
Masochist me? An Ars writer's iPad-only workday - evo_9
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/09/doable-or-not-my-experience-with-working-for-ars-on-the-ipad.ars
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j_col
I have a tablet too, but it's just a toy for consuming media and web content.
I do my real work on a PC, and will continue to do so until it becomes
possible to install web servers, database servers, interpreters and IDEs on a
10" tablet, regardless of what Steve Jobs or this hack for Ars tells me.

> My essential software tools include a fully functional Web browser, an IM
> client for communicating with writers and other editors, some way to access
> IRC (the "office" part of our virtual office lives), an e-mail client, a
> Twitter client, an RSS reader, and a simple writing app that an export clean
> HTML.

See above, some of us have more demanding requirements from our computers.

~~~
protomyth
I don't think you will ever be in the market targeted by an iPad. Some people
(me included) will always need trucks. On the other hand, I can see about 90%
of the people around me being able to use and iPad right now to replace their
current computer needs.

~~~
gks
You're right. Compromises need to be made in order to keep the iPad efficient
in the way it was originally designed and it's pretty unlikely that it will
ever become a mobile coding workstation like the GP wants. Why you're being
down voted is beyond me.

Is the hardware capable of letting you do coding and what not? Sure. But at
the limitation of keeping it appealing to the masses? Probably not.

It's simple. There is more money to be made on the average consumer than the
much rarer programmer/power user.

If you don't like that then I guess you should be happy there are alternatives
that maybe one day will do what you want. But as it stands, not even Android
(the "power user" OS, if you want to even call it that) doesn't even do what
you want without rooting it.

Point is, what the GP wants isn't really something we'll see for the time
being. Being cranky about it isn't going to change things.

~~~
burgerbrain
Letting users _opt-out_ of a walled garden is hardly much of a "compromise" at
all.

And really, that's all you'd need to do to satisfy me.

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j_col
Interesting exchange on there between a commentor and the Ars staffer, check
the response: [http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/09/doable-or-not-
my-e...](http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/09/doable-or-not-my-
experience-with-working-for-ars-on-the-ipad.ars?comments=1#comment-22057346)

~~~
CountHackulus
Pretty sure that the Ars staffer misunderstood the commenter. He was saying
that a huge iMac like that is overkill for that work. Someone's earlier
comment about getting the same work done with a Win 95 486 and WordPerfect 5.1
was about equivalent.

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ableal
This bit sort of describes Macs/PCs around 1985:

 _Instead, I had to make conscious decisions to switch over to IM and respond
to several people at once, or go to IRC to see what the rest of the staff was
up to, or go back to Writing Kit to dedicate another hour to uninterrupted
writing. It's a different mental process for a typical computer user, but it
worked out a bit better than fine if personal productivity was the metric._

