COVID and the iPhone 6

We’re still feeling the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic six years ago in many aspects of our lives. When it came to technology, lots of businesses made huge investments to accommodate remote workplaces. If you haven’t made any investments in your technology since then, it’s like using an iPhone 6, which was released in 2014.

What’s the connection? It’s the speed of change. The iPhone 6 debuted 12 years ago. Think about how the performance of your current iPhone compares to an iPhone 6 – or any single-digit model. Remember, we’re up to iPhone 17.

Now, think about all the equipment you bought six years ago to meet the computing needs brought on by the COVID19 pandemic. In half the time that it took the “revolutionary” iPhone 6 to become a benchmark for obsolescence, your COVID-era technology is now obsolete.

Windows-based computing has advanced in four key areas since 2020, starting with the introduction of Windows 11 in 2021. It featured a new interface for improved windows management and productivity features such as Snap Layouts and virtual desktops to help you organize your workspace better.

But the big stuff was under the hood.

Windows 11 includes several security features like Microsoft Defender Antivirus, Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0, and passwordless authentication options such as Windows Hello and Passkeys to protect against cyber threats. Administrator Protection is a new feature that adds an extra layer of security by requiring Windows Hello authentication for admin tasks, reducing the risk of unauthorized system changes.

Windows 11 also brought Microsoft Copilot: An embedded AI-powered tool to help with tasks like summarizing documents, drafting emails, and managing system settings. It also made possible Smart App Control that predicts which applications are safe to run, enhancing security. It was also much faster, making it better able to handle all the tasks we require for complex computing and cloud technology.

For today’s typical business needs, the minimum required specs for a Windows-based computer include an Intel 8th Generation or AMD Ryzen 3000 series processor, 16GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD. It’s also essential to have the Windows 11 operating system to meet ever-evolving cybersecurity measures and the speed requirements to use cloud-computing effectively. In addition, Microsoft has ended support for Windows 10, and that system will no longer get security updates and bug fixes. Eventually, too, better-performing application software won’t work with it.

We can help you get your hardware up to date. Call us – 973-433-6676 – or email us for an audit.

Brace for the Cost Increases

When it comes to chip shortages and computer prices, the “fun” has just begun. The industry is expecting price increases of at least 25 percent, and no relief is expected until 2028 at the earliest, when manufacturers can get new capacity online. Even if you’re not ready to buy, you need to start planning.

AI is proving to be the blessing and the curse for hardware pricing and availability in today’s world. We’ve been in labs that have AI computers, and they are true technological marvels that drive so many improvements in how we work at just about any job you can imagine. They also require massive amounts of high-quality chips, which manufacturers produce because they have high margins as well as high demand. It’s no wonder that one computer can cost $300,000 to $400,000.

You won’t spend that much, but mistiming a major overhaul of your technology or having to meet emergency needs will wreak havoc on your budgeting. If you were contemplating updating/upgrading your hardware sometime in the next 6 to 12 months, we recommend you move up your timetable. The longer you wait, the more likely it is that your equipment will cost more and that you may not have as many choices.

Similarly, you can expect to pay more for mobile phones and tablets. Memory accounts for around 10 to 20 percent of a smartphone’s cost. Low-margin manufacturers will need to raise their prices accordingly to skimp on upgrades. Manufacturers such as Apple and Samsung are likely better insulated because of their higher margins.

We have partnerships with some of the major computer manufacturers, but it’s hard to say when any kind of benefit from a relationship will get wiped out.

Our advice is don’t panic but start moving ahead. Call us – 973-433-6676 – or email us to evaluate your hardware and software to see what needs an upgrade now and how you can redeploy some of your current equipment. We can also look at what you might do when the law of supply and demand swings back in your favor.

Going Straight to the Cloud

We now have some operating experience with the Windows 365 Cloud PC we recently started using. It’s a cloud-based PC service that lets you access your entire operating system, applications, and files from any device with an internet connection.

