Today Apple sent out invitations to various people in the media about an event happening on September 7th. There were two different invitations sent out, one for an in-person event and another for streaming. The fact that there are two different invitations being sent out indicates that this might be a similar to the World Wide Developer Conference keynote where a selection of press and developers were able to attend the keynote in person.

This event will begin streaming at 10 am Pacific Time on Wednesday, September 7th, 2022. Typically, Apple has Tuesday events, but September 5th is Labor Day in the United States, so it will be on Wednesday the 7th.

As with all other events this one has a theme, "Far Out". It has also become standard that there is an Augmented Reality experience when you visit the Apple Events page.

This event's AR object is a star field that you can zoom in on and view. Music will also play if you zoom in far enough.

It is likely that Apple will announce the new line up of iPhones as well as any new Apple Watches. It is not likely that we will see any new iPads given that Apple confirmed that iPadOS will be released later in the fall.

As is the case with all Apple's events I will have a recap of what was announced sometime after the event, as well as my predictions, sometime before the event.

There has been speculation that Apple would be releasing iPadOS later than iOS 16.0. Typically, Apple does not comment on when they will do this, but Apple has indeed made this official. Apple issued a statement to TechCrunch that said:

This is an especially big year for iPadOS. As its own platform with features specifically designed for iPad, we have the flexibility to deliver iPadOS on its own schedule. This Fall, iPadOS will ship after iOS, as version 16.1 in a free software update.

Beyond this, today Apple released another set of betas for developers. Specifically they released, iOS 16 Beta 7, iPadOS 16 Beta 7, and watchOS 9 Beta 7. The installed version of iOS is displayed as 16.0, and the installed version for iPadOS is displayed as 16.1. This just provides additional confirmation to Apple's statement above.

This is not the first time that iPadOS has been released later than iOS and it is not known whether or not Apple will continue to have separate initial release cycles going forward, only time will tell if that is the case.

With iPadOS being its own operating system, it does not necessarily need to be tied to the release of iOS, even if it has been so in the past. Even so, it would be beneficial for Apple to possibly let developers know earlier in the beta cycle whether or not the operating systems will be released at the same time, or even close together, so that developers can plan their new releases and upgrades accordingly.

Source: TechCrunch

Over the lats six months or so I have had to debug a couple of interesting issues with iPads, in particular iPads with cellular on them. The two devices were an 2nd generation iPad and another was a 2nd Generation 12.9-inch iPad Pro. Let us look at both of these, starting with the 2nd generation iPad.

2nd Generation iPad

The issue that this iPad was exhibiting was that it would start randomly saying "Activating iPad". The issues as intermittent and would do this upon reboot as well as when waking the iPad up.

Rebooting it would not fix it, as it would still give the same issue. Sometimes, letting it sit and attempt to activate would allow it to work, at least for a while. Before it would just be intermittent and happen occasionally, but starting in May it would do it consistently.

While sitting and pondering it for a bit, I came to realization of what was happening. The 2nd generation iPad had a 3G modem in it. The reason that it started doing it consistently in March was because the T-Mobile 3G service began to be shut down in March.

The fix for this was quite simple, remove the 3G SIM card from the iPad, and it works perfectly fine now.

2nd Generation 12.9-inch iPad Pro

The second iPad that has been having issues is a 2nd Generation 12.9-inch iPad Pro from 2017. The issue started with the iOS 15.0.1 update. Updating to iOS 15 on this device was no problem, but starting with iOS 15.0.1 it would no longer update.

The update would download, but upon trying to install it, it would get stuck on "verifying update". No matter how long I let it sit there, it would not do anything. I tried updating using a Mac, through Finder, but that also did not work. The same thing would occur, it would just sit there and spin at the "Verifying Update" window. I could reboot the iPad, and try again, but it would not do anything differently, just the same results.

Now, being the Apple nerd that I am, the fact that it would not update bugged me to no end. So yesterday, I wanted to really figure out what the issue was. I had tried doing some searching online previously, but everything that came up would lead me to a bogus solution.

That is, until this thread (available at https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253245929) came up from the Apple discussions forums, why it did not appear the previous times I did my searching, I do not know.

The first solution suggested to "Insert a SIM card and then do the update", and after inserting a SIM card, and re-trying the update, it actually worked. The second most helpful suggestion on that thread indicated that simply removing the SIM card tray would fix the issue. I did not try this second solution, because the first one worked. It should be noted that the SIM does not need to be an active one, just any compatible SIM card would work.

Obviously, there must be an issue with iOS 15 and verifying an update on a cellular iPad Pro when there is no SIM card in the slot. It is not yet known if the same thing will happen when updating to iOS 16, or if Apple will actually fix it. It seems like these types of issues wait until major versions to be fixed. At least there is a workaround that does indeed work.

July 2022 has just ended, which means that it is now 'Back to School' season. For July I did not listen to that many titles over the past month. I started and stopped a number of titles, but did not finish them because they just were not what I wanted to listen to. Instead, I opted to listen to items that I have listened to before. I only listened to 11 items and none of them were new titles.

All of the titles are Science Fiction titles, which is not too surprising, but typically there is some other genre.

It is likely that I will have new titles each of the next three months, at least I have pre-orders in for titles that are coming out in the next three months.

The book I am going to highlight for July is "Collapsing Empire" by John Scalzi.

Our universe is ruled by physics. Faster than light travel is impossible—until the discovery of The Flow, an extradimensional field available at certain points in space-time, which can take us to other planets around other stars.

Riding The Flow, humanity spreads to innumerable other worlds. Earth is forgotten. A new empire arises, the Interdependency, based on the doctrine that no one human outpost can survive without the others. It’s a hedge against interstellar war—and, for the empire’s rulers, a system of control.

The Flow is eternal—but it’s not static. Just as a river changes course, The Flow changes as well. In rare cases, entire worlds have been cut off from the rest of humanity. When it’s discovered that the entire Flow is moving, possibly separating all human worlds from one another forever, three individuals—a scientist, a starship captain, and the emperox of the Interdependency—must race against time to discover what, if anything, can be salvaged from an interstellar empire on the brink of collapse.

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