Fans of Apple’s iPhone Upgrade Program — the one where you pay monthly for an iPhone and have the opportunity to upgrade to a new model after a given number of payments — rejoice! You can now get a similar deal for an iPad Pro. And when I say “deal”, I really mean it. More on that in a bit.

You might remember the folks at Upgraded have offered a MacBook Upgrade Program for a while now. I used it to purchase this very M4 MacBook Air that I’m typing to you on, and have been super happy with the experience. Their website is crazy-easy to use, setting up the loan very quick, and AppleCare+ is included.

People who like to be on the cutting edge have been asking for Apple to offer this kind of program for products other than the iPhone for years. Upgraded beat them to it for the Mac. And now they have expanded their lineup to include the iPad Pro, lapping Apple in their own game! Here’s how it works, according to their emailed announcement:

Right now, it’s just the iPad Pro models — but the experience works just like our MacBook program. Seamless, flexible, and future-ready. […]

Buying an iPad Pro with us is just like buying a MacBook:

1. Pay monthly over 36 months.
2. Plans start at $31.89/month for the 11-inch, or $40.78/month for the 13-inch.
3. After 24 payments, you can upgrade to a new model or finish the last 12 payments to pay it off.
4. If you upgrade, we’ll send a prepaid return box. Just transfer your data, send the old iPad back, and we’ll refurbish it for its next life.

I mentioned that the program is great for folks who want the latest and greatest, but I think it’s equally appealing to anyone who wants or needs to pay off their gadgets over time. If you’re happy with your iPad after two years, just hang onto it, pay it off, and it’s yours to keep!

Neat! But you said they’re lower than Apple’s own pricing?

Yep! Crazy, right? But here is is in black and white:

iPad Pro, 11-inch, Wi-Fi, 256GB, Space Black

• Upgraded: $999 for the iPad + $149 one-time payment for AppleCare+ = $1148
• Apple: $999 for the iPad + $99.99/year for AppleCare+ (3 years for $299.97) = $1298.97

As you can see, Upgraded has Apple beat by about $150.

Whoa! How is that possible?

How? I’m not sure. But I think it’s because they lined all of this up before Apple’s recent reshuffle of AppleCare+.

I heard that Apple’s monthly and annual pricing went up as they eliminated any AppleCare without Theft & Loss Protection. And I think you used to be able to buy AppleCare for iPads with a one-time payment for a set period (two years?). But that’s no longer an option. It’s now monthly, yearly, or bust.

Even if Upgraded’s AppleCare coverage is only for two years — when you can swap to a new model — instead of three, they’ve still got Apple beat by $50.

The Debt Ceiling

Now, for my MacBook Air purchased through Upgraded, I make monthly payments with 0% interest. That interest rate depends on how Affirm, which manages the loan, judges your credit, so I can’t guarantee that you’ll get that same rate. It may not be as worthwhile if you’re paying a higher interest rate. I don’t link raising my personal debt ceiling, so I probably wouldn’t have sprung for the deal if I was paying extra in interest. But it is absolutely possible to not pay any extra, and in fact pay less than what Apple charges, and have the opportunity to easily upgrade to a newer model in a couple of years.

What will they think up next?

I expect Upgraded will have their hands full for a while expanding to include Mac desktops and other iPad models. But I think they’ve started with the right products.

But what do I want them to offer next?

First of all, the iPhone. I’m not on one of the major cellular carriers, which means I can’t get a phone through Apple’s iPhone Upgrade Program. So, personally, I’d be geeked if Upgraded could offer iPhones on their upgrade program. I kind of doubt it since they’re not a carrier, but maybe!

Next on my list would be the Apple Watch. It’s the only other bit of tech that I feel compelled to upgrade every few years, if just for the battery life improvements and additional sensors they keep packing into newer models. My original Apple Watch Ultra is showing its age, and I’m excited to upgrade it this year. If I could do so at a flat, monthly rate and know that I could easily swap it out for a new one again in a few years if I wanted to, I’d definitely jump on board. Fingers crossed.

Disclosure

I don’t have any sort of affiliation with Upgraded, but they did offer me a one-time discount on my MacBook Air purchase earlier this year. It was unprompted, and basically done as a thank you for all the customers I had sent their way after I first wrote about them last year. I probably would have purchased my MacBook through Upgraded even without the discount just so I could pay it off over time. And now that I’ve actually tried their service, I can wholeheartedly recommend it.

A weekly list of interesting things I found on the internet, posted on Sundays. Sometimes themed, often not.

