A Convenient Truth

Hi. So lately I’ve been on a tech geek kick. This is very scary. As if being a tech geek wasn’t scary enough, there’s the added reality that a tech geek and his money are soon parted. But I think I’ve learned something important about technology and---dare I say it?---life itself.
 

Convenience is overrated.

Let’s talk about home computing. I own an IPad—a device that has first world decadence written all over it. “Honey, have you seen my IPad?” is surely not a question Jesus and his disciples could have ever foreseen. I also own a smartphone—an HTC One X. This thing blows away my old IPhone—bigger, clearer screen with retina display by Steve Jobs’ own definition (300+ pixels per inch). The new IPad and Macbook Pro, um, don’t have retina display by that definition. Apparently Apple’s braintrust interprets “retina display” with the same looseness and fluidity that John Edwards interprets “ethics”. The boys in Silicon Valley must have had a meeting and said, “Ah screw it! Let’s say 200 pixels per inch is retina display too and call it a day! No one will notice!”. My phone also has a zoom function which actually reformats the right margins to make the screen readable! Apple’s zoom functions about as well as the zoom on an ‘84 IBM: you can zoom to your heart’s content but good luck navigating around the screen. Apple just won a patent lawsuit against Samsung because, among others things, Samsung allegedly stole their zoom idea on smartphones. That’s like Paula Abdul suing Lindsey Lohan for stealing her idea to mix Xanax and Red Bull.

Anyway……with my hip, trendy mobile devices I decided to do something about my home computer. I had an old Dell PC—with a tower, a mediocre screen, a wired mouse and keyboard. A real eyesore. This thing scored zero on the Sex Appeal meter. Whenever I go to Barnes and Noble or Starbucks or It’s A Grind or Cosi or any other yuppie haven in West Hartford Center I always see people on their laptops. I’ve never been a fan of laptops but I decided it just might be because I have a hard time seeing the screen. I don’t like them but I want to like them. But I had a plan: get a Windows laptop which is compatible with screen magnification software unlike Macs or Macbooks (again, Apple, why do you hate blind people?). I saw they even make laptops with 17 inch screens and “full HD” 1080p screens. So this would be a piece of cake for me to see! I bought a really nice HP Envy—pretty close to the Windows equivalent of the Macbook Pro. It was a beautifully made, top of the line machine.

God, I hated it.

I returned it after two days to Best Buy for my money back. You might say I subconsciously KNEW I would hate it so I chose Best Buy over Amazon because returning it would be easier. Why does anyone like laptops?? If I was an ergonomics expert and I decided to design the perfect anti-ergonomic machine of death, could I do much better than a laptop computer? The keyboards……awful. The keys are paper thin and clumsy to type on, plus they are set far off from you to make room for the touchpad. Oh, let’s talk about that touchpad. I’ve heard turtles have watched people using touchpads and thought, “Geez, hurry up!”. Maybe experienced touchpad users develop lighting fast usage of it, but I can’t imagine how. I saw the movie We Bought A Zoo recently and there is a scene where Matt Damon is on his laptop---a Macbook, obviously, although a still less blatant product placement than the touching ending to the last Mission Impossible movie when Tom Cruise rewarded his daredevil crew for their hard work by giving them new IPhones!. Anyway, Matt Damon was considering deleting a picture of his widow because he knew he had to get over her. He starts to move the touchpad in the general direction of the “X” at the top of the screen. This scene lasts about 4 minutes. In the Director’s Cut I would guess it’s 9 minutes. You could have left the room, made popcorn, and came back and he would still JUST be getting to the moment of truth when he had to decide to delete or not to delete. (SPOILER: he doesn’t delete. He folds up his laptop--which of course demonstrates the Apple logo to all the audience. Another movie featuring graphic full frontal Apple logos). I guess what I’m trying to say is even Jason Bourne and Good Will Hunting are slow with a touchpad! I rest my case.  
 

And what about the screen angle? You always have to look down at it. Has anyone found a correlation between neck surgeries and laptop computers? My idea of health care reform: ban the laptop computer. I suspect we would save $395 billion per year. I know, I know: you can get a stand for the laptop and you can get a mouse to replace the touchpad. But once I started thinking about doing all that I had a realization: maybe I’m just trying to turn this thing into the desktop it will never be.
 

