This weekend, I had to purchase a new iPhone. My iPhone 11 — bought in October 2019 — was becoming unreliable. Its touch screen was acting up, either producing ghost touches or becoming unresponsive in some areas, which could be frustrating when the affected areas were covering the keyboard. In the past couple of weeks, I even had to use a Bluetooth mouse and a Bluetooth keyboard to unlock my phone a few times.
After four and a half years, getting a new iPhone seems expected. I would have preferred to get an updated-for-2024 version of the iPhone SE, but surprisingly, no new iPhones SE were released. Therefore, as fixing the screen was not a viable option, I had to spend 2 or 3 hundred euros more to get the iPhone 15, which is excessive for my modest needs, but future-proof enough as I plan to use it for another four and a half years, at least.
During this process, I thought a lot about what makes the iPhone the iPhone, what makes it my obvious first choice when it comes to smartphones, and what I was expecting the most from the new device. My first — and obvious — answer is the Apple ecosystem: AirPods, iMessage, Apple Photos, iCloud Drive, continuity, available apps, Safari, etc. But disregarding the appeal of that infamous walled garden, I believe that reliability is what makes the iPhone so good and what made my broken iPhone 11 so frustrating to use in its final weeks.
If you ask people on the street what they think is the best quality of the iPhone, I’m pretty sure you’ll get answers like ease of use, design, the choice and quality of apps, camera performance, etc. I don’t think anyone would say reliability.
Using something that is dependable and performs as expected every time you use it is what I want from a phone, a tool, a car, an app, and many other things. Of course, I love good looks, great ergonomics, durable objects, and a satisfying sense of perceived value. But I’ll take “reliable” over any of these qualities.
I believe that this is a quality we all unconsciously prefer. Think about it: which pen do you use when you need to jot something down? Which knife do you select from the kitchen drawer to slice something up? We all tend to use the same 2 or 3 pens or knives for most things, while other pens and knives in the drawer gather dust. The appearance and value of these 2 or 3 reliable pens or knives won’t matter much. When picking them up, their level of performance will obviously matter, but only if there is confidence in the delivery of that performance, only if the objects are known to behave as expected.
This is why Apple Maps had such a rocky start back in 2012. The app looked great from the start, the UI was — and still is — better than the UI of Google Maps, it had interesting features from the beginning, but it was not reliable. Trusting it to go somewhere was a leap of faith, and I’m talking about the Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade kind. A decade later, things are much better, and I now find Apple Maps to be very, very good for directions and navigation. It has become a reliable app.
But to be able to notice that something has gotten better, one needs to try it again. If you know that a knife is not great in the back of the drawer, you’d never pick it up again after the first disappointing experience. Someone would need to tell you “I’ve sharpened your knives, including the shitty ones” and you’d need to be willing to give that knife a second chance.
This is why Siri is so frustrating. Siri has had many occasions over the year to prove its detractors wrong. Because it’s basically the only knife in the drawer, Siri had plenty of second chances. Its problems are not really about the things it can do or not, not about how the synthesised voices sound: the problem is that Siri is unreliable. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it will do exactly what you want, sometimes it will ask you to unlock your phone first. Sometimes it will clearly hallucinate what you just asked, and sometimes it will just do nothing.
Reliable tech is tech one will want to use repeatedly. If the tech is great but only works from time to time, people will end up using reluctantly. It doesn’t matter how great the tech is if it can’t be great all the time.
This topic reminds me of the “best versus good enough” idea. In a post on this blog, I quoted Robert Watson-Watt:
Give them the third-best to go on with; the second-best comes too late, the best never comes.
Following this analogy, the iPhone may not be the best phone. If I take the photos it produces as an example, the iPhone may not produce the best photos captured by a smartphone camera. They may not even be the second-best. But the iPhone will consistently produce the third-best photo. Every time. It’s a reliable camera, and that’s why it may arguably be the best camera phone.
In the end, it’s not about the quality of the photos: it’s about the reliability of the camera. And I feel that it’s kind of the same for other features of the phone and how I use it.
As I’m writing this in mid-April, I obviously have to mention the Humane AI Pin, as it fits so well into the topic of quality, expectations, and reliability.
