omenti

teaching and technological change

On Saturday my niece sent a few photos from her son's robotics competition.  While standardized components and a simple scripting language are used, there's a lot of room for learning and creativity.  Winning teams spend much of their time modifying the basic design along with moving to more sophisticated programming languages.  The basic hardware is quite expensive so many of the groups are sponsored by their schools and sometimes local businesses.  It seems like a great way for kids who like to build things and play computer games to learn a bit of engineering and programming.  My niece's son isn't interested in math or science at school, but loves to build things.  It's a path that has him learning.  Given the right advisor there could be a lot of learning.  It's also a nice example of using technology as a teaching vehicle.

 

Sometimes new technologies are seen as a way to cheat.  I've read that some teachers worry that language models like GPT-3 will give students easy access to ghost-written essays.  Of course there's still the problem of students buying essays from human, but this may be cheaper and easier to get.  One can imagine a number of ways to deal with this.  A teacher might ask something like "based on the debate Adam and Sally were having last Tuesday, how would you.."   Indexicality - pointing to something in the context in which it occurs - is something these language models can't address.  Better still may be to focus on critical thinking in the class and test on something that isn't a simple regurgitation. Essays seem like a very uncreative way to teach writing and critical thinking skills.   And there will probably be teachers who figure out how to involve language models as a tool to teach creative thinking.  That would be a leap similar to using robotics competitions to teach shop, basic engineering and programming skills.

 

I'd like to see changes in how science and math are taught in high school.  Currently there's a push to eliminate areas most students will rarely use.  I'd counter that by teaching the subjects in a way to improve critical thinking.  Pure math may be a way forward, not the "new math" that crashed and burned in the 60s, but big ideas.  It doesn't have to be about formal proofs and calculations (although tools like Mathematica and Maple can be useful experimentation and visualization tools).  I've probably belabored it before, but simple topology, infinity, the continuum, maps, abstraction, inference and model building. None of this has to be taught with rigor, but playing with them can open pathways students have never thought about.   Sure teach some of the regular math, but it doesn't have to be so repetitive. I'd add probability and risk analysis as well as personal finance. The same with science - do away with memorization and focus on the concepts and how we arrived at them.  Of course extra points for making it playful like the robotics competition.

 

But I'm not a k-12 educator so all of this may be silly.

 

And for college here's something by the wonderful Woodie Flowers of MIT on changes he'd made to university engineering curriculum and beyond.  (Woodie was one of the most innovative teachers at MIT)

 

chindōgu flavored technologies

Chindōgu is the curious Japanese art form of inventing gadgets that seem to a clever solutions to  problems, but which end up causing more problems than they solve.  You may have seen examples like:

toilet paper dispenser hats: you never run out of tissue when you have to sneeze

baby mops: a baby outfit that also mops the floor

umbrella ties

many more .. search the Internet

 

To keep the art form pure you're not supposed to make money - almost guaranteed as the public will see the gadget as useless and won't buy it.  (there was a tragic mistake - the selfie stick started as chindōgu)  I know of an engineering professor who taught a course on creative engineering using it as a vehicle for student projects.

 

For a few years I've found it useful to extend the term to cover technical and social technical inventions that are seen as solving problems by the maker, but are clearly clueless.  A few examples from the past month:

Flat panel displays in cars are a bit of automotive chindōgu.

Blockchains are an example of computational chindōgu.

Meta's Horizon Worlds is pure techno-social chindōgu.

 

Perhaps you might find hunting for this kind of chindōgu useful.  I find it to be a nice way of thinking about what might represent meaningful and useful longterm change.  And of course sometimes you label things incorrectly and have to come back and rethink.  That may be even more useful.

 

And then there are potlatches..  the destruction of wealth to impress and gain status.  Fully autonomous (class five) vehicles, NFTs, Facebook's version of the meta verse, hydrogen powered cars ...  

 

 

 

 

 

when not keeping your cool is a virtue

Why are we paying someone to heat parts of our house we aren't in?

