Whether I’m heading out to a cafe, a week-long trip, or just around the house, my iPad Pro is what I reach for.
The iPad isn’t the most capable device I own, but it’s the most reliable. And increasingly, that’s what I value above all else.
Here is a short list of what I mean by reliable:
Applications won’t hang. They just won’t. Just as importantly, they won’t lag. Jobs may take a _very_ long time to run if I’m running something in parallel, but unlike any desktop OS I have run, the rest of the system won’t stutter. This is the epitome, I think, of Apple’s hardware-software integration.
Battery life is super-predictable.
Connectivity is guaranteed – I have a 4G SIM, so the iPad is always either on Wi-Fi or on cellular data.
It wakes instantly and is ready to go immediately. Always.
FaceID will always work – unlike a laptop, I’m not going to ever mistype my password.
Airdrop always works – at least, between my iPad and phone. I can tap Share on either device confident that the other is always visible.
A peripheral will either work or it won’t. Once I know it works, I can rest assured it’s going to work every time I plug it in.
Apps will never update while I’m using them or at launch.
This is rather niche – I know I can use it to sign and return any document in a pinch. I run into this only a couple of times a year, but when I do it’s extremely reassuring. Even if it’s a paper document, I can scan, sign and print/email it.
I think the most important design choice Apple made is setting very clear expectations about the user experience: both what to expect and what not. I can’t expect applications to run in the background, for instance, so I’ll make sure I’m running screen on any Termius session on remote machines so I can always reconnect and pick up from where I left off. This is as important as the expectation that the machine will always start instantly regardless of whether it’s been off a few seconds or a few days.
None of these is solely a result of the iPad’s form-factor as a tablet. It’s a number of things that come together. Several people have remarked that the iPadOS software does a disservice to the massively capable hardware on recent iPad Pros. They are right, but over time I have come to understand what Apple will not compromise when it builds new software capabilities.
The iPad is in fact a new kind of computer – just one that’s not merely portable and flexible, but completely reliable.
In the past, often the bandwidth was the limiting factor on determining the loading time of an application. But while bandwidth has improved over the years, latency became the limiting factor. You can always increase the bandwidth by setting up more cables or sending more Starlink satelites to space. But reducing the latency is not so easy…
Offline first applications benefit from that because sending the inital state to the client can be done much faster with more bandwidth. And once the data is there, we do no longer have to care about the latency to the backend server.
This is why iOS Background App Refresh, when implemented well, works like magic. iCloud Tabs in Safari are a great example of this:
Safari doesn’t stop you from using the browser while it syncs tabs. In fact, if it detects that the connection isn’t good enough to fetch tabs from other devices quickly enough, it just won’t show you the “From {device name}” section.
Safari continues to attempt to sync tabs in the background, where you’re using the browser or not. When it’s synced, the section shows up. Like magic.
iCloud photos is another example of offline first; there is never any wait time while you use the same photo library across multiple iOS and Mac devices.
Likewise the podcast app Overcast will download podcasts and sync subscriptions silently in the background.
In both cases, the developers have designed for the fact that bandwidth over time is abundant, but when the user launches the app, (lack of) latency is important, so the apps don’t sync right then.
Of course, conflict resolution is an important part of offline-first, and today many applications do this at a file level. The interface’ll ask you which version (from another device or from the local device) you want to use.
Other, more intelligent applications will do this within a file. A text editor like TextMate on MacOS detects that a file that is open in the editor has been changed on the filesystem because it was edited on another device and has synced via, say, iCloud or Dropbox. The editor then uses markup to highlight the conflicting text.
Either way, the application won’t stop you from using it until it can determine everything is synced, which often isn’t possible quickly.
