I used to say: if I didn't have Twitter I wouldn't have friends at school, in the early days, when everyone told me it was really Facebook that was cool.

It's where I would go to say what I needed to say, but I thought nobody wanted to hear. Mostly Apple Keynote commentary, honestly.

But unfortunately, the conspiratorial, there-was-a-Maricopa-County-voting-scandal, anonymous racists with eight digits in their handle, very suddenly taught me that this Twitter — my semi-secret stream of a scarcely witty sixteen year old me: was not mine.

But there were many things I did not know, when the high school French exchange student also said the iOS 7 redesign was overdue. When oh my god, this person won Jeopardy, and they followed me, not you. When the Italian podcaster shared something I said, and then got a fish emoji tattoo.

I didn't know the reason the people around me had values I did not share, but I knew that here, there were people who did — look, there's the data on Twitter, right there.

I didn't know how to fix this code, or what to write, or where I should; and I didn't care, because there were other people, who could.

I didn't know why the first Twitter for iPad was so captivating, all the way to the demise of Tweetbot, via Twitterrific, Talon and Spring.

For years I would anticipate that inevitable ask of 'what is that cute bird on your dock?' then 'what is a client?' Now it'll be an elephant, its heavy feet just an imprint of a time when the vessel for my murmurs was not ruled by a tyrant.

Because as much as I thought that little world was mine, as much as I thought I would stay forever, and see it through, now I know: it was not Twitter I loved, but it was the Twitter I knew.

The first thing any company needs is a good product. Then it needs users. Then it wants more. On the App Store and the web, there are more incredible products than we have time to use; the good ones have ample devoted user bases. But what happens when that is not enough?

We are in a cycle of small companies wanting too much and losing their good product to acquisition or private equity.

There are naïve examples, take Mailbox, the best third-party mail client ever to grace the iPhone, bought by Dropbox, and killed shortly after. There’s the team behind 1Password who took VC funding for their widely popular password manager, only to disappoint core customers by killing off native apps and chasing a web based, team based, growth-based future. I adore 1Password and happily pay a subscription, but I feel less valued as a customer as they chase extra zeros on their valuation.

And I am fearful for companies like Backblaze who recently IPO’d. They are an underdog rival to S3 or GCP Storage, dramatically undercutting Amazon and Google’s prices and offering an unbelievably cheap consumer cloud backup service. But when you have investors to please, when you have growth to chase, unbelievably cheap doesn’t cut it any more.

It is not only acquisitions and VC funding that cause companies to lose their spark. Great products with low prices rapidly fail to satisfy the leaders of companies like OnePlus. This Chinese phone manufacturer boldly proclaimed in its first years that its devices were flagship killers. They were carefully compromised smartphones sold at the lowest price but with industry-leading features intact.

In 2014, Marques Brownlee was calling the $299 OnePlus One “impressive”. TechRadar couldn’t see a “better - or cheaper - alternative” to this “top end phone.” They even started upgrading features within months of each other, just to squeeze out the best hardware they could for the price instead of following the yearly cycles of Samsung and Apple.

But as the years went on, they became one of the companies they set out to kill, expensive phones with hardware that was just okay. Hardware that was compromised by accident, not intention. It’s now cancelling phones that cost the same as an iPhone, and it shed its cult following. It even lost its co-founder, rumour has it because the company left behind a product focus to simply rebrand partner OEM’s devices. “What happened to OnePlus?” asked Brownlee six years later — they outgrew their original intentions and became “the villain.”

There are cases where great development teams were eaten up by a giant, only to get more resources to make their core product so much more powerful, like Workflow, bought by Apple, turned into Shortcuts. We can hope this happens again, but it’s a rare dream.

Most good products already have a clear growth path, their own target for what they want to be. Every small team and small company has a mission and their first iterations will never — if they have prioritised correctly — be able to meet their ambitions. If an investment round can help a team improve their product, of course they will take it. The danger is when they lose control.

Basecamp CEO Jason Fried, who famously has never taken funding for his design focussed B2B software firm, claimed “lots of businesses could be great $10 million, $20 million businesses, but they’re not allowed to be.” He cited companies losing the ability to control their own destiny, you’re “working for somebody else” when you’ve “got to be $200 million or $500 million or a billion.”

It is not true that taking any funding is bad. VCs work to get ideas off the ground. But growth should never hamper the quality of an existing product. If you didn’t set out to make a billion, don’t sacrifice what you’ve built to feed an investor.

Grow if it makes your product better, not to make your investors richer.

Sometimes, we stop doing things we enjoy.

Perhaps it is because there are better things, new things, more challenging things instead. What once was an obstacle is now a routine. Time is limited, and we panic over what we have left in the day, the year, the lockdown, our lives.

Or perhaps we are scared. Perhaps we fear abandoning yet another something we thought we were good at, another slither of potential. Perhaps we are scared of getting bored because we always get bored, because we always drop out, because we always suffer the pain of failing again.

It could be perfectionism; we’re not as good as we want to be at something. We can’t lift as heavy, can’t code as fast, can’t write as eloquently. The crippling nature of self-doubt piles on while we shed the time we waste not doing.

What if we’re just not that focused? What if those who succeed at our talents — the founders and novelists — what if they are just better at tuning out distractions, better and just getting it done. Do we lack passion?

And yet, all of these thoughts, they are all intrusive. They are all: wrong. Inferiority and fear will tarnish our judgment on what is valuable. On what we should commit to.

Anyone can commit, however strongly they claim they cannot. We forget that commitment is not a chore. Commitment is what makes the things we enjoy reliably enjoyable. Commitment is a motivation.

We get good at the things we do. The things we practice, through terrible mistakes and experimentation. The only way to fight our self-doubts, to fight our obsessive introspections, and to prove our instinct is good, is to do a lot. If we enjoy gaming, pull many triggers; if we enjoy sport, kick many balls; if we enjoy writing, tap many keys. We must fight to reach the point where our instinct is satisfied. And if we are committed, we are motivated to chase the impossible goal of meeting our own taste.

