You’ve seen these photos before, even if you don’t remember seeing them. They were originally in past Caturday posts. Unfortunately, writing about them in Caturday posts wasn’t good enough for them, so they took a vote in one of their magic circle meetings and decided they wanted their various photos to also be used as device wallpapers. And so I started to experiment with using my cat photos on my soon-to-be-legacy 12.9” iPad Pro.

The ability to create new iDevice wallpapers is a feature that crept upon me over the last few major releases. I’m not too sure I like the way this feature’s been implemented. I did manage to edit the lock screen text for the time such that it’s back to being thin weight, instead of that horrible (to my eyes) bold weight that suddenly appeared several releases back. Very large fonts do not have to be bold. Thin and elegant is more than sufficient.

One feature I don’t like is how the application so lightens the top of the photo for the lock screen that you can’t read the indicators for WiFi signal strength and battery percentage.

The picture of Nicholas was taken back during his invade-all-the-boxes phase. I actually had to be careful and make sure Nicholas wasn’t in a box I took outside to recycle, because he liked to hide inside boxes that had the top down.

The interior wallpaper is Luke and his sous-chef role during early morning breakfast preparation. He’s always up on the countertop walking around and providing a running commentary in Cat speak. I give him kisses, quick little rubs and scritches, and answer back when he speaks.

In this example the Apple software has dramatically darkened the top third of the photo, far more than what I’d photographed it as, but that’s fine because it allows all the white text to stand out.

I have lots more portrait oriented cat photos, so that over time I’ll cycle through them all. So far the cats haven’t asked me to make a made-on-iPhone movie about them, but I suppose it’s only a matter of time.

On Monday, 10 June, Apple had its big annual get-together, their World-Wide Developer Conference (WWDC). I’ve long since stopped caring and following along, waiting for the dust to clear to check if anything Apple revealed meant anything to me. This year Apple did reveal something important to me: this year Apple decided my 12.9-inch iPad Pro, 2nd generation, won’t get an upgrade to ipadOS 18.

My iPad Pro was first introduced June 2017; I purchased mine Christmas 2018 on heavy discount. I’ve gotten plenty of use out of mine, and will continue to use it until the system just dies. I keep this because this is the last iPad Pro to be introduced with both a home button at the bottom as well as a Lightening. In 2018 Apple introduced new iPads with FaceID, no home button, and USB-C in place of Lightening. That’s why my 12.9-inch was so heavily discounted.

Of course the question is: will I purchase a replacement? Let’s see how much Apple is asking for a replacement.

Apple isn’t giving them away. A near-equal replacement for my old iPad Pro (13-inch, 512GB, M4) with my old iPad as trade-in ($160, how generous) will set me back US$1,139 (without sales tax added in). What makes that worse for me is that if I don’t get an M4 iPad Pro with at least 1TB of storage then I don’t get an M4 will all the cores it’s capable of having. No need to calculate how much that iPad would cost, only to know it’s even more than this price.

I don’t know yet if I’ll make the switch. This iPad still works fine, and I can use it with Side Car to add it to my MacBook as a second screen. I’ve done that many times already and it works wonderfully, especially out in the field at a customer site. I can drive on my MacBook keyboard while what I need to show is on the iPad Pro as a second screen.

I balk at that large sum of money Apple is asking for a new iPad. Just like I balk at that large sum of money Apple is asking for a new iPhone to replace the one I currently own.

I’ve been reading lately about how people are hanging onto their iDevices for longer and longer periods, usually measured in two, or three, or maybe even four years. I beat them all with my seven years of usage with this iPad, and seven years of usage with my iPhone 11 Pro Max. Just like my iPad, my iPhone is still being updated with iOS.

I suspect that iOS/ipadOS 18 will be the last major OS upgrade for either device. If that happens, and if both devices are still operational, I doubt I’ll rush right and and purchase replacements. Just because I won’t get the latest feature doesn’t mean the devices still won’t be highly useful to me. I’m typing in this post using a Logitech case-and-keyboard that I purchased at the same time I purchased the iPad, and it too is still working just fine. In the early days of ownership I was all excited about making this my personal computer. That didn’t quite work out as intended, as I needed a personal computer for a lot more than just content consumption and the occasional bit of creative work, such as this blog post.

