I recently decided to get a new iPad. My previous one was an iPad Pro, purchased at the start of 2017 (see blog post) and still working pretty well. However I’ve recently spotted that it sometimes gets to a moderately low battery level (around 30%) and seems to turn off. Since I rely on it for a lot of musical situations, that makes me a bit nervous. Additionally, although the hardware is still pretty good, I am aware that it is not getting all the updates and some apps are either not working or nagging me about upgrading to new versions. Again, that could include ones I rely on for music so that is why the old iPad needed a newer sibling.

Swapping from one device to another has become pretty painless. I’ve had to sign back into a few services but everything I need is there, including my extensive ForScore library of music for different projects. Meanwhile, everything is pretty similar on the surface to what I’ve been used to.

One thing that is new, to me at least, is the depth effect on photos. I’m using a photo I took in Wales in October 2023 (again, automagically transferred) of a rugged hill viewed across a lake. What I’ve spotted is that, when I have the iPad in landscape mode and it is on the lock screen, the clock text is partially hidden behind the hill. It’s a rather neat effect and it turns out that it is automatically working out the depth of various objects in the photo and exploiting that to create an illusion of depth for interface elements. I have to admit that my mind is a little bit blown by some of the clever things modern machines take for granted that would once have seemed impossible or computationally too expensive.