Weeknote: 5 October 2024 – gamepads, iPhone 16 and bats
Published stuff
My column this week is Nintendo Switch Sports makes me want to ditch the gamepad – and hope the Switch 2 doesn’t ditch innovation. Basically, I’m bored of gamepads. Which isn’t the first time. So I’m also hoping that whatever Nintendo does next isn’t what many people are clamouring for: more Switch 1.1 than Switch 2, with little ‘innovation’ beyond more raw power and a better display.
Also for Stuff, I wrote up a bunch of watchOS tips and updated a feature on mini retro game consoles. And over at TapSmart, I wrote about launcher apps for iPhone and the new AirPods range.
Upcoming stuff
I’m currently immersed in all things iPhone 16, for a bunch of things related to hardware and gaming. More on those as they rock up.
I’m also hoping to dig into some new retro consoles later in the year. Because it turns out, you can never have enough retro consoles. (Note: you probably can, if my very full office is anything to go by.)
Other stuff
I live near a lake that also happens to be a SSSI. It’s good for waterfowl, and also bats. I’d not gone bat spotting in a while, and feared few would be around, given the collapse in UK insect life, which has been noticeable locally. But last night, the family went on a bat walk, and saw a bunch of them flitting around, occasionally divebombing the group of us that had gathered.
The evening also scratched a tech itch I never knew I had. Each family was given a bat detector. And it turns out, you can buy one online. So that might result in one more piece of tech entering the home.
[…] Joan Westenberg asked people about the struggle between “the seamless simplicity of an all-Apple ecosystem [and] the freedom and flexibility of cross-platform independence”. I struggle with this myself. iCloud is too flaky to be reliable. Notes is a risk, because I for years had a scratchpad that had loads of stuff in, and it one day vanished. (I managed to get a version back by powering on a laptop I’d not opened in a week and turning off Wi-Fi before it could sync. That still lost me a week of input though.) Apps can help, such as Exporter, but I really wish Apple’s first-party apps were better at export. And that’s because I do value the simplicity of the ecosystem, and am now fully on board with the Reminders set-up I wrote about last week. […]