Erica Sadun

Where technology meets something or other

Archive for November, 2019

Review: In praise of Ring Fit Adventure

I bought my son Ring Fit Adventure as a reward for bringing home good grades. Little did I know that I would soon monopolize the game. Yes, he uses and loves it too, but only after school. For me, it is full of 2-10 minute exercise breaks perfect for pausing work and getting myself moving.

I recently left a position with a massive commute to a nearby city, ridiculous hours, and lots and lots of sitting. It completely broke up my routine, which had previously included a well considered mix of resistance, strength, flexibility, and aerobics (mixed with a bit of Restorative and Yin yoga, which are the bomb).

My fitness pre-job was hard earned. Lots of its early ramp-up was due to a mix of physical therapy and Wii Fit (or as I like to call it Wii Fiit). Despite the harsh criticism Wii Fit gets, it is an amazing tool for convalescence and several of its activities (most specifically boxing) can get a good heart rate and sweat going. I particularly love its quirky “yoga”, which opened me up to a much wider world of non-scare-quote yoga.

Wii Fit eventually evolved into Wii Fit Plus, which I have never played, mostly due to the fact that we own a bunch of Wii Fits and I never saw enough value to upgrade to the newer system. When the Switch debuted, I hoped they’d continue Nintendo’s fit tradition, and Nintendo finally delivered with Ring Fit Adventure. (Also, it tickles me silly that the Wii Fit trainers are now in Smash.)

Ring Fit Adventure is basically an interval training system based on jogging in place mixed with resistance training using a Pilates Ring and some minimal stretching. It doesn’t sound like much but it works brilliantly. If you regularly move a lot of iron around in your life, this isn’t going to do much for you but if you’re coming off six months of nearly complete inactivity and want to get back in shape to take advantage of more physicality, it’s perfect.

I find it’s never hard to build a sweat and get my heart moving for a good 20-60 minutes. In addition the game has incentivized many of my most hated activities (I’m looking at you, Mr. Squats) and turned them into something I am determined to conquer. Yes, being short means the travel of the thigh sensor may be occasionally tricky to detect (meaning deeper squats for me) but the pilates-style ring is deservedly the star of this show.

From what I can guess, it has some interior material that changes resistance as it bends to allow the system to detect interaction both pushing in and pulling out. There’s a larger-than-expected vocabulary of fitness activities you can incorporate using those two actions including overhead presses and pulls, forward and rear, and the star of the show, the engaged “ab-guard”, which when done correctly allows you to engage your gluts, abs, and shoulders, or basically all the things my PT regularly tells me to engage.

Technically this is a game and there’s some kind of irritating storyline about a picked-on pilates-ring and his steroid abuser ex, but you can ignore most of that and enjoy the beautiful tracks and vistas. There’s a bit of repetition from world to world and a “cheat” system that involves drinking lots of smoothies (because pure sugar is always what people trying to control insulin metabolisms want in their system, right?) but these, too, are minor issues.

Mostly, the game is great because it is, at least for me, hard and it ramps up its difficulty level to level. I’m savoring each “world” and I am in no hurry to finish.  Most recently, I spent time pushing and pulling blocks along a running track with my arms so I could run without falling into holes and by the end of the course, I felt it. For me, finding that physical edge and training to that point of exhaustion just before it’s too much is what makes a great workout.

No, the biggest issue is that we have the one Switch and occasionally my child wants to use his toy without his mom demanding 100% access through the day.

This isn’t a cheap hobby. A basic fully fitted Switch with dock will set you back $300. Add in a second pair of joycons, and that’s another $70-$80. The game alone is $80. And if you end up destroying the pilates ring (the “ring controller” or “ring con”) that’s $45 + shipping direct from Nintendo. (And if you do break that, chances are good you’ll have banged up a joycon as well.) Fortunately, our ring is doing well despite the abuse we have put it through. And we have, as yet, not flung any joycons across the room or into the TV.

Despite the price, most of the cost involves things we would have bought anyway or already own. They’re expensive but have proved to be a delight for the family.

As for Ring Fit Adventure, you shouldn’t have to wait for your report card to treat yourself or your kids to this. I suspect the adults will be playing it longer than the kids unless you treat some of its minigames as pass-and-play so you can enjoy it together.

I hope there will be follow-up fitness products but based on Wii Fit/Wii Fit Plus, Nintendo has a respectable heritage of a single, focused fitness title.