We’ve given it a real-life test over the past six weeks or so, and the big advantage is that we don’t need to lug along a laptop computer anymore. Now, all you need is the Windows 365 Link, a small, 8-oz. device that connects you directly to your Windows 365 Cloud PC. Designed for corporate use, it’s priced at $349.

The device runs a simplified version of Windows called Windows CPC, with no local applications or data storage. It can work with a laptop computer, a tablet or a mobile phone. We prefer the tablet because its display is more practical than a phone for looking at documents, spreadsheets, PowerPoints or anything else you might view on a computer screen.

You can connect the device to a monitor – or even dual 4K monitors – if you are working in an office environment. It has four USB ports, an audio port, an HDMI port and a DisplayPort. I like all the internet connectivity options: Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3 or an Ethernet port. For business travelers, you never know what will be available. I’ve been able to log into my Cloud PC account from hotel rooms and cruise ships – as long as a stable connection is available.

I like the security measures that can’t be disabled, such as a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 chip, BitLocker encryption, and password-less authentication options. Its minimal operating system reduces the attack surface and integrates with Microsoft Intune for management. Those features are great for implementing and managing security when you have multiple users. There’s also no local data storage. If the device is lost or stolen, nobody can tap it for sensitive data.

The irony is that the laptop became a go-to computer because you can take it anywhere and have full computing capabilities. Now we have an even smaller device that fits the way most of us who travel do business.

We can help you and your road warriors get up and running with Windows 365 Link and your Windows 365 Cloud PC. Call us – 973-433-6676 – or email us to answer any questions you have and get everyone who needs a device all set up.

RAMageddon Raising Computer Prices

Computer prices are skyrocketing. Sony has postponed its new PlayStation 6 to 2029. Why? RAM chips are sold out for the year. We are facing RAMageddon, a term coined by Jason England at Tom’s Guide. If you’re thinking about new computers and/or servers, now is the time to act.

This will be a snooze-you-lose proposition because businesses are turning more and more to cloud-based applications that are driven by AI. If you don’t have computers and servers capable of handling massive amounts of data at lightning-fast speeds, you won’t be able to work at maximum productivity.

The problem is that you and those big AI data centers are looking for the same DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory) chips and SSD memory chip storage. RAM chips prices are up 500 percent according to some reports, and SSD memory chips are up 100 percent. Our computer suppliers tell us they’re working off current inventories and will be able to hold the line on pricing until those inventories are exhausted. Then, it will be a matter of finding whatever they can for whatever the market will bear.

The way we see it, computer and server supplies and prices will make the shortages and prices of the COVID era look like bargain-basement shopping. The computer industry doesn’t expect any relief until 2028.

A lot of industry observers say you should buy now and buy as much preinstalled RAM as you can afford for laptops. Most laptops have soldered RAM that you can’t upgrade after purchase, so this is a good general rule of thumb at any point when buying a laptop. But it is even better advice now with prices set to take off. If you can pack 32GB or even 64GB of RAM into that laptop you’re eyeing, go for it.

The same is true for storage. Get the largest hard drive you can. Even though you may do most of your computing in the cloud, your computer’s speed will depend on the combination of RAM and storage to bring in data and work with it before you send finished work back to the cloud.

We’re ready to help. Call us – 973-433-6676 – or email us to discuss your computer and server needs. We can help you shop for the hardware that best meets your needs and then help you get everything installed and configured.

Cellular Wi-Fi? Look Before You Leap

A residential client cut the internet cord in favor of Wi-Fi from their cellular provider. They made the switch abruptly and didn’t get everything they thought they would. If you’re thinking about going cellular for your internet service, you need to have a plan. It’s not a matter of just pulling the plug on one system and plugging in another.

Yes, cellular internet can be cheaper – although the cable internet providers always seem to have a special offer going. You don’t need to bundle services like you used to. The key to cellular is to look at coverage. If you don’t always get a strong cellular signal on your phone at the place you want to put your cellar receiver, you won’t be able to install a good Wi-Fi network.

