I Work IT in a institution with 290 employees and have had 5 switch to iPad Pro's to "replace" their laptop. I am now 5 for 5 with all asking for their laptop back.
iPadOS is nothing more than iPhoneOS renamed and the device is still too heavily crippled for desktop/laptop replacement.
In my mini test case scenario I never said a word..simply the employee asked for iPad Pro.. I just handed it to them... waited... then about 2 weeks later they asked for laptop back.
Not sure what Apple's plan here is but they continue to market this to schools and workplaces as a laptop replacement but refuse to add functionality to the OS and keep it overly crippled/restricted.
On the contrary, I have owned MacBook Pros from the first to the last 17", then again every model since the 16". I also have iPad Pro with magic keyboard and touch pad. I don't travel with the MacBook any more, as I can do anything from the iPad. But it's not just me.
I've also been CTO at mega bank and hedge funds where we've rolled these out along side laptops. I've found that after initial objections, folks tend to agree. After a month or two, white collars who are not devs generally have switched to carrying the iPads, not laptops. Then the support costs basically go to zero, which matters a good deal at scale.
Users do have to think differently. That's ROUGH. Employees will ask for their old thing back if it changes their workflow, period. (See the book "Who Moved My Cheese?")
If they just use it, they generally find out it's fine. Could even be argued the Office / Teams ecosystem is superior.
Bonus: Letting employees have TWO screens (MacBook + iPad) also gives them two retina class monitors, portable, fantastic for hoteling or remote work or work from home. Two screens are better than one, and two that go with you are amazing. The new keyboard/cursor sharing while each device runs its own apps, with copy paste and drag drop between them is even cooler. In this model, the iPad Pro can become a Teams or Slack device, for instance, while other work stays on Mac, so you just wander off to a meeting with your collaboration tools intact. Instead of picking up where you left off, you just pick up and go.
Anything in the gSuite is terrible on iPadOS. Excel is also fairly crippled. I can’t see how it’s usable at all.
Even just for emailing, GMail at least is a terrible application on iPad. For examples, cannot format anything, or view one email while writing another (that isn’t a reply).
I primarily use mine for
* Note taking
* Browsing/showing PDFs in a construction engineering setting. Nothing is faster or as flexible.
* Sketching for construction drawings
But the lack of good tabular worksheet and emails beyond quick replies pushes me back to my laptop all the time.
I gsuite good anywhere? It's not good in the browser on desktop/laptop devices, certainly.
I have noticed they cut tons of features from the iOS versions and keep you from using the site if they're installed (and maybe even if they're not? That's got to be how I ended up with them installed, I wouldn't have done it by choice), which is super annoying and makes no sense since I'm sure it's all the same webtech crap as the "real" sites, just wrapped so it's "native".
Yes? I use a Linux laptop + firefox, g suite works great even for docs that have hundreds of pages (though I do use a top of the line Lenovo P series with an i7 and 32GB of ram).
The Gmail app ate multiple gigs of ram and repeatedly crashed on my prior two Android phones. Disabling it and using an alternate mail client works much better.
>I gsuite good anywhere? It's not good in the browser on desktop/laptop devices, certainly.
Re web-tech: All iPad/iOS browsers run a low-perf version of Safari under the hood. In my experience anything Google seems sluggish on Safari. Frankly, I think that a part of this is due to FUD (Safari is not slow).
I still use FF and Safari for 99% of my browsing, but certain sites just require me to use Chrome.
Lots of people only look at data. A crippled mobile version that permit read access is good for an awful lot of people.
Let's look at pharma. They have a ton of sales reps and relatively few people in tech roles supporting them. Similarly, they have folks in scientific roles that push all software to the limits with a few people supporting them. The use cases of the sales reps are very well catered for on iPad and reps make up a lot of the user population. They present products to customers (eDetailing), have some basic data entry (CRM), might browse a range of reporting, and do some email. Email is critical, but as a sales director, that's not where you want your reps spending time. A limited experience somewhat helps just reply or move on.
I make no claims that this is sufficient for sales directors or scientific staff. It is however very well suited to some of these roles. It's also very reliable, cost effective, and easy to provision. It's unfortunate that laptops end up being so complicated in comparison for this audience.
Google seems bound and determined to make their user experience on Apple products as painful as possible, perhaps in the misguided belief that if we see how awful their products are, we'll want to switch to their native operating system.
Main effect for me has been to drop them like a steaming deuce, but not everyone has the luxury.
I disagree, I think there are 4 good GSuite apps on iPadOS: GMail, Meet, Calendar, and Drive.
With the magic floaty keyboard, even long emails feel fine on iPad.
Unfortunately, Docs, Slides & Sheets are pretty terrible, and fall far short of the desktop experience. For those apps, a Chromebook would be a much better choice. If only they made Chromebooks with trackpads as good as Apple's laptops, or even as good as the magic floaty keyboard.
I wouldn’t say gmail is good if the compose button floats on top of my inbox, a new message opens up in a modal and covers anything you’re trying to read/refer to. No format buttons.
Sheets is terrible. Cannot use the magic keyboard to shift your active cell (ie click a cell, type = and use arrow keys to find the cell you want to reference.. it just quits the cell).
Sheets is a bad UX across every class of device. My mouse supports horizontal scrolling. I can horizontal scroll in every window that requires it, because it's supported at the OS level. Sheets uses it's own control for scrolling which seemingly does not support horizontal scrolling from a mouse wheel.
Office 365 is hard for most organizations to switch from, since the overall package is a set of tools that are generally better than the Gsuite competition.
Some MSPs I work with make good money just converting businesses from Gsuite to Office 365. I don't use either platform personally or at my work, but I understand why Microsoft is eating the SaaS email & baseline office tools market.
Excel is almost guaranteed to be a terrible fit for iPad. Data import/export has always been a weak point with the iOS and the many of the use cases for Excel are data crunching. If you are pulling out the keyboard and mouse regularly then a laptop seems less awkward.
> Data import/export has always been a weak point with the iOS
I don't think this is really very true anymore, and I say that as someone who moved away from using an iPad as my main portable. I'm sure there are specific cases where that's still a problem, but now that it has a file manager, USB drive support, a full array of cloud services support, etc. etc., this is just not a big deal.
At any rate, if you're a dedicated Microsoft Office 365 user, you can be working on the iPadOS version of Excel and using the same files stored in the same cloud service (ideally OneDrive, of course, from Microsoft's point of view) pretty transparently.
I suppose this is colored by my distrust of cloud storage. Since I don't use it for the most part a lot of the "easy" solutions don't work for me. Putting my data on someone else's servers just never seemed like a great idea to me.
Thing that really kills iPad for me is the web browsing experience. I just find iOS Safari so limiting.
It's also needlessly slow (considering M1). I suspect they have some optimisations designed for memory constrained devices like iPhone tuned in the same way for iPad.
Also ad blocker support is limited.
Oh and in a lot of video calling apps, if I try and browse something in Safari while the meeting is happening, then I'll suddenly stop sending video. Though that isn't strictly a Safari issue, more a Apple holding back features from third-party developer issue.
Try 1Blocker or AdGuard Pro. And similar limits (for similar "this shouldn't run that there" reasons) just arrived for the Chromium family.
> needlessly slow
I tend to find that when I notice slowness, I have several hundred tabs open, approaching the 500 tab limit. Save all tabs to bookmarks, close all tabs, and I find it's as "snappy" as the new iOS meme. (Related? New device, no tabs? Hmmm...)
Super annoying this hasn't been resolved since introduction of cloud synced tabs.
That's incredible, thanks for sharing! Looks like it's still working on supporting some APIs (claims to currently support about 70% of Web Extensions APIs), and so far both the Firefox and Chrome NoScript extension don't appear to work for me on iOS, but that's awesome that they're working on adding support for Chrome and Firefox addons. I'll definitely keep an eye on this project.
Currently the ublock origin and dark reader I have tried with the Firefox extensions work very well, but I haven’t tried any others so it is good to know.
As it stands right now, there is essentially no windows support or support for the various browser sync plugins, but both of those are on the way. The main developer seems like a nice dude, and I’ve had a chat with him on Reddit a couple times so it is definitely a VERY active project.
The API is at the same state across all versions of Orion as far as I can tell, which means that at the point it works on your iPhone it will also work on iPad. I would guess that it will be quite soon considering even a couple of weeks ago uBlock didn't work 100% and now it is fully functional.
AdGuard Pro seems to block ads well on iOS/iPadOS. I haven't noticed the browsing experience to be any slower on my iPad Pro M1 than on my 13" Intel MBP.
I prefer Safari on iOS and macOS because it is so limiting that I assume it is helping conserve battery. With Wipr content blocker, I never see ads and it is generally pretty fast.
" I don't travel with the MacBook any more, as I can do anything from the iPad. But it's not just me."
Interesting, how long have you been iPad Pro only? At the price point of the iPad pro with a keyboard and touch-pad.. why not just buy a laptop like the MacBook Air?
Hauling around an iPad pro with a touchpad.. and an external keyboard seems less convenient than just using something like the MacBook Air. Unless I am missing something here.
4. it's a great second screen in either extend desktop or keyboard/mouse mode
> Hauling around an iPad pro with a touchpad.. and an external keyboard
No, the keyboard is the case, you have no sense of carrying a second thing. In fact, it's a magnetic dock, you USB-C charge through a port in the hinge, iPad pops on and off mag-safe style.
I am a lawyer, my boss uses an ipad pro heavily for work. He usually does not have much time to work on stuff, we mail him the contracts, documents etc., he marks them up with digital pen with his comments and sends it to us to revise. He finds it extremely productive. He can give instructions on the go, even while physically walking to a meeting room.
Prior to the ipad pro, we literally took printouts and handed it to the boss for his comments. He doesn't bother with word comments. Many older senior lawyers who learned the practice before word processors still work this way.
For jobs not requiring much typing and special software, iPad pro can be a good addition.
For replacing my work computer, oh no.
If I were provisioned an ipad pro, I'd use it to read and markup contracts, look up legislation, occasionally jump into calls and I'd be pretty happy. I could work on my commute, quickly review documents and respond in off-hours etc. instead of carrying a laptop. The IT provisioned laptop takes ages to boot up, heavier and more fragile than an ipad.
Another problem is that screen and keyboard doesn't quite replace pen and paper in my industry. I switched to Onenote from using a paper notebook during remote working and I miss taking notes on paper greatly. I frequently miss parts in contracts when I read on the screen and have to be extra careful. If I were in the office, I usually printed these out. I knew a senior lawyer who wanted us to print out every piece of related legislation so that she could work on it. She refused to read them on computer.
iPad pro could be highly beneficial for low-tech human mind driven industries such as law.
I know there is AI, I am grateful for redlines and spell checkers, but the computer screen and keyboard interface lacks in some ways.
I'm in an architecture adjacent company and often deal with PDF drawing sets. When I get a 400 page PDF with E-size pages and I'm trying to look through a whole building to find or count something in it, I send those right over to the iPad.
Now that I think about it, displaying gigantic PDFs is probably the most performance intensive thing I use it for, and the iPad Pro is very fast at it.
I’ve found PDF Viewer from PSPDFKit GmbH to perform very well, though I also sometimes use Documents by Readdle which lets me do things like reorder pages without a subscription.
Not sure if Documents is still that way for new users or only because I paid for it back before everything under the sun turned into a subscription.
Heh - I am a lawyer too. One of my old bosses didn't budge off paper even during covid. We had to email him PDFs of drafts so he could read them on his iPad and occasionally he would print them. If he had comments or revisions, he would print the draft, write his comments, and then use his iPhone as a makeshift scanner (no scanner app - he would just take pictures.)
Once in a paper file I had the only example of A4 paper I've ever seen - I'm an American. He was traveling in Europe and we had to send the draft to his hotel so they could print it and give it to him. He wrote comments on it and brought it back.
I'm not of his generation but I think I'd find an iPad pretty useless for work. I print most things I need to review so that I can read the closely and scrawl notes on them, though if I need to give the notes to someone else I put them into Word or on a PDF - but after printing it. I find it too cumbersome to review documents on the computer.
The most I could use an iPad for is a second screen to look up statutes and cases and the like, or just to read emails - but it's too limiting even for emails. In Windows I drag emails to folders to save them, and I take notes with Notepad, go look stuff up in the browser, etc. The iPad is just too limiting.
Former lawyer here. iPads make much more sense for senior partners than for associates or junior partners. They're reviewing documents and writing emails, not composing long memos or doing intensive legal research on the web. The battery life and "boot time" differential are great for senior folks who don't need a desktop environment.
I don't think this dichotomy maps onto technical roles, since there are more technical things you can't do on an iPad, but it's worth recognizing how much iPads can be a game-changer for some of the most senior people in organizations.
I talked to a lawyer in his 70s about this. He liked the way that dictating forced him to consider his thoughts in advance and speak in paragraphs. Technology has made dictation/typing pools unnecessary, but it's worth considering the ways that it might have led to benefits that we currently miss out on.
I've kind of found this with certain reporting that I used to automate. I used to be of mind that everything that can be automated should be automated. I've come to realize it's a big mistake as it limits my processing of information. Even cutting and pasting can have me thinking about something more than automating.
They are not young :). I live outside of US so technology might have come a bit later to us. And law is an industry that does not like change that much.
I'm a lawyer and I also only travel with, and can do a lot (but not all) of my work on an iPad. I probably spend more on my iPad Pro + keyboard than I would for a laptop. But the iPad is also my primary e-reader, I watch movies on it, I take note on it legal pad style, etc. Google apps all suck on iOS so I don't use them. I occasionally remote in to a desktop for this or that, but less frequently.
I mostly find that nerds who don't like iPads have opinions that are like 5 years out of date. Trackpad support is great on iPads. The Files app is all I need on a portable device for file management. I can use any USB device I ever want (though in practice, I never do).
• The Magic Keyboard acts as its own case for the iPad Pro. I wouldn't keep a bare laptop in my bag, but I would throw the iPad-Pro-in-keyboard-case in there.
• The iPad (any iPad) is better for reading books, watching movies, and all the other stuff you do more of on planes/trains/automobiles, than a laptop is. The Keyboard Case holds the iPad up in the air by about two inches (getting the screen closer to your eyeline without straining your neck), and then lets you further position the screen at strange angles (e.g. "inward") for better viewing — angles you can't really adjust a laptop to. And if you want to read a PDF, a graphic novel, or anything else designed to be viewed vertically, you can, at full size — just pick it up and turn it. (Maybe pull the case off to make it lighter, if you're going to be reading for hours.) Basically, the same logic behind bringing a purpose-designed e-reader device.
• If you have a Pencil to go with it, it can also be a reusable piece of paper with infinite "template" content pre-loaded — since you can arbitrarily mark up any PDF or image in the Files app, you can just load on a PDF of coloring-book pages, and now it's a coloring book; or grab a PDF of crossword puzzles, and now it's a crossword puzzle. No purpose-made apps required for either. (If you draw as a hobby, it can be your sketchbook, too; sadly, I'm no artist.) In other words, bringing an iPad also replaces packing those dimestore "activity books", and/or a notebook + actual pencil.
• iPads (or really any convertable / 2-in-1, where you can fold away the angled keyboard part of the computer) are great for showing people the stuff you do / giving people demos — which is something you might be doing a lot at conferences, if that's why you travel. This is a pretty unique use-case; tablets themselves are really "the thing" for this. They maybe replaced... handing out brochures? Having a glossy explainer book printed, and then packing that? Bringing a portable projector + slides?
• Kind of like the recent revival of "intentional dumbphones" that encourage "unplugging", the iPad is designed in a way that still allows for productive work, but makes it less fluid. I can SSH into prod from an iPad, but I don't want to do it for a minute longer than I have to. If you're travelling on vacation, this could keep you focused on relaxing, in a way you might not be if you have a laptop along, tempting you to spend eight hours ignoring your wife and kids to squeeze out that new feature that popped into your head.
Notice that none of those are benefits of the iPad Pro specifically. I don't think that, for at least my use case, there's really much I'd get from an "iPad Pro with Keyboard Case" over an "iPad Air with Keyboard Case." Mind you, I have an iPad Pro... but I bought it because I had the money, and wanted the beautiful color-calibrated display; not because the Air wouldn't have suited my use-case just fine. (Though, when I bought it — 2019 — they weren't yet selling the Keyboard Case for the Air.)
Usually it's still lighter. When I have back problems I will pick up the iPad and take it with me rather than my MacBook Pro. It has the added bonus of being easier to read pdfs and annotate them while traveling too (it's not perfect. If I'm gong to be digging around my email archives I prefer to do that on a Mac but that's partly the way our company limits Outlook on iPads.
