bad. Reader used Microsoft’s ClearType font technology to make text more readable on the relatively low-resolution screens common at the time.

Over the years Reader has been neglected. Other eBook formats – often built around hardware – zoomed past Microsoft in terms of technology and popularity.

What happened to my eBook library

I own a small library of eBooks in Microsoft’s .lit format. Or at least I did. Only a handful of titles and only one that I paid money for.

The books in question are stored somewhere in a back-up on one of the half-dozen or so drives sitting in my home office. I haven’t looked at them in years and I haven’t even bothered to install the Microsoft Reader software on my latest Windows 7 desktop and laptop – that decision alone speaks volumes.

I probably won’t need to read those eBooks again. If I wanted to, it would be a struggle.

2026 update: It is now impossible to read those old books using standard personal computer hardware and software.

The problem with proprietary eBook technology

And that’s the hidden flaw behind all proprietary eBook technologies. They are not timeless.

The problem isn’t just data formats. I’ve documents stored on floppy disks I’ll never access again. A few years ago I threw out 3-inch floppies (a proprietary format from the early 1980s) and the older 5.25 inch discs. At one point I had 8-inch floppies. If those discs contained documents, they are lost forever.

Print books go on effectively for ever. There are many books in my physical library that are older than me. I once read a 400 year old book. Hell, scholars can read Ancient Greek documents and even older works.

Soon, it’ll be a huge mission to read something published for Microsoft Reader.

Enduring formats

While today’s popular eBook formats may last longer than Microsoft Reader, only a fool would assume they will be around for ever. In the meantime I plan to find a way of converting .lit files to another format for when I need those books again.

_While this was originally written in 2008 and the specific problems mentioned here are history, the main point remains as relevant as ever. _

Converting documents from one format to another can be hard.

Sometimes the problem is incompatibilities between different generations of the same application. Microsoft Word 2007’s docx file format isn’t automatically readable in older version of Word.

The same is true for files generated by Excel 2007 and PowerPoint 2007.

When you know in advance a colleague uses an earlier application version, you can choose to do the polite thing and save your document in the older format. This backward compatibility is built-in to Word 2007. Most applications offer similar backward compatibility.

Backward compatibility – up to a point

This is fine in theory, but you’ll either have to remember which format each colleague can use or you’ll just have to send everything in the older format. The problem with this approach is important things in the newer document format may go missing during translation to the older format.

If someone sends you a unopenable docx file – and you’re running an older, yet still reasonably up-to-date version of Word, you’ll only be able to work with the file if you’ve downloaded the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack. This will also work with your Excel and PowerPoint files.

Things can be harder when converting files between applications from rival software companies or between applications running on different operating systems.

Not all software companies go out of their way to may conversion simple. Dealing with ancient documents from long-deceased operating systems is almost impossible. I’ve got MS-Dos Wordperfect and Planperfect files that I can no longer read.

Text, the lowest common denominator

Some geeks by-pass conversion problems by sticking with lowest-common-denominator file formats. Just about every application on any kind of operating system or hardware device that deals with text, from supercomputers to mobile phones and mp3 players can cope with data stored as plain text (.txt) files.

Plain text is enjoying something of a revival thanks to the popularity of texting and similar lo-fi applications.

Text makes sense if you don’t need to keep style formatting information such as fonts, character sizes and bold or italic characters in your documents. An alternative low-end file format allowing some basic style formatting is .rtf, the rich text format. This was originally developed by Microsoft some 20 years ago to allow documents to move between different operating systems and it is still present as an option in just about every application that uses text today.

While I can no longer read my ancient Wordperfect files, I have recently found prehistoric documents from the early 1980s when I ran the CP/M operating system and a program called WordStar. Because they were stored as text files, they are still readable.

Years of writing about technology has taught me to be more, not less, cautious about new gadgets or software.

I’m not an early adopter.

Early adopters are people who feel they must own the latest devices. They think they run ahead of the pack. They upgrade devices and software before everyone else.

Early adopters use the latest phones. They buy cars with weird features.

In the past they would queue in the wee small hours for iPhones, iPads or games consoles. There was a time when they’d go to midnight store openings to get the newest version of Microsoft Windows a few hours earlier.

You have to ask yourself why anyone would do that.

The pre-order brigade

Nowadays they are the people who order devices before they are officially available.

In practice their computers often don’t work because they are awash in beta and alpha versions of software screwing things up.

And some of their kit is, well, unfinished.

Computer makers depend on early adopters. They use them as guinea pigs.

Early adopter first to benefit, first to pay

Marketing types will tell you early adopters will buy a product first to steal a march over the rest of humanity. They claim they will be the first to reap the benefits of the new product. It will make them more productive or live more enjoyable lives.

This can be true. Yet early adopters often face the trauma of getting unfinished, unpolished products to work. Often before manufacturer support teams have learnt the wrinkles of their new products.

Some early adopters race to buy a device that turns out to be a dud and is quickly abandoned by the market and soon after by its maker.

For example, in 2015, my other web site looked at how early adopters of Microsoft’s abandoned Windows Phone were left stranded.

Paying a higher price

There’s another reason computer makers love early adopters — they pay more for technology.

New products usually hit the market with a premium price. Once a product matures, the bugs eliminated and competition appears, profit margins are slimmer.

Companies use high-paying early adopters to fund their product development.

Being an early adopter is fine if you enjoy playing with digital toys. If productivity isn’t as important to you as being cool with a certain crowd. It’s OK if you have the time and money to waste making them work. If you can afford to take a risk on a dud product.

