Tim Cook mentioned in yesterday’s keynote that the iPad mini with Retina Display has 100% customer satisfaction. That is absolutely amazing for any product! Having owned one myself since January, I have to agree completely and admit that I’m still impressed with it on a daily basis. I don’t think I could come up with anything that is a negative, but the one wishlist item I have is now covered in the newly announced iPad mini 3: Touch ID.
I am a strong believer in preserving older technology and getting as much use out of my gear as possible. As some already know, or maybe you have heard quips from Don about it on our Small Dog Speaks radio show, I am an avid Apple Newton user. I still carry my MessagePad 2100, the last of Apple’s groundbreaking PDAs from the ’90s, around with me every day—fully kitted out with WiFi, Bluetooth, and even GPS—but it now has a smaller, faster, and far more modern companion. My first new Apple product in a number of years, in fact.
Last fall, as I transitioned from nearly a decade in our IT department as a server admin & developer to also managing the department, it became clear that—no matter how comfortable I had grown to being on-call for emergencies—there is a big difference between being on-call and managing a department. The former means bringing a MacBook Pro with you everywhere so you can fix down servers or services ASAP when an important phone call or text message comes in. The latter means not just dealing with emergencies, but also being able to quickly fire off emails, pull up documentation, and update reports anywhere & any time. The MacBook Pro was already too cumbersome to always carry with me, but it definitely isn’t conducive to pulling out to quickly read or respond to email, or update my to-do lists. With a MacBook Pro, you really need to sit down and ultimately tend to get sucked into it. I like the full size iPad, but really wanted something smaller & lighter (you know, the size of my Newton, but thinner & lighter).
The iPad mini with Retina Display fit the bill perfectly. It has roughly the same size front face as my MessagePad, but is significantly thinner, half the weight, has an immeasurably nicer display, and is extremely modern, with a vibrant apps marketplace and excellent connectivity options with WiFi, Bluetooth, and the Lightning connector. At times I wish I had picked up the cellular model so it’d have built-in GPS and Internet anywhere, but it’s easily paired with my iPhone 5 so the thought quickly slips away.
It’s hard to compete with the Newton’s battery life which is generally measured in weeks, not days, but the iPad keeps surprising me with its power efficiency. A few weeks ago, while working on the refurbishment of my Land Rover Series III (old Apple gear isn’t my only obsession), my iPad was cranking out music for over 7 hours and still had 88% battery left. After streaming the entire Apple keynote over WiFi, 92% battery remaining. I easily meet and usually exceed Apple’s 10 hour battery life estimate, and can extend it by carefully managing when I enable or disable WiFi or Bluetooth.
We’re big into dogfooding (using the products we sell) so Small Dog runs on Apple’s servers, apps, and Google for Work (née Google Apps for Business; you knew we are a reseller specializing in deployment & migration, right?). Apple’s Pages, Numbers, and Keynote, as well as Google’s, Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Slides are all so easy to pop open, do a little work, then go back to whatever I was doing. The two apps that are always open and get the most use are Google’s Gmail and Yaniv Katan’s gTasks HD Pro for my to-do lists (it syncs through Gmail’s “tasks”, so they’re in Gmail in any web browser). Plus, iOS 8 has greatly improved the sharing of data between apps, making multitasking that much easier and more powerful.
For the server admin side of my job, I couldn’t be happier leaving the MacBook Pro at home on my desk. I can actually manage, troubleshoot, and fix our infrastructure using Panic’s excellent Prompt terminal emulator, VNC Viewer for remote control, and AirPort Utility for managing WiFi devices. Add in 1Password for managing passwords and I’m am one happy server geek. More importantly, the weight off my shoulders—literal and figurative—has less me far less stressed.
Would I upgrade to the iPad mini 3 to get Touch ID? Considering how security conscious I need to be and how much time it’d save, it is extremely likely. That said, I absolutely love my iPad mini with Retina Display as it is. I’m proud to be part of that 100% customer satisfaction rate.
P.S. For those fellow Newton users out there, I still maintain a small list of products that pair well with our green friend.