> biggest drawback of iPad OS is lack of windows, to drag around
First thing productivity users do to a Win or Mac laptop is install a windows manager so they don't drag windows around.
iPad Pro in its landscape dock provides split screen with adjustable ratio, as well as left and right floats, along with swipe between desktops, as well as push to view and pick a diff app. One app wide, one app narrow, tends to put the narrow app in iPhone UI, which is pretty ideal, better than desktop where windows refuse to get narrow.
You can drive iPad with a magic touch pad beautifully. I suspect this workflow management is behind some of the gesture convergence in Ventura and iOS 16.
> First thing productivity users do to a Win or Mac laptop is install a windows manager so they don't drag windows around.
Interesting point of view, but I must either live in a parallel universe or know no "productivity users" (whatever that is supposed to mean) then. Windows' window management features cut it for 99.9% of Windows users, and the rest use PowerToys Fancy Zones or something of that sort.
IMO productivity users are mostly lemmings. MacOS has plenty of good tooling built in to manage windows and desktop environments. A tiling window manager makes a lot of sense with cli based tools but for gui based tools imo becomes annoying fast. Especially when most websites these days will serve you a mobile website depending on the dimensions of your viewport.
I generally put terminals and my note taking app towards the left (smaller windows), my IDEs in the middle (enough for split pane editing when needed), and my browsers on the right, where they are in square / portrait aspect ratio more suited to reading.
> First thing productivity users do to a Win or Mac laptop is install a windows manager so they don't drag windows around.
Well... OK. I'm clearly not a "productivity user".
I'll prefer better optimized workflows on my phone and flexibility and speed of a full sized keyboard with a mouse. Every few years I fall into this "this looks cool, lets try" iPad thing - to only go back to a mouse.
The fact that you can do all your work on an iPad as well as you could do it on a Laptop may say more about your work than the devices. I do not mean this in an insulting way, but perhaps your work is so disconnected from technology or the creative process that you could do it, no matter the device you're using?
I cannot imagine doing my job on on iPad, it's way too limited. can you open more than one google doc at a time yet? run desktop extensions on the web? open complex sheets/excel files? I have no idea what job other than sending emails and being on video calls all day could work on an ipad.
You absolutely can't open complex sheets on the ipad still, I just tried a few and they're not functional. how do you open more than one doc natively? I'm still seeing online that it's not supported (using the browser doesn't count). And yeah, none of the extensions I use have a special iOS equivalent.
Try thinking outside your specific needs. The raw filesystem is an antiquated interface that, honestly, a vast majority of people do not need. In fact, if you observe average computer users, the filesystem is what really impedes their ability to get things done. In fact, the filesystem introduces a huge complexity when the application does not know where its files exist. Did the document you downloaded in the Downloads folder? The Desktop? Documents? Or is it in the last folder you downloaded? Users want to get things done, not hunt for files. The iPad paradigm solves a lot of regular user issues. It was never meant for "power programming users". The car vs. truck analogy.
Not really. It has often been tried to find something better, but there really isn't. It works decently on Apple because they set certain constraints and standards. But overall it is like saying a table of contents in books is antiquated. You don't need it for belles lettres, sure. The analogy doesn't fit too well, but there a similarities.
It is actually the most simple way to present structured information. It is not optimal, but decently approaches it. This is a reason why it is so successful and to my experience even normal users don't have too much trouble with it. Alternatives obfuscate this for everyone.
It is an insufficient abstraction because it gives you less power as a user. Same with everything on iOS. This sadly creeps into MacOS too.
If a table of contents it is a good analogy depends on what you define as content. For me the content is all the files.
A generic way to view data content is a file explorer that lets you explore the file system. Some abstractions can be here too, but it shouldn't be too much and certainly not to a degree like iOS. I can understand why it is there, it is a consumer device primarily.
If you have more than 10 documents, how do you organize them by topic? Into a new folder? Thought as much...
I think the arguments is non-developers don't really need access to it.
You aren't configuring anything or doing anything that needs access to the file system.
You are simply interacting with documents and online systems/applications that you can do the same as on a laptop. Add the greater mobility and the iPad pro really is a better device for most people.
However, as another commenter mentioned, these individuals who SHOULD really benefit from using an iPad primarily also are the group that struggle greatly with the changes to their overall workflow (see Who Moved My Cheese).
Thats kind of a poor argument that just self fulfils itself. If we mask things like the filesystem and the actual shell, then of course no one will really need to use it. If we unmask these things, maybe paradigms will shift and they will themselves use these things.
IMO so few people know how to code because we have been abstracting it for years, not because its tough to do or anything like that. Plenty of things people do are just as challenging as coding. You just need exposure to coding is all, its easy to write bash or python. Anyone could do it in a week. Hard to get that exposure when a company decides it won't be possible for you, and its a slap in the face considering these features are there in the device but you have to jailbreak the damn thing and violate your warranty to get at them.
If you are not the most technologically inclined person, its really the company's marketing that is choosing the product rather than you. Its true with any product you lack relevant knowledge in, marketing becomes the dominant factor of choice beyond tooling that you don't fully yet understand. I think what is especially frustrating in this case, is that these capabilities are already there built into the device, they are just not exposed unless you jailbreak the device.
It allows access to a filesystem, just not the root filesystem.
You can do all the basic copy/cut/paste ops and create whatever folder structure you want. Don't expect to edit system files though. People spend lots of time looking for vulnerabilities to achieve that.
The iOS file system is very frustrating. By default, applications can only access individual files in their own sandbox, and if you want to point an application to a folder of media, you can't—it's simply not possible, or if it is it's so burdensome that it's simply not practical. Least of all for images, which for some reason are not accessible from the Files application and have to be manually exported from the photo gallery app, and music, which is not accessible at all: you need to clumsily use Apple's proprietary sync program on an actual computer.
In contrast, Android also doesn't let you access the root file system, but the user folder is yours to do whatever the hell you want with, and if you want to give your audiobook or music app to your folder of mp3 files that you've collected over the years, you can.
why do you need that for meaningful work? anyhow, github codespaces is usable on the ipad. i've done billable hours while traveling on my ipad, as long as the internet is good.
To be fair, apple devices have airdrop for transferring files, which works much more seemlessly than any kind of network drives I've ever used (and I'm using one right now).
The interface exposed is just not mounting a remote file system.
If it was a real computer with a 'real OS', I'd be able to easily set up network shares and transfer files over wifi, without even plugging a cable in.
I've been using real computers with real OSes for a very, very long time, and when someone says "hey, could you send that file to me," I confess my first thought is not, "Why, sure! Let me just configure a network share that you can mount on your system to do it, because that is obviously the easiest possible way I have at my disposal!"
Ran a similar play recently and found a similar result.
Can’t understate how much people want the nice/fancy/pro device too. It’s hard to lure people off MBPs to generic PC laptops or chromebooks but an iPad Pro + magic keyboard is shiny enough.
Not just lower support cost, but much higher security bar at a lower cost too. Having been at the same fund, and other big banks, that’s an important consideration. Strong MDM, yubikey support if you want it, decent app sandboxing, etc. gives a lot of security control in a nicer manner than on a desktop OS.
Finally, I think the Office/GSuite issue depends so much on usecase and who’s using which bits of each suite. Gmail is so much nicer than Outlook, but GDrive horrible organizationally compared to OneDrive, while GDocs collab beats O365, etc.
I'm curious about the workflow for these employees... How do your staff actually get things done? Are they in excel/word/email all day long? Custom apps?
In dev/data science there are some okay cloud providers (gitpod, etc) that work resonably well on iPad in a pinch but I can't see moving dev full time to one.
This isn't contrary. Quite the opposite. None of the cases you present are iPad only. They are iPad alongside laptops. They might find cases where the iPad is fine, but none are iPad only.
And your "bonus" is basically an iPad Pro as a $1000+ chat device.
Now, if you mean that they added an iPad Pro, and eventually stopped ever using their laptop, that's a different story, but that's not what you said in your comment.
There are plenty of depts with a good iPad use case, typically those with very standard workflows and few apps.
Think about HR who just need Zoom/Meet/WebEx, Greenhouse (or whatever ATS), and email+calendars.
Office admin, customer support, etc. all have simple needs that benefit from a really nice, but easily controlled and secured device.
Also, don’t underestimate how much “the Spotify app works” will entice people too.
Yeah, you won’t convert all the quants, engineers, etc but they aren’t the target. That said, in my experience they love the iPad as a second screen that’s very portable, in contrast to the high powered very unportable workstation.
The biggest factor for iPad adoption is really: “is there an app”. Particularly with SaaS tools there’s often a decent which lends itself to iPad usage.
Yeah this sounds ridiculous. I work at a large asset manager which is constantly upgrading tech after being hamstrung on the budget for many many years. Everyone gets an iPad if you ask for it and a lot of folks who travel need it for making notes in conferences etc. I don’t have a traveling job but I could still get one but it is useless for almost anything beyond doodling. I generally take meetings from my desk so I don’t even use a notebook in most cases and just type it up on my laptop. I did get a separate desktop because I have dev work that requires a lot of compute power from time to time but I manage with those two devices and have never felt anything lacking.
I know people who are laptop power users who are fine traveling with just a tablet and an external keyboard. (They still use a laptop when they're not traveling.)
Good for them but I've never been able to make it work for me. I'll just carry the extra weight. But, to your point, it's also true that, beyond getting an external keyboard, I've never really committed to making a tablet work for me as my only travel device (other than a phone).
IMO companies should give their employees one e-ink screen instead to save their eyes. Most office-style work can be done well on those screens and they are much healthier. I now barely use paper as I use an A4 Onyx tablet with e-ink screen and do most of my notes there. It's so much better than using iPad for that.
My concern with anything e-ink is display latency -- if the display isn't updating at a fast-enough clip, I don't think note-taking would be an enjoyable experience.
> Instead of picking up where you left off, you just pick up and go.
Completely lost me. You don't logout, close all your windows, and so on, when you undock/unplug and go mobile. I never have a problem picking up and going with my laptop, then coming back to my desk right how I left it. And the 27" monitors (32" also common here) are far, far better for productivity and dev work than a 13" ipad HDR screen. iPad is a poor choice for a 2nd screen.
You can even create a separate workspace for when you detach. I don't do that myself but plenty of my colleagues do. (If you don't do that then sometimes a window re-homes itself if you resize or move it while undocked, thinking that is its new home.)
You might not need anything else if you only do some presentation work, data display or write some mails.
It also shines for people that like to write non-digitally. Awesome to draw a quick sketch. But for anything else? Not really a working device. It seems to convince management because Apple is shiny.
This isn't some topic about thinking differently, this is a topic of being restricted, which frankly iOS (before rebranding) simply does to you. Maybe you can map all your workflows to some iOS tool, but I assure you that a notebook is still more powerful. The two monitors might indeed be an advantage though and I hate any form of hoteling and luckily don't do that too often.
>> Then the support costs basically go to zero, which matters a good deal at scale.
Genuine question - what is the biggest time sink/cost for support on laptops? Put another way, exactly why do support costs drop so much with the ipads?
I remember a project in the early 00s at a place I was working. They were rolling out Windows tablets to installation engineers[1].
The justification was to reduce breakages to the screen and hinge of laptops[2]. It sounds daft but apparently it was not uncommon for people to leave their van keys on the keyboard and then shut the lid on them.
By switching to tablets they hoped to get rid of that failure mode.
I imagine that's quite specific but just having less moving parts will increase reliability in a large organisation. A keyboard on a ThinkPad might be easy to change if it fails but a keyboard an iPad will be even easier as it's not attached permanently.
1. In this particular case that means people in hard hats and high viz going up telephone poles and into holes in the ground all day.
2. Standard issue at the time was Panasonic ToughBooks.
I think for me a major bottleneck of using iPad as laptop is that the screen is still gonna be on heavier compared to keyboard, and the whole combo doesn't feel as solid and sturdy as a good laptop does. iPad feel more physically free in some ways (you can just use screen etc ...), and physically restrictive in others (doesn't feel like one big sturdy unit with keyboard).
That all aside, as an engineer it's too restrictive and less fun. I'm sure it can get a lot of other non-programming workflows done quite well though.
I'm not questioning the productivity but the feel of it, if you care about that. It always feels natural to me when weight distribution is heavier towards the keyboard.
I can't speak for Surface Laptop, which I think had a bulky keyboard, but the the normal ones (I think was called Pro), always felt weird. Obviously this all is personal choice.
I think the overall point is, iPad is nice replacement only if you are not going to be using keyboard much.
I was referring to the Surface Pro. Forgot that the laptop even existed. A better keyboard for the Pro would be welcome but not a deal breaker.
The cantilever design iPad keyboards are indeed very heavy to counter the tablet weight. Which brings the total weight of an iPad with the keyboard to almost MB Air weights.
The iPad is really crippled by software. Undoubtedly they cannibalise their own sales by allowing MacOS to run on iPads. But they have purposely killed off their own product categories before. Having that dual mode device is great.
Basically, they're an appliance, and hard for a user to screw up.
Of course it's not actually zero.
There's always someone whose finger can't poke things that will ask where the mouse is, or why this stupid iPad doesn't run Lotus 1,2,3 -- and you have to respect their challenges. Or of course (rare) hardware faults, and you have to provision a new one.
But the appliance-ness of it makes it a support dream.
I thought with an iPad you simply can't manage it remotely. If you can, I want to know, because my father-in-law keeps screwing up his iPad and I can't fix it without shipping it back and forth.
Splashtop will let you view an ipad's screen. It's fiddly to start (remote user has to allow access, enable broadcasting, etc every time, and this is a non-trivial step to get over), but it does work, in the sense that seeing the screen is faster than just guessing what is going on as your panicked user pokes randomly at things no matter what you say, leaving you with no context.
It is functional enough to be useful, if the other person on the line is good at following instructions.
Unless you are a power user who manages to overload it so severely it becomes unusable (not hard to do, if you’re a certain type of power user - unfortunately), it’s basically just a big iphone you can attach a keyboard too.
Much harder to actually break or make unusable than the typical 5-10 yr old windows laptop from the lowest bidder most people interact with.
I used the iPad Pro for about 2 years for nothing but productivity apps and it was overall pretty great.
It wasn't without issue though, here's what I ran into:
1. I didn't run any dev tools on the iPad. That's insane. I used a laptop running macOS for that.
2. Google Docs updates would always ship with weird bugs, like if I'm editing a cell in a Google Sheet and hit space, the space wouldn't insert.
3. There's loads of issues with drag and drop in most apps. Dragging and dropping a picture from Photos into a document is the most common flow which works in some apps, but not in others.
The plus sides:
1. The built-in cellular connection is amazing. I wish MacBook Airs would ship with built-in cellular.
2. The Apple Pencil (2nd gen) is great if you design software or UX.
I’ve been using Safari almost exclusively for 2 years with no problems. I did prefer Chrome for web page development, but I’m not doing that right now.
> but refuse to add functionality to the OS and keep it overly crippled/restricted
What would the point of "adding functionality to the OS" be? If they wanted to put macOS on iPads, they'd just put macOS on iPads.
My understanding at Apple's strategy here is that they're simultaneously exploring two different GUI paradigms — almost pitting them against one-another to see which wins (or, if you like, making a hedged bet):
• macOS, for building "Unix pipeline-like" workflows where you point different programs-as-tools at the same document or take one program's output as another's input. Apple encourages macOS developers to make this kind of app.
• iPadOS, for building "all-in-one silo" workflows (think: Photoshop, Garage Band, XCode), where the developer intends to solve fully for a use-case, such that people with that use-case can get by using only their app. In these cases, rather than interacting with other apps, a siloed app will embed whatever other accessory workflows a user might need, either directly (e.g. XCode embedding a terminal console) or through plugins (Photoshop plugins, Garage Band VST support.) The user might use other apps at the same time as this app, but not in a way where the apps are sharing data or interacting in any way; rather merely using each app to "do what it does" — e.g. referencing a design diagram in Miro while implementing that design in XCode, and writing down reminders in some reminders app. (Thus, the iPadOS 16's Stage Manager, which assumes you want several apps on screen at once, but doesn't implement drag-and-drop between apps or any other kind of useful inter-app interaction.)
As a user, as long as each user-story you have has been perfectly addressed by some particular siloed iPadOS app, then iPadOS should work for you. (And there are a lot of people whose user-stories have all been perfectly addressed by these siloed iPadOS apps — mostly, people with boring, predictable, traditional workflows. Novelists; illustrators; business executives; possibly salespeople.)
