As a watch-wearing Apple fan, you would think I'm in the target market for the Apple Watch. I'm heavily invested in the Apple ecosystem already. I even ordered a new MacBook on April 10. But, I declined to order a watch. And I probably won't get one until I need to write a WatchKit app (or more likely, a native app). Some people are surprised when I tell them, so I'll lay out my reasoning here.

My primary use for watches is to tell the time and the date. John Gruber's review warned that the Apple Watch is actually inferior at telling the time than a regular watch in one respect: the screen stays off unless it (imperfectly) detects you need the time. Since I already have very well established habits of glancing at a watch without much movement, the imperfections in detection would likely be annoying. It's hard to talk myself into a downgrade in timekeeping.

The Apple watch does not want to be just another watch in a collection, worn once a week. Many features of the Apple watch reward wearing it all the time, or could be valuable enough to want to wear it all the time. So if it's not compelling, I wouldn't want to wear it one day a week — but if it is compelling, I wouldn't want to wear it less than seven days a week. So I need to wait until the watch is good enough to justify obsoleting my entire swiss mechanical watch collection.

I don't doubt that it will eventually improve, and offer a superior experience to mechanical watches. It's just a matter of time. When I switch, it will be because the watch is so capable and exciting I no longer mind shelving the rest of the collection. Tough to imagine, and bittersweet.

The New MacBook's design is more polarizing than I expected. In the days since its announcement, many Mac lovers have been rationalizing it as a lame duck, either as a set of poor tradeoffs made solely to announce a new direction (like the original Air) or an under-appointed computer for "the masses" (ugh). As a counterpoint, I'll detail why a programmer might love this Mac.

This is the Mac that will allow me to work from anywhere, with just enough technology. I have coveted the freedom that writers like Federico Viticci enjoy by moving to an iPad. I want to be able to run out the door with a thin, 2 lb. sliver of technology, able to be productive anywhere. For development this requires an iPad-like experience, but with Mac OS X rather than iOS. iOS may have multitasking and extensions, but it is not close to being sophisticated enough to run a full POSIX development environment, web services stack, with database and testing tools. (That's ok, I don't think iOS need ever be that sophisticated.)

So this MacBook is my iPad. The limitations don't affect my use case much at all. I don't care that it doesn't have many ports, since I have another desktop Mac with lots of monitors and drives attached. Literally all important data can be synced through online services such as Dropbox, iCloud, github, FeedWrangler, IMAP servers, and even Overcast, so it's always up to date. The MacBook is also useful offline with a local copy of everything important.

Performance will likely be acceptable for some developers. Server-side development largely requires text editors and unix utilities in Terminal, along with a server stack and database. But it only has to run a handful of processes at a reasonable speed. Many development tasks are less resource intensive than transcoding video or mining for dogecoin. This applies to screen size as well. XCode or Logic Pro users may be squinting, but I spend all day in Terminal and MacVim.

What I really need is something so unobtrusive that I will not hesitate to bring it along, and use in any environment (including a cramped coach seat in an airplane). This new MacBook can give me that experience better than a 13" Retina MacBook Pro. It's like an iPad but with Mac OS X and a hardware keyboard. That's just perfect.

Nobody does emotive better than Merlin Mann. When he really feels something, you do too. Even if you don't understand the issue, you get the feel of it. And until just now, his Clackity Noise post was one I felt more than I understood.

After all (to borrow a Merlinism) isn't it terribly reductive to sieve the meaning of writing into the mere physical act of typing? The physical act of hitting keys on a keyboard is the least important part! Merlin knows better, so why would he focus on the clackity noise?

How To Sit

That was four years ago. My subconscious can be fast if it wants to, but it takes its sweet time before it gets its hands around some ideas. The cattle prod on my subconscious was a luxurious resort on the impossibly beautiful Turks and Caicos island. It was an opportunity to read books that hang around on a well-intentioned list. This one was called How To Sit. Even if I find much of Buddhist philosophy to be kind of nutty, I can always enjoy a good sit.

What I learned is that meditation is not about sitting. Well, it's all about sitting, and not about sitting at all. Damn, I've just become that guy.

It's really about meditation. And meditation is a great way to clear your mind. But your mind doesn't stay empty; your subconscious will fill it right back up again. With meditation, you can clear the accidental and unimportant, and let your subconscious process the meaningful and important.

Buddhism has been teaching meditation for millennia, and it's learned a thing or two. While I'm no expert, I gleaned some things. First, it's intimidating to have a two step process that says:

1. Sit down.
2. Achieve enlightenment.

So instead, it teaches you a step-by-step method that you can actually achieve. You can sit. You can get comfortable. You can pay attention to your breathing. You can repeat a phrase that stresses the act of relaxing.

You don't need a step that says to let your subconscious fill your mind in with what's really bugging you. That will happen anyway. You need steps to allow you to continue to push things from your conscious mind over and over until the subconscious offers up something worth thinking about. And then you'll think about it anyway. No steps needed for that.

So what Buddhism figured out is to drop the intimidating or automatic mental processes, and describe the physical and the approachable parts. If you do enough sitting, and enough mind-clearing, you will eventually focus on the important.

Sitting on a white sand beach, occasionally watching the repetitive azure ocean lap, this made a lot of sense. A calm beach is practically an invitation to meditation all on its own. It reminded me that I already had a kind of introspection process of my own, similar to meditation but not quite.

