Technology Would Work Perfectly If It Wasn't For End-Users!

As we start another new year, I’ve been intrigued by a few discussions I’ve been party to during recent days. One was about upgrading to Mojave (macOS 10.14) and the other was about a smart home system that is very popular in the UK called Hive. The conversations were quite different yet they shared some key similitudes. Both indicated that there are large numbers of people who make key decisions about technical matters by casually surfing the internet and reading negative comments, primarily on social media.

In the two specific discussions I’m referring to, both on Facebook, the original posters were inclined to ignore the good advice and being swayed by both ill-informed suggestions or by completely misinformed statements.

By the end of 2019, it will have been thirty years since I first touched a computer. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t even a computer; it was a dumb terminal attached to a mainframe system in a different part of the city. Since that October day, I’ve witnessed staggering changes in the IT industry which I have ended up spending my life in.

The biggest difference, of course, is that back then, computers were anything but the consumer units that they have become today. The MBP that I’m writing this on is many orders of magnitude more powerful than the old ICL1900 I first used. In those days, before the infinite wisdom of the public was harnessed into the ultimate truth of today’s internet, if you had a problem you had to figure out a solution yourself. And so it has been for most of my working life. In general, you had to programme your way out of problems. Even today, many teething computer problems can be overcome with a bit of imagination and a couple of useful tools. Luckily, some of the smart people who write some of these tools are also generous enough to hang out on the internet and provide amazing advice to those of us who are prepared to do a bit of work and actually think about a problem rather than just expecting someone else to fix it for us.

Whenever you get a new Mac (or upgrade to a new OS) there are often a few things that don’t work quite the way they did. In an ideal world, you’d have the wherewithal to dig down and find out the root cause of the problem and fix it. Sadly, most of us don’t have that luxury these days. I recently found that my new MBP had a minor problem when it auto-switches from  Light to Dark modes (using NightOwl). For some reason, this switch forces a Finder restart and this, in turn, means that TotalFinder terminates. My solution was to use Keyboard Maestro to build a macro so that whenever Finder restarts, TotalFinder will automatically restart as well. It’s a seamless action and I don’t have to do anything.

My point is, that with a bit of imagination and a few readily available tools we can get over niggling problems with fairly simple workarounds. Sure, it took me a couple of hours to isolate the problem, research potential fixes and eventually create my own but was that a good enough reason not to upgrade to Mojave and solve a whole bunch of other problems. Clearly not. But many people out there seem to be looking for excuses not to do things which are pretty much common sense. And they are aided and abetted by others who are determined to make things worse - like the guy who stated that Mojave will not run 32-bit apps. Funny, that, because my version does!

After reading about the person who decided that they had read so much bad press about Hive in a Facebook Hive and Nest forum that they were going to go with a completely different system, I was reminded about the recent reviews I read on Amazon about products I have purchased and found worked perfectly. Although technology has become more prevalent in our homes and daily lives, the majority of people still don’t have any idea about how it works, how to install it correctly, or how to use it correctly. In many cases, they don’t even know why they’ve bought it. “I’ve just bought an Apple Watch - what does it do?”….

So it’s easy for people to buy something, plug it in and then sit back and complain that it doesn’t work rather than actually take the trouble to do it properly. Much of our technology is still emergent - it doesn’t always work exactly as it should, but for many people, it does for most of the time. They just don’t tell the rest of us, because they are quite happy getting on and using the time they’ve saved to do something interesting rather than whine and criticise things they simply don’t understand!

Are problems with Apple kit on the increase? Probably not. But there are now 100,000,000 Mac users all of whom have access to the internet and many of whom are all too ready to bad mouth the technology when it doesn’t work the way they expect. So problems become exaggerated and other people believe the negative hype.

For the record, I have Hive installed in my house and recently we installed it in my fiancee's house. 99% of the time it works perfectly, and I’d be happy to recommend it to a prospective buyer.

For many years I’ve held the belief that if end-users didn’t exist there wouldn’t be any issues with technology. That’s never truer than now!

Happy New Year!