Why So Many Apps Are Asking to Use Bluetooth

September 24, 2019
2 min read

Privacy became somewhat of a theme here, so continuing on this subject – with the release of iOS 13, a lot of apps are asking for the permission to use Bluetooth. Among them are Netflix, YouTube, Waze, Spotify and of course Facebook.

When it asks for the permission, in the little explanation there is it usually tells, that it will help connecting to other Bluetooth devices. Especially with media apps, users could think, that it is necessary to listen through Bluetooth headphones or speakers, but it has nothing to do with that.

Developers have access to those via other means and don’t need permissions for those. The real reason they ask for Bluetooth is location tracking. Using the Bluetooth and WiFi devices around you, app can figure out your location pretty accurately.

This has been happening for quite some time, but only this year Apple added the ability to disallow the permission. It probably tells you something that a lot of developers pulled this functionality from their apps during beta process.

The one legitimate use I did find, was for navigation apps, like Waze. They use Bluetooth in tunnels to navigate you where there is no GPS and mobile signal. But if like me, you live in a place without any tunnels even in farther proximity, you can safely deny the prompt.

Facebook And Location Tracking In iOS 13

September 19, 2019
2 min read

As we’ve seen last week with Spotify, the use of location tracking can be explained with business interest – they want users to stop abusing the Family Premium plan. What Facebook is doing after all the scandals it had with our data, is unexplainable.

In the recent Newsroom article titled “Understanding Updates to Your Device’s Location Settings”, the social network company explains how updates to Android and iOS will prevent them from abusing the constant location tracking.

Facebook is better with location. It powers features like check-ins and makes planning events easier. It helps improve ads and keep you and the Facebook community safe. Features like Find Wi-Fi and Nearby Friends use precise location even when you’re not using the app to make sure that alerts and tools are accurate and personalized for you.

Just read the fucking quote. Facebook tracking your location to keep you safe. How delirious are they? Article further explains, that now there will be the ability in OS to allow location sharing with the app only once and if the app is tracking your location in the background with the app closed, iOS will prompt you with notification, showing map of the location data and explanation why the app uses it (to keep you safe, of course).

This article shows how bad these changes are for Facebook. Right now location tracking is the best data they can get on users. Knowing where you’ve been can give a lot of insights. Which neighborhood do you live in, where do you work, which type of restaurants you go to, if you are sick, how often do you travel. All of this information can be gathered using the background location tracking, without users even noticing.

I’m glad both Google and Apple are making changes to the location tracking in theirs OS’s. I’m sure Facebook will find a way to track it anyway, they say so in the article:

We may still understand your location using things like check-ins, events and information about your internet connection.

This article shows how out of touch Facebook is, but the more scary thing is – people believe them. I hope those changes will educate people more on the type of data they are sending to those companies.

What Happened, Apple?

September 12, 2019
3 min read

Although there was a loot of interesting stuff presented, something was definitely amiss at the latest Apple Event. First it was half an hour too short, leaving time for at least one big thing. Second, different release dates for iOS and iPadOS don’t make sense and actually will be messy.

Regarding the first issue. There were a lot of rumors about Apple bringing the reverse wireless charging to the iPhone. This would give the ability to charge the AirPods from the iPhone. It is now rumored Apple scraped this feature as it didn’t hold up to the high standards (Apple and wireless chargers, am I right?).

There were also a lot of rumors about some kind of Tile device, which you could track. Apple didn’t show anything like that. It even added new processor to the iPhone and didn’t bring it up. How un-Apple is it? This U1 chip is specifically designed for proximity based navigation and right now the only feature it will have – you can AirDrop to the specific person by pointing iPhone at them. Imagine this technology used in retail. This could be a game changer – you point your iPhone at something, it shows you the price, you pay with Apple Pay and you are done.

There was absolutely no mention of AR. Again, this is unlike Apple in the recent years. There were rumors of AR headset, I wouldn’t say it should have been shown in this event, but still, no word? Especially considering, that in the GM builds of iOS 13, people are already finding a lot of new mentions of AR.

Regarding release dates for the OS’s. In the new version redesigned Reminders app uses a different format, so if you update your iPhone on September 19 and use this new format it will stop syncing to the iPad, which will still have old Reminders app and old format.

Also, if you use Shortcuts and change anything in one of them on iOS 13, it will stop working on iOS 12. What about universal apps? Can you update your app for iOS 13, while still supporting iOS 12 for the iPad.

