Apple.

So a few weeks ago, during one of their recent announcements, Apple unveiled their latest addition to the Apple complete home, the Apple HomePod Mini.

I was very excited about this.

We’ve been rocking the home automation vibe in our home for several years, both back east and here in our condo in Chicago. When we moved to the Windy City, I decided to go all in on Apple’s HomeKit automation, and for the most part it has worked very well for us. One of the issues with this approach, however, has been the price of Apple’s HomePod. We have two of them in the house and they were both purchased when on sale at Best Buy. The sale doesn’t come up often.

To provide full coverage throughout the house and to explore other options, we’ve also entertained both Alexa and Google Assistant in addition to our HomePods. Having dissimilar systems is rather maddening, you don’t know who to talk to when you enter a room. Is this an Alexa room or a Google Assistant Room? Should I be talking to Siri.

Earl asked me to get things under control and when Apple announced the smaller, and cheaper while still quite capable HomePod Mini, I was sold. I ordered one as soon as they were available and it arrived in the mail ahead of schedule.

I love it.

Like it’s bigger sibling, the sound quality of the HomePod Mini beats anything else in its class. Setup is a snap. You literally plug it in, hold your iPhone near it for a minute, and then let it do its thing. That’s it. Even though it’s a small device reminiscent of the Amazon Echo or the Google Nest whatever it’s called, the sound quality is amazing. It rivals the sound quality of the original HomePod. The only noticeable difference is less bass, and that’s to be expected due to the differences in size of the unit.

I have the HomePod Mini in my office and it has been working well since installed. While others have issues with interacting with Siri, I rarely have issues when working with the voice based assistant, perhaps I just “speak Siri” or something. She seems to know what I want when I want it and she is properly responsive 98% of the time.

At a $99 price point I’m not disappointed in the purchase at all, in fact I’m delighted. I’m looking forward to adding one more to the household when the funding department permits it.

It’ll be wonderful in the bathroom for music while I’m getting ready in the morning.

Earlier this week Apple had their third product announcement event in as many months. This week’s even focused on the Mac and provided more detail on the company’s move from standard Intel-based CPU chips to their own design, dubbed “Apple Silicon”. During the event Apple talked about impressive bumps in computing speed and, probably more noticeable to the average consumer, battery life. There was talk of some Mac models lasting nearly 20 hours on one charge.

That’s impressive.

Apple also announced the final release date of their latest version of macOS, dubbed “Big Sur”. Originally announced in June at WWDC, “Big Sur” is the first version of macOS to not be a “10-dot-something” since the year 2000. Big Sur incorporates new design elements that are somewhat more relatable to the iPhone and iPad users and is designed to run well on both traditional Macs with Intel CPUs and then new Macs running Apple Silicon.

As an iOS developer, I’ve been running macOS Big Sur for a couple of months. I jumped on the beta in mid August and it has been surprisingly rock solid for the entire experience, to the point that I forgot I was still running a beta. I jumped onto the “Gold Master” or release candidate earlier this week. It has maintained its rock solid status for both me and for my husband when I updated his MacBook Pro on official release day.

There’s plenty of reviews and guides and videos and the like around the details of the new operating system scattered all over the Internet, so I shan’t bore you with the intricacies of what’s changed, but I find the Big Sur experience to be very comfortable, pleasing to the eye, and a slightly faster version of the “same old, same old” I’ve been enjoying on my 2015 MacBook Pro since, well, 2015. Yes, it has a fresh look to it but it works and functions like it always has and that’s what we have, right? Advancements? Maybe a little. Revolutionary? Not at all. Evolutionary? Maybe a tad. Apple likes to play it safe with these things.

The thing is, I don’t find anything else out there to be as polished or as reliable as macOS, at least anything that offers some sort of flexibility for both the casual user and the technical diehard. On a recent Linux podcast they were celebrating the fact that one Linux desktop can now control Philips Hue lights from the computer, something we’ve been able to do for many years on a Mac. I like what Linux is trying to do, but it feels like it’s lagging behind. Google’s ChromeOS locks me into a web browser all the time, and Windows 10 is, well, pretty much the same Windows as Windows 2000. (Much like macOS is a lot like the Mac OS X released in 2001).

I watch “Star Trek” and see holograms and people waving their hands at projected desktops and the like and I wonder if we’re ever going to get there. Probably after I’m dead. In the meantime, I’ll enjoy what I have.

I’m still proudly rockin’ an Apple Series 3 Watch. This is my second Apple Watch, my husband still wears my first, and I purchased this right after the Series 3 was introduced to mix. For the most part it has been a flawless experience.

Earlier this month (or was it at the end of last month?) Apple release Watch OS 7. Ever since upgrading to Watch OS 7 my watch has been sporadically rebooting. This experience hasn’t been limited to my Series 3 watch, plenty of other users have voiced their concerns with the same behavior. I found the glitch to be very frustrating, as it seems my watch especially enjoyed rebooting when I went to pay for something with Apple Pay. I don’t like holding up checkout lines.

Apple released Watch OS 7.0.1 but it didn’t address the rebooting issue. I was a bit surprised by this, especially since Apple is still selling this exact model watch as their low end offering. Plenty of other users were experiencing the same thing. After the update to 7.0.1 I futzed around with the watch a bit and figured out that the rebooting seemed to be related to displaying the city of the weather app on the watch face. If I used a watch face that didn’t show “Chicago” (or wherever I was) next to the forecast, it didn’t reboot as much.

