31

The first year of my 30s is complete! It was a great one, but I have a feeling 31 is going to be even better. This has been a year of preparation: for the future, for the next phase is in the life of our family, for parenthood. And all of that preparation is soon going to pay off.

I can’t wait to see what the next year brings. My life is certainly a blessed one, and I’m so thankful to every one of you for being a part of it.

A New Home for My Domains

One thing I didn’t know before building my first website is that every site is made up of two parts. The first is the content itself, which consists of text, images, and other files that combine to show you what the author published. This blog post is an example of my website’s content, and it comes to you from my web host, Squarespace.

The other key element of a website is its domain name (sometimes just called a domain). That’s the address you type into your browser to get to the content. These usually end in .com, .net, .co.uk, or something similar. For the blog, it’s devondundee.com. In order for a website to be accessible, it needs both content and a domain name.

For years, I’ve purchased all of my domain names through Google Domains. It’s the cheapest option I’ve found, and it comes with a bunch of great features like private registration and email forwarding that other providers charge extra for. Domains is the only Google service that I use other than YouTube, and I’ve never loved running my website through them, but it’s always been the best solution for me.

That is, until Google recently announced that they would be shutting down the service for good and selling their domain name business to none other than Squarespace. I was actually excited by this news. I’ve been hosting websites on Squarespace for eight years years and have had an amazing experience with the company. Plus, this is an opportunity to consolidate all of my web services, both hosting and domain names, into one central place.

So rather than wait around for Google and Squarespace to move my domains for me, I took the initiative and started transitioning them myself. Moving a domain name from one provider to another is a simple process that I’ve done before. But I had never bought one from Squarespace before, and there are some differences between the way the two companies handle them, so I was curious to see how it would go.

It was mostly a smooth experience, but there were a couple of bumps along the way. I started with the domain name for my dad’s company, where I help manage the website. I purchased a year of service for the domain on Squarespace, then I went to Google to approve the transfer. Within a few minutes, everything had moved over.

There was only one problem. I was using Google’s email forwarding feature for that domain, and Squarespace doesn’t currently offer anything equivalent. So all emails being sent to an address at that domain name were being rejected. I ended up solving this by connecting the website to Apple’s iCloud+ service for custom email domains. It’s a better solution anyway, but not as simple as basic email forwarding.

Squarespace has promised to offer “feature continuity” to Google Domains customers when they make the transition this fall, so I’m hopeful that they’ll add an email forwarding option soon. But if they don’t, I imagine a lot of customers will be upset to lose access to it. It’s great to be able to receive emails at a custom domain name without paying extra or going through any setup. Squarespace, and every other domain name provider, should include this feature with every purchase.

I had quite a bit more trouble moving my family website’s domain name to Squarespace. The transfer itself was fine, but once the domain showed up in my Squarespace account, it was listed as insecure. Every time someone visited dundee.me, they were shown a message that the site was potentially malicious. This wasn’t great, especially since it was my primary way of linking people to our baby registry in days leading up to the baby shower.

After two sessions with customer support, my issue was escalated to a senior product specialist who was able to pinpoint the problem. There was a setting in my domain’s backend that I didn’t have access to called DNSSEC that was preventing Squarespace from securing my website. The specialist was able to get the setting changed and fix the security issue, but it wasn’t a quick process.

All in all, my website was insecure—and thus more difficult to access—for a week while all of this was being worked out. It was okay in this instance because my family website doesn’t get a lot of traffic and isn’t something I rely on to make a living, but I can imagine other scenarios where this would be devastating. Squarespace needs to fix whatever went wrong with my domain transfer before moving ten million other domains over later this year.

My final domain transfer, the one for this website, was the easiest of them all. It took less than ten minutes and everything moved over perfectly except for a couple of subdomains (like about.devondundee.com) that I had to recreate. I would have preferred if the subdomains had transferred automatically, but that’s a minor quibble for my use case.

Squarespace still has a few bugs to work out in the transfer process before they’re ready to move over thousands of Google Domains customers. I’m confident that they will. Personally, I’m happy that I’m now able to manage all of my websites in one place and to do so while working with a company that I’m happy to support.

The iPads In My Life

One important note that I left out of my piece last week on improving the iPad hardware line is that I believe the device has never been in a better place than it is today. Despite some quirks that will likely be resolved within the next generation or so, the lineup is solid. There isn’t a bad iPad in the bunch.

I can say that with confidence because I personally use a wide variety of iPads on a regular basis, from entry-level to top-of-the-line, for all kinds of different tasks. Reflecting on this topic, I thought it might be interesting to share the different iPads I use on a day-to-day basis and what I use them for.

