A Tale of Two Tech Fails
As someone who spent my life in the tech industry, every so often I run into a tech problem I struggle to figure out, and which causes me to wonder “How do non-technical people deal with this?”
The first one involves an Apple Pencil. Mine wore out and stopped charging, so I bought a new one — the new “USB-C” version. It arrived, and I plugged a USB-C cable into it, and into the iPad to pair it, and.. Nothing happened. I tried a couple of different cables. Nothing happened. I had Laurie try to pair it with her iPad. Nothing.
So did I get one that was DOA on delivery? I had no idea. I started digging into the documentation and after a bit, I realized what the likely problem was. The Apple Pencil requires a “USB C charging cable”. And that’s the tech failure here — not the pencil (although I do wish it had some way to show it was, in fact, charging, so I’d at least know it’s alive even as it refuses to pair) but the USB C standard: It’s a massive, well-intention cluster.
The problem with USB C is that the functionality a cable supports can differ — some support Thunderbolt, but not all. Some pass data, some can share data and charge. Charging cable shave different capacities, and I ran into this USB C cluster a few months ago when I tried to upgrade to a more powerful charger for the laptop, and I found out that a 100W charger is kinda useless when the cable only supports 16 watts of transfer.
And… the big problem here is that there is no defined standard for manufacturers to lable cables to their capabilities. Some Thunderbolt cables have icons, but not all of them. For basically all of the other variations, well, good luck.
To solve my pencil problem, I did what any tech person would do: I went out to the shop, pulled out my box of spare USB C cables, and just kept pulling them out and trying them until one worked and the pencil paired. It was the fifth I tried. If you’re not a tech type, how do you solve this? Probably with a call or chat with Apple tech support. But this isn’t really an Apple problem, it’s an inherent issue with how they defined out the USB C standard: It does in fact fix many of the issues we’ve had over the years with USB cabling, but for some reason, they didn’t seem to think having a way for a user to know what the cable can and can’t do mattered. Huh. (I’m not the first to run into this: Glenn Fleishman wrote a nice piece on the problem for Tidbits back in 2021)
At my main charging station I do have charging cables, so the pencil was fully charged and ready to go (but wouldn’t tell me until it was paired), but those cables are taped down because I got tired of them randomly unplugging at inconvenient moments — so I now own 2 6” charging cables, one that lives with the charging station and one that lives in my day-bag charging kit. Total cost for the 2, $5. But the frustration of having to convince an inert piece of plastic to talk to the iPad? So much for “it just works”
Seeing Purple
The other problem I ran into recently involved a product called Purple Air. These are air quality monitors, and if you have run into problems with air quality due to wildfires over the last few years, you’ve probably seen data generated by them. When I moved into the place here in Washington, I figured it’d be fun to run one of the sensors and add to the community data, so I bought a unit, and then proceeded to stick it onto the shelf of future projects I lovingly call the island of lost toys.
One of the things I’ve been doing this spring is trying to go through that cache of “one of these days” projects and finish them (I’m happy to report the list of incomplete projects has gone from seven to two). I built out a project box to hold the power supply, fired it up, connected thigns to the cloud, and all seemed to be going okay, so I went and mounted it and waited for the data to start flowing.
A day later, nothing. It was powered, it was configured, everything seemed to be set up right, so I started digging into it, assuming it was something stupid like a firewall issue. After digging into it a bit, I found a support doc that seemed to cover this problem. It turns out there’s an IP conflict between the device and an Eero default configuration. They helpfully give instructions on how to fix it — and those instructions tell you to go in and re-number your entire network off of the 192 network Eero uses by default.
I slowly backed away from the computer and went off to ponder what they’re suggesting, which is a global change to your entire network. This has big implications if you have custom firewall or static IP definitions, and is likely to break various things if you do it casually (or not so casually, to be honest, That’s not something to do to an active and busy network unless you like chasing gremlins for days)
And it was about this time I realized that this product had a hardwired IP address and did not support NAT. NAT is the standard networking protocol that allows a random network device to connect in and ask the router for an IP address.
I’m trying to think of the last time I ran into a network device that didn’t support NAT (which has existed since the 1990s), and I can’t. Realizing that these folks designed a product that hardwired an IP address, didn’t build NAT support into it, and their solution to this is “hey, just go and rewrite your entire network around us! What could possibly go wrong?” just sent me down a path of muttering that was not positive and teambuilding, and which was frankly not safe for work or this blog. One might almost say the air turned a bit blue, perhaps with some purple streaks, as I went and uninstalled the device from the side of my house, pulled it off the project box I had attached it to (because it’s power was from one of those square brick wall warts, and even if you trusted it to be properly weather sealed, having that off the side of the house would have been beyond butt ugly), and it went into the spare parts bucket to be taken apart and scavenged at some point.
Because there’s no way I’m going to shift my entire house to a new network range because someone was too lazy to build NAT support into a basic IP-centric device.
It’s not often I get seriously pissed at a company for stupid design decisions, but Purple Air, you succeeded.
