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About Me, About This

  • What Ihnatko dot com is about
  • What I'm about
  • What Ihnatko dot com covers
  • Editorial policy
  • Ethics policy
  • Artificial Intelligence policy

Hello. I'm Andy Ihnatko. You got here by spelling my last name correctly. Consequently, there's a better-than-even chance that you already know who I am and what I'm about.

But for the benefit of people who got here via a link, or for anybody looking for some first-person quotes to pad out either my obituary or the opening arguments against me in some court thing or another, I'll introduce myself.

I've been a technology journalist for nearly the entirety of my adult life. I started off writing stuff as a volunteer for my local computer user group. Which led to a very long hitch as the back-page columnist for mostly Apple-oriented magazines, which led to a very long hitch as the tech columnist for The Chicago Sun-Times.

I was the tech correspondent for Boston Public Radio on GBH for (Boston's NPR station) for about seven years before 2025 happened. I'm also the co-host of two weekly podcasts: MacBreak Weekly on TWiT (about to hit out 1000th show!), and Material, on Relay (we passed 500 shows this year!). They're swell shows and I'm very proud of 'em.

What Ihnatko Dot Com is about

Short answer: I'm a technology journalist with a range of interests. Read a bunch of this stuff. You'll figure it out and hopefully you'll have some fun while doing so.

Long answer:

I fussed over the name of this blog for far longer than I should have.

Here's an example of Overthinking Things: for the longest time, I planned to call this tech blog "Unannounced Products." Every time anybody in the press asks Apple about future plans – including the possibility that they might introduce an updated iPhone next September – a spokesperson would say "the company does not comment on unannounced products."

I imagined that I'd get loads of free publicity every time Apple said it. I also imagined that this would give my new tech blog an instant air of outlaw danger about it, right at launch. Yeah, man! Andy Ihnatko's tech blog is such a danger to the status quo that the mouthpieces of one of the three most important tech companies on the planet has a firm policy against responding to his latest nuclear firebomb of Truth, Justice, and Wisdom! He's got them skeered!

(I was clearly overthinking things. Fortunately, I did give it enough thought to realize that people would subscribe to "Unannounced Products" expecting to see an 8.000-word report, complete with multi-axis renders and benchmarks, on a tangerine-shaped iPhone slated for 2027. They'd justifiably get quite upset if they didn't.

I finally decided to just go with Ihnatko.com. It suits my goals for the blog. I don't care to cover the entirety of the world of technology from a neutral, unbiased perspective and I'm not suited to do so.

However, I'm perfectly suited to the task of writing about tech through my personal focus and filters. In fact, when the check for my third piece of professional tech journalism cleared and I could just barely start to imagine that people might be willing to pay me to do this on the regular, I was struck by a simple thought that has guided me ever since:

My work will be of no use to anybody if I don't I bring my point of view to everything I write.

Much later, I realized that I wanted to be for technology journalism what Roger Ebert was for film journalism. Roger invested a bit of himself in each of the 7000+ movie reviews he wrote. He didn't make it about himself. But either directly or indirectly, his writing was fortified by everything he'd learned about life, people, the world, the afterworld. "For me, the movies are like a machine that generates empathy," he said.

What I'm about

Forgive me if the above comes across as pretentious. I'm aware that I spend some of my professional time writing about silly, ephemeral gadgets that strike my fancy. Still, that's my aspiration.

I believe that everything Humanity creates is its attempt to understand itself, and to explain itself to future generations.

This applies just as strongly to technology as it does to the arts. The Unicode standard isn't as pretty as the second movement of Beethoven's 7th symphony. But Unicode is the work of thousands of people, all over the world, who share the belief that everybody should be able to communicate with each other, no matter what language they speak.

(Also: the fact that people manipulate Unicode to make ʂιʅʅყ-ʅσσƙιɳɠ ƚҽxƚ is an encouraging sign of Humanity's commitment to keeping things weird. This drive is inextinguishable, regardless of the state of Society at the time. It's one of the things that will save us all, in the end.)

To put it another way:

The hardware and software, the services, and the infrastructure we use today will ultimately decay, break in an irreparable way, cease to be commercially or culturally viable, or simply fade into irrelevance. But the reasons why we created them, and the reasons why they didn't last, are eternal.

What Ihnatko.com covers

With all of that in mind, the stuff that appears on my blog passes just one simple rule:

I think that this subject was worth the time I spent researching and writing a post about it. I also think it'll be worth your time to read it.

