Category: iPad

the cats are taking over

whbeebe
Nicholas on the lock screen

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.

Luke

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.

apple just threw my ipad pro out with the trash

whbeebe2 Comments
iPad Pro, 12.9-inch, 2nd generation

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.

iPad Pro 13-inch M4 cost

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.