Looking at Tech From Another Perspective
Reviewing Tech from the Casual Users Eyes
Update
Hey there! Hope you have been doing well. The last week or so I have been taking things kinda easy. I had a break in my school last week in between classes and decided to give myself a little bit of some leeway, but this week I'm back into the action. Started my next class(insert next class) and I've been revving to keep busy. I have continuously kept working on my Coursera Certs and I'm about halfway through rebuilding my Portfolio. I'm getting close to reaching the part of the Coursera Certifications where I can learn about React Native and I'm excited about that. I enjoyed learning about React for my portfolio blog so I'm even more excited to learn about it for mobile application development.
Hope you guys have been doing well and keeping busy too!
Reviewing Tech from the Casual Users Eyes
So in the world of technology, there are the enthusiasts and the casual users and they see devices very differently. I would say the casual users are the everyday users who may use the technology very well every day, but their love for technology is other nonexistent or very minimal. These types either are amazed that their device can load all these apps on it or they get annoyed when something goes wrong on the device and they don't know. I don't have a survey was done or anything, but this is most of the world.
And then there are the tech enthusiasts. The ones like me who love to just constantly integrate tech and push it to the limit. Things go wrong with it and we can see the things that are still good about a product. We constantly are thriving for the next innovation and get super excited about all the rumors of technology and all the possibilities that it can bring us. We are the ones who live and breathe the tech life.
Now there is nothing wrong with each one of these mindsets. They are both fine in their ways, but as the tech enthusiast who pursues the life of talking and explaining tech to others, the line gets a little gray on our explanations.
Let me explain. We see this in some of your YouTube creators and other forms reviewers sometimes that they get into the real nitty gritty of a product. They start looking at specs and complaining about why this phone got this chipset or if this phone's camera has more than this one. While all of that is fine and dandy, sometimes constantly looking at these specs does curve your opinion of the product. I see this in my own life when I'm reviewing the product or just interacting with some of my friends and family. Someone will ask me about which Mac they should get or which phone they should get and I start talking about the one I would get. I would get the MacBook Pro with 32 GB of RAM and start going off the specs like crazy, but realistically that person may not need to use all that. Sometimes, I don't even need that much horsepower. Heck, I'm writing this on a base-level Mac Mini and I haven't been able to fully push that thing to the limit yet (although I haven't tried video editing yet on it, but that is coming soon).
I guess the point I'm getting at is that sometimes we get super into the weeds of the specs and it makes you forget who this device is geared towards the casual tech fan. See it is nice to have the options there for us, but realistically not everyone is doing all these extensive tasks on their machine. They are running just trying to do the bare minimum on the device. It makes it hard for the reviewer because you have to put yourself in their shoes. You have to make yourself think about what the average person would do. The average person isn't taking a photo and then throwing it in the lightroom and doing all this editing. The average person is just communicating with others and when they take photos just take the photo and apply an Instagram or Snapchat filter it. When they are on the computer, they are just web browsing or doing some basic document editing. They don't need all the power. This is hard for the reviewer sometimes to do this, trust me.
And to be honest that lens is becoming even more and more important. The hardware has started to become so good. With the M1 chips and the latest smartphones both iOS and Android, people are holding onto these devices for longer and longer. Back in the day, those base-level machines and smartphones needed to be upgraded very rapidly to just do the basics. Now people are holding phones for half a decade and still not needing to upgrade.
So when you are out there trying to give a recommendation on a new product to your friend or family, or when you are writing your next review, try to remember that the average user needs and if the products can achieve those goals. I know I'm going to start looking at products like that more and stop trying to only compare devices to high-end models.
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