I don’t. I prefer to let others try things first. Let computer makers and software developers iron out the wrinkles while the product proves its worth. Then I’ll turn up with my money.

In technology the early bird pays the bill.

This story was originally posted in September 2017.

At Reseller News, Rob O’Neill writes:

Kiwibank has booked a $90 million impairment in its software assets and flagged a major change in its SAP core banking rollout.

“Although the strategic review has not yet concluded, a potential change to how we build the core ‘back end’ IT system (CoreMod) to match the demands of the ‘future front end’ has prompted a re-assessment of the value of the work in progress since successfully migrating our batch payments to SAP,” the bank said today.

Source: Kiwibank books a $90 million impairment on software – Reseller News

You have to wonder why boards tolerate large-scale SAP projects when the failure rate is so high.

I’ve been told, off-the-record, by a number of high-ranking technology executives that dumb decisions are imposed from the top down with CIOs left to carry the can and pick up the pieces.

One recurring theme is that most of the cost and time overruns are due to extensive integration and customisation. Make that unnecessary integration and customisation.

It is as if every bank or large business has unique, arcane and esoteric processes that can only be covered by expensive and risky software rewrites.

We know that simply isn’t true.

To think there is something magic tied up in those processes is madness. And expensive.

A smarter strategy for a bank, or any large-scale enterprise, would be to purchase off-the-shelf technology and redesign internal business processes to fit the software. Packaged software usually comes with flexible enough options and settings to cope with essential exceptions.

That’s how it works for small businesses buying accounting software from firms like Xero. Speaking of Xero:

This story was first posted in March 2020.

New Zealand interactive game developers earned $203.4 million dollars during the 2019 financial year – double the $99.9m earned only two years earlier in 2017. The success comes from targeting audiences around the world and 96% of the industry’s earnings came from exports.

Technology lets us export photons in place of atoms. The idea was a common theme in my writing 25 years ago when the internet took off. It took time for the reality of this to creep up on us. Now it is happening in a big way thanks to New Zealand’s game developers.

One hundred years ago farmers would load sheep carcasses onto the, then, latest technology; refrigerator ships. These would belch smoke as they steamed to the other side of the world. It meant exporters earned foreign currency. This kick-started New Zealand on the path to, fifty years later, being one of the world’s richest countries.

Sheep carcasses, milk powder, crayfish, apples and all those other exports were made of atoms. They weighed kilograms and they needed to be physically shifted. The products would often take weeks to reach their destination by ship. There were physical risks.

Game developers sell light particles

Today, when, say, Grinding Gear Games, makes a game sale on the other side of the world, photons, tiny particles of light, race to their new home in a fraction of a second.

There’s nothing wrong with physical exports, that’s been what we’ve done for as long as anyone can remember. Yet tomorrow’s rivers of gold are going to come from exporting photons. We need to start thinking of games exports in the same way we once thought of meat or dairy exports.

The games industry’s export success reflects a broader pattern: NZ tech companies must think globally from the start, turning our small market size from a limitation into a strategic advantage."

If the game industry grows at the same pace for the next five years it could be worth a billion dollars a year by 2025. That’s still less than, say, wine or kiwifruit, but with much better margins.

The games industry exemplifies the high-value export economy Sir Paul Callaghan envisioned. Rowan Simpson’s analysis of the Callaghan legacy showed New Zealand largely failed the challenge to build innovation-driven prosperity. Yet games developers—earning 96% of revenue from exports with minimal physical infrastructure—demonstrate exactly the “exporting photons not atoms” model Callaghan championed.

Building this billion-dollar future requires a steady pipeline of skilled developers. Computer games technology degrees have long been recognized as serious career moves, offering pathways into one of New Zealand’s fastest-growing export sectors.

New Zealand’s games industry creates the exports and well-paid jobs that make government eyes light up.

To date the sector has outperformed almost everyone else. Sales double roughly every two years.

Selling photons around the world earns $20 overseas for every dollar made at home.

This export-first approach reflects how NZ startups are born global - forced by our small market to target international audiences from the outset.

Last year the industry earned $323.9 million.

Now all that is at risk.

Rowan Simpson’s recent analysis of Sir Paul Callaghan’s legacy showed New Zealand struggling to build the high-value, innovation-driven economy Callaghan envisioned. The games industry is one of the few sectors that succeeded—exporting digital products, creating well-paid jobs, doubling revenue every two years. Losing this to Australia would be another missed opportunity in a long series.

Australian land grab

Australia plans to hand video games companies a 30 to 40 per cent tax incentive.

That, says the local industry, will trigger a brain drain across the Tasman. Investment will follow in its wake.

You could view it as a land grab.

Chelsea Rapp, who chairs the New Zealand Game Developers Association says: “Any chance we had of attracting overseas studios to set up shop in New Zealand ends in 2022, and some New Zealand studios are already looking at expanding into Australia instead of expanding locally.”

The Australian government scheme gives game developers a 30 per cent refundable tax offset for production from 2022. On top of the federal money, several Australian states have their own offers which could add a further 10 per cent to the lure.

There’s a suitable vehicle

It’s common when stories like this emerge that the local industry body calls on our government to match the Australian incentives. Yet, there is a New Zealand scheme in place that is similar to the new Australian one.

The New Zealand Screen Production Grant hands out similar sums of money to film and TV companies planning to shoot here. Most of this goes to overseas companies who move here for a while, then pack up and leave at the end.

