This is my Apple Watch Series 7. I purchased this fine instrument back in mid-2022 when Amazon was having a mid-year Black Friday style sale, and the Series 7 was being heavily discounted. My watch at that time was a Series 3, and even though it was the stainless steel bodied version with a whopping 16 MiB of internal storage (due to its ability to connect to a wireless network like my iPhone), it was beginning to show its age, and there was the threat that it wouldn’t get another major watchOS update past 2022. So I decided to take the hint and get the Series 7, even though the Series 3 was still perfectly usable.

This, of course, was my undoing in 2022. No sooner had the Series 7 gone on my wrist than Apple announced the Series 8, and some new features that would only be available on the Series 8 and later. I was unhappy, like I’d been unhappy when Apple released a version of iOS that would perform face recognition while wearing a mask with the iPhone 12 and later, but not with my iPhone 11 Pro Max at that time. This is how Apple rolls, and this is how Apple tempts their users of current and perfectly functional devices to drop more cash and stay on the upgrade treadmill. But I digress…

But wait, you ask. Didn’t I write about going back to my Citizen electro-mechanical watch over my Apple Watch? I did, but I’ve been using my Apple Watch to track a number of health metrics after I had my left knee replaced. Metrics such as number of steps/day, heart beat, blood oxygen levels, walking distance, total time exercise, total time spent outside in the sun, balance, etc, etc. All the metrics are good and getting better over time, since I started the measurements mid-July of 2024. I share my metrics with a number of my doctors. I’d rather be doing all of that, than popping some more questionable prescription meds.

I have no idea exactly when my Apple Watch starting to ask for account verification, except it was during a flurry of Apple software updates earlier this year. I’ve been having to deal with this, every morning, since about February or there abouts. Fortunately I had enough presence of mind this morning to grab a photo with my iPhone before I tapped the “Not Now” button to dismiss it. The Apple Watch 7 is still associated with my iPhone and I still get phone calls and haptic pings from my iPhone, as well as having my walking and exercise information being sent to my Health app on my iPhone. And if you think it’s a simple matter to type in a long password on the Apple Watch’s piss-ant tiny keyboard, without any visual feedback (i.e. seeing the password in plain text while you type it in), they you either don’t own one of these, or you’re just out of your pea-pickin’ mind.

This is what drives me crazy about Apple. Decisions Are Acted Upon and Software Changes Are Made and then buried in the release notes, with Dire Consequences for those trying to use these devices. I would have assumed that mere Bluetooth association from the iPhone I own and have to log into would take care of anything requiring security credentials for the devices to securely communicate, but oh no! In any event nothing is broken if I just tap “Not Now” and it only takes a second to tap that dismissal.

Which brings me up to password management in general. With the latest release of software, Apple split out password management from System Settings into its own Password app. Why is this a problem? Because there is no good way to update passwords within the app. I updated my Amazon password to something a lot stronger than what I had been using through the web interface. Unfortunately I use Vivaldi, and even though Vivaldi picked up the password update, Apple’s Password app did not. When I tried to update a password directly in Password, it wants to send me back to the website to change my password yet again, even though I’ve already changed it. What I was expecting was a simple dialog to appear and I would type in or copy the new password and then save that. Something simple.

Like I said Vivaldi knows, and fortunately for me I also maintain on my computer a file with up-to-date login information that I reference when I need to log in yet again, such as when for whatever reason the login credentials expire. As time goes along I wind up slowly changing a password here or there, and Passwords doesn’t pick up the changes, going further and further out of date as more passwords are changed. For managing something so critical as passwords, Apple’s Password app, and general password management, are worthless.

This is a story about the old vs the new. In my case, it was about an Amazon Echo Dot generation 2 vs an iPhone 16 Pro Max. Let me explain…

I’ve been going around and cleaning out old items around my home, especially unmarked boxes that for whatever reason got stuffed into various corners, where they remained for many a year. When I say many, I’m talking about going back to when I was still fully employed. One day while going through one of those mystery boxes I found an Amazon Echo Dot generation 2 unopened in its box. I have no idea when I purchased it, although it had to be after October 2016 when this model was released. I do have an idea how it was placed into the box I found it in. Back then I was traveling a bit and and was very busy in my job, so we reached out to a cleaning company to get someone into our house to help my wife keep the place clean. One of the cleaning people had a bad habit of “temporarily” placing items into boxes in order to clear an area to clean. That cleaning person had a very bad habit of not telling us she’d done that, and it was but one reason she was eventually sent on her way. I thought I’d found everything she’d stashed away, but I was wrong with this particular item in that box.

We already have a number of Alexa/Amazon items in the house, although we barely use them except to play the occasional tune or to verbally ask Alexa to turn off the lights in one room of our house. We have three advanced models that can display the time, so I have those scattered around as heavily over-engineered digital clocks (and we’ll occasionally set a wakeup alarm with them). I decided to plug in this old/new stock Echo Dot and get it integrated our home network. That’s when my problems stated.

I have the latest Alexa app installed on my iPhone, and have had it on all my iPhones going back at least to Christmas 2016, which is when I believe I purchased this one. I use the Alexa app to bring these Echo devices up and integrated into our home network. Usually when I get a new Echo Dot it gets almost immediately powered on and set up, but apparently not this time. Now I was faced with using the latest iPhone with the latest Alexa app trying to integrate an Echo Dot from late 2016, nearly nine long years ago. A lot of technical advancement happens in a nine year period. And that might have been my problem.

With Alexa up and running on my iPhone and this Echo Dot up and waiting for integration, I found I couldn’t add it to my Alexa network using my iPhone 16, no matter how many times I tried. The iPhone with Alexa would not detect this Echo Dot. I wasted a week of evenings trying one solution after another, discovering yet again during this process that the Internet is full of useless advice. I gave up with the iPhone and was seriously considering tearing the Echo Dot open just to see if I could repurpose the electronics.

