An iPad Catchup
Jan. 30th, 2020 06:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerTo work a bit more with “RSS feeds” and perhaps cut down a little on “idly revisiting sites just to see if they’ve updated,” I installed the program NetNewsWire, which started up already checking a number of “Apple-centric” sites. That might have made a bit more aware over the past several days the iPad was introduced ten years ago this month.
I’d already decided “voice and data plans” for an iPhone or any other smartphone seemed kind of expensive, but the possibility of “data-only plans” for iPads did get my attention. When my brother and I went down to Florida in the spring of 2010 to see one of the last space shuttle launches in person, we did manage to stop into an Apple Store in Orlando to see the iPads there in advance of them becoming available north of the border. However, it wasn’t until my brother just happened to get a Blackberry Playbook (he held onto his Blackberry phone for a long time, although when he had to replace it at last he got an iPhone XR) that I went into the city to an independent dealer selling used Apple products and bought a first-generation iPad, although I did have to retrace my trip after realising I’d been given a “WiFi-only model” without the black plastic on its back covering the cellular antennas.
Since then I’ve used three iPads, turning my old models over to my family, although my oldest model unfortunately had its software go bad in such a way as I can’t hook it up to a computer again and revive it. I am conscious I’m not typing on them as much as I used to, even after discovering how to type apostrophes and quotation marks on its abbreviated keyboard faster and presenting that to a now-defunct Apple user group in advance of the “swipe for punctuation keyboard.” Having cut off the “free-to-play” game I used to run every day until realising how many days that had added up to, my portable pastimes now seem to amount to Solitaire Till Dawn and the number-matching game Threes. However, I am reading more ebooks and “digital comics” now.
I’d already decided “voice and data plans” for an iPhone or any other smartphone seemed kind of expensive, but the possibility of “data-only plans” for iPads did get my attention. When my brother and I went down to Florida in the spring of 2010 to see one of the last space shuttle launches in person, we did manage to stop into an Apple Store in Orlando to see the iPads there in advance of them becoming available north of the border. However, it wasn’t until my brother just happened to get a Blackberry Playbook (he held onto his Blackberry phone for a long time, although when he had to replace it at last he got an iPhone XR) that I went into the city to an independent dealer selling used Apple products and bought a first-generation iPad, although I did have to retrace my trip after realising I’d been given a “WiFi-only model” without the black plastic on its back covering the cellular antennas.
Since then I’ve used three iPads, turning my old models over to my family, although my oldest model unfortunately had its software go bad in such a way as I can’t hook it up to a computer again and revive it. I am conscious I’m not typing on them as much as I used to, even after discovering how to type apostrophes and quotation marks on its abbreviated keyboard faster and presenting that to a now-defunct Apple user group in advance of the “swipe for punctuation keyboard.” Having cut off the “free-to-play” game I used to run every day until realising how many days that had added up to, my portable pastimes now seem to amount to Solitaire Till Dawn and the number-matching game Threes. However, I am reading more ebooks and “digital comics” now.