Ask a luddite (or your mother): What's a Taptic Engine?
For most people, nothing is more synonymous with 'Luddite' than your mother. This time last year, my mother was still bumbling along with her Samsung Alias 2 (a flip phone, for you smartphone folk) and her Windows XP laptop. It took me a good week and a half to explain to her the difference between a laptop and a tablet, and that yes, a tablet was sort of like a laptop with no screen, and no, an Apple and an Android were not different tablet sizes. Fast forward, my mother is much more well versed in the world of technology complete with her iPad mini and new desktop, but she's still not perfect. Asking her what a "taptic engine" would surely be interesting. I posed the question to her, and after answering as many questions as I could without giving it away, her conclusion was that a taptic engine was a technology being implemented in the latest tablets, laptops, and phones, where the more you touched the device, it would produce energy that could power the device. After she self-confidently gave me this explanation she started to think about the technology that she mentally created and realize that maybe that wasn't it.
Was as she right? No way. Was she that far off? It could have been worse. Taptic Engine is the haptic feedback system within the Apple Watch which 'taps' you when you get a notification on your Apple Watch. While my mother was nowhere near the right answer, she did impress me with the creativity of her answer and how she at least got the part about it being in electronics correct. She may still not know what a taptic engine is (Despite my fruitless attempt to explain it to her), but hearing her know the difference between a tablet and a laptop was good enough for me.
