Editor’s note: This story was originally published in July 2015

What makes a gadget worth wearing? Apple is betting it knows better than anyone, and today they’ll likely reveal the final details of the Apple Watch–the most anticipated piece of technology since, well, the last Apple device to hit the streets.

Apple is rarely a first mover in electronics. We’ve all grown used to the company walking into existing markets and redefining them: the original Macintosh, the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad. When it decides to jump in a pool, it strives for an epic cannonball that sends waves throughout the rest of the industry.

Could this time be different? This is, after all, the first major new category Apple will stake out under the stewardship of Tim Cook. The Apple Watch is also unlike anything the company has ever tried before: It’s a device that relies almost as much on fashion as it does technology, with a price tag that some speculate may rise into the $10,000-dollar range when most competing devices cost between $100 and $250. Is this a pure hubris play from Cupertino?

Wearables Whereabouts

Apple’s challenge to sell a look will be more intense than usual. The company has, of course, always focused on aesthetics for its devices–a source of common criticism from competitors and detractors (yet the delight of many consumers). Yet it has never relied so heavily on the buy-in of the fashion community. With models wearing the new smartwatch in magazines and high-end jewelers talking to Apple, clearly the company has its eyes trained on the world of haut-couture. Yet fashion is notoriously fickle; one day’s hot accessory is the next day’s unspeakable faux pas. Even for a company that’s often called elitist, Apple risks selling a device for the few rather than something with mainstream appeal.

Wherever there’s challenge, however, there’s also opportunity–and the wearables market has many. Despite the number of devices clamoring for space on your wrist and on your face, no company has cracked exactly what gives a wearable device mass appeal. Fitbit is perhaps the closest with 70 percent of the fitness-tracker market. Still, they own a niche and one that doesn’t necessarily place it in direct competition with the Apple Watch.

The most direct competitor would be Pebble, which offers what many think is the best smartwatch around. And though it’s made smartwatches since 2013, its products have evolved considerably in that time, and Best Buy continues to sell the devices, finding a truly mainstream market has eluded Pebble.

The startup also isn’t playing in the same league. By my calculations, Pebble has–as of this writing–pre-sold nearly 81,500 of its latest color-screened Pebble Time and Pebble Time Steel smartwatches, bringing in $17 million in revenue. For the sake of comparison Apple, in its most recent quarter, sold 30,000 iPhones per hour and had revenue of $74 billion. Pebble is playing single-A ball; Apple is in the major leagues.

Look at it that way, and the wearables market doesn’t seem so different from the smartphone market before Apple entered. Remember what those devices looked like before the iPhone? Bulky, inconsistent plastic objects with frustratingly small screens and physical keyboards. Fast-forward eight years, and every smartphone looks more or less like an iPhone.

Maybe the Apple Watch will do to wearable devices what the iPod did to MP3 players. But it could just as well be an evolutionary cul-de-sac that ends up in a dustbin next to our PDAs or videophones, to eventually be incorporated into some other far more compelling piece of tech down the road.

Technology That Does Less

The biggest risk for the Apple Watch is the wearable device market as a whole. As of yet, people aren’t crying out for devices to wear on their wrists or faces. They seem futuristic, but perhaps too much–and are better relegated to a retro-future of flying cars and commuting to lunar colonies via rocket ship. The reaction from most of the average folks that I talk to about the Apple Watch is, “why do I need such a thing?”

Take my girlfriend, for example. To her the Apple Watch is just another technological distraction in a world already rife with them. She’s worried that instead of constantly pulling out my phone to check Twitter, reply to text messages, and triage emails, I’ll spend all my time staring at my wrist.

That’s not unjustified. I bought the first iPhone back in 2007, and my friends often joked that it might catch on fire if I didn’t take it out of my pocket, so often did I seem to have it in hand. Eight years later and we’re all glued to our screens, spending far less time engaged with the people around us.

