From the earliest days of the Mac, Macworld magazine chronicled its history. The print publication hit the newsstands in 1984, same year as the original Macintosh personal computer, and kept going for some 30 years, until management decided it was time to go all digital. Only recently, there was a reported staff cutback in which some long-time contributors found themselves without assignments.

I actually wrote for Macworld for a period of several years in the 1990s. I switched to its main rival, MacUser, only months before that magazine folded and combined itself with Macworld. Not one of my smartest moves.

Now I gather most of Macworld is put together these days by a small full-time staff of editors and writers. There are a few notable exceptions, such as Macalope, who delivers a humorous look at some of Apple’s lamer critics.

But without a lot of outside influences and ideas, perhaps the quality of the content may have taken a hit and the publisher may be trying harder to generate some click bait.

So writer Michael Simon did a piece entitled “10 things that need to change about the iPhone X (and none of them are the notch).”

But this wasn’t a one-off. Yet another of Simon’s article is entitled, “Apple Watch Series 3 reviews: The good, the bad, and the ugly.”

That’s the ticket. Look for the negatives. People want to read bad things about Apple, or at least they must be curious why things must go wrong. I just wonder, before I go on, whether anyone has published a piece entitled, “10 things that need to change about the Samsung Galaxy Note 8.”

Such a piece may be there, but it hasn’t risen to the top of Google’s listing. Instead, I ran across a number of articles listing positive features of Samsung’s phablet, such as, “10 Things the Galaxy Note 8 Can Do.”

See what I mean? Good things about Samsung. Bad things about Apple.

So since a Macworld “staff writer” wants to suggest design changes to Apple, let’s have a closer look. The implication is, of course, that Apple’s designers and engineers are making loads of mistakes here, and someone has to set them straight.

That’s different from saying that you’d like to see this that, or another feature, but not that Apple must do it, now, quickly! Time is short!

I’ll list them in the order cited in the article

Clearly Simon doesn’t agree with Apple’s product people. He wants the iPhone X to be called something else. Maybe he never quite recovered from all those rumors about an iPhone 8. But it’s mostly about what Apple ought to call the next version (assuming there’s such a thing and it’s not a one-off) in 2018. Or maybe Apple will follow the Mac product naming regimen here, which is to have a core name, such as MacBook Pro, and an identifier for the year in which the model was released, such as Late 2016. Or maybe he’s allergic to Roman numerals.

As promised, Apple released three of its four operating systems on Tuesday. macOS High Sierra will arrive on Monday, September 25th, but I’ll get to that shortly.

Both tvOS 11, for the fourth-generation Apple TV, and watchOS 4, for the Apple Watch, have minor improvements. The world won’t change, although loyal users of both devices will appreciate the fact that Apple’s developers labor away at making them better and better.

Then there’s iOS 11, which is a major update for the iPhone, and most especially for the iPad. Up till now, the iPad’s status as a productivity tool has been questionable. Yes, you can get pretty decent mobile versions of Microsoft Office; Apple’s iWork and other apps do a creditable job of moving the tablet away from being strictly a consumption device.

Beginning with iOS 10, Apple began to chip away at the iPad’s productivity limits, a potential replacement for a notebook computer. With such things as split-screen multitasking, it became more useful.

iOS 11 takes things along another few steps, adding a Dock reminiscent of the one on the Mac, with more robust capabilities to manage multiple apps at the same time. You can drag and drop content, same as on a Mac, and there’s also a Files app that gives you direct access to your documents that includes support for several cloud services, such as iCloud and Dropbox.

So it seems that, in order to allow the iPad to act more like a traditional personal computer, Apple looked to the Mac platform for ideas to adapt. I except that’s going to continue at a time when some folks have complained about the macOS taking on more of the characteristics of iOS.

So maybe there’s a middle ground.

That said, iOS 11 is humming away on all my iOS gear; well, except for Barbara’s iPhone 5c, which can’t run it. But she uses it just for phone calls, so it’s no big deal.

Now about macOS High Sierra: It will be released on September 25th with a key feature missing for some users. You won’t be able to convert to the fancy new Apple File System (APFS) on Fusion drives, at least for the initial release. It’s mostly intended for pure SSDs, but Fusion drives were converted for early beta testers, who now have to roll back their drives to HFS+ via some terminal commands, a backup and a reformat. If you didn’t convert, feel lucky.

