Jack Cooper

Man, talk about first world problems. How privileged do you have to be to determine that the iPad Pro - the range topping big daddy of the iPad world - isn't quite good enough for you? Although I must disclaim that I do purchase (read: waste my money on) my own devices, so don't write me off as a 'Daddy's money' kind of guy just yet.

$$$$$

Anyway, now that I've cleared my name somewhat, we'll get back to the topic in question. I am currently the semi-happy owner of an iPad Pro, and have been since the first day it ever came out. No, I didn't quite go to the extent of queuing outside an Apple store, but I was sure to order online as quickly as I could. My iPad 3rd gen from 2012 was desperately slow, so I was eager to replace it. I had a bit of money knocking around, so why not treat myself to a powerhouse?

The Pro arrived the day after I ordered it, and Jesus, it's huge in every aspect besides depth. The screen was beautiful, the speakers were meaty, and the internal chipsets were strong and handled anything I threw at them without breaking a sweat. So why, as the title suggests, would I want to ditch it after 10 short months?

All that power... and this is about as taxing as things get

Well, let me tell you. It's all well and good having one of the fastest mobile chipsets and graphics that put a vast majority of laptops to shame, but what's the point of having all that power when you can't utilise it? The Pro, as you likely know, runs iOS. It's a fantastically polished interface that follows Apple's "it just works" slogan nicely. But to keep things so clean and simple, the interface by nature is very closed off. No tinkering here.

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about iOS on a powerful device is how it forces you to use mobile applications. Sure, these apps have been changed to suit the bigger screen, but at the end of the day, these are still apps which are designed to run on 512mb of RAM and 1GHz dual core processors. The Pro never heats up because the hardware is never challenged enough. As a result from all this, even though I knew I had a serious piece of kit in my hands, all I did on my iPad was browse the web and watch YouTube.

Over time I found myself getting more and more frustrated by how locked I was. I paid a pretty penny for this cutting-edge hardware, and I really wanted to use it. This is what has ultimately led me to ditch my iPad Pro in favour for a Surface Pro 4.

I've never done such a thing before. When I acquire a pricey new gadget, I always hold on to it for at least a solid year before moving on. Hell, my previous iPad gave me 3 and a half years of service before I gave in. The Pro is not deformed, and it still feels as quick as the day I got it - letting go of it now feels wrong, somehow. But I know selling on eBay will yield me a decent return, because the Pro is still the latest model, and thankfully I haven't given it a single scratch yet on its beautifully delicate aluminium back. So it's not quite money down the drain. But still... weird.

I'm nervous as hell, but this is the functionality I've always wanted

So why the Surface Pro 4? Well, it offers similar power to the iPad Pro, but because it runs Windows 10, I can utilise that power properly. Think full Adobe suite, and even some PC games, if I become that desperate.

There's no denying I'm a bit nervous about the purchase. The experience will be less polished than the iPad, and it costs an even prettier penny than the Pro ever did (we're talking several hundred more pounds here), but I think it'll be worth it. All I will say though is this: thank god for return periods. I won't sell my iPad until I'm happy and settled with the Surface.

It would now just be sod's law that I acquire the Surface, sell the iPad, and then Apple announces
the iPad Pro to run Mac OS X... goddamn.

I don't usually bother with real diary-esque personal accounts of my life on this blog, but I suppose this one is significant enough to at least give a small honourable mention to. They are, as the title would suggest, my A-level results; those final exams that determine pretty much where the future of your life lies.

The build-up for most people to results day is something close to torture. These grades, after all, are the tipping point on whether you can proceed down the path of your career, or whether you get slapped in the face and get told to do something else. I never applied for uni, because it just didn't appeal to me. I know if I did go, I would've chosen journalism, but that's that. Way, way too late at this point.

As a result, I really didn't have too much pressure and anxiety billowing down on me. I was nervously intrigued, but that's about it, thankfully. Sometimes you have a decent idea how well you did, but this time I genuinely had no clue. I could be straight Bs, or I could be Us and Es. If I could get a load of Cs, then I'd be satisfied.

Turns out the result was pretty much that; 2 Bs and 2 Cs. I'm satisfied with that, without a doubt. Now I know I'm not totally inept at A-levels, I have a slight feeling of regret not going to uni. Not only would it help me get my dream career, it would also be a big part of a young person's life I'd just be skipping. But let's not worry about that now.