Furthermore, the state of ipadOS at the time didn’t allow for complicated work, in spite of Apple’s cheerful advertising to the contrary. In the end I gave up on it and the iPad sat on the shelf for quite a while, until Pandemic Lockdown hit, and I resurrected it for a lot of web viewing. While the iPad was “resting,” Apple was busy making changes and releases to ipadOS, so that when I started to use the hardware again I began to appreciate the software. The software has improved to the point where, at this specific point in time, I would stack it up against a Chromebook, such as the Lenovo model I currently own.

This post is being typed into WordPress’ web editor inside Safari. Everything works as it should inside Safari. I know people like to hate on Safari, and at times I do as well, but there are a lot more times where Safari just fades into the background, which any good browser should.

In the early days of ownership I tried to use a Logitech MX Ergo trackball mouse, and I managed to do that. Unfortunately as I grew to use the combination I discovered that am iPad doesn’t handle a  mouse very well. The way the mouse pointer was rendered on the screen didn’t help matters at all. Instead I started to use the original Apple Pencil to randomly select any spot on the screen, an action I continue to this day. It is with just a touch of irony that the Apple Pencil is a lot more useful on a touch device such as the iPad, in spite of Steve Job’s stylus comment:

So let’s not use a stylus. We’re going to use the best pointing device in the world. We’re going to use a pointing device that we’re all born with – born with ten of them. We’re going to use our fingers. We’re going to touch this with our fingers. And we have invented a new technology called multi-touch, which is phenomenal. It works like magic.

That was back in 2009, when multi-touch was new and shiny. A lot changed from 2009 because a lot was learned in the intervening years before Apple released its Pencil. But I digress…

I like trailing tech. It winds up being a lot cheaper to acquire and own than the leading edge tech. It always does what I need doing. A perfect combination of low cost and more than adequate capability.

I’ve been a solid desktop Vivaldi user for a number of years on Linux, macOS, and Windows. I still continue to use it on the macOS and Windows desktop, having switched back to Firefox on Linux Mint because Firefox works better on Linux Mint for me. But trying to use Vivaldi on Apple’s mobile operating systems has been second rate compared to Safari, which is a bit weird considering that Apple forces everyone to use the same Webkit engine that Safari uses. What follows are two examples of site rendering, Safari first then Vivaldi.

TheRegister might not be the “best” site to browse, but I enjoy its eclectic humor and the subjects it covers. I’ve been reading this site for years. Note how Safari renders the page with illustrative images scattered across the page. Also note the white gaps, one across the top, and one down on the lower right. This is where ads would go if I didn’t have an ad blocker installed on my iPad.

Here’s the same page in the Vivaldi browser, Note how ads are showing up across the top and down the right side, and how there are no, repeat no, illustrative images like there are in the Safari view.

Vivaldi performs equally strangely with other sites. For instance, The Verge likes to write articles with lots of X tweets quoted in the body of the article. Under Safari I can see those tweets (xeets?), but under Vivaldi there are big blank gaps where nothing is shown. And on it goes, with Safari doing a much better job of rendering sites than Vivaldi.

These are just the problems on an iPad. Trying to use Vivaldi on an iPhone is one of the worst experiences I’ve ever endured, so much so that Vivaldi lasted about 30 minutes before I decided I’d had enough and deleted it. I’m about ready to remove it from my iPad as well.

Is Vivaldi on mobile any good? Under Android, the answer is a resounding ‘yes’. I have a Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 Lite 2020 currently running Android 13. I started using Google Chrome on the S6 until I got so tired of the ads that I installed Vivaldi. Once Vivaldi was on the S6 and I started using it, it quickly became apparent that the only way to surf the web on the S6 was with Vivaldi and Vivaldi’s Tracking and Ad Blocking set to its highest level, Block Trackers and Ads. Vivaldi on Android at that setting is head-and-shoulders superior to Vivaldi on iOS at any tracking level.

