Good morning. Hello. How are you? #1092
All Apple edition: they cancelled my lenses so no Vision pro for me. Complaining about Sonoma. Complaining about Screen Time. The dream of Apple doing coffee shop punch cards for one free repair.
Good morning! Hello! How are you? All well? Tuesday. Taco Tuesday. That is exciting. Get to go to the delicious Mexican place in the old BK spot. Exciting. Just back from taking Jane to school. No sight of G Wagon or new fit mom. Aggro van guy was late. Matte Model X guy still early. Stopped at the grocery store after, bought eggs. Their carton was damaged but the eggs were good. I came home and put the eggs in an old carton. Considering performing surgery on the new carton to save it because the food bank collects them. I am neurotic.
After that I stopped at the shipping store to check the Viridian mailbox, which I had not once done since I started telling all our assorted insurance companies and banks that that was our address. Not too bad, just two things. But the good news is the old owner of the mailbox was a nurse so now we get American Nurse magazine. Tim Hwang would be happy.
Listening to the new American Analog Set album. I have it on vinyl and have listened to it tons but I always listen to a new record one last time on streaming to add the best songs to my assorted playlists. This album is marvelous. We are down to 2 hours, 22 minutes on the 2023 “To Investigate” playlist. A milestone is within spitting distance.
Yesterday I had to cancel my Apple Vision Pro order, which you did not know I made. I still have some secrets from you, GMHHAY. I ordered it on Friday, set up an appointment at the local Apple Store to pick it up (that was the only way I could get it on launch day) and sent my prescription in to Zeiss for the custom lenses to deal with my myopia. On Friday Zeiss emailed back and said my prescription was expired and, fair enough, it was. I have an appointment for March. So on Monday AM I called my optician and begged for a one-month extension on my current prescription so I could get this thing. They obliged, bless their hearts. I sent it in again.
Then Zeiss promptly informed me that my prescription was out of range. Mind you, every step of the purchasing process, I checked all the small print, looking for some statement about whether or not my oh-so-myopic eyes could get this thing. There was nothing! Then they just rejected me. I am super annoyed.
I mean, look. With the custom lenses and the apple care and the second-lowest storage amount, 512GB, the thing was $4,600. That is insane that is so stupid. I don’t even really know why I want the thing. It is all very illogical. Even though everyone says it weighs too much, I had visions of wearing it leaning way back on couches, or on my back in bed, looking upwards, letting the thing rest on my eyes not my neck, and giving myself some neck relief from the congenitally fused, perpetually in pain neck. This was a wildly unlikely scenario, the odds are it was going to hurt more than help. Also the money is too much! It is dumb!
And, of course, there is a mystery at play here about myopia and the Apple Vision Pro. The screen is only centimeters from my face! I am nearsited! I should be able to see it fine! I am very confused about the mechanics of Vision Pro confusing my eyes into thinking things are feet away when they’re not. I sort of think it might work anyway? But, then, how could it work both with and without the lenses, unless they did some sort of real-time blurring? It doesn’t make any sense! I wanted to find all this out, and now I gotta, shit, I don’t know, no one around here is going to buy the thing, it’s going to be ages until I can try one now. Grr.
I should be really really happy that they rejected me and I had to cancel the whole order (to be clear, they didn’t make me cancel the whole order, I did, once I couldn’t get my lenses). I ought to be relieved. But instead, last night I found myself, totally weirdly, in a bit of a funk about it! I really wanted to disappear into the VR I guess. I hate the internet and AI but that childhood dream of living on the grid from Tron lives on deep within me I guess.
Or maybe my funk was related to something else, like, I don’t know, massive work stress!
Nah, it was the Apple Vision Pro.
Hold please, I have to restart a frozen Apple Notes.app because Sonoma is hot garbage. Not unrelated! You’d think a two trillion dollar company could do more than one thing at once but nuh uh. All the engineers are busy working on cars and Vision Pro and no one is left minding the shop on OS X. I wonder if they’ll ever get to the point where no one is minding the shop on iOS. Lot more people gonna be pissed then.
