This week on my pop-culture podcast The Incomparable, we talk about the plight of the comic-book reader when it comes to events and continuity. Marvel and DC are both in the process of revisiting and changing their continuity via dramatic in-universe events. Is continuity worth the trouble? Are events fun, or soul-crushing? How do we feel about the old and new Marvel Secret Wars? Does the new all-woman Avengers team fill us with excitement or trepidation or both? And stick around after the show as we discuss Superman’s new power, the appeal of Harley Quinn, and even more comic nerdery!
My guests this week are Andy Ihnatko, Lisa Schmeiser, and Monty Ashley.
Once again, my huge thanks to Automatic for sponsoring Six Colors this week (and for most of June).
Automatic is a small “connected car adapter” that you plug into your car’s diagnostic port. (Automatic works with most gas and hybrid cars released since 1996.) We took a long car trip this week, and my wife and I enjoyed looking through the Automatic data on our trip, the stops, the cost of the gasoline we used on the trip, and even information about when we used our brakes a bit too hard or drove a bit too fast.
Automatic does a bunch more, too, including integrating with other smart devices. Automatic normally costs $99.95, but readers of Six Colors get 20 percent off. Automatic ships in two business days for free, and there’s a 45-day return policy.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
An audience of 40,000, give or take a few million watching on TV
Those of us in the media business—and I use that term loosely, since I’m really talking about anyone who makes stuff and puts it out on the Internet for people to see—like to imagine our Audience. With the capital A.
I don’t think most of us imagine them in a physical setting, because if we did we’d probably run screaming. (I estimate The Incomparable’s listenership at around 25,000… I’d rather not picture us performing a podcast in front of a basketball arena full of fans. That’s terrifying.) But we do imagine, vaguely, that they’re out there. We interact with them on Twitter, get emails, sell them t-shirts, that sort of thing.
But it’s just not true. There’s no Audience. If you tried to plot an audience you’d get a crazy set of overlapping and non-overlapping circles. Your Audience is the sum of many different audiences, all with different habits—and opinions about you.
It’s in the show notes
A couple of years ago I ran a contest on The Incomparable, shamelessly ripped off from The Flop House. I asked listeners to write iTunes reviews of the podcast—good or bad, didn’t matter—and in return I’d pick a random reviewer to choose the topic of a future episode.
When it came to pick the winner, I gathered the names of every iTunes reviewer from every international iTunes store, put them in a spreadsheet, sorted them, and used random.org to pick a number. The winner, from the Australian store, had an indecipherable iTunes name. I did Google searches to no avail. So in the end, I shined the Bat-Signal, and tweeted from @theincomparable seeking the winner. Many times. Over the course of a couple of weeks. Nothing.
So I added a plea to the show notes for our next episode, asking for this person to write in and identify himself. Nothing.1
Finally, driven to desperation, I put a plea to the contest winner in audio form at the very beginning of our next episode. Within a couple of hours, the winner contacted us via email.
This was a great lesson. I like to imagine that the podcast’s Audience is represented by the fans we talk to on Twitter, or the ones that scrupulously study our show notes. But @theincomparable only has about 3300 followers. While I love interacting with them2, they are not the Audience, just a tiny fragment. When we record an episode live, I love talking to the people in the chat room… but even there, that’s not the Audience. I can see our live-stream statistics—there are many more people listening live than actually interacting in the chat room. Even there, we’re dealing with a fragment of a fragment.
Functional high ground
I think of Accidental Tech Podcast as a huge podcast, because in our little realm of tech podcasts it and The Talk Show are the heaviest hitters in terms of audience. But it all depends on your perspective. Only a fraction of the people who read Daring Fireball listen to The Talk Show, I’d wager. Not everyone listens to podcasts. And that’s just within the Apple web. Pull back and now it’s the tech web, which is even larger, but still a tiny fragment of the entire Web.
Remember when Marco Arment posted about Apple’s software reliability problems and his sentiment rapidly spread to Huffington Post, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, and a televised conversation on CNBC? For anyone who’s been listening to ATP since it’s existed, Marco’s complaints in his post were nothing new. Yes, his language was inflammatory, but he’s probably used similarly inflammatory language—maybe even worse!—on previous episodes.
