“Do you mind? I was in the queue before you.”
SLAM!
“Good morning, would you like to talk about Jesus Christ Our Saviour?”
SLAM!
“Smart meters are sucking our brain juice and selling it to Martians. Would you like to sign my petition?”
SLAM!
“I am calling because you or someone in your family – or someone who lives nearby, possibly within a radius of five miles, or any of their families – recently suffered a motoring accident and...”
SLAM!
What’s with all the slamming? Ah now, you had to ask.
It has been a number of years since I switched from iOS smartphones to Android. This situation was initially forced upon me when my trusty iPhone 6 slipped out of my pocket while I laid back on a beanbag to ‘experience’ a video art installation at London’s Tate Modern Gallery.
Yes, I appreciate this counts as a double-strike on my character. It’s a bit like admitting that I went to a French New Wave movie all-nighter at my local arthouse cinema and accidentally left behind an upcycled jute tote bag full of kale. (What can I say? I was distracted by the thrilling action sequences that punctuate Last Year at Marienbad.)
My backup phone was a Huawei – remember them? – and I stuck with Android ever since. Naturally I get the occasional pang of homesickness whenever a new iPhone comes out but the feeling never lasts.
For example, I note that iPhone 15 users with iOS 17 installed have access to (it says here) “exciting new features”. There: I felt a pang and it evaporated before you even reached the end of this sentence. Perhaps there is something wrong with me but I struggle to find what is “exciting” about a standby mode and a diary app. Maybe it’s an age thing: it takes more than it used to for me to get excited.
If you are new-ish to Autosave is for wimps and never read Something for the weekend at The Register, you may not be aware that I used to be something of an Apple advocate earlier in [heh heh, the next two words always make me chuckle] my career. That is, I was on the editorial team of the UK edition of MacUser magazine for several years on either side of the millennium. This was before the company’s resurgence, mind: I first starting writing for MacUser while Steve Jobs was still in exile and producing daft cuboid workstations and funding an unknown 3D animation studio startup.
Eventually some fool must have thought I seemed compliant – er, I mean competent – enough to be trusted with a world exclusive. I got to be the first non-Apple person anywhere on the globe to review a new computer they were about to launch called the ‘iMac’.
I had to test the machine at Apple’s London HQ while an Apple PR minder watched me. The original iMac was no speed demon, nor was it upgradable (apart from system memory) but it was the most fabulous home computer I’d ever seen. Unfortunately, not being able to take the unit away to our own lab where we could test it over time meant that I was unable to discover how absolutely dreadful the puck-shaped mouse was.
Yup, that Jony Ive-designed, RSI-accelerating, rhyming-slang invoking, pucking iMac mouse. You can see it in the photo above. Looks cool, feels shit. I don’t think I ever subsequently saw an original iMac installed anywhere that hadn’t had the mouse replaced and its grimacing owner’s arm in a sling.
But, as sex predators insist, it was a different era back then. You could design a circular mouse that’s three inches too short to fit comfortably in the hand of anybody aged over three, and still be considered a creative genius. I barely mention the puck mouse in my review other than to note that its case was made of the same translucent plastic as that of the keyboard and display: “You can even see the two-tone ball roll inside.”
Yup, mice worked with a rubber ball and rollers in those days. Hilariously, I even had to write a sidebar to explain to readers what a “Universal Serial Bus” was, so cut me some slack.
No slack for Jony Ive, mind. This was the man who also designed Apple’s Power Mac G4 Cube, the only computer I have ever tested that had a touch-sensitive on-off button located on top of the case, right next to the heat vent. Taking automation to the futuristic extreme, it could literally shut down all by itself, and frequently did.
I read that Jony’s design company LoveFrom is now cooking up a $1bn funding deal with Softbank to develop a “consumer device” for OpenAI. No, I have no idea what this means, nor will I embarrass myself in 20 years’ time by waffling uselessly here about its moving parts. Hey Jony, why not make it puck-shaped?