We can build schedules or download apps, but these are only tricks to make us believe we will finish what we start. If we truly are dedicated to something, we won’t need to manipulate our commitment.

I want to commit to writing, yet again.

Apple’s choice to bring control centre to the Mac, with Big Sur’s large buttons and bulbous sliders, was enough to set a budding Apple rumour mill whirring about something the company have been insistent will never happen: a touchscreen Mac. But I don’t think the time is now.

It’s not to say that Apple have never gone back on their word; when the industry changes or their competitors storm down a path they have previously mocked, Apple will change course. But signals they may be building a device that CEO Tim Cook once said would be a ‘toaster fridge’ — a combination Mac and iPad — are not large enough to suggest that macOS 11 is anywhere close to being a touch OS.

There was anticipation in some circles about Apple’s launch of laptops with their own silicon, but I was not surprised to see them use familiar form factors. They needed to reassure wary customers that this is the same Mac as before, just better. Developers have spent the summer building for Apple Silicon with a beta OS still clearly designed for a mouse and keyboard.

Nonetheless, perhaps overwhelming redesigns with ProMotion touchscreens are just too far down the pipeline to be visible.

Big Sur does add more spacing around user interface elements. Alan Dye’s design sensibilities are not hidden, with more whitespace and less contrast. What many believers miss is just because a button is larger, it doesn’t mean its action is touch friendly. A large button in the Finder is likely to reveal a context menu that would be finicky to tap. After their November event, Craig Federighi told The Independent they had redesigned their desktop interface “not remotely considering something about touch.”

I believe Craig. Look at the menu bar, a staple of macOS clearly designed for mouse input. Dropdown menus with nested controls rely on a hover state and a precise pointer. You can’t swipe down to open control centre — it’s a button.

There are hints that Apple is eying a future of desktop touchscreens as Apple Silicon on Macs can run unmodified iOS apps, but it does so in a strange state that requires key combinations to swipe and pinch on a clunky implementation that Dieter Bohn at The Verge called “a messy, weird app experience” from a “gallery of abandonware.” A far cry from the lauded cursor support on iPadOS.

Apple have made their touch-first iPad software work extremely well with a trackpad, and apps are embracing the cursor fast, so it is surprising that running unmodified apps on the Mac is so bad. It is also worth asking: if they can make touch interfaces work great with a pointer on iPad, why can’t they make clickable interfaces work great with touch?

Surely, iOS apps on the Mac and the iPad cursor are signs Apple is looking to blur the line between tap and click. Yet if they were, why would they continue to pour effort into Mac Catalyst, updating the framework that brings iPad apps to the Mac to make them look and feel more like Mac apps, not less, even with a specific Mac Idiom mode? If touch was coming, why double down on letting developers create great Mac specific experiences?

Unless, of course, they are buying time for a grander transition.

Looking long into the distance, when Apple’s chips are mature and PC innovation pulls them into being more feature competitive, I have no doubt touch will come. But for now, we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Big Sur is clearly a mouse driven interface that would have a terrible, clunky, touch experience. I’m sure we will see further changes to design, layout and input well before we swipe and pinch our Finder.

For now, the iPad is far too good a touchscreen Mac to need anything more.

When I was a teenager, I used to trawl the internet for hours to find torrents of indie apps. Most of the time they were apps I had no use for, powerful productivity tools completely unsuited to a high schooler.

But this was as age before the iPad Pro, before the Mac App Store, when software seemed expensive. It was expensive even compared to today when the app I write on, the app I schedule with, my notes app, to-do lists, even ironically, my budget tracker all total three figures worth of subscriptions.

This norm of 2020 is a source of much anger and despair from normal people not like me. It is anger that only grows stronger when it becomes easier and more economical for developers to support multiple platforms under a subscription. The same people who would once spend £2 on coffee but not 59p on an app, are now the people who claim they’d rather pay £50 for a download instead of £30 a year.

And while financial arguments for subscriptions are well understood — indie developers need to earn money on a recurring basis in a competitive market on an anti-competitive app store — the feeling of being trapped in a money sink is not pleasant for anyone.

It’s especially unpleasant when apps remove features for their existing paid users when they shift to a subscription model. It was painful when adverts began appearing in Twitterrific, even if you had previously paid. Perhaps the biggest secret to launching a successful subscription model, is how developers treat their loyal customers.

The most loyal users — the true fans of an app — may be happy to pay more for new features, but others suddenly have an inferior app. For Twitterrific, only users who hadn’t paid in the five years preceding the subscription’s launch would see banner ads. But ads on a paid app made headlines even if the app now receives more timely updates that its upfront purchase competitor: Tweetbot. Adding banner ads did still seem antithetical to App Store head Phil Schiller’s mission to “reward” developers who “do a lot of work to retain a customer over time”.

When Fantastical moved to a £39/yr subscription, users on Reddit lambasted the company for killing “all the goodwill [they’ve] built up over the years,” threatening to uninstall because of the “sad” and “ridiculous” paywall. But if anything, Fantastical is the perfect example of a subscription app. It’s an app that uses completely portable third-party services. You don’t lose anything when the subscription expires.

So it felt worse when apps like 1Password started charging a yearly fee because by design it contains users’ most important data in a proprietary format. But despite hiding it wherever possible, they did continue to allow one-time purchases separate to their sync service until very recently. They also stopped charging individually for different device installs. And they know that once you are a happy 1Password customer, you are paying a subscription for life.

Many of Apple’s own policies are guilty of both encouraging subscription apps and fostering hate of them. Developers are incentivised to use a subscription model because if a customer subscribes for more than a year, Apple halve their App Store fee from 30% to 15%. This also ensures Apple’s continued income from the store.