I’ve been waiting for great training and fitness innovation products that combines the Apple Watch and Apple TV but so far, nothing has grabbed me in the way that Wii Fit and Ring Fit Adventure have.

What about you? Any amazing finds?

Taking charge of those xips

Apple adopted the digitally-signed xip format for Xcode downloads a few years ago. It’s basically a signed version of zip archives. Most commonly, you download a xip and double-click. Archive Utility will open the file, verify its signature, and expand its contents.

In its default settings, Archive Utility always expands files to the same folder you download to. With Xcode, this is a big pain as moving the app with its thousands and thousands of tiny subfiles and embedded executables takes forever. Alternatively, moving the xip file from one location on your system to another can be painfully slow.

Fortunately, Archive Utility does allow you to specify where to unpack. Launch the Application using spotlight (or /System/Library/CoreServices/Applications/Archive Utility.app) and open preferences.

Although there’s no “Ask” option for “Save expanded files”, you can select where you want items to be stored using “into” from the pop-up:

Once set, you have to unset it for general use, because the location persists between launches. This is, needless to say, a big pain when you use archives for non-Xcode purposes on a regular basis:

Fortunately, you can unxip more effectively by using the command-line xip utility located in /usr/bin/xip without having to mess with Archive Utility or its preferences:

% xip
Usage: xip [options] --sign <identity> <input-file> [ <input-file> ... ] <output-xip-file>

Usage: xip --expand <input-file>

99.9% of everything you do with xip is that last “Usage” example. Still, as xip doesn’t offer a --help option, if you want to know what those interesting [options] are, you’ll need to read the man page (man xip). I prefer to open man pages in Preview instead of the command line, using this little trick:

man -t xip | open -f -a /System/Applications/Preview.app

Notice two things here:

  • First, the -t flag tells man to use the Groff typesetter (no relation) to format the page to postscript. This presents as a PDF in Preview. (Specifically, it uses /usr/bin/groff -Tps -mandoc -c if that kind of detail intrigues you.)
  • Second, the path for Preview has changed in Catalina to /System/Applications. If you want to do this on Mojave or earlier, adjust the path accordingly.

(Isn’t that a neat way to view man pages?)

While the man page suggests you can sign your own xip archives and provide your own identities, don’t bother. This format is exclusive to Apple, starting  from macOS Sierra. Only xip archives signed by Apple can be expanded in modern macOS releases. (See Tech note TN 2206 for details.)

Since --expand cannot be used with any other arguments, hop over to /Applications, and expand from there:

% cd /Applications/
% time xip --expand /Volumes/Kiku/xips/Xcode_11.2.1.xip 

Adding the time command at the start of the line lets you know how long it took to unxip, which is deeply satisfying to those of pedantic bent like myself. For those playing along, it was

xip: expanded items from "/Volumes/Kiku/xips/Xcode_11.2.1.xip"
1109.625u 275.408s 10:58.85 210.2%	0+0k 0+0io 167pf+0w

Update:

Whisky tango foxtrot: Xcode allows ObjC switch unindenting

This happened.

You might think I’m about to go off on some Swift rant (and trust me there is a Swift rant inside me waiting to emerge) but it’s the second checkbox that made my mind explode.

From:

To:

Who thought this was a good idea? I’ve never been a fan of left-aligned case in Swift although I embrace it as the standard. But in Objective-Freaking-C? As a standard Apple-blessed toggle in Xcode? No! Thrice no! The option enabling the choice is bad for Swift and worse for Objective-C.

Why is this option in there and why is it available for both languages? It would be best to, as Joe Groff put it, “let sloth naturally lead everyone to pick the default” given that the feature has been expressed in Xcode. Or better yet, file some bug reports for the broken feature.

Each language default reflects years (and decades) of language style consensus:

  • Swift: keyword-aligned.
  • Objective-C: “scope”-aligned.

This new choice in preferences is madness.

Talk me down from here, friends.

Apple Pencil: Too much information

I own a first generation refurbished Apple Pencil. I bought it when I picked up the new 5th gen iPad mini. It’s a delight. I use it for freehand note-taking when I don’t want to tip-tap into the onscreen keyboard or lug around my folding bluetooth keyboard. I use it doodle and draw. I use it to annotate PDFs. I especially love  how it knows what is the pencil and what is my hand so I can rest against the screen and still get work done.

