My iPhone has saved me money?

I’ve calculated that my life is 50% simpler because I own a smartphone. blog.mindrocketnow.com

So I’m one of the people that cannot leave their smartphone alone for more than 6.5 minutes. However, rather than feeling guilty, I think this is a sign of my savvy consumer insight. I did some rough accounting, and using my smartphone has saved me money:

Gadget	Incremental cost on iPhone	Non-iPhone equivalent	Cost of equivalent
Address book	£0 Contacts app	Collins A5	£9.99
Alarm clock	Free app	Casio TQ140	£4.75
Album	£9.99/m Spotify premium	Amazon CD	£4.99 ea.
Babysitting	£4.99 Minecraft app	Local teenager	£8/h
Bike computer	£0 Runkeeper app	Velo Champion 16	£24.99
Boarding pass	£0 Passbook app	Printed at airport	£0
Book	£4.99 Kindle book ea.	Amazon paperback	£5.99 ea.
Calculator	£0 Calculator app	Casio FX-83GT	£11.99
Calendar	£0 Calendar app	Filofax	£7.50
Camera	£0 Camera app	Nikon Coolpix L31	£58
Comic	$69 p.a. Marvel Unlimited	Comic book store comic	£3.99 ea.
Digital music player	£0 Music app	Sony Walkman NWZE585	£84.99
Game	Marvel Puzzle Quest £14.99 in-app purchase	Lego Marvel Avengers for Wii U	£30.99
International call	£0 over wi-fi	BT standard tariff to India	40p/min
Map	£0 Google maps	AtoZ London	£5.99
Movie	£0 Amazon Fire TV app	Amazon blu-ray	£10.99 ea.
Newspaper	£0 Feedly app	The Times	£1.20/d
Radio	£0 Podcasts app	Roberts Radio Revival Mini	£160
Sat nav	£0 Waze app	TomTom Start 25M UK maps	£119.99
Telephone	£28.32/m tariff + £480 for the phone	Line rental + BT 1000 DECT phone	£16.70/m + £19.99
TV box set	£0 Now TV app	Additional NowTV box + subs	£10 + £6.99/m
Weather forecast	£0 Yahoo! Weather app	Watson W8682-mkII	£59.95
Annual Total	£1064.58		£2264.22

Yikes! My gadget habit costs me over a grand per year. At least it’s 50% cheaper using my iPhone than with replacements.

Some of my favourite activities turn out to be free activities that I find better to do on my smartphone; activities like browsing, checking email, or borrowing books from the library. Others are activities that would cost real money in meatspace, are now free using an app, like a second screen movie viewing vs. buying a blu-ray.

Very rarely is there an activity that is cheaper in meatspace than online. The only example I can think of is buying digital media. It’s still cheaper to by real CDs and books, and movies than downloading, unless you buy a subscription.

What I find most interesting about this list, is that there are over 20 activities that I now do with this single device, that I would find valuable enough to pay for. In other words, if I didn’t have my smartphone, I would’ve happily bought a bevvy of additional gadgets. My smartphone is revolutionary because it simplifies my life.

Time to spring clean your passwords.

Persistent personal information is bad, when you aren’t the one in charge. blog.mindrocketnow.com

I use a combination of disposable email addresses from Yahoo! And individually-created passwords by 1Password for managing my online accounts. This enables me to have a unique user name and password for each account, so if one gets compromised it doesn’t affect any other account. Best of all, I don’t have to remember the 400+ username/password combinations that I use – all I have to do is to remember the 1Password password, and the application automatically fills in the unique per-site password.

Using a unique per-site username and password combination is the minimum security you should employ, and using a password manager makes it too easy not to. Password managers such as 1Password are also beginning to support one-time passwords meaning your credentials are only valid per-visit, so even more secure. Definitely don’t tick the “remember me” option on web sites, don’t use Facebook Connect or Google OpenAuth. And think twice about the details you store on their site for convenience – credit cards, addresses, perhaps ID numbers. It’s probably better to enter these details each time you need them.

And definitely don’t record your passwords by saving your emails. Dashlane (a reputable password manager maker) has released a useful little tool that checks your inbox to see if your password is sitting there in plain sight. It doesn’t check the rest of your mailbox, but you don’t file them away, do you?