Unfortunately, Apple have also allowed, and show no sign of clamping down on, scam subscriptions. One QR code reader was allowed on the App Store for long enough to earn an annual revenue of $5.3 million. How? By tricking users into a 3-day trial before maturing to a $156 a year subscription. This app is still live, if cheaper, and still scams people today for a feature that exists for free in Apple’s own camera app. One user found bogus virus scanners charging $99 a week, and a VPN with fake reviews in the top grossing apps chart.

Apple profit from this and therefore have little incentive to remove such apps. They do have some policies to discourage it, but Apple themselves break them. Their developer guidelines show clear examples of how to display subscription pricing inside a button, but in Arcade and News+, they hide pricing in tiny text under leading button labels pushing you to ‘TRY IT FREE.’

If they can weed out such scams and respect developers with one-time purchase fees, perhaps Apple broad and aggressive moves towards making everything they do a monthly fee would be more palatable when they offer value. The iPhone Upgrade Program is essentially a monthly subscription for a phone with frequent updates. And Apple One thrives on users being tied to Apple for their entertainment and fitness. Maybe one day they will combine.

It wouldn’t be a terrible thing because over the past year, I’ve been more and more happy to part with a recurring fee for products I like. With a subscription, I get apps on all my devices in one go, instead of having to choose what devices are most important to me. There are constant updates; the apps I subscribe to were the first to get widgets on iOS 14 and redesigns for macOS Big Sur. Some apps even give you the base app forever but only provide updates if you are subscribed. And with platforms constantly evolving and new devices and paradigms surfacing, from trackpad support on iPad to AR glasses, paying for a static piece of software isn’t going to serve me in the long run.

Even when we don’t want an app forever, those that have portable data can be trialled for pocket change month by month, allowing us to explore all the different alternatives in the store for the same price as buying one large download we might not even use.

And every indie app I mentioned here I already pay for. And I love them. Because with some work, we can make the app store exciting again. We can bounce across innovations and embrace motivated developers. Subscriptions are here to stay, and I can’t wait to see what the next generation of indie app creatives can do with the incentive.

Google have never built a good tablet. It’s a shame, because however good the iPad has become it needs competition to be great. The closest competitor is the Surface, but it is only recently that Apple and Microsoft have converged: Apple turning the iPad into a primary computing device, and Microsoft bringing the entry level surface to sub-£400. There is a gap in the market. For Google.

2011 looked promising for Google. It had been a year since the announcement of iPad and Android 3.0 Honeycomb was the future. A whole OS designed specifically for tablets. A .0 release and an all new user interface. Google weren’t just bolting on tablet support, rather committing to next generation devices.

The Motorola Xoom launched as the first tablet to run this OS and it was fine. It had a larger, higher resolution display than an iPad 2, a flashy Nvidia Tegra 2 and double the RAM than Apple could muster. It had a Super Bowl Commercial. It had PC World calling it ”the most polished Google software effort to date”. In many ways, said Joshua Topolsky, then Editor in Chief of Engadget, it ”outclasses the iPad”.

Then within two years, Google released Android 4.2 and killed the tablet interface with it. And the Xoom became just a small hint at what could have been.

Because Google had just released the Nexus 7 that put the same power as an iPad with the same resolution screen as the Xoom in the palm of your hand. For £159.

Google’s strategy turned to price. Provide better value than the iPad and a more comfortable reading experience. In a time when average screen size for a smartphone was only just crossing 4”, the Nexus 7 was certainly a tablet. Android was well suited to a larger portrait device, having ditched the landscape-first elements that made the Xoom look like a serious iPad competitor.

The Nexus 7 sold up to 4.8 million units in 2012, over 10x that of the Xoom’s first 3 months on the market.

Even Apple reacted. They launched the iPad mini to compete directly. They put it side by side with a generic Android tablet clearly designed to represent the Nexus 7 to show why Apple’s design decisions were the right ones.

Apple went hard with their criticism of ”phone applications stretched up” comparing to their tablet optimised interface with Android post-Jelly Bean. But those buying the Nexus 7 did not care.

Those buying the Nexus 10 did.

Alongside this success, Google had launched a larger device, the Nexus 10, that sold less than a million, and served as a signal that Google didn’t understand why the iPad was successful.

Perhaps it was always doomed when Matias Duarte, who now is the VP of Material Design at Google, introduced this Samsung built device as a “beautiful piece of plastic”.

When asked about the software, what made iPad great, all Duarte could say was that the Nexus 10 was thin, light, and had a high resolution display. He said that as long as developers built apps for Nexus 7, they would have apps for the Nexus 10. While technically true, clearly, an app designed for a 7” display is not immediately a good app on a 10” one. The Verge, unsurprisingly, would later report the ecosystem to be ”woefully lacking in tablet apps”.

Reviews, though, were generally good. The display was ”fantastic”; it was more pixel dense than Apple’s Retina display iPads, with a “very capable processor” putting the device on the ”cusp of something amazing.”

So why did it fail? Not because the iPad was that much better hardware. Even the Surface, that still exists today, was selling at a slow pace. The question remained: why buy a Nexus 10 when Google are not serious about coaxing developers to optimise for it?

It took the Nexus 10 two years to get a predecessor and in that time little was done to incentivise Android apps to work better for larger screen sizes. The Nexus 9 was more expensive than an iPad, had poor performance, and ran apps from developers who had completely given up on tablet counterparts. When iFixit opened up the device, they called it an “exercise in corner cutting,” a wise summation of Google’s continued lacklustre tablet efforts.

And so to the modern day. For the most part, there are no mainstream Android tablets. There is the iPad, and there is the Surface. The best, low-cost alternatives to these have for a while been Chromebooks, which are superb for education. It therefore seemed like a sensible decision for Google to announce the Pixel Slate, the first ChromeOS tablet.

For $799.

On the surface it was a good device, with a high resolution screen, betterexternal display support than iPadOS, more claimed battery life than the iPad, and it ran Android apps.