My pencil keeps its charge for days with light use. When I need to top it up, I can stick it into my iPad’s lightning port. In under 10 minutes it goes from flatline to 100% charge. Yes, it looks a bit odd sticking out like that, but it isn’t for long and it’s easy enough to rest the iPad on a desk until the charge is complete.

Keep track of your current pencil charge in your iPad widget gallery. The Batteries  section shows how much juice is currently available:

When talking about charging, you should think about that tiny cap at the end of the first generation pencil. Fortunately, there are many extremely useful and inexpensive helpers for keeping track of the cap and the charging adapter, the short flat item at the bottom of this picture. It’s used for charging off a USB lightning cable by providing a female-to-female connector between the cable and the pencil:

Many third party gizmos service these tiny pieces. You can purchase replacement magnetic caps that better stick to your pencil and replacement charging adapters for when you lose them. If you’d rather not lose them in the first place, consider a simple holder set like this one. Mine is clear silicon and did not include the tip that covers the nib. The holders make sure the two tiny pieces aren’t easily lost, and that they’re kept along-side the equipment that uses them:

In addition, I purchased a magnetic sleeve to attach my pencil to my iPad and/or its smart cover when not in use. Again, this helps ensure I don’t lose the things I need. I roll the flat part away from my hand and find that it doesn’t interfere with holding the pencil or writing with it.

I use the Selvy PenScript keyboard plug-in to convert handwriting to text. It’s available from my normal keyboard. I tap-and-hold the globe to select it. Make sure when installing that you enable it in Settings > General > Keyboards.

As you see from this screenshot, I also installed the Kaomoji.HW keyboard that allows me to draw emoticons. It’s not very good at its job but it’s pretty hilarious to play with.

The SelvyPen keyboard is surprisingly useful across apps. It’s as easy to enter a URL as it is to type free text.

If you’re looking to enter large tracts of text by hand, Nebo does a great job with handwriting-to-text conversion, allowing you to enter information into notebooks using your pencil. Notice how the app keeps track of the ongoing interpretation in light gray just above the handwriting:

Use the ellipsis (3-dot) menu on the right to convert paragraphs to text and remove the handwriting entry. The accuracy is surprisingly good.

For annotating PDFs, I use Notability. I admit that it’s mostly because I already own it and it’s a great app. There are many other excellent options on the market. I’d love to hear what else you recommend. I apologize for all the blurring but I was reviewing someone else’s work and I wanted to respect their privacy:

For presentation, I have a half dozen apps of varying quality and I can’t really recommend one or the other as being particularly outstanding:

What other apps, tweaks, and gadgets have you found to enhance your pencil-using experience? I love my pencil and am always looking for more ways to get the most from it!

Reader recs:

  • Many readers agree with my use of Notability
  • Mike recs Concepts. “I use it as a vectorized infinite whiteboard for sketching and note taking.”
  • Teddy likes GoodNotes, “which will hide the UI when projecting to an external screen. Also has a nice laser pointer with a trail so you can make temporary markings as you go” and PDF Viewer for annotation.
  • Paper by WeTransfer gets a thumbs up from Paul.

The knee-jerk else-clause

I’ve gotten into several heated discussions recently (I wouldn’t call them arguments or fights as no blows were exchanged and we departed as friends) about whether an if-statement should always include a balancing else clause in languages where it is not mandated by a ternary if form.

My feeling is a firm “no”.

Let me attempt to represent the opposing viewpoint. As far as I can tell, the “yes” faction believes that as proper diligence, an else clause should always be added to address both truth scenarios, even if the clause is populated with nothing other than a comment saying “this clause intentionally left blank”. It promotes a consistent inspection of all possible cases, on par with a switch statement requiring full coverage.