However, if your workflow is niche or "constantly reinventing itself" enough that nobody's ever going to make a siloed app specifically for your needs, and so you expect to get things done by throwing files between various different tools all day — then iPadOS is never going to work for you. You need a desktop OS designed around that kind of thing.
Well, MacOS won. Silos don't work, and they especially don't work when Apple controls the means of distribution single-handedly. MacOS has clutched onto a shred of relevance by letting the user install package managers, download software from the web, run software compilers, and so much more. There is not a future where iPadOS "wins" and MacOS is slayed in ritual combat, or something. It's obviously not a contest, and even by your own admission the separation of these OSes is mostly arbitrary. Apple knows they're gimping the iPad, they're just expecting other people to not care.
Everyone would be happy if Apple focused more on perfecting the iPad's hardware instead of pushing iPadOS to the brink. An iPad with options to run MacOS, iPadOS or Linux would be the knockout product-of-the-decade for Apple IMO. Judging by the design of Monterey, I think iPad/Mac convergence seems fairly likely.
I don't think we would see full convergence. Apple does a decent job at having classes of devices. What I could see is, the top of the line iPad Pro converging with the Macbook Air. The regular iPad, minis, etc will probably stay with a relatively locked down iPadOS. You want an "entry level" Apple laptop, you get an iPad Pro. But if your work flow requires more, than you go with a Macbook Pro, iMac, or Studio.
> There is not a future where iPadOS "wins" and MacOS is slayed in ritual combat, or something.
Well, no, it's not about the Operating Systems; it's about the UI paradigms themselves.
I believe that Apple is worried that the desktop WIMP UI itself is going to be disrupted and fade into irrelevance due to 1. "do everything on the web" devices like Chromebooks, and 2. VR/AR productivity-workflow paradigms that are yet to be formalized; and so they're trying to find a successor to the WIMP UI, one that will still be relevant in 2040, even if/when the WIMP UI dies.
The distinction between iPads and Macs isn't arbitrary, insofar as iPads don't require a keyboard, and Macs do. iPadOS (and iOS) apps have to be designed under the assumption that a keyboard is optional; and that really changes things about how an app can work. You can port apps designed for keyboardless tablets to macOS just fine (and as of the M1 you don't even have to, you can just install them); but fully-featured macOS apps can't just be thrown onto a keyboardless touchscreen. (And you can't say "well, you can't install 'keyboard required' apps if you don't have the keyboard", either; the OS has no idea if the user owns a keyboard but just hasn't bothered docking it.)
You are accidentally correct in the other direction, though — that there's no reason you couldn't run iPadOS as well as macOS on a theoretical "touchscreen Mac" (which would be a different thing than an iPad, precisely because the keyboard would be welded onto it, and so apps could guarantee its presence/require you to use it.) The reason that Macs don't have touchscreens, AFAICT, is because Apple wants to use the iPad — along with everyone who buys one, and every developer who signs on to develop apps for one — as an isolated laboratory to run this "successor to WIMP UI paradigm" experiment. They don't want to "dilute" that experiment by allowing those users and developers to get the advantages of the iPad from any of their other products — because then those users and developers wouldn't be incentivized to use the iPad, and thereby to give them the experimental data they need.
Consider: why didn't Facebook just merge Instagram and WhatsApp into features of Facebook Messenger? And why is it still considered a huge mistake that Twitter killed Vine after acquiring it? Because, like the iPad, these alternate experiences — despite being owned by the same old bigcorp that serves you the traditional experience — are both innovation laboratories, the learnings of which can be folded back into the regular app; and also hedged bets against the market failure of the old-school experience. Vine could have been TikTok if it had been allowed to grow for a few more years. What could the iPad's UI paradigm be if allowed to grow for a few more years?
> What could the iPad's UI paradigm be if allowed to grow for a few more years?
Well, we asked ourselves that at the launch of the iPad. At the time it was basically a reading/web browsing tablet (in other words, revolutionary). But people had grander visions, like running DAWs on it and porting Photoshop and developing software. All of these things are not hardware-limited; their exclusion entirely boils down to arbitrary software decisions made by Apple.
So, we waited. We let it grow for more than a decade. What we have today is just a bigger version of iOS, which is a reflection of Apple's refusal to upset a paradigm they directly profit off of. They're genuinely incapable of disrupting the computing market, because they're the ones abusing the market the hardest.
My only hope is that legislation steps in to stop all this bullshit. Your customers shouldn't be treated like guinea pigs, and they should have the authority to install whatever they want on the hardware they own. If Apple can't design a product that respects those two simple principles, then they're going to have a hard time courting modern-day pros that use Macbooks and Wintel machines.
We’re not moving to the web totally unless the web recreates there UI features we already get on desktop. I have to juggle a half dozen apps at a time no matter how much I automate.
VR/AR makes people feel sick and are fundamentally uncomfortable in a way a screen not strapped to your face isn’t.
Do you actually have issues attaching a pdf to email on iOS?
There are plenty of apps to upload stuff to FTP. If this was an actual thing you used with any regularity, you'd have something installed already if files isn't connecting for you.
No. And to be clear, it depends where the pdf is : if it's inside another app, like adobe scan, you can't unless you share it from the other app and retype your mail. If it's already in "Files", then you are lucky and some apps -like gmail- allow you to pick from "Files".
If you wish for Adobe Scan to store the scan in "Files" automatically, well, you can't. You have to "share" them individually FROM THE APP to "Files".
And I think you will understand, now : this is the same shit show when trying to upload something via FTP. Like family photos.
The UX is stupid. The workflow is abysmal. The discovery is inexistant. The teams responsible for this at Apple don't care, as it's been like this for _years_.
What else are you going to use an iPad for, except for editing family photos and annotating pdfs ?
I don't even understand the advantage of an iPad for non-drawing work. It's just a worse laptop with a too-small keyboard that can fall off and a square screen so it's not good to watch video on and an OS that doesn't do anything well. But Mac laptops are amazing, run all the same software, and don't have any of these problems.
I can't adapt to the workflow on an iPad either, and I have tried. I have really tried. However, I have seen other that have. To them the iPad is easy and macOS is overly complicated.
I am not sure if general computing is changing or there are now two branches, but I have watched other people do things on iPads that I consider impossible. Even simple things, like working in Excel, I find challenging on an iPad. But when I watch someone else who sort of "grew up" on iOS work in Excel on an iPad they are like some kind of wizard. I have found myself more than once now asking someone, "How did you do that?" feelsbadman.jpg
I think a lot comes down to muscle memory and shortcuts. While I know many/most of the shortcuts on iPadOS they are not automatic for me the way they are on macOS. I often have to think, "Wait… how do I do this on the iPad again," for even simple things. I even find drawing applications unintuitive. In the Adobe suite everything is explicit. In Procreate everything is unlabeled. This is even true in consumer applications, like Facebook vs Snapchat. Pinch here, tap there. Swipe from one of the four sides to reveal some function that is completely hidden. But for some people this is intuitive. There is an additional layer (or two) of UI abstraction in iOS/iPadOS that I have not internalized.
There definitely ARE some things you can't do on an iPad, but that list is actually shorter than you might think. There are a lot of things that you can do, they are just done differently… and in a way that, at least for me, seems to take a lot more work. But for others they are like, "Eww, why do I have to look for an icon and move the cursor over to it when I can just…" and then they proceed to input what is essentially sign language into the screen while holding down a modifier key.
I have an iPad Pro M1 11" with the Magic Keyboard.
It doesn't fall off or detach unexpectedly at all. And the keyboard size is close enough to "normal" that I don't notice for normal typing. The only thing I miss is a dedicated ESC key.
All that said, it only replaced my personal laptop. I continue to use a 13" MBP at work.
For personal use… I like the size, it’s a bit more portable than a 13” laptop (0.5lb lighter with Magic Keyboard, 2.7lb lighter on its own), smaller footprint). It does everything I need (surfing, streaming, email, FaceTime).
Would I be happy with a 13” MBA as my personal device? Sure. I basically flipped a coin - the iPad won because shiny new thing.
For work, inability to run Docker/VMs and install VSCode is a deal breaker.
Work is not always about content creation, some people work mostly by consuming content (reading websites, browsing photos, selecting movie clips, navigating PDFs, or something else) and iPad is great for consuming content.
For me iPad is better at these tasks i.e. at tasks about consuming content.
I guess mostly because of its form factor (I can sit on a couch, no need to keep anything on my lap, I can adjust viewing positions easily) and the touchscreen input (to me it’s more immediate than working with the pointer).
It’s subtle; obviously you can sit with a laptop on a couch too, and touchpad can be intuitive as well. Still, for me it adds up to iPad’s UX being more approachable, more hands on, and more natural.
Well I can use the exact same apps on the Mac to do all of those things, so there is functional parity. But you get the advantage of a more precise pointing device, keyboard, and an OS that lets me easily have multiple things open at once. Video is certainly better to watch on a Mac, since it's got the correctly shaped screen and doesn't fall over when you set it down.
> In my mini test case scenario I never said a word..simply the employee asked for iPad Pro.. I just handed it to them... waited... then about 2 weeks later they asked for laptop back.
If you work in IT with hundreds of staff members, why would you let them pick their own devices with zero guidance? This seems like a recipe for disaster no matter which product is picked. Do you let them do this with laptops / printers / operating systems / etc.?
Nope there are only three computer models to choose from and that we support. The iPad Pro was added as a 4th option based on a higher admin recommendation (not in IT ). However we are now back to supporting 3 models.
My daughter is 16 and has used an iPad for school for many years. Latptops are foreign to her. Same for her cohort. They are the next generation of adults and have replaced desktops and laptops with iPads and iPhones.
That is scary to me, an entire generation growing up within the walled garden and perceiving only Apple's products as what is possible for computers to accomplish. These computers are confining, as much as their constriction liberates the user in its simplicity, it is a real constriction. To me, that's exactly what the FLOSS movement hoped to avoid, and failed to do so by advocating for a purist f/open stance rather than winning smaller battles with open source at least staying in the war for market share.
Not just the walled garden. iPads are simply less capable as productivity devices than a laptop is.
Right now, for instance, I have this page open in a web browser, which has youtube playing in one tab, twitter in another, and this in yet another. I also have an iPhone simulator running behind this browser, a terminal window tail -f ing a logfile, and vscode in another window.
All of this stuff is open at the same time. I can hear audio from all of it, access all of it, see all of it, all at the same time. This is not possible on an iPad.
When was the last time you used iPadOS? It can run multiple programs, and can display two side-by-side just fine. Yeah that means it's a little clunky if you need to switch between three or more apps, but it's not like it can't have apps in the background when you can't see them. (Plus, no need to simulate anything, you're on a real iOS device.) There's still no Xcode for iOS, though there is Swift Playgrounds if you're an iOS developer, and VScode still hasn't made it to the App store, but it's got a keyboard and a mouse so if you squint a little, it's fine for a large segment of users.
Sure there are limitations; you can't hit F12 and drop into developer tools in Chrome, plus iOS Chrome is just reskinned Safari anyway. Oh and the sound thing. I'm not saying a full laptop doesn't have more, but the lost capabilities simply aren't showstoppers for everyone, especially if you're not a developer. In fact, because they can have build in cell-modems and macbook air's don't, combined with the fact that there are decent SSH clients, it's actually a better device for some.
Right, but some people do. And the people who do, used to be people who don't. And those people became people who do because it was possible. It is a bit worrying to me that so many people will be growing up with devices with such a low "skill ceiling"; devices which don't let your interest in technology bloom but rather restrict what can be imagined.
> And the people who do, used to be people who don't.
Yep. Walled gardens kill curiosity.
Curiosity is what got me into this industry, way before I knew it could be a career. Playing around, messing with files that ran my games, making web forums and learning to change how they look.
There is also very little digital knowledge for them to gain as they already handle their phones better than their parents. As a technically aligned kid I would have hated an iPad. Well, I still do...
My son, 14, uses a Chrombook instead. I can compare both. Honestly, he hates it. Limited yet still expensive. He would much rather have a Windows or Mac laptop instead. The school prefers Chrombooks over Windows - easier to manage.
It honestly just needs virtualization. They don't care about evolving the product because they are mortified of cannibalizing a revenue stream in an official way.
Only nerds and IT would bother with virtualization and they'd net a new sale.
I've been eyeing an iPad Pro, but it's just a colossal waste as it trends strongly toward only consumption, which is frankly a poor purchase.
Programming on the iPad was OK, in the sense that Blink Shell is a better ssh client than PuTTY, and I don't want to carry my desktop around with me. Eventually I switched back to a Linux 2-in-1 laptop -- it is nice to be able to run GUI applications locally, but it is nowhere near as good a tablet as an iPad despite whatever tweaking I try...
What kills it for me are the apps where you can't copy a single word. e.g. Apple's own Messages app, you're forced to copy the whole message.
Same for the spell checker. For some reason I have ridiculous trouble triggering it in certain apps. I can see the mistake underlined in red but I really struggle to get trigger the correction popup instead of the "copy, lookup, etc" popup.
Maybe it's just me but I don't think I could consider an iPad as laptop replacements without some basic changes to iPadOS.
This one is ridiculous. On Reddit I always want to quote part of a message or copy a phrase to translate it, and it’s literally impossible to do. You have to copy the whole message, paste it in a text editor or in Notes, and finally copy what you actually wanted to copy.
By design it is never going to be able to replace a "laptop" running desktop OS. If the workplace is not designed to work with iPad, then I doubt anyone really can replace even a MacBook with iPad.
Your "mini test" is invalid because they are allowed to choose, ie intermixing all sort of OSes together. In that case it is very likely any workflow the iPad excels at are not used in the workplace, and vice versa that anyone else' workflow is really traditional (as simple as depending on the file system a lot) that doesn't play well with iPad.
When your mini test doesn't agree with how successful it is (for business to deploy iPad), it just means your mini test is nowhere near the norm.
Eg you mentioned school, that's the best case for the iPad to shine, because everyone are mandated to use iPad, and the IT would have already figure out how to perform all needed tasks. (And bonus is that the students are a blank state with no prior bias on how to do a certain thing.)
I can't speak to how Apple attempts to make deals with schools and workplaces, but their normal consumer marketing seems to pretty clearly highlight the differences between a MacBook and an iPad. If anything they seem to go out of their way to maintain significant differences in the two operating systems (which, ironically, is also a very popular complaint in tech circles).
Kids who don’t know better might become accustomed to it and, unless they are power users or interested to become that, they might prefer to scrape by with the iPad.
There is pretty strong evidence that people aren’t great at using full fledged operating systems and feel much more comfortable on a slate with a dumbed down UI
You’re right. Ironically my “dumbed down” description was a little too dumbed down itself. I agree though, there are cases where a tablet is actually a better tool too.
I suppose the problem is that they rarely present us with opportunities or necessity to dig deeper, learn more, and become adept at working with and within the operating system.
I could be wrong, too. The truth is I only use an iPad once every couple of weeks for 30 to 90 minutes. My point of view here could be too limited to be accurate, and I’m totally glossing over non-Apple devices.
I would not say that “people aren’t great at using full fledged operating systems” but that fully fledged operating systems aren’t great at accommodating people.
I think it goes both ways, but I agree, we’re mostly bad at making software work well for human beings.
I do think people have individual limitations though, and eventually complexity becomes exceedingly difficult to hide being a well designed user interface. That’s not their fault though, and I worry that we don’t consider this often enough as we race towards higher technology. We’re definitely leaving people behind.
Apple didn’t listen. They had to make a low cost plastic version of the ipad to survive education.
The chromebook is far cheaper and far more functional.
Kids throw devices like crazy and it turns out that having a glass-only ipad is more expensive (spending $100 on a case that successfully helps it survive is one expensive solution though!).
Note that all this is coming from a huge iPad fan that has used it from day 1 (and I am typing this on my ipad pro!).
I don't think Apple is marketing it as heavily as you think at replacing Workplace laptops, but moreso consumer laptops. iPad is a delightfully simple device for consuming any kind of media, editing photos and videos, light to medium gaming, and doing little creative things.
Without a clear description of what these employees were using their iPads for, it's impossible for anyone else to use this info to determine if their scenario fits yours.
Your ability to use iPad full-time depends heavily on the type of work you do.
Execs and task oriented workers are great iPad use cases. In a global org I’m familiar with, they run about 15k iPads, about 5-10% of the IT engaged headcount. Senior execs in large orgs in particular are ideal in the iPad environment.