 

This was one of my Dad's  deep questions.  Two adults, two kids and three dogs in a small house subject to Montana winters. Cold snaps could be deep and long - a week or more with highs well below 0° F ( -18° C) weren't uncommon.  More impressive were the lows:  -30° F (-35°C) came at least once every Winter and record lows were below -40°.  Dressing for it was a necessary skill.  Inside the home my Dad controlled a powerful technology - the thermostat.

 

When people were around during daytime the thermostat was set to 62°.  The nighttime setting, from 9 PM until the first person got up at about 5:30AM,  was 55°   If people were out of the house  the setting was 52°.   As far as I could tell these were his fundamental constants.  Warm clothing, sweaters, quilts (my parents cheated and had an electric blanket)  made it comfortable and sometimes even too warm.  There was only one thermostat and a few areas of the house were always a bit colder or warmer.  The dogs found the warmest regions at dog level. They also had warm blankets that they'd drag around where needed.

 

Since then I've learned a bit about home heating.  Some of the best information on home energy measurements comes from England.  They found standard modern construction homes see seven to ten percent energy savings for each degree celsius drop between 15°  and 20° C .  Lowering the thermostat setting from 70°  to 61° (21° to 16° C) could translate to 30 to 40% reduction in your heating bill.  It could also make a serious impact in places facing severe gas shortages this coming Winter.  

 

There are other tricks.  A big key is to heat the people and not the airspace where they aren't.  We had a small, partly finished family room in the basement.  We were there a lot during the Winter as it was the warmest room in the house.  Four people and three dogs radiated body heat along with four 150 watt lamps in the ceiling and a small electric heater (pro tip -- if you have a male dog, don't put one of these on the floor).  My Dad had a tendency to drop the thermostat to nighttime levels when we were down there. Most of our books lived there and a long work bench allowed my sister and I to work on homework and hobbies.  There was a TV, but it didn't get used that much.  It's where we told stories.¹  In the Summer the warm rugs on the floor came up and the room was a naturally cool place to escape the heat of the un-airconditioned home.  

 

The English studies I came across note the average English home was heated to 13° C (55° F) in 1970 rising to 20° C by 2000.   Our house wasn't all that different from the average English house. 

 

There are many other tricks for saving energy - insulation, heat pumps and so on, but they won't happen in Europe before this Winter for most people.  Insulation, done improperly, can be a two edged sword.  Forced air heating, the most common type in the US, fills the house with heated air. Insulation keeps as much of the heat as possible inside.  The problem is that often the air is trapped inside.  Stale air can be unhealthy (VoCs, high CO₂ levels, etc.).  There's a simple technology that can help - in fact you needn't look farther than your nose.  Your nose is a heat exchanger.  Cold air comes in and is heated up without releasing much of your body heat when you exhale.  Most industrial buildings and some homes have heat exchangers - they're required by many building codes to keep super insulated homes healthy.  Something to look into if your place is heavily insulated.

 

Localized radiant heat allows you to circulate some air from the outside and still be comfortable - you're heating people rather than the air.  You've probably noticed Scrooge's chair,  in many adaptations of A Christmas Carol, has a high back curved sides.  These were common in the Victorian era.. sit in front of a fireplace and focus the warmth. People have experimented with heated chairs with good results - notably work at Berkeley in the past decade.²  (They also designed and tested cooled chairs for the Summer).  People who live on the Japanese island of Hokkaidō modify the short legged Japanese family tables by putting a blanket over them and a small heater underneath.  I've used one of these visiting a couple from Sapporo when they were living in NY and was amazed how well it worked in their otherwise chilly house.  Teenagers like them for other reasons when their parents aren't home.  