Everything I publish here scores a 2 out of 2. If you head here to see what I have to say about something major that's dominating the tech news cycle, the answer might be "Nothing." Either I didn't think the subject was interesting, or I didn't think I had anything unique to add to the conversation.

I hope your disappointment will be outmatched by your surprise at what I did consider to be a worthy subject. I doubleplus hope that you'll find it to be a good read.

"Things I thought were interesting for me to write about and for you to read about" is frustratingly broad, I know. The list includes, but is by no means limited to:

  • Yes, fresh news. I don't tend to break news stories, but I often have things to say about them once they've breakinated.
  • Hands-on experiences with hardware, software, and services. But let's not call them "reviews." I have a frustration with reviews because we feel an obligation to write them whether we give a flabbing daisypot about it or not. The joy comes from having discovered something wonderful and wanting to share that. Or, conversely, a user experience that sets a new record for office profanity and leaves me highly motivated to wave potential future victims off.
  • Law, regulation, and policy. There was a point when governments and lawmakers decided that technology was moving so fast, and held such potential to transform the world in positive ways, that any attempts to regulate it or direct its future would be reckless. Today, we have tech billionaires who might look at a sunset, decide "That'd be a lot prettier if there were .8% more Argon in the global atmosphere," and have the power to actually make that happen. Sometime between those two endpoints, there became a need for some higher power to restrain Big Tech. Regulators and elected officials are a dramatic step down from an Old-Testament-style God, but it ain't nothing. And what they're doing is worth studying.
  • What all of this is doing to Society. Also, what it should be doing. And what kinds of things Society should be doing back.

Editorial Policy

This bit is just about How The Sausage Is Made.

  • I like to spend a lot of time thinking before I write, and editing what I wrote afterward. I can't write a "hot take" of any real value (others are, sincerely, very good at this), so I won't try. I'll often be the last person to weigh in on something. ("Old Tech News" was another rejected title/theme of this blog. Ultimately, I decided that shining a lantern on that, even whimsically, could have an undesirable impact upon my rate of acquisition of new readers.
  • Opinions have to be backed up with facts. A lifetime in journalism has left me the least-value member on any trivia team. My childhood sports hero was legendary Red Sox first-baseman Carl Yastrzemski. I know he wore number 8 on his uniform. But I still want to look it up and confirm it before I yell it out. Please be assured that a single sentence is often the residue of a three hours of research. I gotta know that something I think is true is actually true.
  • Corrections and updates will be applied in a way so that you can track them. If I write something that's s̶o̶ ̶b̶r̶i̶l̶l̶i̶a̶n̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶n̶o̶n̶e̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶ ̶g̶r̶a̶s̶p̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶p̶a̶r̶a̶m̶e̶t̶e̶r̶s̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶m̶y̶ ̶g̶e̶n̶i̶u̶s̶ ̶w̶i̶t̶h̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶r̶ ̶m̶e̶r̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶r̶e̶e̶-̶d̶i̶m̶e̶n̶s̶i̶o̶n̶a̶l̶ ̶b̶r̶a̶i̶n̶s̶] wrong, you'll see the edits on the page.
  • I maintain a soft firewall between myself and other tech blogs. I admire and respect other tech bloggers/journalists' opinions and observations. I also don't read any of it. I've had this policy in place for years. The Noble reason for it is that I make a big deal about writing from my point of view (note above); also, while it's OK for my knowledge of a topic to be informed by other writers' published reporting, it's not OK for my opinions to benefit from other writers' published opinions. (The less-Noble reason: if we both say something similar, I need to know that it was just coincidence and not a case of my accidentally plagiarizing another's work.)

Ethics Policy

I am a self-funded, self-regulated entity. What I do here and how I do it isn't being examined by editors or publishers, and my health insurance isn't conditional upon my adhering to an institutional Code of Conduct.

But I don't want to let myself down. I don't want to let you down, either. My basic rule is to make sure everything I do, and how I do it, passes a reasonable smell test.

