Ask Paul: April 23 (Premium)

Happy Friday, and greetings from Massachusetts, where we’re spending the weekend. Here’s another great set of reader questions to kick off the weekend.

Short Takes

ggolcher asks:

Thank you always for the great content and to tirelessly make simple what many companies obfuscate. My question is: what’s the situation with Short Takes? I haven’t seen much activity around that segment.

Thanks … And yeah, sorry. That’s on me. It was getting too difficult/time-consuming to do both Ask Paul (which often goes past 3000 words) and Short Takes on Fridays, and so Short Takes always took the hit. But I do still want to do it, and I’ve intended to move it to Monday/Tuesday (depending on the week), but haven’t done so yet. I will try to get that going soon.

A potpourri of questions

bschnatt  asks:

1) Who is the most famous person to ask you for an autograph or a selfie (and conversely, what’s *your* greatest autograph/selfie “conquest”)? If a fan wanted to take a selfie with you with an iPad Pro, would you die from the tortuous conflict raging within your soul? 😉

I’m not sure anyone truly famous has ever asked me for an autograph. I’ve signed some odd things—a Kindle, for example—and I was asked to, but refused, to sign a woman’s breast. I always make a joke when someone wants a picture with an iPad, but I would of course allow it. 🙂

I’m not much for autographs anymore, but when I was very young and working at Burger King (my second job) ever, Bob Lobel, a famous local sportscaster at the time came in and I asked him for his autograph despite the fact that everyone I was working with was making fun of me for doing so. He told me not to listen to those guys, and he was really nice about it. There are others, I guess, like some of MTV vjs and Soledad O’Brien, both of which I met at industry events. But nothing major.

2) Has anyone from Microsoft ever asked you for advice on how they should proceed with something?

Yes. And while I can’t talk too much about this stuff, I spent a lot of time talking to people like Terry Myerson, especially, and even Steven Sinofsky before he finally realized I wasn’t just going to parrot his nonsense. Myerson, in particular, was very interested in my opinions about various things, including the Skylake disaster and how Microsoft should respond and Windows 10 Cloud, which because Windows 10 S. I’ve been close with various people all around Microsoft, and especially in Windows and Windows Server, over the years.

3) What would it take for you to abandon Microsoft and go all-in for Apple? Is there anything in the Apple ecosystem that you continually regret not seeing in the Microsoft ecosystem (and have you expressed these complaints to Microsoft)?

Honestly, the sticking point is the Mac: I could use iPhone (and have), and I already use an iPad every day. But I very much prefer Windows and PCs to the Mac, and I say that having owned/used literally dozens of Macs since 2001. Dozens. I appreciate the hardware, but I’ve never cared for macOS.

4) What are your thoughts about Florida (politics notwithstanding)? Can’t imagine having Christmas without snow, or are you succumbing to the lure of palm trees and white sandy beaches?

I think about Florida for obvious future retirement/low cost of living reasons, but every time I visit, I run into the same issue: It’s too hot almost all of the time, and it’s too humid all of the time. I just can’t deal with that. I keep thinking that I’ll hit some age and be OK with that, or even want it, but it never happens.

With our kids in college—actually, one is graduating next month—my wife and I talk about the future all the time, and of course the pandemic has really driven home the need to move on these plans since you never know what’s going to happen. And we see this future as being split between places, one of which would be a stable home base and one (or more) which could be different every year. (And maybe we don’t go directly to this, but change our schedule over time.) We like this area, or New England, for the summer half of the year, but not for the rest of it. So we’re still trying to figure that out.

5 best

SeattleMike asks:

If you were stranded on a desert island and could only take 5 books, 5 musical albums, and 5 pieces of personal technology, what would you take?

Oh boy. 🙂

So, this is off the top of my head and is the type of thing that could change given the day. And I may have to cheat a bit.

For books, I’d go with The Lord of the Rings, The Stand, the original Foundation trilogy, and Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lector books (the biggest cheat, I guess) at the least. Those are books I’ve read and re-read many times each.

For albums, the cheat is that I’d go with greatest hits collections in many cases if possible. Some kind of Pink Floyd collection (I actually prefer the David Gilmore years). Yann Tierson (mostly instrumental, most famous for Amelie soundtrack, but I’d choose C’était ici, which is a live album). Def Leppard, especially Hysteria. Van Halen, of course. Collective Soul.

Technology? Right now I’m really liking the HP Spectre x360 14 and think that could be a keeper. An iPad Air for reading and watching movies. A smartphone (I guess OnePlus 9 Pro for now, but that changes over time). Some kind of good earbuds with noise reduction, active or otherwise. Maybe a Sonos setup for that music. 🙂

I would probably come up with some different answers a week from now.

Why iPad?

brian_c asks:

Very difficult to ask this question without sounding like I’m trying to start an internet arguement, but this is a genuine question. What exactly is the benefit of getting a new iPad over a Galaxy Tab? …  I see that the iPad ranges in price from twice to five times the cost of my Samsung. What am I missing?

The single biggest thing is app quality. The same apps on both platforms are almost always better on the iPad than they are on Android. For whatever reason, Apple has been much more successful getting developers to customize their apps to take advantage of the screen size/shape and unique features of its tablets where Google has not.

There are other minor issues that impact my own personal decision to stick with iPad, including the fact that I purchase movies through Apple, and you can only access the special features on an Apple device. But it’s primarily about app quality.

And when you look at sales/marketshare, you can see very clearly that this market is all iPad. There are no successful Android tablets. This is a reflection of that app quality issue, I think, as is the fact that the platform’s maker, Google, has stopped even trying to compete in this market and is pushing Chrome OS, and not Android, for tablets.