The reality did not match. The software was poor, and videos showed it performing extremely slowly. MKBHD posted an uncharacteristically harsh review of the device, entitled: “This Ain’t It Chief.” “This thing has made me so sad,” he began, before showing up scaled phone apps lag their way through simple operation.

Despite a great display and speakers and two USB-C ports, Google agreed with the press. They cancelled the project and with that Google-made tablets were dead.

So what is the future? Unfortunately, there probably isn’t one. Google have time and time again demonstrated that they don’t care enough about fostering great tablet software experiences. There will be attempts to make more hardware from OEMs like Samsung, but there is very little incentive when Google are not focussed.

Our best hope for a good Google tablet is a modern day Android Honeycomb, a rethinking of Android that encourages developers to adapt for the larger screen. We know Google are capable of good hardware and capable make a compelling iPad competitor, not for $799, but for the price of an iPad. They just need apps.

The iPad is a great device. But it could be better with more competition. Competition that I wish would come from Google.

It is June, WWDC month and wish list season. On the 22nd, Apple will announce iOS and iPadOS 14 in their first ever remote developer conference.

Features are exciting, and I hope we get some despite Apple’s workforce being at home, but quality of life improves are my main focus in yet another wish list for what needs to be done to enjoy my iPhone more and make my iPad workflows more serious.

New iPad Multitasking Interface

Multitasking on iPad is bad.

If you want to place an app in split view without attaching a keyboard, you have to quit the app, open the second app, bring up the dock, hope the original app is in the ‘recent apps’ section, and drag it to position.

If you have two windows from a single app in split view and want to close one of the windows, you have to leave split view entirely before tapping the app icon in the dock, then show all windows, then swipe away the one you want to close.

There is no way to see the state of an app; it could be in slide over or split view in another layout but you do not know until you tap the app icon from the dock.

Sometimes, I’ll tap Safari from the home screen, and it will open another app entirely, where Safari is in 1/3 split view, even though I have a full screen instance of the browser elsewhere.

What if you want to put two apps from the app overview screen into split view? Impossible.

The iPad Pro has most of the multitasking abilities I need from a tablet, but the software paradigms that have been misshapen to get us here need fixing. They are inconsistent and frustrating.

Multiple Audio Streams

The original iPhone was sold as a ’widescreen iPod with touch controls’ but listening to music today is an inconvenient experience. If you receive a video on iMessage, your music will stop and when the video finishes, Messages has hijacked the audio widget and you have to return to your music or podcast app to continue playing. Every app behaves differently, causing inconsistency and a bad user experience.

Sometimes apps like YouTube don’t even use the Control Centre audio widget when playing in the background.

iOS 14 should allow for multiple audio streams at once. This would also allow for calls in one app, while recording a podcast in another and countless other professional workflows.

Background Video Conferencing

During the Coronavirus pandemic, most of us are engaging in more video calls than usual. But Zoom, Skype and Google Meet cut video feeds when you leave their app. Worse, they cut video even if you open another app in slide over or split view on iPad. You can have your conferencing app in the foreground and still be unable to use video.

Apple’s own FaceTime allows this, so they should open up the capability for third party apps too.

Smarter Rotation Lock

I want the physical rotation lock switch back on iPad. But I’m not going to get that. Instead, I hope Apple follow apps like Apollo and their recent implementation of smarter rotation locking. I should be able to leave rotation lock on, but when a video plays, tap a button to rotate it to landscape. This would make Twitter easier in bed.

Or, Apple could use the True Depth camera on modern iPhones and iPads to detect the angle that the user is looking at their device to decide whether or not to rotate the screen.

Universal Keyboard Shortcuts

Keyboard shortcuts should be more widely implemented system-wide and should be customisable. Cmd-F should put the search bar into focus in every list view.

I should be able to set keyboard shortcuts to activate Siri shortcuts, or for control centre or the dock.

Clipboard History

My clipboard manager, Pastebot, is extremely important to my Mac workflow. I use it to save stuff temporarily as well as sequentially copy and paste. An API to allow this on iPadOS would make working on iPad more productive and would come hand in hand with new keyboard shortcuts.

Better Storage Management

There are a variety of issues with managing storage on iOS. The Files app often shows a different amount of free storage than the Settings app. I have a phantom 2GB being used by the Files app on my iPhone, even though the On My iPhone folder is empty.

Sometimes, I’ll check available storage and then try to airdrop a file that would easily fit in that storage. But it will fail mid-way through the transfer with an error about being out of space. It should at least warn me before starting the transfer.

Third Party Services on HomePod

I’ll never buy a HomePod if it doesn’t support Spotify natively.

Make Control Centre Easier to Activate

It physically hurts to reach control centre on my iPhone 11 Pro Max. The top right hand corner is not the right place to put important, frequently used controls.

There is also a long standing bug where sometimes you cannot even invoke control centre when using Reachability.

Picture in Picture Video on iPhone

Watching video on iPad is great as you can leave the app and keep watching. With iPhones getting bigger and bigger, this should no longer be an iPad exclusive feature.

New Mail App

There are no good mail apps on the App Store. They are either buggy, too expensive or have huge security flaws.

Apple should add a Snooze feature to Mail that syncs between devices, and modernise the interface like third party competitors, so it can become a viable alternative.

Remove Suggestions from Spotlight

Spotlight search has auto-complete suggestions that take a fraction of a second too long to appear. Time and time again I go to tap a search result and accidentally tap a suggestion instead when it appears.

There should be an option to remove them.

Remove App Banners From Safari

Web developers have the ability to add native advertisements for the mobile apps on their websites. These take up space and should be removed. There is often a reason I am not using an app, perhaps this is the first time I have visited that website.

Default Apps

You should be able to set default apps for certain link types. I want Apollo to open all Reddit links, Tweetbot to open Twitter links and Google Maps to open addresses.

Clamp Down on YouTube

There is an App Store rule that system features should not be chargeable. Yet YouTube charge for background audio. Apple should clamp down on this rule.