And then I reached into my collection of old Pixel Android phones and pulled out a Pixel 4a. I purchased a Pixel 2, a Pixel 3x, and two Pixel 4as back in 2020 for a project because they’d been heavily discounted by Amazon of all places. I’m talking half price or less. I picked the 4a because I like its small compact design. It was running Android 13, which is where Google stopped updating the device (which I can thank my luck stars). I could still install from Google Play so I installed the same version of Alexa on the Pixel 4a as I had on my iPhone 16. I then sat down and tried to bring the Echo Dot up using that Pixel 4a. Low and behold it worked the first time. That Echo Dot is now fully integrated in with the rest of my Amazon Echo devices.

So here’s the question. How is that that an “obsolete” Pixel 4a running Android 13 but the same version of Alexa that my latest and greatest iPhone 16 Pro Max, running the latest and greatest iOS version, and with the same version of Alexa as found on Google Play, can properly communicate with the Echo Dot generation 2 when my iPhone 16 can’t?

I have never regretted an Apple device purchase until now. I still wish I had my old iPhone 11 Pro Max, and I would still have it except the 11’s mobile radio was beginning to fail with dropped calls and an inability to be cleared unless the handset was power cycled. I couldn’t have that. The 16’s mobile radio is reliable (so far), so I should be thankful for that. But there have been enough aggravating quirks while operating the 16 that I wish I could trade it in for something completely different. But then I read the horror stories of Android handset problems, especially after an Android software update, and I just have to shake my head. I think it’s all been enshitified now. I need to start looking for much older Pixel handsets, such as perhaps the Pixel 5, or maybe the Pixel 6. Something old but reliable, like the 4as.

Today’s handsets and mobile operating systems are a classic Hobson’s choice.

Apple’s map app, iPhone 16 Pro Max, iOS 18.3.1. The Gulf of Mexico is still the Gulf of Mexico as of early this afternoon. But not for much longer.

Google’s web map, via Vivaldi, iPhone 16 Pro Max, iOS 18.3.1. The Gulf of Mexico is now the Gulf of America. So what happens when I use Proto VPN to go outside the US, to some other country? Let’s go to Australia and try this again.

My VPN connection is up, and the access point is St. Lucie, Queensland, Australia, as shown by this simple test using Weather Underground. Now let’s try Google’s web map again.

We see the original Gulf of Mexico, with Gulf of America in parenthesis. That means we really can’t get around this stupidity, can we? What about the Apple map app? That’s interesting. First of all as I was writing this post it appears that my Apple map app cache reloaded, so that it started to show Gulf of America. Even if I tried to view it again through VPN, it still showed it. And then I accidentally zoomed out somewhat on the Apple map, and this is what I saw next.

Zoom in just a little tighter and Gulf of America appears. Zoom out like this and it’s back to Gulf of Mexico. And I think this is a feature, not a bug. Unlike Google, who will always show Gulf of America no mater where you are in the world, Apple seems to be a little more clever in how they’re showing this. I can’t really use VPN to fake out Apple maps because it’s using my location information to serve up the map data for my location. Which is that big blue dot over Florida.

I wish that big blue dot where somewhere else in the world right now.

It’s fun for Apple’s detractors to hammer away on Apple for a litany of perceived issues, the great majority of which are not real issues to be concerned with. We all know that Apple Intelligence is a work in progress (a polite way of saying a mess), and is labeled as BETA in System Settings. All “AI” is a work in progress, no exceptions. Since Apple is building on top of that, is it any wonder that Apple Intelligence is having problems? Apple Intelligence’s problems don’t detract from the overall usefulness of Apple’s products and services. Trust me, if Apple had decided to reactivate my Apple Intelligence on all of my devices I’d be here screaming like a banshee at Apple’s evil and nefarious ways.

I’m surprisingly happy and productive with Apple’s latest, warts and all.

One nice-to-have feature is the ability to now put widgets on the home screen, as well as the ability to put any icon on to any location of the screen. In the past the iOS screen forced all the icons to line up, starting at the upper left corner, from left to right, then top to bottom. Now I can put widgets on the screen that allow me to read important information without having to open an associated app for that information. The two I’ve added to my home screen are Breathable, which gives me a meter for the Air Quality Index, or AQI, and Weather Strip, which gives me one of the best weather forecasting apps I’ve ever used.

These sit up at the top. The AQI meter gives me the value where I live, in a very clear and convenient meter that shows how good or bad the value is, as well as the numeric value. The source of the data is the EPA, which is indicated by the small EPA logo at the upper left corner. The Weather Strip’s weather widget gives me a reasonably accurate three day forecast, as well as the current weather conditions where I live, which is Dr. Phillips, Florida. As a contrast, let’s set up the Apple weather widget in the place of Weather Strip and compare them.

The Apple weather widget is majority text, a lot of it at small font sizes that makes it difficult to read unless I pull the iPhone up close. What’s more, the Apple weather widget is giving me the local weather forecast for Orlando. I don’t live in Orlando. But because iOS only knows about Orlando, that’s all I get. The main app will allow me to select Dr. Phillips, which I’ve done, but that selection doesn’t transfer to the widget. The Apple weather widget also gives the AQI in tiny text, which I assume is Orlando, not near where I live. This is an example of an app trying to do too much, poorly duplicating what the AQI meter is doing.

There’s a bigger issue I have with the Apple weather app; it’s a hot mess, inaccurate at the best of times. Apple purchased Dark Sky, an app I used to use, in order to supposedly “incorporate” the best Dark Sky features into the Apple weather app. I’ve never seen a change for the better with the Apple weather app; in fact, in my use it’s only gotten worse over time. Thus I’ve gone to using the Weather Strip.

Apple Intelligence

I have not been impressed with Apple Intelligence. Not to beat up just Apple, I’ve not been impressed with any of the artificial intelligent products being pushed out by all the major AI players. Apple Intelligence has been inaccurate to the point where Apple slapped a BETA tag on Apple Intelligence symbol. All beta signifies to me is that Apple is admitting how buggy it is. As a consequence of all these shortcomings I’ve disabled Apple Intelligence on my iPhone. I discovered, rather to my delight, that once disabled I got a battery life boost. Battery life went from good with Apple Intelligence enabled to fantastic with Apple Intelligence disabled. I think that’s a quite fair trade; more battery life for turning off Apple Intelligence.

