On a long road trip this weekend, my son, and I listened to the latest Apple developers conference presentation. CEO Tim Cook and his staff introduced new laptops, new software, and their new AR headset.
It was all very impressive, and made me think about how far computing technology and software have come since I bought my first Apple product in 1984. I have my original Apple //c computer in my office at home and the programs & files on the magnetic floppy discs still work!
Listening to the announcements at the conference, you couldn’t help but see that Apple now spans many dimensions of our digital lives and want many more.
One of my goals in early retirement was to effectively digitize my ‘Smart Life’, but so far, I’ve built a patchwork quilt of things that don’t always work well together. Below, I made a list of the 36 different ways that we manage our lives and entertain ourselves with internet-connected devices and software …
OUR DIGITAL LIFE TODAY …
Data Carriers: Cellular (TMobile), Home WiFi (Xfinity)
Mobile Devices: Phone (Apple), Tablet (Apple), Laptop (MacBook), Watch (Apple), GPS Tags (Apple), Drone (DJI), Cars (BMW & Apple), Mp3 Players (Apple), Headphones (Apple)
Home Devices: Security (xFinity), WiFi Network (Google), Cameras (Wyze), Thermostat (Google), Lighting (Kasa), Printer (Canon)
Entertainment Devices: Television (Amazon & Vizio), Voice Assistants (Amazon), Streaming Devices (Amazon & Apple)
Software: File Storage (Dropbox & Apple), Photos (Apple), Messaging (Apple & Facebook), Social (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram), Browser (Google & Apple), Email (Google), Calendar (Google & Apple), Fitness (Apple), Websites (WordPress & GoDaddy), AI (ChatGPT & MidJourney), Business (Microsoft)
Media: Streaming Video (Netflix, Amazon, Disney, Apple), Music (Spotify), Radio (Sirius XM), Print (Apple), Newspaper (TwinCities.com), Podcasts (Overcast & Apple)
You can see that Apple is the big dog of our digital life already. They are involved in almost half of these hardware and software platforms, and they tend to be the most critical ones. I guess that’s no surprise as, like many people, my digital life is anchored by my phone. It’s the one thing always with me. Almost everything else on the list is primarily enabled or connected to that phone.
My question is how much further do I take it with Apple? How much more do I want to engage with them for the benefit of having the most seamless experience possible?
I think a lot more of my digital could be added to the Apple Ecosystem. I could substitute Apple Mail for Google Mail, switch Apple Music for Spotify, upgrade two more cars to Apple CarPlay, and use Apple TV wrangle streaming services on our TVs (already includes Apple+).
I know some people are not big fans of Apple as a company. I understand their arguments, but I have found their hardware and software be the best in the world. Not in every category, but they are a leader in most of them.
In my mind, their quality & value is greatly enhanced by the way their devices and cloud services integrate with each other. It seems small, but I recently substituted Apple Maps for Google Maps, and that has worked out great. The integration is amazing.
It’s a lot of work to transfer accounts, files, playlists, documents, and other content from one platform to another, but I think I’m at a point where it makes sense to put even more of my digital life into Apple’s care. At this point, I see them as the most thoughtful, capable, and secure company to choose for this.
They certainly charge a premium for their products and services, but they also do a great job with what they offer. I’ll make the shift gradually, but by the end of the year, I expect everything will be better Apple-integrated and I will think of them as my primary go-to digital provider & host. Maybe I’ll even figure out a way to connect my old Apple //c.
How do you keep your ‘Digital Life’ well-organized?
Image: Pixabay
MrFireStation 
I was a little late to computer’s learning Lotus-123 on a pc in 1988. My work was Office based and thus my environment is WORD and Excel. I use same for my consulting. I store work and personal files on an external hard drive and in the Office-365 Cloud.
I do the bulk of my internet reading on iPhone or iPad. I refuse to pay for extra storage from Apple.
Email is Google, calendar is both office and Apple but struggle with getting them to sync. I wish my children, ie tech support lived closer.
I also keep our after life instructions and list of accounts in a digital app provided by our financial advisor at Raymond James. This is a gift to our children to provide a roadmap when we die.
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I run Office on my Macs, but keep the files in the Apple iCloud Files. We used a version of the Office 365 Cloud (‘One Drive’) at MegaCorp, but I didn’t care for it or Google Drive too much. When I made that list today, I was surprised at how little involvement I have with Microsoft products. 20 years ago, they seemed like they were going to own the future!
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I still do Corporate IT Consulting, where Microsoft’s Office 365 is the clear runaway winner in the Office Tools marketplace. I prefer the premium editions of Office 365, because they give you license rights to install Office tools locally on up to five of your devices. I am not so much a fan of the web versions of these products.
