Our neighbor left the box with my mother. He was an Air Force Captain taken with building things of one kind or another. During my Junior year in high school it was building electronic kits. Back in the day that meant anything from Heathkit. The company produced well-designed stereo components, oscilloscopes, an analog computer (long story, but my high school had one), test equipment, and amateur radio gear. If you knew how to solder they were almost idiot-proof and you could repair them yourself when they broke. A few of his old projects somehow made it to me.
It was a Heathkit AA-40 - a 40 watt per channel class A tube amplifier. Unlike many of his gifts it still worked. The problem was I didn't have a turntable or speakers. We had a family stereo, but touching it would have been socially dangerous. I found an old turntable and a single very not very good speaker. Anything moderately good was out of the question. Sometimes it's useful if you can't afford something.
I had read that the mass of the driven element, a speaker cone, was important. Low mass meant high acceleration for a given force. It made sense. There were exotic electrostatic speakers with even lower masses than a cone. Supposedly they sounded great, but had some technical issues. It started me wondering if I could go to an even lower driven mass.
A feature or flaw about me is I'm usually more interested in how something works than what it does or what it might do for me. I thought ham radio would be exciting. It turns out it was mostly people telling you how good your signal was, the weather and a few other boring things. On the other hand how radio waves propagated through the atmosphere was fascinating and still is. Faced with needing a speaker I was drawn to the basics. It was just turning an electrical signal into a mechanical motion which would create a string of pressure differences in the air. Speaker coils, magnets and paper cones. On the other hand if I could make a plasma dance...
I used a blow torch with a wick made out of asbestos (I know) that brought a salt solution into the flame. Of course there was a background noise and it was a serious fire hazard, but you can't have everything at once. The amplifier's output went into a high voltage transformer from a junked TV and into two electrodes in the flame. It worked! The flame moved in time to the music which was sort of identifiable as music. It sounded terrible with the hiss and wasn't exactly safe for indoor use. But I've never been an audiophile, so it was an achievement in my book.
The same with a lot of technology. It's deeply fascinating, but how chips are made and how semiconductors work seems more interesting than how I use them. And how people use technology is more interesting than how I use it. (Sociology is way beyond me.) There's a lot I'm interested in, but when it comes to personal adoption I tend to be in the middle and sometimes the trailing edge. I'll buy something new, like the first iPod or iPhone, and replace it every year until it does what seems useful. Then I keep it until it fails or, like my old MacBook Pro, has a maddening keyboard.
I'm mostly in Apple's ecosystem so smartphone means iPhone to me. As time goes on I've made an effort to rely on it less and less. It packs enough very useful features that I wouldn't go back to a pre-computer wireless phone, but my four year old phone is currently in a wait until it fails mode.
That said I follow Apple developer's conferences and product announcements. The current iPhone 13 has a remarkable set of photographic and video capabilities. Computational photography gets better every year and is now at stun level. Apple is using the processor, graphics processor and machine learning hardware at the same time in some of the modes. It's astounding. If you're a serious photographer like Om or Bryan, you probably need one and have already ordered. The device seems mature at this point. They didn't make a big deal of it being faster, but rather concentrated on battery life. Pro tip - mature portable electronics that check all of the feature boxes focus on battery life. In the end user experience wins.
I'm not a photographer so a new iPhone would be overkill. Maybe in a year what I have now will be unusable and I'll have something new. How these things work and how they're built is the exciting part. I would not have predicted some of the video features on the new phone.
Horace Dediu has one of his always insightful pieces on the importance of the new iPhone. In my case I'm probably a trailing edge user at this point - different from the much larger group Apple is addressing as they reinvent what the iPhone is useful for. He's worth following if you have an interest in on person computational power and the micromobility revolution.
On the other hand Om may have nailed the really important product launch this season. Then again, he offers an excellent iPhone 13 Pro review.
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