At some point in the future, Apple will probably add APFS support to Fusion drives, but you should be able to convert or format a regular hard drive without any issues. One of my backup drives has been using it for a while without incident.

So that’s the reasonable and logical portion of this column.

Now it’s time to look at some more Apple fear-mongering, the threat that our favorite fruit company is going lose its status as something or other one more time.

So a certain analyst for no less than UBS, one Steve Milunovich, claims that the Apple Watch with LTE is somehow destined to dump the iPhone from its vaunted status as “the most important device in our digital lives.”

Just like that. As more Apple Watches are sold, fewer people will rely on the iPhone as a hub machine. As the Apple Watch becomes more capable of working independently, you won’t need a smartphone with which to tether it.

Take a deep breath. It only gets worse.

So the contention here is that fewer people will need smartphones as they buy more fancy smartwatches and other connected gear that may not have even been invented yet. But what if that gear were built by Apple?

Consider this: At one time, the iPod was a huge success with Apple selling tens of millions of them each year. The iPhone arrived, which incorporated the functions of an iPod and other gear, and the iPod began its long, slow descent into obscurity. As of now, the only iPod still in Apple’s inventory is the iPod touch, essentially an iPhone without the phone.

So unlike foolish industry analysts who haven’t a clue about what Apple is doing and why, the company will continue to build and market a product until it’s no longer viable. Then they will move along to the next great thing, whatever it is.

It’s fair to say that no gadget lasts forever. The Mac has had a terrific run, and it has years of useful life left, but there will come a time where other gear will replace it in one way or another. Smartphones could be replaced with contact lenses, I suppose, brain implants and all sorts of other gadgets. Maybe it is true that the Apple Watch will replace the iPhone, and provide a fixed holographic image in place of a large physical display, one that you could manipulate in real time with your fingers. Call it an advanced virtual reality system.

There are lots of amazing ideas that sci-fi writers have envisioned. Consider the products inspired by Star Trek, including the iPad (well perhaps “2001: A Space Odyssey” helped), flip-phones and talking computers. Some scientists are even working on concepts that may result in spaceships using warp drive and matter transportation devices.

Scotty, beam me up!

I have little doubt that there are designers and developers working on what Apple might build five or ten years from now. It is, after all, a forward-looking company. As most of you know, Apple has never been shy about cannibalizing its own gear, meaning that if something amazing is invented, they should be the inventors. If that amazing thing takes sales away from existing products, so be it.

Unfortunately, some alleged industry analysts don’t understand that nothing is forever, even them.

And that’s the way it is.

The entire American marketing scheme for selling mobile handsets received its overdue overhaul via T-Mobile’s “Uncarrier” program. Instead of being stuck with a two-year contract, they basically separated the device from the service.

Well, I suppose it seemed different enough, because you would strike a separate deal to buy or lease a mobile device. This meant that, once the equipment was paid off, your bill would be reduced accordingly. Compare that to those old fashioned two-year cellular plans where, even when you technically had no more obligation to pay off a device, the price would never go down. You’d pay it forever.

You can bet which plan sounds better. But that doesn’t mean U.S. cellular carriers — and even Apple — don’t have a scheme to lock you in. So you can pay a monthly fee for the device, and depending on the deal you select, you can regularly trade in your equipment for the new model. If you want to upgrade every year, you pick the appropriate deal.

In short, you never stop paying. What’s more carriers will, from time to time, offer a trade-on on your old equipment from another carrier. So if you still have payments to make, you can opt to remit the balance, sell it off to a third-party, such as Gazelle, or see what the carrier offers.

But  before you switch carriers, you’re certainly going to want to make sure that you’ll have decent coverage. You don’t want to deal with dropped calls, the inability to make or receive calls, or the lack of a decent Internet connection. Indeed, other than price and other considerations, this is a key reason to switch carriers.

So I have an AT&T account for my business with three lines. One of those lines is used by Chris O’Brien, co-host of my paranormal radio show, The Paracast. These days he hangs his hat in Cottonwood, AZ, and thus probably won’t get reception that’s as solid as it is in and around Phoenix.

