I’ve been a fan of the iPhone since watching Steve Jobs unveil the first one in his now famous keynote.

Today, we’re introducing three revolutionary products of this class. The first one is a widescreen iPod with touch controls. The second is a revolutionary mobile phone. And the third is a breakthrough Internet communications device.

So, three things; a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone and a breakthrough Internet communications device. An iPod, a phone and an Internet communicator… an iPod, a phone and an Internet communicator… are you getting it? These are not three separate devices. This is one device, and we are calling it iPhone.

Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone.

Steve Jobs - January 2007

In 2008, the App Store was launched. Paving the way for the way we now interact and use our phones every day. Some of them making us better, connected, more productive people. Some slowly absorbing our souls with mindless scrolls. Having an App on the App Store is a tech nerd bucket list item, and today I ticked that off.

A few weeks ago I mentioned, after being amazed by the capability of Anthropic’s AI model Claude Code, that I was going to attempt to create an App. Many hours of prompting and troubleshooting later the idea I had has turned into a beautiful iOS App available to download today. Introducing…

Why CPD?

I listen to a lot of business related podcasts, and people who have successfully built businesses often solve a problem for themselves. If you have a problem you think is worth solving, maybe other people will need that problem solved too. For me the problem top of mind is getting my daughter to sleep through the night. While that remains a pipe dream I do have other problems worth solving. As I signed off my Continuous Professional Development for the year, I thought there must be a better way to track this.

I’m a Chartered Accountant of South Africa. One of the best accounting designations in the world, and one that requires a long, difficult journey to acquire. The professional body that governs this designation is called The South African Institute of Chartered Accountants, or SAICA. I made a video back when I miraculously passed my second board exam talking about the magnitude of that journey.
To be fair to my daughter I looked just as exhausted back then. Must just be my face.

Subscribe now

Most professional bodies just require you to prove that every year you’ve done a certain amount of verifiable (provable) training so that you stay up to date with changes and updates to the profession. A few years ago SAICA moved away from tracking hours every year for professional development and moved to a competency based approach.

This approach is very forward thinking and brilliant. Don’t just do a bunch of hours to tick a box. Think about where you may have gaps in your knowledge, where you want to go in life, and target the things you spend time learning around that. So much better than falling asleep during a random technical update course for a week to get forty hours of ‘learning’ under your belt.

The problem? When there are no strict guidelines, it can actually make it difficult to ensure you are not only meeting your yearly requirements, but enjoying the benefits of this modern way of encouraging professional development. SAICA has pages upon pages of guidelines to help with this, but that was not cutting it for me.

This is the problem I wanted to solve. And this is why I built CPDTracks.

I won’t go into the nitty gritty of the App here, but I encourage my fellow SAICA members to check out the App on the App Store. It’s free to play around with, and there’s a yearly subscription if you want to really start using it properly. Send me a message with what you think.

The AI App Building Experience

As I said in my article a few weeks ago, I’ve been using AI to build applications for work for a few years now. These applications have gotten increasingly sophisticated as I’ve gotten better at using the tools and as the tools have gotten increasingly intelligent. But building this application was on an entirely different level. I’ll break this down the same way CPDTracks breaks down your learning year.
I’m so clever. I should have been in marketing.

Plan

I started with the concept. Spending a significant amount of time ingesting the guidance provided by SAICA and then workshopping the way I wanted this to be presented by CPDTracks. Essentially building up what would turn into a monster starting prompt, broken into different files for the AI to work with.

Even though this was a big effort to start, I actually wish I’d spent more time in this planning phase. Changing things later is much harder than getting it right the first time. Kind of like everything in life. As I started building I came up with more ideas, added more features, and iterated over and over. All fine but it introduced a lot of bugs that would need to be fixed later on.

Activities

Monster prompt inputted, Claude Code set to work while I watched in amazement as a pretty decent first version came to life. It wasn’t perfect, it didn’t understand everything I meant, it took its own liberties on things based on what it believed an App of this nature would look like and we had words about that. But friends, this thing created a working app in one go with a decent prompt. That’s wild.

