Warming up to the Apple Watch took me a while.

When the first version of the smartwatch came out in 2015, I delighted in having an Apple-branded product on my wrist. When the novelty wore off, though, I realized the gizmo wasn’t useful to me in any life-changing way, and ended up leaving it on its desktop charger most of the time.

Apple’s initial, largely ineffectual stabs at a smartwatch operating system were part of the problem, but it kept iterating to make its watchOS better and better. An increased emphasis on fitness was a good move (pardon the pun).

Over time, I discovered more and more uses for the Apple Watch, some fitness-related, others not. I detailed this in a recent Pioneer Press column.

And that was before Apple released the groundbreaking Series 4 version of the watch, along with a vastly improved version 5 of watchOS.

Read more ›

Laptops with touch screens are pretty much the norm these days, with a prominent exception: Macintosh notebooks.

Apple has stubbornly refrained from adding fingertip interaction to the displays on its MacBook-branded notebooks (while tryihg to accommode touch aficionados in other ways, like gargantuan trackpads and a controversial MacBook Pro Touch Bar.)

So what’s a touch-y Mac user to do?

Read more ›

I love sit-stand desks, those contraptions that can be raised and lowered so you can work on a computer in a sitting or a standing position.

Standing desks have been hailed on health grounds, though the science on this is a mixed bag, at best. Prolonged sitting isn’t good for you, but switching to a standing desk doesn’t appear based on current evidence to be miraculous wellness enhancer.

So why do I love standing desks?

Read more ›

Tech gifts for the holidays run the gamut price-wise from $20 or less to $1,000 and over, which can make shopping for such products confounding — especially if you are not a geek.

I recently appeared on WCCO-TV, my local CBS affiliate, to shed some light on this. Here are the products I featured in a WCCO Sunday Morning segment.

Read more ›