Many of the products in the Office Suite were not so good when they first rolled them out. Their virtual meeting platform Teams was a mashup of Placeware and Skype, and yes Microsoft found a way to screw up Skype for a while. The current version of Teams is much better than Zoom in my opinion. I like the way that Teams is well integrated with Outlook Calendars. Very easy to join, schedule or start a meeting.
OneDrive has become a lot better recently as well. It has good versioning control and can be setup to synchronize local copies onto your drive and you get 1 TB of storage with your Office 365 subscription at no additional cost. Office 365 is also gaining footprint in the Identity Provider Marketplace with its Azure AD.
My household has a combination iPhones, Android, Windows 10 laptops and gaming computers, and an Air Mac. I have found Apple products mostly easy to work with, except when you want to do something that is not within their use case. For example changing batteries on iPhones is a real pain. You have to use a heat gun and a putty knife to scrape Li-ion batteries off the back cover because they were glued to the cover. I also don’t like that I cannot add my own memory. I refreshed my son’s Air Mac and after putting a new drive in, was amazed how everything transferred over from the cloud.
Here are a couple money saving tips that are in the spirit of FIRE. For the most part computer technology does not change that fast and it doesn’t wear out that fast if you take care of it.
I recommend buying commercial grade laptops, because I have found consumer grades have a much lighter duty build quality and do not hold up. I use a Dell Precision that went off maintenance in January 2019 and I was able to get my former employer to give it to me for free. It is very current in terms of having a 1 TB M.2 Solid State Disk. Here are tricks to extend the life. Change out the battery about every three years. Li-ion can become dangerous if you allow them to get old, especially if you see them start to swell. While changing the battery use compressed air to clean out the fan cooling ducts. Apply fresh thermal paste to the top of the CPUs to transfer heat better to the heatsinks. Uninstall bad software that are resource hogs that you are not using.
My son used his Air MacBook for four years of high school. We bought it out for a hundred or so when he graduated. I upgraded his disk from a mechanical disk to a solid state disk that was twice the size. Doubled his RAM. Changed batteries, cleaned the fan ducts, and reapplied thermal paste to CPUs. This couple hundred dollar laptop has almost got him through four years at UCLA.
For gaming PCs, we upgrade the Graphics Processors (GPUs) every couple of years. GPU and the internet connection is where the majority of gaming performance comes from. You can also change Solid State Disks when upgrading the GPUs to get more and faster storage at reasonable cost. Once again, this is also a good time to clean the dust out of the cooling ducts and freshen up your CPU thermal paste. There is no need to overclock your CPU and Memory, and you will find that it hurts system stability. If you look a resources during intense gaming (my sons, not mine) you will see that the GPU is doing all the work and the CPU is loafing.
Most computing environments are rich in CPU and RAM resources. The major determinants of speed are how fast your Solid State Storage and Internet Connections are. Buying a new laptop to get the latest Intel CPU doesn’t provide much value.
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Great tips! It sounds like you could open your own computer repair shop if you had the desire. I replaced a battery in my last MacBook. That’s the only ‘service’ that I have ever attempted.
We use Microsoft Teams for one of the boards I am on. I’m not a big fan. Logging on from Google Calendar is hit or miss. It asks a lot of repetitive questions and it’s 50/50 if it boots up in time.
Apple shared some new software features yesterday that looked like they will be useful for meetings. They said they will work across Teams, Zoom, and other video conferencing platforms.
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I work on laptop and mobile technology just for my family. The parent of one of my son’s friends asked my wife if I could fix her son’s computer. My wife answered that this is how I earn my living (actually working on much bigger systems in datacenters) and told her what my hourly rate is, and was she ready to pay it. She wasn’t.
Your issue with Teams is likely caused by Google’s calendaring and Team’s not playing nice together. My experience using the Outlook client installed on my laptop has been seamless.
Is the company you are a board member of using Google’s Suite of Office Productivity Tools? I have run into it at a couple of my customers and am not a big fan. If you don’t have license rights to install Office 365 clients on your Mac, you should look at upgrading. The cost difference is negligible.
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It’s our State Zoo that uses it. I think the whole State of MN that is plugged into MS Office. The glitch is probably that they send me the meeting in Outlook, it goes to my Google Calendar, which I access through Apple iCalendar. That’s a lot of handoffs. Works for most things, but Teams links are iffy.
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I keep my calendar in Outlook and Team meetings just pop up with the meeting reminder and I just have to click on join meeting. Attended one this morning. My current mobile is an Android. I might go to an iPhone next time because I really dislike big cell phones that make me feel like I am carrying a television set in my pocket. I will probably continue using Outlook calendars, even if I go the iPhone route.
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