This is where the real work began for me though. Playing with what was there, keeping what I liked, throwing out what I didn’t. Coming up with crazy ideas and trying them just to see how it would look. It truly feels like anything you can think of could be possible with a bit of effort.

For example I thought it would be cool to have a safari animation at the top of the main screen. The jeep drives along an African landscape, goes fast, slows down when it sees a big five animal, other African trees and animals pass by randomly - some rarer than others.

A random idea, and the first decent prompt came up with a great start that told me this was achievable. I then spent hours refining it and making the animals and trees look better. Even throwing in some fun surprises if you watch it long enough. These little things make an App special, and were really fun to include.

Subscribe now

Reflect

Once the App was finally working I then got Claude to audit the work. Knowing full well how awful auditing is I subjected this poor AI to the ultimate pain. Sorry Claude. Go looking for bugs, explain why they are bugs and what we should do to fix them. I even prompted Claude to write the prompt itself. One that I would eventually use multiple times as I went through round after round of bug squishing. Slimy yet satisfying.

As I fixed problems, I came up with more ideas, more features, better workflows. The artist in me who is never done improving was switched on and loving the new challenge. Reflection returned to actioning activities and around and around we went. Finally my wife had had enough of me being on the laptop while she was trying to sleep, so it was time to wrap up development.

Prepping for the App Store

There are things about building an app I hadn’t even considered. Of course I asked Claude what I needed to do, and I was guided every step of the way. Is Claude my new best friend? Even as far as filling in all the different settings and forms when setting up your account on the App Store.

I needed a website, a support page, a privacy policy. Claude ran with it all. I’ve built a few websites in my time, coding them one line as a time like a slave. I have never made a website this easily that looks this good. (Check out cpdtracks.com). Claude went as far as finding a way for me to host it for free, and took control of my browser to set everything up.

Earlier this week I hit submit and my App went to Apple for review. When they came back with a few small issues, Claude walked me through fixing them and resubmitting. What a guy.

The Future Is Going To Be Wild

This experience has reiterated my excitement for what could be possible in the future. This is the worst these tools will ever be! That is insane.

Without having any experience building a native Apple Application I was able to make one that - if I do say so myself - looks beautiful and works really well to solve a problem I’ve been frustrated by for years now.

In a future where anybody with an idea can spend some time on it and make it happen with a relatively inexpensive tool like this, what incredible possibilities could be unlocked? What great new inventions could be created? What great medical mysteries could be solved? It’s an exciting, albeit nerve-racking time to be alive.

From novice to pro

When ChatGPT first started becoming mainstream in early 2023 I began playing with it as a coding tool. My coding experience centered around building websites and digital magazines at school, you can tell I was cool, all self-taught and very limited.

After just a few months, I was building applications and automations for a bunch of different tasks. I was automating things that would once have taken hours of manual work, done in minutes or even seconds. I had found my work happy place. I was making inefficient things efficient, and removing tedious work from the agenda.

When I started using these AI models, building an application took a few months with my limited coding experience. Last year, with the latest models available to us at work and a few years of prompting and bug-fixing under my belt, I updated one of the applications I had built in less than a month of part-time work. This month, I’ve completed another major upgrade using the latest AI tools in less than a day. A week of robust testing and iterative updates all guided by my AI professor followed.

The future is here and it’s only going to get better. We now live in a time where if you have an idea to build something you can do it. It may require some patience and problem-solving, but if you have the vision for what you need these tools are powerful.

In that vein I’ve started doing something I’ve always dreamt of doing. Building my own iPhone App. For my first App, I’m trying to solve a basic problem for myself that may help a few others too. It’s a practice run to see what’s possible with just an idea and an AI tool. I’ll share more about what the App is for in the future but today I want to focus on what my experience with the latest tools means for our future.

