
On Switching from an iPad Pro and MacBook to a Pixelbook - plg
http://www.speirs.org/blog/2018/11/30/on-switching-from-an-ipad-pro-and-a-macbook-to-a-pixelbook
======
m0zg
I'd much rather schools switched mostly to pen and paper, TBH. 95% of homework
in the 9th grade SHOULD NOT require a computer. It's a distraction, and one
which hits kids on the ADHD spectrum especially hard.

There's nothing to be gained from requiring computers for homework in most
cases, and kids get plenty of computer time outside of school. The net effect
of this "progress" is that I have to constantly supervise my 15 year old like
a hawk, or else no homework will get done and he will watch Youtube instead.

This is not a good set-up, because eventually there will be no supervision,
and then he will be well and truly fucked, because he can't seem to realize
that he needs to actually care about anything other than YT and computer
games. I'm afraid that by the time he realizes that it'll be too late to fix
anything.

~~~
Wowfunhappy
If I hadn't been allowed to take notes on a computer in school--or if I'd been
born a few decades earlier and computers weren't available--I literally don't
think I would be where I am today. As in, my grades would have been worse, I
would have gotten into a lesser college, etc.

My handwriting is slow and difficult to decipher. And handwriting makes tiny
revisions—adding words into the middle of a sentence, restructuring a sentence
slightly, etc—unduly annoying.

If the internet is a problem, disable the internet.

I should mention, I actually didn't start using a normal laptop until college.
In grade school, I had this "digital typewriter" of sorts that ran Palm OS.
Very nifty little device... it was far more lightweight than laptops of the
time, and the battery lasted weeks.

~~~
m0zg
Your handwriting would be faster and easier to decipher, out of necessity.

Moreover, research shows that because of this bandwidth restriction (and
because you can draw easily on paper), you'd memorize the material much
better, because you'd be forced to summarize it before you write it down, so
it's entirely possible that you'd get into an even better college.

Without the internet, at least in school that my son goes to, the computers
are utterly useless because everything is online. They have an internet
filter, but kids find holes in it anyway. Kids whose parents don't give a shit
just browse bullshit during class.

At home I use a combination of PiHole and OPNSense to filter things until
homework is done. The list of sites and wildcards is well over 1000 entries
long, and I still can't block everything I need to.

~~~
AndrewDucker
I didn't get a computer until university. My handwriting was terrible,
remained terrible, and my ability to write essays increased dramatically when
I was able to do so with a computer.

~~~
m0zg
Essays, yes, I can see how a computer would help with essay writing. To write
well by hand, one has to rewrite them twice: first write notes and fragments,
then draft, then edited essay.

But I don't know how I'd take notes in science and math if I couldn't quickly
write formulae and draw. My handwriting is also terrible, but I could read it,
and I would not be academically successful if I wasn't forced to take notes.
I'm 100% certain of that. In fact, I've been writing more lately as a part of
my studies. Things just seem to "stick" much better if I don't passively
record, but either summarize, or embody something in code.

~~~
Wowfunhappy
I'm glad that works for you, but I don't think it would have worked for me,
and you shouldn't presume everyone learns the same way. I took handwritten
notes extensively throughout middle school and never really got better at it.
I don't have the hand coordination.

Learning to type around 8th grade was a revelatory experience, and it had a
noticeable impact in my academic performance. Writing, reviewing, note taking,
and even just general organization became much easier, and I thus got better
at it.

I will say, dealing with math symbols on my typewriter-device was always a bit
annoying, and I would sometimes write formulas from those classes on a
standard notepad. I would hope that nowadays, we have better programs for
dealing mathematical notation (in an easy/expedient way).

~~~
bobthepanda
I believe you and the parent commenter are arguing about orthogonal things;
you are arguing that you should be allowed a device that types, while they are
arguing against a device that is connected to the Internet within the
classroom. You could achieve a middle ground where wi-fi is not enabled in the
classroom, so you have to do any online syncing of documents outside the
classroom, but even cloud-based word processors like Google Docs allow you to
work offline.

As far as potentially missing things, I think a thing that has changed is
video recording of lectures. I went to a perennially broke mid-tier public
university in the US, and all lectures (unless small humanities affairs) were
recorded so that you could watch it later, and all the slides were put online.
So it was possible to go back and add things to your notes that you may have
missed before, and in fact it would be a severe disadvantage to _not_ rewatch
lectures since everybody else was doing it. It becomes a lot easier to take
handwritten notes once you can rewind and fast forward through lectures at
your pleasure.