I tried to use the latest darling browser, Vivaldi, to write this post but when I went to the WordPress site and tried to log into my blog account, I got the following bizarre screen:

Whatever is happening, WordPress’ login thinks I’m from somewhere else besides Orlando, Florida. I have no idea what language that is. This isn’t the first time that Vivaldi on my iPad has been identified as an unsupported browser, which kinda warps my mind a bit as this is the third decade of the 21st century and we’re supposed to have left this kind of nonsense behind over 20 years ago with the rise of Mozilla/Phoenix/Firefox and the long overdue death of Internet Explorer 6. But I suppose that whatever Vivaldi is spitting out as an identifier to WordPress’ login page is so alien it can’t handle it. Instead, I fell back to using Apple’s Safari browser, which isn’t bad at all. In spite of what Safari’s legion of vociferous critics may say Apple has invested a lot of quality effort into making mobile Safari the best mobile browser on the iOS platform (and yes, in spite of the name change, ipadOS is still iOS).

What’s even stranger is how WordPress the company has replaced its mobile application with a newer application, Jetpack. As of this point in time I have absolutely no use for Jetpack. The one feature the older WordPress app had, the ability to create and edit posts, is conspicuously absent. Oh, you can click on an entry and pop into an editor to edit an existing post, but the ability to create from new is gone. Furthermore, when you do pop into an editor, it’s that block-based editor that WordPress has attempted to foist on us for years. In spite of WordPress’ warnings it would remove the classic editor, it’s still there for old curmudgeons like me to continue to use.

I suppose I’ll just have to muddle along with the old ways of writing posts. I doubt, however, that I’ll ever need to fret about having a decent tool to write creatively. If and when WordPress ever does get around to finally killing the old classic editor, I’ll either learn to get along with the new stuff because it’s been polished a bit more to make it easier to work with, or else I’ll find yet another tool and go back to the setup I tried years ago with Ulysses. There is the new kid on the block, Obsidian…

Correction/Update

See that round gray circle with the white plus in it, down at the bottom on the lower left? Yeah, that one. That’s the control for creating a new entry. I “discovered” that feature just moments ago. I still won’t use it because it throws me into the block editor which I just do not want. And I did look around a bit to see if I could configure which editor to use, but I didn’t expect to find such a feature, and I didn’t. I’m still sticking with the web-based WordPress dashboard and its classic editor.

Back in August 2017 I wrote about purchasing the Apple 12.9” second generation iPad Pro. I’d found it discounted online and felt it was a decent enough purchase at that time for something lighter and easier to transport than my MacBook Pro. I’d also written how I was going to use an iOS application specifically created to help writing. So how did all that turn out?

Right now I’ve stopped using Ulysses the writing app; I no longer pay yearly for it. I still have the trackball, but I no longer use it with the iPad as it’s too cumbersome. It’s being used on a “regular computer.” For a long period the iPad sat folded up with its keyboard, unused except for my occasional checks to update the operating system. And then a “funny” thing happened around the first of 2023. Back in December 2021 I purchased a 13” M1 MacBook Pro (released 2020) on sale. I started to use that fairly heavily, especially out in the field leaving the big 16” Intel MacBook Pro at home. Meanwhile, the iPad Pro sat alone and unloved.

Then one day, out of the blue, early last year, I grabbed a USB-C to Lightening cable and plugged the iPad Pro into the M1 MacBook Pro and enabled Sidecar. All of a sudden I had a second screen on the big iPad Pro screen. That moment of epiphany made me suddenly appreciate the iPad Pro, not for what it could do alone but what it could do with my MacBook. I started to drop it into my computer bag along with my MacBook. More than once I hooked up the iPad Pro to my MacBook and then duplicated the MacBook’s screen onto the iPad, and then positioned the iPad so that others around me could see what I was doing on the MacBook without straining to look over my shoulders. Other times I used the iPad as a separate screen that greatly enhanced my ability to open up multiple applications and multitask. From that point forward the 12.9” iPad Pro was front and center, and I started to use it both with my MacBook and by itself more and more. It was like I had re-purchased the device.

What I find remarkable about the 12.9” iPad Pro is that the battery is still healthy after all this time; it still charges to full, and it holds a charge a good long while. I was even more surprised that Apple updated the software on this iPad to the latest, 17.1.1. I suspect that when ipadOS 18 is released sometime next year this iPad Pro will finally be dropped. I’m not nearly afraid of that happening because of how ipadOS has evolved over the last five years.