If I have one hope for the Apple Watch, and for wearables in general, it’s that they will make us less dependent on technology. Wearables should dole out the information we want, when we need it, and in bite-size chunks. They shouldn’t further train us to be zombies who constantly stare at screens. The challenge, then, is to smartly and seamlessly integrate technology into daily life while keeping our eyes ahead instead of fixated on glowing slabs (be they phone-sized or watch-sized). If the Apple Watch can deliver on this, then their timing couldn’t be better.

The post From the archive: Can Apple make the first wantable smartwatch? appeared first on Popular Science.

What makes a gadget worth wearing? Apple is betting it knows better than anyone, and today they’ll likely reveal the final details of the Apple Watch–the most anticipated piece of technology since, well, the last Apple device to hit the streets.

Apple is rarely a first mover in electronics. We’ve all grown used to the company walking into existing markets and redefining them: the original Macintosh, the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad. When it decides to jump in a pool, it strives for an epic cannonball that sends waves throughout the rest of the industry.

Could this time be different? This is, after all, the first major new category Apple will stake out under the stewardship of Tim Cook. The Apple Watch is also unlike anything the company has ever tried before: It’s a device that relies almost as much on fashion as it does technology, with a price tag that some speculate may rise into the $10,000-dollar range when most competing devices cost between $100 and $250. Is this a pure hubris play from Cupertino?

Wearables Whereabouts

Apple’s challenge to sell a look will be more intense than usual. The company has, of course, always focused on aesthetics for its devices–a source of common criticism from competitors and detractors (yet the delight of many consumers). Yet it has never relied so heavily on the buy-in of the fashion community. With models wearing the new smartwatch in magazines and high-end jewelers talking to Apple, clearly the company has its eyes trained on the world of haut-couture. Yet fashion is notoriously fickle; one day’s hot accessory is the next day’s unspeakable faux pas. Even for a company that’s often called elitist, Apple risks selling a device for the few rather than something with mainstream appeal.

Wherever there’s challenge, however, there’s also opportunity–and the wearables market has many. Despite the number of devices clamoring for space on your wrist and on your face, no company has cracked exactly what gives a wearable device mass appeal. Fitbit is perhaps the closest with 70 percent of the fitness-tracker market. Still, they own a niche and one that doesn’t necessarily place it in direct competition with the Apple Watch.

The most direct competitor would be Pebble, which offers what many think is the best smartwatch around. And though it’s made smartwatches since 2013, its products have evolved considerably in that time, and Best Buy continues to sell the devices, finding a truly mainstream market has eluded Pebble.

The startup also isn’t playing in the same league. By my calculations, Pebble has–as of this writing–pre-sold nearly 81,500 of its latest color-screened Pebble Time and Pebble Time Steel smartwatches, bringing in $17 million in revenue. For the sake of comparison Apple, in its most recent quarter, sold 30,000 iPhones per hour and had revenue of $74 billion. Pebble is playing single-A ball; Apple is in the major leagues.

Look at it that way, and the wearables market doesn’t seem so different from the smartphone market before Apple entered. Remember what those devices looked like before the iPhone? Bulky, inconsistent plastic objects with frustratingly small screens and physical keyboards. Fast-forward eight years, and every smartphone looks more or less like an iPhone.

Maybe the Apple Watch will do to wearable devices what the iPod did to MP3 players. But it could just as well be an evolutionary cul-de-sac that ends up in a dustbin next to our PDAs or videophones, to eventually be incorporated into some other far more compelling piece of tech down the road.

Technology That Does Less

The biggest risk for the Apple Watch is the wearable device market as a whole. As of yet, people aren’t crying out for devices to wear on their wrists or faces. They seem futuristic, but perhaps too much–and are better relegated to a retro-future of flying cars and commuting to lunar colonies via rocket ship. The reaction from most of the average folks that I talk to about the Apple Watch is, “why do I need such a thing?”

Take my girlfriend, for example. To her the Apple Watch is just another technological distraction in a world already rife with them. She’s worried that instead of constantly pulling out my phone to check Twitter, reply to text messages, and triage emails, I’ll spend all my time staring at my wrist.

