
My iPad Pro experiment - deafcalculus
https://lemire.me/blog/2017/10/03/my-ipad-pro-experiment/
======
ungzd
> But PCs are still around. > > I’m not happy about this.

He is not happy that everyone not switched from real computers to media-
consumption gadgets where programs are curated by central company? Where even
content displayed in these programs must be censored using Victorian
standards?

Maybe we should replace internet with TV? You can watch news and talk shows on
TV, and picture is better! Why use ancient Sumerian technology of text from
3000 BC, when you have 4K video with quadro sound? Disruptive!

~~~
ashark
> media-consumption gadgets

How are people still repeating this? Better sensor suite, better (outward-
facing!) camera, and better built-in ability to use it as a drawing surface
than pretty much any laptop (certainly none combines all those things), an OS
that's actually suitable for creative audio work and doesn't otherwise get in
one's way all the damn time (Android, Windows, Linux), and the software to
match.

But it doesn't have a mouse and the keyboard's an add-on so it must just be
for watching Youtube I guess.

~~~
jbob2000
I need none of those things to play video games and develop software.

~~~
ashark
What does that have to do with whether tablets are more than media consumption
devices?

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valine
Text selection on iPad has been royal pain since iOS 6 (if I’m remembering
correctly), and Apple has done absolutely nothing to remedy the situation
since. You tap hold once to select a word, then you drag this tiny blue dot as
it glitches out and jumps to a random spot on the screen every time you move
your finger. It’s insanity, and I can’t believe Apple went another year
without fixing it in iOS 11.

~~~
ahakki
Text selection on inside a textarea is pretty easy on the iPad and iPhone if
you are using the on-screen keyboards. On the iPhone you can use force-touch
on the keyboard area and then move the cursor wherever you wish. Force-
pressing again starts a selection. On the iPad you use two fingers to drag
across the on-screen keyboard and tap with two fingers begin selecting, which
doesn‘t really work if you are using a hardware keyboard. So it‘s a mixed bag.

~~~
thinkythought
This has the common newer era iOS issue though of, yea it works pretty good
but it completely fails the "will you figure it out on your own" test. Someone
had to show me, and all my friends had no idea it was even a thing.

The old selection method is still terrible and needs to be revamped

------
post_break
I have an iPad Pro and a Macbook Pro. Trying to force the iPad to replace the
Macbook is like trying to replace a truck with a hatch back. You can do "most"
of the things you need, but for some tasks it's a real chore and trying to
make it work just leads to frustration. My iPad gets me 80% of what I need,
but trying to grasp that last 20% ends up causing insane work arounds that
just tarnish the whole experience.

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thinkMOAR
"But PCs are still around. I’m not happy about this."

Would be nice to read why you are unhappy PCs are still around.

Though personally i don't see why one should replace the other. Their own
dimensions, weight, power inside etc, limits or enables one device to do
something the other can't. And touch is nice, but think you really need to be
able to pair a mouse to your iPad to get a desktop feeling anyway. Then again,
those are just my personal opinions about using iPad as a desktop.

~~~
ianai
For one, the constant going between mouse and keyboard forces too much context
switching. Office keyboards also tend toward un-ergonomics.

~~~
Retric
Tablets are inherently worse from an ergonomic standpoint. The only advantage
is the new horrible posture is different so it seems ok for a while.

PS: Humans need several inches of separation between their hands and where
their eyes are pointing to be comfortable for 8+ hours a day for decades.

~~~
ianai
Very true, just trying to stub-in what he may have in mind.

At a basic level, IT really hasn’t disrupted the convenience of pen and paper.
I can still do a lot more and much more quickly with pen+paper than a
computer. Even more so a whiteboard.

Also backlit screens are awful.

What are some other traditional PC drawbacks?

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mcphage
> Some of the worse experience I have is with email. Simply put, I cannot
> quickly select a large chunk of text and delete it. Selecting text on an
> iPad is infuriating. [...]

> The pain that is selecting text affects pretty much all applications where
> text is involved.