Speaking of turning features off, make sure you turn off Photo’s Enhanced Visual Search. The feature was introduced sometime during the iOS 18 updates, and it was enabled by default. Apple says Enhanced Visual Search is supposed to allow you to search for photos “using landmarks or points of interest” it will identify on your behalf. Apple will identify this on your behalf using a combination of on-device ML combined with cloud-based landmark dictionary. My problem is I don’t trust the software, and more significantly, I didn’t opt into this “feature.” I didn’t even know it was there until I read an article about it in The Register. I’ve turned it off, and frankly, I recommend you do the same.

Links

Apple auto-opts everyone into having their photos analyzed by AI for landmarks — https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/03/apple_enhanced_visual_search/

You’re looking at the result of me goofing around with Apple’s new application, Playground. It is Apple Intelligence’s interpretation of a robot astronaut in a nighttime winter holiday with fireworks. The weird touch is the robot snowman on the right but far enough back to be bokeh blurred.

Here’s the view of the app on my iPhone 16 that generated the image. I didn’t have to type in anything. All I did was select five of the suggestion bubbles at the bottom, then touch the result bubble in the middle to have that bubble open up into the complete picture at the top of this post.

I’m not impressed with any of this. I recognize the techniques used by Playground in this image as being misappropriated from human artists whose work I’d seen in years past. This is not some creative masterpiece, nor is it creative in the human sense of the word. All I did was select five inputs embodying human artistic talents strip-mined from the wider internet by an LLM, probably the one hosted by OpenAI, and the software did the rest.

I will continue to explore what Apple Intelligence has to offer with the latest iOS and macOS updates. As for this moment, however, I’m done with Playground.

This is a continuation of my first kinda-sorta review (see link below).

Screen

The 16’s screen is a little longer and a little narrower than the 11’s. Both screens are OLED screens, both Super Retina XDR displays. As far as I’m concerned I see absolutely no difference between the two. That’s great by me, as both are gorgeous to look at. The iPhone 11 display was still in pristine shape when I traded it for the 16.

The notch is obviously gone, in its place the Dynamic Island. I’ve watched it in action enough to appreciate how it’s blended into many functions on the screen. For example when face ID is working, the island expands into a rounded square showing the operating state of face ID and when face ID’s successful it briefly shows a big green check, then shrinks back to the island. I never had a problem with the notch the way some (i.e. “influencers”) did. I don’t have a problem with the island either. I consider both to be well executed.

Case

The 11’s case is stainless steel, while the 16’s is titanium. I purchased the 11 with a dark green (Midnight Green) body, while I purchased the 16 in black. Both cases are IP68 waterproof. I never had a problem with the 11 getting wet (an issue here in Florida during the hurricane season), and I don’t expect any problems with my 16. The biggest difference is that the 11’s edges were rounded while the 16’s are flat, harkening back to the iPhones 4 and 5 series. I have a transparent Supcase that cost all of $20, and with the way it wraps around the iPhone’s body, I’m not all that aware of flatness vs roundedness. I had an Otterbox case on the iPhone 11. With all of that I notice no difference in overall handling between the two.

One nice feature/update is the replacement of the ring/silent switch with a button that can be reprogrammed for different tasks. Ironically enough I programmed my button toggle silent mode when I press it. The old switch was always accidentally getting knocked, putting the 11 into silent mode, and I would miss calls because of that. The button is stiff and so far can’t be accidentally pressed and toggled.

Cameras

I know all about the big changes in the cameras on the iPhone 16 Pro Max. I can tell that the camera island on the back of the body is much bigger than the island is on the iPhone 11 Pro Max. I’ve tried the iPhone 16 camera casually, nothing serious mind you. So far I’m not all that inspired to go running out and use it to create some sort of visual artistic masterpiece that winds up being noticed by Apple itself. I’m sure I’ll discover more about the camera as time progresses.

Speaking of buttons on the case, there is a new Camera Control button that you can press to bring up the camera app as well as use it to take a photo. I also noticed that if I just touch the button and then slide my finger when the camera app is active that I can select between the available camera magnification factors. All of this reminds me of a rangefinder camera setup, except in this case done poorly. I’m not all that inspired by the button due to its very skinny nature; a regular camera release is nice and round compared to this. I also don’t like the placement because I inadvertently squeeze it when I pick the 16 up at the bottom. I’ve spent a decade of iPhone use learning to pick the iPhone up at the bottom so I didn’t trip the power button or the volume controls. To avoid any issues with the Camera Control, I’ve gone into Settings and disabled it.

More Final Thoughts

The iPhone 16 Pro Max is a solid upgrade compared to the iPhone 11 Pro Max. I’m sure there are features I’ll discover in the future that will further justify the purchase of the 16. I will note that if the iPhone 11 Pro Max’s radio and Lightning port for Apple Car Play hadn’t begun to show operational deficiencies that I would have not traded the 11 in for the 16; the iPhone 11 Pro Max was still that good after five years.

Links

my initial iphone 16 review

I’m now fully committed to my iPhone 16 Pro Max. I shipped the older iPhone 11 Pro Max to the exchange center via UPS Ground early Monday; the digital equivalent of Cortés burning his ships. There’s no going back.

Here are some of the features I find worthwhile.

Mobile Radio

The primary requirement for any smartphone is the mobile radio. Without a working mobile radio, calls can’t be reliably  made, text messages can’t be sent or received, and any app that requires a mobile radio in place of WiFi when away from a WiFi access point will not work. The failing radio led to dropped calls and a mode where every other subsequent call would immediately fail. I could reset the radio by putting the iPhone into airplane mode, and then immediately taking it out. That reset the radio and it worked for a time until the next failure. Since transferring from the 11 to the 16 and enabling the 16, I haven’t had a single dropped call or failed text message.

Apple Car Play

Another problem that developed with the 11 and appears to be corrected with the 16 is the physical connection between the iPhone and my 2020 Acura MDX that allows Apple Car Play to function. The connection is simple enough; plug in the iPhone and start the car, or start the car and plug in the iPhone. In either case the two connect and work together, allowing me to use Apple Maps to help navigate while I drive, and to answer incoming phone calls. A problem began to appear with the 11 in which, in certain random occasions the two failed to connect and sync. The only way to correct that problem was to restart the Acura, which in effect rebooted the Acura’s on-board computer and seemed to allow proper connection and synchronization. The iPhone 11 used the iPhone’s older Lightening connection, while the iPhone 16 uses USB-C. I’d tried a number of Lightening cables, including a new one, but the occasional issue would still present itself. With the iPhone 16 and its USB-C cable, I’ve had no more issues.

