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Tag: iPad Pro

  • Week 44.25

    Week 44.25

    I saw a doctor about last week’s vertigo episode, and they concurred with my internet research that it was most likely a case of BPPV. Apparently, it really does “just happen” to anyone and they see quite a few cases of it. I was told to watch my salt intake and blood pressure, and see if the vertigo occurs “too often”, which might indicate a need for further scans.

    The doctor was surprised when I explained that we’d performed the Epley maneuver at home with a YouTube video, and said that it was probably what they’d be doing for me now if I’d still had symptoms. I didn’t explain that it had essentially been an AI consultation, because I didn’t want to get lectured about how they can be wrong. Not saying it’s a good idea, but it helped until I could get an appointment with a real doctor.

    After the doctor’s visit, I decided to have breakfast at Starbucks, a thing I used to do too often when I went in to the office. But in light of the advice I’d just been given about eating less sodium and watching my blood pressure, I opted for an egg white wrap instead of the rosemary chicken croissant that I really wanted, and it was unsatisfying. Is that what I have to look forward to now in old age? Just healthy compromises and remembering the good old days of eating crap?

    As if eating in revenge, we had a huge dinner with Alex at a place called “La Vache!” the following night. They run a simple concept: S$68/person for a salad, ribeye steak, and unlimited French fries. Cocktails are S$26 and pretty substantial. There are also desserts if you have room, including gelato from Messina down the road. Reader, I had a lot of fries and thereby a lot of sodium. So much so I’ve spent the rest of the week trying to up my water intake to make up for it.

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    The MOFT brand iPhone case I got a few weeks ago has been impressing me so much with its soft material and quality construction that I blinked and found that I’ve now bought more products in their MagSafe-compatible lineup.

    The Snap Phone Tripod Wallet folds out into an adjustable stand that could be useful for anyone needing to shoot photos, make video calls, or watch media handsfree. Like I said, I’m barely conscious of why/how I bought these things, because that doesn’t describe me. I suppose I’ll just have to become a content creator then! It also holds up to 2 cards, although in hindsight I should have gone with the thinner version that doesn’t.

    That’s because a few days later, I also ordered their Snap Field Wallet which holds 8 cards and even some folded bills, coins, and a SIM card tool. There’s a version of this that includes a built-in stand, but I decided against it since I already have the “tripod” for stand-related needs.

    Happily, this shopping spree concludes my search for a new minimal wallet to replace my worn and aging Bellroy. Every bearable option I’ve found has been over S$120, and because carrying a wallet is such an antiquated concept for me these days with everything on the phone, I wasn’t thrilled to spend the money. But the MOFT Field Wallet’s low price and novel origami design made for an easier and less risky decision. It’ll mainly stay in my bag, but the option of attaching via MagSafe is a nice bonus.

    ===

    I haven’t seen many films lately, so this week was a corrective period. I saw a Korean arthouse film on MUBI that I don’t regret but can’t recommend, called Woman Is the Future of Man (2004), and a more mainstream Korean thriller called The Old Woman With the Knife (2025). The titular trifecta was pure coincidence, but I also saw the new Keira Knightley vehicle, The Woman in Cabin 10 (2025). None of the above are really worth your limited time on Earth, if we’re being honest.

    Usually, whenever a three-hour film pops up in the queue, I push it down to the bottom. But this time when I saw Martin Scorsese’s Casino (1995) was leaving Netflix, it seemed like a sign to just sit down and do it. I can’t believe I waited so long though, because it’s something of a masterpiece despite the gangland tropes, and I don’t normally even like these kind of stories.

    I subscribed to Disney+ Premium to watch Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) in 3D on the Vision Pro, another three-hour movie. While the story isn’t worth the time, the immersive experience and quirky filmmaking tech was absolutely worth my money. My Letterboxd review: “The story of a Saturday morning cartoon with the technical complexity and execution of a space mission. Big failure on the part of our entire species that we can’t produce a director who can do both parts equally well. Not a film I want to see again.”