> Copy and paste is unnecessarily difficult.

I think this is the key issue. I love my iPad Pro, but deal with
text—selecting it, moving the cursor, copying, pasting, has always always
sucked. Even with a keyboard, even with the pencil and touch screen. I don't
know why this is so bad, but I agree with the author, it is. In my eyes the
pain of dealing with text is the biggest issue holding back wider tablet
usage.

~~~
FeloniousHam
Text manipulation is easily my biggest complaint with the iPad. If Apple
enabled mouse/cursor support, a good portion of the headache of using the iPad
as a general purpose computer would evaporate.

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pyrophane
Articles like this come up periodically. The big drag is that you are stuck
doing development over ssh for the most part, which is why professional
developers don’t really do this.

If your workload is more focused around “productivity” apps, you can use
email, office, etc on an iPad mostly just fine, but text
selection/manipulation becomes a problem.

~~~
DigitalJack
I don't use it as my primary, but it's great for when I have to go visit the
inlaws and don't want to bring my laptop gear. I keep a VPS specifically for
doing this sort of work.

The apple keyboard is better than nothing, but I'm not really a fan. Plus I
hate that effing emoticon key.

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wilkystyle
I love this idea in theory, but iOS is just not there yet, for me. Quoting a
previous comment of mine on the subject:

I have one major thing that holds me back from considering iOS a viable
replacement for a more traditional OS for daily computing: App and browser
tabs are seemingly (not sure what is actually happening on a technical level)
backgrounded if you switch away to a different app/safari tab. This results in
the app restarting/browser tab reloading.

Perhaps this is some sort of caching behavior, and prior apps/tabs are ejected
to make room in memory? Either way, it's very disruptive to have apps/webpages
reload when switching back.

Until I can count on basic things, like my webpage to still be there if i open
my laptop on a plane with no wifi, or my SSH session not to be logged out
simply because i switched to a different app, iOS simply cannot serve as my
main computing OS.

~~~
ricardobeat
It does seem to be related to available memory, and doesn’t happen as often on
the iPad Pro. To be fair, desktop browsers are beginning to do the same, it
makes sense to spare resources not in use.

~~~
wilkystyle
What desktop browsers have you experienced this on?

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ricardobeat
I’ve been doing the same. The Smart cover keyboard is better than I expected,
totally usable for programming.

I use Shelly as terminal app + a Linux VPS. I can login to my work’s VPN,
carry keys using ssh-agent, and even develop html/css/js locally using Coda.

App switching is incredibly fast (even alt-tab works), and I find it much
easier to spatially keep track of apps without overlapping windows. Split
screen on the 12” is amazing. Battery life is better than what any laptop can
offer, 2+ days of normal use.

My main disappointments are with external hardware: the Smart Cover actually
causes smudges in the screen and leaves a very clear straight line where the
keyboard folds. It also appears to double the total weight. The keyboard
randomly disconnects if moved, and the Pencil charging position is just
ridiculous.

~~~
brians
What do you use for ESC? Escape for vi and Meta for emacs have been my
stumbling blocks in this model.

~~~
williamstein
Use control+c instead of escape for vim.

~~~
kps
No, don't. They don't do the same thing.

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__warlord__
The device is nice and the form factor is good for some people, but I wonder
where people will draw the line in regards Apple dictating the way they use
computers, now they will be at Apple's mercy to get software on these devices
and it won't be your choice, I read people complaining about copy-paste but,
is this really the big issue here? are you willing to sacrifice freedom for
convenience?

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mozumder
The 12" iPad Pro is Apple's most amazing device. Ridiculously smooth to
operate. So fast. And a great screen and speaker.

I'm using it much more than I've used any other iPad, probably more so than a
laptop.

If it had proper XCode and a good SSH terminal, it would replace my MacBook
Pro.

As it stands, it seems Apple is trying to keep the Macs their actual pro
development platform.