There are a lot of questions, which make this event a bit weird. Remember the tag line for the event was By Innovation Only and there was nothing Innovating in that event (except of course Pro font in the camera app on the Pro iPhone).

I hope there is a second event in October, where Apple will be able to bring some light on the features it didn’t show us in this event or should we wait another year now?

Bill Gates Says His ‘Greatest Mistake ever’ Was Microsoft Losing to Android

July 7, 2019
4 min read

Tom Warren at The Verge wrote an article about Bill Gates interview and I want to start with one particular part.

Many had assumed that Microsoft’s missed mobile opportunity was a Steve Ballmer era mistake. [Ballmer famously laughed at the iPhone]() , calling it the “most expensive phone in the world and it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard.”

This is a pet peeve of mine. Ballmer did laugh at the price of the iPhone, but what nobody mentions again and again – Apple cut the price shortly after the release of the phone. The price was too high at that time. This doesn’t excuse Microsoft form blowing the mobile, but I think journalists should be factual.

Regarding Gates statement, Google did win the smartphone war, but after that Microsoft became so much more. For the user all of this is good. The more companies there are the better. If Microsoft dominated mobile market together with the desktop, I don’t think anything good would come out of it.

I’m mostly all-in in the Apple ecosystem, but I still use Microsoft Office and gladly pay for it (as Microsoft made it pretty easy). I try not to use Google products, from the privacy perspective. I have Google account at work, but try not to use anything for personal stuff.

Another interesting point is that in technology somehow, we’ve come to the place, where competition is not as strong. We have one dominant player, second – distant one and nothing after that. Take desktop OS as an example, there is Windows which is dominant, than there is a macOS and … it will never be the year of Linux on the desktop. Only now, when the market went to tablets, do you see ChromeOS emerging mostly in schools and universities.

Search is another example. In most of the countries there is Google and nothing else. In post-soviet countries Yandex mostly dominates with Google being second. But even Microsoft with all of its money and position with desktop OS can’t make Bing a worthy contender. And taking it back to the Bill Gates quote – mobile OS. There is Android which dominates market share. There is iPhone which dominates hardware revenue and nothing else. A couple of players tried to enter the market, but without the 3rd party developer support there won’t be users and without users, developers won’t have reason to build their apps for another OS.

Although two players make competition, but duopoly is not the best situation. For most of the people there is no choice. In the mobile OS market, if you want to choose another player you loose a lot. If you want to leave iOS for Android, you will become green bubble, you will lose access to your movies and TV shows, maybe music you bought. You won’t have first party end-to-end encrypted messages. You won’t be able to use Apple Watch. AirPods won’t work as good as with an iPhone.

Consider car manufacturers. First of all there are a couple. You have an actual choice. Japanese, German, French, Italian, Korean, American, etc. If you drove BMW and want your next car to be Audi, what will you lose? At most the membership in the Facebook group. Nothing else. You will just change your car.

Vendor lock-in is an interesting dilemma. I benefit from it a lot in the day-to-day life. Having everything from Apple makes it play together nicely. As an example, I unlock my Apple Watch with my iPhone and later my MacBook with an Apple Watch. It all syncs, I use Apple Music as it works better with a Watch and Siri, although Spotify might even be a better product. But on the other hand, if Apple starts (or one might say already started) making shitty notebooks, it will be hard to buy Windows PC or Chromebook, as they won’t play so nicely with my other devices.

And here we come to a point. Although I am a strong believer in the market making everything right, maybe in some cases some intervention is good? It helped to stop Microsoft dominance, because it felt government looking over the shoulder at every move the company made, so decisions were informed by that. Should the US government break-up Apple? I don’t think so, but we should be asking those questions and not blindly following everything the company does.

WWDC 2019 Keynote Impressions

June 11, 2019
2 min read

Most people jot down some notes about keynote overall and then write or talk about each release in more detail. I’ve went my own way, first going through impressions for each OS – tvOS, watchOS, iOS, macOS, iPadOS and also for Mac Pro.

Now I want give my overall impressions about presentation. I mostly agree with Marco – Apple started listening again. And the reason is pretty simple on it’s surface – iPhone sales. Although thanks to increasing prices for a couple of years revenue from the iPhone didn’t fall, but unit sales plateaued. So now Apple has to sell iPhones more aggressively and give more attention to all other products in the lineup.

