Rene Ritchie

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I've recently gotten a new full-time job, which means needing both work and personal gear, accounts, and apps — and I've started traveling again. A lot. This is the tech that's helping me not only get everything done, but keep my work and life organized and in balance.

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A.I. Artificial intelligence. Machine Learning. Generative Adversarial Networks. Neural Engines. Dall-E. Midjourney. ChatGPT...

It’s the rise of the machines. Judgment day. Humanity deleted, as we become nothing more than an organic boot-loader for an indifferent hive of nanites that’ll crack our world for fuel on their way to dispassionately conquering the stars. 

Oh, whoops. Whoopsie.

It’s the singularity. The great enlightenment. The golden age of humanity, sundered from all labor and toil as ambient world-computing erases all creative limitations, enabling us to literally go where no one has gone before.

Sorry. My bad. Again.

It’s… a tool. On an ever-escalating scale. Neither angel nor demon but we use it so, able to pre-viz a movie or deep-fake propaganda, chat-out an email response or cheat-up an essay, potentially the biggest board with the biggest nail yet, for building or bludgeoning alike.

Here are three stories...

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Up until now, Apple kept an encryption key for things like your personal photos and messages stored on their iCloud servers. That meant, if you ever forgot your passcode or otherwise locked yourself out, Apple could recover that data for you. But, side effect, that also meant a government could subpoena them, or a super-villain could theoretically break in and steal them.

Now, in the US, and in more places over the course of the next year, we’ll have the option to turn on Advanced Data Protection for iCloud. In other words, turn off Apple’s ability to access almost everything on iCloud. literally make them throw their key away. Then, just like our health data and passwords have been, our photos and messages will be utterly, completely locked down.

But should they be? Should we actually turn advanced data protection on?

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Are the Apple Watch, Pixel Watch, Samsung Watch, Garmin, Fitbit and all the other smart wearables functional or just a fad? Can they help connect you, protect you, and keep you from harm, or just overwhelm you with numbers and cause some alarm?

Doctor Mike, noted YouTube creator, family physician, and pro boxer joins me to talk about about health in the age of tech! 

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Does Intel's future lie in foundry? Can AMD ever grow its market share? Will MediaTek compete at the higher end? Is custom back at Qualcomm? And will anyone catch up to Apple? Here's where silicon is heading in 2023!

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Both desktop and mobile silicon are hitting the limits of physics. Power draw keeps increasing while enclosures only get smaller. Process shrinks are becoming more expensive and time-consuming. And foundries are facing geopolitical and competitive concerns. So what can Apple, Qualcomm, Intel, and all the rest do to keep improving performance?

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Is Elon Musk actually going to make a phone? That’s what approximately 42,069 headlines in my feed are saying right now. Not a Tesla phone, Space X Starlink phone, or Neuralink phone, though that’d be kinda hella cool. Not even a Boring phone, despite a lot of people saying phones have gotten at least a little bit boring lately. But a Twitter phone. Why? 

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Twitter vs. Apple. Elon vs. Steve Jobs. I mean, kinda, we’ll get to that in a minute. Point being, Twitter is what everyone is talking about right now. Especially on Twitter. More than FTX imploding — and exploding — at least at time of recording. More than Mark Zuckerberg laying off 11,000 people. More than Apple momentarily junking up the App Store with gambling ads. More than the FBI allegedly test-driving Pegasus spyware a couple or few years back.

Elon Musk speedrunning social network leadership fantasy camp is what’s dominating the hearts and drama-stems of every doom-scroller and tech media thirst trapper in the 1218 universe. 

So, what's going on?

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I’ve been trying to make this video about Twitter and Elon Musk for days but every time I open the app, the story has taken on a new and hilarious twist, which I'll cover here, but finally, I thought — forget it, let’s just go!

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A friend of the family asked me to look at their iPad recently because something wasn’t working right and I noticed they had like 30 instances of the Mail all over the place. I’m exaggerating, of course, but this is a person who’s super smart, taught at university, but just never got computers never understood them. Avoided command lines entirely, struggled with graphical interfaces, but when the iPad came out, that was it, the perfect computer for them. Finally. 

Something simple. Intuitive. Full screen. Focused. 

But year after every couple or few years, layers and layers of capabilities have been added, but with complexities to match, and many of the same problems they had with graphical interfaces, the ones the iPad initially solved for them, are coming back. With a hefty helping of near-constant gesture collisions on top.

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