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Using them now for a while, they are the first working wireless earphones I have used. They work seamlessly when paired with 5 devices. Even without the latest Apple OS’s you can simply activate the connection on a device, and it will switch without you having to first disconnect them somewhere else.

They are mostly reliable, only sometimes, when connected to my Mac, they have some trouble getting themselves sorted out: they can stay stuck using only one side, or a low quality codec. I wonder whether these are actually issues caused by the Mac, as I sometimes need to check Airdrop to get the Bluetooth connection to work. Also the watch intermittently has trouble connecting. It always works after turning off Bluetooth on my other devices, but this is annoying.

They fit very comfortably, and can stay in my ears for hours. My worries about them falling out are unfounded; their low weight means that even when moving the pods do not generate enough force. But be careful not to touch them accidentally: pulling a cap over your ears will surely dislodge them. As they are very easy to put in, I reach for them even when only wanting to listen for a few minutes.

Mildly annoying is only the limited integration with Siri. When you have set it up to only be accessible with an unlocked device, Siri stops working when your device locks. It would be nice if Siri would stay available until you remove the pods from your ears.

Addendum: The AirPods remain pure magic, the cord was such an annoyance. Unfortunately switching between the devices can fail. Sometimes toggling airplane mode helps, sometimes it requires a reboot. Once a fortnight it remains a minor niggle, but it really should be fixed. (May 2017)

There is a lot of consternation over the new MacBook Pro, as people feel it is not powerful enough. It is best summed up when looking at the performance numbers, collected partly by @felix_schwarz:

Basically CPU is just 10% better, GPU up to 190%, and battery life 40% compared to the original 2012 Retina model. Compared to the constant improvements we have seen for iPhone and iPad, this feels utterly slow. But Intel did not stop improving because they are resting on their laurels, it is simply that frequency scaling has become very hard to do beyond 3GHz, and has caused single thread performance to stagnate. The energy efficient way to improve performance are extra cores, and more SIMD width¹, and I suspect that Apple’s Ax cores will soon run into that same wall. It is no surprise that Apple is pushing Metal as GPUs are currently the best bet to get raw performance thanks to parallelism.

In addition we see the flight to quality in full swing, as Macs increasingly cede the low ground to iOS. This brings us an annoying transition to a new, higher performance connection standard (USB-C/Thunderbolt 3), and missing clarity on the 5K display cable: will it be Thunderbolt 3 or DisplayPort 1.4? While I welcome the ability to add a high quality 5K monitor, I see the risk that Thunderbolt 3 will not become the standard connector: it is more expensive than DisplayPort, and power delivery is only useful for notebooks, not desktops. And annoyingly, the LG 5K monitor only supports one computer connection. But at $1200, it is cheap enough to take a risk.

USB-C is the right move, and while the transition will cause teething troubles, and another round of adapters, in a few years we will not miss USB-A. I wonder whether Apple has left just enough room between the ports to allow you to place USB-C to -A plugs side by side, to ease the transition somewhat.

The AirPods are nice when you only want to carry your watch with you, and they will be replacing the remaining uses of the iPod, being able to play music and podcasts during your workouts. It is also very clever to keep the pod name alive after the iPod has withered away. We will see, with the advances in battery durability, whether AirPod batteries will age faster than cables will fray, as it will probably not be worth it to replace their batteries¹, but I would be surprised if they match the 10 years I got from my earphones.

As a technology, they seem to be designed with the watch in mind. For the phone, an alternative where the wireless earpieces could be charged and paired via lightning, and you could still listen to music while charging, might be better². But this is something Apple forbids, clearly indicating that Apple wants watch compatibility dearly.

The current experience with the Apple Watch is a good indication that watch apps can evolve into useful companions. The watch is a good device to display glancable information. Because it is so uncomfortable to hold your arm up for more than a few seconds, it works best for small interactions. It competes for your attention with the phone, which provides a much larger, and more comfortable screen. So the information presented on the watch only wins when: 1) you are using your arms for something else, and cannot easily hold a phone or 2) the information is glanced so fast that the extra 1–3 seconds to pull out your phone would be an issue. All of this means that you should be very selective in what you have on your watch, that you should concentrate on a few tasks that occupy you regularly and rigorously trim your apps down to the few you are actually using.

These are the tasks where the watch excels for me, ordered by functions:

• Siri is brilliant for adding timers, and keeping track of fleeting thoughts, like remembering you of thinks you happen to notice. In the home, Amazon’s Alexa is actually showing what could be done.