This was noticeable in every announcement, it wasn’t apologizing per se, but it felt like Apple was overcompensating. There were ver big changes that got at most one sentence mention during the Keynote and a lot of them were just a text on the slide with “everything else that’s new”. 

There was something for everyone, be it developers, users, professionals. We’ve got new OS, new hardware and new frameworks. We’ve even got the trailer for TV show. All of this in just 2 hours. The pace was unbelievable. Presenters were very proud of the product, just look at the display demonstration. 

I like how passionate, knowledgeable and funny Craig Federighi is. I’ve seen some of the first of his presentations and it’s not even close. It’s a very big growth in presentation skills. This year the biggest joke was about iTunes and with Craig delivering it – it landed perfectly. 

Overall, this was very strong keynote, one of the best in recent years actually. And this gives hope that Apple is able to make products and also improvements to those products afterwards, even if those aren’t iPhone.

WWDC 2019 Keynote Impressions – iPadOS

June 10, 2019
5 min read

Earlier in my impressions of the iOS, I’ve mentioned how when presenting it there was almost nothing said about the iPad, all of the features were mentioned in the context of the iPhone and it was very pronounced. You could definitely see, that it’s intentional, that’s because this year iPad got itself a new, dedicated OS. 

Is this marketing? Yes, of course, iPadOS is still the same iOS just with some feature specifically designed for the iPad, but that always was the case you don’t have always present dock on the iPhone and multitasking is limited to the iPad. Why change the name? For a couple of years we’ve started to realize that Apple improved iPad software only every other version of iOS. Versions 9 and 11 were just such versions. Heavily focused on the improvements for the tablet. But wouldn’t it be great, if iPad got improved every year, like all the other systems? That is the hope of this marketing move. 

With iPad getting it’s own OS it will be much harder to ignore it during the next WWDC. As someone who is more and more leaning toward this future of computing, I like the change and hope that our collective desires will come true. 

With all of this introductions, there was actually a lot of news this year for the iPad.

Let’s start with the improvements from iOS – PS4 and Xbox One controllers support. On my recent trip, I’ve got just iPad Pro with me to watch movies, import photos from the camera, read and play. I can see how I would throw in my DualShock to the bag to play games. With Apple Arcade and some good games for the iPad that would be very interesting. 

Some time ago Apple decided that you don’t need split keyboard on the iPad Pro. I could see with heavy marketing of iPad Pro coupled with Smart Keyboard Folio you would think that it’s not necessary. But sometimes you just use iPad naked and in those moments new small iPhone keyboard underneath the finger is an amazing addition.

Another feature that I love is importing directly into the Lightroom. USB drive and flash support is also nice, but direct import of photos to the Adobe software is amazing. Right now it’s clunky as hell. You have to import photos from camera, then import them to Lightroom and delete photos from the Camera Roll. There is a Shortcut for that, but it never works for me – photos are imported as JPG and not RAW.

Desktop class browser and download manager in Safari – this one grants finally. Although, as I understand, it’s mostly limited to Apple sending information to the website that it’s Mac Safari and by hand improving how the most popular websites work. Time will tell how well it will work and how scalable it will be.

Another feature that only can be judged in use – new gestures. There are now three finger gestures for cut, copy, paste and undo and redo. Also moving the pointer is similar to drag and drop. That on the very first try the presenter couldn’t do it, doesn’t give much confidence. Those gestures could be great and get into your muscle memory or totally forgettable and you will only see them in “Top 5 iPad features you’ve never known” articles.

Some great additions to the Apple Pencil. First, the latency was reduced from 20ms to 9ms. Right now it feels pretty instantaneous, I don’t know how much better will this feel, but it must be good. Second, PencilKit API – now apps that don’t rely on Pencil input as a business model (drawing or note taking apps), can implement similar features as Apple has in Apple Notes.

You can also, with a Apple Pencil gesture, capture and entire web page and annotate it. This is something you’ve had to download utilities on the Mac to do, and it’s built in.

Probably for the first time since the introduction, Apple made some changes to the Springboard. Now there are more icons on the screen and when you rotate the iPad they stay at the same place, finally. Second – you can pin widgets to the main screen, which makes home screen much more dense and rich with information.

Some welcome improvements to the multitasking. You can now have multiple windows of the same app opened, either side-by-side or in split view with some other apps. You can easily find all the windows of the same app with App Expose, which looked easy to use and nice. 

