A few months ago, I had a conversation with my phone’s AI assistant about rescheduling a doctor’s appointment. Standard stuff. Then I started thinking about where exactly that conversation went. Turns out: a server in a data center somewhere. Processed by a cloud AI. Potentially logged for quality improvement. That bothered me more than I … 더 읽기
Last Thanksgiving, I sat down with my phone and realized something uncomfortable: my kids had emergency contacts set up on their phones, but my parents — who are in their mid-seventies and live twenty minutes away — had nothing. No Medical ID. No SOS contacts. Their phones would have been completely opaque to any first … 더 읽기
The first time I set up a smartphone for my dad, I made every mistake in the book. I moved too fast. I used terms like “swipe up from the bottom” and “long press” without realizing those meant nothing to someone who’d never touched a touchscreen before. I handed the phone back thinking it was … 더 읽기
My dad called me last fall, a little flustered. He’d been trying to swap out an old emergency contact — his brother, who had passed — and replace it with my sister’s number instead. But every time he opened the Health app and saw all his medical information sitting there, he froze. “I don’t want … 더 읽기
A few years ago, I helped my dad set up his new iPhone. We went through the basics — Wi-Fi, email, his favorite apps. Before I left, I asked him, “Do you have an emergency contact in here?” He nodded and showed me his contacts app. There it was: ICE — Son (Me), with my … 더 읽기
My mom called me, pretty shaken, last spring. Her neighbor had triggered an SOS alert by accident — and the neighbor’s daughter had received a text out of nowhere saying her mom was in an emergency. No context. Just a location pin and a message. She was fine. But the daughter had no idea the … 더 읽기
My aunt lives alone in a two-bedroom house in Ohio. She’s in her mid-seventies, sharp as a tack, and deeply attached to her independence. She also had a fall in her kitchen last February. She was on the floor for four hours before a neighbor noticed her car hadn’t moved. She was okay, eventually. But … 더 읽기
I’ve been covering smartphone rumors for years, and there’s one device that’s been on my personal wishlist since roughly 2018: a foldable iPhone that actually doesn’t embarrass Apple. Every year I’d read the same line — “Apple is two years away from a foldable iPhone” — and every year, nothing. The rumors piled up. The … 더 읽기
When I helped my dad set up his iPhone last spring, he stopped and asked me something I didn’t immediately know how to answer. “Wait — I just added you as an Emergency Contact. But the Health app is also asking me to fill in a Medical ID. Aren’t those the same thing?” They’re not. … 더 읽기
My mom called me, clearly shaken, about six months ago. Her phone had buzzed twice in a row from an unknown short number, and she had no idea what the messages meant or whether to respond. It turned out my uncle — whom she’d listed as an emergency contact years earlier — had accidentally triggered … 더 읽기