• Glances can be very nice to show you important information you are interested in. Unfortunately they update quite slowly, and this is a problem Apple needs to address. Especially the apps should have a way to cache the relevant information on the phone, so that the display updates very quickly. My most often used glance is the weather (to know when it rains), and I have trimmed the list now to 5 glances, all about weather, podcasts, and the calendar. 3 extra glances are there for pinging my iPhone, checking heartbeat and battery status, but remain mostly unused.

• Apps could be great if they optimize for the up to three most used functions. But they are currently way too slow. It often takes more than 10 seconds for the app to be ready, and this is so bad that I have essentially stopped using them. The builtin apps show that great things should be possible here.

• Notifications are probably the best feature of the watch now, allowing you to quickly decide what should be interrupting you, and to get updates while traveling. The best feature might be that they appear on a screen you are not constantly looking at: you see no interruption while you concentrate on something else, and you catch up on them while you find the time to glance at the time.

watchOS 3 looks like it will fix the issues with glances and apps, combining them into one experience with the dock, and most importantly removing most of the delays. I wonder about the decision to use a button instead of a swipe up to show the dock. Swipe up is lower friction than a button press, because your finger is then already in the right position to continue. And I cannot imagine anyone wanting to interact with control center often enough to justify giving it such prominent placing. Glances gave you very fast access to a few functions: swipe up, swipe left/right, press button on glance directly (only for built in apps, though). This is lost with the dock. While you can see up to date snapshots, they are significantly smaller than the full screen. I really would like to see the swipe up place reserved for showing an alternate watch screen.

I especially like the maps app on the watch. Because it provides directions using vibrations, I can follow them without me being distracted by having to look at a screen or others by hearing the voice prompts.

It is important to understand that the watch will always be a companion to the phone, specializing in making a few tasks better. It has a great niche in being an additional source of authentication, but otherwise every single task you do on the watch could also be done directly on the phone. It is a convenience shortcut, and for apps to thrive on the watch they must adopt this mindset.

There seem to be a lot of people calling for the watch to become a standalone communication device. I doubt that this will be the future: the watch would have to rely on voice as its input method, and it lacks a screen you can comfortably use for more than a few seconds to present you the answers.

Should you want to buy an iPad, buy the 12.9″ model together with a Pencil. The Pencil is the precision tool replacing the mouse on an iPad. It is superior for almost any task, most obviously for drawing, but the precision comes in handy for object manipulation surprisingly often.

It has allowed me to move all my diagramming to the iPad, thanks to the excellent Omnigraffle. Paper by 53 has replaced pen and paper for exploring ideas. OnShape shows that you can implement a professional CAD system on the iPad. PDF Expert delivers excellent tools to annotate documents, and Pixelmator makes it easy to combine graphics to illustrate a point.

People are underestimating the impact of the Pencil, because it requires you to use your iPad flat. You can either use your iPad with the Pencil, or with an external keyboard, but both together is awkward. People seem reluctant to use the iPad naked. But give it a try. The Pencil is a huge improvement whenever you need to work with images, an external keyboard is only a small step up from typing directly on glass. And with speech recognition getting better, we will soon reach the point where even nonnative speakers will be able to dictate faster than they could have ever hoped to type. An external keyboard offers familiarity, but it is also blinding you to see how to use an iPad most effectively.

What many people are not realizing is that the iPad Pro 12.9″ is lighter naked than the 9.7″ model combined with a keyboard and case¹. Not having this extra weight is what makes all the difference when we want to use the iPad handheld. With a light, naked iPad, I can hold it in my hands, type on the glass effectively, maybe holding it up while sitting in my chair, using the armrest. Or I can put it down on my lap, and also use the pen to draw or explore ideas. It is still a bit heavy, and I still would love the iPad to lose half its weight again, but with the current, naked weights, I can already use it for long periods without feeling that I need a table to rest the iPad on². I do not miss a physical keyboard. The typing speed on glass is a bit slower³, but it is still much faster then using a pen, and more than fast enough to keep up with my thoughts. We tend to greatly underestimate the time needed for clearly formulating our thoughts, typing is a relatively minor part of the time I need for a post. I see that a physical keyboard enables you to type blindly, without having to glance from time to time. This is valuable for transcribing talks, but only journalists and secretaries do this often, and I believe this wrongly colors journalists opinions about the necessity of a physical keyboard.