Also, making slide-over, eventually a little iPhone, where you can go through the couple of iPhone sized apps sounds as a big improvement to me. I often though about this idea when using slide-over.

This is the first year of the new iPadOS and it feels like pretty strong one. A lot of new features and improvements make for a release I’m probably most waiting for. All of this could even make me install beta on my iPad this summer, that’s how excited I am.

WWDC 2019 Keynote Impressions – iOS

June 6, 2019
5 min read

One of the most notable changes of the last year was the focus on iOS 12 working better and faster on older devices. You could see the improvements even on the one year old iPhone X. This year Apple also talked about iOS 13 being more optimized. Apps will launch 2x faster, smaller downloads from the App Store and Face ID now unlocks 30% faster. 

Before the keynote, it looked like this year would be quiet for the iPhone and most of the improvements will come to the iPad, as it was mostly ignored last year. During the iOS segment, iPad wasn’t mentioned at all (later about that), but the segment itself was long and not because they tried to make it that way, there was just too much to show.

Mostly those were some little things, like the ability to download large apps over cellular (not all the countries in the world have limited mobile internet), low data mode (which is nice in Europe, where we don’t have roaming, but data is a bit limited when you travel to other countries) or emoji button which is now separate from the globe (very welcome addition in this part of the world, where almost everyone has 2 or more languages added). I will also add QuickPath here (that’s Apple version of the swipe typing. This is a feature Android had for years and I’m using Gboard on my iPhone right now, but would love to dump it, if Apple also adds haptics to the key presses).

But there were also some monumental changes, like the ability to select Wi-Fi network and Bluetooth device from the Control Center. This was on a lot of wish-lists probably from the day Apple showed Control Center. The other one – Volume Control is now on the side of the screen, I think even John Gruber would agree, this one grants a big fat finally.

The feature Apple started presentation of iOS with was Dark mode and it did look cool. Right now there are a lot of apps that feature dark mode on their own, but I don’t use it in all of them. I’ve realized that I’ve turned off dark mode on almost all “content” apps, like Pocket, Twitter, Bear etc. But have it turned on in Overcast, for example and I like the dark interface on macOS. I think here will be something similar. I’m sure I’ll use it, but hope I will be able to change it app by app.

Two apps that received big updates this year were Photos and Reminders. If in case of Photos there was the whole demo of the app, surprisingly reminders got a short mention. It looks like totally different app and I think it could be a great choice for someone in the middle – current Reminders are too simple for my needs, but something like OmniFocus is a total overkill. As I’m using GoodTask right now and it uses Reminders as a backend it will be easy to try new reminders out when the app comes out.

I didn’t like how Photos app looks, but that may just be presentation, will need to check it myself. The much better photo editor and the ability to edit video are great new additions. I liked the Years views, which is something similar to On This Day, but more discoverable. Also the ability to hide duplicates is nice, I wonder if later Apple will let you to remove those (after review, of course).

The other feature I loved was sound sharing through AirPods. This is amazing for travel. Last time we’ve had 10+ hour flight, I’ve had to pack two pairs of wired headphones and a couple of dongles, it looked bizarre. I also don’t share headphones with anybody, so from that point of view it’s amazing, sometimes I want to give my colleagues to listen, I can just share the sound. 

Privacy and Sign-in with Apple

I was thinking of making it the whole separate post, but decided to leave it here. As always Apple is very straightforward about privacy – they don’t need your data, so you can trust them. One great example is location permission, in iOS 13 users will be able to grant access just for one time and you will receive notification if some app uses location data in the background.

The other privacy focused addition sounded great during presentation, but when some details came out a lot of questions were raised. Sign-in with Apple – a lot of apps, when you are signing-in using Facebook or Google, get more information then they actually need, so using this feature Apple will provide only the most necessary and you can even choose if you don’t want to share some information. Additionally, if you don’t want to share your e-mail, you can sign-in using randomly generated e-mail which will forward messages to the real one. Again, sounds amazing. But then, after the Keynote it was discovered that this feature is mandatory if your app uses any other “sign-in” provider. I’m all for new privacy focused features, but here one of the biggest companies in the world uses it’s power to dictate their service. 

This is a very dangerous territory, right now it feels like the trust in Apple is unimaginably high, but what will happen when some key people will be changed? Do we really want to grant so much power to one big player? I think there are only good intentions from developers inside Apple who made this feature and people who decided it will be mandatory, but there is a little of fear for the future. Hope this fear is unreasonable.