 

In short there are many paths to clever - no silver bullets, but a lot of silver buckshot.  Twenty or thirty percent conversation levels are quite realistic for many people.   I won't mention adventures in an unheated 15 foot trailer with three dogs at -25°F (my mother thought colder temperatures were dangerous)

__________

¹  Nordic families seemed to tell a lot of stories.  Our heritage isn't Nordic, but many of our neighbors were and some of that rubbed off on us. 

² Here's an example and test of a heated/cooled chair. You could make one of these.. I haven't seen anything commercial.

 

 

 

where nobody is average

The first military airplanes designed after WWII began to arrive in the late 1940s.  A number of these early jets were more complicated to fly and the number of incidents and accidents alarmed the military.  Incidents where something went wrong, but the pilot and aircraft came back safely, and accidents were more serious.  As the jets were mechanically more reliable than their piston powered WWII era cousins, it only seemed natural to blame pilot error.

 

A  few remarkable pilots would find themselves in a bad spot, but always manage to get themselves out of trouble - often saving the aircraft.  Chuck Yeager was the legendary master  and was sent to airbases to show pilots how to fly correctly.  But the fact was this was happening to very skilled pilots.  With pilot error and aircraft malfunction seen as less likely root causes, eventually cockpit design was questioned.

 

Military airplane cockpit measurements were based on an average of a few measurements of about a hundred airmen in the mid 1920s. Improved nutrition and larger pilots was suspected as changing the average, so a massive study was undertaken that took 140 measurements of nearly 4,100 pilots.  In theory this would lead to a better average cockpit.

 

Gilbert Daniels joined the medical division at Wright Patterson out of college and was one of the people tasked with making these measurements and coming up with averages.  It turned out he was biased.  In college he did some research trying to find an average hand size and found it impossible.  Sifting through the data he looked at ten measurements deemed most important for the cockpit and calculated an average range for each that included 30 percent of the measurements - a nice wide average.  The surprise was than none of the pilots fell within all ten of the wide averages.  Gilbert found if you picked any three of the ten, less than four percent of the pilots would be average.  No one was average.

 

It shouldn't have been a surprise. Women's clothing designers had known it for awhile - something attributed to women being "different."  Eventually the military believed Gilbert's work and mandated highly adjustable cockpits.  All new aircraft had to be adjustable for males in the 5 to 95 percentiles for each of about ten critical dimensions.  Airplane manufactures balked - "it can't be done",  but finally came around because .. well .. contracts.

 

The fifties saw more adjustability come to automotive interiors, but at a much slower and more incomplete pace than military aviation.  About ten years ago I found myself driving a friend's Japanese sports car on the Pacific Coast Highway.  A lovely car considered one of the best handling in the world, but I didn't fit - there was no way to adjust the seat or steering wheel enough.  I'm not particularly tall, but have short legs and a long torso.  I also have very long feet (in theory the right dimensions for a swimmer, but not my thing).  A few months later I was helping a friend move in a rented truck.  The same problem.  There weren't enough adjustments to prevent my feet from getting caught near the pedals.  And then there's automobile safety.  The instrumented dummies used in crash tests cover less than a quarter of adults bringing into question the tests themselves.  

 

And it's not just physical differences.  'What color is the dress?' became a popular question as people legitimately came to different conclusions.  Tonal language native speakers are much more likely than other populations to have "perfect pitch."  Some people are purely visual thinkers, but most are a mixture of audio and visual.  There are people with very poor stereo vision - I know one who is an animator.   Increasingly "on the spectrum" is a meaningless construct.  Our brains have so many differences - so many dimensions - that it's likely none of us are truly "normal."  This has become an issue in fMRI studies recently. For example studies showing differences between men and women are often in the noise and meaningless. The field will eventually get more rigor.  You really need to know what dimension you're measuring.

 

Finally there's neuroplasticity.  We know that kids undergo huge changes in neural connectivity as they grow and some areas of the brain aren't stable until the mid 20s.  (I have a neurological condition that is believed to have resulted from an incomplete severing of neural connections when I was a baby.  It isn't a big thing, but is different enough to be worthy of study).  One seen as stopping around 30, neuroplasticity is seen throughout life, albeit at different rates.  There are examples of dramatic repurposing of regions of the brain.  Helen Santoro's missing left temporal lobe is one of the more dramatic examples.

