High-tech gifts: You should love them. If only you knew how to use them.
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Version 0 of 1. In the grabby haze of Christmas shopping, it seems completely logical to get Mom a Fitbit, and your little brother an Anki Drive, because obviously, everyone needs a robot. For the kids: An Xbox One, because seeing the crazed joy on their faces as they obliterate each other in “Garden Warfare” is what the holidays are all about. But the glut of high-tech gadgets on the market presents a whole new post-Christmas problem: Presents so generous you would totally love them — if only you could figure out how to use them. The higher-tech the gift under the tree, it seems, the greater the heartache. Which explains why, when Stanley Boye of Oxon Hill, Md., arrives at Best Buy at Potomac Yard Center in Alexandria, Va., the day after Christmas, failed Xbox in hand, he looks as if his very spirit has been broken. He had done everything right, surprising his sons, who are 7 and 9, with a hot gift they hadn’t even asked for. But a maliciously timed Christmas Day hacking of the gaming networks for Microsoft’s Xbox and Sony’s PlayStation rendered their nearly $400 present difficult to use. Because no longer can you put in the cartridge and immediately start flinging banana peels at Mario. No, now you must connect to the Internet, sign in with an e-mail address, install the games on the console’s hard drive and then update them regularly. On Christmas night, none of it was going well for the Boyes, or for kids across the country. So the boys went to bed disappointed, their faith in Santa shaken, and Boye stayed up searching for answers until he learned about the hack. “I told their mother, ‘Hey, it is not my fault,’ ” Boye says. But deep down, he felt responsible, so he landed here, at Best Buy’s Geek Squad, where the main Geek, Lawrence Stokes, would set about making the Xbox work. As Boye looked on dejectedly, Stokes got to the business of updating the machine. “If I was a kid,” Stokes confesses, “I’d be so mad.” Terrible gifts — chocolate fountains and sushi-making sets, weird exercise machines and hideous pleated pants — are part of the fabric of the holidays, so much so that stores expect a significant percentage of misguided presents to land in their return piles. But for the technically disinclined, all the gifts on the Top 10 lists, the gadgets touted to make your whole existence better, can be just as poorly received. This year that includes the WeMo, which would allow you to mood-light your living room from your phone, if you could understand it; Blast Motion “wearable motion capture technology,” which can give you metrics and video of your most athletic moments (we think); and the Fitbit and a spate of other wristbands that, when worn constantly, creepily keep tabs on your sleep and your movement. The latter are responsible for one of Stokes’s favorite Geek Squad rescue stories. “I’ve seen someone have one for two months, and she thought she’d have all this data, and it wasn’t recording anything,” he recalls. “It was adorable.” The devices that bring people back for help, says another Geek, Ismael Matos, are the ones that involve complicated configuring to your phone, to your network, to your tablets. “Some things just don’t talk to each other the right way.” So, after investing $250 in your new Nest responsive thermostat — it can tell when you’re home! — sometimes you’re going to have to spring for a new router, too. In the practically Rockwellian mid-’90s, coveted Christmas gifts didn’t have to “talk.” They only had to work, with, at the most, the assistance of a few batteries. A Discman, maybe. A Nintendo 64. A CD subscription (R.I.P., Columbia House). In our more Orwellian, data-culling times, gifts — those given and those gotten — seem to require master’s degrees, and if not that, some kindly nerd willing to explain: What exactly is the cloud? That is so unclear to Marsha Cecil of Alexandria, who had hunkered down with one of Stokes’s fellow Geeks, Gary Lipscomb, and two iPad Airs — one for her, and one for her sweet grandbaby Audrianna, who, at 2, already has hers loaded up with her favorite “Teletubbies” videos. Grandma, on the other hand, is a clunky Toshiba notebook sort of lady and honest about that fact. “This kind, patient saint here,” Cecil says, squeezing Lipscomb’s shoulder warmly, “is trying to teach this computer-illiterate person how to do stuff.” Stuff she seems to have neglected to do along the way, like backing up her data from time to time. Mussie Berne of Arlington, Va., had also picked up an iPad, supplemented with a case and all the extras, for his 9-year-old daughter. “We thought she was going to get excited with an iPad. She still believes in Santa,” he says. But, perhaps without realizing she would be hurting the real Santa’s feelings, he says, “She said, ‘I wish I could have a Samsung.’ ” So, there he was, back at Best Buy, trying to make it right. After more than hour, Stokes had finally signed in, installed “Garden Warfare” and “Pro Evolution Soccer” and gotten Boye’s Xbox up and running. Boye looked drained. The kids would get play tonight. And him? “I have a lot to do. And I have to go to work.” |