So why the big deal about Marco’s post? Simple: It was written down, rather than embedded 40 minutes into a 90-minute-long podcast. Because it was written down, it reached an audience that doesn’t listen to podcasts. Because it was written down, it was easily passed from person to person and processed in a way that a bunch of weekly podcasts just can’t be.
Tech podcasts, like tech blogs, are narrowcasts to specific audiences. But because podcasts aren’t as easily shared as blog posts, they’re more likely to stay within that narrow community. Marco’s post blew up because it went outside that community and into a larger world, which was happy to use his words to their own ends.
You see this kind of audience clash all the time. Threads on Hacker News, for example, will show how words intended for one audience will be interpreted entirely differently by a different audience. When I would write an article for Macworld that was later repurposed for PCWorld, there was a similar result. And anytime one of the pieces I write here is linked to from Daring Fireball or anywhere else, an audience that is not my audience sees it3. They bring an entirely different context to the proceedings, and would probably fill up my comment threads, if I had any.
This is one of the greatest liabilities of the podcast medium, as well as one of its strengths.
It’s a liability because podcasts are not easily chunkable, shareable content. At least with YouTube videos, there’s a standard way to link to a specific time code. Podcasts like Serial can go viral, but podcast content doesn’t. Large parts of the Internet are powered by an economy of link sharing. Podcasts sit outside of that.
It’s a strength, because when you’re making a podcast, you’re speaking to a very specific audience. They know you, they want to hear from you, and in large part they understand the context of what you’re saying. Nobody freaked out about Marco complaining about Apple software quality on ATP because they’d been listening to the conversation that Marco, John, and Casey have been having about Apple for an hour or two per week over the course of a couple of years. We know them, we know their background, and we know the context of their remarks. It’s a powerful thing, that depth and continuity.
So who is the Audience? Take your pick. It can be Google News referrals. It can be loyal RSS readers. It’s chat-room jackals. It’s people you’ve never heard from, who will never email you and never Tweet at you and never buy your t-shirts but still listen to you faithfully, week in and week out.4 It’s all of them, and none of them. Welcome to the Internet.
Just the other day my pal Monty Ashley mentioned that he listens to 10 hours of podcasts a week and has never once read a podcast’s show notes. ↩
They are my besties and never let anyone tell you different. (Hi Joe and Clinton and everyone!) ↩
One would hope that some percentage of them like what I wrote and will decide to read me again sometime…. ↩
Yep, it’s also you nice people who actually read the footnotes. ↩
iMore’s starting a weekly “author spotlight” column, sort of the web equivalent of a backpage column from a magazine. I’m happy to be the author of the first one, which is all about Apple and its cultural embrace of change.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
For a while, iOS developers have complained that the UIKit framework they use to develop apps isn’t available on the Mac, making it harder to apply the same tools and techniques and code they build for iOS to Mac apps.
Today Apple dropped Photos for Mac via a developer release, and some developers are reporting signs that Apple has built this new app using something called UXKit, which sits above the Mac’s familiar AppKit frameworks and strongly resembles UIKit on iOS.
The new Photos for Mac is based on a new private framework in 10.10.3, UXKit. It is essentially a replica of UIKit, based on top of AppKit.
It would make too much sense for Apple to make it easier for developers—inside and outside Apple—to easily use their work on both of Apple’s major OS platforms.
[Update: Brent Simmons doubts this will ever be used outside of Apple., though he says he “could imagine a minimal UXKit that isn’t meant to replace AppKit but that can be used with both AppKit and UIKit.” For all we know, that might be what this is.]
Visually designing a software application that revolves around something inherently non-visual—like sound—is daunting. The immediate impulse is to lean on idioms and affordances from existing audio hardware (as our charming and easy-to-use Piezo does). The more complex a task becomes, however, the less convenient it is to refer to these real-world devices, which themselves can have steep learning curves and be a chore to use.
The new Audio Hijack is a triumph, and Christa’s interface design is the biggest reason why.
I’ve had very little time with Photos but my general impression is that it hits a sweet spot for the casual-to-enthusiastic iOS and digital camera shooter. Its navigation is more nimble and, from what I can tell, its performance is significantly improved over iPhoto’s, which I found sluggish with large image libraries. And, scaling back to the big picture, it’s the first of the old iLife apps that shares a common experience among the Mac, iOS devices, and iCloud. All your photos, your most recent edits, wherever you are. It’s an app worth looking forward to.
