Brainripples

My mother has never learned to use computers, aside from a smartphone that she uses for calls and texting with the grandkids. After my father died and she asked me to do something with my father's several desktop and laptop computers, she cancelled their Internet service that she wouldn't be using. But she held onto my dad's newest tablet, thinking she could use it to browse news and look at photos. This requires a network connection, so I set up her phone for tethering, set up the tablet to automatically connect to that network, and showed her how to turn that on and off on her phone. (I described this as "turning on Internet for the tablet".)

In the end she found this too difficult and she's never used that tablet, so this week she gave it to me. It's an iPad Pro (3rd generation, 12.9") and comes to me with a keyboard cover and a couple of Apple pencils. I'd already downloaded his Apple cloud backups more than a year ago, so I could safely reset the tablet. I'm new to iOS (I use Android), so I figure this is a chance to check it out before the next time I need to replace a phone or tablet. I'm happy to accept pointers, app recommendations, and warnings. I do have a Mac desktop, but their mobile setup is new to me.

Apple aims for intuitive user interfaces, but that doesn't mean they always succeed. When deleting personal information as part of resetting, I had to enter first the PIN and then my father's Apple password. That makes sense. After I entered the password I hit return, but there was no visible change. I hit return again, thinking it hadn't taken, then tried delete to see if that changed anything, and concluded that it was stuck. I let it sit there for a while. Five minutes later, I got a "no connection" popup. Ok, yeah, now that you mention it I should have realized I'd need to connect it to my WiFi for that to work, but if it had given me any indication of what it was doing ("connecting...") while it was doing it, I would have known (a) that it was doing something and (b) that I needed to fix that. Instead, the interface just gave me a mystery for a while. Oops.

Those two Apple pencils are an as-yet-unsolved puzzle. My mother gave me one that was with the tablet (there's a magnetic connection) and one in a box that she thought was new (my father ordered it but never got a chance to use it, she thinks). The two pencils look identical to me, except that the one in the box is missing the plastic cap that should be on its stylus. The plastic cap from the other one does not fit it -- so they seem to be different, but that's my only clue. The box says "2nd generation". Something I found online describes the first generation as round and the second as mostly round with a flat side (because it was too easy for the first generation to roll off of desks). Both of these have that flat side, so I conclude that my father replaced one second-generation pencil with another, but if so, I am left wondering why the cap from one doesn't fit the other. I have no idea which of these is actually newer; maybe he did replace it (maybe he broke his first one?) and he put the old one in the box the new one came in? So many mysteries.

The tablet is now busy updating from iOS 17.1 to 18.5. Yeah, it's been offline a while.