Tech to be thankful for

It's a pretty good time to be into this stuff

I am not from the US, nor have I ever lived there, so the American flavour of Thanksgiving is not something I’ve ever celebrated. The autumn holidays in our house are Diwali and Thanksgiving (Canada’s Version). We eat turkey for Christmas in the UK. I tell my American friends here in Tokyo that I’m thankful for them and that’s about it.

Still, Thanksgiving is not something I can ever fail to notice, not least because it fully dominates the tech news cycle for a week or two every year. Go look at any tech blog right now — it’s wall-to-wall Black Friday deals, or perhaps guides on fixing motion smoothing on your parents’ TV and how to raise the topic of RCS over dinner.

That’s all well and good — I know sites gotta do what they gotta do. But since I do not really envisage Multicore ever becoming a home for aggregated robot vacuum cleaner Amazon sales, and nothing else is going on this week, I thought I’d take a shot at holiday #content all the same.

I am personally thankful for this wildly hot red Analogue Pocket.

I know tech hardware isn’t the most consequential topic in the world. But you care about this stuff, and if you take a step back, I feel like there’s a lot to be thankful for at this point in time. In any other one of the past twelve years I’ve been writing about tech, I think I could probably have come up with a lot of obvious, industry-wide things that needed to be fixed about the hardware most of us use every day. Right now, though, we’re in a pretty good spot.

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USB-C is finally everywhere

With what could possibly be described as a slightly premature headline, I wrote a piece for The Verge in 2015 called “USB-C has already won”. It was based on reporting from Computex Taipei, where Intel announced it was adopting USB-C for its high-speed Thunderbolt 3 standard, so it seemed inevitable that the port would soon be ubiquitous from phones to pro laptops.

Headline aside, I think the story holds up quite well and identifies the potential pain points and confusion that ultimately came to pass. I made sure to note that I didn’t and don’t think USB-A is going away any time soon. But I still don’t think I realised just how prolonged the USB-C transition would be.