JoeKnowTech

I'd been a Windows guy my entire life. Surface Pro 3 was my daily driver — I loved the stylus, the versatility, the 2-in-1 form factor. Then one afternoon I walked into a Microsoft Store, played with a MacBook Air for 20 minutes, and made a decision I was sure I'd regret. Three months later, here's the full verdict. Why I Made the Switch My Surface Pro 3 was 2 years old and starting to show it. The battery had degraded to about 4 hours of real-world use. The fan kicked on constantly during light tasks. And the kickstand-on-lap experience, which I'd always defended, was genuinely getting on my nerves. The MacBook Air had just gotten a price cut and the reviews were calling it the best value laptop Apple had made in years. I got a fair trade-in value for the Surface and walked out with the Air for less than I expected. The First Week: Culture Shock The keyboard shortcuts are different. The file management is different. Right-clicking requires a two-finger tap or a ...

I held out longer than most. While everyone around me was pre-ordering on day one, I kept my iPhone 6S and told myself I'd wait for "something worth upgrading to." Then I spent an afternoon with the iPhone 7 at an Apple Store, and two things happened: I immediately understood why people were excited, and I immediately understood why people were furious. Here's the full breakdown. Reason #1: The Camera Is a Genuine Generational Leap I take a lot of photos. The jump from the iPhone 6S camera to the iPhone 7 camera is not incremental — it's significant. The f/1.8 aperture lets in dramatically more light, which means low-light shots that were noisy and blurry on the 6S are sharp and usable on the 7. Optical Image Stabilization came to the standard model (it was only on the Plus before). Portrait Mode on the 7 Plus changed how phone photos look entirely. Photography alone justified the upgrade for me. If you care about mobile photography, this was the year to move....

I bought what was listed as a "factory unlocked" iPhone on eBay for a great price. Popped in my new carrier's SIM. "SIM Not Supported." I'd been burned by one of the most common — and most misunderstood — problems in the phone market. Here's everything you need to know before it happens to you. What "Unlocked" Actually Means An unlocked phone is one that isn't tied to a specific carrier's network and will work with any compatible SIM card. A locked phone has software on it that restricts it to one carrier — usually the carrier that subsidized the phone's original purchase price. Sounds simple. The problem is that "unlocked" is one of the most misused words in phone listings, and there are actually multiple types of "unlocked" that work very differently. The 4 Types of "Unlocked" — And Which Ones Actually Work 1. Factory Unlocked (TRUE unlocked): The phone was never tied to a carrier in the first...