1️⃣ Got a move streak mix up on your Apple Watch where the gadget thinks you missed a day, but you haven’t? There is a fix! (Related: my stand goal cheater shortcut.) [🔗 sixcolors.com]

2️⃣ New CGP Grey video! I know feel so much smarter about zip codes, and also sad that we don’t use Ireland’s system. [▶️ youtube.com]

3️⃣ Stephen Robles wrote about his journey as a creator, which culminated recently in being invited to WWDC. It’s quite touching. [🔗 beard.fm]

4️⃣ There are so many cool new things and improvements in visionOS 26! This newsletter/blog is the best aggregation of all things Vision Pro (though it’s a little disappointing that almost all the sources are from X). [🔗 lastweekinavp.substack.com]

5️⃣ TIL that there are things such as Nest Rafts to provide a place for loons to nest. [🔗 adirondackexplorer.org]

6️⃣ Rafa retrofit an Opal webcam’s guts into an old Apple iSight camera body and it looks awesome!! Ship it! [🦣 mastodon.design]

7️⃣ Matt Birchler did a little digging into ChatGPT’s alleged gender bias and came away with some optimism. [🔗 birchtree.me]

Thanks for reading 7 Things. If you enjoyed these links or have something neat to share, please let me know. And remember that you can get more links to internet nuggets that I’m finding every day by following me @jarrod on the social web.

7 Things

I’m thrilled to learn (via episode #573 of the Upgrade podcast with Myke Hurley and “Mr. Kobo” himself, Jason Snell) that Kobo has announced a new partnership with Instapaper to replace its Pocket integration:

In partnership with Instapaper, Kobo is working diligently to bring this integration to its eReaders, with the aim of launching by the end of summer 2025. The new Kobo and Instapaper integration will take the place of Kobo’s previous integration with Pocket after that service is sunset in June 2025.

Instapaper echos the announcement in their own blog post, which includes helpful links for importing Pocket content to Instapaper:

Since the Pocket shutdown, our top priority has been to help Pocket users migrate to Instapaper. Pocket users who have made the switch praise Instapaper on its clean, distraction-free reading experience, and robust organization tools.

We’re excited to be partnered closely with Rakuten Kobo to power the read-it-later functionality on their Kobo eReader devices!

I already swapped (back) over to Instapaper as my read-it-later service when Pocket shut down, primarily because it has the same great and easy integration with Reeder Classic — my RSS and all-around reading app of choice.¹ And now that Instapaper will sync saved articles to my Kobo later this summer, it really is a hot swap solution.

Good on both Kobo and Instapaper for stepping in to help out Pocket’s users.

Also of note, and likewise learned on Upgrade, the team from Pocket appears to have broken off to basically recreate it as Folio. It’s available on the web and the App Store, and looks just like Pocket did.

In my brief testing, Folio imported my Pocket saves without issue, and its text-to-voice feature actually beats what Pocket had. Its (single) voice sounds more natural, speeds up without sounding bad, and — my favorite² — actually announces blockquotes by saying, “Quote.”

Although I’m going to stick with Instapaper due to its integrations outlined above, I’m happy to see that the Pocket team is still making a go at it. And perhaps has more leeway on their own to improve the product. Certainly, Folio is an app to keep my eye on.

Apps

Well, a little less than two months since Mozilla announced it was happening, Pocket, the venerable read-it-later service, has officially shut down.

I’ve been meaning for the last few days to check when Mozilla was turning out the lights; go figure, it’s today.

I’ve exported all my saves, which turned out to be a list of nearly 15,000 URLs split across two CSV files.

My real-later journey has been long and winding. I’ve traveled from Instapaper to Pocket to Readability to Instapaper to Reeder to Goodlinks to Readwise Reader to Pocket. But when I got a Kobo a few years ago, I settled on Pocket since you can read your saved items on the e-reader. Pocket has also had great integration with the Reeder app.

Although I rarely use the Pocket app or website, I’ve been very happy with its text parsing and reliability. And I’ve appreciated how democratic it is. It seems like it’s been very developer-friendly, available everywhere, and able to be integrated in other apps.

In fact, I had vague plans of trying to build my own read-later app upon Pocket’s infrastructure some day. I guess that won’t be happening now.

To maintain my current read-it-later workflow, my plan is to import my saves into Instapaper, since it has the same integration with Reeder as Pocket did.¹ That aspect should be fairly seamless. But my Kobo will go back to being purely for reading books.

You had a good run, Pocket. Rest easy, my friend.

Apps

A weekly list of interesting things I found on the internet, posted on Sundays. Sometimes themed, often not.

