Tech
I am reading through articles about announcements from Google I/O 2026, and I think this change Google is planning to make to Tiles in Wear OS 7 has to be one of the most idiotic design decisions I have seen. When you have a UI on a small screen like a watch, why would you not use the entire screen? What are they thinking?
Tiles are also getting a redesign. Google will roll out widgets with Wear OS 7 to replace full-screen tiles. A 2×1 or 2×2 block will display app information in a style that more closely resembles Android 16’s widgets. It doesn’t appear that the new design will allow users to stack widgets on top of each other in the same screen, like Samsung’s version of Wear OS allows Galaxy Watch users to do.
I put my Pixel 10 on a Belkin MagSafe wireless charger. Today it dawned on me that it would be cool if when the phone is on the charger that if a phone call comes in the phone would automatically operate in speaker phone mode so I could just tap a button to receive the call and talk.
Gadgeteer has an embed of a leaked walk thru of the forthcoming Android Desktop that Google officially announced as Googlebook this week. The demo is running in a VM on a Mac not on any native hardware. I don’t see anything in the demo that is really new or exciting. We have been using the “desktop” personal computer metaphor for so long and I wish that a company would have the guts to try something really new.
I think the only reason to consider Googlebook if it were built from the ground up as a AI-based user interface, but instead I think it will simply have AI stuff bolted on and that is not appealing. It’s early days, but hard to say what will be the reason to buy a Googlebook rather than a MacBook.
Om Malik has written a very compelling post about what he calls the Internet of AI. Part of the post is an explanation about what AI actual means from an overall technology perspective. Here is a valuable summary:
The right historical analogy for what is happening with AI is not Web 2.0 or the cloud. It is the railroads of the nineteenth century. Railroad operators understood the freight cars were not where value lived. The value was in owning the rails and everything around them, including the land. Owning the rails meant controlling routes, latency, geography, redundancy, and the cost structure of every customer who depended on the network.
A few days back I asked the question, does Apple really need to have an AI product? In this video Nate Jones reads the tea leaves of Apple’s impending re-org suggesting that Apple’s strategy towards AI may be the same as it’s strategy about personal computing 50 years ago. I think it’s the right move by Apple. However, I do wonder about what might be the relationship between local models and personal computer operating systems.
I can’t help but notice that in his blog post about the value of RAM for AI and how Apple’s unified architecture has proven to be an advantage, Om does not mention the Neo. Om’s point in this post, Memory Is The Machine, is the reason why think users are going wish their first generation Neos have more RAM. Heck, my M4 MacBook Pro’s 16 GB of RAM might not be enough in three years.
Our fears about artificial intelligence are a projection of the fears about ourselves. The human ego desires to control the world, and AI is probably the biggest threat to human control we have created to date. We know that we are incomplete yet our ego insists on turning to ourselves to resolve what ails us rather than changing our mind to follow the path of Jesus.
Personal Programming
I am old enough to remember a time when there were no personal computers. While computers existed throughout my life time (I was born in 1966), personal computers didn’t exist until 1975 (the Altair 8800) and back then they weren’t very useful because one had to program these computers for them to do anything.
In the 1970s there were no stores for one to go to and buy software needed to make the PC do something useful, instead one wrote their own programs. Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote a BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800, which enabled one to write their own programs, and ironically that led to the formation of Microsoft and the personal computer software industry.
The need to write programs limited the market for PCs to hobbyists who were willing to spend the time to learn and tinker and share their code with others. To most hobbyists the idea of selling programs was abhorrent as they saw them as art to be freely shared, and with this point of view the animosity toward Microsoft was born.