Games companies are not able to get this grant.

Here for the longer term

The NZGDA points out that games companies are not likely to pull out immediately after completing a new production. Instead they hang around and start again, either on a sequel or a new project.

In other words, pouring money into the games sector keeps jobs and investment ticking over. There are arguments that governments should not subsidise industries. And there is always a risk of a race to the bottom with Australia.

Almost everyone in business can make an argument why their needs deserve support. Yet in this case the subsidies and race to a bottom risk are already in place. At least for the film sector. It doesn’t make sense to exclude the games market.

What’s more, the games industry often interacts with and swaps skills and personnel other high tech sectors. Keeping it here in New Zealand will benefit the entire home grown technology scene.

The industry’s need for skilled developers isn’t new—games technology education has long been recognized as a pathway to well-paid careers, but Australia’s tax incentives threaten to drain that talent pool.

This story was first posted in March 2013, but it goes back much longer…

Thirty years ago I reviewed the eight-bit Camputers Lynx for Your Computer magazine (no longer online). Tony Smith picked up my review for a look back at the Lynx he wrote for The Register.

The Lynx was interesting. It had a solid case with a keyboard — a design like the Commodore 64 and Vic-20. In those days most British microcomputers had advanced technology inside, they were rubbish on the outside. This was different.

The Lynx had a better specification than its rivals. Camputers offered a higher resolution than competitors and packed the latest ideas in the box. As my review points out, it was well-suited for machine-code programming. Computer buyers thought this was important in the early 1980s.

Camputers Lynx was late to the microcomputer party

As the Register says, the Lynx wasn’t a success. It arrived too late appearing at the end of the British microcomputer boom. And it was expensive compared with popular models. Camputers failed to attract interest from games developers. That proved fatal.

Camputers included a printer port on the back of the Lynx. I mentioned this in another story I wrote about the machine but failed to mention the printer port didn’t work.

Much to my embarrassment my boss at the time, Jack Schofield, pointed this out to me. My excuse — not a good one — is that Camputers had earlier showed me a demonstration where the machine printed text.

The demo Camputers Lynx unit must have been a non-production computer. I learnt an important lesson: don’t trust product demonstrations, trust only what you test yourself.

To most people open source means free software.

Anyone can download this kind of software without paying a fee. It doesn’t break any laws. You have the original developer’s permission to use it.

You can run the software, copy it and pass it on to friends and colleagues.

Free software is only part of the story. It isn’t the most important thing about open source. Yet free software is liberating.

Open source lets you look at code

What matters more is that you can look at the code used to write the software. This means you can see how the developers made the program.

If you have coding skills you can figure out what the developers did. You may be able to understand the assumptions and decisions they made when they wrote the code.

You can tinker with the code and release your own customised version.

Or perhaps you might spot a flaw or an area where the original developers could have done something better. When that happens you can send what you found to the developers and have them fix it, or you can fix it yourself and send them the improved version.

Improving software

This is how software evolves and improves over time. The same process can work with software that isn’t open, but letting everyone interested take a look speeds things up and often means better results.

When you tinker with, improve or fix open source software, you are expected to make your new version as freely available as the original. That way others can follow your work, improve or fix it.

This is a virtuous circle.

Any piece of code can be open source. There are libraries of code snippets you can use to perform simple tasks or include in your own projects.

There are applications and even operating systems. Some of the best known software is based on open source.

Beyond free

While ‘free’ is an important part of the philosophy, there can be open source paid-for software. That is you can look at the code, but you have to pay to use it. The money is often used to pay for further development.

This approach has many of the same benefits. It means that people and companies can earn a living at the same time.

There are also many commercial and semi-commercial products and services that are build on open source foundations.

The opposite to open source software is often known as proprietary software. You can think of this as closed source. It is where someone, usually a company, owns the intellectual property. In some cases this can include patents.

As a rule you don’t get to see proprietary code and you pay to use the software. Until about 30 years ago all software was proprietary. A lot of enterprise and software used by government still is.

Open source now dominates the software world. Most of the world’s systems run on it. The web is open. Most phones run Android, which is a form of open source.

Windows 11 didn’t get a mention in last week’s look at the HP OmniBook X. That was deliberate. If HP’s, otherwise enticing, laptop has a weak spot, it is Microsoft’s operating system.

This was the first time I attempted to work using Windows 11. My previous encounters with the operating system were fleeting and shallow. I was skeptical of Windows 11 at launch, and this hands-on experience confirmed my concerns.

My next Windows 11 experience was on the Surface Laptop Studio, and once again, even excellent hardware can’t compensate for the OS’s frustrations.

For the past 11 years I’ve run Macs. At first with Windows as a second string, but more recently I’ve been exclusively Mac.

What does Windows 11 do for productivity?

When Windows switched from 7 to 8, my productivity dropped. Then I took the plunge with a MacBook. It wasn’t my first time with Apple, but that’s another story.

To say my productivity soared is putting it mildly, moving from Windows to Mac was like gaining an extra working day each week. That’s important when work pays by the word or by the hour.

Windows does some things better than MacOS. Upgrades are easier, working with third party hardware is easier. It also has a wider range of games and applications, not that any of that matters to me.

But, hear me out, it feels like Windows 11 treats users with contempt.

Notification hell

After a decade with MacOS I was shocked to see an important-looking notification appear in the bottom left hand corner of the Windows 11 display that turned out to be an advertisement. Microsoft literally interrupted my flow to direct me to where I could buy a third-party application.

