Thomil's Random Ramblings

The year was 2013. I’d just completed my first year at Apple, the company that had hired me out of my old job and paid for my relocation from Germany to Ireland. Still flush with the feeling of having “moved to the Champions League” of customer support, I decided to treat myself to my very first Mac, an 11” MacBook Air. The original wafer-thin justification was that I’d soon start on the Mac support lines, having started my Apple career on iOS support, and having a personal Mac would make it easier to do my job, although this ploy was so transparent that even Stevie Wonder could see through it. I just wanted a Mac, and a certain constellation of employee discounts had just become available that made said MacBook dirt cheap. However, whilst I absolutely loved MacOS, or OS X as it was still known back then, I really fell in love with the MacBook Air’s form factor. It was compact, light, easy to handle, and I could take it anywhere without it taking up too much space in a bag. I ended up ...

Well, there’s one I didn’t see coming! Sometime in Fall 2021, Apple released their new sixth generation of the iPad mini, a release so far outside of my requirements for a tablet that I did not even remember it, despite the fact that I actually watched the release keynote. Alas, January 2022 brought about a massive change of perspective. As they’d done the previous year, my employer opened up a “gift store” for its employees to coincide with our annual sales kickoff. The offering wasn’t quite as generous as it had been in 2021, which had netted amongst other things a DJI mini 2 and some Apple AirPods Pro . However, my 6th generation iPad from 2018 was getting a bit long in the tooth and as much as I like the Surface concept from Microsoft, the Surface Go 2 was proving to be just a bit too underpowered for me, as well as being too much of a Windows laptop and not enough of a tablet. So, when I saw the iPad mini 6 available in the store, that was pretty much that. That was in mid-Janua...

Apple and cheap – Now there’s two terms you rarely use in one phrase. Even affordable is stretching it, as a quick glance at the price tags in the Apple Online Store will surely tell you. That being said, in recent years, Apple has made moves towards more affordable devices, at least with some of its product lines. The latest effort in this is the new 6th generation iPad that was released in April 2018. It is the device that finally got me to upgrade from my old iPad mini 2.  Now before I get into the review itself, I need to be upfront about a few things. I am a former Apple employee, although I left the company in 2016. I did not receive this device from my former employer, however, and I did not get it at a special discount either. I paid the regular Irish retail price for the device, as well as for the Apple Pencil. My review may occasionally stray from a purely objective path due to this past, so be aware of that. Why mention the pencil, you ask? Well, you’ll have to read t...