When you get right down to it, if you have a lot of devices running your Wi-Fi network – phones/tablets, TVs, computers, smart devices, etc. you need 5G ultrawide cellular service – or whatever your carrier calls it – to make it all work. 5G service essentially comes in three bandwidths:

  • Low Band, which has a frequency rate below 1GHz and provides slower speeds (up to 50 Mbps). However, it’s good for building penetration.
  • Mid Band, which has a frequency range of 1 to 6 GHz and balances coverage in urban areas with speeds from 100 to 900 Mbps. It’s commonly used in urban areas.
  • High Band, which has a frequency range up to 24 GHz, provides very high speeds (up to 10 Gbps) but has limited coverage. It’s best for dense urban environments.

The service you get will depend on how your carrier’s network is configured for your location.

While the information above is for urban areas, we believe 5G service is probably better for rural areas, where it’s either impossible or prohibitively expense to run wires. Cable delivers faster, more stable internet service, and that can be important for businesses and homes that offices and lots of devices.

Aside from technical factors, you also need to look at the logistics of your email. If you leave your cable internet provider, you’ll need to migrate to a new email platform. That’s because email from a phone or cable company is essentially a loss-leader service, and the providers have found it’s a costly loss.

We strongly advise against simply cutting one service and starting with a new one. You should take whatever time you need to let people and organizations know your new address, and you should transfer all your messages to your new platform. Your old cable or phone email provider has no obligation to keep your old messages for an extended time once you disconnect from their service.

If you’re considering a move to a cellular internet provider, call us – 973-433-6676 – or email us to discuss it. Let’s look at your Wi-Fi needs and make sure your internet provider can handle everything on your network, and let’s look at your email platform options and plan an orderly migration process.

Yeah, Tablets Are That Good

We stopped by the home of a client we hadn’t seen in person for a while to pick up a couple of old Macs for disposal. They had been in the habit of bringing along a computer when traveling, but when I showed them my iPad with a mouse and keyboard, it started a whole new conversation.

As most of you know, we’ve been traveling a lot lately, and in addition to my phone and computer, I’ve brought along my DSLR (digital single lens reflex) camera for fine photography. The computer has been a necessity for complex remote service for our clients’ tech problems and for downloading our photos as we go from place to place.

However, I’ve been able to add a keyboard and mouse to my iPad, and that’s mostly made my computer unnecessary. The display clarity on my iPad is nothing short of remarkable, and the screen is big enough to give me all the information I need for work and play. I can access clients’ computers remotely and see their screens as well as I can with a computer.

For a short time or maybe longer, you might find a tablet more to your liking than your laptop, especially if you travel a lot or are mostly mobile. Many of the apps we use, such as Microsoft 365 with Word, Excel and PowerPoint, have mobile apps for Apple and Android phones and tablets. You can also find mobile versions for apps like Photoshop or use the phot editing capabilities in iCloud or Google Photos. All of them take advantage of the cloud, and they work well on tablet screens.

And while we’re on the subject of phones, we’re increasingly inclined to leave our large cameras in our hotel rooms or ship cabins – or even at home – because the lenses in our phones’ cameras are getting better. We can tout the benefits of the latest iPhone Pro models. They’re small enough to put in our pocket but have the capabilities of any point-and-shoot camera and a wider angle lens on a DSLR. They are also very good in low-light environments. The only area where the DSLR and a high-quality lens are better is a long-distance closeup.

And, of course, when you upload your pictures to the cloud – from both your phone or your DSLR – you can see a large, crisp display of each photo on your tablet screen and make some quick edits, such as cropping and color/light adjustments.

Call us – 973-433-6676 – or email us to talk about finding more ways to use your tablet instead of your computer and to see what tablet may best suit your needs. And we might even be able to help you find a photography club, too.

Arming the ‘Road Warrior’

I’ve been traveling a lot over the past two years, and that’s made me more conscious than ever about what we all need to do to create mobile fortresses wherever we are. Some of the best defenses are tried and true, and some take advantage of new technologies. Here are steps for you to consider.