Subscribe now

Now anything is possible

Being able to explain an idea you have, how you want it to work, look and feel in your native language and then have AI bring that idea to life in just a few minutes is mind-blowing. It takes years of technical learning out of the way and allows you to identify a problem, carefully plan a solution and execute it, with an expert at your beck and call. The hype is not just real. It’s understated. It’s cinema, as the kids say.

It doesn’t have to just be an automation or an App, it can be something in the real world too. I’ve followed instructions on how to grout a shower for example. Taken pictures of broken things and gotten instructions on how to fix them. In our family we use it for cooking instructions, taking pictures of ingredients and asking for custom recipes. We are constantly asking for advice on things to feed our daughter that are both good for her and won’t end up on the floor. The floor is still covered in food, but she’s healthy and eating well.

Need a comprehensive and complicated concept explained to you like a child? Done.
Have an idea that you want to mock up before building it? Done.
Ready to build it? Let’s go!
Need someone to tell you not to buy that outfit? Sorry, only someone who truly loves you will do that.

I literally have an AI agent working through my latest App spec in the background while I type this, I’ve told it some ideas I have for how my new App should work and it’s running off and making them happen. I describe what I want, it builds it. I iterate based on what I see and it builds that.

This is a great equalizer. Most of these AI applications currently have decent free versions available for you to use right now from your phone. If you are not playing with these tools, you are missing the boarding call.

But what about the downsides of these powerful tools?

The problems with AI

A lot of people today are focusing on where these tools fall short. The mistakes they make, the abuses people are already using them for —Grok, ahem— the fabricated facts they share. But take a step back. If you told most people ten years ago that tools like this would even exist they would think you were living in a fantasy world with light sabers and slug kings.

I’ve mentioned before that my P(doom)1 is on the higher end of the scale. Humanity has proven that we will choose greed, repeat wars, ignore warnings, and hurt each other in the name of progress. So these tools could very well mean the end of us. These fears are not unfounded, most AI leaders are petrified of what could go wrong even if they’re barreling ahead anyway.

For now, I’m choosing to focus on what I can achieve with these tools while keeping my ear to the ground on where it could all go wrong. We tend to lean towards a negative outlook as people, it’s one of the things that has kept us alive for this long despite animals being superior to us in many ways. But humanity has also come an incredibly long way from playing with sticks in the mud.

We’ve cured diseases, built giant things and microscopic things. We’ve improved quality of life and life expectancy across the board, even managing to slow a global pandemic to the point of ignoring it. Nothing like being back in an airport with everyone coughing and sneezing while standing right on top of you. Almost everybody in the world has incredible access to information never dreamt of in the palm of their hands. Humanity is making progress despite the horrors we see in the news.

Focus on what you control

We can live in a world of fear and worry. Will these incredible tools take my job, will it lead to a recession, wars, the end of humanity?
You can also live in a world of utopia. Will technology solve poverty, sickness and climate change?

While it may be interesting to ponder these big questions, the reality is most of it is out of our control. The billionaires are going to do as they wish, and build what they will and we’re going to be left with the consequences. But we’re a hardy bunch. We’ll do what humans always do. Adapt, recalibrate to a new normal, and bound forward to achieve incredible things. Now if only AI could teach our daughter not to throw her food on the floor for the dog.

In our mystical magical world, used items of any perceived value are listed on websites filled with oddballs buying and selling. The old local market but people communicate through cutting edge technology like cave dwellers trading fire rocks.

In Cayman we call this website eCayTrade. Similar to Craigslist, Gum Tree or Marketplace on Facebook. A cornucopia of people selling anything from a tennis racquet to their house. A cesspool that one must dip their toes into every so often to sell one’s own junk.

Subscribe now

As our baby outgrows her gadgets and gizmos we have begun to hawk her used goods online for a quarter of their shelf value. Thankfully my wife has taken the lead on dealing with those crazies. The only time I venture into the depths of the online marketplace is when I have furniture or a gadget to sell. After recently upgrading my phone, it was time for me to venture back into this black hole of lunacy again.