I'm happy with the grades I've got, and I hope if you're in the same boat as me, that you're happy with yours as well. Have fun adulting in the future!

Protesting against racism & xenophobia stirred by some #Brexit supporters, & the 400% rise in racist hate crimes pic.twitter.com/dNZMdUSoCh

— Peter Tatchell (@PeterTatchell) July 17, 2016

Pretty much everyone I know these days is on Facebook, which makes it an undeniably good site to connect with your friends, and even - much to your own hatred - your direct family. I use it every day to talk to my friends and unashamedly snoop on everyone else's life à la NSA. And yet despite that, I hate Facebook to its core. This wasn't always the case though, as I'm about to point out to you in this post. I was the minimum age when I joined Facebook - 13 - so essentially I have grown up with the website, meaning a lot of changes have happened to get to today. Let's start from the beginning.

Not a care in the world

You're 13. Puberty hasn't quite got full grips on you just yet, but it's got enough of an influence to give you a stroppy mood. You want to join Facebook, really badly. Facebook was for the cool kids; the hierarchy was determined on how early you joined. See that kid over there, in the indoor sunglasses? He joined when he was 9.

Anyway, your parents have finally let you join "that website" (mandatory air punch and prepubescent 'yeah!' instinctively follows), and now you are free to do whatever you want, literally. And that's the first stage: you post all sorts of random crap that nobody in their right mind would care about. But you're 13, you don't think of things like that. And that was why my first ever status was: "chips". You never realise it at the time, but that initial stage was probably the nicest because you literally cared about nothing.

Memes without irony

You're 14, perhaps knocking on the door of 15 now, and you have become somewhat more self-aware. It'd be daft to say you've matured now - not when the hormones are replacing your brain's logic and reasoning - but you are now starting to do your best to appear normal and 'cool'. You want to follow the crowd. So out go the stupid posts about batteries and random TV shows, and in come the memes.

I think most of us know what a meme is: something that is viral on the Internet. There is nothing more to them. That damn multicolour dress is a meme. The Ice Bucket Challenge is a meme. It can apply to anything. But at 14/15, you had a special kind of meme. Those stupid edgy drawing memes that just seemed to pop up everywhere were the epitome of being an awesome and amazing person. They appear so daft now, but if you posted a hot fire meme, you felt like the king of the world... of social networks. Trolololol.

Memes with irony

By the time you're 16 or so, you start to realise that memes in the form of trolls and poker faces are indeed a bit stupid. And you know that everyone else pretty much shares the same opinion. So what do you do? You post more memes, obviously.

However, the difference this time is that you're posting them with irony. For example, you may share a meme in the wrong way and put a hyperbolic caption to it to point out to everyone else how daft they are. Your desired effect from this is that everyone thought you were funny and cool because you were mocking something everyone else follows blindly. In reality though, you just appeared as someone who is trying just a little bit too hard to be funny. The best real world example of this would be the people who apply the Illuminati triangle to stupid little things that vaguely resemble something three-pointed. 2 edgy 4 me, m8.

Is he dead?

Now you're 17; you're nearly an adult, for crying out loud. The hormones are settling down and adulthood is just around the corner, sending you some enticing winks. Maturity has, as near as makes no difference, pretty much fully settled in on you now. As a result, you have realised that doing all of the above is cringe and embarrassing. You stop. As in, completely and utterly stop.

It's this period of time where you go through deleting all your old, ugly profile pictures. A gentle feeling of sorrow winds through you as you realise how care-free life was not four years ago. I was very good at the silence period of Facebook. I felt that I didn't really do anything interesting enough to warrant a post, so I remained a lurker.


Doing this thing called 'adult'

The definition of Facebook has changed for me, as I firmly establish myself as an adult. The website is like a journal, a way of logging in life events with friends and family, and capturing the best moments. It seems to be the same for my friends, who now all just post pictures of elegant outings abroad with their significant other. Three years ago, my feed would be full of groups posing with alcohol like it's some badass thing to do.

I guess the next step would be marriage and baby posts, which is a creepy thought. I'm pretty much going to remain a lurker (my last post was July 2015, celebrating the passing of my driving test), but many of my friends won't. My age is pretty much the first generation who will watch several hundred other people make their own lives, buy their own house, and bring up their own family. It'll be surreal, and cool on so many levels.

