Ask Paul: September 6 (Premium)

Happy Friday from Berlin! This is a shorter-than-usual installment, thanks to an incredibly busy week. But let’s dive in: This weekend isn’t going to weekend itself.

You so German

j5 asks:

How are the German tech journalists and Germans in general, their attitude towards tech, computers, smartphones, privacy, this sort of genre different than the attitudes of Americans towards this? We’re all human beings of course. But we all have different cultural norms as well. For example, was the freak out towards CoPilot the same there as was here with us tech nerds, etc.

I’m not honestly sure. I don’t know a lot of German tech journalists per se, and I didn’t meet any here at IFA, or while in Berlin.

I can make some generalizations that will insult everyone, of course. 🙂

Being in Europe again has been interesting. I’ll touch on this in a “What I Use” post soon, and my wife and will discuss this a bit in the context of a “Why Mexico?-type” post/video as well. But we’ve been to Europe so many times over so many years that this trip has triggered some interesting emotions and thoughts. We love it here. And it’s impossible not to contrast it with home, and with Mexico.

We also have many friends in Europe, and we were lucky enough to hang out with one of them, one of our oldest friends, from France, last night. And we have all these general observations, most of which are just personally amusing or whatever. He’s into tech, and so we spent a lot of time comparing notes.

To be grossly over-simplistic, Germany is very rules-focused, very orderly. Just to stick a single topic on that, drivers in cars are very observant of the road, people on bikes, people crossing the street, and so on, and no one speeds through an intersection to make a light or whatever. Meanwhile, pedestrians will wait for cross-lights even when there are no cars coming, and they won’t rush across an intersection at the last second if that light turns red.

My wife and I are Americans, of course, and willfully oblivious to all this, we’ve simply crossed streets whenever we can, and you can almost feel the stares of disbelief and even animosity a little. I’m constantly reminded of a time on our first trip to Germany, in 2003, I was driving and stopped at an intersection in a tiny town with no other cars in sight when I saw an elderly gentlemen with a cane waiting to cross the street: He shook his cane and me and yelled some complaint, but the point was clear. I had the right of way, and I had to go immediately. He’d cross when he crossed. Meanwhile, in Mexico City, it’s like a game of Frogger where everyone–in cars or on foot–is weaving chaotically around each other, each going whenever they want. It couldn’t be more different.

Germans share much with the Dutch, but one of them I like is a general bluntness I share. I was at a group meal the other day with a guy from the Midwest US, a guy from North Carolina, and a woman from The Netherlands, and one of them got off on a topic I knew was going to trouble the woman (as it did me), and I instantly started counting down to her inevitable response to this, knowing she couldn’t help herself. And sure enough, it didn’t take long. And when she did start contradicting him, I leaned into the other guy and said, “so… what about you?” And we both laughed, knowing this wasn’t going to end well.

Anyway, to further generalize, what I see from people in Europe is the same thing I see from people anywhere, really, the result of some combination of factors that make up their realities. Europe generally has higher taxes than we do in the United States, but that goes into the health and financial safety nets we very much lack in the United States. They are much more concerned about privacy, though that is finally happening to some degree in the states. They seem more distrustful of Big Tech, which I find healthy and correct. I’ve never sensed a general dislike or distrust of Americans per se. In fact, I’ve never felt anything other than welcome, everywhere in Europe.

But for better or worse, I was mostly with Americans on this trip. So it was a bit like going to any trade show, but with better food and in a nicer local. Berlin is a beautiful city. And the people here have been fantastic to us.

Sorry, I realize none of this really addresses your question.

Organization

gg1 asks:

Paul you are very productive. You are incredibly prolific writing for this site, plus also produce Eternal Spring, the many videos you record weekly, book writing, etc. What organization system do you use to keep track, prioritize, and act on the things that you have to do?

I am prolific, for sure. I’m not always organized. But it depends. I feel like I spend a lot of time thinking about how I can be more efficient, and if you look at projects like the decluttering work that comes and goes, you can kind of see the effort.

I’m not sure if I have a formal system per se. Maybe lots of mini-systems for specific things. For work-related things, which is mostly writing, I work mostly out of a synced file system that’s available on all the computers I use. High-level, the book work is in a Book folder, and I use a To-do folder for my current writing for the site and elsewhere. A lot of what I write is transient, in that it happens and is archived, but for longer-term things, or literally to-do things, that’s the system.

I use Google Calendar for all the usual reasons, and for to-do tasks I want done on some schedule. Semi-related to that, I use Google Maps a lot as a sort of to-do for life: When someone recommends a restaurant or other place, I save it to Maps using a green “Want to go” flag. I use Notion extensively, for all kinds of things. It’s where I keep the show notes for Windows Weekly, Hands-On Windows, and Eternal Spring, the latter of which I work on with my wife. It’s where my meeting notes are, but it’s also where I will store random thoughts that occur to me when I’m out somewhere so I can refer to the notes later. This is kind of important. I would forget things otherwise, so writing them down is important.

I’ve worked alone for so long that organizing some of the things I’m doing with my wife has been difficult. We’ve been working on an Eternal Spring book about Mexico City, and this is the type of thing I would have rifled through quickly if it were just me. But just having another person collaborating on this has introduced a lot of unexpected rethinking. She does things differently from me, organizes things differently, and so it’s triggered numerous restarts at every level, from the tools and services we use to just basic ways of reviewing each other’s work and so on. It’s been interesting.

