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Every year throws up a long list of news stories, product launches and events. This year was better than most. Here are six 2019 stories that resonated with me. It’s a personal, unordered list and it’s written from a New Zealand perspective. You may have other highlights. Feel free to share them in the comments below.

Apple AirPods Pro

Apple AirPods Pro

Apple used a busy, noisy Auckland cafe to show off the AirPods Pro. By the time they hit New Zealand there was already an excited buzz about the noise cancelling ear buds. I expected a positive experience.

Even so, the sound quality was surprising. It wasn’t only the active noise cancelling, although that’s impressive enough. The AirPods sound is accurate. It doesn’t seem possible that something so small could sound so good.

My review says Airpods Pro offer affordable noise cancelling. I recommend you read this.

Samsung galaxy foldSamsung Galaxy Fold

Until 2019 it had been a long time since I left a product demonstration with a smile on my face. Then it happened twice in a short period. First with the Apple AirPods Pro, then a second time with the Samsung Galaxy Fold.

The price tag is be north of three grand (NZ$3400). Samsung’s first generation folding phone is a touch more fragile than I’d like. Yet here is the first major breakthrough in handset design since Apple’s first iPhone. Samsung has broken the mould and come up with real innovation.

Samsung’s Galaxy Fold is less a phone, more a small tablet that you can fold and carry in a pocket. You might even see it as a pocket computer. Either way, it is beyond impressive.

When folded it is a long slim phone, a little thicker and heavier than we’ve come to expect. Unfolded it is about the size of an iPad Mini and does much the same job.

Huawei showed its folding phone earlier at Mobile World Congress. A brief look confirmed it was a contender. So far, only one of the two models on show in Barcelona has made it to market in New Zealand.

No doubt there will soon be more, better folding phone designs. I’d love to see what Apple can do with this format: how about an iPhone that morphs into an iPad?

But for now, this is Samsung’s triumph.

César Azpilicueta

Spark Sport, Sky Sport Now

Spark Sport’s Rugby World Cup service came in for flak and some cruel media attention. That’s what you get for interfering with New Zealand’s favourite sporting code.

In my experience the streaming service worked fine during the RWC. I’ve racked up well over a hundred hours with the app. A lot of that was watching Premier League football1.

There have been hiccups, yet it is better experience than the BeIN service it replaced. My only gripe was I enjoyed the preview shows and the run-up coverage before big games on BeIN. Spark offers less of that. Also, half time is not so much fun without pundits.

Spark’s entry into streaming sport services has seen Sky lift its game. The new Sky Sport Now app has 12 channels of sport around the clock.

Sky Sport Now has excellent cricket coverage. It fills the European and international football gaps left by Spark. Most of the time there are enough channels to cover every game. Although there was one Champion’s League round where my team, Chelsea, only showed up as a replay later in the day.

I’m not complaining. The service is excellent. It’s good to see Spark and Sky compete by offering the best customer experience. It would be great if we had more of this kind of competitive tension.

The two streaming sport options are great value. Buying Sky Now and Spark Sport works out less each month than an old-style subscription to Sky’s satellite service. By my reckoning, there’s a broader selection of content to watch. That’s a win.

Deebot Ozmo 900 with Howl Bennett

Deebot Ozmo 900

Robot vacuums aren’t new. The Deebot Ozmo 900 updates the idea. It offers mopping as well as vacuuming. I had low expectations before I saw it in action. It impressed me once we used it. This is the only way to go.

The best part about the Ozmo 900 is that it’s low-slung body can get under beds, cupboards and tables. These are places where manual vacuuming gets hard. Another great aspect is, because it does all the work, you can vacuum more often keeping the house cleaner.

Ozmo 900 is a long way from the Androids science fiction writers promised for 2019. The good news is we don’t need to hire bladerunners to take them out when we’re done with them.

Auckland's first fibre
Steven Joyce installing Auckland’s first UFB cable – Albany – 24 August 2011

UFB: end of part 1

In the end builders finished the national UFB fibre network on time and under budget. That’s rare for a major infrastructure project and unusual given the project length. Read how the project started in The Download.

For me one of the clearest signs the original UFB project succeeded is that government found more money to connect another 169 areas. The so-called UFB2 takes coverage to around 85 percent of the country.