So there we are. I've been growing up with Facebook, and things aren't stopping any time soon. Though I'll remain relatively quiet from now on after maturing somewhat, the website will still likely document many of my significant life events if I choose to. In 2050, I can check Facebook to see what day I bought my first apartment. The more I type about this, the more amazing it seems.

Obviously I should say that not everyone would have the same experience with Facebook through time as I did above. I was a socially awkward and relatively immature individual, so memes were perhaps more prominent for me than the average sane teenager. Anyway, I hoped you enjoyed this long read. See you soon!

If I went to any public website right now where every user had the ability to put their own comments down, I'd be insane. Nobody wants to go to opinion-central. But anyway, let's say I did do such a thing, and I posted a comment saying "Climate change is real, and something needs to be done about it sooner rather than later". Doesn't sound too crazy, right? Well, in this world, saying that is almost as controversial as supporting the English Defence League. And for those of you who are out of the loop, that's bloody well saying something.

via evogreen.co.uk

That's right folks, climate change is still a topic on which many disagree on. There are, of course, many things in this world in which people have strong disagreements in. How the universe started, for example. Or whether there is true life native to a place outside Earth. These are all controversial, because they are topics which haven't been solved, or proven. So people go with their own hypothesis, because that's all there is to go by.

Climate change is somewhat different. It has now been fully proven that climate change has been completely accelerated by human factors. A page from Bloomberg has a fantastic interactive graph which breaks down each natural and human factor that has changed since 1880. It's much cooler to play with the graph yourself to see everything broken down, but here below is the general gist of things:

There is no correlation between natural changes and the warmth of the climate

Human factors on the other hand...

And here we are when we put the two together. Just a little uncanny, if you ask me

So as I hope you can understand, it's pretty cemented that global warming is just one of those things that happen when we burn our fossil fuels, amongst other things. It's basic science; CO2 is a greenhouse gas, which traps the warmer air in, and viola, the Earth is a 'greenhouse'. And bloody hell, do I know how hot those things get sometimes.

Bill Nye, all round good guy, is constantly trying to hammer sense into others on live TV

Ben Carson, a dense mofo, believes the warming is a 'natural stage'

Back in December last year, I made a post where I reported on the condition of my iPad, which was two-and-a-half years old at the time. I stated that it was getting a bit slow now, where websites would freeze, and apps would take their own merry time to open and load new content.

Fun Fact: due to a higher resolution, the iPad 3  is actually slower than the iPad 2

That device is now of course just under three-and-a-half years old, and it's still my daily driver. But to get a sense of its condition now, imagine my car daily driver is a 40bhp VW Beetle, and everyone else is overtaking me on the motorway in their flashy BMWs and Mercedes. What I'm trying to say, of course, is that things haven't exactly got any better throughout 2015. Though one thing that has vanished is the long periods of freezing on a website; that's just been replaced with hardcore lag, right down to when you type something. If you type quick enough, the iPad will quite literally forget what you inputted.

Now I feel the time is ripe to treat myself to a brand new iPad. I, of course, am fully aware that Android tablets exist out there, but they just don't appeal to me. You see, I use tablets as a haven for media consumption - be that websites, YouTube, social media or video calling. I do not use tablets for games, emulation, data tools or activity trackers; things that I personally believe that Android does better. I wouldn't have an iPhone in a million years, but I wouldn't go to anything other than an iPad for tablets. The iPad is locked down and gives very little customisation, but my god does it do media well.

Android tablets don't entice me

Anyway, I'm talking about this because I have come across what has to be one of the biggest first world dilemmas that the world has ever seen. Here's the situation: Apple now has three sizes of iPad available to the public: the Mini (of which I have no interest in at all), the Air series, and the newly announced Pro series. Which one do I go for? It truly is a tricky situation.

If the current Air model (the Air 2) wasn't over a year old now, it would be a no-brainer for me, because I would go straight for that. It's half as much as the new Pro in terms of pricing, and it's still pretty powerful. But there's just something so unsatisfying about buying a product that's already a year old. Granted, you don't pay the full RRP anymore, but it's still a bit wrong for a technophile living in the first world.

