I slowly murdered my iPad 2 over a stretch of two and a half years.
Purchased seven years ago while working for Apple doing tech support for their new lineup of mobile devices, it became an indispensable tool for running my little creative services company. Serving as document store and book reader, digital art board, music composing tool, web surfer, weather reporter and much more, I was cruel to it the fifth winter I had it.
Waking in the wee hours one bone-chilling morning in 2016, I picked it up and began reading the morning news about the winner of the presidential election. After digesting news of the most outrageous election of all time, I decided to go ahead and stoke up the fire before getting out of bed for the day. Setting the iPad on the edge of the bed covers, I hurried downstairs to get the coals in the stove stirred, lots of wood stacked on top of their red glow, then raced back upstairs and leapt back into bed, grabbing the covers and yanking them over on top of me before remembering at the last moment that I had set the iPad down on them.
Watching in horror as the iPad sailed in a high arc from the bed toward the bedroom window, I blanched as it made a half flip at the peak of the arc, thinking it was going to smash into and shatter the window beside the bed. But its arc was too high and short to send it on a trajectory which would reach the window and it landed instead right on its top edge where the front camera is located, right on a power strip located on the floor just below the window. It landed hard and I heard the crunch of gorilla glass, and its screen went dark on impact. I uttered a long stream of words I won't repeat here.
Thinking I had just killed it, I gently lifted it and tried powering it up. Nothing. So I did a reset pressing the home and power buttons simultaneously. It started right up. After a few minutes testing it, I realized I had seriously maimed it but it still worked just fine, even the area of severely cracked touch screen surrounding the front camera.
Whew!
It kept on working for two and a half years without any signs of being abused other than cosmetic appearances. It powered on and off without issue. Accepted charges as expected. Successfully updated OS and apps as needed. It recognized and responded as quickly as it ever did to all gestures. The hardware buttons all still worked fine. An amazing device, so tough and well engineered.
But yesterday, I carelessly dribbled a small amount of fluid directly into the hole surrounded by cracked glass onto the still working front camera. The screen went black then the Apple icon immediately appeared and it finally stopped working. A wave of shame and guilt washed over me for being so stupid. I had slowly but surely murdered my iPad 2.
Letting it dry for 24 hours hasn't helped. It's dead.
The guilt is lifting. I am, after all, just a fumbling bumbling human being with only ten fingers on two hands controlled by a spaced out brain. And it served me so well for seven years. I had hoped to use it for a full decade before setting it aside, but it was time for it to take the big sleep. I have good backups of its content stored on the iMac and its backup drive. So no big deal.
Tomorrow I'll replace it with a new iPad sporting a better design, cameras, circuitry, OS and apps software, and twice the storage space at half the price I paid for the iPad 2 in 2012. I doubt I'll miss the old workhorse when I get the new one in my clumsy mitts and start conversing with Siri–something the iPad 2 could never do. I just have to be more careful and caring with the new iPad since it will be able to talk back to me.
Hmmm . . . maybe there’s an app for Siri to regularly remind me to handle it with care.