This is not OK. Not in any conceivable world.

Another notification, sorry “new alert” flashed up. This might be acceptable if, say, World War III had started and I needed to head to a bunker. The ‘news’ story concerned a ‘celebrity’ I have never heard of doing something I don’t even remotely care about.

At some point, I was busy, so I didn’t take notes, a promotion for a game appeared.

This is not the future we signed up for

How can this even happen with a device that is meant to be a productivity tool?

Sure, all this can be turned off.

Actually I don’t know if it can be turned off. I’m presuming it can, but I couldn’t find where to mute these things without Googling… Except it wasn’t Google. It was Bing and Bing wasn’t forthcoming with the information.

Muting is not the point. These alerts are switched on by default. This is the Windows 11 experience Microsoft wants you to have.

Rightly or wrongly it feels as if Microsoft views Windows 11 users as a market to be milked for extra revenue at every possible opportunity.

Culture shock

This is not an Apple is better than Microsoft partisan rant. Well, not entirely. Apple pushes customers towards iCloud, Music and Apple TV among other services, but it doesn’t stop you from working in order to do this.

The point here is that after a decade away from Windows, revisiting the operating system is a culture shock. It wasn’t this way in 2012.

Before I sent the OmniBook X back to HP, I checked to see if it could run Linux as an alternative, non annoying, operating system. The official answer appears to be “not yet”. The correct answer is “Not soon enough”.

This post was written in March 2013 when Google killed Reader. It is a warning about relying on free services from big tech companies has been validated repeatedly since then. Google has killed over 200 products including Google+, Inbox, Hangouts, Stadia, Podcasts and many more. The lesson remains: sometimes free is too high a price. Updated 2025.

Google says it is closing its free Google Reader service because of declining use.

The company doesn’t make any money from its free web-based RSS reader, so its death doesn’t come as a surprise. After all, Google is a business, not a charity.

RSS is vital. Thousands of people including journalists rely on Google Reader to check online news feed.

Google Reader has been the best tool for that job for a long time. It has been so good that it has killed off most of its competition.

Nothing else compares

Twitter, Facebook and other social media tools simply don’t compare for this kind of work. RSS feeds provide comprehensive lists, social media tends to give a fleeting snapshot.

There are other RSS tools, none of them work as well as Google Reader. It has the best interface for quickly scanning large numbers of posts, it has decent search tools built-in.

If Google started charging for Google Reader, I’d happily pay. It would be worth the fee.

There’s a disturbing side to Google’s decision to shut Google Reader. Before Reader there was a healthy set of competing RSS readers. One by one these fell by the wayside because they were unable to compete with the search giant’s free service.

Google entered the space, wiped out the competition and now it is leaving the space.

A persuasive look at the many reasons why you should have your own website, and some of the benefits it will bring you.

Source: Why I Have a Website and You Should Too · Jamie Tanna | Software (Quality) Engineer

Jamie Tanna’s post lists many good reasons to have a website. Tanna writes from a software engineer’s point of view. Many of the reasons he offers translate directly to other trades and professions.

Your own place online

A powerful reason is to own your own little patch of the online world, what people used to call cyberspace. As Tanna says your patch can be many things, a hub where people contact you, an outlet for your writing and other creative work, or a sophisticated curriculum vitae.

Now you may be thinking you can do all these things on Facebook, Twitter, Medium or Linkedin. That’s true up to a point.

Yet you don’t own those spaces. You are part of someone else’s business model. You don’t have control over how they look, you can’t even be sure they will be there in the long term.

After all, there were people who thought the same about Geocities, Google+ or MySpace in the past.

Do it yourself

Creating your own site takes time, effort and maybe a little money. It doesn’t have to take a lot of any of these things. You’ll need to pay for a domain name… that’s roughly $20 a year. If you are hard-pressed financially there are free options with companies like WordPress. You can get a basic WordPress site up in an hour or so.

You don’t need to be a writer to own your own website. If you post things to Facebook or Twitter, use your site instead (or as well as). It could be a place for photography.

One thing you will find is that a website gives you more of a voice than you’ll get on other people’s sites.

“Some storytellers and influencers are also migrating from personal sites toward individual channels on Medium, Blogger, Twitter, Instagram, and Youtube. But there’s a risk here — those creating and sharing unique content on these channels can lose ownership of that content. And in a world where content is king, brands need to protect their identity.”

As you might expect, Morrison is keen on changing the downward trajectory for domain name registration, but he has a valid point – why would you put the fate of your business in the hands of a platform owned by someone else? Sure, use Facebook etc to engage with your customers, but why not maintain control over your own brand? It baffles me, especially as creating a website is so much easier than it used to be.

Source: Why businesses aren’t picking domain names | ITP Techblog (no longer online).

At ITP Techblog Sarah Putt sees the issue of using Facebook or another social media site as a matter of branding.

She is right. Branding is important.

Yet the issue doesn’t stop there.

A site of your own

Not owning your own domain name, your own website, means you are not master or mistress of your online destiny. It’s that simple. If you place your trust in the big tech companies, they can pull the rug at any moment.

This isn’t scaremongering. It has happened time and again. In many cases companies have been left high and dry. Some have gone under as a result.

The big tech companies care no more about the small businesses who piggyback off their services than you care about the individual microscopic bugs living in your gut.

Media companies learned this lesson the hard way. A decade or so ago Facebook and Google have made huge efforts to woo media companies. They promised all kinds of deals.