The Excruciating Selling Process

Immediately after posting any item on one of these websites you can expect to receive at least four messages asking if the item listed ten minutes ago is still available. Upon replying, “Yes, it’s available,” you are only 43%1 likely to ever hear back from the person ever again. I sometimes imagine these people have fallen into the ocean never to be seen or heard from again.

If you do get a reply the next questions will usually be about the thing you’re selling, which you have more than likely already answered in the advertisement they didn’t read.

If satisfied with your painstakingly copy and pasted response the negotiations begin. If you are dealing with a grifter, they may try some sly tactics like talking up the weaker points of what you are trying to sell.

“The phone’s maximum battery capacity only goes to 89%.”
”Yes that’s what it shows in the screenshot.”
”I may need to replace the battery soon, that is expensive.”
”You are buying a two year old phone, it’s unlikely but if you’d like to, replacing the battery is an option.”
”I’m not sure I can buy it.”
”OK…” (Then why the #$%@ are you messaging me?)

After the mind games they may then make you an offer. One buyer offered me 50% of the asking price, while another offered me their ‘new’ older model iPhone and an old iPad.

Meeting Up with Strangers

If you do finally find somebody willing to offer you a reasonable amount for your item, plus compensation for the pain and suffering of dealing with people, it’s time to meet up. My wife, when recently selling items for $10, has been asked to deliver them to the person’s door. She has kindly agreed - considering it’s a new mom who is buying this baby stuff and is probably going through a lot. I am not that kind. Given the cost of time and fuel we lost more money selling that $10 item than donating it.

Subscribe now

A few phones ago, when we were all still taking COVID seriously, I agreed to drop off a phone to someone in lockdown. They left a plastic bag of money on their doorstep and I dropped the phone in a box before running back to the car. I waited for them to confirm they were happy before driving away feeling like I’d just done a drug deal.

These days, unless I am selling some large piece of furniture I always ask to meet in a public place in case the person is a psycho. If they have been particularly weird in our conversations I’ll make sure it’s in front of a store or restaurant I almost never visit.

Upon meetup, awkward pleasantries out of the way, the item is examined by the buyer while the South African in me is concerned the person may be a flight risk. Yes, it does indeed appear to be an iPhone. No alarming differences from the pictures and it turns on. Great. Cash is exchanged and I try to walk in the opposite direction. Nothing more awkward than saying goodbye to a stranger and then walking alongside them for five minutes to your vehicle.

Still Worth It?

Every time I do this I say never again, but trade ins just don’t give you enough compared to selling the phone to normals. Hopefully one day I'll be rich enough to just give my old valuables away. Until then, every few months you’ll see me online selling something of meaningful value. Please don’t ask me if it’s available.

This week I hit a 365 day streak on Duolingo. Bar the odd skipped day for which Duo will give you a pass, albeit with some borderline death threats from its characters, I’ve been actively trying to learn Portuguese for a year!

My grandparents were born in Portugal, an active part of the Portuguese community when they moved abroad. That Portuguese pride was passed down to their children, who have lived most of their lives outside the country. Learning the language of these pioneering people who enjoy a good argument and whose blood I carry is becoming increasingly important to me as I get older. Perhaps more so because I live as a foreigner thousands of miles from any family or heritage.

Subscribe now

Barriers to Language Enlightenment

But learning a new language is not easy. I’ve never even been close to good at speaking any language except English. Upon returning to Cayman after a vacation I was once randomly selected for an English test, the officer happily ignoring the fact that I was speaking perfect English to him at that exact moment. I got 100% on the test and a complex about my accent.

Learning a new language is especially difficult when your brain is beginning to age like fine wine (read older), you have a newborn in the house fermenting it further through lack of sleep, and the two minute increments you’re learning in are usually whilst hastily getting ready for bed.