It seems that The Verge and Christina Bonnington at Wired also got some hands-on time with the software. General consensus seems to be that it’s a lot speedier than iPhoto—which, let’s admit it, wasn’t a very high bar—and is, also unsurprisingly, heavily influenced by the iOS Photos app.
Developers can get their hands on Photos as part of the OS X 10.10.3 beta seed going up today; everybody else will have to wait until that update is publicly released later this spring.
Werner Koch wrote the software, known as Gnu Privacy Guard, in 1997, and since then has been almost single-handedly keeping it alive with patches and updates from his home in Erkrath, Germany. Now 53, he is running out of money and patience with being underfunded.
I tried to set up GPGTools on Apple Mail once and while it wasn’t the easiest process in the world1, the bigger problem is that so few people use email encryption. Adoption is essentially nil among mainstream consumers.
Apple makes a big deal of the security of iMessage and FaceTime, and we all know to look for the padlock icon in our web browsers. But email is still a huge part of how we communicate online—think of how much critical information is exchanged in plaintext across the Internet everyday. A company like Apple building a transparent, one-click encryption system into its mail client could go a long way toward securing that traffic, even if it were only between users of Apple devices.2
Encouraging the adoption of email encryption by actually investing it would be a great start. It seems like it would be in the interests of most major tech companies—like Google, Microsoft, and Apple—to keep Koch in business, given how much of a concern security has become.
The theory is that Apple would put together bundles of programming – but not the entire TV lineup that pay-TV providers generally offer – and sell it directly to consumers, over the Web. That means Apple wouldn’t be reinventing the way TV works today, but offering its own version of it, with its own interface and user experience.
Apparently, Cupertino’s decided to make an end-run around the cable companies and go directly to the content providers. I don’t know that this approach sounds that exciting to me; I’d probably still end up paying for a lot of shows that I don’t want. I’m still holding out for a hero an all-I-can-stream TV service for a low monthly fee.1
Still, we’ve been down this particular road before, and something tells me this time isn’t likely to be much different from previous occasions.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
Networking: boring, right? Wrong. Networks are our lifelines these days—how else can we keep up-to-date on Twitter, stream our music and TV, and, most importantly, see what our friends scored in Crossy Road?
So it’s frustrating when you can’t get connected—especially when it’s because your device has decided to join the wrong network. I’ve run into this, in particular, with my ISP, Comcast, which provides a broad network of Wi-Fi hotspots that are free with my cable Internet subscription.
All well and good, but those networks tend to be a little slow—not just in terms of their overall throughput, but in the time it takes between joining the network to actually being able to get data on it. I don’t know what the deal is, whether the network just takes a while to authenticate my devices as valid clients or what, but when my phone decides to hop on the network as I’m walking around town, my connection invariably comes to a sudden halt.
Even more annoying, there are some places I go—coffee shops, for example—that have access to Comcast’s hotspots but also have Wi-Fi of their own, and my iOS devices always seem to want to jump on the Comcast network. I even had this happen in my home recently, to my dismay.1
So, it’d be great to be able to tell my iPhone which networks it should try to join first when there are several available. You can already do this pretty easily on OS X by dragging the order of Wi-Fi networks under Advanced in the Network preference pane. 2
I’ve heard some suggestion that if you’re using iCloud the network prioritization from your Mac will actually sync to your iOS devices, but if that is true, I’ve certainly never been able to get it to work.
This may seem like a little thing, and I doubt it’s something that Apple will ever put high on its list of priorities. For most people, the way it works right now is probably fine. But for those of us who end up frequently jumping between networks on our mobile devices, it would definitely be helpful to have a little more control.
Update: Reader Thom Rosario reminds me that you can also define preferred networks via the Apple Configurator (née iPhone Configuration Utility), though it’s not exactly the most user-friendly process.
Admittedly, my iPhone didn’t seem to be finding my home network and so apparently fell back to the Comcast Wi-Fi. So that may be a separate problem. ↩
This interface needs some love too. You can’t search the list, and it’d be great to be able to say “show me networks I haven’t used in the last three months, year, etc.” As it is, I have way too many networks in there that will never exist again, but why the hell would I spend the time weeding them out? ↩
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]
Welcome to the future! Where you can scan your own books page by page thanks to Amazon (http://www.engadget.com/2015/02/03/rip-and-mix-is-fine-but-dont-burn-books/).
