Life is too short?
Heck I don't know why, but why does it feel like everything that I actively wish for takes 20+ years to finally come to fruition?
It's just a feeling, but for me the iphone did not really bring something new for me as in my brain the palm pda did all the things I ever wanted, and yes handspring did it in color and yes the trio did add some other nice things, but ultimately for me it took way too long to get where I wanted it to go (for me). Up to this day I couldn't care less for mobile phones and their functionality and I'm glad that it is somehow hidden and I am not confronted with it during regular usage. But life has changed and instead of meeting a lot of people in real life I use now Zoom/Teams, so the iPhone actually is used for communications that I dreaded before ;)
Even after many years of ipad and then ipad pro usage it is not where it should be. In 2003 (not sure I remember the exact year (but it must have been between 2002 and 2006) I tested and loved a windows based tablet pc which cost 3'000 and had windows journal and you could actually use the pen to insert text in multiple languages (most of the times). Something that the iPad learned a little while ago, but I still don't like it on the ipad.
There are many examples of things that I thought we might have within a few years and in the end it takes decades. One of the things I'm really looking for is to get rid of screens and hope that the goggles will transform any kind of surface real/artificial into a display. I'm looking forward to read books by actually holding a physical book in my hand but the content that I see is generated by the goggles, so I only have to have a hardback, paperback, a glossy magazine some newspaper, but I doubt that the newspaper will survive long enough, some stacks of paper and I will be reading all my favorite things on them and hopefully never have to swipe up/down/left/right or other if I really don't want to. I look forward flipping through pages, skimming a book but the content is from a digital library. Oh boy. And why should I ever install a large screen TV in any room anymore, I know my wife would be happy. For it to work, yes it must be augmented reality, not VR. For it to work it must be lightweight and long lasting, most probably powered through my smartphone with a cable for juice and compute. I don't mind that, while cycling I have to often connect my phone to an external battery and handle the cable, so I won't mind the cable for a decade or two.
Ok, there would be more, but I think coming back to what I originally wanted to write would be a good opportunity now.
So what changed:
Apple in 2022 with the release of iOS 16 has solved my problem of sharing the whole photo library with my wife. This has been a hassle for two decades, where I had to have to keep this job on the side of the photo library manager and boy was I not good at it. Once I lost about 4 photos from one of our children in a digital debacle (even though I had other backups) but out of a couple hundred I missed four. And I hated that job and a couple of times a year I had to answer the question, where can I get a picture of X Y and Z. A few years back I had a workaround in place. Google Photo Backup. That thing allowed me to share all our photos with my wife, free of charge, with a limited resolution that was most of the times ok enough. But she could not edit it or had to download it and store it herself etc.
Apple is an example of a company that had done many things more than ok. It solved so many hassles and introduced a couple. Given time it is getting more and more in the way it should have worked a decade or more ago. Some things at apple take less than a decade and thank you for this. Like the weather app on the iPad and others. And now finally this year is where I can put my side job to the side and .... Well most probably nothing much will change, as it is still much easier to delegate than to do it yourself and I'll be the recipient of please fetch me a picture of X Y and Z orders ;))).
One thing with apple is that many times like now, you get a glimpse of a feature, that you don't really understand yet but it serves a craving that you have and your imagination or in your imagination they solved it, nailed it, did it, it's done, but in reality that has proven not to be the case. So hold your horses and most probably another two years will do the trick, if the world has not moved on to something else, we'll receive the feature in a way that will work for me.
Going to get interesting when she starts deleting some of my photos, our libraries diverged about 6 years ago when we started to use camera phones more and more often than the digital cameras that we store in the cellar. Oh by the way I haven't shot a blurry photo for years, which was the number one issue I had. And the photos that I shoot with my current phone are good, but still not what my Nikon did with the lens we used, that will take another few years and the telephoto shots are around the next decade or so.
So is life too short?
I personally think not, but my brain sometimes/often thinks yes, as we can imagine quite a lot that in the real world is always just around the corner but in the end it takes a couple of decades, half a century or will never be true. The older I get I wish that we could actually have tricorder and fix a lot of stuff, but for now we still have to rely on experts of experts, as it many times takes more than one expert to actually diagnose you correctly, or so it seems and we experienced a few times lately. You are just lucky that I only work with computers and even there in non critical life threatening situations.
