Steve Litchfield

We've been hearing about the phone world 'plateauing' for years. I've been the one proclaiming the concept, since about 2020 - and I'm absolutely right. But 'plateau' is perhaps not what you thought it was. After all, a true plateau is just that - flat, whereas the meaning in the phone world is subtly different. What is DOES mean is that the days of significant year on year advances in phone technology are long gone.  Any phone from 2020 will work just fine today, whether iOS or Android-based. Its performance will be 'fine', its camera putting out photos that are 'fine', its speakers and microphones 'fine', its battery life 'fine'. And so forth. Whereas once (pre-2015, say), there would be compelling reasons to trade your phone in after even less than a year, in order to get the shiny new model that was evidently better at something important, in 2025 there's almost no reason. In fact, we've reached the point where it...

This has blown me away. You know when you switch from one Windows PC to another (i.e. upgrading), you have to spend about a week re-installing all your apps, setting up all your plug-ins and preferences all over again, hoping you haven't missed a setting? I just switched from an old Mac mini to a new one (double the RAM and hard disk, faster graphics etc) and restored the user folder from my Time Machine hard disk backup. 98% of my entire working environment (files, folders, icon placement) got put back straight away on the new machine. I was stunned. But there were a few "?" icons on the dock, where a few of my third party apps were missing (Handbrake, Seashore, Audio Hijack Pro, Cyberduck). So I installed them from the latest versions off the web. And you know what? ALL of their settings, preferences and plug-ins were just 'there', stored in my user folder. There was ZERO work to do on any of them. Upgrading to a new computer used to be a nightmare for me, once ...