Ode to an iPad

First things first: go get a copy of Ad Luna for a mere 99p. You’ve got until Tuesday the 12th. Do it.

If there’s one thing I do well, it’s relentlessly anthropomorphise almost every object I own. And this is apart from the myriad Little Guys that lurk on every corner of my desk that are actually designed to represent some manner of creature: I mean the normal things, the things that I’ve owned for so long that they’ve taken on a life and personality of their own for me. Sometimes I don’t realise they’ve done this, until they go wrong, or break, and I have to mend or replace them and the stakes of swapping out a battery suddenly become far higher than I was expecting. I had a taste of this earlier in the year, when I finally upgraded from my ancient 2010-era Kindle to a still old but significantly less old model – but given that was actually the third Kindle of that model I’d owned and used until it gave out, replacement had lost its sting.

This week was different. This week I had to retire a very old friend. Because for my 18th birthday, almost 12 years ago, my godmother bought me an iPad, and I have used that machine every single day since, until finally I had to bite the bullet and admit that its working days were done.

Its second case and its second RWBY sticker.

That old tablet has served me impeccably in a dozen different ways for 12 years. I have watched thousands of hours of content on it; I have played thousands of hours of games; I have read thousands of pages of books and comics. For the entirety of my time at university that iPad was the repository of every piece of lecture reading I was ever given and more besides – whole periods of history were held on that machine, ready to be perused at the touch of a button. In those days my actual laptop was an elderly beast, only kept functioning by raising it off my desk with LEGO tyres so that the fan could get enough air to not overheat. Even when I replaced that, with the laptop before the one on which I write this post, it was with a hefty, heavy machine, impractical to cart around to every lecture. Not so the iPad. It was only about 5 years after I left university that I actually cleared out all the history reading from the drive to make space for other stuff – over 1500 articles and book chapters. (That I still haven’t gone through and sorted out, because while I could see the thumbnails and titles on my iPad, on my computer almost all of the PDFs are called 1012389235297343.pdf and I have no idea what they’re actually about. One day.)

In the days when my phone was rubbish, which was a very long time, my iPad was the only decent bit of portable technology I had. I awkwardly carted it around to take photos on holidays and at conventions; I once had a friend film one of my job applications with it; I recorded thousands of images of friends and family with that too-big-to-comfortably-hold screen. I used it for scripts – every Fringe show and play I performed in was held on that machine, for which it actually was very practical. In these last few twilight years it was reading, as well as watching videos and stuff like that, that kept the iPad alive and useful for me; bugger squinting at a little phone screen, I want a proper page to turn.

And I wrote on it. For any short trip that didn’t justify lugging the laptop around, the iPad was my portable solution. Every story I’ve written in the last 12 years has, at some point, been copied over to that iPad for a few thousand words of additions. And then transferred back, and fiddled with, because the formatting always got changed slightly and no matter how many settings I tweaked it would always come back to Word as US not UK English. I wrote three whole books on that iPad – novellas, sure, but whole damn stories that one day I’ll rewrite and throw out there into the world. I remember vividly when I started the first of them, sitting in an airport in New York waiting for a delayed flight, looking out at the nightscape and realising that I had all I needed to just write at the tips of my fingers.

It served me well, that iPad. And it never broke. Beyond a couple of glitches that just required a quick reset to fix it never once went seriously wrong, in 12 years. Despite the overall tone of this post I am not an Apple fanboy: I have always used Windows computers and Android phones and I genuinely dislike using their Apple equivalents; I don’t like how restrictive they are in terms of their programs and I especially don’t like how phenomenally overpriced they are. But I have to admit that Apple makes their machines to last. My wife’s old Macbook lasted a decade; my iPad 12 full years. That’s more than I can say for any other computer I’ve had by a factor of two, at least.

But times change. And this iPad is 12 years old, and though its hardware was perfectly functional, software is not so long-lasting. One by one, apps stopped working, because the OS wasn’t sufficiently up to date. I could deal with losing a few games; I had access to most by other means. I could deal with having to run BBC iPlayer in browser. I will forever salute Netflix and Channel 4 for maintaining legacy versions of their apps that keep working with older OSes (and I think that every app, particularly big streaming things like them, should have to do the same, especially the damn BBC). I could, after a while, adjust to having to run YouTube in browser, as irritating and clunky as it was. I could even just about cope with the Kindle app being unusably laggy, and having to separately offload my comics to another app to even read what I owned. I could handle the big button getting stuck and not working, forcing me to use that floaty onscreen accessibility one to close or open anything.

But all of that together was getting old. And I held on, for as long as I physically and financially could, because these things are expensive and these books don’t really pay the bills. And because over 12 years I’ve grown attached to this venerable, reliable machine, that has never once let me down.

12 years, though. It was time.

So this week I bought not a new iPad, because those prices are crazy, but a refurbished one. Only 4 years old is a lot better than 12. It arrived on Tuesday. And, of course, it was instantly and immediately better in every way. All the apps work, and are actually up to date; I can install things like Disney and Dropout, apps that didn’t exist when my iPad was new and so have never worked with it; the Kindle app is fully functional and all my comics are back at my fingertips. The keyboard doesn’t lag when I try to type in Pages. The battery is much better. The big button is no longer broken. There’s a tool that lets you do automation/shortcut stuff so I can, for instance, automatically pause my VPN when I open iPlayer so that the BBC remembers that I’m actually British. I can actually install my VPN.

It’s faster, and slightly bigger, and superior in every way. I will doubtless use it for another 12 years until the relentless advance of technology forces me to go through all this again. I remember, now it’s in my hands, just how many things that my old machine could once do that I’d forgotten about.

Felt like a new machine meant a new look. It’s not pretending to be the old one, after all.

And I turned the old iPad off, once everything was installed. I put it away. And I was sad, because it has done so much for me, that little glass box. I’ve done so much with it. After 12 years it’s impossible not to get attached to something like this. It has been reliable, and constant. It has seen me through almost half my life. If software updates hadn’t forced me to change I would have used it for another 12 years. It is an old friend, that iPad, and I will always be grateful for it, and to my godmother for getting it for me.

But of course I’m not getting rid of it. Recycling obsolete technology that I’m almost certainly never going to use again? Insanity! That iPad will sit forever next to my old Kindle, and my old phone, and my old laptop in the blue plastic box that is the Old Device Retirement Home. They can sit there and swap stories about the days when software was simpler, when batteries held charge, when screens didn’t get black lines across them for no reason. And they can do that for as long as they like. Because if, if, if something goes wrong, if modern technology fails me as, it seems, the world is going to force it to, if I am ever in dire need… those old, reliable machines will be there. That old iPad will still be there, and even if that day comes in another decade’s time, I’ll bet anything you like that it’ll still work. Slowly. After a judicious recharge and a dusting-off. But it’ll work. It always has. It probably always will.