Mastodawn

Rob Pegoraro Dec 1, 2024

A minor Thanksgiving miracle: more pie, less family tech support

Another Thanksgiving with the East Coast side of my extended family has ended, but this one broke with precedent in one welcome way: I spent shockingly little time on family tech-support duty and instead had that much more time for eating, napping, and eating some more.

I would give myself credit for that for buying my mom a 2021-vintage iPad on sale two years ago, but the appreciation properly goes to Apple for making app and system-maintenance updates in iPadOS such an automatic proposition.

When I picked up Mom’s iPad Thursday to see if it needed any software care and feeding, the only update awaiting an install was the unthrilling iPadOS 18.

I took care of that chore, explained the release accurately-enough as “they added a calculator,” and moved that app’s icon to the first home screen. My mother’s aging iPhone, meanwhile, was too old for iOS 18 but had no other updates pending.

Which is great! I’ve spent way too much time at other holiday family gatherings downloading and installing software updates that had escaped other people’s attention.

My sole other tech-support task for my mom was setting up a passkey for her Google account. Not that I expect she will be using it regularly, but that extra layer of authentication might save a step in troubleshooting later on for me or my brother (who works in IT in a Windows-first environment, so family Apple support usually falls to me).

With those digital duties out of the way, I had that much more free time left over for such more important work as making pumpkin pie from scratch (pictured above). And this go-round of Thanksgiving treated me to yet another minor miracle: Enough of my contribution to dessert was left over in the wake of Thursday’s gluttony for me to enjoy a slice of pie after dinner Friday night.

#apple #GoogleSecurity #ios #iPadCalculator #iPadOS18 #passkey #passkeys #pie #pumpkinPie #techSupport #Thanksgiving #ThanksgivingTechSupport

Rob Pegoraro Oct 19, 2024

It says something about the incremental nature of mobile operating-system updates these days that my immediate payoff for installing Apple’s iPadOS 18 on my iPad mini 6–a 37-minute process Saturday afternoon, during which I couldn’t use the tablet for five minutes–was the addition of a calculator app.

Yes, the basic math application that shipped with the original Mac as a “Desk Accessory” applet, and which has remained absent from Apple’s iPad software since I watched Steve Jobs introduce the first one in 2010. Fourteen years later, it’s nice to know that iPad buyers won’t have to make installing PCalc one of their first tablet-setup tasks.

There’s more to iPadOS 18 than that, even setting aside the not-yet-shipped AI features that lead off Apple’s pitch for this release: a new standalone Passwords app (not relevant to me because I use 1Password), a new Privacy & Security category in the Settings app, the ability to require Touch ID authentication to open an app (and then hide that app’s presence behind Touch ID). But none of this stuff struck me as a reason to reach for my tablet when Apple shipped this release a month ago so I could install it right then.

I’m not writing that to knock Apple, because I have about the same reaction to Google’s Android 15 after installing it on a Pixel 8a right after I put iPadOS 18 on the iPad.

The standout features in this update are privacy and security tools that you hope you won’t need–a set of Theft Protection defenses designed to make your phone useless to a thief even if you weren’t able to lock it in time (but which you need to enable from their default state of off), plus a Private Space feature to hide apps behind biometric security that resembles the one I mentioned in iOS 18.

There’s more there–see my PCMag writeup for a breakdown–but this, too, is not an OS update that I’d be able to recognize on your device if I glanced at it from across a table. Which is okay! Technology could stand to have a little less drama.

That said, there is one mobile OS update that I do want to see get fast and widespread uptake: Apple’s iOS 18, which finally brings support for RCS messaging to the iPhone. That feature has yielded an immediate upgrade to my text chats with friends on iPhones running iOS 18, in the obvious form of typing indicators and higher-resolution multimedia and in the less-obvious form of our conversations being encrypted in transit instead of being sent in the clear. Those friends seem to find their end of the banter improved as well.

So if you have an iPhone that can run iOS 18, please ignore everything I wrote before the previous paragraph and rush to install this update. Thank you.

10/20/2024: Updated with a reminder to activate the anti-theft features in Android 15.

https://robpegoraro.com/2024/10/19/the-thrill-may-be-gone-from-mobile-system-updates-and-thats-not-a-bad-thing/

#Android15 #AndroidPrivateSpace #greenBubbles #iOS18 #iPad #iPadCalculator #iPadOS18 #iphone #Pixel8a #RCS