A CT gadget guru takes a look at the current tech landscape

Which gadget do you find indispensable?

The video capacity of the iPhone, with each generation, has been getting just a little more than incrementally better. I am carrying fewer things with me because it does what I need. The other thing for me is the Apple Watch. It started off for me as a fitness tracker a couple years ago, but now because of all the integration with Apple Pay, I am using it a lot.

Which new gadget or service has disappointed so far?

The great idea that isn’t quite there is virtual reality and augmented reality. Most people, having lived through two years of Zoom hell, the last thing they are going to want to do is have a screen attached to their head and see people virtually. That said, from an entertainment perspective I have found it is almost the closest approximation to the Star Trek holodeck that I have ever seen. But are people going to walk around with some nerdy-looking thing on their head? They’re still not anywhere near consumer adoption. It would have to be the same look or feel as a pair of eyeglasses.

With the disruptions to supply chains in the past year, what are your thoughts about fast-tracking any purchase decisions?

What I noticed [this past fall] was that the low-end stuff — the things that people really needed desperately during the pandemic like cheap Chromebooks and low-cost laptops and that sort of stuff, and webcams which were impossible to get — suddenly were not only available in quantity but were getting liquidated. This was months ago. That’s the low end of the market, but things filter upstream. And during the Amazon Prime Early Access sale in October, there were better deals than during Prime Day over the summer. I think what you are going to see this year is availability of electronics that we did not see over the last few years. Even niche items — that stuff now is available. 

Fiber, cable, fixed wireless — how should people think about their internet options?

Depending on where you live, you went from having no choice to now a lot of choices. It’s not going to be the same everywhere — for example, where I live, my cell tower is far away and I get very low data feeds off it, so the wireless option is not really an option at all. If I lived downtown where they have an ultra-wideband tower, it would be a very good option because I pull in a gigabit there off my phone. The best thing I would suggest is that if someone is considering wireless and they have a recent smartphone, download the Speedtest.net app and run it and see what you get, because that would be indicative of what you would get with one of those home services. 

What fiber brings versus all the others is significant upload speeds — it can upload at the same speed it downloads at. For me that’s a big deal.

I don’t think satellite will ever be competitive with fiber, because it’s radio waves and it’s not able to deliver that kind of bandwidth on a small dish. But if you are in a rural area where you have lousy cell phone coverage and no hope of fiber coming by your house, the Starlink service from SpaceX is pretty much comparable to a low-end cable internet connection.

Which rumored product or service are you most interested in seeing in the coming year or two?

Apple is rumored to be working on the AR problem. If history is any guide, they typically sit back and let these markets fester or mature, then they drop their mike, right? There’s a very good track record there; if they develop an AR product, you might see some adoption of that technology. They’re not going to do it until they’re ready, and until the market is ready for it.