Lol that is so already happening.
I say this out of love. I love Apple, I really do. Longest love affair of my life. Forty-two years this year.
Okay notes are open let’s move on. Oh yes. More Apple shit. My — well, Emma’s — well, Mine then Emma’s then Jane’s — iMac 5k is dead. Don’t know what hit it. I know it is dead because multiple clean OS wipes don’t help, and when I boot into recovery mode it takes about 60 seconds between key presses to make a character show up on the screen while entering the wifi password. I did this with multiple keyboards. Interestingly, the thing wouldn’t boot into recovery mode with a wireless keyboard at all, even when plugged in. That is new. I know wireless keyboards are useless for recovery mode while in wireless mode but I thought they were functionally equivalent to wired ones when you plug ‘em in. Nope. Not on this thing, at least.
I’m sad, I mean the thing was extra, Jane does not need an iMac on top of her iPad and phone and Emma and I are set on computers. But it is a great machine, and just the other day this dude on Threads bragged about how his iMac 5k was still going strong. I want to repair it, but I know it’s not economically worth it. Having read many books on scrapping I know the thing will get 99% recycled, but it still makes me sad.
You know what Apple should do? They should have punch cards like coffee shops where after the purchase of ten Macs or more you get one free non-economic, sentimental Mac repair. I would really appreciate that.
Also they should repair NeXTs at the Apple Store, they bought the freakin company. Just sayin’. I bet you can get stupid Beats headphones repaired, sniff sniff.
I guess we’ll just stay on Apple here even more and say that when I got my new phone I accidentally left that infernal Screen Time app on so now it is telling me every week how much screen time I’ve used, and so is my wife and I do not like any of it one bit nope, no sireee. Am I bordering on legally blind? Yes. Have I been staring at screens my entire life since I was like six? Yes? Are the two related? Nope nope nope not gonna convince me. I have been looking at screens my entire life and I am just fine!
But now stupid Apple’s like “hey you looked at your phone five hours a day this week” and that is on top of my work time and yeah that doesn’t feel good (it is more complicated than that, I spend some hours of each work day in a chair using my phone instead of the computer). So now I am trying to reduce it and, you know “be present” for my family or whatever. Trying to remind myself that Jane won’t be the perfect age forever, that conversations with my wife are great and even more fun when I’m fully engaged.
Man when Emma and I were first dating we would sit at this bar in Cambridge and order a bottle of really expensive champagne and we (okay I) would drink it while chatting until 1:30 AM when the bar, one of the only 2AM bars in Cambridge, would fill up with people from Charley’s Kitchen next door and then we would either people watch or socialize for a half hour. This was before Google on our phones and the iPhone. I had a sidekick or a blackberry or both but I wasn’t glued to it. It was great.
I mean, we still have great conversations all the time but ugh phones.
Also it’s so cliche’d to worry about screen time I hate myself for this. I’ve always said it was about what you do on your phone. But these days the “what I do” isn’t great. I mean, it’s not Tik Tok but endlessly scrolling Threads, Instagram, Bluesky, Artifact in a cycle all night is pointless.
It’s all so depressing.
I suppose between work and doomscrolloing I really didn’t need another screen to stare at.
But boy I sure wanted it.
Wow a whole edition about Apple sorry about that. My friend Tim has written a response to me about AI and I was gonna write about that today but I guess we will wait till tomorrow on that one.
Here is a picture of me in the Care Bear sweater with Jane in the studio this weekend.
Todays Media of the Day is “Jackie” by Sinead O’Connor because it came on in the car this morning and I remember the first time I listened to this song, it was the first Sinead I ever heard, because Dave Hoffman kept telling me she was the greatest and I didn’t want to be a luddite so I ran out and bought Lion and the Cobra and listened to it at home so I could pretend I always knew about her. And this is the first song on the album and… damn.
Jane stared out the window listening to it. She said she liked it. Maybe she felt something.
Until tomorrow, fair friend.