The weekend gone by was a long one. India celebrates the birthday of Mahatma Gandhi as a national holiday. 2nd October. It was a holiday for me. Even though I work completely aligned with the US market, that day was a holiday for me. Coincidentally it was the day my old trusted MacBook Pro died on me for the 4th time. I felt devastated. Sad. Morose. I knew I had found a way to write these articles through the iPad. But what about editing photographs? Which I used to perform on the Macbook? How would that be possible? It was pure luck that I chanced upon Snapseed. A photo editing application for iPad.
From Saturday, i.e. the 3rd October 2026 onward I was trying to find various applications for the iPad which can help with a little editing of few of my old photographs. Found a couple. To install them I had to upgrade the iPad software which was another tedious activity. This iPad that I have is also pretty old. Around 10 years old. With a total of only 64 GB worth of memory. Back in the day 64GB felt sufficient. But today it is barely anything.
After tediously deleting applications here and there I finally made some space for the latest iPad OS( operating system). These days file size of operating systems have grown in size significantly. Approximately 17+GB. For a device which is having the least amount of storage, it is a big headache.
Infant more than that. For my 2017 or 2018 iPad Air having a total memory capacity of 64GB. That’s a lot of memory being consumed by just the operating system. Now imagine the stark difference between what the size of the operating system would be when it was purchased. Less than 10GB I am guessing. But’s do a quick search or LLM conversation.
(For the marketing, analytics, SEO/GEO, Product Design teams there’s an important lesson coming towards your way.)
My default behaviour working from an IPad to ask small little questions is always Google. Through a browser.
Wow. The size of software has increased by 3X. We are still using the same hardware but the software itself is taking so much space. I was amazed to even see this stat. There were 16GB iPads being offered as an option for people to buy. Today just the operating system itself is more than 16GB.
So think of the situation. If you want to buy any device, the device purchase would be one time, yet you should be getting software updates. In such situations it is better to buy the version of the product which gives you the ultimate amount of memory. Since you are buying the device for using it the longest possible time. Just like how a ‘smart money’ person would buy one good car like a Totota Innova and run it for the entire lifetime. That’s where the real savings happen. In the last 5 years of car usage. Similarly for IT devices such as mobile, laptop etc should be purchased with the mindset of having the most amount of hard drive storage.
Let me explain a complete purchase decision for a person in India looking to buy a device for productivity. How ecosystems plays a role in nudging buying decisions. This observation can help SaaS companies in multiple ways to look at their or product set as an ecosystem not individual standalone products. Message to Milestone ELT.
Anyway coming to back my story of how the old iPad is starting to do so many things especially in the realms of productivity. With the camera wirelessly getting connected through an application paired with the free application of Snapseed, this new way of working is rather very smooth. Especially when working from a desk setup.
In the last 1 week I have started to take photographs again. After a very long time in fact, my mind is seeing photographs rather than video frames which is rather refreshing to me.
When one door closes (the old faithful died on October 2nd 2026) the other one ones. A new door towards photography, life and spirituality.