Siri

I have never been a fan of Siri, choosing to disable and ignore it whenever possible. The only time I would try to use Siri was to dial a phone number while driving. When I tried it with the 11 there was a fairly good chance Siri would either pick the wrong number or else just fail silently. Thus, ignoring Siri and never using it. I tried that same task with the 16 and was surprised on two counts; first, it works reliably and consistently, and second, when Siri isn’t sure Siri asks explicitly did I ask to call so-and-so, which allows me to correct and train Siri. Siri on the 16 no long fails silently. As a consequence I’ve left Siri operational. I may try other Siri-related tasks in the future.

I don’t know if Apple Intelligence is helping with Siri, of if Siri backend code has been refined, or if the  16’s processor(s) are allowing for better performance. Perhaps a bit of all three.

Battery

The primary reason for purchasing the iPhone 11 Pro Max in 2019 was because it had the largest battery of any of those iPhones, and the largest to date at that point in time. I needed that large battery to minimize any “charge anxiety” with having the phone with me at all times. The battery did indeed have a long life between charges and regular to heavy use of the 11. The battery chemistry and charging circuitry in the 11 were so good that five years later, when I finally let it go, the battery still had 86% of its maximum capacity.

I’d like to offer a side observation about iPhone battery life and charging habits. All the “advice” that’s out on the web about smartphone battery life and how to conserve it has been wrong from the beginning. I’ve always charged my battery to 100%, and I’ve always had it plugged into something that kept it topped up. When using my iPhone with my Acura for Apple Car Play, the iPhone is always physically plugged into the car, and the car was always providing power to the iPhone. My only complaint about the battery on the 11 was how long it took to charge the 11 at some points. Other than that battery life was just fine.

If anything, the iPhone 16 battery is even better. Obviously it’s brand new, the battery construction and chemistry have advanced over the last five years, and I’m sure the iPhone 16’s charging circuitry has been further refined. I’ve noticed the iPhone 16 keeps its charge a very long time, especially at 100%, and when I do plug it in, the iPhone 16 charges back to 100% far more quickly than the iPhone 11 Pro Max did. The battery on the iPhone 16 has me back to just carrying it around rather than keeping it in a charger for the most part. I drop the iPhone 16 in a charger only when I need to, or at night when I sleep.

Various Conclusions

Because of the five year span between the iPhone 11 and the iPhone 16, the iPhone 16 shows considerable refinement in the requirements I care about. I expected this considering the price as well as the passage of time.

I started using iPhones with the iPhone 6, and for the next one to two years until the iPhone 8, I was on Apple’s update plan. That lasted until the iPhone 8, where I fell out of the plan, keeping it longer than intended.

When I purchased my iPhone 11 Pro Max, I gave my wife my iPhone 8 Plus, who then gave her iPhone 7 Plus to our youngest daughter, who’s iPhone 5s was dying. We kept our 2019 phones until my youngest daughter had to purchase a replacement last year, and then my wife and I replaced our respective phones this year.

In our family iPhone usage pattern is clear; use the iPhone until it literally starts to fail in some important feature, then purchase a replacement. In my case that was five years, six years for my wife, and almost seven years for my youngest daughter. I’ve read that iPhone customers are keeping their iPhones, on average, three years between updates. My family goes well beyond that.

But — if the radio and lightening communications hadn’t begun to show signs of intermittent failure, I would be using the iPhone 11 still. And before someone pipes up about “planned obsolescence,” stop right there. Smartphones in general are tiny and packed full of highly complex electronics. Sooner or later wear and tear from constant physical handling will take its toll, resulting in what I experienced with the iPhone 11 towards the end. Based on my experience I expect to keep the iPhone 16 Pro Max for another five years, if not even long. In the mean time I’m enjoying a new iPhone that is operating in such a way as to become transparent to me in my day-to-day use of the device. I think that’s wonderful.

An iPhone 16 Pro Max, 256 GB to be precise. I’ve written ad infinitum I would never give up my iPhone 11 Pro Max for a later model, and I’ve kept to that promise up until now. What changed my mind is that the cellular radio within the 11 was beginning to fail, causing calls to drop and the phone to then go into a mode where every succeeding call also failed. I learned to put the 11 into airplane mode, then take it out of that mode, in order to reboot the radio. It was happening too often (one could say even one time was one too many), especially when I was driving; I use my iPhone with Apple Car in my Acura MDX, primarily for Apple Maps. The 11 radio also had a bad habit of dropping calls while I was walking through big box stores due to signal attenuation within the store itself. Even text messages were having a hard time completing; on more than one occasion I’d come back to iMessage and find that my last attempt at a text message had failed to complete.

A communication device that can’t perform basic voice and text communications reliably is no longer fit for its primary purpose. Thus the replacement.

The deal was triggered by an offer at my local Costco. At the top of the deal was the $350 trade-in that Costco offered for my 11; Apple offered absolutely nothing. There were further benefits such as waving all fees and shaving a little bit off Apple’s MSRP. The cherry on top as it were was the Costco $100 in-store gift card, which I would certainly use. By the time all was said and done the cost of my iPhone 16 Pro Max 256 GB came down to a regular iPhone 16 with 128 GB storage. That’s what I used to pay for all my iPhones from the 6 Plus up to the 8 Plus. Buying the 11 Pro Max cost me nearly double what I paid for the prior 8 Plus. I’d made up my mind to never pay that amount of money again, and furthermore to wait until the 11 was actually failing. The 11 was failing, and the Costco deal helped to considerably bring down the cost of a new replacement.

The 16 was delivered on the day I lost Ruby, so I set it off to the side until Wednesday. Moving everything I had on the 11 over to the 16 was mostly seemless, with some strange bumps along the way. In particular I had to log back into a many of my apps, with only a few of them acting as if nothing had transpired. To transfer all the data all I had to do was sit the 11 next to the 16 and follow the few prompts that showed up on the screens of both. I had about 100 GB of content to transfer, and it was transferred wirelessly from the 11 to the 16 in less than an hour. That included my AT&T phone number.