For schools, I think the iPad sweet spot is grade K-4 for dedicated devices; 4-8 is Chrome and 8+ can be Mac/Chrome/PC. For shared or purpose dedicated devices, iPads fit every level.
Lots of other use case are limited by legacy or enterprise software. Police patrol car, medical point of service and point of sale are examples of use cases where iPads would be the ideal solution, but for the existing software.
Is everything they do web-based? Or did they just not know that it won't run any desktop software and that even if there is an app-store version it's usually cut down to half the features of the desktop version?
I can attest to this, I worked in IT back in 2011 at a school where teachers loved the idea of iPad's over their clunky laptops.
However, in time, they all needed their laptops back and either gave the iPad back or worked 50/50 across both devices.
I have no doubt that today the iPad is more useful for students and teachers, but if you don't have a defined workflow that easily allows for the use of iPads teachers won't use them. We're all too familiar with the way in which Windows works and it integrates well with the networks companies use.
I use the ipad for reading music scores but would never replace it with a laptop. M1 and M2 is overkill for a consumption device that doesn't have a real file system accessible to the user.
We have over 3000 employees with Apple equipment as their primary device, and probably 200 of them are iPad Pro only.
They do serve different niches than laptops, but with a keyboard case in an Office 365 environment, they can be full office/productivity replacements for anyone who prioritizes light travel over running local software.
Either-or obviously desktop. But why either-or not both and an iphone as well. The form factor is so different. And if you develop with lots of internet and book/pdf to reference.
You can ask me to choose TV or ipad or even in reading novel kindle or … obviously not job setting but it is just different tools.
It's a great consumption device though - ever since Google stopped paying attention to the tablet space we have an iPad 9.7 that lays in the kitchen and all my family members only touch it for watching Netflix or YouTube.
Even for browsing it feels very slow compared to Surface tablet or even Firefox on M1 MBP now a days.
Because web apps can actually opens up the flexibility of a classical computer system again. For strategic purposes Apples support here is minimal.
Still not optimal, but certainly far better for education, not only because of the price and because you don't make yourself dependent on a single manufacturer or at least to a lesser degree.
Largest problem is the lack of education of teachers though.
I don't like how Apple is making the iPad more laptop-y. My ideal is to use a normal desktop computer, and an iPad. No laptop. But if I had to pick only one of course it would be a laptop.
ipads (like phones) are appliances... designed for consuming. Much like a microwave or a fridge. they're designed for very specific scenarios. sure you could make it do other things... but it will not be very effective.
Laptops are swiss-army knives. you can create/consume/compute and they're pretty effective at all those things.
One current day iPad killer app IMO is Procreate. It's basically a more intuitive version of Adobe Illustrator completely optimized for iPad + iPen. I bought my then girlfriend (now wife :D) an iPad for her bday in 2020 accepting the risk that we're spending a lot of money on an activity she might not stick with (digital illustration). Happy to report that I was totally wrong and we have def gotten our money's worth through the countless hours she has logged creating art. If she didn't have such a stellar app like Procreate she probably would have tried out other illustration methods. Not a guerilla marketing plug, I have no vested interest in Apple or Procreate. Just sharing an app outside my space that seems to not get much attention here on HN. You can check out my wife's art at https://instagram.com/gabjoart
except 1/10th of the feature set. one man's bloat is another man's essential feature. as a non professional I eventually had to give up as I couldn't keep CS5 running on Mac. I am still on Intel so I guess I could run an older macOS in a VM.
Yeah agreed. I own all the affinity products and i tried really hard to use them.
They’re just not comparable on desktop to the Adobe equivalents. There’s so many basic features missing right now and their forums mention they’re not planning to add some of them.
Not even Photoshop -- Photoshop is mainly about editing, well, photos, while ProCreate is about natural-looking brush painting. Photoshop certainly has brushes, but it's not even attempting any kind of naturalism. People don't generally "paint" in Photoshop. [Edit: from comments below, I stand corrected. Guess it's just the people I know.]
I'm not sure what you call that category of app -- painting apps? Natural-media painting apps? (Although you can choose to make them quite unnatural-looking too if you want.) Fractal Design Painter (later Corel Painter) invented the category I believe, way back in 1991.
EVERYONE uses photoshop in the painting/art world. Seriously, almost everyone. It's the best app for it, and the only reason people use others in my experience is because they're either free or a one-time payment. Or, because they're painting on a tablet, where (the full) photoshop isn't available.
>while ProCreate is about natural-looking brush painting
This is also not true. People use procreate because of the simple UI, nice gestures, tailored to iPads, for a one-off payment - and because its simply just the best option available on iPads. There's no difference in what you can do with brushes, or "naturalness" between them. If anything, photoshop is better at natural-looking brush painting. If you're wanting natural looking brush painting, also check out the lesser-known Rebelle: https://www.escapemotions.com/products/rebelle/about?//produ... - which is designed to more simulate real physical paint, not just in terms of brush patterns but also mixing.
And only the digital painting parts of Photoshop, not photo editing. Which isn't to say that it's not a great app! It's just not a full on replacement for Illustrator of Photoshop.
If you want an alternative to Illustrator or Photoshop, Affinity Designer or Affinity Photo are more in that vein.
I've seen occasional blog posts about X feature from desktop being added to mobile, so definitely didn't launch with feature parity, though they made a big deal about how it was based on the real desktop Photoshop codebase.
But personally I dropped Photoshop when it went subscription (last version I owned was CS5) and I've never tried the iPad version, so no personal experience to compare it.
Came here to +1 on the likelihood of transition thoughts and the discovery of procreate.
I also happened to gift an iPad Pro to my wife. Her daily workflow for work are apps like gdocs and buffer and the ipad handles that just fine. I think we underestimate how similar is the regular job workflow and overestimate the particular setup we need for programming / engineering.
And for digital art, she started from 0 and is now a pro at ClipStudio art and Procreate. She is working on her webtoon and has created plenty of nfts and twitter profile pictures on fiverr. I’ve started bringing an ipad to engineering lectures since it has also helped me
a great deal with note taking.
I bought an iPad in 2020 fully thinking it’s gonna collect dust like all my other tablets over the years.
Nowadays I use it more than my laptop. With the magic keyboard and pen, it really has become the perfect portable computing device. Great for writing, great for sketching diagrams, even good for light coding (like for code samples). And it is fantastic for creating talk slides and even presenting full day workshops. Love it
Was waiting for today’s announcement to upgrade. Running into memory issues lately :D
Bought my wife an iPad in 2020 as well with the same fear that it will largely go unused.
She teaches at a university and would normally write copious notes on dozens of notebooks.
She got a copy of Goodnotes for iPad and started using it for her notes. 2 years later, she hasn’t touched any of her physical notes. All her study material is on iPad.
I bought my wife an iPad Pro and then a Macbook Air after she complained she couldn't do some things on the iPad. Well, eventually she figured out how to do it on the iPad and the MBA has been collecting dust. I adopted the MBA because my trusty old MBP is damn near geriatric (2015) and it's like a shot in the arm. I should have bought it sooner for myself.
It seems like iPad's main feature is that Apple refuses to put a touchscreen or 180degree hinge on a laptop. Laptop has a bigger screen for drawing and coding.
> It seems like iPad's main feature is that Apple refuses to put a touchscreen or 180degree hinge on a laptop.
And extra sensors. And two good cameras, front and rear, with depth & all the other stuff that iPad/iPhone cameras have that Macbook cameras don't. And make it far thinner and lighter. And better speakers. And iOS so there's a touch-focused OS on it. And a cellular connectivity option.
Dunno. For real coding I need a big monitor, a real keyboard, and a proper mouse. My laptop lives in its dock and the only time the built-in screen/keyboard get used are when I'm traveling and can't work from the home office.
I wanted toys, could afford them, and I know myself. For example I have a Switch that was used a lot in its first month that now gets picked up maybe once a quarter for a few minutes.
Agreed. Procreate is a masterclass in iPad app design. Everything runs so smoothly, the features are deep but the interface is still beginner-friendly, it's a joy to draw in with the Apple Pencil, and it has really good options available for exporting your work. Plus, it automatically records a timelapse of every project that you can render out at the end, which is a small feature that I absolutely adore. All that for a single-time purchase? Heck yeah.
Similar story here, my girlfriend uses the iPad/pencil/procreate to draw commissions for people. She absolutely loves it, went did an art degree but then went down a different career path and is now getting back into it.
In a world filled with apps that require a subscription, a persistent internet connection or filled to the brim with ads, procreate really is a breath of fresh air. Just buy it and use it like in the good old days.
I can’t believe it’s just a one-time $10 fee instead of the ridiculous and increasing creative cloud monthly/annual fees. I don’t know how they do it. Maybe it’ll be an annual fee one day but at least the app is worth it.
I love how "Desktop-class apps" means extremely basic features available decades ago on desktop: "consistent undo and redo, a redesigned inline find-and-replace experience, a new document menu, customizable toolbars, and the ability to change file extensions, view folder size".
It seems reasonable for "desktop-class" to refer to the basic features that have typically distinguished desktop personal computers from alternatives like smartphones and tablets. What else would you expect "desktop-class" to mean?
Powerful features that are more than a glorified ^Z. Reminding actions to finger shortcuts, quick access through a command palette, etc.
It'd be like me calling McDonald's restaurant-class because they could suddenly give you a plate. Sure, it's a component, but the porcelain isn't why I go to a restaurant, it's to have a qualified cook doing things with his expertise.
It has always been artificial market segmentation. Their message is clear: don't buy apple if you want a laptop with a touchscreen. Apple will only sell you oversized phones and regular laptops.
> don't buy apple if you want a laptop with a touchscreen
Keep buying Apple laptops, got it. I know that a large number of people keep asking for laptop with touchscreen, but this is one design decision where I whole heartedly with Apple. Touchscreen on laptops make no sense. The use case for a touchscreen is significantly different from a laptop that it makes sense to have two classes of devices.
Then again, I don't really get the large number of iPads sold either. It seems like an extremely niche devices which would only find a use case in certain types of industry.
Yeah I've never used a laptop and wished I could touch the screen to do something. I don't want to lift my hands off my desk to move something around on the screen. I might not be a good representation though because I don't even like moving my hand off the keyboard to use the mouse
Touchscreens on a laptop are kinda silly, especially if it isn't convertible. I will say though, I use touchscreen gestures to navigate my desktops pretty frequently. Blindly reaching for a three-finger swipe feels a lot more natural than pausing to look down at my Touch Bar and figure out what the hell I want to press...
I use the magic trackpad, that feels more natural that touching the screen. 95% of the time my laptop is docker to a USB-C monitor, so having a touchscreen would be a little weird. For professional use, I'd guess that most people have a larger monitor hooked up anyway. For a touchscreen to make sense, my monitor would need to be touch as well.
The issue with the Touch Bar is the same, that's not a professional feature, or even particular useful. Apple knows this, because you can't buy a magic keyboard with the Touch Bar. If it was useful, the Touch Bar would also appear on the those and it doesn't. I'd love to know how many MacBook Pros are sold with and without the Touch Bar.
The best part is that those trackpad gestures translate almost 1:1 from macOS to iPadOS. And you can use magic trackpad with iPad too (although it makes more sense for me personally to use the trackpad built into the iPad magic keyboard case). I havent really used iPad shortcuts before all that much, but once i accidentally triggered a few of them after using it with a trackpad due to the muscle memory from macOS, it all clicked perfectly.
Trackpad gestures are great too, I use my Magic Trackpad 2 on my Linux desktop where I don't have any touchscreens. Still though, I think the display as a multitouch surface shouldn't be overlooked. It's pretty much perfect for gesturing.
I installed OS X on my old Asus Zenbook and the touchscreen still functioned... but yeah not once did I ever think "wow I want to apply my fingers to my laptop screen instead of using the large precise touch surface within easier reach" besides for novelty
I'm always surprised at the pushback from people when the topic of touchscreen laptops comes up. I love mine, even if I don't use it a ton. It's a collection of delightful little things: a modal dialog box that I just reach up and tap Okay. Resting four fingers on the back of the display and using a thumb to scroll a web page. Any situation (like on an airplane) where space is limited, reaching for the screen can be better than using a touchpad. I don't use it instead of mouse/touchpad, but I use it as an additional input, and again, it's delightful.
Apple could let customers launch iPad apps on their Macs and use a touchscreen. But they don't, because they'd rather sell you two devices. It's silly, artificial market segmentation.
And don't buy a Windows laptop if you want a laptop without a touchscreen because the UI will be designed for touch even if you only use a mouse. Although macOS is unfortunately trending in this direction also.
You could actually get a full desktop experience from a tablet back in 2003, with products like the NEC Versa Litepad [1] running Windows XP. With a fully-fledged x86 processor, you could run anything a desktop could run.
It was pretty neat, but I can tell you from experience that coding using handwriting recognition isn't a great experience :)
All of the Tablet PC's running XP Tablet Edition were terrible. I will die on that hill. I tried probably about 10 different versions and the company I worked for was a reseller for them so I got to play with a lot of them. It was just Windows XP with pen input slapped on and it *sucked*.
True, but only for users of the v2 Apple Pencil with the new iPad Pro. For folks with v1, or with an iPad/Pro that doesn't support hover (or who just use our fingers), discoverability will continue to be a challenge...
I really struggle to find a use case for the iPad over my Macbook Pro from 2014.
- It sits on my lap with the screen sitting upright without the need for a case to sit it upright
- I prefer using a keyboard over a touch screen for desktop like applications and browsing
- The trackpad being on my lap or directly in front of me is more ergonomically friendly than having to reach forward to touch the screen
If I was to need to buy another laptop, it would be another Macbook over an iPad.
I'd argue that is exactly what they are doing. Their promotional material and many users are already using iPads as desktops... and they seem to be catering to them.
Could be, but at what point will they stop, i.e. how long before the iPad becomes the Macbook Air? In any case: if they don't stop then I'd think one of those would have to go, makes little sense keeping 2 product lines which are like almost the same?
> if they don't stop then I'd think one of those would have to go, makes little sense keeping 2 product lines which are like almost the same?
I feel like this is exactly what they want. My only question is how much i'll be able to modify my laptop long term. Ie i run Nixpkgs (ie the package system from NixOS) on my laptop. The day i can't modify my Mac OS to my liking is the day i stop buying their laptops.
I do think there's a market for people who want laptops that have the lockdown of phones. Where less things can go wrong because you can't change a lot.
> The day i can't modify my Mac OS to my liking is the day i stop buying their laptops.
That was my mentality too. For me, the cutoff came when Catalina dropped (and I couldn't run 32-bit libraries, even after modding MacOS). Nix was the last thing keeping my sanity together when I last used MacOS. When they pull the plug on that, it's going to be a sad day...
> I do think there's a market for people who want laptops that have the lockdown of phones. Where less things can go wrong because you can't change a lot.
I agree. That's a software problem though, not a hardware problem. Much like the situation on iPhone, Apple could easily offer a "pro mode" or "developer mode" that offers extended functionality while disabling certain high-security features.
If MacBook Air is a browser machine, then it's already happened. If it's a creative work machine, then well, it's close, but you still probably have a some kind of PC nearby.
If it's a developer machine, then the best iPad can do is being a ssh terminal or VSCode browser. A superb terminal, I use it every day to work because I don't have personal laptop.
God damn thank you. This interaction used to be triggered by deep pressing on the keyboard and it drove me insane when they got rid of it, I couldn't find any settings to turn it back on but this works!
My 2017 iPad Pro can do that. I can tap and drag on the cursor to move it. I can also long-tap and drag on the spacebar to move the cursor like a touchpad. I can also drag with 2 fingers anywhere on the keyboard to move the cursor like a touchpad. The first 2 options also work on my iPhone.
Safari history has been broken for something like 4-5 years. About 1% of time back button will take you one step too far (i.e. will show your home page instead of google serp)
As a commment on the /r/iPad subreddit said, Apple accidentally made the most future-proof devices with the 2018 iPad Pros. There is not a single app that makes full use of the increased CPU power of these new iPads.
I own a 2018 11" iPP, and it has been a game-changer in the way I have studied. After buying it, I haven't printed a single sheet of paper for note-taking. It's also a much better Netflix device than my phone.
I was just thinking this myself. I have the 12.9" 2018 iPad Pro and was considering pulling the trigger on this new iPad Pro announced today. But I really have no reason to, my current one runs perfectly and I've even got the floating keyboard case which is backwards compatible with it. It's replaced my laptop entirely, instead I just ssh into my Mac at home and use vim if I feel like writing some code on the road or from bed.
