Basic Apple Guy:

Don’t get me wrong, I am still very much on team AirPods, but I have increasingly found use cases and situations where having a pair of good olde wired EarPods has proven quite useful. They don’t need charging, they work with just about anything, and they’ve quietly aged into a little slice of tech nostalgia. They will still tangle and will snag a few door handles, but for the price of a couple of coffees, they’ve earned a permanent spot in my bag. Sometimes, the simplest tech still has a place in our very wireless world.

I always keep a pair of wired EarPods in my bag. Just in case my AirPods battery dies, they’re lost, or something else that’s unplanned occurs. They work with everything in my kit and are significantly more reliable than wireless options.

➝ Source: basicappleguy.com

The BackPack is a simple little shelf that mounts to the back of your iMac, perfect for hiding external hard drives or other small peripherals.

I bought a couple of them last week — one went on the back of my old iMac and the other went to my mother-in-laws for her iMac. Both of them will be hiding an external hard drive for Time Machine. They’re easy to install, sturdy, and keep your desktop nice and clean.

I should have bought these years ago.

➝ Source: twelvesouth.com

Ben Brooks:

However, there is one good thing about Kickstarter: it shows you what people want. Create a project, get a prototype, put it on Kickstarter (or Indiegogo, I am using those interchangeably here) and you’ll instantly know if there is a market for your product. With that in mind, I searched both services with the phrase “iPad Pro”.

Oh my.

My goal was simple: to figure out what people feel is missing, from a hardware perspective, with the iPad Pro. Surprisingly, I can lump almost all the products I found into three categories: Pencil accessories, cases, and speakers. Let’s take a look at some of what I found, and why there is (or isn’t) a market for such things — and see what we can glean from all of this.

What a brilliant idea. I never would have thought to take this approach when looking at untapped potential in the iPad accessory market. And I think accessory makers would be wise to use this strategy when determining what products would be worth developing in the future.

From Logitech’s press release:

Today Logitech announced the Logitech CREATE Keyboard Case for iPad Pro, developed closely with Apple to leverage the new Smart Connector. As a result, Logitech will bring to market the first ever third-party keyboard compatible with the iPad Pro Smart Connector, eliminating the need to power on, set up or charge the keyboard – it is always ready when you are.

I’m not a keyboard case kind of guy, but this one actually looks more usable to me than Apple’s.

From the recently publish Tested by Apple web page:

Each case design for iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch has to go through a series of tests before it reaches the Apple Store. So you can be sure the case you buy is a perfect match for your iOS device.

I wish every retail store cared this much about the quality of the products they sold.

Jeremy Horowitz, regarding third-party band makers use of the Apple Watch diagnostic port:

Stop before you spend $250 to order an accessory that might never arrive or work properly. […]

While conspiracy theorists will come up with all sorts of explanations for a hidden port, the two key reasons for the Apple Watch to have it are for diagnostics and performing guaranteed reliable firmware updates.

I would avoid buying any accessories that use the Apple Watch’s diagnostic port. That is, unless you fully understand that it might not work at all or will eventually stop working in the future.

I ordered the Bear Motion iPad sleeve after spending hours researching for my recent piece, Essential iPad Accessories. The sleeve had nearly 150 reviews on Amazon with an average rating of 4.6 out of 5 stars. It looked like I had found the perfect iPad sleeve to fit my needs, but I couldn’t have been more wrong.

The Bear Motion sleeve arrived last Wednesday and I was immediately turned off when I opened the box Amazon shipped it in. The sleeve came in an extremely cheap looking, peggable, clear plastic package that has no mention of what product it contained aside from a barcode sticker on the back and the Bear Motion logo along the top. This is the kind of packaging you’d expect to find on a “tablet sleeve” at a dollar store that has the build quality of something you’d find at a dollar store.

I didn’t want the poor packaging design to taint my opinions of the sleeve, though — it’s not like I’ll have to interact with the packaging beyond the initial opening. But then I broke the plastic and got my hands on the actual sleeve, and I found all my misgivings to be true. Here’s how I put it early last week before the sleeve was delivered:

My biggest concern is about build quality. Let’s be honest, $10.99 is a pretty low price. I just hope I’m more inclined to describe it as inexpensive than as cheap.

After spending nearly a week with it, I can safely describe the Bear Motion sleeve for iPad as cheap.

The first sign I saw of its cheap design (aside from the packaging) was actually in the sleeve’s weight. When I picked it up out of the box I was amazed at how light it was. Which would have been a good thing if the materials used in the sleeve felt as though they could protect my iPad from a tumble. But, the lack of weight was actually an indication of absolutely zero additional padding throughout the entire sleeve — save for the thickness of the outer layer of felt which feels nice to the touch, but I can’t trust to protect my $599 iPad.

The inner lining is quite nice, though. It feels very soft and I would never worry about it scratching my device. But, it’s the only layer between the iPad and the accessory pockets. I could never have any peace of mind keeping more hefty accessories inside the pockets with such a thin layer between them and the iPad. I can just imagine dropping the sleeve fully loaded and finding a completely shattered iPad screen because of the impact between it and the accessories in the other pockets.

Which brings me to the closing mechanism — one button on the face of the sleeve and another on the sleeve’s flap are connected by a leather string that you wrap around the two. It works well and stood up to the intense shaking I put it through in order to test whether or not it could come undone by itself. The two buttons are attractive and the mechanism for closing is easy enough to interact with.

But, I’m not fond of how the sleeve looks when it’s closed. The two outer ends of the flap tend to bow-out from the sleeve’s body instead of sitting flush against it. This could go away over time as the fabric gets worn down from use. But with all of the other problems I have with it, it’s not going to stick around long enough for me to find out.

I’ve already requested a refund through Amazon, but it looks like I might have to pay shipping to return it to the seller. This is far from ideal since it means I might be out around $8 in the transaction. But, at least the money is going to UPS (a company I actually like) instead of the sellers of this terrible iPad sleeve.

I suppose I wrote about the Bear Motion last week because I was excited that I could have finally found a sleeve that suited my needs. But, I also hope my hesitance to endorse it came across loud and clear in the way that I wrote about it. Everything I saw — from the reviews on Amazon to the product images — indicated that it was going to be a great sleeve, but that just wasn’t the case. Instead, we have a cheaply made sleeve with plenty of poor design decisions.

This is one of the sleeves that kept cropping up while I was doing research for my piece on Essential iPad Accessories from last week (although, I was obviously more interested in the iPad Air model). I mostly ignored it because the strap that secures your iPad inside of the sleeve is only held on with a magnet which I thought could come loose and allow your iPad to spill out onto the floor. I also wasn’t a fan of its lack of accessory pockets which are a necessity in any sleeve I was willing to consider.