When I bought this device, it still had ipadOS version 10 on it. Seven major versions later and I can see a clear difference for the better using this iPad. If the quality of the current ipadOS release had been as good back in 2017 as it is now, I would never have set the iPad aside and nearly forgotten about it. The different between ipadOS 10 and 17 is that vast, and ipadOS 17 is that good. Once again I’m writing this post on it using the WordPress web-based editor in classic mode, and it’s indistinguishable from working on any other computer that hosts a web browser.

What has happened is my use of the 12.9” iPad has displaced my use of the Lenovo Chromebook. The Chromebook is a lot more computer than the iPad, as I have a Debian 11 virtual machine configured on it that I use for some software development. The pull of this iPad over the Lenovo is the screen. The second generation 12.9” iPad Pro screen is far superior to the much younger Lenovo Chromebook’s screen, matching the quality of all my MacBooks in this household. With my eyesight slowly deteriorating over time, screen quality is becoming more and more of a key usability feature for me. The clarity and brightness of the iPad screen can’t be appreciated enough in my case.

I have debated within myself whether I should trade in the 2019 16” MacBook Pro, a.k.a. “The Beast.” It was purchased with an Intel octacore I9, 64GB memory, and 4TB disk space. The price, with Apple Care, was nearly US$6,000. That was paid for by the project I was working on in 2020, and the machine was left with me when the project came to an end. I still have Apple Care with the machine that will end September 2024. I have been wondering if I should “down size” to a far less expensive Apple Silicon MacBook, a 16” device with an M2 Pro and only 1/2 the memory and disk storage. It would still be expensive, but not nearly as expensive as The Beast. I could take some of that money and invest it into another, more current, iPad Pro with Apple Silicon, thus having the same capabilities as I have now with the 12.9” iPad.

All of that means lots of money, money I’m no longer willing to spend on tech. I’m re-discovering old tech and realizing I never took full advantage of all this old tech I do have. I’m more inclined to purchase a new iPad Pro than I am a MacBook Pro.

For the time being I’m just enjoying the old/new experience of this 2017 technology which shines just as brightly in late 2023 as the latest Apple gear.

Links

the second attempt, this time with feeling

my apple 12.9” ipad pro, 2017 edition

Apple TV+

I got a year’s free subscription to Apple TV+ when I purchased my iPhone 11 Pro Max in September 2019. It was January 2020 before I even bothered to set up the application, let alone start to watch anything on it. The only show I remember watching was “For All Mankind,” and I stopped watching it because I’m no fan of alternate history, especially when it involves the space race of the 1960s between the US and the Soviet Union. The whole series is based on what if the Russians moon rocket booster, the N1, had actually worked? I’ve studied the N1 and it was a manufacturing disaster. The N1, on paper, was the most powerful heavy lift first stage every built. That first stage used 30 NK-15 engines, which were considered the most powerful rocket engines in that class of their day. The problem is that the N1 first stage was not static fire tested, the entire N1 program being under-funded and rushed to completion. As a consequence, all four N1 test launches self-destructed when launched. An awful lot of what went wrong in our time line would have had to have been done correctly in an alternate history. An awful log stretching back decades. You can’t just blithely wish it so. Rocketry is stupidly hard, such that the only rocket that even comes close to the N1 is today’s Falcon Heavy, with three Falcon 9 cores, each core with nine engines, for a total of 27 when the Heavy is under full thrust.

I got tired of all the glib passing over of the technical issues so that “For All Mankind’s” writers could write a convoluted soap opera. I skipped around a few episodes in the first season, and gave up.

After several months of light watching I stopped watching Apple TV+ completely. I only remembered I had it when I received an email from Apple that my free subscription was expiring in November 2020. That’s when I unsubscribed.

CBS All Access

That service was offered through Apple TV+ with a free 30 day all-you-could-watch trial, so I signed up. I managed to watch “Star Trek: Picard” as well as “Star Trek: Discovery.” Both shows were fan-service shows. If you’re a die-hard Trekkie then those shows are certainly for you. I’m not in that category. I’m the 8th grader who turned off the original Star Trek, season three, first episode, “Spock’s Brain,” because it was so bad. That episode has absolutely no redeeming qualities; by the time I’d gotten to the mid-point of the episode I’d had enough. I never watched another episode of season 3, and when NBC finally killed it I barely noticed.