That’s not unjustified. I bought the first iPhone back in 2007, and my friends often joked that it might catch on fire if I didn’t take it out of my pocket, so often did I seem to have it in hand. Eight years later and we’re all glued to our screens, spending far less time engaged with the people around us.

If I have one hope for the Apple Watch, and for wearables in general, it’s that they will make us less dependent on technology. Wearables should dole out the information we want, when we need it, and in bite-size chunks. They shouldn’t further train us to be zombies who constantly stare at screens. The challenge, then, is to smartly and seamlessly integrate technology into daily life while keeping our eyes ahead instead of fixated on glowing slabs (be they phone-sized or watch-sized). If the Apple Watch can deliver on this, then their timing couldn’t be better.

The post Can Apple Make The First Wantable Smartwatch? appeared first on Popular Science.

I’m not an AI hater: I’ve used it for my fair share of projects that involve coding or for troubleshooting various technology problems. In my work testing Apple’s Apple Intelligence releases, I’ve generated some images, all truly bizarre and many of them good for nothing beyond a joke.

But I have been fascinated by the response to Anthropic’s AI watermarking scheme, especially after I read my friend John Gruber’s full-throated rebuttal. I have great respect for John as a writer. He truly cares about details: he’s meticulous about the words he picks, the way he constructs sentences and arguments.

This is why I find his defense so puzzling. Because a large language model could not be further away from those ideals. In the title of his piece, John describes the watermarking system as “a perversion of writing.” That might be the case if AIs were writing. But they are not; they are simply generating text. Those two things are not the same. As per the premise of John’s piece, writing is about carefully picking the words and crafting the meaning of what you’re saying, things that AI do not—and patently cannot—do.

LLMs do not care about the words that they pick because they cannot care about anything.

Speaking of two things that are not the same, John rightly points out the difference between the phrases “he leaped at the chance” and “he jumped at the opportunity”. Those are indeed distinct—if semantically similar—phrases, each of which might be more apt in a particular situation; or, to put it in another fashion: the use of each of those phrases tells us something different, whether about the person being described or the writer.

But the LLM doesn’t know which of those phrases is the right phrase to use. It has a guess, based on its models and weights and inputs. But the ultimate choice of those phrases tells us nothing about the writer because there is no writer.

All of this outrage presupposes the existence of a “correct” answer that the LLM is eschewing because it was told to pick different words, but if there were a correct answer, then shouldn’t it be chosen every time? But an LLM’s non-deterministic nature doesn’t work that way. Because, at the end of the day, the AI does not truly know what any of these words mean. There is no ur-text. You might as well get mad at word choice in a lorem ipsum generator.¹

Likewise the example of “my favorite tropical fruit.” John points out the ridiculousness of a watermarking scheme substituting “pineapple” for “banana.” Of course! Those are not reasonable substitutions (outside of a smoothie).

For a person. But a computer has no favorite fruits. It could not possibly know the right word to use. It has never tasted the sweetness of a pineapple or cut up a banana for its yogurt. So why would I possibly care what it thinks is the correct word for that scenario, right or wrong?

I get being mad about computers interfering with what we, the users, want. But in this, AIs are only the latest example. Autocorrect and autocomplete, computational photography, search engine algorithms: all of that has led us down this path where we’re willing to accept the decisions a computer makes for us. The LLM is just the ultimate expression of that.

Getting mad about your LLM’s choice of words is like being pissed that Godzilla stomped on your garden. Dude, the rest of your city is in flames. Sorry about your flowers, but, you know, *gestures at everything*. We’re already talking about technology with huge environmental, societal, and ethical ramifications. This, to me, is quite possibly the least upsetting thing that AIs have done.

Anyway, welcome to the “mad about AI” fold. Glad to have you, even if I wish maybe you would have been a little more upset about all the words that it stole from me and other writers—words that were all carefully chosen.

