I’m not really one for tech. Though I work in technology, I tend to put the computer away once I’m done working. That said, I consider a smartphone a necessary evil these days, and the main draw for me is not so much the web/connectivity aspect, but the camera.

I’ve had an iPhone XS for a while now, but with frequent slowdowns and less-than-stellar image quality (especially at night) compared to my girlfriend’s iPhone 11, I decided to upgrade early and go all in on the iPhone 12 Pro Max. The image quality is amazing.

Mountains near Empire, CO

I’ve also replaced my laptop – more or less1 – with an iPad Air. I have the Magic Keyboard, which is a work of art, and it’s become my photo editing / Bible studying / writing machine. The Apple Pencil and the Magic Keyboard make it a go-anywhere powerhouse for all of the things I do on a daily basis, and when I want to study2, I can pull the iPad off the keyboard and go to town. I haven’t yet decided whether the 11” is enough; we’ll see how it works out once I really start working on studying textbooks, which is where I think I’d see the added utility of the larger size.

I think that’s the key to living healthily with tech; we have a tendency to fetishize it, and it can very quickly become an idol in and of itself. So long as we can view it as a tool, though, and ensure that it’s useful to us, it can help gather, rather than disperse, our focus.

  1. For the most part. There are still some things that the iPad can’t quite manage – web development is still kind of a pain, for example. ↩︎

  2. Studying using PDFs of textbooks, marking them up and adding notes in the margins, is awesome. Yeah, you could just buy a textbook – but you can often find the PDFs free (or cheap,) and the easy searchability is a fantastic. ↩︎