Turn off

My 9th generation iPad is the iPhone I want: big screen, big battery, reliable as. My 13 Mini was a deliberate compromise because I wanted something that fits in my pocket but the phone iOS is trying to do too much. I don't want a torch button. There's a design disparity between the featherlight touch required for screen interactions and the hefty double-click side button that requires me to change hands. More importantly, iTunes cannot for its life accept that I've purchased only one copy of Sly Stone's High On You which it insists on downloading twice. I'm betting this is because the solo album is tagged under both "Sly Stone" and "Sly and the Family Stone" in some database somewhere in the cloud.

The solution is to stream music but that's a tradeoff between emotional wellbeing and a reliable internet connection. I don't want my music tethered to a network provider. I want to carry it with me on a piece of metal and/or silicone, as god intended.

I can feel myself beginning to age out of tech. The promise of disintermediation has been supplanted by bureaucracy. I've gone back to writing in notebooks and listening to CDs. As I type this a robot vacuum cleaner is banging around my study and I scan my notes and share them across devices, and I'll never go back to pure analog - that would be madness. But the love has gone. Digital's a disappointment.