Ask Paul: December 24 (Premium)

Happy Friday and, if you’re celebrating, Merry Christmas (Eve)! Here’s a holiday-inspired round of reader questions.

Why?

crunchyfrog asks:

I’m frankly surprised you’d be taking questions this close to the Christmas holiday, but cheers to your dedication.

Thanks, I originally meant to do this a day early, on Thursday, but I forgot. Plus, my son is arriving a day later than originally expected (today), so I have the time.

Tech nostalgia

As I’ve aged, I’ve become quite nostalgic over old tech in many categories. Over the years I have owned quite a bit of tech that was really cool and great for the time but eventually got replaced as things progressed. I often kept my tech in great condition and almost always keep original boxes just in case I needed to ship it back or sell it as original boxes with the tech fetch more on eBay. As time has passed though, many of the items were sold, traded in or just lost to time.

Same. And in part because I can use what I do for a living as an excuse, old tech has a way of just piling up and piling up, so I’ve made a concerted effort over the years not to hold on to things, or “collect” them, and make sure they ended up in the hands of people who really needed them and/or would take care of them.

I do still have a few items, like that Byte Magazine collection and the original Samsung Windows phone developer unit, but they’ll need to be exorcised in the coming year.

Speaking of eBay, I have found some really neat treasures and have to stop my self from buying old stuff that’ll probably collect dust or fill drawers, but it got me thinking about a question for this forum:

Going back over early tech you owned, what devices were your most memorable from previous PDA’s, handheld game systems and early Smartphones that you used to own? Say from 1995-2005.

This is a bit earlier than that timeframe, but I bought an Atari Lynx and several game cartridges to play on the plane rides to/from our honeymoon, but I returned it all when we got back because I really couldn’t afford it. And Toys ‘R Us had an incredible return policy. (Which basically amounted to, they would take anything back, including items you didn’t buy there. I’m surprised they’re not still in business.) I’ve always been fascinated by portable gaming, and my son and I had various Sony PSPs over the years. I recall arguing that if they had just adapted a two-stick design like console controllers early on, those could have been great devices for shooters.

I owned almost every single Palm, Handspring, and Sony Palm OS-based PDA ever made, and I was always fascinated by that kind of thing. The Sony units were particularly high-end for the day, as I recall. I also owned a variety of Windows CE/Palm-sized PC/whatever Windows Mobile-type PDAs and then smartphones over the years. The Compaq iPAQ, for example with a variety of sleeves for storage and connectivity. (And that huge two-card sleeve.) Also the Dell versions.

Pre-iPhone, my memory of “smartphones” is a bit vague. I was on Verizon before the iPhone came out, and I was always fascinated by tethering a phone to a laptop to give it Internet access. This was very expensive back then, but I have a specific memory of sitting in the Borders Books next to Penn Station in New York and being online through my Moto Q to get something published. Today, this is just common, obviously, but it was really cool at the time.

This time period was also an interesting time for Microsoft, as it was trying to extend Windows to non-PC devices in a variety of ways, including Handheld PCs, pocketable PDAs and phones, Media Center PCs, tablet PCs, smart displays, and Portable Media Centers. I had a crazy number of all of those devices come and go through my home back then.

We should also remember the iPod, which dominated in the pre-iPhone days. I owned almost every iPod ever made, too, and Apple actually gave me the first version to review. It was one of the only things they ever gave me officially, but I guess my positive review couldn’t overcome the fact that I wasn’t exactly Apple-centric enough. But most iPods were pretty amazing, and that market expanded and improved very quickly.

Merry Christmas!

sherlockholmes (and others) write:

Not a question but I simply want to take this opportunity to say Thank You for all the work you do with this site. I just wanted to wish you, your family and the team Happy Holidays and stay healthy.

Christian aka Sherlock Holmes

Thank you! And to you and everyone else as well.

Windows vs. macOS

rob_segal asks:

You’ve mentioned not liking macOS as much as Windows. What features do you dislike in macOS and what do you find missing or lacking?

You know, this is kind of a tough one. There’s a lot that goes into this, and while it should be obvious that some of it just a familiarity thing—I literally use Windows all day long every day—it’s not just that.

From a historical perspective, I was always fascinated by the Mac, back to the original model, and I was always a close follower of the company’s history and how the platform evolved. But when Steve Jobs returned to Apple and made NeXTSTep/OpenStep the basis for Mac OS X, my interest really exploded: I was always quite taken by the NeXT platform but, like most, I could never afford to own such a thing. So I was very interested to see what happened there. I bought a white iBook right around the time the first version of Mac OS X shipped, and dual-booted with Mac OS 9 (probably), when it still defaulted to that classic OS. And via many, many other Macs, I always evaluated each version of Mac OS X and then macOS in turn.

Obviously, when you switch platforms, you’re looking to bring your workflow with you, and the Mac makes this possible, but it’s not seamless. Most of the apps I use, or could use, are there—the browsers, Office, Teams, OneDrive, some image editing application, etc.—but it’s always the little things. (I’m seeing the same thing now with the iPhone 13 Pro after several years of using mostly Android.) The Mac is not as keyboard shortcut friendly as Windows, and because I rely on that, I keep running into productivity roadblocks. This is in the form of things like ALT + F + [whatever] (or the equivalent on the Mac) to access a menu, plus the fact that not all UI elements in a Mac dialog are accessible via the keyboard. What I mean is that, on Windows, every control that can be pressed or interacted with is part of that dialog’s “z-order,” and you can repeatedly tap TAB to access each in turn. On the Mac, this isn’t the case: Some controls are in the z-order, but some are not.  It makes me less efficient.

