My #1 Most Important Piece of Technology
No piece of technology has changed my life more than my iPhone. That’s a strong statement, but it’s also incredibly true. Particularly when I travel, the fact that it knows where I am and can pull information from the internet anywhere makes it the most useful and productive instrument I own. It’s so effective and easy to use that on many trips I no longer even bring a laptop with me. Either my business doesn’t need attention for a few days (which has to do with automation, not the iPhone) or the iPhone can handel the phone calls, internet browsing and emails that I do need to attend to while away.
Now I’m not going to say the iPhone is the only smartphone out there that can fill this roll, it’s just the only one I’ve tried. Particularly in the last few months new phones from several different manufacturers (particularly phones running Google’s Android operating system) have hit the market that have much of the same, and even more funtionality than the iPhone in some cases. I’ll be sticking with the iPhone for the forseeable future though for two huge reasons.
Reason 1: The App Store. This is a tremendous value add that comes with the iPhone that no other manufacturer or system can match – yet. Watch out for Google’s Android App Market to catch up on this in the coming months and years.
Reason 2: Design and Aesthetics. Now I know some of you will say this isn’t a legitimate reason to like something, but for me it is. If that makes me an Apple fanboy then so be it. The user experience on the iPhone is still superior than any other smartphone currently out there including Android phones.
My MacBook Pro
While my iPhone is great, right now it isn’t so easy to edit together videos for you while we’re traveling on the road. While I bet there’ll be an app for that in the near future, for now my MacBook Pro fills in and does the heavy lifting. At a given time for example, it’s stabilizing the newest HD videos I’ve just imported from my camera, checking on Tweets in Tweetdeck, downloading the movie I want to watch tonight from iTunes and watching YouTube videos – all at the same time and without crashing. Of course there are some programs that still don’t run on OS X, so for that I run Windows 7 and seamlessly switch between Safari and Microsoft Office. For the weight, screen size and brightness, capabilities, and overall workhorse performance, I don’t think there is a better machine out there on the market.