As I expected, the device looks like a complete disaster. After reading and watching a few reviews, I found that the lack of reliability was a recurring theme: battery life? Unreliable. AI? Unreliable. Laser screen thing? Unreliable.
For something meant to be worn every day and eventually replace the smartphone in the daily life of its users, this lack of reliability is a significant issue. How can someone embrace the Humane AI Pin’s philosophy of unintrusive technology if the technology does not perform as expected? Unreliability certainly sounds like an intrusive characteristic of a device, forcing the user to constantly think about how to handle and manage it.
Innovation is great, but without reliability, it scarcely means anything. The more I think about reliability in software and hardware, the more I think it’s the most important quality for the tech I use, as it should be for the proper tools they are.
This post is inspired by the excellent track entitled Lamb’s Garbage (Unfinished), from the classic album and one of my favourites, Mr Oizo’s Lambs Anger. The concept of the song, as its title suggests, is to regroup bits of songs that were never completed to be full tracks.
Since I’ve been sitting on a few short drafts for a while now, and since I can’t seem to convert those drafts into full blog posts, I thought I’d borrow the idea and compile parts of these unfinished posts into an inaugural “unfinished” post, a format that may or may not return. In the meantime, this is a format I can only encourage you to try on your own blog, as I found it quite liberating to get rid of these old files.
A few years ago on Twitter (which in itself feels like ages ago), Canadian DJ/musician/podcaster/truly-funny-guy Tiga wrote something along the lines of “here’s a list of things I don’t care about.” While I can’t remember exactly what was written in it — I think cologne was among the things listed — it made me laugh and I found it somehow interesting. Since I’m still thinking about it today, I thought I would do the same.
The Oscars: Safe to ignore as far as I’m concerned.
K-Pop: Is J-Pop still a thing or not?
Cryptocurrency: This one gets easier and easier to ignore.
The Super Bowl
TikTok: Believe it or not, I have a TikTok account. It dates back to the days of Musical.ly, and now I can’t log in or delete the account.
Taylor Swift: It’s great that she’s successful and important and all, and I’m sure she’s great, and maybe if I would just take a few moments to listen to her music I might even like a few songs (I’m indeed a pop enthusiast after all), but I don’t really care. Is that bad? Also, I’ve witnessed an obvious behaviour from media companies recently, surfing on the Swift mania to get some extra pair of eyes. Great read from Martha Gill on the fact that this attention given to Taylor Swift is taken away from other artists.
The Paris Olympics: So much money that could have been spent on something more useful or important for the city, the region, the country, or the world instead.
Getting out of bed may seem quick and almost instant, but for the next half hour, everything in my brain will be very slow. This reminds me of the Windows PCs from the early 2000s, where “coming out of sleep mode” somehow took longer than booting up, with the hard drive spinning for ages for unknown reasons. Or maybe I had a shitty PC?
I’m guilty of this. Writing things everybody knows, on which everybody already agrees. Or doesn’t agree. Blog post in which I am not saying anything new or really personal.
But writing these ideas down, as well as reading them from other people, helps understanding them better, and makes them more like a thing. Posts like “Why you should start a blog” or “I love RSS” come to mind.
I tend to read all of these posts, and I enjoy them. I write a few of them myself. However, it feels like “blogbait” has indeed become a thing, whether it is done consciously or not.
I am a word guy. It may not look like it on this blog because I write in English and not in my native French, but I can be very annoying with people around me when I keep asking questions like “What does this word mean exactly?”
This is not about rare or complicated words, no, it’s about words we use every day, without really being able to explain what they truly mean. Here are a few examples below:
Spices: is salt a spice? is coffee, or cocoa? is garlic a spice? or mustard? This is not easy. My own explanation is that for something to be called a spice, it needs to be cooked and prepared with the dish before it gets served. If it’s added on the plate, once served, then it is not “spice” but it can be a sauce or a condiment. Mustard can be a condiment or a spice, for instance. I don’t know what I’m talking about, really. I could look at a dictionary but where’s the fun in that?