There are some hardware-related things I don’t like too. On newer MacBooks like the current-era M1 MacBook Air and MacBook Pros, Apple uses a Force Touch haptics system instead of being a moving part, and I hate it. When I try to grab a file icon or whatever on-screen, an action that is basic and second nature in Windows, I can never do so, as it detects my selection as a click. I have spent years trying to fix this through OS settings and just trying to get the feel for it. But it just never works well for me, and it’s frustrating.

The Mac is still an easier transition than Chrome OS or Linux, however. The availability of OneDrive file sync and file system integration is key there. But also the mainstream apps I need every day. And the M1 Mac’s ability to run Windows (on ARM) virtually faster than it runs on physical PCs is both alarming and amazing. But I’m still not swayed. Every time I go back to a Windows PC, it’s a feeling of relief. Everything just works the way I want it to, and I can focus on what I’m working on.

Looking back on the Xbox One

christianwilson asks:

What are your thoughts on Don Mattrick? The guy gets a lot of hate online for how the Xbox One was unveiled but watching Power On reminded me that he was in charge for much of the lifespan of Xbox 360 and Kinect. He also had a good run at EA prior to Microsoft.

Right. He wasn’t a complete idiot, but he looked like one because he presided over Xbox when it was transitioning from the Xbox 360 to the Xbox One, and with the latter console, Microsoft threw away everything it learned and did right with its predecessor. Despite the whole $1+ billion cost of the Red Ring of Death, the Xbox 360 was beloved by its users because it was so laser-focused on games and it established Xbox as the go-to console for shooter fans. And the Xbox 360 cost less than the PS3, which was huge, and it shipped a year earlier.

Flash forward to 2013 and Microsoft was replacing that console with one that was more expensive than the PS4 and required users to take the Kinect whether they wanted it or not. Worse, Microsoft tried to expand the market for the Xbox by focusing not on games first but on television. And this really alienated gamers. And they stayed away in droves.

We can’t only blame Don Mattrick for this. He was just the top person in a team full of executives, all of whom also had to answer to Microsoft’s broader corporate aims, and Xbox as an organization clearly felt that they could make the console interesting for non-gamers too. But … it just fell flat, and there is always a fall guy. Just like Steven Sinofsky, who was lauded for Windows 7 but then literally ruined Windows 8. Xbox One, like Windows phone, succumbed to multiple problems, not just one thing. But price, focus, Kinect, and the original online-only requirements all contributed. Who else can you blame but the team’s leader?

There is no doubt that the unveil of Xbox One was a disaster and, of course, he was the guy in position to take the blame for it. But is it right for his reputation to be completely destroyed by that fateful day in 2013?

History isn’t kind to the losers, unfortunately. It’s not fair for his reputation to be ruined, but he did play the primary role in determining what the Xbox One was, and if you watch Microsoft’s Power On documentary, which I strongly recommend, you’ll learn that Xbox had been neck and heck with PlayStation for the previous generation and it was then outsold by as much as 6 or 8 to 1 with the Xbox One and PS4. He almost killed that platform, and it took Phil Spencer to not just right that ship but figure out a growth model past the consoles. In some ways, we should thank Mattrick for giving us Spencer. Sort of.

Phone

anderb asks:

What phone are you using this week?

I’ve been using the iPhone 13 Pro since it arrived a week ago. I think I’m switching to it semi-permanently, in the sense that I’ll test and use other smartphones in the coming year, I’m sure, but this will likely be my primary phone. I’ll write about that soon either way.

One Windows, one Xbox

bschnatt ask:

I’ve recently dusted off my Lumia 950 XL to find out what the current status of it is (what apps still run, what apps are still available to download, etc). I was glad to see that many apps I use are still chugging along, like Audible, Kindle, and Spotify. (I’ll never use this phone as a daily driver, but the screen is awesome, so I *do* use it in-house for some things.)

Have you tried to use Windows 365 or XBox Cloud Gaming on a Windows 10 Mobile device? I won’t subscribe to these to find out – I’m just curious to know if they’ll run on one 😉 My phone only has 3 GB of RAM, but it’s more performant for many things than my BlackBerry Key2 LE with 4 GB of RAM. Hooray for UWP…

No, there’s no reason to test something like that on an unsupported phone. I mean, who would that benefit? It’s too bad things didn’t work out there, and the synergy between Microsoft’s new gaming initiatives and Windows Mobile could have been interesting. But it’s over.

That said, I have begun using Xbox Cloud Gaming again on a variety of devices, however, including laptops and the iPad, and something positive has happened where the lag/latency was reduced to the point I can play shooters like Halo Infinite successfully, at least in single-player mode. This wasn’t the case not that long ago. So I suppose it could work well on any device that supports both a web browser and an Xbox controller.

Happy holidays, everyone.