Both of those new shows reminded me a bit of that crap. I quickly went through all the episodes, skipping parts that were of no interest to me. On “Picard,” the last episode where Data dies was particularly bilious. “Discovery” on the other hand was just off the scale when it came to overall acceptance of any of the stories or plot lines. “Discovery” is just bad fantasy wrapped in Star Trek technobabble and flashing lights. Once I finished with “Discovery” I killed my subscription.

Netflix

I was an old subscriber to Netflix. I opened a subscription with Netflix back when you ordered DVDs to be shipped to your home, back in the early 2000s. It was cheap, a lot cheaper than going to the movies, and it helped entertain the family, including the girls who were in high school at the time. I stuck with Netflix when they switched over to streaming; I first streamed Netflix with an app I installed on the family Nintendo Wii. When I upgraded the family DVD to Blueray, it came with Netflix streaming pre-installed. Same with my first digital TV, a Samsung 55 incher. Netflix was ubiquitous, and full of video content from the sublime to the ridiculous. It was cheap and plentiful.

Then it got not so cheap and not so plentiful. Other streaming services came along (Disney, for example) and starting pulling movies to show on their services. And then Netflix started to “rotate” movies out, so that if you didn’t watch it, and it was rotated out, too bad, so sad. And then Netflix started to make their own movies, none of which appealed to me. I know my taste in movies can get pretty trashy, but not Netflix trashy. So early 2020 I killed that subscription.

So what are we watching these days?

Amazon Prime with Brit Box

It’s Amazon, and it seems to come with everything. I added Brit Box so we could see all the British TV that never was complete on any other streaming service. So all the seasons and all the episodes are complete on Brit Box. I watched Amazon pretty much because of “The Expanse,” but if you read my last post, you pretty much know I’ve walked away from that. I use Amazon Prime for a lot of other services besides movies, so I’m not to concerned with whether I keep it or not; Video is just one of those added perks.

Disney+

I signed up to Disney+ because it’s cheap and because of “The Mandalorian” and “WandaVision,” as well as the complete catalog of Star Wars, MCU, and Pixar. There’s a lot there to keep me occupied. But not necessarily happy.

I’ve already passed judgement on “The Mandalorian” and found it lacking. Once again, a fan service episode. If there’s any redeeming feature to the show, it was season 1, episode 1, in which Werner Herzog stared as “The Client.” It slowly went down hill from there.

“WandaVision” is a bit more enigmatic. They’re trying to be clever, and they’re almost making it happen. These first few episodes remind me a bit of the first few seasons of “Agents of Shield.” The fact that new episodes are only released weekly every Friday is a bit of a letdown, but then, it takes time to film and produce anything, so I can wait for the finished product to be delivered.

Going back through the MCU catalog has allowed me to build a better understanding of how all the pieces fit together. The problem with movies is the long delay between releases, when you memory of the last movies grow a bit hazy. So when I see something that doesn’t quite make sense in one film, I can go back to a prior film and see how that led to an event in the later film(s). I’ve grown to have a better appreciation of what the MCU accomplished up to this point.

In conclusion

That’s about it. My TV watching is declining over time. I have a recent LG 55 inch TV that is programmed to stream just about everything. Funny thing is I spend as much time watching streamed content on my iPhone and iPads as I do on the LG. My wife is going down the same path. If we want to watch something together I’ll pull up my 12 inch iPad Pro and share it with her. It seems sufficient, and it harkens back to the early days of broadcast TV when my primary TV was a 13″ Sony that my wife and I shared right when we married. Talk about coming around in circles…

As for the other kind of visual entertainment, video games, I hardly play anything anymore. I have exactly one game I play on both iPhone and iPad. My oldest daughter and her husband gave me a Nintendo Switch Lite, on which I play “Animal Crossing” and share it with them and my youngest daughter. I’ve tried to get interested in other Switch games, especially when the local Walmart puts them on sale, but I play them a bit then put the cartridges in my Switch case and don’t think much about them after that.

I have no patience anymore with fantasy and make believe worlds. They take too much time, have too many logic and story holes, and demand too much money over time for too little in return.