I firmly disagree. In my opinion, if-statements boil down to three scenarios:

  • Special Casing: Action that applies solely to certain logic conditions, where the absence of those conditions has no effect in the logic. In such case, I recommend to skip the else. There’s no point to it as the flow of execution continues past the additional steps introduced by the if-statement. Adding an else statement removes the clarity of the step-by-step logic and reduces the weight of the special casing in understanding the code.
  • Either-Or: Separate actions of approximately equal weight that apply to both outcomes. If statements are naturally biased towards the positive clause. If both statements are weighted the same, consider refactoring to switch. Even if the switch is ordered (as it must be in some fasion), a switch-statement reduces the emphasis given to either outcome. If both cases are quite large, consider breaking out functionality to dedicated methods. Further, if the logic overlaps between both cases, consider localizing the conditions closer to the differences, even if the test may be applied several times.
  • One case complex, one case simple: Actions that are of disparate impact or weight, where one clause greatly exceeds the complexity of the other, I always place the more complex clause first when used in an if-statement to emphasize the positive path. At the same time, if the simple case is non-trivial, this is an opportunity to consider whether the logic should be broken up or refactored in some way. If an if-clause is so significantly big that it takes up the majority of a method implementation, perhaps you should be using early return for the lighter condition and promoting the more complex logic to the main method body. To me, a heavy complex if-clause usually signifies an opportunity to refactor.

Given these styles, I don’t see any reason, whether from code-reading clarity or a strict adherence to potential future expansion, to automatically include else-clauses as a mandatory part of a coding style. They add heaviness without real functionality and speak to a philosophy of form weighed over functionality. Code should be light, clear, and direct. Mandatory-else is none of those things.

Am I wrong? Go ahead, convince me otherwise. I’m listening.

Lightweight To-Do list formatting

I recently ran across the todo.txt format project, which allows use to use plain text action item lists to create and manage your projects. I love the simplicity of the idea but there were a number of items that prevented me from wholeheartedly adopting it.

First, I think it’s really ugly. It’s hard to scan, especially when there are lots of things to do. I know that the idea is this is an intermediate representation but that representation is visually heavy.

Second, it’s missing notes. Freehand notes are an important part of task management, whether noting down the phone number for the car place when you need to get your snow tires put on.

Third, it’s order dependent, with a left-to-right layout that really doesn’t work for me.

Fourth, I don’t think the (A)-(Z) priority format is particularly readable.

Even though I do like the +Project and @Context annotation, I feel like todo.txt is a few steps  short of a much more flexible and readable intermediate form.

So I started brainstorming on how I might tweak this concept to be more flexible. For one thing, I think the example strains to make the project and context “fluent” in a way that they don’t have to be. Yes, you may want to query to see “what are all the projects I am working on?” and “what contexts do I work in?” so I can support differentiating them but I don’t think they need to be integrated into the to-do text.

What follows is a very lightly-considered redesign that I have pulled entirely out of thin air. I did not spend much time on this and I’m sure there are better ways to redesign this to support text-based lightly annotated human-readable to-do lists. I’m throwing this out there as a starting point in case any of you want to carry this discussion further. It’s a design exercise for me, one that allowed me to take some of these thoughts out of my head and throw them into a blog post. So take this for what it is.

Imagine tagging that looks like more like this, depending on whether you’re annotating project or context values. Part of me pushes back at the notion of the two types of tagging but I appreciate that you might want to query “show me all my projects” and “show me all my contexts”, and I recognize the value in that:

@(tag) or +(tag)
@(key: value) or +(key: value)
@(priority) or +(priority)

A priority can be as simple as a number, which I think people would process better than “A”, “B”, “C”, etc. As a pattern of (0-9)+, it would also allow easy differentiation in parsing between a tag (arbitrary text) and a priority. Priorities would range from 0 (highest priority) to any arbitrary number (lower priority). I doubt people would use more than two or three priority levels (low, medium, high), if they use them at all.

Because dates are critical for todo deadlines, you could pull them out with NLP or be more explicit: @date(due: 2019-05-02). The single keyword would allow you to parse a date with more flexible keys and disallow an explosion of keywords you might encounter by trying to pre-design specific scenarios like @due(2019-05-02), @checkin(next Tuesday), etc.

Relative dates would need a creation date, which if you’re using an editor rather than the raw format could be injected as @date(created: 2019-05-02). The second you do that, though, you’re moving away from the idea of human-readable, simple annotation, tool-consumable.