~~~
goerz
For XCode, you'll have to tell Apple. But there certainly are a number of very
good SSH terminals, my favorite one being Blink

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imroot
I have two iPad Pro’s — a smaller one and the larger one (dueling personalized
gifts that couldn’t be returned). I use the larger one at home, and when I’m
walking around town or waiting for appointments or going to PT. I love using
the smaller one when I’m traveling.

For 99.999% of my use cases, having mosh-server installed on my digital ocean
server, along with blink, allows me to do what I want to do. For the other
.001% of the cases, there’s usually safari. My _only_ complaint is that it
took me far too long to get comfortable with the “internationalized keyboard”
button where the control button normally is.

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archagon
I'm willing to bet that _no_ future platform will succeed the PC unless it's
an open platform. This automatically disqualifies the iPad. If the next
bitcoin/bittorrent/app-store/web-browser-level idea can't run on your device
without corporate intervention, it can only ever be a follower, not a leader.

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scandox
Keyboards. To me a computer is a keyboard. It may happen to have a monitor
attached. That's certainly a big feature.

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mamcx
I wanna to use iPad for development (so I can walk outside home and sit
anywhere) but for the kind of development I do, I still haven't find a good
setup.

I work with python, F#, html, sqlite, postgresql (plus mnay things more.
MANY).

I will not learn VIM o Emacs. I have use both, I don't like them at all. I
will be fine with nano if it were more robust.

I could use ssh, but:

\- Need a good terminal editor, not VIM or Emacs, with good syntax highlight
and light auto-complete. \- Need to easy run/compile/build/etc. Is ok If I
need to setup the comands myself but need a way to execute them easily on the
editor.

And the most important thing is how I do sql? things like the psql are too
bare, and my sql tend to be LARGE. Exist a terminal based "ide" for sql?

\-----

I have Textastic, Pythonista, Prompt and a few others. None have the editor +
terminal and way to create macros that run on ssh. I think Coda of panic have
it, but no for the languages I need (F#, C#, etc).

\---

The other way is to run a HTML Editor (Maybe monaco of VS Code?) coupled with
a JS SSH client and customize the iPad keyboard with the extra keys. I have
tried several online IDES but none are made for this use-case!

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j45
The Galaxy Note 1 ended my use of the iPad as a tablet.

The iPad, however can't fully replace desktops until it can use a mouse.

Even being a heavy keyboard shortcut user, the mouse can't simply be
touchscreened away. There are many tasks where the precision and speed of a
mouse can't be beat, much like typing is faster than using the touchscreen
keyboard (for most)

The software is there, but I'm not sure why Apple wouldn't expose the ability
to use a mouse.

If tablet sales are plateauing/declining, maybe they can merge into laptops
with bluetooth mouse access, which will never really go away.

Unfortunately Chromebooks (today's netbooks), or Android tablets even allow
more to be done. It's a shame because iPads have so much horsepower.

The fun thing I'm looking forward to is using your iPhone/Android as the
computer itself, attached to a laptop shell/dock. Apple has filed for a patent
on this, and you can order a superbook from Sentio on the Android side, it's
pretty slick and inexpensive.

~~~
waltwalther
> Unfortunately Chromebooks (today's netbooks), or Android tablets even allow
> more to be done. It's a shame because iPads have so much horsepower.

Exactly this. So much power, but so limited. I would much rather use my ipad
pro than my android device, but the android device, which has pitiful specs
compared to the ipad pro, is just as capable as a laptop.

~~~
j45
Agreed. I'm grabbing a superbook dock from sentio so I can just use an android
phone with 4 gb of ram to power my chromebook/netbook. Their sentio os app
renders a fill android Gui and I don't have to maintain an extra laptop or
tablet setup.

I'd really rather not use android, but between tasker, mouse support, and now
the phone-laptop dock, along with creating the phablet category, android
continues to out innovate Apple.

I've had iPhones for years and can't switch back. My macbook is good for what
it does but today's pixelbook from Google might be interesting.

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jrs95
I use a 10.5" iPad Pro in place of a laptop, but I rarely do any development
on it (that's what my desktop or my company laptop is for). Personally I find
programming "on the go" to be really annoying and distracting anyways.