Unfortunately, too many apps today rely on calling home at every launch, even if it isn’t to sync files. Compare the launch of the image creation app Canva and the Twitter app Tweetbot (both cold launches). You can see which one loads existing content first and then start looking to sync. Its clear which one feels more snappy:
Canva
Tweetbot
Whether your users are on a phone perpetually connected to 4G, a desktop plugged into gigabit Ethernet, a laptop with patchy wifi, or a tablet with no available connections nearby, an offline first app gives them confidence that it’ll be available instantly when they need it. To capture text. Review a photo. Add a contact. Or even browse the web.
Recently someone on Twitter bought the new iPhone 13 after several years on Android, and asked about iPhone apps worth trying. This is what I sent them. Here’s hoping you find this list useful.
Several of the reviews of this year’s iPhone 13 line from mainstream USA publications were lukewarm about the main decision a reader wanted to make: should they buy the new iPhone or not?
It’s clear that people are waiting longer to get a new smartphone than they did several years ago. And that wait is getting longer.
I think it’s mostly because smartphones – now just phones – have become an everyday essential. Far from the novelty they were for their first decade, they are now how we interact with the world. Consequently, the choice to get a new iPhone is no longer about signalling exclusivity or wealth; it’s a much more utilitarian decision: whether the phone one owns is now long in the tooth.
And the answer to that question is usually No. For a few years now, phones have been much more capable than the average person needs them to be. Give the average person an iPhone XS instead of the iPhone 13 from three generations later, and they’ll have a hard time convincing themselves that the new one is really all that better.
Phone processors are also as fast as most desktops and laptops. Graphics performance is arguably better. They also have about the same amount of storage space. We use them for different things than we do our computers, but they’re really – as Apple describes its iPad – the Next Computer. It’s just that in ten years, what we think of as a computer has changed in ways our 2007 selves could not imagine.
So it stands to reason that phones would cost as much. In the USA, iPhones used to cost around $500. The first iPhone cost $499 and $599 depending on storage. The iPhone 13 Pro Max, the biggest model in the fifteenth generation of iPhones, now starts at $1099. Only a few Android phones are as expensive, but the percentage increase in price is about the same.
That’s as much as a laptop computer. And so therefore if phones are already faster than we need them to be, they play the same role in our lives that our laptops used to, and they cost as much as a laptop, we shouldn’t be surprised that we replace them as (in)frequently as we do our computers – that is, once every three or four years.
I’d expect that gap to grow.
Apple has understood this for a long time now.
Years ago, they publicly said they were ok with the iPhone cannibalising iPod revenue (because they’d rather they themselves did than anyone else). In much the same way, they welcome, even encourage the use of iPhones for years on end. And in balance, they have opened up opportunities to earn throughout that period of ownership, through services: iCloud. Apple TV+. Apple Music. Arcade. Fitness+. And very likely more in the future.
from Apple
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
Long time readers of this blog know that I a proponent of sustainable computing: thinking about how your hardware, software and data lasts.
Yesterday I took one more step towards extending the life of my pre-retina unibody mid-2012 MacBook Pro.
I maxed out the RAM, doubling it from 8GB to 16GB. Unfortunately the machine does not support any more than that. With 8GB RAM, the machine would often use about 2GB on my SSD as ‘swap’, or overflow space. With 16GB swap is zero, because there is always more free RAM.
The results have been immediate. Applications open quicker on the first launch, especially when there are already several other applications open. Web pages seem to load more quickly too.
As I’ve described previously, I have also upgraded the storage on the machine: changing the spinning hard drive that it shipped with a 1TB SSD. And couple of years ago, I also changed the (then) eight year old battery for a new one. Finally, in other minor changes I’ve replaced some missing screws for the bottom case and replaced the broken/missing feet.
In total this has cost me about INR 15,000 on the outside. The laptop itself is a (free) hand-me-down. That is less than one tenth the office of a new M1 MacBook Pro with similar RAM and storage. Of course the new machine would have been faster and would have had a lot more battery life. But it’d also have been less upgradeable and maintainable. And it’d have fewer ports – and types of ports – than this one.