So I turned it in and bought a new desktop with a real mouse, real keyboard, and big screen. Again, I admit I was tempted to get the 27” iMac. I mean they are, like, white and shiny and stuff. But again, I wanted to have at least the security blanket of using screen magnification software since I read that many programs and websites default to small font especially with high resolution screens. So I did some research looking for the Windows equivalent to the Mac and, much to my shock and amazement, I bought another Dell. Dude, I was getting a Dell.
 

And I must say……the 27 inch screen with its 2560 x 1440 is awesome. By using the computer’s internal font and zoom adjustments I actually don’t need screen magnification after all! Where have these screens been all my life? I guess I won’t be able to write The Great American Novel from a chair in Starbucks while sipping a Double Mocha Cappuccino after all, but who cares?
 

But I’m STILL not sure if this is the perfect choice. Like the iMac, it’s a more modern All In One Desktop. The PC and screen are built together like on a laptop, and you just use a wireless mouse and a wireless keyboard (which I upgraded to a Logitech which lights up the keys—the coolest feature my HP Laptop had going for it). Less space, hardly any wires!
 

Except….I noticed something about this thing. If I stream videos for a fair amount of time, the fan kicks into overdrive and the top of the computer gets super hot. That can’t possibly be good, can it? Also……I don’t think I’m imaging this…..if I’ve been running it for a couple of hours it almost seems like the screen gets a bit less sharp. Apparently I’m not crazy because I read All In One’s are notorious for heating issues, poorer reliability, and, yes, even sometimes blurriness from overheating. Even the iMac apparently suffers from the same problems. It’s basically a very large laptop and, like a laptop, it’s not as reliable as a clunky old fashioned desktop.

Damn! I might end up considering trying to sell this thing on E-Bay and crawling right back to an old school desktop—a super fast tower with a separate 27 inch high resolution monitor. (By the way, ever hear someone say, "Don't buy that! It's Chinese made crap!"? I just read the desktop maker with the best reliability ratings is Lenovo: a Chinese company). I retreated back into a less convenient and portable option than a laptop but maybe I didn’t retreat quite far enough. I could turn it off for a while if it gets super hot and turn it back on, but there’s a real irony when a more convenient All In One desktop actually forces such an inconvenient step.
 

And then there is music. Music sales are down, everyone is worried. What happened? Bands started sucking? Okay, in many, many cases I agree. But I have an additional theory: Mp3’s are ruining music. That’s not a new thought. Record companies panicked when free downloads started cutting into record sales. But maybe it’s purchased mp3’s from ITunes and Amazon as well. I made the mistake of actually buying a CD a few months ago! I felt about as dated as I would have if I had bought a pair of bell bottom jeans and a turtleneck. I went home and did a sound comparison. The much maligned, never very cool plastic CD won hands down. I realized I had fooled myself into thinking ITunes downloads sounded as good, but a direct comparison made me realize CD’s sound clearer and much more 3-dimensional. An mp3 is literally a crushed CD—crushed so that downloading an album won’t take up all of your phone or mp3 player’s space and thereby discourage you from downloading more music. In a way, music has come full circle: mp3’s blended, compressed, nearly mono sound somewhat resembles an AM radio station compared with the more FM sound of a CD..
 

No more sonic fast food for this writer! I bought a bunch more CD’s (wish I hadn’t ditched all my old ones) and a portable (I can’t believe I’m publicly admitting this) Sony CD player! Don’t worry—they still feature their miraculous G Protection anti-skipping technology! (My G protection? My AK. Know what I’m sayin’ homes?). I took it on a run with me……and it skipped. Maybe it doesn’t skip on mall walkers, but it skips when you run. And it nearly fell out of my pocket 78 times. No one ever said 1.4 megabytes per second, 16 bit music listening was a walk in the park.
 

So I devised a brilliant compromise: keep buying CD’s but “rip” them as .WAV files. These are similar to mp3’s but not compressed. They also take up much more space so using my phone to store them wasn’t an option. So…..I bought a 64 GB Ipod Touch. Damnit, Apple! You win again!
 