The portability, battery life, and LTE are huge advantages for the iPad.

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williamstein
I bought an iPad pro 10.5 + LTE in June, and after fixing a bunch of bugs in
CoCalc.com (online coding, LaTeX, and data science), I have been pretty
surprised to find myself using my iPad most of the time for backend
development (for frontend dev, there is an app called "Inspect" that is kind
of like Chrome dev tools). As the linked article says, copy paste is a big
pain point.

What I like: speed, LTE, surprisingly good keyboard, screen nice to look at,
light weight, battery life, excellent built in cameras, the new files app

What I don't like: websockets are disconnected in background tabs after about
30s, copy/paste sucks, lack of chrome dev tools, lack of a real Google Chrome
browser (it's really webkit).

(Disclaimer: I work on CoCalc.)

~~~
justherefortart
What do you use as an input device? Surely not the screen.

~~~
williamstein
I use the apple Smart keyboard (I would only use the screen in a pinch).

~~~
mmargerum
No ESC key Kinda kills emacs + ssh

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waltwalther
I have been doing a similar experiment with the 10.5 ipad pro. I work in
IT/sysadmin. I work in a mainly Windows shop, and have been leaving my laptop
behind, and taking my ipad pro on service calls across campus. My biggest
complaint is file/folder manipulation. I cant really access our network at all
(I use Jump Desktop to remote to windows machines). As a temporary workaround
I use my android phone, which seems to love browsing the network, downloading
files, and even connecting to USB devices. I really, really want my ipad pro
to be my "goto device" but its just not there yet. It may never be for me.

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brudgers
If staying within the Apple ecosystem is a requirement, this is about the only
practical way to get a portable computer with a moderately large touch screen.
If it is not, then there are many hardware options. The tradeoff of Mac for
iOS is why this is a story and the absence of a similar tradeoff is why "My
Surface Pro Experiment" would be a dog bites man headline.

I am not saying the tradeoffs here are or are not worth it. Just that the
reason it is an experiment is because of Apple's decisions regarding its
product line.

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frou_dh
Having owned a couple, I’m no longer interested in the iPad form-factor until
the devices are even thinner and are physically flexible.

A big rigid piece of glass that you have to baby does not sufficiently meld
into the world so that you can use it unceremoniously without thinking about
it. There’s still a conscious “I’m going to go on the iPad now”.

Call me when we can have 10 of them on the same desk, interchangeable, and
sling them around like office supplies. The iPad is physically still in its
awkward phase and we will be laughing at today’s form-factor in years to come.

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whipoodle
Yeah, text selection alone would probably be enough for me not to do this.
It's insanely bad on iOS, and you need to do it all the time if you write
code. Constantly.

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pram
Being able to use a mouse would solve most of these issues?

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AJRF
Can you select text using Alt + Shift + Left/Right arrow? That's the way I do
it on MacBook, but I don't have an iPad Pro keyboard.

~~~
williamstein
Yes, you can when using the iPad Pro keyboard.

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MrDosu
I never get these pieces...

I own a couple of different computing devices and they are just tools. Some
fit a certain job better then others. Why limit yourself?

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jlebrech
if you could code visually (like scratch) but with ability to also write code
then I think coding on a touchscreen will take off. there are 100s of coding
paradigms that could translate to drag and drop and for the rest you can
switch to the keyboard.

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monkmartinez
Why not just use a Chromebook if you are going to limit computing environment
intentionally?

~~~
williamstein
Some reasons that I use my iPad Pro 10.5 instead of my Chromebook pixel,
despite using a web browser most of the time:

\- the ipad pro weighs 1 pounds; the chromebook weighs about 3.5 pounds \- the
ipad pro has much better cameras \- the LTE in the ipad pro was much easier to
get working and works better for me \- my Chromebook pixel doesn't have a
tablet mode or a stylus.

Sometimes I really wish that this ipad could just run ChromeOS though...