    As an example of how this is a film that you can’t really watch traditionally, it constantly switches between 24fps and 48fps shots, often within a single scene. It feels like a videogame, where you’re watching a cinematic cutscene and then it suddenly transitions into ultra-smooth gameplay. The 3D also pops in HDR clarity on the Vision Pro, where it would be dimmer on an IMAX screen. Sitting at home with Disney+ in a headset is oddly the definitive way to experience James Cameron’s shallow deep sea epic, which probably wasn’t what he envisioned.

    I swore I wouldn’t read or watch any of the Dan Brown/Robert Langdon stories, but it’s been almost 20 years so I put The Da Vinci Code (2006, only 149 mins) on one night and it wasn’t terrible. It helps that it’s a Ron Howard film, and I think I might actually see the next two films, Angels & Demons (2009) and Inferno (2016), before they leave Netflix. There was also some positive press for the new Dan Brown book in this series, The Secret of Secrets, so I’ve added it to my reading list. Younger me would be so disappointed.

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    It wasn’t just me that visited the doctor this week — I brought my 2021 iPad Pro (M1) down to the Apple Store over the weekend. When the Apple Genius came up to me and asked, “So what’s wrong with your iPad?”, I answered “It‘s just old.” For a while now, I’ve suspected it of falling short of Apple’s promised “all-day battery life”, but sending it in for a replacement felt like such a hassle that I kept putting it off.

    Because this iPad model doesn’t report battery health in Settings, I figured it was easily below 80% capacity, and was prepared to pay maybe $120–150 for a new battery. So they ran their diagnostics app on it, and told me it’s actually at 86%. Huh. That’s pretty good for 4.5 years! I asked how much it would cost to replace anyway, and was told just shy of S$200, but it would be a full unit swap rather than just a new battery.

    If the battery health had been 70%, I would probably have paid the money and then had to use this for at least another two years. But at 86%, I can probably make this work for another year and then see what the new models look like. So by building a product that actually ages well, Apple has… increased the likelihood of me upgrading even sooner. That’s the 4D chess game that Tim Cook plays, folks.

  • Week 10.24

    Week 10.24

    Last week, I mused on the need for Super Deluxe reissues of Counting Crows’ albums, only to discover that August and Everything After had already received such an edition, with a Dolby Atmos mix, and it was already in my library. Now please do Recovering the Satellites!

    Staying on the subject of music, while watching an episode of True Detective one night, there was a scene where someone flipped through a stack of vinyls in their living room and took one out to play, at which point I paused the show to ask aloud, “why isn’t there an iPad app that will replicate that experience?” I’ve been wanting this for a while, and so this was not a new exclamation. Streaming services are great and all, but I remember the days of having cassettes and CDs, and how the tactile, spatial ritual of flipping through them, selecting one, and loading it into a player was more satisfying than typing into a search field and hitting Enter.

    The app I want would mimic this by letting me set aside a small subset of albums from my larger Apple Music library and display them on a virtual shelf with large cover art, and I would put this on an iPad positioned near our HomePod. The key is this smaller stack of “heavy rotation” picks or favorite classic albums, so I can stand there and choose something to put on in the living room. Bonus points for skeuomorphism: dragging a metaphorical disc onto a spindle would be nice. Apple is rumored to be working on an iPad dock that is also a HomePod, or a HomePod with a screen, much like less audio-centric models already offered by Amazon and Google, but I fear today’s designers will go for direct over delightful.

    If this idea doesn’t resonate with you at all, it’s okay; I think it’s just a specific millennial/xennial urge to respect and protect the album format. I enjoy singles, YouTube-only bootlegs, and melodic fragments on TikTok just as much as the zoomers, but I’ll listen to whole albums till I die. A great album takes advantage of the larger canvas to explore ambitious concepts or stories. It’s the difference between an article and a zine.