I’ve been using this disposable email + password manager solution for a while now, since 2010. 1Password also comes with an analysis of password history, and I’ve just realised that I haven’t changed some of my passwords for over 5 years! Even though the passwords may be strong, even though the emails may be unique, it’s still not a good idea to keep the information the same for a long time. Just because you can store this securely, doesn’t mean the web site will. So time to do some password spring cleaning, methinks – delete those old accounts I no longer use, and freshen up those I use the most.

The oh-so-geeky Apple Watch is not ready for my life yet.

I really want the Apple Watch because it’s so shiny, but I’m having trouble imagining how I’d actually use it. blog.mindrocketnow.com

So which Apple Watch are you going to get? The one with the rubber strap and retails at £299, or the one with exactly the same innards, but retails at £13,500? Put in those terms, it’s a bit of a trivial question, isn’t it? In value-for-money terms, the top-of-the-scale just doesn’t make sense – but then again neither does a top-of-the-scale Breitling.

Traditional watch manufacturers extol the complexity of their complications, that these feats of engineering excellence cannot be matched, and therefore justifies the price. Apple very much justifies its place in this rarefied club, as it too has achieved feats of unparalleled engineering excellence, but in its ability to mass-produce. The atomic delights blog does a great job of explaining the innovation that Apple has put into its manufacturing.

Gold is soft, deforms easily, and is a dumb material to want to make a heavy-wear item like a watch case. But it’s bling, so engineers have the problem of how to make something soft into something hard. The 18k gold that Apple uses for the edition cases is made hard using a new work-hardening technique: rolling precisely milled gold cases to flatten them by a few microns each time, in order to disrupt the crystal lattice structure with just enough dislocations to make them hard, not enough to make them snap. Ultrasonic testers ensure that there aren’t any density variations beneath the surface that could fail in time. A Coordinate Measuring Machine measures that the final case is within 0.05mm of its design.

A lot of decades have gone into developing stainless steal alloys that are hard, whilst ensuring that the nickel in the alloy doesn’t irritate the skin. The clever part is how to create the exceptional strength that Apple required. The Apple Watch innovation is to use cold forging. The steel billet is placed under such immense pressure that it flows into the shape of the case. Using cold forging, the crystal lattices remain intact and the case is immensely strong but not brittle.

Aluminium is a metal that we now associate with Apple, used in its MacBooks, even remote controls, and always to an exacting quality of finish. These techniques are further improved upon for the aluminium watch case. The extrusion process perfectly produces one of the edges for the case, so it’s one less surface to mill. Cases are anodized in densities that are beyond most manufacturers in order to achieve the production volumes. Lasers are used to remove burrs from machined edges so that the precision of the edge is not lost. A laser is also used to cut the serrations on the crown for the same reason.

Apple has deliberately chosen to go way beyond the normal manufacturing processes in making its watch. It is possible to make a gold case without work-hardening, a steel case without cold forging or an aluminium case without lasers.  The huge cost reflects that “good enough” wasn’t good enough for Apple. So by buying an Apple Watch, I’m saying that “good enough” is not good enough for me.

Let’s flip that around a bit: by buying an Apple Watch I’m demonstrating that I’m prepared to spend on something that is far beyond fit-for-purpose. To me, that’s the nub of my cognitive dissonance with the product. You see, I can’t figure out how it’ll fulfil any use case for me. It’s therefore simultaneously beyond fit-for-(Apple’s)-purpose and not fit-for-(my)-purpose.

The negatives outweigh the positives at the moment: the battery won’t last all day, it can’t do anything beyond the abilities of my current bevvy of gadgets, it’s expensive, I’ll irrevocably scratch it within days, and it’ll be obsolete when the next version comes out in 6 months. Which is why I’ve bought the Jawbone UP24 to measure my personal telemetry – I’ll report back on it in a later post.

However, there is one last trick up the sleeve of the Apple Watch that will change my mind, and that’s its apps. The experience of the iPhone showed that a billion possible apps can make a phone that’s terrible at making phone calls indispensible. I’m convinced that the right combination of apps will make the Apple Watch must-wear. Let’s see how long my nerve holds.

Published 13^th March 2015