So start treating your iPad as a tool that can withstand use, and enjoy the light weight. Maybe get a sleeve⁴ to protect your iPad during transport, which can also serve as a nice place to rest your iPad on a table. Trust Apple to make a solid piece of hardware that does not need extra protection.

The new iPad Pro 9.7″ has surprisingly many improvements to its older, larger sibling. The cameras are understandable, as the size is much easier to hold in hand, but it is disappointing that the color temperature matching has not been a part of the large one already. Otherwise the pricing is surprisingly low compared to the 12.9″ model. The larger screen must still be relatively difficult to manufacture, because it is otherwise difficult to see why one should pay $200 more for one, when the medium model is better specified. Of course, as we can already see with the iPhone, Apple is in the enviable situation of not having to compete against close substitutes, allowing it some measure of pricing discrimination, so this could just be Apple’s decision to increase its profits. I feel though that one would be much better served buying the large Pro instead, the larger screen real estate allowing us to work much more efficiently, especially with two apps side by side.

The iPhone SE is a very nice phone, $250 cheaper than the 6s, and basically only missing 3D Touch¹ while having better battery life. It is even a bit heavier than the 5s, so Apple obviously has decided that battery life is now more important than reducing weight even further. It has the potential to be a very popular phone, a lot of great technology, a reasonable price, and no longer any competition in the small but powerful phone space. It will be interesting to see how many people will buy this instead of a 6 or 6s. I would not be surprised if this phone, especially the 64GB model, will capture around 25% market share until the next refresh. At the very least, it will provide very good feedback about which screen sizes people are actually preferring to use, even when this will be biased by price as well. John Gruber has noted in his review that he feels typing on the iPhone SE is a bit problematic, but I do not share this concern, you could type quite fast on the 3.5″ and 4″ iPhones. The issue is more that once you use one size of iPhone, you build a muscle memory for the keys, and you will need a few weeks to a few months to relearn the keys after switching sizes. And until you have finished with your thumb training, you will be frustratingly slow and error prone.

The iPad Pro is an amazing computer that is also pretty frustrating because the software is not yet there. In combination with the Pencil, it becomes an incredible tool for sketching out ideas. I love Paper by 53 for this, and it has replaced paper and pencil for me. It is simply so much more convenient to always have multiple colors, intelligent sketching tools (especially the pencil simulation is brilliant), and a perfect eraser with you that it easily trumps the added space of A3 paper.

It continues to be an iPad, and this means it remains very useful for reading data sheets, as well as marking up any texts. In fact, the large screen combined with a still reasonable weight are the best compromise for a working tablet so far: it has almost completely replaced usage of my iPad Air, since you can’t beat the extra screen space, while remaining light enough to be used while walking.

Writing longer texts is more frustrating, though. It starts with the keyboard support: external ones are adding quite a bit of extra weight, and interacting with the screen is easier when you can quickly move on a trackpad instead of having to move your arm to actually touch the screen. If you put a Bluetooth one to the side, you still lose the onscreen keyboard, which would be very handy for adding a few letters for editing. Typing on glass is not a great experience on the iPad Pro, either. The main problem is that it lacks a haptic reference for your fingers to create a muscle memory for typing. Creating a small indentation in the middle of each side would offer a reference for our thumbs to rest, so that our other digits could learn where the letters are. I believe this is also the reason why I am typing faster on an iPhone than the iPad, the fixed reference from holding the iPhone more than making up for the smaller keys.

The frustration results from the high expectations, and the many small ways in which the software is still incomplete: no builtin way to access additional characters in fonts, no control about font features, neither Word nor Pages allow you to define your own styles, you cannot insert a diagram from OmniGraffle into a text document, organizing documents by project is finally possible, but complicated with document providers¹. There is already software to cover 90% of your needs². But those remaining 10% mean that many still have to wait awhile until the software has caught up. While the iPad Pro has already become my most used computer, there are still enough crucial tasks that require me to switch to my Mac from time to time.

The iPad Pro is a computational power house. It is roughly a match for the MacBook, and even the fastest desktop processors are less than twice as fast in single core performance. With the A9X chip, Apple has made the interesting decision to optimize the general processor for single core performance, and spent a lot of resources to include a powerful GPU that can do parallel workloads via compute shaders. I believe this is the correct decision, especially with a shared memory model that allows us to quickly move tasks between CPU and GPU. It also means that it will take some time for software developers to adapt to this paradigm, as well as to finish supporting more functionality in their iOS software. In the end, the hardware is there, powerful enough to support everything you are now doing on a laptop, and I am optimistic that the software will follow within a few years as well.