    I decided to look through the App Store again, and found that two apps I already had on my iPhone could potentially do the job: Albums: Music Shortcuts, and Longplay. I also found one called Albums – album focused player, but I decided to go with the ones I had. After some tests, I found that a recent 2.0 update to Longplay (which I’d bought long ago but ended up never really using) added support for custom “collections”, which lets me set up this smaller shelf of select LPs, because its default mode is to show all of your albums. And it syncs over iCloud, so I can update my choices at any time from any device. Longplay’s website is here.

    Dusting off my neglected first-gen 12.9” iPad Pro for the purpose, I now have this set up going and it’s… not bad. Longplay’s interface isn’t exactly what I envisioned, and I’d like it to remember that I always want to play out of the same HomePod, but it works for now. The aging (aged?) A9X chip struggles a little to scroll smoothly and filter my huge library in real time, but I was amazed to find that it supports iPadOS 16 — i.e. last year’s OS works on an 8-year old tablet.

    I still remember the launch of this iPad Pro because I was in Tokyo on holiday at the time, and was suffering a bout of ankle pain for a day or two. On November 12, 2015, the morning of the iPad’s launch, I hobbled down to the Ginza Apple Store near where I was staying, and the excitement in the room was incredible. There was a calligraphy demonstration using the new Apple Pencil and a Japanese painting app. Nerds young and old jostled to pick it up. The sheer size of it seemed audacious and unreal compared to the 9.7” iPads we’d been used to.

    Seeing it held in the hands like a magazine, with an insane Retina resolution that surpassed any laptop of that time, the potential for it to be a replacement for printed materials struck me more than ever. This was back when everyone thought the iPad would be a great platform for publishing, and almost every large company spent millions trying to design the right UX and business model for digital versions of Wired, The Economist, Vogue, or what have you. But they were often bloated, difficult to navigate, and often a worse reading experience than paper. I have some ideas on why this didn’t work out, but anyway now we’re just back to good ol’ PDFs and websites.

    I walked out in the cold air thinking, “Well, that was cool, but I’m not going to buy one.” I struggled down the road and sat down for a coffee in the now-closed Monocle Cafe in the Yurakucho Hankyu Men’s department store, followed by lunch at Sushizanmai, and I must have thought it over and changed my mind (surprise), because by 11 PM that night I was taking photos of my new iPad Pro back in the hotel room.

    Did I ever make full use of it? I remember the Apple-centric analyst Horace Dediu reviewing it as a new kind of ‘desktop computer’, owing to its power and reduced portability. I never really brought it to work and used it as a note-taking surface like I imagined. In fact, I never bought another 12.9″ iPad Pro again, always opting for the smaller version whenever I upgraded. For a number of years this one served as our bedroom TV (really a bed TV because that’s how we used it: propped up on some blankets), until it became prone to shutting down abruptly as the battery gave out. It gives me joy to see it finding a new purpose in the home as a hi-fi system.

    ===

    Media activity:

    • As mentioned, we’ve been watching the new True Detective and I agree with the internet that its tone and storyline are a very odd fit for the anthology series, and I’m not sure it really belongs. Supposedly it was pitched to HBO as a new original mystery show, but they asked for it to be changed so it could be a new season of TD. What a weird decision: it felt like supernatural survival horror at times. It was mostly good to see Jodie Foster at work.
    • Fiona Apple is back! Sort of. She features in a song with Iron & Wine called All in Good Time, from their upcoming album, Light Verse. You can listen to it now, though.
    • The new Bleachers is finally out too, and I’ve heard it through once on headphones but wasn’t super in love with it. Will have to give it more time.
    • Jack Antonoff (and Taylor Swift, who is performing her final shows here this weekend) appear in this wonderful portrait of Michael Stipe in the New York Times a few months ago that I only discovered now. R.E.M. was hands-down my favorite band as a teenager, and I loved learning about what he’s been up to, and how our idols in their old age can be such weird, vulnerable, out-of-touch, sincere human beings who are still discovering themselves, still figuring out how to live, struggling to do the work that matters. Here’s a gift link to the article.
    • The new TV adapation of Shogun has been getting so much buzz, and I have fond (if blurry) memories of the 1980 miniseries starring Richard Chamberlain, which must have aired as reruns when I was a kid, so I’ve been excited for it. Episode 1 did not disappoint; it looks like a big budget film and has non-histrionic performances from its Japanese cast. Do you think someone tells them to tone it down when they work on American productions? Because most Japanese dramas I watch are so over-the-top as to puncture the fourth wall like a gaijin’s arm through a shogi door.
    • We still haven’t seen Dune Part II, but decided to watch a 20-min recap on YouTube instead of sitting through the first movie again in preparation. I must be a terrible media reader because I swear I didn’t make sense of Paul’s visions the way I was meant to. I just recall it was the first time I’d been in a theater in nearly two years, just as Covid was unwinding, and being swept up in the sheer visual experience of seeing the world in motion. Because Dune was always more about Westwood Studios’ real-time strategy game on PC to me than the book, David Lynch film, or Syfy series, it’s Arrakis itself and the houses at war that I feel nostalgia for.