------
goldcd
I feel like some old fogey/luddite when I say "I've never seen the point of
iPads" \- or tablets for that matter. I've had a few and they're great as
media consumption/browsing devices - but am utterly bemused when people say
they do "all their work from them". I feel quite angsty enough when my laptop
gets decoupled from the desktop-symbiotic multi-monitors and proper mouse and
keyboard. I can see the point of a Chromebook - shoving Chrome into something
cheap/efficient (if Chrome is all you need), but am eternally bemused over
people trying to bolt keyboards to tablets - "you wanted a laptop"

~~~
pdimitar
Same here, I don't understand people trying to shove work processes on
entertainment devices.

I love my iPad Pro for several purposes -- media consumption, some light
gaming, reading, managing media / bookmark / book collections -- but it would
never occur to me to code on it (even through shells to Linux).

I am not fully comfortable even with my MacBook Pro. I am working on building
a work process that doesn't rely on a mouse or a touchpad and then I could
work on the MBP full time (mostly involving memorizing shell and editor
shortcuts, and making a lot of shell aliases).

Before that there's simply no point -- it's like trying to run with weights on
your ankles.

~~~
goerz
As a theoretical physicist, the iPad can handle work-related tasks that the
MacBook cannot (and vice versa). The unique iPad features mostly center around
the Pencil: annotating papers, and doing "pen-and-paper" math, except that the
iPad is far superior to pen and paper (you can move things around and "re-
edit" them). Actually, the iPad can handle most things the I generally prefer
the MacBook for (programming and writing, mostly), but there's usually some
hoops to jump through. But it's certainly good enough that when I travel, I
usually only take the iPad.

~~~
eigenspace
Mhm, I guess its a pretty niche thing but it always kinda annoys me when
people say its not a real 'Pro' device. For writing math, there's no real
competition against tablets from laptops or desktops.

Not only is the editing experience amazing (which is super important as in
physics I probably write more incorrect things down than I write correct
things), but it makes organization painless. I never had the discipline to
keep paper notes in tidy binders and put them back after I take them out.

There's no way I'd have as good access to my six year old notes if they were
written on paper, especially considering that now they're all backed up to the
cloud and my app has handwriting recognition (only words, not math
unfortunately) so they're quite searchable.

------
mensetmanusman
I have been using the iPad since day 1 in 2010 and almost every single day
since. Our home has 5 versions that I have cycled through for the wife/kids.
It is my daily driver at work.

The best thing about them is they require almost no troubleshooting except for
the occasional restart. The first iPad still has a week standby battery life
which blows my mind.

That said, the devices are still fragile and require bulky protective cases
for kids to not destroy them.

If Apple really cared about iPad in education, they would release a $100
plastic version (hard poly clear screen and backing a la iphone 5c) to get
kids on the OS. They have the software infrastructure to make sure the device
only works through schools if they were afraid of it cannibalising sales of
their glass/metal versions.

Ipad could be an amazing remote teaching assistance device, where someone can
write pen/paper style to walk students through problem solving (I tried this
volunteering through WeTeach, but the browser software was too laggy).

I am all for google docs dominating education if Apple is unwilling to compete
here. We can’t honestly expect schools to spend money on ‘textbooks’ that will
shatter if dropped, and that cost many hundreds of dollars per device.

~~~
bluedino
>> That said, the devices are still fragile and require bulky protective cases
for kids to not destroy them.

Modern laptops aren't much different. You should see how easy it is for a kid
to destroy a MacBook.

~~~
vonseel
I broke a MBP screen a few years ago. Actually, two different laptops broke.
One was warrantied, the other was an accident and had to be paid. The cost for
a Retina display replacement in 2015? About $700. Ouch.

I keep my MacBook on my desk nearly 24/7 now, but I’d hate to know the cost or
have to pay for a display replacement.

~~~
KKKKkkkk1
My Lenovo laptop's screen recently started showing a dark area at the bottom.
So I got a replacement panel off eBay for $40 and replaced it. Takes about 15
min.

------
paultopia
I actually use iOS for work stuff almost constantly, lots more than I use
anything else. (My Macbook spends most of its time these days downloading
things from Dropbox and backing them up to time machine, plus whenever I
decide to actually write some serious code.) But I'm a professor-type in a
non-collaborative field, so:

\- the iPad Pro is amazing for reading academic papers with the pencil at
hand. Ditto for grading and such.

\- the keyboard is good enough that I can write on it at just about full
speed, and I write in markdown anyway.

\- most of the things I need to do that require full computer chops can be
done in the cloud---I have a bunch of little Heroku dynos sitting around
sleeping (on free time) until I ask them to do something like run a document
through pandoc or add something to a database for one of my data collection
projects. The shortcuts app in ios12 + Pythonista + Heroku are an amazing
combination, they allow me to turn almost anything complicated into an API
call that I can trigger with a freaking voice command if I really want (but
mostly share documents into).