Another clear sign of success was Spark’s decision to stream Rugby World Cup coverage.

Next year, Chorus and central North Island fibre company UFF will offer 2Gbps and 4Gbps fibre. We’ve come a long way from ten years ago. Then a 30mbps fibre service looked like the last word in modern data communications.

Vodafone 5G

The Vodafone giant awakes

In recent years it seemed as if Vodafone’s New Zealand operation wasn’t going anywhere. In part this was because the parent company felt it had better things to invest in than the second telco in a small, remote country.

That changed in May. Infratil and Brookfield Asset Management took control in a $3.4 billion deal. Chief executive Jason Paris wasted no time getting the new owners to free up capital. This let Vodafone steal a march on Spark and get a sizeable 5G network running. Vodafone switched 5G on earlier this month.

There has also been an investment in customer support. That’s something that was an embarrassment in the past.

These initiatives are important, yet there’s more to the change. It’s as if Vodafone has had a vitamin injection. Now there is an energy to the business that wasn’t there before. It helps that Paris recruited fresh talent to senior positions, but it goes beyond that. It is as if the company has awoken from a slumber.

What it means in practice is that Spark faces greater competitive pressure than it did 18 months ago. Likewise the next tier of telcos; 2degrees, Vocus and so on, are also feeling the heat. Ten years after government restructured the industry we are seeing the competition those moves aimed to unleash.

Christchurch call

Six of the biggest tech moments of 2019 are positives. The seventh is also a positive, but it’s a positive that came about because of an horrific negative.

In May Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern spoke at the Christchurch Call summit in Paris. It was a response to the Christchurch mosque shootings. The terrorist shooter filmed his crimes, streaming them online in real time.

The summit attempts to force social media companies to take more responsibity for material they publish. During the year, 48 countries signed an agreement to stop social media publishing terror messages. The US didn’t sign.

It isn’t clear if the initiative will work. Yet it is a first step towards wrestling control of online media away from the murderers and criminals who use it as a weapon. I suspect there is more to do, but the longest of journeys starts with a single step.

  1. It could be more than 200 hours, I’m not counting ↩︎
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Many computer users don’t need to spend extra money on security software. Others do. This helps you decide where you fit.

Windows users can get Microsoft Defender1 for free. MacOS has built-in security features2.

For many people these free OS tools are more than enough protection.

That doesn’t mean there are no risks. The online world is as dangerous as ever. Yet, for many people there’s little value in paying for protection. Spend the money elsewhere.

Paid-for computer security won’t be foolproof even if you buy the best on the market. A clever social engineering attack can shimmy past the smartest defence.

A common example is when a crook persuades a victim to hand over a password or let them behind the defences.

Perhaps the most powerful way of defending your computer and data is making frequent encrypted backups. You can automate this in Windows and MacOS.

Given a choice between spending on security software or backup, I’d pick the latter every time.

You should make more than one kind of back-up. Perhaps use a cloud service and a local hard drive or network server. Ideally back up to a removable hard drive that you can store away from your computer.

Always test back-ups to make sure they are usable.

With back-up you can recover from most attacks, even ransomware . Some security products and services include back-up as part of their deal.

Who needs extra security?

  • If you deal with customer data or anyone’s personal data the law says you must protect it from attack. Security software goes some way towards meeting your obligations. It will reduce the likelihood of attack, criminals often find enough low hanging fruit elsewhere to leave your protected data alone.
  • If you have valuable data including material you want to stay secret. This includes things like business plans or product designs.
  • If you are a potential target for online criminals. This can include having valuable IP that crooks or foreign governments might want. It also includes things like working for political parties or campaigns where there are people who would be only too happy to embarrass or expose your data.
  • If you indulge in risky behaviour online. This can mean activity like illegal downloads or visiting dodgy streaming sites. Some sites at the dark end of the web are fronts to help find victims.
  • If you run a small business where employees are on a local network or you have a home system with teenagers. Sure, you can trust the people you know, but you can never be certain that others might make mistakes, either by indulging in risky behaviour or being susceptible to scams. Spending a couple of hundred dollars on security is easier and less stressful than attempting to monitor and police other people’s activity.
  1. Microsoft Defender isn’t perfect, but it does a good job and doesn’t get in the way, unlike some paid-for security software. ↩︎
  2. In six years I’ve never had the slightest security scare on my Macs ↩︎
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Beijing wants people to use only real identities online but there is concern over data collection.