There’s a joy in owning a new, snappy machine, undoubtedly. But there’s a different joy in being able to service your own laptop & update its components. In making deliberate choices about using well crafted, efficient software because you don’t have the luxury of raw processing power.
And using well-constructed hand-me-downs has also forced me to become at least somewhat proficient at repair and maintenance, meaning I get to know these things better, which in turn teaches me what about them makes them great in the first place.
Finally, adopting a mindset of being okay using such tools has over time helped me get better at identifying new items that are likely to last long, perpetuating the cycle.
…a girl around 13, who is somehow related to me. Her mother decided to move 400km away from where they lived, closer to us. And she had literally nothing she could bring, all tech was her dads. Luckily I got some spare hardware for emergencies and we equipped her with a MacBook, an iPad and a small TV with an AppleTV. When I handed her the iPad she clicked on Settings and set up wifi. AppleTV? She could identify the icon easily and setup wifi. MacBook? Blank stares and most likely questioning what she is supposed to do with this thing. She knows how to use touch interfaces and how to read app names displayed on her home screen – she was already using a smartphone. But a computer? Not so much.
… these platforms are not meant to be the same thing. They both go against anything the respective platform is as of today, and undermine the appeal the respective platform has for their users… having the majority of users understand that the iPad is all they need, and having macOS designed for power users seems like a far better idea to me.
“When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that’s what you needed on the farm,” Jobs said at our D8 conference in 2010. “But as vehicles started to be used in the urban centers, cars got more popular. Innovations like automatic transmission and power steering and things that you didn’t care about in a truck as much started to become paramount in cars. … PCs are going to be like trucks. They’re still going to be around, they’re still going to have a lot of value, but they’re going to be used by one out of X people.”
The iPhone, then as now, couldn’t fulfil that role. You needed something in between, and that, he said, was the iPad. The iPad fits in that niche very well, and as the writer describes, more and more people are discovering that the iPad is all they end up using every day.
Apple has understood this from day one. They have doubled down on the ‘What’s a computer’ theme on their advertising campaigns the last few years. That campaign, full of people doing everyday things on their iPad, implicitly challenges people to think about whether they really need to buy a laptop or desktop when they decide they need a new computer.
This month marks the first major changes to the Home Screen in months:
Some apps I use several times daily are now easier to get to. Therefore, I use the App Library less. I had no problems locating and launching apps from there, but as I have mentioned before, I used to get the app search bar mixed up with the Spotlight search bar. I do wish Apple would merge both of them.
These new apps meant making room on the Home Screen, which had been nearly full of widgets. I only really use two of the four shortcuts in the giant shortcuts widget. Those two are now icon-sized pins below the other app icons.
Speaking of widgets, the fantastical widget is now half the size it was, while still displaying the same information as previously. Given the day to day uncertainty of Bombay’s monsoon season, I have a widget for the local weather.
Finally, I’ve added a widget that opens a specific Note in Apple Notes, one that I use as a scratchpad. It’s more flexible than Drafts (which is text only), and much faster than Copied.
The dock remains unchanged:
I continue to use Drafts for quick notes (things I consciously write, as opposed to throwing things into the Scratchpad).
I have also continued using Apple Notes for day to day information management.
My long term notes and archives are of course still in plain text files in my library folder in iCloud Drive.
On the Spotlight and widgets screen to the left of the leftmost Home Screen, I now have a few other widgets:
One for the time in a few cities around the world where friends and family are. This used to be on the Home Screen
One for the weather in another city aboard. This too used to live on Home
And one for the battery. I’m frequently connected to my Bluetooth headphones; this is an easy way to look up he much charge is left on it. I wish the battery level on my Fitbit would show up too.
PS: It doesn’t look like I’m going to install the iOS 15 public betas on my main iPhone yet, so I won’t know until later if there are any changes or new features that’ll change my Home Screen.
Here’s an overview of how I backup my data across drives and devices.