Better Messages Share Window

When sharing via messages, you can not see the full height of a photo in the share window even on Apple’s largest iPhone. It is also impossible to scroll through previous messages. This interface needs fixing.

Decouple Stock Apps

If Apple decoupled stock apps — like Maps and Messages — and allowed them to be updated via the App Store, we would receive more frequent updates and fixes, instead of waiting a whole year for a single, large software update.

Better iMessage Link Previews

If you share a tweet in iMessage that contains a video, the link preview shows a photo. I have to use a specific iMessage sticker pack that tells people to view full tweets. The same applies for threads.

And finally, a problem since day one:

Incoming Calls Shouldn’t Take Up The Whole Screen

When you get a phone call on iPhone, the whole screen is blocked. You either have to send a busy tone, answer, or wait it out. Phone calls should be persistent notifications instead.

Most of the features I want from the next version of iOS are minor. They are fixes and improvements to things Apple already have. I don’t care about home screen widgets. iOS is past the stage of flashy. It's time to double down on making devices a pleasure to use once again.

I believe it starts with this.

If you had to cross the street to save a life, you would not hesitate. But a £10 donation to another country? Maybe you would.

Because we do not see the lives we save by staying at home to avoid a virus. We do not experience the survival of future generations when we recycle. We do not meet those we bring justice to by protesting police brutality. And that means us humans, we don’t care about the long run.

Doing good is about doing what is right regardless of if the result is instant. Yet immediacy does matter. It matters because often we don't know if what feels right is the same as doing good. We have to rely on the instinct that our actions are positive.

And we can exchange this instinct for togetherness and the feeling of being part of a movement; it is the reason protest is so successful and so popular. Instinct is exchangeable for progress, like charges being brought to George Floyd’s killers. We know we have done good.

This is some change, but it is not real change.

Real change is patient and slow. Real change takes commitment and sacrifice. Real change is never good enough.

A utilitarian would say that the best choice is the one that will produce the greatest good, even if that good is far in the future. They would ask, if every person desires their own happiness, why are our individual decisions not the same as those that would create collective happiness?

To respect the long run, perhaps those protesting the police should stay at home to prevent the spread of Coronavirus. People will die because of these protests but in the short game they have led to justice. The danger feels immediate, the solution feels in reach, so we act.

But if we are serious we will not stop until real progress. We will play the long game for George Floyd too.

In a casino, you can double or lose your money in seconds. It is smarter to invest in the stock market, where bigger returns may take decades. Although in each case, it is not clear what is the right choice. Red or Black? Facebook or Tesla? While unlike gambling — in the long game of racial justice and environmentalism, the choices are clear: equality and science — patiently fighting for the long term bettering of the world has a greater impact than fighting for today.

Maybe our governments can learn from this when creating our coronavirus strategy. It needs an end game, a solution, a light at the end of a not-too-long tunnel. Something for the people to work for, because we do not have the patience for the long run.

This does not mean that we should accept hate now because change will come eventually. It means we should fight harder and more consistently. The sportspeople, tech YouTubers and CEOs using their platforms today to say what is right should have no plans to return to normal. Donations to projects fighting racial injustice should not be one time. Reading one book today is not enough if your bookshelf is empty.

The long run is scary, because we don’t trust it. We don’t see small steps even when all of our small steps count towards big goals because most of us will never see them reached in our lifetimes. Goals that are no less important because we are not rewarded for them.

The more good we do for invisible causes the faster they stop being part of the neglected long run, and the more likely our children will see not some change, but real change.

Working from home in an epidemic has been hard. On the surface, I find it boring, I struggle to motivate myself, and I’m less effective. But I hear from my colleagues that they want more of this, that they are more productive, more engaged and not looking forward to returning to the office. For a while, hearing this was frustrating, but I realise I have to adapt.

Most of my job is talking, reading and listening. I’ve been told I’m political in how I go about pushing for my ideas. Sometimes I produce physical work but for the most part I get paid to use common sense, instinct and to tell convincing stories. I also have to bridge parts of my company, departments that are now not only distant in what they do but in location. This is the work I enjoy, and it is the work hardest to do from home.

Instinct is not tangible, so the only way to share on Slack or a video call is with data. This is a good thing; working at home has been good training to not take the easy route, to do my due diligence. But it also makes me more anxious about what I share: I need to bring real justification every time. I worry that because so many of my whims get lost, the occasional good ones are lost too.

The job of a product manager, I was once told, is to do what it takes. It means being a small part of every corner of the company. When you share a small office — I work in a startup of 30 — this is easy. It is much harder to be an authoritative voice in so many places when to speak to somebody means organising a call.

And finally there is the not feeling guilty for a fifteen minute tea break, but feeling terrible for spending the same time at home without working. Perhaps this is because breaks at home are alone and at my desk. At work, they are accompanied by a short conversation or a wander. It is a meaningful distraction that drives focus when I return.

For many, especially in jobs like software engineering, working from home is more efficient and more rewarding. I feel this too, when I have a challenging task to face with clear direction it is beneficial not to be distracted by a tap on the shoulder. I rarely have clear direction, however, and when I do, it is not the work that makes me tick.

So it worries me when I hear of Twitter, Square and Facebook extending work from home policies permanently. That they don’t require many employees to ever return to the office. Shopify are closing their offices for the rest of the year — there isn’t even the option for an office. Fortunately I was comforted by Apple’s more relatable description of a balance between those who are more productive at home, and those who are less; it is “mixed depending on what the roles are,” Tim Cook said.

Then CEO Sundar Pichai told The Verge that even though most of Alphabet’s work can be done from home, the ability to do so varies “widely across teams.” There are people who “really want come back ... depending on what [their] personal experience is.” After all, Google famously invested in their working environments in order to encourage people to work better together.

While I value that most of my colleagues will benefit from more allowance to work out of office, I can’t imagine myself being truly rewarded by work that is not primarily undertaken in a communal location. I thrive off in person collaboration.