Source: China due to introduce face scans for mobile users – BBC News

“People in China are now required to have their faces scanned when registering new mobile phone services, as the authorities seek to verify the identities of the country’s hundreds of millions of internet users.”

It’s creepy. Another step on a path to a terrifying totalitarian state that is starting to make George Orwell’s 1984 nightmare look mild in comparison.

Two things worry me abut this development. First, China could be paving the way for other governments to do something similar. In the West this may be pitched as some kind of protection from terrorism or crime, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be abused.

Second, it may not be secure. It’s bad enough for abusive totalitarian or even nominally democratic governments to use this technology to keep tabs on people, but what if criminals get their hands on it? Say if violent men use it to stalk women. We know that already happens with technologies like police car registration plate databases.

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Why You Should Ditch Your Laptop For iPad Pro

Ben Brooks argues that you should ditch your laptop for an iPad Pro. He says the iPad has shown it is a better tool than a laptop.

Up to a point I agree with Brooks. The iPad Pro can be a better work tool than a laptop in many circumstances. One day it may always outperform the more traditional computer format all the time.

The gap between what you can do on an iPad compared with what you can do on a laptop has almost closed. Every new version of iOS makes the gap smaller. That will accelerate now Apple has split iPadOS from iOS.

But we’re still not all the way there yet. Some tasks are still better done on the laptop. Take, for example, troubleshooting a web page. Despite there being excellent iOS web inspection tools, my favourite is Inspect Browser, this still works better on a laptop with a desktop-style browser.

Some webpages still force the iPad to a mobile version, although you can now demand the desktop page.

There are tasks that are better on an iPad Pro than on a laptop. I’m a journalist, I write for a living, all day most days. Writing is arguably better on an iPad Pro than a laptop.

I no longer use my MacBook as a portable. When I’m on the move the iPad is my preferred device. I fly with it, take it cafes and to meetings. Soon I will drop the MacBook, but not yet.

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sign in with Apple

At first sight sign-in with Apple looks like another attempt by a tech giant to collect user data.

It isn’t. Apple aims to reverse that data collection.

Facebook and Google offer single sign-in services. These are used to monitor people’s online activity.

Single sign-in reduces friction as you move around on-line sites that ask for a log-in. It speeds things up. That’s important in an impatient world.

Sign-in downsides

The downside is that Facebook and Google get to learn a lot more about account holder online activity.

You may view this as innocent, ominous or simply a tax paid to live in the digital world. You may not care.

Other downsides are greater security and privacy risks. In the past single sign-on services have been hacked.

Sign-in with Apple is different. It is more secure. There is built-in two-factor authentication support and anti-fraud detection.

You can use it to sign-in to websites. It also works with iOS apps. That way you know the apps you use are not sharing your private data with someone you may not trust.

Also, you choose if an app developer gets to see your email address. That’s optional.

If you choose not to share, Apple generates a disposable email address for that app. If, say, the app developer starts spamming you, you can kill the email address and lose nothing.

Sign-in with Apple works with Android phones and Windows computers, but you’ll get most from it if you have Apple hardware. It integrates with iOS and Apple Keychain. It also works with Apple TV and Apple Watch.

Sign-in with Apple stays private

There’s no lock-in. On the other hand, it might give privacy aware users who shop elsewhere another reason to consider Apple products.

Apple insists app developers using the App Store offer the service if they offer the Google or Facebook alternative. Otherwise it is optional.

At first I was wary of the idea. Now I’m keen. I’ve never used the Google or Facebook sign-ins and got used to doing things the slow, but more private, way. Now that’s unnecessary.

Of course, you have to trust Apple when it says that it doesn’t interpret collected data or keep track of your log-ins.

The difference here is that we know for certain Facebook and Google do this. Apple makes its money from hardware and services. Facebook and Google are all about surveillance capitalism.

See: Let’s Clarify some Misunderstandings around Sign In with Apple • Aaron Parecki