 

Differences are a feature.

 

 

 

design for kids and community in japan

a minipost

 

About twenty years ago I was associated with a human computer interface department. A good deal of the work was associated with this nebulous concept of “community”. The term tends to be defined in the mind of the person talking about it .. like the word god. We had a list of about twenty words that needed rigorous contest when we publishing internally or externally .. community was everyone’s first choice for the list, That said most of us default to a warm and fuzzy concept. How people and neighborhoods should interact. The sort of thing Bob Kraut worries about. (to be fair he also thinks about communities like QAnon)

 

A recent 99% Invisible podcast focused on Japanese community of place design.. deign for the six year old Mixed use zoning, very narrow roads, a school house at the center and very independent kids. Some of us worry about urban and suburban design and traffic - how to you minimize the two or three ton vehicle carrying a driver and a bag of groceries? We often look to the Netherlands snd the Nordics for inspiration Indeed they’re excellent examples of moving from 1970s car-centric design to something better for cyclists and pedestrians. Japan offers a different path - one that seems unlikely in the US.

 

Here’s the a link to the audio, a transcript and a few videos

 

A comment .. most of us of a certain age grew up with kids walking and cycling everywhere - starting around six for walking and seven or eight for cycling. It was the only way a kid could deal with the scale of suburban design with fixed zoning and wide roads. That’s the environment the Dutch and Nordics started with rather than doubling down on complete car dependance.

 

clearing the air

a mini-post

A year ago I managed to help out getting a small grant from the state to build a number of Corsi-Rosenthal boxes with the help of two teachers (science and art) and about twenty high school kids.  It took a Saturday morning to build about eighty of the air cleaners.  All but two are still working and, even though the filters are visually ugly and dirty, they're working just as well.   I won't list all of the learnings - get in touch if you want to know more - but a big benefit besides cutting the viral load is dramatically cutting PM 2.5.  Kids and teachers report fewer allergy and allergy problems and toxic particulate from a nearby highway has been cut.  I suspect these would be great for fires and dusty areas (thinking Arizona and Salt Lake City).   In the past year more clever variants have appeared so check out YouTube if you're curious.  Oh - and filter prices drop if you buy 100 at a time:-)  The only downside was I never want to see duct tape again,

 

The motivation for the post was a fun discussion Andy Slavitt had with Richard Corsi and Jim Rosenthal on his In the Bubble Podcast.   Such a fantastic project for kids and adults!  (there are a number of commercials - Andy donates all profits to charities).

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inspirational chindōgu

Every now and again someone asks for advice on educational toys, projects or activities for their kids.  For a number of reasons I'm precisely the wrong person to recommend this or that.  It's not that I don't care .. I worry a lot about kids who enjoy math and science until they're 11 or 13 and then suddenly it becomes hard and boring.  This seems to happen to girls more than boys, which is just wrong.  Too many programs  focus on the top ten percent  and too few on those who could use a different way of seeing things.  I'm not terribly interested in the number of STEM graduates from college.  Rather, it's far more important having a literate society.

 

There are a few excellent motivators on YouTube.  Physics Girl is great, but her level is high school and beyond. For preteen and teenage girls (and many others) Simone Giertz is great.  She's a bit nutty, hyper-enthusiastic and has built a good business inventing useless things.  (She's also Swedish.  I defy you to find that in her accent.) Many of her projects are too advanced for a 13 year old to recreate, but the basics are there and recreating them isn't the point.  She wants to make you think about mechanical things differently.  She fires imagination with her humor.  Finally a huge bonus is that she admits to and highlights her mistakes.