Many of those companies that went in boots and all are now out of business. Gone. Kaput.

Pulling the plug

Google pulled the plug on services like Wave and Google+ almost overnight after persuading media companies to sign up. Big tech companies change their rules on a whim. Some of those whims meant cutting off the ways media companies could earn revenue.

Few media companies ever made any much money from the online giants. Those who managed to survive in a fierce and hostile landscape had nowhere to go when the services eventually closed. Many sank without a trace.

Sure, you may have heard stories about people who have made money from having an online business presence on one of the tech giants’ sites. You may also have heard stories about people winning big lottery prizes. The odds are about the same.

Yes, it can be cheap, even free in some cases, to hang out your shingle on Facebook or Google. But it is never really your shingle. It’s theirs.

The case for your own domain name

On the flip side, starting your own web site is not expensive. You can buy a domain name and have a simple presence for the price of a good lunch.

It doesn’t have to be hard work. You don’t need something fancy. And let’s face it, most Facebook companies pages are nothing to write home about either.

Use WordPress. It is not expensive. There’s plenty of help around to get you started. Depending on your needs you can choose between WordPress.com or WordPress.org.

The important thing is the site is entirely your property. I often hear one argument in favour of working with Facebook. It goes somewhere along the lines of ‘fishing where the fish swim’. It’s true, your customers probably are on Facebook. There’s nothing to stop you from going there to engage with with them… just make sure you direct them to your independent web site.

For several years now, the trend among geeks has been to abandon the RSS format. RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a way to queue up and serve content from the internet.

Source: The Case for RSS — MacSparky

Geeks might not like RSS, but it’s an essential tool if you monitor news or need to stay up to date with developments in a subject area.

An RSS feed is a way of listing online material. There’s a feed for this site if you’re interested. It sends out a short headline and an extract for each new post. That way you can stay up to date with everything published here without needing to constantly revisit the site to check for updates.

Separate feeds

Some big sites break up their news rivers into separate feeds. At the New York Times or The Guardian you can choose to read the technology news feed. At ZDNet you can pick subject feeds or selected a feed for an individual journalist.

Sometimes you can also roll your own niche feeds from big sites by using a search term to get a list of all stories including a certain key word.

The beauty of RSS is that it is comprehensive. It misses nothing. If you go offline for a week you can pick up where you left off and catch up immediately.

RSS is comprehensive

The alternatives are social media sites like Twitter or Facebook. They are nothing like as comprehensive or as easy to manage.

Tweets go flying past in a blur on Twitter.

All the main social media sites manage your feed. They decide what you see. This means you can miss important posts as they get pushed out of sight. That doesn’t happen with RSS.

In his story David Sparks says you need to be on Twitter all the time to catch news. Make that: you need to be on Twitter all the time AND staying more alert than most people can manage.

Universal feed

The other great thing about RSS is the format is so universal. It can be as simple as raw text. You can read it on your phone, tablet, computer or anywhere at any time. You can suck it out and place it on your own web site, for instance.

There are RSS readers built into browsers, mail clients like Outlook and other standard software. Or at least there were. I haven’t checked again lately. Feedly is one of the most popular readers. This is both a website and a series of free apps. You can pay a little extra to extra features such as an ability to search feeds, tools for integrating feeds into your workflows and so on.

Not long after becoming a technology journalist I met Adam Osborne.

Osborne invented the portable computer. Let’s be honest, his computer was luggable.

We borrowed one for review.

It was obvious a portable computer would change everything. It set us on the path to the iPhone and the Samsung Galaxy phones. Osborne was a visionary, even if he wasn’t a good businessman — the company went bust after two years.

One thing Osborne said struck a chord at the time: “Adequate is good enough”.

No fannying about

He meant engineers should get a product to the point where it was adequate then send it out the door, no fannying about making it perfect.

It’s a philosophy software companies like Google and Microsoft built fortunes on. Apple, on the other hand, fannies about making everything perfect.

Android works on the adequate is good enough premise. Netbooks were adequate for most users. So was Windows. The fuss over Windows 8 comes down to the simple idea that for many users it isn’t adequate and therefore not good enough.

Good enough

If you’re not a power user, a gamer or an Apple addict you can pick up an adequate and, therefore, good enough, laptop for well under $1000. It’ll do everything you throw at it and then some.

There should be enough change from $1000 for an adequate but good enough phone. It may not have the latest features, but it’ll meet the needs of all but the most demanding users.

None of this is an argument against buying great kit. It’s your money: spend it how you like. But remember most of the time, you don’t have to break the bank to buy tech gear.

_This post was originally published in September 2012, so it’s now about events that happened close to 45 years ago. Oddly, I can remember this very well, better than many recent products and launches. _

Jupiter Cantab’s Jupiter Ace has just turned 30. It is a curious footnote in the history of personal computing.

My review of the Jupiter Ace at Your Computer magazine was published in November 1982. It gets a mention in The Register’s story about the Ace’s 30th birthday.

I still remember the Ace quite well, mainly because it was a quirky home computer. We called them home computers in the early 1980s, the term personal computers came later.

Go Forth with Jupiter Ace

While every other home computer used Basic, the Jupiter Ace used Forth.

Early home computers didn’t have disks or operating system in the modern sense – although you could store programs and data on cassette tape. They mainly had a version of the Basic language stored on Rom.

Basic is an interpreted language. Each line of code is processed or interpreted in turn rather than compiled into machine code. This made it slow.

