Well, yeah -- anything involving text on iOS is far from optimal, so buying an iPad Pro for: email, blogging, creative writing, memo-writing for work, working in spreadsheets, document creation in general; is a mistake.
I read a commentary years back about Google's social efforts. The author blamed Google's failings on the author's assumption that no one at Google actually used their social products. For comparison, it's obvious that Google uses gmail throughout the company, and therefore has practical insight and inherent motivation to make it usable.
I've been saying for many years: I am 100% convinced there is no one at Apple who lives and works on an iPad (small caveat: without having it permanently tethered to a keyboard).
1. Text selection is awful: it takes an eon to select a word in text on iOS compared with double-clicking a word on Mac.
2. God help you if the insertion point is just a character or two away from where you need it: you either have to do the long-press on the keyboard, then carefully drag to correct it, or tap somewhere else completely and then tap where you want it.
3. If iOS thinks it knows where you want the insertion point, it thinks it knows better than you where the insertion point should go. See (2).
4. Selecting large amounts of text is a huge pain.
5. The touch keyboard just isn't viable for use at scale.
I could go on, but it's just a rant and no one at Apple is reading this, so I'll stop there. Apple, if you do happen to read this and want to fix this, hire me!
> 2. God help you if the insertion point is just a character or two away from where you need it: you either have to do the long-press on the keyboard, then carefully drag to correct it, or tap somewhere else completely and then tap where you want it.
I don't know if anyone remembers but back in 2012ish there was a jailbreak tweak in Cydia that allowed you to move the cursor by swiping on your keyboard. It was really intuitive as you don't have to lift your fingers off the keyboard and I remember asking myself why this wasn't just part of iOS. Apple never added that feature to iOS and I still miss it. Not sure how it would have worked today with keyboard swiping but I wish apple let you switch between "swipe to type" and "swipe to move cursor".
I’m not the person you replied to, but this is the feature I was describing above when I said long press on the keyboard. I was borking my memory: it used to be a deep press (when that was a thing) anywhere on the keyboard.
Now, as you say, it’sa long press on the space bar. The problem with that solution is that it’s incredibly slow (perceptually).
This is a large part of why I say no one at apple is working day to day on an iPad. If someone there were forced to, this would be fixed. — or declared to be impossible to fix, I suppose.
From about 2015 to 2021 I was waiting to be able to only take my iPad with me on trips. That was never pleasant, not really possible.
Now I have an M1 MacBook Air, and my iPad is the device collecting dust at home.
(edit to change "boring" to "borking" -- yes, I typed this on iOS, let's not even discuss autocorrect...)
I read a commentary years back about Google's social efforts. The author blamed Google's failings on the author's assumption that no one at Google actually used their social products. For comparison, it's obvious that Google uses gmail throughout the company, and therefore has practical insight and inherent motivation to make it usable.
I've been saying for many years: I am 100% convinced there is no one at Apple who lives and works on an iPad (small caveat: without having it permanently tethered to a keyboard).
1. Text selection is awful: it takes an eon to select a word in text on iOS compared with double-clicking a word on Mac.
2. God help you if the insertion point is just a character or two away from where you need it: you either have to do the long-press on the keyboard, then carefully drag to correct it, or tap somewhere else completely and then tap where you want it.
3. If iOS thinks it knows where you want the insertion point, it thinks it knows better than you where the insertion point should go. See (2).
4. Selecting large amounts of text is a huge pain.
5. The touch keyboard just isn't viable for use at scale.
I could go on, but it's just a rant and no one at Apple is reading this, so I'll stop there. Apple, if you do happen to read this and want to fix this, hire me!