The future sadly will not include Radio Shack, which may be selling its stores to Sprint (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-02/radioshack-is-said-to-discuss-liquidation-as-part-of-sprint-deal) or Amazon (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-03/amazon-said-to-mull-buying-radioshack-stores-in-retail-expansion) or both.
Dan doesn’t mind because You-do-it Electronics is still around (http://youdoitelectronics.com).
And, truly alas, TUAW will not be around in the future (http://www.tuaw.com/2015/02/03/so-long-and-thanks-for-all-the-fish/) and neither will Joystiq (http://www.joystiq.com/2015/02/03/there-is-no-end/).
No sign, however that Daring Fireball is about to go under (http://daringfireball.net).
Individually run sites have the benefit of being able to make their own advertising decisions (http://sixcolors.com/post/2014/12/no-other-gatekeeper-but-me/).
It’s not hard to imagine that AOL might mess up a decision or two as it’s still big in the dialup Internet business (http://consumerist.com/2013/08/08/believe-it-or-not-2-58-million-people-still-pay-for-aol-service/).
If you miss TUAW, you can find most of them soon at Apple World Today (http://appleworld.today).
Apple itself, meanwhile, is rumored to be building a data center in that no-longer-used sapphire manufacturing facility (http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/02/02/apple-to-build-data-command-center-in-arizona/).
Lex is happy there’s a way to make your iOS device’s screen even darker (https://medium.com/@searls/how-to-make-your-iphone-dimmer-than-dim-d20fd3bbbb66). He’s weird that way.
Federico Viticci’s review of the iPad Air 2 isn’t a review of the iPad Air 2, not really. It’s a personal essay about why Viticci has embraced the device’s portability and made it his primary computing device.
I have a very mobile lifestyle, in the literal sense of the word. My post-treatment physical therapy requires me to move often and avoid sitting for several hours a day whenever possible. And every day, I have to leave my house at least twice to drive around Rome for errands, buy fresh groceries, or just pick up my girlfriend at class. I can’t afford to sit at a desk for 8 hours and, truth be told, I like the freedom of not being constrained to a desk and use a desktop computer. One of the best takeaways from my journey so far is, without a doubt, a newfound appreciation for movement and the feeling of being free. This, I believe, has deeply changed how I work and slice up work times during the day.
I’m not convinced that we’re all going to give up our Macs for iPads, but assuming that things will stay the way they are today is almost always a mistake. Tim Cook believes the iPad will be successful in the long arc of time, and if so, then Viticci’s essay is a window into the future.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
The Apple Watch, announced along with the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus on September 9, 2014.
I believe Apple is truly a company that is always looking at the big picture, I really do. The iPhone and iPad and Mac all work together, using iTunes and iCloud and even Apple Pay as infrastructure, in a harmonious way. But at the same time, it’s hard not to look at the size of Apple’s iPhone business and wonder how the success of the iPhone affects Apple’s decision-making.
Apple has sold 346 million iPhones in the past two years. In the same period, Apple has sold 36 million Macs and 138 million iPads. Or consider revenue: Over the past two years, the iPhone has brought in $214B, versus $46B for the Mac and $61B for the iPad. Put together, the Mac and iPad bring in less than half the revenue of the iPhone.
Then there’s the simple calculation that, even if iPhones do get replaced at a much faster pace than Macs and iPads, it’s undeniable that most iPhone users don’t have a Mac1. Your average Apple customer is an iPhone user.
For the last two years, the iPhone has provided more than half of Apple’s corporate revenue, and in the most recent quarter it was more than two-thirds of the revenue. Apple is rapidly becoming iPhone Inc., maker of smartphones and… various other devices.
It’s not unreasonable to assume that the sheer gravity of the iPhone might perturb Apple’s business priorities, at least somewhat. The Mac and iPad are strong businesses on their own, but companies with one huge profit center and other smaller profit centers tend to prioritize the biggest item2. I’m not saying that Apple is ignoring the Mac and iPad—I really do believe that Apple is very good at seeing the forest for the trees. But I do think that the iPhone’s phenomenal success has to have some effect in company strategy.