Just about the only way this hinders my usual workflow (apart from having to
bust out the Mac for heavy coding) is that there's no Zotero on iOS. But
sooner or later I will get around to shoving that into a Heroku dyno and
making some shortcuts to push web pages into its readers and then it'll be
solved too.

For non-collaborative workflows this is perfect. I can see how the author's
collaboration needs really would not be met by such a setup though.

~~~
crooked-v
I'd love to see a guide on setting up that Shortcuts -> Heroku -> final result
workflow in a streamlined manner.

Now.sh could be another useful tool for that kind of thing, since their 2.0
product is focused on no-hassle lamda functions, without needing a full VM
setup.

~~~
paultopia
Maybe I'll write a guide up! I've got a pretty good setup going.

Pending full write up, here are some key pieces:

Shortcuts side: the shortcuts app is really shockingly powerful, mainly
because you can share almost anything you want into it and it intelligently
figures out what you want. For example, if you share a web page from safari
into it, if the first action receives a url, it'll treat it as such, if it
receives a web page it'll take the DOM and not worry about the URL, etc.

There are really three key actions.

1) `Get contents of URL` allows arbitrary http requests. You can pass in data
from other actions. This is the main workhorse for heroku things.

2) `Run JavaScript on web page` allows you to just run arbitrary JS in the
context of whatever page you share into it. It's great for data-collection
type tasks, you can just rip whatever you need out of the DOM and POST it away
per the above, and then shove it into a database from heroku.

3) `Run Pythonista script` does what you'd expect. It passes whatever the
action receives into Pythonista as a command line argument. And then,
obviously, anything goes. If you haven't tried Pythonista, you should check it
out---it's hard to get 3rd party libraries in (and many don't work), but you
get the full stdlib plus a bunch of key libraries that the dev has taken the
trouble to build in, including numpy, requests, matplotlib, beautifulsoup,
PIL, sympy, etc...)

After receiving a response from heroku, it's trivial to save it to
iCloud/Dropbox, put on clipboard, open a preview window with a share sheet
available, etc.

On the Heroku side, the key trick is that you can run Docker containers. So,
for example, my mobile pandoc solution is a docker container that has texlive
and pandoc on it, allowing me to have basically a personal improved docverter.
So I just post a markdown document via shortcuts to a flask endpoint that
converts the document and returns it to me as the response.

------
benjaminwootton
I really wish they would add mouse support to iOS as it would allow me to work
on gslides presentations. I could then leave the MacBook at home a lot more.

Are there any workarounds or markdown presentation apps I should check out?

~~~
mensetmanusman
I use Jump desktop to remote into any number of powerful desktop or laptop
computers. It supports the swiftpoint bluetooth mouse so you can use it in
that way as a keyboard/mouse PC/Mac setup quite well.

------
malshe
The title suggests that the article is going to be about Pixelbook but there
is hardly anything about Pixelbook and the same old iOS can't do this and that
type of a post.

~~~
Johnny555
I don't know what the title was when you saw it, but the _On Switching from an
iPad Pro and MacBook to a Pixelbook_ title I see now seems to match the
article -- it's about the reasons why IOS isn't meeting his needs. I didn't
expect it to be about the virtues of a Pixelbook.

~~~
pdimitar
Actually that's exactly what I expected. If you replace A with B then I fully
expect you to (1) first say how A is inadequate -- which the article did --
and (2) why is B better, which the article didn't state.

~~~
Johnny555
I thought that part was implied -- he switched to the Pixelbook because it's a
Google product that works well with the other Google (Google Suite) product he
uses.

~~~
pdimitar
Fair enough. I expected a bit more thorough motivation than that.

------
timbit42
> and was even able to launch a successful podcast which has almost entirely
> been recorded, edited and published using iOS.

Seriously? I could do that using a 1985 Amiga or Atari ST.

~~~
xenozega
You haven't lived till you've used a toaster to accomplish this... IoT is here

------
moondev
I LOVE my pixel book. Crostini is really a game changer. Its a super polished
experience using native chrome + Linux apps. Android apps too!

------
philip1209
Cloudflare is trialing chromebooks as a replacement for MacBooks:

[https://twitter.com/jgrahamc/status/1068120826678001664?s=19](https://twitter.com/jgrahamc/status/1068120826678001664?s=19)

------
sneak
I use both. The Pixelbook hardware is unparalleled. I like it better than
anything from Apple right now.