If you haven’t done so already, the first thing you should do is install a VPN on every device you use in a place that’s not your office or home. A VPN, or Virtual Private Network, creates a secure connection between your device and the internet. It encrypts your internet traffic, making it unreadable to anyone who might intercept it, and routes it through a remote server, which helps protect your online activities from being monitored. It also protects sensitive information, such as passwords and personal data, especially on public Wi-Fi networks. And if you’ve been reading this newsletter for several years, you know that we don’t consider a password from a publicly provided network, such as a hotel, to be secure.

A VPN can replace your real IP address with its own server IP address and enhance your online privacy by making it difficult for websites and services to track your location and browsing habits. It also allows you to bypass geographic restrictions on websites and streaming services so you can access content that may be blocked where you are.

With a VPN significantly improving your online security and privacy, you can take advantage of other technologies, such as Microsoft’s Cloud PC, which allows you to access a full Windows desktop experience from any device with an internet connection. For business travelers, this means you can replicate your work environment during a flight or while sitting in a public place.

I’ve started using it during my travels to conferences as well as while on vacation. It has two major caveats, which don’t bother me at all. One is that it is a subscription service, so I wouldn’t recommend it for casual use. The other caveat is that it works better on a laptop computer or a tablet. Because it displays what you would get if you logged into your Microsoft 365 account on your office computer, you need a bigger screen. I think a telephone display is too small to be effective.

Combining a VPN and Cloud PC are just two tools you can use to make your online life safe and efficient. We can help you find and configure the tools you need to be productive on the road – or in the air or at sea. Call us – 973-433-6676 – or email us to discuss your needs for online safety when away from the office.

Make Reading a Habit

We’re so overloaded with emails, texts, WhatsApp and other communications that we’ve fallen into the bad habit of skimming messages and probably doing the same with websites and documents. It’s time to get back into the habit of reading things more closely because not everything is as it seems.

For example, you may be expecting to get a payment from a customer or a client, or you may be asking someone for help. When you get an email that appears to be responding to your expectation, many people tend to click on something without reading all the details closely. That’s when disaster strikes because that click opens the door for a hacker.

Hackers have taken really good advantage of artificial intelligence (AI). They can use it to create exact matches for corporate logos and write messages with perfect spelling and the most appropriate language for their target. This makes phishing attacks easier to carry out, and phishing attacks are the most common means of hacking an email account.

The obvious way to combat AI-generated phishing attacks is to use your own RI – real intelligence. Read the sender’s address very carefully. Is it the real address that you know, or is there a slight misspelling, such as an extra letter, a missing letter, or transposed letters? Does it make sense to you that the sender has included an attachment or link?

If you’ve skimmed over a phishing email and didn’t catch a warning sign, you may have provided a hacker with an opening to your personal information and the ability to access your financial accounts. If you’ve skimmed legitimate invitations to use two-factor authentication (2FA) for websites and – especially – your email login credentials, you may have provided an opening for hackers.

Protecting your email login credentials is critical to your online security. If a hacker steals access to your email and you have no 2FA, they can go to your bank’s website, for example, and use the “forgot password” process to reset your password. Signs your email account has been hacked include the inability to log in with your correct password, notifications about changes to your account settings or messages sent from your account that you didn’t initiate.

The start of the year is a good time to get a security audit and initiate strong security procedures, such as 2FA measures and the use of a password manager with unique passwords for every website you and your employees or family members access. Call us – 973-433-6676 – or email us to set up an appointment.

DIY Email

We can expect cable and telecom companies to accelerate their exit from providing email services. Verizon/FIOS long ago transitioned their email management to AOL, which is really Yahoo Mail. Comcast is about to follow the same route, handing their email off to Yahoo. Getting live support from an actual person will become even more difficult. If you think Gmail is an answer, when did you EVER talk to a person from Google? It’s time to take matters into your own hands by getting your own domain and better managing how you handle your email accounts.

