What I Learned from Watching My iPad’s Slow Death

What I Learned from Watching My iPad’s Slow Death by John Herrman:

[…] I wouldn’t say my old electronics always aged gracefully, but their obsolescence wasn’t a death sentence. My old digital camera doesn’t do what some new cameras do — but it’s still a camera. My iPad, by contrast, feels as though it has been abandoned from on high, cut loose from the cloud on which it depends.

It hasn’t been used up; it’s just too old. A pristine iPad from the same era, forgotten in a storeroom and never touched, would be equally useless. The moment it came online, it would demand to be updated; as soon as it was, it would find itself in the same grim predicament as my device, which has been at work for half a decade.

[…] Early criticism of the device, which was minor and muffled by enormous sales, focused on the few things that made it noticeable, like its weight or the size of the black border around its screen. (The iPad Mini was an answer to both complaints.) It was, in contrast to the iPhone from which it descended, understood by its users as simply good enough — not life-changing, but handy. It was to be used until its users started noticing it, at which point it was to be replaced. It was, like the iPhone, immune to attachment. But unlike the iPhones, which might be reclaimed by a cellular carrier as part of a scheduled trade-in or just shoved aside by a two-year upgrade, iPads tend to linger. They have time to reveal their tragic thing ness.

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This is so true. Thanks for sharing.

What I have found, and this is the reason I created a Wiki page to-be, is that browsers are crucial to extending the life of iPads and tablets. Most people simply want to browse the internet and watch videos on them. I found installing Puffin on an iPad 2 saved it from total oblivion.

I also think, like Netbooks, there is something loveable about the clunky early iPads.

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