 More on the electronics front: it turns out I hate iPads
|
Mar. 5th, 2019 @ 08:44 am 
|
|---|
So, in my last post I left out some more unpleasantness of the last couple of weeks.
I broke my tablet.
I'd put it where I usually put it but somehow this time I knocked it off, it landed, clearly, at the worst possible angle, and the screen was shattered.
It still works, kinda, but I've been avoiding using it in any way lest I do something that disrupts my ability to get all my data off, which I'm going to want to.
We took it to the repair guy for a quote, but Samsung parts are apparently now very expensive, and it would cost $300 just for the screen, which seems like too much for a tablet over five years old that's been starting to struggle.
I'd been thinking about replacing it for a while, but was holding off until something that actually seemed like an upgrade was available.
That time is still not yet.
Samsung tablets are now priced at "you might as well get a laptop" and don't include the functionality the one I bought in 2013 had. Hell no.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) velithya spent most of a day researching (I was still sick and I think I was just too pathetic for her to ignore) and came up with the conclusion that an iPad 6+Apple Pencil was probably my best bet.
So I bought those.
And I hated them. I tried - I spent hours messing around with them - but the iPad's UI design is atrocious. Absolutely nothing is intuitive. "I want to close this program, so... I drag my finger slowly up one side of the screen?" Who the hell thought that made sense? "Oh, and I have to do it five or six times until I get the angle exactly right and do it slowly enough but not too slowly."
On my old tablet, that process involved: "Press home button. Touch applications icon."
No piece of electronics has ever inspired more thorough and profound hate in me in less time than the iPad 6.
Also, the Apple Pencil isn't very good, the tip design is absolutely rubbish. And the charging end and its accessories seem to be designed to get lost and require you to buy replacements and/or to break the charging port on your iPad.
So those were returned to the shop for a refund, because I'm not paying hundreds of dollars to be annoyed by the appalling design flaws of morally dubious electronics that I won't use if I can avoid it because I hate everything about the user experience.
Instead, we checked out a second-hand Surface Pro 3, and ended up deciding to buy it.
Now, I'll note that the hardware did and does seem completely fine, and the operating system was reset to factory settings, so none of this is on the previous owners.
The first morning I had it, I wanted to use it to watch basketball, because at this point my laptop was still in for service.
I wanted to be able to put it on the TV so I could use the Surface for other things.
So I installed Chrome, in order to use Chromecast.
Once I had the game playing on the TV, though, I had the issue that - even after I closed the Chrome window - the thing was running very, very slowly.
Fun fact: The Surface Pro 3 has 4GB of memory. Somehow, Windows 10 had this at less than one available.
I hate Windows 10, by the way, just not as much as I hate the iPad 6's OS. Windows 10 sucks but it actually lets me access the information that tells me why it sucks, it lets me adjust assorted settings where the iPad 6 just tells me not to worry my pretty little head about that, and it does things like "have actual buttons to do the basic system operations instead of wanting me to intuit arcane symbols to draw on the screen".
So I was wanting to try and poke at this issue, and rebooted the Surface.
It came back without audio or network capacity.
Diagnostics came up with nothing, and were like "try here to find more information on the internet" you little shit you're not recognising the network.
Oh well, say I. I haven't actually made significant changes to this thing yet. Reset to factory settings again!
... that throws an error.
... "Undoing changes," it says.
... except now it can't boot at all.
So, we had to download Windows 10 install media, and put those on a thumb drive, except that didn't work either, because it turns out the thumb drive was faulty.
IT WAS A DAY
|
So I dunno, we have a Surface, the original, and it has like, I don't know, 1GB of RAM or 2GB maybe, and runs Windows 10, and runs like a top. Video, websites, whatever, no slowdowns or problems. (The original and the Pro are slightly different beasts; the original runs on ARM, which might be its performance boost over the Pro). So I don't know what more to say to that.
The whole "undoing changes" thing is very frustrating; been there on some laptops and it's just plain weird not to mention time-wasting. Best bet is to let the Pro cool down powered off for a while and run a clean install of Windows 10 to see what happens, I guess.
Re: the iPad, I hate tablets so I avoid even the Surface and just stick to my phone and laptop. That said, it sounds like you want a pencil, and before the person I live with literally took it to his job and lost it (no doubt stolen) we briefly had a Galaxy Note 2 or 3, I think (it ran KitKat, so was fairly old).
And even for the ancient architecture and lack of RAM and all it was a delight, and had a pencil, and was the bomb, and so if I could have another Note again I would, so I just thought I'd suggest since Apple's using Samsung screens and Samsung screens are the best, maybe just keep the Note in mind.
Another thought, entirely Samsung-specific: I have a Galaxy S6 and it's my second one because the screen broke twice on my first. The first time it broke I paid $170 to have it fixed, which was more than I could've sold the phone for by then, but I liked it and had bought it new, so I did it.
The second time it broke I bought the whole damn phone (brand-new) again for $100 on eBay. So sometimes (with expensive Samsung this and that) maybe it's worth it to just outright replace devices with their broken screens.
(The replacement screen was not even Samsung (no branding on it, which burned me when I went to sell what was left of the phone a while later, as it looked...not genuine, so I felt I had to drop the price to get it gone. The shop tech told me, "Oh, these parts are just too hard to find"...I don't know about that, either, but no, never again)).
![[User Picture Icon]](https://v2.dreamwidth.org/3974986/75896) |
| From: | sami |
|---|
| Date: |
March 6th, 2019 09:11 am (UTC) |
|---|
|
|
|
|
(Link) |
|
Yeah, the clean install was how we ended up solving it.
The tablet that broke was a Galaxy Note 10.1 (2014 edition) (which I bought in 2013). The trouble is they're now hard to come by, because Samsung isn't really making them any more, and parts are now, apparently, extremely expensive, according to our repair guy.
If Samsung were still making Galaxy Notes I'd be all over it, but apparently the digital artist/pen-using market is pretty niche, and Samsung have abandoned it.
What actually shocked me somewhat is that the iPad doesn't have integrated handwriting recognition, now, in 2019, when my Galaxy Note from six years ago did.
But I hate everything about their OS, anyway, so.
Our repair guy is very good and uses proper parts, but apparently Samsung now charge ridiculous prices for them.
|
|