After making the transfer I’ve noticed how much clearer voice is, and I have yet to encounter one failed call or failed iMessage. Not one. Everything else is very nice to have, but my primary requirement, having an iPhone I can trust to stay connected, has been satisfied.

Before someone in the audience starts yammering on about designed-in obsolescence, watch Asianometry’s YouTube video on the incredible complexity of the RF filter in a modern smartphone. Having something this complex and this small in a portable device (the iPhone) that get’s knocked around for five plus years of regular use, it’s amazing this worked for a long as it did. I got my money’s worth with the iPhone 11 Pro Max, and I expect to do the same with the iPhone 16 Pro Max.

Links

The iPhone Forever Changed the RF Filter — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8jmHtfVmPY

Monday, 16 September, Apple unleashed software updates for iOS, ipadOS, macOS, and watchOS, just to name the four I got. In particular I was interested in macOS 15 Sequoia for my two Apple Silicon MacBook Pros, one of which you see in the fastfetch output at the lead of the post. It is the Apple Silicon MacBook Pros that will have Apple Intelligence features when those features are finally released.

I was pleasantly surprised that my aging iPhone 11 Pro Max was allowed to upgrade to iOS 18. Unfortunately my even more ancient 12.9″ iPad Pro was only allowed to update to ipadOS 17.6, which contained just bug fixes. Bug fixes I don’t mind, as the iPad is still just fine for my needs. My Apple Watch Series 7 updated to watchOS 11, which I find rather remarkable considering how old it is compared to Series 8, Series 9, and the latest Series 10. I’m quite certain that my iPhone will not get any new major iOS versions beyond this year’s iOS 18.

But back to my MacBook Pros. As it turns out, my oldest MacBook Pro, the 16″ Intel i9 Beast, also updated to macOS 15, this version for the Intel architecture. Again, I don’t know how much longer this will go on, but considering how bulked out it is I don’t intent to give it up anytime soon. If nothing else my Parallels Desktop license is bonded to this machine, and I continue to use it for Windows virtualization for those customers who need Windows 11 development.

Which leaves my two Apple Silicon M1 MacBook Pros, the 13″ regular M1 and the 16″ M1 Max. The 16″ M1 Max is meant to eventually replace the 16″ Intel system. When I purchased the M1 Max system it had been discounted so heavily at the time that it cost about 1/3 what was paid for the 16″ Intel system.

Interesting Features

Window Tiling

One interesting feature I’ve been trying out is window tiling. I use window tiling quite a bit on my Linux Mint system, which has had that feature for some number of years. And window tiling isn’t just limited to Linux Mint if you’re curious; there are a lot of Linux distributions that support it.

The example above is a screen capture from my 16″ MBP with three applications tiled on the desktop. You’ll note how crowded it can get. I should note that there are any number of tiling combinations, from side-by-side to one-above-another, or four in each corner, or a combination of those basic placements. In my example I have the right corners filled and the left side filled. My biggest complaint are the gaps between each window; Linux Mint has the window edges tightly abutted with no wasted space.

You can eliminate those gaps by going full screen with two of the applications, such as you see above side-by-side. You will note that macOS 15 has a slider bar between the two tiled windows, allowing you to tweak the devision of space between the two. Reminds me an awful lot of how iPadOS handles multitasking.

I have mixed feelings about how window tiling is implemented on this latest release of macOS. Perhaps over time the Apple coding meisters will clean it up, but I’m not holding my breath on that.

iPhone Mirroring

iPhone mirroring is now a feature of macOS. I can’t say this definitively, but I believe this will only work if you have an iPhone running iOS 18. The reason I can’t say definitively is because by the time I tried this feature my iPhone was already updated to iOS 18. And I have tried it with both my Intel MBP running Sequoia and my Apple Silicon MBPs, and it works with everything running Sequoia.

I like iPhone mirroring because I can control my iPhone from my desktop, and if I’m writing about some feature on my iPhone and I need to grab a screen capture then I can do it from my MacBook without littering my iPhone’s photo folder with junk images. Before sharing came along, I’d take a screen capture and then use AirDrop to move it from my iPhone to my MacBook before I could use it. And I had to be careful to make sure it wasn’t HEIC format, as WordPress won’t accept any HEIC images as media to be used in their blog. Instead I had to go into my iPhone and have my images saved as JPEGs.

It’s a long and somewhat convoluted process to set up iPhone mirroring, with multiple requests with passwords, but once set up you can click on the iPhone Mirroring application and there it is. If you’re wondering why my iPhone icons are big without text, that’s a new feature of iOS 18.

Basically, if you hold down on any bare spot of the iPhone screen to get the wiggling icons, an Edit selection will appear on the upper left corner of the screen. Tap that and you’re presented with the ability to select the icon size (Small vs Large) as well as limited coloration changes. Its the Small size that gives you the text underneath each icon, which I refer to as the classic look. It’s the Large size that makes the icons fill up and remove the text underneath each icon. I prefer large because the icons are easier to see, and the desktop looks less cluttered. A bonus is the larger icons are easer to recognize. What took Apple so long to give us this capability?

In general I can manipulate my iPhone through mirroring without issue. If you’re wondering how you get back to the main screen, if you look at the top right corner of the iPhone mirror window, you’ll see a 3×3 array of square dots. Click that to close the iPhone app or operation and get back to your main screen. You can swipe with the mouse to move between screens (or whatever app you have open that uses the swipe gesture).

I will make the following recommendation: You’ll come to a dialog that asks if you want your Mac to ask every time to log in when you start up mirroring, or to authenticate automatically. I strongly recommend authenticate automatically, unless you’re that paranoid. Either authentication only applies to the Mac you’re setting this up on, not every Mac in the universe. You should only do this on a Mac you control, not a Mac that the rest of the world has access to.

There will be other discoveries in the coming weeks, which may trigger new posts and the possible airing of grievances.

This week I’m “batchin’ it” at home while my wife is visiting a friend down in South Florida. That person is going through the progressive effects of cognitive decline. Judy has know this person since she graduated from Florida State University with her education degree and helped open what would be know as Broward Community College, or BCC. This was back in the mid-1970s. They’ve been friends ever since, even as Judy has moved around the country, then married me, and finally moved (with me) back down to central Florida.