1️⃣ Nick Heer does the work in dismantling this sexist post regarding Apple’s ass handed to it by Judge Gonzalez Rogers. [🔗 pxlnv.com]

2️⃣ Whoa. Monty Python and the Holy Grail turned 50 this year! It still makes me laugh out loud every time I watch it (which you can do for free on YouTube). [🔗 kottke.org]

3️⃣ I had no idea Taylor Swift was so web-forward right from the beginning. She had her music available to download from her website back in 2002 (when she was 13) and by 2003 had a ‘Taylor Talk’ tab there — which I presume was an early blog before she had Tumblr. [🔗 webdesignmuseum.org]

4️⃣ This restaurant is mind-blowing. It looks like a drawing inside! [🔗 kottke.org]

5️⃣ The Baltimore Ravens went all out in their Severance-themed scheduled reveal video. [▶️ youtube.com]

6️⃣ BasicAppleGuy is trying a new approach to reader support in which all his wallpapers and other haberdashery remain free to everyone, but can also be purchased to easily download the files all at once. I like the idea and hope it’s successful for him! [🔗 basicappleguy.com]

7️⃣ This overlapping version of “Dear Theodosia” is beautiful. [▶️ youtube.com]

Thanks for reading 7 Things. If you enjoyed these links or have something neat to share, please let me know. And remember that you can get more links to internet nuggets that I’m finding every day by following me @jarrod on the social web.

7 Things

I’m glad that Jason Snell blogged about his skepticism toward the OpenAI and io partnership because his feelings almost exactly mirror my own. Personally, I don’t trust Sam Altman any further than I could throw him. But I do trust Jony Ive — so his high regard for Altman has to count for something.

The framing of this as “two friends coming together” makes me uncomfortable. It’s like they’re trying to say Sam + Jony is the new Steve + Jony spiritual partnership the world’s been missing without actually saying it.

And yet, I’m glad to see Jony Ive excited about building a tech product again. And it brings me joy that he’s able to continue working with his chosen family of designers. As Snell says:

Never count out Jony Ive and the talented people that surround him. They’ve gotten the band back together, thanks to an enormous investment of AI money, and we’re going to find out–eventually–what they want to put into the world.

The language they’re using certainly frames the product as The Next Big Thing. I hope it really is, because I’d hate to see this team lose credibility in the way Humane — also stacked with ex-Apple talent — did. Theirs is not the roadmap I’d want to see followed.

Linked

A list of interesting things I found on the internet, posted when I’ve got 7 of them. Sometimes themed, often not.

1️⃣ This might be the fastest and easiest dollar I’ve ever spent. This browser extension replaces images of Trump and Musk with kittens. [🔗 apps.apple.com] (Via Lou Plummer)

2️⃣ If the words “HomeStar Runner” mean anything to you, this video is going to make you very happy. [🔗 homestarrunner.com]

3️⃣ If you’re a Harry Potter fan, this zine will probably make you sad. But it resonated with me, a superfan who has nevertheless been disgusted by JKR’s behavior toward trans folks and now feels conflicted about enjoying the series itself. [🔗 redgoldsparkspress.com]

4️⃣ A folding e-reader? Now we’re talking! [🔗 theverge.com]

5️⃣ Niléane’s roundup of playful Mac apps is so fun! [🔗 macstories.net]

6️⃣ David Sparks showed off Perplexity’s new voice assistant app. It’s pretty wild how good they made it hooking into Apple’s native frameworks and does make Siri look extra bad. [🔗 macsparky.com]

7️⃣ YEAH TOAST! My buddy reminded me of this song that has rattling around in the back of my head for half my life. Love it. [▶️ youtube.com]

Thanks for reading 7 Things. If you enjoyed these links or have something neat to share, please let me know. And remember that you can get more links to internet nuggets that I’m finding every day by following me @jarrod on the social web.

7 Things

Acapulco returns in July for a fourth and final season. I’ve enjoyed this series, and I’m glad they’re wrapping up here — it feels like a natural conclusion.

Trying, my underrated favorite, is renewed for a fifth season! Maybe we already knew this and I forgot, but I can’t wait. S4 felt a bit off, so I hope they’ve got their mojo back.

TV Shows

You’d have no way of knowing, but I swapped the entire infrastructure that HeyDingus runs on from Dropbox to iCloud today. It took all of two minutes and a few mouse clicks.

How? Through the magic of file syncing and my hosting service, Blot.