But I also decided to buy a home stereo system. I haven’t owned one in about 10 years. I used to have a monster Sony stereo—two gigantic speakers which were almost as tall as me with a subwoofer for maximum floor and window rattling bass to severely piss off the neighbors. But I ditched it for the convenience of mp3’s and my computer’s disc drive--I was told to love thy neighbor. But I came out of stereo retirement and bought a CD player which does nothing besides play a CD, a receiver which does nothing besides amplify the sound (and get a few radio stations), and two more modestly sized bookshelf speakers which do nothing besides play the music. Blissfully non-versatile. I also learned some important lessons about speaker wire. Wait, don’t stop reading—this will be gripping. it used to come pre-cut and pre-stripped. Now you have to do it all yourself. They obviously laid off the wire-cutters and wire strippers at the RCA factory. Welcome to the new business model. Also, they no longer use pure copper, but some sort of cost saving aluminum-copper combo. But of course that value is passed on to the consumer! Now back to our regularly scheduled programming…..
 

My new system sounds awesome. It’s the anti-smartphone. You can’t put it in your pocket and it does ONE thing. It’s a space hogging, non-versatile collection of parts and I love it. Now…do I go a step further in inconvenience and add a record player? There is that “warm”, “round”, “full” sound of analog every audiophile talks about. They are all sonic chubby chasers, I guess. (Apparently audiophiles also gushed about the crystal clear digital sound of CD’s back in 1983 so they are bigger flip-floppers than Mitt Romney). But I am tempted to relive my childhood when one magical Christmas Eve Santa placed a vinyl copy of Ozzy Osbourne’s Diary Of A Madman under our Christmas tree! (These days I heard Santa just downloads One Direction from the Itunes store. Dark days are upon us, for sure).

But musicians themselves embody a stubborn insistence on old, outdated, inconvenient technology. Most guitar players not only don't use digital amps, they don't even use solid state amps--kind of the bridge to the digital world it seems. They use vacuum tube amps: state of the art technology---in 1930. Stereos and TV's used to be made with tubes too but only guitar amps survive as a standard bearer of the old technology because, most agree, they sound better.
 

Kids, machines are a lot like people: give them one job to do and they just might do a great job at it. Give them multiple jobs and they might do all of them, but will they ever do any of them brilliantly or just passably? Will they be jacks of all trades but masters of none? A smartphone can take photos—but the best smartphone camera is 8 megapixels while an average stand-alone digital camera is in the double digits. Smartphones can play music—but they will never sound as good as a CD or a record. You can type on them—but you have to touch type: which is a bit like crawling after you’ve already learned to walk. You can watch videos—but they will never look as good as on a big screen TV or PC. I’m not sure if there is anything a smartphone does that you can legitimately say it does great except maybe tell time—but they destroy the coolness of a wristwatch. They also work as phones but lack the clumsy coolness of an old analog phone with its rotary dialing ability. You might say they were slow, but I say they were still faster than a laptop touchpad and didn’t make you want to punch something.     
 

Maybe smartphones are a symbol of our modern world where we try to do everything at once. I think our whole economy is in trouble because businesses and politicians seem to have taken the smartphone, All In One approach to managing everything. Businesses want to make profits on sales but they also want to not pay their employees as much—but if every business does the same, who will have the money to keep buying products and services at the same rates? Politicians want to grow the economy but they also don’t want to raise taxes---but how can you grow an economy when you’ve depleted your own education system in the name of lower taxes? You can do all these things at once—but can you have a society which is excelling or just functioning? Our economy today is like an mp3 player, not a home stereo system. You can opt for the convenience and “all in one” approach of a fast food restaurant, but can you expect to have long term health too? Trying to marry convenience and quality in every single aspect of life is a losing game! I say quality rules and convenience blows!

Well, I better wrap this up before my convenient, space saving, versatile All In Once 21^st Century PC blows up. If you want convenience, better make sure you have a good smoke alarm.  

PS--they will have to pry my smartphone from me with my cold, dead hands!