As a small example, consider the iPad. Yes, Tim Cook is bullish “over the long arc of time”, but the iOS development priority list seems to have been focused on the features that most benefit the iPhone for the past few years. With two-and-a-half times the sales, who can argue? Rumors about a large iPad with new multitasking features and maybe even a stylus have been floating out there for a while now. Maybe that will be the impetus to roll out some features that will make iPad users particularly happy.
Then there’s the Apple Watch. This is a new product category for Apple, yes, but it’s also an iPhone accessory. The few existing smartwatches that work with the iPhone seem to work despite iOS’s connectivity features, not because of them. The Apple Watch will be the only real watch accessory for the world’s hundreds of millions of iPhone users. It also won’t work with anything but iPhones, and at least this initial iteration will require a nearby iPhone for most of its functionality.
The Apple Watch is capable of being both a new product category and an accessory to an existing product category because the product it’s an accessory for—the iPhone—provides an enormous pool of potential customers to draw from. The iPhone’s success makes it much easier for Apple to invest huge amounts of time and effort in the Apple Watch.
For the iPod to become a hit product, it had to connect to both Macs and PCs. Apple initially didn’t support the PC, then did so reluctantly (with third-party jukebox software), and finally did so through iTunes for Windows, which Steve Jobs famously likened to a glass of ice water to people in hell3.
For the Apple Watch to become a hit product, it just needs to please a bunch of iPhone users. The iPhone market is large enough that the Apple Watch doesn’t need to stake out new ground for Apple, at least not yet. (I don’t think the Apple Watch will ever connect to Android devices, but it’s possible that one day the Watch might be such a device unto itself that it simply won’t care if you have a phone nearby, or what’s on it.) It’s going to be years, if ever, before the Apple Watch becomes a product that isn’t made for iPhone users4.
The Apple Watch is the smart play for Apple right now. I recognize that. But I still have to lament the lack of progress in a product like the Apple TV. This is a product that’s seen very little hardware improvement in ages, with software that’s in desperate need of a rethink. It’s been passed by in every way by its competitors. The only reason I keep my Apple TV around is because it’s the only way to watch stuff I bought on iTunes and use AirPlay. I keep it around because it uses Apple’s stuff, not because it’s good.
Could Apple TV be the best TV-attached box on the market right now? Sure it could, and maybe there’s even an update in the wings that will make it that. Maybe it’s even been a priority at Apple—just not the top priority. Could you look at the iPhone numbers and choose differently?
And that’s really my point. Not that Apple’s doing anything wrong, but that the iPhone’s success is so massive that it’s got to be coloring the decisions Apple makes. When we look at what Apple does—the products it announces and the ones it doesn’t update—it’s probably worth evaluating those moves while keeping this chart in mind:
My guess is that probably a majority of iPhone users don’t have any other Apple product in their homes, though that might be pushing it a little bit. Still, all of us immersed in the Apple universe need to be aware that the combined Mac-iPhone-iPad experience is less common than we think. ↩
This is arguably good business sense—go with what’s working! But I’ve witnessed solid, profitable businesses run into the ground by companies who just couldn’t justify spending resources on the lesser parts of their portfolio. ↩
I’ve never talked to a Windows user who professed anything but frustration with iTunes, but then again, there aren’t very many Mac users who would give the ol’ syncing ship a hug either. ↩
Best-case scenario for Apple Watch: It becomes such a huge hit that it motivates lots of Android users to switch to iPhone just so they can use it. ↩
Once you’ve recorded your podcast, it’s time to edit. Editing can be incredibly simple—trim the beginning and end point and be done with it—or as complicated as you want to make it. I use a few different editing approaches based on my tools and the needs of the particular shows I do. Let me describe them to you now…
Okay campers, rise and shine, and don’t forget your booties because it’s Groundhog Day! This week on my pop-culture podcast The Incomparable, we talk about one of the least likely film classics of our era: “Groundhog Day,” starring Bill Murray. How does something that seems so generic on its surface unfold into one of the deepest and greatest films of all time? We talk it through, along with me saying unkind things about Andie MacDowell.
My guests this week are Chip Sudderth, Erika Ensign, Dan Frakes, Monty Ashley, and Steve Lutz.
(And when you’re done listening, check out the “Groundhog Day” episode of Defocused, also posted this weekend. Tis the season for a the true excitement of a large squirrel predicting the weather!)
