Ask Paul: February 1 (Premium)

Welcome to February, and Happy Friday: Here’s another set of questions and answers to wind down the week.

Smart home vs. dumb home

JaseCutler asks:

I enjoyed the joke of First Ring Daily as the “best home lighting podcast”. As I’m getting older, and putting up less with products made in this era of “move fast, break things early”, chiefly being IoT devices, I’ve actually ended up getting rid of most of IoT stuff I had. I standardized to Rokus (out went the Chromecasts), set up Sonos, went to dumb lights, and left a Google home in the kitchen for timers at this point. To my question: After your rants on products getting it wrong, do you enjoy having IoT stuff? And I mean really. Do you? Or do you hear of my IoT-less house and go “I want that, but I can’t because I review tech.” If it’s that latter, I’m sorry.

If you go back and look at my earliest articles about the smart home stuff—I think most of them fall under the Paul’s Tech Makeover category—you’ll see that I always intended to approach this in measured steps, to be “smart” about which technologies we adopted and which we ignored. And as I discussed with my wife, and then publicly via the site, I knew we’d make mistakes. And that, in some cases, we’d head down some path, realize it wasn’t working out, and backtrack.

For us, the biggest wins are the Chromecast/Google Cast-based whole house audio and the smart lights, both of which we use and enjoy regularly. And the cord-cutting, which—after some fits and starts—is just working for us now. The recent issues with the Philips Hue stuff are pretty much par for the course for me. I mean, I screw around with technology all the time, so something is always biting me in the butt. But in this case, it’s particularly problematic because it’s not just me that’s affected, and because I don’t really know what’s going on.

As an aside, a reader emailed me last night telling me to use the “Clean up” function for the Hub in the Hue app, and that doing so can, among other things, remove any hidden schedules we may have. So I tried it, and the lights did not change colors last night. One night does not a solution make: We’d gone at least two nights in the past without any change. But I’m hopeful that solves it. Otherwise, I will go through the painful process of removing—and then re-adding—every single Hue light in the house.

Back to the central point of your question, we don’t have a smart home per se. We have a traditional home in which a few things are “smart.” And we intend to keep it that way, generally. But I did write about some ideas for 2019 earlier in Paul’s Tech Makeover: Here’s to an Even Smarter 2019 (Premium).

Apple v. Facebook (and Google)

Lvthunder asks:

Do you think Google and Facebook will get their Enterprise iOS certificate back?

So, it looks like this has resolved itself for now. I assume Apple’s point was made. But with regards to changing Facebook institutionally, there’s a lot more to do. I’m not sure if Apple will ever pull the nuclear switch on Facebook and its mainstream apps. But perhaps it will institute some kind of code of conduct for app data collection in iOS as a start. It’s something to look for.

Looking for a 15-inch tablet

moogleassassin asks:

Currently have SurfaceBook2 15 and while I think it might literally be the best machine I’ve ever owned (and I’ve owned lots). I can’t shake the feeling that its fancy docking mech is a bit unnecessary and I would be better off with a surface Pro long term with an external GPU so I don’t need to upgrade the machine every year purely or the new graphics. As I understand the next Surface Pro should be a decent upgrade both in chassis and CPU with Ice Lake having Thunderbolt built in for sure – which would allow the eGPU. Not sure I can live without the 15″ tablet/screen. Do you or Brad have any idea if MS plan to make a 15″ version of the Pro like the book with the next version? I know some people think 15″ is too big for tablet but me being a special snowflake of a user – I love it…

15-inch 2-in-1/convertible PCs are very rare, and I’m not aware of any 15-inch tablets. Nor do I expect Microsoft to make a 15-inch Surface Pro (or Laptop). 15-inch PCs are typically one of two things: Very low-end PCs or very high-end PCs aimed at power users. And that’s where Surface Book falls, on the latter category.

A future (expensive) option would be a Surface Book 3 (or whatever) that has USB-C/Thunderbolt 3, of course. You could still use an eGPU. And maybe Microsoft will offer the 15-inch version without an internal dGPU, which isn’t the case today.

Choosing a new wearable

BTRProducer asks:

In the last 24 hours my Fitbit Ionic decided to die – just refuses to turn on. I’ve been in the Fitbit ecosystem since February 2011, but like you, I’ve been very annoyed with the whole Bluetooth syncing issue the last few months. So with the need to purchase a new smartwatch, I am wondering if you think it’s worth sticking it out with Fitbit (and maybe getting a Versa), or switching to something else, such as Android Wear? If I were to switch, do you have any recommendations of what device to get? I love all of the fitness-related aspects of a wearable device, but having access to email and calendar notifications (as well as basic apps like weather etc) is high on my list of wants.

I really like the Fitbit form factor and functionality. But yeah, I still have sync issues from time-to-time. Not as many as when I wrote When S%^t Don’t Work (Premium), but … yeah.

I’ve “done” two things in the event that I want to move past Fitbit. I found an app called FitToFit that lets you export your Fitbit data to Google Fit. And I researched alternative wearables. I’ve used various Android Wear devices, but not recently. So I’m kind of non-committal on that, beyond the fact that I prefer the fitness wearable form factor over a watch and I really like multi-day battery life. So the device I found that may be my fallback is the Vivosmart 4: It looks and works much like a Fitbit and is highly-rated.