Duolingo isn’t even teaching me ‘real’ Portuguese as the Europeans might say. It’s Brazilian Portuguese. So when I finally take my family to Portugal and order Pastéis de nata for everyone I may have no idea what they’re saying in reply. Given a lot of the entertainment shot for Portuguese TV is Brazilian hopefully they’ll at least still understand me.

That said, I’ve stuck with it because the app is great! They’ve really nailed the gamification of learning with fantastic graphics, slot machine sound effects, friend streaks (Shout out Di!) and hilariously threatening characters…

Most days I learn for just two minutes to keep my streak alive, but on rare occasions when the lessons have got me locked in and I’m doing it long before my wife shuts off the lights, I could spend an hour learning.

As I reflect on the last year of learning though, I can’t help but feel disappointed by how little Portuguese I can speak or understand. Whilst I can certainly pick up on some words I never knew before, I’m far from ordering at a restaurant never mind having a conversation. Duolingo has a premium feature that allows you to have a verbal conversation with one of the characters. During the few times they’ve allowed me to use it for free as a teaser it’s been a very one sided conversation to put it nicely.

The commitment to learning a language is high, the road long, and technology is making it increasingly unnecessary. Apple and Google both have live translation built into their devices now. I can literally put AirPods into my ears and hear somebody speaking my language while they hear me speaking theirs. Why would somebody even bother learning a language as this technology arrives?

Subscribe now

There’s More To Learning a Language

While language is a means of communication, it also holds culture. There are things South Africans say when speaking English that anybody not exposed to South African English speakers would be perplexed by. Using robot instead of traffic light can cause a lot of confusion in North America for example.

Learning and immersing yourself in that culture is a way to understand where people are coming from better. To know the phrases unique to their language that don’t translate well into yours is to unlock buried treasure. In a world where we’re increasingly bad at connecting, in spite of all our fancy communication technology, can learning a language help bridge some divides?

If not just for the culture, perhaps learning a new language is good for the brain. Studies using brain imaging have found that second-language learners build stronger connections between regions that handle memory, attention, and problem-solving. People who regularly switch between languages show improved focus and mental flexibility, with some scientists even suggesting it can help delay cognitive decline later in life. We could all use a little more brain power after social media has turned our minds into mush.

While there may be some nice unintended benefits, connecting to my heritage is my primary goal in learning Portuguese. I think that means I’m going to have to do it the hard way, one ‘incorrect’ Brazilian Portuguese pronunciation at a time.

Friday, September 12th, 6:55AM. The iPhone 17 pre-orders are about to go live. Since their announcement on Tuesday I’ve been undergoing the usual mental gymnastics where my Inner Accountant fights with the Carefree Creative who needs the latest gadget. We’ll call them IA and CC for short.

Having a kid is a new justification to always have the best possible camera on hand to capture memories. I explain how much better the cameras are to my wife, but her only response is to ensure I understand that having an orange phone is a grave error.

Since I first started carrying a phone, a Nokia 3310 featuring WAP connectivity and Snake, I’ve been on a biennial upgrade cycle. Selling my old phone while it still holds value, and giving at least a little breathing room for the now iterative updates to add up to something more substantial.

Phones today are incredible, an essential part of our lives to connect, learn and be entertained. But they’re a mature product. Innovation has slowed as companies try to figure out if thinner and lighter, folding, or even a completely different form factor will make their product the next must-have. In the meantime, waiting three to four years to get a new phone will not leave you lacking.

“However, for a tech nerd to not have the latest gadget is akin to stabbing them in the eye”, my CC cries in dramatic anguish. Exasperated, my IA replies, “Fine, let’s see if it passes the test.” They walk over to the purchase test room in quadrant G295 of my brain. Torn images of Teslas, camera equipment and short-lived sports lay in a bin waiting for memory incineration.

Subscribe now

The Test

Is it something you absolutely need?