Since the beginning, Blot’s whole advantage was to turn a folder on your computer into a site on the World Wide Web. Originally, Dropbox was the only syncing service that Blot worked with, but over time, David (Blot’s developer) added Git and Google Drive as well. I tried Google Drive at one point but switched back to Dropbox after hitting some weird bugs (that I think are ironed out now). I’ve never tried Git syncing, but if you’re already comfortable with Git, I expect it’d be a really handy way to get syncing and version control for everything on your site.

All the while, the five-ish years that I’ve been writing HeyDingus, iCloud syncing has been on the roadmap but never seemed to be getting much of David’s attention. I wanted it badly, mostly for app compatibility but also because I have a distaste for Dropbox’s device limits and other restrictions. Well, he must have been working hard on it behind the scenes because a month or so ago David announced that iCloud syncing was ready to try!

Having learned my lesson when Google Drive syncing was fresh out of the oven, I convinced myself to hold off and wait for others to root out the bugs. I kept an eye on Blot’s question forum (handily available via RSS), and when I didn’t see any issues arise, I figured I could give it a shot. And then, when I set up my new M4 MacBook Air and didn’t want to install Dropbox and do the device authorization dance, I knew the time had come.

So today, I logged into my Blot dashboard (which I hardly ever have to visit since everything just syncs via my local computer) and headed to the folder sync section. I selected “iCloud”, followed the insanely easy directions¹ to set it up, and voilá my site was rebuilt from the files in iCloud.

It even managed to maintain the Created on and Modified on dates for all my files!

There’s narry a hiccup so far,² and although there’s still a chance iCloud will behave poorly, everyone’s experience in the forums seems to have been very smooth and positive so far. And while you, dear reader, probably won’t notice a thing, I’m anticipating a nice improvement in my workflows for writing and publishing here.

You see, not every writing app has direct integration with Dropbox. And while you’d think that Dropbox would be highly motivated to implement the right APIs so that they would work just like iCloud as a file provider in the file system, there seems to be some disconnect there, and apps such as iA Writer couldn’t use Dropbox as a reliable location to read and write files. As a result, I’ve had to use 1Writer (which does have direct Dropbox integration) on my iPhone and iPad to edit posts on the go. 1Writer is a fine app, but hasn’t seen much development in recent years and has never clicked as well with me as iA Writer.

The only adjustments I’ll need to make will be to rejigger a few of my Shortcuts and Drafts automations to write to iCloud rather than Dropbox. But I expect those workflows to be simpler and reliable as well, since I should be able to write directly to the file system, instead of round-tripping via an internet connection and the Dropbox API before syncing back to my device. Working with the first-party file syncing feature rather than the bolted-on third-party one should be a breath of fresh air.

I tip my hat to David for working through all the challenges of building on top of iCloud as a web service, and for making it so easy to swap syncing services. I’m looking forward to getting even more value from my iCloud subscription and uninstalling Dropbox from my devices.

Blogging

A weekly list of interesting things I found on the internet, posted on Sundays. Sometimes themed, often not.

1️⃣ Ryan Christoffel’s got a good tip for wrangling AirPods’ noise canceling modes with Shortcuts. [🔗 9to5mac.com]

2️⃣ Matt Birchler made a quick little website to house his quick little tools. [🔗 quickstuff.app]

3️⃣ Jason Snell lists out his favorite titles from Apple TV+ if you’re looking for something else to get your money’s worth from your subscription. I wholeheartedly agree with his recommendations, but I have to add Trying as my underrated favorite. (Dickinson, part of the inaugural lineup, is quite good too, and also rarely gets mentioned.) [🔗 sixcolors.com]

4️⃣ Great news for climbing fans! Each climbing discipline at 2028 L.A. Olympics (bouldering, speed climbing, lead climbing) will get their own set of medals! We’ll see more intense competition for sure, seeing as climbers won’t need to be all-rounders and can play to their strength. [🔗 climbing.com]

5️⃣ While technically about climbing gear, this HowNOT2 video does a great job explaining how tariffs affect retailers (and ultimately consumers), how they will have to manage inventory and cash flow, and price products to manage. At 14 minutes, I think it’s well-worth your time. [▶️ youtube.com]

6️⃣ If you’re like me and “discovered” Benson Boone from his recent viral performance at the Grammys(?), I think you’ll enjoy this video of his debut auditioning for American Idol back in the day. [▶️ youtube.com]

7️⃣ Warren Buffet’s shareholder letter for Berkshire Hathaway reads like no other big business document. John Gruber pulled out some prescient passages that stuck with me. [🔗 daringfireball.net]

Thanks for reading 7 Things. If you enjoyed these links or have something neat to share, please let me know. And remember that you can get more links to internet nuggets that I’m finding every day by following me @jarrod on the social web.

7 Things