Honestly have no complaints with this 2018 model, it's one of my favorite pieces of hardware I've ever owned and in fact is what introduced me to the Apple ecosystem (where I'm now fully submersed) in the first place.
> in fact is what introduced me to the Apple ecosystem (where I'm now fully submersed) in the first place.
If you’d be willing to expand on this, I’d be very interested to hear more.
I used to be all-in on Apple devices circa 2010, but drifted back to Windows and Android for gaming & better notification UX (and Windows being a much more familiar OS to me). However, I don’t game on PC anymore, and I’ve become increasingly unhappy with the privacy concerns regarding Google’s ecosystem.
I got a 2020 iPad and the UX is leagues ahead of my aging Samsung Galaxy S9. Given this and the aforementioned privacy concerns, I’ve been considering once again switching to an iPhone and MacBook. Therefore, it would be very valuable to me to hear more about your experiences (and others who have made the same switch and happen to read this).
My 12.9” eventually had like 30 min battery life and I refuse to spend so much on a legit battery replacement.
Instead I mounted it on the side of our refrigerator to be always plugged in.
Our kids use it with friends to look at family pictures, play multiplayer arcade games, stream music, etc.
It became kind of a mini home console for them (it is mounted lower for their height).
It might be a good model for internet browsing as well, and texting, since it forces open communication as they wean into entering the dangerous internet (for some, it can be as dangerous as learning to drive…)
Apple devices last a long time and get software updates for many years. You really don't need to upgrade unless either (A) the new device has features you want, or (B) your current device stops getting software updates, or potentially (C) you have some new use case that would be more performant on a newer device.
Sure! I started off using the Termius app for ssh, but ended up moving to Blink. It's been so long that I can't really say why I stopped using Termius, but Blink works really well. It has a lot of built-in bash commands, but honestly I don't find those that useful since I'm not working on local files. I think if Blink had vim built-in I'd use those commands a lot more, but right now I just open Blink and immediately ssh into my home machine. I have a couple ssh aliases set up for that -- one that uses my local network if I'm at home, and one that connects to my home IP address if I'm out on the road.
The only special setup that I had to do on my Mac was allowing ssh connections and adding the public key that the Blink app created for me. When I was on Windows I found that I had to map the command and option keys from my iPad keyboard to my custom vim keybindings, but now that I use a Mac as well that's not necessary.
Another vote for Blink. In particular, its mosh support is brilliant.
Short version: after installing mosh-server on the remote machine, you run "mosh remotehost" instead of "ssh remotehost". It uses SSH to establish an encrypted UDP "connection" to the server. If your IP changes, Blink instantly re-establishes a connection. If you pause your iPad for a week and come back to it, Blink instantly re-establishes a connection.
What this means in practice is that I can start doing something at home. Oops, time to leave: I take my iPad on with me on the bus to the office, pair it with my phone, and continue working from the same session. Get to work and switch to Wi-Fi, and I keep using that same session. It's freaking magical.
mosh + tmux/screen is a wonderful UX. The lack of an escape key is less critical on a command line, where C-c more reliably does the same thing (and if you're using vim, try C-[ or remapping the action to `jj` instead of Esc).
If I'm on my home network the latency is impossible to notice, I might as well be at my Mac. Same goes for bash completion, it works flawlessly. Once I'm off my home network it's a slightly different story, it just depends on the internet connection wherever I happen to be connecting from. For example I stayed at a hotel in Fargo, ND a few weeks ago and the latency was fine for the most part, but there were moments where the typing or completion would lag behind by a second or two and then catch up. Almost like lag in a video game.
Blink has mosh in addition to ssh, which if I understand correctly is much better suited to handling higher latency connections like that. I just haven't taken the time to set it up at home, so I can't really say how it performs.
All in all, if you're curious about using the iPad for this kind of thing I really recommend it. I absolutely love mine. Apple is pretty generous with their return policy too, I've returned a handful of their laptops just because I had buyer's remorse!
It depends on what you're planning to do with these notes.
For me notebooks go straight to paper recycling after a while, the space and burden is just too much. Anything I intend to last any devent amount of time is digitized, and scanning notebooks is a PITA.
Sure. But most of my notes are lecture slides
as PDFs, and I have e-books also as PDFs. It's much easier to annotate directly on a PDF than to have to print them, annotate, scan, and ensure the scan quality is good.
At some point, 'it's cheaper' is just not a good enough argument for paper notebooks versus the sheer versatility of an iPad.
I would have to buy a veritable cart-load of writing stationery to emulate everything I do on my iPad. It would likely still be cheaper, yes, but it would also be much more of a pain in the neck.
Except at some point those books end up in some storage box in the basement, or potentially tossed out. Digital notes are forever with iCloud/Dropbox/etc and can be searched anytime.
Bingo. I also have a 2018 11" iPad Pro, and the only things that would even nudge me in the direction of upgrading is a landscape-friendly selfie camera (like the new iPad got), significantly smaller bezels, Touch ID (again, the regular iPad has this), and a better display (11" doesn't have mini-LED).
Serious question, would you recommend buying a refurb 2018 for modest usage over the new iPad 10.9"? It's about 100nits brighter, a bit lighter with a bit larger screen and supports pencil 2. Looks like they are about the same price as well.
I would, certainly. I'm also using a 2018 Pro. The additional screen size makes more difference to me than brightness; I never have the brightness all the way up anyway.
That's where I'm at - I keep an eye on new releases because I'm a nerd and I like toys. But realistically I'm not going to shell out for them at least until this one stops getting OS updates.
I don't work-work on it, but it does sit beside me all day. Notes, manuals, calls, music etc. Sharing my screen, pulling up a diagram and the pencil is my favourite way to explain things on calls lately. Then I can just shoot them a pdf when we're done to cut out 'n keep.
I see nothing today that changes this for me - just new toys that I look forward to seeing in a few years.
I (almost) exclusively used “the new iPad” for all my studying and note taking a decade ago. Notability was my go-to app, and I used the touchscreen exclusively. It was a wonderful setup.
You’re right that the 2018 iPads are great. But people buying their first powerful ipad really don’t want a 2018 machine so Apple keeps improving them. Software improves as time goes on.
> There is not a single app that makes full use of the increased CPU power of these new iPads.
Nomad Sculpt. There is no such thing as increased CPU power, often you're dealing with multiple millions of polygons. There is even limitation in the app saying "don't go over X number of polygons" because of CPU limitations. And it's the reason why I'm buying new iPad Pro - to be able to work with more polygons faster.
You're not going to edit a feature film on it, but for anything that's just filming a few minutes of different things and editing then together and posting/sending it wherever, it's a godsend.
Whether you're a professional actor taping a last-minute audition from your hotel room, a sales manager putting together an instructional video on site, or a high schooler putting together a classroom project.
Huh. I had completely written off that use-case because literally any time I've wanted to do anything at all, I've found that whatever movie editing software I'm trying at the time can't do it. So instead of wasting time by trying to edit on iOS, regardless of how simple what I want to do is, I always just copy it to my laptop or desktop and do the editing with real software on a real computer.
But maybe there exists better options. I can't say I have invested in expensive video editing software on iOS. (Not that I've ever had to on macOS or Linux though.)
Video games are more enjoyable with the increased processing power!
Where the 2018 model struggles at high frame rates, the M1 version enables more fluid gameplay at 95-120fps. The new M2 would likely deliver more consistent 120fps performance given the advertised 15% CPU and 35% GPU uplift.
That’s because apple hasn’t introduced any major new features to the ipad pro hardware since then. A 4 year old iphone is also just as future-proof but it doesn’t feel like that since they’ve added many new features to later models.
I own a 2018 11" and an M1 12.9" and there's plenty of times the 11" has failed to cope with something the 12.9" barely breaks a sweat over. I'm not sure what you do with yours, but it's provably untrue that there is not a single app that makes full use of the increased CPU power of these new iPads.
Cubasis / NanoStudio / AUM / AudioBus etc. Anything you can host multiple AUv3 instruments and FX in. The M1 handles many, many more AUs - depending on which ones, probably twice as many or more.
As far as I know, this is the first Apple hardware to support Wifi 6E, which is something I've been waiting on for what feels like forever.
I'm hoping the rumored new laptops will also support 6E.
For those that don't know, Wifi-6E uses the 6Ghz band, and I anticipate it will be very helpful in crowded residential environments where lots of Wifi APs are all landing on the same few 2.4 and 5Ghz channels.
I can't understand the emphasis on more bandwidth. The pain with wifi is overwhelmingly dominated by the slowness establishing a connection (why does it take more than a second?!), with connection reliability and latency (for video calls) also being important.
"Wifi 7: 10 Terrabyte/sec transfer speeds" *yawn*
"Wifi 7: Connects in 500 ms, latency 20 ms, tri-band fallover for 5-nines reliability" *Opens checkbook*
I've never once noticed slowness in connecting as bothering me at all. Are you connecting to new Wi-Fi networks hundreds of times a day or something? My iPad just... stays connected to the networks it knows.
And I believe that higher bandwidth is the solution to better reliability and latency when you've got lots of devices sharing the same router, or other interference. Isn't that how digital radio works?
In fairness, I do notice the time to connect to my home network much more when waking my Macbook Pro from sleep than my iPad. But it is still noticeable on the iPad.
The place where the slowness is most noticeable on iPad is when I want to reconnect it to my iPhone's hotspot. I need to reconnect many times per day because the iPhone turns off the hotspot when its unused for 90 seconds to save battery, and this behavior infuriatingly cannot be disabled.
This is the only thing I’ve missed over the years after switching to Apple. The androids I owned would keep the hotspot enabled all day, apparently without killing the battery.
I notice it all the time. The delay is really annoy when you go in an elevator (so no cell signal) and wait for it to reconnect to your wifi when you step out.
Last time I looked into this, I seem to remember that the Wifi protocol actually had ridiculous hard-coded wait times, e.g, broadcast, listen for 500 ms, then move to next step if nothing heard. I remember being baffled and never understood how that it could possibly be really how it worked, so I definitely might have been misinterpreting.
> The main purpose of scan is to update/confirm the
available WiFi SSID list around the user’s device. There are
two types of scan: active scan and passive scan [3]. The
active scan is triggered periodically: the mobile device first
broadcasts the probe requests, and surrounding APs after
hearing the probe requests will reply probe response packets,
containing information such as the supporting physical rate.
The mobile device will add the SSID of the AP into the
candidate list, if it finds that the AP is compatible. In the
passive scan, the list of available SSIDs can be updated by
beacon packets broadcasted by APs periodically, e.g., every
100ms [4].
In any case, a good protocol would have random wait times that are still (in expectation) of order the rate at which bits are communicated, not some human timescale.
Relatedly: When I turn off a network by pulling the plug on a router, it takes many seconds for this to be reflected in the list of available networks on my Macbook. I don't think there's a good reason for it to be like this.
Agreed! The thing about 6ghz is that it doesn't travel through walls as well, and tends to have shorter range in general.
On the surface, this seems like a negative, but if you're in a crowded apartment building, it can actually be a major benefit. Even if a bunch of your neighbors end up using it on the same channel as you, you won't experience as much interference because the walls will attenuate their signals.
Of course, a single AP might not reliably cover your entire home in 6ghz, but you can always fall back to 2.4 and 5ghz and/or get more APs.
Additionally, WiFi 6 (and 6e) is better in general at detecting neighboring networks across all frequency bands and reducing interference automatically.
If they're configured correctly, multiple APs on a given network can actually lead to lower congestion, because they can each lower their signal strength to only cover a small area... but it sounds like that isn't what happened here.
8 in a single small home is absurdly excessive. My home is more than twice that size and I only have a single AP (although I have been considering adding 1-2 more.)
Pretty surprised they left the front camera on the side of the device. I can't figure out why they would think that makes sense after using it even once. It's so awkward trying to do a meeting and I have this weird camera angle coming from the corner of my face. The alternative is portrait orientation, which puts the camera really far from the center of the screen - feels like it's coming from above or below my face - and puts my video feed opposite to the orientation of my audience's screens, while also not being able to lean on the folded case.
Yeah this would be an improvement I think, considering how little I've seen iPads used in portrait mode it's a little surprising they haven't done it already. I'm guessing it's to support the pencil charging, since the new iPad does have cameras in the expected landscape location but only supports pencil 1
It works perfectly fine. Only main difference is that, in landscape mode, instead of people seeing you look slightly down instead of into the camera (like laptops), people see you look slightly left instead of into the camera.
99% of people seeing your image in the call won't notice or care. Especially when things like your lighting setup make most of the difference that people do notice, which has nothing to do with the camera you're using.
Everyone's creepily staring into nothing anyway. Except those of us who try to look at the camera instead of the screen most of the time. Which means we're not actually looking at anyone's face, even though it looks like we are, which is another problem.
Being a bit off-center is the least of the problems with video calls.
Are you saying unusable because attachment to keyboard skews image centering/symmetry?
I use my iPad for video calls (Zoom) all the freaking time and it's fine, but perhaps that's because i have it in the tall orientation so the camera aligns.
I have an iPad Pro with A15, and it holds battery better than my M1 MacBook Air on video calls. They are both great though, much better than any x64 devices I have ever had.
In case of the MacBook and the iPad, seems like it’s more about the OS. At least that’s what most comments here are mentioning when comparing an iPad to a MacBook.
They keep on pushing on the power of the iPads. Out of curiosity, does anyone really use their iPads for something they’d consider really compute intensive? I find that the best use of a tablet is reading and watching videos. Any time I want to do anything complex or computationally intensive I find a laptop to be much more efficient, both in terms of the OS flexibility and better input devices.
Heck yeah. "Reading" sounds boring and easy, except when you have to quickly skim through 600-page PDFs with illustrations, and switch between those. This is a common use case for anybody designing electronics. I will take every CPU cycle I can get.
The existing iPads were already the best devices for this kind of thing, but faster is always better.
I still find it sad that:
a) Apple restricts iPad OS so much, that it's difficult to make good use of that fantastic hardware. It feels weird that people ask questions like "what can I actually use that power for?"
b) Companies do not ship better iPad apps. At this point, Fusion 360 would work better on this M2 iPad than on most PC machines, but we only get a half-baked "viewer" thing which doesn't really do anything useful.
> a) Apple restricts iPad OS so much, that it's difficult to make good use of that fantastic hardware. It feels weird that people ask questions like "what can I actually use that power for?"
Really, I can't think of a ton of uses for desktop/laptop hardware this powerful. And I don't do any of them, gaming aside (I have a mediocre Windows PC for that, and even that is often using only a fraction of its power for gaming).
The one and only time I've given my m1 Air a real workout is playing with one of those AI art generators, but it's not like that was something I needed to do, or I'd have felt like I was really missing out if I hadn't done it. I did it because I could and it was low-effort.
> Really, I can't think of a ton of uses for desktop/laptop hardware this powerful.
Oh, there are plenty — for one, I would really like to have a good CAD/CAM application. Parametric, history-based, like Fusion 360 or SolidWorks. There is Shapr3D which is absolutely amazing and shows what the hardware is capable of (take a look at the demo videos), but nothing I can use for actual work.
These kinds of apps need both a reasonable GPU for rendering and a really good CPU for computing constraints in sketches, and then for recomputing solids.
Unfortunately, Fusion 360 being an Autodesk product, we aren't even graced with an Apple Silicon version on the Mac yet, even though it's been what, two years since Apple Silicon is out? The application is a slow pig, where usability comes last. So I guess I can keep on dreaming.
Or take electronics CAD — having KiCAD on an iPad would be amazing.
Yeah, not a ton, I didn't write none. 3D modeling, cad, running scientific models. Gaming. Hi-res video editing workflows. Machine learning. I guess "crypto" junk. And some of that (machine learning, crypto, probably most compute-intensive scientific models) aren't something you probably want to do on a tablet or laptop except in a pinch, anyway, because a purpose-built server's much better-suited to it and you probably don't need continuous and detailed visual feedback.
But I don't think it's weird that people struggle to come up with ways to really use super-powerful hardware, because most folks don't do (and don't want to do) much of the above except maybe gaming, and most people who do game don't do it—or at least not in a way that's taxing on the hardware—on all the kinds of devices they own.
The cool stuff lots and lots of people actually use tends to end up in dedicated hardware or paths, like video codecs and image processing and face recognition and all that, not mainly processed by the general CPU or graphics power of their platforms.
Most folks don't do complicated video editing or music production, that doesn't stop Apple from optimizing their hardware around that, too. The problem isn't a lack of demand, but rather the inverse - there's so much demand for new software, that Apple can make tens-of-billions of dollars just off the app distribution platform alone.