In the end, I can’t summarize it any better than to ask: if you care so much about word choice, why are you using AI to generate text?

If this does truly make AI-generated text worse, well…good. A lot of people are already willing to accept what an LLM churns out as “good enough” and, if I’m being realistic, I don’t think this will change anything. But if it does lead to more people being dissatisfied with the pablum they’re being fed and turning instead to writing and editing their own text, then that would actually be a positive outcome. Maybe it’d even mean fewer human writers being put out of jobs.

In the end, what upsets me the most about this is the tacit equating of AIs generating text to writers writing. A computer that has digested the work of thousands if not millions of people and regurgitated them according to a statistical model is equivalent to a person toiling by the sweat of their brow to bring meaning into existence from nothingness?

Get out of here with that garbage.

Backups, as any computer user knows, are worth their weight in gold. If it isn’t backed up, it might as well might not exist. That’s why I have for years trusted ShirtPocket’s SuperDuper! to ensure that all my data is safe and sound. And now, for the first time in a very long time, the venerable backup utility has gotten a top-to-bottom update that brings it into the modern era without sacrificing any of the features—and, most importantly, the reliability—that its users have come to depend on.

While SuperDuper! 4 may look like an entirely new beast, its history has stuck around. It still explains what it’s doing in plain English. It still allows you to make complete, bootable backups. It still has its excellent Smart Update option to optimize the copying process.

But it’s gotten some significant updates too. There’s a new interface, for starters, which conforms to Apple’s current Liquid Glass aesthetic, love it or hate it. It’s a bit of a shock to the system after so long without a change, but it’s hard to deny that the old look had grown somewhat antiquated. The result is an app that makes backups as simple and straightforward as they should be, so that anyone can figure it out: click here to set your destination, choose what method, and click Go.

The changes to SuperDuper! 4 also run more than just skin deep. For example, it’s considerably faster than the previous version—up to an order magnitude faster using the new Turbo implementation of Smart Update, according to Shirt Pocket. That’s borne out in my real-world usage. For example, my last nightly backup of 20.55GB took less than 4 minutes.

There are new capabilities here, too. A new Preview feature lets you perform a dry run of your copy job, letting you see every file that will be changed without actually doing any of it. With a new background helper app, copies won’t interrupt whatever you’re doing. And there’s Shortcuts support, so you can run a workflow when your copy job is completed—or even have one of your shortcuts kick off a copy job.

I’ve been using betas of SuperDuper! 4 for a month or so now, and what’s impressed me most is how much it maintains that set-it-and-forget-it strength of the previous versions. The most important thing for a backup is that element of reliability, so when I open up the app and see “31 successful in a row” note, I know that my data is right where it should be. And if something goes wrong, it’s easier than ever to see what happened: click on a failed job and you’ll get the details, including an Apple Intelligence-powered summary of the job. (You can get that for completed jobs too.)

There are way more features here too, ones that I just don’t have much reason to use for my purposes, but might just well be what you’re looking for. For example, copy rules that let you handle certain files and folders in granular ways, such as excluding certain ones from backups; support for any file system that macOS understands; and there’s support for multiple copy jobs at the same time, even for those that are scheduled.

Backup apps may not be the most exciting software category, but I dare you to find one that’s more crucial. For me, SuperDuper! has done the job for years and I’ve never had any reason to complain about it. Nothing about that seems poised to change with version 4.

SuperDuper! 4 requires macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later. A free trial version lets you make unlimited full erase backups, but to unlock the rest of the features requires a one-time payment of $43.95. There’s also an upgrade discount for owners of SuperDuper 3 of up to 30 percent. (And, if you bought version 3 very recently, you may be able to get version 4 for free.) And good news: if you need to run backups on older systems, SuperDuper 3 is sticking around.

For everybody who’s already backing up their Macs, SuperDuper! 4 may offer some new features and speed increases that will make the process even smoother. For those of you who aren’t yet…what are you waiting for?