I got so tired of it, so I went looking for all the ways to turn it off and just set my own screen brightness. First I went into Display and Brightness and turned off True Tone. That got rid of the crazy hue shifting. Then I had to go hunting further through Settings for more…

I finally stumbled upon Accessibility | Display and Text Size and made sure everything there was off. What surprised me is that Reduce Transparency and Increase Contrast were both enabled. I know I never touched those once, because it’s under Accessibility, and supposedly it’s for folks who actually need help accessing their iPhone. Once I disabled those, the look on my iPhone in particular matched what I used to get right up to the iPhone 8 and its iOS version, 11. The overall look when weird after that, which I know isn’t quite the technical term you’d like to read. But it was usable, I was busy, so I lived with the weirdness.

You’d think by now I would have nailed it all, but no, there’s one more setting which I’ll document here. At the bottom of Display and Text Size is Auto-Brightness. You have to turn that off as well. Once that’s all done, then the screen is just a screen, not some magic marketing checkbox.

The controls for controlling these “features” are all over the place in Settings. Silly me, I would have thought Auto-Brightness would be in Display & Brightness, not two levels down in Accessibility | Display and Text Size. Only a sadistic asshole Apple developer would design and implement it that way.

Now, with the latest version of iOS, all I have to do is swipe down from the upper left corner to get a control panel with the brightness widget, and set the screen brightness to a level I like. It really isn’t that hard to do, folks. The automagic capability in iOS is busted in my not-so-humble-opinion. I’m thankful that I can disable all that crap and do it on my own. Right now, I have screen brightness level set between a third and a half of the slider.

I can’t go cold turkey on Google. I have multiple Gmail accounts to handle various tasks, having been a Gmail user since 2005 when I was invited to participate in the Gmail beta. In the past I attempted to use Google+, and I will on occasion go slumming through YouTube to look for some off-beat bit of music or old TV program. I experimented using G Suite and its individual tools in place of Microsoft Office, but I’ve since just installed and use Libre Office everywhere, not out of some misguided idealogical motivation but because it wouldn’t do all I wanted, the way I wanted.. Finally I’m a Go language user, Go having been developed by Google and for Google’s internal use before it was released as open source for the rest of the world. Google search was the first Google product I turned to, abandoning Yahoo! search completely the day I switched to Google Beta in late 1998. That’s over two decades of using Google products in some form or fashion. And I haven’t even talked about Google World and Google Maps…

Regardless, I fell under the sway of the screaming mimies that Chrome in all its forms was Evil, as was using Google Search. Ok. So on my iPhone and iPads and Mac I started using Apple’s Safari. It was pre-installed and Apple has this big deal about being privacy focused. I’ll give it a shot. For search I turned to DuckDuckGo, the current champion of the digital cognoscenti everywhere. So how did that work out for you Bill?

In the beginning it was a little rough. Search results, in particular, were a little thin, both in quality and quantity. Using Safari was OK and wasn’t all that different than using Chrome or Firefox. Until later.

Over time I found a problem with Safari on both macOS and iOS and iPadOS. It would crash and any open tabs were lost. On. All. Three. Platforms. I use my many open browser tabs to keep track of research that is ongoing at any given time. Over time, the oldest open tabs bubble to the back and are eventually closed by me. I make those decisions. But after three crashes (two on my iPad, one on macOS), I got really peeved. I’ve never had the problem with either Chrome or Firefox. They may crash, but they have tab recovery. No so Safari. The worst crash was on macOS where I had over a dozen leading tabs out of almost 100 open to areas I was actively using for my software and hardware development. That one truly hurt.

I’ve now gone back to a combination of Chrome and Firefox. I won’t even consider Microsoft Edge, so please don’t mention it. As for DuckDuckGo, when I switched browsers I switched back to Google and got what I consider much better search results. For technical questions, I consider Google’s results to be much superior.

Lesson learned? In the future, take everything that is pushing a technical ideological agenda with many grains of salt.

I own a number of Apple devices; several Macs , an iPhone and a pair of iPad Pros. The biggest issues I have are shared by the iPhones and the iPads having to do with their biometric locking features, TouchID and FaceID.

If I use TouchID on the iPads, over time after initial configuration both iPads will exhibit increasing failures to unlock when the front button is pressed. No matter how many times I erase and then reprogram touch ID, unlock remains erratic. I believe the problem is TouchID wants to decode “perfect” fingerprints, and mine are now far from perfect.