On top of that my mother, who is in her 90s and lives up near Atlanta, has been having a medical issue that required her to go to a hospital today for a CT scan and some X-rays. My sister is with her and is sending me constant updates on her physical and emotional state. So far everything is fine.

To keep track of all the iMessages and calls I started to wear my Apple Watch again because I don’t like carrying my iPhone around. I leave my iPhone in the house in its wireless charger. If an iMessage comes in a get a little ping on my watch. The Series 7 face is big enough that I can actually read it there. If a call comes in I can answer it on my Apple Watch. The Series 7 is loud enough and clear enough to carry on a conversation until I can reach my iPhone and transfer the call to it. Meanwhile I can work inside or outside of the house, yet know quickly when I’m needed.

This is a very good use for this type of tech, staying in touch with scattered family. This tech is now five years old for the iPhone and two years for the Apple Watch. I’ve used it like this for many years (I had a Series 3 Apple Watch for a long time before the Series 7) and frankly took it for granted. Cutting back and then re-enabling specific capabilities helped me clearly focus on its positive uses. I just wish it all didn’t cost so much.

Last Monday, 9 September, Apple introduced the iPhone 16, Apple Watch 10, and AirPods 4. The common thread with all of these new hardware releases is that they’re ready to benefit from Apple Intelligence, which if you have those items you won’t begin to use until iOS 18.1 will be released. Out of the gate, Apple Intelligence is promised but not available.

After spending a week thinking about these latest offerings, I won’t be purchasing any of them. The number 1 reason being the cost.

By the time I pick a model, and that means any of them, and select the amount of storage I need in my iPhone, the price heads up towards about $1,000. This is with any of the regular iPhone 16 models. What makes it worse with the Pro variants is that they start at $1,000 and just go up from there. What’s interesting is that an iPhone 16 Pro Max with 256 GB of storage is as expensive as my 13″ M1 MacBook Pro, and it has 16 GB of memory and a 1 TB SSD. And a 13″ screen with a real honest-to-goodness keyboard, two USB-C ports, and a headphone jack. That headphone jack on that MacBook Pro is, as they say, a real keeper feature. No, I can’t take photos and video with my MBP, but that’s what I have a real camera for.

I’m going to stick with my iPhone 11 Pro Max, which I purchased September 2019. It still has 86% of its battery, and it’s eligible for the iOS 18 update this coming Monday. No, it won’t run any of the Apple Intelligence features when Apple finally begins to dribble them out; the only older model that will run Apple Intelligence is the iPhone 15. When iOS 19 comes out in 2025, the iPhone 11 won’t be eligible for that release, but I don’t care. I still won’t update. I’m going to ride my iPhone 11 Pro Max until it literally stops working. And then I’ll decide what brand of smartphone to purchase ahead of any particular model.

As for the other items, I’m already past any Apple Watch. My Citizen Eco-Drive WR 100 is doing just fine. The new AirPods 4 will have the ability to act like hearing aids, which is nice, but then you need an iPhone to actually use them portably, and they’re still AirPods that will only work about an hour before they have to be popped out of your ears and into their charging holder. I really am tired of that “feature.” That constant removal of the device to keep it charged is the primary reason I got tired of the Apple Watch. If I have a hearing issue I’ll go to an audiologist and get decent prescription hearing aids covered by Medicare. I’m definitely old enough for that now.

An iPhone is essentially a castrated MacBook, where the iPhone has a very small screen, no decent keyboard, and absolute limitation as to what software I can install and run on the device. Same processor architecture on both now to be sure. If I’m going to spend a solid four figures in cash on a computer then I want one that I can make better use of than an iPhone.

So the Arc Browser folks dropped another update, and I paid attention to the big changes this time. And I’m not all that enthused to read about them.

First up is the announcement that the Arc team is dropping support for versins of macOS older than version 13. This includes two of my Macs. What’s interesting is that every other browser out there is still supporting those older versions of macOS. I need that support in order to be able to safely browse the web.

Second is the comment about better support for crypto wallet extensions. I have absolutely no use for crypto currencies. Your browser many not support it directly but providing support for extensions is just as bad in my book, and is indicative of the type of customer you’re going after. And I’m not in your target demographic.

Third, but by no means least, is the bold announcement you’re using ChatGPT 4o for your search engine. I’ve come to despise what is supposedly AI, or LLM (large language models) based AI, because it’s not AI but a very sophisticated pattern matching system. To quote from Infoworld:

The problem, however, is that LLMs don’t actually learn anything. They can’t reason. They’re great at pattern matching but not at extrapolating from past training data to future problems, as a recent IEEE study found. Software development has been one of the brightest spots for genAI tools, but perhaps not quite to the extent we’ve hoped. For example, GPT-3.5 lacked training data after 2021. As such, it struggled with easy coding problems on LeetCode that required information that came out after 2021. The study found that its success rate for easy problems plummeted from 89% to 52% and its ability to create code for hard coding problems tanked from 40% to 0.66%.

According to Michelle Hampson, the finding shows that ChatGPT “lacks the critical thinking skills of a human and can only address problems it has previously encountered.” Tim Klapdor less graciously states, “ChatGPT didn’t learn the topic, it did no research, it did no validation, and it contributed no novel thoughts, ideas, or concepts. ChatGPT just colonized all of that data … and now it can copy/paste that information to you in a timely manner because it’s spending $US700K a day on compute.”

Arc is no longer welcome on any computers I control. I have too many other excellent choices.

Links

AI’s moment of disillusionment — https://www.infoworld.com/article/2514409/ais-moment-of-disillusionment.html

I’ve had to create a Red Hat 9.4 virtual machine on my M1 Max MacBook using UTM ( https://mac.getutm.app ). Because this is an ARM architecture machine, I used UTM because it would use Apple Silicon’s native virtualization support, and I installed the aarch64 version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4 so that it would be truly virtualized, not emulated.

