My Spotify Wrapped showed up on the 6th like always, and I still don't know how I feel about the new format. It used to be a handful of shareable slides you could screenshot and dump into your story. Now it's this whole scrolling production with a "Sound Town" feature that told me my music taste matches a city in Ohio I have never been to and, if I'm honest, have no plans to visit. There's also a "listening personality" thing now, mine came back as something like "The Replayer," which, fine, accurate, I did listen to the same Boygenius song something like 140 times in March. But the whole experience took me almost four minutes to get through on my phone Wednesday night, tapping and waiting for animations, when the old version took maybe thirty seconds and I could screenshot the good parts and move on with my life. I don't need Wrapped to be an event. I need it to tell me my numbers and let me leave.
Anyway, that's not even the thing I actually sat down to write about. My mom texted me Monday night in a full panic because someone on her local Facebook group had shared one of those "TURN THIS OFF RIGHT NOW" posts about the NameDrop feature on iPhones, the one where you can tap two iPhones together to share a contact card. Apparently half the police departments in the country put out warnings about it a few weeks back, telling people it lets strangers "steal your information" just by walking near you, which is not remotely how it works. NameDrop requires both phones to be unlocked, held within an inch or two of each other, face to face, and then it asks you to confirm before anything gets shared. You could not accidentally trigger this by standing near someone at a bus stop unless you were both actively trying to high-five your phones together for a solid few seconds. I tried explaining this to my mom over the phone for about ten minutes and she still made me walk her through turning it off in Settings > General > AirDrop, because at that point it was just easier than continuing the argument.
I did update to iOS 17.2 over the weekend though, mostly for the new Journal app, which I'd been curious about since it got announced back in June. I've used it maybe four times now and it's fine. It nudges you with little suggestions based on photos or workouts or places you visited that day, and honestly the suggestions are more interesting than anything I'd have thought to write on my own. Tuesday it prompted me with a photo from a coffee shop near my apartment and asked if I wanted to write about my day, and I ended up writing three paragraphs about nothing in particular, which is more journaling than I've done in probably two years. Whether I keep it up past January is a different question. I have a shelf of paper notebooks with exactly nine entries each that would suggest the odds are not great.
The bigger AI news this week has been impossible to avoid, obviously, and I'm not going to add another take to that pile, there's enough of that going around already. What I will say is that between the Wrapped rollout and the NameDrop thing, it's been a good reminder that most of the tech friction in my actual life this month has had nothing to do with any of that. It's been an app redesign turning a thirty second task into a four minute one, and a garbled warning traveling through a Facebook group faster than any actual explanation ever could. My mom is not going to read Apple's support documentation. She is going to read whatever her cousin reposts, and that's just how it works for most people, myself included half the time if I'm being honest about it.
Also, unrelated, but the coffee shop from the Journal prompt raised their oat milk upcharge to 75 cents sometime in the last month and nobody warned me. Small things.