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Increasingly I was limping along, trying to use an outdated version of Safari as my access point to every function.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.