Until the release last week.

Over the weekend my watch was rebooting like crazy again. This pushed me to the point of frustration, so I wiped the watch out and set it up as a brand new watch.

This fixed the rebooting issue. It also significantly extended the battery life. My watch is snappy and happy again.

Of course, Apple released Watch OS 7.0.2 to address the rebooting issue. I updated to it and it’s still purring along like a contented kitty.

I feel like I still have plenty of life in this watch. It does everything I want it to do and now that the rebooting issue has been resolved I’m feeling confident with its functionality again.

I’ll upgrade when this one completely gives up the ghost.

I have to admit I’m rather excited about the HomePod Mini. At an affordable price point, we’re going to be able to put one or two of these around our home to supplement our existing HomePods.

I know folks like to gripe about Siri but we rarely have an issue using Siri to play music, set alarms, or control our smart devices. We have Alexa in da house as well, and she seems to get more confused than Siri on a regular basis. Maybe I’m just wired to be more Apple friendly or something.

I’m also excited about the new iPhone 12 lineup. My iPhone X is going on three years old and I’m in the mood for an upgrade. I believe the iPhone 12 will fit the bill. I’ll probably sell my Canon camera to help offset the cost. I haven’t used it in quite a while.

When Apple releases a new version of iPadOS, it usually takes a couple of versions for things to settle down. This is my iPad Pro running the latest production version of iPadOS 14.

I have an Apple Watch Series 3 with cellular connectivity. It’s my second Apple Watch and quite frankly, I’m ready for an upgrade to the new Series 6.

However, during today’s trip to Michigan, I was a little disappointed by the latest version of Watch OS (Watch OS 7) on my Apple Watch Series 3.

When we crossed the imaginary line from Central to Eastern Time (otherwise known as the Indiana-Michigan border), my Apple Watch could no longer give me the local weather. The watch would just display “Retrieving Weather…” and nothing else would happen.

My watch also became unresponsive to touch. I would hit a side button to open an application, usually Activity so I could see how I was doing with my rings for the day, and it wouldn’t do anything. The watch would freeze for two or three minutes and then prompt me for my passcode. In fact, I must have entered my passcode into the watch a dozen times today, even though my watch never left my wrist.

I’m taking this as a sign that although my Series 3 watch supports Watch OS 7 just fine, I’m in that dead zone where it’s going to be a slightly janky experience and I should probably update my watch.

The issue here is Apple is still selling the Series 3 watch. I hope theirs behave better than mine.

I really like my Apple Watch but the platform is always slightly dicey when you get away from your home turf. But today the watch just went a little cuckoo when we got away from Chicago.

I’m hoping the upcoming .1 release to Watch OS fixes many of these bugs. I want to get back to “It Just Works”.

Apple reached two trillion dollars in valuation this week. The company is the first U.S. company to achieve this feat; and it achieved this, doubling its one trillion dollars in valuation in just two years.

Honestly, I don’t know a lot about what this means other than the fact that Apple has a metric ton of money.

Yet, the company continues to strong-arm developers and the like into following their “30% cut” of generated revenue from developer apps in their App Store. As a developer that has never developed an iOS app, I’m really not sure how I feel about this, as I’ve never developed anything where Apple had to take a 30% cut of the revenue simply for having the app available for iPhones and iPads.

As consumers we are stuck in a tricky place; Apple charges an exorbitant prices for their hardware and dings developers 30% of their revenue from the apps that are distributed through the Apple app store. Kinda sucky. At the same time, Google offers the Android ecosystem with their Android phones, but vacuum every scrap of data they can from the consumer and use the data to sell ads and share the information with god know who on the other end, disrupting any shred of privacy a user may expect.

Honestly, as consumers we have no great choice. Spend an unreasonable amount of money or whore out our privacy to god knows who.

This is not how technology was suppose to evolve. Devices were suppose to get cheaper and we weren’t suppose to give up our privacy. Why does a company need a two trillion dollar valuation? What purpose does that serve?

So I went ahead and installed Mac OS Big Sur on my mid-2015, 15-inch MacBook Pro. I’ve been messing around with it a bit here and there and while the new UI elements taking some getting used to, it feels more stable than I thought it would. I’m also surprised at the responsiveness, this beta version is running faster than the latest production version on Mac OS Catalina.

I’ve run across a couple of bugs here and there; the label for my clock widget says “City” instead of “Chicago” and the weather widget keeps defaulting back to Cupertino. I was able to reproduce an issue another blogger is seeing, but otherwise it’s a new coat of paint on the status quo. While users will instantly notice the new look and feel, they should still feel comfortable and confident when Big Sur is realized in the Fall.

I sold the Mac Mini I was using as a “BYOD”, or “Bring Your Own Device”, machine at work. Work has completely gone down the Microsoft path and have done their best to lock non-Windows machines out of the network. While my work as a developer that uses Linux (or other Unix platforms) all day long is still entrenched in a decidedly non-Windows environment, the work desktop team feels everyone in the company should be using Windows laptops. So I make do. I can deal and it’ll be nice to use the money from the sale of the Mac mini toward my next computer. I’m trying to decide if I want to try the full-time Linux leap or just embrace this aging MacBook Pro and iPad Pro combo I currently have going on.

Oh well, there’s no need to rush while everything is working just fine.

In the meanwhile, I’ll see what other bugs in Big Sur I can find and provide feedback to Apple. If you’re not filling out bug reports, you’re doing the whole “beta software” thing wrong.