So far the virtualization works flawlessly. Unfortunately for me and my work, the reason for installing it, to provide a RHEL environment for some work I’m doing, is a failure because the software I need to run under RHEL is only available for x86-64, not aarch64. Not everyone is rushing to embrace the future, especially with regards to processor architectures. It now appears that far too many vendors are refusing to support ARM systems, which is a sad state of affairs considering everyone is trying to install as much ARM-based silicon in their clouds; consider for example that AWS released Graviton 4, a 96 core beast that consumes far less power than Intel or AMD for the same workloads.

Anyway, this modest post documents how to set up UTM to install and then run aarch64 RHEL 9.4  on Apple Silicon M1 Max and a MacBook Pro. I’m going to leave the acquisition and installation of UTM as an exercise to the reader. It is open source, so you can either download a free copy from UTM’s website, or else use the App Store to purchase a permanent copy for $9.99. Using the App Store helps the UTM developers to help keep the lights on, and provides you, the user, a way to get automatic updates through the App Store.

After acquiring and installing UTM, you also need to get a copy of Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux to install. You can also do that for free by registering as a developer. You can download and install up to six copies for personal use. I’ve installed three so far, one under UTM and the other two using Parallels on another MacBook Pro running with an Intel i9. I wrote about that machine earlier, and called it the Beast.

With all the bits in place, it’s time to configure UTM and get RHEL installed on it. Again, installing the RHEL ISO isn’t that difficult, but the configuration can be somewhat perplexing. These settings work fine for me, and might work fine for you. But at least they’re a starting point.

I enabled everything on the virtualization tab except Rosetta on Linux. Remember this RHEL is aarch64. I have no idea how RHEL under x86_64 emulation might operate, and I don’t ever intend to find out. Also note that keyboard and pointer support are Mac keyboard and trackpad. The defaults are generic, and they don’t quite work as well.

I had absolutely no idea where to start with the display, so I had to play around with this for awhile before I found the value shown above. I can now shut down the VM window, and when I start it back up it will be at the correct size and resolution. Getting to this point was aggravating.

Finally we come to the networking. I found these settings on a forum posting, and discovered they work well for my setup. For one thing network traffic between my native MacBook Pro and the RHEL VM stay on my machine.

One nice note: power consumption at idle, especially inside the RHEL VM, is at an absolute minimum.

I’m still amazed at the power of Apple Silicon. With UTM installed I will probably start looking at other versions of Linux compiled natively for aarch64 under UTM.

This is the Beast I wrote about in the prior post. This was purchased and delivered in 2020. This is Apple’s final Intel MacBook Pro, and it was delivered with Intel’s highest CPU offering, the Core i9-9980HK with 8 hyper-threaded cores. The machine as delivered had 64 GiB of memory and 4 TiB of SSD storage.

I purchased this Christmas 2021. It was cheaper to purchase this model than an Apple Silicon iPad Pro 13″ with Apple’s Keyboard. A lot cheaper. In spite of its cheapness it’s still faster than the Beast. This is the machine I carry with me when I need to work out in the field, in part because if its performance, and in part because it can put in a solid 8 hour day without having to be tethered to a charger. Battery life with Apple Silicon is phenomenal.

And now this machine. Purchased Christmas 2023. It has half the memory of the Beast, 32 GiB instead of the Beast’s 64 GiB, and only 1/4 the SSD storage at 1 TiB. But it runs rings around the Beast, especially multi-core, and not just in an artificial benchmark. What’s interesting is that the second Apple Silicon MacBook Pro’s single core performance doesn’t exceed that of the first, and that is to be expected if a little surprising. Both machines are running with M1 cores, and Apple promised not to cripple Apple Silicon based on what computer it was put in. Instead Apple differentiates with the number and types of cores in each computer. The 13″ has 4 power + 4 efficiency while the 16.2″ has 8 power + 2 efficiency cores, which explains why the 16.2″ multi-core score is half again higher than the 13″ multi-core score. You’ll note that both machines have the same amount of L1, L2, and L3 cache, so there’s no crippling there. Base CPU frequency is 3.2 GHz, so there’s no crippling there either. Both Apple Silicon machines wipe the floor with the Beast, and the Beast is no slouch.

It also underscores that in 2020 Apple was able to completely trounce Intel’s commercial CPU offerings with its first generation M1 Apple Silicon. Again by a wide margin. I don’t believe that Intel has caught up, let along surpassed Apple in the last four years, and I don’t believe Intel ever will.

I’ll let you look at the output of fastfetch to see what features it shipped to  my house with. This MacBook Pro is the last Intel MBP that Apple produced before the introduction of Apple Silicon. It was purchased on my behalf in 2020 in support of a consulting gig to a project I was hired to support. When it arrived I performed some cursory performance tests with tools I could run on both my older 2015 MBP and this one. I couldn’t believe how much more powerful the Beast was, but then at the price that was paid to secure the Beast, it should have run rings around my older MBP. After transferring everything I needed from the older 2015 MBP I turned it off and put it into its special protective bag. The 2015 MBP is considered “legacy” by Apple and doesn’t get macOS updates anymore.

Unfortunately for the Beast it had been sitting (turned off) since mid-2023. The contract that required its purchase ended in early 2022, and the Beast’s usage began to slowly ramp down until one day I turned it off and closed the lid. I’d power the Beast back up about once/month to install OS and application updates, and to make sure the battery was recharged and topped out.

Now, however, I have a need for the Beast as a host for Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtual machines. I have a paid-for license to Parallels Desktop Pro, so I downloaded a RHEL 9.4 ISO and spun up a pair of RHEL 9.4 VMs. So far everything installed and is working just fine, as I would expect. Which leads me to what I wanted to write about…

I live in the console. Going back to the earliest of commercial computers (DEC VAX, DEC Ultrix on MicroVAX, IBM 370) and the earliest personal computers (Apple II, Pet, C64, DEC Rainbow, IBM PC) I always was at some command prompt. When GUIs began to show up (X Windows, Windows 2) I always had at least one terminal open on the desktop. That’s what I’m comfortable with and what I will be using until the day I no longer have the presence of mind to operate a computer.

Which leads to the problem I had with using iTerm on the Beast. At this point in time I always try to install Power Line, or an equivalent, on every system that supports a shell in a terminal, which is every Unix-like system I currently have access to. On the Mac I use Apple’s supplied z shell (zsh). Within the iTerm I use the Hack font because it supplies the necessary special glyphs that work with the Power Shell feature. And it worked just find on my Apple Silicon systems, but strangely enough, not the Beast.

