thoughts on iOS8, iDevices, and Yosemite

I have some random Apple-related thoughts that I wanted to jot down, so I’m putting them all into a catch-all blog post. Enjoy. (Or Ignore. Or roll your eyes. Or whatever.)

I’ve upgraded both my iPhone 5s and iPad 2 to iOS 8.1. I’m not having any serious issues with the iPhone, and I’m liking some of the changes. But the iPad 2, which was already showing its age, has gotten quite slow and unstable since upgrading it to iOS 8. I had hoped that 8.1 would help, and it did, but not quite enough. So I decided it was time to get a new iPad. I couldn’t quite justify the cost of a brand new iPad Air 2, so I bought a used iPad Air 1 from someone on eBay.

Meanwhile, I took this opportunity to get rid of my old iPhone 4, which had been gathering dust for the last year. I traded that off via Apple’s trade-in/recycling program with Brightstar. I got a $35 Apple gift card out of the deal, which I guess is better than nothing. And as for the old iPad 2, I’ve arranged to sell that to Gazelle for $100. (Brightstar offered a bit less than that, so I went with Gazelle.)

And on my MacBook, which is only a bit more than a year old, I am now running Yosemite. It’s working OK, but with a few minor quirks. The most annoying was having a Java warning box pop up randomly. The annoying part is that it really wasn’t obvious which software was triggering the warning. It would come up randomly, and I couldn’t nail it down to any particular program. (I really wish Apple would include that information in the popup, but I guess that’s too much to ask.) I had already installed the newest Java JRE straight from Oracle, but apparently that’s not what the mystery program was looking for. So now I’ve also installed Java from Apple’s 2014-001 installer. I haven’t gotten the popup since then, but it hasn’t been long enough that I’m going to declare victory. And it rubs me the wrong way that I still don’t know which program is using Java, and why it doesn’t work with Oracle’s version.

I’m actually thinking about doing a backup of my MacBook, then wiping it out and doing a fresh Yosemite install, then moving just the programs and data I need back onto the hard drive. This MacBook has been running slower than I’d like for some time now. I’ve thought about replacing the hard drive with an SSD, and I may still do that at some point, but I’d kind of like to just clear out all the cruft first, and see if that helps.

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