But for now, I’m sticking with Fitbit. I do really like it overall, despite the occasional syncing issues.

Anything exciting from Microsoft?

Lewk asks:

Is there anything coming from Microsoft this year, that genuinely excites you? Whether it be a new service, initiative, Surface device, software or even a conference/show, etc. I’m personally excited for the new Edge browser. The mobile version of Edge has blown me away. And I really like the current version of Edge on desktop, but I always die inside when one feature of a certain website just doesn’t work and I have to fire up a different browser.

So yeah. There are a few things I’m genuinely excited about this year.

Number one is the xCloud service. This is the rare example of something I predicted correctly, and I believe Microsoft has a big chance to lead in a coming generation of cloud-delivered game services.

The Chromium-based Microsoft Edge, for sure. Very interested in this. (And I agree with you that Edge mobile is excellent.)

This sounds goofy, but I’m curiously excited about the Simplified Ribbon for Office.

Anything Surface is always of interest, and while I’m not sure this reaches an “excitement” level, I’m looking forward to the inevitable architecture changes—regarding Surface Connect and Thunderbolt 3—and the new models that will generate.

Microsoft 365 for consumers is more interesting than exciting, but I’m curious to see what they do there. Ditto for whatever Windows 10 feature updates we see this year: Mostly curious to see if they can get past the reliability issues.

On the speculation front, one thing that would be truly exciting is Microsoft bringing Android apps to Windows 10. The right moment to announce that, if it’s happening, is Build (in May). Build is my favorite Microsoft show of the year, regardless.

Chrome OS, but Windows

AnOldAmigaUser asks:

Do you think that Microsoft will develop a Chrome like OS, suitable for the Education market? If not, do you think they would be willing to sell Office 365 for Education with Chromebooks, since it is pretty much web based, and they can use the mobile apps for Chrome for offline use. The level of technical expertise in k-12 is almost non-existent, and Windows devices are a tough sell.

Not only do I think they will do this, I’ve actually seen it. And it looks a lot like Chrome OS, with a squared-off, minimalistic user interface. (Instead of rounded UI elements as in Chrome OS.) It’s basically Windows 10 S with a new user interface, a system that runs only Store apps, including PWAs.

I think it’s necessary. Necessary but late to market.

Email changes

simont asks:

Any update on your email move to Outlook from Gmail?

I was just thinking about writing about this. But the short version is that I’ve still not picked a desktop client. I have, however, chosen Outlook mobile for smartphones.

The issue boils down to finding something that will let me access multiple accounts from a single interface with a single mixed inbox. But on the back-end, I don’t want to use one account to pull email from another (or vice versa) because I now understand that doing so results in lost emails. So if you think about how Outlook mobile works (or Gmail, or Google Inbox, or many other mobile clients), you can configure any number of email accounts (with contacts, calendars, and to-dos as well) and access them all at the same time. I want that for the desktop (which could include a web app).

Currently, most top-level web-based email apps (like Outlook.com, which I like, or Gmail, which I don’t) don’t offer this functionality. Instead, you can only push email to other services or pull email in from other services and then send/receive mail as if you were using the other services. I wish the Windows 10 Mail client was more sophisticated—meaning, better looking and more configurable, especially around text size—because that would be ideal. But it’s not.

On the Mac, I found something called Boxy Suite, which does this, and I paid for it. I’d love to have this, or something just like it, on Windows. (I started with Boxy 2, which was for Google Inbox specifically.)

But the search continues as the clock keeps ticking. Maybe the new Gmail make-over will be good enough that I can stick with that. I doubt it.

Surface Go success

Simard57 asks:

Is the Surface Go more successful than you thought it would be?

When Surface Go was first announced, I’m not sure that I had any feeling one way or another about how successful it would be. It seemed like a neat mini take on the Surface Pro when I first saw it.

But before it was announced, I wrote A $400 Surface Tablet? God, Yes (Premium), explaining that “a $400 Surface tablet isn’t just a good idea. It’s necessary.” The reasoning was that Microsoft’s premium PC strategy wasn’t working, and that Surface had sold poorly over time. (Don’t confuse this fact with anyone’s opinions about the quality of these PCs. Surface PCs are almost always excellent, and Surface Laptop is one of my favorite PCs of all time.)

Since I wrote that, Microsoft announced Surface Go, and its mainstream Surface PCs, Surface Pro 6 and Surface Laptop 2, have been perpetually on sale, offering lower prices than their predecessors. And we can see the net effect of these changes in Microsoft’s most recent earnings: Surface contributed almost $1.9 billion in revenues, an all-time high.

From a quality perspective, Surface Go is garbage: Its processor is underpowered, the battery life is terrible, and the keyboard isn’t full-sized. But these issues can be fixed, in part with a new generation of the product with a more efficient architecture, and I bet they will be. A $400 Surface makes sense. And I think we just saw that it can help Microsoft sell many more units than it would have otherwise if its products all started north of $1000.

Thinking about this now, a future Surface Go could be a nice “starter Surface” for aspirational buyers if they would just get the specs out of the basement. In car terms, it could be like a BMW 1-series or Mercedes A-series. But today’s Surface Go is more like a Cadillac Cimarron, which was rightfully mocked for not being a “real’ Cadillac. (It was just a rebadged Chevy Cavalier.)