Time to buy a couple of new I-Pads. We currently have 3 I-Pad Airs and after 2 years, have dead spots on the screen, frequently freeze, and are generally running poorly. I don’t believe the technology has changed much in the past 2 years and we have just ordered some new swipers (which really suck). Am I limited to the light duty I-Pads, is it better to have a touch screen base unit set up and a couple of other I-Pads, or are there other options out there to consider. This is starting to hurt our ability to conduct business.
When you say “dead spots on the screen,” are you referring to the capacitive touch sensors or the LCD pixels? Seems weird this would happen to several of your devices, as this isn’t a common problem.
Depending on your tasting room size, we find having a couple desktop/laptop devices running the POS and then a ton of iPads to be perfect. As far as iPads go, all of Apple’s current offerings (except probably the mini 2) should be more than sufficient for running POS.
Since the iPad product has, relatively speaking, been tanking for Apple, you can usually find really good deals on them. Apple even has a good refurbished selection on their website.
I’m probably going to take a beating here but I almost never upgrade my iOS on any of my i-devices. I only do it if it is clearly necessary. Strictly my anecdotal experience, but the iOS upgrades I have done over the years have invariably had some kind of negative impact. And in the tech press you always read about some device suffering problems after an upgrade cycle - the iPhone 4s battery life going to crap after a major update (I think to iOS 7.0) being a classic example.
Given that a tasting room iPad should have almost zero other apps running or available in normal operation, I feel pretty comfortable with this policy.
I’m guessing the real issue is when Apple will deprecate iOS support for it. Since it’s 64-bit and they’re still selling it, I’d bet a couple of years.
FYI - We are going to be requiring iOS 8+ pretty soon as we are working on some speed and stability improvements coming into the summer.
Today, that means we technically support everything from iPad 2+, but if you’re looking for anything new, at least the first iPad air generation is suggested.
I expect after apples announcement in mid June, we will be officially not supporting a few.
Apple has announcements a few times a year where they release new hardware / iOS versions, they’ve often dropped support for older versions of devices.
While we try to support legacy devices, we want to work to keep the application fast and on the latest version of iOS.