But people are different and their roles unique. It could be that I need to adapt, grow and learn how to be better and more versatile. I will be become better at remote work by necessity so when I progress in my career it will not be a concern. Right now I am fortunate to be in a company that will continue to have an office, on-site employees, physical collaboration and the type of work that keeps my career relatively on track. What I know for sure is that I am doing the right job for me, that after my excruciating graduate career uncertainty, I landed in the right place.

While I am forced to take a break from what gratifies me, I must make sure I learn what there is to learn from these agonising months, so next time I can face these challenges with enthusiasm.

In London, there is one CCTV camera for every fourteen people. But there are at least eight million residents with smartphones. When police brutality escalates in Hong Kong, and the murder of a black man is filmed by passers by in the US, they look like our greatest defence.

As the people resist in cities across the US through peaceful protest, the police fight back. But they do not do so in secret. They act in the plain view of social media.

In 2015 in South Carolina a story broke that a man had been shot by the police when he attempted to use an officer's taser against him. The officer "felt threatened ... and fired his weapon" the tale told.

Then came the smartphone footage.

Walter Scott was running away, unarmed, his back facing Officer Micheal Slager as he was hit by at least one of eight rounds. Scott died after being handcuffed and receiving no medical attention. Slager was charged with murder.

In the UK last week, smartphone footage caught a black key worker handcuffed for no clear reason by a white officer.

And Hong Kong has faced months of police brutality, including legislators being violently arrested, all caught on film.

Would George Floyd have seen justice if passers by had not pointed their phones at the officer on his neck?

When those in power do not follow the rule of law, we can no longer trust their systems. It becomes the people's job to hold them to account and to document. When the press are abused by the President, when their legitimacy is weakened or they are physically attacked, the people must keep watch.

When the police feel protected by the state, they have no boundaries. The next time an officer kneels on a black man's neck he will remember 2020, the protests and the violence, and know that he is not as protected as he once was. That is as much of achievement than Floyd’s killer’s arrest.

It is the people's power that can erode the systems that protect prejudice and that entrench racism in our society. They have the greatest tool: a high resolution camera in their pocket.

I do not endorse a surveillance state. I hope when Apple and Google release glasses that connect to our phones, they will not have cameras. I am uncomfortable with a Facebook smart home device that can see me sleep. But the ability to keep check on those who feel invincible is a fundamental part of democracy.

Body cameras could be the answer. They are a valuable tool for law enforcement. Yet in Connecticut, where a body cam program began in 2016, less than half of the state's departments took advantage of funding in the first three years it was available.

In a twelve month study in the US, officers randomly assigned to wear body cameras used force 25 times, down from 61 before the experiment. The majority of incidents involved officers not wearing cameras.

While cameras do reduce complaints against officers as they can no longer lie, they remain in the police’s control at every level: the departments on whether to use them, the officers on whether to turn them on. It is not reasonable to expect anyone to be monitored at all times during their job — some privacy is acceptable, but first the police must begin to foster trust.

There is a video circulating on social media of a black police officer berating a white colleague for assaulting a non-violent, seated, protester. For a moment, smartphone footage made us sympathise with — even respect — law enforcement. The police should be protected by the same people that hold them to account: us. We need the police’s help to regain our faith.

When Walter Scott fell to the ground, the officer looked back: did anyone see that. With our smartphones, the answer should always be yes.

My love of podcasts comes in waves. In a virus laden world where walks outside are the only sense of normality available, I am once again in love with the internet’s most underrated medium.

Podcasts are great because they are personal — like you are part of the discussion. While in an age of social distancing this is a valid reason to listen, there are better explanations for podcasts being so powerful.

Unlike blog posts, tweets and documentaries, podcasts are a conversation. Even narratives like Serial are a discussion and My Dad Wrote a Porno is still told by friends around a table. And conversation allows for mistakes so they emulate the way we debate and change our mind.

When we commit to paper we are expected to be right. We reconsider our opinions and arguments and craft how we want to convey ourselves. Podcasters are honest and true to their whims. Because opinions are more trustworthy when they are not rehearsed, when they come from organic thought — the spur of the moment.

Podcasts are long. They are impossible to skim read. For the creator there is no pressure to hold someone’s attention from beginning to end. Podcasts are full of footnotes. They contain tidbits that would not be important enough to make a blog post but are valuable to the listener because the listener cares about the niche. Often passing comments are the most impactful — the most interesting to you — but would never have made the cut on any other medium.

This magic wouldn’t happen if podcasts were not so niche. The best podcasts are those that focus on extremely narrow subject matters and are obsessive about covering every detail. They aren’t precise for journalistic integrity but because the hosts genuinely care about their corner of knowledge. There are 409 episodes of a podcast about pens. There is a weekly podcast about episodes of a TV show that ended fourteen years ago. I am the only person I know who follows the WRC and yet there are still enough people to obsess about the details.

In a recent episode of the Accidental Tech Podcast, Marco Arment said the episodes that he is most proud of — the ones he enjoys the most — are when his co-hosts are just “bs-ing with each other” rather than blockbuster episodes with special guests.

Podcast hosts are people like you being themselves. They are exclusive and obsessive and natural and full of the little things you had no idea other people cared about. They’re honest and they’re innocent.

It is a shame, therefore, that players like Spotify are making land grabs, including making one of the world’s most popular podcasts exclusive to their platform. Podcasts are democratic, and Spotify’s profiteering is damaging to the medium and threatens taking money away from independent publishers. As icing on their cake their podcast player is the worst.

In an age of hostility, fact checking and the politicising of every written word, they’re the internet’s greatest achievement. We must protect it.

To ensure that your data and precious thousands of photos are safely backed up from your smartphone, you have two choices, and neither are good. You could manually sync your device with your computer. Or you could buy cloud storage.

But once you buy 50GB of space for your photos from Apple for 79p per month, you’re locked in to the cloud storage conundrum: you doom yourself to pay forever.