12.9” iPad Pro (M1): This is my main computer, and I mostly use it as a laptop in the Magic Keyboard case. I also connect it to an external monitor, keyboard, and trackpad when I’m in my office at work. I use the iPad Pro for all kinds of tasks from updating websites to designing graphics to writing this very blog post. I wouldn’t be able to do my job without it.

iPad mini (6th generation): As much as I love my iPad Pro, the iPad mini is the one that has my heart. I use it as much as I possibly can because it just feels like magic every time I pick it up. It’s ideal for reading, catching up on social media, playing games, and watching videos. It’s also the device I carry with me throughout the day for reference materials and taking notes in meetings.

iPad Air (4th generation): Every time I use my wife’s iPad Air, I’m reminded of how nice the 11” form factor is, and I’m tempted to ditch my big iPad/small iPad setup and go back to a single machine. (But never enough to actually go through with it!) It’s a great all-purpose tablet that Katherine uses as her only computer outside of work, and it gets lots of use in her job at the preschool, too.

two iPads (5th generation): These devices are from the first budget generation when the iPad rejoined the lineup at just $329. I use these as kiosks in our lobby at work for information and event signups. They’re also great for quick plug-and-play videos, slideshows, or music at events. They still run great five years in, and their batteries are rock-solid.

iPad (7th generation): This is the iPad that controls our PTZ camera for event livestreaming. It’s very single-purpose and never leaves its post, but it performs its function flawlessly and has been more than worth the $250 I paid for it on sale.

iPad (9th generation): I use this iPad to control the lights in the auditorium so I’m not stuck sitting behind the lightboard all the time. It can run slide presentations, too. I’m a fan of the taller screen size and the way the device feels in my hand. It might be the final iteration of the original, legendary iPad form factor; if so, it’s a fitting end. This feels like the best possible iteration of that design.

Those are the seven iPads I use on a regular basis. As you can see, they range from outdated base models to much more recent flagships, and I love them all. There’s no such thing as a bad iPad in my book.

How Apple Can Fix the iPad Lineup

After last fall’s interesting pair of new iPad releases, it became a common refrain in the Apple commentaryverse that the lineup was a mess. I honestly don’t believe the iPad product mix is all that muddled. (After all, there are now six different products in the MacBook line, same as the iPad.) But I do think Apple could make a few tweaks that would create an iPad offering that’s agreeable to everyone.

Rebrand the iPad 9 as iPad SE. The ninth-generation iPad has long filled the Special Edition spot in Apple’s iPad lineup: a legacy form factor at a discounted price. The company should embrace this approach by giving the device the SE moniker. This would make the product’s purpose clear and differentiate it from the current-gen base model iPad.

Bring compatibility for the latest Apple Pencil to the iPad. The most baffling thing about the current state of the iPad is that the no-adjective iPad looks like every other modern, flat-edged version but doesn’t work with the modern, flat-edged Apple Pencil. This needs to be resolved with the next update. I’m not sure exactly what that solution looks like—maybe a third-generation Apple Pencil that charges on the short edge of the device?—but every modern iPad should use the same modern Pencil.

Raise the base storage on the iPad Air and iPad mini. 64 GB of storage is not enough for a mid-tier tablet, which is what both the iPad Air and iPad mini are. If you’re doing any sort of work on an iPad, the $150 storage upgrade is currently a must. These devices should start at 128 GB with the option to buy more storage if you’d like.

Bring the XDR display to the 11” iPad Pro. It’s time. The 12.9” iPad Pro has had it for two generations, and 11” iPad Pro fans deserve the best display, too. This would be a huge differentiator between the 11” iPad Pro and the iPad Air, which is currently the least clear-cut choice in the entire iPad line.

Move the front-facing camera to the long edge on every model. People loved this change to the tenth-generation iPad and were not happy that it didn’t carry over to the M2 iPad Pro as well. The long edge is clearly where the camera belongs for the best video conferencing experience. It should be there on every model. I think this would require a new Apple Pencil or some major reworking of each iPad’s internals, but it’s the right move.

Simplify the accessory options. If all modern iPads have the same shape, they should work with the same accessories. I’ve spoken about consolidating the Apple Pencil story already. As far as keyboards, I think a Smart Keyboard without a trackpad and a Magic Keyboard with a trackpad should cover most iPad use cases without being needlessly complex.

Bonus points: Bring ProMotion to the iPad Air and iPad mini. If the 11” iPad Pro gets an XDR display, that leaves headroom for the mid-tier iPads to gain ProMotion. I’ve heard from several people who consider a 60Hz refresh rate a dealbreaker, especially on the iPad mini. As a huge fan of the mini, I’d be overjoyed at this addition. However, I’m not totally sold on this idea being realistic in the near future, and I don’t think it’s necessarily a must in order to get the iPad offering into shape.

So those are my suggestions for how Apple could clean up the iPad line a bit, resolve its most obvious problems, and make it crystal clear which device fits each customer’s use case. Do you agree with me? Or do you have other ideas of how to fix the iPad line? I’d love to hear them.

Thanks for reading!