Podcast Listening Speed

May 31, 2019
2 min read

Yesterday I’ve wrote about the year of less, one of the last things I’ve changed is the podcast listening speed. Not long after I’ve started listening to the podcasts, I’ve subscribed to a lot of them and in order to even try to keep up, I’ve had to use Smart Speed function of Overcast and also listen at 2x speed. Most of the shows I’ve listened to sounded good, especially with Overcasts sound engine.

But after about 5 years I’ve realized, like with TV shows, it’s just not possible to listen to everything and so it’s better to up the quality of the listening. I also now think it’s much healthier to listen at normal speed. Unfortunately after such a long time listening at 2x speed it’s hard to get back. I tried to listen at 1x from the start, but it’s not possible, so I just reduced a speed bit by bit. Right now, I’m listening at about 1.25 – 1.5x, but podcasts in Polish I listen at 1x. I feel how much easier it is for my brain to process the information. In today’s world we are bombarded with information from every corner and reducing the amount of it when you can feels nice.

Creating New Habits

May 29, 2019
3 min read

Imagine doing something every single day for a year. Sounds intense, right? You do something today and then tomorrow and then the day after that. Like that you will be surprised how fast the year of doing something will pass.

One day in May of last year I’ve decided to take a cold shower in the morning. I liked it so much I decided to do it every day, but I’ve also wanted to track the progress. I thought about how I felt about the Apple Watch Activity rings (I’ve been closing all of them for more than 600 days in a row), so I wanted something similar for my new habit. That’s when I’ve got Streaks 3, very simple, but functional app. Day, after day, after day I’ve been checking off every morning that I’ve taken cold shower until I’ve seen the number – 365. I was amazed that I was doing something for the whole year, every single day.

The app is very straightforward. You can track your habits manually (after finishing doing something you can check the item) or it can track them automatically (it connects to the Health app for automatic tracking). There is also the ability to create items that are checked automatically and you manually change the status if you miss the habit. I also love the Apple Watch app and complication – it shows your progress right there on the watch face and I do almost all of the tracking using the watch app.

Along the way I’ve added some new habits I wanted to make. First – getting up without using snooze button, but I’m deleting it today as I can’t do it. Just can’t right now. I believe I will return to this one after some time, but I’ll need to rethink many things about my sleep habits before I do that.

The third one was health related – drinking 8 glasses of water every day. I feel great about that one, since I’ve started I didn’t miss a day and I feel much better now. Also, when I’ve visited the doctor and showed her my old blood tests vs new ones, she immediately noticed difference – they were much better now.

Next one is mostly for self-improvement – I’m posting at least one photo to the Instagram every day. I wanted to get better at photography, so decided posting something every single day would be a nice practice in shooting and editing. Unfortunately, I wasn’t taking photos every single day, that could be my next challenge, but I was editing and posting one photo every day.

Two more are somewhat connected. One is tracked automatically by Streaks, it’s closing all the three rings every single day. I’ve added it, just to see all the streaks going in one single place. The last one is exercising every day. I’m having some problems with my back and have to do some exercises every day, otherwise the pain becomes uncomfortable. Some days the exercise is harder then the others, but every one of them counts.

Today I’m adding another habit for tracking. I will try to write 200 words every single day. I will try to write posts for this blog or some days it would be something private. I want to improve writing and my English. I think practicing every day will be the best way for improving the skills.

iPad Pro (2018) – The Hardware Story

February 13, 2019
7 min read

The one and only iPad I’ve had before, was the original iPad Mini and I loved it. But quickly phones started to get bigger, laptops thinner and I’ve always used Kindle for reading. So more and more it felt like there was no need for another device in my life and I’ve given that iPad away. 

When Apple presented the new iPad Pro’s I didn’t think much of them. But after seeing those in person and reading all the stories of photographers editing on this thing, I’ve started to look more closely, as I’m getting more and more into photography. One day I’ve decided to get one myself, but I couldn’t decide on the size. I’ve re-listened to all the podcasts that were discussing new iPads, I’ve watched a lot of YouTube videos (and I mean A LOT), but still couldn’t decide which one was right for me. Whenever I went to the store and played with both – I appreciated the screen real-estate of the 12.9”, but also I loved how light the 11” was – you could hold it with one hand. 

