So Christmas came and went, and it brought our household some new technological marvels and along with them trials and tribulations. And this is in addition to me migrating to Linux on my own PC, so here are my thoughts on my technological breakdowns this Xmas.
Firstly I’m going to talk about the Apple iPad Air my wife got for Christmas, and please bear in mind that I roll my eyes when anyone mentions an Apple product. So the big day came and my wife opened her secret pressie from the family and was in tears at the sight of the iPad air inside the wrapping. She opened it and turned it on. Set up an Apple I.D. it demanded immediately, so we did. Give us your credit or debit card details it screamed (first of my hate Apple reasons confirmed, greedy corporation which sells everything it can to you) so she did. Having forked over £400 I think that one of the first things Apple should do is give you a working device, not demand your details so it can hold the device to ransom until you give them, but there you have it.
Having setup an Apple I.D. it was ready for use, except it wasn’t, now Apple demand your username and password before it will do anything just to make doubly sure you’re in their power. Start the app store, username and password, start the browser and it asked again. For my money that was piss taking on an unprecedented scale. Anyway, wife is happy and iPad now works, although anything else you want it to do seems to cost money straight from the first app you want to use, and we haven’t told her yet she can’t hook it to her computer without wiping our daughters Iphone out of the iTunes (including all her backed up music) or letting it set it up to be our daughters iPad. Apple, just great isn’t it?
Second piece of technology was the Kindle for our youngest daughter. A few minutes and it was added to my Amazon account with parental controls on downloading books which need to be paid for. Books were added to the list automatically and a new one bought for my daughter and ready to read in a minute or so. Now that is painless technology and a better out of the box experience than Apples I’d say.
Then I went to start up my PC and Linux Mint refused to work again, so that’s removed from my shortlist of OS’s when my new hard drive arrives. I’m still wondering if Linux really is ready to use yet if you don’t want to spend hours each time you start your PC up just tweaking or writing command line codes which have to be looked up online (when the PC isn’t working how do you find them?).
you can have multiple iTune$ libraries on a single computer ( apparently multiple devices of different types but not worked that out )
hold left shift when you start iTune$ and create a new library just for the iPad ( you’ll need to repopulate the music etc – hope fully it’s all drm free
hope this helps
( hate apple too but iTunes and Airplay is easy and works )