But I digress. Ive has long departed Apple and I was supposed to be talking about iOS 17 on an iPhone 15, and I just remembered another of its other “exciting” new features – NameDrop. This is a function that lets iPhone users swap their contact information by tapping their handsets together.
Please excuse my lack of excitement. I’m pretty sure my Huawei had this feature three or four years ago, and it didn’t harden my nipples then either. It didn’t help knowing that every time I bumped phones with someone – assuming I could find a colleague with a compatible Huawei handset that supported the feature, which was never – it meant my contact swap would be redirected immediately to a bunker full of secret service agents under Beijing overlooked by Xi Jinping sitting on a throne at one end of the hall, stroking a white cat and muttering “excellent, excellent” whenever the comrade-xylophone-player at his feet bonged out some notes to indicate another occidental phone being bumped.
Given that you’re not supposed to knock overheating batteries about, I would like to read a full risk assessment before I whack two red-hot iPhone 15s together. Mind you, fireworks are something that I do find exciting, so maybe the description fits.
If NameDrop is anything like AirDrop, good luck with it. To quote from what’s written on-screen when I activate the feature on my MacBook, “AirDrop lets you share instantly with people nearby”.
They say that language is constantly changing, which might explain why “instantly” doesn’t mean what it used to. Whenever I use it, I have to remind the other person (in the same room, thankfully) how to enable it on their device, then we spend the next 15 minutes troubleshooting why neither of us can see each other’s computer. By the time we’ve got it working, usually after several restarts of both devices, I’m in such a rush to get the files sent across and switch the fucking feature off again that I forget to write down what we did to bring it to life.
Honestly, it would be quicker to connect the devices by serial cable and a pair of acoustic coupler modems.
This came to mind when I met a hiking club friend in the street this week. He asked me if I had the phone number of a mutual acquaintance and would I share it with him?
Good God, I hate it when people ask me this. My toes curl because I know what will happen next: we will begin an intensely annoying and very dull conversion about how the transference of a phone number from one person to another might be achieved within the time left to me on this Earth.
Shall I text you or should you text me? What model of handset do you have? Is it one that will let us get “excited” as we share the phone number? Will it take 15 minutes checking each other’s screens? Shall I email it to you? Oh, Google’s asking me to re-enter my password… shall I email it to you when I get home? etc etc aargh kill me now…
In the event, the various alternative techniques of sharing a phone contact flashed through my mind before I picked the quickest, simplest and most advanced method. I fished a slip of paper and a pen from my bag, wrote the number down and handed it across.
It worked so well that I am currently in discussion with – ooh, I couldn’t possibly reveal who – for $20tn funding to develop this ground-breaking contact-sharing technology into an AI-enhanced app. I’m a bit peeved that Apple jumped the gun on me with the title ‘NameDrop’ (which you must admit is fabulous) so I hired myself for another $1bn to come up with an even better moniker.
MugSlam.
Not only does MugSlam deal with that dreaded Do you have XYZ’s phone number? Can you send it to me? request, it’ll respond accordingly to anyone and everyone who asks you any question whatsoever that you’d rather not respond to. Wish you’d never heard their question? Run Mugslam and slam it back in their mug!
Are you excited, yet?
Alistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling IT journalism, editorial training and digital publishing. Here’s an alternative vid of Pendulum performing Slam live at the Brixton Academy. Mme D and I were in the audience that very night, along with the kids. See if you can spot us. [P.S. The text on my mug reads: “Shall we have a meeting about the meeting?” It is a real mug.]
New Apple product. Meh.
Exciting new features. Double meh.
Pen and paper. Now you're talking.
But, hey, in todays world that would be considered a disruptive technology so, perhaps, we need a Zoom call to talk about setting up a meeting to discuss having a meeting about this novel new approach to information exchange. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it won't catch on but, in the words of the late, great Mr Adams, 'What colour should it be?'
Does MugSlam™® come with tracking capabilities using MugRing?