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My favorite holiday tech gift requires no batteries or software updates. It’s not even a tool, even though it’s made with technology.
Can you guess what this is?
A few years ago my wife experimented with her iPad and stylus to make digital illustrations. use to breed, as a drawing app, has uploaded a photo of our beloved corgi, Max, for reference, before embellishing the picture with a polka dot bow tie and a cartoonish long tongue. I liked it so much that I chose a background color to complement our home and uploaded the image to the app. Map, a printing service that puts your images together in a beautiful frame before delivering it to your door.
A large, framed portrait of Max now hangs in the center of our living room in all its two-dimensional glory. He makes me smile and is always a conversation starter when our guest arrives. That’s more than I can say about other tech gifts I’ve gotten over the years, like video games and smart speakers.
This type of gifting exercise—tech-adjacent gifts without hardware or thoughtless Best Buy gift cards—can be particularly welcome this year. This is because we live in an age of pandemic-induced famine. global chip shortage and supply chain disruptions traditional gifts are hard to buy. (Those who tried to buy a game console last year understand this pain.)
Here’s a list of ideas for tech gifts we can give without actually buying tech, from gifts you can create to experiences that will last a lifetime.
fixing gift
Last week, I told a friend I had a special gift for him: I would fix his iPhone problem.
He had complained to me about his five-year-old iPhone SE. The device can no longer take photos or install software updates as almost all data storage is consumed.
So before I left for the Thanksgiving holiday, I met him for lunch and accompanied him through the process of backing up the photos to an external drive before cleaning up all the images on the device. Then I connected her phone to the computer to backup all her data before installing the new operating system.
He was very excited to have solved this problem before his trip. Now he can take lots of photos on vacation. Also, a new Apple software update has a tool. Add a digital vaccination card to iPhone’s wallet appwhich makes holiday travel a little less stressful during the pandemic.
For those who are a bit tech-savvy, this can act as a template. Listen to loved ones’ complaints about their technology and offer the gift of solving the problem. If it’s a slow Wi-Fi connection, see if you can. diagnose the problem to increase speeds. If it’s a short-lived phone battery, consider taking them to a repair shop to have the battery replaced for a small fee.
In some ways this is better than giving them a brand new device because it saves them the hassle of learning how to use a new technology.
gift of creation
Besides the example of my dog’s digital illustration, there are many ways to use technology to create something for friends and family.
For one, I’m a fan of photobooks that can be easily created with web tools. A Secret Santa gift a colleague gave me a few years ago was a calendar he made using Google’s booklet service. He created it by snapping photos from my dog’s Instagram account and compiling them into a calendar – each month there was a different photo of Max posing next to an entree cooked by my wife and I. I am pleased.
In general, photo printing services offer beautiful ways to turn digital photos into physical memorabilia in the form of vintage-style, large prints, and even mugs and Christmas decorations. (Our sister publication Wirecutter, which reviews products, has tested two dozen photo printing services and highlighted their favorites.)
Before the pandemic turned our lives upside down, my wife bought a DSLR, a type of digital camera used by professionals, to learn more about digital photography. Then there were the quarantines, the holidays turned into accommodations, and the camera ended up living in a drawer.
My plan for a holiday gift for my wife is a two-hour digital photography class at a photography studio in San Francisco that teaches students the basics of photography as they take a ride across the Golden Gate Bridge. (I hope he doesn’t read this column.)
What do your friends and family want to know? We have many options for potential gifting classes as the pandemic has prompted many teachers to offer online virtual education, including cooking classes and exercise routines. The gift of knowledge goes a long way and sometimes comes back, for example, when someone taking online cooking classes uses that new knowledge to make you dinner.
Technology-free gift
The pandemic may have exposed us to more screens than we could have imagined, so a great gift this year could be anything that takes our attention away from technology.
This could be renting a cottage in an area with no cell phone service, game tickets, winter walks and picnics – anything that will save us from our inevitable return to the screens.
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