In my head, a better system would not be single-line. Adding blank spaces between items significantly increases vertical space so python-inspired indentation can avoid that:

Set up appointment for snow tires
  Call and talk to Judy 505-555-1212 # comments are always great
  She says to contact them at least one thursday before the weekend you want # Not thrilled by the manual line breaks here
  to bring the car in.
  @(home) +(winterizing) +(2) @(before: 2019-12-01)
Put snow scraper in car
  @(car) +(winterizing) @(done) # yay me!
Get flu shots for Bob and Francis
  Already got them for Fred and Mary
  @(family) +(health) +(season) +(Costco) +(1) +(shopping) # It's a shopping run, even if it's not strictly buying something

This is rough, obviously, but I think it’s a bit more readable than blockiness of the current format and a bit more flexible:

If working with an editor tool, I’d prefer if done items were automatically moved down to the bottom or maybe removed entirely or added to a different “done.txt” list.

Also, once you have the power of full tagging and categorization, a well built tool should allow you to pull on each of those to view related items in more structured ways. The format is simple but the way you present tagged information doesn’t have to be.

Anyway, those are my thoughts. I see a project with good bones that misses out on a bunch of human factors. What kind of changes would you make to turn this into a more usable and universal approach? Or would you just say “plain text is not really appropriate here” and use OmniFocus or Things instead? I’m curious as to what you think.

Update: Readers mention:

Flipping the switch and the 32-bitpocalypse

I think I’m ready to upgrade my Mac mini to Catalina. I know, I know: “But the 32-bitpocalypse! Are you ready to lose all that investment?” I think I’ve worked through that. Haven’t I?

The last few weeks I’ve been busy. I bought a smallish (0.5 TB) external SSD drive and backed up a good chunk of my Mac mini to it. Today I’ve been running tests on how it works booting on my MBP, not my mini. That’s because my underpowered mini just isn’t strong enough either in boot speed or  running off the external drive to make this a reasonable approach.

On the MacBook, however, the SSD responsiveness is pretty fine. Once booted, I’ve tested Office, Photoshop, and a bunch of other 32-bit apps and while they’re not going to win awards for speed, they run and appear to be stable.

That leaves me with the dilemma. Do I flip the switch? Do I go full Cat on my main work machine? It’s been a reasonably time since release, so what mine fields should I expect to encounter? I honestly don’t want to upgrade and then have to start restoring from Carbon Copy Cloner backups from regret. (My backups are run nightly so they’re there if I need them.)

What do you think? Pull the switch or walk away? I hate being out of step with the latest OS, even if I do have Cat installed on my MBP and am happily using it there. Give me your advice. I’m not ready to walk away from so many apps that I still use many times a week but I don’t want to freeze my mini in the past. Thanks in advance for your advice and suggestions.

Trackpad dragging the easy way

I’m surprised it took me as long as it did to discover that there’s an accessibility alternative for dragging. In System Preferences, visit Accessibility > Pointer Control > Mouse & Trackpad.

Click on Trackpad Options, enable dragging, and choose three finger drag from the pop-down.

I’ve been using three finger dragging for about a week now and it’s been a vast improvement over my attempts to drag items the normal way. Yes, I still end up running out of trackpad room as I always do, but using a finger from the other hand to nudge things where they need to go does the trick for getting my dragged items to their destinations.

I am using this almost entirely in Finder, although the same approach should work for moving words in a document or views in IB.

My enemy the Minimap

The minimap is one of Xcode 11’s starring features. I know many people were excited for it at its debut but after months of exposure, I now just disable it in the Adjust Editor Options menu (the five horizontal lines of unequal width indicating the contents of the primary editor) and grab back that room on my screen:

I’ve spent some time recently considering exactly why it is I hate the minimap so much. It’s not just that it takes up valuable horizontal space (although to be honest, it’s mostly that). If it did a better job to help me navigate or conceptualize my code, I wouldn’t resent that space. Rather, I get little out of it and it’s a blurred colorful distracting mess for me.

In theory, the minimap is a specialized scrollbar for code. It highlights where are you with respect to the file. You hover the cursor over it to view tooltip details. Upon finding a section,  you can quickly jump to it. Hold the command key down and all the tooltips appear at once for a quick and actionable  overview. All contextual bookmarks are larger sized so technically “legible” although I can barely read them with my bad eyes.

I don’t care where I am physically inside my file, so the scope highlights don’t offer much. I care where I am conceptually. My jump bar gives me the same overview as the minimap (using the command key) without stealing screen space or distracting me with extra pointless blurry information.

What I am at a loss to figure out is how the minimap does that better than my beloved jump bar or why people prefer having the big jumble on-screen. As far as I can figure, the overview (whether jump bar or minimap command key) provides the most powerful tool because it relies on recognition of the details you’re looking for. But most of the minimap is designed around recall: where you are in the file, what the shape of your code is like, etc, which is a far weaker place for cognitive support.