Cloud backups through iCloud, full quality image upload to Google Photos, and premium services like Backblaze are effortless and silent. Viewing your photos anywhere at any time saves worry about syncing and saves stress if you break or lose your phone. These services provide the glorious duality we all need from our technology: safety and convenience.

The prices start cheap, 79p a month is insignificant for enough for most people today. But file sizes are increasing with the quality of our cameras. And the better our cameras the more we record and naturally with time, our libraries bulge.

So months down the line — because your iPhone is filling up from hungry apps like Instagram and Facebook unnecessarily holding hundreds of megabytes hostage — you upgrade. To just £2.50 a month for 200GB. Bargain.

But your iPhone takes 4K video at 60fps. That’s 400MB per minute of footage. 8K is round the corner.

You don’t need the 2TB upgrade yet, but your future self craves being able to scroll years back into your memories. As we get older we want to save more, as we have kids, move house, move jobs. Our photo library booms. By the time we are in our old age, photos will be lifelike and file sizes gigantic by today’s standards. I wouldn’t be surprised if over the course of my life I take over a million.

With each passing year you will have been doomed to buy more safety and convenience. Your monthly bill will increase, and increase. Storage sizes come down at a similar rate as file sizes go up.

You’re trapped. Because one day a few years ago you thought: 79p a month, that’s not even a cup of coffee!

Apple are not generous with their free iCloud storage. Nearly a decade after it launched, each user still receives only 5GB. Each user, not each device. You can spend £1000 on an iPhone, £800 on an iPad, £2000 on a mac and £25 per month on Music, TV, Arcade and News and still not have enough storage to back up just two of those devices.

We should not have to pay for safety and convenience, we should have to pay for luxury. Google follow this mantra more closely.

Google give free unlimited photo storage but users have to pay to upload at full quality. I worry I will look back on these compressed images from the cameras of the future and they will be disappointing. This is the reason I record all video in the maximum quality my phone will allow: for the benefit of my future self.

While innovation in cloud storage is stagnating now services are fast and reliable, and while most people don’t need more than the cheaper tiers, perhaps there is a technical reason too. There is only so much storage in the world, and what happens if we fill it up?

In 2025 we will create 163 zettabytes of data. That’s 59 million copies of Netflix’s full international library from 2013 or 15 billion duplicates of Wikipedia. It’s ten times as much data as was created in 2017. With 20% of total data in the world being critical to the continuity of our lives, we need storage space.

That current growth, however means that if we stored one byte on every single atom we would still run out of storage space in less than 180 years.

If Apple and Google were to suddenly provide large amounts of free cloud storage for backups and full quality photo libraries to all their customers, would they risk the safety of future generations? At the rate of technological advancement today, probably not, but Apple are already investing $10 billion in data centres over the next five years to keep up.

Google has 2.5 million servers too. But they charge a significant premium for their higher tiers of cloud storage, perhaps because enterprises will spend more, or perhaps because they want to reserve storage for the highest number of people. On a 200GB plan, they charge 12p per gigabyte per year. Their 2TB option is more economical at 4p, but if you want 10TB, you’re back to 10p. That’s £79.99 per month.

We do not have an immediate data scarcity problem, but the cloud storage business model needs to evolve to allow us to keep our data in sync even when our personal libraries grow unwieldy. Ultimately, consumers should not have to worry about being trapped in a cycle of upgrading their cloud storage accounts, just like they shouldn’t have to worry about the safety of their photos.

Today, if I take a few hundred videos, I will fill my iCloud storage. I have two options: pay up or have my personal data deleted. It shouldn’t have to be this way.

Soon, Apple will launch a Mac without Intel. It’ll have an Apple designed CPU built to dramatically exceed Intel’s performance-per-watt capabilities. It’ll be fast and fan-less but incredibly controversial.

The challenge won’t be in building this device. We know that Apple’s silicon team have put their competitors at Qualcomm to shame. Google are acutely aware of Apple’s dominance and appear to be planning their own chips. The challenge will be marketing a device with an architecture that deems existing apps incompatible.

There will no doubt be an emulation layer for x86 apps to run like normal, but that will not drive headlines. Imagine the headlines after WWDC 2021: Apple Launches Mac That Only Runs iPhone Apps, Apple’s New Mac Can’t Play Games, £999 MacBook Won’t Run Word. It will scare the people who will benefit most from incredible battery life and silent operation.

The first ARM Mac won’t be a ‘pro’ device. It will take time for Adobe and Apple to have native ARM versions of their enterprise level programs. It will be a consumer MacBook, thin and designed to showcase the benefits of ARM. I fully expect it to revive the MacBook line; previously damned by an unreliable keyboard and confusing price point.

But the target market for an entry level MacBook are not people who know the difference between ARM and x86. They are people that just want a good laptop. Yet Apple still want to show just how powerful their own processors are to those who do know and do care.

With iPhone, Apple can do this with the camera. The A13 in the latest iPhones is an extremely powerful chip, but it manifests itself in making the camera perform so well. It is an easy upgrade to grasp. How can Apple show the power of their new laptops in a single feature that everyone can understand?

Maybe it will be in allowing all iPad and iPhone apps to run out of the box. Playing 4K video in a native Netflix app, for example. This would, however, create a bad user experience where touch UIs designed for phone displays are clunky and unoptimised.

Maybe it will be with a high refresh rate, ProMotion 120Hz screen that literally makes actions on the screen happen faster.

Maybe it will be with AAA exclusive Apple Arcade games.

Or a new version of macOS could come with a fresh interface carrying iOS paradigms.

More likely, the silent MacBook will be as thin as an iPad and have a battery that lasts days. But still, if it can’t run Word, customers will run scared.

Perhaps the answer is the courage that let Apple remove the headphone jack from the iPhone 7. Consumers and reviewers were angry; perhaps even Apple sold fewer iPhones that year than their potential, but the iPhone 7 was a stopgap device designed to prepare users for the iPhone X. If the iPhone X — Apple’s radical redesign and most expensive iPhone ever — had been the first to have no headphone jack, that omission would have run the headlines. So Apple did it a year early, even if the world wasn’t ready.