The problem with email from your cable or telecom company or from Yahoo/AOL is that it’s not a profit center – unless they can convince you to buy a support subscription. And buying a support subscription is the only way you’ll get a chance to talk to an actual human being if you have a problem.

Support can be critical when your email gets hacked. In cases with Comcast, for example, it can take human intervention to clear out any contact info a hacker may have planted in your account. Then, you’ll need to reset your password and set up a phone number and secondary email address that can be used for two-factor authentication (2FA) and notifications of problems if you get hacked again. Support people are generally good when you get to one of them after navigating their cumbersome phone trees. When you move to the Yahoo platform, it will be harder to get human support – unless you get a subscription. The cost of Yahoo Plus is $49.99 per year, which includes features such as ad-free email, priority customer support, and premium features for Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Fantasy.

Instead of sliding over to the Yahoo platform when your cable company ends its email, we recommend you go to Outlook or Gmail. Microsoft (Microsoft 365 subscriptions) and Google (lots and lots of ad revenue) have many other ways to monetize their relationship with you, so they put more stock in maintaining email support. Additionally, IT consulting services know the ins and outs of their systems and your needs. We can help you transfer all your folders and messages to your new system. We make it a point to provide the personal support you need when you have problems.

But a much better solution is to get your own email domain for both business and personal use. For security and management, the key benefits are:

  • Enhanced Security and Control: You can create better security processes to prevent unauthorized access, and you can create multiple addresses for specific purposes.
  • Improved Deliverability: Custom email domains allow for proper authentication and are less likely to be flagged as spam.
  • Long-term Consistency: Whether you’re a business, non-profit organization, family or business, you can keep your system going forever and ever if you wish, and people will always know where to contact you. It keeps life simple.
  • Flexibility and Scalability: You can create as many email addresses as needed for various functions. For businesses and organizations, you can manage functions or projects better. For individuals, you can keep various parts of life separate, such as a shopping address where you can get coupons or messages you only want to check occasionally.

 Getting your own email domain is no different from getting any other domain. We can help you with everything involved from securing a domain name to setting up all the email addresses you need. Then, we can work with you to transfer all your messages, folders, etc. from your old email account to your new domain. Call us – 973-433-6676 – or email us to answer all your questions about email accounts and get you set up with a system that can work for you long into the future.

The Key to Better Security

Many of us have replaced keyed door locks with electronic locks that use codes to unlock doors. They emulate the PIN technology we use to unlock our computers. Our computer technology, however, is going the other way. Physical keys – with PIN codes – are proving safer and more convenient in office environments.

In many offices, an administrative assistant or another employee may need to access the email or a website of an employee who is out of the office. Two-factor authentication (2FA) – which should be installed – usually requires access to a second device, such as a cell phone or an email address. If the account owner is not available, 2FA won’t work, unless the system is set up to work with another person’s devices. That gets really complicated, and it can be compromised.

A security key is a much more secure passwordless form of 2FA. The term security key should not be used interchangeably with passkeys, which are another form of passwordless security. Security keys are physical devices that typically work through a USB-C port, but they are not limited to USB-C. They can use USB-A ports and Apple’s Lightning ports.

When you or an authorized user logs in, that person enters your password and then uses the security key, which generates a unique code or signature to confirm your identity. That makes it difficult for unauthorized users to access your account even if they have your password.

Security keys utilize public-key cryptography, making them resistant to phishing and credential theft. They can be used with cell phones, and to be honest, not enough of our clients are setting them up on their phones. They can be more secure in public places.

Security keys work with virtually all password managers, but they need to be supported by website hosts and the cloud providers they use, such as AWS. That support is getting stronger as many services now recognize their importance for enhancing online security. Security keys are compatible with various platforms and applications, providing reliable authentication without the risks associated with cloud storage.

Security keys are relatively inexpensive to purchase, but they do require specific setup and customization. We can help you with a comprehensive purchase and deployment program. Call us – 973-433-6676 – or email us to discuss your needs and develop a program.