So what am I missing? Why should I love the minimap? Please help me figure out what I am not understanding here and help me turn the minimap from an enemy to a friend.

Falling back to an older MBP

I just recently switched from a 2018 15″ MBP back to my 2015 13″ and I thought I’d share some of my reactions to the change. My meandering and unstructured thoughts follow.

Unexpectedly, on returning to the 2015 MBP, I didn’t suddenly go “omgomg the keyboard is amazing again”. The older style was never amazing compared to any good mechanical keyboard. I adapted to the new keyboard just fine, even though my hands never really were big enough for it to be truly comfortable.  Yes, the older keyboard’s keys really are less of a stretch but it wasn’t that much of a hardship either way.

The basic truth for me is that both keyboards are fully usable and that having the dedicated escape key (or not) was never a big deal. The virtual one did the job just fine. That’s something I never expected to admit but it’s true. I may not love MBP keyboards but they work.

I will admit the older dedicated function keys are slightly better, especially given how I’ve rebound them using Keyboard Maestro, but not an order of magnitude more usable. Just…better. Not way better.

The trackpad feels old and quaint in comparison to the newer one. I miss the 2018 trackpad more than I expected, especially given how I’m an admitted trackpad hater. Moving documents has become again slightly more difficult on the older MBP, so there’s that.

My 13″ screen now feels cramped and tiny, as expected. But I once again appreciate how clean and beautiful the Retina display is, as I compare it to my one-older-purchase, the non-Retina MBA. The 2015 13″ is a great laptop, even if it feels chunkier and less streamlined than the 2018. You can tangibly feel the design differences between the 3 years as well as the battery improvements.

On the other hand, moving back from USB-C to all these wonderful ports is delightful. My 2018 was always an octopus, and I had to carry around a bag of hubs and adapters. (I even have one on my keychain, which I probably don’t need anymore.)

Yes, I still use some adapters like my HDMI to Thunderbolt 2, so I can have two monitors running from the 2015 laptop, but that lives on the HDMI cord, not with my laptop.

I have a bunch of extra file space with the built-in SD card reader with my computer-flush reader adapter so it looks built in. The two standard USB ports are so convenient. I have an entire bag of USB-C gizmos that I’d carry around with the 2018 machine that I dumped into my USB box-of-everything for now.

On the other hand, I do miss the fingerprint reader. My experiences unlocking with my watch are hit and miss. Sometimes it works great. Sometimes it doesn’t. I can’t really figure out when it will and won’t: it’s not just after restarts or a long time between use. In contrast, the fingerprint reader absolutely rocks on the 2018, even if I had to remove a bunch of items from the touch bar because sometimes I’d turn on Siri or mute my audio when I thought I was still unlocking.

Speaking of the touch bar, I don’t miss it at all. As a touch typist I was always a little stunned to discover that it had relevant information on it that I never looked at. If the touch bar had important stuff, it should have been on the screen and my screen should have been touchable all over. As someone or other said (I forget exactly who — sorry!), it’s a keyboard when it shouldn’t be and a touch screen where it shouldn’t be. I’m paraphrasing from memory.

Every one of you who develop content for the touch bar, bravo. I am glad of how you are helping the user, especially the user who can see the touch bar and interacts with it. I don’t want you to change a thing. Instead, I want Apple to step up and get that material integrated with the main display so I can take part too.

I’m holding off on upgrading a lot of things right now. I’m still using my iPhone 6+, my 2012 Mac mini, my 2015 MBP. They all work and get the job done and nothing yet has really given me the motivation to push forward to new hardware. The iPhone 11 is lovely but I don’t really take many pictures. The new mini isn’t self serviceable (at least to a klutz like me) and I honestly don’t want to leave Mojave on it and lose my 32-bit apps. The 2015 (running Catalina) is still a really great laptop.

I’m waiting to fall in love again, the way I did with the 5th gen iPad mini, which swept me off my feet early this year. I adore the mini. Revised and supporting the pencil, it gave me new ways to use it, better user experiences, and a solid beautiful form factor making it a natural upgrade from the 2nd gen.

I want my next hardware purchases to have that same passion instead of incremental utility.

What are you buying and what are you holding onto waiting for the right moment? Let me know.