The Pixelbook of course does not support iMessage, so on it I would use OWS’
Signal for messaging... but they (OWS) discontinued their Chrome App version,
and the Android/Play Store version is “incompatible with this device”, so I
can’t use my Pixelbook to chat with anyone outside of Slack or IRCCloud (or
other undesirable/non-e2e chat services like Hangouts/etc), which is super
lame.

OWS really needs to support that platform better.

~~~
saagarjha
> The Pixelbook hardware is unparalleled.

Really? I’ve found it awkwardly designed; it’s really a “form follows
function” laptop to me–especially the palmrest, which makes my fingers angle
_downwards_ while typing and has an unappealing material which seems to gather
sweat. I know why it’s there, but I feel that it could be significantly
improved if the keys were placed in a depression rather than trying to add
stuff to keep them from hitting the screen.

~~~
likeclockwork
That doesn't sound like "form follows function" to me.

~~~
saagarjha
The “form follows function” bit is Google trying too hard to shoehorn their
“two-tone” design into a place it isn’t necessary and doesn’t belong. The
computer would have been significantly improved if the palmrest just stayed
the same material as the rest of the bottom case.

~~~
sagarm
Do you consider the cold metallic palmrests typical in laptops to be somehow
more functional? I find the rubber palmrests quite comfortable.

Also your wrists are _supposed_ to be elevated when typing.

------
ricardobeat
And this is exactly why Google makes sure all the G suite apps are _just a
little broken_ in iOS & Safari. It has been like this for the past half
decade, since Apple stepped on their turf with Maps.

~~~
zapzupnz
There's a Google Docs app for iOS. Shouldn't be too hard for those who are
invested in Google Docs to download the app; that's pretty much standard
procedure on iOS anyway, plus an app will always be a better time than a
website for editing on an iPad.

~~~
ricardobeat
This is in regards to the apps too (“iOS & Safari”). I mean, the native app
shortcomings are the entire subject of this HN post. Where are you coming
from?

------
tomdeboer
What keeps you from installing an alternative browser, like Firefox or Chrome
for iOS? I recently switched to Opera Touch on iOS and it’s been great so far.
Definitely worth a try I would say.

~~~
jordache
Apple only allows the Safari Webkit engine to be installed on iOS. As a
result, all third party browsers on iOS are using the identical browser engine
as iOS Safari. Any browser incompatibility issues is likely shared across all
iOS browsers.

------
ymolodtsov
The only thing I can’t comprehend is how any person using iPad for work can be
dissatisfied with the changes in iOS 12 — apart from the scale of those
changes that could be bigger.

------
threatofrain
I was also a little sad that Apple withdrew Safari from Windows. How does
Apple envision bookmark sharing happen for a Windows user who buys an iPhone?

~~~
giobox
They’ve supported this for quite some time in the absence of Safari for
Windows. The iCloud for Windows client will sync your bookmarks from your
third party Windows browsers, much the same way as it plugs the holes for
syncing photos and documents on Windows as well.

> [https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201391](https://support.apple.com/en-
> us/HT201391)

> [https://www.techrepublic.com/article/pro-tip-sync-
> bookmarks-...](https://www.techrepublic.com/article/pro-tip-sync-bookmarks-
> between-macs-ios-and-windows-using-icloud/)

------
writepub
For one, this article could've been 30% the original length - it drones on and
on repeatatively!

While I find the reasoning sound on why iPads can't be your full time
productivity device, completely ignoring Microsoft surface in this space seems
either ignorant or a paid Google ad for the Chromebook

~~~
ams6110
I think a history of failures in mobile tech keeps most people from even
considering Microsoft gear. Surface may be great, but who is buying them? Who
is developing for them?

Mobile is Apple/iOS, or Google/Android, for better or worse.

~~~
Intermernet
Lots of people are buying them, and anyone developing windows apps is
developing for them. I dual boot my surface book 2 with Linux and I have a
decent Linux machine, a decent Windows machine, a decent tablet and a decent
gaming machine in one device. It's not cheap though!

------
anotheryou
he only uses the browser... keyboard and battery should be his only concerns
anyways

------
titanix2
Tl;dr: dude works in school where they use Google Docs, which run better in a
desktop web browser than the corresponding iOS app.

~~~
saagarjha
I’m pretty sure that Google purposely cripples their office suite on mobile
Safari and iOS because it helps their narrative of iPad not being a “proper”
computer, which helps them sell Chromebooks.

~~~
etse
Or more charitably, underallocates resources to keep feature parity. Yes, to
sell more Chromebooks, but is Apple’s iWork suite available on the Chrome
Store?

~~~
duskwuff
It isn't explicitly a Chrome app, but there are web versions of the iWork apps
available through icloud.com, and they work pretty decently in a browser.