The crux of all this is having the option to run the software you want on the hardware you own. No, I don't do 3D modelling, CAD, scientific simulation or gaming on a daily basis. But I do use that software sometimes, and a device that excludes the possibility of running any of them doesn't sound fun or "limitless" to me. It all leads to the feeling that the iPad is a Disney-fied version of a professional workflow.
This made me wonder: Why do PDFs feel so much slower and bulkier compared to something like viewing HTML over a browser? When it comes to displaying static images and text, shouldn't PDFs outperform HTML pages by miles?
I don’t think it’s true in general, you may just used bad PDF viewers. I can scroll through a content-rich PDF much faster and smoother, than a similarly resource-packed website.
Yep. With PDF Expert on an iPad, you can instantly see a thumbnail view of your pages, as well as swipe the page slider through 600 pages with a thumbnail being shown for each of those as you swipe.
This does get slower for some pathological PDFs, which is why an even faster CPU would help.
Yep. You can actually use WebKit to render PDFs in Linux and it works perfectly fine as well. Performance problems seem to be most prevalent when you browse them in a web browser.
>Apple restricts iPad OS so much, that it's difficult to make good use of that fantastic hardware. It feels weird that people ask questions like "what can I actually use that power for?"
Doesn't faster CPU tend to imply potentially better battery life?
> I find that the best use of a tablet is reading and watching videos.
I think HN forgets the 'pros' using the iPad Pros are video, photography, visual-arts and music professionals.
I'm as disappointed as the next dev on HN that iPadOS still doesn't allow me to run a full version of Xcode. But then I remember there are perfectly good laptops for that, and I'm not the target audience for these devices
I mean, I don’t understand how I could really use an iPad in my workflow as a photographer. Everything is slower without a keyboard, and for raw editing I use a whole bunch of knobs.
I could see maybe using it at the right type of session to quickly review images on a larger screen, but the last time I looked into it there wasn’t a super great way of doing that. Maybe I could cull photos on my iPad but unless I transfer for the photos to it and then back off I’d need to work over my network and that’d probably be slow…
Everything relating to moving files, SD cards, etc. is just a hassle in Apple tablet/phone world. Ironically, a PC just works.
Dodging and burning and masking and using other photo-related tools with a mouse and keyboard feels like I'm producing a very calculated photograph. Using a stylus and multi-touch screen feels closer to the original affordances of crafting and manipulating a physical photograph. For the best of both worlds, I use the iPad in Sidecar / second-screen mode so I can use keyboard shortcuts with 1:1 stylus input.
Oh, I agree about the mouse bit - but Wacom (etc.) tablets have been around forever. I’d also much rather keep my head straight and my arm at rest on my desk all day.
Same goes for music production. I've tried using a few iPad DAWs over the years, but it's so much slower than using a keyboard and mouse, or just popping open your Macbook with Live. Apple already has a product segment that does fairly well with this market, trying to force the iPad into being something it's not just looks silly.
I see a lot of people using an iPad for music alongside a proper computer with a full featured DAW. You don't need a mouse or keyboard shortcuts for idea generation, sketching out rough concepts from inspiration on the go or playing with some of the pretty unique synths & other tools available on iPad. For modular synth simulation I've found iPad with Pencil to be a much much better UI for me than using a mouse.
Producing may be faster on desktop for now because they've had a large head start on optimizing the interfaces for mouse and keyboard, but those affordances are still a subset of what you can do with a touch screen. Touch screens won't replace dedicated controllers with physical knobs, but digital knobs are surprisingly usable.
Touch is far better for performance though. Watching Suzanne Ciani seamlessly integrate her Buchla modular rig with the ipad makes me appreciate just how good the ipad is. A regular computer would be far more cumbersome to use with hardware synths in the moment.
Not really? The iPad isn't velocity-sensitive, and it doesn't have aftertouch or any tactile feedback. A "regular computer" at least has straightforward MIDI routing that you can perform with - the iPad gets outclassed by decade-old Octatracks in terms of performance flexibility.
Ciani is the perfect example that I was about to bring up myself. I got to see her perform live at a conference, and out of her whole setup, she waxed poetic most about her iPad.
Similar things were probably said about smartphones with touch screens being inferior to physical buttons.
After using my tablet as a second screen for production, photo editing, CADing, and coding, it's become woefully apparent that the mouse - a tiny singular cursor - is an inferior grandfather to an interface that _also_ supports multitouch, and the only thing holding tablets back is software. Obsidian is a good example of a mobile app that has parity with its desktop version in both maintaining its keyboard shortcuts but also enabling touch interactions closer to the affordances of physical notes.
Think live performance instead of DAW work. Using a sequencer, effects, or additional soft synths on the ipad along with hardware synths is much nicer than fiddling with a mouse or trackpad.
"Much nicer" is a bit of a stretch (I use a touchscreen laptop with my DAW). The difference between clicking-and-dragging a knob is not that different from tapping-and-dragging one. Same goes for performance; the iPad is not velocity sensitive, and it does not have aftertouch. At that point, you're probably adding in a MIDI keyboard or other hardware, at which point you may as well just perform with a real DAW and leave the iPad at home.
Right now I'm drawing comics using CLIP Studio Paint, which really is a desktop app that runs seamlessly on the iPad (literally it appears to be the same code as what I have on my Mac!)
Each page is ~5000x7000px with dozens of layers including many effects and even 3D models. Even my 2018 iPad Pro breezes through this workflow. With the pencil, it feels like exactly the right device for what I'm doing.
I would play games on my iPad... but there aren't very many that work, because Apple hasn't spent the time (or money) making Metal support widespread. Really, they should just fund / build their own MoltenVK implementation, but I would guess that they don't want to support two paths. It's surprising how MoltenVK only has one full time dev, I could easily see Apple throwing some money at that with huge returns.
My compute intensive tablet activities involves a cheap chromebook duet remote desktopping into an actual desktop already efficiently setup for my workflows. I'd rather wait for reliable remote work solutions / infra than try to cope with subpar workflows.
Give me XCode and Preview (I use the pdf page-re-arranging/deleting/etc a lot) and finally put a fucking calculator on iPad OS and I can stop using macbooks at all. I mean for personal devices, at least, I'd still use one for work since they give me one anyway.
I doubt that. Many very serious artists use Procreate on an iPad as their primary medium, and I honestly can't think of a better tool without jumping about a thousand dollars in price, loath as I am to say it.
For me this is one of those announcements that I'm excited to see the new version, so that I can maybe buy the previous version ;)
That's not a knock on the new version in any way, just a reflection of how much I value this particular type of device / where I feel I need more power and etc.
I just purchased the iPad Air last week. The model I went for was 720 in my local currency, and after today's shop update is now 850. It looks like the Magic Keyboard also increased from 270 to 330.
I’m probably going to get the 12.9” model. I’m a lecturer and it’ll be very useful for my teaching. Not so much for research where I’m working with stuff like Matlab and OpenFOAM and specialist Windows software for laboratory instruments.
Currently I use my Mac and occasionally sidecar with an old 10.5” iPad Pro so I can annotate my mirrored slides while I go. It works but is awkward. When using a projector over HDMI it’s energy intensive so I need to bring along my Mac’s power brick. Often the display scaling from connecting to the room projector will offset my pencil position, the order you connect stuff seems to matter.
I teach a combination of slides and Jupyter notebooks so I need to verify that everything works as expected.
I could try to use a lightning to HDMI adapter and leave the Mac in my office, but I’m also interested in the LiDAR scanner for some research activities.
I also find the iPad great for bringing along to meetings and labs where you want to sketch stuff out, you can email the result to a student after.
I find it a useful tool for class prep also.
So it’s not a replacement for my laptop, but it’ll help me with a significant part of my day to day activities.
The iPad with pencil is really useful for marking up student papers. I bought one during Covid when everything was being turned in online, but some students still prefer to turn in scans rather than paper.
The downside is that Apple doesn't support user accounts, so I won't use anything that everyone in my family shouldn't have access to. Grading only works because it's easy to log out of Canvas. A lot of the nifty features require you to be logged in with your Apple ID, and I'm just not buying an iPad for every family member who might like to use it sometimes.
Interestingly, the 11 inch iPad Pro still retains the LED display of the 2018 iPad Pro, unlike the FALD display of the 12.9 inch.
Seems like display technology has matured and reached an equilibrium pricing state if even Apple can't justify the cost of investing in producing the fancier displays in a second size.
From what I understand it's the exact same cooling design except the larger surface area and thermal mass of the 12.9, which is almost entirely negated by the larger display generating more heat.
I wonder why developer tools are not a priority for Apple for “pro” iPads. At this point, it uses the M2 chip so the limitations on running IDEs, compilers and other tools just seem arbitrarily imposed.
I keep hearing about the desire for developer tools on an ipad and I just don’t get it. The entirety of iPadOS would need to be overhauled in order for it to be conducive for developer work. What is the appeal of doing dev work on a touch based UI with limited access to the file system on a cramped screen? The Mac is perfectly set up for that work.
I have a Smart Keyboard Folio case, which is super slim and light. My 12.9" 2018 iPad Pro is smaller and light but still has a good keyboard feel. (Note: I have a mechanical keyboard on my home Mac, but can still type like a demon on the thin iPad keyboard. It's surprisingly ergonomic.)
I know there's basically no chance I'll be able to run Emacs or VS Code on this portable little device any time soon, but if I could, it'd be my main device by a long way. There's no hardware limitation preventing it, just artificial restrictions on a "pro" device.
Sure. And if we’re going that route, Emacs in Blink is perfectly usable. I just wish this well > $1000 computer was allowed to run the kinds of software I was running on far less powerful systems. I usually have cell or Wi-Fi connectivity, but sometimes you have an idea on an airplane, ya know?
I want it to just run macOS. The 12.9" M2 iPad Pro is absolutely perfect for me in every way except the gimped OS. The screen is great, plenty of storage, amazing battery life, it's light and portable, WiFi 6E, and a cellular modem. Everyone has their own unique needs but for me this would be the absolute ultimate work device... if it ran macOS.
As it stands I have absolutely no interest. It's generous to describe "Stage Manager" as a gimmick.
I don’t want to use the touch interface while developing. I want to be able to do development on the same device that I can use the touch interface for other things as well, like using the Pencil to markup screenshots or design docs. It seems ridiculous that I still have to carry around a bigger, heavier laptop just for that one final use case.
I also have been using a 13” mac for years, so “cramped screen” doesn’t really apply to me on a 12.9” iPad pro’s XDR. It is more than capable, and I would hopefully be able to plug it into my external monitor at home.
I’ve done a significant amount of coding on a terminal on an Android phone.
> The entirety of iPadOS would need to be overhauled in order for it to be conducive for developer work
I disagree. I used an iPad for sysadmin, datascience, some math, and some web dev. Most of the pain comes from arbitrary restrictions Apple places on iPads. (I’d imagine it’ll get more painful as my eyes worsen.)
The appeal is simple: Being able to develop with whatever device you have on you. A laptop beats a tablet, a tablet beats a phone, and a phone beats pencil and paper.
They wouldn't even need to overhaul iPadOS! All they'd need to do is allow Parallels, VMWare or other folks to make virtualization software for the iPad, and people could just run Linux on it (or - gasp! - macOS). The M1 and M2 Macbooks can run virtual machines without a problem, but iPads are not (sigh) allowed to. Despite Apple explicitly and inexplicably selling 16GB models of the iPad Pro.
There are developers tools for iPadOS, they're just not anything you can do professional work with.
The main problem, I think, is most development tools require a relatively low-level of operating system access that Apple has not figured out a way to do given what they want iOS/iPadOS to "be".
My suspicion is they'll eventually find a way to do containers in a manner that's relatively "safe", and they'll lean on Cloud-based build tools that move the hard work off device.
I'd even be happy with a performant VM app that I could run linux on at this point. It would be so nice to be able to swipe up and go from linux VM -> imessage, etc.
Steve Jobs and Tim Cook have both stated that they don't hesitate to cannibalize their own products, and Apple has proved that many times over.
Especially at the scale in which iPad having developer tools could ostensibly cannibalize Mac sales — there's no way this would be a factor in the existence of those tools.
We saw a huge push to bring the mac near iOS territory (the Mac Store, gatekeeper, catalyst, the new design language etc.) . If Apple could, I bet they'd exchange every new mac for an iPad and effectively gain the tightest control they could ever get of a huge part of the ecosystem.
I'm a student, about to graduate from a BSN nursing program that's online except clinicals. I went from using a Dell laptop to using a Pinebook Pro to mostly using an iPad Air (4th gen) for everything, without making an Apple account (so no installing apps).
The iPad is managed by my uni, who installed the Canvas LMS app. I can read pdfs in the Files app, submit papers written in the Word app, attend class with the Zoom ap. Most of work happens in Safari: watching videos, taking exams, etc. I'm a heavy terminal user, so use a GateOne gateway for ssh access in the browser, allowing me to do most serious work on my user's account on a NetBSD server, working in vim, mutt, sc (spreadsheet), manipulating text with awk, browsing with lynx, managing my website, etc.
A good dock is important. I use the Pinebook Pro usb-c dock with a scroll-wheel 3-button Dell mouse and Model M buckling-spring keyboard. A recent update let bluetooth keep sending music to my stereo when docked. Keyboard shortcuts (like ctrl-a and ctrl-e for moving around the lines of a textfile) are a big part of my workflow. The docked peripherals allow more functionality than the Smart Keyboard folio. I don't like touch screens.
When I graduate, I'll probably fall back to something I like better (my little GPD or old ThinkPad X61), but for school the iPad + folio keyboard + dock + shell account is better than any other single device I have tried.
Going on from all of the comments here about the iPad not being able to replace a computer: it’s true. The I/O is not as good and the OS is lacking in terms of being able to do ‘what I want’ with it. It’s just not a computer. It’s a big phone. With that out of the way, I think it still kicks arse. I grab it when:
+ I just want to watch something (yt, streaming)
+ I want to play some music (great speakers)
+ I want to use a computer in a dangerous place (bath, kitchen bench)
+ I don’t want to lug my laptop around
+ I just want to sketch something
+ Want to read/markup a pdf
+ read a long article on the couch
+ play a game on the bus (Papers Please)
It’s great for these quick sessions. It’s more of a ‘life’ computer, where I don’t have to worry so much about it and it sort of ‘gets out of the way’.
It definitely compliments my laptop but cannot ever replace it.
I really love the versatility of my iPad as well but this single use case you mentioned I can't understand:
> + I want to play some music (great speakers)
Yes, the speakers are fine for their size and certainly good enough to listen to a podcast or talk-heavy Youtube video but I couldn't imagine listening to any music on it. Any budget bluetooth speaker for less than 100 bucks or headphones will sound much, much better.
Maybe it's my bias as a musician, but as long as Apple doesn't put Logic on the iPad, it's just not a system that works as a piece of professional kit.
As you know (but others may not), the idea is that you get as far as you can get in GarageBand, then move the project to Logic¹. There's also a way to export a "to go" mix from Logic for GarageBand².
You can get surprisingly far with just GarageBand³.
I have seen some discussions on this post about the use of iPad Pro as a device for actual work, so I will chime in with my experience.
First of, I love the iPad Pro and have been using it for about a year almost daily. I use it for leisure as well as actual work. I am currently writing a technical book, and I decided to do it all on my iPad. I hook up my external keyboard and the Mx Master mouse is paired to both my MacBook and iPad, so I can easily switch.
I initially thought that I would not really like it, but ended up using it as my preferred to device for such work. I can easily sketch things in GoodNotes, and writing with the pen helps me think. I use Termius to ssh into my development machine when I need to write some code, and I use Word to write the text content. I also use the GitHub app although that doesn’t work perfectly so I use the web version as well.
I hardly ever use split screen, so each app is essentially in distraction_free mode. I also notice that I get side tracked way less (no slack, email, or other distractions which I check often on my MacBook). Plus when travelling I only take my iPad now, I worked from airports and hotels only on this device.
I was definitely sceptical about it, but ended up loving it. It actually made me reconsider buying a new macbook, and at this point I would rather upgrade my iPad than buy the new MacBook anyway.
(It is also a great leisure device, depending on what you do. I have Netflix and YouTube on here, and I occasionally draw a bit).
In my day job, I am an engineering manager and it take notes on the iPad as well. Would I switch to the iPad for full Time development? No, probably not. But I do use it for my side projects, and for something like advent of code it is good enough as well.
Apple is pretending weight doesn't matter. They're all clunkers, even the "Air", once you add the keyboard.
My old 12" iPad Pro with the Smart Cover is still lighter than any of the new combos and yet it's heavy compared to certain Android tablets of the same size.
