13 years, at least 15 different devices across 3 hardware providers (Samsung, Google, Nothing) and yesterday I switched over to to the Apple platform. My reason for this, the Apple Watch Ultra 2.
Being on the Apple ecosystem for a couple of months now has helped me realize just why Apple fans are Apple fans, it’s because shit.just.works, and the things that you don’t even know that could be delightful, are delightful. Here’s just a few of them that have caught me pleasantly by surprise, and why I can see myself getting more and more into the ecosystem over the coming weeks, months and years.
- My Watch unlocks both my phone and my (work) laptop;
- Getting a call? Notification shows up in all three places, unobtrusively and I can answer from any three and use either my airpods or speaker phone – it might seem a bit overdone when you have all three near you, but in the real world I frequently don’t and so whatever I have with me/is most convenient/hands free is what I use to answer;
- Application settings and restoration of devices/transfers of devices – just works, seamlessly and beautifully
I can see why people are so impressed.
So when I originally started to draft this message a few months back (note to self, really do need to carve out more time to write, that said I can barely find time to write in my paper journal, let alone here on this public facing bs fest of self-indulgence), Pebble, or T2 as it was previously known was one of the new Twitter/X replacements that had promoted itself on being a kinder, fairer, nicer place to socialize – and on that front they were entirely true. The challenge they had was that without any real conflict, people were all exceedingly polite, you didn’t have anything that drew in any attention or desire to return. One does not watch a movie or tv show where everybody walks around being nice to each other and not saying anything that offends anyone else, it’s not a reflection of reality and doesn’t create any draw for people to want to visit.
Unsurprisingly a couple of days ago the site said that it was shutting down, with it peaking at 10 to 15k users and then that number dropping down into the mid-thousands over the past few weeks. I know that the team said they learnt a lot during the journey, and it certainly taught me a few things about the need for scaling, the nature of humans and the network effects that are inherent in the legacy application (Twitter, now X) are very powerful factors.
Ok, this is relatively short and sweet, and a reflection of my limited time I seem to have of late. More to come, but later.