“YES!!! The Pro has the most incredible cameras ever in an iPhone, and liquid cooling, and pro filming features,” my CC cries while writhing on the floor. My IA looks over their spectacles at the scene before confirming this as a hard no.

If not, is it something you’ve saved for?

My IA checks the budget and confirms that our family does indeed save to be able to buy a new phone every two years. ✔ My wife hears the commotion in my head and pronounces that this is a budget meeting for which she will expect a reward for attendance.

Even though you may have saved for it, is it something you will get a lot of use out of?

“Most of us use our phones every single day, multiple times a day, for too many hours a day. It’s a camera that’s always with us, a professor of all world knowledge on speed dial, a Bible, a language tutor, a personal secretary and home to more entertainment than can ever be consumed in a thousand lifetimes.”

“I’ll take that as a yes,” confirms my IA as my CC picks themselves off the floor and wipes away tears.

Improvements, however incremental, on something you use every day can make a big difference. At least that’s what I tell myself so I can get a new iPhone.

With those two agreeing terms, I can now decide which iPhone to get. The newly announced iPhone Air looks stunning. Going back to the days when the phones got thinner, lighter and shinier every year. But as someone who loves capturing visual memories, whether it’s a beautiful picture of my family, a Cayman sunset or a video for YouTube, the only iPhone I ever really pay close attention to is the iPhone Pro.

I contemplate having a bright orange phone for more than a few moments, but decide on a nice safe blue colour instead as I watch my wife out of the corner of my eye. It’s 7AM, I succumb to the consumerism and click buy.

About The Cat - Inspiration

We were coming home on a breezy Cayman evening, having watched silly old Christmas movies with friends. As we walked towards our apartment, a mangy cat came out of the bush and hissed at us - more likely me specifically. In the movie we’d just watched, a haggard old witch who lived in the forest kept popping up unexpectedly. The prince referred to her as “a crone.”1

“Looks like that crone from the movie we just watched,” I exclaimed. My wife laughed, and we soon started calling the cat Crone. We didn’t know at the time that he was a boy—but the name stuck.

Every day, my wife would sit outside and chat with Crone, feeding him cat treats—and dipping into my hurricane tuna supply. Eventually he allowed her to pet him. Crone went from hissing at us each day to coming running for his treats and a chat.

A kind neighbor took Crone to the vet one day after seeing he wasn’t looking very well. The vet diagnosed him with a sun allergy and feline AIDS. Given he was a stray living in a bush, we volunteered to adopt him so he could live indoors. Conveniently ignoring the fact that I am allergic to cats and that our landlord didn’t allow pets. My wife argued Crone was family and not a pet, deciding sneakily keeping him in our apartment until our new home was finished was worth the risk. This was completely reasonable and got us a significant amount of Good Place points.23

Sadly, in the time we were waiting for our new home to be completed, Crone passed away. His memory, his legend, has lived on far longer than we knew him. In his memory I began to tell crazy elaborate stories to my wife. Stories of the cat that came from the bush in front of our house and his many adventures. My wife loves the stories, often asking me to come up with new adventures, usually at highly inappropriate times.

Why Use ChatGPT to illustrate a storybook?

I’m what one might politely call particular. So whilst I’ve had the idea to turn my Crone stories into a book for my wife for a long time, I didn’t have a way to do it. I looked into getting an artist to illustrate it, but the costs were prohibitive, and I’d likely not be satisfied with the result. I’ve worked with artists before who I sadly drove absolutely dilly with notes. Even in my searches I struggled to find an artist whose style I loved. When AI Illustrators started becoming a thing, I got excited. This artist would never tire of my notes, was reasonably priced, and let me tweak things endlessly to match my vision.

What worked, and what didn’t

I didn’t expect the process to take so long. ChatGPT was exceptional at creating the first draft of an image I wanted it to dream up. Often very close to what I wanted, especially when I was super detailed in my ‘prompt’. I tackled my special project by writing a story and breaking it up into pages that would require images. I then tried to be as detailed as possible, describing the image I wanted to create. Providing example images of the characters based on photographs of us and Crone. That often produced fantastic results within a few tries.

