Tag Archives: air

Not the present I expected…

Posted on by

My decade old first generation iPad Air finally gave up the ghost. Right up until it fell off the cliff, it was still mostly serviceable as a platform for streaming podcasts, or television, or generally schmucking around on the internet. Sure, it was sluggish and with just 16 GB storage, I had to offload all non-essential apps and files years ago, but what finally killed it was the elderly OS no longer supporting a number of apps I use on a regular basis. First Xfinity dropped out. Then it was Twitter. Last week a bunch of others fell off.

Increasingly I was limping along, trying to use an outdated version of Safari as my access point to every function. It finally got to be too slow and too much of a damned bloody nuisance to continue finding ways to work around the limitations imposed by elderly tech.

Anyway, now I have a spanking new iPad Air that’s easily capable of doing 100x more than I’m expecting of it. It’s more than a match for keeping up with any content consumption I’m going to throw at it. A shiny new iPad wasn’t the birthday present I planned to give myself this year, but it’s the one I ended up getting.  I wonder what the chances are this one will still be streaming my media in 2033.

Upgrade me…

Posted on by

I’ve given up on try talking myself out of having the latest, greatest iteration of Apple’s phones and tablets. That sooner rather than later I’ll end up with one of the two new iPads announced this afternoon is a foregone conclusion. Now it’s a simple question of which one I’ll bring home with me.

I’ve really come to like the size of the current Mini as opposed to the “full sized” original iPads. My only disappointment from my Mini is the non-retina display. It’s been sort of like going back to standard definition television after watching everything in HD. Sure, you can do it and it’s perfectly serviceable, but it’s well off the mark from being optimal. The new Mini resolves that issue and adds a whole lot of added horsepower to boot. Of course with the new full sized model being a slimmed down version of its former self, it’s a tossup which one is going to end up being my go-to tablet for the next year.

The only thing I know for sure is after last month’s fiasco of waking long before the crack of dawn and standing in line for four hours to be met with “sorry, sold out.” I won’t be lining up for this launch. I don’t mind standing in line when I know I’m going to have something to show for the trouble, but with Apple product launches I no longer have that old warm fuzzy that they’re going to fill their own supply chain first before making units available for other retailers. Whenever they can ship it to me from China is just going to have to be fast enough this time around.