The Air 2: Sexy, sleek, and smooth, but already a grandad in the technology world

The Pro on the other hand is so new, it's not even available yet. It has some beastly specs, such as the 4GB of RAM. It doesn't sound like loads, but remember that it runs iOS - an OS that runs smoothly on a single GB of RAM. It also has 4 speakers on each corner, and a processor which should apparently match up to the Haswell Intel i5s you find in laptops, according to Apple. Not to mention obviously the 12.9' screen; it's width is the same as the height of a normal iPad screen. Crazy stuff, and it should make YouTube videos really pop... whilst simultaneously browsing Reddit. Apple finally introduced proper split-screen multitasking for the iPad in iOS 9.

So obviously the Pro is the unsurprising winner in terms of the specs war, but the dilemma I face is this: is it actually worth it? The Pro is going to cost $799, which translates to £530 in today's currency conversions. But such is the way taxes are so heavily involved in the UK, the suggested price is actually going to be £679, which is a huge sting in the tail. For now, these are still rumours, but they are coming from pretty legitimate sources.

So, when you consider that I only tend to use an iPad for media consumption (most likely the same as 90% of other iPad users), is the literal 2x price jump worth it? Getting the Pro will of course give me a newer, sexier device that will most likely stay faster for longer, but then again, the £330 Air 2 is not a slouch. It still outperforms pretty much all flagship smartphones from this year, as is on par with the brand new iPhone 6S when it comes to benchmarks, as both return around 4,500 in Geekbench 3 for the multi-core test.

I don't need it, but bloody hell I want it. SO MUCH SCREEN SIZE \o/

A little more than a month ago, I did a review on this blog about my then-new phone, the LG G3. I gave it a lot of praise, and disregarded a lot of niggles the phone has, simply because I hadn't discovered them yet. So this post is to balance things out a bit; what are the downsides to my phone?

To make things clear before we start: I still love my phone, and I don't regret the purchase one little bit whatsoever. It's the most powerful piece of handheld equipment I've ever owned, and I still find it a pleasure to use. However, now that I've spent many weeks with it, I have found a few things that do irk me a little. They are very small nit-picking things, but so damn they should be on a flagship device.

Firstly, the infrared blaster is laughably weak. For those of you who don't know, IR blasters are what enables any remote of yours to 'talk' to the thing you're controlling - say a TV. The one on the G3 is so, so weak, that it almost defeats the object of having one in the first place. You have to be very close and pointing straight at the thing you're trying to control, which is annoying in many situations. I've used many other phone IR blasters, and the vast majority of them have worked better than the G3.

Next, my phone seems to have this peculiar bug with its LED notification light. Every now and then, it will pulsate green like it's got a notification, but when you turn the screen on, you find there's nothing there. More annoyingly, there is literally no way to stop this phantom notification light other than to completely reboot the phone. There is little online about it, which suggests it's not a widespread bug, but it's there for me, and it happens I'd say a few times a week.

The screen. I still can't get enough of that 1440p resolution (even though 1080 I'm sure would've been more than enough), but the resolution is pretty much the only stand-out feature of the phone. It's a basic LCD affair, which means you don't get the deepest blacks around, and it doesn't go particularly bright. It's enough to read in direct sunlight, sure, but when I put it next to the new Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge Plus yesterday, the G3's screen looked positively pathetic. Not to mention the extra pixels put more strain on the processor in the phone. In Geekbench 3, the G3's score ranges from 2,300 to 2,500, depending on how bright the screen is (yes, really). The Samsung Galaxy S5 uses the exact same chip, but due to the lower resolution, the processor doesn't have to work as hard, and it can therefore return a score of 2,700 to 2,900. Still though, the G3 is hardly a slouch.

I'm not done yet. The G3 gets worryingly hot at times, which is a common complaint for the phone. When things do get heated, the phone understandably throttles itself to stop it burning itself out. But this makes the phone agonisingly slow, and due to how easily the G3 heats up, this 'safety sluggishness' happens a lot more than I would perhaps want. Another weird side effect to the heat is the camera loses all ability to focus and stabilise, so you will never get a good picture with a hot G3. In all fairness though, you have to be very intense in usage to get to that stage.

Anything else? Yes, the battery life only just manages to get me through the day, and that's if I put some battery saving consideration into my usage. If I used my phone as much as I want to sometimes, I could easily drain it by late afternoon. Thankfully, the G3 comes with a removable battery, so you can just fling another one in if it becomes a consistent problem. Removable batteries are becoming rare these days, it has to be said.

So there, hopefully that should balance things out a bit. As I say though, I still very much like my G3, and I'd still recommend it if you are looking for a cheap and powerful phone.