So Apple had their event Tuesday, the one everybody already has an opinion on by now. iPad mini, $329, thinner iMac, updated Mac mini, the works. I'm not going to walk through the whole keynote because if you care even a little you've already read six other blogs do that this week. What I actually want to complain about is much dumber and much more personal: they also quietly bumped the full-size iPad to a 4th generation model, with the new Lightning connector and a faster A6X chip, and I bought my iPad 3 in March. Seven months ago. Stood in line at the Apple Store on Boylston on a Friday morning for it and everything.
Seven months. That's not even long enough for the screen protector to get scratched up.
I get that Apple runs on its own calendar and none of us are owed a specific product lifecycle, but there's something genuinely irritating about a company selling you the "new iPad" (that was the actual name, no number, just "the new iPad," which in hindsight was a hilarious mistake) and then turning around before the following spring with a device that makes yours look like the old one. Not the old-old one. Just old. My iPad 3 works exactly the same today as it did on Tuesday morning before the keynote started. Nothing changed about the object in my bag. But its resale value definitely just took a hit, and every 30-pin accessory I own is now a dead end going forward for anything I buy after this.
That's the part that actually stings, not the iPad itself. I've got a speaker dock in the living room that only takes the old connector. My car has an adapter cable wired into the stereo. None of that is going to work with whatever Apple ships from here on, and I'm annoyed enough about it that I've genuinely been looking up what a 3rd-gen iPad goes for on eBay right now, while it's still "the new iPad" in enough people's heads to fetch a decent price. Sell it before the depreciation really sets in, buy the 4th-gen one, eat the loss, move on. That's probably what I end up doing, and I hate that I've already basically talked myself into it in one paragraph.
The iPad mini I have less of an opinion about, mostly because it's just not for me. $329 for the 16GB WiFi model undercuts the full-size iPad by a good margin, and the size looks genuinely nice in every hands-on video I've watched, but there's no Retina display on it, and after using a Retina iPad for the better part of a year I don't think I can go back down in pixel density on purpose. Amazon's got the Kindle Fire HD at $199 and Google's Nexus 7 starts around $199 to $249 depending on storage, and neither of those has a Retina screen either, so I guess Apple's not really trying to win that fight on resolution. They're winning it on the app store being enormous, which, fine, that's a real advantage, I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
Small tangent because I can't help it: tomorrow is Windows 8 launch day, and Surface RT ships with it. A guy two desks over at work has had a preorder in since the announcement and has been counting down out loud for two weeks straight. I'll probably hear all about it Friday whether I ask or not. I've poked at Windows 8 in a VM a little and the whole two-interfaces-stapled-together thing still feels unfinished to me, like they shipped the transition instead of the destination, but I'm curious enough about the hardware that I might actually go look at one in person this weekend instead of just being cranky about it from a distance.
Anyway. Almost a year into keeping this blog now, and if there's a theme to be pulled out of nearly twelve months of posts it might just be "I buy the thing and then I complain about the thing," which, fair, that tracks. iPad 3 is going up for sale this weekend. We'll see what it actually gets me.