Things don’t have to change the world to be important.
- Steve Jobs
The saying goes that every family needs a doctor and a lawyer. Something like that. Though in this past few decades the need for the family IT technician has clearly arisen. My circle of friends tends to serve that role for our families and much as an IT professional will joke to his savvy friends about dealing with clients, so we talk with one another about the family issues and excitement that we are having.
One of my favorite positive stories come from the college days when most of us we dual booting, triple booting, quadruple booting out machines. One of my friends said over the summer he walked in to find his mom on his machine happily writing up a letter in StarWriter under OS/2 with no clue that she was on the cutting edge of computing technologies.
Recently I have been seeing my family slowly making the shift from Windows and Blackberries onto Apples and iPhones. It's an interesting shift. Four years ago when my dad asked what phone he should buy I told him to buy a BlackBerry Bold. One month ago when he asked, I gave him the choice between an iPhone or Galaxy S3. My in-laws upgraded to the iPhone 5 while I was at their home for the holidays. I am their extended computer support as well.
When I was a PeopleSoft consulting I was taught a very interesting way of thinking by PeopleSoft. "We are experts in human resource software and human resource process. Our software is designed around the best processes and the most common processes. If you consult at a company that wants to do heavy customization to PeopleSoft to support their processes the most likely thing you need to change is no the way PeopleSoft does things." Apple expressed a similar sentiment during the iPhone antenna issues explaining how people should use a case or hold it differently, aka "you're holding it wrong."
"So we've been syncing our old iPhones to this older computer. Now we got our new iPhones and we synced it the new computer. We've got most of our settings back on the new iPhone, but our Apps, Photos and Music don't seem to be there. I tried syncing the old iPhones to the new computer but it doesn't get it back." Correct. To me this thinking is trivially wrong. But how do you fix it? So you've got 100% of your music on your old computer synced to your phone. And you've re-ripped 20% of that music to your new computer plus another 20% that's brand new. If you just copy your old files to your new computer you'll have 20% duplicates. "Can't you just download the music off the old phone onto the computer?" Sorry - no. You're holding it wrong.
Now my dad is making the switch from BB to iOS. This one is going to be painful. I can feel it my bones. So I told him step #1 was go to Apple store (or AT&T store) and they will plug the two phones into their magic device that will transfer stuff from one to the other. I saw these thing work wonders when it transferred Ms.Chaos' Palm data into her first iPhone at the Apple Store. The genius told me, "we have a magic elf in the back that does it." Well done magic elf.