I was driven to post this because of the recently reported data loss experienced by several people around the world, caused by a malfunctioning, possibly hacked network storage device from Western Digital: “WD My Book NAS devices are being remotely wiped clean worldwide“.
Today, WD My Book Live and WD My Book Live DUO owners worldwide suddenly found that all of their files were mysteriously deleted, and they could no longer log into the device via a browser or an app.
When they attempted to log in via the Web dashboard, the device stated that they had an “Invalid password.”
“I have a WD My Book live connected to my home LAN and worked fine for years. I have just found that somehow all the data on it is gone today, while the directories seems there but empty.
The same device that Western Digital encouraged its customers to ‘Put Your Life On [It]’, lost people’s photos, music, documents, backups, probably more.
Ordinary people like you and me need a better plan for our life’s work and memories than entrusting it to a company and its specialised hardware and software. We need a plan we understand.
This is that plan.
Devices to backup
MacBook Pro 1TB SSD
iPhone 128GB
iPad 256GB
External 1TB HDD – archives, old pictures, home movies, other uncategorised data
Laptop, phone, tablet all used daily.
Current backup plan
MacBook Pro
Runs Catalina; full weekly disk backup on external 1TB Time Machine HDD.
Quarterly restore test on 2014 MacBook Air also running Catalina
Backup main document and multimedia folders weekly with rsync, run manually from iTerm2, to external 2TB HDD (redundancy for above). Example: sudo rsync -aP --delete /Users/rahulgaitonde/Documents/ /Volumes/Backups/BackupDocuments
External 1TB drive
WD Elements 1TB drive
Backup weekly with rsync, run manually from iTerm2 to external 2TB HDD: same disk as above
iPhone, iPad
2018 12.9″ iPad Pro 256GB and 2018 iPhone XR 128GB
iCloud Drive backup, continuous
Other data
Email: Gmail and Google Workplace; downloaded locally to Thunderbird on MacBook Pro as Mbox files (which is itself backed up as above)
Photos: synced from iPhone and iPad to iCloud; also synced weekly from iPhone to MacBook Pro Photos.app on MacBook Pro
Notes: Notes.app and plaintext files; both synced to iCloud
Contacts, Calendar, Reminder: synced to iCloud; exported monthly to MacBook Pro
Passwords and secure notes: synced to Bitwarden; vault exported monthly to MacBook Pro
RSS feeds: synced to Feedly; OPML exported monthly to Macbook Pro
Bookmarks: synced to Firefox; HTML exported monthly to Macbook Pro
Read Later queue: synced to Instapaper and Pocket; CSV exported monthly to MacBook Pro. Some articles saved locally in Markdown in iCloud Drive
So, here are my tasks:
Weekly
Run Photos.app to sync iCloud Photos locally to Macbook Pro (turn off storage optimisation) – 10 minutes
Backup MacBook Pro to Time Machine external HDD – three hours
run rsync on MacBook Pro drive and on external 1TB HDD. Destination for both is external 2TB HDD (distinct from Time Machine). 10 minutes. First run took a long time; subsequent runs take a fraction of the time that Time Machine backups take.
Total time: appx. 20 active minutes; 3 hours in background
Monthly
Export Contacts, Calendar, RSS OPML, Bookmarks, Password Vault, Read Later queue and store locally – 10 minutes
Weekly tasks for that week
Total time: appx. 10 active minutes + regular weekly backup time
Quarterly
Test restore on 2014 MacBook Air – about 10 active minutes + 2 hours in background
Weekly and monthly tasks
Total time: appx. 10 active minutes + 2 hours in background + regular monthly backup time
Automated:
Downloading mail locally happens throughout the day since Thunderbird is always open
As you can see, I don’t actually spend a lot of time backing up my data. I last suffered a catastrophic data loss in 2008, and I’m determined to not let that happen again, especially now that storage is cheap and fast, and cloud backups exist.