  • iPad Pros

      
    When the 12.9″ iPad Pro was first unveiled, I was pretty sure I didn’t want or need one. Then I held it in the Ginza Apple Store while on vacation and bought one later that same day. The experience of holding such a large screen in your hands and touching it directly is more impressive than it sounds. But what you won’t realize while handling one in the store is how heavy it gets once you add a Smart Cover or Smart Keyboard and a silicone case for the back, if so inclined.

    In the couple of months since, I’ve merely used it like a big iPad, watching movies in bed and occasionally reading comics or news on it; that sort of thing. But I knew it was meant for more and wanted to try bringing it to work with the Pencil and Smart Keyboard. Spoiler: it’s awesome, and I could probably do a lot of my daily stuff on it while moving easily from meeting to desk. The main problem has been its weight, especially when carried in my bag with a camera and power bank and umbrella every day. It’s also too much to hold in one hand while sketching with the other.

    So after a few weeks of deliberation and bugging other people with the pros and cons, I decided to pony up for the new 9.7″ size and try to see if I could make justifiable use of two iPad Pros in one life. The Smart Keyboard hasn’t arrived yet, but I expect it will be even easier to type on than the Logitech and Belkin ones I’ve had for earlier iPads. The size and weight are perfect for one-handed use with the Pencil, although the back is slippery without a silicone case. I don’t think adding one is worth the weight gain, though. The larger iPad Pro is going to stay home and try to become a desktop computer in place of my ageing 2010 iMac. It was an unnecessary and guilt-inducing expense, but the thing that helped justify this dual-iPad setup was asking why I’ve allowed the iMac to go so long without an upgrade.

    I got old! Which makes one treat computers differently, not to mention the nature of the tasks have changed.

    Years ago, I would replace my PC/Mac every couple of years, usually by the end of every three-year AppleCare cycle. My computer was at the center of my life, and as a student living in a single bedroom, I’d spend most of the day in front of its screen; it was TV, telephone, game console, word processor, and library. I ate meals in front of it, and I know I wasn’t the only one.

    These days, I spend most of my time at the office in front of a MacBook Pro, and at all other times, the job of that home computer is being done by an iOS device or Apple TV. I have a bigger house to move around in, and I’m almost never found sitting in front of the iMac. Having a desktop for those purposes seems awfully restrictive now, and confronting the mess of my HDD and locally stored files feels tiresome and archaic. Doing everyday tasks on an iPad without that legacy is a sort of escape, and there’s some measure of security to be had in knowing I could use one of the Macs if I really needed to. Chances are, I won’t. With music and photos on iCloud and other files on Dropbox, the iPad has all it takes to be a primary computer most days. I’ve stopped editing photos in Aperture and Lightroom and do it all with an iOS workflow now. You just have to let go and not look back.

    I think all of us iPad Pro owners are waiting on iOS 10 to see Apple’s grand plan to bring this post-PC vision to maturity, but in the meantime it’s not bad at all.