We need to put slow needs in context here. The Jupiter Ace had an eight-bit processor running at 3.2Mhz. That is roughly 1000th the clock speed of a modern PC.

Forth is still interpreted, but it uses a different structure, so it is many times faster than Basic. It was designed to control radio telescopes, so it was idea for building computer controlled-projects. I had just built a synthesizer and had plans to use the Ace to build a drum machine.

However, it was harder to learn and much harder to understand. And, as I now know, I’m not geek enough for that kind of thing. At the time a friend described it to me as a write-only-language. So the Ace was essentially a computer for serious programmers. That’s not me. I tried to get my head around Forth, but the Ace was soon in a cupboard somewhere collecting dust. T hanks to Liam Proven @lproven for spotting my name in The Register story.

“It doesn’t matter what app it is – they all try to get me to turn on notifications, again and again, so that I can come back to their service. Facebook and Instagram are the most aggressive”.

Source: Still living in a Notification hell – Om Malik

There comes a point where notifications are counter-productive. In my case I first smelled a rat with Linkedin because of the constant barrage of notification mails. The service seemed desperate to get my attention.

That got me thinking about the value I got, or rather did not get, from LinkedIn — close to zero and certainly not enough to compensate for the time lost.

Nothing bad happens when notifications stop

Sure, there can be some notifications that should stop you in your tracks. It’s possible to allow family members or important colleagues to cut through. As for the rest… they can go

I killed my LinkedIn account. Nothing bad happened. In all the years I was a member I got maybe, one small freelance writing gig from LinkedIn. Since leaving my work in-tray is as full as it was and I’ve eliminated a time-sink.

Leaving Facebook is harder. There are people who are important to me who I’m in touch with there. The don’t seem to have any alternative online life. So the account lives, but I’ve turned off all notifications. In fact I’ve turned off almost all notifications from every online service or piece of software.

The only exceptions are where I need to react fast for business reasons. And, anything relating to my immediate family. Here’s the thing. Nothing bad has happened. If anything I’m more productive.

Notifications are often not about serving our needs, but are about someone else’s business model.

There is also a nuclear option. Choose one day a week to turn everything digital off: have a digital sabbath.

As Robin Williams’ 1990 book title says: The Mac is not a typewriter.

More than 20 years on, Macs and MacBooks are still not typewriters.

Yet Apple’s iPad might be.

My iPad links to an Apple Wireless Keyboard and runs iA Writer. This combination gives me the closest thing I’ve seen in 25 years of computing to an old-school manual typewriter.

For a journalist that’s a good thing.

Typewriter easy

Apple didn’t design the iPad with word processing in mind.

On its own the iPad is a poor writing tool. Although the larger on-screen keyboard makes for better typing than using a smartphone. Yet here I am tapping away and loving the experience more than I have done since my last typewriter ribbon dried up back in the 1980s.

Have I taken leave of my senses?

Let me count the ways I love you

Three things make the iPad typewriter-like:

1. Radical simplicity. The iPad, Apple’s Wireless Keyboard and iA Writer make for simple and distraction free writing.

There’s no mouse. That’s great because lifting hands off the keyboard to point and click is the number one cause of pain for old-school touch typists working on PCs.

Until you stop writing, the keyboard controls everything.

At the same time, the crisp serif text on a plain screen is the nearest thing to a type on a sheet of paper. Wonderful.

2. Text editor iA Writer is a text editor. Not a word processor.

There’s nothing dancing on my screen. No pop-ups, no incoming email. At least not the way I’ve set things up. It is just me and my words. The only word processor-like feature is the iPad’s built-in spell checker, which mainly stays out of the way.

Best of all, iA Writer doesn’t do page layout. I don’t care how my words look because I can’t tinker. That’s one less thing to worry about.

This all adds up to fast, productive writing.

3. Quick on the draw Typewriters don’t need to warm-up, to boot or load applications. Nor does the iPad.

My normal morning practice with a laptop was to make a cup of tea while waiting for the PC to be ready for writing. The iPad is ready in seconds.

I can get my thoughts down while they are still fresh. The first 100 words or so are nailed on the iPad before I’d get started on the PC.

The best computer bits are still there

While my iPad writing combination kills the bad stuff about word processing, it keeps the best feature: The ability to go back over copy and make corrections. This was always a pain when using a typewriter.

And I send my writing to just about anywhere in the world in a matter of seconds. Try doing that with a real typewriter.

Other iPad typewriter plus points

My iPad and keyboard are a lot easier to carry than my ageing and neglected portable typewriter – and easier than my laptop. The battery life is long. I can work a whole day without needing to find a power point.

iA Writer uses cloud storage. You can choose DropBox or Apple’s iCloud. This means my work is available to me on any computer anywhere in the world.

The Mac still might not be a typewriter, but the iPad does the job.

PR and marketing people hate it when journalists describe products as ‘cheap’. We get phone calls asking us to change the word to ‘budget’ or ‘affordable’.

That’s because while ‘cheap’ means you can get something at a low price, it has a secondary meaning where the word can be used to mean ‘inferior’.

It’s not as though ‘budget’ doesn’t have a similar implication when the word is used as an adjective. No-one thinks a budget airline is going to deliver a good experience.

Oh yeah?

There’s a “says who?” problem with ‘affordable’.

That $3000 laptop might be affordable to a marketing manager. A bus driver or nurse might not consider it affordable. Journalists should not use words like that. There’s a risk of making readers feel bad about themselves. There’s a danger we’re acting as unpaid promoters when using the language of marketing.