However, there would always be small tweaks I’d like to make, tweaks that would have been quick for human artists but ended up taking hours of back and forth with ChatGPT. The bot would often hallucinate, adding random elements - some seemingly pulled from memories of past projects I’d used ChatGPT for. For example in the past I’ve used it to make a cartoon image of my family for this column and included our dog. Sometimes a dog would randomly appear in the image I was creating, despite never having asked for it or mentioning anything but a cat in my prompts.

Consistency in characters was also very difficult to pull off. Although I think I got better at giving the bot enough information to keep the images moderately consistent, it would often take hours to get a small change to look good. In some cases I gave up and resorted to fixing smaller details in Photoshop myself. Something as simple as fixing a character’s eye colour or asking for an untucked T-shirt—seriously, when have I ever tucked in a T-shirt?— would often result in my character looking completely different.

After months of jumping in and out of the project, I finally started to make decent progress, just in time for my wife’s birthday. I then put it together and sent it off to a printer in Canada. Creating this for her felt infinitely more special than anything I could’ve bought off a shelf. It’s incredible that we have access to such powerful technology today. I was able to write, illustrate and print a completely unique story from my MacBook. Who knows, maybe the adventures of Crone could become a series for the family to enjoy.

Subscribe now

Every year, the tech world gathers for Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference or WWDC. Not to be confused with the very different WWJD (What Would Jesus Do?) It’s a conference for developers to learn what Apple is up to next, and develop cool new applications of incredible value, or incredible time wasting capability.

My wife will kindly smile and nod as I ramble on about how this year Apple has finally made the iPad a computer, how it would be perfect for her next one because it’s super powerful, has a touchscreen, and can literally do anything she might ever need a computer to do… but then she’ll hand me a dirty diaper and ask if I can bath the dog.

We’re trying to keep our baby away from screens, but she does enjoy smacking my Apple Watch while I’m changing her. Maybe she’ll appreciate Apple’s beautiful new liquid glass display language, or that I can simply twist my wrist to silence a call. Unfortunately she’s preoccupied arguing with Paddington Bear about why he will not get into her mouth.

Perhaps you’ll be more excited about this news. Apple users should be excited. The Apple UX (User Experience) is the core reason many of us own iPhones in the first place. I have a Samsung Android phone for work. I hate every minute I have to use it. It’s clunky, unintuitive, and ugly. My iPhone is simple, beautiful and almost always just works - Siri excluded. This year, that experience is getting a fresh coat of liquid glass paint.

Jony Ive, Apple's former chief design officer when Apple created the iPhone, dreamt of a phone that "appears like a single sheet of glass". This new design language edges Apple closer to that aesthetic. Similar to Apple’s Dynamic Island, it feels like the designers are starting to have more fun with how users interact with the interface. It’s not just about being incredibly functional, it’s also a joy to use.

The media is always mixed on these big announcements. Not just from Apple, but from any of the people that make the devices we use every day. We’ve become so difficult to impress — expecting our gadgets to be all singing and dancing, while simultaneously demanding developers slow down before AI takes over the world.

We carry around phones that are cinema-grade cameras in our pockets, that can connect us to nearly all of human knowledge and culture in an instant. We can have a shopping order, full of things our baby will never use, arrive from the other side of the world to our doorstep with the touch of a finger. Technology is incredible.

Subscribe now

I’m excited that Apple is focusing on some more fun stuff this year. It’s not just frivolous pretty colors, it’s core to how we experience the devices we interact with over 2600 times per day*.

So here I am left, an Apple Fanboy alone in a sea of noobs, unable to get anyone excited about my Apple Music Album Motion now gorgeously displayed on my iPhone lockscreen. But when that update drops in September, it’ll feel like opening a Christmas present — one that doesn’t make a dent in the budget.

*According to a 2016 study by research company Dscout