For the most part, new technology fails to excite or impress me. Don’t get me wrong… I’m always interested in technology that genuinely makes a difference in our lives… but I haven’t come across much of that lately. I’m frequently asked by my friends, and sometimes my family members to give recomendations on various toys and tools, and lately I have found myself answering in much the same way… ‘buy what works for you’.

Part of the issue is one of Chinese Obligation… which is what usually happens when you give a friend a recommendation… it is sort of like selling them a car, where anything that goes wrong with that car in the future then becomes your problem. But mostly… It’s just that I don’t care enough to keep up anymore with all of the changes, and subconsciously choose to focus on a small number of technological advances that actually directly impact me and those around me.

I came to this epiphany the other day when my dad asked me ‘What is the fastest commercially available computer out there?’ … my initial answer was basically… ‘whatever you can afford’… ‘whatever is reasonable’… which was not the answer that he was looking for, because he was asking in terms of availability to the general population, and not thinking of Mesh / Cloud computing, or multi-processor systems like I was.

I quickly realized that I honestly did not know. I have not kept up with where we are with the top end speed of processing because I have not really paid attention to computers from that perspective in several years. My goals have always been met by the hardware I own one way or another, and those goals have shifted recently from ‘faster’ and ‘cheaper’ … to ‘more productive’, ‘asthetic’ and ‘hassle free’. I’m finding that those goals are met more often as a result of the underlying software and operating system than by the hardware you choose. Hardware has become a commodity, and as a result… differences in quality and offering (for non-integrated components) are minimal.

Even when looking at software, many of my goals are actually met by ’services’ rather than ‘products’, as the software industry quickly transitions into an atmosphere where hosted applications like Google Apps are more accessible. This further reduces my need to even know anything about what is under the hood of my personal computer, with the minimum requirements being that of a browser.

I have a friend who has asked me every couple of months for the last 2 years if I know of any good deals on a Mac Powerbook. He’s never actually bought one… and my advice is always the same… ‘buy the best that you can afford of the ones that they have available at the time when you have money to buy it, and suck the life out of it for the time you have it’. It’s sort of a cop-out really… because again… I really don’t care. I love Mac… but I’m really not so interested in them to keep up with their every move, and the prices never really change much with each new product release. ‘New’ almost always assumes ‘faster’ anyhow, and so I’m really left with what amounts to a 10-15% price difference between last year’s and this year’s model, so my only decision is… ‘are the new features worth 10-15% more?’.

I own 2 Powerbooks (actually my employer owns one of them)… and they both do everything I need them to. When they cease to do that, I may again become interested in what is available at the time… but for now… I really just do not care. If I’m still working for a company that provides a laptop, I probably still won’t care.

About 2 weeks ago, a friend of mine had some questions about the iPhone, which I have yet to purchase, and this is a bit of a sore spot for me. Because I don’t own one, and have not kept up with the reviews or any information at all on it… I could not answer his questions. I had a twinge of ‘geek guilt’… thinking… ‘i really should know the answer to that question… i am after all his geek friend!’ Understand… I like the iPhone, but for much different and unrelated reasons than what drove the questions he was asking, which were about connecting to a Microsoft Exchange Server and opening Microsoft Word documents and Excel sheets. Again… at least at this point (particularly when I don’t yet own one) … because they are features that I would seldom use, i really don’t care if these features exist on the iPhone, and so I don’t know if they do.

My answer to my friend was basically… ‘I’m sure it does’… founded only in the knowledge that iPhone supports Imap4 and so therefore probably works with Exchange server that way (but most likely not full compatibility, as none of these smart phones really do have full compatibility with Exchange) … and the fact that I just could not see Apple being stupid enough to release the iPhone without having some faculty for opening and editing Word and Excel files. I also figured that if Apple didn’t offer it, some third party would. But I didn’t know… and didn’t really care.

So I’ve developed Techno-Apathy.