​I was pondering the worth of my shiny new stainless steel Series 2 Apple Watch when it occurred to me that the processor upgrade scenario is a lot like the iPad Air 2.

I’ve been banging the privacy drum for a while now and this is the kind of stuff that I’ve foreseen. It’s going to go a lot further though. It has to because the appetite for this data on the corporate side is insatiable. Our health habits, driving speeds, or political views are all highly valuable pieces of information that tell corporations or potential employers what they need to know.
 
Bloomberg - No Credit History, No Problem, Lenders Now Peering At Phone Data

Everybody thinks that paying for services with your data is a one-way street where the buyer gets nothing but benefits. Well, this is just like the introductory trial period when signing up for Cable TV. You don’t pay the full price until you’re hooked. Eventually for some people, paying with personal data is going to result in higher insurance rates, lost job offers, or loan rejections.
 
Data harvesting always has good intentions up front. But access to our data is great power that we willingly hand over. Perhaps people should treat it with more respect. I'm reminded of the line in George Clooney's movie Oh Brother Where Art Thou when the gang asks the traveling musician why he sold his soul to the devil. His response, "Well, I wasn't usin' it".

​Considering that laptops vastly outsell tablets and that tablets have been on a downward sales trend lately I understand that many people might view this claim with a healthy dose of skepticism, but I can’t not say something just because people don’t believe it. Here it goes, laptops are the walking dead. 

​I’ve been noticing a thread lately by writers in the tech community that goes something along the lines of “Smartphones are no longer exciting.” And some of these same writers seem to think that the century’s old technology of automobiles is the next big thing. That’s like dumping Susan Sarandon because she’s too old and asking Cher out for a date. It’s completely contradictory. 

​Apple is an odd company when you look at the way it’s structured. For a company that pulled in over $215 billion in revenue in fiscal 2016, this is a company that is still built like a small- to medium-sized corporation. It has one executive team that oversees every single project. It’s amazing that these guys can get anything done.  

Excellent point by Jordan Golson regarding the interesting situation that electric car makers find themselves in with performance cars.
 
The Verge - Can electric sports cars be sporty without any engine noise?
 
Driving an electric car is like typing on glass. There are whole sensory dimensions missing. It’s like watching a movie through the tinny speakers that are built into the TV. You don’t want to just see the action, you want to hear and feel it. 

The New York Times reports that everyone was stunned by the inability of big data to correctly predict the presidential election outcome.

The Data Said Clinton Would Win, Why You Shouldn't Have Believed It
 
This is exactly what I was talking about in my earlier writing on the shortcomings of big data.

It's an Easy Choice 

​I’m one of those people who sometimes reaches up to touch my MacBook Pro’s screen by force of habit. Which isn’t very often since I do most of my work on my iPad Air 2. But just because I reach up to touch my MacBook’s screen doesn’t mean that I think it’s a good idea for a MacBook to have a touchscreen. On the contrary, reaching up to touch my MacBook’s screen reminds me how nice it is to have a Trackpad and not have to reach for the screen. 

​I predicted earlier this year that it wouldn’t be a big deal for Apple to update the iPhone SE every spring. From a cost-to-benefit perspective, updating the internal components could be worthwhile for Apple in order to offset a usual sales slowdown that occurs in the summer. But there was one big possibility that I hadn’t considered. 

​In the latest episode of the Accidental Tech Podcast, Marco Arment and John Siracusa were discussing their disappointment with Apple seeming to abandon the market for displays. During the discussion, Marco kept asking the question, “Why is selling displays any different from anything else that Apple sells?”. Oh, let me count the ways. I thought it was a good question that might make for an interesting blog post. 

​An excellent article by Jeff Benjamin asks why there isn’t more of a spotlight highlighting the sad state of affairs in the camera industry. Seriously, camera manufacturers are in the business of creating digital products, and yet their buyers are still using the equivalent of little floppy disc drives. Are digital photos taken with pro cameras not the same as digital photos taken with an iPhone? You don’t see SD card slots on iPhones, even though that’s now the source of the vast majority of pictures. 

​Apple has taken huge amount of criticism for letting the iPhone go a third year without a visual design change. Prior to the launch of the iPhone 7 all the analysts were predicting doom and gloom since they assumed that the iPhone 7 was being setup for failure by ensuring weak upgrade sales. It’s too soon to say how this will turn out for Apple. But I saw my old accounting chief, Herman Miller CEO Brian Walker, on Jim Cramer’s Mad Money talking about his icon’s first redesign in...wait for it... twenty two years. I couldn’t help but chuckle at how much faster tech moves than just about anything else. ​I know you can't compare tech to furniture but indulge me for a minute. 