We’re not perfect. I searched my site and found I have used the word 40 times over 13 years and 1500 posts.

In many cases the word is a quotation.

Guilty of using cheap

Yet, your honour, at times I’m guilty as charged.

I’ve used ‘affordable’ at least a dozen times without stopping to think there could be readers who don’t agree with that word choice.

The same logic applies to the word ‘inexpensive’. My inexpensive might not be your inexpensive.

Much of the time journalists use words like ‘cheap’ or ‘affordable’ to contrast with ‘expensive’ or ‘unaffordable’.

Now there are two words that would get a marketing person annoyed if they appeared in a story about a product.

Although not always. The Samsung sales executives showing off the company’s folding phones a year ago were happy to position the product at the premium end of the range. A high price can be a marketing strategy.

As can ‘cheap’. Yet for some reason marketing people prefer that we don’t mention that.

More on Media Language:

• “Best Ever” and other superlatives – Cutting through the hype of “language inflation.”
• The .99 price tag dark pattern – How pricing is used to manipulate perception.

Main Guide:

• How to field media questions.

I wrote this for the Sydney Morning Herald in 2007. It’s now a piece of history.

If smartphones haven’t killed off traditional handheld computers yet, the day can’t be far away. Sales of non-phone Palm and PocketPC devices are stagnant or falling. There’s been nothing much in the way of new hardware for a couple of years.

Sure, but something huge was on the way.

This is a pity. I’ve found my $500 Palm T|X to be one of my most productive tools. It goes way beyond managing my contact file and calendar information.

My word, what low expectations we had in those days.

The T|X has a 3.8 inch 480 by 320 display. While you wouldn’t call it large, it’s half as big again as the screen on most smartphones.

But tiny by today’s standards.

It makes reading text, browsing web pages, viewing photographs and even watching movies a better experience than squinting at a smartphone display.

Which was true at the time.

The 128MB of built-in memory doesn’t sound much by today’s standards, yet I’ve got a dozen or so applications running on my handheld and scores of stored documents. If I need more memory, I simply slot in an SD card.

That sounds even less now.

And we’re not talking about any old documents. The T|X comes with a bundled version of Documents To Go, an application that allows you to read and, in a limited way, edit, Word or Excel files. It can also be used to read .pdfs, making it the nearest thing to an electronic book.

OK, this looks a bit daft today, but at the time the T|X was a realistic ebook reader.

The T|X’s best feature is its built-in WiFi. When I’m travelling around the city, I stop for coffee where’s there’s a free hot spot and catch up on emails. Sure you can do this anywhere with a smartphone – but the bigger screen makes a difference.

WiFi is still wonderful.

I use WiFi to sync my Palm with my desktop before leaving home and then reverse the process when I return.

This was a novelty.

The T|X isn’t perfect, text entry is clumsy and the battery won’t make it through an extended working day if the wireless is switched on. Yet, all-in-all, it manages to better the specification of smartphones in most departments. When I’m on business away from home I carry a smartphone and a T|X.

No doubt a phone manufacturer will marry the features of the T|X with a smartphone before much longer – judging by the announced specifications Apple’s forthcoming iPhone could get there first.

And the rest is history

**Originally written September 2021. **

At the Guardian Haroon Siddique writes Home computing pioneer Sir Clive Sinclair dies.

Sir Clive Sinclair, the inventor and entrepreneur who was instrumental in bringing home computers to the masses, has died at the age of 81.

His daughter, Belinda, said he died at home in London on Thursday morning after a long illness. Sinclair invented the pocket calculator but was best known for popularising the home computer, bringing it to British high-street stores at relatively affordable prices.

Many modern-day titans of the games industry got their start on one of his ZX models. For a certain generation of gamer, the computer of choice was either the ZX Spectrum 48K or its rival, the Commodore 64.”

My first brush with Sinclair was as an A-level student in the UK. Before he made computers, Sinclair designed a low-cost programmable calculator.

It fascinated me and, thanks to a well-paid part-time job, I managed to buy one. From memory it could only handle a few programmable steps, but it was enough to make complex calculations.

My second job after university was working as a reporter for Practical Computing magazine. I started in January 1980 and quickly became familiar with the original Sinclair ZX80 computer.

Later that year I went to the launch of the ZX81 and met Sinclair for the first time. Over the next few years he became a familiar face.

That modest, clunky ZX81 computer changed everything. Before 1981 was out, the publishing company I worked for started Your Computer magazine which focused on small, low-cost home computers. For the first few issues I was staff reporter on both titles.

The next two years were a wild roller coaster ride. An entire industry emerged and I was in the centre of it.

ZX Spectrum was Sinclair’s definitive product

For me, Sinclair’s most important product was the ZX Spectrum. It was flawed in many ways, but it could do enough to spawn a generation of entrepreneurs and get thousands of young people into computing. I still have one in my attic.

By the time the later Sinclair QL appeared, low-cost computers with decent keyboards and storage were pushing out the minimal, low-cost options Sinclair specialised in.

By now Sinclair was Sir Clive. My last brush with his business was the ill-fated C5 battery powered vehicle. It failed and Sinclair faded from sight, later the remnants of his computer business were picked up by Amstrad.

My main memories of Sinclair were his enthusiasm and his ambitions to build devices that anyone, regardless of budget, could afford.