Here are a few specific rules:

  • I have no financial conflicts of interest with the entities I write about. I've been a tech journalist long enough that I still have to wipe away a small, dignified tear and recompose myself every time I encounter a non-integer that's just under 13. It reminds me of when Apple was months away from bankruptcy and the stock was trading at 12⅞. At the time, I had money I could have invested and faith that the company would recover. Buuuut I was writing about Apple. So I just couldn't.
  • I will not participate in any affiliate/referral marketing systems related to any of the entities or businesses that I write about. I don't believe it's possible to write in an impartial fashion about a product or service if I get a kickback from its purchase. If a include a store link to a tech or tech-adjacent thing, it's just a plain-vanilla store link solely for the convenience of the reader.
  • My blog posts and newsletters might occasionally contain Amazon affiliate links for non-tech things. Here's my thinking: when I'm recommending a fiction book or a piece of music or a particularly keen spatula, the level of trust I've built with my audience as a tech journalist doesn't enter into the recommendation at all…so it passes the smell test. Each such link will be explicitly identified (yes, the preceding Amazon link to the OXO Good Grips Stainless Steel Fish Turner is an Amazon Affiliates link). That being said: none of these Amazon Affiliates links are the result of any sort of brand/influencer deal. I love the spatula, I thought it was a spatula worth recommending, let's blog about it and sure, slide in an affiliates link, why not. My Amazon Affiliates income is slight. I take it in the form of store credit, and I tend to spend it on stuff I'm writing about.
  • If I acquired anything through any means other than "I paid for it just like anybody else," I will reveal it. You're entitled to know if I received it on loan for the purpose of review, or received it gratis.
  • If I receive an item of value gratis, I will only keep and use it for research purposes. For example, if a company were to send me a $300 carbon-fiber camera tripod, and for some unfathomable reason didn't want it back, I can't use it for personal photography after I've written about it. It'd have to stay in the closet and wait for a day when I'm writing about something similar and need to make a comparison. Yes, I agree that "item of value" is a slippery term. I've arbitrarily set the dollar amount at somewhere above the cost of a grilled chicken club sandwich plus a non-alcoholic beverage and dessert.
  • I do not accept products or services in exchange for a published review or post. If a company sends or lends me something, they have no knowledge or influence over how I write about it, nor do they receive any assurance that I'lll write about it at all.
  • I do not accept offers of free travel/press junkets from companies/industries I cover. When I travel to a media event or somesuch, I pay my own way.
  • The site has no commercial sponsors. I'm not taking a moral stand. I'd love to open that up as a revenue stream some day (cf. Mickey Bergman, Heist: "Everybody needs money. That's why they call it money"). But I can't even adding weekly sponsors to the mix here until the site is well and truly on its way. If and when that happens, I'll update this policy thingy.

Artificial Intelligence use policies

I make two promises here and now:

  • All content on Ihnatko dot com will be written 100% by AI.
  • No content whatsoever on Ihnatko dot com will be written by AI.

See, because I'm Andy Ihnatko. "A.I."

Now that we've gotten this unavoidable bit of whimsy out of the way:

None of the posts on this site are written by an artificial intelligence system. The sole possible/potential exception

At no time do I use artificial intelligence to aid in the writing. Examples include:

  • Brainstorming of topics
  • Outlining of blog posts
  • As a source of information (however, I often use AI as a navigation aid for the reference materials I provide it).
  • Rewriting for tone/clarity/length

I regard each of these things to be an integral element of the creative process.

Images on this site might bear the grubby, thieving fingerprints of AI. My thoughts on the ethics of using AI in this particular area of creativity keep evolving. I have deep objections against wholesale image creation. Removing a squatting dog from the background of a photo I've taken isn't the same thing. But it isn't completely different, is it?

For now, I've settled on "any use of AI that I deem to be significant will be noted in the image's caption."

I don't consider the creation of titles and summaries of blog posts to be creative work. On that basis, I might get some help from AI to help develop those two things. Like, if I'm drawing a blank and I really want to just click "Publish" already.

Some of the custom code that makes Ihnatko dot come look and behave the way I want it to has been written with the help of AI coding tools. Why make an exception for code? Because although plagiarism has never been an acceptable technique in creative writing, this same practice is a time-honored, traditional skill when programming. If one were to perform a statistical analysis on all of the keystrokes typed while writing a working piece of code, "⌘-C" and "⌘-V" would constitute a substantial slice of the resulting pie chart.

Seriously, when there's something you want to achieve in code, your first step is to find a working example of code that does that thing. You examine it to understand how it functions, and then you adapt it to your specific needs.

Thus, I don't see much difference between asking Gemini "How in the name of Samwise Gamgee's hairy TOE KNUCKLES do I write CSS code that absolutely goddamn guarantees that a line of text will always be centered within its text block no matter what?!" and searching Github for a code snippet.

I recognize that there's a nonzero amount of hypocrisy in this position. You're entitled to disagree with my ultimate conclusion: this amount is less than the background radiation we all experience every day just by trying to live, thrive, and survive within a Society where the unfair distribution of resources is so prominent.