In the early days of this system, I was tempted to automate large parts of it. I could run an open-source Time Capsule using an unused Raspberry Pi and Netatalk. I could also connect the external 2TB drive and run rsync from my Mac to the remote Pi machine (rsync, or remote sync, was in fact built for this use case).
That way my Time Machine backups would run every hour, not weekly. I could also automate rsync to, say, daily by using MacOS’ cron, a scheduling utility that’s part of almost every unix-based system.
But that frequency of backup seems overkill for my data, especially given that the vast majority of my everyday data, the one that changes daily, is backed up to iCloud. Even if I were to lose data mid-month, between restoring from the latest Time Machine backup and then syncing to iCloud, I’d be able to recover most, if not all, of my data. So that means leaving a computer running, with my backup disks attached, that’s really doing useful work for a tiny fraction of the time. That also means extra wear on the very disks I’m using for backup.
In conclusion
My solution is a mix of cloud sync and manual backup.
The cloud portion – for frequently changing data – uses iCloud, which seems to be the most privacy-centric of all cloud services.
The manual portion – for redundancy and archived data – uses open source tools and doesn’t rely on either an always-on computer, specialised hardware or a connection to the Internet, unlike the Western Digital NAS this post began with.
Finally, the solution doesn’t take a lot of time to run, and can be restored from pretty quickly. The only vulnerability in this system is that all the devices and disks are in my house. If there’s a catastrophic event at my place, the data that’s backed up manually will be lost.
Note: my Home Screen in May didn’t change at all from April, so I didn’t post a monthly update.
This month, I added four icons for commonly used apps on my Home Screen, making place for them by using a smaller Fantastical widget:
The dock has also changed. I still use Drafts for quick note taking, but I have begun to use Apple Notes for everyday note and list management, somewhat inspired by an old tweet from the Twitter and Square cofounder Jack Dorsey:
I spend most of my day in iOS Notes app. I use it to think through stuff, draft, remind, record, and doodle. I also have a note for every person I meet regularly where I queue up things I want to talk about. And a note per city for everything I discover (and want to return to). pic.twitter.com/HZGXxAwtn4
”People old enough to remember life pre-Internet, what are some less obvious things you miss about that time?”
Work-life balance
“Leaving home and just being gone for the day. No cell phones.”
Mind-wandering
“I miss spacing out. Like, you could legit just sit on a bench or ride a bus and space out completely, letting your mind wander into those creative zones. Now phones/tech makes it much harder to get there.”
“Having an idea, finding a new hobby or skillset or project to work on, going to the library or bookstore to educate yourself about it, start learning and growing and excited about a new passion. Now… you look it up online, realize there’s a bunch of people who are wayyy better at it than you will ever be, and so you immediately give up out of discouragement. :\”
Presence
“If there were cameras, it was really different. You used them to take pictures of things or had people take pictures of you. But there was no social media to preoccupy your mind. It was just doing something. And whoever you were with, was who you were with.“
“My former housemate – who is twenty years younger than me – and I both left our phones at home by accident one day. So we kept on keeping on doing the days activities. Some errands and some wandering around. At one point, she turned to me and said “So this is what the 80s were like?”
“We weren’t getting texts all the time. No constant robocalls and spam e-mails. No expectation of instant reply 24/7. No constant stress or pressure. We were just there enjoying the moment and the simple stuff.”
The news cycle
“News only being on at 6pm. That was it. Now we have 6 hours of local news and 24 hours of cable news. Not being bombarded all day with “news.” And when you saw “Breaking News” on the screen you knew some serious shit went down.”
A curious one for me was one about identity:
“The ability to start over. I moved a lot, every move I could reinvent myself, bookworm, punk, preppie, I got to try out lots of aspects of my personality and my past wasn’t a factor.”
and its reply “I think especially when young it’s genuinely damaging to be locked into an identity by the stuff you have said / done years ago. How are we supposed to grow? Also being judged by the norms of a previous era which are not cool now.”
