Is upgrading an iPad making the device obsolete?

Recently a person's iPad Air 2 needed to be upgraded from iPadOS 13.2 to iPadOS 14.3. The iPad had around 800 megabytes of space left, which was nowhere near as much memory as required to upgrade the iPad. The iPad did indicate a little more than 3GB was required to upgrade, but without deleting the users photos (or uploading them to Apple's cloud), the person didn't have sufficient free memory to perform the upgrade directly on the iPad.

When you don't have sufficient free memory to upgrade the iPad an alternative method is to use iTunes on a Mac or PC. I first tried using an older MacBook Air, but all that happened was the iPad kept beeping. Next I installed iTunes onto a notebook computer and performed the upgrade. It never ceases to amaze me how Apple's own equipment often doesn't work and yet a PC does. In fact I couldn't even connect the iPad to the MacBook Air to backup the photos. I performed a full copy of the photo folder and then subsequently did a backup using iTunes.

Note: When I plugged the iPad into the PC iTunes prompted to do a Download and Update, or just a Download. Actually I didn't want to do either but there was no other option to select. I'd recently learnt a lesson upgrading an iPhone, the Download and Update option also subsequently provided a backup option. The Update bricked the iPhone so luckily the backup had been successfully performed or the person would have lost all their content on the iPhone. I prefer not to be in the situation where a person can lose all their data. They tend not to be very happy at all if that happens.

For the iPad I choose to do the Download. Once that was done I had access to backup through iTunes. It's good to know, select Download, then do a backup, then do an upgrade is available. It's just not an immediately available option with Apple. I have found in the past Apple doesn't always do things in what I'd consider a logical order.

So how much memory was lost upgrading from iPadOS 13.2 to iPadOS 14.3? 

According to iTunes, before the upgrade there was 3.44GB of memory free, after the upgrade to iPadOS 14.3, the amount of free memory was now 1.48GB. That's a loss of nearly 2GB of memory that is no longer available to the user, or put another way, around 500 photos. Apple really should focus on providing smaller upgrades (or even reducing the size of the iPadOS code) as losing 2GB is pretty much equivalent to losing around 25% of person's available memory on the iPad.

Whilst I haven't really noted the amount of free memory lost in previous upgrades, you do have to wonder how much free memory has been lost over the years as Apple updates their iPadOS operating system.

An average person could only see this as a way that Apple is obsoleting their equipment and over time, forcing them to update their equipment.

Kelvin Eldridge
www.OnlineConnections.com.au