Here's her latest - musical bubblewrap 

 

31 is the new 35

Andrew Revkin and I had a brief exchange about the power of labels.  Both of us object to the phrase "climate emergency."  Even though it is an emergency that could escalate into an existential threat, people don't respond to labeling longer term threats as emergencies.  I've been suggesting we've entered an adaptation epoch.  Andrew, a much better communicator, is still searching.

 

The past two or three years have taught us short term temperature excursions can be dramatic.  Last year the Pacific Northwest recorded previously unheard of temperatures -  the highest in the area in at least 7,000 years and probably much longer.  This Spring it was South Asia.  Last week record heat came to England and parts of Europe.  These events are probably going to be more common and time goes on and greenhouse gas levels continue increasing. 

 

Wet bulb readings of 35°C (95°F at 100% humidity)  have long been considered unsurvivable.  A person in good physical shape would probably die in a few hours. Such events are extremely rare. Until the past decade they've only been recorded a few times and then only for an hour or so.  They're increasing in frequency and length - mostly in the Indian subcontinent.  Finding cooler spaces for people is a matter of life and death.  

 

It's become clear the 35° number was something of a guess.  Recent careful work shows it's more like 31° for young people in good physical shape.   Older and compromised people have lower limits.  The Tokyo Olympics had periods with wet-bulb temperatures in the upper twenties. Athletic performance during these periods was certainly compromised (I saw it happen to a friend). 

 

What can be done?  Cities suffer from heat island effects.  All of the asphalt and concrete increases the local daytime temperature and holds them at higher levels at night. (hot nights may be harder on the body than hot days).  Air conditioning helps, but it costs money and a power grid that not everyone has access to.  Reducing the amount of asphalt and concrete while planting trees can make a big difference.  It's a great justification for reducing the number of cars and roadways in cities (green spaces are a key motivating reason for the dramatic change currently underway in Paris).  Unfortunately green spaces are usually linked to wealth.  In many places racism and redlining have produced some of the worst heat islands.

 

There are other tricks that are easily implemented.  White paint  on roofs can make a difference. Paint that holds up to temperature and monsoons for the better part of a decade isn't cheap, but is becoming more popular.  In Western countries more reflective shingles are appearing. Some of these look fairly normal, but are highly reflective in the infrared and can make a difference in cooling bills. 

 

And you can send some of the excess heat directly to space.  

 

If you're in a very dry area go outside on a clear night and look up.  Feel the cooling on your face.  Now hold a piece of cardboard between your face and the stars.  You'll notice a warmer feeling.  Remove the cardboard and your face gets cooler. 

 

Your body glows - you've undoubtedly seen infrared photos and videos of people.  We radiate photons at a variety of wavelengths, but it peaks around 9.5 microns - about twenty times longer than visible light.  The  atmosphere is transparent to visible light and also from 8 to 13 microns.  Photons from our bodies can radiate to space.   Deep space is really cold (a bit over 2° above absolute zero) so your face is radiating some of it's heat directly to space - enough that you can feel the cooling.

 

Clever material engineering has produced materials that are good at absorbing the heat around them and then radiating it into space. It's enough to reduce cooling requirements - at least in places with very dry atmospheres.  There's still work lowering costs and making the surfaces last longer, but it's something else to try.

 

Back to the idea of an adaptation epoch. Many things will need to be tried and efforts will stretch for generations.  There's enormous opportunity.  It's both sad and dangerous there's so much 19^th century political inertia, but I'm optimistic more clever people, organizations and governments will finally emerge.  As a species we don't have a choice if we want to survive.

 

repairability

My Dad was a Ford man.  More specifically the Ford Falcon.  It was a simple compact car with a 170 cubic inch displacement straight six coupled to a three speed manual transmission.  It scored on the high end of the Mobil fuel economy test - about 19 miles per gallon when the average sedan was in the 12 to 14 range.   But what he really liked about it was how repairable it was.  Not only was it simple to work on, but most of his friends had cars with the same engine and transmission.  If something needed fixing we could usually do it ourselves using tools borrowed from one of his friends.  For more serious repairs there were specialized tools from Strobel's A to Z Rental, garages or (shudder) the Ford dealer.