The biggest benefit that Samsung (and Amazon) can offer in this market is lower prices. But that’s not done anything to stop iPad’s dominance.

A minimalist Windows 10

hrlngrv asks:

Sarcastic and not completely in good faith, but will the News and Information flyout coming to all recent versions of Windows 10 make Windows 10X more appealing to those who hate extras?

Ha!

I hope that Windows 10X’s minimalist design is appealing to people, but the platform needs to make sense—i.e. have apps and services that people want—first.

Espresso

j5 asks:

We see you drinking out of little coffee cups. You may have talked about this before are you a big coffee drinker? If so what do you like? Any coffee tech that you use?

I switched from American coffee to espresso when we got home from our second home swap (2007, I think) in France; coffee here just seems like water to me now.  We used to get espresso from a local Italian shop near Boston, but we’ve been getting Illy espresso for years. I drink one cup of caffeinated espresso in the morning and then switch to decaf. And the Iced Lattes I get from Dunkin’ Donuts are decaf with skim milk.

We briefly flirted with getting an expensive espresso machine, but these things are complicated and need constant maintenance, and so we’ve always used inexpensive machines and end up replacing them roughly every two years. I can’t find the exact one we have right now, I think my wife must have bought it. But it cost less than $150 and is very similar to this.

Windows 10X

AnOldAmigaUser asks:

Any news regarding Windows 10X? Do you think Microsoft will unveil a 10X specific device or devices or just offer it on existing hardware such as the Surface Go and Go Laptop? Will OEMs bother building 10X devices or wait to see what the uptake is?

No, nothing new, sorry. We know it’s been delayed at least twice, so it’s possible that plans are shifting, but my understanding is that Windows 10X will only ship on new hardware and that it won’t be available on existing PCs. But if you think back to last year, Lenovo originally planned to use Windows 10X on its ThinkPad Fold, and then it said it would offer both before just moving to normal Windows 10. So maybe we will see PCs with a choice of 10X and Windows 10.

I think you can expect to see the same level of hesitation from PC makers with regards to 10X as we’ve seen so far with Windows 10 on ARM or Windows 10 S. It’s just such an unknown.

Mexico

Brumfondl asks:

With Mexico having been moved to “Level 4: Do not travel” by the US Stare Dept. due to Covid, has this made you rethink your plans to go there in June?

No. The State Department’s warnings about Mexico are off-the-charts out to lunch and have been for years, and they’re based mostly on “crime” and “kidnapping,” which are the types of things that are both worse here in the United States (at least the crime bit) and are not a factor in the places I intend to visit. If we’re going to use crime as a bar, we’d all have to leave the U.S.

I’ve been watching a lot of Mexico travel videos on YouTube. And you know what I see a lot of? People wearing masks. Plus, we are vaccinated and we’re not idiots. I’m not worried about COVID in Mexico.

Writers, middlemen, and readers

helix2301 asks:

Alex Kantrowitz was on TWIT this week. He was talking about medium and substack and how you need to go direct to your readers and not worry about things like Facebook, Twitter, Google News or Apple News. I guess as a larger well known writer you can do that but I remember you talking about your wife and using medium and getting paid as a writer. I was just wondering your thoughts on getting your content out to the world and if you were a smaller unknown writer would you take more advantage of outlets like Apple News who says they have 100 million readers a week or Google News. I know you post your articles on Twitter to get them out to your followers just wondering your thoughts and ideas on the topic.  I like Alex’s content but don’t think he is as objective as you. You are you always look at things from both sides which is what I really appreciate about your work and would like your option on this topic as I find it interesting.

Well, thank you.

At a high level, this can be compared to the situation that has developed especially since the pandemic with restaurants, where more and more are offering delivery through third-party services because they feel forced to. The problem is that these things are essentially middlemen that take a cut of the pay. So when you go through GrubHub or whatever, the restaurant makes less money. As a fan of certain places, I would ideally like the restaurant to get more (or all of) the money. So we can order directly and pick it up ourselves, or maybe those restaurants also offer their own delivery.

For writers, there are middlemen too. These can be publishers, hosting companies, news aggregators (like Apple News or whatever), and similar. And you have to strike the right balance for you and where you are in life. For a big news organization, using Apple News may or may not be lucrative enough to justify the expenses. (I have no idea.)

I’ve cut out the middleman on the books because publishers still think in terms of paper and I think in terms of regularly updating the content. My wife went to Medium because her clients abandoned her when the pandemic started, and she’s seen a little success there. (And has thankfully found new clients.)

If you think about this site, which is my primary focus, it requires a team of people who can a) pay the bills, b) believe that the business makes sense, c) sell ads, sponsorships, and other things that actually make money, and so on. If I were literally on my own, I would suffer in all areas besides just writing content. So for this kind of endeavor, being part of a team doesn’t just make sense, it’s desirable and preferable. And I’m lucky that we have such a great team of individuals.

Breaking through as a beginner is hard, of course. I wrote for previous websites I created, like the Internet Nexus and the SuperSite for Windows, without being paid much or at all, for years. I was able to do this in the beginning because my wife had a steady job at the time and we felt like it could turn into something viable (perhaps in combination with writing books). And I was lucky in that it worked out. But there are so many more avenues for reaching an audience today than there were 25 years ago. It wouldn’t be the same, but I feel like someone who can communicate in an articulate fashion with enough passion and knowledge about whatever topic should be able to make a place for themselves.