​I had written a post this morning about how Twitter could make for an interesting acquisition target by a large retailer. My thinking was that you could predict the future by eavesdropping on millions of conversations. Then it occurred to me later while I was out on a run, Amazon is already eavesdropping on millions of conversations. Literally, listening to real people speak to each other. 

​In the novel The Great Gatsby, an eccentric millionaire buys a mansion across the river from Daisy and starts to throw huge parties. It was all fun and games and everything was free for the party goers. But that’s because they were simply a means to Gatsby’s end. Which was luring Daisy to his mansion.

​Apple unveiled their new MacBook Pro yesterday, which revealed that secondary touchscreens are coming to a laptop near you. Well, $1700 and up laptops anyway. The Touch Bar looks like a welcome step into the future of laptop evolution. 

​When people think about large corporations, they think that everything must be easier when you have all that volume. Big companies get better prices on raw materials, and they can spread their fixed costs over greater volume. But leveraging your fixed costs is a two-edged sword that can swing back and cut you just as fast as it can help. No one realizes this part. 

​It’s arguable that the Mac Pro deserves the most prominent spot at Apple’s event this Thursday. Even though it’s a small slice of the revenue pie, it’s a big part of the prestige pie. When Apple introduced the Mac Pro three years ago, I was encouraged at how it looked like Apple was doubling down on their top-of-the-line Mac and turning it into an engineering masterpiece in the same vein as world class automakers with their super cars. 

If I see any writers who are on the Amazon Echo bandwagon come out and praise Nintendo’s Switch my head is going to explode. Either you are onboard with a mobile landscape where your information is tied directly to you or you are for the old paradigm where it’s tied to your house. Pick one, because these two ideas are at odds with each other.

Apple has taken a fair share of criticism from tech writers lately because their HomeKit ecosystem hasn’t grown as fast as Amazon’s Echo ecosystem. But doing something right takes time. With the news of a massive internet outage yesterday carried about by a botnet of internet connected devices, this may get more visibility going forward.

​Rumors started coming hot and heavy this week that Apple may be thinking about moving their 2018 MacBooks to a dynamic keyboard with keys that are little e-ink displays. This would allow for custom key changing on-the-fly. 

​Apple has more podcasts dedicated to it than Hillary Clinton has scandals and that’s saying something. But if you’re looking for a podcast with good business sense there aren’t many to choose from. One of the best, however, is The AppleInsider Podcast. If podcasts were newspapers, this one would be the Wall Street Journal. The Wall Street Journal tries to offer relevant news and analysis for busy professionals without the fluff.

​In February when Tim Cook tweeted the blurry Super Bowl celebration picture that he took from his own iPhone, it became a worldwide joke. A pretty funny one too. I couldn’t help but smile every time the “Shot on iPhone 6” meme popped up. It seemed like everyone was having a lot of fun with it. Except maybe Tim Cook.

​I’ve heard the rumors that Apple is looking at offering a new product this fall in the mold of a household assistant. I don’t know if this is true or not, but I have to admit, I’m a little skeptical about it. 

​Assistants are by nature personal When you have an assistant, you speak to him or her in the first person. You never speak to your assistant in the third person. You simply say what you want. Bring me my mail, set up a meeting for next Tuesday, or make a list of the following items.  Your assistant understands that you are the subject of the command because they work directly for you.

​Ever since I laid eyes on Apple’s new AirPods I’ve been wondering just how necessary it is for Apple to ship a physical remote with their next generation Apple TV. Already, in our household we mainly use the remote for the microphone to tell Siri what app or movie to open. We even use Siri for fast forwarding or reversing in videos. It works pretty good. It’s one of those things that you never consciously decide to do but one day you notice that you’ve been doing it that way for a while. 

I love intelligent assistance. I wrote earlier about my favorite features in Apple’s new iOS 10 which both involve learning how I operate. Having my iPhone automatically categorize my e-mail and suggest playlists is pretty cool. But lets get real about how earth shattering important this is. There’s a lot of hyperbole floating around right now about how AI is the next frontier in device evolution. Is it? If automating menial tasks is changing the world then I suppose the Roomba is leading the way.