It was actually better at youtube by being more efficient, I could watch videos for a full day before needing to charge.
How that additional time is actually spent is a whole separate story, but that's entirely tangential to assessing the impact of battery life improving.
If someone has a work-around I'd love to hear it. Until then, or until Apple changes this design, I think I'm done with iPads. I don't want to pay that much to "own" something that Apple can simply make obsolete by reconfiguring or turning off a server somewhere.
Edit: fix typo
Couldn't connect to wifi except through a password-less hotspot. Then I couldnt get online because nothing with SSL was working.
I didnt have a pen drive so I had to FTP off another machine, via my phone hotspot. We got there though!
Except for the battery, which isn’t that easy to replace on an iPad. And apps relying on anything online (including browsers) stop functioning at some point, because you can’t replace the OS or install arbitrary apps.
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iPad+Air+5th+Generation+Battery...
(Having said that, I'm not ruling out replacing it, but I don't think I'll be inclined to do that until they stop updating its version of iPadOS.)
For the amount charged they should be usable for 15-20 years. Enschittification is very much an apple thing. Cue outraged apple cult memebers.
I've also got an iphone 15 pro that has started on on the enschittification update path. Pauses after presses, many more typos and it's just not slick and nice like when it was new.
But sure, in my experience, apple zelaots just won't believe it happens even while observing it.
Being stuck on v17 is a feature for the older A-series chipset.
So should I buy a second pair of work-out earphones or a new tablet? A new tablet would give me back access to app store and many apps, which are no longer compatible with this old slab, but at least Amazon Prime Video and most importantly, VLC still works.
Even at 9 years old, I don't see myself upgrading in the foreseeable future.
In contrast, none of the various Android devices he collected over the years turned on. One came close, then errored out right after booting.
Could also be due to incompatible radios. 2G GSM isn’t available everywhere anymore (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2G#Phase-out), nor is 3G (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3G#Phase-out).
Sorry for your loss.
I expected it to last a little longer, despite the cheap price of around $350 in 2022.
After the Liquid Glass update it became so sluggish that I had to turn off animations in the Accessibility settings. And it still is not enjoyable.
TL;DR sometimes it's not Apple, it's the app devs that deprecate them.
Since linux runs on it, I can run the latest versions of great pieces of software like ed, slack in a web browser, etc.
It is 100% apple's fault that they do not open up the bootloader for devices they'll no longer offer updates for and allow the community to build a custom darwin or linux fork. Even though we paid for the hardware, we are not allowed to use it any longer than apple says.
Are the app devs deprecating just because their support matrix is too big, or because current SDKs will no longer build apps compatible with those devices?
I think the later case is less common on the Android side of the fence, but Apple is not great about keeping old versions of the dev tools functional, and you end up needing to keep elderly Macs around to target older versions of the OS.
Submitting apps to the app store requires using the latest version of Xcode (with a ~half year lag after a new one comes out), so it's now impossible to submit an update to the app store that supports iOS <15.
On Android it’s less of an issue because the SDK ships separately from the system, but there are often still substantial behavioral differences between system versions under the same SDK that can be a real pain in the rear, especially when it comes to permissions-related issues. This why it’s common for Android apps to have odd bugs or behave strangely on ancient versions of Android — while it’s easy for the dev to produce a build technically runs on a wide range of versions, properly testing against all those permutations of versions and manufacturer skins is practically speaking impossible unless you’re a sizable company that keeps a lab full of devices with CI rigged up to test against them all.