This is Technology Bytes, episode 169 for May 31st, 2026.
Technology Bytes is a microcast, where I share brief bytes on interesting technology.
Enjoy, and here we go.
This week I wanted to talk about expectations, and what does that have to do with technology?
Well, I’m really talking about my expectations for the technology that I use on a regular basis, or that I may want to use, or that I look forward to using.
It could fall into all of those categories, maybe what I’ve used in the past.
And oftentimes, my expectations are very high for what I want to do.
So, it helps convince me, and then helps me to convince maybe my wife that I can spend the money for a given technology because it’s going to make my life so much better.
And oftentimes, I set myself up for disappointment.
And I think that is a pattern that I go through over and over again, even when I know that it’s burned me in the past.
And I think, well, if I just had this technology, it would do this.
If I could just use this technology, I could do this, and I’d be better at that.
And I really set myself up for disappointment.
So, I was thinking just in the past few years, so I bought an electric car, always wanted to have an electric car.
And I bought a Kia EV6, and I really like it, and I think it’s really cool, and it’s got some great technology in it.
But at the same time, it doesn’t do everything that I would like it to do.
The built-in navigation for the Kia car itself is tied into the fact that I’m driving an electric vehicle.
So, it knows where the next stop should be if I’m taking a long road trip.
It understands about how long it’s going to take me to charge my car to a point where I can get to the next stop comfortably.
All this information is there, but I don’t want Kia to have that information about me.
I don’t want to use Kia’s technology to do that.
I want to use Apple CarPlay because that’s the system that I enjoy using.
And because Kia won’t open that information up about their car to Apple CarPlay, then I’m losing that availability of information.
So, Apple CarPlay can’t tell me, oh, you need to stop in this much time because then you’ll charge your car at this place for this long.
And it just can’t do any of that.
And so, I become very disappointed with the technology that Kia has chosen and how they’ve chosen to implement it in their vehicle.
In addition, the Apple CarPlay experience in the Kia, while good once you get there, is tough to get there.
It doesn’t remember that I was playing a given podcast the last time I was in my car.
My Honda did, but the Kia doesn’t.
It always starts out in the Kia environment.
I have to go into the Apple CarPlay environment.
That’s just silly.
I don’t understand it.
I don’t understand why my technology that I like to use can’t be tied into all the information that is in my electric car.
So, again, wanting to have an electric car, wanting to drive.
I mean, it’s a nice car.
That’s not necessarily why I got it, but the electric car was the part I liked.
And yet, the technology that they make available to me is not superior unless I use Kia’s technology.
And in addition to that, there are things like remote start and other remote technology.
So, they give it to me for, I don’t know, a year free or whatever, and then it’s a bunch of money.
It’s like $200 a year to do that.
And there’s no way that it costs them that to do that.
I’m already spending a bundle of money on a vehicle, and yet they put all of that technology, all of the cool things in their car, behind a paywall, and they also won’t release it to Apple.
Where do I end up?
Setting myself up for disappointment.
Last week I talked about using artificial intelligence at my work and how I thought it was pretty cool.
And this week I was given an account to do some of the things on my own instead of having to ask for assistance.
And it was really cool.
They did an onboarding process, interviewed me about what I do, said let’s set up a couple things that maybe I can help you with, and it was all quite impressive until we get to the end of the day, and every time I run this report that I have made through the artificial intelligence environment, it gives me different results, and it makes absolutely no sense to me.
And then in the same artificial intelligence environment, I run it from a different perspective, and it gives me a totally different answer.
And so I’m like, what in the world?
We went through this.
I asked you to make it this way, and you said you made it this way, and then I said, okay, let’s do this, and it’s like, oh, sorry, I can’t do that.
And I’m like, well, do it anyway.
And it’s like, oh, yeah, sorry, I can do that.
It’s just back and forth, and I understand it.
I understand that it’s not going to be perfect, but I, again, set myself up for disappointment because I see the potential, and yet the heartache that goes with meeting that potential puts me in arrears.
It makes me think this is not ready for prime time.
Okay, now comes the surprise.
Even in my relationship with Apple and the technology that I use there, I oftentimes get disappointed.
So I am disappointed with the ability that Apple has to know who I am and to know how I operate and to make that readily available through the devices that I use.
It’s frustrating to me that I can’t do this certain thing on this device and I have to use that device.
It’s frustrating to me that Apple doesn’t understand the things I do every day and recognize that it’s on my phone.
It’s there.
They know I’m doing it, I think.
And then I was thinking about some of the interactions that I have with my Apple devices and how it doesn’t seem to learn anything about me, and that gets frustrating.
And sometimes I think, well, if I have the latest this, you know, latest Apple Watch, I’ll be able to do this.
And I really try to live in the Apple environment as much as possible, even in the software.
And yet I often have to make do because of the lack of development.
And one of those places, just an app I use all the time, is the podcast app.
I just can’t drag and rearrange the podcast into an order that I want to listen to them.
I end up having to play a little bit of that one so it jumps to the front of the list, play a little bit of that one so that one jumps to the front of the list until I get the list in the mode that I want to listen to the podcast.
That’s just silly.
Why is that interface so bad?
And it just happens on the regular basis, again, setting myself up for disappointment.
So this is all a first world Joel problem because the loftiness of my aspirations for other people’s technology is not met and it makes me disappointed.
Well, on the other hand, I could say this is exactly what they’ve advertised.
It does exactly what they ask it or told me it was going to do.
All the things that are available are available there just as it was laid out for me.
Kia says you can have all this stuff, you just have to pay for it.
Apple says I can do this and this and this and this.
This is just the way the system operates.
Artificial intelligence says, hey, just keep asking, keep building.
Eventually I’ll get it right and on and on and on.
So I think what I have to do is learn to turn myself down just a little bit and not have such high expectations of things that have no soul, of things that have no ability to necessarily make me happy.
And what I need to do is spend time pouring myself into things and events and beliefs and people who are much more important than technology.
And sometimes I can do that with technology, sometimes I can’t.
But the end result would be maybe a happier me if I temper my expectations to something more realistic.
And here we are just a week plus away from WWDC.
My expectations are already through the roof.
I know I’m going to be disappointed and it’s too late for me to change that.
So all in all, this is a me ranting problem.
This is a me with higher expectations than anyone should possibly have out of a technology environment.
And so I just thought I’d talk about it for this brief moment.
Well, that is all I have for today.
If you have comments, suggestions, or questions, you can send them to technologybytes at merrickfamily.com.
As always, I want to thank you for listening to the Technology Bytes microcast and I look forward to the next time we are together taking another bite of technology.