Watching Ink Dry

I keep an occasional journal with fountain pens. But I don't just write after I've figured out what to write. I often write in order to figure out what to write. I fold over a crisp new page, pick up a wide-nibbed pen with a juicy blue ink, and start writing.

I like to watch the ink dry. Fountain pen ink is water-based, and when it flows well, goes on wet. It sits on the surface of the paper for a few seconds, reflecting a sheen like wet paint. After you're a word or two on, the ink sinks into the paper, getting absorbed into the fibres, losing the sheen and becoming permanent. Sometimes I write a stream of consciousness, just to watch the ink dry as I write past. And before you know it, the words become meaningful.

It's the same principle. Forget the pressure to introspect on something critically important. Just write whatever comes to mind and follow the beautiful sheen on the page.

Enlightenment

It's astonishing to me how you can't skip steps in life. How you can't take perfectly good advice to avoid a broken leg until you've already broken it. And how I couldn't have come to an understanding about what Merlin was going on about until I'd had a good stretch of not knowing what he was going on about. About how I couldn't understand meditation's focus on sitting until I'd already found a similar principle by watching ink dry.

So it's always a cycle where I start by not understanding and even turning up my nose at someone's nuttiness. But in time I generally end up seeing where they were coming from. It doesn't always mean agreement — just because you can see the path someone took through the forest doesn't mean it was the smartest path, but at least you have some idea what they've been through.

I'm still looking for more methods to achieve introspection. Just to write this, I had to sit for a time to think. I watched some ink dry in my journal while many of the words found their way onto a page. And finally, I had to make the keys clack until these electrons were all aligned properly. Maybe I'll take a literal walk in the forest later. I don't yet have a path in mind.

At Marco's virtual insistence, I decided to try a Microsoft Sculpt ergonomic keyboard. Even those without RSI can suffer from poor ergonomics when typing all day, so a design minimizing fatigue and pain is welcome.

My old solution was to prop up the front of Apple's wireless keyboard to make it flat. I used bits of old cardboard, which would have made Jony Ive blanch. They weren't chamfered or anything.

The Good

The Sculpt has some familiarity for those used to Apple's modern aluminium keyboards. The sculpt's keys are similarly low-travel, flat-topped, and silent. The arrow keys, while thankfully almost three times the size of Apple's, are close and tucked into the corner. Every attempt has been made to eliminate unnecessary width, including detaching the number pad and making vertical the control buttons usually on the right hand side.

Even some minor parts of the design have a commendable attention to detail. Both the battery door and stand are attached by magnets rather than fragile plastic tabs. And you don't read much about battery life because it seems to be a solved problem. Battery life is measured in months instead of days or weeks.

The Bad

As a heavy vim user, the main compromise is that the top row — including the escape key — are not actual keyboard buttons. They're zero-travel buttons like you'd see on the front of your monitor or TV. With how often I use Esc, the key may wear out before the batteries wear out.

The top row is even more problematic for Mac users. Apple's keyboards use the F-key row for all sorts of different functions than Windows computers, and the only overlap with the Sculpt is the mute and volume keys. All the other special functions are Windows-specific, and don't do anything on the Mac. And if you flip the toggle to use the F-keys, then you lose even the handy ability to easily change the volume.

Two Weeks In

Switching to a split keyboard from a regular one quickly shows your unconventional habits, typing keys left of the centerline with the right hand, or vice versa. The more unconventional, the more trouble you'll have with a split keyboard. For me, it's the Y. I often type Y with my left hand, and it's taken time to train the proper way.

The designers have done a great job enlargening the bottom row of keys: Ctrl, Alt, ⌘, space. You don't need to be very accurate to find the right key. And even though the backspace key is quite large, it feels so far away that it's taken more time to be accurate with. The bottom line is that, while different, there is no large productivity loss. For a coder, often the bottleneck isn't speed of typing, it's the speed of figuring out what to type.

As far as the main purpose of the keyboard: I can report having no fatigue or wrist pain, in situations which might have caused it with my old setup. Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, I know — there have also been no tiger attacks in my office since I purchased the keyboard. While it's a good start, it's only a start. There's a lot more to consider: elevation, posture, distance to the keyboard, and all sorts of other ergonomic factors that feed into pain-free typing. But this keyboard won't get in your way, if that's your goal.

In all, I heartily endorse Marco's hearty endorsement. If they fixed the top row's hardware and functionality problems it would go from being a good keyboard to a great one.

In 2011, Merlin Mann talked about being scared about making cool stuff, and doing cool things. And how we shouldn't stop doing harder and cooler things just because we're scared. Everyone is scared, even the successful. Back then I was making things, but they weren't as cool as I liked, and they were locked up behind a corporate wall. Merlin's talk inspired me to be scared of bigger and better things.

Instead of enterprise problems, I'm going to help with problems of actual people. Success won't be a number on a spreadsheet, but a smile on someone's face. That's cool.

Instead of locking up my work inside a corporate owner, I'm going to work on something with a wider audience, out on the open web, where it will stand for itself. That's also cool.

I'm going to use my best judgment, instead of trying to achieve consensus among tens of stakeholders. I'm going to sweat user experience details, even the ones that don't have a measurable ROI. I'm going to use modern technology. I'm going to try and delight my customers.

And I'm not going to have an evil business model. I'm going to make something that people like enough to pay for it. I'm not going to sell anyone up the river.

I expect this to be a hard road. My goal is to work on hard but rewarding problems. At least I know I'll be half right; I'm still only projecting the rewarding part.