Maybe in a few weeks, at 2020’s online only WWDC, Apple will announce an ARM MacBook. A year too early and without compatible applications, or without a real reason to do so. Maybe it will be an update to the iMac with the same design that we have had since 2013. Apple should bite the bullet early, take the criticism in a device that isn’t significantly better than their current lineup.

Then the next year, when the ecosystem is ready, when people understand emulation and it is clear that ARM apps can be better than their old counterparts, Apple can release something special: the future of the MacBook.

Today it is our civic duty to be lonely. The mere term social distance instructs us to ignore a fundamental human need. We are settling into a new normal of working and resting in the same place, a new normal of taking self-help advice from social media and trying to convince ourselves that not being productive is acceptable.

We are told to set boundaries in our home for work and play. To use our beds for only sleep and our desks for only work. We are told to designate an exercise zone and a Netflix zone. And even though I think we each need to find routines that help us personally and that this advice often creates more guilt than just doing what works for you, it also ignores our loneliness.

There should be no reason to be any more lonely today than in the pre-pandemic world. Our jobs mandate video calls and friends of past lives reach out to join Zoom.

But we don’t designate a social zone. We set aside our government mandated one form of exercise our day, alone. And even though many of us talk to our friends just as much as before it became law not to, even though we remain face to face on video calls, even though we pay more attention when we are on the phone, we still feel worse about getting less work done than we do if we forget to call our friends.

We have been told that soon we will restart the economy. This fosters guilt for not doing things. The five million people who have never used the internet are ignored, and the vast majority of them are from the vulnerable groups demanded to isolate for the longest.

None of us have been taught what social hygiene is and none of have been given any hope of how lockdown could end. We discuss opening the economy, opening shops and bringing the nation back to work before we are given hope of being face to face with a real person.

Because as well as social contact through video calls, humans need food and water, mental stimulation and touch. Skin hunger is the phenomenon of missing human touch. It might a handshake with a distant relative, a hand on the shoulder from a colleague or a hug from a friend. A lack of human touch is a direct cause of depression. Tiffany Field of the Touch Research Institute reports sufferers being “withdrawn.” Pressure sensors in the skin trigger a decrease in blood pressure and stop cortisol from pumping.

In US prisons, solitary confinement has withdrawn inmates from touch for years. In a cell in New Jersey a prisoner is breaking her knuckles as she punches a concrete wall. Physical torture for a lady who had a life of mental pain. And days later when Lydia Thornton from two cells down instinctively reached out to touch her bruises, the girl cried. Not from pain.

“No, you don’t understand. That’s the first time I’ve been touched by anyone - other than by force - in two years.”

Every day 80,000 to 100,000 inmates are in solitary confinement. In no touch torture. Now billions face a similar reality.

It is a crisis caused by demand for productivity. For the acceptance that video calls on your sofa and study in your kitchen is the best way to ‘stay sane’ in lockdown. For advice that tells us not to watch Netflix in bed. As if this is what is causing millions of new sufferers of depression.

None of us are following social hygiene because none of us know what it is. Before we open restaurants, restart sports, plays, clubs and bars, we have to find a way to end isolation from touch. Find ways for grandmothers to meet their newborn grandchildren.

Social distance can be mitigated but physical distance can not. We can use this opportunity to learn what life is like for millions of the truly lonely, those with no-one to touch even at the end of this pandemic. Those who are really alone.

We have been educated how to make a face mask and shop with distance. We have not been taught how to survive without touch.

The iPod is a symbol of Apple’s past and of an elegant device that did one thing very well. Today’s trends for mainstream technology are to do everything quite well. I have previously argued that the iPad is so powerful because it is so flexible; it can be whatever device the user wants it to be. But power often means complexity, and complexity means distraction. This is why I believe it is time for a new iPod.

The Amazon Kindle is not a particularly great device. Its build quality matches its price and its software is slow. But its purpose — to read text — is executed perfectly. It does not strain the eyes and it holds a whole library. It cannot receive messages and it is not easy to browse social media. You cannot listen to music and will not be notified about the news. It is a single use device.

The Freewrite is designed to be a writing machine, with an excellent mechanical keyboard and no distractions. It is bulky and ugly but is designed to do one thing very well: type.

There is a market for portable music players with powerful DACs from high end Walkmans to audio specialists. But these are expensive pieces of equipment for those with existing local music libraries. They are not for every day consumers.

Because every day consumers already have a streaming service on their smartphones that never leaves their side. Average listeners do not need a dedicated device.

Or at least they don’t think they do. Because average readers don’t need a Kindle, when they have a large phone or a tablet. The same thinking should apply to music.

A new iPod should stream over cellular without a separate data contract. Like the Kindle, the option for unlimited, life long mobile data could mean users could play any song within seconds of unboxing.

A new iPod should have no apps. It should have a search field and playlists that adapt to your listening habits.

A new iPod should have a headphone jack.

And with the minimal computing power it takes to stream an mp3, and no need for a large or high refresh rate display, and with no camera or advanced sensors, this device could be cheap. It could have a large battery and a rugged, easy to manufacture plastic exterior. It could work underwater and on a plane.

It could do one thing very well.

So when you just want to excerise, when you just want to fall asleep, when you are a pensioner without a smartphone but with a love for the music of your glory days, the songs you want to listen to are always accessible, high quality, easy.

When there is no other option, browsing millions of songs and discovering new artists and genres becomes your focus. The iPod encourages you to listen in physical places and in musical spaces where you have not ventured before.

As our technology does more and more, as the power at our fingertips becomes unwieldy and under-utilised, our expectations grow higher. But to be perfect, to do one thing extremely well, we have to drop those distractions.

To design this device, an engineer would need to execute with focus. A narrow sight on a distinctly specific goal. The same focus that the iPod put on our music.