The marvels of modern technology

Over the weekend, I upgraded my phone to iOS 10. Intrigued by the new messaging features, I promptly (and by "promptly" I mean "accidentally") texted my mother two of what she called "strobey hearts." Grateful she'd been the last person to text me (and thus the person whose conversation I opened to test the texting app...there are many people in my phone for whom sending two strobey hearts would not have been appropriate), I closed the messaging app and moved over to my photos.

New to the photos app is a feature that identifies faces, which you can then link to the contacts stored in your phone. Inexplicably enthusiastic about this, I spent quite a bit of time identifying everyone's pictures and linking them. But when done, it didn't appear that the pictures were visible from the contacts app, nor was contact information available from the pictures app. So I'm not sure what the point of that exercise was.

The third stop on this whirlwind tour of electronic exploration was to upgrade my iPad. Upon doing so I quickly discovered that none of the tagging I'd done on my phone had carried over. So again, I'm not sure what the point of that exercise was.

The last Apple product of mine to get my attention was my computer, the very one I'm using to write this entry. The computer upgrade was slightly different than the mobile-device upgrade, and, not knowing what to expect (but expecting big things nonethless!) I opened the photo app here.

Despite all three devices sharing the exact same set of photos, my computer grouped faces entirely differently than my phone and iPad, and on top of that, it didn't seem to know what the hell a face was.

Here are some things my computer thought were human faces:

This collection of running bibs

This tire

This pile of acrylic paint

My parents' cat

My dad's hands holding an owl

This bookcase

Britney Spears' stage

This hotel lamp

This hand-in-jacket

This Emergency Drinking Beer

This Christmas ornament

And me as a little kid watching myself pee
(along with whatever the hell the thing in the next photo is)

Confused, and not fully trusting the process, I tagged only myself on my computer, rationalizing that I'd wasted too much of my life already identifying people in photos whom I would never forget the names of anyway.

But before we get too harsh on the desktop upgrade, allow me to add that after all was said and done, the computer count stopped at 47 pictures of me. On my phone, where most of the tagging was done automatically, the count is 63. Even though, again, it's the exact same set of photos.

THE FUTURE IS NOW.