Based on recommendations due to coronavirus, I wash my hands extensively, both in length of time and number of times during the day, especially if I (seldom, as it turns out) have to leave home. To clean up I use Softsoap manufactured by Colgate-Palmolive. It does a great job, but one problem is it dries out the skin, especially on my fingertips. This leaves a lot of cracking and tiny flakes of skin. That detritus makes fingerprint matching with TouchID very difficult, requiring multiple touches/button presses to open the device. Either it eventually succeeds, or else I just punch in the password (which for me is at least eight characters because I’m that paranoid). In the end I decided that, because I don’t go out with either device, I would disable both password and TouchID. Now, when I want to open the iPads I just push the button and I’m into the device. With a cover on it, when the cover is opened I’m immediately into the device. Securing the device with TouchID while at home is too much of a burden.

Which leads us to the latest and greatest iDevice biometric lock, FaceID. In practice, on my iPhone 11, it works better than TouchID does on any Apple device that supports TouchID. When my phone can see my face at the position where I would comfortably look at the screen, it rarely fails. When it does fail it’s because I’ve either pushed my glasses up onto my forehead or I’ve taken them off completely. The second time I push up on the bottom edge of the screen, it succeeds. So only two attempts to unlock, which is far better than TouchID. The only time I have to enter my password is when it explicitly asks due to its built-in security timeout (after so many days you have to enter the password to get into the iPhone).

FaceID worked great until coronavirus and having to wear a mask. Now it fails repeatedly while I wear my mask. The only saving grace of failure is that FaceID fails fast. And now that I’m used to it failing with my mask on, I’m ready to enter the password. The time to fail first and then enter the password isn’t that much longer than two successive failures, where the second FaceID attempt normally succeeds. Failure due to a face mask underscores the limitations of the existing system.

I say existing, because rumor has it that a better FaceID that can work with a mask on is being engineered and will be installed with the next point release of iOS. In the meantime I can live with the way it behaves because, well, I really have no choice. I won’t remove the device lock because I always travel away from my home with my iPhone and I do want it locked down as much as possible.

I look at the failure of both of these security systems as yet another example of many. These failures illuminate the deep limitations of machine learning that backstops these features running on the devices. It also points to a broader level of poor quality and too many failures in our current technology in general. We spend too much on tech that doesn’t work nearly as well as advertised, and we’re putting it into critical parts of our system of systems, leading to overall fragility in our daily lives. I’ve begun to look at our world as a house of cards. Trouble is, you can’t go anywhere else in the world without running into the same issues. If we ever do have a machine apocalypse it’ll be because the machines themselves malfunctioned, not because they rose up in revolt.

Personal Postscript

Back in October 2019 I spent a premium sum on this particular iPhone 11 Max Pro just for the privilege of trying it out in real life. After seven months of continuous use I now consider that purchase a mistake, especially given how little I’ve come to use a number of its vaunted features. I won’t spend that amount of money again on an iPhone, or any smart phone for that matter, especially an Android. My next iPhone will be “down market”, a much cheaper iPhone 12. I’d considered the latest iPhone SE, but it has TouchID, which I don’t care for all that much anymore. I’m looking at a “low end” iPhone 12 with a smaller screen but with as much battery as possible inside the device. Now all I have to do is bide my time until October of this year.

I’ve been working with iPadOS 13.4 on my iPad Pro, 12.9”, second generation ever since the update. The iPad is my primary writing tool (along with the logi keyboard cover). I picked it up nearly a year ago when B&H Photo had it on sale for $500 off its regular price. Key feature for me was its 512GB of storage. I believe in large storage because I don’t believe in iCloud or Google Drive or anything else. It’s my data, it stays on my machines under my control, and I’m big enough now to do regular backups. This iPad is also capable of 4G LTE connectivity but I declined to enable that; I pay AT&T enough as it is, and if I need network connectivity away from WiFi I’ll turn on my iPhone’s personal hotspot and use that.

I have for the last six months been using the logi (Logitech) MX Ergo Plus trackball mouse (on sale! half price!) with my iPad. I have a second I use with my MacBook. In both cases, I was able to pair them directly over Bluetooth. The Ergo trackball comes with a dongle to plug into a computer’s USB A port for older computers. I had to do that with a Dell laptop I used when I worked. It came with Windows 10 Enterprise installed, with all the corporate controls turned on, so there was no Bluetooth pairing with that machine; thus, the use of the USB dongle. Unfortunately, there is no physical location anywhere on the mouse to store the dongle when not in use, so I’ve managed to misplace it. That means it’s now able to only use Bluetooth with machines that can pair with it, like all of my Apple computer gear.