Multitasking was also a consideration, as it’s so much better on the 12.9” and for photo editing – the bigger the screen the better. While I was trying to decide between the two sizes, I’ve ordered both of them at one of the local retailers, as they are not that common in Latvia and the wait for them could have reached 3 weeks. I thought the faith would decide – I would buy whichever came first. So one day I got two messages saying that both my orders were ready – so much for the faith. I’ve went again to the store to play with both sizes to decide, with no luck, until I though about what Casey said in a reply to me – “I wanted as portable as a Pro could get”. So I chose the 11”, and decided to cancel the order for the 12.9”. 

Few minutes later I found out there was a mistake and 11” wasn’t ready yet, so here it is – the faith did decide for me. And boy the faith was right.

First things first, I thought the 11” would be better using in one hand, but until now I didn’t have a chance to use it this way as it’s still too big and not intended for that type of use.

Second, the screen is gorgeous. I mean, it’s probably the best screen I own, even though it’s not OLED. I know this is not bezel-less screen, but it feels pretty close. 

It’s surprising how thin and light the device is. The screen is almost as big as the one on my MacBook Pro and there are all internals inside it, considering this – it weights almost nothing.

Magnets – there are a lot of them and it shows. Popping the iPad into the Smart Keyboard Folio is effortless and surprisingly taking it off is easy too.

Pencil

Fortunately, there was one new Apple Pencil at the store, so I had it from day one and I’m sure this is an essential accessory for the iPad Pro. It’s so much better with the Pencil – one could argue it should come with the iPad. Even going through the interface, it gives the feeling of replacing the mouse or trackpad. I like it for editing photos as it gives a bit more of a precision. 

The way it charges and connects to the iPad is great. I can’t even imagine that it wasn’t like that before. This is so intuitive and simple, how could Apple ship a worse product before?

I’m not much of an artist, even in my childhood I didn’t like drawing, so I can’t say how good it is at that, but writing something in Apple Notes or Notability is amazing. It feels so close to the pen and paper (of course not texture wise, but just the feeling of it).

Smart Keyboard Folio

As we live in the 3rd world country, Apple products get to us a bit later than to the rest of the world (9 months later in case of AirPods). So I’ve tried to find Smart Keyboard Folio with no luck. Everyone just smiled and said – try again in a month or two. Luck had it, we were traveling to the Bangkok which coincidentally has the Apple Store. Fortunately for me there was one with US layout and so I’ve got myself the official Apple keyboard.

Having this keyboard is totally an improvement. I can now prop the device to watch videos. Typing on this thing is fast. I love the travel and the sound this keyboard makes. The “lapability” is good too. In fact, I’ve written this review on my iPad Pro sitting on the sofa with the tablet on my knees. Just two available angles don’t bother me too much. Sure it would be better to have more choices, but these two angles work for me.

The one disappointment I‘ve had – the keys are not backlit. It’s not a huge issue, as I don’t look at the keyboard while typing, but it sure would be nice to have.

Also, as a lot of people mentioned – it is dull. There is even no Apple logo on the back. It’s just grey peace of plastic. Now I need to find some stickers to cover it.

USB-C

Surprisingly it’s 2019 and this is my first device with USB-C, so now I need to buy a lot of new accessories, like upgrading the charger to more powerful one. Right now, while traveling, I have to bring different cables for iPad, iPhone, Apple Watch, photo camera and power banks. Will have to do some thinking and consolidation of cables and power bricks. The other problem – as we were traveling, we wanted to watch some TV shows on the plane, so I had to buy USB-C to headphone jack dongle. I’ve found a cheap one online from third party and it didn’t work. So I had to buy the official one. 

Also, although my camera can transfer photos via Wi-Fi, it can’t do it for the RAW images, so I’ve had to buy USB-C card reader. This all adds up and iPad Pro becomes more and more expensive over time.

Camera and FaceID

Actually, I don’t have anything to tell about the back camera of the iPad, as I have never even launched it, but I wanted to mention the FaceID. It’s much better then on the iPhone. It works in every orientation, it’s very fast. The animation when you cover it is such a nice touch. Also using iPad with FaceID is so nice, I wish MacBook had one. You don’t think about authentication, you just look at the screen and everything happens like it was intended.

As was discussed a lot, right now the one thing holding iPad Pro back is iOS, that’s why I decided to write the review of just a hardware. I love this device. It’s powerful, it’s beautiful, it’s comfortable, it’s all I wanted and even some more, but I wish I could say the same about the software, we are not there yet. There a lot of hype for iOS 13 and I do hope Apple will deliver.