Salad: what constitutes a salad? This is a wonderful conversation starter (not everyone agrees on that one), and I love bringing it up as soon as I can. Case in point. My answer is sadly quite simple, as my ultimate definition goes like this: “something savoury and cold, that can be eaten with salad dressing.”
Social media: we talk about it all the time, and this one is easy to define, but it’s also hard to not label anything “social media” these days: are comments on a blog “social media”? Is YouTube a social media, GitHub or WhatsApp? Is Tinder a social media? How can we know for sure? This intrigues me.
Content: this word is paradoxically sad. It’s sad that the people creating all of this “content” — creative people — are the one that can’t come up with something better. It’s not really a hard-to-define word, but its definition is so broad that it can encompass basically everything, and ends up meaning nothing. Most of the “content” is basically “feed food” (coining that term). The best definition of content I’ve seen comes from an interview of Khoi Vinh, given to Own Your Content:
Not that the work I do is all that important or memorable, but I prefer to think of it as “writing” rather than as “content.” And for me, that’s an important distinction. Content and writing are not the same thing, at least the way that we’ve come to define them in contemporary society. Content is inherently transactional; its goal is to drive towards some kind of conversion, some kind of exchange of value.
Please let me know if you have any more words like this. Words that we all use but never really try to define precisely, and when we do, it becomes a confusing fog of thoughts.
I’ve recently noticed that I may have finally stopped working on the design of this site. I know that wasn’t the case a few months ago, when I was always trying to add or remove something, either trying to shave a few bytes of the size of the whole website, fine-tuning the aesthetics (should the bottom borders be 2 pixels or 3 pixels wide?), or editing the code to make it pass the W3C validation.
How do you know when a design is complete, if it ever is? Just this week, I made slight adjustments to the spacing between blocks: does it count as a modification? Or is it acceptable to consider a web design “alive” and therefore subject to occasional slight changes?
Some links don’t call for a full blog post, but sometimes I still want to share some of the good stuff I encounter on the web.
A Willy Wonka-inspired experience ‘scam’ was so bad that people called the cops・The kind of story that either makes you laugh or cry. I can’t seem to stop searching for more information about it.
How the most expensive swords in the world are made・The best 25 minutes I spent watching YouTube in a long time.
‘Very few have balls’: How American news lost its nerve・An acute painting of the journalism landscape, particularly in the production and publication of investigations within major media companies. This is largely due to financial ramifications and the pervasive influence of large corporations and billionaires (via Dan Gilmor).
Daft Social, the anti-social social network for minimalists・I really like this, and the more I think about it, the more sense it makes. Maybe it would have gained more traction in the early days of Twitter’s dramatic descent into darkness (via Dense Discovery).
A list of 100 blog post topics to write about・You can bet I’ll be bookmarking this and using it for my blog. I currently have a couple of drafts that would fit perfectly into this list (via Om Malik).
Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky’s photographs from early 20th-century Imperial Russia・It’s mind-boggling to think that these pictures are over a century old. As written on Wikipedia: “His photographs offer a vivid portrait of a lost world—the Russian Empire on the eve of World War I and the coming Russian Civil War” (via David Merfield).
Wikifunction: a free library of functions that anyone can edit.・Kind of surprising that this didn’t exist before, and hopefully a viable alternative to the overwhelming and potentially problematic dominance of Microsoft-owned Github.
In Praise of Buttons — Part Two・Second part of the great first post, and this one is exactly on point when it comes to cooking stove buttons (the most frustrating kind).
Growth is a mind cancer・A refreshing read from Manu Moreale: if a company is already making a comfortable profit, why can’t they be content with steady, stable revenues? Why do they always strive for “growth”? When did “growth” become the sine qua non condition for a company to be considered successful? When did “not growing” become synonymous with failure?
Seven little pieces of my heart・Merlin Mann shares this idea of highly curated playlists, each composed of only seven songs. As a big fan of playlists myself, I’ve started giving it a go with a few of my favourite artists, including Prince — of course — and Frank Ocean, and I may add those new Gentle Introductions playlists somewhere on the site. They’re not necessarily the artist’s top seven songs or your personal favourites, but, as Merlin writes “Just seven really good songs that might help you fall in love too.” Not so easy to make, but I love the concept.