 

The simplicity of cars of the day was balanced by crude manufacturing tolerances.  Pistons fit so poorly in the cylinders that the first 500 or 1000 miles were done with great care using an abrasive oil to polish the parts into shape.  It made a big difference in gas mileage and extending the life of the engine past 50,000 miles.  

 

The dual gas shocks of the 70s opened the market for better cars that used higher precision design and manufacturing processes.  That and the beginnings of cars that crumpled to absorb energy in crashes made simple repair much more difficult.  The amateur mechanic had largely vanished by the 80s.

 

Clothing and shoes were expensive back then.  Quality construction and repairability were important considerations while shopping.  Tailors and dress makers were common.  The same was true for appliances.  Vacuum cleaners, toasters and anything electronic could be repaired at home or the local repair shop. 

 

There are exceptions today .. Jheri makes her own clothing or buys high quality pieces with the intention of buying very little as she hopes each piece will last at least a decade.  She's abandoned fashion and has created a style very much her own.  I suspect some of you - Om for example - have a similar philosophy.    But while it can be done in clothing, it's next to impossible when electronics are involved.

 

By the time I was fourteen I had three or four black and white TVs.  None of them worked - watching TV wasn't interesting.  The tubes, capacitors, transformers, switches and so on..  now those were useful!  I designed and built a few radios and a stereo amplifier.   It was straightforward and the experience taught me a lot about electronics.  Now I look in a computer, TV or radio and see only massive integration.  It's still possible to build things, but design is much more difficult. Learning about circuit elements is probably better done with computer simulations.   

 

The right to repair movement has grown in recent years.  I welcome  it for some products, but given the tight integration of hardware and software  I worry it may not be as generally attractive as proponents claim.  

 

Smartphones are a case in point. Apple is infamous for discouraging third party repair.  You can order a kit from Ifixit to replace a screen, battery and some other parts.  It can work well if you have a bit of experience and Ifitit is upfront with the degree of difficultly. You lack the tools and technique to take apart, replace and reassemble the device to design specifications.  

 

My personal results are mixed.  I easily replaced the battery (twice!) on my first day, first generation iPod.  The battery and screen on my out of warranty iPhone 5 was a different matter.   After five hours of frustration I was left with an operating phone, but the case was fitting tightly and whatever waterproofness was gone.   The misaligned case also interfered with the physical buttons on the side.  I did get another year and a half from the phone though.   It could be worse.  I know someone who replaced the battery on an Android phone with an inexpensive battery from Amazon.  The phone got very hot during charging and caught on fire when he took it apart to pull the battery out.  It filled his place with acrid smoke, but fortunately only destroyed the phone and wastebasket

 

Apple is afraid of regulation so they offer repair kits for some of their devices.   The Verge documented a battery replacement.  You get a huge repair kit with a large hold on your credit card until Apple gets the kit back.  The process probably works well if you're skilled at working with small electronic devices, but this isn't for everyone. Given the cost of shipping I suspect Apple's losing money, but they're also trying to make a point of what it takes to do a high quality repair.  Of course a third party repair shop could buy the tools and perform quality repairs and I suspect that will happen.  Lower quality shops abound, but your phone or laptop may be a bit wonky afterwards.

 

We need to understand what's repairable, what's sort of repairable, and what's not.  Easy to repair smartphones have been offered but they're generally expensive and lacking in features.  I suspect smartphones, laptops and smartwatches are probably moving to a subscription model anyway.  Clothing and some appliances could made for longer lifetimes and repairability.  Then again convincing consumers and companies to move away from a consumption model is a huge, but very important, challenge. 

 

I've mentioned clothing, but should follow-up with other product areas where design for long life, repairability and upgrading is important. It's generally expensive, but in the long run can have advantages.  You may live in an example.

 

 

sorting out what a product announcement means to you

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.