Speaking of which, I’m so involved (hyper-focused, perhaps) in work-related things that I can be much less organized when it comes to the rest of life. My wife is more organized with that, so she’ll send me emails–sometimes the same email, repeatedly–to remind me to do something (recent one, switching over to a new business credit car) or put something on my calendar or whatever.

I want to write something related to this (tentative title One) because I feel like it’s only possible to focus on a single big project at a time. I’m juggling a few right now, and it’s tough.

Maybe the right way to frame all this is that I’m inherently disorganized, so I put things in place to prevent me from stumbling around blindly and forgetting things all the time. I’m one of those people that have to have everything in the right place–keys, glasses, wallet, whatever–or I can’t find them. It’s almost like a “living with ADHD” thing. Just accept that this is the problem and deal with it.

Survey says

TheJoeFin asks:

How often do you informally survey your friends and family members about the tech they use? Have you ever been surprised by a particular tech choice which has changed the way you think about reviewing/evaluating devices?

I do this regularly. I feel like this came up before, but during last weekend’s trip to upstate New York, I literally asked my sister and her husband, both of whom have flagship Samsung phones (as does my wife) and are PC users about whether they had heard about the Phone Link capabilities, were using them, or would find that in any way useful. I’m always trying to understand how “normal” (mainstream/non-technical) people use the technology, as it’s too easy to get stuck in a bubble that doesn’t represent anyone but me or people like me. This is super-important, and it does guide how and what I write about, for reviews and otherwise.

There were two related things from this week that are perhaps relevant to this.

The first is the friend from France I noted above. He’s an Apple guy semi-exclusively, and for all the normal reasons. But his usage of Apple products in recent years is kind of interesting. And that conversation started when he pulled out an iPhone SE, which surprised me. He said that he didn’t really use his phone all that much, also surprising, and that having a small phone was great, and he didn’t need anything more.

During the day, he’s on the Mac. And the Mac has that integration where the phone-specific bits, phone calling and messaging, all happens on whatever device you’re using, so he doesn’t need the phone. When he’s out, he often doesn’t even bring the phone, as he has a cellular-capable Apple Watch and it works the same way. He can listen to podcasts or music, or whatever, and never needs the phone. This is very interesting to me. I would never leave the house without a phone, don’t even like it when it’s left in another room, and I spend money in different places than he does. But I get it. And this is an interesting example of how buying into that ecosystem can really change how one interacts with technology.

The second was a recurring conversation I had with others at the show. I’ve described his year as being perhaps the biggest-ever for the PC, not in the sense that companies will suddenly sell more PCs than ever, but rather because there is so much activity. Silicon makers all coming out with new chip architectures. PC makers releasing what seems like more PC models than ever. And Microsoft pushing forward with its AI focus, for better or worse. I can’t recall a year like this. It’s exciting.

And yet … it doesn’t feel like any of this will move the needle on PC sales. I pointed out that it was odd to me that Qualcomm’s response to new chips from AMD and Intel was to release another, even more low-end version of the chips it already has. And that for all the splash and noise, PCs are still what they’ve been for several years now, a secondary device that most people never consider upgrading and only do so when strictly necessary. And that when that happens, there’s no real excitement like there might be for a phone or whatever. This should inform how we approach PCs, I guess, as tools for the most part, something we use to do other things, not something we use just to use it.

This is weird for me in some ways. Windows, PCs, are a real focus. And yet I have to sort of acknowledge that, to the world, at large, I’m curiously interested in a “thing” that most don’t ever think about, let alone care. I suspect this is an emotion Microsoft is wrestling with, just at a much bigger level. But the perspective is important, I think. We need some people to be invested in this stuff, to really understand it. But most do not.

Intel on the Intel

John_Spear asks:

How do you feel the OEM Lunar Lake announcements at IFA play against the Qualcomm CoPilot PC announcements earlier this year? Will the Intel projects build a similar buzz, or has the CoPilot honeymoon already cooled?

Intel’s Lunar Lake announcement is an interesting watch. It reminded me a bit of Microsoft’s May Copilot+ PC reveal, where it seemed like it couldn’t stop referencing the MacBook Air M3. Except in this case, Intel couldn’t stop mentioning Qualcomm and Snapdragon X. The perception there is interesting to me: Intel, suddenly, is very focused on head-to-head comparisons with AMD and Qualcomm, the latter being a company you’d think they’d never even heard of as recently as 9 months ago.

Competition is fine. Intel is still the market giant here, and what they needed to do was show up, which they did. Based on just the announcement coverage alone, I feel like they’re in a good place. I’ve been asking insiders about how these things really work, however, and there it shifts to cautiously optimistic. I’ve heard contrary opinions about where Zen 5 and Lunar Lake line up, but everyone agreed that Snapdragon has better battery life and better/more reliable instant-on. (Even Intel couldn’t fudge on that one. Its claim is “the most efficient x86 processor,” not “the most efficient PC processor.”) Otherwise, Intel comes out ahead.

The stark reality here is that while we’re finally seeing more AMD- and Qualcomm-based PCs, this is Intel’s market to lose. And while its financial difficulties could probably do more than anything else to make that happen, it appears to have done what it needed to do to get technically competitive again. The questions about reliability and real-world experience will come in time via reviews. There will be a lot of these computers, so we’ll have no lack of evidence.