That’s understandable.

But I’ve been tempted to switch from AT&T for various reasons, and not just to pay less. You see, customer service, which used to be decent enough most of the time, has declined seriously in the wake of the company’s acquisition of the DirecTV satellite service in 2015.

It’s not just bad, it’s awful for users of both services. In order to reach a phone support person, you have to navigate an automated voice assistant that’s only barely capable of voice recognition. As a trained radio broadcaster, I believe that a digital system ought to be able to detect most of my routine requests accurately, but it doesn’t. More often than not, I’m connected to the wrong departmentt. So when I want to talk to someone about my wireless bill, on occasion I am sent to DirecTV support.

T-Mobile has some attractive offers, and my monthly bill may really be lower. And, yes, I’ve looked at prepaid plans, but when you add up the total cost for the level of service I need, savings aren’t so terrific. I require a decent amount of mobile data to continue to drive for Lyft and Uber. Hours upon hours of running a navigation app with turn-by-turn directions while driving passengers about sucks up bandwidth real fast. It’s one of the costs (tax deductible) of doing business.

But one of the big limitations of T-Mobile’s network up till now is that coverage in rural areas hasn’t been so great. So it’s understandable that the company has been attempting to build out its service to provide better coverage not just for less-populated areas, but in buildings in large urban areas where you’re apt to lose a signal.

As part of the network expansion, T-Mobile is rapidly rolling out cell towers that support LTE Band 71 at 600 MHz. They have begun to deploy the expanded service in different parts of the country where service wasn’t so good before, such as Wyoming and other more sparsely populated regions such as West Texas, the Oklahoma panhandle — well you get the picture.

If you live in one of these states, the prospects for expanded coverage should be welcome.

But if you’re read the published reports, you’ll discover that the no iPhone supports Band 71. No, not even the iPhone 8 and iPhone X, nor the Apple Watch with LTE. What’s more, this is a hardware limitation, meaning that these devices can’t be retrofitted later on.

If it’s going to happen, you’ll have to wait until next year to see if Apple installs chips with the proper support.

But even if you’re inclined to switch to a Samsung Galaxy instead, well, no, they don’t support 600 MHz either. Future gear from LG and Samsung will reportedly support Band 71, so one expects Apple to provide such support, perhaps next year.

So was this some evil plot on the part of the major mobile handset makers not to support T-Mobile? It’s more a matter of development time, that with the rapid rollout of 600 MHz, manufacturers didn’t have the chance to order up cellular radios that support this band.

This doesn’t mean that T-Mobile doesn’t work with iPhones and the other premium handsets. It will, just on other bands. This is where the coverage maps may be misleading, presenting a picture of solid coverage where it won’t exist for you.

In fact, coverage maps in general may be highly misleading.

Before you change carriers, you may want to talk to your coworkers, friends, maybe family members in other cities where expect to travel. See which carriers they use, and their experiences as a guide.

Overall, I would assume that larger cities ought to have decent coverage from any major carrier in the U.S. The problems tend to occur in outlying areas. You can also check a carrier’s money back guarantee, and see how long you have to cancel the service if it doesn’t meet your needs.

Long and short is that T-Mobile’s coverage map does display active service areas in Arizona that appear to be better than AT&T and closer in density to Verizon Wireless. Sprint is almost universally worse.

I won’t make any moves, though, until I know for sure that I’ll receive the level of dependable service that I need. But I am really tempted to leave AT&T behind, really tempted.

You may have noticed that, whenever new gear is expected from Samsung, say an update to the Galaxy smartphone line, it will often be touted as yet another iPhone killer. Well, except for one blog from a major publication in which the writer claimed that the iPhone X was meant to be a potential Samsung Galaxy killer.

So turnabout is fair play?

Now before I go on, I will certainly not argue anyone’s taste in any tech gadget. There’s lots of product out there. Some of it is really good, some of it is all right, some of it is cheap and not much else. But the quality of such gear is better than it used to be, so it’s really hard to find a clunker. Well, unless you buy a premium smartphone with a battery that might overheat or burst into flame.

Continue Reading…