Once upon a time, there was this wondrous device called iPod. It could do a whopping 1 thing- store a whole bunch of songs in a tiny little box and play them. No apps. No video. No phone. No notes. No games. No texting. No bluetooth. No maps. No pro motion screen. No retina screen. No touch screen. Not even a color screen.
Just ONE thing.
For those who came to discover it, we gushed & praised it and could not believe our good fortune at having such a tiny little device that could do that one thing. We bought countless millions of them and helped Apple rise from almost having to lay in the grave it was digging for itself, mostly on the strength of this little, one-function device and the halo effect it had in bringing many people back to Apple.
Step forward barely 20 years and we have devices that can still do many things on color touch screens, with graphics, with much greater capabilities than that one-function thing. But because we look at the old relative to what is possible now, we see stuff like that as near useless.
My suggestion: can you find ONE thing that that "3" can do that is useful to you or those around you? If so, perhaps see it like we saw iPods for many years. Can you find TWO things it can do? If so, it has TWICE the potential joy of iPods. THREE things? OMG: how did we ever get by without this full-color "iPod" that can do THREE distinct things? Etc.
I just replaced an iPad Mini 2 with an iPad Mini 6. I then thought about what I should do with the "2" as if it no longer had any uses. However, I found it could still do everything it could do the day before the "6" arrived... and it is still getting app updates. So I made it the "backup" iPad or the one to use in situations that might be a bit damage-risky. While it definitely does not get as much use as "latest & greatest," it still does all kinds of things as well as it did before. For example, in iPod mode, the quality of music it can play is every bit as good as the "6."
My car has a port for iDevice connections. It even had a 30-pin cable option. So I decided to see if it would work with the last generation iPod I still had... maybe almost my entire music library could be available in the car without having to pay ongoing subscription fees to some music service or listen to 80% commercials in free radio? Sure enough, dusted some cobwebs off the 5th gen iPod, synched all of the music I wanted to it, hooked it up to the car system and now my car is loaded with all of my favored playlists... many thousands of songs. I don't need to hook the iDevice in for that, I don't need to lose quality by leaning on bluetooth limitations, I don't need to pay a nickel to listen to songs I own or burn iDevice battery or cellular data when driving. That ancient iPod is
VERY useful again. Tucked it deep into the console and may never touch it again. My car is now a mobile iPod with much better speakers than the buds that came with it way back then.
That iPad "3" probably does many things just fine. It will do select things just as good as the latest generation. Step out of 2021 cutting edge and it is FAR more capable than devices we used to think were dazzling beyond measure. I remember paying- I think- $699 for that first B&W, one-function iPod with a whopping 10GB of storage and only a Firewire port. Thick. Heavy. No cameras. No keyboard. No games. No apps. No texts. No Pencil. No calls. No youtube. No maps. No GPS. No wifi. No streaming music. No... No... No...
But what it COULD do was FANNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNtastic!.. just as an newer-but-still-one-function generation continues to do in my car in 2021. Can that "3" do ONE thing as well? Two? Three? Imagine pre-iPhone Jobs stepping out on a MacWorld stage and showing a new iPod that could now do TWO things? Or maybe a 3-app iPod? "And just one more thing... here's a FOURTH app." Apple Geekgasms for all and we would have stood in lines for hours to pay wayyyyyy up for the incredible, new, 4-app iPod. How could man even live before without this 4-function device???
Perhaps the glass is half full? Maybe more than half full? To repurpose a classic Steven Stills lyric...