I dug in a little bit and discovered the following feature squirreled away in the iTerm configuration.

Note the section titled ‘Non-ASCII Font’ at the bottom of the Text dialog. On my other systems this is not even available because the checkbox titled ‘Use a different font for non-ASCII text’ isn’t checked. But on the Beast it is. When I saw this the first time non-ASCII text was set to sans serif mono, not Hack Nerd Font Mono in the screen capture. That caused the iTerm console to show glyphs that were not full-sized.

Only when i unchecked ‘Use a different font for non-ASCII text’ did the Power Line shell prompt properly display the glyphs, both ASCII and non-ASCII. And having proper non-ASCII rendering is very important, as you’ll see below.

I have also been switching to Neovim ( https://neovim.io ) because I can’t install a version of vim with Python support. Vim needs Python support in order to have Power Line support at the bottom of the editing area. I tried to install it via Homebrew, only to be told that Homebrew considers my Intel-based Beast unsupported, and when I tried to pull the Vim source tarball and build a copy myself, the Vim build failed to use either the Homebrew Python 3.12.4 installed on this machine or Apple’s much older 3.9 default offering. I’m already using nvim on my other machines, so I went on ahead and pulled the Neovim version built for use on Intel Macs and dropped the binary into my local tools directory, in my home folder. I then installed AstroNvim ( https://astronvim.com ) to configure Neovim AstroNvim’s choices are quite good enough for me; I’ve not made any changes so far.

Note the use of glyphs in Neovim to indicate visually the type of file it is (i.e. PowerShell, bash, folder, etc). This comes from having the Hack Nerd fonts used in my iTerm. Working with Neovim is a pleasure. Why use Neovim when I have other more powerful coding tools such as Visual Studio Code? Because I can edit within the same shell I’m working in, and because a lot of times all I want to do is just code.

The Beast is now back in business and some of its rough edges smoothed down.

It’s been the gist of many posts how neofetch is no longer supported, and it’s been years since the last release. And that lack of support for neofetch is beginning to show when certain features don’t work the way they used to. So I went asking the Great Internet Oracle what was a suitable replacement for neofetch, and their were a lot of votes for fastfetch. I pulled the installation packages for Linux Mint and Ubuntu on RPi 5 and installed on both. It works just fine.

Fastfetch appears to be available for many operating systems, especially Linux. There is no release package for macOS on the fastfetch GitHub repo, so I downloaded the source from the repo and built it on my MacBook Pro. It built without error and runs just fine.

If you have Homebrew installed on macOS, you can install fastfetch within Homebrew, and it will be the current release. I built my copy because it’s absolutely easy enough to do.

If you do decide to build fastfetch on macOS, then you’ll need CMake. I installed CMake on my Mac via Homebrew.

Links

fastfetch — https://github.com/fastfetch-cli/fastfetch

Homebrew — The Missing Package Manager for macOS (or Linux) — https://brew.sh

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.

The Panasonic Lumix DMC-TS20 (hereafter referred to as the TS20) is a camera that was introduced in 2012, some twelve years ago. I purchased two copies, one for my wife, and a second as a backup in case my beloved managed to destroy the first copy. My beloved is hell on technology, but I digress…

We used the cameras on a road trip up to Toronto the same year I’d bought the cameras. We’d purchased a pair of 2012 Toyota Priuses, one black and one white. The white one was mine and that was the one we took on the Canadian road trip. The TS-20 worked marvelously, and I used mine when we took the Niagara Falls boat trip. I managed to pick up some interesting (for us) photos as we traveled right up into the mists at the bottom of the falls.

My wife used hers for a while until one day I put them into storage until we decided to take them out and use them for, whatever. Unfortunately we both forgot about them in the ensuing years. In late 2012 I had my first knee operation, then in 2013 I got laid off, and then I got another job that had lots of travel including my first overseas trip to Japan that December, and then events began to jumble together and I lost track of a lot of things, the cameras being a minor part of that. I guess the reason I blog is to document enough so that I can go back and be reminded of what I can no longer remember…

What’s interesting about this camera is its sensor, a 1/2.33″ CCD 16MP sensor with IBIS. Keep in mind that when this camera came out Panasonic was working with Olympus on the micro four thirds standard, so I suspect that some of that in-house expertise spilled over into other cameras that Panasonic was still making at the time. But not with the sensor. The micro four thirds cameras all used CMOS. It was only the earliest prior four thirds cameras that used CCD sensors, such as the Olympus E-1.

When I found the cameras, of course I couldn’t find the chargers. That would have been too logical for me to store the chargers with the cameras. I looked everywhere, but in the end wound up buying a pair of Wasabi Power chargers, along with a pair of Wasabi Power BTR-BCK7-JWP batteries. What is surprising is that the Wasabi battery at 1100 mAh has nearly double the energy capacity of the Panasonic’s 680 mAh capacity. I did manage to charge both the original Panasonic batteries as well as the Wasabi batteries, which provides me with plenty of extras for when I go out and use this very-old-but-new-to-me-again camera.

Using the TS20 is a lot like using a cell phone these days for taking photos. You hold it up to compose on the rear screen, then press the shutter on the top edge, and then you’re done. For example:

Open up either of those photos, taken in full Florida sun, and you’ll see grain galore in the shadows. So much detail is lost that if you enlarge the CVS photo and try to read the handicap signage, you can’t. But I don’t care. I like the colors and I like the camera, and as I’ve said so ofter all that matters now is enjoying the use of the camera and the results. And I do enjoy using this camera. If I want flesh-cutting sharpness I have more cameras and lenses than I can shake a stick at. It might be interesting to take the output of this camera and see if there’s an AI tool that can smooth the noise and upscale resolution so I could read the handicap signage.

The TS20 also calls out another problem with The Present, and that’s with our abandoning of cameras such as the TS20. I’ve often wondered what would such a camera be like with up-to-date sensors and electronics. Because I can tell you from my current perspective I’ve discovered I much prefer the handling of the Panasonic over the Apple. Oh well…

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.