Before direct mouse support was added to iPadOS I was using the Accessibility settings to enable the mouse. With direct mouse support, that’s no longer necessary. My only complaint with direct mouse support is that the mouse pointer went from being a fairly large circle with a dot in the middle to being a much smaller, semi-transparent circle that disappears over any active control. The Accessibility mouse pointer never disappeared, which I consider a much better ergonomic feature over the way it works now. Otherwise, a mouse on the iPad Pro works pretty much like I would expect. In fact mouse support on the iPad is pretty fantastic, and makes the iPad a marvelous writing tool, at least for me.

I know that the latest iPad Pros (2018 and 2020) can be used with Apple’s latest keyboard which contains a track pad, but I’m not that big a fan of trackpads in general (nor am I a big fan of its $300+ price tag). I came to despise trackpads from years ago due to poor support on both Windows and Linux. I neither want nor need them, preferring a mouse or trackball. The trackball is the best solution for me as the device just sits next to my computer/pad, and I maneuver the cursor with the ball. It’s now second nature to me, and I’ve got a travel bag that has a spot for the trackball that allows it to travel where-ever I need to go.

Perhaps this will be the combination that finally induces me to write more. I’ve been making plans and promises to write more for some time, but every time I got into a writing sprint it would suddenly taper off and I’d not post anything for weeks at a time. Perhaps I should recognize that I’m not one of these “regular writers” who can post once a day, every day. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again; writing is hard, especially good writing, the kind people want to spend time reading.

There’s a rumor going around that Apple is planning a new keyboard and cover with a trackpad for its iPad Pros. I don’t know if it’ll be for the newest Pros it might introduce later this year, or if it will be for all the Pros it has released up to this date. Regardless, I have some experience with such keyboards as I’ve written about in earlier posts, and I’m very ambivalent about whether I want a trackpad added or not.

1. Cost. The keyboard I have for the 12.9” iPad Pro was made by logi. Even though it’s not an Apple product, it still wasn’t cheap, costing around $100 when I purchased it. I can only imagine how much more the Apple version with integrated trackpad would cost.
2. Ergonomics. You’ll note in the lede photo that I’ve got my iPhone 11 Pro Max lying on the part of the cover that has no keyboard keys (and which is there in a way for scale). Now imagine that the trackpad is about half that length. I see a cramped space for my hands to rest. I really prefer my pointing device off to the side on a table, and nothing to interfere with where I rest the palms of my hands while I type. You’ll also note how flat the keyboard wrist rest is. The thickness is negligible and contributes to my typing comfort.
3. Robustness. I’ve already lost one expensive logi keyboard cover on my older, smaller Pro and I have no desire to go through that again. It was lost because it was dropped on one corner and two keys were broken out. That makes the keyboard rather useless, especially if it’s the corner where the cursor keys were located. On the larger cover above the edge of the keyboard is well away from the edge of the device when folded, so if it does get knocked it won’t damage the keyboard (the Pro itself suffered neither damage nor ding).
4. Size. Having experienced the difference between the small and large Pros, I don’t see how a practical keyboard and trackpad can be combined for the 9.7” or the newer 10.2” Pros. The screen grew larger because the bezels were shrunk, but the overall physical size hasn’t changed.

All of that is based on a conventionally constructed keyboard with mechanical keys. Who knows what Apple has in mind (ignoring the fact that the rumor is true; it may very well be not). But the more sophisticated and complex the device gets, the more expensive it gets. It wouldn’t surprise me if Apple called it the iPad Pro Keyboard, and set a price in the hundreds of dollars for the thing. Which would place it well outside my budget for such a device to be sure. It will be interesting to see what happens later this year, but I’m pretty sure I’m not in Apple’s target demographic if it is released.

About the lede photo; you’re seeing the logi keyboard and cover, with the logi Ergo Max trackball sitting next to it. Using a trackball is much more comfortable than a regular mouse, as I don’t have to move a mouse, and thus, my right wrist stays still. It’s also a Bluetooth capable device and is paired with the 12.9” iPad Pro it sits next to. It works equally well with my MacBook’s Bluetooth radio.