They're awfully heavy for a device that I treat like a dynamic book.
Sort of correct, it only covers the front or the back (exclusive or), not both simultaneously. So when it's being used as a hand-held tablet the back will be covered, but when it's used as a stand the back is mostly uncovered, and when the front is covered the back is uncovered.
I live pretty far from my parents, and I really want to set them up with a nice video conferencing setup so we can chat as well as in person. I started to spec out a nice setup with open-back headphones, 60 Hz 1080p camera, nice microphone, low latency screen, the works. But this would cost at least $1k, and I'm sure it would be difficult for them to operate. Plus it would be hard to use in certain situations like with children or while eating.
So I've decided to get them the iPad Pro. I'm trusting Apple to focus on things like screen latency and microphone/speaker quality in their products. Plus it should be quite easy for my parents to use. It just seems to me like the iPad Pro is the best product for setting up non-tech people with a decent videoconferencing setup.
Has anyone else solved this problem, or have thoughts on using an iPad for video chatting?
For video chat, you don't need the latest. After the camera on my MacBook stopped working, I started using a 5th gen iPad mini. I use it with a stand on the kitchen table, in landscape mode, and it's fine.
Bigger isn't necessarily better. My wife has a full-size iPad and I find it awkwardly big for most purposes.
But for ease of use for the technically challenged, I think something like a Nest Hub Max might be better, since it will automatically point the camera. Caveats: it's not easy to set up for someone without a cell phone (it's technically unsupported), but once you do it for them, it's easy to make a call. Also, weirdly, the video only works when they call me; if I call them it's audio only. (I ask them to call me back.)
I felt like the system that’s in the portal from Facebook would be the ideal vc setup for my parents (i.e. video calling on a tv). Though, there’s no way I’d want to put a camera from Facebook in my parents house. I did try Google duo (I guess it’s call meet now?) with a Google tv, but since it was with a 3rd party web cam, things like autofocus didn’t work as well as I’d like.
Second with what others said, the new standard iPad should fit your bill. It has the ultrawide camera too with people tracking which makes it even better.
Interestingly the Apple Pencil "hover" feature doesn't require a new generation of Pencil — this works on the 2nd Gen.
Overall, this looks like it is clearly aimed at creators. I have the 2018 Pro with Magic Keyboard and have zero interest in upgrading to this model. Honestly I almost wish I could trade my Pro for a Mini, since it's more pocket-able, and I mainly use my Pro for demoing my startup's technology.
The iPad Pro is an amazing piece of hardware! But the last iterations make zero difference for most consumers. The hardware improved rapidly over a couple of years. Both the 2017 model (move from 9.7 to 10.5 screen) and the 2018 model (new design without home bottom, USB-C, Gen 2 Pencil) were huge steps. Magic Keyboard from 2020 was a great addition as well and works with the 2018 model. For my own usage, the 2018 model is pretty much feature complete from a hardware perspective. Software makes the big difference now.
I am still amazed by my 2018 iPad pro four years later!
The convergence between iPad and Mac is pretty brilliant. If you think about it, the iPad now has a lot of features that are much better than a top of the line Mac, like 5g and the display tech.
It’s all still too new but if you read the tea leaves we are heading towards a convergence. In the future there will be a device that behaves like an iPad on its own. With an app and touch oriented experience, but when connected to a keyboard and mouse will be like a Mac today. The universal app stuff is a great indicator of them moving in that direction, even if it’s still new.
One thing I don’t really understand though is how a Unix interface will work with a device that is also iPad OS. Like, if you can install stuff from online, eg through home brew, will you be able to side load apps? If that’s the case I think the app experience might suffer, but at the same time if the Unix experience has its wings clipped then what do they plan to replace it with?
I mean that sincerely. I don’t think apple is so naive as to think they can make macs into iPads and not provide an alternative. Maybe they’ll offer a native package manager, one that’s even reverse compatible with brew as a starting point, and then provide an integrated notary process as part of that system for publishing recipes.
Is anybody hooking up a keyboard and mouse to their ipad pro and using it as an interface to a remote desktop running in the cloud? If so, what software stack?
code-server https://github.com/coder/code-server works fairly well and can be saved to the home screen as a web applet to get rid of the browser URL bar. Their are a few UI issues related to touch but it has served well enough for some light work.
You can also use a remote apps like Rainway/TeamViewer/RDP/VNC somewhat successfully to get a more full desktop experience. Unfortunately they all seem to have their own input caveats that take some getting used to.
I am personally waiting for Parsec to release native iPadOS and tvOS clients as it provides the best experience I have found.
It seems like the gaming oriented remote desktop apps (Rainway https://rainway.com/, Parsec https://parsec.app/) are the best though as the latency on the more traditional ones is somewhat of a hindrance.
USB/Bluetooth keyboard and mouse support tends to work okay, but the simulated touch mouse makes getting used to things tough. If you have not tried using iPad OS with a mouse I suggest you look into before making a purchase as it is a fairly limiting experience.
Thanks. I wodner if you could tether an ipad and raspberry pi running Code (which isn't really RDP, but a web app that includes a shell) in a fairly self-contained way.
From the press release: "The 11-inch iPad Pro starts at $799 (US) for the Wi-Fi model and $999 (US) for the Wi-Fi + Cellular model; the 12.9-inch iPad Pro starts at $1,099 (US) for the Wi-Fi model, and $1,299 (US) for the Wi-Fi + Cellular model."
> the 16-core Neural Engine can process 15.8 trillion operations per second — 40 percent more than M1 — making iPad Pro even more powerful when handling machine learning tasks
Do people actually use the iPad for machine learning?
The high refresh rate being limited to pro models seems like apple deliberately holding back a feature from it's lesser expensive models to avoid it competing with its more expensive models.
Well, why would any business want to have a standout SKU, and hurt their other SKUs? I guess this could also be a tactic, make one model "best feature/price ratio".
For better or worse, there's not "bang for the buck" iPad model. It really scales linearly. The more you pay, the more you get.
New budget iPad - $450 - Doesn't support Pencil 2. Want that? Upgrade to Air. Weakest processor.
iPad Air - $599 - Support Pencil 2. Weaker screen technology. Mid tier processor.
iPad Pro - $799 - Best of everything (except for MiniLED, which you need the 13" iPad Pro).
It really depends on how much features you can live with.
I would almost want to create a new thread for this, but what is the use case of a tablet? Is this for fulltime physical meeting goers to stylishly take notes?
Is there some benefit to using this over a laptop?
I use my tablet about as much as my desktop and laptop. My use cases are:
(1) Personal entertainment device. When relaxing on a chair or in bed, a laptop is too unwieldy. The TV gets fought over. Pretty much all my movie / YouTube watching is done on the iPad with headphones.
(2) eBook reader. Since my iPad is always withing reach, it makes sense to store all my books on it.
(3) Stylish note-taker. Not a significant part of my use, but I occasionally have stand-up meetings, and meetings in awkward locations, where a tablet makes more sense than a laptop.
(4) Signing stuff. It is much easier to store a document to be signed in OneDrive, open it on the iPad and sign it with the stylus than it is to print-sign-scan.
I was on the fence when the iPad Pro M1 was released, it seemed to finally tick off as a laptop replacement for some of my hobbies (photography and music) but unfortunately it is not a desktop OS, not supporting desktop workflows and apps that I'm used to.
If it was a screen-only version of my MBA M1 I could definitely ditch the MBA and use an iPad exclusively, even if it required attaching a keyboard sometimes. The lacking software still makes it much more of a luxury to me than something to actually replace my use cases for a portable computer... I could afford one but see absolutely no usage given that my MBA is already extremely portable and works like I expect.
I can whip out my iPad when I'm on the train to work and watch streamed or locally downloaded stuff, a laptop is way too cumbersome for that even on a semi-crowded train.
With a keyboard cover I can actually use it for messaging, emails, IM and maybe light writing. Using a stylus, I can either take freeform notes or draw stuff faster than I can with a mouse or touchpad.
And in the pre-M1 days an iPad smoked pretty much every laptop in battery performance.
I bought my iPad (non-pro) mainly to play online chess, to read comic books, and for D&D pdfs at the table. It's also a nice web-browsing and video watching machine. The iPad Pro's are a bit excessive for that sort of "consumer" usage though.
The only great use-case I've seen for the pro is 2d digital art. I have a few artist friends who love the pro+pencil.
Music production on one really interests me, but none of my favorite plugins (effects and instruments) that work MacOS/Windows exist for the ipad. They also don't offer enough storage at the high end Komplete 14 Ultimate is 680GB. Each of the Spitfire sample libraries is near 200GB
There are some nice sequencing apps, but again don't need the pro for that, I just send the MIDI or OSC data to a "real" computer running a "real" DAW.
You mention Komplete — is there a Kontakt player or an alternative for ipad? Or do you have a way of converting kontakt instrument into something else?
I think you can get a lot out of ipad as a plugin host, by using IDAM or something like Sonobus. A few FabFilter AUv3s and you've basically saved the cost of an iPad. Plus, the touchscreen for control.
I know it's very niche and doesn't apply to everybody but I know of a bunch of comic book/comic strip artists that are doing more and more work on the iPad pro and less on their Wacom devices.
Looks really nice, but as a developer I'm unwilling to give that up on my local system! Maybe one day if cloud only becomes a lot better, but even then feels like a downgrade.
I used to be a die-hard iPad-for-coding user, but with the advent of the M1 MBAs I couldn't justify it anymore.
The thing that broke me was that if I wanted a remote development env (because at the end of the day you can't do development on an iPad without some remote computer running stuff for you) at the time you needed to a) provision on via safari manually b) have some kind of script or something on the iPad capable of doing that for you c) have a cheap/low-power computer always running to run the scripts. [This is assuming you don't have a remote computer already you can turn on. E.g. "only iPad + on-demand cloud resources"]
I eventually concluded the M1 MBA is a better option because of how heavy an iPad Pro 12" + Magic KB Case is in comparison.
I still *love* my iPad Pro. The screen is almost a good enough reason to use it. Also it had LTE which was very useful.
I still think it's possible to make the iPad do everything I wanted the M1 MBA to do without significantly changing how Apps are developed or restrictions on iPadOS (and apps like ShellFish, WorkingCopy, and Blink Shell are really my go-to examples of how that could have existed all this time), but while possible today it's just much higher friction and cost to use an iPad to do the same thing an entry-level M1 MBA could do.
Is this using an iPad for coding or is this using an iPad as a dumb terminal and using something else for development?
At the end of the day, that’s what makes an iPad unappealing for me as a development machine. If I am going to pay for an iPad and then rent an affordable VPS just to dev on then why not just buy a computer I can develop on locally right away? Sure, LTE is cool but it probably is more cost effective to go the other way and pay for a hotspot plan for your phone and tether your computer that way.
That being said, I do occasionally feel cool doing dev on my laptop remotely from my iPad using a combination of tailscale, tethering from my phone and using iSH to ssh into an emacs session.
Wait you couldn't hover over the ipad and it didn't show you a pointer? The galaxy tablets had this since a few generations, why didn't apple do this earlier?
Has there been any recent discussions as to why Apple still hasn't introduced cellular connectivity on their laptops? Is it yet another attempt to get people to convert over to the walled garden of iOS? With every ipadOS iteration, they push it to be closer and closer to a desktop experience (windows, monitor support, keyboard trackpad cover, etc).
Maybe once the apple designed 5g chips are ready. Maybe they’ll be a little more battery friendly. And apple will either have to negotiate something worthwhile with carriers or start their own mobile network to keep the data prices reasonable. None of the current carriers offer data plans suitable for full time laptop use.
Modern WWAN might be a bit of a nightmare. I'm not super familiar with recent efforts in the space, but if Apple wanted to knock this out of the park, they'd need two things:
- Unlimited data plans, preferably at a non-insane price (sub $50-month would be nice)
- Both 4G LTE and 5G connectivity. Not just one or the other.
Both of these seem technically possible, but I'd assume they'd be incredibly difficult to pull-off from a business negotiation perspective.
Why does Apple need to provide the plan as well? I mean, given Apple's controlling nature, they may well wish to - but most laptops with mobile internet simply provide a SIM slot hooked up to a standard mobile baseband. Customers find their own plan, and many carriers offer plans which are tablet-oriented, with no calls/texts and sharing the data from a 'master' mobile plan.
I had an iPad for a long while way back. I bought the Retina one initially.
It was nice for what it was.
I just can’t get excited about anything iOS as unless you have REALLY bought into the “ecosystem” it’s a clusterfuck.
- File management is still a sick joke.
- unless they’ve really changed something that I’m unaware of (which I’ll admit is entirely possible) with “iPadOS” vs regular iOS, multitasking is still a pathetic joke. The state saving and pausing which relegates the devices to essentially fancy task switching and not real preemptive multitasking (other than extremely specific program scenarios and services functionality) which drives me insane. Why the hell does my SSH client have to constantly ping my location to get around the “you can run 13 seconds in the background before the OS forcefully state pauses you”? Why the fuck can’t apple give a nice little “this app can run run run till it’s little heart bursts in the background!” Toggle switch you can control?
People go on and on about iPhone battery life and… there’s a reason for that.
- The ridiculous sandboxing between programs that’s supposedly a security feature but just makes for an insufferably inconsistent UI and terrible management of data between programs … I guess that goes with my file management complaint.
I dunno. I just can’t abide a complete blackbox lockdown of my devices to the point of them being literal appliances. But apparently I’m in the minority there.
Also, most people appear to just be perfectly happy rapidly task switching. And having only most of their programs paused when switched from works fine for them I guess.
I will say for /consumption/ of say documents like PDFs and Comics, the iPad is fantastic. But outside of that basic usage they drive me insane.
Sorry for the meandering rant. I’m waiting for food with my 8yo and bored lol
I had the first generation iPad Pro. And eventually I gave it to my wife for a lot of the same reasons you list.
Ultimately, Apple will just doesn't want you to separate your data from the app. It's not just that it's a walled garden, it's a wall around you maintaining your data.
My primary tablet usage during the work day is taking notes. With a pen. And I've started organizing my notes into a self-indexed hierarchy of images. And for backup, those images go into S3. I can then just sync any other machine and peruse the images using Digikam which is kind of nice for a free open source app.
Every solution I've found in the iPad just requires you to put your data in some kind of isolated app playground, and then jump hoops to try to move it into any kind of backup system you can access on desktop OSes. I bought a Microsoft Surface, and despite not having worked in Windows in a decade or so, I was able to get my image-based note taking workflow done and set up in a day.
So, this iPad is a beautiful device I will never own. Purely because of their software policies. It's annoying.
I don't know if it's just me, but it seems like every time I go to save or open something on my iPad it defaults to iCloud. I don't have a paid iCloud account and find this supremely annoying, especially because the default folder names inside iCloud are the same as in local folders. It's as if they're trying to cause people to accidentally save stuff to iCloud, to get them in the habit of using it (and then paying for it).
I get your point but it's a sane default for most users. They expect their stuff to magically be there after replacing their devices. They don't make any distinction between local or cloud storage and can barely handle folder structures these days.
> The ridiculous sandboxing between programs that’s supposedly a security feature but just makes for an insufferably inconsistent UI and terrible management of data between programs … I guess that goes with my file management complaint.
I don’t know, I do think that in theory that strong of a sandboxing is superior and would actually like a better implementation of that on even something like linux. Most of my programs absolutely have no reason to read my documents and what not.
Have an M1 iPad Pro 12.9 inch with the Magic Keyboard and Pencil. Obviously won’t be upgrading any time soon(like 4-5 years minimum) and pray Apple understands that users want significantly improved OS software out of the box. Everything I’ve seen marks this as a disappointing software update, especially Stage Manager.
I have been, for backend development only. I live most of my life in Blink shell connected to a Linux machine. Works great as a very expensive dumb terminal. https://blink.sh/
Cons:
- Multitasking is weak. You can put two windows next to one another as long as you want them to be in a vertical split. The "pull out" side window feature doesn't work on the home screen for no discernible reason, so if you have Things in the side app then open it from the home screen, it's no longer opened in the side app and you have to manually move it back. (append: I haven't tried Stage Manager yet; maybe it will address some of this)
- Hardware keyboard support is pretty weak. The settings app and shortcuts app are two examples of apps with bad keyboard support. The "full keyboard access" is a very strange modality: it turns tab into a chording key. There's no equivalent to "focus all elements" as there is on desktop, so for example if I press tab from this text box, the "reply button" is not selected; the search at the bottom of the page is.