Thanks to this week’s Six Colors sponsor, curbi. It’s an Internet content-filtering service for iOS that actually works, by using iOS profiles and VPN technology.
With curbi you get parental controls for Internet content on iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. It tracks (and can block) sites through any app, not just Safari, since it’s filtering at the network level. And it lets you set time boundaries: For example, you could block specific kinds of content during afternoon homework time, and everything when it’s bedtime.
Learn more about curbi here. There’s a 14-day free trial available, so you can check it out and see if it works for you and your family.
Lex will be back next week but it’s just Dan and John this week.
Apple had a record quarter again (http://sixcolors.com/post/2015/01/apple-announces-q1-2015-results-today/), despite the dreaded currency headwinds. Brr.
Gene Munster got no answers on the Apple TV yet again. Dan likes his Fire TV (http://www.amazon.com/Amazon-W87CUN-Fire-TV-Stick/dp/B00GDQ0RMG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1422649498&sr=8-1&keywords=fire+tv) and Plex (https://plex.tv). The CEO of HBO has famously said he doesn’t care if people share HBO Go logins (http://www.buzzfeed.com/mattlynley/hbos-ceo-doesnt-care-that-you-are-sharing-your-hbo-password#.nwy6PgzY9).
Contrary to what John says in this episode, Netflix is not losing Doctor Who (http://www.cnn.com/2015/01/19/entertainment/netflix-bbc-doctor-who-feat/index.html). It is losing some other shows.
Apple Pay is coming to 200,000 more outlets (http://www.macworld.com/article/2834669/the-ultimate-guide-on-how-and-where-to-use-apple-pay.html).
John talks about his career using plastic disks (http://davewooldridge.com/post/8666912823/for-all-you-star-trek-fans-toy-collectors-i) as counterfeit nickels.
It’s notable that Apple had the most profitable quarter of any company ever (http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/27/apple-just-had-the-biggest-quarterly-earnings-of-any-company-ever/). And that Apple sold more smartphones than Samsung (http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/28/smartphone-report-q4-2014/). For some reason.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
Image: Shutterstock
There are parts of being a gainfully employed editor for a tech website that I miss—dissecting new announcements, access to the latest and greatest technology, and the steady paycheck assuring me that ruin isn’t lurking right around the corner. But there are aspects to the gig I do not miss at all: PR pitches for subjects I do not cover. All-hands meetings. And picking stock photography for articles that might otherwise go art-less.
No, I do not miss the stock art at all.
Allow me to give you the five-second tour of the sausage factory we call Journalism. Today’s stylized tech sites require Big Bold Images at the top of every story because… well, someone did it that way once, so now every site’s got to follow suit. Much of the time, this art is meticulously planned—a photograph of the product you’re writing about, an image lovingly designed by your graphics team, perhaps a screenshot of your high score in Threes. But sometimes, you have a story that doesn’t lend itself to that kind of artistic accompaniment. Or you don’t have the time to work with your graphics team crafting a meticulous image, as if they even value your input on visual things since they see how you dress yourself. Or maybe running that same photo of that same iPhone you’ve run with your eight previous stories will make you more of a wreck than you already are.
That’s when you turn to the stock art. And that’s when you brace yourself for disappointment.
It is not my intention to kick dirt on the efforts of the hard-working people powering America’s stock art industry. It is extremely challenging to come up with an image generic enough to be used in a variety of stories but not so context-free that you’d be better off slapping a child’s doodle at the top of your story and calling it a day. But I don’t think it’s too much to ask that a stock photo depicting a computer or a mobile device or some other gadget at least give off the vibe that everyone involved in the photograph has a passing familiarity with how that piece of technology actually works. I can’t count the number of times I’ve scrolled through a repository of stock photos only to shout out something like “Nobody holds a smartphone that way” or “Nobody installing a hard drive smiles like that, not unless they either have good drugs or a worse grip on reality.”
So you develop coping strategies. Me, I devise backstories for the terrible stock photos I’ve come across and imagine what kind of stories I could possibly use these images for. It’s either that or be haunted by the rictus of a stock model grinning manically at her tablet for the remainder of my days on the planet.
These are the tales I’ve told, as I’ve wandered through the dark corners of stock art websites.
