| I never thought I’d be able to blend two of my favorite things in a post sent to motorcycle riders but here we are talking about Apple & Motorcycling. It’s not all fun and games, don’t worry I have some gripes as well but if you are an Android user or, for some reason, not a motorcycle rider, you can stop reading. I may cross-post this to my blog for added visibility to the technology folks who read my writings over there. |
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| Apple hosts an annual event where they release new products that are consumer centric and portable, namely iPhone, AirPods and Apple Watch. That event occurred a couple of weeks ago and contained the usual once a year refreshes of some products I rely on but don’t really love. I love the Macintosh. If you asked me to pick just one Apple product, it would be the MacBook Pro 16” and formerly, the MacPro. I could get by with a flip phone and mechanical watch and Windows powered tablet but I can’t live without the Mac. I do wear an Apple Watch full time and despite owning all 7 generations of it, I only use it for notifications and answering calls when I’m under a motorcycle doing an oil change. I sleep and shower with the watch on and charge it 2-3 hours during the day while at my desk to 100%. The iPhone is with me when I leave the house but mostly lives on the charger. It charges at my desk, in my car, on my bike and I don’t carry it around with me. At night, when I’m on the couch, the phone is still at my desk. Despite this, I’ve owned nearly every iPhone since 2007 and upgrade every year. AirPods, I’ve lost more than I care to admit so I’ve bought a LOT of AirPods, first the original then the Pro models and the Max. |
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| Finally, Apple’s amazingly complex optical image stabilization that’s in all but one of their iPhone cameras still is not safe to use on motorcycles. This technology isn’t fully compatible with our vibrating motors and Apple has yet to find a technical breakthrough to make it work. Motorcycle riders are still asked to not mount their phones to their bikes. I do but via a vibration damping mount but still, it just seems like we aren’t at the top of the product team’s list when it comes to technical improvements. This issue isn’t exclusive to Apple’s phones but they could work on a fix with their resources.One very welcome improvement is iPhone’s always-on screen. The screen drops to a very low power output setting and changes its refresh rate to once per second (versus 60-120FPS usually). This saves a ton of power. But it means for me, someone who is constantly getting calls, emails and messages can alleviate a natural and trained anxiety I have about missing a message from my boss and the phone, docked to my handlebars is always on without being unlocked and at a high brightness. I like that my phone is always showing me notifications and it is something you can turn off if you’d like. |
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| …and then there’s the new Apple Watch Ultra which I’ve purchased because of course I did since my $900 Titanium Apple Watch purchased 10 months ago was no longer ‘new’ and thus sold to someone on eBay for $750 since you can’t purchase it anymore. The new Apple Watch Ultra seems like an overlander / adventure rider’s dream. Highly accurate GPS, tracking features with one button waypoint markers so you can press a big orange button to mark a spot like where you’re camping or where you left your friends and 36 hours to 1 week of battery life depending on usage along with being more resilient to extreme cold and heat and having a brighter screen that looks great outdoors oh and don’t forget the massively loud emergency alarm you can trigger if you get lost that can be heard from miles away. Every motorcycle rider should get one of these but there’s one big issue. No, it’s not the lack of motorcycle crash detection that someone should absolutely test but it won’t be me. Instead, it’s the design and size. See, the Ultra is HUGE. It’s twice as large as the current Apple Watch. The Digital Crown is larger but covered by a bumper that protects the crown and is likely harder to use with motorcycle gloves and that new big orange button you have to mark your location and other tasks, well that’s going to be obscured by anyone wearing riding gear such as a long sleeve jacket or gloves. The size of the watch means it will make it hard to use with tight gauntlet gloves and the screen will still suffer from fake presses while wearing large gloves. I already have issues fitting my 45MM Apple Watch under large gloves and this is 49MM and twice the height (thickness) with straps that are even larger. About the only things going for it would be the emergency alarm and long lasting battery at least when it comes to the appeal it has to motorcycle riders. |
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| I think the Ultra is going to be a cool watch and I can’t wait to use it but I think maybe motorcycling just isn’t the top of many designer’s list of use cases to appeal to. I’ll give it a go and maybe all of my assumptions are going to be dead wrong when it arrives in a few days. |
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| The last adventure-centric item from Apple though arrived just in the nick of time. They’re adding 2 really great features for those of us who regularly spend multiple days off-grid. That’s a satellite communication feature. I saw a lot of tech reviewers mention that this is only for extreme people and they can’t imagine a use case for it. I picked up my new iPhone 14 Pro Max on release day a few days ago, charged it, put it on my motorcycle and went camping. An hour into my ride, my iPhone’s cell signal bars showed “SOS” instead of Verizon. Yep, I was in satellite mode. I was in that mode for 2 straight days. The iPhone wasn’t talking to any cell phone towers but it was ready, if I needed it, to walk me through an SOS broadcast to call centers that would dispatch help.IPhone 14 and 14 Pro will have 2 years of free SOS and I’ve already cancelled my Garmin InReach Plan which was $30 a month. I don’t need InReach tracking anymore thanks to my RLink which integrates with Revver) and I never used the InReach texting location to my wife so if iPhone can dispatch search & rescue and not charge me for the connection, that’s a huge win. It also works to update your location in Find My so I can manually trigger a location share which I did with my wife when I got to the campsite. I pushed my location to her and she could see I was at a campground. We couldn’t communicate but she knew I had arrived, something that the InReach did more passively via a Map Share Link that I share with her that’s password protected. |
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| This year’s Apple product innovations are a step in the right direction. A more rugged watch with longer battery life and some features that may not work for most motorcyclists, crash detection that might work if you’re on a motorcycle, a new satellite system that will save your life when you’re off-grid and let you tell loved ones where you are when it’s time to setup camp or when you get to the top of that mountain oh and finally, new AirPods which their most exciting feature is the ability to pipe people’s voices in through your ears but eliminate loud noises such as horns, traffic, jackhammers and trains. Not a feature I need when in the woods but it will cause me to wear them more often in noisy areas when I am talking to someone but don’t want a lot of outside noises other than their voice. Pretty cool tech!So there you have it. A newsletter about Apple and Motorcycles. I didn’t think I’d be able to pull it off. I hope you enjoyed it! |
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