These past couple of weeks have been big for Apple as they just released their new iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro, and iOS 13 upgrades. The iPhone 11 was released Sept. 20 and everyone has been raging about it since. The biggest feature that caught my eye was, of course, the double or triple camera options. It has a super-wide mode that can capture up to four times as much of the scene. On top of this, the camera also has intense lighting, and the portrait mode has a quicker focus time and more light settings. This phone has really been marketed for this generation. 

The camera does seem to be the biggest change from the 10 to 11, but there are some small features that I think are super essential and am happy are being fixed. I have an iPhone X right now, and while the phone is great and I’m lucky to have such a high quality gadget, it does have its faults. The Face ID never seems to register unless I stare into my phone’s soul for five seconds. Apple reports that iPhone 11 and 11 pro is up to 30 percent faster. 

My second complaint was the battery life, which somehow only lasts me until around 6 p.m. even when I charge it overnight. They have also fixed battery life issues, reporting that the iPhone 11 has up to four more hours of battery life. There’s a lot of other features like water resistance and point airdrop

For people who don’t want to spend money and upgrade to a whole new phone, Apple launched iOS 13 for iPhone 6 and up Sept. 10. If you keep hitting update later, stop. This update is worth the hour wait time. In my opinion, the best part in would be the dark mode option. I’m always blinded by the light of my screen at any time of the day, but this new option lets users change their home screen and certain participating apps to dark mode. Users can also set an automatic timer for their phone to change to dark mode each night. So if you want your eyes not to be blinded when looking at the time at night, dark mode is the way to go. 

Another useful update is Apple Maps. Apple Maps has been rearranged and updated to remember more locations, suggest locations and view locations in a 3D landscape. If users search for a well-known location and click the binocular button they can view their searched location in a 360-degree earth view, which can be super helpful if you are a visual tracker much like I am. Users are also able to add more saved locations instead of just their home and work location. 

Apple is really trying to listen and improve their products for the masses. They always seem to be coming out with an update or new phone or new version of the old, but I view this in a positive light. Yes, it’s 100 percent capitalism at its finest, don’t get me wrong, but it’s also the mentality that nothing will be perfect. You always want it to be better and with our technology constantly developing, I think our phones need to as well, and Apple recognizes this. 

On Apple’s website, they say the new iPhone 11 has a “chip so advanced, even we’re trying to catch up.” which just goes to show that they are striving for better products each time for their customers. The iPhone 11 will definitely be followed by an iPhone 12 and 13 as well as more iOS updates, but at least Apple is trying – which I think is all I can personally ask from a company.  

What do approximately 20 engaged students, 10 invested faculty and staff, and an inordinate number of Chipotle burritos have in common? They were all gathered in Yates Gill College Union 221 for a University Innovation Fellows (UIF) hosted Rapid-Prototyping and problem solving event, April 18.

The event was headed by Denver Strong, senior mathematics and physics major, a UIF passionate about invoking change on campus through creative problem solving. With the guidance of Dr. Kelli Schutte, chair of the Business Department and UIF faculty advisor, Strong organized this event to get student athletes and relevant school officials in the same room and talking about the things that matter.

Each individual attending the event was allowed to select their seat at a table with a designated conversation topic. The topics discussed included: academic achievement, counseling, facilities, funding and events. These became the focus of conversation during the event.

These subjects were identified for two key reasons: first, they were deemed to be relevant to all William Jewell College students, but have special significance for student athletes, and second, at a UIF event hosted Nov. 2018, these areas were identified to be in need of positive change.

During the event Strong imparted onto attendees some of the skills learned during the extensive UIF training process – to be accepted into the program, students must complete an online application, be vetted by officials at Stanford University and then complete a six-week training program culminating in a four day workshop in Silicon Valley, CA.

Strong concentrated on the UIF model of creating rapid change by developing small-scale physical representations of ideas – prototypes – allowing for immediate feedback from potential users, as opposed to waiting weeks for bureaucratic procedures and high-tech models to be constructed. At the April 18 event Strong had groups of students, faculty and staff work together to construct prototypes for solutions to issues affecting athletes on campus.

The event was supported and co-hosted by former Student Senate President Jakob Miller, senior economics and mathematics major, who was exposed to the UIF design thinking process at the Nov. 2018 event hosted at Rock’n’Run. UIF is an organization that has been active on Jewell’s campus for a number of years and has implemented several projects in the Kansas City community, including the popular #OneDayKC event. This year Jewell’s UIF cohort has focused their energy on empowering community groups – including local schools – by teaching them some of the tools learned through the Stanford designed training program.

The idea of change seems innocent enough and, in moderation, even drives our society. However, enough of it—and enough backlash—can damage customer loyalty for a lifetime. Among the most-studied examples of this is New Coke, which failed so hard that it only spent 79 days on shelves. During those 79 days, Coca-Cola received over 400,000 angry phone calls over a product that’d been misunderstood in the first place—one that had received good scores in taste tests mainly because people saw it as a supplement, rather than a replacement, to Classic Coke. It brought all the anger of the Prohibition era to the 1980s, with people selling old Coke at exorbitant prices and, as CBS News reports, forming outright protest groups like the “Old Cola Drinkers of America.”

As extreme as this example is, it goes to show that this habit of creating products by removing what people love about them to begin with is far from new, and it’s far from over. Just last week, Apple revealed plans for the iPhone 7 and its corresponding product, the AirPod. AirPods, completely wireless headphones, are specifically designed to work with the iPhone 7, eliminating the need for cumbersome cords, as well as headphone jacks. For people who lose small objects easily and don’t want to fork over $159 for another added feature or who just want to keep using the headphones that worked for their father in the 80’s and work for them now, this has created some understandable tension. But even as Apple continues to push people toward this new innovation, people somehow don’t want to buy headphones they have to charge like everything else. Next up on the line for debate will inevitably be complaining about the glitches that result from rushing a product out every six months or so.

Food can be an equally head-scratching case. While people generally tend to like sweet desserts without being told their complete histories, it’s often one of the places where the novelty of newness comes in the most. Whenever a particular flavor becomes at least a little popular—and people start desiring salted caramel over completely passé regular caramel, all the packaged food companies leap right onto it. However, when new flavor trends don’t come out as quickly as the companies would like, the companies are left to grab at straws and guess, leading to them borrowing from nobody’s favorite candy and nobody’s favorite pie (Swedish Fish and Blueberry Pie Oreos, respectively). In fact, milk’s favorite cookie has an almost notorious habit of doing this, with Internet taste tests almost always preferring simple flavors, like a nice lemon crème with Golden Oreos, as opposed to the redundancy that is Cookies and Cream Oreos.

So, what can we conclude from all these findings? Maybe that old phrase “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is true. Innovation can be nice in its place, but it’s something that should come out of years of asking the people if it’s what they really want. Lucky guesses at what they’ll want can happen once in a blue moon, but for everyone else, it’s back to the drawing board. The world isn’t quite ready for cherry tea Oreos yet.