Apple and Planned Obsolescence

The story so far; We purchased the iPad 1 when it first came out(May 25, 2010 to be exact and bought the most expensive model too...$1049.00 after the extended support and tax! Because I was trying to future-proof the purchase...nice.) We have a second generation Apple TV and were planning on giving them both to my mother-in-law so she would have a simple method for email, web and games. Also, with our Apple ID and Photo Stream, she gets our pictures automatically too. But with iOS 6 and Mountain Lion, we can set up shared Photo Streams, which will be better for a couple of reasons. One, so we don't have to leave her with our password(App updates) and so she won't have to get all 4 blurry shots and 1 good one. And just in case I take any inappropriate photos, like naked bicycle day in San Francisco...old fat guys and their weenies...funny to post on Facebook, but not so much so for Mom.

So the problem; iPad 1 is already obsolete and won't be getting iOS 6. And I just updated Apple TV which killed Photo Stream. The published solution is to open Settings-->iCloud on your iOS device and accept the new terms that will pop up. But the new terms aren't popping up and I suspect that they won't on the iPad since it won't be getting iOS 6. And the solution I suspect, is to upgrade our iPhones, but because the maps issue has not been ironed out, we have been holding off.

So because we have iPhones(version 4) we will probably be able to solve this once we upgrade.

BUT, if Mom had only bought an iPad and Apple TV she would now be out of luck! Now for older folks who are retired and have a fixed income, rushing out to buy the latest iPad at 1G a pop is a lot of money. And no way am I jailbreaking it.

Hopefully, they will fix this soon, but in the meantime I submitted a bug report and encourage anyone who also has this problem to do likewise:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/appletv.html

UPDATES:

October 1, 2012 - Created a new Apple ID for Mom. Had to login via iTunes to activate the account to work on Apple TV. Also had to login with that same account for iCloud services on her account on my MacBook to accept the new terms of service. Not sure if it would all work if I had logged into iTunes on the iPad and iCloud on iPad. Now we have to upgrade to iOS 6 and Mountain Lion on our Macs to use the shared Photo Stream feature. Mom is all set now that the Apple TV and the iPad are using her new ID.

Also, upgraded my iPhone 4 to iOS 6 to set up a shared Photo Stream. While it's not as convenient as having just one Photo Stream, having the extra control never is. (Grammar note: While 'is' is not a preposition, and it is pretty well accepted that my use of it here is ok...I still cringe a little.)


October 2, 2012 - So the shared photo streams work only on devices that support them. For some reason I thought that if the ID we used for Mom was the one we shared our Photo Stream with, they would just show up in her Photo Stream. Not the case. On the Apple TV the photos show up, but on the iPad with iOS 5 they do not. You can't tell me that to implement this on a piece of hardware as simple as a slightly older than 2 years old tablet is too difficult. So our work around without buying her the latest iPad, will be to periodically login to her account on my laptop to allow the shared Photo Stream photos to import to her native ID Photo Stream. So she will have duplicates on the Apple TV(one for her Photo Stream and one for the shared Photo Stream) and all the photos on the iPad. She hasn't been using the Apple TV at all anyway, so we might not leave that with her. We will start introducing her to it like we did with the iPad and see how it goes. She uses the iPad daily for games, but never looks at her email. Probably better that way...I would love to not be a slave to email.