I wrote this post in 2009 when spending one day a week offline was far less challenging than it is today. These days I might only get a day away from all digital screens every month or so.

Here’s the idea:

Set aside one day a week when you don’t switch your computer on.

A day when you don’t check mail, update Facebook or tweet.

No firing up the desktop for game playing.

It doesn’t need to be the same day every week. You may have to trim things according to needs and deadlines. You may only be able to manage one day a fortnight.

Go off-line and let the brain rest. Or, if not rest, allow it to change gear.

Take a break instead of constantly responding to incoming messages. Just let them pile up.

There’s always tomorrow.

You can de-stress. And before you say you find it stressful not being in constant touch with cyberspace, think again. You know that isn’t true.

The online world will go on without you.

Read books, chat to friends, play sport, enjoy the sunshine or bake muffins instead.

That way, when you get back online, you’ll be refreshed. It is like a mini holiday. It may sound like a cliché, but I work better after taking a day-long break from my computer.

Digital sabbath not original

The digital sabbath is not an original idea. If you are religious, the first sabbath came at the end of the first recorded week. The Biblical creation story says God rested on the seventh day.

Ancient Jews worked for six days then strictly observed the Shabbat when many everyday things were not allowed. They knew this was mentally and physically healthy. I first heard about the idea of a digital sabbath in an online forum – sadly I don’t recall who or where the original idea comes from.

Problems

It is harder to take even one day’s rest from the digital world if you have a smartphone, an ebook reader or if you use the computer as an entertainment hub for music and video. And you may have a job, or some other responsibilities that make going off-line difficult.

Nevertheless, I suggest you do what you can to give it a try, reconnect once a week with the analogue world.

I’m not perfect

I’d like  to report I take a full day away from my computer every week. The truth is, I don’t always manage it. Although I try to schedule a full day off each week, I generally only get a couple of full-blown digital sabbaths each month.

Originally published December 2011. Updated January 2026. After 40+ years in technology journalism, this principle remains central to my work.

Why detachment matters in journalism

The percentage may have changed slightly—technology has seeped deeper into everyone’s lives since 2011—but the core principle hasn’t: maintaining distance from geek culture makes for better technology journalism.

This isn’t about lacking technical knowledge. It’s about perspective. Technology journalists serve readers, not industry insiders. The moment you write primarily for other technology enthusiasts rather than the people who actually use technology in their daily lives and work, you’ve failed your audience.

According to How geeky are you? I’m only 15 per cent geek.

That seems right.

I fail because I don’t like science fiction or any other geeky form of entertainment.

Despite 30 years of writing about technology, geek culture hasn’t rubbed off on me.

I’m not comfortable when I’m with other technology journalists who want to talk about Star Trek or Dungeons and Dragons.

To say these things don’t interest me is an understatement.

We have science fiction books on our shelves at home. Visitors to our house assume they are mine. They are not. They belong to Mrs B. And apart from her reading tastes, she is even less geeky than me.

Computers do not mean geek

Most of the points I scored on the geek test come from work. After all, I’ve spent years writing about computers and technology, I know the difference between a Rom and a Ram.

Of course, I have more than one dictionary. It’s a journalist thing – they are tools of my trade. And yes, I confess I correct people’s grammar. Editing has been my job for most of my adult life.

In the past, people have commented on my non-geek status making me the wrong person to edit a newspaper’s computer pages, run a computer magazine or write about technology.

Detached

I disagree. A level of detachment means I can make better rational decisions. I’m less tempted to air my prejudices. It means I write for ordinary people, not geeks. In fact one of the skills I’m most proud of is being able to explain tricky things in plain English.

I’m a journalist first, technology specialist second. I can – and have – written about most subjects.

And anyway, most of my work has been writing for non-geek audiences. My lack of geekiness means I can better serve their needs. This approach proved especially valuable when covering New Zealand’s technology industry. Local companies need journalists who can explain their innovations to potential customers and investors, not just other technologists. Being able to translate technical developments into business and economic terms serves both the industry and the public better than insider jargon ever could.

The same applies when covering telecommunications regulation, business model challenges in media, or the impact of technology on society. These stories require understanding the technology, but they’re fundamentally about people, economics, and social change.

My journalism training taught me to ask “why should readers care?” before “how does this work?” That order matters. Geeks often reverse it.

Journalism first, technology second

This reader-first approach shaped how I’ve covered journalism itself. When publishers struggled with digital transformation, the story wasn’t about the technology—it was about business models, audience relationships and sustainable journalism.

When paywalls and subscriptions became necessary, the challenge wasn’t technical implementation but convincing readers of the value proposition. When ad-blocking threatened publishers, it was fundamentally about the broken relationship between readers, publishers, and advertisers.

Technology enables or constrains these developments, but it’s never the whole story. That’s why detachment from geek culture remains an asset, not a liability.

More on journalism and media: This post is part of ongoing coverage about journalism practice, business models and the craft of technology reporting:

• Lack of local technology news damages industry
• Apple’s iPad won’t save newspapers.
• ‘Paywall’ is off-putting, try talking about subscriptions
• Digital subscription spending hits the wall
• Does online media fill the gap left by newspapers

An excellent post cum manifesto from Dave Winer who has done some deep thinking about the web in the past.

Here he encapsulates one perspective on the current state of play that many of us would subscribe to even if it isn’t orthodox thinking.

Activity.pub is fine and good, but as Winer says, it isn’t the only open protocol. Links are essential, but I’d argue the RSS feeds first developed by WIner are equally important.