iTribble

Just over a month or two ago, I wasn't an Apple customer. Sure, my daughter had an iPad (which I had used for a little development), but I didn't own or use any Apple devices myself.

Then my company mobile phone gave up the ghost. I had a Galaxy SII, and was assuming that I would get an SIII when the renewal came due. However, my old phone simply died a few days before the SIII became available in the UK, and I got an iPhone instead as it was actually available there and then.

The iPhone is OK, I guess. I'm not really a heavy smartphone user, it's handy to have some of the features but I wouldn't say that they're really crucial to me. My own personal phone is many years old now, and is one of those increasingly rare device that's actually useful for making phone calls. Generally, though, I wouldn't say that the iPhone is dramatically better than the Galaxy SII I had before; it's a bit more polished, but that's about all.

When it comes to spending my own cash, I then got myself a new iPad. The one with the retina display. I had been meaning to for a while, but was often too busy.

I had used several iPads before, and they've always just felt right. The touch, weight, balance, quality, all combine to generate an excellent experience. I wanted something around the home with reasonable battery life, instant on, and something that doesn't need a magnifying glass or too precise finger location. And the iPad delivers.

The main thing I use it for, a lot, is Sky Go. Generally in catchup mode, rather than live. (It's one of those odd things. Of all the programming that's available, a small fraction is what I want to watch. Invariably there's a multiway conflict, followed by hours or days of total wasteland.)

Generally, I find the Sky Go player to work extremely well. Better than iPlayer, anyway (whether that's the player or the delivery mechanism, though, I'm not quite sure). But then I notice that the latest release of the iPlayer app can download content to the iPad for viewing later, which may come in extremely useful.

I got a little iPod shuffle along with it. It's just great. I had an mp3 player from a brand that I had never heard of, and it wasn't reliable, nor did it have reasonable battery life. The whole thing put me off. But I wanted a little distraction at the gym, so the shuffle was perfect - you don't want to look at it or fiddle with the controls, ever, beyond on and off, and I wanted the smallest and lightest model available. I find myself using it so much now that I could actually do with a larger capacity model to get more tracks in the mix.

The latest toy is a new MacBook Pro. A new company laptop was due, I'm known to be a unix guy, so got offered a choice. My only constraint was that the resolution be adequate. (Seriously, 1366x768 is so 1990s.) So the retina display was called for again.

Frankly, I love it. So the keyboard is different, the trackpad is different, the user interface is different. But I quickly became accustomed to it, especially when things actually work. Like the iPad, though, the user experience is dramatically superior. And that old Windows thing from a mainstream supplier I had before is utter garbage in comparison.

Unfortunately I'm having a bit of trouble persuading the company to go for the dual thunderbolt 27-inch display setup.

So, largely by accident, and certainly without deliberate planning, most of my devices happen to have an Apple logo on.