Why, you might ask, given my antipathy to Apple's walled garden?
And the answer is purely pragmatism.
When I did my blog post about my use of technology in 2024, I mentioned that my Huawei pandemic era android tablet was stuck on an old version of Android and that among other problems some apps had stopped working.
Well I wiped it, and that stopped it complaining that it was out of storage, and am now running with a limited set of apps, basically wikipedia and some news apps.
And that's fine for catching up on the news and some basic fact checking, but doesn't get around the problem that one of the apps that has stopped working is Evernote.
If it wasn't for the fact that I have a lot of material stored in Evernote, I could simply have used the web version to check a document, but just because of the sheer volume of material that I have in Evernote, it's a pain.
I could have bought myself a new high quality Android tablet, but they are not exactly cheap, and even a reasonable mid range one was going to cost me in the region of four hundred bucks.
Given the problem of some apps not working on older versions of Android, second hand wasn't an option.
And then I found a refurbisher I've bought quite a few machines for use with Linux and/or fieldwork from had some 'as new' refurbished iPads for sale at under $200.
While it is an old model, it runs the latest version of Apple's operating system, and comes with Apple's 'niceness' baked in, and will hopefully be supported for another couple of years, and as I've found with the old iPad Mini I still use as a note taker, it's perfectly possible to keep using an iPad long after it's fallen off support, as always it is access to the applications that counts.
If the refurbished ipad lasts for over two years the cost of ownership will be about the same as my Huawei tablet, so in a sense, apart from yet more devices cluttering things up, I won't lose anything...
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