- Web access is a must. Individual apps might provide offline support, but many have sub-par sync systems, where you'll discovered that your offline files have helpfully been completely deleted and require resyncing, but since you're already on the plane by that point you're out of luck.
All in all: works great as an expensive dumb terminal.
Some things work great on the iPad, and for those things the iPad is absolutely fantastic and I will often prefer to use it.
If you want to infinitely scroll, the iPad is unparalleled. It is great for reading and watching. I like it as a game device. It is great for reading news and I enjoy apple's news widgets. Kindle works well. If you want to consume, the iPad is an amazing tool for consumption.
Additionally in the last year, apple made it really easy to use your iPad as a second screen, either as an iPad or as a literal second screen for your macbook. I found myself doing that more and more.
I bought the apple pencil thinking it can't possibly be worth the money, but it is an enjoyable device to use. Writing text on an iPad is more gimmick than feature (for me), but I find it a pleasurable way to scroll or navigate apps.
That being said, once you want to do a task with a keyboard, there is no replacing a laptop. The iPad is also locked down (no terminal, only safari) such that a laptop is still necessary. The iPad is still very much a luxury device and could not stand on its own. Phones and laptops both have features that the iPad does not have that make them necessary. The iPad offers nothing that makes it necessary unless you consider an ancillary screen for your laptop necessary.
Been using my iPad pro 2017 12.9 since 2015. It's basically my email/web/books/video/social device, but also can do work stuff in a pinch. It's not ideal for work, but it's more practical than my 12 mini if I need to do emergency stuff.
I also use it for presentations, sketch out designs and architecture, etc, but it's harder to clean up documents on the iPad because the editing on it is awkward compared do a laptop. For certain things diction works, but just copying and pasting a couple of rows in excel (or any spreadsheet like thing) is just really bad.
That said, the tool you have with you is the best tool, and it's really portable. It's 7 years old at this point and still going strong. It won't use a bunch of the new features in 16, but since I don't use those anyway I don't care.
If you want to test out an iPad, pick up a 1st or 2nd gen iPad Pro. I have three of them around the house (including mine) and the other two get used all the time for video/games/browsing.
I did for ~5 years but switched to the m2 air, complex tasks and multi tasking are much much easier, as well as dev work which is possible in a very limited way on iPad. I always used it with the keyboard attached and the laptop has a better hinge for screen angle too
I use a 5th gen iPad mini for web, email, telephony, ebooks, photos & video capture, but I use older Intel Macs (MBP 2010 & mini 2012) for local media server, storage, photo and video editing, torrent, file manipulation and transcoding, word processing & desktop publishing, pdf generation & editing, VM & emulation, and all the things that iDevices won't easily or gracefully allow or anything I happen to prefer on macOS. Granted, with effort, one can do nearly everything on iDevice, but it isn't always convenient. But upwards of 90% of the things I use Apple technology for is web browsing, email, and watching a movie or tv show, and this incidentally makes my Macs more secure and less needy of administration. I would like to have a new Mac, but I really can't justify it because I no longer use them for web and email, all the old Mac software can still do what I need it to do, although heavy processing takes longer, because the Macs are really in the background, it doesn't slow me down.
I did with the 2018 11” + Magic Keyboard. I felt very capable of doing most day-to-day tasking with the keyboard and mouse. Video calls sucked because the camera is off to the side when in the Magic Keyboard. Stage Manager might help even more, I found the previous “windowing” features to be lacking.
Or you just prefer the form factor overall to a similarly-priced MacBook. I much prefer my 12.9" iPad Pro (I have a 2nd generation one, from way back in 2017) over a comparable MacBook Air. This new iPad Pro is a tempting upgrade for me, although my 2017 device is still working fine which does make the expense difficult to justify.
Best feature not really mentioned is Sidecar! Having a second high quality screen has been a game changer. So portable and so powerful. I will be upgrading my 2018 12.9 iPad Pro to the latest. Mostly for the better screen to match my M1 Max.
As usual I'm envious of this hardware, & wish the rest of us who aren't ok in Apple's tight walled garden had options half as good.
The M2 is a great chip. Yeah, sure, way better than anything else & ridiculously great for a tablet: yes. The display is amazing, as usual. What is new & exciting to me here is Thunderbolt. For so long, "mobile" devices have not had any of the perks of modern computing when it comes to connectivity. Being able to connect to other devices via a modern high speed cable is a kick ass feature that enables all kinds of advanced uses.
With things like Steam Deck, I'm hoping we see a little less strict siloing & see mobile devices start to get competitive in interesting ways. It's a fantastic device: for $400 it blows almost every phone out of the water in almost every conceivable way, wipes the floor & makes mock of what we get. We should have higher expectations, see more cross-market products, but we've been locked into very tight market segments for a long time. One other category busting device I'd cite- really interesting- is the Lenovo Legion Phone, an ultra-serious gaming phone from 2021, which has dual batteries, cooling fans, a 144Hz OLED screen & tip top specs, but most genre-busting of all: a phone with two USB-C ports. Do it. Make your phone a connectable device! Go next level!
I'd love to see a betting pool on what quarter we first see a phone with USB4. Anyone here wanna bet on anytime in 2023? Personally I still think anytime in 2024 is only like 60/40 odds yes. There's little impetus to try, to do better, to make, even though it's so near. Even though the chipspace is tiny. Even though the IP isn't that costly. There's no perceived market, and that belief keeps the market for advancement from occurring.
I love thunderbolt here. The irony is that Apple is one of the most closed ecosystems with the least potential by far to make use of the wide range of nearly-anythings someone could plug in via thunderbolt. Ideally Steam Decks and phones should all be able to make fine use of eGPUs, NICs/infiniband/whatever adapters. They should all support CXL too, but we'll see this, like all the other good stuff, segmented off to servers for 5 years, then desktops for 5 years, before finally it becomes clear & obvious consumers would have great benefit & that it's simpler, more powerful, more flexible to use the good high power specs for these mobile consumer devices too, & we've been shorting ourselves this whole time for no real good reason.
Pretty boring announcement, biggest things is that Apple finally has stock of Broadcom 6E radios so you can expect those going forwards, and that ad expected Apple couldn’t manage to get over 600nits on their small screen device.
So 10Gb and then as an example directly under it shows a news article with a couple small images in it lol. Personally what I'm really waiting for is 40 Gb to load my news articles.
I was told to expect wireless charging for these. I was excited about this, because my mother has an irrational "thing" about wires, and an uncharged iPad is a useless iPad.
Lots of iPad hate in the comments. But remember, if nobody wanted them, they wouldn't keep selling as well as they are.
If you have no interest in an iPad, don't buy one. For me, it's not going to replace my general purpose computers any time soon, but its great for reading or carrying around while on the go for short bursts of work (SSH/Mosh with Blink app, RDP with Microsoft Remote Desktop, VNC with Screens, etc).
Yea, it works well and is plenty fast on a LAN (remote may be laggy). Some things you can't test using emulators, namely App Store stuff I believe, and you need to screw with the resolution/scaling so you can read the text.
I threw a GitHub runner on mine so I can do iOS builds from it.
If you are needing it for web dev, the Inspect browser on iOS works great for that purpose. It is annoying you have to pay $10 for something that should be built in.
There is also one called literally "Web Inspector" from "And a Dinosaur" or something which I believe is free and a Safari extension which pops up devtools on my iPhone
Question from a gen 1 iPad Pro user (first USB-C iPad):
Is the usb>hdmi output still a disaster?
I noticed a huge downgrade in compatibility from my previous ipads doing presentations with the lightning port.
I even diagnosed an issue where the iPad pro would not output to HDMI using Apple’s official dongle if the HDMI cable was longer than 25 ft. Ha (iphone/lightning adapter worked fine in the same setup).
Illustrator here. Very frustrating that hover cursor is new-device only. Here I was hoping for an apple pencil V3. I figured it would be a $200 upgrade, not sell-current-device + $1200. I've got a top of the line 2020 (all specs max) and it seems to have lost about half of its value going by ebay prices.
With iPhone video hardware, ProRes support, and a thunderbolt interface that makes 4k ProRes actually practical to get off the device, the iPad Pro is now likely to be the best video recording device for certain creative niches. You can even edit the video on the same device that captured it in a pinch.
I remember I used to read a lot on my tablet before I started using anki to take notes as I went. I miss it, the screens and then light weight are very easy on the eyes and hands. Reading on a laptop isn’t nearly as nice, but you can’t beat the keyboard
If you only use communication tools, web based apps, Word, and only need to be able to open/tweak an excel or PowerPoint doc, then yeah they’re awesome, anything more and you need a laptop.
Anyone have iPad Pro screen protector recommendations? Looking to get one of these and worried about screens getting "softer glass" and would rather have a sacrificial layer on top.
I wanted the "paper feel", which gives the screen a bit of roughness so it feels like writing on paper rather than glass. I went with this brand on Amazon and have been very happy with it:
Best Buy does lifetime warranties on some of the screen protectors they sell. I have them on my phone. They’re not mind blowing but they have changed them for free for me no questions asked before.
I've generally been pretty happy with JETech's screen protectors, not happy with where they come from, not happy they appear to be a random amazon no-name brand, but I've been pretty loyal to them and when I've deviated, mostly to protectors bought in person, I've noticed a drop in quality.
How large a piece of the chip is that 16 core Neural Engine eating? I'd rather have a more powerful CPU + GPU or am I missing the point a bit? Anyone care to shed some light?
Imaging what a great product we would have if Apple ditched the Mac and put all that hardware and software effort towards a unified touchscreen convertible tablet.
meta invests in vr goggles, apple invests in high definition. none of them invests to replace the keyboard with someting better , not worse. Computers are not useful without communication, and the slow human-computer bandwidth is the real bottleneck for these devices. Keyboards (and mice) are still better after 4 decades . Meta's wrist device might be the revolution we need
The caveat with the above is that you'll need something to host it. You could use a computer on your local network or a VPS of some kind (DigitalOcean, Linode, etc all have cheaper plans for hosting).
Once you get Code Server running, you can add the URL to your homepage to remove the Safari URL bar.
Try GitHub.dev on your iPad now. Totally possible. You can save a link to it on your Home Screen. It’s not a full time workspace but a decent backup option if on the go.
I use my iPad for making music, the latency on AirPods or any other BT headphones makes them a non-starter. It makes me actually angry that they removed the jack from the iPad "pro", killing one of the very few actual pro uses for an iPad.
I’m not knowledgeable on hardware/music, would an usb-c to jack converter decrease quality/increase latency? I know that it is still a bad option as you may want to charge it at the same time..
Maybe those usb-c dongles used primarily in macs? They often have jack as well, would that not be a good replacement?
It’s a replacement, but not a good one. If you want good sound quality and the ability to charge at the same time then it’s quite a bulky dongle. The audio quality varies massively too, so if you mix / master on one and then it breaks, you have to replace it with the exact same one otherwise your next mix / master isn’t going to match the last one. And if they’ve stopped making that one, you’re screwed. All of these are problems Apple have created for pro users of the iPad Pro by removing the jack.
Pro users use audio interfaces. The headphone jack is useful for quick improvised sketching or listening but Apple's official dongle will be fine in those situations as well. It's actually a pretty well made DAC for its size: https://www.kenrockwell.com/apple/lightning-adapter-audio-qu...
For any serious work you'll probably be around a decent audio interface anyway.
It is attached to my studio cans, but that doesn't solve any of the problems I outlined above about varied audio quality between different adapters etc.
I'd love to see this explored more, it seems we have such power in our pockets, all we really need is devices to attach this too rather than more devices with the same cpu/memory and gpu's.
Particularly when you look at Apple devices, if you own multiple apple devices you have several devices with A or M series CPU and GPU's.
github.dev works fine on an iPad - you could integrate with their new codespaces service to run dev servers for web projects. So it easy available fancy remote terminal. If you’re traveling with just your iPad, this is a nice secure option where you don’t need to have clones of repos locally or any keys saved locally to your device.
It’s a big issue with the audience of this site being too hyper focused on software development.
You can see it taken one step further in threads about GitHub Copilot getting torn to bits but the threads on Stable Diffusion getting lauded as the end of artists.
It’s the double standards that come up when people fixate only on what they know well themselves.
Yeah... I like Copilot for helping me with specific coding/data entry tasks, and I like Stable Diffusion for helping with my art workflow (I'm also an artist). I tend to keep quiet about such opinions on here, though, because I know I'll get downvoted into oblivion for heresy.
My criticism of Apple is that it is a closed environment and you get dependent on one manufacturer that is already using its position to demand high prices and doesn't really make you the owner of their devices. This conflicts with engineering in general all over the place for numerous reasons.
Industry automation relies on Windows, which isn't optimal as well, but it still is a far more open system. I hope they don't try to copy Apple. In-house advertising uses Apple for designs and that works decently well. Apple is seen as cool, but it is sometimes hard to integrate them into workflows or more serious work on data.
iOS and it derivatives are simply a toy OS and very unflexible. There is one solution to almost everything and in most cases it works. But that is more or less the end.
> Pretty much everyone here knocking the iPad Pros for being consumption-only passive entertainment devices.
Yeah, this criticism has never made sense to me. I think it could only come from people for whom the only purpose of computers is to make software, not to get out and... you know, do things with the software, in the actual world. I-devices excel at that. They are excellent computers as tools for doing things that aren't focused on locally testing docker containers or whatever we all do in our day jobs that require less-portable and kinda-dumber (their "view of the world", if you will, is much more limited) desktops and laptops.
I use the LiDAR of the iPad Pro to capture full schematic of room in 3D to prepare spatial datasets.
It isn't perfect. The sampling rate of iPad Pro is still lower than professional 3D cameras, but I can't complain when they cost a fraction of the latter. 3DScanner and similar apps do a great job at stitching the volumetric data on the fly & rendering on iPad itself (before I transfer).
We use these data to do some inference via 3D computer vision projects for clients
Do creative types use Ipad Pros? The IPadOS file system is less than optimal. Adobe apps are the real thing and missing features.
My company has a full video team, and photo team. No one has asked for an IPad Pro. They do have proXDR screens and some beefy macs. Only execs have them for a high end zoom boxes especially if they have a windows laptop that have poor mics and cameras. Center stage feature is really nice.
Are there any creatives that don’t work in industry? Video teams that use Mac Pros and Pro Display XDR wouldn’t even be able to use a MacBook Pro does that mean the MacBook Pro can’t be used by creatives?
So yes, creatives use the iPads. It is the main driver for more performance on an ipad. Drawing, audio performance, photo editing, hell, they are great second displays for MacBooks.
And kids. My daughter is using her iPad extensively, and not only for games - she is drawing a lot, and her current CPU is already pushing the limits in some sophisticated drawing apps.
The thing is, is the iPad really the best device at the price point for these people? Artist seems like the only one.
- for a musician, surely the full featured desktop software is better? And for $800 you can get a pretty good laptop
- video editors must also prefer a desktop OS. They can use keyboard hot keys, industry standard software, and get better GPU hardware
- photographers might do pretty well with an iPad Pro but again I think they’d probably still be best with desktop class photoshop
- a casual artist I will contend probably does best with an iPad Pro. But if they start doing really serious professional work, they will again probably want the full desktop software and an expensive Wacom hardware to go alongside
So at both casual and professional levels, the iPad Pro really only makes sense for a casual illustrator from what I can see.
But professional musicians, video editors, and photographers? All the software for doing any of those things is kneecapped versions of Mac apps. If they use an iPad at all it's as some kind of supplementary tool for the real machine the work gets done on.
It's very frustrating that you can't even do simple operations on files that were standard on the '84 Macintosh. I'm not talking about rocket-science or a git-based build system.
I had high hopes for the Files app when it debuted, and was very disappointed.
This isn't surprising, but it's unfortunate -- Apple still hasn't even opened up CoreNFC on the Watch.
I have a custom app for my business which uses NFC, and it's a bummer that iPads, and just about no modern Android tablets have NFC, so while I'd love to use a tablet to do certain tasks, I can't.
What’s your use case? I’m imagining people holding a 12in iPad by a door keypad or Apple Pay terminal fumbling around trying to find where the sensor is (I’m not being very creative with this I realize)
iPadOS is nothing more than iPhoneOS renamed and the device is still too heavily crippled for desktop/laptop replacement.
In my mini test case scenario I never said a word..simply the employee asked for iPad Pro.. I just handed it to them... waited... then about 2 weeks later they asked for laptop back.
Not sure what Apple's plan here is but they continue to market this to schools and workplaces as a laptop replacement but refuse to add functionality to the OS and keep it overly crippled/restricted.